The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor
Dostoyevsky



This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under
the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or
online at http://www.gutenberg.org/license



Title: The Brothers Karamazov

Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Release Date: February 12, 2009 [Ebook #28054]

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8


***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV***





                          The Brothers Karamazov

                      Translated from the Russian of

                            Fyodor Dostoyevsky

                           by Constance Garnett

                             The Lowell Press

                                 New York





CONTENTS


Part I
   Book I. The History Of A Family
      Chapter I. Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov
      Chapter II. He Gets Rid Of His Eldest Son
      Chapter III. The Second Marriage And The Second Family
      Chapter IV. The Third Son, Alyosha
      Chapter V. Elders
   Book II. An Unfortunate Gathering
      Chapter I. They Arrive At The Monastery
      Chapter II. The Old Buffoon
      Chapter III. Peasant Women Who Have Faith
      Chapter IV. A Lady Of Little Faith
      Chapter V. So Be It! So Be It!
      Chapter VI. Why Is Such A Man Alive?
      Chapter VII. A Young Man Bent On A Career
      Chapter VIII. The Scandalous Scene
   Book III. The Sensualists
      Chapter I. In The Servants’ Quarters
      Chapter II. Lizaveta
      Chapter III. The Confession Of A Passionate Heart—In Verse
      Chapter IV. The Confession Of A Passionate Heart—In Anecdote
      Chapter V. The Confession Of A Passionate Heart—"Heels Up"
      Chapter VI. Smerdyakov
      Chapter VII. The Controversy
      Chapter VIII. Over The Brandy
      Chapter IX. The Sensualists
      Chapter X. Both Together
      Chapter XI. Another Reputation Ruined
Part II
   Book IV. Lacerations
      Chapter I. Father Ferapont
      Chapter II. At His Father’s
      Chapter III. A Meeting With The Schoolboys
      Chapter IV. At The Hohlakovs’
      Chapter V. A Laceration In The Drawing-Room
      Chapter VI. A Laceration In The Cottage
      Chapter VII. And In The Open Air
   Book V. Pro And Contra
      Chapter I. The Engagement
      Chapter II. Smerdyakov With A Guitar
      Chapter III. The Brothers Make Friends
      Chapter IV. Rebellion
      Chapter V. The Grand Inquisitor
      Chapter VI. For Awhile A Very Obscure One
      Chapter VII. “It’s Always Worth While Speaking To A Clever Man”
   Book VI. The Russian Monk
      Chapter I. Father Zossima And His Visitors
      Chapter II. The Duel
      Chapter III. Conversations And Exhortations Of Father Zossima
Part III
   Book VII. Alyosha
      Chapter I. The Breath Of Corruption
      Chapter II. A Critical Moment
      Chapter III. An Onion
      Chapter IV. Cana Of Galilee
   Book VIII. Mitya
      Chapter I. Kuzma Samsonov
      Chapter II. Lyagavy
      Chapter III. Gold-Mines
      Chapter IV. In The Dark
      Chapter V. A Sudden Resolution
      Chapter VI. “I Am Coming, Too!”
      Chapter VII. The First And Rightful Lover
      Chapter VIII. Delirium
   Book IX. The Preliminary Investigation
      Chapter I. The Beginning Of Perhotin’s Official Career
      Chapter II. The Alarm
      Chapter III. The Sufferings Of A Soul, The First Ordeal
      Chapter IV. The Second Ordeal
      Chapter V. The Third Ordeal
      Chapter VI. The Prosecutor Catches Mitya
      Chapter VII. Mitya’s Great Secret. Received With Hisses
      Chapter VIII. The Evidence Of The Witnesses. The Babe
      Chapter IX. They Carry Mitya Away
Part IV
   Book X. The Boys
      Chapter I. Kolya Krassotkin
      Chapter II. Children
      Chapter III. The Schoolboy
      Chapter IV. The Lost Dog
      Chapter V. By Ilusha’s Bedside
      Chapter VI. Precocity
      Chapter VII. Ilusha
   Book XI. Ivan
      Chapter I. At Grushenka’s
      Chapter II. The Injured Foot
      Chapter III. A Little Demon
      Chapter IV. A Hymn And A Secret
      Chapter V. Not You, Not You!
      Chapter VI. The First Interview With Smerdyakov
      Chapter VII. The Second Visit To Smerdyakov
      Chapter VIII. The Third And Last Interview With Smerdyakov
      Chapter IX. The Devil. Ivan’s Nightmare
      Chapter X. “It Was He Who Said That”
   Book XII. A Judicial Error
      Chapter I. The Fatal Day
      Chapter II. Dangerous Witnesses
      Chapter III. The Medical Experts And A Pound Of Nuts
      Chapter IV. Fortune Smiles On Mitya
      Chapter V. A Sudden Catastrophe
      Chapter VI. The Prosecutor’s Speech. Sketches Of Character
      Chapter VII. An Historical Survey
      Chapter VIII. A Treatise On Smerdyakov
      Chapter IX. The Galloping Troika. The End Of The Prosecutor’s
      Speech.
      Chapter X. The Speech For The Defense. An Argument That Cuts Both
      Ways
      Chapter XI. There Was No Money. There Was No Robbery
      Chapter XII. And There Was No Murder Either
      Chapter XIII. A Corrupter Of Thought
      Chapter XIV. The Peasants Stand Firm
Epilogue
   Chapter I. Plans For Mitya’s Escape
   Chapter II. For A Moment The Lie Becomes Truth
   Chapter III. Ilusha’s Funeral. The Speech At The Stone
Footnotes






PART I




Book I. The History Of A Family



Chapter I. Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov


Alexey Fyodorovitch Karamazov was the third son of Fyodor Pavlovitch
Karamazov, a land owner well known in our district in his own day, and
still remembered among us owing to his gloomy and tragic death, which
happened thirteen years ago, and which I shall describe in its proper
place. For the present I will only say that this “landowner”—for so we
used to call him, although he hardly spent a day of his life on his own
estate—was a strange type, yet one pretty frequently to be met with, a
type abject and vicious and at the same time senseless. But he was one of
those senseless persons who are very well capable of looking after their
worldly affairs, and, apparently, after nothing else. Fyodor Pavlovitch,
for instance, began with next to nothing; his estate was of the smallest;
he ran to dine at other men’s tables, and fastened on them as a toady, yet
at his death it appeared that he had a hundred thousand roubles in hard
cash. At the same time, he was all his life one of the most senseless,
fantastical fellows in the whole district. I repeat, it was not
stupidity—the majority of these fantastical fellows are shrewd and
intelligent enough—but just senselessness, and a peculiar national form of
it.

He was married twice, and had three sons, the eldest, Dmitri, by his first
wife, and two, Ivan and Alexey, by his second. Fyodor Pavlovitch’s first
wife, Adelaïda Ivanovna, belonged to a fairly rich and distinguished noble
family, also landowners in our district, the Miüsovs. How it came to pass
that an heiress, who was also a beauty, and moreover one of those
vigorous, intelligent girls, so common in this generation, but sometimes
also to be found in the last, could have married such a worthless, puny
weakling, as we all called him, I won’t attempt to explain. I knew a young
lady of the last “romantic” generation who after some years of an
enigmatic passion for a gentleman, whom she might quite easily have
married at any moment, invented insuperable obstacles to their union, and
ended by throwing herself one stormy night into a rather deep and rapid
river from a high bank, almost a precipice, and so perished, entirely to
satisfy her own caprice, and to be like Shakespeare’s Ophelia. Indeed, if
this precipice, a chosen and favorite spot of hers, had been less
picturesque, if there had been a prosaic flat bank in its place, most
likely the suicide would never have taken place. This is a fact, and
probably there have been not a few similar instances in the last two or
three generations. Adelaïda Ivanovna Miüsov’s action was similarly, no
doubt, an echo of other people’s ideas, and was due to the irritation
caused by lack of mental freedom. She wanted, perhaps, to show her
feminine independence, to override class distinctions and the despotism of
her family. And a pliable imagination persuaded her, we must suppose, for
a brief moment, that Fyodor Pavlovitch, in spite of his parasitic
position, was one of the bold and ironical spirits of that progressive
epoch, though he was, in fact, an ill-natured buffoon and nothing more.
What gave the marriage piquancy was that it was preceded by an elopement,
and this greatly captivated Adelaïda Ivanovna’s fancy. Fyodor Pavlovitch’s
position at the time made him specially eager for any such enterprise, for
he was passionately anxious to make a career in one way or another. To
attach himself to a good family and obtain a dowry was an alluring
prospect. As for mutual love it did not exist apparently, either in the
bride or in him, in spite of Adelaïda Ivanovna’s beauty. This was,
perhaps, a unique case of the kind in the life of Fyodor Pavlovitch, who
was always of a voluptuous temper, and ready to run after any petticoat on
the slightest encouragement. She seems to have been the only woman who
made no particular appeal to his senses.

Immediately after the elopement Adelaïda Ivanovna discerned in a flash
that she had no feeling for her husband but contempt. The marriage
accordingly showed itself in its true colors with extraordinary rapidity.
Although the family accepted the event pretty quickly and apportioned the
runaway bride her dowry, the husband and wife began to lead a most
disorderly life, and there were everlasting scenes between them. It was
said that the young wife showed incomparably more generosity and dignity
than Fyodor Pavlovitch, who, as is now known, got hold of all her money up
to twenty-five thousand roubles as soon as she received it, so that those
thousands were lost to her for ever. The little village and the rather
fine town house which formed part of her dowry he did his utmost for a
long time to transfer to his name, by means of some deed of conveyance. He
would probably have succeeded, merely from her moral fatigue and desire to
get rid of him, and from the contempt and loathing he aroused by his
persistent and shameless importunity. But, fortunately, Adelaïda
Ivanovna’s family intervened and circumvented his greediness. It is known
for a fact that frequent fights took place between the husband and wife,
but rumor had it that Fyodor Pavlovitch did not beat his wife but was
beaten by her, for she was a hot-tempered, bold, dark-browed, impatient
woman, possessed of remarkable physical strength. Finally, she left the
house and ran away from Fyodor Pavlovitch with a destitute divinity
student, leaving Mitya, a child of three years old, in her husband’s
hands. Immediately Fyodor Pavlovitch introduced a regular harem into the
house, and abandoned himself to orgies of drunkenness. In the intervals he
used to drive all over the province, complaining tearfully to each and all
of Adelaïda Ivanovna’s having left him, going into details too disgraceful
for a husband to mention in regard to his own married life. What seemed to
gratify him and flatter his self-love most was to play the ridiculous part
of the injured husband, and to parade his woes with embellishments.

“One would think that you’d got a promotion, Fyodor Pavlovitch, you seem
so pleased in spite of your sorrow,” scoffers said to him. Many even added
that he was glad of a new comic part in which to play the buffoon, and
that it was simply to make it funnier that he pretended to be unaware of
his ludicrous position. But, who knows, it may have been simplicity. At
last he succeeded in getting on the track of his runaway wife. The poor
woman turned out to be in Petersburg, where she had gone with her divinity
student, and where she had thrown herself into a life of complete
emancipation. Fyodor Pavlovitch at once began bustling about, making
preparations to go to Petersburg, with what object he could not himself
have said. He would perhaps have really gone; but having determined to do
so he felt at once entitled to fortify himself for the journey by another
bout of reckless drinking. And just at that time his wife’s family
received the news of her death in Petersburg. She had died quite suddenly
in a garret, according to one story, of typhus, or as another version had
it, of starvation. Fyodor Pavlovitch was drunk when he heard of his wife’s
death, and the story is that he ran out into the street and began shouting
with joy, raising his hands to Heaven: “Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant
depart in peace,” but others say he wept without restraint like a little
child, so much so that people were sorry for him, in spite of the
repulsion he inspired. It is quite possible that both versions were true,
that he rejoiced at his release, and at the same time wept for her who
released him. As a general rule, people, even the wicked, are much more
naïve and simple-hearted than we suppose. And we ourselves are, too.



Chapter II. He Gets Rid Of His Eldest Son


You can easily imagine what a father such a man could be and how he would
bring up his children. His behavior as a father was exactly what might be
expected. He completely abandoned the child of his marriage with Adelaïda
Ivanovna, not from malice, nor because of his matrimonial grievances, but
simply because he forgot him. While he was wearying every one with his
tears and complaints, and turning his house into a sink of debauchery, a
faithful servant of the family, Grigory, took the three-year-old Mitya
into his care. If he hadn’t looked after him there would have been no one
even to change the baby’s little shirt.

It happened moreover that the child’s relations on his mother’s side
forgot him too at first. His grandfather was no longer living, his widow,
Mitya’s grandmother, had moved to Moscow, and was seriously ill, while his
daughters were married, so that Mitya remained for almost a whole year in
old Grigory’s charge and lived with him in the servant’s cottage. But if
his father had remembered him (he could not, indeed, have been altogether
unaware of his existence) he would have sent him back to the cottage, as
the child would only have been in the way of his debaucheries. But a
cousin of Mitya’s mother, Pyotr Alexandrovitch Miüsov, happened to return
from Paris. He lived for many years afterwards abroad, but was at that
time quite a young man, and distinguished among the Miüsovs as a man of
enlightened ideas and of European culture, who had been in the capitals
and abroad. Towards the end of his life he became a Liberal of the type
common in the forties and fifties. In the course of his career he had come
into contact with many of the most Liberal men of his epoch, both in
Russia and abroad. He had known Proudhon and Bakunin personally, and in
his declining years was very fond of describing the three days of the
Paris Revolution of February 1848, hinting that he himself had almost
taken part in the fighting on the barricades. This was one of the most
grateful recollections of his youth. He had an independent property of
about a thousand souls, to reckon in the old style. His splendid estate
lay on the outskirts of our little town and bordered on the lands of our
famous monastery, with which Pyotr Alexandrovitch began an endless
lawsuit, almost as soon as he came into the estate, concerning the rights
of fishing in the river or wood-cutting in the forest, I don’t know
exactly which. He regarded it as his duty as a citizen and a man of
culture to open an attack upon the “clericals.” Hearing all about Adelaïda
Ivanovna, whom he, of course, remembered, and in whom he had at one time
been interested, and learning of the existence of Mitya, he intervened, in
spite of all his youthful indignation and contempt for Fyodor Pavlovitch.
He made the latter’s acquaintance for the first time, and told him
directly that he wished to undertake the child’s education. He used long
afterwards to tell as a characteristic touch, that when he began to speak
of Mitya, Fyodor Pavlovitch looked for some time as though he did not
understand what child he was talking about, and even as though he was
surprised to hear that he had a little son in the house. The story may
have been exaggerated, yet it must have been something like the truth.

Fyodor Pavlovitch was all his life fond of acting, of suddenly playing an
unexpected part, sometimes without any motive for doing so, and even to
his own direct disadvantage, as, for instance, in the present case. This
habit, however, is characteristic of a very great number of people, some
of them very clever ones, not like Fyodor Pavlovitch. Pyotr Alexandrovitch
carried the business through vigorously, and was appointed, with Fyodor
Pavlovitch, joint guardian of the child, who had a small property, a house
and land, left him by his mother. Mitya did, in fact, pass into this
cousin’s keeping, but as the latter had no family of his own, and after
securing the revenues of his estates was in haste to return at once to
Paris, he left the boy in charge of one of his cousins, a lady living in
Moscow. It came to pass that, settling permanently in Paris he, too,
forgot the child, especially when the Revolution of February broke out,
making an impression on his mind that he remembered all the rest of his
life. The Moscow lady died, and Mitya passed into the care of one of her
married daughters. I believe he changed his home a fourth time later on. I
won’t enlarge upon that now, as I shall have much to tell later of Fyodor
Pavlovitch’s firstborn, and must confine myself now to the most essential
facts about him, without which I could not begin my story.

In the first place, this Mitya, or rather Dmitri Fyodorovitch, was the
only one of Fyodor Pavlovitch’s three sons who grew up in the belief that
he had property, and that he would be independent on coming of age. He
spent an irregular boyhood and youth. He did not finish his studies at the
gymnasium, he got into a military school, then went to the Caucasus, was
promoted, fought a duel, and was degraded to the ranks, earned promotion
again, led a wild life, and spent a good deal of money. He did not begin
to receive any income from Fyodor Pavlovitch until he came of age, and
until then got into debt. He saw and knew his father, Fyodor Pavlovitch,
for the first time on coming of age, when he visited our neighborhood on
purpose to settle with him about his property. He seems not to have liked
his father. He did not stay long with him, and made haste to get away,
having only succeeded in obtaining a sum of money, and entering into an
agreement for future payments from the estate, of the revenues and value
of which he was unable (a fact worthy of note), upon this occasion, to get
a statement from his father. Fyodor Pavlovitch remarked for the first time
then (this, too, should be noted) that Mitya had a vague and exaggerated
idea of his property. Fyodor Pavlovitch was very well satisfied with this,
as it fell in with his own designs. He gathered only that the young man
was frivolous, unruly, of violent passions, impatient, and dissipated, and
that if he could only obtain ready money he would be satisfied, although
only, of course, for a short time. So Fyodor Pavlovitch began to take
advantage of this fact, sending him from time to time small doles,
installments. In the end, when four years later, Mitya, losing patience,
came a second time to our little town to settle up once for all with his
father, it turned out to his amazement that he had nothing, that it was
difficult to get an account even, that he had received the whole value of
his property in sums of money from Fyodor Pavlovitch, and was perhaps even
in debt to him, that by various agreements into which he had, of his own
desire, entered at various previous dates, he had no right to expect
anything more, and so on, and so on. The young man was overwhelmed,
suspected deceit and cheating, and was almost beside himself. And, indeed,
this circumstance led to the catastrophe, the account of which forms the
subject of my first introductory story, or rather the external side of it.
But before I pass to that story I must say a little of Fyodor Pavlovitch’s
other two sons, and of their origin.



Chapter III. The Second Marriage And The Second Family


Very shortly after getting his four-year-old Mitya off his hands Fyodor
Pavlovitch married a second time. His second marriage lasted eight years.
He took this second wife, Sofya Ivanovna, also a very young girl, from
another province, where he had gone upon some small piece of business in
company with a Jew. Though Fyodor Pavlovitch was a drunkard and a vicious
debauchee he never neglected investing his capital, and managed his
business affairs very successfully, though, no doubt, not
over-scrupulously. Sofya Ivanovna was the daughter of an obscure deacon,
and was left from childhood an orphan without relations. She grew up in
the house of a general’s widow, a wealthy old lady of good position, who
was at once her benefactress and tormentor. I do not know the details, but
I have only heard that the orphan girl, a meek and gentle creature, was
once cut down from a halter in which she was hanging from a nail in the
loft, so terrible were her sufferings from the caprice and everlasting
nagging of this old woman, who was apparently not bad-hearted but had
become an insufferable tyrant through idleness.

Fyodor Pavlovitch made her an offer; inquiries were made about him and he
was refused. But again, as in his first marriage, he proposed an elopement
to the orphan girl. There is very little doubt that she would not on any
account have married him if she had known a little more about him in time.
But she lived in another province; besides, what could a little girl of
sixteen know about it, except that she would be better at the bottom of
the river than remaining with her benefactress. So the poor child
exchanged a benefactress for a benefactor. Fyodor Pavlovitch did not get a
penny this time, for the general’s widow was furious. She gave them
nothing and cursed them both. But he had not reckoned on a dowry; what
allured him was the remarkable beauty of the innocent girl, above all her
innocent appearance, which had a peculiar attraction for a vicious
profligate, who had hitherto admired only the coarser types of feminine
beauty.

“Those innocent eyes slit my soul up like a razor,” he used to say
afterwards, with his loathsome snigger. In a man so depraved this might,
of course, mean no more than sensual attraction. As he had received no
dowry with his wife, and had, so to speak, taken her “from the halter,” he
did not stand on ceremony with her. Making her feel that she had “wronged”
him, he took advantage of her phenomenal meekness and submissiveness to
trample on the elementary decencies of marriage. He gathered loose women
into his house, and carried on orgies of debauchery in his wife’s
presence. To show what a pass things had come to, I may mention that
Grigory, the gloomy, stupid, obstinate, argumentative servant, who had
always hated his first mistress, Adelaïda Ivanovna, took the side of his
new mistress. He championed her cause, abusing Fyodor Pavlovitch in a
manner little befitting a servant, and on one occasion broke up the revels
and drove all the disorderly women out of the house. In the end this
unhappy young woman, kept in terror from her childhood, fell into that
kind of nervous disease which is most frequently found in peasant women
who are said to be “possessed by devils.” At times after terrible fits of
hysterics she even lost her reason. Yet she bore Fyodor Pavlovitch two
sons, Ivan and Alexey, the eldest in the first year of marriage and the
second three years later. When she died, little Alexey was in his fourth
year, and, strange as it seems, I know that he remembered his mother all
his life, like a dream, of course. At her death almost exactly the same
thing happened to the two little boys as to their elder brother, Mitya.
They were completely forgotten and abandoned by their father. They were
looked after by the same Grigory and lived in his cottage, where they were
found by the tyrannical old lady who had brought up their mother. She was
still alive, and had not, all those eight years, forgotten the insult done
her. All that time she was obtaining exact information as to her Sofya’s
manner of life, and hearing of her illness and hideous surroundings she
declared aloud two or three times to her retainers:

“It serves her right. God has punished her for her ingratitude.”

Exactly three months after Sofya Ivanovna’s death the general’s widow
suddenly appeared in our town, and went straight to Fyodor Pavlovitch’s
house. She spent only half an hour in the town but she did a great deal.
It was evening. Fyodor Pavlovitch, whom she had not seen for those eight
years, came in to her drunk. The story is that instantly upon seeing him,
without any sort of explanation, she gave him two good, resounding slaps
on the face, seized him by a tuft of hair, and shook him three times up
and down. Then, without a word, she went straight to the cottage to the
two boys. Seeing, at the first glance, that they were unwashed and in
dirty linen, she promptly gave Grigory, too, a box on the ear, and
announcing that she would carry off both the children she wrapped them
just as they were in a rug, put them in the carriage, and drove off to her
own town. Grigory accepted the blow like a devoted slave, without a word,
and when he escorted the old lady to her carriage he made her a low bow
and pronounced impressively that, “God would repay her for the orphans.”
“You are a blockhead all the same,” the old lady shouted to him as she
drove away.

Fyodor Pavlovitch, thinking it over, decided that it was a good thing, and
did not refuse the general’s widow his formal consent to any proposition
in regard to his children’s education. As for the slaps she had given him,
he drove all over the town telling the story.

It happened that the old lady died soon after this, but she left the boys
in her will a thousand roubles each “for their instruction, and so that
all be spent on them exclusively, with the condition that it be so
portioned out as to last till they are twenty-one, for it is more than
adequate provision for such children. If other people think fit to throw
away their money, let them.” I have not read the will myself, but I heard
there was something queer of the sort, very whimsically expressed. The
principal heir, Yefim Petrovitch Polenov, the Marshal of Nobility of the
province, turned out, however, to be an honest man. Writing to Fyodor
Pavlovitch, and discerning at once that he could extract nothing from him
for his children’s education (though the latter never directly refused but
only procrastinated as he always did in such cases, and was, indeed, at
times effusively sentimental), Yefim Petrovitch took a personal interest
in the orphans. He became especially fond of the younger, Alexey, who
lived for a long while as one of his family. I beg the reader to note this
from the beginning. And to Yefim Petrovitch, a man of a generosity and
humanity rarely to be met with, the young people were more indebted for
their education and bringing up than to any one. He kept the two thousand
roubles left to them by the general’s widow intact, so that by the time
they came of age their portions had been doubled by the accumulation of
interest. He educated them both at his own expense, and certainly spent
far more than a thousand roubles upon each of them. I won’t enter into a
detailed account of their boyhood and youth, but will only mention a few
of the most important events. Of the elder, Ivan, I will only say that he
grew into a somewhat morose and reserved, though far from timid boy. At
ten years old he had realized that they were living not in their own home
but on other people’s charity, and that their father was a man of whom it
was disgraceful to speak. This boy began very early, almost in his infancy
(so they say at least), to show a brilliant and unusual aptitude for
learning. I don’t know precisely why, but he left the family of Yefim
Petrovitch when he was hardly thirteen, entering a Moscow gymnasium, and
boarding with an experienced and celebrated teacher, an old friend of
Yefim Petrovitch. Ivan used to declare afterwards that this was all due to
the “ardor for good works” of Yefim Petrovitch, who was captivated by the
idea that the boy’s genius should be trained by a teacher of genius. But
neither Yefim Petrovitch nor this teacher was living when the young man
finished at the gymnasium and entered the university. As Yefim Petrovitch
had made no provision for the payment of the tyrannical old lady’s legacy,
which had grown from one thousand to two, it was delayed, owing to
formalities inevitable in Russia, and the young man was in great straits
for the first two years at the university, as he was forced to keep
himself all the time he was studying. It must be noted that he did not
even attempt to communicate with his father, perhaps from pride, from
contempt for him, or perhaps from his cool common sense, which told him
that from such a father he would get no real assistance. However that may
have been, the young man was by no means despondent and succeeded in
getting work, at first giving sixpenny lessons and afterwards getting
paragraphs on street incidents into the newspapers under the signature of
“Eye-Witness.” These paragraphs, it was said, were so interesting and
piquant that they were soon taken. This alone showed the young man’s
practical and intellectual superiority over the masses of needy and
unfortunate students of both sexes who hang about the offices of the
newspapers and journals, unable to think of anything better than
everlasting entreaties for copying and translations from the French.
Having once got into touch with the editors Ivan Fyodorovitch always kept
up his connection with them, and in his latter years at the university he
published brilliant reviews of books upon various special subjects, so
that he became well known in literary circles. But only in his last year
he suddenly succeeded in attracting the attention of a far wider circle of
readers, so that a great many people noticed and remembered him. It was
rather a curious incident. When he had just left the university and was
preparing to go abroad upon his two thousand roubles, Ivan Fyodorovitch
published in one of the more important journals a strange article, which
attracted general notice, on a subject of which he might have been
supposed to know nothing, as he was a student of natural science. The
article dealt with a subject which was being debated everywhere at the
time—the position of the ecclesiastical courts. After discussing several
opinions on the subject he went on to explain his own view. What was most
striking about the article was its tone, and its unexpected conclusion.
Many of the Church party regarded him unquestioningly as on their side.
And yet not only the secularists but even atheists joined them in their
applause. Finally some sagacious persons opined that the article was
nothing but an impudent satirical burlesque. I mention this incident
particularly because this article penetrated into the famous monastery in
our neighborhood, where the inmates, being particularly interested in the
question of the ecclesiastical courts, were completely bewildered by it.
Learning the author’s name, they were interested in his being a native of
the town and the son of “that Fyodor Pavlovitch.” And just then it was
that the author himself made his appearance among us.

Why Ivan Fyodorovitch had come amongst us I remember asking myself at the
time with a certain uneasiness. This fateful visit, which was the first
step leading to so many consequences, I never fully explained to myself.
It seemed strange on the face of it that a young man so learned, so proud,
and apparently so cautious, should suddenly visit such an infamous house
and a father who had ignored him all his life, hardly knew him, never
thought of him, and would not under any circumstances have given him
money, though he was always afraid that his sons Ivan and Alexey would
also come to ask him for it. And here the young man was staying in the
house of such a father, had been living with him for two months, and they
were on the best possible terms. This last fact was a special cause of
wonder to many others as well as to me. Pyotr Alexandrovitch Miüsov, of
whom we have spoken already, the cousin of Fyodor Pavlovitch’s first wife,
happened to be in the neighborhood again on a visit to his estate. He had
come from Paris, which was his permanent home. I remember that he was more
surprised than any one when he made the acquaintance of the young man, who
interested him extremely, and with whom he sometimes argued and not
without an inner pang compared himself in acquirements.

“He is proud,” he used to say, “he will never be in want of pence; he has
got money enough to go abroad now. What does he want here? Every one can
see that he hasn’t come for money, for his father would never give him
any. He has no taste for drink and dissipation, and yet his father can’t
do without him. They get on so well together!”

That was the truth; the young man had an unmistakable influence over his
father, who positively appeared to be behaving more decently and even
seemed at times ready to obey his son, though often extremely and even
spitefully perverse.

It was only later that we learned that Ivan had come partly at the request
of, and in the interests of, his elder brother, Dmitri, whom he saw for
the first time on this very visit, though he had before leaving Moscow
been in correspondence with him about an important matter of more concern
to Dmitri than himself. What that business was the reader will learn fully
in due time. Yet even when I did know of this special circumstance I still
felt Ivan Fyodorovitch to be an enigmatic figure, and thought his visit
rather mysterious.

I may add that Ivan appeared at the time in the light of a mediator
between his father and his elder brother Dmitri, who was in open quarrel
with his father and even planning to bring an action against him.

The family, I repeat, was now united for the first time, and some of its
members met for the first time in their lives. The younger brother,
Alexey, had been a year already among us, having been the first of the
three to arrive. It is of that brother Alexey I find it most difficult to
speak in this introduction. Yet I must give some preliminary account of
him, if only to explain one queer fact, which is that I have to introduce
my hero to the reader wearing the cassock of a novice. Yes, he had been
for the last year in our monastery, and seemed willing to be cloistered
there for the rest of his life.



Chapter IV. The Third Son, Alyosha


He was only twenty, his brother Ivan was in his twenty-fourth year at the
time, while their elder brother Dmitri was twenty-seven. First of all, I
must explain that this young man, Alyosha, was not a fanatic, and, in my
opinion at least, was not even a mystic. I may as well give my full
opinion from the beginning. He was simply an early lover of humanity, and
that he adopted the monastic life was simply because at that time it
struck him, so to say, as the ideal escape for his soul struggling from
the darkness of worldly wickedness to the light of love. And the reason
this life struck him in this way was that he found in it at that time, as
he thought, an extraordinary being, our celebrated elder, Zossima, to whom
he became attached with all the warm first love of his ardent heart. But I
do not dispute that he was very strange even at that time, and had been so
indeed from his cradle. I have mentioned already, by the way, that though
he lost his mother in his fourth year he remembered her all his life—her
face, her caresses, “as though she stood living before me.” Such memories
may persist, as every one knows, from an even earlier age, even from two
years old, but scarcely standing out through a whole lifetime like spots
of light out of darkness, like a corner torn out of a huge picture, which
has all faded and disappeared except that fragment. That is how it was
with him. He remembered one still summer evening, an open window, the
slanting rays of the setting sun (that he recalled most vividly of all);
in a corner of the room the holy image, before it a lighted lamp, and on
her knees before the image his mother, sobbing hysterically with cries and
moans, snatching him up in both arms, squeezing him close till it hurt,
and praying for him to the Mother of God, holding him out in both arms to
the image as though to put him under the Mother’s protection ... and
suddenly a nurse runs in and snatches him from her in terror. That was the
picture! And Alyosha remembered his mother’s face at that minute. He used
to say that it was frenzied but beautiful as he remembered. But he rarely
cared to speak of this memory to any one. In his childhood and youth he
was by no means expansive, and talked little indeed, but not from shyness
or a sullen unsociability; quite the contrary, from something different,
from a sort of inner preoccupation entirely personal and unconcerned with
other people, but so important to him that he seemed, as it were, to
forget others on account of it. But he was fond of people: he seemed
throughout his life to put implicit trust in people: yet no one ever
looked on him as a simpleton or naïve person. There was something about
him which made one feel at once (and it was so all his life afterwards)
that he did not care to be a judge of others—that he would never take it
upon himself to criticize and would never condemn any one for anything. He
seemed, indeed, to accept everything without the least condemnation though
often grieving bitterly: and this was so much so that no one could
surprise or frighten him even in his earliest youth. Coming at twenty to
his father’s house, which was a very sink of filthy debauchery, he, chaste
and pure as he was, simply withdrew in silence when to look on was
unbearable, but without the slightest sign of contempt or condemnation.
His father, who had once been in a dependent position, and so was
sensitive and ready to take offense, met him at first with distrust and
sullenness. “He does not say much,” he used to say, “and thinks the more.”
But soon, within a fortnight indeed, he took to embracing him and kissing
him terribly often, with drunken tears, with sottish sentimentality, yet
he evidently felt a real and deep affection for him, such as he had never
been capable of feeling for any one before.

Every one, indeed, loved this young man wherever he went, and it was so
from his earliest childhood. When he entered the household of his patron
and benefactor, Yefim Petrovitch Polenov, he gained the hearts of all the
family, so that they looked on him quite as their own child. Yet he
entered the house at such a tender age that he could not have acted from
design nor artfulness in winning affection. So that the gift of making
himself loved directly and unconsciously was inherent in him, in his very
nature, so to speak. It was the same at school, though he seemed to be
just one of those children who are distrusted, sometimes ridiculed, and
even disliked by their schoolfellows. He was dreamy, for instance, and
rather solitary. From his earliest childhood he was fond of creeping into
a corner to read, and yet he was a general favorite all the while he was
at school. He was rarely playful or merry, but any one could see at the
first glance that this was not from any sullenness. On the contrary he was
bright and good-tempered. He never tried to show off among his
schoolfellows. Perhaps because of this, he was never afraid of any one,
yet the boys immediately understood that he was not proud of his
fearlessness and seemed to be unaware that he was bold and courageous. He
never resented an insult. It would happen that an hour after the offense
he would address the offender or answer some question with as trustful and
candid an expression as though nothing had happened between them. And it
was not that he seemed to have forgotten or intentionally forgiven the
affront, but simply that he did not regard it as an affront, and this
completely conquered and captivated the boys. He had one characteristic
which made all his schoolfellows from the bottom class to the top want to
mock at him, not from malice but because it amused them. This
characteristic was a wild fanatical modesty and chastity. He could not
bear to hear certain words and certain conversations about women. There
are “certain” words and conversations unhappily impossible to eradicate in
schools. Boys pure in mind and heart, almost children, are fond of talking
in school among themselves, and even aloud, of things, pictures, and
images of which even soldiers would sometimes hesitate to speak. More than
that, much that soldiers have no knowledge or conception of is familiar to
quite young children of our intellectual and higher classes. There is no
moral depravity, no real corrupt inner cynicism in it, but there is the
appearance of it, and it is often looked upon among them as something
refined, subtle, daring, and worthy of imitation. Seeing that Alyosha
Karamazov put his fingers in his ears when they talked of “that,” they
used sometimes to crowd round him, pull his hands away, and shout
nastiness into both ears, while he struggled, slipped to the floor, tried
to hide himself without uttering one word of abuse, enduring their insults
in silence. But at last they left him alone and gave up taunting him with
being a “regular girl,” and what’s more they looked upon it with
compassion as a weakness. He was always one of the best in the class but
was never first.

At the time of Yefim Petrovitch’s death Alyosha had two more years to
complete at the provincial gymnasium. The inconsolable widow went almost
immediately after his death for a long visit to Italy with her whole
family, which consisted only of women and girls. Alyosha went to live in
the house of two distant relations of Yefim Petrovitch, ladies whom he had
never seen before. On what terms he lived with them he did not know
himself. It was very characteristic of him, indeed, that he never cared at
whose expense he was living. In that respect he was a striking contrast to
his elder brother Ivan, who struggled with poverty for his first two years
in the university, maintained himself by his own efforts, and had from
childhood been bitterly conscious of living at the expense of his
benefactor. But this strange trait in Alyosha’s character must not, I
think, be criticized too severely, for at the slightest acquaintance with
him any one would have perceived that Alyosha was one of those youths,
almost of the type of religious enthusiast, who, if they were suddenly to
come into possession of a large fortune, would not hesitate to give it
away for the asking, either for good works or perhaps to a clever rogue.
In general he seemed scarcely to know the value of money, not, of course,
in a literal sense. When he was given pocket-money, which he never asked
for, he was either terribly careless of it so that it was gone in a
moment, or he kept it for weeks together, not knowing what to do with it.

In later years Pyotr Alexandrovitch Miüsov, a man very sensitive on the
score of money and bourgeois honesty, pronounced the following judgment,
after getting to know Alyosha:

“Here is perhaps the one man in the world whom you might leave alone
without a penny, in the center of an unknown town of a million
inhabitants, and he would not come to harm, he would not die of cold and
hunger, for he would be fed and sheltered at once; and if he were not, he
would find a shelter for himself, and it would cost him no effort or
humiliation. And to shelter him would be no burden, but, on the contrary,
would probably be looked on as a pleasure.”

He did not finish his studies at the gymnasium. A year before the end of
the course he suddenly announced to the ladies that he was going to see
his father about a plan which had occurred to him. They were sorry and
unwilling to let him go. The journey was not an expensive one, and the
ladies would not let him pawn his watch, a parting present from his
benefactor’s family. They provided him liberally with money and even
fitted him out with new clothes and linen. But he returned half the money
they gave him, saying that he intended to go third class. On his arrival
in the town he made no answer to his father’s first inquiry why he had
come before completing his studies, and seemed, so they say, unusually
thoughtful. It soon became apparent that he was looking for his mother’s
tomb. He practically acknowledged at the time that that was the only
object of his visit. But it can hardly have been the whole reason of it.
It is more probable that he himself did not understand and could not
explain what had suddenly arisen in his soul, and drawn him irresistibly
into a new, unknown, but inevitable path. Fyodor Pavlovitch could not show
him where his second wife was buried, for he had never visited her grave
since he had thrown earth upon her coffin, and in the course of years had
entirely forgotten where she was buried.

Fyodor Pavlovitch, by the way, had for some time previously not been
living in our town. Three or four years after his wife’s death he had gone
to the south of Russia and finally turned up in Odessa, where he spent
several years. He made the acquaintance at first, in his own words, “of a
lot of low Jews, Jewesses, and Jewkins,” and ended by being received by
“Jews high and low alike.” It may be presumed that at this period he
developed a peculiar faculty for making and hoarding money. He finally
returned to our town only three years before Alyosha’s arrival. His former
acquaintances found him looking terribly aged, although he was by no means
an old man. He behaved not exactly with more dignity but with more
effrontery. The former buffoon showed an insolent propensity for making
buffoons of others. His depravity with women was not simply what it used
to be, but even more revolting. In a short time he opened a great number
of new taverns in the district. It was evident that he had perhaps a
hundred thousand roubles or not much less. Many of the inhabitants of the
town and district were soon in his debt, and, of course, had given good
security. Of late, too, he looked somehow bloated and seemed more
irresponsible, more uneven, had sunk into a sort of incoherence, used to
begin one thing and go on with another, as though he were letting himself
go altogether. He was more and more frequently drunk. And, if it had not
been for the same servant Grigory, who by that time had aged considerably
too, and used to look after him sometimes almost like a tutor, Fyodor
Pavlovitch might have got into terrible scrapes. Alyosha’s arrival seemed
to affect even his moral side, as though something had awakened in this
prematurely old man which had long been dead in his soul.

“Do you know,” he used often to say, looking at Alyosha, “that you are
like her, ‘the crazy woman’ ”—that was what he used to call his dead wife,
Alyosha’s mother. Grigory it was who pointed out the “crazy woman’s” grave
to Alyosha. He took him to our town cemetery and showed him in a remote
corner a cast-iron tombstone, cheap but decently kept, on which were
inscribed the name and age of the deceased and the date of her death, and
below a four-lined verse, such as are commonly used on old-fashioned
middle-class tombs. To Alyosha’s amazement this tomb turned out to be
Grigory’s doing. He had put it up on the poor “crazy woman’s” grave at his
own expense, after Fyodor Pavlovitch, whom he had often pestered about the
grave, had gone to Odessa, abandoning the grave and all his memories.
Alyosha showed no particular emotion at the sight of his mother’s grave.
He only listened to Grigory’s minute and solemn account of the erection of
the tomb; he stood with bowed head and walked away without uttering a
word. It was perhaps a year before he visited the cemetery again. But this
little episode was not without an influence upon Fyodor Pavlovitch—and a
very original one. He suddenly took a thousand roubles to our monastery to
pay for requiems for the soul of his wife; but not for the second,
Alyosha’s mother, the “crazy woman,” but for the first, Adelaïda Ivanovna,
who used to thrash him. In the evening of the same day he got drunk and
abused the monks to Alyosha. He himself was far from being religious; he
had probably never put a penny candle before the image of a saint. Strange
impulses of sudden feeling and sudden thought are common in such types.

I have mentioned already that he looked bloated. His countenance at this
time bore traces of something that testified unmistakably to the life he
had led. Besides the long fleshy bags under his little, always insolent,
suspicious, and ironical eyes; besides the multitude of deep wrinkles in
his little fat face, the Adam’s apple hung below his sharp chin like a
great, fleshy goiter, which gave him a peculiar, repulsive, sensual
appearance; add to that a long rapacious mouth with full lips, between
which could be seen little stumps of black decayed teeth. He slobbered
every time he began to speak. He was fond indeed of making fun of his own
face, though, I believe, he was well satisfied with it. He used
particularly to point to his nose, which was not very large, but very
delicate and conspicuously aquiline. “A regular Roman nose,” he used to
say, “with my goiter I’ve quite the countenance of an ancient Roman
patrician of the decadent period.” He seemed proud of it.

Not long after visiting his mother’s grave Alyosha suddenly announced that
he wanted to enter the monastery, and that the monks were willing to
receive him as a novice. He explained that this was his strong desire, and
that he was solemnly asking his consent as his father. The old man knew
that the elder Zossima, who was living in the monastery hermitage, had
made a special impression upon his “gentle boy.”

“That is the most honest monk among them, of course,” he observed, after
listening in thoughtful silence to Alyosha, and seeming scarcely surprised
at his request. “H’m!... So that’s where you want to be, my gentle boy?”

He was half drunk, and suddenly he grinned his slow half-drunken grin,
which was not without a certain cunning and tipsy slyness. “H’m!... I had
a presentiment that you would end in something like this. Would you
believe it? You were making straight for it. Well, to be sure you have
your own two thousand. That’s a dowry for you. And I’ll never desert you,
my angel. And I’ll pay what’s wanted for you there, if they ask for it.
But, of course, if they don’t ask, why should we worry them? What do you
say? You know, you spend money like a canary, two grains a week. H’m!...
Do you know that near one monastery there’s a place outside the town where
every baby knows there are none but ‘the monks’ wives’ living, as they are
called. Thirty women, I believe. I have been there myself. You know, it’s
interesting in its own way, of course, as a variety. The worst of it is
it’s awfully Russian. There are no French women there. Of course they
could get them fast enough, they have plenty of money. If they get to hear
of it they’ll come along. Well, there’s nothing of that sort here, no
‘monks’ wives,’ and two hundred monks. They’re honest. They keep the
fasts. I admit it.... H’m.... So you want to be a monk? And do you know
I’m sorry to lose you, Alyosha; would you believe it, I’ve really grown
fond of you? Well, it’s a good opportunity. You’ll pray for us sinners; we
have sinned too much here. I’ve always been thinking who would pray for
me, and whether there’s any one in the world to do it. My dear boy, I’m
awfully stupid about that. You wouldn’t believe it. Awfully. You see,
however stupid I am about it, I keep thinking, I keep thinking—from time
to time, of course, not all the while. It’s impossible, I think, for the
devils to forget to drag me down to hell with their hooks when I die. Then
I wonder—hooks? Where would they get them? What of? Iron hooks? Where do
they forge them? Have they a foundry there of some sort? The monks in the
monastery probably believe that there’s a ceiling in hell, for instance.
Now I’m ready to believe in hell, but without a ceiling. It makes it more
refined, more enlightened, more Lutheran that is. And, after all, what
does it matter whether it has a ceiling or hasn’t? But, do you know,
there’s a damnable question involved in it? If there’s no ceiling there
can be no hooks, and if there are no hooks it all breaks down, which is
unlikely again, for then there would be none to drag me down to hell, and
if they don’t drag me down what justice is there in the world? _Il
faudrait les inventer_, those hooks, on purpose for me alone, for, if you
only knew, Alyosha, what a blackguard I am.”

“But there are no hooks there,” said Alyosha, looking gently and seriously
at his father.

“Yes, yes, only the shadows of hooks, I know, I know. That’s how a
Frenchman described hell: ‘_J’ai bu l’ombre d’un cocher qui avec l’ombre
d’une brosse frottait l’ombre d’une carrosse._’ How do you know there are
no hooks, darling? When you’ve lived with the monks you’ll sing a
different tune. But go and get at the truth there, and then come and tell
me. Anyway it’s easier going to the other world if one knows what there is
there. Besides, it will be more seemly for you with the monks than here
with me, with a drunken old man and young harlots ... though you’re like
an angel, nothing touches you. And I dare say nothing will touch you
there. That’s why I let you go, because I hope for that. You’ve got all
your wits about you. You will burn and you will burn out; you will be
healed and come back again. And I will wait for you. I feel that you’re
the only creature in the world who has not condemned me. My dear boy, I
feel it, you know. I can’t help feeling it.”

And he even began blubbering. He was sentimental. He was wicked and
sentimental.



Chapter V. Elders


Some of my readers may imagine that my young man was a sickly, ecstatic,
poorly developed creature, a pale, consumptive dreamer. On the contrary,
Alyosha was at this time a well-grown, red-cheeked, clear-eyed lad of
nineteen, radiant with health. He was very handsome, too, graceful,
moderately tall, with hair of a dark brown, with a regular, rather long,
oval-shaped face, and wide-set dark gray, shining eyes; he was very
thoughtful, and apparently very serene. I shall be told, perhaps, that red
cheeks are not incompatible with fanaticism and mysticism; but I fancy
that Alyosha was more of a realist than any one. Oh! no doubt, in the
monastery he fully believed in miracles, but, to my thinking, miracles are
never a stumbling-block to the realist. It is not miracles that dispose
realists to belief. The genuine realist, if he is an unbeliever, will
always find strength and ability to disbelieve in the miraculous, and if
he is confronted with a miracle as an irrefutable fact he would rather
disbelieve his own senses than admit the fact. Even if he admits it, he
admits it as a fact of nature till then unrecognized by him. Faith does
not, in the realist, spring from the miracle but the miracle from faith.
If the realist once believes, then he is bound by his very realism to
admit the miraculous also. The Apostle Thomas said that he would not
believe till he saw, but when he did see he said, “My Lord and my God!”
Was it the miracle forced him to believe? Most likely not, but he believed
solely because he desired to believe and possibly he fully believed in his
secret heart even when he said, “I do not believe till I see.”

I shall be told, perhaps, that Alyosha was stupid, undeveloped, had not
finished his studies, and so on. That he did not finish his studies is
true, but to say that he was stupid or dull would be a great injustice.
I’ll simply repeat what I have said above. He entered upon this path only
because, at that time, it alone struck his imagination and presented
itself to him as offering an ideal means of escape for his soul from
darkness to light. Add to that that he was to some extent a youth of our
last epoch—that is, honest in nature, desiring the truth, seeking for it
and believing in it, and seeking to serve it at once with all the strength
of his soul, seeking for immediate action, and ready to sacrifice
everything, life itself, for it. Though these young men unhappily fail to
understand that the sacrifice of life is, in many cases, the easiest of
all sacrifices, and that to sacrifice, for instance, five or six years of
their seething youth to hard and tedious study, if only to multiply
tenfold their powers of serving the truth and the cause they have set
before them as their goal—such a sacrifice is utterly beyond the strength
of many of them. The path Alyosha chose was a path going in the opposite
direction, but he chose it with the same thirst for swift achievement. As
soon as he reflected seriously he was convinced of the existence of God
and immortality, and at once he instinctively said to himself: “I want to
live for immortality, and I will accept no compromise.” In the same way,
if he had decided that God and immortality did not exist, he would at once
have become an atheist and a socialist. For socialism is not merely the
labor question, it is before all things the atheistic question, the
question of the form taken by atheism to-day, the question of the tower of
Babel built without God, not to mount to heaven from earth but to set up
heaven on earth. Alyosha would have found it strange and impossible to go
on living as before. It is written: “Give all that thou hast to the poor
and follow Me, if thou wouldst be perfect.”

Alyosha said to himself: “I can’t give two roubles instead of ‘all,’ and
only go to mass instead of ‘following Him.’ ” Perhaps his memories of
childhood brought back our monastery, to which his mother may have taken
him to mass. Perhaps the slanting sunlight and the holy image to which his
poor “crazy” mother had held him up still acted upon his imagination.
Brooding on these things he may have come to us perhaps only to see
whether here he could sacrifice all or only “two roubles,” and in the
monastery he met this elder. I must digress to explain what an “elder” is
in Russian monasteries, and I am sorry that I do not feel very competent
to do so. I will try, however, to give a superficial account of it in a
few words. Authorities on the subject assert that the institution of
“elders” is of recent date, not more than a hundred years old in our
monasteries, though in the orthodox East, especially in Sinai and Athos,
it has existed over a thousand years. It is maintained that it existed in
ancient times in Russia also, but through the calamities which overtook
Russia—the Tartars, civil war, the interruption of relations with the East
after the destruction of Constantinople—this institution fell into
oblivion. It was revived among us towards the end of last century by one
of the great “ascetics,” as they called him, Païssy Velitchkovsky, and his
disciples. But to this day it exists in few monasteries only, and has
sometimes been almost persecuted as an innovation in Russia. It flourished
especially in the celebrated Kozelski Optin Monastery. When and how it was
introduced into our monastery I cannot say. There had already been three
such elders and Zossima was the last of them. But he was almost dying of
weakness and disease, and they had no one to take his place. The question
for our monastery was an important one, for it had not been distinguished
by anything in particular till then: they had neither relics of saints,
nor wonder-working ikons, nor glorious traditions, nor historical
exploits. It had flourished and been glorious all over Russia through its
elders, to see and hear whom pilgrims had flocked for thousands of miles
from all parts.

What was such an elder? An elder was one who took your soul, your will,
into his soul and his will. When you choose an elder, you renounce your
own will and yield it to him in complete submission, complete
self-abnegation. This novitiate, this terrible school of abnegation, is
undertaken voluntarily, in the hope of self-conquest, of self-mastery, in
order, after a life of obedience, to attain perfect freedom, that is, from
self; to escape the lot of those who have lived their whole life without
finding their true selves in themselves. This institution of elders is not
founded on theory, but was established in the East from the practice of a
thousand years. The obligations due to an elder are not the ordinary
“obedience” which has always existed in our Russian monasteries. The
obligation involves confession to the elder by all who have submitted
themselves to him, and to the indissoluble bond between him and them.

The story is told, for instance, that in the early days of Christianity
one such novice, failing to fulfill some command laid upon him by his
elder, left his monastery in Syria and went to Egypt. There, after great
exploits, he was found worthy at last to suffer torture and a martyr’s
death for the faith. When the Church, regarding him as a saint, was
burying him, suddenly, at the deacon’s exhortation, “Depart all ye
unbaptized,” the coffin containing the martyr’s body left its place and
was cast forth from the church, and this took place three times. And only
at last they learnt that this holy man had broken his vow of obedience and
left his elder, and, therefore, could not be forgiven without the elder’s
absolution in spite of his great deeds. Only after this could the funeral
take place. This, of course, is only an old legend. But here is a recent
instance.

A monk was suddenly commanded by his elder to quit Athos, which he loved
as a sacred place and a haven of refuge, and to go first to Jerusalem to
do homage to the Holy Places and then to go to the north to Siberia:
“There is the place for thee and not here.” The monk, overwhelmed with
sorrow, went to the Œcumenical Patriarch at Constantinople and besought
him to release him from his obedience. But the Patriarch replied that not
only was he unable to release him, but there was not and could not be on
earth a power which could release him except the elder who had himself
laid that duty upon him. In this way the elders are endowed in certain
cases with unbounded and inexplicable authority. That is why in many of
our monasteries the institution was at first resisted almost to
persecution. Meantime the elders immediately began to be highly esteemed
among the people. Masses of the ignorant people as well as men of
distinction flocked, for instance, to the elders of our monastery to
confess their doubts, their sins, and their sufferings, and ask for
counsel and admonition. Seeing this, the opponents of the elders declared
that the sacrament of confession was being arbitrarily and frivolously
degraded, though the continual opening of the heart to the elder by the
monk or the layman had nothing of the character of the sacrament. In the
end, however, the institution of elders has been retained and is becoming
established in Russian monasteries. It is true, perhaps, that this
instrument which had stood the test of a thousand years for the moral
regeneration of a man from slavery to freedom and to moral perfectibility
may be a two-edged weapon and it may lead some not to humility and
complete self-control but to the most Satanic pride, that is, to bondage
and not to freedom.

The elder Zossima was sixty-five. He came of a family of landowners, had
been in the army in early youth, and served in the Caucasus as an officer.
He had, no doubt, impressed Alyosha by some peculiar quality of his soul.
Alyosha lived in the cell of the elder, who was very fond of him and let
him wait upon him. It must be noted that Alyosha was bound by no
obligation and could go where he pleased and be absent for whole days.
Though he wore the monastic dress it was voluntarily, not to be different
from others. No doubt he liked to do so. Possibly his youthful imagination
was deeply stirred by the power and fame of his elder. It was said that so
many people had for years past come to confess their sins to Father
Zossima and to entreat him for words of advice and healing, that he had
acquired the keenest intuition and could tell from an unknown face what a
new-comer wanted, and what was the suffering on his conscience. He
sometimes astounded and almost alarmed his visitors by his knowledge of
their secrets before they had spoken a word.

Alyosha noticed that many, almost all, went in to the elder for the first
time with apprehension and uneasiness, but came out with bright and happy
faces. Alyosha was particularly struck by the fact that Father Zossima was
not at all stern. On the contrary, he was always almost gay. The monks
used to say that he was more drawn to those who were more sinful, and the
greater the sinner the more he loved him. There were, no doubt, up to the
end of his life, among the monks some who hated and envied him, but they
were few in number and they were silent, though among them were some of
great dignity in the monastery, one, for instance, of the older monks
distinguished for his strict keeping of fasts and vows of silence. But the
majority were on Father Zossima’s side and very many of them loved him
with all their hearts, warmly and sincerely. Some were almost fanatically
devoted to him, and declared, though not quite aloud, that he was a saint,
that there could be no doubt of it, and, seeing that his end was near,
they anticipated miracles and great glory to the monastery in the
immediate future from his relics. Alyosha had unquestioning faith in the
miraculous power of the elder, just as he had unquestioning faith in the
story of the coffin that flew out of the church. He saw many who came with
sick children or relatives and besought the elder to lay hands on them and
to pray over them, return shortly after—some the next day—and, falling in
tears at the elder’s feet, thank him for healing their sick.

Whether they had really been healed or were simply better in the natural
course of the disease was a question which did not exist for Alyosha, for
he fully believed in the spiritual power of his teacher and rejoiced in
his fame, in his glory, as though it were his own triumph. His heart
throbbed, and he beamed, as it were, all over when the elder came out to
the gates of the hermitage into the waiting crowd of pilgrims of the
humbler class who had flocked from all parts of Russia on purpose to see
the elder and obtain his blessing. They fell down before him, wept, kissed
his feet, kissed the earth on which he stood, and wailed, while the women
held up their children to him and brought him the sick “possessed with
devils.” The elder spoke to them, read a brief prayer over them, blessed
them, and dismissed them. Of late he had become so weak through attacks of
illness that he was sometimes unable to leave his cell, and the pilgrims
waited for him to come out for several days. Alyosha did not wonder why
they loved him so, why they fell down before him and wept with emotion
merely at seeing his face. Oh! he understood that for the humble soul of
the Russian peasant, worn out by grief and toil, and still more by the
everlasting injustice and everlasting sin, his own and the world’s, it was
the greatest need and comfort to find some one or something holy to fall
down before and worship.

“Among us there is sin, injustice, and temptation, but yet, somewhere on
earth there is some one holy and exalted. He has the truth; he knows the
truth; so it is not dead upon the earth; so it will come one day to us,
too, and rule over all the earth according to the promise.”

Alyosha knew that this was just how the people felt and even reasoned. He
understood it, but that the elder Zossima was this saint and custodian of
God’s truth—of that he had no more doubt than the weeping peasants and the
sick women who held out their children to the elder. The conviction that
after his death the elder would bring extraordinary glory to the monastery
was even stronger in Alyosha than in any one there, and, of late, a kind
of deep flame of inner ecstasy burnt more and more strongly in his heart.
He was not at all troubled at this elder’s standing as a solitary example
before him.

“No matter. He is holy. He carries in his heart the secret of renewal for
all: that power which will, at last, establish truth on the earth, and all
men will be holy and love one another, and there will be no more rich nor
poor, no exalted nor humbled, but all will be as the children of God, and
the true Kingdom of Christ will come.” That was the dream in Alyosha’s
heart.

The arrival of his two brothers, whom he had not known till then, seemed
to make a great impression on Alyosha. He more quickly made friends with
his half-brother Dmitri (though he arrived later) than with his own
brother Ivan. He was extremely interested in his brother Ivan, but when
the latter had been two months in the town, though they had met fairly
often, they were still not intimate. Alyosha was naturally silent, and he
seemed to be expecting something, ashamed about something, while his
brother Ivan, though Alyosha noticed at first that he looked long and
curiously at him, seemed soon to have left off thinking of him. Alyosha
noticed it with some embarrassment. He ascribed his brother’s indifference
at first to the disparity of their age and education. But he also wondered
whether the absence of curiosity and sympathy in Ivan might be due to some
other cause entirely unknown to him. He kept fancying that Ivan was
absorbed in something—something inward and important—that he was striving
towards some goal, perhaps very hard to attain, and that that was why he
had no thought for him. Alyosha wondered, too, whether there was not some
contempt on the part of the learned atheist for him—a foolish novice. He
knew for certain that his brother was an atheist. He could not take
offense at this contempt, if it existed; yet, with an uneasy embarrassment
which he did not himself understand, he waited for his brother to come
nearer to him. Dmitri used to speak of Ivan with the deepest respect and
with a peculiar earnestness. From him Alyosha learnt all the details of
the important affair which had of late formed such a close and remarkable
bond between the two elder brothers. Dmitri’s enthusiastic references to
Ivan were the more striking in Alyosha’s eyes since Dmitri was, compared
with Ivan, almost uneducated, and the two brothers were such a contrast in
personality and character that it would be difficult to find two men more
unlike.

It was at this time that the meeting, or, rather gathering of the members
of this inharmonious family took place in the cell of the elder who had
such an extraordinary influence on Alyosha. The pretext for this gathering
was a false one. It was at this time that the discord between Dmitri and
his father seemed at its acutest stage and their relations had become
insufferably strained. Fyodor Pavlovitch seems to have been the first to
suggest, apparently in joke, that they should all meet in Father Zossima’s
cell, and that, without appealing to his direct intervention, they might
more decently come to an understanding under the conciliating influence of
the elder’s presence. Dmitri, who had never seen the elder, naturally
supposed that his father was trying to intimidate him, but, as he secretly
blamed himself for his outbursts of temper with his father on several
recent occasions, he accepted the challenge. It must be noted that he was
not, like Ivan, staying with his father, but living apart at the other end
of the town. It happened that Pyotr Alexandrovitch Miüsov, who was staying
in the district at the time, caught eagerly at the idea. A Liberal of the
forties and fifties, a freethinker and atheist, he may have been led on by
boredom or the hope of frivolous diversion. He was suddenly seized with
the desire to see the monastery and the holy man. As his lawsuit with the
monastery still dragged on, he made it the pretext for seeing the
Superior, in order to attempt to settle it amicably. A visitor coming with
such laudable intentions might be received with more attention and
consideration than if he came from simple curiosity. Influences from
within the monastery were brought to bear on the elder, who of late had
scarcely left his cell, and had been forced by illness to deny even his
ordinary visitors. In the end he consented to see them, and the day was
fixed.

“Who has made me a judge over them?” was all he said, smilingly, to
Alyosha.

Alyosha was much perturbed when he heard of the proposed visit. Of all the
wrangling, quarrelsome party, Dmitri was the only one who could regard the
interview seriously. All the others would come from frivolous motives,
perhaps insulting to the elder. Alyosha was well aware of that. Ivan and
Miüsov would come from curiosity, perhaps of the coarsest kind, while his
father might be contemplating some piece of buffoonery. Though he said
nothing, Alyosha thoroughly understood his father. The boy, I repeat, was
far from being so simple as every one thought him. He awaited the day with
a heavy heart. No doubt he was always pondering in his mind how the family
discord could be ended. But his chief anxiety concerned the elder. He
trembled for him, for his glory, and dreaded any affront to him,
especially the refined, courteous irony of Miüsov and the supercilious
half-utterances of the highly educated Ivan. He even wanted to venture on
warning the elder, telling him something about them, but, on second
thoughts, said nothing. He only sent word the day before, through a
friend, to his brother Dmitri, that he loved him and expected him to keep
his promise. Dmitri wondered, for he could not remember what he had
promised, but he answered by letter that he would do his utmost not to let
himself be provoked “by vileness,” but that, although he had a deep
respect for the elder and for his brother Ivan, he was convinced that the
meeting was either a trap for him or an unworthy farce.

“Nevertheless I would rather bite out my tongue than be lacking in respect
to the sainted man whom you reverence so highly,” he wrote in conclusion.
Alyosha was not greatly cheered by the letter.




Book II. An Unfortunate Gathering



Chapter I. They Arrive At The Monastery


It was a warm, bright day at the end of August. The interview with the
elder had been fixed for half-past eleven, immediately after late mass.
Our visitors did not take part in the service, but arrived just as it was
over. First an elegant open carriage, drawn by two valuable horses, drove
up with Miüsov and a distant relative of his, a young man of twenty,
called Pyotr Fomitch Kalganov. This young man was preparing to enter the
university. Miüsov, with whom he was staying for the time, was trying to
persuade him to go abroad to the university of Zurich or Jena. The young
man was still undecided. He was thoughtful and absent-minded. He was
nice-looking, strongly built, and rather tall. There was a strange fixity
in his gaze at times. Like all very absent-minded people he would
sometimes stare at a person without seeing him. He was silent and rather
awkward, but sometimes, when he was alone with any one, he became
talkative and effusive, and would laugh at anything or nothing. But his
animation vanished as quickly as it appeared. He was always well and even
elaborately dressed; he had already some independent fortune and
expectations of much more. He was a friend of Alyosha’s.

In an ancient, jolting, but roomy, hired carriage, with a pair of old
pinkish-gray horses, a long way behind Miüsov’s carriage, came Fyodor
Pavlovitch, with his son Ivan. Dmitri was late, though he had been
informed of the time the evening before. The visitors left their carriage
at the hotel, outside the precincts, and went to the gates of the
monastery on foot. Except Fyodor Pavlovitch, none of the party had ever
seen the monastery, and Miüsov had probably not even been to church for
thirty years. He looked about him with curiosity, together with assumed
ease. But, except the church and the domestic buildings, though these too
were ordinary enough, he found nothing of interest in the interior of the
monastery. The last of the worshippers were coming out of the church,
bareheaded and crossing themselves. Among the humbler people were a few of
higher rank—two or three ladies and a very old general. They were all
staying at the hotel. Our visitors were at once surrounded by beggars, but
none of them gave them anything, except young Kalganov, who took a
ten-copeck piece out of his purse, and, nervous and embarrassed—God knows
why!—hurriedly gave it to an old woman, saying: “Divide it equally.” None
of his companions made any remark upon it, so that he had no reason to be
embarrassed; but, perceiving this, he was even more overcome.

It was strange that their arrival did not seem expected, and that they
were not received with special honor, though one of them had recently made
a donation of a thousand roubles, while another was a very wealthy and
highly cultured landowner, upon whom all in the monastery were in a sense
dependent, as a decision of the lawsuit might at any moment put their
fishing rights in his hands. Yet no official personage met them.

Miüsov looked absent-mindedly at the tombstones round the church, and was
on the point of saying that the dead buried here must have paid a pretty
penny for the right of lying in this “holy place,” but refrained. His
liberal irony was rapidly changing almost into anger.

“Who the devil is there to ask in this imbecile place? We must find out,
for time is passing,” he observed suddenly, as though speaking to himself.

All at once there came up a bald-headed, elderly man with ingratiating
little eyes, wearing a full, summer overcoat. Lifting his hat, he
introduced himself with a honeyed lisp as Maximov, a landowner of Tula. He
at once entered into our visitors’ difficulty.

“Father Zossima lives in the hermitage, apart, four hundred paces from the
monastery, the other side of the copse.”

“I know it’s the other side of the copse,” observed Fyodor Pavlovitch,
“but we don’t remember the way. It is a long time since we’ve been here.”

“This way, by this gate, and straight across the copse ... the copse. Come
with me, won’t you? I’ll show you. I have to go.... I am going myself.
This way, this way.”

They came out of the gate and turned towards the copse. Maximov, a man of
sixty, ran rather than walked, turning sideways to stare at them all, with
an incredible degree of nervous curiosity. His eyes looked starting out of
his head.

“You see, we have come to the elder upon business of our own,” observed
Miüsov severely. “That personage has granted us an audience, so to speak,
and so, though we thank you for showing us the way, we cannot ask you to
accompany us.”

“I’ve been there. I’ve been already; _un chevalier parfait_,” and Maximov
snapped his fingers in the air.

“Who is a _chevalier_?” asked Miüsov.

“The elder, the splendid elder, the elder! The honor and glory of the
monastery, Zossima. Such an elder!”

But his incoherent talk was cut short by a very pale, wan-looking monk of
medium height, wearing a monk’s cap, who overtook them. Fyodor Pavlovitch
and Miüsov stopped.

The monk, with an extremely courteous, profound bow, announced:

“The Father Superior invites all of you gentlemen to dine with him after
your visit to the hermitage. At one o’clock, not later. And you also,” he
added, addressing Maximov.

“That I certainly will, without fail,” cried Fyodor Pavlovitch, hugely
delighted at the invitation. “And, believe me, we’ve all given our word to
behave properly here.... And you, Pyotr Alexandrovitch, will you go, too?”

“Yes, of course. What have I come for but to study all the customs here?
The only obstacle to me is your company....”

“Yes, Dmitri Fyodorovitch is non-existent as yet.”

“It would be a capital thing if he didn’t turn up. Do you suppose I like
all this business, and in your company, too? So we will come to dinner.
Thank the Father Superior,” he said to the monk.

“No, it is my duty now to conduct you to the elder,” answered the monk.

“If so I’ll go straight to the Father Superior—to the Father Superior,”
babbled Maximov.

“The Father Superior is engaged just now. But as you please—” the monk
hesitated.

“Impertinent old man!” Miüsov observed aloud, while Maximov ran back to
the monastery.

“He’s like von Sohn,” Fyodor Pavlovitch said suddenly.

“Is that all you can think of?... In what way is he like von Sohn? Have
you ever seen von Sohn?”

“I’ve seen his portrait. It’s not the features, but something indefinable.
He’s a second von Sohn. I can always tell from the physiognomy.”

“Ah, I dare say you are a connoisseur in that. But, look here, Fyodor
Pavlovitch, you said just now that we had given our word to behave
properly. Remember it. I advise you to control yourself. But, if you begin
to play the fool I don’t intend to be associated with you here.... You see
what a man he is”—he turned to the monk—“I’m afraid to go among decent
people with him.” A fine smile, not without a certain slyness, came on to
the pale, bloodless lips of the monk, but he made no reply, and was
evidently silent from a sense of his own dignity. Miüsov frowned more than
ever.

“Oh, devil take them all! An outer show elaborated through centuries, and
nothing but charlatanism and nonsense underneath,” flashed through
Miüsov’s mind.

“Here’s the hermitage. We’ve arrived,” cried Fyodor Pavlovitch. “The gates
are shut.”

And he repeatedly made the sign of the cross to the saints painted above
and on the sides of the gates.

“When you go to Rome you must do as the Romans do. Here in this hermitage
there are twenty-five saints being saved. They look at one another, and
eat cabbages. And not one woman goes in at this gate. That’s what is
remarkable. And that really is so. But I did hear that the elder receives
ladies,” he remarked suddenly to the monk.

“Women of the people are here too now, lying in the portico there waiting.
But for ladies of higher rank two rooms have been built adjoining the
portico, but outside the precincts—you can see the windows—and the elder
goes out to them by an inner passage when he is well enough. They are
always outside the precincts. There is a Harkov lady, Madame Hohlakov,
waiting there now with her sick daughter. Probably he has promised to come
out to her, though of late he has been so weak that he has hardly shown
himself even to the people.”

“So then there are loopholes, after all, to creep out of the hermitage to
the ladies. Don’t suppose, holy father, that I mean any harm. But do you
know that at Athos not only the visits of women are not allowed, but no
creature of the female sex—no hens, nor turkey-hens, nor cows.”

“Fyodor Pavlovitch, I warn you I shall go back and leave you here. They’ll
turn you out when I’m gone.”

“But I’m not interfering with you, Pyotr Alexandrovitch. Look,” he cried
suddenly, stepping within the precincts, “what a vale of roses they live
in!”

Though there were no roses now, there were numbers of rare and beautiful
autumn flowers growing wherever there was space for them, and evidently
tended by a skillful hand; there were flower-beds round the church, and
between the tombs; and the one-storied wooden house where the elder lived
was also surrounded with flowers.

“And was it like this in the time of the last elder, Varsonofy? He didn’t
care for such elegance. They say he used to jump up and thrash even ladies
with a stick,” observed Fyodor Pavlovitch, as he went up the steps.

“The elder Varsonofy did sometimes seem rather strange, but a great deal
that’s told is foolishness. He never thrashed any one,” answered the monk.
“Now, gentlemen, if you will wait a minute I will announce you.”

“Fyodor Pavlovitch, for the last time, your compact, do you hear? Behave
properly or I will pay you out!” Miüsov had time to mutter again.

“I can’t think why you are so agitated,” Fyodor Pavlovitch observed
sarcastically. “Are you uneasy about your sins? They say he can tell by
one’s eyes what one has come about. And what a lot you think of their
opinion! you, a Parisian, and so advanced. I’m surprised at you.”

But Miüsov had no time to reply to this sarcasm. They were asked to come
in. He walked in, somewhat irritated.

“Now, I know myself, I am annoyed, I shall lose my temper and begin to
quarrel—and lower myself and my ideas,” he reflected.



Chapter II. The Old Buffoon


They entered the room almost at the same moment that the elder came in
from his bedroom. There were already in the cell, awaiting the elder, two
monks of the hermitage, one the Father Librarian, and the other Father
Païssy, a very learned man, so they said, in delicate health, though not
old. There was also a tall young man, who looked about two and twenty,
standing in the corner throughout the interview. He had a broad, fresh
face, and clever, observant, narrow brown eyes, and was wearing ordinary
dress. He was a divinity student, living under the protection of the
monastery. His expression was one of unquestioning, but self-respecting,
reverence. Being in a subordinate and dependent position, and so not on an
equality with the guests, he did not greet them with a bow.

Father Zossima was accompanied by a novice, and by Alyosha. The two monks
rose and greeted him with a very deep bow, touching the ground with their
fingers; then kissed his hand. Blessing them, the elder replied with as
deep a reverence to them, and asked their blessing. The whole ceremony was
performed very seriously and with an appearance of feeling, not like an
everyday rite. But Miüsov fancied that it was all done with intentional
impressiveness. He stood in front of the other visitors. He ought—he had
reflected upon it the evening before—from simple politeness, since it was
the custom here, to have gone up to receive the elder’s blessing, even if
he did not kiss his hand. But when he saw all this bowing and kissing on
the part of the monks he instantly changed his mind. With dignified
gravity he made a rather deep, conventional bow, and moved away to a
chair. Fyodor Pavlovitch did the same, mimicking Miüsov like an ape. Ivan
bowed with great dignity and courtesy, but he too kept his hands at his
sides, while Kalganov was so confused that he did not bow at all. The
elder let fall the hand raised to bless them, and bowing to them again,
asked them all to sit down. The blood rushed to Alyosha’s cheeks. He was
ashamed. His forebodings were coming true.

Father Zossima sat down on a very old-fashioned mahogany sofa, covered
with leather, and made his visitors sit down in a row along the opposite
wall on four mahogany chairs, covered with shabby black leather. The monks
sat, one at the door and the other at the window. The divinity student,
the novice, and Alyosha remained standing. The cell was not very large and
had a faded look. It contained nothing but the most necessary furniture,
of coarse and poor quality. There were two pots of flowers in the window,
and a number of holy pictures in the corner. Before one huge ancient ikon
of the Virgin a lamp was burning. Near it were two other holy pictures in
shining settings, and, next them, carved cherubims, china eggs, a Catholic
cross of ivory, with a Mater Dolorosa embracing it, and several foreign
engravings from the great Italian artists of past centuries. Next to these
costly and artistic engravings were several of the roughest Russian prints
of saints and martyrs, such as are sold for a few farthings at all the
fairs. On the other walls were portraits of Russian bishops, past and
present.

Miüsov took a cursory glance at all these “conventional” surroundings and
bent an intent look upon the elder. He had a high opinion of his own
insight, a weakness excusable in him as he was fifty, an age at which a
clever man of the world of established position can hardly help taking
himself rather seriously. At the first moment he did not like Zossima.
There was, indeed, something in the elder’s face which many people besides
Miüsov might not have liked. He was a short, bent, little man, with very
weak legs, and though he was only sixty-five, he looked at least ten years
older. His face was very thin and covered with a network of fine wrinkles,
particularly numerous about his eyes, which were small, light-colored,
quick, and shining like two bright points. He had a sprinkling of gray
hair about his temples. His pointed beard was small and scanty, and his
lips, which smiled frequently, were as thin as two threads. His nose was
not long, but sharp, like a bird’s beak.

“To all appearances a malicious soul, full of petty pride,” thought
Miüsov. He felt altogether dissatisfied with his position.

A cheap little clock on the wall struck twelve hurriedly, and served to
begin the conversation.

“Precisely to our time,” cried Fyodor Pavlovitch, “but no sign of my son,
Dmitri. I apologize for him, sacred elder!” (Alyosha shuddered all over at
“sacred elder.”) “I am always punctual myself, minute for minute,
remembering that punctuality is the courtesy of kings....”

“But you are not a king, anyway,” Miüsov muttered, losing his
self-restraint at once.

“Yes; that’s true. I’m not a king, and, would you believe it, Pyotr
Alexandrovitch, I was aware of that myself. But, there! I always say the
wrong thing. Your reverence,” he cried, with sudden pathos, “you behold
before you a buffoon in earnest! I introduce myself as such. It’s an old
habit, alas! And if I sometimes talk nonsense out of place it’s with an
object, with the object of amusing people and making myself agreeable. One
must be agreeable, mustn’t one? I was seven years ago in a little town
where I had business, and I made friends with some merchants there. We
went to the captain of police because we had to see him about something,
and to ask him to dine with us. He was a tall, fat, fair, sulky man, the
most dangerous type in such cases. It’s their liver. I went straight up to
him, and with the ease of a man of the world, you know, ‘Mr. Ispravnik,’
said I, ‘be our Napravnik.’ ‘What do you mean by Napravnik?’ said he. I
saw, at the first half-second, that it had missed fire. He stood there so
glum. ‘I wanted to make a joke,’ said I, ‘for the general diversion, as
Mr. Napravnik is our well-known Russian orchestra conductor and what we
need for the harmony of our undertaking is some one of that sort.’ And I
explained my comparison very reasonably, didn’t I? ‘Excuse me,’ said he,
‘I am an Ispravnik, and I do not allow puns to be made on my calling.’ He
turned and walked away. I followed him, shouting, ‘Yes, yes, you are an
Ispravnik, not a Napravnik.’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘since you called me a
Napravnik I am one.’ And would you believe it, it ruined our business! And
I’m always like that, always like that. Always injuring myself with my
politeness. Once, many years ago, I said to an influential person: ‘Your
wife is a ticklish lady,’ in an honorable sense, of the moral qualities,
so to speak. But he asked me, ‘Why, have you tickled her?’ I thought I’d
be polite, so I couldn’t help saying, ‘Yes,’ and he gave me a fine
tickling on the spot. Only that happened long ago, so I’m not ashamed to
tell the story. I’m always injuring myself like that.”

“You’re doing it now,” muttered Miüsov, with disgust.

Father Zossima scrutinized them both in silence.

“Am I? Would you believe it, I was aware of that, too, Pyotr
Alexandrovitch, and let me tell you, indeed, I foresaw I should as soon as
I began to speak. And do you know I foresaw, too, that you’d be the first
to remark on it. The minute I see my joke isn’t coming off, your
reverence, both my cheeks feel as though they were drawn down to the lower
jaw and there is almost a spasm in them. That’s been so since I was young,
when I had to make jokes for my living in noblemen’s families. I am an
inveterate buffoon, and have been from birth up, your reverence, it’s as
though it were a craze in me. I dare say it’s a devil within me. But only
a little one. A more serious one would have chosen another lodging. But
not your soul, Pyotr Alexandrovitch; you’re not a lodging worth having
either. But I do believe—I believe in God, though I have had doubts of
late. But now I sit and await words of wisdom. I’m like the philosopher,
Diderot, your reverence. Did you ever hear, most Holy Father, how Diderot
went to see the Metropolitan Platon, in the time of the Empress Catherine?
He went in and said straight out, ‘There is no God.’ To which the great
bishop lifted up his finger and answered, ‘The fool hath said in his heart
there is no God.’ And he fell down at his feet on the spot. ‘I believe,’
he cried, ‘and will be christened.’ And so he was. Princess Dashkov was
his godmother, and Potyomkin his godfather.”

“Fyodor Pavlovitch, this is unbearable! You know you’re telling lies and
that that stupid anecdote isn’t true. Why are you playing the fool?” cried
Miüsov in a shaking voice.

“I suspected all my life that it wasn’t true,” Fyodor Pavlovitch cried
with conviction. “But I’ll tell you the whole truth, gentlemen. Great
elder! Forgive me, the last thing about Diderot’s christening I made up
just now. I never thought of it before. I made it up to add piquancy. I
play the fool, Pyotr Alexandrovitch, to make myself agreeable. Though I
really don’t know myself, sometimes, what I do it for. And as for Diderot,
I heard as far as ‘the fool hath said in his heart’ twenty times from the
gentry about here when I was young. I heard your aunt, Pyotr
Alexandrovitch, tell the story. They all believe to this day that the
infidel Diderot came to dispute about God with the Metropolitan
Platon....”

Miüsov got up, forgetting himself in his impatience. He was furious, and
conscious of being ridiculous.

What was taking place in the cell was really incredible. For forty or
fifty years past, from the times of former elders, no visitors had entered
that cell without feelings of the profoundest veneration. Almost every one
admitted to the cell felt that a great favor was being shown him. Many
remained kneeling during the whole visit. Of those visitors, many had been
men of high rank and learning, some even freethinkers, attracted by
curiosity, but all without exception had shown the profoundest reverence
and delicacy, for here there was no question of money, but only, on the
one side love and kindness, and on the other penitence and eager desire to
decide some spiritual problem or crisis. So that such buffoonery amazed
and bewildered the spectators, or at least some of them. The monks, with
unchanged countenances, waited, with earnest attention, to hear what the
elder would say, but seemed on the point of standing up, like Miüsov.
Alyosha stood, with hanging head, on the verge of tears. What seemed to
him strangest of all was that his brother Ivan, on whom alone he had
rested his hopes, and who alone had such influence on his father that he
could have stopped him, sat now quite unmoved, with downcast eyes,
apparently waiting with interest to see how it would end, as though he had
nothing to do with it. Alyosha did not dare to look at Rakitin, the
divinity student, whom he knew almost intimately. He alone in the
monastery knew Rakitin’s thoughts.

“Forgive me,” began Miüsov, addressing Father Zossima, “for perhaps I seem
to be taking part in this shameful foolery. I made a mistake in believing
that even a man like Fyodor Pavlovitch would understand what was due on a
visit to so honored a personage. I did not suppose I should have to
apologize simply for having come with him....”

Pyotr Alexandrovitch could say no more, and was about to leave the room,
overwhelmed with confusion.

“Don’t distress yourself, I beg.” The elder got on to his feeble legs, and
taking Pyotr Alexandrovitch by both hands, made him sit down again. “I beg
you not to disturb yourself. I particularly beg you to be my guest.” And
with a bow he went back and sat down again on his little sofa.

“Great elder, speak! Do I annoy you by my vivacity?” Fyodor Pavlovitch
cried suddenly, clutching the arms of his chair in both hands, as though
ready to leap up from it if the answer were unfavorable.

“I earnestly beg you, too, not to disturb yourself, and not to be uneasy,”
the elder said impressively. “Do not trouble. Make yourself quite at home.
And, above all, do not be so ashamed of yourself, for that is at the root
of it all.”

“Quite at home? To be my natural self? Oh, that is much too much, but I
accept it with grateful joy. Do you know, blessed Father, you’d better not
invite me to be my natural self. Don’t risk it.... I will not go so far as
that myself. I warn you for your own sake. Well, the rest is still plunged
in the mists of uncertainty, though there are people who’d be pleased to
describe me for you. I mean that for you, Pyotr Alexandrovitch. But as for
you, holy being, let me tell you, I am brimming over with ecstasy.”

He got up, and throwing up his hands, declaimed, “Blessed be the womb that
bare thee, and the paps that gave thee suck—the paps especially. When you
said just now, ‘Don’t be so ashamed of yourself, for that is at the root
of it all,’ you pierced right through me by that remark, and read me to
the core. Indeed, I always feel when I meet people that I am lower than
all, and that they all take me for a buffoon. So I say, ‘Let me really
play the buffoon. I am not afraid of your opinion, for you are every one
of you worse than I am.’ That is why I am a buffoon. It is from shame,
great elder, from shame; it’s simply over-sensitiveness that makes me
rowdy. If I had only been sure that every one would accept me as the
kindest and wisest of men, oh, Lord, what a good man I should have been
then! Teacher!” he fell suddenly on his knees, “what must I do to gain
eternal life?”

It was difficult even now to decide whether he was joking or really moved.

Father Zossima, lifting his eyes, looked at him, and said with a smile:

“You have known for a long time what you must do. You have sense enough:
don’t give way to drunkenness and incontinence of speech; don’t give way
to sensual lust; and, above all, to the love of money. And close your
taverns. If you can’t close all, at least two or three. And, above
all—don’t lie.”

“You mean about Diderot?”

“No, not about Diderot. Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies
to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot
distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect
for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love, and
in order to occupy and distract himself without love he gives way to
passions and coarse pleasures, and sinks to bestiality in his vices, all
from continual lying to other men and to himself. The man who lies to
himself can be more easily offended than any one. You know it is sometimes
very pleasant to take offense, isn’t it? A man may know that nobody has
insulted him, but that he has invented the insult for himself, has lied
and exaggerated to make it picturesque, has caught at a word and made a
mountain out of a molehill—he knows that himself, yet he will be the first
to take offense, and will revel in his resentment till he feels great
pleasure in it, and so pass to genuine vindictiveness. But get up, sit
down, I beg you. All this, too, is deceitful posturing....”

“Blessed man! Give me your hand to kiss.”

Fyodor Pavlovitch skipped up, and imprinted a rapid kiss on the elder’s
thin hand. “It is, it is pleasant to take offense. You said that so well,
as I never heard it before. Yes, I have been all my life taking offense,
to please myself, taking offense on esthetic grounds, for it is not so
much pleasant as distinguished sometimes to be insulted—that you had
forgotten, great elder, it is distinguished! I shall make a note of that.
But I have been lying, lying positively my whole life long, every day and
hour of it. Of a truth, I am a lie, and the father of lies. Though I
believe I am not the father of lies. I am getting mixed in my texts. Say,
the son of lies, and that will be enough. Only ... my angel ... I may
sometimes talk about Diderot! Diderot will do no harm, though sometimes a
word will do harm. Great elder, by the way, I was forgetting, though I had
been meaning for the last two years to come here on purpose to ask and to
find out something. Only do tell Pyotr Alexandrovitch not to interrupt me.
Here is my question: Is it true, great Father, that the story is told
somewhere in the _Lives of the Saints_ of a holy saint martyred for his
faith who, when his head was cut off at last, stood up, picked up his
head, and, ‘courteously kissing it,’ walked a long way, carrying it in his
hands. Is that true or not, honored Father?”

“No, it is untrue,” said the elder.

“There is nothing of the kind in all the lives of the saints. What saint
do you say the story is told of?” asked the Father Librarian.

“I do not know what saint. I do not know, and can’t tell. I was deceived.
I was told the story. I had heard it, and do you know who told it? Pyotr
Alexandrovitch Miüsov here, who was so angry just now about Diderot. He it
was who told the story.”

“I have never told it you, I never speak to you at all.”

“It is true you did not tell me, but you told it when I was present. It
was three years ago. I mentioned it because by that ridiculous story you
shook my faith, Pyotr Alexandrovitch. You knew nothing of it, but I went
home with my faith shaken, and I have been getting more and more shaken
ever since. Yes, Pyotr Alexandrovitch, you were the cause of a great fall.
That was not a Diderot!”

Fyodor Pavlovitch got excited and pathetic, though it was perfectly clear
to every one by now that he was playing a part again. Yet Miüsov was stung
by his words.

“What nonsense, and it is all nonsense,” he muttered. “I may really have
told it, some time or other ... but not to you. I was told it myself. I
heard it in Paris from a Frenchman. He told me it was read at our mass
from the _Lives of the Saints_ ... he was a very learned man who had made
a special study of Russian statistics and had lived a long time in
Russia.... I have not read the _Lives of the Saints_ myself, and I am not
going to read them ... all sorts of things are said at dinner—we were
dining then.”

“Yes, you were dining then, and so I lost my faith!” said Fyodor
Pavlovitch, mimicking him.

“What do I care for your faith?” Miüsov was on the point of shouting, but
he suddenly checked himself, and said with contempt, “You defile
everything you touch.”

The elder suddenly rose from his seat. “Excuse me, gentlemen, for leaving
you a few minutes,” he said, addressing all his guests. “I have visitors
awaiting me who arrived before you. But don’t you tell lies all the same,”
he added, turning to Fyodor Pavlovitch with a good-humored face. He went
out of the cell. Alyosha and the novice flew to escort him down the steps.
Alyosha was breathless: he was glad to get away, but he was glad, too,
that the elder was good-humored and not offended. Father Zossima was going
towards the portico to bless the people waiting for him there. But Fyodor
Pavlovitch persisted in stopping him at the door of the cell.

“Blessed man!” he cried, with feeling. “Allow me to kiss your hand once
more. Yes, with you I could still talk, I could still get on. Do you think
I always lie and play the fool like this? Believe me, I have been acting
like this all the time on purpose to try you. I have been testing you all
the time to see whether I could get on with you. Is there room for my
humility beside your pride? I am ready to give you a testimonial that one
can get on with you! But now, I’ll be quiet; I will keep quiet all the
time. I’ll sit in a chair and hold my tongue. Now it is for you to speak,
Pyotr Alexandrovitch. You are the principal person left now—for ten
minutes.”



Chapter III. Peasant Women Who Have Faith


Near the wooden portico below, built on to the outer wall of the precinct,
there was a crowd of about twenty peasant women. They had been told that
the elder was at last coming out, and they had gathered together in
anticipation. Two ladies, Madame Hohlakov and her daughter, had also come
out into the portico to wait for the elder, but in a separate part of it
set aside for women of rank.

Madame Hohlakov was a wealthy lady, still young and attractive, and always
dressed with taste. She was rather pale, and had lively black eyes. She
was not more than thirty-three, and had been five years a widow. Her
daughter, a girl of fourteen, was partially paralyzed. The poor child had
not been able to walk for the last six months, and was wheeled about in a
long reclining chair. She had a charming little face, rather thin from
illness, but full of gayety. There was a gleam of mischief in her big dark
eyes with their long lashes. Her mother had been intending to take her
abroad ever since the spring, but they had been detained all the summer by
business connected with their estate. They had been staying a week in our
town, where they had come more for purposes of business than devotion, but
had visited Father Zossima once already, three days before. Though they
knew that the elder scarcely saw any one, they had now suddenly turned up
again, and urgently entreated “the happiness of looking once again on the
great healer.”

The mother was sitting on a chair by the side of her daughter’s invalid
carriage, and two paces from her stood an old monk, not one of our
monastery, but a visitor from an obscure religious house in the far north.
He too sought the elder’s blessing.

But Father Zossima, on entering the portico, went first straight to the
peasants who were crowded at the foot of the three steps that led up into
the portico. Father Zossima stood on the top step, put on his stole, and
began blessing the women who thronged about him. One crazy woman was led
up to him. As soon as she caught sight of the elder she began shrieking
and writhing as though in the pains of childbirth. Laying the stole on her
forehead, he read a short prayer over her, and she was at once soothed and
quieted.

I do not know how it may be now, but in my childhood I often happened to
see and hear these “possessed” women in the villages and monasteries. They
used to be brought to mass; they would squeal and bark like a dog so that
they were heard all over the church. But when the sacrament was carried in
and they were led up to it, at once the “possession” ceased, and the sick
women were always soothed for a time. I was greatly impressed and amazed
at this as a child; but then I heard from country neighbors and from my
town teachers that the whole illness was simulated to avoid work, and that
it could always be cured by suitable severity; various anecdotes were told
to confirm this. But later on I learnt with astonishment from medical
specialists that there is no pretense about it, that it is a terrible
illness to which women are subject, specially prevalent among us in
Russia, and that it is due to the hard lot of the peasant women. It is a
disease, I was told, arising from exhausting toil too soon after hard,
abnormal and unassisted labor in childbirth, and from the hopeless misery,
from beatings, and so on, which some women were not able to endure like
others. The strange and instant healing of the frantic and struggling
woman as soon as she was led up to the holy sacrament, which had been
explained to me as due to malingering and the trickery of the “clericals,”
arose probably in the most natural manner. Both the women who supported
her and the invalid herself fully believed as a truth beyond question that
the evil spirit in possession of her could not hold out if the sick woman
were brought to the sacrament and made to bow down before it. And so, with
a nervous and psychically deranged woman, a sort of convulsion of the
whole organism always took place, and was bound to take place, at the
moment of bowing down to the sacrament, aroused by the expectation of the
miracle of healing and the implicit belief that it would come to pass; and
it did come to pass, though only for a moment. It was exactly the same now
as soon as the elder touched the sick woman with the stole.

Many of the women in the crowd were moved to tears of ecstasy by the
effect of the moment: some strove to kiss the hem of his garment, others
cried out in sing-song voices.

He blessed them all and talked with some of them. The “possessed” woman he
knew already. She came from a village only six versts from the monastery,
and had been brought to him before.

“But here is one from afar.” He pointed to a woman by no means old but
very thin and wasted, with a face not merely sunburnt but almost blackened
by exposure. She was kneeling and gazing with a fixed stare at the elder;
there was something almost frenzied in her eyes.

“From afar off, Father, from afar off! From two hundred miles from here.
From afar off, Father, from afar off!” the woman began in a sing-song
voice as though she were chanting a dirge, swaying her head from side to
side with her cheek resting in her hand.

There is silent and long-suffering sorrow to be met with among the
peasantry. It withdraws into itself and is still. But there is a grief
that breaks out, and from that minute it bursts into tears and finds vent
in wailing. This is particularly common with women. But it is no lighter a
grief than the silent. Lamentations comfort only by lacerating the heart
still more. Such grief does not desire consolation. It feeds on the sense
of its hopelessness. Lamentations spring only from the constant craving to
reopen the wound.

“You are of the tradesman class?” said Father Zossima, looking curiously
at her.

“Townfolk we are, Father, townfolk. Yet we are peasants though we live in
the town. I have come to see you, O Father! We heard of you, Father, we
heard of you. I have buried my little son, and I have come on a
pilgrimage. I have been in three monasteries, but they told me, ‘Go,
Nastasya, go to them’—that is to you. I have come; I was yesterday at the
service, and to-day I have come to you.”

“What are you weeping for?”

“It’s my little son I’m grieving for, Father. He was three years old—three
years all but three months. For my little boy, Father, I’m in anguish, for
my little boy. He was the last one left. We had four, my Nikita and I, and
now we’ve no children, our dear ones have all gone. I buried the first
three without grieving overmuch, and now I have buried the last I can’t
forget him. He seems always standing before me. He never leaves me. He has
withered my heart. I look at his little clothes, his little shirt, his
little boots, and I wail. I lay out all that is left of him, all his
little things. I look at them and wail. I say to Nikita, my husband, ‘Let
me go on a pilgrimage, master.’ He is a driver. We’re not poor people,
Father, not poor; he drives our own horse. It’s all our own, the horse and
the carriage. And what good is it all to us now? My Nikita has begun
drinking while I am away. He’s sure to. It used to be so before. As soon
as I turn my back he gives way to it. But now I don’t think about him.
It’s three months since I left home. I’ve forgotten him. I’ve forgotten
everything. I don’t want to remember. And what would our life be now
together? I’ve done with him, I’ve done. I’ve done with them all. I don’t
care to look upon my house and my goods. I don’t care to see anything at
all!”

“Listen, mother,” said the elder. “Once in olden times a holy saint saw in
the Temple a mother like you weeping for her little one, her only one,
whom God had taken. ‘Knowest thou not,’ said the saint to her, ‘how bold
these little ones are before the throne of God? Verily there are none
bolder than they in the Kingdom of Heaven. “Thou didst give us life, O
Lord,” they say, “and scarcely had we looked upon it when Thou didst take
it back again.” And so boldly they ask and ask again that God gives them
at once the rank of angels. Therefore,’ said the saint, ‘thou, too, O
mother, rejoice and weep not, for thy little son is with the Lord in the
fellowship of the angels.’ That’s what the saint said to the weeping
mother of old. He was a great saint and he could not have spoken falsely.
Therefore you too, mother, know that your little one is surely before the
throne of God, is rejoicing and happy, and praying to God for you, and
therefore weep not, but rejoice.”

The woman listened to him, looking down with her cheek in her hand. She
sighed deeply.

“My Nikita tried to comfort me with the same words as you. ‘Foolish one,’
he said, ‘why weep? Our son is no doubt singing with the angels before
God.’ He says that to me, but he weeps himself. I see that he cries like
me. ‘I know, Nikita,’ said I. ‘Where could he be if not with the Lord God?
Only, here with us now he is not as he used to sit beside us before.’ And
if only I could look upon him one little time, if only I could peep at him
one little time, without going up to him, without speaking, if I could be
hidden in a corner and only see him for one little minute, hear him
playing in the yard, calling in his little voice, ‘Mammy, where are you?’
If only I could hear him pattering with his little feet about the room
just once, only once; for so often, so often I remember how he used to run
to me and shout and laugh, if only I could hear his little feet I should
know him! But he’s gone, Father, he’s gone, and I shall never hear him
again. Here’s his little sash, but him I shall never see or hear now.”

She drew out of her bosom her boy’s little embroidered sash, and as soon
as she looked at it she began shaking with sobs, hiding her eyes with her
fingers through which the tears flowed in a sudden stream.

“It is Rachel of old,” said the elder, “weeping for her children, and will
not be comforted because they are not. Such is the lot set on earth for
you mothers. Be not comforted. Consolation is not what you need. Weep and
be not consoled, but weep. Only every time that you weep be sure to
remember that your little son is one of the angels of God, that he looks
down from there at you and sees you, and rejoices at your tears, and
points at them to the Lord God; and a long while yet will you keep that
great mother’s grief. But it will turn in the end into quiet joy, and your
bitter tears will be only tears of tender sorrow that purifies the heart
and delivers it from sin. And I shall pray for the peace of your child’s
soul. What was his name?”

“Alexey, Father.”

“A sweet name. After Alexey, the man of God?”

“Yes, Father.”

“What a saint he was! I will remember him, mother, and your grief in my
prayers, and I will pray for your husband’s health. It is a sin for you to
leave him. Your little one will see from heaven that you have forsaken his
father, and will weep over you. Why do you trouble his happiness? He is
living, for the soul lives for ever, and though he is not in the house he
is near you, unseen. How can he go into the house when you say that the
house is hateful to you? To whom is he to go if he find you not together,
his father and mother? He comes to you in dreams now, and you grieve. But
then he will send you gentle dreams. Go to your husband, mother; go this
very day.”

“I will go, Father, at your word. I will go. You’ve gone straight to my
heart. My Nikita, my Nikita, you are waiting for me,” the woman began in a
sing-song voice; but the elder had already turned away to a very old
woman, dressed like a dweller in the town, not like a pilgrim. Her eyes
showed that she had come with an object, and in order to say something.
She said she was the widow of a non-commissioned officer, and lived close
by in the town. Her son Vasenka was in the commissariat service, and had
gone to Irkutsk in Siberia. He had written twice from there, but now a
year had passed since he had written. She did inquire about him, but she
did not know the proper place to inquire.

“Only the other day Stepanida Ilyinishna—she’s a rich merchant’s wife—said
to me, ‘You go, Prohorovna, and put your son’s name down for prayer in the
church, and pray for the peace of his soul as though he were dead. His
soul will be troubled,’ she said, ‘and he will write you a letter.’ And
Stepanida Ilyinishna told me it was a certain thing which had been many
times tried. Only I am in doubt.... Oh, you light of ours! is it true or
false, and would it be right?”

“Don’t think of it. It’s shameful to ask the question. How is it possible
to pray for the peace of a living soul? And his own mother too! It’s a
great sin, akin to sorcery. Only for your ignorance it is forgiven you.
Better pray to the Queen of Heaven, our swift defense and help, for his
good health, and that she may forgive you for your error. And another
thing I will tell you, Prohorovna. Either he will soon come back to you,
your son, or he will be sure to send a letter. Go, and henceforward be in
peace. Your son is alive, I tell you.”

“Dear Father, God reward you, our benefactor, who prays for all of us and
for our sins!”

But the elder had already noticed in the crowd two glowing eyes fixed upon
him. An exhausted, consumptive-looking, though young peasant woman was
gazing at him in silence. Her eyes besought him, but she seemed afraid to
approach.

“What is it, my child?”

“Absolve my soul, Father,” she articulated softly, and slowly sank on her
knees and bowed down at his feet. “I have sinned, Father. I am afraid of
my sin.”

The elder sat down on the lower step. The woman crept closer to him, still
on her knees.

“I am a widow these three years,” she began in a half-whisper, with a sort
of shudder. “I had a hard life with my husband. He was an old man. He used
to beat me cruelly. He lay ill; I thought looking at him, if he were to
get well, if he were to get up again, what then? And then the thought came
to me—”

“Stay!” said the elder, and he put his ear close to her lips.

The woman went on in a low whisper, so that it was almost impossible to
catch anything. She had soon done.

“Three years ago?” asked the elder.

“Three years. At first I didn’t think about it, but now I’ve begun to be
ill, and the thought never leaves me.”

“Have you come from far?”

“Over three hundred miles away.”

“Have you told it in confession?”

“I have confessed it. Twice I have confessed it.”

“Have you been admitted to Communion?”

“Yes. I am afraid. I am afraid to die.”

“Fear nothing and never be afraid; and don’t fret. If only your penitence
fail not, God will forgive all. There is no sin, and there can be no sin
on all the earth, which the Lord will not forgive to the truly repentant!
Man cannot commit a sin so great as to exhaust the infinite love of God.
Can there be a sin which could exceed the love of God? Think only of
repentance, continual repentance, but dismiss fear altogether. Believe
that God loves you as you cannot conceive; that He loves you with your
sin, in your sin. It has been said of old that over one repentant sinner
there is more joy in heaven than over ten righteous men. Go, and fear not.
Be not bitter against men. Be not angry if you are wronged. Forgive the
dead man in your heart what wrong he did you. Be reconciled with him in
truth. If you are penitent, you love. And if you love you are of God. All
things are atoned for, all things are saved by love. If I, a sinner, even
as you are, am tender with you and have pity on you, how much more will
God. Love is such a priceless treasure that you can redeem the whole world
by it, and expiate not only your own sins but the sins of others.”

He signed her three times with the cross, took from his own neck a little
ikon and put it upon her. She bowed down to the earth without speaking.

He got up and looked cheerfully at a healthy peasant woman with a tiny
baby in her arms.

“From Vyshegorye, dear Father.”

“Five miles you have dragged yourself with the baby. What do you want?”

“I’ve come to look at you. I have been to you before—or have you
forgotten? You’ve no great memory if you’ve forgotten me. They told us you
were ill. Thinks I, I’ll go and see him for myself. Now I see you, and
you’re not ill! You’ll live another twenty years. God bless you! There are
plenty to pray for you; how should you be ill?”

“I thank you for all, daughter.”

“By the way, I have a thing to ask, not a great one. Here are sixty
copecks. Give them, dear Father, to some one poorer than me. I thought as
I came along, better give through him. He’ll know whom to give to.”

“Thanks, my dear, thanks! You are a good woman. I love you. I will do so
certainly. Is that your little girl?”

“My little girl, Father, Lizaveta.”

“May the Lord bless you both, you and your babe Lizaveta! You have
gladdened my heart, mother. Farewell, dear children, farewell, dear ones.”

He blessed them all and bowed low to them.



Chapter IV. A Lady Of Little Faith


A visitor looking on the scene of his conversation with the peasants and
his blessing them shed silent tears and wiped them away with her
handkerchief. She was a sentimental society lady of genuinely good
disposition in many respects. When the elder went up to her at last she
met him enthusiastically.

“Ah, what I have been feeling, looking on at this touching scene!...” She
could not go on for emotion. “Oh, I understand the people’s love for you.
I love the people myself. I want to love them. And who could help loving
them, our splendid Russian people, so simple in their greatness!”

“How is your daughter’s health? You wanted to talk to me again?”

“Oh, I have been urgently begging for it, I have prayed for it! I was
ready to fall on my knees and kneel for three days at your windows until
you let me in. We have come, great healer, to express our ardent
gratitude. You have healed my Lise, healed her completely, merely by
praying over her last Thursday and laying your hands upon her. We have
hastened here to kiss those hands, to pour out our feelings and our
homage.”

“What do you mean by healed? But she is still lying down in her chair.”

“But her night fevers have entirely ceased ever since Thursday,” said the
lady with nervous haste. “And that’s not all. Her legs are stronger. This
morning she got up well; she had slept all night. Look at her rosy cheeks,
her bright eyes! She used to be always crying, but now she laughs and is
gay and happy. This morning she insisted on my letting her stand up, and
she stood up for a whole minute without any support. She wagers that in a
fortnight she’ll be dancing a quadrille. I’ve called in Doctor
Herzenstube. He shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘I am amazed; I can make
nothing of it.’ And would you have us not come here to disturb you, not
fly here to thank you? Lise, thank him—thank him!”

Lise’s pretty little laughing face became suddenly serious. She rose in
her chair as far as she could and, looking at the elder, clasped her hands
before him, but could not restrain herself and broke into laughter.

“It’s at him,” she said, pointing to Alyosha, with childish vexation at
herself for not being able to repress her mirth.

If any one had looked at Alyosha standing a step behind the elder, he
would have caught a quick flush crimsoning his cheeks in an instant. His
eyes shone and he looked down.

“She has a message for you, Alexey Fyodorovitch. How are you?” the mother
went on, holding out her exquisitely gloved hand to Alyosha.

The elder turned round and all at once looked attentively at Alyosha. The
latter went nearer to Lise and, smiling in a strangely awkward way, held
out his hand to her too. Lise assumed an important air.

“Katerina Ivanovna has sent you this through me.” She handed him a little
note. “She particularly begs you to go and see her as soon as possible;
that you will not fail her, but will be sure to come.”

“She asks me to go and see her? Me? What for?” Alyosha muttered in great
astonishment. His face at once looked anxious. “Oh, it’s all to do with
Dmitri Fyodorovitch and—what has happened lately,” the mother explained
hurriedly. “Katerina Ivanovna has made up her mind, but she must see you
about it.... Why, of course, I can’t say. But she wants to see you at
once. And you will go to her, of course. It is a Christian duty.”

“I have only seen her once,” Alyosha protested with the same perplexity.

“Oh, she is such a lofty, incomparable creature! If only for her
suffering.... Think what she has gone through, what she is enduring now!
Think what awaits her! It’s all terrible, terrible!”

“Very well, I will come,” Alyosha decided, after rapidly scanning the
brief, enigmatic note, which consisted of an urgent entreaty that he would
come, without any sort of explanation.

“Oh, how sweet and generous that would be of you!” cried Lise with sudden
animation. “I told mamma you’d be sure not to go. I said you were saving
your soul. How splendid you are! I’ve always thought you were splendid.
How glad I am to tell you so!”

“Lise!” said her mother impressively, though she smiled after she had said
it.

“You have quite forgotten us, Alexey Fyodorovitch,” she said; “you never
come to see us. Yet Lise has told me twice that she is never happy except
with you.”

Alyosha raised his downcast eyes and again flushed, and again smiled
without knowing why. But the elder was no longer watching him. He had
begun talking to a monk who, as mentioned before, had been awaiting his
entrance by Lise’s chair. He was evidently a monk of the humblest, that is
of the peasant, class, of a narrow outlook, but a true believer, and, in
his own way, a stubborn one. He announced that he had come from the far
north, from Obdorsk, from Saint Sylvester, and was a member of a poor
monastery, consisting of only ten monks. The elder gave him his blessing
and invited him to come to his cell whenever he liked.

“How can you presume to do such deeds?” the monk asked suddenly, pointing
solemnly and significantly at Lise. He was referring to her “healing.”

“It’s too early, of course, to speak of that. Relief is not complete cure,
and may proceed from different causes. But if there has been any healing,
it is by no power but God’s will. It’s all from God. Visit me, Father,” he
added to the monk. “It’s not often I can see visitors. I am ill, and I
know that my days are numbered.”

“Oh, no, no! God will not take you from us. You will live a long, long
time yet,” cried the lady. “And in what way are you ill? You look so well,
so gay and happy.”

“I am extraordinarily better to-day. But I know that it’s only for a
moment. I understand my disease now thoroughly. If I seem so happy to you,
you could never say anything that would please me so much. For men are
made for happiness, and any one who is completely happy has a right to say
to himself, ‘I am doing God’s will on earth.’ All the righteous, all the
saints, all the holy martyrs were happy.”

“Oh, how you speak! What bold and lofty words!” cried the lady. “You seem
to pierce with your words. And yet—happiness, happiness—where is it? Who
can say of himself that he is happy? Oh, since you have been so good as to
let us see you once more to-day, let me tell you what I could not utter
last time, what I dared not say, all I am suffering and have been for so
long! I am suffering! Forgive me! I am suffering!”

And in a rush of fervent feeling she clasped her hands before him.

“From what specially?”

“I suffer ... from lack of faith.”

“Lack of faith in God?”

“Oh, no, no! I dare not even think of that. But the future life—it is such
an enigma! And no one, no one can solve it. Listen! You are a healer, you
are deeply versed in the human soul, and of course I dare not expect you
to believe me entirely, but I assure you on my word of honor that I am not
speaking lightly now. The thought of the life beyond the grave distracts
me to anguish, to terror. And I don’t know to whom to appeal, and have not
dared to all my life. And now I am so bold as to ask you. Oh, God! What
will you think of me now?”

She clasped her hands.

“Don’t distress yourself about my opinion of you,” said the elder. “I
quite believe in the sincerity of your suffering.”

“Oh, how thankful I am to you! You see, I shut my eyes and ask myself if
every one has faith, where did it come from? And then they do say that it
all comes from terror at the menacing phenomena of nature, and that none
of it’s real. And I say to myself, ‘What if I’ve been believing all my
life, and when I come to die there’s nothing but the burdocks growing on
my grave?’ as I read in some author. It’s awful! How—how can I get back my
faith? But I only believed when I was a little child, mechanically,
without thinking of anything. How, how is one to prove it? I have come now
to lay my soul before you and to ask you about it. If I let this chance
slip, no one all my life will answer me. How can I prove it? How can I
convince myself? Oh, how unhappy I am! I stand and look about me and see
that scarcely any one else cares; no one troubles his head about it, and
I’m the only one who can’t stand it. It’s deadly—deadly!”

“No doubt. But there’s no proving it, though you can be convinced of it.”

“How?”

“By the experience of active love. Strive to love your neighbor actively
and indefatigably. In as far as you advance in love you will grow surer of
the reality of God and of the immortality of your soul. If you attain to
perfect self-forgetfulness in the love of your neighbor, then you will
believe without doubt, and no doubt can possibly enter your soul. This has
been tried. This is certain.”

“In active love? There’s another question—and such a question! You see, I
so love humanity that—would you believe it?—I often dream of forsaking all
that I have, leaving Lise, and becoming a sister of mercy. I close my eyes
and think and dream, and at that moment I feel full of strength to
overcome all obstacles. No wounds, no festering sores could at that moment
frighten me. I would bind them up and wash them with my own hands. I would
nurse the afflicted. I would be ready to kiss such wounds.”

“It is much, and well that your mind is full of such dreams and not
others. Sometime, unawares, you may do a good deed in reality.”

“Yes. But could I endure such a life for long?” the lady went on
fervently, almost frantically. “That’s the chief question—that’s my most
agonizing question. I shut my eyes and ask myself, ‘Would you persevere
long on that path? And if the patient whose wounds you are washing did not
meet you with gratitude, but worried you with his whims, without valuing
or remarking your charitable services, began abusing you and rudely
commanding you, and complaining to the superior authorities of you (which
often happens when people are in great suffering)—what then? Would you
persevere in your love, or not?’ And do you know, I came with horror to
the conclusion that, if anything could dissipate my love to humanity, it
would be ingratitude. In short, I am a hired servant, I expect my payment
at once—that is, praise, and the repayment of love with love. Otherwise I
am incapable of loving any one.”

She was in a very paroxysm of self-castigation, and, concluding, she
looked with defiant resolution at the elder.

“It’s just the same story as a doctor once told me,” observed the elder.
“He was a man getting on in years, and undoubtedly clever. He spoke as
frankly as you, though in jest, in bitter jest. ‘I love humanity,’ he
said, ‘but I wonder at myself. The more I love humanity in general, the
less I love man in particular. In my dreams,’ he said, ‘I have often come
to making enthusiastic schemes for the service of humanity, and perhaps I
might actually have faced crucifixion if it had been suddenly necessary;
and yet I am incapable of living in the same room with any one for two
days together, as I know by experience. As soon as any one is near me, his
personality disturbs my self-complacency and restricts my freedom. In
twenty-four hours I begin to hate the best of men: one because he’s too
long over his dinner; another because he has a cold and keeps on blowing
his nose. I become hostile to people the moment they come close to me. But
it has always happened that the more I detest men individually the more
ardent becomes my love for humanity.’ ”

“But what’s to be done? What can one do in such a case? Must one despair?”

“No. It is enough that you are distressed at it. Do what you can, and it
will be reckoned unto you. Much is done already in you since you can so
deeply and sincerely know yourself. If you have been talking to me so
sincerely, simply to gain approbation for your frankness, as you did from
me just now, then of course you will not attain to anything in the
achievement of real love; it will all get no further than dreams, and your
whole life will slip away like a phantom. In that case you will naturally
cease to think of the future life too, and will of yourself grow calmer
after a fashion in the end.”

“You have crushed me! Only now, as you speak, I understand that I was
really only seeking your approbation for my sincerity when I told you I
could not endure ingratitude. You have revealed me to myself. You have
seen through me and explained me to myself!”

“Are you speaking the truth? Well, now, after such a confession, I believe
that you are sincere and good at heart. If you do not attain happiness,
always remember that you are on the right road, and try not to leave it.
Above all, avoid falsehood, every kind of falsehood, especially falseness
to yourself. Watch over your own deceitfulness and look into it every
hour, every minute. Avoid being scornful, both to others and to yourself.
What seems to you bad within you will grow purer from the very fact of
your observing it in yourself. Avoid fear, too, though fear is only the
consequence of every sort of falsehood. Never be frightened at your own
faint-heartedness in attaining love. Don’t be frightened overmuch even at
your evil actions. I am sorry I can say nothing more consoling to you, for
love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams.
Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in
the sight of all. Men will even give their lives if only the ordeal does
not last long but is soon over, with all looking on and applauding as
though on the stage. But active love is labor and fortitude, and for some
people too, perhaps, a complete science. But I predict that just when you
see with horror that in spite of all your efforts you are getting farther
from your goal instead of nearer to it—at that very moment I predict that
you will reach it and behold clearly the miraculous power of the Lord who
has been all the time loving and mysteriously guiding you. Forgive me for
not being able to stay longer with you. They are waiting for me. Good-by.”

The lady was weeping.

“Lise, Lise! Bless her—bless her!” she cried, starting up suddenly.

“She does not deserve to be loved. I have seen her naughtiness all along,”
the elder said jestingly. “Why have you been laughing at Alexey?”

Lise had in fact been occupied in mocking at him all the time. She had
noticed before that Alyosha was shy and tried not to look at her, and she
found this extremely amusing. She waited intently to catch his eye.
Alyosha, unable to endure her persistent stare, was irresistibly and
suddenly drawn to glance at her, and at once she smiled triumphantly in
his face. Alyosha was even more disconcerted and vexed. At last he turned
away from her altogether and hid behind the elder’s back. After a few
minutes, drawn by the same irresistible force, he turned again to see
whether he was being looked at or not, and found Lise almost hanging out
of her chair to peep sideways at him, eagerly waiting for him to look.
Catching his eye, she laughed so that the elder could not help saying,
“Why do you make fun of him like that, naughty girl?”

Lise suddenly and quite unexpectedly blushed. Her eyes flashed and her
face became quite serious. She began speaking quickly and nervously in a
warm and resentful voice:

“Why has he forgotten everything, then? He used to carry me about when I
was little. We used to play together. He used to come to teach me to read,
do you know. Two years ago, when he went away, he said that he would never
forget me, that we were friends for ever, for ever, for ever! And now he’s
afraid of me all at once. Am I going to eat him? Why doesn’t he want to
come near me? Why doesn’t he talk? Why won’t he come and see us? It’s not
that you won’t let him. We know that he goes everywhere. It’s not good
manners for me to invite him. He ought to have thought of it first, if he
hasn’t forgotten me. No, now he’s saving his soul! Why have you put that
long gown on him? If he runs he’ll fall.”

And suddenly she hid her face in her hand and went off into irresistible,
prolonged, nervous, inaudible laughter. The elder listened to her with a
smile, and blessed her tenderly. As she kissed his hand she suddenly
pressed it to her eyes and began crying.

“Don’t be angry with me. I’m silly and good for nothing ... and perhaps
Alyosha’s right, quite right, in not wanting to come and see such a
ridiculous girl.”

“I will certainly send him,” said the elder.



Chapter V. So Be It! So Be It!


The elder’s absence from his cell had lasted for about twenty-five
minutes. It was more than half-past twelve, but Dmitri, on whose account
they had all met there, had still not appeared. But he seemed almost to be
forgotten, and when the elder entered the cell again, he found his guests
engaged in eager conversation. Ivan and the two monks took the leading
share in it. Miüsov, too, was trying to take a part, and apparently very
eagerly, in the conversation. But he was unsuccessful in this also. He was
evidently in the background, and his remarks were treated with neglect,
which increased his irritability. He had had intellectual encounters with
Ivan before and he could not endure a certain carelessness Ivan showed
him.

“Hitherto at least I have stood in the front ranks of all that is
progressive in Europe, and here the new generation positively ignores us,”
he thought.

Fyodor Pavlovitch, who had given his word to sit still and be quiet, had
actually been quiet for some time, but he watched his neighbor Miüsov with
an ironical little smile, obviously enjoying his discomfiture. He had been
waiting for some time to pay off old scores, and now he could not let the
opportunity slip. Bending over his shoulder he began teasing him again in
a whisper.

“Why didn’t you go away just now, after the ‘courteously kissing’? Why did
you consent to remain in such unseemly company? It was because you felt
insulted and aggrieved, and you remained to vindicate yourself by showing
off your intelligence. Now you won’t go till you’ve displayed your
intellect to them.”

“You again?... On the contrary, I’m just going.”

“You’ll be the last, the last of all to go!” Fyodor Pavlovitch delivered
him another thrust, almost at the moment of Father Zossima’s return.

The discussion died down for a moment, but the elder, seating himself in
his former place, looked at them all as though cordially inviting them to
go on. Alyosha, who knew every expression of his face, saw that he was
fearfully exhausted and making a great effort. Of late he had been liable
to fainting fits from exhaustion. His face had the pallor that was common
before such attacks, and his lips were white. But he evidently did not
want to break up the party. He seemed to have some special object of his
own in keeping them. What object? Alyosha watched him intently.

“We are discussing this gentleman’s most interesting article,” said Father
Iosif, the librarian, addressing the elder, and indicating Ivan. “He
brings forward much that is new, but I think the argument cuts both ways.
It is an article written in answer to a book by an ecclesiastical
authority on the question of the ecclesiastical court, and the scope of
its jurisdiction.”

“I’m sorry I have not read your article, but I’ve heard of it,” said the
elder, looking keenly and intently at Ivan.

“He takes up a most interesting position,” continued the Father Librarian.
“As far as Church jurisdiction is concerned he is apparently quite opposed
to the separation of Church from State.”

“That’s interesting. But in what sense?” Father Zossima asked Ivan.

The latter, at last, answered him, not condescendingly, as Alyosha had
feared, but with modesty and reserve, with evident goodwill and apparently
without the slightest _arrière-pensée_.

“I start from the position that this confusion of elements, that is, of
the essential principles of Church and State, will, of course, go on for
ever, in spite of the fact that it is impossible for them to mingle, and
that the confusion of these elements cannot lead to any consistent or even
normal results, for there is falsity at the very foundation of it.
Compromise between the Church and State in such questions as, for
instance, jurisdiction, is, to my thinking, impossible in any real sense.
My clerical opponent maintains that the Church holds a precise and defined
position in the State. I maintain, on the contrary, that the Church ought
to include the whole State, and not simply to occupy a corner in it, and,
if this is, for some reason, impossible at present, then it ought, in
reality, to be set up as the direct and chief aim of the future
development of Christian society!”

“Perfectly true,” Father Païssy, the silent and learned monk, assented
with fervor and decision.

“The purest Ultramontanism!” cried Miüsov impatiently, crossing and
recrossing his legs.

“Oh, well, we have no mountains,” cried Father Iosif, and turning to the
elder he continued: “Observe the answer he makes to the following
‘fundamental and essential’ propositions of his opponent, who is, you must
note, an ecclesiastic. First, that ‘no social organization can or ought to
arrogate to itself power to dispose of the civic and political rights of
its members.’ Secondly, that ‘criminal and civil jurisdiction ought not to
belong to the Church, and is inconsistent with its nature, both as a
divine institution and as an organization of men for religious objects,’
and, finally, in the third place, ‘the Church is a kingdom not of this
world.’ ”

“A most unworthy play upon words for an ecclesiastic!” Father Païssy could
not refrain from breaking in again. “I have read the book which you have
answered,” he added, addressing Ivan, “and was astounded at the words ‘the
Church is a kingdom not of this world.’ If it is not of this world, then
it cannot exist on earth at all. In the Gospel, the words ‘not of this
world’ are not used in that sense. To play with such words is
indefensible. Our Lord Jesus Christ came to set up the Church upon earth.
The Kingdom of Heaven, of course, is not of this world, but in Heaven; but
it is only entered through the Church which has been founded and
established upon earth. And so a frivolous play upon words in such a
connection is unpardonable and improper. The Church is, in truth, a
kingdom and ordained to rule, and in the end must undoubtedly become the
kingdom ruling over all the earth. For that we have the divine promise.”

He ceased speaking suddenly, as though checking himself. After listening
attentively and respectfully Ivan went on, addressing the elder with
perfect composure and as before with ready cordiality:

“The whole point of my article lies in the fact that during the first
three centuries Christianity only existed on earth in the Church and was
nothing but the Church. When the pagan Roman Empire desired to become
Christian, it inevitably happened that, by becoming Christian, it included
the Church but remained a pagan State in very many of its departments. In
reality this was bound to happen. But Rome as a State retained too much of
the pagan civilization and culture, as, for example, in the very objects
and fundamental principles of the State. The Christian Church entering
into the State could, of course, surrender no part of its fundamental
principles—the rock on which it stands—and could pursue no other aims than
those which have been ordained and revealed by God Himself, and among them
that of drawing the whole world, and therefore the ancient pagan State
itself, into the Church. In that way (that is, with a view to the future)
it is not the Church that should seek a definite position in the State,
like ‘every social organization,’ or as ‘an organization of men for
religious purposes’ (as my opponent calls the Church), but, on the
contrary, every earthly State should be, in the end, completely
transformed into the Church and should become nothing else but a Church,
rejecting every purpose incongruous with the aims of the Church. All this
will not degrade it in any way or take from its honor and glory as a great
State, nor from the glory of its rulers, but only turns it from a false,
still pagan, and mistaken path to the true and rightful path, which alone
leads to the eternal goal. This is why the author of the book _On the
Foundations of Church Jurisdiction_ would have judged correctly if, in
seeking and laying down those foundations, he had looked upon them as a
temporary compromise inevitable in our sinful and imperfect days. But as
soon as the author ventures to declare that the foundations which he
predicates now, part of which Father Iosif just enumerated, are the
permanent, essential, and eternal foundations, he is going directly
against the Church and its sacred and eternal vocation. That is the gist
of my article.”

“That is, in brief,” Father Païssy began again, laying stress on each
word, “according to certain theories only too clearly formulated in the
nineteenth century, the Church ought to be transformed into the State, as
though this would be an advance from a lower to a higher form, so as to
disappear into it, making way for science, for the spirit of the age, and
civilization. And if the Church resists and is unwilling, some corner will
be set apart for her in the State, and even that under control—and this
will be so everywhere in all modern European countries. But Russian hopes
and conceptions demand not that the Church should pass as from a lower
into a higher type into the State, but, on the contrary, that the State
should end by being worthy to become only the Church and nothing else. So
be it! So be it!”

“Well, I confess you’ve reassured me somewhat,” Miüsov said smiling, again
crossing his legs. “So far as I understand, then, the realization of such
an ideal is infinitely remote, at the second coming of Christ. That’s as
you please. It’s a beautiful Utopian dream of the abolition of war,
diplomacy, banks, and so on—something after the fashion of socialism,
indeed. But I imagined that it was all meant seriously, and that the
Church might be _now_ going to try criminals, and sentence them to
beating, prison, and even death.”

“But if there were none but the ecclesiastical court, the Church would not
even now sentence a criminal to prison or to death. Crime and the way of
regarding it would inevitably change, not all at once of course, but
fairly soon,” Ivan replied calmly, without flinching.

“Are you serious?” Miüsov glanced keenly at him.

“If everything became the Church, the Church would exclude all the
criminal and disobedient, and would not cut off their heads,” Ivan went
on. “I ask you, what would become of the excluded? He would be cut off
then not only from men, as now, but from Christ. By his crime he would
have transgressed not only against men but against the Church of Christ.
This is so even now, of course, strictly speaking, but it is not clearly
enunciated, and very, very often the criminal of to-day compromises with
his conscience: ‘I steal,’ he says, ‘but I don’t go against the Church.
I’m not an enemy of Christ.’ That’s what the criminal of to-day is
continually saying to himself, but when the Church takes the place of the
State it will be difficult for him, in opposition to the Church all over
the world, to say: ‘All men are mistaken, all in error, all mankind are
the false Church. I, a thief and murderer, am the only true Christian
Church.’ It will be very difficult to say this to himself; it requires a
rare combination of unusual circumstances. Now, on the other side, take
the Church’s own view of crime: is it not bound to renounce the present
almost pagan attitude, and to change from a mechanical cutting off of its
tainted member for the preservation of society, as at present, into
completely and honestly adopting the idea of the regeneration of the man,
of his reformation and salvation?”

“What do you mean? I fail to understand again,” Miüsov interrupted. “Some
sort of dream again. Something shapeless and even incomprehensible. What
is excommunication? What sort of exclusion? I suspect you are simply
amusing yourself, Ivan Fyodorovitch.”

“Yes, but you know, in reality it is so now,” said the elder suddenly, and
all turned to him at once. “If it were not for the Church of Christ there
would be nothing to restrain the criminal from evil-doing, no real
chastisement for it afterwards; none, that is, but the mechanical
punishment spoken of just now, which in the majority of cases only
embitters the heart; and not the real punishment, the only effectual one,
the only deterrent and softening one, which lies in the recognition of sin
by conscience.”

“How is that, may one inquire?” asked Miüsov, with lively curiosity.

“Why,” began the elder, “all these sentences to exile with hard labor, and
formerly with flogging also, reform no one, and what’s more, deter hardly
a single criminal, and the number of crimes does not diminish but is
continually on the increase. You must admit that. Consequently the
security of society is not preserved, for, although the obnoxious member
is mechanically cut off and sent far away out of sight, another criminal
always comes to take his place at once, and often two of them. If anything
does preserve society, even in our time, and does regenerate and transform
the criminal, it is only the law of Christ speaking in his conscience. It
is only by recognizing his wrong-doing as a son of a Christian
society—that is, of the Church—that he recognizes his sin against
society—that is, against the Church. So that it is only against the
Church, and not against the State, that the criminal of to-day can
recognize that he has sinned. If society, as a Church, had jurisdiction,
then it would know when to bring back from exclusion and to reunite to
itself. Now the Church having no real jurisdiction, but only the power of
moral condemnation, withdraws of her own accord from punishing the
criminal actively. She does not excommunicate him but simply persists in
motherly exhortation of him. What is more, the Church even tries to
preserve all Christian communion with the criminal. She admits him to
church services, to the holy sacrament, gives him alms, and treats him
more as a captive than as a convict. And what would become of the
criminal, O Lord, if even the Christian society—that is, the Church—were
to reject him even as the civil law rejects him and cuts him off? What
would become of him if the Church punished him with her excommunication as
the direct consequence of the secular law? There could be no more terrible
despair, at least for a Russian criminal, for Russian criminals still have
faith. Though, who knows, perhaps then a fearful thing would happen,
perhaps the despairing heart of the criminal would lose its faith and then
what would become of him? But the Church, like a tender, loving mother,
holds aloof from active punishment herself, as the sinner is too severely
punished already by the civil law, and there must be at least some one to
have pity on him. The Church holds aloof, above all, because its judgment
is the only one that contains the truth, and therefore cannot practically
and morally be united to any other judgment even as a temporary
compromise. She can enter into no compact about that. The foreign
criminal, they say, rarely repents, for the very doctrines of to-day
confirm him in the idea that his crime is not a crime, but only a reaction
against an unjustly oppressive force. Society cuts him off completely by a
force that triumphs over him mechanically and (so at least they say of
themselves in Europe) accompanies this exclusion with hatred,
forgetfulness, and the most profound indifference as to the ultimate fate
of the erring brother. In this way, it all takes place without the
compassionate intervention of the Church, for in many cases there are no
churches there at all, for though ecclesiastics and splendid church
buildings remain, the churches themselves have long ago striven to pass
from Church into State and to disappear in it completely. So it seems at
least in Lutheran countries. As for Rome, it was proclaimed a State
instead of a Church a thousand years ago. And so the criminal is no longer
conscious of being a member of the Church and sinks into despair. If he
returns to society, often it is with such hatred that society itself
instinctively cuts him off. You can judge for yourself how it must end. In
many cases it would seem to be the same with us, but the difference is
that besides the established law courts we have the Church too, which
always keeps up relations with the criminal as a dear and still precious
son. And besides that, there is still preserved, though only in thought,
the judgment of the Church, which though no longer existing in practice is
still living as a dream for the future, and is, no doubt, instinctively
recognized by the criminal in his soul. What was said here just now is
true too, that is, that if the jurisdiction of the Church were introduced
in practice in its full force, that is, if the whole of the society were
changed into the Church, not only the judgment of the Church would have
influence on the reformation of the criminal such as it never has now, but
possibly also the crimes themselves would be incredibly diminished. And
there can be no doubt that the Church would look upon the criminal and the
crime of the future in many cases quite differently and would succeed in
restoring the excluded, in restraining those who plan evil, and in
regenerating the fallen. It is true,” said Father Zossima, with a smile,
“the Christian society now is not ready and is only resting on some seven
righteous men, but as they are never lacking, it will continue still
unshaken in expectation of its complete transformation from a society
almost heathen in character into a single universal and all-powerful
Church. So be it, so be it! Even though at the end of the ages, for it is
ordained to come to pass! And there is no need to be troubled about times
and seasons, for the secret of the times and seasons is in the wisdom of
God, in His foresight, and His love. And what in human reckoning seems
still afar off, may by the Divine ordinance be close at hand, on the eve
of its appearance. And so be it, so be it!”

“So be it, so be it!” Father Païssy repeated austerely and reverently.

“Strange, extremely strange!” Miüsov pronounced, not so much with heat as
with latent indignation.

“What strikes you as so strange?” Father Iosif inquired cautiously.

“Why, it’s beyond anything!” cried Miüsov, suddenly breaking out; “the
State is eliminated and the Church is raised to the position of the State.
It’s not simply Ultramontanism, it’s arch-Ultramontanism! It’s beyond the
dreams of Pope Gregory the Seventh!”

“You are completely misunderstanding it,” said Father Païssy sternly.
“Understand, the Church is not to be transformed into the State. That is
Rome and its dream. That is the third temptation of the devil. On the
contrary, the State is transformed into the Church, will ascend and become
a Church over the whole world—which is the complete opposite of
Ultramontanism and Rome, and your interpretation, and is only the glorious
destiny ordained for the Orthodox Church. This star will arise in the
east!”

Miüsov was significantly silent. His whole figure expressed extraordinary
personal dignity. A supercilious and condescending smile played on his
lips. Alyosha watched it all with a throbbing heart. The whole
conversation stirred him profoundly. He glanced casually at Rakitin, who
was standing immovable in his place by the door listening and watching
intently though with downcast eyes. But from the color in his cheeks
Alyosha guessed that Rakitin was probably no less excited, and he knew
what caused his excitement.

“Allow me to tell you one little anecdote, gentlemen,” Miüsov said
impressively, with a peculiarly majestic air. “Some years ago, soon after
the _coup d’état_ of December, I happened to be calling in Paris on an
extremely influential personage in the Government, and I met a very
interesting man in his house. This individual was not precisely a
detective but was a sort of superintendent of a whole regiment of
political detectives—a rather powerful position in its own way. I was
prompted by curiosity to seize the opportunity of conversation with him.
And as he had not come as a visitor but as a subordinate official bringing
a special report, and as he saw the reception given me by his chief, he
deigned to speak with some openness, to a certain extent only, of course.
He was rather courteous than open, as Frenchmen know how to be courteous,
especially to a foreigner. But I thoroughly understood him. The subject
was the socialist revolutionaries who were at that time persecuted. I will
quote only one most curious remark dropped by this person. ‘We are not
particularly afraid,’ said he, ‘of all these socialists, anarchists,
infidels, and revolutionists; we keep watch on them and know all their
goings on. But there are a few peculiar men among them who believe in God
and are Christians, but at the same time are socialists. These are the
people we are most afraid of. They are dreadful people! The socialist who
is a Christian is more to be dreaded than a socialist who is an atheist.’
The words struck me at the time, and now they have suddenly come back to
me here, gentlemen.”

“You apply them to us, and look upon us as socialists?” Father Païssy
asked directly, without beating about the bush.

But before Pyotr Alexandrovitch could think what to answer, the door
opened, and the guest so long expected, Dmitri Fyodorovitch, came in. They
had, in fact, given up expecting him, and his sudden appearance caused
some surprise for a moment.



Chapter VI. Why Is Such A Man Alive?


Dmitri Fyodorovitch, a young man of eight and twenty, of medium height and
agreeable countenance, looked older than his years. He was muscular, and
showed signs of considerable physical strength. Yet there was something
not healthy in his face. It was rather thin, his cheeks were hollow, and
there was an unhealthy sallowness in their color. His rather large,
prominent, dark eyes had an expression of firm determination, and yet
there was a vague look in them, too. Even when he was excited and talking
irritably, his eyes somehow did not follow his mood, but betrayed
something else, sometimes quite incongruous with what was passing. “It’s
hard to tell what he’s thinking,” those who talked to him sometimes
declared. People who saw something pensive and sullen in his eyes were
startled by his sudden laugh, which bore witness to mirthful and
light-hearted thoughts at the very time when his eyes were so gloomy. A
certain strained look in his face was easy to understand at this moment.
Every one knew, or had heard of, the extremely restless and dissipated
life which he had been leading of late, as well as of the violent anger to
which he had been roused in his quarrels with his father. There were
several stories current in the town about it. It is true that he was
irascible by nature, “of an unstable and unbalanced mind,” as our justice
of the peace, Katchalnikov, happily described him.

He was stylishly and irreproachably dressed in a carefully buttoned
frock-coat. He wore black gloves and carried a top-hat. Having only lately
left the army, he still had mustaches and no beard. His dark brown hair
was cropped short, and combed forward on his temples. He had the long,
determined stride of a military man. He stood still for a moment on the
threshold, and glancing at the whole party went straight up to the elder,
guessing him to be their host. He made him a low bow, and asked his
blessing. Father Zossima, rising in his chair, blessed him. Dmitri kissed
his hand respectfully, and with intense feeling, almost anger, he said:

“Be so generous as to forgive me for having kept you waiting so long, but
Smerdyakov, the valet sent me by my father, in reply to my inquiries, told
me twice over that the appointment was for one. Now I suddenly learn—”

“Don’t disturb yourself,” interposed the elder. “No matter. You are a
little late. It’s of no consequence....”

“I’m extremely obliged to you, and expected no less from your goodness.”

Saying this, Dmitri bowed once more. Then, turning suddenly towards his
father, made him, too, a similarly low and respectful bow. He had
evidently considered it beforehand, and made this bow in all seriousness,
thinking it his duty to show his respect and good intentions.

Although Fyodor Pavlovitch was taken unawares, he was equal to the
occasion. In response to Dmitri’s bow he jumped up from his chair and made
his son a bow as low in return. His face was suddenly solemn and
impressive, which gave him a positively malignant look. Dmitri bowed
generally to all present, and without a word walked to the window with his
long, resolute stride, sat down on the only empty chair, near Father
Païssy, and, bending forward, prepared to listen to the conversation he
had interrupted.

Dmitri’s entrance had taken no more than two minutes, and the conversation
was resumed. But this time Miüsov thought it unnecessary to reply to
Father Païssy’s persistent and almost irritable question.

“Allow me to withdraw from this discussion,” he observed with a certain
well-bred nonchalance. “It’s a subtle question, too. Here Ivan
Fyodorovitch is smiling at us. He must have something interesting to say
about that also. Ask him.”

“Nothing special, except one little remark,” Ivan replied at once.
“European Liberals in general, and even our liberal dilettanti, often mix
up the final results of socialism with those of Christianity. This wild
notion is, of course, a characteristic feature. But it’s not only Liberals
and dilettanti who mix up socialism and Christianity, but, in many cases,
it appears, the police—the foreign police, of course—do the same. Your
Paris anecdote is rather to the point, Pyotr Alexandrovitch.”

“I ask your permission to drop this subject altogether,” Miüsov repeated.
“I will tell you instead, gentlemen, another interesting and rather
characteristic anecdote of Ivan Fyodorovitch himself. Only five days ago,
in a gathering here, principally of ladies, he solemnly declared in
argument that there was nothing in the whole world to make men love their
neighbors. That there was no law of nature that man should love mankind,
and that, if there had been any love on earth hitherto, it was not owing
to a natural law, but simply because men have believed in immortality.
Ivan Fyodorovitch added in parenthesis that the whole natural law lies in
that faith, and that if you were to destroy in mankind the belief in
immortality, not only love but every living force maintaining the life of
the world would at once be dried up. Moreover, nothing then would be
immoral, everything would be lawful, even cannibalism. That’s not all. He
ended by asserting that for every individual, like ourselves, who does not
believe in God or immortality, the moral law of nature must immediately be
changed into the exact contrary of the former religious law, and that
egoism, even to crime, must become not only lawful but even recognized as
the inevitable, the most rational, even honorable outcome of his position.
From this paradox, gentlemen, you can judge of the rest of our eccentric
and paradoxical friend Ivan Fyodorovitch’s theories.”

“Excuse me,” Dmitri cried suddenly; “if I’ve heard aright, crime must not
only be permitted but even recognized as the inevitable and the most
rational outcome of his position for every infidel! Is that so or not?”

“Quite so,” said Father Païssy.

“I’ll remember it.”

Having uttered these words Dmitri ceased speaking as suddenly as he had
begun. Every one looked at him with curiosity.

“Is that really your conviction as to the consequences of the
disappearance of the faith in immortality?” the elder asked Ivan suddenly.

“Yes. That was my contention. There is no virtue if there is no
immortality.”

“You are blessed in believing that, or else most unhappy.”

“Why unhappy?” Ivan asked smiling.

“Because, in all probability you don’t believe yourself in the immortality
of your soul, nor in what you have written yourself in your article on
Church jurisdiction.”

“Perhaps you are right! ... But I wasn’t altogether joking,” Ivan suddenly
and strangely confessed, flushing quickly.

“You were not altogether joking. That’s true. The question is still
fretting your heart, and not answered. But the martyr likes sometimes to
divert himself with his despair, as it were driven to it by despair
itself. Meanwhile, in your despair, you, too, divert yourself with
magazine articles, and discussions in society, though you don’t believe
your own arguments, and with an aching heart mock at them inwardly....
That question you have not answered, and it is your great grief, for it
clamors for an answer.”

“But can it be answered by me? Answered in the affirmative?” Ivan went on
asking strangely, still looking at the elder with the same inexplicable
smile.

“If it can’t be decided in the affirmative, it will never be decided in
the negative. You know that that is the peculiarity of your heart, and all
its suffering is due to it. But thank the Creator who has given you a
lofty heart capable of such suffering; of thinking and seeking higher
things, for our dwelling is in the heavens. God grant that your heart will
attain the answer on earth, and may God bless your path.”

The elder raised his hand and would have made the sign of the cross over
Ivan from where he stood. But the latter rose from his seat, went up to
him, received his blessing, and kissing his hand went back to his place in
silence. His face looked firm and earnest. This action and all the
preceding conversation, which was so surprising from Ivan, impressed every
one by its strangeness and a certain solemnity, so that all were silent
for a moment, and there was a look almost of apprehension in Alyosha’s
face. But Miüsov suddenly shrugged his shoulders. And at the same moment
Fyodor Pavlovitch jumped up from his seat.

“Most pious and holy elder,” he cried, pointing to Ivan, “that is my son,
flesh of my flesh, the dearest of my flesh! He is my most dutiful Karl
Moor, so to speak, while this son who has just come in, Dmitri, against
whom I am seeking justice from you, is the undutiful Franz Moor—they are
both out of Schiller’s _Robbers_, and so I am the reigning Count von Moor!
Judge and save us! We need not only your prayers but your prophecies!”

“Speak without buffoonery, and don’t begin by insulting the members of
your family,” answered the elder, in a faint, exhausted voice. He was
obviously getting more and more fatigued, and his strength was failing.

“An unseemly farce which I foresaw when I came here!” cried Dmitri
indignantly. He too leapt up. “Forgive it, reverend Father,” he added,
addressing the elder. “I am not a cultivated man, and I don’t even know
how to address you properly, but you have been deceived and you have been
too good-natured in letting us meet here. All my father wants is a
scandal. Why he wants it only he can tell. He always has some motive. But
I believe I know why—”

“They all blame me, all of them!” cried Fyodor Pavlovitch in his turn.
“Pyotr Alexandrovitch here blames me too. You have been blaming me, Pyotr
Alexandrovitch, you have!” he turned suddenly to Miüsov, although the
latter was not dreaming of interrupting him. “They all accuse me of having
hidden the children’s money in my boots, and cheated them, but isn’t there
a court of law? There they will reckon out for you, Dmitri Fyodorovitch,
from your notes, your letters, and your agreements, how much money you
had, how much you have spent, and how much you have left. Why does Pyotr
Alexandrovitch refuse to pass judgment? Dmitri is not a stranger to him.
Because they are all against me, while Dmitri Fyodorovitch is in debt to
me, and not a little, but some thousands of which I have documentary
proof. The whole town is echoing with his debaucheries. And where he was
stationed before, he several times spent a thousand or two for the
seduction of some respectable girl; we know all about that, Dmitri
Fyodorovitch, in its most secret details. I’ll prove it.... Would you
believe it, holy Father, he has captivated the heart of the most honorable
of young ladies of good family and fortune, daughter of a gallant colonel,
formerly his superior officer, who had received many honors and had the
Anna Order on his breast. He compromised the girl by his promise of
marriage, now she is an orphan and here; she is betrothed to him, yet
before her very eyes he is dancing attendance on a certain enchantress.
And although this enchantress has lived in, so to speak, civil marriage
with a respectable man, yet she is of an independent character, an
unapproachable fortress for everybody, just like a legal wife—for she is
virtuous, yes, holy Fathers, she is virtuous. Dmitri Fyodorovitch wants to
open this fortress with a golden key, and that’s why he is insolent to me
now, trying to get money from me, though he has wasted thousands on this
enchantress already. He’s continually borrowing money for the purpose.
From whom do you think? Shall I say, Mitya?”

“Be silent!” cried Dmitri, “wait till I’m gone. Don’t dare in my presence
to asperse the good name of an honorable girl! That you should utter a
word about her is an outrage, and I won’t permit it!”

He was breathless.

“Mitya! Mitya!” cried Fyodor Pavlovitch hysterically, squeezing out a
tear. “And is your father’s blessing nothing to you? If I curse you, what
then?”

“Shameless hypocrite!” exclaimed Dmitri furiously.

“He says that to his father! his father! What would he be with others?
Gentlemen, only fancy; there’s a poor but honorable man living here,
burdened with a numerous family, a captain who got into trouble and was
discharged from the army, but not publicly, not by court-martial, with no
slur on his honor. And three weeks ago, Dmitri seized him by the beard in
a tavern, dragged him out into the street and beat him publicly, and all
because he is an agent in a little business of mine.”

“It’s all a lie! Outwardly it’s the truth, but inwardly a lie!” Dmitri was
trembling with rage. “Father, I don’t justify my action. Yes, I confess it
publicly, I behaved like a brute to that captain, and I regret it now, and
I’m disgusted with myself for my brutal rage. But this captain, this agent
of yours, went to that lady whom you call an enchantress, and suggested to
her from you, that she should take I.O.U.’s of mine which were in your
possession, and should sue me for the money so as to get me into prison by
means of them, if I persisted in claiming an account from you of my
property. Now you reproach me for having a weakness for that lady when you
yourself incited her to captivate me! She told me so to my face.... She
told me the story and laughed at you.... You wanted to put me in prison
because you are jealous of me with her, because you’d begun to force your
attentions upon her; and I know all about that, too; she laughed at you
for that as well—you hear—she laughed at you as she described it. So here
you have this man, this father who reproaches his profligate son!
Gentlemen, forgive my anger, but I foresaw that this crafty old man would
only bring you together to create a scandal. I had come to forgive him if
he held out his hand; to forgive him, and ask forgiveness! But as he has
just this minute insulted not only me, but an honorable young lady, for
whom I feel such reverence that I dare not take her name in vain, I have
made up my mind to show up his game, though he is my father....”

He could not go on. His eyes were glittering and he breathed with
difficulty. But every one in the cell was stirred. All except Father
Zossima got up from their seats uneasily. The monks looked austere but
waited for guidance from the elder. He sat still, pale, not from
excitement but from the weakness of disease. An imploring smile lighted up
his face; from time to time he raised his hand, as though to check the
storm, and, of course, a gesture from him would have been enough to end
the scene; but he seemed to be waiting for something and watched them
intently as though trying to make out something which was not perfectly
clear to him. At last Miüsov felt completely humiliated and disgraced.

“We are all to blame for this scandalous scene,” he said hotly. “But I did
not foresee it when I came, though I knew with whom I had to deal. This
must be stopped at once! Believe me, your reverence, I had no precise
knowledge of the details that have just come to light, I was unwilling to
believe them, and I learn for the first time.... A father is jealous of
his son’s relations with a woman of loose behavior and intrigues with the
creature to get his son into prison! This is the company in which I have
been forced to be present! I was deceived. I declare to you all that I was
as much deceived as any one.”

“Dmitri Fyodorovitch,” yelled Fyodor Pavlovitch suddenly, in an unnatural
voice, “if you were not my son I would challenge you this instant to a
duel ... with pistols, at three paces ... across a handkerchief,” he
ended, stamping with both feet.

With old liars who have been acting all their lives there are moments when
they enter so completely into their part that they tremble or shed tears
of emotion in earnest, although at that very moment, or a second later,
they are able to whisper to themselves, “You know you are lying, you
shameless old sinner! You’re acting now, in spite of your ‘holy’ wrath.”

Dmitri frowned painfully, and looked with unutterable contempt at his
father.

“I thought ... I thought,” he said, in a soft and, as it were, controlled
voice, “that I was coming to my native place with the angel of my heart,
my betrothed, to cherish his old age, and I find nothing but a depraved
profligate, a despicable clown!”

“A duel!” yelled the old wretch again, breathless and spluttering at each
syllable. “And you, Pyotr Alexandrovitch Miüsov, let me tell you that
there has never been in all your family a loftier, and more honest—you
hear—more honest woman than this ‘creature,’ as you have dared to call
her! And you, Dmitri Fyodorovitch, have abandoned your betrothed for that
‘creature,’ so you must yourself have thought that your betrothed couldn’t
hold a candle to her. That’s the woman called a ‘creature’!”

“Shameful!” broke from Father Iosif.

“Shameful and disgraceful!” Kalganov, flushing crimson, cried in a boyish
voice, trembling with emotion. He had been silent till that moment.

“Why is such a man alive?” Dmitri, beside himself with rage, growled in a
hollow voice, hunching up his shoulders till he looked almost deformed.
“Tell me, can he be allowed to go on defiling the earth?” He looked round
at every one and pointed at the old man. He spoke evenly and deliberately.

“Listen, listen, monks, to the parricide!” cried Fyodor Pavlovitch,
rushing up to Father Iosif. “That’s the answer to your ‘shameful!’ What is
shameful? That ‘creature,’ that ‘woman of loose behavior’ is perhaps
holier than you are yourselves, you monks who are seeking salvation! She
fell perhaps in her youth, ruined by her environment. But she loved much,
and Christ himself forgave the woman ‘who loved much.’ ”

“It was not for such love Christ forgave her,” broke impatiently from the
gentle Father Iosif.

“Yes, it was for such, monks, it was! You save your souls here, eating
cabbage, and think you are the righteous. You eat a gudgeon a day, and you
think you bribe God with gudgeon.”

“This is unendurable!” was heard on all sides in the cell.

But this unseemly scene was cut short in a most unexpected way. Father
Zossima rose suddenly from his seat. Almost distracted with anxiety for
the elder and every one else, Alyosha succeeded, however, in supporting
him by the arm. Father Zossima moved towards Dmitri and reaching him sank
on his knees before him. Alyosha thought that he had fallen from weakness,
but this was not so. The elder distinctly and deliberately bowed down at
Dmitri’s feet till his forehead touched the floor. Alyosha was so
astounded that he failed to assist him when he got up again. There was a
faint smile on his lips.

“Good-by! Forgive me, all of you!” he said, bowing on all sides to his
guests.

Dmitri stood for a few moments in amazement. Bowing down to him—what did
it mean? Suddenly he cried aloud, “Oh, God!” hid his face in his hands,
and rushed out of the room. All the guests flocked out after him, in their
confusion not saying good-by, or bowing to their host. Only the monks went
up to him again for a blessing.

“What did it mean, falling at his feet like that? Was it symbolic or
what?” said Fyodor Pavlovitch, suddenly quieted and trying to reopen
conversation without venturing to address anybody in particular. They were
all passing out of the precincts of the hermitage at the moment.

“I can’t answer for a madhouse and for madmen,” Miüsov answered at once
ill-humoredly, “but I will spare myself your company, Fyodor Pavlovitch,
and, trust me, for ever. Where’s that monk?”

“That monk,” that is, the monk who had invited them to dine with the
Superior, did not keep them waiting. He met them as soon as they came down
the steps from the elder’s cell, as though he had been waiting for them
all the time.

“Reverend Father, kindly do me a favor. Convey my deepest respect to the
Father Superior, apologize for me, personally, Miüsov, to his reverence,
telling him that I deeply regret that owing to unforeseen circumstances I
am unable to have the honor of being present at his table, greatly as I
should desire to do so,” Miüsov said irritably to the monk.

“And that unforeseen circumstance, of course, is myself,” Fyodor
Pavlovitch cut in immediately. “Do you hear, Father; this gentleman
doesn’t want to remain in my company or else he’d come at once. And you
shall go, Pyotr Alexandrovitch, pray go to the Father Superior and good
appetite to you. I will decline, and not you. Home, home, I’ll eat at
home, I don’t feel equal to it here, Pyotr Alexandrovitch, my amiable
relative.”

“I am not your relative and never have been, you contemptible man!”

“I said it on purpose to madden you, because you always disclaim the
relationship, though you really are a relation in spite of your shuffling.
I’ll prove it by the church calendar. As for you, Ivan, stay if you like.
I’ll send the horses for you later. Propriety requires you to go to the
Father Superior, Pyotr Alexandrovitch, to apologize for the disturbance
we’ve been making....”

“Is it true that you are going home? Aren’t you lying?”

“Pyotr Alexandrovitch! How could I dare after what’s happened! Forgive me,
gentlemen, I was carried away! And upset besides! And, indeed, I am
ashamed. Gentlemen, one man has the heart of Alexander of Macedon and
another the heart of the little dog Fido. Mine is that of the little dog
Fido. I am ashamed! After such an escapade how can I go to dinner, to
gobble up the monastery’s sauces? I am ashamed, I can’t. You must excuse
me!”

“The devil only knows, what if he deceives us?” thought Miüsov, still
hesitating, and watching the retreating buffoon with distrustful eyes. The
latter turned round, and noticing that Miüsov was watching him, waved him
a kiss.

“Well, are you coming to the Superior?” Miüsov asked Ivan abruptly.

“Why not? I was especially invited yesterday.”

“Unfortunately I feel myself compelled to go to this confounded dinner,”
said Miüsov with the same irritability, regardless of the fact that the
monk was listening. “We ought, at least, to apologize for the disturbance,
and explain that it was not our doing. What do you think?”

“Yes, we must explain that it wasn’t our doing. Besides, father won’t be
there,” observed Ivan.

“Well, I should hope not! Confound this dinner!”

They all walked on, however. The monk listened in silence. On the road
through the copse he made one observation however—that the Father Superior
had been waiting a long time, and that they were more than half an hour
late. He received no answer. Miüsov looked with hatred at Ivan.

“Here he is, going to the dinner as though nothing had happened,” he
thought. “A brazen face, and the conscience of a Karamazov!”



Chapter VII. A Young Man Bent On A Career


Alyosha helped Father Zossima to his bedroom and seated him on his bed. It
was a little room furnished with the bare necessities. There was a narrow
iron bedstead, with a strip of felt for a mattress. In the corner, under
the ikons, was a reading-desk with a cross and the Gospel lying on it. The
elder sank exhausted on the bed. His eyes glittered and he breathed hard.
He looked intently at Alyosha, as though considering something.

“Go, my dear boy, go. Porfiry is enough for me. Make haste, you are needed
there, go and wait at the Father Superior’s table.”

“Let me stay here,” Alyosha entreated.

“You are more needed there. There is no peace there. You will wait, and be
of service. If evil spirits rise up, repeat a prayer. And remember, my
son”—the elder liked to call him that—“this is not the place for you in
the future. When it is God’s will to call me, leave the monastery. Go away
for good.”

Alyosha started.

“What is it? This is not your place for the time. I bless you for great
service in the world. Yours will be a long pilgrimage. And you will have
to take a wife, too. You will have to bear _all_ before you come back.
There will be much to do. But I don’t doubt of you, and so I send you
forth. Christ is with you. Do not abandon Him and He will not abandon you.
You will see great sorrow, and in that sorrow you will be happy. This is
my last message to you: in sorrow seek happiness. Work, work unceasingly.
Remember my words, for although I shall talk with you again, not only my
days but my hours are numbered.”

Alyosha’s face again betrayed strong emotion. The corners of his mouth
quivered.

“What is it again?” Father Zossima asked, smiling gently. “The worldly may
follow the dead with tears, but here we rejoice over the father who is
departing. We rejoice and pray for him. Leave me, I must pray. Go, and
make haste. Be near your brothers. And not near one only, but near both.”

Father Zossima raised his hand to bless him. Alyosha could make no
protest, though he had a great longing to remain. He longed, moreover, to
ask the significance of his bowing to Dmitri, the question was on the tip
of his tongue, but he dared not ask it. He knew that the elder would have
explained it unasked if he had thought fit. But evidently it was not his
will. That action had made a terrible impression on Alyosha; he believed
blindly in its mysterious significance. Mysterious, and perhaps awful.

As he hastened out of the hermitage precincts to reach the monastery in
time to serve at the Father Superior’s dinner, he felt a sudden pang at
his heart, and stopped short. He seemed to hear again Father Zossima’s
words, foretelling his approaching end. What he had foretold so exactly
must infallibly come to pass. Alyosha believed that implicitly. But how
could he be left without him? How could he live without seeing and hearing
him? Where should he go? He had told him not to weep, and to leave the
monastery. Good God! It was long since Alyosha had known such anguish. He
hurried through the copse that divided the monastery from the hermitage,
and unable to bear the burden of his thoughts, he gazed at the ancient
pines beside the path. He had not far to go—about five hundred paces. He
expected to meet no one at that hour, but at the first turn of the path he
noticed Rakitin. He was waiting for some one.

“Are you waiting for me?” asked Alyosha, overtaking him.

“Yes,” grinned Rakitin. “You are hurrying to the Father Superior, I know;
he has a banquet. There’s not been such a banquet since the Superior
entertained the Bishop and General Pahatov, do you remember? I shan’t be
there, but you go and hand the sauces. Tell me one thing, Alexey, what
does that vision mean? That’s what I want to ask you.”

“What vision?”

“That bowing to your brother, Dmitri. And didn’t he tap the ground with
his forehead, too!”

“You speak of Father Zossima?”

“Yes, of Father Zossima.”

“Tapped the ground?”

“Ah, an irreverent expression! Well, what of it? Anyway, what does that
vision mean?”

“I don’t know what it means, Misha.”

“I knew he wouldn’t explain it to you! There’s nothing wonderful about it,
of course, only the usual holy mummery. But there was an object in the
performance. All the pious people in the town will talk about it and
spread the story through the province, wondering what it meant. To my
thinking the old man really has a keen nose; he sniffed a crime. Your
house stinks of it.”

“What crime?”

Rakitin evidently had something he was eager to speak of.

“It’ll be in your family, this crime. Between your brothers and your rich
old father. So Father Zossima flopped down to be ready for what may turn
up. If something happens later on, it’ll be: ‘Ah, the holy man foresaw it,
prophesied it!’ though it’s a poor sort of prophecy, flopping like that.
‘Ah, but it was symbolic,’ they’ll say, ‘an allegory,’ and the devil knows
what all! It’ll be remembered to his glory: ‘He predicted the crime and
marked the criminal!’ That’s always the way with these crazy fanatics;
they cross themselves at the tavern and throw stones at the temple. Like
your elder, he takes a stick to a just man and falls at the feet of a
murderer.”

“What crime? What murderer? What do you mean?”

Alyosha stopped dead. Rakitin stopped, too.

“What murderer? As though you didn’t know! I’ll bet you’ve thought of it
before. That’s interesting, too, by the way. Listen, Alyosha, you always
speak the truth, though you’re always between two stools. Have you thought
of it or not? Answer.”

“I have,” answered Alyosha in a low voice. Even Rakitin was taken aback.

“What? Have you really?” he cried.

“I ... I’ve not exactly thought it,” muttered Alyosha, “but directly you
began speaking so strangely, I fancied I had thought of it myself.”

“You see? (And how well you expressed it!) Looking at your father and your
brother Mitya to-day you thought of a crime. Then I’m not mistaken?”

“But wait, wait a minute,” Alyosha broke in uneasily. “What has led you to
see all this? Why does it interest you? That’s the first question.”

“Two questions, disconnected, but natural. I’ll deal with them separately.
What led me to see it? I shouldn’t have seen it, if I hadn’t suddenly
understood your brother Dmitri, seen right into the very heart of him all
at once. I caught the whole man from one trait. These very honest but
passionate people have a line which mustn’t be crossed. If it were, he’d
run at your father with a knife. But your father’s a drunken and abandoned
old sinner, who can never draw the line—if they both let themselves go,
they’ll both come to grief.”

“No, Misha, no. If that’s all, you’ve reassured me. It won’t come to
that.”

“But why are you trembling? Let me tell you; he may be honest, our Mitya
(he is stupid, but honest), but he’s—a sensualist. That’s the very
definition and inner essence of him. It’s your father has handed him on
his low sensuality. Do you know, I simply wonder at you, Alyosha, how you
can have kept your purity. You’re a Karamazov too, you know! In your
family sensuality is carried to a disease. But now, these three
sensualists are watching one another, with their knives in their belts.
The three of them are knocking their heads together, and you may be the
fourth.”

“You are mistaken about that woman. Dmitri—despises her,” said Alyosha,
with a sort of shudder.

“Grushenka? No, brother, he doesn’t despise her. Since he has openly
abandoned his betrothed for her, he doesn’t despise her. There’s something
here, my dear boy, that you don’t understand yet. A man will fall in love
with some beauty, with a woman’s body, or even with a part of a woman’s
body (a sensualist can understand that), and he’ll abandon his own
children for her, sell his father and mother, and his country, Russia,
too. If he’s honest, he’ll steal; if he’s humane, he’ll murder; if he’s
faithful, he’ll deceive. Pushkin, the poet of women’s feet, sung of their
feet in his verse. Others don’t sing their praises, but they can’t look at
their feet without a thrill—and it’s not only their feet. Contempt’s no
help here, brother, even if he did despise Grushenka. He does, but he
can’t tear himself away.”

“I understand that,” Alyosha jerked out suddenly.

“Really? Well, I dare say you do understand, since you blurt it out at the
first word,” said Rakitin, malignantly. “That escaped you unawares, and
the confession’s the more precious. So it’s a familiar subject; you’ve
thought about it already, about sensuality, I mean! Oh, you virgin soul!
You’re a quiet one, Alyosha, you’re a saint, I know, but the devil only
knows what you’ve thought about, and what you know already! You are pure,
but you’ve been down into the depths.... I’ve been watching you a long
time. You’re a Karamazov yourself; you’re a thorough Karamazov—no doubt
birth and selection have something to answer for. You’re a sensualist from
your father, a crazy saint from your mother. Why do you tremble? Is it
true, then? Do you know, Grushenka has been begging me to bring you along.
‘I’ll pull off his cassock,’ she says. You can’t think how she keeps
begging me to bring you. I wondered why she took such an interest in you.
Do you know, she’s an extraordinary woman, too!”

“Thank her and say I’m not coming,” said Alyosha, with a strained smile.
“Finish what you were saying, Misha. I’ll tell you my idea after.”

“There’s nothing to finish. It’s all clear. It’s the same old tune,
brother. If even you are a sensualist at heart, what of your brother,
Ivan? He’s a Karamazov, too. What is at the root of all you Karamazovs is
that you’re all sensual, grasping and crazy! Your brother Ivan writes
theological articles in joke, for some idiotic, unknown motive of his own,
though he’s an atheist, and he admits it’s a fraud himself—that’s your
brother Ivan. He’s trying to get Mitya’s betrothed for himself, and I
fancy he’ll succeed, too. And what’s more, it’s with Mitya’s consent. For
Mitya will surrender his betrothed to him to be rid of her, and escape to
Grushenka. And he’s ready to do that in spite of all his nobility and
disinterestedness. Observe that. Those are the most fatal people! Who the
devil can make you out? He recognizes his vileness and goes on with it!
Let me tell you, too, the old man, your father, is standing in Mitya’s way
now. He has suddenly gone crazy over Grushenka. His mouth waters at the
sight of her. It’s simply on her account he made that scene in the cell
just now, simply because Miüsov called her an ‘abandoned creature.’ He’s
worse than a tom-cat in love. At first she was only employed by him in
connection with his taverns and in some other shady business, but now he
has suddenly realized all she is and has gone wild about her. He keeps
pestering her with his offers, not honorable ones, of course. And they’ll
come into collision, the precious father and son, on that path! But
Grushenka favors neither of them, she’s still playing with them, and
teasing them both, considering which she can get most out of. For though
she could filch a lot of money from the papa he wouldn’t marry her, and
maybe he’ll turn stingy in the end, and keep his purse shut. That’s where
Mitya’s value comes in; he has no money, but he’s ready to marry her. Yes,
ready to marry her! to abandon his betrothed, a rare beauty, Katerina
Ivanovna, who’s rich, and the daughter of a colonel, and to marry
Grushenka, who has been the mistress of a dissolute old merchant,
Samsonov, a coarse, uneducated, provincial mayor. Some murderous conflict
may well come to pass from all this, and that’s what your brother Ivan is
waiting for. It would suit him down to the ground. He’ll carry off
Katerina Ivanovna, for whom he is languishing, and pocket her dowry of
sixty thousand. That’s very alluring to start with, for a man of no
consequence and a beggar. And, take note, he won’t be wronging Mitya, but
doing him the greatest service. For I know as a fact that Mitya only last
week, when he was with some gypsy girls drunk in a tavern, cried out aloud
that he was unworthy of his betrothed, Katya, but that his brother Ivan,
he was the man who deserved her. And Katerina Ivanovna will not in the end
refuse such a fascinating man as Ivan. She’s hesitating between the two of
them already. And how has that Ivan won you all, so that you all worship
him? He is laughing at you, and enjoying himself at your expense.”

“How do you know? How can you speak so confidently?” Alyosha asked
sharply, frowning.

“Why do you ask, and are frightened at my answer? It shows that you know
I’m speaking the truth.”

“You don’t like Ivan. Ivan wouldn’t be tempted by money.”

“Really? And the beauty of Katerina Ivanovna? It’s not only the money,
though a fortune of sixty thousand is an attraction.”

“Ivan is above that. He wouldn’t make up to any one for thousands. It is
not money, it’s not comfort Ivan is seeking. Perhaps it’s suffering he is
seeking.”

“What wild dream now? Oh, you—aristocrats!”

“Ah, Misha, he has a stormy spirit. His mind is in bondage. He is haunted
by a great, unsolved doubt. He is one of those who don’t want millions,
but an answer to their questions.”

“That’s plagiarism, Alyosha. You’re quoting your elder’s phrases. Ah, Ivan
has set you a problem!” cried Rakitin, with undisguised malice. His face
changed, and his lips twitched. “And the problem’s a stupid one. It is no
good guessing it. Rack your brains—you’ll understand it. His article is
absurd and ridiculous. And did you hear his stupid theory just now: if
there’s no immortality of the soul, then there’s no virtue, and everything
is lawful. (And by the way, do you remember how your brother Mitya cried
out: ‘I will remember!’) An attractive theory for scoundrels!—(I’m being
abusive, that’s stupid.) Not for scoundrels, but for pedantic _poseurs_,
‘haunted by profound, unsolved doubts.’ He’s showing off, and what it all
comes to is, ‘on the one hand we cannot but admit’ and ‘on the other it
must be confessed!’ His whole theory is a fraud! Humanity will find in
itself the power to live for virtue even without believing in immortality.
It will find it in love for freedom, for equality, for fraternity.”

Rakitin could hardly restrain himself in his heat, but, suddenly, as
though remembering something, he stopped short.

“Well, that’s enough,” he said, with a still more crooked smile. “Why are
you laughing? Do you think I’m a vulgar fool?”

“No, I never dreamed of thinking you a vulgar fool. You are clever but ...
never mind, I was silly to smile. I understand your getting hot about it,
Misha. I guess from your warmth that you are not indifferent to Katerina
Ivanovna yourself; I’ve suspected that for a long time, brother, that’s
why you don’t like my brother Ivan. Are you jealous of him?”

“And jealous of her money, too? Won’t you add that?”

“I’ll say nothing about money. I am not going to insult you.”

“I believe it, since you say so, but confound you, and your brother Ivan
with you. Don’t you understand that one might very well dislike him, apart
from Katerina Ivanovna. And why the devil should I like him? He
condescends to abuse me, you know. Why haven’t I a right to abuse him?”

“I never heard of his saying anything about you, good or bad. He doesn’t
speak of you at all.”

“But I heard that the day before yesterday at Katerina Ivanovna’s he was
abusing me for all he was worth—you see what an interest he takes in your
humble servant. And which is the jealous one after that, brother, I can’t
say. He was so good as to express the opinion that, if I don’t go in for
the career of an archimandrite in the immediate future and don’t become a
monk, I shall be sure to go to Petersburg and get on to some solid
magazine as a reviewer, that I shall write for the next ten years, and in
the end become the owner of the magazine, and bring it out on the liberal
and atheistic side, with a socialistic tinge, with a tiny gloss of
socialism, but keeping a sharp look out all the time, that is, keeping in
with both sides and hoodwinking the fools. According to your brother’s
account, the tinge of socialism won’t hinder me from laying by the
proceeds and investing them under the guidance of some Jew, till at the
end of my career I build a great house in Petersburg and move my
publishing offices to it, and let out the upper stories to lodgers. He has
even chosen the place for it, near the new stone bridge across the Neva,
which they say is to be built in Petersburg.”

“Ah, Misha, that’s just what will really happen, every word of it,” cried
Alyosha, unable to restrain a good-humored smile.

“You are pleased to be sarcastic, too, Alexey Fyodorovitch.”

“No, no, I’m joking, forgive me. I’ve something quite different in my
mind. But, excuse me, who can have told you all this? You can’t have been
at Katerina Ivanovna’s yourself when he was talking about you?”

“I wasn’t there, but Dmitri Fyodorovitch was; and I heard him tell it with
my own ears; if you want to know, he didn’t tell me, but I overheard him,
unintentionally, of course, for I was sitting in Grushenka’s bedroom and I
couldn’t go away because Dmitri Fyodorovitch was in the next room.”

“Oh, yes, I’d forgotten she was a relation of yours.”

“A relation! That Grushenka a relation of mine!” cried Rakitin, turning
crimson. “Are you mad? You’re out of your mind!”

“Why, isn’t she a relation of yours? I heard so.”

“Where can you have heard it? You Karamazovs brag of being an ancient,
noble family, though your father used to run about playing the buffoon at
other men’s tables, and was only admitted to the kitchen as a favor. I may
be only a priest’s son, and dirt in the eyes of noblemen like you, but
don’t insult me so lightly and wantonly. I have a sense of honor, too,
Alexey Fyodorovitch, I couldn’t be a relation of Grushenka, a common
harlot. I beg you to understand that!”

Rakitin was intensely irritated.

“Forgive me, for goodness’ sake, I had no idea ... besides ... how can you
call her a harlot? Is she ... that sort of woman?” Alyosha flushed
suddenly. “I tell you again, I heard that she was a relation of yours. You
often go to see her, and you told me yourself you’re not her lover. I
never dreamed that you of all people had such contempt for her! Does she
really deserve it?”

“I may have reasons of my own for visiting her. That’s not your business.
But as for relationship, your brother, or even your father, is more likely
to make her yours than mine. Well, here we are. You’d better go to the
kitchen. Hullo! what’s wrong, what is it? Are we late? They can’t have
finished dinner so soon! Have the Karamazovs been making trouble again? No
doubt they have. Here’s your father and your brother Ivan after him.
They’ve broken out from the Father Superior’s. And look, Father Isidor’s
shouting out something after them from the steps. And your father’s
shouting and waving his arms. I expect he’s swearing. Bah, and there goes
Miüsov driving away in his carriage. You see, he’s going. And there’s old
Maximov running!—there must have been a row. There can’t have been any
dinner. Surely they’ve not been beating the Father Superior! Or have they,
perhaps, been beaten? It would serve them right!”

There was reason for Rakitin’s exclamations. There had been a scandalous,
an unprecedented scene. It had all come from the impulse of a moment.



Chapter VIII. The Scandalous Scene


Miüsov, as a man of breeding and delicacy, could not but feel some inward
qualms, when he reached the Father Superior’s with Ivan: he felt ashamed
of having lost his temper. He felt that he ought to have disdained that
despicable wretch, Fyodor Pavlovitch, too much to have been upset by him
in Father Zossima’s cell, and so to have forgotten himself. “The monks
were not to blame, in any case,” he reflected, on the steps. “And if
they’re decent people here (and the Father Superior, I understand, is a
nobleman) why not be friendly and courteous with them? I won’t argue, I’ll
fall in with everything, I’ll win them by politeness, and ... and ... show
them that I’ve nothing to do with that Æsop, that buffoon, that Pierrot,
and have merely been taken in over this affair, just as they have.”

He determined to drop his litigation with the monastery, and relinquish
his claims to the wood-cutting and fishery rights at once. He was the more
ready to do this because the rights had become much less valuable, and he
had indeed the vaguest idea where the wood and river in question were.

These excellent intentions were strengthened when he entered the Father
Superior’s dining-room, though, strictly speaking, it was not a
dining-room, for the Father Superior had only two rooms altogether; they
were, however, much larger and more comfortable than Father Zossima’s. But
there was no great luxury about the furnishing of these rooms either. The
furniture was of mahogany, covered with leather, in the old-fashioned
style of 1820; the floor was not even stained, but everything was shining
with cleanliness, and there were many choice flowers in the windows; the
most sumptuous thing in the room at the moment was, of course, the
beautifully decorated table. The cloth was clean, the service shone; there
were three kinds of well-baked bread, two bottles of wine, two of
excellent mead, and a large glass jug of kvas—both the latter made in the
monastery, and famous in the neighborhood. There was no vodka. Rakitin
related afterwards that there were five dishes: fish-soup made of
sterlets, served with little fish patties; then boiled fish served in a
special way; then salmon cutlets, ice pudding and compote, and finally,
blanc-mange. Rakitin found out about all these good things, for he could
not resist peeping into the kitchen, where he already had a footing. He
had a footing everywhere, and got information about everything. He was of
an uneasy and envious temper. He was well aware of his own considerable
abilities, and nervously exaggerated them in his self-conceit. He knew he
would play a prominent part of some sort, but Alyosha, who was attached to
him, was distressed to see that his friend Rakitin was dishonorable, and
quite unconscious of being so himself, considering, on the contrary, that
because he would not steal money left on the table he was a man of the
highest integrity. Neither Alyosha nor any one else could have influenced
him in that.

Rakitin, of course, was a person of too little consequence to be invited
to the dinner, to which Father Iosif, Father Païssy, and one other monk
were the only inmates of the monastery invited. They were already waiting
when Miüsov, Kalganov, and Ivan arrived. The other guest, Maximov, stood a
little aside, waiting also. The Father Superior stepped into the middle of
the room to receive his guests. He was a tall, thin, but still vigorous
old man, with black hair streaked with gray, and a long, grave, ascetic
face. He bowed to his guests in silence. But this time they approached to
receive his blessing. Miüsov even tried to kiss his hand, but the Father
Superior drew it back in time to avoid the salute. But Ivan and Kalganov
went through the ceremony in the most simple-hearted and complete manner,
kissing his hand as peasants do.

“We must apologize most humbly, your reverence,” began Miüsov, simpering
affably, and speaking in a dignified and respectful tone. “Pardon us for
having come alone without the gentleman you invited, Fyodor Pavlovitch. He
felt obliged to decline the honor of your hospitality, and not without
reason. In the reverend Father Zossima’s cell he was carried away by the
unhappy dissension with his son, and let fall words which were quite out
of keeping ... in fact, quite unseemly ... as”—he glanced at the
monks—“your reverence is, no doubt, already aware. And therefore,
recognizing that he had been to blame, he felt sincere regret and shame,
and begged me, and his son Ivan Fyodorovitch, to convey to you his
apologies and regrets. In brief, he hopes and desires to make amends
later. He asks your blessing, and begs you to forget what has taken
place.”

As he uttered the last word of his tirade, Miüsov completely recovered his
self-complacency, and all traces of his former irritation disappeared. He
fully and sincerely loved humanity again.

The Father Superior listened to him with dignity, and, with a slight bend
of the head, replied:

“I sincerely deplore his absence. Perhaps at our table he might have
learnt to like us, and we him. Pray be seated, gentlemen.”

He stood before the holy image, and began to say grace, aloud. All bent
their heads reverently, and Maximov clasped his hands before him, with
peculiar fervor.

It was at this moment that Fyodor Pavlovitch played his last prank. It
must be noted that he really had meant to go home, and really had felt the
impossibility of going to dine with the Father Superior as though nothing
had happened, after his disgraceful behavior in the elder’s cell. Not that
he was so very much ashamed of himself—quite the contrary perhaps. But
still he felt it would be unseemly to go to dinner. Yet his creaking
carriage had hardly been brought to the steps of the hotel, and he had
hardly got into it, when he suddenly stopped short. He remembered his own
words at the elder’s: “I always feel when I meet people that I am lower
than all, and that they all take me for a buffoon; so I say let me play
the buffoon, for you are, every one of you, stupider and lower than I.” He
longed to revenge himself on every one for his own unseemliness. He
suddenly recalled how he had once in the past been asked, “Why do you hate
so and so, so much?” And he had answered them, with his shameless
impudence, “I’ll tell you. He has done me no harm. But I played him a
dirty trick, and ever since I have hated him.”

Remembering that now, he smiled quietly and malignantly, hesitating for a
moment. His eyes gleamed, and his lips positively quivered. “Well, since I
have begun, I may as well go on,” he decided. His predominant sensation at
that moment might be expressed in the following words, “Well, there is no
rehabilitating myself now. So let me shame them for all I am worth. I will
show them I don’t care what they think—that’s all!”

He told the coachman to wait, while with rapid steps he returned to the
monastery and straight to the Father Superior’s. He had no clear idea what
he would do, but he knew that he could not control himself, and that a
touch might drive him to the utmost limits of obscenity, but only to
obscenity, to nothing criminal, nothing for which he could be legally
punished. In the last resort, he could always restrain himself, and had
marveled indeed at himself, on that score, sometimes. He appeared in the
Father Superior’s dining-room, at the moment when the prayer was over, and
all were moving to the table. Standing in the doorway, he scanned the
company, and laughing his prolonged, impudent, malicious chuckle, looked
them all boldly in the face. “They thought I had gone, and here I am
again,” he cried to the whole room.

For one moment every one stared at him without a word; and at once every
one felt that something revolting, grotesque, positively scandalous, was
about to happen. Miüsov passed immediately from the most benevolent frame
of mind to the most savage. All the feelings that had subsided and died
down in his heart revived instantly.

“No! this I cannot endure!” he cried. “I absolutely cannot! and ... I
certainly cannot!”

The blood rushed to his head. He positively stammered; but he was beyond
thinking of style, and he seized his hat.

“What is it he cannot?” cried Fyodor Pavlovitch, “that he absolutely
cannot and certainly cannot? Your reverence, am I to come in or not? Will
you receive me as your guest?”

“You are welcome with all my heart,” answered the Superior. “Gentlemen!”
he added, “I venture to beg you most earnestly to lay aside your
dissensions, and to be united in love and family harmony—with prayer to
the Lord at our humble table.”

“No, no, it is impossible!” cried Miüsov, beside himself.

“Well, if it is impossible for Pyotr Alexandrovitch, it is impossible for
me, and I won’t stop. That is why I came. I will keep with Pyotr
Alexandrovitch everywhere now. If you will go away, Pyotr Alexandrovitch,
I will go away too, if you remain, I will remain. You stung him by what
you said about family harmony, Father Superior, he does not admit he is my
relation. That’s right, isn’t it, von Sohn? Here’s von Sohn. How are you,
von Sohn?”

“Do you mean me?” muttered Maximov, puzzled.

“Of course I mean you,” cried Fyodor Pavlovitch. “Who else? The Father
Superior could not be von Sohn.”

“But I am not von Sohn either. I am Maximov.”

“No, you are von Sohn. Your reverence, do you know who von Sohn was? It
was a famous murder case. He was killed in a house of harlotry—I believe
that is what such places are called among you—he was killed and robbed,
and in spite of his venerable age, he was nailed up in a box and sent from
Petersburg to Moscow in the luggage van, and while they were nailing him
up, the harlots sang songs and played the harp, that is to say, the piano.
So this is that very von Sohn. He has risen from the dead, hasn’t he, von
Sohn?”

“What is happening? What’s this?” voices were heard in the group of monks.

“Let us go,” cried Miüsov, addressing Kalganov.

“No, excuse me,” Fyodor Pavlovitch broke in shrilly, taking another step
into the room. “Allow me to finish. There in the cell you blamed me for
behaving disrespectfully just because I spoke of eating gudgeon, Pyotr
Alexandrovitch. Miüsov, my relation, prefers to have _plus de noblesse que
de sincérité_ in his words, but I prefer in mine _plus de sincérité que de
noblesse_, and—damn the _noblesse_! That’s right, isn’t it, von Sohn?
Allow me, Father Superior, though I am a buffoon and play the buffoon, yet
I am the soul of honor, and I want to speak my mind. Yes, I am the soul of
honor, while in Pyotr Alexandrovitch there is wounded vanity and nothing
else. I came here perhaps to have a look and speak my mind. My son,
Alexey, is here, being saved. I am his father; I care for his welfare, and
it is my duty to care. While I’ve been playing the fool, I have been
listening and having a look on the sly; and now I want to give you the
last act of the performance. You know how things are with us? As a thing
falls, so it lies. As a thing once has fallen, so it must lie for ever.
Not a bit of it! I want to get up again. Holy Father, I am indignant with
you. Confession is a great sacrament, before which I am ready to bow down
reverently; but there in the cell, they all kneel down and confess aloud.
Can it be right to confess aloud? It was ordained by the holy Fathers to
confess in secret: then only your confession will be a mystery, and so it
was of old. But how can I explain to him before every one that I did this
and that ... well, you understand what—sometimes it would not be proper to
talk about it—so it is really a scandal! No, Fathers, one might be carried
along with you to the Flagellants, I dare say ... at the first opportunity
I shall write to the Synod, and I shall take my son, Alexey, home.”

We must note here that Fyodor Pavlovitch knew where to look for the weak
spot. There had been at one time malicious rumors which had even reached
the Archbishop (not only regarding our monastery, but in others where the
institution of elders existed) that too much respect was paid to the
elders, even to the detriment of the authority of the Superior, that the
elders abused the sacrament of confession and so on and so on—absurd
charges which had died away of themselves everywhere. But the spirit of
folly, which had caught up Fyodor Pavlovitch, and was bearing him on the
current of his own nerves into lower and lower depths of ignominy,
prompted him with this old slander. Fyodor Pavlovitch did not understand a
word of it, and he could not even put it sensibly, for on this occasion no
one had been kneeling and confessing aloud in the elder’s cell, so that he
could not have seen anything of the kind. He was only speaking from
confused memory of old slanders. But as soon as he had uttered his foolish
tirade, he felt he had been talking absurd nonsense, and at once longed to
prove to his audience, and above all to himself, that he had not been
talking nonsense. And, though he knew perfectly well that with each word
he would be adding more and more absurdity, he could not restrain himself,
and plunged forward blindly.

“How disgraceful!” cried Pyotr Alexandrovitch.

“Pardon me!” said the Father Superior. “It was said of old, ‘Many have
begun to speak against me and have uttered evil sayings about me. And
hearing it I have said to myself: it is the correction of the Lord and He
has sent it to heal my vain soul.’ And so we humbly thank you, honored
guest!” and he made Fyodor Pavlovitch a low bow.

“Tut—tut—tut—sanctimoniousness and stock phrases! Old phrases and old
gestures. The old lies and formal prostrations. We know all about them. A
kiss on the lips and a dagger in the heart, as in Schiller’s _Robbers_. I
don’t like falsehood, Fathers, I want the truth. But the truth is not to
be found in eating gudgeon and that I proclaim aloud! Father monks, why do
you fast? Why do you expect reward in heaven for that? Why, for reward
like that I will come and fast too! No, saintly monk, you try being
virtuous in the world, do good to society, without shutting yourself up in
a monastery at other people’s expense, and without expecting a reward up
aloft for it—you’ll find that a bit harder. I can talk sense, too, Father
Superior. What have they got here?” He went up to the table. “Old port
wine, mead brewed by the Eliseyev Brothers. Fie, fie, fathers! That is
something beyond gudgeon. Look at the bottles the fathers have brought
out, he he he! And who has provided it all? The Russian peasant, the
laborer, brings here the farthing earned by his horny hand, wringing it
from his family and the tax-gatherer! You bleed the people, you know, holy
fathers.”

“This is too disgraceful!” said Father Iosif.

Father Païssy kept obstinately silent. Miüsov rushed from the room, and
Kalganov after him.

“Well, Father, I will follow Pyotr Alexandrovitch! I am not coming to see
you again. You may beg me on your knees, I shan’t come. I sent you a
thousand roubles, so you have begun to keep your eye on me. He he he! No,
I’ll say no more. I am taking my revenge for my youth, for all the
humiliation I endured.” He thumped the table with his fist in a paroxysm
of simulated feeling. “This monastery has played a great part in my life!
It has cost me many bitter tears. You used to set my wife, the crazy one,
against me. You cursed me with bell and book, you spread stories about me
all over the place. Enough, fathers! This is the age of Liberalism, the
age of steamers and railways. Neither a thousand, nor a hundred roubles,
no, nor a hundred farthings will you get out of me!”

It must be noted again that our monastery never had played any great part
in his life, and he never had shed a bitter tear owing to it. But he was
so carried away by his simulated emotion, that he was for one moment
almost believing it himself. He was so touched he was almost weeping. But
at that very instant, he felt that it was time to draw back.

The Father Superior bowed his head at his malicious lie, and again spoke
impressively:

“It is written again, ‘Bear circumspectly and gladly dishonor that cometh
upon thee by no act of thine own, be not confounded and hate not him who
hath dishonored thee.’ And so will we.”

“Tut, tut, tut! Bethinking thyself and the rest of the rigmarole. Bethink
yourselves, Fathers, I will go. But I will take my son, Alexey, away from
here for ever, on my parental authority. Ivan Fyodorovitch, my most
dutiful son, permit me to order you to follow me. Von Sohn, what have you
to stay for? Come and see me now in the town. It is fun there. It is only
one short verst; instead of lenten oil, I will give you sucking-pig and
kasha. We will have dinner with some brandy and liqueur to it.... I’ve
cloudberry wine. Hey, von Sohn, don’t lose your chance.” He went out,
shouting and gesticulating.

It was at that moment Rakitin saw him and pointed him out to Alyosha.

“Alexey!” his father shouted, from far off, catching sight of him. “You
come home to me to-day, for good, and bring your pillow and mattress, and
leave no trace behind.”

Alyosha stood rooted to the spot, watching the scene in silence.
Meanwhile, Fyodor Pavlovitch had got into the carriage, and Ivan was about
to follow him in grim silence without even turning to say good-by to
Alyosha. But at this point another almost incredible scene of grotesque
buffoonery gave the finishing touch to the episode. Maximov suddenly
appeared by the side of the carriage. He ran up, panting, afraid of being
too late. Rakitin and Alyosha saw him running. He was in such a hurry that
in his impatience he put his foot on the step on which Ivan’s left foot
was still resting, and clutching the carriage he kept trying to jump in.
“I am going with you!” he kept shouting, laughing a thin mirthful laugh
with a look of reckless glee in his face. “Take me, too.”

“There!” cried Fyodor Pavlovitch, delighted. “Did I not say he was von
Sohn. It is von Sohn himself, risen from the dead. Why, how did you tear
yourself away? What did you _vonsohn_ there? And how could you get away
from the dinner? You must be a brazen-faced fellow! I am that myself, but
I am surprised at you, brother! Jump in, jump in! Let him pass, Ivan. It
will be fun. He can lie somewhere at our feet. Will you lie at our feet,
von Sohn? Or perch on the box with the coachman. Skip on to the box, von
Sohn!”

But Ivan, who had by now taken his seat, without a word gave Maximov a
violent punch in the breast and sent him flying. It was quite by chance he
did not fall.

“Drive on!” Ivan shouted angrily to the coachman.

“Why, what are you doing, what are you about? Why did you do that?” Fyodor
Pavlovitch protested.

But the carriage had already driven away. Ivan made no reply.

“Well, you are a fellow,” Fyodor Pavlovitch said again.

After a pause of two minutes, looking askance at his son, “Why, it was you
got up all this monastery business. You urged it, you approved of it. Why
are you angry now?”

“You’ve talked rot enough. You might rest a bit now,” Ivan snapped
sullenly.

Fyodor Pavlovitch was silent again for two minutes.

“A drop of brandy would be nice now,” he observed sententiously, but Ivan
made no response.

“You shall have some, too, when we get home.”

Ivan was still silent.

Fyodor Pavlovitch waited another two minutes.

“But I shall take Alyosha away from the monastery, though you will dislike
it so much, most honored Karl von Moor.”

Ivan shrugged his shoulders contemptuously, and turning away stared at the
road. And they did not speak again all the way home.




Book III. The Sensualists



Chapter I. In The Servants’ Quarters


The Karamazovs’ house was far from being in the center of the town, but it
was not quite outside it. It was a pleasant-looking old house of two
stories, painted gray, with a red iron roof. It was roomy and snug, and
might still last many years. There were all sorts of unexpected little
cupboards and closets and staircases. There were rats in it, but Fyodor
Pavlovitch did not altogether dislike them. “One doesn’t feel so solitary
when one’s left alone in the evening,” he used to say. It was his habit to
send the servants away to the lodge for the night and to lock himself up
alone. The lodge was a roomy and solid building in the yard. Fyodor
Pavlovitch used to have the cooking done there, although there was a
kitchen in the house; he did not like the smell of cooking, and, winter
and summer alike, the dishes were carried in across the courtyard. The
house was built for a large family; there was room for five times as many,
with their servants. But at the time of our story there was no one living
in the house but Fyodor Pavlovitch and his son Ivan. And in the lodge
there were only three servants: old Grigory, and his old wife Marfa, and a
young man called Smerdyakov. Of these three we must say a few words. Of
old Grigory we have said something already. He was firm and determined and
went blindly and obstinately for his object, if once he had been brought
by any reasons (and they were often very illogical ones) to believe that
it was immutably right. He was honest and incorruptible. His wife, Marfa
Ignatyevna, had obeyed her husband’s will implicitly all her life, yet she
had pestered him terribly after the emancipation of the serfs. She was set
on leaving Fyodor Pavlovitch and opening a little shop in Moscow with
their small savings. But Grigory decided then, once for all, that “the
woman’s talking nonsense, for every woman is dishonest,” and that they
ought not to leave their old master, whatever he might be, for “that was
now their duty.”

“Do you understand what duty is?” he asked Marfa Ignatyevna.

“I understand what duty means, Grigory Vassilyevitch, but why it’s our
duty to stay here I never shall understand,” Marfa answered firmly.

“Well, don’t understand then. But so it shall be. And you hold your
tongue.”

And so it was. They did not go away, and Fyodor Pavlovitch promised them a
small sum for wages, and paid it regularly. Grigory knew, too, that he had
an indisputable influence over his master. It was true, and he was aware
of it. Fyodor Pavlovitch was an obstinate and cunning buffoon, yet, though
his will was strong enough “in some of the affairs of life,” as he
expressed it, he found himself, to his surprise, extremely feeble in
facing certain other emergencies. He knew his weaknesses and was afraid of
them. There are positions in which one has to keep a sharp look out. And
that’s not easy without a trustworthy man, and Grigory was a most
trustworthy man. Many times in the course of his life Fyodor Pavlovitch
had only just escaped a sound thrashing through Grigory’s intervention,
and on each occasion the old servant gave him a good lecture. But it
wasn’t only thrashings that Fyodor Pavlovitch was afraid of. There were
graver occasions, and very subtle and complicated ones, when Fyodor
Pavlovitch could not have explained the extraordinary craving for some one
faithful and devoted, which sometimes unaccountably came upon him all in a
moment. It was almost a morbid condition. Corrupt and often cruel in his
lust, like some noxious insect, Fyodor Pavlovitch was sometimes, in
moments of drunkenness, overcome by superstitious terror and a moral
convulsion which took an almost physical form. “My soul’s simply quaking
in my throat at those times,” he used to say. At such moments he liked to
feel that there was near at hand, in the lodge if not in the room, a
strong, faithful man, virtuous and unlike himself, who had seen all his
debauchery and knew all his secrets, but was ready in his devotion to
overlook all that, not to oppose him, above all, not to reproach him or
threaten him with anything, either in this world or in the next, and, in
case of need, to defend him—from whom? From somebody unknown, but terrible
and dangerous. What he needed was to feel that there was _another_ man, an
old and tried friend, that he might call him in his sick moments merely to
look at his face, or, perhaps, exchange some quite irrelevant words with
him. And if the old servant were not angry, he felt comforted, and if he
were angry, he was more dejected. It happened even (very rarely however)
that Fyodor Pavlovitch went at night to the lodge to wake Grigory and
fetch him for a moment. When the old man came, Fyodor Pavlovitch would
begin talking about the most trivial matters, and would soon let him go
again, sometimes even with a jest. And after he had gone, Fyodor
Pavlovitch would get into bed with a curse and sleep the sleep of the
just. Something of the same sort had happened to Fyodor Pavlovitch on
Alyosha’s arrival. Alyosha “pierced his heart” by “living with him, seeing
everything and blaming nothing.” Moreover, Alyosha brought with him
something his father had never known before: a complete absence of
contempt for him and an invariable kindness, a perfectly natural
unaffected devotion to the old man who deserved it so little. All this was
a complete surprise to the old profligate, who had dropped all family
ties. It was a new and surprising experience for him, who had till then
loved nothing but “evil.” When Alyosha had left him, he confessed to
himself that he had learnt something he had not till then been willing to
learn.

I have mentioned already that Grigory had detested Adelaïda Ivanovna, the
first wife of Fyodor Pavlovitch and the mother of Dmitri, and that he had,
on the contrary, protected Sofya Ivanovna, the poor “crazy woman,” against
his master and any one who chanced to speak ill or lightly of her. His
sympathy for the unhappy wife had become something sacred to him, so that
even now, twenty years after, he could not bear a slighting allusion to
her from any one, and would at once check the offender. Externally,
Grigory was cold, dignified and taciturn, and spoke, weighing his words,
without frivolity. It was impossible to tell at first sight whether he
loved his meek, obedient wife; but he really did love her, and she knew
it.

Marfa Ignatyevna was by no means foolish; she was probably, indeed,
cleverer than her husband, or, at least, more prudent than he in worldly
affairs, and yet she had given in to him in everything without question or
complaint ever since her marriage, and respected him for his spiritual
superiority. It was remarkable how little they spoke to one another in the
course of their lives, and only of the most necessary daily affairs. The
grave and dignified Grigory thought over all his cares and duties alone,
so that Marfa Ignatyevna had long grown used to knowing that he did not
need her advice. She felt that her husband respected her silence, and took
it as a sign of her good sense. He had never beaten her but once, and then
only slightly. Once during the year after Fyodor Pavlovitch’s marriage
with Adelaïda Ivanovna, the village girls and women—at that time
serfs—were called together before the house to sing and dance. They were
beginning “In the Green Meadows,” when Marfa, at that time a young woman,
skipped forward and danced “the Russian Dance,” not in the village
fashion, but as she had danced it when she was a servant in the service of
the rich Miüsov family, in their private theater, where the actors were
taught to dance by a dancing master from Moscow. Grigory saw how his wife
danced, and, an hour later, at home in their cottage he gave her a lesson,
pulling her hair a little. But there it ended: the beating was never
repeated, and Marfa Ignatyevna gave up dancing.

God had not blessed them with children. One child was born but it died.
Grigory was fond of children, and was not ashamed of showing it. When
Adelaïda Ivanovna had run away, Grigory took Dmitri, then a child of three
years old, combed his hair and washed him in a tub with his own hands, and
looked after him for almost a year. Afterwards he had looked after Ivan
and Alyosha, for which the general’s widow had rewarded him with a slap in
the face; but I have already related all that. The only happiness his own
child had brought him had been in the anticipation of its birth. When it
was born, he was overwhelmed with grief and horror. The baby had six
fingers. Grigory was so crushed by this, that he was not only silent till
the day of the christening, but kept away in the garden. It was spring,
and he spent three days digging the kitchen garden. The third day was
fixed for christening the baby: mean-time Grigory had reached a
conclusion. Going into the cottage where the clergy were assembled and the
visitors had arrived, including Fyodor Pavlovitch, who was to stand
god-father, he suddenly announced that the baby “ought not to be
christened at all.” He announced this quietly, briefly, forcing out his
words, and gazing with dull intentness at the priest.

“Why not?” asked the priest with good-humored surprise.

“Because it’s a dragon,” muttered Grigory.

“A dragon? What dragon?”

Grigory did not speak for some time. “It’s a confusion of nature,” he
muttered vaguely, but firmly, and obviously unwilling to say more.

They laughed, and of course christened the poor baby. Grigory prayed
earnestly at the font, but his opinion of the new-born child remained
unchanged. Yet he did not interfere in any way. As long as the sickly
infant lived he scarcely looked at it, tried indeed not to notice it, and
for the most part kept out of the cottage. But when, at the end of a
fortnight, the baby died of thrush, he himself laid the child in its
little coffin, looked at it in profound grief, and when they were filling
up the shallow little grave he fell on his knees and bowed down to the
earth. He did not for years afterwards mention his child, nor did Marfa
speak of the baby before him, and, even if Grigory were not present, she
never spoke of it above a whisper. Marfa observed that, from the day of
the burial, he devoted himself to “religion,” and took to reading the
_Lives of the Saints_, for the most part sitting alone and in silence, and
always putting on his big, round, silver-rimmed spectacles. He rarely read
aloud, only perhaps in Lent. He was fond of the Book of Job, and had
somehow got hold of a copy of the sayings and sermons of “the God-fearing
Father Isaac the Syrian,” which he read persistently for years together,
understanding very little of it, but perhaps prizing and loving it the
more for that. Of late he had begun to listen to the doctrines of the sect
of Flagellants settled in the neighborhood. He was evidently shaken by
them, but judged it unfitting to go over to the new faith. His habit of
theological reading gave him an expression of still greater gravity.

He was perhaps predisposed to mysticism. And the birth of his deformed
child, and its death, had, as though by special design, been accompanied
by another strange and marvelous event, which, as he said later, had left
a “stamp” upon his soul. It happened that, on the very night after the
burial of his child, Marfa was awakened by the wail of a new-born baby.
She was frightened and waked her husband. He listened and said he thought
it was more like some one groaning, “it might be a woman.” He got up and
dressed. It was a rather warm night in May. As he went down the steps, he
distinctly heard groans coming from the garden. But the gate from the yard
into the garden was locked at night, and there was no other way of
entering it, for it was enclosed all round by a strong, high fence. Going
back into the house, Grigory lighted a lantern, took the garden key, and
taking no notice of the hysterical fears of his wife, who was still
persuaded that she heard a child crying, and that it was her own baby
crying and calling for her, went into the garden in silence. There he
heard at once that the groans came from the bath-house that stood near the
garden gate, and that they were the groans of a woman. Opening the door of
the bath-house, he saw a sight which petrified him. An idiot girl, who
wandered about the streets and was known to the whole town by the nickname
of Lizaveta Smerdyastchaya (Stinking Lizaveta), had got into the
bath-house and had just given birth to a child. She lay dying with the
baby beside her. She said nothing, for she had never been able to speak.
But her story needs a chapter to itself.



Chapter II. Lizaveta


There was one circumstance which struck Grigory particularly, and
confirmed a very unpleasant and revolting suspicion. This Lizaveta was a
dwarfish creature, “not five foot within a wee bit,” as many of the pious
old women said pathetically about her, after her death. Her broad,
healthy, red face had a look of blank idiocy and the fixed stare in her
eyes was unpleasant, in spite of their meek expression. She wandered
about, summer and winter alike, barefooted, wearing nothing but a hempen
smock. Her coarse, almost black hair curled like lamb’s wool, and formed a
sort of huge cap on her head. It was always crusted with mud, and had
leaves, bits of stick, and shavings clinging to it, as she always slept on
the ground and in the dirt. Her father, a homeless, sickly drunkard,
called Ilya, had lost everything and lived many years as a workman with
some well-to-do tradespeople. Her mother had long been dead. Spiteful and
diseased, Ilya used to beat Lizaveta inhumanly whenever she returned to
him. But she rarely did so, for every one in the town was ready to look
after her as being an idiot, and so specially dear to God. Ilya’s
employers, and many others in the town, especially of the tradespeople,
tried to clothe her better, and always rigged her out with high boots and
sheepskin coat for the winter. But, although she allowed them to dress her
up without resisting, she usually went away, preferably to the cathedral
porch, and taking off all that had been given her—kerchief, sheepskin,
skirt or boots—she left them there and walked away barefoot in her smock
as before. It happened on one occasion that a new governor of the
province, making a tour of inspection in our town, saw Lizaveta, and was
wounded in his tenderest susceptibilities. And though he was told she was
an idiot, he pronounced that for a young woman of twenty to wander about
in nothing but a smock was a breach of the proprieties, and must not occur
again. But the governor went his way, and Lizaveta was left as she was. At
last her father died, which made her even more acceptable in the eyes of
the religious persons of the town, as an orphan. In fact, every one seemed
to like her; even the boys did not tease her, and the boys of our town,
especially the schoolboys, are a mischievous set. She would walk into
strange houses, and no one drove her away. Every one was kind to her and
gave her something. If she were given a copper, she would take it, and at
once drop it in the alms-jug of the church or prison. If she were given a
roll or bun in the market, she would hand it to the first child she met.
Sometimes she would stop one of the richest ladies in the town and give it
to her, and the lady would be pleased to take it. She herself never tasted
anything but black bread and water. If she went into an expensive shop,
where there were costly goods or money lying about, no one kept watch on
her, for they knew that if she saw thousands of roubles overlooked by
them, she would not have touched a farthing. She scarcely ever went to
church. She slept either in the church porch or climbed over a hurdle
(there are many hurdles instead of fences to this day in our town) into a
kitchen garden. She used at least once a week to turn up “at home,” that
is at the house of her father’s former employers, and in the winter went
there every night, and slept either in the passage or the cowhouse. People
were amazed that she could stand such a life, but she was accustomed to
it, and, although she was so tiny, she was of a robust constitution. Some
of the townspeople declared that she did all this only from pride, but
that is hardly credible. She could hardly speak, and only from time to
time uttered an inarticulate grunt. How could she have been proud?

It happened one clear, warm, moonlight night in September (many years ago)
five or six drunken revelers were returning from the club at a very late
hour, according to our provincial notions. They passed through the
“back-way,” which led between the back gardens of the houses, with hurdles
on either side. This way leads out on to the bridge over the long,
stinking pool which we were accustomed to call a river. Among the nettles
and burdocks under the hurdle our revelers saw Lizaveta asleep. They
stopped to look at her, laughing, and began jesting with unbridled
licentiousness. It occurred to one young gentleman to make the whimsical
inquiry whether any one could possibly look upon such an animal as a
woman, and so forth.... They all pronounced with lofty repugnance that it
was impossible. But Fyodor Pavlovitch, who was among them, sprang forward
and declared that it was by no means impossible, and that, indeed, there
was a certain piquancy about it, and so on.... It is true that at that
time he was overdoing his part as a buffoon. He liked to put himself
forward and entertain the company, ostensibly on equal terms, of course,
though in reality he was on a servile footing with them. It was just at
the time when he had received the news of his first wife’s death in
Petersburg, and, with crape upon his hat, was drinking and behaving so
shamelessly that even the most reckless among us were shocked at the sight
of him. The revelers, of course, laughed at this unexpected opinion; and
one of them even began challenging him to act upon it. The others repelled
the idea even more emphatically, although still with the utmost hilarity,
and at last they went on their way. Later on, Fyodor Pavlovitch swore that
he had gone with them, and perhaps it was so, no one knows for certain,
and no one ever knew. But five or six months later, all the town was
talking, with intense and sincere indignation, of Lizaveta’s condition,
and trying to find out who was the miscreant who had wronged her. Then
suddenly a terrible rumor was all over the town that this miscreant was no
other than Fyodor Pavlovitch. Who set the rumor going? Of that drunken
band five had left the town and the only one still among us was an elderly
and much respected civil councilor, the father of grown-up daughters, who
could hardly have spread the tale, even if there had been any foundation
for it. But rumor pointed straight at Fyodor Pavlovitch, and persisted in
pointing at him. Of course this was no great grievance to him: he would
not have troubled to contradict a set of tradespeople. In those days he
was proud, and did not condescend to talk except in his own circle of the
officials and nobles, whom he entertained so well.

At the time, Grigory stood up for his master vigorously. He provoked
quarrels and altercations in defense of him and succeeded in bringing some
people round to his side. “It’s the wench’s own fault,” he asserted, and
the culprit was Karp, a dangerous convict, who had escaped from prison and
whose name was well known to us, as he had hidden in our town. This
conjecture sounded plausible, for it was remembered that Karp had been in
the neighborhood just at that time in the autumn, and had robbed three
people. But this affair and all the talk about it did not estrange popular
sympathy from the poor idiot. She was better looked after than ever. A
well-to-do merchant’s widow named Kondratyev arranged to take her into her
house at the end of April, meaning not to let her go out until after the
confinement. They kept a constant watch over her, but in spite of their
vigilance she escaped on the very last day, and made her way into Fyodor
Pavlovitch’s garden. How, in her condition, she managed to climb over the
high, strong fence remained a mystery. Some maintained that she must have
been lifted over by somebody; others hinted at something more uncanny. The
most likely explanation is that it happened naturally—that Lizaveta,
accustomed to clambering over hurdles to sleep in gardens, had somehow
managed to climb this fence, in spite of her condition, and had leapt
down, injuring herself.

Grigory rushed to Marfa and sent her to Lizaveta, while he ran to fetch an
old midwife who lived close by. They saved the baby, but Lizaveta died at
dawn. Grigory took the baby, brought it home, and making his wife sit
down, put it on her lap. “A child of God—an orphan is akin to all,” he
said, “and to us above others. Our little lost one has sent us this, who
has come from the devil’s son and a holy innocent. Nurse him and weep no
more.”

So Marfa brought up the child. He was christened Pavel, to which people
were not slow in adding Fyodorovitch (son of Fyodor). Fyodor Pavlovitch
did not object to any of this, and thought it amusing, though he persisted
vigorously in denying his responsibility. The townspeople were pleased at
his adopting the foundling. Later on, Fyodor Pavlovitch invented a surname
for the child, calling him Smerdyakov, after his mother’s nickname.

So this Smerdyakov became Fyodor Pavlovitch’s second servant, and was
living in the lodge with Grigory and Marfa at the time our story begins.
He was employed as cook. I ought to say something of this Smerdyakov, but
I am ashamed of keeping my readers’ attention so long occupied with these
common menials, and I will go back to my story, hoping to say more of
Smerdyakov in the course of it.



Chapter III. The Confession Of A Passionate Heart—In Verse


Alyosha remained for some time irresolute after hearing the command his
father shouted to him from the carriage. But in spite of his uneasiness he
did not stand still. That was not his way. He went at once to the kitchen
to find out what his father had been doing above. Then he set off,
trusting that on the way he would find some answer to the doubt tormenting
him. I hasten to add that his father’s shouts, commanding him to return
home “with his mattress and pillow” did not frighten him in the least. He
understood perfectly that those peremptory shouts were merely “a flourish”
to produce an effect. In the same way a tradesman in our town who was
celebrating his name-day with a party of friends, getting angry at being
refused more vodka, smashed up his own crockery and furniture and tore his
own and his wife’s clothes, and finally broke his windows, all for the
sake of effect. Next day, of course, when he was sober, he regretted the
broken cups and saucers. Alyosha knew that his father would let him go
back to the monastery next day, possibly even that evening. Moreover, he
was fully persuaded that his father might hurt any one else, but would not
hurt him. Alyosha was certain that no one in the whole world ever would
want to hurt him, and, what is more, he knew that no one could hurt him.
This was for him an axiom, assumed once for all without question, and he
went his way without hesitation, relying on it.

But at that moment an anxiety of a different sort disturbed him, and
worried him the more because he could not formulate it. It was the fear of
a woman, of Katerina Ivanovna, who had so urgently entreated him in the
note handed to him by Madame Hohlakov to come and see her about something.
This request and the necessity of going had at once aroused an uneasy
feeling in his heart, and this feeling had grown more and more painful all
the morning in spite of the scenes at the hermitage and at the Father
Superior’s. He was not uneasy because he did not know what she would speak
of and what he must answer. And he was not afraid of her simply as a
woman. Though he knew little of women, he had spent his life, from early
childhood till he entered the monastery, entirely with women. He was
afraid of that woman, Katerina Ivanovna. He had been afraid of her from
the first time he saw her. He had only seen her two or three times, and
had only chanced to say a few words to her. He thought of her as a
beautiful, proud, imperious girl. It was not her beauty which troubled
him, but something else. And the vagueness of his apprehension increased
the apprehension itself. The girl’s aims were of the noblest, he knew
that. She was trying to save his brother Dmitri simply through generosity,
though he had already behaved badly to her. Yet, although Alyosha
recognized and did justice to all these fine and generous sentiments, a
shiver began to run down his back as soon as he drew near her house.

He reflected that he would not find Ivan, who was so intimate a friend,
with her, for Ivan was certainly now with his father. Dmitri he was even
more certain not to find there, and he had a foreboding of the reason. And
so his conversation would be with her alone. He had a great longing to run
and see his brother Dmitri before that fateful interview. Without showing
him the letter, he could talk to him about it. But Dmitri lived a long way
off, and he was sure to be away from home too. Standing still for a
minute, he reached a final decision. Crossing himself with a rapid and
accustomed gesture, and at once smiling, he turned resolutely in the
direction of his terrible lady.

He knew her house. If he went by the High Street and then across the
market-place, it was a long way round. Though our town is small, it is
scattered, and the houses are far apart. And meanwhile his father was
expecting him, and perhaps had not yet forgotten his command. He might be
unreasonable, and so he had to make haste to get there and back. So he
decided to take a short cut by the back-way, for he knew every inch of the
ground. This meant skirting fences, climbing over hurdles, and crossing
other people’s back-yards, where every one he met knew him and greeted
him. In this way he could reach the High Street in half the time.

He had to pass the garden adjoining his father’s, and belonging to a
little tumbledown house with four windows. The owner of this house, as
Alyosha knew, was a bedridden old woman, living with her daughter, who had
been a genteel maid-servant in generals’ families in Petersburg. Now she
had been at home a year, looking after her sick mother. She always dressed
up in fine clothes, though her old mother and she had sunk into such
poverty that they went every day to Fyodor Pavlovitch’s kitchen for soup
and bread, which Marfa gave readily. Yet, though the young woman came up
for soup, she had never sold any of her dresses, and one of these even had
a long train—a fact which Alyosha had learned from Rakitin, who always
knew everything that was going on in the town. He had forgotten it as soon
as he heard it, but now, on reaching the garden, he remembered the dress
with the train, raised his head, which had been bowed in thought, and came
upon something quite unexpected.

Over the hurdle in the garden, Dmitri, mounted on something, was leaning
forward, gesticulating violently, beckoning to him, obviously afraid to
utter a word for fear of being overheard. Alyosha ran up to the hurdle.

“It’s a good thing you looked up. I was nearly shouting to you,” Mitya
said in a joyful, hurried whisper. “Climb in here quickly! How splendid
that you’ve come! I was just thinking of you!”

Alyosha was delighted too, but he did not know how to get over the hurdle.
Mitya put his powerful hand under his elbow to help him jump. Tucking up
his cassock, Alyosha leapt over the hurdle with the agility of a
bare-legged street urchin.

“Well done! Now come along,” said Mitya in an enthusiastic whisper.

“Where?” whispered Alyosha, looking about him and finding himself in a
deserted garden with no one near but themselves. The garden was small, but
the house was at least fifty paces away.

“There’s no one here. Why do you whisper?” asked Alyosha.

“Why do I whisper? Deuce take it!” cried Dmitri at the top of his voice.
“You see what silly tricks nature plays one. I am here in secret, and on
the watch. I’ll explain later on, but, knowing it’s a secret, I began
whispering like a fool, when there’s no need. Let us go. Over there. Till
then be quiet. I want to kiss you.


    Glory to God in the world,
    Glory to God in me ...


I was just repeating that, sitting here, before you came.”

The garden was about three acres in extent, and planted with trees only
along the fence at the four sides. There were apple-trees, maples, limes
and birch-trees. The middle of the garden was an empty grass space, from
which several hundredweight of hay was carried in the summer. The garden
was let out for a few roubles for the summer. There were also plantations
of raspberries and currants and gooseberries laid out along the sides; a
kitchen garden had been planted lately near the house.

Dmitri led his brother to the most secluded corner of the garden. There,
in a thicket of lime-trees and old bushes of black currant, elder,
snowball-tree, and lilac, there stood a tumble-down green summer-house,
blackened with age. Its walls were of lattice-work, but there was still a
roof which could give shelter. God knows when this summer-house was built.
There was a tradition that it had been put up some fifty years before by a
retired colonel called von Schmidt, who owned the house at that time. It
was all in decay, the floor was rotting, the planks were loose, the
woodwork smelled musty. In the summer-house there was a green wooden table
fixed in the ground, and round it were some green benches upon which it
was still possible to sit. Alyosha had at once observed his brother’s
exhilarated condition, and on entering the arbor he saw half a bottle of
brandy and a wineglass on the table.

“That’s brandy,” Mitya laughed. “I see your look: ‘He’s drinking again!’
Distrust the apparition.


    Distrust the worthless, lying crowd,
    And lay aside thy doubts.


I’m not drinking, I’m only ‘indulging,’ as that pig, your Rakitin, says.
He’ll be a civil councilor one day, but he’ll always talk about
‘indulging.’ Sit down. I could take you in my arms, Alyosha, and press you
to my bosom till I crush you, for in the whole world—in reality—in
re-al-i-ty—(can you take it in?) I love no one but you!”

He uttered the last words in a sort of exaltation.

“No one but you and one ‘jade’ I have fallen in love with, to my ruin. But
being in love doesn’t mean loving. You may be in love with a woman and yet
hate her. Remember that! I can talk about it gayly still. Sit down here by
the table and I’ll sit beside you and look at you, and go on talking. You
shall keep quiet and I’ll go on talking, for the time has come. But on
reflection, you know, I’d better speak quietly, for here—here—you can
never tell what ears are listening. I will explain everything; as they
say, ‘the story will be continued.’ Why have I been longing for you? Why
have I been thirsting for you all these days, and just now? (It’s five
days since I’ve cast anchor here.) Because it’s only to you I can tell
everything; because I must, because I need you, because to-morrow I shall
fly from the clouds, because to-morrow life is ending and beginning. Have
you ever felt, have you ever dreamt of falling down a precipice into a
pit? That’s just how I’m falling, but not in a dream. And I’m not afraid,
and don’t you be afraid. At least, I am afraid, but I enjoy it. It’s not
enjoyment though, but ecstasy. Damn it all, whatever it is! A strong
spirit, a weak spirit, a womanish spirit—whatever it is! Let us praise
nature: you see what sunshine, how clear the sky is, the leaves are all
green, it’s still summer; four o’clock in the afternoon and the stillness!
Where were you going?”

“I was going to father’s, but I meant to go to Katerina Ivanovna’s first.”

“To her, and to father! Oo! what a coincidence! Why was I waiting for you?
Hungering and thirsting for you in every cranny of my soul and even in my
ribs? Why, to send you to father and to her, Katerina Ivanovna, so as to
have done with her and with father. To send an angel. I might have sent
any one, but I wanted to send an angel. And here you are on your way to
see father and her.”

“Did you really mean to send me?” cried Alyosha with a distressed
expression.

“Stay! You knew it! And I see you understand it all at once. But be quiet,
be quiet for a time. Don’t be sorry, and don’t cry.”

Dmitri stood up, thought a moment, and put his finger to his forehead.

“She’s asked you, written to you a letter or something, that’s why you’re
going to her? You wouldn’t be going except for that?”

“Here is her note.” Alyosha took it out of his pocket. Mitya looked
through it quickly.

“And you were going the back-way! Oh, gods, I thank you for sending him by
the back-way, and he came to me like the golden fish to the silly old
fishermen in the fable! Listen, Alyosha, listen, brother! Now I mean to
tell you everything, for I must tell some one. An angel in heaven I’ve
told already; but I want to tell an angel on earth. You are an angel on
earth. You will hear and judge and forgive. And that’s what I need, that
some one above me should forgive. Listen! If two people break away from
everything on earth and fly off into the unknown, or at least one of them,
and before flying off or going to ruin he comes to some one else and says,
‘Do this for me’—some favor never asked before that could only be asked on
one’s deathbed—would that other refuse, if he were a friend or a brother?”

“I will do it, but tell me what it is, and make haste,” said Alyosha.

“Make haste! H’m!... Don’t be in a hurry, Alyosha, you hurry and worry
yourself. There’s no need to hurry now. Now the world has taken a new
turning. Ah, Alyosha, what a pity you can’t understand ecstasy. But what
am I saying to him? As though you didn’t understand it. What an ass I am!
What am I saying? ‘Be noble, O man!’—who says that?”

Alyosha made up his mind to wait. He felt that, perhaps, indeed, his work
lay here. Mitya sank into thought for a moment, with his elbow on the
table and his head in his hand. Both were silent.

“Alyosha,” said Mitya, “you’re the only one who won’t laugh. I should like
to begin—my confession—with Schiller’s _Hymn to Joy_, _An die Freude_! I
don’t know German, I only know it’s called that. Don’t think I’m talking
nonsense because I’m drunk. I’m not a bit drunk. Brandy’s all very well,
but I need two bottles to make me drunk:


    Silenus with his rosy phiz
    Upon his stumbling ass.


But I’ve not drunk a quarter of a bottle, and I’m not Silenus. I’m not
Silenus, though I am strong,(1) for I’ve made a decision once for all.
Forgive me the pun; you’ll have to forgive me a lot more than puns to-day.
Don’t be uneasy. I’m not spinning it out. I’m talking sense, and I’ll come
to the point in a minute. I won’t keep you in suspense. Stay, how does it
go?”

He raised his head, thought a minute, and began with enthusiasm:


    “Wild and fearful in his cavern
     Hid the naked troglodyte,
     And the homeless nomad wandered
     Laying waste the fertile plain.
     Menacing with spear and arrow
     In the woods the hunter strayed....
     Woe to all poor wretches stranded
     On those cruel and hostile shores!

    “From the peak of high Olympus
     Came the mother Ceres down,
     Seeking in those savage regions
     Her lost daughter Proserpine.
     But the Goddess found no refuge,
     Found no kindly welcome there,
     And no temple bearing witness
     To the worship of the gods.

    “From the fields and from the vineyards
     Came no fruits to deck the feasts,
     Only flesh of bloodstained victims
     Smoldered on the altar-fires,
     And where’er the grieving goddess
     Turns her melancholy gaze,
     Sunk in vilest degradation
     Man his loathsomeness displays.”


Mitya broke into sobs and seized Alyosha’s hand.

“My dear, my dear, in degradation, in degradation now, too. There’s a
terrible amount of suffering for man on earth, a terrible lot of trouble.
Don’t think I’m only a brute in an officer’s uniform, wallowing in dirt
and drink. I hardly think of anything but of that degraded man—if only I’m
not lying. I pray God I’m not lying and showing off. I think about that
man because I am that man myself.


    Would he purge his soul from vileness
    And attain to light and worth,
    He must turn and cling for ever
    To his ancient Mother Earth.


But the difficulty is how am I to cling for ever to Mother Earth. I don’t
kiss her. I don’t cleave to her bosom. Am I to become a peasant or a
shepherd? I go on and I don’t know whether I’m going to shame or to light
and joy. That’s the trouble, for everything in the world is a riddle! And
whenever I’ve happened to sink into the vilest degradation (and it’s
always been happening) I always read that poem about Ceres and man. Has it
reformed me? Never! For I’m a Karamazov. For when I do leap into the pit,
I go headlong with my heels up, and am pleased to be falling in that
degrading attitude, and pride myself upon it. And in the very depths of
that degradation I begin a hymn of praise. Let me be accursed. Let me be
vile and base, only let me kiss the hem of the veil in which my God is
shrouded. Though I may be following the devil, I am Thy son, O Lord, and I
love Thee, and I feel the joy without which the world cannot stand.


    Joy everlasting fostereth
    The soul of all creation,
    It is her secret ferment fires
    The cup of life with flame.
    ’Tis at her beck the grass hath turned
    Each blade towards the light
    And solar systems have evolved
    From chaos and dark night,
    Filling the realms of boundless space
    Beyond the sage’s sight.
    At bounteous Nature’s kindly breast,
    All things that breathe drink Joy,
    And birds and beasts and creeping things
    All follow where She leads.
    Her gifts to man are friends in need,
    The wreath, the foaming must,
    To angels—vision of God’s throne,
    To insects—sensual lust.


But enough poetry! I am in tears; let me cry. It may be foolishness that
every one would laugh at. But you won’t laugh. Your eyes are shining, too.
Enough poetry. I want to tell you now about the insects to whom God gave
“sensual lust.”


    To insects—sensual lust.


I am that insect, brother, and it is said of me specially. All we
Karamazovs are such insects, and, angel as you are, that insect lives in
you, too, and will stir up a tempest in your blood. Tempests, because
sensual lust is a tempest—worse than a tempest! Beauty is a terrible and
awful thing! It is terrible because it has not been fathomed and never can
be fathomed, for God sets us nothing but riddles. Here the boundaries meet
and all contradictions exist side by side. I am not a cultivated man,
brother, but I’ve thought a lot about this. It’s terrible what mysteries
there are! Too many riddles weigh men down on earth. We must solve them as
we can, and try to keep a dry skin in the water. Beauty! I can’t endure
the thought that a man of lofty mind and heart begins with the ideal of
the Madonna and ends with the ideal of Sodom. What’s still more awful is
that a man with the ideal of Sodom in his soul does not renounce the ideal
of the Madonna, and his heart may be on fire with that ideal, genuinely on
fire, just as in his days of youth and innocence. Yes, man is broad, too
broad, indeed. I’d have him narrower. The devil only knows what to make of
it! What to the mind is shameful is beauty and nothing else to the heart.
Is there beauty in Sodom? Believe me, that for the immense mass of mankind
beauty is found in Sodom. Did you know that secret? The awful thing is
that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are
fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man. But a man always
talks of his own ache. Listen, now to come to facts.”



Chapter IV. The Confession Of A Passionate Heart—In Anecdote


“I was leading a wild life then. Father said just now that I spent several
thousand roubles in seducing young girls. That’s a swinish invention, and
there was nothing of the sort. And if there was, I didn’t need money
simply for _that_. With me money is an accessory, the overflow of my
heart, the framework. To-day she would be my lady, to-morrow a wench out
of the streets in her place. I entertained them both. I threw away money
by the handful on music, rioting, and gypsies. Sometimes I gave it to the
ladies, too, for they’ll take it greedily, that must be admitted, and be
pleased and thankful for it. Ladies used to be fond of me: not all of
them, but it happened, it happened. But I always liked side-paths, little
dark back-alleys behind the main road—there one finds adventures and
surprises, and precious metal in the dirt. I am speaking figuratively,
brother. In the town I was in, there were no such back-alleys in the
literal sense, but morally there were. If you were like me, you’d know
what that means. I loved vice, I loved the ignominy of vice. I loved
cruelty; am I not a bug, am I not a noxious insect? In fact a Karamazov!
Once we went, a whole lot of us, for a picnic, in seven sledges. It was
dark, it was winter, and I began squeezing a girl’s hand, and forced her
to kiss me. She was the daughter of an official, a sweet, gentle,
submissive creature. She allowed me, she allowed me much in the dark. She
thought, poor thing, that I should come next day to make her an offer (I
was looked upon as a good match, too). But I didn’t say a word to her for
five months. I used to see her in a corner at dances (we were always
having dances), her eyes watching me. I saw how they glowed with fire—a
fire of gentle indignation. This game only tickled that insect lust I
cherished in my soul. Five months later she married an official and left
the town, still angry, and still, perhaps, in love with me. Now they live
happily. Observe that I told no one. I didn’t boast of it. Though I’m full
of low desires, and love what’s low, I’m not dishonorable. You’re
blushing; your eyes flashed. Enough of this filth with you. And all this
was nothing much—wayside blossoms _à la_ Paul de Kock—though the cruel
insect had already grown strong in my soul. I’ve a perfect album of
reminiscences, brother. God bless them, the darlings. I tried to break it
off without quarreling. And I never gave them away. I never bragged of one
of them. But that’s enough. You can’t suppose I brought you here simply to
talk of such nonsense. No, I’m going to tell you something more curious;
and don’t be surprised that I’m glad to tell you, instead of being
ashamed.”

“You say that because I blushed,” Alyosha said suddenly. “I wasn’t
blushing at what you were saying or at what you’ve done. I blushed because
I am the same as you are.”

“You? Come, that’s going a little too far!”

“No, it’s not too far,” said Alyosha warmly (obviously the idea was not a
new one). “The ladder’s the same. I’m at the bottom step, and you’re
above, somewhere about the thirteenth. That’s how I see it. But it’s all
the same. Absolutely the same in kind. Any one on the bottom step is bound
to go up to the top one.”

“Then one ought not to step on at all.”

“Any one who can help it had better not.”

“But can you?”

“I think not.”

“Hush, Alyosha, hush, darling! I could kiss your hand, you touch me so.
That rogue Grushenka has an eye for men. She told me once that she’d
devour you one day. There, there, I won’t! From this field of corruption
fouled by flies, let’s pass to my tragedy, also befouled by flies, that is
by every sort of vileness. Although the old man told lies about my
seducing innocence, there really was something of the sort in my tragedy,
though it was only once, and then it did not come off. The old man who has
reproached me with what never happened does not even know of this fact; I
never told any one about it. You’re the first, except Ivan, of course—Ivan
knows everything. He knew about it long before you. But Ivan’s a tomb.”

“Ivan’s a tomb?”

“Yes.”

Alyosha listened with great attention.

“I was lieutenant in a line regiment, but still I was under supervision,
like a kind of convict. Yet I was awfully well received in the little
town. I spent money right and left. I was thought to be rich; I thought so
myself. But I must have pleased them in other ways as well. Although they
shook their heads over me, they liked me. My colonel, who was an old man,
took a sudden dislike to me. He was always down upon me, but I had
powerful friends, and, moreover, all the town was on my side, so he
couldn’t do me much harm. I was in fault myself for refusing to treat him
with proper respect. I was proud. This obstinate old fellow, who was
really a very good sort, kind-hearted and hospitable, had had two wives,
both dead. His first wife, who was of a humble family, left a daughter as
unpretentious as herself. She was a young woman of four and twenty when I
was there, and was living with her father and an aunt, her mother’s
sister. The aunt was simple and illiterate; the niece was simple but
lively. I like to say nice things about people. I never knew a woman of
more charming character than Agafya—fancy, her name was Agafya Ivanovna!
And she wasn’t bad-looking either, in the Russian style: tall, stout, with
a full figure, and beautiful eyes, though a rather coarse face. She had
not married, although she had had two suitors. She refused them, but was
as cheerful as ever. I was intimate with her, not in ‘that’ way, it was
pure friendship. I have often been friendly with women quite innocently. I
used to talk to her with shocking frankness, and she only laughed. Many
women like such freedom, and she was a girl too, which made it very
amusing. Another thing, one could never think of her as a young lady. She
and her aunt lived in her father’s house with a sort of voluntary
humility, not putting themselves on an equality with other people. She was
a general favorite, and of use to every one, for she was a clever
dressmaker. She had a talent for it. She gave her services freely without
asking for payment, but if any one offered her payment, she didn’t refuse.
The colonel, of course, was a very different matter. He was one of the
chief personages in the district. He kept open house, entertained the
whole town, gave suppers and dances. At the time I arrived and joined the
battalion, all the town was talking of the expected return of the
colonel’s second daughter, a great beauty, who had just left a fashionable
school in the capital. This second daughter is Katerina Ivanovna, and she
was the child of the second wife, who belonged to a distinguished
general’s family; although, as I learnt on good authority, she too brought
the colonel no money. She had connections, and that was all. There may
have been expectations, but they had come to nothing.

“Yet, when the young lady came from boarding-school on a visit, the whole
town revived. Our most distinguished ladies—two ‘Excellencies’ and a
colonel’s wife—and all the rest following their lead, at once took her up
and gave entertainments in her honor. She was the belle of the balls and
picnics, and they got up _tableaux vivants_ in aid of distressed
governesses. I took no notice, I went on as wildly as before, and one of
my exploits at the time set all the town talking. I saw her eyes taking my
measure one evening at the battery commander’s, but I didn’t go up to her,
as though I disdained her acquaintance. I did go up and speak to her at an
evening party not long after. She scarcely looked at me, and compressed
her lips scornfully. ‘Wait a bit. I’ll have my revenge,’ thought I. I
behaved like an awful fool on many occasions at that time, and I was
conscious of it myself. What made it worse was that I felt that ‘Katenka’
was not an innocent boarding-school miss, but a person of character, proud
and really high-principled; above all, she had education and intellect,
and I had neither. You think I meant to make her an offer? No, I simply
wanted to revenge myself, because I was such a hero and she didn’t seem to
feel it.

“Meanwhile, I spent my time in drink and riot, till the lieutenant-colonel
put me under arrest for three days. Just at that time father sent me six
thousand roubles in return for my sending him a deed giving up all claims
upon him—settling our accounts, so to speak, and saying that I wouldn’t
expect anything more. I didn’t understand a word of it at the time. Until
I came here, Alyosha, till the last few days, indeed, perhaps even now, I
haven’t been able to make head or tail of my money affairs with father.
But never mind that, we’ll talk of it later.

“Just as I received the money, I got a letter from a friend telling me
something that interested me immensely. The authorities, I learnt, were
dissatisfied with our lieutenant-colonel. He was suspected of
irregularities; in fact, his enemies were preparing a surprise for him.
And then the commander of the division arrived, and kicked up the devil of
a shindy. Shortly afterwards he was ordered to retire. I won’t tell you
how it all happened. He had enemies certainly. Suddenly there was a marked
coolness in the town towards him and all his family. His friends all
turned their backs on him. Then I took my first step. I met Agafya
Ivanovna, with whom I’d always kept up a friendship, and said, ‘Do you
know there’s a deficit of 4,500 roubles of government money in your
father’s accounts?’

“ ‘What do you mean? What makes you say so? The general was here not long
ago, and everything was all right.’

“ ‘Then it was, but now it isn’t.’

“She was terribly scared.

“ ‘Don’t frighten me!’ she said. ‘Who told you so?’

“ ‘Don’t be uneasy,’ I said, ‘I won’t tell any one. You know I’m as silent
as the tomb. I only wanted, in view of “possibilities,” to add, that when
they demand that 4,500 roubles from your father, and he can’t produce it,
he’ll be tried, and made to serve as a common soldier in his old age,
unless you like to send me your young lady secretly. I’ve just had money
paid me. I’ll give her four thousand, if you like, and keep the secret
religiously.’

“ ‘Ah, you scoundrel!’—that’s what she said. ‘You wicked scoundrel! How
dare you!’

“She went away furiously indignant, while I shouted after her once more
that the secret should be kept sacred. Those two simple creatures, Agafya
and her aunt, I may as well say at once, behaved like perfect angels all
through this business. They genuinely adored their ‘Katya,’ thought her
far above them, and waited on her, hand and foot. But Agafya told her of
our conversation. I found that out afterwards. She didn’t keep it back,
and of course that was all I wanted.

“Suddenly the new major arrived to take command of the battalion. The old
lieutenant-colonel was taken ill at once, couldn’t leave his room for two
days, and didn’t hand over the government money. Dr. Kravchenko declared
that he really was ill. But I knew for a fact, and had known for a long
time, that for the last four years the money had never been in his hands
except when the Commander made his visits of inspection. He used to lend
it to a trustworthy person, a merchant of our town called Trifonov, an old
widower, with a big beard and gold-rimmed spectacles. He used to go to the
fair, do a profitable business with the money, and return the whole sum to
the colonel, bringing with it a present from the fair, as well as interest
on the loan. But this time (I heard all about it quite by chance from
Trifonov’s son and heir, a driveling youth and one of the most vicious in
the world)—this time, I say, Trifonov brought nothing back from the fair.
The lieutenant-colonel flew to him. ‘I’ve never received any money from
you, and couldn’t possibly have received any.’ That was all the answer he
got. So now our lieutenant-colonel is confined to the house, with a towel
round his head, while they’re all three busy putting ice on it. All at
once an orderly arrives on the scene with the book and the order to ‘hand
over the battalion money immediately, within two hours.’ He signed the
book (I saw the signature in the book afterwards), stood up, saying he
would put on his uniform, ran to his bedroom, loaded his double-barreled
gun with a service bullet, took the boot off his right foot, fixed the gun
against his chest, and began feeling for the trigger with his foot. But
Agafya, remembering what I had told her, had her suspicions. She stole up
and peeped into the room just in time. She rushed in, flung herself upon
him from behind, threw her arms round him, and the gun went off, hit the
ceiling, but hurt no one. The others ran in, took away the gun, and held
him by the arms. I heard all about this afterwards. I was at home, it was
getting dusk, and I was just preparing to go out. I had dressed, brushed
my hair, scented my handkerchief, and taken up my cap, when suddenly the
door opened, and facing me in the room stood Katerina Ivanovna.

“It’s strange how things happen sometimes. No one had seen her in the
street, so that no one knew of it in the town. I lodged with two decrepit
old ladies, who looked after me. They were most obliging old things, ready
to do anything for me, and at my request were as silent afterwards as two
cast-iron posts. Of course I grasped the position at once. She walked in
and looked straight at me, her dark eyes determined, even defiant, but on
her lips and round her mouth I saw uncertainty.

“ ‘My sister told me,’ she began, ‘that you would give me 4,500 roubles if
I came to you for it—myself. I have come ... give me the money!’

“She couldn’t keep it up. She was breathless, frightened, her voice failed
her, and the corners of her mouth and the lines round it quivered.
Alyosha, are you listening, or are you asleep?”

“Mitya, I know you will tell the whole truth,” said Alyosha in agitation.

“I am telling it. If I tell the whole truth just as it happened I shan’t
spare myself. My first idea was a—Karamazov one. Once I was bitten by a
centipede, brother, and laid up a fortnight with fever from it. Well, I
felt a centipede biting at my heart then—a noxious insect, you understand?
I looked her up and down. You’ve seen her? She’s a beauty. But she was
beautiful in another way then. At that moment she was beautiful because
she was noble, and I was a scoundrel; she in all the grandeur of her
generosity and sacrifice for her father, and I—a bug! And, scoundrel as I
was, she was altogether at my mercy, body and soul. She was hemmed in. I
tell you frankly, that thought, that venomous thought, so possessed my
heart that it almost swooned with suspense. It seemed as if there could be
no resisting it; as though I should act like a bug, like a venomous
spider, without a spark of pity. I could scarcely breathe. Understand, I
should have gone next day to ask for her hand, so that it might end
honorably, so to speak, and that nobody would or could know. For though
I’m a man of base desires, I’m honest. And at that very second some voice
seemed to whisper in my ear, ‘But when you come to-morrow to make your
proposal, that girl won’t even see you; she’ll order her coachman to kick
you out of the yard. “Publish it through all the town,” she would say,
“I’m not afraid of you.” ’ I looked at the young lady, my voice had not
deceived me. That is how it would be, not a doubt of it. I could see from
her face now that I should be turned out of the house. My spite was
roused. I longed to play her the nastiest swinish cad’s trick: to look at
her with a sneer, and on the spot where she stood before me to stun her
with a tone of voice that only a shopman could use.

“ ‘Four thousand! What do you mean? I was joking. You’ve been counting
your chickens too easily, madam. Two hundred, if you like, with all my
heart. But four thousand is not a sum to throw away on such frivolity.
You’ve put yourself out to no purpose.’

“I should have lost the game, of course. She’d have run away. But it would
have been an infernal revenge. It would have been worth it all. I’d have
howled with regret all the rest of my life, only to have played that
trick. Would you believe it, it has never happened to me with any other
woman, not one, to look at her at such a moment with hatred. But, on my
oath, I looked at her for three seconds, or five perhaps, with fearful
hatred—that hate which is only a hair’s-breadth from love, from the
maddest love!

“I went to the window, put my forehead against the frozen pane, and I
remember the ice burnt my forehead like fire. I did not keep her long,
don’t be afraid. I turned round, went up to the table, opened the drawer
and took out a banknote for five thousand roubles (it was lying in a
French dictionary). Then I showed it her in silence, folded it, handed it
to her, opened the door into the passage, and, stepping back, made her a
deep bow, a most respectful, a most impressive bow, believe me! She
shuddered all over, gazed at me for a second, turned horribly pale—white
as a sheet, in fact—and all at once, not impetuously but softly, gently,
bowed down to my feet—not a boarding-school curtsey, but a Russian bow,
with her forehead to the floor. She jumped up and ran away. I was wearing
my sword. I drew it and nearly stabbed myself with it on the spot; why, I
don’t know. It would have been frightfully stupid, of course. I suppose it
was from delight. Can you understand that one might kill oneself from
delight? But I didn’t stab myself. I only kissed my sword and put it back
in the scabbard—which there was no need to have told you, by the way. And
I fancy that in telling you about my inner conflict I have laid it on
rather thick to glorify myself. But let it pass, and to hell with all who
pry into the human heart! Well, so much for that ‘adventure’ with Katerina
Ivanovna. So now Ivan knows of it, and you—no one else.”

Dmitri got up, took a step or two in his excitement, pulled out his
handkerchief and mopped his forehead, then sat down again, not in the same
place as before, but on the opposite side, so that Alyosha had to turn
quite round to face him.



Chapter V. The Confession Of A Passionate Heart—"Heels Up"


“Now,” said Alyosha, “I understand the first half.”

“You understand the first half. That half is a drama, and it was played
out there. The second half is a tragedy, and it is being acted here.”

“And I understand nothing of that second half so far,” said Alyosha.

“And I? Do you suppose I understand it?”

“Stop, Dmitri. There’s one important question. Tell me, you were
betrothed, you are betrothed still?”

“We weren’t betrothed at once, not for three months after that adventure.
The next day I told myself that the incident was closed, concluded, that
there would be no sequel. It seemed to me caddish to make her an offer. On
her side she gave no sign of life for the six weeks that she remained in
the town; except, indeed, for one action. The day after her visit the
maid-servant slipped round with an envelope addressed to me. I tore it
open: it contained the change out of the banknote. Only four thousand five
hundred roubles was needed, but there was a discount of about two hundred
on changing it. She only sent me about two hundred and sixty. I don’t
remember exactly, but not a note, not a word of explanation. I searched
the packet for a pencil mark—n-nothing! Well, I spent the rest of the
money on such an orgy that the new major was obliged to reprimand me.

“Well, the lieutenant-colonel produced the battalion money, to the
astonishment of every one, for nobody believed that he had the money
untouched. He’d no sooner paid it than he fell ill, took to his bed, and,
three weeks later, softening of the brain set in, and he died five days
afterwards. He was buried with military honors, for he had not had time to
receive his discharge. Ten days after his funeral, Katerina Ivanovna, with
her aunt and sister, went to Moscow. And, behold, on the very day they
went away (I hadn’t seen them, didn’t see them off or take leave) I
received a tiny note, a sheet of thin blue paper, and on it only one line
in pencil: ‘I will write to you. Wait. K.’ And that was all.

“I’ll explain the rest now, in two words. In Moscow their fortunes changed
with the swiftness of lightning and the unexpectedness of an Arabian
fairy-tale. That general’s widow, their nearest relation, suddenly lost
the two nieces who were her heiresses and next-of-kin—both died in the
same week of small-pox. The old lady, prostrated with grief, welcomed
Katya as a daughter, as her one hope, clutched at her, altered her will in
Katya’s favor. But that concerned the future. Meanwhile she gave her, for
present use, eighty thousand roubles, as a marriage portion, to do what
she liked with. She was an hysterical woman. I saw something of her in
Moscow, later.

“Well, suddenly I received by post four thousand five hundred roubles. I
was speechless with surprise, as you may suppose. Three days later came
the promised letter. I have it with me now. You must read it. She offers
to be my wife, offers herself to me. ‘I love you madly,’ she says, ‘even
if you don’t love me, never mind. Be my husband. Don’t be afraid. I won’t
hamper you in any way. I will be your chattel. I will be the carpet under
your feet. I want to love you for ever. I want to save you from yourself.’
Alyosha, I am not worthy to repeat those lines in my vulgar words and in
my vulgar tone, my everlastingly vulgar tone, that I can never cure myself
of. That letter stabs me even now. Do you think I don’t mind—that I don’t
mind still? I wrote her an answer at once, as it was impossible for me to
go to Moscow. I wrote to her with tears. One thing I shall be ashamed of
for ever. I referred to her being rich and having a dowry while I was only
a stuck-up beggar! I mentioned money! I ought to have borne it in silence,
but it slipped from my pen. Then I wrote at once to Ivan, and told him all
I could about it in a letter of six pages, and sent him to her. Why do you
look like that? Why are you staring at me? Yes, Ivan fell in love with
her; he’s in love with her still. I know that. I did a stupid thing, in
the world’s opinion; but perhaps that one stupid thing may be the saving
of us all now. Oo! Don’t you see what a lot she thinks of Ivan, how she
respects him? When she compares us, do you suppose she can love a man like
me, especially after all that has happened here?”

“But I am convinced that she does love a man like you, and not a man like
him.”

“She loves her own _virtue_, not me.” The words broke involuntarily, and
almost malignantly, from Dmitri. He laughed, but a minute later his eyes
gleamed, he flushed crimson and struck the table violently with his fist.

“I swear, Alyosha,” he cried, with intense and genuine anger at himself;
“you may not believe me, but as God is holy, and as Christ is God, I swear
that though I smiled at her lofty sentiments just now, I know that I am a
million times baser in soul than she, and that these lofty sentiments of
hers are as sincere as a heavenly angel’s. That’s the tragedy of it—that I
know that for certain. What if any one does show off a bit? Don’t I do it
myself? And yet I’m sincere, I’m sincere. As for Ivan, I can understand
how he must be cursing nature now—with his intellect, too! To see the
preference given—to whom, to what? To a monster who, though he is
betrothed and all eyes are fixed on him, can’t restrain his
debaucheries—and before the very eyes of his betrothed! And a man like me
is preferred, while he is rejected. And why? Because a girl wants to
sacrifice her life and destiny out of gratitude. It’s ridiculous! I’ve
never said a word of this to Ivan, and Ivan of course has never dropped a
hint of the sort to me. But destiny will be accomplished, and the best man
will hold his ground while the undeserving one will vanish into his
back-alley for ever—his filthy back-alley, his beloved back-alley, where
he is at home and where he will sink in filth and stench at his own free
will and with enjoyment. I’ve been talking foolishly. I’ve no words left.
I use them at random, but it will be as I have said. I shall drown in the
back-alley, and she will marry Ivan.”

“Stop, Dmitri,” Alyosha interrupted again with great anxiety. “There’s one
thing you haven’t made clear yet: you are still betrothed all the same,
aren’t you? How can you break off the engagement if she, your betrothed,
doesn’t want to?”

“Yes, formally and solemnly betrothed. It was all done on my arrival in
Moscow, with great ceremony, with ikons, all in fine style. The general’s
wife blessed us, and—would you believe it?—congratulated Katya. ‘You’ve
made a good choice,’ she said, ‘I see right through him.’ And—would you
believe it?—she didn’t like Ivan, and hardly greeted him. I had a lot of
talk with Katya in Moscow. I told her about myself—sincerely, honorably.
She listened to everything.


    There was sweet confusion,
    There were tender words.


Though there were proud words, too. She wrung out of me a mighty promise
to reform. I gave my promise, and here—”

“What?”

“Why, I called to you and brought you out here to-day, this very
day—remember it—to send you—this very day again—to Katerina Ivanovna,
and—”

“What?”

“To tell her that I shall never come to see her again. Say, ‘He sends you
his compliments.’ ”

“But is that possible?”

“That’s just the reason I’m sending you, in my place, because it’s
impossible. And, how could I tell her myself?”

“And where are you going?”

“To the back-alley.”

“To Grushenka, then!” Alyosha exclaimed mournfully, clasping his hands.
“Can Rakitin really have told the truth? I thought that you had just
visited her, and that was all.”

“Can a betrothed man pay such visits? Is such a thing possible and with
such a betrothed, and before the eyes of all the world? Confound it, I
have some honor! As soon as I began visiting Grushenka, I ceased to be
betrothed, and to be an honest man. I understand that. Why do you look at
me? You see, I went in the first place to beat her. I had heard, and I
know for a fact now, that that captain, father’s agent, had given
Grushenka an I.O.U. of mine for her to sue me for payment, so as to put an
end to me. They wanted to scare me. I went to beat her. I had had a
glimpse of her before. She doesn’t strike one at first sight. I knew about
her old merchant, who’s lying ill now, paralyzed; but he’s leaving her a
decent little sum. I knew, too, that she was fond of money, that she
hoarded it, and lent it at a wicked rate of interest, that she’s a
merciless cheat and swindler. I went to beat her, and I stayed. The storm
broke—it struck me down like the plague. I’m plague-stricken still, and I
know that everything is over, that there will never be anything more for
me. The cycle of the ages is accomplished. That’s my position. And though
I’m a beggar, as fate would have it, I had three thousand just then in my
pocket. I drove with Grushenka to Mokroe, a place twenty-five versts from
here. I got gypsies there and champagne and made all the peasants there
drunk on it, and all the women and girls. I sent the thousands flying. In
three days’ time I was stripped bare, but a hero. Do you suppose the hero
had gained his end? Not a sign of it from her. I tell you that rogue,
Grushenka, has a supple curve all over her body. You can see it in her
little foot, even in her little toe. I saw it, and kissed it, but that was
all, I swear! ‘I’ll marry you if you like,’ she said, ‘you’re a beggar,
you know. Say that you won’t beat me, and will let me do anything I
choose, and perhaps I will marry you.’ She laughed, and she’s laughing
still!”

Dmitri leapt up with a sort of fury. He seemed all at once as though he
were drunk. His eyes became suddenly bloodshot.

“And do you really mean to marry her?”

“At once, if she will. And if she won’t, I shall stay all the same. I’ll
be the porter at her gate. Alyosha!” he cried. He stopped short before
him, and taking him by the shoulders began shaking him violently. “Do you
know, you innocent boy, that this is all delirium, senseless delirium, for
there’s a tragedy here. Let me tell you, Alexey, that I may be a low man,
with low and degraded passions, but a thief and a pickpocket Dmitri
Karamazov never can be. Well, then; let me tell you that I am a thief and
a pickpocket. That very morning, just before I went to beat Grushenka,
Katerina Ivanovna sent for me, and in strict secrecy (why I don’t know, I
suppose she had some reason) asked me to go to the chief town of the
province and to post three thousand roubles to Agafya Ivanovna in Moscow,
so that nothing should be known of it in the town here. So I had that
three thousand roubles in my pocket when I went to see Grushenka, and it
was that money we spent at Mokroe. Afterwards I pretended I had been to
the town, but did not show her the post office receipt. I said I had sent
the money and would bring the receipt, and so far I haven’t brought it.
I’ve forgotten it. Now what do you think you’re going to her to-day to
say? ‘He sends his compliments,’ and she’ll ask you, ‘What about the
money?’ You might still have said to her, ‘He’s a degraded sensualist, and
a low creature, with uncontrolled passions. He didn’t send your money
then, but wasted it, because, like a low brute, he couldn’t control
himself.’ But still you might have added, ‘He isn’t a thief though. Here
is your three thousand; he sends it back. Send it yourself to Agafya
Ivanovna. But he told me to say “he sends his compliments.” ’ But, as it
is, she will ask, ‘But where is the money?’ ”

“Mitya, you are unhappy, yes! But not as unhappy as you think. Don’t worry
yourself to death with despair.”

“What, do you suppose I’d shoot myself because I can’t get three thousand
to pay back? That’s just it. I shan’t shoot myself. I haven’t the strength
now. Afterwards, perhaps. But now I’m going to Grushenka. I don’t care
what happens.”

“And what then?”

“I’ll be her husband if she deigns to have me, and when lovers come, I’ll
go into the next room. I’ll clean her friends’ goloshes, blow up their
samovar, run their errands.”

“Katerina Ivanovna will understand it all,” Alyosha said solemnly. “She’ll
understand how great this trouble is and will forgive. She has a lofty
mind, and no one could be more unhappy than you. She’ll see that for
herself.”

“She won’t forgive everything,” said Dmitri, with a grin. “There’s
something in it, brother, that no woman could forgive. Do you know what
would be the best thing to do?”

“What?”

“Pay back the three thousand.”

“Where can we get it from? I say, I have two thousand. Ivan will give you
another thousand—that makes three. Take it and pay it back.”

“And when would you get it, your three thousand? You’re not of age,
besides, and you must—you absolutely must—take my farewell to her to-day,
with the money or without it, for I can’t drag on any longer, things have
come to such a pass. To-morrow is too late. I shall send you to father.”

“To father?”

“Yes, to father first. Ask him for three thousand.”

“But, Mitya, he won’t give it.”

“As though he would! I know he won’t. Do you know the meaning of despair,
Alexey?”

“Yes.”

“Listen. Legally he owes me nothing. I’ve had it all from him, I know
that. But morally he owes me something, doesn’t he? You know he started
with twenty-eight thousand of my mother’s money and made a hundred
thousand with it. Let him give me back only three out of the twenty-eight
thousand, and he’ll draw my soul out of hell, and it will atone for many
of his sins. For that three thousand—I give you my solemn word—I’ll make
an end of everything, and he shall hear nothing more of me. For the last
time I give him the chance to be a father. Tell him God Himself sends him
this chance.”

“Mitya, he won’t give it for anything.”

“I know he won’t. I know it perfectly well. Now, especially. That’s not
all. I know something more. Now, only a few days ago, perhaps only
yesterday he found out for the first time _in earnest_ (underline _in
earnest_) that Grushenka is really perhaps not joking, and really means to
marry me. He knows her nature; he knows the cat. And do you suppose he’s
going to give me money to help to bring that about when he’s crazy about
her himself? And that’s not all, either. I can tell you more than that. I
know that for the last five days he has had three thousand drawn out of
the bank, changed into notes of a hundred roubles, packed into a large
envelope, sealed with five seals, and tied across with red tape. You see
how well I know all about it! On the envelope is written: ‘To my angel,
Grushenka, when she will come to me.’ He scrawled it himself in silence
and in secret, and no one knows that the money’s there except the valet,
Smerdyakov, whom he trusts like himself. So now he has been expecting
Grushenka for the last three or four days; he hopes she’ll come for the
money. He has sent her word of it, and she has sent him word that perhaps
she’ll come. And if she does go to the old man, can I marry her after
that? You understand now why I’m here in secret and what I’m on the watch
for.”

“For her?”

“Yes, for her. Foma has a room in the house of these sluts here. Foma
comes from our parts; he was a soldier in our regiment. He does jobs for
them. He’s watchman at night and goes grouse-shooting in the day-time; and
that’s how he lives. I’ve established myself in his room. Neither he nor
the women of the house know the secret—that is, that I am on the watch
here.”

“No one but Smerdyakov knows, then?”

“No one else. He will let me know if she goes to the old man.”

“It was he told you about the money, then?”

“Yes. It’s a dead secret. Even Ivan doesn’t know about the money, or
anything. The old man is sending Ivan to Tchermashnya on a two or three
days’ journey. A purchaser has turned up for the copse: he’ll give eight
thousand for the timber. So the old man keeps asking Ivan to help him by
going to arrange it. It will take him two or three days. That’s what the
old man wants, so that Grushenka can come while he’s away.”

“Then he’s expecting Grushenka to-day?”

“No, she won’t come to-day; there are signs. She’s certain not to come,”
cried Mitya suddenly. “Smerdyakov thinks so, too. Father’s drinking now.
He’s sitting at table with Ivan. Go to him, Alyosha, and ask for the three
thousand.”

“Mitya, dear, what’s the matter with you?” cried Alyosha, jumping up from
his place, and looking keenly at his brother’s frenzied face. For one
moment the thought struck him that Dmitri was mad.

“What is it? I’m not insane,” said Dmitri, looking intently and earnestly
at him. “No fear. I am sending you to father, and I know what I’m saying.
I believe in miracles.”

“In miracles?”

“In a miracle of Divine Providence. God knows my heart. He sees my
despair. He sees the whole picture. Surely He won’t let something awful
happen. Alyosha, I believe in miracles. Go!”

“I am going. Tell me, will you wait for me here?”

“Yes. I know it will take some time. You can’t go at him point blank. He’s
drunk now. I’ll wait three hours—four, five, six, seven. Only remember you
must go to Katerina Ivanovna to-day, if it has to be at midnight, _with
the money or without the money_, and say, ‘He sends his compliments to
you.’ I want you to say that verse to her: ‘He sends his compliments to
you.’ ”

“Mitya! And what if Grushenka comes to-day—if not to-day, to-morrow, or
the next day?”

“Grushenka? I shall see her. I shall rush out and prevent it.”

“And if—”

“If there’s an if, it will be murder. I couldn’t endure it.”

“Who will be murdered?”

“The old man. I shan’t kill her.”

“Brother, what are you saying?”

“Oh, I don’t know.... I don’t know. Perhaps I shan’t kill, and perhaps I
shall. I’m afraid that he will suddenly become so loathsome to me with his
face at that moment. I hate his ugly throat, his nose, his eyes, his
shameless snigger. I feel a physical repulsion. That’s what I’m afraid of.
That’s what may be too much for me.”

“I’ll go, Mitya. I believe that God will order things for the best, that
nothing awful may happen.”

“And I will sit and wait for the miracle. And if it doesn’t come to pass—”

Alyosha went thoughtfully towards his father’s house.



Chapter VI. Smerdyakov


He did in fact find his father still at table. Though there was a
dining-room in the house, the table was laid as usual in the drawing-room,
which was the largest room, and furnished with old-fashioned ostentation.
The furniture was white and very old, upholstered in old, red, silky
material. In the spaces between the windows there were mirrors in
elaborate white and gilt frames, of old-fashioned carving. On the walls,
covered with white paper, which was torn in many places, there hung two
large portraits—one of some prince who had been governor of the district
thirty years before, and the other of some bishop, also long since dead.
In the corner opposite the door there were several ikons, before which a
lamp was lighted at nightfall ... not so much for devotional purposes as
to light the room. Fyodor Pavlovitch used to go to bed very late, at three
or four o’clock in the morning, and would wander about the room at night
or sit in an arm-chair, thinking. This had become a habit with him. He
often slept quite alone in the house, sending his servants to the lodge;
but usually Smerdyakov remained, sleeping on a bench in the hall.

When Alyosha came in, dinner was over, but coffee and preserves had been
served. Fyodor Pavlovitch liked sweet things with brandy after dinner.
Ivan was also at table, sipping coffee. The servants, Grigory and
Smerdyakov, were standing by. Both the gentlemen and the servants seemed
in singularly good spirits. Fyodor Pavlovitch was roaring with laughter.
Before he entered the room, Alyosha heard the shrill laugh he knew so
well, and could tell from the sound of it that his father had only reached
the good-humored stage, and was far from being completely drunk.

“Here he is! Here he is!” yelled Fyodor Pavlovitch, highly delighted at
seeing Alyosha. “Join us. Sit down. Coffee is a lenten dish, but it’s hot
and good. I don’t offer you brandy, you’re keeping the fast. But would you
like some? No; I’d better give you some of our famous liqueur. Smerdyakov,
go to the cupboard, the second shelf on the right. Here are the keys. Look
sharp!”

Alyosha began refusing the liqueur.

“Never mind. If you won’t have it, we will,” said Fyodor Pavlovitch,
beaming. “But stay—have you dined?”

“Yes,” answered Alyosha, who had in truth only eaten a piece of bread and
drunk a glass of kvas in the Father Superior’s kitchen. “Though I should
be pleased to have some hot coffee.”

“Bravo, my darling! He’ll have some coffee. Does it want warming? No, it’s
boiling. It’s capital coffee: Smerdyakov’s making. My Smerdyakov’s an
artist at coffee and at fish patties, and at fish soup, too. You must come
one day and have some fish soup. Let me know beforehand.... But, stay;
didn’t I tell you this morning to come home with your mattress and pillow
and all? Have you brought your mattress? He he he!”

“No, I haven’t,” said Alyosha, smiling, too.

“Ah, but you were frightened, you were frightened this morning, weren’t
you? There, my darling, I couldn’t do anything to vex you. Do you know,
Ivan, I can’t resist the way he looks one straight in the face and laughs?
It makes me laugh all over. I’m so fond of him. Alyosha, let me give you
my blessing—a father’s blessing.”

Alyosha rose, but Fyodor Pavlovitch had already changed his mind.

“No, no,” he said. “I’ll just make the sign of the cross over you, for
now. Sit still. Now we’ve a treat for you, in your own line, too. It’ll
make you laugh. Balaam’s ass has begun talking to us here—and how he
talks! How he talks!”

Balaam’s ass, it appeared, was the valet, Smerdyakov. He was a young man
of about four and twenty, remarkably unsociable and taciturn. Not that he
was shy or bashful. On the contrary, he was conceited and seemed to
despise everybody.

But we must pause to say a few words about him now. He was brought up by
Grigory and Marfa, but the boy grew up “with no sense of gratitude,” as
Grigory expressed it; he was an unfriendly boy, and seemed to look at the
world mistrustfully. In his childhood he was very fond of hanging cats,
and burying them with great ceremony. He used to dress up in a sheet as
though it were a surplice, and sang, and waved some object over the dead
cat as though it were a censer. All this he did on the sly, with the
greatest secrecy. Grigory caught him once at this diversion and gave him a
sound beating. He shrank into a corner and sulked there for a week. “He
doesn’t care for you or me, the monster,” Grigory used to say to Marfa,
“and he doesn’t care for any one. Are you a human being?” he said,
addressing the boy directly. “You’re not a human being. You grew from the
mildew in the bath-house.(2) That’s what you are.” Smerdyakov, it appeared
afterwards, could never forgive him those words. Grigory taught him to
read and write, and when he was twelve years old, began teaching him the
Scriptures. But this teaching came to nothing. At the second or third
lesson the boy suddenly grinned.

“What’s that for?” asked Grigory, looking at him threateningly from under
his spectacles.

“Oh, nothing. God created light on the first day, and the sun, moon, and
stars on the fourth day. Where did the light come from on the first day?”

Grigory was thunderstruck. The boy looked sarcastically at his teacher.
There was something positively condescending in his expression. Grigory
could not restrain himself. “I’ll show you where!” he cried, and gave the
boy a violent slap on the cheek. The boy took the slap without a word, but
withdrew into his corner again for some days. A week later he had his
first attack of the disease to which he was subject all the rest of his
life—epilepsy. When Fyodor Pavlovitch heard of it, his attitude to the boy
seemed changed at once. Till then he had taken no notice of him, though he
never scolded him, and always gave him a copeck when he met him.
Sometimes, when he was in good humor, he would send the boy something
sweet from his table. But as soon as he heard of his illness, he showed an
active interest in him, sent for a doctor, and tried remedies, but the
disease turned out to be incurable. The fits occurred, on an average, once
a month, but at various intervals. The fits varied too, in violence: some
were light and some were very severe. Fyodor Pavlovitch strictly forbade
Grigory to use corporal punishment to the boy, and began allowing him to
come upstairs to him. He forbade him to be taught anything whatever for a
time, too. One day when the boy was about fifteen, Fyodor Pavlovitch
noticed him lingering by the bookcase, and reading the titles through the
glass. Fyodor Pavlovitch had a fair number of books—over a hundred—but no
one ever saw him reading. He at once gave Smerdyakov the key of the
bookcase. “Come, read. You shall be my librarian. You’ll be better sitting
reading than hanging about the courtyard. Come, read this,” and Fyodor
Pavlovitch gave him _Evenings in a Cottage near Dikanka_.

He read a little but didn’t like it. He did not once smile, and ended by
frowning.

“Why? Isn’t it funny?” asked Fyodor Pavlovitch.

Smerdyakov did not speak.

“Answer, stupid!”

“It’s all untrue,” mumbled the boy, with a grin.

“Then go to the devil! You have the soul of a lackey. Stay, here’s
Smaragdov’s _Universal History_. That’s all true. Read that.”

But Smerdyakov did not get through ten pages of Smaragdov. He thought it
dull. So the bookcase was closed again.

Shortly afterwards Marfa and Grigory reported to Fyodor Pavlovitch that
Smerdyakov was gradually beginning to show an extraordinary
fastidiousness. He would sit before his soup, take up his spoon and look
into the soup, bend over it, examine it, take a spoonful and hold it to
the light.

“What is it? A beetle?” Grigory would ask.

“A fly, perhaps,” observed Marfa.

The squeamish youth never answered, but he did the same with his bread,
his meat, and everything he ate. He would hold a piece on his fork to the
light, scrutinize it microscopically, and only after long deliberation
decide to put it in his mouth.

“Ach! What fine gentlemen’s airs!” Grigory muttered, looking at him.

When Fyodor Pavlovitch heard of this development in Smerdyakov he
determined to make him his cook, and sent him to Moscow to be trained. He
spent some years there and came back remarkably changed in appearance. He
looked extraordinarily old for his age. His face had grown wrinkled,
yellow, and strangely emasculate. In character he seemed almost exactly
the same as before he went away. He was just as unsociable, and showed not
the slightest inclination for any companionship. In Moscow, too, as we
heard afterwards, he had always been silent. Moscow itself had little
interest for him; he saw very little there, and took scarcely any notice
of anything. He went once to the theater, but returned silent and
displeased with it. On the other hand, he came back to us from Moscow well
dressed, in a clean coat and clean linen. He brushed his clothes most
scrupulously twice a day invariably, and was very fond of cleaning his
smart calf boots with a special English polish, so that they shone like
mirrors. He turned out a first-rate cook. Fyodor Pavlovitch paid him a
salary, almost the whole of which Smerdyakov spent on clothes, pomade,
perfumes, and such things. But he seemed to have as much contempt for the
female sex as for men; he was discreet, almost unapproachable, with them.
Fyodor Pavlovitch began to regard him rather differently. His fits were
becoming more frequent, and on the days he was ill Marfa cooked, which did
not suit Fyodor Pavlovitch at all.

“Why are your fits getting worse?” asked Fyodor Pavlovitch, looking
askance at his new cook. “Would you like to get married? Shall I find you
a wife?”

But Smerdyakov turned pale with anger, and made no reply. Fyodor
Pavlovitch left him with an impatient gesture. The great thing was that he
had absolute confidence in his honesty. It happened once, when Fyodor
Pavlovitch was drunk, that he dropped in the muddy courtyard three
hundred-rouble notes which he had only just received. He only missed them
next day, and was just hastening to search his pockets when he saw the
notes lying on the table. Where had they come from? Smerdyakov had picked
them up and brought them in the day before.

“Well, my lad, I’ve never met any one like you,” Fyodor Pavlovitch said
shortly, and gave him ten roubles. We may add that he not only believed in
his honesty, but had, for some reason, a liking for him, although the
young man looked as morosely at him as at every one and was always silent.
He rarely spoke. If it had occurred to any one to wonder at the time what
the young man was interested in, and what was in his mind, it would have
been impossible to tell by looking at him. Yet he used sometimes to stop
suddenly in the house, or even in the yard or street, and would stand
still for ten minutes, lost in thought. A physiognomist studying his face
would have said that there was no thought in it, no reflection, but only a
sort of contemplation. There is a remarkable picture by the painter
Kramskoy, called “Contemplation.” There is a forest in winter, and on a
roadway through the forest, in absolute solitude, stands a peasant in a
torn kaftan and bark shoes. He stands, as it were, lost in thought. Yet he
is not thinking; he is “contemplating.” If any one touched him he would
start and look at one as though awakening and bewildered. It’s true he
would come to himself immediately; but if he were asked what he had been
thinking about, he would remember nothing. Yet probably he has, hidden
within himself, the impression which had dominated him during the period
of contemplation. Those impressions are dear to him and no doubt he hoards
them imperceptibly, and even unconsciously. How and why, of course, he
does not know either. He may suddenly, after hoarding impressions for many
years, abandon everything and go off to Jerusalem on a pilgrimage for his
soul’s salvation, or perhaps he will suddenly set fire to his native
village, and perhaps do both. There are a good many “contemplatives” among
the peasantry. Well, Smerdyakov was probably one of them, and he probably
was greedily hoarding up his impressions, hardly knowing why.



Chapter VII. The Controversy


But Balaam’s ass had suddenly spoken. The subject was a strange one.
Grigory had gone in the morning to make purchases, and had heard from the
shopkeeper Lukyanov the story of a Russian soldier which had appeared in
the newspaper of that day. This soldier had been taken prisoner in some
remote part of Asia, and was threatened with an immediate agonizing death
if he did not renounce Christianity and follow Islam. He refused to deny
his faith, and was tortured, flayed alive, and died, praising and
glorifying Christ. Grigory had related the story at table. Fyodor
Pavlovitch always liked, over the dessert after dinner, to laugh and talk,
if only with Grigory. This afternoon he was in a particularly good-humored
and expansive mood. Sipping his brandy and listening to the story, he
observed that they ought to make a saint of a soldier like that, and to
take his skin to some monastery. “That would make the people flock, and
bring the money in.”

Grigory frowned, seeing that Fyodor Pavlovitch was by no means touched,
but, as usual, was beginning to scoff. At that moment Smerdyakov, who was
standing by the door, smiled. Smerdyakov often waited at table towards the
end of dinner, and since Ivan’s arrival in our town he had done so every
day.

“What are you grinning at?” asked Fyodor Pavlovitch, catching the smile
instantly, and knowing that it referred to Grigory.

“Well, my opinion is,” Smerdyakov began suddenly and unexpectedly in a
loud voice, “that if that laudable soldier’s exploit was so very great
there would have been, to my thinking, no sin in it if he had on such an
emergency renounced, so to speak, the name of Christ and his own
christening, to save by that same his life, for good deeds, by which, in
the course of years to expiate his cowardice.”

“How could it not be a sin? You’re talking nonsense. For that you’ll go
straight to hell and be roasted there like mutton,” put in Fyodor
Pavlovitch.

It was at this point that Alyosha came in, and Fyodor Pavlovitch, as we
have seen, was highly delighted at his appearance.

“We’re on your subject, your subject,” he chuckled gleefully, making
Alyosha sit down to listen.

“As for mutton, that’s not so, and there’ll be nothing there for this, and
there shouldn’t be either, if it’s according to justice,” Smerdyakov
maintained stoutly.

“How do you mean ‘according to justice’?” Fyodor Pavlovitch cried still
more gayly, nudging Alyosha with his knee.

“He’s a rascal, that’s what he is!” burst from Grigory. He looked
Smerdyakov wrathfully in the face.

“As for being a rascal, wait a little, Grigory Vassilyevitch,” answered
Smerdyakov with perfect composure. “You’d better consider yourself that,
once I am taken prisoner by the enemies of the Christian race, and they
demand from me to curse the name of God and to renounce my holy
christening, I am fully entitled to act by my own reason, since there
would be no sin in it.”

“But you’ve said that before. Don’t waste words. Prove it,” cried Fyodor
Pavlovitch.

“Soup-maker!” muttered Grigory contemptuously.

“As for being a soup-maker, wait a bit, too, and consider for yourself,
Grigory Vassilyevitch, without abusing me. For as soon as I say to those
enemies, ‘No, I’m not a Christian, and I curse my true God,’ then at once,
by God’s high judgment, I become immediately and specially anathema
accursed, and am cut off from the Holy Church, exactly as though I were a
heathen, so that at that very instant, not only when I say it aloud, but
when I think of saying it, before a quarter of a second has passed, I am
cut off. Is that so or not, Grigory Vassilyevitch?”

He addressed Grigory with obvious satisfaction, though he was really
answering Fyodor Pavlovitch’s questions, and was well aware of it, and
intentionally pretending that Grigory had asked the questions.

“Ivan,” cried Fyodor Pavlovitch suddenly, “stoop down for me to whisper.
He’s got this all up for your benefit. He wants you to praise him. Praise
him.”

Ivan listened with perfect seriousness to his father’s excited whisper.

“Stay, Smerdyakov, be quiet a minute,” cried Fyodor Pavlovitch once more.
“Ivan, your ear again.”

Ivan bent down again with a perfectly grave face.

“I love you as I do Alyosha. Don’t think I don’t love you. Some brandy?”

“Yes.—But you’re rather drunk yourself,” thought Ivan, looking steadily at
his father.

He was watching Smerdyakov with great curiosity.

“You’re anathema accursed, as it is,” Grigory suddenly burst out, “and how
dare you argue, you rascal, after that, if—”

“Don’t scold him, Grigory, don’t scold him,” Fyodor Pavlovitch cut him
short.

“You should wait, Grigory Vassilyevitch, if only a short time, and listen,
for I haven’t finished all I had to say. For at the very moment I become
accursed, at that same highest moment, I become exactly like a heathen,
and my christening is taken off me and becomes of no avail. Isn’t that
so?”

“Make haste and finish, my boy,” Fyodor Pavlovitch urged him, sipping from
his wine-glass with relish.

“And if I’ve ceased to be a Christian, then I told no lie to the enemy
when they asked whether I was a Christian or not a Christian, seeing I had
already been relieved by God Himself of my Christianity by reason of the
thought alone, before I had time to utter a word to the enemy. And if I
have already been discharged, in what manner and with what sort of justice
can I be held responsible as a Christian in the other world for having
denied Christ, when, through the very thought alone, before denying Him I
had been relieved from my christening? If I’m no longer a Christian, then
I can’t renounce Christ, for I’ve nothing then to renounce. Who will hold
an unclean Tatar responsible, Grigory Vassilyevitch, even in heaven, for
not having been born a Christian? And who would punish him for that,
considering that you can’t take two skins off one ox? For God Almighty
Himself, even if He did make the Tatar responsible, when he dies would
give him the smallest possible punishment, I imagine (since he must be
punished), judging that he is not to blame if he has come into the world
an unclean heathen, from heathen parents. The Lord God can’t surely take a
Tatar and say he was a Christian? That would mean that the Almighty would
tell a real untruth. And can the Lord of Heaven and earth tell a lie, even
in one word?”

Grigory was thunderstruck and looked at the orator, his eyes nearly
starting out of his head. Though he did not clearly understand what was
said, he had caught something in this rigmarole, and stood, looking like a
man who has just hit his head against a wall. Fyodor Pavlovitch emptied
his glass and went off into his shrill laugh.

“Alyosha! Alyosha! What do you say to that! Ah, you casuist! He must have
been with the Jesuits, somewhere, Ivan. Oh, you stinking Jesuit, who
taught you? But you’re talking nonsense, you casuist, nonsense, nonsense,
nonsense. Don’t cry, Grigory, we’ll reduce him to smoke and ashes in a
moment. Tell me this, O ass; you may be right before your enemies, but you
have renounced your faith all the same in your own heart, and you say
yourself that in that very hour you became anathema accursed. And if once
you’re anathema they won’t pat you on the head for it in hell. What do you
say to that, my fine Jesuit?”

“There is no doubt that I have renounced it in my own heart, but there was
no special sin in that. Or if there was sin, it was the most ordinary.”

“How’s that the most ordinary?”

“You lie, accursed one!” hissed Grigory.

“Consider yourself, Grigory Vassilyevitch,” Smerdyakov went on, staid and
unruffled, conscious of his triumph, but, as it were, generous to the
vanquished foe. “Consider yourself, Grigory Vassilyevitch; it is said in
the Scripture that if you have faith, even as a mustard seed, and bid a
mountain move into the sea, it will move without the least delay at your
bidding. Well, Grigory Vassilyevitch, if I’m without faith and you have so
great a faith that you are continually swearing at me, you try yourself
telling this mountain, not to move into the sea for that’s a long way off,
but even to our stinking little river which runs at the bottom of the
garden. You’ll see for yourself that it won’t budge, but will remain just
where it is however much you shout at it, and that shows, Grigory
Vassilyevitch, that you haven’t faith in the proper manner, and only abuse
others about it. Again, taking into consideration that no one in our day,
not only you, but actually no one, from the highest person to the lowest
peasant, can shove mountains into the sea—except perhaps some one man in
the world, or, at most, two, and they most likely are saving their souls
in secret somewhere in the Egyptian desert, so you wouldn’t find them—if
so it be, if all the rest have no faith, will God curse all the rest? that
is, the population of the whole earth, except about two hermits in the
desert, and in His well-known mercy will He not forgive one of them? And
so I’m persuaded that though I may once have doubted I shall be forgiven
if I shed tears of repentance.”

“Stay!” cried Fyodor Pavlovitch, in a transport of delight. “So you do
suppose there are two who can move mountains? Ivan, make a note of it,
write it down. There you have the Russian all over!”

“You’re quite right in saying it’s characteristic of the people’s faith,”
Ivan assented, with an approving smile.

“You agree. Then it must be so, if you agree. It’s true, isn’t it,
Alyosha? That’s the Russian faith all over, isn’t it?”

“No, Smerdyakov has not the Russian faith at all,” said Alyosha firmly and
gravely.

“I’m not talking about his faith. I mean those two in the desert, only
that idea. Surely that’s Russian, isn’t it?”

“Yes, that’s purely Russian,” said Alyosha smiling.

“Your words are worth a gold piece, O ass, and I’ll give it to you to-day.
But as to the rest you talk nonsense, nonsense, nonsense. Let me tell you,
stupid, that we here are all of little faith, only from carelessness,
because we haven’t time; things are too much for us, and, in the second
place, the Lord God has given us so little time, only twenty-four hours in
the day, so that one hasn’t even time to get sleep enough, much less to
repent of one’s sins. While you have denied your faith to your enemies
when you’d nothing else to think about but to show your faith! So I
consider, brother, that it constitutes a sin.”

“Constitute a sin it may, but consider yourself, Grigory Vassilyevitch,
that it only extenuates it, if it does constitute. If I had believed then
in very truth, as I ought to have believed, then it really would have been
sinful if I had not faced tortures for my faith, and had gone over to the
pagan Mohammedan faith. But, of course, it wouldn’t have come to torture
then, because I should only have had to say at that instant to the
mountain, ‘Move and crush the tormentor,’ and it would have moved and at
the very instant have crushed him like a black-beetle, and I should have
walked away as though nothing had happened, praising and glorifying God.
But, suppose at that very moment I had tried all that, and cried to that
mountain, ‘Crush these tormentors,’ and it hadn’t crushed them, how could
I have helped doubting, pray, at such a time, and at such a dread hour of
mortal terror? And apart from that, I should know already that I could not
attain to the fullness of the Kingdom of Heaven (for since the mountain
had not moved at my word, they could not think very much of my faith up
aloft, and there could be no very great reward awaiting me in the world to
come). So why should I let them flay the skin off me as well, and to no
good purpose? For, even though they had flayed my skin half off my back,
even then the mountain would not have moved at my word or at my cry. And
at such a moment not only doubt might come over one but one might lose
one’s reason from fear, so that one would not be able to think at all.
And, therefore, how should I be particularly to blame if not seeing my
advantage or reward there or here, I should, at least, save my skin. And
so trusting fully in the grace of the Lord I should cherish the hope that
I might be altogether forgiven.”



Chapter VIII. Over The Brandy


The controversy was over. But, strange to say, Fyodor Pavlovitch, who had
been so gay, suddenly began frowning. He frowned and gulped brandy, and it
was already a glass too much.

“Get along with you, Jesuits!” he cried to the servants. “Go away,
Smerdyakov. I’ll send you the gold piece I promised you to-day, but be
off! Don’t cry, Grigory. Go to Marfa. She’ll comfort you and put you to
bed. The rascals won’t let us sit in peace after dinner,” he snapped
peevishly, as the servants promptly withdrew at his word.

“Smerdyakov always pokes himself in now, after dinner. It’s you he’s so
interested in. What have you done to fascinate him?” he added to Ivan.

“Nothing whatever,” answered Ivan. “He’s pleased to have a high opinion of
me; he’s a lackey and a mean soul. Raw material for revolution, however,
when the time comes.”

“For revolution?”

“There will be others and better ones. But there will be some like him as
well. His kind will come first, and better ones after.”

“And when will the time come?”

“The rocket will go off and fizzle out, perhaps. The peasants are not very
fond of listening to these soup-makers, so far.”

“Ah, brother, but a Balaam’s ass like that thinks and thinks, and the
devil knows where he gets to.”

“He’s storing up ideas,” said Ivan, smiling.

“You see, I know he can’t bear me, nor any one else, even you, though you
fancy that he has a high opinion of you. Worse still with Alyosha, he
despises Alyosha. But he doesn’t steal, that’s one thing, and he’s not a
gossip, he holds his tongue, and doesn’t wash our dirty linen in public.
He makes capital fish pasties too. But, damn him, is he worth talking
about so much?”

“Of course he isn’t.”

“And as for the ideas he may be hatching, the Russian peasant, generally
speaking, needs thrashing. That I’ve always maintained. Our peasants are
swindlers, and don’t deserve to be pitied, and it’s a good thing they’re
still flogged sometimes. Russia is rich in birches. If they destroyed the
forests, it would be the ruin of Russia. I stand up for the clever people.
We’ve left off thrashing the peasants, we’ve grown so clever, but they go
on thrashing themselves. And a good thing too. ‘For with what measure ye
mete it shall be measured to you again,’ or how does it go? Anyhow, it
will be measured. But Russia’s all swinishness. My dear, if you only knew
how I hate Russia.... That is, not Russia, but all this vice! But maybe I
mean Russia. _Tout cela c’est de la cochonnerie_.... Do you know what I
like? I like wit.”

“You’ve had another glass. That’s enough.”

“Wait a bit. I’ll have one more, and then another, and then I’ll stop. No,
stay, you interrupted me. At Mokroe I was talking to an old man, and he
told me: ‘There’s nothing we like so much as sentencing girls to be
thrashed, and we always give the lads the job of thrashing them. And the
girl he has thrashed to-day, the young man will ask in marriage to-morrow.
So it quite suits the girls, too,’ he said. There’s a set of de Sades for
you! But it’s clever, anyway. Shall we go over and have a look at it, eh?
Alyosha, are you blushing? Don’t be bashful, child. I’m sorry I didn’t
stay to dinner at the Superior’s and tell the monks about the girls at
Mokroe. Alyosha, don’t be angry that I offended your Superior this
morning. I lost my temper. If there is a God, if He exists, then, of
course, I’m to blame, and I shall have to answer for it. But if there
isn’t a God at all, what do they deserve, your fathers? It’s not enough to
cut their heads off, for they keep back progress. Would you believe it,
Ivan, that that lacerates my sentiments? No, you don’t believe it as I see
from your eyes. You believe what people say, that I’m nothing but a
buffoon. Alyosha, do you believe that I’m nothing but a buffoon?”

“No, I don’t believe it.”

“And I believe you don’t, and that you speak the truth. You look sincere
and you speak sincerely. But not Ivan. Ivan’s supercilious.... I’d make an
end of your monks, though, all the same. I’d take all that mystic stuff
and suppress it, once for all, all over Russia, so as to bring all the
fools to reason. And the gold and the silver that would flow into the
mint!”

“But why suppress it?” asked Ivan.

“That Truth may prevail. That’s why.”

“Well, if Truth were to prevail, you know, you’d be the first to be robbed
and suppressed.”

“Ah! I dare say you’re right. Ah, I’m an ass!” burst out Fyodor
Pavlovitch, striking himself lightly on the forehead. “Well, your
monastery may stand then, Alyosha, if that’s how it is. And we clever
people will sit snug and enjoy our brandy. You know, Ivan, it must have
been so ordained by the Almighty Himself. Ivan, speak, is there a God or
not? Stay, speak the truth, speak seriously. Why are you laughing again?”

“I’m laughing that you should have made a clever remark just now about
Smerdyakov’s belief in the existence of two saints who could move
mountains.”

“Why, am I like him now, then?”

“Very much.”

“Well, that shows I’m a Russian, too, and I have a Russian characteristic.
And you may be caught in the same way, though you are a philosopher. Shall
I catch you? What do you bet that I’ll catch you to-morrow. Speak, all the
same, is there a God, or not? Only, be serious. I want you to be serious
now.”

“No, there is no God.”

“Alyosha, is there a God?”

“There is.”

“Ivan, and is there immortality of some sort, just a little, just a tiny
bit?”

“There is no immortality either.”

“None at all?”

“None at all.”

“There’s absolute nothingness then. Perhaps there is just something?
Anything is better than nothing!”

“Absolute nothingness.”

“Alyosha, is there immortality?”

“There is.”

“God and immortality?”

“God and immortality. In God is immortality.”

“H’m! It’s more likely Ivan’s right. Good Lord! to think what faith, what
force of all kinds, man has lavished for nothing, on that dream, and for
how many thousand years. Who is it laughing at man? Ivan! For the last
time, once for all, is there a God or not? I ask for the last time!”

“And for the last time there is not.”

“Who is laughing at mankind, Ivan?”

“It must be the devil,” said Ivan, smiling.

“And the devil? Does he exist?”

“No, there’s no devil either.”

“It’s a pity. Damn it all, what wouldn’t I do to the man who first
invented God! Hanging on a bitter aspen tree would be too good for him.”

“There would have been no civilization if they hadn’t invented God.”

“Wouldn’t there have been? Without God?”

“No. And there would have been no brandy either. But I must take your
brandy away from you, anyway.”

“Stop, stop, stop, dear boy, one more little glass. I’ve hurt Alyosha’s
feelings. You’re not angry with me, Alyosha? My dear little Alexey!”

“No, I am not angry. I know your thoughts. Your heart is better than your
head.”

“My heart better than my head, is it? Oh, Lord! And that from you. Ivan,
do you love Alyosha?”

“Yes.”

“You must love him” (Fyodor Pavlovitch was by this time very drunk).
“Listen, Alyosha, I was rude to your elder this morning. But I was
excited. But there’s wit in that elder, don’t you think, Ivan?”

“Very likely.”

“There is, there is. _Il y a du Piron là-dedans._ He’s a Jesuit, a Russian
one, that is. As he’s an honorable person there’s a hidden indignation
boiling within him at having to pretend and affect holiness.”

“But, of course, he believes in God.”

“Not a bit of it. Didn’t you know? Why, he tells every one so, himself.
That is, not every one, but all the clever people who come to him. He said
straight out to Governor Schultz not long ago: ‘_Credo_, but I don’t know
in what.’ ”

“Really?”

“He really did. But I respect him. There’s something of Mephistopheles
about him, or rather of ‘The hero of our time’ ... Arbenin, or what’s his
name?... You see, he’s a sensualist. He’s such a sensualist that I should
be afraid for my daughter or my wife if she went to confess to him. You
know, when he begins telling stories.... The year before last he invited
us to tea, tea with liqueur (the ladies send him liqueur), and began
telling us about old times till we nearly split our sides.... Especially
how he once cured a paralyzed woman. ‘If my legs were not bad I know a
dance I could dance you,’ he said. What do you say to that? ‘I’ve plenty
of tricks in my time,’ said he. He did Dernidov, the merchant, out of
sixty thousand.”

“What, he stole it?”

“He brought him the money as a man he could trust, saying, ‘Take care of
it for me, friend, there’ll be a police search at my place to-morrow.’ And
he kept it. ‘You have given it to the Church,’ he declared. I said to him:
‘You’re a scoundrel,’ I said. ‘No,’ said he, ‘I’m not a scoundrel, but I’m
broad-minded.’ But that wasn’t he, that was some one else. I’ve muddled
him with some one else ... without noticing it. Come, another glass and
that’s enough. Take away the bottle, Ivan. I’ve been telling lies. Why
didn’t you stop me, Ivan, and tell me I was lying?”

“I knew you’d stop of yourself.”

“That’s a lie. You did it from spite, from simple spite against me. You
despise me. You have come to me and despised me in my own house.”

“Well, I’m going away. You’ve had too much brandy.”

“I’ve begged you for Christ’s sake to go to Tchermashnya for a day or two,
and you don’t go.”

“I’ll go to-morrow if you’re so set upon it.”

“You won’t go. You want to keep an eye on me. That’s what you want,
spiteful fellow. That’s why you won’t go.”

The old man persisted. He had reached that state of drunkenness when the
drunkard who has till then been inoffensive tries to pick a quarrel and to
assert himself.

“Why are you looking at me? Why do you look like that? Your eyes look at
me and say, ‘You ugly drunkard!’ Your eyes are mistrustful. They’re
contemptuous.... You’ve come here with some design. Alyosha, here, looks
at me and his eyes shine. Alyosha doesn’t despise me. Alexey, you mustn’t
love Ivan.”

“Don’t be ill-tempered with my brother. Leave off attacking him,” Alyosha
said emphatically.

“Oh, all right. Ugh, my head aches. Take away the brandy, Ivan. It’s the
third time I’ve told you.”

He mused, and suddenly a slow, cunning grin spread over his face.

“Don’t be angry with a feeble old man, Ivan. I know you don’t love me, but
don’t be angry all the same. You’ve nothing to love me for. You go to
Tchermashnya. I’ll come to you myself and bring you a present. I’ll show
you a little wench there. I’ve had my eye on her a long time. She’s still
running about bare-foot. Don’t be afraid of bare-footed wenches—don’t
despise them—they’re pearls!”

And he kissed his hand with a smack.

“To my thinking,” he revived at once, seeming to grow sober the instant he
touched on his favorite topic. “To my thinking ... Ah, you boys! You
children, little sucking-pigs, to my thinking ... I never thought a woman
ugly in my life—that’s been my rule! Can you understand that? How could
you understand it? You’ve milk in your veins, not blood. You’re not out of
your shells yet. My rule has been that you can always find something
devilishly interesting in every woman that you wouldn’t find in any other.
Only, one must know how to find it, that’s the point! That’s a talent! To
my mind there are no ugly women. The very fact that she is a woman is half
the battle ... but how could you understand that? Even in _vieilles
filles_, even in them you may discover something that makes you simply
wonder that men have been such fools as to let them grow old without
noticing them. Bare-footed girls or unattractive ones, you must take by
surprise. Didn’t you know that? You must astound them till they’re
fascinated, upset, ashamed that such a gentleman should fall in love with
such a little slut. It’s a jolly good thing that there always are and will
be masters and slaves in the world, so there always will be a little
maid-of-all-work and her master, and you know, that’s all that’s needed
for happiness. Stay ... listen, Alyosha, I always used to surprise your
mother, but in a different way. I paid no attention to her at all, but all
at once, when the minute came, I’d be all devotion to her, crawl on my
knees, kiss her feet, and I always, always—I remember it as though it were
to-day—reduced her to that tinkling, quiet, nervous, queer little laugh.
It was peculiar to her. I knew her attacks always used to begin like that.
The next day she would begin shrieking hysterically, and this little laugh
was not a sign of delight, though it made a very good counterfeit. That’s
the great thing, to know how to take every one. Once Belyavsky—he was a
handsome fellow, and rich—used to like to come here and hang about
her—suddenly gave me a slap in the face in her presence. And she—such a
mild sheep—why, I thought she would have knocked me down for that blow.
How she set on me! ‘You’re beaten, beaten now,’ she said. ‘You’ve taken a
blow from him. You have been trying to sell me to him,’ she said.... ‘And
how dared he strike you in my presence! Don’t dare come near me again,
never, never! Run at once, challenge him to a duel!’... I took her to the
monastery then to bring her to her senses. The holy Fathers prayed her
back to reason. But I swear, by God, Alyosha, I never insulted the poor
crazy girl! Only once, perhaps, in the first year; then she was very fond
of praying. She used to keep the feasts of Our Lady particularly and used
to turn me out of her room then. I’ll knock that mysticism out of her,
thought I! ‘Here,’ said I, ‘you see your holy image. Here it is. Here I
take it down. You believe it’s miraculous, but here, I’ll spit on it
directly and nothing will happen to me for it!’... When she saw it, good
Lord! I thought she would kill me. But she only jumped up, wrung her
hands, then suddenly hid her face in them, began trembling all over and
fell on the floor ... fell all of a heap. Alyosha, Alyosha, what’s the
matter?”

The old man jumped up in alarm. From the time he had begun speaking about
his mother, a change had gradually come over Alyosha’s face. He flushed
crimson, his eyes glowed, his lips quivered. The old sot had gone
spluttering on, noticing nothing, till the moment when something very
strange happened to Alyosha. Precisely what he was describing in the crazy
woman was suddenly repeated with Alyosha. He jumped up from his seat
exactly as his mother was said to have done, wrung his hands, hid his face
in them, and fell back in his chair, shaking all over in an hysterical
paroxysm of sudden violent, silent weeping. His extraordinary resemblance
to his mother particularly impressed the old man.

“Ivan, Ivan! Water, quickly! It’s like her, exactly as she used to be
then, his mother. Spurt some water on him from your mouth, that’s what I
used to do to her. He’s upset about his mother, his mother,” he muttered
to Ivan.

“But she was my mother, too, I believe, his mother. Was she not?” said
Ivan, with uncontrolled anger and contempt. The old man shrank before his
flashing eyes. But something very strange had happened, though only for a
second; it seemed really to have escaped the old man’s mind that Alyosha’s
mother actually was the mother of Ivan too.

“Your mother?” he muttered, not understanding. “What do you mean? What
mother are you talking about? Was she?... Why, damn it! of course she was
yours too! Damn it! My mind has never been so darkened before. Excuse me,
why, I was thinking, Ivan.... He he he!” He stopped. A broad, drunken,
half-senseless grin overspread his face.

At that moment a fearful noise and clamor was heard in the hall, there
were violent shouts, the door was flung open, and Dmitri burst into the
room. The old man rushed to Ivan in terror.

“He’ll kill me! He’ll kill me! Don’t let him get at me!” he screamed,
clinging to the skirt of Ivan’s coat.



Chapter IX. The Sensualists


Grigory and Smerdyakov ran into the room after Dmitri. They had been
struggling with him in the passage, refusing to admit him, acting on
instructions given them by Fyodor Pavlovitch some days before. Taking
advantage of the fact that Dmitri stopped a moment on entering the room to
look about him, Grigory ran round the table, closed the double doors on
the opposite side of the room leading to the inner apartments, and stood
before the closed doors, stretching wide his arms, prepared to defend the
entrance, so to speak, with the last drop of his blood. Seeing this,
Dmitri uttered a scream rather than a shout and rushed at Grigory.

“Then she’s there! She’s hidden there! Out of the way, scoundrel!”

He tried to pull Grigory away, but the old servant pushed him back. Beside
himself with fury, Dmitri struck out, and hit Grigory with all his might.
The old man fell like a log, and Dmitri, leaping over him, broke in the
door. Smerdyakov remained pale and trembling at the other end of the room,
huddling close to Fyodor Pavlovitch.

“She’s here!” shouted Dmitri. “I saw her turn towards the house just now,
but I couldn’t catch her. Where is she? Where is she?”

That shout, “She’s here!” produced an indescribable effect on Fyodor
Pavlovitch. All his terror left him.

“Hold him! Hold him!” he cried, and dashed after Dmitri. Meanwhile Grigory
had got up from the floor, but still seemed stunned. Ivan and Alyosha ran
after their father. In the third room something was heard to fall on the
floor with a ringing crash: it was a large glass vase—not an expensive
one—on a marble pedestal which Dmitri had upset as he ran past it.

“At him!” shouted the old man. “Help!”

Ivan and Alyosha caught the old man and were forcibly bringing him back.

“Why do you run after him? He’ll murder you outright,” Ivan cried
wrathfully at his father.

“Ivan! Alyosha! She must be here. Grushenka’s here. He said he saw her
himself, running.”

He was choking. He was not expecting Grushenka at the time, and the sudden
news that she was here made him beside himself. He was trembling all over.
He seemed frantic.

“But you’ve seen for yourself that she hasn’t come,” cried Ivan.

“But she may have come by that other entrance.”

“You know that entrance is locked, and you have the key.”

Dmitri suddenly reappeared in the drawing-room. He had, of course, found
the other entrance locked, and the key actually was in Fyodor Pavlovitch’s
pocket. The windows of all the rooms were also closed, so Grushenka could
not have come in anywhere nor have run out anywhere.

“Hold him!” shrieked Fyodor Pavlovitch, as soon as he saw him again. “He’s
been stealing money in my bedroom.” And tearing himself from Ivan he
rushed again at Dmitri. But Dmitri threw up both hands and suddenly
clutched the old man by the two tufts of hair that remained on his
temples, tugged at them, and flung him with a crash on the floor. He
kicked him two or three times with his heel in the face. The old man
moaned shrilly. Ivan, though not so strong as Dmitri, threw his arms round
him, and with all his might pulled him away. Alyosha helped him with his
slender strength, holding Dmitri in front.

“Madman! You’ve killed him!” cried Ivan.

“Serve him right!” shouted Dmitri breathlessly. “If I haven’t killed him,
I’ll come again and kill him. You can’t protect him!”

“Dmitri! Go away at once!” cried Alyosha commandingly.

“Alexey! You tell me. It’s only you I can believe; was she here just now,
or not? I saw her myself creeping this way by the fence from the lane. I
shouted, she ran away.”

“I swear she’s not been here, and no one expected her.”

“But I saw her.... So she must ... I’ll find out at once where she is....
Good-by, Alexey! Not a word to Æsop about the money now. But go to
Katerina Ivanovna at once and be sure to say, ‘He sends his compliments to
you!’ Compliments, his compliments! Just compliments and farewell!
Describe the scene to her.”

Meanwhile Ivan and Grigory had raised the old man and seated him in an
arm-chair. His face was covered with blood, but he was conscious and
listened greedily to Dmitri’s cries. He was still fancying that Grushenka
really was somewhere in the house. Dmitri looked at him with hatred as he
went out.

“I don’t repent shedding your blood!” he cried. “Beware, old man, beware
of your dream, for I have my dream, too. I curse you, and disown you
altogether.”

He ran out of the room.

“She’s here. She must be here. Smerdyakov! Smerdyakov!” the old man
wheezed, scarcely audibly, beckoning to him with his finger.

“No, she’s not here, you old lunatic!” Ivan shouted at him angrily. “Here,
he’s fainting! Water! A towel! Make haste, Smerdyakov!”

Smerdyakov ran for water. At last they got the old man undressed, and put
him to bed. They wrapped a wet towel round his head. Exhausted by the
brandy, by his violent emotion, and the blows he had received, he shut his
eyes and fell asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow. Ivan and
Alyosha went back to the drawing-room. Smerdyakov removed the fragments of
the broken vase, while Grigory stood by the table looking gloomily at the
floor.

“Shouldn’t you put a wet bandage on your head and go to bed, too?” Alyosha
said to him. “We’ll look after him. My brother gave you a terrible blow—on
the head.”

“He’s insulted me!” Grigory articulated gloomily and distinctly.

“He’s ‘insulted’ his father, not only you,” observed Ivan with a forced
smile.

“I used to wash him in his tub. He’s insulted me,” repeated Grigory.

“Damn it all, if I hadn’t pulled him away perhaps he’d have murdered him.
It wouldn’t take much to do for Æsop, would it?” whispered Ivan to
Alyosha.

“God forbid!” cried Alyosha.

“Why should He forbid?” Ivan went on in the same whisper, with a malignant
grimace. “One reptile will devour the other. And serve them both right,
too.”

Alyosha shuddered.

“Of course I won’t let him be murdered as I didn’t just now. Stay here,
Alyosha, I’ll go for a turn in the yard. My head’s begun to ache.”

Alyosha went to his father’s bedroom and sat by his bedside behind the
screen for about an hour. The old man suddenly opened his eyes and gazed
for a long while at Alyosha, evidently remembering and meditating. All at
once his face betrayed extraordinary excitement.

“Alyosha,” he whispered apprehensively, “where’s Ivan?”

“In the yard. He’s got a headache. He’s on the watch.”

“Give me that looking-glass. It stands over there. Give it me.”

Alyosha gave him a little round folding looking-glass which stood on the
chest of drawers. The old man looked at himself in it; his nose was
considerably swollen, and on the left side of his forehead there was a
rather large crimson bruise.

“What does Ivan say? Alyosha, my dear, my only son, I’m afraid of Ivan.
I’m more afraid of Ivan than the other. You’re the only one I’m not afraid
of....”

“Don’t be afraid of Ivan either. He is angry, but he’ll defend you.”

“Alyosha, and what of the other? He’s run to Grushenka. My angel, tell me
the truth, was she here just now or not?”

“No one has seen her. It was a mistake. She has not been here.”

“You know Mitya wants to marry her, to marry her.”

“She won’t marry him.”

“She won’t. She won’t. She won’t. She won’t on any account!”

The old man fairly fluttered with joy, as though nothing more comforting
could have been said to him. In his delight he seized Alyosha’s hand and
pressed it warmly to his heart. Tears positively glittered in his eyes.

“That image of the Mother of God of which I was telling you just now,” he
said. “Take it home and keep it for yourself. And I’ll let you go back to
the monastery.... I was joking this morning, don’t be angry with me. My
head aches, Alyosha.... Alyosha, comfort my heart. Be an angel and tell me
the truth!”

“You’re still asking whether she has been here or not?” Alyosha said
sorrowfully.

“No, no, no. I believe you. I’ll tell you what it is: you go to Grushenka
yourself, or see her somehow; make haste and ask her; see for yourself,
which she means to choose, him or me. Eh? What? Can you?”

“If I see her I’ll ask her,” Alyosha muttered, embarrassed.

“No, she won’t tell you,” the old man interrupted, “she’s a rogue. She’ll
begin kissing you and say that it’s you she wants. She’s a deceitful,
shameless hussy. You mustn’t go to her, you mustn’t!”

“No, father, and it wouldn’t be suitable, it wouldn’t be right at all.”

“Where was he sending you just now? He shouted ‘Go’ as he ran away.”

“To Katerina Ivanovna.”

“For money? To ask her for money?”

“No. Not for money.”

“He’s no money; not a farthing. I’ll settle down for the night, and think
things over, and you can go. Perhaps you’ll meet her.... Only be sure to
come to me to-morrow in the morning. Be sure to. I have a word to say to
you to-morrow. Will you come?”

“Yes.”

“When you come, pretend you’ve come of your own accord to ask after me.
Don’t tell any one I told you to. Don’t say a word to Ivan.”

“Very well.”

“Good-by, my angel. You stood up for me, just now. I shall never forget
it. I’ve a word to say to you to-morrow—but I must think about it.”

“And how do you feel now?”

“I shall get up to-morrow and go out, perfectly well, perfectly well!”

Crossing the yard Alyosha found Ivan sitting on the bench at the gateway.
He was sitting writing something in pencil in his note-book. Alyosha told
Ivan that their father had waked up, was conscious, and had let him go
back to sleep at the monastery.

“Alyosha, I should be very glad to meet you to-morrow morning,” said Ivan
cordially, standing up. His cordiality was a complete surprise to Alyosha.

“I shall be at the Hohlakovs’ to-morrow,” answered Alyosha, “I may be at
Katerina Ivanovna’s, too, if I don’t find her now.”

“But you’re going to her now, anyway? For that ‘compliments and
farewell,’ ” said Ivan smiling. Alyosha was disconcerted.

“I think I quite understand his exclamations just now, and part of what
went before. Dmitri has asked you to go to her and say that he—well, in
fact—takes his leave of her?”

“Brother, how will all this horror end between father and Dmitri?”
exclaimed Alyosha.

“One can’t tell for certain. Perhaps in nothing: it may all fizzle out.
That woman is a beast. In any case we must keep the old man indoors and
not let Dmitri in the house.”

“Brother, let me ask one thing more: has any man a right to look at other
men and decide which is worthy to live?”

“Why bring in the question of worth? The matter is most often decided in
men’s hearts on other grounds much more natural. And as for rights—who has
not the right to wish?”

“Not for another man’s death?”

“What even if for another man’s death? Why lie to oneself since all men
live so and perhaps cannot help living so. Are you referring to what I
said just now—that one reptile will devour the other? In that case let me
ask you, do you think me like Dmitri capable of shedding Æsop’s blood,
murdering him, eh?”

“What are you saying, Ivan? Such an idea never crossed my mind. I don’t
think Dmitri is capable of it, either.”

“Thanks, if only for that,” smiled Ivan. “Be sure, I should always defend
him. But in my wishes I reserve myself full latitude in this case. Good-by
till to-morrow. Don’t condemn me, and don’t look on me as a villain,” he
added with a smile.

They shook hands warmly as they had never done before. Alyosha felt that
his brother had taken the first step towards him, and that he had
certainly done this with some definite motive.



Chapter X. Both Together


Alyosha left his father’s house feeling even more exhausted and dejected
in spirit than when he had entered it. His mind too seemed shattered and
unhinged, while he felt that he was afraid to put together the disjointed
fragments and form a general idea from all the agonizing and conflicting
experiences of the day. He felt something bordering upon despair, which he
had never known till then. Towering like a mountain above all the rest
stood the fatal, insoluble question: How would things end between his
father and his brother Dmitri with this terrible woman? Now he had himself
been a witness of it, he had been present and seen them face to face. Yet
only his brother Dmitri could be made unhappy, terribly, completely
unhappy: there was trouble awaiting him. It appeared too that there were
other people concerned, far more so than Alyosha could have supposed
before. There was something positively mysterious in it, too. Ivan had
made a step towards him, which was what Alyosha had been long desiring.
Yet now he felt for some reason that he was frightened at it. And these
women? Strange to say, that morning he had set out for Katerina Ivanovna’s
in the greatest embarrassment; now he felt nothing of the kind. On the
contrary, he was hastening there as though expecting to find guidance from
her. Yet to give her this message was obviously more difficult than
before. The matter of the three thousand was decided irrevocably, and
Dmitri, feeling himself dishonored and losing his last hope, might sink to
any depth. He had, moreover, told him to describe to Katerina Ivanovna the
scene which had just taken place with his father.

It was by now seven o’clock, and it was getting dark as Alyosha entered
the very spacious and convenient house in the High Street occupied by
Katerina Ivanovna. Alyosha knew that she lived with two aunts. One of
them, a woman of little education, was that aunt of her half-sister Agafya
Ivanovna who had looked after her in her father’s house when she came from
boarding-school. The other aunt was a Moscow lady of style and
consequence, though in straitened circumstances. It was said that they
both gave way in everything to Katerina Ivanovna, and that she only kept
them with her as chaperons. Katerina Ivanovna herself gave way to no one
but her benefactress, the general’s widow, who had been kept by illness in
Moscow, and to whom she was obliged to write twice a week a full account
of all her doings.

When Alyosha entered the hall and asked the maid who opened the door to
him to take his name up, it was evident that they were already aware of
his arrival. Possibly he had been noticed from the window. At least,
Alyosha heard a noise, caught the sound of flying footsteps and rustling
skirts. Two or three women, perhaps, had run out of the room.

Alyosha thought it strange that his arrival should cause such excitement.
He was conducted however to the drawing-room at once. It was a large room,
elegantly and amply furnished, not at all in provincial style. There were
many sofas, lounges, settees, big and little tables. There were pictures
on the walls, vases and lamps on the tables, masses of flowers, and even
an aquarium in the window. It was twilight and rather dark. Alyosha made
out a silk mantle thrown down on the sofa, where people had evidently just
been sitting; and on a table in front of the sofa were two unfinished cups
of chocolate, cakes, a glass saucer with blue raisins, and another with
sweetmeats. Alyosha saw that he had interrupted visitors, and frowned. But
at that instant the portière was raised, and with rapid, hurrying
footsteps Katerina Ivanovna came in, holding out both hands to Alyosha
with a radiant smile of delight. At the same instant a servant brought in
two lighted candles and set them on the table.

“Thank God! At last you have come too! I’ve been simply praying for you
all day! Sit down.”

Alyosha had been struck by Katerina Ivanovna’s beauty when, three weeks
before, Dmitri had first brought him, at Katerina Ivanovna’s special
request, to be introduced to her. There had been no conversation between
them at that interview, however. Supposing Alyosha to be very shy,
Katerina Ivanovna had talked all the time to Dmitri to spare him. Alyosha
had been silent, but he had seen a great deal very clearly. He was struck
by the imperiousness, proud ease, and self-confidence of the haughty girl.
And all that was certain, Alyosha felt that he was not exaggerating it. He
thought her great glowing black eyes were very fine, especially with her
pale, even rather sallow, longish face. But in those eyes and in the lines
of her exquisite lips there was something with which his brother might
well be passionately in love, but which perhaps could not be loved for
long. He expressed this thought almost plainly to Dmitri when, after the
visit, his brother besought and insisted that he should not conceal his
impressions on seeing his betrothed.

“You’ll be happy with her, but perhaps—not tranquilly happy.”

“Quite so, brother. Such people remain always the same. They don’t yield
to fate. So you think I shan’t love her for ever.”

“No; perhaps you will love her for ever. But perhaps you won’t always be
happy with her.”

Alyosha had given his opinion at the time, blushing, and angry with
himself for having yielded to his brother’s entreaties and put such
“foolish” ideas into words. For his opinion had struck him as awfully
foolish immediately after he had uttered it. He felt ashamed too of having
given so confident an opinion about a woman. It was with the more
amazement that he felt now, at the first glance at Katerina Ivanovna as
she ran in to him, that he had perhaps been utterly mistaken. This time
her face was beaming with spontaneous good-natured kindliness, and direct
warm-hearted sincerity. The “pride and haughtiness,” which had struck
Alyosha so much before, was only betrayed now in a frank, generous energy
and a sort of bright, strong faith in herself. Alyosha realized at the
first glance, at the first word, that all the tragedy of her position in
relation to the man she loved so dearly was no secret to her; that she
perhaps already knew everything, positively everything. And yet, in spite
of that, there was such brightness in her face, such faith in the future.
Alyosha felt at once that he had gravely wronged her in his thoughts. He
was conquered and captivated immediately. Besides all this, he noticed at
her first words that she was in great excitement, an excitement perhaps
quite exceptional and almost approaching ecstasy.

“I was so eager to see you, because I can learn from you the whole
truth—from you and no one else.”

“I have come,” muttered Alyosha confusedly, “I—he sent me.”

“Ah, he sent you! I foresaw that. Now I know everything—everything!” cried
Katerina Ivanovna, her eyes flashing. “Wait a moment, Alexey Fyodorovitch,
I’ll tell you why I’ve been so longing to see you. You see, I know perhaps
far more than you do yourself, and there’s no need for you to tell me
anything. I’ll tell you what I want from you. I want to know your own last
impression of him. I want you to tell me most directly, plainly, coarsely
even (oh, as coarsely as you like!), what you thought of him just now and
of his position after your meeting with him to-day. That will perhaps be
better than if I had a personal explanation with him, as he does not want
to come to me. Do you understand what I want from you? Now, tell me
simply, tell me every word of the message he sent you with (I knew he
would send you).”

“He told me to give you his compliments—and to say that he would never
come again—but to give you his compliments.”

“His compliments? Was that what he said—his own expression?”

“Yes.”

“Accidentally perhaps he made a mistake in the word, perhaps he did not
use the right word?”

“No; he told me precisely to repeat that word. He begged me two or three
times not to forget to say so.”

Katerina Ivanovna flushed hotly.

“Help me now, Alexey Fyodorovitch. Now I really need your help. I’ll tell
you what I think, and you must simply say whether it’s right or not.
Listen! If he had sent me his compliments in passing, without insisting on
your repeating the words, without emphasizing them, that would be the end
of everything! But if he particularly insisted on those words, if he
particularly told you not to forget to repeat them to me, then perhaps he
was in excitement, beside himself. He had made his decision and was
frightened at it. He wasn’t walking away from me with a resolute step, but
leaping headlong. The emphasis on that phrase may have been simply
bravado.”

“Yes, yes!” cried Alyosha warmly. “I believe that is it.”

“And, if so, he’s not altogether lost. I can still save him. Stay! Did he
not tell you anything about money—about three thousand roubles?”

“He did speak about it, and it’s that more than anything that’s crushing
him. He said he had lost his honor and that nothing matters now,” Alyosha
answered warmly, feeling a rush of hope in his heart and believing that
there really might be a way of escape and salvation for his brother. “But
do you know about the money?” he added, and suddenly broke off.

“I’ve known of it a long time; I telegraphed to Moscow to inquire, and
heard long ago that the money had not arrived. He hadn’t sent the money,
but I said nothing. Last week I learnt that he was still in need of money.
My only object in all this was that he should know to whom to turn, and
who was his true friend. No, he won’t recognize that I am his truest
friend; he won’t know me, and looks on me merely as a woman. I’ve been
tormented all the week, trying to think how to prevent him from being
ashamed to face me because he spent that three thousand. Let him feel
ashamed of himself, let him be ashamed of other people’s knowing, but not
of my knowing. He can tell God everything without shame. Why is it he
still does not understand how much I am ready to bear for his sake? Why,
why doesn’t he know me? How dare he not know me after all that has
happened? I want to save him for ever. Let him forget me as his betrothed.
And here he fears that he is dishonored in my eyes. Why, he wasn’t afraid
to be open with you, Alexey Fyodorovitch. How is it that I don’t deserve
the same?”

The last words she uttered in tears. Tears gushed from her eyes.

“I must tell you,” Alyosha began, his voice trembling too, “what happened
just now between him and my father.”

And he described the whole scene, how Dmitri had sent him to get the
money, how he had broken in, knocked his father down, and after that had
again specially and emphatically begged him to take his compliments and
farewell. “He went to that woman,” Alyosha added softly.

“And do you suppose that I can’t put up with that woman? Does he think I
can’t? But he won’t marry her,” she suddenly laughed nervously. “Could
such a passion last for ever in a Karamazov? It’s passion, not love. He
won’t marry her because she won’t marry him.” Again Katerina Ivanovna
laughed strangely.

“He may marry her,” said Alyosha mournfully, looking down.

“He won’t marry her, I tell you. That girl is an angel. Do you know that?
Do you know that?” Katerina Ivanovna exclaimed suddenly with extraordinary
warmth. “She is one of the most fantastic of fantastic creatures. I know
how bewitching she is, but I know too that she is kind, firm and noble.
Why do you look at me like that, Alexey Fyodorovitch? Perhaps you are
wondering at my words, perhaps you don’t believe me? Agrafena
Alexandrovna, my angel!” she cried suddenly to some one, peeping into the
next room, “come in to us. This is a friend. This is Alyosha. He knows all
about our affairs. Show yourself to him.”

“I’ve only been waiting behind the curtain for you to call me,” said a
soft, one might even say sugary, feminine voice.

The portière was raised and Grushenka herself, smiling and beaming, came
up to the table. A violent revulsion passed over Alyosha. He fixed his
eyes on her and could not take them off. Here she was, that awful woman,
the “beast,” as Ivan had called her half an hour before. And yet one would
have thought the creature standing before him most simple and ordinary, a
good-natured, kind woman, handsome certainly, but so like other handsome
ordinary women! It is true she was very, very good-looking with that
Russian beauty so passionately loved by many men. She was a rather tall
woman, though a little shorter than Katerina Ivanovna, who was
exceptionally tall. She had a full figure, with soft, as it were,
noiseless, movements, softened to a peculiar over-sweetness, like her
voice. She moved, not like Katerina Ivanovna, with a vigorous, bold step,
but noiselessly. Her feet made absolutely no sound on the floor. She sank
softly into a low chair, softly rustling her sumptuous black silk dress,
and delicately nestling her milk-white neck and broad shoulders in a
costly cashmere shawl. She was twenty-two years old, and her face looked
exactly that age. She was very white in the face, with a pale pink tint on
her cheeks. The modeling of her face might be said to be too broad, and
the lower jaw was set a trifle forward. Her upper lip was thin, but the
slightly prominent lower lip was at least twice as full, and looked
pouting. But her magnificent, abundant dark brown hair, her sable-colored
eyebrows and charming gray-blue eyes with their long lashes would have
made the most indifferent person, meeting her casually in a crowd in the
street, stop at the sight of her face and remember it long after. What
struck Alyosha most in that face was its expression of childlike good
nature. There was a childlike look in her eyes, a look of childish
delight. She came up to the table, beaming with delight and seeming to
expect something with childish, impatient, and confiding curiosity. The
light in her eyes gladdened the soul—Alyosha felt that. There was
something else in her which he could not understand, or would not have
been able to define, and which yet perhaps unconsciously affected him. It
was that softness, that voluptuousness of her bodily movements, that
catlike noiselessness. Yet it was a vigorous, ample body. Under the shawl
could be seen full broad shoulders, a high, still quite girlish bosom. Her
figure suggested the lines of the Venus of Milo, though already in
somewhat exaggerated proportions. That could be divined. Connoisseurs of
Russian beauty could have foretold with certainty that this fresh, still
youthful beauty would lose its harmony by the age of thirty, would
“spread”; that the face would become puffy, and that wrinkles would very
soon appear upon her forehead and round the eyes; the complexion would
grow coarse and red perhaps—in fact, that it was the beauty of the moment,
the fleeting beauty which is so often met with in Russian women. Alyosha,
of course, did not think of this; but though he was fascinated, yet he
wondered with an unpleasant sensation, and as it were regretfully, why she
drawled in that way and could not speak naturally. She did so evidently
feeling there was a charm in the exaggerated, honeyed modulation of the
syllables. It was, of course, only a bad, underbred habit that showed bad
education and a false idea of good manners. And yet this intonation and
manner of speaking impressed Alyosha as almost incredibly incongruous with
the childishly simple and happy expression of her face, the soft, babyish
joy in her eyes. Katerina Ivanovna at once made her sit down in an
arm-chair facing Alyosha, and ecstatically kissed her several times on her
smiling lips. She seemed quite in love with her.

“This is the first time we’ve met, Alexey Fyodorovitch,” she said
rapturously. “I wanted to know her, to see her. I wanted to go to her, but
I’d no sooner expressed the wish than she came to me. I knew we should
settle everything together—everything. My heart told me so—I was begged
not to take the step, but I foresaw it would be a way out of the
difficulty, and I was not mistaken. Grushenka has explained everything to
me, told me all she means to do. She flew here like an angel of goodness
and brought us peace and joy.”

“You did not disdain me, sweet, excellent young lady,” drawled Grushenka
in her sing-song voice, still with the same charming smile of delight.

“Don’t dare to speak to me like that, you sorceress, you witch! Disdain
you! Here, I must kiss your lower lip once more. It looks as though it
were swollen, and now it will be more so, and more and more. Look how she
laughs, Alexey Fyodorovitch! It does one’s heart good to see the angel.”

Alyosha flushed, and faint, imperceptible shivers kept running down him.

“You make so much of me, dear young lady, and perhaps I am not at all
worthy of your kindness.”

“Not worthy! She’s not worthy of it!” Katerina Ivanovna cried again with
the same warmth. “You know, Alexey Fyodorovitch, we’re fanciful, we’re
self-willed, but proudest of the proud in our little heart. We’re noble,
we’re generous, Alexey Fyodorovitch, let me tell you. We have only been
unfortunate. We were too ready to make every sacrifice for an unworthy,
perhaps, or fickle man. There was one man—one, an officer too, we loved
him, we sacrificed everything to him. That was long ago, five years ago,
and he has forgotten us, he has married. Now he is a widower, he has
written, he is coming here, and, do you know, we’ve loved him, none but
him, all this time, and we’ve loved him all our life! He will come, and
Grushenka will be happy again. For the last five years she’s been
wretched. But who can reproach her, who can boast of her favor? Only that
bedridden old merchant, but he is more like her father, her friend, her
protector. He found her then in despair, in agony, deserted by the man she
loved. She was ready to drown herself then, but the old merchant saved
her—saved her!”

“You defend me very kindly, dear young lady. You are in a great hurry
about everything,” Grushenka drawled again.

“Defend you! Is it for me to defend you? Should I dare to defend you?
Grushenka, angel, give me your hand. Look at that charming soft little
hand, Alexey Fyodorovitch! Look at it! It has brought me happiness and has
lifted me up, and I’m going to kiss it, outside and inside, here, here,
here!”

And three times she kissed the certainly charming, though rather fat, hand
of Grushenka in a sort of rapture. She held out her hand with a charming
musical, nervous little laugh, watched the “sweet young lady,” and
obviously liked having her hand kissed.

“Perhaps there’s rather too much rapture,” thought Alyosha. He blushed. He
felt a peculiar uneasiness at heart the whole time.

“You won’t make me blush, dear young lady, kissing my hand like this
before Alexey Fyodorovitch.”

“Do you think I meant to make you blush?” said Katerina Ivanovna, somewhat
surprised. “Ah, my dear, how little you understand me!”

“Yes, and you too perhaps quite misunderstand me, dear young lady. Maybe
I’m not so good as I seem to you. I’ve a bad heart; I will have my own
way. I fascinated poor Dmitri Fyodorovitch that day simply for fun.”

“But now you’ll save him. You’ve given me your word. You’ll explain it all
to him. You’ll break to him that you have long loved another man, who is
now offering you his hand.”

“Oh, no! I didn’t give you my word to do that. It was you kept talking
about that. I didn’t give you my word.”

“Then I didn’t quite understand you,” said Katerina Ivanovna slowly,
turning a little pale. “You promised—”

“Oh, no, angel lady, I’ve promised nothing,” Grushenka interrupted softly
and evenly, still with the same gay and simple expression. “You see at
once, dear young lady, what a willful wretch I am compared with you. If I
want to do a thing I do it. I may have made you some promise just now. But
now again I’m thinking: I may take to Mitya again. I liked him very much
once—liked him for almost a whole hour. Now maybe I shall go and tell him
to stay with me from this day forward. You see, I’m so changeable.”

“Just now you said—something quite different,” Katerina Ivanovna whispered
faintly.

“Ah, just now! But, you know. I’m such a soft-hearted, silly creature.
Only think what he’s gone through on my account! What if when I go home I
feel sorry for him? What then?”

“I never expected—”

“Ah, young lady, how good and generous you are compared with me! Now
perhaps you won’t care for a silly creature like me, now you know my
character. Give me your sweet little hand, angelic lady,” she said
tenderly, and with a sort of reverence took Katerina Ivanovna’s hand.

“Here, dear young lady, I’ll take your hand and kiss it as you did mine.
You kissed mine three times, but I ought to kiss yours three hundred times
to be even with you. Well, but let that pass. And then it shall be as God
wills. Perhaps I shall be your slave entirely and want to do your bidding
like a slave. Let it be as God wills, without any agreements and promises.
What a sweet hand—what a sweet hand you have! You sweet young lady, you
incredible beauty!”

She slowly raised the hands to her lips, with the strange object indeed of
“being even” with her in kisses.

Katerina Ivanovna did not take her hand away. She listened with timid hope
to the last words, though Grushenka’s promise to do her bidding like a
slave was very strangely expressed. She looked intently into her eyes; she
still saw in those eyes the same simple-hearted, confiding expression, the
same bright gayety.

“She’s perhaps too naïve,” thought Katerina Ivanovna, with a gleam of
hope.

Grushenka meanwhile seemed enthusiastic over the “sweet hand.” She raised
it deliberately to her lips. But she held it for two or three minutes near
her lips, as though reconsidering something.

“Do you know, angel lady,” she suddenly drawled in an even more soft and
sugary voice, “do you know, after all, I think I won’t kiss your hand?”
And she laughed a little merry laugh.

“As you please. What’s the matter with you?” said Katerina Ivanovna,
starting suddenly.

“So that you may be left to remember that you kissed my hand, but I didn’t
kiss yours.”

There was a sudden gleam in her eyes. She looked with awful intentness at
Katerina Ivanovna.

“Insolent creature!” cried Katerina Ivanovna, as though suddenly grasping
something. She flushed all over and leapt up from her seat.

Grushenka too got up, but without haste.

“So I shall tell Mitya how you kissed my hand, but I didn’t kiss yours at
all. And how he will laugh!”

“Vile slut! Go away!”

“Ah, for shame, young lady! Ah, for shame! That’s unbecoming for you, dear
young lady, a word like that.”

“Go away! You’re a creature for sale!” screamed Katerina Ivanovna. Every
feature was working in her utterly distorted face.

“For sale indeed! You used to visit gentlemen in the dusk for money once;
you brought your beauty for sale. You see, I know.”

Katerina Ivanovna shrieked, and would have rushed at her, but Alyosha held
her with all his strength.

“Not a step, not a word! Don’t speak, don’t answer her. She’ll go
away—she’ll go at once.”

At that instant Katerina Ivanovna’s two aunts ran in at her cry, and with
them a maid-servant. All hurried to her.

“I will go away,” said Grushenka, taking up her mantle from the sofa.
“Alyosha, darling, see me home!”

“Go away—go away, make haste!” cried Alyosha, clasping his hands
imploringly.

“Dear little Alyosha, see me home! I’ve got a pretty little story to tell
you on the way. I got up this scene for your benefit, Alyosha. See me
home, dear, you’ll be glad of it afterwards.”

Alyosha turned away, wringing his hands. Grushenka ran out of the house,
laughing musically.

Katerina Ivanovna went into a fit of hysterics. She sobbed, and was shaken
with convulsions. Every one fussed round her.

“I warned you,” said the elder of her aunts. “I tried to prevent your
doing this. You’re too impulsive. How could you do such a thing? You don’t
know these creatures, and they say she’s worse than any of them. You are
too self-willed.”

“She’s a tigress!” yelled Katerina Ivanovna. “Why did you hold me, Alexey
Fyodorovitch? I’d have beaten her—beaten her!”

She could not control herself before Alyosha; perhaps she did not care to,
indeed.

“She ought to be flogged in public on a scaffold!”

Alyosha withdrew towards the door.

“But, my God!” cried Katerina Ivanovna, clasping her hands. “He! He! He
could be so dishonorable, so inhuman! Why, he told that creature what
happened on that fatal, accursed day! ‘You brought your beauty for sale,
dear young lady.’ She knows it! Your brother’s a scoundrel, Alexey
Fyodorovitch.”

Alyosha wanted to say something, but he couldn’t find a word. His heart
ached.

“Go away, Alexey Fyodorovitch! It’s shameful, it’s awful for me!
To-morrow, I beg you on my knees, come to-morrow. Don’t condemn me.
Forgive me. I don’t know what I shall do with myself now!”

Alyosha walked out into the street reeling. He could have wept as she did.
Suddenly he was overtaken by the maid.

“The young lady forgot to give you this letter from Madame Hohlakov; it’s
been left with us since dinner-time.”

Alyosha took the little pink envelope mechanically and put it, almost
unconsciously, into his pocket.



Chapter XI. Another Reputation Ruined


It was not much more than three-quarters of a mile from the town to the
monastery. Alyosha walked quickly along the road, at that hour deserted.
It was almost night, and too dark to see anything clearly at thirty paces
ahead. There were cross-roads half-way. A figure came into sight under a
solitary willow at the cross-roads. As soon as Alyosha reached the
cross-roads the figure moved out and rushed at him, shouting savagely:

“Your money or your life!”

“So it’s you, Mitya,” cried Alyosha, in surprise, violently startled
however.

“Ha ha ha! You didn’t expect me? I wondered where to wait for you. By her
house? There are three ways from it, and I might have missed you. At last
I thought of waiting here, for you had to pass here, there’s no other way
to the monastery. Come, tell me the truth. Crush me like a beetle. But
what’s the matter?”

“Nothing, brother—it’s the fright you gave me. Oh, Dmitri! Father’s blood
just now.” (Alyosha began to cry, he had been on the verge of tears for a
long time, and now something seemed to snap in his soul.) “You almost
killed him—cursed him—and now—here—you’re making jokes—‘Your money or your
life!’ ”

“Well, what of that? It’s not seemly—is that it? Not suitable in my
position?”

“No—I only—”

“Stay. Look at the night. You see what a dark night, what clouds, what a
wind has risen. I hid here under the willow waiting for you. And as God’s
above, I suddenly thought, why go on in misery any longer, what is there
to wait for? Here I have a willow, a handkerchief, a shirt, I can twist
them into a rope in a minute, and braces besides, and why go on burdening
the earth, dishonoring it with my vile presence? And then I heard you
coming—Heavens, it was as though something flew down to me suddenly. So
there is a man, then, whom I love. Here he is, that man, my dear little
brother, whom I love more than any one in the world, the only one I love
in the world. And I loved you so much, so much at that moment that I
thought, ‘I’ll fall on his neck at once.’ Then a stupid idea struck me, to
have a joke with you and scare you. I shouted, like a fool, ‘Your money!’
Forgive my foolery—it was only nonsense, and there’s nothing unseemly in
my soul.... Damn it all, tell me what’s happened. What did she say? Strike
me, crush me, don’t spare me! Was she furious?”

“No, not that.... There was nothing like that, Mitya. There—I found them
both there.”

“Both? Whom?”

“Grushenka at Katerina Ivanovna’s.”

Dmitri was struck dumb.

“Impossible!” he cried. “You’re raving! Grushenka with her?”

Alyosha described all that had happened from the moment he went in to
Katerina Ivanovna’s. He was ten minutes telling his story. He can’t be
said to have told it fluently and consecutively, but he seemed to make it
clear, not omitting any word or action of significance, and vividly
describing, often in one word, his own sensations. Dmitri listened in
silence, gazing at him with a terrible fixed stare, but it was clear to
Alyosha that he understood it all, and had grasped every point. But as the
story went on, his face became not merely gloomy, but menacing. He
scowled, he clenched his teeth, and his fixed stare became still more
rigid, more concentrated, more terrible, when suddenly, with incredible
rapidity, his wrathful, savage face changed, his tightly compressed lips
parted, and Dmitri Fyodorovitch broke into uncontrolled, spontaneous
laughter. He literally shook with laughter. For a long time he could not
speak.

“So she wouldn’t kiss her hand! So she didn’t kiss it; so she ran away!”
he kept exclaiming with hysterical delight; insolent delight it might have
been called, if it had not been so spontaneous. “So the other one called
her tigress! And a tigress she is! So she ought to be flogged on a
scaffold? Yes, yes, so she ought. That’s just what I think; she ought to
have been long ago. It’s like this, brother, let her be punished, but I
must get better first. I understand the queen of impudence. That’s her all
over! You saw her all over in that hand-kissing, the she-devil! She’s
magnificent in her own line! So she ran home? I’ll go—ah—I’ll run to her!
Alyosha, don’t blame me, I agree that hanging is too good for her.”

“But Katerina Ivanovna!” exclaimed Alyosha sorrowfully.

“I see her, too! I see right through her, as I’ve never done before! It’s
a regular discovery of the four continents of the world, that is, of the
five! What a thing to do! That’s just like Katya, who was not afraid to
face a coarse, unmannerly officer and risk a deadly insult on a generous
impulse to save her father! But the pride, the recklessness, the defiance
of fate, the unbounded defiance! You say that aunt tried to stop her? That
aunt, you know, is overbearing, herself. She’s the sister of the general’s
widow in Moscow, and even more stuck-up than she. But her husband was
caught stealing government money. He lost everything, his estate and all,
and the proud wife had to lower her colors, and hasn’t raised them since.
So she tried to prevent Katya, but she wouldn’t listen to her! She thinks
she can overcome everything, that everything will give way to her. She
thought she could bewitch Grushenka if she liked, and she believed it
herself: she plays a part to herself, and whose fault is it? Do you think
she kissed Grushenka’s hand first, on purpose, with a motive? No, she
really was fascinated by Grushenka, that’s to say, not by Grushenka, but
by her own dream, her own delusion—because it was _her_ dream, _her_
delusion! Alyosha, darling, how did you escape from them, those women? Did
you pick up your cassock and run? Ha ha ha!”

“Brother, you don’t seem to have noticed how you’ve insulted Katerina
Ivanovna by telling Grushenka about that day. And she flung it in her face
just now that she had gone to gentlemen in secret to sell her beauty!
Brother, what could be worse than that insult?”

What worried Alyosha more than anything was that, incredible as it seemed,
his brother appeared pleased at Katerina Ivanovna’s humiliation.

“Bah!” Dmitri frowned fiercely, and struck his forehead with his hand. He
only now realized it, though Alyosha had just told him of the insult, and
Katerina Ivanovna’s cry: “Your brother is a scoundrel!”

“Yes, perhaps, I really did tell Grushenka about that ‘fatal day,’ as
Katya calls it. Yes, I did tell her, I remember! It was that time at
Mokroe. I was drunk, the gypsies were singing.... But I was sobbing. I was
sobbing then, kneeling and praying to Katya’s image, and Grushenka
understood it. She understood it all then. I remember, she cried
herself.... Damn it all! But it’s bound to be so now.... Then she cried,
but now ‘the dagger in the heart’! That’s how women are.”

He looked down and sank into thought.

“Yes, I am a scoundrel, a thorough scoundrel!” he said suddenly, in a
gloomy voice. “It doesn’t matter whether I cried or not, I’m a scoundrel!
Tell her I accept the name, if that’s any comfort. Come, that’s enough.
Good-by. It’s no use talking! It’s not amusing. You go your way and I
mine. And I don’t want to see you again except as a last resource.
Good-by, Alexey!”

He warmly pressed Alyosha’s hand, and still looking down, without raising
his head, as though tearing himself away, turned rapidly towards the town.

Alyosha looked after him, unable to believe he would go away so abruptly.

“Stay, Alexey, one more confession to you alone!” cried Dmitri, suddenly
turning back. “Look at me. Look at me well. You see here, here—there’s
terrible disgrace in store for me.” (As he said “here,” Dmitri struck his
chest with his fist with a strange air, as though the dishonor lay
precisely on his chest, in some spot, in a pocket, perhaps, or hanging
round his neck.) “You know me now, a scoundrel, an avowed scoundrel, but
let me tell you that I’ve never done anything before and never shall
again, anything that can compare in baseness with the dishonor which I
bear now at this very minute on my breast, here, here, which will come to
pass, though I’m perfectly free to stop it. I can stop it or carry it
through, note that. Well, let me tell you, I shall carry it through. I
shan’t stop it. I told you everything just now, but I didn’t tell you
this, because even I had not brass enough for it. I can still pull up; if
I do, I can give back the full half of my lost honor to-morrow. But I
shan’t pull up. I shall carry out my base plan, and you can bear witness
that I told you so beforehand. Darkness and destruction! No need to
explain. You’ll find out in due time. The filthy back-alley and the
she-devil. Good-by. Don’t pray for me, I’m not worth it. And there’s no
need, no need at all.... I don’t need it! Away!”

And he suddenly retreated, this time finally. Alyosha went towards the
monastery.

“What? I shall never see him again! What is he saying?” he wondered
wildly. “Why, I shall certainly see him to-morrow. I shall look him up. I
shall make a point of it. What does he mean?”

                  -------------------------------------

He went round the monastery, and crossed the pine-wood to the hermitage.
The door was opened to him, though no one was admitted at that hour. There
was a tremor in his heart as he went into Father Zossima’s cell.

“Why, why, had he gone forth? Why had he sent him into the world? Here was
peace. Here was holiness. But there was confusion, there was darkness in
which one lost one’s way and went astray at once....”

In the cell he found the novice Porfiry and Father Païssy, who came every
hour to inquire after Father Zossima. Alyosha learnt with alarm that he
was getting worse and worse. Even his usual discourse with the brothers
could not take place that day. As a rule every evening after service the
monks flocked into Father Zossima’s cell, and all confessed aloud their
sins of the day, their sinful thoughts and temptations; even their
disputes, if there had been any. Some confessed kneeling. The elder
absolved, reconciled, exhorted, imposed penance, blessed, and dismissed
them. It was against this general “confession” that the opponents of
“elders” protested, maintaining that it was a profanation of the sacrament
of confession, almost a sacrilege, though this was quite a different
thing. They even represented to the diocesan authorities that such
confessions attained no good object, but actually to a large extent led to
sin and temptation. Many of the brothers disliked going to the elder, and
went against their own will because every one went, and for fear they
should be accused of pride and rebellious ideas. People said that some of
the monks agreed beforehand, saying, “I’ll confess I lost my temper with
you this morning, and you confirm it,” simply in order to have something
to say. Alyosha knew that this actually happened sometimes. He knew, too,
that there were among the monks some who deeply resented the fact that
letters from relations were habitually taken to the elder, to be opened
and read by him before those to whom they were addressed.

It was assumed, of course, that all this was done freely, and in good
faith, by way of voluntary submission and salutary guidance. But, in fact,
there was sometimes no little insincerity, and much that was false and
strained in this practice. Yet the older and more experienced of the monks
adhered to their opinion, arguing that “for those who have come within
these walls sincerely seeking salvation, such obedience and sacrifice will
certainly be salutary and of great benefit; those, on the other hand, who
find it irksome, and repine, are no true monks, and have made a mistake in
entering the monastery—their proper place is in the world. Even in the
temple one cannot be safe from sin and the devil. So it was no good taking
it too much into account.”

“He is weaker, a drowsiness has come over him,” Father Païssy whispered to
Alyosha, as he blessed him. “It’s difficult to rouse him. And he must not
be roused. He waked up for five minutes, sent his blessing to the
brothers, and begged their prayers for him at night. He intends to take
the sacrament again in the morning. He remembered you, Alexey. He asked
whether you had gone away, and was told that you were in the town. ‘I
blessed him for that work,’ he said, ‘his place is there, not here, for
awhile.’ Those were his words about you. He remembered you lovingly, with
anxiety; do you understand how he honored you? But how is it that he has
decided that you shall spend some time in the world? He must have foreseen
something in your destiny! Understand, Alexey, that if you return to the
world, it must be to do the duty laid upon you by your elder, and not for
frivolous vanity and worldly pleasures.”

Father Païssy went out. Alyosha had no doubt that Father Zossima was
dying, though he might live another day or two. Alyosha firmly and
ardently resolved that in spite of his promises to his father, the
Hohlakovs, and Katerina Ivanovna, he would not leave the monastery next
day, but would remain with his elder to the end. His heart glowed with
love, and he reproached himself bitterly for having been able for one
instant to forget him whom he had left in the monastery on his deathbed,
and whom he honored above every one in the world. He went into Father
Zossima’s bedroom, knelt down, and bowed to the ground before the elder,
who slept quietly without stirring, with regular, hardly audible breathing
and a peaceful face.

Alyosha returned to the other room, where Father Zossima had received his
guests in the morning. Taking off his boots, he lay down on the hard,
narrow, leathern sofa, which he had long used as a bed, bringing nothing
but a pillow. The mattress, about which his father had shouted to him that
morning, he had long forgotten to lie on. He took off his cassock, which
he used as a covering. But before going to bed, he fell on his knees and
prayed a long time. In his fervent prayer he did not beseech God to
lighten his darkness but only thirsted for the joyous emotion, which
always visited his soul after the praise and adoration, of which his
evening prayer usually consisted. That joy always brought him light
untroubled sleep. As he was praying, he suddenly felt in his pocket the
little pink note the servant had handed him as he left Katerina
Ivanovna’s. He was disturbed, but finished his prayer. Then, after some
hesitation, he opened the envelope. In it was a letter to him, signed by
Lise, the young daughter of Madame Hohlakov, who had laughed at him before
the elder in the morning.

“Alexey Fyodorovitch,” she wrote, “I am writing to you without any one’s
knowledge, even mamma’s, and I know how wrong it is. But I cannot live
without telling you the feeling that has sprung up in my heart, and this
no one but us two must know for a time. But how am I to say what I want so
much to tell you? Paper, they say, does not blush, but I assure you it’s
not true and that it’s blushing just as I am now, all over. Dear Alyosha,
I love you, I’ve loved you from my childhood, since our Moscow days, when
you were very different from what you are now, and I shall love you all my
life. My heart has chosen you, to unite our lives, and pass them together
till our old age. Of course, on condition that you will leave the
monastery. As for our age we will wait for the time fixed by the law. By
that time I shall certainly be quite strong, I shall be walking and
dancing. There can be no doubt of that.

“You see how I’ve thought of everything. There’s only one thing I can’t
imagine: what you’ll think of me when you read this. I’m always laughing
and being naughty. I made you angry this morning, but I assure you before
I took up my pen, I prayed before the Image of the Mother of God, and now
I’m praying, and almost crying.

“My secret is in your hands. When you come to-morrow, I don’t know how I
shall look at you. Ah, Alexey Fyodorovitch, what if I can’t restrain
myself like a silly and laugh when I look at you as I did to-day. You’ll
think I’m a nasty girl making fun of you, and you won’t believe my letter.
And so I beg you, dear one, if you’ve any pity for me, when you come
to-morrow, don’t look me straight in the face, for if I meet your eyes, it
will be sure to make me laugh, especially as you’ll be in that long gown.
I feel cold all over when I think of it, so when you come, don’t look at
me at all for a time, look at mamma or at the window....

“Here I’ve written you a love-letter. Oh, dear, what have I done? Alyosha,
don’t despise me, and if I’ve done something very horrid and wounded you,
forgive me. Now the secret of my reputation, ruined perhaps for ever, is
in your hands.

“I shall certainly cry to-day. Good-by till our meeting, our _awful_
meeting.—LISE.

“P.S.—Alyosha! You must, must, must come!—LISE.”

Alyosha read the note in amazement, read it through twice, thought a
little, and suddenly laughed a soft, sweet laugh. He started. That laugh
seemed to him sinful. But a minute later he laughed again just as softly
and happily. He slowly replaced the note in the envelope, crossed himself
and lay down. The agitation in his heart passed at once. “God, have mercy
upon all of them, have all these unhappy and turbulent souls in Thy
keeping, and set them in the right path. All ways are Thine. Save them
according to Thy wisdom. Thou art love. Thou wilt send joy to all!”
Alyosha murmured, crossing himself, and falling into peaceful sleep.





PART II




Book IV. Lacerations



Chapter I. Father Ferapont


Alyosha was roused early, before daybreak. Father Zossima woke up feeling
very weak, though he wanted to get out of bed and sit up in a chair. His
mind was quite clear; his face looked very tired, yet bright and almost
joyful. It wore an expression of gayety, kindness and cordiality. “Maybe I
shall not live through the coming day,” he said to Alyosha. Then he
desired to confess and take the sacrament at once. He always confessed to
Father Païssy. After taking the communion, the service of extreme unction
followed. The monks assembled and the cell was gradually filled up by the
inmates of the hermitage. Meantime it was daylight. People began coming
from the monastery. After the service was over the elder desired to kiss
and take leave of every one. As the cell was so small the earlier visitors
withdrew to make room for others. Alyosha stood beside the elder, who was
seated again in his arm-chair. He talked as much as he could. Though his
voice was weak, it was fairly steady.

“I’ve been teaching you so many years, and therefore I’ve been talking
aloud so many years, that I’ve got into the habit of talking, and so much
so that it’s almost more difficult for me to hold my tongue than to talk,
even now, in spite of my weakness, dear Fathers and brothers,” he jested,
looking with emotion at the group round him.

Alyosha remembered afterwards something of what he said to them. But
though he spoke out distinctly and his voice was fairly steady, his speech
was somewhat disconnected. He spoke of many things, he seemed anxious
before the moment of death to say everything he had not said in his life,
and not simply for the sake of instructing them, but as though thirsting
to share with all men and all creation his joy and ecstasy, and once more
in his life to open his whole heart.

“Love one another, Fathers,” said Father Zossima, as far as Alyosha could
remember afterwards. “Love God’s people. Because we have come here and
shut ourselves within these walls, we are no holier than those that are
outside, but on the contrary, from the very fact of coming here, each of
us has confessed to himself that he is worse than others, than all men on
earth.... And the longer the monk lives in his seclusion, the more keenly
he must recognize that. Else he would have had no reason to come here.
When he realizes that he is not only worse than others, but that he is
responsible to all men for all and everything, for all human sins,
national and individual, only then the aim of our seclusion is attained.
For know, dear ones, that every one of us is undoubtedly responsible for
all men and everything on earth, not merely through the general sinfulness
of creation, but each one personally for all mankind and every individual
man. This knowledge is the crown of life for the monk and for every man.
For monks are not a special sort of men, but only what all men ought to
be. Only through that knowledge, our heart grows soft with infinite,
universal, inexhaustible love. Then every one of you will have the power
to win over the whole world by love and to wash away the sins of the world
with your tears.... Each of you keep watch over your heart and confess
your sins to yourself unceasingly. Be not afraid of your sins, even when
perceiving them, if only there be penitence, but make no conditions with
God. Again I say, Be not proud. Be proud neither to the little nor to the
great. Hate not those who reject you, who insult you, who abuse and
slander you. Hate not the atheists, the teachers of evil, the
materialists—and I mean not only the good ones—for there are many good
ones among them, especially in our day—hate not even the wicked ones.
Remember them in your prayers thus: Save, O Lord, all those who have none
to pray for them, save too all those who will not pray. And add: it is not
in pride that I make this prayer, O Lord, for I am lower than all men....
Love God’s people, let not strangers draw away the flock, for if you
slumber in your slothfulness and disdainful pride, or worse still, in
covetousness, they will come from all sides and draw away your flock.
Expound the Gospel to the people unceasingly ... be not extortionate....
Do not love gold and silver, do not hoard them.... Have faith. Cling to
the banner and raise it on high.”

But the elder spoke more disconnectedly than Alyosha reported his words
afterwards. Sometimes he broke off altogether, as though to take breath,
and recover his strength, but he was in a sort of ecstasy. They heard him
with emotion, though many wondered at his words and found them obscure....
Afterwards all remembered those words.

When Alyosha happened for a moment to leave the cell, he was struck by the
general excitement and suspense in the monks who were crowding about it.
This anticipation showed itself in some by anxiety, in others by devout
solemnity. All were expecting that some marvel would happen immediately
after the elder’s death. Their suspense was, from one point of view,
almost frivolous, but even the most austere of the monks were affected by
it. Father Païssy’s face looked the gravest of all.

Alyosha was mysteriously summoned by a monk to see Rakitin, who had
arrived from town with a singular letter for him from Madame Hohlakov. In
it she informed Alyosha of a strange and very opportune incident. It
appeared that among the women who had come on the previous day to receive
Father Zossima’s blessing, there had been an old woman from the town, a
sergeant’s widow, called Prohorovna. She had inquired whether she might
pray for the rest of the soul of her son, Vassenka, who had gone to
Irkutsk, and had sent her no news for over a year. To which Father Zossima
had answered sternly, forbidding her to do so, and saying that to pray for
the living as though they were dead was a kind of sorcery. He afterwards
forgave her on account of her ignorance, and added, “as though reading the
book of the future” (this was Madame Hohlakov’s expression), words of
comfort: “that her son Vassya was certainly alive and he would either come
himself very shortly or send a letter, and that she was to go home and
expect him.” And “Would you believe it?” exclaimed Madame Hohlakov
enthusiastically, “the prophecy has been fulfilled literally indeed, and
more than that.” Scarcely had the old woman reached home when they gave
her a letter from Siberia which had been awaiting her. But that was not
all; in the letter written on the road from Ekaterinenburg, Vassya
informed his mother that he was returning to Russia with an official, and
that three weeks after her receiving the letter he hoped “to embrace his
mother.”

Madame Hohlakov warmly entreated Alyosha to report this new “miracle of
prediction” to the Superior and all the brotherhood. “All, all, ought to
know of it!” she concluded. The letter had been written in haste, the
excitement of the writer was apparent in every line of it. But Alyosha had
no need to tell the monks, for all knew of it already. Rakitin had
commissioned the monk who brought his message “to inform most respectfully
his reverence Father Païssy, that he, Rakitin, has a matter to speak of
with him, of such gravity that he dare not defer it for a moment, and
humbly begs forgiveness for his presumption.” As the monk had given the
message to Father Païssy before that to Alyosha, the latter found after
reading the letter, there was nothing left for him to do but to hand it to
Father Païssy in confirmation of the story.

And even that austere and cautious man, though he frowned as he read the
news of the “miracle,” could not completely restrain some inner emotion.
His eyes gleamed, and a grave and solemn smile came into his lips.

“We shall see greater things!” broke from him.

“We shall see greater things, greater things yet!” the monks around
repeated.

But Father Païssy, frowning again, begged all of them, at least for a
time, not to speak of the matter “till it be more fully confirmed, seeing
there is so much credulity among those of this world, and indeed this
might well have chanced naturally,” he added, prudently, as it were to
satisfy his conscience, though scarcely believing his own disavowal, a
fact his listeners very clearly perceived.

Within the hour the “miracle” was of course known to the whole monastery,
and many visitors who had come for the mass. No one seemed more impressed
by it than the monk who had come the day before from St. Sylvester, from
the little monastery of Obdorsk in the far North. It was he who had been
standing near Madame Hohlakov the previous day and had asked Father
Zossima earnestly, referring to the “healing” of the lady’s daughter, “How
can you presume to do such things?”

He was now somewhat puzzled and did not know whom to believe. The evening
before he had visited Father Ferapont in his cell apart, behind the
apiary, and had been greatly impressed and overawed by the visit. This
Father Ferapont was that aged monk so devout in fasting and observing
silence who has been mentioned already, as antagonistic to Father Zossima
and the whole institution of “elders,” which he regarded as a pernicious
and frivolous innovation. He was a very formidable opponent, although from
his practice of silence he scarcely spoke a word to any one. What made him
formidable was that a number of monks fully shared his feeling, and many
of the visitors looked upon him as a great saint and ascetic, although
they had no doubt that he was crazy. But it was just his craziness
attracted them.

Father Ferapont never went to see the elder. Though he lived in the
hermitage they did not worry him to keep its regulations, and this too
because he behaved as though he were crazy. He was seventy-five or more,
and he lived in a corner beyond the apiary in an old decaying wooden cell
which had been built long ago for another great ascetic, Father Iona, who
had lived to be a hundred and five, and of whose saintly doings many
curious stories were still extant in the monastery and the neighborhood.

Father Ferapont had succeeded in getting himself installed in this same
solitary cell seven years previously. It was simply a peasant’s hut,
though it looked like a chapel, for it contained an extraordinary number
of ikons with lamps perpetually burning before them—which men brought to
the monastery as offerings to God. Father Ferapont had been appointed to
look after them and keep the lamps burning. It was said (and indeed it was
true) that he ate only two pounds of bread in three days. The beekeeper,
who lived close by the apiary, used to bring him the bread every three
days, and even to this man who waited upon him, Father Ferapont rarely
uttered a word. The four pounds of bread, together with the sacrament
bread, regularly sent him on Sundays after the late mass by the Father
Superior, made up his weekly rations. The water in his jug was changed
every day. He rarely appeared at mass. Visitors who came to do him homage
saw him sometimes kneeling all day long at prayer without looking round.
If he addressed them, he was brief, abrupt, strange, and almost always
rude. On very rare occasions, however, he would talk to visitors, but for
the most part he would utter some one strange saying which was a complete
riddle, and no entreaties would induce him to pronounce a word in
explanation. He was not a priest, but a simple monk. There was a strange
belief, chiefly however among the most ignorant, that Father Ferapont had
communication with heavenly spirits and would only converse with them, and
so was silent with men.

The monk from Obdorsk, having been directed to the apiary by the
beekeeper, who was also a very silent and surly monk, went to the corner
where Father Ferapont’s cell stood. “Maybe he will speak as you are a
stranger and maybe you’ll get nothing out of him,” the beekeeper had
warned him. The monk, as he related afterwards, approached in the utmost
apprehension. It was rather late in the evening. Father Ferapont was
sitting at the door of his cell on a low bench. A huge old elm was lightly
rustling overhead. There was an evening freshness in the air. The monk
from Obdorsk bowed down before the saint and asked his blessing.

“Do you want me to bow down to you, monk?” said Father Ferapont. “Get up!”

The monk got up.

“Blessing, be blessed! Sit beside me. Where have you come from?”

What most struck the poor monk was the fact that in spite of his strict
fasting and great age, Father Ferapont still looked a vigorous old man. He
was tall, held himself erect, and had a thin, but fresh and healthy face.
There was no doubt he still had considerable strength. He was of athletic
build. In spite of his great age he was not even quite gray, and still had
very thick hair and a full beard, both of which had once been black. His
eyes were gray, large and luminous, but strikingly prominent. He spoke
with a broad accent. He was dressed in a peasant’s long reddish coat of
coarse convict cloth (as it used to be called) and had a stout rope round
his waist. His throat and chest were bare. Beneath his coat, his shirt of
the coarsest linen showed almost black with dirt, not having been changed
for months. They said that he wore irons weighing thirty pounds under his
coat. His stockingless feet were thrust in old slippers almost dropping to
pieces.

“From the little Obdorsk monastery, from St. Sylvester,” the monk answered
humbly, whilst his keen and inquisitive, but rather frightened little eyes
kept watch on the hermit.

“I have been at your Sylvester’s. I used to stay there. Is Sylvester
well?”

The monk hesitated.

“You are a senseless lot! How do you keep the fasts?”

“Our dietary is according to the ancient conventual rules. During Lent
there are no meals provided for Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. For Tuesday
and Thursday we have white bread, stewed fruit with honey, wild berries,
or salt cabbage and wholemeal stirabout. On Saturday white cabbage soup,
noodles with peas, kasha, all with hemp oil. On weekdays we have dried
fish and kasha with the cabbage soup. From Monday till Saturday evening,
six whole days in Holy Week, nothing is cooked, and we have only bread and
water, and that sparingly; if possible not taking food every day, just the
same as is ordered for first week in Lent. On Good Friday nothing is
eaten. In the same way on the Saturday we have to fast till three o’clock,
and then take a little bread and water and drink a single cup of wine. On
Holy Thursday we drink wine and have something cooked without oil or not
cooked at all, inasmuch as the Laodicean council lays down for Holy
Thursday: ‘It is unseemly by remitting the fast on the Holy Thursday to
dishonor the whole of Lent!’ This is how we keep the fast. But what is
that compared with you, holy Father,” added the monk, growing more
confident, “for all the year round, even at Easter, you take nothing but
bread and water, and what we should eat in two days lasts you full seven.
It’s truly marvelous—your great abstinence.”

“And mushrooms?” asked Father Ferapont, suddenly.

“Mushrooms?” repeated the surprised monk.

“Yes. I can give up their bread, not needing it at all, and go away into
the forest and live there on the mushrooms or the berries, but they can’t
give up their bread here, wherefore they are in bondage to the devil.
Nowadays the unclean deny that there is need of such fasting. Haughty and
unclean is their judgment.”

“Och, true,” sighed the monk.

“And have you seen devils among them?” asked Ferapont.

“Among them? Among whom?” asked the monk, timidly.

“I went to the Father Superior on Trinity Sunday last year, I haven’t been
since. I saw a devil sitting on one man’s chest hiding under his cassock,
only his horns poked out; another had one peeping out of his pocket with
such sharp eyes, he was afraid of me; another settled in the unclean belly
of one, another was hanging round a man’s neck, and so he was carrying him
about without seeing him.”

“You—can see spirits?” the monk inquired.

“I tell you I can see, I can see through them. When I was coming out from
the Superior’s I saw one hiding from me behind the door, and a big one, a
yard and a half or more high, with a thick long gray tail, and the tip of
his tail was in the crack of the door and I was quick and slammed the
door, pinching his tail in it. He squealed and began to struggle, and I
made the sign of the cross over him three times. And he died on the spot
like a crushed spider. He must have rotted there in the corner and be
stinking, but they don’t see, they don’t smell it. It’s a year since I
have been there. I reveal it to you, as you are a stranger.”

“Your words are terrible! But, holy and blessed Father,” said the monk,
growing bolder and bolder, “is it true, as they noise abroad even to
distant lands about you, that you are in continual communication with the
Holy Ghost?”

“He does fly down at times.”

“How does he fly down? In what form?”

“As a bird.”

“The Holy Ghost in the form of a dove?”

“There’s the Holy Ghost and there’s the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit can
appear as other birds—sometimes as a swallow, sometimes a goldfinch and
sometimes as a blue-tit.”

“How do you know him from an ordinary tit?”

“He speaks.”

“How does he speak, in what language?”

“Human language.”

“And what does he tell you?”

“Why, to-day he told me that a fool would visit me and would ask me
unseemly questions. You want to know too much, monk.”

“Terrible are your words, most holy and blessed Father,” the monk shook
his head. But there was a doubtful look in his frightened little eyes.

“Do you see this tree?” asked Father Ferapont, after a pause.

“I do, blessed Father.”

“You think it’s an elm, but for me it has another shape.”

“What sort of shape?” inquired the monk, after a pause of vain
expectation.

“It happens at night. You see those two branches? In the night it is
Christ holding out His arms to me and seeking me with those arms, I see it
clearly and tremble. It’s terrible, terrible!”

“What is there terrible if it’s Christ Himself?”

“Why, He’ll snatch me up and carry me away.”

“Alive?”

“In the spirit and glory of Elijah, haven’t you heard? He will take me in
His arms and bear me away.”

Though the monk returned to the cell he was sharing with one of the
brothers, in considerable perplexity of mind, he still cherished at heart
a greater reverence for Father Ferapont than for Father Zossima. He was
strongly in favor of fasting, and it was not strange that one who kept so
rigid a fast as Father Ferapont should “see marvels.” His words seemed
certainly queer, but God only could tell what was hidden in those words,
and were not worse words and acts commonly seen in those who have
sacrificed their intellects for the glory of God? The pinching of the
devil’s tail he was ready and eager to believe, and not only in the
figurative sense. Besides he had, before visiting the monastery, a strong
prejudice against the institution of “elders,” which he only knew of by
hearsay and believed to be a pernicious innovation. Before he had been
long at the monastery, he had detected the secret murmurings of some
shallow brothers who disliked the institution. He was, besides, a
meddlesome, inquisitive man, who poked his nose into everything. This was
why the news of the fresh “miracle” performed by Father Zossima reduced
him to extreme perplexity. Alyosha remembered afterwards how their
inquisitive guest from Obdorsk had been continually flitting to and fro
from one group to another, listening and asking questions among the monks
that were crowding within and without the elder’s cell. But he did not pay
much attention to him at the time, and only recollected it afterwards.

He had no thought to spare for it indeed, for when Father Zossima, feeling
tired again, had gone back to bed, he thought of Alyosha as he was closing
his eyes, and sent for him. Alyosha ran at once. There was no one else in
the cell but Father Païssy, Father Iosif, and the novice Porfiry. The
elder, opening his weary eyes and looking intently at Alyosha, asked him
suddenly:

“Are your people expecting you, my son?”

Alyosha hesitated.

“Haven’t they need of you? Didn’t you promise some one yesterday to see
them to-day?”

“I did promise—to my father—my brothers—others too.”

“You see, you must go. Don’t grieve. Be sure I shall not die without your
being by to hear my last word. To you I will say that word, my son, it
will be my last gift to you. To you, dear son, because you love me. But
now go to keep your promise.”

Alyosha immediately obeyed, though it was hard to go. But the promise that
he should hear his last word on earth, that it should be the last gift to
him, Alyosha, sent a thrill of rapture through his soul. He made haste
that he might finish what he had to do in the town and return quickly.
Father Païssy, too, uttered some words of exhortation which moved and
surprised him greatly. He spoke as they left the cell together.

“Remember, young man, unceasingly,” Father Païssy began, without preface,
“that the science of this world, which has become a great power, has,
especially in the last century, analyzed everything divine handed down to
us in the holy books. After this cruel analysis the learned of this world
have nothing left of all that was sacred of old. But they have only
analyzed the parts and overlooked the whole, and indeed their blindness is
marvelous. Yet the whole still stands steadfast before their eyes, and the
gates of hell shall not prevail against it. Has it not lasted nineteen
centuries, is it not still a living, a moving power in the individual soul
and in the masses of people? It is still as strong and living even in the
souls of atheists, who have destroyed everything! For even those who have
renounced Christianity and attack it, in their inmost being still follow
the Christian ideal, for hitherto neither their subtlety nor the ardor of
their hearts has been able to create a higher ideal of man and of virtue
than the ideal given by Christ of old. When it has been attempted, the
result has been only grotesque. Remember this especially, young man, since
you are being sent into the world by your departing elder. Maybe,
remembering this great day, you will not forget my words, uttered from the
heart for your guidance, seeing you are young, and the temptations of the
world are great and beyond your strength to endure. Well, now go, my
orphan.”

With these words Father Païssy blessed him. As Alyosha left the monastery
and thought them over, he suddenly realized that he had met a new and
unexpected friend, a warmly loving teacher, in this austere monk who had
hitherto treated him sternly. It was as though Father Zossima had
bequeathed him to him at his death, and “perhaps that’s just what had
passed between them,” Alyosha thought suddenly. The philosophic
reflections he had just heard so unexpectedly testified to the warmth of
Father Païssy’s heart. He was in haste to arm the boy’s mind for conflict
with temptation and to guard the young soul left in his charge with the
strongest defense he could imagine.



Chapter II. At His Father’s


First of all, Alyosha went to his father. On the way he remembered that
his father had insisted the day before that he should come without his
brother Ivan seeing him. “Why so?” Alyosha wondered suddenly. “Even if my
father has something to say to me alone, why should I go in unseen? Most
likely in his excitement yesterday he meant to say something different,”
he decided. Yet he was very glad when Marfa Ignatyevna, who opened the
garden gate to him (Grigory, it appeared, was ill in bed in the lodge),
told him in answer to his question that Ivan Fyodorovitch had gone out two
hours ago.

“And my father?”

“He is up, taking his coffee,” Marfa answered somewhat dryly.

Alyosha went in. The old man was sitting alone at the table wearing
slippers and a little old overcoat. He was amusing himself by looking
through some accounts, rather inattentively however. He was quite alone in
the house, for Smerdyakov too had gone out marketing. Though he had got up
early and was trying to put a bold face on it, he looked tired and weak.
His forehead, upon which huge purple bruises had come out during the
night, was bandaged with a red handkerchief; his nose too had swollen
terribly in the night, and some smaller bruises covered it in patches,
giving his whole face a peculiarly spiteful and irritable look. The old
man was aware of this, and turned a hostile glance on Alyosha as he came
in.

“The coffee is cold,” he cried harshly; “I won’t offer you any. I’ve
ordered nothing but a Lenten fish soup to-day, and I don’t invite any one
to share it. Why have you come?”

“To find out how you are,” said Alyosha.

“Yes. Besides, I told you to come yesterday. It’s all of no consequence.
You need not have troubled. But I knew you’d come poking in directly.”

He said this with almost hostile feeling. At the same time he got up and
looked anxiously in the looking-glass (perhaps for the fortieth time that
morning) at his nose. He began, too, binding his red handkerchief more
becomingly on his forehead.

“Red’s better. It’s just like the hospital in a white one,” he observed
sententiously. “Well, how are things over there? How is your elder?”

“He is very bad; he may die to-day,” answered Alyosha. But his father had
not listened, and had forgotten his own question at once.

“Ivan’s gone out,” he said suddenly. “He is doing his utmost to carry off
Mitya’s betrothed. That’s what he is staying here for,” he added
maliciously, and, twisting his mouth, looked at Alyosha.

“Surely he did not tell you so?” asked Alyosha.

“Yes, he did, long ago. Would you believe it, he told me three weeks ago?
You don’t suppose he too came to murder me, do you? He must have had some
object in coming.”

“What do you mean? Why do you say such things?” said Alyosha, troubled.

“He doesn’t ask for money, it’s true, but yet he won’t get a farthing from
me. I intend living as long as possible, you may as well know, my dear
Alexey Fyodorovitch, and so I need every farthing, and the longer I live,
the more I shall need it,” he continued, pacing from one corner of the
room to the other, keeping his hands in the pockets of his loose greasy
overcoat made of yellow cotton material. “I can still pass for a man at
five and fifty, but I want to pass for one for another twenty years. As I
get older, you know, I shan’t be a pretty object. The wenches won’t come
to me of their own accord, so I shall want my money. So I am saving up
more and more, simply for myself, my dear son Alexey Fyodorovitch. You may
as well know. For I mean to go on in my sins to the end, let me tell you.
For sin is sweet; all abuse it, but all men live in it, only others do it
on the sly, and I openly. And so all the other sinners fall upon me for
being so simple. And your paradise, Alexey Fyodorovitch, is not to my
taste, let me tell you that; and it’s not the proper place for a
gentleman, your paradise, even if it exists. I believe that I fall asleep
and don’t wake up again, and that’s all. You can pray for my soul if you
like. And if you don’t want to, don’t, damn you! That’s my philosophy.
Ivan talked well here yesterday, though we were all drunk. Ivan is a
conceited coxcomb, but he has no particular learning ... nor education
either. He sits silent and smiles at one without speaking—that’s what
pulls him through.”

Alyosha listened to him in silence.

“Why won’t he talk to me? If he does speak, he gives himself airs. Your
Ivan is a scoundrel! And I’ll marry Grushenka in a minute if I want to.
For if you’ve money, Alexey Fyodorovitch, you have only to want a thing
and you can have it. That’s what Ivan is afraid of, he is on the watch to
prevent me getting married and that’s why he is egging on Mitya to marry
Grushenka himself. He hopes to keep me from Grushenka by that (as though I
should leave him my money if I don’t marry her!). Besides if Mitya marries
Grushenka, Ivan will carry off his rich betrothed, that’s what he’s
reckoning on! He is a scoundrel, your Ivan!”

“How cross you are! It’s because of yesterday; you had better lie down,”
said Alyosha.

“There! you say that,” the old man observed suddenly, as though it had
struck him for the first time, “and I am not angry with you. But if Ivan
said it, I should be angry with him. It is only with you I have good
moments, else you know I am an ill-natured man.”

“You are not ill-natured, but distorted,” said Alyosha with a smile.

“Listen. I meant this morning to get that ruffian Mitya locked up and I
don’t know now what I shall decide about it. Of course in these
fashionable days fathers and mothers are looked upon as a prejudice, but
even now the law does not allow you to drag your old father about by the
hair, to kick him in the face in his own house, and brag of murdering him
outright—all in the presence of witnesses. If I liked, I could crush him
and could have him locked up at once for what he did yesterday.”

“Then you don’t mean to take proceedings?”

“Ivan has dissuaded me. I shouldn’t care about Ivan, but there’s another
thing.”

And bending down to Alyosha, he went on in a confidential half-whisper.

“If I send the ruffian to prison, she’ll hear of it and run to see him at
once. But if she hears that he has beaten me, a weak old man, within an
inch of my life, she may give him up and come to me.... For that’s her
way, everything by contraries. I know her through and through! Won’t you
have a drop of brandy? Take some cold coffee and I’ll pour a quarter of a
glass of brandy into it, it’s delicious, my boy.”

“No, thank you. I’ll take that roll with me if I may,” said Alyosha, and
taking a halfpenny French roll he put it in the pocket of his cassock.
“And you’d better not have brandy, either,” he suggested apprehensively,
looking into the old man’s face.

“You are quite right, it irritates my nerves instead of soothing them.
Only one little glass. I’ll get it out of the cupboard.”

He unlocked the cupboard, poured out a glass, drank it, then locked the
cupboard and put the key back in his pocket.

“That’s enough. One glass won’t kill me.”

“You see you are in a better humor now,” said Alyosha, smiling.

“Um! I love you even without the brandy, but with scoundrels I am a
scoundrel. Ivan is not going to Tchermashnya—why is that? He wants to spy
how much I give Grushenka if she comes. They are all scoundrels! But I
don’t recognize Ivan, I don’t know him at all. Where does he come from? He
is not one of us in soul. As though I’d leave him anything! I shan’t leave
a will at all, you may as well know. And I’ll crush Mitya like a beetle. I
squash black-beetles at night with my slipper; they squelch when you tread
on them. And your Mitya will squelch too. _Your_ Mitya, for you love him.
Yes, you love him and I am not afraid of your loving him. But if Ivan
loved him I should be afraid for myself at his loving him. But Ivan loves
nobody. Ivan is not one of us. People like Ivan are not our sort, my boy.
They are like a cloud of dust. When the wind blows, the dust will be
gone.... I had a silly idea in my head when I told you to come to-day; I
wanted to find out from you about Mitya. If I were to hand him over a
thousand or maybe two now, would the beggarly wretch agree to take himself
off altogether for five years or, better still, thirty-five, and without
Grushenka, and give her up once for all, eh?”

“I—I’ll ask him,” muttered Alyosha. “If you would give him three thousand,
perhaps he—”

“That’s nonsense! You needn’t ask him now, no need! I’ve changed my mind.
It was a nonsensical idea of mine. I won’t give him anything, not a penny,
I want my money myself,” cried the old man, waving his hand. “I’ll crush
him like a beetle without it. Don’t say anything to him or else he will
begin hoping. There’s nothing for you to do here, you needn’t stay. Is
that betrothed of his, Katerina Ivanovna, whom he has kept so carefully
hidden from me all this time, going to marry him or not? You went to see
her yesterday, I believe?”

“Nothing will induce her to abandon him.”

“There you see how dearly these fine young ladies love a rake and a
scoundrel. They are poor creatures I tell you, those pale young ladies,
very different from—Ah, if I had his youth and the looks I had then (for I
was better-looking than he at eight and twenty) I’d have been a conquering
hero just as he is. He is a low cad! But he shan’t have Grushenka, anyway,
he shan’t! I’ll crush him!”

His anger had returned with the last words.

“You can go. There’s nothing for you to do here to-day,” he snapped
harshly.

Alyosha went up to say good-by to him, and kissed him on the shoulder.

“What’s that for?” The old man was a little surprised. “We shall see each
other again, or do you think we shan’t?”

“Not at all, I didn’t mean anything.”

“Nor did I, I did not mean anything,” said the old man, looking at him.
“Listen, listen,” he shouted after him, “make haste and come again and
I’ll have a fish soup for you, a fine one, not like to-day. Be sure to
come! Come to-morrow, do you hear, to-morrow!”

And as soon as Alyosha had gone out of the door, he went to the cupboard
again and poured out another half-glass.

“I won’t have more!” he muttered, clearing his throat, and again he locked
the cupboard and put the key in his pocket. Then he went into his bedroom,
lay down on the bed, exhausted, and in one minute he was asleep.



Chapter III. A Meeting With The Schoolboys


“Thank goodness he did not ask me about Grushenka,” thought Alyosha, as he
left his father’s house and turned towards Madame Hohlakov’s, “or I might
have to tell him of my meeting with Grushenka yesterday.”

Alyosha felt painfully that since yesterday both combatants had renewed
their energies, and that their hearts had grown hard again. “Father is
spiteful and angry, he’s made some plan and will stick to it. And what of
Dmitri? He too will be harder than yesterday, he too must be spiteful and
angry, and he too, no doubt, has made some plan. Oh, I must succeed in
finding him to-day, whatever happens.”

But Alyosha had not long to meditate. An incident occurred on the road,
which, though apparently of little consequence, made a great impression on
him. Just after he had crossed the square and turned the corner coming out
into Mihailovsky Street, which is divided by a small ditch from the High
Street (our whole town is intersected by ditches), he saw a group of
schoolboys between the ages of nine and twelve, at the bridge. They were
going home from school, some with their bags on their shoulders, others
with leather satchels slung across them, some in short jackets, others in
little overcoats. Some even had those high boots with creases round the
ankles, such as little boys spoilt by rich fathers love to wear. The whole
group was talking eagerly about something, apparently holding a council.
Alyosha had never from his Moscow days been able to pass children without
taking notice of them, and although he was particularly fond of children
of three or thereabout, he liked schoolboys of ten and eleven too. And so,
anxious as he was to-day, he wanted at once to turn aside to talk to them.
He looked into their excited rosy faces, and noticed at once that all the
boys had stones in their hands. Behind the ditch some thirty paces away,
there was another schoolboy standing by a fence. He too had a satchel at
his side. He was about ten years old, pale, delicate-looking and with
sparkling black eyes. He kept an attentive and anxious watch on the other
six, obviously his schoolfellows with whom he had just come out of school,
but with whom he had evidently had a feud.

Alyosha went up and, addressing a fair, curly-headed, rosy boy in a black
jacket, observed:

“When I used to wear a satchel like yours, I always used to carry it on my
left side, so as to have my right hand free, but you’ve got yours on your
right side. So it will be awkward for you to get at it.”

Alyosha had no art or premeditation in beginning with this practical
remark. But it is the only way for a grown-up person to get at once into
confidential relations with a child, or still more with a group of
children. One must begin in a serious, businesslike way so as to be on a
perfectly equal footing. Alyosha understood it by instinct.

“But he is left-handed,” another, a fine healthy-looking boy of eleven,
answered promptly. All the others stared at Alyosha.

“He even throws stones with his left hand,” observed a third.

At that instant a stone flew into the group, but only just grazed the
left-handed boy, though it was well and vigorously thrown by the boy
standing the other side of the ditch.

“Give it him, hit him back, Smurov,” they all shouted. But Smurov, the
left-handed boy, needed no telling, and at once revenged himself; he threw
a stone, but it missed the boy and hit the ground. The boy the other side
of the ditch, the pocket of whose coat was visibly bulging with stones,
flung another stone at the group; this time it flew straight at Alyosha
and hit him painfully on the shoulder.

“He aimed it at you, he meant it for you. You are Karamazov, Karamazov!”
the boys shouted, laughing. “Come, all throw at him at once!” and six
stones flew at the boy. One struck the boy on the head and he fell down,
but at once leapt up and began ferociously returning their fire. Both
sides threw stones incessantly. Many of the group had their pockets full
too.

“What are you about! Aren’t you ashamed? Six against one! Why, you’ll kill
him,” cried Alyosha.

He ran forward and met the flying stones to screen the solitary boy. Three
or four ceased throwing for a minute.

“He began first!” cried a boy in a red shirt in an angry childish voice.
“He is a beast, he stabbed Krassotkin in class the other day with a
penknife. It bled. Krassotkin wouldn’t tell tales, but he must be
thrashed.”

“But what for? I suppose you tease him.”

“There, he sent a stone in your back again, he knows you,” cried the
children. “It’s you he is throwing at now, not us. Come, all of you, at
him again, don’t miss, Smurov!” and again a fire of stones, and a very
vicious one, began. The boy the other side of the ditch was hit in the
chest; he screamed, began to cry and ran away uphill towards Mihailovsky
Street. They all shouted: “Aha, he is funking, he is running away. Wisp of
tow!”

“You don’t know what a beast he is, Karamazov, killing is too good for
him,” said the boy in the jacket, with flashing eyes. He seemed to be the
eldest.

“What’s wrong with him?” asked Alyosha, “is he a tell-tale or what?”

The boys looked at one another as though derisively.

“Are you going that way, to Mihailovsky?” the same boy went on. “Catch him
up.... You see he’s stopped again, he is waiting and looking at you.”

“He is looking at you,” the other boys chimed in.

“You ask him, does he like a disheveled wisp of tow. Do you hear, ask him
that!”

There was a general burst of laughter. Alyosha looked at them, and they at
him.

“Don’t go near him, he’ll hurt you,” cried Smurov in a warning voice.

“I shan’t ask him about the wisp of tow, for I expect you tease him with
that question somehow. But I’ll find out from him why you hate him so.”

“Find out then, find out,” cried the boys, laughing.

Alyosha crossed the bridge and walked uphill by the fence, straight
towards the boy.

“You’d better look out,” the boys called after him; “he won’t be afraid of
you. He will stab you in a minute, on the sly, as he did Krassotkin.”

The boy waited for him without budging. Coming up to him, Alyosha saw
facing him a child of about nine years old. He was an undersized weakly
boy with a thin pale face, with large dark eyes that gazed at him
vindictively. He was dressed in a rather shabby old overcoat, which he had
monstrously outgrown. His bare arms stuck out beyond his sleeves. There
was a large patch on the right knee of his trousers, and in his right boot
just at the toe there was a big hole in the leather, carefully blackened
with ink. Both the pockets of his great-coat were weighed down with
stones. Alyosha stopped two steps in front of him, looking inquiringly at
him. The boy, seeing at once from Alyosha’s eyes that he wouldn’t beat
him, became less defiant, and addressed him first.

“I am alone, and there are six of them. I’ll beat them all, alone!” he
said suddenly, with flashing eyes.

“I think one of the stones must have hurt you badly,” observed Alyosha.

“But I hit Smurov on the head!” cried the boy.

“They told me that you know me, and that you threw a stone at me on
purpose,” said Alyosha.

The boy looked darkly at him.

“I don’t know you. Do you know me?” Alyosha continued.

“Let me alone!” the boy cried irritably; but he did not move, as though he
were expecting something, and again there was a vindictive light in his
eyes.

“Very well, I am going,” said Alyosha; “only I don’t know you and I don’t
tease you. They told me how they tease you, but I don’t want to tease you.
Good-by!”

“Monk in silk trousers!” cried the boy, following Alyosha with the same
vindictive and defiant expression, and he threw himself into an attitude
of defense, feeling sure that now Alyosha would fall upon him; but Alyosha
turned, looked at him, and walked away. He had not gone three steps before
the biggest stone the boy had in his pocket hit him a painful blow in the
back.

“So you’ll hit a man from behind! They tell the truth, then, when they say
that you attack on the sly,” said Alyosha, turning round again. This time
the boy threw a stone savagely right into Alyosha’s face; but Alyosha just
had time to guard himself, and the stone struck him on the elbow.

“Aren’t you ashamed? What have I done to you?” he cried.

The boy waited in silent defiance, certain that now Alyosha would attack
him. Seeing that even now he would not, his rage was like a little wild
beast’s; he flew at Alyosha himself, and before Alyosha had time to move,
the spiteful child had seized his left hand with both of his and bit his
middle finger. He fixed his teeth in it and it was ten seconds before he
let go. Alyosha cried out with pain and pulled his finger away with all
his might. The child let go at last and retreated to his former distance.
Alyosha’s finger had been badly bitten to the bone, close to the nail; it
began to bleed. Alyosha took out his handkerchief and bound it tightly
round his injured hand. He was a full minute bandaging it. The boy stood
waiting all the time. At last Alyosha raised his gentle eyes and looked at
him.

“Very well,” he said, “you see how badly you’ve bitten me. That’s enough,
isn’t it? Now tell me, what have I done to you?”

The boy stared in amazement.

“Though I don’t know you and it’s the first time I’ve seen you,” Alyosha
went on with the same serenity, “yet I must have done something to you—you
wouldn’t have hurt me like this for nothing. So what have I done? How have
I wronged you, tell me?”

Instead of answering, the boy broke into a loud tearful wail and ran away.
Alyosha walked slowly after him towards Mihailovsky Street, and for a long
time he saw the child running in the distance as fast as ever, not turning
his head, and no doubt still keeping up his tearful wail. He made up his
mind to find him out as soon as he had time, and to solve this mystery.
Just now he had not the time.



Chapter IV. At The Hohlakovs’


Alyosha soon reached Madame Hohlakov’s house, a handsome stone house of
two stories, one of the finest in our town. Though Madame Hohlakov spent
most of her time in another province where she had an estate, or in
Moscow, where she had a house of her own, yet she had a house in our town
too, inherited from her forefathers. The estate in our district was the
largest of her three estates, yet she had been very little in our province
before this time. She ran out to Alyosha in the hall.

“Did you get my letter about the new miracle?” She spoke rapidly and
nervously.

“Yes.”

“Did you show it to every one? He restored the son to his mother!”

“He is dying to-day,” said Alyosha.

“I have heard, I know, oh, how I long to talk to you, to you or some one,
about all this. No, to you, to you! And how sorry I am I can’t see him!
The whole town is in excitement, they are all suspense. But now—do you
know Katerina Ivanovna is here now?”

“Ah, that’s lucky,” cried Alyosha. “Then I shall see her here. She told me
yesterday to be sure to come and see her to-day.”

“I know, I know all. I’ve heard exactly what happened yesterday—and the
atrocious behavior of that—creature. _C’est tragique_, and if I’d been in
her place I don’t know what I should have done. And your brother Dmitri
Fyodorovitch, what do you think of him?—my goodness! Alexey Fyodorovitch,
I am forgetting, only fancy; your brother is in there with her, not that
dreadful brother who was so shocking yesterday, but the other, Ivan
Fyodorovitch, he is sitting with her talking; they are having a serious
conversation. If you could only imagine what’s passing between them
now—it’s awful, I tell you it’s lacerating, it’s like some incredible tale
of horror. They are ruining their lives for no reason any one can see.
They both recognize it and revel in it. I’ve been watching for you! I’ve
been thirsting for you! It’s too much for me, that’s the worst of it. I’ll
tell you all about it presently, but now I must speak of something else,
the most important thing—I had quite forgotten what’s most important. Tell
me, why has Lise been in hysterics? As soon as she heard you were here,
she began to be hysterical!”

“_Maman_, it’s you who are hysterical now, not I,” Lise’s voice caroled
through a tiny crack of the door at the side. Her voice sounded as though
she wanted to laugh, but was doing her utmost to control it. Alyosha at
once noticed the crack, and no doubt Lise was peeping through it, but that
he could not see.

“And no wonder, Lise, no wonder ... your caprices will make me hysterical
too. But she is so ill, Alexey Fyodorovitch, she has been so ill all
night, feverish and moaning! I could hardly wait for the morning and for
Herzenstube to come. He says that he can make nothing of it, that we must
wait. Herzenstube always comes and says that he can make nothing of it. As
soon as you approached the house, she screamed, fell into hysterics, and
insisted on being wheeled back into this room here.”

“Mamma, I didn’t know he had come. It wasn’t on his account I wanted to be
wheeled into this room.”

“That’s not true, Lise, Yulia ran to tell you that Alexey Fyodorovitch was
coming. She was on the look-out for you.”

“My darling mamma, it’s not at all clever of you. But if you want to make
up for it and say something very clever, dear mamma, you’d better tell our
honored visitor, Alexey Fyodorovitch, that he has shown his want of wit by
venturing to us after what happened yesterday and although every one is
laughing at him.”

“Lise, you go too far. I declare I shall have to be severe. Who laughs at
him? I am so glad he has come, I need him, I can’t do without him. Oh,
Alexey Fyodorovitch, I am exceedingly unhappy!”

“But what’s the matter with you, mamma, darling?”

“Ah, your caprices, Lise, your fidgetiness, your illness, that awful night
of fever, that awful everlasting Herzenstube, everlasting, everlasting,
that’s the worst of it! Everything, in fact, everything.... Even that
miracle, too! Oh, how it has upset me, how it has shattered me, that
miracle, dear Alexey Fyodorovitch! And that tragedy in the drawing-room,
it’s more than I can bear, I warn you. I can’t bear it. A comedy, perhaps,
not a tragedy. Tell me, will Father Zossima live till to-morrow, will he?
Oh, my God! What is happening to me? Every minute I close my eyes and see
that it’s all nonsense, all nonsense.”

“I should be very grateful,” Alyosha interrupted suddenly, “if you could
give me a clean rag to bind up my finger with. I have hurt it, and it’s
very painful.”

Alyosha unbound his bitten finger. The handkerchief was soaked with blood.
Madame Hohlakov screamed and shut her eyes.

“Good heavens, what a wound, how awful!”

But as soon as Lise saw Alyosha’s finger through the crack, she flung the
door wide open.

“Come, come here,” she cried, imperiously. “No nonsense now! Good heavens,
why did you stand there saying nothing about it all this time? He might
have bled to death, mamma! How did you do it? Water, water! You must wash
it first of all, simply hold it in cold water to stop the pain, and keep
it there, keep it there.... Make haste, mamma, some water in a slop-basin.
But do make haste,” she finished nervously. She was quite frightened at
the sight of Alyosha’s wound.

“Shouldn’t we send for Herzenstube?” cried Madame Hohlakov.

“Mamma, you’ll be the death of me. Your Herzenstube will come and say that
he can make nothing of it! Water, water! Mamma, for goodness’ sake go
yourself and hurry Yulia, she is such a slowcoach and never can come
quickly! Make haste, mamma, or I shall die.”

“Why, it’s nothing much,” cried Alyosha, frightened at this alarm.

Yulia ran in with water and Alyosha put his finger in it.

“Some lint, mamma, for mercy’s sake, bring some lint and that muddy
caustic lotion for wounds, what’s it called? We’ve got some. You know
where the bottle is, mamma; it’s in your bedroom in the right-hand
cupboard, there’s a big bottle of it there with the lint.”

“I’ll bring everything in a minute, Lise, only don’t scream and don’t
fuss. You see how bravely Alexey Fyodorovitch bears it. Where did you get
such a dreadful wound, Alexey Fyodorovitch?”

Madame Hohlakov hastened away. This was all Lise was waiting for.

“First of all, answer the question, where did you get hurt like this?” she
asked Alyosha, quickly. “And then I’ll talk to you about something quite
different. Well?”

Instinctively feeling that the time of her mother’s absence was precious
for her, Alyosha hastened to tell her of his enigmatic meeting with the
schoolboys in the fewest words possible. Lise clasped her hands at his
story.

“How can you, and in that dress too, associate with schoolboys?” she cried
angrily, as though she had a right to control him. “You are nothing but a
boy yourself if you can do that, a perfect boy! But you must find out for
me about that horrid boy and tell me all about it, for there’s some
mystery in it. Now for the second thing, but first a question: does the
pain prevent you talking about utterly unimportant things, but talking
sensibly?”

“Of course not, and I don’t feel much pain now.”

“That’s because your finger is in the water. It must be changed directly,
for it will get warm in a minute. Yulia, bring some ice from the cellar
and another basin of water. Now she is gone, I can speak; will you give me
the letter I sent you yesterday, dear Alexey Fyodorovitch—be quick, for
mamma will be back in a minute and I don’t want—”

“I haven’t got the letter.”

“That’s not true, you have. I knew you would say that. You’ve got it in
that pocket. I’ve been regretting that joke all night. Give me back the
letter at once, give it me.”

“I’ve left it at home.”

“But you can’t consider me as a child, a little girl, after that silly
joke! I beg your pardon for that silliness, but you must bring me the
letter, if you really haven’t got it—bring it to-day, you must, you must.”

“To-day I can’t possibly, for I am going back to the monastery and I
shan’t come and see you for the next two days—three or four perhaps—for
Father Zossima—”

“Four days, what nonsense! Listen. Did you laugh at me very much?”

“I didn’t laugh at all.”

“Why not?”

“Because I believed all you said.”

“You are insulting me!”

“Not at all. As soon as I read it, I thought that all that would come to
pass, for as soon as Father Zossima dies, I am to leave the monastery.
Then I shall go back and finish my studies, and when you reach the legal
age we will be married. I shall love you. Though I haven’t had time to
think about it, I believe I couldn’t find a better wife than you, and
Father Zossima tells me I must marry.”

“But I am a cripple, wheeled about in a chair,” laughed Lise, flushing
crimson.

“I’ll wheel you about myself, but I’m sure you’ll get well by then.”

“But you are mad,” said Lise, nervously, “to make all this nonsense out of
a joke! Here’s mamma, very _à propos_, perhaps. Mamma, how slow you always
are, how can you be so long! And here’s Yulia with the ice!”

“Oh, Lise, don’t scream, above all things don’t scream. That scream drives
me ... How can I help it when you put the lint in another place? I’ve been
hunting and hunting—I do believe you did it on purpose.”

“But I couldn’t tell that he would come with a bad finger, or else perhaps
I might have done it on purpose. My darling mamma, you begin to say really
witty things.”

“Never mind my being witty, but I must say you show nice feeling for
Alexey Fyodorovitch’s sufferings! Oh, my dear Alexey Fyodorovitch, what’s
killing me is no one thing in particular, not Herzenstube, but everything
together, that’s what is too much for me.”

“That’s enough, mamma, enough about Herzenstube,” Lise laughed gayly.
“Make haste with the lint and the lotion, mamma. That’s simply Goulard’s
water, Alexey Fyodorovitch, I remember the name now, but it’s a splendid
lotion. Would you believe it, mamma, on the way here he had a fight with
the boys in the street, and it was a boy bit his finger, isn’t he a child,
a child himself? Is he fit to be married after that? For only fancy, he
wants to be married, mamma. Just think of him married, wouldn’t it be
funny, wouldn’t it be awful?”

And Lise kept laughing her thin hysterical giggle, looking slyly at
Alyosha.

“But why married, Lise? What makes you talk of such a thing? It’s quite
out of place—and perhaps the boy was rabid.”

“Why, mamma! As though there were rabid boys!”

“Why not, Lise, as though I had said something stupid! Your boy might have
been bitten by a mad dog and he would become mad and bite any one near
him. How well she has bandaged it, Alexey Fyodorovitch! I couldn’t have
done it. Do you still feel the pain?”

“It’s nothing much now.”

“You don’t feel afraid of water?” asked Lise.

“Come, that’s enough, Lise, perhaps I really was rather too quick talking
of the boy being rabid, and you pounced upon it at once Katerina Ivanovna
has only just heard that you are here, Alexey Fyodorovitch, she simply
rushed at me, she’s dying to see you, dying!”

“Ach, mamma, go to them yourself. He can’t go just now, he is in too much
pain.”

“Not at all, I can go quite well,” said Alyosha.

“What! You are going away? Is that what you say?”

“Well, when I’ve seen them, I’ll come back here and we can talk as much as
you like. But I should like to see Katerina Ivanovna at once, for I am
very anxious to be back at the monastery as soon as I can.”

“Mamma, take him away quickly. Alexey Fyodorovitch, don’t trouble to come
and see me afterwards, but go straight back to your monastery and a good
riddance. I want to sleep, I didn’t sleep all night.”

“Ah, Lise, you are only making fun, but how I wish you would sleep!” cried
Madame Hohlakov.

“I don’t know what I’ve done.... I’ll stay another three minutes, five if
you like,” muttered Alyosha.

“Even five! Do take him away quickly, mamma, he is a monster.”

“Lise, you are crazy. Let us go, Alexey Fyodorovitch, she is too
capricious to-day. I am afraid to cross her. Oh, the trouble one has with
nervous girls! Perhaps she really will be able to sleep after seeing you.
How quickly you have made her sleepy, and how fortunate it is!”

“Ah, mamma, how sweetly you talk! I must kiss you for it, mamma.”

“And I kiss you too, Lise. Listen, Alexey Fyodorovitch,” Madame Hohlakov
began mysteriously and importantly, speaking in a rapid whisper. “I don’t
want to suggest anything, I don’t want to lift the veil, you will see for
yourself what’s going on. It’s appalling. It’s the most fantastic farce.
She loves your brother, Ivan, and she is doing her utmost to persuade
herself she loves your brother, Dmitri. It’s appalling! I’ll go in with
you, and if they don’t turn me out, I’ll stay to the end.”



Chapter V. A Laceration In The Drawing-Room


But in the drawing-room the conversation was already over. Katerina
Ivanovna was greatly excited, though she looked resolute. At the moment
Alyosha and Madame Hohlakov entered, Ivan Fyodorovitch stood up to take
leave. His face was rather pale, and Alyosha looked at him anxiously. For
this moment was to solve a doubt, a harassing enigma which had for some
time haunted Alyosha. During the preceding month it had been several times
suggested to him that his brother Ivan was in love with Katerina Ivanovna,
and, what was more, that he meant “to carry her off” from Dmitri. Until
quite lately the idea seemed to Alyosha monstrous, though it worried him
extremely. He loved both his brothers, and dreaded such rivalry between
them. Meantime, Dmitri had said outright on the previous day that he was
glad that Ivan was his rival, and that it was a great assistance to him,
Dmitri. In what way did it assist him? To marry Grushenka? But that
Alyosha considered the worst thing possible. Besides all this, Alyosha had
till the evening before implicitly believed that Katerina Ivanovna had a
steadfast and passionate love for Dmitri; but he had only believed it till
the evening before. He had fancied, too, that she was incapable of loving
a man like Ivan, and that she did love Dmitri, and loved him just as he
was, in spite of all the strangeness of such a passion.

But during yesterday’s scene with Grushenka another idea had struck him.
The word “lacerating,” which Madame Hohlakov had just uttered, almost made
him start, because half waking up towards daybreak that night he had cried
out “Laceration, laceration,” probably applying it to his dream. He had
been dreaming all night of the previous day’s scene at Katerina
Ivanovna’s. Now Alyosha was impressed by Madame Hohlakov’s blunt and
persistent assertion that Katerina Ivanovna was in love with Ivan, and
only deceived herself through some sort of pose, from “self-laceration,”
and tortured herself by her pretended love for Dmitri from some fancied
duty of gratitude. “Yes,” he thought, “perhaps the whole truth lies in
those words.” But in that case what was Ivan’s position? Alyosha felt
instinctively that a character like Katerina Ivanovna’s must dominate, and
she could only dominate some one like Dmitri, and never a man like Ivan.
For Dmitri might at last submit to her domination “to his own happiness”
(which was what Alyosha would have desired), but Ivan—no, Ivan could not
submit to her, and such submission would not give him happiness. Alyosha
could not help believing that of Ivan. And now all these doubts and
reflections flitted through his mind as he entered the drawing-room.
Another idea, too, forced itself upon him: “What if she loved neither of
them—neither Ivan nor Dmitri?”

It must be noted that Alyosha felt as it were ashamed of his own thoughts
and blamed himself when they kept recurring to him during the last month.
“What do I know about love and women and how can I decide such questions?”
he thought reproachfully, after such doubts and surmises. And yet it was
impossible not to think about it. He felt instinctively that this rivalry
was of immense importance in his brothers’ lives and that a great deal
depended upon it.

“One reptile will devour the other,” Ivan had pronounced the day before,
speaking in anger of his father and Dmitri. So Ivan looked upon Dmitri as
a reptile, and perhaps had long done so. Was it perhaps since he had known
Katerina Ivanovna? That phrase had, of course, escaped Ivan unawares
yesterday, but that only made it more important. If he felt like that,
what chance was there of peace? Were there not, on the contrary, new
grounds for hatred and hostility in their family? And with which of them
was Alyosha to sympathize? And what was he to wish for each of them? He
loved them both, but what could he desire for each in the midst of these
conflicting interests? He might go quite astray in this maze, and
Alyosha’s heart could not endure uncertainty, because his love was always
of an active character. He was incapable of passive love. If he loved any
one, he set to work at once to help him. And to do so he must know what he
was aiming at; he must know for certain what was best for each, and having
ascertained this it was natural for him to help them both. But instead of
a definite aim, he found nothing but uncertainty and perplexity on all
sides. “It was lacerating,” as was said just now. But what could he
understand even in this “laceration”? He did not understand the first word
in this perplexing maze.

Seeing Alyosha, Katerina Ivanovna said quickly and joyfully to Ivan, who
had already got up to go, “A minute! Stay another minute! I want to hear
the opinion of this person here whom I trust absolutely. Don’t go away,”
she added, addressing Madame Hohlakov. She made Alyosha sit down beside
her, and Madame Hohlakov sat opposite, by Ivan.

“You are all my friends here, all I have in the world, my dear friends,”
she began warmly, in a voice which quivered with genuine tears of
suffering, and Alyosha’s heart warmed to her at once. “You, Alexey
Fyodorovitch, were witness yesterday of that abominable scene, and saw
what I did. You did not see it, Ivan Fyodorovitch, he did. What he thought
of me yesterday I don’t know. I only know one thing, that if it were
repeated to-day, this minute, I should express the same feelings again as
yesterday—the same feelings, the same words, the same actions. You
remember my actions, Alexey Fyodorovitch; you checked me in one of them”
... (as she said that, she flushed and her eyes shone). “I must tell you
that I can’t get over it. Listen, Alexey Fyodorovitch. I don’t even know
whether I still love _him_. I feel _pity_ for him, and that is a poor sign
of love. If I loved him, if I still loved him, perhaps I shouldn’t be
sorry for him now, but should hate him.”

Her voice quivered, and tears glittered on her eyelashes. Alyosha
shuddered inwardly. “That girl is truthful and sincere,” he thought, “and
she does not love Dmitri any more.”

“That’s true, that’s true,” cried Madame Hohlakov.

“Wait, dear. I haven’t told you the chief, the final decision I came to
during the night. I feel that perhaps my decision is a terrible one—for
me, but I foresee that nothing will induce me to change it—nothing. It
will be so all my life. My dear, kind, ever-faithful and generous adviser,
the one friend I have in the world, Ivan Fyodorovitch, with his deep
insight into the heart, approves and commends my decision. He knows it.”

“Yes, I approve of it,” Ivan assented, in a subdued but firm voice.

“But I should like Alyosha, too (Ah! Alexey Fyodorovitch, forgive my
calling you simply Alyosha), I should like Alexey Fyodorovitch, too, to
tell me before my two friends whether I am right. I feel instinctively
that you, Alyosha, my dear brother (for you are a dear brother to me),”
she said again ecstatically, taking his cold hand in her hot one, “I
foresee that your decision, your approval, will bring me peace, in spite
of all my sufferings, for, after your words, I shall be calm and submit—I
feel that.”

“I don’t know what you are asking me,” said Alyosha, flushing. “I only
know that I love you and at this moment wish for your happiness more than
my own!... But I know nothing about such affairs,” something impelled him
to add hurriedly.

“In such affairs, Alexey Fyodorovitch, in such affairs, the chief thing is
honor and duty and something higher—I don’t know what—but higher perhaps
even than duty. I am conscious of this irresistible feeling in my heart,
and it compels me irresistibly. But it may all be put in two words. I’ve
already decided, even if he marries that—creature,” she began solemnly,
“whom I never, never can forgive, _even then I will not abandon him_.
Henceforward I will never, never abandon him!” she cried, breaking into a
sort of pale, hysterical ecstasy. “Not that I would run after him
continually, get in his way and worry him. Oh, no! I will go away to
another town—where you like—but I will watch over him all my life—I will
watch over him all my life unceasingly. When he becomes unhappy with that
woman, and that is bound to happen quite soon, let him come to me and he
will find a friend, a sister.... Only a sister, of course, and so for
ever; but he will learn at least that that sister is really his sister,
who loves him and has sacrificed all her life to him. I will gain my
point. I will insist on his knowing me and confiding entirely in me,
without reserve,” she cried, in a sort of frenzy. “I will be a god to whom
he can pray—and that, at least, he owes me for his treachery and for what
I suffered yesterday through him. And let him see that all my life I will
be true to him and the promise I gave him, in spite of his being untrue
and betraying me. I will—I will become nothing but a means for his
happiness, or—how shall I say?—an instrument, a machine for his happiness,
and that for my whole life, my whole life, and that he may see that all
his life! That’s my decision. Ivan Fyodorovitch fully approves me.”

She was breathless. She had perhaps intended to express her idea with more
dignity, art and naturalness, but her speech was too hurried and crude. It
was full of youthful impulsiveness, it betrayed that she was still
smarting from yesterday’s insult, and that her pride craved satisfaction.
She felt this herself. Her face suddenly darkened, an unpleasant look came
into her eyes. Alyosha at once saw it and felt a pang of sympathy. His
brother Ivan made it worse by adding:

“I’ve only expressed my own view,” he said. “From any one else, this would
have been affected and overstrained, but from you—no. Any other woman
would have been wrong, but you are right. I don’t know how to explain it,
but I see that you are absolutely genuine and, therefore, you are right.”

“But that’s only for the moment. And what does this moment stand for?
Nothing but yesterday’s insult.” Madame Hohlakov obviously had not
intended to interfere, but she could not refrain from this very just
comment.

“Quite so, quite so,” cried Ivan, with peculiar eagerness, obviously
annoyed at being interrupted, “in any one else this moment would be only
due to yesterday’s impression and would be only a moment. But with
Katerina Ivanovna’s character, that moment will last all her life. What
for any one else would be only a promise is for her an everlasting
burdensome, grim perhaps, but unflagging duty. And she will be sustained
by the feeling of this duty being fulfilled. Your life, Katerina Ivanovna,
will henceforth be spent in painful brooding over your own feelings, your
own heroism, and your own suffering; but in the end that suffering will be
softened and will pass into sweet contemplation of the fulfillment of a
bold and proud design. Yes, proud it certainly is, and desperate in any
case, but a triumph for you. And the consciousness of it will at last be a
source of complete satisfaction and will make you resigned to everything
else.”

This was unmistakably said with some malice and obviously with intention;
even perhaps with no desire to conceal that he spoke ironically and with
intention.

“Oh, dear, how mistaken it all is!” Madame Hohlakov cried again.

“Alexey Fyodorovitch, you speak. I want dreadfully to know what you will
say!” cried Katerina Ivanovna, and burst into tears. Alyosha got up from
the sofa.

“It’s nothing, nothing!” she went on through her tears. “I’m upset, I
didn’t sleep last night. But by the side of two such friends as you and
your brother I still feel strong—for I know—you two will never desert me.”

“Unluckily I am obliged to return to Moscow—perhaps to-morrow—and to leave
you for a long time—And, unluckily, it’s unavoidable,” Ivan said suddenly.

“To-morrow—to Moscow!” her face was suddenly contorted; “but—but, dear me,
how fortunate!” she cried in a voice suddenly changed. In one instant
there was no trace left of her tears. She underwent an instantaneous
transformation, which amazed Alyosha. Instead of a poor, insulted girl,
weeping in a sort of “laceration,” he saw a woman completely
self-possessed and even exceedingly pleased, as though something agreeable
had just happened.

“Oh, not fortunate that I am losing you, of course not,” she corrected
herself suddenly, with a charming society smile. “Such a friend as you are
could not suppose that. I am only too unhappy at losing you.” She rushed
impulsively at Ivan, and seizing both his hands, pressed them warmly. “But
what is fortunate is that you will be able in Moscow to see auntie and
Agafya and to tell them all the horror of my present position. You can
speak with complete openness to Agafya, but spare dear auntie. You will
know how to do that. You can’t think how wretched I was yesterday and this
morning, wondering how I could write them that dreadful letter—for one can
never tell such things in a letter.... Now it will be easy for me to
write, for you will see them and explain everything. Oh, how glad I am!
But I am only glad of that, believe me. Of course, no one can take your
place.... I will run at once to write the letter,” she finished suddenly,
and took a step as though to go out of the room.

“And what about Alyosha and his opinion, which you were so desperately
anxious to hear?” cried Madame Hohlakov. There was a sarcastic, angry note
in her voice.

“I had not forgotten that,” cried Katerina Ivanovna, coming to a sudden
standstill, “and why are you so antagonistic at such a moment?” she added,
with warm and bitter reproachfulness. “What I said, I repeat. I must have
his opinion. More than that, I must have his decision! As he says, so it
shall be. You see how anxious I am for your words, Alexey Fyodorovitch....
But what’s the matter?”

“I couldn’t have believed it. I can’t understand it!” Alyosha cried
suddenly in distress.

“What? What?”

“He is going to Moscow, and you cry out that you are glad. You said that
on purpose! And you begin explaining that you are not glad of that but
sorry to be—losing a friend. But that was acting, too—you were playing a
part—as in a theater!”

“In a theater? What? What do you mean?” exclaimed Katerina Ivanovna,
profoundly astonished, flushing crimson, and frowning.

“Though you assure him you are sorry to lose a friend in him, you persist
in telling him to his face that it’s fortunate he is going,” said Alyosha
breathlessly. He was standing at the table and did not sit down.

“What are you talking about? I don’t understand.”

“I don’t understand myself.... I seemed to see in a flash ... I know I am
not saying it properly, but I’ll say it all the same,” Alyosha went on in
the same shaking and broken voice. “What I see is that perhaps you don’t
love Dmitri at all ... and never have, from the beginning.... And Dmitri,
too, has never loved you ... and only esteems you.... I really don’t know
how I dare to say all this, but somebody must tell the truth ... for
nobody here will tell the truth.”

“What truth?” cried Katerina Ivanovna, and there was an hysterical ring in
her voice.

“I’ll tell you,” Alyosha went on with desperate haste, as though he were
jumping from the top of a house. “Call Dmitri; I will fetch him—and let
him come here and take your hand and take Ivan’s and join your hands. For
you’re torturing Ivan, simply because you love him—and torturing him,
because you love Dmitri through ‘self-laceration’—with an unreal
love—because you’ve persuaded yourself.”

Alyosha broke off and was silent.

“You ... you ... you are a little religious idiot—that’s what you are!”
Katerina Ivanovna snapped. Her face was white and her lips were moving
with anger.

Ivan suddenly laughed and got up. His hat was in his hand.

“You are mistaken, my good Alyosha,” he said, with an expression Alyosha
had never seen in his face before—an expression of youthful sincerity and
strong, irresistibly frank feeling. “Katerina Ivanovna has never cared for
me! She has known all the time that I cared for her—though I never said a
word of my love to her—she knew, but she didn’t care for me. I have never
been her friend either, not for one moment; she is too proud to need my
friendship. She kept me at her side as a means of revenge. She revenged
with me and on me all the insults which she has been continually receiving
from Dmitri ever since their first meeting. For even that first meeting
has rankled in her heart as an insult—that’s what her heart is like! She
has talked to me of nothing but her love for him. I am going now; but,
believe me, Katerina Ivanovna, you really love him. And the more he
insults you, the more you love him—that’s your ‘laceration.’ You love him
just as he is; you love him for insulting you. If he reformed, you’d give
him up at once and cease to love him. But you need him so as to
contemplate continually your heroic fidelity and to reproach him for
infidelity. And it all comes from your pride. Oh, there’s a great deal of
humiliation and self-abasement about it, but it all comes from pride.... I
am too young and I’ve loved you too much. I know that I ought not to say
this, that it would be more dignified on my part simply to leave you, and
it would be less offensive for you. But I am going far away, and shall
never come back.... It is for ever. I don’t want to sit beside a
‘laceration.’... But I don’t know how to speak now. I’ve said
everything.... Good-by, Katerina Ivanovna; you can’t be angry with me, for
I am a hundred times more severely punished than you, if only by the fact
that I shall never see you again. Good-by! I don’t want your hand. You
have tortured me too deliberately for me to be able to forgive you at this
moment. I shall forgive you later, but now I don’t want your hand. ‘Den
Dank, Dame, begehr ich nicht,’ ” he added, with a forced smile, showing,
however, that he could read Schiller, and read him till he knew him by
heart—which Alyosha would never have believed. He went out of the room
without saying good-by even to his hostess, Madame Hohlakov. Alyosha
clasped his hands.

“Ivan!” he cried desperately after him. “Come back, Ivan! No, nothing will
induce him to come back now!” he cried again, regretfully realizing it;
“but it’s my fault, my fault. I began it! Ivan spoke angrily, wrongly.
Unjustly and angrily. He must come back here, come back,” Alyosha kept
exclaiming frantically.

Katerina Ivanovna went suddenly into the next room.

“You have done no harm. You behaved beautifully, like an angel,” Madame
Hohlakov whispered rapidly and ecstatically to Alyosha. “I will do my
utmost to prevent Ivan Fyodorovitch from going.”

Her face beamed with delight, to the great distress of Alyosha, but
Katerina Ivanovna suddenly returned. She had two hundred-rouble notes in
her hand.

“I have a great favor to ask of you, Alexey Fyodorovitch,” she began,
addressing Alyosha with an apparently calm and even voice, as though
nothing had happened. “A week—yes, I think it was a week ago—Dmitri
Fyodorovitch was guilty of a hasty and unjust action—a very ugly action.
There is a low tavern here, and in it he met that discharged officer, that
captain, whom your father used to employ in some business. Dmitri
Fyodorovitch somehow lost his temper with this captain, seized him by the
beard and dragged him out into the street and for some distance along it,
in that insulting fashion. And I am told that his son, a boy, quite a
child, who is at the school here, saw it and ran beside them crying and
begging for his father, appealing to every one to defend him, while every
one laughed. You must forgive me, Alexey Fyodorovitch, I cannot think
without indignation of that disgraceful action of _his_ ... one of those
actions of which only Dmitri Fyodorovitch would be capable in his anger
... and in his passions! I can’t describe it even.... I can’t find my
words. I’ve made inquiries about his victim, and find he is quite a poor
man. His name is Snegiryov. He did something wrong in the army and was
discharged. I can’t tell you what. And now he has sunk into terrible
destitution, with his family—an unhappy family of sick children, and, I
believe, an insane wife. He has been living here a long time; he used to
work as a copying clerk, but now he is getting nothing. I thought if you
... that is I thought ... I don’t know. I am so confused. You see, I
wanted to ask you, my dear Alexey Fyodorovitch, to go to him, to find some
excuse to go to them—I mean to that captain—oh, goodness, how badly I
explain it!—and delicately, carefully, as only you know how to” (Alyosha
blushed), “manage to give him this assistance, these two hundred roubles.
He will be sure to take it.... I mean, persuade him to take it.... Or,
rather, what do I mean? You see it’s not by way of compensation to prevent
him from taking proceedings (for I believe he meant to), but simply a
token of sympathy, of a desire to assist him from me, Dmitri
Fyodorovitch’s betrothed, not from himself.... But you know.... I would go
myself, but you’ll know how to do it ever so much better. He lives in Lake
Street, in the house of a woman called Kalmikov.... For God’s sake, Alexey
Fyodorovitch, do it for me, and now ... now I am rather ... tired.
Good-by!”

She turned and disappeared behind the portière so quickly that Alyosha had
not time to utter a word, though he wanted to speak. He longed to beg her
pardon, to blame himself, to say something, for his heart was full and he
could not bear to go out of the room without it. But Madame Hohlakov took
him by the hand and drew him along with her. In the hall she stopped him
again as before.

“She is proud, she is struggling with herself; but kind, charming,
generous,” she exclaimed, in a half-whisper. “Oh, how I love her,
especially sometimes, and how glad I am again of everything! Dear Alexey
Fyodorovitch, you didn’t know, but I must tell you, that we all, all—both
her aunts, I and all of us, Lise, even—have been hoping and praying for
nothing for the last month but that she may give up your favorite Dmitri,
who takes no notice of her and does not care for her, and may marry Ivan
Fyodorovitch—such an excellent and cultivated young man, who loves her
more than anything in the world. We are in a regular plot to bring it
about, and I am even staying on here perhaps on that account.”

“But she has been crying—she has been wounded again,” cried Alyosha.

“Never trust a woman’s tears, Alexey Fyodorovitch. I am never for the
women in such cases. I am always on the side of the men.”

“Mamma, you are spoiling him,” Lise’s little voice cried from behind the
door.

“No, it was all my fault. I am horribly to blame,” Alyosha repeated
unconsoled, hiding his face in his hands in an agony of remorse for his
indiscretion.

“Quite the contrary; you behaved like an angel, like an angel. I am ready
to say so a thousand times over.”

“Mamma, how has he behaved like an angel?” Lise’s voice was heard again.

“I somehow fancied all at once,” Alyosha went on as though he had not
heard Lise, “that she loved Ivan, and so I said that stupid thing.... What
will happen now?”

“To whom, to whom?” cried Lise. “Mamma, you really want to be the death of
me. I ask you and you don’t answer.”

At the moment the maid ran in.

“Katerina Ivanovna is ill.... She is crying, struggling ... hysterics.”

“What is the matter?” cried Lise, in a tone of real anxiety. “Mamma, I
shall be having hysterics, and not she!”

“Lise, for mercy’s sake, don’t scream, don’t persecute me. At your age one
can’t know everything that grown-up people know. I’ll come and tell you
everything you ought to know. Oh, mercy on us! I am coming, I am
coming.... Hysterics is a good sign, Alexey Fyodorovitch; it’s an
excellent thing that she is hysterical. That’s just as it ought to be. In
such cases I am always against the woman, against all these feminine tears
and hysterics. Run and say, Yulia, that I’ll fly to her. As for Ivan
Fyodorovitch’s going away like that, it’s her own fault. But he won’t go
away. Lise, for mercy’s sake, don’t scream! Oh, yes; you are not
screaming. It’s I am screaming. Forgive your mamma; but I am delighted,
delighted, delighted! Did you notice, Alexey Fyodorovitch, how young, how
young Ivan Fyodorovitch was just now when he went out, when he said all
that and went out? I thought he was so learned, such a _savant_, and all
of a sudden he behaved so warmly, openly, and youthfully, with such
youthful inexperience, and it was all so fine, like you.... And the way he
repeated that German verse, it was just like you! But I must fly, I must
fly! Alexey Fyodorovitch, make haste to carry out her commission, and then
make haste back. Lise, do you want anything now? For mercy’s sake, don’t
keep Alexey Fyodorovitch a minute. He will come back to you at once.”

Madame Hohlakov at last ran off. Before leaving, Alyosha would have opened
the door to see Lise.

“On no account,” cried Lise. “On no account now. Speak through the door.
How have you come to be an angel? That’s the only thing I want to know.”

“For an awful piece of stupidity, Lise! Good-by!”

“Don’t dare to go away like that!” Lise was beginning.

“Lise, I have a real sorrow! I’ll be back directly, but I have a great,
great sorrow!”

And he ran out of the room.



Chapter VI. A Laceration In The Cottage


He certainly was really grieved in a way he had seldom been before. He had
rushed in like a fool, and meddled in what? In a love-affair. “But what do
I know about it? What can I tell about such things?” he repeated to
himself for the hundredth time, flushing crimson. “Oh, being ashamed would
be nothing; shame is only the punishment I deserve. The trouble is I shall
certainly have caused more unhappiness.... And Father Zossima sent me to
reconcile and bring them together. Is this the way to bring them
together?” Then he suddenly remembered how he had tried to join their
hands, and he felt fearfully ashamed again. “Though I acted quite
sincerely, I must be more sensible in the future,” he concluded suddenly,
and did not even smile at his conclusion.

Katerina Ivanovna’s commission took him to Lake Street, and his brother
Dmitri lived close by, in a turning out of Lake Street. Alyosha decided to
go to him in any case before going to the captain, though he had a
presentiment that he would not find his brother. He suspected that he
would intentionally keep out of his way now, but he must find him anyhow.
Time was passing: the thought of his dying elder had not left Alyosha for
one minute from the time he set off from the monastery.

There was one point which interested him particularly about Katerina
Ivanovna’s commission; when she had mentioned the captain’s son, the
little schoolboy who had run beside his father crying, the idea had at
once struck Alyosha that this must be the schoolboy who had bitten his
finger when he, Alyosha, asked him what he had done to hurt him. Now
Alyosha felt practically certain of this, though he could not have said
why. Thinking of another subject was a relief, and he resolved to think no
more about the “mischief” he had done, and not to torture himself with
remorse, but to do what he had to do, let come what would. At that thought
he was completely comforted. Turning to the street where Dmitri lodged, he
felt hungry, and taking out of his pocket the roll he had brought from his
father’s, he ate it. It made him feel stronger.

Dmitri was not at home. The people of the house, an old cabinet-maker, his
son, and his old wife, looked with positive suspicion at Alyosha. “He
hasn’t slept here for the last three nights. Maybe he has gone away,” the
old man said in answer to Alyosha’s persistent inquiries. Alyosha saw that
he was answering in accordance with instructions. When he asked whether he
were not at Grushenka’s or in hiding at Foma’s (Alyosha spoke so freely on
purpose), all three looked at him in alarm. “They are fond of him, they
are doing their best for him,” thought Alyosha. “That’s good.”

At last he found the house in Lake Street. It was a decrepit little house,
sunk on one side, with three windows looking into the street, and with a
muddy yard, in the middle of which stood a solitary cow. He crossed the
yard and found the door opening into the passage. On the left of the
passage lived the old woman of the house with her old daughter. Both
seemed to be deaf. In answer to his repeated inquiry for the captain, one
of them at last understood that he was asking for their lodgers, and
pointed to a door across the passage. The captain’s lodging turned out to
be a simple cottage room. Alyosha had his hand on the iron latch to open
the door, when he was struck by the strange hush within. Yet he knew from
Katerina Ivanovna’s words that the man had a family. “Either they are all
asleep or perhaps they have heard me coming and are waiting for me to open
the door. I’d better knock first,” and he knocked. An answer came, but not
at once, after an interval of perhaps ten seconds.

“Who’s there?” shouted some one in a loud and very angry voice.

Then Alyosha opened the door and crossed the threshold. He found himself
in a regular peasant’s room. Though it was large, it was cumbered up with
domestic belongings of all sorts, and there were several people in it. On
the left was a large Russian stove. From the stove to the window on the
left was a string running across the room, and on it there were rags
hanging. There was a bedstead against the wall on each side, right and
left, covered with knitted quilts. On the one on the left was a pyramid of
four print-covered pillows, each smaller than the one beneath. On the
other there was only one very small pillow. The opposite corner was
screened off by a curtain or a sheet hung on a string. Behind this curtain
could be seen a bed made up on a bench and a chair. The rough square table
of plain wood had been moved into the middle window. The three windows,
which consisted each of four tiny greenish mildewy panes, gave little
light, and were close shut, so that the room was not very light and rather
stuffy. On the table was a frying-pan with the remains of some fried eggs,
a half-eaten piece of bread, and a small bottle with a few drops of vodka.

A woman of genteel appearance, wearing a cotton gown, was sitting on a
chair by the bed on the left. Her face was thin and yellow, and her sunken
cheeks betrayed at the first glance that she was ill. But what struck
Alyosha most was the expression in the poor woman’s eyes—a look of
surprised inquiry and yet of haughty pride. And while he was talking to
her husband, her big brown eyes moved from one speaker to the other with
the same haughty and questioning expression. Beside her at the window
stood a young girl, rather plain, with scanty reddish hair, poorly but
very neatly dressed. She looked disdainfully at Alyosha as he came in.
Beside the other bed was sitting another female figure. She was a very sad
sight, a young girl of about twenty, but hunchback and crippled “with
withered legs,” as Alyosha was told afterwards. Her crutches stood in the
corner close by. The strikingly beautiful and gentle eyes of this poor
girl looked with mild serenity at Alyosha. A man of forty-five was sitting
at the table, finishing the fried eggs. He was spare, small and weakly
built. He had reddish hair and a scanty light-colored beard, very much
like a wisp of tow (this comparison and the phrase “a wisp of tow” flashed
at once into Alyosha’s mind for some reason, he remembered it afterwards).
It was obviously this gentleman who had shouted to him, as there was no
other man in the room. But when Alyosha went in, he leapt up from the
bench on which he was sitting, and, hastily wiping his mouth with a ragged
napkin, darted up to Alyosha.

“It’s a monk come to beg for the monastery. A nice place to come to!” the
girl standing in the left corner said aloud. The man spun round instantly
towards her and answered her in an excited and breaking voice:

“No, Varvara, you are wrong. Allow me to ask,” he turned again to Alyosha,
“what has brought you to—our retreat?”

Alyosha looked attentively at him. It was the first time he had seen him.
There was something angular, flurried and irritable about him. Though he
had obviously just been drinking, he was not drunk. There was
extraordinary impudence in his expression, and yet, strange to say, at the
same time there was fear. He looked like a man who had long been kept in
subjection and had submitted to it, and now had suddenly turned and was
trying to assert himself. Or, better still, like a man who wants
dreadfully to hit you but is horribly afraid you will hit him. In his
words and in the intonation of his shrill voice there was a sort of crazy
humor, at times spiteful and at times cringing, and continually shifting
from one tone to another. The question about “our retreat” he had asked as
it were quivering all over, rolling his eyes, and skipping up so close to
Alyosha that he instinctively drew back a step. He was dressed in a very
shabby dark cotton coat, patched and spotted. He wore checked trousers of
an extremely light color, long out of fashion, and of very thin material.
They were so crumpled and so short that he looked as though he had grown
out of them like a boy.

“I am Alexey Karamazov,” Alyosha began in reply.

“I quite understand that, sir,” the gentleman snapped out at once to
assure him that he knew who he was already. “I am Captain Snegiryov, sir,
but I am still desirous to know precisely what has led you—”

“Oh, I’ve come for nothing special. I wanted to have a word with you—if
only you allow me.”

“In that case, here is a chair, sir; kindly be seated. That’s what they
used to say in the old comedies, ‘kindly be seated,’ ” and with a rapid
gesture he seized an empty chair (it was a rough wooden chair, not
upholstered) and set it for him almost in the middle of the room; then,
taking another similar chair for himself, he sat down facing Alyosha, so
close to him that their knees almost touched.

“Nikolay Ilyitch Snegiryov, sir, formerly a captain in the Russian
infantry, put to shame for his vices, but still a captain. Though I might
not be one now for the way I talk; for the last half of my life I’ve
learnt to say ‘sir.’ It’s a word you use when you’ve come down in the
world.”

“That’s very true,” smiled Alyosha. “But is it used involuntarily or on
purpose?”

“As God’s above, it’s involuntary, and I usen’t to use it! I didn’t use
the word ‘sir’ all my life, but as soon as I sank into low water I began
to say ‘sir.’ It’s the work of a higher power. I see you are interested in
contemporary questions, but how can I have excited your curiosity, living
as I do in surroundings impossible for the exercise of hospitality?”

“I’ve come—about that business.”

“About what business?” the captain interrupted impatiently.

“About your meeting with my brother Dmitri Fyodorovitch,” Alyosha blurted
out awkwardly.

“What meeting, sir? You don’t mean that meeting? About my ‘wisp of tow,’
then?” He moved closer so that his knees positively knocked against
Alyosha. His lips were strangely compressed like a thread.

“What wisp of tow?” muttered Alyosha.

“He is come to complain of me, father!” cried a voice familiar to
Alyosha—the voice of the schoolboy—from behind the curtain. “I bit his
finger just now.” The curtain was pulled, and Alyosha saw his assailant
lying on a little bed made up on the bench and the chair in the corner
under the ikons. The boy lay covered by his coat and an old wadded quilt.
He was evidently unwell, and, judging by his glittering eyes, he was in a
fever. He looked at Alyosha without fear, as though he felt he was at home
and could not be touched.

“What! Did he bite your finger?” The captain jumped up from his chair.
“Was it your finger he bit?”

“Yes. He was throwing stones with other schoolboys. There were six of them
against him alone. I went up to him, and he threw a stone at me and then
another at my head. I asked him what I had done to him. And then he rushed
at me and bit my finger badly, I don’t know why.”

“I’ll thrash him, sir, at once—this minute!” The captain jumped up from
his seat.

“But I am not complaining at all, I am simply telling you ... I don’t want
him to be thrashed. Besides, he seems to be ill.”

“And do you suppose I’d thrash him? That I’d take my Ilusha and thrash him
before you for your satisfaction? Would you like it done at once, sir?”
said the captain, suddenly turning to Alyosha, as though he were going to
attack him. “I am sorry about your finger, sir; but instead of thrashing
Ilusha, would you like me to chop off my four fingers with this knife here
before your eyes to satisfy your just wrath? I should think four fingers
would be enough to satisfy your thirst for vengeance. You won’t ask for
the fifth one too?” He stopped short with a catch in his throat. Every
feature in his face was twitching and working; he looked extremely
defiant. He was in a sort of frenzy.

“I think I understand it all now,” said Alyosha gently and sorrowfully,
still keeping his seat. “So your boy is a good boy, he loves his father,
and he attacked me as the brother of your assailant.... Now I understand
it,” he repeated thoughtfully. “But my brother Dmitri Fyodorovitch regrets
his action, I know that, and if only it is possible for him to come to
you, or better still, to meet you in that same place, he will ask your
forgiveness before every one—if you wish it.”

“After pulling out my beard, you mean, he will ask my forgiveness? And he
thinks that will be a satisfactory finish, doesn’t he?”

“Oh, no! On the contrary, he will do anything you like and in any way you
like.”

“So if I were to ask his highness to go down on his knees before me in
that very tavern—‘The Metropolis’ it’s called—or in the market-place, he
would do it?”

“Yes, he would even go down on his knees.”

“You’ve pierced me to the heart, sir. Touched me to tears and pierced me
to the heart! I am only too sensible of your brother’s generosity. Allow
me to introduce my family, my two daughters and my son—my litter. If I
die, who will care for them, and while I live who but they will care for a
wretch like me? That’s a great thing the Lord has ordained for every man
of my sort, sir. For there must be some one able to love even a man like
me.”

“Ah, that’s perfectly true!” exclaimed Alyosha.

“Oh, do leave off playing the fool! Some idiot comes in, and you put us to
shame!” cried the girl by the window, suddenly turning to her father with
a disdainful and contemptuous air.

“Wait a little, Varvara!” cried her father, speaking peremptorily but
looking at her quite approvingly. “That’s her character,” he said,
addressing Alyosha again.


    “And in all nature there was naught
    That could find favor in his eyes—


or rather in the feminine: that could find favor in her eyes. But now let
me present you to my wife, Arina Petrovna. She is crippled, she is
forty-three; she can move, but very little. She is of humble origin. Arina
Petrovna, compose your countenance. This is Alexey Fyodorovitch Karamazov.
Get up, Alexey Fyodorovitch.” He took him by the hand and with unexpected
force pulled him up. “You must stand up to be introduced to a lady. It’s
not the Karamazov, mamma, who ... h’m ... etcetera, but his brother,
radiant with modest virtues. Come, Arina Petrovna, come, mamma, first your
hand to be kissed.”

And he kissed his wife’s hand respectfully and even tenderly. The girl at
the window turned her back indignantly on the scene; an expression of
extraordinary cordiality came over the haughtily inquiring face of the
woman.

“Good morning! Sit down, Mr. Tchernomazov,” she said.

“Karamazov, mamma, Karamazov. We are of humble origin,” he whispered
again.

“Well, Karamazov, or whatever it is, but I always think of
Tchernomazov.... Sit down. Why has he pulled you up? He calls me crippled,
but I am not, only my legs are swollen like barrels, and I am shriveled up
myself. Once I used to be so fat, but now it’s as though I had swallowed a
needle.”

“We are of humble origin,” the captain muttered again.

“Oh, father, father!” the hunchback girl, who had till then been silent on
her chair, said suddenly, and she hid her eyes in her handkerchief.

“Buffoon!” blurted out the girl at the window.

“Have you heard our news?” said the mother, pointing at her daughters.
“It’s like clouds coming over; the clouds pass and we have music again.
When we were with the army, we used to have many such guests. I don’t mean
to make any comparisons; every one to their taste. The deacon’s wife used
to come then and say, ‘Alexandr Alexandrovitch is a man of the noblest
heart, but Nastasya Petrovna,’ she would say, ‘is of the brood of hell.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘that’s a matter of taste; but you are a little spitfire.’
‘And you want keeping in your place,’ says she. ‘You black sword,’ said I,
‘who asked you to teach me?’ ‘But my breath,’ says she, ‘is clean, and
yours is unclean.’ ‘You ask all the officers whether my breath is
unclean.’ And ever since then I had it in my mind. Not long ago I was
sitting here as I am now, when I saw that very general come in who came
here for Easter, and I asked him: ‘Your Excellency,’ said I, ‘can a lady’s
breath be unpleasant?’ ‘Yes,’ he answered; ‘you ought to open a
window-pane or open the door, for the air is not fresh here.’ And they all
go on like that! And what is my breath to them? The dead smell worse
still! ‘I won’t spoil the air,’ said I, ‘I’ll order some slippers and go
away.’ My darlings, don’t blame your own mother! Nikolay Ilyitch, how is
it I can’t please you? There’s only Ilusha who comes home from school and
loves me. Yesterday he brought me an apple. Forgive your own
mother—forgive a poor lonely creature! Why has my breath become unpleasant
to you?”

And the poor mad woman broke into sobs, and tears streamed down her
cheeks. The captain rushed up to her.

“Mamma, mamma, my dear, give over! You are not lonely. Every one loves
you, every one adores you.” He began kissing both her hands again and
tenderly stroking her face; taking the dinner-napkin, he began wiping away
her tears. Alyosha fancied that he too had tears in his eyes. “There, you
see, you hear?” he turned with a sort of fury to Alyosha, pointing to the
poor imbecile.

“I see and hear,” muttered Alyosha.

“Father, father, how can you—with him! Let him alone!” cried the boy,
sitting up in his bed and gazing at his father with glowing eyes.

“Do give over fooling, showing off your silly antics which never lead to
anything!” shouted Varvara, stamping her foot with passion.

“Your anger is quite just this time, Varvara, and I’ll make haste to
satisfy you. Come, put on your cap, Alexey Fyodorovitch, and I’ll put on
mine. We will go out. I have a word to say to you in earnest, but not
within these walls. This girl sitting here is my daughter Nina; I forgot
to introduce her to you. She is a heavenly angel incarnate ... who has
flown down to us mortals,... if you can understand.”

“There he is shaking all over, as though he is in convulsions!” Varvara
went on indignantly.

“And she there stamping her foot at me and calling me a fool just now, she
is a heavenly angel incarnate too, and she has good reason to call me so.
Come along, Alexey Fyodorovitch, we must make an end.”

And, snatching Alyosha’s hand, he drew him out of the room into the
street.



Chapter VII. And In The Open Air


“The air is fresh, but in my apartment it is not so in any sense of the
word. Let us walk slowly, sir. I should be glad of your kind interest.”

“I too have something important to say to you,” observed Alyosha, “only I
don’t know how to begin.”

“To be sure you must have business with me. You would never have looked in
upon me without some object. Unless you come simply to complain of the
boy, and that’s hardly likely. And, by the way, about the boy: I could not
explain to you in there, but here I will describe that scene to you. My
tow was thicker a week ago—I mean my beard. That’s the nickname they give
to my beard, the schoolboys most of all. Well, your brother Dmitri
Fyodorovitch was pulling me by my beard, I’d done nothing, he was in a
towering rage and happened to come upon me. He dragged me out of the
tavern into the market-place; at that moment the boys were coming out of
school, and with them Ilusha. As soon as he saw me in such a state he
rushed up to me. ‘Father,’ he cried, ‘father!’ He caught hold of me,
hugged me, tried to pull me away, crying to my assailant, ‘Let go, let go,
it’s my father, forgive him!’—yes, he actually cried ‘forgive him.’ He
clutched at that hand, that very hand, in his little hands and kissed
it.... I remember his little face at that moment, I haven’t forgotten it
and I never shall!”

“I swear,” cried Alyosha, “that my brother will express his most deep and
sincere regret, even if he has to go down on his knees in that same
market-place.... I’ll make him or he is no brother of mine!”

“Aha, then it’s only a suggestion! And it does not come from him but
simply from the generosity of your own warm heart. You should have said
so. No, in that case allow me to tell you of your brother’s highly
chivalrous soldierly generosity, for he did give expression to it at the
time. He left off dragging me by my beard and released me: ‘You are an
officer,’ he said, ‘and I am an officer, if you can find a decent man to
be your second send me your challenge. I will give satisfaction, though
you are a scoundrel.’ That’s what he said. A chivalrous spirit indeed! I
retired with Ilusha, and that scene is a family record imprinted for ever
on Ilusha’s soul. No, it’s not for us to claim the privileges of noblemen.
Judge for yourself. You’ve just been in our mansion, what did you see
there? Three ladies, one a cripple and weak-minded, another a cripple and
hunchback and the third not crippled but far too clever. She is a student,
dying to get back to Petersburg, to work for the emancipation of the
Russian woman on the banks of the Neva. I won’t speak of Ilusha, he is
only nine. I am alone in the world, and if I die, what will become of all
of them? I simply ask you that. And if I challenge him and he kills me on
the spot, what then? What will become of them? And worse still, if he
doesn’t kill me but only cripples me: I couldn’t work, but I should still
be a mouth to feed. Who would feed it and who would feed them all? Must I
take Ilusha from school and send him to beg in the streets? That’s what it
means for me to challenge him to a duel. It’s silly talk and nothing
else.”

“He will beg your forgiveness, he will bow down at your feet in the middle
of the market-place,” cried Alyosha again, with glowing eyes.

“I did think of prosecuting him,” the captain went on, “but look in our
code, could I get much compensation for a personal injury? And then
Agrafena Alexandrovna(3) sent for me and shouted at me: ‘Don’t dare to
dream of it! If you proceed against him, I’ll publish it to all the world
that he beat you for your dishonesty, and then you will be prosecuted.’ I
call God to witness whose was the dishonesty and by whose commands I
acted, wasn’t it by her own and Fyodor Pavlovitch’s? ‘And what’s more,’
she went on, ‘I’ll dismiss you for good and you’ll never earn another
penny from me. I’ll speak to my merchant too’ (that’s what she calls her
old man) ‘and he will dismiss you!’ And if he dismisses me, what can I
earn then from any one? Those two are all I have to look to, for your
Fyodor Pavlovitch has not only given over employing me, for another
reason, but he means to make use of papers I’ve signed to go to law
against me. And so I kept quiet, and you have seen our retreat. But now
let me ask you: did Ilusha hurt your finger much? I didn’t like to go into
it in our mansion before him.”

“Yes, very much, and he was in a great fury. He was avenging you on me as
a Karamazov, I see that now. But if only you had seen how he was throwing
stones at his school-fellows! It’s very dangerous. They might kill him.
They are children and stupid. A stone may be thrown and break somebody’s
head.”

“That’s just what has happened. He has been bruised by a stone to-day. Not
on the head but on the chest, just above the heart. He came home crying
and groaning and now he is ill.”

“And you know he attacks them first. He is bitter against them on your
account. They say he stabbed a boy called Krassotkin with a pen-knife not
long ago.”

“I’ve heard about that too, it’s dangerous. Krassotkin is an official
here, we may hear more about it.”

“I would advise you,” Alyosha went on warmly, “not to send him to school
at all for a time till he is calmer ... and his anger is passed.”

“Anger!” the captain repeated, “that’s just what it is. He is a little
creature, but it’s a mighty anger. You don’t know all, sir. Let me tell
you more. Since that incident all the boys have been teasing him about the
‘wisp of tow.’ Schoolboys are a merciless race, individually they are
angels, but together, especially in schools, they are often merciless.
Their teasing has stirred up a gallant spirit in Ilusha. An ordinary boy,
a weak son, would have submitted, have felt ashamed of his father, sir,
but he stood up for his father against them all. For his father and for
truth and justice. For what he suffered when he kissed your brother’s hand
and cried to him ‘Forgive father, forgive him,’—that only God knows—and I,
his father. For our children—not your children, but ours—the children of
the poor gentlemen looked down upon by every one—know what justice means,
sir, even at nine years old. How should the rich know? They don’t explore
such depths once in their lives. But at that moment in the square when he
kissed his hand, at that moment my Ilusha had grasped all that justice
means. That truth entered into him and crushed him for ever, sir,” the
captain said hotly again with a sort of frenzy, and he struck his right
fist against his left palm as though he wanted to show how “the truth”
crushed Ilusha. “That very day, sir, he fell ill with fever and was
delirious all night. All that day he hardly said a word to me, but I
noticed he kept watching me from the corner, though he turned to the
window and pretended to be learning his lessons. But I could see his mind
was not on his lessons. Next day I got drunk to forget my troubles, sinful
man as I am, and I don’t remember much. Mamma began crying, too—I am very
fond of mamma—well, I spent my last penny drowning my troubles. Don’t
despise me for that, sir, in Russia men who drink are the best. The best
men amongst us are the greatest drunkards. I lay down and I don’t remember
about Ilusha, though all that day the boys had been jeering at him at
school. ‘Wisp of tow,’ they shouted, ‘your father was pulled out of the
tavern by his wisp of tow, you ran by and begged forgiveness.’ ”

“On the third day when he came back from school, I saw he looked pale and
wretched. ‘What is it?’ I asked. He wouldn’t answer. Well, there’s no
talking in our mansion without mamma and the girls taking part in it.
What’s more, the girls had heard about it the very first day. Varvara had
begun snarling. ‘You fools and buffoons, can you ever do anything
rational?’ ‘Quite so,’ I said, ‘can we ever do anything rational?’ For the
time I turned it off like that. So in the evening I took the boy out for a
walk, for you must know we go for a walk every evening, always the same
way, along which we are going now—from our gate to that great stone which
lies alone in the road under the hurdle, which marks the beginning of the
town pasture. A beautiful and lonely spot, sir. Ilusha and I walked along
hand in hand as usual. He has a little hand, his fingers are thin and
cold—he suffers with his chest, you know. ‘Father,’ said he, ‘father!’
‘Well?’ said I. I saw his eyes flashing. ‘Father, how he treated you
then!’ ‘It can’t be helped, Ilusha,’ I said. ‘Don’t forgive him, father,
don’t forgive him! At school they say that he has paid you ten roubles for
it.’ ‘No, Ilusha,’ said I, ‘I would not take money from him for anything.’
Then he began trembling all over, took my hand in both his and kissed it
again. ‘Father,’ he said, ‘father, challenge him to a duel, at school they
say you are a coward and won’t challenge him, and that you’ll accept ten
roubles from him.’ ‘I can’t challenge him to a duel, Ilusha,’ I answered.
And I told briefly what I’ve just told you. He listened. ‘Father,’ he
said, ‘anyway don’t forgive it. When I grow up I’ll call him out myself
and kill him.’ His eyes shone and glowed. And of course I am his father,
and I had to put in a word: ‘It’s a sin to kill,’ I said, ‘even in a
duel.’ ‘Father,’ he said, ‘when I grow up, I’ll knock him down, knock the
sword out of his hand, I’ll fall on him, wave my sword over him and say:
“I could kill you, but I forgive you, so there!” ’ You see what the
workings of his little mind have been during these two days; he must have
been planning that vengeance all day, and raving about it at night.

“But he began to come home from school badly beaten, I found out about it
the day before yesterday, and you are right, I won’t send him to that
school any more. I heard that he was standing up against all the class
alone and defying them all, that his heart was full of resentment, of
bitterness—I was alarmed about him. We went for another walk. ‘Father,’ he
asked, ‘are the rich people stronger than any one else on earth?’ ‘Yes,
Ilusha,’ I said, ‘there are no people on earth stronger than the rich.’
‘Father,’ he said, ‘I will get rich, I will become an officer and conquer
everybody. The Tsar will reward me, I will come back here and then no one
will dare—’ Then he was silent and his lips still kept trembling.
‘Father,’ he said, ‘what a horrid town this is.’ ‘Yes, Ilusha,’ I said,
‘it isn’t a very nice town.’ ‘Father, let us move into another town, a
nice one,’ he said, ‘where people don’t know about us.’ ‘We will move, we
will, Ilusha,’ said I, ‘only I must save up for it.’ I was glad to be able
to turn his mind from painful thoughts, and we began to dream of how we
would move to another town, how we would buy a horse and cart. ‘We will
put mamma and your sisters inside, we will cover them up and we’ll walk,
you shall have a lift now and then, and I’ll walk beside, for we must take
care of our horse, we can’t all ride. That’s how we’ll go.’ He was
enchanted at that, most of all at the thought of having a horse and
driving him. For of course a Russian boy is born among horses. We
chattered a long while. Thank God, I thought, I have diverted his mind and
comforted him.

“That was the day before yesterday, in the evening, but last night
everything was changed. He had gone to school in the morning, he came back
depressed, terribly depressed. In the evening I took him by the hand and
we went for a walk; he would not talk. There was a wind blowing and no
sun, and a feeling of autumn; twilight was coming on. We walked along,
both of us depressed. ‘Well, my boy,’ said I, ‘how about our setting off
on our travels?’ I thought I might bring him back to our talk of the day
before. He didn’t answer, but I felt his fingers trembling in my hand. Ah,
I thought, it’s a bad job; there’s something fresh. We had reached the
stone where we are now. I sat down on the stone. And in the air there were
lots of kites flapping and whirling. There were as many as thirty in
sight. Of course, it’s just the season for the kites. ‘Look, Ilusha,’ said
I, ‘it’s time we got out our last year’s kite again. I’ll mend it, where
have you put it away?’ My boy made no answer. He looked away and turned
sideways to me. And then a gust of wind blew up the sand. He suddenly fell
on me, threw both his little arms round my neck and held me tight. You
know, when children are silent and proud, and try to keep back their tears
when they are in great trouble and suddenly break down, their tears fall
in streams. With those warm streams of tears, he suddenly wetted my face.
He sobbed and shook as though he were in convulsions, and squeezed up
against me as I sat on the stone. ‘Father,’ he kept crying, ‘dear father,
how he insulted you!’ And I sobbed too. We sat shaking in each other’s
arms. ‘Ilusha,’ I said to him, ‘Ilusha darling.’ No one saw us then. God
alone saw us, I hope He will record it to my credit. You must thank your
brother, Alexey Fyodorovitch. No, sir, I won’t thrash my boy for your
satisfaction.”

He had gone back to his original tone of resentful buffoonery. Alyosha
felt though that he trusted him, and that if there had been some one else
in his, Alyosha’s place, the man would not have spoken so openly and would
not have told what he had just told. This encouraged Alyosha, whose heart
was trembling on the verge of tears.

“Ah, how I would like to make friends with your boy!” he cried. “If you
could arrange it—”

“Certainly, sir,” muttered the captain.

“But now listen to something quite different!” Alyosha went on. “I have a
message for you. That same brother of mine, Dmitri, has insulted his
betrothed, too, a noble-hearted girl of whom you have probably heard. I
have a right to tell you of her wrong; I ought to do so, in fact, for
hearing of the insult done to you and learning all about your unfortunate
position, she commissioned me at once—just now—to bring you this help from
her—but only from her alone, not from Dmitri, who has abandoned her. Nor
from me, his brother, nor from any one else, but from her, only from her!
She entreats you to accept her help.... You have both been insulted by the
same man. She thought of you only when she had just received a similar
insult from him—similar in its cruelty, I mean. She comes like a sister to
help a brother in misfortune.... She told me to persuade you to take these
two hundred roubles from her, as from a sister, knowing that you are in
such need. No one will know of it, it can give rise to no unjust slander.
There are the two hundred roubles, and I swear you must take them
unless—unless all men are to be enemies on earth! But there are brothers
even on earth.... You have a generous heart ... you must see that, you
must,” and Alyosha held out two new rainbow-colored hundred-rouble notes.

They were both standing at the time by the great stone close to the fence,
and there was no one near. The notes seemed to produce a tremendous
impression on the captain. He started, but at first only from
astonishment. Such an outcome of their conversation was the last thing he
expected. Nothing could have been farther from his dreams than help from
any one—and such a sum!

He took the notes, and for a minute he was almost unable to answer, quite
a new expression came into his face.

“That for me? So much money—two hundred roubles! Good heavens! Why, I
haven’t seen so much money for the last four years! Mercy on us! And she
says she is a sister.... And is that the truth?”

“I swear that all I told you is the truth,” cried Alyosha.

The captain flushed red.

“Listen, my dear, listen. If I take it, I shan’t be behaving like a
scoundrel? In your eyes, Alexey Fyodorovitch, I shan’t be a scoundrel? No,
Alexey Fyodorovitch, listen, listen,” he hurried, touching Alyosha with
both his hands. “You are persuading me to take it, saying that it’s a
sister sends it, but inwardly, in your heart won’t you feel contempt for
me if I take it, eh?”

“No, no, on my salvation I swear I shan’t! And no one will ever know but
me—I, you and she, and one other lady, her great friend.”

“Never mind the lady! Listen, Alexey Fyodorovitch, at a moment like this
you must listen, for you can’t understand what these two hundred roubles
mean to me now.” The poor fellow went on rising gradually into a sort of
incoherent, almost wild enthusiasm. He was thrown off his balance and
talked extremely fast, as though afraid he would not be allowed to say all
he had to say.

“Besides its being honestly acquired from a ‘sister,’ so highly respected
and revered, do you know that now I can look after mamma and Nina, my
hunchback angel daughter? Doctor Herzenstube came to me in the kindness of
his heart and was examining them both for a whole hour. ‘I can make
nothing of it,’ said he, but he prescribed a mineral water which is kept
at a chemist’s here. He said it would be sure to do her good, and he
ordered baths, too, with some medicine in them. The mineral water costs
thirty copecks, and she’d need to drink forty bottles perhaps; so I took
the prescription and laid it on the shelf under the ikons, and there it
lies. And he ordered hot baths for Nina with something dissolved in them,
morning and evening. But how can we carry out such a cure in our mansion,
without servants, without help, without a bath, and without water? Nina is
rheumatic all over, I don’t think I told you that. All her right side
aches at night, she is in agony, and, would you believe it, the angel
bears it without groaning for fear of waking us. We eat what we can get,
and she’ll only take the leavings, what you’d scarcely give to a dog. ‘I
am not worth it, I am taking it from you, I am a burden on you,’ that’s
what her angel eyes try to express. We wait on her, but she doesn’t like
it. ‘I am a useless cripple, no good to any one.’ As though she were not
worth it, when she is the saving of all of us with her angelic sweetness.
Without her, without her gentle word it would be hell among us! She
softens even Varvara. And don’t judge Varvara harshly either, she is an
angel too, she, too, has suffered wrong. She came to us for the summer,
and she brought sixteen roubles she had earned by lessons and saved up, to
go back with to Petersburg in September, that is now. But we took her
money and lived on it, so now she has nothing to go back with. Though
indeed she couldn’t go back, for she has to work for us like a slave. She
is like an overdriven horse with all of us on her back. She waits on us
all, mends and washes, sweeps the floor, puts mamma to bed. And mamma is
capricious and tearful and insane! And now I can get a servant with this
money, you understand, Alexey Fyodorovitch, I can get medicines for the
dear creatures, I can send my student to Petersburg, I can buy beef, I can
feed them properly. Good Lord, but it’s a dream!”

Alyosha was delighted that he had brought him such happiness and that the
poor fellow had consented to be made happy.

“Stay, Alexey Fyodorovitch, stay,” the captain began to talk with frenzied
rapidity, carried away by a new day-dream. “Do you know that Ilusha and I
will perhaps really carry out our dream. We will buy a horse and cart, a
black horse, he insists on its being black, and we will set off as we
pretended the other day. I have an old friend, a lawyer in K. province,
and I heard through a trustworthy man that if I were to go he’d give me a
place as clerk in his office, so, who knows, maybe he would. So I’d just
put mamma and Nina in the cart, and Ilusha could drive, and I’d walk, I’d
walk.... Why, if I only succeed in getting one debt paid that’s owing me,
I should have perhaps enough for that too!”

“There would be enough!” cried Alyosha. “Katerina Ivanovna will send you
as much more as you need, and you know, I have money too, take what you
want, as you would from a brother, from a friend, you can give it back
later.... (You’ll get rich, you’ll get rich!) And you know you couldn’t
have a better idea than to move to another province! It would be the
saving of you, especially of your boy—and you ought to go quickly, before
the winter, before the cold. You must write to us when you are there, and
we will always be brothers.... No, it’s not a dream!”

Alyosha could have hugged him, he was so pleased. But glancing at him he
stopped short. The man was standing with his neck outstretched and his
lips protruding, with a pale and frenzied face. His lips were moving as
though trying to articulate something; no sound came, but still his lips
moved. It was uncanny.

“What is it?” asked Alyosha, startled.

“Alexey Fyodorovitch ... I ... you,” muttered the captain, faltering,
looking at him with a strange, wild, fixed stare, and an air of desperate
resolution. At the same time there was a sort of grin on his lips. “I ...
you, sir ... wouldn’t you like me to show you a little trick I know?” he
murmured, suddenly, in a firm rapid whisper, his voice no longer
faltering.

“What trick?”

“A pretty trick,” whispered the captain. His mouth was twisted on the left
side, his left eye was screwed up. He still stared at Alyosha.

“What is the matter? What trick?” Alyosha cried, now thoroughly alarmed.

“Why, look,” squealed the captain suddenly, and showing him the two notes
which he had been holding by one corner between his thumb and forefinger
during the conversation, he crumpled them up savagely and squeezed them
tight in his right hand. “Do you see, do you see?” he shrieked, pale and
infuriated. And suddenly flinging up his hand, he threw the crumpled notes
on the sand. “Do you see?” he shrieked again, pointing to them. “Look
there!”

And with wild fury he began trampling them under his heel, gasping and
exclaiming as he did so:

“So much for your money! So much for your money! So much for your money!
So much for your money!”

Suddenly he darted back and drew himself up before Alyosha, and his whole
figure expressed unutterable pride.

“Tell those who sent you that the wisp of tow does not sell his honor,” he
cried, raising his arm in the air. Then he turned quickly and began to
run; but he had not run five steps before he turned completely round and
kissed his hand to Alyosha. He ran another five paces and then turned
round for the last time. This time his face was not contorted with
laughter, but quivering all over with tears. In a tearful, faltering,
sobbing voice he cried:

“What should I say to my boy if I took money from you for our shame?”

And then he ran on without turning. Alyosha looked after him,
inexpressibly grieved. Oh, he saw that till the very last moment the man
had not known he would crumple up and fling away the notes. He did not
turn back. Alyosha knew he would not. He would not follow him and call him
back, he knew why. When he was out of sight, Alyosha picked up the two
notes. They were very much crushed and crumpled, and had been pressed into
the sand, but were uninjured and even rustled like new ones when Alyosha
unfolded them and smoothed them out. After smoothing them out, he folded
them up, put them in his pocket and went to Katerina Ivanovna to report on
the success of her commission.




Book V. Pro And Contra



Chapter I. The Engagement


Madame Hohlakov was again the first to meet Alyosha. She was flustered;
something important had happened. Katerina Ivanovna’s hysterics had ended
in a fainting fit, and then “a terrible, awful weakness had followed, she
lay with her eyes turned up and was delirious. Now she was in a fever.
They had sent for Herzenstube; they had sent for the aunts. The aunts were
already here, but Herzenstube had not yet come. They were all sitting in
her room, waiting. She was unconscious now, and what if it turned to brain
fever!”

Madame Hohlakov looked gravely alarmed. “This is serious, serious,” she
added at every word, as though nothing that had happened to her before had
been serious. Alyosha listened with distress, and was beginning to
describe his adventures, but she interrupted him at the first words. She
had not time to listen. She begged him to sit with Lise and wait for her
there.

“Lise,” she whispered almost in his ear, “Lise has greatly surprised me
just now, dear Alexey Fyodorovitch. She touched me, too, and so my heart
forgives her everything. Only fancy, as soon as you had gone, she began to
be truly remorseful for having laughed at you to-day and yesterday, though
she was not laughing at you, but only joking. But she was seriously sorry
for it, almost ready to cry, so that I was quite surprised. She has never
been really sorry for laughing at me, but has only made a joke of it. And
you know she is laughing at me every minute. But this time she was in
earnest. She thinks a great deal of your opinion, Alexey Fyodorovitch, and
don’t take offense or be wounded by her if you can help it. I am never
hard upon her, for she’s such a clever little thing. Would you believe it?
She said just now that you were a friend of her childhood, ‘the greatest
friend of her childhood’—just think of that—‘greatest friend’—and what
about me? She has very strong feelings and memories, and, what’s more, she
uses these phrases, most unexpected words, which come out all of a sudden
when you least expect them. She spoke lately about a pine-tree, for
instance: there used to be a pine-tree standing in our garden in her early
childhood. Very likely it’s standing there still; so there’s no need to
speak in the past tense. Pine-trees are not like people, Alexey
Fyodorovitch, they don’t change quickly. ‘Mamma,’ she said, ‘I remember
this pine-tree as in a dream,’ only she said something so original about
it that I can’t repeat it. Besides, I’ve forgotten it. Well, good-by! I am
so worried I feel I shall go out of my mind. Ah! Alexey Fyodorovitch, I’ve
been out of my mind twice in my life. Go to Lise, cheer her up, as you
always can so charmingly. Lise,” she cried, going to her door, “here I’ve
brought you Alexey Fyodorovitch, whom you insulted so. He is not at all
angry, I assure you; on the contrary, he is surprised that you could
suppose so.”

“_Merci, maman._ Come in, Alexey Fyodorovitch.”

Alyosha went in. Lise looked rather embarrassed, and at once flushed
crimson. She was evidently ashamed of something, and, as people always do
in such cases, she began immediately talking of other things, as though
they were of absorbing interest to her at the moment.

“Mamma has just told me all about the two hundred roubles, Alexey
Fyodorovitch, and your taking them to that poor officer ... and she told
me all the awful story of how he had been insulted ... and you know,
although mamma muddles things ... she always rushes from one thing to
another ... I cried when I heard. Well, did you give him the money and how
is that poor man getting on?”

“The fact is I didn’t give it to him, and it’s a long story,” answered
Alyosha, as though he, too, could think of nothing but his regret at
having failed, yet Lise saw perfectly well that he, too, looked away, and
that he, too, was trying to talk of other things.

Alyosha sat down to the table and began to tell his story, but at the
first words he lost his embarrassment and gained the whole of Lise’s
attention as well. He spoke with deep feeling, under the influence of the
strong impression he had just received, and he succeeded in telling his
story well and circumstantially. In old days in Moscow he had been fond of
coming to Lise and describing to her what had just happened to him, what
he had read, or what he remembered of his childhood. Sometimes they had
made day-dreams and woven whole romances together—generally cheerful and
amusing ones. Now they both felt suddenly transported to the old days in
Moscow, two years before. Lise was extremely touched by his story. Alyosha
described Ilusha with warm feeling. When he finished describing how the
luckless man trampled on the money, Lise could not help clasping her hands
and crying out:

“So you didn’t give him the money! So you let him run away! Oh, dear, you
ought to have run after him!”

“No, Lise; it’s better I didn’t run after him,” said Alyosha, getting up
from his chair and walking thoughtfully across the room.

“How so? How is it better? Now they are without food and their case is
hopeless?”

“Not hopeless, for the two hundred roubles will still come to them. He’ll
take the money to-morrow. To-morrow he will be sure to take it,” said
Alyosha, pacing up and down, pondering. “You see, Lise,” he went on,
stopping suddenly before her, “I made one blunder, but that, even that, is
all for the best.”

“What blunder, and why is it for the best?”

“I’ll tell you. He is a man of weak and timorous character; he has
suffered so much and is very good-natured. I keep wondering why he took
offense so suddenly, for I assure you, up to the last minute, he did not
know that he was going to trample on the notes. And I think now that there
was a great deal to offend him ... and it could not have been otherwise in
his position.... To begin with, he was sore at having been so glad of the
money in my presence and not having concealed it from me. If he had been
pleased, but not so much; if he had not shown it; if he had begun
affecting scruples and difficulties, as other people do when they take
money, he might still endure to take it. But he was too genuinely
delighted, and that was mortifying. Ah, Lise, he is a good and truthful
man—that’s the worst of the whole business. All the while he talked, his
voice was so weak, so broken, he talked so fast, so fast, he kept laughing
such a laugh, or perhaps he was crying—yes, I am sure he was crying, he
was so delighted—and he talked about his daughters—and about the situation
he could get in another town.... And when he had poured out his heart, he
felt ashamed at having shown me his inmost soul like that. So he began to
hate me at once. He is one of those awfully sensitive poor people. What
had made him feel most ashamed was that he had given in too soon and
accepted me as a friend, you see. At first he almost flew at me and tried
to intimidate me, but as soon as he saw the money he had begun embracing
me; he kept touching me with his hands. This must have been how he came to
feel it all so humiliating, and then I made that blunder, a very important
one. I suddenly said to him that if he had not money enough to move to
another town, we would give it to him, and, indeed, I myself would give
him as much as he wanted out of my own money. That struck him all at once.
Why, he thought, did I put myself forward to help him? You know, Lise,
it’s awfully hard for a man who has been injured, when other people look
at him as though they were his benefactors.... I’ve heard that; Father
Zossima told me so. I don’t know how to put it, but I have often seen it
myself. And I feel like that myself, too. And the worst of it was that
though he did not know, up to the very last minute, that he would trample
on the notes, he had a kind of presentiment of it, I am sure of that.
That’s just what made him so ecstatic, that he had that presentiment....
And though it’s so dreadful, it’s all for the best. In fact, I believe
nothing better could have happened.”

“Why, why could nothing better have happened?” cried Lise, looking with
great surprise at Alyosha.

“Because if he had taken the money, in an hour after getting home, he
would be crying with mortification, that’s just what would have happened.
And most likely he would have come to me early to-morrow, and perhaps have
flung the notes at me and trampled upon them as he did just now. But now
he has gone home awfully proud and triumphant, though he knows he has
‘ruined himself.’ So now nothing could be easier than to make him accept
the two hundred roubles by to-morrow, for he has already vindicated his
honor, tossed away the money, and trampled it under foot.... He couldn’t
know when he did it that I should bring it to him again to-morrow, and yet
he is in terrible need of that money. Though he is proud of himself now,
yet even to-day he’ll be thinking what a help he has lost. He will think
of it more than ever at night, will dream of it, and by to-morrow morning
he may be ready to run to me to ask forgiveness. It’s just then that I’ll
appear. ‘Here, you are a proud man,’ I shall say: ‘you have shown it; but
now take the money and forgive us!’ And then he will take it!”

Alyosha was carried away with joy as he uttered his last words, “And then
he will take it!” Lise clapped her hands.

“Ah, that’s true! I understand that perfectly now. Ah, Alyosha, how do you
know all this? So young and yet he knows what’s in the heart.... I should
never have worked it out.”

“The great thing now is to persuade him that he is on an equal footing
with us, in spite of his taking money from us,” Alyosha went on in his
excitement, “and not only on an equal, but even on a higher footing.”

“ ‘On a higher footing’ is charming, Alexey Fyodorovitch; but go on, go
on!”

“You mean there isn’t such an expression as ‘on a higher footing’; but
that doesn’t matter because—”

“Oh, no, of course it doesn’t matter. Forgive me, Alyosha, dear.... You
know, I scarcely respected you till now—that is I respected you but on an
equal footing; but now I shall begin to respect you on a higher footing.
Don’t be angry, dear, at my joking,” she put in at once, with strong
feeling. “I am absurd and small, but you, you! Listen, Alexey
Fyodorovitch. Isn’t there in all our analysis—I mean your analysis ... no,
better call it ours—aren’t we showing contempt for him, for that poor
man—in analyzing his soul like this, as it were, from above, eh? In
deciding so certainly that he will take the money?”

“No, Lise, it’s not contempt,” Alyosha answered, as though he had prepared
himself for the question. “I was thinking of that on the way here. How can
it be contempt when we are all like him, when we are all just the same as
he is? For you know we are just the same, no better. If we are better, we
should have been just the same in his place.... I don’t know about you,
Lise, but I consider that I have a sordid soul in many ways, and his soul
is not sordid; on the contrary, full of fine feeling.... No, Lise, I have
no contempt for him. Do you know, Lise, my elder told me once to care for
most people exactly as one would for children, and for some of them as one
would for the sick in hospitals.”

“Ah, Alexey Fyodorovitch, dear, let us care for people as we would for the
sick!”

“Let us, Lise; I am ready. Though I am not altogether ready in myself. I
am sometimes very impatient and at other times I don’t see things. It’s
different with you.”

“Ah, I don’t believe it! Alexey Fyodorovitch, how happy I am!”

“I am so glad you say so, Lise.”

“Alexey Fyodorovitch, you are wonderfully good, but you are sometimes sort
of formal.... And yet you are not a bit formal really. Go to the door,
open it gently, and see whether mamma is listening,” said Lise, in a
nervous, hurried whisper.

Alyosha went, opened the door, and reported that no one was listening.

“Come here, Alexey Fyodorovitch,” Lise went on, flushing redder and
redder. “Give me your hand—that’s right. I have to make a great
confession, I didn’t write to you yesterday in joke, but in earnest,” and
she hid her eyes with her hand. It was evident that she was greatly
ashamed of the confession.

Suddenly she snatched his hand and impulsively kissed it three times.

“Ah, Lise, what a good thing!” cried Alyosha joyfully. “You know, I was
perfectly sure you were in earnest.”

“Sure? Upon my word!” She put aside his hand, but did not leave go of it,
blushing hotly, and laughing a little happy laugh. “I kiss his hand and he
says, ‘What a good thing!’ ”

But her reproach was undeserved. Alyosha, too, was greatly overcome.

“I should like to please you always, Lise, but I don’t know how to do it,”
he muttered, blushing too.

“Alyosha, dear, you are cold and rude. Do you see? He has chosen me as his
wife and is quite settled about it. He is sure I was in earnest. What a
thing to say! Why, that’s impertinence—that’s what it is.”

“Why, was it wrong of me to feel sure?” Alyosha asked, laughing suddenly.

“Ah, Alyosha, on the contrary, it was delightfully right,” cried Lise,
looking tenderly and happily at him.

Alyosha stood still, holding her hand in his. Suddenly he stooped down and
kissed her on her lips.

“Oh, what are you doing?” cried Lise. Alyosha was terribly abashed.

“Oh, forgive me if I shouldn’t.... Perhaps I’m awfully stupid.... You said
I was cold, so I kissed you.... But I see it was stupid.”

Lise laughed, and hid her face in her hands. “And in that dress!” she
ejaculated in the midst of her mirth. But she suddenly ceased laughing and
became serious, almost stern.

“Alyosha, we must put off kissing. We are not ready for that yet, and we
shall have a long time to wait,” she ended suddenly. “Tell me rather why
you who are so clever, so intellectual, so observant, choose a little
idiot, an invalid like me? Ah, Alyosha, I am awfully happy, for I don’t
deserve you a bit.”

“You do, Lise. I shall be leaving the monastery altogether in a few days.
If I go into the world, I must marry. I know that. _He_ told me to marry,
too. Whom could I marry better than you—and who would have me except you?
I have been thinking it over. In the first place, you’ve known me from a
child and you’ve a great many qualities I haven’t. You are more
light-hearted than I am; above all, you are more innocent than I am. I
have been brought into contact with many, many things already.... Ah, you
don’t know, but I, too, am a Karamazov. What does it matter if you do
laugh and make jokes, and at me, too? Go on laughing. I am so glad you do.
You laugh like a little child, but you think like a martyr.”

“Like a martyr? How?”

“Yes, Lise, your question just now: whether we weren’t showing contempt
for that poor man by dissecting his soul—that was the question of a
sufferer.... You see, I don’t know how to express it, but any one who
thinks of such questions is capable of suffering. Sitting in your invalid
chair you must have thought over many things already.”

“Alyosha, give me your hand. Why are you taking it away?” murmured Lise in
a failing voice, weak with happiness. “Listen, Alyosha. What will you wear
when you come out of the monastery? What sort of suit? Don’t laugh, don’t
be angry, it’s very, very important to me.”

“I haven’t thought about the suit, Lise; but I’ll wear whatever you like.”

“I should like you to have a dark blue velvet coat, a white piqué
waistcoat, and a soft gray felt hat.... Tell me, did you believe that I
didn’t care for you when I said I didn’t mean what I wrote?”

“No, I didn’t believe it.”

“Oh, you insupportable person, you are incorrigible.”

“You see, I knew that you—seemed to care for me, but I pretended to
believe that you didn’t care for me to make it—easier for you.”

“That makes it worse! Worse and better than all! Alyosha, I am awfully
fond of you. Just before you came this morning, I tried my fortune. I
decided I would ask you for my letter, and if you brought it out calmly
and gave it to me (as might have been expected from you) it would mean
that you did not love me at all, that you felt nothing, and were simply a
stupid boy, good for nothing, and that I am ruined. But you left the
letter at home and that cheered me. You left it behind on purpose, so as
not to give it back, because you knew I would ask for it? That was it,
wasn’t it?”

“Ah, Lise, it was not so a bit. The letter is with me now, and it was this
morning, in this pocket. Here it is.”

Alyosha pulled the letter out laughing, and showed it her at a distance.

“But I am not going to give it to you. Look at it from here.”

“Why, then you told a lie? You, a monk, told a lie!”

“I told a lie if you like,” Alyosha laughed, too. “I told a lie so as not
to give you back the letter. It’s very precious to me,” he added suddenly,
with strong feeling, and again he flushed. “It always will be, and I won’t
give it up to any one!”

Lise looked at him joyfully. “Alyosha,” she murmured again, “look at the
door. Isn’t mamma listening?”

“Very well, Lise, I’ll look; but wouldn’t it be better not to look? Why
suspect your mother of such meanness?”

“What meanness? As for her spying on her daughter, it’s her right, it’s
not meanness!” cried Lise, firing up. “You may be sure, Alexey
Fyodorovitch, that when I am a mother, if I have a daughter like myself I
shall certainly spy on her!”

“Really, Lise? That’s not right.”

“Oh, my goodness! What has meanness to do with it? If she were listening
to some ordinary worldly conversation, it would be meanness, but when her
own daughter is shut up with a young man.... Listen, Alyosha, do you know
I shall spy upon you as soon as we are married, and let me tell you I
shall open all your letters and read them, so you may as well be
prepared.”

“Yes, of course, if so—” muttered Alyosha, “only it’s not right.”

“Ah, how contemptuous! Alyosha, dear, we won’t quarrel the very first day.
I’d better tell you the whole truth. Of course, it’s very wrong to spy on
people, and, of course, I am not right and you are, only I shall spy on
you all the same.”

“Do, then; you won’t find out anything,” laughed Alyosha.

“And, Alyosha, will you give in to me? We must decide that too.”

“I shall be delighted to, Lise, and certain to, only not in the most
important things. Even if you don’t agree with me, I shall do my duty in
the most important things.”

“That’s right; but let me tell you I am ready to give in to you not only
in the most important matters, but in everything. And I am ready to vow to
do so now—in everything, and for all my life!” cried Lise fervently, “and
I’ll do it gladly, gladly! What’s more, I’ll swear never to spy on you,
never once, never to read one of your letters. For you are right and I am
not. And though I shall be awfully tempted to spy, I know that I won’t do
it since you consider it dishonorable. You are my conscience now....
Listen, Alexey Fyodorovitch, why have you been so sad lately—both
yesterday and to-day? I know you have a lot of anxiety and trouble, but I
see you have some special grief besides, some secret one, perhaps?”

“Yes, Lise, I have a secret one, too,” answered Alyosha mournfully. “I see
you love me, since you guessed that.”

“What grief? What about? Can you tell me?” asked Lise with timid entreaty.

“I’ll tell you later, Lise—afterwards,” said Alyosha, confused. “Now you
wouldn’t understand it perhaps—and perhaps I couldn’t explain it.”

“I know your brothers and your father are worrying you, too.”

“Yes, my brothers too,” murmured Alyosha, pondering.

“I don’t like your brother Ivan, Alyosha,” said Lise suddenly.

He noticed this remark with some surprise, but did not answer it.

“My brothers are destroying themselves,” he went on, “my father, too. And
they are destroying others with them. It’s ‘the primitive force of the
Karamazovs,’ as Father Païssy said the other day, a crude, unbridled,
earthly force. Does the spirit of God move above that force? Even that I
don’t know. I only know that I, too, am a Karamazov.... Me a monk, a monk!
Am I a monk, Lise? You said just now that I was.”

“Yes, I did.”

“And perhaps I don’t even believe in God.”

“You don’t believe? What is the matter?” said Lise quietly and gently. But
Alyosha did not answer. There was something too mysterious, too subjective
in these last words of his, perhaps obscure to himself, but yet torturing
him.

“And now on the top of it all, my friend, the best man in the world, is
going, is leaving the earth! If you knew, Lise, how bound up in soul I am
with him! And then I shall be left alone.... I shall come to you, Lise....
For the future we will be together.”

“Yes, together, together! Henceforward we shall be always together, all
our lives! Listen, kiss me, I allow you.”

Alyosha kissed her.

“Come, now go. Christ be with you!” and she made the sign of the cross
over him. “Make haste back to _him_ while he is alive. I see I’ve kept you
cruelly. I’ll pray to-day for him and you. Alyosha, we shall be happy!
Shall we be happy, shall we?”

“I believe we shall, Lise.”

Alyosha thought it better not to go in to Madame Hohlakov and was going
out of the house without saying good-by to her. But no sooner had he
opened the door than he found Madame Hohlakov standing before him. From
the first word Alyosha guessed that she had been waiting on purpose to
meet him.

“Alexey Fyodorovitch, this is awful. This is all childish nonsense and
ridiculous. I trust you won’t dream—It’s foolishness, nothing but
foolishness!” she said, attacking him at once.

“Only don’t tell her that,” said Alyosha, “or she will be upset, and
that’s bad for her now.”

“Sensible advice from a sensible young man. Am I to understand that you
only agreed with her from compassion for her invalid state, because you
didn’t want to irritate her by contradiction?”

“Oh, no, not at all. I was quite serious in what I said,” Alyosha declared
stoutly.

“To be serious about it is impossible, unthinkable, and in the first place
I shall never be at home to you again, and I shall take her away, you may
be sure of that.”

“But why?” asked Alyosha. “It’s all so far off. We may have to wait
another year and a half.”

“Ah, Alexey Fyodorovitch, that’s true, of course, and you’ll have time to
quarrel and separate a thousand times in a year and a half. But I am so
unhappy! Though it’s such nonsense, it’s a great blow to me. I feel like
Famusov in the last scene of _Sorrow from Wit_. You are Tchatsky and she
is Sofya, and, only fancy, I’ve run down to meet you on the stairs, and in
the play the fatal scene takes place on the staircase. I heard it all; I
almost dropped. So this is the explanation of her dreadful night and her
hysterics of late! It means love to the daughter but death to the mother.
I might as well be in my grave at once. And a more serious matter still,
what is this letter she has written? Show it me at once, at once!”

“No, there’s no need. Tell me, how is Katerina Ivanovna now? I must know.”

“She still lies in delirium; she has not regained consciousness. Her aunts
are here; but they do nothing but sigh and give themselves airs.
Herzenstube came, and he was so alarmed that I didn’t know what to do for
him. I nearly sent for a doctor to look after him. He was driven home in
my carriage. And on the top of it all, you and this letter! It’s true
nothing can happen for a year and a half. In the name of all that’s holy,
in the name of your dying elder, show me that letter, Alexey Fyodorovitch.
I’m her mother. Hold it in your hand, if you like, and I will read it so.”

“No, I won’t show it to you. Even if she sanctioned it, I wouldn’t. I am
coming to-morrow, and if you like, we can talk over many things, but now
good-by!”

And Alyosha ran downstairs and into the street.



Chapter II. Smerdyakov With A Guitar


He had no time to lose indeed. Even while he was saying good-by to Lise,
the thought had struck him that he must attempt some stratagem to find his
brother Dmitri, who was evidently keeping out of his way. It was getting
late, nearly three o’clock. Alyosha’s whole soul turned to the monastery,
to his dying saint, but the necessity of seeing Dmitri outweighed
everything. The conviction that a great inevitable catastrophe was about
to happen grew stronger in Alyosha’s mind with every hour. What that
catastrophe was, and what he would say at that moment to his brother, he
could perhaps not have said definitely. “Even if my benefactor must die
without me, anyway I won’t have to reproach myself all my life with the
thought that I might have saved something and did not, but passed by and
hastened home. If I do as I intend, I shall be following his great
precept.”

His plan was to catch his brother Dmitri unawares, to climb over the
fence, as he had the day before, get into the garden and sit in the
summer-house. If Dmitri were not there, thought Alyosha, he would not
announce himself to Foma or the women of the house, but would remain
hidden in the summer-house, even if he had to wait there till evening. If,
as before, Dmitri were lying in wait for Grushenka to come, he would be
very likely to come to the summer-house. Alyosha did not, however, give
much thought to the details of his plan, but resolved to act upon it, even
if it meant not getting back to the monastery that day.

Everything happened without hindrance, he climbed over the hurdle almost
in the same spot as the day before, and stole into the summer-house
unseen. He did not want to be noticed. The woman of the house and Foma
too, if he were here, might be loyal to his brother and obey his
instructions, and so refuse to let Alyosha come into the garden, or might
warn Dmitri that he was being sought and inquired for.

There was no one in the summer-house. Alyosha sat down and began to wait.
He looked round the summer-house, which somehow struck him as a great deal
more ancient than before. Though the day was just as fine as yesterday, it
seemed a wretched little place this time. There was a circle on the table,
left no doubt from the glass of brandy having been spilt the day before.
Foolish and irrelevant ideas strayed about his mind, as they always do in
a time of tedious waiting. He wondered, for instance, why he had sat down
precisely in the same place as before, why not in the other seat. At last
he felt very depressed—depressed by suspense and uncertainty. But he had
not sat there more than a quarter of an hour, when he suddenly heard the
thrum of a guitar somewhere quite close. People were sitting, or had only
just sat down, somewhere in the bushes not more than twenty paces away.
Alyosha suddenly recollected that on coming out of the summer-house the
day before, he had caught a glimpse of an old green low garden-seat among
the bushes on the left, by the fence. The people must be sitting on it
now. Who were they?

A man’s voice suddenly began singing in a sugary falsetto, accompanying
himself on the guitar:


    With invincible force
    I am bound to my dear.
    O Lord, have mercy
    On her and on me!
    On her and on me!
    On her and on me!


The voice ceased. It was a lackey’s tenor and a lackey’s song. Another
voice, a woman’s, suddenly asked insinuatingly and bashfully, though with
mincing affectation:

“Why haven’t you been to see us for so long, Pavel Fyodorovitch? Why do
you always look down upon us?”

“Not at all,” answered a man’s voice politely, but with emphatic dignity.
It was clear that the man had the best of the position, and that the woman
was making advances. “I believe the man must be Smerdyakov,” thought
Alyosha, “from his voice. And the lady must be the daughter of the house
here, who has come from Moscow, the one who wears the dress with a tail
and goes to Marfa for soup.”

“I am awfully fond of verses of all kinds, if they rhyme,” the woman’s
voice continued. “Why don’t you go on?”

The man sang again:


    What do I care for royal wealth
    If but my dear one be in health?
    Lord have mercy
    On her and on me!
    On her and on me!
    On her and on me!


“It was even better last time,” observed the woman’s voice. “You sang ‘If
my darling be in health’; it sounded more tender. I suppose you’ve
forgotten to-day.”

“Poetry is rubbish!” said Smerdyakov curtly.

“Oh, no! I am very fond of poetry.”

“So far as it’s poetry, it’s essential rubbish. Consider yourself, who
ever talks in rhyme? And if we were all to talk in rhyme, even though it
were decreed by government, we shouldn’t say much, should we? Poetry is no
good, Marya Kondratyevna.”

“How clever you are! How is it you’ve gone so deep into everything?” The
woman’s voice was more and more insinuating.

“I could have done better than that. I could have known more than that, if
it had not been for my destiny from my childhood up. I would have shot a
man in a duel if he called me names because I am descended from a filthy
beggar and have no father. And they used to throw it in my teeth in
Moscow. It had reached them from here, thanks to Grigory Vassilyevitch.
Grigory Vassilyevitch blames me for rebelling against my birth, but I
would have sanctioned their killing me before I was born that I might not
have come into the world at all. They used to say in the market, and your
mamma too, with great lack of delicacy, set off telling me that her hair
was like a mat on her head, and that she was short of five foot by a wee
bit. Why talk of a wee bit while she might have said ‘a little bit,’ like
every one else? She wanted to make it touching, a regular peasant’s
feeling. Can a Russian peasant be said to feel, in comparison with an
educated man? He can’t be said to have feeling at all, in his ignorance.
From my childhood up when I hear ‘a wee bit,’ I am ready to burst with
rage. I hate all Russia, Marya Kondratyevna.”

“If you’d been a cadet in the army, or a young hussar, you wouldn’t have
talked like that, but would have drawn your saber to defend all Russia.”

“I don’t want to be a hussar, Marya Kondratyevna, and, what’s more, I
should like to abolish all soldiers.”

“And when an enemy comes, who is going to defend us?”

“There’s no need of defense. In 1812 there was a great invasion of Russia
by Napoleon, first Emperor of the French, father of the present one, and
it would have been a good thing if they had conquered us. A clever nation
would have conquered a very stupid one and annexed it. We should have had
quite different institutions.”

“Are they so much better in their own country than we are? I wouldn’t
change a dandy I know of for three young Englishmen,” observed Marya
Kondratyevna tenderly, doubtless accompanying her words with a most
languishing glance.

“That’s as one prefers.”

“But you are just like a foreigner—just like a most gentlemanly foreigner.
I tell you that, though it makes me bashful.”

“If you care to know, the folks there and ours here are just alike in
their vice. They are swindlers, only there the scoundrel wears polished
boots and here he grovels in filth and sees no harm in it. The Russian
people want thrashing, as Fyodor Pavlovitch said very truly yesterday,
though he is mad, and all his children.”

“You said yourself you had such a respect for Ivan Fyodorovitch.”

“But he said I was a stinking lackey. He thinks that I might be unruly. He
is mistaken there. If I had a certain sum in my pocket, I would have left
here long ago. Dmitri Fyodorovitch is lower than any lackey in his
behavior, in his mind, and in his poverty. He doesn’t know how to do
anything, and yet he is respected by every one. I may be only a
soup-maker, but with luck I could open a café restaurant in Petrovka, in
Moscow, for my cookery is something special, and there’s no one in Moscow,
except the foreigners, whose cookery is anything special. Dmitri
Fyodorovitch is a beggar, but if he were to challenge the son of the first
count in the country, he’d fight him. Though in what way is he better than
I am? For he is ever so much stupider than I am. Look at the money he has
wasted without any need!”

“It must be lovely, a duel,” Marya Kondratyevna observed suddenly.

“How so?”

“It must be so dreadful and so brave, especially when young officers with
pistols in their hands pop at one another for the sake of some lady. A
perfect picture! Ah, if only girls were allowed to look on, I’d give
anything to see one!”

“It’s all very well when you are firing at some one, but when he is firing
straight in your mug, you must feel pretty silly. You’d be glad to run
away, Marya Kondratyevna.”

“You don’t mean you would run away?” But Smerdyakov did not deign to
reply. After a moment’s silence the guitar tinkled again, and he sang
again in the same falsetto:


    Whatever you may say,
    I shall go far away.
    Life will be bright and gay
    In the city far away.
    I shall not grieve,
    I shall not grieve at all,
    I don’t intend to grieve at all.


Then something unexpected happened. Alyosha suddenly sneezed. They were
silent. Alyosha got up and walked towards them. He found Smerdyakov
dressed up and wearing polished boots, his hair pomaded, and perhaps
curled. The guitar lay on the garden-seat. His companion was the daughter
of the house, wearing a light-blue dress with a train two yards long. She
was young and would not have been bad-looking, but that her face was so
round and terribly freckled.

“Will my brother Dmitri soon be back?” asked Alyosha with as much
composure as he could.

Smerdyakov got up slowly; Marya Kondratyevna rose too.

“How am I to know about Dmitri Fyodorovitch? It’s not as if I were his
keeper,” answered Smerdyakov quietly, distinctly, and superciliously.

“But I simply asked whether you do know?” Alyosha explained.

“I know nothing of his whereabouts and don’t want to.”

“But my brother told me that you let him know all that goes on in the
house, and promised to let him know when Agrafena Alexandrovna comes.”

Smerdyakov turned a deliberate, unmoved glance upon him.

“And how did you get in this time, since the gate was bolted an hour ago?”
he asked, looking at Alyosha.

“I came in from the back-alley, over the fence, and went straight to the
summer-house. I hope you’ll forgive me,” he added, addressing Marya
Kondratyevna. “I was in a hurry to find my brother.”

“Ach, as though we could take it amiss in you!” drawled Marya
Kondratyevna, flattered by Alyosha’s apology. “For Dmitri Fyodorovitch
often goes to the summer-house in that way. We don’t know he is here and
he is sitting in the summer-house.”

“I am very anxious to find him, or to learn from you where he is now.
Believe me, it’s on business of great importance to him.”

“He never tells us,” lisped Marya Kondratyevna.

“Though I used to come here as a friend,” Smerdyakov began again, “Dmitri
Fyodorovitch has pestered me in a merciless way even here by his incessant
questions about the master. ‘What news?’ he’ll ask. ‘What’s going on in
there now? Who’s coming and going?’ and can’t I tell him something more.
Twice already he’s threatened me with death.”

“With death?” Alyosha exclaimed in surprise.

“Do you suppose he’d think much of that, with his temper, which you had a
chance of observing yourself yesterday? He says if I let Agrafena
Alexandrovna in and she passes the night there, I’ll be the first to
suffer for it. I am terribly afraid of him, and if I were not even more
afraid of doing so, I ought to let the police know. God only knows what he
might not do!”

“His honor said to him the other day, ‘I’ll pound you in a mortar!’ ”
added Marya Kondratyevna.

“Oh, if it’s pounding in a mortar, it may be only talk,” observed Alyosha.
“If I could meet him, I might speak to him about that too.”

“Well, the only thing I can tell you is this,” said Smerdyakov, as though
thinking better of it; “I am here as an old friend and neighbor, and it
would be odd if I didn’t come. On the other hand, Ivan Fyodorovitch sent
me first thing this morning to your brother’s lodging in Lake Street,
without a letter, but with a message to Dmitri Fyodorovitch to go to dine
with him at the restaurant here, in the market-place. I went, but didn’t
find Dmitri Fyodorovitch at home, though it was eight o’clock. ‘He’s been
here, but he is quite gone,’ those were the very words of his landlady.
It’s as though there was an understanding between them. Perhaps at this
moment he is in the restaurant with Ivan Fyodorovitch, for Ivan
Fyodorovitch has not been home to dinner and Fyodor Pavlovitch dined alone
an hour ago, and is gone to lie down. But I beg you most particularly not
to speak of me and of what I have told you, for he’d kill me for nothing
at all.”

“Brother Ivan invited Dmitri to the restaurant to-day?” repeated Alyosha
quickly.

“That’s so.”

“The Metropolis tavern in the market-place?”

“The very same.”

“That’s quite likely,” cried Alyosha, much excited. “Thank you,
Smerdyakov; that’s important. I’ll go there at once.”

“Don’t betray me,” Smerdyakov called after him.

“Oh, no, I’ll go to the tavern as though by chance. Don’t be anxious.”

“But wait a minute, I’ll open the gate to you,” cried Marya Kondratyevna.

“No; it’s a short cut, I’ll get over the fence again.”

What he had heard threw Alyosha into great agitation. He ran to the
tavern. It was impossible for him to go into the tavern in his monastic
dress, but he could inquire at the entrance for his brothers and call them
down. But just as he reached the tavern, a window was flung open, and his
brother Ivan called down to him from it.

“Alyosha, can’t you come up here to me? I shall be awfully grateful.”

“To be sure I can, only I don’t quite know whether in this dress—”

“But I am in a room apart. Come up the steps; I’ll run down to meet you.”

A minute later Alyosha was sitting beside his brother. Ivan was alone
dining.



Chapter III. The Brothers Make Friends


Ivan was not, however, in a separate room, but only in a place shut off by
a screen, so that it was unseen by other people in the room. It was the
first room from the entrance with a buffet along the wall. Waiters were
continually darting to and fro in it. The only customer in the room was an
old retired military man drinking tea in a corner. But there was the usual
bustle going on in the other rooms of the tavern; there were shouts for
the waiters, the sound of popping corks, the click of billiard balls, the
drone of the organ. Alyosha knew that Ivan did not usually visit this
tavern and disliked taverns in general. So he must have come here, he
reflected, simply to meet Dmitri by arrangement. Yet Dmitri was not there.

“Shall I order you fish, soup or anything. You don’t live on tea alone, I
suppose,” cried Ivan, apparently delighted at having got hold of Alyosha.
He had finished dinner and was drinking tea.

“Let me have soup, and tea afterwards, I am hungry,” said Alyosha gayly.

“And cherry jam? They have it here. You remember how you used to love
cherry jam when you were little?”

“You remember that? Let me have jam too, I like it still.”

Ivan rang for the waiter and ordered soup, jam and tea.

“I remember everything, Alyosha, I remember you till you were eleven, I
was nearly fifteen. There’s such a difference between fifteen and eleven
that brothers are never companions at those ages. I don’t know whether I
was fond of you even. When I went away to Moscow for the first few years I
never thought of you at all. Then, when you came to Moscow yourself, we
only met once somewhere, I believe. And now I’ve been here more than three
months, and so far we have scarcely said a word to each other. To-morrow I
am going away, and I was just thinking as I sat here how I could see you
to say good-by and just then you passed.”

“Were you very anxious to see me, then?”

“Very. I want to get to know you once for all, and I want you to know me.
And then to say good-by. I believe it’s always best to get to know people
just before leaving them. I’ve noticed how you’ve been looking at me these
three months. There has been a continual look of expectation in your eyes,
and I can’t endure that. That’s how it is I’ve kept away from you. But in
the end I have learned to respect you. The little man stands firm, I
thought. Though I am laughing, I am serious. You do stand firm, don’t you?
I like people who are firm like that whatever it is they stand by, even if
they are such little fellows as you. Your expectant eyes ceased to annoy
me, I grew fond of them in the end, those expectant eyes. You seem to love
me for some reason, Alyosha?”

“I do love you, Ivan. Dmitri says of you—Ivan is a tomb! I say of you,
Ivan is a riddle. You are a riddle to me even now. But I understand
something in you, and I did not understand it till this morning.”

“What’s that?” laughed Ivan.

“You won’t be angry?” Alyosha laughed too.

“Well?”

“That you are just as young as other young men of three and twenty, that
you are just a young and fresh and nice boy, green in fact! Now, have I
insulted you dreadfully?”

“On the contrary, I am struck by a coincidence,” cried Ivan, warmly and
good-humoredly. “Would you believe it that ever since that scene with her,
I have thought of nothing else but my youthful greenness, and just as
though you guessed that, you begin about it. Do you know I’ve been sitting
here thinking to myself: that if I didn’t believe in life, if I lost faith
in the woman I love, lost faith in the order of things, were convinced in
fact that everything is a disorderly, damnable, and perhaps devil-ridden
chaos, if I were struck by every horror of man’s disillusionment—still I
should want to live and, having once tasted of the cup, I would not turn
away from it till I had drained it! At thirty, though, I shall be sure to
leave the cup, even if I’ve not emptied it, and turn away—where I don’t
know. But till I am thirty, I know that my youth will triumph over
everything—every disillusionment, every disgust with life. I’ve asked
myself many times whether there is in the world any despair that would
overcome this frantic and perhaps unseemly thirst for life in me, and I’ve
come to the conclusion that there isn’t, that is till I am thirty, and
then I shall lose it of myself, I fancy. Some driveling consumptive
moralists—and poets especially—often call that thirst for life base. It’s
a feature of the Karamazovs, it’s true, that thirst for life regardless of
everything; you have it no doubt too, but why is it base? The centripetal
force on our planet is still fearfully strong, Alyosha. I have a longing
for life, and I go on living in spite of logic. Though I may not believe
in the order of the universe, yet I love the sticky little leaves as they
open in spring. I love the blue sky, I love some people, whom one loves
you know sometimes without knowing why. I love some great deeds done by
men, though I’ve long ceased perhaps to have faith in them, yet from old
habit one’s heart prizes them. Here they have brought the soup for you,
eat it, it will do you good. It’s first-rate soup, they know how to make
it here. I want to travel in Europe, Alyosha, I shall set off from here.
And yet I know that I am only going to a graveyard, but it’s a most
precious graveyard, that’s what it is! Precious are the dead that lie
there, every stone over them speaks of such burning life in the past, of
such passionate faith in their work, their truth, their struggle and their
science, that I know I shall fall on the ground and kiss those stones and
weep over them; though I’m convinced in my heart that it’s long been
nothing but a graveyard. And I shall not weep from despair, but simply
because I shall be happy in my tears, I shall steep my soul in my emotion.
I love the sticky leaves in spring, the blue sky—that’s all it is. It’s
not a matter of intellect or logic, it’s loving with one’s inside, with
one’s stomach. One loves the first strength of one’s youth. Do you
understand anything of my tirade, Alyosha?” Ivan laughed suddenly.

“I understand too well, Ivan. One longs to love with one’s inside, with
one’s stomach. You said that so well and I am awfully glad that you have
such a longing for life,” cried Alyosha. “I think every one should love
life above everything in the world.”

“Love life more than the meaning of it?”

“Certainly, love it, regardless of logic as you say, it must be regardless
of logic, and it’s only then one will understand the meaning of it. I have
thought so a long time. Half your work is done, Ivan, you love life, now
you’ve only to try to do the second half and you are saved.”

“You are trying to save me, but perhaps I am not lost! And what does your
second half mean?”

“Why, one has to raise up your dead, who perhaps have not died after all.
Come, let me have tea. I am so glad of our talk, Ivan.”

“I see you are feeling inspired. I am awfully fond of such _professions de
foi_ from such—novices. You are a steadfast person, Alexey. Is it true
that you mean to leave the monastery?”

“Yes, my elder sends me out into the world.”

“We shall see each other then in the world. We shall meet before I am
thirty, when I shall begin to turn aside from the cup. Father doesn’t want
to turn aside from his cup till he is seventy, he dreams of hanging on to
eighty in fact, so he says. He means it only too seriously, though he is a
buffoon. He stands on a firm rock, too, he stands on his sensuality—though
after we are thirty, indeed, there may be nothing else to stand on.... But
to hang on to seventy is nasty, better only to thirty; one might retain ‘a
shadow of nobility’ by deceiving oneself. Have you seen Dmitri to-day?”

“No, but I saw Smerdyakov,” and Alyosha rapidly, though minutely,
described his meeting with Smerdyakov. Ivan began listening anxiously and
questioned him.

“But he begged me not to tell Dmitri that he had told me about him,” added
Alyosha. Ivan frowned and pondered.

“Are you frowning on Smerdyakov’s account?” asked Alyosha.

“Yes, on his account. Damn him, I certainly did want to see Dmitri, but
now there’s no need,” said Ivan reluctantly.

“But are you really going so soon, brother?”

“Yes.”

“What of Dmitri and father? how will it end?” asked Alyosha anxiously.

“You are always harping upon it! What have I to do with it? Am I my
brother Dmitri’s keeper?” Ivan snapped irritably, but then he suddenly
smiled bitterly. “Cain’s answer about his murdered brother, wasn’t it?
Perhaps that’s what you’re thinking at this moment? Well, damn it all, I
can’t stay here to be their keeper, can I? I’ve finished what I had to do,
and I am going. Do you imagine I am jealous of Dmitri, that I’ve been
trying to steal his beautiful Katerina Ivanovna for the last three months?
Nonsense, I had business of my own. I finished it. I am going. I finished
it just now, you were witness.”

“At Katerina Ivanovna’s?”

“Yes, and I’ve released myself once for all. And after all, what have I to
do with Dmitri? Dmitri doesn’t come in. I had my own business to settle
with Katerina Ivanovna. You know, on the contrary, that Dmitri behaved as
though there was an understanding between us. I didn’t ask him to do it,
but he solemnly handed her over to me and gave us his blessing. It’s all
too funny. Ah, Alyosha, if you only knew how light my heart is now! Would
you believe, it, I sat here eating my dinner and was nearly ordering
champagne to celebrate my first hour of freedom. Tfoo! It’s been going on
nearly six months, and all at once I’ve thrown it off. I could never have
guessed even yesterday, how easy it would be to put an end to it if I
wanted.”

“You are speaking of your love, Ivan?”

“Of my love, if you like. I fell in love with the young lady, I worried
myself over her and she worried me. I sat watching over her ... and all at
once it’s collapsed! I spoke this morning with inspiration, but I went
away and roared with laughter. Would you believe it? Yes, it’s the literal
truth.”

“You seem very merry about it now,” observed Alyosha, looking into his
face, which had suddenly grown brighter.

“But how could I tell that I didn’t care for her a bit! Ha ha! It appears
after all I didn’t. And yet how she attracted me! How attractive she was
just now when I made my speech! And do you know she attracts me awfully
even now, yet how easy it is to leave her. Do you think I am boasting?”

“No, only perhaps it wasn’t love.”

“Alyosha,” laughed Ivan, “don’t make reflections about love, it’s unseemly
for you. How you rushed into the discussion this morning! I’ve forgotten
to kiss you for it.... But how she tormented me! It certainly was sitting
by a ‘laceration.’ Ah, she knew how I loved her! She loved me and not
Dmitri,” Ivan insisted gayly. “Her feeling for Dmitri was simply a
self-laceration. All I told her just now was perfectly true, but the worst
of it is, it may take her fifteen or twenty years to find out that she
doesn’t care for Dmitri, and loves me whom she torments, and perhaps she
may never find it out at all, in spite of her lesson to-day. Well, it’s
better so; I can simply go away for good. By the way, how is she now? What
happened after I departed?”

Alyosha told him she had been hysterical, and that she was now, he heard,
unconscious and delirious.

“Isn’t Madame Hohlakov laying it on?”

“I think not.”

“I must find out. Nobody dies of hysterics, though. They don’t matter. God
gave woman hysterics as a relief. I won’t go to her at all. Why push
myself forward again?”

“But you told her that she had never cared for you.”

“I did that on purpose. Alyosha, shall I call for some champagne? Let us
drink to my freedom. Ah, if only you knew how glad I am!”

“No, brother, we had better not drink,” said Alyosha suddenly. “Besides I
feel somehow depressed.”

“Yes, you’ve been depressed a long time, I’ve noticed it.”

“Have you settled to go to-morrow morning, then?”

“Morning? I didn’t say I should go in the morning.... But perhaps it may
be the morning. Would you believe it, I dined here to-day only to avoid
dining with the old man, I loathe him so. I should have left long ago, so
far as he is concerned. But why are you so worried about my going away?
We’ve plenty of time before I go, an eternity!”

“If you are going away to-morrow, what do you mean by an eternity?”

“But what does it matter to us?” laughed Ivan. “We’ve time enough for our
talk, for what brought us here. Why do you look so surprised? Answer: why
have we met here? To talk of my love for Katerina Ivanovna, of the old man
and Dmitri? of foreign travel? of the fatal position of Russia? Of the
Emperor Napoleon? Is that it?”

“No.”

“Then you know what for. It’s different for other people; but we in our
green youth have to settle the eternal questions first of all. That’s what
we care about. Young Russia is talking about nothing but the eternal
questions now. Just when the old folks are all taken up with practical
questions. Why have you been looking at me in expectation for the last
three months? To ask me, ‘What do you believe, or don’t you believe at
all?’ That’s what your eyes have been meaning for these three months,
haven’t they?”

“Perhaps so,” smiled Alyosha. “You are not laughing at me, now, Ivan?”

“Me laughing! I don’t want to wound my little brother who has been
watching me with such expectation for three months. Alyosha, look straight
at me! Of course I am just such a little boy as you are, only not a
novice. And what have Russian boys been doing up till now, some of them, I
mean? In this stinking tavern, for instance, here, they meet and sit down
in a corner. They’ve never met in their lives before and, when they go out
of the tavern, they won’t meet again for forty years. And what do they
talk about in that momentary halt in the tavern? Of the eternal questions,
of the existence of God and immortality. And those who do not believe in
God talk of socialism or anarchism, of the transformation of all humanity
on a new pattern, so that it all comes to the same, they’re the same
questions turned inside out. And masses, masses of the most original
Russian boys do nothing but talk of the eternal questions! Isn’t it so?”

“Yes, for real Russians the questions of God’s existence and of
immortality, or, as you say, the same questions turned inside out, come
first and foremost, of course, and so they should,” said Alyosha, still
watching his brother with the same gentle and inquiring smile.

“Well, Alyosha, it’s sometimes very unwise to be a Russian at all, but
anything stupider than the way Russian boys spend their time one can
hardly imagine. But there’s one Russian boy called Alyosha I am awfully
fond of.”

“How nicely you put that in!” Alyosha laughed suddenly.

“Well, tell me where to begin, give your orders. The existence of God,
eh?”

“Begin where you like. You declared yesterday at father’s that there was
no God.” Alyosha looked searchingly at his brother.

“I said that yesterday at dinner on purpose to tease you and I saw your
eyes glow. But now I’ve no objection to discussing with you, and I say so
very seriously. I want to be friends with you, Alyosha, for I have no
friends and want to try it. Well, only fancy, perhaps I too accept God,”
laughed Ivan; “that’s a surprise for you, isn’t it?”

“Yes, of course, if you are not joking now.”

“Joking? I was told at the elder’s yesterday that I was joking. You know,
dear boy, there was an old sinner in the eighteenth century who declared
that, if there were no God, he would have to be invented. _S’il n’existait
pas Dieu, il faudrait l’inventer._ And man has actually invented God. And
what’s strange, what would be marvelous, is not that God should really
exist; the marvel is that such an idea, the idea of the necessity of God,
could enter the head of such a savage, vicious beast as man. So holy it
is, so touching, so wise and so great a credit it does to man. As for me,
I’ve long resolved not to think whether man created God or God man. And I
won’t go through all the axioms laid down by Russian boys on that subject,
all derived from European hypotheses; for what’s a hypothesis there, is an
axiom with the Russian boy, and not only with the boys but with their
teachers too, for our Russian professors are often just the same boys
themselves. And so I omit all the hypotheses. For what are we aiming at
now? I am trying to explain as quickly as possible my essential nature,
that is what manner of man I am, what I believe in, and for what I hope,
that’s it, isn’t it? And therefore I tell you that I accept God simply.
But you must note this: if God exists and if He really did create the
world, then, as we all know, He created it according to the geometry of
Euclid and the human mind with the conception of only three dimensions in
space. Yet there have been and still are geometricians and philosophers,
and even some of the most distinguished, who doubt whether the whole
universe, or to speak more widely the whole of being, was only created in
Euclid’s geometry; they even dare to dream that two parallel lines, which
according to Euclid can never meet on earth, may meet somewhere in
infinity. I have come to the conclusion that, since I can’t understand
even that, I can’t expect to understand about God. I acknowledge humbly
that I have no faculty for settling such questions, I have a Euclidian
earthly mind, and how could I solve problems that are not of this world?
And I advise you never to think about it either, my dear Alyosha,
especially about God, whether He exists or not. All such questions are
utterly inappropriate for a mind created with an idea of only three
dimensions. And so I accept God and am glad to, and what’s more, I accept
His wisdom, His purpose—which are utterly beyond our ken; I believe in the
underlying order and the meaning of life; I believe in the eternal harmony
in which they say we shall one day be blended. I believe in the Word to
Which the universe is striving, and Which Itself was ‘with God,’ and Which
Itself is God and so on, and so on, to infinity. There are all sorts of
phrases for it. I seem to be on the right path, don’t I? Yet would you
believe it, in the final result I don’t accept this world of God’s, and,
although I know it exists, I don’t accept it at all. It’s not that I don’t
accept God, you must understand, it’s the world created by Him I don’t and
cannot accept. Let me make it plain. I believe like a child that suffering
will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of
human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the
despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidian mind
of man, that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony,
something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all
hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all
the crimes of humanity, of all the blood they’ve shed; that it will make
it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened with
men—but though all that may come to pass, I don’t accept it. I won’t
accept it. Even if parallel lines do meet and I see it myself, I shall see
it and say that they’ve met, but still I won’t accept it. That’s what’s at
the root of me, Alyosha; that’s my creed. I am in earnest in what I say. I
began our talk as stupidly as I could on purpose, but I’ve led up to my
confession, for that’s all you want. You didn’t want to hear about God,
but only to know what the brother you love lives by. And so I’ve told
you.”

Ivan concluded his long tirade with marked and unexpected feeling.

“And why did you begin ‘as stupidly as you could’?” asked Alyosha, looking
dreamily at him.

“To begin with, for the sake of being Russian. Russian conversations on
such subjects are always carried on inconceivably stupidly. And secondly,
the stupider one is, the closer one is to reality. The stupider one is,
the clearer one is. Stupidity is brief and artless, while intelligence
wriggles and hides itself. Intelligence is a knave, but stupidity is
honest and straightforward. I’ve led the conversation to my despair, and
the more stupidly I have presented it, the better for me.”

“You will explain why you don’t accept the world?” said Alyosha.

“To be sure I will, it’s not a secret, that’s what I’ve been leading up
to. Dear little brother, I don’t want to corrupt you or to turn you from
your stronghold, perhaps I want to be healed by you.” Ivan smiled suddenly
quite like a little gentle child. Alyosha had never seen such a smile on
his face before.



Chapter IV. Rebellion


“I must make you one confession,” Ivan began. “I could never understand
how one can love one’s neighbors. It’s just one’s neighbors, to my mind,
that one can’t love, though one might love those at a distance. I once
read somewhere of John the Merciful, a saint, that when a hungry, frozen
beggar came to him, he took him into his bed, held him in his arms, and
began breathing into his mouth, which was putrid and loathsome from some
awful disease. I am convinced that he did that from ‘self-laceration,’
from the self-laceration of falsity, for the sake of the charity imposed
by duty, as a penance laid on him. For any one to love a man, he must be
hidden, for as soon as he shows his face, love is gone.”

“Father Zossima has talked of that more than once,” observed Alyosha; “he,
too, said that the face of a man often hinders many people not practiced
in love, from loving him. But yet there’s a great deal of love in mankind,
and almost Christ-like love. I know that myself, Ivan.”

“Well, I know nothing of it so far, and can’t understand it, and the
innumerable mass of mankind are with me there. The question is, whether
that’s due to men’s bad qualities or whether it’s inherent in their
nature. To my thinking, Christ-like love for men is a miracle impossible
on earth. He was God. But we are not gods. Suppose I, for instance, suffer
intensely. Another can never know how much I suffer, because he is another
and not I. And what’s more, a man is rarely ready to admit another’s
suffering (as though it were a distinction). Why won’t he admit it, do you
think? Because I smell unpleasant, because I have a stupid face, because I
once trod on his foot. Besides, there is suffering and suffering;
degrading, humiliating suffering such as humbles me—hunger, for
instance—my benefactor will perhaps allow me; but when you come to higher
suffering—for an idea, for instance—he will very rarely admit that,
perhaps because my face strikes him as not at all what he fancies a man
should have who suffers for an idea. And so he deprives me instantly of
his favor, and not at all from badness of heart. Beggars, especially
genteel beggars, ought never to show themselves, but to ask for charity
through the newspapers. One can love one’s neighbors in the abstract, or
even at a distance, but at close quarters it’s almost impossible. If it
were as on the stage, in the ballet, where if beggars come in, they wear
silken rags and tattered lace and beg for alms dancing gracefully, then
one might like looking at them. But even then we should not love them. But
enough of that. I simply wanted to show you my point of view. I meant to
speak of the suffering of mankind generally, but we had better confine
ourselves to the sufferings of the children. That reduces the scope of my
argument to a tenth of what it would be. Still we’d better keep to the
children, though it does weaken my case. But, in the first place, children
can be loved even at close quarters, even when they are dirty, even when
they are ugly (I fancy, though, children never are ugly). The second
reason why I won’t speak of grown-up people is that, besides being
disgusting and unworthy of love, they have a compensation—they’ve eaten
the apple and know good and evil, and they have become ‘like gods.’ They
go on eating it still. But the children haven’t eaten anything, and are so
far innocent. Are you fond of children, Alyosha? I know you are, and you
will understand why I prefer to speak of them. If they, too, suffer
horribly on earth, they must suffer for their fathers’ sins, they must be
punished for their fathers, who have eaten the apple; but that reasoning
is of the other world and is incomprehensible for the heart of man here on
earth. The innocent must not suffer for another’s sins, and especially
such innocents! You may be surprised at me, Alyosha, but I am awfully fond
of children, too. And observe, cruel people, the violent, the rapacious,
the Karamazovs are sometimes very fond of children. Children while they
are quite little—up to seven, for instance—are so remote from grown-up
people; they are different creatures, as it were, of a different species.
I knew a criminal in prison who had, in the course of his career as a
burglar, murdered whole families, including several children. But when he
was in prison, he had a strange affection for them. He spent all his time
at his window, watching the children playing in the prison yard. He
trained one little boy to come up to his window and made great friends
with him.... You don’t know why I am telling you all this, Alyosha? My
head aches and I am sad.”

“You speak with a strange air,” observed Alyosha uneasily, “as though you
were not quite yourself.”

“By the way, a Bulgarian I met lately in Moscow,” Ivan went on, seeming
not to hear his brother’s words, “told me about the crimes committed by
Turks and Circassians in all parts of Bulgaria through fear of a general
rising of the Slavs. They burn villages, murder, outrage women and
children, they nail their prisoners by the ears to the fences, leave them
so till morning, and in the morning they hang them—all sorts of things you
can’t imagine. People talk sometimes of bestial cruelty, but that’s a
great injustice and insult to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as
a man, so artistically cruel. The tiger only tears and gnaws, that’s all
he can do. He would never think of nailing people by the ears, even if he
were able to do it. These Turks took a pleasure in torturing children,
too; cutting the unborn child from the mother’s womb, and tossing babies
up in the air and catching them on the points of their bayonets before
their mothers’ eyes. Doing it before the mothers’ eyes was what gave zest
to the amusement. Here is another scene that I thought very interesting.
Imagine a trembling mother with her baby in her arms, a circle of invading
Turks around her. They’ve planned a diversion: they pet the baby, laugh to
make it laugh. They succeed, the baby laughs. At that moment a Turk points
a pistol four inches from the baby’s face. The baby laughs with glee,
holds out its little hands to the pistol, and he pulls the trigger in the
baby’s face and blows out its brains. Artistic, wasn’t it? By the way,
Turks are particularly fond of sweet things, they say.”

“Brother, what are you driving at?” asked Alyosha.

“I think if the devil doesn’t exist, but man has created him, he has
created him in his own image and likeness.”

“Just as he did God, then?” observed Alyosha.

“ ‘It’s wonderful how you can turn words,’ as Polonius says in _Hamlet_,”
laughed Ivan. “You turn my words against me. Well, I am glad. Yours must
be a fine God, if man created Him in his image and likeness. You asked
just now what I was driving at. You see, I am fond of collecting certain
facts, and, would you believe, I even copy anecdotes of a certain sort
from newspapers and books, and I’ve already got a fine collection. The
Turks, of course, have gone into it, but they are foreigners. I have
specimens from home that are even better than the Turks. You know we
prefer beating—rods and scourges—that’s our national institution. Nailing
ears is unthinkable for us, for we are, after all, Europeans. But the rod
and the scourge we have always with us and they cannot be taken from us.
Abroad now they scarcely do any beating. Manners are more humane, or laws
have been passed, so that they don’t dare to flog men now. But they make
up for it in another way just as national as ours. And so national that it
would be practically impossible among us, though I believe we are being
inoculated with it, since the religious movement began in our aristocracy.
I have a charming pamphlet, translated from the French, describing how,
quite recently, five years ago, a murderer, Richard, was executed—a young
man, I believe, of three and twenty, who repented and was converted to the
Christian faith at the very scaffold. This Richard was an illegitimate
child who was given as a child of six by his parents to some shepherds on
the Swiss mountains. They brought him up to work for them. He grew up like
a little wild beast among them. The shepherds taught him nothing, and
scarcely fed or clothed him, but sent him out at seven to herd the flock
in cold and wet, and no one hesitated or scrupled to treat him so. Quite
the contrary, they thought they had every right, for Richard had been
given to them as a chattel, and they did not even see the necessity of
feeding him. Richard himself describes how in those years, like the
Prodigal Son in the Gospel, he longed to eat of the mash given to the
pigs, which were fattened for sale. But they wouldn’t even give him that,
and beat him when he stole from the pigs. And that was how he spent all
his childhood and his youth, till he grew up and was strong enough to go
away and be a thief. The savage began to earn his living as a day laborer
in Geneva. He drank what he earned, he lived like a brute, and finished by
killing and robbing an old man. He was caught, tried, and condemned to
death. They are not sentimentalists there. And in prison he was
immediately surrounded by pastors, members of Christian brotherhoods,
philanthropic ladies, and the like. They taught him to read and write in
prison, and expounded the Gospel to him. They exhorted him, worked upon
him, drummed at him incessantly, till at last he solemnly confessed his
crime. He was converted. He wrote to the court himself that he was a
monster, but that in the end God had vouchsafed him light and shown grace.
All Geneva was in excitement about him—all philanthropic and religious
Geneva. All the aristocratic and well-bred society of the town rushed to
the prison, kissed Richard and embraced him; ‘You are our brother, you
have found grace.’ And Richard does nothing but weep with emotion, ‘Yes,
I’ve found grace! All my youth and childhood I was glad of pigs’ food, but
now even I have found grace. I am dying in the Lord.’ ‘Yes, Richard, die
in the Lord; you have shed blood and must die. Though it’s not your fault
that you knew not the Lord, when you coveted the pigs’ food and were
beaten for stealing it (which was very wrong of you, for stealing is
forbidden); but you’ve shed blood and you must die.’ And on the last day,
Richard, perfectly limp, did nothing but cry and repeat every minute:
‘This is my happiest day. I am going to the Lord.’ ‘Yes,’ cry the pastors
and the judges and philanthropic ladies. ‘This is the happiest day of your
life, for you are going to the Lord!’ They all walk or drive to the
scaffold in procession behind the prison van. At the scaffold they call to
Richard: ‘Die, brother, die in the Lord, for even thou hast found grace!’
And so, covered with his brothers’ kisses, Richard is dragged on to the
scaffold, and led to the guillotine. And they chopped off his head in
brotherly fashion, because he had found grace. Yes, that’s characteristic.
That pamphlet is translated into Russian by some Russian philanthropists
of aristocratic rank and evangelical aspirations, and has been distributed
gratis for the enlightenment of the people. The case of Richard is
interesting because it’s national. Though to us it’s absurd to cut off a
man’s head, because he has become our brother and has found grace, yet we
have our own speciality, which is all but worse. Our historical pastime is
the direct satisfaction of inflicting pain. There are lines in Nekrassov
describing how a peasant lashes a horse on the eyes, ‘on its meek eyes,’
every one must have seen it. It’s peculiarly Russian. He describes how a
feeble little nag has foundered under too heavy a load and cannot move.
The peasant beats it, beats it savagely, beats it at last not knowing what
he is doing in the intoxication of cruelty, thrashes it mercilessly over
and over again. ‘However weak you are, you must pull, if you die for it.’
The nag strains, and then he begins lashing the poor defenseless creature
on its weeping, on its ‘meek eyes.’ The frantic beast tugs and draws the
load, trembling all over, gasping for breath, moving sideways, with a sort
of unnatural spasmodic action—it’s awful in Nekrassov. But that’s only a
horse, and God has given horses to be beaten. So the Tatars have taught
us, and they left us the knout as a remembrance of it. But men, too, can
be beaten. A well-educated, cultured gentleman and his wife beat their own
child with a birch-rod, a girl of seven. I have an exact account of it.
The papa was glad that the birch was covered with twigs. ‘It stings more,’
said he, and so he began stinging his daughter. I know for a fact there
are people who at every blow are worked up to sensuality, to literal
sensuality, which increases progressively at every blow they inflict. They
beat for a minute, for five minutes, for ten minutes, more often and more
savagely. The child screams. At last the child cannot scream, it gasps,
‘Daddy! daddy!’ By some diabolical unseemly chance the case was brought
into court. A counsel is engaged. The Russian people have long called a
barrister ‘a conscience for hire.’ The counsel protests in his client’s
defense. ‘It’s such a simple thing,’ he says, ‘an everyday domestic event.
A father corrects his child. To our shame be it said, it is brought into
court.’ The jury, convinced by him, give a favorable verdict. The public
roars with delight that the torturer is acquitted. Ah, pity I wasn’t
there! I would have proposed to raise a subscription in his honor!
Charming pictures.

“But I’ve still better things about children. I’ve collected a great,
great deal about Russian children, Alyosha. There was a little girl of
five who was hated by her father and mother, ‘most worthy and respectable
people, of good education and breeding.’ You see, I must repeat again, it
is a peculiar characteristic of many people, this love of torturing
children, and children only. To all other types of humanity these
torturers behave mildly and benevolently, like cultivated and humane
Europeans; but they are very fond of tormenting children, even fond of
children themselves in that sense. It’s just their defenselessness that
tempts the tormentor, just the angelic confidence of the child who has no
refuge and no appeal, that sets his vile blood on fire. In every man, of
course, a demon lies hidden—the demon of rage, the demon of lustful heat
at the screams of the tortured victim, the demon of lawlessness let off
the chain, the demon of diseases that follow on vice, gout, kidney
disease, and so on.

“This poor child of five was subjected to every possible torture by those
cultivated parents. They beat her, thrashed her, kicked her for no reason
till her body was one bruise. Then, they went to greater refinements of
cruelty—shut her up all night in the cold and frost in a privy, and
because she didn’t ask to be taken up at night (as though a child of five
sleeping its angelic, sound sleep could be trained to wake and ask), they
smeared her face and filled her mouth with excrement, and it was her
mother, her mother did this. And that mother could sleep, hearing the poor
child’s groans! Can you understand why a little creature, who can’t even
understand what’s done to her, should beat her little aching heart with
her tiny fist in the dark and the cold, and weep her meek unresentful
tears to dear, kind God to protect her? Do you understand that, friend and
brother, you pious and humble novice? Do you understand why this infamy
must be and is permitted? Without it, I am told, man could not have
existed on earth, for he could not have known good and evil. Why should he
know that diabolical good and evil when it costs so much? Why, the whole
world of knowledge is not worth that child’s prayer to ‘dear, kind God’! I
say nothing of the sufferings of grown-up people, they have eaten the
apple, damn them, and the devil take them all! But these little ones! I am
making you suffer, Alyosha, you are not yourself. I’ll leave off if you
like.”

“Never mind. I want to suffer too,” muttered Alyosha.

“One picture, only one more, because it’s so curious, so characteristic,
and I have only just read it in some collection of Russian antiquities.
I’ve forgotten the name. I must look it up. It was in the darkest days of
serfdom at the beginning of the century, and long live the Liberator of
the People! There was in those days a general of aristocratic connections,
the owner of great estates, one of those men—somewhat exceptional, I
believe, even then—who, retiring from the service into a life of leisure,
are convinced that they’ve earned absolute power over the lives of their
subjects. There were such men then. So our general, settled on his
property of two thousand souls, lives in pomp, and domineers over his poor
neighbors as though they were dependents and buffoons. He has kennels of
hundreds of hounds and nearly a hundred dog-boys—all mounted, and in
uniform. One day a serf-boy, a little child of eight, threw a stone in
play and hurt the paw of the general’s favorite hound. ‘Why is my favorite
dog lame?’ He is told that the boy threw a stone that hurt the dog’s paw.
‘So you did it.’ The general looked the child up and down. ‘Take him.’ He
was taken—taken from his mother and kept shut up all night. Early that
morning the general comes out on horseback, with the hounds, his
dependents, dog-boys, and huntsmen, all mounted around him in full hunting
parade. The servants are summoned for their edification, and in front of
them all stands the mother of the child. The child is brought from the
lock-up. It’s a gloomy, cold, foggy autumn day, a capital day for hunting.
The general orders the child to be undressed; the child is stripped naked.
He shivers, numb with terror, not daring to cry.... ‘Make him run,’
commands the general. ‘Run! run!’ shout the dog-boys. The boy runs.... ‘At
him!’ yells the general, and he sets the whole pack of hounds on the
child. The hounds catch him, and tear him to pieces before his mother’s
eyes!... I believe the general was afterwards declared incapable of
administering his estates. Well—what did he deserve? To be shot? To be
shot for the satisfaction of our moral feelings? Speak, Alyosha!”

“To be shot,” murmured Alyosha, lifting his eyes to Ivan with a pale,
twisted smile.

“Bravo!” cried Ivan, delighted. “If even you say so.... You’re a pretty
monk! So there is a little devil sitting in your heart, Alyosha
Karamazov!”

“What I said was absurd, but—”

“That’s just the point, that ‘but’!” cried Ivan. “Let me tell you, novice,
that the absurd is only too necessary on earth. The world stands on
absurdities, and perhaps nothing would have come to pass in it without
them. We know what we know!”

“What do you know?”

“I understand nothing,” Ivan went on, as though in delirium. “I don’t want
to understand anything now. I want to stick to the fact. I made up my mind
long ago not to understand. If I try to understand anything, I shall be
false to the fact, and I have determined to stick to the fact.”

“Why are you trying me?” Alyosha cried, with sudden distress. “Will you
say what you mean at last?”

“Of course, I will; that’s what I’ve been leading up to. You are dear to
me, I don’t want to let you go, and I won’t give you up to your Zossima.”

Ivan for a minute was silent, his face became all at once very sad.

“Listen! I took the case of children only to make my case clearer. Of the
other tears of humanity with which the earth is soaked from its crust to
its center, I will say nothing. I have narrowed my subject on purpose. I
am a bug, and I recognize in all humility that I cannot understand why the
world is arranged as it is. Men are themselves to blame, I suppose; they
were given paradise, they wanted freedom, and stole fire from heaven,
though they knew they would become unhappy, so there is no need to pity
them. With my pitiful, earthly, Euclidian understanding, all I know is
that there is suffering and that there are none guilty; that cause follows
effect, simply and directly; that everything flows and finds its level—but
that’s only Euclidian nonsense, I know that, and I can’t consent to live
by it! What comfort is it to me that there are none guilty and that cause
follows effect simply and directly, and that I know it?—I must have
justice, or I will destroy myself. And not justice in some remote infinite
time and space, but here on earth, and that I could see myself. I have
believed in it. I want to see it, and if I am dead by then, let me rise
again, for if it all happens without me, it will be too unfair. Surely I
haven’t suffered, simply that I, my crimes and my sufferings, may manure
the soil of the future harmony for somebody else. I want to see with my
own eyes the hind lie down with the lion and the victim rise up and
embrace his murderer. I want to be there when every one suddenly
understands what it has all been for. All the religions of the world are
built on this longing, and I am a believer. But then there are the
children, and what am I to do about them? That’s a question I can’t
answer. For the hundredth time I repeat, there are numbers of questions,
but I’ve only taken the children, because in their case what I mean is so
unanswerably clear. Listen! If all must suffer to pay for the eternal
harmony, what have children to do with it, tell me, please? It’s beyond
all comprehension why they should suffer, and why they should pay for the
harmony. Why should they, too, furnish material to enrich the soil for the
harmony of the future? I understand solidarity in sin among men. I
understand solidarity in retribution, too; but there can be no such
solidarity with children. And if it is really true that they must share
responsibility for all their fathers’ crimes, such a truth is not of this
world and is beyond my comprehension. Some jester will say, perhaps, that
the child would have grown up and have sinned, but you see he didn’t grow
up, he was torn to pieces by the dogs, at eight years old. Oh, Alyosha, I
am not blaspheming! I understand, of course, what an upheaval of the
universe it will be, when everything in heaven and earth blends in one
hymn of praise and everything that lives and has lived cries aloud: ‘Thou
art just, O Lord, for Thy ways are revealed.’ When the mother embraces the
fiend who threw her child to the dogs, and all three cry aloud with tears,
‘Thou art just, O Lord!’ then, of course, the crown of knowledge will be
reached and all will be made clear. But what pulls me up here is that I
can’t accept that harmony. And while I am on earth, I make haste to take
my own measures. You see, Alyosha, perhaps it really may happen that if I
live to that moment, or rise again to see it, I, too, perhaps, may cry
aloud with the rest, looking at the mother embracing the child’s torturer,
‘Thou art just, O Lord!’ but I don’t want to cry aloud then. While there
is still time, I hasten to protect myself, and so I renounce the higher
harmony altogether. It’s not worth the tears of that one tortured child
who beat itself on the breast with its little fist and prayed in its
stinking outhouse, with its unexpiated tears to ‘dear, kind God’! It’s not
worth it, because those tears are unatoned for. They must be atoned for,
or there can be no harmony. But how? How are you going to atone for them?
Is it possible? By their being avenged? But what do I care for avenging
them? What do I care for a hell for oppressors? What good can hell do,
since those children have already been tortured? And what becomes of
harmony, if there is hell? I want to forgive. I want to embrace. I don’t
want more suffering. And if the sufferings of children go to swell the sum
of sufferings which was necessary to pay for truth, then I protest that
the truth is not worth such a price. I don’t want the mother to embrace
the oppressor who threw her son to the dogs! She dare not forgive him! Let
her forgive him for herself, if she will, let her forgive the torturer for
the immeasurable suffering of her mother’s heart. But the sufferings of
her tortured child she has no right to forgive; she dare not forgive the
torturer, even if the child were to forgive him! And if that is so, if
they dare not forgive, what becomes of harmony? Is there in the whole
world a being who would have the right to forgive and could forgive? I
don’t want harmony. From love for humanity I don’t want it. I would rather
be left with the unavenged suffering. I would rather remain with my
unavenged suffering and unsatisfied indignation, _even if I were wrong_.
Besides, too high a price is asked for harmony; it’s beyond our means to
pay so much to enter on it. And so I hasten to give back my entrance
ticket, and if I am an honest man I am bound to give it back as soon as
possible. And that I am doing. It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha,
only I most respectfully return Him the ticket.”

“That’s rebellion,” murmured Alyosha, looking down.

“Rebellion? I am sorry you call it that,” said Ivan earnestly. “One can
hardly live in rebellion, and I want to live. Tell me yourself, I
challenge you—answer. Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human
destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace
and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to
death only one tiny creature—that baby beating its breast with its fist,
for instance—and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you
consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell the
truth.”

“No, I wouldn’t consent,” said Alyosha softly.

“And can you admit the idea that men for whom you are building it would
agree to accept their happiness on the foundation of the unexpiated blood
of a little victim? And accepting it would remain happy for ever?”

“No, I can’t admit it. Brother,” said Alyosha suddenly, with flashing
eyes, “you said just now, is there a being in the whole world who would
have the right to forgive and could forgive? But there is a Being and He
can forgive everything, all and for all, because He gave His innocent
blood for all and everything. You have forgotten Him, and on Him is built
the edifice, and it is to Him they cry aloud, ‘Thou art just, O Lord, for
Thy ways are revealed!’ ”

“Ah! the One without sin and His blood! No, I have not forgotten Him; on
the contrary I’ve been wondering all the time how it was you did not bring
Him in before, for usually all arguments on your side put Him in the
foreground. Do you know, Alyosha—don’t laugh! I made a poem about a year
ago. If you can waste another ten minutes on me, I’ll tell it to you.”

“You wrote a poem?”

“Oh, no, I didn’t write it,” laughed Ivan, “and I’ve never written two
lines of poetry in my life. But I made up this poem in prose and I
remembered it. I was carried away when I made it up. You will be my first
reader—that is listener. Why should an author forego even one listener?”
smiled Ivan. “Shall I tell it to you?”

“I am all attention,” said Alyosha.

“My poem is called ‘The Grand Inquisitor’; it’s a ridiculous thing, but I
want to tell it to you.”



Chapter V. The Grand Inquisitor


“Even this must have a preface—that is, a literary preface,” laughed Ivan,
“and I am a poor hand at making one. You see, my action takes place in the
sixteenth century, and at that time, as you probably learnt at school, it
was customary in poetry to bring down heavenly powers on earth. Not to
speak of Dante, in France, clerks, as well as the monks in the
monasteries, used to give regular performances in which the Madonna, the
saints, the angels, Christ, and God himself were brought on the stage. In
those days it was done in all simplicity. In Victor Hugo’s _Notre Dame de
Paris_ an edifying and gratuitous spectacle was provided for the people in
the Hôtel de Ville of Paris in the reign of Louis XI. in honor of the
birth of the dauphin. It was called _Le bon jugement de la très sainte et
gracieuse Vierge Marie_, and she appears herself on the stage and
pronounces her _bon jugement_. Similar plays, chiefly from the Old
Testament, were occasionally performed in Moscow too, up to the times of
Peter the Great. But besides plays there were all sorts of legends and
ballads scattered about the world, in which the saints and angels and all
the powers of Heaven took part when required. In our monasteries the monks
busied themselves in translating, copying, and even composing such
poems—and even under the Tatars. There is, for instance, one such poem (of
course, from the Greek), _The Wanderings of Our Lady through Hell_, with
descriptions as bold as Dante’s. Our Lady visits hell, and the Archangel
Michael leads her through the torments. She sees the sinners and their
punishment. There she sees among others one noteworthy set of sinners in a
burning lake; some of them sink to the bottom of the lake so that they
can’t swim out, and ‘these God forgets’—an expression of extraordinary
depth and force. And so Our Lady, shocked and weeping, falls before the
throne of God and begs for mercy for all in hell—for all she has seen
there, indiscriminately. Her conversation with God is immensely
interesting. She beseeches Him, she will not desist, and when God points
to the hands and feet of her Son, nailed to the Cross, and asks, ‘How can
I forgive His tormentors?’ she bids all the saints, all the martyrs, all
the angels and archangels to fall down with her and pray for mercy on all
without distinction. It ends by her winning from God a respite of
suffering every year from Good Friday till Trinity Day, and the sinners at
once raise a cry of thankfulness from hell, chanting, ‘Thou art just, O
Lord, in this judgment.’ Well, my poem would have been of that kind if it
had appeared at that time. He comes on the scene in my poem, but He says
nothing, only appears and passes on. Fifteen centuries have passed since
He promised to come in His glory, fifteen centuries since His prophet
wrote, ‘Behold, I come quickly’; ‘Of that day and that hour knoweth no
man, neither the Son, but the Father,’ as He Himself predicted on earth.
But humanity awaits him with the same faith and with the same love. Oh,
with greater faith, for it is fifteen centuries since man has ceased to
see signs from heaven.


    No signs from heaven come to-day
    To add to what the heart doth say.


There was nothing left but faith in what the heart doth say. It is true
there were many miracles in those days. There were saints who performed
miraculous cures; some holy people, according to their biographies, were
visited by the Queen of Heaven herself. But the devil did not slumber, and
doubts were already arising among men of the truth of these miracles. And
just then there appeared in the north of Germany a terrible new heresy. “A
huge star like to a torch” (that is, to a church) “fell on the sources of
the waters and they became bitter.” These heretics began blasphemously
denying miracles. But those who remained faithful were all the more ardent
in their faith. The tears of humanity rose up to Him as before, awaited
His coming, loved Him, hoped for Him, yearned to suffer and die for Him as
before. And so many ages mankind had prayed with faith and fervor, “O Lord
our God, hasten Thy coming,” so many ages called upon Him, that in His
infinite mercy He deigned to come down to His servants. Before that day He
had come down, He had visited some holy men, martyrs and hermits, as is
written in their lives. Among us, Tyutchev, with absolute faith in the
truth of his words, bore witness that


    Bearing the Cross, in slavish dress,
    Weary and worn, the Heavenly King
    Our mother, Russia, came to bless,
    And through our land went wandering.


And that certainly was so, I assure you.

“And behold, He deigned to appear for a moment to the people, to the
tortured, suffering people, sunk in iniquity, but loving Him like
children. My story is laid in Spain, in Seville, in the most terrible time
of the Inquisition, when fires were lighted every day to the glory of God,
and ‘in the splendid _auto da fé_ the wicked heretics were burnt.’ Oh, of
course, this was not the coming in which He will appear according to His
promise at the end of time in all His heavenly glory, and which will be
sudden ‘as lightning flashing from east to west.’ No, He visited His
children only for a moment, and there where the flames were crackling
round the heretics. In His infinite mercy He came once more among men in
that human shape in which He walked among men for three years fifteen
centuries ago. He came down to the ‘hot pavements’ of the southern town in
which on the day before almost a hundred heretics had, _ad majorem gloriam
Dei_, been burnt by the cardinal, the Grand Inquisitor, in a magnificent
_auto da fé_, in the presence of the king, the court, the knights, the
cardinals, the most charming ladies of the court, and the whole population
of Seville.

“He came softly, unobserved, and yet, strange to say, every one recognized
Him. That might be one of the best passages in the poem. I mean, why they
recognized Him. The people are irresistibly drawn to Him, they surround
Him, they flock about Him, follow Him. He moves silently in their midst
with a gentle smile of infinite compassion. The sun of love burns in His
heart, light and power shine from His eyes, and their radiance, shed on
the people, stirs their hearts with responsive love. He holds out His
hands to them, blesses them, and a healing virtue comes from contact with
Him, even with His garments. An old man in the crowd, blind from
childhood, cries out, ‘O Lord, heal me and I shall see Thee!’ and, as it
were, scales fall from his eyes and the blind man sees Him. The crowd
weeps and kisses the earth under His feet. Children throw flowers before
Him, sing, and cry hosannah. ‘It is He—it is He!’ all repeat. ‘It must be
He, it can be no one but Him!’ He stops at the steps of the Seville
cathedral at the moment when the weeping mourners are bringing in a little
open white coffin. In it lies a child of seven, the only daughter of a
prominent citizen. The dead child lies hidden in flowers. ‘He will raise
your child,’ the crowd shouts to the weeping mother. The priest, coming to
meet the coffin, looks perplexed, and frowns, but the mother of the dead
child throws herself at His feet with a wail. ‘If it is Thou, raise my
child!’ she cries, holding out her hands to Him. The procession halts, the
coffin is laid on the steps at His feet. He looks with compassion, and His
lips once more softly pronounce, ‘Maiden, arise!’ and the maiden arises.
The little girl sits up in the coffin and looks round, smiling with
wide-open wondering eyes, holding a bunch of white roses they had put in
her hand.

“There are cries, sobs, confusion among the people, and at that moment the
cardinal himself, the Grand Inquisitor, passes by the cathedral. He is an
old man, almost ninety, tall and erect, with a withered face and sunken
eyes, in which there is still a gleam of light. He is not dressed in his
gorgeous cardinal’s robes, as he was the day before, when he was burning
the enemies of the Roman Church—at this moment he is wearing his coarse,
old, monk’s cassock. At a distance behind him come his gloomy assistants
and slaves and the ‘holy guard.’ He stops at the sight of the crowd and
watches it from a distance. He sees everything; he sees them set the
coffin down at His feet, sees the child rise up, and his face darkens. He
knits his thick gray brows and his eyes gleam with a sinister fire. He
holds out his finger and bids the guards take Him. And such is his power,
so completely are the people cowed into submission and trembling obedience
to him, that the crowd immediately makes way for the guards, and in the
midst of deathlike silence they lay hands on Him and lead Him away. The
crowd instantly bows down to the earth, like one man, before the old
Inquisitor. He blesses the people in silence and passes on. The guards
lead their prisoner to the close, gloomy vaulted prison in the ancient
palace of the Holy Inquisition and shut Him in it. The day passes and is
followed by the dark, burning, ‘breathless’ night of Seville. The air is
‘fragrant with laurel and lemon.’ In the pitch darkness the iron door of
the prison is suddenly opened and the Grand Inquisitor himself comes in
with a light in his hand. He is alone; the door is closed at once behind
him. He stands in the doorway and for a minute or two gazes into His face.
At last he goes up slowly, sets the light on the table and speaks.

“ ‘Is it Thou? Thou?’ but receiving no answer, he adds at once, ‘Don’t
answer, be silent. What canst Thou say, indeed? I know too well what Thou
wouldst say. And Thou hast no right to add anything to what Thou hadst
said of old. Why, then, art Thou come to hinder us? For Thou hast come to
hinder us, and Thou knowest that. But dost Thou know what will be
to-morrow? I know not who Thou art and care not to know whether it is Thou
or only a semblance of Him, but to-morrow I shall condemn Thee and burn
Thee at the stake as the worst of heretics. And the very people who have
to-day kissed Thy feet, to-morrow at the faintest sign from me will rush
to heap up the embers of Thy fire. Knowest Thou that? Yes, maybe Thou
knowest it,’ he added with thoughtful penetration, never for a moment
taking his eyes off the Prisoner.”

“I don’t quite understand, Ivan. What does it mean?” Alyosha, who had been
listening in silence, said with a smile. “Is it simply a wild fantasy, or
a mistake on the part of the old man—some impossible _quiproquo_?”

“Take it as the last,” said Ivan, laughing, “if you are so corrupted by
modern realism and can’t stand anything fantastic. If you like it to be a
case of mistaken identity, let it be so. It is true,” he went on,
laughing, “the old man was ninety, and he might well be crazy over his set
idea. He might have been struck by the appearance of the Prisoner. It
might, in fact, be simply his ravings, the delusion of an old man of
ninety, over-excited by the _auto da fé_ of a hundred heretics the day
before. But does it matter to us after all whether it was a mistake of
identity or a wild fantasy? All that matters is that the old man should
speak out, should speak openly of what he has thought in silence for
ninety years.”

“And the Prisoner too is silent? Does He look at him and not say a word?”

“That’s inevitable in any case,” Ivan laughed again. “The old man has told
Him He hasn’t the right to add anything to what He has said of old. One
may say it is the most fundamental feature of Roman Catholicism, in my
opinion at least. ‘All has been given by Thee to the Pope,’ they say, ‘and
all, therefore, is still in the Pope’s hands, and there is no need for
Thee to come now at all. Thou must not meddle for the time, at least.’
That’s how they speak and write too—the Jesuits, at any rate. I have read
it myself in the works of their theologians. ‘Hast Thou the right to
reveal to us one of the mysteries of that world from which Thou hast
come?’ my old man asks Him, and answers the question for Him. ‘No, Thou
hast not; that Thou mayest not add to what has been said of old, and
mayest not take from men the freedom which Thou didst exalt when Thou wast
on earth. Whatsoever Thou revealest anew will encroach on men’s freedom of
faith; for it will be manifest as a miracle, and the freedom of their
faith was dearer to Thee than anything in those days fifteen hundred years
ago. Didst Thou not often say then, “I will make you free”? But now Thou
hast seen these “free” men,’ the old man adds suddenly, with a pensive
smile. ‘Yes, we’ve paid dearly for it,’ he goes on, looking sternly at
Him, ‘but at last we have completed that work in Thy name. For fifteen
centuries we have been wrestling with Thy freedom, but now it is ended and
over for good. Dost Thou not believe that it’s over for good? Thou lookest
meekly at me and deignest not even to be wroth with me. But let me tell
Thee that now, to-day, people are more persuaded than ever that they have
perfect freedom, yet they have brought their freedom to us and laid it
humbly at our feet. But that has been our doing. Was this what Thou didst?
Was this Thy freedom?’ ”

“I don’t understand again,” Alyosha broke in. “Is he ironical, is he
jesting?”

“Not a bit of it! He claims it as a merit for himself and his Church that
at last they have vanquished freedom and have done so to make men happy.
‘For now’ (he is speaking of the Inquisition, of course) ‘for the first
time it has become possible to think of the happiness of men. Man was
created a rebel; and how can rebels be happy? Thou wast warned,’ he says
to Him. ‘Thou hast had no lack of admonitions and warnings, but Thou didst
not listen to those warnings; Thou didst reject the only way by which men
might be made happy. But, fortunately, departing Thou didst hand on the
work to us. Thou hast promised, Thou hast established by Thy word, Thou
hast given to us the right to bind and to unbind, and now, of course, Thou
canst not think of taking it away. Why, then, hast Thou come to hinder
us?’ ”

“And what’s the meaning of ‘no lack of admonitions and warnings’?” asked
Alyosha.

“Why, that’s the chief part of what the old man must say.

“ ‘The wise and dread spirit, the spirit of self-destruction and
non-existence,’ the old man goes on, ‘the great spirit talked with Thee in
the wilderness, and we are told in the books that he “tempted” Thee. Is
that so? And could anything truer be said than what he revealed to Thee in
three questions and what Thou didst reject, and what in the books is
called “the temptation”? And yet if there has ever been on earth a real
stupendous miracle, it took place on that day, on the day of the three
temptations. The statement of those three questions was itself the
miracle. If it were possible to imagine simply for the sake of argument
that those three questions of the dread spirit had perished utterly from
the books, and that we had to restore them and to invent them anew, and to
do so had gathered together all the wise men of the earth—rulers, chief
priests, learned men, philosophers, poets—and had set them the task to
invent three questions, such as would not only fit the occasion, but
express in three words, three human phrases, the whole future history of
the world and of humanity—dost Thou believe that all the wisdom of the
earth united could have invented anything in depth and force equal to the
three questions which were actually put to Thee then by the wise and
mighty spirit in the wilderness? From those questions alone, from the
miracle of their statement, we can see that we have here to do not with
the fleeting human intelligence, but with the absolute and eternal. For in
those three questions the whole subsequent history of mankind is, as it
were, brought together into one whole, and foretold, and in them are
united all the unsolved historical contradictions of human nature. At the
time it could not be so clear, since the future was unknown; but now that
fifteen hundred years have passed, we see that everything in those three
questions was so justly divined and foretold, and has been so truly
fulfilled, that nothing can be added to them or taken from them.

“ ‘Judge Thyself who was right—Thou or he who questioned Thee then?
Remember the first question; its meaning, in other words, was this: “Thou
wouldst go into the world, and art going with empty hands, with some
promise of freedom which men in their simplicity and their natural
unruliness cannot even understand, which they fear and dread—for nothing
has ever been more insupportable for a man and a human society than
freedom. But seest Thou these stones in this parched and barren
wilderness? Turn them into bread, and mankind will run after Thee like a
flock of sheep, grateful and obedient, though for ever trembling, lest
Thou withdraw Thy hand and deny them Thy bread.” But Thou wouldst not
deprive man of freedom and didst reject the offer, thinking, what is that
freedom worth, if obedience is bought with bread? Thou didst reply that
man lives not by bread alone. But dost Thou know that for the sake of that
earthly bread the spirit of the earth will rise up against Thee and will
strive with Thee and overcome Thee, and all will follow him, crying, “Who
can compare with this beast? He has given us fire from heaven!” Dost Thou
know that the ages will pass, and humanity will proclaim by the lips of
their sages that there is no crime, and therefore no sin; there is only
hunger? “Feed men, and then ask of them virtue!” that’s what they’ll write
on the banner, which they will raise against Thee, and with which they
will destroy Thy temple. Where Thy temple stood will rise a new building;
the terrible tower of Babel will be built again, and though, like the one
of old, it will not be finished, yet Thou mightest have prevented that new
tower and have cut short the sufferings of men for a thousand years; for
they will come back to us after a thousand years of agony with their
tower. They will seek us again, hidden underground in the catacombs, for
we shall be again persecuted and tortured. They will find us and cry to
us, “Feed us, for those who have promised us fire from heaven haven’t
given it!” And then we shall finish building their tower, for he finishes
the building who feeds them. And we alone shall feed them in Thy name,
declaring falsely that it is in Thy name. Oh, never, never can they feed
themselves without us! No science will give them bread so long as they
remain free. In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet, and say
to us, “Make us your slaves, but feed us.” They will understand
themselves, at last, that freedom and bread enough for all are
inconceivable together, for never, never will they be able to share
between them! They will be convinced, too, that they can never be free,
for they are weak, vicious, worthless and rebellious. Thou didst promise
them the bread of Heaven, but, I repeat again, can it compare with earthly
bread in the eyes of the weak, ever sinful and ignoble race of man? And if
for the sake of the bread of Heaven thousands shall follow Thee, what is
to become of the millions and tens of thousands of millions of creatures
who will not have the strength to forego the earthly bread for the sake of
the heavenly? Or dost Thou care only for the tens of thousands of the
great and strong, while the millions, numerous as the sands of the sea,
who are weak but love Thee, must exist only for the sake of the great and
strong? No, we care for the weak too. They are sinful and rebellious, but
in the end they too will become obedient. They will marvel at us and look
on us as gods, because we are ready to endure the freedom which they have
found so dreadful and to rule over them—so awful it will seem to them to
be free. But we shall tell them that we are Thy servants and rule them in
Thy name. We shall deceive them again, for we will not let Thee come to us
again. That deception will be our suffering, for we shall be forced to
lie.

“ ‘This is the significance of the first question in the wilderness, and
this is what Thou hast rejected for the sake of that freedom which Thou
hast exalted above everything. Yet in this question lies hid the great
secret of this world. Choosing “bread,” Thou wouldst have satisfied the
universal and everlasting craving of humanity—to find some one to worship.
So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so
painfully as to find some one to worship. But man seeks to worship what is
established beyond dispute, so that all men would agree at once to worship
it. For these pitiful creatures are concerned not only to find what one or
the other can worship, but to find something that all would believe in and
worship; what is essential is that all may be _together_ in it. This
craving for _community_ of worship is the chief misery of every man
individually and of all humanity from the beginning of time. For the sake
of common worship they’ve slain each other with the sword. They have set
up gods and challenged one another, “Put away your gods and come and
worship ours, or we will kill you and your gods!” And so it will be to the
end of the world, even when gods disappear from the earth; they will fall
down before idols just the same. Thou didst know, Thou couldst not but
have known, this fundamental secret of human nature, but Thou didst reject
the one infallible banner which was offered Thee to make all men bow down
to Thee alone—the banner of earthly bread; and Thou hast rejected it for
the sake of freedom and the bread of Heaven. Behold what Thou didst
further. And all again in the name of freedom! I tell Thee that man is
tormented by no greater anxiety than to find some one quickly to whom he
can hand over that gift of freedom with which the ill-fated creature is
born. But only one who can appease their conscience can take over their
freedom. In bread there was offered Thee an invincible banner; give bread,
and man will worship thee, for nothing is more certain than bread. But if
some one else gains possession of his conscience—oh! then he will cast
away Thy bread and follow after him who has ensnared his conscience. In
that Thou wast right. For the secret of man’s being is not only to live
but to have something to live for. Without a stable conception of the
object of life, man would not consent to go on living, and would rather
destroy himself than remain on earth, though he had bread in abundance.
That is true. But what happened? Instead of taking men’s freedom from
them, Thou didst make it greater than ever! Didst Thou forget that man
prefers peace, and even death, to freedom of choice in the knowledge of
good and evil? Nothing is more seductive for man than his freedom of
conscience, but nothing is a greater cause of suffering. And behold,
instead of giving a firm foundation for setting the conscience of man at
rest for ever, Thou didst choose all that is exceptional, vague and
enigmatic; Thou didst choose what was utterly beyond the strength of men,
acting as though Thou didst not love them at all—Thou who didst come to
give Thy life for them! Instead of taking possession of men’s freedom,
Thou didst increase it, and burdened the spiritual kingdom of mankind with
its sufferings for ever. Thou didst desire man’s free love, that he should
follow Thee freely, enticed and taken captive by Thee. In place of the
rigid ancient law, man must hereafter with free heart decide for himself
what is good and what is evil, having only Thy image before him as his
guide. But didst Thou not know that he would at last reject even Thy image
and Thy truth, if he is weighed down with the fearful burden of free
choice? They will cry aloud at last that the truth is not in Thee, for
they could not have been left in greater confusion and suffering than Thou
hast caused, laying upon them so many cares and unanswerable problems.

“ ‘So that, in truth, Thou didst Thyself lay the foundation for the
destruction of Thy kingdom, and no one is more to blame for it. Yet what
was offered Thee? There are three powers, three powers alone, able to
conquer and to hold captive for ever the conscience of these impotent
rebels for their happiness—those forces are miracle, mystery and
authority. Thou hast rejected all three and hast set the example for doing
so. When the wise and dread spirit set Thee on the pinnacle of the temple
and said to Thee, “If Thou wouldst know whether Thou art the Son of God
then cast Thyself down, for it is written: the angels shall hold him up
lest he fall and bruise himself, and Thou shalt know then whether Thou art
the Son of God and shalt prove then how great is Thy faith in Thy Father.”
But Thou didst refuse and wouldst not cast Thyself down. Oh, of course,
Thou didst proudly and well, like God; but the weak, unruly race of men,
are they gods? Oh, Thou didst know then that in taking one step, in making
one movement to cast Thyself down, Thou wouldst be tempting God and have
lost all Thy faith in Him, and wouldst have been dashed to pieces against
that earth which Thou didst come to save. And the wise spirit that tempted
Thee would have rejoiced. But I ask again, are there many like Thee? And
couldst Thou believe for one moment that men, too, could face such a
temptation? Is the nature of men such, that they can reject miracle, and
at the great moments of their life, the moments of their deepest, most
agonizing spiritual difficulties, cling only to the free verdict of the
heart? Oh, Thou didst know that Thy deed would be recorded in books, would
be handed down to remote times and the utmost ends of the earth, and Thou
didst hope that man, following Thee, would cling to God and not ask for a
miracle. But Thou didst not know that when man rejects miracle he rejects
God too; for man seeks not so much God as the miraculous. And as man
cannot bear to be without the miraculous, he will create new miracles of
his own for himself, and will worship deeds of sorcery and witchcraft,
though he might be a hundred times over a rebel, heretic and infidel. Thou
didst not come down from the Cross when they shouted to Thee, mocking and
reviling Thee, “Come down from the cross and we will believe that Thou art
He.” Thou didst not come down, for again Thou wouldst not enslave man by a
miracle, and didst crave faith given freely, not based on miracle. Thou
didst crave for free love and not the base raptures of the slave before
the might that has overawed him for ever. But Thou didst think too highly
of men therein, for they are slaves, of course, though rebellious by
nature. Look round and judge; fifteen centuries have passed, look upon
them. Whom hast Thou raised up to Thyself? I swear, man is weaker and
baser by nature than Thou hast believed him! Can he, can he do what Thou
didst? By showing him so much respect, Thou didst, as it were, cease to
feel for him, for Thou didst ask far too much from him—Thou who hast loved
him more than Thyself! Respecting him less, Thou wouldst have asked less
of him. That would have been more like love, for his burden would have
been lighter. He is weak and vile. What though he is everywhere now
rebelling against our power, and proud of his rebellion? It is the pride
of a child and a schoolboy. They are little children rioting and barring
out the teacher at school. But their childish delight will end; it will
cost them dear. They will cast down temples and drench the earth with
blood. But they will see at last, the foolish children, that, though they
are rebels, they are impotent rebels, unable to keep up their own
rebellion. Bathed in their foolish tears, they will recognize at last that
He who created them rebels must have meant to mock at them. They will say
this in despair, and their utterance will be a blasphemy which will make
them more unhappy still, for man’s nature cannot bear blasphemy, and in
the end always avenges it on itself. And so unrest, confusion and
unhappiness—that is the present lot of man after Thou didst bear so much
for their freedom! The great prophet tells in vision and in image, that he
saw all those who took part in the first resurrection and that there were
of each tribe twelve thousand. But if there were so many of them, they
must have been not men but gods. They had borne Thy cross, they had
endured scores of years in the barren, hungry wilderness, living upon
locusts and roots—and Thou mayest indeed point with pride at those
children of freedom, of free love, of free and splendid sacrifice for Thy
name. But remember that they were only some thousands; and what of the
rest? And how are the other weak ones to blame, because they could not
endure what the strong have endured? How is the weak soul to blame that it
is unable to receive such terrible gifts? Canst Thou have simply come to
the elect and for the elect? But if so, it is a mystery and we cannot
understand it. And if it is a mystery, we too have a right to preach a
mystery, and to teach them that it’s not the free judgment of their
hearts, not love that matters, but a mystery which they must follow
blindly, even against their conscience. So we have done. We have corrected
Thy work and have founded it upon _miracle_, _mystery_ and _authority_.
And men rejoiced that they were again led like sheep, and that the
terrible gift that had brought them such suffering was, at last, lifted
from their hearts. Were we right teaching them this? Speak! Did we not
love mankind, so meekly acknowledging their feebleness, lovingly
lightening their burden, and permitting their weak nature even sin with
our sanction? Why hast Thou come now to hinder us? And why dost Thou look
silently and searchingly at me with Thy mild eyes? Be angry. I don’t want
Thy love, for I love Thee not. And what use is it for me to hide anything
from Thee? Don’t I know to Whom I am speaking? All that I can say is known
to Thee already. And is it for me to conceal from Thee our mystery?
Perhaps it is Thy will to hear it from my lips. Listen, then. We are not
working with Thee, but with _him_—that is our mystery. It’s long—eight
centuries—since we have been on _his_ side and not on Thine. Just eight
centuries ago, we took from him what Thou didst reject with scorn, that
last gift he offered Thee, showing Thee all the kingdoms of the earth. We
took from him Rome and the sword of Cæsar, and proclaimed ourselves sole
rulers of the earth, though hitherto we have not been able to complete our
work. But whose fault is that? Oh, the work is only beginning, but it has
begun. It has long to await completion and the earth has yet much to
suffer, but we shall triumph and shall be Cæsars, and then we shall plan
the universal happiness of man. But Thou mightest have taken even then the
sword of Cæsar. Why didst Thou reject that last gift? Hadst Thou accepted
that last counsel of the mighty spirit, Thou wouldst have accomplished all
that man seeks on earth—that is, some one to worship, some one to keep his
conscience, and some means of uniting all in one unanimous and harmonious
ant-heap, for the craving for universal unity is the third and last
anguish of men. Mankind as a whole has always striven to organize a
universal state. There have been many great nations with great histories,
but the more highly they were developed the more unhappy they were, for
they felt more acutely than other people the craving for world-wide union.
The great conquerors, Timours and Ghenghis-Khans, whirled like hurricanes
over the face of the earth striving to subdue its people, and they too
were but the unconscious expression of the same craving for universal
unity. Hadst Thou taken the world and Cæsar’s purple, Thou wouldst have
founded the universal state and have given universal peace. For who can
rule men if not he who holds their conscience and their bread in his
hands? We have taken the sword of Cæsar, and in taking it, of course, have
rejected Thee and followed _him_. Oh, ages are yet to come of the
confusion of free thought, of their science and cannibalism. For having
begun to build their tower of Babel without us, they will end, of course,
with cannibalism. But then the beast will crawl to us and lick our feet
and spatter them with tears of blood. And we shall sit upon the beast and
raise the cup, and on it will be written, “Mystery.” But then, and only
then, the reign of peace and happiness will come for men. Thou art proud
of Thine elect, but Thou hast only the elect, while we give rest to all.
And besides, how many of those elect, those mighty ones who could become
elect, have grown weary waiting for Thee, and have transferred and will
transfer the powers of their spirit and the warmth of their heart to the
other camp, and end by raising their _free_ banner against Thee. Thou
didst Thyself lift up that banner. But with us all will be happy and will
no more rebel nor destroy one another as under Thy freedom. Oh, we shall
persuade them that they will only become free when they renounce their
freedom to us and submit to us. And shall we be right or shall we be
lying? They will be convinced that we are right, for they will remember
the horrors of slavery and confusion to which Thy freedom brought them.
Freedom, free thought and science, will lead them into such straits and
will bring them face to face with such marvels and insoluble mysteries,
that some of them, the fierce and rebellious, will destroy themselves,
others, rebellious but weak, will destroy one another, while the rest,
weak and unhappy, will crawl fawning to our feet and whine to us: “Yes,
you were right, you alone possess His mystery, and we come back to you,
save us from ourselves!”

“ ‘Receiving bread from us, they will see clearly that we take the bread
made by their hands from them, to give it to them, without any miracle.
They will see that we do not change the stones to bread, but in truth they
will be more thankful for taking it from our hands than for the bread
itself! For they will remember only too well that in old days, without our
help, even the bread they made turned to stones in their hands, while
since they have come back to us, the very stones have turned to bread in
their hands. Too, too well will they know the value of complete
submission! And until men know that, they will be unhappy. Who is most to
blame for their not knowing it?—speak! Who scattered the flock and sent it
astray on unknown paths? But the flock will come together again and will
submit once more, and then it will be once for all. Then we shall give
them the quiet humble happiness of weak creatures such as they are by
nature. Oh, we shall persuade them at last not to be proud, for Thou didst
lift them up and thereby taught them to be proud. We shall show them that
they are weak, that they are only pitiful children, but that childlike
happiness is the sweetest of all. They will become timid and will look to
us and huddle close to us in fear, as chicks to the hen. They will marvel
at us and will be awe-stricken before us, and will be proud at our being
so powerful and clever, that we have been able to subdue such a turbulent
flock of thousands of millions. They will tremble impotently before our
wrath, their minds will grow fearful, they will be quick to shed tears
like women and children, but they will be just as ready at a sign from us
to pass to laughter and rejoicing, to happy mirth and childish song. Yes,
we shall set them to work, but in their leisure hours we shall make their
life like a child’s game, with children’s songs and innocent dance. Oh, we
shall allow them even sin, they are weak and helpless, and they will love
us like children because we allow them to sin. We shall tell them that
every sin will be expiated, if it is done with our permission, that we
allow them to sin because we love them, and the punishment for these sins
we take upon ourselves. And we shall take it upon ourselves, and they will
adore us as their saviors who have taken on themselves their sins before
God. And they will have no secrets from us. We shall allow or forbid them
to live with their wives and mistresses, to have or not to have
children—according to whether they have been obedient or disobedient—and
they will submit to us gladly and cheerfully. The most painful secrets of
their conscience, all, all they will bring to us, and we shall have an
answer for all. And they will be glad to believe our answer, for it will
save them from the great anxiety and terrible agony they endure at present
in making a free decision for themselves. And all will be happy, all the
millions of creatures except the hundred thousand who rule over them. For
only we, we who guard the mystery, shall be unhappy. There will be
thousands of millions of happy babes, and a hundred thousand sufferers who
have taken upon themselves the curse of the knowledge of good and evil.
Peacefully they will die, peacefully they will expire in Thy name, and
beyond the grave they will find nothing but death. But we shall keep the
secret, and for their happiness we shall allure them with the reward of
heaven and eternity. Though if there were anything in the other world, it
certainly would not be for such as they. It is prophesied that Thou wilt
come again in victory, Thou wilt come with Thy chosen, the proud and
strong, but we will say that they have only saved themselves, but we have
saved all. We are told that the harlot who sits upon the beast, and holds
in her hands the _mystery_, shall be put to shame, that the weak will rise
up again, and will rend her royal purple and will strip naked her
loathsome body. But then I will stand up and point out to Thee the
thousand millions of happy children who have known no sin. And we who have
taken their sins upon us for their happiness will stand up before Thee and
say: “Judge us if Thou canst and darest.” Know that I fear Thee not. Know
that I too have been in the wilderness, I too have lived on roots and
locusts, I too prized the freedom with which Thou hast blessed men, and I
too was striving to stand among Thy elect, among the strong and powerful,
thirsting “to make up the number.” But I awakened and would not serve
madness. I turned back and joined the ranks of those _who have corrected
Thy work_. I left the proud and went back to the humble, for the happiness
of the humble. What I say to Thee will come to pass, and our dominion will
be built up. I repeat, to-morrow Thou shalt see that obedient flock who at
a sign from me will hasten to heap up the hot cinders about the pile on
which I shall burn Thee for coming to hinder us. For if any one has ever
deserved our fires, it is Thou. To-morrow I shall burn Thee. _Dixi._’ ”

Ivan stopped. He was carried away as he talked, and spoke with excitement;
when he had finished, he suddenly smiled.

Alyosha had listened in silence; towards the end he was greatly moved and
seemed several times on the point of interrupting, but restrained himself.
Now his words came with a rush.

“But ... that’s absurd!” he cried, flushing. “Your poem is in praise of
Jesus, not in blame of Him—as you meant it to be. And who will believe you
about freedom? Is that the way to understand it? That’s not the idea of it
in the Orthodox Church.... That’s Rome, and not even the whole of Rome,
it’s false—those are the worst of the Catholics, the Inquisitors, the
Jesuits!... And there could not be such a fantastic creature as your
Inquisitor. What are these sins of mankind they take on themselves? Who
are these keepers of the mystery who have taken some curse upon themselves
for the happiness of mankind? When have they been seen? We know the
Jesuits, they are spoken ill of, but surely they are not what you
describe? They are not that at all, not at all.... They are simply the
Romish army for the earthly sovereignty of the world in the future, with
the Pontiff of Rome for Emperor ... that’s their ideal, but there’s no
sort of mystery or lofty melancholy about it.... It’s simple lust of
power, of filthy earthly gain, of domination—something like a universal
serfdom with them as masters—that’s all they stand for. They don’t even
believe in God perhaps. Your suffering Inquisitor is a mere fantasy.”

“Stay, stay,” laughed Ivan, “how hot you are! A fantasy you say, let it be
so! Of course it’s a fantasy. But allow me to say: do you really think
that the Roman Catholic movement of the last centuries is actually nothing
but the lust of power, of filthy earthly gain? Is that Father Païssy’s
teaching?”

“No, no, on the contrary, Father Païssy did once say something rather the
same as you ... but of course it’s not the same, not a bit the same,”
Alyosha hastily corrected himself.

“A precious admission, in spite of your ‘not a bit the same.’ I ask you
why your Jesuits and Inquisitors have united simply for vile material
gain? Why can there not be among them one martyr oppressed by great sorrow
and loving humanity? You see, only suppose that there was one such man
among all those who desire nothing but filthy material gain—if there’s
only one like my old Inquisitor, who had himself eaten roots in the desert
and made frenzied efforts to subdue his flesh to make himself free and
perfect. But yet all his life he loved humanity, and suddenly his eyes
were opened, and he saw that it is no great moral blessedness to attain
perfection and freedom, if at the same time one gains the conviction that
millions of God’s creatures have been created as a mockery, that they will
never be capable of using their freedom, that these poor rebels can never
turn into giants to complete the tower, that it was not for such geese
that the great idealist dreamt his dream of harmony. Seeing all that he
turned back and joined—the clever people. Surely that could have
happened?”

“Joined whom, what clever people?” cried Alyosha, completely carried away.
“They have no such great cleverness and no mysteries and secrets....
Perhaps nothing but Atheism, that’s all their secret. Your Inquisitor does
not believe in God, that’s his secret!”

“What if it is so! At last you have guessed it. It’s perfectly true, it’s
true that that’s the whole secret, but isn’t that suffering, at least for
a man like that, who has wasted his whole life in the desert and yet could
not shake off his incurable love of humanity? In his old age he reached
the clear conviction that nothing but the advice of the great dread spirit
could build up any tolerable sort of life for the feeble, unruly,
‘incomplete, empirical creatures created in jest.’ And so, convinced of
this, he sees that he must follow the counsel of the wise spirit, the
dread spirit of death and destruction, and therefore accept lying and
deception, and lead men consciously to death and destruction, and yet
deceive them all the way so that they may not notice where they are being
led, that the poor blind creatures may at least on the way think
themselves happy. And note, the deception is in the name of Him in Whose
ideal the old man had so fervently believed all his life long. Is not that
tragic? And if only one such stood at the head of the whole army ‘filled
with the lust of power only for the sake of filthy gain’—would not one
such be enough to make a tragedy? More than that, one such standing at the
head is enough to create the actual leading idea of the Roman Church with
all its armies and Jesuits, its highest idea. I tell you frankly that I
firmly believe that there has always been such a man among those who stood
at the head of the movement. Who knows, there may have been some such even
among the Roman Popes. Who knows, perhaps the spirit of that accursed old
man who loves mankind so obstinately in his own way, is to be found even
now in a whole multitude of such old men, existing not by chance but by
agreement, as a secret league formed long ago for the guarding of the
mystery, to guard it from the weak and the unhappy, so as to make them
happy. No doubt it is so, and so it must be indeed. I fancy that even
among the Masons there’s something of the same mystery at the bottom, and
that that’s why the Catholics so detest the Masons as their rivals
breaking up the unity of the idea, while it is so essential that there
should be one flock and one shepherd.... But from the way I defend my idea
I might be an author impatient of your criticism. Enough of it.”

“You are perhaps a Mason yourself!” broke suddenly from Alyosha. “You
don’t believe in God,” he added, speaking this time very sorrowfully. He
fancied besides that his brother was looking at him ironically. “How does
your poem end?” he asked, suddenly looking down. “Or was it the end?”

“I meant to end it like this. When the Inquisitor ceased speaking he
waited some time for his Prisoner to answer him. His silence weighed down
upon him. He saw that the Prisoner had listened intently all the time,
looking gently in his face and evidently not wishing to reply. The old man
longed for Him to say something, however bitter and terrible. But He
suddenly approached the old man in silence and softly kissed him on his
bloodless aged lips. That was all His answer. The old man shuddered. His
lips moved. He went to the door, opened it, and said to Him: ‘Go, and come
no more ... come not at all, never, never!’ And he let Him out into the
dark alleys of the town. The Prisoner went away.”

“And the old man?”

“The kiss glows in his heart, but the old man adheres to his idea.”

“And you with him, you too?” cried Alyosha, mournfully.

Ivan laughed.

“Why, it’s all nonsense, Alyosha. It’s only a senseless poem of a
senseless student, who could never write two lines of verse. Why do you
take it so seriously? Surely you don’t suppose I am going straight off to
the Jesuits, to join the men who are correcting His work? Good Lord, it’s
no business of mine. I told you, all I want is to live on to thirty, and
then ... dash the cup to the ground!”

“But the little sticky leaves, and the precious tombs, and the blue sky,
and the woman you love! How will you live, how will you love them?”
Alyosha cried sorrowfully. “With such a hell in your heart and your head,
how can you? No, that’s just what you are going away for, to join them ...
if not, you will kill yourself, you can’t endure it!”

“There is a strength to endure everything,” Ivan said with a cold smile.

“What strength?”

“The strength of the Karamazovs—the strength of the Karamazov baseness.”

“To sink into debauchery, to stifle your soul with corruption, yes?”

“Possibly even that ... only perhaps till I am thirty I shall escape it,
and then—”

“How will you escape it? By what will you escape it? That’s impossible
with your ideas.”

“In the Karamazov way, again.”

“ ‘Everything is lawful,’ you mean? Everything is lawful, is that it?”

Ivan scowled, and all at once turned strangely pale.

“Ah, you’ve caught up yesterday’s phrase, which so offended Miüsov—and
which Dmitri pounced upon so naïvely, and paraphrased!” he smiled queerly.
“Yes, if you like, ‘everything is lawful’ since the word has been said. I
won’t deny it. And Mitya’s version isn’t bad.”

Alyosha looked at him in silence.

“I thought that going away from here I have you at least,” Ivan said
suddenly, with unexpected feeling; “but now I see that there is no place
for me even in your heart, my dear hermit. The formula, ‘all is lawful,’ I
won’t renounce—will you renounce me for that, yes?”

Alyosha got up, went to him and softly kissed him on the lips.

“That’s plagiarism,” cried Ivan, highly delighted. “You stole that from my
poem. Thank you though. Get up, Alyosha, it’s time we were going, both of
us.”

They went out, but stopped when they reached the entrance of the
restaurant.

“Listen, Alyosha,” Ivan began in a resolute voice, “if I am really able to
care for the sticky little leaves I shall only love them, remembering you.
It’s enough for me that you are somewhere here, and I shan’t lose my
desire for life yet. Is that enough for you? Take it as a declaration of
love if you like. And now you go to the right and I to the left. And it’s
enough, do you hear, enough. I mean even if I don’t go away to-morrow (I
think I certainly shall go) and we meet again, don’t say a word more on
these subjects. I beg that particularly. And about Dmitri too, I ask you
specially, never speak to me again,” he added, with sudden irritation;
“it’s all exhausted, it has all been said over and over again, hasn’t it?
And I’ll make you one promise in return for it. When at thirty, I want to
‘dash the cup to the ground,’ wherever I may be I’ll come to have one more
talk with you, even though it were from America, you may be sure of that.
I’ll come on purpose. It will be very interesting to have a look at you,
to see what you’ll be by that time. It’s rather a solemn promise, you see.
And we really may be parting for seven years or ten. Come, go now to your
Pater Seraphicus, he is dying. If he dies without you, you will be angry
with me for having kept you. Good-by, kiss me once more; that’s right, now
go.”

Ivan turned suddenly and went his way without looking back. It was just as
Dmitri had left Alyosha the day before, though the parting had been very
different. The strange resemblance flashed like an arrow through Alyosha’s
mind in the distress and dejection of that moment. He waited a little,
looking after his brother. He suddenly noticed that Ivan swayed as he
walked and that his right shoulder looked lower than his left. He had
never noticed it before. But all at once he turned too, and almost ran to
the monastery. It was nearly dark, and he felt almost frightened;
something new was growing up in him for which he could not account. The
wind had risen again as on the previous evening, and the ancient pines
murmured gloomily about him when he entered the hermitage copse. He almost
ran. “Pater Seraphicus—he got that name from somewhere—where from?”
Alyosha wondered. “Ivan, poor Ivan, and when shall I see you again?...
Here is the hermitage. Yes, yes, that he is, Pater Seraphicus, he will
save me—from him and for ever!”

Several times afterwards he wondered how he could on leaving Ivan so
completely forget his brother Dmitri, though he had that morning, only a
few hours before, so firmly resolved to find him and not to give up doing
so, even should he be unable to return to the monastery that night.



Chapter VI. For Awhile A Very Obscure One


And Ivan, on parting from Alyosha, went home to Fyodor Pavlovitch’s house.
But, strange to say, he was overcome by insufferable depression, which
grew greater at every step he took towards the house. There was nothing
strange in his being depressed; what was strange was that Ivan could not
have said what was the cause of it. He had often been depressed before,
and there was nothing surprising at his feeling so at such a moment, when
he had broken off with everything that had brought him here, and was
preparing that day to make a new start and enter upon a new, unknown
future. He would again be as solitary as ever, and though he had great
hopes, and great—too great—expectations from life, he could not have given
any definite account of his hopes, his expectations, or even his desires.

Yet at that moment, though the apprehension of the new and unknown
certainly found place in his heart, what was worrying him was something
quite different. “Is it loathing for my father’s house?” he wondered.
“Quite likely; I am so sick of it; and though it’s the last time I shall
cross its hateful threshold, still I loathe it.... No, it’s not that
either. Is it the parting with Alyosha and the conversation I had with
him? For so many years I’ve been silent with the whole world and not
deigned to speak, and all of a sudden I reel off a rigmarole like that.”
It certainly might have been the youthful vexation of youthful
inexperience and vanity—vexation at having failed to express himself,
especially with such a being as Alyosha, on whom his heart had certainly
been reckoning. No doubt that came in, that vexation, it must have done
indeed; but yet that was not it, that was not it either. “I feel sick with
depression and yet I can’t tell what I want. Better not think, perhaps.”

Ivan tried “not to think,” but that, too, was no use. What made his
depression so vexatious and irritating was that it had a kind of casual,
external character—he felt that. Some person or thing seemed to be
standing out somewhere, just as something will sometimes obtrude itself
upon the eye, and though one may be so busy with work or conversation that
for a long time one does not notice it, yet it irritates and almost
torments one till at last one realizes, and removes the offending object,
often quite a trifling and ridiculous one—some article left about in the
wrong place, a handkerchief on the floor, a book not replaced on the
shelf, and so on.

At last, feeling very cross and ill-humored, Ivan arrived home, and
suddenly, about fifteen paces from the garden gate, he guessed what was
fretting and worrying him.

On a bench in the gateway the valet Smerdyakov was sitting enjoying the
coolness of the evening, and at the first glance at him Ivan knew that the
valet Smerdyakov was on his mind, and that it was this man that his soul
loathed. It all dawned upon him suddenly and became clear. Just before,
when Alyosha had been telling him of his meeting with Smerdyakov, he had
felt a sudden twinge of gloom and loathing, which had immediately stirred
responsive anger in his heart. Afterwards, as he talked, Smerdyakov had
been forgotten for the time; but still he had been in his mind, and as
soon as Ivan parted with Alyosha and was walking home, the forgotten
sensation began to obtrude itself again. “Is it possible that a miserable,
contemptible creature like that can worry me so much?” he wondered, with
insufferable irritation.

It was true that Ivan had come of late to feel an intense dislike for the
man, especially during the last few days. He had even begun to notice in
himself a growing feeling that was almost of hatred for the creature.
Perhaps this hatred was accentuated by the fact that when Ivan first came
to the neighborhood he had felt quite differently. Then he had taken a
marked interest in Smerdyakov, and had even thought him very original. He
had encouraged him to talk to him, although he had always wondered at a
certain incoherence, or rather restlessness, in his mind, and could not
understand what it was that so continually and insistently worked upon the
brain of “the contemplative.” They discussed philosophical questions and
even how there could have been light on the first day when the sun, moon,
and stars were only created on the fourth day, and how that was to be
understood. But Ivan soon saw that, though the sun, moon, and stars might
be an interesting subject, yet that it was quite secondary to Smerdyakov,
and that he was looking for something altogether different. In one way and
another, he began to betray a boundless vanity, and a wounded vanity, too,
and that Ivan disliked. It had first given rise to his aversion. Later on,
there had been trouble in the house. Grushenka had come on the scene, and
there had been the scandals with his brother Dmitri—they discussed that,
too. But though Smerdyakov always talked of that with great excitement, it
was impossible to discover what he desired to come of it. There was, in
fact, something surprising in the illogicality and incoherence of some of
his desires, accidentally betrayed and always vaguely expressed.
Smerdyakov was always inquiring, putting certain indirect but obviously
premeditated questions, but what his object was he did not explain, and
usually at the most important moment he would break off and relapse into
silence or pass to another subject. But what finally irritated Ivan most
and confirmed his dislike for him was the peculiar, revolting familiarity
which Smerdyakov began to show more and more markedly. Not that he forgot
himself and was rude; on the contrary, he always spoke very respectfully,
yet he had obviously begun to consider—goodness knows why!—that there was
some sort of understanding between him and Ivan Fyodorovitch. He always
spoke in a tone that suggested that those two had some kind of compact,
some secret between them, that had at some time been expressed on both
sides, only known to them and beyond the comprehension of those around
them. But for a long while Ivan did not recognize the real cause of his
growing dislike and he had only lately realized what was at the root of
it.

With a feeling of disgust and irritation he tried to pass in at the gate
without speaking or looking at Smerdyakov. But Smerdyakov rose from the
bench, and from that action alone, Ivan knew instantly that he wanted
particularly to talk to him. Ivan looked at him and stopped, and the fact
that he did stop, instead of passing by, as he meant to the minute before,
drove him to fury. With anger and repulsion he looked at Smerdyakov’s
emasculate, sickly face, with the little curls combed forward on his
forehead. His left eye winked and he grinned as if to say, “Where are you
going? You won’t pass by; you see that we two clever people have something
to say to each other.”

Ivan shook. “Get away, miserable idiot. What have I to do with you?” was
on the tip of his tongue, but to his profound astonishment he heard
himself say, “Is my father still asleep, or has he waked?”

He asked the question softly and meekly, to his own surprise, and at once,
again to his own surprise, sat down on the bench. For an instant he felt
almost frightened; he remembered it afterwards. Smerdyakov stood facing
him, his hands behind his back, looking at him with assurance and almost
severity.

“His honor is still asleep,” he articulated deliberately (“You were the
first to speak, not I,” he seemed to say). “I am surprised at you, sir,”
he added, after a pause, dropping his eyes affectedly, setting his right
foot forward, and playing with the tip of his polished boot.

“Why are you surprised at me?” Ivan asked abruptly and sullenly, doing his
utmost to restrain himself, and suddenly realizing, with disgust, that he
was feeling intense curiosity and would not, on any account, have gone
away without satisfying it.

“Why don’t you go to Tchermashnya, sir?” Smerdyakov suddenly raised his
eyes and smiled familiarly. “Why I smile you must understand of yourself,
if you are a clever man,” his screwed-up left eye seemed to say.

“Why should I go to Tchermashnya?” Ivan asked in surprise.

Smerdyakov was silent again.

“Fyodor Pavlovitch himself has so begged you to,” he said at last, slowly
and apparently attaching no significance to his answer. “I put you off
with a secondary reason,” he seemed to suggest, “simply to say something.”

“Damn you! Speak out what you want!” Ivan cried angrily at last, passing
from meekness to violence.

Smerdyakov drew his right foot up to his left, pulled himself up, but
still looked at him with the same serenity and the same little smile.

“Substantially nothing—but just by way of conversation.”

Another silence followed. They did not speak for nearly a minute. Ivan
knew that he ought to get up and show anger, and Smerdyakov stood before
him and seemed to be waiting as though to see whether he would be angry or
not. So at least it seemed to Ivan. At last he moved to get up. Smerdyakov
seemed to seize the moment.

“I’m in an awful position, Ivan Fyodorovitch. I don’t know how to help
myself,” he said resolutely and distinctly, and at his last word he
sighed. Ivan Fyodorovitch sat down again.

“They are both utterly crazy, they are no better than little children,”
Smerdyakov went on. “I am speaking of your parent and your brother Dmitri
Fyodorovitch. Here Fyodor Pavlovitch will get up directly and begin
worrying me every minute, ‘Has she come? Why hasn’t she come?’ and so on
up till midnight and even after midnight. And if Agrafena Alexandrovna
doesn’t come (for very likely she does not mean to come at all) then he
will be at me again to-morrow morning, ‘Why hasn’t she come? When will she
come?’—as though I were to blame for it. On the other side it’s no better.
As soon as it gets dark, or even before, your brother will appear with his
gun in his hands: ‘Look out, you rogue, you soup-maker. If you miss her
and don’t let me know she’s been—I’ll kill you before any one.’ When the
night’s over, in the morning, he, too, like Fyodor Pavlovitch, begins
worrying me to death. ‘Why hasn’t she come? Will she come soon?’ And he,
too, thinks me to blame because his lady hasn’t come. And every day and
every hour they get angrier and angrier, so that I sometimes think I shall
kill myself in a fright. I can’t depend upon them, sir.”

“And why have you meddled? Why did you begin to spy for Dmitri
Fyodorovitch?” said Ivan irritably.

“How could I help meddling? Though, indeed, I haven’t meddled at all, if
you want to know the truth of the matter. I kept quiet from the very
beginning, not daring to answer; but he pitched on me to be his servant.
He has had only one thing to say since: ‘I’ll kill you, you scoundrel, if
you miss her,’ I feel certain, sir, that I shall have a long fit
to-morrow.”

“What do you mean by ‘a long fit’?”

“A long fit, lasting a long time—several hours, or perhaps a day or two.
Once it went on for three days. I fell from the garret that time. The
struggling ceased and then began again, and for three days I couldn’t come
back to my senses. Fyodor Pavlovitch sent for Herzenstube, the doctor
here, and he put ice on my head and tried another remedy, too.... I might
have died.”

“But they say one can’t tell with epilepsy when a fit is coming. What
makes you say you will have one to-morrow?” Ivan inquired, with a
peculiar, irritable curiosity.

“That’s just so. You can’t tell beforehand.”

“Besides, you fell from the garret then.”

“I climb up to the garret every day. I might fall from the garret again
to-morrow. And, if not, I might fall down the cellar steps. I have to go
into the cellar every day, too.”

Ivan took a long look at him.

“You are talking nonsense, I see, and I don’t quite understand you,” he
said softly, but with a sort of menace. “Do you mean to pretend to be ill
to-morrow for three days, eh?”

Smerdyakov, who was looking at the ground again, and playing with the toe
of his right foot, set the foot down, moved the left one forward, and,
grinning, articulated:

“If I were able to play such a trick, that is, pretend to have a fit—and
it would not be difficult for a man accustomed to them—I should have a
perfect right to use such a means to save myself from death. For even if
Agrafena Alexandrovna comes to see his father while I am ill, his honor
can’t blame a sick man for not telling him. He’d be ashamed to.”

“Hang it all!” Ivan cried, his face working with anger, “why are you
always in such a funk for your life? All my brother Dmitri’s threats are
only hasty words and mean nothing. He won’t kill you; it’s not you he’ll
kill!”

“He’d kill me first of all, like a fly. But even more than that, I am
afraid I shall be taken for an accomplice of his when he does something
crazy to his father.”

“Why should you be taken for an accomplice?”

“They’ll think I am an accomplice, because I let him know the signals as a
great secret.”

“What signals? Whom did you tell? Confound you, speak more plainly.”

“I’m bound to admit the fact,” Smerdyakov drawled with pedantic composure,
“that I have a secret with Fyodor Pavlovitch in this business. As you know
yourself (if only you do know it) he has for several days past locked
himself in as soon as night or even evening comes on. Of late you’ve been
going upstairs to your room early every evening, and yesterday you did not
come down at all, and so perhaps you don’t know how carefully he has begun
to lock himself in at night, and even if Grigory Vassilyevitch comes to
the door he won’t open to him till he hears his voice. But Grigory
Vassilyevitch does not come, because I wait upon him alone in his room
now. That’s the arrangement he made himself ever since this to-do with
Agrafena Alexandrovna began. But at night, by his orders, I go away to the
lodge so that I don’t get to sleep till midnight, but am on the watch,
getting up and walking about the yard, waiting for Agrafena Alexandrovna
to come. For the last few days he’s been perfectly frantic expecting her.
What he argues is, she is afraid of him, Dmitri Fyodorovitch (Mitya, as he
calls him), ‘and so,’ says he, ‘she’ll come the back-way, late at night,
to me. You look out for her,’ says he, ‘till midnight and later; and if
she does come, you run up and knock at my door or at the window from the
garden. Knock at first twice, rather gently, and then three times more
quickly, then,’ says he, ‘I shall understand at once that she has come,
and will open the door to you quietly.’ Another signal he gave me in case
anything unexpected happens. At first, two knocks, and then, after an
interval, another much louder. Then he will understand that something has
happened suddenly and that I must see him, and he will open to me so that
I can go and speak to him. That’s all in case Agrafena Alexandrovna can’t
come herself, but sends a message. Besides, Dmitri Fyodorovitch might
come, too, so I must let him know he is near. His honor is awfully afraid
of Dmitri Fyodorovitch, so that even if Agrafena Alexandrovna had come and
were locked in with him, and Dmitri Fyodorovitch were to turn up anywhere
near at the time, I should be bound to let him know at once, knocking
three times. So that the first signal of five knocks means Agrafena
Alexandrovna has come, while the second signal of three knocks means
‘something important to tell you.’ His honor has shown me them several
times and explained them. And as in the whole universe no one knows of
these signals but myself and his honor, so he’d open the door without the
slightest hesitation and without calling out (he is awfully afraid of
calling out aloud). Well, those signals are known to Dmitri Fyodorovitch
too, now.”

“How are they known? Did you tell him? How dared you tell him?”

“It was through fright I did it. How could I dare to keep it back from
him? Dmitri Fyodorovitch kept persisting every day, ‘You are deceiving me,
you are hiding something from me! I’ll break both your legs for you.’ So I
told him those secret signals that he might see my slavish devotion, and
might be satisfied that I was not deceiving him, but was telling him all I
could.”

“If you think that he’ll make use of those signals and try to get in,
don’t let him in.”

“But if I should be laid up with a fit, how can I prevent him coming in
then, even if I dared prevent him, knowing how desperate he is?”

“Hang it! How can you be so sure you are going to have a fit, confound
you? Are you laughing at me?”

“How could I dare laugh at you? I am in no laughing humor with this fear
on me. I feel I am going to have a fit. I have a presentiment. Fright
alone will bring it on.”

“Confound it! If you are laid up, Grigory will be on the watch. Let
Grigory know beforehand; he will be sure not to let him in.”

“I should never dare to tell Grigory Vassilyevitch about the signals
without orders from my master. And as for Grigory Vassilyevitch hearing
him and not admitting him, he has been ill ever since yesterday, and Marfa
Ignatyevna intends to give him medicine to-morrow. They’ve just arranged
it. It’s a very strange remedy of hers. Marfa Ignatyevna knows of a
preparation and always keeps it. It’s a strong thing made from some herb.
She has the secret of it, and she always gives it to Grigory Vassilyevitch
three times a year when his lumbago’s so bad he is almost paralyzed by it.
Then she takes a towel, wets it with the stuff, and rubs his whole back
for half an hour till it’s quite red and swollen, and what’s left in the
bottle she gives him to drink with a special prayer; but not quite all,
for on such occasions she leaves some for herself, and drinks it herself.
And as they never take strong drink, I assure you they both drop asleep at
once and sleep sound a very long time. And when Grigory Vassilyevitch
wakes up he is perfectly well after it, but Marfa Ignatyevna always has a
headache from it. So, if Marfa Ignatyevna carries out her intention
to-morrow, they won’t hear anything and hinder Dmitri Fyodorovitch.
They’ll be asleep.”

“What a rigmarole! And it all seems to happen at once, as though it were
planned. You’ll have a fit and they’ll both be unconscious,” cried Ivan.
“But aren’t you trying to arrange it so?” broke from him suddenly, and he
frowned threateningly.

“How could I?... And why should I, when it all depends on Dmitri
Fyodorovitch and his plans?... If he means to do anything, he’ll do it;
but if not, I shan’t be thrusting him upon his father.”

“And why should he go to father, especially on the sly, if, as you say
yourself, Agrafena Alexandrovna won’t come at all?” Ivan went on, turning
white with anger. “You say that yourself, and all the while I’ve been
here, I’ve felt sure it was all the old man’s fancy, and the creature
won’t come to him. Why should Dmitri break in on him if she doesn’t come?
Speak, I want to know what you are thinking!”

“You know yourself why he’ll come. What’s the use of what I think? His
honor will come simply because he is in a rage or suspicious on account of
my illness perhaps, and he’ll dash in, as he did yesterday through
impatience to search the rooms, to see whether she hasn’t escaped him on
the sly. He is perfectly well aware, too, that Fyodor Pavlovitch has a big
envelope with three thousand roubles in it, tied up with ribbon and sealed
with three seals. On it is written in his own hand, ‘To my angel
Grushenka, if she will come,’ to which he added three days later, ‘for my
little chicken.’ There’s no knowing what that might do.”

“Nonsense!” cried Ivan, almost beside himself. “Dmitri won’t come to steal
money and kill my father to do it. He might have killed him yesterday on
account of Grushenka, like the frantic, savage fool he is, but he won’t
steal.”

“He is in very great need of money now—the greatest need, Ivan
Fyodorovitch. You don’t know in what need he is,” Smerdyakov explained,
with perfect composure and remarkable distinctness. “He looks on that
three thousand as his own, too. He said so to me himself. ‘My father still
owes me just three thousand,’ he said. And besides that, consider, Ivan
Fyodorovitch, there is something else perfectly true. It’s as good as
certain, so to say, that Agrafena Alexandrovna will force him, if only she
cares to, to marry her—the master himself, I mean, Fyodor Pavlovitch—if
only she cares to, and of course she may care to. All I’ve said is that
she won’t come, but maybe she’s looking for more than that—I mean to be
mistress here. I know myself that Samsonov, her merchant, was laughing
with her about it, telling her quite openly that it would not be at all a
stupid thing to do. And she’s got plenty of sense. She wouldn’t marry a
beggar like Dmitri Fyodorovitch. So, taking that into consideration, Ivan
Fyodorovitch, reflect that then neither Dmitri Fyodorovitch nor yourself
and your brother, Alexey Fyodorovitch, would have anything after the
master’s death, not a rouble, for Agrafena Alexandrovna would marry him
simply to get hold of the whole, all the money there is. But if your
father were to die now, there’d be some forty thousand for sure, even for
Dmitri Fyodorovitch whom he hates so, for he’s made no will.... Dmitri
Fyodorovitch knows all that very well.”

A sort of shudder passed over Ivan’s face. He suddenly flushed.

“Then why on earth,” he suddenly interrupted Smerdyakov, “do you advise me
to go to Tchermashnya? What did you mean by that? If I go away, you see
what will happen here.” Ivan drew his breath with difficulty.

“Precisely so,” said Smerdyakov, softly and reasonably, watching Ivan
intently, however.

“What do you mean by ‘precisely so’?” Ivan questioned him, with a menacing
light in his eyes, restraining himself with difficulty.

“I spoke because I felt sorry for you. If I were in your place I should
simply throw it all up ... rather than stay on in such a position,”
answered Smerdyakov, with the most candid air looking at Ivan’s flashing
eyes. They were both silent.

“You seem to be a perfect idiot, and what’s more ... an awful scoundrel,
too.” Ivan rose suddenly from the bench. He was about to pass straight
through the gate, but he stopped short and turned to Smerdyakov. Something
strange followed. Ivan, in a sudden paroxysm, bit his lip, clenched his
fists, and, in another minute, would have flung himself on Smerdyakov. The
latter, anyway, noticed it at the same moment, started, and shrank back.
But the moment passed without mischief to Smerdyakov, and Ivan turned in
silence, as it seemed in perplexity, to the gate.

“I am going away to Moscow to-morrow, if you care to know—early to-morrow
morning. That’s all!” he suddenly said aloud angrily, and wondered himself
afterwards what need there was to say this then to Smerdyakov.

“That’s the best thing you can do,” he responded, as though he had
expected to hear it; “except that you can always be telegraphed for from
Moscow, if anything should happen here.”

Ivan stopped again, and again turned quickly to Smerdyakov. But a change
had passed over him, too. All his familiarity and carelessness had
completely disappeared. His face expressed attention and expectation,
intent but timid and cringing.

“Haven’t you something more to say—something to add?” could be read in the
intent gaze he fixed on Ivan.

“And couldn’t I be sent for from Tchermashnya, too—in case anything
happened?” Ivan shouted suddenly, for some unknown reason raising his
voice.

“From Tchermashnya, too ... you could be sent for,” Smerdyakov muttered,
almost in a whisper, looking disconcerted, but gazing intently into Ivan’s
eyes.

“Only Moscow is farther and Tchermashnya is nearer. Is it to save my
spending money on the fare, or to save my going so far out of my way, that
you insist on Tchermashnya?”

“Precisely so ...” muttered Smerdyakov, with a breaking voice. He looked
at Ivan with a revolting smile, and again made ready to draw back. But to
his astonishment Ivan broke into a laugh, and went through the gate still
laughing. Any one who had seen his face at that moment would have known
that he was not laughing from lightness of heart, and he could not have
explained himself what he was feeling at that instant. He moved and walked
as though in a nervous frenzy.



Chapter VII. “It’s Always Worth While Speaking To A Clever Man”


And in the same nervous frenzy, too, he spoke. Meeting Fyodor Pavlovitch
in the drawing-room directly he went in, he shouted to him, waving his
hands, “I am going upstairs to my room, not in to you. Good-by!” and
passed by, trying not even to look at his father. Very possibly the old
man was too hateful to him at that moment; but such an unceremonious
display of hostility was a surprise even to Fyodor Pavlovitch. And the old
man evidently wanted to tell him something at once and had come to meet
him in the drawing-room on purpose. Receiving this amiable greeting, he
stood still in silence and with an ironical air watched his son going
upstairs, till he passed out of sight.

“What’s the matter with him?” he promptly asked Smerdyakov, who had
followed Ivan.

“Angry about something. Who can tell?” the valet muttered evasively.

“Confound him! Let him be angry then. Bring in the samovar, and get along
with you. Look sharp! No news?”

Then followed a series of questions such as Smerdyakov had just complained
of to Ivan, all relating to his expected visitor, and these questions we
will omit. Half an hour later the house was locked, and the crazy old man
was wandering along through the rooms in excited expectation of hearing
every minute the five knocks agreed upon. Now and then he peered out into
the darkness, seeing nothing.

It was very late, but Ivan was still awake and reflecting. He sat up late
that night, till two o’clock. But we will not give an account of his
thoughts, and this is not the place to look into that soul—its turn will
come. And even if one tried, it would be very hard to give an account of
them, for there were no thoughts in his brain, but something very vague,
and, above all, intense excitement. He felt himself that he had lost his
bearings. He was fretted, too, by all sorts of strange and almost
surprising desires; for instance, after midnight he suddenly had an
intense irresistible inclination to go down, open the door, go to the
lodge and beat Smerdyakov. But if he had been asked why, he could not have
given any exact reason, except perhaps that he loathed the valet as one
who had insulted him more gravely than any one in the world. On the other
hand, he was more than once that night overcome by a sort of inexplicable
humiliating terror, which he felt positively paralyzed his physical
powers. His head ached and he was giddy. A feeling of hatred was rankling
in his heart, as though he meant to avenge himself on some one. He even
hated Alyosha, recalling the conversation he had just had with him. At
moments he hated himself intensely. Of Katerina Ivanovna he almost forgot
to think, and wondered greatly at this afterwards, especially as he
remembered perfectly that when he had protested so valiantly to Katerina
Ivanovna that he would go away next day to Moscow, something had whispered
in his heart, “That’s nonsense, you are not going, and it won’t be so easy
to tear yourself away as you are boasting now.”

Remembering that night long afterwards, Ivan recalled with peculiar
repulsion how he had suddenly got up from the sofa and had stealthily, as
though he were afraid of being watched, opened the door, gone out on the
staircase and listened to Fyodor Pavlovitch stirring down below, had
listened a long while—some five minutes—with a sort of strange curiosity,
holding his breath while his heart throbbed. And why he had done all this,
why he was listening, he could not have said. That “action” all his life
afterwards he called “infamous,” and at the bottom of his heart, he
thought of it as the basest action of his life. For Fyodor Pavlovitch
himself he felt no hatred at that moment, but was simply intensely curious
to know how he was walking down there below and what he must be doing now.
He wondered and imagined how he must be peeping out of the dark windows
and stopping in the middle of the room, listening, listening—for some one
to knock. Ivan went out on to the stairs twice to listen like this.

About two o’clock when everything was quiet, and even Fyodor Pavlovitch
had gone to bed, Ivan had got into bed, firmly resolved to fall asleep at
once, as he felt fearfully exhausted. And he did fall asleep at once, and
slept soundly without dreams, but waked early, at seven o’clock, when it
was broad daylight. Opening his eyes, he was surprised to feel himself
extraordinarily vigorous. He jumped up at once and dressed quickly; then
dragged out his trunk and began packing immediately. His linen had come
back from the laundress the previous morning. Ivan positively smiled at
the thought that everything was helping his sudden departure. And his
departure certainly was sudden. Though Ivan had said the day before (to
Katerina Ivanovna, Alyosha, and Smerdyakov) that he was leaving next day,
yet he remembered that he had no thought of departure when he went to bed,
or, at least, had not dreamed that his first act in the morning would be
to pack his trunk. At last his trunk and bag were ready. It was about nine
o’clock when Marfa Ignatyevna came in with her usual inquiry, “Where will
your honor take your tea, in your own room or downstairs?” He looked
almost cheerful, but there was about him, about his words and gestures,
something hurried and scattered. Greeting his father affably, and even
inquiring specially after his health, though he did not wait to hear his
answer to the end, he announced that he was starting off in an hour to
return to Moscow for good, and begged him to send for the horses. His
father heard this announcement with no sign of surprise, and forgot in an
unmannerly way to show regret at losing him. Instead of doing so, he flew
into a great flutter at the recollection of some important business of his
own.

“What a fellow you are! Not to tell me yesterday! Never mind; we’ll manage
it all the same. Do me a great service, my dear boy. Go to Tchermashnya on
the way. It’s only to turn to the left from the station at Volovya, only
another twelve versts and you come to Tchermashnya.”

“I’m sorry, I can’t. It’s eighty versts to the railway and the train
starts for Moscow at seven o’clock to-night. I can only just catch it.”

“You’ll catch it to-morrow or the day after, but to-day turn off to
Tchermashnya. It won’t put you out much to humor your father! If I hadn’t
had something to keep me here, I would have run over myself long ago, for
I’ve some business there in a hurry. But here I ... it’s not the time for
me to go now.... You see, I’ve two pieces of copse land there. The
Maslovs, an old merchant and his son, will give eight thousand for the
timber. But last year I just missed a purchaser who would have given
twelve. There’s no getting any one about here to buy it. The Maslovs have
it all their own way. One has to take what they’ll give, for no one here
dare bid against them. The priest at Ilyinskoe wrote to me last Thursday
that a merchant called Gorstkin, a man I know, had turned up. What makes
him valuable is that he is not from these parts, so he is not afraid of
the Maslovs. He says he will give me eleven thousand for the copse. Do you
hear? But he’ll only be here, the priest writes, for a week altogether, so
you must go at once and make a bargain with him.”

“Well, you write to the priest; he’ll make the bargain.”

“He can’t do it. He has no eye for business. He is a perfect treasure, I’d
give him twenty thousand to take care of for me without a receipt; but he
has no eye for business, he is a perfect child, a crow could deceive him.
And yet he is a learned man, would you believe it? This Gorstkin looks
like a peasant, he wears a blue kaftan, but he is a regular rogue. That’s
the common complaint. He is a liar. Sometimes he tells such lies that you
wonder why he is doing it. He told me the year before last that his wife
was dead and that he had married another, and would you believe it, there
was not a word of truth in it? His wife has never died at all, she is
alive to this day and gives him a beating twice a week. So what you have
to find out is whether he is lying or speaking the truth, when he says he
wants to buy it and would give eleven thousand.”

“I shall be no use in such a business. I have no eye either.”

“Stay, wait a bit! You will be of use, for I will tell you the signs by
which you can judge about Gorstkin. I’ve done business with him a long
time. You see, you must watch his beard; he has a nasty, thin, red beard.
If his beard shakes when he talks and he gets cross, it’s all right, he is
saying what he means, he wants to do business. But if he strokes his beard
with his left hand and grins—he is trying to cheat you. Don’t watch his
eyes, you won’t find out anything from his eyes, he is a deep one, a
rogue—but watch his beard! I’ll give you a note and you show it to him.
He’s called Gorstkin, though his real name is Lyagavy(4); but don’t call
him so, he will be offended. If you come to an understanding with him, and
see it’s all right, write here at once. You need only write: ‘He’s not
lying.’ Stand out for eleven thousand; one thousand you can knock off, but
not more. Just think! there’s a difference between eight thousand and
eleven thousand. It’s as good as picking up three thousand; it’s not so
easy to find a purchaser, and I’m in desperate need of money. Only let me
know it’s serious, and I’ll run over and fix it up. I’ll snatch the time
somehow. But what’s the good of my galloping over, if it’s all a notion of
the priest’s? Come, will you go?”

“Oh, I can’t spare the time. You must excuse me.”

“Come, you might oblige your father. I shan’t forget it. You’ve no heart,
any of you—that’s what it is? What’s a day or two to you? Where are you
going now—to Venice? Your Venice will keep another two days. I would have
sent Alyosha, but what use is Alyosha in a thing like that? I send you
just because you are a clever fellow. Do you suppose I don’t see that? You
know nothing about timber, but you’ve got an eye. All that is wanted is to
see whether the man is in earnest. I tell you, watch his beard—if his
beard shakes you know he is in earnest.”

“You force me to go to that damned Tchermashnya yourself, then?” cried
Ivan, with a malignant smile.

Fyodor Pavlovitch did not catch, or would not catch, the malignancy, but
he caught the smile.

“Then you’ll go, you’ll go? I’ll scribble the note for you at once.”

“I don’t know whether I shall go. I don’t know. I’ll decide on the way.”

“Nonsense! Decide at once. My dear fellow, decide! If you settle the
matter, write me a line; give it to the priest and he’ll send it on to me
at once. And I won’t delay you more than that. You can go to Venice. The
priest will give you horses back to Volovya station.”

The old man was quite delighted. He wrote the note, and sent for the
horses. A light lunch was brought in, with brandy. When Fyodor Pavlovitch
was pleased, he usually became expansive, but to-day he seemed to restrain
himself. Of Dmitri, for instance, he did not say a word. He was quite
unmoved by the parting, and seemed, in fact, at a loss for something to
say. Ivan noticed this particularly. “He must be bored with me,” he
thought. Only when accompanying his son out on to the steps, the old man
began to fuss about. He would have kissed him, but Ivan made haste to hold
out his hand, obviously avoiding the kiss. His father saw it at once, and
instantly pulled himself up.

“Well, good luck to you, good luck to you!” he repeated from the steps.
“You’ll come again some time or other? Mind you do come. I shall always be
glad to see you. Well, Christ be with you!”

Ivan got into the carriage.

“Good-by, Ivan! Don’t be too hard on me!” the father called for the last
time.

The whole household came out to take leave—Smerdyakov, Marfa and Grigory.
Ivan gave them ten roubles each. When he had seated himself in the
carriage, Smerdyakov jumped up to arrange the rug.

“You see ... I am going to Tchermashnya,” broke suddenly from Ivan. Again,
as the day before, the words seemed to drop of themselves, and he laughed,
too, a peculiar, nervous laugh. He remembered it long after.

“It’s a true saying then, that ‘it’s always worth while speaking to a
clever man,’ ” answered Smerdyakov firmly, looking significantly at Ivan.

The carriage rolled away. Nothing was clear in Ivan’s soul, but he looked
eagerly around him at the fields, at the hills, at the trees, at a flock
of geese flying high overhead in the bright sky. And all of a sudden he
felt very happy. He tried to talk to the driver, and he felt intensely
interested in an answer the peasant made him; but a minute later he
realized that he was not catching anything, and that he had not really
even taken in the peasant’s answer. He was silent, and it was pleasant
even so. The air was fresh, pure and cool, the sky bright. The images of
Alyosha and Katerina Ivanovna floated into his mind. But he softly smiled,
blew softly on the friendly phantoms, and they flew away. “There’s plenty
of time for them,” he thought. They reached the station quickly, changed
horses, and galloped to Volovya. “Why is it worth while speaking to a
clever man? What did he mean by that?” The thought seemed suddenly to
clutch at his breathing. “And why did I tell him I was going to
Tchermashnya?” They reached Volovya station. Ivan got out of the carriage,
and the drivers stood round him bargaining over the journey of twelve
versts to Tchermashnya. He told them to harness the horses. He went into
the station house, looked round, glanced at the overseer’s wife, and
suddenly went back to the entrance.

“I won’t go to Tchermashnya. Am I too late to reach the railway by seven,
brothers?”

“We shall just do it. Shall we get the carriage out?”

“At once. Will any one of you be going to the town to-morrow?”

“To be sure. Mitri here will.”

“Can you do me a service, Mitri? Go to my father’s, to Fyodor Pavlovitch
Karamazov, and tell him I haven’t gone to Tchermashnya. Can you?”

“Of course I can. I’ve known Fyodor Pavlovitch a long time.”

“And here’s something for you, for I dare say he won’t give you anything,”
said Ivan, laughing gayly.

“You may depend on it he won’t.” Mitya laughed too. “Thank you, sir. I’ll
be sure to do it.”

At seven o’clock Ivan got into the train and set off to Moscow “Away with
the past. I’ve done with the old world for ever, and may I have no news,
no echo, from it. To a new life, new places and no looking back!” But
instead of delight his soul was filled with such gloom, and his heart
ached with such anguish, as he had never known in his life before. He was
thinking all the night. The train flew on, and only at daybreak, when he
was approaching Moscow, he suddenly roused himself from his meditation.

“I am a scoundrel,” he whispered to himself.

Fyodor Pavlovitch remained well satisfied at having seen his son off. For
two hours afterwards he felt almost happy, and sat drinking brandy. But
suddenly something happened which was very annoying and unpleasant for
every one in the house, and completely upset Fyodor Pavlovitch’s
equanimity at once. Smerdyakov went to the cellar for something and fell
down from the top of the steps. Fortunately, Marfa Ignatyevna was in the
yard and heard him in time. She did not see the fall, but heard his
scream—the strange, peculiar scream, long familiar to her—the scream of
the epileptic falling in a fit. They could not tell whether the fit had
come on him at the moment he was descending the steps, so that he must
have fallen unconscious, or whether it was the fall and the shock that had
caused the fit in Smerdyakov, who was known to be liable to them. They
found him at the bottom of the cellar steps, writhing in convulsions and
foaming at the mouth. It was thought at first that he must have broken
something—an arm or a leg—and hurt himself, but “God had preserved him,”
as Marfa Ignatyevna expressed it—nothing of the kind had happened. But it
was difficult to get him out of the cellar. They asked the neighbors to
help and managed it somehow. Fyodor Pavlovitch himself was present at the
whole ceremony. He helped, evidently alarmed and upset. The sick man did
not regain consciousness; the convulsions ceased for a time, but then
began again, and every one concluded that the same thing would happen, as
had happened a year before, when he accidentally fell from the garret.
They remembered that ice had been put on his head then. There was still
ice in the cellar, and Marfa Ignatyevna had some brought up. In the
evening, Fyodor Pavlovitch sent for Doctor Herzenstube, who arrived at
once. He was a most estimable old man, and the most careful and
conscientious doctor in the province. After careful examination, he
concluded that the fit was a very violent one and might have serious
consequences; that meanwhile he, Herzenstube, did not fully understand it,
but that by to-morrow morning, if the present remedies were unavailing, he
would venture to try something else. The invalid was taken to the lodge,
to a room next to Grigory’s and Marfa Ignatyevna’s.

Then Fyodor Pavlovitch had one misfortune after another to put up with
that day. Marfa Ignatyevna cooked the dinner, and the soup, compared with
Smerdyakov’s, was “no better than dish-water,” and the fowl was so dried
up that it was impossible to masticate it. To her master’s bitter, though
deserved, reproaches, Marfa Ignatyevna replied that the fowl was a very
old one to begin with, and that she had never been trained as a cook. In
the evening there was another trouble in store for Fyodor Pavlovitch; he
was informed that Grigory, who had not been well for the last three days,
was completely laid up by his lumbago. Fyodor Pavlovitch finished his tea
as early as possible and locked himself up alone in the house. He was in
terrible excitement and suspense. That evening he reckoned on Grushenka’s
coming almost as a certainty. He had received from Smerdyakov that morning
an assurance “that she had promised to come without fail.” The
incorrigible old man’s heart throbbed with excitement; he paced up and
down his empty rooms listening. He had to be on the alert. Dmitri might be
on the watch for her somewhere, and when she knocked on the window
(Smerdyakov had informed him two days before that he had told her where
and how to knock) the door must be opened at once. She must not be a
second in the passage, for fear—which God forbid!—that she should be
frightened and run away. Fyodor Pavlovitch had much to think of, but never
had his heart been steeped in such voluptuous hopes. This time he could
say almost certainly that she would come!




Book VI. The Russian Monk



Chapter I. Father Zossima And His Visitors


When with an anxious and aching heart Alyosha went into his elder’s cell,
he stood still almost astonished. Instead of a sick man at his last gasp,
perhaps unconscious, as he had feared to find him, he saw him sitting up
in his chair and, though weak and exhausted, his face was bright and
cheerful, he was surrounded by visitors and engaged in a quiet and joyful
conversation. But he had only got up from his bed a quarter of an hour
before Alyosha’s arrival; his visitors had gathered together in his cell
earlier, waiting for him to wake, having received a most confident
assurance from Father Païssy that “the teacher would get up, and as he had
himself promised in the morning, converse once more with those dear to his
heart.” This promise and indeed every word of the dying elder Father
Païssy put implicit trust in. If he had seen him unconscious, if he had
seen him breathe his last, and yet had his promise that he would rise up
and say good-by to him, he would not have believed perhaps even in death,
but would still have expected the dead man to recover and fulfill his
promise. In the morning as he lay down to sleep, Father Zossima had told
him positively: “I shall not die without the delight of another
conversation with you, beloved of my heart. I shall look once more on your
dear face and pour out my heart to you once again.” The monks, who had
gathered for this probably last conversation with Father Zossima, had all
been his devoted friends for many years. There were four of them: Father
Iosif and Father Païssy, Father Mihaïl, the warden of the hermitage, a man
not very old and far from being learned. He was of humble origin, of
strong will and steadfast faith, of austere appearance, but of deep
tenderness, though he obviously concealed it as though he were almost
ashamed of it. The fourth, Father Anfim, was a very old and humble little
monk of the poorest peasant class. He was almost illiterate, and very
quiet, scarcely speaking to any one. He was the humblest of the humble,
and looked as though he had been frightened by something great and awful
beyond the scope of his intelligence. Father Zossima had a great affection
for this timorous man, and always treated him with marked respect, though
perhaps there was no one he had known to whom he had said less, in spite
of the fact that he had spent years wandering about holy Russia with him.
That was very long ago, forty years before, when Father Zossima first
began his life as a monk in a poor and little monastery at Kostroma, and
when, shortly after, he had accompanied Father Anfim on his pilgrimage to
collect alms for their poor monastery.

The whole party were in the bedroom which, as we mentioned before, was
very small, so that there was scarcely room for the four of them (in
addition to Porfiry, the novice, who stood) to sit round Father Zossima on
chairs brought from the sitting-room. It was already beginning to get
dark, the room was lighted up by the lamps and the candles before the
ikons.

Seeing Alyosha standing embarrassed in the doorway, Father Zossima smiled
at him joyfully and held out his hand.

“Welcome, my quiet one, welcome, my dear, here you are too. I knew you
would come.”

Alyosha went up to him, bowed down before him to the ground and wept.
Something surged up from his heart, his soul was quivering, he wanted to
sob.

“Come, don’t weep over me yet,” Father Zossima smiled, laying his right
hand on his head. “You see I am sitting up talking; maybe I shall live
another twenty years yet, as that dear good woman from Vishegorye, with
her little Lizaveta in her arms, wished me yesterday. God bless the mother
and the little girl Lizaveta,” he crossed himself. “Porfiry, did you take
her offering where I told you?”

He meant the sixty copecks brought him the day before by the good-humored
woman to be given “to some one poorer than me.” Such offerings, always of
money gained by personal toil, are made by way of penance voluntarily
undertaken. The elder had sent Porfiry the evening before to a widow,
whose house had been burnt down lately, and who after the fire had gone
with her children begging alms. Porfiry hastened to reply that he had
given the money, as he had been instructed, “from an unknown
benefactress.”

“Get up, my dear boy,” the elder went on to Alyosha. “Let me look at you.
Have you been home and seen your brother?” It seemed strange to Alyosha
that he asked so confidently and precisely, about one of his brothers
only—but which one? Then perhaps he had sent him out both yesterday and
to-day for the sake of that brother.

“I have seen one of my brothers,” answered Alyosha.

“I mean the elder one, to whom I bowed down.”

“I only saw him yesterday and could not find him to-day,” said Alyosha.

“Make haste to find him, go again to-morrow and make haste, leave
everything and make haste. Perhaps you may still have time to prevent
something terrible. I bowed down yesterday to the great suffering in store
for him.”

He was suddenly silent and seemed to be pondering. The words were strange.
Father Iosif, who had witnessed the scene yesterday, exchanged glances
with Father Païssy. Alyosha could not resist asking:

“Father and teacher,” he began with extreme emotion, “your words are too
obscure.... What is this suffering in store for him?”

“Don’t inquire. I seemed to see something terrible yesterday ... as though
his whole future were expressed in his eyes. A look came into his eyes—so
that I was instantly horror-stricken at what that man is preparing for
himself. Once or twice in my life I’ve seen such a look in a man’s face
... reflecting as it were his future fate, and that fate, alas, came to
pass. I sent you to him, Alexey, for I thought your brotherly face would
help him. But everything and all our fates are from the Lord. ‘Except a
corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it
die, it bringeth forth much fruit.’ Remember that. You, Alexey, I’ve many
times silently blessed for your face, know that,” added the elder with a
gentle smile. “This is what I think of you, you will go forth from these
walls, but will live like a monk in the world. You will have many enemies,
but even your foes will love you. Life will bring you many misfortunes,
but you will find your happiness in them, and will bless life and will
make others bless it—which is what matters most. Well, that is your
character. Fathers and teachers,” he addressed his friends with a tender
smile, “I have never till to-day told even him why the face of this youth
is so dear to me. Now I will tell you. His face has been as it were a
remembrance and a prophecy for me. At the dawn of my life when I was a
child I had an elder brother who died before my eyes at seventeen. And
later on in the course of my life I gradually became convinced that that
brother had been for a guidance and a sign from on high for me. For had he
not come into my life, I should never perhaps, so I fancy at least, have
become a monk and entered on this precious path. He appeared first to me
in my childhood, and here, at the end of my pilgrimage, he seems to have
come to me over again. It is marvelous, fathers and teachers, that Alexey,
who has some, though not a great, resemblance in face, seems to me so like
him spiritually, that many times I have taken him for that young man, my
brother, mysteriously come back to me at the end of my pilgrimage, as a
reminder and an inspiration. So that I positively wondered at so strange a
dream in myself. Do you hear this, Porfiry?” he turned to the novice who
waited on him. “Many times I’ve seen in your face as it were a look of
mortification that I love Alexey more than you. Now you know why that was
so, but I love you too, know that, and many times I grieved at your
mortification. I should like to tell you, dear friends, of that youth, my
brother, for there has been no presence in my life more precious, more
significant and touching. My heart is full of tenderness, and I look at my
whole life at this moment as though living through it again.”

                  -------------------------------------

Here I must observe that this last conversation of Father Zossima with the
friends who visited him on the last day of his life has been partly
preserved in writing. Alexey Fyodorovitch Karamazov wrote it down from
memory, some time after his elder’s death. But whether this was only the
conversation that took place then, or whether he added to it his notes of
parts of former conversations with his teacher, I cannot determine. In his
account, Father Zossima’s talk goes on without interruption, as though he
told his life to his friends in the form of a story, though there is no
doubt, from other accounts of it, that the conversation that evening was
general. Though the guests did not interrupt Father Zossima much, yet they
too talked, perhaps even told something themselves. Besides, Father
Zossima could not have carried on an uninterrupted narrative, for he was
sometimes gasping for breath, his voice failed him, and he even lay down
to rest on his bed, though he did not fall asleep and his visitors did not
leave their seats. Once or twice the conversation was interrupted by
Father Païssy’s reading the Gospel. It is worthy of note, too, that no one
of them supposed that he would die that night, for on that evening of his
life after his deep sleep in the day he seemed suddenly to have found new
strength, which kept him up through this long conversation. It was like a
last effort of love which gave him marvelous energy; only for a little
time, however, for his life was cut short immediately.... But of that
later. I will only add now that I have preferred to confine myself to the
account given by Alexey Fyodorovitch Karamazov. It will be shorter and not
so fatiguing, though of course, as I must repeat, Alyosha took a great
deal from previous conversations and added them to it.

                  -------------------------------------

Notes of the Life of the deceased Priest and Monk, the Elder Zossima,
taken from his own words by Alexey Fyodorovitch Karamazov.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

_(a)_ _Father Zossima’s Brother_

Beloved fathers and teachers, I was born in a distant province in the
north, in the town of V. My father was a gentleman by birth, but of no
great consequence or position. He died when I was only two years old, and
I don’t remember him at all. He left my mother a small house built of
wood, and a fortune, not large, but sufficient to keep her and her
children in comfort. There were two of us, my elder brother Markel and I.
He was eight years older than I was, of hasty irritable temperament, but
kind-hearted and never ironical. He was remarkably silent, especially at
home with me, his mother, and the servants. He did well at school, but did
not get on with his schoolfellows, though he never quarreled, at least so
my mother has told me. Six months before his death, when he was seventeen,
he made friends with a political exile who had been banished from Moscow
to our town for freethinking, and led a solitary existence there. He was a
good scholar who had gained distinction in philosophy in the university.
Something made him take a fancy to Markel, and he used to ask him to see
him. The young man would spend whole evenings with him during that winter,
till the exile was summoned to Petersburg to take up his post again at his
own request, as he had powerful friends.

It was the beginning of Lent, and Markel would not fast, he was rude and
laughed at it. “That’s all silly twaddle, and there is no God,” he said,
horrifying my mother, the servants, and me too. For though I was only
nine, I too was aghast at hearing such words. We had four servants, all
serfs. I remember my mother selling one of the four, the cook Afimya, who
was lame and elderly, for sixty paper roubles, and hiring a free servant
to take her place.

In the sixth week in Lent, my brother, who was never strong and had a
tendency to consumption, was taken ill. He was tall but thin and
delicate-looking, and of very pleasing countenance. I suppose he caught
cold, anyway the doctor, who came, soon whispered to my mother that it was
galloping consumption, that he would not live through the spring. My
mother began weeping, and, careful not to alarm my brother, she entreated
him to go to church, to confess and take the sacrament, as he was still
able to move about. This made him angry, and he said something profane
about the church. He grew thoughtful, however; he guessed at once that he
was seriously ill, and that that was why his mother was begging him to
confess and take the sacrament. He had been aware, indeed, for a long time
past, that he was far from well, and had a year before coolly observed at
dinner to our mother and me, “My life won’t be long among you, I may not
live another year,” which seemed now like a prophecy.

Three days passed and Holy Week had come. And on Tuesday morning my
brother began going to church. “I am doing this simply for your sake,
mother, to please and comfort you,” he said. My mother wept with joy and
grief. “His end must be near,” she thought, “if there’s such a change in
him.” But he was not able to go to church long, he took to his bed, so he
had to confess and take the sacrament at home.

It was a late Easter, and the days were bright, fine, and full of
fragrance. I remember he used to cough all night and sleep badly, but in
the morning he dressed and tried to sit up in an arm-chair. That’s how I
remember him sitting, sweet and gentle, smiling, his face bright and
joyous, in spite of his illness. A marvelous change passed over him, his
spirit seemed transformed. The old nurse would come in and say, “Let me
light the lamp before the holy image, my dear.” And once he would not have
allowed it and would have blown it out.

“Light it, light it, dear, I was a wretch to have prevented you doing it.
You are praying when you light the lamp, and I am praying when I rejoice
seeing you. So we are praying to the same God.”

Those words seemed strange to us, and mother would go to her room and
weep, but when she went in to him she wiped her eyes and looked cheerful.
“Mother, don’t weep, darling,” he would say, “I’ve long to live yet, long
to rejoice with you, and life is glad and joyful.”

“Ah, dear boy, how can you talk of joy when you lie feverish at night,
coughing as though you would tear yourself to pieces.”

“Don’t cry, mother,” he would answer, “life is paradise, and we are all in
paradise, but we won’t see it, if we would, we should have heaven on earth
the next day.”

Every one wondered at his words, he spoke so strangely and positively; we
were all touched and wept. Friends came to see us. “Dear ones,” he would
say to them, “what have I done that you should love me so, how can you
love any one like me, and how was it I did not know, I did not appreciate
it before?”

When the servants came in to him he would say continually, “Dear, kind
people, why are you doing so much for me, do I deserve to be waited on? If
it were God’s will for me to live, I would wait on you, for all men should
wait on one another.”

Mother shook her head as she listened. “My darling, it’s your illness
makes you talk like that.”

“Mother, darling,” he would say, “there must be servants and masters, but
if so I will be the servant of my servants, the same as they are to me.
And another thing, mother, every one of us has sinned against all men, and
I more than any.”

Mother positively smiled at that, smiled through her tears. “Why, how
could you have sinned against all men, more than all? Robbers and
murderers have done that, but what sin have you committed yet, that you
hold yourself more guilty than all?”

“Mother, little heart of mine,” he said (he had begun using such strange
caressing words at that time), “little heart of mine, my joy, believe me,
every one is really responsible to all men for all men and for everything.
I don’t know how to explain it to you, but I feel it is so, painfully
even. And how is it we went on then living, getting angry and not
knowing?”

So he would get up every day, more and more sweet and joyous and full of
love. When the doctor, an old German called Eisenschmidt, came:

“Well, doctor, have I another day in this world?” he would ask, joking.

“You’ll live many days yet,” the doctor would answer, “and months and
years too.”

“Months and years!” he would exclaim. “Why reckon the days? One day is
enough for a man to know all happiness. My dear ones, why do we quarrel,
try to outshine each other and keep grudges against each other? Let’s go
straight into the garden, walk and play there, love, appreciate, and kiss
each other, and glorify life.”

“Your son cannot last long,” the doctor told my mother, as she accompanied
him to the door. “The disease is affecting his brain.”

The windows of his room looked out into the garden, and our garden was a
shady one, with old trees in it which were coming into bud. The first
birds of spring were flitting in the branches, chirruping and singing at
the windows. And looking at them and admiring them, he began suddenly
begging their forgiveness too: “Birds of heaven, happy birds, forgive me,
for I have sinned against you too.” None of us could understand that at
the time, but he shed tears of joy. “Yes,” he said, “there was such a
glory of God all about me: birds, trees, meadows, sky; only I lived in
shame and dishonored it all and did not notice the beauty and glory.”

“You take too many sins on yourself,” mother used to say, weeping.

“Mother, darling, it’s for joy, not for grief I am crying. Though I can’t
explain it to you, I like to humble myself before them, for I don’t know
how to love them enough. If I have sinned against every one, yet all
forgive me, too, and that’s heaven. Am I not in heaven now?”

And there was a great deal more I don’t remember. I remember I went once
into his room when there was no one else there. It was a bright evening,
the sun was setting, and the whole room was lighted up. He beckoned me,
and I went up to him. He put his hands on my shoulders and looked into my
face tenderly, lovingly; he said nothing for a minute, only looked at me
like that.

“Well,” he said, “run and play now, enjoy life for me too.”

I went out then and ran to play. And many times in my life afterwards I
remembered even with tears how he told me to enjoy life for him too. There
were many other marvelous and beautiful sayings of his, though we did not
understand them at the time. He died the third week after Easter. He was
fully conscious though he could not talk; up to his last hour he did not
change. He looked happy, his eyes beamed and sought us, he smiled at us,
beckoned us. There was a great deal of talk even in the town about his
death. I was impressed by all this at the time, but not too much so,
though I cried a good deal at his funeral. I was young then, a child, but
a lasting impression, a hidden feeling of it all, remained in my heart,
ready to rise up and respond when the time came. So indeed it happened.

_(b) Of the Holy Scriptures in the Life of Father Zossima_

I was left alone with my mother. Her friends began advising her to send me
to Petersburg as other parents did. “You have only one son now,” they
said, “and have a fair income, and you will be depriving him perhaps of a
brilliant career if you keep him here.” They suggested I should be sent to
Petersburg to the Cadet Corps, that I might afterwards enter the Imperial
Guard. My mother hesitated for a long time, it was awful to part with her
only child, but she made up her mind to it at last, though not without
many tears, believing she was acting for my happiness. She brought me to
Petersburg and put me into the Cadet Corps, and I never saw her again. For
she too died three years afterwards. She spent those three years mourning
and grieving for both of us.

From the house of my childhood I have brought nothing but precious
memories, for there are no memories more precious than those of early
childhood in one’s first home. And that is almost always so if there is
any love and harmony in the family at all. Indeed, precious memories may
remain even of a bad home, if only the heart knows how to find what is
precious. With my memories of home I count, too, my memories of the Bible,
which, child as I was, I was very eager to read at home. I had a book of
Scripture history then with excellent pictures, called _A Hundred and Four
Stories from the Old and New Testament_, and I learned to read from it. I
have it lying on my shelf now, I keep it as a precious relic of the past.
But even before I learned to read, I remember first being moved to
devotional feeling at eight years old. My mother took me alone to mass (I
don’t remember where my brother was at the time) on the Monday before
Easter. It was a fine day, and I remember to-day, as though I saw it now,
how the incense rose from the censer and softly floated upwards and,
overhead in the cupola, mingled in rising waves with the sunlight that
streamed in at the little window. I was stirred by the sight, and for the
first time in my life I consciously received the seed of God’s word in my
heart. A youth came out into the middle of the church carrying a big book,
so large that at the time I fancied he could scarcely carry it. He laid it
on the reading desk, opened it, and began reading, and suddenly for the
first time I understood something read in the church of God. In the land
of Uz, there lived a man, righteous and God-fearing, and he had great
wealth, so many camels, so many sheep and asses, and his children feasted,
and he loved them very much and prayed for them. “It may be that my sons
have sinned in their feasting.” Now the devil came before the Lord
together with the sons of God, and said to the Lord that he had gone up
and down the earth and under the earth. “And hast thou considered my
servant Job?” God asked of him. And God boasted to the devil, pointing to
his great and holy servant. And the devil laughed at God’s words. “Give
him over to me and Thou wilt see that Thy servant will murmur against Thee
and curse Thy name.” And God gave up the just man He loved so, to the
devil. And the devil smote his children and his cattle and scattered his
wealth, all of a sudden like a thunderbolt from heaven. And Job rent his
mantle and fell down upon the ground and cried aloud, “Naked came I out of
my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return into the earth; the Lord gave
and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord for ever and
ever.”

Fathers and teachers, forgive my tears now, for all my childhood rises up
again before me, and I breathe now as I breathed then, with the breast of
a little child of eight, and I feel as I did then, awe and wonder and
gladness. The camels at that time caught my imagination, and Satan, who
talked like that with God, and God who gave His servant up to destruction,
and His servant crying out: “Blessed be Thy name although Thou dost punish
me,” and then the soft and sweet singing in the church: “Let my prayer
rise up before Thee,” and again incense from the priest’s censer and the
kneeling and the prayer. Ever since then—only yesterday I took it up—I’ve
never been able to read that sacred tale without tears. And how much that
is great, mysterious and unfathomable there is in it! Afterwards I heard
the words of mockery and blame, proud words, “How could God give up the
most loved of His saints for the diversion of the devil, take from him his
children, smite him with sore boils so that he cleansed the corruption
from his sores with a pot-sherd—and for no object except to boast to the
devil! ‘See what My saint can suffer for My sake.’ ” But the greatness of
it lies just in the fact that it is a mystery—that the passing earthly
show and the eternal verity are brought together in it. In the face of the
earthly truth, the eternal truth is accomplished. The Creator, just as on
the first days of creation He ended each day with praise: “That is good
that I have created,” looks upon Job and again praises His creation. And
Job, praising the Lord, serves not only Him but all His creation for
generations and generations, and for ever and ever, since for that he was
ordained. Good heavens, what a book it is, and what lessons there are in
it! What a book the Bible is, what a miracle, what strength is given with
it to man! It is like a mold cast of the world and man and human nature,
everything is there, and a law for everything for all the ages. And what
mysteries are solved and revealed! God raises Job again, gives him wealth
again. Many years pass by, and he has other children and loves them. But
how could he love those new ones when those first children are no more,
when he has lost them? Remembering them, how could he be fully happy with
those new ones, however dear the new ones might be? But he could, he
could. It’s the great mystery of human life that old grief passes
gradually into quiet, tender joy. The mild serenity of age takes the place
of the riotous blood of youth. I bless the rising sun each day, and, as
before, my hearts sings to meet it, but now I love even more its setting,
its long slanting rays and the soft, tender, gentle memories that come
with them, the dear images from the whole of my long, happy life—and over
all the Divine Truth, softening, reconciling, forgiving! My life is
ending, I know that well, but every day that is left me I feel how my
earthly life is in touch with a new infinite, unknown, that approaching
life, the nearness of which sets my soul quivering with rapture, my mind
glowing and my heart weeping with joy.

Friends and teachers, I have heard more than once, and of late one may
hear it more often, that the priests, and above all the village priests,
are complaining on all sides of their miserable income and their
humiliating lot. They plainly state, even in print—I’ve read it
myself—that they are unable to teach the Scriptures to the people because
of the smallness of their means, and if Lutherans and heretics come and
lead the flock astray, they let them lead them astray because they have so
little to live upon. May the Lord increase the sustenance that is so
precious to them, for their complaint is just, too. But of a truth I say,
if any one is to blame in the matter, half the fault is ours. For he may
be short of time, he may say truly that he is overwhelmed all the while
with work and services, but still it’s not all the time, even he has an
hour a week to remember God. And he does not work the whole year round.
Let him gather round him once a week, some hour in the evening, if only
the children at first—the fathers will hear of it and they too will begin
to come. There’s no need to build halls for this, let him take them into
his own cottage. They won’t spoil his cottage, they would only be there
one hour. Let him open that book and begin reading it without grand words
or superciliousness, without condescension to them, but gently and kindly,
being glad that he is reading to them and that they are listening with
attention, loving the words himself, only stopping from time to time to
explain words that are not understood by the peasants. Don’t be anxious,
they will understand everything, the orthodox heart will understand all!
Let him read them about Abraham and Sarah, about Isaac and Rebecca, of how
Jacob went to Laban and wrestled with the Lord in his dream and said,
“This place is holy”—and he will impress the devout mind of the peasant.
Let him read, especially to the children, how the brothers sold Joseph,
the tender boy, the dreamer and prophet, into bondage, and told their
father that a wild beast had devoured him, and showed him his
blood-stained clothes. Let him read them how the brothers afterwards
journeyed into Egypt for corn, and Joseph, already a great ruler,
unrecognized by them, tormented them, accused them, kept his brother
Benjamin, and all through love: “I love you, and loving you I torment
you.” For he remembered all his life how they had sold him to the
merchants in the burning desert by the well, and how, wringing his hands,
he had wept and besought his brothers not to sell him as a slave in a
strange land. And how, seeing them again after many years, he loved them
beyond measure, but he harassed and tormented them in love. He left them
at last not able to bear the suffering of his heart, flung himself on his
bed and wept. Then, wiping his tears away, he went out to them joyful and
told them, “Brothers, I am your brother Joseph!” Let him read them further
how happy old Jacob was on learning that his darling boy was still alive,
and how he went to Egypt leaving his own country, and died in a foreign
land, bequeathing his great prophecy that had lain mysteriously hidden in
his meek and timid heart all his life, that from his offspring, from
Judah, will come the great hope of the world, the Messiah and Saviour.

Fathers and teachers, forgive me and don’t be angry, that like a little
child I’ve been babbling of what you know long ago, and can teach me a
hundred times more skillfully. I only speak from rapture, and forgive my
tears, for I love the Bible. Let him too weep, the priest of God, and be
sure that the hearts of his listeners will throb in response. Only a
little tiny seed is needed—drop it into the heart of the peasant and it
won’t die, it will live in his soul all his life, it will be hidden in the
midst of his darkness and sin, like a bright spot, like a great reminder.
And there’s no need of much teaching or explanation, he will understand it
all simply. Do you suppose that the peasants don’t understand? Try reading
them the touching story of the fair Esther and the haughty Vashti; or the
miraculous story of Jonah in the whale. Don’t forget either the parables
of Our Lord, choose especially from the Gospel of St. Luke (that is what I
did), and then from the Acts of the Apostles the conversion of St. Paul
(that you mustn’t leave out on any account), and from the _Lives of the
Saints_, for instance, the life of Alexey, the man of God and, greatest of
all, the happy martyr and the seer of God, Mary of Egypt—and you will
penetrate their hearts with these simple tales. Give one hour a week to it
in spite of your poverty, only one little hour. And you will see for
yourselves that our people is gracious and grateful, and will repay you a
hundred-fold. Mindful of the kindness of their priest and the moving words
they have heard from him, they will of their own accord help him in his
fields and in his house, and will treat him with more respect than
before—so that it will even increase his worldly well-being too. The thing
is so simple that sometimes one is even afraid to put it into words, for
fear of being laughed at, and yet how true it is! One who does not believe
in God will not believe in God’s people. He who believes in God’s people
will see His Holiness too, even though he had not believed in it till
then. Only the people and their future spiritual power will convert our
atheists, who have torn themselves away from their native soil.

And what is the use of Christ’s words, unless we set an example? The
people is lost without the Word of God, for its soul is athirst for the
Word and for all that is good.

In my youth, long ago, nearly forty years ago, I traveled all over Russia
with Father Anfim, collecting funds for our monastery, and we stayed one
night on the bank of a great navigable river with some fishermen. A
good-looking peasant lad, about eighteen, joined us; he had to hurry back
next morning to pull a merchant’s barge along the bank. I noticed him
looking straight before him with clear and tender eyes. It was a bright,
warm, still, July night, a cool mist rose from the broad river, we could
hear the plash of a fish, the birds were still, all was hushed and
beautiful, everything praying to God. Only we two were not sleeping, the
lad and I, and we talked of the beauty of this world of God’s and of the
great mystery of it. Every blade of grass, every insect, ant, and golden
bee, all so marvelously know their path, though they have not
intelligence, they bear witness to the mystery of God and continually
accomplish it themselves. I saw the dear lad’s heart was moved. He told me
that he loved the forest and the forest birds. He was a bird-catcher, knew
the note of each of them, could call each bird. “I know nothing better
than to be in the forest,” said he, “though all things are good.”

“Truly,” I answered him, “all things are good and fair, because all is
truth. Look,” said I, “at the horse, that great beast that is so near to
man; or the lowly, pensive ox, which feeds him and works for him; look at
their faces, what meekness, what devotion to man, who often beats them
mercilessly. What gentleness, what confidence and what beauty! It’s
touching to know that there’s no sin in them, for all, all except man, is
sinless, and Christ has been with them before us.”

“Why,” asked the boy, “is Christ with them too?”

“It cannot but be so,” said I, “since the Word is for all. All creation
and all creatures, every leaf is striving to the Word, singing glory to
God, weeping to Christ, unconsciously accomplishing this by the mystery of
their sinless life. Yonder,” said I, “in the forest wanders the dreadful
bear, fierce and menacing, and yet innocent in it.” And I told him how
once a bear came to a great saint who had taken refuge in a tiny cell in
the wood. And the great saint pitied him, went up to him without fear and
gave him a piece of bread. “Go along,” said he, “Christ be with you,” and
the savage beast walked away meekly and obediently, doing no harm. And the
lad was delighted that the bear had walked away without hurting the saint,
and that Christ was with him too. “Ah,” said he, “how good that is, how
good and beautiful is all God’s work!” He sat musing softly and sweetly. I
saw he understood. And he slept beside me a light and sinless sleep. May
God bless youth! And I prayed for him as I went to sleep. Lord, send peace
and light to Thy people!



Chapter II. The Duel


_(c) Recollections of Father Zossima’s Youth before he became a Monk. The
Duel_

I spent a long time, almost eight years, in the military cadet school at
Petersburg, and in the novelty of my surroundings there, many of my
childish impressions grew dimmer, though I forgot nothing. I picked up so
many new habits and opinions that I was transformed into a cruel, absurd,
almost savage creature. A surface polish of courtesy and society manners I
did acquire together with the French language.

But we all, myself included, looked upon the soldiers in our service as
cattle. I was perhaps worse than the rest in that respect, for I was so
much more impressionable than my companions. By the time we left the
school as officers, we were ready to lay down our lives for the honor of
the regiment, but no one of us had any knowledge of the real meaning of
honor, and if any one had known it, he would have been the first to
ridicule it. Drunkenness, debauchery and devilry were what we almost
prided ourselves on. I don’t say that we were bad by nature, all these
young men were good fellows, but they behaved badly, and I worst of all.
What made it worse for me was that I had come into my own money, and so I
flung myself into a life of pleasure, and plunged headlong into all the
recklessness of youth.

I was fond of reading, yet strange to say, the Bible was the one book I
never opened at that time, though I always carried it about with me, and I
was never separated from it; in very truth I was keeping that book “for
the day and the hour, for the month and the year,” though I knew it not.

After four years of this life, I chanced to be in the town of K. where our
regiment was stationed at the time. We found the people of the town
hospitable, rich and fond of entertainments. I met with a cordial
reception everywhere, as I was of a lively temperament and was known to be
well off, which always goes a long way in the world. And then a
circumstance happened which was the beginning of it all.

I formed an attachment to a beautiful and intelligent young girl of noble
and lofty character, the daughter of people much respected. They were
well-to-do people of influence and position. They always gave me a cordial
and friendly reception. I fancied that the young lady looked on me with
favor and my heart was aflame at such an idea. Later on I saw and fully
realized that I perhaps was not so passionately in love with her at all,
but only recognized the elevation of her mind and character, which I could
not indeed have helped doing. I was prevented, however, from making her an
offer at the time by my selfishness, I was loath to part with the
allurements of my free and licentious bachelor life in the heyday of my
youth, and with my pockets full of money. I did drop some hint as to my
feelings however, though I put off taking any decisive step for a time.
Then, all of a sudden, we were ordered off for two months to another
district.

On my return two months later, I found the young lady already married to a
rich neighboring landowner, a very amiable man, still young though older
than I was, connected with the best Petersburg society, which I was not,
and of excellent education, which I also was not. I was so overwhelmed at
this unexpected circumstance that my mind was positively clouded. The
worst of it all was that, as I learned then, the young landowner had been
a long while betrothed to her, and I had met him indeed many times in her
house, but blinded by my conceit I had noticed nothing. And this
particularly mortified me; almost everybody had known all about it, while
I knew nothing. I was filled with sudden irrepressible fury. With flushed
face I began recalling how often I had been on the point of declaring my
love to her, and as she had not attempted to stop me or to warn me, she
must, I concluded, have been laughing at me all the time. Later on, of
course, I reflected and remembered that she had been very far from
laughing at me; on the contrary, she used to turn off any love-making on
my part with a jest and begin talking of other subjects; but at that
moment I was incapable of reflecting and was all eagerness for revenge. I
am surprised to remember that my wrath and revengeful feelings were
extremely repugnant to my own nature, for being of an easy temper, I found
it difficult to be angry with any one for long, and so I had to work
myself up artificially and became at last revolting and absurd.

I waited for an opportunity and succeeded in insulting my “rival” in the
presence of a large company. I insulted him on a perfectly extraneous
pretext, jeering at his opinion upon an important public event—it was in
the year 1826(5)—and my jeer was, so people said, clever and effective.
Then I forced him to ask for an explanation, and behaved so rudely that he
accepted my challenge in spite of the vast inequality between us, as I was
younger, a person of no consequence, and of inferior rank. I learned
afterwards for a fact that it was from a jealous feeling on his side also
that my challenge was accepted; he had been rather jealous of me on his
wife’s account before their marriage; he fancied now that if he submitted
to be insulted by me and refused to accept my challenge, and if she heard
of it, she might begin to despise him and waver in her love for him. I
soon found a second in a comrade, an ensign of our regiment. In those days
though duels were severely punished, yet dueling was a kind of fashion
among the officers—so strong and deeply rooted will a brutal prejudice
sometimes be.

It was the end of June, and our meeting was to take place at seven o’clock
the next day on the outskirts of the town—and then something happened that
in very truth was the turning-point of my life. In the evening, returning
home in a savage and brutal humor, I flew into a rage with my orderly
Afanasy, and gave him two blows in the face with all my might, so that it
was covered with blood. He had not long been in my service and I had
struck him before, but never with such ferocious cruelty. And, believe me,
though it’s forty years ago, I recall it now with shame and pain. I went
to bed and slept for about three hours; when I waked up the day was
breaking. I got up—I did not want to sleep any more—I went to the
window—opened it, it looked out upon the garden; I saw the sun rising; it
was warm and beautiful, the birds were singing.

“What’s the meaning of it?” I thought. “I feel in my heart as it were
something vile and shameful. Is it because I am going to shed blood? No,”
I thought, “I feel it’s not that. Can it be that I am afraid of death,
afraid of being killed? No, that’s not it, that’s not it at all.”... And
all at once I knew what it was: it was because I had beaten Afanasy the
evening before! It all rose before my mind, it all was as it were repeated
over again; he stood before me and I was beating him straight on the face
and he was holding his arms stiffly down, his head erect, his eyes fixed
upon me as though on parade. He staggered at every blow and did not even
dare to raise his hands to protect himself. That is what a man has been
brought to, and that was a man beating a fellow creature! What a crime! It
was as though a sharp dagger had pierced me right through. I stood as if I
were struck dumb, while the sun was shining, the leaves were rejoicing and
the birds were trilling the praise of God.... I hid my face in my hands,
fell on my bed and broke into a storm of tears. And then I remembered my
brother Markel and what he said on his death-bed to his servants: “My dear
ones, why do you wait on me, why do you love me, am I worth your waiting
on me?”

“Yes, am I worth it?” flashed through my mind. “After all what am I worth,
that another man, a fellow creature, made in the likeness and image of
God, should serve me?” For the first time in my life this question forced
itself upon me. He had said, “Mother, my little heart, in truth we are
each responsible to all for all, it’s only that men don’t know this. If
they knew it, the world would be a paradise at once.”

“God, can that too be false?” I thought as I wept. “In truth, perhaps, I
am more than all others responsible for all, a greater sinner than all men
in the world.” And all at once the whole truth in its full light appeared
to me; what was I going to do? I was going to kill a good, clever, noble
man, who had done me no wrong, and by depriving his wife of happiness for
the rest of her life, I should be torturing and killing her too. I lay
thus in my bed with my face in the pillow, heedless how the time was
passing. Suddenly my second, the ensign, came in with the pistols to fetch
me.

“Ah,” said he, “it’s a good thing you are up already, it’s time we were
off, come along!”

I did not know what to do and hurried to and fro undecided; we went out to
the carriage, however.

“Wait here a minute,” I said to him. “I’ll be back directly, I have
forgotten my purse.”

And I ran back alone, to Afanasy’s little room.

“Afanasy,” I said, “I gave you two blows on the face yesterday, forgive
me,” I said.

He started as though he were frightened, and looked at me; and I saw that
it was not enough, and on the spot, in my full officer’s uniform, I
dropped at his feet and bowed my head to the ground.

“Forgive me,” I said.

Then he was completely aghast.

“Your honor ... sir, what are you doing? Am I worth it?”

And he burst out crying as I had done before, hid this face in his hands,
turned to the window and shook all over with his sobs. I flew out to my
comrade and jumped into the carriage.

“Ready,” I cried. “Have you ever seen a conqueror?” I asked him. “Here is
one before you.”

I was in ecstasy, laughing and talking all the way, I don’t remember what
about.

He looked at me. “Well, brother, you are a plucky fellow, you’ll keep up
the honor of the uniform, I can see.”

So we reached the place and found them there, waiting us. We were placed
twelve paces apart; he had the first shot. I stood gayly, looking him full
in the face; I did not twitch an eyelash, I looked lovingly at him, for I
knew what I would do. His shot just grazed my cheek and ear.

“Thank God,” I cried, “no man has been killed,” and I seized my pistol,
turned back and flung it far away into the wood. “That’s the place for
you,” I cried.

I turned to my adversary.

“Forgive me, young fool that I am, sir,” I said, “for my unprovoked insult
to you and for forcing you to fire at me. I am ten times worse than you
and more, maybe. Tell that to the person whom you hold dearest in the
world.”

I had no sooner said this than they all three shouted at me.

“Upon my word,” cried my adversary, annoyed, “if you did not want to
fight, why did not you let me alone?”

“Yesterday I was a fool, to-day I know better,” I answered him gayly.

“As to yesterday, I believe you, but as for to-day, it is difficult to
agree with your opinion,” said he.

“Bravo,” I cried, clapping my hands. “I agree with you there too. I have
deserved it!”

“Will you shoot, sir, or not?”

“No, I won’t,” I said; “if you like, fire at me again, but it would be
better for you not to fire.”

The seconds, especially mine, were shouting too: “Can you disgrace the
regiment like this, facing your antagonist and begging his forgiveness! If
I’d only known this!”

I stood facing them all, not laughing now.

“Gentlemen,” I said, “is it really so wonderful in these days to find a
man who can repent of his stupidity and publicly confess his wrongdoing?”

“But not in a duel,” cried my second again.

“That’s what’s so strange,” I said. “For I ought to have owned my fault as
soon as I got here, before he had fired a shot, before leading him into a
great and deadly sin; but we have made our life so grotesque, that to act
in that way would have been almost impossible, for only after I have faced
his shot at the distance of twelve paces could my words have any
significance for him, and if I had spoken before, he would have said, ‘He
is a coward, the sight of the pistols has frightened him, no use to listen
to him.’ Gentlemen,” I cried suddenly, speaking straight from my heart,
“look around you at the gifts of God, the clear sky, the pure air, the
tender grass, the birds; nature is beautiful and sinless, and we, only we,
are sinful and foolish, and we don’t understand that life is heaven, for
we have only to understand that and it will at once be fulfilled in all
its beauty, we shall embrace each other and weep.”

I would have said more but I could not; my voice broke with the sweetness
and youthful gladness of it, and there was such bliss in my heart as I had
never known before in my life.

“All this as rational and edifying,” said my antagonist, “and in any case
you are an original person.”

“You may laugh,” I said to him, laughing too, “but afterwards you will
approve of me.”

“Oh, I am ready to approve of you now,” said he; “will you shake hands?
for I believe you are genuinely sincere.”

“No,” I said, “not now, later on when I have grown worthier and deserve
your esteem, then shake hands and you will do well.”

We went home, my second upbraiding me all the way, while I kissed him. All
my comrades heard of the affair at once and gathered together to pass
judgment on me the same day.

“He has disgraced the uniform,” they said; “let him resign his
commission.”

Some stood up for me: “He faced the shot,” they said.

“Yes, but he was afraid of his other shot and begged for forgiveness.”

“If he had been afraid of being shot, he would have shot his own pistol
first before asking forgiveness, while he flung it loaded into the forest.
No, there’s something else in this, something original.”

I enjoyed listening and looking at them. “My dear friends and comrades,”
said I, “don’t worry about my resigning my commission, for I have done so
already. I have sent in my papers this morning and as soon as I get my
discharge I shall go into a monastery—it’s with that object I am leaving
the regiment.”

When I had said this every one of them burst out laughing.

“You should have told us of that first, that explains everything, we can’t
judge a monk.”

They laughed and could not stop themselves, and not scornfully, but kindly
and merrily. They all felt friendly to me at once, even those who had been
sternest in their censure, and all the following month, before my
discharge came, they could not make enough of me. “Ah, you monk,” they
would say. And every one said something kind to me, they began trying to
dissuade me, even to pity me: “What are you doing to yourself?”

“No,” they would say, “he is a brave fellow, he faced fire and could have
fired his own pistol too, but he had a dream the night before that he
should become a monk, that’s why he did it.”

It was the same thing with the society of the town. Till then I had been
kindly received, but had not been the object of special attention, and now
all came to know me at once and invited me; they laughed at me, but they
loved me. I may mention that although everybody talked openly of our duel,
the authorities took no notice of it, because my antagonist was a near
relation of our general, and as there had been no bloodshed and no serious
consequences, and as I resigned my commission, they took it as a joke. And
I began then to speak aloud and fearlessly, regardless of their laughter,
for it was always kindly and not spiteful laughter. These conversations
mostly took place in the evenings, in the company of ladies; women
particularly liked listening to me then and they made the men listen.

“But how can I possibly be responsible for all?” every one would laugh in
my face. “Can I, for instance, be responsible for you?”

“You may well not know it,” I would answer, “since the whole world has
long been going on a different line, since we consider the veriest lies as
truth and demand the same lies from others. Here I have for once in my
life acted sincerely and, well, you all look upon me as a madman. Though
you are friendly to me, yet, you see, you all laugh at me.”

“But how can we help being friendly to you?” said my hostess, laughing.
The room was full of people. All of a sudden the young lady rose, on whose
account the duel had been fought and whom only lately I had intended to be
my future wife. I had not noticed her coming into the room. She got up,
came to me and held out her hand.

“Let me tell you,” she said, “that I am the first not to laugh at you, but
on the contrary I thank you with tears and express my respect for you for
your action then.”

Her husband, too, came up and then they all approached me and almost
kissed me. My heart was filled with joy, but my attention was especially
caught by a middle-aged man who came up to me with the others. I knew him
by name already, but had never made his acquaintance nor exchanged a word
with him till that evening.

_(d) The Mysterious Visitor_

He had long been an official in the town; he was in a prominent position,
respected by all, rich and had a reputation for benevolence. He subscribed
considerable sums to the almshouse and the orphan asylum; he was very
charitable, too, in secret, a fact which only became known after his
death. He was a man of about fifty, almost stern in appearance and not
much given to conversation. He had been married about ten years and his
wife, who was still young, had borne him three children. Well, I was
sitting alone in my room the following evening, when my door suddenly
opened and this gentleman walked in.

I must mention, by the way, that I was no longer living in my former
quarters. As soon as I resigned my commission, I took rooms with an old
lady, the widow of a government clerk. My landlady’s servant waited upon
me, for I had moved into her rooms simply because on my return from the
duel I had sent Afanasy back to the regiment, as I felt ashamed to look
him in the face after my last interview with him. So prone is the man of
the world to be ashamed of any righteous action.

“I have,” said my visitor, “with great interest listened to you speaking
in different houses the last few days and I wanted at last to make your
personal acquaintance, so as to talk to you more intimately. Can you, dear
sir, grant me this favor?”

“I can, with the greatest pleasure, and I shall look upon it as an honor.”
I said this, though I felt almost dismayed, so greatly was I impressed
from the first moment by the appearance of this man. For though other
people had listened to me with interest and attention, no one had come to
me before with such a serious, stern and concentrated expression. And now
he had come to see me in my own rooms. He sat down.

“You are, I see, a man of great strength of character,” he said; “as you
have dared to serve the truth, even when by doing so you risked incurring
the contempt of all.”

“Your praise is, perhaps, excessive,” I replied.

“No, it’s not excessive,” he answered; “believe me, such a course of
action is far more difficult than you think. It is that which has
impressed me, and it is only on that account that I have come to you,” he
continued. “Tell me, please, that is if you are not annoyed by my perhaps
unseemly curiosity, what were your exact sensations, if you can recall
them, at the moment when you made up your mind to ask forgiveness at the
duel. Do not think my question frivolous; on the contrary, I have in
asking the question a secret motive of my own, which I will perhaps
explain to you later on, if it is God’s will that we should become more
intimately acquainted.”

All the while he was speaking, I was looking at him straight into the face
and I felt all at once a complete trust in him and great curiosity on my
side also, for I felt that there was some strange secret in his soul.

“You ask what were my exact sensations at the moment when I asked my
opponent’s forgiveness,” I answered; “but I had better tell you from the
beginning what I have not yet told any one else.” And I described all that
had passed between Afanasy and me, and how I had bowed down to the ground
at his feet. “From that you can see for yourself,” I concluded, “that at
the time of the duel it was easier for me, for I had made a beginning
already at home, and when once I had started on that road, to go farther
along it was far from being difficult, but became a source of joy and
happiness.”

I liked the way he looked at me as he listened. “All that,” he said, “is
exceedingly interesting. I will come to see you again and again.”

And from that time forth he came to see me nearly every evening. And we
should have become greater friends, if only he had ever talked of himself.
But about himself he scarcely ever said a word, yet continually asked me
about myself. In spite of that I became very fond of him and spoke with
perfect frankness to him about all my feelings; “for,” thought I, “what
need have I to know his secrets, since I can see without that that he is a
good man? Moreover, though he is such a serious man and my senior, he
comes to see a youngster like me and treats me as his equal.” And I
learned a great deal that was profitable from him, for he was a man of
lofty mind.

“That life is heaven,” he said to me suddenly, “that I have long been
thinking about”; and all at once he added, “I think of nothing else
indeed.” He looked at me and smiled. “I am more convinced of it than you
are, I will tell you later why.”

I listened to him and thought that he evidently wanted to tell me
something.

“Heaven,” he went on, “lies hidden within all of us—here it lies hidden in
me now, and if I will it, it will be revealed to me to-morrow and for all
time.”

I looked at him; he was speaking with great emotion and gazing
mysteriously at me, as if he were questioning me.

“And that we are all responsible to all for all, apart from our own sins,
you were quite right in thinking that, and it is wonderful how you could
comprehend it in all its significance at once. And in very truth, so soon
as men understand that, the Kingdom of Heaven will be for them not a
dream, but a living reality.”

“And when,” I cried out to him bitterly, “when will that come to pass? and
will it ever come to pass? Is not it simply a dream of ours?”

“What then, you don’t believe it,” he said. “You preach it and don’t
believe it yourself. Believe me, this dream, as you call it, will come to
pass without doubt; it will come, but not now, for every process has its
law. It’s a spiritual, psychological process. To transform the world, to
recreate it afresh, men must turn into another path psychologically. Until
you have become really, in actual fact, a brother to every one,
brotherhood will not come to pass. No sort of scientific teaching, no kind
of common interest, will ever teach men to share property and privileges
with equal consideration for all. Every one will think his share too small
and they will be always envying, complaining and attacking one another.
You ask when it will come to pass; it will come to pass, but first we have
to go through the period of isolation.”

“What do you mean by isolation?” I asked him.

“Why, the isolation that prevails everywhere, above all in our age—it has
not fully developed, it has not reached its limit yet. For every one
strives to keep his individuality as apart as possible, wishes to secure
the greatest possible fullness of life for himself; but meantime all his
efforts result not in attaining fullness of life but self-destruction, for
instead of self-realization he ends by arriving at complete solitude. All
mankind in our age have split up into units, they all keep apart, each in
his own groove; each one holds aloof, hides himself and hides what he has,
from the rest, and he ends by being repelled by others and repelling them.
He heaps up riches by himself and thinks, ‘How strong I am now and how
secure,’ and in his madness he does not understand that the more he heaps
up, the more he sinks into self-destructive impotence. For he is
accustomed to rely upon himself alone and to cut himself off from the
whole; he has trained himself not to believe in the help of others, in men
and in humanity, and only trembles for fear he should lose his money and
the privileges that he has won for himself. Everywhere in these days men
have, in their mockery, ceased to understand that the true security is to
be found in social solidarity rather than in isolated individual effort.
But this terrible individualism must inevitably have an end, and all will
suddenly understand how unnaturally they are separated from one another.
It will be the spirit of the time, and people will marvel that they have
sat so long in darkness without seeing the light. And then the sign of the
Son of Man will be seen in the heavens.... But, until then, we must keep
the banner flying. Sometimes even if he has to do it alone, and his
conduct seems to be crazy, a man must set an example, and so draw men’s
souls out of their solitude, and spur them to some act of brotherly love,
that the great idea may not die.”

Our evenings, one after another, were spent in such stirring and fervent
talk. I gave up society and visited my neighbors much less frequently.
Besides, my vogue was somewhat over. I say this, not as blame, for they
still loved me and treated me good-humoredly, but there’s no denying that
fashion is a great power in society. I began to regard my mysterious
visitor with admiration, for besides enjoying his intelligence, I began to
perceive that he was brooding over some plan in his heart, and was
preparing himself perhaps for a great deed. Perhaps he liked my not
showing curiosity about his secret, not seeking to discover it by direct
question nor by insinuation. But I noticed at last, that he seemed to show
signs of wanting to tell me something. This had become quite evident,
indeed, about a month after he first began to visit me.

“Do you know,” he said to me once, “that people are very inquisitive about
us in the town and wonder why I come to see you so often. But let them
wonder, for _soon all will be explained_.”

Sometimes an extraordinary agitation would come over him, and almost
always on such occasions he would get up and go away. Sometimes he would
fix a long piercing look upon me, and I thought, “He will say something
directly now.” But he would suddenly begin talking of something ordinary
and familiar. He often complained of headache too.

One day, quite unexpectedly indeed, after he had been talking with great
fervor a long time, I saw him suddenly turn pale, and his face worked
convulsively, while he stared persistently at me.

“What’s the matter?” I said; “do you feel ill?”—he had just been
complaining of headache.

“I ... do you know ... I murdered some one.”

He said this and smiled with a face as white as chalk. “Why is it he is
smiling?” The thought flashed through my mind before I realized anything
else. I too turned pale.

“What are you saying?” I cried.

“You see,” he said, with a pale smile, “how much it has cost me to say the
first word. Now I have said it, I feel I’ve taken the first step and shall
go on.”

For a long while I could not believe him, and I did not believe him at
that time, but only after he had been to see me three days running and
told me all about it. I thought he was mad, but ended by being convinced,
to my great grief and amazement. His crime was a great and terrible one.

Fourteen years before, he had murdered the widow of a landowner, a wealthy
and handsome young woman who had a house in our town. He fell passionately
in love with her, declared his feeling and tried to persuade her to marry
him. But she had already given her heart to another man, an officer of
noble birth and high rank in the service, who was at that time away at the
front, though she was expecting him soon to return. She refused his offer
and begged him not to come and see her. After he had ceased to visit her,
he took advantage of his knowledge of the house to enter at night through
the garden by the roof, at great risk of discovery. But, as often happens,
a crime committed with extraordinary audacity is more successful than
others.

Entering the garret through the skylight, he went down the ladder, knowing
that the door at the bottom of it was sometimes, through the negligence of
the servants, left unlocked. He hoped to find it so, and so it was. He
made his way in the dark to her bedroom, where a light was burning. As
though on purpose, both her maids had gone off to a birthday-party in the
same street, without asking leave. The other servants slept in the
servants’ quarters or in the kitchen on the ground-floor. His passion
flamed up at the sight of her asleep, and then vindictive, jealous anger
took possession of his heart, and like a drunken man, beside himself, he
thrust a knife into her heart, so that she did not even cry out. Then with
devilish and criminal cunning he contrived that suspicion should fall on
the servants. He was so base as to take her purse, to open her chest with
keys from under her pillow, and to take some things from it, doing it all
as it might have been done by an ignorant servant, leaving valuable papers
and taking only money. He took some of the larger gold things, but left
smaller articles that were ten times as valuable. He took with him, too,
some things for himself as remembrances, but of that later. Having done
this awful deed, he returned by the way he had come.

Neither the next day, when the alarm was raised, nor at any time after in
his life, did any one dream of suspecting that he was the criminal. No one
indeed knew of his love for her, for he was always reserved and silent and
had no friend to whom he would have opened his heart. He was looked upon
simply as an acquaintance, and not a very intimate one, of the murdered
woman, as for the previous fortnight he had not even visited her. A serf
of hers called Pyotr was at once suspected, and every circumstance
confirmed the suspicion. The man knew—indeed his mistress did not conceal
the fact—that having to send one of her serfs as a recruit she had decided
to send him, as he had no relations and his conduct was unsatisfactory.
People had heard him angrily threatening to murder her when he was drunk
in a tavern. Two days before her death, he had run away, staying no one
knew where in the town. The day after the murder, he was found on the road
leading out of the town, dead drunk, with a knife in his pocket, and his
right hand happened to be stained with blood. He declared that his nose
had been bleeding, but no one believed him. The maids confessed that they
had gone to a party and that the street-door had been left open till they
returned. And a number of similar details came to light, throwing
suspicion on the innocent servant.

They arrested him, and he was tried for the murder; but a week after the
arrest, the prisoner fell sick of a fever and died unconscious in the
hospital. There the matter ended and the judges and the authorities and
every one in the town remained convinced that the crime had been committed
by no one but the servant who had died in the hospital. And after that the
punishment began.

My mysterious visitor, now my friend, told me that at first he was not in
the least troubled by pangs of conscience. He was miserable a long time,
but not for that reason; only from regret that he had killed the woman he
loved, that she was no more, that in killing her he had killed his love,
while the fire of passion was still in his veins. But of the innocent
blood he had shed, of the murder of a fellow creature, he scarcely
thought. The thought that his victim might have become the wife of another
man was insupportable to him, and so, for a long time, he was convinced in
his conscience that he could not have acted otherwise.

At first he was worried at the arrest of the servant, but his illness and
death soon set his mind at rest, for the man’s death was apparently (so he
reflected at the time) not owing to his arrest or his fright, but a chill
he had taken on the day he ran away, when he had lain all night dead drunk
on the damp ground. The theft of the money and other things troubled him
little, for he argued that the theft had not been committed for gain but
to avert suspicion. The sum stolen was small, and he shortly afterwards
subscribed the whole of it, and much more, towards the funds for
maintaining an almshouse in the town. He did this on purpose to set his
conscience at rest about the theft, and it’s a remarkable fact that for a
long time he really was at peace—he told me this himself. He entered then
upon a career of great activity in the service, volunteered for a
difficult and laborious duty, which occupied him two years, and being a
man of strong will almost forgot the past. Whenever he recalled it, he
tried not to think of it at all. He became active in philanthropy too,
founded and helped to maintain many institutions in the town, did a good
deal in the two capitals, and in both Moscow and Petersburg was elected a
member of philanthropic societies.

At last, however, he began brooding over the past, and the strain of it
was too much for him. Then he was attracted by a fine and intelligent girl
and soon after married her, hoping that marriage would dispel his lonely
depression, and that by entering on a new life and scrupulously doing his
duty to his wife and children, he would escape from old memories
altogether. But the very opposite of what he expected happened. He began,
even in the first month of his marriage, to be continually fretted by the
thought, “My wife loves me—but what if she knew?” When she first told him
that she would soon bear him a child, he was troubled. “I am giving life,
but I have taken life.” Children came. “How dare I love them, teach and
educate them, how can I talk to them of virtue? I have shed blood.” They
were splendid children, he longed to caress them; “and I can’t look at
their innocent candid faces, I am unworthy.”

At last he began to be bitterly and ominously haunted by the blood of his
murdered victim, by the young life he had destroyed, by the blood that
cried out for vengeance. He had begun to have awful dreams. But, being a
man of fortitude, he bore his suffering a long time, thinking: “I shall
expiate everything by this secret agony.” But that hope, too, was vain;
the longer it went on, the more intense was his suffering.

He was respected in society for his active benevolence, though every one
was overawed by his stern and gloomy character. But the more he was
respected, the more intolerable it was for him. He confessed to me that he
had thoughts of killing himself. But he began to be haunted by another
idea—an idea which he had at first regarded as impossible and unthinkable,
though at last it got such a hold on his heart that he could not shake it
off. He dreamed of rising up, going out and confessing in the face of all
men that he had committed murder. For three years this dream had pursued
him, haunting him in different forms. At last he believed with his whole
heart that if he confessed his crime, he would heal his soul and would be
at peace for ever. But this belief filled his heart with terror, for how
could he carry it out? And then came what happened at my duel.

“Looking at you, I have made up my mind.”

I looked at him.

“Is it possible,” I cried, clasping my hands, “that such a trivial
incident could give rise to such a resolution in you?”

“My resolution has been growing for the last three years,” he answered,
“and your story only gave the last touch to it. Looking at you, I
reproached myself and envied you.” He said this to me almost sullenly.

“But you won’t be believed,” I observed; “it’s fourteen years ago.”

“I have proofs, great proofs. I shall show them.”

Then I cried and kissed him.

“Tell me one thing, one thing,” he said (as though it all depended upon
me), “my wife, my children! My wife may die of grief, and though my
children won’t lose their rank and property, they’ll be a convict’s
children and for ever! And what a memory, what a memory of me I shall
leave in their hearts!”

I said nothing.

“And to part from them, to leave them for ever? It’s for ever, you know,
for ever!”

I sat still and repeated a silent prayer. I got up at last, I felt afraid.

“Well?” He looked at me.

“Go!” said I, “confess. Everything passes, only the truth remains. Your
children will understand, when they grow up, the nobility of your
resolution.”

He left me that time as though he had made up his mind. Yet for more than
a fortnight afterwards, he came to me every evening, still preparing
himself, still unable to bring himself to the point. He made my heart
ache. One day he would come determined and say fervently:

“I know it will be heaven for me, heaven, the moment I confess. Fourteen
years I’ve been in hell. I want to suffer. I will take my punishment and
begin to live. You can pass through the world doing wrong, but there’s no
turning back. Now I dare not love my neighbor nor even my own children.
Good God, my children will understand, perhaps, what my punishment has
cost me and will not condemn me! God is not in strength but in truth.”

“All will understand your sacrifice,” I said to him, “if not at once, they
will understand later; for you have served truth, the higher truth, not of
the earth.”

And he would go away seeming comforted, but next day he would come again,
bitter, pale, sarcastic.

“Every time I come to you, you look at me so inquisitively as though to
say, ‘He has still not confessed!’ Wait a bit, don’t despise me too much.
It’s not such an easy thing to do, as you would think. Perhaps I shall not
do it at all. You won’t go and inform against me then, will you?”

And far from looking at him with indiscreet curiosity, I was afraid to
look at him at all. I was quite ill from anxiety, and my heart was full of
tears. I could not sleep at night.

“I have just come from my wife,” he went on. “Do you understand what the
word ‘wife’ means? When I went out, the children called to me, ‘Good-by,
father, make haste back to read _The Children’s Magazine_ with us.’ No,
you don’t understand that! No one is wise from another man’s woe.”

His eyes were glittering, his lips were twitching. Suddenly he struck the
table with his fist so that everything on it danced—it was the first time
he had done such a thing, he was such a mild man.

“But need I?” he exclaimed, “must I? No one has been condemned, no one has
been sent to Siberia in my place, the man died of fever. And I’ve been
punished by my sufferings for the blood I shed. And I shan’t be believed,
they won’t believe my proofs. Need I confess, need I? I am ready to go on
suffering all my life for the blood I have shed, if only my wife and
children may be spared. Will it be just to ruin them with me? Aren’t we
making a mistake? What is right in this case? And will people recognize
it, will they appreciate it, will they respect it?”

“Good Lord!” I thought to myself, “he is thinking of other people’s
respect at such a moment!” And I felt so sorry for him then, that I
believe I would have shared his fate if it could have comforted him. I saw
he was beside himself. I was aghast, realizing with my heart as well as my
mind what such a resolution meant.

“Decide my fate!” he exclaimed again.

“Go and confess,” I whispered to him. My voice failed me, but I whispered
it firmly. I took up the New Testament from the table, the Russian
translation, and showed him the Gospel of St. John, chapter xii. verse 24:

“Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the
ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much
fruit.”

I had just been reading that verse when he came in. He read it.

“That’s true,” he said, but he smiled bitterly. “It’s terrible the things
you find in those books,” he said, after a pause. “It’s easy enough to
thrust them upon one. And who wrote them? Can they have been written by
men?”

“The Holy Spirit wrote them,” said I.

“It’s easy for you to prate,” he smiled again, this time almost with
hatred.

I took the book again, opened it in another place and showed him the
Epistle to the Hebrews, chapter x. verse 31. He read:

“It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”

He read it and simply flung down the book. He was trembling all over.

“An awful text,” he said. “There’s no denying you’ve picked out fitting
ones.” He rose from the chair. “Well!” he said, “good-by, perhaps I shan’t
come again ... we shall meet in heaven. So I have been for fourteen years
‘in the hands of the living God,’ that’s how one must think of those
fourteen years. To-morrow I will beseech those hands to let me go.”

I wanted to take him in my arms and kiss him, but I did not dare—his face
was contorted and somber. He went away.

“Good God,” I thought, “what has he gone to face!” I fell on my knees
before the ikon and wept for him before the Holy Mother of God, our swift
defender and helper. I was half an hour praying in tears, and it was late,
about midnight. Suddenly I saw the door open and he came in again. I was
surprised.

“Where have you been?” I asked him.

“I think,” he said, “I’ve forgotten something ... my handkerchief, I
think.... Well, even if I’ve not forgotten anything, let me stay a
little.”

He sat down. I stood over him.

“You sit down, too,” said he.

I sat down. We sat still for two minutes; he looked intently at me and
suddenly smiled—I remembered that—then he got up, embraced me warmly and
kissed me.

“Remember,” he said, “how I came to you a second time. Do you hear,
remember it!”

And he went out.

“To-morrow,” I thought.

And so it was. I did not know that evening that the next day was his
birthday. I had not been out for the last few days, so I had no chance of
hearing it from any one. On that day he always had a great gathering,
every one in the town went to it. It was the same this time. After dinner
he walked into the middle of the room, with a paper in his hand—a formal
declaration to the chief of his department who was present. This
declaration he read aloud to the whole assembly. It contained a full
account of the crime, in every detail.

“I cut myself off from men as a monster. God has visited me,” he said in
conclusion. “I want to suffer for my sin!”

Then he brought out and laid on the table all the things he had been
keeping for fourteen years, that he thought would prove his crime, the
jewels belonging to the murdered woman which he had stolen to divert
suspicion, a cross and a locket taken from her neck with a portrait of her
betrothed in the locket, her notebook and two letters; one from her
betrothed, telling her that he would soon be with her, and her unfinished
answer left on the table to be sent off next day. He carried off these two
letters—what for? Why had he kept them for fourteen years afterwards
instead of destroying them as evidence against him?

And this is what happened: every one was amazed and horrified, every one
refused to believe it and thought that he was deranged, though all
listened with intense curiosity. A few days later it was fully decided and
agreed in every house that the unhappy man was mad. The legal authorities
could not refuse to take the case up, but they too dropped it. Though the
trinkets and letters made them ponder, they decided that even if they did
turn out to be authentic, no charge could be based on those alone.
Besides, she might have given him those things as a friend, or asked him
to take care of them for her. I heard afterwards, however, that the
genuineness of the things was proved by the friends and relations of the
murdered woman, and that there was no doubt about them. Yet nothing was
destined to come of it, after all.

Five days later, all had heard that he was ill and that his life was in
danger. The nature of his illness I can’t explain, they said it was an
affection of the heart. But it became known that the doctors had been
induced by his wife to investigate his mental condition also, and had come
to the conclusion that it was a case of insanity. I betrayed nothing,
though people ran to question me. But when I wanted to visit him, I was
for a long while forbidden to do so, above all by his wife.

“It’s you who have caused his illness,” she said to me; “he was always
gloomy, but for the last year people noticed that he was peculiarly
excited and did strange things, and now you have been the ruin of him.
Your preaching has brought him to this; for the last month he was always
with you.”

Indeed, not only his wife but the whole town were down upon me and blamed
me. “It’s all your doing,” they said. I was silent and indeed rejoiced at
heart, for I saw plainly God’s mercy to the man who had turned against
himself and punished himself. I could not believe in his insanity.

They let me see him at last, he insisted upon saying good-by to me. I went
in to him and saw at once, that not only his days, but his hours were
numbered. He was weak, yellow, his hands trembled, he gasped for breath,
but his face was full of tender and happy feeling.

“It is done!” he said. “I’ve long been yearning to see you, why didn’t you
come?”

I did not tell him that they would not let me see him.

“God has had pity on me and is calling me to Himself. I know I am dying,
but I feel joy and peace for the first time after so many years. There was
heaven in my heart from the moment I had done what I had to do. Now I dare
to love my children and to kiss them. Neither my wife nor the judges, nor
any one has believed it. My children will never believe it either. I see
in that God’s mercy to them. I shall die, and my name will be without a
stain for them. And now I feel God near, my heart rejoices as in Heaven
... I have done my duty.”

He could not speak, he gasped for breath, he pressed my hand warmly,
looking fervently at me. We did not talk for long, his wife kept peeping
in at us. But he had time to whisper to me:

“Do you remember how I came back to you that second time, at midnight? I
told you to remember it. You know what I came back for? I came to kill
you!”

I started.

“I went out from you then into the darkness, I wandered about the streets,
struggling with myself. And suddenly I hated you so that I could hardly
bear it. Now, I thought, he is all that binds me, and he is my judge. I
can’t refuse to face my punishment to-morrow, for he knows all. It was not
that I was afraid you would betray me (I never even thought of that), but
I thought, ‘How can I look him in the face if I don’t confess?’ And if you
had been at the other end of the earth, but alive, it would have been all
the same, the thought was unendurable that you were alive knowing
everything and condemning me. I hated you as though you were the cause, as
though you were to blame for everything. I came back to you then,
remembering that you had a dagger lying on your table. I sat down and
asked you to sit down, and for a whole minute I pondered. If I had killed
you, I should have been ruined by that murder even if I had not confessed
the other. But I didn’t think about that at all, and I didn’t want to
think of it at that moment. I only hated you and longed to revenge myself
on you for everything. The Lord vanquished the devil in my heart. But let
me tell you, you were never nearer death.”

A week later he died. The whole town followed him to the grave. The chief
priest made a speech full of feeling. All lamented the terrible illness
that had cut short his days. But all the town was up in arms against me
after the funeral, and people even refused to see me. Some, at first a few
and afterwards more, began indeed to believe in the truth of his story,
and they visited me and questioned me with great interest and eagerness,
for man loves to see the downfall and disgrace of the righteous. But I
held my tongue, and very shortly after, I left the town, and five months
later by God’s grace I entered upon the safe and blessed path, praising
the unseen finger which had guided me so clearly to it. But I remember in
my prayer to this day, the servant of God, Mihail, who suffered so
greatly.



Chapter III. Conversations And Exhortations Of Father Zossima


_(e) The Russian Monk and his possible Significance_

Fathers and teachers, what is the monk? In the cultivated world the word
is nowadays pronounced by some people with a jeer, and by others it is
used as a term of abuse, and this contempt for the monk is growing. It is
true, alas, it is true, that there are many sluggards, gluttons,
profligates and insolent beggars among monks. Educated people point to
these: “You are idlers, useless members of society, you live on the labor
of others, you are shameless beggars.” And yet how many meek and humble
monks there are, yearning for solitude and fervent prayer in peace! These
are less noticed, or passed over in silence. And how surprised men would
be if I were to say that from these meek monks, who yearn for solitary
prayer, the salvation of Russia will come perhaps once more! For they are
in truth made ready in peace and quiet “for the day and the hour, the
month and the year.” Meanwhile, in their solitude, they keep the image of
Christ fair and undefiled, in the purity of God’s truth, from the times of
the Fathers of old, the Apostles and the martyrs. And when the time comes
they will show it to the tottering creeds of the world. That is a great
thought. That star will rise out of the East.

That is my view of the monk, and is it false? is it too proud? Look at the
worldly and all who set themselves up above the people of God, has not
God’s image and His truth been distorted in them? They have science; but
in science there is nothing but what is the object of sense. The spiritual
world, the higher part of man’s being is rejected altogether, dismissed
with a sort of triumph, even with hatred. The world has proclaimed the
reign of freedom, especially of late, but what do we see in this freedom
of theirs? Nothing but slavery and self-destruction! For the world says:

“You have desires and so satisfy them, for you have the same rights as the
most rich and powerful. Don’t be afraid of satisfying them and even
multiply your desires.” That is the modern doctrine of the world. In that
they see freedom. And what follows from this right of multiplication of
desires? In the rich, isolation and spiritual suicide; in the poor, envy
and murder; for they have been given rights, but have not been shown the
means of satisfying their wants. They maintain that the world is getting
more and more united, more and more bound together in brotherly community,
as it overcomes distance and sets thoughts flying through the air.

Alas, put no faith in such a bond of union. Interpreting freedom as the
multiplication and rapid satisfaction of desires, men distort their own
nature, for many senseless and foolish desires and habits and ridiculous
fancies are fostered in them. They live only for mutual envy, for luxury
and ostentation. To have dinners, visits, carriages, rank and slaves to
wait on one is looked upon as a necessity, for which life, honor and human
feeling are sacrificed, and men even commit suicide if they are unable to
satisfy it. We see the same thing among those who are not rich, while the
poor drown their unsatisfied need and their envy in drunkenness. But soon
they will drink blood instead of wine, they are being led on to it. I ask
you is such a man free? I knew one “champion of freedom” who told me
himself that, when he was deprived of tobacco in prison, he was so
wretched at the privation that he almost went and betrayed his cause for
the sake of getting tobacco again! And such a man says, “I am fighting for
the cause of humanity.”

How can such a one fight? what is he fit for? He is capable perhaps of
some action quickly over, but he cannot hold out long. And it’s no wonder
that instead of gaining freedom they have sunk into slavery, and instead
of serving the cause of brotherly love and the union of humanity have
fallen, on the contrary, into dissension and isolation, as my mysterious
visitor and teacher said to me in my youth. And therefore the idea of the
service of humanity, of brotherly love and the solidarity of mankind, is
more and more dying out in the world, and indeed this idea is sometimes
treated with derision. For how can a man shake off his habits? What can
become of him if he is in such bondage to the habit of satisfying the
innumerable desires he has created for himself? He is isolated, and what
concern has he with the rest of humanity? They have succeeded in
accumulating a greater mass of objects, but the joy in the world has grown
less.

The monastic way is very different. Obedience, fasting and prayer are
laughed at, yet only through them lies the way to real, true freedom. I
cut off my superfluous and unnecessary desires, I subdue my proud and
wanton will and chastise it with obedience, and with God’s help I attain
freedom of spirit and with it spiritual joy. Which is most capable of
conceiving a great idea and serving it—the rich man in his isolation or
the man who has freed himself from the tyranny of material things and
habits? The monk is reproached for his solitude, “You have secluded
yourself within the walls of the monastery for your own salvation, and
have forgotten the brotherly service of humanity!” But we shall see which
will be most zealous in the cause of brotherly love. For it is not we, but
they, who are in isolation, though they don’t see that. Of old, leaders of
the people came from among us, and why should they not again? The same
meek and humble ascetics will rise up and go out to work for the great
cause. The salvation of Russia comes from the people. And the Russian monk
has always been on the side of the people. We are isolated only if the
people are isolated. The people believe as we do, and an unbelieving
reformer will never do anything in Russia, even if he is sincere in heart
and a genius. Remember that! The people will meet the atheist and overcome
him, and Russia will be one and orthodox. Take care of the peasant and
guard his heart. Go on educating him quietly. That’s your duty as monks,
for the peasant has God in his heart.

(_f_) _Of Masters and Servants, and of whether it is possible for them to
be Brothers in the Spirit_

Of course, I don’t deny that there is sin in the peasants too. And the
fire of corruption is spreading visibly, hourly, working from above
downwards. The spirit of isolation is coming upon the people too.
Money-lenders and devourers of the commune are rising up. Already the
merchant grows more and more eager for rank, and strives to show himself
cultured though he has not a trace of culture, and to this end meanly
despises his old traditions, and is even ashamed of the faith of his
fathers. He visits princes, though he is only a peasant corrupted. The
peasants are rotting in drunkenness and cannot shake off the habit. And
what cruelty to their wives, to their children even! All from drunkenness!
I’ve seen in the factories children of nine years old, frail, rickety,
bent and already depraved. The stuffy workshop, the din of machinery, work
all day long, the vile language and the drink, the drink—is that what a
little child’s heart needs? He needs sunshine, childish play, good
examples all about him, and at least a little love. There must be no more
of this, monks, no more torturing of children, rise up and preach that,
make haste, make haste!

But God will save Russia, for though the peasants are corrupted and cannot
renounce their filthy sin, yet they know it is cursed by God and that they
do wrong in sinning. So that our people still believe in righteousness,
have faith in God and weep tears of devotion.

It is different with the upper classes. They, following science, want to
base justice on reason alone, but not with Christ, as before, and they
have already proclaimed that there is no crime, that there is no sin. And
that’s consistent, for if you have no God what is the meaning of crime? In
Europe the people are already rising up against the rich with violence,
and the leaders of the people are everywhere leading them to bloodshed,
and teaching them that their wrath is righteous. But their “wrath is
accursed, for it is cruel.” But God will save Russia as He has saved her
many times. Salvation will come from the people, from their faith and
their meekness.

Fathers and teachers, watch over the people’s faith and this will not be a
dream. I’ve been struck all my life in our great people by their dignity,
their true and seemly dignity. I’ve seen it myself, I can testify to it,
I’ve seen it and marveled at it, I’ve seen it in spite of the degraded
sins and poverty-stricken appearance of our peasantry. They are not
servile, and even after two centuries of serfdom they are free in manner
and bearing, yet without insolence, and not revengeful and not envious.
“You are rich and noble, you are clever and talented, well, be so, God
bless you. I respect you, but I know that I too am a man. By the very fact
that I respect you without envy I prove my dignity as a man.”

In truth if they don’t say this (for they don’t know how to say this yet),
that is how they act. I have seen it myself, I have known it myself, and,
would you believe it, the poorer our Russian peasant is, the more
noticeable is that serene goodness, for the rich among them are for the
most part corrupted already, and much of that is due to our carelessness
and indifference. But God will save His people, for Russia is great in her
humility. I dream of seeing, and seem to see clearly already, our future.
It will come to pass, that even the most corrupt of our rich will end by
being ashamed of his riches before the poor, and the poor, seeing his
humility, will understand and give way before him, will respond joyfully
and kindly to his honorable shame. Believe me that it will end in that;
things are moving to that. Equality is to be found only in the spiritual
dignity of man, and that will only be understood among us. If we were
brothers, there would be fraternity, but before that, they will never
agree about the division of wealth. We preserve the image of Christ, and
it will shine forth like a precious diamond to the whole world. So may it
be, so may it be!

Fathers and teachers, a touching incident befell me once. In my wanderings
I met in the town of K. my old orderly, Afanasy. It was eight years since
I had parted from him. He chanced to see me in the market-place,
recognized me, ran up to me, and how delighted he was! He simply pounced
on me: “Master dear, is it you? Is it really you I see?” He took me home
with him.

He was no longer in the army, he was married and already had two little
children. He and his wife earned their living as costermongers in the
market-place. His room was poor, but bright and clean. He made me sit
down, set the samovar, sent for his wife, as though my appearance were a
festival for them. He brought me his children: “Bless them, Father.”

“Is it for me to bless them? I am only a humble monk. I will pray for
them. And for you, Afanasy Pavlovitch, I have prayed every day since that
day, for it all came from you,” said I. And I explained that to him as
well as I could. And what do you think? The man kept gazing at me and
could not believe that I, his former master, an officer, was now before
him in such a guise and position; it made him shed tears.

“Why are you weeping?” said I, “better rejoice over me, dear friend, whom
I can never forget, for my path is a glad and joyful one.”

He did not say much, but kept sighing and shaking his head over me
tenderly.

“What has became of your fortune?” he asked.

“I gave it to the monastery,” I answered; “we live in common.”

After tea I began saying good-by, and suddenly he brought out half a
rouble as an offering to the monastery, and another half-rouble I saw him
thrusting hurriedly into my hand: “That’s for you in your wanderings, it
may be of use to you, Father.”

I took his half-rouble, bowed to him and his wife, and went out rejoicing.
And on my way I thought: “Here we are both now, he at home and I on the
road, sighing and shaking our heads, no doubt, and yet smiling joyfully in
the gladness of our hearts, remembering how God brought about our
meeting.”

I have never seen him again since then. I had been his master and he my
servant, but now when we exchanged a loving kiss with softened hearts,
there was a great human bond between us. I have thought a great deal about
that, and now what I think is this: Is it so inconceivable that that grand
and simple-hearted unity might in due time become universal among the
Russian people? I believe that it will come to pass and that the time is
at hand.

And of servants I will add this: In old days when I was young I was often
angry with servants; “the cook had served something too hot, the orderly
had not brushed my clothes.” But what taught me better then was a thought
of my dear brother’s, which I had heard from him in childhood: “Am I worth
it, that another should serve me and be ordered about by me in his poverty
and ignorance?” And I wondered at the time that such simple and
self-evident ideas should be so slow to occur to our minds.

It is impossible that there should be no servants in the world, but act so
that your servant may be freer in spirit than if he were not a servant.
And why cannot I be a servant to my servant and even let him see it, and
that without any pride on my part or any mistrust on his? Why should not
my servant be like my own kindred, so that I may take him into my family
and rejoice in doing so? Even now this can be done, but it will lead to
the grand unity of men in the future, when a man will not seek servants
for himself, or desire to turn his fellow creatures into servants as he
does now, but on the contrary, will long with his whole heart to be the
servant of all, as the Gospel teaches.

And can it be a dream, that in the end man will find his joy only in deeds
of light and mercy, and not in cruel pleasures as now, in gluttony,
fornication, ostentation, boasting and envious rivalry of one with the
other? I firmly believe that it is not and that the time is at hand.
People laugh and ask: “When will that time come and does it look like
coming?” I believe that with Christ’s help we shall accomplish this great
thing. And how many ideas there have been on earth in the history of man
which were unthinkable ten years before they appeared! Yet when their
destined hour had come, they came forth and spread over the whole earth.
So it will be with us, and our people will shine forth in the world, and
all men will say: “The stone which the builders rejected has become the
corner-stone of the building.”

And we may ask the scornful themselves: If our hope is a dream, when will
you build up your edifice and order things justly by your intellect alone,
without Christ? If they declare that it is they who are advancing towards
unity, only the most simple-hearted among them believe it, so that one may
positively marvel at such simplicity. Of a truth, they have more fantastic
dreams than we. They aim at justice, but, denying Christ, they will end by
flooding the earth with blood, for blood cries out for blood, and he that
taketh up the sword shall perish by the sword. And if it were not for
Christ’s covenant, they would slaughter one another down to the last two
men on earth. And those two last men would not be able to restrain each
other in their pride, and the one would slay the other and then himself.
And that would come to pass, were it not for the promise of Christ that
for the sake of the humble and meek the days shall be shortened.

While I was still wearing an officer’s uniform after my duel, I talked
about servants in general society, and I remember every one was amazed at
me. “What!” they asked, “are we to make our servants sit down on the sofa
and offer them tea?” And I answered them: “Why not, sometimes at least?”
Every one laughed. Their question was frivolous and my answer was not
clear; but the thought in it was to some extent right.

(_g_) _Of Prayer, of Love, and of Contact with other Worlds_

Young man, be not forgetful of prayer. Every time you pray, if your prayer
is sincere, there will be new feeling and new meaning in it, which will
give you fresh courage, and you will understand that prayer is an
education. Remember, too, every day, and whenever you can, repeat to
yourself, “Lord, have mercy on all who appear before Thee to-day.” For
every hour and every moment thousands of men leave life on this earth, and
their souls appear before God. And how many of them depart in solitude,
unknown, sad, dejected that no one mourns for them or even knows whether
they have lived or not! And behold, from the other end of the earth
perhaps, your prayer for their rest will rise up to God though you knew
them not nor they you. How touching it must be to a soul standing in dread
before the Lord to feel at that instant that, for him too, there is one to
pray, that there is a fellow creature left on earth to love him too! And
God will look on you both more graciously, for if you have had so much
pity on him, how much will He have pity Who is infinitely more loving and
merciful than you! And He will forgive him for your sake.

Brothers, have no fear of men’s sin. Love a man even in his sin, for that
is the semblance of Divine Love and is the highest love on earth. Love all
God’s creation, the whole and every grain of sand in it. Love every leaf,
every ray of God’s light. Love the animals, love the plants, love
everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery
in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better
every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an
all-embracing love. Love the animals: God has given them the rudiments of
thought and joy untroubled. Do not trouble it, don’t harass them, don’t
deprive them of their happiness, don’t work against God’s intent. Man, do
not pride yourself on superiority to the animals; they are without sin,
and you, with your greatness, defile the earth by your appearance on it,
and leave the traces of your foulness after you—alas, it is true of almost
every one of us! Love children especially, for they too are sinless like
the angels; they live to soften and purify our hearts and as it were to
guide us. Woe to him who offends a child! Father Anfim taught me to love
children. The kind, silent man used often on our wanderings to spend the
farthings given us on sweets and cakes for the children. He could not pass
by a child without emotion. That’s the nature of the man.

At some thoughts one stands perplexed, especially at the sight of men’s
sin, and wonders whether one should use force or humble love. Always
decide to use humble love. If you resolve on that once for all, you may
subdue the whole world. Loving humility is marvelously strong, the
strongest of all things, and there is nothing else like it.

Every day and every hour, every minute, walk round yourself and watch
yourself, and see that your image is a seemly one. You pass by a little
child, you pass by, spiteful, with ugly words, with wrathful heart; you
may not have noticed the child, but he has seen you, and your image,
unseemly and ignoble, may remain in his defenseless heart. You don’t know
it, but you may have sown an evil seed in him and it may grow, and all
because you were not careful before the child, because you did not foster
in yourself a careful, actively benevolent love. Brothers, love is a
teacher; but one must know how to acquire it, for it is hard to acquire,
it is dearly bought, it is won slowly by long labor. For we must love not
only occasionally, for a moment, but for ever. Every one can love
occasionally, even the wicked can.

My brother asked the birds to forgive him; that sounds senseless, but it
is right; for all is like an ocean, all is flowing and blending; a touch
in one place sets up movement at the other end of the earth. It may be
senseless to beg forgiveness of the birds, but birds would be happier at
your side—a little happier, anyway—and children and all animals, if you
were nobler than you are now. It’s all like an ocean, I tell you. Then you
would pray to the birds too, consumed by an all-embracing love, in a sort
of transport, and pray that they too will forgive you your sin. Treasure
this ecstasy, however senseless it may seem to men.

My friends, pray to God for gladness. Be glad as children, as the birds of
heaven. And let not the sin of men confound you in your doings. Fear not
that it will wear away your work and hinder its being accomplished. Do not
say, “Sin is mighty, wickedness is mighty, evil environment is mighty, and
we are lonely and helpless, and evil environment is wearing us away and
hindering our good work from being done.” Fly from that dejection,
children! There is only one means of salvation, then take yourself and
make yourself responsible for all men’s sins, that is the truth, you know,
friends, for as soon as you sincerely make yourself responsible for
everything and for all men, you will see at once that it is really so, and
that you are to blame for every one and for all things. But throwing your
own indolence and impotence on others you will end by sharing the pride of
Satan and murmuring against God.

Of the pride of Satan what I think is this: it is hard for us on earth to
comprehend it, and therefore it is so easy to fall into error and to share
it, even imagining that we are doing something grand and fine. Indeed,
many of the strongest feelings and movements of our nature we cannot
comprehend on earth. Let not that be a stumbling-block, and think not that
it may serve as a justification to you for anything. For the Eternal Judge
asks of you what you can comprehend and not what you cannot. You will know
that yourself hereafter, for you will behold all things truly then and
will not dispute them. On earth, indeed, we are as it were astray, and if
it were not for the precious image of Christ before us, we should be
undone and altogether lost, as was the human race before the flood. Much
on earth is hidden from us, but to make up for that we have been given a
precious mystic sense of our living bond with the other world, with the
higher heavenly world, and the roots of our thoughts and feelings are not
here but in other worlds. That is why the philosophers say that we cannot
apprehend the reality of things on earth.

God took seeds from different worlds and sowed them on this earth, and His
garden grew up and everything came up that could come up, but what grows
lives and is alive only through the feeling of its contact with other
mysterious worlds. If that feeling grows weak or is destroyed in you, the
heavenly growth will die away in you. Then you will be indifferent to life
and even grow to hate it. That’s what I think.

_(h) Can a Man judge his Fellow Creatures? Faith to the End_

Remember particularly that you cannot be a judge of any one. For no one
can judge a criminal, until he recognizes that he is just such a criminal
as the man standing before him, and that he perhaps is more than all men
to blame for that crime. When he understands that, he will be able to be a
judge. Though that sounds absurd, it is true. If I had been righteous
myself, perhaps there would have been no criminal standing before me. If
you can take upon yourself the crime of the criminal your heart is
judging, take it at once, suffer for him yourself, and let him go without
reproach. And even if the law itself makes you his judge, act in the same
spirit so far as possible, for he will go away and condemn himself more
bitterly than you have done. If, after your kiss, he goes away untouched,
mocking at you, do not let that be a stumbling-block to you. It shows his
time has not yet come, but it will come in due course. And if it come not,
no matter; if not he, then another in his place will understand and
suffer, and judge and condemn himself, and the truth will be fulfilled.
Believe that, believe it without doubt; for in that lies all the hope and
faith of the saints.

Work without ceasing. If you remember in the night as you go to sleep, “I
have not done what I ought to have done,” rise up at once and do it. If
the people around you are spiteful and callous and will not hear you, fall
down before them and beg their forgiveness; for in truth you are to blame
for their not wanting to hear you. And if you cannot speak to them in
their bitterness, serve them in silence and in humility, never losing
hope. If all men abandon you and even drive you away by force, then when
you are left alone fall on the earth and kiss it, water it with your tears
and it will bring forth fruit even though no one has seen or heard you in
your solitude. Believe to the end, even if all men went astray and you
were left the only one faithful; bring your offering even then and praise
God in your loneliness. And if two of you are gathered together—then there
is a whole world, a world of living love. Embrace each other tenderly and
praise God, for if only in you two His truth has been fulfilled.

If you sin yourself and grieve even unto death for your sins or for your
sudden sin, then rejoice for others, rejoice for the righteous man,
rejoice that if you have sinned, he is righteous and has not sinned.

If the evil-doing of men moves you to indignation and overwhelming
distress, even to a desire for vengeance on the evil-doers, shun above all
things that feeling. Go at once and seek suffering for yourself, as though
you were yourself guilty of that wrong. Accept that suffering and bear it
and your heart will find comfort, and you will understand that you too are
guilty, for you might have been a light to the evil-doers, even as the one
man sinless, and you were not a light to them. If you had been a light,
you would have lightened the path for others too, and the evil-doer might
perhaps have been saved by your light from his sin. And even though your
light was shining, yet you see men were not saved by it, hold firm and
doubt not the power of the heavenly light. Believe that if they were not
saved, they will be saved hereafter. And if they are not saved hereafter,
then their sons will be saved, for your light will not die even when you
are dead. The righteous man departs, but his light remains. Men are always
saved after the death of the deliverer. Men reject their prophets and slay
them, but they love their martyrs and honor those whom they have slain.
You are working for the whole, you are acting for the future. Seek no
reward, for great is your reward on this earth: the spiritual joy which is
only vouchsafed to the righteous man. Fear not the great nor the mighty,
but be wise and ever serene. Know the measure, know the times, study that.
When you are left alone, pray. Love to throw yourself on the earth and
kiss it. Kiss the earth and love it with an unceasing, consuming love.
Love all men, love everything. Seek that rapture and ecstasy. Water the
earth with the tears of your joy and love those tears. Don’t be ashamed of
that ecstasy, prize it, for it is a gift of God and a great one; it is not
given to many but only to the elect.

_(i) Of Hell and Hell Fire, a Mystic Reflection_

Fathers and teachers, I ponder, “What is hell?” I maintain that it is the
suffering of being unable to love. Once in infinite existence,
immeasurable in time and space, a spiritual creature was given on his
coming to earth, the power of saying, “I am and I love.” Once, only once,
there was given him a moment of active _living_ love, and for that was
earthly life given him, and with it times and seasons. And that happy
creature rejected the priceless gift, prized it and loved it not, scorned
it and remained callous. Such a one, having left the earth, sees Abraham’s
bosom and talks with Abraham as we are told in the parable of the rich man
and Lazarus, and beholds heaven and can go up to the Lord. But that is
just his torment, to rise up to the Lord without ever having loved, to be
brought close to those who have loved when he has despised their love. For
he sees clearly and says to himself, “Now I have understanding, and though
I now thirst to love, there will be nothing great, no sacrifice in my
love, for my earthly life is over, and Abraham will not come even with a
drop of living water (that is the gift of earthly active life) to cool the
fiery thirst of spiritual love which burns in me now, though I despised it
on earth; there is no more life for me and will be no more time! Even
though I would gladly give my life for others, it can never be, for that
life is passed which can be sacrificed for love, and now there is a gulf
fixed between that life and this existence.”

They talk of hell fire in the material sense. I don’t go into that mystery
and I shun it. But I think if there were fire in material sense, they
would be glad of it, for I imagine that in material agony, their still
greater spiritual agony would be forgotten for a moment. Moreover, that
spiritual agony cannot be taken from them, for that suffering is not
external but within them. And if it could be taken from them, I think it
would be bitterer still for the unhappy creatures. For even if the
righteous in Paradise forgave them, beholding their torments, and called
them up to heaven in their infinite love, they would only multiply their
torments, for they would arouse in them still more keenly a flaming thirst
for responsive, active and grateful love which is now impossible. In the
timidity of my heart I imagine, however, that the very recognition of this
impossibility would serve at last to console them. For accepting the love
of the righteous together with the impossibility of repaying it, by this
submissiveness and the effect of this humility, they will attain at last,
as it were, to a certain semblance of that active love which they scorned
in life, to something like its outward expression.... I am sorry, friends
and brothers, that I cannot express this clearly. But woe to those who
have slain themselves on earth, woe to the suicides! I believe that there
can be none more miserable then they. They tell us that it is a sin to
pray for them and outwardly the Church, as it were, renounces them, but in
my secret heart I believe that we may pray even for them. Love can never
be an offense to Christ. For such as those I have prayed inwardly all my
life, I confess it, fathers and teachers, and even now I pray for them
every day.

Oh, there are some who remain proud and fierce even in hell, in spite of
their certain knowledge and contemplation of the absolute truth; there are
some fearful ones who have given themselves over to Satan and his proud
spirit entirely. For such, hell is voluntary and ever consuming; they are
tortured by their own choice. For they have cursed themselves, cursing God
and life. They live upon their vindictive pride like a starving man in the
desert sucking blood out of his own body. But they are never satisfied,
and they refuse forgiveness, they curse God Who calls them. They cannot
behold the living God without hatred, and they cry out that the God of
life should be annihilated, that God should destroy Himself and His own
creation. And they will burn in the fire of their own wrath for ever and
yearn for death and annihilation. But they will not attain to death....

                  -------------------------------------

Here Alexey Fyodorovitch Karamazov’s manuscript ends. I repeat, it is
incomplete and fragmentary. Biographical details, for instance, cover only
Father Zossima’s earliest youth. Of his teaching and opinions we find
brought together sayings evidently uttered on very different occasions.
His utterances during the last few hours have not been kept separate from
the rest, but their general character can be gathered from what we have in
Alexey Fyodorovitch’s manuscript.

The elder’s death came in the end quite unexpectedly. For although those
who were gathered about him that last evening realized that his death was
approaching, yet it was difficult to imagine that it would come so
suddenly. On the contrary, his friends, as I observed already, seeing him
that night apparently so cheerful and talkative, were convinced that there
was at least a temporary change for the better in his condition. Even five
minutes before his death, they said afterwards wonderingly, it was
impossible to foresee it. He seemed suddenly to feel an acute pain in his
chest, he turned pale and pressed his hands to his heart. All rose from
their seats and hastened to him. But though suffering, he still looked at
them with a smile, sank slowly from his chair on to his knees, then bowed
his face to the ground, stretched out his arms and as though in joyful
ecstasy, praying and kissing the ground, quietly and joyfully gave up his
soul to God.

The news of his death spread at once through the hermitage and reached the
monastery. The nearest friends of the deceased and those whose duty it was
from their position began to lay out the corpse according to the ancient
ritual, and all the monks gathered together in the church. And before dawn
the news of the death reached the town. By the morning all the town was
talking of the event, and crowds were flocking from the town to the
monastery. But this subject will be treated in the next book; I will only
add here that before a day had passed something happened so unexpected, so
strange, upsetting, and bewildering in its effect on the monks and the
townspeople, that after all these years, that day of general suspense is
still vividly remembered in the town.





PART III




Book VII. Alyosha



Chapter I. The Breath Of Corruption


The body of Father Zossima was prepared for burial according to the
established ritual. As is well known, the bodies of dead monks and hermits
are not washed. In the words of the Church Ritual: “If any one of the
monks depart in the Lord, the monk designated (that is, whose office it
is) shall wipe the body with warm water, making first the sign of the
cross with a sponge on the forehead of the deceased, on the breast, on the
hands and feet and on the knees, and that is enough.” All this was done by
Father Païssy, who then clothed the deceased in his monastic garb and
wrapped him in his cloak, which was, according to custom, somewhat slit to
allow of its being folded about him in the form of a cross. On his head he
put a hood with an eight-cornered cross. The hood was left open and the
dead man’s face was covered with black gauze. In his hands was put an ikon
of the Saviour. Towards morning he was put in the coffin which had been
made ready long before. It was decided to leave the coffin all day in the
cell, in the larger room in which the elder used to receive his visitors
and fellow monks. As the deceased was a priest and monk of the strictest
rule, the Gospel, not the Psalter, had to be read over his body by monks
in holy orders. The reading was begun by Father Iosif immediately after
the requiem service. Father Païssy desired later on to read the Gospel all
day and night over his dead friend, but for the present he, as well as the
Father Superintendent of the Hermitage, was very busy and occupied, for
something extraordinary, an unheard-of, even “unseemly” excitement and
impatient expectation began to be apparent in the monks, and the visitors
from the monastery hostels, and the crowds of people flocking from the
town. And as time went on, this grew more and more marked. Both the
Superintendent and Father Païssy did their utmost to calm the general
bustle and agitation.

When it was fully daylight, some people began bringing their sick, in most
cases children, with them from the town—as though they had been waiting
expressly for this moment to do so, evidently persuaded that the dead
elder’s remains had a power of healing, which would be immediately made
manifest in accordance with their faith. It was only then apparent how
unquestionably every one in our town had accepted Father Zossima during
his lifetime as a great saint. And those who came were far from being all
of the humbler classes.

This intense expectation on the part of believers displayed with such
haste, such openness, even with impatience and almost insistence,
impressed Father Païssy as unseemly. Though he had long foreseen something
of the sort, the actual manifestation of the feeling was beyond anything
he had looked for. When he came across any of the monks who displayed this
excitement, Father Païssy began to reprove them. “Such immediate
expectation of something extraordinary,” he said, “shows a levity,
possible to worldly people but unseemly in us.”

But little attention was paid him and Father Païssy noticed it uneasily.
Yet he himself (if the whole truth must be told), secretly at the bottom
of his heart, cherished almost the same hopes and could not but be aware
of it, though he was indignant at the too impatient expectation around
him, and saw in it light-mindedness and vanity. Nevertheless, it was
particularly unpleasant to him to meet certain persons, whose presence
aroused in him great misgivings. In the crowd in the dead man’s cell he
noticed with inward aversion (for which he immediately reproached himself)
the presence of Rakitin and of the monk from Obdorsk, who was still
staying in the monastery. Of both of them Father Païssy felt for some
reason suddenly suspicious—though, indeed, he might well have felt the
same about others.

The monk from Obdorsk was conspicuous as the most fussy in the excited
crowd. He was to be seen everywhere; everywhere he was asking questions,
everywhere he was listening, on all sides he was whispering with a
peculiar, mysterious air. His expression showed the greatest impatience
and even a sort of irritation.

As for Rakitin, he, as appeared later, had come so early to the hermitage
at the special request of Madame Hohlakov. As soon as that good-hearted
but weak-minded woman, who could not herself have been admitted to the
hermitage, waked and heard of the death of Father Zossima, she was
overtaken with such intense curiosity that she promptly dispatched Rakitin
to the hermitage, to keep a careful look out and report to her by letter
every half-hour or so “_everything that takes place_.” She regarded
Rakitin as a most religious and devout young man. He was particularly
clever in getting round people and assuming whatever part he thought most
to their taste, if he detected the slightest advantage to himself from
doing so.

It was a bright, clear day, and many of the visitors were thronging about
the tombs, which were particularly numerous round the church and scattered
here and there about the hermitage. As he walked round the hermitage,
Father Païssy remembered Alyosha and that he had not seen him for some
time, not since the night. And he had no sooner thought of him than he at
once noticed him in the farthest corner of the hermitage garden, sitting
on the tombstone of a monk who had been famous long ago for his
saintliness. He sat with his back to the hermitage and his face to the
wall, and seemed to be hiding behind the tombstone. Going up to him,
Father Païssy saw that he was weeping quietly but bitterly, with his face
hidden in his hands, and that his whole frame was shaking with sobs.
Father Païssy stood over him for a little.

“Enough, dear son, enough, dear,” he pronounced with feeling at last. “Why
do you weep? Rejoice and weep not. Don’t you know that this is the
greatest of his days? Think only where he is now, at this moment!”

Alyosha glanced at him, uncovering his face, which was swollen with crying
like a child’s, but turned away at once without uttering a word and hid
his face in his hands again.

“Maybe it is well,” said Father Païssy thoughtfully; “weep if you must,
Christ has sent you those tears.”

“Your touching tears are but a relief to your spirit and will serve to
gladden your dear heart,” he added to himself, walking away from Alyosha,
and thinking lovingly of him. He moved away quickly, however, for he felt
that he too might weep looking at him.

Meanwhile the time was passing; the monastery services and the requiems
for the dead followed in their due course. Father Païssy again took Father
Iosif’s place by the coffin and began reading the Gospel. But before three
o’clock in the afternoon that something took place to which I alluded at
the end of the last book, something so unexpected by all of us and so
contrary to the general hope, that, I repeat, this trivial incident has
been minutely remembered to this day in our town and all the surrounding
neighborhood. I may add here, for myself personally, that I feel it almost
repulsive to recall that event which caused such frivolous agitation and
was such a stumbling-block to many, though in reality it was the most
natural and trivial matter. I should, of course, have omitted all mention
of it in my story, if it had not exerted a very strong influence on the
heart and soul of the chief, though future, hero of my story, Alyosha,
forming a crisis and turning-point in his spiritual development, giving a
shock to his intellect, which finally strengthened it for the rest of his
life and gave it a definite aim.

And so, to return to our story. When before dawn they laid Father
Zossima’s body in the coffin and brought it into the front room, the
question of opening the windows was raised among those who were around the
coffin. But this suggestion made casually by some one was unanswered and
almost unnoticed. Some of those present may perhaps have inwardly noticed
it, only to reflect that the anticipation of decay and corruption from the
body of such a saint was an actual absurdity, calling for compassion (if
not a smile) for the lack of faith and the frivolity it implied. For they
expected something quite different.

And, behold, soon after midday there were signs of something, at first
only observed in silence by those who came in and out and were evidently
each afraid to communicate the thought in his mind. But by three o’clock
those signs had become so clear and unmistakable, that the news swiftly
reached all the monks and visitors in the hermitage, promptly penetrated
to the monastery, throwing all the monks into amazement, and finally, in
the shortest possible time, spread to the town, exciting every one in it,
believers and unbelievers alike. The unbelievers rejoiced, and as for the
believers some of them rejoiced even more than the unbelievers, for “men
love the downfall and disgrace of the righteous,” as the deceased elder
had said in one of his exhortations.

The fact is that a smell of decomposition began to come from the coffin,
growing gradually more marked, and by three o’clock it was quite
unmistakable. In all the past history of our monastery, no such scandal
could be recalled, and in no other circumstances could such a scandal have
been possible, as showed itself in unseemly disorder immediately after
this discovery among the very monks themselves. Afterwards, even many
years afterwards, some sensible monks were amazed and horrified, when they
recalled that day, that the scandal could have reached such proportions.
For in the past, monks of very holy life had died, God-fearing old men,
whose saintliness was acknowledged by all, yet from their humble coffins,
too, the breath of corruption had come, naturally, as from all dead
bodies, but that had caused no scandal nor even the slightest excitement.
Of course there had been, in former times, saints in the monastery whose
memory was carefully preserved and whose relics, according to tradition,
showed no signs of corruption. This fact was regarded by the monks as
touching and mysterious, and the tradition of it was cherished as
something blessed and miraculous, and as a promise, by God’s grace, of
still greater glory from their tombs in the future.

One such, whose memory was particularly cherished, was an old monk, Job,
who had died seventy years before at the age of a hundred and five. He had
been a celebrated ascetic, rigid in fasting and silence, and his tomb was
pointed out to all visitors on their arrival with peculiar respect and
mysterious hints of great hopes connected with it. (That was the very tomb
on which Father Païssy had found Alyosha sitting in the morning.) Another
memory cherished in the monastery was that of the famous Father Varsonofy,
who was only recently dead and had preceded Father Zossima in the
eldership. He was reverenced during his lifetime as a crazy saint by all
the pilgrims to the monastery. There was a tradition that both of these
had lain in their coffins as though alive, that they had shown no signs of
decomposition when they were buried and that there had been a holy light
in their faces. And some people even insisted that a sweet fragrance came
from their bodies.

Yet, in spite of these edifying memories, it would be difficult to explain
the frivolity, absurdity and malice that were manifested beside the coffin
of Father Zossima. It is my private opinion that several different causes
were simultaneously at work, one of which was the deeply-rooted hostility
to the institution of elders as a pernicious innovation, an antipathy
hidden deep in the hearts of many of the monks. Even more powerful was
jealousy of the dead man’s saintliness, so firmly established during his
lifetime that it was almost a forbidden thing to question it. For though
the late elder had won over many hearts, more by love than by miracles,
and had gathered round him a mass of loving adherents, none the less, in
fact, rather the more on that account he had awakened jealousy and so had
come to have bitter enemies, secret and open, not only in the monastery
but in the world outside it. He did no one any harm, but “Why do they
think him so saintly?” And that question alone, gradually repeated, gave
rise at last to an intense, insatiable hatred of him. That, I believe, was
why many people were extremely delighted at the smell of decomposition
which came so quickly, for not a day had passed since his death. At the
same time there were some among those who had been hitherto reverently
devoted to the elder, who were almost mortified and personally affronted
by this incident. This was how the thing happened.

As soon as signs of decomposition had begun to appear, the whole aspect of
the monks betrayed their secret motives in entering the cell. They went
in, stayed a little while and hastened out to confirm the news to the
crowd of other monks waiting outside. Some of the latter shook their heads
mournfully, but others did not even care to conceal the delight which
gleamed unmistakably in their malignant eyes. And now no one reproached
them for it, no one raised his voice in protest, which was strange, for
the majority of the monks had been devoted to the dead elder. But it
seemed as though God had in this case let the minority get the upper hand
for a time.

Visitors from outside, particularly of the educated class, soon went into
the cell, too, with the same spying intent. Of the peasantry few went into
the cell, though there were crowds of them at the gates of the hermitage.
After three o’clock the rush of worldly visitors was greatly increased and
this was no doubt owing to the shocking news. People were attracted who
would not otherwise have come on that day and had not intended to come,
and among them were some personages of high standing. But external decorum
was still preserved and Father Païssy, with a stern face, continued firmly
and distinctly reading aloud the Gospel, apparently not noticing what was
taking place around him, though he had, in fact, observed something
unusual long before. But at last the murmurs, first subdued but gradually
louder and more confident, reached even him. “It shows God’s judgment is
not as man’s,” Father Païssy heard suddenly. The first to give utterance
to this sentiment was a layman, an elderly official from the town, known
to be a man of great piety. But he only repeated aloud what the monks had
long been whispering. They had long before formulated this damning
conclusion, and the worst of it was that a sort of triumphant satisfaction
at that conclusion became more and more apparent every moment. Soon they
began to lay aside even external decorum and almost seemed to feel they
had a sort of right to discard it.

“And for what reason can _this_ have happened,” some of the monks said, at
first with a show of regret; “he had a small frame and his flesh was dried
up on his bones, what was there to decay?”

“It must be a sign from heaven,” others hastened to add, and their opinion
was adopted at once without protest. For it was pointed out, too, that if
the decomposition had been natural, as in the case of every dead sinner,
it would have been apparent later, after a lapse of at least twenty-four
hours, but this premature corruption “was in excess of nature,” and so the
finger of God was evident. It was meant for a sign. This conclusion seemed
irresistible.

Gentle Father Iosif, the librarian, a great favorite of the dead man’s,
tried to reply to some of the evil speakers that “this is not held
everywhere alike,” and that the incorruptibility of the bodies of the just
was not a dogma of the Orthodox Church, but only an opinion, and that even
in the most Orthodox regions, at Athos for instance, they were not greatly
confounded by the smell of corruption, and there the chief sign of the
glorification of the saved was not bodily incorruptibility, but the color
of the bones when the bodies have lain many years in the earth and have
decayed in it. “And if the bones are yellow as wax, that is the great sign
that the Lord has glorified the dead saint, if they are not yellow but
black, it shows that God has not deemed him worthy of such glory—that is
the belief in Athos, a great place, where the Orthodox doctrine has been
preserved from of old, unbroken and in its greatest purity,” said Father
Iosif in conclusion.

But the meek Father’s words had little effect and even provoked a mocking
retort. “That’s all pedantry and innovation, no use listening to it,” the
monks decided. “We stick to the old doctrine, there are all sorts of
innovations nowadays, are we to follow them all?” added others.

“We have had as many holy fathers as they had. There they are among the
Turks, they have forgotten everything. Their doctrine has long been impure
and they have no bells even,” the most sneering added.

Father Iosif walked away, grieving the more since he had put forward his
own opinion with little confidence as though scarcely believing in it
himself. He foresaw with distress that something very unseemly was
beginning and that there were positive signs of disobedience. Little by
little, all the sensible monks were reduced to silence like Father Iosif.
And so it came to pass that all who loved the elder and had accepted with
devout obedience the institution of the eldership were all at once
terribly cast down and glanced timidly in one another’s faces, when they
met. Those who were hostile to the institution of elders, as a novelty,
held up their heads proudly. “There was no smell of corruption from the
late elder Varsonofy, but a sweet fragrance,” they recalled malignantly.
“But he gained that glory not because he was an elder, but because he was
a holy man.”

And this was followed by a shower of criticism and even blame of Father
Zossima. “His teaching was false; he taught that life is a great joy and
not a vale of tears,” said some of the more unreasonable. “He followed the
fashionable belief, he did not recognize material fire in hell,” others,
still more unreasonable, added. “He was not strict in fasting, allowed
himself sweet things, ate cherry jam with his tea, ladies used to send it
to him. Is it for a monk of strict rule to drink tea?” could be heard
among some of the envious. “He sat in pride,” the most malignant declared
vindictively; “he considered himself a saint and he took it as his due
when people knelt before him.” “He abused the sacrament of confession,”
the fiercest opponents of the institution of elders added in a malicious
whisper. And among these were some of the oldest monks, strictest in their
devotion, genuine ascetics, who had kept silent during the life of the
deceased elder, but now suddenly unsealed their lips. And this was
terrible, for their words had great influence on young monks who were not
yet firm in their convictions. The monk from Obdorsk heard all this
attentively, heaving deep sighs and nodding his head. “Yes, clearly Father
Ferapont was right in his judgment yesterday,” and at that moment Father
Ferapont himself made his appearance, as though on purpose to increase the
confusion.

I have mentioned already that he rarely left his wooden cell by the
apiary. He was seldom even seen at church and they overlooked this neglect
on the ground of his craziness, and did not keep him to the rules binding
on all the rest. But if the whole truth is to be told, they hardly had a
choice about it. For it would have been discreditable to insist on
burdening with the common regulations so great an ascetic, who prayed day
and night (he even dropped asleep on his knees). If they had insisted, the
monks would have said, “He is holier than all of us and he follows a rule
harder than ours. And if he does not go to church, it’s because he knows
when he ought to; he has his own rule.” It was to avoid the chance of
these sinful murmurs that Father Ferapont was left in peace.

As every one was aware, Father Ferapont particularly disliked Father
Zossima. And now the news had reached him in his hut that “God’s judgment
is not the same as man’s,” and that something had happened which was “in
excess of nature.” It may well be supposed that among the first to run to
him with the news was the monk from Obdorsk, who had visited him the
evening before and left his cell terror-stricken.

I have mentioned above, that though Father Païssy, standing firm and
immovable reading the Gospel over the coffin, could not hear nor see what
was passing outside the cell, he gauged most of it correctly in his heart,
for he knew the men surrounding him, well. He was not shaken by it, but
awaited what would come next without fear, watching with penetration and
insight for the outcome of the general excitement.

Suddenly an extraordinary uproar in the passage in open defiance of
decorum burst on his ears. The door was flung open and Father Ferapont
appeared in the doorway. Behind him there could be seen accompanying him a
crowd of monks, together with many people from the town. They did not,
however, enter the cell, but stood at the bottom of the steps, waiting to
see what Father Ferapont would say or do. For they felt with a certain
awe, in spite of their audacity, that he had not come for nothing.
Standing in the doorway, Father Ferapont raised his arms, and under his
right arm the keen inquisitive little eyes of the monk from Obdorsk peeped
in. He alone, in his intense curiosity, could not resist running up the
steps after Father Ferapont. The others, on the contrary, pressed farther
back in sudden alarm when the door was noisily flung open. Holding his
hands aloft, Father Ferapont suddenly roared:

“Casting out I cast out!” and, turning in all directions, he began at once
making the sign of the cross at each of the four walls and four corners of
the cell in succession. All who accompanied Father Ferapont immediately
understood his action. For they knew he always did this wherever he went,
and that he would not sit down or say a word, till he had driven out the
evil spirits.

“Satan, go hence! Satan, go hence!” he repeated at each sign of the cross.
“Casting out I cast out,” he roared again.

He was wearing his coarse gown girt with a rope. His bare chest, covered
with gray hair, could be seen under his hempen shirt. His feet were bare.
As soon as he began waving his arms, the cruel irons he wore under his
gown could be heard clanking.

Father Païssy paused in his reading, stepped forward and stood before him
waiting.

“What have you come for, worthy Father? Why do you offend against good
order? Why do you disturb the peace of the flock?” he said at last,
looking sternly at him.

“What have I come for? You ask why? What is your faith?” shouted Father
Ferapont crazily. “I’ve come here to drive out your visitors, the unclean
devils. I’ve come to see how many have gathered here while I have been
away. I want to sweep them out with a birch broom.”

“You cast out the evil spirit, but perhaps you are serving him yourself,”
Father Païssy went on fearlessly. “And who can say of himself ‘I am holy’?
Can you, Father?”

“I am unclean, not holy. I would not sit in an arm-chair and would not
have them bow down to me as an idol,” thundered Father Ferapont. “Nowadays
folk destroy the true faith. The dead man, your saint,” he turned to the
crowd, pointing with his finger to the coffin, “did not believe in devils.
He gave medicine to keep off the devils. And so they have become as common
as spiders in the corners. And now he has begun to stink himself. In that
we see a great sign from God.”

The incident he referred to was this. One of the monks was haunted in his
dreams and, later on, in waking moments, by visions of evil spirits. When
in the utmost terror he confided this to Father Zossima, the elder had
advised continual prayer and rigid fasting. But when that was of no use,
he advised him, while persisting in prayer and fasting, to take a special
medicine. Many persons were shocked at the time and wagged their heads as
they talked over it—and most of all Father Ferapont, to whom some of the
censorious had hastened to report this “extraordinary” counsel on the part
of the elder.

“Go away, Father!” said Father Païssy, in a commanding voice, “it’s not
for man to judge but for God. Perhaps we see here a ‘sign’ which neither
you, nor I, nor any one of us is able to comprehend. Go, Father, and do
not trouble the flock!” he repeated impressively.

“He did not keep the fasts according to the rule and therefore the sign
has come. That is clear and it’s a sin to hide it,” the fanatic, carried
away by a zeal that outstripped his reason, would not be quieted. “He was
seduced by sweetmeats, ladies brought them to him in their pockets, he
sipped tea, he worshiped his belly, filling it with sweet things and his
mind with haughty thoughts.... And for this he is put to shame....”

“You speak lightly, Father.” Father Païssy, too, raised his voice. “I
admire your fasting and severities, but you speak lightly like some
frivolous youth, fickle and childish. Go away, Father, I command you!”
Father Païssy thundered in conclusion.

“I will go,” said Ferapont, seeming somewhat taken aback, but still as
bitter. “You learned men! You are so clever you look down upon my
humbleness. I came hither with little learning and here I have forgotten
what I did know, God Himself has preserved me in my weakness from your
subtlety.”

Father Païssy stood over him, waiting resolutely. Father Ferapont paused
and, suddenly leaning his cheek on his hand despondently, pronounced in a
sing-song voice, looking at the coffin of the dead elder:

“To-morrow they will sing over him ‘Our Helper and Defender’—a splendid
anthem—and over me when I die all they’ll sing will be ‘What earthly
joy’—a little canticle,”(6) he added with tearful regret. “You are proud
and puffed up, this is a vain place!” he shouted suddenly like a madman,
and with a wave of his hand he turned quickly and quickly descended the
steps. The crowd awaiting him below wavered; some followed him at once and
some lingered, for the cell was still open, and Father Païssy, following
Father Ferapont on to the steps, stood watching him. But the excited old
fanatic was not completely silenced. Walking twenty steps away, he
suddenly turned towards the setting sun, raised both his arms and, as
though some one had cut him down, fell to the ground with a loud scream.

“My God has conquered! Christ has conquered the setting sun!” he shouted
frantically, stretching up his hands to the sun, and falling face
downwards on the ground, he sobbed like a little child, shaken by his
tears and spreading out his arms on the ground. Then all rushed up to him;
there were exclamations and sympathetic sobs ... a kind of frenzy seemed
to take possession of them all.

“This is the one who is a saint! This is the one who is a holy man!” some
cried aloud, losing their fear. “This is he who should be an elder,”
others added malignantly.

“He wouldn’t be an elder ... he would refuse ... he wouldn’t serve a
cursed innovation ... he wouldn’t imitate their foolery,” other voices
chimed in at once. And it is hard to say how far they might have gone, but
at that moment the bell rang summoning them to service. All began crossing
themselves at once. Father Ferapont, too, got up and crossing himself went
back to his cell without looking round, still uttering exclamations which
were utterly incoherent. A few followed him, but the greater number
dispersed, hastening to service. Father Païssy let Father Iosif read in
his place and went down. The frantic outcries of bigots could not shake
him, but his heart was suddenly filled with melancholy for some special
reason and he felt that. He stood still and suddenly wondered, “Why am I
sad even to dejection?” and immediately grasped with surprise that his
sudden sadness was due to a very small and special cause. In the crowd
thronging at the entrance to the cell, he had noticed Alyosha and he
remembered that he had felt at once a pang at heart on seeing him. “Can
that boy mean so much to my heart now?” he asked himself, wondering.

At that moment Alyosha passed him, hurrying away, but not in the direction
of the church. Their eyes met. Alyosha quickly turned away his eyes and
dropped them to the ground, and from the boy’s look alone, Father Païssy
guessed what a great change was taking place in him at that moment.

“Have you, too, fallen into temptation?” cried Father Païssy. “Can you be
with those of little faith?” he added mournfully.

Alyosha stood still and gazed vaguely at Father Païssy, but quickly turned
his eyes away again and again looked on the ground. He stood sideways and
did not turn his face to Father Païssy, who watched him attentively.

“Where are you hastening? The bell calls to service,” he asked again, but
again Alyosha gave no answer.

“Are you leaving the hermitage? What, without asking leave, without asking
a blessing?”

Alyosha suddenly gave a wry smile, cast a strange, very strange, look at
the Father to whom his former guide, the former sovereign of his heart and
mind, his beloved elder, had confided him as he lay dying. And suddenly,
still without speaking, waved his hand, as though not caring even to be
respectful, and with rapid steps walked towards the gates away from the
hermitage.

“You will come back again!” murmured Father Païssy, looking after him with
sorrowful surprise.



Chapter II. A Critical Moment


Father Païssy, of course, was not wrong when he decided that his “dear
boy” would come back again. Perhaps indeed, to some extent, he penetrated
with insight into the true meaning of Alyosha’s spiritual condition. Yet I
must frankly own that it would be very difficult for me to give a clear
account of that strange, vague moment in the life of the young hero I love
so much. To Father Païssy’s sorrowful question, “Are you too with those of
little faith?” I could of course confidently answer for Alyosha, “No, he
is not with those of little faith. Quite the contrary.” Indeed, all his
trouble came from the fact that he was of great faith. But still the
trouble was there and was so agonizing that even long afterwards Alyosha
thought of that sorrowful day as one of the bitterest and most fatal days
of his life. If the question is asked: “Could all his grief and
disturbance have been only due to the fact that his elder’s body had shown
signs of premature decomposition instead of at once performing miracles?”
I must answer without beating about the bush, “Yes, it certainly was.” I
would only beg the reader not to be in too great a hurry to laugh at my
young hero’s pure heart. I am far from intending to apologize for him or
to justify his innocent faith on the ground of his youth, or the little
progress he had made in his studies, or any such reason. I must declare,
on the contrary, that I have genuine respect for the qualities of his
heart. No doubt a youth who received impressions cautiously, whose love
was lukewarm, and whose mind was too prudent for his age and so of little
value, such a young man might, I admit, have avoided what happened to my
hero. But in some cases it is really more creditable to be carried away by
an emotion, however unreasonable, which springs from a great love, than to
be unmoved. And this is even truer in youth, for a young man who is always
sensible is to be suspected and is of little worth—that’s my opinion!

“But,” reasonable people will exclaim perhaps, “every young man cannot
believe in such a superstition and your hero is no model for others.”

To this I reply again, “Yes! my hero had faith, a faith holy and
steadfast, but still I am not going to apologize for him.”

Though I declared above, and perhaps too hastily, that I should not
explain or justify my hero, I see that some explanation is necessary for
the understanding of the rest of my story. Let me say then, it was not a
question of miracles. There was no frivolous and impatient expectation of
miracles in his mind. And Alyosha needed no miracles at the time, for the
triumph of some preconceived idea—oh, no, not at all—what he saw before
all was one figure—the figure of his beloved elder, the figure of that
holy man whom he revered with such adoration. The fact is that all the
love that lay concealed in his pure young heart for every one and
everything had, for the past year, been concentrated—and perhaps wrongly
so—on one being, his beloved elder. It is true that being had for so long
been accepted by him as his ideal, that all his young strength and energy
could not but turn towards that ideal, even to the forgetting at the
moment “of every one and everything.” He remembered afterwards how, on
that terrible day, he had entirely forgotten his brother Dmitri, about
whom he had been so anxious and troubled the day before; he had forgotten,
too, to take the two hundred roubles to Ilusha’s father, though he had so
warmly intended to do so the preceding evening. But again it was not
miracles he needed but only “the higher justice” which had been in his
belief outraged by the blow that had so suddenly and cruelly wounded his
heart. And what does it signify that this “justice” looked for by Alyosha
inevitably took the shape of miracles to be wrought immediately by the
ashes of his adored teacher? Why, every one in the monastery cherished the
same thought and the same hope, even those whose intellects Alyosha
revered, Father Païssy himself, for instance. And so Alyosha, untroubled
by doubts, clothed his dreams too in the same form as all the rest. And a
whole year of life in the monastery had formed the habit of this
expectation in his heart. But it was justice, justice, he thirsted for,
not simply miracles.

And now the man who should, he believed, have been exalted above every one
in the whole world, that man, instead of receiving the glory that was his
due, was suddenly degraded and dishonored! What for? Who had judged him?
Who could have decreed this? Those were the questions that wrung his
inexperienced and virginal heart. He could not endure without
mortification, without resentment even, that the holiest of holy men
should have been exposed to the jeering and spiteful mockery of the
frivolous crowd so inferior to him. Even had there been no miracles, had
there been nothing marvelous to justify his hopes, why this indignity, why
this humiliation, why this premature decay, “in excess of nature,” as the
spiteful monks said? Why this “sign from heaven,” which they so
triumphantly acclaimed in company with Father Ferapont, and why did they
believe they had gained the right to acclaim it? Where is the finger of
Providence? Why did Providence hide its face “at the most critical moment”
(so Alyosha thought it), as though voluntarily submitting to the blind,
dumb, pitiless laws of nature?

That was why Alyosha’s heart was bleeding, and, of course, as I have said
already, the sting of it all was that the man he loved above everything on
earth should be put to shame and humiliated! This murmuring may have been
shallow and unreasonable in my hero, but I repeat again for the third
time—and am prepared to admit that it might be difficult to defend my
feeling—I am glad that my hero showed himself not too reasonable at that
moment, for any man of sense will always come back to reason in time, but,
if love does not gain the upper hand in a boy’s heart at such an
exceptional moment, when will it? I will not, however, omit to mention
something strange, which came for a time to the surface of Alyosha’s mind
at this fatal and obscure moment. This new something was the harassing
impression left by the conversation with Ivan, which now persistently
haunted Alyosha’s mind. At this moment it haunted him. Oh, it was not that
something of the fundamental, elemental, so to speak, faith of his soul
had been shaken. He loved his God and believed in Him steadfastly, though
he was suddenly murmuring against Him. Yet a vague but tormenting and evil
impression left by his conversation with Ivan the day before, suddenly
revived again now in his soul and seemed forcing its way to the surface of
his consciousness.

It had begun to get dusk when Rakitin, crossing the pine copse from the
hermitage to the monastery, suddenly noticed Alyosha, lying face downwards
on the ground under a tree, not moving and apparently asleep. He went up
and called him by his name.

“You here, Alexey? Can you have—” he began wondering but broke off. He had
meant to say, “Can you have come to this?”

Alyosha did not look at him, but from a slight movement Rakitin at once
saw that he heard and understood him.

“What’s the matter?” he went on; but the surprise in his face gradually
passed into a smile that became more and more ironical.

“I say, I’ve been looking for you for the last two hours. You suddenly
disappeared. What are you about? What foolery is this? You might just look
at me...”

Alyosha raised his head, sat up and leaned his back against the tree. He
was not crying, but there was a look of suffering and irritability in his
face. He did not look at Rakitin, however, but looked away to one side of
him.

“Do you know your face is quite changed? There’s none of your famous
mildness to be seen in it. Are you angry with some one? Have they been
ill-treating you?”

“Let me alone,” said Alyosha suddenly, with a weary gesture of his hand,
still looking away from him.

“Oho! So that’s how we are feeling! So you can shout at people like other
mortals. That is a come-down from the angels. I say, Alyosha, you have
surprised me, do you hear? I mean it. It’s long since I’ve been surprised
at anything here. I always took you for an educated man....”

Alyosha at last looked at him, but vaguely, as though scarcely
understanding what he said.

“Can you really be so upset simply because your old man has begun to
stink? You don’t mean to say you seriously believed that he was going to
work miracles?” exclaimed Rakitin, genuinely surprised again.

“I believed, I believe, I want to believe, and I will believe, what more
do you want?” cried Alyosha irritably.

“Nothing at all, my boy. Damn it all! why, no schoolboy of thirteen
believes in that now. But there.... So now you are in a temper with your
God, you are rebelling against Him; He hasn’t given promotion, He hasn’t
bestowed the order of merit! Eh, you are a set!”

Alyosha gazed a long while with his eyes half closed at Rakitin, and there
was a sudden gleam in his eyes ... but not of anger with Rakitin.

“I am not rebelling against my God; I simply ‘don’t accept His world.’ ”
Alyosha suddenly smiled a forced smile.

“How do you mean, you don’t accept the world?” Rakitin thought a moment
over his answer. “What idiocy is this?”

Alyosha did not answer.

“Come, enough nonsense, now to business. Have you had anything to eat
to-day?”

“I don’t remember.... I think I have.”

“You need keeping up, to judge by your face. It makes one sorry to look at
you. You didn’t sleep all night either, I hear, you had a meeting in
there. And then all this bobbery afterwards. Most likely you’ve had
nothing to eat but a mouthful of holy bread. I’ve got some sausage in my
pocket; I’ve brought it from the town in case of need, only you won’t eat
sausage....”

“Give me some.”

“I say! You are going it! Why, it’s a regular mutiny, with barricades!
Well, my boy, we must make the most of it. Come to my place.... I
shouldn’t mind a drop of vodka myself, I am tired to death. Vodka is going
too far for you, I suppose ... or would you like some?”

“Give me some vodka too.”

“Hullo! You surprise me, brother!” Rakitin looked at him in amazement.
“Well, one way or another, vodka or sausage, this is a jolly fine chance
and mustn’t be missed. Come along.”

Alyosha got up in silence and followed Rakitin.

“If your little brother Ivan could see this—wouldn’t he be surprised! By
the way, your brother Ivan set off to Moscow this morning, did you know?”

“Yes,” answered Alyosha listlessly, and suddenly the image of his brother
Dmitri rose before his mind. But only for a minute, and though it reminded
him of something that must not be put off for a moment, some duty, some
terrible obligation, even that reminder made no impression on him, did not
reach his heart and instantly faded out of his mind and was forgotten.
But, a long while afterwards, Alyosha remembered this.

“Your brother Ivan declared once that I was a ‘liberal booby with no
talents whatsoever.’ Once you, too, could not resist letting me know I was
‘dishonorable.’ Well! I should like to see what your talents and sense of
honor will do for you now.” This phrase Rakitin finished to himself in a
whisper.

“Listen!” he said aloud, “let’s go by the path beyond the monastery
straight to the town. Hm! I ought to go to Madame Hohlakov’s by the way.
Only fancy, I’ve written to tell her everything that happened, and would
you believe it, she answered me instantly in pencil (the lady has a
passion for writing notes) that ‘she would never have expected _such
conduct_ from a man of such a reverend character as Father Zossima.’ That
was her very word: ‘conduct.’ She is angry too. Eh, you are a set! Stay!”
he cried suddenly again. He suddenly stopped and taking Alyosha by the
shoulder made him stop too.

“Do you know, Alyosha,” he peeped inquisitively into his eyes, absorbed in
a sudden new thought which had dawned on him, and though he was laughing
outwardly he was evidently afraid to utter that new idea aloud, so
difficult he still found it to believe in the strange and unexpected mood
in which he now saw Alyosha. “Alyosha, do you know where we had better
go?” he brought out at last timidly, and insinuatingly.

“I don’t care ... where you like.”

“Let’s go to Grushenka, eh? Will you come?” pronounced Rakitin at last,
trembling with timid suspense.

“Let’s go to Grushenka,” Alyosha answered calmly, at once, and this prompt
and calm agreement was such a surprise to Rakitin that he almost started
back.

“Well! I say!” he cried in amazement, but seizing Alyosha firmly by the
arm he led him along the path, still dreading that he would change his
mind.

They walked along in silence, Rakitin was positively afraid to talk.

“And how glad she will be, how delighted!” he muttered, but lapsed into
silence again. And indeed it was not to please Grushenka he was taking
Alyosha to her. He was a practical person and never undertook anything
without a prospect of gain for himself. His object in this case was
twofold, first a revengeful desire to see “the downfall of the righteous,”
and Alyosha’s fall “from the saints to the sinners,” over which he was
already gloating in his imagination, and in the second place he had in
view a certain material gain for himself, of which more will be said
later.

“So the critical moment has come,” he thought to himself with spiteful
glee, “and we shall catch it on the hop, for it’s just what we want.”



Chapter III. An Onion


Grushenka lived in the busiest part of the town, near the cathedral
square, in a small wooden lodge in the courtyard belonging to the house of
the widow Morozov. The house was a large stone building of two stories,
old and very ugly. The widow led a secluded life with her two unmarried
nieces, who were also elderly women. She had no need to let her lodge, but
every one knew that she had taken in Grushenka as a lodger, four years
before, solely to please her kinsman, the merchant Samsonov, who was known
to be the girl’s protector. It was said that the jealous old man’s object
in placing his “favorite” with the widow Morozov was that the old woman
should keep a sharp eye on her new lodger’s conduct. But this sharp eye
soon proved to be unnecessary, and in the end the widow Morozov seldom met
Grushenka and did not worry her by looking after her in any way. It is
true that four years had passed since the old man had brought the slim,
delicate, shy, timid, dreamy, and sad girl of eighteen from the chief town
of the province, and much had happened since then. Little was known of the
girl’s history in the town and that little was vague. Nothing more had
been learnt during the last four years, even after many persons had become
interested in the beautiful young woman into whom Agrafena Alexandrovna
had meanwhile developed. There were rumors that she had been at seventeen
betrayed by some one, some sort of officer, and immediately afterwards
abandoned by him. The officer had gone away and afterwards married, while
Grushenka had been left in poverty and disgrace. It was said, however,
that though Grushenka had been raised from destitution by the old man,
Samsonov, she came of a respectable family belonging to the clerical
class, that she was the daughter of a deacon or something of the sort.

And now after four years the sensitive, injured and pathetic little orphan
had become a plump, rosy beauty of the Russian type, a woman of bold and
determined character, proud and insolent. She had a good head for
business, was acquisitive, saving and careful, and by fair means or foul
had succeeded, it was said, in amassing a little fortune. There was only
one point on which all were agreed. Grushenka was not easily to be
approached and except her aged protector there had not been one man who
could boast of her favors during those four years. It was a positive fact,
for there had been a good many, especially during the last two years, who
had attempted to obtain those favors. But all their efforts had been in
vain and some of these suitors had been forced to beat an undignified and
even comic retreat, owing to the firm and ironical resistance they met
from the strong-willed young person. It was known, too, that the young
person had, especially of late, been given to what is called
“speculation,” and that she had shown marked abilities in that direction,
so that many people began to say that she was no better than a Jew. It was
not that she lent money on interest, but it was known, for instance, that
she had for some time past, in partnership with old Karamazov, actually
invested in the purchase of bad debts for a trifle, a tenth of their
nominal value, and afterwards had made out of them ten times their value.

The old widower Samsonov, a man of large fortune, was stingy and
merciless. He tyrannized over his grown-up sons, but, for the last year
during which he had been ill and lost the use of his swollen legs, he had
fallen greatly under the influence of his protégée, whom he had at first
kept strictly and in humble surroundings, “on Lenten fare,” as the wits
said at the time. But Grushenka had succeeded in emancipating herself,
while she established in him a boundless belief in her fidelity. The old
man, now long since dead, had had a large business in his day and was also
a noteworthy character, miserly and hard as flint. Though Grushenka’s hold
upon him was so strong that he could not live without her (it had been so
especially for the last two years), he did not settle any considerable
fortune on her and would not have been moved to do so, if she had
threatened to leave him. But he had presented her with a small sum, and
even that was a surprise to every one when it became known.

“You are a wench with brains,” he said to her, when he gave her eight
thousand roubles, “and you must look after yourself, but let me tell you
that except your yearly allowance as before, you’ll get nothing more from
me to the day of my death, and I’ll leave you nothing in my will either.”

And he kept his word; he died and left everything to his sons, whom, with
their wives and children, he had treated all his life as servants.
Grushenka was not even mentioned in his will. All this became known
afterwards. He helped Grushenka with his advice to increase her capital
and put business in her way.

When Fyodor Pavlovitch, who first came into contact with Grushenka over a
piece of speculation, ended to his own surprise by falling madly in love
with her, old Samsonov, gravely ill as he was, was immensely amused. It is
remarkable that throughout their whole acquaintance Grushenka was
absolutely and spontaneously open with the old man, and he seems to have
been the only person in the world with whom she was so. Of late, when
Dmitri too had come on the scene with his love, the old man left off
laughing. On the contrary, he once gave Grushenka a stern and earnest
piece of advice.

“If you have to choose between the two, father or son, you’d better choose
the old man, if only you make sure the old scoundrel will marry you and
settle some fortune on you beforehand. But don’t keep on with the captain,
you’ll get no good out of that.”

These were the very words of the old profligate, who felt already that his
death was not far off and who actually died five months later.

I will note, too, in passing, that although many in our town knew of the
grotesque and monstrous rivalry of the Karamazovs, father and son, the
object of which was Grushenka, scarcely any one understood what really
underlay her attitude to both of them. Even Grushenka’s two servants
(after the catastrophe of which we will speak later) testified in court
that she received Dmitri Fyodorovitch simply from fear because “he
threatened to murder her.” These servants were an old cook, invalidish and
almost deaf, who came from Grushenka’s old home, and her granddaughter, a
smart young girl of twenty, who performed the duties of a maid. Grushenka
lived very economically and her surroundings were anything but luxurious.
Her lodge consisted of three rooms furnished with mahogany furniture in
the fashion of 1820, belonging to her landlady.

It was quite dark when Rakitin and Alyosha entered her rooms, yet they
were not lighted up. Grushenka was lying down in her drawing-room on the
big, hard, clumsy sofa, with a mahogany back. The sofa was covered with
shabby and ragged leather. Under her head she had two white down pillows
taken from her bed. She was lying stretched out motionless on her back
with her hands behind her head. She was dressed as though expecting some
one, in a black silk dress, with a dainty lace fichu on her head, which
was very becoming. Over her shoulders was thrown a lace shawl pinned with
a massive gold brooch. She certainly was expecting some one. She lay as
though impatient and weary, her face rather pale and her lips and eyes
hot, restlessly tapping the arm of the sofa with the tip of her right
foot. The appearance of Rakitin and Alyosha caused a slight excitement.
From the hall they could hear Grushenka leap up from the sofa and cry out
in a frightened voice, “Who’s there?” But the maid met the visitors and at
once called back to her mistress.

“It’s not he, it’s nothing, only other visitors.”

“What can be the matter?” muttered Rakitin, leading Alyosha into the
drawing-room.

Grushenka was standing by the sofa as though still alarmed. A thick coil
of her dark brown hair escaped from its lace covering and fell on her
right shoulder, but she did not notice it and did not put it back till she
had gazed at her visitors and recognized them.

“Ah, it’s you, Rakitin? You quite frightened me. Whom have you brought?
Who is this with you? Good heavens, you have brought him!” she exclaimed,
recognizing Alyosha.

“Do send for candles!” said Rakitin, with the free-and-easy air of a most
intimate friend, who is privileged to give orders in the house.

“Candles ... of course, candles.... Fenya, fetch him a candle.... Well,
you have chosen a moment to bring him!” she exclaimed again, nodding
towards Alyosha, and turning to the looking-glass she began quickly
fastening up her hair with both hands. She seemed displeased.

“Haven’t I managed to please you?” asked Rakitin, instantly almost
offended.

“You frightened me, Rakitin, that’s what it is.” Grushenka turned with a
smile to Alyosha. “Don’t be afraid of me, my dear Alyosha, you cannot
think how glad I am to see you, my unexpected visitor. But you frightened
me, Rakitin, I thought it was Mitya breaking in. You see, I deceived him
just now, I made him promise to believe me and I told him a lie. I told
him that I was going to spend the evening with my old man, Kuzma Kuzmitch,
and should be there till late counting up his money. I always spend one
whole evening a week with him making up his accounts. We lock ourselves in
and he counts on the reckoning beads while I sit and put things down in
the book. I am the only person he trusts. Mitya believes that I am there,
but I came back and have been sitting locked in here, expecting some news.
How was it Fenya let you in? Fenya, Fenya, run out to the gate, open it
and look about whether the captain is to be seen! Perhaps he is hiding and
spying, I am dreadfully frightened.”

“There’s no one there, Agrafena Alexandrovna, I’ve just looked out, I keep
running to peep through the crack, I am in fear and trembling myself.”

“Are the shutters fastened, Fenya? And we must draw the curtains—that’s
better!” She drew the heavy curtains herself. “He’d rush in at once if he
saw a light. I am afraid of your brother Mitya to-day, Alyosha.”

Grushenka spoke aloud, and, though she was alarmed, she seemed very happy
about something.

“Why are you so afraid of Mitya to-day?” inquired Rakitin. “I should have
thought you were not timid with him, you’d twist him round your little
finger.”

“I tell you, I am expecting news, priceless news, so I don’t want Mitya at
all. And he didn’t believe, I feel he didn’t, that I should stay at Kuzma
Kuzmitch’s. He must be in his ambush now, behind Fyodor Pavlovitch’s, in
the garden, watching for me. And if he’s there, he won’t come here, so
much the better! But I really have been to Kuzma Kuzmitch’s, Mitya
escorted me there. I told him I should stay there till midnight, and I
asked him to be sure to come at midnight to fetch me home. He went away
and I sat ten minutes with Kuzma Kuzmitch and came back here again. Ugh, I
was afraid, I ran for fear of meeting him.”

“And why are you so dressed up? What a curious cap you’ve got on!”

“How curious you are yourself, Rakitin! I tell you, I am expecting a
message. If the message comes, I shall fly, I shall gallop away and you
will see no more of me. That’s why I am dressed up, so as to be ready.”

“And where are you flying to?”

“If you know too much, you’ll get old too soon.”

“Upon my word! You are highly delighted ... I’ve never seen you like this
before. You are dressed up as if you were going to a ball.” Rakitin looked
her up and down.

“Much you know about balls.”

“And do you know much about them?”

“I have seen a ball. The year before last, Kuzma Kuzmitch’s son was
married and I looked on from the gallery. Do you suppose I want to be
talking to you, Rakitin, while a prince like this is standing here. Such a
visitor! Alyosha, my dear boy, I gaze at you and can’t believe my eyes.
Good heavens, can you have come here to see me! To tell you the truth, I
never had a thought of seeing you and I didn’t think that you would ever
come and see me. Though this is not the moment now, I am awfully glad to
see you. Sit down on the sofa, here, that’s right, my bright young moon. I
really can’t take it in even now.... Eh, Rakitin, if only you had brought
him yesterday or the day before! But I am glad as it is! Perhaps it’s
better he has come now, at such a moment, and not the day before
yesterday.”

She gayly sat down beside Alyosha on the sofa, looking at him with
positive delight. And she really was glad, she was not lying when she said
so. Her eyes glowed, her lips laughed, but it was a good-hearted merry
laugh. Alyosha had not expected to see such a kind expression in her
face.... He had hardly met her till the day before, he had formed an
alarming idea of her, and had been horribly distressed the day before by
the spiteful and treacherous trick she had played on Katerina Ivanovna. He
was greatly surprised to find her now altogether different from what he
had expected. And, crushed as he was by his own sorrow, his eyes
involuntarily rested on her with attention. Her whole manner seemed
changed for the better since yesterday, there was scarcely any trace of
that mawkish sweetness in her speech, of that voluptuous softness in her
movements. Everything was simple and good-natured, her gestures were
rapid, direct, confiding, but she was greatly excited.

“Dear me, how everything comes together to-day!” she chattered on again.
“And why I am so glad to see you, Alyosha, I couldn’t say myself! If you
ask me, I couldn’t tell you.”

“Come, don’t you know why you’re glad?” said Rakitin, grinning. “You used
to be always pestering me to bring him, you’d some object, I suppose.”

“I had a different object once, but now that’s over, this is not the
moment. I say, I want you to have something nice. I am so good-natured
now. You sit down, too, Rakitin; why are you standing? You’ve sat down
already? There’s no fear of Rakitin’s forgetting to look after himself.
Look, Alyosha, he’s sitting there opposite us, so offended that I didn’t
ask him to sit down before you. Ugh, Rakitin is such a one to take
offense!” laughed Grushenka. “Don’t be angry, Rakitin, I’m kind to-day.
Why are you so depressed, Alyosha? Are you afraid of me?" She peeped into
his eyes with merry mockery”

“He’s sad. The promotion has not been given,” boomed Rakitin.

“What promotion?”

“His elder stinks.”

“What? You are talking some nonsense, you want to say something nasty. Be
quiet, you stupid! Let me sit on your knee, Alyosha, like this.” She
suddenly skipped forward and jumped, laughing, on his knee, like a
nestling kitten, with her right arm about his neck. “I’ll cheer you up, my
pious boy. Yes, really, will you let me sit on your knee? You won’t be
angry? If you tell me, I’ll get off?”

Alyosha did not speak. He sat afraid to move, he heard her words, “If you
tell me, I’ll get off,” but he did not answer. But there was nothing in
his heart such as Rakitin, for instance, watching him malignantly from his
corner, might have expected or fancied. The great grief in his heart
swallowed up every sensation that might have been aroused, and, if only he
could have thought clearly at that moment, he would have realized that he
had now the strongest armor to protect him from every lust and temptation.
Yet in spite of the vague irresponsiveness of his spiritual condition and
the sorrow that overwhelmed him, he could not help wondering at a new and
strange sensation in his heart. This woman, this “dreadful” woman, had no
terror for him now, none of that terror that had stirred in his soul at
any passing thought of woman. On the contrary, this woman, dreaded above
all women, sitting now on his knee, holding him in her arms, aroused in
him now a quite different, unexpected, peculiar feeling, a feeling of the
intensest and purest interest without a trace of fear, of his former
terror. That was what instinctively surprised him.

“You’ve talked nonsense enough,” cried Rakitin, “you’d much better give us
some champagne. You owe it me, you know you do!”

“Yes, I really do. Do you know, Alyosha, I promised him champagne on the
top of everything, if he’d bring you? I’ll have some too! Fenya, Fenya,
bring us the bottle Mitya left! Look sharp! Though I am so stingy, I’ll
stand a bottle, not for you, Rakitin, you’re a toadstool, but he is a
falcon! And though my heart is full of something very different, so be it,
I’ll drink with you. I long for some dissipation.”

“But what is the matter with you? And what is this message, may I ask, or
is it a secret?” Rakitin put in inquisitively, doing his best to pretend
not to notice the snubs that were being continually aimed at him.

“Ech, it’s not a secret, and you know it, too,” Grushenka said, in a voice
suddenly anxious, turning her head towards Rakitin, and drawing a little
away from Alyosha, though she still sat on his knee with her arm round his
neck. “My officer is coming, Rakitin, my officer is coming.”

“I heard he was coming, but is he so near?”

“He is at Mokroe now; he’ll send a messenger from there, so he wrote; I
got a letter from him to-day. I am expecting the messenger every minute.”

“You don’t say so! Why at Mokroe?”

“That’s a long story, I’ve told you enough.”

“Mitya’ll be up to something now—I say! Does he know or doesn’t he?”

“He know! Of course he doesn’t. If he knew, there would be murder. But I
am not afraid of that now, I am not afraid of his knife. Be quiet,
Rakitin, don’t remind me of Dmitri Fyodorovitch, he has bruised my heart.
And I don’t want to think of that at this moment. I can think of Alyosha
here, I can look at Alyosha ... smile at me, dear, cheer up, smile at my
foolishness, at my pleasure.... Ah, he’s smiling, he’s smiling! How kindly
he looks at me! And you know, Alyosha, I’ve been thinking all this time
you were angry with me, because of the day before yesterday, because of
that young lady. I was a cur, that’s the truth.... But it’s a good thing
it happened so. It was a horrid thing, but a good thing too.” Grushenka
smiled dreamily and a little cruel line showed in her smile. “Mitya told
me that she screamed out that I ‘ought to be flogged.’ I did insult her
dreadfully. She sent for me, she wanted to make a conquest of me, to win
me over with her chocolate.... No, it’s a good thing it did end like
that.” She smiled again. “But I am still afraid of your being angry.”

“Yes, that’s really true,” Rakitin put in suddenly with genuine surprise.
“Alyosha, she is really afraid of a chicken like you.”

“He is a chicken to you, Rakitin ... because you’ve no conscience, that’s
what it is! You see, I love him with all my soul, that’s how it is!
Alyosha, do you believe I love you with all my soul?”

“Ah, you shameless woman! She is making you a declaration, Alexey!”

“Well, what of it, I love him!”

“And what about your officer? And the priceless message from Mokroe?”

“That is quite different.”

“That’s a woman’s way of looking at it!”

“Don’t you make me angry, Rakitin.” Grushenka caught him up hotly. “This
is quite different. I love Alyosha in a different way. It’s true, Alyosha,
I had sly designs on you before. For I am a horrid, violent creature. But
at other times I’ve looked upon you, Alyosha, as my conscience. I’ve kept
thinking ‘how any one like that must despise a nasty thing like me.’ I
thought that the day before yesterday, as I ran home from the young
lady’s. I have thought of you a long time in that way, Alyosha, and Mitya
knows, I’ve talked to him about it. Mitya understands. Would you believe
it, I sometimes look at you and feel ashamed, utterly ashamed of
myself.... And how, and since when, I began to think about you like that,
I can’t say, I don’t remember....”

Fenya came in and put a tray with an uncorked bottle and three glasses of
champagne on the table.

“Here’s the champagne!” cried Rakitin. “You’re excited, Agrafena
Alexandrovna, and not yourself. When you’ve had a glass of champagne,
you’ll be ready to dance. Eh, they can’t even do that properly,” he added,
looking at the bottle. “The old woman’s poured it out in the kitchen and
the bottle’s been brought in warm and without a cork. Well, let me have
some, anyway.”

He went up to the table, took a glass, emptied it at one gulp and poured
himself out another.

“One doesn’t often stumble upon champagne,” he said, licking his lips.
“Now, Alyosha, take a glass, show what you can do! What shall we drink to?
The gates of paradise? Take a glass, Grushenka, you drink to the gates of
paradise, too.”

“What gates of paradise?”

She took a glass, Alyosha took his, tasted it and put it back.

“No, I’d better not,” he smiled gently.

“And you bragged!” cried Rakitin.

“Well, if so, I won’t either,” chimed in Grushenka, “I really don’t want
any. You can drink the whole bottle alone, Rakitin. If Alyosha has some, I
will.”

“What touching sentimentality!” said Rakitin tauntingly; “and she’s
sitting on his knee, too! He’s got something to grieve over, but what’s
the matter with you? He is rebelling against his God and ready to eat
sausage....”

“How so?”

“His elder died to-day, Father Zossima, the saint.”

“So Father Zossima is dead,” cried Grushenka. “Good God, I did not know!”
She crossed herself devoutly. “Goodness, what have I been doing, sitting
on his knee like this at such a moment!” She started up as though in
dismay, instantly slipped off his knee and sat down on the sofa.

Alyosha bent a long wondering look upon her and a light seemed to dawn in
his face.

“Rakitin,” he said suddenly, in a firm and loud voice; “don’t taunt me
with having rebelled against God. I don’t want to feel angry with you, so
you must be kinder, too, I’ve lost a treasure such as you have never had,
and you cannot judge me now. You had much better look at her—do you see
how she has pity on me? I came here to find a wicked soul—I felt drawn to
evil because I was base and evil myself, and I’ve found a true sister, I
have found a treasure—a loving heart. She had pity on me just now....
Agrafena Alexandrovna, I am speaking of you. You’ve raised my soul from
the depths.”

Alyosha’s lips were quivering and he caught his breath.

“She has saved you, it seems,” laughed Rakitin spitefully. “And she meant
to get you in her clutches, do you realize that?”

“Stay, Rakitin.” Grushenka jumped up. “Hush, both of you. Now I’ll tell
you all about it. Hush, Alyosha, your words make me ashamed, for I am bad
and not good—that’s what I am. And you hush, Rakitin, because you are
telling lies. I had the low idea of trying to get him in my clutches, but
now you are lying, now it’s all different. And don’t let me hear anything
more from you, Rakitin.”

All this Grushenka said with extreme emotion.

“They are both crazy,” said Rakitin, looking at them with amazement. “I
feel as though I were in a madhouse. They’re both getting so feeble
they’ll begin crying in a minute.”

“I shall begin to cry, I shall,” repeated Grushenka. “He called me his
sister and I shall never forget that. Only let me tell you, Rakitin,
though I am bad, I did give away an onion.”

“An onion? Hang it all, you really are crazy.”

Rakitin wondered at their enthusiasm. He was aggrieved and annoyed, though
he might have reflected that each of them was just passing through a
spiritual crisis such as does not come often in a lifetime. But though
Rakitin was very sensitive about everything that concerned himself, he was
very obtuse as regards the feelings and sensations of others—partly from
his youth and inexperience, partly from his intense egoism.

“You see, Alyosha,” Grushenka turned to him with a nervous laugh. “I was
boasting when I told Rakitin I had given away an onion, but it’s not to
boast I tell you about it. It’s only a story, but it’s a nice story. I
used to hear it when I was a child from Matryona, my cook, who is still
with me. It’s like this. Once upon a time there was a peasant woman and a
very wicked woman she was. And she died and did not leave a single good
deed behind. The devils caught her and plunged her into the lake of fire.
So her guardian angel stood and wondered what good deed of hers he could
remember to tell to God; ‘She once pulled up an onion in her garden,’ said
he, ‘and gave it to a beggar woman.’ And God answered: ‘You take that
onion then, hold it out to her in the lake, and let her take hold and be
pulled out. And if you can pull her out of the lake, let her come to
Paradise, but if the onion breaks, then the woman must stay where she is.’
The angel ran to the woman and held out the onion to her. ‘Come,’ said he,
‘catch hold and I’ll pull you out.’ And he began cautiously pulling her
out. He had just pulled her right out, when the other sinners in the lake,
seeing how she was being drawn out, began catching hold of her so as to be
pulled out with her. But she was a very wicked woman and she began kicking
them. ‘I’m to be pulled out, not you. It’s my onion, not yours.’ As soon
as she said that, the onion broke. And the woman fell into the lake and
she is burning there to this day. So the angel wept and went away. So
that’s the story, Alyosha; I know it by heart, for I am that wicked woman
myself. I boasted to Rakitin that I had given away an onion, but to you
I’ll say: ‘I’ve done nothing but give away one onion all my life, that’s
the only good deed I’ve done.’ So don’t praise me, Alyosha, don’t think me
good, I am bad, I am a wicked woman and you make me ashamed if you praise
me. Eh, I must confess everything. Listen, Alyosha. I was so anxious to
get hold of you that I promised Rakitin twenty-five roubles if he would
bring you to me. Stay, Rakitin, wait!”

She went with rapid steps to the table, opened a drawer, pulled out a
purse and took from it a twenty-five rouble note.

“What nonsense! What nonsense!” cried Rakitin, disconcerted.

“Take it. Rakitin, I owe it you, there’s no fear of your refusing it, you
asked for it yourself.” And she threw the note to him.

“Likely I should refuse it,” boomed Rakitin, obviously abashed, but
carrying off his confusion with a swagger. “That will come in very handy;
fools are made for wise men’s profit.”

“And now hold your tongue, Rakitin, what I am going to say now is not for
your ears. Sit down in that corner and keep quiet. You don’t like us, so
hold your tongue.”

“What should I like you for?” Rakitin snarled, not concealing his
ill-humor. He put the twenty-five rouble note in his pocket and he felt
ashamed at Alyosha’s seeing it. He had reckoned on receiving his payment
later, without Alyosha’s knowing of it, and now, feeling ashamed, he lost
his temper. Till that moment he had thought it discreet not to contradict
Grushenka too flatly in spite of her snubbing, since he had something to
get out of her. But now he, too, was angry:

“One loves people for some reason, but what have either of you done for
me?”

“You should love people without a reason, as Alyosha does.”

“How does he love you? How has he shown it, that you make such a fuss
about it?”

Grushenka was standing in the middle of the room; she spoke with heat and
there were hysterical notes in her voice.

“Hush, Rakitin, you know nothing about us! And don’t dare to speak to me
like that again. How dare you be so familiar! Sit in that corner and be
quiet, as though you were my footman! And now, Alyosha, I’ll tell you the
whole truth, that you may see what a wretch I am! I am not talking to
Rakitin, but to you. I wanted to ruin you, Alyosha, that’s the holy truth;
I quite meant to. I wanted to so much, that I bribed Rakitin to bring you.
And why did I want to do such a thing? You knew nothing about it, Alyosha,
you turned away from me; if you passed me, you dropped your eyes. And I’ve
looked at you a hundred times before to-day; I began asking every one
about you. Your face haunted my heart. ‘He despises me,’ I thought; ‘he
won’t even look at me.’ And I felt it so much at last that I wondered at
myself for being so frightened of a boy. I’ll get him in my clutches and
laugh at him. I was full of spite and anger. Would you believe it, nobody
here dares talk or think of coming to Agrafena Alexandrovna with any evil
purpose. Old Kuzma is the only man I have anything to do with here; I was
bound and sold to him; Satan brought us together, but there has been no
one else. But looking at you, I thought, I’ll get him in my clutches and
laugh at him. You see what a spiteful cur I am, and you called me your
sister! And now that man who wronged me has come; I sit here waiting for a
message from him. And do you know what that man has been to me? Five years
ago, when Kuzma brought me here, I used to shut myself up, that no one
might have sight or sound of me. I was a silly slip of a girl; I used to
sit here sobbing; I used to lie awake all night, thinking: ‘Where is he
now, the man who wronged me? He is laughing at me with another woman, most
likely. If only I could see him, if I could meet him again, I’d pay him
out, I’d pay him out!’ At night I used to lie sobbing into my pillow in
the dark, and I used to brood over it; I used to tear my heart on purpose
and gloat over my anger. ‘I’ll pay him out, I’ll pay him out!’ That’s what
I used to cry out in the dark. And when I suddenly thought that I should
really do nothing to him, and that he was laughing at me then, or perhaps
had utterly forgotten me, I would fling myself on the floor, melt into
helpless tears, and lie there shaking till dawn. In the morning I would
get up more spiteful than a dog, ready to tear the whole world to pieces.
And then what do you think? I began saving money, I became hard-hearted,
grew stout—grew wiser, would you say? No, no one in the whole world sees
it, no one knows it, but when night comes on, I sometimes lie as I did
five years ago, when I was a silly girl, clenching my teeth and crying all
night, thinking, ‘I’ll pay him out, I’ll pay him out!’ Do you hear? Well
then, now you understand me. A month ago a letter came to me—he was
coming, he was a widower, he wanted to see me. It took my breath away;
then I suddenly thought: ‘If he comes and whistles to call me, I shall
creep back to him like a beaten dog.’ I couldn’t believe myself. Am I so
abject? Shall I run to him or not? And I’ve been in such a rage with
myself all this month that I am worse than I was five years ago. Do you
see now, Alyosha, what a violent, vindictive creature I am? I have shown
you the whole truth! I played with Mitya to keep me from running to that
other. Hush, Rakitin, it’s not for you to judge me, I am not speaking to
you. Before you came in, I was lying here waiting, brooding, deciding my
whole future life, and you can never know what was in my heart. Yes,
Alyosha, tell your young lady not to be angry with me for what happened
the day before yesterday.... Nobody in the whole world knows what I am
going through now, and no one ever can know.... For perhaps I shall take a
knife with me to-day, I can’t make up my mind ...”

And at this “tragic” phrase Grushenka broke down, hid her face in her
hands, flung herself on the sofa pillows, and sobbed like a little child.

Alyosha got up and went to Rakitin.

“Misha,” he said, “don’t be angry. She wounded you, but don’t be angry.
You heard what she said just now? You mustn’t ask too much of human
endurance, one must be merciful.”

Alyosha said this at the instinctive prompting of his heart. He felt
obliged to speak and he turned to Rakitin. If Rakitin had not been there,
he would have spoken to the air. But Rakitin looked at him ironically and
Alyosha stopped short.

“You were so primed up with your elder’s teaching last night that now you
have to let it off on me, Alexey, man of God!” said Rakitin, with a smile
of hatred.

“Don’t laugh, Rakitin, don’t smile, don’t talk of the dead—he was better
than any one in the world!” cried Alyosha, with tears in his voice. “I
didn’t speak to you as a judge but as the lowest of the judged. What am I
beside her? I came here seeking my ruin, and said to myself, ‘What does it
matter?’ in my cowardliness, but she, after five years in torment, as soon
as any one says a word from the heart to her—it makes her forget
everything, forgive everything, in her tears! The man who has wronged her
has come back, he sends for her and she forgives him everything, and
hastens joyfully to meet him and she won’t take a knife with her. She
won’t! No, I am not like that. I don’t know whether you are, Misha, but I
am not like that. It’s a lesson to me.... She is more loving than we....
Have you heard her speak before of what she has just told us? No, you
haven’t; if you had, you’d have understood her long ago ... and the person
insulted the day before yesterday must forgive her, too! She will, when
she knows ... and she shall know.... This soul is not yet at peace with
itself, one must be tender with it ... there may be a treasure in that
soul....”

Alyosha stopped, because he caught his breath. In spite of his ill-humor
Rakitin looked at him with astonishment. He had never expected such a
tirade from the gentle Alyosha.

“She’s found some one to plead her cause! Why, are you in love with her?
Agrafena Alexandrovna, our monk’s really in love with you, you’ve made a
conquest!” he cried, with a coarse laugh.

Grushenka lifted her head from the pillow and looked at Alyosha with a
tender smile shining on her tear-stained face.

“Let him alone, Alyosha, my cherub; you see what he is, he is not a person
for you to speak to. Mihail Osipovitch,” she turned to Rakitin, “I meant
to beg your pardon for being rude to you, but now I don’t want to.
Alyosha, come to me, sit down here.” She beckoned to him with a happy
smile. “That’s right, sit here. Tell me,” she shook him by the hand and
peeped into his face, smiling, “tell me, do I love that man or not? the
man who wronged me, do I love him or not? Before you came, I lay here in
the dark, asking my heart whether I loved him. Decide for me, Alyosha, the
time has come, it shall be as you say. Am I to forgive him or not?”

“But you have forgiven him already,” said Alyosha, smiling.

“Yes, I really have forgiven him,” Grushenka murmured thoughtfully. “What
an abject heart! To my abject heart!” She snatched up a glass from the
table, emptied it at a gulp, lifted it in the air and flung it on the
floor. The glass broke with a crash. A little cruel line came into her
smile.

“Perhaps I haven’t forgiven him, though,” she said, with a sort of menace
in her voice, and she dropped her eyes to the ground as though she were
talking to herself. “Perhaps my heart is only getting ready to forgive. I
shall struggle with my heart. You see, Alyosha, I’ve grown to love my
tears in these five years.... Perhaps I only love my resentment, not him
...”

“Well, I shouldn’t care to be in his shoes,” hissed Rakitin.

“Well, you won’t be, Rakitin, you’ll never be in his shoes. You shall
black my shoes, Rakitin, that’s the place you are fit for. You’ll never
get a woman like me ... and he won’t either, perhaps ...”

“Won’t he? Then why are you dressed up like that?” said Rakitin, with a
venomous sneer.

“Don’t taunt me with dressing up, Rakitin, you don’t know all that is in
my heart! If I choose to tear off my finery, I’ll tear it off at once,
this minute,” she cried in a resonant voice. “You don’t know what that
finery is for, Rakitin! Perhaps I shall see him and say: ‘Have you ever
seen me look like this before?’ He left me a thin, consumptive cry-baby of
seventeen. I’ll sit by him, fascinate him and work him up. ‘Do you see
what I am like now?’ I’ll say to him; ‘well, and that’s enough for you, my
dear sir, there’s many a slip twixt the cup and the lip!’ That may be what
the finery is for, Rakitin.” Grushenka finished with a malicious laugh.
“I’m violent and resentful, Alyosha, I’ll tear off my finery, I’ll destroy
my beauty, I’ll scorch my face, slash it with a knife, and turn beggar. If
I choose, I won’t go anywhere now to see any one. If I choose, I’ll send
Kuzma back all he has ever given me, to-morrow, and all his money and I’ll
go out charing for the rest of my life. You think I wouldn’t do it,
Rakitin, that I would not dare to do it? I would, I would, I could do it
directly, only don’t exasperate me ... and I’ll send him about his
business, I’ll snap my fingers in his face, he shall never see me again!”

She uttered the last words in an hysterical scream, but broke down again,
hid her face in her hands, buried it in the pillow and shook with sobs.

Rakitin got up.

“It’s time we were off,” he said, “it’s late, we shall be shut out of the
monastery.”

Grushenka leapt up from her place.

“Surely you don’t want to go, Alyosha!” she cried, in mournful surprise.
“What are you doing to me? You’ve stirred up my feeling, tortured me, and
now you’ll leave me to face this night alone!”

“He can hardly spend the night with you! Though if he wants to, let him!
I’ll go alone,” Rakitin scoffed jeeringly.

“Hush, evil tongue!” Grushenka cried angrily at him; “you never said such
words to me as he has come to say.”

“What has he said to you so special?” asked Rakitin irritably.

“I can’t say, I don’t know. I don’t know what he said to me, it went
straight to my heart; he has wrung my heart.... He is the first, the only
one who has pitied me, that’s what it is. Why did you not come before, you
angel?” She fell on her knees before him as though in a sudden frenzy.
“I’ve been waiting all my life for some one like you, I knew that some one
like you would come and forgive me. I believed that, nasty as I am, some
one would really love me, not only with a shameful love!”

“What have I done to you?” answered Alyosha, bending over her with a
tender smile, and gently taking her by the hands; “I only gave you an
onion, nothing but a tiny little onion, that was all!”

He was moved to tears himself as he said it. At that moment there was a
sudden noise in the passage, some one came into the hall. Grushenka jumped
up, seeming greatly alarmed. Fenya ran noisily into the room, crying out:

“Mistress, mistress darling, a messenger has galloped up,” she cried,
breathless and joyful. “A carriage from Mokroe for you, Timofey the
driver, with three horses, they are just putting in fresh horses.... A
letter, here’s the letter, mistress.”

A letter was in her hand and she waved it in the air all the while she
talked. Grushenka snatched the letter from her and carried it to the
candle. It was only a note, a few lines. She read it in one instant.

“He has sent for me,” she cried, her face white and distorted, with a wan
smile; “he whistles! Crawl back, little dog!”

But only for one instant she stood as though hesitating; suddenly the
blood rushed to her head and sent a glow to her cheeks.

“I will go,” she cried; “five years of my life! Good-by! Good-by, Alyosha,
my fate is sealed. Go, go, leave me all of you, don’t let me see you
again! Grushenka is flying to a new life.... Don’t you remember evil
against me either, Rakitin. I may be going to my death! Ugh! I feel as
though I were drunk!”

She suddenly left them and ran into her bedroom.

“Well, she has no thoughts for us now!” grumbled Rakitin. “Let’s go, or we
may hear that feminine shriek again. I am sick of all these tears and
cries.”

Alyosha mechanically let himself be led out. In the yard stood a covered
cart. Horses were being taken out of the shafts, men were running to and
fro with a lantern. Three fresh horses were being led in at the open gate.
But when Alyosha and Rakitin reached the bottom of the steps, Grushenka’s
bedroom window was suddenly opened and she called in a ringing voice after
Alyosha:

“Alyosha, give my greetings to your brother Mitya and tell him not to
remember evil against me, though I have brought him misery. And tell him,
too, in my words: ‘Grushenka has fallen to a scoundrel, and not to you,
noble heart.’ And add, too, that Grushenka loved him only one hour, only
one short hour she loved him—so let him remember that hour all his
life—say, ‘Grushenka tells you to!’ ”

She ended in a voice full of sobs. The window was shut with a slam.

“H’m, h’m!” growled Rakitin, laughing, “she murders your brother Mitya and
then tells him to remember it all his life! What ferocity!”

Alyosha made no reply, he seemed not to have heard. He walked fast beside
Rakitin as though in a terrible hurry. He was lost in thought and moved
mechanically. Rakitin felt a sudden twinge as though he had been touched
on an open wound. He had expected something quite different by bringing
Grushenka and Alyosha together. Something very different from what he had
hoped for had happened.

“He is a Pole, that officer of hers,” he began again, restraining himself;
“and indeed he is not an officer at all now. He served in the customs in
Siberia, somewhere on the Chinese frontier, some puny little beggar of a
Pole, I expect. Lost his job, they say. He’s heard now that Grushenka’s
saved a little money, so he’s turned up again—that’s the explanation of
the mystery.”

Again Alyosha seemed not to hear. Rakitin could not control himself.

“Well, so you’ve saved the sinner?” he laughed spitefully. “Have you
turned the Magdalene into the true path? Driven out the seven devils, eh?
So you see the miracles you were looking out for just now have come to
pass!”

“Hush, Rakitin,” Alyosha answered with an aching heart.

“So you despise me now for those twenty-five roubles? I’ve sold my friend,
you think. But you are not Christ, you know, and I am not Judas.”

“Oh, Rakitin, I assure you I’d forgotten about it,” cried Alyosha, “you
remind me of it yourself....”

But this was the last straw for Rakitin.

“Damnation take you all and each of you!” he cried suddenly, “why the
devil did I take you up? I don’t want to know you from this time forward.
Go alone, there’s your road!”

And he turned abruptly into another street, leaving Alyosha alone in the
dark. Alyosha came out of the town and walked across the fields to the
monastery.



Chapter IV. Cana Of Galilee


It was very late, according to the monastery ideas, when Alyosha returned
to the hermitage; the door-keeper let him in by a special entrance. It had
struck nine o’clock—the hour of rest and repose after a day of such
agitation for all. Alyosha timidly opened the door and went into the
elder’s cell where his coffin was now standing. There was no one in the
cell but Father Païssy, reading the Gospel in solitude over the coffin,
and the young novice Porfiry, who, exhausted by the previous night’s
conversation and the disturbing incidents of the day, was sleeping the
deep sound sleep of youth on the floor of the other room. Though Father
Païssy heard Alyosha come in, he did not even look in his direction.
Alyosha turned to the right from the door to the corner, fell on his knees
and began to pray.

His soul was overflowing but with mingled feelings; no single sensation
stood out distinctly; on the contrary, one drove out another in a slow,
continual rotation. But there was a sweetness in his heart and, strange to
say, Alyosha was not surprised at it. Again he saw that coffin before him,
the hidden dead figure so precious to him, but the weeping and poignant
grief of the morning was no longer aching in his soul. As soon as he came
in, he fell down before the coffin as before a holy shrine, but joy, joy
was glowing in his mind and in his heart. The one window of the cell was
open, the air was fresh and cool. “So the smell must have become stronger,
if they opened the window,” thought Alyosha. But even this thought of the
smell of corruption, which had seemed to him so awful and humiliating a
few hours before, no longer made him feel miserable or indignant. He began
quietly praying, but he soon felt that he was praying almost mechanically.
Fragments of thought floated through his soul, flashed like stars and went
out again at once, to be succeeded by others. But yet there was reigning
in his soul a sense of the wholeness of things—something steadfast and
comforting—and he was aware of it himself. Sometimes he began praying
ardently, he longed to pour out his thankfulness and love....

But when he had begun to pray, he passed suddenly to something else, and
sank into thought, forgetting both the prayer and what had interrupted it.
He began listening to what Father Païssy was reading, but worn out with
exhaustion he gradually began to doze.

“_And the third day there was a marriage in Cana of Galilee;_” read Father
Païssy. “_And the mother of Jesus was there; And both Jesus was called,
and his disciples, to the marriage._”

“Marriage? What’s that?... A marriage!” floated whirling through Alyosha’s
mind. “There is happiness for her, too.... She has gone to the feast....
No, she has not taken the knife.... That was only a tragic phrase.... Well
... tragic phrases should be forgiven, they must be. Tragic phrases
comfort the heart.... Without them, sorrow would be too heavy for men to
bear. Rakitin has gone off to the back alley. As long as Rakitin broods
over his wrongs, he will always go off to the back alley.... But the high
road ... The road is wide and straight and bright as crystal, and the sun
is at the end of it.... Ah!... What’s being read?”...

“_And when they wanted wine, the mother of Jesus saith unto him, They have
no wine_” ... Alyosha heard.

“Ah, yes, I was missing that, and I didn’t want to miss it, I love that
passage: it’s Cana of Galilee, the first miracle.... Ah, that miracle! Ah,
that sweet miracle! It was not men’s grief, but their joy Christ visited,
He worked His first miracle to help men’s gladness.... ‘He who loves men
loves their gladness, too’ ... He was always repeating that, it was one of
his leading ideas.... ‘There’s no living without joy,’ Mitya says.... Yes,
Mitya.... ‘Everything that is true and good is always full of
forgiveness,’ he used to say that, too” ...

“_Jesus saith unto her, Woman, what has it to do with thee or me? Mine
hour is not yet come._

“_His mother saith unto the servants, Whatsoever he saith unto you, do
it_” ...

“Do it.... Gladness, the gladness of some poor, very poor, people.... Of
course they were poor, since they hadn’t wine enough even at a wedding....
The historians write that, in those days, the people living about the Lake
of Gennesaret were the poorest that can possibly be imagined ... and
another great heart, that other great being, His Mother, knew that He had
come not only to make His great terrible sacrifice. She knew that His
heart was open even to the simple, artless merrymaking of some obscure and
unlearned people, who had warmly bidden Him to their poor wedding. ‘Mine
hour is not yet come,’ He said, with a soft smile (He must have smiled
gently to her). And, indeed, was it to make wine abundant at poor weddings
He had come down to earth? And yet He went and did as she asked Him....
Ah, he is reading again”....

“_Jesus saith unto them, Fill the waterpots with water. And they filled
them up to the brim._

“_And he saith unto them, Draw out now and bear unto the governor of the
feast. And they bare it._

“_When the ruler of the feast had tasted the water that was made wine, and
knew not whence it was; (but the servants which drew the water knew;) the
governor of the feast called the bridegroom,_

“_And saith unto him, Every man at the beginning doth set forth good wine;
and when men have well drunk, that which is worse; but thou hast kept the
good wine until now._”

“But what’s this, what’s this? Why is the room growing wider?... Ah, yes
... It’s the marriage, the wedding ... yes, of course. Here are the
guests, here are the young couple sitting, and the merry crowd and ...
Where is the wise governor of the feast? But who is this? Who? Again the
walls are receding.... Who is getting up there from the great table?
What!... He here, too? But he’s in the coffin ... but he’s here, too. He
has stood up, he sees me, he is coming here.... God!”...

Yes, he came up to him, to him, he, the little, thin old man, with tiny
wrinkles on his face, joyful and laughing softly. There was no coffin now,
and he was in the same dress as he had worn yesterday sitting with them,
when the visitors had gathered about him. His face was uncovered, his eyes
were shining. How was this, then? He, too, had been called to the feast.
He, too, at the marriage of Cana in Galilee....

“Yes, my dear, I am called, too, called and bidden,” he heard a soft voice
saying over him. “Why have you hidden yourself here, out of sight? You
come and join us too.”

It was his voice, the voice of Father Zossima. And it must be he, since he
called him!

The elder raised Alyosha by the hand and he rose from his knees.

“We are rejoicing,” the little, thin old man went on. “We are drinking the
new wine, the wine of new, great gladness; do you see how many guests?
Here are the bride and bridegroom, here is the wise governor of the feast,
he is tasting the new wine. Why do you wonder at me? I gave an onion to a
beggar, so I, too, am here. And many here have given only an onion
each—only one little onion.... What are all our deeds? And you, my gentle
one, you, my kind boy, you too have known how to give a famished woman an
onion to-day. Begin your work, dear one, begin it, gentle one!... Do you
see our Sun, do you see Him?”

“I am afraid ... I dare not look,” whispered Alyosha.

“Do not fear Him. He is terrible in His greatness, awful in His sublimity,
but infinitely merciful. He has made Himself like unto us from love and
rejoices with us. He is changing the water into wine that the gladness of
the guests may not be cut short. He is expecting new guests, He is calling
new ones unceasingly for ever and ever.... There they are bringing new
wine. Do you see they are bringing the vessels....”

Something glowed in Alyosha’s heart, something filled it till it ached,
tears of rapture rose from his soul.... He stretched out his hands,
uttered a cry and waked up.

Again the coffin, the open window, and the soft, solemn, distinct reading
of the Gospel. But Alyosha did not listen to the reading. It was strange,
he had fallen asleep on his knees, but now he was on his feet, and
suddenly, as though thrown forward, with three firm rapid steps he went
right up to the coffin. His shoulder brushed against Father Païssy without
his noticing it. Father Païssy raised his eyes for an instant from his
book, but looked away again at once, seeing that something strange was
happening to the boy. Alyosha gazed for half a minute at the coffin, at
the covered, motionless dead man that lay in the coffin, with the ikon on
his breast and the peaked cap with the octangular cross, on his head. He
had only just been hearing his voice, and that voice was still ringing in
his ears. He was listening, still expecting other words, but suddenly he
turned sharply and went out of the cell.

He did not stop on the steps either, but went quickly down; his soul,
overflowing with rapture, yearned for freedom, space, openness. The vault
of heaven, full of soft, shining stars, stretched vast and fathomless
above him. The Milky Way ran in two pale streams from the zenith to the
horizon. The fresh, motionless, still night enfolded the earth. The white
towers and golden domes of the cathedral gleamed out against the sapphire
sky. The gorgeous autumn flowers, in the beds round the house, were
slumbering till morning. The silence of earth seemed to melt into the
silence of the heavens. The mystery of earth was one with the mystery of
the stars....

Alyosha stood, gazed, and suddenly threw himself down on the earth. He did
not know why he embraced it. He could not have told why he longed so
irresistibly to kiss it, to kiss it all. But he kissed it weeping, sobbing
and watering it with his tears, and vowed passionately to love it, to love
it for ever and ever. “Water the earth with the tears of your joy and love
those tears,” echoed in his soul.

What was he weeping over?

Oh! in his rapture he was weeping even over those stars, which were
shining to him from the abyss of space, and “he was not ashamed of that
ecstasy.” There seemed to be threads from all those innumerable worlds of
God, linking his soul to them, and it was trembling all over “in contact
with other worlds.” He longed to forgive every one and for everything, and
to beg forgiveness. Oh, not for himself, but for all men, for all and for
everything. “And others are praying for me too,” echoed again in his soul.
But with every instant he felt clearly and, as it were, tangibly, that
something firm and unshakable as that vault of heaven had entered into his
soul. It was as though some idea had seized the sovereignty of his
mind—and it was for all his life and for ever and ever. He had fallen on
the earth a weak boy, but he rose up a resolute champion, and he knew and
felt it suddenly at the very moment of his ecstasy. And never, never, all
his life long, could Alyosha forget that minute.

“Some one visited my soul in that hour,” he used to say afterwards, with
implicit faith in his words.

Within three days he left the monastery in accordance with the words of
his elder, who had bidden him “sojourn in the world.”




Book VIII. Mitya



Chapter I. Kuzma Samsonov


But Dmitri, to whom Grushenka, flying away to a new life, had left her
last greetings, bidding him remember the hour of her love for ever, knew
nothing of what had happened to her, and was at that moment in a condition
of feverish agitation and activity. For the last two days he had been in
such an inconceivable state of mind that he might easily have fallen ill
with brain fever, as he said himself afterwards. Alyosha had not been able
to find him the morning before, and Ivan had not succeeded in meeting him
at the tavern on the same day. The people at his lodgings, by his orders,
concealed his movements.

He had spent those two days literally rushing in all directions,
“struggling with his destiny and trying to save himself,” as he expressed
it himself afterwards, and for some hours he even made a dash out of the
town on urgent business, terrible as it was to him to lose sight of
Grushenka for a moment. All this was explained afterwards in detail, and
confirmed by documentary evidence; but for the present we will only note
the most essential incidents of those two terrible days immediately
preceding the awful catastrophe, that broke so suddenly upon him.

Though Grushenka had, it is true, loved him for an hour, genuinely and
sincerely, yet she tortured him sometimes cruelly and mercilessly. The
worst of it was that he could never tell what she meant to do. To prevail
upon her by force or kindness was also impossible: she would yield to
nothing. She would only have become angry and turned away from him
altogether, he knew that well already. He suspected, quite correctly, that
she, too, was passing through an inward struggle, and was in a state of
extraordinary indecision, that she was making up her mind to something,
and unable to determine upon it. And so, not without good reason, he
divined, with a sinking heart, that at moments she must simply hate him
and his passion. And so, perhaps, it was, but what was distressing
Grushenka he did not understand. For him the whole tormenting question lay
between him and Fyodor Pavlovitch.

Here, we must note, by the way, one certain fact: he was firmly persuaded
that Fyodor Pavlovitch would offer, or perhaps had offered, Grushenka
lawful wedlock, and did not for a moment believe that the old voluptuary
hoped to gain his object for three thousand roubles. Mitya had reached
this conclusion from his knowledge of Grushenka and her character. That
was how it was that he could believe at times that all Grushenka’s
uneasiness rose from not knowing which of them to choose, which was most
to her advantage.

Strange to say, during those days it never occurred to him to think of the
approaching return of the “officer,” that is, of the man who had been such
a fatal influence in Grushenka’s life, and whose arrival she was expecting
with such emotion and dread. It is true that of late Grushenka had been
very silent about it. Yet he was perfectly aware of a letter she had
received a month ago from her seducer, and had heard of it from her own
lips. He partly knew, too, what the letter contained. In a moment of spite
Grushenka had shown him that letter, but to her astonishment he attached
hardly any consequence to it. It would be hard to say why this was.
Perhaps, weighed down by all the hideous horror of his struggle with his
own father for this woman, he was incapable of imagining any danger more
terrible, at any rate for the time. He simply did not believe in a suitor
who suddenly turned up again after five years’ disappearance, still less
in his speedy arrival. Moreover, in the “officer’s” first letter which had
been shown to Mitya, the possibility of his new rival’s visit was very
vaguely suggested. The letter was very indefinite, high-flown, and full of
sentimentality. It must be noted that Grushenka had concealed from him the
last lines of the letter, in which his return was alluded to more
definitely. He had, besides, noticed at that moment, he remembered
afterwards, a certain involuntary proud contempt for this missive from
Siberia on Grushenka’s face. Grushenka told him nothing of what had passed
later between her and this rival; so that by degrees he had completely
forgotten the officer’s existence.

He felt that whatever might come later, whatever turn things might take,
his final conflict with Fyodor Pavlovitch was close upon him, and must be
decided before anything else. With a sinking heart he was expecting every
moment Grushenka’s decision, always believing that it would come suddenly,
on the impulse of the moment. All of a sudden she would say to him: “Take
me, I’m yours for ever,” and it would all be over. He would seize her and
bear her away at once to the ends of the earth. Oh, then he would bear her
away at once, as far, far away as possible; to the farthest end of Russia,
if not of the earth, then he would marry her, and settle down with her
incognito, so that no one would know anything about them, there, here, or
anywhere. Then, oh, then, a new life would begin at once!

Of this different, reformed and “virtuous” life (“it must, it must be
virtuous”) he dreamed feverishly at every moment. He thirsted for that
reformation and renewal. The filthy morass, in which he had sunk of his
own free will, was too revolting to him, and, like very many men in such
cases, he put faith above all in change of place. If only it were not for
these people, if only it were not for these circumstances, if only he
could fly away from this accursed place—he would be altogether
regenerated, would enter on a new path. That was what he believed in, and
what he was yearning for.

But all this could only be on condition of the first, the _happy_ solution
of the question. There was another possibility, a different and awful
ending. Suddenly she might say to him: “Go away. I have just come to terms
with Fyodor Pavlovitch. I am going to marry him and don’t want you”—and
then ... but then.... But Mitya did not know what would happen then. Up to
the last hour he didn’t know. That must be said to his credit. He had no
definite intentions, had planned no crime. He was simply watching and
spying in agony, while he prepared himself for the first, happy solution
of his destiny. He drove away any other idea, in fact. But for that ending
a quite different anxiety arose, a new, incidental, but yet fatal and
insoluble difficulty presented itself.

If she were to say to him: “I’m yours; take me away,” how could he take
her away? Where had he the means, the money to do it? It was just at this
time that all sources of revenue from Fyodor Pavlovitch, doles which had
gone on without interruption for so many years, ceased. Grushenka had
money, of course, but with regard to this Mitya suddenly evinced
extraordinary pride; he wanted to carry her away and begin the new life
with her himself, at his own expense, not at hers. He could not conceive
of taking her money, and the very idea caused him a pang of intense
repulsion. I won’t enlarge on this fact or analyze it here, but confine
myself to remarking that this was his attitude at the moment. All this may
have arisen indirectly and unconsciously from the secret stings of his
conscience for the money of Katerina Ivanovna that he had dishonestly
appropriated. “I’ve been a scoundrel to one of them, and I shall be a
scoundrel again to the other directly,” was his feeling then, as he
explained after: “and when Grushenka knows, she won’t care for such a
scoundrel.”

Where then was he to get the means, where was he to get the fateful money?
Without it, all would be lost and nothing could be done, “and only because
I hadn’t the money. Oh, the shame of it!”

To anticipate things: he did, perhaps, know where to get the money, knew,
perhaps, where it lay at that moment. I will say no more of this here, as
it will all be clear later. But his chief trouble, I must explain however
obscurely, lay in the fact that to have that sum he knew of, to _have the
right_ to take it, he must first restore Katerina Ivanovna’s three
thousand—if not, “I’m a common pickpocket, I’m a scoundrel, and I don’t
want to begin a new life as a scoundrel,” Mitya decided. And so he made up
his mind to move heaven and earth to return Katerina Ivanovna that three
thousand, and that _first of all_. The final stage of this decision, so to
say, had been reached only during the last hours, that is, after his last
interview with Alyosha, two days before, on the high-road, on the evening
when Grushenka had insulted Katerina Ivanovna, and Mitya, after hearing
Alyosha’s account of it, had admitted that he was a scoundrel, and told
him to tell Katerina Ivanovna so, if it could be any comfort to her. After
parting from his brother on that night, he had felt in his frenzy that it
would be better “to murder and rob some one than fail to pay my debt to
Katya. I’d rather every one thought me a robber and a murderer, I’d rather
go to Siberia than that Katya should have the right to say that I deceived
her and stole her money, and used her money to run away with Grushenka and
begin a new life! That I can’t do!” So Mitya decided, grinding his teeth,
and he might well fancy at times that his brain would give way. But
meanwhile he went on struggling....

Strange to say, though one would have supposed there was nothing left for
him but despair—for what chance had he, with nothing in the world, to
raise such a sum?—yet to the very end he persisted in hoping that he would
get that three thousand, that the money would somehow come to him of
itself, as though it might drop from heaven. That is just how it is with
people who, like Dmitri, have never had anything to do with money, except
to squander what has come to them by inheritance without any effort of
their own, and have no notion how money is obtained. A whirl of the most
fantastic notions took possession of his brain immediately after he had
parted with Alyosha two days before, and threw his thoughts into a tangle
of confusion. This is how it was he pitched first on a perfectly wild
enterprise. And perhaps to men of that kind in such circumstances the most
impossible, fantastic schemes occur first, and seem most practical.

He suddenly determined to go to Samsonov, the merchant who was Grushenka’s
protector, and to propose a “scheme” to him, and by means of it to obtain
from him at once the whole of the sum required. Of the commercial value of
his scheme he had no doubt, not the slightest, and was only uncertain how
Samsonov would look upon his freak, supposing he were to consider it from
any but the commercial point of view. Though Mitya knew the merchant by
sight, he was not acquainted with him and had never spoken a word to him.
But for some unknown reason he had long entertained the conviction that
the old reprobate, who was lying at death’s door, would perhaps not at all
object now to Grushenka’s securing a respectable position, and marrying a
man “to be depended upon.” And he believed not only that he would not
object, but that this was what he desired, and, if opportunity arose, that
he would be ready to help. From some rumor, or perhaps from some stray
word of Grushenka’s, he had gathered further that the old man would
perhaps prefer him to Fyodor Pavlovitch for Grushenka.

Possibly many of the readers of my novel will feel that in reckoning on
such assistance, and being ready to take his bride, so to speak, from the
hands of her protector, Dmitri showed great coarseness and want of
delicacy. I will only observe that Mitya looked upon Grushenka’s past as
something completely over. He looked on that past with infinite pity and
resolved with all the fervor of his passion that when once Grushenka told
him she loved him and would marry him, it would mean the beginning of a
new Grushenka and a new Dmitri, free from every vice. They would forgive
one another and would begin their lives afresh. As for Kuzma Samsonov,
Dmitri looked upon him as a man who had exercised a fateful influence in
that remote past of Grushenka’s, though she had never loved him, and who
was now himself a thing of the past, completely done with, and, so to say,
non-existent. Besides, Mitya hardly looked upon him as a man at all, for
it was known to every one in the town that he was only a shattered wreck,
whose relations with Grushenka had changed their character and were now
simply paternal, and that this had been so for a long time.

In any case there was much simplicity on Mitya’s part in all this, for in
spite of all his vices, he was a very simple-hearted man. It was an
instance of this simplicity that Mitya was seriously persuaded that, being
on the eve of his departure for the next world, old Kuzma must sincerely
repent of his past relations with Grushenka, and that she had no more
devoted friend and protector in the world than this, now harmless old man.

After his conversation with Alyosha, at the cross-roads, he hardly slept
all night, and at ten o’clock next morning, he was at the house of
Samsonov and telling the servant to announce him. It was a very large and
gloomy old house of two stories, with a lodge and outhouses. In the lower
story lived Samsonov’s two married sons with their families, his old
sister, and his unmarried daughter. In the lodge lived two of his clerks,
one of whom also had a large family. Both the lodge and the lower story
were overcrowded, but the old man kept the upper floor to himself, and
would not even let the daughter live there with him, though she waited
upon him, and in spite of her asthma was obliged at certain fixed hours,
and at any time he might call her, to run upstairs to him from below.

This upper floor contained a number of large rooms kept purely for show,
furnished in the old-fashioned merchant style, with long monotonous rows
of clumsy mahogany chairs along the walls, with glass chandeliers under
shades, and gloomy mirrors on the walls. All these rooms were entirely
empty and unused, for the old man kept to one room, a small, remote
bedroom, where he was waited upon by an old servant with a kerchief on her
head, and by a lad, who used to sit on the locker in the passage. Owing to
his swollen legs, the old man could hardly walk at all, and was only
rarely lifted from his leather arm-chair, when the old woman supporting
him led him up and down the room once or twice. He was morose and taciturn
even with this old woman.

When he was informed of the arrival of the “captain,” he at once refused
to see him. But Mitya persisted and sent his name up again. Samsonov
questioned the lad minutely: What he looked like? Whether he was drunk?
Was he going to make a row? The answer he received was: that he was sober,
but wouldn’t go away. The old man again refused to see him. Then Mitya,
who had foreseen this, and purposely brought pencil and paper with him,
wrote clearly on the piece of paper the words: “On most important business
closely concerning Agrafena Alexandrovna,” and sent it up to the old man.

After thinking a little Samsonov told the lad to take the visitor to the
drawing-room, and sent the old woman downstairs with a summons to his
younger son to come upstairs to him at once. This younger son, a man over
six foot and of exceptional physical strength, who was closely-shaven and
dressed in the European style, though his father still wore a kaftan and a
beard, came at once without a comment. All the family trembled before the
father. The old man had sent for this giant, not because he was afraid of
the “captain” (he was by no means of a timorous temper), but in order to
have a witness in case of any emergency. Supported by his son and the
servant-lad, he waddled at last into the drawing-room. It may be assumed
that he felt considerable curiosity. The drawing-room in which Mitya was
awaiting him was a vast, dreary room that laid a weight of depression on
the heart. It had a double row of windows, a gallery, marbled walls, and
three immense chandeliers with glass lusters covered with shades.

Mitya was sitting on a little chair at the entrance, awaiting his fate
with nervous impatience. When the old man appeared at the opposite door,
seventy feet away, Mitya jumped up at once, and with his long, military
stride walked to meet him. Mitya was well dressed, in a frock-coat,
buttoned up, with a round hat and black gloves in his hands, just as he
had been three days before at the elder’s, at the family meeting with his
father and brothers. The old man waited for him, standing dignified and
unbending, and Mitya felt at once that he had looked him through and
through as he advanced. Mitya was greatly impressed, too, with Samsonov’s
immensely swollen face. His lower lip, which had always been thick, hung
down now, looking like a bun. He bowed to his guest in dignified silence,
motioned him to a low chair by the sofa, and, leaning on his son’s arm he
began lowering himself on to the sofa opposite, groaning painfully, so
that Mitya, seeing his painful exertions, immediately felt remorseful and
sensitively conscious of his insignificance in the presence of the
dignified person he had ventured to disturb.

“What is it you want of me, sir?” said the old man, deliberately,
distinctly, severely, but courteously, when he was at last seated.

Mitya started, leapt up, but sat down again. Then he began at once
speaking with loud, nervous haste, gesticulating, and in a positive
frenzy. He was unmistakably a man driven into a corner, on the brink of
ruin, catching at the last straw, ready to sink if he failed. Old Samsonov
probably grasped all this in an instant, though his face remained cold and
immovable as a statue’s.

“Most honored sir, Kuzma Kuzmitch, you have no doubt heard more than once
of my disputes with my father, Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov, who robbed me
of my inheritance from my mother ... seeing the whole town is gossiping
about it ... for here every one’s gossiping of what they shouldn’t ... and
besides, it might have reached you through Grushenka ... I beg your
pardon, through Agrafena Alexandrovna ... Agrafena Alexandrovna, the lady
for whom I have the highest respect and esteem ...”

So Mitya began, and broke down at the first sentence. We will not
reproduce his speech word for word, but will only summarize the gist of
it. Three months ago, he said, he had of express intention (Mitya
purposely used these words instead of “intentionally”) consulted a lawyer
in the chief town of the province, “a distinguished lawyer, Kuzma
Kuzmitch, Pavel Pavlovitch Korneplodov. You have perhaps heard of him? A
man of vast intellect, the mind of a statesman ... he knows you, too ...
spoke of you in the highest terms ...” Mitya broke down again. But these
breaks did not deter him. He leapt instantly over the gaps, and struggled
on and on.

This Korneplodov, after questioning him minutely, and inspecting the
documents he was able to bring him (Mitya alluded somewhat vaguely to
these documents, and slurred over the subject with special haste),
reported that they certainly might take proceedings concerning the village
of Tchermashnya, which ought, he said, to have come to him, Mitya, from
his mother, and so checkmate the old villain, his father ... “because
every door was not closed and justice might still find a loophole.” In
fact, he might reckon on an additional sum of six or even seven thousand
roubles from Fyodor Pavlovitch, as Tchermashnya was worth, at least,
twenty-five thousand, he might say twenty-eight thousand, in fact,
“thirty, thirty, Kuzma Kuzmitch, and would you believe it, I didn’t get
seventeen from that heartless man!” So he, Mitya, had thrown the business
up, for the time, knowing nothing about the law, but on coming here was
struck dumb by a cross-claim made upon him (here Mitya went adrift again
and again took a flying leap forward), “so will not you, excellent and
honored Kuzma Kuzmitch, be willing to take up all my claims against that
unnatural monster, and pay me a sum down of only three thousand?... You
see, you cannot, in any case, lose over it. On my honor, my honor, I swear
that. Quite the contrary, you may make six or seven thousand instead of
three.” Above all, he wanted this concluded that very day.

“I’ll do the business with you at a notary’s, or whatever it is ... in
fact, I’m ready to do anything.... I’ll hand over all the deeds ...
whatever you want, sign anything ... and we could draw up the agreement at
once ... and if it were possible, if it were only possible, that very
morning.... You could pay me that three thousand, for there isn’t a
capitalist in this town to compare with you, and so would save me from ...
would save me, in fact ... for a good, I might say an honorable action....
For I cherish the most honorable feelings for a certain person, whom you
know well, and care for as a father. I would not have come, indeed, if it
had not been as a father. And, indeed, it’s a struggle of three in this
business, for it’s fate—that’s a fearful thing, Kuzma Kuzmitch! A tragedy,
Kuzma Kuzmitch, a tragedy! And as you’ve dropped out long ago, it’s a
tug-of-war between two. I’m expressing it awkwardly, perhaps, but I’m not
a literary man. You see, I’m on the one side, and that monster on the
other. So you must choose. It’s either I or the monster. It all lies in
your hands—the fate of three lives, and the happiness of two.... Excuse
me, I’m making a mess of it, but you understand ... I see from your
venerable eyes that you understand ... and if you don’t understand, I’m
done for ... so you see!”

Mitya broke off his clumsy speech with that, “so you see!” and jumping up
from his seat, awaited the answer to his foolish proposal. At the last
phrase he had suddenly become hopelessly aware that it had all fallen
flat, above all, that he had been talking utter nonsense.

“How strange it is! On the way here it seemed all right, and now it’s
nothing but nonsense.” The idea suddenly dawned on his despairing mind.
All the while he had been talking, the old man sat motionless, watching
him with an icy expression in his eyes. After keeping him for a moment in
suspense, Kuzma Kuzmitch pronounced at last in the most positive and
chilling tone:

“Excuse me, we don’t undertake such business.”

Mitya suddenly felt his legs growing weak under him.

“What am I to do now, Kuzma Kuzmitch?” he muttered, with a pale smile. “I
suppose it’s all up with me—what do you think?”

“Excuse me....”

Mitya remained standing, staring motionless. He suddenly noticed a
movement in the old man’s face. He started.

“You see, sir, business of that sort’s not in our line,” said the old man
slowly. “There’s the court, and the lawyers—it’s a perfect misery. But if
you like, there is a man here you might apply to.”

“Good heavens! Who is it? You’re my salvation, Kuzma Kuzmitch,” faltered
Mitya.

“He doesn’t live here, and he’s not here just now. He is a peasant, he
does business in timber. His name is Lyagavy. He’s been haggling with
Fyodor Pavlovitch for the last year, over your copse at Tchermashnya. They
can’t agree on the price, maybe you’ve heard? Now he’s come back again and
is staying with the priest at Ilyinskoe, about twelve versts from the
Volovya station. He wrote to me, too, about the business of the copse,
asking my advice. Fyodor Pavlovitch means to go and see him himself. So if
you were to be beforehand with Fyodor Pavlovitch and to make Lyagavy the
offer you’ve made me, he might possibly—”

“A brilliant idea!” Mitya interrupted ecstatically. “He’s the very man, it
would just suit him. He’s haggling with him for it, being asked too much,
and here he would have all the documents entitling him to the property
itself. Ha ha ha!”

And Mitya suddenly went off into his short, wooden laugh, startling
Samsonov.

“How can I thank you, Kuzma Kuzmitch?” cried Mitya effusively.

“Don’t mention it,” said Samsonov, inclining his head.

“But you don’t know, you’ve saved me. Oh, it was a true presentiment
brought me to you.... So now to this priest!”

“No need of thanks.”

“I’ll make haste and fly there. I’m afraid I’ve overtaxed your strength. I
shall never forget it. It’s a Russian says that, Kuzma Kuzmitch, a
R-r-russian!”

“To be sure!”

Mitya seized his hand to press it, but there was a malignant gleam in the
old man’s eye. Mitya drew back his hand, but at once blamed himself for
his mistrustfulness.

“It’s because he’s tired,” he thought.

“For her sake! For her sake, Kuzma Kuzmitch! You understand that it’s for
her,” he cried, his voice ringing through the room. He bowed, turned
sharply round, and with the same long stride walked to the door without
looking back. He was trembling with delight.

“Everything was on the verge of ruin and my guardian angel saved me,” was
the thought in his mind. And if such a business man as Samsonov (a most
worthy old man, and what dignity!) had suggested this course, then ...
then success was assured. He would fly off immediately. “I will be back
before night, I shall be back at night and the thing is done. Could the
old man have been laughing at me?” exclaimed Mitya, as he strode towards
his lodging. He could, of course, imagine nothing, but that the advice was
practical “from such a business man” with an understanding of the
business, with an understanding of this Lyagavy (curious surname!). Or—the
old man was laughing at him.

Alas! The second alternative was the correct one. Long afterwards, when
the catastrophe had happened, old Samsonov himself confessed, laughing,
that he had made a fool of the “captain.” He was a cold, spiteful and
sarcastic man, liable to violent antipathies. Whether it was the
“captain’s” excited face, or the foolish conviction of the “rake and
spendthrift,” that he, Samsonov, could be taken in by such a cock-and-bull
story as his scheme, or his jealousy of Grushenka, in whose name this
“scapegrace” had rushed in on him with such a tale to get money which
worked on the old man, I can’t tell. But at the instant when Mitya stood
before him, feeling his legs grow weak under him, and frantically
exclaiming that he was ruined, at that moment the old man looked at him
with intense spite, and resolved to make a laughing-stock of him. When
Mitya had gone, Kuzma Kuzmitch, white with rage, turned to his son and
bade him see to it that that beggar be never seen again, and never
admitted even into the yard, or else he’d—

He did not utter his threat. But even his son, who often saw him enraged,
trembled with fear. For a whole hour afterwards, the old man was shaking
with anger, and by evening he was worse, and sent for the doctor.



Chapter II. Lyagavy


So he must drive at full speed, and he had not the money for horses. He
had forty kopecks, and that was all, all that was left after so many years
of prosperity! But he had at home an old silver watch which had long
ceased to go. He snatched it up and carried it to a Jewish watchmaker who
had a shop in the market-place. The Jew gave him six roubles for it.

“And I didn’t expect that,” cried Mitya, ecstatically. (He was still in a
state of ecstasy.) He seized his six roubles and ran home. At home he
borrowed three roubles from the people of the house, who loved him so much
that they were pleased to give it him, though it was all they had. Mitya
in his excitement told them on the spot that his fate would be decided
that day, and he described, in desperate haste, the whole scheme he had
put before Samsonov, the latter’s decision, his own hopes for the future,
and so on. These people had been told many of their lodger’s secrets
before, and so looked upon him as a gentleman who was not at all proud,
and almost one of themselves. Having thus collected nine roubles Mitya
sent for posting-horses to take him to the Volovya station. This was how
the fact came to be remembered and established that “at midday, on the day
before the event, Mitya had not a farthing, and that he had sold his watch
to get money and had borrowed three roubles from his landlord, all in the
presence of witnesses.”

I note this fact, later on it will be apparent why I do so.

Though he was radiant with the joyful anticipation that he would at last
solve all his difficulties, yet, as he drew near Volovya station, he
trembled at the thought of what Grushenka might be doing in his absence.
What if she made up her mind to-day to go to Fyodor Pavlovitch? This was
why he had gone off without telling her and why he left orders with his
landlady not to let out where he had gone, if any one came to inquire for
him.

“I must, I must get back to-night,” he repeated, as he was jolted along in
the cart, “and I dare say I shall have to bring this Lyagavy back here ...
to draw up the deed.” So mused Mitya, with a throbbing heart, but alas!
his dreams were not fated to be carried out.

To begin with, he was late, taking a short cut from Volovya station which
turned out to be eighteen versts instead of twelve. Secondly, he did not
find the priest at home at Ilyinskoe; he had gone off to a neighboring
village. While Mitya, setting off there with the same exhausted horses,
was looking for him, it was almost dark.

The priest, a shy and amiable looking little man, informed him at once
that though Lyagavy had been staying with him at first, he was now at
Suhoy Possyolok, that he was staying the night in the forester’s cottage,
as he was buying timber there too. At Mitya’s urgent request that he would
take him to Lyagavy at once, and by so doing “save him, so to speak,” the
priest agreed, after some demur, to conduct him to Suhoy Possyolok; his
curiosity was obviously aroused. But, unluckily, he advised their going on
foot, as it would not be “much over” a verst. Mitya, of course, agreed,
and marched off with his yard-long strides, so that the poor priest almost
ran after him. He was a very cautious man, though not old.

Mitya at once began talking to him, too, of his plans, nervously and
excitedly asking advice in regard to Lyagavy, and talking all the way. The
priest listened attentively, but gave little advice. He turned off Mitya’s
questions with: “I don’t know. Ah, I can’t say. How can I tell?” and so
on. When Mitya began to speak of his quarrel with his father over his
inheritance, the priest was positively alarmed, as he was in some way
dependent on Fyodor Pavlovitch. He inquired, however, with surprise, why
he called the peasant-trader Gorstkin, Lyagavy, and obligingly explained
to Mitya that, though the man’s name really was Lyagavy, he was never
called so, as he would be grievously offended at the name, and that he
must be sure to call him Gorstkin, “or you’ll do nothing with him; he
won’t even listen to you,” said the priest in conclusion.

Mitya was somewhat surprised for a moment, and explained that that was
what Samsonov had called him. On hearing this fact, the priest dropped the
subject, though he would have done well to put into words his doubt
whether, if Samsonov had sent him to that peasant, calling him Lyagavy,
there was not something wrong about it and he was turning him into
ridicule. But Mitya had no time to pause over such trifles. He hurried,
striding along, and only when he reached Suhoy Possyolok did he realize
that they had come not one verst, nor one and a half, but at least three.
This annoyed him, but he controlled himself.

They went into the hut. The forester lived in one half of the hut, and
Gorstkin was lodging in the other, the better room the other side of the
passage. They went into that room and lighted a tallow candle. The hut was
extremely overheated. On the table there was a samovar that had gone out,
a tray with cups, an empty rum bottle, a bottle of vodka partly full, and
some half-eaten crusts of wheaten bread. The visitor himself lay stretched
at full length on the bench, with his coat crushed up under his head for a
pillow, snoring heavily. Mitya stood in perplexity.

“Of course I must wake him. My business is too important. I’ve come in
such haste. I’m in a hurry to get back to-day,” he said in great
agitation. But the priest and the forester stood in silence, not giving
their opinion. Mitya went up and began trying to wake him himself; he
tried vigorously, but the sleeper did not wake.

“He’s drunk,” Mitya decided. “Good Lord! What am I to do? What am I to
do?” And, terribly impatient, he began pulling him by the arms, by the
legs, shaking his head, lifting him up and making him sit on the bench.
Yet, after prolonged exertions, he could only succeed in getting the
drunken man to utter absurd grunts, and violent, but inarticulate oaths.

“No, you’d better wait a little,” the priest pronounced at last, “for he’s
obviously not in a fit state.”

“He’s been drinking the whole day,” the forester chimed in.

“Good heavens!” cried Mitya. “If only you knew how important it is to me
and how desperate I am!”

“No, you’d better wait till morning,” the priest repeated.

“Till morning? Mercy! that’s impossible!”

And in his despair he was on the point of attacking the sleeping man
again, but stopped short at once, realizing the uselessness of his
efforts. The priest said nothing, the sleepy forester looked gloomy.

“What terrible tragedies real life contrives for people,” said Mitya, in
complete despair. The perspiration was streaming down his face. The priest
seized the moment to put before him, very reasonably, that, even if he
succeeded in wakening the man, he would still be drunk and incapable of
conversation. “And your business is important,” he said, “so you’d
certainly better put it off till morning.” With a gesture of despair Mitya
agreed.

“Father, I will stay here with a light, and seize the favorable moment. As
soon as he wakes I’ll begin. I’ll pay you for the light,” he said to the
forester, “for the night’s lodging, too; you’ll remember Dmitri Karamazov.
Only, Father, I don’t know what we’re to do with you. Where will you
sleep?”

“No, I’m going home. I’ll take his horse and get home,” he said,
indicating the forester. “And now I’ll say good-by. I wish you all
success.”

So it was settled. The priest rode off on the forester’s horse, delighted
to escape, though he shook his head uneasily, wondering whether he ought
not next day to inform his benefactor Fyodor Pavlovitch of this curious
incident, “or he may in an unlucky hour hear of it, be angry, and withdraw
his favor.”

The forester, scratching himself, went back to his room without a word,
and Mitya sat on the bench to “catch the favorable moment,” as he
expressed it. Profound dejection clung about his soul like a heavy mist. A
profound, intense dejection! He sat thinking, but could reach no
conclusion. The candle burnt dimly, a cricket chirped; it became
insufferably close in the overheated room. He suddenly pictured the
garden, the path behind the garden, the door of his father’s house
mysteriously opening and Grushenka running in. He leapt up from the bench.

“It’s a tragedy!” he said, grinding his teeth. Mechanically he went up to
the sleeping man and looked in his face. He was a lean, middle-aged
peasant, with a very long face, flaxen curls, and a long, thin, reddish
beard, wearing a blue cotton shirt and a black waistcoat, from the pocket
of which peeped the chain of a silver watch. Mitya looked at his face with
intense hatred, and for some unknown reason his curly hair particularly
irritated him.

What was insufferably humiliating was, that after leaving things of such
importance and making such sacrifices, he, Mitya, utterly worn out, should
with business of such urgency be standing over this dolt on whom his whole
fate depended, while he snored as though there were nothing the matter, as
though he’d dropped from another planet.

“Oh, the irony of fate!” cried Mitya, and, quite losing his head, he fell
again to rousing the tipsy peasant. He roused him with a sort of ferocity,
pulled at him, pushed him, even beat him; but after five minutes of vain
exertions, he returned to his bench in helpless despair, and sat down.

“Stupid! Stupid!” cried Mitya. “And how dishonorable it all is!” something
made him add. His head began to ache horribly. “Should he fling it up and
go away altogether?” he wondered. “No, wait till to-morrow now. I’ll stay
on purpose. What else did I come for? Besides, I’ve no means of going. How
am I to get away from here now? Oh, the idiocy of it!”

But his head ached more and more. He sat without moving, and unconsciously
dozed off and fell asleep as he sat. He seemed to have slept for two hours
or more. He was waked up by his head aching so unbearably that he could
have screamed. There was a hammering in his temples, and the top of his
head ached. It was a long time before he could wake up fully and
understand what had happened to him.

At last he realized that the room was full of charcoal fumes from the
stove, and that he might die of suffocation. And the drunken peasant still
lay snoring. The candle guttered and was about to go out. Mitya cried out,
and ran staggering across the passage into the forester’s room. The
forester waked up at once, but hearing that the other room was full of
fumes, to Mitya’s surprise and annoyance, accepted the fact with strange
unconcern, though he did go to see to it.

“But he’s dead, he’s dead! and ... what am I to do then?” cried Mitya
frantically.

They threw open the doors, opened a window and the chimney. Mitya brought
a pail of water from the passage. First he wetted his own head, then,
finding a rag of some sort, dipped it into the water, and put it on
Lyagavy’s head. The forester still treated the matter contemptuously, and
when he opened the window said grumpily:

“It’ll be all right, now.”

He went back to sleep, leaving Mitya a lighted lantern. Mitya fussed about
the drunken peasant for half an hour, wetting his head, and gravely
resolved not to sleep all night. But he was so worn out that when he sat
down for a moment to take breath, he closed his eyes, unconsciously
stretched himself full length on the bench and slept like the dead.

It was dreadfully late when he waked. It was somewhere about nine o’clock.
The sun was shining brightly in the two little windows of the hut. The
curly-headed peasant was sitting on the bench and had his coat on. He had
another samovar and another bottle in front of him. Yesterday’s bottle had
already been finished, and the new one was more than half empty. Mitya
jumped up and saw at once that the cursed peasant was drunk again,
hopelessly and incurably. He stared at him for a moment with wide opened
eyes. The peasant was silently and slyly watching him, with insulting
composure, and even a sort of contemptuous condescension, so Mitya
fancied. He rushed up to him.

“Excuse me, you see ... I ... you’ve most likely heard from the forester
here in the hut. I’m Lieutenant Dmitri Karamazov, the son of the old
Karamazov whose copse you are buying.”

“That’s a lie!” said the peasant, calmly and confidently.

“A lie? You know Fyodor Pavlovitch?”

“I don’t know any of your Fyodor Pavlovitches,” said the peasant, speaking
thickly.

“You’re bargaining with him for the copse, for the copse. Do wake up, and
collect yourself. Father Pavel of Ilyinskoe brought me here. You wrote to
Samsonov, and he has sent me to you,” Mitya gasped breathlessly.

“You’re l-lying!” Lyagavy blurted out again. Mitya’s legs went cold.

“For mercy’s sake! It isn’t a joke! You’re drunk, perhaps. Yet you can
speak and understand ... or else ... I understand nothing!”

“You’re a painter!”

“For mercy’s sake! I’m Karamazov, Dmitri Karamazov. I have an offer to
make you, an advantageous offer ... very advantageous offer, concerning
the copse!”

The peasant stroked his beard importantly.

“No, you’ve contracted for the job and turned out a scamp. You’re a
scoundrel!”

“I assure you you’re mistaken,” cried Mitya, wringing his hands in
despair. The peasant still stroked his beard, and suddenly screwed up his
eyes cunningly.

“No, you show me this: you tell me the law that allows roguery. D’you
hear? You’re a scoundrel! Do you understand that?”

Mitya stepped back gloomily, and suddenly “something seemed to hit him on
the head,” as he said afterwards. In an instant a light seemed to dawn in
his mind, “a light was kindled and I grasped it all.” He stood, stupefied,
wondering how he, after all a man of intelligence, could have yielded to
such folly, have been led into such an adventure, and have kept it up for
almost twenty-four hours, fussing round this Lyagavy, wetting his head.

“Why, the man’s drunk, dead drunk, and he’ll go on drinking now for a
week; what’s the use of waiting here? And what if Samsonov sent me here on
purpose? What if she—? Oh, God, what have I done?”

The peasant sat watching him and grinning. Another time Mitya might have
killed the fool in a fury, but now he felt as weak as a child. He went
quietly to the bench, took up his overcoat, put it on without a word, and
went out of the hut. He did not find the forester in the next room; there
was no one there. He took fifty kopecks in small change out of his pocket
and put them on the table for his night’s lodging, the candle, and the
trouble he had given. Coming out of the hut he saw nothing but forest all
round. He walked at hazard, not knowing which way to turn out of the hut,
to the right or to the left. Hurrying there the evening before with the
priest, he had not noticed the road. He had no revengeful feeling for
anybody, even for Samsonov, in his heart. He strode along a narrow forest
path, aimless, dazed, without heeding where he was going. A child could
have knocked him down, so weak was he in body and soul. He got out of the
forest somehow, however, and a vista of fields, bare after the harvest,
stretched as far as the eye could see.

“What despair! What death all round!” he repeated, striding on and on.

He was saved by meeting an old merchant who was being driven across
country in a hired trap. When he overtook him, Mitya asked the way, and it
turned out that the old merchant, too, was going to Volovya. After some
discussion Mitya got into the trap. Three hours later they arrived. At
Volovya, Mitya at once ordered posting-horses to drive to the town, and
suddenly realized that he was appallingly hungry. While the horses were
being harnessed, an omelette was prepared for him. He ate it all in an
instant, ate a huge hunk of bread, ate a sausage, and swallowed three
glasses of vodka. After eating, his spirits and his heart grew lighter. He
flew towards the town, urged on the driver, and suddenly made a new and
“unalterable” plan to procure that “accursed money” before evening. “And
to think, only to think that a man’s life should be ruined for the sake of
that paltry three thousand!” he cried, contemptuously. “I’ll settle it
to-day.” And if it had not been for the thought of Grushenka and of what
might have happened to her, which never left him, he would perhaps have
become quite cheerful again.... But the thought of her was stabbing him to
the heart every moment, like a sharp knife.

At last they arrived, and Mitya at once ran to Grushenka.



Chapter III. Gold-Mines


This was the visit of Mitya of which Grushenka had spoken to Rakitin with
such horror. She was just then expecting the “message,” and was much
relieved that Mitya had not been to see her that day or the day before.
She hoped that “please God he won’t come till I’m gone away,” and he
suddenly burst in on her. The rest we know already. To get him off her
hands she suggested at once that he should walk with her to Samsonov’s,
where she said she absolutely must go “to settle his accounts,” and when
Mitya accompanied her at once, she said good-by to him at the gate, making
him promise to come at twelve o’clock to take her home again. Mitya, too,
was delighted at this arrangement. If she was sitting at Samsonov’s she
could not be going to Fyodor Pavlovitch’s, “if only she’s not lying,” he
added at once. But he thought she was not lying from what he saw.

He was that sort of jealous man who, in the absence of the beloved woman,
at once invents all sorts of awful fancies of what may be happening to
her, and how she may be betraying him, but, when shaken, heartbroken,
convinced of her faithlessness, he runs back to her; at the first glance
at her face, her gay, laughing, affectionate face, he revives at once,
lays aside all suspicion and with joyful shame abuses himself for his
jealousy.

After leaving Grushenka at the gate he rushed home. Oh, he had so much
still to do that day! But a load had been lifted from his heart, anyway.

“Now I must only make haste and find out from Smerdyakov whether anything
happened there last night, whether, by any chance, she went to Fyodor
Pavlovitch; ough!” floated through his mind.

Before he had time to reach his lodging, jealousy had surged up again in
his restless heart.

Jealousy! “Othello was not jealous, he was trustful,” observed Pushkin.
And that remark alone is enough to show the deep insight of our great
poet. Othello’s soul was shattered and his whole outlook clouded simply
because _his ideal was destroyed_. But Othello did not begin hiding,
spying, peeping. He was trustful, on the contrary. He had to be led up,
pushed on, excited with great difficulty before he could entertain the
idea of deceit. The truly jealous man is not like that. It is impossible
to picture to oneself the shame and moral degradation to which the jealous
man can descend without a qualm of conscience. And yet it’s not as though
the jealous were all vulgar and base souls. On the contrary, a man of
lofty feelings, whose love is pure and full of self-sacrifice, may yet
hide under tables, bribe the vilest people, and be familiar with the
lowest ignominy of spying and eavesdropping.

Othello was incapable of making up his mind to faithlessness—not incapable
of forgiving it, but of making up his mind to it—though his soul was as
innocent and free from malice as a babe’s. It is not so with the really
jealous man. It is hard to imagine what some jealous men can make up their
mind to and overlook, and what they can forgive! The jealous are the
readiest of all to forgive, and all women know it. The jealous man can
forgive extraordinarily quickly (though, of course, after a violent
scene), and he is able to forgive infidelity almost conclusively proved,
the very kisses and embraces he has seen, if only he can somehow be
convinced that it has all been “for the last time,” and that his rival
will vanish from that day forward, will depart to the ends of the earth,
or that he himself will carry her away somewhere, where that dreaded rival
will not get near her. Of course the reconciliation is only for an hour.
For, even if the rival did disappear next day, he would invent another one
and would be jealous of him. And one might wonder what there was in a love
that had to be so watched over, what a love could be worth that needed
such strenuous guarding. But that the jealous will never understand. And
yet among them are men of noble hearts. It is remarkable, too, that those
very men of noble hearts, standing hidden in some cupboard, listening and
spying, never feel the stings of conscience at that moment, anyway, though
they understand clearly enough with their “noble hearts” the shameful
depths to which they have voluntarily sunk.

At the sight of Grushenka, Mitya’s jealousy vanished, and, for an instant
he became trustful and generous, and positively despised himself for his
evil feelings. But it only proved that, in his love for the woman, there
was an element of something far higher than he himself imagined, that it
was not only a sensual passion, not only the “curve of her body,” of which
he had talked to Alyosha. But, as soon as Grushenka had gone, Mitya began
to suspect her of all the low cunning of faithlessness, and he felt no
sting of conscience at it.

And so jealousy surged up in him again. He had, in any case, to make
haste. The first thing to be done was to get hold of at least a small,
temporary loan of money. The nine roubles had almost all gone on his
expedition. And, as we all know, one can’t take a step without money. But
he had thought over in the cart where he could get a loan. He had a brace
of fine dueling pistols in a case, which he had not pawned till then
because he prized them above all his possessions.

In the “Metropolis” tavern he had some time since made acquaintance with a
young official and had learnt that this very opulent bachelor was
passionately fond of weapons. He used to buy pistols, revolvers, daggers,
hang them on his wall and show them to acquaintances. He prided himself on
them, and was quite a specialist on the mechanism of the revolver. Mitya,
without stopping to think, went straight to him, and offered to pawn his
pistols to him for ten roubles. The official, delighted, began trying to
persuade him to sell them outright. But Mitya would not consent, so the
young man gave him ten roubles, protesting that nothing would induce him
to take interest. They parted friends.

Mitya was in haste; he rushed towards Fyodor Pavlovitch’s by the back way,
to his arbor, to get hold of Smerdyakov as soon as possible. In this way
the fact was established that three or four hours before a certain event,
of which I shall speak later on, Mitya had not a farthing, and pawned for
ten roubles a possession he valued, though, three hours later, he was in
possession of thousands.... But I am anticipating. From Marya Kondratyevna
(the woman living near Fyodor Pavlovitch’s) he learned the very disturbing
fact of Smerdyakov’s illness. He heard the story of his fall in the
cellar, his fit, the doctor’s visit, Fyodor Pavlovitch’s anxiety; he heard
with interest, too, that his brother Ivan had set off that morning for
Moscow.

“Then he must have driven through Volovya before me,” thought Dmitri, but
he was terribly distressed about Smerdyakov. “What will happen now? Who’ll
keep watch for me? Who’ll bring me word?” he thought. He began greedily
questioning the women whether they had seen anything the evening before.
They quite understood what he was trying to find out, and completely
reassured him. No one had been there. Ivan Fyodorovitch had been there the
night; everything had been perfectly as usual. Mitya grew thoughtful. He
would certainly have to keep watch to-day, but where? Here or at
Samsonov’s gate? He decided that he must be on the look out both here and
there, and meanwhile ... meanwhile.... The difficulty was that he had to
carry out the new plan that he had made on the journey back. He was sure
of its success, but he must not delay acting upon it. Mitya resolved to
sacrifice an hour to it: “In an hour I shall know everything, I shall
settle everything, and then, then, first of all to Samsonov’s. I’ll
inquire whether Grushenka’s there and instantly be back here again, stay
till eleven, and then to Samsonov’s again to bring her home.” This was
what he decided.

He flew home, washed, combed his hair, brushed his clothes, dressed, and
went to Madame Hohlakov’s. Alas! he had built his hopes on her. He had
resolved to borrow three thousand from that lady. And what was more, he
felt suddenly convinced that she would not refuse to lend it to him. It
may be wondered why, if he felt so certain, he had not gone to her at
first, one of his own sort, so to speak, instead of to Samsonov, a man he
did not know, who was not of his own class, and to whom he hardly knew how
to speak.

But the fact was that he had never known Madame Hohlakov well, and had
seen nothing of her for the last month, and that he knew she could not
endure him. She had detested him from the first because he was engaged to
Katerina Ivanovna, while she had, for some reason, suddenly conceived the
desire that Katerina Ivanovna should throw him over, and marry the
“charming, chivalrously refined Ivan, who had such excellent manners.”
Mitya’s manners she detested. Mitya positively laughed at her, and had
once said about her that she was just as lively and at her ease as she was
uncultivated. But that morning in the cart a brilliant idea had struck
him: “If she is so anxious I should not marry Katerina Ivanovna” (and he
knew she was positively hysterical upon the subject) “why should she
refuse me now that three thousand, just to enable me to leave Katya and
get away from her for ever. These spoilt fine ladies, if they set their
hearts on anything, will spare no expense to satisfy their caprice.
Besides, she’s so rich,” Mitya argued.

As for his “plan” it was just the same as before; it consisted of the
offer of his rights to Tchermashnya—but not with a commercial object, as
it had been with Samsonov, not trying to allure the lady with the
possibility of making a profit of six or seven thousand—but simply as a
security for the debt. As he worked out this new idea, Mitya was enchanted
with it, but so it always was with him in all his undertakings, in all his
sudden decisions. He gave himself up to every new idea with passionate
enthusiasm. Yet, when he mounted the steps of Madame Hohlakov’s house he
felt a shiver of fear run down his spine. At that moment he saw fully, as
a mathematical certainty, that this was his last hope, that if this broke
down, nothing else was left him in the world, but to “rob and murder some
one for the three thousand.” It was half-past seven when he rang at the
bell.

At first fortune seemed to smile upon him. As soon as he was announced he
was received with extraordinary rapidity. “As though she were waiting for
me,” thought Mitya, and as soon as he had been led to the drawing-room,
the lady of the house herself ran in, and declared at once that she was
expecting him.

“I was expecting you! I was expecting you! Though I’d no reason to suppose
you would come to see me, as you will admit yourself. Yet, I did expect
you. You may marvel at my instinct, Dmitri Fyodorovitch, but I was
convinced all the morning that you would come.”

“That is certainly wonderful, madam,” observed Mitya, sitting down limply,
“but I have come to you on a matter of great importance.... On a matter of
supreme importance for me, that is, madam ... for me alone ... and I
hasten—”

“I know you’ve come on most important business, Dmitri Fyodorovitch; it’s
not a case of presentiment, no reactionary harking back to the miraculous
(have you heard about Father Zossima?). This is a case of mathematics: you
couldn’t help coming, after all that has passed with Katerina Ivanovna;
you couldn’t, you couldn’t, that’s a mathematical certainty.”

“The realism of actual life, madam, that’s what it is. But allow me to
explain—”

“Realism indeed, Dmitri Fyodorovitch. I’m all for realism now. I’ve seen
too much of miracles. You’ve heard that Father Zossima is dead?”

“No, madam, it’s the first time I’ve heard of it.” Mitya was a little
surprised. The image of Alyosha rose to his mind.

“Last night, and only imagine—”

“Madam,” said Mitya, “I can imagine nothing except that I’m in a desperate
position, and that if you don’t help me, everything will come to grief,
and I first of all. Excuse me for the triviality of the expression, but
I’m in a fever—”

“I know, I know that you’re in a fever. You could hardly fail to be, and
whatever you may say to me, I know beforehand. I have long been thinking
over your destiny, Dmitri Fyodorovitch, I am watching over it and studying
it.... Oh, believe me, I’m an experienced doctor of the soul, Dmitri
Fyodorovitch.”

“Madam, if you are an experienced doctor, I’m certainly an experienced
patient,” said Mitya, with an effort to be polite, “and I feel that if you
are watching over my destiny in this way, you will come to my help in my
ruin, and so allow me, at least to explain to you the plan with which I
have ventured to come to you ... and what I am hoping of you.... I have
come, madam—”

“Don’t explain it. It’s of secondary importance. But as for help, you’re
not the first I have helped, Dmitri Fyodorovitch. You have most likely
heard of my cousin, Madame Belmesov. Her husband was ruined, ‘had come to
grief,’ as you characteristically express it, Dmitri Fyodorovitch. I
recommended him to take to horse-breeding, and now he’s doing well. Have
you any idea of horse-breeding, Dmitri Fyodorovitch?”

“Not the faintest, madam; ah, madam, not the faintest!” cried Mitya, in
nervous impatience, positively starting from his seat. “I simply implore
you, madam, to listen to me. Only give me two minutes of free speech that
I may just explain to you everything, the whole plan with which I have
come. Besides, I am short of time. I’m in a fearful hurry,” Mitya cried
hysterically, feeling that she was just going to begin talking again, and
hoping to cut her short. “I have come in despair ... in the last gasp of
despair, to beg you to lend me the sum of three thousand, a loan, but on
safe, most safe security, madam, with the most trustworthy guarantees!
Only let me explain—”

“You must tell me all that afterwards, afterwards!” Madame Hohlakov with a
gesture demanded silence in her turn, “and whatever you may tell me, I
know it all beforehand; I’ve told you so already. You ask for a certain
sum, for three thousand, but I can give you more, immeasurably more, I
will save you, Dmitri Fyodorovitch, but you must listen to me.”

Mitya started from his seat again.

“Madam, will you really be so good!” he cried, with strong feeling. “Good
God, you’ve saved me! You have saved a man from a violent death, from a
bullet.... My eternal gratitude—”

“I will give you more, infinitely more than three thousand!” cried Madame
Hohlakov, looking with a radiant smile at Mitya’s ecstasy.

“Infinitely? But I don’t need so much. I only need that fatal three
thousand, and on my part I can give security for that sum with infinite
gratitude, and I propose a plan which—”

“Enough, Dmitri Fyodorovitch, it’s said and done.” Madame Hohlakov cut him
short, with the modest triumph of beneficence: “I have promised to save
you, and I will save you. I will save you as I did Belmesov. What do you
think of the gold-mines, Dmitri Fyodorovitch?”

“Of the gold-mines, madam? I have never thought anything about them.”

“But I have thought of them for you. Thought of them over and over again.
I have been watching you for the last month. I’ve watched you a hundred
times as you’ve walked past, saying to myself: That’s a man of energy who
ought to be at the gold-mines. I’ve studied your gait and come to the
conclusion: that’s a man who would find gold.”

“From my gait, madam?” said Mitya, smiling.

“Yes, from your gait. You surely don’t deny that character can be told
from the gait, Dmitri Fyodorovitch? Science supports the idea. I’m all for
science and realism now. After all this business with Father Zossima,
which has so upset me, from this very day I’m a realist and I want to
devote myself to practical usefulness. I’m cured. ‘Enough!’ as Turgenev
says.”

“But, madam, the three thousand you so generously promised to lend me—”

“It is yours, Dmitri Fyodorovitch,” Madame Hohlakov cut in at once. “The
money is as good as in your pocket, not three thousand, but three million,
Dmitri Fyodorovitch, in less than no time. I’ll make you a present of the
idea: you shall find gold-mines, make millions, return and become a
leading man, and wake us up and lead us to better things. Are we to leave
it all to the Jews? You will found institutions and enterprises of all
sorts. You will help the poor, and they will bless you. This is the age of
railways, Dmitri Fyodorovitch. You’ll become famous and indispensable to
the Department of Finance, which is so badly off at present. The
depreciation of the rouble keeps me awake at night, Dmitri Fyodorovitch;
people don’t know that side of me—”

“Madam, madam!” Dmitri interrupted with an uneasy presentiment. “I shall
indeed, perhaps, follow your advice, your wise advice, madam.... I shall
perhaps set off ... to the gold-mines.... I’ll come and see you again
about it ... many times, indeed ... but now, that three thousand you so
generously ... oh, that would set me free, and if you could to-day ... you
see, I haven’t a minute, a minute to lose to-day—”

“Enough, Dmitri Fyodorovitch, enough!” Madame Hohlakov interrupted
emphatically. “The question is, will you go to the gold-mines or not; have
you quite made up your mind? Answer yes or no.”

“I will go, madam, afterwards.... I’ll go where you like ... but now—”

“Wait!” cried Madame Hohlakov. And jumping up and running to a handsome
bureau with numerous little drawers, she began pulling out one drawer
after another, looking for something with desperate haste.

“The three thousand,” thought Mitya, his heart almost stopping, “and at
the instant ... without any papers or formalities ... that’s doing things
in gentlemanly style! She’s a splendid woman, if only she didn’t talk so
much!”

“Here!” cried Madame Hohlakov, running back joyfully to Mitya, “here is
what I was looking for!”

It was a tiny silver ikon on a cord, such as is sometimes worn next the
skin with a cross.

“This is from Kiev, Dmitri Fyodorovitch,” she went on reverently, “from
the relics of the Holy Martyr, Varvara. Let me put it on your neck myself,
and with it dedicate you to a new life, to a new career.”

And she actually put the cord round his neck, and began arranging it. In
extreme embarrassment, Mitya bent down and helped her, and at last he got
it under his neck-tie and collar through his shirt to his chest.

“Now you can set off,” Madame Hohlakov pronounced, sitting down
triumphantly in her place again.

“Madam, I am so touched. I don’t know how to thank you, indeed ... for
such kindness, but ... If only you knew how precious time is to me....
That sum of money, for which I shall be indebted to your generosity....
Oh, madam, since you are so kind, so touchingly generous to me,” Mitya
exclaimed impulsively, “then let me reveal to you ... though, of course,
you’ve known it a long time ... that I love somebody here.... I have been
false to Katya ... Katerina Ivanovna I should say.... Oh, I’ve behaved
inhumanly, dishonorably to her, but I fell in love here with another woman
... a woman whom you, madam, perhaps, despise, for you know everything
already, but whom I cannot leave on any account, and therefore that three
thousand now—”

“Leave everything, Dmitri Fyodorovitch,” Madame Hohlakov interrupted in
the most decisive tone. “Leave everything, especially women. Gold-mines
are your goal, and there’s no place for women there. Afterwards, when you
come back rich and famous, you will find the girl of your heart in the
highest society. That will be a modern girl, a girl of education and
advanced ideas. By that time the dawning woman question will have gained
ground, and the new woman will have appeared.”

“Madam, that’s not the point, not at all....” Mitya clasped his hands in
entreaty.

“Yes, it is, Dmitri Fyodorovitch, just what you need; the very thing
you’re yearning for, though you don’t realize it yourself. I am not at all
opposed to the present woman movement, Dmitri Fyodorovitch. The
development of woman, and even the political emancipation of woman in the
near future—that’s my ideal. I’ve a daughter myself, Dmitri Fyodorovitch,
people don’t know that side of me. I wrote a letter to the author,
Shtchedrin, on that subject. He has taught me so much, so much about the
vocation of woman. So last year I sent him an anonymous letter of two
lines: ‘I kiss and embrace you, my teacher, for the modern woman.
Persevere.’ And I signed myself, ‘A Mother.’ I thought of signing myself
‘A contemporary Mother,’ and hesitated, but I stuck to the simple
‘Mother’; there’s more moral beauty in that, Dmitri Fyodorovitch. And the
word ‘contemporary’ might have reminded him of ‘_The Contemporary_’—a
painful recollection owing to the censorship.... Good Heavens, what is the
matter!”

“Madam!” cried Mitya, jumping up at last, clasping his hands before her in
helpless entreaty. “You will make me weep if you delay what you have so
generously—”

“Oh, do weep, Dmitri Fyodorovitch, do weep! That’s a noble feeling ...
such a path lies open before you! Tears will ease your heart, and later on
you will return rejoicing. You will hasten to me from Siberia on purpose
to share your joy with me—”

“But allow me, too!” Mitya cried suddenly. “For the last time I entreat
you, tell me, can I have the sum you promised me to-day, if not, when may
I come for it?”

“What sum, Dmitri Fyodorovitch?”

“The three thousand you promised me ... that you so generously—”

“Three thousand? Roubles? Oh, no, I haven’t got three thousand,” Madame
Hohlakov announced with serene amazement. Mitya was stupefied.

“Why, you said just now ... you said ... you said it was as good as in my
hands—”

“Oh, no, you misunderstood me, Dmitri Fyodorovitch. In that case you
misunderstood me. I was talking of the gold-mines. It’s true I promised
you more, infinitely more than three thousand, I remember it all now, but
I was referring to the gold-mines.”

“But the money? The three thousand?” Mitya exclaimed, awkwardly.

“Oh, if you meant money, I haven’t any. I haven’t a penny, Dmitri
Fyodorovitch. I’m quarreling with my steward about it, and I’ve just
borrowed five hundred roubles from Miüsov, myself. No, no, I’ve no money.
And, do you know, Dmitri Fyodorovitch, if I had, I wouldn’t give it to
you. In the first place I never lend money. Lending money means losing
friends. And I wouldn’t give it to you particularly. I wouldn’t give it
you, because I like you and want to save you, for all you need is the
gold-mines, the gold-mines, the gold-mines!”

“Oh, the devil!” roared Mitya, and with all his might brought his fist
down on the table.

“Aie! Aie!” cried Madame Hohlakov, alarmed, and she flew to the other end
of the drawing-room.

Mitya spat on the ground, and strode rapidly out of the room, out of the
house, into the street, into the darkness! He walked like one possessed,
and beating himself on the breast, on the spot where he had struck himself
two days previously, before Alyosha, the last time he saw him in the dark,
on the road. What those blows upon his breast signified, _on that spot_,
and what he meant by it—that was, for the time, a secret which was known
to no one in the world, and had not been told even to Alyosha. But that
secret meant for him more than disgrace; it meant ruin, suicide. So he had
determined, if he did not get hold of the three thousand that would pay
his debt to Katerina Ivanovna, and so remove from his breast, from _that
spot on his breast_, the shame he carried upon it, that weighed on his
conscience. All this will be fully explained to the reader later on, but
now that his last hope had vanished, this man, so strong in appearance,
burst out crying like a little child a few steps from the Hohlakovs’
house. He walked on, and not knowing what he was doing, wiped away his
tears with his fist. In this way he reached the square, and suddenly
became aware that he had stumbled against something. He heard a piercing
wail from an old woman whom he had almost knocked down.

“Good Lord, you’ve nearly killed me! Why don’t you look where you’re
going, scapegrace?”

“Why, it’s you!” cried Mitya, recognizing the old woman in the dark. It
was the old servant who waited on Samsonov, whom Mitya had particularly
noticed the day before.

“And who are you, my good sir?” said the old woman, in quite a different
voice. “I don’t know you in the dark.”

“You live at Kuzma Kuzmitch’s. You’re the servant there?”

“Just so, sir, I was only running out to Prohoritch’s.... But I don’t know
you now.”

“Tell me, my good woman, is Agrafena Alexandrovna there now?” said Mitya,
beside himself with suspense. “I saw her to the house some time ago.”

“She has been there, sir. She stayed a little while, and went off again.”

“What? Went away?” cried Mitya. “When did she go?”

“Why, as soon as she came. She only stayed a minute. She only told Kuzma
Kuzmitch a tale that made him laugh, and then she ran away.”

“You’re lying, damn you!” roared Mitya.

“Aie! Aie!” shrieked the old woman, but Mitya had vanished.

He ran with all his might to the house where Grushenka lived. At the
moment he reached it, Grushenka was on her way to Mokroe. It was not more
than a quarter of an hour after her departure.

Fenya was sitting with her grandmother, the old cook, Matryona, in the
kitchen when “the captain” ran in. Fenya uttered a piercing shriek on
seeing him.

“You scream?” roared Mitya, “where is she?”

But without giving the terror-stricken Fenya time to utter a word, he fell
all of a heap at her feet.

“Fenya, for Christ’s sake, tell me, where is she?”

“I don’t know. Dmitri Fyodorovitch, my dear, I don’t know. You may kill me
but I can’t tell you.” Fenya swore and protested. “You went out with her
yourself not long ago—”

“She came back!”

“Indeed she didn’t. By God I swear she didn’t come back.”

“You’re lying!” shouted Mitya. “From your terror I know where she is.”

He rushed away. Fenya in her fright was glad she had got off so easily.
But she knew very well that it was only that he was in such haste, or she
might not have fared so well. But as he ran, he surprised both Fenya and
old Matryona by an unexpected action. On the table stood a brass mortar,
with a pestle in it, a small brass pestle, not much more than six inches
long. Mitya already had opened the door with one hand when, with the
other, he snatched up the pestle, and thrust it in his side-pocket.

“Oh, Lord! He’s going to murder some one!” cried Fenya, flinging up her
hands.



Chapter IV. In The Dark


Where was he running? “Where could she be except at Fyodor Pavlovitch’s?
She must have run straight to him from Samsonov’s, that was clear now. The
whole intrigue, the whole deceit was evident.” ... It all rushed whirling
through his mind. He did not run to Marya Kondratyevna’s. “There was no
need to go there ... not the slightest need ... he must raise no alarm ...
they would run and tell directly.... Marya Kondratyevna was clearly in the
plot, Smerdyakov too, he too, all had been bought over!”

He formed another plan of action: he ran a long way round Fyodor
Pavlovitch’s house, crossing the lane, running down Dmitrovsky Street,
then over the little bridge, and so came straight to the deserted alley at
the back, which was empty and uninhabited, with, on one side the hurdle
fence of a neighbor’s kitchen-garden, on the other the strong high fence,
that ran all round Fyodor Pavlovitch’s garden. Here he chose a spot,
apparently the very place, where according to the tradition, he knew
Lizaveta had once climbed over it: “If she could climb over it,” the
thought, God knows why, occurred to him, “surely I can.” He did in fact
jump up, and instantly contrived to catch hold of the top of the fence.
Then he vigorously pulled himself up and sat astride on it. Close by, in
the garden stood the bath-house, but from the fence he could see the
lighted windows of the house too.

“Yes, the old man’s bedroom is lighted up. She’s there!” and he leapt from
the fence into the garden. Though he knew Grigory was ill and very likely
Smerdyakov, too, and that there was no one to hear him, he instinctively
hid himself, stood still, and began to listen. But there was dead silence
on all sides and, as though of design, complete stillness, not the
slightest breath of wind.

“And naught but the whispering silence,” the line for some reason rose to
his mind. “If only no one heard me jump over the fence! I think not.”
Standing still for a minute, he walked softly over the grass in the
garden, avoiding the trees and shrubs. He walked slowly, creeping
stealthily at every step, listening to his own footsteps. It took him five
minutes to reach the lighted window. He remembered that just under the
window there were several thick and high bushes of elder and whitebeam.
The door from the house into the garden on the left-hand side, was shut;
he had carefully looked on purpose to see, in passing. At last he reached
the bushes and hid behind them. He held his breath. “I must wait now,” he
thought, “to reassure them, in case they heard my footsteps and are
listening ... if only I don’t cough or sneeze.”

He waited two minutes. His heart was beating violently, and, at moments,
he could scarcely breathe. “No, this throbbing at my heart won’t stop,” he
thought. “I can’t wait any longer.” He was standing behind a bush in the
shadow. The light of the window fell on the front part of the bush.

“How red the whitebeam berries are!” he murmured, not knowing why. Softly
and noiselessly, step by step, he approached the window, and raised
himself on tiptoe. All Fyodor Pavlovitch’s bedroom lay open before him. It
was not a large room, and was divided in two parts by a red screen,
“Chinese,” as Fyodor Pavlovitch used to call it. The word “Chinese”
flashed into Mitya’s mind, “and behind the screen, is Grushenka,” thought
Mitya. He began watching Fyodor Pavlovitch, who was wearing his new
striped-silk dressing-gown, which Mitya had never seen, and a silk cord
with tassels round the waist. A clean, dandified shirt of fine linen with
gold studs peeped out under the collar of the dressing-gown. On his head
Fyodor Pavlovitch had the same red bandage which Alyosha had seen.

“He has got himself up,” thought Mitya.

His father was standing near the window, apparently lost in thought.
Suddenly he jerked up his head, listened a moment, and hearing nothing
went up to the table, poured out half a glass of brandy from a decanter
and drank it off. Then he uttered a deep sigh, again stood still a moment,
walked carelessly up to the looking-glass on the wall, with his right hand
raised the red bandage on his forehead a little, and began examining his
bruises and scars, which had not yet disappeared.

“He’s alone,” thought Mitya, “in all probability he’s alone.”

Fyodor Pavlovitch moved away from the looking-glass, turned suddenly to
the window and looked out. Mitya instantly slipped away into the shadow.

“She may be there behind the screen. Perhaps she’s asleep by now,” he
thought, with a pang at his heart. Fyodor Pavlovitch moved away from the
window. “He’s looking for her out of the window, so she’s not there. Why
should he stare out into the dark? He’s wild with impatience.” ... Mitya
slipped back at once, and fell to gazing in at the window again. The old
man was sitting down at the table, apparently disappointed. At last he put
his elbow on the table, and laid his right cheek against his hand. Mitya
watched him eagerly.

“He’s alone, he’s alone!” he repeated again. “If she were here, his face
would be different.”

Strange to say, a queer, irrational vexation rose up in his heart that she
was not here. “It’s not that she’s not here,” he explained to himself,
immediately, “but that I can’t tell for certain whether she is or not.”
Mitya remembered afterwards that his mind was at that moment exceptionally
clear, that he took in everything to the slightest detail, and missed no
point. But a feeling of misery, the misery of uncertainty and indecision,
was growing in his heart with every instant. “Is she here or not?” The
angry doubt filled his heart, and suddenly, making up his mind, he put out
his hand and softly knocked on the window frame. He knocked the signal the
old man had agreed upon with Smerdyakov, twice slowly and then three times
more quickly, the signal that meant “Grushenka is here!”

The old man started, jerked up his head, and, jumping up quickly, ran to
the window. Mitya slipped away into the shadow. Fyodor Pavlovitch opened
the window and thrust his whole head out.

“Grushenka, is it you? Is it you?” he said, in a sort of trembling
half-whisper. “Where are you, my angel, where are you?” He was fearfully
agitated and breathless.

“He’s alone.” Mitya decided.

“Where are you?” cried the old man again; and he thrust his head out
farther, thrust it out to the shoulders, gazing in all directions, right
and left. “Come here, I’ve a little present for you. Come, I’ll show
you....”

“He means the three thousand,” thought Mitya.

“But where are you? Are you at the door? I’ll open it directly.”

And the old man almost climbed out of the window, peering out to the
right, where there was a door into the garden, trying to see into the
darkness. In another second he would certainly have run out to open the
door without waiting for Grushenka’s answer.

Mitya looked at him from the side without stirring. The old man’s profile
that he loathed so, his pendent Adam’s apple, his hooked nose, his lips
that smiled in greedy expectation, were all brightly lighted up by the
slanting lamplight falling on the left from the room. A horrible fury of
hatred suddenly surged up in Mitya’s heart: “There he was, his rival, the
man who had tormented him, had ruined his life!” It was a rush of that
sudden, furious, revengeful anger of which he had spoken, as though
foreseeing it, to Alyosha, four days ago in the arbor, when, in answer to
Alyosha’s question, “How can you say you’ll kill our father?” “I don’t
know, I don’t know,” he had said then. “Perhaps I shall not kill him,
perhaps I shall. I’m afraid he’ll suddenly be so loathsome to me at that
moment. I hate his double chin, his nose, his eyes, his shameless grin. I
feel a personal repulsion. That’s what I’m afraid of, that’s what may be
too much for me.” ... This personal repulsion was growing unendurable.
Mitya was beside himself, he suddenly pulled the brass pestle out of his
pocket.

                  -------------------------------------

“God was watching over me then,” Mitya himself said afterwards. At that
very moment Grigory waked up on his bed of sickness. Earlier in the
evening he had undergone the treatment which Smerdyakov had described to
Ivan. He had rubbed himself all over with vodka mixed with a secret, very
strong decoction, had drunk what was left of the mixture while his wife
repeated a “certain prayer” over him, after which he had gone to bed.
Marfa Ignatyevna had tasted the stuff, too, and, being unused to strong
drink, slept like the dead beside her husband.

But Grigory waked up in the night, quite suddenly, and, after a moment’s
reflection, though he immediately felt a sharp pain in his back, he sat up
in bed. Then he deliberated again, got up and dressed hurriedly. Perhaps
his conscience was uneasy at the thought of sleeping while the house was
unguarded “in such perilous times.” Smerdyakov, exhausted by his fit, lay
motionless in the next room. Marfa Ignatyevna did not stir. “The stuff’s
been too much for the woman,” Grigory thought, glancing at her, and
groaning, he went out on the steps. No doubt he only intended to look out
from the steps, for he was hardly able to walk, the pain in his back and
his right leg was intolerable. But he suddenly remembered that he had not
locked the little gate into the garden that evening. He was the most
punctual and precise of men, a man who adhered to an unchangeable routine,
and habits that lasted for years. Limping and writhing with pain he went
down the steps and towards the garden. Yes, the gate stood wide open.
Mechanically he stepped into the garden. Perhaps he fancied something,
perhaps caught some sound, and, glancing to the left he saw his master’s
window open. No one was looking out of it then.

“What’s it open for? It’s not summer now,” thought Grigory, and suddenly,
at that very instant he caught a glimpse of something extraordinary before
him in the garden. Forty paces in front of him a man seemed to be running
in the dark, a sort of shadow was moving very fast.

“Good Lord!” cried Grigory beside himself, and forgetting the pain in his
back, he hurried to intercept the running figure. He took a short cut,
evidently he knew the garden better; the flying figure went towards the
bath-house, ran behind it and rushed to the garden fence. Grigory
followed, not losing sight of him, and ran, forgetting everything. He
reached the fence at the very moment the man was climbing over it. Grigory
cried out, beside himself, pounced on him, and clutched his leg in his two
hands.

Yes, his foreboding had not deceived him. He recognized him, it was he,
the “monster,” the “parricide.”

“Parricide!” the old man shouted so that the whole neighborhood could
hear, but he had not time to shout more, he fell at once, as though struck
by lightning.

Mitya jumped back into the garden and bent over the fallen man. In Mitya’s
hands was a brass pestle, and he flung it mechanically in the grass. The
pestle fell two paces from Grigory, not in the grass but on the path, in a
most conspicuous place. For some seconds he examined the prostrate figure
before him. The old man’s head was covered with blood. Mitya put out his
hand and began feeling it. He remembered afterwards clearly, that he had
been awfully anxious to make sure whether he had broken the old man’s
skull, or simply stunned him with the pestle. But the blood was flowing
horribly; and in a moment Mitya’s fingers were drenched with the hot
stream. He remembered taking out of his pocket the clean white
handkerchief with which he had provided himself for his visit to Madame
Hohlakov, and putting it to the old man’s head, senselessly trying to wipe
the blood from his face and temples. But the handkerchief was instantly
soaked with blood.

“Good heavens! what am I doing it for?” thought Mitya, suddenly pulling
himself together. “If I have broken his skull, how can I find out now? And
what difference does it make now?” he added, hopelessly. “If I’ve killed
him, I’ve killed him.... You’ve come to grief, old man, so there you must
lie!” he said aloud. And suddenly turning to the fence, he vaulted over it
into the lane and fell to running—the handkerchief soaked with blood he
held, crushed up in his right fist, and as he ran he thrust it into the
back pocket of his coat. He ran headlong, and the few passers-by who met
him in the dark, in the streets, remembered afterwards that they had met a
man running that night. He flew back again to the widow Morozov’s house.

Immediately after he had left it that evening, Fenya had rushed to the
chief porter, Nazar Ivanovitch, and besought him, for Christ’s sake, “not
to let the captain in again to-day or to-morrow.” Nazar Ivanovitch
promised, but went upstairs to his mistress who had suddenly sent for him,
and meeting his nephew, a boy of twenty, who had recently come from the
country, on the way up told him to take his place, but forgot to mention
“the captain.” Mitya, running up to the gate, knocked. The lad instantly
recognized him, for Mitya had more than once tipped him. Opening the gate
at once, he let him in, and hastened to inform him with a good-humored
smile that “Agrafena Alexandrovna is not at home now, you know.”

“Where is she then, Prohor?” asked Mitya, stopping short.

“She set off this evening, some two hours ago, with Timofey, to Mokroe.”

“What for?” cried Mitya.

“That I can’t say. To see some officer. Some one invited her and horses
were sent to fetch her.”

Mitya left him, and ran like a madman to Fenya.



Chapter V. A Sudden Resolution


She was sitting in the kitchen with her grandmother; they were both just
going to bed. Relying on Nazar Ivanovitch, they had not locked themselves
in. Mitya ran in, pounced on Fenya and seized her by the throat.

“Speak at once! Where is she? With whom is she now, at Mokroe?” he roared
furiously.

Both the women squealed.

“Aie! I’ll tell you. Aie! Dmitri Fyodorovitch, darling, I’ll tell you
everything directly, I won’t hide anything,” gabbled Fenya, frightened to
death; “she’s gone to Mokroe, to her officer.”

“What officer?” roared Mitya.

“To her officer, the same one she used to know, the one who threw her over
five years ago,” cackled Fenya, as fast as she could speak.

Mitya withdrew the hands with which he was squeezing her throat. He stood
facing her, pale as death, unable to utter a word, but his eyes showed
that he realized it all, all, from the first word, and guessed the whole
position. Poor Fenya was not in a condition at that moment to observe
whether he understood or not. She remained sitting on the trunk as she had
been when he ran into the room, trembling all over, holding her hands out
before her as though trying to defend herself. She seemed to have grown
rigid in that position. Her wide-opened, scared eyes were fixed immovably
upon him. And to make matters worse, both his hands were smeared with
blood. On the way, as he ran, he must have touched his forehead with them,
wiping off the perspiration, so that on his forehead and his right cheek
were blood-stained patches. Fenya was on the verge of hysterics. The old
cook had jumped up and was staring at him like a mad woman, almost
unconscious with terror.

Mitya stood for a moment, then mechanically sank on to a chair next to
Fenya. He sat, not reflecting but, as it were, terror-stricken, benumbed.
Yet everything was clear as day: that officer, he knew about him, he knew
everything perfectly, he had known it from Grushenka herself, had known
that a letter had come from him a month before. So that for a month, for a
whole month, this had been going on, a secret from him, till the very
arrival of this new man, and he had never thought of him! But how could
he, how could he not have thought of him? Why was it he had forgotten this
officer, like that, forgotten him as soon as he heard of him? That was the
question that faced him like some monstrous thing. And he looked at this
monstrous thing with horror, growing cold with horror.

But suddenly, as gently and mildly as a gentle and affectionate child, he
began speaking to Fenya as though he had utterly forgotten how he had
scared and hurt her just now. He fell to questioning Fenya with an extreme
preciseness, astonishing in his position, and though the girl looked
wildly at his blood-stained hands, she, too, with wonderful readiness and
rapidity, answered every question as though eager to put the whole truth
and nothing but the truth before him. Little by little, even with a sort
of enjoyment, she began explaining every detail, not wanting to torment
him, but, as it were, eager to be of the utmost service to him. She
described the whole of that day, in great detail, the visit of Rakitin and
Alyosha, how she, Fenya, had stood on the watch, how the mistress had set
off, and how she had called out of the window to Alyosha to give him,
Mitya, her greetings, and to tell him “to remember for ever how she had
loved him for an hour.”

Hearing of the message, Mitya suddenly smiled, and there was a flush of
color on his pale cheeks. At the same moment Fenya said to him, not a bit
afraid now to be inquisitive:

“Look at your hands, Dmitri Fyodorovitch. They’re all over blood!”

“Yes,” answered Mitya mechanically. He looked carelessly at his hands and
at once forgot them and Fenya’s question.

He sank into silence again. Twenty minutes had passed since he had run in.
His first horror was over, but evidently some new fixed determination had
taken possession of him. He suddenly stood up, smiling dreamily.

“What has happened to you, sir?” said Fenya, pointing to his hands again.
She spoke compassionately, as though she felt very near to him now in his
grief. Mitya looked at his hands again.

“That’s blood, Fenya,” he said, looking at her with a strange expression.
“That’s human blood, and my God! why was it shed? But ... Fenya ...
there’s a fence here” (he looked at her as though setting her a riddle),
“a high fence, and terrible to look at. But at dawn to-morrow, when the
sun rises, Mitya will leap over that fence.... You don’t understand what
fence, Fenya, and, never mind.... You’ll hear to-morrow and understand ...
and now, good-by. I won’t stand in her way. I’ll step aside, I know how to
step aside. Live, my joy.... You loved me for an hour, remember Mityenka
Karamazov so for ever.... She always used to call me Mityenka, do you
remember?”

And with those words he went suddenly out of the kitchen. Fenya was almost
more frightened at this sudden departure than she had been when he ran in
and attacked her.

Just ten minutes later Dmitri went in to Pyotr Ilyitch Perhotin, the young
official with whom he had pawned his pistols. It was by now half-past
eight, and Pyotr Ilyitch had finished his evening tea, and had just put
his coat on again to go to the “Metropolis” to play billiards. Mitya
caught him coming out.

Seeing him with his face all smeared with blood, the young man uttered a
cry of surprise.

“Good heavens! What is the matter?”

“I’ve come for my pistols,” said Mitya, “and brought you the money. And
thanks very much. I’m in a hurry, Pyotr Ilyitch, please make haste.”

Pyotr Ilyitch grew more and more surprised; he suddenly caught sight of a
bundle of bank-notes in Mitya’s hand, and what was more, he had walked in
holding the notes as no one walks in and no one carries money: he had them
in his right hand, and held them outstretched as if to show them.
Perhotin’s servant-boy, who met Mitya in the passage, said afterwards that
he walked into the passage in the same way, with the money outstretched in
his hand, so he must have been carrying them like that even in the
streets. They were all rainbow-colored hundred-rouble notes, and the
fingers holding them were covered with blood.

When Pyotr Ilyitch was questioned later on as to the sum of money, he said
that it was difficult to judge at a glance, but that it might have been
two thousand, or perhaps three, but it was a big, “fat” bundle. “Dmitri
Fyodorovitch,” so he testified afterwards, “seemed unlike himself, too;
not drunk, but, as it were, exalted, lost to everything, but at the same
time, as it were, absorbed, as though pondering and searching for
something and unable to come to a decision. He was in great haste,
answered abruptly and very strangely, and at moments seemed not at all
dejected but quite cheerful.”

“But what _is_ the matter with you? What’s wrong?” cried Pyotr Ilyitch,
looking wildly at his guest. “How is it that you’re all covered with
blood? Have you had a fall? Look at yourself!”

He took him by the elbow and led him to the glass.

Seeing his blood-stained face, Mitya started and scowled wrathfully.

“Damnation! That’s the last straw,” he muttered angrily, hurriedly
changing the notes from his right hand to the left, and impulsively jerked
the handkerchief out of his pocket. But the handkerchief turned out to be
soaked with blood, too (it was the handkerchief he had used to wipe
Grigory’s face). There was scarcely a white spot on it, and it had not
merely begun to dry, but had stiffened into a crumpled ball and could not
be pulled apart. Mitya threw it angrily on the floor.

“Oh, damn it!” he said. “Haven’t you a rag of some sort ... to wipe my
face?”

“So you’re only stained, not wounded? You’d better wash,” said Pyotr
Ilyitch. “Here’s a wash-stand. I’ll pour you out some water.”

“A wash-stand? That’s all right ... but where am I to put this?”

With the strangest perplexity he indicated his bundle of hundred-rouble
notes, looking inquiringly at Pyotr Ilyitch as though it were for him to
decide what he, Mitya, was to do with his own money.

“In your pocket, or on the table here. They won’t be lost.”

“In my pocket? Yes, in my pocket. All right.... But, I say, that’s all
nonsense,” he cried, as though suddenly coming out of his absorption.
“Look here, let’s first settle that business of the pistols. Give them
back to me. Here’s your money ... because I am in great need of them ...
and I haven’t a minute, a minute to spare.”

And taking the topmost note from the bundle he held it out to Pyotr
Ilyitch.

“But I shan’t have change enough. Haven’t you less?”

“No,” said Mitya, looking again at the bundle, and as though not trusting
his own words he turned over two or three of the topmost ones.

“No, they’re all alike,” he added, and again he looked inquiringly at
Pyotr Ilyitch.

“How have you grown so rich?” the latter asked. “Wait, I’ll send my boy to
Plotnikov’s, they close late—to see if they won’t change it. Here, Misha!”
he called into the passage.

“To Plotnikov’s shop—first-rate!” cried Mitya, as though struck by an
idea. “Misha,” he turned to the boy as he came in, “look here, run to
Plotnikov’s and tell them that Dmitri Fyodorovitch sends his greetings,
and will be there directly.... But listen, listen, tell them to have
champagne, three dozen bottles, ready before I come, and packed as it was
to take to Mokroe. I took four dozen with me then,” he added (suddenly
addressing Pyotr Ilyitch); “they know all about it, don’t you trouble,
Misha,” he turned again to the boy. “Stay, listen; tell them to put in
cheese, Strasburg pies, smoked fish, ham, caviare, and everything,
everything they’ve got, up to a hundred roubles, or a hundred and twenty
as before.... But wait: don’t let them forget dessert, sweets, pears,
water-melons, two or three or four—no, one melon’s enough, and chocolate,
candy, toffee, fondants; in fact, everything I took to Mokroe before,
three hundred roubles’ worth with the champagne ... let it be just the
same again. And remember, Misha, if you are called Misha—His name is
Misha, isn’t it?” He turned to Pyotr Ilyitch again.

“Wait a minute,” Protr Ilyitch intervened, listening and watching him
uneasily, “you’d better go yourself and tell them. He’ll muddle it.”

“He will, I see he will! Eh, Misha! Why, I was going to kiss you for the
commission.... If you don’t make a mistake, there’s ten roubles for you,
run along, make haste.... Champagne’s the chief thing, let them bring up
champagne. And brandy, too, and red and white wine, and all I had then....
They know what I had then.”

“But listen!” Pyotr Ilyitch interrupted with some impatience. “I say, let
him simply run and change the money and tell them not to close, and you go
and tell them.... Give him your note. Be off, Misha! Put your best leg
forward!”

Pyotr Ilyitch seemed to hurry Misha off on purpose, because the boy
remained standing with his mouth and eyes wide open, apparently
understanding little of Mitya’s orders, gazing up with amazement and
terror at his blood-stained face and the trembling bloodstained fingers
that held the notes.

“Well, now come and wash,” said Pyotr Ilyitch sternly. “Put the money on
the table or else in your pocket.... That’s right, come along. But take
off your coat.”

And beginning to help him off with his coat, he cried out again:

“Look, your coat’s covered with blood, too!”

“That ... it’s not the coat. It’s only a little here on the sleeve.... And
that’s only here where the handkerchief lay. It must have soaked through.
I must have sat on the handkerchief at Fenya’s, and the blood’s come
through,” Mitya explained at once with a childlike unconsciousness that
was astounding. Pyotr Ilyitch listened, frowning.

“Well, you must have been up to something; you must have been fighting
with some one,” he muttered.

They began to wash. Pyotr Ilyitch held the jug and poured out the water.
Mitya, in desperate haste, scarcely soaped his hands (they were trembling,
and Pyotr Ilyitch remembered it afterwards). But the young official
insisted on his soaping them thoroughly and rubbing them more. He seemed
to exercise more and more sway over Mitya, as time went on. It may be
noted in passing that he was a young man of sturdy character.

“Look, you haven’t got your nails clean. Now rub your face; here, on your
temples, by your ear.... Will you go in that shirt? Where are you going?
Look, all the cuff of your right sleeve is covered with blood.”

“Yes, it’s all bloody,” observed Mitya, looking at the cuff of his shirt.

“Then change your shirt.”

“I haven’t time. You see I’ll ...” Mitya went on with the same confiding
ingenuousness, drying his face and hands on the towel, and putting on his
coat. “I’ll turn it up at the wrist. It won’t be seen under the coat....
You see!”

“Tell me now, what game have you been up to? Have you been fighting with
some one? In the tavern again, as before? Have you been beating that
captain again?” Pyotr Ilyitch asked him reproachfully. “Whom have you been
beating now ... or killing, perhaps?”

“Nonsense!” said Mitya.

“Why ‘nonsense’?”

“Don’t worry,” said Mitya, and he suddenly laughed. “I smashed an old
woman in the market-place just now.”

“Smashed? An old woman?”

“An old man!” cried Mitya, looking Pyotr Ilyitch straight in the face,
laughing, and shouting at him as though he were deaf.

“Confound it! An old woman, an old man.... Have you killed some one?”

“We made it up. We had a row—and made it up. In a place I know of. We
parted friends. A fool.... He’s forgiven me.... He’s sure to have forgiven
me by now ... if he had got up, he wouldn’t have forgiven me”—Mitya
suddenly winked—“only damn him, you know, I say, Pyotr Ilyitch, damn him!
Don’t worry about him! I don’t want to just now!” Mitya snapped out,
resolutely.

“Whatever do you want to go picking quarrels with every one for? ... Just
as you did with that captain over some nonsense.... You’ve been fighting
and now you’re rushing off on the spree—that’s you all over! Three dozen
champagne—what do you want all that for?”

“Bravo! Now give me the pistols. Upon my honor I’ve no time now. I should
like to have a chat with you, my dear boy, but I haven’t the time. And
there’s no need, it’s too late for talking. Where’s my money? Where have I
put it?” he cried, thrusting his hands into his pockets.

“You put it on the table ... yourself.... Here it is. Had you forgotten?
Money’s like dirt or water to you, it seems. Here are your pistols. It’s
an odd thing, at six o’clock you pledged them for ten roubles, and now
you’ve got thousands. Two or three I should say.”

“Three, you bet,” laughed Mitya, stuffing the notes into the side-pocket
of his trousers.

“You’ll lose it like that. Have you found a gold-mine?”

“The mines? The gold-mines?” Mitya shouted at the top of his voice and
went off into a roar of laughter. “Would you like to go to the mines,
Perhotin? There’s a lady here who’ll stump up three thousand for you, if
only you’ll go. She did it for me, she’s so awfully fond of gold-mines. Do
you know Madame Hohlakov?”

“I don’t know her, but I’ve heard of her and seen her. Did she really give
you three thousand? Did she really?” said Pyotr Ilyitch, eyeing him
dubiously.

“As soon as the sun rises to-morrow, as soon as Phœbus, ever young, flies
upwards, praising and glorifying God, you go to her, this Madame Hohlakov,
and ask her whether she did stump up that three thousand or not. Try and
find out.”

“I don’t know on what terms you are ... since you say it so positively, I
suppose she did give it to you. You’ve got the money in your hand, but
instead of going to Siberia you’re spending it all.... Where are you
really off to now, eh?”

“To Mokroe.”

“To Mokroe? But it’s night!”

“Once the lad had all, now the lad has naught,” cried Mitya suddenly.

“How ‘naught’? You say that with all those thousands!”

“I’m not talking about thousands. Damn thousands! I’m talking of the
female character.


    Fickle is the heart of woman
    Treacherous and full of vice;


I agree with Ulysses. That’s what he says.”

“I don’t understand you!”

“Am I drunk?”

“Not drunk, but worse.”

“I’m drunk in spirit, Pyotr Ilyitch, drunk in spirit! But that’s enough!”

“What are you doing, loading the pistol?”

“I’m loading the pistol.”

Unfastening the pistol-case, Mitya actually opened the powder horn, and
carefully sprinkled and rammed in the charge. Then he took the bullet and,
before inserting it, held it in two fingers in front of the candle.

“Why are you looking at the bullet?” asked Pyotr Ilyitch, watching him
with uneasy curiosity.

“Oh, a fancy. Why, if you meant to put that bullet in your brain, would
you look at it or not?”

“Why look at it?”

“It’s going into my brain, so it’s interesting to look and see what it’s
like. But that’s foolishness, a moment’s foolishness. Now that’s done,” he
added, putting in the bullet and driving it home with the ramrod. “Pyotr
Ilyitch, my dear fellow, that’s nonsense, all nonsense, and if only you
knew what nonsense! Give me a little piece of paper now.”

“Here’s some paper.”

“No, a clean new piece, writing-paper. That’s right.”

And taking a pen from the table, Mitya rapidly wrote two lines, folded the
paper in four, and thrust it in his waistcoat pocket. He put the pistols
in the case, locked it up, and kept it in his hand. Then he looked at
Pyotr Ilyitch with a slow, thoughtful smile.

“Now, let’s go.”

“Where are we going? No, wait a minute.... Are you thinking of putting
that bullet in your brain, perhaps?” Pyotr Ilyitch asked uneasily.

“I was fooling about the bullet! I want to live. I love life! You may be
sure of that. I love golden-haired Phœbus and his warm light.... Dear
Pyotr Ilyitch, do you know how to step aside?”

“What do you mean by ‘stepping aside’?”

“Making way. Making way for a dear creature, and for one I hate. And to
let the one I hate become dear—that’s what making way means! And to say to
them: God bless you, go your way, pass on, while I—”

“While you—?”

“That’s enough, let’s go.”

“Upon my word. I’ll tell some one to prevent your going there,” said Pyotr
Ilyitch, looking at him. “What are you going to Mokroe for, now?”

“There’s a woman there, a woman. That’s enough for you. You shut up.”

“Listen, though you’re such a savage I’ve always liked you.... I feel
anxious.”

“Thanks, old fellow. I’m a savage you say. Savages, savages! That’s what I
am always saying. Savages! Why, here’s Misha! I was forgetting him.”

Misha ran in, post-haste, with a handful of notes in change, and reported
that every one was in a bustle at the Plotnikovs’; “They’re carrying down
the bottles, and the fish, and the tea; it will all be ready directly.”
Mitya seized ten roubles and handed it to Pyotr Ilyitch, then tossed
another ten-rouble note to Misha.

“Don’t dare to do such a thing!” cried Pyotr Ilyitch. “I won’t have it in
my house, it’s a bad, demoralizing habit. Put your money away. Here, put
it here, why waste it? It would come in handy to-morrow, and I dare say
you’ll be coming to me to borrow ten roubles again. Why do you keep
putting the notes in your side-pocket? Ah, you’ll lose them!”

“I say, my dear fellow, let’s go to Mokroe together.”

“What should I go for?”

“I say, let’s open a bottle at once, and drink to life! I want to drink,
and especially to drink with you. I’ve never drunk with you, have I?”

“Very well, we can go to the ‘Metropolis.’ I was just going there.”

“I haven’t time for that. Let’s drink at the Plotnikovs’, in the back
room. Shall I ask you a riddle?”

“Ask away.”

Mitya took the piece of paper out of his waistcoat pocket, unfolded it and
showed it. In a large, distinct hand was written: “I punish myself for my
whole life, my whole life I punish!”

“I will certainly speak to some one, I’ll go at once,” said Pyotr Ilyitch,
after reading the paper.

“You won’t have time, dear boy, come and have a drink. March!”

Plotnikov’s shop was at the corner of the street, next door but one to
Pyotr Ilyitch’s. It was the largest grocery shop in our town, and by no
means a bad one, belonging to some rich merchants. They kept everything
that could be got in a Petersburg shop, grocery of all sort, wines
“bottled by the brothers Eliseyev,” fruits, cigars, tea, coffee, sugar,
and so on. There were three shop-assistants and two errand boys always
employed. Though our part of the country had grown poorer, the landowners
had gone away, and trade had got worse, yet the grocery stores flourished
as before, every year with increasing prosperity; there were plenty of
purchasers for their goods.

They were awaiting Mitya with impatience in the shop. They had vivid
recollections of how he had bought, three or four weeks ago, wine and
goods of all sorts to the value of several hundred roubles, paid for in
cash (they would never have let him have anything on credit, of course).
They remembered that then, as now, he had had a bundle of hundred-rouble
notes in his hand, and had scattered them at random, without bargaining,
without reflecting, or caring to reflect what use so much wine and
provisions would be to him. The story was told all over the town that,
driving off then with Grushenka to Mokroe, he had “spent three thousand in
one night and the following day, and had come back from the spree without
a penny.” He had picked up a whole troop of gypsies (encamped in our
neighborhood at the time), who for two days got money without stint out of
him while he was drunk, and drank expensive wine without stint. People
used to tell, laughing at Mitya, how he had given champagne to
grimy-handed peasants, and feasted the village women and girls on sweets
and Strasburg pies. Though to laugh at Mitya to his face was rather a
risky proceeding, there was much laughter behind his back, especially in
the tavern, at his own ingenuous public avowal that all he had got out of
Grushenka by this “escapade” was “permission to kiss her foot, and that
was the utmost she had allowed him.”

By the time Mitya and Pyotr Ilyitch reached the shop, they found a cart
with three horses harnessed abreast with bells, and with Andrey, the
driver, ready waiting for Mitya at the entrance. In the shop they had
almost entirely finished packing one box of provisions, and were only
waiting for Mitya’s arrival to nail it down and put it in the cart. Pyotr
Ilyitch was astounded.

“Where did this cart come from in such a hurry?” he asked Mitya.

“I met Andrey as I ran to you, and told him to drive straight here to the
shop. There’s no time to lose. Last time I drove with Timofey, but Timofey
now has gone on before me with the witch. Shall we be very late, Andrey?”

“They’ll only get there an hour at most before us, not even that maybe. I
got Timofey ready to start. I know how he’ll go. Their pace won’t be ours,
Dmitri Fyodorovitch. How could it be? They won’t get there an hour
earlier!” Andrey, a lanky, red-haired, middle-aged driver, wearing a
full-skirted coat, and with a kaftan on his arm, replied warmly.

“Fifty roubles for vodka if we’re only an hour behind them.”

“I warrant the time, Dmitri Fyodorovitch. Ech, they won’t be half an hour
before us, let alone an hour.”

Though Mitya bustled about seeing after things, he gave his orders
strangely, as it were disconnectedly, and inconsecutively. He began a
sentence and forgot the end of it. Pyotr Ilyitch found himself obliged to
come to the rescue.

“Four hundred roubles’ worth, not less than four hundred roubles’ worth,
just as it was then,” commanded Mitya. “Four dozen champagne, not a bottle
less.”

“What do you want with so much? What’s it for? Stay!” cried Pyotr Ilyitch.
“What’s this box? What’s in it? Surely there isn’t four hundred roubles’
worth here?”

The officious shopmen began explaining with oily politeness that the first
box contained only half a dozen bottles of champagne, and only “the most
indispensable articles,” such as savories, sweets, toffee, etc. But the
main part of the goods ordered would be packed and sent off, as on the
previous occasion, in a special cart also with three horses traveling at
full speed, so that it would arrive not more than an hour later than
Dmitri Fyodorovitch himself.

“Not more than an hour! Not more than an hour! And put in more toffee and
fondants. The girls there are so fond of it,” Mitya insisted hotly.

“The fondants are all right. But what do you want with four dozen of
champagne? One would be enough,” said Pyotr Ilyitch, almost angry. He
began bargaining, asking for a bill of the goods, and refused to be
satisfied. But he only succeeded in saving a hundred roubles. In the end
it was agreed that only three hundred roubles’ worth should be sent.

“Well, you may go to the devil!” cried Pyotr Ilyitch, on second thoughts.
“What’s it to do with me? Throw away your money, since it’s cost you
nothing.”

“This way, my economist, this way, don’t be angry.” Mitya drew him into a
room at the back of the shop. “They’ll give us a bottle here directly.
We’ll taste it. Ech, Pyotr Ilyitch, come along with me, for you’re a nice
fellow, the sort I like.”

Mitya sat down on a wicker chair, before a little table, covered with a
dirty dinner-napkin. Pyotr Ilyitch sat down opposite, and the champagne
soon appeared, and oysters were suggested to the gentlemen. “First-class
oysters, the last lot in.”

“Hang the oysters. I don’t eat them. And we don’t need anything,” cried
Pyotr Ilyitch, almost angrily.

“There’s no time for oysters,” said Mitya. “And I’m not hungry. Do you
know, friend,” he said suddenly, with feeling, “I never have liked all
this disorder.”

“Who does like it? Three dozen of champagne for peasants, upon my word,
that’s enough to make any one angry!”

“That’s not what I mean. I’m talking of a higher order. There’s no order
in me, no higher order. But ... that’s all over. There’s no need to grieve
about it. It’s too late, damn it! My whole life has been disorder, and one
must set it in order. Is that a pun, eh?”

“You’re raving, not making puns!”


    “Glory be to God in Heaven,
    Glory be to God in me....


“That verse came from my heart once, it’s not a verse, but a tear.... I
made it myself ... not while I was pulling the captain’s beard,
though....”

“Why do you bring him in all of a sudden?”

“Why do I bring him in? Foolery! All things come to an end; all things are
made equal. That’s the long and short of it.”

“You know, I keep thinking of your pistols.”

“That’s all foolery, too! Drink, and don’t be fanciful. I love life. I’ve
loved life too much, shamefully much. Enough! Let’s drink to life, dear
boy, I propose the toast. Why am I pleased with myself? I’m a scoundrel,
but I’m satisfied with myself. And yet I’m tortured by the thought that
I’m a scoundrel, but satisfied with myself. I bless the creation. I’m
ready to bless God and His creation directly, but ... I must kill one
noxious insect for fear it should crawl and spoil life for others.... Let
us drink to life, dear brother. What can be more precious than life?
Nothing! To life, and to one queen of queens!”

“Let’s drink to life and to your queen, too, if you like.”

They drank a glass each. Although Mitya was excited and expansive, yet he
was melancholy, too. It was as though some heavy, overwhelming anxiety
were weighing upon him.

“Misha ... here’s your Misha come! Misha, come here, my boy, drink this
glass to Phœbus, the golden-haired, of to-morrow morn....”

“What are you giving it him for?” cried Pyotr Ilyitch, irritably.

“Yes, yes, yes, let me! I want to!”

“E—ech!”

Misha emptied the glass, bowed, and ran out.

“He’ll remember it afterwards,” Mitya remarked. “Woman, I love woman! What
is woman? The queen of creation! My heart is sad, my heart is sad, Pyotr
Ilyitch. Do you remember Hamlet? ‘I am very sorry, good Horatio! Alas,
poor Yorick!’ Perhaps that’s me, Yorick? Yes, I’m Yorick now, and a skull
afterwards.”

Pyotr Ilyitch listened in silence. Mitya, too, was silent for a while.

“What dog’s that you’ve got here?” he asked the shopman, casually,
noticing a pretty little lap-dog with dark eyes, sitting in the corner.

“It belongs to Varvara Alexyevna, the mistress,” answered the clerk. “She
brought it and forgot it here. It must be taken back to her.”

“I saw one like it ... in the regiment ...” murmured Mitya dreamily, “only
that one had its hind leg broken.... By the way, Pyotr Ilyitch, I wanted
to ask you: have you ever stolen anything in your life?”

“What a question!”

“Oh, I didn’t mean anything. From somebody’s pocket, you know. I don’t
mean government money, every one steals that, and no doubt you do,
too....”

“You go to the devil.”

“I’m talking of other people’s money. Stealing straight out of a pocket?
Out of a purse, eh?”

“I stole twenty copecks from my mother when I was nine years old. I took
it off the table on the sly, and held it tight in my hand.”

“Well, and what happened?”

“Oh, nothing. I kept it three days, then I felt ashamed, confessed, and
gave it back.”

“And what then?”

“Naturally I was whipped. But why do you ask? Have you stolen something?”

“I have,” said Mitya, winking slyly.

“What have you stolen?” inquired Pyotr Ilyitch curiously.

“I stole twenty copecks from my mother when I was nine years old, and gave
it back three days after.”

As he said this, Mitya suddenly got up.

“Dmitri Fyodorovitch, won’t you come now?” called Andrey from the door of
the shop.

“Are you ready? We’ll come!” Mitya started. “A few more last words
and—Andrey, a glass of vodka at starting. Give him some brandy as well!
That box” (the one with the pistols) “put under my seat. Good-by, Pyotr
Ilyitch, don’t remember evil against me.”

“But you’re coming back to-morrow?”

“Of course.”

“Will you settle the little bill now?” cried the clerk, springing forward.

“Oh, yes, the bill. Of course.”

He pulled the bundle of notes out of his pocket again, picked out three
hundred roubles, threw them on the counter, and ran hurriedly out of the
shop. Every one followed him out, bowing and wishing him good luck.
Andrey, coughing from the brandy he had just swallowed, jumped up on the
box. But Mitya was only just taking his seat when suddenly to his surprise
he saw Fenya before him. She ran up panting, clasped her hands before him
with a cry, and plumped down at his feet.

“Dmitri Fyodorovitch, dear good Dmitri Fyodorovitch, don’t harm my
mistress. And it was I told you all about it.... And don’t murder him, he
came first, he’s hers! He’ll marry Agrafena Alexandrovna now. That’s why
he’s come back from Siberia. Dmitri Fyodorovitch, dear, don’t take a
fellow creature’s life!”

“Tut—tut—tut! That’s it, is it? So you’re off there to make trouble!”
muttered Pyotr Ilyitch. “Now, it’s all clear, as clear as daylight. Dmitri
Fyodorovitch, give me your pistols at once if you mean to behave like a
man,” he shouted aloud to Mitya. “Do you hear, Dmitri?”

“The pistols? Wait a bit, brother, I’ll throw them into the pool on the
road,” answered Mitya. “Fenya, get up, don’t kneel to me. Mitya won’t hurt
any one, the silly fool won’t hurt any one again. But I say, Fenya,” he
shouted, after having taken his seat. “I hurt you just now, so forgive me
and have pity on me, forgive a scoundrel.... But it doesn’t matter if you
don’t. It’s all the same now. Now then, Andrey, look alive, fly along full
speed!”

Andrey whipped up the horses, and the bells began ringing.

“Good-by, Pyotr Ilyitch! My last tear is for you!...”

“He’s not drunk, but he keeps babbling like a lunatic,” Pyotr Ilyitch
thought as he watched him go. He had half a mind to stay and see the cart
packed with the remaining wines and provisions, knowing that they would
deceive and defraud Mitya. But, suddenly feeling vexed with himself, he
turned away with a curse and went to the tavern to play billiards.

“He’s a fool, though he’s a good fellow,” he muttered as he went. “I’ve
heard of that officer, Grushenka’s former flame. Well, if he has turned
up.... Ech, those pistols! Damn it all! I’m not his nurse! Let them do
what they like! Besides, it’ll all come to nothing. They’re a set of
brawlers, that’s all. They’ll drink and fight, fight and make friends
again. They are not men who do anything real. What does he mean by ‘I’m
stepping aside, I’m punishing myself?’ It’ll come to nothing! He’s shouted
such phrases a thousand times, drunk, in the taverns. But now he’s not
drunk. ‘Drunk in spirit’—they’re fond of fine phrases, the villains. Am I
his nurse? He must have been fighting, his face was all over blood. With
whom? I shall find out at the ‘Metropolis.’ And his handkerchief was
soaked in blood.... It’s still lying on my floor.... Hang it!”

He reached the tavern in a bad humor and at once made up a game. The game
cheered him. He played a second game, and suddenly began telling one of
his partners that Dmitri Karamazov had come in for some cash
again—something like three thousand roubles, and had gone to Mokroe again
to spend it with Grushenka.... This news roused singular interest in his
listeners. They all spoke of it, not laughing, but with a strange gravity.
They left off playing.

“Three thousand? But where can he have got three thousand?”

Questions were asked. The story of Madame Hohlakov’s present was received
with skepticism.

“Hasn’t he robbed his old father?—that’s the question.”

“Three thousand! There’s something odd about it.”

“He boasted aloud that he would kill his father; we all heard him, here.
And it was three thousand he talked about ...”

Pyotr Ilyitch listened. All at once he became short and dry in his
answers. He said not a word about the blood on Mitya’s face and hands,
though he had meant to speak of it at first.

They began a third game, and by degrees the talk about Mitya died away.
But by the end of the third game, Pyotr Ilyitch felt no more desire for
billiards; he laid down the cue, and without having supper as he had
intended, he walked out of the tavern. When he reached the market-place he
stood still in perplexity, wondering at himself. He realized that what he
wanted was to go to Fyodor Pavlovitch’s and find out if anything had
happened there. “On account of some stupid nonsense—as it’s sure to turn
out—am I going to wake up the household and make a scandal? Fooh! damn it,
is it my business to look after them?”

In a very bad humor he went straight home, and suddenly remembered Fenya.
“Damn it all! I ought to have questioned her just now,” he thought with
vexation, “I should have heard everything.” And the desire to speak to
her, and so find out, became so pressing and importunate that when he was
half-way home he turned abruptly and went towards the house where
Grushenka lodged. Going up to the gate he knocked. The sound of the knock
in the silence of the night sobered him and made him feel annoyed. And no
one answered him; every one in the house was asleep.

“And I shall be making a fuss!” he thought, with a feeling of positive
discomfort. But instead of going away altogether, he fell to knocking
again with all his might, filling the street with clamor.

“Not coming? Well, I will knock them up, I will!” he muttered at each
knock, fuming at himself, but at the same time he redoubled his knocks on
the gate.



Chapter VI. “I Am Coming, Too!”


But Dmitri Fyodorovitch was speeding along the road. It was a little more
than twenty versts to Mokroe, but Andrey’s three horses galloped at such a
pace that the distance might be covered in an hour and a quarter. The
swift motion revived Mitya. The air was fresh and cool, there were big
stars shining in the sky. It was the very night, and perhaps the very
hour, in which Alyosha fell on the earth, and rapturously swore to love it
for ever and ever.

All was confusion, confusion, in Mitya’s soul, but although many things
were goading his heart, at that moment his whole being was yearning for
her, his queen, to whom he was flying to look on her for the last time.
One thing I can say for certain; his heart did not waver for one instant.
I shall perhaps not be believed when I say that this jealous lover felt
not the slightest jealousy of this new rival, who seemed to have sprung
out of the earth. If any other had appeared on the scene, he would have
been jealous at once, and would perhaps have stained his fierce hands with
blood again. But as he flew through the night, he felt no envy, no
hostility even, for the man who had been her first lover.... It is true he
had not yet seen him.

“Here there was no room for dispute: it was her right and his; this was
her first love which, after five years, she had not forgotten; so she had
loved him only for those five years, and I, how do I come in? What right
have I? Step aside, Mitya, and make way! What am I now? Now everything is
over apart from the officer—even if he had not appeared, everything would
be over ...”

These words would roughly have expressed his feelings, if he had been
capable of reasoning. But he could not reason at that moment. His present
plan of action had arisen without reasoning. At Fenya’s first words, it
had sprung from feeling, and been adopted in a flash, with all its
consequences. And yet, in spite of his resolution, there was confusion in
his soul, an agonizing confusion: his resolution did not give him peace.
There was so much behind that tortured him. And it seemed strange to him,
at moments, to think that he had written his own sentence of death with
pen and paper: “I punish myself,” and the paper was lying there in his
pocket, ready; the pistol was loaded; he had already resolved how, next
morning, he would meet the first warm ray of “golden-haired Phœbus.”

And yet he could not be quit of the past, of all that he had left behind
and that tortured him. He felt that miserably, and the thought of it sank
into his heart with despair. There was one moment when he felt an impulse
to stop Andrey, to jump out of the cart, to pull out his loaded pistol,
and to make an end of everything without waiting for the dawn. But that
moment flew by like a spark. The horses galloped on, “devouring space,”
and as he drew near his goal, again the thought of her, of her alone, took
more and more complete possession of his soul, chasing away the fearful
images that had been haunting it. Oh, how he longed to look upon her, if
only for a moment, if only from a distance!

“She’s now with _him_,” he thought, “now I shall see what she looks like
with him, her first love, and that’s all I want.” Never had this woman,
who was such a fateful influence in his life, aroused such love in his
breast, such new and unknown feeling, surprising even to himself, a
feeling tender to devoutness, to self-effacement before her! “I will
efface myself!” he said, in a rush of almost hysterical ecstasy.

They had been galloping nearly an hour. Mitya was silent, and though
Andrey was, as a rule, a talkative peasant, he did not utter a word,
either. He seemed afraid to talk, he only whipped up smartly his three
lean, but mettlesome, bay horses. Suddenly Mitya cried out in horrible
anxiety:

“Andrey! What if they’re asleep?”

This thought fell upon him like a blow. It had not occurred to him before.

“It may well be that they’re gone to bed, by now, Dmitri Fyodorovitch.”

Mitya frowned as though in pain. Yes, indeed ... he was rushing there ...
with such feelings ... while they were asleep ... she was asleep, perhaps,
there too.... An angry feeling surged up in his heart.

“Drive on, Andrey! Whip them up! Look alive!” he cried, beside himself.

“But maybe they’re not in bed!” Andrey went on after a pause. “Timofey
said they were a lot of them there—”

“At the station?”

“Not at the posting-station, but at Plastunov’s, at the inn, where they
let out horses, too.”

“I know. So you say there are a lot of them? How’s that? Who are they?”
cried Mitya, greatly dismayed at this unexpected news.

“Well, Timofey was saying they’re all gentlefolk. Two from our town—who
they are I can’t say—and there are two others, strangers, maybe more
besides. I didn’t ask particularly. They’ve set to playing cards, so
Timofey said.”

“Cards?”

“So, maybe they’re not in bed if they’re at cards. It’s most likely not
more than eleven.”

“Quicker, Andrey! Quicker!” Mitya cried again, nervously.

“May I ask you something, sir?” said Andrey, after a pause. “Only I’m
afraid of angering you, sir.”

“What is it?”

“Why, Fenya threw herself at your feet just now, and begged you not to
harm her mistress, and some one else, too ... so you see, sir— It’s I am
taking you there ... forgive me, sir, it’s my conscience ... maybe it’s
stupid of me to speak of it—”

Mitya suddenly seized him by the shoulders from behind.

“Are you a driver?” he asked frantically.

“Yes, sir.”

“Then you know that one has to make way. What would you say to a driver
who wouldn’t make way for any one, but would just drive on and crush
people? No, a driver mustn’t run over people. One can’t run over a man.
One can’t spoil people’s lives. And if you have spoilt a life—punish
yourself.... If only you’ve spoilt, if only you’ve ruined any one’s
life—punish yourself and go away.”

These phrases burst from Mitya almost hysterically. Though Andrey was
surprised at him, he kept up the conversation.

“That’s right, Dmitri Fyodorovitch, you’re quite right, one mustn’t crush
or torment a man, or any kind of creature, for every creature is created
by God. Take a horse, for instance, for some folks, even among us drivers,
drive anyhow. Nothing will restrain them, they just force it along.”

“To hell?” Mitya interrupted, and went off into his abrupt, short laugh.
“Andrey, simple soul,” he seized him by the shoulders again, “tell me,
will Dmitri Fyodorovitch Karamazov go to hell, or not, what do you think?”

“I don’t know, darling, it depends on you, for you are ... you see, sir,
when the Son of God was nailed on the Cross and died, He went straight
down to hell from the Cross, and set free all sinners that were in agony.
And the devil groaned, because he thought that he would get no more
sinners in hell. And God said to him, then, ‘Don’t groan, for you shall
have all the mighty of the earth, the rulers, the chief judges, and the
rich men, and shall be filled up as you have been in all the ages till I
come again.’ Those were His very words ...”

“A peasant legend! Capital! Whip up the left, Andrey!”

“So you see, sir, who it is hell’s for,” said Andrey, whipping up the left
horse, “but you’re like a little child ... that’s how we look on you ...
and though you’re hasty-tempered, sir, yet God will forgive you for your
kind heart.”

“And you, do you forgive me, Andrey?”

“What should I forgive you for, sir? You’ve never done me any harm.”

“No, for every one, for every one, you here alone, on the road, will you
forgive me for every one? Speak, simple peasant heart!”

“Oh, sir! I feel afraid of driving you, your talk is so strange.”

But Mitya did not hear. He was frantically praying and muttering to
himself.

“Lord, receive me, with all my lawlessness, and do not condemn me. Let me
pass by Thy judgment ... do not condemn me, for I have condemned myself,
do not condemn me, for I love Thee, O Lord. I am a wretch, but I love
Thee. If Thou sendest me to hell, I shall love Thee there, and from there
I shall cry out that I love Thee for ever and ever.... But let me love to
the end.... Here and now for just five hours ... till the first light of
Thy day ... for I love the queen of my soul ... I love her and I cannot
help loving her. Thou seest my whole heart.... I shall gallop up, I shall
fall before her and say, ‘You are right to pass on and leave me. Farewell
and forget your victim ... never fret yourself about me!’ ”

“Mokroe!” cried Andrey, pointing ahead with his whip.

Through the pale darkness of the night loomed a solid black mass of
buildings, flung down, as it were, in the vast plain. The village of
Mokroe numbered two thousand inhabitants, but at that hour all were
asleep, and only here and there a few lights still twinkled.

“Drive on, Andrey, I come!” Mitya exclaimed, feverishly.

“They’re not asleep,” said Andrey again, pointing with his whip to the
Plastunovs’ inn, which was at the entrance to the village. The six
windows, looking on the street, were all brightly lighted up.

“They’re not asleep,” Mitya repeated joyously. “Quicker, Andrey! Gallop!
Drive up with a dash! Set the bells ringing! Let all know that I have
come. I’m coming! I’m coming, too!”

Andrey lashed his exhausted team into a gallop, drove with a dash and
pulled up his steaming, panting horses at the high flight of steps.

Mitya jumped out of the cart just as the innkeeper, on his way to bed,
peeped out from the steps curious to see who had arrived.

“Trifon Borissovitch, is that you?”

The innkeeper bent down, looked intently, ran down the steps, and rushed
up to the guest with obsequious delight.

“Dmitri Fyodorovitch, your honor! Do I see you again?”

Trifon Borissovitch was a thick-set, healthy peasant, of middle height,
with a rather fat face. His expression was severe and uncompromising,
especially with the peasants of Mokroe, but he had the power of assuming
the most obsequious countenance, when he had an inkling that it was to his
interest. He dressed in Russian style, with a shirt buttoning down on one
side, and a full-skirted coat. He had saved a good sum of money, but was
for ever dreaming of improving his position. More than half the peasants
were in his clutches, every one in the neighborhood was in debt to him.
From the neighboring landowners he bought and rented lands which were
worked by the peasants, in payment of debts which they could never shake
off. He was a widower, with four grown-up daughters. One of them was
already a widow and lived in the inn with her two children, his
grandchildren, and worked for him like a charwoman. Another of his
daughters was married to a petty official, and in one of the rooms of the
inn, on the wall could be seen, among the family photographs, a miniature
photograph of this official in uniform and official epaulettes. The two
younger daughters used to wear fashionable blue or green dresses, fitting
tight at the back, and with trains a yard long, on Church holidays or when
they went to pay visits. But next morning they would get up at dawn, as
usual, sweep out the rooms with a birch-broom, empty the slops, and clean
up after lodgers.

In spite of the thousands of roubles he had saved, Trifon Borissovitch was
very fond of emptying the pockets of a drunken guest, and remembering that
not a month ago he had, in twenty-four hours, made two if not three
hundred roubles out of Dmitri, when he had come on his escapade with
Grushenka, he met him now with eager welcome, scenting his prey the moment
Mitya drove up to the steps.

“Dmitri Fyodorovitch, dear sir, we see you once more!”

“Stay, Trifon Borissovitch,” began Mitya, “first and foremost, where is
she?”

“Agrafena Alexandrovna?” The inn-keeper understood at once, looking
sharply into Mitya’s face. “She’s here, too ...”

“With whom? With whom?”

“Some strangers. One is an official gentleman, a Pole, to judge from his
speech. He sent the horses for her from here; and there’s another with
him, a friend of his, or a fellow traveler, there’s no telling. They’re
dressed like civilians.”

“Well, are they feasting? Have they money?”

“Poor sort of a feast! Nothing to boast of, Dmitri Fyodorovitch.”

“Nothing to boast of? And who are the others?”

“They’re two gentlemen from the town.... They’ve come back from Tcherny,
and are putting up here. One’s quite a young gentleman, a relative of Mr.
Miüsov, he must be, but I’ve forgotten his name ... and I expect you know
the other, too, a gentleman called Maximov. He’s been on a pilgrimage, so
he says, to the monastery in the town. He’s traveling with this young
relation of Mr. Miüsov.”

“Is that all?”

“Yes.”

“Stay, listen, Trifon Borissovitch. Tell me the chief thing: What of her?
How is she?”

“Oh, she’s only just come. She’s sitting with them.”

“Is she cheerful? Is she laughing?”

“No, I think she’s not laughing much. She’s sitting quite dull. She’s
combing the young gentleman’s hair.”

“The Pole—the officer?”

“He’s not young, and he’s not an officer, either. Not him, sir. It’s the
young gentleman that’s Mr. Miüsov’s relation ... I’ve forgotten his name.”

“Kalganov.”

“That’s it, Kalganov!”

“All right. I’ll see for myself. Are they playing cards?”

“They have been playing, but they’ve left off. They’ve been drinking tea,
the official gentleman asked for liqueurs.”

“Stay, Trifon Borissovitch, stay, my good soul, I’ll see for myself. Now
answer one more question: are the gypsies here?”

“You can’t have the gypsies now, Dmitri Fyodorovitch. The authorities have
sent them away. But we’ve Jews that play the cymbals and the fiddle in the
village, so one might send for them. They’d come.”

“Send for them. Certainly send for them!” cried Mitya. “And you can get
the girls together as you did then, Marya especially, Stepanida, too, and
Arina. Two hundred roubles for a chorus!”

“Oh, for a sum like that I can get all the village together, though by now
they’re asleep. Are the peasants here worth such kindness, Dmitri
Fyodorovitch, or the girls either? To spend a sum like that on such
coarseness and rudeness! What’s the good of giving a peasant a cigar to
smoke, the stinking ruffian! And the girls are all lousy. Besides, I’ll
get my daughters up for nothing, let alone a sum like that. They’ve only
just gone to bed, I’ll give them a kick and set them singing for you. You
gave the peasants champagne to drink the other day, e—ech!”

For all his pretended compassion for Mitya, Trifon Borissovitch had hidden
half a dozen bottles of champagne on that last occasion, and had picked up
a hundred-rouble note under the table, and it had remained in his
clutches.

“Trifon Borissovitch, I sent more than one thousand flying last time I was
here. Do you remember?”

“You did send it flying. I may well remember. You must have left three
thousand behind you.”

“Well, I’ve come to do the same again, do you see?”

And he pulled out his roll of notes, and held them up before the
innkeeper’s nose.

“Now, listen and remember. In an hour’s time the wine will arrive,
savories, pies, and sweets—bring them all up at once. That box Andrey has
got is to be brought up at once, too. Open it, and hand champagne
immediately. And the girls, we must have the girls, Marya especially.”

He turned to the cart and pulled out the box of pistols.

“Here, Andrey, let’s settle. Here’s fifteen roubles for the drive, and
fifty for vodka ... for your readiness, for your love.... Remember
Karamazov!”

“I’m afraid, sir,” faltered Andrey. “Give me five roubles extra, but more
I won’t take. Trifon Borissovitch, bear witness. Forgive my foolish words
...”

“What are you afraid of?” asked Mitya, scanning him. “Well, go to the
devil, if that’s it!” he cried, flinging him five roubles. “Now, Trifon
Borissovitch, take me up quietly and let me first get a look at them, so
that they don’t see me. Where are they? In the blue room?”

Trifon Borissovitch looked apprehensively at Mitya, but at once obediently
did his bidding. Leading him into the passage, he went himself into the
first large room, adjoining that in which the visitors were sitting, and
took the light away. Then he stealthily led Mitya in, and put him in a
corner in the dark, whence he could freely watch the company without being
seen. But Mitya did not look long, and, indeed, he could not see them, he
saw her, his heart throbbed violently, and all was dark before his eyes.

She was sitting sideways to the table in a low chair, and beside her, on
the sofa, was the pretty youth, Kalganov. She was holding his hand and
seemed to be laughing, while he, seeming vexed and not looking at her, was
saying something in a loud voice to Maximov, who sat the other side of the
table, facing Grushenka. Maximov was laughing violently at something. On
the sofa sat _he_, and on a chair by the sofa there was another stranger.
The one on the sofa was lolling backwards, smoking a pipe, and Mitya had
an impression of a stoutish, broad-faced, short little man, who was
apparently angry about something. His friend, the other stranger, struck
Mitya as extraordinarily tall, but he could make out nothing more. He
caught his breath. He could not bear it for a minute, he put the
pistol-case on a chest, and with a throbbing heart he walked, feeling cold
all over, straight into the blue room to face the company.

“Aie!” shrieked Grushenka, the first to notice him.



Chapter VII. The First And Rightful Lover


With his long, rapid strides, Mitya walked straight up to the table.

“Gentlemen,” he said in a loud voice, almost shouting, yet stammering at
every word, “I ... I’m all right! Don’t be afraid!” he exclaimed,
“I—there’s nothing the matter,” he turned suddenly to Grushenka, who had
shrunk back in her chair towards Kalganov, and clasped his hand tightly.
“I ... I’m coming, too. I’m here till morning. Gentlemen, may I stay with
you till morning? Only till morning, for the last time, in this same
room?”

So he finished, turning to the fat little man, with the pipe, sitting on
the sofa. The latter removed his pipe from his lips with dignity and
observed severely:

“_Panie_, we’re here in private. There are other rooms.”

“Why, it’s you, Dmitri Fyodorovitch! What do you mean?” answered Kalganov
suddenly. “Sit down with us. How are you?”

“Delighted to see you, dear ... and precious fellow, I always thought a
lot of you.” Mitya responded, joyfully and eagerly, at once holding out
his hand across the table.

“Aie! How tight you squeeze! You’ve quite broken my fingers,” laughed
Kalganov.

“He always squeezes like that, always,” Grushenka put in gayly, with a
timid smile, seeming suddenly convinced from Mitya’s face that he was not
going to make a scene. She was watching him with intense curiosity and
still some uneasiness. She was impressed by something about him, and
indeed the last thing she expected of him was that he would come in and
speak like this at such a moment.

“Good evening,” Maximov ventured blandly on the left. Mitya rushed up to
him, too.

“Good evening. You’re here, too! How glad I am to find you here, too!
Gentlemen, gentlemen, I—” (He addressed the Polish gentleman with the pipe
again, evidently taking him for the most important person present.) “I
flew here.... I wanted to spend my last day, my last hour in this room, in
this very room ... where I, too, adored ... my queen.... Forgive me,
_panie_,” he cried wildly, “I flew here and vowed— Oh, don’t be afraid,
it’s my last night! Let’s drink to our good understanding. They’ll bring
the wine at once.... I brought this with me.” (Something made him pull out
his bundle of notes.) “Allow me, _panie_! I want to have music, singing, a
revel, as we had before. But the worm, the unnecessary worm, will crawl
away, and there’ll be no more of him. I will commemorate my day of joy on
my last night.”

He was almost choking. There was so much, so much he wanted to say, but
strange exclamations were all that came from his lips. The Pole gazed
fixedly at him, at the bundle of notes in his hand; looked at Grushenka,
and was in evident perplexity.

“If my suverin lady is permitting—” he was beginning.

“What does ‘suverin’ mean? ‘Sovereign,’ I suppose?” interrupted Grushenka.
“I can’t help laughing at you, the way you talk. Sit down, Mitya, what are
you talking about? Don’t frighten us, please. You won’t frighten us, will
you? If you won’t, I am glad to see you ...”

“Me, me frighten you?” cried Mitya, flinging up his hands. “Oh, pass me
by, go your way, I won’t hinder you!...”

And suddenly he surprised them all, and no doubt himself as well, by
flinging himself on a chair, and bursting into tears, turning his head
away to the opposite wall, while his arms clasped the back of the chair
tight, as though embracing it.

“Come, come, what a fellow you are!” cried Grushenka reproachfully.
“That’s just how he comes to see me—he begins talking, and I can’t make
out what he means. He cried like that once before, and now he’s crying
again! It’s shameful! Why are you crying? _As though you had anything to
cry for!_” she added enigmatically, emphasizing each word with some
irritability.

“I ... I’m not crying.... Well, good evening!” He instantly turned round
in his chair, and suddenly laughed, not his abrupt wooden laugh, but a
long, quivering, inaudible nervous laugh.

“Well, there you are again.... Come, cheer up, cheer up!” Grushenka said
to him persuasively. “I’m very glad you’ve come, very glad, Mitya, do you
hear, I’m very glad! I want him to stay here with us,” she said
peremptorily, addressing the whole company, though her words were
obviously meant for the man sitting on the sofa. “I wish it, I wish it!
And if he goes away I shall go, too!” she added with flashing eyes.

“What my queen commands is law!” pronounced the Pole, gallantly kissing
Grushenka’s hand. “I beg you, _panie_, to join our company,” he added
politely, addressing Mitya.

Mitya was jumping up with the obvious intention of delivering another
tirade, but the words did not come.

“Let’s drink, _panie_,” he blurted out instead of making a speech. Every
one laughed.

“Good heavens! I thought he was going to begin again!” Grushenka exclaimed
nervously. “Do you hear, Mitya,” she went on insistently, “don’t prance
about, but it’s nice you’ve brought the champagne. I want some myself, and
I can’t bear liqueurs. And best of all, you’ve come yourself. We were
fearfully dull here.... You’ve come for a spree again, I suppose? But put
your money in your pocket. Where did you get such a lot?”

Mitya had been, all this time, holding in his hand the crumpled bundle of
notes on which the eyes of all, especially of the Poles, were fixed. In
confusion he thrust them hurriedly into his pocket. He flushed. At that
moment the innkeeper brought in an uncorked bottle of champagne, and
glasses on a tray. Mitya snatched up the bottle, but he was so bewildered
that he did not know what to do with it. Kalganov took it from him and
poured out the champagne.

“Another! Another bottle!” Mitya cried to the innkeeper, and, forgetting
to clink glasses with the Pole whom he had so solemnly invited to drink to
their good understanding, he drank off his glass without waiting for any
one else. His whole countenance suddenly changed. The solemn and tragic
expression with which he had entered vanished completely, and a look of
something childlike came into his face. He seemed to have become suddenly
gentle and subdued. He looked shyly and happily at every one, with a
continual nervous little laugh, and the blissful expression of a dog who
has done wrong, been punished, and forgiven. He seemed to have forgotten
everything, and was looking round at every one with a childlike smile of
delight. He looked at Grushenka, laughing continually, and bringing his
chair close up to her. By degrees he had gained some idea of the two
Poles, though he had formed no definite conception of them yet.

The Pole on the sofa struck him by his dignified demeanor and his Polish
accent; and, above all, by his pipe. “Well, what of it? It’s a good thing
he’s smoking a pipe,” he reflected. The Pole’s puffy, middle-aged face,
with its tiny nose and two very thin, pointed, dyed and impudent-looking
mustaches, had not so far roused the faintest doubts in Mitya. He was not
even particularly struck by the Pole’s absurd wig made in Siberia, with
love-locks foolishly combed forward over the temples. “I suppose it’s all
right since he wears a wig,” he went on, musing blissfully. The other,
younger Pole, who was staring insolently and defiantly at the company and
listening to the conversation with silent contempt, still only impressed
Mitya by his great height, which was in striking contrast to the Pole on
the sofa. “If he stood up he’d be six foot three.” The thought flitted
through Mitya’s mind. It occurred to him, too, that this Pole must be the
friend of the other, as it were, a “bodyguard,” and no doubt the big Pole
was at the disposal of the little Pole with the pipe. But this all seemed
to Mitya perfectly right and not to be questioned. In his mood of doglike
submissiveness all feeling of rivalry had died away.

Grushenka’s mood and the enigmatic tone of some of her words he completely
failed to grasp. All he understood, with thrilling heart, was that she was
kind to him, that she had forgiven him, and made him sit by her. He was
beside himself with delight, watching her sip her glass of champagne. The
silence of the company seemed somehow to strike him, however, and he
looked round at every one with expectant eyes.

“Why are we sitting here though, gentlemen? Why don’t you begin doing
something?” his smiling eyes seemed to ask.

“He keeps talking nonsense, and we were all laughing,” Kalganov began
suddenly, as though divining his thought, and pointing to Maximov.

Mitya immediately stared at Kalganov and then at Maximov.

“He’s talking nonsense?” he laughed, his short, wooden laugh, seeming
suddenly delighted at something—“ha ha!”

“Yes. Would you believe it, he will have it that all our cavalry officers
in the twenties married Polish women. That’s awful rot, isn’t it?”

“Polish women?” repeated Mitya, perfectly ecstatic.

Kalganov was well aware of Mitya’s attitude to Grushenka, and he guessed
about the Pole, too, but that did not so much interest him, perhaps did
not interest him at all; what he was interested in was Maximov. He had
come here with Maximov by chance, and he met the Poles here at the inn for
the first time in his life. Grushenka he knew before, and had once been
with some one to see her; but she had not taken to him. But here she
looked at him very affectionately: before Mitya’s arrival, she had been
making much of him, but he seemed somehow to be unmoved by it. He was a
boy, not over twenty, dressed like a dandy, with a very charming
fair-skinned face, and splendid thick, fair hair. From his fair face
looked out beautiful pale blue eyes, with an intelligent and sometimes
even deep expression, beyond his age indeed, although the young man
sometimes looked and talked quite like a child, and was not at all ashamed
of it, even when he was aware of it himself. As a rule he was very
willful, even capricious, though always friendly. Sometimes there was
something fixed and obstinate in his expression. He would look at you and
listen, seeming all the while to be persistently dreaming over something
else. Often he was listless and lazy, at other times he would grow
excited, sometimes, apparently, over the most trivial matters.

“Only imagine, I’ve been taking him about with me for the last four days,”
he went on, indolently drawling his words, quite naturally though, without
the slightest affectation. “Ever since your brother, do you remember,
shoved him off the carriage and sent him flying. That made me take an
interest in him at the time, and I took him into the country, but he keeps
talking such rot I’m ashamed to be with him. I’m taking him back.”

“The gentleman has not seen Polish ladies, and says what is impossible,”
the Pole with the pipe observed to Maximov.

He spoke Russian fairly well, much better, anyway, than he pretended. If
he used Russian words, he always distorted them into a Polish form.

“But I was married to a Polish lady myself,” tittered Maximov.

“But did you serve in the cavalry? You were talking about the cavalry.
Were you a cavalry officer?” put in Kalganov at once.

“Was he a cavalry officer indeed? Ha ha!” cried Mitya, listening eagerly,
and turning his inquiring eyes to each as he spoke, as though there were
no knowing what he might hear from each.

“No, you see,” Maximov turned to him. “What I mean is that those pretty
Polish ladies ... when they danced the mazurka with our Uhlans ... when
one of them dances a mazurka with a Uhlan she jumps on his knee like a
kitten ... a little white one ... and the _pan_-father and _pan_-mother
look on and allow it.... They allow it ... and next day the Uhlan comes
and offers her his hand.... That’s how it is ... offers her his hand, he
he!” Maximov ended, tittering.

“The _pan_ is a _lajdak_!” the tall Pole on the chair growled suddenly and
crossed one leg over the other. Mitya’s eye was caught by his huge greased
boot, with its thick, dirty sole. The dress of both the Poles looked
rather greasy.

“Well, now it’s _lajdak_! What’s he scolding about?” said Grushenka,
suddenly vexed.

“_Pani_ Agrippina, what the gentleman saw in Poland were servant girls,
and not ladies of good birth,” the Pole with the pipe observed to
Grushenka.

“You can reckon on that,” the tall Pole snapped contemptuously.

“What next! Let him talk! People talk, why hinder them? It makes it
cheerful,” Grushenka said crossly.

“I’m not hindering them, _pani_,” said the Pole in the wig, with a long
look at Grushenka, and relapsing into dignified silence he sucked his pipe
again.

“No, no. The Polish gentleman spoke the truth.” Kalganov got excited
again, as though it were a question of vast import. “He’s never been in
Poland, so how can he talk about it? I suppose you weren’t married in
Poland, were you?”

“No, in the Province of Smolensk. Only, a Uhlan had brought her to Russia
before that, my future wife, with her mamma and her aunt, and another
female relation with a grown-up son. He brought her straight from Poland
and gave her up to me. He was a lieutenant in our regiment, a very nice
young man. At first he meant to marry her himself. But he didn’t marry
her, because she turned out to be lame.”

“So you married a lame woman?” cried Kalganov.

“Yes. They both deceived me a little bit at the time, and concealed it. I
thought she was hopping; she kept hopping.... I thought it was for fun.”

“So pleased she was going to marry you!” yelled Kalganov, in a ringing,
childish voice.

“Yes, so pleased. But it turned out to be quite a different cause.
Afterwards, when we were married, after the wedding, that very evening,
she confessed, and very touchingly asked forgiveness. ‘I once jumped over
a puddle when I was a child,’ she said, ‘and injured my leg.’ He he!”

Kalganov went off into the most childish laughter, almost falling on the
sofa. Grushenka, too, laughed. Mitya was at the pinnacle of happiness.

“Do you know, that’s the truth, he’s not lying now,” exclaimed Kalganov,
turning to Mitya; “and do you know, he’s been married twice; it’s his
first wife he’s talking about. But his second wife, do you know, ran away,
and is alive now.”

“Is it possible?” said Mitya, turning quickly to Maximov with an
expression of the utmost astonishment.

“Yes. She did run away. I’ve had that unpleasant experience,” Maximov
modestly assented, “with a _monsieur_. And what was worse, she’d had all
my little property transferred to her beforehand. ‘You’re an educated
man,’ she said to me. ‘You can always get your living.’ She settled my
business with that. A venerable bishop once said to me: ‘One of your wives
was lame, but the other was too light-footed.’ He he!”

“Listen, listen!” cried Kalganov, bubbling over, “if he’s telling lies—and
he often is—he’s only doing it to amuse us all. There’s no harm in that,
is there? You know, I sometimes like him. He’s awfully low, but it’s
natural to him, eh? Don’t you think so? Some people are low from
self-interest, but he’s simply so, from nature. Only fancy, he claims (he
was arguing about it all the way yesterday) that Gogol wrote _Dead Souls_
about him. Do you remember, there’s a landowner called Maximov in it, whom
Nozdryov thrashed. He was charged, do you remember, ‘for inflicting bodily
injury with rods on the landowner Maximov in a drunken condition.’ Would
you believe it, he claims that he was that Maximov and that he was beaten!
Now can it be so? Tchitchikov made his journey, at the very latest, at the
beginning of the twenties, so that the dates don’t fit. He couldn’t have
been thrashed then, he couldn’t, could he?”

It was difficult to imagine what Kalganov was excited about, but his
excitement was genuine. Mitya followed his lead without protest.

“Well, but if they did thrash him!” he cried, laughing.

“It’s not that they thrashed me exactly, but what I mean is—” put in
Maximov.

“What do you mean? Either they thrashed you or they didn’t.”

“What o’clock is it, _panie_?” the Pole, with the pipe, asked his tall
friend, with a bored expression. The other shrugged his shoulders in
reply. Neither of them had a watch.

“Why not talk? Let other people talk. Mustn’t other people talk because
you’re bored?” Grushenka flew at him with evident intention of finding
fault. Something seemed for the first time to flash upon Mitya’s mind.
This time the Pole answered with unmistakable irritability.

“_Pani_, I didn’t oppose it. I didn’t say anything.”

“All right then. Come, tell us your story,” Grushenka cried to Maximov.
“Why are you all silent?”

“There’s nothing to tell, it’s all so foolish,” answered Maximov at once,
with evident satisfaction, mincing a little. “Besides, all that’s by way
of allegory in Gogol, for he’s made all the names have a meaning. Nozdryov
was really called Nosov, and Kuvshinikov had quite a different name, he
was called Shkvornev. Fenardi really was called Fenardi, only he wasn’t an
Italian but a Russian, and Mamsel Fenardi was a pretty girl with her
pretty little legs in tights, and she had a little short skirt with
spangles, and she kept turning round and round, only not for four hours
but for four minutes only, and she bewitched every one...”

“But what were you beaten for?” cried Kalganov.

“For Piron!” answered Maximov.

“What Piron?” cried Mitya.

“The famous French writer, Piron. We were all drinking then, a big party
of us, in a tavern at that very fair. They’d invited me, and first of all
I began quoting epigrams. ‘Is that you, Boileau? What a funny get-up!’ and
Boileau answers that he’s going to a masquerade, that is to the baths, he
he! And they took it to themselves, so I made haste to repeat another,
very sarcastic, well known to all educated people:


    Yes, Sappho and Phaon are we!
    But one grief is weighing on me.
    You don’t know your way to the sea!


They were still more offended and began abusing me in the most unseemly
way for it. And as ill-luck would have it, to set things right, I began
telling a very cultivated anecdote about Piron, how he was not accepted
into the French Academy, and to revenge himself wrote his own epitaph:


    Ci-gît Piron qui ne fut rien,
    Pas même académicien.


They seized me and thrashed me.”

“But what for? What for?”

“For my education. People can thrash a man for anything,” Maximov
concluded, briefly and sententiously.

“Eh, that’s enough! That’s all stupid, I don’t want to listen. I thought
it would be amusing,” Grushenka cut them short, suddenly.

Mitya started, and at once left off laughing. The tall Pole rose upon his
feet, and with the haughty air of a man, bored and out of his element,
began pacing from corner to corner of the room, his hands behind his back.

“Ah, he can’t sit still,” said Grushenka, looking at him contemptuously.
Mitya began to feel anxious. He noticed besides, that the Pole on the sofa
was looking at him with an irritable expression.

“_Panie!_” cried Mitya, “let’s drink! and the other _pan_, too! Let us
drink.”

In a flash he had pulled three glasses towards him, and filled them with
champagne.

“To Poland, _panovie_, I drink to your Poland!” cried Mitya.

“I shall be delighted, _panie_,” said the Pole on the sofa, with dignity
and affable condescension, and he took his glass.

“And the other _pan_, what’s his name? Drink, most illustrious, take your
glass!” Mitya urged.

“Pan Vrublevsky,” put in the Pole on the sofa.

Pan Vrublevsky came up to the table, swaying as he walked.

“To Poland, _panovie!_” cried Mitya, raising his glass. “Hurrah!”

All three drank. Mitya seized the bottle and again poured out three
glasses.

“Now to Russia, _panovie_, and let us be brothers!”

“Pour out some for us,” said Grushenka; “I’ll drink to Russia, too!”

“So will I,” said Kalganov.

“And I would, too ... to Russia, the old grandmother!” tittered Maximov.

“All! All!” cried Mitya. “Trifon Borissovitch, some more bottles!”

The other three bottles Mitya had brought with him were put on the table.
Mitya filled the glasses.

“To Russia! Hurrah!” he shouted again. All drank the toast except the
Poles, and Grushenka tossed off her whole glass at once. The Poles did not
touch theirs.

“How’s this, _panovie_?” cried Mitya, “won’t you drink it?”

Pan Vrublevsky took the glass, raised it and said with a resonant voice:

“To Russia as she was before 1772.”

“Come, that’s better!” cried the other Pole, and they both emptied their
glasses at once.

“You’re fools, you _panovie_,” broke suddenly from Mitya.

“_Panie!_” shouted both the Poles, menacingly, setting on Mitya like a
couple of cocks. Pan Vrublevsky was specially furious.

“Can one help loving one’s own country?” he shouted.

“Be silent! Don’t quarrel! I won’t have any quarreling!” cried Grushenka
imperiously, and she stamped her foot on the floor. Her face glowed, her
eyes were shining. The effects of the glass she had just drunk were
apparent. Mitya was terribly alarmed.

“_Panovie_, forgive me! It was my fault, I’m sorry. Vrublevsky, _panie_
Vrublevsky, I’m sorry.”

“Hold your tongue, you, anyway! Sit down, you stupid!” Grushenka scolded
with angry annoyance.

Every one sat down, all were silent, looking at one another.

“Gentlemen, I was the cause of it all,” Mitya began again, unable to make
anything of Grushenka’s words. “Come, why are we sitting here? What shall
we do ... to amuse ourselves again?”

“Ach, it’s certainly anything but amusing!” Kalganov mumbled lazily.

“Let’s play faro again, as we did just now,” Maximov tittered suddenly.

“Faro? Splendid!” cried Mitya. “If only the _panovie_—”

“It’s lite, _panovie_,” the Pole on the sofa responded, as it were
unwillingly.

“That’s true,” assented Pan Vrublevsky.

“Lite? What do you mean by ‘lite’?” asked Grushenka.

“Late, _pani_! ‘a late hour’ I mean,” the Pole on the sofa explained.

“It’s always late with them. They can never do anything!” Grushenka almost
shrieked in her anger. “They’re dull themselves, so they want others to be
dull. Before you came, Mitya, they were just as silent and kept turning up
their noses at me.”

“My goddess!” cried the Pole on the sofa, “I see you’re not well-disposed
to me, that’s why I’m gloomy. I’m ready, _panie_,” added he, addressing
Mitya.

“Begin, _panie_,” Mitya assented, pulling his notes out of his pocket, and
laying two hundred-rouble notes on the table. “I want to lose a lot to
you. Take your cards. Make the bank.”

“We’ll have cards from the landlord, _panie_,” said the little Pole,
gravely and emphatically.

“That’s much the best way,” chimed in Pan Vrublevsky.

“From the landlord? Very good, I understand, let’s get them from him.
Cards!” Mitya shouted to the landlord.

The landlord brought in a new, unopened pack, and informed Mitya that the
girls were getting ready, and that the Jews with the cymbals would most
likely be here soon; but the cart with the provisions had not yet arrived.
Mitya jumped up from the table and ran into the next room to give orders,
but only three girls had arrived, and Marya was not there yet. And he did
not know himself what orders to give and why he had run out. He only told
them to take out of the box the presents for the girls, the sweets, the
toffee and the fondants. “And vodka for Andrey, vodka for Andrey!” he
cried in haste. “I was rude to Andrey!”

Suddenly Maximov, who had followed him out, touched him on the shoulder.

“Give me five roubles,” he whispered to Mitya. “I’ll stake something at
faro, too, he he!”

“Capital! Splendid! Take ten, here!”

Again he took all the notes out of his pocket and picked out one for ten
roubles. “And if you lose that, come again, come again.”

“Very good,” Maximov whispered joyfully, and he ran back again. Mitya,
too, returned, apologizing for having kept them waiting. The Poles had
already sat down, and opened the pack. They looked much more amiable,
almost cordial. The Pole on the sofa had lighted another pipe and was
preparing to throw. He wore an air of solemnity.

“To your places, gentlemen,” cried Pan Vrublevsky.

“No, I’m not going to play any more,” observed Kalganov, “I’ve lost fifty
roubles to them just now.”

“The _pan_ had no luck, perhaps he’ll be lucky this time,” the Pole on the
sofa observed in his direction.

“How much in the bank? To correspond?” asked Mitya.

“That’s according, _panie_, maybe a hundred, maybe two hundred, as much as
you will stake.”

“A million!” laughed Mitya.

“The Pan Captain has heard of Pan Podvysotsky, perhaps?”

“What Podvysotsky?”

“In Warsaw there was a bank and any one comes and stakes against it.
Podvysotsky comes, sees a thousand gold pieces, stakes against the bank.
The banker says, ‘_Panie_ Podvysotsky, are you laying down the gold, or
must we trust to your honor?’ ‘To my honor, _panie_,’ says Podvysotsky.
‘So much the better.’ The banker throws the dice. Podvysotsky wins. ‘Take
it, _panie_,’ says the banker, and pulling out the drawer he gives him a
million. ‘Take it, _panie_, this is your gain.’ There was a million in the
bank. ‘I didn’t know that,’ says Podvysotsky. ‘_Panie_ Podvysotsky,’ said
the banker, ‘you pledged your honor and we pledged ours.’ Podvysotsky took
the million.”

“That’s not true,” said Kalganov.

“_Panie_ Kalganov, in gentlemanly society one doesn’t say such things.”

“As if a Polish gambler would give away a million!” cried Mitya, but
checked himself at once. “Forgive me, _panie_, it’s my fault again, he
would, he would give away a million, for honor, for Polish honor. You see
how I talk Polish, ha ha! Here, I stake ten roubles, the knave leads.”

“And I put a rouble on the queen, the queen of hearts, the pretty little
_panienotchka_, he he!” laughed Maximov, pulling out his queen, and, as
though trying to conceal it from every one, he moved right up and crossed
himself hurriedly under the table. Mitya won. The rouble won, too.

“A corner!” cried Mitya.

“I’ll bet another rouble, a ‘single’ stake,” Maximov muttered gleefully,
hugely delighted at having won a rouble.

“Lost!” shouted Mitya. “A ‘double’ on the seven!”

The seven too was trumped.

“Stop!” cried Kalganov suddenly.

“Double! Double!” Mitya doubled his stakes, and each time he doubled the
stake, the card he doubled was trumped by the Poles. The rouble stakes
kept winning.

“On the double!” shouted Mitya furiously.

“You’ve lost two hundred, _panie_. Will you stake another hundred?” the
Pole on the sofa inquired.

“What? Lost two hundred already? Then another two hundred! All doubles!”

And pulling his money out of his pocket, Mitya was about to fling two
hundred roubles on the queen, but Kalganov covered it with his hand.

“That’s enough!” he shouted in his ringing voice.

“What’s the matter?” Mitya stared at him.

“That’s enough! I don’t want you to play any more. Don’t!”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t. Hang it, come away. That’s why. I won’t let you go on
playing.”

Mitya gazed at him in astonishment.

“Give it up, Mitya. He may be right. You’ve lost a lot as it is,” said
Grushenka, with a curious note in her voice. Both the Poles rose from
their seats with a deeply offended air.

“Are you joking, _panie_?” said the short man, looking severely at
Kalganov.

“How dare you!” Pan Vrublevsky, too, growled at Kalganov.

“Don’t dare to shout like that,” cried Grushenka. “Ah, you turkey-cocks!”

Mitya looked at each of them in turn. But something in Grushenka’s face
suddenly struck him, and at the same instant something new flashed into
his mind—a strange new thought!

“_Pani_ Agrippina,” the little Pole was beginning, crimson with anger,
when Mitya suddenly went up to him and slapped him on the shoulder.

“Most illustrious, two words with you.”

“What do you want?”

“In the next room, I’ve two words to say to you, something pleasant, very
pleasant. You’ll be glad to hear it.”

The little _pan_ was taken aback and looked apprehensively at Mitya. He
agreed at once, however, on condition that Pan Vrublevsky went with them.

“The bodyguard? Let him come, and I want him, too. I must have him!” cried
Mitya. “March, _panovie_!”

“Where are you going?” asked Grushenka, anxiously.

“We’ll be back in one moment,” answered Mitya.

There was a sort of boldness, a sudden confidence shining in his eyes. His
face had looked very different when he entered the room an hour before.

He led the Poles, not into the large room where the chorus of girls was
assembling and the table was being laid, but into the bedroom on the
right, where the trunks and packages were kept, and there were two large
beds, with pyramids of cotton pillows on each. There was a lighted candle
on a small deal table in the corner. The small man and Mitya sat down to
this table, facing each other, while the huge Vrublevsky stood beside
them, his hands behind his back. The Poles looked severe but were
evidently inquisitive.

“What can I do for you, _panie_?” lisped the little Pole.

“Well, look here, _panie_, I won’t keep you long. There’s money for you,”
he pulled out his notes. “Would you like three thousand? Take it and go
your way.”

The Pole gazed open-eyed at Mitya, with a searching look.

“Three thousand, _panie_?” He exchanged glances with Vrublevsky.

“Three, _panovie_, three! Listen, _panie_, I see you’re a sensible man.
Take three thousand and go to the devil, and Vrublevsky with you—d’you
hear? But, at once, this very minute, and for ever. You understand that,
_panie_, for ever. Here’s the door, you go out of it. What have you got
there, a great-coat, a fur coat? I’ll bring it out to you. They’ll get the
horses out directly, and then—good-by, _panie_!”

Mitya awaited an answer with assurance. He had no doubts. An expression of
extraordinary resolution passed over the Pole’s face.

“And the money, _panie_?”

“The money, _panie_? Five hundred roubles I’ll give you this moment for
the journey, and as a first installment, and two thousand five hundred
to-morrow, in the town—I swear on my honor, I’ll get it, I’ll get it at
any cost!” cried Mitya.

The Poles exchanged glances again. The short man’s face looked more
forbidding.

“Seven hundred, seven hundred, not five hundred, at once, this minute,
cash down!” Mitya added, feeling something wrong. “What’s the matter,
_panie_? Don’t you trust me? I can’t give you the whole three thousand
straight off. If I give it, you may come back to her to-morrow....
Besides, I haven’t the three thousand with me. I’ve got it at home in the
town,” faltered Mitya, his spirit sinking at every word he uttered. “Upon
my word, the money’s there, hidden.”

In an instant an extraordinary sense of personal dignity showed itself in
the little man’s face.

“What next?” he asked ironically. “For shame!” and he spat on the floor.
Pan Vrublevsky spat too.

“You do that, _panie_,” said Mitya, recognizing with despair that all was
over, “because you hope to make more out of Grushenka? You’re a couple of
capons, that’s what you are!”

“This is a mortal insult!” The little Pole turned as red as a crab, and he
went out of the room, briskly, as though unwilling to hear another word.
Vrublevsky swung out after him, and Mitya followed, confused and
crestfallen. He was afraid of Grushenka, afraid that the _pan_ would at
once raise an outcry. And so indeed he did. The Pole walked into the room
and threw himself in a theatrical attitude before Grushenka.

“_Pani_ Agrippina, I have received a mortal insult!” he exclaimed. But
Grushenka suddenly lost all patience, as though they had wounded her in
the tenderest spot.

“Speak Russian! Speak Russian!” she cried, “not another word of Polish!
You used to talk Russian. You can’t have forgotten it in five years.”

She was red with passion.

“_Pani_ Agrippina—”

“My name’s Agrafena, Grushenka, speak Russian or I won’t listen!”

The Pole gasped with offended dignity, and quickly and pompously delivered
himself in broken Russian:

“_Pani_ Agrafena, I came here to forget the past and forgive it, to forget
all that has happened till to-day—”

“Forgive? Came here to forgive me?” Grushenka cut him short, jumping up
from her seat.

“Just so, _pani_, I’m not pusillanimous, I’m magnanimous. But I was
astounded when I saw your lovers. Pan Mitya offered me three thousand, in
the other room to depart. I spat in the _pan’s_ face.”

“What? He offered you money for me?” cried Grushenka, hysterically. “Is it
true, Mitya? How dare you? Am I for sale?”

“_Panie, panie!_” yelled Mitya, “she’s pure and shining, and I have never
been her lover! That’s a lie....”

“How dare you defend me to him?” shrieked Grushenka. “It wasn’t virtue
kept me pure, and it wasn’t that I was afraid of Kuzma, but that I might
hold up my head when I met him, and tell him he’s a scoundrel. And he did
actually refuse the money?”

“He took it! He took it!” cried Mitya; “only he wanted to get the whole
three thousand at once, and I could only give him seven hundred straight
off.”

“I see: he heard I had money, and came here to marry me!”

“_Pani_ Agrippina!” cried the little Pole. “I’m—a knight, I’m—a nobleman,
and not a _lajdak_. I came here to make you my wife and I find you a
different woman, perverse and shameless.”

“Oh, go back where you came from! I’ll tell them to turn you out and
you’ll be turned out,” cried Grushenka, furious. “I’ve been a fool, a
fool, to have been miserable these five years! And it wasn’t for his sake,
it was my anger made me miserable. And this isn’t he at all! Was he like
this? It might be his father! Where did you get your wig from? He was a
falcon, but this is a gander. He used to laugh and sing to me.... And I’ve
been crying for five years, damned fool, abject, shameless I was!”

She sank back in her low chair and hid her face in her hands. At that
instant the chorus of Mokroe began singing in the room on the left—a
rollicking dance song.

“A regular Sodom!” Vrublevsky roared suddenly. “Landlord, send the
shameless hussies away!”

The landlord, who had been for some time past inquisitively peeping in at
the door, hearing shouts and guessing that his guests were quarreling, at
once entered the room.

“What are you shouting for? D’you want to split your throat?” he said,
addressing Vrublevsky, with surprising rudeness.

“Animal!” bellowed Pan Vrublevsky.

“Animal? And what sort of cards were you playing with just now? I gave you
a pack and you hid it. You played with marked cards! I could send you to
Siberia for playing with false cards, d’you know that, for it’s just the
same as false banknotes....”

And going up to the sofa he thrust his fingers between the sofa back and
the cushion, and pulled out an unopened pack of cards.

“Here’s my pack unopened!”

He held it up and showed it to all in the room. “From where I stood I saw
him slip my pack away, and put his in place of it—you’re a cheat and not a
gentleman!”

“And I twice saw the _pan_ change a card!” cried Kalganov.

“How shameful! How shameful!” exclaimed Grushenka, clasping her hands, and
blushing for genuine shame. “Good Lord, he’s come to that!”

“I thought so, too!” said Mitya. But before he had uttered the words,
Vrublevsky, with a confused and infuriated face, shook his fist at
Grushenka, shouting:

“You low harlot!”

Mitya flew at him at once, clutched him in both hands, lifted him in the
air, and in one instant had carried him into the room on the right, from
which they had just come.

“I’ve laid him on the floor, there,” he announced, returning at once,
gasping with excitement. “He’s struggling, the scoundrel! But he won’t
come back, no fear of that!...”

He closed one half of the folding doors, and holding the other ajar called
out to the little Pole:

“Most illustrious, will you be pleased to retire as well?”

“My dear Dmitri Fyodorovitch,” said Trifon Borissovitch, “make them give
you back the money you lost. It’s as good as stolen from you.”

“I don’t want my fifty roubles back,” Kalganov declared suddenly.

“I don’t want my two hundred, either,” cried Mitya, “I wouldn’t take it
for anything! Let him keep it as a consolation.”

“Bravo, Mitya! You’re a trump, Mitya!” cried Grushenka, and there was a
note of fierce anger in the exclamation.

The little _pan_, crimson with fury but still mindful of his dignity, was
making for the door, but he stopped short and said suddenly, addressing
Grushenka:

“_Pani_, if you want to come with me, come. If not, good-by.”

And swelling with indignation and importance he went to the door. This was
a man of character: he had so good an opinion of himself that after all
that had passed, he still expected that she would marry him. Mitya slammed
the door after him.

“Lock it,” said Kalganov. But the key clicked on the other side, they had
locked it from within.

“That’s capital!” exclaimed Grushenka relentlessly. “Serve them right!”



Chapter VIII. Delirium


What followed was almost an orgy, a feast to which all were welcome.
Grushenka was the first to call for wine.

“I want to drink. I want to be quite drunk, as we were before. Do you
remember, Mitya, do you remember how we made friends here last time!”

Mitya himself was almost delirious, feeling that his happiness was at
hand. But Grushenka was continually sending him away from her.

“Go and enjoy yourself. Tell them to dance, to make merry, ‘let the stove
and cottage dance’; as we had it last time,” she kept exclaiming. She was
tremendously excited. And Mitya hastened to obey her. The chorus were in
the next room. The room in which they had been sitting till that moment
was too small, and was divided in two by cotton curtains, behind which was
a huge bed with a puffy feather mattress and a pyramid of cotton pillows.
In the four rooms for visitors there were beds. Grushenka settled herself
just at the door. Mitya set an easy chair for her. She had sat in the same
place to watch the dancing and singing “the time before,” when they had
made merry there. All the girls who had come had been there then; the
Jewish band with fiddles and zithers had come, too, and at last the long
expected cart had arrived with the wines and provisions.

Mitya bustled about. All sorts of people began coming into the room to
look on, peasants and their women, who had been roused from sleep and
attracted by the hopes of another marvelous entertainment such as they had
enjoyed a month before. Mitya remembered their faces, greeting and
embracing every one he knew. He uncorked bottles and poured out wine for
every one who presented himself. Only the girls were very eager for the
champagne. The men preferred rum, brandy, and, above all, hot punch. Mitya
had chocolate made for all the girls, and ordered that three samovars
should be kept boiling all night to provide tea and punch for everyone to
help himself.

An absurd chaotic confusion followed, but Mitya was in his natural
element, and the more foolish it became, the more his spirits rose. If the
peasants had asked him for money at that moment, he would have pulled out
his notes and given them away right and left. This was probably why the
landlord, Trifon Borissovitch, kept hovering about Mitya to protect him.
He seemed to have given up all idea of going to bed that night; but he
drank little, only one glass of punch, and kept a sharp look-out on
Mitya’s interests after his own fashion. He intervened in the nick of
time, civilly and obsequiously persuading Mitya not to give away “cigars
and Rhine wine,” and, above all, money to the peasants as he had done
before. He was very indignant, too, at the peasant girls drinking liqueur,
and eating sweets.

“They’re a lousy lot, Dmitri Fyodorovitch,” he said. “I’d give them a
kick, every one of them, and they’d take it as an honor—that’s all they’re
worth!”

Mitya remembered Andrey again, and ordered punch to be sent out to him. “I
was rude to him just now,” he repeated with a sinking, softened voice.
Kalganov did not want to drink, and at first did not care for the girls’
singing; but after he had drunk a couple of glasses of champagne he became
extraordinarily lively, strolling about the room, laughing and praising
the music and the songs, admiring every one and everything. Maximov,
blissfully drunk, never left his side. Grushenka, too, was beginning to
get drunk. Pointing to Kalganov, she said to Mitya:

“What a dear, charming boy he is!”

And Mitya, delighted, ran to kiss Kalganov and Maximov. Oh, great were his
hopes! She had said nothing yet, and seemed, indeed, purposely to refrain
from speaking. But she looked at him from time to time with caressing and
passionate eyes. At last she suddenly gripped his hand and drew him
vigorously to her. She was sitting at the moment in the low chair by the
door.

“How was it you came just now, eh? Have you walked in!... I was
frightened. So you wanted to give me up to him, did you? Did you really
want to?”

“I didn’t want to spoil your happiness!” Mitya faltered blissfully. But
she did not need his answer.

“Well, go and enjoy yourself ...” she sent him away once more. “Don’t cry,
I’ll call you back again.”

He would run away, and she listened to the singing and looked at the
dancing, though her eyes followed him wherever he went. But in another
quarter of an hour she would call him once more and again he would run
back to her.

“Come, sit beside me, tell me, how did you hear about me, and my coming
here yesterday? From whom did you first hear it?”

And Mitya began telling her all about it, disconnectedly, incoherently,
feverishly. He spoke strangely, often frowning, and stopping abruptly.

“What are you frowning at?” she asked.

“Nothing.... I left a man ill there. I’d give ten years of my life for him
to get well, to know he was all right!”

“Well, never mind him, if he’s ill. So you meant to shoot yourself
to-morrow! What a silly boy! What for? I like such reckless fellows as
you,” she lisped, with a rather halting tongue. “So you would go any
length for me, eh? Did you really mean to shoot yourself to-morrow, you
stupid? No, wait a little. To-morrow I may have something to say to
you.... I won’t say it to-day, but to-morrow. You’d like it to be to-day?
No, I don’t want to to-day. Come, go along now, go and amuse yourself.”

Once, however, she called him, as it were, puzzled and uneasy.

“Why are you sad? I see you’re sad.... Yes, I see it,” she added, looking
intently into his eyes. “Though you keep kissing the peasants and
shouting, I see something. No, be merry. I’m merry; you be merry, too....
I love somebody here. Guess who it is. Ah, look, my boy has fallen asleep,
poor dear, he’s drunk.”

She meant Kalganov. He was, in fact, drunk, and had dropped asleep for a
moment, sitting on the sofa. But he was not merely drowsy from drink; he
felt suddenly dejected, or, as he said, “bored.” He was intensely
depressed by the girls’ songs, which, as the drinking went on, gradually
became coarse and more reckless. And the dances were as bad. Two girls
dressed up as bears, and a lively girl, called Stepanida, with a stick in
her hand, acted the part of keeper, and began to “show them.”

“Look alive, Marya, or you’ll get the stick!”

The bears rolled on the ground at last in the most unseemly fashion, amid
roars of laughter from the closely-packed crowd of men and women.

“Well, let them! Let them!” said Grushenka sententiously, with an ecstatic
expression on her face. “When they do get a day to enjoy themselves, why
shouldn’t folks be happy?”

Kalganov looked as though he had been besmirched with dirt.

“It’s swinish, all this peasant foolery,” he murmured, moving away; “it’s
the game they play when it’s light all night in summer.”

He particularly disliked one “new” song to a jaunty dance-tune. It
described how a gentleman came and tried his luck with the girls, to see
whether they would love him:


    The master came to try the girls:
    Would they love him, would they not?


But the girls could not love the master:


    He would beat me cruelly
    And such love won’t do for me.


Then a gypsy comes along and he, too, tries:


    The gypsy came to try the girls:
    Would they love him, would they not?


But they couldn’t love the gypsy either:


    He would be a thief, I fear,
    And would cause me many a tear.


And many more men come to try their luck, among them a soldier:


    The soldier came to try the girls:
    Would they love him, would they not?


But the soldier is rejected with contempt, in two indecent lines, sung
with absolute frankness and producing a furore in the audience. The song
ends with a merchant:


    The merchant came to try the girls:
    Would they love him, would they not?


And it appears that he wins their love because:


    The merchant will make gold for me
    And his queen I’ll gladly be.


Kalvanov was positively indignant.

“That’s just a song of yesterday,” he said aloud. “Who writes such things
for them? They might just as well have had a railwayman or a Jew come to
try his luck with the girls; they’d have carried all before them.”

And, almost as though it were a personal affront, he declared, on the
spot, that he was bored, sat down on the sofa and immediately fell asleep.
His pretty little face looked rather pale, as it fell back on the sofa
cushion.

“Look how pretty he is,” said Grushenka, taking Mitya up to him. “I was
combing his hair just now; his hair’s like flax, and so thick....”

And, bending over him tenderly, she kissed his forehead. Kalganov
instantly opened his eyes, looked at her, stood up, and with the most
anxious air inquired where was Maximov?

“So that’s who it is you want.” Grushenka laughed. “Stay with me a minute.
Mitya, run and find his Maximov.”

Maximov, it appeared, could not tear himself away from the girls, only
running away from time to time to pour himself out a glass of liqueur. He
had drunk two cups of chocolate. His face was red, and his nose was
crimson; his eyes were moist and mawkishly sweet. He ran up and announced
that he was going to dance the “sabotière.”

“They taught me all those well-bred, aristocratic dances when I was
little....”

“Go, go with him, Mitya, and I’ll watch from here how he dances,” said
Grushenka.

“No, no, I’m coming to look on, too,” exclaimed Kalganov, brushing aside
in the most naïve way Grushenka’s offer to sit with him. They all went to
look on. Maximov danced his dance. But it roused no great admiration in
any one but Mitya. It consisted of nothing but skipping and hopping,
kicking up the feet, and at every skip Maximov slapped the upturned sole
of his foot. Kalganov did not like it at all, but Mitya kissed the dancer.

“Thanks. You’re tired perhaps? What are you looking for here? Would you
like some sweets? A cigar, perhaps?”

“A cigarette.”

“Don’t you want a drink?”

“I’ll just have a liqueur.... Have you any chocolates?”

“Yes, there’s a heap of them on the table there. Choose one, my dear
soul!”

“I like one with vanilla ... for old people. He he!”

“No, brother, we’ve none of that special sort.”

“I say,” the old man bent down to whisper in Mitya’s ear. “That girl
there, little Marya, he he! How would it be if you were to help me make
friends with her?”

“So that’s what you’re after! No, brother, that won’t do!”

“I’d do no harm to any one,” Maximov muttered disconsolately.

“Oh, all right, all right. They only come here to dance and sing, you
know, brother. But damn it all, wait a bit!... Eat and drink and be merry,
meanwhile. Don’t you want money?”

“Later on, perhaps,” smiled Maximov.

“All right, all right....”

Mitya’s head was burning. He went outside to the wooden balcony which ran
round the whole building on the inner side, overlooking the courtyard. The
fresh air revived him. He stood alone in a dark corner, and suddenly
clutched his head in both hands. His scattered thoughts came together; his
sensations blended into a whole and threw a sudden light into his mind. A
fearful and terrible light! “If I’m to shoot myself, why not now?” passed
through his mind. “Why not go for the pistols, bring them here, and here,
in this dark dirty corner, make an end?” Almost a minute he stood,
undecided. A few hours earlier, when he had been dashing here, he was
pursued by disgrace, by the theft he had committed, and that blood, that
blood!... But yet it was easier for him then. Then everything was over: he
had lost her, given her up. She was gone, for him—oh, then his death
sentence had been easier for him; at least it had seemed necessary,
inevitable, for what had he to stay on earth for?

But now? Was it the same as then? Now one phantom, one terror at least was
at an end: that first, rightful lover, that fateful figure had vanished,
leaving no trace. The terrible phantom had turned into something so small,
so comic; it had been carried into the bedroom and locked in. It would
never return. She was ashamed, and from her eyes he could see now whom she
loved. Now he had everything to make life happy ... but he could not go on
living, he could not; oh, damnation! “O God! restore to life the man I
knocked down at the fence! Let this fearful cup pass from me! Lord, thou
hast wrought miracles for such sinners as me! But what, what if the old
man’s alive? Oh, then the shame of the other disgrace I would wipe away. I
would restore the stolen money. I’d give it back; I’d get it somehow....
No trace of that shame will remain except in my heart for ever! But no,
no; oh, impossible cowardly dreams! Oh, damnation!”

Yet there was a ray of light and hope in his darkness. He jumped up and
ran back to the room—to her, to her, his queen for ever! Was not one
moment of her love worth all the rest of life, even in the agonies of
disgrace? This wild question clutched at his heart. “To her, to her alone,
to see her, to hear her, to think of nothing, to forget everything, if
only for that night, for an hour, for a moment!” Just as he turned from
the balcony into the passage, he came upon the landlord, Trifon
Borissovitch. He thought he looked gloomy and worried, and fancied he had
come to find him.

“What is it, Trifon Borissovitch? are you looking for me?”

“No, sir.” The landlord seemed disconcerted. “Why should I be looking for
you? Where have you been?”

“Why do you look so glum? You’re not angry, are you? Wait a bit, you shall
soon get to bed.... What’s the time?”

“It’ll be three o’clock. Past three, it must be.”

“We’ll leave off soon. We’ll leave off.”

“Don’t mention it; it doesn’t matter. Keep it up as long as you like....”

“What’s the matter with him?” Mitya wondered for an instant, and he ran
back to the room where the girls were dancing. But she was not there. She
was not in the blue room either; there was no one but Kalganov asleep on
the sofa. Mitya peeped behind the curtain—she was there. She was sitting
in the corner, on a trunk. Bent forward, with her head and arms on the bed
close by, she was crying bitterly, doing her utmost to stifle her sobs
that she might not be heard. Seeing Mitya, she beckoned him to her, and
when he ran to her, she grasped his hand tightly.

“Mitya, Mitya, I loved him, you know. How I have loved him these five
years, all that time! Did I love him or only my own anger? No, him, him!
It’s a lie that it was my anger I loved and not him. Mitya, I was only
seventeen then; he was so kind to me, so merry; he used to sing to me....
Or so it seemed to a silly girl like me.... And now, O Lord, it’s not the
same man. Even his face is not the same; he’s different altogether. I
shouldn’t have known him. I drove here with Timofey, and all the way I was
thinking how I should meet him, what I should say to him, how we should
look at one another. My soul was faint, and all of a sudden it was just as
though he had emptied a pail of dirty water over me. He talked to me like
a schoolmaster, all so grave and learned; he met me so solemnly that I was
struck dumb. I couldn’t get a word in. At first I thought he was ashamed
to talk before his great big Pole. I sat staring at him and wondering why
I couldn’t say a word to him now. It must have been his wife that ruined
him; you know he threw me up to get married. She must have changed him
like that. Mitya, how shameful it is! Oh, Mitya, I’m ashamed, I’m ashamed
for all my life. Curse it, curse it, curse those five years!”

And again she burst into tears, but clung tight to Mitya’s hand and did
not let it go.

“Mitya, darling, stay, don’t go away. I want to say one word to you,” she
whispered, and suddenly raised her face to him. “Listen, tell me who it is
I love? I love one man here. Who is that man? That’s what you must tell
me.”

A smile lighted up her face that was swollen with weeping, and her eyes
shone in the half darkness.

“A falcon flew in, and my heart sank. ‘Fool! that’s the man you love!’
That was what my heart whispered to me at once. You came in and all grew
bright. What’s he afraid of? I wondered. For you were frightened; you
couldn’t speak. It’s not them he’s afraid of—could you be frightened of
any one? It’s me he’s afraid of, I thought, only me. So Fenya told you,
you little stupid, how I called to Alyosha out of the window that I’d
loved Mityenka for one hour, and that I was going now to love ... another.
Mitya, Mitya, how could I be such a fool as to think I could love any one
after you? Do you forgive me, Mitya? Do you forgive me or not? Do you love
me? Do you love me?” She jumped up and held him with both hands on his
shoulders. Mitya, dumb with rapture, gazed into her eyes, at her face, at
her smile, and suddenly clasped her tightly in his arms and kissed her
passionately.

“You will forgive me for having tormented you? It was through spite I
tormented you all. It was for spite I drove the old man out of his
mind.... Do you remember how you drank at my house one day and broke the
wine-glass? I remembered that and I broke a glass to-day and drank ‘to my
vile heart.’ Mitya, my falcon, why don’t you kiss me? He kissed me once,
and now he draws back and looks and listens. Why listen to me? Kiss me,
kiss me hard, that’s right. If you love, well, then, love! I’ll be your
slave now, your slave for the rest of my life. It’s sweet to be a slave.
Kiss me! Beat me, ill-treat me, do what you will with me.... And I do
deserve to suffer. Stay, wait, afterwards, I won’t have that....” she
suddenly thrust him away. “Go along, Mitya, I’ll come and have some wine,
I want to be drunk, I’m going to get drunk and dance; I must, I must!” She
tore herself away from him and disappeared behind the curtain. Mitya
followed like a drunken man.

“Yes, come what may—whatever may happen now, for one minute I’d give the
whole world,” he thought. Grushenka did, in fact, toss off a whole glass
of champagne at one gulp, and became at once very tipsy. She sat down in
the same chair as before, with a blissful smile on her face. Her cheeks
were glowing, her lips were burning, her flashing eyes were moist; there
was passionate appeal in her eyes. Even Kalganov felt a stir at the heart
and went up to her.

“Did you feel how I kissed you when you were asleep just now?” she said
thickly. “I’m drunk now, that’s what it is.... And aren’t you drunk? And
why isn’t Mitya drinking? Why don’t you drink, Mitya? I’m drunk, and you
don’t drink....”

“I am drunk! I’m drunk as it is ... drunk with you ... and now I’ll be
drunk with wine, too.”

He drank off another glass, and—he thought it strange himself—that glass
made him completely drunk. He was suddenly drunk, although till that
moment he had been quite sober, he remembered that. From that moment
everything whirled about him, as though he were delirious. He walked,
laughed, talked to everybody, without knowing what he was doing. Only one
persistent burning sensation made itself felt continually, “like a red-hot
coal in his heart,” he said afterwards. He went up to her, sat beside her,
gazed at her, listened to her.... She became very talkative, kept calling
every one to her, and beckoned to different girls out of the chorus. When
the girl came up, she either kissed her, or made the sign of the cross
over her. In another minute she might have cried. She was greatly amused
by the “little old man,” as she called Maximov. He ran up every minute to
kiss her hands, “each little finger,” and finally he danced another dance
to an old song, which he sang himself. He danced with special vigor to the
refrain:


    The little pig says—umph! umph! umph!
    The little calf says—moo, moo, moo,
    The little duck says—quack, quack, quack,
    The little goose says—ga, ga, ga.
    The hen goes strutting through the porch;
    Troo-roo-roo-roo-roo, she’ll say,
    Troo-roo-roo-roo-roo, she’ll say!


“Give him something, Mitya,” said Grushenka. “Give him a present, he’s
poor, you know. Ah, the poor, the insulted!... Do you know, Mitya, I shall
go into a nunnery. No, I really shall one day, Alyosha said something to
me to-day that I shall remember all my life.... Yes.... But to-day let us
dance. To-morrow to the nunnery, but to-day we’ll dance. I want to play
to-day, good people, and what of it? God will forgive us. If I were God,
I’d forgive every one: ‘My dear sinners, from this day forth I forgive
you.’ I’m going to beg forgiveness: ‘Forgive me, good people, a silly
wench.’ I’m a beast, that’s what I am. But I want to pray. I gave a little
onion. Wicked as I’ve been, I want to pray. Mitya, let them dance, don’t
stop them. Every one in the world is good. Every one—even the worst of
them. The world’s a nice place. Though we’re bad the world’s all right.
We’re good and bad, good and bad.... Come, tell me, I’ve something to ask
you: come here every one, and I’ll ask you: Why am I so good? You know I
am good. I’m very good.... Come, why am I so good?”

So Grushenka babbled on, getting more and more drunk. At last she
announced that she was going to dance, too. She got up from her chair,
staggering. “Mitya, don’t give me any more wine—if I ask you, don’t give
it to me. Wine doesn’t give peace. Everything’s going round, the stove,
and everything. I want to dance. Let every one see how I dance ... let
them see how beautifully I dance....”

She really meant it. She pulled a white cambric handkerchief out of her
pocket, and took it by one corner in her right hand, to wave it in the
dance. Mitya ran to and fro, the girls were quiet, and got ready to break
into a dancing song at the first signal. Maximov, hearing that Grushenka
wanted to dance, squealed with delight, and ran skipping about in front of
her, humming:


    With legs so slim and sides so trim
    And its little tail curled tight.


But Grushenka waved her handkerchief at him and drove him away.

“Sh-h! Mitya, why don’t they come? Let every one come ... to look on. Call
them in, too, that were locked in.... Why did you lock them in? Tell them
I’m going to dance. Let them look on, too....”

Mitya walked with a drunken swagger to the locked door, and began knocking
to the Poles with his fist.

“Hi, you ... Podvysotskys! Come, she’s going to dance. She calls you.”

“_Lajdak!_” one of the Poles shouted in reply.

“You’re a _lajdak_ yourself! You’re a little scoundrel, that’s what you
are.”

“Leave off laughing at Poland,” said Kalganov sententiously. He too was
drunk.

“Be quiet, boy! If I call him a scoundrel, it doesn’t mean that I called
all Poland so. One _lajdak_ doesn’t make a Poland. Be quiet, my pretty
boy, eat a sweetmeat.”

“Ach, what fellows! As though they were not men. Why won’t they make
friends?” said Grushenka, and went forward to dance. The chorus broke into
“Ah, my porch, my new porch!” Grushenka flung back her head, half opened
her lips, smiled, waved her handkerchief, and suddenly, with a violent
lurch, stood still in the middle of the room, looking bewildered.

“I’m weak....” she said in an exhausted voice. “Forgive me.... I’m weak, I
can’t.... I’m sorry.”

She bowed to the chorus, and then began bowing in all directions.

“I’m sorry.... Forgive me....”

“The lady’s been drinking. The pretty lady has been drinking,” voices were
heard saying.

“The lady’s drunk too much,” Maximov explained to the girls, giggling.

“Mitya, lead me away ... take me,” said Grushenka helplessly. Mitya
pounced on her, snatched her up in his arms, and carried the precious
burden through the curtains.

“Well, now I’ll go,” thought Kalganov, and walking out of the blue room,
he closed the two halves of the door after him. But the orgy in the larger
room went on and grew louder and louder. Mitya laid Grushenka on the bed
and kissed her on the lips.

“Don’t touch me....” she faltered, in an imploring voice. “Don’t touch me,
till I’m yours.... I’ve told you I’m yours, but don’t touch me ... spare
me.... With them here, with them close, you mustn’t. He’s here. It’s nasty
here....”

“I’ll obey you! I won’t think of it ... I worship you!” muttered Mitya.
“Yes, it’s nasty here, it’s abominable.”

And still holding her in his arms, he sank on his knees by the bedside.

“I know, though you’re a brute, you’re generous,” Grushenka articulated
with difficulty. “It must be honorable ... it shall be honorable for the
future ... and let us be honest, let us be good, not brutes, but good ...
take me away, take me far away, do you hear? I don’t want it to be here,
but far, far away....”

“Oh, yes, yes, it must be!” said Mitya, pressing her in his arms. “I’ll
take you and we’ll fly away.... Oh, I’d give my whole life for one year
only to know about that blood!”

“What blood?” asked Grushenka, bewildered.

“Nothing,” muttered Mitya, through his teeth. “Grusha, you wanted to be
honest, but I’m a thief. But I’ve stolen money from Katya.... Disgrace, a
disgrace!”

“From Katya, from that young lady? No, you didn’t steal it. Give it her
back, take it from me.... Why make a fuss? Now everything of mine is
yours. What does money matter? We shall waste it anyway.... Folks like us
are bound to waste money. But we’d better go and work the land. I want to
dig the earth with my own hands. We must work, do you hear? Alyosha said
so. I won’t be your mistress, I’ll be faithful to you, I’ll be your slave,
I’ll work for you. We’ll go to the young lady and bow down to her
together, so that she may forgive us, and then we’ll go away. And if she
won’t forgive us, we’ll go, anyway. Take her her money and love me....
Don’t love her.... Don’t love her any more. If you love her, I shall
strangle her.... I’ll put out both her eyes with a needle....”

“I love you. I love only you. I’ll love you in Siberia....”

“Why Siberia? Never mind, Siberia, if you like. I don’t care ... we’ll
work ... there’s snow in Siberia.... I love driving in the snow ... and
must have bells.... Do you hear, there’s a bell ringing? Where is that
bell ringing? There are people coming.... Now it’s stopped.”

She closed her eyes, exhausted, and suddenly fell asleep for an instant.
There had certainly been the sound of a bell in the distance, but the
ringing had ceased. Mitya let his head sink on her breast. He did not
notice that the bell had ceased ringing, nor did he notice that the songs
had ceased, and that instead of singing and drunken clamor there was
absolute stillness in the house. Grushenka opened her eyes.

“What’s the matter? Was I asleep? Yes ... a bell ... I’ve been asleep and
dreamt I was driving over the snow with bells, and I dozed. I was with
some one I loved, with you. And far, far away. I was holding you and
kissing you, nestling close to you. I was cold, and the snow glistened....
You know how the snow glistens at night when the moon shines. It was as
though I was not on earth. I woke up, and my dear one is close to me. How
sweet that is!...”

“Close to you,” murmured Mitya, kissing her dress, her bosom, her hands.
And suddenly he had a strange fancy: it seemed to him that she was looking
straight before her, not at him, not into his face, but over his head,
with an intent, almost uncanny fixity. An expression of wonder, almost of
alarm, came suddenly into her face.

“Mitya, who is that looking at us?” she whispered.

Mitya turned, and saw that some one had, in fact, parted the curtains and
seemed to be watching them. And not one person alone, it seemed.

He jumped up and walked quickly to the intruder.

“Here, come to us, come here,” said a voice, speaking not loudly, but
firmly and peremptorily.

Mitya passed to the other side of the curtain and stood stock still. The
room was filled with people, but not those who had been there before. An
instantaneous shiver ran down his back, and he shuddered. He recognized
all those people instantly. That tall, stout old man in the overcoat and
forage-cap with a cockade—was the police captain, Mihail Makarovitch. And
that “consumptive-looking” trim dandy, “who always has such polished
boots”—that was the deputy prosecutor. “He has a chronometer worth four
hundred roubles; he showed it to me.” And that small young man in
spectacles.... Mitya forgot his surname though he knew him, had seen him:
he was the “investigating lawyer,” from the “school of jurisprudence,” who
had only lately come to the town. And this man—the inspector of police,
Mavriky Mavrikyevitch, a man he knew well. And those fellows with the
brass plates on, why are they here? And those other two ... peasants....
And there at the door Kalganov with Trifon Borissovitch....

“Gentlemen! What’s this for, gentlemen?” began Mitya, but suddenly, as
though beside himself, not knowing what he was doing, he cried aloud, at
the top of his voice:

“I un—der—stand!”

The young man in spectacles moved forward suddenly, and stepping up to
Mitya, began with dignity, though hurriedly:

“We have to make ... in brief, I beg you to come this way, this way to the
sofa.... It is absolutely imperative that you should give an explanation.”

“The old man!” cried Mitya frantically. “The old man and his blood!... I
understand.”

And he sank, almost fell, on a chair close by, as though he had been mown
down by a scythe.

“You understand? He understands it! Monster and parricide! Your father’s
blood cries out against you!” the old captain of police roared suddenly,
stepping up to Mitya.

He was beside himself, crimson in the face and quivering all over.

“This is impossible!” cried the small young man. “Mihail Makarovitch,
Mihail Makarovitch, this won’t do!... I beg you’ll allow me to speak. I
should never have expected such behavior from you....”

“This is delirium, gentlemen, raving delirium,” cried the captain of
police; “look at him: drunk, at this time of night, in the company of a
disreputable woman, with the blood of his father on his hands.... It’s
delirium!...”

“I beg you most earnestly, dear Mihail Makarovitch, to restrain your
feelings,” the prosecutor said in a rapid whisper to the old police
captain, “or I shall be forced to resort to—”

But the little lawyer did not allow him to finish. He turned to Mitya, and
delivered himself in a loud, firm, dignified voice:

“Ex-Lieutenant Karamazov, it is my duty to inform you that you are charged
with the murder of your father, Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov, perpetrated
this night....”

He said something more, and the prosecutor, too, put in something, but
though Mitya heard them he did not understand them. He stared at them all
with wild eyes.




Book IX. The Preliminary Investigation



Chapter I. The Beginning Of Perhotin’s Official Career


Pyotr Ilyitch Perhotin, whom we left knocking at the strong locked gates
of the widow Morozov’s house, ended, of course, by making himself heard.
Fenya, who was still excited by the fright she had had two hours before,
and too much “upset” to go to bed, was almost frightened into hysterics on
hearing the furious knocking at the gate. Though she had herself seen him
drive away, she fancied that it must be Dmitri Fyodorovitch knocking
again, no one else could knock so savagely. She ran to the house-porter,
who had already waked up and gone out to the gate, and began imploring him
not to open it. But having questioned Pyotr Ilyitch, and learned that he
wanted to see Fenya on very “important business,” the man made up his mind
at last to open. Pyotr Ilyitch was admitted into Fenya’s kitchen, but the
girl begged him to allow the house-porter to be present, “because of her
misgivings.” He began questioning her and at once learnt the most vital
fact, that is, that when Dmitri Fyodorovitch had run out to look for
Grushenka, he had snatched up a pestle from the mortar, and that when he
returned, the pestle was not with him and his hands were smeared with
blood.

“And the blood was simply flowing, dripping from him, dripping!” Fenya
kept exclaiming. This horrible detail was simply the product of her
disordered imagination. But although not “dripping,” Pyotr Ilyitch had
himself seen those hands stained with blood, and had helped to wash them.
Moreover, the question he had to decide was not how soon the blood had
dried, but where Dmitri Fyodorovitch had run with the pestle, or rather,
whether it really was to Fyodor Pavlovitch’s, and how he could
satisfactorily ascertain. Pyotr Ilyitch persisted in returning to this
point, and though he found out nothing conclusive, yet he carried away a
conviction that Dmitri Fyodorovitch could have gone nowhere but to his
father’s house, and that therefore something must have happened there.

“And when he came back,” Fenya added with excitement, “I told him the
whole story, and then I began asking him, ‘Why have you got blood on your
hands, Dmitri Fyodorovitch?’ and he answered that that was human blood,
and that he had just killed some one. He confessed it all to me, and
suddenly ran off like a madman. I sat down and began thinking, where’s he
run off to now like a madman? He’ll go to Mokroe, I thought, and kill my
mistress there. I ran out to beg him not to kill her. I was running to his
lodgings, but I looked at Plotnikov’s shop, and saw him just setting off,
and there was no blood on his hands then.” (Fenya had noticed this and
remembered it.) Fenya’s old grandmother confirmed her evidence as far as
she was capable. After asking some further questions, Pyotr Ilyitch left
the house, even more upset and uneasy than he had been when he entered it.

The most direct and the easiest thing for him to do would have been to go
straight to Fyodor Pavlovitch’s, to find out whether anything had happened
there, and if so, what; and only to go to the police captain, as Pyotr
Ilyitch firmly intended doing, when he had satisfied himself of the fact.
But the night was dark, Fyodor Pavlovitch’s gates were strong, and he
would have to knock again. His acquaintance with Fyodor Pavlovitch was of
the slightest, and what if, after he had been knocking, they opened to
him, and nothing had happened? Then Fyodor Pavlovitch in his jeering way
would go telling the story all over the town, how a stranger, called
Perhotin, had broken in upon him at midnight to ask if any one had killed
him. It would make a scandal. And scandal was what Pyotr Ilyitch dreaded
more than anything in the world.

Yet the feeling that possessed him was so strong, that though he stamped
his foot angrily and swore at himself, he set off again, not to Fyodor
Pavlovitch’s but to Madame Hohlakov’s. He decided that if she denied
having just given Dmitri Fyodorovitch three thousand roubles, he would go
straight to the police captain, but if she admitted having given him the
money, he would go home and let the matter rest till next morning.

It is, of course, perfectly evident that there was even more likelihood of
causing scandal by going at eleven o’clock at night to a fashionable lady,
a complete stranger, and perhaps rousing her from her bed to ask her an
amazing question, than by going to Fyodor Pavlovitch. But that is just how
it is, sometimes, especially in cases like the present one, with the
decisions of the most precise and phlegmatic people. Pyotr Ilyitch was by
no means phlegmatic at that moment. He remembered all his life how a
haunting uneasiness gradually gained possession of him, growing more and
more painful and driving him on, against his will. Yet he kept cursing
himself, of course, all the way for going to this lady, but “I will get to
the bottom of it, I will!” he repeated for the tenth time, grinding his
teeth, and he carried out his intention.

It was exactly eleven o’clock when he entered Madame Hohlakov’s house. He
was admitted into the yard pretty quickly, but, in response to his inquiry
whether the lady was still up, the porter could give no answer, except
that she was usually in bed by that time.

“Ask at the top of the stairs. If the lady wants to receive you, she’ll
receive you. If she won’t, she won’t.”

Pyotr Ilyitch went up, but did not find things so easy here. The footman
was unwilling to take in his name, but finally called a maid. Pyotr
Ilyitch politely but insistently begged her to inform her lady that an
official, living in the town, called Perhotin, had called on particular
business, and that if it were not of the greatest importance he would not
have ventured to come. “Tell her in those words, in those words exactly,”
he asked the girl.

She went away. He remained waiting in the entry. Madame Hohlakov herself
was already in her bedroom, though not yet asleep. She had felt upset ever
since Mitya’s visit, and had a presentiment that she would not get through
the night without the sick headache which always, with her, followed such
excitement. She was surprised on hearing the announcement from the maid.
She irritably declined to see him, however, though the unexpected visit at
such an hour, of an “official living in the town,” who was a total
stranger, roused her feminine curiosity intensely. But this time Pyotr
Ilyitch was as obstinate as a mule. He begged the maid most earnestly to
take another message in these very words:

“That he had come on business of the greatest importance, and that Madame
Hohlakov might have cause to regret it later, if she refused to see him
now.”

“I plunged headlong,” he described it afterwards.

The maid, gazing at him in amazement, went to take his message again.
Madame Hohlakov was impressed. She thought a little, asked what he looked
like, and learned that he was “very well dressed, young and so polite.” We
may note, parenthetically, that Pyotr Ilyitch was a rather good-looking
young man, and well aware of the fact. Madame Hohlakov made up her mind to
see him. She was in her dressing-gown and slippers, but she flung a black
shawl over her shoulders. “The official” was asked to walk into the
drawing-room, the very room in which Mitya had been received shortly
before. The lady came to meet her visitor, with a sternly inquiring
countenance, and, without asking him to sit down, began at once with the
question:

“What do you want?”

“I have ventured to disturb you, madam, on a matter concerning our common
acquaintance, Dmitri Fyodorovitch Karamazov,” Perhotin began.

But he had hardly uttered the name, when the lady’s face showed signs of
acute irritation. She almost shrieked, and interrupted him in a fury:

“How much longer am I to be worried by that awful man?” she cried
hysterically. “How dare you, sir, how could you venture to disturb a lady
who is a stranger to you, in her own house at such an hour!... And to
force yourself upon her to talk of a man who came here, to this very
drawing-room, only three hours ago, to murder me, and went stamping out of
the room, as no one would go out of a decent house. Let me tell you, sir,
that I shall lodge a complaint against you, that I will not let it pass.
Kindly leave me at once.... I am a mother.... I ... I—”

“Murder! then he tried to murder you, too?”

“Why, has he killed somebody else?” Madame Hohlakov asked impulsively.

“If you would kindly listen, madam, for half a moment, I’ll explain it all
in a couple of words,” answered Perhotin, firmly. “At five o’clock this
afternoon Dmitri Fyodorovitch borrowed ten roubles from me, and I know for
a fact he had no money. Yet at nine o’clock, he came to see me with a
bundle of hundred-rouble notes in his hand, about two or three thousand
roubles. His hands and face were all covered with blood, and he looked
like a madman. When I asked him where he had got so much money, he
answered that he had just received it from you, that you had given him a
sum of three thousand to go to the gold-mines....”

Madame Hohlakov’s face assumed an expression of intense and painful
excitement.

“Good God! He must have killed his old father!” she cried, clasping her
hands. “I have never given him money, never! Oh, run, run!... Don’t say
another word! Save the old man ... run to his father ... run!”

“Excuse me, madam, then you did not give him money? You remember for a
fact that you did not give him any money?”

“No, I didn’t, I didn’t! I refused to give it him, for he could not
appreciate it. He ran out in a fury, stamping. He rushed at me, but I
slipped away.... And let me tell you, as I wish to hide nothing from you
now, that he positively spat at me. Can you fancy that! But why are we
standing? Ah, sit down.”

“Excuse me, I....”

“Or better run, run, you must run and save the poor old man from an awful
death!”

“But if he has killed him already?”

“Ah, good heavens, yes! Then what are we to do now? What do you think we
must do now?”

Meantime she had made Pyotr Ilyitch sit down and sat down herself, facing
him. Briefly, but fairly clearly, Pyotr Ilyitch told her the history of
the affair, that part of it at least which he had himself witnessed. He
described, too, his visit to Fenya, and told her about the pestle. All
these details produced an overwhelming effect on the distracted lady, who
kept uttering shrieks, and covering her face with her hands....

“Would you believe it, I foresaw all this! I have that special faculty,
whatever I imagine comes to pass. And how often I’ve looked at that awful
man and always thought, that man will end by murdering me. And now it’s
happened ... that is, if he hasn’t murdered me, but only his own father,
it’s only because the finger of God preserved me, and what’s more, he was
ashamed to murder me because, in this very place, I put the holy ikon from
the relics of the holy martyr, Saint Varvara, on his neck.... And to think
how near I was to death at that minute, I went close up to him and he
stretched out his neck to me!... Do you know, Pyotr Ilyitch (I think you
said your name was Pyotr Ilyitch), I don’t believe in miracles, but that
ikon and this unmistakable miracle with me now—that shakes me, and I’m
ready to believe in anything you like. Have you heard about Father
Zossima?... But I don’t know what I’m saying ... and only fancy, with the
ikon on his neck he spat at me.... He only spat, it’s true, he didn’t
murder me and ... he dashed away! But what shall we do, what must we do
now? What do you think?”

Pyotr Ilyitch got up, and announced that he was going straight to the
police captain, to tell him all about it, and leave him to do what he
thought fit.

“Oh, he’s an excellent man, excellent! Mihail Makarovitch, I know him. Of
course, he’s the person to go to. How practical you are, Pyotr Ilyitch!
How well you’ve thought of everything! I should never have thought of it
in your place!”

“Especially as I know the police captain very well, too,” observed Pyotr
Ilyitch, who still continued to stand, and was obviously anxious to escape
as quickly as possible from the impulsive lady, who would not let him say
good-by and go away.

“And be sure, be sure,” she prattled on, “to come back and tell me what
you see there, and what you find out ... what comes to light ... how
they’ll try him ... and what he’s condemned to.... Tell me, we have no
capital punishment, have we? But be sure to come, even if it’s at three
o’clock at night, at four, at half-past four.... Tell them to wake me, to
wake me, to shake me, if I don’t get up.... But, good heavens, I shan’t
sleep! But wait, hadn’t I better come with you?”

“N—no. But if you would write three lines with your own hand, stating that
you did not give Dmitri Fyodorovitch money, it might, perhaps, be of use
... in case it’s needed....”

“To be sure!” Madame Hohlakov skipped, delighted, to her bureau. “And you
know I’m simply struck, amazed at your resourcefulness, your good sense in
such affairs. Are you in the service here? I’m delighted to think that
you’re in the service here!”

And still speaking, she scribbled on half a sheet of notepaper the
following lines:


    I’ve never in my life lent to that unhappy man, Dmitri
    Fyodorovitch Karamazov (for, in spite of all, he is unhappy),
    three thousand roubles to-day. I’ve never given him money, never:
    That I swear by all that’s holy!

    K. HOHLAKOV.


“Here’s the note!” she turned quickly to Pyotr Ilyitch. “Go, save him.
It’s a noble deed on your part!”

And she made the sign of the cross three times over him. She ran out to
accompany him to the passage.

“How grateful I am to you! You can’t think how grateful I am to you for
having come to me, first. How is it I haven’t met you before? I shall feel
flattered at seeing you at my house in the future. How delightful it is
that you are living here!... Such precision! Such practical ability!...
They must appreciate you, they must understand you. If there’s anything I
can do, believe me ... oh, I love young people! I’m in love with young
people! The younger generation are the one prop of our suffering country.
Her one hope.... Oh, go, go!...”

But Pyotr Ilyitch had already run away or she would not have let him go so
soon. Yet Madame Hohlakov had made a rather agreeable impression on him,
which had somewhat softened his anxiety at being drawn into such an
unpleasant affair. Tastes differ, as we all know. “She’s by no means so
elderly,” he thought, feeling pleased, “on the contrary I should have
taken her for her daughter.”

As for Madame Hohlakov, she was simply enchanted by the young man. “Such
sense! such exactness! in so young a man! in our day! and all that with
such manners and appearance! People say the young people of to-day are no
good for anything, but here’s an example!” etc. So she simply forgot this
“dreadful affair,” and it was only as she was getting into bed, that,
suddenly recalling “how near death she had been,” she exclaimed: “Ah, it
is awful, awful!”

But she fell at once into a sound, sweet sleep.

I would not, however, have dwelt on such trivial and irrelevant details,
if this eccentric meeting of the young official with the by no means
elderly widow had not subsequently turned out to be the foundation of the
whole career of that practical and precise young man. His story is
remembered to this day with amazement in our town, and I shall perhaps
have something to say about it, when I have finished my long history of
the Brothers Karamazov.



Chapter II. The Alarm


Our police captain, Mihail Makarovitch Makarov, a retired
lieutenant-colonel, was a widower and an excellent man. He had only come
to us three years previously, but had won general esteem, chiefly because
he “knew how to keep society together.” He was never without visitors, and
could not have got on without them. Some one or other was always dining
with him; he never sat down to table without guests. He gave regular
dinners, too, on all sorts of occasions, sometimes most surprising ones.
Though the fare was not _recherché_, it was abundant. The fish-pies were
excellent, and the wine made up in quantity for what it lacked in quality.

The first room his guests entered was a well-fitted billiard-room, with
pictures of English race-horses, in black frames on the walls, an
essential decoration, as we all know, for a bachelor’s billiard-room.
There was card-playing every evening at his house, if only at one table.
But at frequent intervals, all the society of our town, with the mammas
and young ladies, assembled at his house to dance. Though Mihail
Makarovitch was a widower, he did not live alone. His widowed daughter
lived with him, with her two unmarried daughters, grown-up girls, who had
finished their education. They were of agreeable appearance and lively
character, and though every one knew they would have no dowry, they
attracted all the young men of fashion to their grandfather’s house.

Mihail Makarovitch was by no means very efficient in his work, though he
performed his duties no worse than many others. To speak plainly, he was a
man of rather narrow education. His understanding of the limits of his
administrative power could not always be relied upon. It was not so much
that he failed to grasp certain reforms enacted during the present reign,
as that he made conspicuous blunders in his interpretation of them. This
was not from any special lack of intelligence, but from carelessness, for
he was always in too great a hurry to go into the subject.

“I have the heart of a soldier rather than of a civilian,” he used to say
of himself. He had not even formed a definite idea of the fundamental
principles of the reforms connected with the emancipation of the serfs,
and only picked it up, so to speak, from year to year, involuntarily
increasing his knowledge by practice. And yet he was himself a landowner.
Pyotr Ilyitch knew for certain that he would meet some of Mihail
Makarovitch’s visitors there that evening, but he didn’t know which. As it
happened, at that moment the prosecutor, and Varvinsky, our district
doctor, a young man, who had only just come to us from Petersburg after
taking a brilliant degree at the Academy of Medicine, were playing whist
at the police captain’s. Ippolit Kirillovitch, the prosecutor (he was
really the deputy prosecutor, but we always called him the prosecutor),
was rather a peculiar man, of about five and thirty, inclined to be
consumptive, and married to a fat and childless woman. He was vain and
irritable, though he had a good intellect, and even a kind heart. It
seemed that all that was wrong with him was that he had a better opinion
of himself than his ability warranted. And that made him seem constantly
uneasy. He had, moreover, certain higher, even artistic, leanings, towards
psychology, for instance, a special study of the human heart, a special
knowledge of the criminal and his crime. He cherished a grievance on this
ground, considering that he had been passed over in the service, and being
firmly persuaded that in higher spheres he had not been properly
appreciated, and had enemies. In gloomy moments he even threatened to give
up his post, and practice as a barrister in criminal cases. The unexpected
Karamazov case agitated him profoundly: “It was a case that might well be
talked about all over Russia.” But I am anticipating.

Nikolay Parfenovitch Nelyudov, the young investigating lawyer, who had
only come from Petersburg two months before, was sitting in the next room
with the young ladies. People talked about it afterwards and wondered that
all the gentlemen should, as though intentionally, on the evening of “the
crime” have been gathered together at the house of the executive
authority. Yet it was perfectly simple and happened quite naturally.

Ippolit Kirillovitch’s wife had had toothache for the last two days, and
he was obliged to go out to escape from her groans. The doctor, from the
very nature of his being, could not spend an evening except at cards.
Nikolay Parfenovitch Nelyudov had been intending for three days past to
drop in that evening at Mihail Makarovitch’s, so to speak casually, so as
slyly to startle the eldest granddaughter, Olga Mihailovna, by showing
that he knew her secret, that he knew it was her birthday, and that she
was trying to conceal it on purpose, so as not to be obliged to give a
dance. He anticipated a great deal of merriment, many playful jests about
her age, and her being afraid to reveal it, about his knowing her secret
and telling everybody, and so on. The charming young man was a great adept
at such teasing; the ladies had christened him “the naughty man,” and he
seemed to be delighted at the name. He was extremely well-bred, however,
of good family, education and feelings, and, though leading a life of
pleasure, his sallies were always innocent and in good taste. He was
short, and delicate-looking. On his white, slender, little fingers he
always wore a number of big, glittering rings. When he was engaged in his
official duties, he always became extraordinarily grave, as though
realizing his position and the sanctity of the obligations laid upon him.
He had a special gift for mystifying murderers and other criminals of the
peasant class during interrogation, and if he did not win their respect,
he certainly succeeded in arousing their wonder.

Pyotr Ilyitch was simply dumbfounded when he went into the police
captain’s. He saw instantly that every one knew. They had positively
thrown down their cards, all were standing up and talking. Even Nikolay
Parfenovitch had left the young ladies and run in, looking strenuous and
ready for action. Pyotr Ilyitch was met with the astounding news that old
Fyodor Pavlovitch really had been murdered that evening in his own house,
murdered and robbed. The news had only just reached them in the following
manner.

Marfa Ignatyevna, the wife of old Grigory, who had been knocked senseless
near the fence, was sleeping soundly in her bed and might well have slept
till morning after the draught she had taken. But, all of a sudden she
waked up, no doubt roused by a fearful epileptic scream from Smerdyakov,
who was lying in the next room unconscious. That scream always preceded
his fits, and always terrified and upset Marfa Ignatyevna. She could never
get accustomed to it. She jumped up and ran half-awake to Smerdyakov’s
room. But it was dark there, and she could only hear the invalid beginning
to gasp and struggle. Then Marfa Ignatyevna herself screamed out and was
going to call her husband, but suddenly realized that when she had got up,
he was not beside her in bed. She ran back to the bedstead and began
groping with her hands, but the bed was really empty. Then he must have
gone out—where? She ran to the steps and timidly called him. She got no
answer, of course, but she caught the sound of groans far away in the
garden in the darkness. She listened. The groans were repeated, and it was
evident they came from the garden.

“Good Lord! Just as it was with Lizaveta Smerdyastchaya!” she thought
distractedly. She went timidly down the steps and saw that the gate into
the garden was open.

“He must be out there, poor dear,” she thought. She went up to the gate
and all at once she distinctly heard Grigory calling her by name, “Marfa!
Marfa!” in a weak, moaning, dreadful voice.

“Lord, preserve us from harm!” Marfa Ignatyevna murmured, and ran towards
the voice, and that was how she found Grigory. But she found him not by
the fence where he had been knocked down, but about twenty paces off. It
appeared later, that he had crawled away on coming to himself, and
probably had been a long time getting so far, losing consciousness several
times. She noticed at once that he was covered with blood, and screamed at
the top of her voice. Grigory was muttering incoherently:

“He has murdered ... his father murdered.... Why scream, silly ... run ...
fetch some one....”

But Marfa continued screaming, and seeing that her master’s window was
open and that there was a candle alight in the window, she ran there and
began calling Fyodor Pavlovitch. But peeping in at the window, she saw a
fearful sight. Her master was lying on his back, motionless, on the floor.
His light-colored dressing-gown and white shirt were soaked with blood.
The candle on the table brightly lighted up the blood and the motionless
dead face of Fyodor Pavlovitch. Terror-stricken, Marfa rushed away from
the window, ran out of the garden, drew the bolt of the big gate and ran
headlong by the back way to the neighbor, Marya Kondratyevna. Both mother
and daughter were asleep, but they waked up at Marfa’s desperate and
persistent screaming and knocking at the shutter. Marfa, shrieking and
screaming incoherently, managed to tell them the main fact, and to beg for
assistance. It happened that Foma had come back from his wanderings and
was staying the night with them. They got him up immediately and all three
ran to the scene of the crime. On the way, Marya Kondratyevna remembered
that at about eight o’clock she heard a dreadful scream from their garden,
and this was no doubt Grigory’s scream, “Parricide!” uttered when he
caught hold of Mitya’s leg.

“Some one person screamed out and then was silent,” Marya Kondratyevna
explained as she ran. Running to the place where Grigory lay, the two
women with the help of Foma carried him to the lodge. They lighted a
candle and saw that Smerdyakov was no better, that he was writhing in
convulsions, his eyes fixed in a squint, and that foam was flowing from
his lips. They moistened Grigory’s forehead with water mixed with vinegar,
and the water revived him at once. He asked immediately:

“Is the master murdered?”

Then Foma and both the women ran to the house and saw this time that not
only the window, but also the door into the garden was wide open, though
Fyodor Pavlovitch had for the last week locked himself in every night and
did not allow even Grigory to come in on any pretext. Seeing that door
open, they were afraid to go in to Fyodor Pavlovitch “for fear anything
should happen afterwards.” And when they returned to Grigory, the old man
told them to go straight to the police captain. Marya Kondratyevna ran
there and gave the alarm to the whole party at the police captain’s. She
arrived only five minutes before Pyotr Ilyitch, so that his story came,
not as his own surmise and theory, but as the direct confirmation, by a
witness, of the theory held by all, as to the identity of the criminal (a
theory he had in the bottom of his heart refused to believe till that
moment).

It was resolved to act with energy. The deputy police inspector of the
town was commissioned to take four witnesses, to enter Fyodor Pavlovitch’s
house and there to open an inquiry on the spot, according to the regular
forms, which I will not go into here. The district doctor, a zealous man,
new to his work, almost insisted on accompanying the police captain, the
prosecutor, and the investigating lawyer.

I will note briefly that Fyodor Pavlovitch was found to be quite dead,
with his skull battered in. But with what? Most likely with the same
weapon with which Grigory had been attacked. And immediately that weapon
was found, Grigory, to whom all possible medical assistance was at once
given, described in a weak and breaking voice how he had been knocked
down. They began looking with a lantern by the fence and found the brass
pestle dropped in a most conspicuous place on the garden path. There were
no signs of disturbance in the room where Fyodor Pavlovitch was lying. But
by the bed, behind the screen, they picked up from the floor a big and
thick envelope with the inscription: “A present of three thousand roubles
for my angel Grushenka, if she is willing to come.” And below had been
added by Fyodor Pavlovitch, “For my little chicken.” There were three
seals of red sealing-wax on the envelope, but it had been torn open and
was empty: the money had been removed. They found also on the floor a
piece of narrow pink ribbon, with which the envelope had been tied up.

One piece of Pyotr Ilyitch’s evidence made a great impression on the
prosecutor and the investigating magistrate, namely, his idea that Dmitri
Fyodorovitch would shoot himself before daybreak, that he had resolved to
do so, had spoken of it to Ilyitch, had taken the pistols, loaded them
before him, written a letter, put it in his pocket, etc. When Pyotr
Ilyitch, though still unwilling to believe in it, threatened to tell some
one so as to prevent the suicide, Mitya had answered grinning: “You’ll be
too late.” So they must make haste to Mokroe to find the criminal, before
he really did shoot himself.

“That’s clear, that’s clear!” repeated the prosecutor in great excitement.
“That’s just the way with mad fellows like that: ‘I shall kill myself
to-morrow, so I’ll make merry till I die!’ ”

The story of how he had bought the wine and provisions excited the
prosecutor more than ever.

“Do you remember the fellow that murdered a merchant called Olsufyev,
gentlemen? He stole fifteen hundred, went at once to have his hair curled,
and then, without even hiding the money, carrying it almost in his hand in
the same way, he went off to the girls.”

All were delayed, however, by the inquiry, the search, and the
formalities, etc., in the house of Fyodor Pavlovitch. It all took time and
so, two hours before starting, they sent on ahead to Mokroe the officer of
the rural police, Mavriky Mavrikyevitch Schmertsov, who had arrived in the
town the morning before to get his pay. He was instructed to avoid raising
the alarm when he reached Mokroe, but to keep constant watch over the
“criminal” till the arrival of the proper authorities, to procure also
witnesses for the arrest, police constables, and so on. Mavriky
Mavrikyevitch did as he was told, preserving his incognito, and giving no
one but his old acquaintance, Trifon Borissovitch, the slightest hint of
his secret business. He had spoken to him just before Mitya met the
landlord in the balcony, looking for him in the dark, and noticed at once
a change in Trifon Borissovitch’s face and voice. So neither Mitya nor any
one else knew that he was being watched. The box with the pistols had been
carried off by Trifon Borissovitch and put in a suitable place. Only after
four o’clock, almost at sunrise, all the officials, the police captain,
the prosecutor, the investigating lawyer, drove up in two carriages, each
drawn by three horses. The doctor remained at Fyodor Pavlovitch’s to make
a post-mortem next day on the body. But he was particularly interested in
the condition of the servant, Smerdyakov.

“Such violent and protracted epileptic fits, recurring continually for
twenty-four hours, are rarely to be met with, and are of interest to
science,” he declared enthusiastically to his companions, and as they left
they laughingly congratulated him on his find. The prosecutor and the
investigating lawyer distinctly remembered the doctor’s saying that
Smerdyakov could not outlive the night.

After these long, but I think necessary explanations, we will return to
that moment of our tale at which we broke off.



Chapter III. The Sufferings Of A Soul, The First Ordeal


And so Mitya sat looking wildly at the people round him, not understanding
what was said to him. Suddenly he got up, flung up his hands, and shouted
aloud:

“I’m not guilty! I’m not guilty of that blood! I’m not guilty of my
father’s blood.... I meant to kill him. But I’m not guilty. Not I.”

But he had hardly said this, before Grushenka rushed from behind the
curtain and flung herself at the police captain’s feet.

“It was my fault! Mine! My wickedness!” she cried, in a heartrending
voice, bathed in tears, stretching out her clasped hands towards them. “He
did it through me. I tortured him and drove him to it. I tortured that
poor old man that’s dead, too, in my wickedness, and brought him to this!
It’s my fault, mine first, mine most, my fault!”

“Yes, it’s your fault! You’re the chief criminal! You fury! You harlot!
You’re the most to blame!” shouted the police captain, threatening her
with his hand. But he was quickly and resolutely suppressed. The
prosecutor positively seized hold of him.

“This is absolutely irregular, Mihail Makarovitch!” he cried. “You are
positively hindering the inquiry.... You’re ruining the case....” he
almost gasped.

“Follow the regular course! Follow the regular course!” cried Nikolay
Parfenovitch, fearfully excited too, “otherwise it’s absolutely
impossible!...”

“Judge us together!” Grushenka cried frantically, still kneeling. “Punish
us together. I will go with him now, if it’s to death!”

“Grusha, my life, my blood, my holy one!” Mitya fell on his knees beside
her and held her tight in his arms. “Don’t believe her,” he cried, “she’s
not guilty of anything, of any blood, of anything!”

He remembered afterwards that he was forcibly dragged away from her by
several men, and that she was led out, and that when he recovered himself
he was sitting at the table. Beside him and behind him stood the men with
metal plates. Facing him on the other side of the table sat Nikolay
Parfenovitch, the investigating lawyer. He kept persuading him to drink a
little water out of a glass that stood on the table.

“That will refresh you, that will calm you. Be calm, don’t be frightened,”
he added, extremely politely. Mitya (he remembered it afterwards) became
suddenly intensely interested in his big rings, one with an amethyst, and
another with a transparent bright yellow stone, of great brilliance. And
long afterwards he remembered with wonder how those rings had riveted his
attention through all those terrible hours of interrogation, so that he
was utterly unable to tear himself away from them and dismiss them, as
things that had nothing to do with his position. On Mitya’s left side, in
the place where Maximov had been sitting at the beginning of the evening,
the prosecutor was now seated, and on Mitya’s right hand, where Grushenka
had been, was a rosy-cheeked young man in a sort of shabby hunting-jacket,
with ink and paper before him. This was the secretary of the investigating
lawyer, who had brought him with him. The police captain was now standing
by the window at the other end of the room, beside Kalganov, who was
sitting there.

“Drink some water,” said the investigating lawyer softly, for the tenth
time.

“I have drunk it, gentlemen, I have ... but ... come, gentlemen, crush me,
punish me, decide my fate!” cried Mitya, staring with terribly fixed
wide-open eyes at the investigating lawyer.

“So you positively declare that you are not guilty of the death of your
father, Fyodor Pavlovitch?” asked the investigating lawyer, softly but
insistently.

“I am not guilty. I am guilty of the blood of another old man but not of
my father’s. And I weep for it! I killed, I killed the old man and knocked
him down.... But it’s hard to have to answer for that murder with another,
a terrible murder of which I am not guilty.... It’s a terrible accusation,
gentlemen, a knock-down blow. But who has killed my father, who has killed
him? Who can have killed him if I didn’t? It’s marvelous, extraordinary,
impossible.”

“Yes, who can have killed him?” the investigating lawyer was beginning,
but Ippolit Kirillovitch, the prosecutor, glancing at him, addressed
Mitya.

“You need not worry yourself about the old servant, Grigory Vassilyevitch.
He is alive, he has recovered, and in spite of the terrible blows
inflicted, according to his own and your evidence, by you, there seems no
doubt that he will live, so the doctor says, at least.”

“Alive? He’s alive?” cried Mitya, flinging up his hands. His face beamed.
“Lord, I thank Thee for the miracle Thou has wrought for me, a sinner and
evildoer. That’s an answer to my prayer. I’ve been praying all night.” And
he crossed himself three times. He was almost breathless.

“So from this Grigory we have received such important evidence concerning
you, that—” The prosecutor would have continued, but Mitya suddenly jumped
up from his chair.

“One minute, gentlemen, for God’s sake, one minute; I will run to her—”

“Excuse me, at this moment it’s quite impossible,” Nikolay Parfenovitch
almost shrieked. He, too, leapt to his feet. Mitya was seized by the men
with the metal plates, but he sat down of his own accord....

“Gentlemen, what a pity! I wanted to see her for one minute only; I wanted
to tell her that it has been washed away, it has gone, that blood that was
weighing on my heart all night, and that I am not a murderer now!
Gentlemen, she is my betrothed!” he said ecstatically and reverently,
looking round at them all. “Oh, thank you, gentlemen! Oh, in one minute
you have given me new life, new heart!... That old man used to carry me in
his arms, gentlemen. He used to wash me in the tub when I was a baby three
years old, abandoned by every one, he was like a father to me!...”

“And so you—” the investigating lawyer began.

“Allow me, gentlemen, allow me one minute more,” interposed Mitya, putting
his elbows on the table and covering his face with his hands. “Let me have
a moment to think, let me breathe, gentlemen. All this is horribly
upsetting, horribly. A man is not a drum, gentlemen!”

“Drink a little more water,” murmured Nikolay Parfenovitch.

Mitya took his hands from his face and laughed. His eyes were confident.
He seemed completely transformed in a moment. His whole bearing was
changed; he was once more the equal of these men, with all of whom he was
acquainted, as though they had all met the day before, when nothing had
happened, at some social gathering. We may note in passing that, on his
first arrival, Mitya had been made very welcome at the police captain’s,
but later, during the last month especially, Mitya had hardly called at
all, and when the police captain met him, in the street, for instance,
Mitya noticed that he frowned and only bowed out of politeness. His
acquaintance with the prosecutor was less intimate, though he sometimes
paid his wife, a nervous and fanciful lady, visits of politeness, without
quite knowing why, and she always received him graciously and had, for
some reason, taken an interest in him up to the last. He had not had time
to get to know the investigating lawyer, though he had met him and talked
to him twice, each time about the fair sex.

“You’re a most skillful lawyer, I see, Nikolay Parfenovitch,” cried Mitya,
laughing gayly, “but I can help you now. Oh, gentlemen, I feel like a new
man, and don’t be offended at my addressing you so simply and directly.
I’m rather drunk, too, I’ll tell you that frankly. I believe I’ve had the
honor and pleasure of meeting you, Nikolay Parfenovitch, at my kinsman
Miüsov’s. Gentlemen, gentlemen, I don’t pretend to be on equal terms with
you. I understand, of course, in what character I am sitting before you.
Oh, of course, there’s a horrible suspicion ... hanging over me ... if
Grigory has given evidence.... A horrible suspicion! It’s awful, awful, I
understand that! But to business, gentlemen, I am ready, and we will make
an end of it in one moment; for, listen, listen, gentlemen! Since I know
I’m innocent, we can put an end to it in a minute. Can’t we? Can’t we?”

Mitya spoke much and quickly, nervously and effusively, as though he
positively took his listeners to be his best friends.

“So, for the present, we will write that you absolutely deny the charge
brought against you,” said Nikolay Parfenovitch, impressively, and bending
down to the secretary he dictated to him in an undertone what to write.

“Write it down? You want to write that down? Well, write it; I consent, I
give my full consent, gentlemen, only ... do you see?... Stay, stay, write
this. Of disorderly conduct I am guilty, of violence on a poor old man I
am guilty. And there is something else at the bottom of my heart, of which
I am guilty, too—but that you need not write down” (he turned suddenly to
the secretary); “that’s my personal life, gentlemen, that doesn’t concern
you, the bottom of my heart, that’s to say.... But of the murder of my old
father I’m not guilty. That’s a wild idea. It’s quite a wild idea!... I
will prove you that and you’ll be convinced directly.... You will laugh,
gentlemen. You’ll laugh yourselves at your suspicion!...”

“Be calm, Dmitri Fyodorovitch,” said the investigating lawyer evidently
trying to allay Mitya’s excitement by his own composure. “Before we go on
with our inquiry, I should like, if you will consent to answer, to hear
you confirm the statement that you disliked your father, Fyodor
Pavlovitch, that you were involved in continual disputes with him. Here at
least, a quarter of an hour ago, you exclaimed that you wanted to kill
him: ‘I didn’t kill him,’ you said, ‘but I wanted to kill him.’ ”

“Did I exclaim that? Ach, that may be so, gentlemen! Yes, unhappily, I did
want to kill him ... many times I wanted to ... unhappily, unhappily!”

“You wanted to. Would you consent to explain what motives precisely led
you to such a sentiment of hatred for your parent?”

“What is there to explain, gentlemen?” Mitya shrugged his shoulders
sullenly, looking down. “I have never concealed my feelings. All the town
knows about it—every one knows in the tavern. Only lately I declared them
in Father Zossima’s cell.... And the very same day, in the evening I beat
my father. I nearly killed him, and I swore I’d come again and kill him,
before witnesses.... Oh, a thousand witnesses! I’ve been shouting it aloud
for the last month, any one can tell you that!... The fact stares you in
the face, it speaks for itself, it cries aloud, but feelings, gentlemen,
feelings are another matter. You see, gentlemen”—Mitya frowned—“it seems
to me that about feelings you’ve no right to question me. I know that you
are bound by your office, I quite understand that, but that’s my affair,
my private, intimate affair, yet ... since I haven’t concealed my feelings
in the past ... in the tavern, for instance, I’ve talked to every one, so
... so I won’t make a secret of it now. You see, I understand, gentlemen,
that there are terrible facts against me in this business. I told every
one that I’d kill him, and now, all of a sudden, he’s been killed. So it
must have been me! Ha ha! I can make allowances for you, gentlemen, I can
quite make allowances. I’m struck all of a heap myself, for who can have
murdered him, if not I? That’s what it comes to, isn’t it? If not I, who
can it be, who? Gentlemen, I want to know, I insist on knowing!” he
exclaimed suddenly. “Where was he murdered? How was he murdered? How, and
with what? Tell me,” he asked quickly, looking at the two lawyers.

“We found him in his study, lying on his back on the floor, with his head
battered in,” said the prosecutor.

“That’s horrible!” Mitya shuddered and, putting his elbows on the table,
hid his face in his right hand.

“We will continue,” interposed Nikolay Parfenovitch. “So what was it that
impelled you to this sentiment of hatred? You have asserted in public, I
believe, that it was based upon jealousy?”

“Well, yes, jealousy. And not only jealousy.”

“Disputes about money?”

“Yes, about money, too.”

“There was a dispute about three thousand roubles, I think, which you
claimed as part of your inheritance?”

“Three thousand! More, more,” cried Mitya hotly; “more than six thousand,
more than ten, perhaps. I told every one so, shouted it at them. But I
made up my mind to let it go at three thousand. I was desperately in need
of that three thousand ... so the bundle of notes for three thousand that
I knew he kept under his pillow, ready for Grushenka, I considered as
simply stolen from me. Yes, gentlemen, I looked upon it as mine, as my own
property....”

The prosecutor looked significantly at the investigating lawyer, and had
time to wink at him on the sly.

“We will return to that subject later,” said the lawyer promptly. “You
will allow us to note that point and write it down; that you looked upon
that money as your own property?”

“Write it down, by all means. I know that’s another fact that tells
against me, but I’m not afraid of facts and I tell them against myself. Do
you hear? Do you know, gentlemen, you take me for a different sort of man
from what I am,” he added, suddenly gloomy and dejected. “You have to deal
with a man of honor, a man of the highest honor; above all—don’t lose
sight of it—a man who’s done a lot of nasty things, but has always been,
and still is, honorable at bottom, in his inner being. I don’t know how to
express it. That’s just what’s made me wretched all my life, that I
yearned to be honorable, that I was, so to say, a martyr to a sense of
honor, seeking for it with a lantern, with the lantern of Diogenes, and
yet all my life I’ve been doing filthy things like all of us, gentlemen
... that is like me alone. That was a mistake, like me alone, me alone!...
Gentlemen, my head aches ...” His brows contracted with pain. “You see,
gentlemen, I couldn’t bear the look of him, there was something in him
ignoble, impudent, trampling on everything sacred, something sneering and
irreverent, loathsome, loathsome. But now that he’s dead, I feel
differently.”

“How do you mean?”

“I don’t feel differently, but I wish I hadn’t hated him so.”

“You feel penitent?”

“No, not penitent, don’t write that. I’m not much good myself, I’m not
very beautiful, so I had no right to consider him repulsive. That’s what I
mean. Write that down, if you like.”

Saying this Mitya became very mournful. He had grown more and more gloomy
as the inquiry continued.

At that moment another unexpected scene followed. Though Grushenka had
been removed, she had not been taken far away, only into the room next but
one from the blue room, in which the examination was proceeding. It was a
little room with one window, next beyond the large room in which they had
danced and feasted so lavishly. She was sitting there with no one by her
but Maximov, who was terribly depressed, terribly scared, and clung to her
side, as though for security. At their door stood one of the peasants with
a metal plate on his breast. Grushenka was crying, and suddenly her grief
was too much for her, she jumped up, flung up her arms and, with a loud
wail of sorrow, rushed out of the room to him, to her Mitya, and so
unexpectedly that they had not time to stop her. Mitya, hearing her cry,
trembled, jumped up, and with a yell rushed impetuously to meet her, not
knowing what he was doing. But they were not allowed to come together,
though they saw one another. He was seized by the arms. He struggled, and
tried to tear himself away. It took three or four men to hold him. She was
seized too, and he saw her stretching out her arms to him, crying aloud as
they carried her away. When the scene was over, he came to himself again,
sitting in the same place as before, opposite the investigating lawyer,
and crying out to them:

“What do you want with her? Why do you torment her? She’s done nothing,
nothing!...”

The lawyers tried to soothe him. About ten minutes passed like this. At
last Mihail Makarovitch, who had been absent, came hurriedly into the
room, and said in a loud and excited voice to the prosecutor:

“She’s been removed, she’s downstairs. Will you allow me to say one word
to this unhappy man, gentlemen? In your presence, gentlemen, in your
presence.”

“By all means, Mihail Makarovitch,” answered the investigating lawyer. “In
the present case we have nothing against it.”

“Listen, Dmitri Fyodorovitch, my dear fellow,” began the police captain,
and there was a look of warm, almost fatherly, feeling for the luckless
prisoner on his excited face. “I took your Agrafena Alexandrovna
downstairs myself, and confided her to the care of the landlord’s
daughters, and that old fellow Maximov is with her all the time. And I
soothed her, do you hear? I soothed and calmed her. I impressed on her
that you have to clear yourself, so she mustn’t hinder you, must not
depress you, or you may lose your head and say the wrong thing in your
evidence. In fact, I talked to her and she understood. She’s a sensible
girl, my boy, a good-hearted girl, she would have kissed my old hands,
begging help for you. She sent me herself, to tell you not to worry about
her. And I must go, my dear fellow, I must go and tell her that you are
calm and comforted about her. And so you must be calm, do you understand?
I was unfair to her; she is a Christian soul, gentlemen, yes, I tell you,
she’s a gentle soul, and not to blame for anything. So what am I to tell
her, Dmitri Fyodorovitch? Will you sit quiet or not?”

The good-natured police captain said a great deal that was irregular, but
Grushenka’s suffering, a fellow creature’s suffering, touched his
good-natured heart, and tears stood in his eyes. Mitya jumped up and
rushed towards him.

“Forgive me, gentlemen, oh, allow me, allow me!” he cried. “You’ve the
heart of an angel, an angel, Mihail Makarovitch, I thank you for her. I
will, I will be calm, cheerful, in fact. Tell her, in the kindness of your
heart, that I am cheerful, quite cheerful, that I shall be laughing in a
minute, knowing that she has a guardian angel like you. I shall have done
with all this directly, and as soon as I’m free, I’ll be with her, she’ll
see, let her wait. Gentlemen,” he said, turning to the two lawyers, “now
I’ll open my whole soul to you; I’ll pour out everything. We’ll finish
this off directly, finish it off gayly. We shall laugh at it in the end,
shan’t we? But, gentlemen, that woman is the queen of my heart. Oh, let me
tell you that. That one thing I’ll tell you now.... I see I’m with
honorable men. She is my light, she is my holy one, and if only you knew!
Did you hear her cry, ‘I’ll go to death with you’? And what have I, a
penniless beggar, done for her? Why such love for me? How can a clumsy,
ugly brute like me, with my ugly face, deserve such love, that she is
ready to go to exile with me? And how she fell down at your feet for my
sake, just now!... and yet she’s proud and has done nothing! How can I
help adoring her, how can I help crying out and rushing to her as I did
just now? Gentlemen, forgive me! But now, now I am comforted.”

And he sank back in his chair and, covering his face with his hands, burst
into tears. But they were happy tears. He recovered himself instantly. The
old police captain seemed much pleased, and the lawyers also. They felt
that the examination was passing into a new phase. When the police captain
went out, Mitya was positively gay.

“Now, gentlemen, I am at your disposal, entirely at your disposal. And if
it were not for all these trivial details, we should understand one
another in a minute. I’m at those details again. I’m at your disposal,
gentlemen, but I declare that we must have mutual confidence, you in me
and I in you, or there’ll be no end to it. I speak in your interests. To
business, gentlemen, to business, and don’t rummage in my soul; don’t
tease me with trifles, but only ask me about facts and what matters, and I
will satisfy you at once. And damn the details!”

So spoke Mitya. The interrogation began again.



Chapter IV. The Second Ordeal


“You don’t know how you encourage us, Dmitri Fyodorovitch, by your
readiness to answer,” said Nikolay Parfenovitch, with an animated air, and
obvious satisfaction beaming in his very prominent, short-sighted, light
gray eyes, from which he had removed his spectacles a moment before. “And
you have made a very just remark about the mutual confidence, without
which it is sometimes positively impossible to get on in cases of such
importance, if the suspected party really hopes and desires to defend
himself and is in a position to do so. We, on our side, will do everything
in our power, and you can see for yourself how we are conducting the case.
You approve, Ippolit Kirillovitch?” He turned to the prosecutor.

“Oh, undoubtedly,” replied the prosecutor. His tone was somewhat cold,
compared with Nikolay Parfenovitch’s impulsiveness.

I will note once for all that Nikolay Parfenovitch, who had but lately
arrived among us, had from the first felt marked respect for Ippolit
Kirillovitch, our prosecutor, and had become almost his bosom friend. He
was almost the only person who put implicit faith in Ippolit
Kirillovitch’s extraordinary talents as a psychologist and orator and in
the justice of his grievance. He had heard of him in Petersburg. On the
other hand, young Nikolay Parfenovitch was the only person in the whole
world whom our “unappreciated” prosecutor genuinely liked. On their way to
Mokroe they had time to come to an understanding about the present case.
And now as they sat at the table, the sharp-witted junior caught and
interpreted every indication on his senior colleague’s face—half a word, a
glance, or a wink.

“Gentlemen, only let me tell my own story and don’t interrupt me with
trivial questions and I’ll tell you everything in a moment,” said Mitya
excitedly.

“Excellent! Thank you. But before we proceed to listen to your
communication, will you allow me to inquire as to another little fact of
great interest to us? I mean the ten roubles you borrowed yesterday at
about five o’clock on the security of your pistols, from your friend,
Pyotr Ilyitch Perhotin.”

“I pledged them, gentlemen. I pledged them for ten roubles. What more?
That’s all about it. As soon as I got back to town I pledged them.”

“You got back to town? Then you had been out of town?”

“Yes, I went a journey of forty versts into the country. Didn’t you know?”

The prosecutor and Nikolay Parfenovitch exchanged glances.

“Well, how would it be if you began your story with a systematic
description of all you did yesterday, from the morning onwards? Allow us,
for instance, to inquire why you were absent from the town, and just when
you left and when you came back—all those facts.”

“You should have asked me like that from the beginning,” cried Mitya,
laughing aloud, “and, if you like, we won’t begin from yesterday, but from
the morning of the day before; then you’ll understand how, why, and where
I went. I went the day before yesterday, gentlemen, to a merchant of the
town, called Samsonov, to borrow three thousand roubles from him on safe
security. It was a pressing matter, gentlemen, it was a sudden necessity.”

“Allow me to interrupt you,” the prosecutor put in politely. “Why were you
in such pressing need for just that sum, three thousand?”

“Oh, gentlemen, you needn’t go into details, how, when and why, and why
just so much money, and not so much, and all that rigmarole. Why, it’ll
run to three volumes, and then you’ll want an epilogue!”

Mitya said all this with the good-natured but impatient familiarity of a
man who is anxious to tell the whole truth and is full of the best
intentions.

“Gentlemen!”—he corrected himself hurriedly—“don’t be vexed with me for my
restiveness, I beg you again. Believe me once more, I feel the greatest
respect for you and understand the true position of affairs. Don’t think
I’m drunk. I’m quite sober now. And, besides, being drunk would be no
hindrance. It’s with me, you know, like the saying: ‘When he is sober, he
is a fool; when he is drunk, he is a wise man.’ Ha ha! But I see,
gentlemen, it’s not the proper thing to make jokes to you, till we’ve had
our explanation, I mean. And I’ve my own dignity to keep up, too. I quite
understand the difference for the moment. I am, after all, in the position
of a criminal, and so, far from being on equal terms with you. And it’s
your business to watch me. I can’t expect you to pat me on the head for
what I did to Grigory, for one can’t break old men’s heads with impunity.
I suppose you’ll put me away for him for six months, or a year perhaps, in
a house of correction. I don’t know what the punishment is—but it will be
without loss of the rights of my rank, without loss of my rank, won’t it?
So you see, gentlemen, I understand the distinction between us.... But you
must see that you could puzzle God Himself with such questions. ‘How did
you step? Where did you step? When did you step? And on what did you
step?’ I shall get mixed up, if you go on like this, and you will put it
all down against me. And what will that lead to? To nothing! And even if
it’s nonsense I’m talking now, let me finish, and you, gentlemen, being
men of honor and refinement, will forgive me! I’ll finish by asking you,
gentlemen, to drop that conventional method of questioning. I mean,
beginning from some miserable trifle, how I got up, what I had for
breakfast, how I spat, and where I spat, and so distracting the attention
of the criminal, suddenly stun him with an overwhelming question, ‘Whom
did you murder? Whom did you rob?’ Ha ha! That’s your regulation method,
that’s where all your cunning comes in. You can put peasants off their
guard like that, but not me. I know the tricks. I’ve been in the service,
too. Ha ha ha! You’re not angry, gentlemen? You forgive my impertinence?”
he cried, looking at them with a good-nature that was almost surprising.
“It’s only Mitya Karamazov, you know, so you can overlook it. It would be
inexcusable in a sensible man; but you can forgive it in Mitya. Ha ha!”

Nikolay Parfenovitch listened, and laughed too. Though the prosecutor did
not laugh, he kept his eyes fixed keenly on Mitya, as though anxious not
to miss the least syllable, the slightest movement, the smallest twitch of
any feature of his face.

“That’s how we have treated you from the beginning,” said Nikolay
Parfenovitch, still laughing. “We haven’t tried to put you out by asking
how you got up in the morning and what you had for breakfast. We began,
indeed, with questions of the greatest importance.”

“I understand. I saw it and appreciated it, and I appreciate still more
your present kindness to me, an unprecedented kindness, worthy of your
noble hearts. We three here are gentlemen, and let everything be on the
footing of mutual confidence between educated, well-bred people, who have
the common bond of noble birth and honor. In any case, allow me to look
upon you as my best friends at this moment of my life, at this moment when
my honor is assailed. That’s no offense to you, gentlemen, is it?”

“On the contrary. You’ve expressed all that so well, Dmitri Fyodorovitch,”
Nikolay Parfenovitch answered with dignified approbation.

“And enough of those trivial questions, gentlemen, all those tricky
questions!” cried Mitya enthusiastically. “Or there’s simply no knowing
where we shall get to! Is there?”

“I will follow your sensible advice entirely,” the prosecutor interposed,
addressing Mitya. “I don’t withdraw my question, however. It is now
vitally important for us to know exactly why you needed that sum, I mean
precisely three thousand.”

“Why I needed it?... Oh, for one thing and another.... Well, it was to pay
a debt.”

“A debt to whom?”

“That I absolutely refuse to answer, gentlemen. Not because I couldn’t, or
because I shouldn’t dare, or because it would be damaging, for it’s all a
paltry matter and absolutely trifling, but—I won’t, because it’s a matter
of principle: that’s my private life, and I won’t allow any intrusion into
my private life. That’s my principle. Your question has no bearing on the
case, and whatever has nothing to do with the case is my private affair. I
wanted to pay a debt. I wanted to pay a debt of honor but to whom I won’t
say.”

“Allow me to make a note of that,” said the prosecutor.

“By all means. Write down that I won’t say, that I won’t. Write that I
should think it dishonorable to say. Ech! you can write it; you’ve nothing
else to do with your time.”

“Allow me to caution you, sir, and to remind you once more, if you are
unaware of it,” the prosecutor began, with a peculiar and stern
impressiveness, “that you have a perfect right not to answer the questions
put to you now, and we on our side have no right to extort an answer from
you, if you decline to give it for one reason or another. That is entirely
a matter for your personal decision. But it is our duty, on the other
hand, in such cases as the present, to explain and set before you the
degree of injury you will be doing yourself by refusing to give this or
that piece of evidence. After which I will beg you to continue.”

“Gentlemen, I’m not angry ... I ...” Mitya muttered in a rather
disconcerted tone. “Well, gentlemen, you see, that Samsonov to whom I went
then ...”

We will, of course, not reproduce his account of what is known to the
reader already. Mitya was impatiently anxious not to omit the slightest
detail. At the same time he was in a hurry to get it over. But as he gave
his evidence it was written down, and therefore they had continually to
pull him up. Mitya disliked this, but submitted; got angry, though still
good-humoredly. He did, it is true, exclaim, from time to time,
“Gentlemen, that’s enough to make an angel out of patience!” Or,
“Gentlemen, it’s no good your irritating me.”

But even though he exclaimed he still preserved for a time his genially
expansive mood. So he told them how Samsonov had made a fool of him two
days before. (He had completely realized by now that he had been fooled.)
The sale of his watch for six roubles to obtain money for the journey was
something new to the lawyers. They were at once greatly interested, and
even, to Mitya’s intense indignation, thought it necessary to write the
fact down as a secondary confirmation of the circumstance that he had
hardly a farthing in his pocket at the time. Little by little Mitya began
to grow surly. Then, after describing his journey to see Lyagavy, the
night spent in the stifling hut, and so on, he came to his return to the
town. Here he began, without being particularly urged, to give a minute
account of the agonies of jealousy he endured on Grushenka’s account.

He was heard with silent attention. They inquired particularly into the
circumstance of his having a place of ambush in Marya Kondratyevna’s house
at the back of Fyodor Pavlovitch’s garden to keep watch on Grushenka, and
of Smerdyakov’s bringing him information. They laid particular stress on
this, and noted it down. Of his jealousy he spoke warmly and at length,
and though inwardly ashamed at exposing his most intimate feelings to
“public ignominy,” so to speak, he evidently overcame his shame in order
to tell the truth. The frigid severity, with which the investigating
lawyer, and still more the prosecutor, stared intently at him as he told
his story, disconcerted him at last considerably.

“That boy, Nikolay Parfenovitch, to whom I was talking nonsense about
women only a few days ago, and that sickly prosecutor are not worth my
telling this to,” he reflected mournfully. “It’s ignominious. ‘Be patient,
humble, hold thy peace.’ ” He wound up his reflections with that line. But
he pulled himself together to go on again. When he came to telling of his
visit to Madame Hohlakov, he regained his spirits and even wished to tell
a little anecdote of that lady which had nothing to do with the case. But
the investigating lawyer stopped him, and civilly suggested that he should
pass on to “more essential matters.” At last, when he described his
despair and told them how, when he left Madame Hohlakov’s, he thought that
he’d “get three thousand if he had to murder some one to do it,” they
stopped him again and noted down that he had “meant to murder some one.”
Mitya let them write it without protest. At last he reached the point in
his story when he learned that Grushenka had deceived him and had returned
from Samsonov’s as soon as he left her there, though she had said that she
would stay there till midnight.

“If I didn’t kill Fenya then, gentlemen, it was only because I hadn’t
time,” broke from him suddenly at that point in his story. That, too, was
carefully written down. Mitya waited gloomily, and was beginning to tell
how he ran into his father’s garden when the investigating lawyer suddenly
stopped him, and opening the big portfolio that lay on the sofa beside him
he brought out the brass pestle.

“Do you recognize this object?” he asked, showing it to Mitya.

“Oh, yes,” he laughed gloomily. “Of course I recognize it. Let me have a
look at it.... Damn it, never mind!”

“You have forgotten to mention it,” observed the investigating lawyer.

“Hang it all, I shouldn’t have concealed it from you. Do you suppose I
could have managed without it? It simply escaped my memory.”

“Be so good as to tell us precisely how you came to arm yourself with it.”

“Certainly I will be so good, gentlemen.”

And Mitya described how he took the pestle and ran.

“But what object had you in view in arming yourself with such a weapon?”

“What object? No object. I just picked it up and ran off.”

“What for, if you had no object?”

Mitya’s wrath flared up. He looked intently at “the boy” and smiled
gloomily and malignantly. He was feeling more and more ashamed at having
told “such people” the story of his jealousy so sincerely and
spontaneously.

“Bother the pestle!” broke from him suddenly.

“But still—”

“Oh, to keep off dogs.... Oh, because it was dark.... In case anything
turned up.”

“But have you ever on previous occasions taken a weapon with you when you
went out, since you’re afraid of the dark?”

“Ugh! damn it all, gentlemen! There’s positively no talking to you!” cried
Mitya, exasperated beyond endurance, and turning to the secretary, crimson
with anger, he said quickly, with a note of fury in his voice:

“Write down at once ... at once ... ‘that I snatched up the pestle to go
and kill my father ... Fyodor Pavlovitch ... by hitting him on the head
with it!’ Well, now are you satisfied, gentlemen? Are your minds
relieved?” he said, glaring defiantly at the lawyers.

“We quite understand that you made that statement just now through
exasperation with us and the questions we put to you, which you consider
trivial, though they are, in fact, essential,” the prosecutor remarked
dryly in reply.

“Well, upon my word, gentlemen! Yes, I took the pestle.... What does one
pick things up for at such moments? I don’t know what for. I snatched it
up and ran—that’s all. For to me, gentlemen, _passons_, or I declare I
won’t tell you any more.”

He sat with his elbows on the table and his head in his hand. He sat
sideways to them and gazed at the wall, struggling against a feeling of
nausea. He had, in fact, an awful inclination to get up and declare that
he wouldn’t say another word, “not if you hang me for it.”

“You see, gentlemen,” he said at last, with difficulty controlling
himself, “you see. I listen to you and am haunted by a dream.... It’s a
dream I have sometimes, you know.... I often dream it—it’s always the same
... that some one is hunting me, some one I’m awfully afraid of ... that
he’s hunting me in the dark, in the night ... tracking me, and I hide
somewhere from him, behind a door or cupboard, hide in a degrading way,
and the worst of it is, he always knows where I am, but he pretends not to
know where I am on purpose, to prolong my agony, to enjoy my terror....
That’s just what you’re doing now. It’s just like that!”

“Is that the sort of thing you dream about?” inquired the prosecutor.

“Yes, it is. Don’t you want to write it down?” said Mitya, with a
distorted smile.

“No; no need to write it down. But still you do have curious dreams.”

“It’s not a question of dreams now, gentlemen—this is realism, this is
real life! I’m a wolf and you’re the hunters. Well, hunt him down!”

“You are wrong to make such comparisons ...” began Nikolay Parfenovitch,
with extraordinary softness.

“No, I’m not wrong, not at all!” Mitya flared up again, though his
outburst of wrath had obviously relieved his heart. He grew more
good-humored at every word. “You may not trust a criminal or a man on
trial tortured by your questions, but an honorable man, the honorable
impulses of the heart (I say that boldly!)—no! That you must believe you
have no right indeed ... but—


    Be silent, heart,
    Be patient, humble, hold thy peace.


Well, shall I go on?” he broke off gloomily.

“If you’ll be so kind,” answered Nikolay Parfenovitch.



Chapter V. The Third Ordeal


Though Mitya spoke sullenly, it was evident that he was trying more than
ever not to forget or miss a single detail of his story. He told them how
he had leapt over the fence into his father’s garden; how he had gone up
to the window; told them all that had passed under the window. Clearly,
precisely, distinctly, he described the feelings that troubled him during
those moments in the garden when he longed so terribly to know whether
Grushenka was with his father or not. But, strange to say, both the
lawyers listened now with a sort of awful reserve, looked coldly at him,
asked few questions. Mitya could gather nothing from their faces.

“They’re angry and offended,” he thought. “Well, bother them!”

When he described how he made up his mind at last to make the “signal” to
his father that Grushenka had come, so that he should open the window, the
lawyers paid no attention to the word “signal,” as though they entirely
failed to grasp the meaning of the word in this connection: so much so,
that Mitya noticed it. Coming at last to the moment when, seeing his
father peering out of the window, his hatred flared up and he pulled the
pestle out of his pocket, he suddenly, as though of design, stopped short.
He sat gazing at the wall and was aware that their eyes were fixed upon
him.

“Well?” said the investigating lawyer. “You pulled out the weapon and ...
and what happened then?”

“Then? Why, then I murdered him ... hit him on the head and cracked his
skull.... I suppose that’s your story. That’s it!”

His eyes suddenly flashed. All his smothered wrath suddenly flamed up with
extraordinary violence in his soul.

“Our story?” repeated Nikolay Parfenovitch. “Well—and yours?”

Mitya dropped his eyes and was a long time silent.

“My story, gentlemen? Well, it was like this,” he began softly. “Whether
it was some one’s tears, or my mother prayed to God, or a good angel
kissed me at that instant, I don’t know. But the devil was conquered. I
rushed from the window and ran to the fence. My father was alarmed and,
for the first time, he saw me then, cried out, and sprang back from the
window. I remember that very well. I ran across the garden to the fence
... and there Grigory caught me, when I was sitting on the fence.”

At that point he raised his eyes at last and looked at his listeners. They
seemed to be staring at him with perfectly unruffled attention. A sort of
paroxysm of indignation seized on Mitya’s soul.

“Why, you’re laughing at me at this moment, gentlemen!” he broke off
suddenly.

“What makes you think that?” observed Nikolay Parfenovitch.

“You don’t believe one word—that’s why! I understand, of course, that I
have come to the vital point. The old man’s lying there now with his skull
broken, while I—after dramatically describing how I wanted to kill him,
and how I snatched up the pestle—I suddenly run away from the window. A
romance! Poetry! As though one could believe a fellow on his word. Ha ha!
You are scoffers, gentlemen!”

And he swung round on his chair so that it creaked.

“And did you notice,” asked the prosecutor suddenly, as though not
observing Mitya’s excitement, “did you notice when you ran away from the
window, whether the door into the garden was open?”

“No, it was not open.”

“It was not?”

“It was shut. And who could open it? Bah! the door. Wait a bit!” he seemed
suddenly to bethink himself, and almost with a start:

“Why, did you find the door open?”

“Yes, it was open.”

“Why, who could have opened it if you did not open it yourselves?” cried
Mitya, greatly astonished.

“The door stood open, and your father’s murderer undoubtedly went in at
that door, and, having accomplished the crime, went out again by the same
door,” the prosecutor pronounced deliberately, as though chiseling out
each word separately. “That is perfectly clear. The murder was committed
in the room and _not through the __ window_; that is absolutely certain
from the examination that has been made, from the position of the body and
everything. There can be no doubt of that circumstance.”

Mitya was absolutely dumbfounded.

“But that’s utterly impossible!” he cried, completely at a loss. “I ... I
didn’t go in.... I tell you positively, definitely, the door was shut the
whole time I was in the garden, and when I ran out of the garden. I only
stood at the window and saw him through the window. That’s all, that’s
all.... I remember to the last minute. And if I didn’t remember, it would
be just the same. I know it, for no one knew the signals except
Smerdyakov, and me, and the dead man. And he wouldn’t have opened the door
to any one in the world without the signals.”

“Signals? What signals?” asked the prosecutor, with greedy, almost
hysterical, curiosity. He instantly lost all trace of his reserve and
dignity. He asked the question with a sort of cringing timidity. He
scented an important fact of which he had known nothing, and was already
filled with dread that Mitya might be unwilling to disclose it.

“So you didn’t know!” Mitya winked at him with a malicious and mocking
smile. “What if I won’t tell you? From whom could you find out? No one
knew about the signals except my father, Smerdyakov, and me: that was all.
Heaven knew, too, but it won’t tell you. But it’s an interesting fact.
There’s no knowing what you might build on it. Ha ha! Take comfort,
gentlemen, I’ll reveal it. You’ve some foolish idea in your hearts. You
don’t know the man you have to deal with! You have to do with a prisoner
who gives evidence against himself, to his own damage! Yes, for I’m a man
of honor and you—are not.”

The prosecutor swallowed this without a murmur. He was trembling with
impatience to hear the new fact. Minutely and diffusely Mitya told them
everything about the signals invented by Fyodor Pavlovitch for Smerdyakov.
He told them exactly what every tap on the window meant, tapped the
signals on the table, and when Nikolay Parfenovitch said that he supposed
he, Mitya, had tapped the signal “Grushenka has come,” when he tapped to
his father, he answered precisely that he had tapped that signal, that
“Grushenka had come.”

“So now you can build up your tower,” Mitya broke off, and again turned
away from them contemptuously.

“So no one knew of the signals but your dead father, you, and the valet
Smerdyakov? And no one else?” Nikolay Parfenovitch inquired once more.

“Yes. The valet Smerdyakov, and Heaven. Write down about Heaven. That may
be of use. Besides, you will need God yourselves.”

And they had already, of course, begun writing it down. But while they
wrote, the prosecutor said suddenly, as though pitching on a new idea:

“But if Smerdyakov also knew of these signals and you absolutely deny all
responsibility for the death of your father, was it not he, perhaps, who
knocked the signal agreed upon, induced your father to open to him, and
then ... committed the crime?”

Mitya turned upon him a look of profound irony and intense hatred. His
silent stare lasted so long that it made the prosecutor blink.

“You’ve caught the fox again,” commented Mitya at last; “you’ve got the
beast by the tail. Ha ha! I see through you, Mr. Prosecutor. You thought,
of course, that I should jump at that, catch at your prompting, and shout
with all my might, ‘Aie! it’s Smerdyakov; he’s the murderer.’ Confess
that’s what you thought. Confess, and I’ll go on.”

But the prosecutor did not confess. He held his tongue and waited.

“You’re mistaken. I’m not going to shout ‘It’s Smerdyakov,’ ” said Mitya.

“And you don’t even suspect him?”

“Why, do you suspect him?”

“He is suspected, too.”

Mitya fixed his eyes on the floor.

“Joking apart,” he brought out gloomily. “Listen. From the very beginning,
almost from the moment when I ran out to you from behind the curtain, I’ve
had the thought of Smerdyakov in my mind. I’ve been sitting here, shouting
that I’m innocent and thinking all the time ‘Smerdyakov!’ I can’t get
Smerdyakov out of my head. In fact, I, too, thought of Smerdyakov just
now; but only for a second. Almost at once I thought, ‘No, it’s not
Smerdyakov.’ It’s not his doing, gentlemen.”

“In that case is there anybody else you suspect?” Nikolay Parfenovitch
inquired cautiously.

“I don’t know any one it could be, whether it’s the hand of Heaven or
Satan, but ... not Smerdyakov,” Mitya jerked out with decision.

“But what makes you affirm so confidently and emphatically that it’s not
he?”

“From my conviction—my impression. Because Smerdyakov is a man of the most
abject character and a coward. He’s not a coward, he’s the epitome of all
the cowardice in the world walking on two legs. He has the heart of a
chicken. When he talked to me, he was always trembling for fear I should
kill him, though I never raised my hand against him. He fell at my feet
and blubbered; he has kissed these very boots, literally, beseeching me
‘not to frighten him.’ Do you hear? ‘Not to frighten him.’ What a thing to
say! Why, I offered him money. He’s a puling chicken—sickly, epileptic,
weak-minded—a child of eight could thrash him. He has no character worth
talking about. It’s not Smerdyakov, gentlemen. He doesn’t care for money;
he wouldn’t take my presents. Besides, what motive had he for murdering
the old man? Why, he’s very likely his son, you know—his natural son. Do
you know that?”

“We have heard that legend. But you are your father’s son, too, you know;
yet you yourself told every one you meant to murder him.”

“That’s a thrust! And a nasty, mean one, too! I’m not afraid! Oh,
gentlemen, isn’t it too base of you to say that to my face? It’s base,
because I told you that myself. I not only wanted to murder him, but I
might have done it. And, what’s more, I went out of my way to tell you of
my own accord that I nearly murdered him. But, you see, I didn’t murder
him; you see, my guardian angel saved me—that’s what you’ve not taken into
account. And that’s why it’s so base of you. For I didn’t kill him, I
didn’t kill him! Do you hear, I did not kill him.”

He was almost choking. He had not been so moved before during the whole
interrogation.

“And what has he told you, gentlemen—Smerdyakov, I mean?” he added
suddenly, after a pause. “May I ask that question?”

“You may ask any question,” the prosecutor replied with frigid severity,
“any question relating to the facts of the case, and we are, I repeat,
bound to answer every inquiry you make. We found the servant Smerdyakov,
concerning whom you inquire, lying unconscious in his bed, in an epileptic
fit of extreme severity, that had recurred, possibly, ten times. The
doctor who was with us told us, after seeing him, that he may possibly not
outlive the night.”

“Well, if that’s so, the devil must have killed him,” broke suddenly from
Mitya, as though until that moment he had been asking himself: “Was it
Smerdyakov or not?”

“We will come back to this later,” Nikolay Parfenovitch decided. “Now,
wouldn’t you like to continue your statement?”

Mitya asked for a rest. His request was courteously granted. After
resting, he went on with his story. But he was evidently depressed. He was
exhausted, mortified and morally shaken. To make things worse the
prosecutor exasperated him, as though intentionally, by vexatious
interruptions about “trifling points.” Scarcely had Mitya described how,
sitting on the wall, he had struck Grigory on the head with the pestle,
while the old man had hold of his left leg, and how he had then jumped
down to look at him, when the prosecutor stopped him to ask him to
describe exactly how he was sitting on the wall. Mitya was surprised.

“Oh, I was sitting like this, astride, one leg on one side of the wall and
one on the other.”

“And the pestle?”

“The pestle was in my hand.”

“Not in your pocket? Do you remember that precisely? Was it a violent blow
you gave him?”

“It must have been a violent one. But why do you ask?”

“Would you mind sitting on the chair just as you sat on the wall then and
showing us just how you moved your arm, and in what direction?”

“You’re making fun of me, aren’t you?” asked Mitya, looking haughtily at
the speaker; but the latter did not flinch.

Mitya turned abruptly, sat astride on his chair, and swung his arm.

“This was how I struck him! That’s how I knocked him down! What more do
you want?”

“Thank you. May I trouble you now to explain why you jumped down, with
what object, and what you had in view?”

“Oh, hang it!... I jumped down to look at the man I’d hurt ... I don’t
know what for!”

“Though you were so excited and were running away?”

“Yes, though I was excited and running away.”

“You wanted to help him?”

“Help!... Yes, perhaps I did want to help him.... I don’t remember.”

“You don’t remember? Then you didn’t quite know what you were doing?”

“Not at all. I remember everything—every detail. I jumped down to look at
him, and wiped his face with my handkerchief.”

“We have seen your handkerchief. Did you hope to restore him to
consciousness?”

“I don’t know whether I hoped it. I simply wanted to make sure whether he
was alive or not.”

“Ah! You wanted to be sure? Well, what then?”

“I’m not a doctor. I couldn’t decide. I ran away thinking I’d killed him.
And now he’s recovered.”

“Excellent,” commented the prosecutor. “Thank you. That’s all I wanted.
Kindly proceed.”

Alas! it never entered Mitya’s head to tell them, though he remembered it,
that he had jumped back from pity, and standing over the prostrate figure
had even uttered some words of regret: “You’ve come to grief, old
man—there’s no help for it. Well, there you must lie.”

The prosecutor could only draw one conclusion: that the man had jumped
back “at such a moment and in such excitement simply with the object of
ascertaining whether the _only_ witness of his crime were dead; that he
must therefore have been a man of great strength, coolness, decision and
foresight even at such a moment,” ... and so on. The prosecutor was
satisfied: “I’ve provoked the nervous fellow by ‘trifles’ and he has said
more than he meant to.”

With painful effort Mitya went on. But this time he was pulled up
immediately by Nikolay Parfenovitch.

“How came you to run to the servant, Fedosya Markovna, with your hands so
covered with blood, and, as it appears, your face, too?”

“Why, I didn’t notice the blood at all at the time,” answered Mitya.

“That’s quite likely. It does happen sometimes.” The prosecutor exchanged
glances with Nikolay Parfenovitch.

“I simply didn’t notice. You’re quite right there, prosecutor,” Mitya
assented suddenly.

Next came the account of Mitya’s sudden determination to “step aside” and
make way for their happiness. But he could not make up his mind to open
his heart to them as before, and tell them about “the queen of his soul.”
He disliked speaking of her before these chilly persons “who were
fastening on him like bugs.” And so in response to their reiterated
questions he answered briefly and abruptly:

“Well, I made up my mind to kill myself. What had I left to live for? That
question stared me in the face. Her first rightful lover had come back,
the man who wronged her but who’d hurried back to offer his love, after
five years, and atone for the wrong with marriage.... So I knew it was all
over for me.... And behind me disgrace, and that blood—Grigory’s.... What
had I to live for? So I went to redeem the pistols I had pledged, to load
them and put a bullet in my brain to-morrow.”

“And a grand feast the night before?”

“Yes, a grand feast the night before. Damn it all, gentlemen! Do make
haste and finish it. I meant to shoot myself not far from here, beyond the
village, and I’d planned to do it at five o’clock in the morning. And I
had a note in my pocket already. I wrote it at Perhotin’s when I loaded my
pistols. Here’s the letter. Read it! It’s not for you I tell it,” he added
contemptuously. He took it from his waistcoat pocket and flung it on the
table. The lawyers read it with curiosity, and, as is usual, added it to
the papers connected with the case.

“And you didn’t even think of washing your hands at Perhotin’s? You were
not afraid then of arousing suspicion?”

“What suspicion? Suspicion or not, I should have galloped here just the
same, and shot myself at five o’clock, and you wouldn’t have been in time
to do anything. If it hadn’t been for what’s happened to my father, you
would have known nothing about it, and wouldn’t have come here. Oh, it’s
the devil’s doing. It was the devil murdered father, it was through the
devil that you found it out so soon. How did you manage to get here so
quick? It’s marvelous, a dream!”

“Mr. Perhotin informed us that when you came to him, you held in your
hands ... your blood-stained hands ... your money ... a lot of money ... a
bundle of hundred-rouble notes, and that his servant-boy saw it too.”

“That’s true, gentlemen. I remember it was so.”

“Now, there’s one little point presents itself. Can you inform us,”
Nikolay Parfenovitch began, with extreme gentleness, “where did you get so
much money all of a sudden, when it appears from the facts, from the
reckoning of time, that you had not been home?”

The prosecutor’s brows contracted at the question being asked so plainly,
but he did not interrupt Nikolay Parfenovitch.

“No, I didn’t go home,” answered Mitya, apparently perfectly composed, but
looking at the floor.

“Allow me then to repeat my question,” Nikolay Parfenovitch went on as
though creeping up to the subject. “Where were you able to procure such a
sum all at once, when by your own confession, at five o’clock the same day
you—”

“I was in want of ten roubles and pledged my pistols with Perhotin, and
then went to Madame Hohlakov to borrow three thousand which she wouldn’t
give me, and so on, and all the rest of it,” Mitya interrupted sharply.
“Yes, gentlemen, I was in want of it, and suddenly thousands turned up,
eh? Do you know, gentlemen, you’re both afraid now ‘what if he won’t tell
us where he got it?’ That’s just how it is. I’m not going to tell you,
gentlemen. You’ve guessed right. You’ll never know,” said Mitya, chipping
out each word with extraordinary determination. The lawyers were silent
for a moment.

“You must understand, Mr. Karamazov, that it is of vital importance for us
to know,” said Nikolay Parfenovitch, softly and suavely.

“I understand; but still I won’t tell you.”

The prosecutor, too, intervened, and again reminded the prisoner that he
was at liberty to refuse to answer questions, if he thought it to his
interest, and so on. But in view of the damage he might do himself by his
silence, especially in a case of such importance as—

“And so on, gentlemen, and so on. Enough! I’ve heard that rigmarole
before,” Mitya interrupted again. “I can see for myself how important it
is, and that this is the vital point, and still I won’t say.”

“What is it to us? It’s not our business, but yours. You are doing
yourself harm,” observed Nikolay Parfenovitch nervously.

“You see, gentlemen, joking apart”—Mitya lifted his eyes and looked firmly
at them both—“I had an inkling from the first that we should come to
loggerheads at this point. But at first when I began to give my evidence,
it was all still far away and misty; it was all floating, and I was so
simple that I began with the supposition of mutual confidence existing
between us. Now I can see for myself that such confidence is out of the
question, for in any case we were bound to come to this cursed
stumbling-block. And now we’ve come to it! It’s impossible and there’s an
end of it! But I don’t blame you. You can’t believe it all simply on my
word. I understand that, of course.”

He relapsed into gloomy silence.

“Couldn’t you, without abandoning your resolution to be silent about the
chief point, could you not, at the same time, give us some slight hint as
to the nature of the motives which are strong enough to induce you to
refuse to answer, at a crisis so full of danger to you?”

Mitya smiled mournfully, almost dreamily.

“I’m much more good-natured than you think, gentlemen. I’ll tell you the
reason why and give you that hint, though you don’t deserve it. I won’t
speak of that, gentlemen, because it would be a stain on my honor. The
answer to the question where I got the money would expose me to far
greater disgrace than the murder and robbing of my father, if I had
murdered and robbed him. That’s why I can’t tell you. I can’t for fear of
disgrace. What, gentlemen, are you going to write that down?”

“Yes, we’ll write it down,” lisped Nikolay Parfenovitch.

“You ought not to write that down about ‘disgrace.’ I only told you that
in the goodness of my heart. I needn’t have told you. I made you a present
of it, so to speak, and you pounce upon it at once. Oh, well, write—write
what you like,” he concluded, with scornful disgust. “I’m not afraid of
you and I can still hold up my head before you.”

“And can’t you tell us the nature of that disgrace?” Nikolay Parfenovitch
hazarded.

The prosecutor frowned darkly.

“No, no, _c’est fini_, don’t trouble yourselves. It’s not worth while
soiling one’s hands. I have soiled myself enough through you as it is.
You’re not worth it—no one is ... Enough, gentlemen. I’m not going on.”

This was said too peremptorily. Nikolay Parfenovitch did not insist
further, but from Ippolit Kirillovitch’s eyes he saw that he had not given
up hope.

“Can you not, at least, tell us what sum you had in your hands when you
went into Mr. Perhotin’s—how many roubles exactly?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“You spoke to Mr. Perhotin, I believe, of having received three thousand
from Madame Hohlakov.”

“Perhaps I did. Enough, gentlemen. I won’t say how much I had.”

“Will you be so good then as to tell us how you came here and what you
have done since you arrived?”

“Oh! you might ask the people here about that. But I’ll tell you if you
like.”

He proceeded to do so, but we won’t repeat his story. He told it dryly and
curtly. Of the raptures of his love he said nothing, but told them that he
abandoned his determination to shoot himself, owing to “new factors in the
case.” He told the story without going into motives or details. And this
time the lawyers did not worry him much. It was obvious that there was no
essential point of interest to them here.

“We shall verify all that. We will come back to it during the examination
of the witnesses, which will, of course, take place in your presence,”
said Nikolay Parfenovitch in conclusion. “And now allow me to request you
to lay on the table everything in your possession, especially all the
money you still have about you.”

“My money, gentlemen? Certainly. I understand that that is necessary. I’m
surprised, indeed, that you haven’t inquired about it before. It’s true I
couldn’t get away anywhere. I’m sitting here where I can be seen. But
here’s my money—count it—take it. That’s all, I think.”

He turned it all out of his pockets; even the small change—two pieces of
twenty copecks—he pulled out of his waistcoat pocket. They counted the
money, which amounted to eight hundred and thirty-six roubles, and forty
copecks.

“And is that all?” asked the investigating lawyer.

“Yes.”

“You stated just now in your evidence that you spent three hundred roubles
at Plotnikovs’. You gave Perhotin ten, your driver twenty, here you lost
two hundred, then....”

Nikolay Parfenovitch reckoned it all up. Mitya helped him readily. They
recollected every farthing and included it in the reckoning. Nikolay
Parfenovitch hurriedly added up the total.

“With this eight hundred you must have had about fifteen hundred at
first?”

“I suppose so,” snapped Mitya.

“How is it they all assert there was much more?”

“Let them assert it.”

“But you asserted it yourself.”

“Yes, I did, too.”

“We will compare all this with the evidence of other persons not yet
examined. Don’t be anxious about your money. It will be properly taken
care of and be at your disposal at the conclusion of ... what is beginning
... if it appears, or, so to speak, is proved that you have undisputed
right to it. Well, and now....”

Nikolay Parfenovitch suddenly got up, and informed Mitya firmly that it
was his duty and obligation to conduct a minute and thorough search “of
your clothes and everything else....”

“By all means, gentlemen. I’ll turn out all my pockets, if you like.”

And he did, in fact, begin turning out his pockets.

“It will be necessary to take off your clothes, too.”

“What! Undress? Ugh! Damn it! Won’t you search me as I am! Can’t you?”

“It’s utterly impossible, Dmitri Fyodorovitch. You must take off your
clothes.”

“As you like,” Mitya submitted gloomily; “only, please, not here, but
behind the curtains. Who will search them?”

“Behind the curtains, of course.”

Nikolay Parfenovitch bent his head in assent. His small face wore an
expression of peculiar solemnity.



Chapter VI. The Prosecutor Catches Mitya


Something utterly unexpected and amazing to Mitya followed. He could
never, even a minute before, have conceived that any one could behave like
that to him, Mitya Karamazov. What was worst of all, there was something
humiliating in it, and on their side something “supercilious and
scornful.” It was nothing to take off his coat, but he was asked to
undress further, or rather not asked but “commanded,” he quite understood
that. From pride and contempt he submitted without a word. Several
peasants accompanied the lawyers and remained on the same side of the
curtain. “To be ready if force is required,” thought Mitya, “and perhaps
for some other reason, too.”

“Well, must I take off my shirt, too?” he asked sharply, but Nikolay
Parfenovitch did not answer. He was busily engaged with the prosecutor in
examining the coat, the trousers, the waistcoat and the cap; and it was
evident that they were both much interested in the scrutiny. “They make no
bones about it,” thought Mitya, “they don’t keep up the most elementary
politeness.”

“I ask you for the second time—need I take off my shirt or not?” he said,
still more sharply and irritably.

“Don’t trouble yourself. We will tell you what to do,” Nikolay
Parfenovitch said, and his voice was positively peremptory, or so it
seemed to Mitya.

Meantime a consultation was going on in undertones between the lawyers.
There turned out to be on the coat, especially on the left side at the
back, a huge patch of blood, dry, and still stiff. There were bloodstains
on the trousers, too. Nikolay Parfenovitch, moreover, in the presence of
the peasant witnesses, passed his fingers along the collar, the cuffs, and
all the seams of the coat and trousers, obviously looking for
something—money, of course. He didn’t even hide from Mitya his suspicion
that he was capable of sewing money up in his clothes.

“He treats me not as an officer but as a thief,” Mitya muttered to
himself. They communicated their ideas to one another with amazing
frankness. The secretary, for instance, who was also behind the curtain,
fussing about and listening, called Nikolay Parfenovitch’s attention to
the cap, which they were also fingering.

“You remember Gridyenko, the copying-clerk,” observed the secretary. “Last
summer he received the wages of the whole office, and pretended to have
lost the money when he was drunk. And where was it found? Why, in just
such pipings in his cap. The hundred-rouble notes were screwed up in
little rolls and sewed in the piping.”

Both the lawyers remembered Gridyenko’s case perfectly, and so laid aside
Mitya’s cap, and decided that all his clothes must be more thoroughly
examined later.

“Excuse me,” cried Nikolay Parfenovitch, suddenly, noticing that the right
cuff of Mitya’s shirt was turned in, and covered with blood, “excuse me,
what’s that, blood?”

“Yes,” Mitya jerked out.

“That is, what blood? ... and why is the cuff turned in?”

Mitya told him how he had got the sleeve stained with blood looking after
Grigory, and had turned it inside when he was washing his hands at
Perhotin’s.

“You must take off your shirt, too. That’s very important as material
evidence.”

Mitya flushed red and flew into a rage.

“What, am I to stay naked?” he shouted.

“Don’t disturb yourself. We will arrange something. And meanwhile take off
your socks.”

“You’re not joking? Is that really necessary?” Mitya’s eyes flashed.

“We are in no mood for joking,” answered Nikolay Parfenovitch sternly.

“Well, if I must—” muttered Mitya, and sitting down on the bed, he took
off his socks. He felt unbearably awkward. All were clothed, while he was
naked, and strange to say, when he was undressed he felt somehow guilty in
their presence, and was almost ready to believe himself that he was
inferior to them, and that now they had a perfect right to despise him.

“When all are undressed, one is somehow not ashamed, but when one’s the
only one undressed and everybody is looking, it’s degrading,” he kept
repeating to himself, again and again. “It’s like a dream, I’ve sometimes
dreamed of being in such degrading positions.” It was a misery to him to
take off his socks. They were very dirty, and so were his underclothes,
and now every one could see it. And what was worse, he disliked his feet.
All his life he had thought both his big toes hideous. He particularly
loathed the coarse, flat, crooked nail on the right one, and now they
would all see it. Feeling intolerably ashamed made him, at once and
intentionally, rougher. He pulled off his shirt, himself.

“Would you like to look anywhere else if you’re not ashamed to?”

“No, there’s no need to, at present.”

“Well, am I to stay naked like this?” he added savagely.

“Yes, that can’t be helped for the time.... Kindly sit down here for a
while. You can wrap yourself in a quilt from the bed, and I ... I’ll see
to all this.”

All the things were shown to the witnesses. The report of the search was
drawn up, and at last Nikolay Parfenovitch went out, and the clothes were
carried out after him. Ippolit Kirillovitch went out, too. Mitya was left
alone with the peasants, who stood in silence, never taking their eyes off
him. Mitya wrapped himself up in the quilt. He felt cold. His bare feet
stuck out, and he couldn’t pull the quilt over so as to cover them.
Nikolay Parfenovitch seemed to be gone a long time, “an insufferable
time.” “He thinks of me as a puppy,” thought Mitya, gnashing his teeth.
“That rotten prosecutor has gone, too, contemptuous no doubt, it disgusts
him to see me naked!”

Mitya imagined, however, that his clothes would be examined and returned
to him. But what was his indignation when Nikolay Parfenovitch came back
with quite different clothes, brought in behind him by a peasant.

“Here are clothes for you,” he observed airily, seeming well satisfied
with the success of his mission. “Mr. Kalganov has kindly provided these
for this unusual emergency, as well as a clean shirt. Luckily he had them
all in his trunk. You can keep your own socks and underclothes.”

Mitya flew into a passion.

“I won’t have other people’s clothes!” he shouted menacingly, “give me my
own!”

“It’s impossible!”

“Give me my own. Damn Kalganov and his clothes, too!”

It was a long time before they could persuade him. But they succeeded
somehow in quieting him down. They impressed upon him that his clothes,
being stained with blood, must be “included with the other material
evidence,” and that they “had not even the right to let him have them now
... taking into consideration the possible outcome of the case.” Mitya at
last understood this. He subsided into gloomy silence and hurriedly
dressed himself. He merely observed, as he put them on, that the clothes
were much better than his old ones, and that he disliked “gaining by the
change.” The coat was, besides, “ridiculously tight. Am I to be dressed up
like a fool ... for your amusement?”

They urged upon him again that he was exaggerating, that Kalganov was only
a little taller, so that only the trousers might be a little too long. But
the coat turned out to be really tight in the shoulders.

“Damn it all! I can hardly button it,” Mitya grumbled. “Be so good as to
tell Mr. Kalganov from me that I didn’t ask for his clothes, and it’s not
my doing that they’ve dressed me up like a clown.”

“He understands that, and is sorry ... I mean, not sorry to lend you his
clothes, but sorry about all this business,” mumbled Nikolay Parfenovitch.

“Confound his sorrow! Well, where now? Am I to go on sitting here?”

He was asked to go back to the “other room.” Mitya went in, scowling with
anger, and trying to avoid looking at any one. Dressed in another man’s
clothes he felt himself disgraced, even in the eyes of the peasants, and
of Trifon Borissovitch, whose face appeared, for some reason, in the
doorway, and vanished immediately. “He’s come to look at me dressed up,”
thought Mitya. He sat down on the same chair as before. He had an absurd
nightmarish feeling, as though he were out of his mind.

“Well, what now? Are you going to flog me? That’s all that’s left for
you,” he said, clenching his teeth and addressing the prosecutor. He would
not turn to Nikolay Parfenovitch, as though he disdained to speak to him.

“He looked too closely at my socks, and turned them inside out on purpose
to show every one how dirty they were—the scoundrel!”

“Well, now we must proceed to the examination of witnesses,” observed
Nikolay Parfenovitch, as though in reply to Mitya’s question.

“Yes,” said the prosecutor thoughtfully, as though reflecting on
something.

“We’ve done what we could in your interest, Dmitri Fyodorovitch,” Nikolay
Parfenovitch went on, “but having received from you such an uncompromising
refusal to explain to us the source from which you obtained the money
found upon you, we are, at the present moment—”

“What is the stone in your ring?” Mitya interrupted suddenly, as though
awakening from a reverie. He pointed to one of the three large rings
adorning Nikolay Parfenovitch’s right hand.

“Ring?” repeated Nikolay Parfenovitch with surprise.

“Yes, that one ... on your middle finger, with the little veins in it,
what stone is that?” Mitya persisted, like a peevish child.

“That’s a smoky topaz,” said Nikolay Parfenovitch, smiling. “Would you
like to look at it? I’ll take it off ...”

“No, don’t take it off,” cried Mitya furiously, suddenly waking up, and
angry with himself. “Don’t take it off ... there’s no need.... Damn it!...
Gentlemen, you’ve sullied my heart! Can you suppose that I would conceal
it from you, if I had really killed my father, that I would shuffle, lie,
and hide myself? No, that’s not like Dmitri Karamazov, that he couldn’t
do, and if I were guilty, I swear I shouldn’t have waited for your coming,
or for the sunrise as I meant at first, but should have killed myself
before this, without waiting for the dawn! I know that about myself now. I
couldn’t have learnt so much in twenty years as I’ve found out in this
accursed night!... And should I have been like this on this night, and at
this moment, sitting with you, could I have talked like this, could I have
moved like this, could I have looked at you and at the world like this, if
I had really been the murderer of my father, when the very thought of
having accidentally killed Grigory gave me no peace all night—not from
fear—oh, not simply from fear of your punishment! The disgrace of it! And
you expect me to be open with such scoffers as you, who see nothing and
believe in nothing, blind moles and scoffers, and to tell you another
nasty thing I’ve done, another disgrace, even if that would save me from
your accusation! No, better Siberia! The man who opened the door to my
father and went in at that door, he killed him, he robbed him. Who was he?
I’m racking my brains and can’t think who. But I can tell you it was not
Dmitri Karamazov, and that’s all I can tell you, and that’s enough,
enough, leave me alone.... Exile me, punish me, but don’t bother me any
more. I’ll say no more. Call your witnesses!”

Mitya uttered his sudden monologue as though he were determined to be
absolutely silent for the future. The prosecutor watched him the whole
time and only when he had ceased speaking, observed, as though it were the
most ordinary thing, with the most frigid and composed air:

“Oh, about the open door of which you spoke just now, we may as well
inform you, by the way, now, of a very interesting piece of evidence of
the greatest importance both to you and to us, that has been given us by
Grigory, the old man you wounded. On his recovery, he clearly and
emphatically stated, in reply to our questions, that when, on coming out
to the steps, and hearing a noise in the garden, he made up his mind to go
into it through the little gate which stood open, before he noticed you
running, as you have told us already, in the dark from the open window
where you saw your father, he, Grigory, glanced to the left, and, while
noticing the open window, observed at the same time, much nearer to him,
the door, standing wide open—that door which you have stated to have been
shut the whole time you were in the garden. I will not conceal from you
that Grigory himself confidently affirms and bears witness that you must
have run from that door, though, of course, he did not see you do so with
his own eyes, since he only noticed you first some distance away in the
garden, running towards the fence.”

Mitya had leapt up from his chair half-way through this speech.

“Nonsense!” he yelled, in a sudden frenzy, “it’s a barefaced lie. He
couldn’t have seen the door open because it was shut. He’s lying!”

“I consider it my duty to repeat that he is firm in his statement. He does
not waver. He adheres to it. We’ve cross-examined him several times.”

“Precisely. I have cross-examined him several times,” Nikolay Parfenovitch
confirmed warmly.

“It’s false, false! It’s either an attempt to slander me, or the
hallucination of a madman,” Mitya still shouted. “He’s simply raving, from
loss of blood, from the wound. He must have fancied it when he came to....
He’s raving.”

“Yes, but he noticed the open door, not when he came to after his
injuries, but before that, as soon as he went into the garden from the
lodge.”

“But it’s false, it’s false! It can’t be so! He’s slandering me from
spite.... He couldn’t have seen it ... I didn’t come from the door,”
gasped Mitya.

The prosecutor turned to Nikolay Parfenovitch and said to him
impressively:

“Confront him with it.”

“Do you recognize this object?”

Nikolay Parfenovitch laid upon the table a large and thick official
envelope, on which three seals still remained intact. The envelope was
empty, and slit open at one end. Mitya stared at it with open eyes.

“It ... it must be that envelope of my father’s, the envelope that
contained the three thousand roubles ... and if there’s inscribed on it,
allow me, ‘For my little chicken’ ... yes—three thousand!” he shouted, “do
you see, three thousand, do you see?”

“Of course, we see. But we didn’t find the money in it. It was empty, and
lying on the floor by the bed, behind the screen.”

For some seconds Mitya stood as though thunderstruck.

“Gentlemen, it’s Smerdyakov!” he shouted suddenly, at the top of his
voice. “It’s he who’s murdered him! He’s robbed him! No one else knew
where the old man hid the envelope. It’s Smerdyakov, that’s clear, now!”

“But you, too, knew of the envelope and that it was under the pillow.”

“I never knew it. I’ve never seen it. This is the first time I’ve looked
at it. I’d only heard of it from Smerdyakov.... He was the only one who
knew where the old man kept it hidden, I didn’t know ...” Mitya was
completely breathless.

“But you told us yourself that the envelope was under your deceased
father’s pillow. You especially stated that it was under the pillow, so
you must have known it.”

“We’ve got it written down,” confirmed Nikolay Parfenovitch.

“Nonsense! It’s absurd! I’d no idea it was under the pillow. And perhaps
it wasn’t under the pillow at all.... It was just a chance guess that it
was under the pillow. What does Smerdyakov say? Have you asked him where
it was? What does Smerdyakov say? that’s the chief point.... And I went
out of my way to tell lies against myself.... I told you without thinking
that it was under the pillow, and now you— Oh, you know how one says the
wrong thing, without meaning it. No one knew but Smerdyakov, only
Smerdyakov, and no one else.... He didn’t even tell me where it was! But
it’s his doing, his doing; there’s no doubt about it, he murdered him,
that’s as clear as daylight now,” Mitya exclaimed more and more
frantically, repeating himself incoherently, and growing more and more
exasperated and excited. “You must understand that, and arrest him at
once.... He must have killed him while I was running away and while
Grigory was unconscious, that’s clear now.... He gave the signal and
father opened to him ... for no one but he knew the signal, and without
the signal father would never have opened the door....”

“But you’re again forgetting the circumstance,” the prosecutor observed,
still speaking with the same restraint, though with a note of triumph,
“that there was no need to give the signal if the door already stood open
when you were there, while you were in the garden....”

“The door, the door,” muttered Mitya, and he stared speechless at the
prosecutor. He sank back helpless in his chair. All were silent.

“Yes, the door!... It’s a nightmare! God is against me!” he exclaimed,
staring before him in complete stupefaction.

“Come, you see,” the prosecutor went on with dignity, “and you can judge
for yourself, Dmitri Fyodorovitch. On the one hand we have the evidence of
the open door from which you ran out, a fact which overwhelms you and us.
On the other side your incomprehensible, persistent, and, so to speak,
obdurate silence with regard to the source from which you obtained the
money which was so suddenly seen in your hands, when only three hours
earlier, on your own showing, you pledged your pistols for the sake of ten
roubles! In view of all these facts, judge for yourself. What are we to
believe, and what can we depend upon? And don’t accuse us of being
‘frigid, cynical, scoffing people,’ who are incapable of believing in the
generous impulses of your heart.... Try to enter into our position ...”

Mitya was indescribably agitated. He turned pale.

“Very well!” he exclaimed suddenly. “I will tell you my secret. I’ll tell
you where I got the money!... I’ll reveal my shame, that I may not have to
blame myself or you hereafter.”

“And believe me, Dmitri Fyodorovitch,” put in Nikolay Parfenovitch, in a
voice of almost pathetic delight, “that every sincere and complete
confession on your part at this moment may, later on, have an immense
influence in your favor, and may, indeed, moreover—”

But the prosecutor gave him a slight shove under the table, and he checked
himself in time. Mitya, it is true, had not heard him.



Chapter VII. Mitya’s Great Secret. Received With Hisses


“Gentlemen,” he began, still in the same agitation, “I want to make a full
confession: that money was _my own_.” The lawyers’ faces lengthened. That
was not at all what they expected.

“How do you mean?” faltered Nikolay Parfenovitch, “when at five o’clock on
the same day, from your own confession—”

“Damn five o’clock on the same day and my own confession! That’s nothing
to do with it now! That money was my own, my own, that is, stolen by me
... not mine, I mean, but stolen by me, and it was fifteen hundred
roubles, and I had it on me all the time, all the time ...”

“But where did you get it?”

“I took it off my neck, gentlemen, off this very neck ... it was here,
round my neck, sewn up in a rag, and I’d had it round my neck a long time,
it’s a month since I put it round my neck ... to my shame and disgrace!”

“And from whom did you ... appropriate it?”

“You mean, ‘steal it’? Speak out plainly now. Yes, I consider that I
practically stole it, but, if you prefer, I ‘appropriated it.’ I consider
I stole it. And last night I stole it finally.”

“Last night? But you said that it’s a month since you ... obtained it?...”

“Yes. But not from my father. Not from my father, don’t be uneasy. I
didn’t steal it from my father, but from her. Let me tell you without
interrupting. It’s hard to do, you know. You see, a month ago, I was sent
for by Katerina Ivanovna, formerly my betrothed. Do you know her?”

“Yes, of course.”

“I know you know her. She’s a noble creature, noblest of the noble. But
she has hated me ever so long, oh, ever so long ... and hated me with good
reason, good reason!”

“Katerina Ivanovna!” Nikolay Parfenovitch exclaimed with wonder. The
prosecutor, too, stared.

“Oh, don’t take her name in vain! I’m a scoundrel to bring her into it.
Yes, I’ve seen that she hated me ... a long while.... From the very first,
even that evening at my lodging ... but enough, enough. You’re unworthy
even to know of that. No need of that at all.... I need only tell you that
she sent for me a month ago, gave me three thousand roubles to send off to
her sister and another relation in Moscow (as though she couldn’t have
sent it off herself!) and I ... it was just at that fatal moment in my
life when I ... well, in fact, when I’d just come to love another, her,
she’s sitting down below now, Grushenka. I carried her off here to Mokroe
then, and wasted here in two days half that damned three thousand, but the
other half I kept on me. Well, I’ve kept that other half, that fifteen
hundred, like a locket round my neck, but yesterday I undid it, and spent
it. What’s left of it, eight hundred roubles, is in your hands now,
Nikolay Parfenovitch. That’s the change out of the fifteen hundred I had
yesterday.”

“Excuse me. How’s that? Why, when you were here a month ago you spent
three thousand, not fifteen hundred, everybody knows that.”

“Who knows it? Who counted the money? Did I let any one count it?”

“Why, you told every one yourself that you’d spent exactly three
thousand.”

“It’s true, I did. I told the whole town so, and the whole town said so.
And here, at Mokroe, too, every one reckoned it was three thousand. Yet I
didn’t spend three thousand, but fifteen hundred. And the other fifteen
hundred I sewed into a little bag. That’s how it was, gentlemen. That’s
where I got that money yesterday....”

“This is almost miraculous,” murmured Nikolay Parfenovitch.

“Allow me to inquire,” observed the prosecutor at last, “have you informed
any one whatever of this circumstance before, I mean that you had fifteen
hundred left about you a month ago?”

“I told no one.”

“That’s strange. Do you mean absolutely no one?”

“Absolutely no one. No one and nobody.”

“What was your reason for this reticence? What was your motive for making
such a secret of it? To be more precise: You have told us at last your
secret, in your words, so ‘disgraceful,’ though in reality—that is, of
course, comparatively speaking—this action, that is, the appropriation of
three thousand roubles belonging to some one else, and, of course, only
for a time is, in my view at least, only an act of the greatest
recklessness and not so disgraceful, when one takes into consideration
your character.... Even admitting that it was an action in the highest
degree discreditable, still, discreditable is not ‘disgraceful.’... Many
people have already guessed, during this last month, about the three
thousand of Katerina Ivanovna’s, that you have spent, and I heard the
legend myself, apart from your confession.... Mihail Makarovitch, for
instance, had heard it, too, so that indeed, it was scarcely a legend, but
the gossip of the whole town. There are indications, too, if I am not
mistaken, that you confessed this yourself to some one, I mean that the
money was Katerina Ivanovna’s, and so, it’s extremely surprising to me
that hitherto, that is, up to the present moment, you have made such an
extraordinary secret of the fifteen hundred you say you put by, apparently
connecting a feeling of positive horror with that secret.... It’s not easy
to believe that it could cost you such distress to confess such a
secret.... You cried out, just now, that Siberia would be better than
confessing it ...”

The prosecutor ceased speaking. He was provoked. He did not conceal his
vexation, which was almost anger, and gave vent to all his accumulated
spleen, disconnectedly and incoherently, without choosing words.

“It’s not the fifteen hundred that’s the disgrace, but that I put it apart
from the rest of the three thousand,” said Mitya firmly.

“Why?” smiled the prosecutor irritably. “What is there disgraceful, to
your thinking, in your having set aside half of the three thousand you had
discreditably, if you prefer, ‘disgracefully,’ appropriated? Your taking
the three thousand is more important than what you did with it. And by the
way, why did you do that—why did you set apart that half, for what
purpose, for what object did you do it? Can you explain that to us?”

“Oh, gentlemen, the purpose is the whole point!” cried Mitya. “I put it
aside because I was vile, that is, because I was calculating, and to be
calculating in such a case is vile ... and that vileness has been going on
a whole month.”

“It’s incomprehensible.”

“I wonder at you. But I’ll make it clearer. Perhaps it really is
incomprehensible. You see, attend to what I say. I appropriate three
thousand entrusted to my honor, I spend it on a spree, say I spend it all,
and next morning I go to her and say, ‘Katya, I’ve done wrong, I’ve
squandered your three thousand,’ well, is that right? No, it’s not
right—it’s dishonest and cowardly, I’m a beast, with no more self-control
than a beast, that’s so, isn’t it? But still I’m not a thief? Not a
downright thief, you’ll admit! I squandered it, but I didn’t steal it. Now
a second, rather more favorable alternative: follow me carefully, or I may
get confused again—my head’s going round—and so, for the second
alternative: I spend here only fifteen hundred out of the three thousand,
that is, only half. Next day I go and take that half to her: ‘Katya, take
this fifteen hundred from me, I’m a low beast, and an untrustworthy
scoundrel, for I’ve wasted half the money, and I shall waste this, too, so
keep me from temptation!’ Well, what of that alternative? I should be a
beast and a scoundrel, and whatever you like; but not a thief, not
altogether a thief, or I should not have brought back what was left, but
have kept that, too. She would see at once that since I brought back half,
I should pay back what I’d spent, that I should never give up trying to,
that I should work to get it and pay it back. So in that case I should be
a scoundrel, but not a thief, you may say what you like, not a thief!”

“I admit that there is a certain distinction,” said the prosecutor, with a
cold smile. “But it’s strange that you see such a vital difference.”

“Yes, I see a vital difference! Every man may be a scoundrel, and perhaps
every man is a scoundrel, but not every one can be a thief, it takes an
arch-scoundrel to be that. Oh, of course, I don’t know how to make these
fine distinctions ... but a thief is lower than a scoundrel, that’s my
conviction. Listen, I carry the money about me a whole month, I may make
up my mind to give it back to-morrow, and I’m a scoundrel no longer, but I
cannot make up my mind, you see, though I’m making up my mind every day,
and every day spurring myself on to do it, and yet for a whole month I
can’t bring myself to it, you see. Is that right to your thinking, is that
right?”

“Certainly, that’s not right, that I can quite understand, and that I
don’t dispute,” answered the prosecutor with reserve. “And let us give up
all discussion of these subtleties and distinctions, and, if you will be
so kind, get back to the point. And the point is, that you have still not
told us, altogether we’ve asked you, why, in the first place, you halved
the money, squandering one half and hiding the other? For what purpose
exactly did you hide it, what did you mean to do with that fifteen
hundred? I insist upon that question, Dmitri Fyodorovitch.”

“Yes, of course!” cried Mitya, striking himself on the forehead; “forgive
me, I’m worrying you, and am not explaining the chief point, or you’d
understand in a minute, for it’s just the motive of it that’s the
disgrace! You see, it was all to do with the old man, my dead father. He
was always pestering Agrafena Alexandrovna, and I was jealous; I thought
then that she was hesitating between me and him. So I kept thinking every
day, suppose she were to make up her mind all of a sudden, suppose she
were to leave off tormenting me, and were suddenly to say to me, ‘I love
you, not him; take me to the other end of the world.’ And I’d only forty
copecks; how could I take her away, what could I do? Why, I’d be lost. You
see, I didn’t know her then, I didn’t understand her, I thought she wanted
money, and that she wouldn’t forgive my poverty. And so I fiendishly
counted out the half of that three thousand, sewed it up, calculating on
it, sewed it up before I was drunk, and after I had sewn it up, I went off
to get drunk on the rest. Yes, that was base. Do you understand now?”

Both the lawyers laughed aloud.

“I should have called it sensible and moral on your part not to have
squandered it all,” chuckled Nikolay Parfenovitch, “for after all what
does it amount to?”

“Why, that I stole it, that’s what it amounts to! Oh, God, you horrify me
by not understanding! Every day that I had that fifteen hundred sewn up
round my neck, every day and every hour I said to myself, ‘You’re a thief!
you’re a thief!’ Yes, that’s why I’ve been so savage all this month,
that’s why I fought in the tavern, that’s why I attacked my father, it was
because I felt I was a thief. I couldn’t make up my mind, I didn’t dare
even to tell Alyosha, my brother, about that fifteen hundred: I felt I was
such a scoundrel and such a pickpocket. But, do you know, while I carried
it I said to myself at the same time every hour: ‘No, Dmitri Fyodorovitch,
you may yet not be a thief.’ Why? Because I might go next day and pay back
that fifteen hundred to Katya. And only yesterday I made up my mind to
tear my amulet off my neck, on my way from Fenya’s to Perhotin. I hadn’t
been able till that moment to bring myself to it. And it was only when I
tore it off that I became a downright thief, a thief and a dishonest man
for the rest of my life. Why? Because, with that I destroyed, too, my
dream of going to Katya and saying, ‘I’m a scoundrel, but not a thief!’ Do
you understand now? Do you understand?”

“What was it made you decide to do it yesterday?” Nikolay Parfenovitch
interrupted.

“Why? It’s absurd to ask. Because I had condemned myself to die at five
o’clock this morning, here, at dawn. I thought it made no difference
whether I died a thief or a man of honor. But I see it’s not so, it turns
out that it does make a difference. Believe me, gentlemen, what has
tortured me most during this night has not been the thought that I’d
killed the old servant, and that I was in danger of Siberia just when my
love was being rewarded, and Heaven was open to me again. Oh, that did
torture me, but not in the same way: not so much as the damned
consciousness that I had torn that damned money off my breast at last and
spent it, and had become a downright thief! Oh, gentlemen, I tell you
again, with a bleeding heart, I have learnt a great deal this night. I
have learnt that it’s not only impossible to live a scoundrel, but
impossible to die a scoundrel.... No, gentlemen, one must die honest....”

Mitya was pale. His face had a haggard and exhausted look, in spite of his
being intensely excited.

“I am beginning to understand you, Dmitri Fyodorovitch,” the prosecutor
said slowly, in a soft and almost compassionate tone. “But all this, if
you’ll excuse my saying so, is a matter of nerves, in my opinion ... your
overwrought nerves, that’s what it is. And why, for instance, should you
not have saved yourself such misery for almost a month, by going and
returning that fifteen hundred to the lady who had entrusted it to you?
And why could you not have explained things to her, and in view of your
position, which you describe as being so awful, why could you not have had
recourse to the plan which would so naturally have occurred to one’s mind,
that is, after honorably confessing your errors to her, why could you not
have asked her to lend you the sum needed for your expenses, which, with
her generous heart, she would certainly not have refused you in your
distress, especially if it had been with some guarantee, or even on the
security you offered to the merchant Samsonov, and to Madame Hohlakov? I
suppose you still regard that security as of value?”

Mitya suddenly crimsoned.

“Surely you don’t think me such an out and out scoundrel as that? You
can’t be speaking in earnest?” he said, with indignation, looking the
prosecutor straight in the face, and seeming unable to believe his ears.

“I assure you I’m in earnest.... Why do you imagine I’m not serious?” It
was the prosecutor’s turn to be surprised.

“Oh, how base that would have been! Gentlemen, do you know, you are
torturing me! Let me tell you everything, so be it. I’ll confess all my
infernal wickedness, but to put you to shame, and you’ll be surprised
yourselves at the depth of ignominy to which a medley of human passions
can sink. You must know that I already had that plan myself, that plan you
spoke of, just now, prosecutor! Yes, gentlemen, I, too, have had that
thought in my mind all this current month, so that I was on the point of
deciding to go to Katya—I was mean enough for that. But to go to her, to
tell her of my treachery, and for that very treachery, to carry it out,
for the expenses of that treachery, to beg for money from her, Katya (to
beg, do you hear, to beg), and go straight from her to run away with the
other, the rival, who hated and insulted her—to think of it! You must be
mad, prosecutor!”

“Mad I am not, but I did speak in haste, without thinking ... of that
feminine jealousy ... if there could be jealousy in this case, as you
assert ... yes, perhaps there is something of the kind,” said the
prosecutor, smiling.

“But that would have been so infamous!” Mitya brought his fist down on the
table fiercely. “That would have been filthy beyond everything! Yes, do
you know that she might have given me that money, yes, and she would have
given it, too; she’d have been certain to give it, to be revenged on me,
she’d have given it to satisfy her vengeance, to show her contempt for me,
for hers is an infernal nature, too, and she’s a woman of great wrath. I’d
have taken the money, too, oh, I should have taken it; I should have taken
it, and then, for the rest of my life ... oh, God! Forgive me, gentlemen,
I’m making such an outcry because I’ve had that thought in my mind so
lately, only the day before yesterday, that night when I was having all
that bother with Lyagavy, and afterwards yesterday, all day yesterday, I
remember, till that happened ...”

“Till what happened?” put in Nikolay Parfenovitch inquisitively, but Mitya
did not hear it.

“I have made you an awful confession,” Mitya said gloomily in conclusion.
“You must appreciate it, and what’s more, you must respect it, for if not,
if that leaves your souls untouched, then you’ve simply no respect for me,
gentlemen, I tell you that, and I shall die of shame at having confessed
it to men like you! Oh, I shall shoot myself! Yes, I see, I see already
that you don’t believe me. What, you want to write that down, too?” he
cried in dismay.

“Yes, what you said just now,” said Nikolay Parfenovitch, looking at him
in surprise, “that is, that up to the last hour you were still
contemplating going to Katerina Ivanovna to beg that sum from her.... I
assure you, that’s a very important piece of evidence for us, Dmitri
Fyodorovitch, I mean for the whole case ... and particularly for you,
particularly important for you.”

“Have mercy, gentlemen!” Mitya flung up his hands. “Don’t write that,
anyway; have some shame. Here I’ve torn my heart asunder before you, and
you seize the opportunity and are fingering the wounds in both halves....
Oh, my God!”

In despair he hid his face in his hands.

“Don’t worry yourself so, Dmitri Fyodorovitch,” observed the prosecutor,
“everything that is written down will be read over to you afterwards, and
what you don’t agree to we’ll alter as you like. But now I’ll ask you one
little question for the second time. Has no one, absolutely no one, heard
from you of that money you sewed up? That, I must tell you, is almost
impossible to believe.”

“No one, no one, I told you so before, or you’ve not understood anything!
Let me alone!”

“Very well, this matter is bound to be explained, and there’s plenty of
time for it, but meantime, consider; we have perhaps a dozen witnesses
that you yourself spread it abroad, and even shouted almost everywhere
about the three thousand you’d spent here; three thousand, not fifteen
hundred. And now, too, when you got hold of the money you had yesterday,
you gave many people to understand that you had brought three thousand
with you.”

“You’ve got not dozens, but hundreds of witnesses, two hundred witnesses,
two hundred have heard it, thousands have heard it!” cried Mitya.

“Well, you see, all bear witness to it. And the word _all_ means
something.”

“It means nothing. I talked rot, and every one began repeating it.”

“But what need had you to ‘talk rot,’ as you call it?”

“The devil knows. From bravado perhaps ... at having wasted so much
money.... To try and forget that money I had sewn up, perhaps ... yes,
that was why ... damn it ... how often will you ask me that question?
Well, I told a fib, and that was the end of it, once I’d said it, I didn’t
care to correct it. What does a man tell lies for sometimes?”

“That’s very difficult to decide, Dmitri Fyodorovitch, what makes a man
tell lies,” observed the prosecutor impressively. “Tell me, though, was
that ‘amulet,’ as you call it, on your neck, a big thing?”

“No, not big.”

“How big, for instance?”

“If you fold a hundred-rouble note in half, that would be the size.”

“You’d better show us the remains of it. You must have them somewhere.”

“Damnation, what nonsense! I don’t know where they are.”

“But excuse me: where and when did you take it off your neck? According to
your own evidence you didn’t go home.”

“When I was going from Fenya’s to Perhotin’s, on the way I tore it off my
neck and took out the money.”

“In the dark?”

“What should I want a light for? I did it with my fingers in one minute.”

“Without scissors, in the street?”

“In the market-place I think it was. Why scissors? It was an old rag. It
was torn in a minute.”

“Where did you put it afterwards?”

“I dropped it there.”

“Where was it, exactly?”

“In the market-place, in the market-place! The devil knows whereabouts.
What do you want to know for?”

“That’s extremely important, Dmitri Fyodorovitch. It would be material
evidence in your favor. How is it you don’t understand that? Who helped
you to sew it up a month ago?”

“No one helped me. I did it myself.”

“Can you sew?”

“A soldier has to know how to sew. No knowledge was needed to do that.”

“Where did you get the material, that is, the rag in which you sewed the
money?”

“Are you laughing at me?”

“Not at all. And we are in no mood for laughing, Dmitri Fyodorovitch.”

“I don’t know where I got the rag from—somewhere, I suppose.”

“I should have thought you couldn’t have forgotten it?”

“Upon my word, I don’t remember. I might have torn a bit off my linen.”

“That’s very interesting. We might find in your lodgings to-morrow the
shirt or whatever it is from which you tore the rag. What sort of rag was
it, cloth or linen?”

“Goodness only knows what it was. Wait a bit.... I believe I didn’t tear
it off anything. It was a bit of calico.... I believe I sewed it up in a
cap of my landlady’s.”

“In your landlady’s cap?”

“Yes. I took it from her.”

“How did you get it?”

“You see, I remember once taking a cap for a rag, perhaps to wipe my pen
on. I took it without asking, because it was a worthless rag. I tore it
up, and I took the notes and sewed them up in it. I believe it was in that
very rag I sewed them. An old piece of calico, washed a thousand times.”

“And you remember that for certain now?”

“I don’t know whether for certain. I think it was in the cap. But, hang
it, what does it matter?”

“In that case your landlady will remember that the thing was lost?”

“No, she won’t, she didn’t miss it. It was an old rag, I tell you, an old
rag not worth a farthing.”

“And where did you get the needle and thread?”

“I’ll stop now. I won’t say any more. Enough of it!” said Mitya, losing
his temper at last.

“It’s strange that you should have so completely forgotten where you threw
the pieces in the market-place.”

“Give orders for the market-place to be swept to-morrow, and perhaps
you’ll find it,” said Mitya, sneering. “Enough, gentlemen, enough!” he
decided, in an exhausted voice. “I see you don’t believe me! Not for a
moment! It’s my fault, not yours. I ought not to have been so ready. Why,
why did I degrade myself by confessing my secret to you? It’s a joke to
you. I see that from your eyes. You led me on to it, prosecutor? Sing a
hymn of triumph if you can.... Damn you, you torturers!”

He bent his head, and hid his face in his hands. The lawyers were silent.
A minute later he raised his head and looked at them almost vacantly. His
face now expressed complete, hopeless despair, and he sat mute and passive
as though hardly conscious of what was happening. In the meantime they had
to finish what they were about. They had immediately to begin examining
the witnesses. It was by now eight o’clock in the morning. The lights had
been extinguished long ago. Mihail Makarovitch and Kalganov, who had been
continually in and out of the room all the while the interrogation had
been going on, had now both gone out again. The lawyers, too, looked very
tired. It was a wretched morning, the whole sky was overcast, and the rain
streamed down in bucketfuls. Mitya gazed blankly out of the window.

“May I look out of the window?” he asked Nikolay Parfenovitch, suddenly.

“Oh, as much as you like,” the latter replied.

Mitya got up and went to the window.... The rain lashed against its little
greenish panes. He could see the muddy road just below the house, and
farther away, in the rain and mist, a row of poor, black, dismal huts,
looking even blacker and poorer in the rain. Mitya thought of “Phœbus the
golden-haired,” and how he had meant to shoot himself at his first ray.
“Perhaps it would be even better on a morning like this,” he thought with
a smile, and suddenly, flinging his hand downwards, he turned to his
“torturers.”

“Gentlemen,” he cried, “I see that I am lost! But she? Tell me about her,
I beseech you. Surely she need not be ruined with me? She’s innocent, you
know, she was out of her mind when she cried last night ‘It’s all my
fault!’ She’s done nothing, nothing! I’ve been grieving over her all night
as I sat with you.... Can’t you, won’t you tell me what you are going to
do with her now?”

“You can set your mind quite at rest on that score, Dmitri Fyodorovitch,”
the prosecutor answered at once, with evident alacrity. “We have, so far,
no grounds for interfering with the lady in whom you are so interested. I
trust that it may be the same in the later development of the case.... On
the contrary, we’ll do everything that lies in our power in that matter.
Set your mind completely at rest.”

“Gentlemen, I thank you. I knew that you were honest, straight-forward
people in spite of everything. You’ve taken a load off my heart.... Well,
what are we to do now? I’m ready.”

“Well, we ought to make haste. We must pass to examining the witnesses
without delay. That must be done in your presence and therefore—”

“Shouldn’t we have some tea first?” interposed Nikolay Parfenovitch, “I
think we’ve deserved it!”

They decided that if tea were ready downstairs (Mihail Makarovitch had, no
doubt, gone down to get some) they would have a glass and then “go on and
on,” putting off their proper breakfast until a more favorable
opportunity. Tea really was ready below, and was soon brought up. Mitya at
first refused the glass that Nikolay Parfenovitch politely offered him,
but afterwards he asked for it himself and drank it greedily. He looked
surprisingly exhausted. It might have been supposed from his Herculean
strength that one night of carousing, even accompanied by the most violent
emotions, could have had little effect on him. But he felt that he could
hardly hold his head up, and from time to time all the objects about him
seemed heaving and dancing before his eyes. “A little more and I shall
begin raving,” he said to himself.



Chapter VIII. The Evidence Of The Witnesses. The Babe


The examination of the witnesses began. But we will not continue our story
in such detail as before. And so we will not dwell on how Nikolay
Parfenovitch impressed on every witness called that he must give his
evidence in accordance with truth and conscience, and that he would
afterwards have to repeat his evidence on oath, how every witness was
called upon to sign the protocol of his evidence, and so on. We will only
note that the point principally insisted upon in the examination was the
question of the three thousand roubles, that is, was the sum spent here,
at Mokroe, by Mitya on the first occasion, a month before, three thousand
or fifteen hundred? And again had he spent three thousand or fifteen
hundred yesterday? Alas, all the evidence given by every one turned out to
be against Mitya. There was not one in his favor, and some witnesses
introduced new, almost crushing facts, in contradiction of his, Mitya’s,
story.

The first witness examined was Trifon Borissovitch. He was not in the
least abashed as he stood before the lawyers. He had, on the contrary, an
air of stern and severe indignation with the accused, which gave him an
appearance of truthfulness and personal dignity. He spoke little, and with
reserve, waited to be questioned, answered precisely and deliberately.
Firmly and unhesitatingly he bore witness that the sum spent a month
before could not have been less than three thousand, that all the peasants
about here would testify that they had heard the sum of three thousand
mentioned by Dmitri Fyodorovitch himself. “What a lot of money he flung
away on the gypsy girls alone! He wasted a thousand, I daresay, on them
alone.”

“I don’t believe I gave them five hundred,” was Mitya’s gloomy comment on
this. “It’s a pity I didn’t count the money at the time, but I was
drunk....”

Mitya was sitting sideways with his back to the curtains. He listened
gloomily, with a melancholy and exhausted air, as though he would say:

“Oh, say what you like. It makes no difference now.”

“More than a thousand went on them, Dmitri Fyodorovitch,” retorted Trifon
Borissovitch firmly. “You flung it about at random and they picked it up.
They were a rascally, thievish lot, horse-stealers, they’ve been driven
away from here, or maybe they’d bear witness themselves how much they got
from you. I saw the sum in your hands, myself—count it I didn’t, you
didn’t let me, that’s true enough—but by the look of it I should say it
was far more than fifteen hundred ... fifteen hundred, indeed! We’ve seen
money too. We can judge of amounts....”

As for the sum spent yesterday he asserted that Dmitri Fyodorovitch had
told him, as soon as he arrived, that he had brought three thousand with
him.

“Come now, is that so, Trifon Borissovitch?” replied Mitya. “Surely I
didn’t declare so positively that I’d brought three thousand?”

“You did say so, Dmitri Fyodorovitch. You said it before Andrey. Andrey
himself is still here. Send for him. And in the hall, when you were
treating the chorus, you shouted straight out that you would leave your
sixth thousand here—that is with what you spent before, we must
understand. Stepan and Semyon heard it, and Pyotr Fomitch Kalganov, too,
was standing beside you at the time. Maybe he’d remember it....”

The evidence as to the “sixth” thousand made an extraordinary impression
on the two lawyers. They were delighted with this new mode of reckoning;
three and three made six, three thousand then and three now made six, that
was clear.

They questioned all the peasants suggested by Trifon Borissovitch, Stepan
and Semyon, the driver Andrey, and Kalganov. The peasants and the driver
unhesitatingly confirmed Trifon Borissovitch’s evidence. They noted down,
with particular care, Andrey’s account of the conversation he had had with
Mitya on the road: “ ‘Where,’ says he, ‘am I, Dmitri Fyodorovitch, going,
to heaven or to hell, and shall I be forgiven in the next world or not?’ ”

The psychological Ippolit Kirillovitch heard this with a subtle smile, and
ended by recommending that these remarks as to where Dmitri Fyodorovitch
would go should be “included in the case.”

Kalganov, when called, came in reluctantly, frowning and ill-humored, and
he spoke to the lawyers as though he had never met them before in his
life, though they were acquaintances whom he had been meeting every day
for a long time past. He began by saying that “he knew nothing about it
and didn’t want to.” But it appeared that he had heard of the “sixth”
thousand, and he admitted that he had been standing close by at the
moment. As far as he could see he “didn’t know” how much money Mitya had
in his hands. He affirmed that the Poles had cheated at cards. In reply to
reiterated questions he stated that, after the Poles had been turned out,
Mitya’s position with Agrafena Alexandrovna had certainly improved, and
that she had said that she loved him. He spoke of Agrafena Alexandrovna
with reserve and respect, as though she had been a lady of the best
society, and did not once allow himself to call her Grushenka. In spite of
the young man’s obvious repugnance at giving evidence, Ippolit
Kirillovitch examined him at great length, and only from him learnt all
the details of what made up Mitya’s “romance,” so to say, on that night.
Mitya did not once pull Kalganov up. At last they let the young man go,
and he left the room with unconcealed indignation.

The Poles, too, were examined. Though they had gone to bed in their room,
they had not slept all night, and on the arrival of the police officers
they hastily dressed and got ready, realizing that they would certainly be
sent for. They gave their evidence with dignity, though not without some
uneasiness. The little Pole turned out to be a retired official of the
twelfth class, who had served in Siberia as a veterinary surgeon. His name
was Mussyalovitch. Pan Vrublevsky turned out to be an uncertificated
dentist. Although Nikolay Parfenovitch asked them questions on entering
the room they both addressed their answers to Mihail Makarovitch, who was
standing on one side, taking him in their ignorance for the most important
person and in command, and addressed him at every word as “Pan Colonel.”
Only after several reproofs from Mihail Makarovitch himself, they grasped
that they had to address their answers to Nikolay Parfenovitch only. It
turned out that they could speak Russian quite correctly except for their
accent in some words. Of his relations with Grushenka, past and present,
Pan Mussyalovitch spoke proudly and warmly, so that Mitya was roused at
once and declared that he would not allow the “scoundrel” to speak like
that in his presence! Pan Mussyalovitch at once called attention to the
word “scoundrel” and begged that it should be put down in the protocol.
Mitya fumed with rage.

“He’s a scoundrel! A scoundrel! You can put that down. And put down, too,
that, in spite of the protocol I still declare that he’s a scoundrel!” he
cried.

Though Nikolay Parfenovitch did insert this in the protocol, he showed the
most praiseworthy tact and management. After sternly reprimanding Mitya,
he cut short all further inquiry into the romantic aspect of the case, and
hastened to pass to what was essential. One piece of evidence given by the
Poles roused special interest in the lawyers: that was how, in that very
room, Mitya had tried to buy off Pan Mussyalovitch, and had offered him
three thousand roubles to resign his claims, seven hundred roubles down,
and the remaining two thousand three hundred “to be paid next day in the
town.” He had sworn at the time that he had not the whole sum with him at
Mokroe, but that his money was in the town. Mitya observed hotly that he
had not said that he would be sure to pay him the remainder next day in
the town. But Pan Vrublevsky confirmed the statement, and Mitya, after
thinking for a moment admitted, frowning, that it must have been as the
Poles stated, that he had been excited at the time, and might indeed have
said so.

The prosecutor positively pounced on this piece of evidence. It seemed to
establish for the prosecution (and they did, in fact, base this deduction
on it) that half, or a part of, the three thousand that had come into
Mitya’s hands might really have been left somewhere hidden in the town, or
even, perhaps, somewhere here, in Mokroe. This would explain the
circumstance, so baffling for the prosecution, that only eight hundred
roubles were to be found in Mitya’s hands. This circumstance had been the
one piece of evidence which, insignificant as it was, had hitherto told,
to some extent, in Mitya’s favor. Now this one piece of evidence in his
favor had broken down. In answer to the prosecutor’s inquiry, where he
would have got the remaining two thousand three hundred roubles, since he
himself had denied having more than fifteen hundred, Mitya confidently
replied that he had meant to offer the “little chap,” not money, but a
formal deed of conveyance of his rights to the village of Tchermashnya,
those rights which he had already offered to Samsonov and Madame Hohlakov.
The prosecutor positively smiled at the “innocence of this subterfuge.”

“And you imagine he would have accepted such a deed as a substitute for
two thousand three hundred roubles in cash?”

“He certainly would have accepted it,” Mitya declared warmly. “Why, look
here, he might have grabbed not two thousand, but four or six, for it. He
would have put his lawyers, Poles and Jews, on to the job, and might have
got, not three thousand, but the whole property out of the old man.”

The evidence of Pan Mussyalovitch was, of course, entered in the protocol
in the fullest detail. Then they let the Poles go. The incident of the
cheating at cards was hardly touched upon. Nikolay Parfenovitch was too
well pleased with them, as it was, and did not want to worry them with
trifles, moreover, it was nothing but a foolish, drunken quarrel over
cards. There had been drinking and disorder enough, that night.... So the
two hundred roubles remained in the pockets of the Poles.

Then old Maximov was summoned. He came in timidly, approached with little
steps, looking very disheveled and depressed. He had, all this time, taken
refuge below with Grushenka, sitting dumbly beside her, and “now and then
he’d begin blubbering over her and wiping his eyes with a blue check
handkerchief,” as Mihail Makarovitch described afterwards. So that she
herself began trying to pacify and comfort him. The old man at once
confessed that he had done wrong, that he had borrowed “ten roubles in my
poverty,” from Dmitri Fyodorovitch, and that he was ready to pay it back.
To Nikolay Parfenovitch’s direct question, had he noticed how much money
Dmitri Fyodorovitch held in his hand, as he must have been able to see the
sum better than any one when he took the note from him, Maximov, in the
most positive manner, declared that there was twenty thousand.

“Have you ever seen so much as twenty thousand before, then?” inquired
Nikolay Parfenovitch, with a smile.

“To be sure I have, not twenty, but seven, when my wife mortgaged my
little property. She’d only let me look at it from a distance, boasting of
it to me. It was a very thick bundle, all rainbow-colored notes. And
Dmitri Fyodorovitch’s were all rainbow-colored....”

He was not kept long. At last it was Grushenka’s turn. Nikolay
Parfenovitch was obviously apprehensive of the effect her appearance might
have on Mitya, and he muttered a few words of admonition to him, but Mitya
bowed his head in silence, giving him to understand “that he would not
make a scene.” Mihail Makarovitch himself led Grushenka in. She entered
with a stern and gloomy face, that looked almost composed and sat down
quietly on the chair offered her by Nikolay Parfenovitch. She was very
pale, she seemed to be cold, and wrapped herself closely in her
magnificent black shawl. She was suffering from a slight feverish
chill—the first symptom of the long illness which followed that night. Her
grave air, her direct earnest look and quiet manner made a very favorable
impression on every one. Nikolay Parfenovitch was even a little bit
“fascinated.” He admitted himself, when talking about it afterwards, that
only then had he seen “how handsome the woman was,” for, though he had
seen her several times before, he had always looked upon her as something
of a “provincial hetaira.” “She has the manners of the best society,” he
said enthusiastically, gossiping about her in a circle of ladies. But this
was received with positive indignation by the ladies, who immediately
called him a “naughty man,” to his great satisfaction.

As she entered the room, Grushenka only glanced for an instant at Mitya,
who looked at her uneasily. But her face reassured him at once. After the
first inevitable inquiries and warnings, Nikolay Parfenovitch asked her,
hesitating a little, but preserving the most courteous manner, on what
terms she was with the retired lieutenant, Dmitri Fyodorovitch Karamazov.
To this Grushenka firmly and quietly replied:

“He was an acquaintance. He came to see me as an acquaintance during the
last month.” To further inquisitive questions she answered plainly and
with complete frankness, that, though “at times” she had thought him
attractive, she had not loved him, but had won his heart as well as his
old father’s “in my nasty spite,” that she had seen that Mitya was very
jealous of Fyodor Pavlovitch and every one else; but that had only amused
her. She had never meant to go to Fyodor Pavlovitch, she had simply been
laughing at him. “I had no thoughts for either of them all this last
month. I was expecting another man who had wronged me. But I think,” she
said in conclusion, “that there’s no need for you to inquire about that,
nor for me to answer you, for that’s my own affair.”

Nikolay Parfenovitch immediately acted upon this hint. He again dismissed
the “romantic” aspect of the case and passed to the serious one, that is,
to the question of most importance, concerning the three thousand roubles.
Grushenka confirmed the statement that three thousand roubles had
certainly been spent on the first carousal at Mokroe, and, though she had
not counted the money herself, she had heard that it was three thousand
from Dmitri Fyodorovitch’s own lips.

“Did he tell you that alone, or before some one else, or did you only hear
him speak of it to others in your presence?” the prosecutor inquired
immediately.

To which Grushenka replied that she had heard him say so before other
people, and had heard him say so when they were alone.

“Did he say it to you alone once, or several times?” inquired the
prosecutor, and learned that he had told Grushenka so several times.

Ippolit Kirillovitch was very well satisfied with this piece of evidence.
Further examination elicited that Grushenka knew, too, where that money
had come from, and that Dmitri Fyodorovitch had got it from Katerina
Ivanovna.

“And did you never, once, hear that the money spent a month ago was not
three thousand, but less, and that Dmitri Fyodorovitch had saved half that
sum for his own use?”

“No, I never heard that,” answered Grushenka.

It was explained further that Mitya had, on the contrary, often told her
that he hadn’t a farthing.

“He was always expecting to get some from his father,” said Grushenka in
conclusion.

“Did he never say before you ... casually, or in a moment of irritation,”
Nikolay Parfenovitch put in suddenly, “that he intended to make an attempt
on his father’s life?”

“Ach, he did say so,” sighed Grushenka.

“Once or several times?”

“He mentioned it several times, always in anger.”

“And did you believe he would do it?”

“No, I never believed it,” she answered firmly. “I had faith in his noble
heart.”

“Gentlemen, allow me,” cried Mitya suddenly, “allow me to say one word to
Agrafena Alexandrovna, in your presence.”

“You can speak,” Nikolay Parfenovitch assented.

“Agrafena Alexandrovna!” Mitya got up from his chair, “have faith in God
and in me. I am not guilty of my father’s murder!”

Having uttered these words Mitya sat down again on his chair. Grushenka
stood up and crossed herself devoutly before the ikon. “Thanks be to Thee,
O Lord,” she said, in a voice thrilled with emotion, and still standing,
she turned to Nikolay Parfenovitch and added:

“As he has spoken now, believe it! I know him. He’ll say anything as a
joke or from obstinacy, but he’ll never deceive you against his
conscience. He’s telling the whole truth, you may believe it.”

“Thanks, Agrafena Alexandrovna, you’ve given me fresh courage,” Mitya
responded in a quivering voice.

As to the money spent the previous day, she declared that she did not know
what sum it was, but had heard him tell several people that he had three
thousand with him. And to the question where he got the money, she said
that he had told her that he had “stolen” it from Katerina Ivanovna, and
that she had replied to that that he hadn’t stolen it, and that he must
pay the money back next day. On the prosecutor’s asking her emphatically
whether the money he said he had stolen from Katerina Ivanovna was what he
had spent yesterday, or what he had squandered here a month ago, she
declared that he meant the money spent a month ago, and that that was how
she understood him.

Grushenka was at last released, and Nikolay Parfenovitch informed her
impulsively that she might at once return to the town and that if he could
be of any assistance to her, with horses for example, or if she would care
for an escort, he ... would be—

“I thank you sincerely,” said Grushenka, bowing to him, “I’m going with
this old gentleman, I am driving him back to town with me, and meanwhile,
if you’ll allow me, I’ll wait below to hear what you decide about Dmitri
Fyodorovitch.”

She went out. Mitya was calm, and even looked more cheerful, but only for
a moment. He felt more and more oppressed by a strange physical weakness.
His eyes were closing with fatigue. The examination of the witnesses was,
at last, over. They proceeded to a final revision of the protocol. Mitya
got up, moved from his chair to the corner by the curtain, lay down on a
large chest covered with a rug, and instantly fell asleep.

He had a strange dream, utterly out of keeping with the place and the
time.

He was driving somewhere in the steppes, where he had been stationed long
ago, and a peasant was driving him in a cart with a pair of horses,
through snow and sleet. He was cold, it was early in November, and the
snow was falling in big wet flakes, melting as soon as it touched the
earth. And the peasant drove him smartly, he had a fair, long beard. He
was not an old man, somewhere about fifty, and he had on a gray peasant’s
smock. Not far off was a village, he could see the black huts, and half
the huts were burnt down, there were only the charred beams sticking up.
And as they drove in, there were peasant women drawn up along the road, a
lot of women, a whole row, all thin and wan, with their faces a sort of
brownish color, especially one at the edge, a tall, bony woman, who looked
forty, but might have been only twenty, with a long thin face. And in her
arms was a little baby crying. And her breasts seemed so dried up that
there was not a drop of milk in them. And the child cried and cried, and
held out its little bare arms, with its little fists blue from cold.

“Why are they crying? Why are they crying?” Mitya asked, as they dashed
gayly by.

“It’s the babe,” answered the driver, “the babe weeping.”

And Mitya was struck by his saying, in his peasant way, “the babe,” and he
liked the peasant’s calling it a “babe.” There seemed more pity in it.

“But why is it weeping?” Mitya persisted stupidly, “why are its little
arms bare? Why don’t they wrap it up?”

“The babe’s cold, its little clothes are frozen and don’t warm it.”

“But why is it? Why?” foolish Mitya still persisted.

“Why, they’re poor people, burnt out. They’ve no bread. They’re begging
because they’ve been burnt out.”

“No, no,” Mitya, as it were, still did not understand. “Tell me why it is
those poor mothers stand there? Why are people poor? Why is the babe poor?
Why is the steppe barren? Why don’t they hug each other and kiss? Why
don’t they sing songs of joy? Why are they so dark from black misery? Why
don’t they feed the babe?”

And he felt that, though his questions were unreasonable and senseless,
yet he wanted to ask just that, and he had to ask it just in that way. And
he felt that a passion of pity, such as he had never known before, was
rising in his heart, that he wanted to cry, that he wanted to do something
for them all, so that the babe should weep no more, so that the
dark-faced, dried-up mother should not weep, that no one should shed tears
again from that moment, and he wanted to do it at once, at once,
regardless of all obstacles, with all the recklessness of the Karamazovs.

“And I’m coming with you. I won’t leave you now for the rest of my life,
I’m coming with you,” he heard close beside him Grushenka’s tender voice,
thrilling with emotion. And his heart glowed, and he struggled forward
towards the light, and he longed to live, to live, to go on and on,
towards the new, beckoning light, and to hasten, hasten, now, at once!

“What! Where?” he exclaimed opening his eyes, and sitting up on the chest,
as though he had revived from a swoon, smiling brightly. Nikolay
Parfenovitch was standing over him, suggesting that he should hear the
protocol read aloud and sign it. Mitya guessed that he had been asleep an
hour or more, but he did not hear Nikolay Parfenovitch. He was suddenly
struck by the fact that there was a pillow under his head, which hadn’t
been there when he had leant back, exhausted, on the chest.

“Who put that pillow under my head? Who was so kind?” he cried, with a
sort of ecstatic gratitude, and tears in his voice, as though some great
kindness had been shown him.

He never found out who this kind man was; perhaps one of the peasant
witnesses, or Nikolay Parfenovitch’s little secretary, had compassionately
thought to put a pillow under his head; but his whole soul was quivering
with tears. He went to the table and said that he would sign whatever they
liked.

“I’ve had a good dream, gentlemen,” he said in a strange voice, with a new
light, as of joy, in his face.



Chapter IX. They Carry Mitya Away


When the protocol had been signed, Nikolay Parfenovitch turned solemnly to
the prisoner and read him the “Committal,” setting forth, that in such a
year, on such a day, in such a place, the investigating lawyer of
such-and-such a district court, having examined so-and-so (to wit, Mitya)
accused of this and of that (all the charges were carefully written out)
and having considered that the accused, not pleading guilty to the charges
made against him, had brought forward nothing in his defense, while the
witnesses, so-and-so, and so-and-so, and the circumstances such-and-such
testify against him, acting in accordance with such-and-such articles of
the Statute Book, and so on, has ruled, that, in order to preclude
so-and-so (Mitya) from all means of evading pursuit and judgment he be
detained in such-and-such a prison, which he hereby notifies to the
accused and communicates a copy of this same “Committal” to the deputy
prosecutor, and so on, and so on.

In brief, Mitya was informed that he was, from that moment, a prisoner,
and that he would be driven at once to the town, and there shut up in a
very unpleasant place. Mitya listened attentively, and only shrugged his
shoulders.

“Well, gentlemen, I don’t blame you. I’m ready.... I understand that
there’s nothing else for you to do.”

Nikolay Parfenovitch informed him gently that he would be escorted at once
by the rural police officer, Mavriky Mavrikyevitch, who happened to be on
the spot....

“Stay,” Mitya interrupted, suddenly, and impelled by uncontrollable
feeling he pronounced, addressing all in the room:

“Gentlemen, we’re all cruel, we’re all monsters, we all make men weep, and
mothers, and babes at the breast, but of all, let it be settled here, now,
of all I am the lowest reptile! I’ve sworn to amend, and every day I’ve
done the same filthy things. I understand now that such men as I need a
blow, a blow of destiny to catch them as with a noose, and bind them by a
force from without. Never, never should I have risen of myself! But the
thunderbolt has fallen. I accept the torture of accusation, and my public
shame, I want to suffer and by suffering I shall be purified. Perhaps I
shall be purified, gentlemen? But listen, for the last time, I am not
guilty of my father’s blood. I accept my punishment, not because I killed
him, but because I meant to kill him, and perhaps I really might have
killed him. Still I mean to fight it out with you. I warn you of that.
I’ll fight it out with you to the end, and then God will decide. Good-by,
gentlemen, don’t be vexed with me for having shouted at you during the
examination. Oh, I was still such a fool then.... In another minute I
shall be a prisoner, but now, for the last time, as a free man, Dmitri
Karamazov offers you his hand. Saying good-by to you, I say it to all
men.”

His voice quivered and he stretched out his hand, but Nikolay
Parfenovitch, who happened to stand nearest to him, with a sudden, almost
nervous movement, hid his hands behind his back. Mitya instantly noticed
this, and started. He let his outstretched hand fall at once.

“The preliminary inquiry is not yet over,” Nikolay Parfenovitch faltered,
somewhat embarrassed. “We will continue it in the town, and I, for my
part, of course, am ready to wish you all success ... in your defense....
As a matter of fact, Dmitri Fyodorovitch, I’ve always been disposed to
regard you as, so to speak, more unfortunate than guilty. All of us here,
if I may make bold to speak for all, we are all ready to recognize that
you are, at bottom, a young man of honor, but, alas, one who has been
carried away by certain passions to a somewhat excessive degree....”

Nikolay Parfenovitch’s little figure was positively majestic by the time
he had finished speaking. It struck Mitya that in another minute this
“boy” would take his arm, lead him to another corner, and renew their
conversation about “girls.” But many quite irrelevant and inappropriate
thoughts sometimes occur even to a prisoner when he is being led out to
execution.

“Gentlemen, you are good, you are humane, may I see _her_ to say ‘good-by’
for the last time?” asked Mitya.

“Certainly, but considering ... in fact, now it’s impossible except in the
presence of—”

“Oh, well, if it must be so, it must!”

Grushenka was brought in, but the farewell was brief, and of few words,
and did not at all satisfy Nikolay Parfenovitch. Grushenka made a deep bow
to Mitya.

“I have told you I am yours, and I will be yours. I will follow you for
ever, wherever they may send you. Farewell; you are guiltless, though
you’ve been your own undoing.”

Her lips quivered, tears flowed from her eyes.

“Forgive me, Grusha, for my love, for ruining you, too, with my love.”

Mitya would have said something more, but he broke off and went out. He
was at once surrounded by men who kept a constant watch on him. At the
bottom of the steps to which he had driven up with such a dash the day
before with Andrey’s three horses, two carts stood in readiness. Mavriky
Mavrikyevitch, a sturdy, thick-set man with a wrinkled face, was annoyed
about something, some sudden irregularity. He was shouting angrily. He
asked Mitya to get into the cart with somewhat excessive surliness.

“When I stood him drinks in the tavern, the man had quite a different
face,” thought Mitya, as he got in. At the gates there was a crowd of
people, peasants, women and drivers. Trifon Borissovitch came down the
steps too. All stared at Mitya.

“Forgive me at parting, good people!” Mitya shouted suddenly from the
cart.

“Forgive us too!” he heard two or three voices.

“Good-by to you, too, Trifon Borissovitch!”

But Trifon Borissovitch did not even turn round. He was, perhaps, too
busy. He, too, was shouting and fussing about something. It appeared that
everything was not yet ready in the second cart, in which two constables
were to accompany Mavriky Mavrikyevitch. The peasant who had been ordered
to drive the second cart was pulling on his smock, stoutly maintaining
that it was not his turn to go, but Akim’s. But Akim was not to be seen.
They ran to look for him. The peasant persisted and besought them to wait.

“You see what our peasants are, Mavriky Mavrikyevitch. They’ve no shame!”
exclaimed Trifon Borissovitch. “Akim gave you twenty-five copecks the day
before yesterday. You’ve drunk it all and now you cry out. I’m simply
surprised at your good-nature, with our low peasants, Mavriky
Mavrikyevitch, that’s all I can say.”

“But what do we want a second cart for?” Mitya put in. “Let’s start with
the one, Mavriky Mavrikyevitch. I won’t be unruly, I won’t run away from
you, old fellow. What do we want an escort for?”

“I’ll trouble you, sir, to learn how to speak to me if you’ve never been
taught. I’m not ‘old fellow’ to you, and you can keep your advice for
another time!” Mavriky Mavrikyevitch snapped out savagely, as though glad
to vent his wrath.

Mitya was reduced to silence. He flushed all over. A moment later he felt
suddenly very cold. The rain had ceased, but the dull sky was still
overcast with clouds, and a keen wind was blowing straight in his face.

“I’ve taken a chill,” thought Mitya, twitching his shoulders.

At last Mavriky Mavrikyevitch, too, got into the cart, sat down heavily,
and, as though without noticing it, squeezed Mitya into the corner. It is
true that he was out of humor and greatly disliked the task that had been
laid upon him.

“Good-by, Trifon Borissovitch!” Mitya shouted again, and felt himself,
that he had not called out this time from good-nature, but involuntarily,
from resentment.

But Trifon Borissovitch stood proudly, with both hands behind his back,
and staring straight at Mitya with a stern and angry face, he made no
reply.

“Good-by, Dmitri Fyodorovitch, good-by!” he heard all at once the voice of
Kalganov, who had suddenly darted out. Running up to the cart he held out
his hand to Mitya. He had no cap on.

Mitya had time to seize and press his hand.

“Good-by, dear fellow! I shan’t forget your generosity,” he cried warmly.

But the cart moved and their hands parted. The bell began ringing and
Mitya was driven off.

Kalganov ran back, sat down in a corner, bent his head, hid his face in
his hands, and burst out crying. For a long while he sat like that, crying
as though he were a little boy instead of a young man of twenty. Oh, he
believed almost without doubt in Mitya’s guilt.

“What are these people? What can men be after this?” he exclaimed
incoherently, in bitter despondency, almost despair. At that moment he had
no desire to live.

“Is it worth it? Is it worth it?” exclaimed the boy in his grief.





PART IV




Book X. The Boys



Chapter I. Kolya Krassotkin


It was the beginning of November. There had been a hard frost, eleven
degrees Réaumur, without snow, but a little dry snow had fallen on the
frozen ground during the night, and a keen dry wind was lifting and
blowing it along the dreary streets of our town, especially about the
market-place. It was a dull morning, but the snow had ceased.

Not far from the market-place, close to Plotnikov’s shop, there stood a
small house, very clean both without and within. It belonged to Madame
Krassotkin, the widow of a former provincial secretary, who had been dead
for fourteen years. His widow, still a nice-looking woman of thirty-two,
was living in her neat little house on her private means. She lived in
respectable seclusion; she was of a soft but fairly cheerful disposition.
She was about eighteen at the time of her husband’s death; she had been
married only a year and had just borne him a son. From the day of his
death she had devoted herself heart and soul to the bringing up of her
precious treasure, her boy Kolya. Though she had loved him passionately
those fourteen years, he had caused her far more suffering than happiness.
She had been trembling and fainting with terror almost every day, afraid
he would fall ill, would catch cold, do something naughty, climb on a
chair and fall off it, and so on and so on. When Kolya began going to
school, the mother devoted herself to studying all the sciences with him
so as to help him, and go through his lessons with him. She hastened to
make the acquaintance of the teachers and their wives, even made up to
Kolya’s schoolfellows, and fawned upon them in the hope of thus saving
Kolya from being teased, laughed at, or beaten by them. She went so far
that the boys actually began to mock at him on her account and taunt him
with being a “mother’s darling.”

But the boy could take his own part. He was a resolute boy, “tremendously
strong,” as was rumored in his class, and soon proved to be the fact; he
was agile, strong-willed, and of an audacious and enterprising temper. He
was good at lessons, and there was a rumor in the school that he could
beat the teacher, Dardanelov, at arithmetic and universal history. Though
he looked down upon every one, he was a good comrade and not supercilious.
He accepted his schoolfellows’ respect as his due, but was friendly with
them. Above all, he knew where to draw the line. He could restrain himself
on occasion, and in his relations with the teachers he never overstepped
that last mystic limit beyond which a prank becomes an unpardonable breach
of discipline. But he was as fond of mischief on every possible occasion
as the smallest boy in the school, and not so much for the sake of
mischief as for creating a sensation, inventing something, something
effective and conspicuous. He was extremely vain. He knew how to make even
his mother give way to him; he was almost despotic in his control of her.
She gave way to him, oh, she had given way to him for years. The one
thought unendurable to her was that her boy had no great love for her. She
was always fancying that Kolya was “unfeeling” to her, and at times,
dissolving into hysterical tears, she used to reproach him with his
coldness. The boy disliked this, and the more demonstrations of feeling
were demanded of him the more he seemed intentionally to avoid them. Yet
it was not intentional on his part but instinctive—it was his character.
His mother was mistaken; he was very fond of her. He only disliked
“sheepish sentimentality,” as he expressed it in his schoolboy language.

There was a bookcase in the house containing a few books that had been his
father’s. Kolya was fond of reading, and had read several of them by
himself. His mother did not mind that and only wondered sometimes at
seeing the boy stand for hours by the bookcase poring over a book instead
of going to play. And in that way Kolya read some things unsuitable for
his age.

Though the boy, as a rule, knew where to draw the line in his mischief, he
had of late begun to play pranks that caused his mother serious alarm. It
is true there was nothing vicious in what he did, but a wild mad
recklessness.

It happened that July, during the summer holidays, that the mother and son
went to another district, forty-five miles away, to spend a week with a
distant relation, whose husband was an official at the railway station
(the very station, the nearest one to our town, from which a month later
Ivan Fyodorovitch Karamazov set off for Moscow). There Kolya began by
carefully investigating every detail connected with the railways, knowing
that he could impress his schoolfellows when he got home with his newly
acquired knowledge. But there happened to be some other boys in the place
with whom he soon made friends. Some of them were living at the station,
others in the neighborhood; there were six or seven of them, all between
twelve and fifteen, and two of them came from our town. The boys played
together, and on the fourth or fifth day of Kolya’s stay at the station, a
mad bet was made by the foolish boys. Kolya, who was almost the youngest
of the party and rather looked down upon by the others in consequence, was
moved by vanity or by reckless bravado to bet them two roubles that he
would lie down between the rails at night when the eleven o’clock train
was due, and would lie there without moving while the train rolled over
him at full speed. It is true they made a preliminary investigation, from
which it appeared that it was possible to lie so flat between the rails
that the train could pass over without touching, but to lie there was no
joke! Kolya maintained stoutly that he would. At first they laughed at
him, called him a little liar, a braggart, but that only egged him on.
What piqued him most was that these boys of fifteen turned up their noses
at him too superciliously, and were at first disposed to treat him as “a
small boy,” not fit to associate with them, and that was an unendurable
insult.

And so it was resolved to go in the evening, half a mile from the station,
so that the train might have time to get up full speed after leaving the
station. The boys assembled. It was a pitch-dark night without a moon. At
the time fixed, Kolya lay down between the rails. The five others who had
taken the bet waited among the bushes below the embankment, their hearts
beating with suspense, which was followed by alarm and remorse. At last
they heard in the distance the rumble of the train leaving the station.
Two red lights gleamed out of the darkness; the monster roared as it
approached.

“Run, run away from the rails,” the boys cried to Kolya from the bushes,
breathless with terror. But it was too late: the train darted up and flew
past. The boys rushed to Kolya. He lay without moving. They began pulling
at him, lifting him up. He suddenly got up and walked away without a word.
Then he explained that he had lain there as though he were insensible to
frighten them, but the fact was that he really had lost consciousness, as
he confessed long after to his mother. In this way his reputation as “a
desperate character,” was established for ever. He returned home to the
station as white as a sheet. Next day he had a slight attack of nervous
fever, but he was in high spirits and well pleased with himself. The
incident did not become known at once, but when they came back to the town
it penetrated to the school and even reached the ears of the masters. But
then Kolya’s mother hastened to entreat the masters on her boy’s behalf,
and in the end Dardanelov, a respected and influential teacher, exerted
himself in his favor, and the affair was ignored.

Dardanelov was a middle-aged bachelor, who had been passionately in love
with Madame Krassotkin for many years past, and had once already, about a
year previously, ventured, trembling with fear and the delicacy of his
sentiments, to offer her most respectfully his hand in marriage. But she
refused him resolutely, feeling that to accept him would be an act of
treachery to her son, though Dardanelov had, to judge from certain
mysterious symptoms, reason for believing that he was not an object of
aversion to the charming but too chaste and tender-hearted widow. Kolya’s
mad prank seemed to have broken the ice, and Dardanelov was rewarded for
his intercession by a suggestion of hope. The suggestion, it is true, was
a faint one, but then Dardanelov was such a paragon of purity and delicacy
that it was enough for the time being to make him perfectly happy. He was
fond of the boy, though he would have felt it beneath him to try and win
him over, and was severe and strict with him in class. Kolya, too, kept
him at a respectful distance. He learned his lessons perfectly; he was
second in his class, was reserved with Dardanelov, and the whole class
firmly believed that Kolya was so good at universal history that he could
“beat” even Dardanelov. Kolya did indeed ask him the question, “Who
founded Troy?” to which Dardanelov had made a very vague reply, referring
to the movements and migrations of races, to the remoteness of the period,
to the mythical legends. But the question, “Who had founded Troy?” that
is, what individuals, he could not answer, and even for some reason
regarded the question as idle and frivolous. But the boys remained
convinced that Dardanelov did not know who founded Troy. Kolya had read of
the founders of Troy in Smaragdov, whose history was among the books in
his father’s bookcase. In the end all the boys became interested in the
question, who it was that had founded Troy, but Krassotkin would not tell
his secret, and his reputation for knowledge remained unshaken.

After the incident on the railway a certain change came over Kolya’s
attitude to his mother. When Anna Fyodorovna (Madame Krassotkin) heard of
her son’s exploit, she almost went out of her mind with horror. She had
such terrible attacks of hysterics, lasting with intervals for several
days, that Kolya, seriously alarmed at last, promised on his honor that
such pranks should never be repeated. He swore on his knees before the
holy image, and swore by the memory of his father, at Madame Krassotkin’s
instance, and the “manly” Kolya burst into tears like a boy of six. And
all that day the mother and son were constantly rushing into each other’s
arms sobbing. Next day Kolya woke up as “unfeeling” as before, but he had
become more silent, more modest, sterner, and more thoughtful.

Six weeks later, it is true, he got into another scrape, which even
brought his name to the ears of our Justice of the Peace, but it was a
scrape of quite another kind, amusing, foolish, and he did not, as it
turned out, take the leading part in it, but was only implicated in it.
But of this later. His mother still fretted and trembled, but the more
uneasy she became, the greater were the hopes of Dardanelov. It must be
noted that Kolya understood and divined what was in Dardanelov’s heart
and, of course, despised him profoundly for his “feelings”; he had in the
past been so tactless as to show this contempt before his mother, hinting
vaguely that he knew what Dardanelov was after. But from the time of the
railway incident his behavior in this respect also was changed; he did not
allow himself the remotest allusion to the subject and began to speak more
respectfully of Dardanelov before his mother, which the sensitive woman at
once appreciated with boundless gratitude. But at the slightest mention of
Dardanelov by a visitor in Kolya’s presence, she would flush as pink as a
rose. At such moments Kolya would either stare out of the window scowling,
or would investigate the state of his boots, or would shout angrily for
“Perezvon,” the big, shaggy, mangy dog, which he had picked up a month
before, brought home, and kept for some reason secretly indoors, not
showing him to any of his schoolfellows. He bullied him frightfully,
teaching him all sorts of tricks, so that the poor dog howled for him
whenever he was absent at school, and when he came in, whined with
delight, rushed about as if he were crazy, begged, lay down on the ground
pretending to be dead, and so on; in fact, showed all the tricks he had
taught him, not at the word of command, but simply from the zeal of his
excited and grateful heart.

I have forgotten, by the way, to mention that Kolya Krassotkin was the boy
stabbed with a penknife by the boy already known to the reader as the son
of Captain Snegiryov. Ilusha had been defending his father when the
schoolboys jeered at him, shouting the nickname “wisp of tow.”



Chapter II. Children


And so on that frosty, snowy, and windy day in November, Kolya Krassotkin
was sitting at home. It was Sunday and there was no school. It had just
struck eleven, and he particularly wanted to go out “on very urgent
business,” but he was left alone in charge of the house, for it so
happened that all its elder inmates were absent owing to a sudden and
singular event. Madame Krassotkin had let two little rooms, separated from
the rest of the house by a passage, to a doctor’s wife with her two small
children. This lady was the same age as Anna Fyodorovna, and a great
friend of hers. Her husband, the doctor, had taken his departure twelve
months before, going first to Orenburg and then to Tashkend, and for the
last six months she had not heard a word from him. Had it not been for her
friendship with Madame Krassotkin, which was some consolation to the
forsaken lady, she would certainly have completely dissolved away in
tears. And now, to add to her misfortunes, Katerina, her only servant, was
suddenly moved the evening before to announce, to her mistress’s
amazement, that she proposed to bring a child into the world before
morning. It seemed almost miraculous to every one that no one had noticed
the probability of it before. The astounded doctor’s wife decided to move
Katerina while there was still time to an establishment in the town kept
by a midwife for such emergencies. As she set great store by her servant,
she promptly carried out this plan and remained there looking after her.
By the morning all Madame Krassotkin’s friendly sympathy and energy were
called upon to render assistance and appeal to some one for help in the
case.

So both the ladies were absent from home, the Krassotkins’ servant,
Agafya, had gone out to the market, and Kolya was thus left for a time to
protect and look after “the kids,” that is, the son and daughter of the
doctor’s wife, who were left alone. Kolya was not afraid of taking care of
the house, besides he had Perezvon, who had been told to lie flat, without
moving, under the bench in the hall. Every time Kolya, walking to and fro
through the rooms, came into the hall, the dog shook his head and gave two
loud and insinuating taps on the floor with his tail, but alas! the
whistle did not sound to release him. Kolya looked sternly at the luckless
dog, who relapsed again into obedient rigidity. The one thing that
troubled Kolya was “the kids.” He looked, of course, with the utmost scorn
on Katerina’s unexpected adventure, but he was very fond of the bereaved
“kiddies,” and had already taken them a picture-book. Nastya, the elder, a
girl of eight, could read, and Kostya, the boy, aged seven, was very fond
of being read to by her. Krassotkin could, of course, have provided more
diverting entertainment for them. He could have made them stand side by
side and played soldiers with them, or sent them hiding all over the
house. He had done so more than once before and was not above doing it, so
much so that a report once spread at school that Krassotkin played horses
with the little lodgers at home, prancing with his head on one side like a
trace-horse. But Krassotkin haughtily parried this thrust, pointing out
that to play horses with boys of one’s own age, boys of thirteen, would
certainly be disgraceful “at this date,” but that he did it for the sake
of “the kids” because he liked them, and no one had a right to call him to
account for his feelings. The two “kids” adored him.

But on this occasion he was in no mood for games. He had very important
business of his own before him, something almost mysterious. Meanwhile
time was passing and Agafya, with whom he could have left the children,
would not come back from market. He had several times already crossed the
passage, opened the door of the lodgers’ room and looked anxiously at “the
kids” who were sitting over the book, as he had bidden them. Every time he
opened the door they grinned at him, hoping he would come in and would do
something delightful and amusing. But Kolya was bothered and did not go
in.

At last it struck eleven and he made up his mind, once for all, that if
that “damned” Agafya did not come back within ten minutes he should go out
without waiting for her, making “the kids” promise, of course, to be brave
when he was away, not to be naughty, not to cry from fright. With this
idea he put on his wadded winter overcoat with its catskin fur collar,
slung his satchel round his shoulder, and, regardless of his mother’s
constantly reiterated entreaties that he would always put on goloshes in
such cold weather, he looked at them contemptuously as he crossed the hall
and went out with only his boots on. Perezvon, seeing him in his outdoor
clothes, began tapping nervously, yet vigorously, on the floor with his
tail. Twitching all over, he even uttered a plaintive whine. But Kolya,
seeing his dog’s passionate excitement, decided that it was a breach of
discipline, kept him for another minute under the bench, and only when he
had opened the door into the passage, whistled for him. The dog leapt up
like a mad creature and rushed bounding before him rapturously.

Kolya opened the door to peep at “the kids.” They were both sitting as
before at the table, not reading but warmly disputing about something. The
children often argued together about various exciting problems of life,
and Nastya, being the elder, always got the best of it. If Kostya did not
agree with her, he almost always appealed to Kolya Krassotkin, and his
verdict was regarded as infallible by both of them. This time the “kids’”
discussion rather interested Krassotkin, and he stood still in the passage
to listen. The children saw he was listening and that made them dispute
with even greater energy.

“I shall never, never believe,” Nastya prattled, “that the old women find
babies among the cabbages in the kitchen-garden. It’s winter now and there
are no cabbages, and so the old woman couldn’t have taken Katerina a
daughter.”

Kolya whistled to himself.

“Or perhaps they do bring babies from somewhere, but only to those who are
married.”

Kostya stared at Nastya and listened, pondering profoundly.

“Nastya, how silly you are!” he said at last, firmly and calmly. “How can
Katerina have a baby when she isn’t married?”

Nastya was exasperated.

“You know nothing about it,” she snapped irritably. “Perhaps she has a
husband, only he is in prison, so now she’s got a baby.”

“But is her husband in prison?” the matter-of-fact Kostya inquired
gravely.

“Or, I tell you what,” Nastya interrupted impulsively, completely
rejecting and forgetting her first hypothesis. “She hasn’t a husband, you
are right there, but she wants to be married, and so she’s been thinking
of getting married, and thinking and thinking of it till now she’s got it,
that is, not a husband but a baby.”

“Well, perhaps so,” Kostya agreed, entirely vanquished. “But you didn’t
say so before. So how could I tell?”

“Come, kiddies,” said Kolya, stepping into the room. “You’re terrible
people, I see.”

“And Perezvon with you!” grinned Kostya, and began snapping his fingers
and calling Perezvon.

“I am in a difficulty, kids,” Krassotkin began solemnly, “and you must
help me. Agafya must have broken her leg, since she has not turned up till
now, that’s certain. I must go out. Will you let me go?”

The children looked anxiously at one another. Their smiling faces showed
signs of uneasiness, but they did not yet fully grasp what was expected of
them.

“You won’t be naughty while I am gone? You won’t climb on the cupboard and
break your legs? You won’t be frightened alone and cry?”

A look of profound despondency came into the children’s faces.

“And I could show you something as a reward, a little copper cannon which
can be fired with real gunpowder.”

The children’s faces instantly brightened. “Show us the cannon,” said
Kostya, beaming all over.

Krassotkin put his hand in his satchel, and pulling out a little bronze
cannon stood it on the table.

“Ah, you are bound to ask that! Look, it’s on wheels.” He rolled the toy
on along the table. “And it can be fired off, too. It can be loaded with
shot and fired off.”

“And it could kill any one?”

“It can kill any one; you’ve only got to aim at anybody,” and Krassotkin
explained where the powder had to be put, where the shot should be rolled
in, showing a tiny hole like a touch-hole, and told them that it kicked
when it was fired.

The children listened with intense interest. What particularly struck
their imagination was that the cannon kicked.

“And have you got any powder?” Nastya inquired.

“Yes.”

“Show us the powder, too,” she drawled with a smile of entreaty.

Krassotkin dived again into his satchel and pulled out a small flask
containing a little real gunpowder. He had some shot, too, in a screw of
paper. He even uncorked the flask and shook a little powder into the palm
of his hand.

“One has to be careful there’s no fire about, or it would blow up and kill
us all,” Krassotkin warned them sensationally.

The children gazed at the powder with an awe-stricken alarm that only
intensified their enjoyment. But Kostya liked the shot better.

“And does the shot burn?” he inquired.

“No, it doesn’t.”

“Give me a little shot,” he asked in an imploring voice.

“I’ll give you a little shot; here, take it, but don’t show it to your
mother till I come back, or she’ll be sure to think it’s gunpowder, and
will die of fright and give you a thrashing.”

“Mother never does whip us,” Nastya observed at once.

“I know, I only said it to finish the sentence. And don’t you ever deceive
your mother except just this once, until I come back. And so, kiddies, can
I go out? You won’t be frightened and cry when I’m gone?”

“We sha—all cry,” drawled Kostya, on the verge of tears already.

“We shall cry, we shall be sure to cry,” Nastya chimed in with timid
haste.

“Oh, children, children, how fraught with peril are your years! There’s no
help for it, chickens, I shall have to stay with you I don’t know how
long. And time is passing, time is passing, oogh!”

“Tell Perezvon to pretend to be dead!” Kostya begged.

“There’s no help for it, we must have recourse to Perezvon. _Ici_,
Perezvon.” And Kolya began giving orders to the dog, who performed all his
tricks.

He was a rough-haired dog, of medium size, with a coat of a sort of
lilac-gray color. He was blind in his right eye, and his left ear was
torn. He whined and jumped, stood and walked on his hind legs, lay on his
back with his paws in the air, rigid as though he were dead. While this
last performance was going on, the door opened and Agafya, Madame
Krassotkin’s servant, a stout woman of forty, marked with small-pox,
appeared in the doorway. She had come back from market and had a bag full
of provisions in her hand. Holding up the bag of provisions in her left
hand she stood still to watch the dog. Though Kolya had been so anxious
for her return, he did not cut short the performance, and after keeping
Perezvon dead for the usual time, at last he whistled to him. The dog
jumped up and began bounding about in his joy at having done his duty.

“Only think, a dog!” Agafya observed sententiously.

“Why are you late, female?” asked Krassotkin sternly.

“Female, indeed! Go on with you, you brat.”

“Brat?”

“Yes, a brat. What is it to you if I’m late; if I’m late, you may be sure
I have good reason,” muttered Agafya, busying herself about the stove,
without a trace of anger or displeasure in her voice. She seemed quite
pleased, in fact, to enjoy a skirmish with her merry young master.

“Listen, you frivolous young woman,” Krassotkin began, getting up from the
sofa, “can you swear by all you hold sacred in the world and something
else besides, that you will watch vigilantly over the kids in my absence?
I am going out.”

“And what am I going to swear for?” laughed Agafya. “I shall look after
them without that.”

“No, you must swear on your eternal salvation. Else I shan’t go.”

“Well, don’t then. What does it matter to me? It’s cold out; stay at
home.”

“Kids,” Kolya turned to the children, “this woman will stay with you till
I come back or till your mother comes, for she ought to have been back
long ago. She will give you some lunch, too. You’ll give them something,
Agafya, won’t you?”

“That I can do.”

“Good-by, chickens, I go with my heart at rest. And you, granny,” he added
gravely, in an undertone, as he passed Agafya, “I hope you’ll spare their
tender years and not tell them any of your old woman’s nonsense about
Katerina. _Ici_, Perezvon!”

“Get along with you!” retorted Agafya, really angry this time. “Ridiculous
boy! You want a whipping for saying such things, that’s what you want!”



Chapter III. The Schoolboy


But Kolya did not hear her. At last he could go out. As he went out at the
gate he looked round him, shrugged up his shoulders, and saying “It is
freezing,” went straight along the street and turned off to the right
towards the market-place. When he reached the last house but one before
the market-place he stopped at the gate, pulled a whistle out of his
pocket, and whistled with all his might as though giving a signal. He had
not to wait more than a minute before a rosy-cheeked boy of about eleven,
wearing a warm, neat and even stylish coat, darted out to meet him. This
was Smurov, a boy in the preparatory class (two classes below Kolya
Krassotkin), son of a well-to-do official. Apparently he was forbidden by
his parents to associate with Krassotkin, who was well known to be a
desperately naughty boy, so Smurov was obviously slipping out on the sly.
He was—if the reader has not forgotten—one of the group of boys who two
months before had thrown stones at Ilusha. He was the one who told Alyosha
Karamazov about Ilusha.

“I’ve been waiting for you for the last hour, Krassotkin,” said Smurov
stolidly, and the boys strode towards the market-place.

“I am late,” answered Krassotkin. “I was detained by circumstances. You
won’t be thrashed for coming with me?”

“Come, I say, I’m never thrashed! And you’ve got Perezvon with you?”

“Yes.”

“You’re taking him, too?”

“Yes.”

“Ah! if it were only Zhutchka!”

“That’s impossible. Zhutchka’s non-existent. Zhutchka is lost in the mists
of obscurity.”

“Ah! couldn’t we do this?” Smurov suddenly stood still. “You see Ilusha
says that Zhutchka was a shaggy, grayish, smoky-looking dog like Perezvon.
Couldn’t you tell him this is Zhutchka, and he might believe you?”

“Boy, shun a lie, that’s one thing; even with a good object—that’s
another. Above all, I hope you’ve not told them anything about my coming.”

“Heaven forbid! I know what I am about. But you won’t comfort him with
Perezvon,” said Smurov, with a sigh. “You know his father, the captain,
‘the wisp of tow,’ told us that he was going to bring him a real mastiff
pup, with a black nose, to-day. He thinks that would comfort Ilusha; but I
doubt it.”

“And how is Ilusha?”

“Ah, he is bad, very bad! I believe he’s in consumption: he is quite
conscious, but his breathing! His breathing’s gone wrong. The other day he
asked to have his boots on to be led round the room. He tried to walk, but
he couldn’t stand. ‘Ah, I told you before, father,’ he said, ‘that those
boots were no good. I could never walk properly in them.’ He fancied it
was his boots that made him stagger, but it was simply weakness, really.
He won’t live another week. Herzenstube is looking after him. Now they are
rich again—they’ve got heaps of money.”

“They are rogues.”

“Who are rogues?”

“Doctors and the whole crew of quacks collectively, and also, of course,
individually. I don’t believe in medicine. It’s a useless institution. I
mean to go into all that. But what’s that sentimentality you’ve got up
there? The whole class seems to be there every day.”

“Not the whole class: it’s only ten of our fellows who go to see him every
day. There’s nothing in that.”

“What I don’t understand in all this is the part that Alexey Karamazov is
taking in it. His brother’s going to be tried to-morrow or next day for
such a crime, and yet he has so much time to spend on sentimentality with
boys.”

“There’s no sentimentality about it. You are going yourself now to make it
up with Ilusha.”

“Make it up with him? What an absurd expression! But I allow no one to
analyze my actions.”

“And how pleased Ilusha will be to see you! He has no idea that you are
coming. Why was it, why was it you wouldn’t come all this time?” Smurov
cried with sudden warmth.

“My dear boy, that’s my business, not yours. I am going of myself because
I choose to, but you’ve all been hauled there by Alexey Karamazov—there’s
a difference, you know. And how do you know? I may not be going to make it
up at all. It’s a stupid expression.”

“It’s not Karamazov at all; it’s not his doing. Our fellows began going
there of themselves. Of course, they went with Karamazov at first. And
there’s been nothing of that sort—no silliness. First one went, and then
another. His father was awfully pleased to see us. You know he will simply
go out of his mind if Ilusha dies. He sees that Ilusha’s dying. And he
seems so glad we’ve made it up with Ilusha. Ilusha asked after you, that
was all. He just asks and says no more. His father will go out of his mind
or hang himself. He behaved like a madman before. You know he is a very
decent man. We made a mistake then. It’s all the fault of that murderer
who beat him then.”

“Karamazov’s a riddle to me all the same. I might have made his
acquaintance long ago, but I like to have a proper pride in some cases.
Besides, I have a theory about him which I must work out and verify.”

Kolya subsided into dignified silence. Smurov, too, was silent. Smurov, of
course, worshiped Krassotkin and never dreamed of putting himself on a
level with him. Now he was tremendously interested at Kolya’s saying that
he was “going of himself” to see Ilusha. He felt that there must be some
mystery in Kolya’s suddenly taking it into his head to go to him that day.
They crossed the market-place, in which at that hour were many loaded
wagons from the country and a great number of live fowls. The market women
were selling rolls, cottons and threads, etc., in their booths. These
Sunday markets were naïvely called “fairs” in the town, and there were
many such fairs in the year.

Perezvon ran about in the wildest spirits, sniffing about first one side,
then the other. When he met other dogs they zealously smelt each other
over according to the rules of canine etiquette.

“I like to watch such realistic scenes, Smurov,” said Kolya suddenly.
“Have you noticed how dogs sniff at one another when they meet? It seems
to be a law of their nature.”

“Yes; it’s a funny habit.”

“No, it’s not funny; you are wrong there. There’s nothing funny in nature,
however funny it may seem to man with his prejudices. If dogs could reason
and criticize us they’d be sure to find just as much that would be funny
to them, if not far more, in the social relations of men, their
masters—far more, indeed. I repeat that, because I am convinced that there
is far more foolishness among us. That’s Rakitin’s idea—a remarkable idea.
I am a Socialist, Smurov.”

“And what is a Socialist?” asked Smurov.

“That’s when all are equal and all have property in common, there are no
marriages, and every one has any religion and laws he likes best, and all
the rest of it. You are not old enough to understand that yet. It’s cold,
though.”

“Yes, twelve degrees of frost. Father looked at the thermometer just now.”

“Have you noticed, Smurov, that in the middle of winter we don’t feel so
cold even when there are fifteen or eighteen degrees of frost as we do
now, in the beginning of winter, when there is a sudden frost of twelve
degrees, especially when there is not much snow. It’s because people are
not used to it. Everything is habit with men, everything even in their
social and political relations. Habit is the great motive-power. What a
funny-looking peasant!”

Kolya pointed to a tall peasant, with a good-natured countenance in a long
sheepskin coat, who was standing by his wagon, clapping together his
hands, in their shapeless leather gloves, to warm them. His long fair
beard was all white with frost.

“That peasant’s beard’s frozen,” Kolya cried in a loud provocative voice
as he passed him.

“Lots of people’s beards are frozen,” the peasant replied, calmly and
sententiously.

“Don’t provoke him,” observed Smurov.

“It’s all right; he won’t be cross; he’s a nice fellow. Good-by, Matvey.”

“Good-by.”

“Is your name Matvey?”

“Yes. Didn’t you know?”

“No, I didn’t. It was a guess.”

“You don’t say so! You are a schoolboy, I suppose?”

“Yes.”

“You get whipped, I expect?”

“Nothing to speak of—sometimes.”

“Does it hurt?”

“Well, yes, it does.”

“Ech, what a life!” The peasant heaved a sigh from the bottom of his
heart.

“Good-by, Matvey.”

“Good-by. You are a nice chap, that you are.”

The boys went on.

“That was a nice peasant,” Kolya observed to Smurov. “I like talking to
the peasants, and am always glad to do them justice.”

“Why did you tell a lie, pretending we are thrashed?” asked Smurov.

“I had to say that to please him.”

“How do you mean?”

“You know, Smurov, I don’t like being asked the same thing twice. I like
people to understand at the first word. Some things can’t be explained.
According to a peasant’s notions, schoolboys are whipped, and must be
whipped. What would a schoolboy be if he were not whipped? And if I were
to tell him we are not, he’d be disappointed. But you don’t understand
that. One has to know how to talk to the peasants.”

“Only don’t tease them, please, or you’ll get into another scrape as you
did about that goose.”

“So you’re afraid?”

“Don’t laugh, Kolya. Of course I’m afraid. My father would be awfully
cross. I am strictly forbidden to go out with you.”

“Don’t be uneasy, nothing will happen this time. Hallo, Natasha!” he
shouted to a market woman in one of the booths.

“Call me Natasha! What next! My name is Marya,” the middle-aged market
woman shouted at him.

“I am so glad it’s Marya. Good-by!”

“Ah, you young rascal! A brat like you to carry on so!”

“I’m in a hurry. I can’t stay now. You shall tell me next Sunday.” Kolya
waved his hand at her, as though she had attacked him and not he her.

“I’ve nothing to tell you next Sunday. You set upon me, you impudent young
monkey. I didn’t say anything,” bawled Marya. “You want a whipping, that’s
what you want, you saucy jackanapes!”

There was a roar of laughter among the other market women round her.
Suddenly a man in a violent rage darted out from the arcade of shops close
by. He was a young man, not a native of the town, with dark, curly hair
and a long, pale face, marked with smallpox. He wore a long blue coat and
a peaked cap, and looked like a merchant’s clerk. He was in a state of
stupid excitement and brandished his fist at Kolya.

“I know you!” he cried angrily, “I know you!”

Kolya stared at him. He could not recall when he could have had a row with
the man. But he had been in so many rows in the street that he could
hardly remember them all.

“Do you?” he asked sarcastically.

“I know you! I know you!” the man repeated idiotically.

“So much the better for you. Well, it’s time I was going. Good-by!”

“You are at your saucy pranks again?” cried the man. “You are at your
saucy pranks again? I know, you are at it again!”

“It’s not your business, brother, if I am at my saucy pranks again,” said
Kolya, standing still and scanning him.

“Not my business?”

“No; it’s not your business.”

“Whose then? Whose then? Whose then?”

“It’s Trifon Nikititch’s business, not yours.”

“What Trifon Nikititch?” asked the youth, staring with loutish amazement
at Kolya, but still as angry as ever.

Kolya scanned him gravely.

“Have you been to the Church of the Ascension?” he suddenly asked him,
with stern emphasis.

“What Church of Ascension? What for? No, I haven’t,” said the young man,
somewhat taken aback.

“Do you know Sabaneyev?” Kolya went on even more emphatically and even
more severely.

“What Sabaneyev? No, I don’t know him.”

“Well then you can go to the devil,” said Kolya, cutting short the
conversation; and turning sharply to the right he strode quickly on his
way as though he disdained further conversation with a dolt who did not
even know Sabaneyev.

“Stop, heigh! What Sabaneyev?” the young man recovered from his momentary
stupefaction and was as excited as before. “What did he say?” He turned to
the market women with a silly stare.

The women laughed.

“You can never tell what he’s after,” said one of them.

“What Sabaneyev is it he’s talking about?” the young man repeated, still
furious and brandishing his right arm.

“It must be a Sabaneyev who worked for the Kuzmitchovs, that’s who it must
be,” one of the women suggested.

The young man stared at her wildly.

“For the Kuzmitchovs?” repeated another woman. “But his name wasn’t
Trifon. His name’s Kuzma, not Trifon; but the boy said Trifon Nikititch,
so it can’t be the same.”

“His name is not Trifon and not Sabaneyev, it’s Tchizhov,” put in suddenly
a third woman, who had hitherto been silent, listening gravely. “Alexey
Ivanitch is his name. Tchizhov, Alexey Ivanitch.”

“Not a doubt about it, it’s Tchizhov,” a fourth woman emphatically
confirmed the statement.

The bewildered youth gazed from one to another.

“But what did he ask for, what did he ask for, good people?” he cried
almost in desperation. “ ‘Do you know Sabaneyev?’ says he. And who the
devil’s to know who is Sabaneyev?”

“You’re a senseless fellow. I tell you it’s not Sabaneyev, but Tchizhov,
Alexey Ivanitch Tchizhov, that’s who it is!” one of the women shouted at
him impressively.

“What Tchizhov? Who is he? Tell me, if you know.”

“That tall, sniveling fellow who used to sit in the market in the summer.”

“And what’s your Tchizhov to do with me, good people, eh?”

“How can I tell what he’s to do with you?” put in another. “You ought to
know yourself what you want with him, if you make such a clamor about him.
He spoke to you, he did not speak to us, you stupid. Don’t you really know
him?”

“Know whom?”

“Tchizhov.”

“The devil take Tchizhov and you with him. I’ll give him a hiding, that I
will. He was laughing at me!”

“Will give Tchizhov a hiding! More likely he will give you one. You are a
fool, that’s what you are!”

“Not Tchizhov, not Tchizhov, you spiteful, mischievous woman. I’ll give
the boy a hiding. Catch him, catch him, he was laughing at me!”

The woman guffawed. But Kolya was by now a long way off, marching along
with a triumphant air. Smurov walked beside him, looking round at the
shouting group far behind. He too was in high spirits, though he was still
afraid of getting into some scrape in Kolya’s company.

“What Sabaneyev did you mean?” he asked Kolya, foreseeing what his answer
would be.

“How do I know? Now there’ll be a hubbub among them all day. I like to
stir up fools in every class of society. There’s another blockhead, that
peasant there. You know, they say ‘there’s no one stupider than a stupid
Frenchman,’ but a stupid Russian shows it in his face just as much. Can’t
you see it all over his face that he is a fool, that peasant, eh?”

“Let him alone, Kolya. Let’s go on.”

“Nothing could stop me, now I am once off. Hey, good morning, peasant!”

A sturdy-looking peasant, with a round, simple face and grizzled beard,
who was walking by, raised his head and looked at the boy. He seemed not
quite sober.

“Good morning, if you are not laughing at me,” he said deliberately in
reply.

“And if I am?” laughed Kolya.

“Well, a joke’s a joke. Laugh away. I don’t mind. There’s no harm in a
joke.”

“I beg your pardon, brother, it was a joke.”

“Well, God forgive you!”

“Do you forgive me, too?”

“I quite forgive you. Go along.”

“I say, you seem a clever peasant.”

“Cleverer than you,” the peasant answered unexpectedly, with the same
gravity.

“I doubt it,” said Kolya, somewhat taken aback.

“It’s true, though.”

“Perhaps it is.”

“It is, brother.”

“Good-by, peasant!”

“Good-by!”

“There are all sorts of peasants,” Kolya observed to Smurov after a brief
silence. “How could I tell I had hit on a clever one? I am always ready to
recognize intelligence in the peasantry.”

In the distance the cathedral clock struck half-past eleven. The boys made
haste and they walked as far as Captain Snegiryov’s lodging, a
considerable distance, quickly and almost in silence. Twenty paces from
the house Kolya stopped and told Smurov to go on ahead and ask Karamazov
to come out to him.

“One must sniff round a bit first,” he observed to Smurov.

“Why ask him to come out?” Smurov protested. “You go in; they will be
awfully glad to see you. What’s the sense of making friends in the frost
out here?”

“I know why I want to see him out here in the frost,” Kolya cut him short
in the despotic tone he was fond of adopting with “small boys,” and Smurov
ran to do his bidding.



Chapter IV. The Lost Dog


Kolya leaned against the fence with an air of dignity, waiting for Alyosha
to appear. Yes, he had long wanted to meet him. He had heard a great deal
about him from the boys, but hitherto he had always maintained an
appearance of disdainful indifference when he was mentioned, and he had
even “criticized” what he heard about Alyosha. But secretly he had a great
longing to make his acquaintance; there was something sympathetic and
attractive in all he was told about Alyosha. So the present moment was
important: to begin with, he had to show himself at his best, to show his
independence, “Or he’ll think of me as thirteen and take me for a boy,
like the rest of them. And what are these boys to him? I shall ask him
when I get to know him. It’s a pity I am so short, though. Tuzikov is
younger than I am, yet he is half a head taller. But I have a clever face.
I am not good-looking. I know I’m hideous, but I’ve a clever face. I
mustn’t talk too freely; if I fall into his arms all at once, he may
think—Tfoo! how horrible if he should think—!”

Such were the thoughts that excited Kolya while he was doing his utmost to
assume the most independent air. What distressed him most was his being so
short; he did not mind so much his “hideous” face, as being so short. On
the wall in a corner at home he had the year before made a pencil-mark to
show his height, and every two months since he anxiously measured himself
against it to see how much he had gained. But alas! he grew very slowly,
and this sometimes reduced him almost to despair. His face was in reality
by no means “hideous”; on the contrary, it was rather attractive, with a
fair, pale skin, freckled. His small, lively gray eyes had a fearless
look, and often glowed with feeling. He had rather high cheekbones; small,
very red, but not very thick, lips; his nose was small and unmistakably
turned up. “I’ve a regular pug nose, a regular pug nose,” Kolya used to
mutter to himself when he looked in the looking-glass, and he always left
it with indignation. “But perhaps I haven’t got a clever face?” he
sometimes thought, doubtful even of that. But it must not be supposed that
his mind was preoccupied with his face and his height. On the contrary,
however bitter the moments before the looking-glass were to him, he
quickly forgot them, and forgot them for a long time, “abandoning himself
entirely to ideas and to real life,” as he formulated it to himself.

Alyosha came out quickly and hastened up to Kolya. Before he reached him,
Kolya could see that he looked delighted. “Can he be so glad to see me?”
Kolya wondered, feeling pleased. We may note here, in passing, that
Alyosha’s appearance had undergone a complete change since we saw him
last. He had abandoned his cassock and was wearing now a well-cut coat, a
soft, round hat, and his hair had been cropped short. All this was very
becoming to him, and he looked quite handsome. His charming face always
had a good-humored expression; but there was a gentleness and serenity in
his good-humor. To Kolya’s surprise, Alyosha came out to him just as he
was, without an overcoat. He had evidently come in haste. He held out his
hand to Kolya at once.

“Here you are at last! How anxious we’ve been to see you!”

“There were reasons which you shall know directly. Anyway, I am glad to
make your acquaintance. I’ve long been hoping for an opportunity, and have
heard a great deal about you,” Kolya muttered, a little breathless.

“We should have met anyway. I’ve heard a great deal about you, too; but
you’ve been a long time coming here.”

“Tell me, how are things going?”

“Ilusha is very ill. He is certainly dying.”

“How awful! You must admit that medicine is a fraud, Karamazov,” cried
Kolya warmly.

“Ilusha has mentioned you often, very often, even in his sleep, in
delirium, you know. One can see that you used to be very, very dear to him
... before the incident ... with the knife.... Then there’s another
reason.... Tell me, is that your dog?”

“Yes, Perezvon.”

“Not Zhutchka?” Alyosha looked at Kolya with eyes full of pity. “Is she
lost for ever?”

“I know you would all like it to be Zhutchka. I’ve heard all about it.”
Kolya smiled mysteriously. “Listen, Karamazov, I’ll tell you all about it.
That’s what I came for; that’s what I asked you to come out here for, to
explain the whole episode to you before we go in,” he began with
animation. “You see, Karamazov, Ilusha came into the preparatory class
last spring. Well, you know what our preparatory class is—a lot of small
boys. They began teasing Ilusha at once. I am two classes higher up, and,
of course, I only look on at them from a distance. I saw the boy was weak
and small, but he wouldn’t give in to them; he fought with them. I saw he
was proud, and his eyes were full of fire. I like children like that. And
they teased him all the more. The worst of it was he was horribly dressed
at the time, his breeches were too small for him, and there were holes in
his boots. They worried him about it; they jeered at him. That I can’t
stand. I stood up for him at once, and gave it to them hot. I beat them,
but they adore me, do you know, Karamazov?” Kolya boasted impulsively;
“but I am always fond of children. I’ve two chickens in my hands at home
now—that’s what detained me to-day. So they left off beating Ilusha and I
took him under my protection. I saw the boy was proud. I tell you that,
the boy was proud; but in the end he became slavishly devoted to me: he
did my slightest bidding, obeyed me as though I were God, tried to copy
me. In the intervals between the classes he used to run to me at once, and
I’d go about with him. On Sundays, too. They always laugh when an older
boy makes friends with a younger one like that; but that’s a prejudice. If
it’s my fancy, that’s enough. I am teaching him, developing him. Why
shouldn’t I develop him if I like him? Here you, Karamazov, have taken up
with all these nestlings. I see you want to influence the younger
generation—to develop them, to be of use to them, and I assure you this
trait in your character, which I knew by hearsay, attracted me more than
anything. Let us get to the point, though. I noticed that there was a sort
of softness and sentimentality coming over the boy, and you know I have a
positive hatred of this sheepish sentimentality, and I have had it from a
baby. There were contradictions in him, too: he was proud, but he was
slavishly devoted to me, and yet all at once his eyes would flash and he’d
refuse to agree with me; he’d argue, fly into a rage. I used sometimes to
propound certain ideas; I could see that it was not so much that he
disagreed with the ideas, but that he was simply rebelling against me,
because I was cool in responding to his endearments. And so, in order to
train him properly, the tenderer he was, the colder I became. I did it on
purpose: that was my idea. My object was to form his character, to lick
him into shape, to make a man of him ... and besides ... no doubt, you
understand me at a word. Suddenly I noticed for three days in succession
he was downcast and dejected, not because of my coldness, but for
something else, something more important. I wondered what the tragedy was.
I have pumped him and found out that he had somehow got to know
Smerdyakov, who was footman to your late father—it was before his death,
of course—and he taught the little fool a silly trick—that is, a brutal,
nasty trick. He told him to take a piece of bread, to stick a pin in it,
and throw it to one of those hungry dogs who snap up anything without
biting it, and then to watch and see what would happen. So they prepared a
piece of bread like that and threw it to Zhutchka, that shaggy dog there’s
been such a fuss about. The people of the house it belonged to never fed
it at all, though it barked all day. (Do you like that stupid barking,
Karamazov? I can’t stand it.) So it rushed at the bread, swallowed it, and
began to squeal; it turned round and round and ran away, squealing as it
ran out of sight. That was Ilusha’s own account of it. He confessed it to
me, and cried bitterly. He hugged me, shaking all over. He kept on
repeating ‘He ran away squealing’: the sight of that haunted him. He was
tormented by remorse, I could see that. I took it seriously. I determined
to give him a lesson for other things as well. So I must confess I wasn’t
quite straightforward, and pretended to be more indignant perhaps than I
was. ‘You’ve done a nasty thing,’ I said, ‘you are a scoundrel. I won’t
tell of it, of course, but I shall have nothing more to do with you for a
time. I’ll think it over and let you know through Smurov’—that’s the boy
who’s just come with me; he’s always ready to do anything for me—‘whether
I will have anything to do with you in the future or whether I give you up
for good as a scoundrel.’ He was tremendously upset. I must own I felt I’d
gone too far as I spoke, but there was no help for it. I did what I
thought best at the time. A day or two after, I sent Smurov to tell him
that I would not speak to him again. That’s what we call it when two
schoolfellows refuse to have anything more to do with one another.
Secretly I only meant to send him to Coventry for a few days and then, if
I saw signs of repentance, to hold out my hand to him again. That was my
intention. But what do you think happened? He heard Smurov’s message, his
eyes flashed. ‘Tell Krassotkin from me,’ he cried, ‘that I will throw
bread with pins to all the dogs—all—all of them!’ ‘So he’s going in for a
little temper. We must smoke it out of him.’ And I began to treat him with
contempt; whenever I met him I turned away or smiled sarcastically. And
just then that affair with his father happened. You remember? You must
realize that he was fearfully worked up by what had happened already. The
boys, seeing I’d given him up, set on him and taunted him, shouting, ‘Wisp
of tow, wisp of tow!’ And he had soon regular skirmishes with them, which
I am very sorry for. They seem to have given him one very bad beating. One
day he flew at them all as they were coming out of school. I stood a few
yards off, looking on. And, I swear, I don’t remember that I laughed; it
was quite the other way, I felt awfully sorry for him, in another minute I
would have run up to take his part. But he suddenly met my eyes. I don’t
know what he fancied; but he pulled out a penknife, rushed at me, and
struck at my thigh, here in my right leg. I didn’t move. I don’t mind
owning I am plucky sometimes, Karamazov. I simply looked at him
contemptuously, as though to say, ‘This is how you repay all my kindness!
Do it again, if you like, I’m at your service.’ But he didn’t stab me
again; he broke down, he was frightened at what he had done, he threw away
the knife, burst out crying, and ran away. I did not sneak on him, of
course, and I made them all keep quiet, so it shouldn’t come to the ears
of the masters. I didn’t even tell my mother till it had healed up. And
the wound was a mere scratch. And then I heard that the same day he’d been
throwing stones and had bitten your finger—but you understand now what a
state he was in! Well, it can’t be helped: it was stupid of me not to come
and forgive him—that is, to make it up with him—when he was taken ill. I
am sorry for it now. But I had a special reason. So now I’ve told you all
about it ... but I’m afraid it was stupid of me.”

“Oh, what a pity,” exclaimed Alyosha, with feeling, “that I didn’t know
before what terms you were on with him, or I’d have come to you long ago
to beg you to go to him with me. Would you believe it, when he was
feverish he talked about you in delirium. I didn’t know how much you were
to him! And you’ve really not succeeded in finding that dog? His father
and the boys have been hunting all over the town for it. Would you believe
it, since he’s been ill, I’ve three times heard him repeat with tears,
‘It’s because I killed Zhutchka, father, that I am ill now. God is
punishing me for it.’ He can’t get that idea out of his head. And if the
dog were found and proved to be alive, one might almost fancy the joy
would cure him. We have all rested our hopes on you.”

“Tell me, what made you hope that I should be the one to find him?” Kolya
asked, with great curiosity. “Why did you reckon on me rather than any one
else?”

“There was a report that you were looking for the dog, and that you would
bring it when you’d found it. Smurov said something of the sort. We’ve all
been trying to persuade Ilusha that the dog is alive, that it’s been seen.
The boys brought him a live hare; he just looked at it, with a faint
smile, and asked them to set it free in the fields. And so we did. His
father has just this moment come back, bringing him a mastiff pup, hoping
to comfort him with that; but I think it only makes it worse.”

“Tell me, Karamazov, what sort of man is the father? I know him, but what
do you make of him—a mountebank, a buffoon?”

“Oh, no; there are people of deep feeling who have been somehow crushed.
Buffoonery in them is a form of resentful irony against those to whom they
daren’t speak the truth, from having been for years humiliated and
intimidated by them. Believe me, Krassotkin, that sort of buffoonery is
sometimes tragic in the extreme. His whole life now is centered in Ilusha,
and if Ilusha dies, he will either go mad with grief or kill himself. I
feel almost certain of that when I look at him now.”

“I understand you, Karamazov. I see you understand human nature,” Kolya
added, with feeling.

“And as soon as I saw you with a dog, I thought it was Zhutchka you were
bringing.”

“Wait a bit, Karamazov, perhaps we shall find it yet; but this is
Perezvon. I’ll let him go in now and perhaps it will amuse Ilusha more
than the mastiff pup. Wait a bit, Karamazov, you will know something in a
minute. But, I say, I am keeping you here!” Kolya cried suddenly. “You’ve
no overcoat on in this bitter cold. You see what an egoist I am. Oh, we
are all egoists, Karamazov!”

“Don’t trouble; it is cold, but I don’t often catch cold. Let us go in,
though, and, by the way, what is your name? I know you are called Kolya,
but what else?”

“Nikolay—Nikolay Ivanovitch Krassotkin, or, as they say in official
documents, ‘Krassotkin son.’ ” Kolya laughed for some reason, but added
suddenly, “Of course I hate my name Nikolay.”

“Why so?”

“It’s so trivial, so ordinary.”

“You are thirteen?” asked Alyosha.

“No, fourteen—that is, I shall be fourteen very soon, in a fortnight. I’ll
confess one weakness of mine, Karamazov, just to you, since it’s our first
meeting, so that you may understand my character at once. I hate being
asked my age, more than that ... and in fact ... there’s a libelous story
going about me, that last week I played robbers with the preparatory boys.
It’s a fact that I did play with them, but it’s a perfect libel to say I
did it for my own amusement. I have reasons for believing that you’ve
heard the story; but I wasn’t playing for my own amusement, it was for the
sake of the children, because they couldn’t think of anything to do by
themselves. But they’ve always got some silly tale. This is an awful town
for gossip, I can tell you.”

“But what if you had been playing for your own amusement, what’s the
harm?”

“Come, I say, for my own amusement! You don’t play horses, do you?”

“But you must look at it like this,” said Alyosha, smiling. “Grown-up
people go to the theater and there the adventures of all sorts of heroes
are represented—sometimes there are robbers and battles, too—and isn’t
that just the same thing, in a different form, of course? And young
people’s games of soldiers or robbers in their playtime are also art in
its first stage. You know, they spring from the growing artistic instincts
of the young. And sometimes these games are much better than performances
in the theater, the only difference is that people go there to look at the
actors, while in these games the young people are the actors themselves.
But that’s only natural.”

“You think so? Is that your idea?” Kolya looked at him intently. “Oh, you
know, that’s rather an interesting view. When I go home, I’ll think it
over. I’ll admit I thought I might learn something from you. I’ve come to
learn of you, Karamazov,” Kolya concluded, in a voice full of spontaneous
feeling.

“And I of you,” said Alyosha, smiling and pressing his hand.

Kolya was much pleased with Alyosha. What struck him most was that he
treated him exactly like an equal and that he talked to him just as if he
were “quite grown up.”

“I’ll show you something directly, Karamazov; it’s a theatrical
performance, too,” he said, laughing nervously. “That’s why I’ve come.”

“Let us go first to the people of the house, on the left. All the boys
leave their coats in there, because the room is small and hot.”

“Oh, I’m only coming in for a minute. I’ll keep on my overcoat. Perezvon
will stay here in the passage and be dead. _Ici_, Perezvon, lie down and
be dead! You see how he’s dead. I’ll go in first and explore, then I’ll
whistle to him when I think fit, and you’ll see, he’ll dash in like mad.
Only Smurov must not forget to open the door at the moment. I’ll arrange
it all and you’ll see something.”



Chapter V. By Ilusha’s Bedside


The room inhabited by the family of the retired captain Snegiryov is
already familiar to the reader. It was close and crowded at that moment
with a number of visitors. Several boys were sitting with Ilusha, and
though all of them, like Smurov, were prepared to deny that it was Alyosha
who had brought them and reconciled them with Ilusha, it was really the
fact. All the art he had used had been to take them, one by one, to
Ilusha, without “sheepish sentimentality,” appearing to do so casually and
without design. It was a great consolation to Ilusha in his suffering. He
was greatly touched by seeing the almost tender affection and sympathy
shown him by these boys, who had been his enemies. Krassotkin was the only
one missing and his absence was a heavy load on Ilusha’s heart. Perhaps
the bitterest of all his bitter memories was his stabbing Krassotkin, who
had been his one friend and protector. Clever little Smurov, who was the
first to make it up with Ilusha, thought it was so. But when Smurov hinted
to Krassotkin that Alyosha wanted to come and see him about something, the
latter cut him short, bidding Smurov tell “Karamazov” at once that he knew
best what to do, that he wanted no one’s advice, and that, if he went to
see Ilusha, he would choose his own time for he had “his own reasons.”

That was a fortnight before this Sunday. That was why Alyosha had not been
to see him, as he had meant to. But though he waited, he sent Smurov to
him twice again. Both times Krassotkin met him with a curt, impatient
refusal, sending Alyosha a message not to bother him any more, that if he
came himself, he, Krassotkin, would not go to Ilusha at all. Up to the
very last day, Smurov did not know that Kolya meant to go to Ilusha that
morning, and only the evening before, as he parted from Smurov, Kolya
abruptly told him to wait at home for him next morning, for he would go
with him to the Snegiryovs’, but warned him on no account to say he was
coming, as he wanted to drop in casually. Smurov obeyed. Smurov’s fancy
that Kolya would bring back the lost dog was based on the words Kolya had
dropped that “they must be asses not to find the dog, if it was alive.”
When Smurov, waiting for an opportunity, timidly hinted at his guess about
the dog, Krassotkin flew into a violent rage. “I’m not such an ass as to
go hunting about the town for other people’s dogs when I’ve got a dog of
my own! And how can you imagine a dog could be alive after swallowing a
pin? Sheepish sentimentality, that’s what it is!”

For the last fortnight Ilusha had not left his little bed under the ikons
in the corner. He had not been to school since the day he met Alyosha and
bit his finger. He was taken ill the same day, though for a month
afterwards he was sometimes able to get up and walk about the room and
passage. But latterly he had become so weak that he could not move without
help from his father. His father was terribly concerned about him. He even
gave up drinking and was almost crazy with terror that his boy would die.
And often, especially after leading him round the room on his arm and
putting him back to bed, he would run to a dark corner in the passage and,
leaning his head against the wall, he would break into paroxysms of
violent weeping, stifling his sobs that they might not be heard by Ilusha.

Returning to the room, he would usually begin doing something to amuse and
comfort his precious boy; he would tell him stories, funny anecdotes, or
would mimic comic people he had happened to meet, even imitate the howls
and cries of animals. But Ilusha could not bear to see his father fooling
and playing the buffoon. Though the boy tried not to show how he disliked
it, he saw with an aching heart that his father was an object of contempt,
and he was continually haunted by the memory of the “wisp of tow” and that
“terrible day.”

Nina, Ilusha’s gentle, crippled sister, did not like her father’s
buffoonery either (Varvara had been gone for some time past to Petersburg
to study at the university). But the half-imbecile mother was greatly
diverted and laughed heartily when her husband began capering about or
performing something. It was the only way she could be amused; all the
rest of the time she was grumbling and complaining that now every one had
forgotten her, that no one treated her with respect, that she was
slighted, and so on. But during the last few days she had completely
changed. She began looking constantly at Ilusha’s bed in the corner and
seemed lost in thought. She was more silent, quieter, and, if she cried,
she cried quietly so as not to be heard. The captain noticed the change in
her with mournful perplexity. The boys’ visits at first only angered her,
but later on their merry shouts and stories began to divert her, and at
last she liked them so much that, if the boys had given up coming, she
would have felt dreary without them. When the children told some story or
played a game, she laughed and clapped her hands. She called some of them
to her and kissed them. She was particularly fond of Smurov.

As for the captain, the presence in his room of the children, who came to
cheer up Ilusha, filled his heart from the first with ecstatic joy. He
even hoped that Ilusha would now get over his depression, and that that
would hasten his recovery. In spite of his alarm about Ilusha, he had not,
till lately, felt one minute’s doubt of his boy’s ultimate recovery.

He met his little visitors with homage, waited upon them hand and foot; he
was ready to be their horse and even began letting them ride on his back,
but Ilusha did not like the game and it was given up. He began buying
little things for them, gingerbread and nuts, gave them tea and cut them
sandwiches. It must be noted that all this time he had plenty of money. He
had taken the two hundred roubles from Katerina Ivanovna just as Alyosha
had predicted he would. And afterwards Katerina Ivanovna, learning more
about their circumstances and Ilusha’s illness, visited them herself, made
the acquaintance of the family, and succeeded in fascinating the
half-imbecile mother. Since then she had been lavish in helping them, and
the captain, terror-stricken at the thought that his boy might be dying,
forgot his pride and humbly accepted her assistance.

All this time Doctor Herzenstube, who was called in by Katerina Ivanovna,
came punctually every other day, but little was gained by his visits and
he dosed the invalid mercilessly. But on that Sunday morning a new doctor
was expected, who had come from Moscow, where he had a great reputation.
Katerina Ivanovna had sent for him from Moscow at great expense, not
expressly for Ilusha, but for another object of which more will be said in
its place hereafter. But, as he had come, she had asked him to see Ilusha
as well, and the captain had been told to expect him. He hadn’t the
slightest idea that Kolya Krassotkin was coming, though he had long wished
for a visit from the boy for whom Ilusha was fretting.

At the moment when Krassotkin opened the door and came into the room, the
captain and all the boys were round Ilusha’s bed, looking at a tiny
mastiff pup, which had only been born the day before, though the captain
had bespoken it a week ago to comfort and amuse Ilusha, who was still
fretting over the lost and probably dead Zhutchka. Ilusha, who had heard
three days before that he was to be presented with a puppy, not an
ordinary puppy, but a pedigree mastiff (a very important point, of
course), tried from delicacy of feeling to pretend that he was pleased.
But his father and the boys could not help seeing that the puppy only
served to recall to his little heart the thought of the unhappy dog he had
killed. The puppy lay beside him feebly moving and he, smiling sadly,
stroked it with his thin, pale, wasted hand. Clearly he liked the puppy,
but ... it wasn’t Zhutchka; if he could have had Zhutchka and the puppy,
too, then he would have been completely happy.

“Krassotkin!” cried one of the boys suddenly. He was the first to see him
come in.

Krassotkin’s entrance made a general sensation; the boys moved away and
stood on each side of the bed, so that he could get a full view of Ilusha.
The captain ran eagerly to meet Kolya.

“Please come in ... you are welcome!” he said hurriedly. “Ilusha, Mr.
Krassotkin has come to see you!”

But Krassotkin, shaking hands with him hurriedly, instantly showed his
complete knowledge of the manners of good society. He turned first to the
captain’s wife sitting in her arm-chair, who was very ill-humored at the
moment, and was grumbling that the boys stood between her and Ilusha’s bed
and did not let her see the new puppy. With the greatest courtesy he made
her a bow, scraping his foot, and turning to Nina, he made her, as the
only other lady present, a similar bow. This polite behavior made an
extremely favorable impression on the deranged lady.

“There, you can see at once he is a young man that has been well brought
up,” she commented aloud, throwing up her hands; “but as for our other
visitors they come in one on the top of another.”

“How do you mean, mamma, one on the top of another, how is that?” muttered
the captain affectionately, though a little anxious on her account.

“That’s how they ride in. They get on each other’s shoulders in the
passage and prance in like that on a respectable family. Strange sort of
visitors!”

“But who’s come in like that, mamma?”

“Why, that boy came in riding on that one’s back and this one on that
one’s.”

Kolya was already by Ilusha’s bedside. The sick boy turned visibly paler.
He raised himself in the bed and looked intently at Kolya. Kolya had not
seen his little friend for two months, and he was overwhelmed at the sight
of him. He had never imagined that he would see such a wasted, yellow
face, such enormous, feverishly glowing eyes and such thin little hands.
He saw, with grieved surprise, Ilusha’s rapid, hard breathing and dry
lips. He stepped close to him, held out his hand, and almost overwhelmed,
he said:

“Well, old man ... how are you?” But his voice failed him, he couldn’t
achieve an appearance of ease; his face suddenly twitched and the corners
of his mouth quivered. Ilusha smiled a pitiful little smile, still unable
to utter a word. Something moved Kolya to raise his hand and pass it over
Ilusha’s hair.

“Never mind!” he murmured softly to him to cheer him up, or perhaps not
knowing why he said it. For a minute they were silent again.

“Hallo, so you’ve got a new puppy?” Kolya said suddenly, in a most callous
voice.

“Ye—es,” answered Ilusha in a long whisper, gasping for breath.

“A black nose, that means he’ll be fierce, a good house-dog,” Kolya
observed gravely and stolidly, as if the only thing he cared about was the
puppy and its black nose. But in reality he still had to do his utmost to
control his feelings not to burst out crying like a child, and do what he
would he could not control it. “When it grows up, you’ll have to keep it
on the chain, I’m sure.”

“He’ll be a huge dog!” cried one of the boys.

“Of course he will,” “a mastiff,” “large,” “like this,” “as big as a
calf,” shouted several voices.

“As big as a calf, as a real calf,” chimed in the captain. “I got one like
that on purpose, one of the fiercest breed, and his parents are huge and
very fierce, they stand as high as this from the floor.... Sit down here,
on Ilusha’s bed, or here on the bench. You are welcome, we’ve been hoping
to see you a long time.... You were so kind as to come with Alexey
Fyodorovitch?”

Krassotkin sat on the edge of the bed, at Ilusha’s feet. Though he had
perhaps prepared a free-and-easy opening for the conversation on his way,
now he completely lost the thread of it.

“No ... I came with Perezvon. I’ve got a dog now, called Perezvon. A
Slavonic name. He’s out there ... if I whistle, he’ll run in. I’ve brought
a dog, too,” he said, addressing Ilusha all at once. “Do you remember
Zhutchka, old man?” he suddenly fired the question at him.

Ilusha’s little face quivered. He looked with an agonized expression at
Kolya. Alyosha, standing at the door, frowned and signed to Kolya not to
speak of Zhutchka, but he did not or would not notice.

“Where ... is Zhutchka?” Ilusha asked in a broken voice.

“Oh, well, my boy, your Zhutchka’s lost and done for!”

Ilusha did not speak, but he fixed an intent gaze once more on Kolya.
Alyosha, catching Kolya’s eye, signed to him vigorously again, but he
turned away his eyes pretending not to have noticed.

“It must have run away and died somewhere. It must have died after a meal
like that,” Kolya pronounced pitilessly, though he seemed a little
breathless. “But I’ve got a dog, Perezvon ... A Slavonic name.... I’ve
brought him to show you.”

“I don’t want him!” said Ilusha suddenly.

“No, no, you really must see him ... it will amuse you. I brought him on
purpose.... He’s the same sort of shaggy dog.... You allow me to call in
my dog, madam?” He suddenly addressed Madame Snegiryov, with inexplicable
excitement in his manner.

“I don’t want him, I don’t want him!” cried Ilusha, with a mournful break
in his voice. There was a reproachful light in his eyes.

“You’d better,” the captain started up from the chest by the wall on which
he had just sat down, “you’d better ... another time,” he muttered, but
Kolya could not be restrained. He hurriedly shouted to Smurov, “Open the
door,” and as soon as it was open, he blew his whistle. Perezvon dashed
headlong into the room.

“Jump, Perezvon, beg! Beg!” shouted Kolya, jumping up, and the dog stood
erect on its hind-legs by Ilusha’s bedside. What followed was a surprise
to every one: Ilusha started, lurched violently forward, bent over
Perezvon and gazed at him, faint with suspense.

“It’s ... Zhutchka!” he cried suddenly, in a voice breaking with joy and
suffering.

“And who did you think it was?” Krassotkin shouted with all his might, in
a ringing, happy voice, and bending down he seized the dog and lifted him
up to Ilusha.

“Look, old man, you see, blind of one eye and the left ear is torn, just
the marks you described to me. It was by that I found him. I found him
directly. He did not belong to any one!” he explained, turning quickly to
the captain, to his wife, to Alyosha and then again to Ilusha. “He used to
live in the Fedotovs’ back-yard. Though he made his home there, they did
not feed him. He was a stray dog that had run away from the village ... I
found him.... You see, old man, he couldn’t have swallowed what you gave
him. If he had, he must have died, he must have! So he must have spat it
out, since he is alive. You did not see him do it. But the pin pricked his
tongue, that is why he squealed. He ran away squealing and you thought
he’d swallowed it. He might well squeal, because the skin of dogs’ mouths
is so tender ... tenderer than in men, much tenderer!” Kolya cried
impetuously, his face glowing and radiant with delight. Ilusha could not
speak. White as a sheet, he gazed open-mouthed at Kolya, with his great
eyes almost starting out of his head. And if Krassotkin, who had no
suspicion of it, had known what a disastrous and fatal effect such a
moment might have on the sick child’s health, nothing would have induced
him to play such a trick on him. But Alyosha was perhaps the only person
in the room who realized it. As for the captain he behaved like a small
child.

“Zhutchka! It’s Zhutchka!” he cried in a blissful voice, “Ilusha, this is
Zhutchka, your Zhutchka! Mamma, this is Zhutchka!” He was almost weeping.

“And I never guessed!” cried Smurov regretfully. “Bravo, Krassotkin! I
said he’d find the dog and here he’s found him.”

“Here he’s found him!” another boy repeated gleefully.

“Krassotkin’s a brick!” cried a third voice.

“He’s a brick, he’s a brick!” cried the other boys, and they began
clapping.

“Wait, wait,” Krassotkin did his utmost to shout above them all. “I’ll
tell you how it happened, that’s the whole point. I found him, I took him
home and hid him at once. I kept him locked up at home and did not show
him to any one till to-day. Only Smurov has known for the last fortnight,
but I assured him this dog was called Perezvon and he did not guess. And
meanwhile I taught the dog all sorts of tricks. You should only see all
the things he can do! I trained him so as to bring you a well-trained dog,
in good condition, old man, so as to be able to say to you, ‘See, old man,
what a fine dog your Zhutchka is now!’ Haven’t you a bit of meat? He’ll
show you a trick that will make you die with laughing. A piece of meat,
haven’t you got any?”

The captain ran across the passage to the landlady, where their cooking
was done. Not to lose precious time, Kolya, in desperate haste, shouted to
Perezvon, “Dead!” And the dog immediately turned round and lay on his back
with its four paws in the air. The boys laughed. Ilusha looked on with the
same suffering smile, but the person most delighted with the dog’s
performance was “mamma.” She laughed at the dog and began snapping her
fingers and calling it, “Perezvon, Perezvon!”

“Nothing will make him get up, nothing!” Kolya cried triumphantly, proud
of his success. “He won’t move for all the shouting in the world, but if I
call to him, he’ll jump up in a minute. Ici, Perezvon!” The dog leapt up
and bounded about, whining with delight. The captain ran back with a piece
of cooked beef.

“Is it hot?” Kolya inquired hurriedly, with a business-like air, taking
the meat. “Dogs don’t like hot things. No, it’s all right. Look,
everybody, look, Ilusha, look, old man; why aren’t you looking? He does
not look at him, now I’ve brought him.”

The new trick consisted in making the dog stand motionless with his nose
out and putting a tempting morsel of meat just on his nose. The luckless
dog had to stand without moving, with the meat on his nose, as long as his
master chose to keep him, without a movement, perhaps for half an hour.
But he kept Perezvon only for a brief moment.

“Paid for!” cried Kolya, and the meat passed in a flash from the dog’s
nose to his mouth. The audience, of course, expressed enthusiasm and
surprise.

“Can you really have put off coming all this time simply to train the
dog?” exclaimed Alyosha, with an involuntary note of reproach in his
voice.

“Simply for that!” answered Kolya, with perfect simplicity. “I wanted to
show him in all his glory.”

“Perezvon! Perezvon,” called Ilusha suddenly, snapping his thin fingers
and beckoning to the dog.

“What is it? Let him jump up on the bed! _Ici_, Perezvon!” Kolya slapped
the bed and Perezvon darted up by Ilusha. The boy threw both arms round
his head and Perezvon instantly licked his cheek. Ilusha crept close to
him, stretched himself out in bed and hid his face in the dog’s shaggy
coat.

“Dear, dear!” kept exclaiming the captain. Kolya sat down again on the
edge of the bed.

“Ilusha, I can show you another trick. I’ve brought you a little cannon.
You remember, I told you about it before and you said how much you’d like
to see it. Well, here, I’ve brought it to you.”

And Kolya hurriedly pulled out of his satchel the little bronze cannon. He
hurried, because he was happy himself. Another time he would have waited
till the sensation made by Perezvon had passed off, now he hurried on
regardless of all consideration. “You are all happy now,” he felt, “so
here’s something to make you happier!” He was perfectly enchanted himself.

“I’ve been coveting this thing for a long while; it’s for you, old man,
it’s for you. It belonged to Morozov, it was no use to him, he had it from
his brother. I swopped a book from father’s book-case for it, _A Kinsman
of Mahomet or Salutary Folly_, a scandalous book published in Moscow a
hundred years ago, before they had any censorship. And Morozov has a taste
for such things. He was grateful to me, too....”

Kolya held the cannon in his hand so that all could see and admire it.
Ilusha raised himself, and, with his right arm still round the dog, he
gazed enchanted at the toy. The sensation was even greater when Kolya
announced that he had gunpowder too, and that it could be fired off at
once “if it won’t alarm the ladies.” “Mamma” immediately asked to look at
the toy closer and her request was granted. She was much pleased with the
little bronze cannon on wheels and began rolling it to and fro on her lap.
She readily gave permission for the cannon to be fired, without any idea
of what she had been asked. Kolya showed the powder and the shot. The
captain, as a military man, undertook to load it, putting in a minute
quantity of powder. He asked that the shot might be put off till another
time. The cannon was put on the floor, aiming towards an empty part of the
room, three grains of powder were thrust into the touch-hole and a match
was put to it. A magnificent explosion followed. Mamma was startled, but
at once laughed with delight. The boys gazed in speechless triumph. But
the captain, looking at Ilusha, was more enchanted than any of them. Kolya
picked up the cannon and immediately presented it to Ilusha, together with
the powder and the shot.

“I got it for you, for you! I’ve been keeping it for you a long time,” he
repeated once more in his delight.

“Oh, give it to me! No, give me the cannon!” mamma began begging like a
little child. Her face showed a piteous fear that she would not get it.
Kolya was disconcerted. The captain fidgeted uneasily.

“Mamma, mamma,” he ran to her, “the cannon’s yours, of course, but let
Ilusha have it, because it’s a present to him, but it’s just as good as
yours. Ilusha will always let you play with it; it shall belong to both of
you, both of you.”

“No, I don’t want it to belong to both of us, I want it to be mine
altogether, not Ilusha’s,” persisted mamma, on the point of tears.

“Take it, mother, here, keep it!” Ilusha cried. “Krassotkin, may I give it
to my mother?” he turned to Krassotkin with an imploring face, as though
he were afraid he might be offended at his giving his present to some one
else.

“Of course you may,” Krassotkin assented heartily, and, taking the cannon
from Ilusha, he handed it himself to mamma with a polite bow. She was so
touched that she cried.

“Ilusha, darling, he’s the one who loves his mamma!” she said tenderly,
and at once began wheeling the cannon to and fro on her lap again.

“Mamma, let me kiss your hand.” The captain darted up to her at once and
did so.

“And I never saw such a charming fellow as this nice boy,” said the
grateful lady, pointing to Krassotkin.

“And I’ll bring you as much powder as you like, Ilusha. We make the powder
ourselves now. Borovikov found out how it’s made—twenty-four parts of
saltpeter, ten of sulphur and six of birchwood charcoal. It’s all pounded
together, mixed into a paste with water and rubbed through a tammy
sieve—that’s how it’s done.”

“Smurov told me about your powder, only father says it’s not real
gunpowder,” responded Ilusha.

“Not real?” Kolya flushed. “It burns. I don’t know, of course.”

“No, I didn’t mean that,” put in the captain with a guilty face. “I only
said that real powder is not made like that, but that’s nothing, it can be
made so.”

“I don’t know, you know best. We lighted some in a pomatum pot, it burned
splendidly, it all burnt away leaving only a tiny ash. But that was only
the paste, and if you rub it through ... but of course you know best, I
don’t know.... And Bulkin’s father thrashed him on account of our powder,
did you hear?” he turned to Ilusha.

“Yes,” answered Ilusha. He listened to Kolya with immense interest and
enjoyment.

“We had prepared a whole bottle of it and he used to keep it under his
bed. His father saw it. He said it might explode, and thrashed him on the
spot. He was going to make a complaint against me to the masters. He is
not allowed to go about with me now, no one is allowed to go about with me
now. Smurov is not allowed to either, I’ve got a bad name with every one.
They say I’m a ‘desperate character,’ ” Kolya smiled scornfully. “It all
began from what happened on the railway.”

“Ah, we’ve heard of that exploit of yours, too,” cried the captain. “How
could you lie still on the line? Is it possible you weren’t the least
afraid, lying there under the train? Weren’t you frightened?”

The captain was abject in his flattery of Kolya.

“N—not particularly,” answered Kolya carelessly. “What’s blasted my
reputation more than anything here was that cursed goose,” he said,
turning again to Ilusha. But though he assumed an unconcerned air as he
talked, he still could not control himself and was continually missing the
note he tried to keep up.

“Ah! I heard about the goose!” Ilusha laughed, beaming all over. “They
told me, but I didn’t understand. Did they really take you to the court?”

“The most stupid, trivial affair, they made a mountain of a molehill as
they always do,” Kolya began carelessly. “I was walking through the
market-place here one day, just when they’d driven in the geese. I stopped
and looked at them. All at once a fellow, who is an errand-boy at
Plotnikov’s now, looked at me and said, ‘What are you looking at the geese
for?’ I looked at him; he was a stupid, moon-faced fellow of twenty. I am
always on the side of the peasantry, you know. I like talking to the
peasants.... We’ve dropped behind the peasants—that’s an axiom. I believe
you are laughing, Karamazov?”

“No, Heaven forbid, I am listening,” said Alyosha with a most good-natured
air, and the sensitive Kolya was immediately reassured.

“My theory, Karamazov, is clear and simple,” he hurried on again, looking
pleased. “I believe in the people and am always glad to give them their
due, but I am not for spoiling them, that is a _sine qua non_ ... But I
was telling you about the goose. So I turned to the fool and answered, ‘I
am wondering what the goose thinks about.’ He looked at me quite stupidly,
‘And what does the goose think about?’ he asked. ‘Do you see that cart
full of oats?’ I said. ‘The oats are dropping out of the sack, and the
goose has put its neck right under the wheel to gobble them up—do you
see?’ ‘I see that quite well,’ he said. ‘Well,’ said I, ‘if that cart were
to move on a little, would it break the goose’s neck or not?’ ‘It’d be
sure to break it,’ and he grinned all over his face, highly delighted.
‘Come on, then,’ said I, ‘let’s try.’ ‘Let’s,’ he said. And it did not
take us long to arrange: he stood at the bridle without being noticed, and
I stood on one side to direct the goose. And the owner wasn’t looking, he
was talking to some one, so I had nothing to do, the goose thrust its head
in after the oats of itself, under the cart, just under the wheel. I
winked at the lad, he tugged at the bridle, and crack. The goose’s neck
was broken in half. And, as luck would have it, all the peasants saw us at
that moment and they kicked up a shindy at once. ‘You did that on
purpose!’ ‘No, not on purpose.’ ‘Yes, you did, on purpose!’ Well, they
shouted, ‘Take him to the justice of the peace!’ They took me, too. ‘You
were there, too,’ they said, ‘you helped, you’re known all over the
market!’ And, for some reason, I really am known all over the market,”
Kolya added conceitedly. “We all went off to the justice’s, they brought
the goose, too. The fellow was crying in a great funk, simply blubbering
like a woman. And the farmer kept shouting that you could kill any number
of geese like that. Well, of course, there were witnesses. The justice of
the peace settled it in a minute, that the farmer was to be paid a rouble
for the goose, and the fellow to have the goose. And he was warned not to
play such pranks again. And the fellow kept blubbering like a woman. ‘It
wasn’t me,’ he said, ‘it was he egged me on,’ and he pointed to me. I
answered with the utmost composure that I hadn’t egged him on, that I
simply stated the general proposition, had spoken hypothetically. The
justice of the peace smiled and was vexed with himself at once for having
smiled. ‘I’ll complain to your masters of you, so that for the future you
mayn’t waste your time on such general propositions, instead of sitting at
your books and learning your lessons.’ He didn’t complain to the masters,
that was a joke, but the matter was noised abroad and came to the ears of
the masters. Their ears are long, you know! The classical master,
Kolbasnikov, was particularly shocked about it, but Dardanelov got me off
again. But Kolbasnikov is savage with every one now like a green ass. Did
you know, Ilusha, he is just married, got a dowry of a thousand roubles,
and his bride’s a regular fright of the first rank and the last degree.
The third-class fellows wrote an epigram on it:


    Astounding news has reached the class,
    Kolbasnikov has been an ass.


And so on, awfully funny, I’ll bring it to you later on. I say nothing
against Dardanelov, he is a learned man, there’s no doubt about it. I
respect men like that and it’s not because he stood up for me.”

“But you took him down about the founders of Troy!” Smurov put in
suddenly, unmistakably proud of Krassotkin at such a moment. He was
particularly pleased with the story of the goose.

“Did you really take him down?” the captain inquired, in a flattering way.
“On the question who founded Troy? We heard of it, Ilusha told me about it
at the time.”

“He knows everything, father, he knows more than any of us!” put in
Ilusha; “he only pretends to be like that, but really he is top in every
subject....”

Ilusha looked at Kolya with infinite happiness.

“Oh, that’s all nonsense about Troy, a trivial matter. I consider this an
unimportant question,” said Kolya with haughty humility. He had by now
completely recovered his dignity, though he was still a little uneasy. He
felt that he was greatly excited and that he had talked about the goose,
for instance, with too little reserve, while Alyosha had looked serious
and had not said a word all the time. And the vain boy began by degrees to
have a rankling fear that Alyosha was silent because he despised him, and
thought he was showing off before him. If he dared to think anything like
that Kolya would—

“I regard the question as quite a trivial one,” he rapped out again,
proudly.

“And I know who founded Troy,” a boy, who had not spoken before, said
suddenly, to the surprise of every one. He was silent and seemed to be
shy. He was a pretty boy of about eleven, called Kartashov. He was sitting
near the door. Kolya looked at him with dignified amazement.

The fact was that the identity of the founders of Troy had become a secret
for the whole school, a secret which could only be discovered by reading
Smaragdov, and no one had Smaragdov but Kolya. One day, when Kolya’s back
was turned, Kartashov hastily opened Smaragdov, which lay among Kolya’s
books, and immediately lighted on the passage relating to the foundation
of Troy. This was a good time ago, but he felt uneasy and could not bring
himself to announce publicly that he too knew who had founded Troy, afraid
of what might happen and of Krassotkin’s somehow putting him to shame over
it. But now he couldn’t resist saying it. For weeks he had been longing
to.

“Well, who did found it?” asked Kolya, turning to him with haughty
superciliousness. He saw from his face that he really did know and at once
made up his mind how to take it. There was, so to speak, a discordant note
in the general harmony.

“Troy was founded by Teucer, Dardanus, Ilius and Tros,” the boy rapped out
at once, and in the same instant he blushed, blushed so, that it was
painful to look at him. But the boys stared at him, stared at him for a
whole minute, and then all the staring eyes turned at once and were
fastened upon Kolya, who was still scanning the audacious boy with
disdainful composure.

“In what sense did they found it?” he deigned to comment at last. “And
what is meant by founding a city or a state? What do they do? Did they go
and each lay a brick, do you suppose?”

There was laughter. The offending boy turned from pink to crimson. He was
silent and on the point of tears. Kolya held him so for a minute.

“Before you talk of a historical event like the foundation of a
nationality, you must first understand what you mean by it,” he admonished
him in stern, incisive tones. “But I attach no consequence to these old
wives’ tales and I don’t think much of universal history in general,” he
added carelessly, addressing the company generally.

“Universal history?” the captain inquired, looking almost scared.

“Yes, universal history! It’s the study of the successive follies of
mankind and nothing more. The only subjects I respect are mathematics and
natural science,” said Kolya. He was showing off and he stole a glance at
Alyosha; his was the only opinion he was afraid of there. But Alyosha was
still silent and still serious as before. If Alyosha had said a word it
would have stopped him, but Alyosha was silent and “it might be the
silence of contempt,” and that finally irritated Kolya.

“The classical languages, too ... they are simply madness, nothing more.
You seem to disagree with me again, Karamazov?”

“I don’t agree,” said Alyosha, with a faint smile.

“The study of the classics, if you ask my opinion, is simply a police
measure, that’s simply why it has been introduced into our schools.” By
degrees Kolya began to get breathless again. “Latin and Greek were
introduced because they are a bore and because they stupefy the intellect.
It was dull before, so what could they do to make things duller? It was
senseless enough before, so what could they do to make it more senseless?
So they thought of Greek and Latin. That’s my opinion, I hope I shall
never change it,” Kolya finished abruptly. His cheeks were flushed.

“That’s true,” assented Smurov suddenly, in a ringing tone of conviction.
He had listened attentively.

“And yet he is first in Latin himself,” cried one of the group of boys
suddenly.

“Yes, father, he says that and yet he is first in Latin,” echoed Ilusha.

“What of it?” Kolya thought fit to defend himself, though the praise was
very sweet to him. “I am fagging away at Latin because I have to, because
I promised my mother to pass my examination, and I think that whatever you
do, it’s worth doing it well. But in my soul I have a profound contempt
for the classics and all that fraud.... You don’t agree, Karamazov?”

“Why ‘fraud’?” Alyosha smiled again.

“Well, all the classical authors have been translated into all languages,
so it was not for the sake of studying the classics they introduced Latin,
but solely as a police measure, to stupefy the intelligence. So what can
one call it but a fraud?”

“Why, who taught you all this?” cried Alyosha, surprised at last.

“In the first place I am capable of thinking for myself without being
taught. Besides, what I said just now about the classics being translated
our teacher Kolbasnikov has said to the whole of the third class.”

“The doctor has come!” cried Nina, who had been silent till then.

A carriage belonging to Madame Hohlakov drove up to the gate. The captain,
who had been expecting the doctor all the morning, rushed headlong out to
meet him. “Mamma” pulled herself together and assumed a dignified air.
Alyosha went up to Ilusha and began setting his pillows straight. Nina,
from her invalid chair, anxiously watched him putting the bed tidy. The
boys hurriedly took leave. Some of them promised to come again in the
evening. Kolya called Perezvon and the dog jumped off the bed.

“I won’t go away, I won’t go away,” Kolya said hastily to Ilusha. “I’ll
wait in the passage and come back when the doctor’s gone, I’ll come back
with Perezvon.”

But by now the doctor had entered, an important-looking person with long,
dark whiskers and a shiny, shaven chin, wearing a bearskin coat. As he
crossed the threshold he stopped, taken aback; he probably fancied he had
come to the wrong place. “How is this? Where am I?” he muttered, not
removing his coat nor his peaked sealskin cap. The crowd, the poverty of
the room, the washing hanging on a line in the corner, puzzled him. The
captain, bent double, was bowing low before him.

“It’s here, sir, here, sir,” he muttered cringingly; “it’s here, you’ve
come right, you were coming to us...”

“Sne-gi-ryov?” the doctor said loudly and pompously. “Mr. Snegiryov—is
that you?”

“That’s me, sir!”

“Ah!”

The doctor looked round the room with a squeamish air once more and threw
off his coat, displaying to all eyes the grand decoration at his neck. The
captain caught the fur coat in the air, and the doctor took off his cap.

“Where is the patient?” he asked emphatically.



Chapter VI. Precocity


“What do you think the doctor will say to him?” Kolya asked quickly. “What
a repulsive mug, though, hasn’t he? I can’t endure medicine!”

“Ilusha is dying. I think that’s certain,” answered Alyosha, mournfully.

“They are rogues! Medicine’s a fraud! I am glad to have made your
acquaintance, though, Karamazov. I wanted to know you for a long time. I
am only sorry we meet in such sad circumstances.”

Kolya had a great inclination to say something even warmer and more
demonstrative, but he felt ill at ease. Alyosha noticed this, smiled, and
pressed his hand.

“I’ve long learned to respect you as a rare person,” Kolya muttered again,
faltering and uncertain. “I have heard you are a mystic and have been in
the monastery. I know you are a mystic, but ... that hasn’t put me off.
Contact with real life will cure you.... It’s always so with characters
like yours.”

“What do you mean by mystic? Cure me of what?” Alyosha was rather
astonished.

“Oh, God and all the rest of it.”

“What, don’t you believe in God?”

“Oh, I’ve nothing against God. Of course, God is only a hypothesis, but
... I admit that He is needed ... for the order of the universe and all
that ... and that if there were no God He would have to be invented,”
added Kolya, beginning to blush. He suddenly fancied that Alyosha might
think he was trying to show off his knowledge and to prove that he was
“grown up.” “I haven’t the slightest desire to show off my knowledge to
him,” Kolya thought indignantly. And all of a sudden he felt horribly
annoyed.

“I must confess I can’t endure entering on such discussions,” he said with
a final air. “It’s possible for one who doesn’t believe in God to love
mankind, don’t you think so? Voltaire didn’t believe in God and loved
mankind?” (“I am at it again,” he thought to himself.)

“Voltaire believed in God, though not very much, I think, and I don’t
think he loved mankind very much either,” said Alyosha quietly, gently,
and quite naturally, as though he were talking to some one of his own age,
or even older. Kolya was particularly struck by Alyosha’s apparent
diffidence about his opinion of Voltaire. He seemed to be leaving the
question for him, little Kolya, to settle.

“Have you read Voltaire?” Alyosha finished.

“No, not to say read.... But I’ve read _Candide_ in the Russian
translation ... in an absurd, grotesque, old translation ... (At it again!
again!)”

“And did you understand it?”

“Oh, yes, everything.... That is ... Why do you suppose I shouldn’t
understand it? There’s a lot of nastiness in it, of course.... Of course I
can understand that it’s a philosophical novel and written to advocate an
idea....” Kolya was getting mixed by now. “I am a Socialist, Karamazov, I
am an incurable Socialist,” he announced suddenly, apropos of nothing.

“A Socialist?” laughed Alyosha. “But when have you had time to become one?
Why, I thought you were only thirteen?”

Kolya winced.

“In the first place I am not thirteen, but fourteen, fourteen in a
fortnight,” he flushed angrily, “and in the second place I am at a
complete loss to understand what my age has to do with it? The question is
what are my convictions, not what is my age, isn’t it?”

“When you are older, you’ll understand for yourself the influence of age
on convictions. I fancied, too, that you were not expressing your own
ideas,” Alyosha answered serenely and modestly, but Kolya interrupted him
hotly:

“Come, you want obedience and mysticism. You must admit that the Christian
religion, for instance, has only been of use to the rich and the powerful
to keep the lower classes in slavery. That’s so, isn’t it?”

“Ah, I know where you read that, and I am sure some one told you so!”
cried Alyosha.

“I say, what makes you think I read it? And certainly no one told me so. I
can think for myself.... I am not opposed to Christ, if you like. He was a
most humane person, and if He were alive to-day, He would be found in the
ranks of the revolutionists, and would perhaps play a conspicuous part....
There’s no doubt about that.”

“Oh, where, where did you get that from? What fool have you made friends
with?” exclaimed Alyosha.

“Come, the truth will out! It has so chanced that I have often talked to
Mr. Rakitin, of course, but ... old Byelinsky said that, too, so they
say.”

“Byelinsky? I don’t remember. He hasn’t written that anywhere.”

“If he didn’t write it, they say he said it. I heard that from a ... but
never mind.”

“And have you read Byelinsky?”

“Well, no ... I haven’t read all of him, but ... I read the passage about
Tatyana, why she didn’t go off with Onyegin.”

“Didn’t go off with Onyegin? Surely you don’t ... understand that
already?”

“Why, you seem to take me for little Smurov,” said Kolya, with a grin of
irritation. “But please don’t suppose I am such a revolutionist. I often
disagree with Mr. Rakitin. Though I mention Tatyana, I am not at all for
the emancipation of women. I acknowledge that women are a subject race and
must obey. _Les femmes tricottent_, as Napoleon said.” Kolya, for some
reason, smiled, “And on that question at least I am quite of one mind with
that pseudo-great man. I think, too, that to leave one’s own country and
fly to America is mean, worse than mean—silly. Why go to America when one
may be of great service to humanity here? Now especially. There’s a
perfect mass of fruitful activity open to us. That’s what I answered.”

“What do you mean? Answered whom? Has some one suggested your going to
America already?”

“I must own, they’ve been at me to go, but I declined. That’s between
ourselves, of course, Karamazov; do you hear, not a word to any one. I say
this only to you. I am not at all anxious to fall into the clutches of the
secret police and take lessons at the Chain bridge.


    _Long will you remember_
    _The house at the Chain bridge._


Do you remember? It’s splendid. Why are you laughing? You don’t suppose I
am fibbing, do you?” (“What if he should find out that I’ve only that one
number of _The Bell_ in father’s bookcase, and haven’t read any more of
it?” Kolya thought with a shudder.)

“Oh, no, I am not laughing and don’t suppose for a moment that you are
lying. No, indeed, I can’t suppose so, for all this, alas! is perfectly
true. But tell me, have you read Pushkin—_Onyegin_, for instance?... You
spoke just now of Tatyana.”

“No, I haven’t read it yet, but I want to read it. I have no prejudices,
Karamazov; I want to hear both sides. What makes you ask?”

“Oh, nothing.”

“Tell me, Karamazov, have you an awful contempt for me?” Kolya rapped out
suddenly and drew himself up before Alyosha, as though he were on drill.
“Be so kind as to tell me, without beating about the bush.”

“I have a contempt for you?” Alyosha looked at him wondering. “What for? I
am only sad that a charming nature such as yours should be perverted by
all this crude nonsense before you have begun life.”

“Don’t be anxious about my nature,” Kolya interrupted, not without
complacency. “But it’s true that I am stupidly sensitive, crudely
sensitive. You smiled just now, and I fancied you seemed to—”

“Oh, my smile meant something quite different. I’ll tell you why I smiled.
Not long ago I read the criticism made by a German who had lived in
Russia, on our students and schoolboys of to-day. ‘Show a Russian
schoolboy,’ he writes, ‘a map of the stars, which he knows nothing about,
and he will give you back the map next day with corrections on it.’ No
knowledge and unbounded conceit—that’s what the German meant to say about
the Russian schoolboy.”

“Yes, that’s perfectly right,” Kolya laughed suddenly, “exactly so! Bravo
the German! But he did not see the good side, what do you think? Conceit
may be, that comes from youth, that will be corrected if need be, but, on
the other hand, there is an independent spirit almost from childhood,
boldness of thought and conviction, and not the spirit of these sausage
makers, groveling before authority.... But the German was right all the
same. Bravo the German! But Germans want strangling all the same. Though
they are so good at science and learning they must be strangled.”

“Strangled, what for?” smiled Alyosha.

“Well, perhaps I am talking nonsense, I agree. I am awfully childish
sometimes, and when I am pleased about anything I can’t restrain myself
and am ready to talk any stuff. But, I say, we are chattering away here
about nothing, and that doctor has been a long time in there. But perhaps
he’s examining the mamma and that poor crippled Nina. I liked that Nina,
you know. She whispered to me suddenly as I was coming away, ‘Why didn’t
you come before?’ And in such a voice, so reproachfully! I think she is
awfully nice and pathetic.”

“Yes, yes! Well, you’ll be coming often, you will see what she is like. It
would do you a great deal of good to know people like that, to learn to
value a great deal which you will find out from knowing these people,”
Alyosha observed warmly. “That would have more effect on you than
anything.”

“Oh, how I regret and blame myself for not having come sooner!” Kolya
exclaimed, with bitter feeling.

“Yes, it’s a great pity. You saw for yourself how delighted the poor child
was to see you. And how he fretted for you to come!”

“Don’t tell me! You make it worse! But it serves me right. What kept me
from coming was my conceit, my egoistic vanity, and the beastly
wilfullness, which I never can get rid of, though I’ve been struggling
with it all my life. I see that now. I am a beast in lots of ways,
Karamazov!”

“No, you have a charming nature, though it’s been distorted, and I quite
understand why you have had such an influence on this generous, morbidly
sensitive boy,” Alyosha answered warmly.

“And you say that to me!” cried Kolya; “and would you believe it, I
thought—I’ve thought several times since I’ve been here—that you despised
me! If only you knew how I prize your opinion!”

“But are you really so sensitive? At your age! Would you believe it, just
now, when you were telling your story, I thought, as I watched you, that
you must be very sensitive!”

“You thought so? What an eye you’ve got, I say! I bet that was when I was
talking about the goose. That was just when I was fancying you had a great
contempt for me for being in such a hurry to show off, and for a moment I
quite hated you for it, and began talking like a fool. Then I fancied—just
now, here—when I said that if there were no God He would have to be
invented, that I was in too great a hurry to display my knowledge,
especially as I got that phrase out of a book. But I swear I wasn’t
showing off out of vanity, though I really don’t know why. Because I was
so pleased? Yes, I believe it was because I was so pleased ... though it’s
perfectly disgraceful for any one to be gushing directly they are pleased,
I know that. But I am convinced now that you don’t despise me; it was all
my imagination. Oh, Karamazov, I am profoundly unhappy. I sometimes fancy
all sorts of things, that every one is laughing at me, the whole world,
and then I feel ready to overturn the whole order of things.”

“And you worry every one about you,” smiled Alyosha.

“Yes, I worry every one about me, especially my mother. Karamazov, tell
me, am I very ridiculous now?”

“Don’t think about that, don’t think of it at all!” cried Alyosha. “And
what does ridiculous mean? Isn’t every one constantly being or seeming
ridiculous? Besides, nearly all clever people now are fearfully afraid of
being ridiculous, and that makes them unhappy. All I am surprised at is
that you should be feeling that so early, though I’ve observed it for some
time past, and not only in you. Nowadays the very children have begun to
suffer from it. It’s almost a sort of insanity. The devil has taken the
form of that vanity and entered into the whole generation; it’s simply the
devil,” added Alyosha, without a trace of the smile that Kolya, staring at
him, expected to see. “You are like every one else,” said Alyosha, in
conclusion, “that is, like very many others. Only you must not be like
everybody else, that’s all.”

“Even if every one is like that?”

“Yes, even if every one is like that. You be the only one not like it. You
really are not like every one else, here you are not ashamed to confess to
something bad and even ridiculous. And who will admit so much in these
days? No one. And people have even ceased to feel the impulse to
self-criticism. Don’t be like every one else, even if you are the only
one.”

“Splendid! I was not mistaken in you. You know how to console one. Oh, how
I have longed to know you, Karamazov! I’ve long been eager for this
meeting. Can you really have thought about me, too? You said just now that
you thought of me, too?”

“Yes, I’d heard of you and had thought of you, too ... and if it’s partly
vanity that makes you ask, it doesn’t matter.”

“Do you know, Karamazov, our talk has been like a declaration of love,”
said Kolya, in a bashful and melting voice. “That’s not ridiculous, is
it?”

“Not at all ridiculous, and if it were, it wouldn’t matter, because it’s
been a good thing.” Alyosha smiled brightly.

“But do you know, Karamazov, you must admit that you are a little ashamed
yourself, now.... I see it by your eyes.” Kolya smiled with a sort of sly
happiness.

“Why ashamed?”

“Well, why are you blushing?”

“It was you made me blush,” laughed Alyosha, and he really did blush. “Oh,
well, I am a little, goodness knows why, I don’t know...” he muttered,
almost embarrassed.

“Oh, how I love you and admire you at this moment just because you are
rather ashamed! Because you are just like me,” cried Kolya, in positive
ecstasy. His cheeks glowed, his eyes beamed.

“You know, Kolya, you will be very unhappy in your life,” something made
Alyosha say suddenly.

“I know, I know. How you know it all beforehand!” Kolya agreed at once.

“But you will bless life on the whole, all the same.”

“Just so, hurrah! You are a prophet. Oh, we shall get on together,
Karamazov! Do you know, what delights me most, is that you treat me quite
like an equal. But we are not equals, no, we are not, you are better! But
we shall get on. Do you know, all this last month, I’ve been saying to
myself, ‘Either we shall be friends at once, for ever, or we shall part
enemies to the grave!’ ”

“And saying that, of course, you loved me,” Alyosha laughed gayly.

“I did. I loved you awfully. I’ve been loving and dreaming of you. And how
do you know it all beforehand? Ah, here’s the doctor. Goodness! What will
he tell us? Look at his face!”



Chapter VII. Ilusha


The doctor came out of the room again, muffled in his fur coat and with
his cap on his head. His face looked almost angry and disgusted, as though
he were afraid of getting dirty. He cast a cursory glance round the
passage, looking sternly at Alyosha and Kolya as he did so. Alyosha waved
from the door to the coachman, and the carriage that had brought the
doctor drove up. The captain darted out after the doctor, and, bowing
apologetically, stopped him to get the last word. The poor fellow looked
utterly crushed; there was a scared look in his eyes.

“Your Excellency, your Excellency ... is it possible?” he began, but could
not go on and clasped his hands in despair. Yet he still gazed imploringly
at the doctor, as though a word from him might still change the poor boy’s
fate.

“I can’t help it, I am not God!” the doctor answered offhand, though with
the customary impressiveness.

“Doctor ... your Excellency ... and will it be soon, soon?”

“You must be prepared for anything,” said the doctor in emphatic and
incisive tones, and dropping his eyes, he was about to step out to the
coach.

“Your Excellency, for Christ’s sake!” the terror-stricken captain stopped
him again. “Your Excellency! but can nothing, absolutely nothing save him
now?”

“It’s not in my hands now,” said the doctor impatiently, “but h’m!...” he
stopped suddenly. “If you could, for instance ... send ... your patient
... at once, without delay” (the words “at once, without delay,” the
doctor uttered with an almost wrathful sternness that made the captain
start) “to Syracuse, the change to the new be-ne-ficial climatic
conditions might possibly effect—”

“To Syracuse!” cried the captain, unable to grasp what was said.

“Syracuse is in Sicily,” Kolya jerked out suddenly in explanation. The
doctor looked at him.

“Sicily! your Excellency,” faltered the captain, “but you’ve seen”—he
spread out his hands, indicating his surroundings—“mamma and my family?”

“N—no, Sicily is not the place for the family, the family should go to
Caucasus in the early spring ... your daughter must go to the Caucasus,
and your wife ... after a course of the waters in the Caucasus for her
rheumatism ... must be sent straight to Paris to the mental specialist
Lepelletier; I could give you a note to him, and then ... there might be a
change—”

“Doctor, doctor! But you see!” The captain flung wide his hands again
despairingly, indicating the bare wooden walls of the passage.

“Well, that’s not my business,” grinned the doctor. “I have only told you
the answer of medical science to your question as to possible treatment.
As for the rest, to my regret—”

“Don’t be afraid, apothecary, my dog won’t bite you,” Kolya rapped out
loudly, noticing the doctor’s rather uneasy glance at Perezvon, who was
standing in the doorway. There was a wrathful note in Kolya’s voice. He
used the word apothecary instead of doctor on purpose, and, as he
explained afterwards, used it “to insult him.”

“What’s that?” The doctor flung up his head, staring with surprise at
Kolya. “Who’s this?” he addressed Alyosha, as though asking him to
explain.

“It’s Perezvon’s master, don’t worry about me,” Kolya said incisively
again.

“Perezvon?”(7) repeated the doctor, perplexed.

“He hears the bell, but where it is he cannot tell. Good-by, we shall meet
in Syracuse.”

“Who’s this? Who’s this?” The doctor flew into a terrible rage.

“He is a schoolboy, doctor, he is a mischievous boy; take no notice of
him,” said Alyosha, frowning and speaking quickly. “Kolya, hold your
tongue!” he cried to Krassotkin. “Take no notice of him, doctor,” he
repeated, rather impatiently.

“He wants a thrashing, a good thrashing!” The doctor stamped in a perfect
fury.

“And you know, apothecary, my Perezvon might bite!” said Kolya, turning
pale, with quivering voice and flashing eyes. “_Ici_, Perezvon!”

“Kolya, if you say another word, I’ll have nothing more to do with you,”
Alyosha cried peremptorily.

“There is only one man in the world who can command Nikolay
Krassotkin—this is the man”; Kolya pointed to Alyosha. “I obey him,
good-by!”

He stepped forward, opened the door, and quickly went into the inner room.
Perezvon flew after him. The doctor stood still for five seconds in
amazement, looking at Alyosha; then, with a curse, he went out quickly to
the carriage, repeating aloud, “This is ... this is ... I don’t know what
it is!” The captain darted forward to help him into the carriage. Alyosha
followed Kolya into the room. He was already by Ilusha’s bedside. The sick
boy was holding his hand and calling for his father. A minute later the
captain, too, came back.

“Father, father, come ... we ...” Ilusha faltered in violent excitement,
but apparently unable to go on, he flung his wasted arms round his father
and Kolya, uniting them in one embrace, and hugging them as tightly as he
could. The captain suddenly began to shake with dumb sobs, and Kolya’s
lips and chin twitched.

“Father, father! How sorry I am for you!” Ilusha moaned bitterly.

“Ilusha ... darling ... the doctor said ... you would be all right ... we
shall be happy ... the doctor ...” the captain began.

“Ah, father! I know what the new doctor said to you about me.... I saw!”
cried Ilusha, and again he hugged them both with all his strength, hiding
his face on his father’s shoulder.

“Father, don’t cry, and when I die get a good boy, another one ... choose
one of them all, a good one, call him Ilusha and love him instead of
me....”

“Hush, old man, you’ll get well,” Krassotkin cried suddenly, in a voice
that sounded angry.

“But don’t ever forget me, father,” Ilusha went on, “come to my grave ...
and, father, bury me by our big stone, where we used to go for our walk,
and come to me there with Krassotkin in the evening ... and Perezvon ... I
shall expect you.... Father, father!”

His voice broke. They were all three silent, still embracing. Nina was
crying quietly in her chair, and at last seeing them all crying, “mamma,”
too, burst into tears.

“Ilusha! Ilusha!” she exclaimed.

Krassotkin suddenly released himself from Ilusha’s embrace.

“Good-by, old man, mother expects me back to dinner,” he said quickly.
“What a pity I did not tell her! She will be dreadfully anxious.... But
after dinner I’ll come back to you for the whole day, for the whole
evening, and I’ll tell you all sorts of things, all sorts of things. And
I’ll bring Perezvon, but now I will take him with me, because he will
begin to howl when I am away and bother you. Good-by!”

And he ran out into the passage. He didn’t want to cry, but in the passage
he burst into tears. Alyosha found him crying.

“Kolya, you must be sure to keep your word and come, or he will be
terribly disappointed,” Alyosha said emphatically.

“I will! Oh, how I curse myself for not having come before!” muttered
Kolya, crying, and no longer ashamed of it.

At that moment the captain flew out of the room, and at once closed the
door behind him. His face looked frenzied, his lips were trembling. He
stood before the two and flung up his arms.

“I don’t want a good boy! I don’t want another boy!” he muttered in a wild
whisper, clenching his teeth. “If I forget thee, Jerusalem, may my
tongue—” He broke off with a sob and sank on his knees before the wooden
bench. Pressing his fists against his head, he began sobbing with absurd
whimpering cries, doing his utmost that his cries should not be heard in
the room.

Kolya ran out into the street.

“Good-by, Karamazov? Will you come yourself?” he cried sharply and angrily
to Alyosha.

“I will certainly come in the evening.”

“What was that he said about Jerusalem?... What did he mean by that?”

“It’s from the Bible. ‘If I forget thee, Jerusalem,’ that is, if I forget
all that is most precious to me, if I let anything take its place, then
may—”

“I understand, that’s enough! Mind you come! _Ici_, Perezvon!” he cried
with positive ferocity to the dog, and with rapid strides he went home.




Book XI. Ivan



Chapter I. At Grushenka’s


Alyosha went towards the cathedral square to the widow Morozov’s house to
see Grushenka, who had sent Fenya to him early in the morning with an
urgent message begging him to come. Questioning Fenya, Alyosha learned
that her mistress had been particularly distressed since the previous day.
During the two months that had passed since Mitya’s arrest, Alyosha had
called frequently at the widow Morozov’s house, both from his own
inclination and to take messages for Mitya. Three days after Mitya’s
arrest, Grushenka was taken very ill and was ill for nearly five weeks.
For one whole week she was unconscious. She was very much changed—thinner
and a little sallow, though she had for the past fortnight been well
enough to go out. But to Alyosha her face was even more attractive than
before, and he liked to meet her eyes when he went in to her. A look of
firmness and intelligent purpose had developed in her face. There were
signs of a spiritual transformation in her, and a steadfast, fine and
humble determination that nothing could shake could be discerned in her.
There was a small vertical line between her brows which gave her charming
face a look of concentrated thought, almost austere at the first glance.
There was scarcely a trace of her former frivolity.

It seemed strange to Alyosha, too, that in spite of the calamity that had
overtaken the poor girl, betrothed to a man who had been arrested for a
terrible crime, almost at the instant of their betrothal, in spite of her
illness and the almost inevitable sentence hanging over Mitya, Grushenka
had not yet lost her youthful cheerfulness. There was a soft light in the
once proud eyes, though at times they gleamed with the old vindictive fire
when she was visited by one disturbing thought stronger than ever in her
heart. The object of that uneasiness was the same as ever—Katerina
Ivanovna, of whom Grushenka had even raved when she lay in delirium.
Alyosha knew that she was fearfully jealous of her. Yet Katerina Ivanovna
had not once visited Mitya in his prison, though she might have done it
whenever she liked. All this made a difficult problem for Alyosha, for he
was the only person to whom Grushenka opened her heart and from whom she
was continually asking advice. Sometimes he was unable to say anything.

Full of anxiety he entered her lodging. She was at home. She had returned
from seeing Mitya half an hour before, and from the rapid movement with
which she leapt up from her chair to meet him he saw that she had been
expecting him with great impatience. A pack of cards dealt for a game of
“fools” lay on the table. A bed had been made up on the leather sofa on
the other side and Maximov lay, half-reclining, on it. He wore a
dressing-gown and a cotton nightcap, and was evidently ill and weak,
though he was smiling blissfully. When the homeless old man returned with
Grushenka from Mokroe two months before, he had simply stayed on and was
still staying with her. He arrived with her in rain and sleet, sat down on
the sofa, drenched and scared, and gazed mutely at her with a timid,
appealing smile. Grushenka, who was in terrible grief and in the first
stage of fever, almost forgot his existence in all she had to do the first
half-hour after her arrival. Suddenly she chanced to look at him intently:
he laughed a pitiful, helpless little laugh. She called Fenya and told her
to give him something to eat. All that day he sat in the same place,
almost without stirring. When it got dark and the shutters were closed,
Fenya asked her mistress:

“Is the gentleman going to stay the night, mistress?”

“Yes; make him a bed on the sofa,” answered Grushenka.

Questioning him more in detail, Grushenka learned from him that he had
literally nowhere to go, and that “Mr. Kalganov, my benefactor, told me
straight that he wouldn’t receive me again and gave me five roubles.”

“Well, God bless you, you’d better stay, then,” Grushenka decided in her
grief, smiling compassionately at him. Her smile wrung the old man’s heart
and his lips twitched with grateful tears. And so the destitute wanderer
had stayed with her ever since. He did not leave the house even when she
was ill. Fenya and her grandmother, the cook, did not turn him out, but
went on serving him meals and making up his bed on the sofa. Grushenka had
grown used to him, and coming back from seeing Mitya (whom she had begun
to visit in prison before she was really well) she would sit down and
begin talking to “Maximushka” about trifling matters, to keep her from
thinking of her sorrow. The old man turned out to be a good story-teller
on occasions, so that at last he became necessary to her. Grushenka saw
scarcely any one else beside Alyosha, who did not come every day and never
stayed long. Her old merchant lay seriously ill at this time, “at his last
gasp” as they said in the town, and he did, in fact, die a week after
Mitya’s trial. Three weeks before his death, feeling the end approaching,
he made his sons, their wives and children, come upstairs to him at last
and bade them not leave him again. From that moment he gave strict orders
to his servants not to admit Grushenka and to tell her if she came, “The
master wishes you long life and happiness and tells you to forget him.”
But Grushenka sent almost every day to inquire after him.

“You’ve come at last!” she cried, flinging down the cards and joyfully
greeting Alyosha, “and Maximushka’s been scaring me that perhaps you
wouldn’t come. Ah, how I need you! Sit down to the table. What will you
have—coffee?”

“Yes, please,” said Alyosha, sitting down at the table. “I am very
hungry.”

“That’s right. Fenya, Fenya, coffee,” cried Grushenka. “It’s been made a
long time ready for you. And bring some little pies, and mind they are
hot. Do you know, we’ve had a storm over those pies to-day. I took them to
the prison for him, and would you believe it, he threw them back to me: he
would not eat them. He flung one of them on the floor and stamped on it.
So I said to him: ‘I shall leave them with the warder; if you don’t eat
them before evening, it will be that your venomous spite is enough for
you!’ With that I went away. We quarreled again, would you believe it?
Whenever I go we quarrel.”

Grushenka said all this in one breath in her agitation. Maximov, feeling
nervous, at once smiled and looked on the floor.

“What did you quarrel about this time?” asked Alyosha.

“I didn’t expect it in the least. Only fancy, he is jealous of the Pole.
‘Why are you keeping him?’ he said. ‘So you’ve begun keeping him.’ He is
jealous, jealous of me all the time, jealous eating and sleeping! He even
took it into his head to be jealous of Kuzma last week.”

“But he knew about the Pole before?”

“Yes, but there it is. He has known about him from the very beginning, but
to-day he suddenly got up and began scolding about him. I am ashamed to
repeat what he said. Silly fellow! Rakitin went in as I came out. Perhaps
Rakitin is egging him on. What do you think?” she added carelessly.

“He loves you, that’s what it is: he loves you so much. And now he is
particularly worried.”

“I should think he might be, with the trial to-morrow. And I went to him
to say something about to-morrow, for I dread to think what’s going to
happen then. You say that he is worried, but how worried I am! And he
talks about the Pole! He’s too silly! He is not jealous of Maximushka yet,
anyway.”

“My wife was dreadfully jealous over me, too,” Maximov put in his word.

“Jealous of you?” Grushenka laughed in spite of herself. “Of whom could
she have been jealous?”

“Of the servant girls.”

“Hold your tongue, Maximushka, I am in no laughing mood now; I feel angry.
Don’t ogle the pies. I shan’t give you any; they are not good for you, and
I won’t give you any vodka either. I have to look after him, too, just as
though I kept an almshouse,” she laughed.

“I don’t deserve your kindness. I am a worthless creature,” said Maximov,
with tears in his voice. “You would do better to spend your kindness on
people of more use than me.”

“Ech, every one is of use, Maximushka, and how can we tell who’s of most
use? If only that Pole didn’t exist, Alyosha. He’s taken it into his head
to fall ill, too, to-day. I’ve been to see him also. And I shall send him
some pies, too, on purpose. I hadn’t sent him any, but Mitya accused me of
it, so now I shall send some! Ah, here’s Fenya with a letter! Yes, it’s
from the Poles—begging again!”

Pan Mussyalovitch had indeed sent an extremely long and characteristically
eloquent letter in which he begged her to lend him three roubles. In the
letter was enclosed a receipt for the sum, with a promise to repay it
within three months, signed by Pan Vrublevsky as well. Grushenka had
received many such letters, accompanied by such receipts, from her former
lover during the fortnight of her convalescence. But she knew that the two
Poles had been to ask after her health during her illness. The first
letter Grushenka got from them was a long one, written on large notepaper
and with a big family crest on the seal. It was so obscure and rhetorical
that Grushenka put it down before she had read half, unable to make head
or tail of it. She could not attend to letters then. The first letter was
followed next day by another in which Pan Mussyalovitch begged her for a
loan of two thousand roubles for a very short period. Grushenka left that
letter, too, unanswered. A whole series of letters had followed—one every
day—all as pompous and rhetorical, but the loan asked for, gradually
diminishing, dropped to a hundred roubles, then to twenty-five, to ten,
and finally Grushenka received a letter in which both the Poles begged her
for only one rouble and included a receipt signed by both.

Then Grushenka suddenly felt sorry for them, and at dusk she went round
herself to their lodging. She found the two Poles in great poverty, almost
destitution, without food or fuel, without cigarettes, in debt to their
landlady. The two hundred roubles they had carried off from Mitya at
Mokroe had soon disappeared. But Grushenka was surprised at their meeting
her with arrogant dignity and self-assertion, with the greatest punctilio
and pompous speeches. Grushenka simply laughed, and gave her former
admirer ten roubles. Then, laughing, she told Mitya of it and he was not
in the least jealous. But ever since, the Poles had attached themselves to
Grushenka and bombarded her daily with requests for money and she had
always sent them small sums. And now that day Mitya had taken it into his
head to be fearfully jealous.

“Like a fool, I went round to him just for a minute, on the way to see
Mitya, for he is ill, too, my Pole,” Grushenka began again with nervous
haste. “I was laughing, telling Mitya about it. ‘Fancy,’ I said, ‘my Pole
had the happy thought to sing his old songs to me to the guitar. He
thought I would be touched and marry him!’ Mitya leapt up swearing.... So,
there, I’ll send them the pies! Fenya, is it that little girl they’ve
sent? Here, give her three roubles and pack a dozen pies up in a paper and
tell her to take them. And you, Alyosha, be sure to tell Mitya that I did
send them the pies.”

“I wouldn’t tell him for anything,” said Alyosha, smiling.

“Ech! You think he is unhappy about it. Why, he’s jealous on purpose. He
doesn’t care,” said Grushenka bitterly.

“On purpose?” queried Alyosha.

“I tell you you are silly, Alyosha. You know nothing about it, with all
your cleverness. I am not offended that he is jealous of a girl like me. I
would be offended if he were not jealous. I am like that. I am not
offended at jealousy. I have a fierce heart, too. I can be jealous myself.
Only what offends me is that he doesn’t love me at all. I tell you he is
jealous now _on purpose_. Am I blind? Don’t I see? He began talking to me
just now of that woman, of Katerina, saying she was this and that, how she
had ordered a doctor from Moscow for him, to try and save him; how she had
ordered the best counsel, the most learned one, too. So he loves her, if
he’ll praise her to my face, more shame to him! He’s treated me badly
himself, so he attacked me, to make out I am in fault first and to throw
it all on me. ‘You were with your Pole before me, so I can’t be blamed for
Katerina,’ that’s what it amounts to. He wants to throw the whole blame on
me. He attacked me on purpose, on purpose, I tell you, but I’ll—”

Grushenka could not finish saying what she would do. She hid her eyes in
her handkerchief and sobbed violently.

“He doesn’t love Katerina Ivanovna,” said Alyosha firmly.

“Well, whether he loves her or not, I’ll soon find out for myself,” said
Grushenka, with a menacing note in her voice, taking the handkerchief from
her eyes. Her face was distorted. Alyosha saw sorrowfully that from being
mild and serene, it had become sullen and spiteful.

“Enough of this foolishness,” she said suddenly; “it’s not for that I sent
for you. Alyosha, darling, to-morrow—what will happen to-morrow? That’s
what worries me! And it’s only me it worries! I look at every one and no
one is thinking of it. No one cares about it. Are you thinking about it
even? To-morrow he’ll be tried, you know. Tell me, how will he be tried?
You know it’s the valet, the valet killed him! Good heavens! Can they
condemn him in place of the valet and will no one stand up for him? They
haven’t troubled the valet at all, have they?”

“He’s been severely cross-examined,” observed Alyosha thoughtfully; “but
every one came to the conclusion it was not he. Now he is lying very ill.
He has been ill ever since that attack. Really ill,” added Alyosha.

“Oh, dear! couldn’t you go to that counsel yourself and tell him the whole
thing by yourself? He’s been brought from Petersburg for three thousand
roubles, they say.”

“We gave these three thousand together—Ivan, Katerina Ivanovna and I—but
she paid two thousand for the doctor from Moscow herself. The counsel
Fetyukovitch would have charged more, but the case has become known all
over Russia; it’s talked of in all the papers and journals. Fetyukovitch
agreed to come more for the glory of the thing, because the case has
become so notorious. I saw him yesterday.”

“Well? Did you talk to him?” Grushenka put in eagerly.

“He listened and said nothing. He told me that he had already formed his
opinion. But he promised to give my words consideration.”

“Consideration! Ah, they are swindlers! They’ll ruin him. And why did she
send for the doctor?”

“As an expert. They want to prove that Mitya’s mad and committed the
murder when he didn’t know what he was doing”; Alyosha smiled gently; “but
Mitya won’t agree to that.”

“Yes; but that would be the truth if he had killed him!” cried Grushenka.
“He was mad then, perfectly mad, and that was my fault, wretch that I am!
But, of course, he didn’t do it, he didn’t do it! And they are all against
him, the whole town. Even Fenya’s evidence went to prove he had done it.
And the people at the shop, and that official, and at the tavern, too,
before, people had heard him say so! They are all, all against him, all
crying out against him.”

“Yes, there’s a fearful accumulation of evidence,” Alyosha observed
grimly.

“And Grigory—Grigory Vassilyevitch—sticks to his story that the door was
open, persists that he saw it—there’s no shaking him. I went and talked to
him myself. He’s rude about it, too.”

“Yes, that’s perhaps the strongest evidence against him,” said Alyosha.

“And as for Mitya’s being mad, he certainly seems like it now,” Grushenka
began with a peculiarly anxious and mysterious air. “Do you know, Alyosha,
I’ve been wanting to talk to you about it for a long time. I go to him
every day and simply wonder at him. Tell me, now, what do you suppose he’s
always talking about? He talks and talks and I can make nothing of it. I
fancied he was talking of something intellectual that I couldn’t
understand in my foolishness. Only he suddenly began talking to me about a
babe—that is, about some child. ‘Why is the babe poor?’ he said. ‘It’s for
that babe I am going to Siberia now. I am not a murderer, but I must go to
Siberia!’ What that meant, what babe, I couldn’t tell for the life of me.
Only I cried when he said it, because he said it so nicely. He cried
himself, and I cried, too. He suddenly kissed me and made the sign of the
cross over me. What did it mean, Alyosha, tell me? What is this babe?”

“It must be Rakitin, who’s been going to see him lately,” smiled Alyosha,
“though ... that’s not Rakitin’s doing. I didn’t see Mitya yesterday. I’ll
see him to-day.”

“No, it’s not Rakitin; it’s his brother Ivan Fyodorovitch upsetting him.
It’s his going to see him, that’s what it is,” Grushenka began, and
suddenly broke off. Alyosha gazed at her in amazement.

“Ivan’s going? Has he been to see him? Mitya told me himself that Ivan
hasn’t been once.”

“There ... there! What a girl I am! Blurring things out!” exclaimed
Grushenka, confused and suddenly blushing. “Stay, Alyosha, hush! Since
I’ve said so much I’ll tell the whole truth—he’s been to see him twice,
the first directly he arrived. He galloped here from Moscow at once, of
course, before I was taken ill; and the second time was a week ago. He
told Mitya not to tell you about it, under any circumstances; and not to
tell any one, in fact. He came secretly.”

Alyosha sat plunged in thought, considering something. The news evidently
impressed him.

“Ivan doesn’t talk to me of Mitya’s case,” he said slowly. “He’s said very
little to me these last two months. And whenever I go to see him, he seems
vexed at my coming, so I’ve not been to him for the last three weeks.
H’m!... if he was there a week ago ... there certainly has been a change
in Mitya this week.”

“There has been a change,” Grushenka assented quickly. “They have a
secret, they have a secret! Mitya told me himself there was a secret, and
such a secret that Mitya can’t rest. Before then, he was cheerful—and,
indeed, he is cheerful now—but when he shakes his head like that, you
know, and strides about the room and keeps pulling at the hair on his
right temple with his right hand, I know there is something on his mind
worrying him.... I know! He was cheerful before, though, indeed, he is
cheerful to-day.”

“But you said he was worried.”

“Yes, he is worried and yet cheerful. He keeps on being irritable for a
minute and then cheerful and then irritable again. And you know, Alyosha,
I am constantly wondering at him—with this awful thing hanging over him,
he sometimes laughs at such trifles as though he were a baby himself.”

“And did he really tell you not to tell me about Ivan? Did he say, ‘Don’t
tell him’?”

“Yes, he told me, ‘Don’t tell him.’ It’s you that Mitya’s most afraid of.
Because it’s a secret: he said himself it was a secret. Alyosha, darling,
go to him and find out what their secret is and come and tell me,”
Grushenka besought him with sudden eagerness. “Set my mind at rest that I
may know the worst that’s in store for me. That’s why I sent for you.”

“You think it’s something to do with you? If it were, he wouldn’t have
told you there was a secret.”

“I don’t know. Perhaps he wants to tell me, but doesn’t dare to. He warns
me. There is a secret, he tells me, but he won’t tell me what it is.”

“What do you think yourself?”

“What do I think? It’s the end for me, that’s what I think. They all three
have been plotting my end, for Katerina’s in it. It’s all Katerina, it all
comes from her. She is this and that, and that means that I am not. He
tells me that beforehand—warns me. He is planning to throw me over, that’s
the whole secret. They’ve planned it together, the three of them—Mitya,
Katerina, and Ivan Fyodorovitch. Alyosha, I’ve been wanting to ask you a
long time. A week ago he suddenly told me that Ivan was in love with
Katerina, because he often goes to see her. Did he tell me the truth or
not? Tell me, on your conscience, tell me the worst.”

“I won’t tell you a lie. Ivan is not in love with Katerina Ivanovna, I
think.”

“Oh, that’s what I thought! He is lying to me, shameless deceiver, that’s
what it is! And he was jealous of me just now, so as to put the blame on
me afterwards. He is stupid, he can’t disguise what he is doing; he is so
open, you know.... But I’ll give it to him, I’ll give it to him! ‘You
believe I did it,’ he said. He said that to me, to me. He reproached me
with that! God forgive him! You wait, I’ll make it hot for Katerina at the
trial! I’ll just say a word then ... I’ll tell everything then!”

And again she cried bitterly.

“This I can tell you for certain, Grushenka,” Alyosha said, getting up.
“First, that he loves you, loves you more than any one in the world, and
you only, believe me. I know. I do know. The second thing is that I don’t
want to worm his secret out of him, but if he’ll tell me of himself
to-day, I shall tell him straight out that I have promised to tell you.
Then I’ll come to you to-day, and tell you. Only ... I fancy ... Katerina
Ivanovna has nothing to do with it, and that the secret is about something
else. That’s certain. It isn’t likely it’s about Katerina Ivanovna, it
seems to me. Good-by for now.”

Alyosha shook hands with her. Grushenka was still crying. He saw that she
put little faith in his consolation, but she was better for having had her
sorrow out, for having spoken of it. He was sorry to leave her in such a
state of mind, but he was in haste. He had a great many things to do
still.



Chapter II. The Injured Foot


The first of these things was at the house of Madame Hohlakov, and he
hurried there to get it over as quickly as possible and not be too late
for Mitya. Madame Hohlakov had been slightly ailing for the last three
weeks: her foot had for some reason swollen up, and though she was not in
bed, she lay all day half-reclining on the couch in her boudoir, in a
fascinating but decorous _déshabillé_. Alyosha had once noted with
innocent amusement that, in spite of her illness, Madame Hohlakov had
begun to be rather dressy—top-knots, ribbons, loose wrappers, had made
their appearance, and he had an inkling of the reason, though he dismissed
such ideas from his mind as frivolous. During the last two months the
young official, Perhotin, had become a regular visitor at the house.

Alyosha had not called for four days and he was in haste to go straight to
Lise, as it was with her he had to speak, for Lise had sent a maid to him
the previous day, specially asking him to come to her “about something
very important,” a request which, for certain reasons, had interest for
Alyosha. But while the maid went to take his name in to Lise, Madame
Hohlakov heard of his arrival from some one, and immediately sent to beg
him to come to her “just for one minute.” Alyosha reflected that it was
better to accede to the mamma’s request, or else she would be sending down
to Lise’s room every minute that he was there. Madame Hohlakov was lying
on a couch. She was particularly smartly dressed and was evidently in a
state of extreme nervous excitement. She greeted Alyosha with cries of
rapture.

“It’s ages, ages, perfect ages since I’ve seen you! It’s a whole week—only
think of it! Ah, but you were here only four days ago, on Wednesday. You
have come to see Lise. I’m sure you meant to slip into her room on tiptoe,
without my hearing you. My dear, dear Alexey Fyodorovitch, if you only
knew how worried I am about her! But of that later, though that’s the most
important thing, of that later. Dear Alexey Fyodorovitch, I trust you
implicitly with my Lise. Since the death of Father Zossima—God rest his
soul!” (she crossed herself)—“I look upon you as a monk, though you look
charming in your new suit. Where did you find such a tailor in these
parts? No, no, that’s not the chief thing—of that later. Forgive me for
sometimes calling you Alyosha; an old woman like me may take liberties,”
she smiled coquettishly; “but that will do later, too. The important thing
is that I shouldn’t forget what is important. Please remind me of it
yourself. As soon as my tongue runs away with me, you just say ‘the
important thing?’ Ach! how do I know now what is of most importance? Ever
since Lise took back her promise—her childish promise, Alexey
Fyodorovitch—to marry you, you’ve realized, of course, that it was only
the playful fancy of a sick child who had been so long confined to her
chair—thank God, she can walk now!... that new doctor Katya sent for from
Moscow for your unhappy brother, who will to-morrow—But why speak of
to-morrow? I am ready to die at the very thought of to-morrow. Ready to
die of curiosity.... That doctor was with us yesterday and saw Lise.... I
paid him fifty roubles for the visit. But that’s not the point, that’s not
the point again. You see, I’m mixing everything up. I am in such a hurry.
Why am I in a hurry? I don’t understand. It’s awful how I seem growing
unable to understand anything. Everything seems mixed up in a sort of
tangle. I am afraid you are so bored you will jump up and run away, and
that will be all I shall see of you. Goodness! Why are we sitting here and
no coffee? Yulia, Glafira, coffee!”

Alyosha made haste to thank her, and said that he had only just had
coffee.

“Where?”

“At Agrafena Alexandrovna’s.”

“At ... at that woman’s? Ah, it’s she has brought ruin on every one. I
know nothing about it though. They say she has become a saint, though it’s
rather late in the day. She had better have done it before. What use is it
now? Hush, hush, Alexey Fyodorovitch, for I have so much to say to you
that I am afraid I shall tell you nothing. This awful trial ... I shall
certainly go, I am making arrangements. I shall be carried there in my
chair; besides I can sit up. I shall have people with me. And, you know, I
am a witness. How shall I speak, how shall I speak? I don’t know what I
shall say. One has to take an oath, hasn’t one?”

“Yes; but I don’t think you will be able to go.”

“I can sit up. Ah, you put me out! Ah! this trial, this savage act, and
then they are all going to Siberia, some are getting married, and all this
so quickly, so quickly, everything’s changing, and at last—nothing. All
grow old and have death to look forward to. Well, so be it! I am weary.
This Katya, _cette charmante personne_, has disappointed all my hopes. Now
she is going to follow one of your brothers to Siberia, and your other
brother is going to follow her, and will live in the nearest town, and
they will all torment one another. It drives me out of my mind. Worst of
all—the publicity. The story has been told a million times over in all the
papers in Moscow and Petersburg. Ah! yes, would you believe it, there’s a
paragraph that I was ‘a dear friend’ of your brother’s ——, I can’t repeat
the horrid word. Just fancy, just fancy!”

“Impossible! Where was the paragraph? What did it say?”

“I’ll show you directly. I got the paper and read it yesterday. Here, in
the Petersburg paper _Gossip_. The paper began coming out this year. I am
awfully fond of gossip, and I take it in, and now it pays me out—this is
what gossip comes to! Here it is, here, this passage. Read it.”

And she handed Alyosha a sheet of newspaper which had been under her
pillow.

It was not exactly that she was upset, she seemed overwhelmed and perhaps
everything really was mixed up in a tangle in her head. The paragraph was
very typical, and must have been a great shock to her, but, fortunately
perhaps, she was unable to keep her mind fixed on any one subject at that
moment, and so might race off in a minute to something else and quite
forget the newspaper.

Alyosha was well aware that the story of the terrible case had spread all
over Russia. And, good heavens! what wild rumors about his brother, about
the Karamazovs, and about himself he had read in the course of those two
months, among other equally credible items! One paper had even stated that
he had gone into a monastery and become a monk, in horror at his brother’s
crime. Another contradicted this, and stated that he and his elder, Father
Zossima, had broken into the monastery chest and “made tracks from the
monastery.” The present paragraph in the paper _Gossip_ was under the
heading, “The Karamazov Case at Skotoprigonyevsk.” (That, alas! was the
name of our little town. I had hitherto kept it concealed.) It was brief,
and Madame Hohlakov was not directly mentioned in it. No names appeared,
in fact. It was merely stated that the criminal, whose approaching trial
was making such a sensation—retired army captain, an idle swaggerer, and
reactionary bully—was continually involved in amorous intrigues, and
particularly popular with certain ladies “who were pining in solitude.”
One such lady, a pining widow, who tried to seem young though she had a
grown-up daughter, was so fascinated by him that only two hours before the
crime she offered him three thousand roubles, on condition that he would
elope with her to the gold mines. But the criminal, counting on escaping
punishment, had preferred to murder his father to get the three thousand
rather than go off to Siberia with the middle-aged charms of his pining
lady. This playful paragraph finished, of course, with an outburst of
generous indignation at the wickedness of parricide and at the lately
abolished institution of serfdom. Reading it with curiosity, Alyosha
folded up the paper and handed it back to Madame Hohlakov.

“Well, that must be me,” she hurried on again. “Of course I am meant.
Scarcely more than an hour before, I suggested gold mines to him, and here
they talk of ‘middle-aged charms’ as though that were my motive! He writes
that out of spite! God Almighty forgive him for the middle-aged charms, as
I forgive him! You know it’s— Do you know who it is? It’s your friend
Rakitin.”

“Perhaps,” said Alyosha, “though I’ve heard nothing about it.”

“It’s he, it’s he! No ‘perhaps’ about it. You know I turned him out of the
house.... You know all that story, don’t you?”

“I know that you asked him not to visit you for the future, but why it
was, I haven’t heard ... from you, at least.”

“Ah, then you’ve heard it from him! He abuses me, I suppose, abuses me
dreadfully?”

“Yes, he does; but then he abuses every one. But why you’ve given him up I
haven’t heard from him either. I meet him very seldom now, indeed. We are
not friends.”

“Well, then, I’ll tell you all about it. There’s no help for it, I’ll
confess, for there is one point in which I was perhaps to blame. Only a
little, little point, so little that perhaps it doesn’t count. You see, my
dear boy”—Madame Hohlakov suddenly looked arch and a charming, though
enigmatic, smile played about her lips—“you see, I suspect ... You must
forgive me, Alyosha. I am like a mother to you.... No, no; quite the
contrary. I speak to you now as though you were my father—mother’s quite
out of place. Well, it’s as though I were confessing to Father Zossima,
that’s just it. I called you a monk just now. Well, that poor young man,
your friend, Rakitin (Mercy on us! I can’t be angry with him. I feel
cross, but not very), that frivolous young man, would you believe it,
seems to have taken it into his head to fall in love with me. I only
noticed it later. At first—a month ago—he only began to come oftener to
see me, almost every day; though, of course, we were acquainted before. I
knew nothing about it ... and suddenly it dawned upon me, and I began to
notice things with surprise. You know, two months ago, that modest,
charming, excellent young man, Pyotr Ilyitch Perhotin, who’s in the
service here, began to be a regular visitor at the house. You met him here
ever so many times yourself. And he is an excellent, earnest young man,
isn’t he? He comes once every three days, not every day (though I should
be glad to see him every day), and always so well dressed. Altogether, I
love young people, Alyosha, talented, modest, like you, and he has almost
the mind of a statesman, he talks so charmingly, and I shall certainly,
certainly try and get promotion for him. He is a future diplomat. On that
awful day he almost saved me from death by coming in the night. And your
friend Rakitin comes in such boots, and always stretches them out on the
carpet.... He began hinting at his feelings, in fact, and one day, as he
was going, he squeezed my hand terribly hard. My foot began to swell
directly after he pressed my hand like that. He had met Pyotr Ilyitch here
before, and would you believe it, he is always gibing at him, growling at
him, for some reason. I simply looked at the way they went on together and
laughed inwardly. So I was sitting here alone—no, I was laid up then.
Well, I was lying here alone and suddenly Rakitin comes in, and only
fancy! brought me some verses of his own composition—a short poem, on my
bad foot: that is, he described my foot in a poem. Wait a minute—how did
it go?


    A captivating little foot.


It began somehow like that. I can never remember poetry. I’ve got it here.
I’ll show it to you later. But it’s a charming thing—charming; and, you
know, it’s not only about the foot, it had a good moral, too, a charming
idea, only I’ve forgotten it; in fact, it was just the thing for an album.
So, of course, I thanked him, and he was evidently flattered. I’d hardly
had time to thank him when in comes Pyotr Ilyitch, and Rakitin suddenly
looked as black as night. I could see that Pyotr Ilyitch was in the way,
for Rakitin certainly wanted to say something after giving me the verses.
I had a presentiment of it; but Pyotr Ilyitch came in. I showed Pyotr
Ilyitch the verses and didn’t say who was the author. But I am convinced
that he guessed, though he won’t own it to this day, and declares he had
no idea. But he says that on purpose. Pyotr Ilyitch began to laugh at
once, and fell to criticizing it. ‘Wretched doggerel,’ he said they were,
‘some divinity student must have written them,’ and with such vehemence,
such vehemence! Then, instead of laughing, your friend flew into a rage.
‘Good gracious!’ I thought, ‘they’ll fly at each other.’ ‘It was I who
wrote them,’ said he. ‘I wrote them as a joke,’ he said, ‘for I think it
degrading to write verses.... But they are good poetry. They want to put a
monument to your Pushkin for writing about women’s feet, while I wrote
with a moral purpose, and you,’ said he, ‘are an advocate of serfdom.
You’ve no humane ideas,’ said he. ‘You have no modern enlightened
feelings, you are uninfluenced by progress, you are a mere official,’ he
said, ‘and you take bribes.’ Then I began screaming and imploring them.
And, you know, Pyotr Ilyitch is anything but a coward. He at once took up
the most gentlemanly tone, looked at him sarcastically, listened, and
apologized. ‘I’d no idea,’ said he. ‘I shouldn’t have said it, if I had
known. I should have praised it. Poets are all so irritable,’ he said. In
short, he laughed at him under cover of the most gentlemanly tone. He
explained to me afterwards that it was all sarcastic. I thought he was in
earnest. Only as I lay there, just as before you now, I thought, ‘Would
it, or would it not, be the proper thing for me to turn Rakitin out for
shouting so rudely at a visitor in my house?’ And, would you believe it, I
lay here, shut my eyes, and wondered, would it be the proper thing or not.
I kept worrying and worrying, and my heart began to beat, and I couldn’t
make up my mind whether to make an outcry or not. One voice seemed to be
telling me, ‘Speak,’ and the other ‘No, don’t speak.’ And no sooner had
the second voice said that than I cried out, and fainted. Of course, there
was a fuss. I got up suddenly and said to Rakitin, ‘It’s painful for me to
say it, but I don’t wish to see you in my house again.’ So I turned him
out. Ah! Alexey Fyodorovitch, I know myself I did wrong. I was putting it
on. I wasn’t angry with him at all, really; but I suddenly fancied—that
was what did it—that it would be such a fine scene.... And yet, believe
me, it was quite natural, for I really shed tears and cried for several
days afterwards, and then suddenly, one afternoon, I forgot all about it.
So it’s a fortnight since he’s been here, and I kept wondering whether he
would come again. I wondered even yesterday, then suddenly last night came
this _Gossip_. I read it and gasped. Who could have written it? He must
have written it. He went home, sat down, wrote it on the spot, sent it,
and they put it in. It was a fortnight ago, you see. But, Alyosha, it’s
awful how I keep talking and don’t say what I want to say. Ah! the words
come of themselves!”

“It’s very important for me to be in time to see my brother to-day,”
Alyosha faltered.

“To be sure, to be sure! You bring it all back to me. Listen, what is an
aberration?”

“What aberration?” asked Alyosha, wondering.

“In the legal sense. An aberration in which everything is pardonable.
Whatever you do, you will be acquitted at once.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ll tell you. This Katya ... Ah! she is a charming, charming creature,
only I never can make out who it is she is in love with. She was with me
some time ago and I couldn’t get anything out of her. Especially as she
won’t talk to me except on the surface now. She is always talking about my
health and nothing else, and she takes up such a tone with me, too. I
simply said to myself, ‘Well, so be it. I don’t care’... Oh, yes. I was
talking of aberration. This doctor has come. You know a doctor has come?
Of course, you know it—the one who discovers madmen. You wrote for him.
No, it wasn’t you, but Katya. It’s all Katya’s doing. Well, you see, a man
may be sitting perfectly sane and suddenly have an aberration. He may be
conscious and know what he is doing and yet be in a state of aberration.
And there’s no doubt that Dmitri Fyodorovitch was suffering from
aberration. They found out about aberration as soon as the law courts were
reformed. It’s all the good effect of the reformed law courts. The doctor
has been here and questioned me about that evening, about the gold mines.
‘How did he seem then?’ he asked me. He must have been in a state of
aberration. He came in shouting, ‘Money, money, three thousand! Give me
three thousand!’ and then went away and immediately did the murder. ‘I
don’t want to murder him,’ he said, and he suddenly went and murdered him.
That’s why they’ll acquit him, because he struggled against it and yet he
murdered him.”

“But he didn’t murder him,” Alyosha interrupted rather sharply. He felt
more and more sick with anxiety and impatience.

“Yes, I know it was that old man Grigory murdered him.”

“Grigory?” cried Alyosha.

“Yes, yes; it was Grigory. He lay as Dmitri Fyodorovitch struck him down,
and then got up, saw the door open, went in and killed Fyodor Pavlovitch.”

“But why, why?”

“Suffering from aberration. When he recovered from the blow Dmitri
Fyodorovitch gave him on the head, he was suffering from aberration; he
went and committed the murder. As for his saying he didn’t, he very likely
doesn’t remember. Only, you know, it’ll be better, ever so much better, if
Dmitri Fyodorovitch murdered him. And that’s how it must have been, though
I say it was Grigory. It certainly was Dmitri Fyodorovitch, and that’s
better, ever so much better! Oh! not better that a son should have killed
his father, I don’t defend that. Children ought to honor their parents,
and yet it would be better if it were he, as you’d have nothing to cry
over then, for he did it when he was unconscious or rather when he was
conscious, but did not know what he was doing. Let them acquit him—that’s
so humane, and would show what a blessing reformed law courts are. I knew
nothing about it, but they say they have been so a long time. And when I
heard it yesterday, I was so struck by it that I wanted to send for you at
once. And if he is acquitted, make him come straight from the law courts
to dinner with me, and I’ll have a party of friends, and we’ll drink to
the reformed law courts. I don’t believe he’d be dangerous; besides, I’ll
invite a great many friends, so that he could always be led out if he did
anything. And then he might be made a justice of the peace or something in
another town, for those who have been in trouble themselves make the best
judges. And, besides, who isn’t suffering from aberration nowadays?—you,
I, all of us are in a state of aberration, and there are ever so many
examples of it: a man sits singing a song, suddenly something annoys him,
he takes a pistol and shoots the first person he comes across, and no one
blames him for it. I read that lately, and all the doctors confirm it. The
doctors are always confirming; they confirm anything. Why, my Lise is in a
state of aberration. She made me cry again yesterday, and the day before,
too, and to-day I suddenly realized that it’s all due to aberration. Oh,
Lise grieves me so! I believe she’s quite mad. Why did she send for you?
Did she send for you or did you come of yourself?”

“Yes, she sent for me, and I am just going to her.” Alyosha got up
resolutely.

“Oh, my dear, dear Alexey Fyodorovitch, perhaps that’s what’s most
important,” Madame Hohlakov cried, suddenly bursting into tears. “God
knows I trust Lise to you with all my heart, and it’s no matter her
sending for you on the sly, without telling her mother. But forgive me, I
can’t trust my daughter so easily to your brother Ivan Fyodorovitch,
though I still consider him the most chivalrous young man. But only fancy,
he’s been to see Lise and I knew nothing about it!”

“How? What? When?” Alyosha was exceedingly surprised. He had not sat down
again and listened standing.

“I will tell you; that’s perhaps why I asked you to come, for I don’t know
now why I did ask you to come. Well, Ivan Fyodorovitch has been to see me
twice, since he came back from Moscow. First time he came as a friend to
call on me, and the second time Katya was here and he came because he
heard she was here. I didn’t, of course, expect him to come often, knowing
what a lot he has to do as it is, _vous comprenez, cette affaire et la
mort terrible de votre papa_. But I suddenly heard he’d been here again,
not to see me but to see Lise. That’s six days ago now. He came, stayed
five minutes, and went away. And I didn’t hear of it till three days
afterwards, from Glafira, so it was a great shock to me. I sent for Lise
directly. She laughed. ‘He thought you were asleep,’ she said, ‘and came
in to me to ask after your health.’ Of course, that’s how it happened. But
Lise, Lise, mercy on us, how she distresses me! Would you believe it, one
night, four days ago, just after you saw her last time, and had gone away,
she suddenly had a fit, screaming, shrieking, hysterics! Why is it I never
have hysterics? Then, next day another fit, and the same thing on the
third, and yesterday too, and then yesterday that aberration. She suddenly
screamed out, ‘I hate Ivan Fyodorovitch. I insist on your never letting
him come to the house again.’ I was struck dumb at these amazing words,
and answered, ‘On what grounds could I refuse to see such an excellent
young man, a young man of such learning too, and so unfortunate?’—for all
this business is a misfortune, isn’t it? She suddenly burst out laughing
at my words, and so rudely, you know. Well, I was pleased; I thought I had
amused her and the fits would pass off, especially as I wanted to refuse
to see Ivan Fyodorovitch anyway on account of his strange visits without
my knowledge, and meant to ask him for an explanation. But early this
morning Lise waked up and flew into a passion with Yulia and, would you
believe it, slapped her in the face. That’s monstrous; I am always polite
to my servants. And an hour later she was hugging Yulia’s feet and kissing
them. She sent a message to me that she wasn’t coming to me at all, and
would never come and see me again, and when I dragged myself down to her,
she rushed to kiss me, crying, and as she kissed me, she pushed me out of
the room without saying a word, so I couldn’t find out what was the
matter. Now, dear Alexey Fyodorovitch, I rest all my hopes on you, and, of
course, my whole life is in your hands. I simply beg you to go to Lise and
find out everything from her, as you alone can, and come back and tell
me—me, her mother, for you understand it will be the death of me, simply
the death of me, if this goes on, or else I shall run away. I can stand no
more. I have patience; but I may lose patience, and then ... then
something awful will happen. Ah, dear me! At last, Pyotr Ilyitch!” cried
Madame Hohlakov, beaming all over as she saw Perhotin enter the room. “You
are late, you are late! Well, sit down, speak, put us out of suspense.
What does the counsel say. Where are you off to, Alexey Fyodorovitch?”

“To Lise.”

“Oh, yes. You won’t forget, you won’t forget what I asked you? It’s a
question of life and death!”

“Of course, I won’t forget, if I can ... but I am so late,” muttered
Alyosha, beating a hasty retreat.

“No, be sure, be sure to come in; don’t say ‘If you can.’ I shall die if
you don’t,” Madame Hohlakov called after him, but Alyosha had already left
the room.



Chapter III. A Little Demon


Going in to Lise, he found her half reclining in the invalid-chair, in
which she had been wheeled when she was unable to walk. She did not move
to meet him, but her sharp, keen eyes were simply riveted on his face.
There was a feverish look in her eyes, her face was pale and yellow.
Alyosha was amazed at the change that had taken place in her in three
days. She was positively thinner. She did not hold out her hand to him. He
touched the thin, long fingers which lay motionless on her dress, then he
sat down facing her, without a word.

“I know you are in a hurry to get to the prison,” Lise said curtly, “and
mamma’s kept you there for hours; she’s just been telling you about me and
Yulia.”

“How do you know?” asked Alyosha.

“I’ve been listening. Why do you stare at me? I want to listen and I do
listen, there’s no harm in that. I don’t apologize.”

“You are upset about something?”

“On the contrary, I am very happy. I’ve only just been reflecting for the
thirtieth time what a good thing it is I refused you and shall not be your
wife. You are not fit to be a husband. If I were to marry you and give you
a note to take to the man I loved after you, you’d take it and be sure to
give it to him and bring an answer back, too. If you were forty, you would
still go on taking my love-letters for me.”

She suddenly laughed.

“There is something spiteful and yet open-hearted about you,” Alyosha
smiled to her.

“The open-heartedness consists in my not being ashamed of myself with you.
What’s more, I don’t want to feel ashamed with you, just with you.
Alyosha, why is it I don’t respect you? I am very fond of you, but I don’t
respect you. If I respected you, I shouldn’t talk to you without shame,
should I?”

“No.”

“But do you believe that I am not ashamed with you?”

“No, I don’t believe it.”

Lise laughed nervously again; she spoke rapidly.

“I sent your brother, Dmitri Fyodorovitch, some sweets in prison. Alyosha,
you know, you are quite pretty! I shall love you awfully for having so
quickly allowed me not to love you.”

“Why did you send for me to-day, Lise?”

“I wanted to tell you of a longing I have. I should like some one to
torture me, marry me and then torture me, deceive me and go away. I don’t
want to be happy.”

“You are in love with disorder?”

“Yes, I want disorder. I keep wanting to set fire to the house. I keep
imagining how I’ll creep up and set fire to the house on the sly; it must
be on the sly. They’ll try to put it out, but it’ll go on burning. And I
shall know and say nothing. Ah, what silliness! And how bored I am!”

She waved her hand with a look of repulsion.

“It’s your luxurious life,” said Alyosha, softly.

“Is it better, then, to be poor?”

“Yes, it is better.”

“That’s what your monk taught you. That’s not true. Let me be rich and all
the rest poor, I’ll eat sweets and drink cream and not give any to any one
else. Ach, don’t speak, don’t say anything,” she shook her hand at him,
though Alyosha had not opened his mouth. “You’ve told me all that before,
I know it all by heart. It bores me. If I am ever poor, I shall murder
somebody, and even if I am rich, I may murder some one, perhaps—why do
nothing! But do you know, I should like to reap, cut the rye? I’ll marry
you, and you shall become a peasant, a real peasant; we’ll keep a colt,
shall we? Do you know Kalganov?”

“Yes.”

“He is always wandering about, dreaming. He says, ‘Why live in real life?
It’s better to dream. One can dream the most delightful things, but real
life is a bore.’ But he’ll be married soon for all that; he’s been making
love to me already. Can you spin tops?”

“Yes.”

“Well, he’s just like a top: he wants to be wound up and set spinning and
then to be lashed, lashed, lashed with a whip. If I marry him, I’ll keep
him spinning all his life. You are not ashamed to be with me?”

“No.”

“You are awfully cross, because I don’t talk about holy things. I don’t
want to be holy. What will they do to one in the next world for the
greatest sin? You must know all about that.”

“God will censure you.” Alyosha was watching her steadily.

“That’s just what I should like. I would go up and they would censure me,
and I would burst out laughing in their faces. I should dreadfully like to
set fire to the house, Alyosha, to our house; you still don’t believe me?”

“Why? There are children of twelve years old, who have a longing to set
fire to something and they do set things on fire, too. It’s a sort of
disease.”

“That’s not true, that’s not true; there may be children, but that’s not
what I mean.”

“You take evil for good; it’s a passing crisis, it’s the result of your
illness, perhaps.”

“You do despise me, though! It’s simply that I don’t want to do good, I
want to do evil, and it has nothing to do with illness.”

“Why do evil?”

“So that everything might be destroyed. Ah, how nice it would be if
everything were destroyed! You know, Alyosha, I sometimes think of doing a
fearful lot of harm and everything bad, and I should do it for a long
while on the sly and suddenly every one would find it out. Every one will
stand round and point their fingers at me and I would look at them all.
That would be awfully nice. Why would it be so nice, Alyosha?”

“I don’t know. It’s a craving to destroy something good or, as you say, to
set fire to something. It happens sometimes.”

“I not only say it, I shall do it.”

“I believe you.”

“Ah, how I love you for saying you believe me. And you are not lying one
little bit. But perhaps you think that I am saying all this on purpose to
annoy you?”

“No, I don’t think that ... though perhaps there is a little desire to do
that in it, too.”

“There is a little. I never can tell lies to you,” she declared, with a
strange fire in her eyes.

What struck Alyosha above everything was her earnestness. There was not a
trace of humor or jesting in her face now, though, in old days, fun and
gayety never deserted her even at her most “earnest” moments.

“There are moments when people love crime,” said Alyosha thoughtfully.

“Yes, yes! You have uttered my thought; they love crime, every one loves
crime, they love it always, not at some ‘moments.’ You know, it’s as
though people have made an agreement to lie about it and have lied about
it ever since. They all declare that they hate evil, but secretly they all
love it.”

“And are you still reading nasty books?”

“Yes, I am. Mamma reads them and hides them under her pillow and I steal
them.”

“Aren’t you ashamed to destroy yourself?”

“I want to destroy myself. There’s a boy here, who lay down between the
railway lines when the train was passing. Lucky fellow! Listen, your
brother is being tried now for murdering his father and every one loves
his having killed his father.”

“Loves his having killed his father?”

“Yes, loves it; every one loves it! Everybody says it’s so awful, but
secretly they simply love it. I for one love it.”

“There is some truth in what you say about every one,” said Alyosha
softly.

“Oh, what ideas you have!” Lise shrieked in delight. “And you a monk, too!
You wouldn’t believe how I respect you, Alyosha, for never telling lies.
Oh, I must tell you a funny dream of mine. I sometimes dream of devils.
It’s night; I am in my room with a candle and suddenly there are devils
all over the place, in all the corners, under the table, and they open the
doors; there’s a crowd of them behind the doors and they want to come and
seize me. And they are just coming, just seizing me. But I suddenly cross
myself and they all draw back, though they don’t go away altogether, they
stand at the doors and in the corners, waiting. And suddenly I have a
frightful longing to revile God aloud, and so I begin, and then they come
crowding back to me, delighted, and seize me again and I cross myself
again and they all draw back. It’s awful fun. it takes one’s breath away.”

“I’ve had the same dream, too,” said Alyosha suddenly.

“Really?” cried Lise, surprised. “I say, Alyosha, don’t laugh, that’s
awfully important. Could two different people have the same dream?”

“It seems they can.”

“Alyosha, I tell you, it’s awfully important,” Lise went on, with really
excessive amazement. “It’s not the dream that’s important, but your having
the same dream as me. You never lie to me, don’t lie now: is it true? You
are not laughing?”

“It’s true.”

Lise seemed extraordinarily impressed and for half a minute she was
silent.

“Alyosha, come and see me, come and see me more often,” she said suddenly,
in a supplicating voice.

“I’ll always come to see you, all my life,” answered Alyosha firmly.

“You are the only person I can talk to, you know,” Lise began again. “I
talk to no one but myself and you. Only you in the whole world. And to you
more readily than to myself. And I am not a bit ashamed with you, not a
bit. Alyosha, why am I not ashamed with you, not a bit? Alyosha, is it
true that at Easter the Jews steal a child and kill it?”

“I don’t know.”

“There’s a book here in which I read about the trial of a Jew, who took a
child of four years old and cut off the fingers from both hands, and then
crucified him on the wall, hammered nails into him and crucified him, and
afterwards, when he was tried, he said that the child died soon, within
four hours. That was ‘soon’! He said the child moaned, kept on moaning and
he stood admiring it. That’s nice!”

“Nice?”

“Nice; I sometimes imagine that it was I who crucified him. He would hang
there moaning and I would sit opposite him eating pineapple _compote_. I
am awfully fond of pineapple _compote_. Do you like it?”

Alyosha looked at her in silence. Her pale, sallow face was suddenly
contorted, her eyes burned.

“You know, when I read about that Jew I shook with sobs all night. I kept
fancying how the little thing cried and moaned (a child of four years old
understands, you know), and all the while the thought of pineapple
_compote_ haunted me. In the morning I wrote a letter to a certain person,
begging him _particularly_ to come and see me. He came and I suddenly told
him all about the child and the pineapple _compote_. _All_ about it,
_all_, and said that it was nice. He laughed and said it really was nice.
Then he got up and went away. He was only here five minutes. Did he
despise me? Did he despise me? Tell me, tell me, Alyosha, did he despise
me or not?” She sat up on the couch, with flashing eyes.

“Tell me,” Alyosha asked anxiously, “did you send for that person?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Did you send him a letter?”

“Yes.”

“Simply to ask about that, about that child?”

“No, not about that at all. But when he came, I asked him about that at
once. He answered, laughed, got up and went away.”

“That person behaved honorably,” Alyosha murmured.

“And did he despise me? Did he laugh at me?”

“No, for perhaps he believes in the pineapple _compote_ himself. He is
very ill now, too, Lise.”

“Yes, he does believe in it,” said Lise, with flashing eyes.

“He doesn’t despise any one,” Alyosha went on. “Only he does not believe
any one. If he doesn’t believe in people, of course, he does despise
them.”

“Then he despises me, me?”

“You, too.”

“Good,” Lise seemed to grind her teeth. “When he went out laughing, I felt
that it was nice to be despised. The child with fingers cut off is nice,
and to be despised is nice....”

And she laughed in Alyosha’s face, a feverish malicious laugh.

“Do you know, Alyosha, do you know, I should like—Alyosha, save me!” She
suddenly jumped from the couch, rushed to him and seized him with both
hands. “Save me!” she almost groaned. “Is there any one in the world I
could tell what I’ve told you? I’ve told you the truth, the truth. I shall
kill myself, because I loathe everything! I don’t want to live, because I
loathe everything! I loathe everything, everything. Alyosha, why don’t you
love me in the least?” she finished in a frenzy.

“But I do love you!” answered Alyosha warmly.

“And will you weep over me, will you?”

“Yes.”

“Not because I won’t be your wife, but simply weep for me?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you! It’s only your tears I want. Every one else may punish me and
trample me under foot, every one, every one, not excepting _any one_. For
I don’t love any one. Do you hear, not any one! On the contrary, I hate
him! Go, Alyosha; it’s time you went to your brother”; she tore herself
away from him suddenly.

“How can I leave you like this?” said Alyosha, almost in alarm.

“Go to your brother, the prison will be shut; go, here’s your hat. Give my
love to Mitya, go, go!”

And she almost forcibly pushed Alyosha out of the door. He looked at her
with pained surprise, when he was suddenly aware of a letter in his right
hand, a tiny letter folded up tight and sealed. He glanced at it and
instantly read the address, “To Ivan Fyodorovitch Karamazov.” He looked
quickly at Lise. Her face had become almost menacing.

“Give it to him, you must give it to him!” she ordered him, trembling and
beside herself. “To-day, at once, or I’ll poison myself! That’s why I sent
for you.”

And she slammed the door quickly. The bolt clicked. Alyosha put the note
in his pocket and went straight downstairs, without going back to Madame
Hohlakov; forgetting her, in fact. As soon as Alyosha had gone, Lise
unbolted the door, opened it a little, put her finger in the crack and
slammed the door with all her might, pinching her finger. Ten seconds
after, releasing her finger, she walked softly, slowly to her chair, sat
up straight in it and looked intently at her blackened finger and at the
blood that oozed from under the nail. Her lips were quivering and she kept
whispering rapidly to herself:

“I am a wretch, wretch, wretch, wretch!”



Chapter IV. A Hymn And A Secret


It was quite late (days are short in November) when Alyosha rang at the
prison gate. It was beginning to get dusk. But Alyosha knew that he would
be admitted without difficulty. Things were managed in our little town, as
everywhere else. At first, of course, on the conclusion of the preliminary
inquiry, relations and a few other persons could only obtain interviews
with Mitya by going through certain inevitable formalities. But later,
though the formalities were not relaxed, exceptions were made for some, at
least, of Mitya’s visitors. So much so, that sometimes the interviews with
the prisoner in the room set aside for the purpose were practically
_tête-à-tête_.

These exceptions, however, were few in number; only Grushenka, Alyosha and
Rakitin were treated like this. But the captain of the police, Mihail
Mihailovitch, was very favorably disposed to Grushenka. His abuse of her
at Mokroe weighed on the old man’s conscience, and when he learned the
whole story, he completely changed his view of her. And strange to say,
though he was firmly persuaded of his guilt, yet after Mitya was once in
prison, the old man came to take a more and more lenient view of him. “He
was a man of good heart, perhaps,” he thought, “who had come to grief from
drinking and dissipation.” His first horror had been succeeded by pity. As
for Alyosha, the police captain was very fond of him and had known him for
a long time. Rakitin, who had of late taken to coming very often to see
the prisoner, was one of the most intimate acquaintances of the “police
captain’s young ladies,” as he called them, and was always hanging about
their house. He gave lessons in the house of the prison superintendent,
too, who, though scrupulous in the performance of his duties, was a
kind-hearted old man. Alyosha, again, had an intimate acquaintance of long
standing with the superintendent, who was fond of talking to him,
generally on sacred subjects. He respected Ivan Fyodorovitch, and stood in
awe of his opinion, though he was a great philosopher himself;
“self-taught,” of course. But Alyosha had an irresistible attraction for
him. During the last year the old man had taken to studying the Apocryphal
Gospels, and constantly talked over his impressions with his young friend.
He used to come and see him in the monastery and discussed for hours
together with him and with the monks. So even if Alyosha were late at the
prison, he had only to go to the superintendent and everything was made
easy. Besides, every one in the prison, down to the humblest warder, had
grown used to Alyosha. The sentry, of course, did not trouble him so long
as the authorities were satisfied.

When Mitya was summoned from his cell, he always went downstairs, to the
place set aside for interviews. As Alyosha entered the room he came upon
Rakitin, who was just taking leave of Mitya. They were both talking
loudly. Mitya was laughing heartily as he saw him out, while Rakitin
seemed grumbling. Rakitin did not like meeting Alyosha, especially of
late. He scarcely spoke to him, and bowed to him stiffly. Seeing Alyosha
enter now, he frowned and looked away, as though he were entirely absorbed
in buttoning his big, warm, fur-trimmed overcoat. Then he began looking at
once for his umbrella.

“I must mind not to forget my belongings,” he muttered, simply to say
something.

“Mind you don’t forget other people’s belongings,” said Mitya, as a joke,
and laughed at once at his own wit. Rakitin fired up instantly.

“You’d better give that advice to your own family, who’ve always been a
slave-driving lot, and not to Rakitin,” he cried, suddenly trembling with
anger.

“What’s the matter? I was joking,” cried Mitya. “Damn it all! They are all
like that,” he turned to Alyosha, nodding towards Rakitin’s hurriedly
retreating figure. “He was sitting here, laughing and cheerful, and all at
once he boils up like that. He didn’t even nod to you. Have you broken
with him completely? Why are you so late? I’ve not been simply waiting,
but thirsting for you the whole morning. But never mind. We’ll make up for
it now.”

“Why does he come here so often? Surely you are not such great friends?”
asked Alyosha. He, too, nodded at the door through which Rakitin had
disappeared.

“Great friends with Rakitin? No, not as much as that. Is it likely—a pig
like that? He considers I am ... a blackguard. They can’t understand a
joke either, that’s the worst of such people. They never understand a
joke, and their souls are dry, dry and flat; they remind me of prison
walls when I was first brought here. But he is a clever fellow, very
clever. Well, Alexey, it’s all over with me now.”

He sat down on the bench and made Alyosha sit down beside him.

“Yes, the trial’s to-morrow. Are you so hopeless, brother?” Alyosha said,
with an apprehensive feeling.

“What are you talking about?” said Mitya, looking at him rather
uncertainly. “Oh, you mean the trial! Damn it all! Till now we’ve been
talking of things that don’t matter, about this trial, but I haven’t said
a word to you about the chief thing. Yes, the trial is to-morrow; but it
wasn’t the trial I meant, when I said it was all over with me. Why do you
look at me so critically?”

“What do you mean, Mitya?”

“Ideas, ideas, that’s all! Ethics! What is ethics?”

“Ethics?” asked Alyosha, wondering.

“Yes; is it a science?”

“Yes, there is such a science ... but ... I confess I can’t explain to you
what sort of science it is.”

“Rakitin knows. Rakitin knows a lot, damn him! He’s not going to be a
monk. He means to go to Petersburg. There he’ll go in for criticism of an
elevating tendency. Who knows, he may be of use and make his own career,
too. Ough! they are first-rate, these people, at making a career! Damn
ethics, I am done for, Alexey, I am, you man of God! I love you more than
any one. It makes my heart yearn to look at you. Who was Karl Bernard?”

“Karl Bernard?” Alyosha was surprised again.

“No, not Karl. Stay, I made a mistake. Claude Bernard. What was he?
Chemist or what?”

“He must be a savant,” answered Alyosha; “but I confess I can’t tell you
much about him, either. I’ve heard of him as a savant, but what sort I
don’t know.”

“Well, damn him, then! I don’t know either,” swore Mitya. “A scoundrel of
some sort, most likely. They are all scoundrels. And Rakitin will make his
way. Rakitin will get on anywhere; he is another Bernard. Ugh, these
Bernards! They are all over the place.”

“But what is the matter?” Alyosha asked insistently.

“He wants to write an article about me, about my case, and so begin his
literary career. That’s what he comes for; he said so himself. He wants to
prove some theory. He wants to say ‘he couldn’t help murdering his father,
he was corrupted by his environment,’ and so on. He explained it all to
me. He is going to put in a tinge of Socialism, he says. But there, damn
the fellow, he can put in a tinge if he likes, I don’t care. He can’t bear
Ivan, he hates him. He’s not fond of you, either. But I don’t turn him
out, for he is a clever fellow. Awfully conceited, though. I said to him
just now, ‘The Karamazovs are not blackguards, but philosophers; for all
true Russians are philosophers, and though you’ve studied, you are not a
philosopher—you are a low fellow.’ He laughed, so maliciously. And I said
to him, ‘_De ideabus non est disputandum_.’ Isn’t that rather good? I can
set up for being a classic, you see!” Mitya laughed suddenly.

“Why is it all over with you? You said so just now,” Alyosha interposed.

“Why is it all over with me? H’m!... The fact of it is ... if you take it
as a whole, I am sorry to lose God—that’s why it is.”

“What do you mean by ‘sorry to lose God’?”

“Imagine: inside, in the nerves, in the head—that is, these nerves are
there in the brain ... (damn them!) there are sort of little tails, the
little tails of those nerves, and as soon as they begin quivering ... that
is, you see, I look at something with my eyes and then they begin
quivering, those little tails ... and when they quiver, then an image
appears ... it doesn’t appear at once, but an instant, a second, passes
... and then something like a moment appears; that is, not a moment—devil
take the moment!—but an image; that is, an object, or an action, damn it!
That’s why I see and then think, because of those tails, not at all
because I’ve got a soul, and that I am some sort of image and likeness.
All that is nonsense! Rakitin explained it all to me yesterday, brother,
and it simply bowled me over. It’s magnificent, Alyosha, this science! A
new man’s arising—that I understand.... And yet I am sorry to lose God!”

“Well, that’s a good thing, anyway,” said Alyosha.

“That I am sorry to lose God? It’s chemistry, brother, chemistry! There’s
no help for it, your reverence, you must make way for chemistry. And
Rakitin does dislike God. Ough! doesn’t he dislike Him! That’s the sore
point with all of them. But they conceal it. They tell lies. They pretend.
‘Will you preach this in your reviews?’ I asked him. ‘Oh, well, if I did
it openly, they won’t let it through,’ he said. He laughed. ‘But what will
become of men then?’ I asked him, ‘without God and immortal life? All
things are lawful then, they can do what they like?’ ‘Didn’t you know?’ he
said laughing, ‘a clever man can do what he likes,’ he said. ‘A clever man
knows his way about, but you’ve put your foot in it, committing a murder,
and now you are rotting in prison.’ He says that to my face! A regular
pig! I used to kick such people out, but now I listen to them. He talks a
lot of sense, too. Writes well. He began reading me an article last week.
I copied out three lines of it. Wait a minute. Here it is.”

Mitya hurriedly pulled out a piece of paper from his pocket and read:

“ ‘In order to determine this question, it is above all essential to put
one’s personality in contradiction to one’s reality.’ Do you understand
that?”

“No, I don’t,” said Alyosha. He looked at Mitya and listened to him with
curiosity.

“I don’t understand either. It’s dark and obscure, but intellectual.
‘Every one writes like that now,’ he says, ‘it’s the effect of their
environment.’ They are afraid of the environment. He writes poetry, too,
the rascal. He’s written in honor of Madame Hohlakov’s foot. Ha ha ha!”

“I’ve heard about it,” said Alyosha.

“Have you? And have you heard the poem?”

“No.”

“I’ve got it. Here it is. I’ll read it to you. You don’t know—I haven’t
told you—there’s quite a story about it. He’s a rascal! Three weeks ago he
began to tease me. ‘You’ve got yourself into a mess, like a fool, for the
sake of three thousand, but I’m going to collar a hundred and fifty
thousand. I am going to marry a widow and buy a house in Petersburg.’ And
he told me he was courting Madame Hohlakov. She hadn’t much brains in her
youth, and now at forty she has lost what she had. ‘But she’s awfully
sentimental,’ he says; ‘that’s how I shall get hold of her. When I marry
her, I shall take her to Petersburg and there I shall start a newspaper.’
And his mouth was simply watering, the beast, not for the widow, but for
the hundred and fifty thousand. And he made me believe it. He came to see
me every day. ‘She is coming round,’ he declared. He was beaming with
delight. And then, all of a sudden, he was turned out of the house.
Perhotin’s carrying everything before him, bravo! I could kiss the silly
old noodle for turning him out of the house. And he had written this
doggerel. ‘It’s the first time I’ve soiled my hands with writing poetry,’
he said. ‘It’s to win her heart, so it’s in a good cause. When I get hold
of the silly woman’s fortune, I can be of great social utility.’ They have
this social justification for every nasty thing they do! ‘Anyway it’s
better than your Pushkin’s poetry,’ he said, ‘for I’ve managed to advocate
enlightenment even in that.’ I understand what he means about Pushkin, I
quite see that, if he really was a man of talent and only wrote about
women’s feet. But wasn’t Rakitin stuck up about his doggerel! The vanity
of these fellows! ‘On the convalescence of the swollen foot of the object
of my affections’—he thought of that for a title. He’s a waggish fellow.


    A captivating little foot,
    Though swollen and red and tender!
    The doctors come and plasters put,
    But still they cannot mend her.

    Yet, ’tis not for her foot I dread—
    A theme for Pushkin’s muse more fit—
    It’s not her foot, it is her head:
    I tremble for her loss of wit!

    For as her foot swells, strange to say,
    Her intellect is on the wane—
    Oh, for some remedy I pray
    That may restore both foot and brain!


He is a pig, a regular pig, but he’s very arch, the rascal! And he really
has put in a progressive idea. And wasn’t he angry when she kicked him
out! He was gnashing his teeth!”

“He’s taken his revenge already,” said Alyosha. “He’s written a paragraph
about Madame Hohlakov.”

And Alyosha told him briefly about the paragraph in _Gossip_.

“That’s his doing, that’s his doing!” Mitya assented, frowning. “That’s
him! These paragraphs ... I know ... the insulting things that have been
written about Grushenka, for instance.... And about Katya, too.... H’m!”

He walked across the room with a harassed air.

“Brother, I cannot stay long,” Alyosha said, after a pause. “To-morrow
will be a great and awful day for you, the judgment of God will be
accomplished ... I am amazed at you, you walk about here, talking of I
don’t know what ...”

“No, don’t be amazed at me,” Mitya broke in warmly. “Am I to talk of that
stinking dog? Of the murderer? We’ve talked enough of him. I don’t want to
say more of the stinking son of Stinking Lizaveta! God will kill him, you
will see. Hush!”

He went up to Alyosha excitedly and kissed him. His eyes glowed.

“Rakitin wouldn’t understand it,” he began in a sort of exaltation; “but
you, you’ll understand it all. That’s why I was thirsting for you. You
see, there’s so much I’ve been wanting to tell you for ever so long, here,
within these peeling walls, but I haven’t said a word about what matters
most; the moment never seems to have come. Now I can wait no longer. I
must pour out my heart to you. Brother, these last two months I’ve found
in myself a new man. A new man has risen up in me. He was hidden in me,
but would never have come to the surface, if it hadn’t been for this blow
from heaven. I am afraid! And what do I care if I spend twenty years in
the mines, breaking ore with a hammer? I am not a bit afraid of that—it’s
something else I am afraid of now: that that new man may leave me. Even
there, in the mines, under-ground, I may find a human heart in another
convict and murderer by my side, and I may make friends with him, for even
there one may live and love and suffer. One may thaw and revive a frozen
heart in that convict, one may wait upon him for years, and at last bring
up from the dark depths a lofty soul, a feeling, suffering creature; one
may bring forth an angel, create a hero! There are so many of them,
hundreds of them, and we are all to blame for them. Why was it I dreamed
of that ‘babe’ at such a moment? ‘Why is the babe so poor?’ That was a
sign to me at that moment. It’s for the babe I’m going. Because we are all
responsible for all. For all the ‘babes,’ for there are big children as
well as little children. All are ‘babes.’ I go for all, because some one
must go for all. I didn’t kill father, but I’ve got to go. I accept it.
It’s all come to me here, here, within these peeling walls. There are
numbers of them there, hundreds of them underground, with hammers in their
hands. Oh, yes, we shall be in chains and there will be no freedom, but
then, in our great sorrow, we shall rise again to joy, without which man
cannot live nor God exist, for God gives joy: it’s His privilege—a grand
one. Ah, man should be dissolved in prayer! What should I be underground
there without God? Rakitin’s laughing! If they drive God from the earth,
we shall shelter Him underground. One cannot exist in prison without God;
it’s even more impossible than out of prison. And then we men underground
will sing from the bowels of the earth a glorious hymn to God, with Whom
is joy. Hail to God and His joy! I love Him!”

Mitya was almost gasping for breath as he uttered his wild speech. He
turned pale, his lips quivered, and tears rolled down his cheeks.

“Yes, life is full, there is life even underground,” he began again. “You
wouldn’t believe, Alexey, how I want to live now, what a thirst for
existence and consciousness has sprung up in me within these peeling
walls. Rakitin doesn’t understand that; all he cares about is building a
house and letting flats. But I’ve been longing for you. And what is
suffering? I am not afraid of it, even if it were beyond reckoning. I am
not afraid of it now. I was afraid of it before. Do you know, perhaps I
won’t answer at the trial at all.... And I seem to have such strength in
me now, that I think I could stand anything, any suffering, only to be
able to say and to repeat to myself every moment, ‘I exist.’ In thousands
of agonies—I exist. I’m tormented on the rack—but I exist! Though I sit
alone on a pillar—I exist! I see the sun, and if I don’t see the sun, I
know it’s there. And there’s a whole life in that, in knowing that the sun
is there. Alyosha, my angel, all these philosophies are the death of me.
Damn them! Brother Ivan—”

“What of brother Ivan?” interrupted Alyosha, but Mitya did not hear.

“You see, I never had any of these doubts before, but it was all hidden
away in me. It was perhaps just because ideas I did not understand were
surging up in me, that I used to drink and fight and rage. It was to
stifle them in myself, to still them, to smother them. Ivan is not
Rakitin, there is an idea in him. Ivan is a sphinx and is silent; he is
always silent. It’s God that’s worrying me. That’s the only thing that’s
worrying me. What if He doesn’t exist? What if Rakitin’s right—that it’s
an idea made up by men? Then if He doesn’t exist, man is the chief of the
earth, of the universe. Magnificent! Only how is he going to be good
without God? That’s the question. I always come back to that. For whom is
man going to love then? To whom will he be thankful? To whom will he sing
the hymn? Rakitin laughs. Rakitin says that one can love humanity without
God. Well, only a sniveling idiot can maintain that. I can’t understand
it. Life’s easy for Rakitin. ‘You’d better think about the extension of
civic rights, or even of keeping down the price of meat. You will show
your love for humanity more simply and directly by that, than by
philosophy.’ I answered him, ‘Well, but you, without a God, are more
likely to raise the price of meat, if it suits you, and make a rouble on
every copeck.’ He lost his temper. But after all, what is goodness? Answer
me that, Alexey. Goodness is one thing with me and another with a
Chinaman, so it’s a relative thing. Or isn’t it? Is it not relative? A
treacherous question! You won’t laugh if I tell you it’s kept me awake two
nights. I only wonder now how people can live and think nothing about it.
Vanity! Ivan has no God. He has an idea. It’s beyond me. But he is silent.
I believe he is a free-mason. I asked him, but he is silent. I wanted to
drink from the springs of his soul—he was silent. But once he did drop a
word.”

“What did he say?” Alyosha took it up quickly.

“I said to him, ‘Then everything is lawful, if it is so?’ He frowned.
‘Fyodor Pavlovitch, our papa,’ he said, ‘was a pig, but his ideas were
right enough.’ That was what he dropped. That was all he said. That was
going one better than Rakitin.”

“Yes,” Alyosha assented bitterly. “When was he with you?”

“Of that later; now I must speak of something else. I have said nothing
about Ivan to you before. I put it off to the last. When my business here
is over and the verdict has been given, then I’ll tell you something. I’ll
tell you everything. We’ve something tremendous on hand.... And you shall
be my judge in it. But don’t begin about that now; be silent. You talk of
to-morrow, of the trial; but, would you believe it, I know nothing about
it.”

“Have you talked to the counsel?”

“What’s the use of the counsel? I told him all about it. He’s a soft,
city-bred rogue—a Bernard! But he doesn’t believe me—not a bit of it. Only
imagine, he believes I did it. I see it. ‘In that case,’ I asked him, ‘why
have you come to defend me?’ Hang them all! They’ve got a doctor down,
too, want to prove I’m mad. I won’t have that! Katerina Ivanovna wants to
do her ‘duty’ to the end, whatever the strain!” Mitya smiled bitterly.
“The cat! Hard-hearted creature! She knows that I said of her at Mokroe
that she was a woman of ‘great wrath.’ They repeated it. Yes, the facts
against me have grown numerous as the sands of the sea. Grigory sticks to
his point. Grigory’s honest, but a fool. Many people are honest because
they are fools: that’s Rakitin’s idea. Grigory’s my enemy. And there are
some people who are better as foes than friends. I mean Katerina Ivanovna.
I am afraid, oh, I am afraid she will tell how she bowed to the ground
after that four thousand. She’ll pay it back to the last farthing. I don’t
want her sacrifice; they’ll put me to shame at the trial. I wonder how I
can stand it. Go to her, Alyosha, ask her not to speak of that in the
court, can’t you? But damn it all, it doesn’t matter! I shall get through
somehow. I don’t pity her. It’s her own doing. She deserves what she gets.
I shall have my own story to tell, Alexey.” He smiled bitterly again.
“Only ... only Grusha, Grusha! Good Lord! Why should she have such
suffering to bear?” he exclaimed suddenly, with tears. “Grusha’s killing
me; the thought of her’s killing me, killing me. She was with me just
now....”

“She told me she was very much grieved by you to-day.”

“I know. Confound my temper! It was jealousy. I was sorry, I kissed her as
she was going. I didn’t ask her forgiveness.”

“Why didn’t you?” exclaimed Alyosha.

Suddenly Mitya laughed almost mirthfully.

“God preserve you, my dear boy, from ever asking forgiveness for a fault
from a woman you love. From one you love especially, however greatly you
may have been in fault. For a woman—devil only knows what to make of a
woman! I know something about them, anyway. But try acknowledging you are
in fault to a woman. Say, ‘I am sorry, forgive me,’ and a shower of
reproaches will follow! Nothing will make her forgive you simply and
directly, she’ll humble you to the dust, bring forward things that have
never happened, recall everything, forget nothing, add something of her
own, and only then forgive you. And even the best, the best of them do it.
She’ll scrape up all the scrapings and load them on your head. They are
ready to flay you alive, I tell you, every one of them, all these angels
without whom we cannot live! I tell you plainly and openly, dear boy,
every decent man ought to be under some woman’s thumb. That’s my
conviction—not conviction, but feeling. A man ought to be magnanimous, and
it’s no disgrace to a man! No disgrace to a hero, not even a Cæsar! But
don’t ever beg her pardon all the same for anything. Remember that rule
given you by your brother Mitya, who’s come to ruin through women. No, I’d
better make it up to Grusha somehow, without begging pardon. I worship
her, Alexey, worship her. Only she doesn’t see it. No, she still thinks I
don’t love her enough. And she tortures me, tortures me with her love. The
past was nothing! In the past it was only those infernal curves of hers
that tortured me, but now I’ve taken all her soul into my soul and through
her I’ve become a man myself. Will they marry us? If they don’t, I shall
die of jealousy. I imagine something every day.... What did she say to you
about me?”

Alyosha repeated all Grushenka had said to him that day. Mitya listened,
made him repeat things, and seemed pleased.

“Then she is not angry at my being jealous?” he exclaimed. “She is a
regular woman! ‘I’ve a fierce heart myself!’ Ah, I love such fierce
hearts, though I can’t bear any one’s being jealous of me. I can’t endure
it. We shall fight. But I shall love her, I shall love her infinitely.
Will they marry us? Do they let convicts marry? That’s the question. And
without her I can’t exist....”

Mitya walked frowning across the room. It was almost dark. He suddenly
seemed terribly worried.

“So there’s a secret, she says, a secret? We have got up a plot against
her, and Katya is mixed up in it, she thinks. No, my good Grushenka,
that’s not it. You are very wide of the mark, in your foolish feminine
way. Alyosha, darling, well, here goes! I’ll tell you our secret!”

He looked round, went close up quickly to Alyosha, who was standing before
him, and whispered to him with an air of mystery, though in reality no one
could hear them: the old warder was dozing in the corner, and not a word
could reach the ears of the soldiers on guard.

“I will tell you all our secret,” Mitya whispered hurriedly. “I meant to
tell you later, for how could I decide on anything without you? You are
everything to me. Though I say that Ivan is superior to us, you are my
angel. It’s your decision will decide it. Perhaps it’s you that is
superior and not Ivan. You see, it’s a question of conscience, question of
the higher conscience—the secret is so important that I can’t settle it
myself, and I’ve put it off till I could speak to you. But anyway it’s too
early to decide now, for we must wait for the verdict. As soon as the
verdict is given, you shall decide my fate. Don’t decide it now. I’ll tell
you now. You listen, but don’t decide. Stand and keep quiet. I won’t tell
you everything. I’ll only tell you the idea, without details, and you keep
quiet. Not a question, not a movement. You agree? But, goodness, what
shall I do with your eyes? I’m afraid your eyes will tell me your
decision, even if you don’t speak. Oo! I’m afraid! Alyosha, listen! Ivan
suggests my _escaping_. I won’t tell you the details: it’s all been
thought out: it can all be arranged. Hush, don’t decide. I should go to
America with Grusha. You know I can’t live without Grusha! What if they
won’t let her follow me to Siberia? Do they let convicts get married? Ivan
thinks not. And without Grusha what should I do there underground with a
hammer? I should only smash my skull with the hammer! But, on the other
hand, my conscience? I should have run away from suffering. A sign has
come, I reject the sign. I have a way of salvation and I turn my back on
it. Ivan says that in America, ‘with the good-will,’ I can be of more use
than underground. But what becomes of our hymn from underground? What’s
America? America is vanity again! And there’s a lot of swindling in
America, too, I expect. I should have run away from crucifixion! I tell
you, you know, Alexey, because you are the only person who can understand
this. There’s no one else. It’s folly, madness to others, all I’ve told
you of the hymn. They’ll say I’m out of my mind or a fool. I am not out of
my mind and I am not a fool. Ivan understands about the hymn, too. He
understands, only he doesn’t answer—he doesn’t speak. He doesn’t believe
in the hymn. Don’t speak, don’t speak. I see how you look! You have
already decided. Don’t decide, spare me! I can’t live without Grusha. Wait
till after the trial!”

Mitya ended beside himself. He held Alyosha with both hands on his
shoulders, and his yearning, feverish eyes were fixed on his brother’s.

“They don’t let convicts marry, do they?” he repeated for the third time
in a supplicating voice.

Alyosha listened with extreme surprise and was deeply moved.

“Tell me one thing,” he said. “Is Ivan very keen on it, and whose idea was
it?”

“His, his, and he is very keen on it. He didn’t come to see me at first,
then he suddenly came a week ago and he began about it straight away. He
is awfully keen on it. He doesn’t ask me, but orders me to escape. He
doesn’t doubt of my obeying him, though I showed him all my heart as I
have to you, and told him about the hymn, too. He told me he’d arrange it;
he’s found out about everything. But of that later. He’s simply set on it.
It’s all a matter of money: he’ll pay ten thousand for escape and give me
twenty thousand for America. And he says we can arrange a magnificent
escape for ten thousand.”

“And he told you on no account to tell me?” Alyosha asked again.

“To tell no one, and especially not you; on no account to tell you. He is
afraid, no doubt, that you’ll stand before me as my conscience. Don’t tell
him I told you. Don’t tell him, for anything.”

“You are right,” Alyosha pronounced; “it’s impossible to decide anything
before the trial is over. After the trial you’ll decide of yourself. Then
you’ll find that new man in yourself and he will decide.”

“A new man, or a Bernard who’ll decide _à la_ Bernard, for I believe I’m a
contemptible Bernard myself,” said Mitya, with a bitter grin.

“But, brother, have you no hope then of being acquitted?”

Mitya shrugged his shoulders nervously and shook his head. “Alyosha,
darling, it’s time you were going,” he said, with a sudden haste. “There’s
the superintendent shouting in the yard. He’ll be here directly. We are
late; it’s irregular. Embrace me quickly. Kiss me! Sign me with the cross,
darling, for the cross I have to bear to-morrow.”

They embraced and kissed.

“Ivan,” said Mitya suddenly, “suggests my escaping; but, of course, he
believes I did it.”

A mournful smile came on to his lips.

“Have you asked him whether he believes it?” asked Alyosha.

“No, I haven’t. I wanted to, but I couldn’t. I hadn’t the courage. But I
saw it from his eyes. Well, good-by!”

Once more they kissed hurriedly, and Alyosha was just going out, when
Mitya suddenly called him back.

“Stand facing me! That’s right!” And again he seized Alyosha, putting both
hands on his shoulders. His face became suddenly quite pale, so that it
was dreadfully apparent, even through the gathering darkness. His lips
twitched, his eyes fastened upon Alyosha.

“Alyosha, tell me the whole truth, as you would before God. Do you believe
I did it? Do you, do you in yourself, believe it? The whole truth, don’t
lie!” he cried desperately.

Everything seemed heaving before Alyosha, and he felt something like a
stab at his heart.

“Hush! What do you mean?” he faltered helplessly.

“The whole truth, the whole, don’t lie!” repeated Mitya.

“I’ve never for one instant believed that you were the murderer!” broke in
a shaking voice from Alyosha’s breast, and he raised his right hand in the
air, as though calling God to witness his words.

Mitya’s whole face was lighted up with bliss.

“Thank you!” he articulated slowly, as though letting a sigh escape him
after fainting. “Now you have given me new life. Would you believe it,
till this moment I’ve been afraid to ask you, you, even you. Well, go!
You’ve given me strength for to-morrow. God bless you! Come, go along!
Love Ivan!” was Mitya’s last word.

Alyosha went out in tears. Such distrustfulness in Mitya, such lack of
confidence even to him, to Alyosha—all this suddenly opened before Alyosha
an unsuspected depth of hopeless grief and despair in the soul of his
unhappy brother. Intense, infinite compassion overwhelmed him instantly.
There was a poignant ache in his torn heart. “Love Ivan!”—he suddenly
recalled Mitya’s words. And he was going to Ivan. He badly wanted to see
Ivan all day. He was as much worried about Ivan as about Mitya, and more
than ever now.



Chapter V. Not You, Not You!


On the way to Ivan he had to pass the house where Katerina Ivanovna was
living. There was light in the windows. He suddenly stopped and resolved
to go in. He had not seen Katerina Ivanovna for more than a week. But now
it struck him that Ivan might be with her, especially on the eve of the
terrible day. Ringing, and mounting the staircase, which was dimly lighted
by a Chinese lantern, he saw a man coming down, and as they met, he
recognized him as his brother. So he was just coming from Katerina
Ivanovna.

“Ah, it’s only you,” said Ivan dryly. “Well, good-by! You are going to
her?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t advise you to; she’s upset and you’ll upset her more.”

A door was instantly flung open above, and a voice cried suddenly:

“No, no! Alexey Fyodorovitch, have you come from him?”

“Yes, I have been with him.”

“Has he sent me any message? Come up, Alyosha, and you, Ivan Fyodorovitch,
you must come back, you must. Do you hear?”

There was such a peremptory note in Katya’s voice that Ivan, after a
moment’s hesitation, made up his mind to go back with Alyosha.

“She was listening,” he murmured angrily to himself, but Alyosha heard it.

“Excuse my keeping my greatcoat on,” said Ivan, going into the
drawing-room. “I won’t sit down. I won’t stay more than a minute.”

“Sit down, Alexey Fyodorovitch,” said Katerina Ivanovna, though she
remained standing. She had changed very little during this time, but there
was an ominous gleam in her dark eyes. Alyosha remembered afterwards that
she had struck him as particularly handsome at that moment.

“What did he ask you to tell me?”

“Only one thing,” said Alyosha, looking her straight in the face, “that
you would spare yourself and say nothing at the trial of what” (he was a
little confused) “... passed between you ... at the time of your first
acquaintance ... in that town.”

“Ah! that I bowed down to the ground for that money!” She broke into a
bitter laugh. “Why, is he afraid for me or for himself? He asks me to
spare—whom? Him or myself? Tell me, Alexey Fyodorovitch!”

Alyosha watched her intently, trying to understand her.

“Both yourself and him,” he answered softly.

“I am glad to hear it,” she snapped out maliciously, and she suddenly
blushed.

“You don’t know me yet, Alexey Fyodorovitch,” she said menacingly. “And I
don’t know myself yet. Perhaps you’ll want to trample me under foot after
my examination to-morrow.”

“You will give your evidence honorably,” said Alyosha; “that’s all that’s
wanted.”

“Women are often dishonorable,” she snarled. “Only an hour ago I was
thinking I felt afraid to touch that monster ... as though he were a
reptile ... but no, he is still a human being to me! But did he do it? Is
he the murderer?” she cried, all of a sudden, hysterically, turning
quickly to Ivan. Alyosha saw at once that she had asked Ivan that question
before, perhaps only a moment before he came in, and not for the first
time, but for the hundredth, and that they had ended by quarreling.

“I’ve been to see Smerdyakov.... It was you, you who persuaded me that he
murdered his father. It’s only you I believed!” she continued, still
addressing Ivan. He gave her a sort of strained smile. Alyosha started at
her tone. He had not suspected such familiar intimacy between them.

“Well, that’s enough, anyway,” Ivan cut short the conversation. “I am
going. I’ll come to-morrow.” And turning at once, he walked out of the
room and went straight downstairs.

With an imperious gesture, Katerina Ivanovna seized Alyosha by both hands.

“Follow him! Overtake him! Don’t leave him alone for a minute!” she said,
in a hurried whisper. “He’s mad! Don’t you know that he’s mad? He is in a
fever, nervous fever. The doctor told me so. Go, run after him....”

Alyosha jumped up and ran after Ivan, who was not fifty paces ahead of
him.

“What do you want?” He turned quickly on Alyosha, seeing that he was
running after him. “She told you to catch me up, because I’m mad. I know
it all by heart,” he added irritably.

“She is mistaken, of course; but she is right that you are ill,” said
Alyosha. “I was looking at your face just now. You look very ill, Ivan.”

Ivan walked on without stopping. Alyosha followed him.

“And do you know, Alexey Fyodorovitch, how people do go out of their
mind?” Ivan asked in a voice suddenly quiet, without a trace of
irritation, with a note of the simplest curiosity.

“No, I don’t. I suppose there are all kinds of insanity.”

“And can one observe that one’s going mad oneself?”

“I imagine one can’t see oneself clearly in such circumstances,” Alyosha
answered with surprise.

Ivan paused for half a minute.

“If you want to talk to me, please change the subject,” he said suddenly.

“Oh, while I think of it, I have a letter for you,” said Alyosha timidly,
and he took Lise’s note from his pocket and held it out to Ivan. They were
just under a lamp-post. Ivan recognized the handwriting at once.

“Ah, from that little demon!” he laughed maliciously, and, without opening
the envelope, he tore it into bits and threw it in the air. The bits were
scattered by the wind.

“She’s not sixteen yet, I believe, and already offering herself,” he said
contemptuously, striding along the street again.

“How do you mean, offering herself?” exclaimed Alyosha.

“As wanton women offer themselves, to be sure.”

“How can you, Ivan, how can you?” Alyosha cried warmly, in a grieved
voice. “She is a child; you are insulting a child! She is ill; she is very
ill, too. She is on the verge of insanity, too, perhaps.... I had hoped to
hear something from you ... that would save her.”

“You’ll hear nothing from me. If she is a child I am not her nurse. Be
quiet, Alexey. Don’t go on about her. I am not even thinking about it.”

They were silent again for a moment.

“She will be praying all night now to the Mother of God to show her how to
act to-morrow at the trial,” he said sharply and angrily again.

“You ... you mean Katerina Ivanovna?”

“Yes. Whether she’s to save Mitya or ruin him. She’ll pray for light from
above. She can’t make up her mind for herself, you see. She has not had
time to decide yet. She takes me for her nurse, too. She wants me to sing
lullabies to her.”

“Katerina Ivanovna loves you, brother,” said Alyosha sadly.

“Perhaps; but I am not very keen on her.”

“She is suffering. Why do you ... sometimes say things to her that give
her hope?” Alyosha went on, with timid reproach. “I know that you’ve given
her hope. Forgive me for speaking to you like this,” he added.

“I can’t behave to her as I ought—break off altogether and tell her so
straight out,” said Ivan, irritably. “I must wait till sentence is passed
on the murderer. If I break off with her now, she will avenge herself on
me by ruining that scoundrel to-morrow at the trial, for she hates him and
knows she hates him. It’s all a lie—lie upon lie! As long as I don’t break
off with her, she goes on hoping, and she won’t ruin that monster, knowing
how I want to get him out of trouble. If only that damned verdict would
come!”

The words “murderer” and “monster” echoed painfully in Alyosha’s heart.

“But how can she ruin Mitya?” he asked, pondering on Ivan’s words. “What
evidence can she give that would ruin Mitya?”

“You don’t know that yet. She’s got a document in her hands, in Mitya’s
own writing, that proves conclusively that he did murder Fyodor
Pavlovitch.”

“That’s impossible!” cried Alyosha.

“Why is it impossible? I’ve read it myself.”

“There can’t be such a document!” Alyosha repeated warmly. “There can’t
be, because he’s not the murderer. It’s not he murdered father, not he!”

Ivan suddenly stopped.

“Who is the murderer then, according to you?” he asked, with apparent
coldness. There was even a supercilious note in his voice.

“You know who,” Alyosha pronounced in a low, penetrating voice.

“Who? You mean the myth about that crazy idiot, the epileptic,
Smerdyakov?”

Alyosha suddenly felt himself trembling all over.

“You know who,” broke helplessly from him. He could scarcely breathe.

“Who? Who?” Ivan cried almost fiercely. All his restraint suddenly
vanished.

“I only know one thing,” Alyosha went on, still almost in a whisper, “_it
wasn’t you_ killed father.”

“ ‘Not you’! What do you mean by ‘not you’?” Ivan was thunderstruck.

“It was not you killed father, not you!” Alyosha repeated firmly.

The silence lasted for half a minute.

“I know I didn’t. Are you raving?” said Ivan, with a pale, distorted
smile. His eyes were riveted on Alyosha. They were standing again under a
lamp-post.

“No, Ivan. You’ve told yourself several times that you are the murderer.”

“When did I say so? I was in Moscow.... When have I said so?” Ivan
faltered helplessly.

“You’ve said so to yourself many times, when you’ve been alone during
these two dreadful months,” Alyosha went on softly and distinctly as
before. Yet he was speaking now, as it were, not of himself, not of his
own will, but obeying some irresistible command. “You have accused
yourself and have confessed to yourself that you are the murderer and no
one else. But you didn’t do it: you are mistaken: you are not the
murderer. Do you hear? It was not you! God has sent me to tell you so.”

They were both silent. The silence lasted a whole long minute. They were
both standing still, gazing into each other’s eyes. They were both pale.
Suddenly Ivan began trembling all over, and clutched Alyosha’s shoulder.

“You’ve been in my room!” he whispered hoarsely. “You’ve been there at
night, when he came.... Confess ... have you seen him, have you seen him?”

“Whom do you mean—Mitya?” Alyosha asked, bewildered.

“Not him, damn the monster!” Ivan shouted, in a frenzy. “Do you know that
he visits me? How did you find out? Speak!”

“Who is _he_! I don’t know whom you are talking about,” Alyosha faltered,
beginning to be alarmed.

“Yes, you do know ... or how could you—? It’s impossible that you don’t
know.”

Suddenly he seemed to check himself. He stood still and seemed to reflect.
A strange grin contorted his lips.

“Brother,” Alyosha began again, in a shaking voice, “I have said this to
you, because you’ll believe my word, I know that. I tell you once and for
all, it’s not you. You hear, once for all! God has put it into my heart to
say this to you, even though it may make you hate me from this hour.”

But by now Ivan had apparently regained his self-control.

“Alexey Fyodorovitch,” he said, with a cold smile, “I can’t endure
prophets and epileptics—messengers from God especially—and you know that
only too well. I break off all relations with you from this moment and
probably for ever. I beg you to leave me at this turning. It’s the way to
your lodgings, too. You’d better be particularly careful not to come to me
to-day! Do you hear?”

He turned and walked on with a firm step, not looking back.

“Brother,” Alyosha called after him, “if anything happens to you to-day,
turn to me before any one!”

But Ivan made no reply. Alyosha stood under the lamp-post at the cross
roads, till Ivan had vanished into the darkness. Then he turned and walked
slowly homewards. Both Alyosha and Ivan were living in lodgings; neither
of them was willing to live in Fyodor Pavlovitch’s empty house. Alyosha
had a furnished room in the house of some working people. Ivan lived some
distance from him. He had taken a roomy and fairly comfortable lodge
attached to a fine house that belonged to a well-to-do lady, the widow of
an official. But his only attendant was a deaf and rheumatic old crone who
went to bed at six o’clock every evening and got up at six in the morning.
Ivan had become remarkably indifferent to his comforts of late, and very
fond of being alone. He did everything for himself in the one room he
lived in, and rarely entered any of the other rooms in his abode.

He reached the gate of the house and had his hand on the bell, when he
suddenly stopped. He felt that he was trembling all over with anger.
Suddenly he let go of the bell, turned back with a curse, and walked with
rapid steps in the opposite direction. He walked a mile and a half to a
tiny, slanting, wooden house, almost a hut, where Marya Kondratyevna, the
neighbor who used to come to Fyodor Pavlovitch’s kitchen for soup and to
whom Smerdyakov had once sung his songs and played on the guitar, was now
lodging. She had sold their little house, and was now living here with her
mother. Smerdyakov, who was ill—almost dying—had been with them ever since
Fyodor Pavlovitch’s death. It was to him Ivan was going now, drawn by a
sudden and irresistible prompting.



Chapter VI. The First Interview With Smerdyakov


This was the third time that Ivan had been to see Smerdyakov since his
return from Moscow. The first time he had seen him and talked to him was
on the first day of his arrival, then he had visited him once more, a
fortnight later. But his visits had ended with that second one, so that it
was now over a month since he had seen him. And he had scarcely heard
anything of him.

Ivan had only returned five days after his father’s death, so that he was
not present at the funeral, which took place the day before he came back.
The cause of his delay was that Alyosha, not knowing his Moscow address,
had to apply to Katerina Ivanovna to telegraph to him, and she, not
knowing his address either, telegraphed to her sister and aunt, reckoning
on Ivan’s going to see them as soon as he arrived in Moscow. But he did
not go to them till four days after his arrival. When he got the telegram,
he had, of course, set off post-haste to our town. The first to meet him
was Alyosha, and Ivan was greatly surprised to find that, in opposition to
the general opinion of the town, he refused to entertain a suspicion
against Mitya, and spoke openly of Smerdyakov as the murderer. Later on,
after seeing the police captain and the prosecutor, and hearing the
details of the charge and the arrest, he was still more surprised at
Alyosha, and ascribed his opinion only to his exaggerated brotherly
feeling and sympathy with Mitya, of whom Alyosha, as Ivan knew, was very
fond.

By the way, let us say a word or two of Ivan’s feeling to his brother
Dmitri. He positively disliked him; at most, felt sometimes a compassion
for him, and even that was mixed with great contempt, almost repugnance.
Mitya’s whole personality, even his appearance, was extremely unattractive
to him. Ivan looked with indignation on Katerina Ivanovna’s love for his
brother. Yet he went to see Mitya on the first day of his arrival, and
that interview, far from shaking Ivan’s belief in his guilt, positively
strengthened it. He found his brother agitated, nervously excited. Mitya
had been talkative, but very absent-minded and incoherent. He used violent
language, accused Smerdyakov, and was fearfully muddled. He talked
principally about the three thousand roubles, which he said had been
“stolen” from him by his father.

“The money was mine, it was my money,” Mitya kept repeating. “Even if I
had stolen it, I should have had the right.”

He hardly contested the evidence against him, and if he tried to turn a
fact to his advantage, it was in an absurd and incoherent way. He hardly
seemed to wish to defend himself to Ivan or any one else. Quite the
contrary, he was angry and proudly scornful of the charges against him; he
was continually firing up and abusing every one. He only laughed
contemptuously at Grigory’s evidence about the open door, and declared
that it was “the devil that opened it.” But he could not bring forward any
coherent explanation of the fact. He even succeeded in insulting Ivan
during their first interview, telling him sharply that it was not for
people who declared that “everything was lawful,” to suspect and question
him. Altogether he was anything but friendly with Ivan on that occasion.
Immediately after that interview with Mitya, Ivan went for the first time
to see Smerdyakov.

In the railway train on his way from Moscow, he kept thinking of
Smerdyakov and of his last conversation with him on the evening before he
went away. Many things seemed to him puzzling and suspicious. But when he
gave his evidence to the investigating lawyer Ivan said nothing, for the
time, of that conversation. He put that off till he had seen Smerdyakov,
who was at that time in the hospital.

Doctor Herzenstube and Varvinsky, the doctor he met in the hospital,
confidently asserted in reply to Ivan’s persistent questions, that
Smerdyakov’s epileptic attack was unmistakably genuine, and were surprised
indeed at Ivan asking whether he might not have been shamming on the day
of the catastrophe. They gave him to understand that the attack was an
exceptional one, the fits persisting and recurring several times, so that
the patient’s life was positively in danger, and it was only now, after
they had applied remedies, that they could assert with confidence that the
patient would survive. “Though it might well be,” added Doctor
Herzenstube, “that his reason would be impaired for a considerable period,
if not permanently.” On Ivan’s asking impatiently whether that meant that
he was now mad, they told him that this was not yet the case, in the full
sense of the word, but that certain abnormalities were perceptible. Ivan
decided to find out for himself what those abnormalities were.

At the hospital he was at once allowed to see the patient. Smerdyakov was
lying on a truckle-bed in a separate ward. There was only one other bed in
the room, and in it lay a tradesman of the town, swollen with dropsy, who
was obviously almost dying; he could be no hindrance to their
conversation. Smerdyakov grinned uncertainly on seeing Ivan, and for the
first instant seemed nervous. So at least Ivan fancied. But that was only
momentary. For the rest of the time he was struck, on the contrary, by
Smerdyakov’s composure. From the first glance Ivan had no doubt that he
was very ill. He was very weak; he spoke slowly, seeming to move his
tongue with difficulty; he was much thinner and sallower. Throughout the
interview, which lasted twenty minutes, he kept complaining of headache
and of pain in all his limbs. His thin emasculate face seemed to have
become so tiny; his hair was ruffled, and his crest of curls in front
stood up in a thin tuft. But in the left eye, which was screwed up and
seemed to be insinuating something, Smerdyakov showed himself unchanged.
“It’s always worth while speaking to a clever man.” Ivan was reminded of
that at once. He sat down on the stool at his feet. Smerdyakov, with
painful effort, shifted his position in bed, but he was not the first to
speak. He remained dumb, and did not even look much interested.

“Can you talk to me?” asked Ivan. “I won’t tire you much.”

“Certainly I can,” mumbled Smerdyakov, in a faint voice. “Has your honor
been back long?” he added patronizingly, as though encouraging a nervous
visitor.

“I only arrived to-day.... To see the mess you are in here.” Smerdyakov
sighed.

“Why do you sigh? You knew of it all along,” Ivan blurted out.

Smerdyakov was stolidly silent for a while.

“How could I help knowing? It was clear beforehand. But how could I tell
it would turn out like that?”

“What would turn out? Don’t prevaricate! You’ve foretold you’d have a fit;
on the way down to the cellar, you know. You mentioned the very spot.”

“Have you said so at the examination yet?” Smerdyakov queried with
composure.

Ivan felt suddenly angry.

“No, I haven’t yet, but I certainly shall. You must explain a great deal
to me, my man; and let me tell you, I am not going to let you play with
me!”

“Why should I play with you, when I put my whole trust in you, as in God
Almighty?” said Smerdyakov, with the same composure, only for a moment
closing his eyes.

“In the first place,” began Ivan, “I know that epileptic fits can’t be
told beforehand. I’ve inquired; don’t try and take me in. You can’t
foretell the day and the hour. How was it you told me the day and the hour
beforehand, and about the cellar, too? How could you tell that you would
fall down the cellar stairs in a fit, if you didn’t sham a fit on
purpose?”

“I had to go to the cellar anyway, several times a day, indeed,”
Smerdyakov drawled deliberately. “I fell from the garret just in the same
way a year ago. It’s quite true you can’t tell the day and hour of a fit
beforehand, but you can always have a presentiment of it.”

“But you did foretell the day and the hour!”

“In regard to my epilepsy, sir, you had much better inquire of the doctors
here. You can ask them whether it was a real fit or a sham; it’s no use my
saying any more about it.”

“And the cellar? How could you know beforehand of the cellar?”

“You don’t seem able to get over that cellar! As I was going down to the
cellar, I was in terrible dread and doubt. What frightened me most was
losing you and being left without defense in all the world. So I went down
into the cellar thinking, ‘Here, it’ll come on directly, it’ll strike me
down directly, shall I fall?’ And it was through this fear that I suddenly
felt the spasm that always comes ... and so I went flying. All that and
all my previous conversation with you at the gate the evening before, when
I told you how frightened I was and spoke of the cellar, I told all that
to Doctor Herzenstube and Nikolay Parfenovitch, the investigating lawyer,
and it’s all been written down in the protocol. And the doctor here, Mr.
Varvinsky, maintained to all of them that it was just the thought of it
brought it on, the apprehension that I might fall. It was just then that
the fit seized me. And so they’ve written it down, that it’s just how it
must have happened, simply from my fear.”

As he finished, Smerdyakov drew a deep breath, as though exhausted.

“Then you have said all that in your evidence?” said Ivan, somewhat taken
aback. He had meant to frighten him with the threat of repeating their
conversation, and it appeared that Smerdyakov had already reported it all
himself.

“What have I to be afraid of? Let them write down the whole truth,”
Smerdyakov pronounced firmly.

“And have you told them every word of our conversation at the gate?”

“No, not to say every word.”

“And did you tell them that you can sham fits, as you boasted then?”

“No, I didn’t tell them that either.”

“Tell me now, why did you send me then to Tchermashnya?”

“I was afraid you’d go away to Moscow; Tchermashnya is nearer, anyway.”

“You are lying; you suggested my going away yourself; you told me to get
out of the way of trouble.”

“That was simply out of affection and my sincere devotion to you,
foreseeing trouble in the house, to spare you. Only I wanted to spare
myself even more. That’s why I told you to get out of harm’s way, that you
might understand that there would be trouble in the house, and would
remain at home to protect your father.”

“You might have said it more directly, you blockhead!” Ivan suddenly fired
up.

“How could I have said it more directly then? It was simply my fear that
made me speak, and you might have been angry, too. I might well have been
apprehensive that Dmitri Fyodorovitch would make a scene and carry away
that money, for he considered it as good as his own; but who could tell
that it would end in a murder like this? I thought that he would only
carry off the three thousand that lay under the master’s mattress in the
envelope, and you see, he’s murdered him. How could you guess it either,
sir?”

“But if you say yourself that it couldn’t be guessed, how could I have
guessed and stayed at home? You contradict yourself!” said Ivan,
pondering.

“You might have guessed from my sending you to Tchermashnya and not to
Moscow.”

“How could I guess it from that?”

Smerdyakov seemed much exhausted, and again he was silent for a minute.

“You might have guessed from the fact of my asking you not to go to
Moscow, but to Tchermashnya, that I wanted to have you nearer, for
Moscow’s a long way off, and Dmitri Fyodorovitch, knowing you are not far
off, would not be so bold. And if anything had happened, you might have
come to protect me, too, for I warned you of Grigory Vassilyevitch’s
illness, and that I was afraid of having a fit. And when I explained those
knocks to you, by means of which one could go in to the deceased, and that
Dmitri Fyodorovitch knew them all through me, I thought that you would
guess yourself that he would be sure to do something, and so wouldn’t go
to Tchermashnya even, but would stay.”

“He talks very coherently,” thought Ivan, “though he does mumble; what’s
the derangement of his faculties that Herzenstube talked of?”

“You are cunning with me, damn you!” he exclaimed, getting angry.

“But I thought at the time that you quite guessed,” Smerdyakov parried
with the simplest air.

“If I’d guessed, I should have stayed,” cried Ivan.

“Why, I thought that it was because you guessed, that you went away in
such a hurry, only to get out of trouble, only to run away and save
yourself in your fright.”

“You think that every one is as great a coward as yourself?”

“Forgive me, I thought you were like me.”

“Of course, I ought to have guessed,” Ivan said in agitation; “and I did
guess there was some mischief brewing on your part ... only you are lying,
you are lying again,” he cried, suddenly recollecting. “Do you remember
how you went up to the carriage and said to me, ‘It’s always worth while
speaking to a clever man’? So you were glad I went away, since you praised
me?”

Smerdyakov sighed again and again. A trace of color came into his face.

“If I was pleased,” he articulated rather breathlessly, “it was simply
because you agreed not to go to Moscow, but to Tchermashnya. For it was
nearer, anyway. Only when I said these words to you, it was not by way of
praise, but of reproach. You didn’t understand it.”

“What reproach?”

“Why, that foreseeing such a calamity you deserted your own father, and
would not protect us, for I might have been taken up any time for stealing
that three thousand.”

“Damn you!” Ivan swore again. “Stay, did you tell the prosecutor and the
investigating lawyer about those knocks?”

“I told them everything just as it was.”

Ivan wondered inwardly again.

“If I thought of anything then,” he began again, “it was solely of some
wickedness on your part. Dmitri might kill him, but that he would steal—I
did not believe that then.... But I was prepared for any wickedness from
you. You told me yourself you could sham a fit. What did you say that
for?”

“It was just through my simplicity, and I never have shammed a fit on
purpose in my life. And I only said so then to boast to you. It was just
foolishness. I liked you so much then, and was open-hearted with you.”

“My brother directly accuses you of the murder and theft.”

“What else is left for him to do?” said Smerdyakov, with a bitter grin.
“And who will believe him with all the proofs against him? Grigory
Vassilyevitch saw the door open. What can he say after that? But never
mind him! He is trembling to save himself.”

He slowly ceased speaking; then suddenly, as though on reflection, added:

“And look here again. He wants to throw it on me and make out that it is
the work of my hands—I’ve heard that already. But as to my being clever at
shamming a fit: should I have told you beforehand that I could sham one,
if I really had had such a design against your father? If I had been
planning such a murder could I have been such a fool as to give such
evidence against myself beforehand? And to his son, too! Upon my word! Is
that likely? As if that could be, such a thing has never happened. No one
hears this talk of ours now, except Providence itself, and if you were to
tell of it to the prosecutor and Nikolay Parfenovitch you might defend me
completely by doing so, for who would be likely to be such a criminal, if
he is so open-hearted beforehand? Any one can see that.”

“Well,” and Ivan got up to cut short the conversation, struck by
Smerdyakov’s last argument. “I don’t suspect you at all, and I think it’s
absurd, indeed, to suspect you. On the contrary, I am grateful to you for
setting my mind at rest. Now I am going, but I’ll come again. Meanwhile,
good-by. Get well. Is there anything you want?”

“I am very thankful for everything. Marfa Ignatyevna does not forget me,
and provides me anything I want, according to her kindness. Good people
visit me every day.”

“Good-by. But I shan’t say anything of your being able to sham a fit, and
I don’t advise you to, either,” something made Ivan say suddenly.

“I quite understand. And if you don’t speak of that, I shall say nothing
of that conversation of ours at the gate.”

Then it happened that Ivan went out, and only when he had gone a dozen
steps along the corridor, he suddenly felt that there was an insulting
significance in Smerdyakov’s last words. He was almost on the point of
turning back, but it was only a passing impulse, and muttering,
“Nonsense!” he went out of the hospital.

His chief feeling was one of relief at the fact that it was not
Smerdyakov, but Mitya, who had committed the murder, though he might have
been expected to feel the opposite. He did not want to analyze the reason
for this feeling, and even felt a positive repugnance at prying into his
sensations. He felt as though he wanted to make haste to forget something.
In the following days he became convinced of Mitya’s guilt, as he got to
know all the weight of evidence against him. There was evidence of people
of no importance, Fenya and her mother, for instance, but the effect of it
was almost overpowering. As to Perhotin, the people at the tavern, and at
Plotnikov’s shop, as well as the witnesses at Mokroe, their evidence
seemed conclusive. It was the details that were so damning. The secret of
the knocks impressed the lawyers almost as much as Grigory’s evidence as
to the open door. Grigory’s wife, Marfa, in answer to Ivan’s questions,
declared that Smerdyakov had been lying all night the other side of the
partition wall. “He was not three paces from our bed,” and that although
she was a sound sleeper she waked several times and heard him moaning, “He
was moaning the whole time, moaning continually.”

Talking to Herzenstube, and giving it as his opinion that Smerdyakov was
not mad, but only rather weak, Ivan only evoked from the old man a subtle
smile.

“Do you know how he spends his time now?” he asked; “learning lists of
French words by heart. He has an exercise-book under his pillow with the
French words written out in Russian letters for him by some one, he he
he!”

Ivan ended by dismissing all doubts. He could not think of Dmitri without
repulsion. Only one thing was strange, however. Alyosha persisted that
Dmitri was not the murderer, and that “in all probability” Smerdyakov was.
Ivan always felt that Alyosha’s opinion meant a great deal to him, and so
he was astonished at it now. Another thing that was strange was that
Alyosha did not make any attempt to talk about Mitya with Ivan, that he
never began on the subject and only answered his questions. This, too,
struck Ivan particularly.

But he was very much preoccupied at that time with something quite apart
from that. On his return from Moscow, he abandoned himself hopelessly to
his mad and consuming passion for Katerina Ivanovna. This is not the time
to begin to speak of this new passion of Ivan’s, which left its mark on
all the rest of his life: this would furnish the subject for another
novel, which I may perhaps never write. But I cannot omit to mention here
that when Ivan, on leaving Katerina Ivanovna with Alyosha, as I’ve related
already, told him, “I am not keen on her,” it was an absolute lie: he
loved her madly, though at times he hated her so that he might have
murdered her. Many causes helped to bring about this feeling. Shattered by
what had happened with Mitya, she rushed on Ivan’s return to meet him as
her one salvation. She was hurt, insulted and humiliated in her feelings.
And here the man had come back to her, who had loved her so ardently
before (oh! she knew that very well), and whose heart and intellect she
considered so superior to her own. But the sternly virtuous girl did not
abandon herself altogether to the man she loved, in spite of the Karamazov
violence of his passions and the great fascination he had for her. She was
continually tormented at the same time by remorse for having deserted
Mitya, and in moments of discord and violent anger (and they were
numerous) she told Ivan so plainly. This was what he had called to Alyosha
“lies upon lies.” There was, of course, much that was false in it, and
that angered Ivan more than anything.... But of all this later.

He did, in fact, for a time almost forget Smerdyakov’s existence, and yet,
a fortnight after his first visit to him, he began to be haunted by the
same strange thoughts as before. It’s enough to say that he was
continually asking himself, why was it that on that last night in Fyodor
Pavlovitch’s house he had crept out on to the stairs like a thief and
listened to hear what his father was doing below? Why had he recalled that
afterwards with repulsion? Why next morning, had he been suddenly so
depressed on the journey? Why, as he reached Moscow, had he said to
himself, “I am a scoundrel”? And now he almost fancied that these
tormenting thoughts would make him even forget Katerina Ivanovna, so
completely did they take possession of him again. It was just after
fancying this, that he met Alyosha in the street. He stopped him at once,
and put a question to him:

“Do you remember when Dmitri burst in after dinner and beat father, and
afterwards I told you in the yard that I reserved ‘the right to
desire’?... Tell me, did you think then that I desired father’s death or
not?”

“I did think so,” answered Alyosha, softly.

“It was so, too; it was not a matter of guessing. But didn’t you fancy
then that what I wished was just that ‘one reptile should devour another’;
that is, just that Dmitri should kill father, and as soon as possible ...
and that I myself was even prepared to help to bring that about?”

Alyosha turned rather pale, and looked silently into his brother’s face.

“Speak!” cried Ivan, “I want above everything to know what you thought
then. I want the truth, the truth!”

He drew a deep breath, looking angrily at Alyosha before his answer came.

“Forgive me, I did think that, too, at the time,” whispered Alyosha, and
he did not add one softening phrase.

“Thanks,” snapped Ivan, and, leaving Alyosha, he went quickly on his way.
From that time Alyosha noticed that Ivan began obviously to avoid him and
seemed even to have taken a dislike to him, so much so that Alyosha gave
up going to see him. Immediately after that meeting with him, Ivan had not
gone home, but went straight to Smerdyakov again.



Chapter VII. The Second Visit To Smerdyakov


By that time Smerdyakov had been discharged from the hospital. Ivan knew
his new lodging, the dilapidated little wooden house, divided in two by a
passage on one side of which lived Marya Kondratyevna and her mother, and
on the other, Smerdyakov. No one knew on what terms he lived with them,
whether as a friend or as a lodger. It was supposed afterwards that he had
come to stay with them as Marya Kondratyevna’s betrothed, and was living
there for a time without paying for board or lodging. Both mother and
daughter had the greatest respect for him and looked upon him as greatly
superior to themselves.

Ivan knocked, and, on the door being opened, went straight into the
passage. By Marya Kondratyevna’s directions he went straight to the better
room on the left, occupied by Smerdyakov. There was a tiled stove in the
room and it was extremely hot. The walls were gay with blue paper, which
was a good deal used however, and in the cracks under it cockroaches
swarmed in amazing numbers, so that there was a continual rustling from
them. The furniture was very scanty: two benches against each wall and two
chairs by the table. The table of plain wood was covered with a cloth with
pink patterns on it. There was a pot of geranium on each of the two little
windows. In the corner there was a case of ikons. On the table stood a
little copper samovar with many dents in it, and a tray with two cups. But
Smerdyakov had finished tea and the samovar was out. He was sitting at the
table on a bench. He was looking at an exercise-book and slowly writing
with a pen. There was a bottle of ink by him and a flat iron candlestick,
but with a composite candle. Ivan saw at once from Smerdyakov’s face that
he had completely recovered from his illness. His face was fresher,
fuller, his hair stood up jauntily in front, and was plastered down at the
sides. He was sitting in a parti-colored, wadded dressing-gown, rather
dirty and frayed, however. He had spectacles on his nose, which Ivan had
never seen him wearing before. This trifling circumstance suddenly
redoubled Ivan’s anger: “A creature like that and wearing spectacles!”

Smerdyakov slowly raised his head and looked intently at his visitor
through his spectacles; then he slowly took them off and rose from the
bench, but by no means respectfully, almost lazily, doing the least
possible required by common civility. All this struck Ivan instantly; he
took it all in and noted it at once—most of all the look in Smerdyakov’s
eyes, positively malicious, churlish and haughty. “What do you want to
intrude for?” it seemed to say; “we settled everything then; why have you
come again?” Ivan could scarcely control himself.

“It’s hot here,” he said, still standing, and unbuttoned his overcoat.

“Take off your coat,” Smerdyakov conceded.

Ivan took off his coat and threw it on a bench with trembling hands. He
took a chair, moved it quickly to the table and sat down. Smerdyakov
managed to sit down on his bench before him.

“To begin with, are we alone?” Ivan asked sternly and impulsively. “Can
they overhear us in there?”

“No one can hear anything. You’ve seen for yourself: there’s a passage.”

“Listen, my good fellow; what was that you babbled, as I was leaving the
hospital, that if I said nothing about your faculty of shamming fits, you
wouldn’t tell the investigating lawyer all our conversation at the gate?
What do you mean by _all_? What could you mean by it? Were you threatening
me? Have I entered into some sort of compact with you? Do you suppose I am
afraid of you?”

Ivan said this in a perfect fury, giving him to understand with obvious
intention that he scorned any subterfuge or indirectness and meant to show
his cards. Smerdyakov’s eyes gleamed resentfully, his left eye winked, and
he at once gave his answer, with his habitual composure and deliberation.
“You want to have everything above-board; very well, you shall have it,”
he seemed to say.

“This is what I meant then, and this is why I said that, that you, knowing
beforehand of this murder of your own parent, left him to his fate, and
that people mightn’t after that conclude any evil about your feelings and
perhaps of something else, too—that’s what I promised not to tell the
authorities.”

Though Smerdyakov spoke without haste and obviously controlling himself,
yet there was something in his voice, determined and emphatic, resentful
and insolently defiant. He stared impudently at Ivan. A mist passed before
Ivan’s eyes for the first moment.

“How? What? Are you out of your mind?”

“I’m perfectly in possession of all my faculties.”

“Do you suppose I _knew_ of the murder?” Ivan cried at last, and he
brought his fist violently on the table. “What do you mean by ‘something
else, too’? Speak, scoundrel!”

Smerdyakov was silent and still scanned Ivan with the same insolent stare.

“Speak, you stinking rogue, what is that ‘something else, too’?”

“The ‘something else’ I meant was that you probably, too, were very
desirous of your parent’s death.”

Ivan jumped up and struck him with all his might on the shoulder, so that
he fell back against the wall. In an instant his face was bathed in tears.
Saying, “It’s a shame, sir, to strike a sick man,” he dried his eyes with
a very dirty blue check handkerchief and sank into quiet weeping. A minute
passed.

“That’s enough! Leave off,” Ivan said peremptorily, sitting down again.
“Don’t put me out of all patience.”

Smerdyakov took the rag from his eyes. Every line of his puckered face
reflected the insult he had just received.

“So you thought then, you scoundrel, that together with Dmitri I meant to
kill my father?”

“I didn’t know what thoughts were in your mind then,” said Smerdyakov
resentfully; “and so I stopped you then at the gate to sound you on that
very point.”

“To sound what, what?”

“Why, that very circumstance, whether you wanted your father to be
murdered or not.”

What infuriated Ivan more than anything was the aggressive, insolent tone
to which Smerdyakov persistently adhered.

“It was you murdered him?” he cried suddenly.

Smerdyakov smiled contemptuously.

“You know of yourself, for a fact, that it wasn’t I murdered him. And I
should have thought that there was no need for a sensible man to speak of
it again.”

“But why, why had you such a suspicion about me at the time?”

“As you know already, it was simply from fear. For I was in such a
position, shaking with fear, that I suspected every one. I resolved to
sound you, too, for I thought if you wanted the same as your brother, then
the business was as good as settled and I should be crushed like a fly,
too.”

“Look here, you didn’t say that a fortnight ago.”

“I meant the same when I talked to you in the hospital, only I thought
you’d understand without wasting words, and that being such a sensible man
you wouldn’t care to talk of it openly.”

“What next! Come answer, answer, I insist: what was it ... what could I
have done to put such a degrading suspicion into your mean soul?”

“As for the murder, you couldn’t have done that and didn’t want to, but as
for wanting some one else to do it, that was just what you did want.”

“And how coolly, how coolly he speaks! But why should I have wanted it;
what grounds had I for wanting it?”

“What grounds had you? What about the inheritance?” said Smerdyakov
sarcastically, and, as it were, vindictively. “Why, after your parent’s
death there was at least forty thousand to come to each of you, and very
likely more, but if Fyodor Pavlovitch got married then to that lady,
Agrafena Alexandrovna, she would have had all his capital made over to her
directly after the wedding, for she’s plenty of sense, so that your parent
would not have left you two roubles between the three of you. And were
they far from a wedding, either? Not a hair’s-breadth: that lady had only
to lift her little finger and he would have run after her to church, with
his tongue out.”

Ivan restrained himself with painful effort.

“Very good,” he commented at last. “You see, I haven’t jumped up, I
haven’t knocked you down, I haven’t killed you. Speak on. So, according to
you, I had fixed on Dmitri to do it; I was reckoning on him?”

“How could you help reckoning on him? If he killed him, then he would lose
all the rights of a nobleman, his rank and property, and would go off to
exile; so his share of the inheritance would come to you and your brother
Alexey Fyodorovitch in equal parts; so you’d each have not forty, but
sixty thousand each. There’s not a doubt you did reckon on Dmitri
Fyodorovitch.”

“What I put up with from you! Listen, scoundrel, if I had reckoned on any
one then, it would have been on you, not on Dmitri, and I swear I did
expect some wickedness from you ... at the time.... I remember my
impression!”

“I thought, too, for a minute, at the time, that you were reckoning on me
as well,” said Smerdyakov, with a sarcastic grin. “So that it was just by
that more than anything you showed me what was in your mind. For if you
had a foreboding about me and yet went away, you as good as said to me,
‘You can murder my parent, I won’t hinder you!’ ”

“You scoundrel! So that’s how you understood it!”

“It was all that going to Tchermashnya. Why! You were meaning to go to
Moscow and refused all your father’s entreaties to go to Tchermashnya—and
simply at a foolish word from me you consented at once! What reason had
you to consent to Tchermashnya? Since you went to Tchermashnya with no
reason, simply at my word, it shows that you must have expected something
from me.”

“No, I swear I didn’t!” shouted Ivan, grinding his teeth.

“You didn’t? Then you ought, as your father’s son, to have had me taken to
the lock-up and thrashed at once for my words then ... or at least, to
have given me a punch in the face on the spot, but you were not a bit
angry, if you please, and at once in a friendly way acted on my foolish
word and went away, which was utterly absurd, for you ought to have stayed
to save your parent’s life. How could I help drawing my conclusions?”

Ivan sat scowling, both his fists convulsively pressed on his knees.

“Yes, I am sorry I didn’t punch you in the face,” he said with a bitter
smile. “I couldn’t have taken you to the lock-up just then. Who would have
believed me and what charge could I bring against you? But the punch in
the face ... oh, I’m sorry I didn’t think of it. Though blows are
forbidden, I should have pounded your ugly face to a jelly.”

Smerdyakov looked at him almost with relish.

“In the ordinary occasions of life,” he said in the same complacent and
sententious tone in which he had taunted Grigory and argued with him about
religion at Fyodor Pavlovitch’s table, “in the ordinary occasions of life,
blows on the face are forbidden nowadays by law, and people have given
them up, but in exceptional occasions of life people still fly to blows,
not only among us but all over the world, be it even the fullest Republic
of France, just as in the time of Adam and Eve, and they never will leave
off, but you, even in an exceptional case, did not dare.”

“What are you learning French words for?” Ivan nodded towards the
exercise-book lying on the table.

“Why shouldn’t I learn them so as to improve my education, supposing that
I may myself chance to go some day to those happy parts of Europe?”

“Listen, monster.” Ivan’s eyes flashed and he trembled all over. “I am not
afraid of your accusations; you can say what you like about me, and if I
don’t beat you to death, it’s simply because I suspect you of that crime
and I’ll drag you to justice. I’ll unmask you.”

“To my thinking, you’d better keep quiet, for what can you accuse me of,
considering my absolute innocence? and who would believe you? Only if you
begin, I shall tell everything, too, for I must defend myself.”

“Do you think I am afraid of you now?”

“If the court doesn’t believe all I’ve said to you just now, the public
will, and you will be ashamed.”

“That’s as much as to say, ‘It’s always worth while speaking to a sensible
man,’ eh?” snarled Ivan.

“You hit the mark, indeed. And you’d better be sensible.”

Ivan got up, shaking all over with indignation, put on his coat, and
without replying further to Smerdyakov, without even looking at him,
walked quickly out of the cottage. The cool evening air refreshed him.
There was a bright moon in the sky. A nightmare of ideas and sensations
filled his soul. “Shall I go at once and give information against
Smerdyakov? But what information can I give? He is not guilty, anyway. On
the contrary, he’ll accuse me. And in fact, why did I set off for
Tchermashnya then? What for? What for?” Ivan asked himself. “Yes, of
course, I was expecting something and he is right....” And he remembered
for the hundredth time how, on the last night in his father’s house, he
had listened on the stairs. But he remembered it now with such anguish
that he stood still on the spot as though he had been stabbed. “Yes, I
expected it then, that’s true! I wanted the murder, I did want the murder!
Did I want the murder? Did I want it? I must kill Smerdyakov! If I don’t
dare kill Smerdyakov now, life is not worth living!”

Ivan did not go home, but went straight to Katerina Ivanovna and alarmed
her by his appearance. He was like a madman. He repeated all his
conversation with Smerdyakov, every syllable of it. He couldn’t be calmed,
however much she tried to soothe him: he kept walking about the room,
speaking strangely, disconnectedly. At last he sat down, put his elbows on
the table, leaned his head on his hands and pronounced this strange
sentence: “If it’s not Dmitri, but Smerdyakov who’s the murderer, I share
his guilt, for I put him up to it. Whether I did, I don’t know yet. But if
he is the murderer, and not Dmitri, then, of course, I am the murderer,
too.”

When Katerina Ivanovna heard that, she got up from her seat without a
word, went to her writing-table, opened a box standing on it, took out a
sheet of paper and laid it before Ivan. This was the document of which
Ivan spoke to Alyosha later on as a “conclusive proof” that Dmitri had
killed his father. It was the letter written by Mitya to Katerina Ivanovna
when he was drunk, on the very evening he met Alyosha at the crossroads on
the way to the monastery, after the scene at Katerina Ivanovna’s, when
Grushenka had insulted her. Then, parting from Alyosha, Mitya had rushed
to Grushenka. I don’t know whether he saw her, but in the evening he was
at the “Metropolis,” where he got thoroughly drunk. Then he asked for pen
and paper and wrote a document of weighty consequences to himself. It was
a wordy, disconnected, frantic letter, a drunken letter in fact. It was
like the talk of a drunken man, who, on his return home, begins with
extraordinary heat telling his wife or one of his household how he has
just been insulted, what a rascal had just insulted him, what a fine
fellow he is on the other hand, and how he will pay that scoundrel out;
and all that at great length, with great excitement and incoherence, with
drunken tears and blows on the table. The letter was written on a dirty
piece of ordinary paper of the cheapest kind. It had been provided by the
tavern and there were figures scrawled on the back of it. There was
evidently not space enough for his drunken verbosity and Mitya not only
filled the margins but had written the last line right across the rest.
The letter ran as follows:


    FATAL KATYA: To-morrow I will get the money and repay your three
    thousand and farewell, woman of great wrath, but farewell, too, my
    love! Let us make an end! To-morrow I shall try and get it from
    every one, and if I can’t borrow it, I give you my word of honor I
    shall go to my father and break his skull and take the money from
    under the pillow, if only Ivan has gone. If I have to go to
    Siberia for it, I’ll give you back your three thousand. And
    farewell. I bow down to the ground before you, for I’ve been a
    scoundrel to you. Forgive me! No, better not forgive me, you’ll be
    happier and so shall I! Better Siberia than your love, for I love
    another woman and you got to know her too well to-day, so how can
    you forgive? I will murder the man who’s robbed me! I’ll leave you
    all and go to the East so as to see no one again. Not _her_
    either, for you are not my only tormentress; she is too. Farewell!

    P.S.—I write my curse, but I adore you! I hear it in my heart. One
    string is left, and it vibrates. Better tear my heart in two! I
    shall kill myself, but first of all that cur. I shall tear three
    thousand from him and fling it to you. Though I’ve been a
    scoundrel to you, I am not a thief! You can expect three thousand.
    The cur keeps it under his mattress, in pink ribbon. I am not a
    thief, but I’ll murder my thief. Katya, don’t look disdainful.
    Dmitri is not a thief! but a murderer! He has murdered his father
    and ruined himself to hold his ground, rather than endure your
    pride. And he doesn’t love you.

    P.P.S.—I kiss your feet, farewell! P.P.P.S.—Katya, pray to God
    that some one’ll give me the money. Then I shall not be steeped in
    gore, and if no one does—I shall! Kill me!

    Your slave and enemy,

    D. KARAMAZOV.


When Ivan read this “document” he was convinced. So then it was his
brother, not Smerdyakov. And if not Smerdyakov, then not he, Ivan. This
letter at once assumed in his eyes the aspect of a logical proof. There
could be no longer the slightest doubt of Mitya’s guilt. The suspicion
never occurred to Ivan, by the way, that Mitya might have committed the
murder in conjunction with Smerdyakov, and, indeed, such a theory did not
fit in with the facts. Ivan was completely reassured. The next morning he
only thought of Smerdyakov and his gibes with contempt. A few days later
he positively wondered how he could have been so horribly distressed at
his suspicions. He resolved to dismiss him with contempt and forget him.
So passed a month. He made no further inquiry about Smerdyakov, but twice
he happened to hear that he was very ill and out of his mind.

“He’ll end in madness,” the young doctor Varvinsky observed about him, and
Ivan remembered this. During the last week of that month Ivan himself
began to feel very ill. He went to consult the Moscow doctor who had been
sent for by Katerina Ivanovna just before the trial. And just at that time
his relations with Katerina Ivanovna became acutely strained. They were
like two enemies in love with one another. Katerina Ivanovna’s “returns”
to Mitya, that is, her brief but violent revulsions of feeling in his
favor, drove Ivan to perfect frenzy. Strange to say, until that last scene
described above, when Alyosha came from Mitya to Katerina Ivanovna, Ivan
had never once, during that month, heard her express a doubt of Mitya’s
guilt, in spite of those “returns” that were so hateful to him. It is
remarkable, too, that while he felt that he hated Mitya more and more
every day, he realized that it was not on account of Katya’s “returns”
that he hated him, but just _because he was the murderer of his father_.
He was conscious of this and fully recognized it to himself.

Nevertheless, he went to see Mitya ten days before the trial and proposed
to him a plan of escape—a plan he had obviously thought over a long time.
He was partly impelled to do this by a sore place still left in his heart
from a phrase of Smerdyakov’s, that it was to his, Ivan’s, advantage that
his brother should be convicted, as that would increase his inheritance
and Alyosha’s from forty to sixty thousand roubles. He determined to
sacrifice thirty thousand on arranging Mitya’s escape. On his return from
seeing him, he was very mournful and dispirited; he suddenly began to feel
that he was anxious for Mitya’s escape, not only to heal that sore place
by sacrificing thirty thousand, but for another reason. “Is it because I
am as much a murderer at heart?” he asked himself. Something very deep
down seemed burning and rankling in his soul. His pride above all suffered
cruelly all that month. But of that later....

When, after his conversation with Alyosha, Ivan suddenly decided with his
hand on the bell of his lodging to go to Smerdyakov, he obeyed a sudden
and peculiar impulse of indignation. He suddenly remembered how Katerina
Ivanovna had only just cried out to him in Alyosha’s presence: “It was
you, you, persuaded me of his” (that is, Mitya’s) “guilt!” Ivan was
thunderstruck when he recalled it. He had never once tried to persuade her
that Mitya was the murderer; on the contrary, he had suspected himself in
her presence, that time when he came back from Smerdyakov. It was _she_,
she, who had produced that “document” and proved his brother’s guilt. And
now she suddenly exclaimed: “I’ve been at Smerdyakov’s myself!” When had
she been there? Ivan had known nothing of it. So she was not at all so
sure of Mitya’s guilt! And what could Smerdyakov have told her? What,
what, had he said to her? His heart burned with violent anger. He could
not understand how he could, half an hour before, have let those words
pass and not have cried out at the moment. He let go of the bell and
rushed off to Smerdyakov. “I shall kill him, perhaps, this time,” he
thought on the way.



Chapter VIII. The Third And Last Interview With Smerdyakov


When he was half-way there, the keen dry wind that had been blowing early
that morning rose again, and a fine dry snow began falling thickly. It did
not lie on the ground, but was whirled about by the wind, and soon there
was a regular snowstorm. There were scarcely any lamp-posts in the part of
the town where Smerdyakov lived. Ivan strode alone in the darkness,
unconscious of the storm, instinctively picking out his way. His head
ached and there was a painful throbbing in his temples. He felt that his
hands were twitching convulsively. Not far from Marya Kondratyevna’s
cottage, Ivan suddenly came upon a solitary drunken little peasant. He was
wearing a coarse and patched coat, and was walking in zigzags, grumbling
and swearing to himself. Then suddenly he would begin singing in a husky
drunken voice:


    “Ach, Vanka’s gone to Petersburg;
    I won’t wait till he comes back.”


But he broke off every time at the second line and began swearing again;
then he would begin the same song again. Ivan felt an intense hatred for
him before he had thought about him at all. Suddenly he realized his
presence and felt an irresistible impulse to knock him down. At that
moment they met, and the peasant with a violent lurch fell full tilt
against Ivan, who pushed him back furiously. The peasant went flying
backwards and fell like a log on the frozen ground. He uttered one
plaintive “O—oh!” and then was silent. Ivan stepped up to him. He was
lying on his back, without movement or consciousness. “He will be frozen,”
thought Ivan, and he went on his way to Smerdyakov’s.

In the passage, Marya Kondratyevna, who ran out to open the door with a
candle in her hand, whispered that Smerdyakov was very ill, “It’s not that
he’s laid up, but he seems not himself, and he even told us to take the
tea away; he wouldn’t have any.”

“Why, does he make a row?” asked Ivan coarsely.

“Oh, dear, no, quite the contrary, he’s very quiet. Only please don’t talk
to him too long,” Marya Kondratyevna begged him. Ivan opened the door and
stepped into the room.

It was over-heated as before, but there were changes in the room. One of
the benches at the side had been removed, and in its place had been put a
large old mahogany leather sofa, on which a bed had been made up, with
fairly clean white pillows. Smerdyakov was sitting on the sofa, wearing
the same dressing-gown. The table had been brought out in front of the
sofa, so that there was hardly room to move. On the table lay a thick book
in yellow cover, but Smerdyakov was not reading it. He seemed to be
sitting doing nothing. He met Ivan with a slow silent gaze, and was
apparently not at all surprised at his coming. There was a great change in
his face; he was much thinner and sallower. His eyes were sunken and there
were blue marks under them.

“Why, you really are ill?” Ivan stopped short. “I won’t keep you long, I
won’t even take off my coat. Where can one sit down?”

He went to the other end of the table, moved up a chair and sat down on
it.

“Why do you look at me without speaking? I’ve only come with one question,
and I swear I won’t go without an answer. Has the young lady, Katerina
Ivanovna, been with you?”

Smerdyakov still remained silent, looking quietly at Ivan as before.
Suddenly, with a motion of his hand, he turned his face away.

“What’s the matter with you?” cried Ivan.

“Nothing.”

“What do you mean by ‘nothing’?”

“Yes, she has. It’s no matter to you. Let me alone.”

“No, I won’t let you alone. Tell me, when was she here?”

“Why, I’d quite forgotten about her,” said Smerdyakov, with a scornful
smile, and turning his face to Ivan again, he stared at him with a look of
frenzied hatred, the same look that he had fixed on him at their last
interview, a month before.

“You seem very ill yourself, your face is sunken; you don’t look like
yourself,” he said to Ivan.

“Never mind my health, tell me what I ask you.”

“But why are your eyes so yellow? The whites are quite yellow. Are you so
worried?” He smiled contemptuously and suddenly laughed outright.

“Listen; I’ve told you I won’t go away without an answer!” Ivan cried,
intensely irritated.

“Why do you keep pestering me? Why do you torment me?” said Smerdyakov,
with a look of suffering.

“Damn it! I’ve nothing to do with you. Just answer my question and I’ll go
away.”

“I’ve no answer to give you,” said Smerdyakov, looking down again.

“You may be sure I’ll make you answer!”

“Why are you so uneasy?” Smerdyakov stared at him, not simply with
contempt, but almost with repulsion. “Is this because the trial begins
to-morrow? Nothing will happen to you; can’t you believe that at last? Go
home, go to bed and sleep in peace, don’t be afraid of anything.”

“I don’t understand you.... What have I to be afraid of to-morrow?” Ivan
articulated in astonishment, and suddenly a chill breath of fear did in
fact pass over his soul. Smerdyakov measured him with his eyes.

“You don’t understand?” he drawled reproachfully. “It’s a strange thing a
sensible man should care to play such a farce!”

Ivan looked at him speechless. The startling, incredibly supercilious tone
of this man who had once been his valet, was extraordinary in itself. He
had not taken such a tone even at their last interview.

“I tell you, you’ve nothing to be afraid of. I won’t say anything about
you; there’s no proof against you. I say, how your hands are trembling!
Why are your fingers moving like that? Go home, _you_ did not murder him.”

Ivan started. He remembered Alyosha.

“I know it was not I,” he faltered.

“Do you?” Smerdyakov caught him up again.

Ivan jumped up and seized him by the shoulder.

“Tell me everything, you viper! Tell me everything!”

Smerdyakov was not in the least scared. He only riveted his eyes on Ivan
with insane hatred.

“Well, it was you who murdered him, if that’s it,” he whispered furiously.

Ivan sank back on his chair, as though pondering something. He laughed
malignantly.

“You mean my going away. What you talked about last time?”

“You stood before me last time and understood it all, and you understand
it now.”

“All I understand is that you are mad.”

“Aren’t you tired of it? Here we are face to face; what’s the use of going
on keeping up a farce to each other? Are you still trying to throw it all
on me, to my face? _You_ murdered him; you are the real murderer, I was
only your instrument, your faithful servant, and it was following your
words I did it.”

“_Did_ it? Why, did you murder him?” Ivan turned cold.

Something seemed to give way in his brain, and he shuddered all over with
a cold shiver. Then Smerdyakov himself looked at him wonderingly; probably
the genuineness of Ivan’s horror struck him.

“You don’t mean to say you really did not know?” he faltered
mistrustfully, looking with a forced smile into his eyes. Ivan still gazed
at him, and seemed unable to speak.


    Ach, Vanka’s gone to Petersburg;
    I won’t wait till he comes back,


suddenly echoed in his head.

“Do you know, I am afraid that you are a dream, a phantom sitting before
me,” he muttered.

“There’s no phantom here, but only us two and one other. No doubt he is
here, that third, between us.”

“Who is he? Who is here? What third person?” Ivan cried in alarm, looking
about him, his eyes hastily searching in every corner.

“That third is God Himself—Providence. He is the third beside us now. Only
don’t look for Him, you won’t find Him.”

“It’s a lie that you killed him!” Ivan cried madly. “You are mad, or
teasing me again!”

Smerdyakov, as before, watched him curiously, with no sign of fear. He
could still scarcely get over his incredulity; he still fancied that Ivan
knew everything and was trying to “throw it all on him to his face.”

“Wait a minute,” he said at last in a weak voice, and suddenly bringing up
his left leg from under the table, he began turning up his trouser leg. He
was wearing long white stockings and slippers. Slowly he took off his
garter and fumbled to the bottom of his stocking. Ivan gazed at him, and
suddenly shuddered in a paroxysm of terror.

“He’s mad!” he cried, and rapidly jumping up, he drew back, so that he
knocked his back against the wall and stood up against it, stiff and
straight. He looked with insane terror at Smerdyakov, who, entirely
unaffected by his terror, continued fumbling in his stocking, as though he
were making an effort to get hold of something with his fingers and pull
it out. At last he got hold of it and began pulling it out. Ivan saw that
it was a piece of paper, or perhaps a roll of papers. Smerdyakov pulled it
out and laid it on the table.

“Here,” he said quietly.

“What is it?” asked Ivan, trembling.

“Kindly look at it,” Smerdyakov answered, still in the same low tone.

Ivan stepped up to the table, took up the roll of paper and began
unfolding it, but suddenly he drew back his fingers, as though from
contact with a loathsome reptile.

“Your hands keep twitching,” observed Smerdyakov, and he deliberately
unfolded the bundle himself. Under the wrapper were three packets of
hundred-rouble notes.

“They are all here, all the three thousand roubles; you need not count
them. Take them,” Smerdyakov suggested to Ivan, nodding at the notes. Ivan
sank back in his chair. He was as white as a handkerchief.

“You frightened me ... with your stocking,” he said, with a strange grin.

“Can you really not have known till now?” Smerdyakov asked once more.

“No, I did not know. I kept thinking of Dmitri. Brother, brother! Ach!” He
suddenly clutched his head in both hands.

“Listen. Did you kill him alone? With my brother’s help or without?”

“It was only with you, with your help, I killed him, and Dmitri
Fyodorovitch is quite innocent.”

“All right, all right. Talk about me later. Why do I keep on trembling? I
can’t speak properly.”

“You were bold enough then. You said ‘everything was lawful,’ and how
frightened you are now,” Smerdyakov muttered in surprise. “Won’t you have
some lemonade? I’ll ask for some at once. It’s very refreshing. Only I
must hide this first.”

And again he motioned at the notes. He was just going to get up and call
at the door to Marya Kondratyevna to make some lemonade and bring it them,
but, looking for something to cover up the notes that she might not see
them, he first took out his handkerchief, and as it turned out to be very
dirty, took up the big yellow book that Ivan had noticed at first lying on
the table, and put it over the notes. The book was _The Sayings of the
Holy Father Isaac the Syrian_. Ivan read it mechanically.

“I won’t have any lemonade,” he said. “Talk of me later. Sit down and tell
me how you did it. Tell me all about it.”

“You’d better take off your greatcoat, or you’ll be too hot.” Ivan, as
though he’d only just thought of it, took off his coat, and, without
getting up from his chair, threw it on the bench.

“Speak, please, speak.”

He seemed calmer. He waited, feeling sure that Smerdyakov would tell him
_all_ about it.

“How it was done?” sighed Smerdyakov. “It was done in a most natural way,
following your very words.”

“Of my words later,” Ivan broke in again, apparently with complete
self-possession, firmly uttering his words, and not shouting as before.
“Only tell me in detail how you did it. Everything, as it happened. Don’t
forget anything. The details, above everything, the details, I beg you.”

“You’d gone away, then I fell into the cellar.”

“In a fit or in a sham one?”

“A sham one, naturally. I shammed it all. I went quietly down the steps to
the very bottom and lay down quietly, and as I lay down I gave a scream,
and struggled, till they carried me out.”

“Stay! And were you shamming all along, afterwards, and in the hospital?”

“No, not at all. Next day, in the morning, before they took me to the
hospital, I had a real attack and a more violent one than I’ve had for
years. For two days I was quite unconscious.”

“All right, all right. Go on.”

“They laid me on the bed. I knew I’d be the other side of the partition,
for whenever I was ill, Marfa Ignatyevna used to put me there, near them.
She’s always been very kind to me, from my birth up. At night I moaned,
but quietly. I kept expecting Dmitri Fyodorovitch to come.”

“Expecting him? To come to you?”

“Not to me. I expected him to come into the house, for I’d no doubt that
he’d come that night, for being without me and getting no news, he’d be
sure to come and climb over the fence, as he used to, and do something.”

“And if he hadn’t come?”

“Then nothing would have happened. I should never have brought myself to
it without him.”

“All right, all right ... speak more intelligibly, don’t hurry; above all,
don’t leave anything out!”

“I expected him to kill Fyodor Pavlovitch. I thought that was certain, for
I had prepared him for it ... during the last few days.... He knew about
the knocks, that was the chief thing. With his suspiciousness and the fury
which had been growing in him all those days, he was bound to get into the
house by means of those taps. That was inevitable, so I was expecting
him.”

“Stay,” Ivan interrupted; “if he had killed him, he would have taken the
money and carried it away; you must have considered that. What would you
have got by it afterwards? I don’t see.”

“But he would never have found the money. That was only what I told him,
that the money was under the mattress. But that wasn’t true. It had been
lying in a box. And afterwards I suggested to Fyodor Pavlovitch, as I was
the only person he trusted, to hide the envelope with the notes in the
corner behind the ikons, for no one would have guessed that place,
especially if they came in a hurry. So that’s where the envelope lay, in
the corner behind the ikons. It would have been absurd to keep it under
the mattress; the box, anyway, could be locked. But all believe it was
under the mattress. A stupid thing to believe. So if Dmitri Fyodorovitch
had committed the murder, finding nothing, he would either have run away
in a hurry, afraid of every sound, as always happens with murderers, or he
would have been arrested. So I could always have clambered up to the ikons
and have taken away the money next morning or even that night, and it
would have all been put down to Dmitri Fyodorovitch. I could reckon upon
that.”

“But what if he did not kill him, but only knocked him down?”

“If he did not kill him, of course, I would not have ventured to take the
money, and nothing would have happened. But I calculated that he would
beat him senseless, and I should have time to take it then, and then I’d
make out to Fyodor Pavlovitch that it was no one but Dmitri Fyodorovitch
who had taken the money after beating him.”

“Stop ... I am getting mixed. Then it was Dmitri after all who killed him;
you only took the money?”

“No, he didn’t kill him. Well, I might as well have told you now that he
was the murderer.... But I don’t want to lie to you now, because ...
because if you really haven’t understood till now, as I see for myself,
and are not pretending, so as to throw your guilt on me to my very face,
you are still responsible for it all, since you knew of the murder and
charged me to do it, and went away knowing all about it. And so I want to
prove to your face this evening that you are the only real murderer in the
whole affair, and I am not the real murderer, though I did kill him. You
are the rightful murderer.”

“Why, why, am I a murderer? Oh, God!” Ivan cried, unable to restrain
himself at last, and forgetting that he had put off discussing himself
till the end of the conversation. “You still mean that Tchermashnya? Stay,
tell me, why did you want my consent, if you really took Tchermashnya for
consent? How will you explain that now?”

“Assured of your consent, I should have known that you wouldn’t have made
an outcry over those three thousand being lost, even if I’d been
suspected, instead of Dmitri Fyodorovitch, or as his accomplice; on the
contrary, you would have protected me from others.... And when you got
your inheritance you would have rewarded me when you were able, all the
rest of your life. For you’d have received your inheritance through me,
seeing that if he had married Agrafena Alexandrovna, you wouldn’t have had
a farthing.”

“Ah! Then you intended to worry me all my life afterwards,” snarled Ivan.
“And what if I hadn’t gone away then, but had informed against you?”

“What could you have informed? That I persuaded you to go to Tchermashnya?
That’s all nonsense. Besides, after our conversation you would either have
gone away or have stayed. If you had stayed, nothing would have happened.
I should have known that you didn’t want it done, and should have
attempted nothing. As you went away, it meant you assured me that you
wouldn’t dare to inform against me at the trial, and that you’d overlook
my having the three thousand. And, indeed, you couldn’t have prosecuted me
afterwards, because then I should have told it all in the court; that is,
not that I had stolen the money or killed him—I shouldn’t have said
that—but that you’d put me up to the theft and the murder, though I didn’t
consent to it. That’s why I needed your consent, so that you couldn’t have
cornered me afterwards, for what proof could you have had? I could always
have cornered you, revealing your eagerness for your father’s death, and I
tell you the public would have believed it all, and you would have been
ashamed for the rest of your life.”

“Was I then so eager, was I?” Ivan snarled again.

“To be sure you were, and by your consent you silently sanctioned my doing
it.” Smerdyakov looked resolutely at Ivan. He was very weak and spoke
slowly and wearily, but some hidden inner force urged him on. He evidently
had some design. Ivan felt that.

“Go on,” he said. “Tell me what happened that night.”

“What more is there to tell! I lay there and I thought I heard the master
shout. And before that Grigory Vassilyevitch had suddenly got up and came
out, and he suddenly gave a scream, and then all was silence and darkness.
I lay there waiting, my heart beating; I couldn’t bear it. I got up at
last, went out. I saw the window open on the left into the garden, and I
stepped to the left to listen whether he was sitting there alive, and I
heard the master moving about, sighing, so I knew he was alive. ‘Ech!’ I
thought. I went to the window and shouted to the master, ‘It’s I.’ And he
shouted to me, ‘He’s been, he’s been; he’s run away.’ He meant Dmitri
Fyodorovitch had been. ‘He’s killed Grigory!’ ‘Where?’ I whispered.
‘There, in the corner,’ he pointed. He was whispering, too. ‘Wait a bit,’
I said. I went to the corner of the garden to look, and there I came upon
Grigory Vassilyevitch lying by the wall, covered with blood, senseless. So
it’s true that Dmitri Fyodorovitch has been here, was the thought that
came into my head, and I determined on the spot to make an end of it, as
Grigory Vassilyevitch, even if he were alive, would see nothing of it, as
he lay there senseless. The only risk was that Marfa Ignatyevna might wake
up. I felt that at the moment, but the longing to get it done came over
me, till I could scarcely breathe. I went back to the window to the master
and said, ‘She’s here, she’s come; Agrafena Alexandrovna has come, wants
to be let in.’ And he started like a baby. ‘Where is she?’ he fairly
gasped, but couldn’t believe it. ‘She’s standing there,’ said I. ‘Open.’
He looked out of the window at me, half believing and half distrustful,
but afraid to open. ‘Why, he is afraid of me now,’ I thought. And it was
funny. I bethought me to knock on the window-frame those taps we’d agreed
upon as a signal that Grushenka had come, in his presence, before his
eyes. He didn’t seem to believe my word, but as soon as he heard the taps,
he ran at once to open the door. He opened it. I would have gone in, but
he stood in the way to prevent me passing. ‘Where is she? Where is she?’
He looked at me, all of a tremble. ‘Well,’ thought I, ‘if he’s so
frightened of me as all that, it’s a bad look out!’ And my legs went weak
with fright that he wouldn’t let me in or would call out, or Marfa
Ignatyevna would run up, or something else might happen. I don’t remember
now, but I must have stood pale, facing him. I whispered to him, ‘Why,
she’s there, there, under the window; how is it you don’t see her?’ I
said. ‘Bring her then, bring her.’ ‘She’s afraid,’ said I; ‘she was
frightened at the noise, she’s hidden in the bushes; go and call to her
yourself from the study.’ He ran to the window, put the candle in the
window. ‘Grushenka,’ he cried, ‘Grushenka, are you here?’ Though he cried
that, he didn’t want to lean out of the window, he didn’t want to move
away from me, for he was panic-stricken; he was so frightened he didn’t
dare to turn his back on me. ‘Why, here she is,’ said I. I went up to the
window and leaned right out of it. ‘Here she is; she’s in the bush,
laughing at you, don’t you see her?’ He suddenly believed it; he was all
of a shake—he was awfully crazy about her—and he leaned right out of the
window. I snatched up that iron paper-weight from his table; do you
remember, weighing about three pounds? I swung it and hit him on the top
of the skull with the corner of it. He didn’t even cry out. He only sank
down suddenly, and I hit him again and a third time. And the third time I
knew I’d broken his skull. He suddenly rolled on his back, face upwards,
covered with blood. I looked round. There was no blood on me, not a spot.
I wiped the paper-weight, put it back, went up to the ikons, took the
money out of the envelope, and flung the envelope on the floor and the
pink ribbon beside it. I went out into the garden all of a tremble,
straight to the apple-tree with a hollow in it—you know that hollow. I’d
marked it long before and put a rag and a piece of paper ready in it. I
wrapped all the notes in the rag and stuffed it deep down in the hole. And
there it stayed for over a fortnight. I took it out later, when I came out
of the hospital. I went back to my bed, lay down and thought, ‘If Grigory
Vassilyevitch has been killed outright it may be a bad job for me, but if
he is not killed and recovers, it will be first-rate, for then he’ll bear
witness that Dmitri Fyodorovitch has been here, and so he must have killed
him and taken the money.’ Then I began groaning with suspense and
impatience, so as to wake Marfa Ignatyevna as soon as possible. At last
she got up and she rushed to me, but when she saw Grigory Vassilyevitch
was not there, she ran out, and I heard her scream in the garden. And that
set it all going and set my mind at rest.”

He stopped. Ivan had listened all the time in dead silence without
stirring or taking his eyes off him. As he told his story Smerdyakov
glanced at him from time to time, but for the most part kept his eyes
averted. When he had finished he was evidently agitated and was breathing
hard. The perspiration stood out on his face. But it was impossible to
tell whether it was remorse he was feeling, or what.

“Stay,” cried Ivan, pondering. “What about the door? If he only opened the
door to you, how could Grigory have seen it open before? For Grigory saw
it before you went.”

It was remarkable that Ivan spoke quite amicably, in a different tone, not
angry as before, so if any one had opened the door at that moment and
peeped in at them, he would certainly have concluded that they were
talking peaceably about some ordinary, though interesting, subject.

“As for that door and Grigory Vassilyevitch’s having seen it open, that’s
only his fancy,” said Smerdyakov, with a wry smile. “He is not a man, I
assure you, but an obstinate mule. He didn’t see it, but fancied he had
seen it, and there’s no shaking him. It’s just our luck he took that
notion into his head, for they can’t fail to convict Dmitri Fyodorovitch
after that.”

“Listen ...” said Ivan, beginning to seem bewildered again and making an
effort to grasp something. “Listen. There are a lot of questions I want to
ask you, but I forget them ... I keep forgetting and getting mixed up.
Yes. Tell me this at least, why did you open the envelope and leave it
there on the floor? Why didn’t you simply carry off the envelope?... When
you were telling me, I thought you spoke about it as though it were the
right thing to do ... but why, I can’t understand....”

“I did that for a good reason. For if a man had known all about it, as I
did for instance, if he’d seen those notes before, and perhaps had put
them in that envelope himself, and had seen the envelope sealed up and
addressed, with his own eyes, if such a man had done the murder, what
should have made him tear open the envelope afterwards, especially in such
desperate haste, since he’d know for certain the notes must be in the
envelope? No, if the robber had been some one like me, he’d simply have
put the envelope straight in his pocket and got away with it as fast as he
could. But it’d be quite different with Dmitri Fyodorovitch. He only knew
about the envelope by hearsay; he had never seen it, and if he’d found it,
for instance, under the mattress, he’d have torn it open as quickly as
possible to make sure the notes were in it. And he’d have thrown the
envelope down, without having time to think that it would be evidence
against him. Because he was not an habitual thief and had never directly
stolen anything before, for he is a gentleman born, and if he did bring
himself to steal, it would not be regular stealing, but simply taking what
was his own, for he’d told the whole town he meant to before, and had even
bragged aloud before every one that he’d go and take his property from
Fyodor Pavlovitch. I didn’t say that openly to the prosecutor when I was
being examined, but quite the contrary, I brought him to it by a hint, as
though I didn’t see it myself, and as though he’d thought of it himself
and I hadn’t prompted him; so that Mr. Prosecutor’s mouth positively
watered at my suggestion.”

“But can you possibly have thought of all that on the spot?” cried Ivan,
overcome with astonishment. He looked at Smerdyakov again with alarm.

“Mercy on us! Could any one think of it all in such a desperate hurry? It
was all thought out beforehand.”

“Well ... well, it was the devil helped you!” Ivan cried again. “No, you
are not a fool, you are far cleverer than I thought....”

He got up, obviously intending to walk across the room. He was in terrible
distress. But as the table blocked his way, and there was hardly room to
pass between the table and the wall, he only turned round where he stood
and sat down again. Perhaps the impossibility of moving irritated him, as
he suddenly cried out almost as furiously as before.

“Listen, you miserable, contemptible creature! Don’t you understand that
if I haven’t killed you, it’s simply because I am keeping you to answer
to-morrow at the trial. God sees,” Ivan raised his hand, “perhaps I, too,
was guilty; perhaps I really had a secret desire for my father’s ...
death, but I swear I was not as guilty as you think, and perhaps I didn’t
urge you on at all. No, no, I didn’t urge you on! But no matter, I will
give evidence against myself to-morrow at the trial. I’m determined to! I
shall tell everything, everything. But we’ll make our appearance together.
And whatever you may say against me at the trial, whatever evidence you
give, I’ll face it; I am not afraid of you. I’ll confirm it all myself!
But you must confess, too! You must, you must; we’ll go together. That’s
how it shall be!”

Ivan said this solemnly and resolutely and from his flashing eyes alone it
could be seen that it would be so.

“You are ill, I see; you are quite ill. Your eyes are yellow,” Smerdyakov
commented, without the least irony, with apparent sympathy in fact.

“We’ll go together,” Ivan repeated. “And if you won’t go, no matter, I’ll
go alone.”

Smerdyakov paused as though pondering.

“There’ll be nothing of the sort, and you won’t go,” he concluded at last
positively.

“You don’t understand me,” Ivan exclaimed reproachfully.

“You’ll be too much ashamed, if you confess it all. And, what’s more, it
will be no use at all, for I shall say straight out that I never said
anything of the sort to you, and that you are either ill (and it looks
like it, too), or that you’re so sorry for your brother that you are
sacrificing yourself to save him and have invented it all against me, for
you’ve always thought no more of me than if I’d been a fly. And who will
believe you, and what single proof have you got?”

“Listen, you showed me those notes just now to convince me.”

Smerdyakov lifted the book off the notes and laid it on one side.

“Take that money away with you,” Smerdyakov sighed.

“Of course, I shall take it. But why do you give it to me, if you
committed the murder for the sake of it?” Ivan looked at him with great
surprise.

“I don’t want it,” Smerdyakov articulated in a shaking voice, with a
gesture of refusal. “I did have an idea of beginning a new life with that
money in Moscow or, better still, abroad. I did dream of it, chiefly
because ‘all things are lawful.’ That was quite right what you taught me,
for you talked a lot to me about that. For if there’s no everlasting God,
there’s no such thing as virtue, and there’s no need of it. You were right
there. So that’s how I looked at it.”

“Did you come to that of yourself?” asked Ivan, with a wry smile.

“With your guidance.”

“And now, I suppose, you believe in God, since you are giving back the
money?”

“No, I don’t believe,” whispered Smerdyakov.

“Then why are you giving it back?”

“Leave off ... that’s enough!” Smerdyakov waved his hand again. “You used
to say yourself that everything was lawful, so now why are you so upset,
too? You even want to go and give evidence against yourself.... Only
there’ll be nothing of the sort! You won’t go to give evidence,”
Smerdyakov decided with conviction.

“You’ll see,” said Ivan.

“It isn’t possible. You are very clever. You are fond of money, I know
that. You like to be respected, too, for you’re very proud; you are far
too fond of female charms, too, and you mind most of all about living in
undisturbed comfort, without having to depend on any one—that’s what you
care most about. You won’t want to spoil your life for ever by taking such
a disgrace on yourself. You are like Fyodor Pavlovitch, you are more like
him than any of his children; you’ve the same soul as he had.”

“You are not a fool,” said Ivan, seeming struck. The blood rushed to his
face. “You are serious now!” he observed, looking suddenly at Smerdyakov
with a different expression.

“It was your pride made you think I was a fool. Take the money.”

Ivan took the three rolls of notes and put them in his pocket without
wrapping them in anything.

“I shall show them at the court to-morrow,” he said.

“Nobody will believe you, as you’ve plenty of money of your own; you may
simply have taken it out of your cash-box and brought it to the court.”

Ivan rose from his seat.

“I repeat,” he said, “the only reason I haven’t killed you is that I need
you for to-morrow, remember that, don’t forget it!”

“Well, kill me. Kill me now,” Smerdyakov said, all at once looking
strangely at Ivan. “You won’t dare do that even!” he added, with a bitter
smile. “You won’t dare to do anything, you, who used to be so bold!”

“Till to-morrow,” cried Ivan, and moved to go out.

“Stay a moment.... Show me those notes again.”

Ivan took out the notes and showed them to him. Smerdyakov looked at them
for ten seconds.

“Well, you can go,” he said, with a wave of his hand. “Ivan Fyodorovitch!”
he called after him again.

“What do you want?” Ivan turned without stopping.

“Good-by!”

“Till to-morrow!” Ivan cried again, and he walked out of the cottage.

The snowstorm was still raging. He walked the first few steps boldly, but
suddenly began staggering. “It’s something physical,” he thought with a
grin. Something like joy was springing up in his heart. He was conscious
of unbounded resolution; he would make an end of the wavering that had so
tortured him of late. His determination was taken, “and now it will not be
changed,” he thought with relief. At that moment he stumbled against
something and almost fell down. Stopping short, he made out at his feet
the peasant he had knocked down, still lying senseless and motionless. The
snow had almost covered his face. Ivan seized him and lifted him in his
arms. Seeing a light in the little house to the right he went up, knocked
at the shutters, and asked the man to whom the house belonged to help him
carry the peasant to the police-station, promising him three roubles. The
man got ready and came out. I won’t describe in detail how Ivan succeeded
in his object, bringing the peasant to the police-station and arranging
for a doctor to see him at once, providing with a liberal hand for the
expenses. I will only say that this business took a whole hour, but Ivan
was well content with it. His mind wandered and worked incessantly.

“If I had not taken my decision so firmly for to-morrow,” he reflected
with satisfaction, “I should not have stayed a whole hour to look after
the peasant, but should have passed by, without caring about his being
frozen. I am quite capable of watching myself, by the way,” he thought at
the same instant, with still greater satisfaction, “although they have
decided that I am going out of my mind!”

Just as he reached his own house he stopped short, asking himself suddenly
hadn’t he better go at once to the prosecutor and tell him everything. He
decided the question by turning back to the house. “Everything together
to-morrow!” he whispered to himself, and, strange to say, almost all his
gladness and self-satisfaction passed in one instant.

As he entered his own room he felt something like a touch of ice on his
heart, like a recollection or, more exactly, a reminder, of something
agonizing and revolting that was in that room now, at that moment, and had
been there before. He sank wearily on his sofa. The old woman brought him
a samovar; he made tea, but did not touch it. He sat on the sofa and felt
giddy. He felt that he was ill and helpless. He was beginning to drop
asleep, but got up uneasily and walked across the room to shake off his
drowsiness. At moments he fancied he was delirious, but it was not illness
that he thought of most. Sitting down again, he began looking round, as
though searching for something. This happened several times. At last his
eyes were fastened intently on one point. Ivan smiled, but an angry flush
suffused his face. He sat a long time in his place, his head propped on
both arms, though he looked sideways at the same point, at the sofa that
stood against the opposite wall. There was evidently something, some
object, that irritated him there, worried him and tormented him.



Chapter IX. The Devil. Ivan’s Nightmare


I am not a doctor, but yet I feel that the moment has come when I must
inevitably give the reader some account of the nature of Ivan’s illness.
Anticipating events I can say at least one thing: he was at that moment on
the very eve of an attack of brain fever. Though his health had long been
affected, it had offered a stubborn resistance to the fever which in the
end gained complete mastery over it. Though I know nothing of medicine, I
venture to hazard the suggestion that he really had perhaps, by a terrible
effort of will, succeeded in delaying the attack for a time, hoping, of
course, to check it completely. He knew that he was unwell, but he loathed
the thought of being ill at that fatal time, at the approaching crisis in
his life, when he needed to have all his wits about him, to say what he
had to say boldly and resolutely and “to justify himself to himself.”

He had, however, consulted the new doctor, who had been brought from
Moscow by a fantastic notion of Katerina Ivanovna’s to which I have
referred already. After listening to him and examining him the doctor came
to the conclusion that he was actually suffering from some disorder of the
brain, and was not at all surprised by an admission which Ivan had
reluctantly made him. “Hallucinations are quite likely in your condition,”
the doctor opined, “though it would be better to verify them ... you must
take steps at once, without a moment’s delay, or things will go badly with
you.” But Ivan did not follow this judicious advice and did not take to
his bed to be nursed. “I am walking about, so I am strong enough, if I
drop, it’ll be different then, any one may nurse me who likes,” he
decided, dismissing the subject.

And so he was sitting almost conscious himself of his delirium and, as I
have said already, looking persistently at some object on the sofa against
the opposite wall. Some one appeared to be sitting there, though goodness
knows how he had come in, for he had not been in the room when Ivan came
into it, on his return from Smerdyakov. This was a person or, more
accurately speaking, a Russian gentleman of a particular kind, no longer
young, _qui faisait la cinquantaine_, as the French say, with rather long,
still thick, dark hair, slightly streaked with gray and a small pointed
beard. He was wearing a brownish reefer jacket, rather shabby, evidently
made by a good tailor though, and of a fashion at least three years old,
that had been discarded by smart and well-to-do people for the last two
years. His linen and his long scarf-like neck-tie were all such as are
worn by people who aim at being stylish, but on closer inspection his
linen was not over-clean and his wide scarf was very threadbare. The
visitor’s check trousers were of excellent cut, but were too light in
color and too tight for the present fashion. His soft fluffy white hat was
out of keeping with the season.

In brief there was every appearance of gentility on straitened means. It
looked as though the gentleman belonged to that class of idle landowners
who used to flourish in the times of serfdom. He had unmistakably been, at
some time, in good and fashionable society, had once had good connections,
had possibly preserved them indeed, but, after a gay youth, becoming
gradually impoverished on the abolition of serfdom, he had sunk into the
position of a poor relation of the best class, wandering from one good old
friend to another and received by them for his companionable and
accommodating disposition and as being, after all, a gentleman who could
be asked to sit down with any one, though, of course, not in a place of
honor. Such gentlemen of accommodating temper and dependent position, who
can tell a story, take a hand at cards, and who have a distinct aversion
for any duties that may be forced upon them, are usually solitary
creatures, either bachelors or widowers. Sometimes they have children, but
if so, the children are always being brought up at a distance, at some
aunt’s, to whom these gentlemen never allude in good society, seeming
ashamed of the relationship. They gradually lose sight of their children
altogether, though at intervals they receive a birthday or Christmas
letter from them and sometimes even answer it.

The countenance of the unexpected visitor was not so much good-natured, as
accommodating and ready to assume any amiable expression as occasion might
arise. He had no watch, but he had a tortoise-shell lorgnette on a black
ribbon. On the middle finger of his right hand was a massive gold ring
with a cheap opal stone in it.

Ivan was angrily silent and would not begin the conversation. The visitor
waited and sat exactly like a poor relation who had come down from his
room to keep his host company at tea, and was discreetly silent, seeing
that his host was frowning and preoccupied. But he was ready for any
affable conversation as soon as his host should begin it. All at once his
face expressed a sudden solicitude.

“I say,” he began to Ivan, “excuse me, I only mention it to remind you.
You went to Smerdyakov’s to find out about Katerina Ivanovna, but you came
away without finding out anything about her, you probably forgot—”

“Ah, yes,” broke from Ivan and his face grew gloomy with uneasiness. “Yes,
I’d forgotten ... but it doesn’t matter now, never mind, till to-morrow,”
he muttered to himself, “and you,” he added, addressing his visitor, “I
should have remembered that myself in a minute, for that was just what was
tormenting me! Why do you interfere, as if I should believe that you
prompted me, and that I didn’t remember it of myself?”

“Don’t believe it then,” said the gentleman, smiling amicably, “what’s the
good of believing against your will? Besides, proofs are no help to
believing, especially material proofs. Thomas believed, not because he saw
Christ risen, but because he wanted to believe, before he saw. Look at the
spiritualists, for instance.... I am very fond of them ... only fancy,
they imagine that they are serving the cause of religion, because the
devils show them their horns from the other world. That, they say, is a
material proof, so to speak, of the existence of another world. The other
world and material proofs, what next! And if you come to that, does
proving there’s a devil prove that there’s a God? I want to join an
idealist society, I’ll lead the opposition in it, I’ll say I am a realist,
but not a materialist, he he!”

“Listen,” Ivan suddenly got up from the table. “I seem to be delirious....
I am delirious, in fact, talk any nonsense you like, I don’t care! You
won’t drive me to fury, as you did last time. But I feel somehow
ashamed.... I want to walk about the room.... I sometimes don’t see you
and don’t even hear your voice as I did last time, but I always guess what
you are prating, for it’s I, _I myself speaking, not you_. Only I don’t
know whether I was dreaming last time or whether I really saw you. I’ll
wet a towel and put it on my head and perhaps you’ll vanish into air.”

Ivan went into the corner, took a towel, and did as he said, and with a
wet towel on his head began walking up and down the room.

“I am so glad you treat me so familiarly,” the visitor began.

“Fool,” laughed Ivan, “do you suppose I should stand on ceremony with you?
I am in good spirits now, though I’ve a pain in my forehead ... and in the
top of my head ... only please don’t talk philosophy, as you did last
time. If you can’t take yourself off, talk of something amusing. Talk
gossip, you are a poor relation, you ought to talk gossip. What a
nightmare to have! But I am not afraid of you. I’ll get the better of you.
I won’t be taken to a mad-house!”

“_C’est charmant_, poor relation. Yes, I am in my natural shape. For what
am I on earth but a poor relation? By the way, I am listening to you and
am rather surprised to find you are actually beginning to take me for
something real, not simply your fancy, as you persisted in declaring last
time—”

“Never for one minute have I taken you for reality,” Ivan cried with a
sort of fury. “You are a lie, you are my illness, you are a phantom. It’s
only that I don’t know how to destroy you and I see I must suffer for a
time. You are my hallucination. You are the incarnation of myself, but
only of one side of me ... of my thoughts and feelings, but only the
nastiest and stupidest of them. From that point of view you might be of
interest to me, if only I had time to waste on you—”

“Excuse me, excuse me, I’ll catch you. When you flew out at Alyosha under
the lamp-post this evening and shouted to him, ‘You learnt it from _him_!
How do you know that _he_ visits me?’ you were thinking of me then. So for
one brief moment you did believe that I really exist,” the gentleman
laughed blandly.

“Yes, that was a moment of weakness ... but I couldn’t believe in you. I
don’t know whether I was asleep or awake last time. Perhaps I was only
dreaming then and didn’t see you really at all—”

“And why were you so surly with Alyosha just now? He is a dear; I’ve
treated him badly over Father Zossima.”

“Don’t talk of Alyosha! How dare you, you flunkey!” Ivan laughed again.

“You scold me, but you laugh—that’s a good sign. But you are ever so much
more polite than you were last time and I know why: that great resolution
of yours—”

“Don’t speak of my resolution,” cried Ivan, savagely.

“I understand, I understand, _c’est noble, c’est charmant_, you are going
to defend your brother and to sacrifice yourself ... _C’est
chevaleresque_.”

“Hold your tongue, I’ll kick you!”

“I shan’t be altogether sorry, for then my object will be attained. If you
kick me, you must believe in my reality, for people don’t kick ghosts.
Joking apart, it doesn’t matter to me, scold if you like, though it’s
better to be a trifle more polite even to me. ‘Fool, flunkey!’ what
words!”

“Scolding you, I scold myself,” Ivan laughed again, “you are myself,
myself, only with a different face. You just say what I am thinking ...
and are incapable of saying anything new!”

“If I am like you in my way of thinking, it’s all to my credit,” the
gentleman declared, with delicacy and dignity.

“You choose out only my worst thoughts, and what’s more, the stupid ones.
You are stupid and vulgar. You are awfully stupid. No, I can’t put up with
you! What am I to do, what am I to do?” Ivan said through his clenched
teeth.

“My dear friend, above all things I want to behave like a gentleman and to
be recognized as such,” the visitor began in an excess of deprecating and
simple-hearted pride, typical of a poor relation. “I am poor, but ... I
won’t say very honest, but ... it’s an axiom generally accepted in society
that I am a fallen angel. I certainly can’t conceive how I can ever have
been an angel. If I ever was, it must have been so long ago that there’s
no harm in forgetting it. Now I only prize the reputation of being a
gentlemanly person and live as I can, trying to make myself agreeable. I
love men genuinely, I’ve been greatly calumniated! Here when I stay with
you from time to time, my life gains a kind of reality and that’s what I
like most of all. You see, like you, I suffer from the fantastic and so I
love the realism of earth. Here, with you, everything is circumscribed,
here all is formulated and geometrical, while we have nothing but
indeterminate equations! I wander about here dreaming. I like dreaming.
Besides, on earth I become superstitious. Please don’t laugh, that’s just
what I like, to become superstitious. I adopt all your habits here: I’ve
grown fond of going to the public baths, would you believe it? and I go
and steam myself with merchants and priests. What I dream of is becoming
incarnate once for all and irrevocably in the form of some merchant’s wife
weighing eighteen stone, and of believing all she believes. My ideal is to
go to church and offer a candle in simple-hearted faith, upon my word it
is. Then there would be an end to my sufferings. I like being doctored
too; in the spring there was an outbreak of smallpox and I went and was
vaccinated in a foundling hospital—if only you knew how I enjoyed myself
that day. I subscribed ten roubles in the cause of the Slavs!... But you
are not listening. Do you know, you are not at all well this evening? I
know you went yesterday to that doctor ... well, what about your health?
What did the doctor say?”

“Fool!” Ivan snapped out.

“But you are clever, anyway. You are scolding again? I didn’t ask out of
sympathy. You needn’t answer. Now rheumatism has come in again—”

“Fool!” repeated Ivan.

“You keep saying the same thing; but I had such an attack of rheumatism
last year that I remember it to this day.”

“The devil have rheumatism!”

“Why not, if I sometimes put on fleshly form? I put on fleshly form and I
take the consequences. Satan _sum et nihil humanum a me alienum puto_.”

“What, what, Satan _sum et nihil humanum_ ... that’s not bad for the
devil!”

“I am glad I’ve pleased you at last.”

“But you didn’t get that from me.” Ivan stopped suddenly, seeming struck.
“That never entered my head, that’s strange.”

“_C’est du nouveau, n’est-ce pas?_ This time I’ll act honestly and explain
to you. Listen, in dreams and especially in nightmares, from indigestion
or anything, a man sees sometimes such artistic visions, such complex and
real actuality, such events, even a whole world of events, woven into such
a plot, with such unexpected details from the most exalted matters to the
last button on a cuff, as I swear Leo Tolstoy has never invented. Yet such
dreams are sometimes seen not by writers, but by the most ordinary people,
officials, journalists, priests.... The subject is a complete enigma. A
statesman confessed to me, indeed, that all his best ideas came to him
when he was asleep. Well, that’s how it is now, though I am your
hallucination, yet just as in a nightmare, I say original things which had
not entered your head before. So I don’t repeat your ideas, yet I am only
your nightmare, nothing more.”

“You are lying, your aim is to convince me you exist apart and are not my
nightmare, and now you are asserting you are a dream.”

“My dear fellow, I’ve adopted a special method to-day, I’ll explain it to
you afterwards. Stay, where did I break off? Oh, yes! I caught cold then,
only not here but yonder.”

“Where is yonder? Tell me, will you be here long? Can’t you go away?” Ivan
exclaimed almost in despair. He ceased walking to and fro, sat down on the
sofa, leaned his elbows on the table again and held his head tight in both
hands. He pulled the wet towel off and flung it away in vexation. It was
evidently of no use.

“Your nerves are out of order,” observed the gentleman, with a carelessly
easy, though perfectly polite, air. “You are angry with me even for being
able to catch cold, though it happened in a most natural way. I was
hurrying then to a diplomatic _soirée_ at the house of a lady of high rank
in Petersburg, who was aiming at influence in the Ministry. Well, an
evening suit, white tie, gloves, though I was God knows where and had to
fly through space to reach your earth.... Of course, it took only an
instant, but you know a ray of light from the sun takes full eight
minutes, and fancy in an evening suit and open waistcoat. Spirits don’t
freeze, but when one’s in fleshly form, well ... in brief, I didn’t think,
and set off, and you know in those ethereal spaces, in the water that is
above the firmament, there’s such a frost ... at least one can’t call it
frost, you can fancy, 150 degrees below zero! You know the game the
village girls play—they invite the unwary to lick an ax in thirty degrees
of frost, the tongue instantly freezes to it and the dupe tears the skin
off, so it bleeds. But that’s only in 30 degrees, in 150 degrees I imagine
it would be enough to put your finger on the ax and it would be the end of
it ... if only there could be an ax there.”

“And can there be an ax there?” Ivan interrupted, carelessly and
disdainfully. He was exerting himself to the utmost not to believe in the
delusion and not to sink into complete insanity.

“An ax?” the guest interrupted in surprise.

“Yes, what would become of an ax there?” Ivan cried suddenly, with a sort
of savage and insistent obstinacy.

“What would become of an ax in space? _Quelle idée!_ If it were to fall to
any distance, it would begin, I think, flying round the earth without
knowing why, like a satellite. The astronomers would calculate the rising
and the setting of the ax, _Gatzuk_ would put it in his calendar, that’s
all.”

“You are stupid, awfully stupid,” said Ivan peevishly. “Fib more cleverly
or I won’t listen. You want to get the better of me by realism, to
convince me that you exist, but I don’t want to believe you exist! I won’t
believe it!”

“But I am not fibbing, it’s all the truth; the truth is unhappily hardly
ever amusing. I see you persist in expecting something big of me, and
perhaps something fine. That’s a great pity, for I only give what I can—”

“Don’t talk philosophy, you ass!”

“Philosophy, indeed, when all my right side is numb and I am moaning and
groaning. I’ve tried all the medical faculty: they can diagnose
beautifully, they have the whole of your disease at their finger-tips, but
they’ve no idea how to cure you. There was an enthusiastic little student
here, ‘You may die,’ said he, ‘but you’ll know perfectly what disease you
are dying of!’ And then what a way they have sending people to
specialists! ‘We only diagnose,’ they say, ‘but go to such-and-such a
specialist, he’ll cure you.’ The old doctor who used to cure all sorts of
disease has completely disappeared, I assure you, now there are only
specialists and they all advertise in the newspapers. If anything is wrong
with your nose, they send you to Paris: there, they say, is a European
specialist who cures noses. If you go to Paris, he’ll look at your nose; I
can only cure your right nostril, he’ll tell you, for I don’t cure the
left nostril, that’s not my speciality, but go to Vienna, there there’s a
specialist who will cure your left nostril. What are you to do? I fell
back on popular remedies, a German doctor advised me to rub myself with
honey and salt in the bath-house. Solely to get an extra bath I went,
smeared myself all over and it did me no good at all. In despair I wrote
to Count Mattei in Milan. He sent me a book and some drops, bless him,
and, only fancy, Hoff’s malt extract cured me! I bought it by accident,
drank a bottle and a half of it, and I was ready to dance, it took it away
completely. I made up my mind to write to the papers to thank him, I was
prompted by a feeling of gratitude, and only fancy, it led to no end of a
bother: not a single paper would take my letter. ‘It would be very
reactionary,’ they said, ‘no one will believe it. _Le diable n’existe
point._ You’d better remain anonymous,’ they advised me. What use is a
letter of thanks if it’s anonymous? I laughed with the men at the
newspaper office; ‘It’s reactionary to believe in God in our days,’ I
said, ‘but I am the devil, so I may be believed in.’ ‘We quite understand
that,’ they said. ‘Who doesn’t believe in the devil? Yet it won’t do, it
might injure our reputation. As a joke, if you like.’ But I thought as a
joke it wouldn’t be very witty. So it wasn’t printed. And do you know, I
have felt sore about it to this day. My best feelings, gratitude, for
instance, are literally denied me simply from my social position.”

“Philosophical reflections again?” Ivan snarled malignantly.

“God preserve me from it, but one can’t help complaining sometimes. I am a
slandered man. You upbraid me every moment with being stupid. One can see
you are young. My dear fellow, intelligence isn’t the only thing! I have
naturally a kind and merry heart. ‘I also write vaudevilles of all sorts.’
You seem to take me for Hlestakov grown old, but my fate is a far more
serious one. Before time was, by some decree which I could never make out,
I was pre-destined ‘to deny’ and yet I am genuinely good-hearted and not
at all inclined to negation. ‘No, you must go and deny, without denial
there’s no criticism and what would a journal be without a column of
criticism?’ Without criticism it would be nothing but one ‘hosannah.’ But
nothing but hosannah is not enough for life, the hosannah must be tried in
the crucible of doubt and so on, in the same style. But I don’t meddle in
that, I didn’t create it, I am not answerable for it. Well, they’ve chosen
their scapegoat, they’ve made me write the column of criticism and so life
was made possible. We understand that comedy; I, for instance, simply ask
for annihilation. No, live, I am told, for there’d be nothing without you.
If everything in the universe were sensible, nothing would happen. There
would be no events without you, and there must be events. So against the
grain I serve to produce events and do what’s irrational because I am
commanded to. For all their indisputable intelligence, men take this farce
as something serious, and that is their tragedy. They suffer, of course
... but then they live, they live a real life, not a fantastic one, for
suffering is life. Without suffering what would be the pleasure of it? It
would be transformed into an endless church service; it would be holy, but
tedious. But what about me? I suffer, but still, I don’t live. I am x in
an indeterminate equation. I am a sort of phantom in life who has lost all
beginning and end, and who has even forgotten his own name. You are
laughing— no, you are not laughing, you are angry again. You are for ever
angry, all you care about is intelligence, but I repeat again that I would
give away all this super-stellar life, all the ranks and honors, simply to
be transformed into the soul of a merchant’s wife weighing eighteen stone
and set candles at God’s shrine.”

“Then even you don’t believe in God?” said Ivan, with a smile of hatred.

“What can I say?—that is, if you are in earnest—”

“Is there a God or not?” Ivan cried with the same savage intensity.

“Ah, then you are in earnest! My dear fellow, upon my word I don’t know.
There! I’ve said it now!”

“You don’t know, but you see God? No, you are not some one apart, you are
myself, you are I and nothing more! You are rubbish, you are my fancy!”

“Well, if you like, I have the same philosophy as you, that would be true.
_Je pense, donc je suis_, I know that for a fact; all the rest, all these
worlds, God and even Satan—all that is not proved, to my mind. Does all
that exist of itself, or is it only an emanation of myself, a logical
development of my ego which alone has existed for ever: but I make haste
to stop, for I believe you will be jumping up to beat me directly.”

“You’d better tell me some anecdote!” said Ivan miserably.

“There is an anecdote precisely on our subject, or rather a legend, not an
anecdote. You reproach me with unbelief, you see, you say, yet you don’t
believe. But, my dear fellow, I am not the only one like that. We are all
in a muddle over there now and all through your science. Once there used
to be atoms, five senses, four elements, and then everything hung together
somehow. There were atoms in the ancient world even, but since we’ve
learned that you’ve discovered the chemical molecule and protoplasm and
the devil knows what, we had to lower our crest. There’s a regular muddle,
and, above all, superstition, scandal; there’s as much scandal among us as
among you, you know; a little more in fact, and spying, indeed, for we
have our secret police department where private information is received.
Well, this wild legend belongs to our middle ages—not yours, but ours—and
no one believes it even among us, except the old ladies of eighteen stone,
not your old ladies I mean, but ours. We’ve everything you have, I am
revealing one of our secrets out of friendship for you; though it’s
forbidden. This legend is about Paradise. There was, they say, here on
earth a thinker and philosopher. He rejected everything, ‘laws,
conscience, faith,’ and, above all, the future life. He died; he expected
to go straight to darkness and death and he found a future life before
him. He was astounded and indignant. ‘This is against my principles!’ he
said. And he was punished for that ... that is, you must excuse me, I am
just repeating what I heard myself, it’s only a legend ... he was
sentenced to walk a quadrillion kilometers in the dark (we’ve adopted the
metric system, you know) and when he has finished that quadrillion, the
gates of heaven would be opened to him and he’ll be forgiven—”

“And what tortures have you in the other world besides the quadrillion
kilometers?” asked Ivan, with a strange eagerness.

“What tortures? Ah, don’t ask. In old days we had all sorts, but now they
have taken chiefly to moral punishments—‘the stings of conscience’ and all
that nonsense. We got that, too, from you, from the softening of your
manners. And who’s the better for it? Only those who have got no
conscience, for how can they be tortured by conscience when they have
none? But decent people who have conscience and a sense of honor suffer
for it. Reforms, when the ground has not been prepared for them,
especially if they are institutions copied from abroad, do nothing but
mischief! The ancient fire was better. Well, this man, who was condemned
to the quadrillion kilometers, stood still, looked round and lay down
across the road. ‘I won’t go, I refuse on principle!’ Take the soul of an
enlightened Russian atheist and mix it with the soul of the prophet Jonah,
who sulked for three days and nights in the belly of the whale, and you
get the character of that thinker who lay across the road.”

“What did he lie on there?”

“Well, I suppose there was something to lie on. You are not laughing?”

“Bravo!” cried Ivan, still with the same strange eagerness. Now he was
listening with an unexpected curiosity. “Well, is he lying there now?”

“That’s the point, that he isn’t. He lay there almost a thousand years and
then he got up and went on.”

“What an ass!” cried Ivan, laughing nervously and still seeming to be
pondering something intently. “Does it make any difference whether he lies
there for ever or walks the quadrillion kilometers? It would take a
billion years to walk it?”

“Much more than that. I haven’t got a pencil and paper or I could work it
out. But he got there long ago, and that’s where the story begins.”

“What, he got there? But how did he get the billion years to do it?”

“Why, you keep thinking of our present earth! But our present earth may
have been repeated a billion times. Why, it’s become extinct, been frozen;
cracked, broken to bits, disintegrated into its elements, again ‘the water
above the firmament,’ then again a comet, again a sun, again from the sun
it becomes earth—and the same sequence may have been repeated endlessly
and exactly the same to every detail, most unseemly and insufferably
tedious—”

“Well, well, what happened when he arrived?”

“Why, the moment the gates of Paradise were open and he walked in, before
he had been there two seconds, by his watch (though to my thinking his
watch must have long dissolved into its elements on the way), he cried out
that those two seconds were worth walking not a quadrillion kilometers but
a quadrillion of quadrillions, raised to the quadrillionth power! In fact,
he sang ‘hosannah’ and overdid it so, that some persons there of lofty
ideas wouldn’t shake hands with him at first—he’d become too rapidly
reactionary, they said. The Russian temperament. I repeat, it’s a legend.
I give it for what it’s worth. So that’s the sort of ideas we have on such
subjects even now.”

“I’ve caught you!” Ivan cried, with an almost childish delight, as though
he had succeeded in remembering something at last. “That anecdote about
the quadrillion years, I made up myself! I was seventeen then, I was at
the high school. I made up that anecdote and told it to a schoolfellow
called Korovkin, it was at Moscow.... The anecdote is so characteristic
that I couldn’t have taken it from anywhere. I thought I’d forgotten it
... but I’ve unconsciously recalled it—I recalled it myself—it was not you
telling it! Thousands of things are unconsciously remembered like that
even when people are being taken to execution ... it’s come back to me in
a dream. You are that dream! You are a dream, not a living creature!”

“From the vehemence with which you deny my existence,” laughed the
gentleman, “I am convinced that you believe in me.”

“Not in the slightest! I haven’t a hundredth part of a grain of faith in
you!”

“But you have the thousandth of a grain. Homeopathic doses perhaps are the
strongest. Confess that you have faith even to the ten-thousandth of a
grain.”

“Not for one minute,” cried Ivan furiously. “But I should like to believe
in you,” he added strangely.

“Aha! There’s an admission! But I am good-natured. I’ll come to your
assistance again. Listen, it was I caught you, not you me. I told you your
anecdote you’d forgotten, on purpose, so as to destroy your faith in me
completely.”

“You are lying. The object of your visit is to convince me of your
existence!”

“Just so. But hesitation, suspense, conflict between belief and
disbelief—is sometimes such torture to a conscientious man, such as you
are, that it’s better to hang oneself at once. Knowing that you are
inclined to believe in me, I administered some disbelief by telling you
that anecdote. I lead you to belief and disbelief by turns, and I have my
motive in it. It’s the new method. As soon as you disbelieve in me
completely, you’ll begin assuring me to my face that I am not a dream but
a reality. I know you. Then I shall have attained my object, which is an
honorable one. I shall sow in you only a tiny grain of faith and it will
grow into an oak-tree—and such an oak-tree that, sitting on it, you will
long to enter the ranks of ‘the hermits in the wilderness and the saintly
women,’ for that is what you are secretly longing for. You’ll dine on
locusts, you’ll wander into the wilderness to save your soul!”

“Then it’s for the salvation of my soul you are working, is it, you
scoundrel?”

“One must do a good work sometimes. How ill-humored you are!”

“Fool! did you ever tempt those holy men who ate locusts and prayed
seventeen years in the wilderness till they were overgrown with moss?”

“My dear fellow, I’ve done nothing else. One forgets the whole world and
all the worlds, and sticks to one such saint, because he is a very
precious diamond. One such soul, you know, is sometimes worth a whole
constellation. We have our system of reckoning, you know. The conquest is
priceless! And some of them, on my word, are not inferior to you in
culture, though you won’t believe it. They can contemplate such depths of
belief and disbelief at the same moment that sometimes it really seems
that they are within a hair’s-breadth of being ‘turned upside down,’ as
the actor Gorbunov says.”

“Well, did you get your nose pulled?”(8)

“My dear fellow,” observed the visitor sententiously, “it’s better to get
off with your nose pulled than without a nose at all. As an afflicted
marquis observed not long ago (he must have been treated by a specialist)
in confession to his spiritual father—a Jesuit. I was present, it was
simply charming. ‘Give me back my nose!’ he said, and he beat his breast.
‘My son,’ said the priest evasively, ‘all things are accomplished in
accordance with the inscrutable decrees of Providence, and what seems a
misfortune sometimes leads to extraordinary, though unapparent, benefits.
If stern destiny has deprived you of your nose, it’s to your advantage
that no one can ever pull you by your nose.’ ‘Holy father, that’s no
comfort,’ cried the despairing marquis. ‘I’d be delighted to have my nose
pulled every day of my life, if it were only in its proper place.’ ‘My
son,’ sighs the priest, ‘you can’t expect every blessing at once. This is
murmuring against Providence, who even in this has not forgotten you, for
if you repine as you repined just now, declaring you’d be glad to have
your nose pulled for the rest of your life, your desire has already been
fulfilled indirectly, for when you lost your nose, you were led by the
nose.’ ”

“Fool, how stupid!” cried Ivan.

“My dear friend, I only wanted to amuse you. But I swear that’s the
genuine Jesuit casuistry and I swear that it all happened word for word as
I’ve told you. It happened lately and gave me a great deal of trouble. The
unhappy young man shot himself that very night when he got home. I was by
his side till the very last moment. Those Jesuit confessionals are really
my most delightful diversion at melancholy moments. Here’s another
incident that happened only the other day. A little blonde Norman girl of
twenty—a buxom, unsophisticated beauty that would make your mouth
water—comes to an old priest. She bends down and whispers her sin into the
grating. ‘Why, my daughter, have you fallen again already?’ cries the
priest. ‘O Sancta Maria, what do I hear! Not the same man this time, how
long is this going on? Aren’t you ashamed!’ ‘_Ah, mon père_,’ answers the
sinner with tears of penitence, ‘_ça lui fait tant de plaisir, et à moi si
peu de peine!_’ Fancy, such an answer! I drew back. It was the cry of
nature, better than innocence itself, if you like. I absolved her sin on
the spot and was turning to go, but I was forced to turn back. I heard the
priest at the grating making an appointment with her for the
evening—though he was an old man hard as flint, he fell in an instant! It
was nature, the truth of nature asserted its rights! What, you are turning
up your nose again? Angry again? I don’t know how to please you—”

“Leave me alone, you are beating on my brain like a haunting nightmare,”
Ivan moaned miserably, helpless before his apparition. “I am bored with
you, agonizingly and insufferably. I would give anything to be able to
shake you off!”

“I repeat, moderate your expectations, don’t demand of me ‘everything
great and noble’ and you’ll see how well we shall get on,” said the
gentleman impressively. “You are really angry with me for not having
appeared to you in a red glow, with thunder and lightning, with scorched
wings, but have shown myself in such a modest form. You are wounded, in
the first place, in your esthetic feelings, and, secondly, in your pride.
How could such a vulgar devil visit such a great man as you! Yes, there is
that romantic strain in you, that was so derided by Byelinsky. I can’t
help it, young man, as I got ready to come to you I did think as a joke of
appearing in the figure of a retired general who had served in the
Caucasus, with a star of the Lion and the Sun on my coat. But I was
positively afraid of doing it, for you’d have thrashed me for daring to
pin the Lion and the Sun on my coat, instead of, at least, the Polar Star
or the Sirius. And you keep on saying I am stupid, but, mercy on us! I
make no claim to be equal to you in intelligence. Mephistopheles declared
to Faust that he desired evil, but did only good. Well, he can say what he
likes, it’s quite the opposite with me. I am perhaps the one man in all
creation who loves the truth and genuinely desires good. I was there when
the Word, Who died on the Cross, rose up into heaven bearing on His bosom
the soul of the penitent thief. I heard the glad shrieks of the cherubim
singing and shouting hosannah and the thunderous rapture of the seraphim
which shook heaven and all creation, and I swear to you by all that’s
sacred, I longed to join the choir and shout hosannah with them all. The
word had almost escaped me, had almost broken from my lips ... you know
how susceptible and esthetically impressionable I am. But common sense—oh,
a most unhappy trait in my character—kept me in due bounds and I let the
moment pass! For what would have happened, I reflected, what would have
happened after my hosannah? Everything on earth would have been
extinguished at once and no events could have occurred. And so, solely
from a sense of duty and my social position, I was forced to suppress the
good moment and to stick to my nasty task. Somebody takes all the credit
of what’s good for Himself, and nothing but nastiness is left for me. But
I don’t envy the honor of a life of idle imposture, I am not ambitious.
Why am I, of all creatures in the world, doomed to be cursed by all decent
people and even to be kicked, for if I put on mortal form I am bound to
take such consequences sometimes? I know, of course, there’s a secret in
it, but they won’t tell me the secret for anything, for then perhaps,
seeing the meaning of it, I might bawl hosannah, and the indispensable
minus would disappear at once, and good sense would reign supreme
throughout the whole world. And that, of course, would mean the end of
everything, even of magazines and newspapers, for who would take them in?
I know that at the end of all things I shall be reconciled. I, too, shall
walk my quadrillion and learn the secret. But till that happens I am
sulking and fulfill my destiny though it’s against the grain—that is, to
ruin thousands for the sake of saving one. How many souls have had to be
ruined and how many honorable reputations destroyed for the sake of that
one righteous man, Job, over whom they made such a fool of me in old days!
Yes, till the secret is revealed, there are two sorts of truths for
me—one, their truth, yonder, which I know nothing about so far, and the
other my own. And there’s no knowing which will turn out the better....
Are you asleep?”

“I might well be,” Ivan groaned angrily. “All my stupid ideas—outgrown,
thrashed out long ago, and flung aside like a dead carcass—you present to
me as something new!”

“There’s no pleasing you! And I thought I should fascinate you by my
literary style. That hosannah in the skies really wasn’t bad, was it? And
then that ironical tone _à la_ Heine, eh?”

“No, I was never such a flunkey! How then could my soul beget a flunkey
like you?”

“My dear fellow, I know a most charming and attractive young Russian
gentleman, a young thinker and a great lover of literature and art, the
author of a promising poem entitled _The Grand Inquisitor_. I was only
thinking of him!”

“I forbid you to speak of _The Grand Inquisitor_,” cried Ivan, crimson
with shame.

“And the _Geological Cataclysm_. Do you remember? That was a poem, now!”

“Hold your tongue, or I’ll kill you!”

“You’ll kill me? No, excuse me, I will speak. I came to treat myself to
that pleasure. Oh, I love the dreams of my ardent young friends, quivering
with eagerness for life! ‘There are new men,’ you decided last spring,
when you were meaning to come here, ‘they propose to destroy everything
and begin with cannibalism. Stupid fellows! they didn’t ask my advice! I
maintain that nothing need be destroyed, that we only need to destroy the
idea of God in man, that’s how we have to set to work. It’s that, that we
must begin with. Oh, blind race of men who have no understanding! As soon
as men have all of them denied God—and I believe that period, analogous
with geological periods, will come to pass—the old conception of the
universe will fall of itself without cannibalism, and, what’s more, the
old morality, and everything will begin anew. Men will unite to take from
life all it can give, but only for joy and happiness in the present world.
Man will be lifted up with a spirit of divine Titanic pride and the
man-god will appear. From hour to hour extending his conquest of nature
infinitely by his will and his science, man will feel such lofty joy from
hour to hour in doing it that it will make up for all his old dreams of
the joys of heaven. Every one will know that he is mortal and will accept
death proudly and serenely like a god. His pride will teach him that it’s
useless for him to repine at life’s being a moment, and he will love his
brother without need of reward. Love will be sufficient only for a moment
of life, but the very consciousness of its momentariness will intensify
its fire, which now is dissipated in dreams of eternal love beyond the
grave’... and so on and so on in the same style. Charming!”

Ivan sat with his eyes on the floor, and his hands pressed to his ears,
but he began trembling all over. The voice continued.

“The question now is, my young thinker reflected, is it possible that such
a period will ever come? If it does, everything is determined and humanity
is settled for ever. But as, owing to man’s inveterate stupidity, this
cannot come about for at least a thousand years, every one who recognizes
the truth even now may legitimately order his life as he pleases, on the
new principles. In that sense, ‘all things are lawful’ for him. What’s
more, even if this period never comes to pass, since there is anyway no
God and no immortality, the new man may well become the man-god, even if
he is the only one in the whole world, and promoted to his new position,
he may lightheartedly overstep all the barriers of the old morality of the
old slave-man, if necessary. There is no law for God. Where God stands,
the place is holy. Where I stand will be at once the foremost place ...
‘all things are lawful’ and that’s the end of it! That’s all very
charming; but if you want to swindle why do you want a moral sanction for
doing it? But that’s our modern Russian all over. He can’t bring himself
to swindle without a moral sanction. He is so in love with truth—”

The visitor talked, obviously carried away by his own eloquence, speaking
louder and louder and looking ironically at his host. But he did not
succeed in finishing; Ivan suddenly snatched a glass from the table and
flung it at the orator.

“_Ah, mais c’est bête enfin_,” cried the latter, jumping up from the sofa
and shaking the drops of tea off himself. “He remembers Luther’s inkstand!
He takes me for a dream and throws glasses at a dream! It’s like a woman!
I suspected you were only pretending to stop up your ears.”

A loud, persistent knocking was suddenly heard at the window. Ivan jumped
up from the sofa.

“Do you hear? You’d better open,” cried the visitor; “it’s your brother
Alyosha with the most interesting and surprising news, I’ll be bound!”

“Be silent, deceiver, I knew it was Alyosha, I felt he was coming, and of
course he has not come for nothing; of course he brings ‘news,’ ” Ivan
exclaimed frantically.

“Open, open to him. There’s a snowstorm and he is your brother. _Monsieur
sait-il le temps qu’il fait? C’est à ne pas mettre un chien dehors_.”

The knocking continued. Ivan wanted to rush to the window, but something
seemed to fetter his arms and legs. He strained every effort to break his
chains, but in vain. The knocking at the window grew louder and louder. At
last the chains were broken and Ivan leapt up from the sofa. He looked
round him wildly. Both candles had almost burnt out, the glass he had just
thrown at his visitor stood before him on the table, and there was no one
on the sofa opposite. The knocking on the window frame went on
persistently, but it was by no means so loud as it had seemed in his
dream; on the contrary, it was quite subdued.

“It was not a dream! No, I swear it was not a dream, it all happened just
now!” cried Ivan. He rushed to the window and opened the movable pane.

“Alyosha, I told you not to come,” he cried fiercely to his brother. “In
two words, what do you want? In two words, do you hear?”

“An hour ago Smerdyakov hanged himself,” Alyosha answered from the yard.

“Come round to the steps, I’ll open at once,” said Ivan, going to open the
door to Alyosha.



Chapter X. “It Was He Who Said That”


Alyosha coming in told Ivan that a little over an hour ago Marya
Kondratyevna had run to his rooms and informed him Smerdyakov had taken
his own life. “I went in to clear away the samovar and he was hanging on a
nail in the wall.” On Alyosha’s inquiring whether she had informed the
police, she answered that she had told no one, “but I flew straight to
you, I’ve run all the way.” She seemed perfectly crazy, Alyosha reported,
and was shaking like a leaf. When Alyosha ran with her to the cottage, he
found Smerdyakov still hanging. On the table lay a note: “I destroy my
life of my own will and desire, so as to throw no blame on any one.”
Alyosha left the note on the table and went straight to the police captain
and told him all about it. “And from him I’ve come straight to you,” said
Alyosha, in conclusion, looking intently into Ivan’s face. He had not
taken his eyes off him while he told his story, as though struck by
something in his expression.

“Brother,” he cried suddenly, “you must be terribly ill. You look and
don’t seem to understand what I tell you.”

“It’s a good thing you came,” said Ivan, as though brooding, and not
hearing Alyosha’s exclamation. “I knew he had hanged himself.”

“From whom?”

“I don’t know. But I knew. Did I know? Yes, he told me. He told me so just
now.”

Ivan stood in the middle of the room, and still spoke in the same brooding
tone, looking at the ground.

“Who is _he_?” asked Alyosha, involuntarily looking round.

“He’s slipped away.”

Ivan raised his head and smiled softly.

“He was afraid of you, of a dove like you. You are a ‘pure cherub.’ Dmitri
calls you a cherub. Cherub!... the thunderous rapture of the seraphim.
What are seraphim? Perhaps a whole constellation. But perhaps that
constellation is only a chemical molecule. There’s a constellation of the
Lion and the Sun. Don’t you know it?”

“Brother, sit down,” said Alyosha in alarm. “For goodness’ sake, sit down
on the sofa! You are delirious; put your head on the pillow, that’s right.
Would you like a wet towel on your head? Perhaps it will do you good.”

“Give me the towel: it’s here on the chair. I just threw it down there.”

“It’s not here. Don’t worry yourself. I know where it is—here,” said
Alyosha, finding a clean towel, folded up and unused, by Ivan’s
dressing-table in the other corner of the room. Ivan looked strangely at
the towel: recollection seemed to come back to him for an instant.

“Stay”—he got up from the sofa—“an hour ago I took that new towel from
there and wetted it. I wrapped it round my head and threw it down here ...
How is it it’s dry? There was no other.”

“You put that towel on your head?” asked Alyosha.

“Yes, and walked up and down the room an hour ago ... Why have the candles
burnt down so? What’s the time?”

“Nearly twelve.”

“No, no, no!” Ivan cried suddenly. “It was not a dream. He was here; he
was sitting here, on that sofa. When you knocked at the window, I threw a
glass at him ... this one. Wait a minute. I was asleep last time, but this
dream was not a dream. It has happened before. I have dreams now, Alyosha
... yet they are not dreams, but reality. I walk about, talk and see ...
though I am asleep. But he was sitting here, on that sofa there.... He is
frightfully stupid, Alyosha, frightfully stupid.” Ivan laughed suddenly
and began pacing about the room.

“Who is stupid? Of whom are you talking, brother?” Alyosha asked anxiously
again.

“The devil! He’s taken to visiting me. He’s been here twice, almost three
times. He taunted me with being angry at his being a simple devil and not
Satan, with scorched wings, in thunder and lightning. But he is not Satan:
that’s a lie. He is an impostor. He is simply a devil—a paltry, trivial
devil. He goes to the baths. If you undressed him, you’d be sure to find
he had a tail, long and smooth like a Danish dog’s, a yard long, dun
color.... Alyosha, you are cold. You’ve been in the snow. Would you like
some tea? What? Is it cold? Shall I tell her to bring some? _C’est à ne
pas mettre un chien dehors._...”

Alyosha ran to the washing-stand, wetted the towel, persuaded Ivan to sit
down again, and put the wet towel round his head. He sat down beside him.

“What were you telling me just now about Lise?” Ivan began again. (He was
becoming very talkative.) “I like Lise. I said something nasty about her.
It was a lie. I like her ... I am afraid for Katya to-morrow. I am more
afraid of her than of anything. On account of the future. She will cast me
off to-morrow and trample me under foot. She thinks that I am ruining
Mitya from jealousy on her account! Yes, she thinks that! But it’s not so.
To-morrow the cross, but not the gallows. No, I shan’t hang myself. Do you
know, I can never commit suicide, Alyosha. Is it because I am base? I am
not a coward. Is it from love of life? How did I know that Smerdyakov had
hanged himself? Yes, it was _he_ told me so.”

“And you are quite convinced that there has been some one here?” asked
Alyosha.

“Yes, on that sofa in the corner. You would have driven him away. You did
drive him away: he disappeared when you arrived. I love your face,
Alyosha. Did you know that I loved your face? And _he_ is myself, Alyosha.
All that’s base in me, all that’s mean and contemptible. Yes, I am a
romantic. He guessed it ... though it’s a libel. He is frightfully stupid;
but it’s to his advantage. He has cunning, animal cunning—he knew how to
infuriate me. He kept taunting me with believing in him, and that was how
he made me listen to him. He fooled me like a boy. He told me a great deal
that was true about myself, though. I should never have owned it to
myself. Do you know, Alyosha,” Ivan added in an intensely earnest and
confidential tone, “I should be awfully glad to think that it was _he_ and
not I.”

“He has worn you out,” said Alyosha, looking compassionately at his
brother.

“He’s been teasing me. And you know he does it so cleverly, so cleverly.
‘Conscience! What is conscience? I make it up for myself. Why am I
tormented by it? From habit. From the universal habit of mankind for the
seven thousand years. So let us give it up, and we shall be gods.’ It was
he said that, it was he said that!”

“And not you, not you?” Alyosha could not help crying, looking frankly at
his brother. “Never mind him, anyway; have done with him and forget him.
And let him take with him all that you curse now, and never come back!”

“Yes, but he is spiteful. He laughed at me. He was impudent, Alyosha,”
Ivan said, with a shudder of offense. “But he was unfair to me, unfair to
me about lots of things. He told lies about me to my face. ‘Oh, you are
going to perform an act of heroic virtue: to confess you murdered your
father, that the valet murdered him at your instigation.’ ”

“Brother,” Alyosha interposed, “restrain yourself. It was not you murdered
him. It’s not true!”

“That’s what he says, he, and he knows it. ‘You are going to perform an
act of heroic virtue, and you don’t believe in virtue; that’s what
tortures you and makes you angry, that’s why you are so vindictive.’ He
said that to me about me and he knows what he says.”

“It’s you say that, not he,” exclaimed Alyosha mournfully, “and you say it
because you are ill and delirious, tormenting yourself.”

“No, he knows what he says. ‘You are going from pride,’ he says. ‘You’ll
stand up and say it was I killed him, and why do you writhe with horror?
You are lying! I despise your opinion, I despise your horror!’ He said
that about me. ‘And do you know you are longing for their praise—“he is a
criminal, a murderer, but what a generous soul; he wanted to save his
brother and he confessed.” ’ That’s a lie, Alyosha!” Ivan cried suddenly,
with flashing eyes. “I don’t want the low rabble to praise me, I swear I
don’t! That’s a lie! That’s why I threw the glass at him and it broke
against his ugly face.”

“Brother, calm yourself, stop!” Alyosha entreated him.

“Yes, he knows how to torment one. He’s cruel,” Ivan went on, unheeding.
“I had an inkling from the first what he came for. ‘Granting that you go
through pride, still you had a hope that Smerdyakov might be convicted and
sent to Siberia, and Mitya would be acquitted, while you would only be
punished with moral condemnation’ (‘Do you hear?’ he laughed then)—‘and
some people will praise you. But now Smerdyakov’s dead, he has hanged
himself, and who’ll believe you alone? But yet you are going, you are
going, you’ll go all the same, you’ve decided to go. What are you going
for now?’ That’s awful, Alyosha. I can’t endure such questions. Who dare
ask me such questions?”

“Brother,” interposed Alyosha—his heart sank with terror, but he still
seemed to hope to bring Ivan to reason—“how could he have told you of
Smerdyakov’s death before I came, when no one knew of it and there was no
time for any one to know of it?”

“He told me,” said Ivan firmly, refusing to admit a doubt. “It was all he
did talk about, if you come to that. ‘And it would be all right if you
believed in virtue,’ he said. ‘No matter if they disbelieve you, you are
going for the sake of principle. But you are a little pig like Fyodor
Pavlovitch, and what do you want with virtue? Why do you want to go
meddling if your sacrifice is of no use to any one? Because you don’t know
yourself why you go! Oh, you’d give a great deal to know yourself why you
go! And can you have made up your mind? You’ve not made up your mind.
You’ll sit all night deliberating whether to go or not. But you will go;
you know you’ll go. You know that whichever way you decide, the decision
does not depend on you. You’ll go because you won’t dare not to go. Why
won’t you dare? You must guess that for yourself. That’s a riddle for
you!’ He got up and went away. You came and he went. He called me a
coward, Alyosha! _Le mot de l’énigme_ is that I am a coward. ‘It is not
for such eagles to soar above the earth.’ It was he added that—he! And
Smerdyakov said the same. He must be killed! Katya despises me. I’ve seen
that for a month past. Even Lise will begin to despise me! ‘You are going
in order to be praised.’ That’s a brutal lie! And you despise me too,
Alyosha. Now I am going to hate you again! And I hate the monster, too! I
hate the monster! I don’t want to save the monster. Let him rot in
Siberia! He’s begun singing a hymn! Oh, to-morrow I’ll go, stand before
them, and spit in their faces!”

He jumped up in a frenzy, flung off the towel, and fell to pacing up and
down the room again. Alyosha recalled what he had just said. “I seem to be
sleeping awake.... I walk, I speak, I see, but I am asleep.” It seemed to
be just like that now. Alyosha did not leave him. The thought passed
through his mind to run for a doctor, but he was afraid to leave his
brother alone: there was no one to whom he could leave him. By degrees
Ivan lost consciousness completely at last. He still went on talking,
talking incessantly, but quite incoherently, and even articulated his
words with difficulty. Suddenly he staggered violently; but Alyosha was in
time to support him. Ivan let him lead him to his bed. Alyosha undressed
him somehow and put him to bed. He sat watching over him for another two
hours. The sick man slept soundly, without stirring, breathing softly and
evenly. Alyosha took a pillow and lay down on the sofa, without
undressing.

As he fell asleep he prayed for Mitya and Ivan. He began to understand
Ivan’s illness. “The anguish of a proud determination. An earnest
conscience!” God, in Whom he disbelieved, and His truth were gaining
mastery over his heart, which still refused to submit. “Yes,” the thought
floated through Alyosha’s head as it lay on the pillow, “yes, if
Smerdyakov is dead, no one will believe Ivan’s evidence; but he will go
and give it.” Alyosha smiled softly. “God will conquer!” he thought. “He
will either rise up in the light of truth, or ... he’ll perish in hate,
revenging on himself and on every one his having served the cause he does
not believe in,” Alyosha added bitterly, and again he prayed for Ivan.




Book XII. A Judicial Error



Chapter I. The Fatal Day


At ten o’clock in the morning of the day following the events I have
described, the trial of Dmitri Karamazov began in our district court.

I hasten to emphasize the fact that I am far from esteeming myself capable
of reporting all that took place at the trial in full detail, or even in
the actual order of events. I imagine that to mention everything with full
explanation would fill a volume, even a very large one. And so I trust I
may not be reproached, for confining myself to what struck me. I may have
selected as of most interest what was of secondary importance, and may
have omitted the most prominent and essential details. But I see I shall
do better not to apologize. I will do my best and the reader will see for
himself that I have done all I can.

And, to begin with, before entering the court, I will mention what
surprised me most on that day. Indeed, as it appeared later, every one was
surprised at it, too. We all knew that the affair had aroused great
interest, that every one was burning with impatience for the trial to
begin, that it had been a subject of talk, conjecture, exclamation and
surmise for the last two months in local society. Every one knew, too,
that the case had become known throughout Russia, but yet we had not
imagined that it had aroused such burning, such intense, interest in every
one, not only among ourselves, but all over Russia. This became evident at
the trial this day.

Visitors had arrived not only from the chief town of our province, but
from several other Russian towns, as well as from Moscow and Petersburg.
Among them were lawyers, ladies, and even several distinguished
personages. Every ticket of admission had been snatched up. A special
place behind the table at which the three judges sat was set apart for the
most distinguished and important of the men visitors; a row of arm-chairs
had been placed there—something exceptional, which had never been allowed
before. A large proportion—not less than half of the public—were ladies.
There was such a large number of lawyers from all parts that they did not
know where to seat them, for every ticket had long since been eagerly
sought for and distributed. I saw at the end of the room, behind the
platform, a special partition hurriedly put up, behind which all these
lawyers were admitted, and they thought themselves lucky to have standing
room there, for all chairs had been removed for the sake of space, and the
crowd behind the partition stood throughout the case closely packed,
shoulder to shoulder.

Some of the ladies, especially those who came from a distance, made their
appearance in the gallery very smartly dressed, but the majority of the
ladies were oblivious even of dress. Their faces betrayed hysterical,
intense, almost morbid, curiosity. A peculiar fact—established afterwards
by many observations—was that almost all the ladies, or, at least the vast
majority of them, were on Mitya’s side and in favor of his being
acquitted. This was perhaps chiefly owing to his reputation as a conqueror
of female hearts. It was known that two women rivals were to appear in the
case. One of them—Katerina Ivanovna—was an object of general interest. All
sorts of extraordinary tales were told about her, amazing anecdotes of her
passion for Mitya, in spite of his crime. Her pride and “aristocratic
connections” were particularly insisted upon (she had called upon scarcely
any one in the town). People said she intended to petition the Government
for leave to accompany the criminal to Siberia and to be married to him
somewhere in the mines. The appearance of Grushenka in court was awaited
with no less impatience. The public was looking forward with anxious
curiosity to the meeting of the two rivals—the proud aristocratic girl and
“the hetaira.” But Grushenka was a more familiar figure to the ladies of
the district than Katerina Ivanovna. They had already seen “the woman who
had ruined Fyodor Pavlovitch and his unhappy son,” and all, almost without
exception, wondered how father and son could be so in love with “such a
very common, ordinary Russian girl, who was not even pretty.”

In brief, there was a great deal of talk. I know for a fact that there
were several serious family quarrels on Mitya’s account in our town. Many
ladies quarreled violently with their husbands over differences of opinion
about the dreadful case, and it was only natural that the husbands of
these ladies, far from being favorably disposed to the prisoner, should
enter the court bitterly prejudiced against him. In fact, one may say
pretty certainly that the masculine, as distinguished from the feminine,
part of the audience were biased against the prisoner. There were numbers
of severe, frowning, even vindictive faces. Mitya, indeed, had managed to
offend many people during his stay in the town. Some of the visitors were,
of course, in excellent spirits and quite unconcerned as to the fate of
Mitya personally. But all were interested in the trial, and the majority
of the men were certainly hoping for the conviction of the criminal,
except perhaps the lawyers, who were more interested in the legal than in
the moral aspect of the case.

Everybody was excited at the presence of the celebrated lawyer,
Fetyukovitch. His talent was well known, and this was not the first time
he had defended notorious criminal cases in the provinces. And if he
defended them, such cases became celebrated and long remembered all over
Russia. There were stories, too, about our prosecutor and about the
President of the Court. It was said that Ippolit Kirillovitch was in a
tremor at meeting Fetyukovitch, and that they had been enemies from the
beginning of their careers in Petersburg, that though our sensitive
prosecutor, who always considered that he had been aggrieved by some one
in Petersburg because his talents had not been properly appreciated, was
keenly excited over the Karamazov case, and was even dreaming of
rebuilding his flagging fortunes by means of it, Fetyukovitch, they said,
was his one anxiety. But these rumors were not quite just. Our prosecutor
was not one of those men who lose heart in face of danger. On the
contrary, his self-confidence increased with the increase of danger. It
must be noted that our prosecutor was in general too hasty and morbidly
impressionable. He would put his whole soul into some case and work at it
as though his whole fate and his whole fortune depended on its result.
This was the subject of some ridicule in the legal world, for just by this
characteristic our prosecutor had gained a wider notoriety than could have
been expected from his modest position. People laughed particularly at his
passion for psychology. In my opinion, they were wrong, and our prosecutor
was, I believe, a character of greater depth than was generally supposed.
But with his delicate health he had failed to make his mark at the outset
of his career and had never made up for it later.

As for the President of our Court, I can only say that he was a humane and
cultured man, who had a practical knowledge of his work and progressive
views. He was rather ambitious, but did not concern himself greatly about
his future career. The great aim of his life was to be a man of advanced
ideas. He was, too, a man of connections and property. He felt, as we
learnt afterwards, rather strongly about the Karamazov case, but from a
social, not from a personal standpoint. He was interested in it as a
social phenomenon, in its classification and its character as a product of
our social conditions, as typical of the national character, and so on,
and so on. His attitude to the personal aspect of the case, to its tragic
significance and the persons involved in it, including the prisoner, was
rather indifferent and abstract, as was perhaps fitting, indeed.

The court was packed and overflowing long before the judges made their
appearance. Our court is the best hall in the town—spacious, lofty, and
good for sound. On the right of the judges, who were on a raised platform,
a table and two rows of chairs had been put ready for the jury. On the
left was the place for the prisoner and the counsel for the defense. In
the middle of the court, near the judges, was a table with the “material
proofs.” On it lay Fyodor Pavlovitch’s white silk dressing-gown, stained
with blood; the fatal brass pestle with which the supposed murder had been
committed; Mitya’s shirt, with a blood-stained sleeve; his coat, stained
with blood in patches over the pocket in which he had put his
handkerchief; the handkerchief itself, stiff with blood and by now quite
yellow; the pistol loaded by Mitya at Perhotin’s with a view to suicide,
and taken from him on the sly at Mokroe by Trifon Borissovitch; the
envelope in which the three thousand roubles had been put ready for
Grushenka, the narrow pink ribbon with which it had been tied, and many
other articles I don’t remember. In the body of the hall, at some
distance, came the seats for the public. But in front of the balustrade a
few chairs had been placed for witnesses who remained in the court after
giving their evidence.

At ten o’clock the three judges arrived—the President, one honorary
justice of the peace, and one other. The prosecutor, of course, entered
immediately after. The President was a short, stout, thick-set man of
fifty, with a dyspeptic complexion, dark hair turning gray and cut short,
and a red ribbon, of what Order I don’t remember. The prosecutor struck me
and the others, too, as looking particularly pale, almost green. His face
seemed to have grown suddenly thinner, perhaps in a single night, for I
had seen him looking as usual only two days before. The President began
with asking the court whether all the jury were present.

But I see I can’t go on like this, partly because some things I did not
hear, others I did not notice, and others I have forgotten, but most of
all because, as I have said before, I have literally no time or space to
mention everything that was said and done. I only know that neither side
objected to very many of the jurymen. I remember the twelve jurymen—four
were petty officials of the town, two were merchants, and six peasants and
artisans of the town. I remember, long before the trial, questions were
continually asked with some surprise, especially by ladies: “Can such a
delicate, complex and psychological case be submitted for decision to
petty officials and even peasants?” and “What can an official, still more
a peasant, understand in such an affair?” All the four officials in the
jury were, in fact, men of no consequence and of low rank. Except one who
was rather younger, they were gray-headed men, little known in society,
who had vegetated on a pitiful salary, and who probably had elderly,
unpresentable wives and crowds of children, perhaps even without shoes and
stockings. At most, they spent their leisure over cards and, of course,
had never read a single book. The two merchants looked respectable, but
were strangely silent and stolid. One of them was close-shaven, and was
dressed in European style; the other had a small, gray beard, and wore a
red ribbon with some sort of a medal upon it on his neck. There is no need
to speak of the artisans and the peasants. The artisans of
Skotoprigonyevsk are almost peasants, and even work on the land. Two of
them also wore European dress, and, perhaps for that reason, were dirtier
and more uninviting-looking than the others. So that one might well
wonder, as I did as soon as I had looked at them, “what men like that
could possibly make of such a case?” Yet their faces made a strangely
imposing, almost menacing, impression; they were stern and frowning.

At last the President opened the case of the murder of Fyodor Pavlovitch
Karamazov. I don’t quite remember how he described him. The court usher
was told to bring in the prisoner, and Mitya made his appearance. There
was a hush through the court. One could have heard a fly. I don’t know how
it was with others, but Mitya made a most unfavorable impression on me. He
looked an awful dandy in a brand-new frock-coat. I heard afterwards that
he had ordered it in Moscow expressly for the occasion from his own
tailor, who had his measure. He wore immaculate black kid gloves and
exquisite linen. He walked in with his yard-long strides, looking stiffly
straight in front of him, and sat down in his place with a most
unperturbed air.

At the same moment the counsel for defense, the celebrated Fetyukovitch,
entered, and a sort of subdued hum passed through the court. He was a
tall, spare man, with long thin legs, with extremely long, thin, pale
fingers, clean-shaven face, demurely brushed, rather short hair, and thin
lips that were at times curved into something between a sneer and a smile.
He looked about forty. His face would have been pleasant, if it had not
been for his eyes, which, in themselves small and inexpressive, were set
remarkably close together, with only the thin, long nose as a dividing
line between them. In fact, there was something strikingly birdlike about
his face. He was in evening dress and white tie.

I remember the President’s first questions to Mitya, about his name, his
calling, and so on. Mitya answered sharply, and his voice was so
unexpectedly loud that it made the President start and look at the
prisoner with surprise. Then followed a list of persons who were to take
part in the proceedings—that is, of the witnesses and experts. It was a
long list. Four of the witnesses were not present—Miüsov, who had given
evidence at the preliminary inquiry, but was now in Paris; Madame Hohlakov
and Maximov, who were absent through illness; and Smerdyakov, through his
sudden death, of which an official statement from the police was
presented. The news of Smerdyakov’s death produced a sudden stir and
whisper in the court. Many of the audience, of course, had not heard of
the sudden suicide. What struck people most was Mitya’s sudden outburst As
soon as the statement of Smerdyakov’s death was made, he cried out aloud
from his place:

“He was a dog and died like a dog!”

I remember how his counsel rushed to him, and how the President addressed
him, threatening to take stern measures, if such an irregularity were
repeated. Mitya nodded and in a subdued voice repeated several times
abruptly to his counsel, with no show of regret:

“I won’t again, I won’t. It escaped me. I won’t do it again.”

And, of course, this brief episode did him no good with the jury or the
public. His character was displayed, and it spoke for itself. It was under
the influence of this incident that the opening statement was read. It was
rather short, but circumstantial. It only stated the chief reasons why he
had been arrested, why he must be tried, and so on. Yet it made a great
impression on me. The clerk read it loudly and distinctly. The whole
tragedy was suddenly unfolded before us, concentrated, in bold relief, in
a fatal and pitiless light. I remember how, immediately after it had been
read, the President asked Mitya in a loud impressive voice:

“Prisoner, do you plead guilty?”

Mitya suddenly rose from his seat.

“I plead guilty to drunkenness and dissipation,” he exclaimed, again in a
startling, almost frenzied, voice, “to idleness and debauchery. I meant to
become an honest man for good, just at the moment when I was struck down
by fate. But I am not guilty of the death of that old man, my enemy and my
father. No, no, I am not guilty of robbing him! I could not be. Dmitri
Karamazov is a scoundrel, but not a thief.”

He sat down again, visibly trembling all over. The President again
briefly, but impressively, admonished him to answer only what was asked,
and not to go off into irrelevant exclamations. Then he ordered the case
to proceed. All the witnesses were led up to take the oath. Then I saw
them all together. The brothers of the prisoner were, however, allowed to
give evidence without taking the oath. After an exhortation from the
priest and the President, the witnesses were led away and were made to sit
as far as possible apart from one another. Then they began calling them up
one by one.



Chapter II. Dangerous Witnesses


I do not know whether the witnesses for the defense and for the
prosecution were separated into groups by the President, and whether it
was arranged to call them in a certain order. But no doubt it was so. I
only know that the witnesses for the prosecution were called first. I
repeat I don’t intend to describe all the questions step by step. Besides,
my account would be to some extent superfluous, because in the speeches
for the prosecution and for the defense the whole course of the evidence
was brought together and set in a strong and significant light, and I took
down parts of those two remarkable speeches in full, and will quote them
in due course, together with one extraordinary and quite unexpected
episode, which occurred before the final speeches, and undoubtedly
influenced the sinister and fatal outcome of the trial.

I will only observe that from the first moments of the trial one peculiar
characteristic of the case was conspicuous and observed by all, that is,
the overwhelming strength of the prosecution as compared with the
arguments the defense had to rely upon. Every one realized it from the
first moment that the facts began to group themselves round a single
point, and the whole horrible and bloody crime was gradually revealed.
Every one, perhaps, felt from the first that the case was beyond dispute,
that there was no doubt about it, that there could be really no
discussion, and that the defense was only a matter of form, and that the
prisoner was guilty, obviously and conclusively guilty. I imagine that
even the ladies, who were so impatiently longing for the acquittal of the
interesting prisoner, were at the same time, without exception, convinced
of his guilt. What’s more, I believe they would have been mortified if his
guilt had not been so firmly established, as that would have lessened the
effect of the closing scene of the criminal’s acquittal. That he would be
acquitted, all the ladies, strange to say, were firmly persuaded up to the
very last moment. “He is guilty, but he will be acquitted, from motives of
humanity, in accordance with the new ideas, the new sentiments that had
come into fashion,” and so on, and so on. And that was why they had
crowded into the court so impatiently. The men were more interested in the
contest between the prosecutor and the famous Fetyukovitch. All were
wondering and asking themselves what could even a talent like
Fetyukovitch’s make of such a desperate case; and so they followed his
achievements, step by step, with concentrated attention.

But Fetyukovitch remained an enigma to all up to the very end, up to his
speech. Persons of experience suspected that he had some design, that he
was working towards some object, but it was almost impossible to guess
what it was. His confidence and self-reliance were unmistakable, however.
Every one noticed with pleasure, moreover, that he, after so short a stay,
not more than three days, perhaps, among us, had so wonderfully succeeded
in mastering the case and “had studied it to a nicety.” People described
with relish, afterwards, how cleverly he had “taken down” all the
witnesses for the prosecution, and as far as possible perplexed them and,
what’s more, had aspersed their reputation and so depreciated the value of
their evidence. But it was supposed that he did this rather by way of
sport, so to speak, for professional glory, to show nothing had been
omitted of the accepted methods, for all were convinced that he could do
no real good by such disparagement of the witnesses, and probably was more
aware of this than any one, having some idea of his own in the background,
some concealed weapon of defense, which he would suddenly reveal when the
time came. But meanwhile, conscious of his strength, he seemed to be
diverting himself.

So, for instance, when Grigory, Fyodor Pavlovitch’s old servant, who had
given the most damning piece of evidence about the open door, was
examined, the counsel for the defense positively fastened upon him when
his turn came to question him. It must be noted that Grigory entered the
hall with a composed and almost stately air, not the least disconcerted by
the majesty of the court or the vast audience listening to him. He gave
evidence with as much confidence as though he had been talking with his
Marfa, only perhaps more respectfully. It was impossible to make him
contradict himself. The prosecutor questioned him first in detail about
the family life of the Karamazovs. The family picture stood out in lurid
colors. It was plain to ear and eye that the witness was guileless and
impartial. In spite of his profound reverence for the memory of his
deceased master, he yet bore witness that he had been unjust to Mitya and
“hadn’t brought up his children as he should. He’d have been devoured by
lice when he was little, if it hadn’t been for me,” he added, describing
Mitya’s early childhood. “It wasn’t fair either of the father to wrong his
son over his mother’s property, which was by right his.”

In reply to the prosecutor’s question what grounds he had for asserting
that Fyodor Pavlovitch had wronged his son in their money relations,
Grigory, to the surprise of every one, had no proof at all to bring
forward, but he still persisted that the arrangement with the son was
“unfair,” and that he ought “to have paid him several thousand roubles
more.” I must note, by the way, that the prosecutor asked this question
whether Fyodor Pavlovitch had really kept back part of Mitya’s inheritance
with marked persistence of all the witnesses who could be asked it, not
excepting Alyosha and Ivan, but he obtained no exact information from any
one; all alleged that it was so, but were unable to bring forward any
distinct proof. Grigory’s description of the scene at the dinner-table,
when Dmitri had burst in and beaten his father, threatening to come back
to kill him, made a sinister impression on the court, especially as the
old servant’s composure in telling it, his parsimony of words and peculiar
phraseology, were as effective as eloquence. He observed that he was not
angry with Mitya for having knocked him down and struck him on the face;
he had forgiven him long ago, he said. Of the deceased Smerdyakov he
observed, crossing himself, that he was a lad of ability, but stupid and
afflicted, and, worse still, an infidel, and that it was Fyodor Pavlovitch
and his elder son who had taught him to be so. But he defended
Smerdyakov’s honesty almost with warmth, and related how Smerdyakov had
once found the master’s money in the yard, and, instead of concealing it,
had taken it to his master, who had rewarded him with a “gold piece” for
it, and trusted him implicitly from that time forward. He maintained
obstinately that the door into the garden had been open. But he was asked
so many questions that I can’t recall them all.

At last the counsel for the defense began to cross-examine him, and the
first question he asked was about the envelope in which Fyodor Pavlovitch
was supposed to have put three thousand roubles for “a certain person.”
“Have you ever seen it, you, who were for so many years in close
attendance on your master?” Grigory answered that he had not seen it and
had never heard of the money from any one “till everybody was talking
about it.” This question about the envelope Fetyukovitch put to every one
who could conceivably have known of it, as persistently as the prosecutor
asked his question about Dmitri’s inheritance, and got the same answer
from all, that no one had seen the envelope, though many had heard of it.
From the beginning every one noticed Fetyukovitch’s persistence on this
subject.

“Now, with your permission I’ll ask you a question,” Fetyukovitch said,
suddenly and unexpectedly. “Of what was that balsam, or, rather,
decoction, made, which, as we learn from the preliminary inquiry, you used
on that evening to rub your lumbago, in the hope of curing it?”

Grigory looked blankly at the questioner, and after a brief silence
muttered, “There was saffron in it.”

“Nothing but saffron? Don’t you remember any other ingredient?”

“There was milfoil in it, too.”

“And pepper perhaps?” Fetyukovitch queried.

“Yes, there was pepper, too.”

“Etcetera. And all dissolved in vodka?”

“In spirit.”

There was a faint sound of laughter in the court.

“You see, in spirit. After rubbing your back, I believe, you drank what
was left in the bottle with a certain pious prayer, only known to your
wife?”

“I did.”

“Did you drink much? Roughly speaking, a wine-glass or two?”

“It might have been a tumbler-full.”

“A tumbler-full, even. Perhaps a tumbler and a half?”

Grigory did not answer. He seemed to see what was meant.

“A glass and a half of neat spirit—is not at all bad, don’t you think? You
might see the gates of heaven open, not only the door into the garden?”

Grigory remained silent. There was another laugh in the court. The
President made a movement.

“Do you know for a fact,” Fetyukovitch persisted, “whether you were awake
or not when you saw the open door?”

“I was on my legs.”

“That’s not a proof that you were awake.” (There was again laughter in the
court.) “Could you have answered at that moment, if any one had asked you
a question—for instance, what year it is?”

“I don’t know.”

“And what year is it, Anno Domini, do you know?”

Grigory stood with a perplexed face, looking straight at his tormentor.
Strange to say, it appeared he really did not know what year it was.

“But perhaps you can tell me how many fingers you have on your hands?”

“I am a servant,” Grigory said suddenly, in a loud and distinct voice. “If
my betters think fit to make game of me, it is my duty to suffer it.”

Fetyukovitch was a little taken aback, and the President intervened,
reminding him that he must ask more relevant questions. Fetyukovitch bowed
with dignity and said that he had no more questions to ask of the witness.
The public and the jury, of course, were left with a grain of doubt in
their minds as to the evidence of a man who might, while undergoing a
certain cure, have seen “the gates of heaven,” and who did not even know
what year he was living in. But before Grigory left the box another
episode occurred. The President, turning to the prisoner, asked him
whether he had any comment to make on the evidence of the last witness.

“Except about the door, all he has said is true,” cried Mitya, in a loud
voice. “For combing the lice off me, I thank him; for forgiving my blows,
I thank him. The old man has been honest all his life and as faithful to
my father as seven hundred poodles.”

“Prisoner, be careful in your language,” the President admonished him.

“I am not a poodle,” Grigory muttered.

“All right, it’s I am a poodle myself,” cried Mitya. “If it’s an insult, I
take it to myself and I beg his pardon. I was a beast and cruel to him. I
was cruel to Æsop too.”

“What Æsop?” the President asked sternly again.

“Oh, Pierrot ... my father, Fyodor Pavlovitch.”

The President again and again warned Mitya impressively and very sternly
to be more careful in his language.

“You are injuring yourself in the opinion of your judges.”

The counsel for the defense was equally clever in dealing with the
evidence of Rakitin. I may remark that Rakitin was one of the leading
witnesses and one to whom the prosecutor attached great significance. It
appeared that he knew everything; his knowledge was amazing, he had been
everywhere, seen everything, talked to everybody, knew every detail of the
biography of Fyodor Pavlovitch and all the Karamazovs. Of the envelope, it
is true, he had only heard from Mitya himself. But he described minutely
Mitya’s exploits in the “Metropolis,” all his compromising doings and
sayings, and told the story of Captain Snegiryov’s “wisp of tow.” But even
Rakitin could say nothing positive about Mitya’s inheritance, and confined
himself to contemptuous generalities.

“Who could tell which of them was to blame, and which was in debt to the
other, with their crazy Karamazov way of muddling things so that no one
could make head or tail of it?” He attributed the tragic crime to the
habits that had become ingrained by ages of serfdom and the distressed
condition of Russia, due to the lack of appropriate institutions. He was,
in fact, allowed some latitude of speech. This was the first occasion on
which Rakitin showed what he could do, and attracted notice. The
prosecutor knew that the witness was preparing a magazine article on the
case, and afterwards in his speech, as we shall see later, quoted some
ideas from the article, showing that he had seen it already. The picture
drawn by the witness was a gloomy and sinister one, and greatly
strengthened the case for the prosecution. Altogether, Rakitin’s discourse
fascinated the public by its independence and the extraordinary nobility
of its ideas. There were even two or three outbreaks of applause when he
spoke of serfdom and the distressed condition of Russia.

But Rakitin, in his youthful ardor, made a slight blunder, of which the
counsel for the defense at once adroitly took advantage. Answering certain
questions about Grushenka, and carried away by the loftiness of his own
sentiments and his success, of which he was, of course, conscious, he went
so far as to speak somewhat contemptuously of Agrafena Alexandrovna as
“the kept mistress of Samsonov.” He would have given a good deal to take
back his words afterwards, for Fetyukovitch caught him out over it at
once. And it was all because Rakitin had not reckoned on the lawyer having
been able to become so intimately acquainted with every detail in so short
a time.

“Allow me to ask,” began the counsel for the defense, with the most
affable and even respectful smile, “you are, of course, the same Mr.
Rakitin whose pamphlet, _The Life of the Deceased Elder, Father Zossima_,
published by the diocesan authorities, full of profound and religious
reflections and preceded by an excellent and devout dedication to the
bishop, I have just read with such pleasure?”

“I did not write it for publication ... it was published afterwards,”
muttered Rakitin, for some reason fearfully disconcerted and almost
ashamed.

“Oh, that’s excellent! A thinker like you can, and indeed ought to, take
the widest view of every social question. Your most instructive pamphlet
has been widely circulated through the patronage of the bishop, and has
been of appreciable service.... But this is the chief thing I should like
to learn from you. You stated just now that you were very intimately
acquainted with Madame Svyetlov.” (It must be noted that Grushenka’s
surname was Svyetlov. I heard it for the first time that day, during the
case.)

“I cannot answer for all my acquaintances.... I am a young man ... and who
can be responsible for every one he meets?” cried Rakitin, flushing all
over.

“I understand, I quite understand,” cried Fetyukovitch, as though he, too,
were embarrassed and in haste to excuse himself. “You, like any other,
might well be interested in an acquaintance with a young and beautiful
woman who would readily entertain the _élite_ of the youth of the
neighborhood, but ... I only wanted to know ... It has come to my
knowledge that Madame Svyetlov was particularly anxious a couple of months
ago to make the acquaintance of the younger Karamazov, Alexey
Fyodorovitch, and promised you twenty-five roubles, if you would bring him
to her in his monastic dress. And that actually took place on the evening
of the day on which the terrible crime, which is the subject of the
present investigation, was committed. You brought Alexey Karamazov to
Madame Svyetlov, and did you receive the twenty-five roubles from Madame
Svyetlov as a reward, that’s what I wanted to hear from you?”

“It was a joke.... I don’t see of what interest that can be to you.... I
took it for a joke ... meaning to give it back later....”

“Then you did take— But you have not given it back yet ... or have you?”

“That’s of no consequence,” muttered Rakitin, “I refuse to answer such
questions.... Of course I shall give it back.”

The President intervened, but Fetyukovitch declared he had no more
questions to ask of the witness. Mr. Rakitin left the witness-box not
absolutely without a stain upon his character. The effect left by the
lofty idealism of his speech was somewhat marred, and Fetyukovitch’s
expression, as he watched him walk away, seemed to suggest to the public
“this is a specimen of the lofty-minded persons who accuse him.” I
remember that this incident, too, did not pass off without an outbreak
from Mitya. Enraged by the tone in which Rakitin had referred to
Grushenka, he suddenly shouted “Bernard!” When, after Rakitin’s
cross-examination, the President asked the prisoner if he had anything to
say, Mitya cried loudly:

“Since I’ve been arrested, he has borrowed money from me! He is a
contemptible Bernard and opportunist, and he doesn’t believe in God; he
took the bishop in!”

Mitya, of course, was pulled up again for the intemperance of his
language, but Rakitin was done for. Captain Snegiryov’s evidence was a
failure, too, but from quite a different reason. He appeared in ragged and
dirty clothes, muddy boots, and in spite of the vigilance and expert
observation of the police officers, he turned out to be hopelessly drunk.
On being asked about Mitya’s attack upon him, he refused to answer.

“God bless him. Ilusha told me not to. God will make it up to me yonder.”

“Who told you not to tell? Of whom are you talking?”

“Ilusha, my little son. ‘Father, father, how he insulted you!’ He said
that at the stone. Now he is dying....”

The captain suddenly began sobbing, and plumped down on his knees before
the President. He was hurriedly led away amidst the laughter of the
public. The effect prepared by the prosecutor did not come off at all.

Fetyukovitch went on making the most of every opportunity, and amazed
people more and more by his minute knowledge of the case. Thus, for
example, Trifon Borissovitch made a great impression, of course, very
prejudicial to Mitya. He calculated almost on his fingers that on his
first visit to Mokroe, Mitya must have spent three thousand roubles, “or
very little less. Just think what he squandered on those gypsy girls
alone! And as for our lousy peasants, it wasn’t a case of flinging half a
rouble in the street, he made them presents of twenty-five roubles each,
at least, he didn’t give them less. And what a lot of money was simply
stolen from him! And if any one did steal, he did not leave a receipt. How
could one catch the thief when he was flinging his money away all the
time? Our peasants are robbers, you know; they have no care for their
souls. And the way he went on with the girls, our village girls! They’re
completely set up since then, I tell you, they used to be poor.” He
recalled, in fact, every item of expense and added it all up. So the
theory that only fifteen hundred had been spent and the rest had been put
aside in a little bag seemed inconceivable.

“I saw three thousand as clear as a penny in his hands, I saw it with my
own eyes; I should think I ought to know how to reckon money,” cried
Trifon Borissovitch, doing his best to satisfy “his betters.”

When Fetyukovitch had to cross-examine him, he scarcely tried to refute
his evidence, but began asking him about an incident at the first carousal
at Mokroe, a month before the arrest, when Timofey and another peasant
called Akim had picked up on the floor in the passage a hundred roubles
dropped by Mitya when he was drunk, and had given them to Trifon
Borissovitch and received a rouble each from him for doing so. “Well,”
asked the lawyer, “did you give that hundred roubles back to Mr.
Karamazov?” Trifon Borissovitch shuffled in vain.... He was obliged, after
the peasants had been examined, to admit the finding of the hundred
roubles, only adding that he had religiously returned it all to Dmitri
Fyodorovitch “in perfect honesty, and it’s only because his honor was in
liquor at the time, he wouldn’t remember it.” But, as he had denied the
incident of the hundred roubles till the peasants had been called to prove
it, his evidence as to returning the money to Mitya was naturally regarded
with great suspicion. So one of the most dangerous witnesses brought
forward by the prosecution was again discredited.

The same thing happened with the Poles. They took up an attitude of pride
and independence; they vociferated loudly that they had both been in the
service of the Crown, and that “Pan Mitya” had offered them three thousand
“to buy their honor,” and that they had seen a large sum of money in his
hands. Pan Mussyalovitch introduced a terrible number of Polish words into
his sentences, and seeing that this only increased his consequence in the
eyes of the President and the prosecutor, grew more and more pompous, and
ended by talking in Polish altogether. But Fetyukovitch caught them, too,
in his snares. Trifon Borissovitch, recalled, was forced, in spite of his
evasions, to admit that Pan Vrublevsky had substituted another pack of
cards for the one he had provided, and that Pan Mussyalovitch had cheated
during the game. Kalganov confirmed this, and both the Poles left the
witness-box with damaged reputations, amidst laughter from the public.

Then exactly the same thing happened with almost all the most dangerous
witnesses. Fetyukovitch succeeded in casting a slur on all of them, and
dismissing them with a certain derision. The lawyers and experts were lost
in admiration, and were only at a loss to understand what good purpose
could be served by it, for all, I repeat, felt that the case for the
prosecution could not be refuted, but was growing more and more tragically
overwhelming. But from the confidence of the “great magician” they saw
that he was serene, and they waited, feeling that “such a man” had not
come from Petersburg for nothing, and that he was not a man to return
unsuccessful.



Chapter III. The Medical Experts And A Pound Of Nuts


The evidence of the medical experts, too, was of little use to the
prisoner. And it appeared later that Fetyukovitch had not reckoned much
upon it. The medical line of defense had only been taken up through the
insistence of Katerina Ivanovna, who had sent for a celebrated doctor from
Moscow on purpose. The case for the defense could, of course, lose nothing
by it and might, with luck, gain something from it. There was, however, an
element of comedy about it, through the difference of opinion of the
doctors. The medical experts were the famous doctor from Moscow, our
doctor, Herzenstube, and the young doctor, Varvinsky. The two latter
appeared also as witnesses for the prosecution.

The first to be called in the capacity of expert was Doctor Herzenstube.
He was a gray and bald old man of seventy, of middle height and sturdy
build. He was much esteemed and respected by every one in the town. He was
a conscientious doctor and an excellent and pious man, a Hernguter or
Moravian brother, I am not quite sure which. He had been living amongst us
for many years and behaved with wonderful dignity. He was a kind-hearted
and humane man. He treated the sick poor and peasants for nothing, visited
them in their slums and huts, and left money for medicine, but he was as
obstinate as a mule. If once he had taken an idea into his head, there was
no shaking it. Almost every one in the town was aware, by the way, that
the famous doctor had, within the first two or three days of his presence
among us, uttered some extremely offensive allusions to Doctor
Herzenstube’s qualifications. Though the Moscow doctor asked twenty-five
roubles for a visit, several people in the town were glad to take
advantage of his arrival, and rushed to consult him regardless of expense.
All these had, of course, been previously patients of Doctor Herzenstube,
and the celebrated doctor had criticized his treatment with extreme
harshness. Finally, he had asked the patients as soon as he saw them,
“Well, who has been cramming you with nostrums? Herzenstube? He, he!”
Doctor Herzenstube, of course, heard all this, and now all the three
doctors made their appearance, one after another, to be examined.

Doctor Herzenstube roundly declared that the abnormality of the prisoner’s
mental faculties was self-evident. Then giving his grounds for this
opinion, which I omit here, he added that the abnormality was not only
evident in many of the prisoner’s actions in the past, but was apparent
even now at this very moment. When he was asked to explain how it was
apparent now at this moment, the old doctor, with simple-hearted
directness, pointed out that the prisoner on entering the court had “an
extraordinary air, remarkable in the circumstances”; that he had “marched
in like a soldier, looking straight before him, though it would have been
more natural for him to look to the left where, among the public, the
ladies were sitting, seeing that he was a great admirer of the fair sex
and must be thinking much of what the ladies are saying of him now,” the
old man concluded in his peculiar language.

I must add that he spoke Russian readily, but every phrase was formed in
German style, which did not, however, trouble him, for it had always been
a weakness of his to believe that he spoke Russian perfectly, better
indeed than Russians. And he was very fond of using Russian proverbs,
always declaring that the Russian proverbs were the best and most
expressive sayings in the whole world. I may remark, too, that in
conversation, through absent-mindedness he often forgot the most ordinary
words, which sometimes went out of his head, though he knew them
perfectly. The same thing happened, though, when he spoke German, and at
such times he always waved his hand before his face as though trying to
catch the lost word, and no one could induce him to go on speaking till he
had found the missing word. His remark that the prisoner ought to have
looked at the ladies on entering roused a whisper of amusement in the
audience. All our ladies were very fond of our old doctor; they knew, too,
that having been all his life a bachelor and a religious man of exemplary
conduct, he looked upon women as lofty creatures. And so his unexpected
observation struck every one as very queer.

The Moscow doctor, being questioned in his turn, definitely and
emphatically repeated that he considered the prisoner’s mental condition
abnormal in the highest degree. He talked at length and with erudition of
“aberration” and “mania,” and argued that, from all the facts collected,
the prisoner had undoubtedly been in a condition of aberration for several
days before his arrest, and, if the crime had been committed by him, it
must, even if he were conscious of it, have been almost involuntary, as he
had not the power to control the morbid impulse that possessed him.

But apart from temporary aberration, the doctor diagnosed mania, which
premised, in his words, to lead to complete insanity in the future. (It
must be noted that I report this in my own words, the doctor made use of
very learned and professional language.) “All his actions are in
contravention of common sense and logic,” he continued. “Not to refer to
what I have not seen, that is, the crime itself and the whole catastrophe,
the day before yesterday, while he was talking to me, he had an
unaccountably fixed look in his eye. He laughed unexpectedly when there
was nothing to laugh at. He showed continual and inexplicable
irritability, using strange words, ‘Bernard!’ ‘Ethics!’ and others equally
inappropriate.” But the doctor detected mania, above all, in the fact that
the prisoner could not even speak of the three thousand roubles, of which
he considered himself to have been cheated, without extraordinary
irritation, though he could speak comparatively lightly of other
misfortunes and grievances. According to all accounts, he had even in the
past, whenever the subject of the three thousand roubles was touched on,
flown into a perfect frenzy, and yet he was reported to be a disinterested
and not grasping man.

“As to the opinion of my learned colleague,” the Moscow doctor added
ironically in conclusion, “that the prisoner would, on entering the court,
have naturally looked at the ladies and not straight before him, I will
only say that, apart from the playfulness of this theory, it is radically
unsound. For though I fully agree that the prisoner, on entering the court
where his fate will be decided, would not naturally look straight before
him in that fixed way, and that that may really be a sign of his abnormal
mental condition, at the same time I maintain that he would naturally not
look to the left at the ladies, but, on the contrary, to the right to find
his legal adviser, on whose help all his hopes rest and on whose defense
all his future depends.” The doctor expressed his opinion positively and
emphatically.

But the unexpected pronouncement of Doctor Varvinsky gave the last touch
of comedy to the difference of opinion between the experts. In his opinion
the prisoner was now, and had been all along, in a perfectly normal
condition, and, although he certainly must have been in a nervous and
exceedingly excited state before his arrest, this might have been due to
several perfectly obvious causes, jealousy, anger, continual drunkenness,
and so on. But this nervous condition would not involve the mental
aberration of which mention had just been made. As to the question whether
the prisoner should have looked to the left or to the right on entering
the court, “in his modest opinion,” the prisoner would naturally look
straight before him on entering the court, as he had in fact done, as that
was where the judges, on whom his fate depended, were sitting. So that it
was just by looking straight before him that he showed his perfectly
normal state of mind at the present. The young doctor concluded his
“modest” testimony with some heat.

“Bravo, doctor!” cried Mitya, from his seat, “just so!”

Mitya, of course, was checked, but the young doctor’s opinion had a
decisive influence on the judges and on the public, and, as appeared
afterwards, every one agreed with him. But Doctor Herzenstube, when called
as a witness, was quite unexpectedly of use to Mitya. As an old resident
in the town who had known the Karamazov family for years, he furnished
some facts of great value for the prosecution, and suddenly, as though
recalling something, he added:

“But the poor young man might have had a very different life, for he had a
good heart both in childhood and after childhood, that I know. But the
Russian proverb says, ‘If a man has one head, it’s good, but if another
clever man comes to visit him, it would be better still, for then there
will be two heads and not only one.’ ”

“One head is good, but two are better,” the prosecutor put in impatiently.
He knew the old man’s habit of talking slowly and deliberately, regardless
of the impression he was making and of the delay he was causing, and
highly prizing his flat, dull and always gleefully complacent German wit.
The old man was fond of making jokes.

“Oh, yes, that’s what I say,” he went on stubbornly. “One head is good,
but two are much better, but he did not meet another head with wits, and
his wits went. Where did they go? I’ve forgotten the word.” He went on,
passing his hand before his eyes, “Oh, yes, _spazieren_.”

“Wandering?”

“Oh, yes, wandering, that’s what I say. Well, his wits went wandering and
fell in such a deep hole that he lost himself. And yet he was a grateful
and sensitive boy. Oh, I remember him very well, a little chap so high,
left neglected by his father in the back yard, when he ran about without
boots on his feet, and his little breeches hanging by one button.”

A note of feeling and tenderness suddenly came into the honest old man’s
voice. Fetyukovitch positively started, as though scenting something, and
caught at it instantly.

“Oh, yes, I was a young man then.... I was ... well, I was forty-five
then, and had only just come here. And I was so sorry for the boy then; I
asked myself why shouldn’t I buy him a pound of ... a pound of what? I’ve
forgotten what it’s called. A pound of what children are very fond of,
what is it, what is it?” The doctor began waving his hands again. “It
grows on a tree and is gathered and given to every one....”

“Apples?”

“Oh, no, no. You have a dozen of apples, not a pound.... No, there are a
lot of them, and all little. You put them in the mouth and crack.”

“Nuts?”

“Quite so, nuts, I say so.” The doctor repeated in the calmest way as
though he had been at no loss for a word. “And I bought him a pound of
nuts, for no one had ever bought the boy a pound of nuts before. And I
lifted my finger and said to him, ‘Boy, _Gott der Vater_.’ He laughed and
said, ‘_Gott der Vater_.’... ‘_Gott der Sohn_.’ He laughed again and
lisped, ‘_Gott der Sohn_.’ ‘_Gott der heilige Geist_.’ Then he laughed and
said as best he could, ‘_Gott der heilige Geist_.’ I went away, and two
days after I happened to be passing, and he shouted to me of himself,
‘Uncle, _Gott der Vater, Gott der Sohn_,’ and he had only forgotten ‘_Gott
der heilige Geist_.’ But I reminded him of it and I felt very sorry for
him again. But he was taken away, and I did not see him again.
Twenty-three years passed. I am sitting one morning in my study, a
white-haired old man, when there walks into the room a blooming young man,
whom I should never have recognized, but he held up his finger and said,
laughing, ‘_Gott der Vater, Gott der Sohn_, and _Gott der heilige Geist_.
I have just arrived and have come to thank you for that pound of nuts, for
no one else ever bought me a pound of nuts; you are the only one that ever
did.’ And then I remembered my happy youth and the poor child in the yard,
without boots on his feet, and my heart was touched and I said, ‘You are a
grateful young man, for you have remembered all your life the pound of
nuts I bought you in your childhood.’ And I embraced him and blessed him.
And I shed tears. He laughed, but he shed tears, too ... for the Russian
often laughs when he ought to be weeping. But he did weep; I saw it. And
now, alas!...”

“And I am weeping now, German, I am weeping now, too, you saintly man,”
Mitya cried suddenly.

In any case the anecdote made a certain favorable impression on the
public. But the chief sensation in Mitya’s favor was created by the
evidence of Katerina Ivanovna, which I will describe directly. Indeed,
when the witnesses _à décharge_, that is, called by the defense, began
giving evidence, fortune seemed all at once markedly more favorable to
Mitya, and what was particularly striking, this was a surprise even to the
counsel for the defense. But before Katerina Ivanovna was called, Alyosha
was examined, and he recalled a fact which seemed to furnish positive
evidence against one important point made by the prosecution.



Chapter IV. Fortune Smiles On Mitya


It came quite as a surprise even to Alyosha himself. He was not required
to take the oath, and I remember that both sides addressed him very gently
and sympathetically. It was evident that his reputation for goodness had
preceded him. Alyosha gave his evidence modestly and with restraint, but
his warm sympathy for his unhappy brother was unmistakable. In answer to
one question, he sketched his brother’s character as that of a man,
violent-tempered perhaps and carried away by his passions, but at the same
time honorable, proud and generous, capable of self-sacrifice, if
necessary. He admitted, however, that, through his passion for Grushenka
and his rivalry with his father, his brother had been of late in an
intolerable position. But he repelled with indignation the suggestion that
his brother might have committed a murder for the sake of gain, though he
recognized that the three thousand roubles had become almost an obsession
with Mitya; that he looked upon them as part of the inheritance he had
been cheated of by his father, and that, indifferent as he was to money as
a rule, he could not even speak of that three thousand without fury. As
for the rivalry of the two “ladies,” as the prosecutor expressed it—that
is, of Grushenka and Katya—he answered evasively and was even unwilling to
answer one or two questions altogether.

“Did your brother tell you, anyway, that he intended to kill your father?”
asked the prosecutor. “You can refuse to answer if you think necessary,”
he added.

“He did not tell me so directly,” answered Alyosha.

“How so? Did he indirectly?”

“He spoke to me once of his hatred for our father and his fear that at an
extreme moment ... at a moment of fury, he might perhaps murder him.”

“And you believed him?”

“I am afraid to say that I did. But I never doubted that some higher
feeling would always save him at the fatal moment, as it has indeed saved
him, for it was not he killed my father,” Alyosha said firmly, in a loud
voice that was heard throughout the court.

The prosecutor started like a war-horse at the sound of a trumpet.

“Let me assure you that I fully believe in the complete sincerity of your
conviction and do not explain it by or identify it with your affection for
your unhappy brother. Your peculiar view of the whole tragic episode is
known to us already from the preliminary investigation. I won’t attempt to
conceal from you that it is highly individual and contradicts all the
other evidence collected by the prosecution. And so I think it essential
to press you to tell me what facts have led you to this conviction of your
brother’s innocence and of the guilt of another person against whom you
gave evidence at the preliminary inquiry?”

“I only answered the questions asked me at the preliminary inquiry,”
replied Alyosha, slowly and calmly. “I made no accusation against
Smerdyakov of myself.”

“Yet you gave evidence against him?”

“I was led to do so by my brother Dmitri’s words. I was told what took
place at his arrest and how he had pointed to Smerdyakov before I was
examined. I believe absolutely that my brother is innocent, and if he
didn’t commit the murder, then—”

“Then Smerdyakov? Why Smerdyakov? And why are you so completely persuaded
of your brother’s innocence?”

“I cannot help believing my brother. I know he wouldn’t lie to me. I saw
from his face he wasn’t lying.”

“Only from his face? Is that all the proof you have?”

“I have no other proof.”

“And of Smerdyakov’s guilt you have no proof whatever but your brother’s
word and the expression of his face?”

“No, I have no other proof.”

The prosecutor dropped the examination at this point. The impression left
by Alyosha’s evidence on the public was most disappointing. There had been
talk about Smerdyakov before the trial; some one had heard something, some
one had pointed out something else, it was said that Alyosha had gathered
together some extraordinary proofs of his brother’s innocence and
Smerdyakov’s guilt, and after all there was nothing, no evidence except
certain moral convictions so natural in a brother.

But Fetyukovitch began his cross-examination. On his asking Alyosha when
it was that the prisoner had told him of his hatred for his father and
that he might kill him, and whether he had heard it, for instance, at
their last meeting before the catastrophe, Alyosha started as he answered,
as though only just recollecting and understanding something.

“I remember one circumstance now which I’d quite forgotten myself. It
wasn’t clear to me at the time, but now—”

And, obviously only now for the first time struck by an idea, he recounted
eagerly how, at his last interview with Mitya that evening under the tree,
on the road to the monastery, Mitya had struck himself on the breast, “the
upper part of the breast,” and had repeated several times that he had a
means of regaining his honor, that that means was here, here on his
breast. “I thought, when he struck himself on the breast, he meant that it
was in his heart,” Alyosha continued, “that he might find in his heart
strength to save himself from some awful disgrace which was awaiting him
and which he did not dare confess even to me. I must confess I did think
at the time that he was speaking of our father, and that the disgrace he
was shuddering at was the thought of going to our father and doing some
violence to him. Yet it was just then that he pointed to something on his
breast, so that I remember the idea struck me at the time that the heart
is not on that part of the breast, but below, and that he struck himself
much too high, just below the neck, and kept pointing to that place. My
idea seemed silly to me at the time, but he was perhaps pointing then to
that little bag in which he had fifteen hundred roubles!”

“Just so,” Mitya cried from his place. “That’s right, Alyosha, it was the
little bag I struck with my fist.”

Fetyukovitch flew to him in hot haste entreating him to keep quiet, and at
the same instant pounced on Alyosha. Alyosha, carried away himself by his
recollection, warmly expressed his theory that this disgrace was probably
just that fifteen hundred roubles on him, which he might have returned to
Katerina Ivanovna as half of what he owed her, but which he had yet
determined not to repay her and to use for another purpose—namely, to
enable him to elope with Grushenka, if she consented.

“It is so, it must be so,” exclaimed Alyosha, in sudden excitement. “My
brother cried several times that half of the disgrace, half of it (he said
_half_ several times) he could free himself from at once, but that he was
so unhappy in his weakness of will that he wouldn’t do it ... that he knew
beforehand he was incapable of doing it!”

“And you clearly, confidently remember that he struck himself just on this
part of the breast?” Fetyukovitch asked eagerly.

“Clearly and confidently, for I thought at the time, ‘Why does he strike
himself up there when the heart is lower down?’ and the thought seemed
stupid to me at the time ... I remember its seeming stupid ... it flashed
through my mind. That’s what brought it back to me just now. How could I
have forgotten it till now? It was that little bag he meant when he said
he had the means but wouldn’t give back that fifteen hundred. And when he
was arrested at Mokroe he cried out—I know, I was told it—that he
considered it the most disgraceful act of his life that when he had the
means of repaying Katerina Ivanovna half (half, note!) what he owed her,
he yet could not bring himself to repay the money and preferred to remain
a thief in her eyes rather than part with it. And what torture, what
torture that debt has been to him!” Alyosha exclaimed in conclusion.

The prosecutor, of course, intervened. He asked Alyosha to describe once
more how it had all happened, and several times insisted on the question,
“Had the prisoner seemed to point to anything? Perhaps he had simply
struck himself with his fist on the breast?”

“But it was not with his fist,” cried Alyosha; “he pointed with his
fingers and pointed here, very high up.... How could I have so completely
forgotten it till this moment?”

The President asked Mitya what he had to say to the last witness’s
evidence. Mitya confirmed it, saying that he had been pointing to the
fifteen hundred roubles which were on his breast, just below the neck, and
that that was, of course, the disgrace, “A disgrace I cannot deny, the
most shameful act of my whole life,” cried Mitya. “I might have repaid it
and didn’t repay it. I preferred to remain a thief in her eyes rather than
give it back. And the most shameful part of it was that I knew beforehand
I shouldn’t give it back! You are right, Alyosha! Thanks, Alyosha!”

So Alyosha’s cross-examination ended. What was important and striking
about it was that one fact at least had been found, and even though this
were only one tiny bit of evidence, a mere hint at evidence, it did go
some little way towards proving that the bag had existed and had contained
fifteen hundred roubles and that the prisoner had not been lying at the
preliminary inquiry when he alleged at Mokroe that those fifteen hundred
roubles were “his own.” Alyosha was glad. With a flushed face he moved
away to the seat assigned to him. He kept repeating to himself: “How was
it I forgot? How could I have forgotten it? And what made it come back to
me now?”

Katerina Ivanovna was called to the witness-box. As she entered something
extraordinary happened in the court. The ladies clutched their lorgnettes
and opera-glasses. There was a stir among the men: some stood up to get a
better view. Everybody alleged afterwards that Mitya had turned “white as
a sheet” on her entrance. All in black, she advanced modestly, almost
timidly. It was impossible to tell from her face that she was agitated;
but there was a resolute gleam in her dark and gloomy eyes. I may remark
that many people mentioned that she looked particularly handsome at that
moment. She spoke softly but clearly, so that she was heard all over the
court. She expressed herself with composure, or at least tried to appear
composed. The President began his examination discreetly and very
respectfully, as though afraid to touch on “certain chords,” and showing
consideration for her great unhappiness. But in answer to one of the first
questions Katerina Ivanovna replied firmly that she had been formerly
betrothed to the prisoner, “until he left me of his own accord...” she
added quietly. When they asked her about the three thousand she had
entrusted to Mitya to post to her relations, she said firmly, “I didn’t
give him the money simply to send it off. I felt at the time that he was
in great need of money.... I gave him the three thousand on the
understanding that he should post it within the month if he cared to.
There was no need for him to worry himself about that debt afterwards.”

I will not repeat all the questions asked her and all her answers in
detail. I will only give the substance of her evidence.

“I was firmly convinced that he would send off that sum as soon as he got
money from his father,” she went on. “I have never doubted his
disinterestedness and his honesty ... his scrupulous honesty ... in money
matters. He felt quite certain that he would receive the money from his
father, and spoke to me several times about it. I knew he had a feud with
his father and have always believed that he had been unfairly treated by
his father. I don’t remember any threat uttered by him against his father.
He certainly never uttered any such threat before me. If he had come to me
at that time, I should have at once relieved his anxiety about that
unlucky three thousand roubles, but he had given up coming to see me ...
and I myself was put in such a position ... that I could not invite
him.... And I had no right, indeed, to be exacting as to that money,” she
added suddenly, and there was a ring of resolution in her voice. “I was
once indebted to him for assistance in money for more than three thousand,
and I took it, although I could not at that time foresee that I should
ever be in a position to repay my debt.”

There was a note of defiance in her voice. It was then Fetyukovitch began
his cross-examination.

“Did that take place not here, but at the beginning of your acquaintance?”
Fetyukovitch suggested cautiously, feeling his way, instantly scenting
something favorable. I must mention in parenthesis that, though
Fetyukovitch had been brought from Petersburg partly at the instance of
Katerina Ivanovna herself, he knew nothing about the episode of the four
thousand roubles given her by Mitya, and of her “bowing to the ground to
him.” She concealed this from him and said nothing about it, and that was
strange. It may be pretty certainly assumed that she herself did not know
till the very last minute whether she would speak of that episode in the
court, and waited for the inspiration of the moment.

No, I can never forget those moments. She began telling her story. She
told everything, the whole episode that Mitya had told Alyosha, and her
bowing to the ground, and her reason. She told about her father and her
going to Mitya, and did not in one word, in a single hint, suggest that
Mitya had himself, through her sister, proposed they should “send him
Katerina Ivanovna” to fetch the money. She generously concealed that and
was not ashamed to make it appear as though she had of her own impulse run
to the young officer, relying on something ... to beg him for the money.
It was something tremendous! I turned cold and trembled as I listened. The
court was hushed, trying to catch each word. It was something unexampled.
Even from such a self-willed and contemptuously proud girl as she was,
such an extremely frank avowal, such sacrifice, such self-immolation,
seemed incredible. And for what, for whom? To save the man who had
deceived and insulted her and to help, in however small a degree, in
saving him, by creating a strong impression in his favor. And, indeed, the
figure of the young officer who, with a respectful bow to the innocent
girl, handed her his last four thousand roubles—all he had in the
world—was thrown into a very sympathetic and attractive light, but ... I
had a painful misgiving at heart! I felt that calumny might come of it
later (and it did, in fact, it did). It was repeated all over the town
afterwards with spiteful laughter that the story was perhaps not quite
complete—that is, in the statement that the officer had let the young lady
depart “with nothing but a respectful bow.” It was hinted that something
was here omitted.

“And even if nothing had been omitted, if this were the whole story,” the
most highly respected of our ladies maintained, “even then it’s very
doubtful whether it was creditable for a young girl to behave in that way,
even for the sake of saving her father.”

And can Katerina Ivanovna, with her intelligence, her morbid
sensitiveness, have failed to understand that people would talk like that?
She must have understood it, yet she made up her mind to tell everything.
Of course, all these nasty little suspicions as to the truth of her story
only arose afterwards and at the first moment all were deeply impressed by
it. As for the judges and the lawyers, they listened in reverent, almost
shame-faced silence to Katerina Ivanovna. The prosecutor did not venture
upon even one question on the subject. Fetyukovitch made a low bow to her.
Oh, he was almost triumphant! Much ground had been gained. For a man to
give his last four thousand on a generous impulse and then for the same
man to murder his father for the sake of robbing him of three thousand—the
idea seemed too incongruous. Fetyukovitch felt that now the charge of
theft, at least, was as good as disproved. “The case” was thrown into
quite a different light. There was a wave of sympathy for Mitya. As for
him.... I was told that once or twice, while Katerina Ivanovna was giving
her evidence, he jumped up from his seat, sank back again, and hid his
face in his hands. But when she had finished, he suddenly cried in a
sobbing voice:

“Katya, why have you ruined me?” and his sobs were audible all over the
court. But he instantly restrained himself, and cried again:

“Now I am condemned!”

Then he sat rigid in his place, with his teeth clenched and his arms
across his chest. Katerina Ivanovna remained in the court and sat down in
her place. She was pale and sat with her eyes cast down. Those who were
sitting near her declared that for a long time she shivered all over as
though in a fever. Grushenka was called.

I am approaching the sudden catastrophe which was perhaps the final cause
of Mitya’s ruin. For I am convinced, so is every one—all the lawyers said
the same afterwards—that if the episode had not occurred, the prisoner
would at least have been recommended to mercy. But of that later. A few
words first about Grushenka.

She, too, was dressed entirely in black, with her magnificent black shawl
on her shoulders. She walked to the witness-box with her smooth, noiseless
tread, with the slightly swaying gait common in women of full figure. She
looked steadily at the President, turning her eyes neither to the right
nor to the left. To my thinking she looked very handsome at that moment,
and not at all pale, as the ladies alleged afterwards. They declared, too,
that she had a concentrated and spiteful expression. I believe that she
was simply irritated and painfully conscious of the contemptuous and
inquisitive eyes of our scandal-loving public. She was proud and could not
stand contempt. She was one of those people who flare up, angry and eager
to retaliate, at the mere suggestion of contempt. There was an element of
timidity, too, of course, and inward shame at her own timidity, so it was
not strange that her tone kept changing. At one moment it was angry,
contemptuous and rough, and at another there was a sincere note of
self-condemnation. Sometimes she spoke as though she were taking a
desperate plunge; as though she felt, “I don’t care what happens, I’ll say
it....” Apropos of her acquaintance with Fyodor Pavlovitch, she remarked
curtly, “That’s all nonsense, and was it my fault that he would pester
me?” But a minute later she added, “It was all my fault. I was laughing at
them both—at the old man and at him, too—and I brought both of them to
this. It was all on account of me it happened.”

Samsonov’s name came up somehow. “That’s nobody’s business,” she snapped
at once, with a sort of insolent defiance. “He was my benefactor; he took
me when I hadn’t a shoe to my foot, when my family had turned me out.” The
President reminded her, though very politely, that she must answer the
questions directly, without going off into irrelevant details. Grushenka
crimsoned and her eyes flashed.

The envelope with the notes in it she had not seen, but had only heard
from “that wicked wretch” that Fyodor Pavlovitch had an envelope with
notes for three thousand in it. “But that was all foolishness. I was only
laughing. I wouldn’t have gone to him for anything.”

“To whom are you referring as ‘that wicked wretch’?” inquired the
prosecutor.

“The lackey, Smerdyakov, who murdered his master and hanged himself last
night.”

She was, of course, at once asked what ground she had for such a definite
accusation; but it appeared that she, too, had no grounds for it.

“Dmitri Fyodorovitch told me so himself; you can believe him. The woman
who came between us has ruined him; she is the cause of it all, let me
tell you,” Grushenka added. She seemed to be quivering with hatred, and
there was a vindictive note in her voice.

She was again asked to whom she was referring.

“The young lady, Katerina Ivanovna there. She sent for me, offered me
chocolate, tried to fascinate me. There’s not much true shame about her, I
can tell you that....”

At this point the President checked her sternly, begging her to moderate
her language. But the jealous woman’s heart was burning, and she did not
care what she did.

“When the prisoner was arrested at Mokroe,” the prosecutor asked, “every
one saw and heard you run out of the next room and cry out: ‘It’s all my
fault. We’ll go to Siberia together!’ So you already believed him to have
murdered his father?”

“I don’t remember what I felt at the time,” answered Grushenka. “Every one
was crying out that he had killed his father, and I felt that it was my
fault, that it was on my account he had murdered him. But when he said he
wasn’t guilty, I believed him at once, and I believe him now and always
shall believe him. He is not the man to tell a lie.”

Fetyukovitch began his cross-examination. I remember that among other
things he asked about Rakitin and the twenty-five roubles “you paid him
for bringing Alexey Fyodorovitch Karamazov to see you.”

“There was nothing strange about his taking the money,” sneered Grushenka,
with angry contempt. “He was always coming to me for money: he used to get
thirty roubles a month at least out of me, chiefly for luxuries: he had
enough to keep him without my help.”

“What led you to be so liberal to Mr. Rakitin?” Fetyukovitch asked, in
spite of an uneasy movement on the part of the President.

“Why, he is my cousin. His mother was my mother’s sister. But he’s always
besought me not to tell any one here of it, he is so dreadfully ashamed of
me.”

This fact was a complete surprise to every one; no one in the town nor in
the monastery, not even Mitya, knew of it. I was told that Rakitin turned
purple with shame where he sat. Grushenka had somehow heard before she
came into the court that he had given evidence against Mitya, and so she
was angry. The whole effect on the public, of Rakitin’s speech, of his
noble sentiments, of his attacks upon serfdom and the political disorder
of Russia, was this time finally ruined. Fetyukovitch was satisfied: it
was another godsend. Grushenka’s cross-examination did not last long and,
of course, there could be nothing particularly new in her evidence. She
left a very disagreeable impression on the public; hundreds of
contemptuous eyes were fixed upon her, as she finished giving her evidence
and sat down again in the court, at a good distance from Katerina
Ivanovna. Mitya was silent throughout her evidence. He sat as though
turned to stone, with his eyes fixed on the ground.

Ivan was called to give evidence.



Chapter V. A Sudden Catastrophe


I may note that he had been called before Alyosha. But the usher of the
court announced to the President that, owing to an attack of illness or
some sort of fit, the witness could not appear at the moment, but was
ready to give his evidence as soon as he recovered. But no one seemed to
have heard it and it only came out later.

His entrance was for the first moment almost unnoticed. The principal
witnesses, especially the two rival ladies, had already been questioned.
Curiosity was satisfied for the time; the public was feeling almost
fatigued. Several more witnesses were still to be heard, who probably had
little information to give after all that had been given. Time was
passing. Ivan walked up with extraordinary slowness, looking at no one,
and with his head bowed, as though plunged in gloomy thought. He was
irreproachably dressed, but his face made a painful impression, on me at
least: there was an earthy look in it, a look like a dying man’s. His eyes
were lusterless; he raised them and looked slowly round the court. Alyosha
jumped up from his seat and moaned “Ah!” I remember that, but it was
hardly noticed.

The President began by informing him that he was a witness not on oath,
that he might answer or refuse to answer, but that, of course, he must
bear witness according to his conscience, and so on, and so on. Ivan
listened and looked at him blankly, but his face gradually relaxed into a
smile, and as soon as the President, looking at him in astonishment,
finished, he laughed outright.

“Well, and what else?” he asked in a loud voice.

There was a hush in the court; there was a feeling of something strange.
The President showed signs of uneasiness.

“You ... are perhaps still unwell?” he began, looking everywhere for the
usher.

“Don’t trouble yourself, your excellency, I am well enough and can tell
you something interesting,” Ivan answered with sudden calmness and
respectfulness.

“You have some special communication to make?” the President went on,
still mistrustfully.

Ivan looked down, waited a few seconds and, raising his head, answered,
almost stammering:

“No ... I haven’t. I have nothing particular.”

They began asking him questions. He answered, as it were, reluctantly,
with extreme brevity, with a sort of disgust which grew more and more
marked, though he answered rationally. To many questions he answered that
he did not know. He knew nothing of his father’s money relations with
Dmitri. “I wasn’t interested in the subject,” he added. Threats to murder
his father he had heard from the prisoner. Of the money in the envelope he
had heard from Smerdyakov.

“The same thing over and over again,” he interrupted suddenly, with a look
of weariness. “I have nothing particular to tell the court.”

“I see you are unwell and understand your feelings,” the President began.

He turned to the prosecutor and the counsel for the defense to invite them
to examine the witness, if necessary, when Ivan suddenly asked in an
exhausted voice:

“Let me go, your excellency, I feel very ill.”

And with these words, without waiting for permission, he turned to walk
out of the court. But after taking four steps he stood still, as though he
had reached a decision, smiled slowly, and went back.

“I am like the peasant girl, your excellency ... you know. How does it go?
‘I’ll stand up if I like, and I won’t if I don’t.’ They were trying to put
on her sarafan to take her to church to be married, and she said, ‘I’ll
stand up if I like, and I won’t if I don’t.’... It’s in some book about
the peasantry.”

“What do you mean by that?” the President asked severely.

“Why, this,” Ivan suddenly pulled out a roll of notes. “Here’s the money
... the notes that lay in that envelope” (he nodded towards the table on
which lay the material evidence), “for the sake of which our father was
murdered. Where shall I put them? Mr. Superintendent, take them.”

The usher of the court took the whole roll and handed it to the President.

“How could this money have come into your possession if it is the same
money?” the President asked wonderingly.

“I got them from Smerdyakov, from the murderer, yesterday.... I was with
him just before he hanged himself. It was he, not my brother, killed our
father. He murdered him and I incited him to do it ... Who doesn’t desire
his father’s death?”

“Are you in your right mind?” broke involuntarily from the President.

“I should think I am in my right mind ... in the same nasty mind as all of
you ... as all these ... ugly faces.” He turned suddenly to the audience.
“My father has been murdered and they pretend they are horrified,” he
snarled, with furious contempt. “They keep up the sham with one another.
Liars! They all desire the death of their fathers. One reptile devours
another.... If there hadn’t been a murder, they’d have been angry and gone
home ill-humored. It’s a spectacle they want! _Panem et circenses_. Though
I am one to talk! Have you any water? Give me a drink for Christ’s sake!”
He suddenly clutched his head.

The usher at once approached him. Alyosha jumped up and cried, “He is ill.
Don’t believe him: he has brain fever.” Katerina Ivanovna rose impulsively
from her seat and, rigid with horror, gazed at Ivan. Mitya stood up and
greedily looked at his brother and listened to him with a wild, strange
smile.

“Don’t disturb yourselves. I am not mad, I am only a murderer,” Ivan began
again. “You can’t expect eloquence from a murderer,” he added suddenly for
some reason and laughed a queer laugh.

The prosecutor bent over to the President in obvious dismay. The two other
judges communicated in agitated whispers. Fetyukovitch pricked up his ears
as he listened: the hall was hushed in expectation. The President seemed
suddenly to recollect himself.

“Witness, your words are incomprehensible and impossible here. Calm
yourself, if you can, and tell your story ... if you really have something
to tell. How can you confirm your statement ... if indeed you are not
delirious?”

“That’s just it. I have no proof. That cur Smerdyakov won’t send you
proofs from the other world ... in an envelope. You think of nothing but
envelopes—one is enough. I’ve no witnesses ... except one, perhaps,” he
smiled thoughtfully.

“Who is your witness?”

“He has a tail, your excellency, and that would be irregular! _Le diable
n’existe point!_ Don’t pay attention: he is a paltry, pitiful devil,” he
added suddenly. He ceased laughing and spoke as it were, confidentially.
“He is here somewhere, no doubt—under that table with the material
evidence on it, perhaps. Where should he sit if not there? You see, listen
to me. I told him I don’t want to keep quiet, and he talked about the
geological cataclysm ... idiocy! Come, release the monster ... he’s been
singing a hymn. That’s because his heart is light! It’s like a drunken man
in the street bawling how ‘Vanka went to Petersburg,’ and I would give a
quadrillion quadrillions for two seconds of joy. You don’t know me! Oh,
how stupid all this business is! Come, take me instead of him! I didn’t
come for nothing.... Why, why is everything so stupid?...”

And he began slowly, and as it were reflectively, looking round him again.
But the court was all excitement by now. Alyosha rushed towards him, but
the court usher had already seized Ivan by the arm.

“What are you about?” he cried, staring into the man’s face, and suddenly
seizing him by the shoulders, he flung him violently to the floor. But the
police were on the spot and he was seized. He screamed furiously. And all
the time he was being removed, he yelled and screamed something
incoherent.

The whole court was thrown into confusion. I don’t remember everything as
it happened. I was excited myself and could not follow. I only know that
afterwards, when everything was quiet again and every one understood what
had happened, the court usher came in for a reprimand, though he very
reasonably explained that the witness had been quite well, that the doctor
had seen him an hour ago, when he had a slight attack of giddiness, but
that, until he had come into the court, he had talked quite consecutively,
so that nothing could have been foreseen—that he had, in fact, insisted on
giving evidence. But before every one had completely regained their
composure and recovered from this scene, it was followed by another.
Katerina Ivanovna had an attack of hysterics. She sobbed, shrieking
loudly, but refused to leave the court, struggled, and besought them not
to remove her. Suddenly she cried to the President:

“There is more evidence I must give at once ... at once! Here is a
document, a letter ... take it, read it quickly, quickly! It’s a letter
from that monster ... that man there, there!” she pointed to Mitya. “It
was he killed his father, you will see that directly. He wrote to me how
he would kill his father! But the other one is ill, he is ill, he is
delirious!” she kept crying out, beside herself.

The court usher took the document she held out to the President, and she,
dropping into her chair, hiding her face in her hands, began convulsively
and noiselessly sobbing, shaking all over, and stifling every sound for
fear she should be ejected from the court. The document she had handed up
was that letter Mitya had written at the “Metropolis” tavern, which Ivan
had spoken of as a “mathematical proof.” Alas! its mathematical
conclusiveness was recognized, and had it not been for that letter, Mitya
might have escaped his doom or, at least, that doom would have been less
terrible. It was, I repeat, difficult to notice every detail. What
followed is still confused to my mind. The President must, I suppose, have
at once passed on the document to the judges, the jury, and the lawyers on
both sides. I only remember how they began examining the witness. On being
gently asked by the President whether she had recovered sufficiently,
Katerina Ivanovna exclaimed impetuously:

“I am ready, I am ready! I am quite equal to answering you,” she added,
evidently still afraid that she would somehow be prevented from giving
evidence. She was asked to explain in detail what this letter was and
under what circumstances she received it.

“I received it the day before the crime was committed, but he wrote it the
day before that, at the tavern—that is, two days before he committed the
crime. Look, it is written on some sort of bill!” she cried breathlessly.
“He hated me at that time, because he had behaved contemptibly and was
running after that creature ... and because he owed me that three
thousand.... Oh! he was humiliated by that three thousand on account of
his own meanness! This is how it happened about that three thousand. I beg
you, I beseech you, to hear me. Three weeks before he murdered his father,
he came to me one morning. I knew he was in want of money, and what he
wanted it for. Yes, yes—to win that creature and carry her off. I knew
then that he had been false to me and meant to abandon me, and it was I,
I, who gave him that money, who offered it to him on the pretext of his
sending it to my sister in Moscow. And as I gave it him, I looked him in
the face and said that he could send it when he liked, ‘in a month’s time
would do.’ How, how could he have failed to understand that I was
practically telling him to his face, ‘You want money to be false to me
with your creature, so here’s the money for you. I give it to you myself.
Take it, if you have so little honor as to take it!’ I wanted to prove
what he was, and what happened? He took it, he took it, and squandered it
with that creature in one night.... But he knew, he knew that I knew all
about it. I assure you he understood, too, that I gave him that money to
test him, to see whether he was so lost to all sense of honor as to take
it from me. I looked into his eyes and he looked into mine, and he
understood it all and he took it—he carried off my money!”

“That’s true, Katya,” Mitya roared suddenly, “I looked into your eyes and
I knew that you were dishonoring me, and yet I took your money. Despise me
as a scoundrel, despise me, all of you! I’ve deserved it!”

“Prisoner,” cried the President, “another word and I will order you to be
removed.”

“That money was a torment to him,” Katya went on with impulsive haste. “He
wanted to repay it me. He wanted to, that’s true; but he needed money for
that creature, too. So he murdered his father, but he didn’t repay me, and
went off with her to that village where he was arrested. There, again, he
squandered the money he had stolen after the murder of his father. And a
day before the murder he wrote me this letter. He was drunk when he wrote
it. I saw it at once, at the time. He wrote it from spite, and feeling
certain, positively certain, that I should never show it to any one, even
if he did kill him, or else he wouldn’t have written it. For he knew I
shouldn’t want to revenge myself and ruin him! But read it, read it
attentively—more attentively, please—and you will see that he had
described it all in his letter, all beforehand, how he would kill his
father and where his money was kept. Look, please, don’t overlook that,
there’s one phrase there, ‘I shall kill him as soon as Ivan has gone
away.’ So he thought it all out beforehand how he would kill him,”
Katerina Ivanovna pointed out to the court with venomous and malignant
triumph. Oh! it was clear she had studied every line of that letter and
detected every meaning underlining it. “If he hadn’t been drunk, he
wouldn’t have written to me; but, look, everything is written there
beforehand, just as he committed the murder after. A complete program of
it!” she exclaimed frantically.

She was reckless now of all consequences to herself, though, no doubt, she
had foreseen them even a month ago, for even then, perhaps, shaking with
anger, she had pondered whether to show it at the trial or not. Now she
had taken the fatal plunge. I remember that the letter was read aloud by
the clerk, directly afterwards, I believe. It made an overwhelming
impression. They asked Mitya whether he admitted having written the
letter.

“It’s mine, mine!” cried Mitya. “I shouldn’t have written it, if I hadn’t
been drunk!... We’ve hated each other for many things, Katya, but I swear,
I swear I loved you even while I hated you, and you didn’t love me!”

He sank back on his seat, wringing his hands in despair. The prosecutor
and counsel for the defense began cross-examining her, chiefly to
ascertain what had induced her to conceal such a document and to give her
evidence in quite a different tone and spirit just before.

“Yes, yes. I was telling lies just now. I was lying against my honor and
my conscience, but I wanted to save him, for he has hated and despised me
so!” Katya cried madly. “Oh, he has despised me horribly, he has always
despised me, and do you know, he has despised me from the very moment that
I bowed down to him for that money. I saw that.... I felt it at once at
the time, but for a long time I wouldn’t believe it. How often I have read
it in his eyes, ‘You came of yourself, though.’ Oh, he didn’t understand,
he had no idea why I ran to him, he can suspect nothing but baseness, he
judged me by himself, he thought every one was like himself!” Katya hissed
furiously, in a perfect frenzy. “And he only wanted to marry me, because
I’d inherited a fortune, because of that, because of that! I always
suspected it was because of that! Oh, he is a brute! He was always
convinced that I should be trembling with shame all my life before him,
because I went to him then, and that he had a right to despise me for ever
for it, and so to be superior to me—that’s why he wanted to marry me!
That’s so, that’s all so! I tried to conquer him by my love—a love that
knew no bounds. I even tried to forgive his faithlessness; but he
understood nothing, nothing! How could he understand indeed? He is a
monster! I only received that letter the next evening: it was brought me
from the tavern—and only that morning, only that morning I wanted to
forgive him everything, everything—even his treachery!”

The President and the prosecutor, of course, tried to calm her. I can’t
help thinking that they felt ashamed of taking advantage of her hysteria
and of listening to such avowals. I remember hearing them say to her, “We
understand how hard it is for you; be sure we are able to feel for you,”
and so on, and so on. And yet they dragged the evidence out of the raving,
hysterical woman. She described at last with extraordinary clearness,
which is so often seen, though only for a moment, in such over-wrought
states, how Ivan had been nearly driven out of his mind during the last
two months trying to save “the monster and murderer,” his brother.

“He tortured himself,” she exclaimed, “he was always trying to minimize
his brother’s guilt and confessing to me that he, too, had never loved his
father, and perhaps desired his death himself. Oh, he has a tender,
over-tender conscience! He tormented himself with his conscience! He told
me everything, everything! He came every day and talked to me as his only
friend. I have the honor to be his only friend!” she cried suddenly with a
sort of defiance, and her eyes flashed. “He had been twice to see
Smerdyakov. One day he came to me and said, ‘If it was not my brother, but
Smerdyakov committed the murder’ (for the legend was circulating
everywhere that Smerdyakov had done it), ‘perhaps I too am guilty, for
Smerdyakov knew I didn’t like my father and perhaps believed that I
desired my father’s death.’ Then I brought out that letter and showed it
him. He was entirely convinced that his brother had done it, and he was
overwhelmed by it. He couldn’t endure the thought that his own brother was
a parricide! Only a week ago I saw that it was making him ill. During the
last few days he has talked incoherently in my presence. I saw his mind
was giving way. He walked about, raving; he was seen muttering in the
streets. The doctor from Moscow, at my request, examined him the day
before yesterday and told me that he was on the eve of brain fever—and all
on his account, on account of this monster! And last night he learnt that
Smerdyakov was dead! It was such a shock that it drove him out of his mind
... and all through this monster, all for the sake of saving the monster!”

Oh, of course, such an outpouring, such an avowal is only possible once in
a lifetime—at the hour of death, for instance, on the way to the scaffold!
But it was in Katya’s character, and it was such a moment in her life. It
was the same impetuous Katya who had thrown herself on the mercy of a
young profligate to save her father; the same Katya who had just before,
in her pride and chastity, sacrificed herself and her maidenly modesty
before all these people, telling of Mitya’s generous conduct, in the hope
of softening his fate a little. And now, again, she sacrificed herself;
but this time it was for another, and perhaps only now—perhaps only at
this moment—she felt and knew how dear that other was to her! She had
sacrificed herself in terror for him, conceiving all of a sudden that he
had ruined himself by his confession that it was he who had committed the
murder, not his brother, she had sacrificed herself to save him, to save
his good name, his reputation!

And yet one terrible doubt occurred to one—was she lying in her
description of her former relations with Mitya?—that was the question. No,
she had not intentionally slandered him when she cried that Mitya despised
her for her bowing down to him! She believed it herself. She had been
firmly convinced, perhaps ever since that bow, that the simple-hearted
Mitya, who even then adored her, was laughing at her and despising her.
She had loved him with an hysterical, “lacerated” love only from pride,
from wounded pride, and that love was not like love, but more like
revenge. Oh! perhaps that lacerated love would have grown into real love,
perhaps Katya longed for nothing more than that, but Mitya’s faithlessness
had wounded her to the bottom of her heart, and her heart could not
forgive him. The moment of revenge had come upon her suddenly, and all
that had been accumulating so long and so painfully in the offended
woman’s breast burst out all at once and unexpectedly. She betrayed Mitya,
but she betrayed herself, too. And no sooner had she given full expression
to her feelings than the tension of course was over and she was
overwhelmed with shame. Hysterics began again: she fell on the floor,
sobbing and screaming. She was carried out. At that moment Grushenka, with
a wail, rushed towards Mitya before they had time to prevent her.

“Mitya,” she wailed, “your serpent has destroyed you! There, she has shown
you what she is!” she shouted to the judges, shaking with anger. At a
signal from the President they seized her and tried to remove her from the
court. She wouldn’t allow it. She fought and struggled to get back to
Mitya. Mitya uttered a cry and struggled to get to her. He was
overpowered.

Yes, I think the ladies who came to see the spectacle must have been
satisfied—the show had been a varied one. Then I remember the Moscow
doctor appeared on the scene. I believe the President had previously sent
the court usher to arrange for medical aid for Ivan. The doctor announced
to the court that the sick man was suffering from a dangerous attack of
brain fever, and that he must be at once removed. In answer to questions
from the prosecutor and the counsel for the defense he said that the
patient had come to him of his own accord the day before yesterday and
that he had warned him that he had such an attack coming on, but he had
not consented to be looked after. “He was certainly not in a normal state
of mind: he told me himself that he saw visions when he was awake, that he
met several persons in the street, who were dead, and that Satan visited
him every evening,” said the doctor, in conclusion. Having given his
evidence, the celebrated doctor withdrew. The letter produced by Katerina
Ivanovna was added to the material proofs. After some deliberation, the
judges decided to proceed with the trial and to enter both the unexpected
pieces of evidence (given by Ivan and Katerina Ivanovna) on the protocol.

But I will not detail the evidence of the other witnesses, who only
repeated and confirmed what had been said before, though all with their
characteristic peculiarities. I repeat, all was brought together in the
prosecutor’s speech, which I shall quote immediately. Every one was
excited, every one was electrified by the late catastrophe, and all were
awaiting the speeches for the prosecution and the defense with intense
impatience. Fetyukovitch was obviously shaken by Katerina Ivanovna’s
evidence. But the prosecutor was triumphant. When all the evidence had
been taken, the court was adjourned for almost an hour. I believe it was
just eight o’clock when the President returned to his seat and our
prosecutor, Ippolit Kirillovitch, began his speech.



Chapter VI. The Prosecutor’s Speech. Sketches Of Character


Ippolit Kirillovitch began his speech, trembling with nervousness, with
cold sweat on his forehead, feeling hot and cold all over by turns. He
described this himself afterwards. He regarded this speech as his
_chef-d’œuvre_, the _chef-d’œuvre_ of his whole life, as his swan-song. He
died, it is true, nine months later of rapid consumption, so that he had
the right, as it turned out, to compare himself to a swan singing his last
song. He had put his whole heart and all the brain he had into that
speech. And poor Ippolit Kirillovitch unexpectedly revealed that at least
some feeling for the public welfare and “the eternal question” lay
concealed in him. Where his speech really excelled was in its sincerity.
He genuinely believed in the prisoner’s guilt; he was accusing him not as
an official duty only, and in calling for vengeance he quivered with a
genuine passion “for the security of society.” Even the ladies in the
audience, though they remained hostile to Ippolit Kirillovitch, admitted
that he made an extraordinary impression on them. He began in a breaking
voice, but it soon gained strength and filled the court to the end of his
speech. But as soon as he had finished, he almost fainted.

“Gentlemen of the jury,” began the prosecutor, “this case has made a stir
throughout Russia. But what is there to wonder at, what is there so
peculiarly horrifying in it for us? We are so accustomed to such crimes!
That’s what’s so horrible, that such dark deeds have ceased to horrify us.
What ought to horrify us is that we are so accustomed to it, and not this
or that isolated crime. What are the causes of our indifference, our
lukewarm attitude to such deeds, to such signs of the times, ominous of an
unenviable future? Is it our cynicism, is it the premature exhaustion of
intellect and imagination in a society that is sinking into decay, in
spite of its youth? Is it that our moral principles are shattered to their
foundations, or is it, perhaps, a complete lack of such principles among
us? I cannot answer such questions; nevertheless they are disturbing, and
every citizen not only must, but ought to be harassed by them. Our newborn
and still timid press has done good service to the public already, for
without it we should never have heard of the horrors of unbridled violence
and moral degradation which are continually made known by the press, not
merely to those who attend the new jury courts established in the present
reign, but to every one. And what do we read almost daily? Of things
beside which the present case grows pale, and seems almost commonplace.
But what is most important is that the majority of our national crimes of
violence bear witness to a widespread evil, now so general among us that
it is difficult to contend against it.

“One day we see a brilliant young officer of high society, at the very
outset of his career, in a cowardly underhand way, without a pang of
conscience, murdering an official who had once been his benefactor, and
the servant girl, to steal his own I.O.U. and what ready money he could
find on him; ‘it will come in handy for my pleasures in the fashionable
world and for my career in the future.’ After murdering them, he puts
pillows under the head of each of his victims; he goes away. Next, a young
hero ‘decorated for bravery’ kills the mother of his chief and benefactor,
like a highwayman, and to urge his companions to join him he asserts that
‘she loves him like a son, and so will follow all his directions and take
no precautions.’ Granted that he is a monster, yet I dare not say in these
days that he is unique. Another man will not commit the murder, but will
feel and think like him, and is as dishonorable in soul. In silence, alone
with his conscience, he asks himself perhaps, ‘What is honor, and isn’t
the condemnation of bloodshed a prejudice?’

“Perhaps people will cry out against me that I am morbid, hysterical, that
it is a monstrous slander, that I am exaggerating. Let them say so—and
heavens! I should be the first to rejoice if it were so! Oh, don’t believe
me, think of me as morbid, but remember my words; if only a tenth, if only
a twentieth part of what I say is true—even so it’s awful! Look how our
young people commit suicide, without asking themselves Hamlet’s question
what there is beyond, without a sign of such a question, as though all
that relates to the soul and to what awaits us beyond the grave had long
been erased in their minds and buried under the sands. Look at our vice,
at our profligates. Fyodor Pavlovitch, the luckless victim in the present
case, was almost an innocent babe compared with many of them. And yet we
all knew him, ‘he lived among us!’...

“Yes, one day perhaps the leading intellects of Russia and of Europe will
study the psychology of Russian crime, for the subject is worth it. But
this study will come later, at leisure, when all the tragic topsy-turvydom
of to-day is farther behind us, so that it’s possible to examine it with
more insight and more impartiality than I can do. Now we are either
horrified or pretend to be horrified, though we really gloat over the
spectacle, and love strong and eccentric sensations which tickle our
cynical, pampered idleness. Or, like little children, we brush the
dreadful ghosts away and hide our heads in the pillow so as to return to
our sports and merriment as soon as they have vanished. But we must one
day begin life in sober earnest, we must look at ourselves as a society;
it’s time we tried to grasp something of our social position, or at least
to make a beginning in that direction.

“A great writer(9) of the last epoch, comparing Russia to a swift troika
galloping to an unknown goal, exclaims, ‘Oh, troika, birdlike troika, who
invented thee!’ and adds, in proud ecstasy, that all the peoples of the
world stand aside respectfully to make way for the recklessly galloping
troika to pass. That may be, they may stand aside, respectfully or no, but
in my poor opinion the great writer ended his book in this way either in
an access of childish and naïve optimism, or simply in fear of the
censorship of the day. For if the troika were drawn by his heroes,
Sobakevitch, Nozdryov, Tchitchikov, it could reach no rational goal,
whoever might be driving it. And those were the heroes of an older
generation, ours are worse specimens still....”

At this point Ippolit Kirillovitch’s speech was interrupted by applause.
The liberal significance of this simile was appreciated. The applause was,
it’s true, of brief duration, so that the President did not think it
necessary to caution the public, and only looked severely in the direction
of the offenders. But Ippolit Kirillovitch was encouraged; he had never
been applauded before! He had been all his life unable to get a hearing,
and now he suddenly had an opportunity of securing the ear of all Russia.

“What, after all, is this Karamazov family, which has gained such an
unenviable notoriety throughout Russia?” he continued. “Perhaps I am
exaggerating, but it seems to me that certain fundamental features of the
educated class of to-day are reflected in this family picture—only, of
course, in miniature, ‘like the sun in a drop of water.’ Think of that
unhappy, vicious, unbridled old man, who has met with such a melancholy
end, the head of a family! Beginning life of noble birth, but in a poor
dependent position, through an unexpected marriage he came into a small
fortune. A petty knave, a toady and buffoon, of fairly good, though
undeveloped, intelligence, he was, above all, a moneylender, who grew
bolder with growing prosperity. His abject and servile characteristics
disappeared, his malicious and sarcastic cynicism was all that remained.
On the spiritual side he was undeveloped, while his vitality was
excessive. He saw nothing in life but sensual pleasure, and he brought his
children up to be the same. He had no feelings for his duties as a father.
He ridiculed those duties. He left his little children to the servants,
and was glad to be rid of them, forgot about them completely. The old
man’s maxim was _Après moi le déluge_. He was an example of everything
that is opposed to civic duty, of the most complete and malignant
individualism. ‘The world may burn for aught I care, so long as I am all
right,’ and he was all right; he was content, he was eager to go on living
in the same way for another twenty or thirty years. He swindled his own
son and spent his money, his maternal inheritance, on trying to get his
mistress from him. No, I don’t intend to leave the prisoner’s defense
altogether to my talented colleague from Petersburg. I will speak the
truth myself, I can well understand what resentment he had heaped up in
his son’s heart against him.

“But enough, enough of that unhappy old man; he has paid the penalty. Let
us remember, however, that he was a father, and one of the typical fathers
of to-day. Am I unjust, indeed, in saying that he is typical of many
modern fathers? Alas! many of them only differ in not openly professing
such cynicism, for they are better educated, more cultured, but their
philosophy is essentially the same as his. Perhaps I am a pessimist, but
you have agreed to forgive me. Let us agree beforehand, you need not
believe me, but let me speak. Let me say what I have to say, and remember
something of my words.

“Now for the children of this father, this head of a family. One of them
is the prisoner before us, all the rest of my speech will deal with him.
Of the other two I will speak only cursorily.

“The elder is one of those modern young men of brilliant education and
vigorous intellect, who has lost all faith in everything. He has denied
and rejected much already, like his father. We have all heard him, he was
a welcome guest in local society. He never concealed his opinions, quite
the contrary in fact, which justifies me in speaking rather openly of him
now, of course, not as an individual, but as a member of the Karamazov
family. Another personage closely connected with the case died here by his
own hand last night. I mean an afflicted idiot, formerly the servant, and
possibly the illegitimate son, of Fyodor Pavlovitch, Smerdyakov. At the
preliminary inquiry, he told me with hysterical tears how the young Ivan
Karamazov had horrified him by his spiritual audacity. ‘Everything in the
world is lawful according to him, and nothing must be forbidden in the
future—that is what he always taught me.’ I believe that idiot was driven
out of his mind by this theory, though, of course, the epileptic attacks
from which he suffered, and this terrible catastrophe, have helped to
unhinge his faculties. But he dropped one very interesting observation,
which would have done credit to a more intelligent observer, and that is,
indeed, why I’ve mentioned it: ‘If there is one of the sons that is like
Fyodor Pavlovitch in character, it is Ivan Fyodorovitch.’

“With that remark I conclude my sketch of his character, feeling it
indelicate to continue further. Oh, I don’t want to draw any further
conclusions and croak like a raven over the young man’s future. We’ve seen
to-day in this court that there are still good impulses in his young
heart, that family feeling has not been destroyed in him by lack of faith
and cynicism, which have come to him rather by inheritance than by the
exercise of independent thought.

“Then the third son. Oh, he is a devout and modest youth, who does not
share his elder brother’s gloomy and destructive theory of life. He has
sought to cling to the ‘ideas of the people,’ or to what goes by that name
in some circles of our intellectual classes. He clung to the monastery,
and was within an ace of becoming a monk. He seems to me to have betrayed
unconsciously, and so early, that timid despair which leads so many in our
unhappy society, who dread cynicism and its corrupting influences, and
mistakenly attribute all the mischief to European enlightenment, to return
to their ‘native soil,’ as they say, to the bosom, so to speak, of their
mother earth, like frightened children, yearning to fall asleep on the
withered bosom of their decrepit mother, and to sleep there for ever, only
to escape the horrors that terrify them.

“For my part I wish the excellent and gifted young man every success; I
trust that his youthful idealism and impulse towards the ideas of the
people may never degenerate, as often happens, on the moral side into
gloomy mysticism, and on the political into blind chauvinism—two elements
which are even a greater menace to Russia than the premature decay, due to
misunderstanding and gratuitous adoption of European ideas, from which his
elder brother is suffering.”

Two or three people clapped their hands at the mention of chauvinism and
mysticism. Ippolit Kirillovitch had been, indeed, carried away by his own
eloquence. All this had little to do with the case in hand, to say nothing
of the fact of its being somewhat vague, but the sickly and consumptive
man was overcome by the desire to express himself once in his life. People
said afterwards that he was actuated by unworthy motives in his criticism
of Ivan, because the latter had on one or two occasions got the better of
him in argument, and Ippolit Kirillovitch, remembering it, tried now to
take his revenge. But I don’t know whether it was true. All this was only
introductory, however, and the speech passed to more direct consideration
of the case.

“But to return to the eldest son,” Ippolit Kirillovitch went on. “He is
the prisoner before us. We have his life and his actions, too, before us;
the fatal day has come and all has been brought to the surface. While his
brothers seem to stand for ‘Europeanism’ and ‘the principles of the
people,’ he seems to represent Russia as she is. Oh, not all Russia, not
all! God preserve us, if it were! Yet, here we have her, our mother
Russia, the very scent and sound of her. Oh, he is spontaneous, he is a
marvelous mingling of good and evil, he is a lover of culture and
Schiller, yet he brawls in taverns and plucks out the beards of his boon
companions. Oh, he, too, can be good and noble, but only when all goes
well with him. What is more, he can be carried off his feet, positively
carried off his feet by noble ideals, but only if they come of themselves,
if they fall from heaven for him, if they need not be paid for. He
dislikes paying for anything, but is very fond of receiving, and that’s so
with him in everything. Oh, give him every possible good in life (he
couldn’t be content with less), and put no obstacle in his way, and he
will show that he, too, can be noble. He is not greedy, no, but he must
have money, a great deal of money, and you will see how generously, with
what scorn of filthy lucre, he will fling it all away in the reckless
dissipation of one night. But if he has not money, he will show what he is
ready to do to get it when he is in great need of it. But all this later,
let us take events in their chronological order.

“First, we have before us a poor abandoned child, running about the
back-yard ‘without boots on his feet,’ as our worthy and esteemed fellow
citizen, of foreign origin, alas! expressed it just now. I repeat it
again, I yield to no one the defense of the criminal. I am here to accuse
him, but to defend him also. Yes, I, too, am human; I, too, can weigh the
influence of home and childhood on the character. But the boy grows up and
becomes an officer; for a duel and other reckless conduct he is exiled to
one of the remote frontier towns of Russia. There he led a wild life as an
officer. And, of course, he needed money, money before all things, and so
after prolonged disputes he came to a settlement with his father, and the
last six thousand was sent him. A letter is in existence in which he
practically gives up his claim to the rest and settles his conflict with
his father over the inheritance on the payment of this six thousand.

“Then came his meeting with a young girl of lofty character and brilliant
education. Oh, I do not venture to repeat the details; you have only just
heard them. Honor, self-sacrifice were shown there, and I will be silent.
The figure of the young officer, frivolous and profligate, doing homage to
true nobility and a lofty ideal, was shown in a very sympathetic light
before us. But the other side of the medal was unexpectedly turned to us
immediately after in this very court. Again I will not venture to
conjecture why it happened so, but there were causes. The same lady,
bathed in tears of long-concealed indignation, alleged that he, he of all
men, had despised her for her action, which, though incautious, reckless
perhaps, was still dictated by lofty and generous motives. He, he, the
girl’s betrothed, looked at her with that smile of mockery, which was more
insufferable from him than from any one. And knowing that he had already
deceived her (he had deceived her, believing that she was bound to endure
everything from him, even treachery), she intentionally offered him three
thousand roubles, and clearly, too clearly, let him understand that she
was offering him money to deceive her. ‘Well, will you take it or not, are
you so lost to shame?’ was the dumb question in her scrutinizing eyes. He
looked at her, saw clearly what was in her mind (he’s admitted here before
you that he understood it all), appropriated that three thousand
unconditionally, and squandered it in two days with the new object of his
affections.

“What are we to believe then? The first legend of the young officer
sacrificing his last farthing in a noble impulse of generosity and doing
reverence to virtue, or this other revolting picture? As a rule, between
two extremes one has to find the mean, but in the present case this is not
true. The probability is that in the first case he was genuinely noble,
and in the second as genuinely base. And why? Because he was of the broad
Karamazov character—that’s just what I am leading up to—capable of
combining the most incongruous contradictions, and capable of the greatest
heights and of the greatest depths. Remember the brilliant remark made by
a young observer who has seen the Karamazov family at close quarters—Mr.
Rakitin: ‘The sense of their own degradation is as essential to those
reckless, unbridled natures as the sense of their lofty generosity.’ And
that’s true, they need continually this unnatural mixture. Two extremes at
the same moment, or they are miserable and dissatisfied and their
existence is incomplete. They are wide, wide as mother Russia; they
include everything and put up with everything.

“By the way, gentlemen of the jury, we’ve just touched upon that three
thousand roubles, and I will venture to anticipate things a little. Can
you conceive that a man like that, on receiving that sum and in such a
way, at the price of such shame, such disgrace, such utter degradation,
could have been capable that very day of setting apart half that sum, that
very day, and sewing it up in a little bag, and would have had the
firmness of character to carry it about with him for a whole month
afterwards, in spite of every temptation and his extreme need of it!
Neither in drunken debauchery in taverns, nor when he was flying into the
country, trying to get from God knows whom, the money so essential to him
to remove the object of his affections from being tempted by his father,
did he bring himself to touch that little bag! Why, if only to avoid
abandoning his mistress to the rival of whom he was so jealous, he would
have been certain to have opened that bag and to have stayed at home to
keep watch over her, and to await the moment when she would say to him at
last ‘I am yours,’ and to fly with her far from their fatal surroundings.

“But no, he did not touch his talisman, and what is the reason he gives
for it? The chief reason, as I have just said, was that when she would
say, ‘I am yours, take me where you will,’ he might have the wherewithal
to take her. But that first reason, in the prisoner’s own words, was of
little weight beside the second. While I have that money on me, he said, I
am a scoundrel, not a thief, for I can always go to my insulted betrothed,
and, laying down half the sum I have fraudulently appropriated, I can
always say to her, ‘You see, I’ve squandered half your money, and shown I
am a weak and immoral man, and, if you like, a scoundrel’ (I use the
prisoner’s own expressions), ‘but though I am a scoundrel, I am not a
thief, for if I had been a thief, I shouldn’t have brought you back this
half of the money, but should have taken it as I did the other half!’ A
marvelous explanation! This frantic, but weak man, who could not resist
the temptation of accepting the three thousand roubles at the price of
such disgrace, this very man suddenly develops the most stoical firmness,
and carries about a thousand roubles without daring to touch it. Does that
fit in at all with the character we have analyzed? No, and I venture to
tell you how the real Dmitri Karamazov would have behaved in such
circumstances, if he really had brought himself to put away the money.

“At the first temptation—for instance, to entertain the woman with whom he
had already squandered half the money—he would have unpicked his little
bag and have taken out some hundred roubles, for why should he have taken
back precisely half the money, that is, fifteen hundred roubles? why not
fourteen hundred? He could just as well have said then that he was not a
thief, because he brought back fourteen hundred roubles. Then another time
he would have unpicked it again and taken out another hundred, and then a
third, and then a fourth, and before the end of the month he would have
taken the last note but one, feeling that if he took back only a hundred
it would answer the purpose, for a thief would have stolen it all. And
then he would have looked at this last note, and have said to himself,
‘It’s really not worth while to give back one hundred; let’s spend that,
too!’ That’s how the real Dmitri Karamazov, as we know him, would have
behaved. One cannot imagine anything more incongruous with the actual fact
than this legend of the little bag. Nothing could be more inconceivable.
But we shall return to that later.”

After touching upon what had come out in the proceedings concerning the
financial relations of father and son, and arguing again and again that it
was utterly impossible, from the facts known, to determine which was in
the wrong, Ippolit Kirillovitch passed to the evidence of the medical
experts in reference to Mitya’s fixed idea about the three thousand owing
him.



Chapter VII. An Historical Survey


“The medical experts have striven to convince us that the prisoner is out
of his mind and, in fact, a maniac. I maintain that he is in his right
mind, and that if he had not been, he would have behaved more cleverly. As
for his being a maniac, that I would agree with, but only in one point,
that is, his fixed idea about the three thousand. Yet I think one might
find a much simpler cause than his tendency to insanity. For my part I
agree thoroughly with the young doctor who maintained that the prisoner’s
mental faculties have always been normal, and that he has only been
irritable and exasperated. The object of the prisoner’s continual and
violent anger was not the sum itself; there was a special motive at the
bottom of it. That motive is jealousy!”

Here Ippolit Kirillovitch described at length the prisoner’s fatal passion
for Grushenka. He began from the moment when the prisoner went to the
“young person’s” lodgings “to beat her”—“I use his own expression,” the
prosecutor explained—“but instead of beating her, he remained there, at
her feet. That was the beginning of the passion. At the same time the
prisoner’s father was captivated by the same young person—a strange and
fatal coincidence, for they both lost their hearts to her simultaneously,
though both had known her before. And she inspired in both of them the
most violent, characteristically Karamazov passion. We have her own
confession: ‘I was laughing at both of them.’ Yes, the sudden desire to
make a jest of them came over her, and she conquered both of them at once.
The old man, who worshiped money, at once set aside three thousand roubles
as a reward for one visit from her, but soon after that, he would have
been happy to lay his property and his name at her feet, if only she would
become his lawful wife. We have good evidence of this. As for the
prisoner, the tragedy of his fate is evident; it is before us. But such
was the young person’s ‘game.’ The enchantress gave the unhappy young man
no hope until the last moment, when he knelt before her, stretching out
hands that were already stained with the blood of his father and rival. It
was in that position that he was arrested. ‘Send me to Siberia with him, I
have brought him to this, I am most to blame,’ the woman herself cried, in
genuine remorse at the moment of his arrest.

“The talented young man, to whom I have referred already, Mr. Rakitin,
characterized this heroine in brief and impressive terms: ‘She was
disillusioned early in life, deceived and ruined by a betrothed, who
seduced and abandoned her. She was left in poverty, cursed by her
respectable family, and taken under the protection of a wealthy old man,
whom she still, however, considers as her benefactor. There was perhaps
much that was good in her young heart, but it was embittered too early.
She became prudent and saved money. She grew sarcastic and resentful
against society.’ After this sketch of her character it may well be
understood that she might laugh at both of them simply from mischief, from
malice.

“After a month of hopeless love and moral degradation, during which he
betrayed his betrothed and appropriated money entrusted to his honor, the
prisoner was driven almost to frenzy, almost to madness by continual
jealousy—and of whom? His father! And the worst of it was that the crazy
old man was alluring and enticing the object of his affection by means of
that very three thousand roubles, which the son looked upon as his own
property, part of his inheritance from his mother, of which his father was
cheating him. Yes, I admit it was hard to bear! It might well drive a man
to madness. It was not the money, but the fact that this money was used
with such revolting cynicism to ruin his happiness!”

Then the prosecutor went on to describe how the idea of murdering his
father had entered the prisoner’s head, and illustrated his theory with
facts.

“At first he only talked about it in taverns—he was talking about it all
that month. Ah, he likes being always surrounded with company, and he
likes to tell his companions everything, even his most diabolical and
dangerous ideas; he likes to share every thought with others, and expects,
for some reason, that those he confides in will meet him with perfect
sympathy, enter into all his troubles and anxieties, take his part and not
oppose him in anything. If not, he flies into a rage and smashes up
everything in the tavern. [Then followed the anecdote about Captain
Snegiryov.] Those who heard the prisoner began to think at last that he
might mean more than threats, and that such a frenzy might turn threats
into actions.”

Here the prosecutor described the meeting of the family at the monastery,
the conversations with Alyosha, and the horrible scene of violence when
the prisoner had rushed into his father’s house just after dinner.

“I cannot positively assert,” the prosecutor continued, “that the prisoner
fully intended to murder his father before that incident. Yet the idea had
several times presented itself to him, and he had deliberated on it—for
that we have facts, witnesses, and his own words. I confess, gentlemen of
the jury,” he added, “that till to-day I have been uncertain whether to
attribute to the prisoner conscious premeditation. I was firmly convinced
that he had pictured the fatal moment beforehand, but had only pictured
it, contemplating it as a possibility. He had not definitely considered
when and how he might commit the crime.

“But I was only uncertain till to-day, till that fatal document was
presented to the court just now. You yourselves heard that young lady’s
exclamation, ‘It is the plan, the program of the murder!’ That is how she
defined that miserable, drunken letter of the unhappy prisoner. And, in
fact, from that letter we see that the whole fact of the murder was
premeditated. It was written two days before, and so we know now for a
fact that, forty-eight hours before the perpetration of his terrible
design, the prisoner swore that, if he could not get money next day, he
would murder his father in order to take the envelope with the notes from
under his pillow, as soon as Ivan had left. ‘As soon as Ivan had gone
away’—you hear that; so he had thought everything out, weighing every
circumstance, and he carried it all out just as he had written it. The
proof of premeditation is conclusive; the crime must have been committed
for the sake of the money, that is stated clearly, that is written and
signed. The prisoner does not deny his signature.

“I shall be told he was drunk when he wrote it. But that does not diminish
the value of the letter, quite the contrary; he wrote when drunk what he
had planned when sober. Had he not planned it when sober, he would not
have written it when drunk. I shall be asked: Then why did he talk about
it in taverns? A man who premeditates such a crime is silent and keeps it
to himself. Yes, but he talked about it before he had formed a plan, when
he had only the desire, only the impulse to it. Afterwards he talked less
about it. On the evening he wrote that letter at the ‘Metropolis’ tavern,
contrary to his custom he was silent, though he had been drinking. He did
not play billiards, he sat in a corner, talked to no one. He did indeed
turn a shopman out of his seat, but that was done almost unconsciously,
because he could never enter a tavern without making a disturbance. It is
true that after he had taken the final decision, he must have felt
apprehensive that he had talked too much about his design beforehand, and
that this might lead to his arrest and prosecution afterwards. But there
was nothing for it; he could not take his words back, but his luck had
served him before, it would serve him again. He believed in his star, you
know! I must confess, too, that he did a great deal to avoid the fatal
catastrophe. ‘To-morrow I shall try and borrow the money from every one,’
as he writes in his peculiar language, ‘and if they won’t give it to me,
there will be bloodshed.’ ”

Here Ippolit Kirillovitch passed to a detailed description of all Mitya’s
efforts to borrow the money. He described his visit to Samsonov, his
journey to Lyagavy. “Harassed, jeered at, hungry, after selling his watch
to pay for the journey (though he tells us he had fifteen hundred roubles
on him—a likely story), tortured by jealousy at having left the object of
his affections in the town, suspecting that she would go to Fyodor
Pavlovitch in his absence, he returned at last to the town, to find, to
his joy, that she had not been near his father. He accompanied her himself
to her protector. (Strange to say, he doesn’t seem to have been jealous of
Samsonov, which is psychologically interesting.) Then he hastens back to
his ambush in the back gardens, and there learns that Smerdyakov is in a
fit, that the other servant is ill—the coast is clear and he knows the
‘signals’—what a temptation! Still he resists it; he goes off to a lady
who has for some time been residing in the town, and who is highly
esteemed among us, Madame Hohlakov. That lady, who had long watched his
career with compassion, gave him the most judicious advice, to give up his
dissipated life, his unseemly love-affair, the waste of his youth and
vigor in pot-house debauchery, and to set off to Siberia to the
gold-mines: ‘that would be an outlet for your turbulent energies, your
romantic character, your thirst for adventure.’ ”

After describing the result of this conversation and the moment when the
prisoner learnt that Grushenka had not remained at Samsonov’s, the sudden
frenzy of the luckless man worn out with jealousy and nervous exhaustion,
at the thought that she had deceived him and was now with his father,
Ippolit Kirillovitch concluded by dwelling upon the fatal influence of
chance. “Had the maid told him that her mistress was at Mokroe with her
former lover, nothing would have happened. But she lost her head, she
could only swear and protest her ignorance, and if the prisoner did not
kill her on the spot, it was only because he flew in pursuit of his false
mistress.

“But note, frantic as he was, he took with him a brass pestle. Why that?
Why not some other weapon? But since he had been contemplating his plan
and preparing himself for it for a whole month, he would snatch up
anything like a weapon that caught his eye. He had realized for a month
past that any object of the kind would serve as a weapon, so he instantly,
without hesitation, recognized that it would serve his purpose. So it was
by no means unconsciously, by no means involuntarily, that he snatched up
that fatal pestle. And then we find him in his father’s garden—the coast
is clear, there are no witnesses, darkness and jealousy. The suspicion
that she was there, with him, with his rival, in his arms, and perhaps
laughing at him at that moment—took his breath away. And it was not mere
suspicion, the deception was open, obvious. She must be there, in that
lighted room, she must be behind the screen; and the unhappy man would
have us believe that he stole up to the window, peeped respectfully in,
and discreetly withdrew, for fear something terrible and immoral should
happen. And he tries to persuade us of that, us, who understand his
character, who know his state of mind at the moment, and that he knew the
signals by which he could at once enter the house.” At this point Ippolit
Kirillovitch broke off to discuss exhaustively the suspected connection of
Smerdyakov with the murder. He did this very circumstantially, and every
one realized that, although he professed to despise that suspicion, he
thought the subject of great importance.



Chapter VIII. A Treatise On Smerdyakov


“To begin with, what was the source of this suspicion?” (Ippolit
Kirillovitch began.) “The first person who cried out that Smerdyakov had
committed the murder was the prisoner himself at the moment of his arrest,
yet from that time to this he had not brought forward a single fact to
confirm the charge, nor the faintest suggestion of a fact. The charge is
confirmed by three persons only—the two brothers of the prisoner and
Madame Svyetlov. The elder of these brothers expressed his suspicions only
to-day, when he was undoubtedly suffering from brain fever. But we know
that for the last two months he has completely shared our conviction of
his brother’s guilt and did not attempt to combat that idea. But of that
later. The younger brother has admitted that he has not the slightest fact
to support his notion of Smerdyakov’s guilt, and has only been led to that
conclusion from the prisoner’s own words and the expression of his face.
Yes, that astounding piece of evidence has been brought forward twice
to-day by him. Madame Svyetlov was even more astounding. ‘What the
prisoner tells you, you must believe; he is not a man to tell a lie.’ That
is all the evidence against Smerdyakov produced by these three persons,
who are all deeply concerned in the prisoner’s fate. And yet the theory of
Smerdyakov’s guilt has been noised about, has been and is still
maintained. Is it credible? Is it conceivable?”

Here Ippolit Kirillovitch thought it necessary to describe the personality
of Smerdyakov, “who had cut short his life in a fit of insanity.” He
depicted him as a man of weak intellect, with a smattering of education,
who had been thrown off his balance by philosophical ideas above his level
and certain modern theories of duty, which he learnt in practice from the
reckless life of his master, who was also perhaps his father—Fyodor
Pavlovitch; and, theoretically, from various strange philosophical
conversations with his master’s elder son, Ivan Fyodorovitch, who readily
indulged in this diversion, probably feeling dull or wishing to amuse
himself at the valet’s expense. “He spoke to me himself of his spiritual
condition during the last few days at his father’s house,” Ippolit
Kirillovitch explained; “but others too have borne witness to it—the
prisoner himself, his brother, and the servant Grigory—that is, all who
knew him well.

“Moreover, Smerdyakov, whose health was shaken by his attacks of epilepsy,
had not the courage of a chicken. ‘He fell at my feet and kissed them,’
the prisoner himself has told us, before he realized how damaging such a
statement was to himself. ‘He is an epileptic chicken,’ he declared about
him in his characteristic language. And the prisoner chose him for his
confidant (we have his own word for it) and he frightened him into
consenting at last to act as a spy for him. In that capacity he deceived
his master, revealing to the prisoner the existence of the envelope with
the notes in it and the signals by means of which he could get into the
house. How could he help telling him, indeed? ‘He would have killed me, I
could see that he would have killed me,’ he said at the inquiry, trembling
and shaking even before us, though his tormentor was by that time arrested
and could do him no harm. ‘He suspected me at every instant. In fear and
trembling I hastened to tell him every secret to pacify him, that he might
see that I had not deceived him and let me off alive.’ Those are his own
words. I wrote them down and I remember them. ‘When he began shouting at
me, I would fall on my knees.’

“He was naturally very honest and enjoyed the complete confidence of his
master, ever since he had restored him some money he had lost. So it may
be supposed that the poor fellow suffered pangs of remorse at having
deceived his master, whom he loved as his benefactor. Persons severely
afflicted with epilepsy are, so the most skillful doctors tell us, always
prone to continual and morbid self-reproach. They worry over their
‘wickedness,’ they are tormented by pangs of conscience, often entirely
without cause; they exaggerate and often invent all sorts of faults and
crimes. And here we have a man of that type who had really been driven to
wrong-doing by terror and intimidation.

“He had, besides, a strong presentiment that something terrible would be
the outcome of the situation that was developing before his eyes. When
Ivan Fyodorovitch was leaving for Moscow, just before the catastrophe,
Smerdyakov besought him to remain, though he was too timid to tell him
plainly what he feared. He confined himself to hints, but his hints were
not understood.

“It must be observed that he looked on Ivan Fyodorovitch as a protector,
whose presence in the house was a guarantee that no harm would come to
pass. Remember the phrase in Dmitri Karamazov’s drunken letter, ‘I shall
kill the old man, if only Ivan goes away.’ So Ivan Fyodorovitch’s presence
seemed to every one a guarantee of peace and order in the house.

“But he went away, and within an hour of his young master’s departure
Smerdyakov was taken with an epileptic fit. But that’s perfectly
intelligible. Here I must mention that Smerdyakov, oppressed by terror and
despair of a sort, had felt during those last few days that one of the
fits from which he had suffered before at moments of strain, might be
coming upon him again. The day and hour of such an attack cannot, of
course, be foreseen, but every epileptic can feel beforehand that he is
likely to have one. So the doctors tell us. And so, as soon as Ivan
Fyodorovitch had driven out of the yard, Smerdyakov, depressed by his
lonely and unprotected position, went to the cellar. He went down the
stairs wondering if he would have a fit or not, and what if it were to
come upon him at once. And that very apprehension, that very wonder,
brought on the spasm in his throat that always precedes such attacks, and
he fell unconscious into the cellar. And in this perfectly natural
occurrence people try to detect a suspicion, a hint that he was shamming
an attack _on purpose_. But, if it were on purpose, the question arises at
once, what was his motive? What was he reckoning on? What was he aiming
at? I say nothing about medicine: science, I am told, may go astray: the
doctors were not able to discriminate between the counterfeit and the
real. That may be so, but answer me one question: what motive had he for
such a counterfeit? Could he, had he been plotting the murder, have
desired to attract the attention of the household by having a fit just
before?

“You see, gentlemen of the jury, on the night of the murder, there were
five persons in Fyodor Pavlovitch’s—Fyodor Pavlovitch himself (but he did
not kill himself, that’s evident); then his servant, Grigory, but he was
almost killed himself; the third person was Grigory’s wife, Marfa
Ignatyevna, but it would be simply shameful to imagine her murdering her
master. Two persons are left—the prisoner and Smerdyakov. But, if we are
to believe the prisoner’s statement that he is not the murderer, then
Smerdyakov must have been, for there is no other alternative, no one else
can be found. That is what accounts for the artful, astounding accusation
against the unhappy idiot who committed suicide yesterday. Had a shadow of
suspicion rested on any one else, had there been any sixth person, I am
persuaded that even the prisoner would have been ashamed to accuse
Smerdyakov, and would have accused that sixth person, for to charge
Smerdyakov with that murder is perfectly absurd.

“Gentlemen, let us lay aside psychology, let us lay aside medicine, let us
even lay aside logic, let us turn only to the facts and see what the facts
tell us. If Smerdyakov killed him, how did he do it? Alone or with the
assistance of the prisoner? Let us consider the first alternative—that he
did it alone. If he had killed him it must have been with some object, for
some advantage to himself. But not having a shadow of the motive that the
prisoner had for the murder—hatred, jealousy, and so on—Smerdyakov could
only have murdered him for the sake of gain, in order to appropriate the
three thousand roubles he had seen his master put in the envelope. And yet
he tells another person—and a person most closely interested, that is, the
prisoner—everything about the money and the signals, where the envelope
lay, what was written on it, what it was tied up with, and, above all,
told him of those signals by which he could enter the house. Did he do
this simply to betray himself, or to invite to the same enterprise one who
would be anxious to get that envelope for himself? ‘Yes,’ I shall be told,
‘but he betrayed it from fear.’ But how do you explain this? A man who
could conceive such an audacious, savage act, and carry it out, tells
facts which are known to no one else in the world, and which, if he held
his tongue, no one would ever have guessed!

“No, however cowardly he might be, if he had plotted such a crime, nothing
would have induced him to tell any one about the envelope and the signals,
for that was as good as betraying himself beforehand. He would have
invented something, he would have told some lie if he had been forced to
give information, but he would have been silent about that. For, on the
other hand, if he had said nothing about the money, but had committed the
murder and stolen the money, no one in the world could have charged him
with murder for the sake of robbery, since no one but he had seen the
money, no one but he knew of its existence in the house. Even if he had
been accused of the murder, it could only have been thought that he had
committed it from some other motive. But since no one had observed any
such motive in him beforehand, and every one saw, on the contrary, that
his master was fond of him and honored him with his confidence, he would,
of course, have been the last to be suspected. People would have suspected
first the man who had a motive, a man who had himself declared he had such
motives, who had made no secret of it; they would, in fact, have suspected
the son of the murdered man, Dmitri Fyodorovitch. Had Smerdyakov killed
and robbed him, and the son been accused of it, that would, of course,
have suited Smerdyakov. Yet are we to believe that, though plotting the
murder, he told that son, Dmitri, about the money, the envelope, and the
signals? Is that logical? Is that clear?

“When the day of the murder planned by Smerdyakov came, we have him
falling downstairs in a _feigned_ fit—with what object? In the first place
that Grigory, who had been intending to take his medicine, might put it
off and remain on guard, seeing there was no one to look after the house,
and, in the second place, I suppose, that his master seeing that there was
no one to guard him, and in terror of a visit from his son, might redouble
his vigilance and precaution. And, most of all, I suppose that he,
Smerdyakov, disabled by the fit, might be carried from the kitchen, where
he always slept, apart from all the rest, and where he could go in and out
as he liked, to Grigory’s room at the other end of the lodge, where he was
always put, shut off by a screen three paces from their own bed. This was
the immemorial custom established by his master and the kind-hearted Marfa
Ignatyevna, whenever he had a fit. There, lying behind the screen, he
would most likely, to keep up the sham, have begun groaning, and so
keeping them awake all night (as Grigory and his wife testified). And all
this, we are to believe, that he might more conveniently get up and murder
his master!

“But I shall be told that he shammed illness on purpose that he might not
be suspected and that he told the prisoner of the money and the signals to
tempt him to commit the murder, and when he had murdered him and had gone
away with the money, making a noise, most likely, and waking people,
Smerdyakov got up, am I to believe, and went in—what for? To murder his
master a second time and carry off the money that had already been stolen?
Gentlemen, are you laughing? I am ashamed to put forward such suggestions,
but, incredible as it seems, that’s just what the prisoner alleges. When
he had left the house, had knocked Grigory down and raised an alarm, he
tells us Smerdyakov got up, went in and murdered his master and stole the
money! I won’t press the point that Smerdyakov could hardly have reckoned
on this beforehand, and have foreseen that the furious and exasperated son
would simply come to peep in respectfully, though he knew the signals, and
beat a retreat, leaving Smerdyakov his booty. Gentlemen of the jury, I put
this question to you in earnest; when was the moment when Smerdyakov could
have committed his crime? Name that moment, or you can’t accuse him.

“But, perhaps, the fit was a real one, the sick man suddenly recovered,
heard a shout, and went out. Well—what then? He looked about him and said,
‘Why not go and kill the master?’ And how did he know what had happened,
since he had been lying unconscious till that moment? But there’s a limit
to these flights of fancy.

“ ‘Quite so,’ some astute people will tell me, ‘but what if they were in
agreement? What if they murdered him together and shared the money—what
then?’ A weighty question, truly! And the facts to confirm it are
astounding. One commits the murder and takes all the trouble while his
accomplice lies on one side shamming a fit, apparently to arouse suspicion
in every one, alarm in his master and alarm in Grigory. It would be
interesting to know what motives could have induced the two accomplices to
form such an insane plan.

“But perhaps it was not a case of active complicity on Smerdyakov’s part,
but only of passive acquiescence; perhaps Smerdyakov was intimidated and
agreed not to prevent the murder, and foreseeing that he would be blamed
for letting his master be murdered, without screaming for help or
resisting, he may have obtained permission from Dmitri Karamazov to get
out of the way by shamming a fit—‘you may murder him as you like; it’s
nothing to me.’ But as this attack of Smerdyakov’s was bound to throw the
household into confusion, Dmitri Karamazov could never have agreed to such
a plan. I will waive that point however. Supposing that he did agree, it
would still follow that Dmitri Karamazov is the murderer and the
instigator, and Smerdyakov is only a passive accomplice, and not even an
accomplice, but merely acquiesced against his will through terror.

“But what do we see? As soon as he is arrested the prisoner instantly
throws all the blame on Smerdyakov, not accusing him of being his
accomplice, but of being himself the murderer. ‘He did it alone,’ he says.
‘He murdered and robbed him. It was the work of his hands.’ Strange sort
of accomplices who begin to accuse one another at once! And think of the
risk for Karamazov. After committing the murder while his accomplice lay
in bed, he throws the blame on the invalid, who might well have resented
it and in self-preservation might well have confessed the truth. For he
might well have seen that the court would at once judge how far he was
responsible, and so he might well have reckoned that if he were punished,
it would be far less severely than the real murderer. But in that case he
would have been certain to make a confession, yet he has not done so.
Smerdyakov never hinted at their complicity, though the actual murderer
persisted in accusing him and declaring that he had committed the crime
alone.

“What’s more, Smerdyakov at the inquiry volunteered the statement that it
was _he_ who had told the prisoner of the envelope of notes and of the
signals, and that, but for him, he would have known nothing about them. If
he had really been a guilty accomplice, would he so readily have made this
statement at the inquiry? On the contrary, he would have tried to conceal
it, to distort the facts or minimize them. But he was far from distorting
or minimizing them. No one but an innocent man, who had no fear of being
charged with complicity, could have acted as he did. And in a fit of
melancholy arising from his disease and this catastrophe he hanged himself
yesterday. He left a note written in his peculiar language, ‘I destroy
myself of my own will and inclination so as to throw no blame on any one.’
What would it have cost him to add: ‘I am the murderer, not Karamazov’?
But that he did not add. Did his conscience lead him to suicide and not to
avowing his guilt?

“And what followed? Notes for three thousand roubles were brought into the
court just now, and we were told that they were the same that lay in the
envelope now on the table before us, and that the witness had received
them from Smerdyakov the day before. But I need not recall the painful
scene, though I will make one or two comments, selecting such trivial ones
as might not be obvious at first sight to every one, and so may be
overlooked. In the first place, Smerdyakov must have given back the money
and hanged himself yesterday from remorse. And only yesterday he confessed
his guilt to Ivan Karamazov, as the latter informs us. If it were not so,
indeed, why should Ivan Fyodorovitch have kept silence till now? And so,
if he has confessed, then why, I ask again, did he not avow the whole
truth in the last letter he left behind, knowing that the innocent
prisoner had to face this terrible ordeal the next day?

“The money alone is no proof. A week ago, quite by chance, the fact came
to the knowledge of myself and two other persons in this court that Ivan
Fyodorovitch had sent two five per cent. coupons of five thousand
each—that is, ten thousand in all—to the chief town of the province to be
changed. I only mention this to point out that any one may have money, and
that it can’t be proved that these notes are the same as were in Fyodor
Pavlovitch’s envelope.

“Ivan Karamazov, after receiving yesterday a communication of such
importance from the real murderer, did not stir. Why didn’t he report it
at once? Why did he put it all off till morning? I think I have a right to
conjecture why. His health had been giving way for a week past: he had
admitted to a doctor and to his most intimate friends that he was
suffering from hallucinations and seeing phantoms of the dead: he was on
the eve of the attack of brain fever by which he has been stricken down
to-day. In this condition he suddenly heard of Smerdyakov’s death, and at
once reflected, ‘The man is dead, I can throw the blame on him and save my
brother. I have money. I will take a roll of notes and say that Smerdyakov
gave them me before his death.’ You will say that was dishonorable: it’s
dishonorable to slander even the dead, and even to save a brother. True,
but what if he slandered him unconsciously? What if, finally unhinged by
the sudden news of the valet’s death, he imagined it really was so? You
saw the recent scene: you have seen the witness’s condition. He was
standing up and was speaking, but where was his mind?

“Then followed the document, the prisoner’s letter written two days before
the crime, and containing a complete program of the murder. Why, then, are
we looking for any other program? The crime was committed precisely
according to this program, and by no other than the writer of it. Yes,
gentlemen of the jury, it went off without a hitch! He did not run
respectfully and timidly away from his father’s window, though he was
firmly convinced that the object of his affections was with him. No, that
is absurd and unlikely! He went in and murdered him. Most likely he killed
him in anger, burning with resentment, as soon as he looked on his hated
rival. But having killed him, probably with one blow of the brass pestle,
and having convinced himself, after careful search, that she was not
there, he did not, however, forget to put his hand under the pillow and
take out the envelope, the torn cover of which lies now on the table
before us.

“I mention this fact that you may note one, to my thinking, very
characteristic circumstance. Had he been an experienced murderer and had
he committed the murder for the sake of gain only, would he have left the
torn envelope on the floor as it was found, beside the corpse? Had it been
Smerdyakov, for instance, murdering his master to rob him, he would have
simply carried away the envelope with him, without troubling himself to
open it over his victim’s corpse, for he would have known for certain that
the notes were in the envelope—they had been put in and sealed up in his
presence—and had he taken the envelope with him, no one would ever have
known of the robbery. I ask you, gentlemen, would Smerdyakov have behaved
in that way? Would he have left the envelope on the floor?

“No, this was the action of a frantic murderer, a murderer who was not a
thief and had never stolen before that day, who snatched the notes from
under the pillow, not like a thief stealing them, but as though seizing
his own property from the thief who had stolen it. For that was the idea
which had become almost an insane obsession in Dmitri Karamazov in regard
to that money. And pouncing upon the envelope, which he had never seen
before, he tore it open to make sure whether the money was in it, and ran
away with the money in his pocket, even forgetting to consider that he had
left an astounding piece of evidence against himself in that torn envelope
on the floor. All because it was Karamazov, not Smerdyakov, he didn’t
think, he didn’t reflect, and how should he? He ran away; he heard behind
him the servant cry out; the old man caught him, stopped him and was
felled to the ground by the brass pestle.

“The prisoner, moved by pity, leapt down to look at him. Would you believe
it, he tells us that he leapt down out of pity, out of compassion, to see
whether he could do anything for him. Was that a moment to show
compassion? No; he jumped down simply to make certain whether the only
witness of his crime were dead or alive. Any other feeling, any other
motive would be unnatural. Note that he took trouble over Grigory, wiped
his head with his handkerchief and, convincing himself he was dead, he ran
to the house of his mistress, dazed and covered with blood. How was it he
never thought that he was covered with blood and would be at once
detected? But the prisoner himself assures us that he did not even notice
that he was covered with blood. That may be believed, that is very
possible, that always happens at such moments with criminals. On one point
they will show diabolical cunning, while another will escape them
altogether. But he was thinking at that moment of one thing only—where was
_she_? He wanted to find out at once where she was, so he ran to her
lodging and learnt an unexpected and astounding piece of news—she had gone
off to Mokroe to meet her first lover.”



Chapter IX. The Galloping Troika. The End Of The Prosecutor’s Speech.


Ippolit Kirillovitch had chosen the historical method of exposition,
beloved by all nervous orators, who find in its limitation a check on
their own eager rhetoric. At this moment in his speech he went off into a
dissertation on Grushenka’s “first lover,” and brought forward several
interesting thoughts on this theme.

“Karamazov, who had been frantically jealous of every one, collapsed, so
to speak, and effaced himself at once before this first lover. What makes
it all the more strange is that he seems to have hardly thought of this
formidable rival. But he had looked upon him as a remote danger, and
Karamazov always lives in the present. Possibly he regarded him as a
fiction. But his wounded heart grasped instantly that the woman had been
concealing this new rival and deceiving him, because he was anything but a
fiction to her, because he was the one hope of her life. Grasping this
instantly, he resigned himself.

“Gentlemen of the jury, I cannot help dwelling on this unexpected trait in
the prisoner’s character. He suddenly evinces an irresistible desire for
justice, a respect for woman and a recognition of her right to love. And
all this at the very moment when he had stained his hands with his
father’s blood for her sake! It is true that the blood he had shed was
already crying out for vengeance, for, after having ruined his soul and
his life in this world, he was forced to ask himself at that same instant
what he was and what he could be now to her, to that being, dearer to him
than his own soul, in comparison with that former lover who had returned
penitent, with new love, to the woman he had once betrayed, with honorable
offers, with the promise of a reformed and happy life. And he, luckless
man, what could he give her now, what could he offer her?

“Karamazov felt all this, knew that all ways were barred to him by his
crime and that he was a criminal under sentence, and not a man with life
before him! This thought crushed him. And so he instantly flew to one
frantic plan, which, to a man of Karamazov’s character, must have appeared
the one inevitable way out of his terrible position. That way out was
suicide. He ran for the pistols he had left in pledge with his friend
Perhotin and on the way, as he ran, he pulled out of his pocket the money,
for the sake of which he had stained his hands with his father’s gore. Oh,
now he needed money more than ever. Karamazov would die, Karamazov would
shoot himself and it should be remembered! To be sure, he was a poet and
had burnt the candle at both ends all his life. ‘To her, to her! and
there, oh, there I will give a feast to the whole world, such as never was
before, that will be remembered and talked of long after! In the midst of
shouts of wild merriment, reckless gypsy songs and dances I shall raise
the glass and drink to the woman I adore and her new-found happiness! And
then, on the spot, at her feet, I shall dash out my brains before her and
punish myself! She will remember Mitya Karamazov sometimes, she will see
how Mitya loved her, she will feel for Mitya!’

“Here we see in excess a love of effect, a romantic despair and
sentimentality, and the wild recklessness of the Karamazovs. Yes, but
there is something else, gentlemen of the jury, something that cries out
in the soul, throbs incessantly in the mind, and poisons the heart unto
death—that _something_ is conscience, gentlemen of the jury, its judgment,
its terrible torments! The pistol will settle everything, the pistol is
the only way out! But _beyond_—I don’t know whether Karamazov wondered at
that moment ‘What lies beyond,’ and whether Karamazov could, like Hamlet,
wonder ‘What lies beyond.’ No, gentlemen of the jury, they have their
Hamlets, but we still have our Karamazovs!”

Here Ippolit Kirillovitch drew a minute picture of Mitya’s preparations,
the scene at Perhotin’s, at the shop, with the drivers. He quoted numerous
words and actions, confirmed by witnesses, and the picture made a terrible
impression on the audience. The guilt of this harassed and desperate man
stood out clear and convincing, when the facts were brought together.

“What need had he of precaution? Two or three times he almost confessed,
hinted at it, all but spoke out.” (Then followed the evidence given by
witnesses.) “He even cried out to the peasant who drove him, ‘Do you know,
you are driving a murderer!’ But it was impossible for him to speak out,
he had to get to Mokroe and there to finish his romance. But what was
awaiting the luckless man? Almost from the first minute at Mokroe he saw
that his invincible rival was perhaps by no means so invincible, that the
toast to their new-found happiness was not desired and would not be
acceptable. But you know the facts, gentlemen of the jury, from the
preliminary inquiry. Karamazov’s triumph over his rival was complete and
his soul passed into quite a new phase, perhaps the most terrible phase
through which his soul has passed or will pass.

“One may say with certainty, gentlemen of the jury,” the prosecutor
continued, “that outraged nature and the criminal heart bring their own
vengeance more completely than any earthly justice. What’s more, justice
and punishment on earth positively alleviate the punishment of nature and
are, indeed, essential to the soul of the criminal at such moments, as its
salvation from despair. For I cannot imagine the horror and moral
suffering of Karamazov when he learnt that she loved him, that for his
sake she had rejected her first lover, that she was summoning him, Mitya,
to a new life, that she was promising him happiness—and when? When
everything was over for him and nothing was possible!

“By the way, I will note in parenthesis a point of importance for the
light it throws on the prisoner’s position at the moment. This woman, this
love of his, had been till the last moment, till the very instant of his
arrest, a being unattainable, passionately desired by him but
unattainable. Yet why did he not shoot himself then, why did he relinquish
his design and even forget where his pistol was? It was just that
passionate desire for love and the hope of satisfying it that restrained
him. Throughout their revels he kept close to his adored mistress, who was
at the banquet with him and was more charming and fascinating to him than
ever—he did not leave her side, abasing himself in his homage before her.

“His passion might well, for a moment, stifle not only the fear of arrest,
but even the torments of conscience. For a moment, oh, only for a moment!
I can picture the state of mind of the criminal hopelessly enslaved by
these influences—first, the influence of drink, of noise and excitement,
of the thud of the dance and the scream of the song, and of her, flushed
with wine, singing and dancing and laughing to him! Secondly, the hope in
the background that the fatal end might still be far off, that not till
next morning, at least, they would come and take him. So he had a few
hours and that’s much, very much! In a few hours one can think of many
things. I imagine that he felt something like what criminals feel when
they are being taken to the scaffold. They have another long, long street
to pass down and at walking pace, past thousands of people. Then there
will be a turning into another street and only at the end of that street
the dread place of execution! I fancy that at the beginning of the journey
the condemned man, sitting on his shameful cart, must feel that he has
infinite life still before him. The houses recede, the cart moves on—oh,
that’s nothing, it’s still far to the turning into the second street and
he still looks boldly to right and to left at those thousands of callously
curious people with their eyes fixed on him, and he still fancies that he
is just such a man as they. But now the turning comes to the next street.
Oh, that’s nothing, nothing, there’s still a whole street before him, and
however many houses have been passed, he will still think there are many
left. And so to the very end, to the very scaffold.

“This I imagine is how it was with Karamazov then. ‘They’ve not had time
yet,’ he must have thought, ‘I may still find some way out, oh, there’s
still time to make some plan of defense, and now, now—she is so
fascinating!’

“His soul was full of confusion and dread, but he managed, however, to put
aside half his money and hide it somewhere—I cannot otherwise explain the
disappearance of quite half of the three thousand he had just taken from
his father’s pillow. He had been in Mokroe more than once before, he had
caroused there for two days together already, he knew the old big house
with all its passages and outbuildings. I imagine that part of the money
was hidden in that house, not long before the arrest, in some crevice,
under some floor, in some corner, under the roof. With what object? I
shall be asked. Why, the catastrophe may take place at once, of course; he
hadn’t yet considered how to meet it, he hadn’t the time, his head was
throbbing and his heart was with _her_, but money—money was indispensable
in any case! With money a man is always a man. Perhaps such foresight at
such a moment may strike you as unnatural? But he assures us himself that
a month before, at a critical and exciting moment, he had halved his money
and sewn it up in a little bag. And though that was not true, as we shall
prove directly, it shows the idea was a familiar one to Karamazov, he had
contemplated it. What’s more, when he declared at the inquiry that he had
put fifteen hundred roubles in a bag (which never existed) he may have
invented that little bag on the inspiration of the moment, because he had
two hours before divided his money and hidden half of it at Mokroe till
morning, in case of emergency, simply not to have it on himself. Two
extremes, gentlemen of the jury, remember that Karamazov can contemplate
two extremes and both at once.

“We have looked in the house, but we haven’t found the money. It may still
be there or it may have disappeared next day and be in the prisoner’s
hands now. In any case he was at her side, on his knees before her, she
was lying on the bed, he had his hands stretched out to her and he had so
entirely forgotten everything that he did not even hear the men coming to
arrest him. He hadn’t time to prepare any line of defense in his mind. He
was caught unawares and confronted with his judges, the arbiters of his
destiny.

“Gentlemen of the jury, there are moments in the execution of our duties
when it is terrible for us to face a man, terrible on his account, too!
The moments of contemplating that animal fear, when the criminal sees that
all is lost, but still struggles, still means to struggle, the moments
when every instinct of self-preservation rises up in him at once and he
looks at you with questioning and suffering eyes, studies you, your face,
your thoughts, uncertain on which side you will strike, and his distracted
mind frames thousands of plans in an instant, but he is still afraid to
speak, afraid of giving himself away! This purgatory of the spirit, this
animal thirst for self-preservation, these humiliating moments of the
human soul, are awful, and sometimes arouse horror and compassion for the
criminal even in the lawyer. And this was what we all witnessed then.

“At first he was thunderstruck and in his terror dropped some very
compromising phrases. ‘Blood! I’ve deserved it!’ But he quickly restrained
himself. He had not prepared what he was to say, what answer he was to
make, he had nothing but a bare denial ready. ‘I am not guilty of my
father’s death.’ That was his fence for the moment and behind it he hoped
to throw up a barricade of some sort. His first compromising exclamations
he hastened to explain by declaring that he was responsible for the death
of the servant Grigory only. ‘Of that bloodshed I am guilty, but who has
killed my father, gentlemen, who has killed him? Who can have killed him,
_if not I_?’ Do you hear, he asked us that, us, who had come to ask him
that question! Do you hear that phrase uttered with such premature
haste—‘if not I’—the animal cunning, the naïveté, the Karamazov impatience
of it? ‘I didn’t kill him and you mustn’t think I did! I wanted to kill
him, gentlemen, I wanted to kill him,’ he hastens to admit (he was in a
hurry, in a terrible hurry), ‘but still I am not guilty, it is not I
murdered him.’ He concedes to us that he wanted to murder him, as though
to say, you can see for yourselves how truthful I am, so you’ll believe
all the sooner that I didn’t murder him. Oh, in such cases the criminal is
often amazingly shallow and credulous.

“At that point one of the lawyers asked him, as it were incidentally, the
most simple question, ‘Wasn’t it Smerdyakov killed him?’ Then, as we
expected, he was horribly angry at our having anticipated him and caught
him unawares, before he had time to pave the way to choose and snatch the
moment when it would be most natural to bring in Smerdyakov’s name. He
rushed at once to the other extreme, as he always does, and began to
assure us that Smerdyakov could not have killed him, was not capable of
it. But don’t believe him, that was only his cunning; he didn’t really
give up the idea of Smerdyakov; on the contrary, he meant to bring him
forward again; for, indeed, he had no one else to bring forward, but he
would do that later, because for the moment that line was spoiled for him.
He would bring him forward perhaps next day, or even a few days later,
choosing an opportunity to cry out to us, ‘You know I was more skeptical
about Smerdyakov than you, you remember that yourselves, but now I am
convinced. He killed him, he must have done!’ And for the present he falls
back upon a gloomy and irritable denial. Impatience and anger prompted
him, however, to the most inept and incredible explanation of how he
looked into his father’s window and how he respectfully withdrew. The
worst of it was that he was unaware of the position of affairs, of the
evidence given by Grigory.

“We proceeded to search him. The search angered, but encouraged him, the
whole three thousand had not been found on him, only half of it. And no
doubt only at that moment of angry silence, the fiction of the little bag
first occurred to him. No doubt he was conscious himself of the
improbability of the story and strove painfully to make it sound more
likely, to weave it into a romance that would sound plausible. In such
cases the first duty, the chief task of the investigating lawyers, is to
prevent the criminal being prepared, to pounce upon him unexpectedly so
that he may blurt out his cherished ideas in all their simplicity,
improbability and inconsistency. The criminal can only be made to speak by
the sudden and apparently incidental communication of some new fact, of
some circumstance of great importance in the case, of which he had no
previous idea and could not have foreseen. We had such a fact in
readiness—that was Grigory’s evidence about the open door through which
the prisoner had run out. He had completely forgotten about that door and
had not even suspected that Grigory could have seen it.

“The effect of it was amazing. He leapt up and shouted to us, ‘Then
Smerdyakov murdered him, it was Smerdyakov!’ and so betrayed the basis of
the defense he was keeping back, and betrayed it in its most improbable
shape, for Smerdyakov could only have committed the murder after he had
knocked Grigory down and run away. When we told him that Grigory saw the
door was open before he fell down, and had heard Smerdyakov behind the
screen as he came out of his bedroom—Karamazov was positively crushed. My
esteemed and witty colleague, Nikolay Parfenovitch, told me afterwards
that he was almost moved to tears at the sight of him. And to improve
matters, the prisoner hastened to tell us about the much-talked-of little
bag—so be it, you shall hear this romance!

“Gentlemen of the jury, I have told you already why I consider this
romance not only an absurdity, but the most improbable invention that
could have been brought forward in the circumstances. If one tried for a
bet to invent the most unlikely story, one could hardly find anything more
incredible. The worst of such stories is that the triumphant romancers can
always be put to confusion and crushed by the very details in which real
life is so rich and which these unhappy and involuntary story-tellers
neglect as insignificant trifles. Oh, they have no thought to spare for
such details, their minds are concentrated on their grand invention as a
whole, and fancy any one daring to pull them up for a trifle! But that’s
how they are caught. The prisoner was asked the question, ‘Where did you
get the stuff for your little bag and who made it for you?’ ‘I made it
myself.’ ‘And where did you get the linen?’ The prisoner was positively
offended, he thought it almost insulting to ask him such a trivial
question, and would you believe it, his resentment was genuine! But they
are all like that. ‘I tore it off my shirt.’ ‘Then we shall find that
shirt among your linen to-morrow, with a piece torn off.’ And only fancy,
gentlemen of the jury, if we really had found that torn shirt (and how
could we have failed to find it in his chest of drawers or trunk?) that
would have been a fact, a material fact in support of his statement! But
he was incapable of that reflection. ‘I don’t remember, it may not have
been off my shirt, I sewed it up in one of my landlady’s caps.’ ‘What sort
of a cap?’ ‘It was an old cotton rag of hers lying about.’ ‘And do you
remember that clearly?’ ‘No, I don’t.’ And he was angry, very angry, and
yet imagine not remembering it! At the most terrible moments of man’s
life, for instance when he is being led to execution, he remembers just
such trifles. He will forget anything but some green roof that has flashed
past him on the road, or a jackdaw on a cross—that he will remember. He
concealed the making of that little bag from his household, he must have
remembered his humiliating fear that some one might come in and find him
needle in hand, how at the slightest sound he slipped behind the screen
(there is a screen in his lodgings).

“But, gentlemen of the jury, why do I tell you all this, all these
details, trifles?” cried Ippolit Kirillovitch suddenly. “Just because the
prisoner still persists in these absurdities to this moment. He has not
explained anything since that fatal night two months ago, he has not added
one actual illuminating fact to his former fantastic statements; all those
are trivialities. ‘You must believe it on my honor.’ Oh, we are glad to
believe it, we are eager to believe it, even if only on his word of honor!
Are we jackals thirsting for human blood? Show us a single fact in the
prisoner’s favor and we shall rejoice; but let it be a substantial, real
fact, and not a conclusion drawn from the prisoner’s expression by his own
brother, or that when he beat himself on the breast he must have meant to
point to the little bag, in the darkness, too. We shall rejoice at the new
fact, we shall be the first to repudiate our charge, we shall hasten to
repudiate it. But now justice cries out and we persist, we cannot
repudiate anything.”

Ippolit Kirillovitch passed to his final peroration. He looked as though
he was in a fever, he spoke of the blood that cried for vengeance, the
blood of the father murdered by his son, with the base motive of robbery!
He pointed to the tragic and glaring consistency of the facts.

“And whatever you may hear from the talented and celebrated counsel for
the defense,” Ippolit Kirillovitch could not resist adding, “whatever
eloquent and touching appeals may be made to your sensibilities, remember
that at this moment you are in a temple of justice. Remember that you are
the champions of our justice, the champions of our holy Russia, of her
principles, her family, everything that she holds sacred! Yes, you
represent Russia here at this moment, and your verdict will be heard not
in this hall only but will reëcho throughout the whole of Russia, and all
Russia will hear you, as her champions and her judges, and she will be
encouraged or disheartened by your verdict. Do not disappoint Russia and
her expectations. Our fatal troika dashes on in her headlong flight
perhaps to destruction and in all Russia for long past men have stretched
out imploring hands and called a halt to its furious reckless course. And
if other nations stand aside from that troika that may be, not from
respect, as the poet would fain believe, but simply from horror. From
horror, perhaps from disgust. And well it is that they stand aside, but
maybe they will cease one day to do so and will form a firm wall
confronting the hurrying apparition and will check the frenzied rush of
our lawlessness, for the sake of their own safety, enlightenment and
civilization. Already we have heard voices of alarm from Europe, they
already begin to sound. Do not tempt them! Do not heap up their growing
hatred by a sentence justifying the murder of a father by his son!”

Though Ippolit Kirillovitch was genuinely moved, he wound up his speech
with this rhetorical appeal—and the effect produced by him was
extraordinary. When he had finished his speech, he went out hurriedly and,
as I have mentioned before, almost fainted in the adjoining room. There
was no applause in the court, but serious persons were pleased. The ladies
were not so well satisfied, though even they were pleased with his
eloquence, especially as they had no apprehensions as to the upshot of the
trial and had full trust in Fetyukovitch. “He will speak at last and of
course carry all before him.”

Every one looked at Mitya; he sat silent through the whole of the
prosecutor’s speech, clenching his teeth, with his hands clasped, and his
head bowed. Only from time to time he raised his head and listened,
especially when Grushenka was spoken of. When the prosecutor mentioned
Rakitin’s opinion of her, a smile of contempt and anger passed over his
face and he murmured rather audibly, “The Bernards!” When Ippolit
Kirillovitch described how he had questioned and tortured him at Mokroe,
Mitya raised his head and listened with intense curiosity. At one point he
seemed about to jump up and cry out, but controlled himself and only
shrugged his shoulders disdainfully. People talked afterwards of the end
of the speech, of the prosecutor’s feat in examining the prisoner at
Mokroe, and jeered at Ippolit Kirillovitch. “The man could not resist
boasting of his cleverness,” they said.

The court was adjourned, but only for a short interval, a quarter of an
hour or twenty minutes at most. There was a hum of conversation and
exclamations in the audience. I remember some of them.

“A weighty speech,” a gentleman in one group observed gravely.

“He brought in too much psychology,” said another voice.

“But it was all true, the absolute truth!”

“Yes, he is first rate at it.”

“He summed it all up.”

“Yes, he summed us up, too,” chimed in another voice. “Do you remember, at
the beginning of his speech, making out we were all like Fyodor
Pavlovitch?”

“And at the end, too. But that was all rot.”

“And obscure too.”

“He was a little too much carried away.”

“It’s unjust, it’s unjust.”

“No, it was smartly done, anyway. He’s had long to wait, but he’s had his
say, ha ha!”

“What will the counsel for the defense say?”

In another group I heard:

“He had no business to make a thrust at the Petersburg man like that;
‘appealing to your sensibilities’—do you remember?”

“Yes, that was awkward of him.”

“He was in too great a hurry.”

“He is a nervous man.”

“We laugh, but what must the prisoner be feeling?”

“Yes, what must it be for Mitya?”

In a third group:

“What lady is that, the fat one, with the lorgnette, sitting at the end?”

“She is a general’s wife, divorced, I know her.”

“That’s why she has the lorgnette.”

“She is not good for much.”

“Oh, no, she is a piquante little woman.”

“Two places beyond her there is a little fair woman, she is prettier.”

“They caught him smartly at Mokroe, didn’t they, eh?”

“Oh, it was smart enough. We’ve heard it before, how often he has told the
story at people’s houses!”

“And he couldn’t resist doing it now. That’s vanity.”

“He is a man with a grievance, he he!”

“Yes, and quick to take offense. And there was too much rhetoric, such
long sentences.”

“Yes, he tries to alarm us, he kept trying to alarm us. Do you remember
about the troika? Something about ‘They have Hamlets, but we have, so far,
only Karamazovs!’ That was cleverly said!”

“That was to propitiate the liberals. He is afraid of them.”

“Yes, and he is afraid of the lawyer, too.”

“Yes, what will Fetyukovitch say?”

“Whatever he says, he won’t get round our peasants.”

“Don’t you think so?”

A fourth group:

“What he said about the troika was good, that piece about the other
nations.”

“And that was true what he said about other nations not standing it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Why, in the English Parliament a Member got up last week and speaking
about the Nihilists asked the Ministry whether it was not high time to
intervene, to educate this barbarous people. Ippolit was thinking of him,
I know he was. He was talking about that last week.”

“Not an easy job.”

“Not an easy job? Why not?”

“Why, we’d shut up Kronstadt and not let them have any corn. Where would
they get it?”

“In America. They get it from America now.”

“Nonsense!”

But the bell rang, all rushed to their places. Fetyukovitch mounted the
tribune.



Chapter X. The Speech For The Defense. An Argument That Cuts Both Ways


All was hushed as the first words of the famous orator rang out. The eyes
of the audience were fastened upon him. He began very simply and directly,
with an air of conviction, but not the slightest trace of conceit. He made
no attempt at eloquence, at pathos, or emotional phrases. He was like a
man speaking in a circle of intimate and sympathetic friends. His voice
was a fine one, sonorous and sympathetic, and there was something genuine
and simple in the very sound of it. But every one realized at once that
the speaker might suddenly rise to genuine pathos and “pierce the heart
with untold power.” His language was perhaps more irregular than Ippolit
Kirillovitch’s, but he spoke without long phrases, and indeed, with more
precision. One thing did not please the ladies: he kept bending forward,
especially at the beginning of his speech, not exactly bowing, but as
though he were about to dart at his listeners, bending his long spine in
half, as though there were a spring in the middle that enabled him to bend
almost at right angles.

At the beginning of his speech he spoke rather disconnectedly, without
system, one may say, dealing with facts separately, though, at the end,
these facts formed a whole. His speech might be divided into two parts,
the first consisting of criticism in refutation of the charge, sometimes
malicious and sarcastic. But in the second half he suddenly changed his
tone, and even his manner, and at once rose to pathos. The audience seemed
on the look-out for it, and quivered with enthusiasm.

He went straight to the point, and began by saying that although he
practiced in Petersburg, he had more than once visited provincial towns to
defend prisoners, of whose innocence he had a conviction or at least a
preconceived idea. “That is what has happened to me in the present case,”
he explained. “From the very first accounts in the newspapers I was struck
by something which strongly prepossessed me in the prisoner’s favor. What
interested me most was a fact which often occurs in legal practice, but
rarely, I think, in such an extreme and peculiar form as in the present
case. I ought to formulate that peculiarity only at the end of my speech,
but I will do so at the very beginning, for it is my weakness to go to
work directly, not keeping my effects in reserve and economizing my
material. That may be imprudent on my part, but at least it’s sincere.
What I have in my mind is this: there is an overwhelming chain of evidence
against the prisoner, and at the same time not one fact that will stand
criticism, if it is examined separately. As I followed the case more
closely in the papers my idea was more and more confirmed, and I suddenly
received from the prisoner’s relatives a request to undertake his defense.
I at once hurried here, and here I became completely convinced. It was to
break down this terrible chain of facts, and to show that each piece of
evidence taken separately was unproved and fantastic, that I undertook the
case.”

So Fetyukovitch began.

“Gentlemen of the jury,” he suddenly protested, “I am new to this
district. I have no preconceived ideas. The prisoner, a man of turbulent
and unbridled temper, has not insulted me. But he has insulted perhaps
hundreds of persons in this town, and so prejudiced many people against
him beforehand. Of course I recognize that the moral sentiment of local
society is justly excited against him. The prisoner is of turbulent and
violent temper. Yet he was received in society here; he was even welcome
in the family of my talented friend, the prosecutor.”

(N.B. At these words there were two or three laughs in the audience,
quickly suppressed, but noticed by all. All of us knew that the prosecutor
received Mitya against his will, solely because he had somehow interested
his wife—a lady of the highest virtue and moral worth, but fanciful,
capricious, and fond of opposing her husband, especially in trifles.
Mitya’s visits, however, had not been frequent.)

“Nevertheless I venture to suggest,” Fetyukovitch continued, “that in
spite of his independent mind and just character, my opponent may have
formed a mistaken prejudice against my unfortunate client. Oh, that is so
natural; the unfortunate man has only too well deserved such prejudice.
Outraged morality, and still more outraged taste, is often relentless. We
have, in the talented prosecutor’s speech, heard a stern analysis of the
prisoner’s character and conduct, and his severe critical attitude to the
case was evident. And, what’s more, he went into psychological subtleties
into which he could not have entered, if he had the least conscious and
malicious prejudice against the prisoner. But there are things which are
even worse, even more fatal in such cases, than the most malicious and
consciously unfair attitude. It is worse if we are carried away by the
artistic instinct, by the desire to create, so to speak, a romance,
especially if God has endowed us with psychological insight. Before I
started on my way here, I was warned in Petersburg, and was myself aware,
that I should find here a talented opponent whose psychological insight
and subtlety had gained him peculiar renown in legal circles of recent
years. But profound as psychology is, it’s a knife that cuts both ways.”
(Laughter among the public.) “You will, of course, forgive me my
comparison; I can’t boast of eloquence. But I will take as an example any
point in the prosecutor’s speech.

“The prisoner, running away in the garden in the dark, climbed over the
fence, was seized by the servant, and knocked him down with a brass
pestle. Then he jumped back into the garden and spent five minutes over
the man, trying to discover whether he had killed him or not. And the
prosecutor refuses to believe the prisoner’s statement that he ran to old
Grigory out of pity. ‘No,’ he says, ‘such sensibility is impossible at
such a moment, that’s unnatural; he ran to find out whether the only
witness of his crime was dead or alive, and so showed that he had
committed the murder, since he would not have run back for any other
reason.’

“Here you have psychology; but let us take the same method and apply it to
the case the other way round, and our result will be no less probable. The
murderer, we are told, leapt down to find out, as a precaution, whether
the witness was alive or not, yet he had left in his murdered father’s
study, as the prosecutor himself argues, an amazing piece of evidence in
the shape of a torn envelope, with an inscription that there had been
three thousand roubles in it. ‘If he had carried that envelope away with
him, no one in the world would have known of that envelope and of the
notes in it, and that the money had been stolen by the prisoner.’ Those
are the prosecutor’s own words. So on one side you see a complete absence
of precaution, a man who has lost his head and run away in a fright,
leaving that clew on the floor, and two minutes later, when he has killed
another man, we are entitled to assume the most heartless and calculating
foresight in him. But even admitting this was so, it is psychological
subtlety, I suppose, that discerns that under certain circumstances I
become as bloodthirsty and keen-sighted as a Caucasian eagle, while at the
next I am as timid and blind as a mole. But if I am so bloodthirsty and
cruelly calculating that when I kill a man I only run back to find out
whether he is alive to witness against me, why should I spend five minutes
looking after my victim at the risk of encountering other witnesses? Why
soak my handkerchief, wiping the blood off his head so that it may be
evidence against me later? If he were so cold-hearted and calculating, why
not hit the servant on the head again and again with the same pestle so as
to kill him outright and relieve himself of all anxiety about the witness?

“Again, though he ran to see whether the witness was alive, he left
another witness on the path, that brass pestle which he had taken from the
two women, and which they could always recognize afterwards as theirs, and
prove that he had taken it from them. And it is not as though he had
forgotten it on the path, dropped it through carelessness or haste, no, he
had flung away his weapon, for it was found fifteen paces from where
Grigory lay. Why did he do so? Just because he was grieved at having
killed a man, an old servant; and he flung away the pestle with a curse,
as a murderous weapon. That’s how it must have been, what other reason
could he have had for throwing it so far? And if he was capable of feeling
grief and pity at having killed a man, it shows that he was innocent of
his father’s murder. Had he murdered him, he would never have run to
another victim out of pity; then he would have felt differently; his
thoughts would have been centered on self-preservation. He would have had
none to spare for pity, that is beyond doubt. On the contrary, he would
have broken his skull instead of spending five minutes looking after him.
There was room for pity and good-feeling just because his conscience had
been clear till then. Here we have a different psychology. I have
purposely resorted to this method, gentlemen of the jury, to show that you
can prove anything by it. It all depends on who makes use of it.
Psychology lures even most serious people into romancing, and quite
unconsciously. I am speaking of the abuse of psychology, gentlemen.”

Sounds of approval and laughter, at the expense of the prosecutor, were
again audible in the court. I will not repeat the speech in detail; I will
only quote some passages from it, some leading points.



Chapter XI. There Was No Money. There Was No Robbery


There was one point that struck every one in Fetyukovitch’s speech. He
flatly denied the existence of the fatal three thousand roubles, and
consequently, the possibility of their having been stolen.

“Gentlemen of the jury,” he began. “Every new and unprejudiced observer
must be struck by a characteristic peculiarity in the present case,
namely, the charge of robbery, and the complete impossibility of proving
that there was anything to be stolen. We are told that money was
stolen—three thousand roubles—but whether those roubles ever existed,
nobody knows. Consider, how have we heard of that sum, and who has seen
the notes? The only person who saw them, and stated that they had been put
in the envelope, was the servant, Smerdyakov. He had spoken of it to the
prisoner and his brother, Ivan Fyodorovitch, before the catastrophe.
Madame Svyetlov, too, had been told of it. But not one of these three
persons had actually seen the notes, no one but Smerdyakov had seen them.

“Here the question arises, if it’s true that they did exist, and that
Smerdyakov had seen them, when did he see them for the last time? What if
his master had taken the notes from under his bed and put them back in his
cash-box without telling him? Note, that according to Smerdyakov’s story
the notes were kept under the mattress; the prisoner must have pulled them
out, and yet the bed was absolutely unrumpled; that is carefully recorded
in the protocol. How could the prisoner have found the notes without
disturbing the bed? How could he have helped soiling with his
blood-stained hands the fine and spotless linen with which the bed had
been purposely made?

“But I shall be asked: What about the envelope on the floor? Yes, it’s
worth saying a word or two about that envelope. I was somewhat surprised
just now to hear the highly talented prosecutor declare of himself—of
himself, observe—that but for that envelope, but for its being left on the
floor, no one in the world would have known of the existence of that
envelope and the notes in it, and therefore of the prisoner’s having
stolen it. And so that torn scrap of paper is, by the prosecutor’s own
admission, the sole proof on which the charge of robbery rests, ‘otherwise
no one would have known of the robbery, nor perhaps even of the money.’
But is the mere fact that that scrap of paper was lying on the floor a
proof that there was money in it, and that that money had been stolen?
Yet, it will be objected, Smerdyakov had seen the money in the envelope.
But when, when had he seen it for the last time, I ask you that? I talked
to Smerdyakov, and he told me that he had seen the notes two days before
the catastrophe. Then why not imagine that old Fyodor Pavlovitch, locked
up alone in impatient and hysterical expectation of the object of his
adoration, may have whiled away the time by breaking open the envelope and
taking out the notes. ‘What’s the use of the envelope?’ he may have asked
himself. ‘She won’t believe the notes are there, but when I show her the
thirty rainbow-colored notes in one roll, it will make more impression,
you may be sure, it will make her mouth water.’ And so he tears open the
envelope, takes out the money, and flings the envelope on the floor,
conscious of being the owner and untroubled by any fears of leaving
evidence.

“Listen, gentlemen, could anything be more likely than this theory and
such an action? Why is it out of the question? But if anything of the sort
could have taken place, the charge of robbery falls to the ground; if
there was no money, there was no theft of it. If the envelope on the floor
may be taken as evidence that there had been money in it, why may I not
maintain the opposite, that the envelope was on the floor because the
money had been taken from it by its owner?

“But I shall be asked what became of the money if Fyodor Pavlovitch took
it out of the envelope since it was not found when the police searched the
house? In the first place, part of the money was found in the cash-box,
and secondly, he might have taken it out that morning or the evening
before to make some other use of it, to give or send it away; he may have
changed his idea, his plan of action completely, without thinking it
necessary to announce the fact to Smerdyakov beforehand. And if there is
the barest possibility of such an explanation, how can the prisoner be so
positively accused of having committed murder for the sake of robbery, and
of having actually carried out that robbery? This is encroaching on the
domain of romance. If it is maintained that something has been stolen, the
thing must be produced, or at least its existence must be proved beyond
doubt. Yet no one had ever seen these notes.

“Not long ago in Petersburg a young man of eighteen, hardly more than a
boy, who carried on a small business as a costermonger, went in broad
daylight into a moneychanger’s shop with an ax, and with extraordinary,
typical audacity killed the master of the shop and carried off fifteen
hundred roubles. Five hours later he was arrested, and, except fifteen
roubles he had already managed to spend, the whole sum was found on him.
Moreover, the shopman, on his return to the shop after the murder,
informed the police not only of the exact sum stolen, but even of the
notes and gold coins of which that sum was made up, and those very notes
and coins were found on the criminal. This was followed by a full and
genuine confession on the part of the murderer. That’s what I call
evidence, gentlemen of the jury! In that case I know, I see, I touch the
money, and cannot deny its existence. Is it the same in the present case?
And yet it is a question of life and death.

“Yes, I shall be told, but he was carousing that night, squandering money;
he was shown to have had fifteen hundred roubles—where did he get the
money? But the very fact that only fifteen hundred could be found, and the
other half of the sum could nowhere be discovered, shows that that money
was not the same, and had never been in any envelope. By strict
calculation of time it was proved at the preliminary inquiry that the
prisoner ran straight from those women servants to Perhotin’s without
going home, and that he had been nowhere. So he had been all the time in
company and therefore could not have divided the three thousand in half
and hidden half in the town. It’s just this consideration that has led the
prosecutor to assume that the money is hidden in some crevice at Mokroe.
Why not in the dungeons of the castle of Udolpho, gentlemen? Isn’t this
supposition really too fantastic and too romantic? And observe, if that
supposition breaks down, the whole charge of robbery is scattered to the
winds, for in that case what could have become of the other fifteen
hundred roubles? By what miracle could they have disappeared, since it’s
proved the prisoner went nowhere else? And we are ready to ruin a man’s
life with such tales!

“I shall be told that he could not explain where he got the fifteen
hundred that he had, and every one knew that he was without money before
that night. Who knew it, pray? The prisoner has made a clear and
unflinching statement of the source of that money, and if you will have it
so, gentlemen of the jury, nothing can be more probable than that
statement, and more consistent with the temper and spirit of the prisoner.
The prosecutor is charmed with his own romance. A man of weak will, who
had brought himself to take the three thousand so insultingly offered by
his betrothed, could not, we are told, have set aside half and sewn it up,
but would, even if he had done so, have unpicked it every two days and
taken out a hundred, and so would have spent it all in a month. All this,
you will remember, was put forward in a tone that brooked no
contradiction. But what if the thing happened quite differently? What if
you’ve been weaving a romance, and about quite a different kind of man?
That’s just it, you have invented quite a different man!

“I shall be told, perhaps, there are witnesses that he spent on one day
all that three thousand given him by his betrothed a month before the
catastrophe, so he could not have divided the sum in half. But who are
these witnesses? The value of their evidence has been shown in court
already. Besides, in another man’s hand a crust always seems larger, and
no one of these witnesses counted that money; they all judged simply at
sight. And the witness Maximov has testified that the prisoner had twenty
thousand in his hand. You see, gentlemen of the jury, psychology is a
two-edged weapon. Let me turn the other edge now and see what comes of it.

“A month before the catastrophe the prisoner was entrusted by Katerina
Ivanovna with three thousand roubles to send off by post. But the question
is: is it true that they were entrusted to him in such an insulting and
degrading way as was proclaimed just now? The first statement made by the
young lady on the subject was different, perfectly different. In the
second statement we heard only cries of resentment and revenge, cries of
long-concealed hatred. And the very fact that the witness gave her first
evidence incorrectly, gives us a right to conclude that her second piece
of evidence may have been incorrect also. The prosecutor will not, dare
not (his own words) touch on that story. So be it. I will not touch on it
either, but will only venture to observe that if a lofty and
high-principled person, such as that highly respected young lady
unquestionably is, if such a person, I say, allows herself suddenly in
court to contradict her first statement, with the obvious motive of
ruining the prisoner, it is clear that this evidence has been given not
impartially, not coolly. Have not we the right to assume that a revengeful
woman might have exaggerated much? Yes, she may well have exaggerated, in
particular, the insult and humiliation of her offering him the money. No,
it was offered in such a way that it was possible to take it, especially
for a man so easy-going as the prisoner, above all, as he expected to
receive shortly from his father the three thousand roubles that he
reckoned was owing to him. It was unreflecting of him, but it was just his
irresponsible want of reflection that made him so confident that his
father would give him the money, that he would get it, and so could always
dispatch the money entrusted to him and repay the debt.

“But the prosecutor refuses to allow that he could the same day have set
aside half the money and sewn it up in a little bag. That’s not his
character, he tells us, he couldn’t have had such feelings. But yet he
talked himself of the broad Karamazov nature; he cried out about the two
extremes which a Karamazov can contemplate at once. Karamazov is just such
a two-sided nature, fluctuating between two extremes, that even when moved
by the most violent craving for riotous gayety, he can pull himself up, if
something strikes him on the other side. And on the other side is
love—that new love which had flamed up in his heart, and for that love he
needed money; oh, far more than for carousing with his mistress. If she
were to say to him, ‘I am yours, I won’t have Fyodor Pavlovitch,’ then he
must have money to take her away. That was more important than carousing.
Could a Karamazov fail to understand it? That anxiety was just what he was
suffering from—what is there improbable in his laying aside that money and
concealing it in case of emergency?

“But time passed, and Fyodor Pavlovitch did not give the prisoner the
expected three thousand; on the contrary, the latter heard that he meant
to use this sum to seduce the woman he, the prisoner, loved. ‘If Fyodor
Pavlovitch doesn’t give the money,’ he thought, ‘I shall be put in the
position of a thief before Katerina Ivanovna.’ And then the idea presented
itself to him that he would go to Katerina Ivanovna, lay before her the
fifteen hundred roubles he still carried round his neck, and say, ‘I am a
scoundrel, but not a thief.’ So here we have already a twofold reason why
he should guard that sum of money as the apple of his eye, why he
shouldn’t unpick the little bag, and spend it a hundred at a time. Why
should you deny the prisoner a sense of honor? Yes, he has a sense of
honor, granted that it’s misplaced, granted it’s often mistaken, yet it
exists and amounts to a passion, and he has proved that.

“But now the affair becomes even more complex; his jealous torments reach
a climax, and those same two questions torture his fevered brain more and
more: ‘If I repay Katerina Ivanovna, where can I find the means to go off
with Grushenka?’ If he behaved wildly, drank, and made disturbances in the
taverns in the course of that month, it was perhaps because he was
wretched and strained beyond his powers of endurance. These two questions
became so acute that they drove him at last to despair. He sent his
younger brother to beg for the last time for the three thousand roubles,
but without waiting for a reply, burst in himself and ended by beating the
old man in the presence of witnesses. After that he had no prospect of
getting it from any one; his father would not give it him after that
beating.

“The same evening he struck himself on the breast, just on the upper part
of the breast where the little bag was, and swore to his brother that he
had the means of not being a scoundrel, but that still he would remain a
scoundrel, for he foresaw that he would not use that means, that he
wouldn’t have the character, that he wouldn’t have the will-power to do
it. Why, why does the prosecutor refuse to believe the evidence of Alexey
Karamazov, given so genuinely and sincerely, so spontaneously and
convincingly? And why, on the contrary, does he force me to believe in
money hidden in a crevice, in the dungeons of the castle of Udolpho?

“The same evening, after his talk with his brother, the prisoner wrote
that fatal letter, and that letter is the chief, the most stupendous proof
of the prisoner having committed robbery! ‘I shall beg from every one, and
if I don’t get it I shall murder my father and shall take the envelope
with the pink ribbon on it from under his mattress as soon as Ivan has
gone.’ A full program of the murder, we are told, so it must have been he.
‘It has all been done as he wrote,’ cries the prosecutor.

“But in the first place, it’s the letter of a drunken man and written in
great irritation; secondly, he writes of the envelope from what he has
heard from Smerdyakov again, for he has not seen the envelope himself; and
thirdly, he wrote it indeed, but how can you prove that he did it? Did the
prisoner take the envelope from under the pillow, did he find the money,
did that money exist indeed? And was it to get money that the prisoner ran
off, if you remember? He ran off post-haste not to steal, but to find out
where she was, the woman who had crushed him. He was not running to carry
out a program, to carry out what he had written, that is, not for an act
of premeditated robbery, but he ran suddenly, spontaneously, in a jealous
fury. Yes! I shall be told, but when he got there and murdered him he
seized the money, too. But did he murder him after all? The charge of
robbery I repudiate with indignation. A man cannot be accused of robbery,
if it’s impossible to state accurately what he has stolen; that’s an
axiom. But did he murder him without robbery, did he murder him at all? Is
that proved? Isn’t that, too, a romance?”



Chapter XII. And There Was No Murder Either


“Allow me, gentlemen of the jury, to remind you that a man’s life is at
stake and that you must be careful. We have heard the prosecutor himself
admit that until to-day he hesitated to accuse the prisoner of a full and
conscious premeditation of the crime; he hesitated till he saw that fatal
drunken letter which was produced in court to-day. ‘All was done as
written.’ But, I repeat again, he was running to her, to seek her, solely
to find out where she was. That’s a fact that can’t be disputed. Had she
been at home, he would not have run away, but would have remained at her
side, and so would not have done what he promised in the letter. He ran
unexpectedly and accidentally, and by that time very likely he did not
even remember his drunken letter. ‘He snatched up the pestle,’ they say,
and you will remember how a whole edifice of psychology was built on that
pestle—why he was bound to look at that pestle as a weapon, to snatch it
up, and so on, and so on. A very commonplace idea occurs to me at this
point: What if that pestle had not been in sight, had not been lying on
the shelf from which it was snatched by the prisoner, but had been put
away in a cupboard? It would not have caught the prisoner’s eye, and he
would have run away without a weapon, with empty hands, and then he would
certainly not have killed any one. How then can I look upon the pestle as
a proof of premeditation?

“Yes, but he talked in the taverns of murdering his father, and two days
before, on the evening when he wrote his drunken letter, he was quiet and
only quarreled with a shopman in the tavern, because a Karamazov could not
help quarreling, forsooth! But my answer to that is, that, if he was
planning such a murder in accordance with his letter, he certainly would
not have quarreled even with a shopman, and probably would not have gone
into the tavern at all, because a person plotting such a crime seeks quiet
and retirement, seeks to efface himself, to avoid being seen and heard,
and that not from calculation, but from instinct. Gentlemen of the jury,
the psychological method is a two-edged weapon, and we, too, can use it.
As for all this shouting in taverns throughout the month, don’t we often
hear children, or drunkards coming out of taverns shout, ‘I’ll kill you’?
but they don’t murder any one. And that fatal letter—isn’t that simply
drunken irritability, too? Isn’t that simply the shout of the brawler
outside the tavern, ‘I’ll kill you! I’ll kill the lot of you!’ Why not,
why could it not be that? What reason have we to call that letter ‘fatal’
rather than absurd? Because his father has been found murdered, because a
witness saw the prisoner running out of the garden with a weapon in his
hand, and was knocked down by him: therefore, we are told, everything was
done as he had planned in writing, and the letter was not ‘absurd,’ but
‘fatal.’

“Now, thank God! we’ve come to the real point: ‘since he was in the
garden, he must have murdered him.’ In those few words: ‘since he _was_,
then he _must_’ lies the whole case for the prosecution. He was there, so
he must have. And what if there is no _must_ about it, even if he was
there? Oh, I admit that the chain of evidence—the coincidences—are really
suggestive. But examine all these facts separately, regardless of their
connection. Why, for instance, does the prosecution refuse to admit the
truth of the prisoner’s statement that he ran away from his father’s
window? Remember the sarcasms in which the prosecutor indulged at the
expense of the respectful and ‘pious’ sentiments which suddenly came over
the murderer. But what if there were something of the sort, a feeling of
religious awe, if not of filial respect? ‘My mother must have been praying
for me at that moment,’ were the prisoner’s words at the preliminary
inquiry, and so he ran away as soon as he convinced himself that Madame
Svyetlov was not in his father’s house. ‘But he could not convince himself
by looking through the window,’ the prosecutor objects. But why couldn’t
he? Why? The window opened at the signals given by the prisoner. Some word
might have been uttered by Fyodor Pavlovitch, some exclamation which
showed the prisoner that she was not there. Why should we assume
everything as we imagine it, as we make up our minds to imagine it? A
thousand things may happen in reality which elude the subtlest
imagination.

“ ‘Yes, but Grigory saw the door open and so the prisoner certainly was in
the house, therefore he killed him.’ Now about that door, gentlemen of the
jury.... Observe that we have only the statement of one witness as to that
door, and he was at the time in such a condition, that— But supposing the
door was open; supposing the prisoner has lied in denying it, from an
instinct of self-defense, natural in his position; supposing he did go
into the house—well, what then? How does it follow that because he was
there he committed the murder? He might have dashed in, run through the
rooms; might have pushed his father away; might have struck him; but as
soon as he had made sure Madame Svyetlov was not there, he may have run
away rejoicing that she was not there and that he had not killed his
father. And it was perhaps just because he had escaped from the temptation
to kill his father, because he had a clear conscience and was rejoicing at
not having killed him, that he was capable of a pure feeling, the feeling
of pity and compassion, and leapt off the fence a minute later to the
assistance of Grigory after he had, in his excitement, knocked him down.

“With terrible eloquence the prosecutor has described to us the dreadful
state of the prisoner’s mind at Mokroe when love again lay before him
calling him to new life, while love was impossible for him because he had
his father’s bloodstained corpse behind him and beyond that
corpse—retribution. And yet the prosecutor allowed him love, which he
explained, according to his method, talking about his drunken condition,
about a criminal being taken to execution, about it being still far off,
and so on and so on. But again I ask, Mr. Prosecutor, have you not
invented a new personality? Is the prisoner so coarse and heartless as to
be able to think at that moment of love and of dodges to escape
punishment, if his hands were really stained with his father’s blood? No,
no, no! As soon as it was made plain to him that she loved him and called
him to her side, promising him new happiness, oh! then, I protest he must
have felt the impulse to suicide doubled, trebled, and must have killed
himself, if he had his father’s murder on his conscience. Oh, no! he would
not have forgotten where his pistols lay! I know the prisoner: the savage,
stony heartlessness ascribed to him by the prosecutor is inconsistent with
his character. He would have killed himself, that’s certain. He did not
kill himself just because ‘his mother’s prayers had saved him,’ and he was
innocent of his father’s blood. He was troubled, he was grieving that
night at Mokroe only about old Grigory and praying to God that the old man
would recover, that his blow had not been fatal, and that he would not
have to suffer for it. Why not accept such an interpretation of the facts?
What trustworthy proof have we that the prisoner is lying?

“But we shall be told at once again, ‘There is his father’s corpse! If he
ran away without murdering him, who did murder him?’ Here, I repeat, you
have the whole logic of the prosecution. Who murdered him, if not he?
There’s no one to put in his place.

“Gentlemen of the jury, is that really so? Is it positively, actually true
that there is no one else at all? We’ve heard the prosecutor count on his
fingers all the persons who were in that house that night. They were five
in number; three of them, I agree, could not have been responsible—the
murdered man himself, old Grigory, and his wife. There are left then the
prisoner and Smerdyakov, and the prosecutor dramatically exclaims that the
prisoner pointed to Smerdyakov because he had no one else to fix on, that
had there been a sixth person, even a phantom of a sixth person, he would
have abandoned the charge against Smerdyakov at once in shame and have
accused that other. But, gentlemen of the jury, why may I not draw the
very opposite conclusion? There are two persons—the prisoner and
Smerdyakov. Why can I not say that you accuse my client, simply because
you have no one else to accuse? And you have no one else only because you
have determined to exclude Smerdyakov from all suspicion.

“It’s true, indeed, Smerdyakov is accused only by the prisoner, his two
brothers, and Madame Svyetlov. But there are others who accuse him: there
are vague rumors of a question, of a suspicion, an obscure report, a
feeling of expectation. Finally, we have the evidence of a combination of
facts very suggestive, though, I admit, inconclusive. In the first place
we have precisely on the day of the catastrophe that fit, for the
genuineness of which the prosecutor, for some reason, has felt obliged to
make a careful defense. Then Smerdyakov’s sudden suicide on the eve of the
trial. Then the equally startling evidence given in court to-day by the
elder of the prisoner’s brothers, who had believed in his guilt, but has
to-day produced a bundle of notes and proclaimed Smerdyakov as the
murderer. Oh, I fully share the court’s and the prosecutor’s conviction
that Ivan Karamazov is suffering from brain fever, that his statement may
really be a desperate effort, planned in delirium, to save his brother by
throwing the guilt on the dead man. But again Smerdyakov’s name is
pronounced, again there is a suggestion of mystery. There is something
unexplained, incomplete. And perhaps it may one day be explained. But we
won’t go into that now. Of that later.

“The court has resolved to go on with the trial, but, meantime, I might
make a few remarks about the character-sketch of Smerdyakov drawn with
subtlety and talent by the prosecutor. But while I admire his talent I
cannot agree with him. I have visited Smerdyakov, I have seen him and
talked to him, and he made a very different impression on me. He was weak
in health, it is true; but in character, in spirit, he was by no means the
weak man the prosecutor has made him out to be. I found in him no trace of
the timidity on which the prosecutor so insisted. There was no simplicity
about him, either. I found in him, on the contrary, an extreme
mistrustfulness concealed under a mask of _naïveté_, and an intelligence
of considerable range. The prosecutor was too simple in taking him for
weak-minded. He made a very definite impression on me: I left him with the
conviction that he was a distinctly spiteful creature, excessively
ambitious, vindictive, and intensely envious. I made some inquiries: he
resented his parentage, was ashamed of it, and would clench his teeth when
he remembered that he was the son of ‘stinking Lizaveta.’ He was
disrespectful to the servant Grigory and his wife, who had cared for him
in his childhood. He cursed and jeered at Russia. He dreamed of going to
France and becoming a Frenchman. He used often to say that he hadn’t the
means to do so. I fancy he loved no one but himself and had a strangely
high opinion of himself. His conception of culture was limited to good
clothes, clean shirt-fronts and polished boots. Believing himself to be
the illegitimate son of Fyodor Pavlovitch (there is evidence of this), he
might well have resented his position, compared with that of his master’s
legitimate sons. They had everything, he nothing. They had all the rights,
they had the inheritance, while he was only the cook. He told me himself
that he had helped Fyodor Pavlovitch to put the notes in the envelope. The
destination of that sum—a sum which would have made his career—must have
been hateful to him. Moreover, he saw three thousand roubles in new
rainbow-colored notes. (I asked him about that on purpose.) Oh, beware of
showing an ambitious and envious man a large sum of money at once! And it
was the first time he had seen so much money in the hands of one man. The
sight of the rainbow-colored notes may have made a morbid impression on
his imagination, but with no immediate results.

“The talented prosecutor, with extraordinary subtlety, sketched for us all
the arguments for and against the hypothesis of Smerdyakov’s guilt, and
asked us in particular what motive he had in feigning a fit. But he may
not have been feigning at all, the fit may have happened quite naturally,
but it may have passed off quite naturally, and the sick man may have
recovered, not completely perhaps, but still regaining consciousness, as
happens with epileptics.

“The prosecutor asks at what moment could Smerdyakov have committed the
murder. But it is very easy to point out that moment. He might have waked
up from deep sleep (for he was only asleep—an epileptic fit is always
followed by a deep sleep) at that moment when the old Grigory shouted at
the top of his voice ‘Parricide!’ That shout in the dark and stillness may
have waked Smerdyakov whose sleep may have been less sound at the moment:
he might naturally have waked up an hour before.

“Getting out of bed, he goes almost unconsciously and with no definite
motive towards the sound to see what’s the matter. His head is still
clouded with his attack, his faculties are half asleep; but, once in the
garden, he walks to the lighted windows and he hears terrible news from
his master, who would be, of course, glad to see him. His mind sets to
work at once. He hears all the details from his frightened master, and
gradually in his disordered brain there shapes itself an idea—terrible,
but seductive and irresistibly logical. To kill the old man, take the
three thousand, and throw all the blame on to his young master. A terrible
lust of money, of booty, might seize upon him as he realized his security
from detection. Oh! these sudden and irresistible impulses come so often
when there is a favorable opportunity, and especially with murderers who
have had no idea of committing a murder beforehand. And Smerdyakov may
have gone in and carried out his plan. With what weapon? Why, with any
stone picked up in the garden. But what for, with what object? Why, the
three thousand which means a career for him. Oh, I am not contradicting
myself—the money may have existed. And perhaps Smerdyakov alone knew where
to find it, where his master kept it. And the covering of the money—the
torn envelope on the floor?

“Just now, when the prosecutor was explaining his subtle theory that only
an inexperienced thief like Karamazov would have left the envelope on the
floor, and not one like Smerdyakov, who would have avoided leaving a piece
of evidence against himself, I thought as I listened that I was hearing
something very familiar, and, would you believe it, I have heard that very
argument, that very conjecture, of how Karamazov would have behaved,
precisely two days before, from Smerdyakov himself. What’s more, it struck
me at the time. I fancied that there was an artificial simplicity about
him; that he was in a hurry to suggest this idea to me that I might fancy
it was my own. He insinuated it, as it were. Did he not insinuate the same
idea at the inquiry and suggest it to the talented prosecutor?

“I shall be asked, ‘What about the old woman, Grigory’s wife? She heard
the sick man moaning close by, all night.’ Yes, she heard it, but that
evidence is extremely unreliable. I knew a lady who complained bitterly
that she had been kept awake all night by a dog in the yard. Yet the poor
beast, it appeared, had only yelped once or twice in the night. And that’s
natural. If any one is asleep and hears a groan he wakes up, annoyed at
being waked, but instantly falls asleep again. Two hours later, again a
groan, he wakes up and falls asleep again; and the same thing again two
hours later—three times altogether in the night. Next morning the sleeper
wakes up and complains that some one has been groaning all night and
keeping him awake. And it is bound to seem so to him: the intervals of two
hours of sleep he does not remember, he only remembers the moments of
waking, so he feels he has been waked up all night.

“But why, why, asks the prosecutor, did not Smerdyakov confess in his last
letter? Why did his conscience prompt him to one step and not to both?
But, excuse me, conscience implies penitence, and the suicide may not have
felt penitence, but only despair. Despair and penitence are two very
different things. Despair may be vindictive and irreconcilable, and the
suicide, laying his hands on himself, may well have felt redoubled hatred
for those whom he had envied all his life.

“Gentlemen of the jury, beware of a miscarriage of justice! What is there
unlikely in all I have put before you just now? Find the error in my
reasoning; find the impossibility, the absurdity. And if there is but a
shade of possibility, but a shade of probability in my propositions, do
not condemn him. And is there only a shade? I swear by all that is sacred,
I fully believe in the explanation of the murder I have just put forward.
What troubles me and makes me indignant is that of all the mass of facts
heaped up by the prosecution against the prisoner, there is not a single
one certain and irrefutable. And yet the unhappy man is to be ruined by
the accumulation of these facts. Yes, the accumulated effect is awful: the
blood, the blood dripping from his fingers, the bloodstained shirt, the
dark night resounding with the shout ‘Parricide!’ and the old man falling
with a broken head. And then the mass of phrases, statements, gestures,
shouts! Oh! this has so much influence, it can so bias the mind; but,
gentlemen of the jury, can it bias your minds? Remember, you have been
given absolute power to bind and to loose, but the greater the power, the
more terrible its responsibility.

“I do not draw back one iota from what I have said just now, but suppose
for one moment I agreed with the prosecution that my luckless client had
stained his hands with his father’s blood. This is only hypothesis, I
repeat; I never for one instant doubt of his innocence. But, so be it, I
assume that my client is guilty of parricide. Even so, hear what I have to
say. I have it in my heart to say something more to you, for I feel that
there must be a great conflict in your hearts and minds.... Forgive my
referring to your hearts and minds, gentlemen of the jury, but I want to
be truthful and sincere to the end. Let us all be sincere!”

At this point the speech was interrupted by rather loud applause. The last
words, indeed, were pronounced with a note of such sincerity that every
one felt that he really might have something to say, and that what he was
about to say would be of the greatest consequence. But the President,
hearing the applause, in a loud voice threatened to clear the court if
such an incident were repeated. Every sound was hushed and Fetyukovitch
began in a voice full of feeling quite unlike the tone he had used
hitherto.



Chapter XIII. A Corrupter Of Thought


“It’s not only the accumulation of facts that threatens my client with
ruin, gentlemen of the jury,” he began, “what is really damning for my
client is one fact—the dead body of his father. Had it been an ordinary
case of murder you would have rejected the charge in view of the
triviality, the incompleteness, and the fantastic character of the
evidence, if you examine each part of it separately; or, at least, you
would have hesitated to ruin a man’s life simply from the prejudice
against him which he has, alas! only too well deserved. But it’s not an
ordinary case of murder, it’s a case of parricide. That impresses men’s
minds, and to such a degree that the very triviality and incompleteness of
the evidence becomes less trivial and less incomplete even to an
unprejudiced mind. How can such a prisoner be acquitted? What if he
committed the murder and gets off unpunished? That is what every one,
almost involuntarily, instinctively, feels at heart.

“Yes, it’s a fearful thing to shed a father’s blood—the father who has
begotten me, loved me, not spared his life for me, grieved over my
illnesses from childhood up, troubled all his life for my happiness, and
has lived in my joys, in my successes. To murder such a father—that’s
inconceivable. Gentlemen of the jury, what is a father—a real father? What
is the meaning of that great word? What is the great idea in that name? We
have just indicated in part what a true father is and what he ought to be.
In the case in which we are now so deeply occupied and over which our
hearts are aching—in the present case, the father, Fyodor Pavlovitch
Karamazov, did not correspond to that conception of a father to which we
have just referred. That’s the misfortune. And indeed some fathers are a
misfortune. Let us examine this misfortune rather more closely: we must
shrink from nothing, gentlemen of the jury, considering the importance of
the decision you have to make. It’s our particular duty not to shrink from
any idea, like children or frightened women, as the talented prosecutor
happily expresses it.

“But in the course of his heated speech my esteemed opponent (and he was
my opponent before I opened my lips) exclaimed several times, ‘Oh, I will
not yield the defense of the prisoner to the lawyer who has come down from
Petersburg. I accuse, but I defend also!’ He exclaimed that several times,
but forgot to mention that if this terrible prisoner was for twenty-three
years so grateful for a mere pound of nuts given him by the only man who
had been kind to him, as a child in his father’s house, might not such a
man well have remembered for twenty-three years how he ran in his father’s
back-yard, ‘without boots on his feet and with his little trousers hanging
by one button’—to use the expression of the kind-hearted doctor,
Herzenstube?

“Oh, gentlemen of the jury, why need we look more closely at this
misfortune, why repeat what we all know already? What did my client meet
with when he arrived here, at his father’s house, and why depict my client
as a heartless egoist and monster? He is uncontrolled, he is wild and
unruly—we are trying him now for that—but who is responsible for his life?
Who is responsible for his having received such an unseemly bringing up,
in spite of his excellent disposition and his grateful and sensitive
heart? Did any one train him to be reasonable? Was he enlightened by
study? Did any one love him ever so little in his childhood? My client was
left to the care of Providence like a beast of the field. He thirsted
perhaps to see his father after long years of separation. A thousand times
perhaps he may, recalling his childhood, have driven away the loathsome
phantoms that haunted his childish dreams and with all his heart he may
have longed to embrace and to forgive his father! And what awaited him? He
was met by cynical taunts, suspicions and wrangling about money. He heard
nothing but revolting talk and vicious precepts uttered daily over the
brandy, and at last he saw his father seducing his mistress from him with
his own money. Oh, gentlemen of the jury, that was cruel and revolting!
And that old man was always complaining of the disrespect and cruelty of
his son. He slandered him in society, injured him, calumniated him, bought
up his unpaid debts to get him thrown into prison.

“Gentlemen of the jury, people like my client, who are fierce, unruly, and
uncontrolled on the surface, are sometimes, most frequently indeed,
exceedingly tender-hearted, only they don’t express it. Don’t laugh, don’t
laugh at my idea! The talented prosecutor laughed mercilessly just now at
my client for loving Schiller—loving the sublime and beautiful! I should
not have laughed at that in his place. Yes, such natures—oh, let me speak
in defense of such natures, so often and so cruelly misunderstood—these
natures often thirst for tenderness, goodness, and justice, as it were, in
contrast to themselves, their unruliness, their ferocity—they thirst for
it unconsciously. Passionate and fierce on the surface, they are painfully
capable of loving woman, for instance, and with a spiritual and elevated
love. Again do not laugh at me, this is very often the case in such
natures. But they cannot hide their passions—sometimes very coarse—and
that is conspicuous and is noticed, but the inner man is unseen. Their
passions are quickly exhausted; but, by the side of a noble and lofty
creature that seemingly coarse and rough man seeks a new life, seeks to
correct himself, to be better, to become noble and honorable, ‘sublime and
beautiful,’ however much the expression has been ridiculed.

“I said just now that I would not venture to touch upon my client’s
engagement. But I may say half a word. What we heard just now was not
evidence, but only the scream of a frenzied and revengeful woman, and it
was not for her—oh, not for her!—to reproach him with treachery, for she
has betrayed him! If she had had but a little time for reflection she
would not have given such evidence. Oh, do not believe her! No, my client
is not a monster, as she called him!

“The Lover of Mankind on the eve of His Crucifixion said: ‘I am the Good
Shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for his sheep, so that not
one of them might be lost.’ Let not a man’s soul be lost through us!

“I asked just now what does ‘father’ mean, and exclaimed that it was a
great word, a precious name. But one must use words honestly, gentlemen,
and I venture to call things by their right names: such a father as old
Karamazov cannot be called a father and does not deserve to be. Filial
love for an unworthy father is an absurdity, an impossibility. Love cannot
be created from nothing: only God can create something from nothing.

“ ‘Fathers, provoke not your children to wrath,’ the apostle writes, from
a heart glowing with love. It’s not for the sake of my client that I quote
these sacred words, I mention them for all fathers. Who has authorized me
to preach to fathers? No one. But as a man and a citizen I make my
appeal—_vivos voco!_ We are not long on earth, we do many evil deeds and
say many evil words. So let us all catch a favorable moment when we are
all together to say a good word to each other. That’s what I am doing:
while I am in this place I take advantage of my opportunity. Not for
nothing is this tribune given us by the highest authority—all Russia hears
us! I am not speaking only for the fathers here present, I cry aloud to
all fathers: ‘Fathers, provoke not your children to wrath.’ Yes, let us
first fulfill Christ’s injunction ourselves and only then venture to
expect it of our children. Otherwise we are not fathers, but enemies of
our children, and they are not our children, but our enemies, and we have
made them our enemies ourselves. ‘What measure ye mete it shall be
measured unto you again’—it’s not I who say that, it’s the Gospel precept,
measure to others according as they measure to you. How can we blame
children if they measure us according to our measure?

“Not long ago a servant girl in Finland was suspected of having secretly
given birth to a child. She was watched, and a box of which no one knew
anything was found in the corner of the loft, behind some bricks. It was
opened and inside was found the body of a new-born child which she had
killed. In the same box were found the skeletons of two other babies
which, according to her own confession, she had killed at the moment of
their birth.

“Gentlemen of the jury, was she a mother to her children? She gave birth
to them, indeed; but was she a mother to them? Would any one venture to
give her the sacred name of mother? Let us be bold, gentlemen, let us be
audacious even: it’s our duty to be so at this moment and not to be afraid
of certain words and ideas like the Moscow women in Ostrovsky’s play, who
are scared at the sound of certain words. No, let us prove that the
progress of the last few years has touched even us, and let us say
plainly, the father is not merely he who begets the child, but he who
begets it and does his duty by it.

“Oh, of course, there is the other meaning, there is the other
interpretation of the word ‘father,’ which insists that any father, even
though he be a monster, even though he be the enemy of his children, still
remains my father simply because he begot me. But this is, so to say, the
mystical meaning which I cannot comprehend with my intellect, but can only
accept by faith, or, better to say, _on faith_, like many other things
which I do not understand, but which religion bids me believe. But in that
case let it be kept outside the sphere of actual life. In the sphere of
actual life, which has, indeed, its own rights, but also lays upon us
great duties and obligations, in that sphere, if we want to be
humane—Christian, in fact—we must, or ought to, act only upon convictions
justified by reason and experience, which have been passed through the
crucible of analysis; in a word, we must act rationally, and not as though
in dream and delirium, that we may not do harm, that we may not ill-treat
and ruin a man. Then it will be real Christian work, not only mystic, but
rational and philanthropic....”

There was violent applause at this passage from many parts of the court,
but Fetyukovitch waved his hands as though imploring them to let him
finish without interruption. The court relapsed into silence at once. The
orator went on.

“Do you suppose, gentlemen, that our children as they grow up and begin to
reason can avoid such questions? No, they cannot, and we will not impose
on them an impossible restriction. The sight of an unworthy father
involuntarily suggests tormenting questions to a young creature,
especially when he compares him with the excellent fathers of his
companions. The conventional answer to this question is: ‘He begot you,
and you are his flesh and blood, and therefore you are bound to love him.’
The youth involuntarily reflects: ‘But did he love me when he begot me?’
he asks, wondering more and more. ‘Was it for my sake he begot me? He did
not know me, not even my sex, at that moment, at the moment of passion,
perhaps, inflamed by wine, and he has only transmitted to me a propensity
to drunkenness—that’s all he’s done for me.... Why am I bound to love him
simply for begetting me when he has cared nothing for me all my life
after?’

“Oh, perhaps those questions strike you as coarse and cruel, but do not
expect an impossible restraint from a young mind. ‘Drive nature out of the
door and it will fly in at the window,’ and, above all, let us not be
afraid of words, but decide the question according to the dictates of
reason and humanity and not of mystic ideas. How shall it be decided? Why,
like this. Let the son stand before his father and ask him, ‘Father, tell
me, why must I love you? Father, show me that I must love you,’ and if
that father is able to answer him and show him good reason, we have a
real, normal, parental relation, not resting on mystical prejudice, but on
a rational, responsible and strictly humanitarian basis. But if he does
not, there’s an end to the family tie. He is not a father to him, and the
son has a right to look upon him as a stranger, and even an enemy. Our
tribune, gentlemen of the jury, ought to be a school of true and sound
ideas.”

(Here the orator was interrupted by irrepressible and almost frantic
applause. Of course, it was not the whole audience, but a good half of it
applauded. The fathers and mothers present applauded. Shrieks and
exclamations were heard from the gallery, where the ladies were sitting.
Handkerchiefs were waved. The President began ringing his bell with all
his might. He was obviously irritated by the behavior of the audience, but
did not venture to clear the court as he had threatened. Even persons of
high position, old men with stars on their breasts, sitting on specially
reserved seats behind the judges, applauded the orator and waved their
handkerchiefs. So that when the noise died down, the President confined
himself to repeating his stern threat to clear the court, and
Fetyukovitch, excited and triumphant, continued his speech.)

“Gentlemen of the jury, you remember that awful night of which so much has
been said to-day, when the son got over the fence and stood face to face
with the enemy and persecutor who had begotten him. I insist most
emphatically it was not for money he ran to his father’s house: the charge
of robbery is an absurdity, as I proved before. And it was not to murder
him he broke into the house, oh, no! If he had had that design he would,
at least, have taken the precaution of arming himself beforehand. The
brass pestle he caught up instinctively without knowing why he did it.
Granted that he deceived his father by tapping at the window, granted that
he made his way in—I’ve said already that I do not for a moment believe
that legend, but let it be so, let us suppose it for a moment. Gentlemen,
I swear to you by all that’s holy, if it had not been his father, but an
ordinary enemy, he would, after running through the rooms and satisfying
himself that the woman was not there, have made off, post-haste, without
doing any harm to his rival. He would have struck him, pushed him away
perhaps, nothing more, for he had no thought and no time to spare for
that. What he wanted to know was where she was. But his father, his
father! The mere sight of the father who had hated him from his childhood,
had been his enemy, his persecutor, and now his unnatural rival, was
enough! A feeling of hatred came over him involuntarily, irresistibly,
clouding his reason. It all surged up in one moment! It was an impulse of
madness and insanity, but also an impulse of nature, irresistibly and
unconsciously (like everything in nature) avenging the violation of its
eternal laws.

“But the prisoner even then did not murder him—I maintain that, I cry that
aloud!—no, he only brandished the pestle in a burst of indignant disgust,
not meaning to kill him, not knowing that he would kill him. Had he not
had this fatal pestle in his hand, he would have only knocked his father
down perhaps, but would not have killed him. As he ran away, he did not
know whether he had killed the old man. Such a murder is not a murder.
Such a murder is not a parricide. No, the murder of such a father cannot
be called parricide. Such a murder can only be reckoned parricide by
prejudice.

“But I appeal to you again and again from the depths of my soul; did this
murder actually take place? Gentlemen of the jury, if we convict and
punish him, he will say to himself: ‘These people have done nothing for my
bringing up, for my education, nothing to improve my lot, nothing to make
me better, nothing to make me a man. These people have not given me to eat
and to drink, have not visited me in prison and nakedness, and here they
have sent me to penal servitude. I am quits, I owe them nothing now, and
owe no one anything for ever. They are wicked and I will be wicked. They
are cruel and I will be cruel.’ That is what he will say, gentlemen of the
jury. And I swear, by finding him guilty you will only make it easier for
him: you will ease his conscience, he will curse the blood he has shed and
will not regret it. At the same time you will destroy in him the
possibility of becoming a new man, for he will remain in his wickedness
and blindness all his life.

“But do you want to punish him fearfully, terribly, with the most awful
punishment that could be imagined, and at the same time to save him and
regenerate his soul? If so, overwhelm him with your mercy! You will see,
you will hear how he will tremble and be horror-struck. ‘How can I endure
this mercy? How can I endure so much love? Am I worthy of it?’ That’s what
he will exclaim.

“Oh, I know, I know that heart, that wild but grateful heart, gentlemen of
the jury! It will bow before your mercy; it thirsts for a great and loving
action, it will melt and mount upwards. There are souls which, in their
limitation, blame the whole world. But subdue such a soul with mercy, show
it love, and it will curse its past, for there are many good impulses in
it. Such a heart will expand and see that God is merciful and that men are
good and just. He will be horror-stricken; he will be crushed by remorse
and the vast obligation laid upon him henceforth. And he will not say
then, ‘I am quits,’ but will say, ‘I am guilty in the sight of all men and
am more unworthy than all.’ With tears of penitence and poignant, tender
anguish, he will exclaim: ‘Others are better than I, they wanted to save
me, not to ruin me!’ Oh, this act of mercy is so easy for you, for in the
absence of anything like real evidence it will be too awful for you to
pronounce: ‘Yes, he is guilty.’

“Better acquit ten guilty men than punish one innocent man! Do you hear,
do you hear that majestic voice from the past century of our glorious
history? It is not for an insignificant person like me to remind you that
the Russian court does not exist for the punishment only, but also for the
salvation of the criminal! Let other nations think of retribution and the
letter of the law, we will cling to the spirit and the meaning—the
salvation and the reformation of the lost. If this is true, if Russia and
her justice are such, she may go forward with good cheer! Do not try to
scare us with your frenzied troikas from which all the nations stand aside
in disgust. Not a runaway troika, but the stately chariot of Russia will
move calmly and majestically to its goal. In your hands is the fate of my
client, in your hands is the fate of Russian justice. You will defend it,
you will save it, you will prove that there are men to watch over it, that
it is in good hands!”



Chapter XIV. The Peasants Stand Firm


This was how Fetyukovitch concluded his speech, and the enthusiasm of the
audience burst like an irresistible storm. It was out of the question to
stop it: the women wept, many of the men wept too, even two important
personages shed tears. The President submitted, and even postponed ringing
his bell. The suppression of such an enthusiasm would be the suppression
of something sacred, as the ladies cried afterwards. The orator himself
was genuinely touched.

And it was at this moment that Ippolit Kirillovitch got up to make certain
objections. People looked at him with hatred. “What? What’s the meaning of
it? He positively dares to make objections,” the ladies babbled. But if
the whole world of ladies, including his wife, had protested he could not
have been stopped at that moment. He was pale, he was shaking with
emotion, his first phrases were even unintelligible, he gasped for breath,
could hardly speak clearly, lost the thread. But he soon recovered
himself. Of this new speech of his I will quote only a few sentences.

“... I am reproached with having woven a romance. But what is this defense
if not one romance on the top of another? All that was lacking was poetry.
Fyodor Pavlovitch, while waiting for his mistress, tears open the envelope
and throws it on the floor. We are even told what he said while engaged in
this strange act. Is not this a flight of fancy? And what proof have we
that he had taken out the money? Who heard what he said? The weak-minded
idiot, Smerdyakov, transformed into a Byronic hero, avenging society for
his illegitimate birth—isn’t this a romance in the Byronic style? And the
son who breaks into his father’s house and murders him without murdering
him is not even a romance—this is a sphinx setting us a riddle which he
cannot solve himself. If he murdered him, he murdered him, and what’s the
meaning of his murdering him without having murdered him—who can make head
or tail of this?

“Then we are admonished that our tribune is a tribune of true and sound
ideas and from this tribune of ‘sound ideas’ is heard a solemn declaration
that to call the murder of a father ‘parricide’ is nothing but a
prejudice! But if parricide is a prejudice, and if every child is to ask
his father why he is to love him, what will become of us? What will become
of the foundations of society? What will become of the family? Parricide,
it appears, is only a bogy of Moscow merchants’ wives. The most precious,
the most sacred guarantees for the destiny and future of Russian justice
are presented to us in a perverted and frivolous form, simply to attain an
object—to obtain the justification of something which cannot be justified.
‘Oh, crush him by mercy,’ cries the counsel for the defense; but that’s
all the criminal wants, and to-morrow it will be seen how much he is
crushed. And is not the counsel for the defense too modest in asking only
for the acquittal of the prisoner? Why not found a charity in the honor of
the parricide to commemorate his exploit among future generations?
Religion and the Gospel are corrected—that’s all mysticism, we are told,
and ours is the only true Christianity which has been subjected to the
analysis of reason and common sense. And so they set up before us a false
semblance of Christ! ‘What measure ye mete so it shall be meted unto you
again,’ cried the counsel for the defense, and instantly deduces that
Christ teaches us to measure as it is measured to us—and this from the
tribune of truth and sound sense! We peep into the Gospel only on the eve
of making speeches, in order to dazzle the audience by our acquaintance
with what is, anyway, a rather original composition, which may be of use
to produce a certain effect—all to serve the purpose! But what Christ
commands us is something very different: He bids us beware of doing this,
because the wicked world does this, but we ought to forgive and to turn
the other cheek, and not to measure to our persecutors as they measure to
us. This is what our God has taught us and not that to forbid children to
murder their fathers is a prejudice. And we will not from the tribune of
truth and good sense correct the Gospel of our Lord, Whom the counsel for
the defense deigns to call only ‘the crucified lover of humanity,’ in
opposition to all orthodox Russia, which calls to Him, ‘For Thou art our
God!’ ”

At this the President intervened and checked the over-zealous speaker,
begging him not to exaggerate, not to overstep the bounds, and so on, as
presidents always do in such cases. The audience, too, was uneasy. The
public was restless: there were even exclamations of indignation.
Fetyukovitch did not so much as reply; he only mounted the tribune to lay
his hand on his heart and, with an offended voice, utter a few words full
of dignity. He only touched again, lightly and ironically, on “romancing”
and “psychology,” and in an appropriate place quoted, “Jupiter, you are
angry, therefore you are wrong,” which provoked a burst of approving
laughter in the audience, for Ippolit Kirillovitch was by no means like
Jupiter. Then, _à propos_ of the accusation that he was teaching the young
generation to murder their fathers, Fetyukovitch observed, with great
dignity, that he would not even answer. As for the prosecutor’s charge of
uttering unorthodox opinions, Fetyukovitch hinted that it was a personal
insinuation and that he had expected in this court to be secure from
accusations “damaging to my reputation as a citizen and a loyal subject.”
But at these words the President pulled him up, too, and Fetyukovitch
concluded his speech with a bow, amid a hum of approbation in the court.
And Ippolit Kirillovitch was, in the opinion of our ladies, “crushed for
good.”

Then the prisoner was allowed to speak. Mitya stood up, but said very
little. He was fearfully exhausted, physically and mentally. The look of
strength and independence with which he had entered in the morning had
almost disappeared. He seemed as though he had passed through an
experience that day, which had taught him for the rest of his life
something very important he had not understood till then. His voice was
weak, he did not shout as before. In his words there was a new note of
humility, defeat and submission.

“What am I to say, gentlemen of the jury? The hour of judgment has come
for me, I feel the hand of God upon me! The end has come to an erring man!
But, before God, I repeat to you, I am innocent of my father’s blood! For
the last time I repeat, it wasn’t I killed him! I was erring, but I loved
what is good. Every instant I strove to reform, but I lived like a wild
beast. I thank the prosecutor, he told me many things about myself that I
did not know; but it’s not true that I killed my father, the prosecutor is
mistaken. I thank my counsel, too. I cried listening to him; but it’s not
true that I killed my father, and he needn’t have supposed it. And don’t
believe the doctors. I am perfectly sane, only my heart is heavy. If you
spare me, if you let me go, I will pray for you. I will be a better man. I
give you my word before God I will! And if you will condemn me, I’ll break
my sword over my head myself and kiss the pieces. But spare me, do not rob
me of my God! I know myself, I shall rebel! My heart is heavy, gentlemen
... spare me!”

He almost fell back in his place: his voice broke: he could hardly
articulate the last phrase. Then the judges proceeded to put the questions
and began to ask both sides to formulate their conclusions.

But I will not describe the details. At last the jury rose to retire for
consultation. The President was very tired, and so his last charge to the
jury was rather feeble. “Be impartial, don’t be influenced by the
eloquence of the defense, but yet weigh the arguments. Remember that there
is a great responsibility laid upon you,” and so on and so on.

The jury withdrew and the court adjourned. People could get up, move
about, exchange their accumulated impressions, refresh themselves at the
buffet. It was very late, almost one o’clock in the night, but nobody went
away: the strain was so great that no one could think of repose. All
waited with sinking hearts; though that is, perhaps, too much to say, for
the ladies were only in a state of hysterical impatience and their hearts
were untroubled. An acquittal, they thought, was inevitable. They all
prepared themselves for a dramatic moment of general enthusiasm. I must
own there were many among the men, too, who were convinced that an
acquittal was inevitable. Some were pleased, others frowned, while some
were simply dejected, not wanting him to be acquitted. Fetyukovitch
himself was confident of his success. He was surrounded by people
congratulating him and fawning upon him.

“There are,” he said to one group, as I was told afterwards, “there are
invisible threads binding the counsel for the defense with the jury. One
feels during one’s speech if they are being formed. I was aware of them.
They exist. Our cause is won. Set your mind at rest.”

“What will our peasants say now?” said one stout, cross-looking,
pock-marked gentleman, a landowner of the neighborhood, approaching a
group of gentlemen engaged in conversation.

“But they are not all peasants. There are four government clerks among
them.”

“Yes, there are clerks,” said a member of the district council, joining
the group.

“And do you know that Nazaryev, the merchant with the medal, a juryman?”

“What of him?”

“He is a man with brains.”

“But he never speaks.”

“He is no great talker, but so much the better. There’s no need for the
Petersburg man to teach him: he could teach all Petersburg himself. He’s
the father of twelve children. Think of that!”

“Upon my word, you don’t suppose they won’t acquit him?” one of our young
officials exclaimed in another group.

“They’ll acquit him for certain,” said a resolute voice.

“It would be shameful, disgraceful, not to acquit him!” cried the
official. “Suppose he did murder him—there are fathers and fathers! And,
besides, he was in such a frenzy.... He really may have done nothing but
swing the pestle in the air, and so knocked the old man down. But it was a
pity they dragged the valet in. That was simply an absurd theory! If I’d
been in Fetyukovitch’s place, I should simply have said straight out: ‘He
murdered him; but he is not guilty, hang it all!’ ”

“That’s what he did, only without saying, ‘Hang it all!’ ”

“No, Mihail Semyonovitch, he almost said that, too,” put in a third voice.

“Why, gentlemen, in Lent an actress was acquitted in our town who had cut
the throat of her lover’s lawful wife.”

“Oh, but she did not finish cutting it.”

“That makes no difference. She began cutting it.”

“What did you think of what he said about children? Splendid, wasn’t it?”

“Splendid!”

“And about mysticism, too!”

“Oh, drop mysticism, do!” cried some one else; “think of Ippolit and his
fate from this day forth. His wife will scratch his eyes out to-morrow for
Mitya’s sake.”

“Is she here?”

“What an idea! If she’d been here she’d have scratched them out in court.
She is at home with toothache. He he he!”

“He he he!”

In a third group:

“I dare say they will acquit Mitenka, after all.”

“I should not be surprised if he turns the ‘Metropolis’ upside down
to-morrow. He will be drinking for ten days!”

“Oh, the devil!”

“The devil’s bound to have a hand in it. Where should he be if not here?”

“Well, gentlemen, I admit it was eloquent. But still it’s not the thing to
break your father’s head with a pestle! Or what are we coming to?”

“The chariot! Do you remember the chariot?”

“Yes; he turned a cart into a chariot!”

“And to-morrow he will turn a chariot into a cart, just to suit his
purpose.”

“What cunning chaps there are nowadays! Is there any justice to be had in
Russia?”

But the bell rang. The jury deliberated for exactly an hour, neither more
nor less. A profound silence reigned in the court as soon as the public
had taken their seats. I remember how the jurymen walked into the court.
At last! I won’t repeat the questions in order, and, indeed, I have
forgotten them. I remember only the answer to the President’s first and
chief question: “Did the prisoner commit the murder for the sake of
robbery and with premeditation?” (I don’t remember the exact words.) There
was a complete hush. The foreman of the jury, the youngest of the clerks,
pronounced, in a clear, loud voice, amidst the deathlike stillness of the
court:

“Yes, guilty!”

And the same answer was repeated to every question: “Yes, guilty!” and
without the slightest extenuating comment. This no one had expected;
almost every one had reckoned upon a recommendation to mercy, at least.
The deathlike silence in the court was not broken—all seemed petrified:
those who desired his conviction as well as those who had been eager for
his acquittal. But that was only for the first instant, and it was
followed by a fearful hubbub. Many of the men in the audience were
pleased. Some were rubbing their hands with no attempt to conceal their
joy. Those who disagreed with the verdict seemed crushed, shrugged their
shoulders, whispered, but still seemed unable to realize this. But how
shall I describe the state the ladies were in? I thought they would create
a riot. At first they could scarcely believe their ears. Then suddenly the
whole court rang with exclamations: “What’s the meaning of it? What next?”
They leapt up from their places. They seemed to fancy that it might be at
once reconsidered and reversed. At that instant Mitya suddenly stood up
and cried in a heartrending voice, stretching his hands out before him:

“I swear by God and the dreadful Day of Judgment I am not guilty of my
father’s blood! Katya, I forgive you! Brothers, friends, have pity on the
other woman!”

He could not go on, and broke into a terrible sobbing wail that was heard
all over the court in a strange, unnatural voice unlike his own. From the
farthest corner at the back of the gallery came a piercing shriek—it was
Grushenka. She had succeeded in begging admittance to the court again
before the beginning of the lawyers’ speeches. Mitya was taken away. The
passing of the sentence was deferred till next day. The whole court was in
a hubbub but I did not wait to hear. I only remember a few exclamations I
heard on the steps as I went out.

“He’ll have a twenty years’ trip to the mines!”

“Not less.”

“Well, our peasants have stood firm.”

“And have done for our Mitya.”





EPILOGUE




Chapter I. Plans For Mitya’s Escape


Very early, at nine o’clock in the morning, five days after the trial,
Alyosha went to Katerina Ivanovna’s to talk over a matter of great
importance to both of them, and to give her a message. She sat and talked
to him in the very room in which she had once received Grushenka. In the
next room Ivan Fyodorovitch lay unconscious in a high fever. Katerina
Ivanovna had immediately after the scene at the trial ordered the sick and
unconscious man to be carried to her house, disregarding the inevitable
gossip and general disapproval of the public. One of the two relations who
lived with her had departed to Moscow immediately after the scene in
court, the other remained. But if both had gone away, Katerina Ivanovna
would have adhered to her resolution, and would have gone on nursing the
sick man and sitting by him day and night. Varvinsky and Herzenstube were
attending him. The famous doctor had gone back to Moscow, refusing to give
an opinion as to the probable end of the illness. Though the doctors
encouraged Katerina Ivanovna and Alyosha, it was evident that they could
not yet give them positive hopes of recovery.

Alyosha came to see his sick brother twice a day. But this time he had
specially urgent business, and he foresaw how difficult it would be to
approach the subject, yet he was in great haste. He had another engagement
that could not be put off for that same morning, and there was need of
haste.

They had been talking for a quarter of an hour. Katerina Ivanovna was pale
and terribly fatigued, yet at the same time in a state of hysterical
excitement. She had a presentiment of the reason why Alyosha had come to
her.

“Don’t worry about his decision,” she said, with confident emphasis to
Alyosha. “One way or another he is bound to come to it. He must escape.
That unhappy man, that hero of honor and principle—not he, not Dmitri
Fyodorovitch, but the man lying the other side of that door, who has
sacrificed himself for his brother,” Katya added, with flashing eyes—“told
me the whole plan of escape long ago. You know he has already entered into
negotiations.... I’ve told you something already.... You see, it will
probably come off at the third _étape_ from here, when the party of
prisoners is being taken to Siberia. Oh, it’s a long way off yet. Ivan
Fyodorovitch has already visited the superintendent of the third _étape_.
But we don’t know yet who will be in charge of the party, and it’s
impossible to find that out so long beforehand. To-morrow perhaps I will
show you in detail the whole plan which Ivan Fyodorovitch left me on the
eve of the trial in case of need.... That was when—do you remember?—you
found us quarreling. He had just gone down-stairs, but seeing you I made
him come back; do you remember? Do you know what we were quarreling about
then?”

“No, I don’t,” said Alyosha.

“Of course he did not tell you. It was about that plan of escape. He had
told me the main idea three days before, and we began quarreling about it
at once and quarreled for three days. We quarreled because, when he told
me that if Dmitri Fyodorovitch were convicted he would escape abroad with
that creature, I felt furious at once—I can’t tell you why, I don’t know
myself why.... Oh, of course, I was furious then about that creature, and
that she, too, should go abroad with Dmitri!” Katerina Ivanovna exclaimed
suddenly, her lips quivering with anger. “As soon as Ivan Fyodorovitch saw
that I was furious about that woman, he instantly imagined I was jealous
of Dmitri and that I still loved Dmitri. That is how our first quarrel
began. I would not give an explanation, I could not ask forgiveness. I
could not bear to think that such a man could suspect me of still loving
that ... and when I myself had told him long before that I did not love
Dmitri, that I loved no one but him! It was only resentment against that
creature that made me angry with him. Three days later, on the evening you
came, he brought me a sealed envelope, which I was to open at once, if
anything happened to him. Oh, he foresaw his illness! He told me that the
envelope contained the details of the escape, and that if he died or was
taken dangerously ill, I was to save Mitya alone. Then he left me money,
nearly ten thousand—those notes to which the prosecutor referred in his
speech, having learnt from some one that he had sent them to be changed. I
was tremendously impressed to find that Ivan Fyodorovitch had not given up
his idea of saving his brother, and was confiding this plan of escape to
me, though he was still jealous of me and still convinced that I loved
Mitya. Oh, that was a sacrifice! No, you cannot understand the greatness
of such self-sacrifice, Alexey Fyodorovitch. I wanted to fall at his feet
in reverence, but I thought at once that he would take it only for my joy
at the thought of Mitya’s being saved (and he certainly would have
imagined that!), and I was so exasperated at the mere possibility of such
an unjust thought on his part that I lost my temper again, and instead of
kissing his feet, flew into a fury again! Oh, I am unhappy! It’s my
character, my awful, unhappy character! Oh, you will see, I shall end by
driving him, too, to abandon me for another with whom he can get on
better, like Dmitri. But ... no, I could not bear it, I should kill
myself. And when you came in then, and when I called to you and told him
to come back, I was so enraged by the look of contempt and hatred he
turned on me that—do you remember?—I cried out to you that it was he, he
alone who had persuaded me that his brother Dmitri was a murderer! I said
that malicious thing on purpose to wound him again. He had never, never
persuaded me that his brother was a murderer. On the contrary, it was I
who persuaded him! Oh, my vile temper was the cause of everything! I paved
the way to that hideous scene at the trial. He wanted to show me that he
was an honorable man, and that, even if I loved his brother, he would not
ruin him for revenge or jealousy. So he came to the court ... I am the
cause of it all, I alone am to blame!”

Katya never had made such confessions to Alyosha before, and he felt that
she was now at that stage of unbearable suffering when even the proudest
heart painfully crushes its pride and falls vanquished by grief. Oh,
Alyosha knew another terrible reason of her present misery, though she had
carefully concealed it from him during those days since the trial; but it
would have been for some reason too painful to him if she had been brought
so low as to speak to him now about that. She was suffering for her
“treachery” at the trial, and Alyosha felt that her conscience was
impelling her to confess it to him, to him, Alyosha, with tears and cries
and hysterical writhings on the floor. But he dreaded that moment and
longed to spare her. It made the commission on which he had come even more
difficult. He spoke of Mitya again.

“It’s all right, it’s all right, don’t be anxious about him!” she began
again, sharply and stubbornly. “All that is only momentary, I know him, I
know his heart only too well. You may be sure he will consent to escape.
It’s not as though it would be immediately; he will have time to make up
his mind to it. Ivan Fyodorovitch will be well by that time and will
manage it all himself, so that I shall have nothing to do with it. Don’t
be anxious; he will consent to run away. He has agreed already: do you
suppose he would give up that creature? And they won’t let her go to him,
so he is bound to escape. It’s you he’s most afraid of, he is afraid you
won’t approve of his escape on moral grounds. But you must generously
_allow_ it, if your sanction is so necessary,” Katya added viciously. She
paused and smiled.

“He talks about some hymn,” she went on again, “some cross he has to bear,
some duty; I remember Ivan Fyodorovitch told me a great deal about it, and
if you knew how he talked!” Katya cried suddenly, with feeling she could
not repress, “if you knew how he loved that wretched man at the moment he
told me, and how he hated him, perhaps, at the same moment. And I heard
his story and his tears with sneering disdain. Brute! Yes, I am a brute. I
am responsible for his fever. But that man in prison is incapable of
suffering,” Katya concluded irritably. “Can such a man suffer? Men like
him never suffer!”

There was a note of hatred and contemptuous repulsion in her words. And
yet it was she who had betrayed him. “Perhaps because she feels how she’s
wronged him she hates him at moments,” Alyosha thought to himself. He
hoped that it was only “at moments.” In Katya’s last words he detected a
challenging note, but he did not take it up.

“I sent for you this morning to make you promise to persuade him yourself.
Or do you, too, consider that to escape would be dishonorable, cowardly,
or something ... unchristian, perhaps?” Katya added, even more defiantly.

“Oh, no. I’ll tell him everything,” muttered Alyosha. “He asks you to come
and see him to-day,” he blurted out suddenly, looking her steadily in the
face. She started, and drew back a little from him on the sofa.

“Me? Can that be?” she faltered, turning pale.

“It can and ought to be!” Alyosha began emphatically, growing more
animated. “He needs you particularly just now. I would not have opened the
subject and worried you, if it were not necessary. He is ill, he is beside
himself, he keeps asking for you. It is not to be reconciled with you that
he wants you, but only that you would go and show yourself at his door. So
much has happened to him since that day. He realizes that he has injured
you beyond all reckoning. He does not ask your forgiveness—‘It’s
impossible to forgive me,’ he says himself—but only that you would show
yourself in his doorway.”

“It’s so sudden....” faltered Katya. “I’ve had a presentiment all these
days that you would come with that message. I knew he would ask me to
come. It’s impossible!”

“Let it be impossible, but do it. Only think, he realizes for the first
time how he has wounded you, the first time in his life; he had never
grasped it before so fully. He said, ‘If she refuses to come I shall be
unhappy all my life.’ Do you hear? though he is condemned to penal
servitude for twenty years, he is still planning to be happy—is not that
piteous? Think—you must visit him; though he is ruined, he is innocent,”
broke like a challenge from Alyosha. “His hands are clean, there is no
blood on them! For the sake of his infinite sufferings in the future visit
him now. Go, greet him on his way into the darkness—stand at his door,
that is all.... You ought to do it, you ought to!” Alyosha concluded,
laying immense stress on the word “ought.”

“I ought to ... but I cannot....” Katya moaned. “He will look at me.... I
can’t.”

“Your eyes ought to meet. How will you live all your life, if you don’t
make up your mind to do it now?”

“Better suffer all my life.”

“You ought to go, you ought to go,” Alyosha repeated with merciless
emphasis.

“But why to-day, why at once?... I can’t leave our patient—”

“You can for a moment. It will only be a moment. If you don’t come, he
will be in delirium by to-night. I would not tell you a lie; have pity on
him!”

“Have pity on _me!_” Katya said, with bitter reproach, and she burst into
tears.

“Then you will come,” said Alyosha firmly, seeing her tears. “I’ll go and
tell him you will come directly.”

“No, don’t tell him so on any account,” cried Katya in alarm. “I will
come, but don’t tell him beforehand, for perhaps I may go, but not go
in.... I don’t know yet—”

Her voice failed her. She gasped for breath. Alyosha got up to go.

“And what if I meet any one?” she said suddenly, in a low voice, turning
white again.

“That’s just why you must go now, to avoid meeting any one. There will be
no one there, I can tell you that for certain. We will expect you,” he
concluded emphatically, and went out of the room.




Chapter II. For A Moment The Lie Becomes Truth


He hurried to the hospital where Mitya was lying now. The day after his
fate was determined, Mitya had fallen ill with nervous fever, and was sent
to the prison division of the town hospital. But at the request of several
persons (Alyosha, Madame Hohlakov, Lise, etc.), Doctor Varvinsky had put
Mitya not with other prisoners, but in a separate little room, the one
where Smerdyakov had been. It is true that there was a sentinel at the
other end of the corridor, and there was a grating over the window, so
that Varvinsky could be at ease about the indulgence he had shown, which
was not quite legal, indeed; but he was a kind-hearted and compassionate
young man. He knew how hard it would be for a man like Mitya to pass at
once so suddenly into the society of robbers and murderers, and that he
must get used to it by degrees. The visits of relations and friends were
informally sanctioned by the doctor and overseer, and even by the police
captain. But only Alyosha and Grushenka had visited Mitya. Rakitin had
tried to force his way in twice, but Mitya persistently begged Varvinsky
not to admit him.

Alyosha found him sitting on his bed in a hospital dressing-gown, rather
feverish, with a towel, soaked in vinegar and water, on his head. He
looked at Alyosha as he came in with an undefined expression, but there
was a shade of something like dread discernible in it. He had become
terribly preoccupied since the trial; sometimes he would be silent for
half an hour together, and seemed to be pondering something heavily and
painfully, oblivious of everything about him. If he roused himself from
his brooding and began to talk, he always spoke with a kind of abruptness
and never of what he really wanted to say. He looked sometimes with a face
of suffering at his brother. He seemed to be more at ease with Grushenka
than with Alyosha. It is true, he scarcely spoke to her at all, but as
soon as she came in, his whole face lighted up with joy.

Alyosha sat down beside him on the bed in silence. This time Mitya was
waiting for Alyosha in suspense, but he did not dare ask him a question.
He felt it almost unthinkable that Katya would consent to come, and at the
same time he felt that if she did not come, something inconceivable would
happen. Alyosha understood his feelings.

“Trifon Borissovitch,” Mitya began nervously, “has pulled his whole inn to
pieces, I am told. He’s taken up the flooring, pulled apart the planks,
split up all the gallery, I am told. He is seeking treasure all the
time—the fifteen hundred roubles which the prosecutor said I’d hidden
there. He began playing these tricks, they say, as soon as he got home.
Serve him right, the swindler! The guard here told me yesterday; he comes
from there.”

“Listen,” began Alyosha. “She will come, but I don’t know when. Perhaps
to-day, perhaps in a few days, that I can’t tell. But she will come, she
will, that’s certain.”

Mitya started, would have said something, but was silent. The news had a
tremendous effect on him. It was evident that he would have liked terribly
to know what had been said, but he was again afraid to ask. Something
cruel and contemptuous from Katya would have cut him like a knife at that
moment.

“This was what she said among other things; that I must be sure to set
your conscience at rest about escaping. If Ivan is not well by then she
will see to it all herself.”

“You’ve spoken of that already,” Mitya observed musingly.

“And you have repeated it to Grusha,” observed Alyosha.

“Yes,” Mitya admitted. “She won’t come this morning.” He looked timidly at
his brother. “She won’t come till the evening. When I told her yesterday
that Katya was taking measures, she was silent, but she set her mouth. She
only whispered, ‘Let her!’ She understood that it was important. I did not
dare to try her further. She understands now, I think, that Katya no
longer cares for me, but loves Ivan.”

“Does she?” broke from Alyosha.

“Perhaps she does not. Only she is not coming this morning,” Mitya
hastened to explain again; “I asked her to do something for me. You know,
Ivan is superior to all of us. He ought to live, not us. He will recover.”

“Would you believe it, though Katya is alarmed about him, she scarcely
doubts of his recovery,” said Alyosha.

“That means that she is convinced he will die. It’s because she is
frightened she’s so sure he will get well.”

“Ivan has a strong constitution, and I, too, believe there’s every hope
that he will get well,” Alyosha observed anxiously.

“Yes, he will get well. But she is convinced that he will die. She has a
great deal of sorrow to bear...” A silence followed. A grave anxiety was
fretting Mitya.

“Alyosha, I love Grusha terribly,” he said suddenly in a shaking voice,
full of tears.

“They won’t let her go out there to you,” Alyosha put in at once.

“And there is something else I wanted to tell you,” Mitya went on, with a
sudden ring in his voice. “If they beat me on the way or out there, I
won’t submit to it. I shall kill some one, and shall be shot for it. And
this will be going on for twenty years! They speak to me rudely as it is.
I’ve been lying here all night, passing judgment on myself. I am not
ready! I am not able to resign myself. I wanted to sing a ‘hymn’; but if a
guard speaks rudely to me, I have not the strength to bear it. For Grusha
I would bear anything ... anything except blows.... But she won’t be
allowed to come there.”

Alyosha smiled gently.

“Listen, brother, once for all,” he said. “This is what I think about it.
And you know that I would not tell you a lie. Listen: you are not ready,
and such a cross is not for you. What’s more, you don’t need such a
martyr’s cross when you are not ready for it. If you had murdered our
father, it would grieve me that you should reject your punishment. But you
are innocent, and such a cross is too much for you. You wanted to make
yourself another man by suffering. I say, only remember that other man
always, all your life and wherever you go; and that will be enough for
you. Your refusal of that great cross will only serve to make you feel all
your life an even greater duty, and that constant feeling will do more to
make you a new man, perhaps, than if you went there. For there you would
not endure it and would repine, and perhaps at last would say: ‘I am
quits.’ The lawyer was right about that. Such heavy burdens are not for
all men. For some they are impossible. These are my thoughts about it, if
you want them so much. If other men would have to answer for your escape,
officers or soldiers, then I would not have ‘allowed’ you,” smiled
Alyosha. “But they declare—the superintendent of that _étape_ told Ivan
himself—that if it’s well managed there will be no great inquiry, and that
they can get off easily. Of course, bribing is dishonest even in such a
case, but I can’t undertake to judge about it, because if Ivan and Katya
commissioned me to act for you, I know I should go and give bribes. I must
tell you the truth. And so I can’t judge of your own action. But let me
assure you that I shall never condemn you. And it would be a strange thing
if I could judge you in this. Now I think I’ve gone into everything.”

“But I do condemn myself!” cried Mitya. “I shall escape, that was settled
apart from you; could Mitya Karamazov do anything but run away? But I
shall condemn myself, and I will pray for my sin for ever. That’s how the
Jesuits talk, isn’t it? Just as we are doing?”

“Yes.” Alyosha smiled gently.

“I love you for always telling the whole truth and never hiding anything,”
cried Mitya, with a joyful laugh. “So I’ve caught my Alyosha being
Jesuitical. I must kiss you for that. Now listen to the rest; I’ll open
the other side of my heart to you. This is what I planned and decided. If
I run away, even with money and a passport, and even to America, I should
be cheered up by the thought that I am not running away for pleasure, not
for happiness, but to another exile as bad, perhaps, as Siberia. It is as
bad, Alyosha, it is! I hate that America, damn it, already. Even though
Grusha will be with me. Just look at her; is she an American? She is
Russian, Russian to the marrow of her bones; she will be homesick for the
mother country, and I shall see every hour that she is suffering for my
sake, that she has taken up that cross for me. And what harm has she done?
And how shall I, too, put up with the rabble out there, though they may be
better than I, every one of them? I hate that America already! And though
they may be wonderful at machinery, every one of them, damn them, they are
not of my soul. I love Russia, Alyosha, I love the Russian God, though I
am a scoundrel myself. I shall choke there!” he exclaimed, his eyes
suddenly flashing. His voice was trembling with tears. “So this is what
I’ve decided, Alyosha, listen,” he began again, mastering his emotion. “As
soon as I arrive there with Grusha, we will set to work at once on the
land, in solitude, somewhere very remote, with wild bears. There must be
some remote parts even there. I am told there are still Redskins there,
somewhere, on the edge of the horizon. So to the country of the _Last of
the Mohicans_, and there we’ll tackle the grammar at once, Grusha and I.
Work and grammar—that’s how we’ll spend three years. And by that time we
shall speak English like any Englishman. And as soon as we’ve learnt
it—good-by to America! We’ll run here to Russia as American citizens.
Don’t be uneasy—we would not come to this little town. We’d hide
somewhere, a long way off, in the north or in the south. I shall be
changed by that time, and she will, too, in America. The doctors shall
make me some sort of wart on my face—what’s the use of their being so
mechanical!—or else I’ll put out one eye, let my beard grow a yard, and I
shall turn gray, fretting for Russia. I dare say they won’t recognize us.
And if they do, let them send us to Siberia. I don’t care. It will show
it’s our fate. We’ll work on the land here, too, somewhere in the wilds,
and I’ll make up as an American all my life. But we shall die on our own
soil. That’s my plan, and it shan’t be altered. Do you approve?”

“Yes,” said Alyosha, not wanting to contradict him. Mitya paused for a
minute and said suddenly:

“And how they worked it up at the trial! Didn’t they work it up!”

“If they had not, you would have been convicted just the same,” said
Alyosha, with a sigh.

“Yes, people are sick of me here! God bless them, but it’s hard,” Mitya
moaned miserably. Again there was silence for a minute.

“Alyosha, put me out of my misery at once!” he exclaimed suddenly. “Tell
me, is she coming now, or not? Tell me? What did she say? How did she say
it?”

“She said she would come, but I don’t know whether she will come to-day.
It’s hard for her, you know,” Alyosha looked timidly at his brother.

“I should think it is hard for her! Alyosha, it will drive me out of my
mind. Grusha keeps looking at me. She understands. My God, calm my heart:
what is it I want? I want Katya! Do I understand what I want? It’s the
headstrong, evil Karamazov spirit! No, I am not fit for suffering. I am a
scoundrel, that’s all one can say.”

“Here she is!” cried Alyosha.

At that instant Katya appeared in the doorway. For a moment she stood
still, gazing at Mitya with a dazed expression. He leapt impulsively to
his feet, and a scared look came into his face. He turned pale, but a
timid, pleading smile appeared on his lips at once, and with an
irresistible impulse he held out both hands to Katya. Seeing it, she flew
impetuously to him. She seized him by the hands, and almost by force made
him sit down on the bed. She sat down beside him, and still keeping his
hands pressed them violently. Several times they both strove to speak, but
stopped short and again gazed speechless with a strange smile, their eyes
fastened on one another. So passed two minutes.

“Have you forgiven me?” Mitya faltered at last, and at the same moment
turning to Alyosha, his face working with joy, he cried, “Do you hear what
I am asking, do you hear?”

“That’s what I loved you for, that you are generous at heart!” broke from
Katya. “My forgiveness is no good to you, nor yours to me; whether you
forgive me or not, you will always be a sore place in my heart, and I in
yours—so it must be....” She stopped to take breath. “What have I come
for?” she began again with nervous haste: “to embrace your feet, to press
your hands like this, till it hurts—you remember how in Moscow I used to
squeeze them—to tell you again that you are my god, my joy, to tell you
that I love you madly,” she moaned in anguish, and suddenly pressed his
hand greedily to her lips. Tears streamed from her eyes. Alyosha stood
speechless and confounded; he had never expected what he was seeing.

“Love is over, Mitya!” Katya began again, “but the past is painfully dear
to me. Know that you will always be so. But now let what might have been
come true for one minute,” she faltered, with a drawn smile, looking into
his face joyfully again. “You love another woman, and I love another man,
and yet I shall love you for ever, and you will love me; do you know that?
Do you hear? Love me, love me all your life!” she cried, with a quiver
almost of menace in her voice.

“I shall love you, and ... do you know, Katya,” Mitya began, drawing a
deep breath at each word, “do you know, five days ago, that same evening,
I loved you.... When you fell down and were carried out ... All my life!
So it will be, so it will always be—”

So they murmured to one another frantic words, almost meaningless, perhaps
not even true, but at that moment it was all true, and they both believed
what they said implicitly.

“Katya,” cried Mitya suddenly, “do you believe I murdered him? I know you
don’t believe it now, but then ... when you gave evidence.... Surely,
surely you did not believe it!”

“I did not believe it even then. I’ve never believed it. I hated you, and
for a moment I persuaded myself. While I was giving evidence I persuaded
myself and believed it, but when I’d finished speaking I left off
believing it at once. Don’t doubt that! I have forgotten that I came here
to punish myself,” she said, with a new expression in her voice, quite
unlike the loving tones of a moment before.

“Woman, yours is a heavy burden,” broke, as it were, involuntarily from
Mitya.

“Let me go,” she whispered. “I’ll come again. It’s more than I can bear
now.”

She was getting up from her place, but suddenly uttered a loud scream and
staggered back. Grushenka walked suddenly and noiselessly into the room.
No one had expected her. Katya moved swiftly to the door, but when she
reached Grushenka, she stopped suddenly, turned as white as chalk and
moaned softly, almost in a whisper:

“Forgive me!”

Grushenka stared at her and, pausing for an instant, in a vindictive,
venomous voice, answered:

“We are full of hatred, my girl, you and I! We are both full of hatred! As
though we could forgive one another! Save him, and I’ll worship you all my
life.”

“You won’t forgive her!” cried Mitya, with frantic reproach.

“Don’t be anxious, I’ll save him for you!” Katya whispered rapidly, and
she ran out of the room.

“And you could refuse to forgive her when she begged your forgiveness
herself?” Mitya exclaimed bitterly again.

“Mitya, don’t dare to blame her; you have no right to!” Alyosha cried
hotly.

“Her proud lips spoke, not her heart,” Grushenka brought out in a tone of
disgust. “If she saves you I’ll forgive her everything—”

She stopped speaking, as though suppressing something. She could not yet
recover herself. She had come in, as appeared afterwards, accidentally,
with no suspicion of what she would meet.

“Alyosha, run after her!” Mitya cried to his brother; “tell her ... I
don’t know ... don’t let her go away like this!”

“I’ll come to you again at nightfall,” said Alyosha, and he ran after
Katya. He overtook her outside the hospital grounds. She was walking fast,
but as soon as Alyosha caught her up she said quickly:

“No, before that woman I can’t punish myself! I asked her forgiveness
because I wanted to punish myself to the bitter end. She would not forgive
me.... I like her for that!” she added, in an unnatural voice, and her
eyes flashed with fierce resentment.

“My brother did not expect this in the least,” muttered Alyosha. “He was
sure she would not come—”

“No doubt. Let us leave that,” she snapped. “Listen: I can’t go with you
to the funeral now. I’ve sent them flowers. I think they still have money.
If necessary, tell them I’ll never abandon them.... Now leave me, leave
me, please. You are late as it is—the bells are ringing for the
service.... Leave me, please!”




Chapter III. Ilusha’s Funeral. The Speech At The Stone


He really was late. They had waited for him and had already decided to
bear the pretty flower-decked little coffin to the church without him. It
was the coffin of poor little Ilusha. He had died two days after Mitya was
sentenced. At the gate of the house Alyosha was met by the shouts of the
boys, Ilusha’s schoolfellows. They had all been impatiently expecting him
and were glad that he had come at last. There were about twelve of them,
they all had their school-bags or satchels on their shoulders. “Father
will cry, be with father,” Ilusha had told them as he lay dying, and the
boys remembered it. Kolya Krassotkin was the foremost of them.

“How glad I am you’ve come, Karamazov!” he cried, holding out his hand to
Alyosha. “It’s awful here. It’s really horrible to see it. Snegiryov is
not drunk, we know for a fact he’s had nothing to drink to-day, but he
seems as if he were drunk ... I am always manly, but this is awful.
Karamazov, if I am not keeping you, one question before you go in?”

“What is it, Kolya?” said Alyosha.

“Is your brother innocent or guilty? Was it he killed your father or was
it the valet? As you say, so it will be. I haven’t slept for the last four
nights for thinking of it.”

“The valet killed him, my brother is innocent,” answered Alyosha.

“That’s what I said,” cried Smurov.

“So he will perish an innocent victim!” exclaimed Kolya; “though he is
ruined he is happy! I could envy him!”

“What do you mean? How can you? Why?” cried Alyosha surprised.

“Oh, if I, too, could sacrifice myself some day for truth!” said Kolya
with enthusiasm.

“But not in such a cause, not with such disgrace and such horror!” said
Alyosha.

“Of course ... I should like to die for all humanity, and as for disgrace,
I don’t care about that—our names may perish. I respect your brother!”

“And so do I!” the boy, who had once declared that he knew who had founded
Troy, cried suddenly and unexpectedly, and he blushed up to his ears like
a peony as he had done on that occasion.

Alyosha went into the room. Ilusha lay with his hands folded and his eyes
closed in a blue coffin with a white frill round it. His thin face was
hardly changed at all, and strange to say there was no smell of decay from
the corpse. The expression of his face was serious and, as it were,
thoughtful. His hands, crossed over his breast, looked particularly
beautiful, as though chiseled in marble. There were flowers in his hands
and the coffin, inside and out, was decked with flowers, which had been
sent early in the morning by Lise Hohlakov. But there were flowers too
from Katerina Ivanovna, and when Alyosha opened the door, the captain had
a bunch in his trembling hands and was strewing them again over his dear
boy. He scarcely glanced at Alyosha when he came in, and he would not look
at any one, even at his crazy weeping wife, “mamma,” who kept trying to
stand on her crippled legs to get a nearer look at her dead boy. Nina had
been pushed in her chair by the boys close up to the coffin. She sat with
her head pressed to it and she too was no doubt quietly weeping.
Snegiryov’s face looked eager, yet bewildered and exasperated. There was
something crazy about his gestures and the words that broke from him. “Old
man, dear old man!” he exclaimed every minute, gazing at Ilusha. It was
his habit to call Ilusha “old man,” as a term of affection when he was
alive.

“Father, give me a flower, too; take that white one out of his hand and
give it me,” the crazy mother begged, whimpering. Either because the
little white rose in Ilusha’s hand had caught her fancy or that she wanted
one from his hand to keep in memory of him, she moved restlessly,
stretching out her hands for the flower.

“I won’t give it to any one, I won’t give you anything,” Snegiryov cried
callously. “They are his flowers, not yours! Everything is his, nothing is
yours!”

“Father, give mother a flower!” said Nina, lifting her face wet with
tears.

“I won’t give away anything and to her less than any one! She didn’t love
Ilusha. She took away his little cannon and he gave it to her,” the
captain broke into loud sobs at the thought of how Ilusha had given up his
cannon to his mother. The poor, crazy creature was bathed in noiseless
tears, hiding her face in her hands.

The boys, seeing that the father would not leave the coffin and that it
was time to carry it out, stood round it in a close circle and began to
lift it up.

“I don’t want him to be buried in the churchyard,” Snegiryov wailed
suddenly; “I’ll bury him by the stone, by our stone! Ilusha told me to. I
won’t let him be carried out!”

He had been saying for the last three days that he would bury him by the
stone, but Alyosha, Krassotkin, the landlady, her sister and all the boys
interfered.

“What an idea, bury him by an unholy stone, as though he had hanged
himself!” the old landlady said sternly. “There in the churchyard the
ground has been crossed. He’ll be prayed for there. One can hear the
singing in church and the deacon reads so plainly and verbally that it
will reach him every time just as though it were read over his grave.”

At last the captain made a gesture of despair as though to say, “Take him
where you will.” The boys raised the coffin, but as they passed the
mother, they stopped for a moment and lowered it that she might say
good-by to Ilusha. But on seeing that precious little face, which for the
last three days she had only looked at from a distance, she trembled all
over and her gray head began twitching spasmodically over the coffin.

“Mother, make the sign of the cross over him, give him your blessing, kiss
him,” Nina cried to her. But her head still twitched like an automaton and
with a face contorted with bitter grief she began, without a word, beating
her breast with her fist. They carried the coffin past her. Nina pressed
her lips to her brother’s for the last time as they bore the coffin by
her. As Alyosha went out of the house he begged the landlady to look after
those who were left behind, but she interrupted him before he had
finished.

“To be sure, I’ll stay with them, we are Christians, too.” The old woman
wept as she said it.

They had not far to carry the coffin to the church, not more than three
hundred paces. It was a still, clear day, with a slight frost. The church
bells were still ringing. Snegiryov ran fussing and distracted after the
coffin, in his short old summer overcoat, with his head bare and his soft,
old, wide-brimmed hat in his hand. He seemed in a state of bewildered
anxiety. At one minute he stretched out his hand to support the head of
the coffin and only hindered the bearers, at another he ran alongside and
tried to find a place for himself there. A flower fell on the snow and he
rushed to pick it up as though everything in the world depended on the
loss of that flower.

“And the crust of bread, we’ve forgotten the crust!” he cried suddenly in
dismay. But the boys reminded him at once that he had taken the crust of
bread already and that it was in his pocket. He instantly pulled it out
and was reassured.

“Ilusha told me to, Ilusha,” he explained at once to Alyosha. “I was
sitting by him one night and he suddenly told me: ‘Father, when my grave
is filled up crumble a piece of bread on it so that the sparrows may fly
down, I shall hear and it will cheer me up not to be lying alone.’ ”

“That’s a good thing,” said Alyosha, “we must often take some.”

“Every day, every day!” said the captain quickly, seeming cheered at the
thought.

They reached the church at last and set the coffin in the middle of it.
The boys surrounded it and remained reverently standing so, all through
the service. It was an old and rather poor church; many of the ikons were
without settings; but such churches are the best for praying in. During
the mass Snegiryov became somewhat calmer, though at times he had
outbursts of the same unconscious and, as it were, incoherent anxiety. At
one moment he went up to the coffin to set straight the cover or the
wreath, when a candle fell out of the candlestick he rushed to replace it
and was a fearful time fumbling over it, then he subsided and stood
quietly by the coffin with a look of blank uneasiness and perplexity.
After the Epistle he suddenly whispered to Alyosha, who was standing
beside him, that the Epistle had not been read properly but did not
explain what he meant. During the prayer, “Like the Cherubim,” he joined
in the singing but did not go on to the end. Falling on his knees, he
pressed his forehead to the stone floor and lay so for a long while.

At last came the funeral service itself and candles were distributed. The
distracted father began fussing about again, but the touching and
impressive funeral prayers moved and roused his soul. He seemed suddenly
to shrink together and broke into rapid, short sobs, which he tried at
first to smother, but at last he sobbed aloud. When they began taking
leave of the dead and closing the coffin, he flung his arms about, as
though he would not allow them to cover Ilusha, and began greedily and
persistently kissing his dead boy on the lips. At last they succeeded in
persuading him to come away from the step, but suddenly he impulsively
stretched out his hand and snatched a few flowers from the coffin. He
looked at them and a new idea seemed to dawn upon him, so that he
apparently forgot his grief for a minute. Gradually he seemed to sink into
brooding and did not resist when the coffin was lifted up and carried to
the grave. It was an expensive one in the churchyard close to the church,
Katerina Ivanovna had paid for it. After the customary rites the
grave-diggers lowered the coffin. Snegiryov with his flowers in his hands
bent down so low over the open grave that the boys caught hold of his coat
in alarm and pulled him back. He did not seem to understand fully what was
happening. When they began filling up the grave, he suddenly pointed
anxiously at the falling earth and began trying to say something, but no
one could make out what he meant, and he stopped suddenly. Then he was
reminded that he must crumble the bread and he was awfully excited,
snatched up the bread and began pulling it to pieces and flinging the
morsels on the grave.

“Come, fly down, birds, fly down, sparrows!” he muttered anxiously.

One of the boys observed that it was awkward for him to crumble the bread
with the flowers in his hands and suggested he should give them to some
one to hold for a time. But he would not do this and seemed indeed
suddenly alarmed for his flowers, as though they wanted to take them from
him altogether. And after looking at the grave, and as it were, satisfying
himself that everything had been done and the bread had been crumbled, he
suddenly, to the surprise of every one, turned, quite composedly even, and
made his way homewards. But his steps became more and more hurried, he
almost ran. The boys and Alyosha kept up with him.

“The flowers are for mamma, the flowers are for mamma! I was unkind to
mamma,” he began exclaiming suddenly.

Some one called to him to put on his hat as it was cold. But he flung the
hat in the snow as though he were angry and kept repeating, “I won’t have
the hat, I won’t have the hat.” Smurov picked it up and carried it after
him. All the boys were crying, and Kolya and the boy who discovered about
Troy most of all. Though Smurov, with the captain’s hat in his hand, was
crying bitterly too, he managed, as he ran, to snatch up a piece of red
brick that lay on the snow of the path, to fling it at the flock of
sparrows that was flying by. He missed them, of course, and went on crying
as he ran. Half-way, Snegiryov suddenly stopped, stood still for half a
minute, as though struck by something, and suddenly turning back to the
church, ran towards the deserted grave. But the boys instantly overtook
him and caught hold of him on all sides. Then he fell helpless on the snow
as though he had been knocked down, and struggling, sobbing, and wailing,
he began crying out, “Ilusha, old man, dear old man!” Alyosha and Kolya
tried to make him get up, soothing and persuading him.

“Captain, give over, a brave man must show fortitude,” muttered Kolya.

“You’ll spoil the flowers,” said Alyosha, “and mamma is expecting them,
she is sitting crying because you would not give her any before. Ilusha’s
little bed is still there—”

“Yes, yes, mamma!” Snegiryov suddenly recollected, “they’ll take away the
bed, they’ll take it away,” he added as though alarmed that they really
would. He jumped up and ran homewards again. But it was not far off and
they all arrived together. Snegiryov opened the door hurriedly and called
to his wife with whom he had so cruelly quarreled just before:

“Mamma, poor crippled darling, Ilusha has sent you these flowers,” he
cried, holding out to her a little bunch of flowers that had been frozen
and broken while he was struggling in the snow. But at that instant he saw
in the corner, by the little bed, Ilusha’s little boots, which the
landlady had put tidily side by side. Seeing the old, patched,
rusty-looking, stiff boots he flung up his hands and rushed to them, fell
on his knees, snatched up one boot and, pressing his lips to it, began
kissing it greedily, crying, “Ilusha, old man, dear old man, where are
your little feet?”

“Where have you taken him away? Where have you taken him?” the lunatic
cried in a heartrending voice. Nina, too, broke into sobs. Kolya ran out
of the room, the boys followed him. At last Alyosha too went out.

“Let them weep,” he said to Kolya, “it’s no use trying to comfort them
just now. Let us wait a minute and then go back.”

“No, it’s no use, it’s awful,” Kolya assented. “Do you know, Karamazov,”
he dropped his voice so that no one could hear them, “I feel dreadfully
sad, and if it were only possible to bring him back, I’d give anything in
the world to do it.”

“Ah, so would I,” said Alyosha.

“What do you think, Karamazov? Had we better come back here to-night?
He’ll be drunk, you know.”

“Perhaps he will. Let us come together, you and I, that will be enough, to
spend an hour with them, with the mother and Nina. If we all come together
we shall remind them of everything again,” Alyosha suggested.

“The landlady is laying the table for them now—there’ll be a funeral
dinner or something, the priest is coming; shall we go back to it,
Karamazov?”

“Of course,” said Alyosha.

“It’s all so strange, Karamazov, such sorrow and then pancakes after it,
it all seems so unnatural in our religion.”

“They are going to have salmon, too,” the boy who had discovered about
Troy observed in a loud voice.

“I beg you most earnestly, Kartashov, not to interrupt again with your
idiotic remarks, especially when one is not talking to you and doesn’t
care to know whether you exist or not!” Kolya snapped out irritably. The
boy flushed crimson but did not dare to reply.

Meantime they were strolling slowly along the path and suddenly Smurov
exclaimed:

“There’s Ilusha’s stone, under which they wanted to bury him.”

They all stood still by the big stone. Alyosha looked and the whole
picture of what Snegiryov had described to him that day, how Ilusha,
weeping and hugging his father, had cried, “Father, father, how he
insulted you,” rose at once before his imagination.

A sudden impulse seemed to come into his soul. With a serious and earnest
expression he looked from one to another of the bright, pleasant faces of
Ilusha’s schoolfellows, and suddenly said to them:

“Boys, I should like to say one word to you, here at this place.”

The boys stood round him and at once bent attentive and expectant eyes
upon him.

“Boys, we shall soon part. I shall be for some time with my two brothers,
of whom one is going to Siberia and the other is lying at death’s door.
But soon I shall leave this town, perhaps for a long time, so we shall
part. Let us make a compact here, at Ilusha’s stone, that we will never
forget Ilusha and one another. And whatever happens to us later in life,
if we don’t meet for twenty years afterwards, let us always remember how
we buried the poor boy at whom we once threw stones, do you remember, by
the bridge? and afterwards we all grew so fond of him. He was a fine boy,
a kind-hearted, brave boy, he felt for his father’s honor and resented the
cruel insult to him and stood up for him. And so in the first place, we
will remember him, boys, all our lives. And even if we are occupied with
most important things, if we attain to honor or fall into great
misfortune—still let us remember how good it was once here, when we were
all together, united by a good and kind feeling which made us, for the
time we were loving that poor boy, better perhaps than we are. My little
doves—let me call you so, for you are very like them, those pretty blue
birds, at this minute as I look at your good dear faces. My dear children,
perhaps you won’t understand what I am saying to you, because I often
speak very unintelligibly, but you’ll remember it all the same and will
agree with my words some time. You must know that there is nothing higher
and stronger and more wholesome and good for life in the future than some
good memory, especially a memory of childhood, of home. People talk to you
a great deal about your education, but some good, sacred memory, preserved
from childhood, is perhaps the best education. If a man carries many such
memories with him into life, he is safe to the end of his days, and if one
has only one good memory left in one’s heart, even that may sometime be
the means of saving us. Perhaps we may even grow wicked later on, may be
unable to refrain from a bad action, may laugh at men’s tears and at those
people who say as Kolya did just now, ‘I want to suffer for all men,’ and
may even jeer spitefully at such people. But however bad we may
become—which God forbid—yet, when we recall how we buried Ilusha, how we
loved him in his last days, and how we have been talking like friends all
together, at this stone, the cruelest and most mocking of us—if we do
become so—will not dare to laugh inwardly at having been kind and good at
this moment! What’s more, perhaps, that one memory may keep him from great
evil and he will reflect and say, ‘Yes, I was good and brave and honest
then!’ Let him laugh to himself, that’s no matter, a man often laughs at
what’s good and kind. That’s only from thoughtlessness. But I assure you,
boys, that as he laughs he will say at once in his heart, ‘No, I do wrong
to laugh, for that’s not a thing to laugh at.’ ”

“That will be so, I understand you, Karamazov!” cried Kolya, with flashing
eyes.

The boys were excited and they, too, wanted to say something, but they
restrained themselves, looking with intentness and emotion at the speaker.

“I say this in case we become bad,” Alyosha went on, “but there’s no
reason why we should become bad, is there, boys? Let us be, first and
above all, kind, then honest and then let us never forget each other! I
say that again. I give you my word for my part that I’ll never forget one
of you. Every face looking at me now I shall remember even for thirty
years. Just now Kolya said to Kartashov that we did not care to know
whether he exists or not. But I cannot forget that Kartashov exists and
that he is not blushing now as he did when he discovered the founders of
Troy, but is looking at me with his jolly, kind, dear little eyes. Boys,
my dear boys, let us all be generous and brave like Ilusha, clever, brave
and generous like Kolya (though he will be ever so much cleverer when he
is grown up), and let us all be as modest, as clever and sweet as
Kartashov. But why am I talking about those two? You are all dear to me,
boys, from this day forth, I have a place in my heart for you all, and I
beg you to keep a place in your hearts for me! Well, and who has united us
in this kind, good feeling which we shall remember and intend to remember
all our lives? Who, if not Ilusha, the good boy, the dear boy, precious to
us for ever! Let us never forget him. May his memory live for ever in our
hearts from this time forth!”

“Yes, yes, for ever, for ever!” the boys cried in their ringing voices,
with softened faces.

“Let us remember his face and his clothes and his poor little boots, his
coffin and his unhappy, sinful father, and how boldly he stood up for him
alone against the whole school.”

“We will remember, we will remember,” cried the boys. “He was brave, he
was good!”

“Ah, how I loved him!” exclaimed Kolya.

“Ah, children, ah, dear friends, don’t be afraid of life! How good life is
when one does something good and just!”

“Yes, yes,” the boys repeated enthusiastically.

“Karamazov, we love you!” a voice, probably Kartashov’s, cried
impulsively.

“We love you, we love you!” they all caught it up. There were tears in the
eyes of many of them.

“Hurrah for Karamazov!” Kolya shouted ecstatically.

“And may the dead boy’s memory live for ever!” Alyosha added again with
feeling.

“For ever!” the boys chimed in again.

“Karamazov,” cried Kolya, “can it be true what’s taught us in religion,
that we shall all rise again from the dead and shall live and see each
other again, all, Ilusha too?”

“Certainly we shall all rise again, certainly we shall see each other and
shall tell each other with joy and gladness all that has happened!”
Alyosha answered, half laughing, half enthusiastic.

“Ah, how splendid it will be!” broke from Kolya.

“Well, now we will finish talking and go to his funeral dinner. Don’t be
put out at our eating pancakes—it’s a very old custom and there’s
something nice in that!” laughed Alyosha. “Well, let us go! And now we go
hand in hand.”

“And always so, all our lives hand in hand! Hurrah for Karamazov!” Kolya
cried once more rapturously, and once more the boys took up his
exclamation: “Hurrah for Karamazov!”

THE END






FOOTNOTES


    1 In Russian, “silen.”

    2 A proverbial expression in Russia.

    3 Grushenka.

    4 i.e. setter dog.

    5 Probably the public event was the Decabrist plot against the Tsar,
      of December 1825, in which the most distinguished men in Russia were
      concerned.—TRANSLATOR’S NOTE.

    6 When a monk’s body is carried out from the cell to the church and
      from the church to the graveyard, the canticle “What earthly joy...”
      is sung. If the deceased was a priest as well as a monk the canticle
      “Our Helper and Defender” is sung instead.

    7 i.e. a chime of bells.

    8 Literally: “Did you get off with a long nose made at you?”—a
      proverbial expression in Russia for failure.

    9 Gogol is meant.





***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV***



CREDITS


February 12, 2009

            Project Gutenberg TEI edition 1
            Produced by David Edwards, David King, and the Online
            Distributed Proofreading Team at <http://www.pgdp.net/>. (This
            file was produced from images generously made available by The
            Internet Archive).



A WORD FROM PROJECT GUTENBERG


This file should be named 28054-0.txt or 28054-0.zip.

This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:


    http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/8/0/5/28054/


Updated editions will replace the previous one — the old editions will be
renamed.

Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no one
owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and
you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission
and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the
General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and
distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works to protect the Project
Gutenberg™ concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered
trademark, and may not be used if you charge for the eBooks, unless you
receive specific permission. If you do not charge anything for copies of
this eBook, complying with the rules is very easy. You may use this eBook
for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports,
performances and research. They may be modified and printed and given away
— you may do practically _anything_ with public domain eBooks.
Redistribution is subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
redistribution.



THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE


_Please read this before you distribute or use this work._

To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the free
distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work (or
any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project Gutenberg”),
you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project Gutenberg™
License (available with this file or online at
http://www.gutenberg.org/license).


Section 1.


General Terms of Use & Redistributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works


1.A.


By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg™ electronic work,
you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to and accept all the
terms of this license and intellectual property (trademark/copyright)
agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all the terms of this
agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy all copies of
Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in your possession. If you paid a fee
for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project Gutenberg™ electronic work
and you do not agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement, you may
obtain a refund from the person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set
forth in paragraph 1.E.8.


1.B.


“Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only be used on or
associated in any way with an electronic work by people who agree to be
bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few things that you can
do with most Project Gutenberg™ electronic works even without complying
with the full terms of this agreement. See paragraph 1.C below. There are
a lot of things you can do with Project Gutenberg™ electronic works if you
follow the terms of this agreement and help preserve free future access to
Project Gutenberg™ electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.


1.C.


The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the Foundation” or
PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works. Nearly all the individual works in the
collection are in the public domain in the United States. If an individual
work is in the public domain in the United States and you are located in
the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from copying,
distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative works based on
the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of
course, we hope that you will support the Project Gutenberg™ mission of
promoting free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project
Gutenberg™ works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for
keeping the Project Gutenberg™ name associated with the work. You can
easily comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the
same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg™ License when you
share it without charge with others.


1.D.


The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern what you
can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are in a constant
state of change. If you are outside the United States, check the laws of
your country in addition to the terms of this agreement before
downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or creating
derivative works based on this work or any other Project Gutenberg™ work.
The Foundation makes no representations concerning the copyright status of
any work in any country outside the United States.


1.E.


Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:


1.E.1.


The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate access
to, the full Project Gutenberg™ License must appear prominently whenever
any copy of a Project Gutenberg™ work (any work on which the phrase
“Project Gutenberg” appears, or with which the phrase “Project Gutenberg”
is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed, copied or
distributed:


    This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
    almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away
    or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License
    included with this eBook or online at http://www.gutenberg.org


1.E.2.


If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is derived from the
public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is posted with
permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied and
distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees or
charges. If you are redistributing or providing access to a work with the
phrase “Project Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the work, you
must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7
or obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg™
trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.


1.E.3.


If an individual Project Gutenberg™ electronic work is posted with the
permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution must comply
with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional terms imposed
by the copyright holder. Additional terms will be linked to the Project
Gutenberg™ License for all works posted with the permission of the
copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.


1.E.4.


Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg™ License
terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this work or any
other work associated with Project Gutenberg™.


1.E.5.


Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this electronic
work, or any part of this electronic work, without prominently displaying
the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with active links or immediate
access to the full terms of the Project Gutenberg™ License.


1.E.6.


You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary, compressed,
marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any word
processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access to or
distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg™ work in a format other than
“Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in the official version posted
on the official Project Gutenberg™ web site (http://www.gutenberg.org),
you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
request, of the work in its original “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other form.
Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg™ License as
specified in paragraph 1.E.1.


1.E.7.


Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying, performing,
copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg™ works unless you comply
with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.


1.E.8.


You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing access to or
distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works provided that

    - You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
      the use of Project Gutenberg™ works calculated using the method you
      already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed to
      the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark, but he has agreed to
      donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project Gutenberg
      Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid within 60
      days following each date on which you prepare (or are legally
      required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty payments
      should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project Gutenberg
      Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in Section 4,
      “Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
      Archive Foundation.”

      You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
      you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
      does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg™ License.
      You must require such a user to return or destroy all copies of the
      works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue all use of and
      all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg™ works.

      You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of
      any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
      electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
      receipt of the work.

      You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
      distribution of Project Gutenberg™ works.


1.E.9.


If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg™ electronic
work or group of works on different terms than are set forth in this
agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from both the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael Hart, the owner of the
Project Gutenberg™ trademark. Contact the Foundation as set forth in
Section 3 below.


1.F.


1.F.1.


Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable effort to
identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread public domain
works in creating the Project Gutenberg™ collection. Despite these
efforts, Project Gutenberg™ electronic works, and the medium on which they
may be stored, may contain “Defects,” such as, but not limited to,
incomplete, inaccurate or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright
or other intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk
or other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot
be read by your equipment.


1.F.2.


LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES — Except for the “Right of
Replacement or Refund” described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project Gutenberg™
trademark, and any other party distributing a Project Gutenberg™
electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all liability to you for
damages, costs and expenses, including legal fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE
NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH
OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3. YOU AGREE THAT THE
FOUNDATION, THE TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT
WILL NOT BE LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL,
PUNITIVE OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY
OF SUCH DAMAGE.


1.F.3.


LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND — If you discover a defect in this
electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can receive a refund
of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a written explanation to
the person you received the work from. If you received the work on a
physical medium, you must return the medium with your written explanation.
The person or entity that provided you with the defective work may elect
to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a refund. If you received the
work electronically, the person or entity providing it to you may choose
to give you a second opportunity to receive the work electronically in
lieu of a refund. If the second copy is also defective, you may demand a
refund in writing without further opportunities to fix the problem.


1.F.4.


Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth in
paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you ’AS-IS,’ WITH NO OTHER
WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.


1.F.5.


Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied warranties or the
exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages. If any disclaimer or
limitation set forth in this agreement violates the law of the state
applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be interpreted to make
the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by the applicable state
law. The invalidity or unenforceability of any provision of this agreement
shall not void the remaining provisions.


1.F.6.


INDEMNITY — You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the trademark
owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone providing copies of
Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in accordance with this agreement, and
any volunteers associated with the production, promotion and distribution
of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs
and expenses, including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from
any of the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of
this or any Project Gutenberg™ work, (b) alteration, modification, or
additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg™ work, and (c) any Defect
you cause.


Section  2.


           Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg™


Project Gutenberg™ is synonymous with the free distribution of electronic
works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers including
obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It exists because of the
efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from people in all walks
of life.

Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the assistance
they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg™’s goals and ensuring
that the Project Gutenberg™ collection will remain freely available for
generations to come. In 2001, the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation was created to provide a secure and permanent future for
Project Gutenberg™ and future generations. To learn more about the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations
can help, see Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation web page at
http://www.pglaf.org.


Section 3.


   Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation


The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the state of
Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal Revenue Service.
The Foundation’s EIN or federal tax identification number is 64-6221541.
Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
http://www.gutenberg.org/fundraising/pglaf. Contributions to the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full
extent permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state’s laws.

The Foundation’s principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr.
S. Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
throughout numerous locations. Its business office is located at 809 North
1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
business@pglaf.org. Email contact links and up to date contact information
can be found at the Foundation’s web site and official page at
http://www.pglaf.org

For additional contact information:


    Dr. Gregory B. Newby
    Chief Executive and Director
    gbnewby@pglaf.org


Section 4.


  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
                                Foundation


Project Gutenberg™ depends upon and cannot survive without wide spread
public support and donations to carry out its mission of increasing the
number of public domain and licensed works that can be freely distributed
in machine readable form accessible by the widest array of equipment
including outdated equipment. Many small donations ($1 to $5,000) are
particularly important to maintaining tax exempt status with the IRS.

The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United States.
Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a considerable
effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up with these
requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations where we have not
received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND DONATIONS or
determine the status of compliance for any particular state visit
http://www.gutenberg.org/fundraising/donate

While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we have
not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition against
accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who approach us
with offers to donate.

International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make any
statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from outside the
United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.

Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation methods
and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other ways including
checks, online payments and credit card donations. To donate, please
visit: http://www.gutenberg.org/fundraising/donate


Section 5.


      General Information About Project Gutenberg™ electronic works.


Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg™
concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared with
anyone. For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project Gutenberg™
eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.

Project Gutenberg™ eBooks are often created from several printed editions,
all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S. unless a copyright
notice is included. Thus, we do not necessarily keep eBooks in compliance
with any particular paper edition.

Each eBook is in a subdirectory of the same number as the eBook’s eBook
number, often in several formats including plain vanilla ASCII, compressed
(zipped), HTML and others.

Corrected _editions_ of our eBooks replace the old file and take over the
old filename and etext number. The replaced older file is renamed.
_Versions_ based on separate sources are treated as new eBooks receiving
new filenames and etext numbers.

Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:


    http://www.gutenberg.org


This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg™, including how
to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation,
how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to subscribe to our email
newsletter to hear about new eBooks.






***FINIS***
The Project Gutenberg EBook of Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org


Title: Crime and Punishment

Author: Fyodor Dostoevsky

Release Date: March 28, 2006 [EBook #2554]
[Last updated: November 15, 2011]

Language: English


*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CRIME AND PUNISHMENT ***




Produced by John Bickers; and Dagny





CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

By Fyodor Dostoevsky



Translated By Constance Garnett




TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE

A few words about Dostoevsky himself may help the English reader to
understand his work.

Dostoevsky was the son of a doctor. His parents were very hard-working
and deeply religious people, but so poor that they lived with their five
children in only two rooms. The father and mother spent their evenings
in reading aloud to their children, generally from books of a serious
character.

Though always sickly and delicate Dostoevsky came out third in the
final examination of the Petersburg school of Engineering. There he had
already begun his first work, "Poor Folk."

This story was published by the poet Nekrassov in his review and
was received with acclamations. The shy, unknown youth found himself
instantly something of a celebrity. A brilliant and successful career
seemed to open before him, but those hopes were soon dashed. In 1849 he
was arrested.

Though neither by temperament nor conviction a revolutionist, Dostoevsky
was one of a little group of young men who met together to read Fourier
and Proudhon. He was accused of "taking part in conversations against
the censorship, of reading a letter from Byelinsky to Gogol, and of
knowing of the intention to set up a printing press." Under Nicholas
I. (that "stern and just man," as Maurice Baring calls him) this was
enough, and he was condemned to death. After eight months' imprisonment
he was with twenty-one others taken out to the Semyonovsky Square to
be shot. Writing to his brother Mihail, Dostoevsky says: "They snapped
words over our heads, and they made us put on the white shirts worn by
persons condemned to death. Thereupon we were bound in threes to stakes,
to suffer execution. Being the third in the row, I concluded I had only
a few minutes of life before me. I thought of you and your dear ones and
I contrived to kiss Plestcheiev and Dourov, who were next to me, and to
bid them farewell. Suddenly the troops beat a tattoo, we were unbound,
brought back upon the scaffold, and informed that his Majesty had spared
us our lives." The sentence was commuted to hard labour.

One of the prisoners, Grigoryev, went mad as soon as he was untied, and
never regained his sanity.

The intense suffering of this experience left a lasting stamp on
Dostoevsky's mind. Though his religious temper led him in the end to
accept every suffering with resignation and to regard it as a blessing
in his own case, he constantly recurs to the subject in his writings.
He describes the awful agony of the condemned man and insists on the
cruelty of inflicting such torture. Then followed four years of penal
servitude, spent in the company of common criminals in Siberia, where
he began the "Dead House," and some years of service in a disciplinary
battalion.

He had shown signs of some obscure nervous disease before his arrest
and this now developed into violent attacks of epilepsy, from which he
suffered for the rest of his life. The fits occurred three or four times
a year and were more frequent in periods of great strain. In 1859 he was
allowed to return to Russia. He started a journal--"Vremya," which was
forbidden by the Censorship through a misunderstanding. In 1864 he lost
his first wife and his brother Mihail. He was in terrible poverty, yet
he took upon himself the payment of his brother's debts. He started
another journal--"The Epoch," which within a few months was also
prohibited. He was weighed down by debt, his brother's family was
dependent on him, he was forced to write at heart-breaking speed, and is
said never to have corrected his work. The later years of his life were
much softened by the tenderness and devotion of his second wife.

In June 1880 he made his famous speech at the unveiling of the
monument to Pushkin in Moscow and he was received with extraordinary
demonstrations of love and honour.

A few months later Dostoevsky died. He was followed to the grave by a
vast multitude of mourners, who "gave the hapless man the funeral of a
king." He is still probably the most widely read writer in Russia.

In the words of a Russian critic, who seeks to explain the feeling
inspired by Dostoevsky: "He was one of ourselves, a man of our blood and
our bone, but one who has suffered and has seen so much more deeply than
we have his insight impresses us as wisdom... that wisdom of the heart
which we seek that we may learn from it how to live. All his other
gifts came to him from nature, this he won for himself and through it he
became great."





CRIME AND PUNISHMENT




PART I



CHAPTER I

On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of
the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though
in hesitation, towards K. bridge.

He had successfully avoided meeting his landlady on the staircase. His
garret was under the roof of a high, five-storied house and was more
like a cupboard than a room. The landlady who provided him with garret,
dinners, and attendance, lived on the floor below, and every time
he went out he was obliged to pass her kitchen, the door of which
invariably stood open. And each time he passed, the young man had a
sick, frightened feeling, which made him scowl and feel ashamed. He was
hopelessly in debt to his landlady, and was afraid of meeting her.

This was not because he was cowardly and abject, quite the contrary; but
for some time past he had been in an overstrained irritable condition,
verging on hypochondria. He had become so completely absorbed in
himself, and isolated from his fellows that he dreaded meeting, not
only his landlady, but anyone at all. He was crushed by poverty, but the
anxieties of his position had of late ceased to weigh upon him. He had
given up attending to matters of practical importance; he had lost all
desire to do so. Nothing that any landlady could do had a real terror
for him. But to be stopped on the stairs, to be forced to listen to her
trivial, irrelevant gossip, to pestering demands for payment, threats
and complaints, and to rack his brains for excuses, to prevaricate, to
lie--no, rather than that, he would creep down the stairs like a cat and
slip out unseen.

This evening, however, on coming out into the street, he became acutely
aware of his fears.

"I want to attempt a thing _like that_ and am frightened by these
trifles," he thought, with an odd smile. "Hm... yes, all is in a man's
hands and he lets it all slip from cowardice, that's an axiom. It would
be interesting to know what it is men are most afraid of. Taking a new
step, uttering a new word is what they fear most.... But I am talking
too much. It's because I chatter that I do nothing. Or perhaps it is
that I chatter because I do nothing. I've learned to chatter this
last month, lying for days together in my den thinking... of Jack the
Giant-killer. Why am I going there now? Am I capable of _that_? Is
_that_ serious? It is not serious at all. It's simply a fantasy to amuse
myself; a plaything! Yes, maybe it is a plaything."

The heat in the street was terrible: and the airlessness, the bustle
and the plaster, scaffolding, bricks, and dust all about him, and that
special Petersburg stench, so familiar to all who are unable to get out
of town in summer--all worked painfully upon the young man's already
overwrought nerves. The insufferable stench from the pot-houses, which
are particularly numerous in that part of the town, and the drunken men
whom he met continually, although it was a working day, completed
the revolting misery of the picture. An expression of the profoundest
disgust gleamed for a moment in the young man's refined face. He was,
by the way, exceptionally handsome, above the average in height, slim,
well-built, with beautiful dark eyes and dark brown hair. Soon he sank
into deep thought, or more accurately speaking into a complete blankness
of mind; he walked along not observing what was about him and not caring
to observe it. From time to time, he would mutter something, from the
habit of talking to himself, to which he had just confessed. At these
moments he would become conscious that his ideas were sometimes in a
tangle and that he was very weak; for two days he had scarcely tasted
food.

He was so badly dressed that even a man accustomed to shabbiness would
have been ashamed to be seen in the street in such rags. In that quarter
of the town, however, scarcely any shortcoming in dress would have
created surprise. Owing to the proximity of the Hay Market, the number
of establishments of bad character, the preponderance of the trading
and working class population crowded in these streets and alleys in the
heart of Petersburg, types so various were to be seen in the streets
that no figure, however queer, would have caused surprise. But there was
such accumulated bitterness and contempt in the young man's heart, that,
in spite of all the fastidiousness of youth, he minded his rags least
of all in the street. It was a different matter when he met with
acquaintances or with former fellow students, whom, indeed, he disliked
meeting at any time. And yet when a drunken man who, for some unknown
reason, was being taken somewhere in a huge waggon dragged by a heavy
dray horse, suddenly shouted at him as he drove past: "Hey there, German
hatter" bawling at the top of his voice and pointing at him--the young
man stopped suddenly and clutched tremulously at his hat. It was a tall
round hat from Zimmerman's, but completely worn out, rusty with age, all
torn and bespattered, brimless and bent on one side in a most unseemly
fashion. Not shame, however, but quite another feeling akin to terror
had overtaken him.

"I knew it," he muttered in confusion, "I thought so! That's the worst
of all! Why, a stupid thing like this, the most trivial detail might
spoil the whole plan. Yes, my hat is too noticeable.... It looks absurd
and that makes it noticeable.... With my rags I ought to wear a cap, any
sort of old pancake, but not this grotesque thing. Nobody wears such
a hat, it would be noticed a mile off, it would be remembered.... What
matters is that people would remember it, and that would give them
a clue. For this business one should be as little conspicuous as
possible.... Trifles, trifles are what matter! Why, it's just such
trifles that always ruin everything...."

He had not far to go; he knew indeed how many steps it was from the gate
of his lodging house: exactly seven hundred and thirty. He had counted
them once when he had been lost in dreams. At the time he had put no
faith in those dreams and was only tantalising himself by their hideous
but daring recklessness. Now, a month later, he had begun to look upon
them differently, and, in spite of the monologues in which he jeered at
his own impotence and indecision, he had involuntarily come to regard
this "hideous" dream as an exploit to be attempted, although he
still did not realise this himself. He was positively going now for a
"rehearsal" of his project, and at every step his excitement grew more
and more violent.

With a sinking heart and a nervous tremor, he went up to a huge house
which on one side looked on to the canal, and on the other into the
street. This house was let out in tiny tenements and was inhabited by
working people of all kinds--tailors, locksmiths, cooks, Germans of
sorts, girls picking up a living as best they could, petty clerks, etc.
There was a continual coming and going through the two gates and in the
two courtyards of the house. Three or four door-keepers were employed on
the building. The young man was very glad to meet none of them, and
at once slipped unnoticed through the door on the right, and up the
staircase. It was a back staircase, dark and narrow, but he was familiar
with it already, and knew his way, and he liked all these surroundings:
in such darkness even the most inquisitive eyes were not to be dreaded.

"If I am so scared now, what would it be if it somehow came to pass that
I were really going to do it?" he could not help asking himself as he
reached the fourth storey. There his progress was barred by some porters
who were engaged in moving furniture out of a flat. He knew that the
flat had been occupied by a German clerk in the civil service, and his
family. This German was moving out then, and so the fourth floor on this
staircase would be untenanted except by the old woman. "That's a good
thing anyway," he thought to himself, as he rang the bell of the old
woman's flat. The bell gave a faint tinkle as though it were made of
tin and not of copper. The little flats in such houses always have bells
that ring like that. He had forgotten the note of that bell, and now
its peculiar tinkle seemed to remind him of something and to bring it
clearly before him.... He started, his nerves were terribly overstrained
by now. In a little while, the door was opened a tiny crack: the old
woman eyed her visitor with evident distrust through the crack, and
nothing could be seen but her little eyes, glittering in the darkness.
But, seeing a number of people on the landing, she grew bolder, and
opened the door wide. The young man stepped into the dark entry, which
was partitioned off from the tiny kitchen. The old woman stood facing
him in silence and looking inquiringly at him. She was a diminutive,
withered up old woman of sixty, with sharp malignant eyes and a sharp
little nose. Her colourless, somewhat grizzled hair was thickly smeared
with oil, and she wore no kerchief over it. Round her thin long neck,
which looked like a hen's leg, was knotted some sort of flannel rag,
and, in spite of the heat, there hung flapping on her shoulders, a mangy
fur cape, yellow with age. The old woman coughed and groaned at every
instant. The young man must have looked at her with a rather peculiar
expression, for a gleam of mistrust came into her eyes again.

"Raskolnikov, a student, I came here a month ago," the young man made
haste to mutter, with a half bow, remembering that he ought to be more
polite.

"I remember, my good sir, I remember quite well your coming here," the
old woman said distinctly, still keeping her inquiring eyes on his face.

"And here... I am again on the same errand," Raskolnikov continued, a
little disconcerted and surprised at the old woman's mistrust. "Perhaps
she is always like that though, only I did not notice it the other
time," he thought with an uneasy feeling.

The old woman paused, as though hesitating; then stepped on one side,
and pointing to the door of the room, she said, letting her visitor pass
in front of her:

"Step in, my good sir."

The little room into which the young man walked, with yellow paper on
the walls, geraniums and muslin curtains in the windows, was brightly
lighted up at that moment by the setting sun.

"So the sun will shine like this _then_ too!" flashed as it were by
chance through Raskolnikov's mind, and with a rapid glance he scanned
everything in the room, trying as far as possible to notice and
remember its arrangement. But there was nothing special in the room. The
furniture, all very old and of yellow wood, consisted of a sofa with
a huge bent wooden back, an oval table in front of the sofa, a
dressing-table with a looking-glass fixed on it between the windows,
chairs along the walls and two or three half-penny prints in yellow
frames, representing German damsels with birds in their hands--that was
all. In the corner a light was burning before a small ikon. Everything
was very clean; the floor and the furniture were brightly polished;
everything shone.

"Lizaveta's work," thought the young man. There was not a speck of dust
to be seen in the whole flat.

"It's in the houses of spiteful old widows that one finds such
cleanliness," Raskolnikov thought again, and he stole a curious glance
at the cotton curtain over the door leading into another tiny room, in
which stood the old woman's bed and chest of drawers and into which he
had never looked before. These two rooms made up the whole flat.

"What do you want?" the old woman said severely, coming into the room
and, as before, standing in front of him so as to look him straight in
the face.

"I've brought something to pawn here," and he drew out of his pocket
an old-fashioned flat silver watch, on the back of which was engraved a
globe; the chain was of steel.

"But the time is up for your last pledge. The month was up the day
before yesterday."

"I will bring you the interest for another month; wait a little."

"But that's for me to do as I please, my good sir, to wait or to sell
your pledge at once."

"How much will you give me for the watch, Alyona Ivanovna?"

"You come with such trifles, my good sir, it's scarcely worth anything.
I gave you two roubles last time for your ring and one could buy it
quite new at a jeweler's for a rouble and a half."

"Give me four roubles for it, I shall redeem it, it was my father's. I
shall be getting some money soon."

"A rouble and a half, and interest in advance, if you like!"

"A rouble and a half!" cried the young man.

"Please yourself"--and the old woman handed him back the watch. The
young man took it, and was so angry that he was on the point of going
away; but checked himself at once, remembering that there was nowhere
else he could go, and that he had had another object also in coming.

"Hand it over," he said roughly.

The old woman fumbled in her pocket for her keys, and disappeared behind
the curtain into the other room. The young man, left standing alone in
the middle of the room, listened inquisitively, thinking. He could hear
her unlocking the chest of drawers.

"It must be the top drawer," he reflected. "So she carries the keys in
a pocket on the right. All in one bunch on a steel ring.... And there's
one key there, three times as big as all the others, with deep notches;
that can't be the key of the chest of drawers... then there must be some
other chest or strong-box... that's worth knowing. Strong-boxes always
have keys like that... but how degrading it all is."

The old woman came back.

"Here, sir: as we say ten copecks the rouble a month, so I must take
fifteen copecks from a rouble and a half for the month in advance. But
for the two roubles I lent you before, you owe me now twenty copecks
on the same reckoning in advance. That makes thirty-five copecks
altogether. So I must give you a rouble and fifteen copecks for the
watch. Here it is."

"What! only a rouble and fifteen copecks now!"

"Just so."

The young man did not dispute it and took the money. He looked at the
old woman, and was in no hurry to get away, as though there was still
something he wanted to say or to do, but he did not himself quite know
what.

"I may be bringing you something else in a day or two, Alyona
Ivanovna--a valuable thing--silver--a cigarette-box, as soon as I get it
back from a friend..." he broke off in confusion.

"Well, we will talk about it then, sir."

"Good-bye--are you always at home alone, your sister is not here with
you?" He asked her as casually as possible as he went out into the
passage.

"What business is she of yours, my good sir?"

"Oh, nothing particular, I simply asked. You are too quick.... Good-day,
Alyona Ivanovna."

Raskolnikov went out in complete confusion. This confusion became more
and more intense. As he went down the stairs, he even stopped short, two
or three times, as though suddenly struck by some thought. When he was
in the street he cried out, "Oh, God, how loathsome it all is! and
can I, can I possibly.... No, it's nonsense, it's rubbish!" he added
resolutely. "And how could such an atrocious thing come into my head?
What filthy things my heart is capable of. Yes, filthy above all,
disgusting, loathsome, loathsome!--and for a whole month I've been...."
But no words, no exclamations, could express his agitation. The feeling
of intense repulsion, which had begun to oppress and torture his heart
while he was on his way to the old woman, had by now reached such a
pitch and had taken such a definite form that he did not know what to
do with himself to escape from his wretchedness. He walked along the
pavement like a drunken man, regardless of the passers-by, and jostling
against them, and only came to his senses when he was in the next
street. Looking round, he noticed that he was standing close to a tavern
which was entered by steps leading from the pavement to the basement.
At that instant two drunken men came out at the door, and abusing and
supporting one another, they mounted the steps. Without stopping to
think, Raskolnikov went down the steps at once. Till that moment he had
never been into a tavern, but now he felt giddy and was tormented by a
burning thirst. He longed for a drink of cold beer, and attributed his
sudden weakness to the want of food. He sat down at a sticky little
table in a dark and dirty corner; ordered some beer, and eagerly drank
off the first glassful. At once he felt easier; and his thoughts became
clear.

"All that's nonsense," he said hopefully, "and there is nothing in it
all to worry about! It's simply physical derangement. Just a glass of
beer, a piece of dry bread--and in one moment the brain is stronger,
the mind is clearer and the will is firm! Phew, how utterly petty it all
is!"

But in spite of this scornful reflection, he was by now looking cheerful
as though he were suddenly set free from a terrible burden: and he gazed
round in a friendly way at the people in the room. But even at that
moment he had a dim foreboding that this happier frame of mind was also
not normal.

There were few people at the time in the tavern. Besides the two drunken
men he had met on the steps, a group consisting of about five men and
a girl with a concertina had gone out at the same time. Their departure
left the room quiet and rather empty. The persons still in the tavern
were a man who appeared to be an artisan, drunk, but not extremely so,
sitting before a pot of beer, and his companion, a huge, stout man with
a grey beard, in a short full-skirted coat. He was very drunk: and had
dropped asleep on the bench; every now and then, he began as though in
his sleep, cracking his fingers, with his arms wide apart and the upper
part of his body bounding about on the bench, while he hummed some
meaningless refrain, trying to recall some such lines as these:

   "His wife a year he fondly loved
    His wife a--a year he--fondly loved."

Or suddenly waking up again:

   "Walking along the crowded row
    He met the one he used to know."

But no one shared his enjoyment: his silent companion looked with
positive hostility and mistrust at all these manifestations. There was
another man in the room who looked somewhat like a retired government
clerk. He was sitting apart, now and then sipping from his pot and
looking round at the company. He, too, appeared to be in some agitation.



CHAPTER II

Raskolnikov was not used to crowds, and, as we said before, he avoided
society of every sort, more especially of late. But now all at once he
felt a desire to be with other people. Something new seemed to be taking
place within him, and with it he felt a sort of thirst for company. He
was so weary after a whole month of concentrated wretchedness and gloomy
excitement that he longed to rest, if only for a moment, in some other
world, whatever it might be; and, in spite of the filthiness of the
surroundings, he was glad now to stay in the tavern.

The master of the establishment was in another room, but he frequently
came down some steps into the main room, his jaunty, tarred boots with
red turn-over tops coming into view each time before the rest of his
person. He wore a full coat and a horribly greasy black satin waistcoat,
with no cravat, and his whole face seemed smeared with oil like an
iron lock. At the counter stood a boy of about fourteen, and there was
another boy somewhat younger who handed whatever was wanted. On the
counter lay some sliced cucumber, some pieces of dried black bread, and
some fish, chopped up small, all smelling very bad. It was insufferably
close, and so heavy with the fumes of spirits that five minutes in such
an atmosphere might well make a man drunk.

There are chance meetings with strangers that interest us from the
first moment, before a word is spoken. Such was the impression made on
Raskolnikov by the person sitting a little distance from him, who looked
like a retired clerk. The young man often recalled this impression
afterwards, and even ascribed it to presentiment. He looked repeatedly
at the clerk, partly no doubt because the latter was staring
persistently at him, obviously anxious to enter into conversation. At
the other persons in the room, including the tavern-keeper, the clerk
looked as though he were used to their company, and weary of it, showing
a shade of condescending contempt for them as persons of station and
culture inferior to his own, with whom it would be useless for him to
converse. He was a man over fifty, bald and grizzled, of medium height,
and stoutly built. His face, bloated from continual drinking, was of
a yellow, even greenish, tinge, with swollen eyelids out of which keen
reddish eyes gleamed like little chinks. But there was something very
strange in him; there was a light in his eyes as though of intense
feeling--perhaps there were even thought and intelligence, but at the
same time there was a gleam of something like madness. He was wearing an
old and hopelessly ragged black dress coat, with all its buttons missing
except one, and that one he had buttoned, evidently clinging to this
last trace of respectability. A crumpled shirt front, covered with spots
and stains, protruded from his canvas waistcoat. Like a clerk, he wore
no beard, nor moustache, but had been so long unshaven that his chin
looked like a stiff greyish brush. And there was something respectable
and like an official about his manner too. But he was restless; he
ruffled up his hair and from time to time let his head drop into his
hands dejectedly resting his ragged elbows on the stained and sticky
table. At last he looked straight at Raskolnikov, and said loudly and
resolutely:

"May I venture, honoured sir, to engage you in polite conversation?
Forasmuch as, though your exterior would not command respect, my
experience admonishes me that you are a man of education and not
accustomed to drinking. I have always respected education when in
conjunction with genuine sentiments, and I am besides a titular
counsellor in rank. Marmeladov--such is my name; titular counsellor. I
make bold to inquire--have you been in the service?"

"No, I am studying," answered the young man, somewhat surprised at
the grandiloquent style of the speaker and also at being so directly
addressed. In spite of the momentary desire he had just been feeling for
company of any sort, on being actually spoken to he felt immediately his
habitual irritable and uneasy aversion for any stranger who approached
or attempted to approach him.

"A student then, or formerly a student," cried the clerk. "Just what
I thought! I'm a man of experience, immense experience, sir," and he
tapped his forehead with his fingers in self-approval. "You've been a
student or have attended some learned institution!... But allow me...."
He got up, staggered, took up his jug and glass, and sat down beside
the young man, facing him a little sideways. He was drunk, but spoke
fluently and boldly, only occasionally losing the thread of his
sentences and drawling his words. He pounced upon Raskolnikov as
greedily as though he too had not spoken to a soul for a month.

"Honoured sir," he began almost with solemnity, "poverty is not a vice,
that's a true saying. Yet I know too that drunkenness is not a virtue,
and that that's even truer. But beggary, honoured sir, beggary is a
vice. In poverty you may still retain your innate nobility of soul, but
in beggary--never--no one. For beggary a man is not chased out of human
society with a stick, he is swept out with a broom, so as to make it as
humiliating as possible; and quite right, too, forasmuch as in beggary
I am ready to be the first to humiliate myself. Hence the pot-house!
Honoured sir, a month ago Mr. Lebeziatnikov gave my wife a beating, and
my wife is a very different matter from me! Do you understand? Allow me
to ask you another question out of simple curiosity: have you ever spent
a night on a hay barge, on the Neva?"

"No, I have not happened to," answered Raskolnikov. "What do you mean?"

"Well, I've just come from one and it's the fifth night I've slept
so...." He filled his glass, emptied it and paused. Bits of hay were in
fact clinging to his clothes and sticking to his hair. It seemed quite
probable that he had not undressed or washed for the last five days.
His hands, particularly, were filthy. They were fat and red, with black
nails.

His conversation seemed to excite a general though languid interest. The
boys at the counter fell to sniggering. The innkeeper came down from the
upper room, apparently on purpose to listen to the "funny fellow"
and sat down at a little distance, yawning lazily, but with dignity.
Evidently Marmeladov was a familiar figure here, and he had most
likely acquired his weakness for high-flown speeches from the habit of
frequently entering into conversation with strangers of all sorts in
the tavern. This habit develops into a necessity in some drunkards, and
especially in those who are looked after sharply and kept in order
at home. Hence in the company of other drinkers they try to justify
themselves and even if possible obtain consideration.

"Funny fellow!" pronounced the innkeeper. "And why don't you work, why
aren't you at your duty, if you are in the service?"

"Why am I not at my duty, honoured sir," Marmeladov went on, addressing
himself exclusively to Raskolnikov, as though it had been he who put
that question to him. "Why am I not at my duty? Does not my heart ache
to think what a useless worm I am? A month ago when Mr. Lebeziatnikov
beat my wife with his own hands, and I lay drunk, didn't I suffer?
Excuse me, young man, has it ever happened to you... hm... well, to
petition hopelessly for a loan?"

"Yes, it has. But what do you mean by hopelessly?"

"Hopelessly in the fullest sense, when you know beforehand that you
will get nothing by it. You know, for instance, beforehand with positive
certainty that this man, this most reputable and exemplary citizen, will
on no consideration give you money; and indeed I ask you why should he?
For he knows of course that I shan't pay it back. From compassion? But
Mr. Lebeziatnikov who keeps up with modern ideas explained the other day
that compassion is forbidden nowadays by science itself, and that that's
what is done now in England, where there is political economy. Why, I
ask you, should he give it to me? And yet though I know beforehand that
he won't, I set off to him and..."

"Why do you go?" put in Raskolnikov.

"Well, when one has no one, nowhere else one can go! For every man must
have somewhere to go. Since there are times when one absolutely must
go somewhere! When my own daughter first went out with a yellow ticket,
then I had to go... (for my daughter has a yellow passport)," he added
in parenthesis, looking with a certain uneasiness at the young man.
"No matter, sir, no matter!" he went on hurriedly and with apparent
composure when both the boys at the counter guffawed and even the
innkeeper smiled--"No matter, I am not confounded by the wagging of
their heads; for everyone knows everything about it already, and all
that is secret is made open. And I accept it all, not with contempt, but
with humility. So be it! So be it! 'Behold the man!' Excuse me, young
man, can you.... No, to put it more strongly and more distinctly; not
_can_ you but _dare_ you, looking upon me, assert that I am not a pig?"

The young man did not answer a word.

"Well," the orator began again stolidly and with even increased dignity,
after waiting for the laughter in the room to subside. "Well, so be
it, I am a pig, but she is a lady! I have the semblance of a beast, but
Katerina Ivanovna, my spouse, is a person of education and an officer's
daughter. Granted, granted, I am a scoundrel, but she is a woman of a
noble heart, full of sentiments, refined by education. And yet... oh,
if only she felt for me! Honoured sir, honoured sir, you know every man
ought to have at least one place where people feel for him! But Katerina
Ivanovna, though she is magnanimous, she is unjust.... And yet, although
I realise that when she pulls my hair she only does it out of pity--for
I repeat without being ashamed, she pulls my hair, young man," he
declared with redoubled dignity, hearing the sniggering again--"but, my
God, if she would but once.... But no, no! It's all in vain and it's no
use talking! No use talking! For more than once, my wish did come true
and more than once she has felt for me but... such is my fate and I am a
beast by nature!"

"Rather!" assented the innkeeper yawning. Marmeladov struck his fist
resolutely on the table.

"Such is my fate! Do you know, sir, do you know, I have sold her very
stockings for drink? Not her shoes--that would be more or less in the
order of things, but her stockings, her stockings I have sold for drink!
Her mohair shawl I sold for drink, a present to her long ago, her own
property, not mine; and we live in a cold room and she caught cold this
winter and has begun coughing and spitting blood too. We have three
little children and Katerina Ivanovna is at work from morning till
night; she is scrubbing and cleaning and washing the children, for she's
been used to cleanliness from a child. But her chest is weak and she has
a tendency to consumption and I feel it! Do you suppose I don't feel it?
And the more I drink the more I feel it. That's why I drink too. I try
to find sympathy and feeling in drink.... I drink so that I may suffer
twice as much!" And as though in despair he laid his head down on the
table.

"Young man," he went on, raising his head again, "in your face I seem to
read some trouble of mind. When you came in I read it, and that was why
I addressed you at once. For in unfolding to you the story of my life, I
do not wish to make myself a laughing-stock before these idle listeners,
who indeed know all about it already, but I am looking for a man
of feeling and education. Know then that my wife was educated in a
high-class school for the daughters of noblemen, and on leaving she
danced the shawl dance before the governor and other personages for
which she was presented with a gold medal and a certificate of merit.
The medal... well, the medal of course was sold--long ago, hm... but the
certificate of merit is in her trunk still and not long ago she showed
it to our landlady. And although she is most continually on bad terms
with the landlady, yet she wanted to tell someone or other of her past
honours and of the happy days that are gone. I don't condemn her for
it, I don't blame her, for the one thing left her is recollection of
the past, and all the rest is dust and ashes. Yes, yes, she is a lady
of spirit, proud and determined. She scrubs the floors herself and has
nothing but black bread to eat, but won't allow herself to be treated
with disrespect. That's why she would not overlook Mr. Lebeziatnikov's
rudeness to her, and so when he gave her a beating for it, she took to
her bed more from the hurt to her feelings than from the blows. She was
a widow when I married her, with three children, one smaller than the
other. She married her first husband, an infantry officer, for love, and
ran away with him from her father's house. She was exceedingly fond of
her husband; but he gave way to cards, got into trouble and with that he
died. He used to beat her at the end: and although she paid him back, of
which I have authentic documentary evidence, to this day she speaks of
him with tears and she throws him up to me; and I am glad, I am glad
that, though only in imagination, she should think of herself as having
once been happy.... And she was left at his death with three children in
a wild and remote district where I happened to be at the time; and she
was left in such hopeless poverty that, although I have seen many ups
and downs of all sort, I don't feel equal to describing it even. Her
relations had all thrown her off. And she was proud, too, excessively
proud.... And then, honoured sir, and then, I, being at the time a
widower, with a daughter of fourteen left me by my first wife, offered
her my hand, for I could not bear the sight of such suffering. You can
judge the extremity of her calamities, that she, a woman of education
and culture and distinguished family, should have consented to be my
wife. But she did! Weeping and sobbing and wringing her hands, she
married me! For she had nowhere to turn! Do you understand, sir, do you
understand what it means when you have absolutely nowhere to turn? No,
that you don't understand yet.... And for a whole year, I performed
my duties conscientiously and faithfully, and did not touch this" (he
tapped the jug with his finger), "for I have feelings. But even so, I
could not please her; and then I lost my place too, and that through no
fault of mine but through changes in the office; and then I did touch
it!... It will be a year and a half ago soon since we found ourselves at
last after many wanderings and numerous calamities in this magnificent
capital, adorned with innumerable monuments. Here I obtained a
situation.... I obtained it and I lost it again. Do you understand? This
time it was through my own fault I lost it: for my weakness had come
out.... We have now part of a room at Amalia Fyodorovna Lippevechsel's;
and what we live upon and what we pay our rent with, I could not say.
There are a lot of people living there besides ourselves. Dirt and
disorder, a perfect Bedlam... hm... yes... And meanwhile my daughter by
my first wife has grown up; and what my daughter has had to put up with
from her step-mother whilst she was growing up, I won't speak of. For,
though Katerina Ivanovna is full of generous feelings, she is a spirited
lady, irritable and short-tempered.... Yes. But it's no use going over
that! Sonia, as you may well fancy, has had no education. I did make an
effort four years ago to give her a course of geography and universal
history, but as I was not very well up in those subjects myself and we
had no suitable books, and what books we had... hm, anyway we have not
even those now, so all our instruction came to an end. We stopped at
Cyrus of Persia. Since she has attained years of maturity, she has read
other books of romantic tendency and of late she had read with great
interest a book she got through Mr. Lebeziatnikov, Lewes' Physiology--do
you know it?--and even recounted extracts from it to us: and that's the
whole of her education. And now may I venture to address you, honoured
sir, on my own account with a private question. Do you suppose that
a respectable poor girl can earn much by honest work? Not fifteen
farthings a day can she earn, if she is respectable and has no special
talent and that without putting her work down for an instant! And what's
more, Ivan Ivanitch Klopstock the civil counsellor--have you heard of
him?--has not to this day paid her for the half-dozen linen shirts she
made him and drove her roughly away, stamping and reviling her, on the
pretext that the shirt collars were not made like the pattern and were
put in askew. And there are the little ones hungry.... And Katerina
Ivanovna walking up and down and wringing her hands, her cheeks flushed
red, as they always are in that disease: 'Here you live with us,' says
she, 'you eat and drink and are kept warm and you do nothing to help.'
And much she gets to eat and drink when there is not a crust for the
little ones for three days! I was lying at the time... well, what of
it! I was lying drunk and I heard my Sonia speaking (she is a gentle
creature with a soft little voice... fair hair and such a pale, thin
little face). She said: 'Katerina Ivanovna, am I really to do a thing
like that?' And Darya Frantsovna, a woman of evil character and very
well known to the police, had two or three times tried to get at her
through the landlady. 'And why not?' said Katerina Ivanovna with a jeer,
'you are something mighty precious to be so careful of!' But don't blame
her, don't blame her, honoured sir, don't blame her! She was not herself
when she spoke, but driven to distraction by her illness and the crying
of the hungry children; and it was said more to wound her than anything
else.... For that's Katerina Ivanovna's character, and when children
cry, even from hunger, she falls to beating them at once. At six o'clock
I saw Sonia get up, put on her kerchief and her cape, and go out of the
room and about nine o'clock she came back. She walked straight up to
Katerina Ivanovna and she laid thirty roubles on the table before her
in silence. She did not utter a word, she did not even look at her, she
simply picked up our big green _drap de dames_ shawl (we have a shawl,
made of _drap de dames_), put it over her head and face and lay down
on the bed with her face to the wall; only her little shoulders and her
body kept shuddering.... And I went on lying there, just as before....
And then I saw, young man, I saw Katerina Ivanovna, in the same silence
go up to Sonia's little bed; she was on her knees all the evening
kissing Sonia's feet, and would not get up, and then they both fell
asleep in each other's arms... together, together... yes... and I... lay
drunk."

Marmeladov stopped short, as though his voice had failed him. Then he
hurriedly filled his glass, drank, and cleared his throat.

"Since then, sir," he went on after a brief pause--"Since then, owing
to an unfortunate occurrence and through information given by
evil-intentioned persons--in all which Darya Frantsovna took a
leading part on the pretext that she had been treated with want of
respect--since then my daughter Sofya Semyonovna has been forced to take
a yellow ticket, and owing to that she is unable to go on living with
us. For our landlady, Amalia Fyodorovna would not hear of it (though
she had backed up Darya Frantsovna before) and Mr. Lebeziatnikov too...
hm.... All the trouble between him and Katerina Ivanovna was on Sonia's
account. At first he was for making up to Sonia himself and then all of
a sudden he stood on his dignity: 'how,' said he, 'can a highly educated
man like me live in the same rooms with a girl like that?' And Katerina
Ivanovna would not let it pass, she stood up for her... and so that's
how it happened. And Sonia comes to us now, mostly after dark; she
comforts Katerina Ivanovna and gives her all she can.... She has a room
at the Kapernaumovs' the tailors, she lodges with them; Kapernaumov is
a lame man with a cleft palate and all of his numerous family have cleft
palates too. And his wife, too, has a cleft palate. They all live in one
room, but Sonia has her own, partitioned off.... Hm... yes... very poor
people and all with cleft palates... yes. Then I got up in the morning,
and put on my rags, lifted up my hands to heaven and set off to his
excellency Ivan Afanasyvitch. His excellency Ivan Afanasyvitch, do you
know him? No? Well, then, it's a man of God you don't know. He is wax...
wax before the face of the Lord; even as wax melteth!... His eyes were
dim when he heard my story. 'Marmeladov, once already you have
deceived my expectations... I'll take you once more on my own
responsibility'--that's what he said, 'remember,' he said, 'and now you
can go.' I kissed the dust at his feet--in thought only, for in reality
he would not have allowed me to do it, being a statesman and a man of
modern political and enlightened ideas. I returned home, and when I
announced that I'd been taken back into the service and should receive a
salary, heavens, what a to-do there was!..."

Marmeladov stopped again in violent excitement. At that moment a whole
party of revellers already drunk came in from the street, and the sounds
of a hired concertina and the cracked piping voice of a child of seven
singing "The Hamlet" were heard in the entry. The room was filled with
noise. The tavern-keeper and the boys were busy with the new-comers.
Marmeladov paying no attention to the new arrivals continued his story.
He appeared by now to be extremely weak, but as he became more and more
drunk, he became more and more talkative. The recollection of his
recent success in getting the situation seemed to revive him, and was
positively reflected in a sort of radiance on his face. Raskolnikov
listened attentively.

"That was five weeks ago, sir. Yes.... As soon as Katerina Ivanovna
and Sonia heard of it, mercy on us, it was as though I stepped into the
kingdom of Heaven. It used to be: you can lie like a beast, nothing but
abuse. Now they were walking on tiptoe, hushing the children. 'Semyon
Zaharovitch is tired with his work at the office, he is resting, shh!'
They made me coffee before I went to work and boiled cream for me! They
began to get real cream for me, do you hear that? And how they managed
to get together the money for a decent outfit--eleven roubles, fifty
copecks, I can't guess. Boots, cotton shirt-fronts--most magnificent,
a uniform, they got up all in splendid style, for eleven roubles and
a half. The first morning I came back from the office I found Katerina
Ivanovna had cooked two courses for dinner--soup and salt meat with
horse radish--which we had never dreamed of till then. She had not any
dresses... none at all, but she got herself up as though she were going
on a visit; and not that she'd anything to do it with, she smartened
herself up with nothing at all, she'd done her hair nicely, put on a
clean collar of some sort, cuffs, and there she was, quite a different
person, she was younger and better looking. Sonia, my little darling,
had only helped with money 'for the time,' she said, 'it won't do for me
to come and see you too often. After dark maybe when no one can see.' Do
you hear, do you hear? I lay down for a nap after dinner and what do you
think: though Katerina Ivanovna had quarrelled to the last degree with
our landlady Amalia Fyodorovna only a week before, she could not
resist then asking her in to coffee. For two hours they were sitting,
whispering together. 'Semyon Zaharovitch is in the service again,
now, and receiving a salary,' says she, 'and he went himself to his
excellency and his excellency himself came out to him, made all the
others wait and led Semyon Zaharovitch by the hand before everybody into
his study.' Do you hear, do you hear? 'To be sure,' says he, 'Semyon
Zaharovitch, remembering your past services,' says he, 'and in spite
of your propensity to that foolish weakness, since you promise now and
since moreover we've got on badly without you,' (do you hear, do you
hear;) 'and so,' says he, 'I rely now on your word as a gentleman.' And
all that, let me tell you, she has simply made up for herself, and not
simply out of wantonness, for the sake of bragging; no, she believes it
all herself, she amuses herself with her own fancies, upon my word she
does! And I don't blame her for it, no, I don't blame her!... Six days
ago when I brought her my first earnings in full--twenty-three roubles
forty copecks altogether--she called me her poppet: 'poppet,' said she,
'my little poppet.' And when we were by ourselves, you understand?
You would not think me a beauty, you would not think much of me as a
husband, would you?... Well, she pinched my cheek, 'my little poppet,'
said she."

Marmeladov broke off, tried to smile, but suddenly his chin began
to twitch. He controlled himself however. The tavern, the degraded
appearance of the man, the five nights in the hay barge, and the pot of
spirits, and yet this poignant love for his wife and children bewildered
his listener. Raskolnikov listened intently but with a sick sensation.
He felt vexed that he had come here.

"Honoured sir, honoured sir," cried Marmeladov recovering himself--"Oh,
sir, perhaps all this seems a laughing matter to you, as it does to
others, and perhaps I am only worrying you with the stupidity of all the
trivial details of my home life, but it is not a laughing matter to me.
For I can feel it all.... And the whole of that heavenly day of my life
and the whole of that evening I passed in fleeting dreams of how I would
arrange it all, and how I would dress all the children, and how I should
give her rest, and how I should rescue my own daughter from dishonour
and restore her to the bosom of her family.... And a great deal more....
Quite excusable, sir. Well, then, sir" (Marmeladov suddenly gave a sort
of start, raised his head and gazed intently at his listener) "well, on
the very next day after all those dreams, that is to say, exactly five
days ago, in the evening, by a cunning trick, like a thief in the night,
I stole from Katerina Ivanovna the key of her box, took out what was
left of my earnings, how much it was I have forgotten, and now look
at me, all of you! It's the fifth day since I left home, and they are
looking for me there and it's the end of my employment, and my uniform
is lying in a tavern on the Egyptian bridge. I exchanged it for the
garments I have on... and it's the end of everything!"

Marmeladov struck his forehead with his fist, clenched his teeth, closed
his eyes and leaned heavily with his elbow on the table. But a minute
later his face suddenly changed and with a certain assumed slyness and
affectation of bravado, he glanced at Raskolnikov, laughed and said:

"This morning I went to see Sonia, I went to ask her for a pick-me-up!
He-he-he!"

"You don't say she gave it to you?" cried one of the new-comers; he
shouted the words and went off into a guffaw.

"This very quart was bought with her money," Marmeladov declared,
addressing himself exclusively to Raskolnikov. "Thirty copecks she gave
me with her own hands, her last, all she had, as I saw.... She said
nothing, she only looked at me without a word.... Not on earth, but up
yonder... they grieve over men, they weep, but they don't blame them,
they don't blame them! But it hurts more, it hurts more when they don't
blame! Thirty copecks yes! And maybe she needs them now, eh? What do
you think, my dear sir? For now she's got to keep up her appearance. It
costs money, that smartness, that special smartness, you know? Do you
understand? And there's pomatum, too, you see, she must have things;
petticoats, starched ones, shoes, too, real jaunty ones to show off her
foot when she has to step over a puddle. Do you understand, sir, do you
understand what all that smartness means? And here I, her own father,
here I took thirty copecks of that money for a drink! And I am drinking
it! And I have already drunk it! Come, who will have pity on a man like
me, eh? Are you sorry for me, sir, or not? Tell me, sir, are you sorry
or not? He-he-he!"

He would have filled his glass, but there was no drink left. The pot was
empty.

"What are you to be pitied for?" shouted the tavern-keeper who was again
near them.

Shouts of laughter and even oaths followed. The laughter and the oaths
came from those who were listening and also from those who had heard
nothing but were simply looking at the figure of the discharged
government clerk.

"To be pitied! Why am I to be pitied?" Marmeladov suddenly declaimed,
standing up with his arm outstretched, as though he had been only
waiting for that question.

"Why am I to be pitied, you say? Yes! there's nothing to pity me for! I
ought to be crucified, crucified on a cross, not pitied! Crucify me,
oh judge, crucify me but pity me! And then I will go of myself to be
crucified, for it's not merry-making I seek but tears and tribulation!...
Do you suppose, you that sell, that this pint of yours has been
sweet to me? It was tribulation I sought at the bottom of it, tears and
tribulation, and have found it, and I have tasted it; but He will pity
us Who has had pity on all men, Who has understood all men and all
things, He is the One, He too is the judge. He will come in that day
and He will ask: 'Where is the daughter who gave herself for her cross,
consumptive step-mother and for the little children of another? Where is
the daughter who had pity upon the filthy drunkard, her earthly father,
undismayed by his beastliness?' And He will say, 'Come to me! I have
already forgiven thee once.... I have forgiven thee once.... Thy sins
which are many are forgiven thee for thou hast loved much....' And he
will forgive my Sonia, He will forgive, I know it... I felt it in my
heart when I was with her just now! And He will judge and will forgive
all, the good and the evil, the wise and the meek.... And when He has
done with all of them, then He will summon us. 'You too come forth,'
He will say, 'Come forth ye drunkards, come forth, ye weak ones, come
forth, ye children of shame!' And we shall all come forth, without shame
and shall stand before him. And He will say unto us, 'Ye are swine, made
in the Image of the Beast and with his mark; but come ye also!' And the
wise ones and those of understanding will say, 'Oh Lord, why dost Thou
receive these men?' And He will say, 'This is why I receive them, oh ye
wise, this is why I receive them, oh ye of understanding, that not one
of them believed himself to be worthy of this.' And He will hold out His
hands to us and we shall fall down before him... and we shall weep...
and we shall understand all things! Then we shall understand all!... and
all will understand, Katerina Ivanovna even... she will understand....
Lord, Thy kingdom come!" And he sank down on the bench exhausted, and
helpless, looking at no one, apparently oblivious of his surroundings
and plunged in deep thought. His words had created a certain impression;
there was a moment of silence; but soon laughter and oaths were heard
again.

"That's his notion!"

"Talked himself silly!"

"A fine clerk he is!"

And so on, and so on.

"Let us go, sir," said Marmeladov all at once, raising his head and
addressing Raskolnikov--"come along with me... Kozel's house, looking
into the yard. I'm going to Katerina Ivanovna--time I did."

Raskolnikov had for some time been wanting to go and he had meant to
help him. Marmeladov was much unsteadier on his legs than in his speech
and leaned heavily on the young man. They had two or three hundred
paces to go. The drunken man was more and more overcome by dismay and
confusion as they drew nearer the house.

"It's not Katerina Ivanovna I am afraid of now," he muttered in
agitation--"and that she will begin pulling my hair. What does my hair
matter! Bother my hair! That's what I say! Indeed it will be better if
she does begin pulling it, that's not what I am afraid of... it's her
eyes I am afraid of... yes, her eyes... the red on her cheeks, too,
frightens me... and her breathing too.... Have you noticed how people
in that disease breathe... when they are excited? I am frightened of
the children's crying, too.... For if Sonia has not taken them food...
I don't know what's happened! I don't know! But blows I am not afraid
of.... Know, sir, that such blows are not a pain to me, but even an
enjoyment. In fact I can't get on without it.... It's better so. Let
her strike me, it relieves her heart... it's better so... There is the
house. The house of Kozel, the cabinet-maker... a German, well-to-do.
Lead the way!"

They went in from the yard and up to the fourth storey. The staircase
got darker and darker as they went up. It was nearly eleven o'clock
and although in summer in Petersburg there is no real night, yet it was
quite dark at the top of the stairs.

A grimy little door at the very top of the stairs stood ajar. A very
poor-looking room about ten paces long was lighted up by a candle-end;
the whole of it was visible from the entrance. It was all in disorder,
littered up with rags of all sorts, especially children's garments.
Across the furthest corner was stretched a ragged sheet. Behind it
probably was the bed. There was nothing in the room except two chairs
and a sofa covered with American leather, full of holes, before which
stood an old deal kitchen-table, unpainted and uncovered. At the edge
of the table stood a smoldering tallow-candle in an iron candlestick. It
appeared that the family had a room to themselves, not part of a room,
but their room was practically a passage. The door leading to the other
rooms, or rather cupboards, into which Amalia Lippevechsel's flat was
divided stood half open, and there was shouting, uproar and laughter
within. People seemed to be playing cards and drinking tea there. Words
of the most unceremonious kind flew out from time to time.

Raskolnikov recognised Katerina Ivanovna at once. She was a rather tall,
slim and graceful woman, terribly emaciated, with magnificent dark brown
hair and with a hectic flush in her cheeks. She was pacing up and down
in her little room, pressing her hands against her chest; her lips
were parched and her breathing came in nervous broken gasps. Her eyes
glittered as in fever and looked about with a harsh immovable stare. And
that consumptive and excited face with the last flickering light of the
candle-end playing upon it made a sickening impression. She seemed to
Raskolnikov about thirty years old and was certainly a strange wife for
Marmeladov.... She had not heard them and did not notice them coming in.
She seemed to be lost in thought, hearing and seeing nothing. The room
was close, but she had not opened the window; a stench rose from the
staircase, but the door on to the stairs was not closed. From the inner
rooms clouds of tobacco smoke floated in, she kept coughing, but did not
close the door. The youngest child, a girl of six, was asleep, sitting
curled up on the floor with her head on the sofa. A boy a year older
stood crying and shaking in the corner, probably he had just had a
beating. Beside him stood a girl of nine years old, tall and thin,
wearing a thin and ragged chemise with an ancient cashmere pelisse flung
over her bare shoulders, long outgrown and barely reaching her knees.
Her arm, as thin as a stick, was round her brother's neck. She was
trying to comfort him, whispering something to him, and doing all she
could to keep him from whimpering again. At the same time her large
dark eyes, which looked larger still from the thinness of her frightened
face, were watching her mother with alarm. Marmeladov did not enter the
door, but dropped on his knees in the very doorway, pushing Raskolnikov
in front of him. The woman seeing a stranger stopped indifferently
facing him, coming to herself for a moment and apparently wondering what
he had come for. But evidently she decided that he was going into
the next room, as he had to pass through hers to get there. Taking no
further notice of him, she walked towards the outer door to close it
and uttered a sudden scream on seeing her husband on his knees in the
doorway.

"Ah!" she cried out in a frenzy, "he has come back! The criminal! the
monster!... And where is the money? What's in your pocket, show me! And
your clothes are all different! Where are your clothes? Where is the
money! Speak!"

And she fell to searching him. Marmeladov submissively and obediently
held up both arms to facilitate the search. Not a farthing was there.

"Where is the money?" she cried--"Mercy on us, can he have drunk it all?
There were twelve silver roubles left in the chest!" and in a fury
she seized him by the hair and dragged him into the room. Marmeladov
seconded her efforts by meekly crawling along on his knees.

"And this is a consolation to me! This does not hurt me, but is a
positive con-so-la-tion, ho-nou-red sir," he called out, shaken to and
fro by his hair and even once striking the ground with his forehead.
The child asleep on the floor woke up, and began to cry. The boy in the
corner losing all control began trembling and screaming and rushed
to his sister in violent terror, almost in a fit. The eldest girl was
shaking like a leaf.

"He's drunk it! he's drunk it all," the poor woman screamed in
despair--"and his clothes are gone! And they are hungry, hungry!"--and
wringing her hands she pointed to the children. "Oh, accursed life!
And you, are you not ashamed?"--she pounced all at once upon
Raskolnikov--"from the tavern! Have you been drinking with him? You have
been drinking with him, too! Go away!"

The young man was hastening away without uttering a word. The inner door
was thrown wide open and inquisitive faces were peering in at it. Coarse
laughing faces with pipes and cigarettes and heads wearing caps thrust
themselves in at the doorway. Further in could be seen figures in
dressing gowns flung open, in costumes of unseemly scantiness, some of
them with cards in their hands. They were particularly diverted, when
Marmeladov, dragged about by his hair, shouted that it was a consolation
to him. They even began to come into the room; at last a sinister shrill
outcry was heard: this came from Amalia Lippevechsel herself pushing her
way amongst them and trying to restore order after her own fashion and
for the hundredth time to frighten the poor woman by ordering her
with coarse abuse to clear out of the room next day. As he went out,
Raskolnikov had time to put his hand into his pocket, to snatch up the
coppers he had received in exchange for his rouble in the tavern and to
lay them unnoticed on the window. Afterwards on the stairs, he changed
his mind and would have gone back.

"What a stupid thing I've done," he thought to himself, "they have Sonia
and I want it myself." But reflecting that it would be impossible to
take it back now and that in any case he would not have taken it, he
dismissed it with a wave of his hand and went back to his lodging.
"Sonia wants pomatum too," he said as he walked along the street, and he
laughed malignantly--"such smartness costs money.... Hm! And maybe Sonia
herself will be bankrupt to-day, for there is always a risk, hunting
big game... digging for gold... then they would all be without a crust
to-morrow except for my money. Hurrah for Sonia! What a mine they've dug
there! And they're making the most of it! Yes, they are making the most
of it! They've wept over it and grown used to it. Man grows used to
everything, the scoundrel!"

He sank into thought.

"And what if I am wrong," he cried suddenly after a moment's thought.
"What if man is not really a scoundrel, man in general, I mean, the
whole race of mankind--then all the rest is prejudice, simply artificial
terrors and there are no barriers and it's all as it should be."



CHAPTER III

He waked up late next day after a broken sleep. But his sleep had not
refreshed him; he waked up bilious, irritable, ill-tempered, and looked
with hatred at his room. It was a tiny cupboard of a room about six
paces in length. It had a poverty-stricken appearance with its dusty
yellow paper peeling off the walls, and it was so low-pitched that a man
of more than average height was ill at ease in it and felt every moment
that he would knock his head against the ceiling. The furniture was in
keeping with the room: there were three old chairs, rather rickety; a
painted table in the corner on which lay a few manuscripts and books;
the dust that lay thick upon them showed that they had been long
untouched. A big clumsy sofa occupied almost the whole of one wall and
half the floor space of the room; it was once covered with chintz, but
was now in rags and served Raskolnikov as a bed. Often he went to sleep
on it, as he was, without undressing, without sheets, wrapped in his old
student's overcoat, with his head on one little pillow, under which he
heaped up all the linen he had, clean and dirty, by way of a bolster. A
little table stood in front of the sofa.

It would have been difficult to sink to a lower ebb of disorder, but to
Raskolnikov in his present state of mind this was positively agreeable.
He had got completely away from everyone, like a tortoise in its shell,
and even the sight of a servant girl who had to wait upon him and looked
sometimes into his room made him writhe with nervous irritation. He was
in the condition that overtakes some monomaniacs entirely concentrated
upon one thing. His landlady had for the last fortnight given up sending
him in meals, and he had not yet thought of expostulating with her,
though he went without his dinner. Nastasya, the cook and only servant,
was rather pleased at the lodger's mood and had entirely given up
sweeping and doing his room, only once a week or so she would stray into
his room with a broom. She waked him up that day.

"Get up, why are you asleep?" she called to him. "It's past nine, I have
brought you some tea; will you have a cup? I should think you're fairly
starving?"

Raskolnikov opened his eyes, started and recognised Nastasya.

"From the landlady, eh?" he asked, slowly and with a sickly face sitting
up on the sofa.

"From the landlady, indeed!"

She set before him her own cracked teapot full of weak and stale tea and
laid two yellow lumps of sugar by the side of it.

"Here, Nastasya, take it please," he said, fumbling in his pocket (for
he had slept in his clothes) and taking out a handful of coppers--"run
and buy me a loaf. And get me a little sausage, the cheapest, at the
pork-butcher's."

"The loaf I'll fetch you this very minute, but wouldn't you rather have
some cabbage soup instead of sausage? It's capital soup, yesterday's. I
saved it for you yesterday, but you came in late. It's fine soup."

When the soup had been brought, and he had begun upon it, Nastasya
sat down beside him on the sofa and began chatting. She was a country
peasant-woman and a very talkative one.

"Praskovya Pavlovna means to complain to the police about you," she
said.

He scowled.

"To the police? What does she want?"

"You don't pay her money and you won't turn out of the room. That's what
she wants, to be sure."

"The devil, that's the last straw," he muttered, grinding his teeth,
"no, that would not suit me... just now. She is a fool," he added aloud.
"I'll go and talk to her to-day."

"Fool she is and no mistake, just as I am. But why, if you are so
clever, do you lie here like a sack and have nothing to show for it? One
time you used to go out, you say, to teach children. But why is it you
do nothing now?"

"I am doing..." Raskolnikov began sullenly and reluctantly.

"What are you doing?"

"Work..."

"What sort of work?"

"I am thinking," he answered seriously after a pause.

Nastasya was overcome with a fit of laughter. She was given to laughter
and when anything amused her, she laughed inaudibly, quivering and
shaking all over till she felt ill.

"And have you made much money by your thinking?" she managed to
articulate at last.

"One can't go out to give lessons without boots. And I'm sick of it."

"Don't quarrel with your bread and butter."

"They pay so little for lessons. What's the use of a few coppers?" he
answered, reluctantly, as though replying to his own thought.

"And you want to get a fortune all at once?"

He looked at her strangely.

"Yes, I want a fortune," he answered firmly, after a brief pause.

"Don't be in such a hurry, you quite frighten me! Shall I get you the
loaf or not?"

"As you please."

"Ah, I forgot! A letter came for you yesterday when you were out."

"A letter? for me! from whom?"

"I can't say. I gave three copecks of my own to the postman for it. Will
you pay me back?"

"Then bring it to me, for God's sake, bring it," cried Raskolnikov
greatly excited--"good God!"

A minute later the letter was brought him. That was it: from his mother,
from the province of R----. He turned pale when he took it. It was a
long while since he had received a letter, but another feeling also
suddenly stabbed his heart.

"Nastasya, leave me alone, for goodness' sake; here are your three
copecks, but for goodness' sake, make haste and go!"

The letter was quivering in his hand; he did not want to open it in her
presence; he wanted to be left _alone_ with this letter. When Nastasya
had gone out, he lifted it quickly to his lips and kissed it; then he
gazed intently at the address, the small, sloping handwriting, so dear
and familiar, of the mother who had once taught him to read and write.
He delayed; he seemed almost afraid of something. At last he opened it;
it was a thick heavy letter, weighing over two ounces, two large sheets
of note paper were covered with very small handwriting.

"My dear Rodya," wrote his mother--"it's two months since I last had a
talk with you by letter which has distressed me and even kept me
awake at night, thinking. But I am sure you will not blame me for my
inevitable silence. You know how I love you; you are all we have to look
to, Dounia and I, you are our all, our one hope, our one stay. What a
grief it was to me when I heard that you had given up the university
some months ago, for want of means to keep yourself and that you had
lost your lessons and your other work! How could I help you out of my
hundred and twenty roubles a year pension? The fifteen roubles I sent
you four months ago I borrowed, as you know, on security of my pension,
from Vassily Ivanovitch Vahrushin a merchant of this town. He is a
kind-hearted man and was a friend of your father's too. But having given
him the right to receive the pension, I had to wait till the debt was
paid off and that is only just done, so that I've been unable to send
you anything all this time. But now, thank God, I believe I shall
be able to send you something more and in fact we may congratulate
ourselves on our good fortune now, of which I hasten to inform you. In
the first place, would you have guessed, dear Rodya, that your sister
has been living with me for the last six weeks and we shall not be
separated in the future. Thank God, her sufferings are over, but I will
tell you everything in order, so that you may know just how everything
has happened and all that we have hitherto concealed from you. When you
wrote to me two months ago that you had heard that Dounia had a great
deal to put up with in the Svidrigraïlovs' house, when you wrote that
and asked me to tell you all about it--what could I write in answer to
you? If I had written the whole truth to you, I dare say you would have
thrown up everything and have come to us, even if you had to walk all
the way, for I know your character and your feelings, and you would not
let your sister be insulted. I was in despair myself, but what could I
do? And, besides, I did not know the whole truth myself then. What
made it all so difficult was that Dounia received a hundred roubles
in advance when she took the place as governess in their family, on
condition of part of her salary being deducted every month, and so it
was impossible to throw up the situation without repaying the debt.
This sum (now I can explain it all to you, my precious Rodya) she took
chiefly in order to send you sixty roubles, which you needed so terribly
then and which you received from us last year. We deceived you then,
writing that this money came from Dounia's savings, but that was not
so, and now I tell you all about it, because, thank God, things have
suddenly changed for the better, and that you may know how Dounia loves
you and what a heart she has. At first indeed Mr. Svidrigaïlov treated
her very rudely and used to make disrespectful and jeering remarks at
table.... But I don't want to go into all those painful details, so as
not to worry you for nothing when it is now all over. In short, in spite
of the kind and generous behaviour of Marfa Petrovna, Mr. Svidrigaïlov's
wife, and all the rest of the household, Dounia had a very hard time,
especially when Mr. Svidrigaïlov, relapsing into his old regimental
habits, was under the influence of Bacchus. And how do you think it
was all explained later on? Would you believe that the crazy fellow had
conceived a passion for Dounia from the beginning, but had concealed
it under a show of rudeness and contempt. Possibly he was ashamed and
horrified himself at his own flighty hopes, considering his years and
his being the father of a family; and that made him angry with Dounia.
And possibly, too, he hoped by his rude and sneering behaviour to hide
the truth from others. But at last he lost all control and had the face
to make Dounia an open and shameful proposal, promising her all sorts of
inducements and offering, besides, to throw up everything and take her
to another estate of his, or even abroad. You can imagine all she went
through! To leave her situation at once was impossible not only on
account of the money debt, but also to spare the feelings of Marfa
Petrovna, whose suspicions would have been aroused: and then Dounia
would have been the cause of a rupture in the family. And it would
have meant a terrible scandal for Dounia too; that would have been
inevitable. There were various other reasons owing to which Dounia could
not hope to escape from that awful house for another six weeks. You know
Dounia, of course; you know how clever she is and what a strong will she
has. Dounia can endure a great deal and even in the most difficult cases
she has the fortitude to maintain her firmness. She did not even write
to me about everything for fear of upsetting me, although we were
constantly in communication. It all ended very unexpectedly. Marfa
Petrovna accidentally overheard her husband imploring Dounia in the
garden, and, putting quite a wrong interpretation on the position, threw
the blame upon her, believing her to be the cause of it all. An awful
scene took place between them on the spot in the garden; Marfa Petrovna
went so far as to strike Dounia, refused to hear anything and was
shouting at her for a whole hour and then gave orders that Dounia should
be packed off at once to me in a plain peasant's cart, into which they
flung all her things, her linen and her clothes, all pell-mell, without
folding it up and packing it. And a heavy shower of rain came on, too,
and Dounia, insulted and put to shame, had to drive with a peasant in an
open cart all the seventeen versts into town. Only think now what answer
could I have sent to the letter I received from you two months ago and
what could I have written? I was in despair; I dared not write to
you the truth because you would have been very unhappy, mortified
and indignant, and yet what could you do? You could only perhaps ruin
yourself, and, besides, Dounia would not allow it; and fill up my letter
with trifles when my heart was so full of sorrow, I could not. For a
whole month the town was full of gossip about this scandal, and it came
to such a pass that Dounia and I dared not even go to church on account
of the contemptuous looks, whispers, and even remarks made aloud about
us. All our acquaintances avoided us, nobody even bowed to us in the
street, and I learnt that some shopmen and clerks were intending to
insult us in a shameful way, smearing the gates of our house with pitch,
so that the landlord began to tell us we must leave. All this was set
going by Marfa Petrovna who managed to slander Dounia and throw dirt at
her in every family. She knows everyone in the neighbourhood, and that
month she was continually coming into the town, and as she is
rather talkative and fond of gossiping about her family affairs and
particularly of complaining to all and each of her husband--which is not
at all right--so in a short time she had spread her story not only in
the town, but over the whole surrounding district. It made me ill, but
Dounia bore it better than I did, and if only you could have seen how
she endured it all and tried to comfort me and cheer me up! She is
an angel! But by God's mercy, our sufferings were cut short: Mr.
Svidrigaïlov returned to his senses and repented and, probably
feeling sorry for Dounia, he laid before Marfa Petrovna a complete and
unmistakable proof of Dounia's innocence, in the form of a letter Dounia
had been forced to write and give to him, before Marfa Petrovna
came upon them in the garden. This letter, which remained in Mr.
Svidrigaïlov's hands after her departure, she had written to refuse
personal explanations and secret interviews, for which he was entreating
her. In that letter she reproached him with great heat and indignation
for the baseness of his behaviour in regard to Marfa Petrovna, reminding
him that he was the father and head of a family and telling him how
infamous it was of him to torment and make unhappy a defenceless girl,
unhappy enough already. Indeed, dear Rodya, the letter was so nobly and
touchingly written that I sobbed when I read it and to this day I cannot
read it without tears. Moreover, the evidence of the servants, too,
cleared Dounia's reputation; they had seen and known a great deal more
than Mr. Svidrigaïlov had himself supposed--as indeed is always the case
with servants. Marfa Petrovna was completely taken aback, and 'again
crushed' as she said herself to us, but she was completely convinced of
Dounia's innocence. The very next day, being Sunday, she went straight
to the Cathedral, knelt down and prayed with tears to Our Lady to give
her strength to bear this new trial and to do her duty. Then she
came straight from the Cathedral to us, told us the whole story, wept
bitterly and, fully penitent, she embraced Dounia and besought her to
forgive her. The same morning without any delay, she went round to all
the houses in the town and everywhere, shedding tears, she asserted in
the most flattering terms Dounia's innocence and the nobility of
her feelings and her behavior. What was more, she showed and read to
everyone the letter in Dounia's own handwriting to Mr. Svidrigaïlov and
even allowed them to take copies of it--which I must say I think was
superfluous. In this way she was busy for several days in driving about
the whole town, because some people had taken offence through precedence
having been given to others. And therefore they had to take turns, so
that in every house she was expected before she arrived, and everyone
knew that on such and such a day Marfa Petrovna would be reading the
letter in such and such a place and people assembled for every reading
of it, even many who had heard it several times already both in their
own houses and in other people's. In my opinion a great deal, a very
great deal of all this was unnecessary; but that's Marfa Petrovna's
character. Anyway she succeeded in completely re-establishing Dounia's
reputation and the whole ignominy of this affair rested as an indelible
disgrace upon her husband, as the only person to blame, so that I really
began to feel sorry for him; it was really treating the crazy fellow too
harshly. Dounia was at once asked to give lessons in several families,
but she refused. All of a sudden everyone began to treat her with marked
respect and all this did much to bring about the event by which, one may
say, our whole fortunes are now transformed. You must know, dear Rodya,
that Dounia has a suitor and that she has already consented to marry
him. I hasten to tell you all about the matter, and though it has been
arranged without asking your consent, I think you will not be aggrieved
with me or with your sister on that account, for you will see that we
could not wait and put off our decision till we heard from you. And you
could not have judged all the facts without being on the spot. This
was how it happened. He is already of the rank of a counsellor, Pyotr
Petrovitch Luzhin, and is distantly related to Marfa Petrovna, who
has been very active in bringing the match about. It began with his
expressing through her his desire to make our acquaintance. He was
properly received, drank coffee with us and the very next day he sent
us a letter in which he very courteously made an offer and begged for a
speedy and decided answer. He is a very busy man and is in a great hurry
to get to Petersburg, so that every moment is precious to him. At first,
of course, we were greatly surprised, as it had all happened so quickly
and unexpectedly. We thought and talked it over the whole day. He is a
well-to-do man, to be depended upon, he has two posts in the government
and has already made his fortune. It is true that he is forty-five years
old, but he is of a fairly prepossessing appearance and might still be
thought attractive by women, and he is altogether a very respectable and
presentable man, only he seems a little morose and somewhat conceited.
But possibly that may only be the impression he makes at first sight.
And beware, dear Rodya, when he comes to Petersburg, as he shortly will
do, beware of judging him too hastily and severely, as your way is, if
there is anything you do not like in him at first sight. I give you this
warning, although I feel sure that he will make a favourable impression
upon you. Moreover, in order to understand any man one must be
deliberate and careful to avoid forming prejudices and mistaken ideas,
which are very difficult to correct and get over afterwards. And Pyotr
Petrovitch, judging by many indications, is a thoroughly estimable man.
At his first visit, indeed, he told us that he was a practical man, but
still he shares, as he expressed it, many of the convictions 'of our
most rising generation' and he is an opponent of all prejudices. He
said a good deal more, for he seems a little conceited and likes to be
listened to, but this is scarcely a vice. I, of course, understood very
little of it, but Dounia explained to me that, though he is not a man
of great education, he is clever and seems to be good-natured. You know
your sister's character, Rodya. She is a resolute, sensible, patient and
generous girl, but she has a passionate heart, as I know very well.
Of course, there is no great love either on his side, or on hers, but
Dounia is a clever girl and has the heart of an angel, and will make
it her duty to make her husband happy who on his side will make her
happiness his care. Of that we have no good reason to doubt, though it
must be admitted the matter has been arranged in great haste. Besides he
is a man of great prudence and he will see, to be sure, of himself, that
his own happiness will be the more secure, the happier Dounia is with
him. And as for some defects of character, for some habits and even
certain differences of opinion--which indeed are inevitable even in
the happiest marriages--Dounia has said that, as regards all that, she
relies on herself, that there is nothing to be uneasy about, and
that she is ready to put up with a great deal, if only their future
relationship can be an honourable and straightforward one. He struck me,
for instance, at first, as rather abrupt, but that may well come
from his being an outspoken man, and that is no doubt how it is. For
instance, at his second visit, after he had received Dounia's consent,
in the course of conversation, he declared that before making
Dounia's acquaintance, he had made up his mind to marry a girl of
good reputation, without dowry and, above all, one who had experienced
poverty, because, as he explained, a man ought not to be indebted to his
wife, but that it is better for a wife to look upon her husband as her
benefactor. I must add that he expressed it more nicely and politely
than I have done, for I have forgotten his actual phrases and only
remember the meaning. And, besides, it was obviously not said of design,
but slipped out in the heat of conversation, so that he tried afterwards
to correct himself and smooth it over, but all the same it did strike
me as somewhat rude, and I said so afterwards to Dounia. But Dounia was
vexed, and answered that 'words are not deeds,' and that, of course, is
perfectly true. Dounia did not sleep all night before she made up
her mind, and, thinking that I was asleep, she got out of bed and was
walking up and down the room all night; at last she knelt down before
the ikon and prayed long and fervently and in the morning she told me
that she had decided.

"I have mentioned already that Pyotr Petrovitch is just setting off for
Petersburg, where he has a great deal of business, and he wants to open
a legal bureau. He has been occupied for many years in conducting civil
and commercial litigation, and only the other day he won an important
case. He has to be in Petersburg because he has an important case before
the Senate. So, Rodya dear, he may be of the greatest use to you, in
every way indeed, and Dounia and I have agreed that from this very day
you could definitely enter upon your career and might consider that
your future is marked out and assured for you. Oh, if only this comes to
pass! This would be such a benefit that we could only look upon it as a
providential blessing. Dounia is dreaming of nothing else. We have even
ventured already to drop a few words on the subject to Pyotr Petrovitch.
He was cautious in his answer, and said that, of course, as he could not
get on without a secretary, it would be better to be paying a salary to
a relation than to a stranger, if only the former were fitted for the
duties (as though there could be doubt of your being fitted!) but then
he expressed doubts whether your studies at the university would leave
you time for work at his office. The matter dropped for the time, but
Dounia is thinking of nothing else now. She has been in a sort of fever
for the last few days, and has already made a regular plan for
your becoming in the end an associate and even a partner in Pyotr
Petrovitch's business, which might well be, seeing that you are a
student of law. I am in complete agreement with her, Rodya, and share
all her plans and hopes, and think there is every probability of
realising them. And in spite of Pyotr Petrovitch's evasiveness, very
natural at present (since he does not know you), Dounia is firmly
persuaded that she will gain everything by her good influence over her
future husband; this she is reckoning upon. Of course we are careful
not to talk of any of these more remote plans to Pyotr Petrovitch,
especially of your becoming his partner. He is a practical man and might
take this very coldly, it might all seem to him simply a day-dream. Nor
has either Dounia or I breathed a word to him of the great hopes we have
of his helping us to pay for your university studies; we have not spoken
of it in the first place, because it will come to pass of itself,
later on, and he will no doubt without wasting words offer to do it of
himself, (as though he could refuse Dounia that) the more readily since
you may by your own efforts become his right hand in the office, and
receive this assistance not as a charity, but as a salary earned by your
own work. Dounia wants to arrange it all like this and I quite agree
with her. And we have not spoken of our plans for another reason, that
is, because I particularly wanted you to feel on an equal footing when
you first meet him. When Dounia spoke to him with enthusiasm about
you, he answered that one could never judge of a man without seeing
him close, for oneself, and that he looked forward to forming his own
opinion when he makes your acquaintance. Do you know, my precious
Rodya, I think that perhaps for some reasons (nothing to do with Pyotr
Petrovitch though, simply for my own personal, perhaps old-womanish,
fancies) I should do better to go on living by myself, apart, than with
them, after the wedding. I am convinced that he will be generous and
delicate enough to invite me and to urge me to remain with my daughter
for the future, and if he has said nothing about it hitherto, it is
simply because it has been taken for granted; but I shall refuse. I have
noticed more than once in my life that husbands don't quite get on with
their mothers-in-law, and I don't want to be the least bit in anyone's
way, and for my own sake, too, would rather be quite independent, so
long as I have a crust of bread of my own, and such children as you and
Dounia. If possible, I would settle somewhere near you, for the most
joyful piece of news, dear Rodya, I have kept for the end of my letter:
know then, my dear boy, that we may, perhaps, be all together in a
very short time and may embrace one another again after a separation of
almost three years! It is settled _for certain_ that Dounia and I are to
set off for Petersburg, exactly when I don't know, but very, very soon,
possibly in a week. It all depends on Pyotr Petrovitch who will let us
know when he has had time to look round him in Petersburg. To suit his
own arrangements he is anxious to have the ceremony as soon as possible,
even before the fast of Our Lady, if it could be managed, or if that is
too soon to be ready, immediately after. Oh, with what happiness I shall
press you to my heart! Dounia is all excitement at the joyful thought
of seeing you, she said one day in joke that she would be ready to marry
Pyotr Petrovitch for that alone. She is an angel! She is not writing
anything to you now, and has only told me to write that she has so much,
so much to tell you that she is not going to take up her pen now, for
a few lines would tell you nothing, and it would only mean upsetting
herself; she bids me send you her love and innumerable kisses. But
although we shall be meeting so soon, perhaps I shall send you as much
money as I can in a day or two. Now that everyone has heard that Dounia
is to marry Pyotr Petrovitch, my credit has suddenly improved and I know
that Afanasy Ivanovitch will trust me now even to seventy-five roubles
on the security of my pension, so that perhaps I shall be able to send
you twenty-five or even thirty roubles. I would send you more, but I am
uneasy about our travelling expenses; for though Pyotr Petrovitch has
been so kind as to undertake part of the expenses of the journey, that
is to say, he has taken upon himself the conveyance of our bags and big
trunk (which will be conveyed through some acquaintances of his), we
must reckon upon some expense on our arrival in Petersburg, where we
can't be left without a halfpenny, at least for the first few days. But
we have calculated it all, Dounia and I, to the last penny, and we see
that the journey will not cost very much. It is only ninety versts from
us to the railway and we have come to an agreement with a driver we
know, so as to be in readiness; and from there Dounia and I can travel
quite comfortably third class. So that I may very likely be able to send
to you not twenty-five, but thirty roubles. But enough; I have covered
two sheets already and there is no space left for more; our whole
history, but so many events have happened! And now, my precious Rodya,
I embrace you and send you a mother's blessing till we meet. Love Dounia
your sister, Rodya; love her as she loves you and understand that she
loves you beyond everything, more than herself. She is an angel and you,
Rodya, you are everything to us--our one hope, our one consolation. If
only you are happy, we shall be happy. Do you still say your prayers,
Rodya, and believe in the mercy of our Creator and our Redeemer? I am
afraid in my heart that you may have been visited by the new spirit of
infidelity that is abroad to-day; If it is so, I pray for you. Remember,
dear boy, how in your childhood, when your father was living, you used
to lisp your prayers at my knee, and how happy we all were in those
days. Good-bye, till we meet then--I embrace you warmly, warmly, with
many kisses.

"Yours till death,

"PULCHERIA RASKOLNIKOV."


Almost from the first, while he read the letter, Raskolnikov's face was
wet with tears; but when he finished it, his face was pale and distorted
and a bitter, wrathful and malignant smile was on his lips. He laid his
head down on his threadbare dirty pillow and pondered, pondered a long
time. His heart was beating violently, and his brain was in a turmoil.
At last he felt cramped and stifled in the little yellow room that was
like a cupboard or a box. His eyes and his mind craved for space. He
took up his hat and went out, this time without dread of meeting
anyone; he had forgotten his dread. He turned in the direction of the
Vassilyevsky Ostrov, walking along Vassilyevsky Prospect, as though
hastening on some business, but he walked, as his habit was, without
noticing his way, muttering and even speaking aloud to himself, to the
astonishment of the passers-by. Many of them took him to be drunk.



CHAPTER IV

His mother's letter had been a torture to him, but as regards the chief
fact in it, he had felt not one moment's hesitation, even whilst he was
reading the letter. The essential question was settled, and irrevocably
settled, in his mind: "Never such a marriage while I am alive and
Mr. Luzhin be damned!" "The thing is perfectly clear," he muttered
to himself, with a malignant smile anticipating the triumph of his
decision. "No, mother, no, Dounia, you won't deceive me! and then they
apologise for not asking my advice and for taking the decision without
me! I dare say! They imagine it is arranged now and can't be broken
off; but we will see whether it can or not! A magnificent excuse:
'Pyotr Petrovitch is such a busy man that even his wedding has to be in
post-haste, almost by express.' No, Dounia, I see it all and I know what
you want to say to me; and I know too what you were thinking about, when
you walked up and down all night, and what your prayers were like before
the Holy Mother of Kazan who stands in mother's bedroom. Bitter is
the ascent to Golgotha.... Hm... so it is finally settled; you have
determined to marry a sensible business man, Avdotya Romanovna, one
who has a fortune (has _already_ made his fortune, that is so much
more solid and impressive) a man who holds two government posts and who
shares the ideas of our most rising generation, as mother writes, and
who _seems_ to be kind, as Dounia herself observes. That _seems_ beats
everything! And that very Dounia for that very '_seems_' is marrying
him! Splendid! splendid!

"... But I should like to know why mother has written to me about 'our
most rising generation'? Simply as a descriptive touch, or with the idea
of prepossessing me in favour of Mr. Luzhin? Oh, the cunning of them!
I should like to know one thing more: how far they were open with one
another that day and night and all this time since? Was it all put into
_words_, or did both understand that they had the same thing at heart
and in their minds, so that there was no need to speak of it aloud, and
better not to speak of it. Most likely it was partly like that, from
mother's letter it's evident: he struck her as rude _a little_, and
mother in her simplicity took her observations to Dounia. And she was
sure to be vexed and 'answered her angrily.' I should think so! Who
would not be angered when it was quite clear without any naïve questions
and when it was understood that it was useless to discuss it. And why
does she write to me, 'love Dounia, Rodya, and she loves you more than
herself'? Has she a secret conscience-prick at sacrificing her daughter
to her son? 'You are our one comfort, you are everything to us.' Oh,
mother!"

His bitterness grew more and more intense, and if he had happened to
meet Mr. Luzhin at the moment, he might have murdered him.

"Hm... yes, that's true," he continued, pursuing the whirling ideas that
chased each other in his brain, "it is true that 'it needs time and care
to get to know a man,' but there is no mistake about Mr. Luzhin. The
chief thing is he is 'a man of business and _seems_ kind,' that was
something, wasn't it, to send the bags and big box for them! A kind man,
no doubt after that! But his _bride_ and her mother are to drive in a
peasant's cart covered with sacking (I know, I have been driven in
it). No matter! It is only ninety versts and then they can 'travel very
comfortably, third class,' for a thousand versts! Quite right, too. One
must cut one's coat according to one's cloth, but what about you, Mr.
Luzhin? She is your bride.... And you must be aware that her mother has
to raise money on her pension for the journey. To be sure it's a matter
of business, a partnership for mutual benefit, with equal shares and
expenses;--food and drink provided, but pay for your tobacco. The
business man has got the better of them, too. The luggage will cost less
than their fares and very likely go for nothing. How is it that they
don't both see all that, or is it that they don't want to see? And
they are pleased, pleased! And to think that this is only the first
blossoming, and that the real fruits are to come! But what really
matters is not the stinginess, is not the meanness, but the _tone_
of the whole thing. For that will be the tone after marriage, it's a
foretaste of it. And mother too, why should she be so lavish? What will
she have by the time she gets to Petersburg? Three silver roubles or
two 'paper ones' as _she_ says.... that old woman... hm. What does
she expect to live upon in Petersburg afterwards? She has her reasons
already for guessing that she _could not_ live with Dounia after the
marriage, even for the first few months. The good man has no doubt let
slip something on that subject also, though mother would deny it: 'I
shall refuse,' says she. On whom is she reckoning then? Is she counting
on what is left of her hundred and twenty roubles of pension when
Afanasy Ivanovitch's debt is paid? She knits woollen shawls and
embroiders cuffs, ruining her old eyes. And all her shawls don't add
more than twenty roubles a year to her hundred and twenty, I know
that. So she is building all her hopes all the time on Mr. Luzhin's
generosity; 'he will offer it of himself, he will press it on me.'
You may wait a long time for that! That's how it always is with these
Schilleresque noble hearts; till the last moment every goose is a swan
with them, till the last moment, they hope for the best and will see
nothing wrong, and although they have an inkling of the other side of
the picture, yet they won't face the truth till they are forced to; the
very thought of it makes them shiver; they thrust the truth away with
both hands, until the man they deck out in false colours puts a fool's
cap on them with his own hands. I should like to know whether Mr. Luzhin
has any orders of merit; I bet he has the Anna in his buttonhole and
that he puts it on when he goes to dine with contractors or merchants.
He will be sure to have it for his wedding, too! Enough of him, confound
him!

"Well,... mother I don't wonder at, it's like her, God bless her, but
how could Dounia? Dounia darling, as though I did not know you! You were
nearly twenty when I saw you last: I understood you then. Mother writes
that 'Dounia can put up with a great deal.' I know that very well. I
knew that two years and a half ago, and for the last two and a half
years I have been thinking about it, thinking of just that, that 'Dounia
can put up with a great deal.' If she could put up with Mr. Svidrigaïlov
and all the rest of it, she certainly can put up with a great deal. And
now mother and she have taken it into their heads that she can put up
with Mr. Luzhin, who propounds the theory of the superiority of
wives raised from destitution and owing everything to their husband's
bounty--who propounds it, too, almost at the first interview. Granted
that he 'let it slip,' though he is a sensible man, (yet maybe it
was not a slip at all, but he meant to make himself clear as soon as
possible) but Dounia, Dounia? She understands the man, of course, but
she will have to live with the man. Why! she'd live on black bread
and water, she would not sell her soul, she would not barter her moral
freedom for comfort; she would not barter it for all Schleswig-Holstein,
much less Mr. Luzhin's money. No, Dounia was not that sort when I knew
her and... she is still the same, of course! Yes, there's no denying,
the Svidrigaïlovs are a bitter pill! It's a bitter thing to spend one's
life a governess in the provinces for two hundred roubles, but I know
she would rather be a nigger on a plantation or a Lett with a German
master than degrade her soul, and her moral dignity, by binding herself
for ever to a man whom she does not respect and with whom she has
nothing in common--for her own advantage. And if Mr. Luzhin had been of
unalloyed gold, or one huge diamond, she would never have consented to
become his legal concubine. Why is she consenting then? What's the
point of it? What's the answer? It's clear enough: for herself, for her
comfort, to save her life she would not sell herself, but for someone
else she is doing it! For one she loves, for one she adores, she will
sell herself! That's what it all amounts to; for her brother, for her
mother, she will sell herself! She will sell everything! In such cases,
'we overcome our moral feeling if necessary,' freedom, peace, conscience
even, all, all are brought into the market. Let my life go, if only my
dear ones may be happy! More than that, we become casuists, we learn
to be Jesuitical and for a time maybe we can soothe ourselves, we can
persuade ourselves that it is one's duty for a good object. That's just
like us, it's as clear as daylight. It's clear that Rodion Romanovitch
Raskolnikov is the central figure in the business, and no one else. Oh,
yes, she can ensure his happiness, keep him in the university, make him
a partner in the office, make his whole future secure; perhaps he may
even be a rich man later on, prosperous, respected, and may even end his
life a famous man! But my mother? It's all Rodya, precious Rodya, her
first born! For such a son who would not sacrifice such a daughter! Oh,
loving, over-partial hearts! Why, for his sake we would not shrink even
from Sonia's fate. Sonia, Sonia Marmeladov, the eternal victim so long
as the world lasts. Have you taken the measure of your sacrifice, both
of you? Is it right? Can you bear it? Is it any use? Is there sense in
it? And let me tell you, Dounia, Sonia's life is no worse than life with
Mr. Luzhin. 'There can be no question of love,' mother writes. And what
if there can be no respect either, if on the contrary there is aversion,
contempt, repulsion, what then? So you will have to 'keep up your
appearance,' too. Is not that so? Do you understand what that smartness
means? Do you understand that the Luzhin smartness is just the same
thing as Sonia's and may be worse, viler, baser, because in your case,
Dounia, it's a bargain for luxuries, after all, but with Sonia it's
simply a question of starvation. It has to be paid for, it has to be
paid for, Dounia, this smartness. And what if it's more than you can
bear afterwards, if you regret it? The bitterness, the misery, the
curses, the tears hidden from all the world, for you are not a Marfa
Petrovna. And how will your mother feel then? Even now she is uneasy,
she is worried, but then, when she sees it all clearly? And I? Yes,
indeed, what have you taken me for? I won't have your sacrifice, Dounia,
I won't have it, mother! It shall not be, so long as I am alive, it
shall not, it shall not! I won't accept it!"

He suddenly paused in his reflection and stood still.

"It shall not be? But what are you going to do to prevent it? You'll
forbid it? And what right have you? What can you promise them on your
side to give you such a right? Your whole life, your whole future, you
will devote to them _when you have finished your studies and obtained a
post_? Yes, we have heard all that before, and that's all _words_, but
now? Now something must be done, now, do you understand that? And
what are you doing now? You are living upon them. They borrow on their
hundred roubles pension. They borrow from the Svidrigaïlovs. How are
you going to save them from Svidrigaïlovs, from Afanasy Ivanovitch
Vahrushin, oh, future millionaire Zeus who would arrange their lives for
them? In another ten years? In another ten years, mother will be blind
with knitting shawls, maybe with weeping too. She will be worn to a
shadow with fasting; and my sister? Imagine for a moment what may have
become of your sister in ten years? What may happen to her during those
ten years? Can you fancy?"

So he tortured himself, fretting himself with such questions, and
finding a kind of enjoyment in it. And yet all these questions were not
new ones suddenly confronting him, they were old familiar aches. It was
long since they had first begun to grip and rend his heart. Long, long
ago his present anguish had its first beginnings; it had waxed and
gathered strength, it had matured and concentrated, until it had taken
the form of a fearful, frenzied and fantastic question, which tortured
his heart and mind, clamouring insistently for an answer. Now his
mother's letter had burst on him like a thunderclap. It was clear
that he must not now suffer passively, worrying himself over unsolved
questions, but that he must do something, do it at once, and do it
quickly. Anyway he must decide on something, or else...

"Or throw up life altogether!" he cried suddenly, in a frenzy--"accept
one's lot humbly as it is, once for all and stifle everything in
oneself, giving up all claim to activity, life and love!"

"Do you understand, sir, do you understand what it means when you have
absolutely nowhere to turn?" Marmeladov's question came suddenly into
his mind, "for every man must have somewhere to turn...."

He gave a sudden start; another thought, that he had had yesterday,
slipped back into his mind. But he did not start at the thought
recurring to him, for he knew, he had _felt beforehand_, that it must
come back, he was expecting it; besides it was not only yesterday's
thought. The difference was that a month ago, yesterday even, the
thought was a mere dream: but now... now it appeared not a dream at all,
it had taken a new menacing and quite unfamiliar shape, and he suddenly
became aware of this himself.... He felt a hammering in his head, and
there was a darkness before his eyes.

He looked round hurriedly, he was searching for something. He wanted
to sit down and was looking for a seat; he was walking along the K----
Boulevard. There was a seat about a hundred paces in front of him. He
walked towards it as fast he could; but on the way he met with a little
adventure which absorbed all his attention. Looking for the seat, he had
noticed a woman walking some twenty paces in front of him, but at first
he took no more notice of her than of other objects that crossed his
path. It had happened to him many times going home not to notice the
road by which he was going, and he was accustomed to walk like that. But
there was at first sight something so strange about the woman in front
of him, that gradually his attention was riveted upon her, at first
reluctantly and, as it were, resentfully, and then more and more
intently. He felt a sudden desire to find out what it was that was so
strange about the woman. In the first place, she appeared to be a girl
quite young, and she was walking in the great heat bareheaded and with
no parasol or gloves, waving her arms about in an absurd way. She had
on a dress of some light silky material, but put on strangely awry, not
properly hooked up, and torn open at the top of the skirt, close to the
waist: a great piece was rent and hanging loose. A little kerchief was
flung about her bare throat, but lay slanting on one side. The girl was
walking unsteadily, too, stumbling and staggering from side to side. She
drew Raskolnikov's whole attention at last. He overtook the girl at the
seat, but, on reaching it, she dropped down on it, in the corner;
she let her head sink on the back of the seat and closed her eyes,
apparently in extreme exhaustion. Looking at her closely, he saw at once
that she was completely drunk. It was a strange and shocking sight. He
could hardly believe that he was not mistaken. He saw before him the
face of a quite young, fair-haired girl--sixteen, perhaps not more than
fifteen, years old, pretty little face, but flushed and heavy looking
and, as it were, swollen. The girl seemed hardly to know what she was
doing; she crossed one leg over the other, lifting it indecorously, and
showed every sign of being unconscious that she was in the street.

Raskolnikov did not sit down, but he felt unwilling to leave her,
and stood facing her in perplexity. This boulevard was never much
frequented; and now, at two o'clock, in the stifling heat, it was quite
deserted. And yet on the further side of the boulevard, about fifteen
paces away, a gentleman was standing on the edge of the pavement. He,
too, would apparently have liked to approach the girl with some object
of his own. He, too, had probably seen her in the distance and had
followed her, but found Raskolnikov in his way. He looked angrily at
him, though he tried to escape his notice, and stood impatiently biding
his time, till the unwelcome man in rags should have moved away. His
intentions were unmistakable. The gentleman was a plump, thickly-set
man, about thirty, fashionably dressed, with a high colour, red lips and
moustaches. Raskolnikov felt furious; he had a sudden longing to insult
this fat dandy in some way. He left the girl for a moment and walked
towards the gentleman.

"Hey! You Svidrigaïlov! What do you want here?" he shouted, clenching
his fists and laughing, spluttering with rage.

"What do you mean?" the gentleman asked sternly, scowling in haughty
astonishment.

"Get away, that's what I mean."

"How dare you, you low fellow!"

He raised his cane. Raskolnikov rushed at him with his fists, without
reflecting that the stout gentleman was a match for two men like
himself. But at that instant someone seized him from behind, and a
police constable stood between them.

"That's enough, gentlemen, no fighting, please, in a public place. What
do you want? Who are you?" he asked Raskolnikov sternly, noticing his
rags.

Raskolnikov looked at him intently. He had a straight-forward, sensible,
soldierly face, with grey moustaches and whiskers.

"You are just the man I want," Raskolnikov cried, catching at his arm.
"I am a student, Raskolnikov.... You may as well know that too," he
added, addressing the gentleman, "come along, I have something to show
you."

And taking the policeman by the hand he drew him towards the seat.

"Look here, hopelessly drunk, and she has just come down the boulevard.
There is no telling who and what she is, she does not look like a
professional. It's more likely she has been given drink and deceived
somewhere... for the first time... you understand? and they've put her
out into the street like that. Look at the way her dress is torn, and
the way it has been put on: she has been dressed by somebody, she has
not dressed herself, and dressed by unpractised hands, by a man's hands;
that's evident. And now look there: I don't know that dandy with whom I
was going to fight, I see him for the first time, but he, too, has seen
her on the road, just now, drunk, not knowing what she is doing, and now
he is very eager to get hold of her, to get her away somewhere while she
is in this state... that's certain, believe me, I am not wrong. I saw
him myself watching her and following her, but I prevented him, and he
is just waiting for me to go away. Now he has walked away a little, and
is standing still, pretending to make a cigarette.... Think how can we
keep her out of his hands, and how are we to get her home?"

The policeman saw it all in a flash. The stout gentleman was easy to
understand, he turned to consider the girl. The policeman bent over to
examine her more closely, and his face worked with genuine compassion.

"Ah, what a pity!" he said, shaking his head--"why, she is quite a
child! She has been deceived, you can see that at once. Listen, lady,"
he began addressing her, "where do you live?" The girl opened her weary
and sleepy-looking eyes, gazed blankly at the speaker and waved her
hand.

"Here," said Raskolnikov feeling in his pocket and finding twenty
copecks, "here, call a cab and tell him to drive her to her address. The
only thing is to find out her address!"

"Missy, missy!" the policeman began again, taking the money. "I'll fetch
you a cab and take you home myself. Where shall I take you, eh? Where do
you live?"

"Go away! They won't let me alone," the girl muttered, and once more
waved her hand.

"Ach, ach, how shocking! It's shameful, missy, it's a shame!" He shook
his head again, shocked, sympathetic and indignant.

"It's a difficult job," the policeman said to Raskolnikov, and as he
did so, he looked him up and down in a rapid glance. He, too, must have
seemed a strange figure to him: dressed in rags and handing him money!

"Did you meet her far from here?" he asked him.

"I tell you she was walking in front of me, staggering, just here, in
the boulevard. She only just reached the seat and sank down on it."

"Ah, the shameful things that are done in the world nowadays, God have
mercy on us! An innocent creature like that, drunk already! She has been
deceived, that's a sure thing. See how her dress has been torn too....
Ah, the vice one sees nowadays! And as likely as not she belongs to
gentlefolk too, poor ones maybe.... There are many like that nowadays.
She looks refined, too, as though she were a lady," and he bent over her
once more.

Perhaps he had daughters growing up like that, "looking like ladies and
refined" with pretensions to gentility and smartness....

"The chief thing is," Raskolnikov persisted, "to keep her out of this
scoundrel's hands! Why should he outrage her! It's as clear as day what
he is after; ah, the brute, he is not moving off!"

Raskolnikov spoke aloud and pointed to him. The gentleman heard him,
and seemed about to fly into a rage again, but thought better of it, and
confined himself to a contemptuous look. He then walked slowly another
ten paces away and again halted.

"Keep her out of his hands we can," said the constable thoughtfully,
"if only she'd tell us where to take her, but as it is.... Missy, hey,
missy!" he bent over her once more.

She opened her eyes fully all of a sudden, looked at him intently, as
though realising something, got up from the seat and walked away in the
direction from which she had come. "Oh shameful wretches, they won't let
me alone!" she said, waving her hand again. She walked quickly, though
staggering as before. The dandy followed her, but along another avenue,
keeping his eye on her.

"Don't be anxious, I won't let him have her," the policeman said
resolutely, and he set off after them.

"Ah, the vice one sees nowadays!" he repeated aloud, sighing.

At that moment something seemed to sting Raskolnikov; in an instant a
complete revulsion of feeling came over him.

"Hey, here!" he shouted after the policeman.

The latter turned round.

"Let them be! What is it to do with you? Let her go! Let him amuse
himself." He pointed at the dandy, "What is it to do with you?"

The policeman was bewildered, and stared at him open-eyed. Raskolnikov
laughed.

"Well!" ejaculated the policeman, with a gesture of contempt, and he
walked after the dandy and the girl, probably taking Raskolnikov for a
madman or something even worse.

"He has carried off my twenty copecks," Raskolnikov murmured angrily
when he was left alone. "Well, let him take as much from the other
fellow to allow him to have the girl and so let it end. And why did I
want to interfere? Is it for me to help? Have I any right to help? Let
them devour each other alive--what is to me? How did I dare to give him
twenty copecks? Were they mine?"

In spite of those strange words he felt very wretched. He sat down on
the deserted seat. His thoughts strayed aimlessly.... He found it hard
to fix his mind on anything at that moment. He longed to forget himself
altogether, to forget everything, and then to wake up and begin life
anew....

"Poor girl!" he said, looking at the empty corner where she had
sat--"She will come to herself and weep, and then her mother will find
out.... She will give her a beating, a horrible, shameful beating and
then maybe, turn her out of doors.... And even if she does not, the
Darya Frantsovnas will get wind of it, and the girl will soon be
slipping out on the sly here and there. Then there will be the hospital
directly (that's always the luck of those girls with respectable
mothers, who go wrong on the sly) and then... again the hospital...
drink... the taverns... and more hospital, in two or three years--a
wreck, and her life over at eighteen or nineteen.... Have not I seen
cases like that? And how have they been brought to it? Why, they've all
come to it like that. Ugh! But what does it matter? That's as it should
be, they tell us. A certain percentage, they tell us, must every year
go... that way... to the devil, I suppose, so that the rest may remain
chaste, and not be interfered with. A percentage! What splendid words
they have; they are so scientific, so consolatory.... Once you've said
'percentage' there's nothing more to worry about. If we had any other
word... maybe we might feel more uneasy.... But what if Dounia were one
of the percentage! Of another one if not that one?

"But where am I going?" he thought suddenly. "Strange, I came out for
something. As soon as I had read the letter I came out.... I was going
to Vassilyevsky Ostrov, to Razumihin. That's what it was... now I
remember. What for, though? And what put the idea of going to Razumihin
into my head just now? That's curious."

He wondered at himself. Razumihin was one of his old comrades at the
university. It was remarkable that Raskolnikov had hardly any friends at
the university; he kept aloof from everyone, went to see no one, and did
not welcome anyone who came to see him, and indeed everyone soon gave
him up. He took no part in the students' gatherings, amusements or
conversations. He worked with great intensity without sparing himself,
and he was respected for this, but no one liked him. He was very poor,
and there was a sort of haughty pride and reserve about him, as though
he were keeping something to himself. He seemed to some of his comrades
to look down upon them all as children, as though he were superior in
development, knowledge and convictions, as though their beliefs and
interests were beneath him.

With Razumihin he had got on, or, at least, he was more unreserved and
communicative with him. Indeed it was impossible to be on any other
terms with Razumihin. He was an exceptionally good-humoured and candid
youth, good-natured to the point of simplicity, though both depth and
dignity lay concealed under that simplicity. The better of his comrades
understood this, and all were fond of him. He was extremely intelligent,
though he was certainly rather a simpleton at times. He was of striking
appearance--tall, thin, blackhaired and always badly shaved. He was
sometimes uproarious and was reputed to be of great physical strength.
One night, when out in a festive company, he had with one blow laid
a gigantic policeman on his back. There was no limit to his drinking
powers, but he could abstain from drink altogether; he sometimes went
too far in his pranks; but he could do without pranks altogether.
Another thing striking about Razumihin, no failure distressed him, and
it seemed as though no unfavourable circumstances could crush him. He
could lodge anywhere, and bear the extremes of cold and hunger. He was
very poor, and kept himself entirely on what he could earn by work of
one sort or another. He knew of no end of resources by which to earn
money. He spent one whole winter without lighting his stove, and used to
declare that he liked it better, because one slept more soundly in
the cold. For the present he, too, had been obliged to give up the
university, but it was only for a time, and he was working with all his
might to save enough to return to his studies again. Raskolnikov had
not been to see him for the last four months, and Razumihin did not even
know his address. About two months before, they had met in the street,
but Raskolnikov had turned away and even crossed to the other side that
he might not be observed. And though Razumihin noticed him, he passed
him by, as he did not want to annoy him.



CHAPTER V

"Of course, I've been meaning lately to go to Razumihin's to ask for
work, to ask him to get me lessons or something..." Raskolnikov thought,
"but what help can he be to me now? Suppose he gets me lessons, suppose
he shares his last farthing with me, if he has any farthings, so that
I could get some boots and make myself tidy enough to give lessons...
hm... Well and what then? What shall I do with the few coppers I
earn? That's not what I want now. It's really absurd for me to go to
Razumihin...."

The question why he was now going to Razumihin agitated him even more
than he was himself aware; he kept uneasily seeking for some sinister
significance in this apparently ordinary action.

"Could I have expected to set it all straight and to find a way out by
means of Razumihin alone?" he asked himself in perplexity.

He pondered and rubbed his forehead, and, strange to say, after long
musing, suddenly, as if it were spontaneously and by chance, a fantastic
thought came into his head.

"Hm... to Razumihin's," he said all at once, calmly, as though he had
reached a final determination. "I shall go to Razumihin's of course,
but... not now. I shall go to him... on the next day after It, when It
will be over and everything will begin afresh...."

And suddenly he realised what he was thinking.

"After It," he shouted, jumping up from the seat, "but is It really
going to happen? Is it possible it really will happen?" He left the
seat, and went off almost at a run; he meant to turn back, homewards,
but the thought of going home suddenly filled him with intense loathing;
in that hole, in that awful little cupboard of his, all _this_ had for a
month past been growing up in him; and he walked on at random.

His nervous shudder had passed into a fever that made him feel
shivering; in spite of the heat he felt cold. With a kind of effort he
began almost unconsciously, from some inner craving, to stare at all
the objects before him, as though looking for something to distract his
attention; but he did not succeed, and kept dropping every moment into
brooding. When with a start he lifted his head again and looked round,
he forgot at once what he had just been thinking about and even where he
was going. In this way he walked right across Vassilyevsky Ostrov, came
out on to the Lesser Neva, crossed the bridge and turned towards the
islands. The greenness and freshness were at first restful to his weary
eyes after the dust of the town and the huge houses that hemmed him in
and weighed upon him. Here there were no taverns, no stifling closeness,
no stench. But soon these new pleasant sensations passed into morbid
irritability. Sometimes he stood still before a brightly painted summer
villa standing among green foliage, he gazed through the fence, he saw
in the distance smartly dressed women on the verandahs and balconies,
and children running in the gardens. The flowers especially caught his
attention; he gazed at them longer than at anything. He was met, too, by
luxurious carriages and by men and women on horseback; he watched them
with curious eyes and forgot about them before they had vanished from
his sight. Once he stood still and counted his money; he found he had
thirty copecks. "Twenty to the policeman, three to Nastasya for the
letter, so I must have given forty-seven or fifty to the Marmeladovs
yesterday," he thought, reckoning it up for some unknown reason, but he
soon forgot with what object he had taken the money out of his pocket.
He recalled it on passing an eating-house or tavern, and felt that he
was hungry.... Going into the tavern he drank a glass of vodka and ate a
pie of some sort. He finished eating it as he walked away. It was a long
while since he had taken vodka and it had an effect upon him at once,
though he only drank a wineglassful. His legs felt suddenly heavy and
a great drowsiness came upon him. He turned homewards, but reaching
Petrovsky Ostrov he stopped completely exhausted, turned off the road
into the bushes, sank down upon the grass and instantly fell asleep.

In a morbid condition of the brain, dreams often have a singular
actuality, vividness, and extraordinary semblance of reality. At times
monstrous images are created, but the setting and the whole picture are
so truth-like and filled with details so delicate, so unexpectedly, but
so artistically consistent, that the dreamer, were he an artist like
Pushkin or Turgenev even, could never have invented them in the waking
state. Such sick dreams always remain long in the memory and make a
powerful impression on the overwrought and deranged nervous system.

Raskolnikov had a fearful dream. He dreamt he was back in his childhood
in the little town of his birth. He was a child about seven years old,
walking into the country with his father on the evening of a holiday. It
was a grey and heavy day, the country was exactly as he remembered it;
indeed he recalled it far more vividly in his dream than he had done in
memory. The little town stood on a level flat as bare as the hand, not
even a willow near it; only in the far distance, a copse lay, a dark
blur on the very edge of the horizon. A few paces beyond the last market
garden stood a tavern, a big tavern, which had always aroused in him a
feeling of aversion, even of fear, when he walked by it with his father.
There was always a crowd there, always shouting, laughter and abuse,
hideous hoarse singing and often fighting. Drunken and horrible-looking
figures were hanging about the tavern. He used to cling close to his
father, trembling all over when he met them. Near the tavern the road
became a dusty track, the dust of which was always black. It was a
winding road, and about a hundred paces further on, it turned to the
right to the graveyard. In the middle of the graveyard stood a stone
church with a green cupola where he used to go to mass two or three
times a year with his father and mother, when a service was held in
memory of his grandmother, who had long been dead, and whom he had never
seen. On these occasions they used to take on a white dish tied up in a
table napkin a special sort of rice pudding with raisins stuck in it in
the shape of a cross. He loved that church, the old-fashioned, unadorned
ikons and the old priest with the shaking head. Near his grandmother's
grave, which was marked by a stone, was the little grave of his younger
brother who had died at six months old. He did not remember him at all,
but he had been told about his little brother, and whenever he visited
the graveyard he used religiously and reverently to cross himself and
to bow down and kiss the little grave. And now he dreamt that he was
walking with his father past the tavern on the way to the graveyard; he
was holding his father's hand and looking with dread at the tavern. A
peculiar circumstance attracted his attention: there seemed to be
some kind of festivity going on, there were crowds of gaily dressed
townspeople, peasant women, their husbands, and riff-raff of all sorts,
all singing and all more or less drunk. Near the entrance of the tavern
stood a cart, but a strange cart. It was one of those big carts usually
drawn by heavy cart-horses and laden with casks of wine or other heavy
goods. He always liked looking at those great cart-horses, with their
long manes, thick legs, and slow even pace, drawing along a perfect
mountain with no appearance of effort, as though it were easier going
with a load than without it. But now, strange to say, in the shafts of
such a cart he saw a thin little sorrel beast, one of those peasants'
nags which he had often seen straining their utmost under a heavy load
of wood or hay, especially when the wheels were stuck in the mud or in
a rut. And the peasants would beat them so cruelly, sometimes even
about the nose and eyes, and he felt so sorry, so sorry for them that
he almost cried, and his mother always used to take him away from the
window. All of a sudden there was a great uproar of shouting, singing
and the balalaïka, and from the tavern a number of big and very drunken
peasants came out, wearing red and blue shirts and coats thrown over
their shoulders.

"Get in, get in!" shouted one of them, a young thick-necked peasant with
a fleshy face red as a carrot. "I'll take you all, get in!"

But at once there was an outbreak of laughter and exclamations in the
crowd.

"Take us all with a beast like that!"

"Why, Mikolka, are you crazy to put a nag like that in such a cart?"

"And this mare is twenty if she is a day, mates!"

"Get in, I'll take you all," Mikolka shouted again, leaping first into
the cart, seizing the reins and standing straight up in front. "The bay
has gone with Matvey," he shouted from the cart--"and this brute, mates,
is just breaking my heart, I feel as if I could kill her. She's just
eating her head off. Get in, I tell you! I'll make her gallop! She'll
gallop!" and he picked up the whip, preparing himself with relish to
flog the little mare.

"Get in! Come along!" The crowd laughed. "D'you hear, she'll gallop!"

"Gallop indeed! She has not had a gallop in her for the last ten years!"

"She'll jog along!"

"Don't you mind her, mates, bring a whip each of you, get ready!"

"All right! Give it to her!"

They all clambered into Mikolka's cart, laughing and making jokes. Six
men got in and there was still room for more. They hauled in a fat,
rosy-cheeked woman. She was dressed in red cotton, in a pointed, beaded
headdress and thick leather shoes; she was cracking nuts and laughing.
The crowd round them was laughing too and indeed, how could they help
laughing? That wretched nag was to drag all the cartload of them at a
gallop! Two young fellows in the cart were just getting whips ready to
help Mikolka. With the cry of "now," the mare tugged with all her might,
but far from galloping, could scarcely move forward; she struggled with
her legs, gasping and shrinking from the blows of the three whips which
were showered upon her like hail. The laughter in the cart and in the
crowd was redoubled, but Mikolka flew into a rage and furiously thrashed
the mare, as though he supposed she really could gallop.

"Let me get in, too, mates," shouted a young man in the crowd whose
appetite was aroused.

"Get in, all get in," cried Mikolka, "she will draw you all. I'll beat
her to death!" And he thrashed and thrashed at the mare, beside himself
with fury.

"Father, father," he cried, "father, what are they doing? Father, they
are beating the poor horse!"

"Come along, come along!" said his father. "They are drunken and
foolish, they are in fun; come away, don't look!" and he tried to draw
him away, but he tore himself away from his hand, and, beside himself
with horror, ran to the horse. The poor beast was in a bad way. She was
gasping, standing still, then tugging again and almost falling.

"Beat her to death," cried Mikolka, "it's come to that. I'll do for
her!"

"What are you about, are you a Christian, you devil?" shouted an old man
in the crowd.

"Did anyone ever see the like? A wretched nag like that pulling such a
cartload," said another.

"You'll kill her," shouted the third.

"Don't meddle! It's my property, I'll do what I choose. Get in, more of
you! Get in, all of you! I will have her go at a gallop!..."

All at once laughter broke into a roar and covered everything: the mare,
roused by the shower of blows, began feebly kicking. Even the old man
could not help smiling. To think of a wretched little beast like that
trying to kick!

Two lads in the crowd snatched up whips and ran to the mare to beat her
about the ribs. One ran each side.

"Hit her in the face, in the eyes, in the eyes," cried Mikolka.

"Give us a song, mates," shouted someone in the cart and everyone in the
cart joined in a riotous song, jingling a tambourine and whistling. The
woman went on cracking nuts and laughing.

... He ran beside the mare, ran in front of her, saw her being whipped
across the eyes, right in the eyes! He was crying, he felt choking, his
tears were streaming. One of the men gave him a cut with the whip across
the face, he did not feel it. Wringing his hands and screaming, he
rushed up to the grey-headed old man with the grey beard, who was
shaking his head in disapproval. One woman seized him by the hand and
would have taken him away, but he tore himself from her and ran back to
the mare. She was almost at the last gasp, but began kicking once more.

"I'll teach you to kick," Mikolka shouted ferociously. He threw down
the whip, bent forward and picked up from the bottom of the cart a long,
thick shaft, he took hold of one end with both hands and with an effort
brandished it over the mare.

"He'll crush her," was shouted round him. "He'll kill her!"

"It's my property," shouted Mikolka and brought the shaft down with a
swinging blow. There was a sound of a heavy thud.

"Thrash her, thrash her! Why have you stopped?" shouted voices in the
crowd.

And Mikolka swung the shaft a second time and it fell a second time
on the spine of the luckless mare. She sank back on her haunches, but
lurched forward and tugged forward with all her force, tugged first on
one side and then on the other, trying to move the cart. But the six
whips were attacking her in all directions, and the shaft was raised
again and fell upon her a third time, then a fourth, with heavy measured
blows. Mikolka was in a fury that he could not kill her at one blow.

"She's a tough one," was shouted in the crowd.

"She'll fall in a minute, mates, there will soon be an end of her," said
an admiring spectator in the crowd.

"Fetch an axe to her! Finish her off," shouted a third.

"I'll show you! Stand off," Mikolka screamed frantically; he threw down
the shaft, stooped down in the cart and picked up an iron crowbar. "Look
out," he shouted, and with all his might he dealt a stunning blow at the
poor mare. The blow fell; the mare staggered, sank back, tried to pull,
but the bar fell again with a swinging blow on her back and she fell on
the ground like a log.

"Finish her off," shouted Mikolka and he leapt beside himself, out of
the cart. Several young men, also flushed with drink, seized anything
they could come across--whips, sticks, poles, and ran to the dying
mare. Mikolka stood on one side and began dealing random blows with the
crowbar. The mare stretched out her head, drew a long breath and died.

"You butchered her," someone shouted in the crowd.

"Why wouldn't she gallop then?"

"My property!" shouted Mikolka, with bloodshot eyes, brandishing the bar
in his hands. He stood as though regretting that he had nothing more to
beat.

"No mistake about it, you are not a Christian," many voices were
shouting in the crowd.

But the poor boy, beside himself, made his way, screaming, through the
crowd to the sorrel nag, put his arms round her bleeding dead head and
kissed it, kissed the eyes and kissed the lips.... Then he jumped up and
flew in a frenzy with his little fists out at Mikolka. At that instant
his father, who had been running after him, snatched him up and carried
him out of the crowd.

"Come along, come! Let us go home," he said to him.

"Father! Why did they... kill... the poor horse!" he sobbed, but his
voice broke and the words came in shrieks from his panting chest.

"They are drunk.... They are brutal... it's not our business!" said his
father. He put his arms round his father but he felt choked, choked. He
tried to draw a breath, to cry out--and woke up.

He waked up, gasping for breath, his hair soaked with perspiration, and
stood up in terror.

"Thank God, that was only a dream," he said, sitting down under a tree
and drawing deep breaths. "But what is it? Is it some fever coming on?
Such a hideous dream!"

He felt utterly broken: darkness and confusion were in his soul. He
rested his elbows on his knees and leaned his head on his hands.

"Good God!" he cried, "can it be, can it be, that I shall really take an
axe, that I shall strike her on the head, split her skull open... that I
shall tread in the sticky warm blood, break the lock, steal and tremble;
hide, all spattered in the blood... with the axe.... Good God, can it
be?"

He was shaking like a leaf as he said this.

"But why am I going on like this?" he continued, sitting up again, as it
were in profound amazement. "I knew that I could never bring myself
to it, so what have I been torturing myself for till now? Yesterday,
yesterday, when I went to make that... _experiment_, yesterday I
realised completely that I could never bear to do it.... Why am I going
over it again, then? Why am I hesitating? As I came down the stairs
yesterday, I said myself that it was base, loathsome, vile, vile... the
very thought of it made me feel sick and filled me with horror.

"No, I couldn't do it, I couldn't do it! Granted, granted that there is
no flaw in all that reasoning, that all that I have concluded this last
month is clear as day, true as arithmetic.... My God! Anyway I couldn't
bring myself to it! I couldn't do it, I couldn't do it! Why, why then am
I still...?"

He rose to his feet, looked round in wonder as though surprised at
finding himself in this place, and went towards the bridge. He was pale,
his eyes glowed, he was exhausted in every limb, but he seemed suddenly
to breathe more easily. He felt he had cast off that fearful burden that
had so long been weighing upon him, and all at once there was a sense
of relief and peace in his soul. "Lord," he prayed, "show me my path--I
renounce that accursed... dream of mine."

Crossing the bridge, he gazed quietly and calmly at the Neva, at the
glowing red sun setting in the glowing sky. In spite of his weakness he
was not conscious of fatigue. It was as though an abscess that had been
forming for a month past in his heart had suddenly broken. Freedom,
freedom! He was free from that spell, that sorcery, that obsession!

Later on, when he recalled that time and all that happened to him during
those days, minute by minute, point by point, he was superstitiously
impressed by one circumstance, which, though in itself not very
exceptional, always seemed to him afterwards the predestined
turning-point of his fate. He could never understand and explain to
himself why, when he was tired and worn out, when it would have been
more convenient for him to go home by the shortest and most direct way,
he had returned by the Hay Market where he had no need to go. It was
obviously and quite unnecessarily out of his way, though not much so. It
is true that it happened to him dozens of times to return home without
noticing what streets he passed through. But why, he was always asking
himself, why had such an important, such a decisive and at the same time
such an absolutely chance meeting happened in the Hay Market (where he
had moreover no reason to go) at the very hour, the very minute of his
life when he was just in the very mood and in the very circumstances
in which that meeting was able to exert the gravest and most decisive
influence on his whole destiny? As though it had been lying in wait for
him on purpose!

It was about nine o'clock when he crossed the Hay Market. At the tables
and the barrows, at the booths and the shops, all the market people were
closing their establishments or clearing away and packing up their
wares and, like their customers, were going home. Rag pickers and
costermongers of all kinds were crowding round the taverns in the dirty
and stinking courtyards of the Hay Market. Raskolnikov particularly
liked this place and the neighbouring alleys, when he wandered aimlessly
in the streets. Here his rags did not attract contemptuous attention,
and one could walk about in any attire without scandalising people. At
the corner of an alley a huckster and his wife had two tables set out
with tapes, thread, cotton handkerchiefs, etc. They, too, had got up to
go home, but were lingering in conversation with a friend, who had just
come up to them. This friend was Lizaveta Ivanovna, or, as everyone
called her, Lizaveta, the younger sister of the old pawnbroker, Alyona
Ivanovna, whom Raskolnikov had visited the previous day to pawn his
watch and make his _experiment_.... He already knew all about Lizaveta
and she knew him a little too. She was a single woman of about
thirty-five, tall, clumsy, timid, submissive and almost idiotic. She was
a complete slave and went in fear and trembling of her sister, who
made her work day and night, and even beat her. She was standing with
a bundle before the huckster and his wife, listening earnestly and
doubtfully. They were talking of something with special warmth. The
moment Raskolnikov caught sight of her, he was overcome by a strange
sensation as it were of intense astonishment, though there was nothing
astonishing about this meeting.

"You could make up your mind for yourself, Lizaveta Ivanovna," the
huckster was saying aloud. "Come round to-morrow about seven. They will
be here too."

"To-morrow?" said Lizaveta slowly and thoughtfully, as though unable to
make up her mind.

"Upon my word, what a fright you are in of Alyona Ivanovna," gabbled
the huckster's wife, a lively little woman. "I look at you, you are like
some little babe. And she is not your own sister either--nothing but a
step-sister and what a hand she keeps over you!"

"But this time don't say a word to Alyona Ivanovna," her husband
interrupted; "that's my advice, but come round to us without asking.
It will be worth your while. Later on your sister herself may have a
notion."

"Am I to come?"

"About seven o'clock to-morrow. And they will be here. You will be able
to decide for yourself."

"And we'll have a cup of tea," added his wife.

"All right, I'll come," said Lizaveta, still pondering, and she began
slowly moving away.

Raskolnikov had just passed and heard no more. He passed softly,
unnoticed, trying not to miss a word. His first amazement was followed
by a thrill of horror, like a shiver running down his spine. He had
learnt, he had suddenly quite unexpectedly learnt, that the next day at
seven o'clock Lizaveta, the old woman's sister and only companion, would
be away from home and that therefore at seven o'clock precisely the old
woman _would be left alone_.

He was only a few steps from his lodging. He went in like a man
condemned to death. He thought of nothing and was incapable of thinking;
but he felt suddenly in his whole being that he had no more freedom
of thought, no will, and that everything was suddenly and irrevocably
decided.

Certainly, if he had to wait whole years for a suitable opportunity, he
could not reckon on a more certain step towards the success of the plan
than that which had just presented itself. In any case, it would have
been difficult to find out beforehand and with certainty, with
greater exactness and less risk, and without dangerous inquiries and
investigations, that next day at a certain time an old woman, on whose
life an attempt was contemplated, would be at home and entirely alone.



CHAPTER VI

Later on Raskolnikov happened to find out why the huckster and his
wife had invited Lizaveta. It was a very ordinary matter and there was
nothing exceptional about it. A family who had come to the town and been
reduced to poverty were selling their household goods and clothes, all
women's things. As the things would have fetched little in the market,
they were looking for a dealer. This was Lizaveta's business. She
undertook such jobs and was frequently employed, as she was very honest
and always fixed a fair price and stuck to it. She spoke as a rule
little and, as we have said already, she was very submissive and timid.

But Raskolnikov had become superstitious of late. The traces of
superstition remained in him long after, and were almost ineradicable.
And in all this he was always afterwards disposed to see something
strange and mysterious, as it were, the presence of some peculiar
influences and coincidences. In the previous winter a student he knew
called Pokorev, who had left for Harkov, had chanced in conversation to
give him the address of Alyona Ivanovna, the old pawnbroker, in case he
might want to pawn anything. For a long while he did not go to her, for
he had lessons and managed to get along somehow. Six weeks ago he had
remembered the address; he had two articles that could be pawned: his
father's old silver watch and a little gold ring with three red stones,
a present from his sister at parting. He decided to take the ring. When
he found the old woman he had felt an insurmountable repulsion for her
at the first glance, though he knew nothing special about her. He got
two roubles from her and went into a miserable little tavern on his way
home. He asked for tea, sat down and sank into deep thought. A strange
idea was pecking at his brain like a chicken in the egg, and very, very
much absorbed him.

Almost beside him at the next table there was sitting a student, whom he
did not know and had never seen, and with him a young officer. They had
played a game of billiards and began drinking tea. All at once he heard
the student mention to the officer the pawnbroker Alyona Ivanovna and
give him her address. This of itself seemed strange to Raskolnikov; he
had just come from her and here at once he heard her name. Of course
it was a chance, but he could not shake off a very extraordinary
impression, and here someone seemed to be speaking expressly for him;
the student began telling his friend various details about Alyona
Ivanovna.

"She is first-rate," he said. "You can always get money from her. She is
as rich as a Jew, she can give you five thousand roubles at a time and
she is not above taking a pledge for a rouble. Lots of our fellows have
had dealings with her. But she is an awful old harpy...."

And he began describing how spiteful and uncertain she was, how if you
were only a day late with your interest the pledge was lost; how she
gave a quarter of the value of an article and took five and even seven
percent a month on it and so on. The student chattered on, saying
that she had a sister Lizaveta, whom the wretched little creature was
continually beating, and kept in complete bondage like a small child,
though Lizaveta was at least six feet high.

"There's a phenomenon for you," cried the student and he laughed.

They began talking about Lizaveta. The student spoke about her with a
peculiar relish and was continually laughing and the officer listened
with great interest and asked him to send Lizaveta to do some mending
for him. Raskolnikov did not miss a word and learned everything about
her. Lizaveta was younger than the old woman and was her half-sister,
being the child of a different mother. She was thirty-five. She worked
day and night for her sister, and besides doing the cooking and the
washing, she did sewing and worked as a charwoman and gave her sister
all she earned. She did not dare to accept an order or job of any kind
without her sister's permission. The old woman had already made her
will, and Lizaveta knew of it, and by this will she would not get a
farthing; nothing but the movables, chairs and so on; all the money was
left to a monastery in the province of N----, that prayers might be
said for her in perpetuity. Lizaveta was of lower rank than her sister,
unmarried and awfully uncouth in appearance, remarkably tall with long
feet that looked as if they were bent outwards. She always wore battered
goatskin shoes, and was clean in her person. What the student expressed
most surprise and amusement about was the fact that Lizaveta was
continually with child.

"But you say she is hideous?" observed the officer.

"Yes, she is so dark-skinned and looks like a soldier dressed up, but
you know she is not at all hideous. She has such a good-natured face
and eyes. Strikingly so. And the proof of it is that lots of people are
attracted by her. She is such a soft, gentle creature, ready to put up
with anything, always willing, willing to do anything. And her smile is
really very sweet."

"You seem to find her attractive yourself," laughed the officer.

"From her queerness. No, I'll tell you what. I could kill that damned
old woman and make off with her money, I assure you, without the
faintest conscience-prick," the student added with warmth. The officer
laughed again while Raskolnikov shuddered. How strange it was!

"Listen, I want to ask you a serious question," the student said hotly.
"I was joking of course, but look here; on one side we have a stupid,
senseless, worthless, spiteful, ailing, horrid old woman, not simply
useless but doing actual mischief, who has not an idea what she is
living for herself, and who will die in a day or two in any case. You
understand? You understand?"

"Yes, yes, I understand," answered the officer, watching his excited
companion attentively.

"Well, listen then. On the other side, fresh young lives thrown away for
want of help and by thousands, on every side! A hundred thousand good
deeds could be done and helped, on that old woman's money which will be
buried in a monastery! Hundreds, thousands perhaps, might be set on the
right path; dozens of families saved from destitution, from ruin, from
vice, from the Lock hospitals--and all with her money. Kill her, take
her money and with the help of it devote oneself to the service of
humanity and the good of all. What do you think, would not one tiny
crime be wiped out by thousands of good deeds? For one life thousands
would be saved from corruption and decay. One death, and a hundred lives
in exchange--it's simple arithmetic! Besides, what value has the life of
that sickly, stupid, ill-natured old woman in the balance of existence!
No more than the life of a louse, of a black-beetle, less in fact
because the old woman is doing harm. She is wearing out the lives of
others; the other day she bit Lizaveta's finger out of spite; it almost
had to be amputated."

"Of course she does not deserve to live," remarked the officer, "but
there it is, it's nature."

"Oh, well, brother, but we have to correct and direct nature, and, but
for that, we should drown in an ocean of prejudice. But for that,
there would never have been a single great man. They talk of
duty, conscience--I don't want to say anything against duty and
conscience;--but the point is, what do we mean by them? Stay, I have
another question to ask you. Listen!"

"No, you stay, I'll ask you a question. Listen!"

"Well?"

"You are talking and speechifying away, but tell me, would you kill the
old woman _yourself_?"

"Of course not! I was only arguing the justice of it.... It's nothing to
do with me...."

"But I think, if you would not do it yourself, there's no justice about
it.... Let us have another game."

Raskolnikov was violently agitated. Of course, it was all ordinary
youthful talk and thought, such as he had often heard before in
different forms and on different themes. But why had he happened to hear
such a discussion and such ideas at the very moment when his own brain
was just conceiving... _the very same ideas_? And why, just at the
moment when he had brought away the embryo of his idea from the old
woman had he dropped at once upon a conversation about her? This
coincidence always seemed strange to him. This trivial talk in a tavern
had an immense influence on him in his later action; as though there had
really been in it something preordained, some guiding hint....

*****

On returning from the Hay Market he flung himself on the sofa and sat
for a whole hour without stirring. Meanwhile it got dark; he had no
candle and, indeed, it did not occur to him to light up. He could never
recollect whether he had been thinking about anything at that time. At
last he was conscious of his former fever and shivering, and he realised
with relief that he could lie down on the sofa. Soon heavy, leaden sleep
came over him, as it were crushing him.

He slept an extraordinarily long time and without dreaming. Nastasya,
coming into his room at ten o'clock the next morning, had difficulty
in rousing him. She brought him in tea and bread. The tea was again the
second brew and again in her own tea-pot.

"My goodness, how he sleeps!" she cried indignantly. "And he is always
asleep."

He got up with an effort. His head ached, he stood up, took a turn in
his garret and sank back on the sofa again.

"Going to sleep again," cried Nastasya. "Are you ill, eh?"

He made no reply.

"Do you want some tea?"

"Afterwards," he said with an effort, closing his eyes again and turning
to the wall.

Nastasya stood over him.

"Perhaps he really is ill," she said, turned and went out. She came in
again at two o'clock with soup. He was lying as before. The tea stood
untouched. Nastasya felt positively offended and began wrathfully
rousing him.

"Why are you lying like a log?" she shouted, looking at him with
repulsion.

He got up, and sat down again, but said nothing and stared at the floor.

"Are you ill or not?" asked Nastasya and again received no answer.
"You'd better go out and get a breath of air," she said after a pause.
"Will you eat it or not?"

"Afterwards," he said weakly. "You can go."

And he motioned her out.

She remained a little longer, looked at him with compassion and went
out.

A few minutes afterwards, he raised his eyes and looked for a long while
at the tea and the soup. Then he took the bread, took up a spoon and
began to eat.

He ate a little, three or four spoonfuls, without appetite, as it were
mechanically. His head ached less. After his meal he stretched himself
on the sofa again, but now he could not sleep; he lay without stirring,
with his face in the pillow. He was haunted by day-dreams and such
strange day-dreams; in one, that kept recurring, he fancied that he was
in Africa, in Egypt, in some sort of oasis. The caravan was resting,
the camels were peacefully lying down; the palms stood all around in a
complete circle; all the party were at dinner. But he was drinking water
from a spring which flowed gurgling close by. And it was so cool, it was
wonderful, wonderful, blue, cold water running among the parti-coloured
stones and over the clean sand which glistened here and there like
gold.... Suddenly he heard a clock strike. He started, roused himself,
raised his head, looked out of the window, and seeing how late it was,
suddenly jumped up wide awake as though someone had pulled him off the
sofa. He crept on tiptoe to the door, stealthily opened it and began
listening on the staircase. His heart beat terribly. But all was quiet
on the stairs as if everyone was asleep.... It seemed to him strange and
monstrous that he could have slept in such forgetfulness from the
previous day and had done nothing, had prepared nothing yet.... And
meanwhile perhaps it had struck six. And his drowsiness and stupefaction
were followed by an extraordinary, feverish, as it were distracted
haste. But the preparations to be made were few. He concentrated all his
energies on thinking of everything and forgetting nothing; and his heart
kept beating and thumping so that he could hardly breathe. First he had
to make a noose and sew it into his overcoat--a work of a moment. He
rummaged under his pillow and picked out amongst the linen stuffed away
under it, a worn out, old unwashed shirt. From its rags he tore a long
strip, a couple of inches wide and about sixteen inches long. He folded
this strip in two, took off his wide, strong summer overcoat of some
stout cotton material (his only outer garment) and began sewing the two
ends of the rag on the inside, under the left armhole. His hands shook
as he sewed, but he did it successfully so that nothing showed outside
when he put the coat on again. The needle and thread he had got ready
long before and they lay on his table in a piece of paper. As for the
noose, it was a very ingenious device of his own; the noose was intended
for the axe. It was impossible for him to carry the axe through the
street in his hands. And if hidden under his coat he would still have
had to support it with his hand, which would have been noticeable. Now
he had only to put the head of the axe in the noose, and it would hang
quietly under his arm on the inside. Putting his hand in his coat
pocket, he could hold the end of the handle all the way, so that it did
not swing; and as the coat was very full, a regular sack in fact, it
could not be seen from outside that he was holding something with the
hand that was in the pocket. This noose, too, he had designed a
fortnight before.

When he had finished with this, he thrust his hand into a little opening
between his sofa and the floor, fumbled in the left corner and drew out
the _pledge_, which he had got ready long before and hidden there. This
pledge was, however, only a smoothly planed piece of wood the size and
thickness of a silver cigarette case. He picked up this piece of wood
in one of his wanderings in a courtyard where there was some sort of
a workshop. Afterwards he had added to the wood a thin smooth piece
of iron, which he had also picked up at the same time in the street.
Putting the iron which was a little the smaller on the piece of wood,
he fastened them very firmly, crossing and re-crossing the thread round
them; then wrapped them carefully and daintily in clean white paper and
tied up the parcel so that it would be very difficult to untie it. This
was in order to divert the attention of the old woman for a time, while
she was trying to undo the knot, and so to gain a moment. The iron strip
was added to give weight, so that the woman might not guess the first
minute that the "thing" was made of wood. All this had been stored by
him beforehand under the sofa. He had only just got the pledge out when
he heard someone suddenly about in the yard.

"It struck six long ago."

"Long ago! My God!"

He rushed to the door, listened, caught up his hat and began to descend
his thirteen steps cautiously, noiselessly, like a cat. He had still the
most important thing to do--to steal the axe from the kitchen. That the
deed must be done with an axe he had decided long ago. He had also a
pocket pruning-knife, but he could not rely on the knife and still less
on his own strength, and so resolved finally on the axe. We may note in
passing, one peculiarity in regard to all the final resolutions taken by
him in the matter; they had one strange characteristic: the more final
they were, the more hideous and the more absurd they at once became in
his eyes. In spite of all his agonising inward struggle, he never for
a single instant all that time could believe in the carrying out of his
plans.

And, indeed, if it had ever happened that everything to the least point
could have been considered and finally settled, and no uncertainty of
any kind had remained, he would, it seems, have renounced it all
as something absurd, monstrous and impossible. But a whole mass of
unsettled points and uncertainties remained. As for getting the axe,
that trifling business cost him no anxiety, for nothing could be easier.
Nastasya was continually out of the house, especially in the evenings;
she would run in to the neighbours or to a shop, and always left the
door ajar. It was the one thing the landlady was always scolding her
about. And so, when the time came, he would only have to go quietly into
the kitchen and to take the axe, and an hour later (when everything
was over) go in and put it back again. But these were doubtful points.
Supposing he returned an hour later to put it back, and Nastasya had
come back and was on the spot. He would of course have to go by and wait
till she went out again. But supposing she were in the meantime to miss
the axe, look for it, make an outcry--that would mean suspicion or at
least grounds for suspicion.

But those were all trifles which he had not even begun to consider, and
indeed he had no time. He was thinking of the chief point, and put off
trifling details, until _he could believe in it all_. But that seemed
utterly unattainable. So it seemed to himself at least. He could not
imagine, for instance, that he would sometime leave off thinking, get
up and simply go there.... Even his late experiment (i.e. his visit with
the object of a final survey of the place) was simply an attempt at
an experiment, far from being the real thing, as though one should say
"come, let us go and try it--why dream about it!"--and at once he
had broken down and had run away cursing, in a frenzy with himself.
Meanwhile it would seem, as regards the moral question, that his
analysis was complete; his casuistry had become keen as a razor, and he
could not find rational objections in himself. But in the last resort
he simply ceased to believe in himself, and doggedly, slavishly sought
arguments in all directions, fumbling for them, as though someone were
forcing and drawing him to it.

At first--long before indeed--he had been much occupied with one
question; why almost all crimes are so badly concealed and so easily
detected, and why almost all criminals leave such obvious traces? He
had come gradually to many different and curious conclusions, and in his
opinion the chief reason lay not so much in the material impossibility
of concealing the crime, as in the criminal himself. Almost every
criminal is subject to a failure of will and reasoning power by a
childish and phenomenal heedlessness, at the very instant when prudence
and caution are most essential. It was his conviction that this eclipse
of reason and failure of will power attacked a man like a disease,
developed gradually and reached its highest point just before the
perpetration of the crime, continued with equal violence at the moment
of the crime and for longer or shorter time after, according to the
individual case, and then passed off like any other disease. The
question whether the disease gives rise to the crime, or whether the
crime from its own peculiar nature is always accompanied by something of
the nature of disease, he did not yet feel able to decide.

When he reached these conclusions, he decided that in his own case there
could not be such a morbid reaction, that his reason and will would
remain unimpaired at the time of carrying out his design, for the
simple reason that his design was "not a crime...." We will omit all the
process by means of which he arrived at this last conclusion; we have
run too far ahead already.... We may add only that the practical, purely
material difficulties of the affair occupied a secondary position in his
mind. "One has but to keep all one's will-power and reason to deal
with them, and they will all be overcome at the time when once one has
familiarised oneself with the minutest details of the business...." But
this preparation had never been begun. His final decisions were what he
came to trust least, and when the hour struck, it all came to pass quite
differently, as it were accidentally and unexpectedly.

One trifling circumstance upset his calculations, before he had even
left the staircase. When he reached the landlady's kitchen, the door
of which was open as usual, he glanced cautiously in to see whether, in
Nastasya's absence, the landlady herself was there, or if not, whether
the door to her own room was closed, so that she might not peep out when
he went in for the axe. But what was his amazement when he suddenly
saw that Nastasya was not only at home in the kitchen, but was occupied
there, taking linen out of a basket and hanging it on a line. Seeing
him, she left off hanging the clothes, turned to him and stared at him
all the time he was passing. He turned away his eyes, and walked past as
though he noticed nothing. But it was the end of everything; he had not
the axe! He was overwhelmed.

"What made me think," he reflected, as he went under the gateway, "what
made me think that she would be sure not to be at home at that moment!
Why, why, why did I assume this so certainly?"

He was crushed and even humiliated. He could have laughed at himself in
his anger.... A dull animal rage boiled within him.

He stood hesitating in the gateway. To go into the street, to go a walk
for appearance' sake was revolting; to go back to his room, even more
revolting. "And what a chance I have lost for ever!" he muttered,
standing aimlessly in the gateway, just opposite the porter's little
dark room, which was also open. Suddenly he started. From the porter's
room, two paces away from him, something shining under the bench to the
right caught his eye.... He looked about him--nobody. He approached the
room on tiptoe, went down two steps into it and in a faint voice called
the porter. "Yes, not at home! Somewhere near though, in the yard, for
the door is wide open." He dashed to the axe (it was an axe) and pulled
it out from under the bench, where it lay between two chunks of wood;
at once, before going out, he made it fast in the noose, he thrust both
hands into his pockets and went out of the room; no one had noticed him!
"When reason fails, the devil helps!" he thought with a strange grin.
This chance raised his spirits extraordinarily.

He walked along quietly and sedately, without hurry, to avoid awakening
suspicion. He scarcely looked at the passers-by, tried to escape looking
at their faces at all, and to be as little noticeable as possible.
Suddenly he thought of his hat. "Good heavens! I had the money the day
before yesterday and did not get a cap to wear instead!" A curse rose
from the bottom of his soul.

Glancing out of the corner of his eye into a shop, he saw by a clock on
the wall that it was ten minutes past seven. He had to make haste and at
the same time to go someway round, so as to approach the house from the
other side....

When he had happened to imagine all this beforehand, he had sometimes
thought that he would be very much afraid. But he was not very much
afraid now, was not afraid at all, indeed. His mind was even occupied
by irrelevant matters, but by nothing for long. As he passed the Yusupov
garden, he was deeply absorbed in considering the building of great
fountains, and of their refreshing effect on the atmosphere in all
the squares. By degrees he passed to the conviction that if the summer
garden were extended to the field of Mars, and perhaps joined to the
garden of the Mihailovsky Palace, it would be a splendid thing and a
great benefit to the town. Then he was interested by the question why
in all great towns men are not simply driven by necessity, but in some
peculiar way inclined to live in those parts of the town where there
are no gardens nor fountains; where there is most dirt and smell and all
sorts of nastiness. Then his own walks through the Hay Market came back
to his mind, and for a moment he waked up to reality. "What nonsense!"
he thought, "better think of nothing at all!"

"So probably men led to execution clutch mentally at every object that
meets them on the way," flashed through his mind, but simply flashed,
like lightning; he made haste to dismiss this thought.... And by now
he was near; here was the house, here was the gate. Suddenly a clock
somewhere struck once. "What! can it be half-past seven? Impossible, it
must be fast!"

Luckily for him, everything went well again at the gates. At that very
moment, as though expressly for his benefit, a huge waggon of hay had
just driven in at the gate, completely screening him as he passed under
the gateway, and the waggon had scarcely had time to drive through into
the yard, before he had slipped in a flash to the right. On the other
side of the waggon he could hear shouting and quarrelling; but no one
noticed him and no one met him. Many windows looking into that huge
quadrangular yard were open at that moment, but he did not raise his
head--he had not the strength to. The staircase leading to the old
woman's room was close by, just on the right of the gateway. He was
already on the stairs....

Drawing a breath, pressing his hand against his throbbing heart, and
once more feeling for the axe and setting it straight, he began softly
and cautiously ascending the stairs, listening every minute. But the
stairs, too, were quite deserted; all the doors were shut; he met no
one. One flat indeed on the first floor was wide open and painters were
at work in it, but they did not glance at him. He stood still, thought
a minute and went on. "Of course it would be better if they had not been
here, but... it's two storeys above them."

And there was the fourth storey, here was the door, here was the
flat opposite, the empty one. The flat underneath the old woman's was
apparently empty also; the visiting card nailed on the door had been
torn off--they had gone away!... He was out of breath. For one instant
the thought floated through his mind "Shall I go back?" But he made no
answer and began listening at the old woman's door, a dead silence. Then
he listened again on the staircase, listened long and intently...
then looked about him for the last time, pulled himself together, drew
himself up, and once more tried the axe in the noose. "Am I very pale?"
he wondered. "Am I not evidently agitated? She is mistrustful.... Had I
better wait a little longer... till my heart leaves off thumping?"

But his heart did not leave off. On the contrary, as though to spite
him, it throbbed more and more violently. He could stand it no longer,
he slowly put out his hand to the bell and rang. Half a minute later he
rang again, more loudly.

No answer. To go on ringing was useless and out of place. The old woman
was, of course, at home, but she was suspicious and alone. He had some
knowledge of her habits... and once more he put his ear to the door.
Either his senses were peculiarly keen (which it is difficult to
suppose), or the sound was really very distinct. Anyway, he suddenly
heard something like the cautious touch of a hand on the lock and the
rustle of a skirt at the very door. Someone was standing stealthily
close to the lock and just as he was doing on the outside was secretly
listening within, and seemed to have her ear to the door.... He moved
a little on purpose and muttered something aloud that he might not have
the appearance of hiding, then rang a third time, but quietly, soberly,
and without impatience, Recalling it afterwards, that moment stood out
in his mind vividly, distinctly, for ever; he could not make out how he
had had such cunning, for his mind was as it were clouded at moments and
he was almost unconscious of his body.... An instant later he heard the
latch unfastened.



CHAPTER VII

The door was as before opened a tiny crack, and again two sharp and
suspicious eyes stared at him out of the darkness. Then Raskolnikov lost
his head and nearly made a great mistake.

Fearing the old woman would be frightened by their being alone, and not
hoping that the sight of him would disarm her suspicions, he took
hold of the door and drew it towards him to prevent the old woman from
attempting to shut it again. Seeing this she did not pull the door back,
but she did not let go the handle so that he almost dragged her out with
it on to the stairs. Seeing that she was standing in the doorway not
allowing him to pass, he advanced straight upon her. She stepped back
in alarm, tried to say something, but seemed unable to speak and stared
with open eyes at him.

"Good evening, Alyona Ivanovna," he began, trying to speak easily, but
his voice would not obey him, it broke and shook. "I have come... I have
brought something... but we'd better come in... to the light...."

And leaving her, he passed straight into the room uninvited. The old
woman ran after him; her tongue was unloosed.

"Good heavens! What it is? Who is it? What do you want?"

"Why, Alyona Ivanovna, you know me... Raskolnikov... here, I brought you
the pledge I promised the other day..." And he held out the pledge.

The old woman glanced for a moment at the pledge, but at once stared in
the eyes of her uninvited visitor. She looked intently, maliciously and
mistrustfully. A minute passed; he even fancied something like a sneer
in her eyes, as though she had already guessed everything. He felt that
he was losing his head, that he was almost frightened, so frightened
that if she were to look like that and not say a word for another half
minute, he thought he would have run away from her.

"Why do you look at me as though you did not know me?" he said suddenly,
also with malice. "Take it if you like, if not I'll go elsewhere, I am
in a hurry."

He had not even thought of saying this, but it was suddenly said of
itself. The old woman recovered herself, and her visitor's resolute tone
evidently restored her confidence.

"But why, my good sir, all of a minute.... What is it?" she asked,
looking at the pledge.

"The silver cigarette case; I spoke of it last time, you know."

She held out her hand.

"But how pale you are, to be sure... and your hands are trembling too?
Have you been bathing, or what?"

"Fever," he answered abruptly. "You can't help getting pale... if you've
nothing to eat," he added, with difficulty articulating the words.

His strength was failing him again. But his answer sounded like the
truth; the old woman took the pledge.

"What is it?" she asked once more, scanning Raskolnikov intently, and
weighing the pledge in her hand.

"A thing... cigarette case.... Silver.... Look at it."

"It does not seem somehow like silver.... How he has wrapped it up!"

Trying to untie the string and turning to the window, to the light (all
her windows were shut, in spite of the stifling heat), she left
him altogether for some seconds and stood with her back to him. He
unbuttoned his coat and freed the axe from the noose, but did not yet
take it out altogether, simply holding it in his right hand under the
coat. His hands were fearfully weak, he felt them every moment growing
more numb and more wooden. He was afraid he would let the axe slip and
fall.... A sudden giddiness came over him.

"But what has he tied it up like this for?" the old woman cried with
vexation and moved towards him.

He had not a minute more to lose. He pulled the axe quite out, swung
it with both arms, scarcely conscious of himself, and almost without
effort, almost mechanically, brought the blunt side down on her head. He
seemed not to use his own strength in this. But as soon as he had once
brought the axe down, his strength returned to him.

The old woman was as always bareheaded. Her thin, light hair, streaked
with grey, thickly smeared with grease, was plaited in a rat's tail and
fastened by a broken horn comb which stood out on the nape of her neck.
As she was so short, the blow fell on the very top of her skull. She
cried out, but very faintly, and suddenly sank all of a heap on the
floor, raising her hands to her head. In one hand she still held "the
pledge." Then he dealt her another and another blow with the blunt side
and on the same spot. The blood gushed as from an overturned glass, the
body fell back. He stepped back, let it fall, and at once bent over her
face; she was dead. Her eyes seemed to be starting out of their sockets,
the brow and the whole face were drawn and contorted convulsively.

He laid the axe on the ground near the dead body and felt at once in her
pocket (trying to avoid the streaming body)--the same right-hand pocket
from which she had taken the key on his last visit. He was in full
possession of his faculties, free from confusion or giddiness, but his
hands were still trembling. He remembered afterwards that he had been
particularly collected and careful, trying all the time not to get
smeared with blood.... He pulled out the keys at once, they were all,
as before, in one bunch on a steel ring. He ran at once into the bedroom
with them. It was a very small room with a whole shrine of holy images.
Against the other wall stood a big bed, very clean and covered with
a silk patchwork wadded quilt. Against a third wall was a chest of
drawers. Strange to say, so soon as he began to fit the keys into the
chest, so soon as he heard their jingling, a convulsive shudder passed
over him. He suddenly felt tempted again to give it all up and go
away. But that was only for an instant; it was too late to go back.
He positively smiled at himself, when suddenly another terrifying idea
occurred to his mind. He suddenly fancied that the old woman might be
still alive and might recover her senses. Leaving the keys in the chest,
he ran back to the body, snatched up the axe and lifted it once more
over the old woman, but did not bring it down. There was no doubt that
she was dead. Bending down and examining her again more closely, he saw
clearly that the skull was broken and even battered in on one side. He
was about to feel it with his finger, but drew back his hand and indeed
it was evident without that. Meanwhile there was a perfect pool of
blood. All at once he noticed a string on her neck; he tugged at it, but
the string was strong and did not snap and besides, it was soaked
with blood. He tried to pull it out from the front of the dress, but
something held it and prevented its coming. In his impatience he raised
the axe again to cut the string from above on the body, but did not
dare, and with difficulty, smearing his hand and the axe in the blood,
after two minutes' hurried effort, he cut the string and took it off
without touching the body with the axe; he was not mistaken--it was a
purse. On the string were two crosses, one of Cyprus wood and one of
copper, and an image in silver filigree, and with them a small greasy
chamois leather purse with a steel rim and ring. The purse was stuffed
very full; Raskolnikov thrust it in his pocket without looking at it,
flung the crosses on the old woman's body and rushed back into the
bedroom, this time taking the axe with him.

He was in terrible haste, he snatched the keys, and began trying them
again. But he was unsuccessful. They would not fit in the locks. It
was not so much that his hands were shaking, but that he kept making
mistakes; though he saw for instance that a key was not the right one
and would not fit, still he tried to put it in. Suddenly he remembered
and realised that the big key with the deep notches, which was hanging
there with the small keys could not possibly belong to the chest of
drawers (on his last visit this had struck him), but to some strong box,
and that everything perhaps was hidden in that box. He left the chest
of drawers, and at once felt under the bedstead, knowing that old
women usually keep boxes under their beds. And so it was; there was a
good-sized box under the bed, at least a yard in length, with an arched
lid covered with red leather and studded with steel nails. The notched
key fitted at once and unlocked it. At the top, under a white sheet, was
a coat of red brocade lined with hareskin; under it was a silk dress,
then a shawl and it seemed as though there was nothing below but
clothes. The first thing he did was to wipe his blood-stained hands on
the red brocade. "It's red, and on red blood will be less noticeable,"
the thought passed through his mind; then he suddenly came to himself.
"Good God, am I going out of my senses?" he thought with terror.

But no sooner did he touch the clothes than a gold watch slipped from
under the fur coat. He made haste to turn them all over. There turned
out to be various articles made of gold among the clothes--probably
all pledges, unredeemed or waiting to be redeemed--bracelets, chains,
ear-rings, pins and such things. Some were in cases, others simply
wrapped in newspaper, carefully and exactly folded, and tied round with
tape. Without any delay, he began filling up the pockets of his trousers
and overcoat without examining or undoing the parcels and cases; but he
had not time to take many....

He suddenly heard steps in the room where the old woman lay. He stopped
short and was still as death. But all was quiet, so it must have been
his fancy. All at once he heard distinctly a faint cry, as though
someone had uttered a low broken moan. Then again dead silence for
a minute or two. He sat squatting on his heels by the box and waited
holding his breath. Suddenly he jumped up, seized the axe and ran out of
the bedroom.

In the middle of the room stood Lizaveta with a big bundle in her arms.
She was gazing in stupefaction at her murdered sister, white as a sheet
and seeming not to have the strength to cry out. Seeing him run out
of the bedroom, she began faintly quivering all over, like a leaf, a
shudder ran down her face; she lifted her hand, opened her mouth, but
still did not scream. She began slowly backing away from him into the
corner, staring intently, persistently at him, but still uttered no
sound, as though she could not get breath to scream. He rushed at her
with the axe; her mouth twitched piteously, as one sees babies' mouths,
when they begin to be frightened, stare intently at what frightens them
and are on the point of screaming. And this hapless Lizaveta was so
simple and had been so thoroughly crushed and scared that she did not
even raise a hand to guard her face, though that was the most necessary
and natural action at the moment, for the axe was raised over her face.
She only put up her empty left hand, but not to her face, slowly holding
it out before her as though motioning him away. The axe fell with the
sharp edge just on the skull and split at one blow all the top of the
head. She fell heavily at once. Raskolnikov completely lost his head,
snatching up her bundle, dropped it again and ran into the entry.

Fear gained more and more mastery over him, especially after this
second, quite unexpected murder. He longed to run away from the place
as fast as possible. And if at that moment he had been capable of seeing
and reasoning more correctly, if he had been able to realise all the
difficulties of his position, the hopelessness, the hideousness and the
absurdity of it, if he could have understood how many obstacles and,
perhaps, crimes he had still to overcome or to commit, to get out of
that place and to make his way home, it is very possible that he would
have flung up everything, and would have gone to give himself up, and
not from fear, but from simple horror and loathing of what he had
done. The feeling of loathing especially surged up within him and grew
stronger every minute. He would not now have gone to the box or even
into the room for anything in the world.

But a sort of blankness, even dreaminess, had begun by degrees to take
possession of him; at moments he forgot himself, or rather, forgot what
was of importance, and caught at trifles. Glancing, however, into the
kitchen and seeing a bucket half full of water on a bench, he bethought
him of washing his hands and the axe. His hands were sticky with blood.
He dropped the axe with the blade in the water, snatched a piece of soap
that lay in a broken saucer on the window, and began washing his hands
in the bucket. When they were clean, he took out the axe, washed the
blade and spent a long time, about three minutes, washing the wood where
there were spots of blood rubbing them with soap. Then he wiped it all
with some linen that was hanging to dry on a line in the kitchen and
then he was a long while attentively examining the axe at the window.
There was no trace left on it, only the wood was still damp. He
carefully hung the axe in the noose under his coat. Then as far as was
possible, in the dim light in the kitchen, he looked over his overcoat,
his trousers and his boots. At the first glance there seemed to be
nothing but stains on the boots. He wetted the rag and rubbed the boots.
But he knew he was not looking thoroughly, that there might be something
quite noticeable that he was overlooking. He stood in the middle of the
room, lost in thought. Dark agonising ideas rose in his mind--the idea
that he was mad and that at that moment he was incapable of reasoning,
of protecting himself, that he ought perhaps to be doing something
utterly different from what he was now doing. "Good God!" he muttered "I
must fly, fly," and he rushed into the entry. But here a shock of terror
awaited him such as he had never known before.

He stood and gazed and could not believe his eyes: the door, the outer
door from the stairs, at which he had not long before waited and rung,
was standing unfastened and at least six inches open. No lock, no bolt,
all the time, all that time! The old woman had not shut it after him
perhaps as a precaution. But, good God! Why, he had seen Lizaveta
afterwards! And how could he, how could he have failed to reflect that
she must have come in somehow! She could not have come through the wall!

He dashed to the door and fastened the latch.

"But no, the wrong thing again! I must get away, get away...."

He unfastened the latch, opened the door and began listening on the
staircase.

He listened a long time. Somewhere far away, it might be in the gateway,
two voices were loudly and shrilly shouting, quarrelling and scolding.
"What are they about?" He waited patiently. At last all was still, as
though suddenly cut off; they had separated. He was meaning to go out,
but suddenly, on the floor below, a door was noisily opened and someone
began going downstairs humming a tune. "How is it they all make such
a noise?" flashed through his mind. Once more he closed the door and
waited. At last all was still, not a soul stirring. He was just taking a
step towards the stairs when he heard fresh footsteps.

The steps sounded very far off, at the very bottom of the stairs, but
he remembered quite clearly and distinctly that from the first sound he
began for some reason to suspect that this was someone coming _there_,
to the fourth floor, to the old woman. Why? Were the sounds somehow
peculiar, significant? The steps were heavy, even and unhurried. Now
_he_ had passed the first floor, now he was mounting higher, it was
growing more and more distinct! He could hear his heavy breathing. And
now the third storey had been reached. Coming here! And it seemed to
him all at once that he was turned to stone, that it was like a dream
in which one is being pursued, nearly caught and will be killed, and is
rooted to the spot and cannot even move one's arms.

At last when the unknown was mounting to the fourth floor, he suddenly
started, and succeeded in slipping neatly and quickly back into the
flat and closing the door behind him. Then he took the hook and softly,
noiselessly, fixed it in the catch. Instinct helped him. When he had
done this, he crouched holding his breath, by the door. The unknown
visitor was by now also at the door. They were now standing opposite one
another, as he had just before been standing with the old woman, when
the door divided them and he was listening.

The visitor panted several times. "He must be a big, fat man," thought
Raskolnikov, squeezing the axe in his hand. It seemed like a dream
indeed. The visitor took hold of the bell and rang it loudly.

As soon as the tin bell tinkled, Raskolnikov seemed to be aware of
something moving in the room. For some seconds he listened quite
seriously. The unknown rang again, waited and suddenly tugged violently
and impatiently at the handle of the door. Raskolnikov gazed in horror
at the hook shaking in its fastening, and in blank terror expected every
minute that the fastening would be pulled out. It certainly did seem
possible, so violently was he shaking it. He was tempted to hold the
fastening, but _he_ might be aware of it. A giddiness came over him
again. "I shall fall down!" flashed through his mind, but the unknown
began to speak and he recovered himself at once.

"What's up? Are they asleep or murdered? D-damn them!" he bawled in a
thick voice, "Hey, Alyona Ivanovna, old witch! Lizaveta Ivanovna, hey,
my beauty! open the door! Oh, damn them! Are they asleep or what?"

And again, enraged, he tugged with all his might a dozen times at
the bell. He must certainly be a man of authority and an intimate
acquaintance.

At this moment light hurried steps were heard not far off, on the
stairs. Someone else was approaching. Raskolnikov had not heard them at
first.

"You don't say there's no one at home," the new-comer cried in a
cheerful, ringing voice, addressing the first visitor, who still went on
pulling the bell. "Good evening, Koch."

"From his voice he must be quite young," thought Raskolnikov.

"Who the devil can tell? I've almost broken the lock," answered Koch.
"But how do you come to know me?"

"Why! The day before yesterday I beat you three times running at
billiards at Gambrinus'."

"Oh!"

"So they are not at home? That's queer. It's awfully stupid though.
Where could the old woman have gone? I've come on business."

"Yes; and I have business with her, too."

"Well, what can we do? Go back, I suppose, Aie--aie! And I was hoping to
get some money!" cried the young man.

"We must give it up, of course, but what did she fix this time for? The
old witch fixed the time for me to come herself. It's out of my way.
And where the devil she can have got to, I can't make out. She sits here
from year's end to year's end, the old hag; her legs are bad and yet
here all of a sudden she is out for a walk!"

"Hadn't we better ask the porter?"

"What?"

"Where she's gone and when she'll be back."

"Hm.... Damn it all!... We might ask.... But you know she never does go
anywhere."

And he once more tugged at the door-handle.

"Damn it all. There's nothing to be done, we must go!"

"Stay!" cried the young man suddenly. "Do you see how the door shakes if
you pull it?"

"Well?"

"That shows it's not locked, but fastened with the hook! Do you hear how
the hook clanks?"

"Well?"

"Why, don't you see? That proves that one of them is at home. If they
were all out, they would have locked the door from the outside with the
key and not with the hook from inside. There, do you hear how the hook
is clanking? To fasten the hook on the inside they must be at home,
don't you see. So there they are sitting inside and don't open the
door!"

"Well! And so they must be!" cried Koch, astonished. "What are they
about in there?" And he began furiously shaking the door.

"Stay!" cried the young man again. "Don't pull at it! There must be
something wrong.... Here, you've been ringing and pulling at the door
and still they don't open! So either they've both fainted or..."

"What?"

"I tell you what. Let's go fetch the porter, let him wake them up."

"All right."

Both were going down.

"Stay. You stop here while I run down for the porter."

"What for?"

"Well, you'd better."

"All right."

"I'm studying the law you see! It's evident, e-vi-dent there's something
wrong here!" the young man cried hotly, and he ran downstairs.

Koch remained. Once more he softly touched the bell which gave one
tinkle, then gently, as though reflecting and looking about him, began
touching the door-handle pulling it and letting it go to make sure once
more that it was only fastened by the hook. Then puffing and panting he
bent down and began looking at the keyhole: but the key was in the lock
on the inside and so nothing could be seen.

Raskolnikov stood keeping tight hold of the axe. He was in a sort of
delirium. He was even making ready to fight when they should come in.
While they were knocking and talking together, the idea several times
occurred to him to end it all at once and shout to them through the
door. Now and then he was tempted to swear at them, to jeer at them,
while they could not open the door! "Only make haste!" was the thought
that flashed through his mind.

"But what the devil is he about?..." Time was passing, one minute, and
another--no one came. Koch began to be restless.

"What the devil?" he cried suddenly and in impatience deserting his
sentry duty, he, too, went down, hurrying and thumping with his heavy
boots on the stairs. The steps died away.

"Good heavens! What am I to do?"

Raskolnikov unfastened the hook, opened the door--there was no sound.
Abruptly, without any thought at all, he went out, closing the door as
thoroughly as he could, and went downstairs.

He had gone down three flights when he suddenly heard a loud voice
below--where could he go! There was nowhere to hide. He was just going
back to the flat.

"Hey there! Catch the brute!"

Somebody dashed out of a flat below, shouting, and rather fell than ran
down the stairs, bawling at the top of his voice.

"Mitka! Mitka! Mitka! Mitka! Mitka! Blast him!"

The shout ended in a shriek; the last sounds came from the yard; all was
still. But at the same instant several men talking loud and fast began
noisily mounting the stairs. There were three or four of them. He
distinguished the ringing voice of the young man. "Hey!"

Filled with despair he went straight to meet them, feeling "come what
must!" If they stopped him--all was lost; if they let him pass--all was
lost too; they would remember him. They were approaching; they were only
a flight from him--and suddenly deliverance! A few steps from him on the
right, there was an empty flat with the door wide open, the flat on the
second floor where the painters had been at work, and which, as though
for his benefit, they had just left. It was they, no doubt, who had just
run down, shouting. The floor had only just been painted, in the middle
of the room stood a pail and a broken pot with paint and brushes. In one
instant he had whisked in at the open door and hidden behind the wall
and only in the nick of time; they had already reached the landing.
Then they turned and went on up to the fourth floor, talking loudly. He
waited, went out on tiptoe and ran down the stairs.

No one was on the stairs, nor in the gateway. He passed quickly through
the gateway and turned to the left in the street.

He knew, he knew perfectly well that at that moment they were at the
flat, that they were greatly astonished at finding it unlocked, as
the door had just been fastened, that by now they were looking at the
bodies, that before another minute had passed they would guess and
completely realise that the murderer had just been there, and had
succeeded in hiding somewhere, slipping by them and escaping. They would
guess most likely that he had been in the empty flat, while they were
going upstairs. And meanwhile he dared not quicken his pace much, though
the next turning was still nearly a hundred yards away. "Should he
slip through some gateway and wait somewhere in an unknown street? No,
hopeless! Should he fling away the axe? Should he take a cab? Hopeless,
hopeless!"

At last he reached the turning. He turned down it more dead than alive.
Here he was half way to safety, and he understood it; it was less risky
because there was a great crowd of people, and he was lost in it like a
grain of sand. But all he had suffered had so weakened him that he could
scarcely move. Perspiration ran down him in drops, his neck was all wet.
"My word, he has been going it!" someone shouted at him when he came out
on the canal bank.

He was only dimly conscious of himself now, and the farther he went the
worse it was. He remembered however, that on coming out on to the canal
bank, he was alarmed at finding few people there and so being more
conspicuous, and he had thought of turning back. Though he was almost
falling from fatigue, he went a long way round so as to get home from
quite a different direction.

He was not fully conscious when he passed through the gateway of his
house! He was already on the staircase before he recollected the axe.
And yet he had a very grave problem before him, to put it back and to
escape observation as far as possible in doing so. He was of course
incapable of reflecting that it might perhaps be far better not to
restore the axe at all, but to drop it later on in somebody's yard. But
it all happened fortunately, the door of the porter's room was closed
but not locked, so that it seemed most likely that the porter was at
home. But he had so completely lost all power of reflection that he
walked straight to the door and opened it. If the porter had asked him,
"What do you want?" he would perhaps have simply handed him the axe. But
again the porter was not at home, and he succeeded in putting the axe
back under the bench, and even covering it with the chunk of wood as
before. He met no one, not a soul, afterwards on the way to his room;
the landlady's door was shut. When he was in his room, he flung himself
on the sofa just as he was--he did not sleep, but sank into blank
forgetfulness. If anyone had come into his room then, he would have
jumped up at once and screamed. Scraps and shreds of thoughts were
simply swarming in his brain, but he could not catch at one, he could
not rest on one, in spite of all his efforts....




PART II



CHAPTER I

So he lay a very long while. Now and then he seemed to wake up, and at
such moments he noticed that it was far into the night, but it did not
occur to him to get up. At last he noticed that it was beginning to get
light. He was lying on his back, still dazed from his recent oblivion.
Fearful, despairing cries rose shrilly from the street, sounds which he
heard every night, indeed, under his window after two o'clock. They woke
him up now.

"Ah! the drunken men are coming out of the taverns," he thought, "it's
past two o'clock," and at once he leaped up, as though someone had
pulled him from the sofa.

"What! Past two o'clock!"

He sat down on the sofa--and instantly recollected everything! All at
once, in one flash, he recollected everything.

For the first moment he thought he was going mad. A dreadful chill came
over him; but the chill was from the fever that had begun long before in
his sleep. Now he was suddenly taken with violent shivering, so that his
teeth chattered and all his limbs were shaking. He opened the door and
began listening--everything in the house was asleep. With amazement he
gazed at himself and everything in the room around him, wondering how he
could have come in the night before without fastening the door, and have
flung himself on the sofa without undressing, without even taking his
hat off. It had fallen off and was lying on the floor near his pillow.

"If anyone had come in, what would he have thought? That I'm drunk
but..."

He rushed to the window. There was light enough, and he began hurriedly
looking himself all over from head to foot, all his clothes; were there
no traces? But there was no doing it like that; shivering with cold, he
began taking off everything and looking over again. He turned everything
over to the last threads and rags, and mistrusting himself, went through
his search three times.

But there seemed to be nothing, no trace, except in one place, where
some thick drops of congealed blood were clinging to the frayed edge
of his trousers. He picked up a big claspknife and cut off the frayed
threads. There seemed to be nothing more.

Suddenly he remembered that the purse and the things he had taken out of
the old woman's box were still in his pockets! He had not thought till
then of taking them out and hiding them! He had not even thought of them
while he was examining his clothes! What next? Instantly he rushed
to take them out and fling them on the table. When he had pulled out
everything, and turned the pocket inside out to be sure there was
nothing left, he carried the whole heap to the corner. The paper had
come off the bottom of the wall and hung there in tatters. He began
stuffing all the things into the hole under the paper: "They're in! All
out of sight, and the purse too!" he thought gleefully, getting up and
gazing blankly at the hole which bulged out more than ever. Suddenly
he shuddered all over with horror; "My God!" he whispered in despair:
"what's the matter with me? Is that hidden? Is that the way to hide
things?"

He had not reckoned on having trinkets to hide. He had only thought of
money, and so had not prepared a hiding-place.

"But now, now, what am I glad of?" he thought, "Is that hiding things?
My reason's deserting me--simply!"

He sat down on the sofa in exhaustion and was at once shaken by another
unbearable fit of shivering. Mechanically he drew from a chair beside
him his old student's winter coat, which was still warm though almost in
rags, covered himself up with it and once more sank into drowsiness and
delirium. He lost consciousness.

Not more than five minutes had passed when he jumped up a second time,
and at once pounced in a frenzy on his clothes again.

"How could I go to sleep again with nothing done? Yes, yes; I have not
taken the loop off the armhole! I forgot it, forgot a thing like that!
Such a piece of evidence!"

He pulled off the noose, hurriedly cut it to pieces and threw the bits
among his linen under the pillow.

"Pieces of torn linen couldn't rouse suspicion, whatever happened; I
think not, I think not, any way!" he repeated, standing in the middle
of the room, and with painful concentration he fell to gazing about
him again, at the floor and everywhere, trying to make sure he had not
forgotten anything. The conviction that all his faculties, even memory,
and the simplest power of reflection were failing him, began to be an
insufferable torture.

"Surely it isn't beginning already! Surely it isn't my punishment coming
upon me? It is!"

The frayed rags he had cut off his trousers were actually lying on the
floor in the middle of the room, where anyone coming in would see them!

"What is the matter with me!" he cried again, like one distraught.

Then a strange idea entered his head; that, perhaps, all his clothes
were covered with blood, that, perhaps, there were a great many
stains, but that he did not see them, did not notice them because
his perceptions were failing, were going to pieces... his reason was
clouded.... Suddenly he remembered that there had been blood on the
purse too. "Ah! Then there must be blood on the pocket too, for I put
the wet purse in my pocket!"

In a flash he had turned the pocket inside out and, yes!--there were
traces, stains on the lining of the pocket!

"So my reason has not quite deserted me, so I still have some sense and
memory, since I guessed it of myself," he thought triumphantly, with
a deep sigh of relief; "it's simply the weakness of fever, a moment's
delirium," and he tore the whole lining out of the left pocket of his
trousers. At that instant the sunlight fell on his left boot; on the
sock which poked out from the boot, he fancied there were traces! He
flung off his boots; "traces indeed! The tip of the sock was soaked with
blood;" he must have unwarily stepped into that pool.... "But what am I
to do with this now? Where am I to put the sock and rags and pocket?"

He gathered them all up in his hands and stood in the middle of the
room.

"In the stove? But they would ransack the stove first of all. Burn them?
But what can I burn them with? There are no matches even. No, better
go out and throw it all away somewhere. Yes, better throw it away," he
repeated, sitting down on the sofa again, "and at once, this minute,
without lingering..."

But his head sank on the pillow instead. Again the unbearable icy
shivering came over him; again he drew his coat over him.

And for a long while, for some hours, he was haunted by the impulse to
"go off somewhere at once, this moment, and fling it all away, so that
it may be out of sight and done with, at once, at once!" Several times
he tried to rise from the sofa, but could not.

He was thoroughly waked up at last by a violent knocking at his door.

"Open, do, are you dead or alive? He keeps sleeping here!" shouted
Nastasya, banging with her fist on the door. "For whole days together
he's snoring here like a dog! A dog he is too. Open I tell you. It's
past ten."

"Maybe he's not at home," said a man's voice.

"Ha! that's the porter's voice.... What does he want?"

He jumped up and sat on the sofa. The beating of his heart was a
positive pain.

"Then who can have latched the door?" retorted Nastasya. "He's taken to
bolting himself in! As if he were worth stealing! Open, you stupid, wake
up!"

"What do they want? Why the porter? All's discovered. Resist or open?
Come what may!..."

He half rose, stooped forward and unlatched the door.

His room was so small that he could undo the latch without leaving the
bed. Yes; the porter and Nastasya were standing there.

Nastasya stared at him in a strange way. He glanced with a defiant and
desperate air at the porter, who without a word held out a grey folded
paper sealed with bottle-wax.

"A notice from the office," he announced, as he gave him the paper.

"From what office?"

"A summons to the police office, of course. You know which office."

"To the police?... What for?..."

"How can I tell? You're sent for, so you go."

The man looked at him attentively, looked round the room and turned to
go away.

"He's downright ill!" observed Nastasya, not taking her eyes off him.
The porter turned his head for a moment. "He's been in a fever since
yesterday," she added.

Raskolnikov made no response and held the paper in his hands, without
opening it. "Don't you get up then," Nastasya went on compassionately,
seeing that he was letting his feet down from the sofa. "You're ill, and
so don't go; there's no such hurry. What have you got there?"

He looked; in his right hand he held the shreds he had cut from his
trousers, the sock, and the rags of the pocket. So he had been asleep
with them in his hand. Afterwards reflecting upon it, he remembered that
half waking up in his fever, he had grasped all this tightly in his hand
and so fallen asleep again.

"Look at the rags he's collected and sleeps with them, as though he has
got hold of a treasure..."

And Nastasya went off into her hysterical giggle.

Instantly he thrust them all under his great coat and fixed his
eyes intently upon her. Far as he was from being capable of rational
reflection at that moment, he felt that no one would behave like that
with a person who was going to be arrested. "But... the police?"

"You'd better have some tea! Yes? I'll bring it, there's some left."

"No... I'm going; I'll go at once," he muttered, getting on to his feet.

"Why, you'll never get downstairs!"

"Yes, I'll go."

"As you please."

She followed the porter out.

At once he rushed to the light to examine the sock and the rags.

"There are stains, but not very noticeable; all covered with dirt,
and rubbed and already discoloured. No one who had no suspicion could
distinguish anything. Nastasya from a distance could not have noticed,
thank God!" Then with a tremor he broke the seal of the notice and began
reading; he was a long while reading, before he understood. It was an
ordinary summons from the district police-station to appear that day at
half-past nine at the office of the district superintendent.

"But when has such a thing happened? I never have anything to do with
the police! And why just to-day?" he thought in agonising bewilderment.
"Good God, only get it over soon!"

He was flinging himself on his knees to pray, but broke into
laughter--not at the idea of prayer, but at himself.

He began, hurriedly dressing. "If I'm lost, I am lost, I don't care!
Shall I put the sock on?" he suddenly wondered, "it will get dustier
still and the traces will be gone."

But no sooner had he put it on than he pulled it off again in loathing
and horror. He pulled it off, but reflecting that he had no other socks,
he picked it up and put it on again--and again he laughed.

"That's all conventional, that's all relative, merely a way of looking
at it," he thought in a flash, but only on the top surface of his
mind, while he was shuddering all over, "there, I've got it on! I have
finished by getting it on!"

But his laughter was quickly followed by despair.

"No, it's too much for me..." he thought. His legs shook. "From fear,"
he muttered. His head swam and ached with fever. "It's a trick! They
want to decoy me there and confound me over everything," he mused, as
he went out on to the stairs--"the worst of it is I'm almost
light-headed... I may blurt out something stupid..."

On the stairs he remembered that he was leaving all the things just as
they were in the hole in the wall, "and very likely, it's on purpose
to search when I'm out," he thought, and stopped short. But he was
possessed by such despair, such cynicism of misery, if one may so call
it, that with a wave of his hand he went on. "Only to get it over!"

In the street the heat was insufferable again; not a drop of rain had
fallen all those days. Again dust, bricks and mortar, again the stench
from the shops and pot-houses, again the drunken men, the Finnish
pedlars and half-broken-down cabs. The sun shone straight in his eyes,
so that it hurt him to look out of them, and he felt his head going
round--as a man in a fever is apt to feel when he comes out into the
street on a bright sunny day.

When he reached the turning into _the_ street, in an agony of
trepidation he looked down it... at _the_ house... and at once averted
his eyes.

"If they question me, perhaps I'll simply tell," he thought, as he drew
near the police-station.

The police-station was about a quarter of a mile off. It had lately been
moved to new rooms on the fourth floor of a new house. He had been once
for a moment in the old office but long ago. Turning in at the gateway,
he saw on the right a flight of stairs which a peasant was mounting with
a book in his hand. "A house-porter, no doubt; so then, the office is
here," and he began ascending the stairs on the chance. He did not want
to ask questions of anyone.

"I'll go in, fall on my knees, and confess everything..." he thought, as
he reached the fourth floor.

The staircase was steep, narrow and all sloppy with dirty water. The
kitchens of the flats opened on to the stairs and stood open almost
the whole day. So there was a fearful smell and heat. The staircase
was crowded with porters going up and down with their books under their
arms, policemen, and persons of all sorts and both sexes. The door of
the office, too, stood wide open. Peasants stood waiting within. There,
too, the heat was stifling and there was a sickening smell of fresh
paint and stale oil from the newly decorated rooms.

After waiting a little, he decided to move forward into the next room.
All the rooms were small and low-pitched. A fearful impatience drew him
on and on. No one paid attention to him. In the second room some
clerks sat writing, dressed hardly better than he was, and rather a
queer-looking set. He went up to one of them.

"What is it?"

He showed the notice he had received.

"You are a student?" the man asked, glancing at the notice.

"Yes, formerly a student."

The clerk looked at him, but without the slightest interest. He was a
particularly unkempt person with the look of a fixed idea in his eye.

"There would be no getting anything out of him, because he has no
interest in anything," thought Raskolnikov.

"Go in there to the head clerk," said the clerk, pointing towards the
furthest room.

He went into that room--the fourth in order; it was a small room and
packed full of people, rather better dressed than in the outer rooms.
Among them were two ladies. One, poorly dressed in mourning, sat at the
table opposite the chief clerk, writing something at his dictation.
The other, a very stout, buxom woman with a purplish-red, blotchy face,
excessively smartly dressed with a brooch on her bosom as big as a
saucer, was standing on one side, apparently waiting for something.
Raskolnikov thrust his notice upon the head clerk. The latter glanced
at it, said: "Wait a minute," and went on attending to the lady in
mourning.

He breathed more freely. "It can't be that!"

By degrees he began to regain confidence, he kept urging himself to have
courage and be calm.

"Some foolishness, some trifling carelessness, and I may betray myself!
Hm... it's a pity there's no air here," he added, "it's stifling.... It
makes one's head dizzier than ever... and one's mind too..."

He was conscious of a terrible inner turmoil. He was afraid of losing
his self-control; he tried to catch at something and fix his mind on it,
something quite irrelevant, but he could not succeed in this at all. Yet
the head clerk greatly interested him, he kept hoping to see through him
and guess something from his face.

He was a very young man, about two and twenty, with a dark mobile
face that looked older than his years. He was fashionably dressed and
foppish, with his hair parted in the middle, well combed and pomaded,
and wore a number of rings on his well-scrubbed fingers and a gold chain
on his waistcoat. He said a couple of words in French to a foreigner who
was in the room, and said them fairly correctly.

"Luise Ivanovna, you can sit down," he said casually to the
gaily-dressed, purple-faced lady, who was still standing as though not
venturing to sit down, though there was a chair beside her.

"Ich danke," said the latter, and softly, with a rustle of silk she sank
into the chair. Her light blue dress trimmed with white lace floated
about the table like an air-balloon and filled almost half the room. She
smelt of scent. But she was obviously embarrassed at filling half
the room and smelling so strongly of scent; and though her smile was
impudent as well as cringing, it betrayed evident uneasiness.

The lady in mourning had done at last, and got up. All at once, with
some noise, an officer walked in very jauntily, with a peculiar swing of
his shoulders at each step. He tossed his cockaded cap on the table and
sat down in an easy-chair. The small lady positively skipped from her
seat on seeing him, and fell to curtsying in a sort of ecstasy; but the
officer took not the smallest notice of her, and she did not venture to
sit down again in his presence. He was the assistant superintendent. He
had a reddish moustache that stood out horizontally on each side of his
face, and extremely small features, expressive of nothing much except
a certain insolence. He looked askance and rather indignantly at
Raskolnikov; he was so very badly dressed, and in spite of his
humiliating position, his bearing was by no means in keeping with his
clothes. Raskolnikov had unwarily fixed a very long and direct look on
him, so that he felt positively affronted.

"What do you want?" he shouted, apparently astonished that such a ragged
fellow was not annihilated by the majesty of his glance.

"I was summoned... by a notice..." Raskolnikov faltered.

"For the recovery of money due, from _the student_," the head clerk
interfered hurriedly, tearing himself from his papers. "Here!" and he
flung Raskolnikov a document and pointed out the place. "Read that!"

"Money? What money?" thought Raskolnikov, "but... then... it's certainly
not _that_."

And he trembled with joy. He felt sudden intense indescribable relief. A
load was lifted from his back.

"And pray, what time were you directed to appear, sir?" shouted the
assistant superintendent, seeming for some unknown reason more and more
aggrieved. "You are told to come at nine, and now it's twelve!"

"The notice was only brought me a quarter of an hour ago," Raskolnikov
answered loudly over his shoulder. To his own surprise he, too, grew
suddenly angry and found a certain pleasure in it. "And it's enough that
I have come here ill with fever."

"Kindly refrain from shouting!"

"I'm not shouting, I'm speaking very quietly, it's you who are shouting
at me. I'm a student, and allow no one to shout at me."

The assistant superintendent was so furious that for the first minute he
could only splutter inarticulately. He leaped up from his seat.

"Be silent! You are in a government office. Don't be impudent, sir!"

"You're in a government office, too," cried Raskolnikov, "and you're
smoking a cigarette as well as shouting, so you are showing disrespect
to all of us."

He felt an indescribable satisfaction at having said this.

The head clerk looked at him with a smile. The angry assistant
superintendent was obviously disconcerted.

"That's not your business!" he shouted at last with unnatural loudness.
"Kindly make the declaration demanded of you. Show him. Alexandr
Grigorievitch. There is a complaint against you! You don't pay your
debts! You're a fine bird!"

But Raskolnikov was not listening now; he had eagerly clutched at the
paper, in haste to find an explanation. He read it once, and a second
time, and still did not understand.

"What is this?" he asked the head clerk.

"It is for the recovery of money on an I O U, a writ. You must
either pay it, with all expenses, costs and so on, or give a written
declaration when you can pay it, and at the same time an undertaking not
to leave the capital without payment, and nor to sell or conceal your
property. The creditor is at liberty to sell your property, and proceed
against you according to the law."

"But I... am not in debt to anyone!"

"That's not our business. Here, an I O U for a hundred and fifteen
roubles, legally attested, and due for payment, has been brought us
for recovery, given by you to the widow of the assessor Zarnitsyn, nine
months ago, and paid over by the widow Zarnitsyn to one Mr. Tchebarov.
We therefore summon you, hereupon."

"But she is my landlady!"

"And what if she is your landlady?"

The head clerk looked at him with a condescending smile of compassion,
and at the same time with a certain triumph, as at a novice under fire
for the first time--as though he would say: "Well, how do you feel now?"
But what did he care now for an I O U, for a writ of recovery! Was that
worth worrying about now, was it worth attention even! He stood, he
read, he listened, he answered, he even asked questions himself, but
all mechanically. The triumphant sense of security, of deliverance from
overwhelming danger, that was what filled his whole soul that moment
without thought for the future, without analysis, without suppositions
or surmises, without doubts and without questioning. It was an instant
of full, direct, purely instinctive joy. But at that very moment
something like a thunderstorm took place in the office. The assistant
superintendent, still shaken by Raskolnikov's disrespect, still fuming
and obviously anxious to keep up his wounded dignity, pounced on the
unfortunate smart lady, who had been gazing at him ever since he came in
with an exceedingly silly smile.

"You shameful hussy!" he shouted suddenly at the top of his voice. (The
lady in mourning had left the office.) "What was going on at your house
last night? Eh! A disgrace again, you're a scandal to the whole street.
Fighting and drinking again. Do you want the house of correction? Why,
I have warned you ten times over that I would not let you off the
eleventh! And here you are again, again, you... you...!"

The paper fell out of Raskolnikov's hands, and he looked wildly at the
smart lady who was so unceremoniously treated. But he soon saw what it
meant, and at once began to find positive amusement in the scandal. He
listened with pleasure, so that he longed to laugh and laugh... all his
nerves were on edge.

"Ilya Petrovitch!" the head clerk was beginning anxiously, but stopped
short, for he knew from experience that the enraged assistant could not
be stopped except by force.

As for the smart lady, at first she positively trembled before the
storm. But, strange to say, the more numerous and violent the terms of
abuse became, the more amiable she looked, and the more seductive the
smiles she lavished on the terrible assistant. She moved uneasily, and
curtsied incessantly, waiting impatiently for a chance of putting in her
word: and at last she found it.

"There was no sort of noise or fighting in my house, Mr. Captain," she
pattered all at once, like peas dropping, speaking Russian confidently,
though with a strong German accent, "and no sort of scandal, and his
honour came drunk, and it's the whole truth I am telling, Mr. Captain,
and I am not to blame.... Mine is an honourable house, Mr. Captain,
and honourable behaviour, Mr. Captain, and I always, always dislike any
scandal myself. But he came quite tipsy, and asked for three bottles
again, and then he lifted up one leg, and began playing the pianoforte
with one foot, and that is not at all right in an honourable house, and
he _ganz_ broke the piano, and it was very bad manners indeed and I said
so. And he took up a bottle and began hitting everyone with it. And then
I called the porter, and Karl came, and he took Karl and hit him in the
eye; and he hit Henriette in the eye, too, and gave me five slaps on the
cheek. And it was so ungentlemanly in an honourable house, Mr. Captain,
and I screamed. And he opened the window over the canal, and stood in
the window, squealing like a little pig; it was a disgrace. The idea of
squealing like a little pig at the window into the street! Fie upon him!
And Karl pulled him away from the window by his coat, and it is true,
Mr. Captain, he tore _sein rock_. And then he shouted that _man muss_
pay him fifteen roubles damages. And I did pay him, Mr. Captain, five
roubles for _sein rock_. And he is an ungentlemanly visitor and caused
all the scandal. 'I will show you up,' he said, 'for I can write to all
the papers about you.'"

"Then he was an author?"

"Yes, Mr. Captain, and what an ungentlemanly visitor in an honourable
house...."

"Now then! Enough! I have told you already..."

"Ilya Petrovitch!" the head clerk repeated significantly.

The assistant glanced rapidly at him; the head clerk slightly shook his
head.

"... So I tell you this, most respectable Luise Ivanovna, and I tell it
you for the last time," the assistant went on. "If there is a scandal
in your honourable house once again, I will put you yourself in the
lock-up, as it is called in polite society. Do you hear? So a literary
man, an author took five roubles for his coat-tail in an 'honourable
house'? A nice set, these authors!"

And he cast a contemptuous glance at Raskolnikov. "There was a scandal
the other day in a restaurant, too. An author had eaten his dinner and
would not pay; 'I'll write a satire on you,' says he. And there was
another of them on a steamer last week used the most disgraceful
language to the respectable family of a civil councillor, his wife and
daughter. And there was one of them turned out of a confectioner's shop
the other day. They are like that, authors, literary men, students,
town-criers.... Pfoo! You get along! I shall look in upon you myself one
day. Then you had better be careful! Do you hear?"

With hurried deference, Luise Ivanovna fell to curtsying in all
directions, and so curtsied herself to the door. But at the door, she
stumbled backwards against a good-looking officer with a fresh, open
face and splendid thick fair whiskers. This was the superintendent of
the district himself, Nikodim Fomitch. Luise Ivanovna made haste
to curtsy almost to the ground, and with mincing little steps, she
fluttered out of the office.

"Again thunder and lightning--a hurricane!" said Nikodim Fomitch to Ilya
Petrovitch in a civil and friendly tone. "You are aroused again, you are
fuming again! I heard it on the stairs!"

"Well, what then!" Ilya Petrovitch drawled with gentlemanly nonchalance;
and he walked with some papers to another table, with a jaunty swing of
his shoulders at each step. "Here, if you will kindly look: an author,
or a student, has been one at least, does not pay his debts, has given
an I O U, won't clear out of his room, and complaints are constantly
being lodged against him, and here he has been pleased to make a protest
against my smoking in his presence! He behaves like a cad himself, and
just look at him, please. Here's the gentleman, and very attractive he
is!"

"Poverty is not a vice, my friend, but we know you go off like powder,
you can't bear a slight, I daresay you took offence at something and
went too far yourself," continued Nikodim Fomitch, turning affably to
Raskolnikov. "But you were wrong there; he is a capital fellow, I assure
you, but explosive, explosive! He gets hot, fires up, boils over, and no
stopping him! And then it's all over! And at the bottom he's a heart of
gold! His nickname in the regiment was the Explosive Lieutenant...."

"And what a regiment it was, too," cried Ilya Petrovitch, much gratified
at this agreeable banter, though still sulky.

Raskolnikov had a sudden desire to say something exceptionally pleasant
to them all. "Excuse me, Captain," he began easily, suddenly addressing
Nikodim Fomitch, "will you enter into my position?... I am ready to
ask pardon, if I have been ill-mannered. I am a poor student, sick
and shattered (shattered was the word he used) by poverty. I am not
studying, because I cannot keep myself now, but I shall get money.... I
have a mother and sister in the province of X. They will send it to
me, and I will pay. My landlady is a good-hearted woman, but she is so
exasperated at my having lost my lessons, and not paying her for the
last four months, that she does not even send up my dinner... and I
don't understand this I O U at all. She is asking me to pay her on this
I O U. How am I to pay her? Judge for yourselves!..."

"But that is not our business, you know," the head clerk was observing.

"Yes, yes. I perfectly agree with you. But allow me to explain..."
Raskolnikov put in again, still addressing Nikodim Fomitch, but trying
his best to address Ilya Petrovitch also, though the latter persistently
appeared to be rummaging among his papers and to be contemptuously
oblivious of him. "Allow me to explain that I have been living with her
for nearly three years and at first... at first... for why should I not
confess it, at the very beginning I promised to marry her daughter, it
was a verbal promise, freely given... she was a girl... indeed, I liked
her, though I was not in love with her... a youthful affair in fact...
that is, I mean to say, that my landlady gave me credit freely in those
days, and I led a life of... I was very heedless..."

"Nobody asks you for these personal details, sir, we've no time to
waste," Ilya Petrovitch interposed roughly and with a note of triumph;
but Raskolnikov stopped him hotly, though he suddenly found it
exceedingly difficult to speak.

"But excuse me, excuse me. It is for me to explain... how it all
happened... In my turn... though I agree with you... it is unnecessary.
But a year ago, the girl died of typhus. I remained lodging there as
before, and when my landlady moved into her present quarters, she said
to me... and in a friendly way... that she had complete trust in me,
but still, would I not give her an I O U for one hundred and fifteen
roubles, all the debt I owed her. She said if only I gave her that,
she would trust me again, as much as I liked, and that she would never,
never--those were her own words--make use of that I O U till I could pay
of myself... and now, when I have lost my lessons and have nothing to
eat, she takes action against me. What am I to say to that?"

"All these affecting details are no business of ours." Ilya Petrovitch
interrupted rudely. "You must give a written undertaking but as for your
love affairs and all these tragic events, we have nothing to do with
that."

"Come now... you are harsh," muttered Nikodim Fomitch, sitting down at
the table and also beginning to write. He looked a little ashamed.

"Write!" said the head clerk to Raskolnikov.

"Write what?" the latter asked, gruffly.

"I will dictate to you."

Raskolnikov fancied that the head clerk treated him more casually and
contemptuously after his speech, but strange to say he suddenly felt
completely indifferent to anyone's opinion, and this revulsion took
place in a flash, in one instant. If he had cared to think a little,
he would have been amazed indeed that he could have talked to them like
that a minute before, forcing his feelings upon them. And where had
those feelings come from? Now if the whole room had been filled, not
with police officers, but with those nearest and dearest to him, he
would not have found one human word for them, so empty was his heart. A
gloomy sensation of agonising, everlasting solitude and remoteness, took
conscious form in his soul. It was not the meanness of his sentimental
effusions before Ilya Petrovitch, nor the meanness of the latter's
triumph over him that had caused this sudden revulsion in his heart.
Oh, what had he to do now with his own baseness, with all these petty
vanities, officers, German women, debts, police-offices? If he had been
sentenced to be burnt at that moment, he would not have stirred, would
hardly have heard the sentence to the end. Something was happening to
him entirely new, sudden and unknown. It was not that he understood, but
he felt clearly with all the intensity of sensation that he could
never more appeal to these people in the police-office with sentimental
effusions like his recent outburst, or with anything whatever; and that
if they had been his own brothers and sisters and not police-officers,
it would have been utterly out of the question to appeal to them in any
circumstance of life. He had never experienced such a strange and awful
sensation. And what was most agonising--it was more a sensation than a
conception or idea, a direct sensation, the most agonising of all the
sensations he had known in his life.

The head clerk began dictating to him the usual form of declaration,
that he could not pay, that he undertook to do so at a future date, that
he would not leave the town, nor sell his property, and so on.

"But you can't write, you can hardly hold the pen," observed the head
clerk, looking with curiosity at Raskolnikov. "Are you ill?"

"Yes, I am giddy. Go on!"

"That's all. Sign it."

The head clerk took the paper, and turned to attend to others.

Raskolnikov gave back the pen; but instead of getting up and going away,
he put his elbows on the table and pressed his head in his hands. He
felt as if a nail were being driven into his skull. A strange idea
suddenly occurred to him, to get up at once, to go up to Nikodim
Fomitch, and tell him everything that had happened yesterday, and then
to go with him to his lodgings and to show him the things in the hole
in the corner. The impulse was so strong that he got up from his seat
to carry it out. "Hadn't I better think a minute?" flashed through his
mind. "No, better cast off the burden without thinking." But all at once
he stood still, rooted to the spot. Nikodim Fomitch was talking eagerly
with Ilya Petrovitch, and the words reached him:

"It's impossible, they'll both be released. To begin with, the whole
story contradicts itself. Why should they have called the porter, if it
had been their doing? To inform against themselves? Or as a blind? No,
that would be too cunning! Besides, Pestryakov, the student, was seen at
the gate by both the porters and a woman as he went in. He was walking
with three friends, who left him only at the gate, and he asked the
porters to direct him, in the presence of the friends. Now, would he
have asked his way if he had been going with such an object? As for
Koch, he spent half an hour at the silversmith's below, before he went
up to the old woman and he left him at exactly a quarter to eight. Now
just consider..."

"But excuse me, how do you explain this contradiction? They state
themselves that they knocked and the door was locked; yet three minutes
later when they went up with the porter, it turned out the door was
unfastened."

"That's just it; the murderer must have been there and bolted himself
in; and they'd have caught him for a certainty if Koch had not been
an ass and gone to look for the porter too. _He_ must have seized the
interval to get downstairs and slip by them somehow. Koch keeps crossing
himself and saying: 'If I had been there, he would have jumped out and
killed me with his axe.' He is going to have a thanksgiving service--ha,
ha!"

"And no one saw the murderer?"

"They might well not see him; the house is a regular Noah's Ark," said
the head clerk, who was listening.

"It's clear, quite clear," Nikodim Fomitch repeated warmly.

"No, it is anything but clear," Ilya Petrovitch maintained.

Raskolnikov picked up his hat and walked towards the door, but he did
not reach it....

When he recovered consciousness, he found himself sitting in a chair,
supported by someone on the right side, while someone else was standing
on the left, holding a yellowish glass filled with yellow water, and
Nikodim Fomitch standing before him, looking intently at him. He got up
from the chair.

"What's this? Are you ill?" Nikodim Fomitch asked, rather sharply.

"He could hardly hold his pen when he was signing," said the head clerk,
settling back in his place, and taking up his work again.

"Have you been ill long?" cried Ilya Petrovitch from his place, where
he, too, was looking through papers. He had, of course, come to look at
the sick man when he fainted, but retired at once when he recovered.

"Since yesterday," muttered Raskolnikov in reply.

"Did you go out yesterday?"

"Yes."

"Though you were ill?"

"Yes."

"At what time?"

"About seven."

"And where did you go, my I ask?"

"Along the street."

"Short and clear."

Raskolnikov, white as a handkerchief, had answered sharply, jerkily,
without dropping his black feverish eyes before Ilya Petrovitch's stare.

"He can scarcely stand upright. And you..." Nikodim Fomitch was
beginning.

"No matter," Ilya Petrovitch pronounced rather peculiarly.

Nikodim Fomitch would have made some further protest, but glancing at
the head clerk who was looking very hard at him, he did not speak. There
was a sudden silence. It was strange.

"Very well, then," concluded Ilya Petrovitch, "we will not detain you."

Raskolnikov went out. He caught the sound of eager conversation on his
departure, and above the rest rose the questioning voice of Nikodim
Fomitch. In the street, his faintness passed off completely.

"A search--there will be a search at once," he repeated to himself,
hurrying home. "The brutes! they suspect."

His former terror mastered him completely again.



CHAPTER II

"And what if there has been a search already? What if I find them in my
room?"

But here was his room. Nothing and no one in it. No one had peeped in.
Even Nastasya had not touched it. But heavens! how could he have left
all those things in the hole?

He rushed to the corner, slipped his hand under the paper, pulled the
things out and lined his pockets with them. There were eight articles in
all: two little boxes with ear-rings or something of the sort, he hardly
looked to see; then four small leather cases. There was a chain, too,
merely wrapped in newspaper and something else in newspaper, that looked
like a decoration.... He put them all in the different pockets of his
overcoat, and the remaining pocket of his trousers, trying to conceal
them as much as possible. He took the purse, too. Then he went out of
his room, leaving the door open. He walked quickly and resolutely, and
though he felt shattered, he had his senses about him. He was afraid of
pursuit, he was afraid that in another half-hour, another quarter of an
hour perhaps, instructions would be issued for his pursuit, and so at
all costs, he must hide all traces before then. He must clear everything
up while he still had some strength, some reasoning power left him....
Where was he to go?

That had long been settled: "Fling them into the canal, and all traces
hidden in the water, the thing would be at an end." So he had decided in
the night of his delirium when several times he had had the impulse to
get up and go away, to make haste, and get rid of it all. But to get
rid of it, turned out to be a very difficult task. He wandered along
the bank of the Ekaterininsky Canal for half an hour or more and looked
several times at the steps running down to the water, but he could not
think of carrying out his plan; either rafts stood at the steps' edge,
and women were washing clothes on them, or boats were moored there, and
people were swarming everywhere. Moreover he could be seen and noticed
from the banks on all sides; it would look suspicious for a man to go
down on purpose, stop, and throw something into the water. And what if
the boxes were to float instead of sinking? And of course they would.
Even as it was, everyone he met seemed to stare and look round, as if
they had nothing to do but to watch him. "Why is it, or can it be my
fancy?" he thought.

At last the thought struck him that it might be better to go to the
Neva. There were not so many people there, he would be less observed,
and it would be more convenient in every way, above all it was further
off. He wondered how he could have been wandering for a good half-hour,
worried and anxious in this dangerous past without thinking of it
before. And that half-hour he had lost over an irrational plan, simply
because he had thought of it in delirium! He had become extremely absent
and forgetful and he was aware of it. He certainly must make haste.

He walked towards the Neva along V---- Prospect, but on the way
another idea struck him. "Why to the Neva? Would it not be better to go
somewhere far off, to the Islands again, and there hide the things
in some solitary place, in a wood or under a bush, and mark the spot
perhaps?" And though he felt incapable of clear judgment, the idea
seemed to him a sound one. But he was not destined to go there. For
coming out of V---- Prospect towards the square, he saw on the left a
passage leading between two blank walls to a courtyard. On the right
hand, the blank unwhitewashed wall of a four-storied house stretched far
into the court; on the left, a wooden hoarding ran parallel with it for
twenty paces into the court, and then turned sharply to the left. Here
was a deserted fenced-off place where rubbish of different sorts was
lying. At the end of the court, the corner of a low, smutty, stone shed,
apparently part of some workshop, peeped from behind the hoarding. It
was probably a carriage builder's or carpenter's shed; the whole place
from the entrance was black with coal dust. Here would be the place to
throw it, he thought. Not seeing anyone in the yard, he slipped in, and
at once saw near the gate a sink, such as is often put in yards where
there are many workmen or cab-drivers; and on the hoarding above had
been scribbled in chalk the time-honoured witticism, "Standing here
strictly forbidden." This was all the better, for there would be nothing
suspicious about his going in. "Here I could throw it all in a heap and
get away!"

Looking round once more, with his hand already in his pocket, he noticed
against the outer wall, between the entrance and the sink, a big unhewn
stone, weighing perhaps sixty pounds. The other side of the wall was a
street. He could hear passers-by, always numerous in that part, but he
could not be seen from the entrance, unless someone came in from the
street, which might well happen indeed, so there was need of haste.

He bent down over the stone, seized the top of it firmly in both hands,
and using all his strength turned it over. Under the stone was a small
hollow in the ground, and he immediately emptied his pocket into it.
The purse lay at the top, and yet the hollow was not filled up. Then he
seized the stone again and with one twist turned it back, so that it was
in the same position again, though it stood a very little higher. But
he scraped the earth about it and pressed it at the edges with his foot.
Nothing could be noticed.

Then he went out, and turned into the square. Again an intense,
almost unbearable joy overwhelmed him for an instant, as it had in
the police-office. "I have buried my tracks! And who, who can think of
looking under that stone? It has been lying there most likely ever since
the house was built, and will lie as many years more. And if it were
found, who would think of me? It is all over! No clue!" And he laughed.
Yes, he remembered that he began laughing a thin, nervous noiseless
laugh, and went on laughing all the time he was crossing the square. But
when he reached the K---- Boulevard where two days before he had come
upon that girl, his laughter suddenly ceased. Other ideas crept into his
mind. He felt all at once that it would be loathsome to pass that seat
on which after the girl was gone, he had sat and pondered, and that it
would be hateful, too, to meet that whiskered policeman to whom he had
given the twenty copecks: "Damn him!"

He walked, looking about him angrily and distractedly. All his ideas now
seemed to be circling round some single point, and he felt that there
really was such a point, and that now, now, he was left facing that
point--and for the first time, indeed, during the last two months.

"Damn it all!" he thought suddenly, in a fit of ungovernable fury.
"If it has begun, then it has begun. Hang the new life! Good Lord, how
stupid it is!... And what lies I told to-day! How despicably I fawned
upon that wretched Ilya Petrovitch! But that is all folly! What do I
care for them all, and my fawning upon them! It is not that at all! It
is not that at all!"

Suddenly he stopped; a new utterly unexpected and exceedingly simple
question perplexed and bitterly confounded him.

"If it all has really been done deliberately and not idiotically, if
I really had a certain and definite object, how is it I did not even
glance into the purse and don't know what I had there, for which I have
undergone these agonies, and have deliberately undertaken this base,
filthy degrading business? And here I wanted at once to throw into the
water the purse together with all the things which I had not seen
either... how's that?"

Yes, that was so, that was all so. Yet he had known it all before, and
it was not a new question for him, even when it was decided in the night
without hesitation and consideration, as though so it must be, as though
it could not possibly be otherwise.... Yes, he had known it all, and
understood it all; it surely had all been settled even yesterday at the
moment when he was bending over the box and pulling the jewel-cases out
of it.... Yes, so it was.

"It is because I am very ill," he decided grimly at last, "I have been
worrying and fretting myself, and I don't know what I am doing....
Yesterday and the day before yesterday and all this time I have been
worrying myself.... I shall get well and I shall not worry.... But what
if I don't get well at all? Good God, how sick I am of it all!"

He walked on without resting. He had a terrible longing for some
distraction, but he did not know what to do, what to attempt. A new
overwhelming sensation was gaining more and more mastery over him
every moment; this was an immeasurable, almost physical, repulsion for
everything surrounding him, an obstinate, malignant feeling of hatred.
All who met him were loathsome to him--he loathed their faces, their
movements, their gestures. If anyone had addressed him, he felt that he
might have spat at him or bitten him....

He stopped suddenly, on coming out on the bank of the Little Neva, near
the bridge to Vassilyevsky Ostrov. "Why, he lives here, in that house,"
he thought, "why, I have not come to Razumihin of my own accord! Here
it's the same thing over again.... Very interesting to know, though;
have I come on purpose or have I simply walked here by chance? Never
mind, I said the day before yesterday that I would go and see him the
day _after_; well, and so I will! Besides I really cannot go further
now."

He went up to Razumihin's room on the fifth floor.

The latter was at home in his garret, busily writing at the moment, and
he opened the door himself. It was four months since they had seen each
other. Razumihin was sitting in a ragged dressing-gown, with slippers on
his bare feet, unkempt, unshaven and unwashed. His face showed surprise.

"Is it you?" he cried. He looked his comrade up and down; then after a
brief pause, he whistled. "As hard up as all that! Why, brother, you've
cut me out!" he added, looking at Raskolnikov's rags. "Come sit down,
you are tired, I'll be bound."

And when he had sunk down on the American leather sofa, which was
in even worse condition than his own, Razumihin saw at once that his
visitor was ill.

"Why, you are seriously ill, do you know that?" He began feeling his
pulse. Raskolnikov pulled away his hand.

"Never mind," he said, "I have come for this: I have no lessons.... I
wanted,... but I don't really want lessons...."

"But I say! You are delirious, you know!" Razumihin observed, watching
him carefully.

"No, I am not."

Raskolnikov got up from the sofa. As he had mounted the stairs to
Razumihin's, he had not realised that he would be meeting his friend
face to face. Now, in a flash, he knew, that what he was least of all
disposed for at that moment was to be face to face with anyone in the
wide world. His spleen rose within him. He almost choked with rage at
himself as soon as he crossed Razumihin's threshold.

"Good-bye," he said abruptly, and walked to the door.

"Stop, stop! You queer fish."

"I don't want to," said the other, again pulling away his hand.

"Then why the devil have you come? Are you mad, or what? Why, this
is... almost insulting! I won't let you go like that."

"Well, then, I came to you because I know no one but you who could
help... to begin... because you are kinder than anyone--cleverer, I
mean, and can judge... and now I see that I want nothing. Do you hear?
Nothing at all... no one's services... no one's sympathy. I am by
myself... alone. Come, that's enough. Leave me alone."

"Stay a minute, you sweep! You are a perfect madman. As you like for all
I care. I have no lessons, do you see, and I don't care about that, but
there's a bookseller, Heruvimov--and he takes the place of a lesson.
I would not exchange him for five lessons. He's doing publishing of a
kind, and issuing natural science manuals and what a circulation they
have! The very titles are worth the money! You always maintained that I
was a fool, but by Jove, my boy, there are greater fools than I am!
Now he is setting up for being advanced, not that he has an inkling of
anything, but, of course, I encourage him. Here are two signatures of
the German text--in my opinion, the crudest charlatanism; it discusses
the question, 'Is woman a human being?' And, of course, triumphantly
proves that she is. Heruvimov is going to bring out this work as a
contribution to the woman question; I am translating it; he will expand
these two and a half signatures into six, we shall make up a gorgeous
title half a page long and bring it out at half a rouble. It will do! He
pays me six roubles the signature, it works out to about fifteen roubles
for the job, and I've had six already in advance. When we have finished
this, we are going to begin a translation about whales, and then some of
the dullest scandals out of the second part of _Les Confessions_ we have
marked for translation; somebody has told Heruvimov, that Rousseau was
a kind of Radishchev. You may be sure I don't contradict him, hang him!
Well, would you like to do the second signature of '_Is woman a human
being?_' If you would, take the German and pens and paper--all those
are provided, and take three roubles; for as I have had six roubles in
advance on the whole thing, three roubles come to you for your share.
And when you have finished the signature there will be another three
roubles for you. And please don't think I am doing you a service; quite
the contrary, as soon as you came in, I saw how you could help me; to
begin with, I am weak in spelling, and secondly, I am sometimes utterly
adrift in German, so that I make it up as I go along for the most part.
The only comfort is, that it's bound to be a change for the better.
Though who can tell, maybe it's sometimes for the worse. Will you take
it?"

Raskolnikov took the German sheets in silence, took the three roubles
and without a word went out. Razumihin gazed after him in astonishment.
But when Raskolnikov was in the next street, he turned back, mounted the
stairs to Razumihin's again and laying on the table the German article
and the three roubles, went out again, still without uttering a word.

"Are you raving, or what?" Razumihin shouted, roused to fury at last.
"What farce is this? You'll drive me crazy too... what did you come to
see me for, damn you?"

"I don't want... translation," muttered Raskolnikov from the stairs.

"Then what the devil do you want?" shouted Razumihin from above.
Raskolnikov continued descending the staircase in silence.

"Hey, there! Where are you living?"

No answer.

"Well, confound you then!"

But Raskolnikov was already stepping into the street. On the Nikolaevsky
Bridge he was roused to full consciousness again by an unpleasant
incident. A coachman, after shouting at him two or three times, gave him
a violent lash on the back with his whip, for having almost fallen under
his horses' hoofs. The lash so infuriated him that he dashed away to the
railing (for some unknown reason he had been walking in the very middle
of the bridge in the traffic). He angrily clenched and ground his teeth.
He heard laughter, of course.

"Serves him right!"

"A pickpocket I dare say."

"Pretending to be drunk, for sure, and getting under the wheels on
purpose; and you have to answer for him."

"It's a regular profession, that's what it is."

But while he stood at the railing, still looking angry and bewildered
after the retreating carriage, and rubbing his back, he suddenly felt
someone thrust money into his hand. He looked. It was an elderly woman
in a kerchief and goatskin shoes, with a girl, probably her daughter
wearing a hat, and carrying a green parasol.

"Take it, my good man, in Christ's name."

He took it and they passed on. It was a piece of twenty copecks. From
his dress and appearance they might well have taken him for a beggar
asking alms in the streets, and the gift of the twenty copecks he
doubtless owed to the blow, which made them feel sorry for him.

He closed his hand on the twenty copecks, walked on for ten paces, and
turned facing the Neva, looking towards the palace. The sky was without
a cloud and the water was almost bright blue, which is so rare in the
Neva. The cupola of the cathedral, which is seen at its best from the
bridge about twenty paces from the chapel, glittered in the sunlight,
and in the pure air every ornament on it could be clearly distinguished.
The pain from the lash went off, and Raskolnikov forgot about it; one
uneasy and not quite definite idea occupied him now completely. He stood
still, and gazed long and intently into the distance; this spot was
especially familiar to him. When he was attending the university, he had
hundreds of times--generally on his way home--stood still on this spot,
gazed at this truly magnificent spectacle and almost always marvelled at
a vague and mysterious emotion it roused in him. It left him strangely
cold; this gorgeous picture was for him blank and lifeless. He wondered
every time at his sombre and enigmatic impression and, mistrusting
himself, put off finding the explanation of it. He vividly recalled
those old doubts and perplexities, and it seemed to him that it was
no mere chance that he recalled them now. It struck him as strange and
grotesque, that he should have stopped at the same spot as before,
as though he actually imagined he could think the same thoughts, be
interested in the same theories and pictures that had interested him...
so short a time ago. He felt it almost amusing, and yet it wrung his
heart. Deep down, hidden far away out of sight all that seemed to him
now--all his old past, his old thoughts, his old problems and theories,
his old impressions and that picture and himself and all, all.... He
felt as though he were flying upwards, and everything were vanishing
from his sight. Making an unconscious movement with his hand, he
suddenly became aware of the piece of money in his fist. He opened his
hand, stared at the coin, and with a sweep of his arm flung it into
the water; then he turned and went home. It seemed to him, he had cut
himself off from everyone and from everything at that moment.

Evening was coming on when he reached home, so that he must have been
walking about six hours. How and where he came back he did not remember.
Undressing, and quivering like an overdriven horse, he lay down on the
sofa, drew his greatcoat over him, and at once sank into oblivion....

It was dusk when he was waked up by a fearful scream. Good God, what a
scream! Such unnatural sounds, such howling, wailing, grinding, tears,
blows and curses he had never heard.

He could never have imagined such brutality, such frenzy. In terror he
sat up in bed, almost swooning with agony. But the fighting, wailing
and cursing grew louder and louder. And then to his intense amazement
he caught the voice of his landlady. She was howling, shrieking and
wailing, rapidly, hurriedly, incoherently, so that he could not make
out what she was talking about; she was beseeching, no doubt, not to be
beaten, for she was being mercilessly beaten on the stairs. The voice of
her assailant was so horrible from spite and rage that it was almost
a croak; but he, too, was saying something, and just as quickly
and indistinctly, hurrying and spluttering. All at once Raskolnikov
trembled; he recognised the voice--it was the voice of Ilya Petrovitch.
Ilya Petrovitch here and beating the landlady! He is kicking her,
banging her head against the steps--that's clear, that can be told
from the sounds, from the cries and the thuds. How is it, is the world
topsy-turvy? He could hear people running in crowds from all the storeys
and all the staircases; he heard voices, exclamations, knocking, doors
banging. "But why, why, and how could it be?" he repeated, thinking
seriously that he had gone mad. But no, he heard too distinctly! And
they would come to him then next, "for no doubt... it's all about
that... about yesterday.... Good God!" He would have fastened his door
with the latch, but he could not lift his hand... besides, it would
be useless. Terror gripped his heart like ice, tortured him and numbed
him.... But at last all this uproar, after continuing about ten minutes,
began gradually to subside. The landlady was moaning and groaning; Ilya
Petrovitch was still uttering threats and curses.... But at last he,
too, seemed to be silent, and now he could not be heard. "Can he have
gone away? Good Lord!" Yes, and now the landlady is going too, still
weeping and moaning... and then her door slammed.... Now the crowd was
going from the stairs to their rooms, exclaiming, disputing, calling
to one another, raising their voices to a shout, dropping them to a
whisper. There must have been numbers of them--almost all the inmates
of the block. "But, good God, how could it be! And why, why had he come
here!"

Raskolnikov sank worn out on the sofa, but could not close his eyes. He
lay for half an hour in such anguish, such an intolerable sensation of
infinite terror as he had never experienced before. Suddenly a bright
light flashed into his room. Nastasya came in with a candle and a plate
of soup. Looking at him carefully and ascertaining that he was not
asleep, she set the candle on the table and began to lay out what she
had brought--bread, salt, a plate, a spoon.

"You've eaten nothing since yesterday, I warrant. You've been trudging
about all day, and you're shaking with fever."

"Nastasya... what were they beating the landlady for?"

She looked intently at him.

"Who beat the landlady?"

"Just now... half an hour ago, Ilya Petrovitch, the assistant
superintendent, on the stairs.... Why was he ill-treating her like that,
and... why was he here?"

Nastasya scrutinised him, silent and frowning, and her scrutiny lasted a
long time. He felt uneasy, even frightened at her searching eyes.

"Nastasya, why don't you speak?" he said timidly at last in a weak
voice.

"It's the blood," she answered at last softly, as though speaking to
herself.

"Blood? What blood?" he muttered, growing white and turning towards the
wall.

Nastasya still looked at him without speaking.

"Nobody has been beating the landlady," she declared at last in a firm,
resolute voice.

He gazed at her, hardly able to breathe.

"I heard it myself.... I was not asleep... I was sitting up," he
said still more timidly. "I listened a long while. The assistant
superintendent came.... Everyone ran out on to the stairs from all the
flats."

"No one has been here. That's the blood crying in your ears. When
there's no outlet for it and it gets clotted, you begin fancying
things.... Will you eat something?"

He made no answer. Nastasya still stood over him, watching him.

"Give me something to drink... Nastasya."

She went downstairs and returned with a white earthenware jug of water.
He remembered only swallowing one sip of the cold water and spilling
some on his neck. Then followed forgetfulness.



CHAPTER III

He was not completely unconscious, however, all the time he was ill; he
was in a feverish state, sometimes delirious, sometimes half conscious.
He remembered a great deal afterwards. Sometimes it seemed as though
there were a number of people round him; they wanted to take him away
somewhere, there was a great deal of squabbling and discussing about
him. Then he would be alone in the room; they had all gone away afraid
of him, and only now and then opened the door a crack to look at him;
they threatened him, plotted something together, laughed, and mocked
at him. He remembered Nastasya often at his bedside; he distinguished
another person, too, whom he seemed to know very well, though he could
not remember who he was, and this fretted him, even made him cry.
Sometimes he fancied he had been lying there a month; at other times
it all seemed part of the same day. But of _that_--of _that_ he had
no recollection, and yet every minute he felt that he had forgotten
something he ought to remember. He worried and tormented himself trying
to remember, moaned, flew into a rage, or sank into awful, intolerable
terror. Then he struggled to get up, would have run away, but someone
always prevented him by force, and he sank back into impotence and
forgetfulness. At last he returned to complete consciousness.

It happened at ten o'clock in the morning. On fine days the sun shone
into the room at that hour, throwing a streak of light on the right
wall and the corner near the door. Nastasya was standing beside him
with another person, a complete stranger, who was looking at him
very inquisitively. He was a young man with a beard, wearing a full,
short-waisted coat, and looked like a messenger. The landlady was
peeping in at the half-opened door. Raskolnikov sat up.

"Who is this, Nastasya?" he asked, pointing to the young man.

"I say, he's himself again!" she said.

"He is himself," echoed the man.

Concluding that he had returned to his senses, the landlady closed the
door and disappeared. She was always shy and dreaded conversations or
discussions. She was a woman of forty, not at all bad-looking, fat
and buxom, with black eyes and eyebrows, good-natured from fatness and
laziness, and absurdly bashful.

"Who... are you?" he went on, addressing the man. But at that moment
the door was flung open, and, stooping a little, as he was so tall,
Razumihin came in.

"What a cabin it is!" he cried. "I am always knocking my head. You call
this a lodging! So you are conscious, brother? I've just heard the news
from Pashenka."

"He has just come to," said Nastasya.

"Just come to," echoed the man again, with a smile.

"And who are you?" Razumihin asked, suddenly addressing him. "My name is
Vrazumihin, at your service; not Razumihin, as I am always called, but
Vrazumihin, a student and gentleman; and he is my friend. And who are
you?"

"I am the messenger from our office, from the merchant Shelopaev, and
I've come on business."

"Please sit down." Razumihin seated himself on the other side of the
table. "It's a good thing you've come to, brother," he went on to
Raskolnikov. "For the last four days you have scarcely eaten or drunk
anything. We had to give you tea in spoonfuls. I brought Zossimov to see
you twice. You remember Zossimov? He examined you carefully and said at
once it was nothing serious--something seemed to have gone to your head.
Some nervous nonsense, the result of bad feeding, he says you have not
had enough beer and radish, but it's nothing much, it will pass and you
will be all right. Zossimov is a first-rate fellow! He is making quite a
name. Come, I won't keep you," he said, addressing the man again. "Will
you explain what you want? You must know, Rodya, this is the second time
they have sent from the office; but it was another man last time, and I
talked to him. Who was it came before?"

"That was the day before yesterday, I venture to say, if you please,
sir. That was Alexey Semyonovitch; he is in our office, too."

"He was more intelligent than you, don't you think so?"

"Yes, indeed, sir, he is of more weight than I am."

"Quite so; go on."

"At your mamma's request, through Afanasy Ivanovitch Vahrushin, of whom
I presume you have heard more than once, a remittance is sent to you
from our office," the man began, addressing Raskolnikov. "If you are in
an intelligible condition, I've thirty-five roubles to remit to you, as
Semyon Semyonovitch has received from Afanasy Ivanovitch at your mamma's
request instructions to that effect, as on previous occasions. Do you
know him, sir?"

"Yes, I remember... Vahrushin," Raskolnikov said dreamily.

"You hear, he knows Vahrushin," cried Razumihin. "He is in 'an
intelligible condition'! And I see you are an intelligent man too. Well,
it's always pleasant to hear words of wisdom."

"That's the gentleman, Vahrushin, Afanasy Ivanovitch. And at the request
of your mamma, who has sent you a remittance once before in the
same manner through him, he did not refuse this time also, and sent
instructions to Semyon Semyonovitch some days since to hand you
thirty-five roubles in the hope of better to come."

"That 'hoping for better to come' is the best thing you've said, though
'your mamma' is not bad either. Come then, what do you say? Is he fully
conscious, eh?"

"That's all right. If only he can sign this little paper."

"He can scrawl his name. Have you got the book?"

"Yes, here's the book."

"Give it to me. Here, Rodya, sit up. I'll hold you. Take the pen and
scribble 'Raskolnikov' for him. For just now, brother, money is sweeter
to us than treacle."

"I don't want it," said Raskolnikov, pushing away the pen.

"Not want it?"

"I won't sign it."

"How the devil can you do without signing it?"

"I don't want... the money."

"Don't want the money! Come, brother, that's nonsense, I bear witness.
Don't trouble, please, it's only that he is on his travels again. But
that's pretty common with him at all times though.... You are a man of
judgment and we will take him in hand, that is, more simply, take his
hand and he will sign it. Here."

"But I can come another time."

"No, no. Why should we trouble you? You are a man of judgment.... Now,
Rodya, don't keep your visitor, you see he is waiting," and he made
ready to hold Raskolnikov's hand in earnest.

"Stop, I'll do it alone," said the latter, taking the pen and signing
his name.

The messenger took out the money and went away.

"Bravo! And now, brother, are you hungry?"

"Yes," answered Raskolnikov.

"Is there any soup?"

"Some of yesterday's," answered Nastasya, who was still standing there.

"With potatoes and rice in it?"

"Yes."

"I know it by heart. Bring soup and give us some tea."

"Very well."

Raskolnikov looked at all this with profound astonishment and a dull,
unreasoning terror. He made up his mind to keep quiet and see what
would happen. "I believe I am not wandering. I believe it's reality," he
thought.

In a couple of minutes Nastasya returned with the soup, and announced
that the tea would be ready directly. With the soup she brought two
spoons, two plates, salt, pepper, mustard for the beef, and so on. The
table was set as it had not been for a long time. The cloth was clean.

"It would not be amiss, Nastasya, if Praskovya Pavlovna were to send us
up a couple of bottles of beer. We could empty them."

"Well, you are a cool hand," muttered Nastasya, and she departed to
carry out his orders.

Raskolnikov still gazed wildly with strained attention. Meanwhile
Razumihin sat down on the sofa beside him, as clumsily as a bear put his
left arm round Raskolnikov's head, although he was able to sit up, and
with his right hand gave him a spoonful of soup, blowing on it that
it might not burn him. But the soup was only just warm. Raskolnikov
swallowed one spoonful greedily, then a second, then a third. But after
giving him a few more spoonfuls of soup, Razumihin suddenly stopped, and
said that he must ask Zossimov whether he ought to have more.

Nastasya came in with two bottles of beer.

"And will you have tea?"

"Yes."

"Cut along, Nastasya, and bring some tea, for tea we may venture on
without the faculty. But here is the beer!" He moved back to his chair,
pulled the soup and meat in front of him, and began eating as though he
had not touched food for three days.

"I must tell you, Rodya, I dine like this here every day now," he
mumbled with his mouth full of beef, "and it's all Pashenka, your dear
little landlady, who sees to that; she loves to do anything for me. I
don't ask for it, but, of course, I don't object. And here's Nastasya
with the tea. She is a quick girl. Nastasya, my dear, won't you have
some beer?"

"Get along with your nonsense!"

"A cup of tea, then?"

"A cup of tea, maybe."

"Pour it out. Stay, I'll pour it out myself. Sit down."

He poured out two cups, left his dinner, and sat on the sofa again. As
before, he put his left arm round the sick man's head, raised him up
and gave him tea in spoonfuls, again blowing each spoonful steadily and
earnestly, as though this process was the principal and most effective
means towards his friend's recovery. Raskolnikov said nothing and made
no resistance, though he felt quite strong enough to sit up on the sofa
without support and could not merely have held a cup or a spoon, but
even perhaps could have walked about. But from some queer, almost
animal, cunning he conceived the idea of hiding his strength and lying
low for a time, pretending if necessary not to be yet in full possession
of his faculties, and meanwhile listening to find out what was going on.
Yet he could not overcome his sense of repugnance. After sipping a dozen
spoonfuls of tea, he suddenly released his head, pushed the spoon away
capriciously, and sank back on the pillow. There were actually real
pillows under his head now, down pillows in clean cases, he observed
that, too, and took note of it.

"Pashenka must give us some raspberry jam to-day to make him some
raspberry tea," said Razumihin, going back to his chair and attacking
his soup and beer again.

"And where is she to get raspberries for you?" asked Nastasya, balancing
a saucer on her five outspread fingers and sipping tea through a lump of
sugar.

"She'll get it at the shop, my dear. You see, Rodya, all sorts of things
have been happening while you have been laid up. When you decamped in
that rascally way without leaving your address, I felt so angry that I
resolved to find you out and punish you. I set to work that very day.
How I ran about making inquiries for you! This lodging of yours I had
forgotten, though I never remembered it, indeed, because I did not know
it; and as for your old lodgings, I could only remember it was at the
Five Corners, Harlamov's house. I kept trying to find that Harlamov's
house, and afterwards it turned out that it was not Harlamov's, but
Buch's. How one muddles up sound sometimes! So I lost my temper, and I
went on the chance to the address bureau next day, and only fancy, in
two minutes they looked you up! Your name is down there."

"My name!"

"I should think so; and yet a General Kobelev they could not find while
I was there. Well, it's a long story. But as soon as I did land on this
place, I soon got to know all your affairs--all, all, brother, I know
everything; Nastasya here will tell you. I made the acquaintance of
Nikodim Fomitch and Ilya Petrovitch, and the house-porter and Mr.
Zametov, Alexandr Grigorievitch, the head clerk in the police office,
and, last, but not least, of Pashenka; Nastasya here knows...."

"He's got round her," Nastasya murmured, smiling slyly.

"Why don't you put the sugar in your tea, Nastasya Nikiforovna?"

"You are a one!" Nastasya cried suddenly, going off into a giggle. "I am
not Nikiforovna, but Petrovna," she added suddenly, recovering from her
mirth.

"I'll make a note of it. Well, brother, to make a long story short,
I was going in for a regular explosion here to uproot all malignant
influences in the locality, but Pashenka won the day. I had not
expected, brother, to find her so... prepossessing. Eh, what do you
think?"

Raskolnikov did not speak, but he still kept his eyes fixed upon him,
full of alarm.

"And all that could be wished, indeed, in every respect," Razumihin went
on, not at all embarrassed by his silence.

"Ah, the sly dog!" Nastasya shrieked again. This conversation afforded
her unspeakable delight.

"It's a pity, brother, that you did not set to work in the right way
at first. You ought to have approached her differently. She is, so
to speak, a most unaccountable character. But we will talk about her
character later.... How could you let things come to such a pass that
she gave up sending you your dinner? And that I O U? You must have been
mad to sign an I O U. And that promise of marriage when her daughter,
Natalya Yegorovna, was alive?... I know all about it! But I see that's
a delicate matter and I am an ass; forgive me. But, talking of
foolishness, do you know Praskovya Pavlovna is not nearly so foolish as
you would think at first sight?"

"No," mumbled Raskolnikov, looking away, but feeling that it was better
to keep up the conversation.

"She isn't, is she?" cried Razumihin, delighted to get an answer out
of him. "But she is not very clever either, eh? She is essentially,
essentially an unaccountable character! I am sometimes quite at a loss,
I assure you.... She must be forty; she says she is thirty-six, and
of course she has every right to say so. But I swear I judge her
intellectually, simply from the metaphysical point of view; there is a
sort of symbolism sprung up between us, a sort of algebra or what not!
I don't understand it! Well, that's all nonsense. Only, seeing that you
are not a student now and have lost your lessons and your clothes, and
that through the young lady's death she has no need to treat you as
a relation, she suddenly took fright; and as you hid in your den and
dropped all your old relations with her, she planned to get rid of you.
And she's been cherishing that design a long time, but was sorry to lose
the I O U, for you assured her yourself that your mother would pay."

"It was base of me to say that.... My mother herself is almost
a beggar... and I told a lie to keep my lodging... and be fed,"
Raskolnikov said loudly and distinctly.

"Yes, you did very sensibly. But the worst of it is that at that point
Mr. Tchebarov turns up, a business man. Pashenka would never have
thought of doing anything on her own account, she is too retiring; but
the business man is by no means retiring, and first thing he puts the
question, 'Is there any hope of realising the I O U?' Answer: there is,
because he has a mother who would save her Rodya with her hundred and
twenty-five roubles pension, if she has to starve herself; and a sister,
too, who would go into bondage for his sake. That's what he was building
upon.... Why do you start? I know all the ins and outs of your affairs
now, my dear boy--it's not for nothing that you were so open with
Pashenka when you were her prospective son-in-law, and I say all this as
a friend.... But I tell you what it is; an honest and sensitive man is
open; and a business man 'listens and goes on eating' you up. Well,
then she gave the I O U by way of payment to this Tchebarov, and without
hesitation he made a formal demand for payment. When I heard of all this
I wanted to blow him up, too, to clear my conscience, but by that time
harmony reigned between me and Pashenka, and I insisted on stopping
the whole affair, engaging that you would pay. I went security for you,
brother. Do you understand? We called Tchebarov, flung him ten
roubles and got the I O U back from him, and here I have the honour of
presenting it to you. She trusts your word now. Here, take it, you see I
have torn it."

Razumihin put the note on the table. Raskolnikov looked at him and
turned to the wall without uttering a word. Even Razumihin felt a
twinge.

"I see, brother," he said a moment later, "that I have been playing the
fool again. I thought I should amuse you with my chatter, and I believe
I have only made you cross."

"Was it you I did not recognise when I was delirious?" Raskolnikov
asked, after a moment's pause without turning his head.

"Yes, and you flew into a rage about it, especially when I brought
Zametov one day."

"Zametov? The head clerk? What for?" Raskolnikov turned round quickly
and fixed his eyes on Razumihin.

"What's the matter with you?... What are you upset about? He wanted to
make your acquaintance because I talked to him a lot about you.... How
could I have found out so much except from him? He is a capital
fellow, brother, first-rate... in his own way, of course. Now we are
friends--see each other almost every day. I have moved into this part,
you know. I have only just moved. I've been with him to Luise Ivanovna
once or twice.... Do you remember Luise, Luise Ivanovna?

"Did I say anything in delirium?"

"I should think so! You were beside yourself."

"What did I rave about?"

"What next? What did you rave about? What people do rave about.... Well,
brother, now I must not lose time. To work." He got up from the table
and took up his cap.

"What did I rave about?"

"How he keeps on! Are you afraid of having let out some secret? Don't
worry yourself; you said nothing about a countess. But you said a lot
about a bulldog, and about ear-rings and chains, and about Krestovsky
Island, and some porter, and Nikodim Fomitch and Ilya Petrovitch, the
assistant superintendent. And another thing that was of special interest
to you was your own sock. You whined, 'Give me my sock.' Zametov
hunted all about your room for your socks, and with his own scented,
ring-bedecked fingers he gave you the rag. And only then were you
comforted, and for the next twenty-four hours you held the wretched
thing in your hand; we could not get it from you. It is most likely
somewhere under your quilt at this moment. And then you asked so
piteously for fringe for your trousers. We tried to find out what sort
of fringe, but we could not make it out. Now to business! Here are
thirty-five roubles; I take ten of them, and shall give you an account
of them in an hour or two. I will let Zossimov know at the same time,
though he ought to have been here long ago, for it is nearly twelve. And
you, Nastasya, look in pretty often while I am away, to see whether he
wants a drink or anything else. And I will tell Pashenka what is wanted
myself. Good-bye!"

"He calls her Pashenka! Ah, he's a deep one!" said Nastasya as he went
out; then she opened the door and stood listening, but could not resist
running downstairs after him. She was very eager to hear what he would
say to the landlady. She was evidently quite fascinated by Razumihin.

No sooner had she left the room than the sick man flung off the
bedclothes and leapt out of bed like a madman. With burning, twitching
impatience he had waited for them to be gone so that he might set to
work. But to what work? Now, as though to spite him, it eluded him.

"Good God, only tell me one thing: do they know of it yet or not? What
if they know it and are only pretending, mocking me while I am laid up,
and then they will come in and tell me that it's been discovered long
ago and that they have only... What am I to do now? That's what I've
forgotten, as though on purpose; forgotten it all at once, I remembered
a minute ago."

He stood in the middle of the room and gazed in miserable bewilderment
about him; he walked to the door, opened it, listened; but that was not
what he wanted. Suddenly, as though recalling something, he rushed to
the corner where there was a hole under the paper, began examining it,
put his hand into the hole, fumbled--but that was not it. He went to the
stove, opened it and began rummaging in the ashes; the frayed edges of
his trousers and the rags cut off his pocket were lying there just as
he had thrown them. No one had looked, then! Then he remembered the sock
about which Razumihin had just been telling him. Yes, there it lay on
the sofa under the quilt, but it was so covered with dust and grime that
Zametov could not have seen anything on it.

"Bah, Zametov! The police office! And why am I sent for to the police
office? Where's the notice? Bah! I am mixing it up; that was then. I
looked at my sock then, too, but now... now I have been ill. But
what did Zametov come for? Why did Razumihin bring him?" he muttered,
helplessly sitting on the sofa again. "What does it mean? Am I still in
delirium, or is it real? I believe it is real.... Ah, I remember; I must
escape! Make haste to escape. Yes, I must, I must escape! Yes... but
where? And where are my clothes? I've no boots. They've taken them away!
They've hidden them! I understand! Ah, here is my coat--they passed that
over! And here is money on the table, thank God! And here's the I O U...
I'll take the money and go and take another lodging. They won't find
me!... Yes, but the address bureau? They'll find me, Razumihin will find
me. Better escape altogether... far away... to America, and let them
do their worst! And take the I O U... it would be of use there.... What
else shall I take? They think I am ill! They don't know that I can walk,
ha-ha-ha! I could see by their eyes that they know all about it! If
only I could get downstairs! And what if they have set a watch
there--policemen! What's this tea? Ah, and here is beer left, half a
bottle, cold!"

He snatched up the bottle, which still contained a glassful of beer, and
gulped it down with relish, as though quenching a flame in his breast.
But in another minute the beer had gone to his head, and a faint and
even pleasant shiver ran down his spine. He lay down and pulled the
quilt over him. His sick and incoherent thoughts grew more and more
disconnected, and soon a light, pleasant drowsiness came upon him. With
a sense of comfort he nestled his head into the pillow, wrapped more
closely about him the soft, wadded quilt which had replaced the old,
ragged greatcoat, sighed softly and sank into a deep, sound, refreshing
sleep.

He woke up, hearing someone come in. He opened his eyes and saw
Razumihin standing in the doorway, uncertain whether to come in or
not. Raskolnikov sat up quickly on the sofa and gazed at him, as though
trying to recall something.

"Ah, you are not asleep! Here I am! Nastasya, bring in the parcel!"
Razumihin shouted down the stairs. "You shall have the account
directly."

"What time is it?" asked Raskolnikov, looking round uneasily.

"Yes, you had a fine sleep, brother, it's almost evening, it will be six
o'clock directly. You have slept more than six hours."

"Good heavens! Have I?"

"And why not? It will do you good. What's the hurry? A tryst, is it?
We've all time before us. I've been waiting for the last three hours for
you; I've been up twice and found you asleep. I've called on Zossimov
twice; not at home, only fancy! But no matter, he will turn up. And
I've been out on my own business, too. You know I've been moving to-day,
moving with my uncle. I have an uncle living with me now. But that's
no matter, to business. Give me the parcel, Nastasya. We will open it
directly. And how do you feel now, brother?"

"I am quite well, I am not ill. Razumihin, have you been here long?"

"I tell you I've been waiting for the last three hours."

"No, before."

"How do you mean?"

"How long have you been coming here?"

"Why I told you all about it this morning. Don't you remember?"

Raskolnikov pondered. The morning seemed like a dream to him. He could
not remember alone, and looked inquiringly at Razumihin.

"Hm!" said the latter, "he has forgotten. I fancied then that you were
not quite yourself. Now you are better for your sleep.... You really
look much better. First-rate! Well, to business. Look here, my dear
boy."

He began untying the bundle, which evidently interested him.

"Believe me, brother, this is something specially near my heart. For we
must make a man of you. Let's begin from the top. Do you see this
cap?" he said, taking out of the bundle a fairly good though cheap and
ordinary cap. "Let me try it on."

"Presently, afterwards," said Raskolnikov, waving it off pettishly.

"Come, Rodya, my boy, don't oppose it, afterwards will be too late; and
I shan't sleep all night, for I bought it by guess, without measure.
Just right!" he cried triumphantly, fitting it on, "just your size! A
proper head-covering is the first thing in dress and a recommendation in
its own way. Tolstyakov, a friend of mine, is always obliged to take off
his pudding basin when he goes into any public place where other
people wear their hats or caps. People think he does it from slavish
politeness, but it's simply because he is ashamed of his bird's nest;
he is such a boastful fellow! Look, Nastasya, here are two specimens of
headgear: this Palmerston"--he took from the corner Raskolnikov's old,
battered hat, which for some unknown reason, he called a Palmerston--"or
this jewel! Guess the price, Rodya, what do you suppose I paid for it,
Nastasya!" he said, turning to her, seeing that Raskolnikov did not
speak.

"Twenty copecks, no more, I dare say," answered Nastasya.

"Twenty copecks, silly!" he cried, offended. "Why, nowadays you would
cost more than that--eighty copecks! And that only because it has been
worn. And it's bought on condition that when's it's worn out, they will
give you another next year. Yes, on my word! Well, now let us pass to
the United States of America, as they called them at school. I assure
you I am proud of these breeches," and he exhibited to Raskolnikov a
pair of light, summer trousers of grey woollen material. "No holes, no
spots, and quite respectable, although a little worn; and a waistcoat
to match, quite in the fashion. And its being worn really is an
improvement, it's softer, smoother.... You see, Rodya, to my thinking,
the great thing for getting on in the world is always to keep to the
seasons; if you don't insist on having asparagus in January, you keep
your money in your purse; and it's the same with this purchase. It's
summer now, so I've been buying summer things--warmer materials will be
wanted for autumn, so you will have to throw these away in any case...
especially as they will be done for by then from their own lack of
coherence if not your higher standard of luxury. Come, price them! What
do you say? Two roubles twenty-five copecks! And remember the condition:
if you wear these out, you will have another suit for nothing! They only
do business on that system at Fedyaev's; if you've bought a thing once,
you are satisfied for life, for you will never go there again of your
own free will. Now for the boots. What do you say? You see that they are
a bit worn, but they'll last a couple of months, for it's foreign work
and foreign leather; the secretary of the English Embassy sold them last
week--he had only worn them six days, but he was very short of cash.
Price--a rouble and a half. A bargain?"

"But perhaps they won't fit," observed Nastasya.

"Not fit? Just look!" and he pulled out of his pocket Raskolnikov's
old, broken boot, stiffly coated with dry mud. "I did not go
empty-handed--they took the size from this monster. We all did our best.
And as to your linen, your landlady has seen to that. Here, to begin
with are three shirts, hempen but with a fashionable front.... Well
now then, eighty copecks the cap, two roubles twenty-five copecks the
suit--together three roubles five copecks--a rouble and a half for the
boots--for, you see, they are very good--and that makes four roubles
fifty-five copecks; five roubles for the underclothes--they were
bought in the lo--which makes exactly nine roubles fifty-five copecks.
Forty-five copecks change in coppers. Will you take it? And so, Rodya,
you are set up with a complete new rig-out, for your overcoat will
serve, and even has a style of its own. That comes from getting one's
clothes from Sharmer's! As for your socks and other things, I leave them
to you; we've twenty-five roubles left. And as for Pashenka and paying
for your lodging, don't you worry. I tell you she'll trust you for
anything. And now, brother, let me change your linen, for I daresay you
will throw off your illness with your shirt."

"Let me be! I don't want to!" Raskolnikov waved him off. He had listened
with disgust to Razumihin's efforts to be playful about his purchases.

"Come, brother, don't tell me I've been trudging around for nothing,"
Razumihin insisted. "Nastasya, don't be bashful, but help me--that's
it," and in spite of Raskolnikov's resistance he changed his linen. The
latter sank back on the pillows and for a minute or two said nothing.

"It will be long before I get rid of them," he thought. "What money was
all that bought with?" he asked at last, gazing at the wall.

"Money? Why, your own, what the messenger brought from Vahrushin, your
mother sent it. Have you forgotten that, too?"

"I remember now," said Raskolnikov after a long, sullen silence.
Razumihin looked at him, frowning and uneasy.

The door opened and a tall, stout man whose appearance seemed familiar
to Raskolnikov came in.



CHAPTER IV

Zossimov was a tall, fat man with a puffy, colourless, clean-shaven face
and straight flaxen hair. He wore spectacles, and a big gold ring on
his fat finger. He was twenty-seven. He had on a light grey fashionable
loose coat, light summer trousers, and everything about him loose,
fashionable and spick and span; his linen was irreproachable, his
watch-chain was massive. In manner he was slow and, as it were,
nonchalant, and at the same time studiously free and easy; he made
efforts to conceal his self-importance, but it was apparent at every
instant. All his acquaintances found him tedious, but said he was clever
at his work.

"I've been to you twice to-day, brother. You see, he's come to himself,"
cried Razumihin.

"I see, I see; and how do we feel now, eh?" said Zossimov to
Raskolnikov, watching him carefully and, sitting down at the foot of the
sofa, he settled himself as comfortably as he could.

"He is still depressed," Razumihin went on. "We've just changed his
linen and he almost cried."

"That's very natural; you might have put it off if he did not wish
it.... His pulse is first-rate. Is your head still aching, eh?"

"I am well, I am perfectly well!" Raskolnikov declared positively
and irritably. He raised himself on the sofa and looked at them with
glittering eyes, but sank back on to the pillow at once and turned to
the wall. Zossimov watched him intently.

"Very good.... Going on all right," he said lazily. "Has he eaten
anything?"

They told him, and asked what he might have.

"He may have anything... soup, tea... mushrooms and cucumbers, of
course, you must not give him; he'd better not have meat either, and...
but no need to tell you that!" Razumihin and he looked at each
other. "No more medicine or anything. I'll look at him again to-morrow.
Perhaps, to-day even... but never mind..."

"To-morrow evening I shall take him for a walk," said Razumihin. "We are
going to the Yusupov garden and then to the Palais de Crystal."

"I would not disturb him to-morrow at all, but I don't know... a little,
maybe... but we'll see."

"Ach, what a nuisance! I've got a house-warming party to-night; it's
only a step from here. Couldn't he come? He could lie on the sofa. You
are coming?" Razumihin said to Zossimov. "Don't forget, you promised."

"All right, only rather later. What are you going to do?"

"Oh, nothing--tea, vodka, herrings. There will be a pie... just our
friends."

"And who?"

"All neighbours here, almost all new friends, except my old uncle, and
he is new too--he only arrived in Petersburg yesterday to see to some
business of his. We meet once in five years."

"What is he?"

"He's been stagnating all his life as a district postmaster; gets a
little pension. He is sixty-five--not worth talking about.... But I
am fond of him. Porfiry Petrovitch, the head of the Investigation
Department here... But you know him."

"Is he a relation of yours, too?"

"A very distant one. But why are you scowling? Because you quarrelled
once, won't you come then?"

"I don't care a damn for him."

"So much the better. Well, there will be some students, a teacher, a
government clerk, a musician, an officer and Zametov."

"Do tell me, please, what you or he"--Zossimov nodded at
Raskolnikov--"can have in common with this Zametov?"

"Oh, you particular gentleman! Principles! You are worked by principles,
as it were by springs; you won't venture to turn round on your own
account. If a man is a nice fellow, that's the only principle I go upon.
Zametov is a delightful person."

"Though he does take bribes."

"Well, he does! and what of it? I don't care if he does take bribes,"
Razumihin cried with unnatural irritability. "I don't praise him for
taking bribes. I only say he is a nice man in his own way! But if one
looks at men in all ways--are there many good ones left? Why, I am sure
I shouldn't be worth a baked onion myself... perhaps with you thrown
in."

"That's too little; I'd give two for you."

"And I wouldn't give more than one for you. No more of your jokes!
Zametov is no more than a boy. I can pull his hair and one must draw him
not repel him. You'll never improve a man by repelling him, especially
a boy. One has to be twice as careful with a boy. Oh, you progressive
dullards! You don't understand. You harm yourselves running another man
down.... But if you want to know, we really have something in common."

"I should like to know what."

"Why, it's all about a house-painter.... We are getting him out of
a mess! Though indeed there's nothing to fear now. The matter is
absolutely self-evident. We only put on steam."

"A painter?"

"Why, haven't I told you about it? I only told you the beginning then
about the murder of the old pawnbroker-woman. Well, the painter is mixed
up in it..."

"Oh, I heard about that murder before and was rather interested in it...
partly... for one reason.... I read about it in the papers, too...."

"Lizaveta was murdered, too," Nastasya blurted out, suddenly addressing
Raskolnikov. She remained in the room all the time, standing by the door
listening.

"Lizaveta," murmured Raskolnikov hardly audibly.

"Lizaveta, who sold old clothes. Didn't you know her? She used to come
here. She mended a shirt for you, too."

Raskolnikov turned to the wall where in the dirty, yellow paper he
picked out one clumsy, white flower with brown lines on it and began
examining how many petals there were in it, how many scallops in the
petals and how many lines on them. He felt his arms and legs as lifeless
as though they had been cut off. He did not attempt to move, but stared
obstinately at the flower.

"But what about the painter?" Zossimov interrupted Nastasya's chatter
with marked displeasure. She sighed and was silent.

"Why, he was accused of the murder," Razumihin went on hotly.

"Was there evidence against him then?"

"Evidence, indeed! Evidence that was no evidence, and that's what we
have to prove. It was just as they pitched on those fellows, Koch and
Pestryakov, at first. Foo! how stupidly it's all done, it makes one
sick, though it's not one's business! Pestryakov may be coming
to-night.... By the way, Rodya, you've heard about the business already;
it happened before you were ill, the day before you fainted at the
police office while they were talking about it."

Zossimov looked curiously at Raskolnikov. He did not stir.

"But I say, Razumihin, I wonder at you. What a busybody you are!"
Zossimov observed.

"Maybe I am, but we will get him off anyway," shouted Razumihin,
bringing his fist down on the table. "What's the most offensive is not
their lying--one can always forgive lying--lying is a delightful thing,
for it leads to truth--what is offensive is that they lie and worship
their own lying.... I respect Porfiry, but... What threw them out at
first? The door was locked, and when they came back with the porter
it was open. So it followed that Koch and Pestryakov were the
murderers--that was their logic!"

"But don't excite yourself; they simply detained them, they could not
help that.... And, by the way, I've met that man Koch. He used to buy
unredeemed pledges from the old woman? Eh?"

"Yes, he is a swindler. He buys up bad debts, too. He makes a profession
of it. But enough of him! Do you know what makes me angry? It's their
sickening rotten, petrified routine.... And this case might be the means
of introducing a new method. One can show from the psychological data
alone how to get on the track of the real man. 'We have facts,' they
say. But facts are not everything--at least half the business lies in
how you interpret them!"

"Can you interpret them, then?"

"Anyway, one can't hold one's tongue when one has a feeling, a tangible
feeling, that one might be a help if only.... Eh! Do you know the
details of the case?"

"I am waiting to hear about the painter."

"Oh, yes! Well, here's the story. Early on the third day after the
murder, when they were still dandling Koch and Pestryakov--though they
accounted for every step they took and it was as plain as a pikestaff--an
unexpected fact turned up. A peasant called Dushkin, who keeps a
dram-shop facing the house, brought to the police office a jeweller's
case containing some gold ear-rings, and told a long rigamarole. 'The
day before yesterday, just after eight o'clock'--mark the day and the
hour!--'a journeyman house-painter, Nikolay, who had been in to see me
already that day, brought me this box of gold ear-rings and stones, and
asked me to give him two roubles for them. When I asked him where he got
them, he said that he picked them up in the street. I did not ask him
anything more.' I am telling you Dushkin's story. 'I gave him a note'--a
rouble that is--'for I thought if he did not pawn it with me he would
with another. It would all come to the same thing--he'd spend it on
drink, so the thing had better be with me. The further you hide it
the quicker you will find it, and if anything turns up, if I hear any
rumours, I'll take it to the police.' Of course, that's all taradiddle;
he lies like a horse, for I know this Dushkin, he is a pawnbroker and
a receiver of stolen goods, and he did not cheat Nikolay out of a
thirty-rouble trinket in order to give it to the police. He was simply
afraid. But no matter, to return to Dushkin's story. 'I've known
this peasant, Nikolay Dementyev, from a child; he comes from the same
province and district of Zaraïsk, we are both Ryazan men. And though
Nikolay is not a drunkard, he drinks, and I knew he had a job in that
house, painting work with Dmitri, who comes from the same village, too.
As soon as he got the rouble he changed it, had a couple of glasses,
took his change and went out. But I did not see Dmitri with him then.
And the next day I heard that someone had murdered Alyona Ivanovna and
her sister, Lizaveta Ivanovna, with an axe. I knew them, and I felt
suspicious about the ear-rings at once, for I knew the murdered woman
lent money on pledges. I went to the house, and began to make careful
inquiries without saying a word to anyone. First of all I asked, "Is
Nikolay here?" Dmitri told me that Nikolay had gone off on the spree; he
had come home at daybreak drunk, stayed in the house about ten minutes,
and went out again. Dmitri didn't see him again and is finishing the
job alone. And their job is on the same staircase as the murder, on
the second floor. When I heard all that I did not say a word to
anyone'--that's Dushkin's tale--'but I found out what I could about
the murder, and went home feeling as suspicious as ever. And at eight
o'clock this morning'--that was the third day, you understand--'I saw
Nikolay coming in, not sober, though not to say very drunk--he could
understand what was said to him. He sat down on the bench and did not
speak. There was only one stranger in the bar and a man I knew asleep
on a bench and our two boys. "Have you seen Dmitri?" said I. "No, I
haven't," said he. "And you've not been here either?" "Not since the day
before yesterday," said he. "And where did you sleep last night?"
"In Peski, with the Kolomensky men." "And where did you get those
ear-rings?" I asked. "I found them in the street," and the way he said
it was a bit queer; he did not look at me. "Did you hear what happened
that very evening, at that very hour, on that same staircase?" said I.
"No," said he, "I had not heard," and all the while he was listening,
his eyes were staring out of his head and he turned as white as chalk. I
told him all about it and he took his hat and began getting up. I wanted
to keep him. "Wait a bit, Nikolay," said I, "won't you have a drink?"
And I signed to the boy to hold the door, and I came out from behind the
bar; but he darted out and down the street to the turning at a run.
I have not seen him since. Then my doubts were at an end--it was his
doing, as clear as could be....'"

"I should think so," said Zossimov.

"Wait! Hear the end. Of course they sought high and low for Nikolay;
they detained Dushkin and searched his house; Dmitri, too, was arrested;
the Kolomensky men also were turned inside out. And the day before
yesterday they arrested Nikolay in a tavern at the end of the town. He
had gone there, taken the silver cross off his neck and asked for a dram
for it. They gave it to him. A few minutes afterwards the woman went
to the cowshed, and through a crack in the wall she saw in the stable
adjoining he had made a noose of his sash from the beam, stood on a
block of wood, and was trying to put his neck in the noose. The woman
screeched her hardest; people ran in. 'So that's what you are up to!'
'Take me,' he says, 'to such-and-such a police officer; I'll confess
everything.' Well, they took him to that police station--that is
here--with a suitable escort. So they asked him this and that, how old
he is, 'twenty-two,' and so on. At the question, 'When you were working
with Dmitri, didn't you see anyone on the staircase at such-and-such a
time?'--answer: 'To be sure folks may have gone up and down, but I did
not notice them.' 'And didn't you hear anything, any noise, and so on?'
'We heard nothing special.' 'And did you hear, Nikolay, that on the same
day Widow So-and-so and her sister were murdered and robbed?' 'I
never knew a thing about it. The first I heard of it was from Afanasy
Pavlovitch the day before yesterday.' 'And where did you find the
ear-rings?' 'I found them on the pavement.' 'Why didn't you go to work
with Dmitri the other day?' 'Because I was drinking.' 'And where were
you drinking?' 'Oh, in such-and-such a place.' 'Why did you run away
from Dushkin's?' 'Because I was awfully frightened.' 'What were
you frightened of?' 'That I should be accused.' 'How could you be
frightened, if you felt free from guilt?' Now, Zossimov, you may not
believe me, that question was put literally in those words. I know it
for a fact, it was repeated to me exactly! What do you say to that?"

"Well, anyway, there's the evidence."

"I am not talking of the evidence now, I am talking about that question,
of their own idea of themselves. Well, so they squeezed and squeezed
him and he confessed: 'I did not find it in the street, but in the flat
where I was painting with Dmitri.' 'And how was that?' 'Why, Dmitri and
I were painting there all day, and we were just getting ready to go, and
Dmitri took a brush and painted my face, and he ran off and I after him.
I ran after him, shouting my hardest, and at the bottom of the stairs I
ran right against the porter and some gentlemen--and how many gentlemen
were there I don't remember. And the porter swore at me, and the other
porter swore, too, and the porter's wife came out, and swore at us, too;
and a gentleman came into the entry with a lady, and he swore at us,
too, for Dmitri and I lay right across the way. I got hold of Dmitri's
hair and knocked him down and began beating him. And Dmitri, too, caught
me by the hair and began beating me. But we did it all not for temper
but in a friendly way, for sport. And then Dmitri escaped and ran into
the street, and I ran after him; but I did not catch him, and went back
to the flat alone; I had to clear up my things. I began putting them
together, expecting Dmitri to come, and there in the passage, in the
corner by the door, I stepped on the box. I saw it lying there wrapped
up in paper. I took off the paper, saw some little hooks, undid them,
and in the box were the ear-rings....'"

"Behind the door? Lying behind the door? Behind the door?" Raskolnikov
cried suddenly, staring with a blank look of terror at Razumihin, and he
slowly sat up on the sofa, leaning on his hand.

"Yes... why? What's the matter? What's wrong?" Razumihin, too, got up
from his seat.

"Nothing," Raskolnikov answered faintly, turning to the wall. All were
silent for a while.

"He must have waked from a dream," Razumihin said at last, looking
inquiringly at Zossimov. The latter slightly shook his head.

"Well, go on," said Zossimov. "What next?"

"What next? As soon as he saw the ear-rings, forgetting Dmitri and
everything, he took up his cap and ran to Dushkin and, as we know, got
a rouble from him. He told a lie saying he found them in the street, and
went off drinking. He keeps repeating his old story about the murder:
'I know nothing of it, never heard of it till the day before yesterday.'
'And why didn't you come to the police till now?' 'I was frightened.'
'And why did you try to hang yourself?' 'From anxiety.' 'What anxiety?'
'That I should be accused of it.' Well, that's the whole story. And now
what do you suppose they deduced from that?"

"Why, there's no supposing. There's a clue, such as it is, a fact. You
wouldn't have your painter set free?"

"Now they've simply taken him for the murderer. They haven't a shadow of
doubt."

"That's nonsense. You are excited. But what about the ear-rings? You
must admit that, if on the very same day and hour ear-rings from the old
woman's box have come into Nikolay's hands, they must have come there
somehow. That's a good deal in such a case."

"How did they get there? How did they get there?" cried Razumihin.
"How can you, a doctor, whose duty it is to study man and who has more
opportunity than anyone else for studying human nature--how can you fail
to see the character of the man in the whole story? Don't you see at
once that the answers he has given in the examination are the holy
truth? They came into his hand precisely as he has told us--he stepped
on the box and picked it up."

"The holy truth! But didn't he own himself that he told a lie at first?"

"Listen to me, listen attentively. The porter and Koch and Pestryakov
and the other porter and the wife of the first porter and the woman who
was sitting in the porter's lodge and the man Kryukov, who had just got
out of a cab at that minute and went in at the entry with a lady on his
arm, that is eight or ten witnesses, agree that Nikolay had Dmitri on
the ground, was lying on him beating him, while Dmitri hung on to his
hair, beating him, too. They lay right across the way, blocking the
thoroughfare. They were sworn at on all sides while they 'like children'
(the very words of the witnesses) were falling over one another,
squealing, fighting and laughing with the funniest faces, and, chasing
one another like children, they ran into the street. Now take careful
note. The bodies upstairs were warm, you understand, warm when they
found them! If they, or Nikolay alone, had murdered them and broken open
the boxes, or simply taken part in the robbery, allow me to ask you one
question: do their state of mind, their squeals and giggles and childish
scuffling at the gate fit in with axes, bloodshed, fiendish cunning,
robbery? They'd just killed them, not five or ten minutes before, for
the bodies were still warm, and at once, leaving the flat open, knowing
that people would go there at once, flinging away their booty, they
rolled about like children, laughing and attracting general attention.
And there are a dozen witnesses to swear to that!"

"Of course it is strange! It's impossible, indeed, but..."

"No, brother, no _buts_. And if the ear-rings being found in Nikolay's
hands at the very day and hour of the murder constitutes an important
piece of circumstantial evidence against him--although the explanation
given by him accounts for it, and therefore it does not tell seriously
against him--one must take into consideration the facts which prove him
innocent, especially as they are facts that _cannot be denied_. And
do you suppose, from the character of our legal system, that they will
accept, or that they are in a position to accept, this fact--resting
simply on a psychological impossibility--as irrefutable and conclusively
breaking down the circumstantial evidence for the prosecution? No, they
won't accept it, they certainly won't, because they found the jewel-case
and the man tried to hang himself, 'which he could not have done if he
hadn't felt guilty.' That's the point, that's what excites me, you must
understand!"

"Oh, I see you are excited! Wait a bit. I forgot to ask you; what proof
is there that the box came from the old woman?"

"That's been proved," said Razumihin with apparent reluctance, frowning.
"Koch recognised the jewel-case and gave the name of the owner, who
proved conclusively that it was his."

"That's bad. Now another point. Did anyone see Nikolay at the time
that Koch and Pestryakov were going upstairs at first, and is there no
evidence about that?"

"Nobody did see him," Razumihin answered with vexation. "That's the
worst of it. Even Koch and Pestryakov did not notice them on their way
upstairs, though, indeed, their evidence could not have been worth much.
They said they saw the flat was open, and that there must be work going
on in it, but they took no special notice and could not remember whether
there actually were men at work in it."

"Hm!... So the only evidence for the defence is that they were beating
one another and laughing. That constitutes a strong presumption, but...
How do you explain the facts yourself?"

"How do I explain them? What is there to explain? It's clear. At any
rate, the direction in which explanation is to be sought is clear, and
the jewel-case points to it. The real murderer dropped those ear-rings.
The murderer was upstairs, locked in, when Koch and Pestryakov knocked
at the door. Koch, like an ass, did not stay at the door; so the
murderer popped out and ran down, too; for he had no other way of
escape. He hid from Koch, Pestryakov and the porter in the flat when
Nikolay and Dmitri had just run out of it. He stopped there while the
porter and others were going upstairs, waited till they were out of
hearing, and then went calmly downstairs at the very minute when Dmitri
and Nikolay ran out into the street and there was no one in the entry;
possibly he was seen, but not noticed. There are lots of people going
in and out. He must have dropped the ear-rings out of his pocket when
he stood behind the door, and did not notice he dropped them, because he
had other things to think of. The jewel-case is a conclusive proof that
he did stand there.... That's how I explain it."

"Too clever! No, my boy, you're too clever. That beats everything."

"But, why, why?"

"Why, because everything fits too well... it's too melodramatic."

"A-ach!" Razumihin was exclaiming, but at that moment the door opened
and a personage came in who was a stranger to all present.



CHAPTER V

This was a gentleman no longer young, of a stiff and portly appearance,
and a cautious and sour countenance. He began by stopping short in the
doorway, staring about him with offensive and undisguised astonishment,
as though asking himself what sort of place he had come to.
Mistrustfully and with an affectation of being alarmed and almost
affronted, he scanned Raskolnikov's low and narrow "cabin." With the
same amazement he stared at Raskolnikov, who lay undressed, dishevelled,
unwashed, on his miserable dirty sofa, looking fixedly at him. Then with
the same deliberation he scrutinised the uncouth, unkempt figure and
unshaven face of Razumihin, who looked him boldly and inquiringly in the
face without rising from his seat. A constrained silence lasted for a
couple of minutes, and then, as might be expected, some scene-shifting
took place. Reflecting, probably from certain fairly unmistakable signs,
that he would get nothing in this "cabin" by attempting to overawe them,
the gentleman softened somewhat, and civilly, though with some severity,
emphasising every syllable of his question, addressed Zossimov:

"Rodion Romanovitch Raskolnikov, a student, or formerly a student?"

Zossimov made a slight movement, and would have answered, had not
Razumihin anticipated him.

"Here he is lying on the sofa! What do you want?"

This familiar "what do you want" seemed to cut the ground from the
feet of the pompous gentleman. He was turning to Razumihin, but checked
himself in time and turned to Zossimov again.

"This is Raskolnikov," mumbled Zossimov, nodding towards him. Then he
gave a prolonged yawn, opening his mouth as wide as possible. Then he
lazily put his hand into his waistcoat-pocket, pulled out a huge gold
watch in a round hunter's case, opened it, looked at it and as slowly
and lazily proceeded to put it back.

Raskolnikov himself lay without speaking, on his back, gazing
persistently, though without understanding, at the stranger. Now that
his face was turned away from the strange flower on the paper, it
was extremely pale and wore a look of anguish, as though he had just
undergone an agonising operation or just been taken from the rack. But
the new-comer gradually began to arouse his attention, then his wonder,
then suspicion and even alarm. When Zossimov said "This is Raskolnikov"
he jumped up quickly, sat on the sofa and with an almost defiant, but
weak and breaking, voice articulated:

"Yes, I am Raskolnikov! What do you want?"

The visitor scrutinised him and pronounced impressively:

"Pyotr Petrovitch Luzhin. I believe I have reason to hope that my name
is not wholly unknown to you?"

But Raskolnikov, who had expected something quite different, gazed
blankly and dreamily at him, making no reply, as though he heard the
name of Pyotr Petrovitch for the first time.

"Is it possible that you can up to the present have received no
information?" asked Pyotr Petrovitch, somewhat disconcerted.

In reply Raskolnikov sank languidly back on the pillow, put his hands
behind his head and gazed at the ceiling. A look of dismay came into
Luzhin's face. Zossimov and Razumihin stared at him more inquisitively
than ever, and at last he showed unmistakable signs of embarrassment.

"I had presumed and calculated," he faltered, "that a letter posted more
than ten days, if not a fortnight ago..."

"I say, why are you standing in the doorway?" Razumihin interrupted
suddenly. "If you've something to say, sit down. Nastasya and you are so
crowded. Nastasya, make room. Here's a chair, thread your way in!"

He moved his chair back from the table, made a little space between the
table and his knees, and waited in a rather cramped position for the
visitor to "thread his way in." The minute was so chosen that it was
impossible to refuse, and the visitor squeezed his way through, hurrying
and stumbling. Reaching the chair, he sat down, looking suspiciously at
Razumihin.

"No need to be nervous," the latter blurted out. "Rodya has been ill for
the last five days and delirious for three, but now he is recovering and
has got an appetite. This is his doctor, who has just had a look at him.
I am a comrade of Rodya's, like him, formerly a student, and now I am
nursing him; so don't you take any notice of us, but go on with your
business."

"Thank you. But shall I not disturb the invalid by my presence and
conversation?" Pyotr Petrovitch asked of Zossimov.

"N-no," mumbled Zossimov; "you may amuse him." He yawned again.

"He has been conscious a long time, since the morning," went on
Razumihin, whose familiarity seemed so much like unaffected good-nature
that Pyotr Petrovitch began to be more cheerful, partly, perhaps,
because this shabby and impudent person had introduced himself as a
student.

"Your mamma," began Luzhin.

"Hm!" Razumihin cleared his throat loudly. Luzhin looked at him
inquiringly.

"That's all right, go on."

Luzhin shrugged his shoulders.

"Your mamma had commenced a letter to you while I was sojourning in
her neighbourhood. On my arrival here I purposely allowed a few days to
elapse before coming to see you, in order that I might be fully
assured that you were in full possession of the tidings; but now, to my
astonishment..."

"I know, I know!" Raskolnikov cried suddenly with impatient vexation.
"So you are the _fiancé_? I know, and that's enough!"

There was no doubt about Pyotr Petrovitch's being offended this time,
but he said nothing. He made a violent effort to understand what it all
meant. There was a moment's silence.

Meanwhile Raskolnikov, who had turned a little towards him when he
answered, began suddenly staring at him again with marked curiosity, as
though he had not had a good look at him yet, or as though something
new had struck him; he rose from his pillow on purpose to stare at
him. There certainly was something peculiar in Pyotr Petrovitch's whole
appearance, something which seemed to justify the title of "fiancé" so
unceremoniously applied to him. In the first place, it was evident, far
too much so indeed, that Pyotr Petrovitch had made eager use of his few
days in the capital to get himself up and rig himself out in expectation
of his betrothed--a perfectly innocent and permissible proceeding,
indeed. Even his own, perhaps too complacent, consciousness of the
agreeable improvement in his appearance might have been forgiven in such
circumstances, seeing that Pyotr Petrovitch had taken up the rôle of
fiancé. All his clothes were fresh from the tailor's and were all
right, except for being too new and too distinctly appropriate. Even
the stylish new round hat had the same significance. Pyotr Petrovitch
treated it too respectfully and held it too carefully in his hands. The
exquisite pair of lavender gloves, real Louvain, told the same tale,
if only from the fact of his not wearing them, but carrying them in
his hand for show. Light and youthful colours predominated in Pyotr
Petrovitch's attire. He wore a charming summer jacket of a fawn shade,
light thin trousers, a waistcoat of the same, new and fine linen, a
cravat of the lightest cambric with pink stripes on it, and the best
of it was, this all suited Pyotr Petrovitch. His very fresh and even
handsome face looked younger than his forty-five years at all times.
His dark, mutton-chop whiskers made an agreeable setting on both sides,
growing thickly upon his shining, clean-shaven chin. Even his hair,
touched here and there with grey, though it had been combed and curled
at a hairdresser's, did not give him a stupid appearance, as curled hair
usually does, by inevitably suggesting a German on his wedding-day.
If there really was something unpleasing and repulsive in his rather
good-looking and imposing countenance, it was due to quite other
causes. After scanning Mr. Luzhin unceremoniously, Raskolnikov smiled
malignantly, sank back on the pillow and stared at the ceiling as
before.

But Mr. Luzhin hardened his heart and seemed to determine to take no
notice of their oddities.

"I feel the greatest regret at finding you in this situation," he began,
again breaking the silence with an effort. "If I had been aware of your
illness I should have come earlier. But you know what business is. I
have, too, a very important legal affair in the Senate, not to mention
other preoccupations which you may well conjecture. I am expecting your
mamma and sister any minute."

Raskolnikov made a movement and seemed about to speak; his face showed
some excitement. Pyotr Petrovitch paused, waited, but as nothing
followed, he went on:

"... Any minute. I have found a lodging for them on their arrival."

"Where?" asked Raskolnikov weakly.

"Very near here, in Bakaleyev's house."

"That's in Voskresensky," put in Razumihin. "There are two storeys of
rooms, let by a merchant called Yushin; I've been there."

"Yes, rooms..."

"A disgusting place--filthy, stinking and, what's more, of doubtful
character. Things have happened there, and there are all sorts of queer
people living there. And I went there about a scandalous business. It's
cheap, though..."

"I could not, of course, find out so much about it, for I am a stranger
in Petersburg myself," Pyotr Petrovitch replied huffily. "However, the
two rooms are exceedingly clean, and as it is for so short a time...
I have already taken a permanent, that is, our future flat," he said,
addressing Raskolnikov, "and I am having it done up. And meanwhile I am
myself cramped for room in a lodging with my friend Andrey Semyonovitch
Lebeziatnikov, in the flat of Madame Lippevechsel; it was he who told me
of Bakaleyev's house, too..."

"Lebeziatnikov?" said Raskolnikov slowly, as if recalling something.

"Yes, Andrey Semyonovitch Lebeziatnikov, a clerk in the Ministry. Do you
know him?"

"Yes... no," Raskolnikov answered.

"Excuse me, I fancied so from your inquiry. I was once his guardian....
A very nice young man and advanced. I like to meet young people: one
learns new things from them." Luzhin looked round hopefully at them all.

"How do you mean?" asked Razumihin.

"In the most serious and essential matters," Pyotr Petrovitch replied,
as though delighted at the question. "You see, it's ten years since I
visited Petersburg. All the novelties, reforms, ideas have reached us in
the provinces, but to see it all more clearly one must be in Petersburg.
And it's my notion that you observe and learn most by watching the
younger generation. And I confess I am delighted..."

"At what?"

"Your question is a wide one. I may be mistaken, but I fancy I find
clearer views, more, so to say, criticism, more practicality..."

"That's true," Zossimov let drop.

"Nonsense! There's no practicality." Razumihin flew at him.
"Practicality is a difficult thing to find; it does not drop down from
heaven. And for the last two hundred years we have been divorced from
all practical life. Ideas, if you like, are fermenting," he said to
Pyotr Petrovitch, "and desire for good exists, though it's in a childish
form, and honesty you may find, although there are crowds of brigands.
Anyway, there's no practicality. Practicality goes well shod."

"I don't agree with you," Pyotr Petrovitch replied, with evident
enjoyment. "Of course, people do get carried away and make mistakes,
but one must have indulgence; those mistakes are merely evidence of
enthusiasm for the cause and of abnormal external environment. If little
has been done, the time has been but short; of means I will not speak.
It's my personal view, if you care to know, that something has been
accomplished already. New valuable ideas, new valuable works are
circulating in the place of our old dreamy and romantic authors.
Literature is taking a maturer form, many injurious prejudices have been
rooted up and turned into ridicule.... In a word, we have cut ourselves
off irrevocably from the past, and that, to my thinking, is a great
thing..."

"He's learnt it by heart to show off!" Raskolnikov pronounced suddenly.

"What?" asked Pyotr Petrovitch, not catching his words; but he received
no reply.

"That's all true," Zossimov hastened to interpose.

"Isn't it so?" Pyotr Petrovitch went on, glancing affably at Zossimov.
"You must admit," he went on, addressing Razumihin with a shade of
triumph and superciliousness--he almost added "young man"--"that there
is an advance, or, as they say now, progress in the name of science and
economic truth..."

"A commonplace."

"No, not a commonplace! Hitherto, for instance, if I were told, 'love
thy neighbour,' what came of it?" Pyotr Petrovitch went on, perhaps with
excessive haste. "It came to my tearing my coat in half to share with my
neighbour and we both were left half naked. As a Russian proverb has
it, 'Catch several hares and you won't catch one.' Science now tells
us, love yourself before all men, for everything in the world rests on
self-interest. You love yourself and manage your own affairs properly
and your coat remains whole. Economic truth adds that the better private
affairs are organised in society--the more whole coats, so to say--the
firmer are its foundations and the better is the common welfare
organised too. Therefore, in acquiring wealth solely and exclusively for
myself, I am acquiring, so to speak, for all, and helping to bring to
pass my neighbour's getting a little more than a torn coat; and that not
from private, personal liberality, but as a consequence of the general
advance. The idea is simple, but unhappily it has been a long time
reaching us, being hindered by idealism and sentimentality. And yet it
would seem to want very little wit to perceive it..."

"Excuse me, I've very little wit myself," Razumihin cut in sharply,
"and so let us drop it. I began this discussion with an object, but I've
grown so sick during the last three years of this chattering to amuse
oneself, of this incessant flow of commonplaces, always the same, that,
by Jove, I blush even when other people talk like that. You are in a
hurry, no doubt, to exhibit your acquirements; and I don't blame you,
that's quite pardonable. I only wanted to find out what sort of man you
are, for so many unscrupulous people have got hold of the progressive
cause of late and have so distorted in their own interests everything
they touched, that the whole cause has been dragged in the mire. That's
enough!"

"Excuse me, sir," said Luzhin, affronted, and speaking with excessive
dignity. "Do you mean to suggest so unceremoniously that I too..."

"Oh, my dear sir... how could I?... Come, that's enough," Razumihin
concluded, and he turned abruptly to Zossimov to continue their previous
conversation.

Pyotr Petrovitch had the good sense to accept the disavowal. He made up
his mind to take leave in another minute or two.

"I trust our acquaintance," he said, addressing Raskolnikov, "may, upon
your recovery and in view of the circumstances of which you are aware,
become closer... Above all, I hope for your return to health..."

Raskolnikov did not even turn his head. Pyotr Petrovitch began getting
up from his chair.

"One of her customers must have killed her," Zossimov declared
positively.

"Not a doubt of it," replied Razumihin. "Porfiry doesn't give his
opinion, but is examining all who have left pledges with her there."

"Examining them?" Raskolnikov asked aloud.

"Yes. What then?"

"Nothing."

"How does he get hold of them?" asked Zossimov.

"Koch has given the names of some of them, other names are on the
wrappers of the pledges and some have come forward of themselves."

"It must have been a cunning and practised ruffian! The boldness of it!
The coolness!"

"That's just what it wasn't!" interposed Razumihin. "That's what throws
you all off the scent. But I maintain that he is not cunning, not
practised, and probably this was his first crime! The supposition that
it was a calculated crime and a cunning criminal doesn't work. Suppose
him to have been inexperienced, and it's clear that it was only a chance
that saved him--and chance may do anything. Why, he did not foresee
obstacles, perhaps! And how did he set to work? He took jewels worth
ten or twenty roubles, stuffing his pockets with them, ransacked the
old woman's trunks, her rags--and they found fifteen hundred roubles,
besides notes, in a box in the top drawer of the chest! He did not know
how to rob; he could only murder. It was his first crime, I assure you,
his first crime; he lost his head. And he got off more by luck than good
counsel!"

"You are talking of the murder of the old pawnbroker, I believe?" Pyotr
Petrovitch put in, addressing Zossimov. He was standing, hat and gloves
in hand, but before departing he felt disposed to throw off a few more
intellectual phrases. He was evidently anxious to make a favourable
impression and his vanity overcame his prudence.

"Yes. You've heard of it?"

"Oh, yes, being in the neighbourhood."

"Do you know the details?"

"I can't say that; but another circumstance interests me in the
case--the whole question, so to say. Not to speak of the fact that crime
has been greatly on the increase among the lower classes during the last
five years, not to speak of the cases of robbery and arson everywhere,
what strikes me as the strangest thing is that in the higher classes,
too, crime is increasing proportionately. In one place one hears of a
student's robbing the mail on the high road; in another place people of
good social position forge false banknotes; in Moscow of late a whole
gang has been captured who used to forge lottery tickets, and one of
the ringleaders was a lecturer in universal history; then our secretary
abroad was murdered from some obscure motive of gain.... And if this old
woman, the pawnbroker, has been murdered by someone of a higher class
in society--for peasants don't pawn gold trinkets--how are we to explain
this demoralisation of the civilised part of our society?"

"There are many economic changes," put in Zossimov.

"How are we to explain it?" Razumihin caught him up. "It might be
explained by our inveterate impracticality."

"How do you mean?"

"What answer had your lecturer in Moscow to make to the question why he
was forging notes? 'Everybody is getting rich one way or another, so I
want to make haste to get rich too.' I don't remember the exact words,
but the upshot was that he wants money for nothing, without waiting or
working! We've grown used to having everything ready-made, to walking
on crutches, to having our food chewed for us. Then the great hour
struck,[*] and every man showed himself in his true colours."

     [*] The emancipation of the serfs in 1861 is meant.
     --TRANSLATOR'S NOTE.

"But morality? And so to speak, principles..."

"But why do you worry about it?" Raskolnikov interposed suddenly. "It's
in accordance with your theory!"

"In accordance with my theory?"

"Why, carry out logically the theory you were advocating just now, and
it follows that people may be killed..."

"Upon my word!" cried Luzhin.

"No, that's not so," put in Zossimov.

Raskolnikov lay with a white face and twitching upper lip, breathing
painfully.

"There's a measure in all things," Luzhin went on superciliously.
"Economic ideas are not an incitement to murder, and one has but to
suppose..."

"And is it true," Raskolnikov interposed once more suddenly, again in a
voice quivering with fury and delight in insulting him, "is it true that
you told your _fiancée_... within an hour of her acceptance, that what
pleased you most... was that she was a beggar... because it was better
to raise a wife from poverty, so that you may have complete control over
her, and reproach her with your being her benefactor?"

"Upon my word," Luzhin cried wrathfully and irritably, crimson with
confusion, "to distort my words in this way! Excuse me, allow me to
assure you that the report which has reached you, or rather, let me say,
has been conveyed to you, has no foundation in truth, and I... suspect
who... in a word... this arrow... in a word, your mamma... She seemed
to me in other things, with all her excellent qualities, of a somewhat
high-flown and romantic way of thinking.... But I was a thousand miles
from supposing that she would misunderstand and misrepresent things in
so fanciful a way.... And indeed... indeed..."

"I tell you what," cried Raskolnikov, raising himself on his pillow and
fixing his piercing, glittering eyes upon him, "I tell you what."

"What?" Luzhin stood still, waiting with a defiant and offended face.
Silence lasted for some seconds.

"Why, if ever again... you dare to mention a single word... about my
mother... I shall send you flying downstairs!"

"What's the matter with you?" cried Razumihin.

"So that's how it is?" Luzhin turned pale and bit his lip. "Let me tell
you, sir," he began deliberately, doing his utmost to restrain himself
but breathing hard, "at the first moment I saw you you were ill-disposed
to me, but I remained here on purpose to find out more. I could forgive
a great deal in a sick man and a connection, but you... never after
this..."

"I am not ill," cried Raskolnikov.

"So much the worse..."

"Go to hell!"

But Luzhin was already leaving without finishing his speech, squeezing
between the table and the chair; Razumihin got up this time to let him
pass. Without glancing at anyone, and not even nodding to Zossimov, who
had for some time been making signs to him to let the sick man alone,
he went out, lifting his hat to the level of his shoulders to avoid
crushing it as he stooped to go out of the door. And even the curve of
his spine was expressive of the horrible insult he had received.

"How could you--how could you!" Razumihin said, shaking his head in
perplexity.

"Let me alone--let me alone all of you!" Raskolnikov cried in a frenzy.
"Will you ever leave off tormenting me? I am not afraid of you! I am
not afraid of anyone, anyone now! Get away from me! I want to be alone,
alone, alone!"

"Come along," said Zossimov, nodding to Razumihin.

"But we can't leave him like this!"

"Come along," Zossimov repeated insistently, and he went out. Razumihin
thought a minute and ran to overtake him.

"It might be worse not to obey him," said Zossimov on the stairs. "He
mustn't be irritated."

"What's the matter with him?"

"If only he could get some favourable shock, that's what would do it! At
first he was better.... You know he has got something on his mind! Some
fixed idea weighing on him.... I am very much afraid so; he must have!"

"Perhaps it's that gentleman, Pyotr Petrovitch. From his conversation
I gather he is going to marry his sister, and that he had received a
letter about it just before his illness...."

"Yes, confound the man! he may have upset the case altogether. But have
you noticed, he takes no interest in anything, he does not respond to
anything except one point on which he seems excited--that's the murder?"

"Yes, yes," Razumihin agreed, "I noticed that, too. He is interested,
frightened. It gave him a shock on the day he was ill in the police
office; he fainted."

"Tell me more about that this evening and I'll tell you something
afterwards. He interests me very much! In half an hour I'll go and see
him again.... There'll be no inflammation though."

"Thanks! And I'll wait with Pashenka meantime and will keep watch on him
through Nastasya...."

Raskolnikov, left alone, looked with impatience and misery at Nastasya,
but she still lingered.

"Won't you have some tea now?" she asked.

"Later! I am sleepy! Leave me."

He turned abruptly to the wall; Nastasya went out.



CHAPTER VI

But as soon as she went out, he got up, latched the door, undid the
parcel which Razumihin had brought in that evening and had tied up again
and began dressing. Strange to say, he seemed immediately to have become
perfectly calm; not a trace of his recent delirium nor of the panic
fear that had haunted him of late. It was the first moment of a strange
sudden calm. His movements were precise and definite; a firm purpose was
evident in them. "To-day, to-day," he muttered to himself. He understood
that he was still weak, but his intense spiritual concentration gave him
strength and self-confidence. He hoped, moreover, that he would not
fall down in the street. When he had dressed in entirely new clothes, he
looked at the money lying on the table, and after a moment's thought
put it in his pocket. It was twenty-five roubles. He took also all the
copper change from the ten roubles spent by Razumihin on the clothes.
Then he softly unlatched the door, went out, slipped downstairs and
glanced in at the open kitchen door. Nastasya was standing with her back
to him, blowing up the landlady's samovar. She heard nothing. Who would
have dreamed of his going out, indeed? A minute later he was in the
street.

It was nearly eight o'clock, the sun was setting. It was as stifling as
before, but he eagerly drank in the stinking, dusty town air. His head
felt rather dizzy; a sort of savage energy gleamed suddenly in his
feverish eyes and his wasted, pale and yellow face. He did not know and
did not think where he was going, he had one thought only: "that all
_this_ must be ended to-day, once for all, immediately; that he would
not return home without it, because he _would not go on living like
that_." How, with what to make an end? He had not an idea about it,
he did not even want to think of it. He drove away thought; thought
tortured him. All he knew, all he felt was that everything must be
changed "one way or another," he repeated with desperate and immovable
self-confidence and determination.

From old habit he took his usual walk in the direction of the Hay
Market. A dark-haired young man with a barrel organ was standing in
the road in front of a little general shop and was grinding out a very
sentimental song. He was accompanying a girl of fifteen, who stood
on the pavement in front of him. She was dressed up in a crinoline, a
mantle and a straw hat with a flame-coloured feather in it, all very
old and shabby. In a strong and rather agreeable voice, cracked and
coarsened by street singing, she sang in hope of getting a copper from
the shop. Raskolnikov joined two or three listeners, took out a five
copeck piece and put it in the girl's hand. She broke off abruptly on a
sentimental high note, shouted sharply to the organ grinder "Come on,"
and both moved on to the next shop.

"Do you like street music?" said Raskolnikov, addressing a middle-aged
man standing idly by him. The man looked at him, startled and wondering.

"I love to hear singing to a street organ," said Raskolnikov, and his
manner seemed strangely out of keeping with the subject--"I like it
on cold, dark, damp autumn evenings--they must be damp--when all the
passers-by have pale green, sickly faces, or better still when wet
snow is falling straight down, when there's no wind--you know what I
mean?--and the street lamps shine through it..."

"I don't know.... Excuse me..." muttered the stranger, frightened by the
question and Raskolnikov's strange manner, and he crossed over to the
other side of the street.

Raskolnikov walked straight on and came out at the corner of the Hay
Market, where the huckster and his wife had talked with Lizaveta; but
they were not there now. Recognising the place, he stopped, looked round
and addressed a young fellow in a red shirt who stood gaping before a
corn chandler's shop.

"Isn't there a man who keeps a booth with his wife at this corner?"

"All sorts of people keep booths here," answered the young man, glancing
superciliously at Raskolnikov.

"What's his name?"

"What he was christened."

"Aren't you a Zaraïsky man, too? Which province?"

The young man looked at Raskolnikov again.

"It's not a province, your excellency, but a district. Graciously
forgive me, your excellency!"

"Is that a tavern at the top there?"

"Yes, it's an eating-house and there's a billiard-room and you'll find
princesses there too.... La-la!"

Raskolnikov crossed the square. In that corner there was a dense crowd
of peasants. He pushed his way into the thickest part of it, looking
at the faces. He felt an unaccountable inclination to enter into
conversation with people. But the peasants took no notice of him; they
were all shouting in groups together. He stood and thought a little and
took a turning to the right in the direction of V.

He had often crossed that little street which turns at an angle, leading
from the market-place to Sadovy Street. Of late he had often felt drawn
to wander about this district, when he felt depressed, that he might
feel more so.

Now he walked along, thinking of nothing. At that point there is a great
block of buildings, entirely let out in dram shops and eating-houses;
women were continually running in and out, bare-headed and in their
indoor clothes. Here and there they gathered in groups, on the pavement,
especially about the entrances to various festive establishments in
the lower storeys. From one of these a loud din, sounds of singing, the
tinkling of a guitar and shouts of merriment, floated into the street.
A crowd of women were thronging round the door; some were sitting on the
steps, others on the pavement, others were standing talking. A drunken
soldier, smoking a cigarette, was walking near them in the road,
swearing; he seemed to be trying to find his way somewhere, but had
forgotten where. One beggar was quarrelling with another, and a man dead
drunk was lying right across the road. Raskolnikov joined the throng of
women, who were talking in husky voices. They were bare-headed and wore
cotton dresses and goatskin shoes. There were women of forty and some
not more than seventeen; almost all had blackened eyes.

He felt strangely attracted by the singing and all the noise and
uproar in the saloon below.... someone could be heard within dancing
frantically, marking time with his heels to the sounds of the guitar
and of a thin falsetto voice singing a jaunty air. He listened intently,
gloomily and dreamily, bending down at the entrance and peeping
inquisitively in from the pavement.

  "Oh, my handsome soldier
   Don't beat me for nothing,"

trilled the thin voice of the singer. Raskolnikov felt a great desire to
make out what he was singing, as though everything depended on that.

"Shall I go in?" he thought. "They are laughing. From drink. Shall I get
drunk?"

"Won't you come in?" one of the women asked him. Her voice was
still musical and less thick than the others, she was young and not
repulsive--the only one of the group.

"Why, she's pretty," he said, drawing himself up and looking at her.

She smiled, much pleased at the compliment.

"You're very nice looking yourself," she said.

"Isn't he thin though!" observed another woman in a deep bass. "Have you
just come out of a hospital?"

"They're all generals' daughters, it seems, but they have all snub
noses," interposed a tipsy peasant with a sly smile on his face, wearing
a loose coat. "See how jolly they are."

"Go along with you!"

"I'll go, sweetie!"

And he darted down into the saloon below. Raskolnikov moved on.

"I say, sir," the girl shouted after him.

"What is it?"

She hesitated.

"I'll always be pleased to spend an hour with you, kind gentleman, but
now I feel shy. Give me six copecks for a drink, there's a nice young
man!"

Raskolnikov gave her what came first--fifteen copecks.

"Ah, what a good-natured gentleman!"

"What's your name?"

"Ask for Duclida."

"Well, that's too much," one of the women observed, shaking her head
at Duclida. "I don't know how you can ask like that. I believe I should
drop with shame...."

Raskolnikov looked curiously at the speaker. She was a pock-marked wench
of thirty, covered with bruises, with her upper lip swollen. She made
her criticism quietly and earnestly. "Where is it," thought Raskolnikov.
"Where is it I've read that someone condemned to death says or thinks,
an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock,
on such a narrow ledge that he'd only room to stand, and the ocean,
everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around
him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his
life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than to die
at once! Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be!...
How true it is! Good God, how true! Man is a vile creature!... And vile
is he who calls him vile for that," he added a moment later.

He went into another street. "Bah, the Palais de Cristal! Razumihin
was just talking of the Palais de Cristal. But what on earth was it
I wanted? Yes, the newspapers.... Zossimov said he'd read it in the
papers. Have you the papers?" he asked, going into a very spacious and
positively clean restaurant, consisting of several rooms, which were,
however, rather empty. Two or three people were drinking tea, and in a
room further away were sitting four men drinking champagne. Raskolnikov
fancied that Zametov was one of them, but he could not be sure at that
distance. "What if it is?" he thought.

"Will you have vodka?" asked the waiter.

"Give me some tea and bring me the papers, the old ones for the last
five days, and I'll give you something."

"Yes, sir, here's to-day's. No vodka?"

The old newspapers and the tea were brought. Raskolnikov sat down and
began to look through them.

"Oh, damn... these are the items of intelligence. An accident on a
staircase, spontaneous combustion of a shopkeeper from alcohol, a fire
in Peski... a fire in the Petersburg quarter... another fire in the
Petersburg quarter... and another fire in the Petersburg quarter....
Ah, here it is!" He found at last what he was seeking and began to
read it. The lines danced before his eyes, but he read it all and began
eagerly seeking later additions in the following numbers. His hands
shook with nervous impatience as he turned the sheets. Suddenly someone
sat down beside him at his table. He looked up, it was the head clerk
Zametov, looking just the same, with the rings on his fingers and the
watch-chain, with the curly, black hair, parted and pomaded, with the
smart waistcoat, rather shabby coat and doubtful linen. He was in a good
humour, at least he was smiling very gaily and good-humouredly. His dark
face was rather flushed from the champagne he had drunk.

"What, you here?" he began in surprise, speaking as though he'd known
him all his life. "Why, Razumihin told me only yesterday you were
unconscious. How strange! And do you know I've been to see you?"

Raskolnikov knew he would come up to him. He laid aside the papers and
turned to Zametov. There was a smile on his lips, and a new shade of
irritable impatience was apparent in that smile.

"I know you have," he answered. "I've heard it. You looked for my
sock.... And you know Razumihin has lost his heart to you? He says
you've been with him to Luise Ivanovna's--you know, the woman you tried
to befriend, for whom you winked to the Explosive Lieutenant and he
would not understand. Do you remember? How could he fail to
understand--it was quite clear, wasn't it?"

"What a hot head he is!"

"The explosive one?"

"No, your friend Razumihin."

"You must have a jolly life, Mr. Zametov; entrance free to the most
agreeable places. Who's been pouring champagne into you just now?"

"We've just been... having a drink together.... You talk about pouring
it into me!"

"By way of a fee! You profit by everything!" Raskolnikov laughed, "it's
all right, my dear boy," he added, slapping Zametov on the shoulder. "I
am not speaking from temper, but in a friendly way, for sport, as that
workman of yours said when he was scuffling with Dmitri, in the case of
the old woman...."

"How do you know about it?"

"Perhaps I know more about it than you do."

"How strange you are.... I am sure you are still very unwell. You
oughtn't to have come out."

"Oh, do I seem strange to you?"

"Yes. What are you doing, reading the papers?"

"Yes."

"There's a lot about the fires."

"No, I am not reading about the fires." Here he looked mysteriously at
Zametov; his lips were twisted again in a mocking smile. "No, I am not
reading about the fires," he went on, winking at Zametov. "But confess
now, my dear fellow, you're awfully anxious to know what I am reading
about?"

"I am not in the least. Mayn't I ask a question? Why do you keep
on...?"

"Listen, you are a man of culture and education?"

"I was in the sixth class at the gymnasium," said Zametov with some
dignity.

"Sixth class! Ah, my cock-sparrow! With your parting and your rings--you
are a gentleman of fortune. Foo! what a charming boy!" Here Raskolnikov
broke into a nervous laugh right in Zametov's face. The latter drew
back, more amazed than offended.

"Foo! how strange you are!" Zametov repeated very seriously. "I can't
help thinking you are still delirious."

"I am delirious? You are fibbing, my cock-sparrow! So I am strange? You
find me curious, do you?"

"Yes, curious."

"Shall I tell you what I was reading about, what I was looking for? See
what a lot of papers I've made them bring me. Suspicious, eh?"

"Well, what is it?"

"You prick up your ears?"

"How do you mean--'prick up my ears'?"

"I'll explain that afterwards, but now, my boy, I declare to you... no,
better 'I confess'... No, that's not right either; 'I make a deposition
and you take it.' I depose that I was reading, that I was looking and
searching...." he screwed up his eyes and paused. "I was searching--and
came here on purpose to do it--for news of the murder of the old
pawnbroker woman," he articulated at last, almost in a whisper, bringing
his face exceedingly close to the face of Zametov. Zametov looked at him
steadily, without moving or drawing his face away. What struck Zametov
afterwards as the strangest part of it all was that silence followed for
exactly a minute, and that they gazed at one another all the while.

"What if you have been reading about it?" he cried at last, perplexed
and impatient. "That's no business of mine! What of it?"

"The same old woman," Raskolnikov went on in the same whisper, not
heeding Zametov's explanation, "about whom you were talking in the
police-office, you remember, when I fainted. Well, do you understand
now?"

"What do you mean? Understand... what?" Zametov brought out, almost
alarmed.

Raskolnikov's set and earnest face was suddenly transformed, and he
suddenly went off into the same nervous laugh as before, as though
utterly unable to restrain himself. And in one flash he recalled with
extraordinary vividness of sensation a moment in the recent past, that
moment when he stood with the axe behind the door, while the latch
trembled and the men outside swore and shook it, and he had a sudden
desire to shout at them, to swear at them, to put out his tongue at
them, to mock them, to laugh, and laugh, and laugh!

"You are either mad, or..." began Zametov, and he broke off, as though
stunned by the idea that had suddenly flashed into his mind.

"Or? Or what? What? Come, tell me!"

"Nothing," said Zametov, getting angry, "it's all nonsense!"

Both were silent. After his sudden fit of laughter Raskolnikov became
suddenly thoughtful and melancholy. He put his elbow on the table and
leaned his head on his hand. He seemed to have completely forgotten
Zametov. The silence lasted for some time.

"Why don't you drink your tea? It's getting cold," said Zametov.

"What! Tea? Oh, yes...." Raskolnikov sipped the glass, put a morsel of
bread in his mouth and, suddenly looking at Zametov, seemed to remember
everything and pulled himself together. At the same moment his face
resumed its original mocking expression. He went on drinking tea.

"There have been a great many of these crimes lately," said Zametov.
"Only the other day I read in the _Moscow News_ that a whole gang of
false coiners had been caught in Moscow. It was a regular society. They
used to forge tickets!"

"Oh, but it was a long time ago! I read about it a month ago,"
Raskolnikov answered calmly. "So you consider them criminals?" he added,
smiling.

"Of course they are criminals."

"They? They are children, simpletons, not criminals! Why, half a hundred
people meeting for such an object--what an idea! Three would be too
many, and then they want to have more faith in one another than in
themselves! One has only to blab in his cups and it all collapses.
Simpletons! They engaged untrustworthy people to change the notes--what
a thing to trust to a casual stranger! Well, let us suppose that these
simpletons succeed and each makes a million, and what follows for the
rest of their lives? Each is dependent on the others for the rest of his
life! Better hang oneself at once! And they did not know how to change
the notes either; the man who changed the notes took five thousand
roubles, and his hands trembled. He counted the first four thousand,
but did not count the fifth thousand--he was in such a hurry to get the
money into his pocket and run away. Of course he roused suspicion. And
the whole thing came to a crash through one fool! Is it possible?"

"That his hands trembled?" observed Zametov, "yes, that's quite
possible. That, I feel quite sure, is possible. Sometimes one can't
stand things."

"Can't stand that?"

"Why, could you stand it then? No, I couldn't. For the sake of a hundred
roubles to face such a terrible experience? To go with false notes
into a bank where it's their business to spot that sort of thing! No, I
should not have the face to do it. Would you?"

Raskolnikov had an intense desire again "to put his tongue out." Shivers
kept running down his spine.

"I should do it quite differently," Raskolnikov began. "This is how I
would change the notes: I'd count the first thousand three or four times
backwards and forwards, looking at every note and then I'd set to the
second thousand; I'd count that half-way through and then hold some
fifty-rouble note to the light, then turn it, then hold it to the light
again--to see whether it was a good one. 'I am afraid,' I would say, 'a
relation of mine lost twenty-five roubles the other day through a
false note,' and then I'd tell them the whole story. And after I began
counting the third, 'No, excuse me,' I would say, 'I fancy I made a
mistake in the seventh hundred in that second thousand, I am not sure.'
And so I would give up the third thousand and go back to the second and
so on to the end. And when I had finished, I'd pick out one from the
fifth and one from the second thousand and take them again to the light
and ask again, 'Change them, please,' and put the clerk into such a stew
that he would not know how to get rid of me. When I'd finished and had
gone out, I'd come back, 'No, excuse me,' and ask for some explanation.
That's how I'd do it."

"Foo! what terrible things you say!" said Zametov, laughing. "But all
that is only talk. I dare say when it came to deeds you'd make a slip.
I believe that even a practised, desperate man cannot always reckon on
himself, much less you and I. To take an example near home--that old
woman murdered in our district. The murderer seems to have been a
desperate fellow, he risked everything in open daylight, was saved by
a miracle--but his hands shook, too. He did not succeed in robbing the
place, he couldn't stand it. That was clear from the..."

Raskolnikov seemed offended.

"Clear? Why don't you catch him then?" he cried, maliciously gibing at
Zametov.

"Well, they will catch him."

"Who? You? Do you suppose you could catch him? You've a tough job! A
great point for you is whether a man is spending money or not. If he had
no money and suddenly begins spending, he must be the man. So that any
child can mislead you."

"The fact is they always do that, though," answered Zametov. "A man will
commit a clever murder at the risk of his life and then at once he goes
drinking in a tavern. They are caught spending money, they are not all
as cunning as you are. You wouldn't go to a tavern, of course?"

Raskolnikov frowned and looked steadily at Zametov.

"You seem to enjoy the subject and would like to know how I should
behave in that case, too?" he asked with displeasure.

"I should like to," Zametov answered firmly and seriously. Somewhat too
much earnestness began to appear in his words and looks.

"Very much?"

"Very much!"

"All right then. This is how I should behave," Raskolnikov began, again
bringing his face close to Zametov's, again staring at him and speaking
in a whisper, so that the latter positively shuddered. "This is what
I should have done. I should have taken the money and jewels, I should
have walked out of there and have gone straight to some deserted place
with fences round it and scarcely anyone to be seen, some kitchen garden
or place of that sort. I should have looked out beforehand some stone
weighing a hundredweight or more which had been lying in the corner from
the time the house was built. I would lift that stone--there would sure
to be a hollow under it, and I would put the jewels and money in that
hole. Then I'd roll the stone back so that it would look as before,
would press it down with my foot and walk away. And for a year or two,
three maybe, I would not touch it. And, well, they could search! There'd
be no trace."

"You are a madman," said Zametov, and for some reason he too spoke in a
whisper, and moved away from Raskolnikov, whose eyes were glittering. He
had turned fearfully pale and his upper lip was twitching and quivering.
He bent down as close as possible to Zametov, and his lips began to move
without uttering a word. This lasted for half a minute; he knew what he
was doing, but could not restrain himself. The terrible word trembled on
his lips, like the latch on that door; in another moment it will break
out, in another moment he will let it go, he will speak out.

"And what if it was I who murdered the old woman and Lizaveta?" he said
suddenly and--realised what he had done.

Zametov looked wildly at him and turned white as the tablecloth. His
face wore a contorted smile.

"But is it possible?" he brought out faintly. Raskolnikov looked
wrathfully at him.

"Own up that you believed it, yes, you did?"

"Not a bit of it, I believe it less than ever now," Zametov cried
hastily.

"I've caught my cock-sparrow! So you did believe it before, if now you
believe less than ever?"

"Not at all," cried Zametov, obviously embarrassed. "Have you been
frightening me so as to lead up to this?"

"You don't believe it then? What were you talking about behind my
back when I went out of the police-office? And why did the explosive
lieutenant question me after I fainted? Hey, there," he shouted to the
waiter, getting up and taking his cap, "how much?"

"Thirty copecks," the latter replied, running up.

"And there is twenty copecks for vodka. See what a lot of money!" he
held out his shaking hand to Zametov with notes in it. "Red notes and
blue, twenty-five roubles. Where did I get them? And where did my new
clothes come from? You know I had not a copeck. You've cross-examined my
landlady, I'll be bound.... Well, that's enough! _Assez causé!_ Till we
meet again!"

He went out, trembling all over from a sort of wild hysterical
sensation, in which there was an element of insufferable rapture. Yet he
was gloomy and terribly tired. His face was twisted as after a fit.
His fatigue increased rapidly. Any shock, any irritating sensation
stimulated and revived his energies at once, but his strength failed as
quickly when the stimulus was removed.

Zametov, left alone, sat for a long time in the same place, plunged in
thought. Raskolnikov had unwittingly worked a revolution in his brain on
a certain point and had made up his mind for him conclusively.

"Ilya Petrovitch is a blockhead," he decided.

Raskolnikov had hardly opened the door of the restaurant when he
stumbled against Razumihin on the steps. They did not see each other
till they almost knocked against each other. For a moment they stood
looking each other up and down. Razumihin was greatly astounded, then
anger, real anger gleamed fiercely in his eyes.

"So here you are!" he shouted at the top of his voice--"you ran away
from your bed! And here I've been looking for you under the sofa! We
went up to the garret. I almost beat Nastasya on your account. And here
he is after all. Rodya! What is the meaning of it? Tell me the whole
truth! Confess! Do you hear?"

"It means that I'm sick to death of you all and I want to be alone,"
Raskolnikov answered calmly.

"Alone? When you are not able to walk, when your face is as white as a
sheet and you are gasping for breath! Idiot!... What have you been doing
in the Palais de Cristal? Own up at once!"

"Let me go!" said Raskolnikov and tried to pass him. This was too much
for Razumihin; he gripped him firmly by the shoulder.

"Let you go? You dare tell me to let you go? Do you know what I'll do
with you directly? I'll pick you up, tie you up in a bundle, carry you
home under my arm and lock you up!"

"Listen, Razumihin," Raskolnikov began quietly, apparently calm--"can't
you see that I don't want your benevolence? A strange desire you have to
shower benefits on a man who... curses them, who feels them a burden in
fact! Why did you seek me out at the beginning of my illness? Maybe I
was very glad to die. Didn't I tell you plainly enough to-day that
you were torturing me, that I was... sick of you! You seem to want to
torture people! I assure you that all that is seriously hindering my
recovery, because it's continually irritating me. You saw Zossimov
went away just now to avoid irritating me. You leave me alone too, for
goodness' sake! What right have you, indeed, to keep me by force? Don't
you see that I am in possession of all my faculties now? How, how can
I persuade you not to persecute me with your kindness? I may be
ungrateful, I may be mean, only let me be, for God's sake, let me be!
Let me be, let me be!"

He began calmly, gloating beforehand over the venomous phrases he was
about to utter, but finished, panting for breath, in a frenzy, as he had
been with Luzhin.

Razumihin stood a moment, thought and let his hand drop.

"Well, go to hell then," he said gently and thoughtfully. "Stay," he
roared, as Raskolnikov was about to move. "Listen to me. Let me tell
you, that you are all a set of babbling, posing idiots! If you've any
little trouble you brood over it like a hen over an egg. And you are
plagiarists even in that! There isn't a sign of independent life in
you! You are made of spermaceti ointment and you've lymph in your veins
instead of blood. I don't believe in anyone of you! In any circumstances
the first thing for all of you is to be unlike a human being! Stop!" he
cried with redoubled fury, noticing that Raskolnikov was again making
a movement--"hear me out! You know I'm having a house-warming this
evening, I dare say they've arrived by now, but I left my uncle there--I
just ran in--to receive the guests. And if you weren't a fool, a common
fool, a perfect fool, if you were an original instead of a translation...
you see, Rodya, I recognise you're a clever fellow, but you're a
fool!--and if you weren't a fool you'd come round to me this evening
instead of wearing out your boots in the street! Since you have gone
out, there's no help for it! I'd give you a snug easy chair, my landlady
has one... a cup of tea, company.... Or you could lie on the sofa--any
way you would be with us.... Zossimov will be there too. Will you come?"

"No."

"R-rubbish!" Razumihin shouted, out of patience. "How do you know?
You can't answer for yourself! You don't know anything about it....
Thousands of times I've fought tooth and nail with people and run back
to them afterwards.... One feels ashamed and goes back to a man! So
remember, Potchinkov's house on the third storey...."

"Why, Mr. Razumihin, I do believe you'd let anybody beat you from sheer
benevolence."

"Beat? Whom? Me? I'd twist his nose off at the mere idea! Potchinkov's
house, 47, Babushkin's flat...."

"I shall not come, Razumihin." Raskolnikov turned and walked away.

"I bet you will," Razumihin shouted after him. "I refuse to know you if
you don't! Stay, hey, is Zametov in there?"

"Yes."

"Did you see him?"

"Yes."

"Talked to him?"

"Yes."

"What about? Confound you, don't tell me then. Potchinkov's house, 47,
Babushkin's flat, remember!"

Raskolnikov walked on and turned the corner into Sadovy Street.
Razumihin looked after him thoughtfully. Then with a wave of his hand he
went into the house but stopped short of the stairs.

"Confound it," he went on almost aloud. "He talked sensibly but yet...
I am a fool! As if madmen didn't talk sensibly! And this was just what
Zossimov seemed afraid of." He struck his finger on his forehead. "What
if... how could I let him go off alone? He may drown himself.... Ach,
what a blunder! I can't." And he ran back to overtake Raskolnikov, but
there was no trace of him. With a curse he returned with rapid steps to
the Palais de Cristal to question Zametov.

Raskolnikov walked straight to X---- Bridge, stood in the middle, and
leaning both elbows on the rail stared into the distance. On parting
with Razumihin, he felt so much weaker that he could scarcely reach this
place. He longed to sit or lie down somewhere in the street. Bending
over the water, he gazed mechanically at the last pink flush of the
sunset, at the row of houses growing dark in the gathering twilight, at
one distant attic window on the left bank, flashing as though on fire in
the last rays of the setting sun, at the darkening water of the canal,
and the water seemed to catch his attention. At last red circles flashed
before his eyes, the houses seemed moving, the passers-by, the canal
banks, the carriages, all danced before his eyes. Suddenly he started,
saved again perhaps from swooning by an uncanny and hideous sight. He
became aware of someone standing on the right side of him; he looked
and saw a tall woman with a kerchief on her head, with a long, yellow,
wasted face and red sunken eyes. She was looking straight at him, but
obviously she saw nothing and recognised no one. Suddenly she leaned her
right hand on the parapet, lifted her right leg over the railing, then
her left and threw herself into the canal. The filthy water parted and
swallowed up its victim for a moment, but an instant later the drowning
woman floated to the surface, moving slowly with the current, her head
and legs in the water, her skirt inflated like a balloon over her back.

"A woman drowning! A woman drowning!" shouted dozens of voices; people
ran up, both banks were thronged with spectators, on the bridge people
crowded about Raskolnikov, pressing up behind him.

"Mercy on it! it's our Afrosinya!" a woman cried tearfully close by.
"Mercy! save her! kind people, pull her out!"

"A boat, a boat" was shouted in the crowd. But there was no need of a
boat; a policeman ran down the steps to the canal, threw off his great
coat and his boots and rushed into the water. It was easy to reach her:
she floated within a couple of yards from the steps, he caught hold of
her clothes with his right hand and with his left seized a pole which a
comrade held out to him; the drowning woman was pulled out at once. They
laid her on the granite pavement of the embankment. She soon recovered
consciousness, raised her head, sat up and began sneezing and coughing,
stupidly wiping her wet dress with her hands. She said nothing.

"She's drunk herself out of her senses," the same woman's voice wailed
at her side. "Out of her senses. The other day she tried to hang
herself, we cut her down. I ran out to the shop just now, left my little
girl to look after her--and here she's in trouble again! A neighbour,
gentleman, a neighbour, we live close by, the second house from the end,
see yonder...."

The crowd broke up. The police still remained round the woman, someone
mentioned the police station.... Raskolnikov looked on with a strange
sensation of indifference and apathy. He felt disgusted. "No, that's
loathsome... water... it's not good enough," he muttered to himself.
"Nothing will come of it," he added, "no use to wait. What about the
police office...? And why isn't Zametov at the police office? The police
office is open till ten o'clock...." He turned his back to the railing
and looked about him.

"Very well then!" he said resolutely; he moved from the bridge and
walked in the direction of the police office. His heart felt hollow and
empty. He did not want to think. Even his depression had passed, there
was not a trace now of the energy with which he had set out "to make an
end of it all." Complete apathy had succeeded to it.

"Well, it's a way out of it," he thought, walking slowly and listlessly
along the canal bank. "Anyway I'll make an end, for I want to.... But
is it a way out? What does it matter! There'll be the square yard of
space--ha! But what an end! Is it really the end? Shall I tell them or
not? Ah... damn! How tired I am! If I could find somewhere to sit or lie
down soon! What I am most ashamed of is its being so stupid. But I don't
care about that either! What idiotic ideas come into one's head."

To reach the police office he had to go straight forward and take the
second turning to the left. It was only a few paces away. But at the
first turning he stopped and, after a minute's thought, turned into a
side street and went two streets out of his way, possibly without any
object, or possibly to delay a minute and gain time. He walked, looking
at the ground; suddenly someone seemed to whisper in his ear; he lifted
his head and saw that he was standing at the very gate of _the_ house.
He had not passed it, he had not been near it since _that_ evening.
An overwhelming, unaccountable prompting drew him on. He went into the
house, passed through the gateway, then into the first entrance on the
right, and began mounting the familiar staircase to the fourth storey.
The narrow, steep staircase was very dark. He stopped at each landing
and looked round him with curiosity; on the first landing the framework
of the window had been taken out. "That wasn't so then," he thought.
Here was the flat on the second storey where Nikolay and Dmitri had been
working. "It's shut up and the door newly painted. So it's to let." Then
the third storey and the fourth. "Here!" He was perplexed to find the
door of the flat wide open. There were men there, he could hear voices;
he had not expected that. After brief hesitation he mounted the last
stairs and went into the flat. It, too, was being done up; there were
workmen in it. This seemed to amaze him; he somehow fancied that he
would find everything as he left it, even perhaps the corpses in the
same places on the floor. And now, bare walls, no furniture; it seemed
strange. He walked to the window and sat down on the window-sill. There
were two workmen, both young fellows, but one much younger than the
other. They were papering the walls with a new white paper covered with
lilac flowers, instead of the old, dirty, yellow one. Raskolnikov for
some reason felt horribly annoyed by this. He looked at the new paper
with dislike, as though he felt sorry to have it all so changed.
The workmen had obviously stayed beyond their time and now they were
hurriedly rolling up their paper and getting ready to go home. They took
no notice of Raskolnikov's coming in; they were talking. Raskolnikov
folded his arms and listened.

"She comes to me in the morning," said the elder to the younger, "very
early, all dressed up. 'Why are you preening and prinking?' says I. 'I
am ready to do anything to please you, Tit Vassilitch!' That's a way of
going on! And she dressed up like a regular fashion book!"

"And what is a fashion book?" the younger one asked. He obviously
regarded the other as an authority.

"A fashion book is a lot of pictures, coloured, and they come to the
tailors here every Saturday, by post from abroad, to show folks how
to dress, the male sex as well as the female. They're pictures. The
gentlemen are generally wearing fur coats and for the ladies' fluffles,
they're beyond anything you can fancy."

"There's nothing you can't find in Petersburg," the younger cried
enthusiastically, "except father and mother, there's everything!"

"Except them, there's everything to be found, my boy," the elder
declared sententiously.

Raskolnikov got up and walked into the other room where the strong box,
the bed, and the chest of drawers had been; the room seemed to him very
tiny without furniture in it. The paper was the same; the paper in the
corner showed where the case of ikons had stood. He looked at it and
went to the window. The elder workman looked at him askance.

"What do you want?" he asked suddenly.

Instead of answering Raskolnikov went into the passage and pulled the
bell. The same bell, the same cracked note. He rang it a second and
a third time; he listened and remembered. The hideous and agonisingly
fearful sensation he had felt then began to come back more and more
vividly. He shuddered at every ring and it gave him more and more
satisfaction.

"Well, what do you want? Who are you?" the workman shouted, going out to
him. Raskolnikov went inside again.

"I want to take a flat," he said. "I am looking round."

"It's not the time to look at rooms at night! and you ought to come up
with the porter."

"The floors have been washed, will they be painted?" Raskolnikov went
on. "Is there no blood?"

"What blood?"

"Why, the old woman and her sister were murdered here. There was a
perfect pool there."

"But who are you?" the workman cried, uneasy.

"Who am I?"

"Yes."

"You want to know? Come to the police station, I'll tell you."

The workmen looked at him in amazement.

"It's time for us to go, we are late. Come along, Alyoshka. We must lock
up," said the elder workman.

"Very well, come along," said Raskolnikov indifferently, and going
out first, he went slowly downstairs. "Hey, porter," he cried in the
gateway.

At the entrance several people were standing, staring at the passers-by;
the two porters, a peasant woman, a man in a long coat and a few others.
Raskolnikov went straight up to them.

"What do you want?" asked one of the porters.

"Have you been to the police office?"

"I've just been there. What do you want?"

"Is it open?"

"Of course."

"Is the assistant there?"

"He was there for a time. What do you want?"

Raskolnikov made no reply, but stood beside them lost in thought.

"He's been to look at the flat," said the elder workman, coming forward.

"Which flat?"

"Where we are at work. 'Why have you washed away the blood?' says he.
'There has been a murder here,' says he, 'and I've come to take it.'
And he began ringing at the bell, all but broke it. 'Come to the police
station,' says he. 'I'll tell you everything there.' He wouldn't leave
us."

The porter looked at Raskolnikov, frowning and perplexed.

"Who are you?" he shouted as impressively as he could.

"I am Rodion Romanovitch Raskolnikov, formerly a student, I live in
Shil's house, not far from here, flat Number 14, ask the porter, he
knows me." Raskolnikov said all this in a lazy, dreamy voice, not
turning round, but looking intently into the darkening street.

"Why have you been to the flat?"

"To look at it."

"What is there to look at?"

"Take him straight to the police station," the man in the long coat
jerked in abruptly.

Raskolnikov looked intently at him over his shoulder and said in the
same slow, lazy tones:

"Come along."

"Yes, take him," the man went on more confidently. "Why was he going
into _that_, what's in his mind, eh?"

"He's not drunk, but God knows what's the matter with him," muttered the
workman.

"But what do you want?" the porter shouted again, beginning to get angry
in earnest--"Why are you hanging about?"

"You funk the police station then?" said Raskolnikov jeeringly.

"How funk it? Why are you hanging about?"

"He's a rogue!" shouted the peasant woman.

"Why waste time talking to him?" cried the other porter, a huge peasant
in a full open coat and with keys on his belt. "Get along! He is a rogue
and no mistake. Get along!"

And seizing Raskolnikov by the shoulder he flung him into the street. He
lurched forward, but recovered his footing, looked at the spectators in
silence and walked away.

"Strange man!" observed the workman.

"There are strange folks about nowadays," said the woman.

"You should have taken him to the police station all the same," said the
man in the long coat.

"Better have nothing to do with him," decided the big porter. "A regular
rogue! Just what he wants, you may be sure, but once take him up, you
won't get rid of him.... We know the sort!"

"Shall I go there or not?" thought Raskolnikov, standing in the middle
of the thoroughfare at the cross-roads, and he looked about him, as
though expecting from someone a decisive word. But no sound came, all
was dead and silent like the stones on which he walked, dead to him, to
him alone.... All at once at the end of the street, two hundred yards
away, in the gathering dusk he saw a crowd and heard talk and shouts.
In the middle of the crowd stood a carriage.... A light gleamed in the
middle of the street. "What is it?" Raskolnikov turned to the right
and went up to the crowd. He seemed to clutch at everything and smiled
coldly when he recognised it, for he had fully made up his mind to go to
the police station and knew that it would all soon be over.



CHAPTER VII

An elegant carriage stood in the middle of the road with a pair of
spirited grey horses; there was no one in it, and the coachman had got
off his box and stood by; the horses were being held by the bridle....
A mass of people had gathered round, the police standing in front. One
of them held a lighted lantern which he was turning on something lying
close to the wheels. Everyone was talking, shouting, exclaiming; the
coachman seemed at a loss and kept repeating:

"What a misfortune! Good Lord, what a misfortune!"

Raskolnikov pushed his way in as far as he could, and succeeded at last
in seeing the object of the commotion and interest. On the ground a
man who had been run over lay apparently unconscious, and covered with
blood; he was very badly dressed, but not like a workman. Blood was
flowing from his head and face; his face was crushed, mutilated and
disfigured. He was evidently badly injured.

"Merciful heaven!" wailed the coachman, "what more could I do? If I'd
been driving fast or had not shouted to him, but I was going quietly,
not in a hurry. Everyone could see I was going along just like everybody
else. A drunken man can't walk straight, we all know.... I saw him
crossing the street, staggering and almost falling. I shouted again
and a second and a third time, then I held the horses in, but he fell
straight under their feet! Either he did it on purpose or he was very
tipsy.... The horses are young and ready to take fright... they started,
he screamed... that made them worse. That's how it happened!"

"That's just how it was," a voice in the crowd confirmed.

"He shouted, that's true, he shouted three times," another voice
declared.

"Three times it was, we all heard it," shouted a third.

But the coachman was not very much distressed and frightened. It was
evident that the carriage belonged to a rich and important person who
was awaiting it somewhere; the police, of course, were in no little
anxiety to avoid upsetting his arrangements. All they had to do was to
take the injured man to the police station and the hospital. No one knew
his name.

Meanwhile Raskolnikov had squeezed in and stooped closer over him. The
lantern suddenly lighted up the unfortunate man's face. He recognised
him.

"I know him! I know him!" he shouted, pushing to the front. "It's a
government clerk retired from the service, Marmeladov. He lives close
by in Kozel's house.... Make haste for a doctor! I will pay, see?" He
pulled money out of his pocket and showed it to the policeman. He was in
violent agitation.

The police were glad that they had found out who the man was.
Raskolnikov gave his own name and address, and, as earnestly as if it
had been his father, he besought the police to carry the unconscious
Marmeladov to his lodging at once.

"Just here, three houses away," he said eagerly, "the house belongs to
Kozel, a rich German. He was going home, no doubt drunk. I know him,
he is a drunkard. He has a family there, a wife, children, he has one
daughter.... It will take time to take him to the hospital, and there is
sure to be a doctor in the house. I'll pay, I'll pay! At least he will
be looked after at home... they will help him at once. But he'll die
before you get him to the hospital." He managed to slip something
unseen into the policeman's hand. But the thing was straightforward
and legitimate, and in any case help was closer here. They raised the
injured man; people volunteered to help.

Kozel's house was thirty yards away. Raskolnikov walked behind,
carefully holding Marmeladov's head and showing the way.

"This way, this way! We must take him upstairs head foremost. Turn
round! I'll pay, I'll make it worth your while," he muttered.

Katerina Ivanovna had just begun, as she always did at every free
moment, walking to and fro in her little room from window to stove and
back again, with her arms folded across her chest, talking to herself
and coughing. Of late she had begun to talk more than ever to her eldest
girl, Polenka, a child of ten, who, though there was much she did not
understand, understood very well that her mother needed her, and so
always watched her with her big clever eyes and strove her utmost
to appear to understand. This time Polenka was undressing her little
brother, who had been unwell all day and was going to bed. The boy was
waiting for her to take off his shirt, which had to be washed at night.
He was sitting straight and motionless on a chair, with a silent,
serious face, with his legs stretched out straight before him--heels
together and toes turned out.

He was listening to what his mother was saying to his sister, sitting
perfectly still with pouting lips and wide-open eyes, just as all good
little boys have to sit when they are undressed to go to bed. A little
girl, still younger, dressed literally in rags, stood at the screen,
waiting for her turn. The door on to the stairs was open to relieve
them a little from the clouds of tobacco smoke which floated in from the
other rooms and brought on long terrible fits of coughing in the poor,
consumptive woman. Katerina Ivanovna seemed to have grown even thinner
during that week and the hectic flush on her face was brighter than
ever.

"You wouldn't believe, you can't imagine, Polenka," she said, walking
about the room, "what a happy luxurious life we had in my papa's house
and how this drunkard has brought me, and will bring you all, to ruin!
Papa was a civil colonel and only a step from being a governor; so that
everyone who came to see him said, 'We look upon you, Ivan Mihailovitch,
as our governor!' When I... when..." she coughed violently, "oh, cursed
life," she cried, clearing her throat and pressing her hands to her
breast, "when I... when at the last ball... at the marshal's...
Princess Bezzemelny saw me--who gave me the blessing when your father
and I were married, Polenka--she asked at once 'Isn't that the pretty
girl who danced the shawl dance at the breaking-up?' (You must mend
that tear, you must take your needle and darn it as I showed you, or
to-morrow--cough, cough, cough--he will make the hole bigger," she
articulated with effort.) "Prince Schegolskoy, a kammerjunker, had just
come from Petersburg then... he danced the mazurka with me and wanted to
make me an offer next day; but I thanked him in flattering expressions
and told him that my heart had long been another's. That other was your
father, Polya; papa was fearfully angry.... Is the water ready? Give me
the shirt, and the stockings! Lida," said she to the youngest one, "you
must manage without your chemise to-night... and lay your stockings out
with it... I'll wash them together.... How is it that drunken vagabond
doesn't come in? He has worn his shirt till it looks like a dish-clout,
he has torn it to rags! I'd do it all together, so as not to have to
work two nights running! Oh, dear! (Cough, cough, cough, cough!) Again!
What's this?" she cried, noticing a crowd in the passage and the men,
who were pushing into her room, carrying a burden. "What is it? What are
they bringing? Mercy on us!"

"Where are we to put him?" asked the policeman, looking round when
Marmeladov, unconscious and covered with blood, had been carried in.

"On the sofa! Put him straight on the sofa, with his head this way,"
Raskolnikov showed him.

"Run over in the road! Drunk!" someone shouted in the passage.

Katerina Ivanovna stood, turning white and gasping for breath. The
children were terrified. Little Lida screamed, rushed to Polenka and
clutched at her, trembling all over.

Having laid Marmeladov down, Raskolnikov flew to Katerina Ivanovna.

"For God's sake be calm, don't be frightened!" he said, speaking
quickly, "he was crossing the road and was run over by a carriage, don't
be frightened, he will come to, I told them bring him here... I've been
here already, you remember? He will come to; I'll pay!"

"He's done it this time!" Katerina Ivanovna cried despairingly and she
rushed to her husband.

Raskolnikov noticed at once that she was not one of those women who
swoon easily. She instantly placed under the luckless man's head a
pillow, which no one had thought of and began undressing and examining
him. She kept her head, forgetting herself, biting her trembling lips
and stifling the screams which were ready to break from her.

Raskolnikov meanwhile induced someone to run for a doctor. There was a
doctor, it appeared, next door but one.

"I've sent for a doctor," he kept assuring Katerina Ivanovna, "don't be
uneasy, I'll pay. Haven't you water?... and give me a napkin or a towel,
anything, as quick as you can.... He is injured, but not killed, believe
me.... We shall see what the doctor says!"

Katerina Ivanovna ran to the window; there, on a broken chair in the
corner, a large earthenware basin full of water had been stood, in
readiness for washing her children's and husband's linen that night.
This washing was done by Katerina Ivanovna at night at least twice a
week, if not oftener. For the family had come to such a pass that they
were practically without change of linen, and Katerina Ivanovna could
not endure uncleanliness and, rather than see dirt in the house, she
preferred to wear herself out at night, working beyond her strength when
the rest were asleep, so as to get the wet linen hung on a line and dry
by the morning. She took up the basin of water at Raskolnikov's request,
but almost fell down with her burden. But the latter had already
succeeded in finding a towel, wetted it and began washing the blood off
Marmeladov's face.

Katerina Ivanovna stood by, breathing painfully and pressing her hands
to her breast. She was in need of attention herself. Raskolnikov began
to realise that he might have made a mistake in having the injured man
brought here. The policeman, too, stood in hesitation.

"Polenka," cried Katerina Ivanovna, "run to Sonia, make haste. If you
don't find her at home, leave word that her father has been run over
and that she is to come here at once... when she comes in. Run, Polenka!
there, put on the shawl."

"Run your fastest!" cried the little boy on the chair suddenly, after
which he relapsed into the same dumb rigidity, with round eyes, his
heels thrust forward and his toes spread out.

Meanwhile the room had become so full of people that you couldn't have
dropped a pin. The policemen left, all except one, who remained for a
time, trying to drive out the people who came in from the stairs. Almost
all Madame Lippevechsel's lodgers had streamed in from the inner rooms
of the flat; at first they were squeezed together in the doorway, but
afterwards they overflowed into the room. Katerina Ivanovna flew into a
fury.

"You might let him die in peace, at least," she shouted at the crowd,
"is it a spectacle for you to gape at? With cigarettes! (Cough, cough,
cough!) You might as well keep your hats on.... And there is one in his
hat!... Get away! You should respect the dead, at least!"

Her cough choked her--but her reproaches were not without result. They
evidently stood in some awe of Katerina Ivanovna. The lodgers, one after
another, squeezed back into the doorway with that strange inner feeling
of satisfaction which may be observed in the presence of a sudden
accident, even in those nearest and dearest to the victim, from which
no living man is exempt, even in spite of the sincerest sympathy and
compassion.

Voices outside were heard, however, speaking of the hospital and saying
that they'd no business to make a disturbance here.

"No business to die!" cried Katerina Ivanovna, and she was rushing to
the door to vent her wrath upon them, but in the doorway came face to
face with Madame Lippevechsel who had only just heard of the accident
and ran in to restore order. She was a particularly quarrelsome and
irresponsible German.

"Ah, my God!" she cried, clasping her hands, "your husband drunken
horses have trampled! To the hospital with him! I am the landlady!"

"Amalia Ludwigovna, I beg you to recollect what you are saying,"
Katerina Ivanovna began haughtily (she always took a haughty tone with
the landlady that she might "remember her place" and even now could not
deny herself this satisfaction). "Amalia Ludwigovna..."

"I have you once before told that you to call me Amalia Ludwigovna may
not dare; I am Amalia Ivanovna."

"You are not Amalia Ivanovna, but Amalia Ludwigovna, and as I am not
one of your despicable flatterers like Mr. Lebeziatnikov, who's laughing
behind the door at this moment (a laugh and a cry of 'they are at it
again' was in fact audible at the door) so I shall always call you
Amalia Ludwigovna, though I fail to understand why you dislike that
name. You can see for yourself what has happened to Semyon Zaharovitch;
he is dying. I beg you to close that door at once and to admit no one.
Let him at least die in peace! Or I warn you the Governor-General,
himself, shall be informed of your conduct to-morrow. The prince knew
me as a girl; he remembers Semyon Zaharovitch well and has often been
a benefactor to him. Everyone knows that Semyon Zaharovitch had many
friends and protectors, whom he abandoned himself from an honourable
pride, knowing his unhappy weakness, but now (she pointed to
Raskolnikov) a generous young man has come to our assistance, who has
wealth and connections and whom Semyon Zaharovitch has known from a
child. You may rest assured, Amalia Ludwigovna..."

All this was uttered with extreme rapidity, getting quicker and quicker,
but a cough suddenly cut short Katerina Ivanovna's eloquence. At that
instant the dying man recovered consciousness and uttered a groan; she
ran to him. The injured man opened his eyes and without recognition or
understanding gazed at Raskolnikov who was bending over him. He drew
deep, slow, painful breaths; blood oozed at the corners of his mouth
and drops of perspiration came out on his forehead. Not recognising
Raskolnikov, he began looking round uneasily. Katerina Ivanovna looked
at him with a sad but stern face, and tears trickled from her eyes.

"My God! His whole chest is crushed! How he is bleeding," she said
in despair. "We must take off his clothes. Turn a little, Semyon
Zaharovitch, if you can," she cried to him.

Marmeladov recognised her.

"A priest," he articulated huskily.

Katerina Ivanovna walked to the window, laid her head against the window
frame and exclaimed in despair:

"Oh, cursed life!"

"A priest," the dying man said again after a moment's silence.

"They've gone for him," Katerina Ivanovna shouted to him, he obeyed her
shout and was silent. With sad and timid eyes he looked for her; she
returned and stood by his pillow. He seemed a little easier but not for
long.

Soon his eyes rested on little Lida, his favourite, who was shaking in
the corner, as though she were in a fit, and staring at him with her
wondering childish eyes.

"A-ah," he signed towards her uneasily. He wanted to say something.

"What now?" cried Katerina Ivanovna.

"Barefoot, barefoot!" he muttered, indicating with frenzied eyes the
child's bare feet.

"Be silent," Katerina Ivanovna cried irritably, "you know why she is
barefooted."

"Thank God, the doctor," exclaimed Raskolnikov, relieved.

The doctor came in, a precise little old man, a German, looking about
him mistrustfully; he went up to the sick man, took his pulse, carefully
felt his head and with the help of Katerina Ivanovna he unbuttoned the
blood-stained shirt, and bared the injured man's chest. It was gashed,
crushed and fractured, several ribs on the right side were broken.
On the left side, just over the heart, was a large, sinister-looking
yellowish-black bruise--a cruel kick from the horse's hoof. The doctor
frowned. The policeman told him that he was caught in the wheel and
turned round with it for thirty yards on the road.

"It's wonderful that he has recovered consciousness," the doctor
whispered softly to Raskolnikov.

"What do you think of him?" he asked.

"He will die immediately."

"Is there really no hope?"

"Not the faintest! He is at the last gasp.... His head is badly injured,
too... Hm... I could bleed him if you like, but... it would be useless.
He is bound to die within the next five or ten minutes."

"Better bleed him then."

"If you like.... But I warn you it will be perfectly useless."

At that moment other steps were heard; the crowd in the passage parted,
and the priest, a little, grey old man, appeared in the doorway bearing
the sacrament. A policeman had gone for him at the time of the accident.
The doctor changed places with him, exchanging glances with him.
Raskolnikov begged the doctor to remain a little while. He shrugged his
shoulders and remained.

All stepped back. The confession was soon over. The dying man probably
understood little; he could only utter indistinct broken sounds.
Katerina Ivanovna took little Lida, lifted the boy from the chair, knelt
down in the corner by the stove and made the children kneel in front of
her. The little girl was still trembling; but the boy, kneeling on his
little bare knees, lifted his hand rhythmically, crossing himself with
precision and bowed down, touching the floor with his forehead, which
seemed to afford him especial satisfaction. Katerina Ivanovna bit her
lips and held back her tears; she prayed, too, now and then pulling
straight the boy's shirt, and managed to cover the girl's bare shoulders
with a kerchief, which she took from the chest without rising from her
knees or ceasing to pray. Meanwhile the door from the inner rooms was
opened inquisitively again. In the passage the crowd of spectators from
all the flats on the staircase grew denser and denser, but they did not
venture beyond the threshold. A single candle-end lighted up the scene.

At that moment Polenka forced her way through the crowd at the door. She
came in panting from running so fast, took off her kerchief, looked for
her mother, went up to her and said, "She's coming, I met her in the
street." Her mother made her kneel beside her.

Timidly and noiselessly a young girl made her way through the crowd,
and strange was her appearance in that room, in the midst of want, rags,
death and despair. She, too, was in rags, her attire was all of
the cheapest, but decked out in gutter finery of a special stamp,
unmistakably betraying its shameful purpose. Sonia stopped short in the
doorway and looked about her bewildered, unconscious of everything.
She forgot her fourth-hand, gaudy silk dress, so unseemly here with
its ridiculous long train, and her immense crinoline that filled up the
whole doorway, and her light-coloured shoes, and the parasol she brought
with her, though it was no use at night, and the absurd round straw hat
with its flaring flame-coloured feather. Under this rakishly-tilted hat
was a pale, frightened little face with lips parted and eyes staring in
terror. Sonia was a small thin girl of eighteen with fair hair, rather
pretty, with wonderful blue eyes. She looked intently at the bed and the
priest; she too was out of breath with running. At last whispers, some
words in the crowd probably, reached her. She looked down and took a
step forward into the room, still keeping close to the door.

The service was over. Katerina Ivanovna went up to her husband again.
The priest stepped back and turned to say a few words of admonition and
consolation to Katerina Ivanovna on leaving.

"What am I to do with these?" she interrupted sharply and irritably,
pointing to the little ones.

"God is merciful; look to the Most High for succour," the priest began.

"Ach! He is merciful, but not to us."

"That's a sin, a sin, madam," observed the priest, shaking his head.

"And isn't that a sin?" cried Katerina Ivanovna, pointing to the dying
man.

"Perhaps those who have involuntarily caused the accident will agree to
compensate you, at least for the loss of his earnings."

"You don't understand!" cried Katerina Ivanovna angrily waving her hand.
"And why should they compensate me? Why, he was drunk and threw himself
under the horses! What earnings? He brought us in nothing but misery.
He drank everything away, the drunkard! He robbed us to get drink, he
wasted their lives and mine for drink! And thank God he's dying! One
less to keep!"

"You must forgive in the hour of death, that's a sin, madam, such
feelings are a great sin."

Katerina Ivanovna was busy with the dying man; she was giving him water,
wiping the blood and sweat from his head, setting his pillow straight,
and had only turned now and then for a moment to address the priest. Now
she flew at him almost in a frenzy.

"Ah, father! That's words and only words! Forgive! If he'd not been run
over, he'd have come home to-day drunk and his only shirt dirty and
in rags and he'd have fallen asleep like a log, and I should have been
sousing and rinsing till daybreak, washing his rags and the children's
and then drying them by the window and as soon as it was daylight I
should have been darning them. That's how I spend my nights!... What's
the use of talking of forgiveness! I have forgiven as it is!"

A terrible hollow cough interrupted her words. She put her handkerchief
to her lips and showed it to the priest, pressing her other hand to her
aching chest. The handkerchief was covered with blood. The priest bowed
his head and said nothing.

Marmeladov was in the last agony; he did not take his eyes off the face
of Katerina Ivanovna, who was bending over him again. He kept trying
to say something to her; he began moving his tongue with difficulty and
articulating indistinctly, but Katerina Ivanovna, understanding that he
wanted to ask her forgiveness, called peremptorily to him:

"Be silent! No need! I know what you want to say!" And the sick man
was silent, but at the same instant his wandering eyes strayed to the
doorway and he saw Sonia.

Till then he had not noticed her: she was standing in the shadow in a
corner.

"Who's that? Who's that?" he said suddenly in a thick gasping voice,
in agitation, turning his eyes in horror towards the door where his
daughter was standing, and trying to sit up.

"Lie down! Lie do-own!" cried Katerina Ivanovna.

With unnatural strength he had succeeded in propping himself on his
elbow. He looked wildly and fixedly for some time on his daughter, as
though not recognising her. He had never seen her before in such attire.
Suddenly he recognised her, crushed and ashamed in her humiliation and
gaudy finery, meekly awaiting her turn to say good-bye to her dying
father. His face showed intense suffering.

"Sonia! Daughter! Forgive!" he cried, and he tried to hold out his hand
to her, but losing his balance, he fell off the sofa, face downwards on
the floor. They rushed to pick him up, they put him on the sofa; but he
was dying. Sonia with a faint cry ran up, embraced him and remained so
without moving. He died in her arms.

"He's got what he wanted," Katerina Ivanovna cried, seeing her husband's
dead body. "Well, what's to be done now? How am I to bury him! What can
I give them to-morrow to eat?"

Raskolnikov went up to Katerina Ivanovna.

"Katerina Ivanovna," he began, "last week your husband told me all his
life and circumstances.... Believe me, he spoke of you with passionate
reverence. From that evening, when I learnt how devoted he was to you
all and how he loved and respected you especially, Katerina Ivanovna,
in spite of his unfortunate weakness, from that evening we became
friends.... Allow me now... to do something... to repay my debt to my
dead friend. Here are twenty roubles, I think--and if that can be of any
assistance to you, then... I... in short, I will come again, I will
be sure to come again... I shall, perhaps, come again to-morrow....
Good-bye!"

And he went quickly out of the room, squeezing his way through the crowd
to the stairs. But in the crowd he suddenly jostled against Nikodim
Fomitch, who had heard of the accident and had come to give instructions
in person. They had not met since the scene at the police station, but
Nikodim Fomitch knew him instantly.

"Ah, is that you?" he asked him.

"He's dead," answered Raskolnikov. "The doctor and the priest have been,
all as it should have been. Don't worry the poor woman too much, she is
in consumption as it is. Try and cheer her up, if possible... you are a
kind-hearted man, I know..." he added with a smile, looking straight in
his face.

"But you are spattered with blood," observed Nikodim Fomitch, noticing
in the lamplight some fresh stains on Raskolnikov's waistcoat.

"Yes... I'm covered with blood," Raskolnikov said with a peculiar air;
then he smiled, nodded and went downstairs.

He walked down slowly and deliberately, feverish but not conscious
of it, entirely absorbed in a new overwhelming sensation of life and
strength that surged up suddenly within him. This sensation might be
compared to that of a man condemned to death who has suddenly been
pardoned. Halfway down the staircase he was overtaken by the priest on
his way home; Raskolnikov let him pass, exchanging a silent greeting
with him. He was just descending the last steps when he heard rapid
footsteps behind him. Someone overtook him; it was Polenka. She was
running after him, calling "Wait! wait!"

He turned round. She was at the bottom of the staircase and stopped
short a step above him. A dim light came in from the yard. Raskolnikov
could distinguish the child's thin but pretty little face, looking at
him with a bright childish smile. She had run after him with a message
which she was evidently glad to give.

"Tell me, what is your name?... and where do you live?" she said
hurriedly in a breathless voice.

He laid both hands on her shoulders and looked at her with a sort of
rapture. It was such a joy to him to look at her, he could not have said
why.

"Who sent you?"

"Sister Sonia sent me," answered the girl, smiling still more brightly.

"I knew it was sister Sonia sent you."

"Mamma sent me, too... when sister Sonia was sending me, mamma came up,
too, and said 'Run fast, Polenka.'"

"Do you love sister Sonia?"

"I love her more than anyone," Polenka answered with a peculiar
earnestness, and her smile became graver.

"And will you love me?"

By way of answer he saw the little girl's face approaching him, her full
lips naïvely held out to kiss him. Suddenly her arms as thin as sticks
held him tightly, her head rested on his shoulder and the little girl
wept softly, pressing her face against him.

"I am sorry for father," she said a moment later, raising her
tear-stained face and brushing away the tears with her hands. "It's
nothing but misfortunes now," she added suddenly with that peculiarly
sedate air which children try hard to assume when they want to speak
like grown-up people.

"Did your father love you?"

"He loved Lida most," she went on very seriously without a smile,
exactly like grown-up people, "he loved her because she is little and
because she is ill, too. And he always used to bring her presents. But
he taught us to read and me grammar and scripture, too," she added with
dignity. "And mother never used to say anything, but we knew that she
liked it and father knew it, too. And mother wants to teach me French,
for it's time my education began."

"And do you know your prayers?"

"Of course, we do! We knew them long ago. I say my prayers to myself
as I am a big girl now, but Kolya and Lida say them aloud with mother.
First they repeat the 'Ave Maria' and then another prayer: 'Lord,
forgive and bless sister Sonia,' and then another, 'Lord, forgive and
bless our second father.' For our elder father is dead and this is
another one, but we do pray for the other as well."

"Polenka, my name is Rodion. Pray sometimes for me, too. 'And Thy
servant Rodion,' nothing more."

"I'll pray for you all the rest of my life," the little girl declared
hotly, and suddenly smiling again she rushed at him and hugged him
warmly once more.

Raskolnikov told her his name and address and promised to be sure to
come next day. The child went away quite enchanted with him. It was past
ten when he came out into the street. In five minutes he was standing on
the bridge at the spot where the woman had jumped in.

"Enough," he pronounced resolutely and triumphantly. "I've done with
fancies, imaginary terrors and phantoms! Life is real! haven't I lived
just now? My life has not yet died with that old woman! The Kingdom of
Heaven to her--and now enough, madam, leave me in peace! Now for the
reign of reason and light... and of will, and of strength... and now
we will see! We will try our strength!" he added defiantly, as though
challenging some power of darkness. "And I was ready to consent to live
in a square of space!

"I am very weak at this moment, but... I believe my illness is all over.
I knew it would be over when I went out. By the way, Potchinkov's house
is only a few steps away. I certainly must go to Razumihin even if
it were not close by... let him win his bet! Let us give him some
satisfaction, too--no matter! Strength, strength is what one wants, you
can get nothing without it, and strength must be won by strength--that's
what they don't know," he added proudly and self-confidently and
he walked with flagging footsteps from the bridge. Pride and
self-confidence grew continually stronger in him; he was becoming
a different man every moment. What was it had happened to work this
revolution in him? He did not know himself; like a man catching at a
straw, he suddenly felt that he, too, 'could live, that there was still
life for him, that his life had not died with the old woman.' Perhaps he
was in too great a hurry with his conclusions, but he did not think of
that.

"But I did ask her to remember 'Thy servant Rodion' in her prayers," the
idea struck him. "Well, that was... in case of emergency," he added and
laughed himself at his boyish sally. He was in the best of spirits.

He easily found Razumihin; the new lodger was already known at
Potchinkov's and the porter at once showed him the way. Half-way
upstairs he could hear the noise and animated conversation of a big
gathering of people. The door was wide open on the stairs; he could
hear exclamations and discussion. Razumihin's room was fairly large; the
company consisted of fifteen people. Raskolnikov stopped in the entry,
where two of the landlady's servants were busy behind a screen with two
samovars, bottles, plates and dishes of pie and savouries, brought up
from the landlady's kitchen. Raskolnikov sent in for Razumihin. He ran
out delighted. At the first glance it was apparent that he had had a
great deal to drink and, though no amount of liquor made Razumihin quite
drunk, this time he was perceptibly affected by it.

"Listen," Raskolnikov hastened to say, "I've only just come to tell you
you've won your bet and that no one really knows what may not happen to
him. I can't come in; I am so weak that I shall fall down directly. And
so good evening and good-bye! Come and see me to-morrow."

"Do you know what? I'll see you home. If you say you're weak yourself,
you must..."

"And your visitors? Who is the curly-headed one who has just peeped
out?"

"He? Goodness only knows! Some friend of uncle's, I expect, or perhaps
he has come without being invited... I'll leave uncle with them, he
is an invaluable person, pity I can't introduce you to him now. But
confound them all now! They won't notice me, and I need a little fresh
air, for you've come just in the nick of time--another two minutes and I
should have come to blows! They are talking such a lot of wild stuff...
you simply can't imagine what men will say! Though why shouldn't you
imagine? Don't we talk nonsense ourselves? And let them... that's the
way to learn not to!... Wait a minute, I'll fetch Zossimov."

Zossimov pounced upon Raskolnikov almost greedily; he showed a special
interest in him; soon his face brightened.

"You must go to bed at once," he pronounced, examining the patient as
far as he could, "and take something for the night. Will you take it? I
got it ready some time ago... a powder."

"Two, if you like," answered Raskolnikov. The powder was taken at once.

"It's a good thing you are taking him home," observed Zossimov to
Razumihin--"we shall see how he is to-morrow, to-day he's not at all
amiss--a considerable change since the afternoon. Live and learn..."

"Do you know what Zossimov whispered to me when we were coming out?"
Razumihin blurted out, as soon as they were in the street. "I won't tell
you everything, brother, because they are such fools. Zossimov told me
to talk freely to you on the way and get you to talk freely to me, and
afterwards I am to tell him about it, for he's got a notion in his head
that you are... mad or close on it. Only fancy! In the first place,
you've three times the brains he has; in the second, if you are not mad,
you needn't care a hang that he has got such a wild idea; and thirdly,
that piece of beef whose specialty is surgery has gone mad on mental
diseases, and what's brought him to this conclusion about you was your
conversation to-day with Zametov."

"Zametov told you all about it?"

"Yes, and he did well. Now I understand what it all means and so does
Zametov.... Well, the fact is, Rodya... the point is... I am a little
drunk now.... But that's... no matter... the point is that this
idea... you understand? was just being hatched in their brains... you
understand? That is, no one ventured to say it aloud, because the idea
is too absurd and especially since the arrest of that painter, that
bubble's burst and gone for ever. But why are they such fools? I gave
Zametov a bit of a thrashing at the time--that's between ourselves,
brother; please don't let out a hint that you know of it; I've noticed
he is a ticklish subject; it was at Luise Ivanovna's. But to-day, to-day
it's all cleared up. That Ilya Petrovitch is at the bottom of it! He
took advantage of your fainting at the police station, but he is ashamed
of it himself now; I know that..."

Raskolnikov listened greedily. Razumihin was drunk enough to talk too
freely.

"I fainted then because it was so close and the smell of paint," said
Raskolnikov.

"No need to explain that! And it wasn't the paint only: the fever had
been coming on for a month; Zossimov testifies to that! But how crushed
that boy is now, you wouldn't believe! 'I am not worth his little
finger,' he says. Yours, he means. He has good feelings at times,
brother. But the lesson, the lesson you gave him to-day in the Palais
de Cristal, that was too good for anything! You frightened him at first,
you know, he nearly went into convulsions! You almost convinced
him again of the truth of all that hideous nonsense, and then you
suddenly--put out your tongue at him: 'There now, what do you make of
it?' It was perfect! He is crushed, annihilated now! It was masterly, by
Jove, it's what they deserve! Ah, that I wasn't there! He was hoping to
see you awfully. Porfiry, too, wants to make your acquaintance..."

"Ah!... he too... but why did they put me down as mad?"

"Oh, not mad. I must have said too much, brother.... What struck him,
you see, was that only that subject seemed to interest you; now it's
clear why it did interest you; knowing all the circumstances... and
how that irritated you and worked in with your illness... I am a little
drunk, brother, only, confound him, he has some idea of his own... I
tell you, he's mad on mental diseases. But don't you mind him..."

For half a minute both were silent.

"Listen, Razumihin," began Raskolnikov, "I want to tell you plainly:
I've just been at a death-bed, a clerk who died... I gave them all my
money... and besides I've just been kissed by someone who, if I had
killed anyone, would just the same... in fact I saw someone else
there... with a flame-coloured feather... but I am talking nonsense; I
am very weak, support me... we shall be at the stairs directly..."

"What's the matter? What's the matter with you?" Razumihin asked
anxiously.

"I am a little giddy, but that's not the point, I am so sad, so sad...
like a woman. Look, what's that? Look, look!"

"What is it?"

"Don't you see? A light in my room, you see? Through the crack..."

They were already at the foot of the last flight of stairs, at the level
of the landlady's door, and they could, as a fact, see from below that
there was a light in Raskolnikov's garret.

"Queer! Nastasya, perhaps," observed Razumihin.

"She is never in my room at this time and she must be in bed long ago,
but... I don't care! Good-bye!"

"What do you mean? I am coming with you, we'll come in together!"

"I know we are going in together, but I want to shake hands here and say
good-bye to you here. So give me your hand, good-bye!"

"What's the matter with you, Rodya?"

"Nothing... come along... you shall be witness."

They began mounting the stairs, and the idea struck Razumihin that
perhaps Zossimov might be right after all. "Ah, I've upset him with my
chatter!" he muttered to himself.

When they reached the door they heard voices in the room.

"What is it?" cried Razumihin. Raskolnikov was the first to open the
door; he flung it wide and stood still in the doorway, dumbfoundered.

His mother and sister were sitting on his sofa and had been waiting an
hour and a half for him. Why had he never expected, never thought of
them, though the news that they had started, were on their way and would
arrive immediately, had been repeated to him only that day? They had
spent that hour and a half plying Nastasya with questions. She was
standing before them and had told them everything by now. They were
beside themselves with alarm when they heard of his "running away"
to-day, ill and, as they understood from her story, delirious! "Good
Heavens, what had become of him?" Both had been weeping, both had been
in anguish for that hour and a half.

A cry of joy, of ecstasy, greeted Raskolnikov's entrance. Both rushed to
him. But he stood like one dead; a sudden intolerable sensation struck
him like a thunderbolt. He did not lift his arms to embrace them, he
could not. His mother and sister clasped him in their arms, kissed him,
laughed and cried. He took a step, tottered and fell to the ground,
fainting.

Anxiety, cries of horror, moans... Razumihin who was standing in the
doorway flew into the room, seized the sick man in his strong arms and
in a moment had him on the sofa.

"It's nothing, nothing!" he cried to the mother and sister--"it's only a
faint, a mere trifle! Only just now the doctor said he was much better,
that he is perfectly well! Water! See, he is coming to himself, he is
all right again!"

And seizing Dounia by the arm so that he almost dislocated it, he made
her bend down to see that "he is all right again." The mother and sister
looked on him with emotion and gratitude, as their Providence. They
had heard already from Nastasya all that had been done for their Rodya
during his illness, by this "very competent young man," as Pulcheria
Alexandrovna Raskolnikov called him that evening in conversation with
Dounia.




PART III



CHAPTER I

Raskolnikov got up, and sat down on the sofa. He waved his hand weakly
to Razumihin to cut short the flow of warm and incoherent consolations
he was addressing to his mother and sister, took them both by the hand
and for a minute or two gazed from one to the other without speaking.
His mother was alarmed by his expression. It revealed an emotion
agonisingly poignant, and at the same time something immovable, almost
insane. Pulcheria Alexandrovna began to cry.

Avdotya Romanovna was pale; her hand trembled in her brother's.

"Go home... with him," he said in a broken voice, pointing to Razumihin,
"good-bye till to-morrow; to-morrow everything... Is it long since you
arrived?"

"This evening, Rodya," answered Pulcheria Alexandrovna, "the train was
awfully late. But, Rodya, nothing would induce me to leave you now! I
will spend the night here, near you..."

"Don't torture me!" he said with a gesture of irritation.

"I will stay with him," cried Razumihin, "I won't leave him for a
moment. Bother all my visitors! Let them rage to their hearts' content!
My uncle is presiding there."

"How, how can I thank you!" Pulcheria Alexandrovna was beginning, once
more pressing Razumihin's hands, but Raskolnikov interrupted her again.

"I can't have it! I can't have it!" he repeated irritably, "don't worry
me! Enough, go away... I can't stand it!"

"Come, mamma, come out of the room at least for a minute," Dounia
whispered in dismay; "we are distressing him, that's evident."

"Mayn't I look at him after three years?" wept Pulcheria Alexandrovna.

"Stay," he stopped them again, "you keep interrupting me, and my ideas
get muddled.... Have you seen Luzhin?"

"No, Rodya, but he knows already of our arrival. We have heard, Rodya,
that Pyotr Petrovitch was so kind as to visit you today," Pulcheria
Alexandrovna added somewhat timidly.

"Yes... he was so kind... Dounia, I promised Luzhin I'd throw him
downstairs and told him to go to hell...."

"Rodya, what are you saying! Surely, you don't mean to tell us..."
Pulcheria Alexandrovna began in alarm, but she stopped, looking at
Dounia.

Avdotya Romanovna was looking attentively at her brother, waiting
for what would come next. Both of them had heard of the quarrel from
Nastasya, so far as she had succeeded in understanding and reporting it,
and were in painful perplexity and suspense.

"Dounia," Raskolnikov continued with an effort, "I don't want that
marriage, so at the first opportunity to-morrow you must refuse Luzhin,
so that we may never hear his name again."

"Good Heavens!" cried Pulcheria Alexandrovna.

"Brother, think what you are saying!" Avdotya Romanovna began
impetuously, but immediately checked herself. "You are not fit to talk
now, perhaps; you are tired," she added gently.

"You think I am delirious? No... You are marrying Luzhin for _my_
sake. But I won't accept the sacrifice. And so write a letter before
to-morrow, to refuse him... Let me read it in the morning and that will
be the end of it!"

"That I can't do!" the girl cried, offended, "what right have you..."

"Dounia, you are hasty, too, be quiet, to-morrow... Don't you see..."
the mother interposed in dismay. "Better come away!"

"He is raving," Razumihin cried tipsily, "or how would he dare!
To-morrow all this nonsense will be over... to-day he certainly did
drive him away. That was so. And Luzhin got angry, too.... He made
speeches here, wanted to show off his learning and he went out
crest-fallen...."

"Then it's true?" cried Pulcheria Alexandrovna.

"Good-bye till to-morrow, brother," said Dounia compassionately--"let us
go, mother... Good-bye, Rodya."

"Do you hear, sister," he repeated after them, making a last effort,
"I am not delirious; this marriage is--an infamy. Let me act like
a scoundrel, but you mustn't... one is enough... and though I am a
scoundrel, I wouldn't own such a sister. It's me or Luzhin! Go now...."

"But you're out of your mind! Despot!" roared Razumihin; but Raskolnikov
did not and perhaps could not answer. He lay down on the sofa, and
turned to the wall, utterly exhausted. Avdotya Romanovna looked with
interest at Razumihin; her black eyes flashed; Razumihin positively
started at her glance.

Pulcheria Alexandrovna stood overwhelmed.

"Nothing would induce me to go," she whispered in despair to Razumihin.
"I will stay somewhere here... escort Dounia home."

"You'll spoil everything," Razumihin answered in the same whisper,
losing patience--"come out on to the stairs, anyway. Nastasya, show a
light! I assure you," he went on in a half whisper on the stairs--"that
he was almost beating the doctor and me this afternoon! Do you
understand? The doctor himself! Even he gave way and left him, so as not
to irritate him. I remained downstairs on guard, but he dressed at once
and slipped off. And he will slip off again if you irritate him, at this
time of night, and will do himself some mischief...."

"What are you saying?"

"And Avdotya Romanovna can't possibly be left in those lodgings without
you. Just think where you are staying! That blackguard Pyotr Petrovitch
couldn't find you better lodgings... But you know I've had a little to
drink, and that's what makes me... swear; don't mind it...."

"But I'll go to the landlady here," Pulcheria Alexandrovna insisted,
"I'll beseech her to find some corner for Dounia and me for the night. I
can't leave him like that, I cannot!"

This conversation took place on the landing just before the landlady's
door. Nastasya lighted them from a step below. Razumihin was in
extraordinary excitement. Half an hour earlier, while he was bringing
Raskolnikov home, he had indeed talked too freely, but he was aware of
it himself, and his head was clear in spite of the vast quantities he
had imbibed. Now he was in a state bordering on ecstasy, and all that he
had drunk seemed to fly to his head with redoubled effect. He stood with
the two ladies, seizing both by their hands, persuading them, and giving
them reasons with astonishing plainness of speech, and at almost every
word he uttered, probably to emphasise his arguments, he squeezed their
hands painfully as in a vise. He stared at Avdotya Romanovna without the
least regard for good manners. They sometimes pulled their hands out of
his huge bony paws, but far from noticing what was the matter, he drew
them all the closer to him. If they'd told him to jump head foremost
from the staircase, he would have done it without thought or hesitation
in their service. Though Pulcheria Alexandrovna felt that the young man
was really too eccentric and pinched her hand too much, in her anxiety
over her Rodya she looked on his presence as providential, and was
unwilling to notice all his peculiarities. But though Avdotya Romanovna
shared her anxiety, and was not of timorous disposition, she could not
see the glowing light in his eyes without wonder and almost alarm. It
was only the unbounded confidence inspired by Nastasya's account of her
brother's queer friend, which prevented her from trying to run away from
him, and to persuade her mother to do the same. She realised, too,
that even running away was perhaps impossible now. Ten minutes later,
however, she was considerably reassured; it was characteristic of
Razumihin that he showed his true nature at once, whatever mood he might
be in, so that people quickly saw the sort of man they had to deal with.

"You can't go to the landlady, that's perfect nonsense!" he cried. "If
you stay, though you are his mother, you'll drive him to a frenzy, and
then goodness knows what will happen! Listen, I'll tell you what I'll
do: Nastasya will stay with him now, and I'll conduct you both home, you
can't be in the streets alone; Petersburg is an awful place in that
way.... But no matter! Then I'll run straight back here and a quarter of
an hour later, on my word of honour, I'll bring you news how he is,
whether he is asleep, and all that. Then, listen! Then I'll run home in
a twinkling--I've a lot of friends there, all drunk--I'll fetch
Zossimov--that's the doctor who is looking after him, he is there, too,
but he is not drunk; he is not drunk, he is never drunk! I'll drag him
to Rodya, and then to you, so that you'll get two reports in the
hour--from the doctor, you understand, from the doctor himself, that's a
very different thing from my account of him! If there's anything wrong,
I swear I'll bring you here myself, but, if it's all right, you go to
bed. And I'll spend the night here, in the passage, he won't hear me,
and I'll tell Zossimov to sleep at the landlady's, to be at hand. Which
is better for him: you or the doctor? So come home then! But the
landlady is out of the question; it's all right for me, but it's out of
the question for you: she wouldn't take you, for she's... for she's a
fool... She'd be jealous on my account of Avdotya Romanovna and of you,
too, if you want to know... of Avdotya Romanovna certainly. She is an
absolutely, absolutely unaccountable character! But I am a fool, too!...
No matter! Come along! Do you trust me? Come, do you trust me or not?"

"Let us go, mother," said Avdotya Romanovna, "he will certainly do what
he has promised. He has saved Rodya already, and if the doctor really
will consent to spend the night here, what could be better?"

"You see, you... you... understand me, because you are an angel!"
Razumihin cried in ecstasy, "let us go! Nastasya! Fly upstairs and sit
with him with a light; I'll come in a quarter of an hour."

Though Pulcheria Alexandrovna was not perfectly convinced, she made no
further resistance. Razumihin gave an arm to each and drew them down
the stairs. He still made her uneasy, as though he was competent and
good-natured, was he capable of carrying out his promise? He seemed in
such a condition....

"Ah, I see you think I am in such a condition!" Razumihin broke in upon
her thoughts, guessing them, as he strolled along the pavement with huge
steps, so that the two ladies could hardly keep up with him, a fact he
did not observe, however. "Nonsense! That is... I am drunk like a fool,
but that's not it; I am not drunk from wine. It's seeing you has turned
my head... But don't mind me! Don't take any notice: I am talking
nonsense, I am not worthy of you.... I am utterly unworthy of you! The
minute I've taken you home, I'll pour a couple of pailfuls of water over
my head in the gutter here, and then I shall be all right.... If only
you knew how I love you both! Don't laugh, and don't be angry! You may
be angry with anyone, but not with me! I am his friend, and therefore I
am your friend, too, I want to be... I had a presentiment... Last year
there was a moment... though it wasn't a presentiment really, for
you seem to have fallen from heaven. And I expect I shan't sleep all
night... Zossimov was afraid a little time ago that he would go mad...
that's why he mustn't be irritated."

"What do you say?" cried the mother.

"Did the doctor really say that?" asked Avdotya Romanovna, alarmed.

"Yes, but it's not so, not a bit of it. He gave him some medicine, a
powder, I saw it, and then your coming here.... Ah! It would have been
better if you had come to-morrow. It's a good thing we went away. And in
an hour Zossimov himself will report to you about everything. He is not
drunk! And I shan't be drunk.... And what made me get so tight? Because
they got me into an argument, damn them! I've sworn never to argue! They
talk such trash! I almost came to blows! I've left my uncle to preside.
Would you believe, they insist on complete absence of individualism
and that's just what they relish! Not to be themselves, to be as unlike
themselves as they can. That's what they regard as the highest point of
progress. If only their nonsense were their own, but as it is..."

"Listen!" Pulcheria Alexandrovna interrupted timidly, but it only added
fuel to the flames.

"What do you think?" shouted Razumihin, louder than ever, "you think I
am attacking them for talking nonsense? Not a bit! I like them to talk
nonsense. That's man's one privilege over all creation. Through error
you come to the truth! I am a man because I err! You never reach any
truth without making fourteen mistakes and very likely a hundred and
fourteen. And a fine thing, too, in its way; but we can't even make
mistakes on our own account! Talk nonsense, but talk your own nonsense,
and I'll kiss you for it. To go wrong in one's own way is better than
to go right in someone else's. In the first case you are a man, in the
second you're no better than a bird. Truth won't escape you, but life
can be cramped. There have been examples. And what are we doing now?
In science, development, thought, invention, ideals, aims, liberalism,
judgment, experience and everything, everything, everything, we are
still in the preparatory class at school. We prefer to live on other
people's ideas, it's what we are used to! Am I right, am I right?" cried
Razumihin, pressing and shaking the two ladies' hands.

"Oh, mercy, I do not know," cried poor Pulcheria Alexandrovna.

"Yes, yes... though I don't agree with you in everything," added Avdotya
Romanovna earnestly and at once uttered a cry, for he squeezed her hand
so painfully.

"Yes, you say yes... well after that you... you..." he cried in
a transport, "you are a fount of goodness, purity, sense... and
perfection. Give me your hand... you give me yours, too! I want to kiss
your hands here at once, on my knees..." and he fell on his knees on the
pavement, fortunately at that time deserted.

"Leave off, I entreat you, what are you doing?" Pulcheria Alexandrovna
cried, greatly distressed.

"Get up, get up!" said Dounia laughing, though she, too, was upset.

"Not for anything till you let me kiss your hands! That's it! Enough! I
get up and we'll go on! I am a luckless fool, I am unworthy of you and
drunk... and I am ashamed.... I am not worthy to love you, but to do
homage to you is the duty of every man who is not a perfect beast! And
I've done homage.... Here are your lodgings, and for that alone Rodya
was right in driving your Pyotr Petrovitch away.... How dare he! how
dare he put you in such lodgings! It's a scandal! Do you know the
sort of people they take in here? And you his betrothed! You are
his betrothed? Yes? Well, then, I'll tell you, your _fiancé_ is a
scoundrel."

"Excuse me, Mr. Razumihin, you are forgetting..." Pulcheria Alexandrovna
was beginning.

"Yes, yes, you are right, I did forget myself, I am ashamed of it,"
Razumihin made haste to apologise. "But... but you can't be angry with
me for speaking so! For I speak sincerely and not because... hm, hm!
That would be disgraceful; in fact not because I'm in... hm! Well,
anyway, I won't say why, I daren't.... But we all saw to-day when he
came in that that man is not of our sort. Not because he had his hair
curled at the barber's, not because he was in such a hurry to show his
wit, but because he is a spy, a speculator, because he is a skin-flint
and a buffoon. That's evident. Do you think him clever? No, he is a
fool, a fool. And is he a match for you? Good heavens! Do you see,
ladies?" he stopped suddenly on the way upstairs to their rooms, "though
all my friends there are drunk, yet they are all honest, and though we
do talk a lot of trash, and I do, too, yet we shall talk our way to the
truth at last, for we are on the right path, while Pyotr Petrovitch...
is not on the right path. Though I've been calling them all sorts of
names just now, I do respect them all... though I don't respect Zametov,
I like him, for he is a puppy, and that bullock Zossimov, because he
is an honest man and knows his work. But enough, it's all said and
forgiven. Is it forgiven? Well, then, let's go on. I know this corridor,
I've been here, there was a scandal here at Number 3.... Where are you
here? Which number? eight? Well, lock yourselves in for the night, then.
Don't let anybody in. In a quarter of an hour I'll come back with news,
and half an hour later I'll bring Zossimov, you'll see! Good-bye, I'll
run."

"Good heavens, Dounia, what is going to happen?" said Pulcheria
Alexandrovna, addressing her daughter with anxiety and dismay.

"Don't worry yourself, mother," said Dounia, taking off her hat and
cape. "God has sent this gentleman to our aid, though he has come from a
drinking party. We can depend on him, I assure you. And all that he has
done for Rodya...."

"Ah. Dounia, goodness knows whether he will come! How could I bring
myself to leave Rodya?... And how different, how different I had fancied
our meeting! How sullen he was, as though not pleased to see us...."

Tears came into her eyes.

"No, it's not that, mother. You didn't see, you were crying all the
time. He is quite unhinged by serious illness--that's the reason."

"Ah, that illness! What will happen, what will happen? And how he talked
to you, Dounia!" said the mother, looking timidly at her daughter,
trying to read her thoughts and, already half consoled by Dounia's
standing up for her brother, which meant that she had already forgiven
him. "I am sure he will think better of it to-morrow," she added,
probing her further.

"And I am sure that he will say the same to-morrow... about that,"
Avdotya Romanovna said finally. And, of course, there was no going
beyond that, for this was a point which Pulcheria Alexandrovna was
afraid to discuss. Dounia went up and kissed her mother. The latter
warmly embraced her without speaking. Then she sat down to wait
anxiously for Razumihin's return, timidly watching her daughter who
walked up and down the room with her arms folded, lost in thought.
This walking up and down when she was thinking was a habit of Avdotya
Romanovna's and the mother was always afraid to break in on her
daughter's mood at such moments.

Razumihin, of course, was ridiculous in his sudden drunken infatuation
for Avdotya Romanovna. Yet apart from his eccentric condition, many
people would have thought it justified if they had seen Avdotya
Romanovna, especially at that moment when she was walking to and
fro with folded arms, pensive and melancholy. Avdotya Romanovna was
remarkably good looking; she was tall, strikingly well-proportioned,
strong and self-reliant--the latter quality was apparent in every
gesture, though it did not in the least detract from the grace and
softness of her movements. In face she resembled her brother, but she
might be described as really beautiful. Her hair was dark brown, a
little lighter than her brother's; there was a proud light in her almost
black eyes and yet at times a look of extraordinary kindness. She was
pale, but it was a healthy pallor; her face was radiant with freshness
and vigour. Her mouth was rather small; the full red lower lip projected
a little as did her chin; it was the only irregularity in her beautiful
face, but it gave it a peculiarly individual and almost haughty
expression. Her face was always more serious and thoughtful than gay;
but how well smiles, how well youthful, lighthearted, irresponsible,
laughter suited her face! It was natural enough that a warm, open,
simple-hearted, honest giant like Razumihin, who had never seen anyone
like her and was not quite sober at the time, should lose his head
immediately. Besides, as chance would have it, he saw Dounia for the
first time transfigured by her love for her brother and her joy at
meeting him. Afterwards he saw her lower lip quiver with indignation
at her brother's insolent, cruel and ungrateful words--and his fate was
sealed.

He had spoken the truth, moreover, when he blurted out in his drunken
talk on the stairs that Praskovya Pavlovna, Raskolnikov's eccentric
landlady, would be jealous of Pulcheria Alexandrovna as well as of
Avdotya Romanovna on his account. Although Pulcheria Alexandrovna was
forty-three, her face still retained traces of her former beauty; she
looked much younger than her age, indeed, which is almost always the
case with women who retain serenity of spirit, sensitiveness and pure
sincere warmth of heart to old age. We may add in parenthesis that to
preserve all this is the only means of retaining beauty to old age. Her
hair had begun to grow grey and thin, there had long been little crow's
foot wrinkles round her eyes, her cheeks were hollow and sunken from
anxiety and grief, and yet it was a handsome face. She was Dounia
over again, twenty years older, but without the projecting underlip.
Pulcheria Alexandrovna was emotional, but not sentimental, timid and
yielding, but only to a certain point. She could give way and accept a
great deal even of what was contrary to her convictions, but there was a
certain barrier fixed by honesty, principle and the deepest convictions
which nothing would induce her to cross.

Exactly twenty minutes after Razumihin's departure, there came two
subdued but hurried knocks at the door: he had come back.

"I won't come in, I haven't time," he hastened to say when the door was
opened. "He sleeps like a top, soundly, quietly, and God grant he may
sleep ten hours. Nastasya's with him; I told her not to leave till I
came. Now I am fetching Zossimov, he will report to you and then you'd
better turn in; I can see you are too tired to do anything...."

And he ran off down the corridor.

"What a very competent and... devoted young man!" cried Pulcheria
Alexandrovna exceedingly delighted.

"He seems a splendid person!" Avdotya Romanovna replied with some
warmth, resuming her walk up and down the room.

It was nearly an hour later when they heard footsteps in the corridor
and another knock at the door. Both women waited this time completely
relying on Razumihin's promise; he actually had succeeded in bringing
Zossimov. Zossimov had agreed at once to desert the drinking party to
go to Raskolnikov's, but he came reluctantly and with the greatest
suspicion to see the ladies, mistrusting Razumihin in his exhilarated
condition. But his vanity was at once reassured and flattered; he saw
that they were really expecting him as an oracle. He stayed just ten
minutes and succeeded in completely convincing and comforting Pulcheria
Alexandrovna. He spoke with marked sympathy, but with the reserve and
extreme seriousness of a young doctor at an important consultation.
He did not utter a word on any other subject and did not display the
slightest desire to enter into more personal relations with the two
ladies. Remarking at his first entrance the dazzling beauty of Avdotya
Romanovna, he endeavoured not to notice her at all during his visit and
addressed himself solely to Pulcheria Alexandrovna. All this gave him
extraordinary inward satisfaction. He declared that he thought the
invalid at this moment going on very satisfactorily. According to his
observations the patient's illness was due partly to his unfortunate
material surroundings during the last few months, but it had partly also
a moral origin, "was, so to speak, the product of several material and
moral influences, anxieties, apprehensions, troubles, certain ideas...
and so on." Noticing stealthily that Avdotya Romanovna was following his
words with close attention, Zossimov allowed himself to enlarge on this
theme. On Pulcheria Alexandrovna's anxiously and timidly inquiring as
to "some suspicion of insanity," he replied with a composed and candid
smile that his words had been exaggerated; that certainly the patient
had some fixed idea, something approaching a monomania--he, Zossimov,
was now particularly studying this interesting branch of medicine--but
that it must be recollected that until to-day the patient had been in
delirium and... and that no doubt the presence of his family would have
a favourable effect on his recovery and distract his mind, "if only all
fresh shocks can be avoided," he added significantly. Then he got up,
took leave with an impressive and affable bow, while blessings, warm
gratitude, and entreaties were showered upon him, and Avdotya Romanovna
spontaneously offered her hand to him. He went out exceedingly pleased
with his visit and still more so with himself.

"We'll talk to-morrow; go to bed at once!" Razumihin said in conclusion,
following Zossimov out. "I'll be with you to-morrow morning as early as
possible with my report."

"That's a fetching little girl, Avdotya Romanovna," remarked Zossimov,
almost licking his lips as they both came out into the street.

"Fetching? You said fetching?" roared Razumihin and he flew at Zossimov
and seized him by the throat. "If you ever dare.... Do you understand?
Do you understand?" he shouted, shaking him by the collar and squeezing
him against the wall. "Do you hear?"

"Let me go, you drunken devil," said Zossimov, struggling and when he
had let him go, he stared at him and went off into a sudden guffaw.
Razumihin stood facing him in gloomy and earnest reflection.

"Of course, I am an ass," he observed, sombre as a storm cloud, "but
still... you are another."

"No, brother, not at all such another. I am not dreaming of any folly."

They walked along in silence and only when they were close to
Raskolnikov's lodgings, Razumihin broke the silence in considerable
anxiety.

"Listen," he said, "you're a first-rate fellow, but among your other
failings, you're a loose fish, that I know, and a dirty one, too. You
are a feeble, nervous wretch, and a mass of whims, you're getting fat
and lazy and can't deny yourself anything--and I call that dirty because
it leads one straight into the dirt. You've let yourself get so slack
that I don't know how it is you are still a good, even a devoted doctor.
You--a doctor--sleep on a feather bed and get up at night to your
patients! In another three or four years you won't get up for your
patients... But hang it all, that's not the point!... You are going
to spend to-night in the landlady's flat here. (Hard work I've had to
persuade her!) And I'll be in the kitchen. So here's a chance for you to
get to know her better.... It's not as you think! There's not a trace of
anything of the sort, brother...!"

"But I don't think!"

"Here you have modesty, brother, silence, bashfulness, a savage
virtue... and yet she's sighing and melting like wax, simply melting!
Save me from her, by all that's unholy! She's most prepossessing... I'll
repay you, I'll do anything...."

Zossimov laughed more violently than ever.

"Well, you are smitten! But what am I to do with her?"

"It won't be much trouble, I assure you. Talk any rot you like to her,
as long as you sit by her and talk. You're a doctor, too; try curing
her of something. I swear you won't regret it. She has a piano, and you
know, I strum a little. I have a song there, a genuine Russian one: 'I
shed hot tears.' She likes the genuine article--and well, it all
began with that song; Now you're a regular performer, a _maître_, a
Rubinstein.... I assure you, you won't regret it!"

"But have you made her some promise? Something signed? A promise of
marriage, perhaps?"

"Nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing of the kind! Besides she is not
that sort at all.... Tchebarov tried that...."

"Well then, drop her!"

"But I can't drop her like that!"

"Why can't you?"

"Well, I can't, that's all about it! There's an element of attraction
here, brother."

"Then why have you fascinated her?"

"I haven't fascinated her; perhaps I was fascinated myself in my folly.
But she won't care a straw whether it's you or I, so long as somebody
sits beside her, sighing.... I can't explain the position, brother...
look here, you are good at mathematics, and working at it now... begin
teaching her the integral calculus; upon my soul, I'm not joking, I'm
in earnest, it'll be just the same to her. She will gaze at you and sigh
for a whole year together. I talked to her once for two days at a time
about the Prussian House of Lords (for one must talk of something)--she
just sighed and perspired! And you mustn't talk of love--she's bashful
to hysterics--but just let her see you can't tear yourself away--that's
enough. It's fearfully comfortable; you're quite at home, you can
read, sit, lie about, write. You may even venture on a kiss, if you're
careful."

"But what do I want with her?"

"Ach, I can't make you understand! You see, you are made for each other!
I have often been reminded of you!... You'll come to it in the end! So
does it matter whether it's sooner or later? There's the feather-bed
element here, brother--ach! and not only that! There's an attraction
here--here you have the end of the world, an anchorage, a quiet haven,
the navel of the earth, the three fishes that are the foundation of the
world, the essence of pancakes, of savoury fish-pies, of the evening
samovar, of soft sighs and warm shawls, and hot stoves to sleep on--as
snug as though you were dead, and yet you're alive--the advantages
of both at once! Well, hang it, brother, what stuff I'm talking, it's
bedtime! Listen. I sometimes wake up at night; so I'll go in and look at
him. But there's no need, it's all right. Don't you worry yourself,
yet if you like, you might just look in once, too. But if you notice
anything--delirium or fever--wake me at once. But there can't be...."



CHAPTER II

Razumihin waked up next morning at eight o'clock, troubled and serious.
He found himself confronted with many new and unlooked-for perplexities.
He had never expected that he would ever wake up feeling like that. He
remembered every detail of the previous day and he knew that a perfectly
novel experience had befallen him, that he had received an impression
unlike anything he had known before. At the same time he recognised
clearly that the dream which had fired his imagination was hopelessly
unattainable--so unattainable that he felt positively ashamed of it, and
he hastened to pass to the other more practical cares and difficulties
bequeathed him by that "thrice accursed yesterday."

The most awful recollection of the previous day was the way he had shown
himself "base and mean," not only because he had been drunk, but
because he had taken advantage of the young girl's position to abuse
her _fiancé_ in his stupid jealousy, knowing nothing of their mutual
relations and obligations and next to nothing of the man himself. And
what right had he to criticise him in that hasty and unguarded manner?
Who had asked for his opinion? Was it thinkable that such a creature as
Avdotya Romanovna would be marrying an unworthy man for money? So there
must be something in him. The lodgings? But after all how could he know
the character of the lodgings? He was furnishing a flat... Foo! how
despicable it all was! And what justification was it that he was drunk?
Such a stupid excuse was even more degrading! In wine is truth, and the
truth had all come out, "that is, all the uncleanness of his coarse
and envious heart"! And would such a dream ever be permissible to
him, Razumihin? What was he beside such a girl--he, the drunken noisy
braggart of last night? Was it possible to imagine so absurd and cynical
a juxtaposition? Razumihin blushed desperately at the very idea and
suddenly the recollection forced itself vividly upon him of how he had
said last night on the stairs that the landlady would be jealous of
Avdotya Romanovna... that was simply intolerable. He brought his fist
down heavily on the kitchen stove, hurt his hand and sent one of the
bricks flying.

"Of course," he muttered to himself a minute later with a feeling of
self-abasement, "of course, all these infamies can never be wiped out or
smoothed over... and so it's useless even to think of it, and I must
go to them in silence and do my duty... in silence, too... and not ask
forgiveness, and say nothing... for all is lost now!"

And yet as he dressed he examined his attire more carefully than usual.
He hadn't another suit--if he had had, perhaps he wouldn't have put it
on. "I would have made a point of not putting it on." But in any case he
could not remain a cynic and a dirty sloven; he had no right to offend
the feelings of others, especially when they were in need of his
assistance and asking him to see them. He brushed his clothes carefully.
His linen was always decent; in that respect he was especially clean.

He washed that morning scrupulously--he got some soap from Nastasya--he
washed his hair, his neck and especially his hands. When it came to the
question whether to shave his stubbly chin or not (Praskovya Pavlovna
had capital razors that had been left by her late husband), the question
was angrily answered in the negative. "Let it stay as it is! What if
they think that I shaved on purpose to...? They certainly would think
so! Not on any account!"

"And... the worst of it was he was so coarse, so dirty, he had the
manners of a pothouse; and... and even admitting that he knew he had
some of the essentials of a gentleman... what was there in that to be
proud of? Everyone ought to be a gentleman and more than that... and all
the same (he remembered) he, too, had done little things... not exactly
dishonest, and yet.... And what thoughts he sometimes had; hm... and to
set all that beside Avdotya Romanovna! Confound it! So be it! Well, he'd
make a point then of being dirty, greasy, pothouse in his manners and he
wouldn't care! He'd be worse!"

He was engaged in such monologues when Zossimov, who had spent the night
in Praskovya Pavlovna's parlour, came in.

He was going home and was in a hurry to look at the invalid first.
Razumihin informed him that Raskolnikov was sleeping like a dormouse.
Zossimov gave orders that they shouldn't wake him and promised to see
him again about eleven.

"If he is still at home," he added. "Damn it all! If one can't control
one's patients, how is one to cure them? Do you know whether _he_ will
go to them, or whether _they_ are coming here?"

"They are coming, I think," said Razumihin, understanding the object
of the question, "and they will discuss their family affairs, no doubt.
I'll be off. You, as the doctor, have more right to be here than I."

"But I am not a father confessor; I shall come and go away; I've plenty
to do besides looking after them."

"One thing worries me," interposed Razumihin, frowning. "On the way home
I talked a lot of drunken nonsense to him... all sorts of things... and
amongst them that you were afraid that he... might become insane."

"You told the ladies so, too."

"I know it was stupid! You may beat me if you like! Did you think so
seriously?"

"That's nonsense, I tell you, how could I think it seriously? You,
yourself, described him as a monomaniac when you fetched me to
him... and we added fuel to the fire yesterday, you did, that is, with
your story about the painter; it was a nice conversation, when he was,
perhaps, mad on that very point! If only I'd known what happened then
at the police station and that some wretch... had insulted him with this
suspicion! Hm... I would not have allowed that conversation yesterday.
These monomaniacs will make a mountain out of a mole-hill... and
see their fancies as solid realities.... As far as I remember, it was
Zametov's story that cleared up half the mystery, to my mind. Why, I
know one case in which a hypochondriac, a man of forty, cut the throat
of a little boy of eight, because he couldn't endure the jokes he made
every day at table! And in this case his rags, the insolent police
officer, the fever and this suspicion! All that working upon a man half
frantic with hypochondria, and with his morbid exceptional vanity! That
may well have been the starting-point of illness. Well, bother it
all!... And, by the way, that Zametov certainly is a nice fellow, but
hm... he shouldn't have told all that last night. He is an awful
chatterbox!"

"But whom did he tell it to? You and me?"

"And Porfiry."

"What does that matter?"

"And, by the way, have you any influence on them, his mother and sister?
Tell them to be more careful with him to-day...."

"They'll get on all right!" Razumihin answered reluctantly.

"Why is he so set against this Luzhin? A man with money and she doesn't
seem to dislike him... and they haven't a farthing, I suppose? eh?"

"But what business is it of yours?" Razumihin cried with annoyance. "How
can I tell whether they've a farthing? Ask them yourself and perhaps
you'll find out...."

"Foo! what an ass you are sometimes! Last night's wine has not gone off
yet.... Good-bye; thank your Praskovya Pavlovna from me for my night's
lodging. She locked herself in, made no reply to my _bonjour_ through
the door; she was up at seven o'clock, the samovar was taken into her
from the kitchen. I was not vouchsafed a personal interview...."

At nine o'clock precisely Razumihin reached the lodgings at Bakaleyev's
house. Both ladies were waiting for him with nervous impatience. They
had risen at seven o'clock or earlier. He entered looking as black as
night, bowed awkwardly and was at once furious with himself for it. He
had reckoned without his host: Pulcheria Alexandrovna fairly rushed at
him, seized him by both hands and was almost kissing them. He glanced
timidly at Avdotya Romanovna, but her proud countenance wore at that
moment an expression of such gratitude and friendliness, such
complete and unlooked-for respect (in place of the sneering looks and
ill-disguised contempt he had expected), that it threw him into greater
confusion than if he had been met with abuse. Fortunately there was a
subject for conversation, and he made haste to snatch at it.

Hearing that everything was going well and that Rodya had not yet waked,
Pulcheria Alexandrovna declared that she was glad to hear it, because
"she had something which it was very, very necessary to talk over
beforehand." Then followed an inquiry about breakfast and an invitation
to have it with them; they had waited to have it with him. Avdotya
Romanovna rang the bell: it was answered by a ragged dirty waiter, and
they asked him to bring tea which was served at last, but in such
a dirty and disorderly way that the ladies were ashamed. Razumihin
vigorously attacked the lodgings, but, remembering Luzhin, stopped
in embarrassment and was greatly relieved by Pulcheria Alexandrovna's
questions, which showered in a continual stream upon him.

He talked for three quarters of an hour, being constantly interrupted
by their questions, and succeeded in describing to them all the
most important facts he knew of the last year of Raskolnikov's life,
concluding with a circumstantial account of his illness. He omitted,
however, many things, which were better omitted, including the scene at
the police station with all its consequences. They listened eagerly
to his story, and, when he thought he had finished and satisfied his
listeners, he found that they considered he had hardly begun.

"Tell me, tell me! What do you think...? Excuse me, I still don't know
your name!" Pulcheria Alexandrovna put in hastily.

"Dmitri Prokofitch."

"I should like very, very much to know, Dmitri Prokofitch... how he
looks... on things in general now, that is, how can I explain, what are
his likes and dislikes? Is he always so irritable? Tell me, if you can,
what are his hopes and, so to say, his dreams? Under what influences is
he now? In a word, I should like..."

"Ah, mother, how can he answer all that at once?" observed Dounia.

"Good heavens, I had not expected to find him in the least like this,
Dmitri Prokofitch!"

"Naturally," answered Razumihin. "I have no mother, but my uncle comes
every year and almost every time he can scarcely recognise me, even in
appearance, though he is a clever man; and your three years' separation
means a great deal. What am I to tell you? I have known Rodion for
a year and a half; he is morose, gloomy, proud and haughty, and of
late--and perhaps for a long time before--he has been suspicious and
fanciful. He has a noble nature and a kind heart. He does not like
showing his feelings and would rather do a cruel thing than open his
heart freely. Sometimes, though, he is not at all morbid, but simply
cold and inhumanly callous; it's as though he were alternating between
two characters. Sometimes he is fearfully reserved! He says he is
so busy that everything is a hindrance, and yet he lies in bed doing
nothing. He doesn't jeer at things, not because he hasn't the wit, but
as though he hadn't time to waste on such trifles. He never listens
to what is said to him. He is never interested in what interests other
people at any given moment. He thinks very highly of himself and perhaps
he is right. Well, what more? I think your arrival will have a most
beneficial influence upon him."

"God grant it may," cried Pulcheria Alexandrovna, distressed by
Razumihin's account of her Rodya.

And Razumihin ventured to look more boldly at Avdotya Romanovna at last.
He glanced at her often while he was talking, but only for a moment and
looked away again at once. Avdotya Romanovna sat at the table, listening
attentively, then got up again and began walking to and fro with her
arms folded and her lips compressed, occasionally putting in a question,
without stopping her walk. She had the same habit of not listening to
what was said. She was wearing a dress of thin dark stuff and she had a
white transparent scarf round her neck. Razumihin soon detected signs of
extreme poverty in their belongings. Had Avdotya Romanovna been dressed
like a queen, he felt that he would not be afraid of her, but perhaps
just because she was poorly dressed and that he noticed all the misery
of her surroundings, his heart was filled with dread and he began to be
afraid of every word he uttered, every gesture he made, which was very
trying for a man who already felt diffident.

"You've told us a great deal that is interesting about my brother's
character... and have told it impartially. I am glad. I thought that you
were too uncritically devoted to him," observed Avdotya Romanovna with
a smile. "I think you are right that he needs a woman's care," she added
thoughtfully.

"I didn't say so; but I daresay you are right, only..."

"What?"

"He loves no one and perhaps he never will," Razumihin declared
decisively.

"You mean he is not capable of love?"

"Do you know, Avdotya Romanovna, you are awfully like your brother, in
everything, indeed!" he blurted out suddenly to his own surprise, but
remembering at once what he had just before said of her brother,
he turned as red as a crab and was overcome with confusion. Avdotya
Romanovna couldn't help laughing when she looked at him.

"You may both be mistaken about Rodya," Pulcheria Alexandrovna remarked,
slightly piqued. "I am not talking of our present difficulty, Dounia.
What Pyotr Petrovitch writes in this letter and what you and I have
supposed may be mistaken, but you can't imagine, Dmitri Prokofitch, how
moody and, so to say, capricious he is. I never could depend on what
he would do when he was only fifteen. And I am sure that he might
do something now that nobody else would think of doing... Well, for
instance, do you know how a year and a half ago he astounded me and gave
me a shock that nearly killed me, when he had the idea of marrying that
girl--what was her name--his landlady's daughter?"

"Did you hear about that affair?" asked Avdotya Romanovna.

"Do you suppose----" Pulcheria Alexandrovna continued warmly. "Do you
suppose that my tears, my entreaties, my illness, my possible death from
grief, our poverty would have made him pause? No, he would calmly have
disregarded all obstacles. And yet it isn't that he doesn't love us!"

"He has never spoken a word of that affair to me," Razumihin answered
cautiously. "But I did hear something from Praskovya Pavlovna herself,
though she is by no means a gossip. And what I heard certainly was
rather strange."

"And what did you hear?" both the ladies asked at once.

"Well, nothing very special. I only learned that the marriage, which
only failed to take place through the girl's death, was not at all to
Praskovya Pavlovna's liking. They say, too, the girl was not at all
pretty, in fact I am told positively ugly... and such an invalid... and
queer. But she seems to have had some good qualities. She must have
had some good qualities or it's quite inexplicable.... She had no money
either and he wouldn't have considered her money.... But it's always
difficult to judge in such matters."

"I am sure she was a good girl," Avdotya Romanovna observed briefly.

"God forgive me, I simply rejoiced at her death. Though I don't know
which of them would have caused most misery to the other--he to her
or she to him," Pulcheria Alexandrovna concluded. Then she began
tentatively questioning him about the scene on the previous day with
Luzhin, hesitating and continually glancing at Dounia, obviously to
the latter's annoyance. This incident more than all the rest evidently
caused her uneasiness, even consternation. Razumihin described it in
detail again, but this time he added his own conclusions: he openly
blamed Raskolnikov for intentionally insulting Pyotr Petrovitch, not
seeking to excuse him on the score of his illness.

"He had planned it before his illness," he added.

"I think so, too," Pulcheria Alexandrovna agreed with a dejected air.
But she was very much surprised at hearing Razumihin express himself
so carefully and even with a certain respect about Pyotr Petrovitch.
Avdotya Romanovna, too, was struck by it.

"So this is your opinion of Pyotr Petrovitch?" Pulcheria Alexandrovna
could not resist asking.

"I can have no other opinion of your daughter's future husband,"
Razumihin answered firmly and with warmth, "and I don't say it simply
from vulgar politeness, but because... simply because Avdotya Romanovna
has of her own free will deigned to accept this man. If I spoke so
rudely of him last night, it was because I was disgustingly drunk and...
mad besides; yes, mad, crazy, I lost my head completely... and this
morning I am ashamed of it."

He crimsoned and ceased speaking. Avdotya Romanovna flushed, but did not
break the silence. She had not uttered a word from the moment they began
to speak of Luzhin.

Without her support Pulcheria Alexandrovna obviously did not know what
to do. At last, faltering and continually glancing at her daughter, she
confessed that she was exceedingly worried by one circumstance.

"You see, Dmitri Prokofitch," she began. "I'll be perfectly open with
Dmitri Prokofitch, Dounia?"

"Of course, mother," said Avdotya Romanovna emphatically.

"This is what it is," she began in haste, as though the permission to
speak of her trouble lifted a weight off her mind. "Very early this
morning we got a note from Pyotr Petrovitch in reply to our letter
announcing our arrival. He promised to meet us at the station, you
know; instead of that he sent a servant to bring us the address of these
lodgings and to show us the way; and he sent a message that he would
be here himself this morning. But this morning this note came from him.
You'd better read it yourself; there is one point in it which worries me
very much... you will soon see what that is, and... tell me your candid
opinion, Dmitri Prokofitch! You know Rodya's character better than
anyone and no one can advise us better than you can. Dounia, I must tell
you, made her decision at once, but I still don't feel sure how to act
and I... I've been waiting for your opinion."

Razumihin opened the note which was dated the previous evening and read
as follows:

"Dear Madam, Pulcheria Alexandrovna, I have the honour to inform you
that owing to unforeseen obstacles I was rendered unable to meet you at
the railway station; I sent a very competent person with the same object
in view. I likewise shall be deprived of the honour of an interview with
you to-morrow morning by business in the Senate that does not admit of
delay, and also that I may not intrude on your family circle while you
are meeting your son, and Avdotya Romanovna her brother. I shall have
the honour of visiting you and paying you my respects at your lodgings
not later than to-morrow evening at eight o'clock precisely, and
herewith I venture to present my earnest and, I may add, imperative
request that Rodion Romanovitch may not be present at our interview--as
he offered me a gross and unprecedented affront on the occasion of my
visit to him in his illness yesterday, and, moreover, since I desire
from you personally an indispensable and circumstantial explanation
upon a certain point, in regard to which I wish to learn your own
interpretation. I have the honour to inform you, in anticipation,
that if, in spite of my request, I meet Rodion Romanovitch, I shall be
compelled to withdraw immediately and then you have only yourself to
blame. I write on the assumption that Rodion Romanovitch who appeared so
ill at my visit, suddenly recovered two hours later and so, being able
to leave the house, may visit you also. I was confirmed in that belief
by the testimony of my own eyes in the lodging of a drunken man who
was run over and has since died, to whose daughter, a young woman of
notorious behaviour, he gave twenty-five roubles on the pretext of the
funeral, which gravely surprised me knowing what pains you were at to
raise that sum. Herewith expressing my special respect to your estimable
daughter, Avdotya Romanovna, I beg you to accept the respectful homage
of

"Your humble servant,

"P. LUZHIN."


"What am I to do now, Dmitri Prokofitch?" began Pulcheria Alexandrovna,
almost weeping. "How can I ask Rodya not to come? Yesterday he insisted
so earnestly on our refusing Pyotr Petrovitch and now we are ordered not
to receive Rodya! He will come on purpose if he knows, and... what will
happen then?"

"Act on Avdotya Romanovna's decision," Razumihin answered calmly at
once.

"Oh, dear me! She says... goodness knows what she says, she doesn't
explain her object! She says that it would be best, at least, not that
it would be best, but that it's absolutely necessary that Rodya should
make a point of being here at eight o'clock and that they must meet....
I didn't want even to show him the letter, but to prevent him
from coming by some stratagem with your help... because he is so
irritable.... Besides I don't understand about that drunkard who died
and that daughter, and how he could have given the daughter all the
money... which..."

"Which cost you such sacrifice, mother," put in Avdotya Romanovna.

"He was not himself yesterday," Razumihin said thoughtfully, "if you
only knew what he was up to in a restaurant yesterday, though there
was sense in it too.... Hm! He did say something, as we were going home
yesterday evening, about a dead man and a girl, but I didn't understand
a word.... But last night, I myself..."

"The best thing, mother, will be for us to go to him ourselves and
there I assure you we shall see at once what's to be done. Besides,
it's getting late--good heavens, it's past ten," she cried looking at
a splendid gold enamelled watch which hung round her neck on a thin
Venetian chain, and looked entirely out of keeping with the rest of her
dress. "A present from her _fiancé_," thought Razumihin.

"We must start, Dounia, we must start," her mother cried in a flutter.
"He will be thinking we are still angry after yesterday, from our coming
so late. Merciful heavens!"

While she said this she was hurriedly putting on her hat and mantle;
Dounia, too, put on her things. Her gloves, as Razumihin noticed, were
not merely shabby but had holes in them, and yet this evident poverty
gave the two ladies an air of special dignity, which is always found in
people who know how to wear poor clothes. Razumihin looked reverently
at Dounia and felt proud of escorting her. "The queen who mended her
stockings in prison," he thought, "must have looked then every inch a
queen and even more a queen than at sumptuous banquets and levées."

"My God!" exclaimed Pulcheria Alexandrovna, "little did I think that I
should ever fear seeing my son, my darling, darling Rodya! I am afraid,
Dmitri Prokofitch," she added, glancing at him timidly.

"Don't be afraid, mother," said Dounia, kissing her, "better have faith
in him."

"Oh, dear, I have faith in him, but I haven't slept all night,"
exclaimed the poor woman.

They came out into the street.

"Do you know, Dounia, when I dozed a little this morning I dreamed of
Marfa Petrovna... she was all in white... she came up to me, took
my hand, and shook her head at me, but so sternly as though she were
blaming me.... Is that a good omen? Oh, dear me! You don't know, Dmitri
Prokofitch, that Marfa Petrovna's dead!"

"No, I didn't know; who is Marfa Petrovna?"

"She died suddenly; and only fancy..."

"Afterwards, mamma," put in Dounia. "He doesn't know who Marfa Petrovna
is."

"Ah, you don't know? And I was thinking that you knew all about us.
Forgive me, Dmitri Prokofitch, I don't know what I am thinking about
these last few days. I look upon you really as a providence for us, and
so I took it for granted that you knew all about us. I look on you as a
relation.... Don't be angry with me for saying so. Dear me, what's the
matter with your right hand? Have you knocked it?"

"Yes, I bruised it," muttered Razumihin overjoyed.

"I sometimes speak too much from the heart, so that Dounia finds fault
with me.... But, dear me, what a cupboard he lives in! I wonder whether
he is awake? Does this woman, his landlady, consider it a room? Listen,
you say he does not like to show his feelings, so perhaps I shall annoy
him with my... weaknesses? Do advise me, Dmitri Prokofitch, how am I to
treat him? I feel quite distracted, you know."

"Don't question him too much about anything if you see him frown; don't
ask him too much about his health; he doesn't like that."

"Ah, Dmitri Prokofitch, how hard it is to be a mother! But here are the
stairs.... What an awful staircase!"

"Mother, you are quite pale, don't distress yourself, darling," said
Dounia caressing her, then with flashing eyes she added: "He ought to be
happy at seeing you, and you are tormenting yourself so."

"Wait, I'll peep in and see whether he has waked up."

The ladies slowly followed Razumihin, who went on before, and when they
reached the landlady's door on the fourth storey, they noticed that her
door was a tiny crack open and that two keen black eyes were watching
them from the darkness within. When their eyes met, the door was
suddenly shut with such a slam that Pulcheria Alexandrovna almost cried
out.



CHAPTER III

"He is well, quite well!" Zossimov cried cheerfully as they entered.

He had come in ten minutes earlier and was sitting in the same place
as before, on the sofa. Raskolnikov was sitting in the opposite corner,
fully dressed and carefully washed and combed, as he had not been for
some time past. The room was immediately crowded, yet Nastasya managed
to follow the visitors in and stayed to listen.

Raskolnikov really was almost well, as compared with his condition the
day before, but he was still pale, listless, and sombre. He looked like
a wounded man or one who has undergone some terrible physical suffering.
His brows were knitted, his lips compressed, his eyes feverish. He spoke
little and reluctantly, as though performing a duty, and there was a
restlessness in his movements.

He only wanted a sling on his arm or a bandage on his finger to complete
the impression of a man with a painful abscess or a broken arm. The
pale, sombre face lighted up for a moment when his mother and sister
entered, but this only gave it a look of more intense suffering, in
place of its listless dejection. The light soon died away, but the look
of suffering remained, and Zossimov, watching and studying his patient
with all the zest of a young doctor beginning to practise, noticed
in him no joy at the arrival of his mother and sister, but a sort of
bitter, hidden determination to bear another hour or two of inevitable
torture. He saw later that almost every word of the following
conversation seemed to touch on some sore place and irritate it. But
at the same time he marvelled at the power of controlling himself
and hiding his feelings in a patient who the previous day had, like a
monomaniac, fallen into a frenzy at the slightest word.

"Yes, I see myself now that I am almost well," said Raskolnikov,
giving his mother and sister a kiss of welcome which made Pulcheria
Alexandrovna radiant at once. "And I don't say this _as I did
yesterday_," he said, addressing Razumihin, with a friendly pressure of
his hand.

"Yes, indeed, I am quite surprised at him to-day," began Zossimov, much
delighted at the ladies' entrance, for he had not succeeded in keeping
up a conversation with his patient for ten minutes. "In another three or
four days, if he goes on like this, he will be just as before, that is,
as he was a month ago, or two... or perhaps even three. This has been
coming on for a long while.... eh? Confess, now, that it has been
perhaps your own fault?" he added, with a tentative smile, as though
still afraid of irritating him.

"It is very possible," answered Raskolnikov coldly.

"I should say, too," continued Zossimov with zest, "that your complete
recovery depends solely on yourself. Now that one can talk to you,
I should like to impress upon you that it is essential to avoid the
elementary, so to speak, fundamental causes tending to produce your
morbid condition: in that case you will be cured, if not, it will go
from bad to worse. These fundamental causes I don't know, but they must
be known to you. You are an intelligent man, and must have observed
yourself, of course. I fancy the first stage of your derangement
coincides with your leaving the university. You must not be left without
occupation, and so, work and a definite aim set before you might, I
fancy, be very beneficial."

"Yes, yes; you are perfectly right.... I will make haste and return to
the university: and then everything will go smoothly...."

Zossimov, who had begun his sage advice partly to make an effect before
the ladies, was certainly somewhat mystified, when, glancing at his
patient, he observed unmistakable mockery on his face. This lasted
an instant, however. Pulcheria Alexandrovna began at once thanking
Zossimov, especially for his visit to their lodging the previous night.

"What! he saw you last night?" Raskolnikov asked, as though startled.
"Then you have not slept either after your journey."

"Ach, Rodya, that was only till two o'clock. Dounia and I never go to
bed before two at home."

"I don't know how to thank him either," Raskolnikov went on,
suddenly frowning and looking down. "Setting aside the question of
payment--forgive me for referring to it (he turned to Zossimov)--I
really don't know what I have done to deserve such special attention
from you! I simply don't understand it... and... and... it weighs upon
me, indeed, because I don't understand it. I tell you so candidly."

"Don't be irritated." Zossimov forced himself to laugh. "Assume that you
are my first patient--well--we fellows just beginning to practise love
our first patients as if they were our children, and some almost fall in
love with them. And, of course, I am not rich in patients."

"I say nothing about him," added Raskolnikov, pointing to Razumihin,
"though he has had nothing from me either but insult and trouble."

"What nonsense he is talking! Why, you are in a sentimental mood to-day,
are you?" shouted Razumihin.

If he had had more penetration he would have seen that there was no
trace of sentimentality in him, but something indeed quite the opposite.
But Avdotya Romanovna noticed it. She was intently and uneasily watching
her brother.

"As for you, mother, I don't dare to speak," he went on, as though
repeating a lesson learned by heart. "It is only to-day that I have
been able to realise a little how distressed you must have been here
yesterday, waiting for me to come back."

When he had said this, he suddenly held out his hand to his sister,
smiling without a word. But in this smile there was a flash of real
unfeigned feeling. Dounia caught it at once, and warmly pressed his
hand, overjoyed and thankful. It was the first time he had addressed her
since their dispute the previous day. The mother's face lighted up
with ecstatic happiness at the sight of this conclusive unspoken
reconciliation. "Yes, that is what I love him for," Razumihin,
exaggerating it all, muttered to himself, with a vigorous turn in his
chair. "He has these movements."

"And how well he does it all," the mother was thinking to herself. "What
generous impulses he has, and how simply, how delicately he put an end
to all the misunderstanding with his sister--simply by holding out his
hand at the right minute and looking at her like that.... And what
fine eyes he has, and how fine his whole face is!... He is even better
looking than Dounia.... But, good heavens, what a suit--how terribly
he's dressed!... Vasya, the messenger boy in Afanasy Ivanitch's shop, is
better dressed! I could rush at him and hug him... weep over him--but
I am afraid.... Oh, dear, he's so strange! He's talking kindly, but I'm
afraid! Why, what am I afraid of?..."

"Oh, Rodya, you wouldn't believe," she began suddenly, in haste to
answer his words to her, "how unhappy Dounia and I were yesterday! Now
that it's all over and done with and we are quite happy again--I can
tell you. Fancy, we ran here almost straight from the train to embrace
you and that woman--ah, here she is! Good morning, Nastasya!... She told
us at once that you were lying in a high fever and had just run away
from the doctor in delirium, and they were looking for you in the
streets. You can't imagine how we felt! I couldn't help thinking of the
tragic end of Lieutenant Potanchikov, a friend of your father's--you
can't remember him, Rodya--who ran out in the same way in a high fever
and fell into the well in the court-yard and they couldn't pull him out
till next day. Of course, we exaggerated things. We were on the point of
rushing to find Pyotr Petrovitch to ask him to help.... Because we were
alone, utterly alone," she said plaintively and stopped short,
suddenly, recollecting it was still somewhat dangerous to speak of Pyotr
Petrovitch, although "we are quite happy again."

"Yes, yes.... Of course it's very annoying...." Raskolnikov muttered in
reply, but with such a preoccupied and inattentive air that Dounia gazed
at him in perplexity.

"What else was it I wanted to say?" He went on trying to recollect. "Oh,
yes; mother, and you too, Dounia, please don't think that I didn't mean
to come and see you to-day and was waiting for you to come first."

"What are you saying, Rodya?" cried Pulcheria Alexandrovna. She, too,
was surprised.

"Is he answering us as a duty?" Dounia wondered. "Is he being reconciled
and asking forgiveness as though he were performing a rite or repeating
a lesson?"

"I've only just waked up, and wanted to go to you, but was delayed owing
to my clothes; I forgot yesterday to ask her... Nastasya... to wash out
the blood... I've only just dressed."

"Blood! What blood?" Pulcheria Alexandrovna asked in alarm.

"Oh, nothing--don't be uneasy. It was when I was wandering about
yesterday, rather delirious, I chanced upon a man who had been run
over... a clerk..."

"Delirious? But you remember everything!" Razumihin interrupted.

"That's true," Raskolnikov answered with special carefulness. "I
remember everything even to the slightest detail, and yet--why I did
that and went there and said that, I can't clearly explain now."

"A familiar phenomenon," interposed Zossimov, "actions are sometimes
performed in a masterly and most cunning way, while the direction of the
actions is deranged and dependent on various morbid impressions--it's
like a dream."

"Perhaps it's a good thing really that he should think me almost a
madman," thought Raskolnikov.

"Why, people in perfect health act in the same way too," observed
Dounia, looking uneasily at Zossimov.

"There is some truth in your observation," the latter replied. "In that
sense we are certainly all not infrequently like madmen, but with the
slight difference that the deranged are somewhat madder, for we
must draw a line. A normal man, it is true, hardly exists. Among
dozens--perhaps hundreds of thousands--hardly one is to be met with."

At the word "madman," carelessly dropped by Zossimov in his chatter on
his favourite subject, everyone frowned.

Raskolnikov sat seeming not to pay attention, plunged in thought with a
strange smile on his pale lips. He was still meditating on something.

"Well, what about the man who was run over? I interrupted you!"
Razumihin cried hastily.

"What?" Raskolnikov seemed to wake up. "Oh... I got spattered with
blood helping to carry him to his lodging. By the way, mamma, I did an
unpardonable thing yesterday. I was literally out of my mind. I gave
away all the money you sent me... to his wife for the funeral. She's
a widow now, in consumption, a poor creature... three little children,
starving... nothing in the house... there's a daughter, too... perhaps
you'd have given it yourself if you'd seen them. But I had no right to
do it I admit, especially as I knew how you needed the money yourself.
To help others one must have the right to do it, or else _Crevez,
chiens, si vous n'êtes pas contents_." He laughed, "That's right, isn't
it, Dounia?"

"No, it's not," answered Dounia firmly.

"Bah! you, too, have ideals," he muttered, looking at her almost with
hatred, and smiling sarcastically. "I ought to have considered that....
Well, that's praiseworthy, and it's better for you... and if you reach a
line you won't overstep, you will be unhappy... and if you overstep it,
maybe you will be still unhappier.... But all that's nonsense," he added
irritably, vexed at being carried away. "I only meant to say that I beg
your forgiveness, mother," he concluded, shortly and abruptly.

"That's enough, Rodya, I am sure that everything you do is very good,"
said his mother, delighted.

"Don't be too sure," he answered, twisting his mouth into a smile.

A silence followed. There was a certain constraint in all this
conversation, and in the silence, and in the reconciliation, and in the
forgiveness, and all were feeling it.

"It is as though they were afraid of me," Raskolnikov was thinking
to himself, looking askance at his mother and sister. Pulcheria
Alexandrovna was indeed growing more timid the longer she kept silent.

"Yet in their absence I seemed to love them so much," flashed through
his mind.

"Do you know, Rodya, Marfa Petrovna is dead," Pulcheria Alexandrovna
suddenly blurted out.

"What Marfa Petrovna?"

"Oh, mercy on us--Marfa Petrovna Svidrigaïlov. I wrote you so much about
her."

"A-a-h! Yes, I remember.... So she's dead! Oh, really?" he roused
himself suddenly, as if waking up. "What did she die of?"

"Only imagine, quite suddenly," Pulcheria Alexandrovna answered
hurriedly, encouraged by his curiosity. "On the very day I was sending
you that letter! Would you believe it, that awful man seems to have been
the cause of her death. They say he beat her dreadfully."

"Why, were they on such bad terms?" he asked, addressing his sister.

"Not at all. Quite the contrary indeed. With her, he was always very
patient, considerate even. In fact, all those seven years of their
married life he gave way to her, too much so indeed, in many cases. All
of a sudden he seems to have lost patience."

"Then he could not have been so awful if he controlled himself for seven
years? You seem to be defending him, Dounia?"

"No, no, he's an awful man! I can imagine nothing more awful!" Dounia
answered, almost with a shudder, knitting her brows, and sinking into
thought.

"That had happened in the morning," Pulcheria Alexandrovna went on
hurriedly. "And directly afterwards she ordered the horses to be
harnessed to drive to the town immediately after dinner. She always used
to drive to the town in such cases. She ate a very good dinner, I am
told...."

"After the beating?"

"That was always her... habit; and immediately after dinner, so as not
to be late in starting, she went to the bath-house.... You see, she was
undergoing some treatment with baths. They have a cold spring there, and
she used to bathe in it regularly every day, and no sooner had she got
into the water when she suddenly had a stroke!"

"I should think so," said Zossimov.

"And did he beat her badly?"

"What does that matter!" put in Dounia.

"H'm! But I don't know why you want to tell us such gossip, mother,"
said Raskolnikov irritably, as it were in spite of himself.

"Ah, my dear, I don't know what to talk about," broke from Pulcheria
Alexandrovna.

"Why, are you all afraid of me?" he asked, with a constrained smile.

"That's certainly true," said Dounia, looking directly and sternly at
her brother. "Mother was crossing herself with terror as she came up the
stairs."

His face worked, as though in convulsion.

"Ach, what are you saying, Dounia! Don't be angry, please, Rodya....
Why did you say that, Dounia?" Pulcheria Alexandrovna began,
overwhelmed--"You see, coming here, I was dreaming all the way, in the
train, how we should meet, how we should talk over everything
together.... And I was so happy, I did not notice the journey! But what
am I saying? I am happy now.... You should not, Dounia.... I am happy
now--simply in seeing you, Rodya...."

"Hush, mother," he muttered in confusion, not looking at her, but
pressing her hand. "We shall have time to speak freely of everything!"

As he said this, he was suddenly overwhelmed with confusion and turned
pale. Again that awful sensation he had known of late passed with deadly
chill over his soul. Again it became suddenly plain and perceptible to
him that he had just told a fearful lie--that he would never now be
able to speak freely of everything--that he would never again be able to
_speak_ of anything to anyone. The anguish of this thought was such that
for a moment he almost forgot himself. He got up from his seat, and not
looking at anyone walked towards the door.

"What are you about?" cried Razumihin, clutching him by the arm.

He sat down again, and began looking about him, in silence. They were
all looking at him in perplexity.

"But what are you all so dull for?" he shouted, suddenly and quite
unexpectedly. "Do say something! What's the use of sitting like this?
Come, do speak. Let us talk.... We meet together and sit in silence....
Come, anything!"

"Thank God; I was afraid the same thing as yesterday was beginning
again," said Pulcheria Alexandrovna, crossing herself.

"What is the matter, Rodya?" asked Avdotya Romanovna, distrustfully.

"Oh, nothing! I remembered something," he answered, and suddenly
laughed.

"Well, if you remembered something; that's all right!... I was beginning
to think..." muttered Zossimov, getting up from the sofa. "It is time
for me to be off. I will look in again perhaps... if I can..." He made
his bows, and went out.

"What an excellent man!" observed Pulcheria Alexandrovna.

"Yes, excellent, splendid, well-educated, intelligent," Raskolnikov
began, suddenly speaking with surprising rapidity, and a liveliness he
had not shown till then. "I can't remember where I met him before my
illness.... I believe I have met him somewhere----... And this is a good
man, too," he nodded at Razumihin. "Do you like him, Dounia?" he asked
her; and suddenly, for some unknown reason, laughed.

"Very much," answered Dounia.

"Foo!--what a pig you are!" Razumihin protested, blushing in terrible
confusion, and he got up from his chair. Pulcheria Alexandrovna smiled
faintly, but Raskolnikov laughed aloud.

"Where are you off to?"

"I must go."

"You need not at all. Stay. Zossimov has gone, so you must. Don't go.
What's the time? Is it twelve o'clock? What a pretty watch you have got,
Dounia. But why are you all silent again? I do all the talking."

"It was a present from Marfa Petrovna," answered Dounia.

"And a very expensive one!" added Pulcheria Alexandrovna.

"A-ah! What a big one! Hardly like a lady's."

"I like that sort," said Dounia.

"So it is not a present from her _fiancé_," thought Razumihin, and was
unreasonably delighted.

"I thought it was Luzhin's present," observed Raskolnikov.

"No, he has not made Dounia any presents yet."

"A-ah! And do you remember, mother, I was in love and wanted to get
married?" he said suddenly, looking at his mother, who was disconcerted
by the sudden change of subject and the way he spoke of it.

"Oh, yes, my dear."

Pulcheria Alexandrovna exchanged glances with Dounia and Razumihin.

"H'm, yes. What shall I tell you? I don't remember much indeed. She was
such a sickly girl," he went on, growing dreamy and looking down again.
"Quite an invalid. She was fond of giving alms to the poor, and was
always dreaming of a nunnery, and once she burst into tears when she
began talking to me about it. Yes, yes, I remember. I remember very
well. She was an ugly little thing. I really don't know what drew me
to her then--I think it was because she was always ill. If she had been
lame or hunchback, I believe I should have liked her better still," he
smiled dreamily. "Yes, it was a sort of spring delirium."

"No, it was not only spring delirium," said Dounia, with warm feeling.

He fixed a strained intent look on his sister, but did not hear or did
not understand her words. Then, completely lost in thought, he got up,
went up to his mother, kissed her, went back to his place and sat down.

"You love her even now?" said Pulcheria Alexandrovna, touched.

"Her? Now? Oh, yes.... You ask about her? No... that's all now, as
it were, in another world... and so long ago. And indeed everything
happening here seems somehow far away." He looked attentively at them.
"You, now... I seem to be looking at you from a thousand miles away...
but, goodness knows why we are talking of that! And what's the use of
asking about it?" he added with annoyance, and biting his nails, fell
into dreamy silence again.

"What a wretched lodging you have, Rodya! It's like a tomb," said
Pulcheria Alexandrovna, suddenly breaking the oppressive silence. "I
am sure it's quite half through your lodging you have become so
melancholy."

"My lodging," he answered, listlessly. "Yes, the lodging had a great
deal to do with it.... I thought that, too.... If only you knew, though,
what a strange thing you said just now, mother," he said, laughing
strangely.

A little more, and their companionship, this mother and this sister,
with him after three years' absence, this intimate tone of conversation,
in face of the utter impossibility of really speaking about anything,
would have been beyond his power of endurance. But there was one urgent
matter which must be settled one way or the other that day--so he had
decided when he woke. Now he was glad to remember it, as a means of
escape.

"Listen, Dounia," he began, gravely and drily, "of course I beg your
pardon for yesterday, but I consider it my duty to tell you again that
I do not withdraw from my chief point. It is me or Luzhin. If I am a
scoundrel, you must not be. One is enough. If you marry Luzhin, I cease
at once to look on you as a sister."

"Rodya, Rodya! It is the same as yesterday again," Pulcheria
Alexandrovna cried, mournfully. "And why do you call yourself a
scoundrel? I can't bear it. You said the same yesterday."

"Brother," Dounia answered firmly and with the same dryness. "In all
this there is a mistake on your part. I thought it over at night,
and found out the mistake. It is all because you seem to fancy I am
sacrificing myself to someone and for someone. That is not the case at
all. I am simply marrying for my own sake, because things are hard for
me. Though, of course, I shall be glad if I succeed in being useful to
my family. But that is not the chief motive for my decision...."

"She is lying," he thought to himself, biting his nails vindictively.
"Proud creature! She won't admit she wants to do it out of charity! Too
haughty! Oh, base characters! They even love as though they hate.... Oh,
how I... hate them all!"

"In fact," continued Dounia, "I am marrying Pyotr Petrovitch because of
two evils I choose the less. I intend to do honestly all he expects of
me, so I am not deceiving him.... Why did you smile just now?" She, too,
flushed, and there was a gleam of anger in her eyes.

"All?" he asked, with a malignant grin.

"Within certain limits. Both the manner and form of Pyotr Petrovitch's
courtship showed me at once what he wanted. He may, of course, think too
well of himself, but I hope he esteems me, too.... Why are you laughing
again?"

"And why are you blushing again? You are lying, sister. You are
intentionally lying, simply from feminine obstinacy, simply to hold your
own against me.... You cannot respect Luzhin. I have seen him and talked
with him. So you are selling yourself for money, and so in any case you
are acting basely, and I am glad at least that you can blush for it."

"It is not true. I am not lying," cried Dounia, losing her composure.
"I would not marry him if I were not convinced that he esteems me
and thinks highly of me. I would not marry him if I were not firmly
convinced that I can respect him. Fortunately, I can have convincing
proof of it this very day... and such a marriage is not a vileness, as
you say! And even if you were right, if I really had determined on a
vile action, is it not merciless on your part to speak to me like that?
Why do you demand of me a heroism that perhaps you have not either? It
is despotism; it is tyranny. If I ruin anyone, it is only myself.... I
am not committing a murder. Why do you look at me like that? Why are you
so pale? Rodya, darling, what's the matter?"

"Good heavens! You have made him faint," cried Pulcheria Alexandrovna.

"No, no, nonsense! It's nothing. A little giddiness--not fainting. You
have fainting on the brain. H'm, yes, what was I saying? Oh, yes. In
what way will you get convincing proof to-day that you can respect him,
and that he... esteems you, as you said. I think you said to-day?"

"Mother, show Rodya Pyotr Petrovitch's letter," said Dounia.

With trembling hands, Pulcheria Alexandrovna gave him the letter. He
took it with great interest, but, before opening it, he suddenly looked
with a sort of wonder at Dounia.

"It is strange," he said, slowly, as though struck by a new idea. "What
am I making such a fuss for? What is it all about? Marry whom you like!"

He said this as though to himself, but said it aloud, and looked for
some time at his sister, as though puzzled. He opened the letter at
last, still with the same look of strange wonder on his face. Then,
slowly and attentively, he began reading, and read it through twice.
Pulcheria Alexandrovna showed marked anxiety, and all indeed expected
something particular.

"What surprises me," he began, after a short pause, handing the letter
to his mother, but not addressing anyone in particular, "is that he is a
business man, a lawyer, and his conversation is pretentious indeed, and
yet he writes such an uneducated letter."

They all started. They had expected something quite different.

"But they all write like that, you know," Razumihin observed, abruptly.

"Have you read it?"

"Yes."

"We showed him, Rodya. We... consulted him just now," Pulcheria
Alexandrovna began, embarrassed.

"That's just the jargon of the courts," Razumihin put in. "Legal
documents are written like that to this day."

"Legal? Yes, it's just legal--business language--not so very uneducated,
and not quite educated--business language!"

"Pyotr Petrovitch makes no secret of the fact that he had a cheap
education, he is proud indeed of having made his own way," Avdotya
Romanovna observed, somewhat offended by her brother's tone.

"Well, if he's proud of it, he has reason, I don't deny it. You seem to
be offended, sister, at my making only such a frivolous criticism on the
letter, and to think that I speak of such trifling matters on purpose to
annoy you. It is quite the contrary, an observation apropos of the style
occurred to me that is by no means irrelevant as things stand. There
is one expression, 'blame yourselves' put in very significantly and
plainly, and there is besides a threat that he will go away at once if I
am present. That threat to go away is equivalent to a threat to abandon
you both if you are disobedient, and to abandon you now after summoning
you to Petersburg. Well, what do you think? Can one resent such an
expression from Luzhin, as we should if he (he pointed to Razumihin) had
written it, or Zossimov, or one of us?"

"N-no," answered Dounia, with more animation. "I saw clearly that it
was too naïvely expressed, and that perhaps he simply has no skill
in writing... that is a true criticism, brother. I did not expect,
indeed..."

"It is expressed in legal style, and sounds coarser than perhaps he
intended. But I must disillusion you a little. There is one expression
in the letter, one slander about me, and rather a contemptible one. I
gave the money last night to the widow, a woman in consumption, crushed
with trouble, and not 'on the pretext of the funeral,' but simply to pay
for the funeral, and not to the daughter--a young woman, as he writes,
of notorious behaviour (whom I saw last night for the first time in my
life)--but to the widow. In all this I see a too hasty desire to slander
me and to raise dissension between us. It is expressed again in legal
jargon, that is to say, with a too obvious display of the aim, and
with a very naïve eagerness. He is a man of intelligence, but to act
sensibly, intelligence is not enough. It all shows the man and... I
don't think he has a great esteem for you. I tell you this simply to
warn you, because I sincerely wish for your good..."

Dounia did not reply. Her resolution had been taken. She was only
awaiting the evening.

"Then what is your decision, Rodya?" asked Pulcheria Alexandrovna, who
was more uneasy than ever at the sudden, new businesslike tone of his
talk.

"What decision?"

"You see Pyotr Petrovitch writes that you are not to be with us this
evening, and that he will go away if you come. So will you... come?"

"That, of course, is not for me to decide, but for you first, if you are
not offended by such a request; and secondly, by Dounia, if she, too, is
not offended. I will do what you think best," he added, drily.

"Dounia has already decided, and I fully agree with her," Pulcheria
Alexandrovna hastened to declare.

"I decided to ask you, Rodya, to urge you not to fail to be with us at
this interview," said Dounia. "Will you come?"

"Yes."

"I will ask you, too, to be with us at eight o'clock," she said,
addressing Razumihin. "Mother, I am inviting him, too."

"Quite right, Dounia. Well, since you have decided," added Pulcheria
Alexandrovna, "so be it. I shall feel easier myself. I do not like
concealment and deception. Better let us have the whole truth.... Pyotr
Petrovitch may be angry or not, now!"



CHAPTER IV

At that moment the door was softly opened, and a young girl walked into
the room, looking timidly about her. Everyone turned towards her with
surprise and curiosity. At first sight, Raskolnikov did not recognise
her. It was Sofya Semyonovna Marmeladov. He had seen her yesterday for
the first time, but at such a moment, in such surroundings and in such
a dress, that his memory retained a very different image of her. Now she
was a modestly and poorly-dressed young girl, very young, indeed,
almost like a child, with a modest and refined manner, with a candid but
somewhat frightened-looking face. She was wearing a very plain indoor
dress, and had on a shabby old-fashioned hat, but she still carried a
parasol. Unexpectedly finding the room full of people, she was not so
much embarrassed as completely overwhelmed with shyness, like a
little child. She was even about to retreat. "Oh... it's you!" said
Raskolnikov, extremely astonished, and he, too, was confused. He at once
recollected that his mother and sister knew through Luzhin's letter
of "some young woman of notorious behaviour." He had only just been
protesting against Luzhin's calumny and declaring that he had seen the
girl last night for the first time, and suddenly she had walked in. He
remembered, too, that he had not protested against the expression "of
notorious behaviour." All this passed vaguely and fleetingly through
his brain, but looking at her more intently, he saw that the humiliated
creature was so humiliated that he felt suddenly sorry for her. When she
made a movement to retreat in terror, it sent a pang to his heart.

"I did not expect you," he said, hurriedly, with a look that made her
stop. "Please sit down. You come, no doubt, from Katerina Ivanovna.
Allow me--not there. Sit here...."

At Sonia's entrance, Razumihin, who had been sitting on one of
Raskolnikov's three chairs, close to the door, got up to allow her to
enter. Raskolnikov had at first shown her the place on the sofa where
Zossimov had been sitting, but feeling that the sofa which served him
as a bed, was too _familiar_ a place, he hurriedly motioned her to
Razumihin's chair.

"You sit here," he said to Razumihin, putting him on the sofa.

Sonia sat down, almost shaking with terror, and looked timidly at the
two ladies. It was evidently almost inconceivable to herself that she
could sit down beside them. At the thought of it, she was so frightened
that she hurriedly got up again, and in utter confusion addressed
Raskolnikov.

"I... I... have come for one minute. Forgive me for disturbing you," she
began falteringly. "I come from Katerina Ivanovna, and she had no one to
send. Katerina Ivanovna told me to beg you... to be at the service... in
the morning... at Mitrofanievsky... and then... to us... to her...
to do her the honour... she told me to beg you..." Sonia stammered and
ceased speaking.

"I will try, certainly, most certainly," answered Raskolnikov. He,
too, stood up, and he, too, faltered and could not finish his sentence.
"Please sit down," he said, suddenly. "I want to talk to you. You are
perhaps in a hurry, but please, be so kind, spare me two minutes," and
he drew up a chair for her.

Sonia sat down again, and again timidly she took a hurried, frightened
look at the two ladies, and dropped her eyes. Raskolnikov's pale face
flushed, a shudder passed over him, his eyes glowed.

"Mother," he said, firmly and insistently, "this is Sofya Semyonovna
Marmeladov, the daughter of that unfortunate Mr. Marmeladov, who was run
over yesterday before my eyes, and of whom I was just telling you."

Pulcheria Alexandrovna glanced at Sonia, and slightly screwed up
her eyes. In spite of her embarrassment before Rodya's urgent and
challenging look, she could not deny herself that satisfaction. Dounia
gazed gravely and intently into the poor girl's face, and scrutinised
her with perplexity. Sonia, hearing herself introduced, tried to raise
her eyes again, but was more embarrassed than ever.

"I wanted to ask you," said Raskolnikov, hastily, "how things were
arranged yesterday. You were not worried by the police, for instance?"

"No, that was all right... it was too evident, the cause of death...
they did not worry us... only the lodgers are angry."

"Why?"

"At the body's remaining so long. You see it is hot now. So that,
to-day, they will carry it to the cemetery, into the chapel, until
to-morrow. At first Katerina Ivanovna was unwilling, but now she sees
herself that it's necessary..."

"To-day, then?"

"She begs you to do us the honour to be in the church to-morrow for the
service, and then to be present at the funeral lunch."

"She is giving a funeral lunch?"

"Yes... just a little.... She told me to thank you very much for helping
us yesterday. But for you, we should have had nothing for the funeral."

All at once her lips and chin began trembling, but, with an effort, she
controlled herself, looking down again.

During the conversation, Raskolnikov watched her carefully. She had a
thin, very thin, pale little face, rather irregular and angular, with a
sharp little nose and chin. She could not have been called pretty, but
her blue eyes were so clear, and when they lighted up, there was such
a kindliness and simplicity in her expression that one could not help
being attracted. Her face, and her whole figure indeed, had another
peculiar characteristic. In spite of her eighteen years, she looked
almost a little girl--almost a child. And in some of her gestures, this
childishness seemed almost absurd.

"But has Katerina Ivanovna been able to manage with such small means?
Does she even mean to have a funeral lunch?" Raskolnikov asked,
persistently keeping up the conversation.

"The coffin will be plain, of course... and everything will be plain, so
it won't cost much. Katerina Ivanovna and I have reckoned it all out, so
that there will be enough left... and Katerina Ivanovna was very anxious
it should be so. You know one can't... it's a comfort to her... she is
like that, you know...."

"I understand, I understand... of course... why do you look at my room
like that? My mother has just said it is like a tomb."

"You gave us everything yesterday," Sonia said suddenly, in reply, in a
loud rapid whisper; and again she looked down in confusion. Her lips
and chin were trembling once more. She had been struck at once
by Raskolnikov's poor surroundings, and now these words broke out
spontaneously. A silence followed. There was a light in Dounia's eyes,
and even Pulcheria Alexandrovna looked kindly at Sonia.

"Rodya," she said, getting up, "we shall have dinner together, of
course. Come, Dounia.... And you, Rodya, had better go for a little
walk, and then rest and lie down before you come to see us.... I am
afraid we have exhausted you...."

"Yes, yes, I'll come," he answered, getting up fussily. "But I have
something to see to."

"But surely you will have dinner together?" cried Razumihin, looking in
surprise at Raskolnikov. "What do you mean?"

"Yes, yes, I am coming... of course, of course! And you stay a minute.
You do not want him just now, do you, mother? Or perhaps I am taking him
from you?"

"Oh, no, no. And will you, Dmitri Prokofitch, do us the favour of dining
with us?"

"Please do," added Dounia.

Razumihin bowed, positively radiant. For one moment, they were all
strangely embarrassed.

"Good-bye, Rodya, that is till we meet. I do not like saying good-bye.
Good-bye, Nastasya. Ah, I have said good-bye again."

Pulcheria Alexandrovna meant to greet Sonia, too; but it somehow failed
to come off, and she went in a flutter out of the room.

But Avdotya Romanovna seemed to await her turn, and following her mother
out, gave Sonia an attentive, courteous bow. Sonia, in confusion, gave
a hurried, frightened curtsy. There was a look of poignant discomfort
in her face, as though Avdotya Romanovna's courtesy and attention were
oppressive and painful to her.

"Dounia, good-bye," called Raskolnikov, in the passage. "Give me your
hand."

"Why, I did give it to you. Have you forgotten?" said Dounia, turning
warmly and awkwardly to him.

"Never mind, give it to me again." And he squeezed her fingers warmly.

Dounia smiled, flushed, pulled her hand away, and went off quite happy.

"Come, that's capital," he said to Sonia, going back and looking
brightly at her. "God give peace to the dead, the living have still to
live. That is right, isn't it?"

Sonia looked surprised at the sudden brightness of his face. He looked
at her for some moments in silence. The whole history of the dead father
floated before his memory in those moments....

*****

"Heavens, Dounia," Pulcheria Alexandrovna began, as soon as they were in
the street, "I really feel relieved myself at coming away--more at ease.
How little did I think yesterday in the train that I could ever be glad
of that."

"I tell you again, mother, he is still very ill. Don't you see it?
Perhaps worrying about us upset him. We must be patient, and much, much
can be forgiven."

"Well, you were not very patient!" Pulcheria Alexandrovna caught her up,
hotly and jealously. "Do you know, Dounia, I was looking at you two. You
are the very portrait of him, and not so much in face as in soul. You
are both melancholy, both morose and hot-tempered, both haughty and both
generous.... Surely he can't be an egoist, Dounia. Eh? When I think of
what is in store for us this evening, my heart sinks!"

"Don't be uneasy, mother. What must be, will be."

"Dounia, only think what a position we are in! What if Pyotr Petrovitch
breaks it off?" poor Pulcheria Alexandrovna blurted out, incautiously.

"He won't be worth much if he does," answered Dounia, sharply and
contemptuously.

"We did well to come away," Pulcheria Alexandrovna hurriedly broke in.
"He was in a hurry about some business or other. If he gets out and has
a breath of air... it is fearfully close in his room.... But where is
one to get a breath of air here? The very streets here feel like shut-up
rooms. Good heavens! what a town!... stay... this side... they will
crush you--carrying something. Why, it is a piano they have got, I
declare... how they push!... I am very much afraid of that young woman,
too."

"What young woman, mother?

"Why, that Sofya Semyonovna, who was there just now."

"Why?"

"I have a presentiment, Dounia. Well, you may believe it or not, but
as soon as she came in, that very minute, I felt that she was the chief
cause of the trouble...."

"Nothing of the sort!" cried Dounia, in vexation. "What nonsense, with
your presentiments, mother! He only made her acquaintance the evening
before, and he did not know her when she came in."

"Well, you will see.... She worries me; but you will see, you will
see! I was so frightened. She was gazing at me with those eyes. I could
scarcely sit still in my chair when he began introducing her, do you
remember? It seems so strange, but Pyotr Petrovitch writes like that
about her, and he introduces her to us--to you! So he must think a great
deal of her."

"People will write anything. We were talked about and written about,
too. Have you forgotten? I am sure that she is a good girl, and that it
is all nonsense."

"God grant it may be!"

"And Pyotr Petrovitch is a contemptible slanderer," Dounia snapped out,
suddenly.

Pulcheria Alexandrovna was crushed; the conversation was not resumed.

*****

"I will tell you what I want with you," said Raskolnikov, drawing
Razumihin to the window.

"Then I will tell Katerina Ivanovna that you are coming," Sonia said
hurriedly, preparing to depart.

"One minute, Sofya Semyonovna. We have no secrets. You are not in our
way. I want to have another word or two with you. Listen!" he turned
suddenly to Razumihin again. "You know that... what's his name...
Porfiry Petrovitch?"

"I should think so! He is a relation. Why?" added the latter, with
interest.

"Is not he managing that case... you know, about that murder?... You
were speaking about it yesterday."

"Yes... well?" Razumihin's eyes opened wide.

"He was inquiring for people who had pawned things, and I have some
pledges there, too--trifles--a ring my sister gave me as a keepsake when
I left home, and my father's silver watch--they are only worth five or
six roubles altogether... but I value them. So what am I to do now? I
do not want to lose the things, especially the watch. I was quaking just
now, for fear mother would ask to look at it, when we spoke of Dounia's
watch. It is the only thing of father's left us. She would be ill if
it were lost. You know what women are. So tell me what to do. I know I
ought to have given notice at the police station, but would it not be
better to go straight to Porfiry? Eh? What do you think? The matter
might be settled more quickly. You see, mother may ask for it before
dinner."

"Certainly not to the police station. Certainly to Porfiry," Razumihin
shouted in extraordinary excitement. "Well, how glad I am. Let us go at
once. It is a couple of steps. We shall be sure to find him."

"Very well, let us go."

"And he will be very, very glad to make your acquaintance. I have
often talked to him of you at different times. I was speaking of you
yesterday. Let us go. So you knew the old woman? So that's it! It is all
turning out splendidly.... Oh, yes, Sofya Ivanovna..."

"Sofya Semyonovna," corrected Raskolnikov. "Sofya Semyonovna, this is my
friend Razumihin, and he is a good man."

"If you have to go now," Sonia was beginning, not looking at Razumihin
at all, and still more embarrassed.

"Let us go," decided Raskolnikov. "I will come to you to-day, Sofya
Semyonovna. Only tell me where you live."

He was not exactly ill at ease, but seemed hurried, and avoided her
eyes. Sonia gave her address, and flushed as she did so. They all went
out together.

"Don't you lock up?" asked Razumihin, following him on to the stairs.

"Never," answered Raskolnikov. "I have been meaning to buy a lock for
these two years. People are happy who have no need of locks," he said,
laughing, to Sonia. They stood still in the gateway.

"Do you go to the right, Sofya Semyonovna? How did you find me, by the
way?" he added, as though he wanted to say something quite different. He
wanted to look at her soft clear eyes, but this was not easy.

"Why, you gave your address to Polenka yesterday."

"Polenka? Oh, yes; Polenka, that is the little girl. She is your sister?
Did I give her the address?"

"Why, had you forgotten?"

"No, I remember."

"I had heard my father speak of you... only I did not know your name,
and he did not know it. And now I came... and as I had learnt your name,
I asked to-day, 'Where does Mr. Raskolnikov live?' I did not know you
had only a room too.... Good-bye, I will tell Katerina Ivanovna."

She was extremely glad to escape at last; she went away looking down,
hurrying to get out of sight as soon as possible, to walk the twenty
steps to the turning on the right and to be at last alone, and then
moving rapidly along, looking at no one, noticing nothing, to think, to
remember, to meditate on every word, every detail. Never, never had she
felt anything like this. Dimly and unconsciously a whole new world was
opening before her. She remembered suddenly that Raskolnikov meant to
come to her that day, perhaps at once!

"Only not to-day, please, not to-day!" she kept muttering with a sinking
heart, as though entreating someone, like a frightened child. "Mercy! to
me... to that room... he will see... oh, dear!"

She was not capable at that instant of noticing an unknown gentleman who
was watching her and following at her heels. He had accompanied her from
the gateway. At the moment when Razumihin, Raskolnikov, and she stood
still at parting on the pavement, this gentleman, who was just passing,
started on hearing Sonia's words: "and I asked where Mr. Raskolnikov
lived?" He turned a rapid but attentive look upon all three, especially
upon Raskolnikov, to whom Sonia was speaking; then looked back and noted
the house. All this was done in an instant as he passed, and trying not
to betray his interest, he walked on more slowly as though waiting for
something. He was waiting for Sonia; he saw that they were parting, and
that Sonia was going home.

"Home? Where? I've seen that face somewhere," he thought. "I must find
out."

At the turning he crossed over, looked round, and saw Sonia coming the
same way, noticing nothing. She turned the corner. He followed her on
the other side. After about fifty paces he crossed over again, overtook
her and kept two or three yards behind her.

He was a man about fifty, rather tall and thickly set, with broad high
shoulders which made him look as though he stooped a little. He wore
good and fashionable clothes, and looked like a gentleman of position.
He carried a handsome cane, which he tapped on the pavement at each
step; his gloves were spotless. He had a broad, rather pleasant face
with high cheek-bones and a fresh colour, not often seen in Petersburg.
His flaxen hair was still abundant, and only touched here and there with
grey, and his thick square beard was even lighter than his hair.
His eyes were blue and had a cold and thoughtful look; his lips were
crimson. He was a remarkedly well-preserved man and looked much younger
than his years.

When Sonia came out on the canal bank, they were the only two persons on
the pavement. He observed her dreaminess and preoccupation. On reaching
the house where she lodged, Sonia turned in at the gate; he followed
her, seeming rather surprised. In the courtyard she turned to the right
corner. "Bah!" muttered the unknown gentleman, and mounted the stairs
behind her. Only then Sonia noticed him. She reached the third storey,
turned down the passage, and rang at No. 9. On the door was inscribed
in chalk, "Kapernaumov, Tailor." "Bah!" the stranger repeated again,
wondering at the strange coincidence, and he rang next door, at No. 8.
The doors were two or three yards apart.

"You lodge at Kapernaumov's," he said, looking at Sonia and laughing.
"He altered a waistcoat for me yesterday. I am staying close here at
Madame Resslich's. How odd!" Sonia looked at him attentively.

"We are neighbours," he went on gaily. "I only came to town the day
before yesterday. Good-bye for the present."

Sonia made no reply; the door opened and she slipped in. She felt for
some reason ashamed and uneasy.

*****

On the way to Porfiry's, Razumihin was obviously excited.

"That's capital, brother," he repeated several times, "and I am glad! I
am glad!"

"What are you glad about?" Raskolnikov thought to himself.

"I didn't know that you pledged things at the old woman's, too. And...
was it long ago? I mean, was it long since you were there?"

"What a simple-hearted fool he is!"

"When was it?" Raskolnikov stopped still to recollect. "Two or three
days before her death it must have been. But I am not going to redeem
the things now," he put in with a sort of hurried and conspicuous
solicitude about the things. "I've not more than a silver rouble
left... after last night's accursed delirium!"

He laid special emphasis on the delirium.

"Yes, yes," Razumihin hastened to agree--with what was not clear. "Then
that's why you... were stuck... partly... you know in your delirium you
were continually mentioning some rings or chains! Yes, yes... that's
clear, it's all clear now."

"Hullo! How that idea must have got about among them. Here this man will
go to the stake for me, and I find him delighted at having it _cleared
up_ why I spoke of rings in my delirium! What a hold the idea must have
on all of them!"

"Shall we find him?" he asked suddenly.

"Oh, yes," Razumihin answered quickly. "He is a nice fellow, you will
see, brother. Rather clumsy, that is to say, he is a man of polished
manners, but I mean clumsy in a different sense. He is an intelligent
fellow, very much so indeed, but he has his own range of ideas.... He
is incredulous, sceptical, cynical... he likes to impose on people, or
rather to make fun of them. His is the old, circumstantial method....
But he understands his work... thoroughly.... Last year he cleared up a
case of murder in which the police had hardly a clue. He is very, very
anxious to make your acquaintance!"

"On what grounds is he so anxious?"

"Oh, it's not exactly... you see, since you've been ill I happen to have
mentioned you several times.... So, when he heard about you... about
your being a law student and not able to finish your studies, he said,
'What a pity!' And so I concluded... from everything together, not only
that; yesterday Zametov... you know, Rodya, I talked some nonsense on
the way home to you yesterday, when I was drunk... I am afraid, brother,
of your exaggerating it, you see."

"What? That they think I am a madman? Maybe they are right," he said
with a constrained smile.

"Yes, yes.... That is, pooh, no!... But all that I said (and there was
something else too) it was all nonsense, drunken nonsense."

"But why are you apologising? I am so sick of it all!" Raskolnikov cried
with exaggerated irritability. It was partly assumed, however.

"I know, I know, I understand. Believe me, I understand. One's ashamed
to speak of it."

"If you are ashamed, then don't speak of it."

Both were silent. Razumihin was more than ecstatic and Raskolnikov
perceived it with repulsion. He was alarmed, too, by what Razumihin had
just said about Porfiry.

"I shall have to pull a long face with him too," he thought, with a
beating heart, and he turned white, "and do it naturally, too. But the
most natural thing would be to do nothing at all. Carefully do nothing
at all! No, _carefully_ would not be natural again.... Oh, well, we
shall see how it turns out.... We shall see... directly. Is it a good
thing to go or not? The butterfly flies to the light. My heart is
beating, that's what's bad!"

"In this grey house," said Razumihin.

"The most important thing, does Porfiry know that I was at the old
hag's flat yesterday... and asked about the blood? I must find that out
instantly, as soon as I go in, find out from his face; otherwise... I'll
find out, if it's my ruin."

"I say, brother," he said suddenly, addressing Razumihin, with a sly
smile, "I have been noticing all day that you seem to be curiously
excited. Isn't it so?"

"Excited? Not a bit of it," said Razumihin, stung to the quick.

"Yes, brother, I assure you it's noticeable. Why, you sat on your chair
in a way you never do sit, on the edge somehow, and you seemed to be
writhing all the time. You kept jumping up for nothing. One moment you
were angry, and the next your face looked like a sweetmeat. You even
blushed; especially when you were invited to dinner, you blushed
awfully."

"Nothing of the sort, nonsense! What do you mean?"

"But why are you wriggling out of it, like a schoolboy? By Jove, there
he's blushing again."

"What a pig you are!"

"But why are you so shamefaced about it? Romeo! Stay, I'll tell of you
to-day. Ha-ha-ha! I'll make mother laugh, and someone else, too..."

"Listen, listen, listen, this is serious.... What next, you fiend!"
Razumihin was utterly overwhelmed, turning cold with horror. "What will
you tell them? Come, brother... foo! what a pig you are!"

"You are like a summer rose. And if only you knew how it suits you; a
Romeo over six foot high! And how you've washed to-day--you cleaned your
nails, I declare. Eh? That's something unheard of! Why, I do believe
you've got pomatum on your hair! Bend down."

"Pig!"

Raskolnikov laughed as though he could not restrain himself. So
laughing, they entered Porfiry Petrovitch's flat. This is what
Raskolnikov wanted: from within they could be heard laughing as they
came in, still guffawing in the passage.

"Not a word here or I'll... brain you!" Razumihin whispered furiously,
seizing Raskolnikov by the shoulder.



CHAPTER V

Raskolnikov was already entering the room. He came in looking as though
he had the utmost difficulty not to burst out laughing again. Behind him
Razumihin strode in gawky and awkward, shamefaced and red as a peony,
with an utterly crestfallen and ferocious expression. His face and
whole figure really were ridiculous at that moment and amply justified
Raskolnikov's laughter. Raskolnikov, not waiting for an introduction,
bowed to Porfiry Petrovitch, who stood in the middle of the room
looking inquiringly at them. He held out his hand and shook hands, still
apparently making desperate efforts to subdue his mirth and utter a few
words to introduce himself. But he had no sooner succeeded in assuming
a serious air and muttering something when he suddenly glanced again as
though accidentally at Razumihin, and could no longer control himself:
his stifled laughter broke out the more irresistibly the more he tried
to restrain it. The extraordinary ferocity with which Razumihin received
this "spontaneous" mirth gave the whole scene the appearance of most
genuine fun and naturalness. Razumihin strengthened this impression as
though on purpose.

"Fool! You fiend," he roared, waving his arm which at once struck a
little round table with an empty tea-glass on it. Everything was sent
flying and crashing.

"But why break chairs, gentlemen? You know it's a loss to the Crown,"
Porfiry Petrovitch quoted gaily.

Raskolnikov was still laughing, with his hand in Porfiry Petrovitch's,
but anxious not to overdo it, awaited the right moment to put a natural
end to it. Razumihin, completely put to confusion by upsetting the table
and smashing the glass, gazed gloomily at the fragments, cursed and
turned sharply to the window where he stood looking out with his back
to the company with a fiercely scowling countenance, seeing nothing.
Porfiry Petrovitch laughed and was ready to go on laughing, but
obviously looked for explanations. Zametov had been sitting in the
corner, but he rose at the visitors' entrance and was standing in
expectation with a smile on his lips, though he looked with surprise and
even it seemed incredulity at the whole scene and at Raskolnikov with a
certain embarrassment. Zametov's unexpected presence struck Raskolnikov
unpleasantly.

"I've got to think of that," he thought. "Excuse me, please," he began,
affecting extreme embarrassment. "Raskolnikov."

"Not at all, very pleasant to see you... and how pleasantly you've come
in.... Why, won't he even say good-morning?" Porfiry Petrovitch nodded
at Razumihin.

"Upon my honour I don't know why he is in such a rage with me. I only
told him as we came along that he was like Romeo... and proved it. And
that was all, I think!"

"Pig!" ejaculated Razumihin, without turning round.

"There must have been very grave grounds for it, if he is so furious at
the word," Porfiry laughed.

"Oh, you sharp lawyer!... Damn you all!" snapped Razumihin, and suddenly
bursting out laughing himself, he went up to Porfiry with a more
cheerful face as though nothing had happened. "That'll do! We are
all fools. To come to business. This is my friend Rodion Romanovitch
Raskolnikov; in the first place he has heard of you and wants to make
your acquaintance, and secondly, he has a little matter of business with
you. Bah! Zametov, what brought you here? Have you met before? Have you
known each other long?"

"What does this mean?" thought Raskolnikov uneasily.

Zametov seemed taken aback, but not very much so.

"Why, it was at your rooms we met yesterday," he said easily.

"Then I have been spared the trouble. All last week he was begging me
to introduce him to you. Porfiry and you have sniffed each other out
without me. Where is your tobacco?"

Porfiry Petrovitch was wearing a dressing-gown, very clean linen, and
trodden-down slippers. He was a man of about five and thirty, short,
stout even to corpulence, and clean shaven. He wore his hair cut short
and had a large round head, particularly prominent at the back. His
soft, round, rather snub-nosed face was of a sickly yellowish colour,
but had a vigorous and rather ironical expression. It would have been
good-natured except for a look in the eyes, which shone with a watery,
mawkish light under almost white, blinking eyelashes. The expression
of those eyes was strangely out of keeping with his somewhat womanish
figure, and gave it something far more serious than could be guessed at
first sight.

As soon as Porfiry Petrovitch heard that his visitor had a little matter
of business with him, he begged him to sit down on the sofa and sat down
himself on the other end, waiting for him to explain his business, with
that careful and over-serious attention which is at once oppressive and
embarrassing, especially to a stranger, and especially if what you are
discussing is in your opinion of far too little importance for such
exceptional solemnity. But in brief and coherent phrases Raskolnikov
explained his business clearly and exactly, and was so well satisfied
with himself that he even succeeded in taking a good look at Porfiry.
Porfiry Petrovitch did not once take his eyes off him. Razumihin,
sitting opposite at the same table, listened warmly and impatiently,
looking from one to the other every moment with rather excessive
interest.

"Fool," Raskolnikov swore to himself.

"You have to give information to the police," Porfiry replied, with a
most businesslike air, "that having learnt of this incident, that is of
the murder, you beg to inform the lawyer in charge of the case that such
and such things belong to you, and that you desire to redeem them...
or... but they will write to you."

"That's just the point, that at the present moment," Raskolnikov tried
his utmost to feign embarrassment, "I am not quite in funds... and
even this trifling sum is beyond me... I only wanted, you see, for
the present to declare that the things are mine, and that when I have
money...."

"That's no matter," answered Porfiry Petrovitch, receiving his
explanation of his pecuniary position coldly, "but you can, if you
prefer, write straight to me, to say, that having been informed of the
matter, and claiming such and such as your property, you beg..."

"On an ordinary sheet of paper?" Raskolnikov interrupted eagerly, again
interested in the financial side of the question.

"Oh, the most ordinary," and suddenly Porfiry Petrovitch looked with
obvious irony at him, screwing up his eyes and, as it were, winking at
him. But perhaps it was Raskolnikov's fancy, for it all lasted but a
moment. There was certainly something of the sort, Raskolnikov could
have sworn he winked at him, goodness knows why.

"He knows," flashed through his mind like lightning.

"Forgive my troubling you about such trifles," he went on, a little
disconcerted, "the things are only worth five roubles, but I prize them
particularly for the sake of those from whom they came to me, and I must
confess that I was alarmed when I heard..."

"That's why you were so much struck when I mentioned to Zossimov that
Porfiry was inquiring for everyone who had pledges!" Razumihin put in
with obvious intention.

This was really unbearable. Raskolnikov could not help glancing at him
with a flash of vindictive anger in his black eyes, but immediately
recollected himself.

"You seem to be jeering at me, brother?" he said to him, with a
well-feigned irritability. "I dare say I do seem to you absurdly anxious
about such trash; but you mustn't think me selfish or grasping for that,
and these two things may be anything but trash in my eyes. I told you
just now that the silver watch, though it's not worth a cent, is the
only thing left us of my father's. You may laugh at me, but my mother is
here," he turned suddenly to Porfiry, "and if she knew," he turned again
hurriedly to Razumihin, carefully making his voice tremble, "that the
watch was lost, she would be in despair! You know what women are!"

"Not a bit of it! I didn't mean that at all! Quite the contrary!"
shouted Razumihin distressed.

"Was it right? Was it natural? Did I overdo it?" Raskolnikov asked
himself in a tremor. "Why did I say that about women?"

"Oh, your mother is with you?" Porfiry Petrovitch inquired.

"Yes."

"When did she come?"

"Last night."

Porfiry paused as though reflecting.

"Your things would not in any case be lost," he went on calmly and
coldly. "I have been expecting you here for some time."

And as though that was a matter of no importance, he carefully offered
the ash-tray to Razumihin, who was ruthlessly scattering cigarette ash
over the carpet. Raskolnikov shuddered, but Porfiry did not seem to be
looking at him, and was still concerned with Razumihin's cigarette.

"What? Expecting him? Why, did you know that he had pledges _there_?"
cried Razumihin.

Porfiry Petrovitch addressed himself to Raskolnikov.

"Your things, the ring and the watch, were wrapped up together, and on
the paper your name was legibly written in pencil, together with the
date on which you left them with her..."

"How observant you are!" Raskolnikov smiled awkwardly, doing his very
utmost to look him straight in the face, but he failed, and suddenly
added:

"I say that because I suppose there were a great many pledges... that it
must be difficult to remember them all.... But you remember them all so
clearly, and... and..."

"Stupid! Feeble!" he thought. "Why did I add that?"

"But we know all who had pledges, and you are the only one who hasn't
come forward," Porfiry answered with hardly perceptible irony.

"I haven't been quite well."

"I heard that too. I heard, indeed, that you were in great distress
about something. You look pale still."

"I am not pale at all.... No, I am quite well," Raskolnikov snapped
out rudely and angrily, completely changing his tone. His anger was
mounting, he could not repress it. "And in my anger I shall betray
myself," flashed through his mind again. "Why are they torturing me?"

"Not quite well!" Razumihin caught him up. "What next! He was
unconscious and delirious all yesterday. Would you believe, Porfiry, as
soon as our backs were turned, he dressed, though he could hardly stand,
and gave us the slip and went off on a spree somewhere till midnight,
delirious all the time! Would you believe it! Extraordinary!"

"Really delirious? You don't say so!" Porfiry shook his head in a
womanish way.

"Nonsense! Don't you believe it! But you don't believe it anyway,"
Raskolnikov let slip in his anger. But Porfiry Petrovitch did not seem
to catch those strange words.

"But how could you have gone out if you hadn't been delirious?"
Razumihin got hot suddenly. "What did you go out for? What was the
object of it? And why on the sly? Were you in your senses when you did
it? Now that all danger is over I can speak plainly."

"I was awfully sick of them yesterday." Raskolnikov addressed Porfiry
suddenly with a smile of insolent defiance, "I ran away from them to
take lodgings where they wouldn't find me, and took a lot of money with
me. Mr. Zametov there saw it. I say, Mr. Zametov, was I sensible or
delirious yesterday; settle our dispute."

He could have strangled Zametov at that moment, so hateful were his
expression and his silence to him.

"In my opinion you talked sensibly and even artfully, but you were
extremely irritable," Zametov pronounced dryly.

"And Nikodim Fomitch was telling me to-day," put in Porfiry Petrovitch,
"that he met you very late last night in the lodging of a man who had
been run over."

"And there," said Razumihin, "weren't you mad then? You gave your last
penny to the widow for the funeral. If you wanted to help, give fifteen
or twenty even, but keep three roubles for yourself at least, but he
flung away all the twenty-five at once!"

"Maybe I found a treasure somewhere and you know nothing of it? So
that's why I was liberal yesterday.... Mr. Zametov knows I've found a
treasure! Excuse us, please, for disturbing you for half an hour
with such trivialities," he said, turning to Porfiry Petrovitch, with
trembling lips. "We are boring you, aren't we?"

"Oh no, quite the contrary, quite the contrary! If only you knew how you
interest me! It's interesting to look on and listen... and I am really
glad you have come forward at last."

"But you might give us some tea! My throat's dry," cried Razumihin.

"Capital idea! Perhaps we will all keep you company. Wouldn't you
like... something more essential before tea?"

"Get along with you!"

Porfiry Petrovitch went out to order tea.

Raskolnikov's thoughts were in a whirl. He was in terrible exasperation.

"The worst of it is they don't disguise it; they don't care to stand on
ceremony! And how if you didn't know me at all, did you come to talk
to Nikodim Fomitch about me? So they don't care to hide that they are
tracking me like a pack of dogs. They simply spit in my face." He was
shaking with rage. "Come, strike me openly, don't play with me like a
cat with a mouse. It's hardly civil, Porfiry Petrovitch, but perhaps I
won't allow it! I shall get up and throw the whole truth in your ugly
faces, and you'll see how I despise you." He could hardly breathe.
"And what if it's only my fancy? What if I am mistaken, and through
inexperience I get angry and don't keep up my nasty part? Perhaps it's
all unintentional. All their phrases are the usual ones, but there is
something about them.... It all might be said, but there is something.
Why did he say bluntly, 'With her'? Why did Zametov add that I spoke
artfully? Why do they speak in that tone? Yes, the tone.... Razumihin
is sitting here, why does he see nothing? That innocent blockhead never
does see anything! Feverish again! Did Porfiry wink at me just now? Of
course it's nonsense! What could he wink for? Are they trying to upset
my nerves or are they teasing me? Either it's ill fancy or they know!
Even Zametov is rude.... Is Zametov rude? Zametov has changed his mind.
I foresaw he would change his mind! He is at home here, while it's my
first visit. Porfiry does not consider him a visitor; sits with his back
to him. They're as thick as thieves, no doubt, over me! Not a doubt they
were talking about me before we came. Do they know about the flat? If
only they'd make haste! When I said that I ran away to take a flat he
let it pass.... I put that in cleverly about a flat, it may be of use
afterwards.... Delirious, indeed... ha-ha-ha! He knows all about last
night! He didn't know of my mother's arrival! The hag had written the
date on in pencil! You are wrong, you won't catch me! There are no
facts... it's all supposition! You produce facts! The flat even isn't a
fact but delirium. I know what to say to them.... Do they know about the
flat? I won't go without finding out. What did I come for? But my being
angry now, maybe is a fact! Fool, how irritable I am! Perhaps that's
right; to play the invalid.... He is feeling me. He will try to catch
me. Why did I come?"

All this flashed like lightning through his mind.

Porfiry Petrovitch returned quickly. He became suddenly more jovial.

"Your party yesterday, brother, has left my head rather.... And I am out
of sorts altogether," he began in quite a different tone, laughing to
Razumihin.

"Was it interesting? I left you yesterday at the most interesting point.
Who got the best of it?"

"Oh, no one, of course. They got on to everlasting questions, floated
off into space."

"Only fancy, Rodya, what we got on to yesterday. Whether there is such a
thing as crime. I told you that we talked our heads off."

"What is there strange? It's an everyday social question," Raskolnikov
answered casually.

"The question wasn't put quite like that," observed Porfiry.

"Not quite, that's true," Razumihin agreed at once, getting warm and
hurried as usual. "Listen, Rodion, and tell us your opinion, I want to
hear it. I was fighting tooth and nail with them and wanted you to
help me. I told them you were coming.... It began with the socialist
doctrine. You know their doctrine; crime is a protest against the
abnormality of the social organisation and nothing more, and nothing
more; no other causes admitted!..."

"You are wrong there," cried Porfiry Petrovitch; he was noticeably
animated and kept laughing as he looked at Razumihin, which made him
more excited than ever.

"Nothing is admitted," Razumihin interrupted with heat.

"I am not wrong. I'll show you their pamphlets. Everything with them
is 'the influence of environment,' and nothing else. Their favourite
phrase! From which it follows that, if society is normally organised,
all crime will cease at once, since there will be nothing to protest
against and all men will become righteous in one instant. Human nature
is not taken into account, it is excluded, it's not supposed to exist!
They don't recognise that humanity, developing by a historical living
process, will become at last a normal society, but they believe that a
social system that has come out of some mathematical brain is going
to organise all humanity at once and make it just and sinless in an
instant, quicker than any living process! That's why they instinctively
dislike history, 'nothing but ugliness and stupidity in it,' and they
explain it all as stupidity! That's why they so dislike the _living_
process of life; they don't want a _living soul_! The living soul
demands life, the soul won't obey the rules of mechanics, the soul is an
object of suspicion, the soul is retrograde! But what they want though
it smells of death and can be made of India-rubber, at least is not
alive, has no will, is servile and won't revolt! And it comes in the end
to their reducing everything to the building of walls and the planning
of rooms and passages in a phalanstery! The phalanstery is ready,
indeed, but your human nature is not ready for the phalanstery--it
wants life, it hasn't completed its vital process, it's too soon for the
graveyard! You can't skip over nature by logic. Logic presupposes three
possibilities, but there are millions! Cut away a million, and reduce
it all to the question of comfort! That's the easiest solution of the
problem! It's seductively clear and you musn't think about it. That's
the great thing, you mustn't think! The whole secret of life in two
pages of print!"

"Now he is off, beating the drum! Catch hold of him, do!" laughed
Porfiry. "Can you imagine," he turned to Raskolnikov, "six people
holding forth like that last night, in one room, with punch as a
preliminary! No, brother, you are wrong, environment accounts for a
great deal in crime; I can assure you of that."

"Oh, I know it does, but just tell me: a man of forty violates a child
of ten; was it environment drove him to it?"

"Well, strictly speaking, it did," Porfiry observed with noteworthy
gravity; "a crime of that nature may be very well ascribed to the
influence of environment."

Razumihin was almost in a frenzy. "Oh, if you like," he roared. "I'll
prove to you that your white eyelashes may very well be ascribed to the
Church of Ivan the Great's being two hundred and fifty feet high, and I
will prove it clearly, exactly, progressively, and even with a Liberal
tendency! I undertake to! Will you bet on it?"

"Done! Let's hear, please, how he will prove it!"

"He is always humbugging, confound him," cried Razumihin, jumping up and
gesticulating. "What's the use of talking to you? He does all that
on purpose; you don't know him, Rodion! He took their side yesterday,
simply to make fools of them. And the things he said yesterday! And they
were delighted! He can keep it up for a fortnight together. Last year he
persuaded us that he was going into a monastery: he stuck to it for two
months. Not long ago he took it into his head to declare he was going
to get married, that he had everything ready for the wedding. He ordered
new clothes indeed. We all began to congratulate him. There was no
bride, nothing, all pure fantasy!"

"Ah, you are wrong! I got the clothes before. It was the new clothes in
fact that made me think of taking you in."

"Are you such a good dissembler?" Raskolnikov asked carelessly.

"You wouldn't have supposed it, eh? Wait a bit, I shall take you in,
too. Ha-ha-ha! No, I'll tell you the truth. All these questions about
crime, environment, children, recall to my mind an article of yours
which interested me at the time. 'On Crime'... or something of the
sort, I forget the title, I read it with pleasure two months ago in the
_Periodical Review_."

"My article? In the _Periodical Review_?" Raskolnikov asked in
astonishment. "I certainly did write an article upon a book six months
ago when I left the university, but I sent it to the _Weekly Review_."

"But it came out in the _Periodical_."

"And the _Weekly Review_ ceased to exist, so that's why it wasn't
printed at the time."

"That's true; but when it ceased to exist, the _Weekly Review_ was
amalgamated with the _Periodical_, and so your article appeared two
months ago in the latter. Didn't you know?"

Raskolnikov had not known.

"Why, you might get some money out of them for the article! What a
strange person you are! You lead such a solitary life that you know
nothing of matters that concern you directly. It's a fact, I assure
you."

"Bravo, Rodya! I knew nothing about it either!" cried Razumihin. "I'll
run to-day to the reading-room and ask for the number. Two months ago?
What was the date? It doesn't matter though, I will find it. Think of
not telling us!"

"How did you find out that the article was mine? It's only signed with
an initial."

"I only learnt it by chance, the other day. Through the editor; I know
him.... I was very much interested."

"I analysed, if I remember, the psychology of a criminal before and
after the crime."

"Yes, and you maintained that the perpetration of a crime is always
accompanied by illness. Very, very original, but... it was not that part
of your article that interested me so much, but an idea at the end of
the article which I regret to say you merely suggested without working
it out clearly. There is, if you recollect, a suggestion that there are
certain persons who can... that is, not precisely are able to, but have
a perfect right to commit breaches of morality and crimes, and that the
law is not for them."

Raskolnikov smiled at the exaggerated and intentional distortion of his
idea.

"What? What do you mean? A right to crime? But not because of the
influence of environment?" Razumihin inquired with some alarm even.

"No, not exactly because of it," answered Porfiry. "In his article all
men are divided into 'ordinary' and 'extraordinary.' Ordinary men have
to live in submission, have no right to transgress the law, because,
don't you see, they are ordinary. But extraordinary men have a right to
commit any crime and to transgress the law in any way, just because they
are extraordinary. That was your idea, if I am not mistaken?"

"What do you mean? That can't be right?" Razumihin muttered in
bewilderment.

Raskolnikov smiled again. He saw the point at once, and knew where they
wanted to drive him. He decided to take up the challenge.

"That wasn't quite my contention," he began simply and modestly. "Yet
I admit that you have stated it almost correctly; perhaps, if you like,
perfectly so." (It almost gave him pleasure to admit this.) "The only
difference is that I don't contend that extraordinary people are always
bound to commit breaches of morals, as you call it. In fact, I doubt
whether such an argument could be published. I simply hinted that an
'extraordinary' man has the right... that is not an official right, but
an inner right to decide in his own conscience to overstep... certain
obstacles, and only in case it is essential for the practical fulfilment
of his idea (sometimes, perhaps, of benefit to the whole of humanity).
You say that my article isn't definite; I am ready to make it as clear
as I can. Perhaps I am right in thinking you want me to; very well. I
maintain that if the discoveries of Kepler and Newton could not have
been made known except by sacrificing the lives of one, a dozen, a
hundred, or more men, Newton would have had the right, would indeed have
been in duty bound... to _eliminate_ the dozen or the hundred men for
the sake of making his discoveries known to the whole of humanity. But
it does not follow from that that Newton had a right to murder people
right and left and to steal every day in the market. Then, I remember, I
maintain in my article that all... well, legislators and leaders of men,
such as Lycurgus, Solon, Mahomet, Napoleon, and so on, were all without
exception criminals, from the very fact that, making a new law, they
transgressed the ancient one, handed down from their ancestors and held
sacred by the people, and they did not stop short at bloodshed either,
if that bloodshed--often of innocent persons fighting bravely in defence
of ancient law--were of use to their cause. It's remarkable, in fact,
that the majority, indeed, of these benefactors and leaders of humanity
were guilty of terrible carnage. In short, I maintain that all great men
or even men a little out of the common, that is to say capable of giving
some new word, must from their very nature be criminals--more or less,
of course. Otherwise it's hard for them to get out of the common rut;
and to remain in the common rut is what they can't submit to, from their
very nature again, and to my mind they ought not, indeed, to submit to
it. You see that there is nothing particularly new in all that. The
same thing has been printed and read a thousand times before. As for my
division of people into ordinary and extraordinary, I acknowledge that
it's somewhat arbitrary, but I don't insist upon exact numbers. I only
believe in my leading idea that men are _in general_ divided by a law
of nature into two categories, inferior (ordinary), that is, so to say,
material that serves only to reproduce its kind, and men who have
the gift or the talent to utter _a new word_. There are, of course,
innumerable sub-divisions, but the distinguishing features of both
categories are fairly well marked. The first category, generally
speaking, are men conservative in temperament and law-abiding; they live
under control and love to be controlled. To my thinking it is their duty
to be controlled, because that's their vocation, and there is nothing
humiliating in it for them. The second category all transgress the
law; they are destroyers or disposed to destruction according to their
capacities. The crimes of these men are of course relative and varied;
for the most part they seek in very varied ways the destruction of the
present for the sake of the better. But if such a one is forced for the
sake of his idea to step over a corpse or wade through blood, he can, I
maintain, find within himself, in his conscience, a sanction for wading
through blood--that depends on the idea and its dimensions, note that.
It's only in that sense I speak of their right to crime in my article
(you remember it began with the legal question). There's no need for
such anxiety, however; the masses will scarcely ever admit this right,
they punish them or hang them (more or less), and in doing so fulfil
quite justly their conservative vocation. But the same masses set these
criminals on a pedestal in the next generation and worship them (more or
less). The first category is always the man of the present, the second
the man of the future. The first preserve the world and people it, the
second move the world and lead it to its goal. Each class has an equal
right to exist. In fact, all have equal rights with me--and _vive la
guerre éternelle_--till the New Jerusalem, of course!"

"Then you believe in the New Jerusalem, do you?"

"I do," Raskolnikov answered firmly; as he said these words and during
the whole preceding tirade he kept his eyes on one spot on the carpet.

"And... and do you believe in God? Excuse my curiosity."

"I do," repeated Raskolnikov, raising his eyes to Porfiry.

"And... do you believe in Lazarus' rising from the dead?"

"I... I do. Why do you ask all this?"

"You believe it literally?"

"Literally."

"You don't say so.... I asked from curiosity. Excuse me. But let us
go back to the question; they are not always executed. Some, on the
contrary..."

"Triumph in their lifetime? Oh, yes, some attain their ends in this
life, and then..."

"They begin executing other people?"

"If it's necessary; indeed, for the most part they do. Your remark is
very witty."

"Thank you. But tell me this: how do you distinguish those extraordinary
people from the ordinary ones? Are there signs at their birth? I feel
there ought to be more exactitude, more external definition. Excuse the
natural anxiety of a practical law-abiding citizen, but couldn't they
adopt a special uniform, for instance, couldn't they wear something, be
branded in some way? For you know if confusion arises and a member of
one category imagines that he belongs to the other, begins to 'eliminate
obstacles' as you so happily expressed it, then..."

"Oh, that very often happens! That remark is wittier than the other."

"Thank you."

"No reason to; but take note that the mistake can only arise in
the first category, that is among the ordinary people (as I perhaps
unfortunately called them). In spite of their predisposition to
obedience very many of them, through a playfulness of nature, sometimes
vouchsafed even to the cow, like to imagine themselves advanced people,
'destroyers,' and to push themselves into the 'new movement,' and
this quite sincerely. Meanwhile the really _new_ people are very often
unobserved by them, or even despised as reactionaries of grovelling
tendencies. But I don't think there is any considerable danger here,
and you really need not be uneasy for they never go very far. Of course,
they might have a thrashing sometimes for letting their fancy run away
with them and to teach them their place, but no more; in fact, even
this isn't necessary as they castigate themselves, for they are very
conscientious: some perform this service for one another and others
chastise themselves with their own hands.... They will impose various
public acts of penitence upon themselves with a beautiful and edifying
effect; in fact you've nothing to be uneasy about.... It's a law of
nature."

"Well, you have certainly set my mind more at rest on that score; but
there's another thing worries me. Tell me, please, are there many people
who have the right to kill others, these extraordinary people? I am
ready to bow down to them, of course, but you must admit it's alarming
if there are a great many of them, eh?"

"Oh, you needn't worry about that either," Raskolnikov went on in the
same tone. "People with new ideas, people with the faintest capacity for
saying something _new_, are extremely few in number, extraordinarily
so in fact. One thing only is clear, that the appearance of all these
grades and sub-divisions of men must follow with unfailing regularity
some law of nature. That law, of course, is unknown at present, but I am
convinced that it exists, and one day may become known. The vast mass of
mankind is mere material, and only exists in order by some great effort,
by some mysterious process, by means of some crossing of races and
stocks, to bring into the world at last perhaps one man out of a
thousand with a spark of independence. One in ten thousand perhaps--I
speak roughly, approximately--is born with some independence, and with
still greater independence one in a hundred thousand. The man of genius
is one of millions, and the great geniuses, the crown of humanity,
appear on earth perhaps one in many thousand millions. In fact I have
not peeped into the retort in which all this takes place. But there
certainly is and must be a definite law, it cannot be a matter of
chance."

"Why, are you both joking?" Razumihin cried at last. "There you sit,
making fun of one another. Are you serious, Rodya?"

Raskolnikov raised his pale and almost mournful face and made no reply.
And the unconcealed, persistent, nervous, and _discourteous_ sarcasm of
Porfiry seemed strange to Razumihin beside that quiet and mournful face.

"Well, brother, if you are really serious... You are right, of course,
in saying that it's not new, that it's like what we've read and heard a
thousand times already; but what is really original in all this, and is
exclusively your own, to my horror, is that you sanction bloodshed
_in the name of conscience_, and, excuse my saying so, with such
fanaticism.... That, I take it, is the point of your article. But that
sanction of bloodshed _by conscience_ is to my mind... more terrible
than the official, legal sanction of bloodshed...."

"You are quite right, it is more terrible," Porfiry agreed.

"Yes, you must have exaggerated! There is some mistake, I shall read it.
You can't think that! I shall read it."

"All that is not in the article, there's only a hint of it," said
Raskolnikov.

"Yes, yes." Porfiry couldn't sit still. "Your attitude to crime is
pretty clear to me now, but... excuse me for my impertinence (I am
really ashamed to be worrying you like this), you see, you've removed
my anxiety as to the two grades getting mixed, but... there are various
practical possibilities that make me uneasy! What if some man or youth
imagines that he is a Lycurgus or Mahomet--a future one of course--and
suppose he begins to remove all obstacles.... He has some great
enterprise before him and needs money for it... and tries to get it...
do you see?"

Zametov gave a sudden guffaw in his corner. Raskolnikov did not even
raise his eyes to him.

"I must admit," he went on calmly, "that such cases certainly must
arise. The vain and foolish are particularly apt to fall into that
snare; young people especially."

"Yes, you see. Well then?"

"What then?" Raskolnikov smiled in reply; "that's not my fault. So it is
and so it always will be. He said just now (he nodded at Razumihin)
that I sanction bloodshed. Society is too well protected by prisons,
banishment, criminal investigators, penal servitude. There's no need to
be uneasy. You have but to catch the thief."

"And what if we do catch him?"

"Then he gets what he deserves."

"You are certainly logical. But what of his conscience?"

"Why do you care about that?"

"Simply from humanity."

"If he has a conscience he will suffer for his mistake. That will be his
punishment--as well as the prison."

"But the real geniuses," asked Razumihin frowning, "those who have
the right to murder? Oughtn't they to suffer at all even for the blood
they've shed?"

"Why the word _ought_? It's not a matter of permission or prohibition.
He will suffer if he is sorry for his victim. Pain and suffering are
always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The
really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth," he added
dreamily, not in the tone of the conversation.

He raised his eyes, looked earnestly at them all, smiled, and took his
cap. He was too quiet by comparison with his manner at his entrance, and
he felt this. Everyone got up.

"Well, you may abuse me, be angry with me if you like," Porfiry
Petrovitch began again, "but I can't resist. Allow me one little
question (I know I am troubling you). There is just one little notion I
want to express, simply that I may not forget it."

"Very good, tell me your little notion," Raskolnikov stood waiting, pale
and grave before him.

"Well, you see... I really don't know how to express it properly....
It's a playful, psychological idea.... When you were writing your
article, surely you couldn't have helped, he-he! fancying yourself...
just a little, an 'extraordinary' man, uttering a _new word_ in your
sense.... That's so, isn't it?"

"Quite possibly," Raskolnikov answered contemptuously.

Razumihin made a movement.

"And, if so, could you bring yourself in case of worldly difficulties
and hardship or for some service to humanity--to overstep obstacles?...
For instance, to rob and murder?"

And again he winked with his left eye, and laughed noiselessly just as
before.

"If I did I certainly should not tell you," Raskolnikov answered with
defiant and haughty contempt.

"No, I was only interested on account of your article, from a literary
point of view..."

"Foo! how obvious and insolent that is!" Raskolnikov thought with
repulsion.

"Allow me to observe," he answered dryly, "that I don't consider myself
a Mahomet or a Napoleon, nor any personage of that kind, and not being
one of them I cannot tell you how I should act."

"Oh, come, don't we all think ourselves Napoleons now in Russia?"
Porfiry Petrovitch said with alarming familiarity.

Something peculiar betrayed itself in the very intonation of his voice.

"Perhaps it was one of these future Napoleons who did for Alyona
Ivanovna last week?" Zametov blurted out from the corner.

Raskolnikov did not speak, but looked firmly and intently at Porfiry.
Razumihin was scowling gloomily. He seemed before this to be noticing
something. He looked angrily around. There was a minute of gloomy
silence. Raskolnikov turned to go.

"Are you going already?" Porfiry said amiably, holding out his hand with
excessive politeness. "Very, very glad of your acquaintance. As for your
request, have no uneasiness, write just as I told you, or, better still,
come to me there yourself in a day or two... to-morrow, indeed. I shall
be there at eleven o'clock for certain. We'll arrange it all; we'll have
a talk. As one of the last to be _there_, you might perhaps be able to
tell us something," he added with a most good-natured expression.

"You want to cross-examine me officially in due form?" Raskolnikov asked
sharply.

"Oh, why? That's not necessary for the present. You misunderstand me.
I lose no opportunity, you see, and... I've talked with all who had
pledges.... I obtained evidence from some of them, and you are the
last.... Yes, by the way," he cried, seemingly suddenly delighted, "I
just remember, what was I thinking of?" he turned to Razumihin, "you
were talking my ears off about that Nikolay... of course, I know, I know
very well," he turned to Raskolnikov, "that the fellow is innocent, but
what is one to do? We had to trouble Dmitri too.... This is the point,
this is all: when you went up the stairs it was past seven, wasn't it?"

"Yes," answered Raskolnikov, with an unpleasant sensation at the very
moment he spoke that he need not have said it.

"Then when you went upstairs between seven and eight, didn't you see in
a flat that stood open on a second storey, do you remember? two workmen
or at least one of them? They were painting there, didn't you notice
them? It's very, very important for them."

"Painters? No, I didn't see them," Raskolnikov answered slowly, as
though ransacking his memory, while at the same instant he was racking
every nerve, almost swooning with anxiety to conjecture as quickly as
possible where the trap lay and not to overlook anything. "No, I didn't
see them, and I don't think I noticed a flat like that open.... But on
the fourth storey" (he had mastered the trap now and was triumphant)
"I remember now that someone was moving out of the flat opposite Alyona
Ivanovna's.... I remember... I remember it clearly. Some porters
were carrying out a sofa and they squeezed me against the wall. But
painters... no, I don't remember that there were any painters, and I
don't think that there was a flat open anywhere, no, there wasn't."

"What do you mean?" Razumihin shouted suddenly, as though he had
reflected and realised. "Why, it was on the day of the murder the
painters were at work, and he was there three days before? What are you
asking?"

"Foo! I have muddled it!" Porfiry slapped himself on the forehead.
"Deuce take it! This business is turning my brain!" he addressed
Raskolnikov somewhat apologetically. "It would be such a great thing for
us to find out whether anyone had seen them between seven and eight at
the flat, so I fancied you could perhaps have told us something.... I
quite muddled it."

"Then you should be more careful," Razumihin observed grimly.

The last words were uttered in the passage. Porfiry Petrovitch saw them
to the door with excessive politeness.

They went out into the street gloomy and sullen, and for some steps they
did not say a word. Raskolnikov drew a deep breath.



CHAPTER VI

"I don't believe it, I can't believe it!" repeated Razumihin, trying in
perplexity to refute Raskolnikov's arguments.

They were by now approaching Bakaleyev's lodgings, where Pulcheria
Alexandrovna and Dounia had been expecting them a long while. Razumihin
kept stopping on the way in the heat of discussion, confused and excited
by the very fact that they were for the first time speaking openly about
_it_.

"Don't believe it, then!" answered Raskolnikov, with a cold, careless
smile. "You were noticing nothing as usual, but I was weighing every
word."

"You are suspicious. That is why you weighed their words... h'm...
certainly, I agree, Porfiry's tone was rather strange, and still
more that wretch Zametov!... You are right, there was something about
him--but why? Why?"

"He has changed his mind since last night."

"Quite the contrary! If they had that brainless idea, they would do
their utmost to hide it, and conceal their cards, so as to catch you
afterwards.... But it was all impudent and careless."

"If they had had facts--I mean, real facts--or at least grounds for
suspicion, then they would certainly have tried to hide their game,
in the hope of getting more (they would have made a search long ago
besides). But they have no facts, not one. It is all mirage--all
ambiguous. Simply a floating idea. So they try to throw me out by
impudence. And perhaps, he was irritated at having no facts, and blurted
it out in his vexation--or perhaps he has some plan... he seems an
intelligent man. Perhaps he wanted to frighten me by pretending to
know. They have a psychology of their own, brother. But it is loathsome
explaining it all. Stop!"

"And it's insulting, insulting! I understand you. But... since we have
spoken openly now (and it is an excellent thing that we have at last--I
am glad) I will own now frankly that I noticed it in them long ago,
this idea. Of course the merest hint only--an insinuation--but why an
insinuation even? How dare they? What foundation have they? If only you
knew how furious I have been. Think only! Simply because a poor student,
unhinged by poverty and hypochondria, on the eve of a severe delirious
illness (note that), suspicious, vain, proud, who has not seen a soul to
speak to for six months, in rags and in boots without soles, has to
face some wretched policemen and put up with their insolence; and
the unexpected debt thrust under his nose, the I.O.U. presented
by Tchebarov, the new paint, thirty degrees Reaumur and a stifling
atmosphere, a crowd of people, the talk about the murder of a person
where he had been just before, and all that on an empty stomach--he
might well have a fainting fit! And that, that is what they found it
all on! Damn them! I understand how annoying it is, but in your place,
Rodya, I would laugh at them, or better still, spit in their ugly faces,
and spit a dozen times in all directions. I'd hit out in all
directions, neatly too, and so I'd put an end to it. Damn them! Don't be
downhearted. It's a shame!"

"He really has put it well, though," Raskolnikov thought.

"Damn them? But the cross-examination again, to-morrow?" he said with
bitterness. "Must I really enter into explanations with them? I feel
vexed as it is, that I condescended to speak to Zametov yesterday in the
restaurant...."

"Damn it! I will go myself to Porfiry. I will squeeze it out of him, as
one of the family: he must let me know the ins and outs of it all! And
as for Zametov..."

"At last he sees through him!" thought Raskolnikov.

"Stay!" cried Razumihin, seizing him by the shoulder again. "Stay! you
were wrong. I have thought it out. You are wrong! How was that a trap?
You say that the question about the workmen was a trap. But if you had
done _that_, could you have said you had seen them painting the flat...
and the workmen? On the contrary, you would have seen nothing, even if
you had seen it. Who would own it against himself?"

"If I had done _that thing_, I should certainly have said that I had
seen the workmen and the flat," Raskolnikov answered, with reluctance
and obvious disgust.

"But why speak against yourself?"

"Because only peasants, or the most inexperienced novices deny
everything flatly at examinations. If a man is ever so little developed
and experienced, he will certainly try to admit all the external facts
that can't be avoided, but will seek other explanations of them, will
introduce some special, unexpected turn, that will give them another
significance and put them in another light. Porfiry might well reckon
that I should be sure to answer so, and say I had seen them to give an
air of truth, and then make some explanation."

"But he would have told you at once that the workmen could not have been
there two days before, and that therefore you must have been there on
the day of the murder at eight o'clock. And so he would have caught you
over a detail."

"Yes, that is what he was reckoning on, that I should not have time to
reflect, and should be in a hurry to make the most likely answer, and
so would forget that the workmen could not have been there two days
before."

"But how could you forget it?"

"Nothing easier. It is in just such stupid things clever people are most
easily caught. The more cunning a man is, the less he suspects that he
will be caught in a simple thing. The more cunning a man is, the simpler
the trap he must be caught in. Porfiry is not such a fool as you
think...."

"He is a knave then, if that is so!"

Raskolnikov could not help laughing. But at the very moment, he was
struck by the strangeness of his own frankness, and the eagerness
with which he had made this explanation, though he had kept up all the
preceding conversation with gloomy repulsion, obviously with a motive,
from necessity.

"I am getting a relish for certain aspects!" he thought to himself.
But almost at the same instant he became suddenly uneasy, as though an
unexpected and alarming idea had occurred to him. His uneasiness kept on
increasing. They had just reached the entrance to Bakaleyev's.

"Go in alone!" said Raskolnikov suddenly. "I will be back directly."

"Where are you going? Why, we are just here."

"I can't help it.... I will come in half an hour. Tell them."

"Say what you like, I will come with you."

"You, too, want to torture me!" he screamed, with such bitter
irritation, such despair in his eyes that Razumihin's hands dropped.
He stood for some time on the steps, looking gloomily at Raskolnikov
striding rapidly away in the direction of his lodging. At last, gritting
his teeth and clenching his fist, he swore he would squeeze Porfiry
like a lemon that very day, and went up the stairs to reassure Pulcheria
Alexandrovna, who was by now alarmed at their long absence.

When Raskolnikov got home, his hair was soaked with sweat and he was
breathing heavily. He went rapidly up the stairs, walked into his
unlocked room and at once fastened the latch. Then in senseless terror
he rushed to the corner, to that hole under the paper where he had put
the things; put his hand in, and for some minutes felt carefully in the
hole, in every crack and fold of the paper. Finding nothing, he got up
and drew a deep breath. As he was reaching the steps of Bakaleyev's, he
suddenly fancied that something, a chain, a stud or even a bit of paper
in which they had been wrapped with the old woman's handwriting on it,
might somehow have slipped out and been lost in some crack, and then
might suddenly turn up as unexpected, conclusive evidence against him.

He stood as though lost in thought, and a strange, humiliated, half
senseless smile strayed on his lips. He took his cap at last and went
quietly out of the room. His ideas were all tangled. He went dreamily
through the gateway.

"Here he is himself," shouted a loud voice.

He raised his head.

The porter was standing at the door of his little room and was pointing
him out to a short man who looked like an artisan, wearing a long coat
and a waistcoat, and looking at a distance remarkably like a woman. He
stooped, and his head in a greasy cap hung forward. From his wrinkled
flabby face he looked over fifty; his little eyes were lost in fat and
they looked out grimly, sternly and discontentedly.

"What is it?" Raskolnikov asked, going up to the porter.

The man stole a look at him from under his brows and he looked at him
attentively, deliberately; then he turned slowly and went out of the
gate into the street without saying a word.

"What is it?" cried Raskolnikov.

"Why, he there was asking whether a student lived here, mentioned your
name and whom you lodged with. I saw you coming and pointed you out and
he went away. It's funny."

The porter too seemed rather puzzled, but not much so, and after
wondering for a moment he turned and went back to his room.

Raskolnikov ran after the stranger, and at once caught sight of
him walking along the other side of the street with the same even,
deliberate step with his eyes fixed on the ground, as though in
meditation. He soon overtook him, but for some time walked behind him.
At last, moving on to a level with him, he looked at his face. The man
noticed him at once, looked at him quickly, but dropped his eyes again;
and so they walked for a minute side by side without uttering a word.

"You were inquiring for me... of the porter?" Raskolnikov said at last,
but in a curiously quiet voice.

The man made no answer; he didn't even look at him. Again they were both
silent.

"Why do you... come and ask for me... and say nothing.... What's the
meaning of it?"

Raskolnikov's voice broke and he seemed unable to articulate the words
clearly.

The man raised his eyes this time and turned a gloomy sinister look at
Raskolnikov.

"Murderer!" he said suddenly in a quiet but clear and distinct voice.

Raskolnikov went on walking beside him. His legs felt suddenly weak, a
cold shiver ran down his spine, and his heart seemed to stand still for
a moment, then suddenly began throbbing as though it were set free. So
they walked for about a hundred paces, side by side in silence.

The man did not look at him.

"What do you mean... what is.... Who is a murderer?" muttered
Raskolnikov hardly audibly.

"_You_ are a murderer," the man answered still more articulately and
emphatically, with a smile of triumphant hatred, and again he looked
straight into Raskolnikov's pale face and stricken eyes.

They had just reached the cross-roads. The man turned to the left
without looking behind him. Raskolnikov remained standing, gazing after
him. He saw him turn round fifty paces away and look back at him still
standing there. Raskolnikov could not see clearly, but he fancied that
he was again smiling the same smile of cold hatred and triumph.

With slow faltering steps, with shaking knees, Raskolnikov made his way
back to his little garret, feeling chilled all over. He took off his cap
and put it on the table, and for ten minutes he stood without moving.
Then he sank exhausted on the sofa and with a weak moan of pain he
stretched himself on it. So he lay for half an hour.

He thought of nothing. Some thoughts or fragments of thoughts, some
images without order or coherence floated before his mind--faces of
people he had seen in his childhood or met somewhere once, whom he would
never have recalled, the belfry of the church at V., the billiard table
in a restaurant and some officers playing billiards, the smell of cigars
in some underground tobacco shop, a tavern room, a back staircase quite
dark, all sloppy with dirty water and strewn with egg-shells, and the
Sunday bells floating in from somewhere.... The images followed one
another, whirling like a hurricane. Some of them he liked and tried
to clutch at, but they faded and all the while there was an oppression
within him, but it was not overwhelming, sometimes it was even
pleasant.... The slight shivering still persisted, but that too
was an almost pleasant sensation.

He heard the hurried footsteps of Razumihin; he closed his eyes and
pretended to be asleep. Razumihin opened the door and stood for some
time in the doorway as though hesitating, then he stepped softly into
the room and went cautiously to the sofa. Raskolnikov heard Nastasya's
whisper:

"Don't disturb him! Let him sleep. He can have his dinner later."

"Quite so," answered Razumihin. Both withdrew carefully and closed the
door. Another half-hour passed. Raskolnikov opened his eyes, turned on
his back again, clasping his hands behind his head.

"Who is he? Who is that man who sprang out of the earth? Where was he,
what did he see? He has seen it all, that's clear. Where was he then?
And from where did he see? Why has he only now sprung out of the earth?
And how could he see? Is it possible? Hm..." continued Raskolnikov,
turning cold and shivering, "and the jewel case Nikolay found behind the
door--was that possible? A clue? You miss an infinitesimal line and you
can build it into a pyramid of evidence! A fly flew by and saw it! Is it
possible?" He felt with sudden loathing how weak, how physically weak he
had become. "I ought to have known it," he thought with a bitter smile.
"And how dared I, knowing myself, knowing how I should be, take up an
axe and shed blood! I ought to have known beforehand.... Ah, but I did
know!" he whispered in despair. At times he came to a standstill at some
thought.

"No, those men are not made so. The real _Master_ to whom all is
permitted storms Toulon, makes a massacre in Paris, _forgets_ an army in
Egypt, _wastes_ half a million men in the Moscow expedition and gets off
with a jest at Vilna. And altars are set up to him after his death, and
so _all_ is permitted. No, such people, it seems, are not of flesh but
of bronze!"

One sudden irrelevant idea almost made him laugh. Napoleon, the
pyramids, Waterloo, and a wretched skinny old woman, a pawnbroker with
a red trunk under her bed--it's a nice hash for Porfiry Petrovitch to
digest! How can they digest it! It's too inartistic. "A Napoleon creep
under an old woman's bed! Ugh, how loathsome!"

At moments he felt he was raving. He sank into a state of feverish
excitement. "The old woman is of no consequence," he thought, hotly and
incoherently. "The old woman was a mistake perhaps, but she is not
what matters! The old woman was only an illness.... I was in a hurry to
overstep.... I didn't kill a human being, but a principle! I killed the
principle, but I didn't overstep, I stopped on this side.... I was
only capable of killing. And it seems I wasn't even capable of that...
Principle? Why was that fool Razumihin abusing the socialists? They are
industrious, commercial people; 'the happiness of all' is their case.
No, life is only given to me once and I shall never have it again; I
don't want to wait for 'the happiness of all.' I want to live myself,
or else better not live at all. I simply couldn't pass by my mother
starving, keeping my rouble in my pocket while I waited for the
'happiness of all.' I am putting my little brick into the happiness of
all and so my heart is at peace. Ha-ha! Why have you let me slip? I only
live once, I too want.... Ech, I am an æsthetic louse and nothing
more," he added suddenly, laughing like a madman. "Yes, I am certainly a
louse," he went on, clutching at the idea, gloating over it and playing
with it with vindictive pleasure. "In the first place, because I can
reason that I am one, and secondly, because for a month past I have been
troubling benevolent Providence, calling it to witness that not for
my own fleshly lusts did I undertake it, but with a grand and noble
object--ha-ha! Thirdly, because I aimed at carrying it out as justly as
possible, weighing, measuring and calculating. Of all the lice I picked
out the most useless one and proposed to take from her only as much as I
needed for the first step, no more nor less (so the rest would have gone
to a monastery, according to her will, ha-ha!). And what shows that I
am utterly a louse," he added, grinding his teeth, "is that I am
perhaps viler and more loathsome than the louse I killed, and _I felt
beforehand_ that I should tell myself so _after_ killing her. Can
anything be compared with the horror of that? The vulgarity! The
abjectness! I understand the 'prophet' with his sabre, on his steed:
Allah commands and 'trembling' creation must obey! The 'prophet' is
right, he is right when he sets a battery across the street and blows up
the innocent and the guilty without deigning to explain! It's for you to
obey, trembling creation, and not _to have desires_, for that's not for
you!... I shall never, never forgive the old woman!"

His hair was soaked with sweat, his quivering lips were parched, his
eyes were fixed on the ceiling.

"Mother, sister--how I loved them! Why do I hate them now? Yes, I hate
them, I feel a physical hatred for them, I can't bear them near me....
I went up to my mother and kissed her, I remember.... To embrace her
and think if she only knew... shall I tell her then? That's just what
I might do.... _She_ must be the same as I am," he added, straining
himself to think, as it were struggling with delirium. "Ah, how I hate
the old woman now! I feel I should kill her again if she came to life!
Poor Lizaveta! Why did she come in?... It's strange though, why is it
I scarcely ever think of her, as though I hadn't killed her? Lizaveta!
Sonia! Poor gentle things, with gentle eyes.... Dear women! Why don't
they weep? Why don't they moan? They give up everything... their eyes
are soft and gentle.... Sonia, Sonia! Gentle Sonia!"

He lost consciousness; it seemed strange to him that he didn't remember
how he got into the street. It was late evening. The twilight had fallen
and the full moon was shining more and more brightly; but there was a
peculiar breathlessness in the air. There were crowds of people in the
street; workmen and business people were making their way home; other
people had come out for a walk; there was a smell of mortar, dust and
stagnant water. Raskolnikov walked along, mournful and anxious; he was
distinctly aware of having come out with a purpose, of having to do
something in a hurry, but what it was he had forgotten. Suddenly he
stood still and saw a man standing on the other side of the street,
beckoning to him. He crossed over to him, but at once the man turned and
walked away with his head hanging, as though he had made no sign to
him. "Stay, did he really beckon?" Raskolnikov wondered, but he tried
to overtake him. When he was within ten paces he recognised him and
was frightened; it was the same man with stooping shoulders in the long
coat. Raskolnikov followed him at a distance; his heart was beating;
they went down a turning; the man still did not look round. "Does he
know I am following him?" thought Raskolnikov. The man went into the
gateway of a big house. Raskolnikov hastened to the gate and looked in
to see whether he would look round and sign to him. In the court-yard
the man did turn round and again seemed to beckon him. Raskolnikov at
once followed him into the yard, but the man was gone. He must have
gone up the first staircase. Raskolnikov rushed after him. He heard
slow measured steps two flights above. The staircase seemed strangely
familiar. He reached the window on the first floor; the moon shone
through the panes with a melancholy and mysterious light; then he
reached the second floor. Bah! this is the flat where the painters were
at work... but how was it he did not recognise it at once? The steps
of the man above had died away. "So he must have stopped or hidden
somewhere." He reached the third storey, should he go on? There was a
stillness that was dreadful.... But he went on. The sound of his own
footsteps scared and frightened him. How dark it was! The man must be
hiding in some corner here. Ah! the flat was standing wide open, he
hesitated and went in. It was very dark and empty in the passage, as
though everything had been removed; he crept on tiptoe into the parlour
which was flooded with moonlight. Everything there was as before, the
chairs, the looking-glass, the yellow sofa and the pictures in the
frames. A huge, round, copper-red moon looked in at the windows.
"It's the moon that makes it so still, weaving some mystery," thought
Raskolnikov. He stood and waited, waited a long while, and the more
silent the moonlight, the more violently his heart beat, till it was
painful. And still the same hush. Suddenly he heard a momentary sharp
crack like the snapping of a splinter and all was still again. A fly
flew up suddenly and struck the window pane with a plaintive buzz. At
that moment he noticed in the corner between the window and the little
cupboard something like a cloak hanging on the wall. "Why is that cloak
here?" he thought, "it wasn't there before...." He went up to it quietly
and felt that there was someone hiding behind it. He cautiously moved
the cloak and saw, sitting on a chair in the corner, the old woman bent
double so that he couldn't see her face; but it was she. He stood over
her. "She is afraid," he thought. He stealthily took the axe from the
noose and struck her one blow, then another on the skull. But strange
to say she did not stir, as though she were made of wood. He was
frightened, bent down nearer and tried to look at her; but she, too,
bent her head lower. He bent right down to the ground and peeped up
into her face from below, he peeped and turned cold with horror: the old
woman was sitting and laughing, shaking with noiseless laughter, doing
her utmost that he should not hear it. Suddenly he fancied that the door
from the bedroom was opened a little and that there was laughter and
whispering within. He was overcome with frenzy and he began hitting the
old woman on the head with all his force, but at every blow of the axe
the laughter and whispering from the bedroom grew louder and the old
woman was simply shaking with mirth. He was rushing away, but the
passage was full of people, the doors of the flats stood open and on the
landing, on the stairs and everywhere below there were people, rows of
heads, all looking, but huddled together in silence and expectation.
Something gripped his heart, his legs were rooted to the spot, they
would not move.... He tried to scream and woke up.

He drew a deep breath--but his dream seemed strangely to persist:
his door was flung open and a man whom he had never seen stood in the
doorway watching him intently.

Raskolnikov had hardly opened his eyes and he instantly closed them
again. He lay on his back without stirring.

"Is it still a dream?" he wondered and again raised his eyelids hardly
perceptibly; the stranger was standing in the same place, still watching
him.

He stepped cautiously into the room, carefully closing the door after
him, went up to the table, paused a moment, still keeping his eyes on
Raskolnikov, and noiselessly seated himself on the chair by the sofa; he
put his hat on the floor beside him and leaned his hands on his cane
and his chin on his hands. It was evident that he was prepared to wait
indefinitely. As far as Raskolnikov could make out from his stolen
glances, he was a man no longer young, stout, with a full, fair, almost
whitish beard.

Ten minutes passed. It was still light, but beginning to get dusk. There
was complete stillness in the room. Not a sound came from the stairs.
Only a big fly buzzed and fluttered against the window pane. It was
unbearable at last. Raskolnikov suddenly got up and sat on the sofa.

"Come, tell me what you want."

"I knew you were not asleep, but only pretending," the stranger answered
oddly, laughing calmly. "Arkady Ivanovitch Svidrigaïlov, allow me to
introduce myself...."




PART IV



CHAPTER I

"Can this be still a dream?" Raskolnikov thought once more.

He looked carefully and suspiciously at the unexpected visitor.

"Svidrigaïlov! What nonsense! It can't be!" he said at last aloud in
bewilderment.

His visitor did not seem at all surprised at this exclamation.

"I've come to you for two reasons. In the first place, I wanted to make
your personal acquaintance, as I have already heard a great deal about
you that is interesting and flattering; secondly, I cherish the hope
that you may not refuse to assist me in a matter directly concerning the
welfare of your sister, Avdotya Romanovna. For without your support she
might not let me come near her now, for she is prejudiced against me,
but with your assistance I reckon on..."

"You reckon wrongly," interrupted Raskolnikov.

"They only arrived yesterday, may I ask you?"

Raskolnikov made no reply.

"It was yesterday, I know. I only arrived myself the day before. Well,
let me tell you this, Rodion Romanovitch, I don't consider it necessary
to justify myself, but kindly tell me what was there particularly
criminal on my part in all this business, speaking without prejudice,
with common sense?"

Raskolnikov continued to look at him in silence.

"That in my own house I persecuted a defenceless girl and 'insulted her
with my infamous proposals'--is that it? (I am anticipating you.) But
you've only to assume that I, too, am a man _et nihil humanum_... in a
word, that I am capable of being attracted and falling in love (which
does not depend on our will), then everything can be explained in the
most natural manner. The question is, am I a monster, or am I myself
a victim? And what if I am a victim? In proposing to the object of my
passion to elope with me to America or Switzerland, I may have cherished
the deepest respect for her and may have thought that I was promoting
our mutual happiness! Reason is the slave of passion, you know; why,
probably, I was doing more harm to myself than anyone!"

"But that's not the point," Raskolnikov interrupted with disgust. "It's
simply that whether you are right or wrong, we dislike you. We don't
want to have anything to do with you. We show you the door. Go out!"

Svidrigaïlov broke into a sudden laugh.

"But you're... but there's no getting round you," he said, laughing in
the frankest way. "I hoped to get round you, but you took up the right
line at once!"

"But you are trying to get round me still!"

"What of it? What of it?" cried Svidrigaïlov, laughing openly. "But this
is what the French call _bonne guerre_, and the most innocent form of
deception!... But still you have interrupted me; one way or another, I
repeat again: there would never have been any unpleasantness except for
what happened in the garden. Marfa Petrovna..."

"You have got rid of Marfa Petrovna, too, so they say?" Raskolnikov
interrupted rudely.

"Oh, you've heard that, too, then? You'd be sure to, though.... But
as for your question, I really don't know what to say, though my own
conscience is quite at rest on that score. Don't suppose that I am in
any apprehension about it. All was regular and in order; the medical
inquiry diagnosed apoplexy due to bathing immediately after a heavy
dinner and a bottle of wine, and indeed it could have proved nothing
else. But I'll tell you what I have been thinking to myself of late, on
my way here in the train, especially: didn't I contribute to all that...
calamity, morally, in a way, by irritation or something of the
sort. But I came to the conclusion that that, too, was quite out of the
question."

Raskolnikov laughed.

"I wonder you trouble yourself about it!"

"But what are you laughing at? Only consider, I struck her just twice
with a switch--there were no marks even... don't regard me as a cynic,
please; I am perfectly aware how atrocious it was of me and all that;
but I know for certain, too, that Marfa Petrovna was very likely pleased
at my, so to say, warmth. The story of your sister had been wrung out to
the last drop; for the last three days Marfa Petrovna had been forced to
sit at home; she had nothing to show herself with in the town. Besides,
she had bored them so with that letter (you heard about her reading the
letter). And all of a sudden those two switches fell from heaven! Her
first act was to order the carriage to be got out.... Not to speak
of the fact that there are cases when women are very, very glad to be
insulted in spite of all their show of indignation. There are instances
of it with everyone; human beings in general, indeed, greatly love to
be insulted, have you noticed that? But it's particularly so with women.
One might even say it's their only amusement."

At one time Raskolnikov thought of getting up and walking out and so
finishing the interview. But some curiosity and even a sort of prudence
made him linger for a moment.

"You are fond of fighting?" he asked carelessly.

"No, not very," Svidrigaïlov answered, calmly. "And Marfa Petrovna and
I scarcely ever fought. We lived very harmoniously, and she was always
pleased with me. I only used the whip twice in all our seven years (not
counting a third occasion of a very ambiguous character). The first
time, two months after our marriage, immediately after we arrived in the
country, and the last time was that of which we are speaking. Did you
suppose I was such a monster, such a reactionary, such a slave driver?
Ha, ha! By the way, do you remember, Rodion Romanovitch, how a few years
ago, in those days of beneficent publicity, a nobleman, I've forgotten
his name, was put to shame everywhere, in all the papers, for having
thrashed a German woman in the railway train. You remember? It was in
those days, that very year I believe, the 'disgraceful action of the
_Age_' took place (you know, 'The Egyptian Nights,' that public reading,
you remember? The dark eyes, you know! Ah, the golden days of our youth,
where are they?). Well, as for the gentleman who thrashed the German,
I feel no sympathy with him, because after all what need is there
for sympathy? But I must say that there are sometimes such provoking
'Germans' that I don't believe there is a progressive who could quite
answer for himself. No one looked at the subject from that point of view
then, but that's the truly humane point of view, I assure you."

After saying this, Svidrigaïlov broke into a sudden laugh again.
Raskolnikov saw clearly that this was a man with a firm purpose in his
mind and able to keep it to himself.

"I expect you've not talked to anyone for some days?" he asked.

"Scarcely anyone. I suppose you are wondering at my being such an
adaptable man?"

"No, I am only wondering at your being too adaptable a man."

"Because I am not offended at the rudeness of your questions? Is that
it? But why take offence? As you asked, so I answered," he replied,
with a surprising expression of simplicity. "You know, there's
hardly anything I take interest in," he went on, as it were dreamily,
"especially now, I've nothing to do.... You are quite at liberty to
imagine though that I am making up to you with a motive, particularly as
I told you I want to see your sister about something. But I'll confess
frankly, I am very much bored. The last three days especially, so I am
delighted to see you.... Don't be angry, Rodion Romanovitch, but you
seem to be somehow awfully strange yourself. Say what you like, there's
something wrong with you, and now, too... not this very minute, I mean,
but now, generally.... Well, well, I won't, I won't, don't scowl! I am
not such a bear, you know, as you think."

Raskolnikov looked gloomily at him.

"You are not a bear, perhaps, at all," he said. "I fancy indeed that
you are a man of very good breeding, or at least know how on occasion to
behave like one."

"I am not particularly interested in anyone's opinion," Svidrigaïlov
answered, dryly and even with a shade of haughtiness, "and therefore why
not be vulgar at times when vulgarity is such a convenient cloak for our
climate... and especially if one has a natural propensity that way," he
added, laughing again.

"But I've heard you have many friends here. You are, as they say, 'not
without connections.' What can you want with me, then, unless you've
some special object?"

"That's true that I have friends here," Svidrigaïlov admitted, not
replying to the chief point. "I've met some already. I've been lounging
about for the last three days, and I've seen them, or they've seen me.
That's a matter of course. I am well dressed and reckoned not a poor
man; the emancipation of the serfs hasn't affected me; my property
consists chiefly of forests and water meadows. The revenue has not
fallen off; but... I am not going to see them, I was sick of them long
ago. I've been here three days and have called on no one.... What a town
it is! How has it come into existence among us, tell me that? A town of
officials and students of all sorts. Yes, there's a great deal I didn't
notice when I was here eight years ago, kicking up my heels.... My only
hope now is in anatomy, by Jove, it is!"

"Anatomy?"

"But as for these clubs, Dussauts, parades, or progress, indeed,
maybe--well, all that can go on without me," he went on, again without
noticing the question. "Besides, who wants to be a card-sharper?"

"Why, have you been a card-sharper then?"

"How could I help being? There was a regular set of us, men of the best
society, eight years ago; we had a fine time. And all men of breeding,
you know, poets, men of property. And indeed as a rule in our Russian
society the best manners are found among those who've been thrashed,
have you noticed that? I've deteriorated in the country. But I did get
into prison for debt, through a low Greek who came from Nezhin. Then
Marfa Petrovna turned up; she bargained with him and bought me off for
thirty thousand silver pieces (I owed seventy thousand). We were united
in lawful wedlock and she bore me off into the country like a treasure.
You know she was five years older than I. She was very fond of me. For
seven years I never left the country. And, take note, that all my life
she held a document over me, the IOU for thirty thousand roubles, so
if I were to elect to be restive about anything I should be trapped at
once! And she would have done it! Women find nothing incompatible in
that."

"If it hadn't been for that, would you have given her the slip?"

"I don't know what to say. It was scarcely the document restrained me. I
didn't want to go anywhere else. Marfa Petrovna herself invited me to go
abroad, seeing I was bored, but I've been abroad before, and always
felt sick there. For no reason, but the sunrise, the bay of Naples, the
sea--you look at them and it makes you sad. What's most revolting is
that one is really sad! No, it's better at home. Here at least one
blames others for everything and excuses oneself. I should have gone
perhaps on an expedition to the North Pole, because _j'ai le vin
mauvais_ and hate drinking, and there's nothing left but wine. I have
tried it. But, I say, I've been told Berg is going up in a great balloon
next Sunday from the Yusupov Garden and will take up passengers at a
fee. Is it true?"

"Why, would you go up?"

"I... No, oh, no," muttered Svidrigaïlov really seeming to be deep in
thought.

"What does he mean? Is he in earnest?" Raskolnikov wondered.

"No, the document didn't restrain me," Svidrigaïlov went on,
meditatively. "It was my own doing, not leaving the country, and nearly
a year ago Marfa Petrovna gave me back the document on my name-day
and made me a present of a considerable sum of money, too. She had a
fortune, you know. 'You see how I trust you, Arkady Ivanovitch'--that
was actually her expression. You don't believe she used it? But do
you know I managed the estate quite decently, they know me in the
neighbourhood. I ordered books, too. Marfa Petrovna at first approved,
but afterwards she was afraid of my over-studying."

"You seem to be missing Marfa Petrovna very much?"

"Missing her? Perhaps. Really, perhaps I am. And, by the way, do you
believe in ghosts?"

"What ghosts?"

"Why, ordinary ghosts."

"Do you believe in them?"

"Perhaps not, _pour vous plaire_.... I wouldn't say no exactly."

"Do you see them, then?"

Svidrigaïlov looked at him rather oddly.

"Marfa Petrovna is pleased to visit me," he said, twisting his mouth
into a strange smile.

"How do you mean 'she is pleased to visit you'?"

"She has been three times. I saw her first on the very day of the
funeral, an hour after she was buried. It was the day before I left to
come here. The second time was the day before yesterday, at daybreak, on
the journey at the station of Malaya Vishera, and the third time was two
hours ago in the room where I am staying. I was alone."

"Were you awake?"

"Quite awake. I was wide awake every time. She comes, speaks to me for
a minute and goes out at the door--always at the door. I can almost hear
her."

"What made me think that something of the sort must be happening to
you?" Raskolnikov said suddenly.

At the same moment he was surprised at having said it. He was much
excited.

"What! Did you think so?" Svidrigaïlov asked in astonishment. "Did you
really? Didn't I say that there was something in common between us, eh?"

"You never said so!" Raskolnikov cried sharply and with heat.

"Didn't I?"

"No!"

"I thought I did. When I came in and saw you lying with your eyes shut,
pretending, I said to myself at once, 'Here's the man.'"

"What do you mean by 'the man?' What are you talking about?" cried
Raskolnikov.

"What do I mean? I really don't know...." Svidrigaïlov muttered
ingenuously, as though he, too, were puzzled.

For a minute they were silent. They stared in each other's faces.

"That's all nonsense!" Raskolnikov shouted with vexation. "What does she
say when she comes to you?"

"She! Would you believe it, she talks of the silliest trifles and--man
is a strange creature--it makes me angry. The first time she came in (I
was tired you know: the funeral service, the funeral ceremony, the lunch
afterwards. At last I was left alone in my study. I lighted a cigar and
began to think), she came in at the door. 'You've been so busy to-day,
Arkady Ivanovitch, you have forgotten to wind the dining-room clock,'
she said. All those seven years I've wound that clock every week, and if
I forgot it she would always remind me. The next day I set off on my way
here. I got out at the station at daybreak; I'd been asleep, tired out,
with my eyes half open, I was drinking some coffee. I looked up and
there was suddenly Marfa Petrovna sitting beside me with a pack of
cards in her hands. 'Shall I tell your fortune for the journey, Arkady
Ivanovitch?' She was a great hand at telling fortunes. I shall never
forgive myself for not asking her to. I ran away in a fright, and,
besides, the bell rang. I was sitting to-day, feeling very heavy after a
miserable dinner from a cookshop; I was sitting smoking, all of a sudden
Marfa Petrovna again. She came in very smart in a new green silk dress
with a long train. 'Good day, Arkady Ivanovitch! How do you like my
dress? Aniska can't make like this.' (Aniska was a dressmaker in the
country, one of our former serf girls who had been trained in Moscow, a
pretty wench.) She stood turning round before me. I looked at the dress,
and then I looked carefully, very carefully, at her face. 'I wonder
you trouble to come to me about such trifles, Marfa Petrovna.' 'Good
gracious, you won't let one disturb you about anything!' To tease her
I said, 'I want to get married, Marfa Petrovna.' 'That's just like you,
Arkady Ivanovitch; it does you very little credit to come looking for a
bride when you've hardly buried your wife. And if you could make a good
choice, at least, but I know it won't be for your happiness or hers, you
will only be a laughing-stock to all good people.' Then she went out and
her train seemed to rustle. Isn't it nonsense, eh?"

"But perhaps you are telling lies?" Raskolnikov put in.

"I rarely lie," answered Svidrigaïlov thoughtfully, apparently not
noticing the rudeness of the question.

"And in the past, have you ever seen ghosts before?"

"Y-yes, I have seen them, but only once in my life, six years ago. I had
a serf, Filka; just after his burial I called out forgetting 'Filka, my
pipe!' He came in and went to the cupboard where my pipes were. I sat
still and thought 'he is doing it out of revenge,' because we had a
violent quarrel just before his death. 'How dare you come in with a hole
in your elbow?' I said. 'Go away, you scamp!' He turned and went out,
and never came again. I didn't tell Marfa Petrovna at the time. I wanted
to have a service sung for him, but I was ashamed."

"You should go to a doctor."

"I know I am not well, without your telling me, though I don't know
what's wrong; I believe I am five times as strong as you are. I didn't
ask you whether you believe that ghosts are seen, but whether you
believe that they exist."

"No, I won't believe it!" Raskolnikov cried, with positive anger.

"What do people generally say?" muttered Svidrigaïlov, as though
speaking to himself, looking aside and bowing his head. "They say, 'You
are ill, so what appears to you is only unreal fantasy.' But that's not
strictly logical. I agree that ghosts only appear to the sick, but that
only proves that they are unable to appear except to the sick, not that
they don't exist."

"Nothing of the sort," Raskolnikov insisted irritably.

"No? You don't think so?" Svidrigaïlov went on, looking at him
deliberately. "But what do you say to this argument (help me with
it): ghosts are, as it were, shreds and fragments of other worlds, the
beginning of them. A man in health has, of course, no reason to see
them, because he is above all a man of this earth and is bound for the
sake of completeness and order to live only in this life. But as soon
as one is ill, as soon as the normal earthly order of the organism is
broken, one begins to realise the possibility of another world; and the
more seriously ill one is, the closer becomes one's contact with that
other world, so that as soon as the man dies he steps straight into that
world. I thought of that long ago. If you believe in a future life, you
could believe in that, too."

"I don't believe in a future life," said Raskolnikov.

Svidrigaïlov sat lost in thought.

"And what if there are only spiders there, or something of that sort,"
he said suddenly.

"He is a madman," thought Raskolnikov.

"We always imagine eternity as something beyond our conception,
something vast, vast! But why must it be vast? Instead of all that, what
if it's one little room, like a bath house in the country, black
and grimy and spiders in every corner, and that's all eternity is? I
sometimes fancy it like that."

"Can it be you can imagine nothing juster and more comforting than
that?" Raskolnikov cried, with a feeling of anguish.

"Juster? And how can we tell, perhaps that is just, and do you know
it's what I would certainly have made it," answered Svidrigaïlov, with a
vague smile.

This horrible answer sent a cold chill through Raskolnikov. Svidrigaïlov
raised his head, looked at him, and suddenly began laughing.

"Only think," he cried, "half an hour ago we had never seen each other,
we regarded each other as enemies; there is a matter unsettled between
us; we've thrown it aside, and away we've gone into the abstract! Wasn't
I right in saying that we were birds of a feather?"

"Kindly allow me," Raskolnikov went on irritably, "to ask you to explain
why you have honoured me with your visit... and... and I am in a hurry,
I have no time to waste. I want to go out."

"By all means, by all means. Your sister, Avdotya Romanovna, is going to
be married to Mr. Luzhin, Pyotr Petrovitch?"

"Can you refrain from any question about my sister and from mentioning
her name? I can't understand how you dare utter her name in my presence,
if you really are Svidrigaïlov."

"Why, but I've come here to speak about her; how can I avoid mentioning
her?"

"Very good, speak, but make haste."

"I am sure that you must have formed your own opinion of this Mr.
Luzhin, who is a connection of mine through my wife, if you have only
seen him for half an hour, or heard any facts about him. He is no
match for Avdotya Romanovna. I believe Avdotya Romanovna is sacrificing
herself generously and imprudently for the sake of... for the sake of
her family. I fancied from all I had heard of you that you would be very
glad if the match could be broken off without the sacrifice of worldly
advantages. Now I know you personally, I am convinced of it."

"All this is very naïve... excuse me, I should have said impudent on
your part," said Raskolnikov.

"You mean to say that I am seeking my own ends. Don't be uneasy, Rodion
Romanovitch, if I were working for my own advantage, I would not have
spoken out so directly. I am not quite a fool. I will confess something
psychologically curious about that: just now, defending my love for
Avdotya Romanovna, I said I was myself the victim. Well, let me tell you
that I've no feeling of love now, not the slightest, so that I wonder
myself indeed, for I really did feel something..."

"Through idleness and depravity," Raskolnikov put in.

"I certainly am idle and depraved, but your sister has such qualities
that even I could not help being impressed by them. But that's all
nonsense, as I see myself now."

"Have you seen that long?"

"I began to be aware of it before, but was only perfectly sure of it the
day before yesterday, almost at the moment I arrived in Petersburg. I
still fancied in Moscow, though, that I was coming to try to get Avdotya
Romanovna's hand and to cut out Mr. Luzhin."

"Excuse me for interrupting you; kindly be brief, and come to the object
of your visit. I am in a hurry, I want to go out..."

"With the greatest pleasure. On arriving here and determining on a
certain... journey, I should like to make some necessary preliminary
arrangements. I left my children with an aunt; they are well provided
for; and they have no need of me personally. And a nice father I should
make, too! I have taken nothing but what Marfa Petrovna gave me a year
ago. That's enough for me. Excuse me, I am just coming to the point.
Before the journey which may come off, I want to settle Mr. Luzhin, too.
It's not that I detest him so much, but it was through him I quarrelled
with Marfa Petrovna when I learned that she had dished up this marriage.
I want now to see Avdotya Romanovna through your mediation, and if you
like in your presence, to explain to her that in the first place she
will never gain anything but harm from Mr. Luzhin. Then, begging
her pardon for all past unpleasantness, to make her a present of ten
thousand roubles and so assist the rupture with Mr. Luzhin, a rupture to
which I believe she is herself not disinclined, if she could see the way
to it."

"You are certainly mad," cried Raskolnikov not so much angered as
astonished. "How dare you talk like that!"

"I knew you would scream at me; but in the first place, though I am not
rich, this ten thousand roubles is perfectly free; I have absolutely no
need for it. If Avdotya Romanovna does not accept it, I shall waste
it in some more foolish way. That's the first thing. Secondly, my
conscience is perfectly easy; I make the offer with no ulterior motive.
You may not believe it, but in the end Avdotya Romanovna and you will
know. The point is, that I did actually cause your sister, whom I
greatly respect, some trouble and unpleasantness, and so, sincerely
regretting it, I want--not to compensate, not to repay her for the
unpleasantness, but simply to do something to her advantage, to show
that I am not, after all, privileged to do nothing but harm. If there
were a millionth fraction of self-interest in my offer, I should not
have made it so openly; and I should not have offered her ten thousand
only, when five weeks ago I offered her more, Besides, I may, perhaps,
very soon marry a young lady, and that alone ought to prevent suspicion
of any design on Avdotya Romanovna. In conclusion, let me say that
in marrying Mr. Luzhin, she is taking money just the same, only from
another man. Don't be angry, Rodion Romanovitch, think it over coolly
and quietly."

Svidrigaïlov himself was exceedingly cool and quiet as he was saying
this.

"I beg you to say no more," said Raskolnikov. "In any case this is
unpardonable impertinence."

"Not in the least. Then a man may do nothing but harm to his neighbour
in this world, and is prevented from doing the tiniest bit of good
by trivial conventional formalities. That's absurd. If I died, for
instance, and left that sum to your sister in my will, surely she
wouldn't refuse it?"

"Very likely she would."

"Oh, no, indeed. However, if you refuse it, so be it, though ten
thousand roubles is a capital thing to have on occasion. In any case I
beg you to repeat what I have said to Avdotya Romanovna."

"No, I won't."

"In that case, Rodion Romanovitch, I shall be obliged to try and see her
myself and worry her by doing so."

"And if I do tell her, will you not try to see her?"

"I don't know really what to say. I should like very much to see her
once more."

"Don't hope for it."

"I'm sorry. But you don't know me. Perhaps we may become better
friends."

"You think we may become friends?"

"And why not?" Svidrigaïlov said, smiling. He stood up and took his hat.
"I didn't quite intend to disturb you and I came here without reckoning
on it... though I was very much struck by your face this morning."

"Where did you see me this morning?" Raskolnikov asked uneasily.

"I saw you by chance.... I kept fancying there is something about you
like me.... But don't be uneasy. I am not intrusive; I used to get on
all right with card-sharpers, and I never bored Prince Svirbey, a great
personage who is a distant relation of mine, and I could write about
Raphael's _Madonna_ in Madam Prilukov's album, and I never left Marfa
Petrovna's side for seven years, and I used to stay the night at
Viazemsky's house in the Hay Market in the old days, and I may go up in
a balloon with Berg, perhaps."

"Oh, all right. Are you starting soon on your travels, may I ask?"

"What travels?"

"Why, on that 'journey'; you spoke of it yourself."

"A journey? Oh, yes. I did speak of a journey. Well, that's a wide
subject.... if only you knew what you are asking," he added, and gave
a sudden, loud, short laugh. "Perhaps I'll get married instead of the
journey. They're making a match for me."

"Here?"

"Yes."

"How have you had time for that?"

"But I am very anxious to see Avdotya Romanovna once. I earnestly beg
it. Well, good-bye for the present. Oh, yes. I have forgotten something.
Tell your sister, Rodion Romanovitch, that Marfa Petrovna remembered
her in her will and left her three thousand roubles. That's absolutely
certain. Marfa Petrovna arranged it a week before her death, and it was
done in my presence. Avdotya Romanovna will be able to receive the money
in two or three weeks."

"Are you telling the truth?"

"Yes, tell her. Well, your servant. I am staying very near you."

As he went out, Svidrigaïlov ran up against Razumihin in the doorway.



CHAPTER II

It was nearly eight o'clock. The two young men hurried to Bakaleyev's,
to arrive before Luzhin.

"Why, who was that?" asked Razumihin, as soon as they were in the
street.

"It was Svidrigaïlov, that landowner in whose house my sister was
insulted when she was their governess. Through his persecuting her with
his attentions, she was turned out by his wife, Marfa Petrovna. This
Marfa Petrovna begged Dounia's forgiveness afterwards, and she's just
died suddenly. It was of her we were talking this morning. I don't
know why I'm afraid of that man. He came here at once after his wife's
funeral. He is very strange, and is determined on doing something.... We
must guard Dounia from him... that's what I wanted to tell you, do you
hear?"

"Guard her! What can he do to harm Avdotya Romanovna? Thank you, Rodya,
for speaking to me like that.... We will, we will guard her. Where does
he live?"

"I don't know."

"Why didn't you ask? What a pity! I'll find out, though."

"Did you see him?" asked Raskolnikov after a pause.

"Yes, I noticed him, I noticed him well."

"You did really see him? You saw him clearly?" Raskolnikov insisted.

"Yes, I remember him perfectly, I should know him in a thousand; I have
a good memory for faces."

They were silent again.

"Hm!... that's all right," muttered Raskolnikov. "Do you know, I
fancied... I keep thinking that it may have been an hallucination."

"What do you mean? I don't understand you."

"Well, you all say," Raskolnikov went on, twisting his mouth into a
smile, "that I am mad. I thought just now that perhaps I really am mad,
and have only seen a phantom."

"What do you mean?"

"Why, who can tell? Perhaps I am really mad, and perhaps everything that
happened all these days may be only imagination."

"Ach, Rodya, you have been upset again!... But what did he say, what did
he come for?"

Raskolnikov did not answer. Razumihin thought a minute.

"Now let me tell you my story," he began, "I came to you, you were
asleep. Then we had dinner and then I went to Porfiry's, Zametov was
still with him. I tried to begin, but it was no use. I couldn't speak in
the right way. They don't seem to understand and can't understand, but
are not a bit ashamed. I drew Porfiry to the window, and began talking
to him, but it was still no use. He looked away and I looked away. At
last I shook my fist in his ugly face, and told him as a cousin I'd
brain him. He merely looked at me, I cursed and came away. That was
all. It was very stupid. To Zametov I didn't say a word. But, you see, I
thought I'd made a mess of it, but as I went downstairs a brilliant idea
struck me: why should we trouble? Of course if you were in any danger
or anything, but why need you care? You needn't care a hang for them. We
shall have a laugh at them afterwards, and if I were in your place I'd
mystify them more than ever. How ashamed they'll be afterwards! Hang
them! We can thrash them afterwards, but let's laugh at them now!"

"To be sure," answered Raskolnikov. "But what will you say to-morrow?"
he thought to himself. Strange to say, till that moment it had never
occurred to him to wonder what Razumihin would think when he knew. As he
thought it, Raskolnikov looked at him. Razumihin's account of his visit
to Porfiry had very little interest for him, so much had come and gone
since then.

In the corridor they came upon Luzhin; he had arrived punctually
at eight, and was looking for the number, so that all three went in
together without greeting or looking at one another. The young men
walked in first, while Pyotr Petrovitch, for good manners, lingered a
little in the passage, taking off his coat. Pulcheria Alexandrovna came
forward at once to greet him in the doorway, Dounia was welcoming her
brother. Pyotr Petrovitch walked in and quite amiably, though with
redoubled dignity, bowed to the ladies. He looked, however, as though
he were a little put out and could not yet recover himself. Pulcheria
Alexandrovna, who seemed also a little embarrassed, hastened to make
them all sit down at the round table where a samovar was boiling. Dounia
and Luzhin were facing one another on opposite sides of the table.
Razumihin and Raskolnikov were facing Pulcheria Alexandrovna, Razumihin
was next to Luzhin and Raskolnikov was beside his sister.

A moment's silence followed. Pyotr Petrovitch deliberately drew out a
cambric handkerchief reeking of scent and blew his nose with an air of
a benevolent man who felt himself slighted, and was firmly resolved to
insist on an explanation. In the passage the idea had occurred to him to
keep on his overcoat and walk away, and so give the two ladies a sharp
and emphatic lesson and make them feel the gravity of the position.
But he could not bring himself to do this. Besides, he could not endure
uncertainty, and he wanted an explanation: if his request had been so
openly disobeyed, there was something behind it, and in that case it was
better to find it out beforehand; it rested with him to punish them and
there would always be time for that.

"I trust you had a favourable journey," he inquired officially of
Pulcheria Alexandrovna.

"Oh, very, Pyotr Petrovitch."

"I am gratified to hear it. And Avdotya Romanovna is not over-fatigued
either?"

"I am young and strong, I don't get tired, but it was a great strain for
mother," answered Dounia.

"That's unavoidable! our national railways are of terrible length.
'Mother Russia,' as they say, is a vast country.... In spite of all my
desire to do so, I was unable to meet you yesterday. But I trust all
passed off without inconvenience?"

"Oh, no, Pyotr Petrovitch, it was all terribly disheartening," Pulcheria
Alexandrovna hastened to declare with peculiar intonation, "and if
Dmitri Prokofitch had not been sent us, I really believe by God Himself,
we should have been utterly lost. Here, he is! Dmitri Prokofitch
Razumihin," she added, introducing him to Luzhin.

"I had the pleasure... yesterday," muttered Pyotr Petrovitch with a
hostile glance sidelong at Razumihin; then he scowled and was silent.

Pyotr Petrovitch belonged to that class of persons, on the surface very
polite in society, who make a great point of punctiliousness, but who,
directly they are crossed in anything, are completely disconcerted, and
become more like sacks of flour than elegant and lively men of society.
Again all was silent; Raskolnikov was obstinately mute, Avdotya
Romanovna was unwilling to open the conversation too soon. Razumihin had
nothing to say, so Pulcheria Alexandrovna was anxious again.

"Marfa Petrovna is dead, have you heard?" she began having recourse to
her leading item of conversation.

"To be sure, I heard so. I was immediately informed, and I have come to
make you acquainted with the fact that Arkady Ivanovitch Svidrigaïlov
set off in haste for Petersburg immediately after his wife's funeral. So
at least I have excellent authority for believing."

"To Petersburg? here?" Dounia asked in alarm and looked at her mother.

"Yes, indeed, and doubtless not without some design, having in view the
rapidity of his departure, and all the circumstances preceding it."

"Good heavens! won't he leave Dounia in peace even here?" cried
Pulcheria Alexandrovna.

"I imagine that neither you nor Avdotya Romanovna have any grounds for
uneasiness, unless, of course, you are yourselves desirous of getting
into communication with him. For my part I am on my guard, and am now
discovering where he is lodging."

"Oh, Pyotr Petrovitch, you would not believe what a fright you have
given me," Pulcheria Alexandrovna went on: "I've only seen him twice,
but I thought him terrible, terrible! I am convinced that he was the
cause of Marfa Petrovna's death."

"It's impossible to be certain about that. I have precise information. I
do not dispute that he may have contributed to accelerate the course of
events by the moral influence, so to say, of the affront; but as to the
general conduct and moral characteristics of that personage, I am
in agreement with you. I do not know whether he is well off now, and
precisely what Marfa Petrovna left him; this will be known to me within
a very short period; but no doubt here in Petersburg, if he has any
pecuniary resources, he will relapse at once into his old ways. He is
the most depraved, and abjectly vicious specimen of that class of men.
I have considerable reason to believe that Marfa Petrovna, who was so
unfortunate as to fall in love with him and to pay his debts eight years
ago, was of service to him also in another way. Solely by her exertions
and sacrifices, a criminal charge, involving an element of fantastic
and homicidal brutality for which he might well have been sentenced to
Siberia, was hushed up. That's the sort of man he is, if you care to
know."

"Good heavens!" cried Pulcheria Alexandrovna. Raskolnikov listened
attentively.

"Are you speaking the truth when you say that you have good evidence of
this?" Dounia asked sternly and emphatically.

"I only repeat what I was told in secret by Marfa Petrovna. I must
observe that from the legal point of view the case was far from clear.
There was, and I believe still is, living here a woman called Resslich,
a foreigner, who lent small sums of money at interest, and did other
commissions, and with this woman Svidrigaïlov had for a long while close
and mysterious relations. She had a relation, a niece I believe, living
with her, a deaf and dumb girl of fifteen, or perhaps not more than
fourteen. Resslich hated this girl, and grudged her every crust; she
used to beat her mercilessly. One day the girl was found hanging in
the garret. At the inquest the verdict was suicide. After the usual
proceedings the matter ended, but, later on, information was given that
the child had been... cruelly outraged by Svidrigaïlov. It is true, this
was not clearly established, the information was given by another German
woman of loose character whose word could not be trusted; no statement
was actually made to the police, thanks to Marfa Petrovna's money and
exertions; it did not get beyond gossip. And yet the story is a very
significant one. You heard, no doubt, Avdotya Romanovna, when you were
with them the story of the servant Philip who died of ill treatment he
received six years ago, before the abolition of serfdom."

"I heard, on the contrary, that this Philip hanged himself."

"Quite so, but what drove him, or rather perhaps disposed him,
to suicide was the systematic persecution and severity of Mr.
Svidrigaïlov."

"I don't know that," answered Dounia, dryly. "I only heard a queer story
that Philip was a sort of hypochondriac, a sort of domestic philosopher,
the servants used to say, 'he read himself silly,' and that he hanged
himself partly on account of Mr. Svidrigaïlov's mockery of him and not
his blows. When I was there he behaved well to the servants, and they
were actually fond of him, though they certainly did blame him for
Philip's death."

"I perceive, Avdotya Romanovna, that you seem disposed to undertake his
defence all of a sudden," Luzhin observed, twisting his lips into
an ambiguous smile, "there's no doubt that he is an astute man, and
insinuating where ladies are concerned, of which Marfa Petrovna, who has
died so strangely, is a terrible instance. My only desire has been to be
of service to you and your mother with my advice, in view of the renewed
efforts which may certainly be anticipated from him. For my part it's
my firm conviction, that he will end in a debtor's prison again.
Marfa Petrovna had not the slightest intention of settling anything
substantial on him, having regard for his children's interests, and,
if she left him anything, it would only be the merest sufficiency,
something insignificant and ephemeral, which would not last a year for a
man of his habits."

"Pyotr Petrovitch, I beg you," said Dounia, "say no more of Mr.
Svidrigaïlov. It makes me miserable."

"He has just been to see me," said Raskolnikov, breaking his silence for
the first time.

There were exclamations from all, and they all turned to him. Even Pyotr
Petrovitch was roused.

"An hour and a half ago, he came in when I was asleep, waked me, and
introduced himself," Raskolnikov continued. "He was fairly cheerful
and at ease, and quite hopes that we shall become friends. He is
particularly anxious, by the way, Dounia, for an interview with you, at
which he asked me to assist. He has a proposition to make to you, and
he told me about it. He told me, too, that a week before her death Marfa
Petrovna left you three thousand roubles in her will, Dounia, and that
you can receive the money very shortly."

"Thank God!" cried Pulcheria Alexandrovna, crossing herself. "Pray for
her soul, Dounia!"

"It's a fact!" broke from Luzhin.

"Tell us, what more?" Dounia urged Raskolnikov.

"Then he said that he wasn't rich and all the estate was left to his
children who are now with an aunt, then that he was staying somewhere
not far from me, but where, I don't know, I didn't ask...."

"But what, what does he want to propose to Dounia?" cried Pulcheria
Alexandrovna in a fright. "Did he tell you?"

"Yes."

"What was it?"

"I'll tell you afterwards."

Raskolnikov ceased speaking and turned his attention to his tea.

Pyotr Petrovitch looked at his watch.

"I am compelled to keep a business engagement, and so I shall not be in
your way," he added with an air of some pique and he began getting up.

"Don't go, Pyotr Petrovitch," said Dounia, "you intended to spend
the evening. Besides, you wrote yourself that you wanted to have an
explanation with mother."

"Precisely so, Avdotya Romanovna," Pyotr Petrovitch answered
impressively, sitting down again, but still holding his hat. "I
certainly desired an explanation with you and your honoured mother upon
a very important point indeed. But as your brother cannot speak openly
in my presence of some proposals of Mr. Svidrigaïlov, I, too, do not
desire and am not able to speak openly... in the presence of others...
of certain matters of the greatest gravity. Moreover, my most weighty
and urgent request has been disregarded...."

Assuming an aggrieved air, Luzhin relapsed into dignified silence.

"Your request that my brother should not be present at our meeting was
disregarded solely at my instance," said Dounia. "You wrote that you
had been insulted by my brother; I think that this must be explained at
once, and you must be reconciled. And if Rodya really has insulted you,
then he _should_ and _will_ apologise."

Pyotr Petrovitch took a stronger line.

"There are insults, Avdotya Romanovna, which no goodwill can make us
forget. There is a line in everything which it is dangerous to overstep;
and when it has been overstepped, there is no return."

"That wasn't what I was speaking of exactly, Pyotr Petrovitch," Dounia
interrupted with some impatience. "Please understand that our whole
future depends now on whether all this is explained and set right as
soon as possible. I tell you frankly at the start that I cannot look at
it in any other light, and if you have the least regard for me, all this
business must be ended to-day, however hard that may be. I repeat that
if my brother is to blame he will ask your forgiveness."

"I am surprised at your putting the question like that," said Luzhin,
getting more and more irritated. "Esteeming, and so to say, adoring you,
I may at the same time, very well indeed, be able to dislike some member
of your family. Though I lay claim to the happiness of your hand, I
cannot accept duties incompatible with..."

"Ah, don't be so ready to take offence, Pyotr Petrovitch," Dounia
interrupted with feeling, "and be the sensible and generous man I have
always considered, and wish to consider, you to be. I've given you a
great promise, I am your betrothed. Trust me in this matter and, believe
me, I shall be capable of judging impartially. My assuming the part of
judge is as much a surprise for my brother as for you. When I insisted
on his coming to our interview to-day after your letter, I told
him nothing of what I meant to do. Understand that, if you are not
reconciled, I must choose between you--it must be either you or he. That
is how the question rests on your side and on his. I don't want to be
mistaken in my choice, and I must not be. For your sake I must break off
with my brother, for my brother's sake I must break off with you. I can
find out for certain now whether he is a brother to me, and I want to
know it; and of you, whether I am dear to you, whether you esteem me,
whether you are the husband for me."

"Avdotya Romanovna," Luzhin declared huffily, "your words are of too
much consequence to me; I will say more, they are offensive in view
of the position I have the honour to occupy in relation to you. To say
nothing of your strange and offensive setting me on a level with an
impertinent boy, you admit the possibility of breaking your promise to
me. You say 'you or he,' showing thereby of how little consequence I
am in your eyes... I cannot let this pass considering the relationship
and... the obligations existing between us."

"What!" cried Dounia, flushing. "I set your interest beside all that has
hitherto been most precious in my life, what has made up the _whole_ of
my life, and here you are offended at my making too _little_ account of
you."

Raskolnikov smiled sarcastically, Razumihin fidgeted, but Pyotr
Petrovitch did not accept the reproof; on the contrary, at every word he
became more persistent and irritable, as though he relished it.

"Love for the future partner of your life, for your husband, ought to
outweigh your love for your brother," he pronounced sententiously, "and
in any case I cannot be put on the same level.... Although I said so
emphatically that I would not speak openly in your brother's presence,
nevertheless, I intend now to ask your honoured mother for a necessary
explanation on a point of great importance closely affecting my dignity.
Your son," he turned to Pulcheria Alexandrovna, "yesterday in the
presence of Mr. Razsudkin (or... I think that's it? excuse me I have
forgotten your surname," he bowed politely to Razumihin) "insulted me by
misrepresenting the idea I expressed to you in a private conversation,
drinking coffee, that is, that marriage with a poor girl who has had
experience of trouble is more advantageous from the conjugal point of
view than with one who has lived in luxury, since it is more profitable
for the moral character. Your son intentionally exaggerated the
significance of my words and made them ridiculous, accusing me of
malicious intentions, and, as far as I could see, relied upon your
correspondence with him. I shall consider myself happy, Pulcheria
Alexandrovna, if it is possible for you to convince me of an opposite
conclusion, and thereby considerately reassure me. Kindly let me know
in what terms precisely you repeated my words in your letter to Rodion
Romanovitch."

"I don't remember," faltered Pulcheria Alexandrovna. "I repeated them as
I understood them. I don't know how Rodya repeated them to you, perhaps
he exaggerated."

"He could not have exaggerated them, except at your instigation."

"Pyotr Petrovitch," Pulcheria Alexandrovna declared with dignity, "the
proof that Dounia and I did not take your words in a very bad sense is
the fact that we are here."

"Good, mother," said Dounia approvingly.

"Then this is my fault again," said Luzhin, aggrieved.

"Well, Pyotr Petrovitch, you keep blaming Rodion, but you yourself have
just written what was false about him," Pulcheria Alexandrovna added,
gaining courage.

"I don't remember writing anything false."

"You wrote," Raskolnikov said sharply, not turning to Luzhin, "that I
gave money yesterday not to the widow of the man who was killed, as was
the fact, but to his daughter (whom I had never seen till yesterday).
You wrote this to make dissension between me and my family, and for that
object added coarse expressions about the conduct of a girl whom you
don't know. All that is mean slander."

"Excuse me, sir," said Luzhin, quivering with fury. "I enlarged upon
your qualities and conduct in my letter solely in response to your
sister's and mother's inquiries, how I found you, and what impression
you made on me. As for what you've alluded to in my letter, be so good
as to point out one word of falsehood, show, that is, that you didn't
throw away your money, and that there are not worthless persons in that
family, however unfortunate."

"To my thinking, you, with all your virtues, are not worth the little
finger of that unfortunate girl at whom you throw stones."

"Would you go so far then as to let her associate with your mother and
sister?"

"I have done so already, if you care to know. I made her sit down to-day
with mother and Dounia."

"Rodya!" cried Pulcheria Alexandrovna. Dounia crimsoned, Razumihin
knitted his brows. Luzhin smiled with lofty sarcasm.

"You may see for yourself, Avdotya Romanovna," he said, "whether it is
possible for us to agree. I hope now that this question is at an end,
once and for all. I will withdraw, that I may not hinder the pleasures
of family intimacy, and the discussion of secrets." He got up from his
chair and took his hat. "But in withdrawing, I venture to request
that for the future I may be spared similar meetings, and, so to
say, compromises. I appeal particularly to you, honoured Pulcheria
Alexandrovna, on this subject, the more as my letter was addressed to
you and to no one else."

Pulcheria Alexandrovna was a little offended.

"You seem to think we are completely under your authority, Pyotr
Petrovitch. Dounia has told you the reason your desire was disregarded,
she had the best intentions. And indeed you write as though you were
laying commands upon me. Are we to consider every desire of yours as
a command? Let me tell you on the contrary that you ought to show
particular delicacy and consideration for us now, because we have thrown
up everything, and have come here relying on you, and so we are in any
case in a sense in your hands."

"That is not quite true, Pulcheria Alexandrovna, especially at the
present moment, when the news has come of Marfa Petrovna's legacy, which
seems indeed very apropos, judging from the new tone you take to me," he
added sarcastically.

"Judging from that remark, we may certainly presume that you were
reckoning on our helplessness," Dounia observed irritably.

"But now in any case I cannot reckon on it, and I particularly desire
not to hinder your discussion of the secret proposals of Arkady
Ivanovitch Svidrigaïlov, which he has entrusted to your brother and
which have, I perceive, a great and possibly a very agreeable interest
for you."

"Good heavens!" cried Pulcheria Alexandrovna.

Razumihin could not sit still on his chair.

"Aren't you ashamed now, sister?" asked Raskolnikov.

"I am ashamed, Rodya," said Dounia. "Pyotr Petrovitch, go away," she
turned to him, white with anger.

Pyotr Petrovitch had apparently not at all expected such a conclusion.
He had too much confidence in himself, in his power and in the
helplessness of his victims. He could not believe it even now. He turned
pale, and his lips quivered.

"Avdotya Romanovna, if I go out of this door now, after such a
dismissal, then, you may reckon on it, I will never come back. Consider
what you are doing. My word is not to be shaken."

"What insolence!" cried Dounia, springing up from her seat. "I don't
want you to come back again."

"What! So that's how it stands!" cried Luzhin, utterly unable to the
last moment to believe in the rupture and so completely thrown out of
his reckoning now. "So that's how it stands! But do you know, Avdotya
Romanovna, that I might protest?"

"What right have you to speak to her like that?" Pulcheria Alexandrovna
intervened hotly. "And what can you protest about? What rights have you?
Am I to give my Dounia to a man like you? Go away, leave us altogether!
We are to blame for having agreed to a wrong action, and I above
all...."

"But you have bound me, Pulcheria Alexandrovna," Luzhin stormed in a
frenzy, "by your promise, and now you deny it and... besides... I have
been led on account of that into expenses...."

This last complaint was so characteristic of Pyotr Petrovitch, that
Raskolnikov, pale with anger and with the effort of restraining it,
could not help breaking into laughter. But Pulcheria Alexandrovna was
furious.

"Expenses? What expenses? Are you speaking of our trunk? But the
conductor brought it for nothing for you. Mercy on us, we have bound
you! What are you thinking about, Pyotr Petrovitch, it was you bound us,
hand and foot, not we!"

"Enough, mother, no more please," Avdotya Romanovna implored. "Pyotr
Petrovitch, do be kind and go!"

"I am going, but one last word," he said, quite unable to control
himself. "Your mamma seems to have entirely forgotten that I made up my
mind to take you, so to speak, after the gossip of the town had spread
all over the district in regard to your reputation. Disregarding public
opinion for your sake and reinstating your reputation, I certainly
might very well reckon on a fitting return, and might indeed look for
gratitude on your part. And my eyes have only now been opened! I see
myself that I may have acted very, very recklessly in disregarding the
universal verdict...."

"Does the fellow want his head smashed?" cried Razumihin, jumping up.

"You are a mean and spiteful man!" cried Dounia.

"Not a word! Not a movement!" cried Raskolnikov, holding Razumihin back;
then going close up to Luzhin, "Kindly leave the room!" he said quietly
and distinctly, "and not a word more or..."

Pyotr Petrovitch gazed at him for some seconds with a pale face that
worked with anger, then he turned, went out, and rarely has any man
carried away in his heart such vindictive hatred as he felt against
Raskolnikov. Him, and him alone, he blamed for everything. It is
noteworthy that as he went downstairs he still imagined that his case
was perhaps not utterly lost, and that, so far as the ladies were
concerned, all might "very well indeed" be set right again.



CHAPTER III

The fact was that up to the last moment he had never expected such an
ending; he had been overbearing to the last degree, never dreaming that
two destitute and defenceless women could escape from his control. This
conviction was strengthened by his vanity and conceit, a conceit to
the point of fatuity. Pyotr Petrovitch, who had made his way up from
insignificance, was morbidly given to self-admiration, had the highest
opinion of his intelligence and capacities, and sometimes even gloated
in solitude over his image in the glass. But what he loved and valued
above all was the money he had amassed by his labour, and by all sorts
of devices: that money made him the equal of all who had been his
superiors.

When he had bitterly reminded Dounia that he had decided to take her in
spite of evil report, Pyotr Petrovitch had spoken with perfect sincerity
and had, indeed, felt genuinely indignant at such "black ingratitude."
And yet, when he made Dounia his offer, he was fully aware of the
groundlessness of all the gossip. The story had been everywhere
contradicted by Marfa Petrovna, and was by then disbelieved by all the
townspeople, who were warm in Dounia'a defence. And he would not have
denied that he knew all that at the time. Yet he still thought highly
of his own resolution in lifting Dounia to his level and regarded it as
something heroic. In speaking of it to Dounia, he had let out the secret
feeling he cherished and admired, and he could not understand that
others should fail to admire it too. He had called on Raskolnikov with
the feelings of a benefactor who is about to reap the fruits of his good
deeds and to hear agreeable flattery. And as he went downstairs now, he
considered himself most undeservedly injured and unrecognised.

Dounia was simply essential to him; to do without her was unthinkable.
For many years he had had voluptuous dreams of marriage, but he had
gone on waiting and amassing money. He brooded with relish, in profound
secret, over the image of a girl--virtuous, poor (she must be poor),
very young, very pretty, of good birth and education, very timid, one
who had suffered much, and was completely humbled before him, one who
would all her life look on him as her saviour, worship him, admire him
and only him. How many scenes, how many amorous episodes he had imagined
on this seductive and playful theme, when his work was over! And,
behold, the dream of so many years was all but realised; the beauty and
education of Avdotya Romanovna had impressed him; her helpless position
had been a great allurement; in her he had found even more than he
dreamed of. Here was a girl of pride, character, virtue, of education
and breeding superior to his own (he felt that), and this creature would
be slavishly grateful all her life for his heroic condescension, and
would humble herself in the dust before him, and he would have absolute,
unbounded power over her!... Not long before, he had, too, after long
reflection and hesitation, made an important change in his career and
was now entering on a wider circle of business. With this change his
cherished dreams of rising into a higher class of society seemed likely
to be realised.... He was, in fact, determined to try his fortune
in Petersburg. He knew that women could do a very great deal. The
fascination of a charming, virtuous, highly educated woman might make
his way easier, might do wonders in attracting people to him, throwing
an aureole round him, and now everything was in ruins! This sudden
horrible rupture affected him like a clap of thunder; it was like a
hideous joke, an absurdity. He had only been a tiny bit masterful,
had not even time to speak out, had simply made a joke, been carried
away--and it had ended so seriously. And, of course, too, he did love
Dounia in his own way; he already possessed her in his dreams--and all
at once! No! The next day, the very next day, it must all be set right,
smoothed over, settled. Above all he must crush that conceited milksop
who was the cause of it all. With a sick feeling he could not help
recalling Razumihin too, but, he soon reassured himself on that score;
as though a fellow like that could be put on a level with him! The man
he really dreaded in earnest was Svidrigaïlov.... He had, in short, a
great deal to attend to....

*****

"No, I, I am more to blame than anyone!" said Dounia, kissing and
embracing her mother. "I was tempted by his money, but on my honour,
brother, I had no idea he was such a base man. If I had seen through him
before, nothing would have tempted me! Don't blame me, brother!"

"God has delivered us! God has delivered us!" Pulcheria Alexandrovna
muttered, but half consciously, as though scarcely able to realise what
had happened.

They were all relieved, and in five minutes they were laughing. Only now
and then Dounia turned white and frowned, remembering what had passed.
Pulcheria Alexandrovna was surprised to find that she, too, was glad:
she had only that morning thought rupture with Luzhin a terrible
misfortune. Razumihin was delighted. He did not yet dare to express his
joy fully, but he was in a fever of excitement as though a ton-weight
had fallen off his heart. Now he had the right to devote his life to
them, to serve them.... Anything might happen now! But he felt afraid to
think of further possibilities and dared not let his imagination
range. But Raskolnikov sat still in the same place, almost sullen and
indifferent. Though he had been the most insistent on getting rid of
Luzhin, he seemed now the least concerned at what had happened. Dounia
could not help thinking that he was still angry with her, and Pulcheria
Alexandrovna watched him timidly.

"What did Svidrigaïlov say to you?" said Dounia, approaching him.

"Yes, yes!" cried Pulcheria Alexandrovna.

Raskolnikov raised his head.

"He wants to make you a present of ten thousand roubles and he desires
to see you once in my presence."

"See her! On no account!" cried Pulcheria Alexandrovna. "And how dare he
offer her money!"

Then Raskolnikov repeated (rather dryly) his conversation with
Svidrigaïlov, omitting his account of the ghostly visitations of Marfa
Petrovna, wishing to avoid all unnecessary talk.

"What answer did you give him?" asked Dounia.

"At first I said I would not take any message to you. Then he said that
he would do his utmost to obtain an interview with you without my help.
He assured me that his passion for you was a passing infatuation, now he
has no feeling for you. He doesn't want you to marry Luzhin.... His talk
was altogether rather muddled."

"How do you explain him to yourself, Rodya? How did he strike you?"

"I must confess I don't quite understand him. He offers you ten
thousand, and yet says he is not well off. He says he is going away, and
in ten minutes he forgets he has said it. Then he says is he going to be
married and has already fixed on the girl.... No doubt he has a motive,
and probably a bad one. But it's odd that he should be so clumsy about
it if he had any designs against you.... Of course, I refused this
money on your account, once for all. Altogether, I thought him very
strange.... One might almost think he was mad. But I may be mistaken;
that may only be the part he assumes. The death of Marfa Petrovna seems
to have made a great impression on him."

"God rest her soul," exclaimed Pulcheria Alexandrovna. "I shall always,
always pray for her! Where should we be now, Dounia, without this three
thousand! It's as though it had fallen from heaven! Why, Rodya, this
morning we had only three roubles in our pocket and Dounia and I were
just planning to pawn her watch, so as to avoid borrowing from that man
until he offered help."

Dounia seemed strangely impressed by Svidrigaïlov's offer. She still
stood meditating.

"He has got some terrible plan," she said in a half whisper to herself,
almost shuddering.

Raskolnikov noticed this disproportionate terror.

"I fancy I shall have to see him more than once again," he said to
Dounia.

"We will watch him! I will track him out!" cried Razumihin, vigorously.
"I won't lose sight of him. Rodya has given me leave. He said to me
himself just now. 'Take care of my sister.' Will you give me leave, too,
Avdotya Romanovna?"

Dounia smiled and held out her hand, but the look of anxiety did not
leave her face. Pulcheria Alexandrovna gazed at her timidly, but the
three thousand roubles had obviously a soothing effect on her.

A quarter of an hour later, they were all engaged in a lively
conversation. Even Raskolnikov listened attentively for some time,
though he did not talk. Razumihin was the speaker.

"And why, why should you go away?" he flowed on ecstatically. "And what
are you to do in a little town? The great thing is, you are all here
together and you need one another--you do need one another, believe me.
For a time, anyway.... Take me into partnership, and I assure you we'll
plan a capital enterprise. Listen! I'll explain it all in detail to
you, the whole project! It all flashed into my head this morning,
before anything had happened... I tell you what; I have an uncle, I must
introduce him to you (a most accommodating and respectable old man).
This uncle has got a capital of a thousand roubles, and he lives on his
pension and has no need of that money. For the last two years he has
been bothering me to borrow it from him and pay him six per cent.
interest. I know what that means; he simply wants to help me. Last year
I had no need of it, but this year I resolved to borrow it as soon as
he arrived. Then you lend me another thousand of your three and we have
enough for a start, so we'll go into partnership, and what are we going
to do?"

Then Razumihin began to unfold his project, and he explained at length
that almost all our publishers and booksellers know nothing at all
of what they are selling, and for that reason they are usually bad
publishers, and that any decent publications pay as a rule and give
a profit, sometimes a considerable one. Razumihin had, indeed, been
dreaming of setting up as a publisher. For the last two years he had
been working in publishers' offices, and knew three European languages
well, though he had told Raskolnikov six days before that he was
"schwach" in German with an object of persuading him to take half his
translation and half the payment for it. He had told a lie then, and
Raskolnikov knew he was lying.

"Why, why should we let our chance slip when we have one of the chief
means of success--money of our own!" cried Razumihin warmly. "Of course
there will be a lot of work, but we will work, you, Avdotya Romanovna,
I, Rodion.... You get a splendid profit on some books nowadays! And
the great point of the business is that we shall know just what wants
translating, and we shall be translating, publishing, learning all at
once. I can be of use because I have experience. For nearly two years
I've been scuttling about among the publishers, and now I know every
detail of their business. You need not be a saint to make pots, believe
me! And why, why should we let our chance slip! Why, I know--and I kept
the secret--two or three books which one might get a hundred roubles
simply for thinking of translating and publishing. Indeed, and I would
not take five hundred for the very idea of one of them. And what do you
think? If I were to tell a publisher, I dare say he'd hesitate--they are
such blockheads! And as for the business side, printing, paper, selling,
you trust to me, I know my way about. We'll begin in a small way and go
on to a large. In any case it will get us our living and we shall get
back our capital."

Dounia's eyes shone.

"I like what you are saying, Dmitri Prokofitch!" she said.

"I know nothing about it, of course," put in Pulcheria Alexandrovna,
"it may be a good idea, but again God knows. It's new and untried. Of
course, we must remain here at least for a time." She looked at Rodya.

"What do you think, brother?" said Dounia.

"I think he's got a very good idea," he answered. "Of course, it's too
soon to dream of a publishing firm, but we certainly might bring out
five or six books and be sure of success. I know of one book myself
which would be sure to go well. And as for his being able to manage it,
there's no doubt about that either. He knows the business.... But we can
talk it over later...."

"Hurrah!" cried Razumihin. "Now, stay, there's a flat here in this
house, belonging to the same owner. It's a special flat apart, not
communicating with these lodgings. It's furnished, rent moderate,
three rooms. Suppose you take them to begin with. I'll pawn your watch
to-morrow and bring you the money, and everything can be arranged then.
You can all three live together, and Rodya will be with you. But where
are you off to, Rodya?"

"What, Rodya, you are going already?" Pulcheria Alexandrovna asked in
dismay.

"At such a minute?" cried Razumihin.

Dounia looked at her brother with incredulous wonder. He held his cap in
his hand, he was preparing to leave them.

"One would think you were burying me or saying good-bye for ever," he
said somewhat oddly. He attempted to smile, but it did not turn out a
smile. "But who knows, perhaps it is the last time we shall see each
other..." he let slip accidentally. It was what he was thinking, and it
somehow was uttered aloud.

"What is the matter with you?" cried his mother.

"Where are you going, Rodya?" asked Dounia rather strangely.

"Oh, I'm quite obliged to..." he answered vaguely, as though hesitating
what he would say. But there was a look of sharp determination in his
white face.

"I meant to say... as I was coming here... I meant to tell you, mother,
and you, Dounia, that it would be better for us to part for a time. I
feel ill, I am not at peace.... I will come afterwards, I will come of
myself... when it's possible. I remember you and love you.... Leave me,
leave me alone. I decided this even before... I'm absolutely resolved on
it. Whatever may come to me, whether I come to ruin or not, I want to be
alone. Forget me altogether, it's better. Don't inquire about me. When
I can, I'll come of myself or... I'll send for you. Perhaps it will all
come back, but now if you love me, give me up... else I shall begin to
hate you, I feel it.... Good-bye!"

"Good God!" cried Pulcheria Alexandrovna. Both his mother and his sister
were terribly alarmed. Razumihin was also.

"Rodya, Rodya, be reconciled with us! Let us be as before!" cried his
poor mother.

He turned slowly to the door and slowly went out of the room. Dounia
overtook him.

"Brother, what are you doing to mother?" she whispered, her eyes
flashing with indignation.

He looked dully at her.

"No matter, I shall come.... I'm coming," he muttered in an undertone,
as though not fully conscious of what he was saying, and he went out of
the room.

"Wicked, heartless egoist!" cried Dounia.

"He is insane, but not heartless. He is mad! Don't you see it? You're
heartless after that!" Razumihin whispered in her ear, squeezing
her hand tightly. "I shall be back directly," he shouted to the
horror-stricken mother, and he ran out of the room.

Raskolnikov was waiting for him at the end of the passage.

"I knew you would run after me," he said. "Go back to them--be with
them... be with them to-morrow and always.... I... perhaps I shall
come... if I can. Good-bye."

And without holding out his hand he walked away.

"But where are you going? What are you doing? What's the matter with
you? How can you go on like this?" Razumihin muttered, at his wits' end.

Raskolnikov stopped once more.

"Once for all, never ask me about anything. I have nothing to tell you.
Don't come to see me. Maybe I'll come here.... Leave me, but _don't
leave_ them. Do you understand me?"

It was dark in the corridor, they were standing near the lamp. For a
minute they were looking at one another in silence. Razumihin remembered
that minute all his life. Raskolnikov's burning and intent eyes
grew more penetrating every moment, piercing into his soul, into his
consciousness. Suddenly Razumihin started. Something strange, as it
were, passed between them.... Some idea, some hint, as it were, slipped,
something awful, hideous, and suddenly understood on both sides....
Razumihin turned pale.

"Do you understand now?" said Raskolnikov, his face twitching nervously.
"Go back, go to them," he said suddenly, and turning quickly, he went
out of the house.

I will not attempt to describe how Razumihin went back to the ladies,
how he soothed them, how he protested that Rodya needed rest in his
illness, protested that Rodya was sure to come, that he would come every
day, that he was very, very much upset, that he must not be irritated,
that he, Razumihin, would watch over him, would get him a doctor, the
best doctor, a consultation.... In fact from that evening Razumihin took
his place with them as a son and a brother.



CHAPTER IV

Raskolnikov went straight to the house on the canal bank where Sonia
lived. It was an old green house of three storeys. He found the
porter and obtained from him vague directions as to the whereabouts of
Kapernaumov, the tailor. Having found in the corner of the courtyard
the entrance to the dark and narrow staircase, he mounted to the second
floor and came out into a gallery that ran round the whole second storey
over the yard. While he was wandering in the darkness, uncertain where
to turn for Kapernaumov's door, a door opened three paces from him; he
mechanically took hold of it.

"Who is there?" a woman's voice asked uneasily.

"It's I... come to see you," answered Raskolnikov and he walked into the
tiny entry.

On a broken chair stood a candle in a battered copper candlestick.

"It's you! Good heavens!" cried Sonia weakly, and she stood rooted to
the spot.

"Which is your room? This way?" and Raskolnikov, trying not to look at
her, hastened in.

A minute later Sonia, too, came in with the candle, set down the
candlestick and, completely disconcerted, stood before him inexpressibly
agitated and apparently frightened by his unexpected visit. The colour
rushed suddenly to her pale face and tears came into her eyes... She
felt sick and ashamed and happy, too.... Raskolnikov turned away quickly
and sat on a chair by the table. He scanned the room in a rapid glance.

It was a large but exceedingly low-pitched room, the only one let by the
Kapernaumovs, to whose rooms a closed door led in the wall on the left.
In the opposite side on the right hand wall was another door, always
kept locked. That led to the next flat, which formed a separate lodging.
Sonia's room looked like a barn; it was a very irregular quadrangle and
this gave it a grotesque appearance. A wall with three windows looking
out on to the canal ran aslant so that one corner formed a very acute
angle, and it was difficult to see in it without very strong light.
The other corner was disproportionately obtuse. There was scarcely any
furniture in the big room: in the corner on the right was a bedstead,
beside it, nearest the door, a chair. A plain, deal table covered by a
blue cloth stood against the same wall, close to the door into the other
flat. Two rush-bottom chairs stood by the table. On the opposite
wall near the acute angle stood a small plain wooden chest of drawers
looking, as it were, lost in a desert. That was all there was in the
room. The yellow, scratched and shabby wall-paper was black in the
corners. It must have been damp and full of fumes in the winter. There
was every sign of poverty; even the bedstead had no curtain.

Sonia looked in silence at her visitor, who was so attentively and
unceremoniously scrutinising her room, and even began at last to tremble
with terror, as though she was standing before her judge and the arbiter
of her destinies.

"I am late.... It's eleven, isn't it?" he asked, still not lifting his
eyes.

"Yes," muttered Sonia, "oh yes, it is," she added, hastily, as though in
that lay her means of escape. "My landlady's clock has just struck... I
heard it myself...."

"I've come to you for the last time," Raskolnikov went on gloomily,
although this was the first time. "I may perhaps not see you again..."

"Are you... going away?"

"I don't know... to-morrow...."

"Then you are not coming to Katerina Ivanovna to-morrow?" Sonia's voice
shook.

"I don't know. I shall know to-morrow morning.... Never mind that: I've
come to say one word...."

He raised his brooding eyes to her and suddenly noticed that he was
sitting down while she was all the while standing before him.

"Why are you standing? Sit down," he said in a changed voice, gentle and
friendly.

She sat down. He looked kindly and almost compassionately at her.

"How thin you are! What a hand! Quite transparent, like a dead hand."

He took her hand. Sonia smiled faintly.

"I have always been like that," she said.

"Even when you lived at home?"

"Yes."

"Of course, you were," he added abruptly and the expression of his face
and the sound of his voice changed again suddenly.

He looked round him once more.

"You rent this room from the Kapernaumovs?"

"Yes...."

"They live there, through that door?"

"Yes.... They have another room like this."

"All in one room?"

"Yes."

"I should be afraid in your room at night," he observed gloomily.

"They are very good people, very kind," answered Sonia, who still seemed
bewildered, "and all the furniture, everything... everything is theirs.
And they are very kind and the children, too, often come to see me."

"They all stammer, don't they?"

"Yes.... He stammers and he's lame. And his wife, too.... It's not
exactly that she stammers, but she can't speak plainly. She is a very
kind woman. And he used to be a house serf. And there are seven
children... and it's only the eldest one that stammers and the others
are simply ill... but they don't stammer.... But where did you hear
about them?" she added with some surprise.

"Your father told me, then. He told me all about you.... And how you
went out at six o'clock and came back at nine and how Katerina Ivanovna
knelt down by your bed."

Sonia was confused.

"I fancied I saw him to-day," she whispered hesitatingly.

"Whom?"

"Father. I was walking in the street, out there at the corner, about ten
o'clock and he seemed to be walking in front. It looked just like him. I
wanted to go to Katerina Ivanovna...."

"You were walking in the streets?"

"Yes," Sonia whispered abruptly, again overcome with confusion and
looking down.

"Katerina Ivanovna used to beat you, I dare say?"

"Oh no, what are you saying? No!" Sonia looked at him almost with
dismay.

"You love her, then?"

"Love her? Of course!" said Sonia with plaintive emphasis, and she
clasped her hands in distress. "Ah, you don't.... If you only knew!
You see, she is quite like a child.... Her mind is quite unhinged, you
see... from sorrow. And how clever she used to be... how generous... how
kind! Ah, you don't understand, you don't understand!"

Sonia said this as though in despair, wringing her hands in excitement
and distress. Her pale cheeks flushed, there was a look of anguish in
her eyes. It was clear that she was stirred to the very depths, that
she was longing to speak, to champion, to express something. A sort
of _insatiable_ compassion, if one may so express it, was reflected in
every feature of her face.

"Beat me! how can you? Good heavens, beat me! And if she did beat me,
what then? What of it? You know nothing, nothing about it.... She is so
unhappy... ah, how unhappy! And ill.... She is seeking righteousness,
she is pure. She has such faith that there must be righteousness
everywhere and she expects it.... And if you were to torture her, she
wouldn't do wrong. She doesn't see that it's impossible for people to
be righteous and she is angry at it. Like a child, like a child. She is
good!"

"And what will happen to you?"

Sonia looked at him inquiringly.

"They are left on your hands, you see. They were all on your hands
before, though.... And your father came to you to beg for drink. Well,
how will it be now?"

"I don't know," Sonia articulated mournfully.

"Will they stay there?"

"I don't know.... They are in debt for the lodging, but the landlady,
I hear, said to-day that she wanted to get rid of them, and Katerina
Ivanovna says that she won't stay another minute."

"How is it she is so bold? She relies upon you?"

"Oh, no, don't talk like that.... We are one, we live like one." Sonia
was agitated again and even angry, as though a canary or some other
little bird were to be angry. "And what could she do? What, what could
she do?" she persisted, getting hot and excited. "And how she cried
to-day! Her mind is unhinged, haven't you noticed it? At one minute she
is worrying like a child that everything should be right to-morrow, the
lunch and all that.... Then she is wringing her hands, spitting blood,
weeping, and all at once she will begin knocking her head against the
wall, in despair. Then she will be comforted again. She builds all her
hopes on you; she says that you will help her now and that she will
borrow a little money somewhere and go to her native town with me and
set up a boarding school for the daughters of gentlemen and take me to
superintend it, and we will begin a new splendid life. And she kisses
and hugs me, comforts me, and you know she has such faith, such faith in
her fancies! One can't contradict her. And all the day long she has been
washing, cleaning, mending. She dragged the wash tub into the room with
her feeble hands and sank on the bed, gasping for breath. We went this
morning to the shops to buy shoes for Polenka and Lida for theirs are
quite worn out. Only the money we'd reckoned wasn't enough, not nearly
enough. And she picked out such dear little boots, for she has taste,
you don't know. And there in the shop she burst out crying before the
shopmen because she hadn't enough.... Ah, it was sad to see her...."

"Well, after that I can understand your living like this," Raskolnikov
said with a bitter smile.

"And aren't you sorry for them? Aren't you sorry?" Sonia flew at him
again. "Why, I know, you gave your last penny yourself, though you'd
seen nothing of it, and if you'd seen everything, oh dear! And how
often, how often I've brought her to tears! Only last week! Yes, I! Only
a week before his death. I was cruel! And how often I've done it! Ah,
I've been wretched at the thought of it all day!"

Sonia wrung her hands as she spoke at the pain of remembering it.

"You were cruel?"

"Yes, I--I. I went to see them," she went on, weeping, "and father said,
'read me something, Sonia, my head aches, read to me, here's a book.' He
had a book he had got from Andrey Semyonovitch Lebeziatnikov, he lives
there, he always used to get hold of such funny books. And I said, 'I
can't stay,' as I didn't want to read, and I'd gone in chiefly to show
Katerina Ivanovna some collars. Lizaveta, the pedlar, sold me some
collars and cuffs cheap, pretty, new, embroidered ones. Katerina
Ivanovna liked them very much; she put them on and looked at herself
in the glass and was delighted with them. 'Make me a present of them,
Sonia,' she said, 'please do.' '_Please do_,' she said, she wanted them
so much. And when could she wear them? They just reminded her of her old
happy days. She looked at herself in the glass, admired herself, and she
has no clothes at all, no things of her own, hasn't had all these years!
And she never asks anyone for anything; she is proud, she'd sooner give
away everything. And these she asked for, she liked them so much. And I
was sorry to give them. 'What use are they to you, Katerina Ivanovna?' I
said. I spoke like that to her, I ought not to have said that! She gave
me such a look. And she was so grieved, so grieved at my refusing her.
And it was so sad to see.... And she was not grieved for the collars,
but for my refusing, I saw that. Ah, if only I could bring it all back,
change it, take back those words! Ah, if I... but it's nothing to you!"

"Did you know Lizaveta, the pedlar?"

"Yes.... Did you know her?" Sonia asked with some surprise.

"Katerina Ivanovna is in consumption, rapid consumption; she will soon
die," said Raskolnikov after a pause, without answering her question.

"Oh, no, no, no!"

And Sonia unconsciously clutched both his hands, as though imploring
that she should not.

"But it will be better if she does die."

"No, not better, not at all better!" Sonia unconsciously repeated in
dismay.

"And the children? What can you do except take them to live with you?"

"Oh, I don't know," cried Sonia, almost in despair, and she put her
hands to her head.

It was evident that that idea had very often occurred to her before and
he had only roused it again.

"And, what, if even now, while Katerina Ivanovna is alive, you get ill
and are taken to the hospital, what will happen then?" he persisted
pitilessly.

"How can you? That cannot be!"

And Sonia's face worked with awful terror.

"Cannot be?" Raskolnikov went on with a harsh smile. "You are not
insured against it, are you? What will happen to them then? They will
be in the street, all of them, she will cough and beg and knock her head
against some wall, as she did to-day, and the children will cry....
Then she will fall down, be taken to the police station and to the
hospital, she will die, and the children..."

"Oh, no.... God will not let it be!" broke at last from Sonia's
overburdened bosom.

She listened, looking imploringly at him, clasping her hands in dumb
entreaty, as though it all depended upon him.

Raskolnikov got up and began to walk about the room. A minute passed.
Sonia was standing with her hands and her head hanging in terrible
dejection.

"And can't you save? Put by for a rainy day?" he asked, stopping
suddenly before her.

"No," whispered Sonia.

"Of course not. Have you tried?" he added almost ironically.

"Yes."

"And it didn't come off! Of course not! No need to ask."

And again he paced the room. Another minute passed.

"You don't get money every day?"

Sonia was more confused than ever and colour rushed into her face again.

"No," she whispered with a painful effort.

"It will be the same with Polenka, no doubt," he said suddenly.

"No, no! It can't be, no!" Sonia cried aloud in desperation, as though
she had been stabbed. "God would not allow anything so awful!"

"He lets others come to it."

"No, no! God will protect her, God!" she repeated beside herself.

"But, perhaps, there is no God at all," Raskolnikov answered with a sort
of malignance, laughed and looked at her.

Sonia's face suddenly changed; a tremor passed over it. She looked at
him with unutterable reproach, tried to say something, but could not
speak and broke into bitter, bitter sobs, hiding her face in her hands.

"You say Katerina Ivanovna's mind is unhinged; your own mind is
unhinged," he said after a brief silence.

Five minutes passed. He still paced up and down the room in silence, not
looking at her. At last he went up to her; his eyes glittered. He put
his two hands on her shoulders and looked straight into her tearful
face. His eyes were hard, feverish and piercing, his lips were
twitching. All at once he bent down quickly and dropping to the
ground, kissed her foot. Sonia drew back from him as from a madman. And
certainly he looked like a madman.

"What are you doing to me?" she muttered, turning pale, and a sudden
anguish clutched at her heart.

He stood up at once.

"I did not bow down to you, I bowed down to all the suffering of
humanity," he said wildly and walked away to the window. "Listen," he
added, turning to her a minute later. "I said just now to an insolent
man that he was not worth your little finger... and that I did my sister
honour making her sit beside you."

"Ach, you said that to them! And in her presence?" cried Sonia,
frightened. "Sit down with me! An honour! Why, I'm... dishonourable....
Ah, why did you say that?"

"It was not because of your dishonour and your sin I said that of you,
but because of your great suffering. But you are a great sinner, that's
true," he added almost solemnly, "and your worst sin is that you have
destroyed and betrayed yourself _for nothing_. Isn't that fearful? Isn't
it fearful that you are living in this filth which you loathe so, and at
the same time you know yourself (you've only to open your eyes) that you
are not helping anyone by it, not saving anyone from anything? Tell me,"
he went on almost in a frenzy, "how this shame and degradation can exist
in you side by side with other, opposite, holy feelings? It would be
better, a thousand times better and wiser to leap into the water and end
it all!"

"But what would become of them?" Sonia asked faintly, gazing at him with
eyes of anguish, but not seeming surprised at his suggestion.

Raskolnikov looked strangely at her. He read it all in her face; so she
must have had that thought already, perhaps many times, and earnestly
she had thought out in her despair how to end it and so earnestly, that
now she scarcely wondered at his suggestion. She had not even noticed
the cruelty of his words. (The significance of his reproaches and his
peculiar attitude to her shame she had, of course, not noticed either,
and that, too, was clear to him.) But he saw how monstrously the thought
of her disgraceful, shameful position was torturing her and had long
tortured her. "What, what," he thought, "could hitherto have hindered
her from putting an end to it?" Only then he realised what those poor
little orphan children and that pitiful half-crazy Katerina Ivanovna,
knocking her head against the wall in her consumption, meant for Sonia.

But, nevertheless, it was clear to him again that with her character and
the amount of education she had after all received, she could not in any
case remain so. He was still confronted by the question, how could she
have remained so long in that position without going out of her mind,
since she could not bring herself to jump into the water? Of course he
knew that Sonia's position was an exceptional case, though unhappily not
unique and not infrequent, indeed; but that very exceptionalness, her
tinge of education, her previous life might, one would have thought,
have killed her at the first step on that revolting path. What held her
up--surely not depravity? All that infamy had obviously only touched
her mechanically, not one drop of real depravity had penetrated to her
heart; he saw that. He saw through her as she stood before him....

"There are three ways before her," he thought, "the canal, the madhouse,
or... at last to sink into depravity which obscures the mind and turns
the heart to stone."

The last idea was the most revolting, but he was a sceptic, he was
young, abstract, and therefore cruel, and so he could not help believing
that the last end was the most likely.

"But can that be true?" he cried to himself. "Can that creature who has
still preserved the purity of her spirit be consciously drawn at last
into that sink of filth and iniquity? Can the process already have
begun? Can it be that she has only been able to bear it till now,
because vice has begun to be less loathsome to her? No, no, that cannot
be!" he cried, as Sonia had just before. "No, what has kept her from the
canal till now is the idea of sin and they, the children.... And if she
has not gone out of her mind... but who says she has not gone out of her
mind? Is she in her senses? Can one talk, can one reason as she does?
How can she sit on the edge of the abyss of loathsomeness into which she
is slipping and refuse to listen when she is told of danger? Does she
expect a miracle? No doubt she does. Doesn't that all mean madness?"

He stayed obstinately at that thought. He liked that explanation indeed
better than any other. He began looking more intently at her.

"So you pray to God a great deal, Sonia?" he asked her.

Sonia did not speak; he stood beside her waiting for an answer.

"What should I be without God?" she whispered rapidly, forcibly,
glancing at him with suddenly flashing eyes, and squeezing his hand.

"Ah, so that is it!" he thought.

"And what does God do for you?" he asked, probing her further.

Sonia was silent a long while, as though she could not answer. Her weak
chest kept heaving with emotion.

"Be silent! Don't ask! You don't deserve!" she cried suddenly, looking
sternly and wrathfully at him.

"That's it, that's it," he repeated to himself.

"He does everything," she whispered quickly, looking down again.

"That's the way out! That's the explanation," he decided, scrutinising
her with eager curiosity, with a new, strange, almost morbid feeling.
He gazed at that pale, thin, irregular, angular little face, those soft
blue eyes, which could flash with such fire, such stern energy, that
little body still shaking with indignation and anger--and it all seemed
to him more and more strange, almost impossible. "She is a religious
maniac!" he repeated to himself.

There was a book lying on the chest of drawers. He had noticed it every
time he paced up and down the room. Now he took it up and looked at it.
It was the New Testament in the Russian translation. It was bound in
leather, old and worn.

"Where did you get that?" he called to her across the room.

She was still standing in the same place, three steps from the table.

"It was brought me," she answered, as it were unwillingly, not looking
at him.

"Who brought it?"

"Lizaveta, I asked her for it."

"Lizaveta! strange!" he thought.

Everything about Sonia seemed to him stranger and more wonderful every
moment. He carried the book to the candle and began to turn over the
pages.

"Where is the story of Lazarus?" he asked suddenly.

Sonia looked obstinately at the ground and would not answer. She was
standing sideways to the table.

"Where is the raising of Lazarus? Find it for me, Sonia."

She stole a glance at him.

"You are not looking in the right place.... It's in the fourth gospel,"
she whispered sternly, without looking at him.

"Find it and read it to me," he said. He sat down with his elbow on the
table, leaned his head on his hand and looked away sullenly, prepared to
listen.

"In three weeks' time they'll welcome me in the madhouse! I shall be
there if I am not in a worse place," he muttered to himself.

Sonia heard Raskolnikov's request distrustfully and moved hesitatingly
to the table. She took the book however.

"Haven't you read it?" she asked, looking up at him across the table.

Her voice became sterner and sterner.

"Long ago.... When I was at school. Read!"

"And haven't you heard it in church?"

"I... haven't been. Do you often go?"

"N-no," whispered Sonia.

Raskolnikov smiled.

"I understand.... And you won't go to your father's funeral to-morrow?"

"Yes, I shall. I was at church last week, too... I had a requiem
service."

"For whom?"

"For Lizaveta. She was killed with an axe."

His nerves were more and more strained. His head began to go round.

"Were you friends with Lizaveta?"

"Yes.... She was good... she used to come... not often... she
couldn't.... We used to read together and... talk. She will see God."

The last phrase sounded strange in his ears. And here was something new
again: the mysterious meetings with Lizaveta and both of them--religious
maniacs.

"I shall be a religious maniac myself soon! It's infectious!"

"Read!" he cried irritably and insistently.

Sonia still hesitated. Her heart was throbbing. She hardly dared to read
to him. He looked almost with exasperation at the "unhappy lunatic."

"What for? You don't believe?..." she whispered softly and as it were
breathlessly.

"Read! I want you to," he persisted. "You used to read to Lizaveta."

Sonia opened the book and found the place. Her hands were shaking, her
voice failed her. Twice she tried to begin and could not bring out the
first syllable.

"Now a certain man was sick named Lazarus of Bethany..." she forced
herself at last to read, but at the third word her voice broke like an
overstrained string. There was a catch in her breath.

Raskolnikov saw in part why Sonia could not bring herself to read to him
and the more he saw this, the more roughly and irritably he insisted on
her doing so. He understood only too well how painful it was for her
to betray and unveil all that was her _own_. He understood that these
feelings really were her _secret treasure_, which she had kept perhaps
for years, perhaps from childhood, while she lived with an unhappy
father and a distracted stepmother crazed by grief, in the midst of
starving children and unseemly abuse and reproaches. But at the same
time he knew now and knew for certain that, although it filled her with
dread and suffering, yet she had a tormenting desire to read and to read
to _him_ that he might hear it, and to read _now_ whatever might come of
it!... He read this in her eyes, he could see it in her intense emotion.
She mastered herself, controlled the spasm in her throat and went on
reading the eleventh chapter of St. John. She went on to the nineteenth
verse:

"And many of the Jews came to Martha and Mary to comfort them concerning
their brother.

"Then Martha as soon as she heard that Jesus was coming went and met
Him: but Mary sat still in the house.

"Then said Martha unto Jesus, Lord, if Thou hadst been here, my brother
had not died.

"But I know that even now whatsoever Thou wilt ask of God, God will give
it Thee...."

Then she stopped again with a shamefaced feeling that her voice would
quiver and break again.

"Jesus said unto her, thy brother shall rise again.

"Martha saith unto Him, I know that he shall rise again in the
resurrection, at the last day.

"Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection and the life: he that
believeth in Me though he were dead, yet shall he live.

"And whosoever liveth and believeth in Me shall never die. Believest
thou this?

"She saith unto Him,"

(And drawing a painful breath, Sonia read distinctly and forcibly as
though she were making a public confession of faith.)

"Yea, Lord: I believe that Thou art the Christ, the Son of God Which
should come into the world."

She stopped and looked up quickly at him, but controlling herself went
on reading. Raskolnikov sat without moving, his elbows on the table and
his eyes turned away. She read to the thirty-second verse.

"Then when Mary was come where Jesus was and saw Him, she fell down at
His feet, saying unto Him, Lord if Thou hadst been here, my brother had
not died.

"When Jesus therefore saw her weeping, and the Jews also weeping which
came with her, He groaned in the spirit and was troubled,

"And said, Where have ye laid him? They said unto Him, Lord, come and
see.

"Jesus wept.

"Then said the Jews, behold how He loved him!

"And some of them said, could not this Man which opened the eyes of the
blind, have caused that even this man should not have died?"

Raskolnikov turned and looked at her with emotion. Yes, he had known it!
She was trembling in a real physical fever. He had expected it. She was
getting near the story of the greatest miracle and a feeling of immense
triumph came over her. Her voice rang out like a bell; triumph and joy
gave it power. The lines danced before her eyes, but she knew what she
was reading by heart. At the last verse "Could not this Man which opened
the eyes of the blind..." dropping her voice she passionately reproduced
the doubt, the reproach and censure of the blind disbelieving Jews, who
in another moment would fall at His feet as though struck by
thunder, sobbing and believing.... "And _he, he_--too, is blinded and
unbelieving, he, too, will hear, he, too, will believe, yes, yes! At
once, now," was what she was dreaming, and she was quivering with happy
anticipation.

"Jesus therefore again groaning in Himself cometh to the grave. It was a
cave, and a stone lay upon it.

"Jesus said, Take ye away the stone. Martha, the sister of him that was
dead, saith unto Him, Lord by this time he stinketh: for he hath been
dead four days."

She laid emphasis on the word _four_.

"Jesus saith unto her, Said I not unto thee that if thou wouldest
believe, thou shouldest see the glory of God?

"Then they took away the stone from the place where the dead was laid.
And Jesus lifted up His eyes and said, Father, I thank Thee that Thou
hast heard Me.

"And I knew that Thou hearest Me always; but because of the people which
stand by I said it, that they may believe that Thou hast sent Me.

"And when He thus had spoken, He cried with a loud voice, Lazarus, come
forth.

"And he that was dead came forth."

(She read loudly, cold and trembling with ecstasy, as though she were
seeing it before her eyes.)

"Bound hand and foot with graveclothes; and his face was bound about
with a napkin. Jesus saith unto them, Loose him and let him go.

"Then many of the Jews which came to Mary and had seen the things which
Jesus did believed on Him."

She could read no more, closed the book and got up from her chair
quickly.

"That is all about the raising of Lazarus," she whispered severely and
abruptly, and turning away she stood motionless, not daring to raise
her eyes to him. She still trembled feverishly. The candle-end was
flickering out in the battered candlestick, dimly lighting up in the
poverty-stricken room the murderer and the harlot who had so strangely
been reading together the eternal book. Five minutes or more passed.

"I came to speak of something," Raskolnikov said aloud, frowning. He got
up and went to Sonia. She lifted her eyes to him in silence. His face
was particularly stern and there was a sort of savage determination in
it.

"I have abandoned my family to-day," he said, "my mother and sister. I
am not going to see them. I've broken with them completely."

"What for?" asked Sonia amazed. Her recent meeting with his mother and
sister had left a great impression which she could not analyse. She
heard his news almost with horror.

"I have only you now," he added. "Let us go together.... I've come to
you, we are both accursed, let us go our way together!"

His eyes glittered "as though he were mad," Sonia thought, in her turn.

"Go where?" she asked in alarm and she involuntarily stepped back.

"How do I know? I only know it's the same road, I know that and nothing
more. It's the same goal!"

She looked at him and understood nothing. She knew only that he was
terribly, infinitely unhappy.

"No one of them will understand, if you tell them, but I have
understood. I need you, that is why I have come to you."

"I don't understand," whispered Sonia.

"You'll understand later. Haven't you done the same? You, too, have
transgressed... have had the strength to transgress. You have laid
hands on yourself, you have destroyed a life... _your own_ (it's all the
same!). You might have lived in spirit and understanding, but you'll
end in the Hay Market.... But you won't be able to stand it, and if
you remain alone you'll go out of your mind like me. You are like a mad
creature already. So we must go together on the same road! Let us go!"

"What for? What's all this for?" said Sonia, strangely and violently
agitated by his words.

"What for? Because you can't remain like this, that's why! You must look
things straight in the face at last, and not weep like a child and cry
that God won't allow it. What will happen, if you should really be taken
to the hospital to-morrow? She is mad and in consumption, she'll soon
die and the children? Do you mean to tell me Polenka won't come to
grief? Haven't you seen children here at the street corners sent out
by their mothers to beg? I've found out where those mothers live and in
what surroundings. Children can't remain children there! At seven the
child is vicious and a thief. Yet children, you know, are the image of
Christ: 'theirs is the kingdom of Heaven.' He bade us honour and love
them, they are the humanity of the future...."

"What's to be done, what's to be done?" repeated Sonia, weeping
hysterically and wringing her hands.

"What's to be done? Break what must be broken, once for all, that's all,
and take the suffering on oneself. What, you don't understand? You'll
understand later.... Freedom and power, and above all, power! Over all
trembling creation and all the ant-heap!... That's the goal, remember
that! That's my farewell message. Perhaps it's the last time I shall
speak to you. If I don't come to-morrow, you'll hear of it all, and then
remember these words. And some day later on, in years to come, you'll
understand perhaps what they meant. If I come to-morrow, I'll tell you
who killed Lizaveta.... Good-bye."

Sonia started with terror.

"Why, do you know who killed her?" she asked, chilled with horror,
looking wildly at him.

"I know and will tell... you, only you. I have chosen you out. I'm not
coming to you to ask forgiveness, but simply to tell you. I chose you
out long ago to hear this, when your father talked of you and when
Lizaveta was alive, I thought of it. Good-bye, don't shake hands.
To-morrow!"

He went out. Sonia gazed at him as at a madman. But she herself was like
one insane and felt it. Her head was going round.

"Good heavens, how does he know who killed Lizaveta? What did those
words mean? It's awful!" But at the same time _the idea_ did not enter
her head, not for a moment! "Oh, he must be terribly unhappy!... He has
abandoned his mother and sister.... What for? What has happened? And
what had he in his mind? What did he say to her? He had kissed her foot
and said... said (yes, he had said it clearly) that he could not live
without her.... Oh, merciful heavens!"

Sonia spent the whole night feverish and delirious. She jumped up from
time to time, wept and wrung her hands, then sank again into feverish
sleep and dreamt of Polenka, Katerina Ivanovna and Lizaveta, of reading
the gospel and him... him with pale face, with burning eyes... kissing
her feet, weeping.

On the other side of the door on the right, which divided Sonia's room
from Madame Resslich's flat, was a room which had long stood empty. A
card was fixed on the gate and a notice stuck in the windows over the
canal advertising it to let. Sonia had long been accustomed to the
room's being uninhabited. But all that time Mr. Svidrigaïlov had been
standing, listening at the door of the empty room. When Raskolnikov went
out he stood still, thought a moment, went on tiptoe to his own room
which adjoined the empty one, brought a chair and noiselessly carried it
to the door that led to Sonia's room. The conversation had struck him
as interesting and remarkable, and he had greatly enjoyed it--so much so
that he brought a chair that he might not in the future, to-morrow, for
instance, have to endure the inconvenience of standing a whole hour, but
might listen in comfort.



CHAPTER V

When next morning at eleven o'clock punctually Raskolnikov went into the
department of the investigation of criminal causes and sent his name in
to Porfiry Petrovitch, he was surprised at being kept waiting so long:
it was at least ten minutes before he was summoned. He had expected
that they would pounce upon him. But he stood in the waiting-room, and
people, who apparently had nothing to do with him, were continually
passing to and fro before him. In the next room which looked like an
office, several clerks were sitting writing and obviously they had
no notion who or what Raskolnikov might be. He looked uneasily and
suspiciously about him to see whether there was not some guard, some
mysterious watch being kept on him to prevent his escape. But there was
nothing of the sort: he saw only the faces of clerks absorbed in petty
details, then other people, no one seemed to have any concern with him.
He might go where he liked for them. The conviction grew stronger in him
that if that enigmatic man of yesterday, that phantom sprung out of the
earth, had seen everything, they would not have let him stand and wait
like that. And would they have waited till he elected to appear at
eleven? Either the man had not yet given information, or... or simply
he knew nothing, had seen nothing (and how could he have seen anything?)
and so all that had happened to him the day before was again a phantom
exaggerated by his sick and overstrained imagination. This conjecture
had begun to grow strong the day before, in the midst of all his
alarm and despair. Thinking it all over now and preparing for a fresh
conflict, he was suddenly aware that he was trembling--and he felt a
rush of indignation at the thought that he was trembling with fear at
facing that hateful Porfiry Petrovitch. What he dreaded above all was
meeting that man again; he hated him with an intense, unmitigated hatred
and was afraid his hatred might betray him. His indignation was such
that he ceased trembling at once; he made ready to go in with a cold and
arrogant bearing and vowed to himself to keep as silent as possible,
to watch and listen and for once at least to control his overstrained
nerves. At that moment he was summoned to Porfiry Petrovitch.

He found Porfiry Petrovitch alone in his study. His study was a room
neither large nor small, furnished with a large writing-table, that
stood before a sofa, upholstered in checked material, a bureau, a
bookcase in the corner and several chairs--all government furniture,
of polished yellow wood. In the further wall there was a closed door,
beyond it there were no doubt other rooms. On Raskolnikov's entrance
Porfiry Petrovitch had at once closed the door by which he had come in
and they remained alone. He met his visitor with an apparently genial
and good-tempered air, and it was only after a few minutes that
Raskolnikov saw signs of a certain awkwardness in him, as though he had
been thrown out of his reckoning or caught in something very secret.

"Ah, my dear fellow! Here you are... in our domain"... began Porfiry,
holding out both hands to him. "Come, sit down, old man... or perhaps
you don't like to be called 'my dear fellow' and 'old man!'--_tout
court_? Please don't think it too familiar.... Here, on the sofa."

Raskolnikov sat down, keeping his eyes fixed on him. "In our domain,"
the apologies for familiarity, the French phrase _tout court_, were all
characteristic signs.

"He held out both hands to me, but he did not give me one--he drew it
back in time," struck him suspiciously. Both were watching each other,
but when their eyes met, quick as lightning they looked away.

"I brought you this paper... about the watch. Here it is. Is it all
right or shall I copy it again?"

"What? A paper? Yes, yes, don't be uneasy, it's all right," Porfiry
Petrovitch said as though in haste, and after he had said it he took the
paper and looked at it. "Yes, it's all right. Nothing more is needed,"
he declared with the same rapidity and he laid the paper on the table.

A minute later when he was talking of something else he took it from the
table and put it on his bureau.

"I believe you said yesterday you would like to question me...
formally... about my acquaintance with the murdered woman?" Raskolnikov
was beginning again. "Why did I put in 'I believe'" passed through
his mind in a flash. "Why am I so uneasy at having put in that '_I
believe_'?" came in a second flash. And he suddenly felt that his
uneasiness at the mere contact with Porfiry, at the first words, at the
first looks, had grown in an instant to monstrous proportions, and that
this was fearfully dangerous. His nerves were quivering, his emotion was
increasing. "It's bad, it's bad! I shall say too much again."

"Yes, yes, yes! There's no hurry, there's no hurry," muttered Porfiry
Petrovitch, moving to and fro about the table without any apparent aim,
as it were making dashes towards the window, the bureau and the table,
at one moment avoiding Raskolnikov's suspicious glance, then again
standing still and looking him straight in the face.

His fat round little figure looked very strange, like a ball rolling
from one side to the other and rebounding back.

"We've plenty of time. Do you smoke? have you your own? Here, a
cigarette!" he went on, offering his visitor a cigarette. "You know I am
receiving you here, but my own quarters are through there, you know, my
government quarters. But I am living outside for the time, I had to
have some repairs done here. It's almost finished now.... Government
quarters, you know, are a capital thing. Eh, what do you think?"

"Yes, a capital thing," answered Raskolnikov, looking at him almost
ironically.

"A capital thing, a capital thing," repeated Porfiry Petrovitch, as
though he had just thought of something quite different. "Yes, a capital
thing," he almost shouted at last, suddenly staring at Raskolnikov and
stopping short two steps from him.

This stupid repetition was too incongruous in its ineptitude with the
serious, brooding and enigmatic glance he turned upon his visitor.

But this stirred Raskolnikov's spleen more than ever and he could not
resist an ironical and rather incautious challenge.

"Tell me, please," he asked suddenly, looking almost insolently at him
and taking a kind of pleasure in his own insolence. "I believe it's a
sort of legal rule, a sort of legal tradition--for all investigating
lawyers--to begin their attack from afar, with a trivial, or at least
an irrelevant subject, so as to encourage, or rather, to divert the man
they are cross-examining, to disarm his caution and then all at once to
give him an unexpected knock-down blow with some fatal question. Isn't
that so? It's a sacred tradition, mentioned, I fancy, in all the manuals
of the art?"

"Yes, yes.... Why, do you imagine that was why I spoke about government
quarters... eh?"

And as he said this Porfiry Petrovitch screwed up his eyes and winked;
a good-humoured, crafty look passed over his face. The wrinkles on his
forehead were smoothed out, his eyes contracted, his features broadened
and he suddenly went off into a nervous prolonged laugh, shaking all
over and looking Raskolnikov straight in the face. The latter forced
himself to laugh, too, but when Porfiry, seeing that he was laughing,
broke into such a guffaw that he turned almost crimson, Raskolnikov's
repulsion overcame all precaution; he left off laughing, scowled and
stared with hatred at Porfiry, keeping his eyes fixed on him while his
intentionally prolonged laughter lasted. There was lack of precaution on
both sides, however, for Porfiry Petrovitch seemed to be laughing in
his visitor's face and to be very little disturbed at the annoyance with
which the visitor received it. The latter fact was very significant
in Raskolnikov's eyes: he saw that Porfiry Petrovitch had not been
embarrassed just before either, but that he, Raskolnikov, had perhaps
fallen into a trap; that there must be something, some motive here
unknown to him; that, perhaps, everything was in readiness and in
another moment would break upon him...

He went straight to the point at once, rose from his seat and took his
cap.

"Porfiry Petrovitch," he began resolutely, though with considerable
irritation, "yesterday you expressed a desire that I should come to you
for some inquiries" (he laid special stress on the word "inquiries"). "I
have come and if you have anything to ask me, ask it, and if not, allow
me to withdraw. I have no time to spare.... I have to be at the funeral
of that man who was run over, of whom you... know also," he added,
feeling angry at once at having made this addition and more irritated at
his anger. "I am sick of it all, do you hear? and have long been. It's
partly what made me ill. In short," he shouted, feeling that the phrase
about his illness was still more out of place, "in short, kindly examine
me or let me go, at once. And if you must examine me, do so in the
proper form! I will not allow you to do so otherwise, and so meanwhile,
good-bye, as we have evidently nothing to keep us now."

"Good heavens! What do you mean? What shall I question you about?"
cackled Porfiry Petrovitch with a change of tone, instantly leaving off
laughing. "Please don't disturb yourself," he began fidgeting from place
to place and fussily making Raskolnikov sit down. "There's no hurry,
there's no hurry, it's all nonsense. Oh, no, I'm very glad you've come
to see me at last... I look upon you simply as a visitor. And as for
my confounded laughter, please excuse it, Rodion Romanovitch. Rodion
Romanovitch? That is your name?... It's my nerves, you tickled me
so with your witty observation; I assure you, sometimes I shake with
laughter like an india-rubber ball for half an hour at a time.... I'm
often afraid of an attack of paralysis. Do sit down. Please do, or I
shall think you are angry..."

Raskolnikov did not speak; he listened, watching him, still frowning
angrily. He did sit down, but still held his cap.

"I must tell you one thing about myself, my dear Rodion Romanovitch,"
Porfiry Petrovitch continued, moving about the room and again avoiding
his visitor's eyes. "You see, I'm a bachelor, a man of no consequence
and not used to society; besides, I have nothing before me, I'm set, I'm
running to seed and... and have you noticed, Rodion Romanovitch, that in
our Petersburg circles, if two clever men meet who are not intimate, but
respect each other, like you and me, it takes them half an hour before
they can find a subject for conversation--they are dumb, they sit
opposite each other and feel awkward. Everyone has subjects of
conversation, ladies for instance... people in high society always have
their subjects of conversation, _c'est de rigueur_, but people of the
middle sort like us, thinking people that is, are always tongue-tied
and awkward. What is the reason of it? Whether it is the lack of public
interest, or whether it is we are so honest we don't want to deceive one
another, I don't know. What do you think? Do put down your cap, it
looks as if you were just going, it makes me uncomfortable... I am so
delighted..."

Raskolnikov put down his cap and continued listening in silence with
a serious frowning face to the vague and empty chatter of Porfiry
Petrovitch. "Does he really want to distract my attention with his silly
babble?"

"I can't offer you coffee here; but why not spend five minutes with a
friend?" Porfiry pattered on, "and you know all these official
duties... please don't mind my running up and down, excuse it, my dear
fellow, I am very much afraid of offending you, but exercise is
absolutely indispensable for me. I'm always sitting and so glad to be
moving about for five minutes... I suffer from my sedentary life... I
always intend to join a gymnasium; they say that officials of all ranks,
even Privy Councillors, may be seen skipping gaily there; there you have
it, modern science... yes, yes.... But as for my duties here, inquiries
and all such formalities... you mentioned inquiries yourself just now...
I assure you these interrogations are sometimes more embarrassing for
the interrogator than for the interrogated.... You made the observation
yourself just now very aptly and wittily." (Raskolnikov had made no
observation of the kind.) "One gets into a muddle! A regular muddle! One
keeps harping on the same note, like a drum! There is to be a reform and
we shall be called by a different name, at least, he-he-he! And as for
our legal tradition, as you so wittily called it, I thoroughly agree
with you. Every prisoner on trial, even the rudest peasant, knows that
they begin by disarming him with irrelevant questions (as you so happily
put it) and then deal him a knock-down blow, he-he-he!--your felicitous
comparison, he-he! So you really imagined that I meant by 'government
quarters'... he-he! You are an ironical person. Come. I won't go on! Ah,
by the way, yes! One word leads to another. You spoke of formality just
now, apropos of the inquiry, you know. But what's the use of formality?
In many cases it's nonsense. Sometimes one has a friendly chat and gets
a good deal more out of it. One can always fall back on formality, allow
me to assure you. And after all, what does it amount to? An examining
lawyer cannot be bounded by formality at every step. The work of
investigation is, so to speak, a free art in its own way, he-he-he!"

Porfiry Petrovitch took breath a moment. He had simply babbled on
uttering empty phrases, letting slip a few enigmatic words and again
reverting to incoherence. He was almost running about the room, moving
his fat little legs quicker and quicker, looking at the ground, with his
right hand behind his back, while with his left making gesticulations
that were extraordinarily incongruous with his words. Raskolnikov
suddenly noticed that as he ran about the room he seemed twice to stop
for a moment near the door, as though he were listening.

"Is he expecting anything?"

"You are certainly quite right about it," Porfiry began gaily, looking
with extraordinary simplicity at Raskolnikov (which startled him and
instantly put him on his guard); "certainly quite right in laughing so
wittily at our legal forms, he-he! Some of these elaborate psychological
methods are exceedingly ridiculous and perhaps useless, if one adheres
too closely to the forms. Yes... I am talking of forms again. Well, if
I recognise, or more strictly speaking, if I suspect someone or other to
be a criminal in any case entrusted to me... you're reading for the law,
of course, Rodion Romanovitch?"

"Yes, I was..."

"Well, then it is a precedent for you for the future--though don't
suppose I should venture to instruct you after the articles you publish
about crime! No, I simply make bold to state it by way of fact, if I
took this man or that for a criminal, why, I ask, should I worry him
prematurely, even though I had evidence against him? In one case I may
be bound, for instance, to arrest a man at once, but another may be in
quite a different position, you know, so why shouldn't I let him walk
about the town a bit? he-he-he! But I see you don't quite understand, so
I'll give you a clearer example. If I put him in prison too soon, I
may very likely give him, so to speak, moral support, he-he! You're
laughing?"

Raskolnikov had no idea of laughing. He was sitting with compressed
lips, his feverish eyes fixed on Porfiry Petrovitch's.

"Yet that is the case, with some types especially, for men are so
different. You say 'evidence'. Well, there may be evidence. But
evidence, you know, can generally be taken two ways. I am an examining
lawyer and a weak man, I confess it. I should like to make a proof, so
to say, mathematically clear. I should like to make a chain of evidence
such as twice two are four, it ought to be a direct, irrefutable proof!
And if I shut him up too soon--even though I might be convinced _he_
was the man, I should very likely be depriving myself of the means of
getting further evidence against him. And how? By giving him, so to
speak, a definite position, I shall put him out of suspense and set his
mind at rest, so that he will retreat into his shell. They say that at
Sevastopol, soon after Alma, the clever people were in a terrible fright
that the enemy would attack openly and take Sevastopol at once. But when
they saw that the enemy preferred a regular siege, they were delighted,
I am told and reassured, for the thing would drag on for two months at
least. You're laughing, you don't believe me again? Of course, you're
right, too. You're right, you're right. These are special cases, I
admit. But you must observe this, my dear Rodion Romanovitch, the
general case, the case for which all legal forms and rules are intended,
for which they are calculated and laid down in books, does not exist at
all, for the reason that every case, every crime, for instance, so soon
as it actually occurs, at once becomes a thoroughly special case and
sometimes a case unlike any that's gone before. Very comic cases of that
sort sometimes occur. If I leave one man quite alone, if I don't touch
him and don't worry him, but let him know or at least suspect every
moment that I know all about it and am watching him day and night, and
if he is in continual suspicion and terror, he'll be bound to lose his
head. He'll come of himself, or maybe do something which will make it as
plain as twice two are four--it's delightful. It may be so with a simple
peasant, but with one of our sort, an intelligent man cultivated on a
certain side, it's a dead certainty. For, my dear fellow, it's a very
important matter to know on what side a man is cultivated. And then
there are nerves, there are nerves, you have overlooked them! Why, they
are all sick, nervous and irritable!... And then how they all suffer
from spleen! That I assure you is a regular gold-mine for us. And it's
no anxiety to me, his running about the town free! Let him, let him walk
about for a bit! I know well enough that I've caught him and that he
won't escape me. Where could he escape to, he-he? Abroad, perhaps? A
Pole will escape abroad, but not here, especially as I am watching
and have taken measures. Will he escape into the depths of the country
perhaps? But you know, peasants live there, real rude Russian peasants.
A modern cultivated man would prefer prison to living with such
strangers as our peasants. He-he! But that's all nonsense, and on
the surface. It's not merely that he has nowhere to run to, he is
_psychologically_ unable to escape me, he-he! What an expression!
Through a law of nature he can't escape me if he had anywhere to go.
Have you seen a butterfly round a candle? That's how he will keep
circling and circling round me. Freedom will lose its attractions. He'll
begin to brood, he'll weave a tangle round himself, he'll worry himself
to death! What's more he will provide me with a mathematical proof--if I
only give him long enough interval.... And he'll keep circling round
me, getting nearer and nearer and then--flop! He'll fly straight into my
mouth and I'll swallow him, and that will be very amusing, he-he-he! You
don't believe me?"

Raskolnikov made no reply; he sat pale and motionless, still gazing with
the same intensity into Porfiry's face.

"It's a lesson," he thought, turning cold. "This is beyond the cat
playing with a mouse, like yesterday. He can't be showing off his power
with no motive... prompting me; he is far too clever for that... he must
have another object. What is it? It's all nonsense, my friend, you are
pretending, to scare me! You've no proofs and the man I saw had no
real existence. You simply want to make me lose my head, to work me up
beforehand and so to crush me. But you are wrong, you won't do it! But
why give me such a hint? Is he reckoning on my shattered nerves? No, my
friend, you are wrong, you won't do it even though you have some trap
for me... let us see what you have in store for me."

And he braced himself to face a terrible and unknown ordeal. At times
he longed to fall on Porfiry and strangle him. This anger was what he
dreaded from the beginning. He felt that his parched lips were flecked
with foam, his heart was throbbing. But he was still determined not to
speak till the right moment. He realised that this was the best
policy in his position, because instead of saying too much he would be
irritating his enemy by his silence and provoking him into speaking too
freely. Anyhow, this was what he hoped for.

"No, I see you don't believe me, you think I am playing a harmless joke
on you," Porfiry began again, getting more and more lively, chuckling
at every instant and again pacing round the room. "And to be sure you're
right: God has given me a figure that can awaken none but comic ideas in
other people; a buffoon; but let me tell you, and I repeat it, excuse
an old man, my dear Rodion Romanovitch, you are a man still young, so to
say, in your first youth and so you put intellect above everything, like
all young people. Playful wit and abstract arguments fascinate you and
that's for all the world like the old Austrian _Hof-kriegsrath_, as
far as I can judge of military matters, that is: on paper they'd beaten
Napoleon and taken him prisoner, and there in their study they worked it
all out in the cleverest fashion, but look you, General Mack surrendered
with all his army, he-he-he! I see, I see, Rodion Romanovitch, you are
laughing at a civilian like me, taking examples out of military history!
But I can't help it, it's my weakness. I am fond of military science.
And I'm ever so fond of reading all military histories. I've certainly
missed my proper career. I ought to have been in the army, upon my
word I ought. I shouldn't have been a Napoleon, but I might have been a
major, he-he! Well, I'll tell you the whole truth, my dear fellow, about
this _special case_, I mean: actual fact and a man's temperament, my
dear sir, are weighty matters and it's astonishing how they sometimes
deceive the sharpest calculation! I--listen to an old man--am speaking
seriously, Rodion Romanovitch" (as he said this Porfiry Petrovitch, who
was scarcely five-and-thirty, actually seemed to have grown old; even
his voice changed and he seemed to shrink together) "Moreover, I'm
a candid man... am I a candid man or not? What do you say? I fancy I
really am: I tell you these things for nothing and don't even expect a
reward for it, he-he! Well, to proceed, wit in my opinion is a splendid
thing, it is, so to say, an adornment of nature and a consolation of
life, and what tricks it can play! So that it sometimes is hard for a
poor examining lawyer to know where he is, especially when he's liable
to be carried away by his own fancy, too, for you know he is a man after
all! But the poor fellow is saved by the criminal's temperament, worse
luck for him! But young people carried away by their own wit don't think
of that 'when they overstep all obstacles,' as you wittily and cleverly
expressed it yesterday. He will lie--that is, the man who is a _special
case_, the incognito, and he will lie well, in the cleverest fashion;
you might think he would triumph and enjoy the fruits of his wit, but at
the most interesting, the most flagrant moment he will faint. Of course
there may be illness and a stuffy room as well, but anyway! Anyway he's
given us the idea! He lied incomparably, but he didn't reckon on his
temperament. That's what betrays him! Another time he will be carried
away by his playful wit into making fun of the man who suspects him, he
will turn pale as it were on purpose to mislead, but his paleness will
be _too natural_, too much like the real thing, again he has given us
an idea! Though his questioner may be deceived at first, he will think
differently next day if he is not a fool, and, of course, it is like
that at every step! He puts himself forward where he is not wanted,
speaks continually when he ought to keep silent, brings in all sorts of
allegorical allusions, he-he! Comes and asks why didn't you take me long
ago? he-he-he! And that can happen, you know, with the cleverest man,
the psychologist, the literary man. The temperament reflects everything
like a mirror! Gaze into it and admire what you see! But why are you so
pale, Rodion Romanovitch? Is the room stuffy? Shall I open the window?"

"Oh, don't trouble, please," cried Raskolnikov and he suddenly broke
into a laugh. "Please don't trouble."

Porfiry stood facing him, paused a moment and suddenly he too laughed.
Raskolnikov got up from the sofa, abruptly checking his hysterical
laughter.

"Porfiry Petrovitch," he began, speaking loudly and distinctly, though
his legs trembled and he could scarcely stand. "I see clearly at last
that you actually suspect me of murdering that old woman and her sister
Lizaveta. Let me tell you for my part that I am sick of this. If you
find that you have a right to prosecute me legally, to arrest me, then
prosecute me, arrest me. But I will not let myself be jeered at to my
face and worried..."

His lips trembled, his eyes glowed with fury and he could not restrain
his voice.

"I won't allow it!" he shouted, bringing his fist down on the table. "Do
you hear that, Porfiry Petrovitch? I won't allow it."

"Good heavens! What does it mean?" cried Porfiry Petrovitch, apparently
quite frightened. "Rodion Romanovitch, my dear fellow, what is the
matter with you?"

"I won't allow it," Raskolnikov shouted again.

"Hush, my dear man! They'll hear and come in. Just think, what could we
say to them?" Porfiry Petrovitch whispered in horror, bringing his face
close to Raskolnikov's.

"I won't allow it, I won't allow it," Raskolnikov repeated mechanically,
but he too spoke in a sudden whisper.

Porfiry turned quickly and ran to open the window.

"Some fresh air! And you must have some water, my dear fellow. You're
ill!" and he was running to the door to call for some when he found a
decanter of water in the corner. "Come, drink a little," he whispered,
rushing up to him with the decanter. "It will be sure to do you good."

Porfiry Petrovitch's alarm and sympathy were so natural that Raskolnikov
was silent and began looking at him with wild curiosity. He did not take
the water, however.

"Rodion Romanovitch, my dear fellow, you'll drive yourself out of your
mind, I assure you, ach, ach! Have some water, do drink a little."

He forced him to take the glass. Raskolnikov raised it mechanically to
his lips, but set it on the table again with disgust.

"Yes, you've had a little attack! You'll bring back your illness again,
my dear fellow," Porfiry Petrovitch cackled with friendly sympathy,
though he still looked rather disconcerted. "Good heavens, you must
take more care of yourself! Dmitri Prokofitch was here, came to see me
yesterday--I know, I know, I've a nasty, ironical temper, but what they
made of it!... Good heavens, he came yesterday after you'd been. We
dined and he talked and talked away, and I could only throw up my hands
in despair! Did he come from you? But do sit down, for mercy's sake, sit
down!"

"No, not from me, but I knew he went to you and why he went,"
Raskolnikov answered sharply.

"You knew?"

"I knew. What of it?"

"Why this, Rodion Romanovitch, that I know more than that about you;
I know about everything. I know how you went _to take a flat_ at night
when it was dark and how you rang the bell and asked about the blood, so
that the workmen and the porter did not know what to make of it. Yes, I
understand your state of mind at that time... but you'll drive yourself
mad like that, upon my word! You'll lose your head! You're full of
generous indignation at the wrongs you've received, first from destiny,
and then from the police officers, and so you rush from one thing to
another to force them to speak out and make an end of it all, because
you are sick of all this suspicion and foolishness. That's so, isn't
it? I have guessed how you feel, haven't I? Only in that way you'll
lose your head and Razumihin's, too; he's too _good_ a man for such
a position, you must know that. You are ill and he is good and your
illness is infectious for him... I'll tell you about it when you are
more yourself.... But do sit down, for goodness' sake. Please rest, you
look shocking, do sit down."

Raskolnikov sat down; he no longer shivered, he was hot all over. In
amazement he listened with strained attention to Porfiry Petrovitch who
still seemed frightened as he looked after him with friendly solicitude.
But he did not believe a word he said, though he felt a strange
inclination to believe. Porfiry's unexpected words about the flat had
utterly overwhelmed him. "How can it be, he knows about the flat then,"
he thought suddenly, "and he tells it me himself!"

"Yes, in our legal practice there was a case almost exactly similar, a
case of morbid psychology," Porfiry went on quickly. "A man confessed to
murder and how he kept it up! It was a regular hallucination; he brought
forward facts, he imposed upon everyone and why? He had been partly, but
only partly, unintentionally the cause of a murder and when he knew that
he had given the murderers the opportunity, he sank into dejection, it
got on his mind and turned his brain, he began imagining things and he
persuaded himself that he was the murderer. But at last the High Court
of Appeal went into it and the poor fellow was acquitted and put under
proper care. Thanks to the Court of Appeal! Tut-tut-tut! Why, my dear
fellow, you may drive yourself into delirium if you have the impulse
to work upon your nerves, to go ringing bells at night and asking about
blood! I've studied all this morbid psychology in my practice. A man
is sometimes tempted to jump out of a window or from a belfry. Just the
same with bell-ringing.... It's all illness, Rodion Romanovitch! You
have begun to neglect your illness. You should consult an experienced
doctor, what's the good of that fat fellow? You are lightheaded! You
were delirious when you did all this!"

For a moment Raskolnikov felt everything going round.

"Is it possible, is it possible," flashed through his mind, "that he is
still lying? He can't be, he can't be." He rejected that idea, feeling
to what a degree of fury it might drive him, feeling that that fury
might drive him mad.

"I was not delirious. I knew what I was doing," he cried, straining
every faculty to penetrate Porfiry's game, "I was quite myself, do you
hear?"

"Yes, I hear and understand. You said yesterday you were not delirious,
you were particularly emphatic about it! I understand all you can tell
me! A-ach!... Listen, Rodion Romanovitch, my dear fellow. If you were
actually a criminal, or were somehow mixed up in this damnable business,
would you insist that you were not delirious but in full possession
of your faculties? And so emphatically and persistently? Would it be
possible? Quite impossible, to my thinking. If you had anything on
your conscience, you certainly ought to insist that you were delirious.
That's so, isn't it?"

There was a note of slyness in this inquiry. Raskolnikov drew back on
the sofa as Porfiry bent over him and stared in silent perplexity at
him.

"Another thing about Razumihin--you certainly ought to have said that he
came of his own accord, to have concealed your part in it! But you don't
conceal it! You lay stress on his coming at your instigation."

Raskolnikov had not done so. A chill went down his back.

"You keep telling lies," he said slowly and weakly, twisting his lips
into a sickly smile, "you are trying again to show that you know all
my game, that you know all I shall say beforehand," he said, conscious
himself that he was not weighing his words as he ought. "You want to
frighten me... or you are simply laughing at me..."

He still stared at him as he said this and again there was a light of
intense hatred in his eyes.

"You keep lying," he said. "You know perfectly well that the best
policy for the criminal is to tell the truth as nearly as possible... to
conceal as little as possible. I don't believe you!"

"What a wily person you are!" Porfiry tittered, "there's no catching
you; you've a perfect monomania. So you don't believe me? But still you
do believe me, you believe a quarter; I'll soon make you believe the
whole, because I have a sincere liking for you and genuinely wish you
good."

Raskolnikov's lips trembled.

"Yes, I do," went on Porfiry, touching Raskolnikov's arm genially, "you
must take care of your illness. Besides, your mother and sister are here
now; you must think of them. You must soothe and comfort them and you do
nothing but frighten them..."

"What has that to do with you? How do you know it? What concern is it of
yours? You are keeping watch on me and want to let me know it?"

"Good heavens! Why, I learnt it all from you yourself! You don't
notice that in your excitement you tell me and others everything. From
Razumihin, too, I learnt a number of interesting details yesterday. No,
you interrupted me, but I must tell you that, for all your wit, your
suspiciousness makes you lose the common-sense view of things. To return
to bell-ringing, for instance. I, an examining lawyer, have betrayed a
precious thing like that, a real fact (for it is a fact worth having),
and you see nothing in it! Why, if I had the slightest suspicion of you,
should I have acted like that? No, I should first have disarmed your
suspicions and not let you see I knew of that fact, should have diverted
your attention and suddenly have dealt you a knock-down blow (your
expression) saying: 'And what were you doing, sir, pray, at ten or
nearly eleven at the murdered woman's flat and why did you ring the bell
and why did you ask about blood? And why did you invite the porters
to go with you to the police station, to the lieutenant?' That's how
I ought to have acted if I had a grain of suspicion of you. I ought to
have taken your evidence in due form, searched your lodging and perhaps
have arrested you, too... so I have no suspicion of you, since I have
not done that! But you can't look at it normally and you see nothing, I
say again."

Raskolnikov started so that Porfiry Petrovitch could not fail to
perceive it.

"You are lying all the while," he cried, "I don't know your object,
but you are lying. You did not speak like that just now and I cannot be
mistaken!"

"I am lying?" Porfiry repeated, apparently incensed, but preserving
a good-humoured and ironical face, as though he were not in the least
concerned at Raskolnikov's opinion of him. "I am lying... but how did
I treat you just now, I, the examining lawyer? Prompting you and giving
you every means for your defence; illness, I said, delirium, injury,
melancholy and the police officers and all the rest of it? Ah! He-he-he!
Though, indeed, all those psychological means of defence are not very
reliable and cut both ways: illness, delirium, I don't remember--that's
all right, but why, my good sir, in your illness and in your delirium
were you haunted by just those delusions and not by any others? There
may have been others, eh? He-he-he!"

Raskolnikov looked haughtily and contemptuously at him.

"Briefly," he said loudly and imperiously, rising to his feet and in so
doing pushing Porfiry back a little, "briefly, I want to know, do you
acknowledge me perfectly free from suspicion or not? Tell me, Porfiry
Petrovitch, tell me once for all and make haste!"

"What a business I'm having with you!" cried Porfiry with a perfectly
good-humoured, sly and composed face. "And why do you want to know, why
do you want to know so much, since they haven't begun to worry you? Why,
you are like a child asking for matches! And why are you so uneasy? Why
do you force yourself upon us, eh? He-he-he!"

"I repeat," Raskolnikov cried furiously, "that I can't put up with it!"

"With what? Uncertainty?" interrupted Porfiry.

"Don't jeer at me! I won't have it! I tell you I won't have it. I can't
and I won't, do you hear, do you hear?" he shouted, bringing his fist
down on the table again.

"Hush! Hush! They'll overhear! I warn you seriously, take care of
yourself. I am not joking," Porfiry whispered, but this time there was
not the look of old womanish good nature and alarm in his face. Now
he was peremptory, stern, frowning and for once laying aside all
mystification.

But this was only for an instant. Raskolnikov, bewildered, suddenly fell
into actual frenzy, but, strange to say, he again obeyed the command to
speak quietly, though he was in a perfect paroxysm of fury.

"I will not allow myself to be tortured," he whispered, instantly
recognising with hatred that he could not help obeying the command and
driven to even greater fury by the thought. "Arrest me, search me, but
kindly act in due form and don't play with me! Don't dare!"

"Don't worry about the form," Porfiry interrupted with the same sly
smile, as it were, gloating with enjoyment over Raskolnikov. "I invited
you to see me quite in a friendly way."

"I don't want your friendship and I spit on it! Do you hear? And, here,
I take my cap and go. What will you say now if you mean to arrest me?"

He took up his cap and went to the door.

"And won't you see my little surprise?" chuckled Porfiry, again taking
him by the arm and stopping him at the door.

He seemed to become more playful and good-humoured which maddened
Raskolnikov.

"What surprise?" he asked, standing still and looking at Porfiry in
alarm.

"My little surprise, it's sitting there behind the door, he-he-he!"
(He pointed to the locked door.) "I locked him in that he should not
escape."

"What is it? Where? What?..."

Raskolnikov walked to the door and would have opened it, but it was
locked.

"It's locked, here is the key!"

And he brought a key out of his pocket.

"You are lying," roared Raskolnikov without restraint, "you lie, you
damned punchinello!" and he rushed at Porfiry who retreated to the other
door, not at all alarmed.

"I understand it all! You are lying and mocking so that I may betray
myself to you..."

"Why, you could not betray yourself any further, my dear Rodion
Romanovitch. You are in a passion. Don't shout, I shall call the
clerks."

"You are lying! Call the clerks! You knew I was ill and tried to work
me into a frenzy to make me betray myself, that was your object! Produce
your facts! I understand it all. You've no evidence, you have only
wretched rubbishly suspicions like Zametov's! You knew my character, you
wanted to drive me to fury and then to knock me down with priests and
deputies.... Are you waiting for them? eh! What are you waiting for?
Where are they? Produce them?"

"Why deputies, my good man? What things people will imagine! And to do
so would not be acting in form as you say, you don't know the business,
my dear fellow.... And there's no escaping form, as you see," Porfiry
muttered, listening at the door through which a noise could be heard.

"Ah, they're coming," cried Raskolnikov. "You've sent for them! You
expected them! Well, produce them all: your deputies, your witnesses,
what you like!... I am ready!"

But at this moment a strange incident occurred, something so unexpected
that neither Raskolnikov nor Porfiry Petrovitch could have looked for
such a conclusion to their interview.



CHAPTER VI

When he remembered the scene afterwards, this is how Raskolnikov saw it.

The noise behind the door increased, and suddenly the door was opened a
little.

"What is it?" cried Porfiry Petrovitch, annoyed. "Why, I gave orders..."

For an instant there was no answer, but it was evident that there were
several persons at the door, and that they were apparently pushing
somebody back.

"What is it?" Porfiry Petrovitch repeated, uneasily.

"The prisoner Nikolay has been brought," someone answered.

"He is not wanted! Take him away! Let him wait! What's he doing here?
How irregular!" cried Porfiry, rushing to the door.

"But he..." began the same voice, and suddenly ceased.

Two seconds, not more, were spent in actual struggle, then someone gave
a violent shove, and then a man, very pale, strode into the room.

This man's appearance was at first sight very strange. He stared
straight before him, as though seeing nothing. There was a determined
gleam in his eyes; at the same time there was a deathly pallor in his
face, as though he were being led to the scaffold. His white lips were
faintly twitching.

He was dressed like a workman and was of medium height, very young,
slim, his hair cut in round crop, with thin spare features. The man whom
he had thrust back followed him into the room and succeeded in seizing
him by the shoulder; he was a warder; but Nikolay pulled his arm away.

Several persons crowded inquisitively into the doorway. Some of them
tried to get in. All this took place almost instantaneously.

"Go away, it's too soon! Wait till you are sent for!... Why have you
brought him so soon?" Porfiry Petrovitch muttered, extremely annoyed,
and as it were thrown out of his reckoning.

But Nikolay suddenly knelt down.

"What's the matter?" cried Porfiry, surprised.

"I am guilty! Mine is the sin! I am the murderer," Nikolay articulated
suddenly, rather breathless, but speaking fairly loudly.

For ten seconds there was silence as though all had been struck dumb;
even the warder stepped back, mechanically retreated to the door, and
stood immovable.

"What is it?" cried Porfiry Petrovitch, recovering from his momentary
stupefaction.

"I... am the murderer," repeated Nikolay, after a brief pause.

"What... you... what... whom did you kill?" Porfiry Petrovitch was
obviously bewildered.

Nikolay again was silent for a moment.

"Alyona Ivanovna and her sister Lizaveta Ivanovna, I... killed... with
an axe. Darkness came over me," he added suddenly, and was again silent.

He still remained on his knees. Porfiry Petrovitch stood for some
moments as though meditating, but suddenly roused himself and waved back
the uninvited spectators. They instantly vanished and closed the door.
Then he looked towards Raskolnikov, who was standing in the corner,
staring wildly at Nikolay and moved towards him, but stopped short,
looked from Nikolay to Raskolnikov and then again at Nikolay, and
seeming unable to restrain himself darted at the latter.

"You're in too great a hurry," he shouted at him, almost angrily. "I
didn't ask you what came over you.... Speak, did you kill them?"

"I am the murderer.... I want to give evidence," Nikolay pronounced.

"Ach! What did you kill them with?"

"An axe. I had it ready."

"Ach, he is in a hurry! Alone?"

Nikolay did not understand the question.

"Did you do it alone?"

"Yes, alone. And Mitka is not guilty and had no share in it."

"Don't be in a hurry about Mitka! A-ach! How was it you ran downstairs
like that at the time? The porters met you both!"

"It was to put them off the scent... I ran after Mitka," Nikolay replied
hurriedly, as though he had prepared the answer.

"I knew it!" cried Porfiry, with vexation. "It's not his own tale he is
telling," he muttered as though to himself, and suddenly his eyes rested
on Raskolnikov again.

He was apparently so taken up with Nikolay that for a moment he had
forgotten Raskolnikov. He was a little taken aback.

"My dear Rodion Romanovitch, excuse me!" he flew up to him, "this won't
do; I'm afraid you must go... it's no good your staying... I will...
you see, what a surprise!... Good-bye!"

And taking him by the arm, he showed him to the door.

"I suppose you didn't expect it?" said Raskolnikov who, though he had
not yet fully grasped the situation, had regained his courage.

"You did not expect it either, my friend. See how your hand is
trembling! He-he!"

"You're trembling, too, Porfiry Petrovitch!"

"Yes, I am; I didn't expect it."

They were already at the door; Porfiry was impatient for Raskolnikov to
be gone.

"And your little surprise, aren't you going to show it to me?"
Raskolnikov said, sarcastically.

"Why, his teeth are chattering as he asks, he-he! You are an ironical
person! Come, till we meet!"

"I believe we can say _good-bye_!"

"That's in God's hands," muttered Porfiry, with an unnatural smile.

As he walked through the office, Raskolnikov noticed that many people
were looking at him. Among them he saw the two porters from _the_ house,
whom he had invited that night to the police station. They stood there
waiting. But he was no sooner on the stairs than he heard the voice of
Porfiry Petrovitch behind him. Turning round, he saw the latter running
after him, out of breath.

"One word, Rodion Romanovitch; as to all the rest, it's in God's hands,
but as a matter of form there are some questions I shall have to ask
you... so we shall meet again, shan't we?"

And Porfiry stood still, facing him with a smile.

"Shan't we?" he added again.

He seemed to want to say something more, but could not speak out.

"You must forgive me, Porfiry Petrovitch, for what has just passed... I
lost my temper," began Raskolnikov, who had so far regained his courage
that he felt irresistibly inclined to display his coolness.

"Don't mention it, don't mention it," Porfiry replied, almost gleefully.
"I myself, too... I have a wicked temper, I admit it! But we shall meet
again. If it's God's will, we may see a great deal of one another."

"And will get to know each other through and through?" added
Raskolnikov.

"Yes; know each other through and through," assented Porfiry Petrovitch,
and he screwed up his eyes, looking earnestly at Raskolnikov. "Now
you're going to a birthday party?"

"To a funeral."

"Of course, the funeral! Take care of yourself, and get well."

"I don't know what to wish you," said Raskolnikov, who had begun to
descend the stairs, but looked back again. "I should like to wish you
success, but your office is such a comical one."

"Why comical?" Porfiry Petrovitch had turned to go, but he seemed to
prick up his ears at this.

"Why, how you must have been torturing and harassing that poor Nikolay
psychologically, after your fashion, till he confessed! You must have
been at him day and night, proving to him that he was the murderer, and
now that he has confessed, you'll begin vivisecting him again. 'You are
lying,' you'll say. 'You are not the murderer! You can't be! It's not
your own tale you are telling!' You must admit it's a comical business!"

"He-he-he! You noticed then that I said to Nikolay just now that it was
not his own tale he was telling?"

"How could I help noticing it!"

"He-he! You are quick-witted. You notice everything! You've really a
playful mind! And you always fasten on the comic side... he-he! They say
that was the marked characteristic of Gogol, among the writers."

"Yes, of Gogol."

"Yes, of Gogol.... I shall look forward to meeting you."

"So shall I."

Raskolnikov walked straight home. He was so muddled and bewildered that
on getting home he sat for a quarter of an hour on the sofa, trying to
collect his thoughts. He did not attempt to think about Nikolay; he
was stupefied; he felt that his confession was something inexplicable,
amazing--something beyond his understanding. But Nikolay's confession
was an actual fact. The consequences of this fact were clear to him at
once, its falsehood could not fail to be discovered, and then they
would be after him again. Till then, at least, he was free and must do
something for himself, for the danger was imminent.

But how imminent? His position gradually became clear to him.
Remembering, sketchily, the main outlines of his recent scene with
Porfiry, he could not help shuddering again with horror. Of course,
he did not yet know all Porfiry's aims, he could not see into all his
calculations. But he had already partly shown his hand, and no one knew
better than Raskolnikov how terrible Porfiry's "lead" had been for
him. A little more and he _might_ have given himself away completely,
circumstantially. Knowing his nervous temperament and from the first
glance seeing through him, Porfiry, though playing a bold game, was
bound to win. There's no denying that Raskolnikov had compromised
himself seriously, but no _facts_ had come to light as yet; there was
nothing positive. But was he taking a true view of the position? Wasn't
he mistaken? What had Porfiry been trying to get at? Had he really some
surprise prepared for him? And what was it? Had he really been expecting
something or not? How would they have parted if it had not been for the
unexpected appearance of Nikolay?

Porfiry had shown almost all his cards--of course, he had risked
something in showing them--and if he had really had anything up his
sleeve (Raskolnikov reflected), he would have shown that, too. What was
that "surprise"? Was it a joke? Had it meant anything? Could it have
concealed anything like a fact, a piece of positive evidence? His
yesterday's visitor? What had become of him? Where was he to-day? If
Porfiry really had any evidence, it must be connected with him....

He sat on the sofa with his elbows on his knees and his face hidden in
his hands. He was still shivering nervously. At last he got up, took his
cap, thought a minute, and went to the door.

He had a sort of presentiment that for to-day, at least, he might
consider himself out of danger. He had a sudden sense almost of joy; he
wanted to make haste to Katerina Ivanovna's. He would be too late for
the funeral, of course, but he would be in time for the memorial dinner,
and there at once he would see Sonia.

He stood still, thought a moment, and a suffering smile came for a
moment on to his lips.

"To-day! To-day," he repeated to himself. "Yes, to-day! So it must
be...."

But as he was about to open the door, it began opening of itself. He
started and moved back. The door opened gently and slowly, and there
suddenly appeared a figure--yesterday's visitor _from underground_.

The man stood in the doorway, looked at Raskolnikov without speaking,
and took a step forward into the room. He was exactly the same as
yesterday; the same figure, the same dress, but there was a great change
in his face; he looked dejected and sighed deeply. If he had only put
his hand up to his cheek and leaned his head on one side he would have
looked exactly like a peasant woman.

"What do you want?" asked Raskolnikov, numb with terror. The man was
still silent, but suddenly he bowed down almost to the ground, touching
it with his finger.

"What is it?" cried Raskolnikov.

"I have sinned," the man articulated softly.

"How?"

"By evil thoughts."

They looked at one another.

"I was vexed. When you came, perhaps in drink, and bade the porters go
to the police station and asked about the blood, I was vexed that they
let you go and took you for drunken. I was so vexed that I lost my
sleep. And remembering the address we came here yesterday and asked for
you...."

"Who came?" Raskolnikov interrupted, instantly beginning to recollect.

"I did, I've wronged you."

"Then you come from that house?"

"I was standing at the gate with them... don't you remember? We have
carried on our trade in that house for years past. We cure and prepare
hides, we take work home... most of all I was vexed...."

And the whole scene of the day before yesterday in the gateway came
clearly before Raskolnikov's mind; he recollected that there had
been several people there besides the porters, women among them.
He remembered one voice had suggested taking him straight to the
police-station. He could not recall the face of the speaker, and even
now he did not recognise it, but he remembered that he had turned round
and made him some answer....

So this was the solution of yesterday's horror. The most awful thought
was that he had been actually almost lost, had almost done for himself
on account of such a _trivial_ circumstance. So this man could tell
nothing except his asking about the flat and the blood stains. So
Porfiry, too, had nothing but that _delirium_, no facts but this
_psychology_ which _cuts both ways_, nothing positive. So if no more
facts come to light (and they must not, they must not!) then... then
what can they do to him? How can they convict him, even if they arrest
him? And Porfiry then had only just heard about the flat and had not
known about it before.

"Was it you who told Porfiry... that I'd been there?" he cried, struck
by a sudden idea.

"What Porfiry?"

"The head of the detective department?"

"Yes. The porters did not go there, but I went."

"To-day?"

"I got there two minutes before you. And I heard, I heard it all, how he
worried you."

"Where? What? When?"

"Why, in the next room. I was sitting there all the time."

"What? Why, then you were the surprise? But how could it happen? Upon my
word!"

"I saw that the porters did not want to do what I said," began the man;
"for it's too late, said they, and maybe he'll be angry that we did not
come at the time. I was vexed and I lost my sleep, and I began making
inquiries. And finding out yesterday where to go, I went to-day. The
first time I went he wasn't there, when I came an hour later he couldn't
see me. I went the third time, and they showed me in. I informed him of
everything, just as it happened, and he began skipping about the room
and punching himself on the chest. 'What do you scoundrels mean by it?
If I'd known about it I should have arrested him!' Then he ran out,
called somebody and began talking to him in the corner, then he turned
to me, scolding and questioning me. He scolded me a great deal; and I
told him everything, and I told him that you didn't dare to say a word
in answer to me yesterday and that you didn't recognise me. And he
fell to running about again and kept hitting himself on the chest, and
getting angry and running about, and when you were announced he told
me to go into the next room. 'Sit there a bit,' he said. 'Don't move,
whatever you may hear.' And he set a chair there for me and locked
me in. 'Perhaps,' he said, 'I may call you.' And when Nikolay'd been
brought he let me out as soon as you were gone. 'I shall send for you
again and question you,' he said."

"And did he question Nikolay while you were there?"

"He got rid of me as he did of you, before he spoke to Nikolay."

The man stood still, and again suddenly bowed down, touching the ground
with his finger.

"Forgive me for my evil thoughts, and my slander."

"May God forgive you," answered Raskolnikov.

And as he said this, the man bowed down again, but not to the ground,
turned slowly and went out of the room.

"It all cuts both ways, now it all cuts both ways," repeated
Raskolnikov, and he went out more confident than ever.

"Now we'll make a fight for it," he said, with a malicious smile, as he
went down the stairs. His malice was aimed at himself; with shame and
contempt he recollected his "cowardice."




PART V



CHAPTER I

The morning that followed the fateful interview with Dounia and
her mother brought sobering influences to bear on Pyotr Petrovitch.
Intensely unpleasant as it was, he was forced little by little to accept
as a fact beyond recall what had seemed to him only the day before
fantastic and incredible. The black snake of wounded vanity had been
gnawing at his heart all night. When he got out of bed, Pyotr Petrovitch
immediately looked in the looking-glass. He was afraid that he had
jaundice. However his health seemed unimpaired so far, and looking at
his noble, clear-skinned countenance which had grown fattish of
late, Pyotr Petrovitch for an instant was positively comforted in the
conviction that he would find another bride and, perhaps, even a better
one. But coming back to the sense of his present position, he turned
aside and spat vigorously, which excited a sarcastic smile in Andrey
Semyonovitch Lebeziatnikov, the young friend with whom he was staying.
That smile Pyotr Petrovitch noticed, and at once set it down against his
young friend's account. He had set down a good many points against him
of late. His anger was redoubled when he reflected that he ought not to
have told Andrey Semyonovitch about the result of yesterday's interview.
That was the second mistake he had made in temper, through impulsiveness
and irritability.... Moreover, all that morning one unpleasantness
followed another. He even found a hitch awaiting him in his legal case
in the senate. He was particularly irritated by the owner of the flat
which had been taken in view of his approaching marriage and was being
redecorated at his own expense; the owner, a rich German tradesman,
would not entertain the idea of breaking the contract which had just
been signed and insisted on the full forfeit money, though Pyotr
Petrovitch would be giving him back the flat practically redecorated. In
the same way the upholsterers refused to return a single rouble of the
instalment paid for the furniture purchased but not yet removed to the
flat.

"Am I to get married simply for the sake of the furniture?" Pyotr
Petrovitch ground his teeth and at the same time once more he had a
gleam of desperate hope. "Can all that be really so irrevocably over?
Is it no use to make another effort?" The thought of Dounia sent a
voluptuous pang through his heart. He endured anguish at that moment,
and if it had been possible to slay Raskolnikov instantly by wishing it,
Pyotr Petrovitch would promptly have uttered the wish.

"It was my mistake, too, not to have given them money," he thought, as
he returned dejectedly to Lebeziatnikov's room, "and why on earth was I
such a Jew? It was false economy! I meant to keep them without a penny
so that they should turn to me as their providence, and look at them!
foo! If I'd spent some fifteen hundred roubles on them for the trousseau
and presents, on knick-knacks, dressing-cases, jewellery, materials, and
all that sort of trash from Knopp's and the English shop, my position
would have been better and... stronger! They could not have refused me
so easily! They are the sort of people that would feel bound to return
money and presents if they broke it off; and they would find it hard to
do it! And their conscience would prick them: how can we dismiss a man
who has hitherto been so generous and delicate?.... H'm! I've made a
blunder."

And grinding his teeth again, Pyotr Petrovitch called himself a
fool--but not aloud, of course.

He returned home, twice as irritated and angry as before. The
preparations for the funeral dinner at Katerina Ivanovna's excited
his curiosity as he passed. He had heard about it the day before; he
fancied, indeed, that he had been invited, but absorbed in his own cares
he had paid no attention. Inquiring of Madame Lippevechsel who was busy
laying the table while Katerina Ivanovna was away at the cemetery, he
heard that the entertainment was to be a great affair, that all the
lodgers had been invited, among them some who had not known the dead
man, that even Andrey Semyonovitch Lebeziatnikov was invited in spite of
his previous quarrel with Katerina Ivanovna, that he, Pyotr Petrovitch,
was not only invited, but was eagerly expected as he was the most
important of the lodgers. Amalia Ivanovna herself had been invited with
great ceremony in spite of the recent unpleasantness, and so she was
very busy with preparations and was taking a positive pleasure in them;
she was moreover dressed up to the nines, all in new black silk, and she
was proud of it. All this suggested an idea to Pyotr Petrovitch and he
went into his room, or rather Lebeziatnikov's, somewhat thoughtful. He
had learnt that Raskolnikov was to be one of the guests.

Andrey Semyonovitch had been at home all the morning. The attitude of
Pyotr Petrovitch to this gentleman was strange, though perhaps natural.
Pyotr Petrovitch had despised and hated him from the day he came to stay
with him and at the same time he seemed somewhat afraid of him. He
had not come to stay with him on his arrival in Petersburg simply from
parsimony, though that had been perhaps his chief object. He had heard
of Andrey Semyonovitch, who had once been his ward, as a leading young
progressive who was taking an important part in certain interesting
circles, the doings of which were a legend in the provinces. It had
impressed Pyotr Petrovitch. These powerful omniscient circles who
despised everyone and showed everyone up had long inspired in him a
peculiar but quite vague alarm. He had not, of course, been able to form
even an approximate notion of what they meant. He, like everyone, had
heard that there were, especially in Petersburg, progressives of some
sort, nihilists and so on, and, like many people, he exaggerated and
distorted the significance of those words to an absurd degree. What for
many years past he had feared more than anything was _being shown
up_ and this was the chief ground for his continual uneasiness at the
thought of transferring his business to Petersburg. He was afraid of
this as little children are sometimes panic-stricken. Some years before,
when he was just entering on his own career, he had come upon two cases
in which rather important personages in the province, patrons of his,
had been cruelly shown up. One instance had ended in great scandal
for the person attacked and the other had very nearly ended in serious
trouble. For this reason Pyotr Petrovitch intended to go into the
subject as soon as he reached Petersburg and, if necessary, to
anticipate contingencies by seeking the favour of "our younger
generation." He relied on Andrey Semyonovitch for this and before
his visit to Raskolnikov he had succeeded in picking up some current
phrases. He soon discovered that Andrey Semyonovitch was a commonplace
simpleton, but that by no means reassured Pyotr Petrovitch. Even if he
had been certain that all the progressives were fools like him, it
would not have allayed his uneasiness. All the doctrines, the ideas, the
systems, with which Andrey Semyonovitch pestered him had no interest for
him. He had his own object--he simply wanted to find out at once what
was happening _here_. Had these people any power or not? Had he anything
to fear from them? Would they expose any enterprise of his? And what
precisely was now the object of their attacks? Could he somehow make up
to them and get round them if they really were powerful? Was this the
thing to do or not? Couldn't he gain something through them? In fact
hundreds of questions presented themselves.

Andrey Semyonovitch was an anæmic, scrofulous little man, with strangely
flaxen mutton-chop whiskers of which he was very proud. He was a clerk
and had almost always something wrong with his eyes. He was rather
soft-hearted, but self-confident and sometimes extremely conceited in
speech, which had an absurd effect, incongruous with his little figure.
He was one of the lodgers most respected by Amalia Ivanovna, for he did
not get drunk and paid regularly for his lodgings. Andrey Semyonovitch
really was rather stupid; he attached himself to the cause of progress
and "our younger generation" from enthusiasm. He was one of the numerous
and varied legion of dullards, of half-animate abortions, conceited,
half-educated coxcombs, who attach themselves to the idea most in
fashion only to vulgarise it and who caricature every cause they serve,
however sincerely.

Though Lebeziatnikov was so good-natured, he, too, was beginning to
dislike Pyotr Petrovitch. This happened on both sides unconsciously.
However simple Andrey Semyonovitch might be, he began to see that Pyotr
Petrovitch was duping him and secretly despising him, and that "he was
not the right sort of man." He had tried expounding to him the system of
Fourier and the Darwinian theory, but of late Pyotr Petrovitch began to
listen too sarcastically and even to be rude. The fact was he had begun
instinctively to guess that Lebeziatnikov was not merely a commonplace
simpleton, but, perhaps, a liar, too, and that he had no connections of
any consequence even in his own circle, but had simply picked things up
third-hand; and that very likely he did not even know much about his own
work of propaganda, for he was in too great a muddle. A fine person he
would be to show anyone up! It must be noted, by the way, that Pyotr
Petrovitch had during those ten days eagerly accepted the strangest
praise from Andrey Semyonovitch; he had not protested, for instance,
when Andrey Semyonovitch belauded him for being ready to contribute to
the establishment of the new "commune," or to abstain from christening
his future children, or to acquiesce if Dounia were to take a lover a
month after marriage, and so on. Pyotr Petrovitch so enjoyed hearing
his own praises that he did not disdain even such virtues when they were
attributed to him.

Pyotr Petrovitch had had occasion that morning to realise some
five-per-cent bonds and now he sat down to the table and counted over
bundles of notes. Andrey Semyonovitch who hardly ever had any money
walked about the room pretending to himself to look at all those bank
notes with indifference and even contempt. Nothing would have convinced
Pyotr Petrovitch that Andrey Semyonovitch could really look on the money
unmoved, and the latter, on his side, kept thinking bitterly that Pyotr
Petrovitch was capable of entertaining such an idea about him and
was, perhaps, glad of the opportunity of teasing his young friend by
reminding him of his inferiority and the great difference between them.

He found him incredibly inattentive and irritable, though he, Andrey
Semyonovitch, began enlarging on his favourite subject, the foundation
of a new special "commune." The brief remarks that dropped from Pyotr
Petrovitch between the clicking of the beads on the reckoning frame
betrayed unmistakable and discourteous irony. But the "humane" Andrey
Semyonovitch ascribed Pyotr Petrovitch's ill-humour to his recent breach
with Dounia and he was burning with impatience to discourse on that
theme. He had something progressive to say on the subject which
might console his worthy friend and "could not fail" to promote his
development.

"There is some sort of festivity being prepared at that... at the
widow's, isn't there?" Pyotr Petrovitch asked suddenly, interrupting
Andrey Semyonovitch at the most interesting passage.

"Why, don't you know? Why, I was telling you last night what I think
about all such ceremonies. And she invited you too, I heard. You were
talking to her yesterday..."

"I should never have expected that beggarly fool would have spent on
this feast all the money she got from that other fool, Raskolnikov. I
was surprised just now as I came through at the preparations there, the
wines! Several people are invited. It's beyond everything!" continued
Pyotr Petrovitch, who seemed to have some object in pursuing the
conversation. "What? You say I am asked too? When was that? I don't
remember. But I shan't go. Why should I? I only said a word to her in
passing yesterday of the possibility of her obtaining a year's salary as
a destitute widow of a government clerk. I suppose she has invited me on
that account, hasn't she? He-he-he!"

"I don't intend to go either," said Lebeziatnikov.

"I should think not, after giving her a thrashing! You might well
hesitate, he-he!"

"Who thrashed? Whom?" cried Lebeziatnikov, flustered and blushing.

"Why, you thrashed Katerina Ivanovna a month ago. I heard so
yesterday... so that's what your convictions amount to... and the woman
question, too, wasn't quite sound, he-he-he!" and Pyotr Petrovitch, as
though comforted, went back to clicking his beads.

"It's all slander and nonsense!" cried Lebeziatnikov, who was always
afraid of allusions to the subject. "It was not like that at all, it
was quite different. You've heard it wrong; it's a libel. I was simply
defending myself. She rushed at me first with her nails, she pulled
out all my whiskers.... It's permissable for anyone, I should hope,
to defend himself and I never allow anyone to use violence to me on
principle, for it's an act of despotism. What was I to do? I simply
pushed her back."

"He-he-he!" Luzhin went on laughing maliciously.

"You keep on like that because you are out of humour yourself.... But
that's nonsense and it has nothing, nothing whatever to do with the
woman question! You don't understand; I used to think, indeed, that
if women are equal to men in all respects, even in strength (as is
maintained now) there ought to be equality in that, too. Of course, I
reflected afterwards that such a question ought not really to arise,
for there ought not to be fighting and in the future society fighting is
unthinkable... and that it would be a queer thing to seek for equality
in fighting. I am not so stupid... though, of course, there is
fighting... there won't be later, but at present there is... confound
it! How muddled one gets with you! It's not on that account that I
am not going. I am not going on principle, not to take part in the
revolting convention of memorial dinners, that's why! Though, of course,
one might go to laugh at it.... I am sorry there won't be any priests at
it. I should certainly go if there were."

"Then you would sit down at another man's table and insult it and those
who invited you. Eh?"

"Certainly not insult, but protest. I should do it with a good object. I
might indirectly assist the cause of enlightenment and propaganda. It's
a duty of every man to work for enlightenment and propaganda and the
more harshly, perhaps, the better. I might drop a seed, an idea.... And
something might grow up from that seed. How should I be insulting them?
They might be offended at first, but afterwards they'd see I'd done them
a service. You know, Terebyeva (who is in the community now) was blamed
because when she left her family and... devoted... herself, she wrote to
her father and mother that she wouldn't go on living conventionally and
was entering on a free marriage and it was said that that was too harsh,
that she might have spared them and have written more kindly. I think
that's all nonsense and there's no need of softness; on the contrary,
what's wanted is protest. Varents had been married seven years, she
abandoned her two children, she told her husband straight out in a
letter: 'I have realised that I cannot be happy with you. I can never
forgive you that you have deceived me by concealing from me that there
is another organisation of society by means of the communities. I have
only lately learned it from a great-hearted man to whom I have given
myself and with whom I am establishing a community. I speak plainly
because I consider it dishonest to deceive you. Do as you think best.
Do not hope to get me back, you are too late. I hope you will be happy.'
That's how letters like that ought to be written!"

"Is that Terebyeva the one you said had made a third free marriage?"

"No, it's only the second, really! But what if it were the fourth, what
if it were the fifteenth, that's all nonsense! And if ever I regretted
the death of my father and mother, it is now, and I sometimes think
if my parents were living what a protest I would have aimed at them! I
would have done something on purpose... I would have shown them! I would
have astonished them! I am really sorry there is no one!"

"To surprise! He-he! Well, be that as you will," Pyotr Petrovitch
interrupted, "but tell me this; do you know the dead man's daughter, the
delicate-looking little thing? It's true what they say about her, isn't
it?"

"What of it? I think, that is, it is my own personal conviction that
this is the normal condition of women. Why not? I mean, _distinguons_.
In our present society it is not altogether normal, because it is
compulsory, but in the future society it will be perfectly normal,
because it will be voluntary. Even as it is, she was quite right: she
was suffering and that was her asset, so to speak, her capital which
she had a perfect right to dispose of. Of course, in the future
society there will be no need of assets, but her part will have another
significance, rational and in harmony with her environment. As to Sofya
Semyonovna personally, I regard her action as a vigorous protest against
the organisation of society, and I respect her deeply for it; I rejoice
indeed when I look at her!"

"I was told that you got her turned out of these lodgings."

Lebeziatnikov was enraged.

"That's another slander," he yelled. "It was not so at all! That was all
Katerina Ivanovna's invention, for she did not understand! And I never
made love to Sofya Semyonovna! I was simply developing her, entirely
disinterestedly, trying to rouse her to protest.... All I wanted was her
protest and Sofya Semyonovna could not have remained here anyway!"

"Have you asked her to join your community?"

"You keep on laughing and very inappropriately, allow me to tell
you. You don't understand! There is no such rôle in a community. The
community is established that there should be no such rôles. In a
community, such a rôle is essentially transformed and what is stupid
here is sensible there, what, under present conditions, is unnatural
becomes perfectly natural in the community. It all depends on the
environment. It's all the environment and man himself is nothing. And
I am on good terms with Sofya Semyonovna to this day, which is a proof
that she never regarded me as having wronged her. I am trying now to
attract her to the community, but on quite, quite a different footing.
What are you laughing at? We are trying to establish a community of
our own, a special one, on a broader basis. We have gone further in our
convictions. We reject more! And meanwhile I'm still developing Sofya
Semyonovna. She has a beautiful, beautiful character!"

"And you take advantage of her fine character, eh? He-he!"

"No, no! Oh, no! On the contrary."

"Oh, on the contrary! He-he-he! A queer thing to say!"

"Believe me! Why should I disguise it? In fact, I feel it strange myself
how timid, chaste and modern she is with me!"

"And you, of course, are developing her... he-he! trying to prove to her
that all that modesty is nonsense?"

"Not at all, not at all! How coarsely, how stupidly--excuse me saying
so--you misunderstand the word development! Good heavens, how... crude
you still are! We are striving for the freedom of women and you have
only one idea in your head.... Setting aside the general question
of chastity and feminine modesty as useless in themselves and indeed
prejudices, I fully accept her chastity with me, because that's for her
to decide. Of course if she were to tell me herself that she wanted me,
I should think myself very lucky, because I like the girl very much; but
as it is, no one has ever treated her more courteously than I, with more
respect for her dignity... I wait in hopes, that's all!"

"You had much better make her a present of something. I bet you never
thought of that."

"You don't understand, as I've told you already! Of course, she is in
such a position, but it's another question. Quite another question!
You simply despise her. Seeing a fact which you mistakenly consider
deserving of contempt, you refuse to take a humane view of a fellow
creature. You don't know what a character she is! I am only sorry that
of late she has quite given up reading and borrowing books. I used
to lend them to her. I am sorry, too, that with all the energy and
resolution in protesting--which she has already shown once--she has
little self-reliance, little, so to say, independence, so as to
break free from certain prejudices and certain foolish ideas. Yet she
thoroughly understands some questions, for instance about kissing of
hands, that is, that it's an insult to a woman for a man to kiss her
hand, because it's a sign of inequality. We had a debate about it and
I described it to her. She listened attentively to an account of the
workmen's associations in France, too. Now I am explaining the question
of coming into the room in the future society."

"And what's that, pray?"

"We had a debate lately on the question: Has a member of the community
the right to enter another member's room, whether man or woman, at any
time... and we decided that he has!"

"It might be at an inconvenient moment, he-he!"

Lebeziatnikov was really angry.

"You are always thinking of something unpleasant," he cried with
aversion. "Tfoo! How vexed I am that when I was expounding our system, I
referred prematurely to the question of personal privacy! It's always
a stumbling-block to people like you, they turn it into ridicule before
they understand it. And how proud they are of it, too! Tfoo! I've often
maintained that that question should not be approached by a novice till
he has a firm faith in the system. And tell me, please, what do you
find so shameful even in cesspools? I should be the first to be ready
to clean out any cesspool you like. And it's not a question of
self-sacrifice, it's simply work, honourable, useful work which is
as good as any other and much better than the work of a Raphael and a
Pushkin, because it is more useful."

"And more honourable, more honourable, he-he-he!"

"What do you mean by 'more honourable'? I don't understand such
expressions to describe human activity. 'More honourable,' 'nobler'--all
those are old-fashioned prejudices which I reject. Everything which is
_of use_ to mankind is honourable. I only understand one word: _useful_!
You can snigger as much as you like, but that's so!"

Pyotr Petrovitch laughed heartily. He had finished counting the money
and was putting it away. But some of the notes he left on the table. The
"cesspool question" had already been a subject of dispute between them.
What was absurd was that it made Lebeziatnikov really angry, while it
amused Luzhin and at that moment he particularly wanted to anger his
young friend.

"It's your ill-luck yesterday that makes you so ill-humoured and
annoying," blurted out Lebeziatnikov, who in spite of his "independence"
and his "protests" did not venture to oppose Pyotr Petrovitch and still
behaved to him with some of the respect habitual in earlier years.

"You'd better tell me this," Pyotr Petrovitch interrupted with haughty
displeasure, "can you... or rather are you really friendly enough with
that young person to ask her to step in here for a minute? I think
they've all come back from the cemetery... I heard the sound of
steps... I want to see her, that young person."

"What for?" Lebeziatnikov asked with surprise.

"Oh, I want to. I am leaving here to-day or to-morrow and therefore I
wanted to speak to her about... However, you may be present during the
interview. It's better you should be, indeed. For there's no knowing
what you might imagine."

"I shan't imagine anything. I only asked and, if you've anything to say
to her, nothing is easier than to call her in. I'll go directly and you
may be sure I won't be in your way."

Five minutes later Lebeziatnikov came in with Sonia. She came in very
much surprised and overcome with shyness as usual. She was always shy in
such circumstances and was always afraid of new people, she had been as
a child and was even more so now.... Pyotr Petrovitch met her "politely
and affably," but with a certain shade of bantering familiarity which in
his opinion was suitable for a man of his respectability and weight
in dealing with a creature so young and so _interesting_ as she. He
hastened to "reassure" her and made her sit down facing him at the
table. Sonia sat down, looked about her--at Lebeziatnikov, at the notes
lying on the table and then again at Pyotr Petrovitch and her eyes
remained riveted on him. Lebeziatnikov was moving to the door. Pyotr
Petrovitch signed to Sonia to remain seated and stopped Lebeziatnikov.

"Is Raskolnikov in there? Has he come?" he asked him in a whisper.

"Raskolnikov? Yes. Why? Yes, he is there. I saw him just come in....
Why?"

"Well, I particularly beg you to remain here with us and not to leave
me alone with this... young woman. I only want a few words with her,
but God knows what they may make of it. I shouldn't like Raskolnikov to
repeat anything.... You understand what I mean?"

"I understand!" Lebeziatnikov saw the point. "Yes, you are right.... Of
course, I am convinced personally that you have no reason to be uneasy,
but... still, you are right. Certainly I'll stay. I'll stand here at the
window and not be in your way... I think you are right..."

Pyotr Petrovitch returned to the sofa, sat down opposite Sonia, looked
attentively at her and assumed an extremely dignified, even severe
expression, as much as to say, "don't you make any mistake, madam."
Sonia was overwhelmed with embarrassment.

"In the first place, Sofya Semyonovna, will you make my excuses to your
respected mamma.... That's right, isn't it? Katerina Ivanovna stands
in the place of a mother to you?" Pyotr Petrovitch began with great
dignity, though affably.

It was evident that his intentions were friendly.

"Quite so, yes; the place of a mother," Sonia answered, timidly and
hurriedly.

"Then will you make my apologies to her? Through inevitable
circumstances I am forced to be absent and shall not be at the dinner in
spite of your mamma's kind invitation."

"Yes... I'll tell her... at once."

And Sonia hastily jumped up from her seat.

"Wait, that's not all," Pyotr Petrovitch detained her, smiling at her
simplicity and ignorance of good manners, "and you know me little, my
dear Sofya Semyonovna, if you suppose I would have ventured to trouble
a person like you for a matter of so little consequence affecting myself
only. I have another object."

Sonia sat down hurriedly. Her eyes rested again for an instant on the
grey-and-rainbow-coloured notes that remained on the table, but she
quickly looked away and fixed her eyes on Pyotr Petrovitch. She felt it
horribly indecorous, especially for _her_, to look at another person's
money. She stared at the gold eye-glass which Pyotr Petrovitch held
in his left hand and at the massive and extremely handsome ring with a
yellow stone on his middle finger. But suddenly she looked away and, not
knowing where to turn, ended by staring Pyotr Petrovitch again straight
in the face. After a pause of still greater dignity he continued.

"I chanced yesterday in passing to exchange a couple of words with
Katerina Ivanovna, poor woman. That was sufficient to enable me to
ascertain that she is in a position--preternatural, if one may so
express it."

"Yes... preternatural..." Sonia hurriedly assented.

"Or it would be simpler and more comprehensible to say, ill."

"Yes, simpler and more comprehen... yes, ill."

"Quite so. So then from a feeling of humanity and so to speak
compassion, I should be glad to be of service to her in any way,
foreseeing her unfortunate position. I believe the whole of this
poverty-stricken family depends now entirely on you?"

"Allow me to ask," Sonia rose to her feet, "did you say something to her
yesterday of the possibility of a pension? Because she told me you had
undertaken to get her one. Was that true?"

"Not in the slightest, and indeed it's an absurdity! I merely hinted at
her obtaining temporary assistance as the widow of an official who had
died in the service--if only she has patronage... but apparently your
late parent had not served his full term and had not indeed been in the
service at all of late. In fact, if there could be any hope, it would be
very ephemeral, because there would be no claim for assistance in
that case, far from it.... And she is dreaming of a pension already,
he-he-he!... A go-ahead lady!"

"Yes, she is. For she is credulous and good-hearted, and she believes
everything from the goodness of her heart and... and... and she is like
that... yes... You must excuse her," said Sonia, and again she got up to
go.

"But you haven't heard what I have to say."

"No, I haven't heard," muttered Sonia.

"Then sit down." She was terribly confused; she sat down again a third
time.

"Seeing her position with her unfortunate little ones, I should be glad,
as I have said before, so far as lies in my power, to be of service,
that is, so far as is in my power, not more. One might for instance get
up a subscription for her, or a lottery, something of the sort, such as
is always arranged in such cases by friends or even outsiders desirous
of assisting people. It was of that I intended to speak to you; it might
be done."

"Yes, yes... God will repay you for it," faltered Sonia, gazing intently
at Pyotr Petrovitch.

"It might be, but we will talk of it later. We might begin it to-day, we
will talk it over this evening and lay the foundation so to speak. Come
to me at seven o'clock. Mr. Lebeziatnikov, I hope, will assist us. But
there is one circumstance of which I ought to warn you beforehand and
for which I venture to trouble you, Sofya Semyonovna, to come here. In
my opinion money cannot be, indeed it's unsafe to put it into Katerina
Ivanovna's own hands. The dinner to-day is a proof of that. Though she
has not, so to speak, a crust of bread for to-morrow and... well, boots
or shoes, or anything; she has bought to-day Jamaica rum, and even,
I believe, Madeira and... and coffee. I saw it as I passed through.
To-morrow it will all fall upon you again, they won't have a crust of
bread. It's absurd, really, and so, to my thinking, a subscription ought
to be raised so that the unhappy widow should not know of the money, but
only you, for instance. Am I right?"

"I don't know... this is only to-day, once in her life.... She was
so anxious to do honour, to celebrate the memory.... And she is very
sensible... but just as you think and I shall be very, very... they will
all be... and God will reward... and the orphans..."

Sonia burst into tears.

"Very well, then, keep it in mind; and now will you accept for the
benefit of your relation the small sum that I am able to spare, from me
personally. I am very anxious that my name should not be mentioned in
connection with it. Here... having so to speak anxieties of my own, I
cannot do more..."

And Pyotr Petrovitch held out to Sonia a ten-rouble note carefully
unfolded. Sonia took it, flushed crimson, jumped up, muttered something
and began taking leave. Pyotr Petrovitch accompanied her ceremoniously
to the door. She got out of the room at last, agitated and distressed,
and returned to Katerina Ivanovna, overwhelmed with confusion.

All this time Lebeziatnikov had stood at the window or walked about the
room, anxious not to interrupt the conversation; when Sonia had gone he
walked up to Pyotr Petrovitch and solemnly held out his hand.

"I heard and _saw_ everything," he said, laying stress on the last verb.
"That is honourable, I mean to say, it's humane! You wanted to avoid
gratitude, I saw! And although I cannot, I confess, in principle
sympathise with private charity, for it not only fails to eradicate the
evil but even promotes it, yet I must admit that I saw your action with
pleasure--yes, yes, I like it."

"That's all nonsense," muttered Pyotr Petrovitch, somewhat disconcerted,
looking carefully at Lebeziatnikov.

"No, it's not nonsense! A man who has suffered distress and annoyance as
you did yesterday and who yet can sympathise with the misery of others,
such a man... even though he is making a social mistake--is still
deserving of respect! I did not expect it indeed of you, Pyotr
Petrovitch, especially as according to your ideas... oh, what a drawback
your ideas are to you! How distressed you are for instance by your
ill-luck yesterday," cried the simple-hearted Lebeziatnikov, who felt
a return of affection for Pyotr Petrovitch. "And, what do you want with
marriage, with _legal_ marriage, my dear, noble Pyotr Petrovitch? Why do
you cling to this _legality_ of marriage? Well, you may beat me if you
like, but I am glad, positively glad it hasn't come off, that you are
free, that you are not quite lost for humanity.... you see, I've spoken
my mind!"

"Because I don't want in your free marriage to be made a fool of and
to bring up another man's children, that's why I want legal marriage,"
Luzhin replied in order to make some answer.

He seemed preoccupied by something.

"Children? You referred to children," Lebeziatnikov started off like
a warhorse at the trumpet call. "Children are a social question and a
question of first importance, I agree; but the question of children has
another solution. Some refuse to have children altogether, because they
suggest the institution of the family. We'll speak of children later,
but now as to the question of honour, I confess that's my weak point.
That horrid, military, Pushkin expression is unthinkable in the
dictionary of the future. What does it mean indeed? It's nonsense,
there will be no deception in a free marriage! That is only the natural
consequence of a legal marriage, so to say, its corrective, a protest.
So that indeed it's not humiliating... and if I ever, to suppose an
absurdity, were to be legally married, I should be positively glad of
it. I should say to my wife: 'My dear, hitherto I have loved you, now
I respect you, for you've shown you can protest!' You laugh! That's
because you are of incapable of getting away from prejudices. Confound
it all! I understand now where the unpleasantness is of being deceived
in a legal marriage, but it's simply a despicable consequence of a
despicable position in which both are humiliated. When the deception is
open, as in a free marriage, then it does not exist, it's unthinkable.
Your wife will only prove how she respects you by considering you
incapable of opposing her happiness and avenging yourself on her for
her new husband. Damn it all! I sometimes dream if I were to be married,
pfoo! I mean if I were to marry, legally or not, it's just the same,
I should present my wife with a lover if she had not found one for
herself. 'My dear,' I should say, 'I love you, but even more than that I
desire you to respect me. See!' Am I not right?"

Pyotr Petrovitch sniggered as he listened, but without much merriment.
He hardly heard it indeed. He was preoccupied with something else and
even Lebeziatnikov at last noticed it. Pyotr Petrovitch seemed excited
and rubbed his hands. Lebeziatnikov remembered all this and reflected
upon it afterwards.



CHAPTER II

It would be difficult to explain exactly what could have originated the
idea of that senseless dinner in Katerina Ivanovna's disordered brain.
Nearly ten of the twenty roubles, given by Raskolnikov for Marmeladov's
funeral, were wasted upon it. Possibly Katerina Ivanovna felt obliged to
honour the memory of the deceased "suitably," that all the lodgers,
and still more Amalia Ivanovna, might know "that he was in no way their
inferior, and perhaps very much their superior," and that no one had the
right "to turn up his nose at him." Perhaps the chief element was that
peculiar "poor man's pride," which compels many poor people to spend
their last savings on some traditional social ceremony, simply in order
to do "like other people," and not to "be looked down upon." It is very
probable, too, that Katerina Ivanovna longed on this occasion, at
the moment when she seemed to be abandoned by everyone, to show those
"wretched contemptible lodgers" that she knew "how to do things, how
to entertain" and that she had been brought up "in a genteel, she might
almost say aristocratic colonel's family" and had not been meant for
sweeping floors and washing the children's rags at night. Even the
poorest and most broken-spirited people are sometimes liable to these
paroxysms of pride and vanity which take the form of an irresistible
nervous craving. And Katerina Ivanovna was not broken-spirited; she
might have been killed by circumstance, but her spirit could not have
been broken, that is, she could not have been intimidated, her will
could not be crushed. Moreover Sonia had said with good reason that her
mind was unhinged. She could not be said to be insane, but for a year
past she had been so harassed that her mind might well be overstrained.
The later stages of consumption are apt, doctors tell us, to affect the
intellect.

There was no great variety of wines, nor was there Madeira; but wine
there was. There was vodka, rum and Lisbon wine, all of the poorest
quality but in sufficient quantity. Besides the traditional rice and
honey, there were three or four dishes, one of which consisted of
pancakes, all prepared in Amalia Ivanovna's kitchen. Two samovars were
boiling, that tea and punch might be offered after dinner. Katerina
Ivanovna had herself seen to purchasing the provisions, with the help
of one of the lodgers, an unfortunate little Pole who had somehow been
stranded at Madame Lippevechsel's. He promptly put himself at Katerina
Ivanovna's disposal and had been all that morning and all the day before
running about as fast as his legs could carry him, and very anxious
that everyone should be aware of it. For every trifle he ran to Katerina
Ivanovna, even hunting her out at the bazaar, at every instant called
her "_Pani_." She was heartily sick of him before the end, though
she had declared at first that she could not have got on without this
"serviceable and magnanimous man." It was one of Katerina Ivanovna's
characteristics to paint everyone she met in the most glowing colours.
Her praises were so exaggerated as sometimes to be embarrassing; she
would invent various circumstances to the credit of her new acquaintance
and quite genuinely believe in their reality. Then all of a sudden she
would be disillusioned and would rudely and contemptuously repulse the
person she had only a few hours before been literally adoring. She
was naturally of a gay, lively and peace-loving disposition, but from
continual failures and misfortunes she had come to desire so _keenly_
that all should live in peace and joy and should not _dare_ to break the
peace, that the slightest jar, the smallest disaster reduced her almost
to frenzy, and she would pass in an instant from the brightest hopes and
fancies to cursing her fate and raving, and knocking her head against
the wall.

Amalia Ivanovna, too, suddenly acquired extraordinary importance in
Katerina Ivanovna's eyes and was treated by her with extraordinary
respect, probably only because Amalia Ivanovna had thrown herself heart
and soul into the preparations. She had undertaken to lay the table,
to provide the linen, crockery, etc., and to cook the dishes in her
kitchen, and Katerina Ivanovna had left it all in her hands and gone
herself to the cemetery. Everything had been well done. Even the
table-cloth was nearly clean; the crockery, knives, forks and glasses
were, of course, of all shapes and patterns, lent by different lodgers,
but the table was properly laid at the time fixed, and Amalia Ivanovna,
feeling she had done her work well, had put on a black silk dress and
a cap with new mourning ribbons and met the returning party with some
pride. This pride, though justifiable, displeased Katerina Ivanovna for
some reason: "as though the table could not have been laid except by
Amalia Ivanovna!" She disliked the cap with new ribbons, too. "Could she
be stuck up, the stupid German, because she was mistress of the house,
and had consented as a favour to help her poor lodgers! As a favour!
Fancy that! Katerina Ivanovna's father who had been a colonel and almost
a governor had sometimes had the table set for forty persons, and then
anyone like Amalia Ivanovna, or rather Ludwigovna, would not have been
allowed into the kitchen."

Katerina Ivanovna, however, put off expressing her feelings for the
time and contented herself with treating her coldly, though she decided
inwardly that she would certainly have to put Amalia Ivanovna down
and set her in her proper place, for goodness only knew what she was
fancying herself. Katerina Ivanovna was irritated too by the fact that
hardly any of the lodgers invited had come to the funeral, except
the Pole who had just managed to run into the cemetery, while to the
memorial dinner the poorest and most insignificant of them had turned
up, the wretched creatures, many of them not quite sober. The older
and more respectable of them all, as if by common consent, stayed away.
Pyotr Petrovitch Luzhin, for instance, who might be said to be the most
respectable of all the lodgers, did not appear, though Katerina Ivanovna
had the evening before told all the world, that is Amalia Ivanovna,
Polenka, Sonia and the Pole, that he was the most generous,
noble-hearted man with a large property and vast connections, who had
been a friend of her first husband's, and a guest in her father's
house, and that he had promised to use all his influence to secure her
a considerable pension. It must be noted that when Katerina Ivanovna
exalted anyone's connections and fortune, it was without any ulterior
motive, quite disinterestedly, for the mere pleasure of adding to
the consequence of the person praised. Probably "taking his cue" from
Luzhin, "that contemptible wretch Lebeziatnikov had not turned up
either. What did he fancy himself? He was only asked out of kindness
and because he was sharing the same room with Pyotr Petrovitch and was a
friend of his, so that it would have been awkward not to invite him."

Among those who failed to appear were "the genteel lady and her
old-maidish daughter," who had only been lodgers in the house for the
last fortnight, but had several times complained of the noise and uproar
in Katerina Ivanovna's room, especially when Marmeladov had come
back drunk. Katerina Ivanovna heard this from Amalia Ivanovna who,
quarrelling with Katerina Ivanovna, and threatening to turn the whole
family out of doors, had shouted at her that they "were not worth the
foot" of the honourable lodgers whom they were disturbing. Katerina
Ivanovna determined now to invite this lady and her daughter, "whose
foot she was not worth," and who had turned away haughtily when she
casually met them, so that they might know that "she was more noble in
her thoughts and feelings and did not harbour malice," and might see
that she was not accustomed to her way of living. She had proposed to
make this clear to them at dinner with allusions to her late father's
governorship, and also at the same time to hint that it was exceedingly
stupid of them to turn away on meeting her. The fat colonel-major (he
was really a discharged officer of low rank) was also absent, but it
appeared that he had been "not himself" for the last two days. The party
consisted of the Pole, a wretched looking clerk with a spotty face and
a greasy coat, who had not a word to say for himself, and smelt
abominably, a deaf and almost blind old man who had once been in the
post office and who had been from immemorial ages maintained by someone
at Amalia Ivanovna's.

A retired clerk of the commissariat department came, too; he was
drunk, had a loud and most unseemly laugh and only fancy--was without
a waistcoat! One of the visitors sat straight down to the table without
even greeting Katerina Ivanovna. Finally one person having no suit
appeared in his dressing-gown, but this was too much, and the efforts of
Amalia Ivanovna and the Pole succeeded in removing him. The Pole brought
with him, however, two other Poles who did not live at Amalia Ivanovna's
and whom no one had seen here before. All this irritated Katerina
Ivanovna intensely. "For whom had they made all these preparations
then?" To make room for the visitors the children had not even been laid
for at the table; but the two little ones were sitting on a bench in the
furthest corner with their dinner laid on a box, while Polenka as a big
girl had to look after them, feed them, and keep their noses wiped like
well-bred children's.

Katerina Ivanovna, in fact, could hardly help meeting her guests with
increased dignity, and even haughtiness. She stared at some of them with
special severity, and loftily invited them to take their seats. Rushing
to the conclusion that Amalia Ivanovna must be responsible for those who
were absent, she began treating her with extreme nonchalance, which the
latter promptly observed and resented. Such a beginning was no good omen
for the end. All were seated at last.

Raskolnikov came in almost at the moment of their return from the
cemetery. Katerina Ivanovna was greatly delighted to see him, in the
first place, because he was the one "educated visitor, and, as everyone
knew, was in two years to take a professorship in the university," and
secondly because he immediately and respectfully apologised for having
been unable to be at the funeral. She positively pounced upon him, and
made him sit on her left hand (Amalia Ivanovna was on her right). In
spite of her continual anxiety that the dishes should be passed round
correctly and that everyone should taste them, in spite of the agonising
cough which interrupted her every minute and seemed to have grown worse
during the last few days, she hastened to pour out in a half whisper to
Raskolnikov all her suppressed feelings and her just indignation at
the failure of the dinner, interspersing her remarks with lively and
uncontrollable laughter at the expense of her visitors and especially of
her landlady.

"It's all that cuckoo's fault! You know whom I mean? Her, her!" Katerina
Ivanovna nodded towards the landlady. "Look at her, she's making round
eyes, she feels that we are talking about her and can't understand.
Pfoo, the owl! Ha-ha! (Cough-cough-cough.) And what does she put on that
cap for? (Cough-cough-cough.) Have you noticed that she wants everyone
to consider that she is patronising me and doing me an honour by being
here? I asked her like a sensible woman to invite people, especially
those who knew my late husband, and look at the set of fools she has
brought! The sweeps! Look at that one with the spotty face. And those
wretched Poles, ha-ha-ha! (Cough-cough-cough.) Not one of them has ever
poked his nose in here, I've never set eyes on them. What have they come
here for, I ask you? There they sit in a row. Hey, _pan_!" she cried
suddenly to one of them, "have you tasted the pancakes? Take some more!
Have some beer! Won't you have some vodka? Look, he's jumped up and is
making his bows, they must be quite starved, poor things. Never mind,
let them eat! They don't make a noise, anyway, though I'm really afraid
for our landlady's silver spoons... Amalia Ivanovna!" she addressed her
suddenly, almost aloud, "if your spoons should happen to be stolen,
I won't be responsible, I warn you! Ha-ha-ha!" She laughed turning to
Raskolnikov, and again nodding towards the landlady, in high glee at her
sally. "She didn't understand, she didn't understand again! Look how
she sits with her mouth open! An owl, a real owl! An owl in new ribbons,
ha-ha-ha!"

Here her laugh turned again to an insufferable fit of coughing that
lasted five minutes. Drops of perspiration stood out on her forehead
and her handkerchief was stained with blood. She showed Raskolnikov
the blood in silence, and as soon as she could get her breath began
whispering to him again with extreme animation and a hectic flush on her
cheeks.

"Do you know, I gave her the most delicate instructions, so to speak,
for inviting that lady and her daughter, you understand of whom I am
speaking? It needed the utmost delicacy, the greatest nicety, but she
has managed things so that that fool, that conceited baggage, that
provincial nonentity, simply because she is the widow of a major, and
has come to try and get a pension and to fray out her skirts in the
government offices, because at fifty she paints her face (everybody
knows it)... a creature like that did not think fit to come, and has
not even answered the invitation, which the most ordinary good manners
required! I can't understand why Pyotr Petrovitch has not come? But
where's Sonia? Where has she gone? Ah, there she is at last! what is it,
Sonia, where have you been? It's odd that even at your father's funeral
you should be so unpunctual. Rodion Romanovitch, make room for her
beside you. That's your place, Sonia... take what you like. Have some of
the cold entrée with jelly, that's the best. They'll bring the pancakes
directly. Have they given the children some? Polenka, have you got
everything? (Cough-cough-cough.) That's all right. Be a good girl, Lida,
and, Kolya, don't fidget with your feet; sit like a little gentleman.
What are you saying, Sonia?"

Sonia hastened to give her Pyotr Petrovitch's apologies, trying to
speak loud enough for everyone to hear and carefully choosing the most
respectful phrases which she attributed to Pyotr Petrovitch. She added
that Pyotr Petrovitch had particularly told her to say that, as soon as
he possibly could, he would come immediately to discuss _business_ alone
with her and to consider what could be done for her, etc., etc.

Sonia knew that this would comfort Katerina Ivanovna, would flatter her
and gratify her pride. She sat down beside Raskolnikov; she made him a
hurried bow, glancing curiously at him. But for the rest of the time
she seemed to avoid looking at him or speaking to him. She seemed
absent-minded, though she kept looking at Katerina Ivanovna, trying
to please her. Neither she nor Katerina Ivanovna had been able to get
mourning; Sonia was wearing dark brown, and Katerina Ivanovna had on her
only dress, a dark striped cotton one.

The message from Pyotr Petrovitch was very successful. Listening to
Sonia with dignity, Katerina Ivanovna inquired with equal dignity how
Pyotr Petrovitch was, then at once whispered almost aloud to
Raskolnikov that it certainly would have been strange for a man of
Pyotr Petrovitch's position and standing to find himself in such
"extraordinary company," in spite of his devotion to her family and his
old friendship with her father.

"That's why I am so grateful to you, Rodion Romanovitch, that you have
not disdained my hospitality, even in such surroundings," she added
almost aloud. "But I am sure that it was only your special affection for
my poor husband that has made you keep your promise."

Then once more with pride and dignity she scanned her visitors, and
suddenly inquired aloud across the table of the deaf man: "Wouldn't he
have some more meat, and had he been given some wine?" The old man made
no answer and for a long while could not understand what he was asked,
though his neighbours amused themselves by poking and shaking him. He
simply gazed about him with his mouth open, which only increased the
general mirth.

"What an imbecile! Look, look! Why was he brought? But as to Pyotr
Petrovitch, I always had confidence in him," Katerina Ivanovna
continued, "and, of course, he is not like..." with an extremely stern
face she addressed Amalia Ivanovna so sharply and loudly that the latter
was quite disconcerted, "not like your dressed up draggletails whom
my father would not have taken as cooks into his kitchen, and my late
husband would have done them honour if he had invited them in the
goodness of his heart."

"Yes, he was fond of drink, he was fond of it, he did drink!" cried the
commissariat clerk, gulping down his twelfth glass of vodka.

"My late husband certainly had that weakness, and everyone knows
it," Katerina Ivanovna attacked him at once, "but he was a kind and
honourable man, who loved and respected his family. The worst of it was
his good nature made him trust all sorts of disreputable people, and he
drank with fellows who were not worth the sole of his shoe. Would you
believe it, Rodion Romanovitch, they found a gingerbread cock in his
pocket; he was dead drunk, but he did not forget the children!"

"A cock? Did you say a cock?" shouted the commissariat clerk.

Katerina Ivanovna did not vouchsafe a reply. She sighed, lost in
thought.

"No doubt you think, like everyone, that I was too severe with him," she
went on, addressing Raskolnikov. "But that's not so! He respected me, he
respected me very much! He was a kind-hearted man! And how sorry I was
for him sometimes! He would sit in a corner and look at me, I used to
feel so sorry for him, I used to want to be kind to him and then would
think to myself: 'Be kind to him and he will drink again,' it was only
by severity that you could keep him within bounds."

"Yes, he used to get his hair pulled pretty often," roared the
commissariat clerk again, swallowing another glass of vodka.

"Some fools would be the better for a good drubbing, as well as having
their hair pulled. I am not talking of my late husband now!" Katerina
Ivanovna snapped at him.

The flush on her cheeks grew more and more marked, her chest heaved. In
another minute she would have been ready to make a scene. Many of the
visitors were sniggering, evidently delighted. They began poking the
commissariat clerk and whispering something to him. They were evidently
trying to egg him on.

"Allow me to ask what are you alluding to," began the clerk, "that is
to say, whose... about whom... did you say just now... But I don't care!
That's nonsense! Widow! I forgive you.... Pass!"

And he took another drink of vodka.

Raskolnikov sat in silence, listening with disgust. He only ate from
politeness, just tasting the food that Katerina Ivanovna was continually
putting on his plate, to avoid hurting her feelings. He watched Sonia
intently. But Sonia became more and more anxious and distressed; she,
too, foresaw that the dinner would not end peaceably, and saw with
terror Katerina Ivanovna's growing irritation. She knew that she, Sonia,
was the chief reason for the 'genteel' ladies' contemptuous treatment of
Katerina Ivanovna's invitation. She had heard from Amalia Ivanovna that
the mother was positively offended at the invitation and had asked the
question: "How could she let her daughter sit down beside _that young
person_?" Sonia had a feeling that Katerina Ivanovna had already heard
this and an insult to Sonia meant more to Katerina Ivanovna than an
insult to herself, her children, or her father, Sonia knew that
Katerina Ivanovna would not be satisfied now, "till she had shown those
draggletails that they were both..." To make matters worse someone
passed Sonia, from the other end of the table, a plate with two hearts
pierced with an arrow, cut out of black bread. Katerina Ivanovna flushed
crimson and at once said aloud across the table that the man who sent it
was "a drunken ass!"

Amalia Ivanovna was foreseeing something amiss, and at the same time
deeply wounded by Katerina Ivanovna's haughtiness, and to restore the
good-humour of the company and raise herself in their esteem she began,
apropos of nothing, telling a story about an acquaintance of hers "Karl
from the chemist's," who was driving one night in a cab, and that "the
cabman wanted him to kill, and Karl very much begged him not to kill,
and wept and clasped hands, and frightened and from fear pierced his
heart." Though Katerina Ivanovna smiled, she observed at once that
Amalia Ivanovna ought not to tell anecdotes in Russian; the latter was
still more offended, and she retorted that her "_Vater aus Berlin_ was a
very important man, and always went with his hands in pockets." Katerina
Ivanovna could not restrain herself and laughed so much that Amalia
Ivanovna lost patience and could scarcely control herself.

"Listen to the owl!" Katerina Ivanovna whispered at once, her
good-humour almost restored, "she meant to say he kept his hands in
his pockets, but she said he put his hands in people's pockets.
(Cough-cough.) And have you noticed, Rodion Romanovitch, that all these
Petersburg foreigners, the Germans especially, are all stupider than
we! Can you fancy anyone of us telling how 'Karl from the chemist's'
'pierced his heart from fear' and that the idiot, instead of punishing
the cabman, 'clasped his hands and wept, and much begged.' Ah, the fool!
And you know she fancies it's very touching and does not suspect how
stupid she is! To my thinking that drunken commissariat clerk is a great
deal cleverer, anyway one can see that he has addled his brains with
drink, but you know, these foreigners are always so well behaved
and serious.... Look how she sits glaring! She is angry, ha-ha!
(Cough-cough-cough.)"

Regaining her good-humour, Katerina Ivanovna began at once telling
Raskolnikov that when she had obtained her pension, she intended to open
a school for the daughters of gentlemen in her native town T----.
This was the first time she had spoken to him of the project, and she
launched out into the most alluring details. It suddenly appeared that
Katerina Ivanovna had in her hands the very certificate of honour of
which Marmeladov had spoken to Raskolnikov in the tavern, when he told
him that Katerina Ivanovna, his wife, had danced the shawl dance
before the governor and other great personages on leaving school. This
certificate of honour was obviously intended now to prove Katerina
Ivanovna's right to open a boarding-school; but she had armed herself
with it chiefly with the object of overwhelming "those two stuck-up
draggletails" if they came to the dinner, and proving incontestably
that Katerina Ivanovna was of the most noble, "she might even say
aristocratic family, a colonel's daughter and was far superior to
certain adventuresses who have been so much to the fore of late." The
certificate of honour immediately passed into the hands of the drunken
guests, and Katerina Ivanovna did not try to retain it, for it actually
contained the statement _en toutes lettres_, that her father was of the
rank of a major, and also a companion of an order, so that she really
was almost the daughter of a colonel.

Warming up, Katerina Ivanovna proceeded to enlarge on the peaceful and
happy life they would lead in T----, on the gymnasium teachers whom
she would engage to give lessons in her boarding-school, one a most
respectable old Frenchman, one Mangot, who had taught Katerina Ivanovna
herself in old days and was still living in T----, and would no doubt
teach in her school on moderate terms. Next she spoke of Sonia who would
go with her to T---- and help her in all her plans. At this someone at
the further end of the table gave a sudden guffaw.

Though Katerina Ivanovna tried to appear to be disdainfully unaware of
it, she raised her voice and began at once speaking with conviction of
Sonia's undoubted ability to assist her, of "her gentleness, patience,
devotion, generosity and good education," tapping Sonia on the cheek and
kissing her warmly twice. Sonia flushed crimson, and Katerina Ivanovna
suddenly burst into tears, immediately observing that she was "nervous
and silly, that she was too much upset, that it was time to finish, and
as the dinner was over, it was time to hand round the tea."

At that moment, Amalia Ivanovna, deeply aggrieved at taking no part in
the conversation, and not being listened to, made one last effort,
and with secret misgivings ventured on an exceedingly deep and weighty
observation, that "in the future boarding-school she would have to pay
particular attention to _die Wäsche_, and that there certainly must be a
good _dame_ to look after the linen, and secondly that the young ladies
must not novels at night read."

Katerina Ivanovna, who certainly was upset and very tired, as well as
heartily sick of the dinner, at once cut short Amalia Ivanovna, saying
"she knew nothing about it and was talking nonsense, that it was the
business of the laundry maid, and not of the directress of a high-class
boarding-school to look after _die Wäsche_, and as for novel-reading,
that was simply rudeness, and she begged her to be silent." Amalia
Ivanovna fired up and getting angry observed that she only "meant her
good," and that "she had meant her very good," and that "it was long
since she had paid her _gold_ for the lodgings."

Katerina Ivanovna at once "set her down," saying that it was a lie to
say she wished her good, because only yesterday when her dead husband
was lying on the table, she had worried her about the lodgings. To this
Amalia Ivanovna very appropriately observed that she had invited those
ladies, but "those ladies had not come, because those ladies _are_
ladies and cannot come to a lady who is not a lady." Katerina Ivanovna
at once pointed out to her, that as she was a slut she could not judge
what made one really a lady. Amalia Ivanovna at once declared that her
"_Vater aus Berlin_ was a very, very important man, and both hands in
pockets went, and always used to say: 'Poof! poof!'" and she leapt
up from the table to represent her father, sticking her hands in her
pockets, puffing her cheeks, and uttering vague sounds resembling "poof!
poof!" amid loud laughter from all the lodgers, who purposely encouraged
Amalia Ivanovna, hoping for a fight.

But this was too much for Katerina Ivanovna, and she at once declared,
so that all could hear, that Amalia Ivanovna probably never had a
father, but was simply a drunken Petersburg Finn, and had certainly once
been a cook and probably something worse. Amalia Ivanovna turned as red
as a lobster and squealed that perhaps Katerina Ivanovna never had a
father, "but she had a _Vater aus Berlin_ and that he wore a long coat
and always said poof-poof-poof!"

Katerina Ivanovna observed contemptuously that all knew what her family
was and that on that very certificate of honour it was stated in print
that her father was a colonel, while Amalia Ivanovna's father--if she
really had one--was probably some Finnish milkman, but that probably she
never had a father at all, since it was still uncertain whether her name
was Amalia Ivanovna or Amalia Ludwigovna.

At this Amalia Ivanovna, lashed to fury, struck the table with her fist,
and shrieked that she was Amalia Ivanovna, and not Ludwigovna, "that
her _Vater_ was named Johann and that he was a burgomeister, and that
Katerina Ivanovna's _Vater_ was quite never a burgomeister." Katerina
Ivanovna rose from her chair, and with a stern and apparently calm voice
(though she was pale and her chest was heaving) observed that "if she
dared for one moment to set her contemptible wretch of a father on a
level with her papa, she, Katerina Ivanovna, would tear her cap off her
head and trample it under foot." Amalia Ivanovna ran about the room,
shouting at the top of her voice, that she was mistress of the house and
that Katerina Ivanovna should leave the lodgings that minute; then she
rushed for some reason to collect the silver spoons from the table.
There was a great outcry and uproar, the children began crying. Sonia
ran to restrain Katerina Ivanovna, but when Amalia Ivanovna shouted
something about "the yellow ticket," Katerina Ivanovna pushed Sonia
away, and rushed at the landlady to carry out her threat.

At that minute the door opened, and Pyotr Petrovitch Luzhin appeared
on the threshold. He stood scanning the party with severe and vigilant
eyes. Katerina Ivanovna rushed to him.



CHAPTER III

"Pyotr Petrovitch," she cried, "protect me... you at least! Make this
foolish woman understand that she can't behave like this to a lady in
misfortune... that there is a law for such things.... I'll go to the
governor-general himself.... She shall answer for it.... Remembering my
father's hospitality protect these orphans."

"Allow me, madam.... Allow me." Pyotr Petrovitch waved her off. "Your
papa as you are well aware I had not the honour of knowing" (someone
laughed aloud) "and I do not intend to take part in your everlasting
squabbles with Amalia Ivanovna.... I have come here to speak of my own
affairs... and I want to have a word with your stepdaughter, Sofya...
Ivanovna, I think it is? Allow me to pass."

Pyotr Petrovitch, edging by her, went to the opposite corner where Sonia
was.

Katerina Ivanovna remained standing where she was, as though
thunderstruck. She could not understand how Pyotr Petrovitch could deny
having enjoyed her father's hospitality. Though she had invented it
herself, she believed in it firmly by this time. She was struck too
by the businesslike, dry and even contemptuous menacing tone of Pyotr
Petrovitch. All the clamour gradually died away at his entrance. Not
only was this "serious business man" strikingly incongruous with the
rest of the party, but it was evident, too, that he had come upon some
matter of consequence, that some exceptional cause must have brought him
and that therefore something was going to happen. Raskolnikov, standing
beside Sonia, moved aside to let him pass; Pyotr Petrovitch did not
seem to notice him. A minute later Lebeziatnikov, too, appeared in the
doorway; he did not come in, but stood still, listening with marked
interest, almost wonder, and seemed for a time perplexed.

"Excuse me for possibly interrupting you, but it's a matter of
some importance," Pyotr Petrovitch observed, addressing the company
generally. "I am glad indeed to find other persons present. Amalia
Ivanovna, I humbly beg you as mistress of the house to pay careful
attention to what I have to say to Sofya Ivanovna. Sofya Ivanovna,"
he went on, addressing Sonia, who was very much surprised and already
alarmed, "immediately after your visit I found that a hundred-rouble
note was missing from my table, in the room of my friend Mr.
Lebeziatnikov. If in any way whatever you know and will tell us where
it is now, I assure you on my word of honour and call all present to
witness that the matter shall end there. In the opposite case I shall be
compelled to have recourse to very serious measures and then... you must
blame yourself."

Complete silence reigned in the room. Even the crying children were
still. Sonia stood deadly pale, staring at Luzhin and unable to say a
word. She seemed not to understand. Some seconds passed.

"Well, how is it to be then?" asked Luzhin, looking intently at her.

"I don't know.... I know nothing about it," Sonia articulated faintly at
last.

"No, you know nothing?" Luzhin repeated and again he paused for some
seconds. "Think a moment, mademoiselle," he began severely, but still,
as it were, admonishing her. "Reflect, I am prepared to give you time
for consideration. Kindly observe this: if I were not so entirely
convinced I should not, you may be sure, with my experience venture to
accuse you so directly. Seeing that for such direct accusation before
witnesses, if false or even mistaken, I should myself in a certain sense
be made responsible, I am aware of that. This morning I changed for
my own purposes several five-per-cent securities for the sum of
approximately three thousand roubles. The account is noted down in my
pocket-book. On my return home I proceeded to count the money--as Mr.
Lebeziatnikov will bear witness--and after counting two thousand three
hundred roubles I put the rest in my pocket-book in my coat pocket.
About five hundred roubles remained on the table and among them three
notes of a hundred roubles each. At that moment you entered (at my
invitation)--and all the time you were present you were exceedingly
embarrassed; so that three times you jumped up in the middle of the
conversation and tried to make off. Mr. Lebeziatnikov can bear witness
to this. You yourself, mademoiselle, probably will not refuse to confirm
my statement that I invited you through Mr. Lebeziatnikov, solely in
order to discuss with you the hopeless and destitute position of your
relative, Katerina Ivanovna (whose dinner I was unable to attend),
and the advisability of getting up something of the nature of a
subscription, lottery or the like, for her benefit. You thanked me and
even shed tears. I describe all this as it took place, primarily to
recall it to your mind and secondly to show you that not the slightest
detail has escaped my recollection. Then I took a ten-rouble note from
the table and handed it to you by way of first instalment on my part
for the benefit of your relative. Mr. Lebeziatnikov saw all this. Then
I accompanied you to the door--you being still in the same state of
embarrassment--after which, being left alone with Mr. Lebeziatnikov I
talked to him for ten minutes--then Mr. Lebeziatnikov went out and I
returned to the table with the money lying on it, intending to count
it and to put it aside, as I proposed doing before. To my surprise one
hundred-rouble note had disappeared. Kindly consider the position.
Mr. Lebeziatnikov I cannot suspect. I am ashamed to allude to such
a supposition. I cannot have made a mistake in my reckoning, for the
minute before your entrance I had finished my accounts and found the
total correct. You will admit that recollecting your embarrassment, your
eagerness to get away and the fact that you kept your hands for some
time on the table, and taking into consideration your social position
and the habits associated with it, I was, so to say, with horror and
positively against my will, _compelled_ to entertain a suspicion--a
cruel, but justifiable suspicion! I will add further and repeat that in
spite of my positive conviction, I realise that I run a certain risk in
making this accusation, but as you see, I could not let it pass. I have
taken action and I will tell you why: solely, madam, solely, owing
to your black ingratitude! Why! I invite you for the benefit of your
destitute relative, I present you with my donation of ten roubles and
you, on the spot, repay me for all that with such an action. It is too
bad! You need a lesson. Reflect! Moreover, like a true friend I beg
you--and you could have no better friend at this moment--think what you
are doing, otherwise I shall be immovable! Well, what do you say?"

"I have taken nothing," Sonia whispered in terror, "you gave me ten
roubles, here it is, take it."

Sonia pulled her handkerchief out of her pocket, untied a corner of it,
took out the ten-rouble note and gave it to Luzhin.

"And the hundred roubles you do not confess to taking?" he insisted
reproachfully, not taking the note.

Sonia looked about her. All were looking at her with such awful, stern,
ironical, hostile eyes. She looked at Raskolnikov... he stood against
the wall, with his arms crossed, looking at her with glowing eyes.

"Good God!" broke from Sonia.

"Amalia Ivanovna, we shall have to send word to the police and therefore
I humbly beg you meanwhile to send for the house porter," Luzhin said
softly and even kindly.

"_Gott der Barmherzige_! I knew she was the thief," cried Amalia
Ivanovna, throwing up her hands.

"You knew it?" Luzhin caught her up, "then I suppose you had some reason
before this for thinking so. I beg you, worthy Amalia Ivanovna, to
remember your words which have been uttered before witnesses."

There was a buzz of loud conversation on all sides. All were in
movement.

"What!" cried Katerina Ivanovna, suddenly realising the position, and
she rushed at Luzhin. "What! You accuse her of stealing? Sonia? Ah, the
wretches, the wretches!"

And running to Sonia she flung her wasted arms round her and held her as
in a vise.

"Sonia! how dared you take ten roubles from him? Foolish girl! Give it
to me! Give me the ten roubles at once--here!"

And snatching the note from Sonia, Katerina Ivanovna crumpled it up and
flung it straight into Luzhin's face. It hit him in the eye and fell
on the ground. Amalia Ivanovna hastened to pick it up. Pyotr Petrovitch
lost his temper.

"Hold that mad woman!" he shouted.

At that moment several other persons, besides Lebeziatnikov, appeared in
the doorway, among them the two ladies.

"What! Mad? Am I mad? Idiot!" shrieked Katerina Ivanovna. "You are an
idiot yourself, pettifogging lawyer, base man! Sonia, Sonia take his
money! Sonia a thief! Why, she'd give away her last penny!" and Katerina
Ivanovna broke into hysterical laughter. "Did you ever see such an
idiot?" she turned from side to side. "And you too?" she suddenly saw
the landlady, "and you too, sausage eater, you declare that she is a
thief, you trashy Prussian hen's leg in a crinoline! She hasn't been
out of this room: she came straight from you, you wretch, and sat down
beside me, everyone saw her. She sat here, by Rodion Romanovitch. Search
her! Since she's not left the room, the money would have to be on her!
Search her, search her! But if you don't find it, then excuse me, my
dear fellow, you'll answer for it! I'll go to our Sovereign, to our
Sovereign, to our gracious Tsar himself, and throw myself at his feet,
to-day, this minute! I am alone in the world! They would let me in! Do
you think they wouldn't? You're wrong, I will get in! I will get in!
You reckoned on her meekness! You relied upon that! But I am not so
submissive, let me tell you! You've gone too far yourself. Search her,
search her!"

And Katerina Ivanovna in a frenzy shook Luzhin and dragged him towards
Sonia.

"I am ready, I'll be responsible... but calm yourself, madam, calm
yourself. I see that you are not so submissive!... Well, well, but as to
that..." Luzhin muttered, "that ought to be before the police... though
indeed there are witnesses enough as it is.... I am ready.... But in
any case it's difficult for a man... on account of her sex.... But with
the help of Amalia Ivanovna... though, of course, it's not the way to do
things.... How is it to be done?"

"As you will! Let anyone who likes search her!" cried Katerina Ivanovna.
"Sonia, turn out your pockets! See! Look, monster, the pocket is empty,
here was her handkerchief! Here is the other pocket, look! D'you see,
d'you see?"

And Katerina Ivanovna turned--or rather snatched--both pockets inside
out. But from the right pocket a piece of paper flew out and describing
a parabola in the air fell at Luzhin's feet. Everyone saw it, several
cried out. Pyotr Petrovitch stooped down, picked up the paper in two
fingers, lifted it where all could see it and opened it. It was a
hundred-rouble note folded in eight. Pyotr Petrovitch held up the note
showing it to everyone.

"Thief! Out of my lodging. Police, police!" yelled Amalia Ivanovna.
"They must to Siberia be sent! Away!"

Exclamations arose on all sides. Raskolnikov was silent, keeping his
eyes fixed on Sonia, except for an occasional rapid glance at Luzhin.
Sonia stood still, as though unconscious. She was hardly able to feel
surprise. Suddenly the colour rushed to her cheeks; she uttered a cry
and hid her face in her hands.

"No, it wasn't I! I didn't take it! I know nothing about it," she cried
with a heartrending wail, and she ran to Katerina Ivanovna, who clasped
her tightly in her arms, as though she would shelter her from all the
world.

"Sonia! Sonia! I don't believe it! You see, I don't believe it!" she
cried in the face of the obvious fact, swaying her to and fro in her
arms like a baby, kissing her face continually, then snatching at her
hands and kissing them, too, "you took it! How stupid these people are!
Oh dear! You are fools, fools," she cried, addressing the whole room,
"you don't know, you don't know what a heart she has, what a girl she
is! She take it, she? She'd sell her last rag, she'd go barefoot to help
you if you needed it, that's what she is! She has the yellow passport
because my children were starving, she sold herself for us! Ah, husband,
husband! Do you see? Do you see? What a memorial dinner for you!
Merciful heavens! Defend her, why are you all standing still? Rodion
Romanovitch, why don't you stand up for her? Do you believe it, too? You
are not worth her little finger, all of you together! Good God! Defend
her now, at least!"

The wail of the poor, consumptive, helpless woman seemed to produce a
great effect on her audience. The agonised, wasted, consumptive face,
the parched blood-stained lips, the hoarse voice, the tears unrestrained
as a child's, the trustful, childish and yet despairing prayer for help
were so piteous that everyone seemed to feel for her. Pyotr Petrovitch
at any rate was at once moved to _compassion_.

"Madam, madam, this incident does not reflect upon you!" he cried
impressively, "no one would take upon himself to accuse you of being an
instigator or even an accomplice in it, especially as you have proved
her guilt by turning out her pockets, showing that you had no previous
idea of it. I am most ready, most ready to show compassion, if poverty,
so to speak, drove Sofya Semyonovna to it, but why did you refuse to
confess, mademoiselle? Were you afraid of the disgrace? The first step?
You lost your head, perhaps? One can quite understand it.... But how
could you have lowered yourself to such an action? Gentlemen," he
addressed the whole company, "gentlemen! Compassionate and, so to say,
commiserating these people, I am ready to overlook it even now in spite
of the personal insult lavished upon me! And may this disgrace be a
lesson to you for the future," he said, addressing Sonia, "and I will
carry the matter no further. Enough!"

Pyotr Petrovitch stole a glance at Raskolnikov. Their eyes met, and the
fire in Raskolnikov's seemed ready to reduce him to ashes. Meanwhile
Katerina Ivanovna apparently heard nothing. She was kissing and hugging
Sonia like a madwoman. The children, too, were embracing Sonia on
all sides, and Polenka--though she did not fully understand what was
wrong--was drowned in tears and shaking with sobs, as she hid her pretty
little face, swollen with weeping, on Sonia's shoulder.

"How vile!" a loud voice cried suddenly in the doorway.

Pyotr Petrovitch looked round quickly.

"What vileness!" Lebeziatnikov repeated, staring him straight in the
face.

Pyotr Petrovitch gave a positive start--all noticed it and recalled it
afterwards. Lebeziatnikov strode into the room.

"And you dared to call me as witness?" he said, going up to Pyotr
Petrovitch.

"What do you mean? What are you talking about?" muttered Luzhin.

"I mean that you... are a slanderer, that's what my words mean!"
Lebeziatnikov said hotly, looking sternly at him with his short-sighted
eyes.

He was extremely angry. Raskolnikov gazed intently at him, as though
seizing and weighing each word. Again there was a silence. Pyotr
Petrovitch indeed seemed almost dumbfounded for the first moment.

"If you mean that for me,..." he began, stammering. "But what's the
matter with you? Are you out of your mind?"

"I'm in my mind, but you are a scoundrel! Ah, how vile! I have heard
everything. I kept waiting on purpose to understand it, for I must own
even now it is not quite logical.... What you have done it all for I
can't understand."

"Why, what have I done then? Give over talking in your nonsensical
riddles! Or maybe you are drunk!"

"You may be a drunkard, perhaps, vile man, but I am not! I never touch
vodka, for it's against my convictions. Would you believe it, he, he
himself, with his own hands gave Sofya Semyonovna that hundred-rouble
note--I saw it, I was a witness, I'll take my oath! He did it, he!"
repeated Lebeziatnikov, addressing all.

"Are you crazy, milksop?" squealed Luzhin. "She is herself before
you--she herself here declared just now before everyone that I gave her
only ten roubles. How could I have given it to her?"

"I saw it, I saw it," Lebeziatnikov repeated, "and though it is against
my principles, I am ready this very minute to take any oath you like
before the court, for I saw how you slipped it in her pocket. Only
like a fool I thought you did it out of kindness! When you were saying
good-bye to her at the door, while you held her hand in one hand, with
the other, the left, you slipped the note into her pocket. I saw it, I
saw it!"

Luzhin turned pale.

"What lies!" he cried impudently, "why, how could you, standing by the
window, see the note? You fancied it with your short-sighted eyes. You
are raving!"

"No, I didn't fancy it. And though I was standing some way off, I saw
it all. And though it certainly would be hard to distinguish a note from
the window--that's true--I knew for certain that it was a hundred-rouble
note, because, when you were going to give Sofya Semyonovna ten roubles,
you took up from the table a hundred-rouble note (I saw it because I
was standing near then, and an idea struck me at once, so that I did not
forget you had it in your hand). You folded it and kept it in your hand
all the time. I didn't think of it again until, when you were getting
up, you changed it from your right hand to your left and nearly dropped
it! I noticed it because the same idea struck me again, that you meant
to do her a kindness without my seeing. You can fancy how I watched you
and I saw how you succeeded in slipping it into her pocket. I saw it, I
saw it, I'll take my oath."

Lebeziatnikov was almost breathless. Exclamations arose on all hands
chiefly expressive of wonder, but some were menacing in tone. They all
crowded round Pyotr Petrovitch. Katerina Ivanovna flew to Lebeziatnikov.

"I was mistaken in you! Protect her! You are the only one to take her
part! She is an orphan. God has sent you!"

Katerina Ivanovna, hardly knowing what she was doing, sank on her knees
before him.

"A pack of nonsense!" yelled Luzhin, roused to fury, "it's all nonsense
you've been talking! 'An idea struck you, you didn't think, you
noticed'--what does it amount to? So I gave it to her on the sly on
purpose? What for? With what object? What have I to do with this...?"

"What for? That's what I can't understand, but that what I am telling
you is the fact, that's certain! So far from my being mistaken, you
infamous criminal man, I remember how, on account of it, a question
occurred to me at once, just when I was thanking you and pressing
your hand. What made you put it secretly in her pocket? Why you did it
secretly, I mean? Could it be simply to conceal it from me, knowing that
my convictions are opposed to yours and that I do not approve of private
benevolence, which effects no radical cure? Well, I decided that you
really were ashamed of giving such a large sum before me. Perhaps,
too, I thought, he wants to give her a surprise, when she finds a whole
hundred-rouble note in her pocket. (For I know, some benevolent people
are very fond of decking out their charitable actions in that way.) Then
the idea struck me, too, that you wanted to test her, to see whether,
when she found it, she would come to thank you. Then, too, that you
wanted to avoid thanks and that, as the saying is, your right hand
should not know... something of that sort, in fact. I thought of so
many possibilities that I put off considering it, but still thought it
indelicate to show you that I knew your secret. But another idea struck
me again that Sofya Semyonovna might easily lose the money before she
noticed it, that was why I decided to come in here to call her out of
the room and to tell her that you put a hundred roubles in her pocket.
But on my way I went first to Madame Kobilatnikov's to take them the
'General Treatise on the Positive Method' and especially to recommend
Piderit's article (and also Wagner's); then I come on here and what a
state of things I find! Now could I, could I, have all these ideas and
reflections if I had not seen you put the hundred-rouble note in her
pocket?"

When Lebeziatnikov finished his long-winded harangue with the logical
deduction at the end, he was quite tired, and the perspiration streamed
from his face. He could not, alas, even express himself correctly
in Russian, though he knew no other language, so that he was quite
exhausted, almost emaciated after this heroic exploit. But his speech
produced a powerful effect. He had spoken with such vehemence, with such
conviction that everyone obviously believed him. Pyotr Petrovitch felt
that things were going badly with him.

"What is it to do with me if silly ideas did occur to you?" he shouted,
"that's no evidence. You may have dreamt it, that's all! And I tell you,
you are lying, sir. You are lying and slandering from some spite against
me, simply from pique, because I did not agree with your free-thinking,
godless, social propositions!"

But this retort did not benefit Pyotr Petrovitch. Murmurs of disapproval
were heard on all sides.

"Ah, that's your line now, is it!" cried Lebeziatnikov, "that's
nonsense! Call the police and I'll take my oath! There's only one thing
I can't understand: what made him risk such a contemptible action. Oh,
pitiful, despicable man!"

"I can explain why he risked such an action, and if necessary, I, too,
will swear to it," Raskolnikov said at last in a firm voice, and he
stepped forward.

He appeared to be firm and composed. Everyone felt clearly, from the
very look of him that he really knew about it and that the mystery would
be solved.

"Now I can explain it all to myself," said Raskolnikov, addressing
Lebeziatnikov. "From the very beginning of the business, I suspected
that there was some scoundrelly intrigue at the bottom of it. I began
to suspect it from some special circumstances known to me only, which
I will explain at once to everyone: they account for everything. Your
valuable evidence has finally made everything clear to me. I beg all,
all to listen. This gentleman (he pointed to Luzhin) was recently
engaged to be married to a young lady--my sister, Avdotya Romanovna
Raskolnikov. But coming to Petersburg he quarrelled with me, the day
before yesterday, at our first meeting and I drove him out of my room--I
have two witnesses to prove it. He is a very spiteful man.... The day
before yesterday I did not know that he was staying here, in your room,
and that consequently on the very day we quarrelled--the day before
yesterday--he saw me give Katerina Ivanovna some money for the funeral,
as a friend of the late Mr. Marmeladov. He at once wrote a note to
my mother and informed her that I had given away all my money, not
to Katerina Ivanovna but to Sofya Semyonovna, and referred in a most
contemptible way to the... character of Sofya Semyonovna, that is,
hinted at the character of my attitude to Sofya Semyonovna. All this you
understand was with the object of dividing me from my mother and sister,
by insinuating that I was squandering on unworthy objects the money
which they had sent me and which was all they had. Yesterday evening,
before my mother and sister and in his presence, I declared that I had
given the money to Katerina Ivanovna for the funeral and not to Sofya
Semyonovna and that I had no acquaintance with Sofya Semyonovna and had
never seen her before, indeed. At the same time I added that he,
Pyotr Petrovitch Luzhin, with all his virtues, was not worth Sofya
Semyonovna's little finger, though he spoke so ill of her. To his
question--would I let Sofya Semyonovna sit down beside my sister, I
answered that I had already done so that day. Irritated that my mother
and sister were unwilling to quarrel with me at his insinuations, he
gradually began being unpardonably rude to them. A final rupture took
place and he was turned out of the house. All this happened yesterday
evening. Now I beg your special attention: consider: if he had now
succeeded in proving that Sofya Semyonovna was a thief, he would
have shown to my mother and sister that he was almost right in his
suspicions, that he had reason to be angry at my putting my sister on
a level with Sofya Semyonovna, that, in attacking me, he was protecting
and preserving the honour of my sister, his betrothed. In fact he might
even, through all this, have been able to estrange me from my family,
and no doubt he hoped to be restored to favour with them; to say nothing
of revenging himself on me personally, for he has grounds for supposing
that the honour and happiness of Sofya Semyonovna are very precious to
me. That was what he was working for! That's how I understand it. That's
the whole reason for it and there can be no other!"

It was like this, or somewhat like this, that Raskolnikov wound up his
speech which was followed very attentively, though often interrupted by
exclamations from his audience. But in spite of interruptions he spoke
clearly, calmly, exactly, firmly. His decisive voice, his tone of
conviction and his stern face made a great impression on everyone.

"Yes, yes, that's it," Lebeziatnikov assented gleefully, "that must be
it, for he asked me, as soon as Sofya Semyonovna came into our room,
whether you were here, whether I had seen you among Katerina Ivanovna's
guests. He called me aside to the window and asked me in secret. It was
essential for him that you should be here! That's it, that's it!"

Luzhin smiled contemptuously and did not speak. But he was very pale. He
seemed to be deliberating on some means of escape. Perhaps he would have
been glad to give up everything and get away, but at the moment this
was scarcely possible. It would have implied admitting the truth of
the accusations brought against him. Moreover, the company, which had
already been excited by drink, was now too much stirred to allow it. The
commissariat clerk, though indeed he had not grasped the whole position,
was shouting louder than anyone and was making some suggestions very
unpleasant to Luzhin. But not all those present were drunk; lodgers came
in from all the rooms. The three Poles were tremendously excited
and were continually shouting at him: "The _pan_ is a _lajdak_!" and
muttering threats in Polish. Sonia had been listening with strained
attention, though she too seemed unable to grasp it all; she seemed as
though she had just returned to consciousness. She did not take her
eyes off Raskolnikov, feeling that all her safety lay in him. Katerina
Ivanovna breathed hard and painfully and seemed fearfully exhausted.
Amalia Ivanovna stood looking more stupid than anyone, with her mouth
wide open, unable to make out what had happened. She only saw that Pyotr
Petrovitch had somehow come to grief.

Raskolnikov was attempting to speak again, but they did not let him.
Everyone was crowding round Luzhin with threats and shouts of abuse.
But Pyotr Petrovitch was not intimidated. Seeing that his accusation of
Sonia had completely failed, he had recourse to insolence:

"Allow me, gentlemen, allow me! Don't squeeze, let me pass!" he said,
making his way through the crowd. "And no threats, if you please! I
assure you it will be useless, you will gain nothing by it. On the
contrary, you'll have to answer, gentlemen, for violently obstructing
the course of justice. The thief has been more than unmasked, and I
shall prosecute. Our judges are not so blind and... not so drunk, and
will not believe the testimony of two notorious infidels, agitators, and
atheists, who accuse me from motives of personal revenge which they are
foolish enough to admit.... Yes, allow me to pass!"

"Don't let me find a trace of you in my room! Kindly leave at once, and
everything is at an end between us! When I think of the trouble I've
been taking, the way I've been expounding... all this fortnight!"

"I told you myself to-day that I was going, when you tried to keep me;
now I will simply add that you are a fool. I advise you to see a doctor
for your brains and your short sight. Let me pass, gentlemen!"

He forced his way through. But the commissariat clerk was unwilling to
let him off so easily: he picked up a glass from the table, brandished
it in the air and flung it at Pyotr Petrovitch; but the glass flew
straight at Amalia Ivanovna. She screamed, and the clerk, overbalancing,
fell heavily under the table. Pyotr Petrovitch made his way to his room
and half an hour later had left the house. Sonia, timid by nature, had
felt before that day that she could be ill-treated more easily than
anyone, and that she could be wronged with impunity. Yet till that
moment she had fancied that she might escape misfortune by care,
gentleness and submissiveness before everyone. Her disappointment was
too great. She could, of course, bear with patience and almost without
murmur anything, even this. But for the first minute she felt it too
bitter. In spite of her triumph and her justification--when her first
terror and stupefaction had passed and she could understand it all
clearly--the feeling of her helplessness and of the wrong done to her
made her heart throb with anguish and she was overcome with hysterical
weeping. At last, unable to bear any more, she rushed out of the room
and ran home, almost immediately after Luzhin's departure. When amidst
loud laughter the glass flew at Amalia Ivanovna, it was more than the
landlady could endure. With a shriek she rushed like a fury at Katerina
Ivanovna, considering her to blame for everything.

"Out of my lodgings! At once! Quick march!"

And with these words she began snatching up everything she could lay
her hands on that belonged to Katerina Ivanovna, and throwing it on the
floor. Katerina Ivanovna, pale, almost fainting, and gasping for breath,
jumped up from the bed where she had sunk in exhaustion and darted at
Amalia Ivanovna. But the battle was too unequal: the landlady waved her
away like a feather.

"What! As though that godless calumny was not enough--this vile creature
attacks me! What! On the day of my husband's funeral I am turned out of
my lodging! After eating my bread and salt she turns me into the street,
with my orphans! Where am I to go?" wailed the poor woman, sobbing and
gasping. "Good God!" she cried with flashing eyes, "is there no justice
upon earth? Whom should you protect if not us orphans? We shall see!
There is law and justice on earth, there is, I will find it! Wait a bit,
godless creature! Polenka, stay with the children, I'll come back. Wait
for me, if you have to wait in the street. We will see whether there is
justice on earth!"

And throwing over her head that green shawl which Marmeladov had
mentioned to Raskolnikov, Katerina Ivanovna squeezed her way through the
disorderly and drunken crowd of lodgers who still filled the room, and,
wailing and tearful, she ran into the street--with a vague intention
of going at once somewhere to find justice. Polenka with the two little
ones in her arms crouched, terrified, on the trunk in the corner of the
room, where she waited trembling for her mother to come back. Amalia
Ivanovna raged about the room, shrieking, lamenting and throwing
everything she came across on the floor. The lodgers talked
incoherently, some commented to the best of their ability on what had
happened, others quarrelled and swore at one another, while others
struck up a song....

"Now it's time for me to go," thought Raskolnikov. "Well, Sofya
Semyonovna, we shall see what you'll say now!"

And he set off in the direction of Sonia's lodgings.



CHAPTER IV

Raskolnikov had been a vigorous and active champion of Sonia against
Luzhin, although he had such a load of horror and anguish in his own
heart. But having gone through so much in the morning, he found a sort
of relief in a change of sensations, apart from the strong personal
feeling which impelled him to defend Sonia. He was agitated too,
especially at some moments, by the thought of his approaching interview
with Sonia: he _had_ to tell her who had killed Lizaveta. He knew the
terrible suffering it would be to him and, as it were, brushed away the
thought of it. So when he cried as he left Katerina Ivanovna's, "Well,
Sofya Semyonovna, we shall see what you'll say now!" he was still
superficially excited, still vigorous and defiant from his triumph over
Luzhin. But, strange to say, by the time he reached Sonia's lodging, he
felt a sudden impotence and fear. He stood still in hesitation at the
door, asking himself the strange question: "Must he tell her who killed
Lizaveta?" It was a strange question because he felt at the very time
not only that he could not help telling her, but also that he could
not put off the telling. He did not yet know why it must be so, he
only _felt_ it, and the agonising sense of his impotence before
the inevitable almost crushed him. To cut short his hesitation and
suffering, he quickly opened the door and looked at Sonia from the
doorway. She was sitting with her elbows on the table and her face in
her hands, but seeing Raskolnikov she got up at once and came to meet
him as though she were expecting him.

"What would have become of me but for you?" she said quickly, meeting
him in the middle of the room.

Evidently she was in haste to say this to him. It was what she had been
waiting for.

Raskolnikov went to the table and sat down on the chair from which she
had only just risen. She stood facing him, two steps away, just as she
had done the day before.

"Well, Sonia?" he said, and felt that his voice was trembling, "it was
all due to 'your social position and the habits associated with it.' Did
you understand that just now?"

Her face showed her distress.

"Only don't talk to me as you did yesterday," she interrupted him.
"Please don't begin it. There is misery enough without that."

She made haste to smile, afraid that he might not like the reproach.

"I was silly to come away from there. What is happening there now? I
wanted to go back directly, but I kept thinking that... you would come."

He told her that Amalia Ivanovna was turning them out of their lodging
and that Katerina Ivanovna had run off somewhere "to seek justice."

"My God!" cried Sonia, "let's go at once...."

And she snatched up her cape.

"It's everlastingly the same thing!" said Raskolnikov, irritably.
"You've no thought except for them! Stay a little with me."

"But... Katerina Ivanovna?"

"You won't lose Katerina Ivanovna, you may be sure, she'll come to you
herself since she has run out," he added peevishly. "If she doesn't find
you here, you'll be blamed for it...."

Sonia sat down in painful suspense. Raskolnikov was silent, gazing at
the floor and deliberating.

"This time Luzhin did not want to prosecute you," he began, not looking
at Sonia, "but if he had wanted to, if it had suited his plans, he would
have sent you to prison if it had not been for Lebeziatnikov and me.
Ah?"

"Yes," she assented in a faint voice. "Yes," she repeated, preoccupied
and distressed.

"But I might easily not have been there. And it was quite an accident
Lebeziatnikov's turning up."

Sonia was silent.

"And if you'd gone to prison, what then? Do you remember what I said
yesterday?"

Again she did not answer. He waited.

"I thought you would cry out again 'don't speak of it, leave off.'"
Raskolnikov gave a laugh, but rather a forced one. "What, silence
again?" he asked a minute later. "We must talk about something, you
know. It would be interesting for me to know how you would decide a
certain 'problem' as Lebeziatnikov would say." (He was beginning to lose
the thread.) "No, really, I am serious. Imagine, Sonia, that you had
known all Luzhin's intentions beforehand. Known, that is, for a fact,
that they would be the ruin of Katerina Ivanovna and the children and
yourself thrown in--since you don't count yourself for anything--Polenka
too... for she'll go the same way. Well, if suddenly it all depended on
your decision whether he or they should go on living, that is whether
Luzhin should go on living and doing wicked things, or Katerina Ivanovna
should die? How would you decide which of them was to die? I ask you?"

Sonia looked uneasily at him. There was something peculiar in this
hesitating question, which seemed approaching something in a roundabout
way.

"I felt that you were going to ask some question like that," she said,
looking inquisitively at him.

"I dare say you did. But how is it to be answered?"

"Why do you ask about what could not happen?" said Sonia reluctantly.

"Then it would be better for Luzhin to go on living and doing wicked
things? You haven't dared to decide even that!"

"But I can't know the Divine Providence.... And why do you ask what
can't be answered? What's the use of such foolish questions? How could
it happen that it should depend on my decision--who has made me a judge
to decide who is to live and who is not to live?"

"Oh, if the Divine Providence is to be mixed up in it, there is no doing
anything," Raskolnikov grumbled morosely.

"You'd better say straight out what you want!" Sonia cried in distress.
"You are leading up to something again.... Can you have come simply to
torture me?"

She could not control herself and began crying bitterly. He looked at
her in gloomy misery. Five minutes passed.

"Of course you're right, Sonia," he said softly at last. He was suddenly
changed. His tone of assumed arrogance and helpless defiance was gone.
Even his voice was suddenly weak. "I told you yesterday that I was not
coming to ask forgiveness and almost the first thing I've said is to ask
forgiveness.... I said that about Luzhin and Providence for my own sake.
I was asking forgiveness, Sonia...."

He tried to smile, but there was something helpless and incomplete in
his pale smile. He bowed his head and hid his face in his hands.

And suddenly a strange, surprising sensation of a sort of bitter hatred
for Sonia passed through his heart. As it were wondering and frightened
of this sensation, he raised his head and looked intently at her; but he
met her uneasy and painfully anxious eyes fixed on him; there was
love in them; his hatred vanished like a phantom. It was not the real
feeling; he had taken the one feeling for the other. It only meant that
_that_ minute had come.

He hid his face in his hands again and bowed his head. Suddenly he
turned pale, got up from his chair, looked at Sonia, and without
uttering a word sat down mechanically on her bed.

His sensations that moment were terribly like the moment when he had
stood over the old woman with the axe in his hand and felt that "he must
not lose another minute."

"What's the matter?" asked Sonia, dreadfully frightened.

He could not utter a word. This was not at all, not at all the way he
had intended to "tell" and he did not understand what was happening to
him now. She went up to him, softly, sat down on the bed beside him and
waited, not taking her eyes off him. Her heart throbbed and sank. It
was unendurable; he turned his deadly pale face to her. His lips worked,
helplessly struggling to utter something. A pang of terror passed
through Sonia's heart.

"What's the matter?" she repeated, drawing a little away from him.

"Nothing, Sonia, don't be frightened.... It's nonsense. It really is
nonsense, if you think of it," he muttered, like a man in delirium. "Why
have I come to torture you?" he added suddenly, looking at her. "Why,
really? I keep asking myself that question, Sonia...."

He had perhaps been asking himself that question a quarter of an hour
before, but now he spoke helplessly, hardly knowing what he said and
feeling a continual tremor all over.

"Oh, how you are suffering!" she muttered in distress, looking intently
at him.

"It's all nonsense.... Listen, Sonia." He suddenly smiled, a pale
helpless smile for two seconds. "You remember what I meant to tell you
yesterday?"

Sonia waited uneasily.

"I said as I went away that perhaps I was saying good-bye for ever, but
that if I came to-day I would tell you who... who killed Lizaveta."

She began trembling all over.

"Well, here I've come to tell you."

"Then you really meant it yesterday?" she whispered with difficulty.
"How do you know?" she asked quickly, as though suddenly regaining her
reason.

Sonia's face grew paler and paler, and she breathed painfully.

"I know."

She paused a minute.

"Have they found him?" she asked timidly.

"No."

"Then how do you know about _it_?" she asked again, hardly audibly and
again after a minute's pause.

He turned to her and looked very intently at her.

"Guess," he said, with the same distorted helpless smile.

A shudder passed over her.

"But you... why do you frighten me like this?" she said, smiling like a
child.

"I must be a great friend of _his_... since I know," Raskolnikov went
on, still gazing into her face, as though he could not turn his eyes
away. "He... did not mean to kill that Lizaveta... he... killed her
accidentally.... He meant to kill the old woman when she was alone and
he went there... and then Lizaveta came in... he killed her too."

Another awful moment passed. Both still gazed at one another.

"You can't guess, then?" he asked suddenly, feeling as though he were
flinging himself down from a steeple.

"N-no..." whispered Sonia.

"Take a good look."

As soon as he had said this again, the same familiar sensation froze his
heart. He looked at her and all at once seemed to see in her face the
face of Lizaveta. He remembered clearly the expression in Lizaveta's
face, when he approached her with the axe and she stepped back to the
wall, putting out her hand, with childish terror in her face, looking
as little children do when they begin to be frightened of something,
looking intently and uneasily at what frightens them, shrinking back and
holding out their little hands on the point of crying. Almost the same
thing happened now to Sonia. With the same helplessness and the same
terror, she looked at him for a while and, suddenly putting out her left
hand, pressed her fingers faintly against his breast and slowly began to
get up from the bed, moving further from him and keeping her eyes fixed
even more immovably on him. Her terror infected him. The same fear
showed itself on his face. In the same way he stared at her and almost
with the same _childish_ smile.

"Have you guessed?" he whispered at last.

"Good God!" broke in an awful wail from her bosom.

She sank helplessly on the bed with her face in the pillows, but a
moment later she got up, moved quickly to him, seized both his hands
and, gripping them tight in her thin fingers, began looking into his
face again with the same intent stare. In this last desperate look she
tried to look into him and catch some last hope. But there was no hope;
there was no doubt remaining; it was all true! Later on, indeed, when
she recalled that moment, she thought it strange and wondered why she
had seen at once that there was no doubt. She could not have said, for
instance, that she had foreseen something of the sort--and yet now, as
soon as he told her, she suddenly fancied that she had really foreseen
this very thing.

"Stop, Sonia, enough! don't torture me," he begged her miserably.

It was not at all, not at all like this he had thought of telling her,
but this is how it happened.

She jumped up, seeming not to know what she was doing, and, wringing her
hands, walked into the middle of the room; but quickly went back and sat
down again beside him, her shoulder almost touching his. All of a sudden
she started as though she had been stabbed, uttered a cry and fell on
her knees before him, she did not know why.

"What have you done--what have you done to yourself?" she said in
despair, and, jumping up, she flung herself on his neck, threw her arms
round him, and held him tightly.

Raskolnikov drew back and looked at her with a mournful smile.

"You are a strange girl, Sonia--you kiss me and hug me when I tell you
about that.... You don't think what you are doing."

"There is no one--no one in the whole world now so unhappy as you!" she
cried in a frenzy, not hearing what he said, and she suddenly broke into
violent hysterical weeping.

A feeling long unfamiliar to him flooded his heart and softened it at
once. He did not struggle against it. Two tears started into his eyes
and hung on his eyelashes.

"Then you won't leave me, Sonia?" he said, looking at her almost with
hope.

"No, no, never, nowhere!" cried Sonia. "I will follow you, I will follow
you everywhere. Oh, my God! Oh, how miserable I am!... Why, why didn't I
know you before! Why didn't you come before? Oh, dear!"

"Here I have come."

"Yes, now! What's to be done now?... Together, together!" she repeated
as it were unconsciously, and she hugged him again. "I'll follow you to
Siberia!"

He recoiled at this, and the same hostile, almost haughty smile came to
his lips.

"Perhaps I don't want to go to Siberia yet, Sonia," he said.

Sonia looked at him quickly.

Again after her first passionate, agonising sympathy for the unhappy man
the terrible idea of the murder overwhelmed her. In his changed tone she
seemed to hear the murderer speaking. She looked at him bewildered. She
knew nothing as yet, why, how, with what object it had been. Now all
these questions rushed at once into her mind. And again she could not
believe it: "He, he is a murderer! Could it be true?"

"What's the meaning of it? Where am I?" she said in complete
bewilderment, as though still unable to recover herself. "How could you,
you, a man like you.... How could you bring yourself to it?... What does
it mean?"

"Oh, well--to plunder. Leave off, Sonia," he answered wearily, almost
with vexation.

Sonia stood as though struck dumb, but suddenly she cried:

"You were hungry! It was... to help your mother? Yes?"

"No, Sonia, no," he muttered, turning away and hanging his head. "I was
not so hungry.... I certainly did want to help my mother, but... that's
not the real thing either.... Don't torture me, Sonia."

Sonia clasped her hands.

"Could it, could it all be true? Good God, what a truth! Who could
believe it? And how could you give away your last farthing and yet
rob and murder! Ah," she cried suddenly, "that money you gave Katerina
Ivanovna... that money.... Can that money..."

"No, Sonia," he broke in hurriedly, "that money was not it. Don't worry
yourself! That money my mother sent me and it came when I was ill, the
day I gave it to you.... Razumihin saw it... he received it for me....
That money was mine--my own."

Sonia listened to him in bewilderment and did her utmost to comprehend.

"And _that_ money.... I don't even know really whether there was any
money," he added softly, as though reflecting. "I took a purse off her
neck, made of chamois leather... a purse stuffed full of something...
but I didn't look in it; I suppose I hadn't time.... And the
things--chains and trinkets--I buried under a stone with the purse next
morning in a yard off the V---- Prospect. They are all there now...."

Sonia strained every nerve to listen.

"Then why... why, you said you did it to rob, but you took nothing?" she
asked quickly, catching at a straw.

"I don't know.... I haven't yet decided whether to take that money or
not," he said, musing again; and, seeming to wake up with a start, he
gave a brief ironical smile. "Ach, what silly stuff I am talking, eh?"

The thought flashed through Sonia's mind, wasn't he mad? But she
dismissed it at once. "No, it was something else." She could make
nothing of it, nothing.

"Do you know, Sonia," he said suddenly with conviction, "let me tell
you: if I'd simply killed because I was hungry," laying stress on
every word and looking enigmatically but sincerely at her, "I should
be _happy_ now. You must believe that! What would it matter to you," he
cried a moment later with a sort of despair, "what would it matter to
you if I were to confess that I did wrong? What do you gain by such
a stupid triumph over me? Ah, Sonia, was it for that I've come to you
to-day?"

Again Sonia tried to say something, but did not speak.

"I asked you to go with me yesterday because you are all I have left."

"Go where?" asked Sonia timidly.

"Not to steal and not to murder, don't be anxious," he smiled bitterly.
"We are so different.... And you know, Sonia, it's only now, only this
moment that I understand _where_ I asked you to go with me yesterday!
Yesterday when I said it I did not know where. I asked you for one
thing, I came to you for one thing--not to leave me. You won't leave me,
Sonia?"

She squeezed his hand.

"And why, why did I tell her? Why did I let her know?" he cried a minute
later in despair, looking with infinite anguish at her. "Here you expect
an explanation from me, Sonia; you are sitting and waiting for it, I see
that. But what can I tell you? You won't understand and will only suffer
misery... on my account! Well, you are crying and embracing me again.
Why do you do it? Because I couldn't bear my burden and have come to
throw it on another: you suffer too, and I shall feel better! And can
you love such a mean wretch?"

"But aren't you suffering, too?" cried Sonia.

Again a wave of the same feeling surged into his heart, and again for an
instant softened it.

"Sonia, I have a bad heart, take note of that. It may explain a great
deal. I have come because I am bad. There are men who wouldn't have
come. But I am a coward and... a mean wretch. But... never mind! That's
not the point. I must speak now, but I don't know how to begin."

He paused and sank into thought.

"Ach, we are so different," he cried again, "we are not alike. And why,
why did I come? I shall never forgive myself that."

"No, no, it was a good thing you came," cried Sonia. "It's better I
should know, far better!"

He looked at her with anguish.

"What if it were really that?" he said, as though reaching a conclusion.
"Yes, that's what it was! I wanted to become a Napoleon, that is why I
killed her.... Do you understand now?"

"N-no," Sonia whispered naïvely and timidly. "Only speak, speak, I shall
understand, I shall understand _in myself_!" she kept begging him.

"You'll understand? Very well, we shall see!" He paused and was for some
time lost in meditation.

"It was like this: I asked myself one day this question--what if
Napoleon, for instance, had happened to be in my place, and if he had
not had Toulon nor Egypt nor the passage of Mont Blanc to begin his
career with, but instead of all those picturesque and monumental things,
there had simply been some ridiculous old hag, a pawnbroker, who had
to be murdered too to get money from her trunk (for his career, you
understand). Well, would he have brought himself to that if there had
been no other means? Wouldn't he have felt a pang at its being so far
from monumental and... and sinful, too? Well, I must tell you that I
worried myself fearfully over that 'question' so that I was awfully
ashamed when I guessed at last (all of a sudden, somehow) that it would
not have given him the least pang, that it would not even have struck
him that it was not monumental... that he would not have seen that there
was anything in it to pause over, and that, if he had had no other way,
he would have strangled her in a minute without thinking about it!
Well, I too... left off thinking about it... murdered her, following
his example. And that's exactly how it was! Do you think it funny? Yes,
Sonia, the funniest thing of all is that perhaps that's just how it
was."

Sonia did not think it at all funny.

"You had better tell me straight out... without examples," she begged,
still more timidly and scarcely audibly.

He turned to her, looked sadly at her and took her hands.

"You are right again, Sonia. Of course that's all nonsense, it's almost
all talk! You see, you know of course that my mother has scarcely
anything, my sister happened to have a good education and was condemned
to drudge as a governess. All their hopes were centered on me. I was a
student, but I couldn't keep myself at the university and was forced
for a time to leave it. Even if I had lingered on like that, in ten
or twelve years I might (with luck) hope to be some sort of teacher or
clerk with a salary of a thousand roubles" (he repeated it as though it
were a lesson) "and by that time my mother would be worn out with grief
and anxiety and I could not succeed in keeping her in comfort while my
sister... well, my sister might well have fared worse! And it's a hard
thing to pass everything by all one's life, to turn one's back upon
everything, to forget one's mother and decorously accept the insults
inflicted on one's sister. Why should one? When one has buried them to
burden oneself with others--wife and children--and to leave them again
without a farthing? So I resolved to gain possession of the old woman's
money and to use it for my first years without worrying my mother,
to keep myself at the university and for a little while after leaving
it--and to do this all on a broad, thorough scale, so as to build up
a completely new career and enter upon a new life of independence....
Well... that's all.... Well, of course in killing the old woman I did
wrong.... Well, that's enough."

He struggled to the end of his speech in exhaustion and let his head
sink.

"Oh, that's not it, that's not it," Sonia cried in distress. "How could
one... no, that's not right, not right."

"You see yourself that it's not right. But I've spoken truly, it's the
truth."

"As though that could be the truth! Good God!"

"I've only killed a louse, Sonia, a useless, loathsome, harmful
creature."

"A human being--a louse!"

"I too know it wasn't a louse," he answered, looking strangely at
her. "But I am talking nonsense, Sonia," he added. "I've been talking
nonsense a long time.... That's not it, you are right there. There were
quite, quite other causes for it! I haven't talked to anyone for so
long, Sonia.... My head aches dreadfully now."

His eyes shone with feverish brilliance. He was almost delirious; an
uneasy smile strayed on his lips. His terrible exhaustion could be seen
through his excitement. Sonia saw how he was suffering. She too
was growing dizzy. And he talked so strangely; it seemed somehow
comprehensible, but yet... "But how, how! Good God!" And she wrung her
hands in despair.

"No, Sonia, that's not it," he began again suddenly, raising his head,
as though a new and sudden train of thought had struck and as it were
roused him--"that's not it! Better... imagine--yes, it's certainly
better--imagine that I am vain, envious, malicious, base, vindictive
and... well, perhaps with a tendency to insanity. (Let's have it all out
at once! They've talked of madness already, I noticed.) I told you just
now I could not keep myself at the university. But do you know that
perhaps I might have done? My mother would have sent me what I needed
for the fees and I could have earned enough for clothes, boots and food,
no doubt. Lessons had turned up at half a rouble. Razumihin works! But I
turned sulky and wouldn't. (Yes, sulkiness, that's the right word for
it!) I sat in my room like a spider. You've been in my den, you've seen
it.... And do you know, Sonia, that low ceilings and tiny rooms cramp
the soul and the mind? Ah, how I hated that garret! And yet I wouldn't
go out of it! I wouldn't on purpose! I didn't go out for days together,
and I wouldn't work, I wouldn't even eat, I just lay there doing
nothing. If Nastasya brought me anything, I ate it, if she didn't, I
went all day without; I wouldn't ask, on purpose, from sulkiness! At
night I had no light, I lay in the dark and I wouldn't earn money for
candles. I ought to have studied, but I sold my books; and the dust lies
an inch thick on the notebooks on my table. I preferred lying still and
thinking. And I kept thinking.... And I had dreams all the time, strange
dreams of all sorts, no need to describe! Only then I began to fancy
that... No, that's not it! Again I am telling you wrong! You see I kept
asking myself then: why am I so stupid that if others are stupid--and I
know they are--yet I won't be wiser? Then I saw, Sonia, that if one
waits for everyone to get wiser it will take too long.... Afterwards I
understood that that would never come to pass, that men won't change and
that nobody can alter it and that it's not worth wasting effort over it.
Yes, that's so. That's the law of their nature, Sonia,... that's so!...
And I know now, Sonia, that whoever is strong in mind and spirit will
have power over them. Anyone who is greatly daring is right in their
eyes. He who despises most things will be a lawgiver among them and he
who dares most of all will be most in the right! So it has been till now
and so it will always be. A man must be blind not to see it!"

Though Raskolnikov looked at Sonia as he said this, he no longer cared
whether she understood or not. The fever had complete hold of him; he
was in a sort of gloomy ecstasy (he certainly had been too long without
talking to anyone). Sonia felt that his gloomy creed had become his
faith and code.

"I divined then, Sonia," he went on eagerly, "that power is only
vouchsafed to the man who dares to stoop and pick it up. There is only
one thing, one thing needful: one has only to dare! Then for the first
time in my life an idea took shape in my mind which no one had ever
thought of before me, no one! I saw clear as daylight how strange it is
that not a single person living in this mad world has had the daring to
go straight for it all and send it flying to the devil! I... I wanted
_to have the daring_... and I killed her. I only wanted to have the
daring, Sonia! That was the whole cause of it!"

"Oh hush, hush," cried Sonia, clasping her hands. "You turned away from
God and God has smitten you, has given you over to the devil!"

"Then Sonia, when I used to lie there in the dark and all this became
clear to me, was it a temptation of the devil, eh?"

"Hush, don't laugh, blasphemer! You don't understand, you don't
understand! Oh God! He won't understand!"

"Hush, Sonia! I am not laughing. I know myself that it was the devil
leading me. Hush, Sonia, hush!" he repeated with gloomy insistence. "I
know it all, I have thought it all over and over and whispered it all
over to myself, lying there in the dark.... I've argued it all over with
myself, every point of it, and I know it all, all! And how sick, how
sick I was then of going over it all! I have kept wanting to forget it
and make a new beginning, Sonia, and leave off thinking. And you don't
suppose that I went into it headlong like a fool? I went into it like a
wise man, and that was just my destruction. And you mustn't suppose that
I didn't know, for instance, that if I began to question myself whether
I had the right to gain power--I certainly hadn't the right--or that if
I asked myself whether a human being is a louse it proved that it wasn't
so for me, though it might be for a man who would go straight to his
goal without asking questions.... If I worried myself all those days,
wondering whether Napoleon would have done it or not, I felt clearly
of course that I wasn't Napoleon. I had to endure all the agony of that
battle of ideas, Sonia, and I longed to throw it off: I wanted to murder
without casuistry, to murder for my own sake, for myself alone! I didn't
want to lie about it even to myself. It wasn't to help my mother I did
the murder--that's nonsense--I didn't do the murder to gain wealth and
power and to become a benefactor of mankind. Nonsense! I simply did it;
I did the murder for myself, for myself alone, and whether I became a
benefactor to others, or spent my life like a spider catching men in
my web and sucking the life out of men, I couldn't have cared at that
moment.... And it was not the money I wanted, Sonia, when I did it. It
was not so much the money I wanted, but something else.... I know it all
now.... Understand me! Perhaps I should never have committed a murder
again. I wanted to find out something else; it was something else led
me on. I wanted to find out then and quickly whether I was a louse
like everybody else or a man. Whether I can step over barriers or
not, whether I dare stoop to pick up or not, whether I am a trembling
creature or whether I have the _right_..."

"To kill? Have the right to kill?" Sonia clasped her hands.

"Ach, Sonia!" he cried irritably and seemed about to make some retort,
but was contemptuously silent. "Don't interrupt me, Sonia. I want to
prove one thing only, that the devil led me on then and he has shown me
since that I had not the right to take that path, because I am just such
a louse as all the rest. He was mocking me and here I've come to you
now! Welcome your guest! If I were not a louse, should I have come to
you? Listen: when I went then to the old woman's I only went to
_try_.... You may be sure of that!"

"And you murdered her!"

"But how did I murder her? Is that how men do murders? Do men go to
commit a murder as I went then? I will tell you some day how I went!
Did I murder the old woman? I murdered myself, not her! I crushed myself
once for all, for ever.... But it was the devil that killed that old
woman, not I. Enough, enough, Sonia, enough! Let me be!" he cried in a
sudden spasm of agony, "let me be!"

He leaned his elbows on his knees and squeezed his head in his hands as
in a vise.

"What suffering!" A wail of anguish broke from Sonia.

"Well, what am I to do now?" he asked, suddenly raising his head and
looking at her with a face hideously distorted by despair.

"What are you to do?" she cried, jumping up, and her eyes that had been
full of tears suddenly began to shine. "Stand up!" (She seized him by
the shoulder, he got up, looking at her almost bewildered.) "Go at once,
this very minute, stand at the cross-roads, bow down, first kiss the
earth which you have defiled and then bow down to all the world and say
to all men aloud, 'I am a murderer!' Then God will send you life again.
Will you go, will you go?" she asked him, trembling all over, snatching
his two hands, squeezing them tight in hers and gazing at him with eyes
full of fire.

He was amazed at her sudden ecstasy.

"You mean Siberia, Sonia? I must give myself up?" he asked gloomily.

"Suffer and expiate your sin by it, that's what you must do."

"No! I am not going to them, Sonia!"

"But how will you go on living? What will you live for?" cried Sonia,
"how is it possible now? Why, how can you talk to your mother? (Oh, what
will become of them now?) But what am I saying? You have abandoned your
mother and your sister already. He has abandoned them already! Oh,
God!" she cried, "why, he knows it all himself. How, how can he live by
himself! What will become of you now?"

"Don't be a child, Sonia," he said softly. "What wrong have I done
them? Why should I go to them? What should I say to them? That's only a
phantom.... They destroy men by millions themselves and look on it as a
virtue. They are knaves and scoundrels, Sonia! I am not going to them.
And what should I say to them--that I murdered her, but did not dare to
take the money and hid it under a stone?" he added with a bitter smile.
"Why, they would laugh at me, and would call me a fool for not getting
it. A coward and a fool! They wouldn't understand and they don't deserve
to understand. Why should I go to them? I won't. Don't be a child,
Sonia...."

"It will be too much for you to bear, too much!" she repeated, holding
out her hands in despairing supplication.

"Perhaps I've been unfair to myself," he observed gloomily, pondering,
"perhaps after all I am a man and not a louse and I've been in too great
a hurry to condemn myself. I'll make another fight for it."

A haughty smile appeared on his lips.

"What a burden to bear! And your whole life, your whole life!"

"I shall get used to it," he said grimly and thoughtfully. "Listen," he
began a minute later, "stop crying, it's time to talk of the facts: I've
come to tell you that the police are after me, on my track...."

"Ach!" Sonia cried in terror.

"Well, why do you cry out? You want me to go to Siberia and now you are
frightened? But let me tell you: I shall not give myself up. I shall
make a struggle for it and they won't do anything to me. They've no real
evidence. Yesterday I was in great danger and believed I was lost; but
to-day things are going better. All the facts they know can be explained
two ways, that's to say I can turn their accusations to my credit, do
you understand? And I shall, for I've learnt my lesson. But they will
certainly arrest me. If it had not been for something that happened,
they would have done so to-day for certain; perhaps even now they will
arrest me to-day.... But that's no matter, Sonia; they'll let me out
again... for there isn't any real proof against me, and there won't be,
I give you my word for it. And they can't convict a man on what they
have against me. Enough.... I only tell you that you may know.... I will
try to manage somehow to put it to my mother and sister so that they
won't be frightened.... My sister's future is secure, however, now, I
believe... and my mother's must be too.... Well, that's all. Be careful,
though. Will you come and see me in prison when I am there?"

"Oh, I will, I will."

They sat side by side, both mournful and dejected, as though they had
been cast up by the tempest alone on some deserted shore. He looked at
Sonia and felt how great was her love for him, and strange to say he
felt it suddenly burdensome and painful to be so loved. Yes, it was a
strange and awful sensation! On his way to see Sonia he had felt that
all his hopes rested on her; he expected to be rid of at least part
of his suffering, and now, when all her heart turned towards him, he
suddenly felt that he was immeasurably unhappier than before.

"Sonia," he said, "you'd better not come and see me when I am in
prison."

Sonia did not answer, she was crying. Several minutes passed.

"Have you a cross on you?" she asked, as though suddenly thinking of it.

He did not at first understand the question.

"No, of course not. Here, take this one, of cypress wood. I have
another, a copper one that belonged to Lizaveta. I changed with
Lizaveta: she gave me her cross and I gave her my little ikon. I will
wear Lizaveta's now and give you this. Take it... it's mine! It's mine,
you know," she begged him. "We will go to suffer together, and together
we will bear our cross!"

"Give it me," said Raskolnikov.

He did not want to hurt her feelings. But immediately he drew back the
hand he held out for the cross.

"Not now, Sonia. Better later," he added to comfort her.

"Yes, yes, better," she repeated with conviction, "when you go to meet
your suffering, then put it on. You will come to me, I'll put it on you,
we will pray and go together."

At that moment someone knocked three times at the door.

"Sofya Semyonovna, may I come in?" they heard in a very familiar and
polite voice.

Sonia rushed to the door in a fright. The flaxen head of Mr.
Lebeziatnikov appeared at the door.



CHAPTER V

Lebeziatnikov looked perturbed.

"I've come to you, Sofya Semyonovna," he began. "Excuse me... I thought
I should find you," he said, addressing Raskolnikov suddenly, "that is,
I didn't mean anything... of that sort... But I just thought... Katerina
Ivanovna has gone out of her mind," he blurted out suddenly, turning
from Raskolnikov to Sonia.

Sonia screamed.

"At least it seems so. But... we don't know what to do, you see! She
came back--she seems to have been turned out somewhere, perhaps
beaten.... So it seems at least,... She had run to your father's former
chief, she didn't find him at home: he was dining at some other
general's.... Only fancy, she rushed off there, to the other general's,
and, imagine, she was so persistent that she managed to get the chief to
see her, had him fetched out from dinner, it seems. You can imagine what
happened. She was turned out, of course; but, according to her own
story, she abused him and threw something at him. One may well believe
it.... How it is she wasn't taken up, I can't understand! Now she is
telling everyone, including Amalia Ivanovna; but it's difficult to
understand her, she is screaming and flinging herself about.... Oh yes,
she shouts that since everyone has abandoned her, she will take the
children and go into the street with a barrel-organ, and the children
will sing and dance, and she too, and collect money, and will go every
day under the general's window... 'to let everyone see well-born
children, whose father was an official, begging in the street.' She
keeps beating the children and they are all crying. She is teaching Lida
to sing 'My Village,' the boy to dance, Polenka the same. She is tearing
up all the clothes, and making them little caps like actors; she means
to carry a tin basin and make it tinkle, instead of music.... She won't
listen to anything.... Imagine the state of things! It's beyond
anything!"

Lebeziatnikov would have gone on, but Sonia, who had heard him almost
breathless, snatched up her cloak and hat, and ran out of the room,
putting on her things as she went. Raskolnikov followed her and
Lebeziatnikov came after him.

"She has certainly gone mad!" he said to Raskolnikov, as they went out
into the street. "I didn't want to frighten Sofya Semyonovna, so I said
'it seemed like it,' but there isn't a doubt of it. They say that in
consumption the tubercles sometimes occur in the brain; it's a pity I
know nothing of medicine. I did try to persuade her, but she wouldn't
listen."

"Did you talk to her about the tubercles?"

"Not precisely of the tubercles. Besides, she wouldn't have understood!
But what I say is, that if you convince a person logically that he
has nothing to cry about, he'll stop crying. That's clear. Is it your
conviction that he won't?"

"Life would be too easy if it were so," answered Raskolnikov.

"Excuse me, excuse me; of course it would be rather difficult for
Katerina Ivanovna to understand, but do you know that in Paris they have
been conducting serious experiments as to the possibility of curing the
insane, simply by logical argument? One professor there, a scientific
man of standing, lately dead, believed in the possibility of such
treatment. His idea was that there's nothing really wrong with the
physical organism of the insane, and that insanity is, so to say, a
logical mistake, an error of judgment, an incorrect view of things. He
gradually showed the madman his error and, would you believe it, they
say he was successful? But as he made use of douches too, how far
success was due to that treatment remains uncertain.... So it seems at
least."

Raskolnikov had long ceased to listen. Reaching the house where he
lived, he nodded to Lebeziatnikov and went in at the gate. Lebeziatnikov
woke up with a start, looked about him and hurried on.

Raskolnikov went into his little room and stood still in the middle
of it. Why had he come back here? He looked at the yellow and tattered
paper, at the dust, at his sofa.... From the yard came a loud continuous
knocking; someone seemed to be hammering... He went to the window, rose
on tiptoe and looked out into the yard for a long time with an air of
absorbed attention. But the yard was empty and he could not see who was
hammering. In the house on the left he saw some open windows; on the
window-sills were pots of sickly-looking geraniums. Linen was hung out
of the windows... He knew it all by heart. He turned away and sat down
on the sofa.

Never, never had he felt himself so fearfully alone!

Yes, he felt once more that he would perhaps come to hate Sonia, now
that he had made her more miserable.

"Why had he gone to her to beg for her tears? What need had he to poison
her life? Oh, the meanness of it!"

"I will remain alone," he said resolutely, "and she shall not come to
the prison!"

Five minutes later he raised his head with a strange smile. That was a
strange thought.

"Perhaps it really would be better in Siberia," he thought suddenly.

He could not have said how long he sat there with vague thoughts surging
through his mind. All at once the door opened and Dounia came in. At
first she stood still and looked at him from the doorway, just as he
had done at Sonia; then she came in and sat down in the same place
as yesterday, on the chair facing him. He looked silently and almost
vacantly at her.

"Don't be angry, brother; I've only come for one minute," said Dounia.

Her face looked thoughtful but not stern. Her eyes were bright and soft.
He saw that she too had come to him with love.

"Brother, now I know all, _all_. Dmitri Prokofitch has explained and
told me everything. They are worrying and persecuting you through a
stupid and contemptible suspicion.... Dmitri Prokofitch told me that
there is no danger, and that you are wrong in looking upon it with such
horror. I don't think so, and I fully understand how indignant you must
be, and that that indignation may have a permanent effect on you. That's
what I am afraid of. As for your cutting yourself off from us, I don't
judge you, I don't venture to judge you, and forgive me for having
blamed you for it. I feel that I too, if I had so great a trouble,
should keep away from everyone. I shall tell mother nothing _of this_,
but I shall talk about you continually and shall tell her from you that
you will come very soon. Don't worry about her; _I_ will set her mind at
rest; but don't you try her too much--come once at least; remember that
she is your mother. And now I have come simply to say" (Dounia began
to get up) "that if you should need me or should need... all my life or
anything... call me, and I'll come. Good-bye!"

She turned abruptly and went towards the door.

"Dounia!" Raskolnikov stopped her and went towards her. "That Razumihin,
Dmitri Prokofitch, is a very good fellow."

Dounia flushed slightly.

"Well?" she asked, waiting a moment.

"He is competent, hardworking, honest and capable of real love....
Good-bye, Dounia."

Dounia flushed crimson, then suddenly she took alarm.

"But what does it mean, brother? Are we really parting for ever that
you... give me such a parting message?"

"Never mind.... Good-bye."

He turned away, and walked to the window. She stood a moment, looked at
him uneasily, and went out troubled.

No, he was not cold to her. There was an instant (the very last one)
when he had longed to take her in his arms and _say good-bye_ to her,
and even _to tell_ her, but he had not dared even to touch her hand.

"Afterwards she may shudder when she remembers that I embraced her, and
will feel that I stole her kiss."

"And would _she_ stand that test?" he went on a few minutes later to
himself. "No, she wouldn't; girls like that can't stand things! They
never do."

And he thought of Sonia.

There was a breath of fresh air from the window. The daylight was
fading. He took up his cap and went out.

He could not, of course, and would not consider how ill he was. But all
this continual anxiety and agony of mind could not but affect him. And
if he were not lying in high fever it was perhaps just because this
continual inner strain helped to keep him on his legs and in possession
of his faculties. But this artificial excitement could not last long.

He wandered aimlessly. The sun was setting. A special form of misery had
begun to oppress him of late. There was nothing poignant, nothing acute
about it; but there was a feeling of permanence, of eternity about it;
it brought a foretaste of hopeless years of this cold leaden misery, a
foretaste of an eternity "on a square yard of space." Towards evening
this sensation usually began to weigh on him more heavily.

"With this idiotic, purely physical weakness, depending on the sunset or
something, one can't help doing something stupid! You'll go to Dounia,
as well as to Sonia," he muttered bitterly.

He heard his name called. He looked round. Lebeziatnikov rushed up to
him.

"Only fancy, I've been to your room looking for you. Only fancy, she's
carried out her plan, and taken away the children. Sofya Semyonovna and
I have had a job to find them. She is rapping on a frying-pan and making
the children dance. The children are crying. They keep stopping at the
cross-roads and in front of shops; there's a crowd of fools running
after them. Come along!"

"And Sonia?" Raskolnikov asked anxiously, hurrying after Lebeziatnikov.

"Simply frantic. That is, it's not Sofya Semyonovna's frantic, but
Katerina Ivanovna, though Sofya Semyonova's frantic too. But Katerina
Ivanovna is absolutely frantic. I tell you she is quite mad. They'll be
taken to the police. You can fancy what an effect that will have....
They are on the canal bank, near the bridge now, not far from Sofya
Semyonovna's, quite close."

On the canal bank near the bridge and not two houses away from the one
where Sonia lodged, there was a crowd of people, consisting principally
of gutter children. The hoarse broken voice of Katerina Ivanovna could
be heard from the bridge, and it certainly was a strange spectacle
likely to attract a street crowd. Katerina Ivanovna in her old dress
with the green shawl, wearing a torn straw hat, crushed in a hideous way
on one side, was really frantic. She was exhausted and breathless. Her
wasted consumptive face looked more suffering than ever, and indeed out
of doors in the sunshine a consumptive always looks worse than at home.
But her excitement did not flag, and every moment her irritation grew
more intense. She rushed at the children, shouted at them, coaxed
them, told them before the crowd how to dance and what to sing, began
explaining to them why it was necessary, and driven to desperation by
their not understanding, beat them.... Then she would make a rush at the
crowd; if she noticed any decently dressed person stopping to look, she
immediately appealed to him to see what these children "from a genteel,
one may say aristocratic, house" had been brought to. If she heard
laughter or jeering in the crowd, she would rush at once at the scoffers
and begin squabbling with them. Some people laughed, others shook their
heads, but everyone felt curious at the sight of the madwoman with the
frightened children. The frying-pan of which Lebeziatnikov had spoken
was not there, at least Raskolnikov did not see it. But instead of
rapping on the pan, Katerina Ivanovna began clapping her wasted hands,
when she made Lida and Kolya dance and Polenka sing. She too joined in
the singing, but broke down at the second note with a fearful cough,
which made her curse in despair and even shed tears. What made her most
furious was the weeping and terror of Kolya and Lida. Some effort had
been made to dress the children up as street singers are dressed. The
boy had on a turban made of something red and white to look like a Turk.
There had been no costume for Lida; she simply had a red knitted cap,
or rather a night cap that had belonged to Marmeladov, decorated with
a broken piece of white ostrich feather, which had been Katerina
Ivanovna's grandmother's and had been preserved as a family possession.
Polenka was in her everyday dress; she looked in timid perplexity at her
mother, and kept at her side, hiding her tears. She dimly realised her
mother's condition, and looked uneasily about her. She was terribly
frightened of the street and the crowd. Sonia followed Katerina
Ivanovna, weeping and beseeching her to return home, but Katerina
Ivanovna was not to be persuaded.

"Leave off, Sonia, leave off," she shouted, speaking fast, panting and
coughing. "You don't know what you ask; you are like a child! I've
told you before that I am not coming back to that drunken German. Let
everyone, let all Petersburg see the children begging in the streets,
though their father was an honourable man who served all his life in
truth and fidelity, and one may say died in the service." (Katerina
Ivanovna had by now invented this fantastic story and thoroughly
believed it.) "Let that wretch of a general see it! And you are silly,
Sonia: what have we to eat? Tell me that. We have worried you enough, I
won't go on so! Ah, Rodion Romanovitch, is that you?" she cried, seeing
Raskolnikov and rushing up to him. "Explain to this silly girl, please,
that nothing better could be done! Even organ-grinders earn their
living, and everyone will see at once that we are different, that we are
an honourable and bereaved family reduced to beggary. And that general
will lose his post, you'll see! We shall perform under his windows every
day, and if the Tsar drives by, I'll fall on my knees, put the children
before me, show them to him, and say 'Defend us father.' He is the
father of the fatherless, he is merciful, he'll protect us, you'll
see, and that wretch of a general.... Lida, _tenez vous droite_! Kolya,
you'll dance again. Why are you whimpering? Whimpering again! What
are you afraid of, stupid? Goodness, what am I to do with them, Rodion
Romanovitch? If you only knew how stupid they are! What's one to do with
such children?"

And she, almost crying herself--which did not stop her uninterrupted,
rapid flow of talk--pointed to the crying children. Raskolnikov tried
to persuade her to go home, and even said, hoping to work on her vanity,
that it was unseemly for her to be wandering about the streets like
an organ-grinder, as she was intending to become the principal of a
boarding-school.

"A boarding-school, ha-ha-ha! A castle in the air," cried Katerina
Ivanovna, her laugh ending in a cough. "No, Rodion Romanovitch, that
dream is over! All have forsaken us!... And that general.... You know,
Rodion Romanovitch, I threw an inkpot at him--it happened to be standing
in the waiting-room by the paper where you sign your name. I wrote my
name, threw it at him and ran away. Oh, the scoundrels, the scoundrels!
But enough of them, now I'll provide for the children myself, I won't
bow down to anybody! She has had to bear enough for us!" she pointed
to Sonia. "Polenka, how much have you got? Show me! What, only two
farthings! Oh, the mean wretches! They give us nothing, only run after
us, putting their tongues out. There, what is that blockhead laughing
at?" (She pointed to a man in the crowd.) "It's all because Kolya here
is so stupid; I have such a bother with him. What do you want, Polenka?
Tell me in French, _parlez-moi français_. Why, I've taught you, you know
some phrases. Else how are you to show that you are of good family, well
brought-up children, and not at all like other organ-grinders? We aren't
going to have a Punch and Judy show in the street, but to sing a genteel
song.... Ah, yes,... What are we to sing? You keep putting me out,
but we... you see, we are standing here, Rodion Romanovitch, to find
something to sing and get money, something Kolya can dance to.... For,
as you can fancy, our performance is all impromptu.... We must talk it
over and rehearse it all thoroughly, and then we shall go to Nevsky,
where there are far more people of good society, and we shall be noticed
at once. Lida knows 'My Village' only, nothing but 'My Village,' and
everyone sings that. We must sing something far more genteel.... Well,
have you thought of anything, Polenka? If only you'd help your mother!
My memory's quite gone, or I should have thought of something. We really
can't sing 'An Hussar.' Ah, let us sing in French, 'Cinq sous,' I have
taught it you, I have taught it you. And as it is in French, people will
see at once that you are children of good family, and that will be much
more touching.... You might sing 'Marlborough s'en va-t-en guerre,'
for that's quite a child's song and is sung as a lullaby in all the
aristocratic houses.

"_Marlborough s'en va-t-en guerre Ne sait quand reviendra_..."
she began singing. "But no, better sing 'Cinq sous.' Now, Kolya, your
hands on your hips, make haste, and you, Lida, keep turning the other
way, and Polenka and I will sing and clap our hands!

"_Cinq sous, cinq sous Pour monter notre menage_."

(Cough-cough-cough!) "Set your dress straight, Polenka, it's slipped
down on your shoulders," she observed, panting from coughing. "Now it's
particularly necessary to behave nicely and genteelly, that all may
see that you are well-born children. I said at the time that the bodice
should be cut longer, and made of two widths. It was your fault, Sonia,
with your advice to make it shorter, and now you see the child is quite
deformed by it.... Why, you're all crying again! What's the matter,
stupids? Come, Kolya, begin. Make haste, make haste! Oh, what an
unbearable child!

"Cinq sous, cinq sous.

"A policeman again! What do you want?"

A policeman was indeed forcing his way through the crowd. But at that
moment a gentleman in civilian uniform and an overcoat--a solid-looking
official of about fifty with a decoration on his neck (which delighted
Katerina Ivanovna and had its effect on the policeman)--approached and
without a word handed her a green three-rouble note. His face wore
a look of genuine sympathy. Katerina Ivanovna took it and gave him a
polite, even ceremonious, bow.

"I thank you, honoured sir," she began loftily. "The causes that have
induced us (take the money, Polenka: you see there are generous and
honourable people who are ready to help a poor gentlewoman in distress).
You see, honoured sir, these orphans of good family--I might even say of
aristocratic connections--and that wretch of a general sat eating
grouse... and stamped at my disturbing him. 'Your excellency,' I said,
'protect the orphans, for you knew my late husband, Semyon Zaharovitch,
and on the very day of his death the basest of scoundrels slandered his
only daughter.'... That policeman again! Protect me," she cried to the
official. "Why is that policeman edging up to me? We have only just run
away from one of them. What do you want, fool?"

"It's forbidden in the streets. You mustn't make a disturbance."

"It's you're making a disturbance. It's just the same as if I were
grinding an organ. What business is it of yours?"

"You have to get a licence for an organ, and you haven't got one, and in
that way you collect a crowd. Where do you lodge?"

"What, a license?" wailed Katerina Ivanovna. "I buried my husband
to-day. What need of a license?"

"Calm yourself, madam, calm yourself," began the official. "Come along;
I will escort you.... This is no place for you in the crowd. You are
ill."

"Honoured sir, honoured sir, you don't know," screamed Katerina
Ivanovna. "We are going to the Nevsky.... Sonia, Sonia! Where is she?
She is crying too! What's the matter with you all? Kolya, Lida, where
are you going?" she cried suddenly in alarm. "Oh, silly children! Kolya,
Lida, where are they off to?..."

Kolya and Lida, scared out of their wits by the crowd, and their
mother's mad pranks, suddenly seized each other by the hand, and ran off
at the sight of the policeman who wanted to take them away somewhere.
Weeping and wailing, poor Katerina Ivanovna ran after them. She was
a piteous and unseemly spectacle, as she ran, weeping and panting for
breath. Sonia and Polenka rushed after them.

"Bring them back, bring them back, Sonia! Oh stupid, ungrateful
children!... Polenka! catch them.... It's for your sakes I..."

She stumbled as she ran and fell down.

"She's cut herself, she's bleeding! Oh, dear!" cried Sonia, bending over
her.

All ran up and crowded around. Raskolnikov and Lebeziatnikov were the
first at her side, the official too hastened up, and behind him the
policeman who muttered, "Bother!" with a gesture of impatience, feeling
that the job was going to be a troublesome one.

"Pass on! Pass on!" he said to the crowd that pressed forward.

"She's dying," someone shouted.

"She's gone out of her mind," said another.

"Lord have mercy upon us," said a woman, crossing herself. "Have they
caught the little girl and the boy? They're being brought back, the
elder one's got them.... Ah, the naughty imps!"

When they examined Katerina Ivanovna carefully, they saw that she had
not cut herself against a stone, as Sonia thought, but that the blood
that stained the pavement red was from her chest.

"I've seen that before," muttered the official to Raskolnikov and
Lebeziatnikov; "that's consumption; the blood flows and chokes the
patient. I saw the same thing with a relative of my own not long ago...
nearly a pint of blood, all in a minute.... What's to be done though?
She is dying."

"This way, this way, to my room!" Sonia implored. "I live here!... See,
that house, the second from here.... Come to me, make haste," she turned
from one to the other. "Send for the doctor! Oh, dear!"

Thanks to the official's efforts, this plan was adopted, the policeman
even helping to carry Katerina Ivanovna. She was carried to Sonia's
room, almost unconscious, and laid on the bed. The blood was still
flowing, but she seemed to be coming to herself. Raskolnikov,
Lebeziatnikov, and the official accompanied Sonia into the room and were
followed by the policeman, who first drove back the crowd which followed
to the very door. Polenka came in holding Kolya and Lida, who
were trembling and weeping. Several persons came in too from the
Kapernaumovs' room; the landlord, a lame one-eyed man of strange
appearance with whiskers and hair that stood up like a brush, his
wife, a woman with an everlastingly scared expression, and several
open-mouthed children with wonder-struck faces. Among these,
Svidrigaïlov suddenly made his appearance. Raskolnikov looked at him
with surprise, not understanding where he had come from and not having
noticed him in the crowd. A doctor and priest wore spoken of. The
official whispered to Raskolnikov that he thought it was too late now
for the doctor, but he ordered him to be sent for. Kapernaumov ran
himself.

Meanwhile Katerina Ivanovna had regained her breath. The bleeding ceased
for a time. She looked with sick but intent and penetrating eyes at
Sonia, who stood pale and trembling, wiping the sweat from her brow with
a handkerchief. At last she asked to be raised. They sat her up on the
bed, supporting her on both sides.

"Where are the children?" she said in a faint voice. "You've brought
them, Polenka? Oh the sillies! Why did you run away.... Och!"

Once more her parched lips were covered with blood. She moved her eyes,
looking about her.

"So that's how you live, Sonia! Never once have I been in your room."

She looked at her with a face of suffering.

"We have been your ruin, Sonia. Polenka, Lida, Kolya, come here! Well,
here they are, Sonia, take them all! I hand them over to you, I've had
enough! The ball is over." (Cough!) "Lay me down, let me die in peace."

They laid her back on the pillow.

"What, the priest? I don't want him. You haven't got a rouble to spare.
I have no sins. God must forgive me without that. He knows how I have
suffered.... And if He won't forgive me, I don't care!"

She sank more and more into uneasy delirium. At times she shuddered,
turned her eyes from side to side, recognised everyone for a minute,
but at once sank into delirium again. Her breathing was hoarse and
difficult, there was a sort of rattle in her throat.

"I said to him, your excellency," she ejaculated, gasping after each
word. "That Amalia Ludwigovna, ah! Lida, Kolya, hands on your hips,
make haste! _Glissez, glissez! pas de basque!_ Tap with your heels, be a
graceful child!

"_Du hast Diamanten und Perlen_

"What next? That's the thing to sing.

"_Du hast die schonsten Augen Madchen, was willst du mehr?_

"What an idea! _Was willst du mehr?_ What things the fool invents! Ah,
yes!

"In the heat of midday in the vale of Dagestan.

"Ah, how I loved it! I loved that song to distraction, Polenka! Your
father, you know, used to sing it when we were engaged.... Oh those
days! Oh that's the thing for us to sing! How does it go? I've
forgotten. Remind me! How was it?"

She was violently excited and tried to sit up. At last, in a horribly
hoarse, broken voice, she began, shrieking and gasping at every word,
with a look of growing terror.

"In the heat of midday!... in the vale!... of Dagestan!... With lead in
my breast!..."

"Your excellency!" she wailed suddenly with a heart-rending scream and
a flood of tears, "protect the orphans! You have been their father's
guest... one may say aristocratic...." She started, regaining
consciousness, and gazed at all with a sort of terror, but at once
recognised Sonia.

"Sonia, Sonia!" she articulated softly and caressingly, as though
surprised to find her there. "Sonia darling, are you here, too?"

They lifted her up again.

"Enough! It's over! Farewell, poor thing! I am done for! I am broken!"
she cried with vindictive despair, and her head fell heavily back on the
pillow.

She sank into unconsciousness again, but this time it did not last long.
Her pale, yellow, wasted face dropped back, her mouth fell open, her leg
moved convulsively, she gave a deep, deep sigh and died.

Sonia fell upon her, flung her arms about her, and remained motionless
with her head pressed to the dead woman's wasted bosom. Polenka threw
herself at her mother's feet, kissing them and weeping violently. Though
Kolya and Lida did not understand what had happened, they had a feeling
that it was something terrible; they put their hands on each other's
little shoulders, stared straight at one another and both at once opened
their mouths and began screaming. They were both still in their fancy
dress; one in a turban, the other in the cap with the ostrich feather.

And how did "the certificate of merit" come to be on the bed beside
Katerina Ivanovna? It lay there by the pillow; Raskolnikov saw it.

He walked away to the window. Lebeziatnikov skipped up to him.

"She is dead," he said.

"Rodion Romanovitch, I must have two words with you," said Svidrigaïlov,
coming up to them.

Lebeziatnikov at once made room for him and delicately withdrew.
Svidrigaïlov drew Raskolnikov further away.

"I will undertake all the arrangements, the funeral and that. You know
it's a question of money and, as I told you, I have plenty to spare. I
will put those two little ones and Polenka into some good orphan asylum,
and I will settle fifteen hundred roubles to be paid to each on coming
of age, so that Sofya Semyonovna need have no anxiety about them. And I
will pull her out of the mud too, for she is a good girl, isn't she? So
tell Avdotya Romanovna that that is how I am spending her ten thousand."

"What is your motive for such benevolence?" asked Raskolnikov.

"Ah! you sceptical person!" laughed Svidrigaïlov. "I told you I had no
need of that money. Won't you admit that it's simply done from humanity?
She wasn't 'a louse,' you know" (he pointed to the corner where the
dead woman lay), "was she, like some old pawnbroker woman? Come, you'll
agree, is Luzhin to go on living, and doing wicked things or is she to
die? And if I didn't help them, Polenka would go the same way."

He said this with an air of a sort of gay winking slyness, keeping his
eyes fixed on Raskolnikov, who turned white and cold, hearing his own
phrases, spoken to Sonia. He quickly stepped back and looked wildly at
Svidrigaïlov.

"How do you know?" he whispered, hardly able to breathe.

"Why, I lodge here at Madame Resslich's, the other side of the wall.
Here is Kapernaumov, and there lives Madame Resslich, an old and devoted
friend of mine. I am a neighbour."

"You?"

"Yes," continued Svidrigaïlov, shaking with laughter. "I assure you
on my honour, dear Rodion Romanovitch, that you have interested me
enormously. I told you we should become friends, I foretold it. Well,
here we have. And you will see what an accommodating person I am. You'll
see that you can get on with me!"




PART VI



CHAPTER I

A strange period began for Raskolnikov: it was as though a fog had
fallen upon him and wrapped him in a dreary solitude from which there
was no escape. Recalling that period long after, he believed that his
mind had been clouded at times, and that it had continued so, with
intervals, till the final catastrophe. He was convinced that he had been
mistaken about many things at that time, for instance as to the date
of certain events. Anyway, when he tried later on to piece his
recollections together, he learnt a great deal about himself from what
other people told him. He had mixed up incidents and had explained
events as due to circumstances which existed only in his imagination. At
times he was a prey to agonies of morbid uneasiness, amounting sometimes
to panic. But he remembered, too, moments, hours, perhaps whole days,
of complete apathy, which came upon him as a reaction from his previous
terror and might be compared with the abnormal insensibility, sometimes
seen in the dying. He seemed to be trying in that latter stage to escape
from a full and clear understanding of his position. Certain essential
facts which required immediate consideration were particularly irksome
to him. How glad he would have been to be free from some cares, the
neglect of which would have threatened him with complete, inevitable
ruin.

He was particularly worried about Svidrigaïlov, he might be said to be
permanently thinking of Svidrigaïlov. From the time of Svidrigaïlov's
too menacing and unmistakable words in Sonia's room at the moment of
Katerina Ivanovna's death, the normal working of his mind seemed to
break down. But although this new fact caused him extreme uneasiness,
Raskolnikov was in no hurry for an explanation of it. At times, finding
himself in a solitary and remote part of the town, in some wretched
eating-house, sitting alone lost in thought, hardly knowing how he had
come there, he suddenly thought of Svidrigaïlov. He recognised
suddenly, clearly, and with dismay that he ought at once to come to an
understanding with that man and to make what terms he could. Walking
outside the city gates one day, he positively fancied that they had
fixed a meeting there, that he was waiting for Svidrigaïlov. Another
time he woke up before daybreak lying on the ground under some bushes
and could not at first understand how he had come there.

But during the two or three days after Katerina Ivanovna's death, he
had two or three times met Svidrigaïlov at Sonia's lodging, where he
had gone aimlessly for a moment. They exchanged a few words and made no
reference to the vital subject, as though they were tacitly agreed not
to speak of it for a time.

Katerina Ivanovna's body was still lying in the coffin, Svidrigaïlov was
busy making arrangements for the funeral. Sonia too was very busy. At
their last meeting Svidrigaïlov informed Raskolnikov that he had made
an arrangement, and a very satisfactory one, for Katerina Ivanovna's
children; that he had, through certain connections, succeeded in getting
hold of certain personages by whose help the three orphans could be at
once placed in very suitable institutions; that the money he had settled
on them had been of great assistance, as it is much easier to place
orphans with some property than destitute ones. He said something
too about Sonia and promised to come himself in a day or two to see
Raskolnikov, mentioning that "he would like to consult with him, that
there were things they must talk over...."

This conversation took place in the passage on the stairs. Svidrigaïlov
looked intently at Raskolnikov and suddenly, after a brief pause,
dropping his voice, asked: "But how is it, Rodion Romanovitch; you
don't seem yourself? You look and you listen, but you don't seem to
understand. Cheer up! We'll talk things over; I am only sorry, I've
so much to do of my own business and other people's. Ah, Rodion
Romanovitch," he added suddenly, "what all men need is fresh air, fresh
air... more than anything!"

He moved to one side to make way for the priest and server, who
were coming up the stairs. They had come for the requiem service. By
Svidrigaïlov's orders it was sung twice a day punctually. Svidrigaïlov
went his way. Raskolnikov stood still a moment, thought, and followed
the priest into Sonia's room. He stood at the door. They began quietly,
slowly and mournfully singing the service. From his childhood the
thought of death and the presence of death had something oppressive
and mysteriously awful; and it was long since he had heard the requiem
service. And there was something else here as well, too awful and
disturbing. He looked at the children: they were all kneeling by the
coffin; Polenka was weeping. Behind them Sonia prayed, softly and, as it
were, timidly weeping.

"These last two days she hasn't said a word to me, she hasn't glanced at
me," Raskolnikov thought suddenly. The sunlight was bright in the room;
the incense rose in clouds; the priest read, "Give rest, oh Lord...."
Raskolnikov stayed all through the service. As he blessed them and
took his leave, the priest looked round strangely. After the service,
Raskolnikov went up to Sonia. She took both his hands and let her
head sink on his shoulder. This slight friendly gesture bewildered
Raskolnikov. It seemed strange to him that there was no trace of
repugnance, no trace of disgust, no tremor in her hand. It was the
furthest limit of self-abnegation, at least so he interpreted it.

Sonia said nothing. Raskolnikov pressed her hand and went out. He felt
very miserable. If it had been possible to escape to some solitude, he
would have thought himself lucky, even if he had to spend his whole life
there. But although he had almost always been by himself of late, he had
never been able to feel alone. Sometimes he walked out of the town on to
the high road, once he had even reached a little wood, but the lonelier
the place was, the more he seemed to be aware of an uneasy presence near
him. It did not frighten him, but greatly annoyed him, so that he
made haste to return to the town, to mingle with the crowd, to enter
restaurants and taverns, to walk in busy thoroughfares. There he felt
easier and even more solitary. One day at dusk he sat for an hour
listening to songs in a tavern and he remembered that he positively
enjoyed it. But at last he had suddenly felt the same uneasiness again,
as though his conscience smote him. "Here I sit listening to singing,
is that what I ought to be doing?" he thought. Yet he felt at once
that that was not the only cause of his uneasiness; there was something
requiring immediate decision, but it was something he could not clearly
understand or put into words. It was a hopeless tangle. "No, better the
struggle again! Better Porfiry again... or Svidrigaïlov.... Better some
challenge again... some attack. Yes, yes!" he thought. He went out of
the tavern and rushed away almost at a run. The thought of Dounia and
his mother suddenly reduced him almost to a panic. That night he woke
up before morning among some bushes in Krestovsky Island, trembling
all over with fever; he walked home, and it was early morning when he
arrived. After some hours' sleep the fever left him, but he woke up
late, two o'clock in the afternoon.

He remembered that Katerina Ivanovna's funeral had been fixed for that
day, and was glad that he was not present at it. Nastasya brought him
some food; he ate and drank with appetite, almost with greediness. His
head was fresher and he was calmer than he had been for the last three
days. He even felt a passing wonder at his previous attacks of panic.

The door opened and Razumihin came in.

"Ah, he's eating, then he's not ill," said Razumihin. He took a chair
and sat down at the table opposite Raskolnikov.

He was troubled and did not attempt to conceal it. He spoke with evident
annoyance, but without hurry or raising his voice. He looked as though
he had some special fixed determination.

"Listen," he began resolutely. "As far as I am concerned, you may all go
to hell, but from what I see, it's clear to me that I can't make head or
tail of it; please don't think I've come to ask you questions. I don't
want to know, hang it! If you begin telling me your secrets, I dare say
I shouldn't stay to listen, I should go away cursing. I have only come
to find out once for all whether it's a fact that you are mad? There is
a conviction in the air that you are mad or very nearly so. I admit
I've been disposed to that opinion myself, judging from your stupid,
repulsive and quite inexplicable actions, and from your recent behavior
to your mother and sister. Only a monster or a madman could treat them
as you have; so you must be mad."

"When did you see them last?"

"Just now. Haven't you seen them since then? What have you been doing
with yourself? Tell me, please. I've been to you three times already.
Your mother has been seriously ill since yesterday. She had made up
her mind to come to you; Avdotya Romanovna tried to prevent her; she
wouldn't hear a word. 'If he is ill, if his mind is giving way, who can
look after him like his mother?' she said. We all came here together, we
couldn't let her come alone all the way. We kept begging her to be calm.
We came in, you weren't here; she sat down, and stayed ten minutes,
while we stood waiting in silence. She got up and said: 'If he's
gone out, that is, if he is well, and has forgotten his mother, it's
humiliating and unseemly for his mother to stand at his door begging for
kindness.' She returned home and took to her bed; now she is in a fever.
'I see,' she said, 'that he has time for _his girl_.' She means by _your
girl_ Sofya Semyonovna, your betrothed or your mistress, I don't know. I
went at once to Sofya Semyonovna's, for I wanted to know what was going
on. I looked round, I saw the coffin, the children crying, and
Sofya Semyonovna trying them on mourning dresses. No sign of you. I
apologised, came away, and reported to Avdotya Romanovna. So that's all
nonsense and you haven't got a girl; the most likely thing is that you
are mad. But here you sit, guzzling boiled beef as though you'd not had
a bite for three days. Though as far as that goes, madmen eat too, but
though you have not said a word to me yet... you are not mad! That I'd
swear! Above all, you are not mad! So you may go to hell, all of you,
for there's some mystery, some secret about it, and I don't intend to
worry my brains over your secrets. So I've simply come to swear at you,"
he finished, getting up, "to relieve my mind. And I know what to do
now."

"What do you mean to do now?"

"What business is it of yours what I mean to do?"

"You are going in for a drinking bout."

"How... how did you know?"

"Why, it's pretty plain."

Razumihin paused for a minute.

"You always have been a very rational person and you've never been mad,
never," he observed suddenly with warmth. "You're right: I shall drink.
Good-bye!"

And he moved to go out.

"I was talking with my sister--the day before yesterday, I think it
was--about you, Razumihin."

"About me! But... where can you have seen her the day before yesterday?"
Razumihin stopped short and even turned a little pale.

One could see that his heart was throbbing slowly and violently.

"She came here by herself, sat there and talked to me."

"She did!"

"Yes."

"What did you say to her... I mean, about me?"

"I told her you were a very good, honest, and industrious man. I didn't
tell her you love her, because she knows that herself."

"She knows that herself?"

"Well, it's pretty plain. Wherever I might go, whatever happened to me,
you would remain to look after them. I, so to speak, give them into your
keeping, Razumihin. I say this because I know quite well how you love
her, and am convinced of the purity of your heart. I know that she too
may love you and perhaps does love you already. Now decide for yourself,
as you know best, whether you need go in for a drinking bout or not."

"Rodya! You see... well.... Ach, damn it! But where do you mean to go?
Of course, if it's all a secret, never mind.... But I... I shall find
out the secret... and I am sure that it must be some ridiculous nonsense
and that you've made it all up. Anyway you are a capital fellow, a
capital fellow!..."

"That was just what I wanted to add, only you interrupted, that that was
a very good decision of yours not to find out these secrets. Leave it to
time, don't worry about it. You'll know it all in time when it must be.
Yesterday a man said to me that what a man needs is fresh air, fresh
air, fresh air. I mean to go to him directly to find out what he meant
by that."

Razumihin stood lost in thought and excitement, making a silent
conclusion.

"He's a political conspirator! He must be. And he's on the eve of some
desperate step, that's certain. It can only be that! And... and Dounia
knows," he thought suddenly.

"So Avdotya Romanovna comes to see you," he said, weighing each
syllable, "and you're going to see a man who says we need more air, and
so of course that letter... that too must have something to do with it,"
he concluded to himself.

"What letter?"

"She got a letter to-day. It upset her very much--very much indeed. Too
much so. I began speaking of you, she begged me not to. Then... then
she said that perhaps we should very soon have to part... then she began
warmly thanking me for something; then she went to her room and locked
herself in."

"She got a letter?" Raskolnikov asked thoughtfully.

"Yes, and you didn't know? hm..."

They were both silent.

"Good-bye, Rodion. There was a time, brother, when I.... Never mind,
good-bye. You see, there was a time.... Well, good-bye! I must be off
too. I am not going to drink. There's no need now.... That's all stuff!"

He hurried out; but when he had almost closed the door behind him, he
suddenly opened it again, and said, looking away:

"Oh, by the way, do you remember that murder, you know Porfiry's, that
old woman? Do you know the murderer has been found, he has confessed
and given the proofs. It's one of those very workmen, the painter, only
fancy! Do you remember I defended them here? Would you believe it, all
that scene of fighting and laughing with his companions on the stairs
while the porter and the two witnesses were going up, he got up on
purpose to disarm suspicion. The cunning, the presence of mind of the
young dog! One can hardly credit it; but it's his own explanation, he
has confessed it all. And what a fool I was about it! Well, he's simply
a genius of hypocrisy and resourcefulness in disarming the suspicions of
the lawyers--so there's nothing much to wonder at, I suppose! Of course
people like that are always possible. And the fact that he couldn't keep
up the character, but confessed, makes him easier to believe in. But
what a fool I was! I was frantic on their side!"

"Tell me, please, from whom did you hear that, and why does it interest
you so?" Raskolnikov asked with unmistakable agitation.

"What next? You ask me why it interests me!... Well, I heard it from
Porfiry, among others... It was from him I heard almost all about it."

"From Porfiry?"

"From Porfiry."

"What... what did he say?" Raskolnikov asked in dismay.

"He gave me a capital explanation of it. Psychologically, after his
fashion."

"He explained it? Explained it himself?"

"Yes, yes; good-bye. I'll tell you all about it another time, but now
I'm busy. There was a time when I fancied... But no matter, another
time!... What need is there for me to drink now? You have made me drunk
without wine. I am drunk, Rodya! Good-bye, I'm going. I'll come again
very soon."

He went out.

"He's a political conspirator, there's not a doubt about it," Razumihin
decided, as he slowly descended the stairs. "And he's drawn his sister
in; that's quite, quite in keeping with Avdotya Romanovna's character.
There are interviews between them!... She hinted at it too... So many of
her words.... and hints... bear that meaning! And how else can all this
tangle be explained? Hm! And I was almost thinking... Good heavens,
what I thought! Yes, I took leave of my senses and I wronged him! It was
his doing, under the lamp in the corridor that day. Pfoo! What a crude,
nasty, vile idea on my part! Nikolay is a brick, for confessing.... And
how clear it all is now! His illness then, all his strange actions...
before this, in the university, how morose he used to be, how gloomy....
But what's the meaning now of that letter? There's something in that,
too, perhaps. Whom was it from? I suspect...! No, I must find out!"

He thought of Dounia, realising all he had heard and his heart throbbed,
and he suddenly broke into a run.

As soon as Razumihin went out, Raskolnikov got up, turned to the window,
walked into one corner and then into another, as though forgetting the
smallness of his room, and sat down again on the sofa. He felt, so to
speak, renewed; again the struggle, so a means of escape had come.

"Yes, a means of escape had come! It had been too stifling, too
cramping, the burden had been too agonising. A lethargy had come upon
him at times. From the moment of the scene with Nikolay at Porfiry's he
had been suffocating, penned in without hope of escape. After Nikolay's
confession, on that very day had come the scene with Sonia; his
behaviour and his last words had been utterly unlike anything he
could have imagined beforehand; he had grown feebler, instantly and
fundamentally! And he had agreed at the time with Sonia, he had agreed
in his heart he could not go on living alone with such a thing on his
mind!

"And Svidrigaïlov was a riddle... He worried him, that was true, but
somehow not on the same point. He might still have a struggle to come
with Svidrigaïlov. Svidrigaïlov, too, might be a means of escape; but
Porfiry was a different matter.

"And so Porfiry himself had explained it to Razumihin, had explained it
_psychologically_. He had begun bringing in his damned psychology again!
Porfiry? But to think that Porfiry should for one moment believe that
Nikolay was guilty, after what had passed between them before Nikolay's
appearance, after that tête-à-tête interview, which could have only
_one_ explanation? (During those days Raskolnikov had often recalled
passages in that scene with Porfiry; he could not bear to let his mind
rest on it.) Such words, such gestures had passed between them, they
had exchanged such glances, things had been said in such a tone and had
reached such a pass, that Nikolay, whom Porfiry had seen through at the
first word, at the first gesture, could not have shaken his conviction.

"And to think that even Razumihin had begun to suspect! The scene in the
corridor under the lamp had produced its effect then. He had rushed to
Porfiry.... But what had induced the latter to receive him like that?
What had been his object in putting Razumihin off with Nikolay? He must
have some plan; there was some design, but what was it? It was true that
a long time had passed since that morning--too long a time--and no sight
nor sound of Porfiry. Well, that was a bad sign...."

Raskolnikov took his cap and went out of the room, still pondering. It
was the first time for a long while that he had felt clear in his mind,
at least. "I must settle Svidrigaïlov," he thought, "and as soon as
possible; he, too, seems to be waiting for me to come to him of my own
accord." And at that moment there was such a rush of hate in his
weary heart that he might have killed either of those two--Porfiry or
Svidrigaïlov. At least he felt that he would be capable of doing it
later, if not now.

"We shall see, we shall see," he repeated to himself.

But no sooner had he opened the door than he stumbled upon Porfiry
himself in the passage. He was coming in to see him. Raskolnikov was
dumbfounded for a minute, but only for one minute. Strange to say, he
was not very much astonished at seeing Porfiry and scarcely afraid of
him. He was simply startled, but was quickly, instantly, on his guard.
"Perhaps this will mean the end? But how could Porfiry have approached
so quietly, like a cat, so that he had heard nothing? Could he have been
listening at the door?"

"You didn't expect a visitor, Rodion Romanovitch," Porfiry explained,
laughing. "I've been meaning to look in a long time; I was passing by
and thought why not go in for five minutes. Are you going out? I won't
keep you long. Just let me have one cigarette."

"Sit down, Porfiry Petrovitch, sit down." Raskolnikov gave his visitor
a seat with so pleased and friendly an expression that he would have
marvelled at himself, if he could have seen it.

The last moment had come, the last drops had to be drained! So a man
will sometimes go through half an hour of mortal terror with a brigand,
yet when the knife is at his throat at last, he feels no fear.

Raskolnikov seated himself directly facing Porfiry, and looked at him
without flinching. Porfiry screwed up his eyes and began lighting a
cigarette.

"Speak, speak," seemed as though it would burst from Raskolnikov's
heart. "Come, why don't you speak?"



CHAPTER II

"Ah these cigarettes!" Porfiry Petrovitch ejaculated at last, having
lighted one. "They are pernicious, positively pernicious, and yet I
can't give them up! I cough, I begin to have tickling in my throat and
a difficulty in breathing. You know I am a coward, I went lately to
Dr. B----n; he always gives at least half an hour to each patient. He
positively laughed looking at me; he sounded me: 'Tobacco's bad for
you,' he said, 'your lungs are affected.' But how am I to give it up?
What is there to take its place? I don't drink, that's the mischief,
he-he-he, that I don't. Everything is relative, Rodion Romanovitch,
everything is relative!"

"Why, he's playing his professional tricks again," Raskolnikov thought
with disgust. All the circumstances of their last interview suddenly
came back to him, and he felt a rush of the feeling that had come upon
him then.

"I came to see you the day before yesterday, in the evening; you didn't
know?" Porfiry Petrovitch went on, looking round the room. "I came into
this very room. I was passing by, just as I did to-day, and I thought
I'd return your call. I walked in as your door was wide open, I looked
round, waited and went out without leaving my name with your servant.
Don't you lock your door?"

Raskolnikov's face grew more and more gloomy. Porfiry seemed to guess
his state of mind.

"I've come to have it out with you, Rodion Romanovitch, my dear fellow!
I owe you an explanation and must give it to you," he continued with a
slight smile, just patting Raskolnikov's knee.

But almost at the same instant a serious and careworn look came into his
face; to his surprise Raskolnikov saw a touch of sadness in it. He had
never seen and never suspected such an expression in his face.

"A strange scene passed between us last time we met, Rodion Romanovitch.
Our first interview, too, was a strange one; but then... and one thing
after another! This is the point: I have perhaps acted unfairly to you;
I feel it. Do you remember how we parted? Your nerves were unhinged and
your knees were shaking and so were mine. And, you know, our behaviour
was unseemly, even ungentlemanly. And yet we are gentlemen, above all,
in any case, gentlemen; that must be understood. Do you remember what we
came to?... and it was quite indecorous."

"What is he up to, what does he take me for?" Raskolnikov asked himself
in amazement, raising his head and looking with open eyes on Porfiry.

"I've decided openness is better between us," Porfiry Petrovitch went
on, turning his head away and dropping his eyes, as though unwilling to
disconcert his former victim and as though disdaining his former wiles.
"Yes, such suspicions and such scenes cannot continue for long. Nikolay
put a stop to it, or I don't know what we might not have come to. That
damned workman was sitting at the time in the next room--can you realise
that? You know that, of course; and I am aware that he came to you
afterwards. But what you supposed then was not true: I had not sent for
anyone, I had made no kind of arrangements. You ask why I hadn't? What
shall I say to you? it had all come upon me so suddenly. I had scarcely
sent for the porters (you noticed them as you went out, I dare say).
An idea flashed upon me; I was firmly convinced at the time, you see,
Rodion Romanovitch. Come, I thought--even if I let one thing slip for
a time, I shall get hold of something else--I shan't lose what I want,
anyway. You are nervously irritable, Rodion Romanovitch, by temperament;
it's out of proportion with other qualities of your heart and character,
which I flatter myself I have to some extent divined. Of course I did
reflect even then that it does not always happen that a man gets up and
blurts out his whole story. It does happen sometimes, if you make a
man lose all patience, though even then it's rare. I was capable of
realising that. If I only had a fact, I thought, the least little fact
to go upon, something I could lay hold of, something tangible, not
merely psychological. For if a man is guilty, you must be able to get
something substantial out of him; one may reckon upon most surprising
results indeed. I was reckoning on your temperament, Rodion Romanovitch,
on your temperament above all things! I had great hopes of you at that
time."

"But what are you driving at now?" Raskolnikov muttered at last, asking
the question without thinking.

"What is he talking about?" he wondered distractedly, "does he really
take me to be innocent?"

"What am I driving at? I've come to explain myself, I consider it my
duty, so to speak. I want to make clear to you how the whole business,
the whole misunderstanding arose. I've caused you a great deal of
suffering, Rodion Romanovitch. I am not a monster. I understand what
it must mean for a man who has been unfortunate, but who is proud,
imperious and above all, impatient, to have to bear such treatment!
I regard you in any case as a man of noble character and not without
elements of magnanimity, though I don't agree with all your convictions.
I wanted to tell you this first, frankly and quite sincerely, for above
all I don't want to deceive you. When I made your acquaintance, I felt
attracted by you. Perhaps you will laugh at my saying so. You have a
right to. I know you disliked me from the first and indeed you've no
reason to like me. You may think what you like, but I desire now to do
all I can to efface that impression and to show that I am a man of heart
and conscience. I speak sincerely."

Porfiry Petrovitch made a dignified pause. Raskolnikov felt a rush of
renewed alarm. The thought that Porfiry believed him to be innocent
began to make him uneasy.

"It's scarcely necessary to go over everything in detail," Porfiry
Petrovitch went on. "Indeed, I could scarcely attempt it. To begin with
there were rumours. Through whom, how, and when those rumours came to
me... and how they affected you, I need not go into. My suspicions
were aroused by a complete accident, which might just as easily not have
happened. What was it? Hm! I believe there is no need to go into that
either. Those rumours and that accident led to one idea in my mind. I
admit it openly--for one may as well make a clean breast of it--I was
the first to pitch on you. The old woman's notes on the pledges and
the rest of it--that all came to nothing. Yours was one of a hundred.
I happened, too, to hear of the scene at the office, from a man who
described it capitally, unconsciously reproducing the scene with great
vividness. It was just one thing after another, Rodion Romanovitch, my
dear fellow! How could I avoid being brought to certain ideas? From a
hundred rabbits you can't make a horse, a hundred suspicions don't make
a proof, as the English proverb says, but that's only from the rational
point of view--you can't help being partial, for after all a lawyer
is only human. I thought, too, of your article in that journal, do you
remember, on your first visit we talked of it? I jeered at you at the
time, but that was only to lead you on. I repeat, Rodion Romanovitch,
you are ill and impatient. That you were bold, headstrong, in earnest
and... had felt a great deal I recognised long before. I, too, have felt
the same, so that your article seemed familiar to me. It was conceived
on sleepless nights, with a throbbing heart, in ecstasy and suppressed
enthusiasm. And that proud suppressed enthusiasm in young people is
dangerous! I jeered at you then, but let me tell you that, as a literary
amateur, I am awfully fond of such first essays, full of the heat of
youth. There is a mistiness and a chord vibrating in the mist. Your
article is absurd and fantastic, but there's a transparent sincerity,
a youthful incorruptible pride and the daring of despair in it. It's a
gloomy article, but that's what's fine in it. I read your article and
put it aside, thinking as I did so 'that man won't go the common way.'
Well, I ask you, after that as a preliminary, how could I help being
carried away by what followed? Oh, dear, I am not saying anything, I
am not making any statement now. I simply noted it at the time. What is
there in it? I reflected. There's nothing in it, that is really nothing
and perhaps absolutely nothing. And it's not at all the thing for
the prosecutor to let himself be carried away by notions: here I have
Nikolay on my hands with actual evidence against him--you may think what
you like of it, but it's evidence. He brings in his psychology, too; one
has to consider him, too, for it's a matter of life and death. Why am
I explaining this to you? That you may understand, and not blame my
malicious behaviour on that occasion. It was not malicious, I assure
you, he-he! Do you suppose I didn't come to search your room at the
time? I did, I did, he-he! I was here when you were lying ill in bed,
not officially, not in my own person, but I was here. Your room was
searched to the last thread at the first suspicion; but _umsonst_! I
thought to myself, now that man will come, will come of himself and
quickly, too; if he's guilty, he's sure to come. Another man wouldn't,
but he will. And you remember how Mr. Razumihin began discussing the
subject with you? We arranged that to excite you, so we purposely spread
rumours, that he might discuss the case with you, and Razumihin is not a
man to restrain his indignation. Mr. Zametov was tremendously struck by
your anger and your open daring. Think of blurting out in a restaurant
'I killed her.' It was too daring, too reckless. I thought so myself, if
he is guilty he will be a formidable opponent. That was what I thought
at the time. I was expecting you. But you simply bowled Zametov over
and... well, you see, it all lies in this--that this damnable psychology
can be taken two ways! Well, I kept expecting you, and so it was, you
came! My heart was fairly throbbing. Ach!

"Now, why need you have come? Your laughter, too, as you came in, do you
remember? I saw it all plain as daylight, but if I hadn't expected you
so specially, I should not have noticed anything in your laughter. You
see what influence a mood has! Mr. Razumihin then--ah, that stone, that
stone under which the things were hidden! I seem to see it somewhere
in a kitchen garden. It was in a kitchen garden, you told Zametov and
afterwards you repeated that in my office? And when we began picking
your article to pieces, how you explained it! One could take every word
of yours in two senses, as though there were another meaning hidden.

"So in this way, Rodion Romanovitch, I reached the furthest limit, and
knocking my head against a post, I pulled myself up, asking myself what
I was about. After all, I said, you can take it all in another sense if
you like, and it's more natural so, indeed. I couldn't help admitting
it was more natural. I was bothered! 'No, I'd better get hold of some
little fact' I said. So when I heard of the bell-ringing, I held my
breath and was all in a tremor. 'Here is my little fact,' thought I, and
I didn't think it over, I simply wouldn't. I would have given a thousand
roubles at that minute to have seen you with my own eyes, when you
walked a hundred paces beside that workman, after he had called you
murderer to your face, and you did not dare to ask him a question
all the way. And then what about your trembling, what about your
bell-ringing in your illness, in semi-delirium?

"And so, Rodion Romanovitch, can you wonder that I played such pranks on
you? And what made you come at that very minute? Someone seemed to
have sent you, by Jove! And if Nikolay had not parted us... and do you
remember Nikolay at the time? Do you remember him clearly? It was a
thunderbolt, a regular thunderbolt! And how I met him! I didn't believe
in the thunderbolt, not for a minute. You could see it for yourself;
and how could I? Even afterwards, when you had gone and he began making
very, very plausible answers on certain points, so that I was surprised
at him myself, even then I didn't believe his story! You see what it is
to be as firm as a rock! No, thought I, _Morgenfrüh_. What has Nikolay
got to do with it!"

"Razumihin told me just now that you think Nikolay guilty and had
yourself assured him of it...."

His voice failed him, and he broke off. He had been listening in
indescribable agitation, as this man who had seen through and through
him, went back upon himself. He was afraid of believing it and did not
believe it. In those still ambiguous words he kept eagerly looking for
something more definite and conclusive.

"Mr. Razumihin!" cried Porfiry Petrovitch, seeming glad of a question
from Raskolnikov, who had till then been silent. "He-he-he! But I had to
put Mr. Razumihin off; two is company, three is none. Mr. Razumihin is
not the right man, besides he is an outsider. He came running to me
with a pale face.... But never mind him, why bring him in? To return
to Nikolay, would you like to know what sort of a type he is, how I
understand him, that is? To begin with, he is still a child and not
exactly a coward, but something by way of an artist. Really, don't laugh
at my describing him so. He is innocent and responsive to influence. He
has a heart, and is a fantastic fellow. He sings and dances, he tells
stories, they say, so that people come from other villages to hear him.
He attends school too, and laughs till he cries if you hold up a finger
to him; he will drink himself senseless--not as a regular vice, but at
times, when people treat him, like a child. And he stole, too, then,
without knowing it himself, for 'How can it be stealing, if one picks it
up?' And do you know he is an Old Believer, or rather a dissenter? There
have been Wanderers[*] in his family, and he was for two years in his
village under the spiritual guidance of a certain elder. I learnt all
this from Nikolay and from his fellow villagers. And what's more, he
wanted to run into the wilderness! He was full of fervour, prayed at
night, read the old books, 'the true' ones, and read himself crazy.

     [*] A religious sect.--TRANSLATOR'S NOTE.

"Petersburg had a great effect upon him, especially the women and the
wine. He responds to everything and he forgot the elder and all that. I
learnt that an artist here took a fancy to him, and used to go and see
him, and now this business came upon him.

"Well, he was frightened, he tried to hang himself! He ran away! How can
one get over the idea the people have of Russian legal proceedings? The
very word 'trial' frightens some of them. Whose fault is it? We shall
see what the new juries will do. God grant they do good! Well, in
prison, it seems, he remembered the venerable elder; the Bible, too,
made its appearance again. Do you know, Rodion Romanovitch, the force of
the word 'suffering' among some of these people! It's not a question of
suffering for someone's benefit, but simply, 'one must suffer.' If they
suffer at the hands of the authorities, so much the better. In my time
there was a very meek and mild prisoner who spent a whole year in prison
always reading his Bible on the stove at night and he read himself
crazy, and so crazy, do you know, that one day, apropos of nothing, he
seized a brick and flung it at the governor; though he had done him
no harm. And the way he threw it too: aimed it a yard on one side
on purpose, for fear of hurting him. Well, we know what happens to
a prisoner who assaults an officer with a weapon. So 'he took his
suffering.'

"So I suspect now that Nikolay wants to take his suffering or something
of the sort. I know it for certain from facts, indeed. Only he doesn't
know that I know. What, you don't admit that there are such fantastic
people among the peasants? Lots of them. The elder now has begun
influencing him, especially since he tried to hang himself. But he'll
come and tell me all himself. You think he'll hold out? Wait a bit,
he'll take his words back. I am waiting from hour to hour for him to
come and abjure his evidence. I have come to like that Nikolay and am
studying him in detail. And what do you think? He-he! He answered me
very plausibly on some points, he obviously had collected some evidence
and prepared himself cleverly. But on other points he is simply at sea,
knows nothing and doesn't even suspect that he doesn't know!

"No, Rodion Romanovitch, Nikolay doesn't come in! This is a fantastic,
gloomy business, a modern case, an incident of to-day when the heart
of man is troubled, when the phrase is quoted that blood 'renews,' when
comfort is preached as the aim of life. Here we have bookish dreams, a
heart unhinged by theories. Here we see resolution in the first stage,
but resolution of a special kind: he resolved to do it like jumping over
a precipice or from a bell tower and his legs shook as he went to the
crime. He forgot to shut the door after him, and murdered two people for
a theory. He committed the murder and couldn't take the money, and what
he did manage to snatch up he hid under a stone. It wasn't enough for
him to suffer agony behind the door while they battered at the door and
rung the bell, no, he had to go to the empty lodging, half delirious, to
recall the bell-ringing, he wanted to feel the cold shiver over again....
Well, that we grant, was through illness, but consider this: he is
a murderer, but looks upon himself as an honest man, despises others,
poses as injured innocence. No, that's not the work of a Nikolay, my
dear Rodion Romanovitch!"

All that had been said before had sounded so like a recantation that
these words were too great a shock. Raskolnikov shuddered as though he
had been stabbed.

"Then... who then... is the murderer?" he asked in a breathless voice,
unable to restrain himself.

Porfiry Petrovitch sank back in his chair, as though he were amazed at
the question.

"Who is the murderer?" he repeated, as though unable to believe his
ears. "Why, _you_, Rodion Romanovitch! You are the murderer," he added,
almost in a whisper, in a voice of genuine conviction.

Raskolnikov leapt from the sofa, stood up for a few seconds and sat down
again without uttering a word. His face twitched convulsively.

"Your lip is twitching just as it did before," Porfiry Petrovitch
observed almost sympathetically. "You've been misunderstanding me, I
think, Rodion Romanovitch," he added after a brief pause, "that's why
you are so surprised. I came on purpose to tell you everything and deal
openly with you."

"It was not I murdered her," Raskolnikov whispered like a frightened
child caught in the act.

"No, it was you, you Rodion Romanovitch, and no one else," Porfiry
whispered sternly, with conviction.

They were both silent and the silence lasted strangely long, about ten
minutes. Raskolnikov put his elbow on the table and passed his fingers
through his hair. Porfiry Petrovitch sat quietly waiting. Suddenly
Raskolnikov looked scornfully at Porfiry.

"You are at your old tricks again, Porfiry Petrovitch! Your old method
again. I wonder you don't get sick of it!"

"Oh, stop that, what does that matter now? It would be a different
matter if there were witnesses present, but we are whispering alone. You
see yourself that I have not come to chase and capture you like a hare.
Whether you confess it or not is nothing to me now; for myself, I am
convinced without it."

"If so, what did you come for?" Raskolnikov asked irritably. "I ask you
the same question again: if you consider me guilty, why don't you take
me to prison?"

"Oh, that's your question! I will answer you, point for point. In the
first place, to arrest you so directly is not to my interest."

"How so? If you are convinced you ought...."

"Ach, what if I am convinced? That's only my dream for the time. Why
should I put you in safety? You know that's it, since you ask me to do
it. If I confront you with that workman for instance and you say to him
'were you drunk or not? Who saw me with you? I simply took you to be
drunk, and you were drunk, too.' Well, what could I answer, especially
as your story is a more likely one than his? for there's nothing but
psychology to support his evidence--that's almost unseemly with his ugly
mug, while you hit the mark exactly, for the rascal is an inveterate
drunkard and notoriously so. And I have myself admitted candidly several
times already that that psychology can be taken in two ways and that the
second way is stronger and looks far more probable, and that apart from
that I have as yet nothing against you. And though I shall put you in
prison and indeed have come--quite contrary to etiquette--to inform you
of it beforehand, yet I tell you frankly, also contrary to etiquette,
that it won't be to my advantage. Well, secondly, I've come to you
because..."

"Yes, yes, secondly?" Raskolnikov was listening breathless.

"Because, as I told you just now, I consider I owe you an explanation. I
don't want you to look upon me as a monster, as I have a genuine liking
for you, you may believe me or not. And in the third place I've come to
you with a direct and open proposition--that you should surrender
and confess. It will be infinitely more to your advantage and to my
advantage too, for my task will be done. Well, is this open on my part
or not?"

Raskolnikov thought a minute.

"Listen, Porfiry Petrovitch. You said just now you have nothing but
psychology to go on, yet now you've gone on mathematics. Well, what if
you are mistaken yourself, now?"

"No, Rodion Romanovitch, I am not mistaken. I have a little fact even
then, Providence sent it me."

"What little fact?"

"I won't tell you what, Rodion Romanovitch. And in any case, I haven't
the right to put it off any longer, I must arrest you. So think it over:
it makes no difference to me _now_ and so I speak only for your sake.
Believe me, it will be better, Rodion Romanovitch."

Raskolnikov smiled malignantly.

"That's not simply ridiculous, it's positively shameless. Why, even if I
were guilty, which I don't admit, what reason should I have to confess,
when you tell me yourself that I shall be in greater safety in prison?"

"Ah, Rodion Romanovitch, don't put too much faith in words, perhaps
prison will not be altogether a restful place. That's only theory and
my theory, and what authority am I for you? Perhaps, too, even now I am
hiding something from you? I can't lay bare everything, he-he! And how
can you ask what advantage? Don't you know how it would lessen your
sentence? You would be confessing at a moment when another man has taken
the crime on himself and so has muddled the whole case. Consider that! I
swear before God that I will so arrange that your confession shall
come as a complete surprise. We will make a clean sweep of all these
psychological points, of a suspicion against you, so that your crime
will appear to have been something like an aberration, for in truth it
was an aberration. I am an honest man, Rodion Romanovitch, and will keep
my word."

Raskolnikov maintained a mournful silence and let his head sink
dejectedly. He pondered a long while and at last smiled again, but his
smile was sad and gentle.

"No!" he said, apparently abandoning all attempt to keep up appearances
with Porfiry, "it's not worth it, I don't care about lessening the
sentence!"

"That's just what I was afraid of!" Porfiry cried warmly and, as it
seemed, involuntarily. "That's just what I feared, that you wouldn't
care about the mitigation of sentence."

Raskolnikov looked sadly and expressively at him.

"Ah, don't disdain life!" Porfiry went on. "You have a great deal of
it still before you. How can you say you don't want a mitigation of
sentence? You are an impatient fellow!"

"A great deal of what lies before me?"

"Of life. What sort of prophet are you, do you know much about it? Seek
and ye shall find. This may be God's means for bringing you to Him. And
it's not for ever, the bondage...."

"The time will be shortened," laughed Raskolnikov.

"Why, is it the bourgeois disgrace you are afraid of? It may be that you
are afraid of it without knowing it, because you are young! But anyway
_you_ shouldn't be afraid of giving yourself up and confessing."

"Ach, hang it!" Raskolnikov whispered with loathing and contempt, as
though he did not want to speak aloud.

He got up again as though he meant to go away, but sat down again in
evident despair.

"Hang it, if you like! You've lost faith and you think that I am
grossly flattering you; but how long has your life been? How much do
you understand? You made up a theory and then were ashamed that it broke
down and turned out to be not at all original! It turned out something
base, that's true, but you are not hopelessly base. By no means so base!
At least you didn't deceive yourself for long, you went straight to the
furthest point at one bound. How do I regard you? I regard you as one
of those men who would stand and smile at their torturer while he cuts
their entrails out, if only they have found faith or God. Find it and
you will live. You have long needed a change of air. Suffering, too,
is a good thing. Suffer! Maybe Nikolay is right in wanting to suffer.
I know you don't believe in it--but don't be over-wise; fling yourself
straight into life, without deliberation; don't be afraid--the flood
will bear you to the bank and set you safe on your feet again. What
bank? How can I tell? I only believe that you have long life before
you. I know that you take all my words now for a set speech prepared
beforehand, but maybe you will remember them after. They may be of use
some time. That's why I speak. It's as well that you only killed the
old woman. If you'd invented another theory you might perhaps have
done something a thousand times more hideous. You ought to thank God,
perhaps. How do you know? Perhaps God is saving you for something.
But keep a good heart and have less fear! Are you afraid of the great
expiation before you? No, it would be shameful to be afraid of it. Since
you have taken such a step, you must harden your heart. There is justice
in it. You must fulfil the demands of justice. I know that you don't
believe it, but indeed, life will bring you through. You will live it
down in time. What you need now is fresh air, fresh air, fresh air!"

Raskolnikov positively started.

"But who are you? what prophet are you? From the height of what majestic
calm do you proclaim these words of wisdom?"

"Who am I? I am a man with nothing to hope for, that's all. A man
perhaps of feeling and sympathy, maybe of some knowledge too, but my day
is over. But you are a different matter, there is life waiting for you.
Though, who knows? maybe your life, too, will pass off in smoke and come
to nothing. Come, what does it matter, that you will pass into another
class of men? It's not comfort you regret, with your heart! What of
it that perhaps no one will see you for so long? It's not time, but
yourself that will decide that. Be the sun and all will see you. The
sun has before all to be the sun. Why are you smiling again? At my being
such a Schiller? I bet you're imagining that I am trying to get round
you by flattery. Well, perhaps I am, he-he-he! Perhaps you'd better not
believe my word, perhaps you'd better never believe it altogether--I'm
made that way, I confess it. But let me add, you can judge for yourself,
I think, how far I am a base sort of man and how far I am honest."

"When do you mean to arrest me?"

"Well, I can let you walk about another day or two. Think it over, my
dear fellow, and pray to God. It's more in your interest, believe me."

"And what if I run away?" asked Raskolnikov with a strange smile.

"No, you won't run away. A peasant would run away, a fashionable
dissenter would run away, the flunkey of another man's thought, for
you've only to show him the end of your little finger and he'll be ready
to believe in anything for the rest of his life. But you've ceased to
believe in your theory already, what will you run away with? And what
would you do in hiding? It would be hateful and difficult for you, and
what you need more than anything in life is a definite position, an
atmosphere to suit you. And what sort of atmosphere would you have? If
you ran away, you'd come back to yourself. _You can't get on without
us._ And if I put you in prison--say you've been there a month, or two,
or three--remember my word, you'll confess of yourself and perhaps to
your own surprise. You won't know an hour beforehand that you are coming
with a confession. I am convinced that you will decide, 'to take your
suffering.' You don't believe my words now, but you'll come to it of
yourself. For suffering, Rodion Romanovitch, is a great thing. Never
mind my having grown fat, I know all the same. Don't laugh at it,
there's an idea in suffering, Nokolay is right. No, you won't run away,
Rodion Romanovitch."

Raskolnikov got up and took his cap. Porfiry Petrovitch also rose.

"Are you going for a walk? The evening will be fine, if only we don't
have a storm. Though it would be a good thing to freshen the air."

He, too, took his cap.

"Porfiry Petrovitch, please don't take up the notion that I have
confessed to you to-day," Raskolnikov pronounced with sullen insistence.
"You're a strange man and I have listened to you from simple curiosity.
But I have admitted nothing, remember that!"

"Oh, I know that, I'll remember. Look at him, he's trembling! Don't
be uneasy, my dear fellow, have it your own way. Walk about a bit, you
won't be able to walk too far. If anything happens, I have one request
to make of you," he added, dropping his voice. "It's an awkward one, but
important. If anything were to happen (though indeed I don't believe
in it and think you quite incapable of it), yet in case you were taken
during these forty or fifty hours with the notion of putting an end to
the business in some other way, in some fantastic fashion--laying hands
on yourself--(it's an absurd proposition, but you must forgive me for
it) do leave a brief but precise note, only two lines, and mention the
stone. It will be more generous. Come, till we meet! Good thoughts and
sound decisions to you!"

Porfiry went out, stooping and avoiding looking at Raskolnikov. The
latter went to the window and waited with irritable impatience till he
calculated that Porfiry had reached the street and moved away. Then he
too went hurriedly out of the room.



CHAPTER III

He hurried to Svidrigaïlov's. What he had to hope from that man he
did not know. But that man had some hidden power over him. Having once
recognised this, he could not rest, and now the time had come.

On the way, one question particularly worried him: had Svidrigaïlov been
to Porfiry's?

As far as he could judge, he would swear to it, that he had not. He
pondered again and again, went over Porfiry's visit; no, he hadn't been,
of course he hadn't.

But if he had not been yet, would he go? Meanwhile, for the present he
fancied he couldn't. Why? He could not have explained, but if he could,
he would not have wasted much thought over it at the moment. It all
worried him and at the same time he could not attend to it. Strange to
say, none would have believed it perhaps, but he only felt a faint vague
anxiety about his immediate future. Another, much more important anxiety
tormented him--it concerned himself, but in a different, more vital way.
Moreover, he was conscious of immense moral fatigue, though his mind was
working better that morning than it had done of late.

And was it worth while, after all that had happened, to contend with
these new trivial difficulties? Was it worth while, for instance, to
manoeuvre that Svidrigaïlov should not go to Porfiry's? Was it worth
while to investigate, to ascertain the facts, to waste time over anyone
like Svidrigaïlov?

Oh, how sick he was of it all!

And yet he was hastening to Svidrigaïlov; could he be expecting
something _new_ from him, information, or means of escape? Men will
catch at straws! Was it destiny or some instinct bringing them together?
Perhaps it was only fatigue, despair; perhaps it was not Svidrigaïlov
but some other whom he needed, and Svidrigaïlov had simply presented
himself by chance. Sonia? But what should he go to Sonia for now? To beg
her tears again? He was afraid of Sonia, too. Sonia stood before him as
an irrevocable sentence. He must go his own way or hers. At that moment
especially he did not feel equal to seeing her. No, would it not be
better to try Svidrigaïlov? And he could not help inwardly owning that
he had long felt that he must see him for some reason.

But what could they have in common? Their very evil-doing could not
be of the same kind. The man, moreover, was very unpleasant, evidently
depraved, undoubtedly cunning and deceitful, possibly malignant. Such
stories were told about him. It is true he was befriending Katerina
Ivanovna's children, but who could tell with what motive and what it
meant? The man always had some design, some project.

There was another thought which had been continually hovering of late
about Raskolnikov's mind, and causing him great uneasiness. It was so
painful that he made distinct efforts to get rid of it. He sometimes
thought that Svidrigaïlov was dogging his footsteps. Svidrigaïlov had
found out his secret and had had designs on Dounia. What if he had them
still? Wasn't it practically certain that he had? And what if, having
learnt his secret and so having gained power over him, he were to use it
as a weapon against Dounia?

This idea sometimes even tormented his dreams, but it had never
presented itself so vividly to him as on his way to Svidrigaïlov.
The very thought moved him to gloomy rage. To begin with, this would
transform everything, even his own position; he would have at once to
confess his secret to Dounia. Would he have to give himself up perhaps
to prevent Dounia from taking some rash step? The letter? This morning
Dounia had received a letter. From whom could she get letters in
Petersburg? Luzhin, perhaps? It's true Razumihin was there to protect
her, but Razumihin knew nothing of the position. Perhaps it was his duty
to tell Razumihin? He thought of it with repugnance.

In any case he must see Svidrigaïlov as soon as possible, he decided
finally. Thank God, the details of the interview were of little
consequence, if only he could get at the root of the matter; but
if Svidrigaïlov were capable... if he were intriguing against
Dounia--then...

Raskolnikov was so exhausted by what he had passed through that month
that he could only decide such questions in one way; "then I shall kill
him," he thought in cold despair.

A sudden anguish oppressed his heart, he stood still in the middle of
the street and began looking about to see where he was and which way he
was going. He found himself in X. Prospect, thirty or forty paces from
the Hay Market, through which he had come. The whole second storey of
the house on the left was used as a tavern. All the windows were wide
open; judging from the figures moving at the windows, the rooms were
full to overflowing. There were sounds of singing, of clarionet and
violin, and the boom of a Turkish drum. He could hear women shrieking.
He was about to turn back wondering why he had come to the X. Prospect,
when suddenly at one of the end windows he saw Svidrigaïlov, sitting
at a tea-table right in the open window with a pipe in his mouth.
Raskolnikov was dreadfully taken aback, almost terrified. Svidrigaïlov
was silently watching and scrutinising him and, what struck Raskolnikov
at once, seemed to be meaning to get up and slip away unobserved.
Raskolnikov at once pretended not to have seen him, but to be looking
absent-mindedly away, while he watched him out of the corner of his eye.
His heart was beating violently. Yet, it was evident that Svidrigaïlov
did not want to be seen. He took the pipe out of his mouth and was on
the point of concealing himself, but as he got up and moved back his
chair, he seemed to have become suddenly aware that Raskolnikov had seen
him, and was watching him. What had passed between them was much the
same as what happened at their first meeting in Raskolnikov's room. A
sly smile came into Svidrigaïlov's face and grew broader and
broader. Each knew that he was seen and watched by the other. At last
Svidrigaïlov broke into a loud laugh.

"Well, well, come in if you want me; I am here!" he shouted from the
window.

Raskolnikov went up into the tavern. He found Svidrigaïlov in a tiny
back room, adjoining the saloon in which merchants, clerks and numbers
of people of all sorts were drinking tea at twenty little tables to the
desperate bawling of a chorus of singers. The click of billiard balls
could be heard in the distance. On the table before Svidrigaïlov stood
an open bottle and a glass half full of champagne. In the room he found
also a boy with a little hand organ, a healthy-looking red-cheeked girl
of eighteen, wearing a tucked-up striped skirt, and a Tyrolese hat with
ribbons. In spite of the chorus in the other room, she was singing some
servants' hall song in a rather husky contralto, to the accompaniment of
the organ.

"Come, that's enough," Svidrigaïlov stopped her at Raskolnikov's
entrance. The girl at once broke off and stood waiting respectfully.
She had sung her guttural rhymes, too, with a serious and respectful
expression in her face.

"Hey, Philip, a glass!" shouted Svidrigaïlov.

"I won't drink anything," said Raskolnikov.

"As you like, I didn't mean it for you. Drink, Katia! I don't want
anything more to-day, you can go." He poured her out a full glass, and
laid down a yellow note.

Katia drank off her glass of wine, as women do, without putting it down,
in twenty gulps, took the note and kissed Svidrigaïlov's hand, which he
allowed quite seriously. She went out of the room and the boy trailed
after her with the organ. Both had been brought in from the street.
Svidrigaïlov had not been a week in Petersburg, but everything about him
was already, so to speak, on a patriarchal footing; the waiter, Philip,
was by now an old friend and very obsequious.

The door leading to the saloon had a lock on it. Svidrigaïlov was at
home in this room and perhaps spent whole days in it. The tavern was
dirty and wretched, not even second-rate.

"I was going to see you and looking for you," Raskolnikov began, "but
I don't know what made me turn from the Hay Market into the X. Prospect
just now. I never take this turning. I turn to the right from the Hay
Market. And this isn't the way to you. I simply turned and here you are.
It is strange!"

"Why don't you say at once 'it's a miracle'?"

"Because it may be only chance."

"Oh, that's the way with all you folk," laughed Svidrigaïlov. "You won't
admit it, even if you do inwardly believe it a miracle! Here you say
that it may be only chance. And what cowards they all are here, about
having an opinion of their own, you can't fancy, Rodion Romanovitch. I
don't mean you, you have an opinion of your own and are not afraid to
have it. That's how it was you attracted my curiosity."

"Nothing else?"

"Well, that's enough, you know," Svidrigaïlov was obviously exhilarated,
but only slightly so, he had not had more than half a glass of wine.

"I fancy you came to see me before you knew that I was capable of having
what you call an opinion of my own," observed Raskolnikov.

"Oh, well, it was a different matter. Everyone has his own plans. And
apropos of the miracle let me tell you that I think you have been asleep
for the last two or three days. I told you of this tavern myself, there
is no miracle in your coming straight here. I explained the way myself,
told you where it was, and the hours you could find me here. Do you
remember?"

"I don't remember," answered Raskolnikov with surprise.

"I believe you. I told you twice. The address has been stamped
mechanically on your memory. You turned this way mechanically and yet
precisely according to the direction, though you are not aware of
it. When I told you then, I hardly hoped you understood me. You give
yourself away too much, Rodion Romanovitch. And another thing, I'm
convinced there are lots of people in Petersburg who talk to themselves
as they walk. This is a town of crazy people. If only we had scientific
men, doctors, lawyers and philosophers might make most valuable
investigations in Petersburg each in his own line. There are few places
where there are so many gloomy, strong and queer influences on the soul
of man as in Petersburg. The mere influences of climate mean so much.
And it's the administrative centre of all Russia and its character must
be reflected on the whole country. But that is neither here nor there
now. The point is that I have several times watched you. You walk out
of your house--holding your head high--twenty paces from home you let it
sink, and fold your hands behind your back. You look and evidently see
nothing before nor beside you. At last you begin moving your lips and
talking to yourself, and sometimes you wave one hand and declaim, and at
last stand still in the middle of the road. That's not at all the thing.
Someone may be watching you besides me, and it won't do you any good.
It's nothing really to do with me and I can't cure you, but, of course,
you understand me."

"Do you know that I am being followed?" asked Raskolnikov, looking
inquisitively at him.

"No, I know nothing about it," said Svidrigaïlov, seeming surprised.

"Well, then, let us leave me alone," Raskolnikov muttered, frowning.

"Very good, let us leave you alone."

"You had better tell me, if you come here to drink, and directed me
twice to come here to you, why did you hide, and try to get away just
now when I looked at the window from the street? I saw it."

"He-he! And why was it you lay on your sofa with closed eyes and
pretended to be asleep, though you were wide awake while I stood in your
doorway? I saw it."

"I may have had... reasons. You know that yourself."

"And I may have had my reasons, though you don't know them."

Raskolnikov dropped his right elbow on the table, leaned his chin in the
fingers of his right hand, and stared intently at Svidrigaïlov. For a
full minute he scrutinised his face, which had impressed him before. It
was a strange face, like a mask; white and red, with bright red lips,
with a flaxen beard, and still thick flaxen hair. His eyes were somehow
too blue and their expression somehow too heavy and fixed. There was
something awfully unpleasant in that handsome face, which looked so
wonderfully young for his age. Svidrigaïlov was smartly dressed in light
summer clothes and was particularly dainty in his linen. He wore a huge
ring with a precious stone in it.

"Have I got to bother myself about you, too, now?" said Raskolnikov
suddenly, coming with nervous impatience straight to the point. "Even
though perhaps you are the most dangerous man if you care to injure me,
I don't want to put myself out any more. I will show you at once that I
don't prize myself as you probably think I do. I've come to tell you at
once that if you keep to your former intentions with regard to my sister
and if you think to derive any benefit in that direction from what has
been discovered of late, I will kill you before you get me locked up.
You can reckon on my word. You know that I can keep it. And in the
second place if you want to tell me anything--for I keep fancying all
this time that you have something to tell me--make haste and tell it,
for time is precious and very likely it will soon be too late."

"Why in such haste?" asked Svidrigaïlov, looking at him curiously.

"Everyone has his plans," Raskolnikov answered gloomily and impatiently.

"You urged me yourself to frankness just now, and at the first question
you refuse to answer," Svidrigaïlov observed with a smile. "You
keep fancying that I have aims of my own and so you look at me with
suspicion. Of course it's perfectly natural in your position. But
though I should like to be friends with you, I shan't trouble myself
to convince you of the contrary. The game isn't worth the candle and I
wasn't intending to talk to you about anything special."

"What did you want me, for, then? It was you who came hanging about me."

"Why, simply as an interesting subject for observation. I liked the
fantastic nature of your position--that's what it was! Besides you are
the brother of a person who greatly interested me, and from that person
I had in the past heard a very great deal about you, from which I
gathered that you had a great influence over her; isn't that enough?
Ha-ha-ha! Still I must admit that your question is rather complex, and
is difficult for me to answer. Here, you, for instance, have come to me
not only for a definite object, but for the sake of hearing something
new. Isn't that so? Isn't that so?" persisted Svidrigaïlov with a sly
smile. "Well, can't you fancy then that I, too, on my way here in the
train was reckoning on you, on your telling me something new, and on my
making some profit out of you! You see what rich men we are!"

"What profit could you make?"

"How can I tell you? How do I know? You see in what a tavern I spend all
my time and it's my enjoyment, that's to say it's no great enjoyment,
but one must sit somewhere; that poor Katia now--you saw her?... If only
I had been a glutton now, a club gourmand, but you see I can eat this."

He pointed to a little table in the corner where the remnants of a
terrible-looking beef-steak and potatoes lay on a tin dish.

"Have you dined, by the way? I've had something and want nothing more.
I don't drink, for instance, at all. Except for champagne I never touch
anything, and not more than a glass of that all the evening, and even
that is enough to make my head ache. I ordered it just now to wind
myself up, for I am just going off somewhere and you see me in a
peculiar state of mind. That was why I hid myself just now like a
schoolboy, for I was afraid you would hinder me. But I believe," he
pulled out his watch, "I can spend an hour with you. It's half-past
four now. If only I'd been something, a landowner, a father, a cavalry
officer, a photographer, a journalist... I am nothing, no specialty,
and sometimes I am positively bored. I really thought you would tell me
something new."

"But what are you, and why have you come here?"

"What am I? You know, a gentleman, I served for two years in the
cavalry, then I knocked about here in Petersburg, then I married Marfa
Petrovna and lived in the country. There you have my biography!"

"You are a gambler, I believe?"

"No, a poor sort of gambler. A card-sharper--not a gambler."

"You have been a card-sharper then?"

"Yes, I've been a card-sharper too."

"Didn't you get thrashed sometimes?"

"It did happen. Why?"

"Why, you might have challenged them... altogether it must have been
lively."

"I won't contradict you, and besides I am no hand at philosophy. I
confess that I hastened here for the sake of the women."

"As soon as you buried Marfa Petrovna?"

"Quite so," Svidrigaïlov smiled with engaging candour. "What of it? You
seem to find something wrong in my speaking like that about women?"

"You ask whether I find anything wrong in vice?"

"Vice! Oh, that's what you are after! But I'll answer you in order,
first about women in general; you know I am fond of talking. Tell me,
what should I restrain myself for? Why should I give up women, since I
have a passion for them? It's an occupation, anyway."

"So you hope for nothing here but vice?"

"Oh, very well, for vice then. You insist on its being vice. But anyway
I like a direct question. In this vice at least there is something
permanent, founded indeed upon nature and not dependent on fantasy,
something present in the blood like an ever-burning ember, for ever
setting one on fire and, maybe, not to be quickly extinguished, even
with years. You'll agree it's an occupation of a sort."

"That's nothing to rejoice at, it's a disease and a dangerous one."

"Oh, that's what you think, is it! I agree, that it is a disease like
everything that exceeds moderation. And, of course, in this one must
exceed moderation. But in the first place, everybody does so in one way
or another, and in the second place, of course, one ought to be moderate
and prudent, however mean it may be, but what am I to do? If I hadn't
this, I might have to shoot myself. I am ready to admit that a decent
man ought to put up with being bored, but yet..."

"And could you shoot yourself?"

"Oh, come!" Svidrigaïlov parried with disgust. "Please don't speak of
it," he added hurriedly and with none of the bragging tone he had shown
in all the previous conversation. His face quite changed. "I admit it's
an unpardonable weakness, but I can't help it. I am afraid of death and
I dislike its being talked of. Do you know that I am to a certain extent
a mystic?"

"Ah, the apparitions of Marfa Petrovna! Do they still go on visiting
you?"

"Oh, don't talk of them; there have been no more in Petersburg, confound
them!" he cried with an air of irritation. "Let's rather talk of that...
though... H'm! I have not much time, and can't stay long with you,
it's a pity! I should have found plenty to tell you."

"What's your engagement, a woman?"

"Yes, a woman, a casual incident.... No, that's not what I want to talk
of."

"And the hideousness, the filthiness of all your surroundings, doesn't
that affect you? Have you lost the strength to stop yourself?"

"And do you pretend to strength, too? He-he-he! You surprised me just
now, Rodion Romanovitch, though I knew beforehand it would be so.
You preach to me about vice and æsthetics! You--a Schiller, you--an
idealist! Of course that's all as it should be and it would be
surprising if it were not so, yet it is strange in reality.... Ah,
what a pity I have no time, for you're a most interesting type! And,
by-the-way, are you fond of Schiller? I am awfully fond of him."

"But what a braggart you are," Raskolnikov said with some disgust.

"Upon my word, I am not," answered Svidrigaïlov laughing. "However, I
won't dispute it, let me be a braggart, why not brag, if it hurts no
one? I spent seven years in the country with Marfa Petrovna, so now when
I come across an intelligent person like you--intelligent and highly
interesting--I am simply glad to talk and, besides, I've drunk that
half-glass of champagne and it's gone to my head a little. And besides,
there's a certain fact that has wound me up tremendously, but about that
I... will keep quiet. Where are you off to?" he asked in alarm.

Raskolnikov had begun getting up. He felt oppressed and stifled and,
as it were, ill at ease at having come here. He felt convinced that
Svidrigaïlov was the most worthless scoundrel on the face of the earth.

"A-ach! Sit down, stay a little!" Svidrigaïlov begged. "Let them bring
you some tea, anyway. Stay a little, I won't talk nonsense, about
myself, I mean. I'll tell you something. If you like I'll tell you how a
woman tried 'to save' me, as you would call it? It will be an answer to
your first question indeed, for the woman was your sister. May I tell
you? It will help to spend the time."

"Tell me, but I trust that you..."

"Oh, don't be uneasy. Besides, even in a worthless low fellow like me,
Avdotya Romanovna can only excite the deepest respect."



CHAPTER IV

"You know perhaps--yes, I told you myself," began Svidrigaïlov, "that
I was in the debtors' prison here, for an immense sum, and had not
any expectation of being able to pay it. There's no need to go into
particulars how Marfa Petrovna bought me out; do you know to what a
point of insanity a woman can sometimes love? She was an honest woman,
and very sensible, although completely uneducated. Would you believe
that this honest and jealous woman, after many scenes of hysterics and
reproaches, condescended to enter into a kind of contract with me which
she kept throughout our married life? She was considerably older than
I, and besides, she always kept a clove or something in her mouth. There
was so much swinishness in my soul and honesty too, of a sort, as to
tell her straight out that I couldn't be absolutely faithful to her.
This confession drove her to frenzy, but yet she seems in a way to have
liked my brutal frankness. She thought it showed I was unwilling to
deceive her if I warned her like this beforehand and for a jealous
woman, you know, that's the first consideration. After many tears an
unwritten contract was drawn up between us: first, that I would never
leave Marfa Petrovna and would always be her husband; secondly, that I
would never absent myself without her permission; thirdly, that I would
never set up a permanent mistress; fourthly, in return for this, Marfa
Petrovna gave me a free hand with the maidservants, but only with her
secret knowledge; fifthly, God forbid my falling in love with a woman of
our class; sixthly, in case I--which God forbid--should be visited by
a great serious passion I was bound to reveal it to Marfa Petrovna. On
this last score, however, Marfa Petrovna was fairly at ease. She was a
sensible woman and so she could not help looking upon me as a dissolute
profligate incapable of real love. But a sensible woman and a jealous
woman are two very different things, and that's where the trouble
came in. But to judge some people impartially we must renounce certain
preconceived opinions and our habitual attitude to the ordinary people
about us. I have reason to have faith in your judgment rather than
in anyone's. Perhaps you have already heard a great deal that was
ridiculous and absurd about Marfa Petrovna. She certainly had some very
ridiculous ways, but I tell you frankly that I feel really sorry for the
innumerable woes of which I was the cause. Well, and that's enough, I
think, by way of a decorous _oraison funèbre_ for the most tender wife
of a most tender husband. When we quarrelled, I usually held my tongue
and did not irritate her and that gentlemanly conduct rarely failed to
attain its object, it influenced her, it pleased her, indeed. These were
times when she was positively proud of me. But your sister she couldn't
put up with, anyway. And however she came to risk taking such a
beautiful creature into her house as a governess. My explanation is that
Marfa Petrovna was an ardent and impressionable woman and simply fell
in love herself--literally fell in love--with your sister. Well, little
wonder--look at Avdotya Romanovna! I saw the danger at the first glance
and what do you think, I resolved not to look at her even. But Avdotya
Romanovna herself made the first step, would you believe it? Would you
believe it too that Marfa Petrovna was positively angry with me at first
for my persistent silence about your sister, for my careless reception
of her continual adoring praises of Avdotya Romanovna. I don't know
what it was she wanted! Well, of course, Marfa Petrovna told Avdotya
Romanovna every detail about me. She had the unfortunate habit of
telling literally everyone all our family secrets and continually
complaining of me; how could she fail to confide in such a delightful
new friend? I expect they talked of nothing else but me and no doubt
Avdotya Romanovna heard all those dark mysterious rumours that were
current about me.... I don't mind betting that you too have heard
something of the sort already?"

"I have. Luzhin charged you with having caused the death of a child. Is
that true?"

"Don't refer to those vulgar tales, I beg," said Svidrigaïlov with
disgust and annoyance. "If you insist on wanting to know about all that
idiocy, I will tell you one day, but now..."

"I was told too about some footman of yours in the country whom you
treated badly."

"I beg you to drop the subject," Svidrigaïlov interrupted again with
obvious impatience.

"Was that the footman who came to you after death to fill your pipe?...
you told me about it yourself." Raskolnikov felt more and more
irritated.

Svidrigaïlov looked at him attentively and Raskolnikov fancied he caught
a flash of spiteful mockery in that look. But Svidrigaïlov restrained
himself and answered very civilly:

"Yes, it was. I see that you, too, are extremely interested and shall
feel it my duty to satisfy your curiosity at the first opportunity. Upon
my soul! I see that I really might pass for a romantic figure with
some people. Judge how grateful I must be to Marfa Petrovna for having
repeated to Avdotya Romanovna such mysterious and interesting gossip
about me. I dare not guess what impression it made on her, but in any
case it worked in my interests. With all Avdotya Romanovna's natural
aversion and in spite of my invariably gloomy and repellent aspect--she
did at least feel pity for me, pity for a lost soul. And if once a
girl's heart is moved to _pity_, it's more dangerous than anything. She
is bound to want to 'save him,' to bring him to his senses, and lift
him up and draw him to nobler aims, and restore him to new life and
usefulness--well, we all know how far such dreams can go. I saw at once
that the bird was flying into the cage of herself. And I too made ready.
I think you are frowning, Rodion Romanovitch? There's no need. As you
know, it all ended in smoke. (Hang it all, what a lot I am drinking!)
Do you know, I always, from the very beginning, regretted that it wasn't
your sister's fate to be born in the second or third century A.D., as
the daughter of a reigning prince or some governor or pro-consul in Asia
Minor. She would undoubtedly have been one of those who would endure
martyrdom and would have smiled when they branded her bosom with hot
pincers. And she would have gone to it of herself. And in the fourth or
fifth century she would have walked away into the Egyptian desert and
would have stayed there thirty years living on roots and ecstasies and
visions. She is simply thirsting to face some torture for someone, and
if she can't get her torture, she'll throw herself out of a window. I've
heard something of a Mr. Razumihin--he's said to be a sensible fellow;
his surname suggests it, indeed. He's probably a divinity student. Well,
he'd better look after your sister! I believe I understand her, and I am
proud of it. But at the beginning of an acquaintance, as you know, one
is apt to be more heedless and stupid. One doesn't see clearly. Hang it
all, why is she so handsome? It's not my fault. In fact, it began on
my side with a most irresistible physical desire. Avdotya Romanovna is
awfully chaste, incredibly and phenomenally so. Take note, I tell you
this about your sister as a fact. She is almost morbidly chaste, in
spite of her broad intelligence, and it will stand in her way. There
happened to be a girl in the house then, Parasha, a black-eyed
wench, whom I had never seen before--she had just come from another
village--very pretty, but incredibly stupid: she burst into tears,
wailed so that she could be heard all over the place and caused scandal.
One day after dinner Avdotya Romanovna followed me into an avenue in
the garden and with flashing eyes _insisted_ on my leaving poor Parasha
alone. It was almost our first conversation by ourselves. I, of course,
was only too pleased to obey her wishes, tried to appear disconcerted,
embarrassed, in fact played my part not badly. Then came interviews,
mysterious conversations, exhortations, entreaties, supplications, even
tears--would you believe it, even tears? Think what the passion for
propaganda will bring some girls to! I, of course, threw it all on
my destiny, posed as hungering and thirsting for light, and finally
resorted to the most powerful weapon in the subjection of the
female heart, a weapon which never fails one. It's the well-known
resource--flattery. Nothing in the world is harder than speaking the
truth and nothing easier than flattery. If there's the hundredth part
of a false note in speaking the truth, it leads to a discord, and that
leads to trouble. But if all, to the last note, is false in flattery, it
is just as agreeable, and is heard not without satisfaction. It may be
a coarse satisfaction, but still a satisfaction. And however coarse the
flattery, at least half will be sure to seem true. That's so for all
stages of development and classes of society. A vestal virgin might be
seduced by flattery. I can never remember without laughter how I once
seduced a lady who was devoted to her husband, her children, and her
principles. What fun it was and how little trouble! And the lady really
had principles--of her own, anyway. All my tactics lay in simply being
utterly annihilated and prostrate before her purity. I flattered her
shamelessly, and as soon as I succeeded in getting a pressure of
the hand, even a glance from her, I would reproach myself for having
snatched it by force, and would declare that she had resisted, so that
I could never have gained anything but for my being so unprincipled.
I maintained that she was so innocent that she could not foresee my
treachery, and yielded to me unconsciously, unawares, and so on. In
fact, I triumphed, while my lady remained firmly convinced that she was
innocent, chaste, and faithful to all her duties and obligations and
had succumbed quite by accident. And how angry she was with me when I
explained to her at last that it was my sincere conviction that she was
just as eager as I. Poor Marfa Petrovna was awfully weak on the side of
flattery, and if I had only cared to, I might have had all her property
settled on me during her lifetime. (I am drinking an awful lot of wine
now and talking too much.) I hope you won't be angry if I mention now
that I was beginning to produce the same effect on Avdotya Romanovna.
But I was stupid and impatient and spoiled it all. Avdotya Romanovna had
several times--and one time in particular--been greatly displeased by
the expression of my eyes, would you believe it? There was sometimes a
light in them which frightened her and grew stronger and stronger and
more unguarded till it was hateful to her. No need to go into detail,
but we parted. There I acted stupidly again. I fell to jeering in the
coarsest way at all such propaganda and efforts to convert me; Parasha
came on to the scene again, and not she alone; in fact there was a
tremendous to-do. Ah, Rodion Romanovitch, if you could only see how your
sister's eyes can flash sometimes! Never mind my being drunk at this
moment and having had a whole glass of wine. I am speaking the truth.
I assure you that this glance has haunted my dreams; the very rustle of
her dress was more than I could stand at last. I really began to think
that I might become epileptic. I could never have believed that I could
be moved to such a frenzy. It was essential, indeed, to be reconciled,
but by then it was impossible. And imagine what I did then! To what
a pitch of stupidity a man can be brought by frenzy! Never undertake
anything in a frenzy, Rodion Romanovitch. I reflected that Avdotya
Romanovna was after all a beggar (ach, excuse me, that's not the word...
but does it matter if it expresses the meaning?), that she lived by
her work, that she had her mother and you to keep (ach, hang it, you
are frowning again), and I resolved to offer her all my money--thirty
thousand roubles I could have realised then--if she would run away with
me here, to Petersburg. Of course I should have vowed eternal love,
rapture, and so on. Do you know, I was so wild about her at that time
that if she had told me to poison Marfa Petrovna or to cut her throat
and to marry herself, it would have been done at once! But it ended in
the catastrophe of which you know already. You can fancy how frantic I
was when I heard that Marfa Petrovna had got hold of that scoundrelly
attorney, Luzhin, and had almost made a match between them--which would
really have been just the same thing as I was proposing. Wouldn't it?
Wouldn't it? I notice that you've begun to be very attentive... you
interesting young man...."

Svidrigaïlov struck the table with his fist impatiently. He was flushed.
Raskolnikov saw clearly that the glass or glass and a half of champagne
that he had sipped almost unconsciously was affecting him--and he
resolved to take advantage of the opportunity. He felt very suspicious
of Svidrigaïlov.

"Well, after what you have said, I am fully convinced that you have
come to Petersburg with designs on my sister," he said directly to
Svidrigaïlov, in order to irritate him further.

"Oh, nonsense," said Svidrigaïlov, seeming to rouse himself. "Why, I
told you... besides your sister can't endure me."

"Yes, I am certain that she can't, but that's not the point."

"Are you so sure that she can't?" Svidrigaïlov screwed up his eyes and
smiled mockingly. "You are right, she doesn't love me, but you can
never be sure of what has passed between husband and wife or lover and
mistress. There's always a little corner which remains a secret to
the world and is only known to those two. Will you answer for it that
Avdotya Romanovna regarded me with aversion?"

"From some words you've dropped, I notice that you still have
designs--and of course evil ones--on Dounia and mean to carry them out
promptly."

"What, have I dropped words like that?" Svidrigaïlov asked in naïve
dismay, taking not the slightest notice of the epithet bestowed on his
designs.

"Why, you are dropping them even now. Why are you so frightened? What
are you so afraid of now?"

"Me--afraid? Afraid of you? You have rather to be afraid of me, _cher
ami_. But what nonsense.... I've drunk too much though, I see that. I
was almost saying too much again. Damn the wine! Hi! there, water!"

He snatched up the champagne bottle and flung it without ceremony out of
the window. Philip brought the water.

"That's all nonsense!" said Svidrigaïlov, wetting a towel and putting it
to his head. "But I can answer you in one word and annihilate all your
suspicions. Do you know that I am going to get married?"

"You told me so before."

"Did I? I've forgotten. But I couldn't have told you so for certain for
I had not even seen my betrothed; I only meant to. But now I really
have a betrothed and it's a settled thing, and if it weren't that I have
business that can't be put off, I would have taken you to see them
at once, for I should like to ask your advice. Ach, hang it, only ten
minutes left! See, look at the watch. But I must tell you, for it's an
interesting story, my marriage, in its own way. Where are you off to?
Going again?"

"No, I'm not going away now."

"Not at all? We shall see. I'll take you there, I'll show you my
betrothed, only not now. For you'll soon have to be off. You have to go
to the right and I to the left. Do you know that Madame Resslich, the
woman I am lodging with now, eh? I know what you're thinking, that she's
the woman whose girl they say drowned herself in the winter. Come, are
you listening? She arranged it all for me. You're bored, she said,
you want something to fill up your time. For, you know, I am a gloomy,
depressed person. Do you think I'm light-hearted? No, I'm gloomy. I do
no harm, but sit in a corner without speaking a word for three days at a
time. And that Resslich is a sly hussy, I tell you. I know what she has
got in her mind; she thinks I shall get sick of it, abandon my wife and
depart, and she'll get hold of her and make a profit out of her--in our
class, of course, or higher. She told me the father was a broken-down
retired official, who has been sitting in a chair for the last three
years with his legs paralysed. The mamma, she said, was a sensible
woman. There is a son serving in the provinces, but he doesn't help;
there is a daughter, who is married, but she doesn't visit them. And
they've two little nephews on their hands, as though their own children
were not enough, and they've taken from school their youngest daughter,
a girl who'll be sixteen in another month, so that then she can be
married. She was for me. We went there. How funny it was! I present
myself--a landowner, a widower, of a well-known name, with connections,
with a fortune. What if I am fifty and she is not sixteen? Who thinks
of that? But it's fascinating, isn't it? It is fascinating, ha-ha! You
should have seen how I talked to the papa and mamma. It was worth paying
to have seen me at that moment. She comes in, curtseys, you can fancy,
still in a short frock--an unopened bud! Flushing like a sunset--she had
been told, no doubt. I don't know how you feel about female faces, but
to my mind these sixteen years, these childish eyes, shyness and tears
of bashfulness are better than beauty; and she is a perfect little
picture, too. Fair hair in little curls, like a lamb's, full little rosy
lips, tiny feet, a charmer!... Well, we made friends. I told them I was
in a hurry owing to domestic circumstances, and the next day, that is
the day before yesterday, we were betrothed. When I go now I take her on
my knee at once and keep her there.... Well, she flushes like a sunset
and I kiss her every minute. Her mamma of course impresses on her that
this is her husband and that this must be so. It's simply delicious! The
present betrothed condition is perhaps better than marriage. Here you
have what is called _la nature et la vérité_, ha-ha! I've talked to her
twice, she is far from a fool. Sometimes she steals a look at me that
positively scorches me. Her face is like Raphael's Madonna. You know,
the Sistine Madonna's face has something fantastic in it, the face
of mournful religious ecstasy. Haven't you noticed it? Well, she's
something in that line. The day after we'd been betrothed, I bought her
presents to the value of fifteen hundred roubles--a set of diamonds and
another of pearls and a silver dressing-case as large as this, with all
sorts of things in it, so that even my Madonna's face glowed. I sat her
on my knee, yesterday, and I suppose rather too unceremoniously--she
flushed crimson and the tears started, but she didn't want to show it.
We were left alone, she suddenly flung herself on my neck (for the first
time of her own accord), put her little arms round me, kissed me, and
vowed that she would be an obedient, faithful, and good wife, would make
me happy, would devote all her life, every minute of her life, would
sacrifice everything, everything, and that all she asks in return is
my _respect_, and that she wants 'nothing, nothing more from me, no
presents.' You'll admit that to hear such a confession, alone, from an
angel of sixteen in a muslin frock, with little curls, with a flush
of maiden shyness in her cheeks and tears of enthusiasm in her eyes is
rather fascinating! Isn't it fascinating? It's worth paying for, isn't
it? Well... listen, we'll go to see my betrothed, only not just now!"

"The fact is this monstrous difference in age and development excites
your sensuality! Will you really make such a marriage?"

"Why, of course. Everyone thinks of himself, and he lives most gaily who
knows best how to deceive himself. Ha-ha! But why are you so keen about
virtue? Have mercy on me, my good friend. I am a sinful man. Ha-ha-ha!"

"But you have provided for the children of Katerina Ivanovna. Though...
though you had your own reasons.... I understand it all now."

"I am always fond of children, very fond of them," laughed Svidrigaïlov.
"I can tell you one curious instance of it. The first day I came here I
visited various haunts, after seven years I simply rushed at them. You
probably notice that I am not in a hurry to renew acquaintance with my
old friends. I shall do without them as long as I can. Do you know, when
I was with Marfa Petrovna in the country, I was haunted by the thought
of these places where anyone who knows his way about can find a great
deal. Yes, upon my soul! The peasants have vodka, the educated young
people, shut out from activity, waste themselves in impossible dreams
and visions and are crippled by theories; Jews have sprung up and are
amassing money, and all the rest give themselves up to debauchery. From
the first hour the town reeked of its familiar odours. I chanced to be
in a frightful den--I like my dens dirty--it was a dance, so called, and
there was a _cancan_ such as I never saw in my day. Yes, there you
have progress. All of a sudden I saw a little girl of thirteen, nicely
dressed, dancing with a specialist in that line, with another one
_vis-à-vis_. Her mother was sitting on a chair by the wall. You can't
fancy what a _cancan_ that was! The girl was ashamed, blushed, at
last felt insulted, and began to cry. Her partner seized her and began
whirling her round and performing before her; everyone laughed and--I
like your public, even the _cancan_ public--they laughed and shouted,
'Serves her right--serves her right! Shouldn't bring children!' Well,
it's not my business whether that consoling reflection was logical or
not. I at once fixed on my plan, sat down by the mother, and began by
saying that I too was a stranger and that people here were ill-bred and
that they couldn't distinguish decent folks and treat them with respect,
gave her to understand that I had plenty of money, offered to take them
home in my carriage. I took them home and got to know them. They were
lodging in a miserable little hole and had only just arrived from the
country. She told me that she and her daughter could only regard my
acquaintance as an honour. I found out that they had nothing of their
own and had come to town upon some legal business. I proffered my
services and money. I learnt that they had gone to the dancing saloon
by mistake, believing that it was a genuine dancing class. I offered to
assist in the young girl's education in French and dancing. My offer was
accepted with enthusiasm as an honour--and we are still friendly.... If
you like, we'll go and see them, only not just now."

"Stop! Enough of your vile, nasty anecdotes, depraved vile, sensual
man!"

"Schiller, you are a regular Schiller! _O la vertu va-t-elle se nicher?_
But you know I shall tell you these things on purpose, for the pleasure
of hearing your outcries!"

"I dare say. I can see I am ridiculous myself," muttered Raskolnikov
angrily.

Svidrigaïlov laughed heartily; finally he called Philip, paid his bill,
and began getting up.

"I say, but I am drunk, _assez causé_," he said. "It's been a pleasure."

"I should rather think it must be a pleasure!" cried Raskolnikov,
getting up. "No doubt it is a pleasure for a worn-out profligate to
describe such adventures with a monstrous project of the same sort in
his mind--especially under such circumstances and to such a man as
me.... It's stimulating!"

"Well, if you come to that," Svidrigaïlov answered, scrutinising
Raskolnikov with some surprise, "if you come to that, you are a thorough
cynic yourself. You've plenty to make you so, anyway. You can understand
a great deal... and you can do a great deal too. But enough. I sincerely
regret not having had more talk with you, but I shan't lose sight of
you.... Only wait a bit."

Svidrigaïlov walked out of the restaurant. Raskolnikov walked out after
him. Svidrigaïlov was not however very drunk, the wine had affected him
for a moment, but it was passing off every minute. He was preoccupied
with something of importance and was frowning. He was apparently excited
and uneasy in anticipation of something. His manner to Raskolnikov had
changed during the last few minutes, and he was ruder and more sneering
every moment. Raskolnikov noticed all this, and he too was uneasy. He
became very suspicious of Svidrigaïlov and resolved to follow him.

They came out on to the pavement.

"You go to the right, and I to the left, or if you like, the other way.
Only _adieu, mon plaisir_, may we meet again."

And he walked to the right towards the Hay Market.



CHAPTER V

Raskolnikov walked after him.

"What's this?" cried Svidrigaïlov turning round, "I thought I said..."

"It means that I am not going to lose sight of you now."

"What?"

Both stood still and gazed at one another, as though measuring their
strength.

"From all your half tipsy stories," Raskolnikov observed harshly, "I am
_positive_ that you have not given up your designs on my sister, but
are pursuing them more actively than ever. I have learnt that my sister
received a letter this morning. You have hardly been able to sit still
all this time.... You may have unearthed a wife on the way, but that
means nothing. I should like to make certain myself."

Raskolnikov could hardly have said himself what he wanted and of what he
wished to make certain.

"Upon my word! I'll call the police!"

"Call away!"

Again they stood for a minute facing each other. At last Svidrigaïlov's
face changed. Having satisfied himself that Raskolnikov was not
frightened at his threat, he assumed a mirthful and friendly air.

"What a fellow! I purposely refrained from referring to your affair,
though I am devoured by curiosity. It's a fantastic affair. I've put it
off till another time, but you're enough to rouse the dead.... Well, let
us go, only I warn you beforehand I am only going home for a moment,
to get some money; then I shall lock up the flat, take a cab and go to
spend the evening at the Islands. Now, now are you going to follow me?"

"I'm coming to your lodgings, not to see you but Sofya Semyonovna, to
say I'm sorry not to have been at the funeral."

"That's as you like, but Sofya Semyonovna is not at home. She has taken
the three children to an old lady of high rank, the patroness of some
orphan asylums, whom I used to know years ago. I charmed the old lady by
depositing a sum of money with her to provide for the three children of
Katerina Ivanovna and subscribing to the institution as well. I told her
too the story of Sofya Semyonovna in full detail, suppressing nothing.
It produced an indescribable effect on her. That's why Sofya Semyonovna
has been invited to call to-day at the X. Hotel where the lady is
staying for the time."

"No matter, I'll come all the same."

"As you like, it's nothing to me, but I won't come with you; here we are
at home. By the way, I am convinced that you regard me with suspicion
just because I have shown such delicacy and have not so far troubled
you with questions... you understand? It struck you as extraordinary; I
don't mind betting it's that. Well, it teaches one to show delicacy!"

"And to listen at doors!"

"Ah, that's it, is it?" laughed Svidrigaïlov. "Yes, I should have been
surprised if you had let that pass after all that has happened. Ha-ha!
Though I did understand something of the pranks you had been up to and
were telling Sofya Semyonovna about, what was the meaning of it? Perhaps
I am quite behind the times and can't understand. For goodness' sake,
explain it, my dear boy. Expound the latest theories!"

"You couldn't have heard anything. You're making it all up!"

"But I'm not talking about that (though I did hear something). No, I'm
talking of the way you keep sighing and groaning now. The Schiller in
you is in revolt every moment, and now you tell me not to listen at
doors. If that's how you feel, go and inform the police that you had
this mischance: you made a little mistake in your theory. But if you are
convinced that one mustn't listen at doors, but one may murder old women
at one's pleasure, you'd better be off to America and make haste. Run,
young man! There may still be time. I'm speaking sincerely. Haven't you
the money? I'll give you the fare."

"I'm not thinking of that at all," Raskolnikov interrupted with disgust.

"I understand (but don't put yourself out, don't discuss it if you don't
want to). I understand the questions you are worrying over--moral ones,
aren't they? Duties of citizen and man? Lay them all aside. They are
nothing to you now, ha-ha! You'll say you are still a man and a citizen.
If so you ought not to have got into this coil. It's no use taking up a
job you are not fit for. Well, you'd better shoot yourself, or don't you
want to?"

"You seem trying to enrage me, to make me leave you."

"What a queer fellow! But here we are. Welcome to the staircase. You
see, that's the way to Sofya Semyonovna. Look, there is no one at home.
Don't you believe me? Ask Kapernaumov. She leaves the key with him. Here
is Madame de Kapernaumov herself. Hey, what? She is rather deaf. Has she
gone out? Where? Did you hear? She is not in and won't be till late in
the evening probably. Well, come to my room; you wanted to come and see
me, didn't you? Here we are. Madame Resslich's not at home. She is a
woman who is always busy, an excellent woman I assure you.... She might
have been of use to you if you had been a little more sensible. Now,
see! I take this five-per-cent bond out of the bureau--see what a lot
I've got of them still--this one will be turned into cash to-day. I
mustn't waste any more time. The bureau is locked, the flat is locked,
and here we are again on the stairs. Shall we take a cab? I'm going to
the Islands. Would you like a lift? I'll take this carriage. Ah, you
refuse? You are tired of it! Come for a drive! I believe it will come on
to rain. Never mind, we'll put down the hood...."

Svidrigaïlov was already in the carriage. Raskolnikov decided that his
suspicions were at least for that moment unjust. Without answering a
word he turned and walked back towards the Hay Market. If he had only
turned round on his way he might have seen Svidrigaïlov get out not a
hundred paces off, dismiss the cab and walk along the pavement. But he
had turned the corner and could see nothing. Intense disgust drew him
away from Svidrigaïlov.

"To think that I could for one instant have looked for help from that
coarse brute, that depraved sensualist and blackguard!" he cried.

Raskolnikov's judgment was uttered too lightly and hastily: there was
something about Svidrigaïlov which gave him a certain original, even a
mysterious character. As concerned his sister, Raskolnikov was convinced
that Svidrigaïlov would not leave her in peace. But it was too tiresome
and unbearable to go on thinking and thinking about this.

When he was alone, he had not gone twenty paces before he sank, as
usual, into deep thought. On the bridge he stood by the railing and
began gazing at the water. And his sister was standing close by him.

He met her at the entrance to the bridge, but passed by without seeing
her. Dounia had never met him like this in the street before and was
struck with dismay. She stood still and did not know whether to call
to him or not. Suddenly she saw Svidrigaïlov coming quickly from the
direction of the Hay Market.

He seemed to be approaching cautiously. He did not go on to the
bridge, but stood aside on the pavement, doing all he could to avoid
Raskolnikov's seeing him. He had observed Dounia for some time and had
been making signs to her. She fancied he was signalling to beg her not
to speak to her brother, but to come to him.

That was what Dounia did. She stole by her brother and went up to
Svidrigaïlov.

"Let us make haste away," Svidrigaïlov whispered to her, "I don't want
Rodion Romanovitch to know of our meeting. I must tell you I've been
sitting with him in the restaurant close by, where he looked me up and
I had great difficulty in getting rid of him. He has somehow heard of
my letter to you and suspects something. It wasn't you who told him, of
course, but if not you, who then?"

"Well, we've turned the corner now," Dounia interrupted, "and my brother
won't see us. I have to tell you that I am going no further with you.
Speak to me here. You can tell it all in the street."

"In the first place, I can't say it in the street; secondly, you must
hear Sofya Semyonovna too; and, thirdly, I will show you some papers....
Oh well, if you won't agree to come with me, I shall refuse to give
any explanation and go away at once. But I beg you not to forget that
a very curious secret of your beloved brother's is entirely in my
keeping."

Dounia stood still, hesitating, and looked at Svidrigaïlov with
searching eyes.

"What are you afraid of?" he observed quietly. "The town is not the
country. And even in the country you did me more harm than I did you."

"Have you prepared Sofya Semyonovna?"

"No, I have not said a word to her and am not quite certain whether she
is at home now. But most likely she is. She has buried her stepmother
to-day: she is not likely to go visiting on such a day. For the time I
don't want to speak to anyone about it and I half regret having spoken
to you. The slightest indiscretion is as bad as betrayal in a thing like
this. I live there in that house, we are coming to it. That's the porter
of our house--he knows me very well; you see, he's bowing; he sees I'm
coming with a lady and no doubt he has noticed your face already and you
will be glad of that if you are afraid of me and suspicious. Excuse
my putting things so coarsely. I haven't a flat to myself; Sofya
Semyonovna's room is next to mine--she lodges in the next flat. The
whole floor is let out in lodgings. Why are you frightened like a child?
Am I really so terrible?"

Svidrigaïlov's lips were twisted in a condescending smile; but he was in
no smiling mood. His heart was throbbing and he could scarcely breathe.
He spoke rather loud to cover his growing excitement. But Dounia did not
notice this peculiar excitement, she was so irritated by his remark that
she was frightened of him like a child and that he was so terrible to
her.

"Though I know that you are not a man... of honour, I am not in the
least afraid of you. Lead the way," she said with apparent composure,
but her face was very pale.

Svidrigaïlov stopped at Sonia's room.

"Allow me to inquire whether she is at home.... She is not. How
unfortunate! But I know she may come quite soon. If she's gone out, it
can only be to see a lady about the orphans. Their mother is dead....
I've been meddling and making arrangements for them. If Sofya Semyonovna
does not come back in ten minutes, I will send her to you, to-day if
you like. This is my flat. These are my two rooms. Madame Resslich,
my landlady, has the next room. Now, look this way. I will show you
my chief piece of evidence: this door from my bedroom leads into two
perfectly empty rooms, which are to let. Here they are... You must look
into them with some attention."

Svidrigaïlov occupied two fairly large furnished rooms. Dounia was
looking about her mistrustfully, but saw nothing special in the
furniture or position of the rooms. Yet there was something to observe,
for instance, that Svidrigaïlov's flat was exactly between two sets of
almost uninhabited apartments. His rooms were not entered directly
from the passage, but through the landlady's two almost empty rooms.
Unlocking a door leading out of his bedroom, Svidrigaïlov showed Dounia
the two empty rooms that were to let. Dounia stopped in the doorway, not
knowing what she was called to look upon, but Svidrigaïlov hastened to
explain.

"Look here, at this second large room. Notice that door, it's locked.
By the door stands a chair, the only one in the two rooms. I brought it
from my rooms so as to listen more conveniently. Just the other side of
the door is Sofya Semyonovna's table; she sat there talking to Rodion
Romanovitch. And I sat here listening on two successive evenings, for
two hours each time--and of course I was able to learn something, what
do you think?"

"You listened?"

"Yes, I did. Now come back to my room; we can't sit down here."

He brought Avdotya Romanovna back into his sitting-room and offered her
a chair. He sat down at the opposite side of the table, at least seven
feet from her, but probably there was the same glow in his eyes which
had once frightened Dounia so much. She shuddered and once more looked
about her distrustfully. It was an involuntary gesture; she evidently
did not wish to betray her uneasiness. But the secluded position of
Svidrigaïlov's lodging had suddenly struck her. She wanted to ask
whether his landlady at least were at home, but pride kept her from
asking. Moreover, she had another trouble in her heart incomparably
greater than fear for herself. She was in great distress.

"Here is your letter," she said, laying it on the table. "Can it be true
what you write? You hint at a crime committed, you say, by my brother.
You hint at it too clearly; you daren't deny it now. I must tell you
that I'd heard of this stupid story before you wrote and don't believe a
word of it. It's a disgusting and ridiculous suspicion. I know the story
and why and how it was invented. You can have no proofs. You promised to
prove it. Speak! But let me warn you that I don't believe you! I don't
believe you!"

Dounia said this, speaking hurriedly, and for an instant the colour
rushed to her face.

"If you didn't believe it, how could you risk coming alone to my rooms?
Why have you come? Simply from curiosity?"

"Don't torment me. Speak, speak!"

"There's no denying that you are a brave girl. Upon my word, I thought
you would have asked Mr. Razumihin to escort you here. But he was not
with you nor anywhere near. I was on the look-out. It's spirited of
you, it proves you wanted to spare Rodion Romanovitch. But everything
is divine in you.... About your brother, what am I to say to you? You've
just seen him yourself. What did you think of him?"

"Surely that's not the only thing you are building on?"

"No, not on that, but on his own words. He came here on two successive
evenings to see Sofya Semyonovna. I've shown you where they sat. He made
a full confession to her. He is a murderer. He killed an old woman, a
pawnbroker, with whom he had pawned things himself. He killed her sister
too, a pedlar woman called Lizaveta, who happened to come in while he
was murdering her sister. He killed them with an axe he brought with
him. He murdered them to rob them and he did rob them. He took money and
various things.... He told all this, word for word, to Sofya Semyonovna,
the only person who knows his secret. But she has had no share by word
or deed in the murder; she was as horrified at it as you are now. Don't
be anxious, she won't betray him."

"It cannot be," muttered Dounia, with white lips. She gasped for breath.
"It cannot be. There was not the slightest cause, no sort of ground....
It's a lie, a lie!"

"He robbed her, that was the cause, he took money and things. It's true
that by his own admission he made no use of the money or things, but hid
them under a stone, where they are now. But that was because he dared
not make use of them."

"But how could he steal, rob? How could he dream of it?" cried Dounia,
and she jumped up from the chair. "Why, you know him, and you've seen
him, can he be a thief?"

She seemed to be imploring Svidrigaïlov; she had entirely forgotten her
fear.

"There are thousands and millions of combinations and possibilities,
Avdotya Romanovna. A thief steals and knows he is a scoundrel, but I've
heard of a gentleman who broke open the mail. Who knows, very likely he
thought he was doing a gentlemanly thing! Of course I should not have
believed it myself if I'd been told of it as you have, but I believe my
own ears. He explained all the causes of it to Sofya Semyonovna too, but
she did not believe her ears at first, yet she believed her own eyes at
last."

"What... were the causes?"

"It's a long story, Avdotya Romanovna. Here's... how shall I tell
you?--A theory of a sort, the same one by which I for instance consider
that a single misdeed is permissible if the principal aim is right, a
solitary wrongdoing and hundreds of good deeds! It's galling too, of
course, for a young man of gifts and overweening pride to know that if
he had, for instance, a paltry three thousand, his whole career, his
whole future would be differently shaped and yet not to have that three
thousand. Add to that, nervous irritability from hunger, from lodging
in a hole, from rags, from a vivid sense of the charm of his social
position and his sister's and mother's position too. Above all, vanity,
pride and vanity, though goodness knows he may have good qualities
too.... I am not blaming him, please don't think it; besides, it's not
my business. A special little theory came in too--a theory of a
sort--dividing mankind, you see, into material and superior persons,
that is persons to whom the law does not apply owing to their
superiority, who make laws for the rest of mankind, the material, that
is. It's all right as a theory, _une théorie comme une autre_. Napoleon
attracted him tremendously, that is, what affected him was that a
great many men of genius have not hesitated at wrongdoing, but have
overstepped the law without thinking about it. He seems to have fancied
that he was a genius too--that is, he was convinced of it for a time. He
has suffered a great deal and is still suffering from the idea that he
could make a theory, but was incapable of boldly overstepping the law,
and so he is not a man of genius. And that's humiliating for a young man
of any pride, in our day especially...."

"But remorse? You deny him any moral feeling then? Is he like that?"

"Ah, Avdotya Romanovna, everything is in a muddle now; not that it was
ever in very good order. Russians in general are broad in their ideas,
Avdotya Romanovna, broad like their land and exceedingly disposed to
the fantastic, the chaotic. But it's a misfortune to be broad without
a special genius. Do you remember what a lot of talk we had together on
this subject, sitting in the evenings on the terrace after supper? Why,
you used to reproach me with breadth! Who knows, perhaps we were talking
at the very time when he was lying here thinking over his plan. There
are no sacred traditions amongst us, especially in the educated class,
Avdotya Romanovna. At the best someone will make them up somehow for
himself out of books or from some old chronicle. But those are for the
most part the learned and all old fogeys, so that it would be almost
ill-bred in a man of society. You know my opinions in general, though. I
never blame anyone. I do nothing at all, I persevere in that. But
we've talked of this more than once before. I was so happy indeed as to
interest you in my opinions.... You are very pale, Avdotya Romanovna."

"I know his theory. I read that article of his about men to whom all is
permitted. Razumihin brought it to me."

"Mr. Razumihin? Your brother's article? In a magazine? Is there such an
article? I didn't know. It must be interesting. But where are you going,
Avdotya Romanovna?"

"I want to see Sofya Semyonovna," Dounia articulated faintly. "How do I
go to her? She has come in, perhaps. I must see her at once. Perhaps
she..."

Avdotya Romanovna could not finish. Her breath literally failed her.

"Sofya Semyonovna will not be back till night, at least I believe not.
She was to have been back at once, but if not, then she will not be in
till quite late."

"Ah, then you are lying! I see... you were lying... lying all the
time.... I don't believe you! I don't believe you!" cried Dounia,
completely losing her head.

Almost fainting, she sank on to a chair which Svidrigaïlov made haste to
give her.

"Avdotya Romanovna, what is it? Control yourself! Here is some water.
Drink a little...."

He sprinkled some water over her. Dounia shuddered and came to herself.

"It has acted violently," Svidrigaïlov muttered to himself, frowning.
"Avdotya Romanovna, calm yourself! Believe me, he has friends. We will
save him. Would you like me to take him abroad? I have money, I can get
a ticket in three days. And as for the murder, he will do all sorts of
good deeds yet, to atone for it. Calm yourself. He may become a great
man yet. Well, how are you? How do you feel?"

"Cruel man! To be able to jeer at it! Let me go..."

"Where are you going?"

"To him. Where is he? Do you know? Why is this door locked? We came in
at that door and now it is locked. When did you manage to lock it?"

"We couldn't be shouting all over the flat on such a subject. I am far
from jeering; it's simply that I'm sick of talking like this. But how
can you go in such a state? Do you want to betray him? You will drive
him to fury, and he will give himself up. Let me tell you, he is already
being watched; they are already on his track. You will simply be giving
him away. Wait a little: I saw him and was talking to him just now. He
can still be saved. Wait a bit, sit down; let us think it over together.
I asked you to come in order to discuss it alone with you and to
consider it thoroughly. But do sit down!"

"How can you save him? Can he really be saved?"

Dounia sat down. Svidrigaïlov sat down beside her.

"It all depends on you, on you, on you alone," he began with glowing
eyes, almost in a whisper and hardly able to utter the words for
emotion.

Dounia drew back from him in alarm. He too was trembling all over.

"You... one word from you, and he is saved. I... I'll save him. I have
money and friends. I'll send him away at once. I'll get a passport,
two passports, one for him and one for me. I have friends... capable
people.... If you like, I'll take a passport for you... for your
mother.... What do you want with Razumihin? I love you too.... I love
you beyond everything.... Let me kiss the hem of your dress, let me, let
me.... The very rustle of it is too much for me. Tell me, 'do that,'
and I'll do it. I'll do everything. I will do the impossible. What you
believe, I will believe. I'll do anything--anything! Don't, don't look
at me like that. Do you know that you are killing me?..."

He was almost beginning to rave.... Something seemed suddenly to go to
his head. Dounia jumped up and rushed to the door.

"Open it! Open it!" she called, shaking the door. "Open it! Is there no
one there?"

Svidrigaïlov got up and came to himself. His still trembling lips slowly
broke into an angry mocking smile.

"There is no one at home," he said quietly and emphatically. "The
landlady has gone out, and it's waste of time to shout like that. You
are only exciting yourself uselessly."

"Where is the key? Open the door at once, at once, base man!"

"I have lost the key and cannot find it."

"This is an outrage," cried Dounia, turning pale as death. She rushed
to the furthest corner, where she made haste to barricade herself with a
little table.

She did not scream, but she fixed her eyes on her tormentor and watched
every movement he made.

Svidrigaïlov remained standing at the other end of the room facing her.
He was positively composed, at least in appearance, but his face was
pale as before. The mocking smile did not leave his face.

"You spoke of outrage just now, Avdotya Romanovna. In that case you
may be sure I've taken measures. Sofya Semyonovna is not at home. The
Kapernaumovs are far away--there are five locked rooms between. I am at
least twice as strong as you are and I have nothing to fear, besides.
For you could not complain afterwards. You surely would not be willing
actually to betray your brother? Besides, no one would believe you. How
should a girl have come alone to visit a solitary man in his lodgings?
So that even if you do sacrifice your brother, you could prove nothing.
It is very difficult to prove an assault, Avdotya Romanovna."

"Scoundrel!" whispered Dounia indignantly.

"As you like, but observe I was only speaking by way of a general
proposition. It's my personal conviction that you are perfectly
right--violence is hateful. I only spoke to show you that you need have
no remorse even if... you were willing to save your brother of your
own accord, as I suggest to you. You would be simply submitting to
circumstances, to violence, in fact, if we must use that word. Think
about it. Your brother's and your mother's fate are in your hands. I
will be your slave... all my life... I will wait here."

Svidrigaïlov sat down on the sofa about eight steps from Dounia. She had
not the slightest doubt now of his unbending determination. Besides, she
knew him. Suddenly she pulled out of her pocket a revolver, cocked it
and laid it in her hand on the table. Svidrigaïlov jumped up.

"Aha! So that's it, is it?" he cried, surprised but smiling maliciously.
"Well, that completely alters the aspect of affairs. You've made things
wonderfully easier for me, Avdotya Romanovna. But where did you get the
revolver? Was it Mr. Razumihin? Why, it's my revolver, an old friend!
And how I've hunted for it! The shooting lessons I've given you in the
country have not been thrown away."

"It's not your revolver, it belonged to Marfa Petrovna, whom you killed,
wretch! There was nothing of yours in her house. I took it when I began
to suspect what you were capable of. If you dare to advance one step, I
swear I'll kill you." She was frantic.

"But your brother? I ask from curiosity," said Svidrigaïlov, still
standing where he was.

"Inform, if you want to! Don't stir! Don't come nearer! I'll shoot! You
poisoned your wife, I know; you are a murderer yourself!" She held the
revolver ready.

"Are you so positive I poisoned Marfa Petrovna?"

"You did! You hinted it yourself; you talked to me of poison.... I know
you went to get it... you had it in readiness.... It was your doing....
It must have been your doing.... Scoundrel!"

"Even if that were true, it would have been for your sake... you would
have been the cause."

"You are lying! I hated you always, always...."

"Oho, Avdotya Romanovna! You seem to have forgotten how you softened
to me in the heat of propaganda. I saw it in your eyes. Do you remember
that moonlight night, when the nightingale was singing?"

"That's a lie," there was a flash of fury in Dounia's eyes, "that's a
lie and a libel!"

"A lie? Well, if you like, it's a lie. I made it up. Women ought not
to be reminded of such things," he smiled. "I know you will shoot, you
pretty wild creature. Well, shoot away!"

Dounia raised the revolver, and deadly pale, gazed at him, measuring the
distance and awaiting the first movement on his part. Her lower lip was
white and quivering and her big black eyes flashed like fire. He had
never seen her so handsome. The fire glowing in her eyes at the moment
she raised the revolver seemed to kindle him and there was a pang of
anguish in his heart. He took a step forward and a shot rang out. The
bullet grazed his hair and flew into the wall behind. He stood still and
laughed softly.

"The wasp has stung me. She aimed straight at my head. What's this?
Blood?" he pulled out his handkerchief to wipe the blood, which flowed
in a thin stream down his right temple. The bullet seemed to have just
grazed the skin.

Dounia lowered the revolver and looked at Svidrigaïlov not so much in
terror as in a sort of wild amazement. She seemed not to understand what
she was doing and what was going on.

"Well, you missed! Fire again, I'll wait," said Svidrigaïlov softly,
still smiling, but gloomily. "If you go on like that, I shall have time
to seize you before you cock again."

Dounia started, quickly cocked the pistol and again raised it.

"Let me be," she cried in despair. "I swear I'll shoot again. I... I'll
kill you."

"Well... at three paces you can hardly help it. But if you don't...
then." His eyes flashed and he took two steps forward. Dounia shot
again: it missed fire.

"You haven't loaded it properly. Never mind, you have another charge
there. Get it ready, I'll wait."

He stood facing her, two paces away, waiting and gazing at her with wild
determination, with feverishly passionate, stubborn, set eyes. Dounia
saw that he would sooner die than let her go. "And... now, of course she
would kill him, at two paces!" Suddenly she flung away the revolver.

"She's dropped it!" said Svidrigaïlov with surprise, and he drew a deep
breath. A weight seemed to have rolled from his heart--perhaps not only
the fear of death; indeed he may scarcely have felt it at that moment.
It was the deliverance from another feeling, darker and more bitter,
which he could not himself have defined.

He went to Dounia and gently put his arm round her waist. She did not
resist, but, trembling like a leaf, looked at him with suppliant eyes.
He tried to say something, but his lips moved without being able to
utter a sound.

"Let me go," Dounia implored. Svidrigaïlov shuddered. Her voice now was
quite different.

"Then you don't love me?" he asked softly. Dounia shook her head.

"And... and you can't? Never?" he whispered in despair.

"Never!"

There followed a moment of terrible, dumb struggle in the heart of
Svidrigaïlov. He looked at her with an indescribable gaze. Suddenly
he withdrew his arm, turned quickly to the window and stood facing it.
Another moment passed.

"Here's the key."

He took it out of the left pocket of his coat and laid it on the table
behind him, without turning or looking at Dounia.

"Take it! Make haste!"

He looked stubbornly out of the window. Dounia went up to the table to
take the key.

"Make haste! Make haste!" repeated Svidrigaïlov, still without turning
or moving. But there seemed a terrible significance in the tone of that
"make haste."

Dounia understood it, snatched up the key, flew to the door, unlocked it
quickly and rushed out of the room. A minute later, beside herself, she
ran out on to the canal bank in the direction of X. Bridge.

Svidrigaïlov remained three minutes standing at the window. At last he
slowly turned, looked about him and passed his hand over his forehead. A
strange smile contorted his face, a pitiful, sad, weak smile, a smile of
despair. The blood, which was already getting dry, smeared his hand.
He looked angrily at it, then wetted a towel and washed his temple.
The revolver which Dounia had flung away lay near the door and suddenly
caught his eye. He picked it up and examined it. It was a little pocket
three-barrel revolver of old-fashioned construction. There were still
two charges and one capsule left in it. It could be fired again. He
thought a little, put the revolver in his pocket, took his hat and went
out.



CHAPTER VI

He spent that evening till ten o'clock going from one low haunt to
another. Katia too turned up and sang another gutter song, how a certain

"villain and tyrant,"

"began kissing Katia."

Svidrigaïlov treated Katia and the organ-grinder and some singers and
the waiters and two little clerks. He was particularly drawn to these
clerks by the fact that they both had crooked noses, one bent to the
left and the other to the right. They took him finally to a pleasure
garden, where he paid for their entrance. There was one lanky
three-year-old pine-tree and three bushes in the garden, besides a
"Vauxhall," which was in reality a drinking-bar where tea too was
served, and there were a few green tables and chairs standing round it.
A chorus of wretched singers and a drunken but exceedingly depressed
German clown from Munich with a red nose entertained the public. The
clerks quarrelled with some other clerks and a fight seemed imminent.
Svidrigaïlov was chosen to decide the dispute. He listened to them for
a quarter of an hour, but they shouted so loud that there was no
possibility of understanding them. The only fact that seemed certain was
that one of them had stolen something and had even succeeded in
selling it on the spot to a Jew, but would not share the spoil with his
companion. Finally it appeared that the stolen object was a teaspoon
belonging to the Vauxhall. It was missed and the affair began to seem
troublesome. Svidrigaïlov paid for the spoon, got up, and walked out of
the garden. It was about six o'clock. He had not drunk a drop of wine
all this time and had ordered tea more for the sake of appearances than
anything.

It was a dark and stifling evening. Threatening storm-clouds came over
the sky about ten o'clock. There was a clap of thunder, and the rain
came down like a waterfall. The water fell not in drops, but beat on the
earth in streams. There were flashes of lightning every minute and each
flash lasted while one could count five.

Drenched to the skin, he went home, locked himself in, opened the
bureau, took out all his money and tore up two or three papers. Then,
putting the money in his pocket, he was about to change his clothes,
but, looking out of the window and listening to the thunder and the
rain, he gave up the idea, took up his hat and went out of the room
without locking the door. He went straight to Sonia. She was at home.

She was not alone: the four Kapernaumov children were with her. She
was giving them tea. She received Svidrigaïlov in respectful silence,
looking wonderingly at his soaking clothes. The children all ran away at
once in indescribable terror.

Svidrigaïlov sat down at the table and asked Sonia to sit beside him.
She timidly prepared to listen.

"I may be going to America, Sofya Semyonovna," said Svidrigaïlov, "and
as I am probably seeing you for the last time, I have come to make some
arrangements. Well, did you see the lady to-day? I know what she said to
you, you need not tell me." (Sonia made a movement and blushed.) "Those
people have their own way of doing things. As to your sisters and your
brother, they are really provided for and the money assigned to them
I've put into safe keeping and have received acknowledgments. You had
better take charge of the receipts, in case anything happens. Here, take
them! Well now, that's settled. Here are three 5-per-cent bonds to the
value of three thousand roubles. Take those for yourself, entirely for
yourself, and let that be strictly between ourselves, so that no one
knows of it, whatever you hear. You will need the money, for to go on
living in the old way, Sofya Semyonovna, is bad, and besides there is no
need for it now."

"I am so much indebted to you, and so are the children and my
stepmother," said Sonia hurriedly, "and if I've said so little... please
don't consider..."

"That's enough! that's enough!"

"But as for the money, Arkady Ivanovitch, I am very grateful to you,
but I don't need it now. I can always earn my own living. Don't think me
ungrateful. If you are so charitable, that money...."

"It's for you, for you, Sofya Semyonovna, and please don't waste words
over it. I haven't time for it. You will want it. Rodion Romanovitch
has two alternatives: a bullet in the brain or Siberia." (Sonia looked
wildly at him, and started.) "Don't be uneasy, I know all about it from
himself and I am not a gossip; I won't tell anyone. It was good advice
when you told him to give himself up and confess. It would be much
better for him. Well, if it turns out to be Siberia, he will go and
you will follow him. That's so, isn't it? And if so, you'll need money.
You'll need it for him, do you understand? Giving it to you is the same
as my giving it to him. Besides, you promised Amalia Ivanovna to pay
what's owing. I heard you. How can you undertake such obligations so
heedlessly, Sofya Semyonovna? It was Katerina Ivanovna's debt and not
yours, so you ought not to have taken any notice of the German woman.
You can't get through the world like that. If you are ever questioned
about me--to-morrow or the day after you will be asked--don't say
anything about my coming to see you now and don't show the money to
anyone or say a word about it. Well, now good-bye." (He got up.) "My
greetings to Rodion Romanovitch. By the way, you'd better put the money
for the present in Mr. Razumihin's keeping. You know Mr. Razumihin? Of
course you do. He's not a bad fellow. Take it to him to-morrow or...
when the time comes. And till then, hide it carefully."

Sonia too jumped up from her chair and looked in dismay at Svidrigaïlov.
She longed to speak, to ask a question, but for the first moments she
did not dare and did not know how to begin.

"How can you... how can you be going now, in such rain?"

"Why, be starting for America, and be stopped by rain! Ha, ha! Good-bye,
Sofya Semyonovna, my dear! Live and live long, you will be of use to
others. By the way... tell Mr. Razumihin I send my greetings to him.
Tell him Arkady Ivanovitch Svidrigaïlov sends his greetings. Be sure
to."

He went out, leaving Sonia in a state of wondering anxiety and vague
apprehension.

It appeared afterwards that on the same evening, at twenty past eleven,
he made another very eccentric and unexpected visit. The rain still
persisted. Drenched to the skin, he walked into the little flat where
the parents of his betrothed lived, in Third Street in Vassilyevsky
Island. He knocked some time before he was admitted, and his visit
at first caused great perturbation; but Svidrigaïlov could be
very fascinating when he liked, so that the first, and indeed very
intelligent surmise of the sensible parents that Svidrigaïlov had
probably had so much to drink that he did not know what he was doing
vanished immediately. The decrepit father was wheeled in to see
Svidrigaïlov by the tender and sensible mother, who as usual began the
conversation with various irrelevant questions. She never asked a direct
question, but began by smiling and rubbing her hands and then, if she
were obliged to ascertain something--for instance, when Svidrigaïlov
would like to have the wedding--she would begin by interested and
almost eager questions about Paris and the court life there, and only
by degrees brought the conversation round to Third Street. On other
occasions this had of course been very impressive, but this time Arkady
Ivanovitch seemed particularly impatient, and insisted on seeing his
betrothed at once, though he had been informed, to begin with, that she
had already gone to bed. The girl of course appeared.

Svidrigaïlov informed her at once that he was obliged by very important
affairs to leave Petersburg for a time, and therefore brought her
fifteen thousand roubles and begged her accept them as a present from
him, as he had long been intending to make her this trifling present
before their wedding. The logical connection of the present with his
immediate departure and the absolute necessity of visiting them for that
purpose in pouring rain at midnight was not made clear. But it all went
off very well; even the inevitable ejaculations of wonder and regret,
the inevitable questions were extraordinarily few and restrained. On the
other hand, the gratitude expressed was most glowing and was reinforced
by tears from the most sensible of mothers. Svidrigaïlov got up,
laughed, kissed his betrothed, patted her cheek, declared he would soon
come back, and noticing in her eyes, together with childish curiosity, a
sort of earnest dumb inquiry, reflected and kissed her again, though
he felt sincere anger inwardly at the thought that his present would be
immediately locked up in the keeping of the most sensible of mothers. He
went away, leaving them all in a state of extraordinary excitement, but
the tender mamma, speaking quietly in a half whisper, settled some of
the most important of their doubts, concluding that Svidrigaïlov was
a great man, a man of great affairs and connections and of great
wealth--there was no knowing what he had in his mind. He would start
off on a journey and give away money just as the fancy took him, so that
there was nothing surprising about it. Of course it was strange that he
was wet through, but Englishmen, for instance, are even more eccentric,
and all these people of high society didn't think of what was said of
them and didn't stand on ceremony. Possibly, indeed, he came like that
on purpose to show that he was not afraid of anyone. Above all, not a
word should be said about it, for God knows what might come of it, and
the money must be locked up, and it was most fortunate that Fedosya, the
cook, had not left the kitchen. And above all not a word must be said
to that old cat, Madame Resslich, and so on and so on. They sat up
whispering till two o'clock, but the girl went to bed much earlier,
amazed and rather sorrowful.

Svidrigaïlov meanwhile, exactly at midnight, crossed the bridge on the
way back to the mainland. The rain had ceased and there was a roaring
wind. He began shivering, and for one moment he gazed at the black
waters of the Little Neva with a look of special interest, even inquiry.
But he soon felt it very cold, standing by the water; he turned and
went towards Y. Prospect. He walked along that endless street for a long
time, almost half an hour, more than once stumbling in the dark on the
wooden pavement, but continually looking for something on the right side
of the street. He had noticed passing through this street lately that
there was a hotel somewhere towards the end, built of wood, but fairly
large, and its name he remembered was something like Adrianople. He was
not mistaken: the hotel was so conspicuous in that God-forsaken place
that he could not fail to see it even in the dark. It was a long,
blackened wooden building, and in spite of the late hour there were
lights in the windows and signs of life within. He went in and asked
a ragged fellow who met him in the corridor for a room. The latter,
scanning Svidrigaïlov, pulled himself together and led him at once to a
close and tiny room in the distance, at the end of the corridor, under
the stairs. There was no other, all were occupied. The ragged fellow
looked inquiringly.

"Is there tea?" asked Svidrigaïlov.

"Yes, sir."

"What else is there?"

"Veal, vodka, savouries."

"Bring me tea and veal."

"And you want nothing else?" he asked with apparent surprise.

"Nothing, nothing."

The ragged man went away, completely disillusioned.

"It must be a nice place," thought Svidrigaïlov. "How was it I didn't
know it? I expect I look as if I came from a café chantant and have
had some adventure on the way. It would be interesting to know who stay
here?"

He lighted the candle and looked at the room more carefully. It was a
room so low-pitched that Svidrigaïlov could only just stand up in it;
it had one window; the bed, which was very dirty, and the plain-stained
chair and table almost filled it up. The walls looked as though they
were made of planks, covered with shabby paper, so torn and dusty
that the pattern was indistinguishable, though the general
colour--yellow--could still be made out. One of the walls was cut short
by the sloping ceiling, though the room was not an attic but just under
the stairs.

Svidrigaïlov set down the candle, sat down on the bed and sank into
thought. But a strange persistent murmur which sometimes rose to a shout
in the next room attracted his attention. The murmur had not ceased from
the moment he entered the room. He listened: someone was upbraiding and
almost tearfully scolding, but he heard only one voice.

Svidrigaïlov got up, shaded the light with his hand and at once he saw
light through a crack in the wall; he went up and peeped through. The
room, which was somewhat larger than his, had two occupants. One of
them, a very curly-headed man with a red inflamed face, was standing
in the pose of an orator, without his coat, with his legs wide apart to
preserve his balance, and smiting himself on the breast. He reproached
the other with being a beggar, with having no standing whatever. He
declared that he had taken the other out of the gutter and he could turn
him out when he liked, and that only the finger of Providence sees it
all. The object of his reproaches was sitting in a chair, and had the
air of a man who wants dreadfully to sneeze, but can't. He sometimes
turned sheepish and befogged eyes on the speaker, but obviously had not
the slightest idea what he was talking about and scarcely heard it. A
candle was burning down on the table; there were wine-glasses, a nearly
empty bottle of vodka, bread and cucumber, and glasses with the dregs
of stale tea. After gazing attentively at this, Svidrigaïlov turned away
indifferently and sat down on the bed.

The ragged attendant, returning with the tea, could not resist asking
him again whether he didn't want anything more, and again receiving a
negative reply, finally withdrew. Svidrigaïlov made haste to drink a
glass of tea to warm himself, but could not eat anything. He began
to feel feverish. He took off his coat and, wrapping himself in the
blanket, lay down on the bed. He was annoyed. "It would have been better
to be well for the occasion," he thought with a smile. The room was
close, the candle burnt dimly, the wind was roaring outside, he heard
a mouse scratching in the corner and the room smelt of mice and of
leather. He lay in a sort of reverie: one thought followed another. He
felt a longing to fix his imagination on something. "It must be a garden
under the window," he thought. "There's a sound of trees. How I dislike
the sound of trees on a stormy night, in the dark! They give one a
horrid feeling." He remembered how he had disliked it when he passed
Petrovsky Park just now. This reminded him of the bridge over the Little
Neva and he felt cold again as he had when standing there. "I never have
liked water," he thought, "even in a landscape," and he suddenly smiled
again at a strange idea: "Surely now all these questions of taste and
comfort ought not to matter, but I've become more particular, like an
animal that picks out a special place... for such an occasion. I ought
to have gone into the Petrovsky Park! I suppose it seemed dark, cold,
ha-ha! As though I were seeking pleasant sensations!... By the way, why
haven't I put out the candle?" he blew it out. "They've gone to bed next
door," he thought, not seeing the light at the crack. "Well, now, Marfa
Petrovna, now is the time for you to turn up; it's dark, and the very
time and place for you. But now you won't come!"

He suddenly recalled how, an hour before carrying out his design on
Dounia, he had recommended Raskolnikov to trust her to Razumihin's
keeping. "I suppose I really did say it, as Raskolnikov guessed, to
tease myself. But what a rogue that Raskolnikov is! He's gone through a
good deal. He may be a successful rogue in time when he's got over
his nonsense. But now he's _too_ eager for life. These young men
are contemptible on that point. But, hang the fellow! Let him please
himself, it's nothing to do with me."

He could not get to sleep. By degrees Dounia's image rose before him,
and a shudder ran over him. "No, I must give up all that now," he
thought, rousing himself. "I must think of something else. It's queer
and funny. I never had a great hatred for anyone, I never particularly
desired to avenge myself even, and that's a bad sign, a bad sign, a bad
sign. I never liked quarrelling either, and never lost my temper--that's
a bad sign too. And the promises I made her just now, too--Damnation!
But--who knows?--perhaps she would have made a new man of me
somehow...."

He ground his teeth and sank into silence again. Again Dounia's image
rose before him, just as she was when, after shooting the first time,
she had lowered the revolver in terror and gazed blankly at him, so that
he might have seized her twice over and she would not have lifted a hand
to defend herself if he had not reminded her. He recalled how at that
instant he felt almost sorry for her, how he had felt a pang at his
heart...

"Aïe! Damnation, these thoughts again! I must put it away!"

He was dozing off; the feverish shiver had ceased, when suddenly
something seemed to run over his arm and leg under the bedclothes. He
started. "Ugh! hang it! I believe it's a mouse," he thought, "that's the
veal I left on the table." He felt fearfully disinclined to pull off the
blanket, get up, get cold, but all at once something unpleasant ran over
his leg again. He pulled off the blanket and lighted the candle. Shaking
with feverish chill he bent down to examine the bed: there was nothing.
He shook the blanket and suddenly a mouse jumped out on the sheet.
He tried to catch it, but the mouse ran to and fro in zigzags without
leaving the bed, slipped between his fingers, ran over his hand and
suddenly darted under the pillow. He threw down the pillow, but in one
instant felt something leap on his chest and dart over his body and down
his back under his shirt. He trembled nervously and woke up.

The room was dark. He was lying on the bed and wrapped up in the blanket
as before. The wind was howling under the window. "How disgusting," he
thought with annoyance.

He got up and sat on the edge of the bedstead with his back to the
window. "It's better not to sleep at all," he decided. There was a cold
damp draught from the window, however; without getting up he drew the
blanket over him and wrapped himself in it. He was not thinking of
anything and did not want to think. But one image rose after another,
incoherent scraps of thought without beginning or end passed through his
mind. He sank into drowsiness. Perhaps the cold, or the dampness, or
the dark, or the wind that howled under the window and tossed the trees
roused a sort of persistent craving for the fantastic. He kept dwelling
on images of flowers, he fancied a charming flower garden, a bright,
warm, almost hot day, a holiday--Trinity day. A fine, sumptuous country
cottage in the English taste overgrown with fragrant flowers, with
flower beds going round the house; the porch, wreathed in climbers, was
surrounded with beds of roses. A light, cool staircase, carpeted with
rich rugs, was decorated with rare plants in china pots. He noticed
particularly in the windows nosegays of tender, white, heavily fragrant
narcissus bending over their bright, green, thick long stalks. He was
reluctant to move away from them, but he went up the stairs and came
into a large, high drawing-room and again everywhere--at the windows,
the doors on to the balcony, and on the balcony itself--were flowers.
The floors were strewn with freshly-cut fragrant hay, the windows
were open, a fresh, cool, light air came into the room. The birds were
chirruping under the window, and in the middle of the room, on a table
covered with a white satin shroud, stood a coffin. The coffin was
covered with white silk and edged with a thick white frill; wreaths of
flowers surrounded it on all sides. Among the flowers lay a girl in a
white muslin dress, with her arms crossed and pressed on her bosom, as
though carved out of marble. But her loose fair hair was wet; there was
a wreath of roses on her head. The stern and already rigid profile of
her face looked as though chiselled of marble too, and the smile on her
pale lips was full of an immense unchildish misery and sorrowful appeal.
Svidrigaïlov knew that girl; there was no holy image, no burning candle
beside the coffin; no sound of prayers: the girl had drowned herself.
She was only fourteen, but her heart was broken. And she had destroyed
herself, crushed by an insult that had appalled and amazed that childish
soul, had smirched that angel purity with unmerited disgrace and torn
from her a last scream of despair, unheeded and brutally disregarded, on
a dark night in the cold and wet while the wind howled....

Svidrigaïlov came to himself, got up from the bed and went to the
window. He felt for the latch and opened it. The wind lashed furiously
into the little room and stung his face and his chest, only covered with
his shirt, as though with frost. Under the window there must have been
something like a garden, and apparently a pleasure garden. There, too,
probably there were tea-tables and singing in the daytime. Now drops of
rain flew in at the window from the trees and bushes; it was dark as
in a cellar, so that he could only just make out some dark blurs of
objects. Svidrigaïlov, bending down with elbows on the window-sill,
gazed for five minutes into the darkness; the boom of a cannon, followed
by a second one, resounded in the darkness of the night. "Ah, the
signal! The river is overflowing," he thought. "By morning it will be
swirling down the street in the lower parts, flooding the basements and
cellars. The cellar rats will swim out, and men will curse in the rain
and wind as they drag their rubbish to their upper storeys. What time is
it now?" And he had hardly thought it when, somewhere near, a clock on
the wall, ticking away hurriedly, struck three.

"Aha! It will be light in an hour! Why wait? I'll go out at once
straight to the park. I'll choose a great bush there drenched with rain,
so that as soon as one's shoulder touches it, millions of drops drip on
one's head."

He moved away from the window, shut it, lighted the candle, put on his
waistcoat, his overcoat and his hat and went out, carrying the candle,
into the passage to look for the ragged attendant who would be asleep
somewhere in the midst of candle-ends and all sorts of rubbish, to pay
him for the room and leave the hotel. "It's the best minute; I couldn't
choose a better."

He walked for some time through a long narrow corridor without finding
anyone and was just going to call out, when suddenly in a dark corner
between an old cupboard and the door he caught sight of a strange object
which seemed to be alive. He bent down with the candle and saw a little
girl, not more than five years old, shivering and crying, with her
clothes as wet as a soaking house-flannel. She did not seem afraid of
Svidrigaïlov, but looked at him with blank amazement out of her big
black eyes. Now and then she sobbed as children do when they have been
crying a long time, but are beginning to be comforted. The child's face
was pale and tired, she was numb with cold. "How can she have come here?
She must have hidden here and not slept all night." He began questioning
her. The child suddenly becoming animated, chattered away in her baby
language, something about "mammy" and that "mammy would beat her," and
about some cup that she had "bwoken." The child chattered on without
stopping. He could only guess from what she said that she was a
neglected child, whose mother, probably a drunken cook, in the service
of the hotel, whipped and frightened her; that the child had broken
a cup of her mother's and was so frightened that she had run away the
evening before, had hidden for a long while somewhere outside in the
rain, at last had made her way in here, hidden behind the cupboard and
spent the night there, crying and trembling from the damp, the darkness
and the fear that she would be badly beaten for it. He took her in his
arms, went back to his room, sat her on the bed, and began undressing
her. The torn shoes which she had on her stockingless feet were as
wet as if they had been standing in a puddle all night. When he had
undressed her, he put her on the bed, covered her up and wrapped her in
the blanket from her head downwards. She fell asleep at once. Then he
sank into dreary musing again.

"What folly to trouble myself," he decided suddenly with an oppressive
feeling of annoyance. "What idiocy!" In vexation he took up the candle
to go and look for the ragged attendant again and make haste to go away.
"Damn the child!" he thought as he opened the door, but he turned again
to see whether the child was asleep. He raised the blanket carefully.
The child was sleeping soundly, she had got warm under the blanket,
and her pale cheeks were flushed. But strange to say that flush seemed
brighter and coarser than the rosy cheeks of childhood. "It's a flush
of fever," thought Svidrigaïlov. It was like the flush from drinking, as
though she had been given a full glass to drink. Her crimson lips were
hot and glowing; but what was this? He suddenly fancied that her long
black eyelashes were quivering, as though the lids were opening and a
sly crafty eye peeped out with an unchildlike wink, as though the little
girl were not asleep, but pretending. Yes, it was so. Her lips parted in
a smile. The corners of her mouth quivered, as though she were trying to
control them. But now she quite gave up all effort, now it was a grin,
a broad grin; there was something shameless, provocative in that quite
unchildish face; it was depravity, it was the face of a harlot, the
shameless face of a French harlot. Now both eyes opened wide; they
turned a glowing, shameless glance upon him; they laughed, invited
him.... There was something infinitely hideous and shocking in that
laugh, in those eyes, in such nastiness in the face of a child. "What,
at five years old?" Svidrigaïlov muttered in genuine horror. "What does
it mean?" And now she turned to him, her little face all aglow, holding
out her arms.... "Accursed child!" Svidrigaïlov cried, raising his hand
to strike her, but at that moment he woke up.

He was in the same bed, still wrapped in the blanket. The candle had not
been lighted, and daylight was streaming in at the windows.

"I've had nightmare all night!" He got up angrily, feeling utterly
shattered; his bones ached. There was a thick mist outside and he could
see nothing. It was nearly five. He had overslept himself! He got up,
put on his still damp jacket and overcoat. Feeling the revolver in his
pocket, he took it out and then he sat down, took a notebook out of his
pocket and in the most conspicuous place on the title page wrote a few
lines in large letters. Reading them over, he sank into thought with his
elbows on the table. The revolver and the notebook lay beside him. Some
flies woke up and settled on the untouched veal, which was still on
the table. He stared at them and at last with his free right hand began
trying to catch one. He tried till he was tired, but could not catch it.
At last, realising that he was engaged in this interesting pursuit, he
started, got up and walked resolutely out of the room. A minute later he
was in the street.

A thick milky mist hung over the town. Svidrigaïlov walked along the
slippery dirty wooden pavement towards the Little Neva. He was picturing
the waters of the Little Neva swollen in the night, Petrovsky Island,
the wet paths, the wet grass, the wet trees and bushes and at last the
bush.... He began ill-humouredly staring at the houses, trying to think
of something else. There was not a cabman or a passer-by in the street.
The bright yellow, wooden, little houses looked dirty and dejected with
their closed shutters. The cold and damp penetrated his whole body and
he began to shiver. From time to time he came across shop signs and read
each carefully. At last he reached the end of the wooden pavement and
came to a big stone house. A dirty, shivering dog crossed his path with
its tail between its legs. A man in a greatcoat lay face downwards; dead
drunk, across the pavement. He looked at him and went on. A high tower
stood up on the left. "Bah!" he shouted, "here is a place. Why should
it be Petrovsky? It will be in the presence of an official witness
anyway...."

He almost smiled at this new thought and turned into the street where
there was the big house with the tower. At the great closed gates of
the house, a little man stood with his shoulder leaning against them,
wrapped in a grey soldier's coat, with a copper Achilles helmet on his
head. He cast a drowsy and indifferent glance at Svidrigaïlov. His
face wore that perpetual look of peevish dejection, which is so sourly
printed on all faces of Jewish race without exception. They both,
Svidrigaïlov and Achilles, stared at each other for a few minutes
without speaking. At last it struck Achilles as irregular for a man
not drunk to be standing three steps from him, staring and not saying a
word.

"What do you want here?" he said, without moving or changing his
position.

"Nothing, brother, good morning," answered Svidrigaïlov.

"This isn't the place."

"I am going to foreign parts, brother."

"To foreign parts?"

"To America."

"America."

Svidrigaïlov took out the revolver and cocked it. Achilles raised his
eyebrows.

"I say, this is not the place for such jokes!"

"Why shouldn't it be the place?"

"Because it isn't."

"Well, brother, I don't mind that. It's a good place. When you are
asked, you just say he was going, he said, to America."

He put the revolver to his right temple.

"You can't do it here, it's not the place," cried Achilles, rousing
himself, his eyes growing bigger and bigger.

Svidrigaïlov pulled the trigger.



CHAPTER VII

The same day, about seven o'clock in the evening, Raskolnikov was on
his way to his mother's and sister's lodging--the lodging in Bakaleyev's
house which Razumihin had found for them. The stairs went up from
the street. Raskolnikov walked with lagging steps, as though still
hesitating whether to go or not. But nothing would have turned him back:
his decision was taken.

"Besides, it doesn't matter, they still know nothing," he thought, "and
they are used to thinking of me as eccentric."

He was appallingly dressed: his clothes torn and dirty, soaked with a
night's rain. His face was almost distorted from fatigue, exposure, the
inward conflict that had lasted for twenty-four hours. He had spent all
the previous night alone, God knows where. But anyway he had reached a
decision.

He knocked at the door which was opened by his mother. Dounia was not
at home. Even the servant happened to be out. At first Pulcheria
Alexandrovna was speechless with joy and surprise; then she took him by
the hand and drew him into the room.

"Here you are!" she began, faltering with joy. "Don't be angry with
me, Rodya, for welcoming you so foolishly with tears: I am laughing not
crying. Did you think I was crying? No, I am delighted, but I've got
into such a stupid habit of shedding tears. I've been like that ever
since your father's death. I cry for anything. Sit down, dear boy, you
must be tired; I see you are. Ah, how muddy you are."

"I was in the rain yesterday, mother...." Raskolnikov began.

"No, no," Pulcheria Alexandrovna hurriedly interrupted, "you thought I
was going to cross-question you in the womanish way I used to; don't be
anxious, I understand, I understand it all: now I've learned the ways
here and truly I see for myself that they are better. I've made up my
mind once for all: how could I understand your plans and expect you to
give an account of them? God knows what concerns and plans you may have,
or what ideas you are hatching; so it's not for me to keep nudging your
elbow, asking you what you are thinking about? But, my goodness! why
am I running to and fro as though I were crazy...? I am reading your
article in the magazine for the third time, Rodya. Dmitri Prokofitch
brought it to me. Directly I saw it I cried out to myself: 'There,
foolish one,' I thought, 'that's what he is busy about; that's the
solution of the mystery! Learned people are always like that. He may
have some new ideas in his head just now; he is thinking them over and I
worry him and upset him.' I read it, my dear, and of course there was a
great deal I did not understand; but that's only natural--how should I?"

"Show me, mother."

Raskolnikov took the magazine and glanced at his article. Incongruous
as it was with his mood and his circumstances, he felt that strange and
bitter sweet sensation that every author experiences the first time he
sees himself in print; besides, he was only twenty-three. It lasted only
a moment. After reading a few lines he frowned and his heart throbbed
with anguish. He recalled all the inward conflict of the preceding
months. He flung the article on the table with disgust and anger.

"But, however foolish I may be, Rodya, I can see for myself that you
will very soon be one of the leading--if not the leading man--in the
world of Russian thought. And they dared to think you were mad! You
don't know, but they really thought that. Ah, the despicable creatures,
how could they understand genius! And Dounia, Dounia was all but
believing it--what do you say to that? Your father sent twice to
magazines--the first time poems (I've got the manuscript and will show
you) and the second time a whole novel (I begged him to let me copy it
out) and how we prayed that they should be taken--they weren't! I was
breaking my heart, Rodya, six or seven days ago over your food and your
clothes and the way you are living. But now I see again how foolish
I was, for you can attain any position you like by your intellect and
talent. No doubt you don't care about that for the present and you are
occupied with much more important matters...."

"Dounia's not at home, mother?"

"No, Rodya. I often don't see her; she leaves me alone. Dmitri
Prokofitch comes to see me, it's so good of him, and he always talks
about you. He loves you and respects you, my dear. I don't say that
Dounia is very wanting in consideration. I am not complaining. She has
her ways and I have mine; she seems to have got some secrets of late and
I never have any secrets from you two. Of course, I am sure that Dounia
has far too much sense, and besides she loves you and me... but I don't
know what it will all lead to. You've made me so happy by coming now,
Rodya, but she has missed you by going out; when she comes in I'll tell
her: 'Your brother came in while you were out. Where have you been all
this time?' You mustn't spoil me, Rodya, you know; come when you can,
but if you can't, it doesn't matter, I can wait. I shall know, anyway,
that you are fond of me, that will be enough for me. I shall read what
you write, I shall hear about you from everyone, and sometimes you'll
come yourself to see me. What could be better? Here you've come now to
comfort your mother, I see that."

Here Pulcheria Alexandrovna began to cry.

"Here I am again! Don't mind my foolishness. My goodness, why am I
sitting here?" she cried, jumping up. "There is coffee and I don't offer
you any. Ah, that's the selfishness of old age. I'll get it at once!"

"Mother, don't trouble, I am going at once. I haven't come for that.
Please listen to me."

Pulcheria Alexandrovna went up to him timidly.

"Mother, whatever happens, whatever you hear about me, whatever you are
told about me, will you always love me as you do now?" he asked suddenly
from the fullness of his heart, as though not thinking of his words and
not weighing them.

"Rodya, Rodya, what is the matter? How can you ask me such a question?
Why, who will tell me anything about you? Besides, I shouldn't believe
anyone, I should refuse to listen."

"I've come to assure you that I've always loved you and I am glad
that we are alone, even glad Dounia is out," he went on with the same
impulse. "I have come to tell you that though you will be unhappy, you
must believe that your son loves you now more than himself, and that all
you thought about me, that I was cruel and didn't care about you, was
all a mistake. I shall never cease to love you.... Well, that's enough:
I thought I must do this and begin with this...."

Pulcheria Alexandrovna embraced him in silence, pressing him to her
bosom and weeping gently.

"I don't know what is wrong with you, Rodya," she said at last. "I've
been thinking all this time that we were simply boring you and now I see
that there is a great sorrow in store for you, and that's why you are
miserable. I've foreseen it a long time, Rodya. Forgive me for speaking
about it. I keep thinking about it and lie awake at nights. Your sister
lay talking in her sleep all last night, talking of nothing but you. I
caught something, but I couldn't make it out. I felt all the morning
as though I were going to be hanged, waiting for something, expecting
something, and now it has come! Rodya, Rodya, where are you going? You
are going away somewhere?"

"Yes."

"That's what I thought! I can come with you, you know, if you need
me. And Dounia, too; she loves you, she loves you dearly--and Sofya
Semyonovna may come with us if you like. You see, I am glad to look upon
her as a daughter even... Dmitri Prokofitch will help us to go together.
But... where... are you going?"

"Good-bye, mother."

"What, to-day?" she cried, as though losing him for ever.

"I can't stay, I must go now...."

"And can't I come with you?"

"No, but kneel down and pray to God for me. Your prayer perhaps will
reach Him."

"Let me bless you and sign you with the cross. That's right, that's
right. Oh, God, what are we doing?"

Yes, he was glad, he was very glad that there was no one there, that
he was alone with his mother. For the first time after all those awful
months his heart was softened. He fell down before her, he kissed her
feet and both wept, embracing. And she was not surprised and did not
question him this time. For some days she had realised that something
awful was happening to her son and that now some terrible minute had
come for him.

"Rodya, my darling, my first born," she said sobbing, "now you are just
as when you were little. You would run like this to me and hug me and
kiss me. When your father was living and we were poor, you comforted us
simply by being with us and when I buried your father, how often we
wept together at his grave and embraced, as now. And if I've been crying
lately, it's that my mother's heart had a foreboding of trouble. The
first time I saw you, that evening, you remember, as soon as we arrived
here, I guessed simply from your eyes. My heart sank at once, and to-day
when I opened the door and looked at you, I thought the fatal hour had
come. Rodya, Rodya, you are not going away to-day?"

"No!"

"You'll come again?"

"Yes... I'll come."

"Rodya, don't be angry, I don't dare to question you. I know I mustn't.
Only say two words to me--is it far where you are going?"

"Very far."

"What is awaiting you there? Some post or career for you?"

"What God sends... only pray for me." Raskolnikov went to the door, but
she clutched him and gazed despairingly into his eyes. Her face worked
with terror.

"Enough, mother," said Raskolnikov, deeply regretting that he had come.

"Not for ever, it's not yet for ever? You'll come, you'll come
to-morrow?"

"I will, I will, good-bye." He tore himself away at last.

It was a warm, fresh, bright evening; it had cleared up in the morning.
Raskolnikov went to his lodgings; he made haste. He wanted to finish all
before sunset. He did not want to meet anyone till then. Going up the
stairs he noticed that Nastasya rushed from the samovar to watch him
intently. "Can anyone have come to see me?" he wondered. He had a
disgusted vision of Porfiry. But opening his door he saw Dounia. She
was sitting alone, plunged in deep thought, and looked as though she had
been waiting a long time. He stopped short in the doorway. She rose from
the sofa in dismay and stood up facing him. Her eyes, fixed upon him,
betrayed horror and infinite grief. And from those eyes alone he saw at
once that she knew.

"Am I to come in or go away?" he asked uncertainly.

"I've been all day with Sofya Semyonovna. We were both waiting for you.
We thought that you would be sure to come there."

Raskolnikov went into the room and sank exhausted on a chair.

"I feel weak, Dounia, I am very tired; and I should have liked at this
moment to be able to control myself."

He glanced at her mistrustfully.

"Where were you all night?"

"I don't remember clearly. You see, sister, I wanted to make up my mind
once for all, and several times I walked by the Neva, I remember that
I wanted to end it all there, but... I couldn't make up my mind," he
whispered, looking at her mistrustfully again.

"Thank God! That was just what we were afraid of, Sofya Semyonovna and
I. Then you still have faith in life? Thank God, thank God!"

Raskolnikov smiled bitterly.

"I haven't faith, but I have just been weeping in mother's arms; I
haven't faith, but I have just asked her to pray for me. I don't know
how it is, Dounia, I don't understand it."

"Have you been at mother's? Have you told her?" cried Dounia,
horror-stricken. "Surely you haven't done that?"

"No, I didn't tell her... in words; but she understood a great deal.
She heard you talking in your sleep. I am sure she half understands it
already. Perhaps I did wrong in going to see her. I don't know why I did
go. I am a contemptible person, Dounia."

"A contemptible person, but ready to face suffering! You are, aren't
you?"

"Yes, I am going. At once. Yes, to escape the disgrace I thought of
drowning myself, Dounia, but as I looked into the water, I thought that
if I had considered myself strong till now I'd better not be afraid of
disgrace," he said, hurrying on. "It's pride, Dounia."

"Pride, Rodya."

There was a gleam of fire in his lustreless eyes; he seemed to be glad
to think that he was still proud.

"You don't think, sister, that I was simply afraid of the water?" he
asked, looking into her face with a sinister smile.

"Oh, Rodya, hush!" cried Dounia bitterly. Silence lasted for two
minutes. He sat with his eyes fixed on the floor; Dounia stood at the
other end of the table and looked at him with anguish. Suddenly he got
up.

"It's late, it's time to go! I am going at once to give myself up. But I
don't know why I am going to give myself up."

Big tears fell down her cheeks.

"You are crying, sister, but can you hold out your hand to me?"

"You doubted it?"

She threw her arms round him.

"Aren't you half expiating your crime by facing the suffering?" she
cried, holding him close and kissing him.

"Crime? What crime?" he cried in sudden fury. "That I killed a vile
noxious insect, an old pawnbroker woman, of use to no one!... Killing
her was atonement for forty sins. She was sucking the life out of poor
people. Was that a crime? I am not thinking of it and I am not thinking
of expiating it, and why are you all rubbing it in on all sides? 'A
crime! a crime!' Only now I see clearly the imbecility of my cowardice,
now that I have decided to face this superfluous disgrace. It's simply
because I am contemptible and have nothing in me that I have decided to,
perhaps too for my advantage, as that... Porfiry... suggested!"

"Brother, brother, what are you saying? Why, you have shed blood?" cried
Dounia in despair.

"Which all men shed," he put in almost frantically, "which flows and has
always flowed in streams, which is spilt like champagne, and for which
men are crowned in the Capitol and are called afterwards benefactors of
mankind. Look into it more carefully and understand it! I too wanted to
do good to men and would have done hundreds, thousands of good deeds
to make up for that one piece of stupidity, not stupidity even, simply
clumsiness, for the idea was by no means so stupid as it seems now
that it has failed.... (Everything seems stupid when it fails.) By that
stupidity I only wanted to put myself into an independent position, to
take the first step, to obtain means, and then everything would have
been smoothed over by benefits immeasurable in comparison.... But I...
I couldn't carry out even the first step, because I am contemptible,
that's what's the matter! And yet I won't look at it as you do. If I had
succeeded I should have been crowned with glory, but now I'm trapped."

"But that's not so, not so! Brother, what are you saying?"

"Ah, it's not picturesque, not æsthetically attractive! I fail to
understand why bombarding people by regular siege is more honourable.
The fear of appearances is the first symptom of impotence. I've never,
never recognised this more clearly than now, and I am further than ever
from seeing that what I did was a crime. I've never, never been stronger
and more convinced than now."

The colour had rushed into his pale exhausted face, but as he uttered
his last explanation, he happened to meet Dounia's eyes and he saw such
anguish in them that he could not help being checked. He felt that he
had, anyway, made these two poor women miserable, that he was, anyway,
the cause...

"Dounia darling, if I am guilty forgive me (though I cannot be forgiven
if I am guilty). Good-bye! We won't dispute. It's time, high time to go.
Don't follow me, I beseech you, I have somewhere else to go.... But you
go at once and sit with mother. I entreat you to! It's my last request
of you. Don't leave her at all; I left her in a state of anxiety, that
she is not fit to bear; she will die or go out of her mind. Be with
her! Razumihin will be with you. I've been talking to him.... Don't cry
about me: I'll try to be honest and manly all my life, even if I am a
murderer. Perhaps I shall some day make a name. I won't disgrace you,
you will see; I'll still show.... Now good-bye for the present," he
concluded hurriedly, noticing again a strange expression in Dounia's
eyes at his last words and promises. "Why are you crying? Don't cry,
don't cry: we are not parting for ever! Ah, yes! Wait a minute, I'd
forgotten!"

He went to the table, took up a thick dusty book, opened it and took
from between the pages a little water-colour portrait on ivory. It was
the portrait of his landlady's daughter, who had died of fever, that
strange girl who had wanted to be a nun. For a minute he gazed at the
delicate expressive face of his betrothed, kissed the portrait and gave
it to Dounia.

"I used to talk a great deal about it to her, only to her," he said
thoughtfully. "To her heart I confided much of what has since been so
hideously realised. Don't be uneasy," he returned to Dounia, "she was
as much opposed to it as you, and I am glad that she is gone. The great
point is that everything now is going to be different, is going to
be broken in two," he cried, suddenly returning to his dejection.
"Everything, everything, and am I prepared for it? Do I want it myself?
They say it is necessary for me to suffer! What's the object of these
senseless sufferings? shall I know any better what they are for, when I
am crushed by hardships and idiocy, and weak as an old man after twenty
years' penal servitude? And what shall I have to live for then? Why am I
consenting to that life now? Oh, I knew I was contemptible when I stood
looking at the Neva at daybreak to-day!"

At last they both went out. It was hard for Dounia, but she loved him.
She walked away, but after going fifty paces she turned round to look
at him again. He was still in sight. At the corner he too turned and for
the last time their eyes met; but noticing that she was looking at him,
he motioned her away with impatience and even vexation, and turned the
corner abruptly.

"I am wicked, I see that," he thought to himself, feeling ashamed a
moment later of his angry gesture to Dounia. "But why are they so fond
of me if I don't deserve it? Oh, if only I were alone and no one loved
me and I too had never loved anyone! _Nothing of all this would have
happened._ But I wonder shall I in those fifteen or twenty years grow so
meek that I shall humble myself before people and whimper at every word
that I am a criminal? Yes, that's it, that's it, that's what they are
sending me there for, that's what they want. Look at them running to and
fro about the streets, every one of them a scoundrel and a criminal at
heart and, worse still, an idiot. But try to get me off and they'd be
wild with righteous indignation. Oh, how I hate them all!"

He fell to musing by what process it could come to pass, that he could
be humbled before all of them, indiscriminately--humbled by conviction.
And yet why not? It must be so. Would not twenty years of continual
bondage crush him utterly? Water wears out a stone. And why, why should
he live after that? Why should he go now when he knew that it would be
so? It was the hundredth time perhaps that he had asked himself that
question since the previous evening, but still he went.



CHAPTER VIII

When he went into Sonia's room, it was already getting dark. All day
Sonia had been waiting for him in terrible anxiety. Dounia had been
waiting with her. She had come to her that morning, remembering
Svidrigaïlov's words that Sonia knew. We will not describe the
conversation and tears of the two girls, and how friendly they became.
Dounia gained one comfort at least from that interview, that her
brother would not be alone. He had gone to her, Sonia, first with his
confession; he had gone to her for human fellowship when he needed it;
she would go with him wherever fate might send him. Dounia did not ask,
but she knew it was so. She looked at Sonia almost with reverence and
at first almost embarrassed her by it. Sonia was almost on the point
of tears. She felt herself, on the contrary, hardly worthy to look at
Dounia. Dounia's gracious image when she had bowed to her so attentively
and respectfully at their first meeting in Raskolnikov's room had
remained in her mind as one of the fairest visions of her life.

Dounia at last became impatient and, leaving Sonia, went to her
brother's room to await him there; she kept thinking that he would come
there first. When she had gone, Sonia began to be tortured by the dread
of his committing suicide, and Dounia too feared it. But they had spent
the day trying to persuade each other that that could not be, and both
were less anxious while they were together. As soon as they parted, each
thought of nothing else. Sonia remembered how Svidrigaïlov had said to
her the day before that Raskolnikov had two alternatives--Siberia or...
Besides she knew his vanity, his pride and his lack of faith.

"Is it possible that he has nothing but cowardice and fear of death to
make him live?" she thought at last in despair.

Meanwhile the sun was setting. Sonia was standing in dejection, looking
intently out of the window, but from it she could see nothing but the
unwhitewashed blank wall of the next house. At last when she began to
feel sure of his death--he walked into the room.

She gave a cry of joy, but looking carefully into his face she turned
pale.

"Yes," said Raskolnikov, smiling. "I have come for your cross, Sonia. It
was you told me to go to the cross-roads; why is it you are frightened
now it's come to that?"

Sonia gazed at him astonished. His tone seemed strange to her; a cold
shiver ran over her, but in a moment she guessed that the tone and the
words were a mask. He spoke to her looking away, as though to avoid
meeting her eyes.

"You see, Sonia, I've decided that it will be better so. There is one
fact.... But it's a long story and there's no need to discuss it. But
do you know what angers me? It annoys me that all those stupid brutish
faces will be gaping at me directly, pestering me with their stupid
questions, which I shall have to answer--they'll point their fingers at
me.... Tfoo! You know I am not going to Porfiry, I am sick of him. I'd
rather go to my friend, the Explosive Lieutenant; how I shall surprise
him, what a sensation I shall make! But I must be cooler; I've become
too irritable of late. You know I was nearly shaking my fist at my
sister just now, because she turned to take a last look at me. It's
a brutal state to be in! Ah! what am I coming to! Well, where are the
crosses?"

He seemed hardly to know what he was doing. He could not stay still or
concentrate his attention on anything; his ideas seemed to gallop after
one another, he talked incoherently, his hands trembled slightly.

Without a word Sonia took out of the drawer two crosses, one of cypress
wood and one of copper. She made the sign of the cross over herself and
over him, and put the wooden cross on his neck.

"It's the symbol of my taking up the cross," he laughed. "As though I
had not suffered much till now! The wooden cross, that is the peasant
one; the copper one, that is Lizaveta's--you will wear yourself, show
me! So she had it on... at that moment? I remember two things like
these too, a silver one and a little ikon. I threw them back on the old
woman's neck. Those would be appropriate now, really, those are what I
ought to put on now.... But I am talking nonsense and forgetting what
matters; I'm somehow forgetful.... You see I have come to warn you,
Sonia, so that you might know... that's all--that's all I came for. But
I thought I had more to say. You wanted me to go yourself. Well, now I
am going to prison and you'll have your wish. Well, what are you crying
for? You too? Don't. Leave off! Oh, how I hate it all!"

But his feeling was stirred; his heart ached, as he looked at her. "Why
is she grieving too?" he thought to himself. "What am I to her? Why does
she weep? Why is she looking after me, like my mother or Dounia? She'll
be my nurse."

"Cross yourself, say at least one prayer," Sonia begged in a timid
broken voice.

"Oh certainly, as much as you like! And sincerely, Sonia, sincerely...."

But he wanted to say something quite different.

He crossed himself several times. Sonia took up her shawl and put
it over her head. It was the green _drap de dames_ shawl of which
Marmeladov had spoken, "the family shawl." Raskolnikov thought of that
looking at it, but he did not ask. He began to feel himself that he
was certainly forgetting things and was disgustingly agitated. He was
frightened at this. He was suddenly struck too by the thought that Sonia
meant to go with him.

"What are you doing? Where are you going? Stay here, stay! I'll go
alone," he cried in cowardly vexation, and almost resentful, he moved
towards the door. "What's the use of going in procession?" he muttered
going out.

Sonia remained standing in the middle of the room. He had not even said
good-bye to her; he had forgotten her. A poignant and rebellious doubt
surged in his heart.

"Was it right, was it right, all this?" he thought again as he went down
the stairs. "Couldn't he stop and retract it all... and not go?"

But still he went. He felt suddenly once for all that he mustn't ask
himself questions. As he turned into the street he remembered that he
had not said good-bye to Sonia, that he had left her in the middle of
the room in her green shawl, not daring to stir after he had shouted
at her, and he stopped short for a moment. At the same instant, another
thought dawned upon him, as though it had been lying in wait to strike
him then.

"Why, with what object did I go to her just now? I told her--on
business; on what business? I had no sort of business! To tell her I was
_going_; but where was the need? Do I love her? No, no, I drove her away
just now like a dog. Did I want her crosses? Oh, how low I've sunk! No,
I wanted her tears, I wanted to see her terror, to see how her heart
ached! I had to have something to cling to, something to delay me, some
friendly face to see! And I dared to believe in myself, to dream of what
I would do! I am a beggarly contemptible wretch, contemptible!"

He walked along the canal bank, and he had not much further to go. But
on reaching the bridge he stopped and turning out of his way along it
went to the Hay Market.

He looked eagerly to right and left, gazed intently at every object and
could not fix his attention on anything; everything slipped away. "In
another week, another month I shall be driven in a prison van over this
bridge, how shall I look at the canal then? I should like to remember
this!" slipped into his mind. "Look at this sign! How shall I read those
letters then? It's written here 'Campany,' that's a thing to remember,
that letter _a_, and to look at it again in a month--how shall I look
at it then? What shall I be feeling and thinking then?... How trivial
it all must be, what I am fretting about now! Of course it must all be
interesting... in its way... (Ha-ha-ha! What am I thinking about?) I am
becoming a baby, I am showing off to myself; why am I ashamed? Foo! how
people shove! that fat man--a German he must be--who pushed against
me, does he know whom he pushed? There's a peasant woman with a baby,
begging. It's curious that she thinks me happier than she is. I might
give her something, for the incongruity of it. Here's a five copeck
piece left in my pocket, where did I get it? Here, here... take it, my
good woman!"

"God bless you," the beggar chanted in a lachrymose voice.

He went into the Hay Market. It was distasteful, very distasteful to be
in a crowd, but he walked just where he saw most people. He would have
given anything in the world to be alone; but he knew himself that he
would not have remained alone for a moment. There was a man drunk and
disorderly in the crowd; he kept trying to dance and falling down. There
was a ring round him. Raskolnikov squeezed his way through the crowd,
stared for some minutes at the drunken man and suddenly gave a short
jerky laugh. A minute later he had forgotten him and did not see him,
though he still stared. He moved away at last, not remembering where he
was; but when he got into the middle of the square an emotion suddenly
came over him, overwhelming him body and mind.

He suddenly recalled Sonia's words, "Go to the cross-roads, bow down to
the people, kiss the earth, for you have sinned against it too, and say
aloud to the whole world, 'I am a murderer.'" He trembled, remembering
that. And the hopeless misery and anxiety of all that time, especially
of the last hours, had weighed so heavily upon him that he positively
clutched at the chance of this new unmixed, complete sensation. It came
over him like a fit; it was like a single spark kindled in his soul and
spreading fire through him. Everything in him softened at once and the
tears started into his eyes. He fell to the earth on the spot....

He knelt down in the middle of the square, bowed down to the earth, and
kissed that filthy earth with bliss and rapture. He got up and bowed
down a second time.

"He's boozed," a youth near him observed.

There was a roar of laughter.

"He's going to Jerusalem, brothers, and saying good-bye to his children
and his country. He's bowing down to all the world and kissing the great
city of St. Petersburg and its pavement," added a workman who was a
little drunk.

"Quite a young man, too!" observed a third.

"And a gentleman," someone observed soberly.

"There's no knowing who's a gentleman and who isn't nowadays."

These exclamations and remarks checked Raskolnikov, and the words, "I am
a murderer," which were perhaps on the point of dropping from his lips,
died away. He bore these remarks quietly, however, and, without looking
round, he turned down a street leading to the police office. He had a
glimpse of something on the way which did not surprise him; he had felt
that it must be so. The second time he bowed down in the Hay Market he
saw, standing fifty paces from him on the left, Sonia. She was hiding
from him behind one of the wooden shanties in the market-place. She had
followed him then on his painful way! Raskolnikov at that moment felt
and knew once for all that Sonia was with him for ever and would follow
him to the ends of the earth, wherever fate might take him. It wrung his
heart... but he was just reaching the fatal place.

He went into the yard fairly resolutely. He had to mount to the third
storey. "I shall be some time going up," he thought. He felt as though
the fateful moment was still far off, as though he had plenty of time
left for consideration.

Again the same rubbish, the same eggshells lying about on the spiral
stairs, again the open doors of the flats, again the same kitchens and
the same fumes and stench coming from them. Raskolnikov had not been
here since that day. His legs were numb and gave way under him, but
still they moved forward. He stopped for a moment to take breath, to
collect himself, so as to enter _like a man_. "But why? what for?" he
wondered, reflecting. "If I must drink the cup what difference does it
make? The more revolting the better." He imagined for an instant the
figure of the "explosive lieutenant," Ilya Petrovitch. Was he actually
going to him? Couldn't he go to someone else? To Nikodim Fomitch?
Couldn't he turn back and go straight to Nikodim Fomitch's lodgings?
At least then it would be done privately.... No, no! To the "explosive
lieutenant"! If he must drink it, drink it off at once.

Turning cold and hardly conscious, he opened the door of the office.
There were very few people in it this time--only a house porter and a
peasant. The doorkeeper did not even peep out from behind his screen.
Raskolnikov walked into the next room. "Perhaps I still need not speak,"
passed through his mind. Some sort of clerk not wearing a uniform was
settling himself at a bureau to write. In a corner another clerk was
seating himself. Zametov was not there, nor, of course, Nikodim Fomitch.

"No one in?" Raskolnikov asked, addressing the person at the bureau.

"Whom do you want?"

"A-ah! Not a sound was heard, not a sight was seen, but I scent the
Russian... how does it go on in the fairy tale... I've forgotten! 'At
your service!'" a familiar voice cried suddenly.

Raskolnikov shuddered. The Explosive Lieutenant stood before him. He
had just come in from the third room. "It is the hand of fate," thought
Raskolnikov. "Why is he here?"

"You've come to see us? What about?" cried Ilya Petrovitch. He
was obviously in an exceedingly good humour and perhaps a trifle
exhilarated. "If it's on business you are rather early.[*] It's only a
chance that I am here... however I'll do what I can. I must admit, I...
what is it, what is it? Excuse me...."

     [*] Dostoevsky appears to have forgotten that it is after
     sunset, and that the last time Raskolnikov visited the
     police office at two in the afternoon he was reproached for
     coming too late.--TRANSLATOR.

"Raskolnikov."

"Of course, Raskolnikov. You didn't imagine I'd forgotten? Don't think I
am like that... Rodion Ro--Ro--Rodionovitch, that's it, isn't it?"

"Rodion Romanovitch."

"Yes, yes, of course, Rodion Romanovitch! I was just getting at it. I
made many inquiries about you. I assure you I've been genuinely grieved
since that... since I behaved like that... it was explained to me
afterwards that you were a literary man... and a learned one too... and
so to say the first steps... Mercy on us! What literary or scientific
man does not begin by some originality of conduct! My wife and I have
the greatest respect for literature, in my wife it's a genuine passion!
Literature and art! If only a man is a gentleman, all the rest can be
gained by talents, learning, good sense, genius. As for a hat--well,
what does a hat matter? I can buy a hat as easily as I can a bun; but
what's under the hat, what the hat covers, I can't buy that! I was even
meaning to come and apologise to you, but thought maybe you'd... But I
am forgetting to ask you, is there anything you want really? I hear your
family have come?"

"Yes, my mother and sister."

"I've even had the honour and happiness of meeting your sister--a highly
cultivated and charming person. I confess I was sorry I got so hot with
you. There it is! But as for my looking suspiciously at your fainting
fit--that affair has been cleared up splendidly! Bigotry and fanaticism!
I understand your indignation. Perhaps you are changing your lodging on
account of your family's arriving?"

"No, I only looked in... I came to ask... I thought that I should find
Zametov here."

"Oh, yes! Of course, you've made friends, I heard. Well, no, Zametov is
not here. Yes, we've lost Zametov. He's not been here since yesterday...
he quarrelled with everyone on leaving... in the rudest way. He is a
feather-headed youngster, that's all; one might have expected something
from him, but there, you know what they are, our brilliant young men.
He wanted to go in for some examination, but it's only to talk and
boast about it, it will go no further than that. Of course it's a very
different matter with you or Mr. Razumihin there, your friend. Your
career is an intellectual one and you won't be deterred by failure. For
you, one may say, all the attractions of life _nihil est_--you are an
ascetic, a monk, a hermit!... A book, a pen behind your ear, a learned
research--that's where your spirit soars! I am the same way myself....
Have you read Livingstone's Travels?"

"No."

"Oh, I have. There are a great many Nihilists about nowadays, you know,
and indeed it is not to be wondered at. What sort of days are they? I
ask you. But we thought... you are not a Nihilist of course? Answer me
openly, openly!"

"N-no..."

"Believe me, you can speak openly to me as you would to yourself!
Official duty is one thing but... you are thinking I meant to say
_friendship_ is quite another? No, you're wrong! It's not friendship,
but the feeling of a man and a citizen, the feeling of humanity and of
love for the Almighty. I may be an official, but I am always bound
to feel myself a man and a citizen.... You were asking about Zametov.
Zametov will make a scandal in the French style in a house of bad
reputation, over a glass of champagne... that's all your Zametov is good
for! While I'm perhaps, so to speak, burning with devotion and lofty
feelings, and besides I have rank, consequence, a post! I am married and
have children, I fulfil the duties of a man and a citizen, but who is
he, may I ask? I appeal to you as a man ennobled by education... Then
these midwives, too, have become extraordinarily numerous."

Raskolnikov raised his eyebrows inquiringly. The words of Ilya
Petrovitch, who had obviously been dining, were for the most part a
stream of empty sounds for him. But some of them he understood. He
looked at him inquiringly, not knowing how it would end.

"I mean those crop-headed wenches," the talkative Ilya Petrovitch
continued. "Midwives is my name for them. I think it a very satisfactory
one, ha-ha! They go to the Academy, study anatomy. If I fall ill, am
I to send for a young lady to treat me? What do you say? Ha-ha!" Ilya
Petrovitch laughed, quite pleased with his own wit. "It's an immoderate
zeal for education, but once you're educated, that's enough. Why abuse
it? Why insult honourable people, as that scoundrel Zametov does? Why
did he insult me, I ask you? Look at these suicides, too, how common
they are, you can't fancy! People spend their last halfpenny and kill
themselves, boys and girls and old people. Only this morning we heard
about a gentleman who had just come to town. Nil Pavlitch, I say, what
was the name of that gentleman who shot himself?"

"Svidrigaïlov," someone answered from the other room with drowsy
listlessness.

Raskolnikov started.

"Svidrigaïlov! Svidrigaïlov has shot himself!" he cried.

"What, do you know Svidrigaïlov?"

"Yes... I knew him.... He hadn't been here long."

"Yes, that's so. He had lost his wife, was a man of reckless habits and
all of a sudden shot himself, and in such a shocking way.... He left
in his notebook a few words: that he dies in full possession of his
faculties and that no one is to blame for his death. He had money, they
say. How did you come to know him?"

"I... was acquainted... my sister was governess in his family."

"Bah-bah-bah! Then no doubt you can tell us something about him. You had
no suspicion?"

"I saw him yesterday... he... was drinking wine; I knew nothing."

Raskolnikov felt as though something had fallen on him and was stifling
him.

"You've turned pale again. It's so stuffy here..."

"Yes, I must go," muttered Raskolnikov. "Excuse my troubling you...."

"Oh, not at all, as often as you like. It's a pleasure to see you and I
am glad to say so."

Ilya Petrovitch held out his hand.

"I only wanted... I came to see Zametov."

"I understand, I understand, and it's a pleasure to see you."

"I... am very glad... good-bye," Raskolnikov smiled.

He went out; he reeled, he was overtaken with giddiness and did not know
what he was doing. He began going down the stairs, supporting himself
with his right hand against the wall. He fancied that a porter pushed
past him on his way upstairs to the police office, that a dog in
the lower storey kept up a shrill barking and that a woman flung a
rolling-pin at it and shouted. He went down and out into the yard.
There, not far from the entrance, stood Sonia, pale and horror-stricken.
She looked wildly at him. He stood still before her. There was a look of
poignant agony, of despair, in her face. She clasped her hands. His lips
worked in an ugly, meaningless smile. He stood still a minute, grinned
and went back to the police office.

Ilya Petrovitch had sat down and was rummaging among some papers. Before
him stood the same peasant who had pushed by on the stairs.

"Hulloa! Back again! have you left something behind? What's the matter?"

Raskolnikov, with white lips and staring eyes, came slowly nearer.
He walked right to the table, leaned his hand on it, tried to say
something, but could not; only incoherent sounds were audible.

"You are feeling ill, a chair! Here, sit down! Some water!"

Raskolnikov dropped on to a chair, but he kept his eyes fixed on the
face of Ilya Petrovitch, which expressed unpleasant surprise. Both
looked at one another for a minute and waited. Water was brought.

"It was I..." began Raskolnikov.

"Drink some water."

Raskolnikov refused the water with his hand, and softly and brokenly,
but distinctly said:

"_It was I killed the old pawnbroker woman and her sister Lizaveta with
an axe and robbed them._"

Ilya Petrovitch opened his mouth. People ran up on all sides.

Raskolnikov repeated his statement.



EPILOGUE

I

Siberia. On the banks of a broad solitary river stands a town, one of
the administrative centres of Russia; in the town there is a fortress,
in the fortress there is a prison. In the prison the second-class
convict Rodion Raskolnikov has been confined for nine months. Almost a
year and a half has passed since his crime.

There had been little difficulty about his trial. The criminal adhered
exactly, firmly, and clearly to his statement. He did not confuse nor
misrepresent the facts, nor soften them in his own interest, nor omit
the smallest detail. He explained every incident of the murder, the
secret of _the pledge_ (the piece of wood with a strip of metal) which
was found in the murdered woman's hand. He described minutely how he
had taken her keys, what they were like, as well as the chest and its
contents; he explained the mystery of Lizaveta's murder; described how
Koch and, after him, the student knocked, and repeated all they had said
to one another; how he afterwards had run downstairs and heard Nikolay
and Dmitri shouting; how he had hidden in the empty flat and afterwards
gone home. He ended by indicating the stone in the yard off the
Voznesensky Prospect under which the purse and the trinkets were found.
The whole thing, in fact, was perfectly clear. The lawyers and the
judges were very much struck, among other things, by the fact that he
had hidden the trinkets and the purse under a stone, without making
use of them, and that, what was more, he did not now remember what the
trinkets were like, or even how many there were. The fact that he had
never opened the purse and did not even know how much was in it seemed
incredible. There turned out to be in the purse three hundred and
seventeen roubles and sixty copecks. From being so long under the stone,
some of the most valuable notes lying uppermost had suffered from the
damp. They were a long while trying to discover why the accused man
should tell a lie about this, when about everything else he had made
a truthful and straightforward confession. Finally some of the lawyers
more versed in psychology admitted that it was possible he had really
not looked into the purse, and so didn't know what was in it when he
hid it under the stone. But they immediately drew the deduction that
the crime could only have been committed through temporary mental
derangement, through homicidal mania, without object or the pursuit of
gain. This fell in with the most recent fashionable theory of temporary
insanity, so often applied in our days in criminal cases. Moreover
Raskolnikov's hypochondriacal condition was proved by many witnesses, by
Dr. Zossimov, his former fellow students, his landlady and her servant.
All this pointed strongly to the conclusion that Raskolnikov was not
quite like an ordinary murderer and robber, but that there was another
element in the case.

To the intense annoyance of those who maintained this opinion, the
criminal scarcely attempted to defend himself. To the decisive question
as to what motive impelled him to the murder and the robbery, he
answered very clearly with the coarsest frankness that the cause was
his miserable position, his poverty and helplessness, and his desire to
provide for his first steps in life by the help of the three thousand
roubles he had reckoned on finding. He had been led to the murder
through his shallow and cowardly nature, exasperated moreover by
privation and failure. To the question what led him to confess, he
answered that it was his heartfelt repentance. All this was almost
coarse....

The sentence however was more merciful than could have been expected,
perhaps partly because the criminal had not tried to justify himself,
but had rather shown a desire to exaggerate his guilt. All the strange
and peculiar circumstances of the crime were taken into consideration.
There could be no doubt of the abnormal and poverty-stricken condition
of the criminal at the time. The fact that he had made no use of what he
had stolen was put down partly to the effect of remorse, partly to his
abnormal mental condition at the time of the crime. Incidentally the
murder of Lizaveta served indeed to confirm the last hypothesis: a man
commits two murders and forgets that the door is open! Finally, the
confession, at the very moment when the case was hopelessly muddled by
the false evidence given by Nikolay through melancholy and fanaticism,
and when, moreover, there were no proofs against the real criminal, no
suspicions even (Porfiry Petrovitch fully kept his word)--all this did
much to soften the sentence. Other circumstances, too, in the prisoner's
favour came out quite unexpectedly. Razumihin somehow discovered and
proved that while Raskolnikov was at the university he had helped a poor
consumptive fellow student and had spent his last penny on supporting
him for six months, and when this student died, leaving a decrepit
old father whom he had maintained almost from his thirteenth year,
Raskolnikov had got the old man into a hospital and paid for his funeral
when he died. Raskolnikov's landlady bore witness, too, that when they
had lived in another house at Five Corners, Raskolnikov had rescued two
little children from a house on fire and was burnt in doing so. This was
investigated and fairly well confirmed by many witnesses. These facts
made an impression in his favour.

And in the end the criminal was, in consideration of extenuating
circumstances, condemned to penal servitude in the second class for a
term of eight years only.

At the very beginning of the trial Raskolnikov's mother fell ill. Dounia
and Razumihin found it possible to get her out of Petersburg during the
trial. Razumihin chose a town on the railway not far from Petersburg, so
as to be able to follow every step of the trial and at the same time
to see Avdotya Romanovna as often as possible. Pulcheria Alexandrovna's
illness was a strange nervous one and was accompanied by a partial
derangement of her intellect.

When Dounia returned from her last interview with her brother, she
had found her mother already ill, in feverish delirium. That evening
Razumihin and she agreed what answers they must make to her mother's
questions about Raskolnikov and made up a complete story for her
mother's benefit of his having to go away to a distant part of Russia
on a business commission, which would bring him in the end money and
reputation.

But they were struck by the fact that Pulcheria Alexandrovna never
asked them anything on the subject, neither then nor thereafter. On the
contrary, she had her own version of her son's sudden departure; she
told them with tears how he had come to say good-bye to her, hinting
that she alone knew many mysterious and important facts, and that Rodya
had many very powerful enemies, so that it was necessary for him to be
in hiding. As for his future career, she had no doubt that it would be
brilliant when certain sinister influences could be removed. She assured
Razumihin that her son would be one day a great statesman, that his
article and brilliant literary talent proved it. This article she was
continually reading, she even read it aloud, almost took it to bed
with her, but scarcely asked where Rodya was, though the subject was
obviously avoided by the others, which might have been enough to awaken
her suspicions.

They began to be frightened at last at Pulcheria Alexandrovna's strange
silence on certain subjects. She did not, for instance, complain of
getting no letters from him, though in previous years she had only lived
on the hope of letters from her beloved Rodya. This was the cause of
great uneasiness to Dounia; the idea occurred to her that her mother
suspected that there was something terrible in her son's fate and was
afraid to ask, for fear of hearing something still more awful. In any
case, Dounia saw clearly that her mother was not in full possession of
her faculties.

It happened once or twice, however, that Pulcheria Alexandrovna gave
such a turn to the conversation that it was impossible to answer her
without mentioning where Rodya was, and on receiving unsatisfactory and
suspicious answers she became at once gloomy and silent, and this mood
lasted for a long time. Dounia saw at last that it was hard to deceive
her and came to the conclusion that it was better to be absolutely
silent on certain points; but it became more and more evident that
the poor mother suspected something terrible. Dounia remembered her
brother's telling her that her mother had overheard her talking in her
sleep on the night after her interview with Svidrigaïlov and before the
fatal day of the confession: had not she made out something from that?
Sometimes days and even weeks of gloomy silence and tears would be
succeeded by a period of hysterical animation, and the invalid would
begin to talk almost incessantly of her son, of her hopes of his
future.... Her fancies were sometimes very strange. They humoured her,
pretended to agree with her (she saw perhaps that they were pretending),
but she still went on talking.

Five months after Raskolnikov's confession, he was sentenced. Razumihin
and Sonia saw him in prison as often as it was possible. At last
the moment of separation came. Dounia swore to her brother that the
separation should not be for ever, Razumihin did the same. Razumihin, in
his youthful ardour, had firmly resolved to lay the foundations at least
of a secure livelihood during the next three or four years, and saving
up a certain sum, to emigrate to Siberia, a country rich in every
natural resource and in need of workers, active men and capital. There
they would settle in the town where Rodya was and all together would
begin a new life. They all wept at parting.

Raskolnikov had been very dreamy for a few days before. He asked a great
deal about his mother and was constantly anxious about her. He worried
so much about her that it alarmed Dounia. When he heard about his
mother's illness he became very gloomy. With Sonia he was particularly
reserved all the time. With the help of the money left to her by
Svidrigaïlov, Sonia had long ago made her preparations to follow the
party of convicts in which he was despatched to Siberia. Not a word
passed between Raskolnikov and her on the subject, but both knew it
would be so. At the final leave-taking he smiled strangely at his
sister's and Razumihin's fervent anticipations of their happy future
together when he should come out of prison. He predicted that their
mother's illness would soon have a fatal ending. Sonia and he at last
set off.

Two months later Dounia was married to Razumihin. It was a quiet and
sorrowful wedding; Porfiry Petrovitch and Zossimov were invited however.
During all this period Razumihin wore an air of resolute determination.
Dounia put implicit faith in his carrying out his plans and indeed she
could not but believe in him. He displayed a rare strength of will.
Among other things he began attending university lectures again in order
to take his degree. They were continually making plans for the future;
both counted on settling in Siberia within five years at least. Till
then they rested their hopes on Sonia.

Pulcheria Alexandrovna was delighted to give her blessing to Dounia's
marriage with Razumihin; but after the marriage she became even more
melancholy and anxious. To give her pleasure Razumihin told her how
Raskolnikov had looked after the poor student and his decrepit father
and how a year ago he had been burnt and injured in rescuing two
little children from a fire. These two pieces of news excited Pulcheria
Alexandrovna's disordered imagination almost to ecstasy. She was
continually talking about them, even entering into conversation with
strangers in the street, though Dounia always accompanied her. In public
conveyances and shops, wherever she could capture a listener, she would
begin the discourse about her son, his article, how he had helped the
student, how he had been burnt at the fire, and so on! Dounia did
not know how to restrain her. Apart from the danger of her morbid
excitement, there was the risk of someone's recalling Raskolnikov's name
and speaking of the recent trial. Pulcheria Alexandrovna found out the
address of the mother of the two children her son had saved and insisted
on going to see her.

At last her restlessness reached an extreme point. She would sometimes
begin to cry suddenly and was often ill and feverishly delirious. One
morning she declared that by her reckoning Rodya ought soon to be home,
that she remembered when he said good-bye to her he said that they must
expect him back in nine months. She began to prepare for his coming,
began to do up her room for him, to clean the furniture, to wash and
put up new hangings and so on. Dounia was anxious, but said nothing and
helped her to arrange the room. After a fatiguing day spent in continual
fancies, in joyful day-dreams and tears, Pulcheria Alexandrovna was
taken ill in the night and by morning she was feverish and delirious.
It was brain fever. She died within a fortnight. In her delirium she
dropped words which showed that she knew a great deal more about her
son's terrible fate than they had supposed.

For a long time Raskolnikov did not know of his mother's death, though
a regular correspondence had been maintained from the time he reached
Siberia. It was carried on by means of Sonia, who wrote every month
to the Razumihins and received an answer with unfailing regularity. At
first they found Sonia's letters dry and unsatisfactory, but later on
they came to the conclusion that the letters could not be better, for
from these letters they received a complete picture of their unfortunate
brother's life. Sonia's letters were full of the most matter-of-fact
detail, the simplest and clearest description of all Raskolnikov's
surroundings as a convict. There was no word of her own hopes, no
conjecture as to the future, no description of her feelings. Instead of
any attempt to interpret his state of mind and inner life, she gave the
simple facts--that is, his own words, an exact account of his health,
what he asked for at their interviews, what commission he gave her
and so on. All these facts she gave with extraordinary minuteness. The
picture of their unhappy brother stood out at last with great clearness
and precision. There could be no mistake, because nothing was given but
facts.

But Dounia and her husband could get little comfort out of the news,
especially at first. Sonia wrote that he was constantly sullen and not
ready to talk, that he scarcely seemed interested in the news she gave
him from their letters, that he sometimes asked after his mother and
that when, seeing that he had guessed the truth, she told him at last
of her death, she was surprised to find that he did not seem greatly
affected by it, not externally at any rate. She told them that, although
he seemed so wrapped up in himself and, as it were, shut himself off
from everyone--he took a very direct and simple view of his new life;
that he understood his position, expected nothing better for the time,
had no ill-founded hopes (as is so common in his position) and scarcely
seemed surprised at anything in his surroundings, so unlike anything he
had known before. She wrote that his health was satisfactory; he did his
work without shirking or seeking to do more; he was almost indifferent
about food, but except on Sundays and holidays the food was so bad that
at last he had been glad to accept some money from her, Sonia, to have
his own tea every day. He begged her not to trouble about anything else,
declaring that all this fuss about him only annoyed him. Sonia wrote
further that in prison he shared the same room with the rest, that she
had not seen the inside of their barracks, but concluded that they were
crowded, miserable and unhealthy; that he slept on a plank bed with a
rug under him and was unwilling to make any other arrangement. But that
he lived so poorly and roughly, not from any plan or design, but simply
from inattention and indifference.

Sonia wrote simply that he had at first shown no interest in her visits,
had almost been vexed with her indeed for coming, unwilling to talk and
rude to her. But that in the end these visits had become a habit and
almost a necessity for him, so that he was positively distressed when
she was ill for some days and could not visit him. She used to see him
on holidays at the prison gates or in the guard-room, to which he was
brought for a few minutes to see her. On working days she would go to
see him at work either at the workshops or at the brick kilns, or at the
sheds on the banks of the Irtish.

About herself, Sonia wrote that she had succeeded in making some
acquaintances in the town, that she did sewing, and, as there
was scarcely a dressmaker in the town, she was looked upon as an
indispensable person in many houses. But she did not mention that the
authorities were, through her, interested in Raskolnikov; that his task
was lightened and so on.

At last the news came (Dounia had indeed noticed signs of alarm and
uneasiness in the preceding letters) that he held aloof from everyone,
that his fellow prisoners did not like him, that he kept silent for days
at a time and was becoming very pale. In the last letter Sonia wrote
that he had been taken very seriously ill and was in the convict ward of
the hospital.



II

He was ill a long time. But it was not the horrors of prison life, not
the hard labour, the bad food, the shaven head, or the patched clothes
that crushed him. What did he care for all those trials and hardships!
he was even glad of the hard work. Physically exhausted, he could at
least reckon on a few hours of quiet sleep. And what was the food to
him--the thin cabbage soup with beetles floating in it? In the past as a
student he had often not had even that. His clothes were warm and suited
to his manner of life. He did not even feel the fetters. Was he ashamed
of his shaven head and parti-coloured coat? Before whom? Before Sonia?
Sonia was afraid of him, how could he be ashamed before her? And yet he
was ashamed even before Sonia, whom he tortured because of it with
his contemptuous rough manner. But it was not his shaven head and his
fetters he was ashamed of: his pride had been stung to the quick. It was
wounded pride that made him ill. Oh, how happy he would have been if he
could have blamed himself! He could have borne anything then, even
shame and disgrace. But he judged himself severely, and his exasperated
conscience found no particularly terrible fault in his past, except
a simple _blunder_ which might happen to anyone. He was ashamed just
because he, Raskolnikov, had so hopelessly, stupidly come to grief
through some decree of blind fate, and must humble himself and submit to
"the idiocy" of a sentence, if he were anyhow to be at peace.

Vague and objectless anxiety in the present, and in the future a
continual sacrifice leading to nothing--that was all that lay before
him. And what comfort was it to him that at the end of eight years he
would only be thirty-two and able to begin a new life! What had he to
live for? What had he to look forward to? Why should he strive? To live
in order to exist? Why, he had been ready a thousand times before to
give up existence for the sake of an idea, for a hope, even for a fancy.
Mere existence had always been too little for him; he had always wanted
more. Perhaps it was just because of the strength of his desires that he
had thought himself a man to whom more was permissible than to others.

And if only fate would have sent him repentance--burning repentance that
would have torn his heart and robbed him of sleep, that repentance, the
awful agony of which brings visions of hanging or drowning! Oh, he would
have been glad of it! Tears and agonies would at least have been life.
But he did not repent of his crime.

At least he might have found relief in raging at his stupidity, as he
had raged at the grotesque blunders that had brought him to prison.
But now in prison, _in freedom_, he thought over and criticised all his
actions again and by no means found them so blundering and so grotesque
as they had seemed at the fatal time.

"In what way," he asked himself, "was my theory stupider than others
that have swarmed and clashed from the beginning of the world? One has
only to look at the thing quite independently, broadly, and uninfluenced
by commonplace ideas, and my idea will by no means seem so... strange.
Oh, sceptics and halfpenny philosophers, why do you halt half-way!

"Why does my action strike them as so horrible?" he said to himself. "Is
it because it was a crime? What is meant by crime? My conscience is at
rest. Of course, it was a legal crime, of course, the letter of the law
was broken and blood was shed. Well, punish me for the letter of the
law... and that's enough. Of course, in that case many of the
benefactors of mankind who snatched power for themselves instead of
inheriting it ought to have been punished at their first steps. But
those men succeeded and so _they were right_, and I didn't, and so I
had no right to have taken that step."

It was only in that that he recognised his criminality, only in the fact
that he had been unsuccessful and had confessed it.

He suffered too from the question: why had he not killed himself? Why
had he stood looking at the river and preferred to confess? Was the
desire to live so strong and was it so hard to overcome it? Had not
Svidrigaïlov overcome it, although he was afraid of death?

In misery he asked himself this question, and could not understand that,
at the very time he had been standing looking into the river, he had
perhaps been dimly conscious of the fundamental falsity in himself and
his convictions. He didn't understand that that consciousness might be
the promise of a future crisis, of a new view of life and of his future
resurrection.

He preferred to attribute it to the dead weight of instinct which he
could not step over, again through weakness and meanness. He looked at
his fellow prisoners and was amazed to see how they all loved life and
prized it. It seemed to him that they loved and valued life more in
prison than in freedom. What terrible agonies and privations some of
them, the tramps for instance, had endured! Could they care so much for
a ray of sunshine, for the primeval forest, the cold spring hidden away
in some unseen spot, which the tramp had marked three years before, and
longed to see again, as he might to see his sweetheart, dreaming of the
green grass round it and the bird singing in the bush? As he went on he
saw still more inexplicable examples.

In prison, of course, there was a great deal he did not see and did not
want to see; he lived as it were with downcast eyes. It was loathsome
and unbearable for him to look. But in the end there was much that
surprised him and he began, as it were involuntarily, to notice much
that he had not suspected before. What surprised him most of all was
the terrible impossible gulf that lay between him and all the rest. They
seemed to be a different species, and he looked at them and they at
him with distrust and hostility. He felt and knew the reasons of his
isolation, but he would never have admitted till then that those reasons
were so deep and strong. There were some Polish exiles, political
prisoners, among them. They simply looked down upon all the rest as
ignorant churls; but Raskolnikov could not look upon them like that.
He saw that these ignorant men were in many respects far wiser than the
Poles. There were some Russians who were just as contemptuous, a former
officer and two seminarists. Raskolnikov saw their mistake as clearly.
He was disliked and avoided by everyone; they even began to hate him at
last--why, he could not tell. Men who had been far more guilty despised
and laughed at his crime.

"You're a gentleman," they used to say. "You shouldn't hack about with
an axe; that's not a gentleman's work."

The second week in Lent, his turn came to take the sacrament with his
gang. He went to church and prayed with the others. A quarrel broke out
one day, he did not know how. All fell on him at once in a fury.

"You're an infidel! You don't believe in God," they shouted. "You ought
to be killed."

He had never talked to them about God nor his belief, but they wanted to
kill him as an infidel. He said nothing. One of the prisoners rushed at
him in a perfect frenzy. Raskolnikov awaited him calmly and silently;
his eyebrows did not quiver, his face did not flinch. The guard
succeeded in intervening between him and his assailant, or there would
have been bloodshed.

There was another question he could not decide: why were they all so
fond of Sonia? She did not try to win their favour; she rarely met
them, sometimes only she came to see him at work for a moment. And yet
everybody knew her, they knew that she had come out to follow _him_,
knew how and where she lived. She never gave them money, did them no
particular services. Only once at Christmas she sent them all presents
of pies and rolls. But by degrees closer relations sprang up between
them and Sonia. She would write and post letters for them to their
relations. Relations of the prisoners who visited the town, at their
instructions, left with Sonia presents and money for them. Their wives
and sweethearts knew her and used to visit her. And when she visited
Raskolnikov at work, or met a party of the prisoners on the road, they
all took off their hats to her. "Little mother Sofya Semyonovna, you
are our dear, good little mother," coarse branded criminals said to that
frail little creature. She would smile and bow to them and everyone was
delighted when she smiled. They even admired her gait and turned round
to watch her walking; they admired her too for being so little, and, in
fact, did not know what to admire her most for. They even came to her
for help in their illnesses.

He was in the hospital from the middle of Lent till after Easter. When
he was better, he remembered the dreams he had had while he was feverish
and delirious. He dreamt that the whole world was condemned to a
terrible new strange plague that had come to Europe from the depths of
Asia. All were to be destroyed except a very few chosen. Some new sorts
of microbes were attacking the bodies of men, but these microbes were
endowed with intelligence and will. Men attacked by them became at once
mad and furious. But never had men considered themselves so intellectual
and so completely in possession of the truth as these sufferers, never
had they considered their decisions, their scientific conclusions, their
moral convictions so infallible. Whole villages, whole towns and peoples
went mad from the infection. All were excited and did not understand
one another. Each thought that he alone had the truth and was wretched
looking at the others, beat himself on the breast, wept, and wrung
his hands. They did not know how to judge and could not agree what to
consider evil and what good; they did not know whom to blame, whom
to justify. Men killed each other in a sort of senseless spite. They
gathered together in armies against one another, but even on the march
the armies would begin attacking each other, the ranks would be broken
and the soldiers would fall on each other, stabbing and cutting, biting
and devouring each other. The alarm bell was ringing all day long in
the towns; men rushed together, but why they were summoned and who was
summoning them no one knew. The most ordinary trades were abandoned,
because everyone proposed his own ideas, his own improvements, and they
could not agree. The land too was abandoned. Men met in groups, agreed
on something, swore to keep together, but at once began on something
quite different from what they had proposed. They accused one another,
fought and killed each other. There were conflagrations and famine. All
men and all things were involved in destruction. The plague spread and
moved further and further. Only a few men could be saved in the whole
world. They were a pure chosen people, destined to found a new race and
a new life, to renew and purify the earth, but no one had seen these
men, no one had heard their words and their voices.

Raskolnikov was worried that this senseless dream haunted his memory so
miserably, the impression of this feverish delirium persisted so long.
The second week after Easter had come. There were warm bright spring
days; in the prison ward the grating windows under which the sentinel
paced were opened. Sonia had only been able to visit him twice during
his illness; each time she had to obtain permission, and it was
difficult. But she often used to come to the hospital yard, especially
in the evening, sometimes only to stand a minute and look up at the
windows of the ward.

One evening, when he was almost well again, Raskolnikov fell asleep. On
waking up he chanced to go to the window, and at once saw Sonia in the
distance at the hospital gate. She seemed to be waiting for someone.
Something stabbed him to the heart at that minute. He shuddered and
moved away from the window. Next day Sonia did not come, nor the day
after; he noticed that he was expecting her uneasily. At last he was
discharged. On reaching the prison he learnt from the convicts that
Sofya Semyonovna was lying ill at home and was unable to go out.

He was very uneasy and sent to inquire after her; he soon learnt that
her illness was not dangerous. Hearing that he was anxious about her,
Sonia sent him a pencilled note, telling him that she was much better,
that she had a slight cold and that she would soon, very soon come and
see him at his work. His heart throbbed painfully as he read it.

Again it was a warm bright day. Early in the morning, at six o'clock, he
went off to work on the river bank, where they used to pound alabaster
and where there was a kiln for baking it in a shed. There were only
three of them sent. One of the convicts went with the guard to the
fortress to fetch a tool; the other began getting the wood ready and
laying it in the kiln. Raskolnikov came out of the shed on to the river
bank, sat down on a heap of logs by the shed and began gazing at the
wide deserted river. From the high bank a broad landscape opened before
him, the sound of singing floated faintly audible from the other bank.
In the vast steppe, bathed in sunshine, he could just see, like black
specks, the nomads' tents. There there was freedom, there other men were
living, utterly unlike those here; there time itself seemed to stand
still, as though the age of Abraham and his flocks had not passed.
Raskolnikov sat gazing, his thoughts passed into day-dreams, into
contemplation; he thought of nothing, but a vague restlessness excited
and troubled him. Suddenly he found Sonia beside him; she had come up
noiselessly and sat down at his side. It was still quite early; the
morning chill was still keen. She wore her poor old burnous and the
green shawl; her face still showed signs of illness, it was thinner and
paler. She gave him a joyful smile of welcome, but held out her hand
with her usual timidity. She was always timid of holding out her hand
to him and sometimes did not offer it at all, as though afraid he would
repel it. He always took her hand as though with repugnance, always
seemed vexed to meet her and was sometimes obstinately silent throughout
her visit. Sometimes she trembled before him and went away deeply
grieved. But now their hands did not part. He stole a rapid glance
at her and dropped his eyes on the ground without speaking. They were
alone, no one had seen them. The guard had turned away for the time.

How it happened he did not know. But all at once something seemed to
seize him and fling him at her feet. He wept and threw his arms round
her knees. For the first instant she was terribly frightened and she
turned pale. She jumped up and looked at him trembling. But at the same
moment she understood, and a light of infinite happiness came into her
eyes. She knew and had no doubt that he loved her beyond everything and
that at last the moment had come....

They wanted to speak, but could not; tears stood in their eyes. They
were both pale and thin; but those sick pale faces were bright with the
dawn of a new future, of a full resurrection into a new life. They were
renewed by love; the heart of each held infinite sources of life for the
heart of the other.

They resolved to wait and be patient. They had another seven years to
wait, and what terrible suffering and what infinite happiness before
them! But he had risen again and he knew it and felt it in all his
being, while she--she only lived in his life.

On the evening of the same day, when the barracks were locked,
Raskolnikov lay on his plank bed and thought of her. He had even fancied
that day that all the convicts who had been his enemies looked at him
differently; he had even entered into talk with them and they answered
him in a friendly way. He remembered that now, and thought it was bound
to be so. Wasn't everything now bound to be changed?

He thought of her. He remembered how continually he had tormented her
and wounded her heart. He remembered her pale and thin little face.
But these recollections scarcely troubled him now; he knew with what
infinite love he would now repay all her sufferings. And what were all,
_all_ the agonies of the past! Everything, even his crime, his sentence
and imprisonment, seemed to him now in the first rush of feeling an
external, strange fact with which he had no concern. But he could not
think for long together of anything that evening, and he could not have
analysed anything consciously; he was simply feeling. Life had stepped
into the place of theory and something quite different would work itself
out in his mind.

Under his pillow lay the New Testament. He took it up mechanically.
The book belonged to Sonia; it was the one from which she had read the
raising of Lazarus to him. At first he was afraid that she would worry
him about religion, would talk about the gospel and pester him with
books. But to his great surprise she had not once approached the subject
and had not even offered him the Testament. He had asked her for it
himself not long before his illness and she brought him the book without
a word. Till now he had not opened it.

He did not open it now, but one thought passed through his mind: "Can
her convictions not be mine now? Her feelings, her aspirations at
least...."

She too had been greatly agitated that day, and at night she was taken
ill again. But she was so happy--and so unexpectedly happy--that she was
almost frightened of her happiness. Seven years, _only_ seven years! At
the beginning of their happiness at some moments they were both ready
to look on those seven years as though they were seven days. He did not
know that the new life would not be given him for nothing, that he would
have to pay dearly for it, that it would cost him great striving, great
suffering.

But that is the beginning of a new story--the story of the gradual
renewal of a man, the story of his gradual regeneration, of his passing
from one world into another, of his initiation into a new unknown life.
That might be the subject of a new story, but our present story is
ended.





End of Project Gutenberg's Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky

*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CRIME AND PUNISHMENT ***

***** This file should be named 2554-8.txt or 2554-8.zip *****
This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
        http://www.gutenberg.org/2/5/5/2554/

Produced by John Bickers; and Dagny and David Widger

Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
will be renamed.

Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
redistribution.



*** START: FULL LICENSE ***

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK

To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
http://gutenberg.org/license).


Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
electronic works

1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.

1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
works.  See paragraph 1.E below.

1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.

1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
States.

1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:

1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
copied or distributed:

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
1.E.9.

1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.

1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.

1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
Gutenberg-tm License.

1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.

1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.

1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
that

- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."

- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
     License.  You must require such a user to return or
     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
     Project Gutenberg-tm works.

- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
     of receipt of the work.

- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.

1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.

1.F.

1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
your equipment.

1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
DAMAGE.

1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
opportunities to fix the problem.

1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.

1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.

1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.


Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm

Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
people in all walks of life.

Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.


Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation

The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
http://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.

The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
page at http://pglaf.org

For additional contact information:
     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
     Chief Executive and Director
     gbnewby@pglaf.org


Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation

Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
status with the IRS.

The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
particular state visit http://pglaf.org

While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
approach us with offers to donate.

International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.

Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate


Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
works.

Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.


Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.


Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:

     http://www.gutenberg.org

This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
The Project Gutenberg EBook of English Literature, by William J. Long

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net


Title: English Literature
       Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World

Author: William J. Long

Release Date: January 6, 2004 [EBook #10609]

Language: English


*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ENGLISH LITERATURE ***




Produced by Kevin Handy, Dave Maddock and PG Distributed Proofreaders




ENGLISH LITERATURE

ITS HISTORY AND ITS SIGNIFICANCE
FOR THE LIFE OF THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING
WORLD

A TEXT-BOOK FOR SCHOOLS

BY
WILLIAM J. LONG, PH.D. (Heidelberg)

       *       *       *       *       *

TO
MY FRIEND
C H T
IN GRATITUDE FOR
HIS CONTINUED HELP IN THE
PREPARATION OF
THIS BOOK

       *       *       *       *       *

PREFACE

This book, which presents the whole splendid history of English literature
from Anglo-Saxon times to the close of the Victorian Era, has three
specific aims. The first is to create or to encourage in every student the
desire to read the best books, and to know literature itself rather than
what has been written about literature. The second is to interpret
literature both personally and historically, that is, to show how a great
book generally reflects not only the author's life and thought but also the
spirit of the age and the ideals of the nation's history. The third aim is
to show, by a study of each successive period, how our literature has
steadily developed from its first simple songs and stories to its present
complexity in prose and poetry.

To carry out these aims we have introduced the following features:

(1) A brief, accurate summary of historical events and social conditions in
each period, and a consideration of the ideals which stirred the whole
nation, as in the days of Elizabeth, before they found expression in
literature.

(2) A study of the various literary epochs in turn, showing what each
gained from the epoch preceding, and how each aided in the development of a
national literature.

(3) A readable biography of every important writer, showing how he lived
and worked, how he met success or failure, how he influenced his age, and
how his age influenced him.

(4) A study and analysis of every author's best works, and of many of the
books required for college-entrance examinations.

(5) Selections enough--especially from earlier writers, and from writers
not likely to be found in the home or school library--to indicate the
spirit of each author's work; and directions as to the best works to read,
and where such works may be found in inexpensive editions.

(6) A frank, untechnical discussion of each great writer's work as a whole,
and a critical estimate of his relative place and influence in our
literature.

(7) A series of helps to students and teachers at the end of each chapter,
including summaries, selections for reading, bibliographies, a list of
suggestive questions, and a chronological table of important events in the
history and literature of each period.

(8) Throughout this book we have remembered Roger Ascham's suggestion, made
over three centuries ago and still pertinent, that "'tis a poor way to make
a child love study by beginning with the things which he naturally
dislikes." We have laid emphasis upon the delights of literature; we have
treated books not as mere instruments of research--which is the danger in
most of our studies--but rather as instruments of enjoyment and of
inspiration; and by making our study as attractive as possible we have
sought to encourage the student to read widely for himself, to choose the
best books, and to form his own judgment about what our first Anglo-Saxon
writers called "the things worthy to be remembered."

To those who may use this book in their homes or in their class rooms, the
writer ventures to offer one or two friendly suggestions out of his own
experience as a teacher of young people. First, the amount of space here
given to different periods and authors is not an index of the relative
amount of time to be spent upon the different subjects. Thus, to tell the
story of Spenser's life and ideals requires as much space as to tell the
story of Tennyson; but the average class will spend its time more
pleasantly and profitably with the latter poet than with the former.
Second, many authors who are and ought to be included in this history need
not be studied in the class room. A text-book is not a catechism but a
storehouse, in which one finds what he wants, and some good things beside.
Few classes will find time to study Blake or Newman, for instance; but in
nearly every class there will be found one or two students who are
attracted by the mysticism of Blake or by the profound spirituality of
Newman. Such students should be encouraged to follow their own spirits, and
to share with their classmates the joy of their discoveries. And they
should find in their text-book the material for their own study and
reading.

A third suggestion relates to the method of teaching literature; and here
it might be well to consider the word of a great poet,--that if you would
know where the ripest cherries are, ask the boys and the blackbirds. It is
surprising how much a young person will get out of the _Merchant of
Venice_, and somehow arrive at Shakespeare's opinion of Shylock and Portia,
if we do not bother him too much with notes and critical directions as to
what he ought to seek and find. Turn a child and a donkey loose in the same
field, and the child heads straight for the beautiful spots where brooks
are running and birds singing, while the donkey turns as naturally to weeds
and thistles. In our study of literature we have perhaps too much sympathy
with the latter, and we even insist that the child come back from his own
quest of the ideal to join us in our critical companionship. In reading
many text-books of late, and in visiting many class rooms, the writer has
received the impression that we lay too much stress on second-hand
criticism, passed down from book to book; and we set our pupils to
searching for figures of speech and elements of style, as if the great
books of the world were subject to chemical analysis. This seems to be a
mistake, for two reasons: first, the average young person has no natural
interest in such matters; and second, he is unable to appreciate them. He
feels unconsciously with Chaucer:

    And as for me, though that my wit be lytë,
    On bookës for to rede I me delytë.

Indeed, many mature persons (including the writer of this history) are
often unable to explain at first the charm or the style of an author who
pleases them; and the more profound the impression made by a book, the more
difficult it is to give expression to our thought and feeling. To read and
enjoy good books is with us, as with Chaucer, the main thing; to analyze
the author's style or explain our own enjoyment seems of secondary and
small importance. However that may be, we state frankly our own conviction
that the detailed study and analysis of a few standard works--which is the
only literary pabulum given to many young people in our schools--bears the
same relation to true literature that theology bears to religion, or
psychology to friendship. One is a more or less unwelcome mental
discipline; the other is the joy of life.

The writer ventures to suggest, therefore, that, since literature is our
subject, we begin and end with good books; and that we stand aside while
the great writers speak their own message to our pupils. In studying each
successive period, let the student begin by reading the best that the age
produced; let him feel in his own way the power and mystery of _Beowulf_,
the broad charity of Shakespeare, the sublimity of Milton, the romantic
enthusiasm of Scott; and then, when his own taste is pleased and satisfied,
a new one will arise,--to know something about the author, the times in
which he lived, and finally of criticism, which, in its simplicity, is the
discovery that the men and women of other ages were very much like
ourselves, loving as we love, bearing the same burdens, and following the
same ideals:

    Lo, with the ancient
    Roots of man's nature
    Twines the eternal
    Passion of song.
    Ever Love fans it;
    Ever Life feeds it;
    Time cannot age it;
    Death cannot slay.

To answer the questions which arise naturally between teacher and pupil
concerning the books that they read, is one object of this volume. It aims
not simply to instruct but also to inspire; to trace the historical
development of English literature, and at the same time to allure its
readers to the best books and the best writers. And from beginning to end
it is written upon the assumption that the first virtue of such a work is
to be accurate, and the second to be interesting.

The author acknowledges, with gratitude and appreciation, his indebtedness
to Professor William Lyon Phelps for the use of his literary map of
England, and to the keen critics, teachers of literature and history, who
have read the proofs of this book, and have improved it by their good
suggestions.

WILLIAM J. LONG STAMFORD, CONNECTICUT

       *       *       *       *       *



CONTENTS

CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION--THE MEANING OF LITERATURE

The Shell and the Book. Qualities of Literature. Tests of Literature. The
Object in studying Literature. Importance of Literature. Summary of the
Subject. Bibliography.

CHAPTER II. THE ANGLO-SAXON OR OLD-ENGLISH PERIOD

Our First Poetry. "Beowulf." "Widsith." "Deor's Lament." "The Seafarer."
"The Fight at Finnsburgh." "Waldere." Anglo-Saxon Life. Our First Speech.
Christian Writers. Northumbrian Literature. Bede. Cædmon. Cynewulf. Decline
of Northumbrian Literature. Alfred. Summary. Bibliography. Questions.
Chronology.

CHAPTER III. THE ANGLO-NORMAN PERIOD

The Normans. The Conquest. Literary Ideals of the Normans. Geoffrey of
Monmouth. Work of the French Writers. Layamon's "Brut." Metrical Romances.
The Pearl. Miscellaneous Literature of the Norman Period. Summary.
Bibliography. Questions. Chronology.

CHAPTER IV. THE AGE OF CHAUCER

History of the Period. Five Writers of the Age. Chaucer. Langland. "Piers
Plowman." John Wyclif. John Mandeville. Summary. Bibliography. Questions.
Chronology.

CHAPTER V. THE REVIVAL OF LEARNING

Political Changes. Literature of the Revival. Wyatt and Surrey. Malory's
"Morte d'Arthur." Summary. Bibliography. Questions. Chronology.

CHAPTER VI. THE AGE OF ELIZABETH

Political Summary. Characteristics of the Elizabethan Age. The Non-Dramatic
Poets. Edmund Spenser. Minor Poets. Thomas Sackville. Philip Sidney. George
Chapman. Michael Drayton. The Origin of the Drama. The Religious Period of
the Drama. Miracle and Mystery Plays. The Moral Period of the Drama. The
Interludes. The Artistic Period of the Drama. Classical Influence upon the
Drama. Shakespeare's Predecessors in the Drama. Christopher Marlowe.
Shakespeare. Decline of the Drama. Shakespeare's Contemporaries and
Successors. Ben Jonson. Beaumont and Fletcher. John Webster. Thomas
Middleton. Thomas Heywood. Thomas Dekker. Massinger, Ford, Shirley. Prose
Writers. Francis Bacon. Richard Hooker. Sidney and Raleigh. John Foxe.
Camden and Knox. Hakluyt and Purchas. Thomas North. Summary. Bibliography.
Questions. Chronology.

CHAPTER VII. THE PURITAN AGE

The Puritan Movement. Changing Ideals. Literary Characteristics. The
Transition Poets. Samuel Daniel. The Song Writers. The Spenserian Poets.
The Metaphysical Poets. John Donne. George Herbert. The Cavalier Poets.
Thomas Carew. Robert Herrick. Suckling and Lovelace. John Milton. The Prose
Writers. John Bunyan. Robert Burton. Thomas Browne. Thomas Fuller. Jeremy
Taylor. Richard Baxter. Izaak Walton. Summary. Bibliography. Questions.
Chronology.

CHAPTER VIII. PERIOD OF THE RESTORATION

History of the Period. Literary Characteristics. John Dryden. Samuel
Butler. Hobbes and Locke. Evelyn and Pepys. Summary. Bibliography.
Questions. Chronology.

CHAPTER IX. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE

History of the Period. Literary Characteristics. The Classic Age. Alexander
Pope. Jonathan Swift. Joseph Addison. "The Tatler" and "The Spectator."
Samuel Johnson. Boswell's "Life of Johnson." Later Augustan Writers. Edmund
Burke. Edward Gibbon. The Revival of Romantic Poetry. Thomas Gray. Oliver
Goldsmith. William Cowper. Robert Burns. William Blake. The Minor Poets of
the Romantic Revival. James Thomson. William Collins. George Crabbe. James
Macpherson. Thomas Chatterton. Thomas Percy. The First English Novelists.
Meaning of the Novel. Precursors of the Novel. Discovery of the Modern
Novel. Daniel Defoe. Samuel Richardson. Henry Fielding. Smollett and
Sterne. Summary. Bibliography. Questions. Chronology.

CHAPTER X. THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM

Historical Summary. Literary Characteristics of the Age. The Poets of
Romanticism. William Wordsworth. Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Robert Southey.
Walter Scott. Byron. Percy Bysshe Shelley. John Keats. Prose Writers of the
Romantic Period. Charles Lamb. Thomas De Quincey. Jane Austen. Walter
Savage Landor. Summary. Bibliography. Questions. Chronology.

CHAPTER XI. THE VICTORIAN AGE

Historical Summary. Literary Characteristics. Poets of the Victorian Age.
Alfred Tennyson. Robert Browning. Minor Poets of the Victorian Age.
Elizabeth Barrett. Rossetti. Morris. Swinburne. Novelists of the Victorian
Age. Charles Dickens. William Makepeace Thackeray. George Eliot. Minor
Novelists of the Victorian Age. Charles Reade. Anthony Trollope. Charlotte
Brontë. Bulwer Lytton. Charles Kingsley. Mrs. Gaskell. Blackmore. Meredith.
Hardy. Stevenson. Essayists of the Victorian Age. Macaulay. Carlyle.
Ruskin. Matthew Arnold. Newman. The Spirit of Modern Literature. Summary.
Bibliography. Questions. Chronology.

GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

       *       *       *       *       *



CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION--THE MEANING OF LITERATURE

    Hold the hye wey, and lat thy gost thee lede.
          Chaucer's _Truth_
      On, on, you noblest English, ...
      Follow your spirit.
            Shakespeare's _Henry V_


THE SHELL AND THE BOOK. A child and a man were one day walking on the
seashore when the child found a little shell and held it to his ear.
Suddenly he heard sounds,--strange, low, melodious sounds, as if the shell
were remembering and repeating to itself the murmurs of its ocean home. The
child's face filled with wonder as he listened. Here in the little shell,
apparently, was a voice from another world, and he listened with delight to
its mystery and music. Then came the man, explaining that the child heard
nothing strange; that the pearly curves of the shell simply caught a
multitude of sounds too faint for human ears, and filled the glimmering
hollows with the murmur of innumerable echoes. It was not a new world, but
only the unnoticed harmony of the old that had aroused the child's wonder.

Some such experience as this awaits us when we begin the study of
literature, which has always two aspects, one of simple enjoyment and
appreciation, the other of analysis and exact description. Let a little
song appeal to the ear, or a noble book to the heart, and for the moment,
at least, we discover a new world, a world so different from our own that
it seems a place of dreams and magic. To enter and enjoy this new world, to
love good books for their own sake, is the chief thing; to analyze and
explain them is a less joyous but still an important matter. Behind every
book is a man; behind the man is the race; and behind the race are the
natural and social environments whose influence is unconsciously reflected.
These also we must know, if the book is to speak its whole message. In a
word, we have now reached a point where we wish to understand as well as to
enjoy literature; and the first step, since exact definition is impossible,
is to determine some of its essential qualities.

QUALITIES OF LITERATURE. The first significant thing is the essentially
artistic quality of all literature. All art is the expression of life in
forms of truth and beauty; or rather, it is the reflection of some truth
and beauty which are in the world, but which remain unnoticed until brought
to our attention by some sensitive human soul, just as the delicate curves
of the shell reflect sounds and harmonies too faint to be otherwise
noticed. A hundred men may pass a hayfield and see only the sweaty toil and
the windrows of dried grass; but here is one who pauses by a Roumanian
meadow, where girls are making hay and singing as they work. He looks
deeper, sees truth and beauty where we see only dead grass, and he reflects
what he sees in a little poem in which the hay tells its own story:

      Yesterday's flowers am I,
    And I have drunk my last sweet draught of dew.
    Young maidens came and sang me to my death;
    The moon looks down and sees me in my shroud,
      The shroud of my last dew.
    Yesterday's flowers that are yet in me
    Must needs make way for all to-morrow's flowers.
    The maidens, too, that sang me to my death
    Must even so make way for all the maids
      That are to come.
    And as my soul, so too their soul will be
    Laden with fragrance of the days gone by.
    The maidens that to-morrow come this way
    Will not remember that I once did bloom,
    For they will only see the new-born flowers.
    Yet will my perfume-laden soul bring back,
    As a sweet memory, to women's hearts
        Their days of maidenhood.
    And then they will be sorry that they came
        To sing me to my death;
    And all the butterflies will mourn for me.
        I bear away with me
    The sunshine's dear remembrance, and the low
        Soft murmurs of the spring.
    My breath is sweet as children's prattle is;
    I drank in all the whole earth's fruitfulness,
    To make of it the fragrance of my soul
      That shall outlive my death.[1]

One who reads only that first exquisite line, "Yesterday's flowers am I,"
can never again see hay without recalling the beauty that was hidden from
his eyes until the poet found it.

In the same pleasing, surprising way, all artistic work must be a kind of
revelation. Thus architecture is probably the oldest of the arts; yet we
still have many builders but few architects, that is, men whose work in
wood or stone suggests some hidden truth and beauty to the human senses. So
in literature, which is the art that expresses life in words that appeal to
our own sense of the beautiful, we have many writers but few artists. In
the broadest sense, perhaps, literature means simply the written records of
the race, including all its history and sciences, as well as its poems and
novels; in the narrower sense literature is the artistic record of life,
and most of our writing is excluded from it, just as the mass of our
buildings, mere shelters from storm and from cold, are excluded from
architecture. A history or a work of science may be and sometimes is
literature, but only as we forget the subject-matter and the presentation
of facts in the simple beauty of its expression.

The second quality of literature is its suggestiveness, its appeal to our
emotions and imagination rather than to our intellect. It is not so much
what it says as what it awakens in us that constitutes its charm. When
Milton makes Satan say, "Myself am Hell," he does not state any fact, but
rather opens up in these three tremendous words a whole world of
speculation and imagination. When Faustus in the presence of Helen asks,
"Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?" he does not state a
fact or expect an answer. He opens a door through which our imagination
enters a new world, a world of music, love, beauty, heroism,--the whole
splendid world of Greek literature. Such magic is in words. When
Shakespeare describes the young Biron as speaking

        In such apt and gracious words
    That aged ears play truant at his tales,

he has unconsciously given not only an excellent description of himself,
but the measure of all literature, which makes us play truant with the
present world and run away to live awhile in the pleasant realm of fancy.
The province of all art is not to instruct but to delight; and only as
literature delights us, causing each reader to build in his own soul that
"lordly pleasure house" of which Tennyson dreamed in his "Palace of Art,"
is it worthy of its name.

The third characteristic of literature, arising directly from the other
two, is its permanence. The world does not live by bread alone.
Notwithstanding its hurry and bustle and apparent absorption in material
things, it does not willingly let any beautiful thing perish. This is even
more true of its songs than of its painting and sculpture; though
permanence is a quality we should hardly expect in the present deluge of
books and magazines pouring day and night from our presses in the name of
literature. But this problem of too many books is not modern, as we
suppose. It has been a problem ever since Caxton brought the first printing
press from Flanders, four hundred years ago, and in the shadow of
Westminster Abbey opened his little shop and advertised his wares as "good
and chepe." Even earlier, a thousand years before Caxton and his printing
press, the busy scholars of the great library of Alexandria found that the
number of parchments was much too great for them to handle; and now, when
we print more in a week than all the Alexandrian scholars could copy in a
century, it would seem impossible that any production could be permanent;
that any song or story could live to give delight in future ages. But
literature is like a river in flood, which gradually purifies itself in two
ways,--the mud settles to the bottom, and the scum rises to the top. When
we examine the writings that by common consent constitute our literature,
the clear stream purified of its dross, we find at least two more
qualities, which we call the tests of literature, and which determine its
permanence.

TESTS OF LITERATURE. The first of these is universality, that is, the
appeal to the widest human interests and the simplest human emotions.
Though we speak of national and race literatures, like the Greek or
Teutonic, and though each has certain superficial marks arising out of the
peculiarities of its own people, it is nevertheless true that good
literature knows no nationality, nor any bounds save those of humanity. It
is occupied chiefly with elementary passions and emotions,--love and hate,
joy and sorrow, fear and faith,--which are an essential part of our human
nature; and the more it reflects these emotions the more surely does it
awaken a response in men of every race. Every father must respond to the
parable of the prodigal son; wherever men are heroic, they will acknowledge
the mastery of Homer; wherever a man thinks on the strange phenomenon of
evil in the world, he will find his own thoughts in the Book of Job; in
whatever place men love their children, their hearts must be stirred by the
tragic sorrow of _Oedipus_ and _King Lear_. All these are but shining
examples of the law that only as a book or a little song appeals to
universal human interest does it become permanent.

The second test is a purely personal one, and may be expressed in the
indefinite word "style." It is only in a mechanical sense that style is
"the adequate expression of thought," or "the peculiar manner of expressing
thought," or any other of the definitions that are found in the rhetorics.
In a deeper sense, style is the man, that is, the unconscious expression of
the writer's own personality. It is the very soul of one man reflecting, as
in a glass, the thoughts and feelings of humanity. As no glass is
colorless, but tinges more or less deeply the reflections from its surface,
so no author can interpret human life without unconsciously giving to it
the native hue of his own soul. It is this intensely personal element that
constitutes style. Every permanent book has more or less of these two
elements, the objective and the subjective, the universal and the personal,
the deep thought and feeling of the race reflected and colored by the
writer's own life and experience.

THE OBJECT IN STUDYING LITERATURE. Aside from the pleasure of reading, of
entering into a new world and having our imagination quickened, the study
of literature has one definite object, and that is to know men. Now man is
ever a dual creature; he has an outward and an inner nature; he is not only
a doer of deeds, but a dreamer of dreams; and to know him, the man of any
age, we must search deeper than his history. History records his deeds, his
outward acts largely; but every great act springs from an ideal, and to
understand this we must read his literature, where we find his ideals
recorded. When we read a history of the Anglo-Saxons, for instance, we
learn that they were sea rovers, pirates, explorers, great eaters and
drinkers; and we know something of their hovels and habits, and the lands
which they harried and plundered. All that is interesting; but it does not
tell us what most we want to know about these old ancestors of ours,--not
only what they did, but what they thought and felt; how they looked on life
and death; what they loved, what they feared, and what they reverenced in
God and man. Then we turn from history to the literature which they
themselves produced, and instantly we become acquainted. These hardy people
were not simply fighters and freebooters; they were men like ourselves;
their emotions awaken instant response in the souls of their descendants.
At the words of their gleemen we thrill again to their wild love of freedom
and the open sea; we grow tender at their love of home, and patriotic at
their deathless loyalty to their chief, whom they chose for themselves and
hoisted on their shields in symbol of his leadership. Once more we grow
respectful in the presence of pure womanhood, or melancholy before the
sorrows and problems of life, or humbly confident, looking up to the God
whom they dared to call the Allfather. All these and many more intensely
real emotions pass through our souls as we read the few shining fragments
of verses that the jealous ages have left us.

It is so with any age or people. To understand them we must read not simply
their history, which records their deeds, but their literature, which
records the dreams that made their deeds possible. So Aristotle was
profoundly right when he said that "poetry is more serious and
philosophical than history"; and Goethe, when he explained literature as
"the humanization of the whole world."

IMPORTANCE OF LITERATURE. It is a curious and prevalent opinion that
literature, like all art, is a mere play of imagination, pleasing enough,
like a new novel, but without any serious or practical importance. Nothing
could be farther from the truth. Literature preserves the ideals of a
people; and ideals--love, faith, duty, friendship, freedom, reverence--are
the part of human life most worthy of preservation. The Greeks were a
marvelous people; yet of all their mighty works we cherish only a few
ideals,--ideals of beauty in perishable stone, and ideals of truth in
imperishable prose and poetry. It was simply the ideals of the Greeks and
Hebrews and Romans, preserved in their literature, which made them what
they were, and which determined their value to future generations. Our
democracy, the boast of all English-speaking nations, is a dream; not the
doubtful and sometimes disheartening spectacle presented in our legislative
halls, but the lovely and immortal ideal of a free and equal manhood,
preserved as a most precious heritage in every great literature from the
Greeks to the Anglo-Saxons. All our arts, our sciences, even our inventions
are founded squarely upon ideals; for under every invention is still the
dream of _Beowulf_, that man may overcome the forces of nature; and the
foundation of all our sciences and discoveries is the immortal dream that
men "shall be as gods, knowing good and evil."

In a word, our whole civilization, our freedom, our progress, our homes,
our religion, rest solidly upon ideals for their foundation. Nothing but an
ideal ever endures upon earth. It is therefore impossible to overestimate
the practical importance of literature, which preserves these ideals from
fathers to sons, while men, cities, governments, civilizations, vanish from
the face of the earth. It is only when we remember this that we appreciate
the action of the devout Mussulman, who picks up and carefully preserves
every scrap of paper on which words are written, because the scrap may
perchance contain the name of Allah, and the ideal is too enormously
important to be neglected or lost.

SUMMARY OF THE SUBJECT. We are now ready, if not to define, at least to
understand a little more clearly the object of our present study.
Literature is the expression of life in words of truth and beauty; it is
the written record of man's spirit, of his thoughts, emotions, aspirations;
it is the history, and the only history, of the human soul. It is
characterized by its artistic, its suggestive, its permanent qualities. Its
two tests are its universal interest and its personal style. Its object,
aside from the delight it gives us, is to know man, that is, the soul of
man rather than his actions; and since it preserves to the race the ideals
upon which all our civilization is founded, it is one of the most important
and delightful subjects that can occupy the human mind.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. (NOTE. Each chapter in this book includes a special
bibliography of historical and literary works, selections for reading,
chronology, etc.; and a general bibliography of texts, helps, and reference
books will be found at the end. The following books, which are among the
best of their kind, are intended to help the student to a better
appreciation of literature and to a better knowledge of literary
criticism.)

_GENERAL WORKS_. Woodberry's Appreciation of Literature (Baker & Taylor
Co.); Gates's Studies in Appreciation (Macmillan); Bates's Talks on the
Study of Literature (Houghton, Mifflin); Worsfold's On the Exercise of
Judgment in Literature (Dent); Harrison's The Choice of Books (Macmillan);
Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies, Part I; Matthew Arnold's Essays in Criticism.

_ESSAYS_. Emerson's Books, in Society and Solitude; Dowden's The
Interpretation of Literature, in Transcripts and Studies (Kegan Paul &
Co.), and The Teaching of English Literature, in New Studies in Literature
(Houghton, Mifflin); The Study of Literature, Essays by Morley, Nicolls,
and L. Stephen, edited by A.F. Blaisdell (Willard Small).

_CRITICISM_. Gayley and Scott's An Introduction to the Methods and
Materials of Literary Criticism (Ginn and Company); Winchester's Principles
of Literary Criticism (Macmillan); Worsfold's Principles of Criticism
(Longmans); Johnson's Elements of Literary Criticism (American Book
Company); Saintsbury's History of Criticism (Dodd, Mead).

_POETRY_. Gummere's Handbook of Poetics (Ginn and Company); Stedman's The
Nature and Elements of Poetry (Houghton, Mifflin); Johnson's The Forms of
English Poetry (American Book Company); Alden's Specimens of English Verse
(Holt); Gummere's The Beginnings of Poetry (Macmillan); Saintsbury's
History of English Prosody (Macmillan).

_THE DRAMA_. Caffin's Appreciation of the Drama (Baker & Taylor Co.).

_THE NOVEL_. Raleigh's The English Novel (Scribner); Hamilton's The
Materials and Methods of Fiction (Baker & Taylor Co.).


       *       *       *       *       *



CHAPTER II

THE ANGLO-SAXON OR OLD-ENGLISH PERIOD (450-1050)

I. OUR FIRST POETRY

BEOWULF. Here is the story of Beowulf, the earliest and the greatest epic,
or heroic poem, in our literature. It begins with a prologue, which is not
an essential part of the story, but which we review gladly for the sake of
the splendid poetical conception that produced Scyld, king of the Spear
Danes.[2]

At a time when the Spear Danes were without a king, a ship came sailing
into their harbor. It was filled with treasures and weapons of war; and in
the midst of these warlike things was a baby sleeping. No man sailed the
ship; it came of itself, bringing the child, whose name was Scyld.

Now Scyld grew and became a mighty warrior, and led the Spear Danes for
many years, and was their king. When his son Beowulf[3] had become strong
and wise enough to rule, then Wyrd (Fate), who speaks but once to any man,
came and stood at hand; and it was time for Scyld to go. This is how they
buried him:

    Then Scyld departed, at word of Wyrd spoken,
    The hero to go to the home of the gods.
    Sadly they bore him to brink of the ocean,
    Comrades, still heeding his word of command.
    There rode in the harbor the prince's ship, ready,
    With prow curving proudly and shining sails set.
    Shipward they bore him, their hero beloved;
    The mighty they laid at the foot of the mast.
    Treasures were there from far and near gathered,
    Byrnies of battle, armor and swords;
    Never a keel sailed out of a harbor
    So splendidly tricked with the trappings of war.
    They heaped on his bosom a hoard of bright jewels
    To fare with him forth on the flood's great breast.
    No less gift they gave than the Unknown provided,
    When alone, as a child, he came in from the mere.
    High o'er his head waved a bright golden standard--
    Now let the waves bear their wealth to the holm.
    Sad-souled they gave back its gift to the ocean,
    Mournful their mood as he sailed out to sea.[4]

"And no man," says the poet, "neither counselor nor hero, can tell who
received that lading."

One of Scyld's descendants was Hrothgar, king of the Danes; and with him
the story of our Beowulf begins. Hrothgar in his old age had built near the
sea a mead hall called Heorot, the most splendid hall in the whole world,
where the king and his thanes gathered nightly to feast and to listen to
the songs of his gleemen. One night, as they were all sleeping, a frightful
monster, Grendel, broke into the hall, killed thirty of the sleeping
warriors, and carried off their bodies to devour them in his lair under the
sea. The appalling visit was speedily repeated, and fear and death reigned
in the great hall. The warriors fought at first; but fled when they
discovered that no weapon could harm the monster. Heorot was left deserted
and silent. For twelve winters Grendel's horrible raids continued, and joy
was changed to mourning among the Spear Danes.

At last the rumor of Grendel crossed over the sea to the land of the Geats,
where a young hero dwelt in the house of his uncle, King Hygelac. Beowulf
was his name, a man of immense strength and courage, and a mighty swimmer
who had developed his powers fighting the "nickers," whales, walruses and
seals, in the icebound northern ocean. When he heard the story, Beowulf was
stirred to go and fight the monster and free the Danes, who were his
father's friends.

With fourteen companions he crosses the sea. There is an excellent bit of
ocean poetry here (ll. 210-224), and we get a vivid idea of the hospitality
of a brave people by following the poet's description of Beowulf's meeting
with King Hrothgar and Queen Wealhtheow, and of the joy and feasting and
story-telling in Heorot. The picture of Wealhtheow passing the mead cup to
the warriors with her own hand is a noble one, and plainly indicates the
reverence paid by these strong men to their wives and mothers. Night comes
on; the fear of Grendel is again upon the Danes, and all withdraw after the
king has warned Beowulf of the frightful danger of sleeping in the hall.
But Beowulf lies down with his warriors, saying proudly that, since weapons
will not avail against the monster, he will grapple with him bare handed
and trust to a warrior's strength.

    Forth from the fens, from the misty moorlands,
    Grendel came gliding--God's wrath[5] he bore--
    Came under clouds, until he saw clearly,
    Glittering with gold plates, the mead hall of men.
    Down fell the door, though fastened with fire bands;
    Open it sprang at the stroke of his paw.
    Swollen with rage burst in the bale-bringer;
    Flamed in his eyes a fierce light, likest fire.[6]

At the sight of men again sleeping in the hall, Grendel laughs in his
heart, thinking of his feast. He seizes the nearest sleeper, crushes his
"bone case" with a bite, tears him limb from limb, and swallows him. Then
he creeps to the couch of Beowulf and stretches out a claw, only to find it
clutched in a grip of steel. A sudden terror strikes the monster's heart.
He roars, struggles, tries to jerk his arm free; but Beowulf leaps to his
feet and grapples his enemy bare handed. To and fro they surge. Tables are
overturned; golden benches ripped from their fastenings; the whole building
quakes, and only its iron bands keep it from falling to pieces. Beowulf's
companions are on their feet now, hacking vainly at the monster with swords
and battle-axes, adding their shouts to the crashing of furniture and the
howling "war song" of Grendel. Outside in the town the Danes stand
shivering at the uproar. Slowly the monster struggles to the door, dragging
Beowulf, whose fingers crack with the strain, but who never relaxes his
first grip. Suddenly a wide wound opens in the monster's side; the sinews
snap; the whole arm is wrenched off at the shoulder; and Grendel escapes
shrieking across the moor, and plunges into the sea to die.

Beowulf first exults in his night's work; then he hangs the huge arm with
its terrible claws from a cross-beam over the king's seat, as one would
hang up a bear's skin after a hunt. At daylight came the Danes; and all day
long, in the intervals of singing, story-telling, speech making, and gift
giving, they return to wonder at the mighty "grip of Grendel" and to
rejoice in Beowulf's victory.

When night falls a great feast is spread in Heorot, and the Danes sleep
once more in the great hall. At midnight comes another monster, a horrible,
half-human creature,[7] mother of Grendel, raging to avenge her offspring.
She thunders at the door; the Danes leap up and grasp their weapons; but
the monster enters, seizes Aeschere, who is friend and adviser of the king,
and rushes away with him over the fens.

The old scenes of sorrow are reviewed in the morning; but Beowulf says
simply:

    Sorrow not, wise man. It is better for each
    That his friend he avenge than that he mourn much.
    Each of us shall the end await
    Of worldly life: let him who may gain
    Honor ere death. That is for a warrior,
    When he is dead, afterwards best.
    Arise, kingdom's guardian! Let us quickly go
    To view the track of Grendel's kinsman.
    I promise it thee: he will not escape,
    Nor in earth's bosom, nor in mountain-wood,
    Nor in ocean's depths, go where he will.[8]

Then he girds himself for the new fight and follows the track of the second
enemy across the fens. Here is Hrothgar's description of the place where
live the monsters, "spirits of elsewhere," as he calls them:

                    They inhabit
    The dim land that gives shelter to the wolf,
    The windy headlands, perilous fen paths,
    Where, under mountain mist, the stream flows down
    And floods the ground. Not far hence, but a mile,
    The mere stands, over which hang death-chill groves,
    A wood fast-rooted overshades the flood;
    There every night a ghastly miracle
    Is seen, fire in the water. No man knows,
    Not the most wise, the bottom of that mere.
    The firm-horned heath-stalker, the hart, when pressed,
    Wearied by hounds, and hunted from afar,
    Will rather die of thirst upon its bank
    Than bend his head to it. It is unholy.
    Dark to the clouds its yeasty waves mount up
    When wind stirs hateful tempest, till the air
    Grows dreary, and the heavens pour down tears.[9]

Beowulf plunges into the horrible place, while his companions wait for him
oh the shore. For a long time he sinks through the flood; then, as he
reaches bottom, Grendel's mother rushes out upon him and drags him into a
cave, where sea monsters swarm at him from behind and gnash his armor with
their tusks. The edge of his sword is turned with the mighty blow he deals
the _merewif_; but it harms not the monster. Casting the weapon aside, he
grips her and tries to hurl her down, while her claws and teeth clash upon
his corslet but cannot penetrate the steel rings. She throws her bulk upon
him, crushes him down, draws a short sword and plunges it at him; but again
his splendid byrnie saves him. He is wearied now, and oppressed. Suddenly,
as his eye sweeps the cave, he catches sight of a magic sword, made by the
giants long ago, too heavy for warriors to wield. Struggling up he seizes
the weapon, whirls it and brings down a crashing blow upon the monster's
neck. It smashes through the ring bones; the _merewif_ falls, and the fight
is won.

The cave is full of treasures; but Beowulf heeds them not, for near him
lies Grendel, dead from the wound received the previous night. Again
Beowulf swings the great sword and strikes off his enemy's head; and lo, as
the venomous blood touches the sword blade, the steel melts like ice before
the fire, and only the hilt is left in Beowulf's hand. Taking the hilt and
the head, the hero enters the ocean and mounts up to the shore.

Only his own faithful band were waiting there; for the Danes, seeing the
ocean bubble with fresh blood, thought it was all over with the hero and
had gone home. And there they were, mourning in Heorot, when Beowulf
returned with the monstrous head of Grendel carried on a spear shaft by
four of his stoutest followers.

In the last part of the poem there is another great fight. Beowulf is now
an old man; he has reigned for fifty years, beloved by all his people. He
has overcome every enemy but one, a fire dragon keeping watch over an
enormous treasure hidden among the mountains. One day a wanderer stumbles
upon the enchanted cave and, entering, takes a jeweled cup while the
firedrake sleeps heavily. That same night the dragon, in a frightful rage,
belching forth fire and smoke, rushes down upon the nearest villages,
leaving a trail of death and terror behind him.

Again Beowulf goes forth to champion his people. As he approaches the
dragon's cave, he has a presentiment that death lurks within:

    Sat on the headland there the warrior king;
    Farewell he said to hearth-companions true,
    The gold-friend of the Geats; his mind was sad,
    Death-ready, restless. And Wyrd was drawing nigh,
    Who now must meet and touch the aged man,
    To seek the treasure that his soul had saved
    And separate his body from his life.[10]

There is a flash of illumination, like that which comes to a dying man, in
which his mind runs back over his long life and sees something of profound
meaning in the elemental sorrow moving side by side with magnificent
courage. Then follows the fight with the firedrake, in which Beowulf,
wrapped in fire and smoke, is helped by the heroism of Wiglaf, one of his
companions. The dragon is slain, but the fire has entered Beowulf's lungs
and he knows that Wyrd is at hand. This is his thought, while Wiglaf
removes his battered armor:

    "One deep regret I have: that to a son
    I may not give the armor I have worn,
    To bear it after me. For fifty years
    I ruled these people well, and not a king
    Of those who dwell around me, dared oppress
    Or meet me with his hosts. At home I waited
    For the time that Wyrd controls. Mine own I kept,
    Nor quarrels sought, nor ever falsely swore.
    Now, wounded sore, I wait for joy to come."[11]

He sends Wiglaf into the firedrake's cave, who finds it filled with rare
treasures and, most wonderful of all, a golden banner from which light
proceeds and illumines all the darkness. But Wiglaf cares little for the
treasures; his mind is full of his dying chief. He fills his hands with
costly ornaments and hurries to throw them at his hero's feet. The old man
looks with sorrow at the gold, thanks the "Lord of all" that by death he
has gained more riches for his people, and tells his faithful thane how his
body shall be burned on the Whale ness, or headland:

    "My life is well paid for this hoard; and now
    Care for the people's needs. I may no more
    Be with them. Bid the warriors raise a barrow
    After the burning, on the ness by the sea,
    On Hronesness, which shall rise high and be
    For a remembrance to my people. Seafarers
    Who from afar over the mists of waters
    Drive foamy keels may call it Beowulf's Mount
    Hereafter." Then the hero from his neck
    Put off a golden collar; to his thane,
    To the young warrior, gave it with his helm,
    Armlet and corslet; bade him use them well.
    "Thou art the last Waegmunding of our race,
    For fate has swept my kinsmen all away.
    Earls in their strength are to their Maker gone,
    And I must follow them."[12]

Beowulf was still living when Wiglaf sent a messenger hurriedly to his
people; when they came they found him dead, and the huge dragon dead on the
sand beside him.

    Then the Goth's people reared a mighty pile
    With shields and armour hung, as he had asked,
    And in the midst the warriors laid their lord,
    Lamenting. Then the warriors on the mount
    Kindled a mighty bale fire; the smoke rose
    Black from the Swedish pine, the sound of flame
    Mingled with sound of weeping; ... while smoke
    Spread over heaven. Then upon the hill
    The people of the Weders wrought a mound,
    High, broad, and to be seen far out at sea.
    In ten days they had built and walled it in
    As the wise thought most worthy; placed in it
    Rings, jewels, other treasures from the hoard.
    They left the riches, golden joy of earls,
    In dust, for earth to hold; where yet it lies,
    Useless as ever. Then about the mound
    The warriors rode, and raised a mournful song
    For their dead king; exalted his brave deeds,
    Holding it fit men honour their liege lord,
    Praise him and love him when his soul is fled.
    Thus the [Geat's] people, sharers of his hearth,
    Mourned their chief's fall, praised him, of kings, of men
    The mildest and the kindest, and to all
    His people gentlest, yearning for their praise.[13]

One is tempted to linger over the details of the magnificent ending: the
unselfish heroism of Beowulf, the great prototype of King Alfred; the
generous grief of his people, ignoring gold and jewels in the thought of
the greater treasure they had lost; the memorial mound on the low cliff,
which would cause every returning mariner to steer a straight course to
harbor in the remembrance of his dead hero; and the pure poetry which marks
every noble line. But the epic is great enough and simple enough to speak
for itself. Search the literatures of the world, and you will find no other
such picture of a brave man's death.

Concerning the history of _Beowulf_ a whole library has been written, and
scholars still differ too radically for us to express a positive judgment.
This much, however, is clear,--that there existed, at the time the poem was
composed, various northern legends of Beowa, a half-divine hero, and the
monster Grendel. The latter has been interpreted in various
ways,--sometimes as a bear, and again as the malaria of the marsh lands.
For those interested in symbols the simplest interpretation of these myths
is to regard Beowulf's successive fights with the three dragons as the
overcoming, first, of the overwhelming danger of the sea, which was beaten
back by the dykes; second, the conquering of the sea itself, when men
learned to sail upon it; and third, the conflict with the hostile forces of
nature, which are overcome at last by man's indomitable will and
perseverance.

All this is purely mythical; but there are historical incidents to reckon
with. About the year 520 a certain northern chief, called by the chronicler
Chochilaicus (who is generally identified with the Hygelac of the epic),
led a huge plundering expedition up the Rhine. After a succession of
battles he was overcome by the Franks, but--and now we enter a legendary
region once more--not until a gigantic nephew of Hygelac had performed
heroic feats of valor, and had saved the remnants of the host by a
marvelous feat of swimming. The majority of scholars now hold that these
historical events and personages were celebrated in the epic; but some
still assert that the events which gave a foundation for _Beowulf_ occurred
wholly on English soil, where the poem itself was undoubtedly written.

The rhythm of _Beowulf_ and indeed of all our earliest poetry depended upon
accent and alliteration; that is, the beginning of two or more words in the
same line with the same sound or letter. The lines were made up of two
short halves, separated by a pause. No rime was used; but a musical effect
was produced by giving each half line two strongly accented syllables. Each
full line, therefore, had four accents, three of which (i.e. two in the
first half, and one in the second) usually began with the same sound or
letter. The musical effect was heightened by the harp with which the
gleeman accompanied his singing.. The poetical form will be seen clearly in
the following selection from the wonderfully realistic description of the
fens haunted by Grendel. It will need only one or two readings aloud to
show that many of these strange-looking words are practically the same as
those we still use, though many of the vowel sounds were pronounced
differently by our ancestors.

                              ... Hie dygel lond
    Warigeath, wulf-hleothu,     windige næssas,
      Frecne fen-gelad,      thær fyrgen-stream
    Under næssa genipu     nither gewiteth,
    Flod under foldan.     Nis thæt feor heonon,
    Mil-gemearces,     thaet se mere standeth,
    Ofer thæm hongiath     hrinde bearwas
                     ... They (a) darksome land
    Ward (inhabit), wolf cliffs,     windy nesses,
    Frightful fen paths     where mountain stream
    Under nesses' mists     nether (downward) wanders,
    A flood under earth.     It is not far hence,
    By mile measure,     that the mere stands,
    Over which hang     rimy groves.

WIDSITH. The poem "Widsith," the wide goer or wanderer, is in part, at
least, probably the oldest in our language. The author and the date of its
composition are unknown; but the personal account of the minstrel's life
belongs to the time before the Saxons first came to England.[14] It
expresses the wandering life of the gleeman, who goes forth into the world
to abide here or there, according as he is rewarded for his singing. From
the numerous references to rings and rewards, and from the praise given to
generous givers, it would seem that literature as a paying profession began
very early in our history, and also that the pay was barely sufficient to
hold soul and body together. Of all our modern poets, Goldsmith wandering
over Europe paying for his lodging with his songs is most suggestive of
this first recorded singer of our race. His last lines read:

    Thus wandering, they who shape songs for men
    Pass over many lands, and tell their need,
    And speak their thanks, and ever, south or north,
    Meet someone skilled in songs and free in gifts,
    Who would be raised among his friends to fame
    And do brave deeds till light and life are gone.
    He who has thus wrought himself praise shall have
    A settled glory underneath the stars.[15]

DEOR'S LAMENT. In "Deor" we have another picture of the Saxon scop, or
minstrel, not in glad wandering, but in manly sorrow. It seems that the
scop's living depended entirely upon his power to please his chief, and
that at any time he might be supplanted by a better poet. Deor had this
experience, and comforts himself in a grim way by recalling various
examples of men who have suffered more than himself. The poem is arranged
in strophes, each one telling of some afflicted hero and ending with the
same refrain: _His sorrow passed away; so will mine_. "Deor" is much more
poetic than "Widsith," and is the one perfect lyric[16] of the Anglo-Saxon
period.

    Weland for a woman knew too well exile.
    Strong of soul that earl, sorrow sharp he bore;
    To companionship he had care and weary longing,
    Winter-freezing wretchedness. Woe he found again, again,
    After that Nithhad in a need had laid him--
    Staggering sinew-wounds--sorrow-smitten man!
    _That he overwent; this also may I_.[17]

THE SEAFARER. The wonderful poem of "The Seafarer" seems to be in two
distinct parts. The first shows the hardships of ocean life; but stronger
than hardships is the subtle call of the sea. The second part is an
allegory, in which the troubles of the seaman are symbols of the troubles
of this life, and the call of the ocean is the call in the soul to be up
and away to its true home with God. Whether the last was added by some monk
who saw the allegorical possibilities of the first part, or whether some
sea-loving Christian scop wrote both, is uncertain. Following are a few
selected lines to show the spirit of the poem:

    The hail flew in showers about me; and there I heard only
    The roar of the sea, ice-cold waves, and the song of the swan;
    For pastime the gannets' cry served me; the kittiwakes' chatter
    For laughter of men; and for mead drink the call of the sea mews.
    When storms on the rocky cliffs beat, then the terns, icy-feathered,
    Made answer; full oft the sea eagle forebodingly screamed,
    The eagle with pinions wave-wet....
    The shadows of night became darker, it snowed from the north;
    The world was enchained by the frost; hail fell upon earth;
    'T was the coldest of grain. Yet the thoughts of my heart now are throbbing
    To test the high streams, the salt waves in tumultuous play.
    Desire in my heart ever urges my spirit to wander,
    To seek out the home of the stranger in lands afar off.
      There is no one that dwells upon earth, so exalted in mind,
    But that he has always a longing, a sea-faring passion
    For what the Lord God shall bestow, be it honor or death.
    No heart for the harp has he, nor for acceptance of treasure,
    No pleasure has he in a wife, no delight in the world,
    Nor in aught save the roll of the billows; but always a longing,
    A yearning uneasiness, hastens him on to the sea.
      The woodlands are captured by blossoms, the hamlets grow fair,
    Broad meadows are beautiful, earth again bursts into life,
    And all stir the heart of the wanderer eager to journey,
    So he meditates going afar on the pathway of tides.
    The cuckoo, moreover, gives warning with sorrowful note,
    Summer's harbinger sings, and forebodes to the heart bitter sorrow.
      Now my spirit uneasily turns in the heart's narrow chamber,
    Now wanders forth over the tide, o'er the home of the whale,
    To the ends of the earth--and comes back to me.
      Eager and greedy,
    The lone wanderer screams, and resistlessly drives my soul onward,
    Over the whale-path, over the tracts of the sea.[18]

THE FIGHT AT FINNSBURGH AND WALDERE. Two other of our oldest poems well
deserve mention. The "Fight at Finnsburgh" is a fragment of fifty lines,
discovered on the inside of a piece of parchment drawn over the wooden
covers of a book of homilies. It is a magnificent war song, describing with
Homeric power the defense of a hall by Hnæf[19] with sixty warriors,
against the attack of Finn and his army. At midnight, when Hnæf and his men
are sleeping, they are surrounded by an army rushing in with fire and
sword. Hnæf springs to his feet at the first alarm and wakens his warriors
with a call to action that rings like a bugle blast:

    This no eastward dawning is, nor is here a dragon flying,
    Nor of this high hall are the horns a burning;
    But they rush upon us here--now the ravens sing,
    Growling is the gray wolf, grim the war-wood rattles,
    Shield to shaft is answering.[20]

The fight lasts five days, but the fragment ends before we learn the
outcome: The same fight is celebrated by Hrothgar's gleeman at the feast in
Heorot, after the slaying of Grendel.

"Waldere" is a fragment of two leaves, from which we get only a glimpse of
the story of Waldere (Walter of Aquitaine) and his betrothed bride
Hildgund, who were hostages at the court of Attila. They escaped with a
great treasure, and in crossing the mountains were attacked by Gunther and
his warriors, among whom was Walter's former comrade, Hagen. Walter fights
them all and escapes. The same story was written in Latin in the tenth
century, and is also part of the old German _Nibelungenlied_. Though the
saga did not originate with the Anglo-Saxons, their version of it is the
oldest that has come down to us. The chief significance of these "Waldere"
fragments lies in the evidence they afford that our ancestors were familiar
with the legends and poetry of other Germanic peoples.


II. ANGLO-SAXON LIFE

We have now read some of our earliest records, and have been surprised,
perhaps, that men who are generally described in the histories as savage
fighters and freebooters could produce such excellent poetry. It is the
object of the study of all literature to make us better acquainted with
men,--not simply with their deeds, which is the function of history, but
with the dreams and ideals which underlie all their actions. So a reading
of this early Anglo-Saxon poetry not only makes us acquainted, but also
leads to a profound respect for the men who were our ancestors. Before we
study more of their literature it is well to glance briefly at their life
and language.

THE NAME Originally the name Anglo-Saxon denotes two of the three Germanic
tribes,--Jutes, Angles, and Saxons,--who in the middle of the fifth
century left their homes on the shores of the North Sea and the Baltic to
conquer and colonize distant Britain. Angeln was the home of one tribe, and
the name still clings to the spot whence some of our forefathers sailed on
their momentous voyage. The old Saxon word _angul_ or _ongul_ means a hook,
and the English verb _angle_ is used invariably by Walton and older writers
in the sense of fishing. We may still think, therefore, of the first Angles
as hook-men, possibly because of their fishing, more probably because the
shore where they lived, at the foot of the peninsula of Jutland, was bent
in the shape of a fishhook. The name Saxon from _seax, sax_, a short sword,
means the sword-man, and from the name we may judge something of the temper
of the hardy fighters who preceded the Angles into Britain. The Angles were
the most numerous of the conquering tribes, and from them the new home was
called Anglalond. By gradual changes this became first Englelond and then
England.

More than five hundred years after the landing of these tribes, and while
they called themselves Englishmen, we find the Latin writers of the Middle
Ages speaking of the inhabitants of Britain as _Anglisaxones_,--that is,
Saxons of England,--to distinguish them from the Saxons of the Continent.
In the Latin charters of King Alfred the same name appears; but it is never
seen or heard in his native speech. There he always speaks of his beloved
"Englelond" and of his brave "Englisc" people. In the sixteenth century,
when the old name of Englishmen clung to the new people resulting from the
union of Saxon and Norman, the name Anglo-Saxon was first used in the
national sense by the scholar Camden[21] in his _History of Britain_; and
since then it has been in general use among English writers. In recent
years the name has gained a wider significance, until it is now used to
denote a spirit rather than a nation, the brave, vigorous, enlarging spirit
that characterizes the English-speaking races everywhere, and that has
already put a broad belt of English law and English liberty around the
whole world.

THE LIFE. If the literature of a people springs directly out of its life,
then the stern, barbarous life of our Saxon forefathers would seem, at
first glance, to promise little of good literature. Outwardly their life
was a constant hardship, a perpetual struggle against savage nature and
savage men. Behind them were gloomy forests inhabited by wild beasts and
still wilder men, and peopled in their imagination with dragons and evil
shapes. In front of them, thundering at the very dikes for entrance, was
the treacherous North Sea, with its fogs and storms and ice, but with that
indefinable call of the deep that all men hear who live long beneath its
influence. Here they lived, a big, blond, powerful race, and hunted and
fought and sailed, and drank and feasted when their labor was done. Almost
the first thing we notice about these big, fearless, childish men is that
they love the sea; and because they love it they hear and answer its call:

    ... No delight has he in the world,
    Nor in aught save the roll of the billows; but always a longing,
    A yearning uneasiness, hastens him on to the sea.[22]

As might be expected, this love of the ocean finds expression in all their
poetry. In _Beowulf_ alone there are fifteen names for the sea, from the
_holm_, that is, the horizon sea, the "upmounding," to the _brim_, which is
the ocean flinging its welter of sand and creamy foam upon the beach at
your feet. And the figures used to describe or glorify it--"the swan road,
the whale path, the heaving battle plain"--are almost as numerous. In all
their poetry there is a magnificent sense of lordship over the wild sea
even in its hour of tempest and fury:

    Often it befalls us, on the ocean's highways,
    In the boats our boatmen, when the storm is roaring,
    Leap the billows over, on our stallions of the foam.[23]

THE INNER LIFE. A man's life is more than his work; his dream is ever
greater than his achievement; and literature reflects not so much man's
deed as the spirit which animates him; not the poor thing that he does, but
rather the splendid thing that he ever hopes to do. In no place is this
more evident than in the age we are now studying. Those early sea kings
were a marvelous mixture of savagery and sentiment, of rough living and of
deep feeling, of splendid courage and the deep melancholy of men who know
their limitations and have faced the unanswered problem of death. They were
not simply fearless freebooters who harried every coast in their war
galleys. If that were all, they would have no more history or literature
than the Barbary pirates, of whom the same thing could be said. These
strong fathers of ours were men of profound emotions. In all their fighting
the love of an untarnished glory was uppermost; and under the warrior's
savage exterior was hidden a great love of home and homely virtues, and a
reverence for the one woman to whom he would presently return in triumph.
So when the wolf hunt was over, or the desperate fight was won, these
mighty men would gather in the banquet hall, and lay their weapons aside
where the open fire would flash upon them, and there listen to the songs of
Scop and Gleeman,--men who could put into adequate words the emotions and
aspirations that all men feel but that only a few can ever express:

    Music and song where the heroes sat--
    The glee-wood rang, a song uprose
    When Hrothgar's scop gave the hall good cheer.[24]

It is this great and hidden life of the Anglo-Saxons that finds expression
in all their literature. Briefly, it is summed up in five great
principles,--their love of personal freedom, their responsiveness to
nature, their religion, their reverence for womanhood, and their struggle
for glory as a ruling motive in every noble life.

In reading Anglo-Saxon poetry it is well to remember these five principles,
for they are like the little springs at the head of a great river,--clear,
pure springs of poetry, and out of them the best of our literature has
always flowed. Thus when we read,

    Blast of the tempest--it aids our oars;
    Rolling of thunder--it hurts us not;
    Rush of the hurricane--bending its neck
    To speed us whither our wills are bent,

we realize that these sea rovers had the spirit of kinship with the mighty
life of nature; and kinship with nature invariably expresses itself in
poetry. Again, when we read,

    Now hath the man
    O'ercome his troubles. No pleasure does he lack,
    Nor steeds, nor jewels, nor the joys of mead,
    Nor any treasure that the earth can give,
    O royal woman, if he have but thee,[25]

we know we are dealing with an essentially noble man, not a savage; we are
face to face with that profound reverence for womanhood which inspires the
greater part of all good poetry, and we begin to honor as well as
understand our ancestors. So in the matter of glory or honor; it was,
apparently, not the love of fighting, but rather the love of honor
resulting from fighting well, which animated our forefathers in every
campaign. "He was a man deserving of remembrance" was the highest thing
that could be said of a dead warrior; and "He is a man deserving of praise"
was the highest tribute to the living. The whole secret of Beowulf's mighty
life is summed up in the last line, "Ever yearning for his people's
praise." So every tribe had its scop, or poet, more important than any
warrior, who put the deeds of its heroes into the expressive words that
constitute literature; and every banquet hall had its gleeman, who sang the
scop's poetry in order that the deed and the man might be remembered.
Oriental peoples built monuments to perpetuate the memory of their dead;
but our ancestors made poems, which should live and stir men's souls long
after monuments of brick and stone had crumbled away. It is to this intense
love of glory and the desire to be remembered that we are indebted for
Anglo-Saxon literature.

OUR FIRST SPEECH. Our first recorded speech begins with the songs of
Widsith and Deor, which the Anglo-Saxons may have brought with them when
they first conquered Britain. At first glance these songs in their native
dress look strange as a foreign tongue; but when we examine them carefully
we find many words that have been familiar since childhood. We have seen
this in _Beowulf_; but in prose the resemblance of this old speech to our
own is even more striking. Here, for instance, is a fragment of the simple
story of the conquest of Britain by our Anglo-Saxon ancestors:

Her Hengest and Æsc his sunu gefuhton with Bryttas, on thaere
stowe the is gecweden Creccanford, and thær ofslogon feower thusenda wera.
And tha Bryttas tha forleton Cent-lond, and mid myclum ege flugon to
Lundenbyrig. (At this time Hengest and Aesc, his son, fought against the
Britons at the place which is called Crayford and there slew four thousand
men. And then the Britons forsook Kentland, and with much fear fled to
London town.)[26]

The reader who utters these words aloud a few times will speedily recognize
his own tongue, not simply in the words but also in the whole structure of
the sentences.

From such records we see that our speech is Teutonic in its origin; and
when we examine any Teutonic language we learn that it is only a branch of
the great Aryan or Indo-European family of languages. In life and language,
therefore, we are related first to the Teutonic races, and through them to
all the nations of this Indo-European family, which, starting with enormous
vigor from their original home (probably in central Europe)[27] spread
southward and westward, driving out the native tribes and slowly developing
the mighty civilizations of India, Persia, Greece, Rome, and the wilder but
more vigorous life of the Celts and Teutons. In all these
languages--Sanskrit, Iranian, Greek, Latin, Celtic, Teutonic--we recognize
the same root words for father and mother, for God and man, for the common
needs and the common relations of life; and since words are windows through
which we see the soul of this old people, we find certain ideals of love,
home, faith, heroism, liberty, which seem to have been the very life of our
forefathers, and which were inherited by them from their old heroic and
conquering ancestors. It was on the borders of the North Sea that our
fathers halted for unnumbered centuries on their westward journey, and
slowly developed the national life and language which we now call Anglo-
Saxon.

It is this old vigorous Anglo-Saxon language which forms the basis of our
modern English. If we read a paragraph from any good English book, and then
analyze it, as we would a flower, to see what it contains, we find two
distinct classes of words. The first class, containing simple words
expressing the common things of life, makes up the strong framework of our
language. These words are like the stem and bare branches of a mighty oak,
and if we look them up in the dictionary we find that almost invariably
they come to us from our Anglo-Saxon ancestors. The second and larger class
of words is made up of those that give grace, variety, ornament, to our
speech. They are like the leaves and blossoms of the same tree, and when we
examine their history we find that they come to us from the Celts, Romans,
Normans, and other peoples with whom we have been in contact in the long
years of our development. The most prominent characteristic of our present
language, therefore, is its dual character. Its best qualities--strength,
simplicity, directness--come from Anglo-Saxon sources; its enormous added
wealth of expression, its comprehensiveness, its plastic adaptability to
new conditions and ideas, are largely the result of additions from other
languages, and especially of its gradual absorption of the French language
after the Norman Conquest. It is this dual character, this combination of
native and foreign, of innate and exotic elements, which accounts for the
wealth of our English language and literature. To see it in concrete form,
we should read in succession _Beowulf_ and _Paradise Lost_, the two great
epics which show the root and the flower of our literary development.


III. CHRISTIAN WRITERS OF THE ANGLO-SAXON PERIOD

The literature of this period falls naturally into two divisions,--pagan
and Christian. The former represents the poetry which the Anglo-Saxons
probably brought with them in the form of oral sagas,--the crude material
out of which literature was slowly developed on English soil; the latter
represents the writings developed under teaching of the monks, after the
old pagan religion had vanished, but while it still retained its hold on
the life and language of the people. In reading our earliest poetry it is
well to remember that all of it was copied by the monks, and seems to have
been more or less altered to give it a religious coloring.

The coming of Christianity meant not simply a new life and leader for
England; it meant also the wealth of a new language. The scop is now
replaced by the literary monk; and that monk, though he lives among common
people and speaks with the English tongue, has behind him all the culture
and literary resources of the Latin language. The effect is seen instantly
in our early prose and poetry.

NORTHUMBRIAN LITERATURE. In general, two great schools of Christian
influence came into England, and speedily put an end to the frightful wars
that had waged continually among the various petty kingdoms of the
Anglo-Saxons. The first of these, under the leadership of Augustine, came
from Rome. It spread in the south and center of England, especially in the
kingdom of Essex. It founded schools and partially educated the rough
people, but it produced no lasting literature. The other, under the
leadership of the saintly Aidan, came from Ireland, which country had been
for centuries a center of religion and education for all western Europe.
The monks of this school labored chiefly in Northumbria, and to their
influence we owe all that is best in Anglo-Saxon literature. It is called
the Northumbrian School; its center was the monasteries and abbeys, such as
Jarrow and Whitby, and its three greatest names are Bede, Cædmon, and
Cynewulf.


BEDE (673-735)

The Venerable Bede, as he is generally called, our first great scholar and
"the father of our English learning," wrote almost exclusively in Latin,
his last work, the translation of the Gospel of John into Anglo-Saxon,
having been unfortunately lost. Much to our regret, therefore, his books
and the story of his gentle, heroic life must be excluded from this history
of our literature. His works, over forty in number, covered the whole field
of human knowledge in his day, and were so admirably written that they were
widely copied as text-books, or rather manuscripts, in nearly all the
monastery schools of Europe.

The work most important to us is the _Ecclesiastical History of the English
People_. It is a fascinating history to read even now, with its curious
combination of accurate scholarship and immense credulity. In all strictly
historical matters Bede is a model. Every known authority on the subject,
from Pliny to Gildas, was carefully considered; every learned pilgrim to
Rome was commissioned by Bede to ransack the archives and to make copies of
papal decrees and royal letters; and to these were added the testimony of
abbots who could speak from personal knowledge of events or repeat the
traditions of their several monasteries.

Side by side with this historical exactness are marvelous stories of saints
and missionaries. It was an age of credulity, and miracles were in men's
minds continually. The men of whom he wrote lived lives more wonderful than
any romance, and their courage and gentleness made a tremendous impression
on the rough, warlike people to whom they came with open hands and hearts.
It is the natural way of all primitive peoples to magnify the works of
their heroes, and so deeds of heroism and kindness, which were part of the
daily life of the Irish missionaries, were soon transformed into the
miracles of the saints. Bede believed these things, as all other men did,
and records them with charming simplicity, just as he received them from
bishop or abbot. Notwithstanding its errors, we owe to this work nearly all
our knowledge of the eight centuries of our history following the landing
of Cæsar in Britain.

CÆDMON (Seventh Century)

    Now must we hymn the Master of heaven,
    The might of the Maker, the deeds of the Father,
    The thought of His heart. He, Lord everlasting,
    Established of old the source of all wonders:
    Creator all-holy, He hung the bright heaven,
    A roof high upreared, o'er the children of men;
    The King of mankind then created for mortals
    The world in its beauty, the earth spread beneath them,
    He, Lord everlasting, omnipotent God.[28]

If _Beowulf_ and the fragments of our earliest poetry were brought into
England, then the hymn given above is the first verse of all native English
song that has come down to us, and Cædmon is the first poet to whom we can
give a definite name and date. The words were written about 665 A.D. and
are found copied at the end of a manuscript of Bede's _Ecclesiastical
History_.

LIFE OF CæDMON. What little we know of Cædmon, the Anglo-Saxon Milton, as
he is properly called, is taken from Bede's account[29] of the Abbess Hilda
and of her monastery at Whitby. Here is a free and condensed translation of
Bede's story:

There was, in the monastery of the Abbess Hilda, a brother distinguished by
the grace of God, for that he could make poems treating of goodness and
religion. Whatever was translated to him (for he could not read) of Sacred
Scripture he shortly reproduced in poetic form of great sweetness and
beauty. None of all the English poets could equal him, for he learned not
the art of song from men, nor sang by the arts of men. Rather did he
receive all his poetry as a free gift from God, and for this reason he did
never compose poetry of a vain or worldly kind.

Until of mature age he lived as a layman and had never learned any poetry.
Indeed, so ignorant of singing was he that sometimes, at a feast, where it
was the custom that for the pleasure of all each guest should sing in turn,
he would rise from the table when he saw the harp coming to him and go home
ashamed. Now it happened once that he did this thing at a certain
festivity, and went out to the stall to care for the horses, this duty
being assigned to him for that night. As he slept at the usual time, one
stood by him saying: "Cædmon, sing me something." "I cannot sing," he
answered, "and that is why I came hither from the feast." But he who spake
unto him said again, "Cædmon, sing to me." And he said, "What shall I
sing?" and he said, "Sing the beginning of created things." Thereupon
Cædmon began to sing verses that he had never heard before, of this import:
"Now should we praise the power and wisdom of the Creator, the works of the
Father." This is the sense but not the form of the hymn that he sang while
sleeping.

When he awakened, Cædmon remembered the words of the hymn and added to them
many more. In the morning he went to the steward of the monastery lands and
showed him the gift he had received in sleep. The steward brought him to
Hilda, who made him repeat to the monks the hymn he had composed, and all
agreed that the grace of God was upon Cædmon. To test him they expounded to
him a bit of Scripture from the Latin and bade him, if he could, to turn it
into poetry. He went away humbly and returned in the morning with an
excellent poem. Thereupon Hilda received him and his family into the
monastery, made him one of the brethren, and commanded that the whole
course of Bible history be expounded to him. He in turn, reflecting upon
what he had heard, transformed it into most delightful poetry, and by
echoing it back to the monks in more melodious sounds made his teachers his
listeners. In all this his aim was to turn men from wickedness and to help
them to the love and practice of well doing.

[Then follows a brief record of Cædmon's life and an exquisite picture of
his death amidst the brethren.] And so it came to pass [says the simple
record] that as he served God while living in purity of mind and serenity
of spirit, so by a peaceful death he left the world and went to look upon
His face.

CæDMON'S WORKS. The greatest work attributed to Cædmon is the so-called
_Paraphrase_. It is the story of Genesis, Exodus, and a part of Daniel,
told in glowing, poetic language, with a power of insight and imagination
which often raises it from paraphrase into the realm of true poetry. Though
we have Bede's assurance that Cædmon "transformed the whole course of Bible
history into most delightful poetry," no work known certainly to have been
composed by him has come down to us. In the seventeenth century this
Anglo-Saxon _Paraphrase_ was discovered and attributed to Cædmon, and his
name is still associated with it, though it is now almost certain that the
_Paraphrase_ is the work of more than one writer.

Aside from the doubtful question of authorship, even a casual reading of
the poem brings us into the presence of a poet rude indeed, but with a
genius strongly suggestive at times of the matchless Milton. The book opens
with a hymn of praise, and then tells of the fall of Satan and his rebel
angels from heaven, which is familiar to us in Milton's _Paradise Lost_.
Then follows the creation of the world, and the _Paraphrase_ begins to
thrill with the old Anglo-Saxon love of nature.

    Here first the Eternal Father, guard of all,
    Of heaven and earth, raisèd up the firmament,
    The Almighty Lord set firm by His strong power
    This roomy land; grass greened not yet the plain,
    Ocean far spread hid the wan ways in gloom.
    Then was the Spirit gloriously bright
    Of Heaven's Keeper borne over the deep
    Swiftly. The Life-giver, the Angel's Lord,
    Over the ample ground bade come forth Light.
    Quickly the High King's bidding was obeyed,
    Over the waste there shone light's holy ray.
    Then parted He, Lord of triumphant might,
    Shadow from shining, darkness from the light.
    Light, by the Word of God, was first named day.[30]

After recounting the story of Paradise, the Fall, and the Deluge, the
_Paraphrase_ is continued in the Exodus, of which the poet makes a noble
epic, rushing on with the sweep of a Saxon army to battle. A single
selection is given here to show how the poet adapted the story to his
hearers:

                        Then they saw,
    Forth and forward faring, Pharaoh's war array
    Gliding on, a grove of spears;--glittering the hosts!
    Fluttered there the banners, there the folk the march trod.
    Onwards surged the war, strode the spears along,
    Blickered the broad shields; blew aloud the trumpets....
    Wheeling round in gyres, yelled the fowls of war,
    Of the battle greedy; hoarsely barked the raven,
    Dew upon his feathers, o'er the fallen corpses--
    Swart that chooser of the slain! Sang aloud the wolves
    At eve their horrid song, hoping for the carrion.[31]

Besides the _Paraphrase_ we have a few fragments of the same general
character which are attributed to the school of Cædmon. The longest of
these is _Judith_, in which the story of an apocryphal book of the Old
Testament is done into vigorous poetry. Holofernes is represented as a
savage and cruel Viking, reveling in his mead hall; and when the heroic
Judith cuts off his head with his own sword and throws it down before the
warriors of her people, rousing them to battle and victory, we reach
perhaps the most dramatic and brilliant point of Anglo-Saxon literature.


CYNEWULF (Eighth Century)

Of Cynewulf, greatest of the Anglo-Saxon poets, excepting only the unknown
author of _Beowulf_, we know very little. Indeed, it was not till 1840,
more than a thousand years after his death, that even his name became
known. Though he is the only one of our early poets who signed his works,
the name was never plainly written, but woven into the verses in the form
of secret runes,[32] suggesting a modern charade, but more difficult of
interpretation until one has found the key to the poet's signature.

WORKS OF CYNEWULF. The only signed poems of Cynewulf are _The Christ,
Juliana, The Fates of the Apostles_, and _Elene_. Unsigned poems attributed
to him or his school are _Andreas_, the _Phoenix_, the _Dream of the Rood_,
the _Descent into Hell_, _Guthlac_, the _Wanderer_, and some of the
Riddles. The last are simply literary conundrums in which some well-known
object, like the bow or drinking horn, is described in poetic language, and
the hearer must guess the name. Some of them, like "The Swan"[33] and "The
Storm Spirit," are unusually beautiful.

Of all these works the most characteristic is undoubtedly _The Christ_, a
didactic poem in three parts: the first celebrating the Nativity; the
second, the Ascension; and the third, "Doomsday," telling the torments of
the wicked and the unending joy of the redeemed. Cynewulf takes his
subject-matter partly from the Church liturgy, but more largely from the
homilies of Gregory the Great. The whole is well woven together, and
contains some hymns of great beauty and many passages of intense dramatic
force. Throughout the poem a deep love for Christ and a reverence for the
Virgin Mary are manifest. More than any other poem in any language, _The
Christ_ reflects the spirit of early Latin Christianity.

Here is a fragment comparing life to a sea voyage,--a comparison which
occurs sooner or later to every thoughtful person, and which finds perfect
expression in Tennyson's "Crossing the Bar."

    Now 'tis most like as if we fare in ships
    On the ocean flood, over the water cold,
    Driving our vessels through the spacious seas
    With horses of the deep. A perilous way is this
    Of boundless waves, and there are stormy seas
    On which we toss here in this (reeling) world
    O'er the deep paths. Ours was a sorry plight
    Until at last we sailed unto the land,
    Over the troubled main. Help came to us
    That brought us to the haven of salvation,
    God's Spirit-Son, and granted grace to us
    That we might know e'en from the vessel's deck
    Where we must bind with anchorage secure
    Our ocean steeds, old stallions of the waves.

In the two epic poems of _Andreas_ and _Elene_ Cynewulf (if he be the
author) reaches the very summit of his poetical art. _Andreas_, an unsigned
poem, records the story of St. Andrew, who crosses the sea to rescue his
comrade St. Matthew from the cannibals. A young ship-master who sails the
boat turns out to be Christ in disguise, Matthew is set free, and the
savages are converted by a miracle.[34] It is a spirited poem, full of rush
and incident, and the descriptions of the sea are the best in Anglo-Saxon
poetry.

_Elene_ has for its subject-matter the finding of the true cross. It tells
of Constantine's vision of the Rood, on the eve of battle. After his
victory under the new emblem he sends his mother Helena (Elene) to
Jerusalem in search of the original cross and the nails. The poem, which is
of very uneven quality, might properly be put at the end of Cynewulf's
works. He adds to the poem a personal note, signing his name in runes; and,
if we accept the wonderful "Vision of the Rood" as Cynewulf's work, we
learn how he found the cross at last in his own heart. There is a
suggestion here of the future Sir Launfal and the search for the Holy
Grail.

DECLINE OF NORTHUMBRIAN LITERATURE. The same northern energy which had
built up learning and literature so rapidly in Northumbria was instrumental
in pulling it down again. Toward the end of the century in which Cynewulf
lived, the Danes swept down on the English coasts and overwhelmed
Northumbria. Monasteries and schools were destroyed; scholars and teachers
alike were put to the sword, and libraries that had been gathered leaf by
leaf with the toil of centuries were scattered to the four winds. So all
true Northumbrian literature perished, with the exception of a few
fragments, and that which we now possess[35] is largely a translation in
the dialect of the West Saxons. This translation was made by Alfred's
scholars, after he had driven back the Danes in an effort to preserve the
ideals and the civilization that had been so hardly won. With the conquest
of Northumbria ends the poetic period of Anglo-Saxon literature. With
Alfred the Great of Wessex our prose literature makes a beginning.


ALFRED (848-901)

    "Every craft and every power soon grows
    old and is passed over and forgotten, if it
    be without wisdom.... This is now to be
    said, that whilst I live I wish to live nobly,
    and after life to leave to the men who come
    after me a memory of good works."[36]

So wrote the great Alfred, looking back over his heroic life. That he lived
nobly none can doubt who reads the history of the greatest of Anglo-Saxon
kings; and his good works include, among others, the education of half a
country, the salvage of a noble native literature, and the creation of the
first English prose.

LIFE AND TIMES OF ALFRED. For the history of Alfred's times, and details of
the terrific struggle with the Northmen, the reader must be referred to the
histories. The struggle ended with the Treaty of Wedmore, in 878, with the
establishment of Alfred not only as king of Wessex, but as overlord of the
whole northern country. Then the hero laid down his sword, and set himself
as a little child to learn to read and write Latin, so that he might lead
his people in peace as he had led them in war. It is then that Alfred began
to be the heroic figure in literature that he had formerly been in the wars
against the Northmen.

With the same patience and heroism that had marked the long struggle for
freedom, Alfred set himself to the task of educating his people. First he
gave them laws, beginning with the Ten Commandments and ending with the
Golden Rule, and then established courts where laws could be faithfully
administered. Safe from the Danes by land, he created a navy, almost the
first of the English fleets, to drive them from the coast. Then, with peace
and justice established within his borders, he sent to Europe for scholars
and teachers, and set them over schools that he established. Hitherto all
education had been in Latin; now he set himself the task, first, of
teaching every free-born Englishman to read and write his own language, and
second, of translating into English the best books for their instruction.
Every poor scholar was honored at his court and was speedily set to work at
teaching or translating; every wanderer bringing a book or a leaf of
manuscript from the pillaged monasteries of Northumbria was sure of his
reward. In this way the few fragments of native Northumbrian literature,
which we have been studying, were saved to the world. Alfred and his
scholars treasured the rare fragments and copied them in the West-Saxon
dialect. With the exception of Cædmon's Hymn, we have hardly a single leaf
from the great literature of Northumbria in the dialect in which it was
first written.

WORKS OF ALFRED. Aside from his educational work, Alfred is known chiefly
as a translator. After fighting his country's battles, and at a time when
most men were content with military honor, he began to learn Latin, that he
might translate the works that would be most helpful to his people. His
important translations are four in number: Orosius's _Universal History and
Geography_, the leading work in general history for several centuries;
Bede's _History_,[37] the first great historical work written on English
soil; Pope Gregory's _Shepherds' Book_, intended especially for the clergy;
and Boethius's _Consolations of Philosophy_, the favorite philosophical
work of the Middle Ages.

More important than any translation is the _English_ or _Saxon Chronicle_.
This was probably at first a dry record, especially of important births and
deaths in the West-Saxon kingdom. Alfred enlarged this scant record,
beginning the story with Cæsar's conquest. When it touches his own reign
the dry chronicle becomes an interesting and connected story, the oldest
history belonging to any modern nation in its own language. The record of
Alfred's reign, probably by himself, is a splendid bit of writing and shows
clearly his claim to a place in literature as well as in history. The
_Chronicle_ was continued after Alfred's death, and is the best monument of
early English prose that is left to us. Here and there stirring songs are
included in the narrative, like "The Battle of Brunanburh" and "The Battle
of Maldon."[38] The last, entered 991, seventy-five years before the Norman
Conquest, is the swan song of Anglo-Saxon poetry. The _Chronicle_ was
continued for a century after the Norman Conquest, and is extremely
valuable not only as a record of events but as a literary monument showing
the development of our language.

CLOSE OF THE ANGLO-SAXON PERIOD. After Alfred's death there is little to
record, except the loss of the two supreme objects of his heroic struggle,
namely, a national life and a national literature. It was at once the
strength and the weakness of the Saxon that he lived apart as a free man
and never joined efforts willingly with any large body of his fellows. The
tribe was his largest idea of nationality, and, with all our admiration, we
must confess as we first meet him that he has not enough sense of unity to
make a great nation, nor enough culture to produce a great literature. A
few noble political ideals repeated in a score of petty kingdoms, and a few
literary ideals copied but never increased,--that is the summary of his
literary history. For a full century after Alfred literature was
practically at a standstill, having produced the best of which it was
capable, and England waited for the national impulse and for the culture
necessary for a new and greater art. Both of these came speedily, by way of
the sea, in the Norman Conquest.

SUMMARY OF ANGLO-SAXON PERIOD. Our literature begins with songs and stories
of a time when our Teutonic ancestors were living on the borders of the
North Sea. Three tribes of these ancestors, the Jutes, Angles, and Saxons,
conquered Britain in the latter half of the fifth century, and laid the
foundation of the English nation. The first landing was probably by a tribe
of Jutes, under chiefs called by the chronicle Hengist and Horsa. The date
is doubtful; but the year 449 is accepted by most historians.

These old ancestors were hardy warriors and sea rovers, yet were capable of
profound and noble emotions. Their poetry reflects this double nature. Its
subjects were chiefly the sea and the plunging boats, battles, adventure,
brave deeds, the glory of warriors, and the love of home. Accent,
alliteration, and an abrupt break in the middle of each line gave their
poetry a kind of martial rhythm. In general the poetry is earnest and
somber, and pervaded by fatalism and religious feeling. A careful reading
of the few remaining fragments of Anglo-Saxon literature reveals five
striking characteristics: the love of freedom; responsiveness to nature,
especially in her sterner moods; strong religious convictions, and a belief
in Wyrd, or Fate; reverence for womanhood; and a devotion to glory as the
ruling motive in every warrior's life.

In our study we have noted: (1) the great epic or heroic poem _Beowulf_,
and a few fragments of our first poetry, such as "Widsith," "Deor's
Lament," and "The Seafarer." (2) Characteristics of Anglo-Saxon life; the
form of our first speech. (3) The Northumbrian school of writers. Bede, our
first historian, belongs to this school; but all his extant works are in
Latin. The two great poets are Cædmon and Cynewulf. Northumbrian literature
flourished between 650 and 850. In the year 867 Northumbria was conquered
by the Danes, who destroyed the monasteries and the libraries containing
our earliest literature. (4) The beginnings of English prose writing under
Alfred (848-901). Our most important prose work of this age is the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which was revised and enlarged by Alfred, and which
was continued for more than two centuries. It is the oldest historical
record known to any European nation in its own tongue.

SELECTIONS FOR READING. _Miscellaneous Poetry_. The Seafarer, Love Letter
(Husband's Message), Battle of Brunanburh, Deor's Lament, Riddles, Exodus,
The Christ, Andreas, Dream of the Rood, extracts in Cook and Tinker's
Translations from Old English Poetry[39] (Ginn and Company); Judith,
translation by A.S. Cook. Good selections are found also in Brooke's
History of Early English Literature, and Morley's English Writers, vols. 1
and 2.

_Beowulf_. J.R.C. Hall's prose translation; Child's Beowulf (Riverside
Literature Series); Morris and Wyatt's The Tale of Beowulf; Earle's The
Deeds of Beowulf; Metrical versions by Garnett, J.L. Hall, Lumsden, etc.

_Prose_. A few paragraphs of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in Manly's English
Prose; translations in Cook and Tinker's Old English Prose.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.[40]

_HISTORY_. For the facts of the Anglo-Saxon conquest of England consult
first a good text-book: Montgomery, pp. 31--57, or Cheyney, pp. 36-84. For
fuller treatment see Green, ch. 1; Traill, vol. 1; Ramsey's Foundations of
England; Turner's History of the Anglo-Saxons; Freeman's Old English
History; Allen's Anglo-Saxon England; Cook's Life of Alfred; Asser's Life
of King Alfred, edited by W.H. Stevenson; C. Plummer's Life and Times of
Alfred the Great; E. Dale's National Life and Character in the Mirror of
Early English Literature; Rhys's Celtic Britain.

_LITERATURE. Anglo-Saxon Texts_. Library of Anglo-Saxon Poetry, and Albion
Series of Anglo-Saxon and Middle English Poetry (Ginn and Company); Belles
Lettres Series of English Classics, sec. 1 (Heath & Co.); J.W. Bright's
Anglo-Saxon Reader; Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Primer, and Anglo-Saxon Reader.

_General Works_. Jusserand, Ten Brink, Cambridge History, Morley (full
titles and publishers in General Bibliography).

_Special Works_. Brooke's History of Early English Literature; Earle's
Anglo-Saxon Literature; Lewis's Beginnings of English Literature; Arnold's
Celtic Literature (for relations of Saxon and Celt); Longfellow's Poets and
Poetry of Europe; Hall's Old English Idyls; Gayley's Classic Myths, or
Guerber's Myths of the Northlands (for Norse Mythology); Brother Azarias's
Development of Old English Thought.

Beowulf, prose translations by Tinker, Hall, Earle, Morris and Wyatt;
metrical versions by Garnett, J.L. Hall, Lumsden, etc. The Exeter Book (a
collection of Anglo-Saxon texts), edited and translated by Gollancz. The
Christ of Cynewulf, prose translation by Whitman; the same poem, text and
translation, by Gollancz; text by Cook. Cædmon's Paraphrase, text and
translation, by Thorpe. Garnett's Elene, Judith, and other Anglo-Saxon
Poems. Translations of Andreas and the Phoenix, in Gollancz's Exeter Book.
Bede's History, in Temple Classics; the same with the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
(one volume) in Bohn's Antiquarian Library.


SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS.[41]

1. What is the relation of history and literature? Why should both subjects
be studied together? Explain the qualities that characterize all great
literature. Has any text-book in history ever appealed to you as a work of
literature? What literary qualities have you noticed in standard historical
works, such as those of Macaulay, Prescott, Gibbon, Green, Motley, Parkman,
and John Fiske?

2. Why did the Anglo-Saxons come to England? What induced them to remain?
Did any change occur in their ideals, or in their manner of life? Do you
know any social or political institutions which they brought, and which, we
still cherish?

3. From the literature you have read, what do you know about our Anglo-
Saxon ancestors? What virtues did they admire in men? How was woman
regarded? Can you compare the Anglo-Saxon ideal of woman with that of other
nations, the Romans for instance?

4. Tell in your own words the general qualities of Anglo-Saxon poetry. How
did it differ in its metrical form from modern poetry? What passages seem
to you worth learning and remembering? Can you explain why poetry is more
abundant and more interesting than prose in the earliest literature of all
nations?

5. Tell the story of _Beowulf_. What appeals to you most in the poem? Why
is it a work for all time, or, as the Anglo-Saxons would say, why is it
worthy to be remembered? Note the permanent quality of literature, and the
ideals and emotions which are emphasized in _Beowulf_. Describe the burials
of Scyld and of Beowulf. Does the poem teach any moral lesson? Explain the
Christian elements in this pagan epic.

6. Name some other of our earliest poems, and describe the one you like
best. How does the sea figure in our first poetry? How is nature regarded?
What poem reveals the life of the scop or poet? How do you account for the
serious character of Anglo-Saxon poetry? Compare the Saxon and the Celt
with regard to the gladsomeness of life as shown in their literature.

7. What useful purpose did poetry serve among our ancestors? What purpose
did the harp serve in reciting their poems? Would the harp add anything to
our modern poetry?

8. What is meant by Northumbrian literature? Who are the great Northumbrian
writers? What besides the Danish conquest caused the decline of
Northumbrian literature?

9. For what is Bede worthy to be remembered? Tell the story of Cædmon, as
recorded in Bede's History. What new element is introduced in Cædmon's
poems? What effect did Christianity have upon Anglo-Saxon literature? Can
you quote any passages from Cædmon to show that Anglo-Saxon character was
not changed but given a new direction? If you have read Milton's _Paradise
Lost_, what resemblances are there between that poem and Cædmon's
_Paraphrase?_

10. What are the Cynewulf poems? Describe any that you have read. How do
they compare in spirit and in expression with _Beowulf_? with Cædmon? Read
_The Phoenix_ (which is a translation from the Latin) in Brooke's History
of Early English Literature, or in Gollancz's Exeter Book, or in Cook's
Translations from Old English Poetry, and tell what elements you find to
show that the poem is not of Anglo-Saxon origin. Compare the views of
nature in Beowulf and in the Cynewulf poems.

11. Describe the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. What is its value in our language,
literature, and history? Give an account of Alfred's life and of his work
for literature. How does Anglo-Saxon prose compare in interest with the
poetry?


                              CHRONOLOGY
=====================================================================
  HISTORY                          |  LITERATURE
---------------------------------------------------------------------
                                   |
449(?). Landing of Hengist and     |
        Horsa in Britain           |
                                   |
477. Landing of South Saxons       |
                                   |
547. Angles settle Northumbria     | 547. Gildas's History
                                   |
597. Landing of Augustine and his  |
      monks. Conversion of Kent    |
                                   |
617. Eadwine, king of Northumbria  |
                                   |
635-665. Coming of St. Aidan.      |
      Conversion of Northumbria    | 664. Cædmon at Whitby
                                   |
                                   | 673-735. Bede
                                   |
                                   | 750 (_cir_.). Cynewulf
                                   |   poems
867. Danes conquer Northumbria     |
                                   |
871. Alfred, king of Wessex        | 860. Anglo-Saxon Chronicle begun
                                   |
878. Defeat of Danes. Peace of     |
       Wedmore                     |
                                   |
901. Death of Alfred               | 991. Last known poem of the
                                   |        Anglo-Saxon
                                   |        period, The Battle of
                                   |        Maldon, otherwise called
                                   |        Byrhtnoth's Death
1013-1042. Danish period           |
                                   |
1016. Cnut, king                   |
                                   |
1042. Edward the Confessor. Saxon  |
        period restored            |
                                   |
1049. Westminster Abbey begun      |
                                   |
1066. Harold, last of Saxon kings. |
        Norman Conquest            |
=====================================================================

       *       *       *       *       *



CHAPTER III

THE ANGLO-NORMAN PERIOD (1066-1350)

I. HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION

THE NORMANS. The name Norman, which is a softened form of Northman, tells
its own story. The men who bore the name came originally from
Scandinavia,--bands of big, blond, fearless men cruising after plunder and
adventure in their Viking ships, and bringing terror wherever they
appeared. It was these same "Children of Woden" who, under the Danes' raven
flag, had blotted out Northumbrian civilization in the ninth century. Later
the same race of men came plundering along the French coast and conquered
the whole northern country; but here the results were altogether different.
Instead of blotting out a superior civilization, as the Danes had done,
they promptly abandoned their own. Their name of Normandy still clings to
the new home; but all else that was Norse disappeared as the conquerors
intermarried with the native Franks and accepted French ideals and spoke
the French language. So rapidly did they adopt and improve the Roman
civilization of the natives that, from a rude tribe of heathen Vikings,
they had developed within a single century into the most polished and
intellectual people in all Europe. The union of Norse and French (i.e.
Roman-Gallic) blood had here produced a race having the best qualities of
both,--the will power and energy of the one, the eager curiosity and vivid
imagination of the other. When these Norman-French people appeared in
Anglo-Saxon England they brought with them three noteworthy things: a
lively Celtic disposition, a vigorous and progressive Latin civilization,
and a Romance language.[42] We are to think of the conquerors, therefore,
as they thought and spoke of themselves in the Domesday Book and all their
contemporary literature, not as Normans but as _Franci_, that is,
Frenchmen.

THE CONQUEST. At the battle of Hastings (1066) the power of Harold, last of
the Saxon kings, was broken, and William, duke of Normandy, became master
of England. Of the completion of that stupendous Conquest which began at
Hastings, and which changed the civilization of a whole nation, this is not
the place to speak. We simply point out three great results of the Conquest
which have a direct bearing on our literature. First, notwithstanding
Cæsar's legions and Augustine's monks, the Normans were the first to bring
the culture and the practical ideals of Roman civilization home to the
English people; and this at a critical time, when England had produced her
best, and her own literature and civilization had already begun to decay.
Second, they forced upon England the national idea, that is, a strong,
centralized government to replace the loose authority of a Saxon chief over
his tribesmen. And the world's history shows that without a great
nationality a great literature is impossible. Third, they brought to
England the wealth of a new language and literature, and our English
gradually absorbed both. For three centuries after Hastings French was the
language of the upper classes, of courts and schools and literature; yet so
tenaciously did the common people cling to their own strong speech that in
the end English absorbed almost the whole body of French words and became
the language of the land. It was the welding of Saxon and French into one
speech that produced the wealth of our modern English.

Naturally such momentous changes in a nation were not brought about
suddenly. At first Normans and Saxons lived apart in the relation of
masters and servants, with more or less contempt on one side and hatred on
the other; but in an astonishingly short time these two races were drawn
powerfully together, like two men of different dispositions who are often
led into a steadfast friendship by the attraction of opposite qualities,
each supplying what the other lacks. The _Anglo-Saxon Chronicle_, which was
continued for a century after Hastings, finds much to praise in the
conquerors; on the other hand the Normans, even before the Conquest, had no
great love for the French nation. After conquering England they began to
regard it as home and speedily developed a new sense of nationality.
Geoffrey's popular _History_,[43] written less than a century after the
Conquest, made conquerors and conquered alike proud of their country by its
stories of heroes who, curiously enough, were neither Norman nor Saxon, but
creations of the native Celts. Thus does literature, whether in a battle
song or a history, often play the chief role in the development of
nationality.[44] Once the mutual distrust was overcome the two races
gradually united, and out of this union of Saxons and Normans came the new
English life and literature.

LITERARY IDEALS OF THE NORMANS. The change in the life of the conquerors
from Norsemen to Normans, from Vikings to Frenchmen, is shown most clearly
in the literature which they brought with them to England. The old Norse
strength and grandeur, the magnificent sagas telling of the tragic
struggles of men and gods, which still stir us profoundly,--these have all
disappeared. In their place is a bright, varied, talkative literature,
which runs to endless verses, and which makes a wonderful romance out of
every subject it touches. The theme may be religion or love or chivalry or
history, the deeds of Alexander or the misdeeds of a monk; but the author's
purpose never varies. He must tell a romantic story and amuse his audience;
and the more wonders and impossibilities he relates, the more surely is he
believed. We are reminded, in reading, of the native Gauls, who would stop
every traveler and compel him to tell a story ere he passed on. There was
more of the Gaul than of the Norseman in the conquerors, and far more of
fancy than of thought or feeling in their literature. If you would see this
in concrete form, read the _Chanson de Roland_, the French national epic
(which the Normans first put into literary form), in contrast with
_Beowulf_, which voices the Saxon's thought and feeling before the profound
mystery of human life. It is not our purpose to discuss the evident merits
or the serious defects of Norman-French literature, but only to point out
two facts which impress the student, namely, that Anglo-Saxon literature
was at one time enormously superior to the French, and that the latter,
with its evident inferiority, absolutely replaced the former. "The fact is
too often ignored," says Professor Schofield,[45] "that before 1066 the
Anglo-Saxons had a body of native literature distinctly superior to any
which the Normans or French could boast at that time; their prose
especially was unparalleled for extent and power in any European
vernacular." Why, then, does this superior literature disappear and for
nearly three centuries French remain supreme, so much so that writers on
English soil, even when they do not use the French language, still
slavishly copy the French models?

To understand this curious phenomenon it is necessary only to remember the
relative conditions of the two races who lived side by side in England. On
the one hand the Anglo-Saxons were a conquered people, and without liberty
a great literature is impossible. The inroads of the Danes and their own
tribal wars had already destroyed much of their writings, and in their new
condition of servitude they could hardly preserve what remained. The
conquering Normans, on the other hand, represented the civilization of
France, which country, during the early Middle Ages, was the literary and
educational center of all Europe. They came to England at a time when the
idea of nationality was dead, when culture had almost vanished, when
Englishmen lived apart in narrow isolation; and they brought with them law,
culture, the prestige of success, and above all the strong impulse to share
in the great world's work and to join in the moving currents of the world's
history. Small wonder, then, that the young Anglo-Saxons felt the
quickening of this new life and turned naturally to the cultured and
progressive Normans as their literary models.


II. LITERATURE OF THE NORMAN PERIOD

In the Advocates' Library at Edinburgh there is a beautifully illuminated
manuscript, written about 1330, which gives us an excellent picture of the
literature of the Norman period. In examining it we are to remember that
literature was in the hands of the clergy and nobles; that the common
people could not read, and had only a few songs and ballads for their
literary portion. We are to remember also that parchments were scarce and
very expensive, and that a single manuscript often contained all the
reading matter of a castle or a village. Hence this old manuscript is as
suggestive as a modern library. It contains over forty distinct works, the
great bulk of them being romances. There are metrical or verse romances of
French and Celtic and English heroes, like Roland, Arthur and Tristram, and
Bevis of Hampton. There are stories of Alexander, the Greek romance of
"Flores and Blanchefleur," and a collection of Oriental tales called "The
Seven Wise Masters." There are legends of the Virgin and the saints, a
paraphrase of Scripture, a treatise on the seven deadly sins, some Bible
history, a dispute among birds concerning women, a love song or two, a
vision of Purgatory, a vulgar story with a Gallic flavor, a chronicle of
English kings and Norman barons, and a political satire. There are a few
other works, similarly incongruous, crowded together in this typical
manuscript, which now gives mute testimony to the literary taste of the
times.

Obviously it is impossible to classify such a variety. We note simply that
it is mediæval in spirit, and French in style and expression; and that sums
up the age. All the scholarly works of the period, like William of
Malmesbury's _History_, and Anselm's[46] _Cur Deus Homo_, and Roger Bacon's
_Opus Majus_, the beginning of modern experimental science, were written in
Latin; while nearly all other works were written in French, or else were
English copies or translations of French originals. Except for the advanced
student, therefore, they hardly belong to the story of English literature.
We shall note here only one or two marked literary types, like the Riming
Chronicle (or verse history) and the Metrical Romance, and a few writers
whose work has especial significance.

GEOFFREY OF MONMOUTH. (d. 1154). Geoffrey's _Historia Regum Britanniae_ is
noteworthy, not as literature, but rather as a source book from which many
later writers drew their literary materials. Among the native Celtic tribes
an immense number of legends, many of them of exquisite beauty, had been
preserved through four successive conquests of Britain. Geoffrey, a Welsh
monk, collected some of these legends and, aided chiefly by his
imagination, wrote a complete history of the Britons. His alleged authority
was an ancient manuscript in the native Welsh tongue containing the lives
and deeds of all their kings, from Brutus, the alleged founder of Britain,
down to the coming of Julius Cæsar.[47] From this Geoffrey wrote his
history, down to the death of Cadwalader in 689.

The "History" is a curious medley of pagan and Christian legends, of
chronicle, comment, and pure invention,--all recorded in minute detail and
with a gravity which makes it clear that Geoffrey had no conscience, or
else was a great joker. As history the whole thing is rubbish; but it was
extraordinarily successful at the time and made all who heard it, whether
Normans or Saxons, proud of their own country. It is interesting to us
because it gave a new direction to the literature of England by showing the
wealth of poetry and romance that lay in its own traditions of Arthur and
his knights. Shakespeare's _King Lear_, Malory's _Morte d'Arthur_, and
Tennyson's _Idylls of the King_ were founded on the work of this monk, who
had the genius to put unwritten Celtic tradition in the enduring form of
Latin prose.

WORK OF THE FRENCH WRITERS. The French literature of the Norman period is
interesting chiefly because of the avidity with which foreign writers
seized upon the native legends and made them popular in England. Until
Geoffrey's preposterous chronicle appeared, these legends had not been used
to any extent as literary material. Indeed, they were scarcely known in
England, though familiar to French and Italian minstrels. Legends of Arthur
and his court were probably first taken to Brittany by Welsh emigrants in
the fifth and sixth centuries. They became immensely popular wherever they
were told, and they were slowly carried by minstrels and story-tellers all
over Europe. That they had never received literary form or recognition was
due to a peculiarity of mediæval literature, which required that every tale
should have some ancient authority behind it. Geoffrey met this demand by
creating an historical manuscript of Welsh history. That was enough for the
age. With Geoffrey and his alleged manuscript to rest upon, the Norman-
French writers were free to use the fascinating stories which had been-for
centuries in the possession of their wandering minstrels. Geoffrey's Latin
history was put into French verse by Gaimar _(c_. 1150) and by Wace (_c_.
1155), and from these French versions the work was first translated into
English. From about 1200 onward Arthur and Guinevere and the matchless band
of Celtic heroes that we meet later (1470) in Malory's _Morte d' Arthur_
became the permanent possession of our literature.

LAYAMON'S BRUT (_c_. 1200). This is the most important of the English
riming chronicles, that is, history related in the form of doggerel verse,
probably because poetry is more easily memorized than prose. We give here a
free rendering of selected lines at the beginning of the poem, which tell
us all we know of Layamon, the first who ever wrote as an Englishman for
Englishmen, including in the term all who loved England and called it home,
no matter where their ancestors were born.

Now there was a priest in the land named Layamon. He was son of Leovenath
--may God be gracious unto him. He dwelt at Ernley, at a noble church on
Severn's bank. He read many books, and it came to his mind to tell the
noble deeds of the English. Then he began to journey far and wide over the
land to procure noble books for authority. He took the English book that
Saint Bede made, another in Latin that Saint Albin made,[48] and a third
book that a French clerk made, named Wace.[49] Layamon laid these works
before him and turned the leaves; lovingly he beheld them. Pen he took, and
wrote on book-skin, and made the three books into one.

The poem begins with the destruction of Troy and the flight of "Æneas the
duke" into Italy. Brutus, a great-grandson of Æneas, gathers his people and
sets out to find a new land in the West. Then follows the founding of the
Briton kingdom, and the last third of the poem, which is over thirty
thousand lines in length, is taken up with the history of Arthur and his
knights. If the _Brut_ had no merits of its own, it would still interest
us, for it marks the first appearance of the Arthurian legends in our own
tongue. A single selection is given here from Arthur's dying speech,
familiar to us in Tennyson's _Morte d'Arthur_. The reader will notice here
two things: first, that though the poem is almost pure Anglo-Saxon,[50] our
first speech has already dropped many inflections and is more easily read
than _Beowulf_; second, that French influence is already at work in
Layamon's rimes and assonances, that is, the harmony resulting from using
the same vowel sound in several successive lines:

    And ich wulle varen to Avalun:  And I will fare to Avalun,
    To vairest alre maidene,        To fairest of all maidens,
    To Argante there quene,         To Argante the queen,
    Alven swithe sceone.            An elf very beautiful.
    And heo seal mine wunden        And she shall my wounds
    Makien alle isunde,             Make all sound;
    Al hal me makien                All whole me make
    Mid haleweiye drenchen.         With healing drinks.
    And seothe ich cumen wulle      And again will I come
    To mine kiueriche               To my kingdom
    And wunien mid Brutten          And dwell with Britons
    Mid muchelere wunne.            With mickle joy.
    Aefne than worden               Even (with) these words
    Ther com of se wenden           There came from the sea
    That wes an sceort bat lithen,  A short little boat gliding,
    Sceoven mid uthen,              Shoved by the waves;
    And twa wimmen ther inne,       And two women therein,
    Wunderliche idihte.             Wondrously attired.
    And heo nomen Arthur anan       And they took Arthur anon
    And an eovste hine vereden      And bore him hurriedly,
    And softe hine adun leiden,     And softly laid him down,
    And forth gunnen lithen.        And forth gan glide.

METRICAL ROMANCES. Love, chivalry, and religion, all pervaded by the spirit
of romance,--these are the three great literary ideals which find
expression in the metrical romances. Read these romances now, with their
knights and fair ladies, their perilous adventures and tender love-making,
their minstrelsy and tournaments and gorgeous cavalcades,--as if humanity
were on parade, and life itself were one tumultuous holiday in the open
air,--and you have an epitome of the whole childish, credulous soul of the
Middle Ages. The Normans first brought this type of romance into England,
and so popular did it become, so thoroughly did it express the romantic
spirit of the time, that it speedily overshadowed all other forms of
literary expression.

Though the metrical romances varied much in form and subject-matter, the
general type remains the same,--a long rambling poem or series of poems
treating of love or knightly adventure or both. Its hero is a knight; its
characters are fair ladies in distress, warriors in armor, giants, dragons,
enchanters, and various enemies of Church and State; and its emphasis is
almost invariably on love, religion, and duty as defined by chivalry. In
the French originals of these romances the lines were a definite length,
the meter exact, and rimes and assonances were both used to give melody. In
England this metrical system came in contact with the uneven lines, the
strong accent and alliteration of the native songs; and it is due to the
gradual union of the two systems, French and Saxon, that our English became
capable of the melody and amazing variety of verse forms which first find
expression in Chaucer's poetry.

In the enormous number of these verse romances we note three main
divisions, according to subject, into the romances (or the so-called
matter) of France, Rome, and Britain.[51] The matter of France deals
largely with the exploits of Charlemagne and his peers, and the chief of
these Carlovingian cycles is the _Chanson de Roland_, the national epic,
which celebrates the heroism of Roland in his last fight against the
Saracens at Ronceval. Originally these romances were called _Chansons de
Geste_; and the name is significant as indicating that the poems were
originally short songs[52] celebrating the deeds _(gesta)_ of well-known
heroes. Later the various songs concerning one hero were gathered together
and the _Geste_ became an epic, like the _Chanson de Roland_, or a kind of
continued ballad story, hardly deserving the name of epic, like the _Geste
of Robin Hood_.[53]

The matter of Rome consisted largely of tales from Greek and Roman sources;
and the two great cycles of these romances deal with the deeds of
Alexander, a favorite hero, and the siege of Troy, with which the Britons
thought they had some historic connection. To these were added a large
number of tales from Oriental sources; and in the exuberant imagination of
the latter we see the influence which the Saracens--those nimble wits who
gave us our first modern sciences and who still reveled in the _Arabian
Nights_--had begun to exercise on the literature of Europe.

To the English reader, at least, the most interesting of the romances are
those which deal with the exploits of Arthur and his Knights of the Round
Table,--the richest storehouse of romance which our literature has ever
found. There were many cycles of Arthurian romances, chief of which are
those of Gawain, Launcelot, Merlin, the Quest of the Holy Grail, and the
Death of Arthur. In preceding sections we have seen how these fascinating
romances were used by Geoffrey and the French writers, and how, through the
French, they found their way into English, appearing first in our speech in
Layamon's _Brut_. The point to remember is that, while the legends are
Celtic in origin, their literary form is due to French poets, who
originated the metrical romance. All our early English romances are either
copies or translations of the French; and this is true not only of the
matter of France and Rome, but of Celtic heroes like Arthur, and English
heroes like Guy of Warwick and Robin Hood.

The most interesting of all Arthurian romances are those of the Gawain
cycle,[54] and of these the story of _Sir Gawain and the Green Knight_ is
best worth reading, for many reasons. First, though the material is taken
from French sources,[55] the English workmanship is the finest of our early
romances. Second, the unknown author of this romance probably wrote also
"The Pearl," and is the greatest English poet of the Norman period. Third,
the poem itself with its dramatic interest, its vivid descriptions, and its
moral purity, is one of the most delightful old romances in any language.

In form _Sir Gawain_ is an interesting combination of French and Saxon
elements. It is written in an elaborate stanza combining meter and
alliteration. At the end of each stanza is a rimed refrain, called by the
French a "tail rime." We give here a brief outline of the story; but if the
reader desires the poem itself, he is advised to begin with a modern
version, as the original is in the West Midland dialect and is exceedingly
difficult to follow.

On New Year's day, while Arthur and his knights are keeping the Yuletide
feast at Camelot, a gigantic knight in green enters the banquet hall on
horseback and challenges the bravest knight present to an exchange of
blows; that is, he will expose his neck to a blow of his own big battle-ax,
if any knight will agree to abide a blow in return. After some natural
consternation and a fine speech by Arthur, Gawain accepts the challenge,
takes the battle-ax, and with one blow sends the giant's head rolling
through the hall. The Green Knight, who is evidently a terrible magician,
picks up his head and mounts his horse. He holds out his head and the
ghastly lips speak, warning Gawain to be faithful to his promise and to
seek through the world till he finds the Green Chapel. There, on next New
Year's day, the Green Knight will meet him and return the blow.

The second canto of the poem describes Gawain's long journey through the
wilderness on his steed Gringolet, and his adventures with storm and cold,
with, wild beasts and monsters, as he seeks in vain for the Green Chapel.
On Christmas eve, in the midst of a vast forest, he offers a prayer to
"Mary, mildest mother so dear," and is rewarded by sight of a great castle.
He enters and is royally entertained by the host, an aged hero, and by his
wife, who is the most beautiful woman the knight ever beheld. Gawain learns
that he is at last near the Green Chapel, and settles down for a little
comfort after his long quest.

The next canto shows the life in the castle, and describes a curious
compact between the host, who goes hunting daily, and the knight, who
remains in the castle to entertain the young wife. The compact is that at
night each man shall give the other whatever good thing he obtains during
the day. While the host is hunting, the young woman tries in vain to induce
Gawain to make love to her, and ends by giving him a kiss. When the host
returns and gives his guest the game he has killed Gawain returns the kiss.
On the third day, her temptations having twice failed, the lady offers
Gawain a ring, which he refuses; but when she offers a magic green girdle
that will preserve the wearer from death, Gawain, who remembers the giant's
ax so soon to fall on his neck, accepts the girdle as a "jewel for the
jeopardy" and promises the lady to keep the gift secret. Here, then, are
two conflicting compacts. When the host returns and offers his game, Gawain
returns the kiss but says nothing of the green girdle.

The last canto brings our knight to the Green Chapel, after he is
repeatedly warned to turn back in the face of certain death. The Chapel is
a terrible place in the midst of desolation; and as Gawain approaches he
hears a terrifying sound, the grating of steel on stone, where the giant is
sharpening a new battle-ax. The Green Knight appears, and Gawain, true to
his compact, offers his neck for the blow. Twice the ax swings harmlessly;
the third time it falls on his shoulder and wounds him. Whereupon Gawain
jumps for his armor, draws his sword, and warns the giant that the compact
calls for only one blow, and that, if another is offered, he will defend
himself.

Then the Green Knight explains things. He is lord of the castle where
Gawain has been entertained for days past. The first two swings of the ax
were harmless because Gawain had been true to his compact and twice
returned the kiss. The last blow had wounded him because he concealed the
gift of the green girdle, which belongs to the Green Knight and was woven
by his wife. Moreover, the whole thing has been arranged by Morgain the
fay-woman (an enemy of Queen Guinevere, who appears often in the Arthurian
romances). Full of shame, Gawain throws back the gift and is ready to atone
for his deception; but the Green Knight thinks he has already atoned, and
presents the green girdle as a free gift. Gawain returns to Arthur's court,
tells the whole story frankly, and ever after that the knights of the Round
Table wear a green girdle in his honor.[56]

THE PEARL. In the same manuscript with "Sir Gawain" are found three other
remarkable poems, written about 1350, and known to us, in order, as "The
Pearl," "Cleanness," and "Patience." The first is the most beautiful, and
received its name from the translator and editor, Richard Morris, in 1864.
"Patience" is a paraphrase of the book of Jonah; "Cleanness" moralizes on
the basis of Bible stories; but "The Pearl" is an intensely human and
realistic picture of a father's grief for his little daughter Margaret, "My
precious perle wythouten spot." It is the saddest of all our early poems.

On the grave of his little one, covered over with flowers, the father pours
out his love and grief till, in the summer stillness, he falls asleep,
while we hear in the sunshine the drowsy hum of insects and the faraway
sound of the reapers' sickles. He dreams there, and the dream grows into a
vision beautiful. His body lies still upon the grave while his spirit goes
to a land, exquisite beyond all words, where he comes suddenly upon a
stream that he cannot cross. As he wanders along the bank, seeking in vain
for a ford, a marvel rises before his eyes, a crystal cliff, and seated
beneath it a little maiden who raises a happy, shining face,--the face of
his little Margaret.

    More then me lyste my drede aros,
    I stod full stylle and dorste not calle;
    Wyth yghen open and mouth ful clos,
    I stod as hende as hawk in halle.

He dares not speak for fear of breaking the spell; but sweet as a lily she
comes down the crystal stream's bank to meet and speak with him, and tell
him of the happy life of heaven and how to live to be worthy of it. In his
joy he listens, forgetting all his grief; then the heart of the man cries
out for its own, and he struggles to cross the stream to join her. In the
struggle the dream vanishes; he wakens to find his eyes wet and his head on
the little mound that marks the spot where his heart is buried.

From the ideals of these three poems, and from peculiarities of style and
meter, it is probable that their author wrote also _Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight_. If so, the unknown author is the one genius of the age whose
poetry of itself has power to interest us, and who stands between Cynewulf
and Chaucer as a worthy follower of the one and forerunner of the other.

MISCELLANEOUS LITERATURE OF THE NORMAN PERIOD. It is well-nigh impossible
to classify the remaining literature of this period, and very little of it
is now read, except by advanced students. Those interested in the
development of "transition" English will find in _the Ancren Riwle_, i.e.
"Rule of the Anchoresses" (_c_. 1225), the most beautiful bit of old
English prose ever written. It is a book of excellent religious advice and
comfort, written for three ladies who wished to live a religious life,
without, however, becoming nuns or entering any religious orders. The
author was Bishop Poore of Salisbury, according to Morton, who first edited
this old classic in 1853. Orm's _Ormulum_, written soon after the _Brut_,
is a paraphrase of the gospel lessons for the year, somewhat after the
manner of Cædmon's _Paraphrase_, but without any of Cædmon's poetic fire
and originality. _Cursor Mundi_ (_c_. 1320) is a very long poem which makes
a kind of metrical romance out of Bible history and shows the whole dealing
of God with man from Creation to Domesday. It is interesting as showing a
parallel to the cycles of miracle plays, which attempt to cover the same
vast ground. They were forming in this age; but we will study them later,
when we try to understand the rise of the drama in England.

Besides these greater works, an enormous number of fables and satires
appeared in this age, copied or translated from the French, like the
metrical romances. The most famous of these are "The Owl and the
Nightingale,"--a long debate between the two birds, one representing the
gay side of life, the other the sterner side of law and morals,--and "Land
of Cockaygne," i.e. "Luxury Land," a keen satire on monks and monastic
religion.[57]

While most of the literature of the time was a copy of the French and was
intended only for the upper classes, here and there were singers who made
ballads for the common people; and these, next to the metrical romances,
are the most interesting and significant of all the works of the Norman
period. On account of its obscure origin and its oral transmission, the
ballad is always the most difficult of literary subjects.[58] We make here
only three suggestions, which may well be borne in mind: that ballads were
produced continually in England from Anglo-Saxon times until the
seventeenth century; that for centuries they were the only really popular
literature; and that in the ballads alone one is able to understand the
common people. Read, for instance, the ballads of the "merrie greenwood
men," which gradually collected into the _Geste of Robin Hood_, and you
will understand better, perhaps, than from reading many histories what the
common people of England felt and thought while their lords and masters
were busy with impossible metrical romances.

In these songs speaks the heart of the English folk. There is lawlessness
indeed; but this seems justified by the oppression of the times and by the
barbarous severity of the game laws. An intense hatred of shams and
injustice lurks in every song; but the hatred is saved from bitterness by
the humor with which captives, especially rich churchmen, are solemnly
lectured by the bandits, while they squirm at sight of devilish tortures
prepared before their eyes in order to make them give up their golden
purses; and the scene generally ends in a bit of wild horse-play. There is
fighting enough, and ambush and sudden death lurk at every turn of the
lonely roads; but there is also a rough, honest chivalry for women, and a
generous sharing of plunder with the poor and needy. All literature is but
a dream expressed, and "Robin Hood" is the dream of an ignorant and
oppressed but essentially noble people, struggling and determined to be
free.

Far more poetical than the ballads, and more interesting even than the
romances, are the little lyrics of the period,--those tears and smiles of
long ago that crystallized into poems, to tell us that the hearts of men
are alike in all ages. Of these, the best known are the "Luve Ron" (love
rune or letter) of Thomas de Hales _(c_. 1250); "Springtime" _(c_. 1300),
beginning "Lenten (spring) ys come with luve to toune"; and the melodious
love song "Alysoun," written at the end of the thirteenth century by some
unknown poet who heralds the coming of Chaucer:

    Bytuene Mersh and Averil,
    When spray biginneth to springe
    The lutel foul[59] hath hire wyl
    On hyre lud[60] to synge.
    Ich libbe[61] in love longinge
    For semlokest[62] of all thinge.
    She may me blisse bringe;
    Icham[63] in hire baundoun.[64]
        An hendy hap ichabbe yhent,[65]
        Ichot[66] from hevene it is me sent,
        From alle wymmen mi love is lent[67]
        And lyht[68] on Alysoun.

SUMMARY OF THE NORMAN PERIOD. The Normans were originally a hardy race of
sea rovers inhabiting Scandinavia. In the tenth century they conquered a
part of northern France, which is still called Normandy, and rapidly
adopted French civilization and the French language. Their conquest of
Anglo-Saxon England under William, Duke of Normandy, began with the battle
of Hastings in 1066. The literature which they brought to England is
remarkable for its bright, romantic tales of love and adventure, in marked
contrast with the strength and somberness of Anglo-Saxon poetry. During the
three centuries following Hastings, Normans and Saxons gradually united.
The Anglo-Saxon speech simplified itself by dropping most of its Teutonic
inflections, absorbed eventually a large part of the French vocabulary, and
became our English language. English literature is also a combination of
French and Saxon elements. The three chief effects of the conquest were
_(1)_ the bringing of Roman civilization to England; _(2)_ the growth of
nationality, i.e. a strong centralized government, instead of the loose
union of Saxon tribes; _(3)_ the new language and literature, which were
proclaimed in Chaucer.

At first the new literature was remarkably varied, but of small intrinsic
worth; and very little of it is now read. In our study we have noted: (1)
Geoffrey's History, which is valuable as a source book of literature, since
it contains the native Celtic legends of Arthur. (2) The work of the French
writers, who made the Arthurian legends popular. (3) Riming Chronicles,
i.e. history in doggerel verse, like Layamon's _Brut_. (4) Metrical
Romances, or tales in verse. These were numerous, and of four classes: (a)
the Matter of France, tales centering about Charlemagne and his peers,
chief of which is the Chanson de Roland; (b) Matter of Greece and Rome, an
endless series of fabulous tales about Alexander, and about the Fall of
Troy; (c) Matter of England, stories of Bevis of Hampton, Guy of Warwick,
Robin Hood, etc.; (d) Matter of Britain, tales having for their heroes
Arthur and his knights of the Round Table. The best of these romances is
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. (5) Miscellaneous literature,--the Ancren
Riwle, our best piece of early English prose; Orm's Ormulum; Cursor Mundi,
with its suggestive parallel to the Miracle plays; and ballads, like King
Horn and the Robin Hood songs, which were the only poetry of the common
people.


SELECTIONS FOR READING. For advanced students, and as a study of language,
a few selections as given in Manly's English Poetry and in Manly's English
Prose; or selections from the Ormulum, Brut, Ancren Riwle, and King Horn,
etc., in Morris and Skeat's Specimens of Early English. The ordinary
student will get a better idea of the literature of the period by using the
following: Sir Gawain, modernized by J. L. Weston, in Arthurian Romances
Series (Nutt); The Nun's Rule (Ancren Riwle), modern version by J. Morton,
in King's Classics; Aucassin and Nicolete, translated by A. Lang (Crowell &
Co.); Tristan and Iseult, in Arthurian Romances; Evans's The High History
of the Holy Grail, in Temple Classics; The Pearl, various modern versions
in prose and verse; one of the best is Jewett's metrical version (Crowell &
Co.); The Song of Roland, in King's Classics, and in Riverside Literature
Series; Evans's translation of Geoffrey's History, in Temple Classics;
Guest's The Mabinogion, in Everyman's Library, or S. Lanier's Boy's
Mabinogion (i.e. Welsh fairy tales and romances); Selected Ballads, in
Athenæum Press Series, and in Pocket Classics; Gayley and Flaherty's Poetry
of the People; Bates's A Ballad Book.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.[69]

_HISTORY. Text-book_, Montgomery, pp. 58-86, or Cheyney, pp. 88-144. For
fuller treatment, Green, ch. 2; Traill; Gardiner, etc. Jewett's Story of
the Normans (Stories of the Nations Series); Freeman's Short History of the
Norman Conquest; Hutton's King and Baronage (Oxford Manuals of English
History).

_LITERATURE. General Works_. Jusserand; Ten Brink; Mitchell, vol. I, From
Celt to Tudor; The Cambridge History of English Literature.

_Special Works_. Schofield's English Literature from the Norman Conquest to
Chaucer; Lewis's Beginnings of English Literature; Ker's Epic and Romance;
Saintsbury's The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory; Newell's
King Arthur and the Round Table; Maynadier, The Arthur of the English
Poets; Rhys's Studies in the Arthurian Legends.

_Ballads_. Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads; Gummere's Old
English Ballads (one volume); Hazlitt's Early Popular Poetry of England;
Gayley and Flaherty's Poetry of the People; Percy's Reliques of Ancient
English Poetry, in Everyman's Library.

_Texts, Translations, etc_. Morris and Skeat's Specimens of Early English;
Morris's Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in Early English Text Series;
Madden's Layamon's Brut, text and translation (a standard work, but rare);
The Pearl, text and translation, by Gollancz; the same poem, prose version,
by Osgood, metrical versions by Jewett, Weir Mitchell, and Mead; Geoffrey's
History, translation, in Giles's Six Old English Chronicles (Bohn's
Antiquarian Library); Morley's Early English Prose Romances; Joyce's Old
Celtic Romances; Guest's The Mabinogion; Lanier's Boy's Mabinogion;
Arthurian Romances Series (translations). The Belles Lettres Series, sec. 2
(announced), will contain the texts of a large number of works of this
period, with notes and introductions.

_Language_. Marsh's Lectures on the English Language; Bradley's Making of
English; Lounsbury's History of the English Language; Emerson's Brief
History of the English Language; Greenough and Kittredge's Words and their
Ways in English Speech; Welsh's Development of English Literature and
Language.


SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS. 1. What did the Northmen originally have in common
with the Anglo-Saxons and the Danes? What brought about the remarkable
change from Northmen to Normans? Tell briefly the story of the Norman
Conquest. How did the Conquest affect the life and literature of England?

2. What types of literature were produced after the Conquest? How do they
compare with Anglo-Saxon literature? What works of this period are
considered worthy of a permanent place in our literature?

3. What is meant by the Riming Chronicles? What part did they play in
developing the idea of nationality? What led historians of this period to
write in verse? Describe Geoffrey's History. What was its most valuable
element from the view point of literature?

4. What is Layamon's _Brut?_ Why did Layamon choose this name for his
Chronicle? What special literary interest attaches to the poem?

5. What were the Metrical Romances? What reasons led to the great interest
in three classes of romances, i.e. Matters of France, Rome, and Britain?
What new and important element enters our literature in this type? Read one
of the Metrical Romances in English and comment freely upon it, as to
interest, structure, ideas, and literary quality.

6. Tell the story of _Sir Gawain and the Green Knight_. What French and
what Saxon elements are found in the poem? Compare it with _Beowulf_ to
show the points of inferiority and superiority. Compare Beowulf's fight
with Grendel or the Fire Drake and Sir Gawain's encounter with the Green
Knight, having in mind (1) the virtues of the hero, (2) the qualities of
the enemy, (3) the methods of warfare, (4) the purpose of the struggle.
Read selections from _The Pearl_ and compare with _Dear's Lament_. What are
the personal and the universal interests in each poem?

7. Tell some typical story from the Mabinogion. Where did the Arthurian
legends originate, and how did they become known to English readers? What
modern writers have used these legends? What fine elements do you find in
them that are not found in Anglo-Saxon poetry?

8. What part did Arthur play in the early history of Britain? How long did
the struggle between Britons and Saxons last? What Celtic names and
elements entered into English language and literature?

9. What is a ballad, and what distinguishes it from other forms of poetry?
Describe the ballad which you like best. Why did the ballad, more than any
other form of literature, appeal to the common people? What modern poems
suggest the old popular ballad? How do these compare in form and subject
matter with the Robin Hood ballads?

                                  CHRONOLOGY
=============================================================================
  HISTORY                              |  LITERATURE
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
 912. Northmen settle in Normandy      |
1066. Battle of Hastings. William,     |
      king of England                  |
                                       | 1086. Domesday Book completed
1087. William Rufus                    |
1093. Anselm, archbishop of Canterbury |
                                       | 1094(_cir._). Anselem's Cur Deus Homo
1096. First Crusade                    |
1100. Henry I                          |
                                       | 1110. First recorded Miracle play in
                                       |       England (see chapter on the
                                       |       Drama)
1135. Stephen                          |
                                       | 1137(_cir_.). Geoffrey's History
1147. Second Crusade                   |
1154. Henry II                         |
1189. Richard I. Third Crusade         |
1199. John                             |
                                       | 1200 (_cir_.). Layamon's Brut
1215. Magna Charta                     |
1216. Henry III                        |
                                       | 1225 (_cir_.). Ancren Riwle
1230 (_cir._). University of Cambridge |
      chartered                        |
1265. Beginning of House of Commons.   |
      Simon de Montfort                |
                                       | 1267. Roger Bacon's Opus Majus
1272. Edward I                         |
1295. First complete Parliament        |
                                       | 1300-1400. York and Wakefield.
                                       |       Miracle plays
1307. Edward II                        |
                                       | 1320 (_cir_.). Cursor Mundi
1327. Edward III                       |
1338. Beginning of Hundred Years' War  |
      with France                      |
                                       | 1340 (?). Birth of Chaucer
                                       | 1350 (_cir_.). Sir Gawain. The Pearl
=======================================+====================================


       *       *       *       *       *



CHAPTER IV

THE AGE OF CHAUCER (1350-1400)

THE NEW NATIONAL LIFE AND LITERATURE

HISTORY OF THE PERIOD. Two great movements may be noted in the complex life
of England during the fourteenth century. The first is political, and
culminates in the reign of Edward III. It shows the growth of the English
national spirit following the victories of Edward and the Black Prince on
French soil, during the Hundred Years' War. In the rush of this great
national movement, separating England from the political ties of France
and, to a less degree, from ecclesiastical bondage to Rome, the mutual
distrust and jealousy which had divided nobles and commons were momentarily
swept aside by a wave of patriotic enthusiasm. The French language lost its
official prestige, and English became the speech not only of the common
people but of courts and Parliament as well.

The second movement is social; it falls largely within the reign of
Edward's successor, Richard II, and marks the growing discontent with the
contrast between luxury and poverty, between the idle wealthy classes and
the overtaxed peasants. Sometimes this movement is quiet and strong, as
when Wyclif arouses the conscience of England; again it has the portentous
rumble of an approaching tempest, as when John Ball harangues a multitude
of discontented peasants on Black Heath commons, using the famous text:

    When Adam delved and Eve span
    Who was then the gentleman?

and again it breaks out into the violent rebellion of Wat Tyler. All these
things show the same Saxon spirit that had won its freedom in a thousand
years' struggle against foreign enemies, and that now felt itself oppressed
by a social and industrial tyranny in its own midst.

Aside from these two movements, the age was one of unusual stir and
progress. Chivalry, that mediæval institution of mixed good and evil, was
in its Indian summer,--a sentiment rather than a practical system. Trade,
and its resultant wealth and luxury, were increasing enormously. Following
trade, as the Vikings had followed glory, the English began to be a
conquering and colonizing people, like the Anglo-Saxons. The native shed
something of his insularity and became a traveler, going first to view the
places where trade had opened the way, and returning with wider interests
and a larger horizon. Above all, the first dawn of the Renaissance is
heralded in England, as in Spain and Italy, by the appearance of a national
literature.

FIVE WRITERS OF THE AGE. The literary movement of the age clearly reflects
the stirring life of the times. There is Langland, voicing the social
discontent, preaching the equality of men and the dignity of labor; Wyclif,
greatest of English religious reformers, giving the Gospel to the people in
their own tongue, and the freedom of the Gospel in unnumbered tracts and
addresses; Gower, the scholar and literary man, criticising this vigorous
life and plainly afraid of its consequences; and Mandeville, the traveler,
romancing about the wonders to be seen abroad. Above all there is
Chaucer,--scholar, traveler, business man, courtier, sharing in all the
stirring life of his times, and reflecting it in literature as no other but
Shakespeare has ever done. Outside of England the greatest literary
influence of the age was that of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, whose
works, then at the summit of their influence in Italy, profoundly affected
the literature of all Europe.

CHAUCER (1340?-1400)

                     'What man artow?' quod he;
    'Thou lokest as thou woldest finde an hare,
    For ever upon the ground I see thee stare.
    Approchë neer, and loke up merily....
    He semeth elvish by his contenaunce.'
                 (The Host's description of Chaucer,
                             Prologue, _Sir Thopas_)

ON READING CHAUCER. The difficulties of reading Chaucer are more apparent
than real, being due largely to obsolete spelling, and there is small
necessity for using any modern versions of the poet's work, which seem to
miss the quiet charm and dry humor of the original. If the reader will
observe the following general rules (which of necessity ignore many
differences in pronunciation of fourteenth-century English), he may, in an
hour or two, learn to read Chaucer almost as easily as Shakespeare: (1) Get
the lilt of the lines, and let the meter itself decide how final syllables
are to be pronounced. Remember that Chaucer is among the most musical of
poets, and that there is melody in nearly every line. If the verse seems
rough, it is because we do not read it correctly. (2) Vowels in Chaucer
have much the same value as in modern German; consonants are practically
the same as in modern English. (3) Pronounce aloud any strange-looking
words. Where the eye fails, the ear will often recognize the meaning. If
eye and ear both fail, then consult the glossary found in every good
edition of the poet's works. (4) Final _e_ is usually sounded (like _a_ in
Virginia) except where the following word begins with a vowel or with _h_.
In the latter case the final syllable of one word and the first of the word
following are run together, as in reading Virgil. At the end of a line the
_e_, if lightly pronounced, adds melody to the verse.[70]

In dealing with Chaucer's masterpiece, the reader is urged to read widely
at first, for the simple pleasure of the stories, and to remember that
poetry and romance are more interesting and important than Middle English.
When we like and appreciate Chaucer--his poetry, his humor, his good
stories, his kind heart---it will be time enough to study his language.

LIFE OF CHAUCER. For our convenience the life of Chaucer is divided into
three periods. The first, of thirty years, includes his youth and early
manhood, in which time he was influenced almost exclusively by French
literary models. The second period, of fifteen years, covers Chaucer's
active life as diplomat and man of affairs; and in this the Italian
influence seems stronger than the French. The third, of fifteen years,
generally known as the English period, is the time of Chaucer's richest
development. He lives at home, observes life closely but kindly, and while
the French influence is still strong, as shown in the _Canterbury Tales_,
he seems to grow more independent of foreign models and is dominated
chiefly by the vigorous life of his own English people.

Chaucer's boyhood was spent in London, on Thames Street near the river,
where the world's commerce was continually coming and going. There he saw
daily the shipman of the _Canterbury Tales_ just home in his good ship
Maudelayne, with the fascination of unknown lands in his clothes and
conversation. Of his education we know nothing, except that he was a great
reader. His father was a wine merchant, purveyor to the royal household,
and from this accidental relation between trade and royalty may have arisen
the fact that at seventeen years Chaucer was made page to the Princess
Elizabeth. This was the beginning of his connection with the brilliant
court, which in the next forty years, under three kings, he was to know so
intimately.

At nineteen he went with the king on one of the many expeditions of the
Hundred Years' War, and here he saw chivalry and all the pageantry of
mediæval war at the height of their outward splendor. Taken prisoner at the
unsuccessful siege of Rheims, he is said to have been ransomed by money out
of the royal purse. Returning to England, he became after a few years
squire of the royal household, the personal attendant and confidant of the
king. It was during this first period that he married a maid of honor to
the queen. This was probably Philippa Roet, sister to the wife of John of
Gaunt, the famous Duke of Lancaster. From numerous whimsical references in
his early poems, it has been thought that this marriage into a noble family
was not a happy one; but this is purely a matter of supposition or of
doubtful inference.

In 1370 Chaucer was sent abroad on the first of those diplomatic missions
that were to occupy the greater part of the next fifteen years. Two years
later he made his first official visit to Italy, to arrange a commercial
treaty with Genoa, and from this time is noticeable a rapid development in
his literary powers and the prominence of Italian literary influences.
During the intervals between his different missions he filled various
offices at home, chief of which was Comptroller of Customs at the port of
London. An enormous amount of personal labor was involved; but Chaucer
seems to have found time to follow his spirit into the new fields of
Italian literature:

    For whan thy labour doon al is,
    And hast y-maad thy rekeninges,
    In stede of reste and newe thinges,
    Thou gost hoom to thy hous anoon,
    And, also domb as any stoon,
    Thou sittest at another boke
    Til fully daswed is thy loke,
    And livest thus as an hermyte.[71]

In 1386 Chaucer was elected member of Parliament from Kent, and the
distinctly English period of his life and work begins. Though exceedingly
busy in public affairs and as receiver of customs, his heart was still with
his books, from which only nature could win him:

    And as for me, though that my wit be lyte,
    On bokes for to rede I me delyte,
    And to hem yeve I feyth and ful credence,
    And in myn herte have hem in reverence
    So hertely, that ther is game noon
    That fro my bokes maketh me to goon,
    But hit be seldom, on the holyday;
    Save, certeynly, whan that the month of May
    Is comen, and that I here the foules singe,
    And that the floures ginnen for to springe--
    Farwel my book and my devocioun![72]

In the fourteenth century politics seems to have been, for honest men, a
very uncertain business. Chaucer naturally adhered to the party of John of
Gaunt, and his fortunes rose or fell with those of his leader. From this
time until his death he is up and down on the political ladder; to-day with
money and good prospects, to-morrow in poverty and neglect, writing his
"Complaint to His Empty Purs," which he humorously calls his "saveour doun
in this werlde here." This poem called the king's attention to the poet's
need and increased his pension; but he had but few months to enjoy the
effect of this unusual "Complaint." For he died the next year, 1400, and
was buried with honor in Westminster Abbey. The last period of his life,
though outwardly most troubled, was the most fruitful of all. His "Truth,"
or "Good Counsel," reveals the quiet, beautiful spirit of his life,
unspoiled either by the greed of trade or the trickery of politics:

    Flee fro the prees, and dwelle with sothfastnesse,
    Suffyce unto thy good, though hit be smal;
    For hord[73] hath hate, and climbing tikelnesse,
    Prees[74] hath envye, and wele[75] blent[76] overal;
    Savour no more than thee bihovë shal;
    Werk[77] wel thyself, that other folk canst rede;
    And trouthe shal delivere, hit is no drede.
    Tempest[78] thee noght al croked to redresse,
    In trust of hir[79] that turneth as a bal:
    Gret reste stant in litel besinesse;
    And eek be war to sporne[80] ageyn an al[81];
    Stryve noght, as doth the crokke with the wal.
    Daunte[82] thyself, that dauntest otheres dede;
    And trouthe shal delivere, hit is no drede.
    That thee is sent, receyve in buxumnesse,
    The wrastling for this worlde axeth a fal.
    Her nis non hoom, her nis but wildernesse:
    Forth, pilgrim, forth! Forth, beste, out of thy stall,
    Know thy contree, look up, thank God of al;
    Hold the hye wey, and lat thy gost thee lede:
    And trouthe shal delivere, hit is no drede.

WORKS OF CHAUCER, FIRST PERIOD. The works of Chaucer are roughly divided
into three classes, corresponding to the three periods of his life. It
should be remembered, however, that it is impossible to fix exact dates for
most of his works. Some of his _Canterbury Tales_ were written earlier than
the English period, and were only grouped with the others in his final
arrangement.

The best known, though not the best, poem of the first period is the
_Romaunt of the Rose_,[83] a translation from the French _Roman de la
Rose_, the most popular poem of the Middle Ages,--a graceful but
exceedingly tiresome allegory of the whole course of love. The Rose growing
in its mystic garden is typical of the lady Beauty. Gathering the Rose
represents the lover's attempt to win his lady's favor; and the different
feelings aroused--Love, Hate, Envy, Jealousy, Idleness, Sweet Looks--are
the allegorical persons of the poet's drama. Chaucer translated this
universal favorite, putting in some original English touches; but of the
present _Romaunt_ only the first seventeen hundred lines are believed to be
Chaucer's own work.

Perhaps the best poem of this period is the "Dethe of Blanche the
Duchesse," better known, as the "Boke of the Duchesse," a poem of
considerable dramatic and emotional power, written after the death of
Blanche, wife of Chaucer's patron, John of Gaunt. Additional poems are the
"Compleynte to Pite," a graceful love poem; the "A B C," a prayer to the
Virgin, translated from the French of a Cistercian monk, its verses
beginning with the successive letters of the alphabet; and a number of what
Chaucer calls "ballads, roundels, and virelays," with which, says his
friend Gower, "the land was filled." The latter were imitations of the
prevailing French love ditties.

SECOND PERIOD. The chief work of the second or Italian period is _Troilus
and Criseyde_, a poem of eight thousand lines. The original story was a
favorite of many authors during the Middle Ages, and Shakespeare makes use
of it in his _Troilus and Cressida_. The immediate source of Chaucer's poem
is Boccaccio's _Il Filostrato,_ "the love-smitten one"; but he uses his
material very freely, to reflect the ideals of his own age and society, and
so gives to the whole story a dramatic force and beauty which it had never
known before.

The "Hous of Fame" is one of Chaucer's unfinished poems, having the rare
combination of lofty thought and simple, homely language, showing the
influence of the great Italian master. In the poem the author is carried
away in a dream by a great eagle from the brittle temple of Venus, in a
sandy wilderness, up to the hall of fame. To this house come all rumors of
earth, as the sparks fly upward. The house stands on a rock of ice

                writen ful of names
    Of folk that hadden grete fames.

Many of these have disappeared as the ice melted; but the older names are
clear as when first written. For many of his ideas Chaucer is indebted to
Dante, Ovid, and Virgil; but the unusual conception and the splendid
workmanship are all his own.

The third great poem of the period is the _Legende of Goode Wimmen_. As he
is resting in the fields among the daisies, he falls asleep and a gay
procession draws near. First comes the love god, leading by the hand
Alcestis, model of all wifely virtues, whose emblem is the daisy; and
behind them follow a troup of glorious women, all of whom have been
faithful in love. They gather about the poet; the god upbraids him for
having translated the _Romance of the Rose_, and for his early poems
reflecting on the vanity and fickleness of women. Alcestis intercedes for
him, and offers pardon if he will atone for his errors by writing a
"glorious legend of good women." Chaucer promises, and as soon as he awakes
sets himself to the task. Nine legends were written, of which "Thisbe" is
perhaps the best. It is probable that Chaucer intended to make this his
masterpiece, devoting many years to stories of famous women who were true
to love; but either because he wearied of his theme, or because the plan of
the _Canterbury Tales_ was growing in his mind, he abandoned the task in
the middle of his ninth legend,--fortunately, perhaps, for the reader will
find the Prologue more interesting than any of the legends.

THIRD PERIOD. Chaucer's masterpiece, the _Canterbury Tales_, one of the
most famous works in all literature, fills the third or English period of
his life. The plan of the work is magnificent: to represent the wide sweep
of English life by gathering a motley company together and letting each
class of society tell its own favorite stories. Though the great work was
never finished, Chaucer succeeded in his purpose so well that in the
_Canterbury Tales_ he has given us a picture of contemporary English life,
its work and play, its deeds and dreams, its fun and sympathy and hearty
joy of living, such as no other single work of literature has ever equaled.

PLAN OF THE CANTERBURY TALES. Opposite old London, at the southern end of
London Bridge, once stood the Tabard Inn of Southwark, a quarter made
famous not only by the _Canterbury Tales_, but also by the first playhouses
where Shakespeare had his training. This Southwark was the point of
departure of all travel to the south of England, especially of those
mediæval pilgrimages to the shrine of Thomas a Becket in Canterbury. On a
spring evening, at the inspiring time of the year when "longen folk to goon
on pilgrimages," Chaucer alights at the Tabard Inn, and finds it occupied
by a various company of people bent on a pilgrimage. Chance alone had
brought them together; for it was the custom of pilgrims to wait at some
friendly inn until a sufficient company were gathered to make the journey
pleasant and safe from robbers that might be encountered on the way.
Chaucer joins this company, which includes all classes of English society,
from the Oxford scholar to the drunken miller, and accepts gladly their
invitation to go with them on the morrow.

At supper the jovial host of the Tabard Inn suggests that, to enliven the
journey, each of the company shall tell four tales, two going and two
coming, on whatever subject shall suit him best. The host will travel with
them as master of ceremonies, and whoever tells the best story shall be
given a fine supper at the general expense when they all come back
again,--a shrewd bit of business and a fine idea, as the pilgrims all
agree.

When they draw lots for the first story the chance falls to the Knight, who
tells one of the best of the _Canterbury Tales_, the chivalric story of
"Palamon and Arcite." Then the tales follow rapidly, each with its prologue
and epilogue, telling how the story came about, and its effects on the
merry company. Interruptions are numerous; the narrative is full of life
and movement, as when the miller gets drunk and insists on telling his tale
out of season, or when they stop at a friendly inn for the night, or when
the poet with sly humor starts his story of "Sir Thopas," in dreary
imitation of the metrical romances of the day, and is roared at by the host
for his "drasty ryming." With Chaucer we laugh at his own expense, and are
ready for the next tale.

From the number of persons in the company, thirty-two in all, it is evident
that Chaucer meditated an immense work of one hundred and twenty-eight
tales, which should cover the whole life of England. Only twenty-four were
written; some of these are incomplete, and others are taken from his
earlier work to fill out the general plan of the _Canterbury Tales_.
Incomplete as they are, they cover a wide range, including stories of love
and chivalry, of saints and legends, travels, adventures, animal fables,
allegory, satires, and the coarse humor of the common people. Though all
but two are written in verse and abound in exquisite poetical touches, they
are stories as well as poems, and Chaucer is to be regarded as our first
short-story teller as well as our first modern poet. The work ends with a
kindly farewell from the poet to his reader, and so "here taketh the makere
of this book his leve."

PROLOGUE TO THE CANTERBURY TALES. In the famous "Prologue" the poet makes
us acquainted with the various characters of his drama. Until Chaucer's day
popular literature had been busy chiefly with the gods and heroes of a
golden age; it had been essentially romantic, and so had never attempted to
study men and women as they are, or to describe them so that the reader
recognizes them, not as ideal heroes, but as his own neighbors. Chaucer not
only attempted this new realistic task, but accomplished it so well that
his characters were instantly recognized as true to life, and they have
since become the permanent possession of our literature. Beowulf and Roland
are ideal heroes, essentially creatures of the imagination; but the merry
host of the Tabard Inn, Madame Eglantyne, the fat monk, the parish priest,
the kindly plowman, the poor scholar with his "bookës black and red,"--all
seem more like personal acquaintances than characters in a book. Says
Dryden: "I see all the pilgrims, their humours, their features and their
very dress, as distinctly as if I had supped with them at the Tabard in
Southwark." Chaucer is the first English writer to bring the atmosphere of
romantic interest about the men and women and the daily work of one's own
world,--which is the aim of nearly all modern literature.

The historian of our literature is tempted to linger over this "Prologue"
and to quote from it passage after passage to show how keenly and yet
kindly our first modern poet observed his fellow-men. The characters, too,
attract one like a good play: the "verray parfit gentil knight" and his
manly son, the modest prioress, model of sweet piety and society manners,
the sporting monk and the fat friar, the discreet man of law, the well-fed
country squire, the sailor just home from sea, the canny doctor, the
lovable parish priest who taught true religion to his flock, but "first he
folwed it himselve"; the coarse but good-hearted Wyf of Bath, the thieving
miller leading the pilgrims to the music of his bagpipe,--all these and
many others from every walk of English life, and all described with a
quiet, kindly humor which seeks instinctively the best in human nature, and
which has an ample garment of charity to cover even its faults and
failings. "Here," indeed, as Dryden says, "is God's plenty." Probably no
keener or kinder critic ever described his fellows; and in this immortal
"Prologue" Chaucer is a model for all those who would put our human life
into writing. The student should read it entire, as an introduction not
only to the poet but to all our modern literature.

THE KNIGHT'S TALE. As a story, "Palamon and Arcite" is, in many respects,
the best of the _Canterbury Tales_, reflecting as it does the ideals of the
time in regard to romantic love and knightly duty. Though its dialogues and
descriptions are somewhat too long and interrupt the story, yet it shows
Chaucer at his best in his dramatic power, his exquisite appreciation of
nature, and his tender yet profound philosophy of living, which could
overlook much of human frailty in the thought that

    Infinite been the sorwes and the teres
    Of oldë folk, and folk of tendre yeres.

The idea of the story was borrowed from Boccaccio; but parts of the
original tale were much older and belonged to the common literary stock of
the Middle Ages. Like Shakespeare, Chaucer took the material for his poems
wherever he found it, and his originality consists in giving to an old
story some present human interest, making it express the life and ideals of
his own age. In this respect the "Knight's Tale" is remarkable. Its names
are those of an ancient civilization, but its characters are men and women
of the English nobility as Chaucer knew them. In consequence the story has
many anachronisms, such as the mediæval tournament before the temple of
Mars; but the reader scarcely notices these things, being absorbed in the
dramatic interest of the narrative.

Briefly, the "Knight's Tale" is the story of two young men, fast friends,
who are found wounded on the battlefield and taken prisoners to Athens.
There from their dungeon window they behold the fair maid Emily; both fall
desperately in love with her, and their friendship turns to strenuous
rivalry. One is pardoned; the other escapes; and then knights, empires,
nature,--the whole universe follows their desperate efforts to win one
small maiden, who prays meanwhile to be delivered from both her bothersome
suitors. As the best of the _Canterbury Tales_ are now easily accessible,
we omit here all quotations. The story must be read entire, with the
Prioress' tale of Hugh of Lincoln, the Clerk's tale of Patient Griselda,
and the Nun's Priest's merry tale of Chanticleer and the Fox, if the reader
would appreciate the variety and charm of our first modern poet and
story-teller.

FORM OF CHAUCER'S POETRY. There are three principal meters to be found in
Chaucer's verse. In the _Canterbury Tales_ he uses lines of ten syllables
and five accents each, and the lines run in couplets:

    His eyen twinkled in his heed aright
    As doon the sterres in the frosty night.

The same musical measure, arranged in seven-line stanzas, but with a
different rime, called the Rime Royal, is found in its most perfect form in
_Troilus_.

    O blisful light, of whiche the bemes clere
    Adorneth al the thridde hevene faire!
    O sonnes leef, O Joves doughter dere,
    Plesaunce of love, O goodly debonaire,
    In gentil hertes ay redy to repaire!
    O verray cause of hele and of gladnesse,
    Y-heried be thy might and thy goodnesse!
    In hevene and helle, in erthe and salte see
    Is felt thy might, if that I wel descerne;
    As man, brid, best, fish, herbe and grene tree
    Thee fele in tymes with vapour eterne.
    God loveth, and to love wol nought werne;
    And in this world no lyves creature,
    With-outen love, is worth, or may endure.[84]

The third meter is the eight-syllable line with four accents, the lines
riming in couplets, as in the "Boke of the Duchesse":

    Thereto she coude so wel pleye,
    Whan that hir liste, that I dar seye
    That she was lyk to torche bright,
    That every man may take-of light
    Ynough, and hit hath never the lesse.

Besides these principal meters, Chaucer in his short poems used many other
poetical forms modeled after the French, who in the fourteenth century were
cunning workers in every form of verse. Chief among these are the difficult
but exquisite rondel, "Now welcom Somer with thy sonne softe," which closes
the "Parliament of Fowls," and the ballad, "Flee fro the prees," which has
been already quoted. In the "Monk's Tale" there is a melodious measure
which may have furnished the model for Spenser's famous stanza.[85]
Chaucer's poetry is extremely musical and must be judged by the ear rather
than by the eye. To the modern reader the lines appear broken and uneven;
but if one reads them over a few times, he soon catches the perfect swing
of the measure, and finds that he is in the hands of a master whose ear is
delicately sensitive to the smallest accent. There is a lilt in all his
lines which is marvelous when we consider that he is the first to show us
the poetic possibilities of the language. His claim upon our gratitude is
twofold:[86] first, for discovering the music that is in our English
speech; and second, for his influence in fixing the Midland dialect as the
literary language of England.


CHAUCER'S CONTEMPORARIES

WILLIAM LANGLAND (1332? ....?)

LIFE. Very little is known of Langland. He was born probably near Malvern,
in Worcestershire, the son of a poor freeman, and in his early life lived
in the fields as a shepherd. Later he went to London with his wife and
children, getting a hungry living as clerk in the church. His real life
meanwhile was that of a seer, a prophet after Isaiah's own heart, if we may
judge by the prophecy which soon found a voice in _Piers Plowman_. In 1399,
after the success of his great work, he was possibly writing another poem
called _Richard the Redeless_, a protest against Richard II; but we are not
certain of the authorship of this poem, which was left unfinished by the
assassination of the king. After 1399 Langland disappears utterly, and the
date of his death is unknown.

PIERS PLOWMAN. "The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye
the way of the Lord," might well be written at the beginning of this
remarkable poem. Truth, sincerity, a direct and practical appeal to
conscience, and a vision of right triumphant over wrong,--these are the
elements of all prophecy; and it was undoubtedly these elements in _Piers
Plowman_ that produced such an impression on the people of England. For
centuries literature had been busy in pleasing the upper classes chiefly;
but here at last was a great poem which appealed directly to the common
people, and its success was enormous. The whole poem is traditionally
attributed to Langland; but it is now known to be the work of several
different writers. It first appeared in 1362 as a poem of eighteen hundred
lines, and this may have been Langland's work. In the next thirty years,
during the desperate social conditions which led to Tyler's Rebellion, it
was repeatedly revised and enlarged by different hands till it reached its
final form of about fifteen thousand lines.

The poem as we read it now is in two distinct parts, the first containing
the vision of Piers, the second a series of visions called "The Search for
Dowel, Dobet, Dobest" (do well, better, best). The entire poem is in
strongly accented, alliterative lines, something like _Beowulf_, and its
immense popularity shows that the common people still cherished this easily
memorized form of Saxon poetry. Its tremendous appeal to justice and common
honesty, its clarion call to every man, whether king, priest, noble, or
laborer, to do his Christian duty, takes from it any trace of prejudice or
bigotry with which such works usually abound. Its loyalty to the Church,
while denouncing abuses that had crept into it in that period, was one of
the great influences which led to the Reformation in England. Its two great
principles, the equality of men before God and the dignity of honest labor,
roused a whole nation of freemen. Altogether it is one of the world's great
works, partly because of its national influence, partly because it is the
very best picture we possess of the social life of the fourteenth century:

Briefly, _Piers Plowman_ is an allegory of life. In the first vision, that
of the "Field Full of Folk," the poet lies down on the Malvern Hills on a
May morning, and a vision comes to him in sleep. On the plain beneath him
gather a multitude of folk, a vast crowd expressing the varied life of the
world. All classes and conditions are there; workingmen are toiling that
others may seize all the first fruits of their labor and live high on the
proceeds; and the genius of the throng is Lady Bribery, a powerfully drawn
figure, expressing the corrupt social life of the times.

The next visions are those of the Seven Deadly Sins, allegorical figures,
but powerful as those of _Pilgrim's Progress_, making the allegories of the
_Romaunt of the Rose_ seem like shadows in comparison. These all came to
Piers asking the way to Truth; but Piers is plowing his half acre and
refuses to leave his work and lead them. He sets them all to honest toil as
the best possible remedy for their vices, and preaches the gospel of work
as a preparation for salvation. Throughout the poem Piers bears strong
resemblance to John Baptist preaching to the crowds in the wilderness. The
later visions are proclamations of the moral and spiritual life of man. The
poem grows dramatic in its intensity, rising to its highest power in
Piers's triumph over Death. And then the poet wakes from his vision with
the sound of Easter bells ringing in his ears.

Here are a few lines to illustrate the style and language; but the whole
poem must be read if one is to understand its crude strength and prophetic
spirit:

    In a somer sesun, whon softe was the sonne,
    I schop[87] me into a shroud, as I a scheep were,
    In habite as an heremite, unholy of werkes,
    Went wyde in this world, wondres to here.
    Bote in a Mayes mornynge, on Malverne hulles,
    Me byfel a ferly,[88] of fairie me thoughte.
    I was wery, forwandred, and went me to reste
    Undur a brod banke, bi a bourne[89] side;
    And as I lay and lened, and loked on the watres,
    I slumbred in a slepyng---hit swyed[90] so murie....


JOHN WYCLIF (1324?-1384)

Wyclif, as a man, is by far the most powerful English figure of the
fourteenth century. The immense influence of his preaching in the native
tongue, and the power of his Lollards to stir the souls of the common folk,
are too well known historically to need repetition. Though a university man
and a profound scholar, he sides with Langland, and his interests are with
the people rather than with the privileged classes, for whom Chaucer
writes. His great work, which earned him his title of "father of English
prose," is the translation of the Bible. Wyclif himself translated the
gospels, and much more of the New Testament; the rest was finished by his
followers, especially by Nicholas of Hereford. These translations were made
from the Latin Vulgate, not from the original Greek and Hebrew, and the
whole work was revised in 1388 by John Purvey, a disciple of Wyclif. It is
impossible to overestimate the influence of this work, both on our English
prose and on the lives of the English people.

Though Wyclif's works are now unread, except by occasional scholars, he
still occupies a very high place in our literature. His translation of the
Bible was slowly copied all over England, and so fixed a national standard
of English prose to replace the various dialects. Portions of this
translation, in the form of favorite passages from Scripture, were copied
by thousands, and for the first time in our history a standard of pure
English was established in the homes of the common people.

As a suggestion of the language of that day, we quote a few familiar
sentences from the Sermon on the Mount, as given in the later version of
Wyclif's Gospel:

And he openyde his mouth, and taughte hem, and seide, Blessid ben pore men
in spirit, for the kyngdom of hevenes is herne.[91] Blessid ben mylde men,
for thei schulen welde[92] the erthe. Blessid ben thei that mornen, for
thei schulen be coumfortid. Blessid ben thei that hungren and thristen
rightwisnesse,[93] for thei schulen be fulfillid. Blessid ben merciful men,
for thei schulen gete merci. Blessid ben thei that ben of clene herte, for
thei schulen se God. Blessid ben pesible men, for thei schulen be
clepid[94] Goddis children. Blessid ben thei that suffren persecusioun for
rightfulnesse, for the kyngdom of hevenes is herne.[95] ...

Eftsoone ye han herd, that it was seid to elde men, Thou schalt not
forswere, but thou schalt yelde[96] thin othis to the Lord. But Y seie[97]
to you, that ye swere not for ony thing;... but be youre worde, yhe, yhe;
nay, nay; and that that is more than these, is of yvel....

Ye han herd that it was seid, Thou schalt love thi neighbore, and hate thin
enemye. But Y seie to you, love ye youre enemyes, do ye wel to hem[98] that
hatiden[99] you, and preye ye for hem that pursuen[100] and sclaundren[101]
you; that ye be the sones of youre Fadir that is in hevenes, that makith
his sunne to rise upon goode and yvele men, and reyneth[102] on just men
and unjuste.... Therefore be ye parfit, as youre hevenli Fadir is parfit.


JOHN MANDEVILLE

About the year 1356 there appeared in England an extraordinary book called
the _Voyage and Travail of Sir John Maundeville_, written in excellent
style in the Midland dialect, which was then becoming the literary language
of England. For years this interesting work and its unknown author were
subjects of endless dispute; but it is now fairly certain that this
collection of travelers' tales is simply a compilation from Odoric, Marco
Polo, and various other sources. The original work was probably in French,
which was speedily translated into Latin, then into English and other
languages; and wherever it appeared it became extremely popular, its
marvelous stories of foreign lands being exactly suited to the credulous
spirit of the age.[103] At the present time there are said to be three
hundred copied manuscripts of "Mandeville" in various languages,--more,
probably, than of any other work save the gospels. In the prologue of the
English version the author calls himself John Maundeville and gives an
outline of his wide travels during thirty years; but the name is probably a
"blind," the prologue more or less spurious, and the real compiler is still
to be discovered.

The modern reader may spend an hour or two very pleasantly in this old
wonderland. On its literary side the book is remarkable, though a
translation, as being the first prose work in modern English having a
distinctly literary style and flavor. Otherwise it is a most interesting
commentary on the general culture and credulity of the fourteenth century.


SUMMARY OF THE AGE OF CHAUCER. The fourteenth century is remarkable
historically for the decline of feudalism (organized by the Normans), for
the growth of the English national spirit during the wars with France, for
the prominence of the House of Commons, and for the growing power of the
laboring classes, who had heretofore been in a condition hardly above that
of slavery.

The age produced five writers of note, one of whom, Geoffrey Chaucer, is
one of the greatest of English writers. His poetry is remarkable for its
variety, its story interest, and its wonderful melody. Chaucer's work and
Wyclif's translation of the Bible developed the Midland dialect into the
national language of England.

In our study we have noted: (1) Chaucer, his life and work; his early or
French period, in which he translated "The Romance of the Rose" and wrote
many minor poems; his middle or Italian period, of which the chief poems
are "Troilus and Cressida" and "The Legend of Good Women"; his late or
English period, in which he worked at his masterpiece, the famous
_Canterbury Tales_. (2) Langland, the poet and prophet of social reforms.
His chief work is _Piers Plowman_. (3) Wyclif, the religious reformer, who
first translated the gospels into English, and by his translation fixed a
common standard of English speech. (4) Mandeville, the alleged traveler,
who represents the new English interest in distant lands following the
development of foreign trade. He is famous for _Mandeville's Travels_, a
book which romances about the wonders to be seen abroad. The fifth writer
of the age is Gower, who wrote in three languages, French, Latin, and
English. His chief English work is the _Confessio Amantis_, a long poem
containing one hundred and twelve tales. Of these only the "Knight Florent"
and two or three others are interesting to a modern reader.

SELECTIONS FOR READING. Chaucer's Prologue, the Knight's Tale, Nun's
Priest's Tale, Prioress' Tale, Clerk's Tale. These are found, more or less
complete, in Standard English Classics, King's Classics, Riverside
Literature Series, etc. Skeat's school edition of the Prologue, Knight's
Tale, etc., is especially good, and includes a study of fourteenth-century
English. Miscellaneous poems of Chaucer in Manly's English Poetry or Ward's
English Poets. Piers Plowman, in King's Classics. Mandeville's Travels,
modernized, in English Classics, and in Cassell's National Library.

For the advanced student, and as a study of language, compare selections
from Wyclif, Chaucer's prose work, Mandeville, etc., in Manly's English
Prose, or Morris and Skeat's Specimens of Early English, or Craik's English
Prose Selections. Selections from Wyclif's Bible in English Classics
Series.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.[104]

_HISTORY. Text-book_, Montgomery, pp. 115-149, or Cheyney, pp. 186-263. For
fuller treatment, Green, ch. 5; Traill; Gardiner.

_Special Works_. Hutton's King and Baronage (Oxford Manuals); Jusserand's
Wayfaring Life in the Fourteenth Century; Coulton's Chaucer and his
England; Pauli's Pictures from Old England; Wright's History of Domestic
Manners and Sentiments in England during the Middle Ages; Trevelyan's
England in the Age of Wyclif; Jenks's In the Days of Chaucer; Froissart's
Chronicle, in Everyman's Library; the same, new edition, 1895 (Macmillan);
Lanier's Boys' Froissart (i.e. Froissart's Chronicle of Historical Events,
1325-1400); Newbolt's Stories from Froissart; Bulfinch's Age of Chivalry
may be read in connection with this and the preceding periods.

_LITERATURE. General Works_. Jusserand; Ten Brink; Mitchell; Minto's
Characteristics of English Poets; Courthope's History of English Poetry.

_Chaucer_, (1) Life: by Lounsbury, in Studies in Chaucer, vol. I; by Ward,
in English Men of Letters Series; Pollard's Chaucer Primer. (2) Aids to
study: F.J. Snell's The Age of Chaucer; Lounsbury's Studies in Chaucer (3
vols.); Root's The Poetry of Chaucer; Lowell's Essay, in My Study Windows;
Hammond's Chaucer: a Biographical Manual; Hempl's Chaucer's Pronunciation;
Introductions to school editions of Chaucer, by Skeat, Liddell, and Mather.
(3) Texts and selections: The Oxford Chaucer, 6 vols., edited by Skeat, is
the standard; Skeat's Student's Chaucer; The Globe Chaucer (Macmillan);
Works of Chaucer, edited by Lounsbury (Crowell); Pollard's The Canterbury
Tales, Eversley edition; Skeat's Selections from Chaucer (Clarendon Press);
Chaucer's Prologue, and various tales, in Standard English Classics (Ginn
and Company), and in other school series.

_Minor Writers_. Morris and Skeat's Specimens of Early English Prose.
Jusserand's Piers Plowman; Skeat's Piers Plowman (text, glossary and
notes); Warren's Piers Plowman in Modern Prose. Arnold's Wyclif's Select
English Works; Sergeant's Wyclif (Heroes of the Nation Series); Le Bas's
Life of John Wyclif. Travels of Sir John Mandeville (modern spelling), in
Library of English Classics; Macaulay's Gower's English Works.

SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS. 1. What are the chief historical events of the
fourteenth century? What social movement is noticeable? What writers
reflect political and social conditions?

2. Tell briefly the story of Chaucer's life. What foreign influences are
noticeable? Name a few poems illustrating his three periods of work. What
qualities have you noticed in his poetry? Why is he called our first
national poet?

3. Give the plan of the _Canterbury Tales_. For what is the Prologue
remarkable? What light does it throw upon English life of the fourteenth
century? Quote or read some passages that have impressed you. Which
character do you like best? Are any of the characters like certain men and
women whom you know? What classes of society are introduced? Is Chaucer's
attitude sympathetic or merely critical?

4. Tell in your own words the tale you like best. Which tale seems truest
to life as you know it? Mention any other poets who tell stories in verse.

5. Quote or read passages which show Chaucer's keenness of observation, his
humor, his kindness in judgment, his delight in nature. What side of human
nature does he emphasize? Make a little comparison between Chaucer and
Shakespeare, having in mind (1) the characters described by both poets, (2)
their knowledge of human nature, (3) the sources of their plots, (4) the
interest of their works.

6. Describe briefly _Piers Plowman_ and its author. Why is the poem called
"the gospel of the poor"? What message does it contain for daily labor?
Does it apply to any modern conditions? Note any resemblance in ideas
between _Piers Plowman_ and such modern works as Carlyle's _Past and
Present_, Kingsley's _Alton Locke_, Morris's _Dream of John Ball_, etc.

7. For what is Wyclif remarkable in literature? How did his work affect our
language? Note resemblances and differences between Wyclif and the
Puritans.

8. What is _Mandeville's Travels_? What light does it throw on the mental
condition of the age? What essential difference do you note between this
book and _Gulliver's Travels_?


                    CHRONOLOGY, FOURTEENTH CENTURY
=======================================================================
  HISTORY                          |  LITERATURE
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
1327. Edward III                   |
                                   |
1338. Beginning of Hundred Years'  |
      War with France              |  1340(?). Birth of Chaucer
                                   |
1347. Capture of Calais            |
                                   |
1348-1349. Black Death             |  1356. Mandeville's Travels
                                   |
                                   |  1359. Chaucer in French War
                                   |
                                   |  1360-1370. Chaucer's early
                                   |     or French period
                                   |
1373. Winchester College, first    |
      great public school          |  1370-1385. Chaucer's Middle or
                                   |     Italian period
1377. Richard II. Wyclif and the   |
      Lollards begin Reformation   |  1362-1395. Piers Plowman
      in England                   |
                                   |
1381. Peasant Rebellion. Wat Tyler |  1385-1400. Canterbury Tales
                                   |
                                   |  1382. First complete Bible in
                                   |     English
                                   |
1399. Deposition of Richard II.    |  1400. Death of Chaucer
      Henry IV chosen by Parliament|     (Dante's Divina Commedia,
                                   |     _c_. 1310; Petrarch's
                                   |     sonnets and poems, 1325-1374;
                                   |     Boccaccio's tales, _c_.
                                   |     1350.)
========================================================================

       *       *       *       *       *



CHAPTER V

THE REVIVAL OF LEARNING (1400-1550)

I. HISTORY OF THE PERIOD

POLITICAL CHANGES. The century and a half following the death of Chaucer
(1400-1550) is the most volcanic period of English history. The land is
swept by vast changes, inseparable from the rapid accumulation of national
power; but since power is the most dangerous of gifts until men have
learned to control it, these changes seem at first to have no specific aim
or direction. Henry V--whose erratic yet vigorous life, as depicted by
Shakespeare, was typical of the life of his times--first let Europe feel
the might of the new national spirit. To divert that growing and unruly
spirit from rebellion at home, Henry led his army abroad, in the apparently
impossible attempt to gain for himself three things: a French wife, a
French revenue, and the French crown itself. The battle of Agincourt was
fought in 1415, and five years later, by the Treaty of Troyes, France
acknowledged his right to all his outrageous demands.

The uselessness of the terrific struggle on French soil is shown by the
rapidity with which all its results were swept away. When Henry died in
1422, leaving his son heir to the crowns of France and England, a
magnificent recumbent statue with head of pure silver was placed in
Westminster Abbey to commemorate his victories. The silver head was
presently stolen, and the loss is typical of all that he had struggled for.
His son, Henry VI, was but the shadow of a king, a puppet in the hands of
powerful nobles, who seized the power of England and turned it to self-
destruction. Meanwhile all his foreign possessions were won back by the
French under the magic leadership of Joan of Arc. Cade's Rebellion (1450)
and the bloody Wars of the Roses (1455-1485) are names to show how the
energy of England was violently destroying itself, like a great engine that
has lost its balance wheel. The frightful reign of Richard III followed,
which had, however, this redeeming quality, that it marked the end of civil
wars and the self-destruction of feudalism, and made possible a new growth
of English national sentiment under the popular Tudors.

In the long reign of Henry VIII the changes are less violent, but have more
purpose and significance. His age is marked by a steady increase in the
national power at home and abroad, by the entrance of the Reformation "by a
side door," and by the final separation of England from all ecclesiastical
bondage in Parliament's famous Act of Supremacy. In previous reigns
chivalry and the old feudal system had practically been banished; now
monasticism, the third mediæval institution with its mixed evil and good,
received its death-blow in the wholesale suppression of the monasteries and
the removal of abbots from the House of Lords. Notwithstanding the evil
character of the king and the hypocrisy of proclaiming such a creature the
head of any church or the defender of any faith, we acquiesce silently in
Stubb's declaration[105] that "the world owes some of its greatest debts to
men from whose memory the world recoils."

While England during this period was in constant political strife, yet
rising slowly, like the spiral flight of an eagle, to heights of national
greatness, intellectually it moved forward with bewildering rapidity.
Printing was brought to England by Caxton (_c_. 1476), and for the first
time in history it was possible for a book or an idea to reach the whole
nation. Schools and universities were established in place of the old
monasteries; Greek ideas and Greek culture came to England in the
Renaissance, and man's spiritual freedom was proclaimed in the Reformation.
The great names of the period are numerous and significant, but literature
is strangely silent. Probably the very turmoil of the age prevented any
literary development, for literature is one of the arts of peace; it
requires quiet and meditation rather than activity, and the stirring life
of the Renaissance had first to be lived before it could express itself in
the new literature of the Elizabethan period.

THE REVIVAL OF LEARNING. The Revival of Learning denotes, in its broadest
sense, that gradual enlightenment of the human mind after the darkness of
the Middle Ages. The names Renaissance and Humanism, which are often
applied to the same movement, have properly a narrower significance. The
term Renaissance, though used by many writers "to denote the whole
transition from the Middle Ages to the modern world,"[106] is more
correctly applied to the revival of art resulting from the discovery and
imitation of classic models in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
Humanism applies to the revival of classic literature, and was so called by
its leaders, following the example of Petrarch, because they held that the
study of the classics, _literae humaniores_,--i.e. the "more human
writings," rather than the old theology,--was the best means of promoting
the largest human interests. We use the term Revival of Learning to cover
the whole movement, whose essence was, according to Lamartine, that "man
discovered himself and the universe," and, according to Taine, that man, so
long blinded, "had suddenly opened his eyes and seen."

We shall understand this better if we remember that in the Middle Ages
man's whole world consisted of the narrow Mediterranean and the nations
that clustered about it; and that this little world seemed bounded by
impassable barriers, as if God had said to their sailors, "Hitherto shalt
thou come, but no farther." Man's mind also was bounded by the same narrow
lines. His culture as measured by the great deductive system of
Scholasticism consisted not in discovery, but rather in accepting certain
principles and traditions established by divine and ecclesiastical
authority as the basis of all truth. These were his Pillars of Hercules,
his mental and spiritual bounds that he must not pass, and within these,
like a child playing with lettered blocks, he proceeded to build his
intellectual system. Only as we remember their limitations can we
appreciate the heroism of these toilers of the Middle Ages, giants in
intellect, yet playing with children's toys; ignorant of the laws and
forces of the universe, while debating the essence and locomotion of
angels; eager to learn, yet forbidden to enter fresh fields in the right of
free exploration and the joy of individual discovery.

The Revival stirred these men as the voyages of Da Gama and Columbus
stirred the mariners of the Mediterranean. First came the sciences and
inventions of the Arabs, making their way slowly against the prejudice of
the authorities, and opening men's eyes to the unexplored realms of nature.
Then came the flood of Greek literature which the new art of printing
carried swiftly to every school in Europe, revealing a new world of poetry
and philosophy. Scholars flocked to the universities, as adventurers to the
new world of America, and there the old authority received a deathblow.
Truth only was authority; to search for truth everywhere, as men sought for
new lands and gold and the fountain of youth,--that was the new spirit
which awoke in Europe with the Revival of Learning.


II. LITERATURE OF THE REVIVAL

The hundred and fifty years of the Revival period are singularly destitute
of good literature. Men's minds were too much occupied with religious and
political changes and with the rapid enlargement of the mental horizon to
find time for that peace and leisure which are essential for literary
results. Perhaps, also, the floods of newly discovered classics, which
occupied scholars and the new printing presses alike, were by their very
power and abundance a discouragement of native talent. Roger Ascham
(1515-1568), a famous classical scholar, who published a book called
_Toxophilus_ (School of Shooting) in 1545, expresses in his preface, or
"apology," a very widespread dissatisfaction over the neglect of native
literature when he says, "And as for ye Latin or greke tongue, every thing
is so excellently done in them, that none can do better: In the Englysh
tonge contrary, every thinge in a maner so meanly, both for the matter and
handelynge, that no man can do worse."

On the Continent, also, this new interest in the classics served to check
the growth of native literatures. In Italy especially, for a full century
after the brilliant age of Dante and Petrarch, no great literature was
produced, and the Italian language itself seemed to go backward.[107] The
truth is that these great writers were, like Chaucer, far in advance of
their age, and that the mediæval mind was too narrow, too scantily
furnished with ideas to produce a varied literature. The fifteenth century
was an age of preparation, of learning the beginnings of science, and of
getting acquainted with the great ideals,--the stern law, the profound
philosophy, the suggestive mythology, and the noble poetry of the Greeks
and Romans. So the mind was furnished with ideas for a new literature.

With the exception of Malory's _Morte d'Arthur_ (which is still mediæval in
spirit) the student will find little of interest in the literature of this
period. We give here a brief summary of the men and the books most "worthy
of remembrance"; but for the real literature of the Renaissance one must go
forward a century and a half to the age of Elizabeth.

The two greatest books which appeared in England during this period are
undoubtedly Erasmus's[108] _Praise of Folly_ (_Encomium Moriae_) and More's
_Utopia_, the famous "Kingdom of Nowhere." Both were written in Latin, but
were speedily translated into all European languages. The _Praise of Folly_
is like a song of victory for the New Learning, which had driven away vice,
ignorance, and superstition, the three foes of humanity. It was published
in 1511 after the accession of Henry VIII. Folly is represented as donning
cap and bells and mounting a pulpit, where the vice and cruelty of kings,
the selfishness and ignorance of the clergy, and the foolish standards of
education are satirized without mercy.

More's _Utopia_, published in 1516, is a powerful and original study of
social conditions, unlike anything which had ever appeared in any
literature.[109] In our own day we have seen its influence in Bellamy's
_Looking Backward_, an enormously successful book, which recently set
people to thinking of the unnecessary cruelty of modern social conditions.
More learns from a sailor, one of Amerigo Vespucci's companions, of a
wonderful Kingdom of Nowhere, in which all questions of labor, government,
society, and religion have been easily settled by simple justice and common
sense. In this _Utopia_ we find for the first time, as the foundations of
civilized society, the three great words, Liberty, Fraternity, Equality,
which retained their inspiration through all the violence of the French
Revolution and which are still the unrealized ideal of every free
government. As he hears of this wonderful country More wonders why, after
fifteen centuries of Christianity, his own land is so little civilized; and
as we read the book to-day we ask ourselves the same question. The splendid
dream is still far from being realized; yet it seems as if any nation could
become Utopia in a single generation, so simple and just are the
requirements.

Greater than either of these books, in its influence upon the common
people, is Tyndale's translation of the New Testament (1525), which fixed a
standard of good English, and at the same time brought that standard not
only to scholars but to the homes of the common people. Tyndale made his
translation from the original Greek, and later translated parts of the Old
Testament from the Hebrew. Much of Tyndale's work was included in Cranmer's
Bible, known also as the Great Bible, in 1539, and was read in every parish
church in England. It was the foundation for the Authorized Version, which
appeared nearly a century later and became the standard for the whole
English-speaking race.

WYATT AND SURREY. In 1557 appeared probably the first printed collection of
miscellaneous English poems, known as _Tottel's Miscellany_. It contained
the work of the so-called courtly makers, or poets, which had hitherto
circulated in manuscript form for the benefit of the court. About half of
these poems were the work of Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503?-1542) and of Henry
Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517?-1547). Both together wrote amorous sonnets
modeled after the Italians, introducing a new verse form which, although
very difficult, has been a favorite ever since with our English poets.[110]
Surrey is noted, not for any especial worth or originality of his own
poems, but rather for his translation of two books of Virgil "in strange
meter." The strange meter was the blank verse, which had never before
appeared in English. The chief literary work of these two men, therefore,
is to introduce the sonnet and the blank verse,--one the most dainty, the
other the most flexible and characteristic form of English poetry,--which
in the hands of Shakespeare and Milton were used to make the world's
masterpieces.

MALORY'S MORTE D'ARTHUR. The greatest English work of this period, measured
by its effect on subsequent literature, is undoubtedly the _Morte
d'Arthur_, a collection of the Arthurian romances told in simple and vivid
prose. Of Sir Thomas Malory, the author, Caxton[111] in his introduction
says that he was a knight, and completed his work in 1470, fifteen years
before Caxton printed it. The record adds that "he was the servant of Jesu
both by day and night." Beyond that we know little[112] except what may be
inferred from the splendid work itself.

Malory groups the legends about the central idea of the search for the Holy
Grail. Though many of the stories, like Tristram and Isolde, are purely
pagan, Malory treats them all in such a way as to preserve the whole spirit
of mediæval Christianity as it has been preserved in no other work. It was
to Malory rather than to Layamon or to the early French writers that
Shakespeare and his contemporaries turned for their material; and in our
own age he has supplied Tennyson and Matthew Arnold and Swinburne and
Morris with the inspiration for the "Idylls of the King" and the "Death of
Tristram" and the other exquisite poems which center about Arthur and the
knights of his Round Table.

In subject-matter the book belongs to the mediæval age; but Malory himself,
with his desire to preserve the literary monuments of the past, belongs to
the Renaissance; and he deserves our lasting gratitude for attempting to
preserve the legends and poetry of Britain at a time when scholars were
chiefly busy with the classics of Greece and Rome. As the Arthurian legends
are one of the great recurring motives of English literature, Malory's work
should be better known. His stories may be and should be told to every
child as part of his literary inheritance. Then Malory may be read for his
style and his English prose and his expression of the mediæval spirit. And
then the stories may be read again, in Tennyson's "Idylls," to show how
those exquisite old fancies appeal to the minds of our modern poets.


SUMMARY OF THE REVIVAL OF LEARNING PERIOD. This transition period is at
first one of decline from the Age of Chaucer, and then of intellectual
preparation for the Age of Elizabeth. For a century and a half after
Chaucer not a single great English work appeared, and the general standard
of literature was very low. There are three chief causes to account for
this: (1) the long war with France and the civil Wars of the Roses
distracted attention from books and poetry, and destroyed of ruined many
noble English families who had been friends and patrons of literature; (2)
the Reformation in the latter part of the period filled men's minds with
religious questions; (3) the Revival of Learning set scholars and literary
men to an eager study of the classics, rather than to the creation of
native literature. Historically the age is noticeable for its intellectual
progress, for the introduction of printing, for the discovery of America,
for the beginning of the Reformation, and for the growth of political power
among the common people.

In our study we have noted: (1) the Revival of Learning, what it was, and
the significance of the terms Humanism and Renaissance; (2) three
influential literary works,--Erasmus's _Praise of Folly_, More's _Utopia_,
and Tyndale's translation of the New Testament; (3) Wyatt and Surrey, and
the so-called courtly makers or poets; (4) Malory's _Morte d'Arthur_, a
collection of the Arthurian legends in English prose. The Miracle and
Mystery Plays were the most popular form of entertainment in this age; but
we have reserved them for special study in connection with the Rise of the
Drama, in the following chapter.

SELECTIONS FOR READING. Malory's Morte d'Arthur, selections, in Athenaeum
Press Series, etc. (It is interesting to read Tennyson's Passing of Arthur
in connection with Malory's account.) Utopia, in Arber's Reprints, Temple
Classics, King's Classics, etc. Selections from Wyatt, Surrey, etc., in
Manly's English Poetry or Ward's English Poets; Tottel's Miscellany, in
Arber's Reprints. Morris and Skeat's Specimens of Early English, vol. 3,
has good selections from this period.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.[113]

_HISTORY. Text-book_, Montgomery, pp. 150-208, or Cheyney, pp. 264-328.
Greene, ch. 6; Traill; Gardiner; Froude; etc.

_Special Works_. Denton's England in the Fifteenth Century; Flower's The
Century of Sir Thomas More; The Household of Sir Thomas More, in King's
Classics; Green's Town Life in the Fifteenth Century; Field's Introduction
to the Study of the Renaissance; Einstein's The Italian Renaissance in
England; Seebohm's The Oxford Reformers (Erasmus, More, etc.).

_LITERATURE. General Works_. Jusserand; Ten Brink; Minto's Characteristics
of English Poets.

_Special Works_. Saintsbury's Elizabethan Literature; Malory's Morte
d'Arthur, edited by Sommer; the same by Gollancz (Temple Classics);
Lanier's The Boy's King Arthur; More's Utopia, in Temple Classics, King's
Classics, etc.; Roper's Life of Sir Thomas More, in King's Classics, Temple
Classics, etc.; Ascham's Schoolmaster, in Arber's English Reprints; Poems
of Wyatt and Surrey, in English Reprints and Bell's Aldine Poets; Simonds's
Sir Thomas Wyatt and His Poems; Allen's Selections from Erasmus;
Jusserand's Romance of a King's Life (James I of Scotland) contains
extracts and an admirable criticism of the King's Quair.

SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS. 1. The fifteenth century in English literature is
sometimes called "the age of arrest." Can you explain why? What causes
account for the lack of great literature in this period? Why should the
ruin of noble families at this time seriously affect our literature? Can
you recall anything from the Anglo-Saxon period to justify your opinion?

2. What is meant by Humanism? What was the first effect of the study of
Greek and Latin classics upon our literature? What excellent literary
purposes did the classics serve in later periods?

3. What are the chief benefits to literature of the discovery of printing?
What effect on civilization has the multiplication of books?

4. Describe More's _Utopia_. Do you know any modern books like it? Why
should any impractical scheme of progress be still called Utopian?

5. What work of this period had the greatest effect on the English
language? Explain why.

6. What was the chief literary influence exerted by Wyatt and Surrey? Do
you know any later poets who made use of the verse forms which they
introduced?

7. Which of Malory's stories do you like best? Where did these stories
originate? Have they any historical foundation? What two great elements did
Malory combine in his work? What is the importance of his book to later
English literature? Compare Tennyson's "Idylls of the King" and Malory's
stories with regard to material, expression, and interest. Note the marked
resemblances and differences between the _Morte d'Arthur_ and the
_Nibelungen Lied_.

                               CHRONOLOGY
===========================================================================
  HISTORY                           |  LITERATURE
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
1413. Henry V                       |
1415. Battle of Agincourt           |
1422. Henry VI                      | 1470. Malory's Morte d' Arthur
1428. Siege of Orleans. Joan of Arc | 1474(c). Caxton, at Bruges,
1453. End of Hundred Year's War     |       prints the first book in
1455-1485. War of Roses             |       English, the Recuyell of the
1461. Edward IV                     |       Histories of Troye
1483. Richard III                   | 1477. First book printed in
                                    |       England
1485. Henry VII                     | 1485. Morte d'Arthur printed
                                    |       by Caxton
1492. Columbus discovers America    | 1499. Colet, Erasmus, and More
1509. Henry VIII                    |       bring the New Learning to
                                    |       Oxford
                                    | 1509. Erasmus's Praise of
                                    |       Folly
                                    | 1516. More's Utopia
                                    | 1525. Tydale's New Testament
1534. Act of Supremacy. The         | 1530(c). Introduction of the
      Reformation accomplished      |       sonnet and blank verse by
                                    |       Wyatt and Surrey
                                    | 1539. The Great Bible
1547. Edward VI                     |
1553. Mary                          | 1557. Tottel's Miscellany
1558. Elizabeth                     |
===========================================================================

       *       *       *       *       *



CHAPTER VI

THE AGE OF ELIZABETH (1550-1620)

I. HISTORY OF THE PERIOD

POLITICAL SUMMARY. In the Age of Elizabeth all doubt seems to vanish from
English history. After the reigns of Edward and Mary, with defeat and
humiliation abroad and persecutions and rebellion at home, the accession of
a popular sovereign was like the sunrise after a long night, and, in
Milton's words, we suddenly see England, "a noble and puissant nation,
rousing herself, like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible
locks." With the queen's character, a strange mingling of frivolity and
strength which reminds one of that iron image with feet of clay, we have
nothing whatever to do. It is the national life that concerns the literary
student, since even a beginner must notice that any great development of
the national life is invariably associated with a development of the
national literature. It is enough for our purpose, therefore, to point out
two facts: that Elizabeth, with all her vanity and inconsistency, steadily
loved England and England's greatness; and that she inspired all her people
with the unbounded patriotism which exults in Shakespeare, and with the
personal devotion which finds a voice in the _Faery Queen_. Under her
administration the English national life progressed by gigantic leaps
rather than by slow historical process, and English literature reached the
very highest point of its development. It is possible to indicate only a
few general characteristics of this great age which had a direct bearing
upon its literature.

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE ELIZABETHAN AGE. The most characteristic feature of
the age was the comparative religious tolerance, which was due largely to
the queen's influence. The frightful excesses of the religious war known as
the Thirty Years' War on the Continent found no parallel in England. Upon
her accession Elizabeth found the whole kingdom divided against itself; the
North was largely Catholic, while the southern counties were as strongly
Protestant. Scotland had followed the Reformation in its own intense way,
while Ireland remained true to its old religious traditions, and both
countries were openly rebellious. The court, made up of both parties,
witnessed the rival intrigues of those who sought to gain the royal favor.
It was due partly to the intense absorption of men's minds in religious
questions that the preceding century, though an age of advancing learning,
produced scarcely any literature worthy of the name. Elizabeth favored both
religious parties, and presently the world saw with amazement Catholics and
Protestants acting together as trusted counselors of a great sovereign. The
defeat of the Spanish Armada established the Reformation as a fact in
England, and at the same time united all Englishmen in a magnificent
national enthusiasm. For the first time since the Reformation began, the
fundamental question of religious toleration seemed to be settled, and the
mind of man, freed from religious fears and persecutions, turned with a
great creative impulse to other forms of activity. It is partly from this
new freedom of the mind that the Age of Elizabeth received its great
literary stimulus.

2. It was an age of comparative social contentment, in strong contrast with
the days of Langland. The rapid increase of manufacturing towns gave
employment to thousands who had before been idle and discontented.
Increasing trade brought enormous wealth to England, and this wealth was
shared to this extent, at least, that for the first time some systematic
care for the needy was attempted. Parishes were made responsible for their
own poor, and the wealthy were taxed to support them or give them
employment. The increase of wealth, the improvement in living, the
opportunities for labor, the new social content--these also are factors
which help to account for the new literary activity.

3. It is an age of dreams, of adventure, of unbounded enthusiasm springing
from the new lands of fabulous riches revealed by English explorers. Drake
sails around the world, shaping the mighty course which English colonizers
shall follow through the centuries; and presently the young philosopher
Bacon is saying confidently, "I have taken all knowledge for my province."
The mind must search farther than the eye; with new, rich lands opened to
the sight, the imagination must create new forms to people the new worlds.
Hakluyt's famous _Collection of Voyages_, and _Purchas, His Pilgrimage_,
were even more stimulating to the English imagination than to the English
acquisitiveness. While her explorers search the new world for the Fountain
of Youth, her poets are creating literary works that are young forever.
Marston writes:[114] "Why, man, all their dripping pans are pure gold. The
prisoners they take are fettered in gold; and as for rubies and diamonds,
they goe forth on holydayes and gather 'hem by the seashore to hang on
their children's coates." This comes nearer to being a description of
Shakespeare's poetry than of the Indians in Virginia. Prospero, in _The
Tempest_, with his control over the mighty powers and harmonies of nature,
is only the literary dream of that science which had just begun to grapple
with the forces of the universe. Cabot, Drake, Frobisher, Gilbert, Raleigh,
Willoughby, Hawkins,--a score of explorers reveal a new earth to men's
eyes, and instantly literature creates a new heaven to match it. So dreams
and deeds increase side by side, and the dream is ever greater than the
deed. That is the meaning of literature.

4. To sum up, the Age of Elizabeth was a time of intellectual liberty, of
growing intelligence and comfort among all classes, of unbounded
patriotism, and of peace at home and abroad. For a parallel we must go back
to the Age of Pericles in Athens, or of Augustus in Rome, or go forward a
little to the magnificent court of Louis XIV, when Corneille, Racine, and
Molière brought the drama in France to the point where Marlowe,
Shakespeare, and Jonson had left it in England half a century earlier. Such
an age of great thought and great action, appealing to the eyes as well as
to the imagination and intellect, finds but one adequate literary
expression; neither poetry nor the story can express the whole man,--his
thought, feeling, action, and the resulting character; hence in the Age of
Elizabeth literature turned instinctively to the drama and brought it
rapidly to the highest stage of its development.


II. THE NON-DRAMATIC POETS OF THE ELIZABETHAN AGE

EDMUND SPENSER (1552-1599)

    _(Cuddie)_
        "Piers, I have pipéd erst so long with pain
        That all mine oaten reeds been rent and wore,
        And my poor Muse hath spent her sparéd store,
        Yet little good hath got, and much less gain.
        Such pleasaunce makes the grasshopper so poor,
        And ligge so layd[115] when winter doth her strain.
        The dapper ditties that I wont devise,
        To feed youth's fancy, and the flocking fry
        Delghten much--what I the bet forthy?
        They han the pleasure, I a slender prize:
        I beat the bush, the birds to them do fly:
        What good thereof to Cuddie can arise?
    (_Piers_)
        Cuddie, the praise is better than the price,
        The glory eke much greater than the gain:..."
                _Shepherd's Calendar_, October

In these words, with their sorrowful suggestion of Deor, Spenser reveals
his own heart, unconsciously perhaps, as no biographer could possibly do.
His life and work seem to center about three great influences, summed up in
three names: Cambridge, where he grew acquainted with the classics and the
Italian poets; London, where he experienced the glamour and the
disappointment of court life; and Ireland, which steeped him in the beauty
and imagery of old Celtic poetry and first gave him leisure to write his
masterpiece.

LIFE. Of Spenser's early life and parentage we know little, except that he
was born in East Smithfield, near the Tower of London, and was poor. His
education began at the Merchant Tailors' School in London and was continued
in Cambridge, where as a poor sizar and fag for wealthy students he earned
a scant living. Here in the glorious world that only a poor scholar knows
how to create for himself he read the classics, made acquaintance with the
great Italian poets, and wrote numberless little poems of his own. Though
Chaucer was his beloved master, his ambition was not to rival the
_Canterbury Tales_, but rather to express the dream of English chivalry,
much as Ariosto had done for Italy in _Orlando Furioso_.

After leaving Cambridge (1576) Spenser went to the north of England, on
some unknown work or quest. Here his chief occupation was to fall in love
and to record his melancholy over the lost Rosalind in the _Shepherd's
Calendar_. Upon his friend Harvey's advice he came to London, bringing his
poems; and here he met Leicester, then at the height of royal favor, and
the latter took him to live at Leicester House. Here he finished the
_Shepherd's Calendar_, and here he met Sidney and all the queen's
favorites. The court was full of intrigues, lying and flattery, and
Spenser's opinion of his own uncomfortable position is best expressed in a
few lines from "Mother Hubbard's Tale":

    Full little knowest thou, that has not tried,
    What hell it is, in suing long to bide:
    To lose good days, that might be better spent;
    To waste long nights in pensive discontent;
           *       *       *       *       *
    To fret thy soul with crosses and with cares;
    To eat thy heart through comfortless despairs;
    To fawn, to crouch, to wait, to ride, to run,
    To spend, to give, to want, to be undone.

In 1580, through Leicester's influence, Spenser, who was utterly weary of
his dependent position, was made secretary to Lord Grey, the queen's deputy
in Ireland, and the third period of his life began. He accompanied his
chief through one campaign of savage brutality in putting down an Irish
rebellion, and was given an immense estate with the castle of Kilcolman, in
Munster, which had been confiscated from Earl Desmond, one of the Irish
leaders. His life here, where according to the terms of his grant he must
reside as an English settler, he regarded as lonely exile:

    My luckless lot,
    That banished had myself, like wight forlore,
    Into that waste, where I was quite forgot.

It is interesting to note here a gentle poet's view of the "unhappy
island." After nearly sixteen years' residence he wrote his _View of the
State of Ireland_ (1596),[116] his only prose work, in which he submits a
plan for "pacifying the oppressed and rebellious people." This was to bring
a huge force of cavalry and infantry into the country, give the Irish a
brief time to submit, and after that to hunt them down like wild beasts. He
calculated that cold, famine, and sickness would help the work of the
sword, and that after the rebels had been well hounded for two winters the
following summer would find the country peaceful. This plan, from the poet
of harmony and beauty, was somewhat milder than the usual treatment of a
brave people whose offense was that they loved liberty and religion.
Strange as it may seem, the _View_ was considered most statesmanlike, and
was excellently well received in England.

In Kilcolman, surrounded by great natural beauty, Spenser finished the
first three books of the _Faery Queen_. In 1589 Raleigh visited him, heard
the poem with enthusiasm, hurried the poet off to London, and presented him
to Elizabeth. The first three books met with instant success when published
and were acclaimed as the greatest work in the English language. A yearly
pension of fifty pounds was conferred by Elizabeth, but rarely paid, and
the poet turned back to exile, that is, to Ireland again.

Soon after his return, Spenser fell in love with his beautiful Elizabeth,
an Irish girl; wrote his _Amoretti_, or sonnets, in her honor; and
afterwards represented her, in the _Faery Queen_, as the beautiful woman
dancing among the Graces. In 1594 he married Elizabeth, celebrating his
wedding with his "Epithalamion," one of the most beautiful wedding hymns in
any language.

Spenser's next visit to London was in 1595, when he published "Astrophel,"
an elegy on the death of his friend Sidney, and three more books of the
_Faery Queen_. On this visit he lived again at Leicester House, now
occupied by the new favorite Essex, where he probably met Shakespeare and
the other literary lights of the Elizabethan Age. Soon after his return to
Ireland, Spenser was appointed Sheriff of Cork, a queer office for a poet,
which probably brought about his undoing. The same year Tyrone's Rebellion
broke out in Munster. Kilcolman, the ancient house of Desmond, was one of
the first places attacked by the rebels, and Spenser barely escaped with
his wife and two children. It is supposed that some unfinished parts of the
_Faery Queen_ were burned in the castle.

From the shock of this frightful experience Spenser never recovered. He
returned to England heartbroken, and in the following year (1599) he died
in an inn at Westminster. According to Ben Jonson he died "for want of
bread"; but whether that is a poetic way of saying that he had lost his
property or that he actually died of destitution, will probably never be
known. He was buried beside his master Chaucer in Westminster Abbey, the
poets of that age thronging to his funeral and, according to Camden,
"casting their elegies and the pens that had written them into his tomb."

SPENSER'S WORKS. _The Faery Queen_ is the great work upon which the poet's
fame chiefly rests. The original plan of the poem included twenty-four
books, each of which was to recount the adventure and triumph of a knight
who represented a moral virtue. Spenser's purpose, as indicated in a letter
to Raleigh which introduces the poem, is as follows:

To pourtraict in Arthure, before he was king, the image of a brave Knight,
perfected in the twelve private Morall Vertues, as Aristotle hath devised;
which is the purpose of these first twelve bookes: which if I finde to be
well accepted, I may be perhaps encoraged to frame the other part of
Polliticke Vertues in his person, after that hee came to be king.

Each of the Virtues appears as a knight, fighting his opposing Vice, and
the poem tells the story of the conflicts. It is therefore purely
allegorical, not only in its personified virtues but also in its
representation of life as a struggle between good and evil. In its strong
moral element the poem differs radically from _Orlando Furioso_, upon which
it was modeled. Spenser completed only six books, celebrating Holiness,
Temperance, Chastity, Friendship, Justice, and Courtesy. We have also a
fragment of the seventh, treating of Constancy; but the rest of this book
was not written, or else was lost in the fire at Kilcolman. The first three
books are by far the best; and judging by the way the interest lags and the
allegory grows incomprehensible, it is perhaps as well for Spenser's
reputation that the other eighteen books remained a dream.

ARGUMENT OF THE FAERY QUEEN. From the introductory letter we learn that the
hero visits the queen's court in Fairy Land, while she is holding a
twelve-days festival. On each day some distressed person appears
unexpectedly, tells a woful story of dragons, of enchantresses, or of
distressed beauty or virtue, and asks for a champion to right the wrong and
to let the oppressed go free. Sometimes a knight volunteers or begs for the
dangerous mission; again the duty is assigned by the queen; and the
journeys and adventures of these knights are the subjects of the several
books. The first recounts the adventures of the Redcross Knight,
representing Holiness, and the lady Una, representing Religion. Their
contests are symbolical of the world-wide struggle between virtue and faith
on the one hand, and sin and heresy on the other. The second book tells the
story of Sir Guyon, or Temperance; the third, of Britomartis, representing
Chastity; the fourth, fifth, and sixth, of Cambel and Triamond
(Friendship), Artegall (Justice), and Sir Calidore (Courtesy). Spenser's
plan was a very elastic one and he filled up the measure of his narrative
with everything that caught his fancy,--historical events and personages
under allegorical masks, beautiful ladies, chivalrous knights, giants,
monsters, dragons, sirens, enchanters, and adventures enough to stock a
library of fiction. If you read Homer or Virgil, you know his subject in
the first strong line; if you read Cædmon's _Paraphrase_ or Milton's epic,
the introduction gives you the theme; but Spenser's great poem--with the
exception of a single line in the prologue, "Fierce warres and faithfull
loves shall moralize my song"--gives hardly a hint of what is coming.

As to the meaning of the allegorical figures, one is generally in doubt. In
the first three books the shadowy Faery Queen sometimes represents the
glory of God and sometimes Elizabeth, who was naturally flattered by the
parallel. Britomartis is also Elizabeth. The Redcross Knight is Sidney, the
model Englishman. Arthur, who always appears to rescue the oppressed, is
Leicester, which is another outrageous flattery. Una is sometimes religion
and sometimes the Protestant Church; while Duessa represents Mary Queen of
Scots, or general Catholicism. In the last three books Elizabeth appears
again as Mercilla; Henry IV of France as Bourbon; the war in the
Netherlands as the story of Lady Belge; Raleigh as Timias; the earls of
Northumberland and Westmoreland (lovers of Mary or Duessa) as Blandamour
and Paridell; and so on through the wide range of contemporary characters
and events, till the allegory becomes as difficult to follow as the second
part of Goethe's _Faust_.

POETICAL FORM. For the _Faery Queen_ Spenser invented a new verse form,
which has been called since his day the Spenserian stanza. Because of its
rare beauty it has been much used by nearly all our poets in their best
work. The new stanza was an improved form of Ariosto's _ottava rima_ (i.e.
eight-line stanza) and bears a close resemblance to one of Chaucer's most
musical verse forms in the "Monk's Tale." Spenser's stanza is in nine
lines, eight of five feet each and the last of six feet, riming
_ababbcbcc_. A few selections from the first book, which is best worth
reading, are reproduced here to show the style and melody of the verse.

      A Gentle Knight was pricking on the plaine,
      Ycladd[117] in mightie armes and silver shielde,
      Wherein old dints of deepe woundes did remaine
      The cruell markes of many a bloody fielde;
      Yet armes till that time did he never wield:
      His angry steede did chide his foming bitt,
      As much disdayning to the curbe to yield:
      Full iolly[118] knight he seemd, and faire did sitt,
    As one for knightly giusts[119] and fierce encounters fitt.
      And on his brest a bloodie crosse he bore,
      The deare remembrance of his dying Lord,
      For whose sweete sake that glorious badge he wore,
      And dead, as living ever, him ador'd:
      Upon his shield the like was also scor'd,
      For soveraine hope, which in his helpe he had,
      Right faithfull true he was in deede and word;
      But of his cheere[120] did seeme too solemne sad;
    Yet nothing did he dread, but ever was ydrad.[121]

This sleepy bit, from the dwelling of Morpheus, invites us to linger:

      And, more to lulle him in his slumber soft,
      A trickling streame from high rock tumbling downe,
      And ever-drizling raine upon the loft,
      Mixt with a murmuring winde, much like the sowne
      Of swarming bees, did cast him in a swowne.
      No other noyse, nor peoples troublous cryes,
      As still are wont t'annoy the walled towne,
      Might there be heard: but carelesse Quiet lyes,
      Wrapt in eternal silence farre from enimyes.

The description of Una shows the poet's sense of ideal beauty:

      One day, nigh wearie of the yrkesome way,
      From her unhastie beast she did alight;
      And on the grasse her dainty limbs did lay
      In secrete shadow, far from all mens sight;
      From her fayre head her fillet she undight,[122]
      And layd her stole aside; Her angels face,
      As the great eye of heaven, shynéd bright,
      And made a sunshine in the shady place;
    Did never mortall eye behold such heavenly grace.
      It fortunéd, out of the thickest wood
      A ramping lyon rushéd suddeinly,
      Hunting full greedy after salvage blood:
      Soone as the royall Virgin he did spy,
      With gaping mouth at her ran greedily,
      To have at once devourd her tender corse:
      But to the pray whenas he drew more ny,
      His bloody rage aswaged with remorse,[123]
    And, with the sight amazd, forgat his furious forse.
      Instead thereof he kist her wearie feet,
      And lickt her lilly hands with fawning tong;
      As he her wrongéd innocence did weet.[124]
      O how can beautie maister the most strong,
      And simple truth subdue avenging wrong!

MINOR POEMS. Next to his masterpiece, the _Shepherd's Calendar_ (1579) is
the best known of Spenser's poems; though, as his first work, it is below
many others in melody. It consists of twelve pastoral poems, or eclogues,
one for each month of the year. The themes are generally rural life,
nature, love in the fields; and the speakers are shepherds and
shepherdesses. To increase the rustic effect Spenser uses strange forms of
speech and obsolete words, to such an extent that Jonson complained his
works are not English or any other language. Some are melancholy poems on
his lost Rosalind; some are satires on the clergy; one, "The Briar and the
Oak," is an allegory; one flatters Elizabeth, and others are pure fables
touched with the Puritan spirit. They are written in various styles and
meters, and show plainly that Spenser was practicing and preparing himself
for greater work.

Other noteworthy poems are "Mother Hubbard's Tale," a satire on society;
"Astrophel," an elegy on the death of Sidney; _Amoretti_, or sonnets, to
his Elizabeth; the marriage hymn, "Epithalamion," and four "Hymns," on
Love, Beauty, Heavenly Love, and Heavenly Beauty. There are numerous other
poems and collections of poems, but these show the scope of his work and
are best worth reading.

IMPORTANCE OF THE SHEPHERD'S CALENDAR. The publication of this work, in
1579, by an unknown writer who signed himself modestly "Immerito," marks an
important epoch in our literature. We shall appreciate this better if we
remember the long years during which England had been without a great poet.
Chaucer and Spenser are often studied together as poets of the Renaissance
period, and the idea prevails that they were almost contemporary. In fact,
nearly two centuries passed after Chaucer's death,--years of enormous
political and intellectual development,--and not only did Chaucer have no
successor but our language had changed so rapidly that Englishmen had lost
the ability to read his lines correctly.[125]

This first published work of Spenser is noteworthy in at least four
respects: first, it marks the appearance of the first national poet in two
centuries; second, it shows again the variety and melody of English verse,
which had been largely a tradition since Chaucer; third, it was our first
pastoral, the beginning of a long series of English pastoral compositions
modeled on Spenser, and as such exerted a strong influence on subsequent
literature; and fourth, it marks the real beginning of the outburst of
great Elizabethan poetry.

CHARACTERISTICS OF SPENSER'S POETRY. The five main qualities of Spenser's
poetry are (1) a perfect melody; (2) a rare sense of beauty; (3) a splendid
imagination, which could gather into one poem heroes, knights, ladies,
dwarfs, demons and dragons, classic mythology, stories of chivalry, and the
thronging ideals of the Renaissance,--all passing in gorgeous procession
across an ever-changing and ever-beautiful landscape; (4) a lofty moral
purity and seriousness; (5) a delicate idealism, which could make all
nature and every common thing beautiful. In contrast with these excellent
qualities the reader will probably note the strange appearance of his lines
due to his fondness for obsolete words, like _eyne_ (eyes) and _shend_
(shame), and his tendency to coin others, like _mercify_, to suit his own
purposes.

It is Spenser's idealism, his love of beauty, and his exquisite melody
which have caused him to be known as "the poets' poet." Nearly all our
subsequent singers acknowledge their delight in him and their indebtedness.
Macaulay alone among critics voices a fault which all who are not poets
quickly feel, namely that, with all Spenser's excellences, he is difficult
to read. The modern man loses himself in the confused allegory of the
_Faery Queen_, skips all but the marked passages, and softly closes the
book in gentle weariness. Even the best of his longer poems, while of
exquisite workmanship and delightfully melodious, generally fail to hold
the reader's attention. The movement is languid; there is little dramatic
interest, and only a suggestion of humor. The very melody of his verses
sometimes grows monotonous, like a Strauss waltz too long continued. We
shall best appreciate Spenser by reading at first only a few well-chosen
selections from the _Faery Queen_ and the _Shepherd's Calendar_, and a few
of the minor poems which exemplify his wonderful melody.

COMPARISON BETWEEN CHAUCER AND SPENSER. At the outset it is well to
remember that, though Spenser regarded Chaucer as his master, two centuries
intervene between them, and that their writings have almost nothing in
common. We shall appreciate this better by a brief comparison between our
first two modern poets.

Chaucer was a combined poet and man of affairs, with the latter
predominating. Though dealing largely with ancient or mediæval material, he
has a curiously modern way of looking at life. Indeed, he is our only
author preceding Shakespeare with whom we feel thoroughly at home. He threw
aside the outgrown metrical romance, which was practically the only form of
narrative in his day, invented the art of story-telling in verse, and
brought it to a degree of perfection which has probably never since been
equaled. Though a student of the classics, he lived wholly in the present,
studied the men and women of his own time, painted them as they were, but
added always a touch of kindly humor or romance to make them more
interesting. So his mission appears to be simply to amuse himself and his
readers. His mastery of various and melodious verse was marvelous and has
never been surpassed in our language; but the English of his day was
changing rapidly, and in a very few years men were unable to appreciate his
art, so that even to Spenser and Dryden, for example, he seemed deficient
in metrical skill. On this account his influence on our literature has been
much less than we should expect from the quality of his work and from his
position as one of the greatest of English poets.

Like Chaucer, Spenser was a busy man of affairs, but in him the poet and
the scholar always predominates. He writes as the idealist, describing men
not as they are but as he thinks they should be; he has no humor, and his
mission is not to amuse but to reform. Like Chaucer he studies the classics
and contemporary French and Italian writers; but instead of adapting his
material to present-day conditions, he makes poetry, as in his Eclogues for
instance, more artificial even than his foreign models. Where Chaucer looks
about him and describes life as he sees it, Spenser always looks backward
for his inspiration; he lives dreamily in the past, in a realm of purely
imaginary emotions and adventures. His first quality is imagination, not
observation, and he is the first of our poets to create a world of dreams,
fancies, and illusions. His second quality is a wonderful sensitiveness to
beauty, which shows itself not only in his subject-matter but also in the
manner of his poetry. Like Chaucer, he is an almost perfect workman; but in
reading Chaucer we think chiefly of his natural characters or his ideas,
while in reading Spenser we think of the beauty of expression. The
exquisite Spenserian stanza and the rich melody of Spenser's verse have
made him the model of all our modern poets.


MINOR POETS

Though Spenser is the one great non-dramatic poet of the Elizabethan Age, a
multitude of minor poets demand attention of the student who would
understand the tremendous literary activity of the period. One needs only
to read _The Paradyse of Daynty Devises_ (1576), or _A Gorgeous Gallery of
Gallant Inventions_ (1578), or any other of the miscellaneous collections
to find hundreds of songs, many of them of exquisite workmanship, by poets
whose names now awaken no response. A glance is enough to assure one that
over all England "the sweet spirit of song had arisen, like the first
chirping of birds after a storm." Nearly two hundred poets are recorded in
the short period from 1558 to 1625, and many of them were prolific writers.
In a work like this, we can hardly do more than mention a few of the best
known writers, and spend a moment at least with the works that suggest
Marlowe's description of "infinite riches in a little room." The reader
will note for himself the interesting union of action and thought in these
men, so characteristic of the Elizabethan Age; for most of them were
engaged chiefly in business or war or politics, and literature was to them
a pleasant recreation rather than an absorbing profession.

THOMAS SACKVILLE (1536-1608). Sir Thomas Sackville, Earl of Dorset and Lord
High Treasurer of England, is generally classed with Wyatt and Surrey among
the predecessors of the Elizabethan Age. In imitation of Dante's _Inferno_,
Sackville formed the design of a great poem called _The Mirror for
Magistrates_. Under guidance of an allegorical personage called Sorrow, he
meets the spirits of all the important actors in English history. The idea
was to follow Lydgate's _Fall of Princes_ and let each character tell his
own story; so that the poem would be a mirror in which present rulers might
see themselves and read this warning: "Who reckless rules right soon may
hope to rue." Sackville finished only the "Induction" and the "Complaint of
the Duke of Buckingham." These are written in the rime royal, and are
marked by strong poetic feeling and expression. Unfortunately Sackville
turned from poetry to politics, and the poem was carried on by two inferior
poets, William Baldwin and George Ferrers.

Sackville wrote also, in connection with Thomas Norton, the first English
tragedy, _Ferrex and Porrex_, called also _Gorboduc_, which will be
considered in the following section on the Rise of the Drama.

PHILIP SIDNEY (1554-1586). Sidney, the ideal gentleman, the Sir Calidore of
Spenser's "Legend of Courtesy," is vastly more interesting as a man than as
a writer, and the student is recommended to read his biography rather than
his books. His life expresses, better than any single literary work, the
two ideals of the age,--personal honor and national greatness.

As a writer he is known by three principal works, all published after his
death, showing how little importance he attached to his own writing, even
while he was encouraging Spenser. The _Arcadia_ is a pastoral romance,
interspersed with eclogues, in which shepherds and shepherdesses sing of
the delights of rural life. Though the work was taken up idly as a summer's
pastime, it became immensely popular and was imitated by a hundred poets.
The _Apologie for Poetrie_ (1595), generally called the _Defense of
Poesie_, appeared in answer to a pamphlet by Stephen Gosson called _The
School of Abuse_ (1579), in which the poetry of the age and its unbridled
pleasure were denounced with Puritan thoroughness and conviction. The
_Apologie_ is one of the first critical essays in English; and though its
style now seems labored and unnatural,--the pernicious result of Euphues
and his school,--it is still one of the best expressions of the place and
meaning of poetry in any language. _Astrophel and Stella_ is a collection
of songs and sonnets addressed to Lady Penelope Devereux, to whom Sidney
had once been betrothed. They abound in exquisite lines and passages,
containing more poetic feeling and expression than the songs of any other
minor writer of the age.

GEORGE CHAPMAN (1559?-1634). Chapman spent his long, quiet life among the
dramatists, and wrote chiefly for the stage. His plays, which were for the
most part merely poems in dialogue, fell far below the high dramatic
standard of his time and are now almost unread. His most famous work is the
metrical translation of the _Iliad_ (1611) and of the _Odyssey_ (1614).
Chapman's _Homer_, though lacking the simplicity and dignity of the
original, has a force and rapidity of movement which makes it superior in
many respects to Pope's more familiar translation. Chapman is remembered
also as the finisher of Marlowe's _Hero and Leander_, in which, apart from
the drama, the Renaissance movement is seen at perhaps its highest point in
English poetry. Out of scores of long poems of the period, _Hero and
Leander_ and the _Faery Queen_ are the only two which are even slightly
known to modern readers.

MICHAEL DRAYTON (1563-1631). Drayton is the most voluminous and, to
antiquarians at least, the most interesting of the minor poets. He is the
Layamon of the Elizabethan Age, and vastly more scholarly than his
predecessor. His chief work is _Polyolbion_, an enormous poem of many
thousand couplets, describing the towns, mountains, and rivers of Britain,
with the interesting legends connected with each. It is an extremely
valuable work and represents a lifetime of study and research. Two other
long works are the _Barons' Wars_ and the _Heroic Epistle of England;_ and
besides these were many minor poems. One of the best of these is the
"Battle of Agincourt," a ballad written in the lively meter which Tennyson
used with some variations in the "Charge of the Light Brigade," and which
shows the old English love of brave deeds and of the songs that stir a
people's heart in memory of noble ancestors.


III. THE FIRST ENGLISH DRAMATISTS

THE ORIGIN OF THE DRAMA. First the deed, then the story, then the play;
that seems to be the natural development of the drama in its simplest form.
The great deeds of a people are treasured in its literature, and later
generations represent in play or pantomime certain parts of the story which
appeal most powerfully to the imagination. Among primitive races the deeds
of their gods and heroes are often represented at the yearly festivals; and
among children, whose instincts are not yet blunted by artificial habits,
one sees the story that was heard at bedtime repeated next day in vigorous
action, when our boys turn scouts and our girls princesses, precisely as
our first dramatists turned to the old legends and heroes of Britain for
their first stage productions. To act a part seems as natural to humanity
as to tell a story; and originally the drama is but an old story retold to
the eye, a story put into action by living performers, who for the moment
"make believe" or imagine themselves to be the old heroes.

To illustrate the matter simply, there was a great life lived by him who
was called the Christ. Inevitably the life found its way into literature,
and we have the Gospels. Around the life and literature sprang up a great
religion. Its worship was at first simple,--the common prayer, the evening
meal together, the remembered words of the Master, and the closing hymn.
Gradually a ritual was established, which grew more elaborate and
impressive as the centuries went by. Scenes from the Master's life began to
be represented in the churches, especially at Christmas time, when the
story of Christ's birth was made more effective, to the eyes of a people
who could not read, by a babe in a manger surrounded by magi and shepherds,
with a choir of angels chanting the _Gloria in Excelsis_.[126] Other
impressive scenes from the Gospel followed; then the Old Testament was
called upon, until a complete cycle of plays from the Creation to the Final
Judgment was established, and we have the Mysteries and Miracle plays of
the Middle Ages. Out of these came directly the drama of the Elizabethan
Age.


PERIODS IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DRAMA

1. THE RELIGIOUS PERIOD. In Europe, as in Greece, the drama had a
distinctly religious origin.[127] The first characters were drawn from the
New Testament, and the object of the first plays was to make the church
service more impressive, or to emphasize moral lessons by showing the
reward of the good and the punishment of the evil doer. In the latter days
of the Roman Empire the Church found the stage possessed by frightful
plays, which debased the morals of a people already fallen too low. Reform
seemed impossible; the corrupt drama was driven from the stage, and plays
of every kind were forbidden. But mankind loves a spectacle, and soon the
Church itself provided a substitute for the forbidden plays in the famous
Mysteries and Miracles.

MIRACLE AND MYSTERY PLAYS. In France the name _miracle_ was given to any
play representing the lives of the saints, while the _mystère_ represented
scenes from the life of Christ or stories from the Old Testament associated
with the coming of Messiah. In England this distinction was almost unknown;
the name Miracle was used indiscriminately for all plays having their
origin in the Bible or in the lives of the saints; and the name Mystery, to
distinguish a certain class of plays, was not used until long after the
religious drama had passed away.

The earliest Miracle of which we have any record in England is the _Ludus
de Sancta Katharina_, which was performed in Dunstable about the year
1110.[128] It is not known who wrote the original play of St. Catherine,
but our first version was prepared by Geoffrey of St. Albans, a French
school-teacher of Dunstable. Whether or not the play was given in English
is not known, but it was customary in the earliest plays for the chief
actors to speak in Latin or French, to show their importance, while minor
and comic parts of the same play were given in English.

For four centuries after this first recorded play the Miracles increased
steadily in number and popularity in England. They were given first very
simply and impressively in the churches; then, as the actors increased in
number and the plays in liveliness, they overflowed to the churchyards; but
when fun and hilarity began to predominate even in the most sacred
representations, the scandalized priests forbade plays altogether on church
grounds. By the year 1300 the Miracles were out of ecclesiastical hands and
adopted eagerly by the town guilds; and in the following two centuries we
find the Church preaching against the abuse of the religious drama which it
had itself introduced, and which at first had served a purely religious
purpose.[129] But by this time the Miracles had taken strong hold upon the
English people, and they continued to be immensely popular until, in the
sixteenth century, they were replaced by the Elizabethan drama.

The early Miracle plays of England were divided into two classes: the
first, given at Christmas, included all plays connected with the birth of
Christ; the second, at Easter, included the plays relating to his death and
triumph. By the beginning of the fourteenth century all these plays were,
in various localities, united in single cycles beginning with the Creation
and ending with the Final Judgment. The complete cycle was presented every
spring, beginning on Corpus Christi day; and as the presentation of so many
plays meant a continuous outdoor festival of a week or more, this day was
looked forward to as the happiest of the whole year.

Probably every important town in England had its own cycle of plays for its
own guilds to perform, but nearly all have been lost. At the present day
only four cycles exist (except in the most fragmentary condition), and
these, though they furnish an interesting commentary on the times, add very
little to our literature. The four cycles are the Chester and York plays,
so called from the towns in which they were given; the Towneley or
Wakefield plays, named for the Towneley family, which for a long time owned
the manuscript; and the Coventry plays, which on doubtful evidence have
been associated with the Grey Friars (Franciscans) of Coventry. The Chester
cycle has 25 plays, the Wakefield 30, the Coventry 42, and the York 48. It
is impossible to fix either the date or the authorship of any of these
plays; we only know certainly that they were in great favor from the
twelfth to the sixteenth century. The York plays are generally considered
to be the best; but those of Wakefield show more humor and variety, and
better workmanship. The former cycle especially shows a certain unity
resulting from its aim to represent the whole of man's life from birth to
death. The same thing is noticeable in _Cursor Mundi_, which, with the York
and Wakefield cycles, belongs to the fourteenth century.

At first the actors as well as the authors of the Miracles were the priests
and their chosen assistants. Later, when The town guilds took up the plays
and each guild became responsible for one or more of the series, the actors
were carefully selected and trained. By four o'clock on the morning of
Corpus Christi all the players had to be in their places in the movable
theaters, which were scattered throughout the town in the squares and open
places. Each of these theaters consisted of a two-story platform, set on
wheels. The lower story was a dressing room for the actors; the upper story
was the stage proper, and was reached by a trapdoor from below. When the
play was over the platform was dragged away, and the next play in the cycle
took its place. So in a single square several plays would be presented in
rapid sequence to the same audience. Meanwhile the first play moved on to
another square, where another audience was waiting to hear it.

Though the plays were distinctly religious in character, there is hardly
one without its humorous element. In the play of Noah, for instance, Noah's
shrewish wife makes fun for the audience by wrangling with her husband. In
the Crucifixion play Herod is a prankish kind of tyrant who leaves the
stage to rant among the audience; so that to "out-herod Herod" became a
common proverb. In all the plays the devil is a favorite character and the
butt of every joke. He also leaves the stage to play pranks or frighten the
wondering children. On the side of the stage was often seen a huge dragon's
head with gaping red jaws, belching forth fire and smoke, out of which
poured a tumultuous troop of devils with clubs and pitchforks and gridirons
to punish the wicked characters and to drag them away at last, howling and
shrieking, into hell-mouth, as the dragon's head was called. So the fear of
hell was ingrained into an ignorant people for four centuries. Alternating
with these horrors were bits of rough horse-play and domestic scenes of
peace and kindliness, representing the life of the English fields and
homes. With these were songs and carols, like that of the Nativity, for
instance:

    As I out rode this enderes (last) night,
    Of three jolly shepherds I saw a sight,
    And all about their fold a star shone bright;
         They sang _terli terlow_,
    So merryly the shepherds their pipes can blow.
    Down from heaven, from heaven so high,
    Of angels there came a great companye
    With mirth, and joy, and great solemnitye;
         They sang _terli terlow_,
    So merryly the shepherds their pipes can blow.

Such songs were taken home by the audience and sung for a season, as a
popular tune is now caught from the stage and sung on the streets; and at
times the whole audience would very likely join in the chorus.

After these plays were written according to the general outline of the
Bible stories, no change was tolerated, the audience insisting, like
children at "Punch and Judy," upon seeing the same things year after year.
No originality in plot or treatment was possible, therefore; the only
variety was in new songs and jokes, and in the pranks of the devil.
Childish as such plays seem to us, they are part of the religious
development of all uneducated people. Even now the Persian play of the
"Martyrdom of Ali" is celebrated yearly, and the famous "Passion Play," a
true Miracle, is given every ten years at Oberammergau.

2. THE MORAL PERIOD OF THE DRAMA.[130] The second or moral period of the
drama is shown by the increasing prevalence of the Morality plays. In these
the characters were allegorical personages,--Life, Death, Repentance,
Goodness, Love, Greed, and other virtues and vices. The Moralities may be
regarded, therefore, as the dramatic counterpart of the once popular
allegorical poetry exemplified by the _Romance of the Rose_. It did not
occur to our first, unknown dramatists to portray men and women as they are
until they had first made characters of abstract human qualities.
Nevertheless, the Morality marks a distinct advance over the Miracle in
that it gave free scope to the imagination for new plots and incidents. In
Spain and Portugal these plays, under the name _auto_, were wonderfully
developed by the genius of Calderon and Gil Vicente; but in England the
Morality was a dreary kind of performance, like the allegorical poetry
which preceded it.

To enliven the audience the devil of the Miracle plays was introduced; and
another lively personage called the Vice was the predecessor of our modern
clown and jester. His business was to torment the "virtues" by mischievous
pranks, and especially to make the devil's life a burden by beating him
with a bladder or a wooden sword at every opportunity. The Morality
generally ended in the triumph of virtue, the devil leaping into hell-mouth
with Vice on his back.

The best known of the Moralities is "Everyman," which has recently been
revived in England and America. The subject of the play is the summoning of
every man by Death; and the moral is that nothing can take away the terror
of the inevitable summons but an honest life and the comforts of religion.
In its dramatic unity it suggests the pure Greek drama; there is no change
of time or scene, and the stage is never empty from the beginning to the
end of the performance. Other well-known Moralities are the "Pride of
Life," "Hyckescorner," and "Castell of Perseverance." In the latter, man is
represented as shut up in a castle garrisoned by the virtues and besieged
by the vices.

Like the Miracle plays, most of the old Moralities are of unknown date and
origin. Of the known authors of Moralities, two of the best are John
Skelton, who wrote "Magnificence," and probably also "The Necromancer"; and
Sir David Lindsay (1490-1555), "the poet of the Scotch Reformation," whose
religious business it was to make rulers uncomfortable by telling them
unpleasant truths in the form of poetry. With these men a new element
enters into the Moralities. They satirize or denounce abuses of Church and
State, and introduce living personages thinly disguised as allegories; so
that the stage first becomes a power in shaping events and correcting
abuses.

THE INTERLUDES. It is impossible to draw any accurate line of distinction
between the Moralities and Interludes. In general we may think of the
latter as dramatic scenes, sometimes given by themselves (usually with
music and singing) at banquets and entertainments where a little fun was
wanted; and again slipped into a Miracle play to enliven the audience after
a solemn scene. Thus on the margin of a page of one of the old Chester
plays we read, "The boye and pigge when the kinges are gone." Certainly
this was no part of the original scene between Herod and the three kings.
So also the quarrel between Noah and his wife is probably a late addition
to an old play. The Interludes originated, undoubtedly, in a sense of
humor; and to John Heywood (1497?-1580?), a favorite retainer and jester at
the court of Mary, is due the credit for raising the Interlude to the
distinct dramatic form known as comedy.

Heywood's Interludes were written between 1520 and 1540. His most famous is
"The Four P's," a contest of wit between a "Pardoner, a Palmer, a Pedlar
and a Poticary." The characters here strongly suggest those of
Chaucer.[131] Another interesting Interlude is called "The Play of the
Weather." In this Jupiter and the gods assemble to listen to complaints
about the weather and to reform abuses. Naturally everybody wants his own
kind of weather. The climax is reached by a boy who announces that a boy's
pleasure consists in two things, catching birds and throwing snowballs, and
begs for the weather to be such that he can always do both. Jupiter decides
that he will do just as he pleases about the weather, and everybody goes
home satisfied.

All these early plays were written, for the most part, in a mingling of
prose and wretched doggerel, and add nothing to our literature. Their great
work was to train actors, to keep alive the dramatic spirit, and to prepare
the way for the true drama.

3. THE ARTISTIC PERIOD OF THE DRAMA. The artistic is the final stage in the
development of the English drama. It differs radically from the other two
in that its chief purpose is not to point a moral but to represent human
life as it is. The artistic drama may have purpose, no less than the
Miracle play, but the motive is always subordinate to the chief end of
representing life itself.

The first true play in English, with a regular plot, divided into acts and
scenes, is probably the comedy, "Ralph Royster Doyster." It was written by
Nicholas Udall, master of Eton, and later of Westminster school, and was
first acted by his schoolboys some time before 1556. The story is that of a
conceited fop in love with a widow, who is already engaged to another man.
The play is an adaptation of the _Miles Gloriosus_, a classic comedy by
Plautus, and the English characters are more or less artificial; but as
furnishing a model of a clear plot and natural dialogue, the influence of
this first comedy, with its mixture of classic and English elements, can
hardly be overestimated.

The next play, "Gammer Gurton's Needle" _(cir_. 1562), is a domestic
comedy, a true bit of English realism, representing the life of the peasant
class.

Gammer Gurton is patching the leather breeches of her man Hodge, when Gib,
the cat, gets into the milk pan. While Gammer chases the cat the family
needle is lost, a veritable calamity in those days. The whole household is
turned upside down, and the neighbors are dragged into the affair. Various
comical situations are brought about by Diccon, a thieving vagabond, who
tells Gammer that her neighbor, Dame Chatte, has taken her needle, and who
then hurries to tell Dame Chatte that she is accused by Gammer of stealing
a favorite rooster. Naturally there is a terrible row when the two irate
old women meet and misunderstand each other. Diccon also drags Doctor Rat,
the curate, into the quarrel by telling him that, if he will but creep into
Dame Chatte's cottage by a hidden way, he will find her using the stolen
needle. Then Diccon secretly warns Dame Chatte that Gammer Gurton's man
Hodge is coming to steal her chickens; and the old woman hides in the dark
passage and cudgels the curate soundly with the door bar. All the parties
are finally brought before the justice, when Hodge suddenly and painfully
finds the lost needle--which is all the while stuck in his leather
breeches--and the scene ends uproariously for both audience and actors.

This first wholly English comedy is full of fun and coarse humor, and is
wonderfully true to the life it represents. It was long attributed to John
Still, afterwards bishop of Bath; but the authorship is now definitely
assigned to William Stevenson.[132] Our earliest edition of the play was
printed in 1575; but a similar play called "Dyccon of Bedlam" was licensed
in 1552, twelve years before Shakespeare's birth.

To show the spirit and the metrical form of the play we give a fragment of
the boy's description of the dullard Hodge trying to light a fire on the
hearth from the cat's eyes, and another fragment of the old drinking song
at the beginning of the second act.

    At last in a dark corner two sparkes he thought he sees
    Which were, indede, nought els but Gyb our cat's two eyes.
    "Puffe!" quod Hodge, thinking therby to have fyre without doubt;
    With that Gyb shut her two eyes, and so the fyre was out.
    And by-and-by them opened, even as they were before;
    With that the sparkes appeared, even as they had done of yore.
    And, even as Hodge blew the fire, as he did thincke,
    Gyb, as she felt the blast, strayght-way began to wyncke,
    Tyll Hodge fell of swering, as came best to his turne,
    The fier was sure bewicht, and therfore wold not burne.
    At last Gyb up the stayers, among the old postes and pinnes,
    And Hodge he hied him after till broke were both his shinnes,
    Cursynge and swering othes, were never of his makyng,
    That Gyb wold fyre the house if that shee were not taken.

        _Fyrste a Songe:_
    _Backe and syde, go bare, go bare;
      Booth foote and hande, go colde;
    But, bellye, God sende thee good ale ynoughe,
      Whether it be newe or olde_!
    I can not eate but lytle meate,
      My stomacke is not good;
    But sure I thinke that I can dryncke
      With him that weares a hood.
    Thoughe I go bare, take ye no care,
      I am nothinge a-colde,
    I stuffe my skyn so full within
      Of ioly good ale and olde.
    _Backe and syde, go bare_, etc.

Our first tragedy, "Gorboduc," was written by Thomas Sackville and Thomas
Norton, and was acted in 1562, only two years before the birth of
Shakespeare. It is remarkable not only as our first tragedy, but as the
first play to be written in blank verse, the latter being most significant,
since it started the drama into the style of verse best suited to the
genius of English playwrights.

The story of "Gorboduc" is taken from the early annals of Britain and
recalls the story used by Shakespeare in _King Lear_. Gorboduc, king of
Britain, divides his kingdom between his sons Ferrex and Porrex. The sons
quarrel, and Porrex, the younger, slays his brother, who is the queen's
favorite. Videna, the queen, slays Porrex in revenge; the people rebel and
slay Videna and Gorboduc; then the nobles kill the rebels, and in turn fall
to fighting each other. The line of Brutus being extinct with the death of
Gorboduc, the country falls into anarchy, with rebels, nobles, and a
Scottish invader all fighting for the right of succession. The curtain
falls upon a scene of bloodshed and utter confusion.

The artistic finish of this first tragedy is marred by the authors' evident
purpose to persuade Elizabeth to marry. It aims to show the danger to which
England is exposed by the uncertainty of succession. Otherwise the plan of
the play follows the classical rule of Seneca. There is very little action
on the stage; bloodshed and battle are announced by a messenger; and the
chorus, of four old men of Britain, sums up the situation with a few moral
observations at the end of each of the first four acts.

CLASSICAL INFLUENCE UPON THE DRAMA. The revival of Latin literature had a
decided influence upon the English drama as it developed from the Miracle
plays. In the fifteenth century English teachers, in order to increase the
interest in Latin, began to let their boys act the plays which they had
read as literature, precisely as our colleges now present Greek or German
plays at the yearly festivals. Seneca was the favorite Latin author, and
all his tragedies were translated into English between 1559 and 1581. This
was the exact period in which the first English playwrights were shaping
their own ideas; but the severe simplicity of the classical drama seemed at
first only to hamper the exuberant English spirit. To understand this, one
has only to compare a tragedy of Seneca or of Euripides with one of
Shakespeare, and see how widely the two masters differ in methods.

In the classic play the so-called dramatic unities of time, place, and
action were strictly observed. Time and place must remain the same; the
play could represent a period of only a few hours, and whatever action was
introduced must take place at the spot where the play began. The
characters, therefore, must remain unchanged throughout; there was no
possibility of the child becoming a man, or of the man's growth with
changing circumstances. As the play was within doors, all vigorous action
was deemed out of place on the stage, and battles and important events were
simply announced by a messenger. The classic drama also drew a sharp line
between tragedy and comedy, all fun being rigorously excluded from serious
representations.

The English drama, on the other hand, strove to represent the whole sweep
of life in a single play. The scene changed rapidly; the same actors
appeared now at home, now at court, now on the battlefield; and vigorous
action filled the stage before the eyes of the spectators. The child of one
act appeared as the man of the next, and the imagination of the spectator
was called upon to bridge the gaps from place to place and from year to
year. So the dramatist had free scope to present all life in a single place
and a single hour. Moreover, since the world is always laughing and always
crying at the same moment, tragedy and comedy were presented side by side,
as they are in life itself. As Hamlet sings, after the play that amused the
court but struck the king with deadly fear:

    Why, let the stricken deer go weep,
    The hart ungalled play;
    For some must watch, while some must sleep:
    So runs the world away.

Naturally, with these two ideals struggling to master the English drama,
two schools of writers arose. The University Two Schools Wits, as men of
learning were called, generally of Drama upheld the classical ideal, and
ridiculed the crude-ness of the new English plays. Sackville and Norton
were of this class, and "Gorboduc" was classic in its construction. In the
"Defense of Poesie" Sidney upholds the classics and ridicules the too
ambitious scope of the English drama. Against these were the popular
playwrights, Lyly, Peele, Greene, Marlowe, and many others, who recognized
the English love of action and disregarded the dramatic unities in their
endeavor to present life as it is. In the end the native drama prevailed,
aided by the popular taste which had been trained by four centuries of
Miracles. Our first plays, especially of the romantic type, were extremely
crude and often led to ridiculously extravagant scenes; and here is where
the classic drama exercised an immense influence for good, by insisting
upon beauty of form and definiteness of structure at a time when the
tendency was to satisfy a taste for stage spectacles without regard to
either.

In the year 1574 a royal permit to Lord Leicester's actors allowed them "to
give plays anywhere throughout our realm of England," and this must be
regarded as the beginning of the regular drama. Two years later the first
playhouse, known as "The Theater," was built for these actors by James
Burbage in Finsbury Fields, just north of London. It was in this theater
that Shakespeare probably found employment when he first came to the city.
The success of this venture was immediate, and the next thirty years saw a
score of theatrical companies, at least seven regular theaters, and a dozen
or more inn yards permanently fitted for the giving of plays,--all
established in the city and its immediate suburbs. The growth seems all the
more remarkable when we remember that the London of those days would now be
considered a small city, having (in 1600) only about a hundred thousand
inhabitants.

A Dutch traveler, Johannes de Witt, who visited London in 1596, has given
us the only contemporary drawing we possess of the interior of one of these
theaters. They were built of stone and wood, round or octagonal in shape,
and without a roof, being simply an inclosed courtyard. At one side was the
stage, and before it on the bare ground, or pit, stood that large part of
the audience who could afford to pay only an admission fee. The players and
these groundlings were exposed to the weather; those that paid for seats
were in galleries sheltered by a narrow porch-roof projecting inwards from
the encircling walls; while the young nobles and gallants, who came to be
seen and who could afford the extra fee, took seats on the stage itself,
and smoked and chaffed the actors and threw nuts at the groundlings.[133]
The whole idea of these first theaters, according to De Witt, was like that
of the Roman amphitheater; and the resemblance was heightened by the fact
that, when no play was on the boards, the stage might be taken away and the
pit given over to bull and bear baiting.

In all these theaters, probably, the stage consisted of a bare platform,
with a curtain or "traverse" across the middle, separating the front from
the rear stage. On the latter unexpected scenes or characters were
"discovered" by simply drawing the curtain aside. At first little or no
scenery was used, a gilded sign being the only announcement of a change of
scene; and this very lack of scenery led to better acting, since the actors
must be realistic enough to make the audience forget its shabby
surroundings.[134] By Shakespeare's day, however, painted scenery had
appeared, first at university plays, and then in the regular theaters.[135]
In all our first plays female parts were taken by boy actors, who evidently
were more distressing than the crude scenery, for contemporary literature
has many satirical references to their acting,[136] and even the tolerant
Shakespeare writes:

    Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness.

However that may be, the stage was deemed unfit for women, and actresses
were unknown in England until after the Restoration.

SHAKESPEARE'S PREDECESSORS IN THE DRAMA. The English drama as it developed
from the Miracle plays has an interesting history. It began with
schoolmasters, like Udall, who translated and adapted Latin plays for their
boys to act, and who were naturally governed by classic ideals. It was
continued by the choir masters of St. Paul and the Royal and the Queen's
Chapel, whose companies of choir-boy actors were famous in London and
rivaled the players of the regular theaters.[137] These choir masters were
our first stage managers. They began with masques and interludes and the
dramatic presentation of classic myths modeled after the Italians; but some
of them, like Richard Edwards (choir master of the Queen's Chapel in 1561),
soon added farces from English country life and dramatized some of
Chaucer's stories. Finally, the regular playwrights, Kyd, Nash, Lyly,
Peele, Greene, and Marlowe, brought the English drama to the point where
Shakespeare began to experiment upon it.

Each of these playwrights added or emphasized some essential element in the
drama, which appeared later in the work of Shakespeare. Thus John Lyly
(1554?-1606), who is now known chiefly as having developed the pernicious
literary style called euphuism,[138] is one of the most influential of the
early dramatists. His court comedies are remarkable for their witty
dialogue and for being our first plays to aim definitely at unity and
artistic finish. Thomas Kyd's _Spanish Tragedy_ (_c._ 1585) first gives us
the drama, or rather the melodrama, of passion, copied by Marlowe and
Shakespeare. This was the most popular of the early Elizabethan plays; it
was revised again and again, and Ben Jonson is said to have written one
version and to have acted the chief part of Hieronimo.[139] And Robert
Greene (1558?-1592) plays the chief part in the early development of
romantic comedy, and gives us some excellent scenes of English country life
in plays like _Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay_.

Even a brief glance at the life and work of these first playwrights shows
three noteworthy things which have a bearing on Shakespeare's career: (1)
These men were usually actors as well as dramatists. They knew the stage
and the audience, and in writing their plays they remembered not only the
actor's part but also the audience's love for stories and brave spectacles.
"Will it act well, and will it please our audience," were the questions of
chief concern to our early dramatists. (2) Their training began as actors;
then they revised old plays, and finally became independent writers. In
this their work shows an exact parallel with that of Shakespeare. (3) They
often worked together, probably as Shakespeare worked with Marlowe and
Fletcher, either in revising old plays or in creating new ones. They had a
common store of material from which they derived their stories and
characters, hence their frequent repetition of names; and they often
produced two or more plays on the same subject. Much of Shakespeare's work
depends, as we shall see, on previous plays; and even his _Hamlet_ uses the
material of an earlier play of the same name, probably by Kyd, which was
well known to the London stage in 1589, some twelve years before
Shakespeare's great work was written.

All these things are significant, if we are to understand the Elizabethan
drama and the man who brought it to perfection. Shakespeare was not simply
a great genius; he was also a great worker, and he developed in exactly the
same way as did all his fellow craftsmen. And, contrary to the prevalent
opinion, the Elizabethan drama is not a Minerva-like creation, springing
full grown from the head of one man; it is rather an orderly though rapid
development, in which many men bore a part. All our early dramatists are
worthy of study for the part they played in the development of the drama;
but we can here consider only one, the most typical of all, whose best work
is often ranked with that of Shakespeare.


CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE (1564-1593)

Marlowe is one of the most suggestive figures of the English Renaissance,
and the greatest of Shakespeare's predecessors. The glory of the
Elizabethan drama dates from his _Tamburlaine_ (1587), wherein the whole
restless temper of the age finds expression:

    Nature, that framed us of four elements
    Warring within our breasts for regiment,
    Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds:
    Our souls--whose faculties can comprehend
    The wondrous architecture of the world,
    And measure every wandering planet's course,
    Still climbing after knowledge infinite,
    And always moving as the restless spheres--
    Will us to wear ourselves and never rest.
    _Tamburlaine_, Pt. I, II, vii.

Life. Marlowe was born in Canterbury, only a few months before Shakespeare.
He was the son of a poor shoemaker, but through the kindness of a patron
was educated at the town grammar school and then at Cambridge. When he came
to London (_c._ 1584), his soul was surging with the ideals of the
Renaissance, which later found expression in Faustus, the scholar longing
for unlimited knowledge and for power to grasp the universe. Unfortunately,
Marlowe had also the unbridled passions which mark the early, or Pagan
Renaissance, as Taine calls it, and the conceit of a young man just
entering the realms of knowledge. He became an actor and lived in a
low-tavern atmosphere of excess and wretchedness. In 1587, when but
twenty-three years old, he produced _Tamburlaine_, which brought him
instant recognition. Thereafter, notwithstanding his wretched life, he
holds steadily to a high literary purpose. Though all his plays abound in
violence, no doubt reflecting many of the violent scenes in which he lived,
he develops his "mighty line" and depicts great scenes in magnificent
bursts of poetry, such as the stage had never heard before. In five years,
while Shakespeare was serving his apprenticeship, Marlowe produced all his
great work. Then he was stabbed in a drunken brawl and died wretchedly, as
he had lived. The Epilogue of _Faustus_ might be written across his
tombstone:

    Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight,
    And burned is Apollo's laurel bough
    That sometime grew within this learnéd man.

MARLOWE'S WORKS. In addition to the poem "Hero and Leander," to which we
have referred,[140] Marlowe is famous for four dramas, now known as the
Marlowesque or one-man type of tragedy, each revolving about one central
personality who is consumed by the lust of power. The first of these is
_Tamburlaine_, the story of Timur the Tartar. Timur begins as a shepherd
chief, who first rebels and then triumphs over the Persian king.
Intoxicated by his success, Timur rushes like a tempest over the whole
East. Seated on his chariot drawn by captive kings, with a caged emperor
before him, he boasts of his power which overrides all things. Then,
afflicted with disease, he raves against the gods and would overthrow them
as he has overthrown earthly rulers. _Tamburlaine_ is an epic rather than a
drama; but one can understand its instant success with a people only half
civilized, fond of military glory, and the instant adoption of its "mighty
line" as the instrument of all dramatic expression.

_Faustus_, the second play, is one of the best of Marlowe's works.[141] The
story is that of a scholar who longs for infinite knowledge, and who turns
from Theology, Philosophy, Medicine, and Law, the four sciences of the
time, to the study of magic, much as a child might turn from jewels to
tinsel and colored paper. In order to learn magic he sells himself to the
devil, on condition that he shall have twenty-four years of absolute power
and knowledge. The play is the story of those twenty-four years. Like
_Tamburlaine_, it is lacking in dramatic construction,[142] but has an
unusual number of passages of rare poetic beauty. Milton's Satan suggests
strongly that the author of _Paradise Lost_ had access to _Faustus_ and
used it, as he may also have used _Tamburlaine_, for the magnificent
panorama displayed by Satan in _Paradise Regained_. For instance, more than
fifty years before Milton's hero says, "Which way I turn is hell, myself am
hell," Marlowe had written:

    _Faust_. How comes it then that thou art out of hell?
    _Mephisto_. Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.
           *       *       *       *       *
        Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed
        In one self place; for where we are is hell,
        And where hell is there must we ever be.

Marlowe's third play is _The Jew of Malta_, a study of the lust for wealth,
which centers about Barabas, a terrible old money lender, strongly
suggestive of Shylock in _The Merchant of Venice_. The first part of the
play is well constructed, showing a decided advance, but the last part is
an accumulation of melodramatic horrors. Barabas is checked in his
murderous career by falling into a boiling caldron which he had prepared
for another, and dies blaspheming, his only regret being that he has not
done more evil in his life.

Marlowe's last play is _Edward II_, a tragic study of a king's weakness and
misery. In point of style and dramatic construction, it is by far the best
of Marlowe's plays, and is a worthy predecessor of Shakespeare's historical
drama.

Marlowe is the only dramatist of the time who is ever compared with
Shakespeare.[143] When we remember that he died at twenty-nine, probably
before Shakespeare had produced a single great play, we must wonder what he
might have done had he outlived his wretched youth and become a man. Here
and there his work is remarkable for its splendid imagination, for the
stateliness of its verse, and for its rare bits of poetic beauty; but in
dramatic instinct, in wide knowledge of human life, in humor, in
delineation of woman's character, in the delicate fancy which presents an
Ariel as perfectly as a Macbeth,--in a word, in all that makes a dramatic
genius, Shakespeare stands alone. Marlowe simply prepared the way for the
master who was to follow.

VARIETY OF THE EARLY DRAMA. The thirty years between our first regular
English plays and Shakespeare's first comedy[144] witnessed a development
of the drama which astonishes us both by its rapidity and variety. We shall
better appreciate Shakespeare's work if we glance for a moment at the plays
that preceded him, and note how he covers the whole field and writes almost
every form and variety of the drama known to his age.

First in importance, or at least in popular interest, are the new Chronicle
plays, founded upon historical events and characters. They show the strong
national spirit of the Elizabethan Age, and their popularity was due
largely to the fact that audiences came to the theaters partly to gratify
their awakened national spirit and to get their first knowledge of national
history. Some of the Moralities, like Bayle's _King Johan_ (1538), are
crude Chronicle plays, and the early Robin Hood plays and the first
tragedy, _Gorboduc_, show the same awakened popular interest in English
history. During the reign of Elizabeth the popular Chronicle plays
increased till we have the record of over two hundred and twenty, half of
which are still extant, dealing with almost every important character, real
or legendary, in English history. Of Shakespeare's thirty-seven dramas, ten
are true Chronicle plays of English kings; three are from the legendary
annals of Britain; and three more are from the history of other nations.

Other types of the early drama are less clearly defined, but we may sum
them up under a few general heads: (1) The Domestic Drama began with crude
home scenes introduced into the Miracles and developed in a score of
different ways, from the coarse humor of _Gammer Gurton's Needle_ to the
Comedy of Manners of Jonson and the later dramatists. Shakespeare's _Taming
of the Shrew_ and _Merry Wives of Windsor_ belong to this class. (2) The
so-called Court Comedy is the opposite of the former in that it represented
a different kind of life and was intended for a different audience. It was
marked by elaborate dialogue, by jests, retorts, and endless plays on
words, rather than by action. It was made popular by Lyly's success, and
was imitated in Shakespeare's first or "Lylian" comedies, such as _Love's
Labour's Lost_, and the complicated _Two Gentlemen of Verona_. (3) Romantic
Comedy and Romantic Tragedy suggest the most artistic and finished types of
the drama, which were experimented upon by Peele, Greene, and Marlowe, and
were brought to perfection in _The Merchant of Venice, Romeo and Juliet_,
and _The Tempest_. (4) In addition to the above types were several
others,--the Classical Plays, modeled upon Seneca and favored by cultivated
audiences; the Melodrama, favorite of the groundlings, which depended not
on plot or characters but upon a variety of striking scenes and incidents;
and the Tragedy of Blood, always more or less melodramatic, like Kyd's
_Spanish Tragedy_, which grew more blood-and-thundery in Marlowe and
reached a climax of horrors in Shakespeare's _Titus Andronicus_. It is
noteworthy that _Hamlet, Lear_, and _Macbeth_ all belong to this class, but
the developed genius of the author raised them to a height such as the
Tragedy of Blood had never known before.

These varied types are quite enough to show with what doubtful and unguided
experiments our first dramatists were engaged, like men first setting out
in rafts and dugouts on an unknown sea. They are the more interesting when
we remember that Shakespeare tried them all; that he is the only dramatist
whose plays cover the whole range of the drama from its beginning to its
decline. From the stage spectacle he developed the drama of human life; and
instead of the doggerel and bombast of our first plays he gives us the
poetry of _Romeo and Juliet_ and _Midsummer Night's Dream_. In a word,
Shakespeare brought order out of dramatic chaos. In a few short years he
raised the drama from a blundering experiment to a perfection of form and
expression which has never since been rivaled.


IV. SHAKESPEARE

One who reads a few of Shakespeare's great plays and then the meager story
of his life is generally filled with a vague wonder. Here is an unknown
country boy, poor and poorly educated according to the standards of his
age, who arrives at the great city of London and goes to work at odd jobs
in a theater. In a year or two he is associated with scholars and
dramatists, the masters of their age, writing plays of kings and clowns, of
gentlemen and heroes and noble women, all of whose lives he seems to know
by intimate association. In a few years more he leads all that brilliant
group of poets and dramatists who have given undying glory to the Age of
Elizabeth. Play after play runs from his pen, mighty dramas of human life
and character following one another so rapidly that good work seems
impossible; yet they stand the test of time, and their poetry is still
unrivaled in any language. For all this great work the author apparently
cares little, since he makes no attempt to collect or preserve his
writings. A thousand scholars have ever since been busy collecting,
identifying, classifying the works which this magnificent workman tossed
aside so carelessly when he abandoned the drama and retired to his native
village. He has a marvelously imaginative and creative mind; but he invents
few, if any, new plots or stories. He simply takes an old play or an old
poem, makes it over quickly, and lo! this old familiar material glows with
the deepest thoughts and the tenderest feelings that ennoble our humanity;
and each new generation of men finds it more wonderful than the last. How
did he do it? That is still an unanswered question and the source of our
wonder.

There are, in general, two theories to account for Shakespeare. The
romantic school of writers have always held that in him "all came from
within"; that his genius was his sufficient guide; and that to the
overmastering power of his genius alone we owe all his great works.
Practical, unimaginative men, on the other hand, assert that in Shakespeare
"all came from without," and that we must study his environment rather than
his genius, if we are to understand him. He lived in a play-loving age; he
studied the crowds, gave them what they wanted, and simply reflected their
own thoughts and feelings. In reflecting the English crowd about him he
unconsciously reflected all crowds, which are alike in all ages; hence his
continued popularity. And in being guided by public sentiment he was not
singular, but followed the plain path that every good dramatist has always
followed to success.

Probably the truth of the matter is to be found somewhere between these two
extremes. Of his great genius there can be no question; but there are other
things to consider. As we have already noticed, Shakespeare was trained,
like his fellow workmen, first as an actor, second as a reviser of old
plays, and last as an independent dramatist. He worked with other
playwrights and learned their secret. Like them, he studied and followed
the public taste, and his work indicates at least three stages, from his
first somewhat crude experiments to his finished masterpieces. So it would
seem that in Shakespeare we have the result of hard work and of orderly
human development, quite as much as of transcendent genius.

LIFE (1564-1616). Two outward influences were powerful in developing the
genius of Shakespeare,--the little village of Stratford, center of the most
beautiful and romantic district in rural England, and the great city of
London, the center of the world's political activity. In one he learned to
know the natural man in his natural environment; in the other, the social,
the artificial man in the most unnatural of surroundings.

From the register of the little parish church at Stratford-on-Avon we learn
that William Shakespeare was baptized there on the twenty-sixth of April,
1564 (old style). As it was customary to baptize children on the third day
after birth, the twenty-third of April (May 3, according to our present
calendar) is generally accepted as the poet's birthday.

His father, John Shakespeare, was a farmer's son from the neighboring
village of Snitterfield, who came to Stratford about 1551, and began to
prosper as a trader in corn, meat, leather, and other agricultural
products. His mother, Mary Arden, was the daughter of a prosperous farmer,
descended from an old Warwickshire family of mixed Anglo-Saxon and Norman
blood. In 1559 this married couple sold a piece of land, and the document
is signed, "The marke + of John Shacksper. The marke + of Mary Shacksper";
and from this it has been generally inferred that, like the vast majority
of their countrymen, neither of the poet's parents could read or write.
This was probably true of his mother; but the evidence from Stratford
documents now indicates that his father could write, and that he also
audited the town accounts; though in attesting documents he sometimes made
a mark, leaving his name to be filled in by the one who drew up the
document.

Of Shakespeare's education we know little, except that for a few years he
probably attended the endowed grammar school at Stratford, where he picked
up the "small Latin and less Greek" to which his learned friend Ben Jonson
refers. His real teachers, meanwhile, were the men and women and the
natural influences which surrounded him. Stratford is a charming little
village in beautiful Warwickshire, and near at hand were the Forest of
Arden, the old castles of Warwick and Kenilworth, and the old Roman camps
and military roads, to appeal powerfully to the boy's lively imagination.
Every phase of the natural beauty of this exquisite region is reflected in
Shakespeare's poetry; just as his characters reflect the nobility and the
littleness, the gossip, vices, emotions, prejudices, and traditions of the
people about him.

    I saw a smith stand with his hammer, thus,
    The whilst his iron did on the anvil cool,
    With open mouth swallowing a tailor's news;
    Who, with his shears and measure in his hand,
    Standing on slippers, which his nimble haste
    Had falsely thrust upon contrary feet,
    Told of a many thousand warlike French
    That were embattailed and ranked in Kent.[145]

Such passages suggest not only genius but also a keen, sympathetic
observer, whose eyes see every significant detail. So with the nurse in
_Romeo and Juliet_, whose endless gossip and vulgarity cannot quite hide a
kind heart. She is simply the reflection of some forgotten nurse with whom
Shakespeare had talked by the wayside.

Not only the gossip but also the dreams, the unconscious poetry that sleeps
in the heart of the common people, appeal tremendously to Shakespeare's
imagination and are reflected in his greatest plays. Othello tries to tell
a curt soldier's story of his love; but the account is like a bit of
Mandeville's famous travels, teeming with the fancies that filled men's
heads when the great round world was first brought to their attention by
daring explorers. Here is a bit of folklore, touched by Shakespeare's
exquisite fancy, which shows what one boy listened to before the fire at
Halloween:

                               She comes
    In shape no bigger than an agate-stone
    On the fore-finger of an alderman,
    Drawn with a team of little atomies
    Athwart men's noses as they lie asleep;
    Her waggon-spokes made of long spinners' legs,
    The cover of the wings of grasshoppers,
    The traces of the smallest spider's web,
    The collars of the moonshine's watery beams,
    Her whip of cricket's bone, the lash of film,
    Her waggoner a small grey-coated gnat,
           *       *       *       *       *
    Her chariot is an empty hazel nut
    Made by the joiner squirrel, or old grub,
    Time out o' mind the fairies' coachmakers.
    And in this state she gallops night by night
    Through lovers' brains, and then they dream of love;
           *       *       *       *       *
    O'er lawyers' fingers, who straight dream on fees,
    O'er ladies' lips, who straight on kisses dream.[146]

So with Shakespeare's education at the hands of Nature, which came from
keeping his heart as well as his eyes wide open to the beauty of the world.
He speaks of a horse, and we know the fine points of a thoroughbred; he
mentions the duke's hounds, and we hear them clamoring on a fox trail,
their voices matched like bells in the frosty air; he stops for an instant
in the sweep of a tragedy to note a flower, a star, a moonlit bank, a
hilltop touched by the sunrise, and instantly we know what our own hearts
felt but could not quite express when we saw the same thing. Because he
notes and remembers every significant thing in the changing panorama of
earth and sky, no other writer has ever approached him in the perfect
natural setting of his characters.

When Shakespeare was about fourteen years old his father lost his little
property and fell into debt, and the boy probably left school to help
support the family of younger children. What occupation he followed for the
next eight years is a matter of conjecture. From evidence found in his
plays, it is alleged with some show of authority that he was a country
schoolmaster and a lawyer's clerk, the character of Holofernes, in _Love's
Labour's Lost_, being the warrant for one, and Shakespeare's knowledge of
law terms for the other. But if we take such evidence, then Shakespeare
must have been a botanist, because of his knowledge of wild flowers; a
sailor, because he knows the ropes; a courtier, because of his
extraordinary facility in quips and compliments and courtly language; a
clown, because none other is so dull and foolish; a king, because Richard
and Henry are true to life; a woman, because he has sounded the depths of a
woman's feelings; and surely a Roman, because in _Coriolanus_ and _Julius
Cæsar_ he has shown us the Roman spirit better than have the Roman writers
themselves. He was everything, in his imagination, and it is impossible
from a study of his scenes and characters to form a definite opinion as to
his early occupation.

In 1582 Shakespeare was married to Anne Hathaway, the daughter of a peasant
family of Shottery, who was eight years older than her boy husband. From
numerous sarcastic references to marriage made by the characters in his
plays, and from the fact that he soon left his wife and family and went to
London, it is generally alleged that the marriage was a hasty and unhappy
one; but here again the evidence is entirely untrustworthy. In many
Miracles as well as in later plays it was customary to depict the seamy
side of domestic life for the amusement of the crowd; and Shakespeare may
have followed the public taste in this as he did in other things. The
references to love and home and quiet joys in Shakespeare's plays are
enough, if we take such evidence, to establish firmly the opposite
supposition, that his love was a very happy one. And the fact that, after
his enormous success in London, he retired to Stratford to live quietly
with his wife and daughters, tends to the same conclusion.

About the year 1587 Shakespeare left his family and went to London and
joined himself to Burbage's company of players. A persistent tradition says
that he had incurred the anger of Sir Thomas Lucy, first by poaching deer
in that nobleman's park, and then, when haled before a magistrate, by
writing a scurrilous ballad about Sir Thomas, which so aroused the old
gentleman's ire that Shakespeare was obliged to flee the country. An old
record[147] says that the poet "was much given to all unluckiness in
stealing venison and rabbits," the unluckiness probably consisting in
getting caught himself, and not in any lack of luck in catching the
rabbits. The ridicule heaped upon the Lucy family in _Henry IV_ and the
_Merry Wives of Windsor_ gives some weight to this tradition. Nicholas
Rowe, who published the first life of Shakespeare,[148] is the authority
for this story; but there is some reason to doubt whether, at the time when
Shakespeare is said to have poached in the deer park of Sir Thomas Lucy at
Charlescote, there were any deer or park at the place referred to. The
subject is worthy of some scant attention, if only to show how worthless is
the attempt to construct out of rumor the story of a great life which,
fortunately perhaps, had no contemporary biographer.

Of his life in London from 1587 to 1611, the period of his greatest
literary activity, we know nothing definitely. We can judge only from his
plays, and from these it is evident that he entered into the stirring life
of England's capital with the same perfect sympathy and understanding that
marked him among the plain people of his native Warwickshire. The first
authentic reference to him is in 1592, when Greene's[149] bitter attack
appeared, showing plainly that Shakespeare had in five years assumed an
important position among playwrights. Then appeared the apology of the
publishers of Greene's pamphlet, with their tribute to the poet's sterling
character, and occasional literary references which show that he was known
among his fellows as "the gentle Shakespeare." Ben Jonson says of him: "I
loved the man and do honor his memory, on this side idolatry, as much as
any. He was indeed honest, and of an open and free nature." To judge from
only three of his earliest plays[150] it would seem reasonably evident that
in the first five years of his London life he had gained entrance to the
society of gentlemen and scholars, had caught their characteristic
mannerisms and expressions, and so was ready by knowledge and observation
as well as by genius to weave into his dramas the whole stirring life of
the English people. The plays themselves, with the testimony of
contemporaries and his business success, are strong evidence against the
tradition that his life in London was wild and dissolute, like that of the
typical actor and playwright of his time.

Shakespeare's first work may well have been that of a general helper, an
odd-job man, about the theater; but he soon became an actor, and the
records of the old London theaters show that in the next ten years he
gained a prominent place, though there is little reason to believe that he
was counted among the "stars." Within two years he was at work on plays,
and his course here was exactly like that of other playwrights of his time.
He worked with other men, and he revised old plays before writing his own,
and so gained a practical knowledge of his art. _Henry VI _(_c_. 1590-1591)
is an example of this tinkering work, in which, however, his native power
is unmistakably manifest. The three parts of _Henry VI_ (and _Richard III_,
which belongs with them) are a succession of scenes from English Chronicle
history strung together very loosely; and only in the last is there any
definite attempt at unity. That he soon fell under Marlowe's influence is
evident from the atrocities and bombast of _Titus Andronicus_ and _Richard
III_. The former may have been written by both playwrights in
collaboration, or may be one of Marlowe's horrors left unfinished by his
early death and brought to an end by Shakespeare. He soon broke away from
this apprentice work, and then appeared in rapid succession _Love's
Labour's Lost, Comedy of Errors, Two Gentlemen of Verona_, the first
English Chronicle plays,[151] _A Midsummer Night's Dream_, and _Romeo and
Juliet_. This order is more or less conjectural; but the wide variety of
these plays, as well as their unevenness and frequent crudities, marks the
first or experimental stage of Shakespeare's work. It is as if the author
were trying his power, or more likely trying the temper of his audience.
For it must be remembered that to please his audience was probably the
ruling motive of Shakespeare, as of the other early dramatists, during the
most vigorous and prolific period of his career.

Shakespeare's poems, rather than his dramatic work, mark the beginning of
his success. "Venus and Adonis" became immensely popular in London, and its
dedication to the Earl of Southampton brought, according to tradition, a
substantial money gift, which may have laid the foundation for
Shakespeare's business success. He appears to have shrewdly invested his
money, and soon became part owner of the Globe and Blackfriars theaters, in
which his plays were presented by his own companies. His success and
popularity grew amazingly. Within a decade of his unnoticed arrival in
London he was one of the most famous actors and literary men in England.

Following his experimental work there came a succession of wonderful
plays,--_Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Julius Cæsar,
Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra_. The great
tragedies of this period are associated with a period of gloom and sorrow
in the poet's life; but of its cause we have no knowledge. It may have been
this unknown sorrow which turned his thoughts back to Stratford and caused,
apparently, a dissatisfaction with his work and profession; but the latter
is generally attributed to other causes. Actors and playwrights were in his
day generally looked upon with suspicion or contempt; and Shakespeare, even
in the midst of success, seems to have looked forward to the time when he
could retire to Stratford to live the life of a farmer and country
gentleman. His own and his father's families were first released from debt;
then, in 1597, he bought New Place, the finest house in Stratford, and soon
added a tract of farming land to complete his estate. His profession may
have prevented his acquiring the title of "gentleman," or he may have only
followed a custom of the time[152] when he applied for and obtained a coat
of arms for his father, and so indirectly secured the title by inheritance.
His home visits grew more and more frequent till, about the year 1611, he
left London and retired permanently to Stratford.

Though still in the prime of life, Shakespeare soon abandoned his dramatic
work for the comfortable life of a country gentleman. Of his later plays,
_Coriolanus, Cymbeline, Winter's Tale_, and _Pericles_ show a decided
falling off from his previous work, and indicate another period of
experimentation; this time not to test his own powers but to catch the
fickle humor of the public. As is usually the case with a theater-going
people, they soon turned from serious drama to sentimental or more
questionable spectacles; and with Fletcher, who worked with Shakespeare and
succeeded him as the first playwright of London, the decline of the drama
had already begun. In 1609, however, occurred an event which gave
Shakespeare his chance for a farewell to the public. An English ship
disappeared, and all on board were given up for lost. A year later the
sailors returned home, and their arrival created intense excitement. They
had been wrecked on the unknown Bermudas, and had lived there for ten
months, terrified by mysterious noises which they thought came from spirits
and devils. Five different accounts of this fascinating shipwreck were
published, and the Bermudas became known as the "Ile of Divels."
Shakespeare took this story--which caused as much popular interest as that
later shipwreck which gave us _Robinson Crusoe_--and wove it into _The
Tempest_. In the same year (1611) he probably sold his interest in the
Globe and Blackfriars theaters, and his dramatic work was ended. A few
plays were probably left unfinished[153] and were turned over to Fletcher
and other dramatists.

That Shakespeare thought little of his success and had no idea that his
dramas were the greatest that the world ever produced seems evident from
the fact that he made no attempt to collect or publish his works, or even
to save his manuscripts, which were carelessly left to stage managers of
the theaters, and so found their way ultimately to the ragman. After a few
years of quiet life, of which we have less record than of hundreds of
simple country gentlemen of the time, Shakespeare died on the probable
anniversary of his birth, April 23, 1616. He was given a tomb in the
chancel of the parish church, not because of his preëminence in literature,
but because of his interest in the affairs of a country village. And in the
sad irony of fate, the broad stone that covered his tomb--now an object of
veneration to the thousands that yearly visit the little church--was
inscribed as follows:

    Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbeare
    To dig the dust enclosed heare;
    Bleste be the man that spares these stones,
    And curst be he that moves my bones.

This wretched doggerel, over the world's greatest poet, was intended, no
doubt, as a warning to some stupid sexton, lest he should empty the grave
and give the honored place to some amiable gentleman who had given more
tithes to the parish.

WORKS OF SHAKESPEARE. At the time of Shakespeare's death twenty-one plays
existed in manuscripts in the various theaters. A few others had already
been printed in quarto form, and the latter are the only publications that
could possibly have met with the poet's own approval. More probably they
were taken down in shorthand by some listener at the play and then
"pirated" by some publisher for his own profit. The first printed
collection of his plays, now called the First Folio (1623), was made by two
actors, Heming and Condell, who asserted that they had access to the papers
of the poet and had made a perfect edition, "in order to keep the memory of
so worthy a friend and fellow alive." This contains thirty-six of the
thirty-seven plays generally attributed to Shakespeare, _Pericles_ being
omitted. This celebrated First Folio was printed from playhouse manuscripts
and from printed quartos containing many notes and changes by individual
actors and stage managers. Moreover, it was full of typographical errors,
though the editors alleged great care and accuracy; and so, though it is
the only authoritative edition we have, it is of little value in
determining the dates, or the classification of the plays as they existed
in Shakespeare's mind.

Notwithstanding this uncertainty, a careful reading of the plays and poems
leaves us with an impression of four different periods of work, probably
corresponding with the growth and experience of the poet's life. These are:
(1) a period of early experimentation. It is marked by youthfulness and
exuberance of imagination, by extravagance of language, and by the frequent
use of rimed couplets with his blank verse. The period dates from his
arrival in London to 1595. Typical works of this first period are his early
poems, _Love's Labour's Lost, Two Gentlemen of Verona_, and _Richard III_.
(2) A period of rapid growth and development, from 1595 to 1600. Such plays
as _The Merchant of Venice, Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It_, and
_Henry IV_, all written in this period, show more careful and artistic
work, better plots, and a marked increase in knowledge of human nature. (3)
A period of gloom and depression, from 1600 to 1607, which marks the full
maturity of his powers. What caused this evident sadness is unknown; but it
is generally attributed to some personal experience, coupled with the
political misfortunes of his friends, Essex and Southampton. The _Sonnets_
with their note of personal disappointment, _Twelfth Night_, which is
Shakespeare's "farewell to mirth," and his great tragedies, _Hamlet, Lear,
Macbeth, Othello_, and _Julius Cæsar_, belong to this period. (4) A period
of restored serenity, of calm after storm, which marked the last years of
the poet's literary work. _The Winter's Tale_ and _The Tempest_ are the
best of his later plays; but they all show a falling off from his previous
work, and indicate a second period of experimentation with the taste of a
fickle public.

To read in succession four plays, taking a typical work from each of the
above periods, is one of the very best ways of getting quickly at the real
life and mind of Shakespeare. Following is a complete list with the
approximate dates of his works, classified according to the above four
periods.

First Period, Early Experiment. _Venus and Adonis, Rape of Lucrece_, 1594;
_Titus Andronicus, Henry VI_ (three parts), 1590-1591; _Love's Labour's
Lost_, 1590; _Comedy of Errors, Two Gentlemen of Verona_, 1591-1592;
_Richard-III_, 1593; _Richard II, King John_, 1594-1595.

Second Period, Development. _Romeo and Juliet, Midsummer Night's Dream_,
1595; _Merchant of Venice, Henry IV_ (first part), 1596; _Henry IV_ (second
part), _Merry Wives of Windsor_, 1597; _Much Ado About Nothing_, 1598; _As
You Like It, Henry V_, 1599.

Third Period, Maturity and Gloom. _Sonnets_ (1600-?), _Twelfth Night_,
1600; _Taming of the Shrew, Julius Cæsar, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida_,
1601-1602; _All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure_, 1603;
_Othello_, 1604; _King Lear_, 1605; _Macbeth_, 1606; _Antony and Cleopatra,
Timon of Athens_, 1607.

Fourth Period, Late Experiment. _Coriolanus, Pericles_, 1608; _Cymbeline_,
1609; _Winter's Tale_, 1610-1611; _The Tempest_, 1611; _Henry VIII_
(unfinished).

CLASSIFICATION ACCORDING TO SOURCE. In history, legend, and story,
Shakespeare found the material for nearly all his dramas; and so they are
often divided into three classes, called historical plays, like _Richard
III_ and _Henry V;_ legendary or partly historical plays, like _Macbeth,
King Lear_, and _Julius Cæsar;_ and fictional plays, like _Romeo and
Juliet_ and _The Merchant of Venice_. Shakespeare invented few, if any, of
the plots or stories upon which his dramas are founded, but borrowed them
freely, after the custom of his age, wherever he found them. For his
legendary and historical material he depended, largely on _Holinshed's
Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland_, and on North's translation
of Plutarch's famous _Lives_.

A full half of his plays are fictional, and in these he used the most
popular romances of the day, seeming to depend most on the Italian
story-tellers. Only two or three of his plots, as in _Love's Labour's Lost_
and _Merry Wives of Windsor_, are said to be original, and even these are
doubtful. Occasionally Shakespeare made over an older play, as in _Henry
VI, Comedy of Errors_, and _Hamlet;_ and in one instance at least he seized
upon an incident of shipwreck in which London was greatly interested, and
made out of it the original and fascinating play of _The Tempest_, in much
the same spirit which leads our modern playwrights when they dramatize a
popular novel or a war story to catch the public fancy.

CLASSIFICATION ACCORDING TO DRAMATIC TYPE. Shakespeare's dramas are usually
divided into three classes, called tragedies, comedies, and historical
plays. Strictly speaking the drama has but two divisions, tragedy and
comedy, in which are included the many subordinate forms of tragi-comedy,
melodrama, lyric drama (opera), farce, etc. A tragedy is a drama in which
the principal characters are involved in desperate circumstances or led by
overwhelming passions. It is invariably serious and dignified. The movement
is always stately, but grows more and more rapid as it approaches the
climax; and the end is always calamitous, resulting in death or dire
misfortune to the principals. As Chaucer's monk says, before he begins to
"biwayle in maner of tragedie":

    Tragedie is to seyn a certeyn storie
    Of him that stood in great prosperitee,
    And is y-fallen out of heigh degree
    Into miserie, and endeth wrecchedly.

A comedy, on the other hand, is a drama in which the characters are placed
in more or less humorous situations. The movement is light and often
mirthful, and the play ends in general good will and happiness. The
historical drama aims to present some historical age or character, and may
be either a comedy or a tragedy. The following list includes the best of
Shakespeare's plays in each of the three classes; but the order indicates
merely the author's personal opinion of the relative merits of the plays in
each class. Thus _Merchant of Venice_ would be the first of the comedies
for the beginner to read, and _Julius Cæsar_ is an excellent introduction
to the historical plays and the tragedies.

Comedies. _Merchant of Venice, Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It,
Winter's Tale, The Tempest, Twelfth Night_.

Tragedies. _Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Hamlet, King Lear, Othello_.

Historical Plays. _Julius Cæsar, Richard III, Henry IV, Henry V,
Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra_.

DOUBTFUL PLAYS. It is reasonably certain that some of the plays generally
attributed to Shakespeare are partly the work of other dramatists. The
first of these doubtful plays, often called the Pre-Shakespearian Group,
are _Titus Andronicus_ and the first part of _Henry VI_. Shakespeare
probably worked with Marlowe in the two last parts of _Henry VI_ and in
_Richard III_. The three plays, _Taming of the Shrew, Timon_, and
_Pericles_ are only partly Shakespeare's work, but the other authors are
unknown. _Henry VIII_ is the work of Fletcher and Shakespeare, opinion
being divided as to whether Shakespeare helped Fletcher, or whether it was
an unfinished work of Shakespeare which was put into Fletcher's hands for
completion. _Two Noble Kinsmen_ is a play not ordinarily found in editions
of Shakespeare, but it is often placed among his doubtful works. The
greater part of the play is undoubtedly by Fletcher. _Edward III_ is one of
several crude plays published at first anonymously and later attributed to
Shakespeare by publishers who desired to sell their wares. It contains a
few passages that strongly suggest Shakespeare; but the external evidence
is all against his authorship.

SHAKESPEARE'S POEMS. It is generally asserted that, if Shakespeare had
written no plays, his poems alone would have given him a commanding place
in the Elizabethan Age. Nevertheless, in the various histories of our
literature there is apparent a desire to praise and pass over all but the
_Sonnets_ as rapidly as possible; and the reason may be stated frankly. His
two long poems, "Venus and Adonis" and "The Rape of Lucrece," contain much
poetic fancy; but it must be said of both that the subjects are unpleasant,
and that they are dragged out to unnecessary length in order to show the
play of youthful imagination. They were extremely popular in Shakespeare's
day, but in comparison with his great dramatic works these poems are now of
minor importance.

Shakespeare's _Sonnets_, one hundred and fifty-four in number, are the only
direct expression of the poet's own feelings that we possess; for his plays
are the most impersonal in all literature. They were published together in
1609; but if they had any unity in Shakespeare's mind, their plan and
purpose are hard to discover. By some critics they are regarded as mere
literary exercises; by others as the expression of some personal grief
during the third period of the poet's literary career. Still others, taking
a hint from the sonnet beginning "Two loves I have, of comfort and
despair," divide them all into two classes, addressed to a man who was
Shakespeare's friend, and to a woman who disdained his love. The reader may
well avoid such classifications and read a few sonnets, like the twenty-
ninth, for instance, and let them speak their own message. A few are
trivial and artificial enough, suggesting the elaborate exercises of a
piano player; but the majority are remarkable for their subtle thought and
exquisite expression. Here and there is one, like that beginning

    When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
    I summon up remembrance of things past,

which will haunt the reader long afterwards, like the remembrance of an old
German melody.

SHAKESPEARE'S PLACE AND INFLUENCE. Shakespeare holds, by general
acclamation, the foremost place in the world's literature, and his
overwhelming greatness renders it difficult to criticise or even to praise
him. Two poets only, Homer and Dante, have been named with him; but each of
these wrote within narrow limits, while Shakespeare's genius included all
the world of nature and of men. In a word, he is the universal poet. To
study nature in his works is like exploring a new and beautiful country; to
study man in his works is like going into a great city, viewing the motley
crowd as one views a great masquerade in which past and present mingle
freely and familiarly, as if the dead were all living again. And the
marvelous thing, in this masquerade of all sorts and conditions of men, is
that Shakespeare lifts the mask from every face, lets us see the man as he
is in his own soul, and shows us in each one some germ of good, some "soul
of goodness" even in things evil. For Shakespeare strikes no uncertain
note, and raises no doubts to add to the burden of your own. Good always
overcomes evil in the long run; and love, faith, work, and duty are the
four elements that in all ages make the world right. To criticise or praise
the genius that creates these men and women is to criticise or praise
humanity itself.

Of his influence in literature it is equally difficult to speak. Goethe
expresses the common literary judgment when he says, "I do not remember
that any book or person or event in my life ever made so great an
impression upon me as the plays of Shakespeare." His influence upon our own
language and thought is beyond calculation. Shakespeare and the King James
Bible are the two great conservators of the English speech; and one who
habitually reads them finds himself possessed of a style and vocabulary
that are beyond criticism. Even those who read no Shakespeare are still
unconsciously guided by him, for his thought and expression have so
pervaded our life and literature that it is impossible, so long as one
speaks the English language, to escape his influence.

    His life was gentle, and the elements
    So mixed in him, that Nature might stand up
    And say to all the world, "This was a man!"


V. SHAKESPEARE'S CONTEMPORARIES AND SUCCESSORS IN THE DRAMA

DECLINE OF THE DRAMA. It was inevitable that the drama should decline after
Shakespeare, for the simple reason that there was no other great enough to
fill his place. Aside from this, other causes were at work, and the chief
of these was at the very source of the Elizabethan dramas. It must be
remembered that our first playwrights wrote to please their audiences; that
the drama rose in England because of the desire of a patriotic people to
see something of the stirring life of the times reflected on the stage. For
there were no papers or magazines in those days, and people came to the
theaters not only to be amused but to be informed. Like children, they
wanted to see a story acted; and like men, they wanted to know what it
meant. Shakespeare fulfilled their desire. He gave them their story, and
his genius was great enough to show in every play not only their own life
and passions but something of the meaning of all life, and of that eternal
justice which uses the war of human passions for its own great ends. Thus
good and evil mingle freely in his dramas; but the evil is never
attractive, and the good triumphs as inevitably as fate. Though his
language is sometimes coarse, we are to remember that it was the custom of
his age to speak somewhat coarsely, and that in language, as in thought and
feeling, Shakespeare is far above most of his contemporaries.

With his successors all this was changed. The audience itself had gradually
changed, and in place of plain people eager for a story and for
information, we see a larger and larger proportion of those who went to the
play because they had nothing else to do. They wanted amusement only, and
since they had blunted by idleness the desire for simple and wholesome
amusement, they called for something more sensational. Shakespeare's
successors catered to the depraved tastes of this new audience. They lacked
not only Shakespeare's genius, but his broad charity, his moral insight
into life. With the exception of Ben Jonson, they neglected the simple fact
that man in his deepest nature is a moral being, and that only a play which
satisfies the whole nature of man by showing the triumph of the moral law
can ever wholly satisfy an audience or a people. Beaumont and Fletcher,
forgetting the deep meaning of life, strove for effect by increasing the
sensationalism of their plays; Webster reveled in tragedies of blood and
thunder; Massinger and Ford made another step downward, producing evil and
licentious scenes for their own sake, making characters and situations more
immoral till, notwithstanding these dramatists' ability, the stage had
become insincere, frivolous, and bad. Ben Jonson's ode, "Come Leave the
Loathed Stage," is the judgment of a large and honest nature grown weary of
the plays and the players of the time. We read with a sense of relief that
in 1642, only twenty-six years after Shakespeare's death, both houses of
Parliament voted to close the theaters as breeders of lies and immorality.


BEN JONSON (1573?-1637)

Personally Jonson is the most commanding literary figure among the
Elizabethans. For twenty-five years he was the literary dictator of London,
the chief of all the wits that gathered nightly at the old Devil Tavern.
With his great learning, his ability, and his commanding position as poet
laureate, he set himself squarely against his contemporaries and the
romantic tendency of the age. For two things he fought bravely,--to restore
the classic form of the drama, and to keep the stage from its downward
course. Apparently he failed; the romantic school fixed its hold more
strongly than ever; the stage went swiftly to an end as sad as that of the
early dramatists. Nevertheless his influence lived and grew more powerful
till, aided largely by French influence, it resulted in the so-called
classicism of the eighteenth century.

LIFE. Jonson was born at Westminster about the year 1573. His father, an
educated gentleman, had his property confiscated and was himself thrown
into prison by Queen Mary; so we infer the family was of some prominence.
From his mother he received certain strong characteristics, and by a single
short reference in Jonson's works we are led to see the kind of woman she
was. It is while Jonson is telling Drummond of the occasion when he was
thrown into prison, because some passages in the comedy of _Eastward Ho!_
gave offense to King James, and he was in danger of a horrible death, after
having his ears and nose cut off. He tells us how, after his pardon, he was
banqueting with his friends, when his "old mother" came in and showed a
paper full of "lusty strong poison," which she intended to mix with his
drink just before the execution. And to show that she "was no churl," she
intended first to drink of the poison herself. The incident is all the more
suggestive from the fact that Chapman and Marston, one his friend and the
other his enemy, were first cast into prison as the authors of _Eastward
Ho!_ and rough Ben Jonson at once declared that he too had had a small hand
in the writing and went to join them in prison.

Jonson's father came out of prison, having given up his estate, and became
a minister. He died just before the son's birth, and two years later the
mother married a bricklayer of London. The boy was sent to a private
school, and later made his own way to Westminster School, where the
submaster, Camden, struck by the boy's ability, taught and largely
supported him. For a short time he may have studied at the university in
Cambridge; but his stepfather soon set him to learning the bricklayer's
trade. He ran away from this, and went with the English army to fight
Spaniards in the Low Countries. His best known exploit there was to fight a
duel between the lines with one of the enemy's soldiers, while both armies
looked on. Jonson killed his man, and took his arms, and made his way back
to his own lines in a way to delight the old Norman troubadours. He soon
returned to England, and married precipitately when only nineteen or twenty
years old. Five years later we find him employed, like Shakespeare, as
actor and reviser of old plays in the theater. Thereafter his life is a
varied and stormy one. He killed an actor in a duel, and only escaped
hanging by pleading "benefit of clergy";[154] but he lost all his poor
goods and was branded for life on his left thumb. In his first great play,
_Every Man in His Humour_ (1598), Shakespeare acted one of the parts; and
that may have been the beginning of their long friendship. Other plays
followed rapidly. Upon the accession of James, Jonson's masques won him
royal favor, and he was made poet laureate. He now became undoubted leader
of the literary men of his time, though his rough honesty and his hatred of
the literary tendencies of the age made him quarrel with nearly all of
them. In 1616, soon after Shakespeare's retirement, he stopped writing for
the stage and gave himself up to study and serious work. In 1618 he
traveled on foot to Scotland, where he visited Drummond, from whom we have
the scant records of his varied life. His impressions of this journey,
called _Foot Pilgrimage_, were lost in a fire before publication.
Thereafter he produced less, and his work declined in vigor; but spite of
growing poverty and infirmity we notice in his later work, especially in
the unfinished _Sad Shepherd_, a certain mellowness and tender human
sympathy which were lacking in his earlier productions. He died poverty
stricken in 1637. Unlike Shakespeare's, his death was mourned as a national
calamity, and he was buried with all honor in Westminster Abbey. On his
grave was laid a marble slab, on which the words "O rare Ben Jonson" were
his sufficient epitaph.

WORKS OF BEN JONSON. Jonson's work is in strong contrast with that of
Shakespeare and of the later Elizabethan dramatists. Alone he fought
against the romantic tendency of the age, and to restore the classic
standards. Thus the whole action of his drama usually covers only a few
hours, or a single day. He never takes liberties with historical facts, as
Shakespeare does, but is accurate to the smallest detail. His dramas abound
in classical learning, are carefully and logically constructed, and comedy
and tragedy are kept apart, instead of crowding each other as they do in
Shakespeare and in life. In one respect his comedies are worthy of careful
reading,--they are intensely realistic, presenting men and women of the
time exactly as they were. From a few of Jonson's scenes we can
understand--better than from all the plays of Shakespeare--how men talked
and acted during the Age of Elizabeth.

Jonson's first comedy, _Every Man in His Humour_, is a key to all his
dramas. The word "humour" in his age stood for some characteristic whim or
quality of society. Jonson gives to his leading character some prominent
humor, exaggerates it, as the cartoonist enlarges the most characteristic
feature of a face, and so holds it before our attention that all other
qualities are lost sight of; which is the method that Dickens used later in
many of his novels. _Every Man in His Humour_ was the first of three
satires. Its special aim was to ridicule the humors of the city. The
second, _Cynthia's Revels_, satirizes the humors of the court; while the
third, _The Poetaster_, the result of a quarrel with his contemporaries,
was leveled at the false standards of the poets of the age.

The three best known of Jonson's comedies are _Volpone, or the Fox, The
Alchemist_, and _Epicoene, or the Silent Woman. Volpone_ is a keen and
merciless analysis of a man governed by an overwhelming love of money for
its own sake. The first words in the first scene are a key to the whole
comedy:

    _(Volpone)_
        Good morning to the day; and next, my gold!
        Open the shrine that I may see my saint.
            (_Mosca withdraws a curtain and discovers piles of
             gold, plate, jewels, etc._)
        Hail the world's soul, and mine!

Volpone's method of increasing his wealth is to play upon the avarice of
men. He pretends to be at the point of death, and his "suitors," who know
his love of gain and that he has no heirs, endeavor hypocritically to
sweeten his last moments by giving him rich presents, so that he will leave
them all his wealth. The intrigues of these suitors furnish the story of
the play, and show to what infamous depths avarice will lead a man.

_The Alchemist_ is a study of quackery on one side and of gullibility on
the other, founded on the mediæval idea of the philosopher's stone,[155]
and applies as well to the patent medicines and get-rich-quick schemes of
our day as to the peculiar forms of quackery with which Jonson was more
familiar. In plot and artistic construction _The Alchemist_ is an almost
perfect specimen of the best English drama. It has some remarkably good
passages, and is the most readable of Jonson's plays.

_Epicoene, or the Silent Woman_, is a prose comedy exceedingly well
constructed, full of life, abounding in fun and unexpected situations. Here
is a brief outline from which the reader may see of what materials Jonson
made up his comedies.

The chief character is Morose, a rich old codger whose humor is a horror of
noise. He lives in a street so narrow that it will admit no carriages; he
pads the doors; plugs the keyhole; puts mattresses on the stairs. He
dismisses a servant who wears squeaky boots; makes all the rest go about in
thick stockings; and they must answer him by signs, since he cannot bear to
hear anybody but himself talk. He disinherits his poor nephew Eugenie, and,
to make sure that the latter will not get any money out of him, resolves to
marry. His confidant in this delicate matter is Cutbeard the barber, who,
unlike his kind, never speaks unless spoken to, and does not even knick his
scissors as he works. Cutbeard (who is secretly in league with the nephew)
tells him of Epicoene, a rare, silent woman, and Morose is so delighted
with her silence that he resolves to marry her on the spot. Cutbeard
produces a parson with a bad cold, who can speak only in a whisper, to
marry them; and when the parson coughs after the ceremony Morose demands
back five shillings of the fee. To save it the parson coughs more, and is
hurriedly bundled out of the house. The silent woman finds her voice
immediately after the marriage, begins to talk loudly and to make reforms
in the household, driving Morose to distraction. A noisy dinner party from
a neighboring house, with drums and trumpets and a quarreling man and wife,
is skillfully guided in at this moment to celebrate the wedding. Morose
flees for his life, and is found perched like a monkey on a crossbeam in
the attic, with all his nightcaps tied over his ears. He seeks a divorce,
but is driven frantic by the loud arguments of a lawyer and a divine, who
are no other than Cutbeard and a sea captain disguised. When Morose is past
all hope the nephew offers to release him from his wife and her noisy
friends if he will allow him five hundred pounds a year. Morose offers him
anything, everything, to escape his torment, and signs a deed to that
effect. Then comes the surprise of the play when Eugenie whips the wig from
Epicoene and shows a boy in disguise.

It will be seen that the _Silent Woman_, with its rapid action and its
unexpected situations, offers an excellent opportunity for the actors; but
the reading of the play, as of most of Jonson's comedies, is marred by low
intrigues showing a sad state of morals among the upper classes.

Besides these, and many other less known comedies, Jonson wrote two great
tragedies, _Sejanus_ (1603) and _Catiline_ (1611), upon severe classical
lines. After ceasing his work for the stage, Jonson wrote many masques in
honor of James I and of Queen Anne, to be played amid elaborate scenery by
the gentlemen of the court. The best of these are "The Satyr," "The
Penates," "Masque of Blackness," "Masque of Beauty," "Hue and Cry after
Cupid," and "The Masque of Queens." In all his plays Jonson showed a strong
lyric gift, and some of his little poems and songs, like "The Triumph of
Charis," "Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes," and "To the Memory of my
Beloved Mother," are now better known than his great dramatic works. A
single volume of prose, called _Timber, or Discoveries made upon Men and
Matter_, is an interesting collection of short essays which are more like
Bacon's than any other work of the age.

BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER. The work of these two men is so closely interwoven
that, though Fletcher outlived Beaumont by nine years and the latter had no
hand in some forty of the plays that bear their joint names, we still class
them together, and only scholars attempt to separate their works so as to
give each writer his due share. Unlike most of the Elizabethan dramatists,
they both came from noble and cultured families and were university
trained. Their work, in strong contrast with Jonson's, is intensely
romantic, and in it all, however coarse or brutal the scene, there is
still, as Emerson pointed out, the subtle "recognition of gentility."

Beaumont (1584-1616) was the brother of Sir John Beaumont of
Leicestershire. From Oxford he came to London to study law, but soon gave
it up to write for the stage. Fletcher (1579-1625) was the son of the
bishop of London, and shows in all his work the influence of his high
social position and of his Cambridge education. The two dramatists met at
the Mermaid tavern under Ben Jonson's leadership and soon became
inseparable friends, living and working together. Tradition has it that
Beaumont supplied the judgment and the solid work of the play, while
Fletcher furnished the high-colored sentiment and the lyric poetry, without
which an Elizabethan play would have been incomplete. Of their joint plays,
the two best known are _Philaster_, whose old theme, like that of
_Cymbeline_ and _Griselda_, is the jealousy of a lover and the faithfulness
of a girl, and _The Maid's Tragedy_. Concerning Fletcher's work the most
interesting literary question is how much did he write of Shakespeare's
_Henry VIII_, and how much did Shakespeare help him in _The Two Noble
Kinsmen_.

JOHN WEBSTER. Of Webster's personal history we know nothing except that he
was well known as a dramatist under James I. His extraordinary powers of
expression rank him with Shakespeare; but his talent seems to have been
largely devoted to the blood-and-thunder play begun by Marlowe. His two
best known plays are _The White Devil_ (pub. 1612) and _The Duchess of
Malfi_ (pub. 1623). The latter, spite of its horrors, ranks him as one of
the greatest masters of English tragedy. It must be remembered that he
sought in this play to reproduce the Italian life of the sixteenth century,
and for this no imaginary horrors are needed. The history of any Italian
court or city in this period furnishes more vice and violence and dishonor
than even the gloomy imagination of Webster could conceive. All the
so-called blood tragedies of the Elizabethan period, from Thomas Kyd's
_Spanish Tragedy_ down, however much they may condemn the brutal taste of
the English audiences, are still only so many search lights thrown upon a
history of horrible darkness.

THOMAS MIDDLETON (1570?-1627). Middleton is best known by two great plays,
_The Changeling_[156] and _Women Beware Women_. In poetry and diction they
are almost worthy at times to rank with Shakespeare's plays; otherwise, in
their sensationalism and unnaturalness they do violence to the moral sense
and are repulsive to the modern reader. Two earlier plays, _A Trick to
catch the Old One_, his best comedy, and _A Fair Quarrel_, his earliest
tragedy, are less mature in thought and expression, but more readable,
because they seem to express Middleton's own idea of the drama rather than
that of the corrupt court and playwrights of his later age.

THOMAS HEYWOOD (1580?-1650?). Heywood's life, of which we know little in
detail, covers the whole period of the Elizabethan drama. To the glory of
that drama he contributed, according to his own statement, the greater
part, at least, of nearly two hundred and twenty plays. It was an enormous
amount of work; but he seems to have been animated by the modern literary
spirit of following the best market and striking while the financial iron
is hot. Naturally good work was impossible, even to genius, under such
circumstances, and few of his plays are now known. The two best, if the
reader would obtain his own idea of Heywood's undoubted ability, are _A
Woman killed with Kindness_, a pathetic story of domestic life, and _The
Fair Maid of the West_, a melodrama with plenty of fighting of the popular
kind.

THOMAS DEKKER (1570-?). Dekker is in pleasing contrast with most of the
dramatists of the time. All we know of him must be inferred from his works,
which show a happy and sunny nature, pleasant and good to meet. The reader
will find the best expression of Dekker's personality and erratic genius in
_The Shoemakers' Holiday_, a humorous study of plain working people, and
_Old Fortunatus_, a fairy drama of the wishing hat and no end of money.
Whether intended for children or not, it had the effect of charming the
elders far more than the young people, and the play became immensely
popular.

MASSINGER, FORD, SHIRLEY. These three men mark the end of the Elizabethan
drama. Their work, done largely while the struggle was on between the
actors and the corrupt court, on one side, and the Puritans on the other,
shows a deliberate turning away not only from Puritan standards but from
the high ideals of their own art to pander to the corrupt taste of the
upper classes.

Philip Massinger (1584-1640) was a dramatic poet of great natural ability;
but his plots and situations are usually so strained and artificial that
the modern reader finds no interest in them. In his best comedy, _A New Way
to Pay Old Debts_, he achieved great popularity and gave us one figure, Sir
Giles Overreach, which is one of the typical characters of the English
stage. His best plays are _The Great Duke of Florence, The Virgin Martyr_,
and _The Maid of Honour_.

John Ford (1586-1642?) and James Shirley (1596-1666) have left us little of
permanent literary value, and their works are read only by those who wish
to understand the whole rise and fall of the drama. An occasional scene in
Ford's plays is as strong as anything that the Elizabethan Age produced;
but as a whole the plays are unnatural and tiresome. Probably his best play
is _The Broken Heart_ (1633). Shirley was given to imitation of his
predecessors, and his very imitation is characteristic of an age which had
lost its inspiration. A single play, _Hyde Park_, with its frivolous,
realistic dialogue, is sometimes read for its reflection of the fashionable
gossipy talk of the day. Long before Shirley's death the actors said,
"Farewell! Othello's occupation's gone." Parliament voted to close the
theaters, thereby saving the drama from a more inglorious death by
dissipation.[157]


VI. THE PROSE WRITERS

FRANCIS BACON (1561-1626)

In Bacon we see one of those complex and contradictory natures which are
the despair of the biographer. If the writer be an admirer of Bacon, he
finds too much that he must excuse or pass over in silence; and if he takes
his stand on the law to condemn the avarice and dishonesty of his subject,
he finds enough moral courage and nobility to make him question the justice
of his own judgment. On the one hand is rugged Ben Jonson's tribute to his
power and ability, and on the other Hallam's summary that he was "a man
who, being intrusted with the highest gifts of Heaven, habitually abused
them for the poorest purposes of earth--hired them out for guineas,
places, and titles in the service of injustice, covetousness, and
oppression."

Laying aside the opinions of others, and relying only upon the facts of
Bacon's life, we find on the one side the politician, cold, calculating,
selfish, and on the other the literary and scientific man with an
impressive devotion to truth for its own great sake; here a man using
questionable means to advance his own interests, and there a man seeking
with zeal and endless labor to penetrate the secret ways of Nature, with no
other object than to advance the interests of his fellow-men. So, in our
ignorance of the secret motives and springs of the man's life, judgment is
necessarily suspended. Bacon was apparently one of those double natures
that only God is competent to judge, because of the strange mixture of
intellectual strength and moral weakness that is in them.

LIFE. Bacon was the son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper of the Seal, and
of the learned Ann Cook, sister-in-law to Lord Burleigh, greatest of the
queen's statesmen. From these connections, as well as from native gifts, he
was attracted to the court, and as a child was called by Elizabeth her
"Little Lord Keeper." At twelve he went to Cambridge, but left the
university after two years, declaring the whole plan of education to be
radically wrong, and the system of Aristotle, which was the basis of all
philosophy in those days, to be a childish delusion, since in the course of
centuries it had "produced no fruit, but only a jungle of dry and useless
branches." Strange, even for a sophomore of fourteen, thus to condemn the
whole system of the universities; but such was the boy, and the system!
Next year, in order to continue his education, he accompanied the English
ambassador to France, where he is said to have busied himself chiefly with
the practical studies of statistics and diplomacy.

Two years later he was recalled to London by the death of his father.
Without money, and naturally with expensive tastes, he applied to his Uncle
Burleigh for a lucrative position. It was in this application that he used
the expression, so characteristic of the Elizabethan Age, that he "had
taken all knowledge for his province." Burleigh, who misjudged him as a
dreamer and self-seeker, not only refused to help him at the court but
successfully opposed his advancement by Elizabeth. Bacon then took up the
study of law, and was admitted to the bar in 1582. That he had not lost his
philosophy in the mazes of the law is shown by his tract, written about
this time, "On the Greatest Birth of Time," which was a plea for his
inductive system of philosophy, reasoning from many facts to one law,
rather than from an assumed law to particular facts, which was the
deductive method that had been in use for centuries. In his famous plea for
progress Bacon demanded three things: the free investigation of nature, the
discovery of facts instead of theories, and the verification of results by
experiment rather than by argument. In our day these are the A, B, C of
science, but in Bacon's time they seemed revolutionary.

As a lawyer he became immediately successful; his knowledge and power of
pleading became widely known, and it was almost at the beginning of his
career that Jonson wrote, "The fear of every one that heard him speak was
that he should make an end." The publication of his _Essays_ added greatly
to his fame; but Bacon was not content. His head was buzzing with huge
schemes,--the pacification of unhappy Ireland, the simplification of
English law, the reform of the church, the study of nature, the
establishment of a new philosophy. Meanwhile, sad to say, he played the
game of politics for his personal advantage. He devoted himself to Essex,
the young and dangerous favorite of the queen, won his friendship, and then
used him skillfully to better his own position. When the earl was tried for
treason it was partly, at least, through Bacon's efforts that he was
convicted and beheaded; and though Bacon claims to have been actuated by a
high sense of justice, we are not convinced that he understood either
justice or friendship in appearing as queen's counsel against the man who
had befriended him. His coldbloodedness and lack of moral sensitiveness
appear even in his essays on "Love" and "Friendship." Indeed, we can
understand his life only upon the theory that his intellectuality left him
cold and dead to the higher sentiments of our humanity.

During Elizabeth's reign Bacon had sought repeatedly for high office, but
had been blocked by Burleigh and perhaps also by the queen's own shrewdness
in judging men. With the advent of James I (1603) Bacon devoted himself to
the new ruler and rose rapidly in favor. He was knighted, and soon
afterwards attained another object of his ambition in marrying a rich wife.
The appearance of his great work, the _Advancement of Learning_, in 1605,
was largely the result of the mental stimulus produced by his change in
fortune. In 1613 he was made attorney-general, and speedily made enemies by
using the office to increase his personal ends. He justified himself in his
course by his devotion to the king's cause, and by the belief that the
higher his position and the more ample his means the more he could do for
science. It was in this year that Bacon wrote his series of _State Papers_,
which show a marvelous grasp of the political tendencies of his age. Had
his advice been followed, it would have certainly averted the struggle
between king and parliament that followed speedily. In 1617 he was
appointed to his father's office, Lord Keeper of the Seal, and the next
year to the high office of Lord Chancellor. With this office he received
the title of Baron Verulam, and later of Viscount St. Alban, which he
affixed with some vanity to his literary work. Two years later appeared his
greatest work, the _Novum Organum_, called after Aristotle's famous
_Organon_.

Bacon did not long enjoy his political honors. The storm which had been
long gathering against James's government broke suddenly upon Bacon's head.
When Parliament assembled in 1621 it vented its distrust of James and his
favorite Villiers by striking unexpectedly at their chief adviser. Bacon
was sternly accused of accepting bribes, and the evidence was so great that
he confessed that there was much political corruption abroad in the land,
that he was personally guilty of some of it, and he threw himself upon the
mercy of his judges. Parliament at that time was in no mood for mercy.
Bacon was deprived of his office and was sentenced to pay the enormous fine
of 40,000 pounds, to be imprisoned during the king's pleasure, and
thereafter to be banished forever from Parliament and court. Though the
imprisonment lasted only a few days and the fine was largely remitted,
Bacon's hopes and schemes for political honors were ended; and it is at
this point of appalling adversity that the nobility in the man's nature
asserts itself strongly. If the reader be interested to apply a great man's
philosophy to his own life, he will find the essay, "Of Great Place," most
interesting in this connection.

Bacon now withdrew permanently from public life, and devoted his splendid
ability to literary and scientific work. He completed the _Essays_,
experimented largely, wrote history, scientific articles, and one
scientific novel, and made additions to his _Instauratio Magna_, the great
philosophical work which was never finished. In the spring of 1626, while
driving in a snowstorm, it occurred to him that snow might be used as a
preservative instead of salt. True to his own method of arriving at truth,
he stopped at the first house, bought a fowl, and proceeded to test his
theory. The experiment chilled him, and he died soon after from the effects
of his exposure. As Macaulay wrote, "the great apostle of experimental
philosophy was destined to be its martyr."

WORKS OF BACON. Bacon's philosophic works, _The Advancement of Learning_
and the _Novum Organum_, will be best understood in connection with the
_Instauratio Magna_, or _The Great Institution of True Philosophy_, of
which they were parts. The _Instauratio_ was never completed, but the very
idea of the work was magnificent,--to sweep away the involved philosophy of
the schoolmen and the educational systems of the universities, and to
substitute a single great work which should be a complete education, "a
rich storehouse for the glory of the Creator and for the relief of man's
estate." The object of this education was to bring practical results to all
the people, instead of a little selfish culture and much useless
speculation, which, he conceived, were the only products of the
universities.

THE INSTAURATIO MAGNA. This was the most ambitious, though it is not the
best known, of Bacon's works. For the insight it gives us into the author's
mind, we note here a brief outline of his subject. It was divided into six
parts, as follows:

1. _Partitiones Scientiarum_. This was to be a classification and summary
of all human knowledge. Philosophy and all speculation must be cast out and
the natural sciences established as the basis of all education. The only
part completed was _The Advancement of Learning_, which served as an
introduction.

2. _Novum Organum_, or the "new instrument," that is, the use of reason and
experiment instead of the old Aristotelian logic. To find truth one must do
two things: (_a_) get rid of all prejudices or idols, as Bacon called them.
These "idols" are four: "idols of the tribe," that is, prejudices due to
common methods of thought among all races; "idols of the cave or den," that
is, personal peculiarities and prejudices; "idols of the market place," due
to errors of language; and "idols of the theater," which are the unreliable
traditions of men. (_b_) After discarding the above "idols" we must
interrogate nature; must collect facts by means of numerous experiments,
arrange them in order, and then determine the law that underlies them.

It will be seen at a glance that the above is the most important of Bacon's
works. The _Organum_ was to be in several books, only two of which he
completed, and these he wrote and rewrote twelve times until they satisfied
him.

3. _Historic Naturalis et Experimentalis_, the study of all the phenomena
of nature. Of four parts of this work which he completed, one of them at
least, the _Sylva Sylvarum_, is decidedly at variance with his own idea of
fact and experiment. It abounds in fanciful explanations, more worthy of
the poetic than of the scientific mind. Nature is seen to be full of
desires and instincts; the air "thirsts" for light and fragrance; bodies
rise or sink because they have an "appetite" for height or depth; the
qualities of bodies are the result of an "essence," so that when we
discover the essences of gold and silver and diamonds it will be a simple
matter to create as much of them as we may need.

4. _Scala Intellectus_, or "Ladder of the Mind," is the rational
application of the _Organum_ to all problems. By it the mind should ascend
step by step from particular facts and instances to general laws and
abstract principles.

5. _Prodromi_, "Prophecies or Anticipations," is a list of discoveries that
men shall make when they have applied Bacon's methods of study and
experimentation.

6. _Philosophia Secunda_, which was to be a record of practical results of
the new philosophy when the succeeding ages should have applied it
faithfully.

It is impossible to regard even the outline of such a vast work without an
involuntary thrill of admiration for the bold and original mind which
conceived it. "We may," said Bacon, "make no despicable beginnings. The
destinies of the human race must complete the work ... for upon this will
depend not only a speculative good but all the fortunes of mankind and all
their power." There is the unconscious expression of one of the great minds
of the world. Bacon was like one of the architects of the Middle Ages, who
drew his plans for a mighty cathedral, perfect in every detail from the
deep foundation stone to the cross on the highest spire, and who gave over
his plans to the builders, knowing that, in his own lifetime, only one tiny
chapel would be completed; but knowing also that the very beauty of his
plans would appeal to others, and that succeeding ages would finish the
work which he dared to begin.

THE ESSAYS. Bacon's famous _Essays_ is the one work which will interest all
students of our literature. His _Instauratio_ was in Latin, written mostly
by paid helpers from short English abstracts. He regarded Latin as the only
language worthy of a great work; but the world neglected his Latin to seize
upon his English,--marvelous English, terse, pithy, packed with thought, in
an age that used endless circumlocutions. The first ten essays, published
in 1597, were brief notebook jottings of Bacon's observations. Their
success astonished the author, but not till fifteen years later were they
republished and enlarged. Their charm grew upon Bacon himself, and during
his retirement he gave more thought to the wonderful language which he had
at first despised as much as Aristotle's philosophy. In 1612 appeared a
second edition containing thirty-eight essays, and in 1625, the year before
his death, he republished the _Essays_ in their present form, polishing and
enlarging the original ten to fifty-eight, covering a wide variety of
subjects suggested by the life of men around him.

Concerning the best of these essays there are as many opinions as there are
readers, and what one gets out of them depends largely upon his own thought
and intelligence. In this respect they are like that Nature to which Bacon
directed men's thoughts. The whole volume may be read through in an
evening; but after one has read them a dozen times he still finds as many
places to pause and reflect as at the first reading. If one must choose out
of such a storehouse, we would suggest "Studies," "Goodness," "Riches,"
"Atheism," "Unity in Religion," "Adversity," "Friendship," and "Great
Place" as an introduction to Bacon's worldly-wise philosophy.

MISCELLANEOUS WORKS. Other works of Bacon are interesting as a revelation
of the Elizabethan mind, rather than because of any literary value. _The
New Atlantis_ is a kind of scientific novel describing another Utopia as
seen by Bacon. The inhabitants of Atlantis have banished Philosophy and
applied Bacon's method of investigating Nature, using the results to better
their own condition. They have a wonderful civilization, in which many of
our later discoveries--academies of the sciences, observatories, balloons,
submarines, the modification of species, and several others--were
foreshadowed with a strange mixture of cold reason and poetic intuition.
_De Sapientia Veterum_ is a fanciful attempt to show the deep meaning
underlying ancient myths,--a meaning which would have astonished the myth
makers themselves. The _History of Henry VII_ is a calm, dispassionate, and
remarkably accurate history, which makes us regret that Bacon did not do
more historical work. Besides these are metrical versions of certain
Psalms--which are valuable, in view of the controversy anent Shakespeare's
plays, for showing Bacon's utter inability to write poetry--and a large
number of letters and state papers showing the range and power of his
intellect.

BACON'S PLACE AND WORK. Although Bacon was for the greater part of his life
a busy man of affairs, one cannot read his work without becoming conscious
of two things,--a perennial freshness, which the world insists upon in all
literature that is to endure, and an intellectual power which marks him as
one of the great minds of the world.

Of late the general tendency is to give less and less prominence to his
work in science and philosophy; but criticism of his _Instauratio_, in view
of his lofty aim, is of small consequence. It is true that his "science"
to-day seems woefully inadequate; true also that, though he sought to
discover truth, he thought perhaps to monopolize it, and so looked with the
same suspicion upon Copernicus as upon the philosophers. The practical man
who despises philosophy has simply misunderstood the thing he despises. In
being practical and experimental in a romantic age he was not unique, as is
often alleged, but only expressed the tendency of the English mind in all
ages. Three centuries earlier the monk Roger Bacon did more practical
experimenting than the Elizabethan sage; and the latter's famous "idols"
are strongly suggestive of the former's "Four Sources of Human Ignorance."
Although Bacon did not make any of the scientific discoveries at which he
aimed, yet the whole spirit of his work, especially of _the Organum_, has
strongly influenced science in the direction of accurate observation and of
carefully testing every theory by practical experiment. "He that regardeth
the clouds shall not sow," said a wise writer of old; and Bacon turned
men's thoughts from the heavens above, with which they had been too busy,
to the earth beneath, which they had too much neglected. In an age when men
were busy with romance and philosophy, he insisted that the first object of
education is to make a man familiar with his natural environment; from
books he turned to men, from theory to fact, from philosophy to nature,--
and that is perhaps his greatest contribution to life and literature. Like
Moses upon Pisgah, he stood high enough above his fellows to look out over
a promised land, which his people would inherit, but into which he himself
might never enter.

RICHARD HOOKER (1554?-1600) In strong contrast with Bacon is Richard
Hooker, one of the greatest prose writers of the Elizabethan Age. One must
read the story of his life, an obscure and lowly life animated by a great
spirit, as told by Izaak Walton, to appreciate the full force of this
contrast. Bacon took all knowledge for his province, but mastered no single
part of it. Hooker, taking a single theme, the law and practice of the
English Church, so handled it that no scholar even of the present day would
dream of superseding it or of building upon any other foundation than that
which Hooker laid down. His one great work is _The Laws of Ecclesiastical
Polity_,[158] a theological and argumentative book; but, entirely apart
from its subject, it will be read wherever men desire to hear the power and
stateliness of the English language. Here is a single sentence, remarkable
not only for its perfect form but also for its expression of the reverence
for law which lies at the heart of Anglo-Saxon civilization:

Of law there can be no less acknowledged than that her seat is the bosom of
God, her voice the harmony of the world; all things in heaven and earth do
her homage; the very least as feeling her care, and the greatest as not
exempted from her power; both angels and men, and creatures of what
condition soever, though each in different sort and manner, yet all with
uniform consent admiring her as the mother of their peace and joy.

SIDNEY AND RALEIGH. Among the prose writers of this wonderful literary age
there are many others that deserve passing notice, though they fall far
below the standard of Bacon and Hooker. Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586), who
has already been considered as a poet, is quite as well known by his prose
works, _Arcadia_, a pastoral romance, and the _Defense of Poesie_, one of
our earliest literary essays. Sidney, whom the poet Shelley has eulogized,
represents the whole romantic tendency of his age; while Sir Walter Raleigh
(1552?-1618) represents its adventurous spirit and activity. The life of
Raleigh is an almost incomprehensible mixture of the poet, scholar, and
adventurer; now helping the Huguenots or the struggling Dutch in Europe,
and now leading an expedition into the unmapped wilds of the New World;
busy here with court intrigues, and there with piratical attempts to
capture the gold-laden Spanish galleons; one moment sailing the high seas
in utter freedom, and the next writing history and poetry to solace his
imprisonment. Such a life in itself is a volume far more interesting than
anything that he wrote. He is the restless spirit of the Elizabethan Age
personified.

Raleigh's chief prose works are the _Discoverie of Guiana_, a work which
would certainly have been interesting enough had he told simply what he
saw, but which was filled with colonization schemes and visions of an El
Dorado to fill the eyes and ears of the credulous; and the _History of the
World_, written to occupy his prison hours. The history is a wholly
untrustworthy account of events from creation to the downfall of the
Macedonian Empire. It is interesting chiefly for its style, which is simple
and dignified, and for the flashes of wit and poetry that break into the
fantastic combination of miracles, traditions, hearsay, and state records
which he called history. In the conclusion is the famous apostrophe to
Death, which suggests what Raleigh might have done had he lived less
strenuously and written more carefully.

O eloquent, just, and mighty Death! whom none could advise thou hast
persuaded; what none hath dared thou hast done; and whom all the world hath
flattered thou only hast cast out of the world and despised; thou hast
drawn together all the star-stretched greatness, all the pride, cruelty,
and ambition of man, and covered it all over with these two narrow words,
_Hic jacet_!

JOHN FOXE (1516-1587). Foxe will be remembered always for his famous _Book
of Martyrs_, a book that our elders gave to us on Sundays when we were
young, thinking it good discipline for us to afflict our souls when we
wanted to be roaming the sunlit fields, or when in our enforced idleness we
would, if our own taste in the matter had been consulted, have made good
shift to be quiet and happy with _Robinson Crusoe_. So we have a gloomy
memory of Foxe, and something of a grievance, which prevent a just
appreciation of his worth.

Foxe had been driven out of England by the Marian persecutions, and in a
wandering but diligent life on the Continent he conceived the idea of
writing a history of the persecutions of the church from the earliest days
to his own. The part relating to England and Scotland was published, in
Latin, in 1559 under a title as sonorous and impressive as the Roman office
for the dead,--_Rerum in Ecclesia Gestarum Maximarumque per Europam
Persecutionum Commentarii_. On his return to England Foxe translated this
work, calling it the _Acts and Monuments_; but it soon became known as the
_Book of Martyrs_, and so it will always be called. Foxe's own bitter
experience causes him to write with more heat and indignation than his
saintly theme would warrant, and the "holy tone" sometimes spoils a
narrative that would be impressive in its bare simplicity. Nevertheless the
book has made for itself a secure place in our literature. It is strongest
in its record of humble men, like Rowland Taylor and Thomas Hawkes, whose
sublime heroism, but for this narrative, would have been lost amid the
great names and the great events that fill the Elizabethan Age.

CAMDEN AND KNOX. Two historians, William Camden and John Knox, stand out
prominently among the numerous historical writers of the age. Camden's
_Britannia_ (1586) is a monumental work, which marks the beginning of true
antiquarian research in the field of history; and his _Annals of Queen
Elizabeth_ is worthy of a far higher place than has thus far been given it.
John Knox, the reformer, in his _History of the Reformation in Scotland_,
has some very vivid portraits of his helpers and enemies. The personal and
aggressive elements enter too strongly for a work of history; but the
autobiographical parts show rare literary power. His account of his famous
interview with Mary Queen of Scots is clear-cut as a cameo, and shows the
man's extraordinary power better than a whole volume of biography. Such
scenes make one wish that more of his time had been given to literary work,
rather than to the disputes and troubles of his own Scotch kirk.

HAKLUYT AND PURCHAS. Two editors of this age have made for themselves an
enviable place in our literature. They are Richard Hakluyt (1552?-1616) and
Samuel Purchas (1575?-1626). Hakluyt was a clergyman who in the midst of
his little parish set himself to achieve two great patriotic ends,--to
promote the wealth and commerce of his country, and to preserve the memory
of all his countrymen who added to the glory of the realm by their travels
and explorations. To further the first object he concerned himself deeply
with the commercial interests of the East India Company, with Raleigh's
colonizing plans in Virginia, and with a translation of De Soto's travels
in America. To further the second he made himself familiar with books of
voyages in all foreign languages and with the brief reports of explorations
of his own countrymen. His _Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries
of the English Nation_, in three volumes, appeared first in 1589, and a
second edition followed in 1598-1600. The first volume tells of voyages to
the north; the second to India and the East; the third, which is as large
as the other two, to the New World. With the exception of the very first
voyage, that of King Arthur to Iceland in 517, which is founded on a myth,
all the voyages are authentic accounts of the explorers themselves, and are
immensely interesting reading even at the present day. No other book of
travels has so well expressed the spirit and energy of the English race, or
better deserves a place in our literature.

Samuel Purchas, who was also a clergyman, continued the work of Hakluyt,
using many of the latter's unpublished manuscripts and condensing the
records of numerous other voyages. His first famous book, _Purchas, His
Pilgrimage_, appeared in 1613, and was followed by _Hakluytus Posthumus, or
Purchas His Pilgrimes_, in 1625. The very name inclines one to open the
book with pleasure, and when one follows his inclination--which is, after
all, one of the best guides in literature--he is rarely disappointed.
Though it falls far below the standard of Hakluyt, both in accuracy and
literary finish, there is still plenty to make one glad that the book was
written and that he can now comfortably follow Purchas on his pilgrimage.

THOMAS NORTH. Among the translators of the Elizabethan Age Sir Thomas North
(1535?-1601?) is most deserving of notice because of his version of
_Plutarch's Lives_ (1579) from which Shakespeare took the characters and
many of the incidents for three great Roman plays. Thus in North we read:

Cæsar also had Cassius in great jealousy and suspected him much: whereupon
he said on a time to his friends: "What will Cassius do, think ye? I like
not his pale looks." Another time when Cæsar's friends warned him of
Antonius and Dolabella, he answered them again, "I never reckon of them;
but these pale-visaged and carrion lean people, I fear them most," meaning
Brutus and Cassius.

Shakespeare merely touches such a scene with the magic of his genius, and
his Cæsar speaks:

    Let me have men about me that are fat:
    Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep o' nights.
    Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look:
    He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.

A careful reading of North's _Plutarch_ and then of the famous Roman plays
shows to how great an extent Shakespeare was dependent upon his obscure
contemporary.

North's translation, to which we owe so many heroic models in our
literature, was probably made not from Plutarch but from Amyot's excellent
French translation. Nevertheless he reproduces the spirit of the original,
and notwithstanding our modern and more accurate translations, he remains
the most inspiring interpreter of the great biographer whom Emerson calls
"the historian of heroism."

SUMMARY OF THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. This period is generally regarded as the
greatest in the history of our literature. Historically, we note in this
age the tremendous impetus received from the Renaissance, from the
Reformation, and from the exploration of the New World. It was marked by a
strong national spirit, by patriotism, by religious tolerance, by social
content, by intellectual progress, and by unbounded enthusiasm.

Such an age, of thought, feeling, and vigorous action, finds its best
expression in the drama; and the wonderful development of the drama,
culminating in Shakespeare, is the most significant characteristic of the
Elizabethan period. Though the age produced some excellent prose works, it
is essentially an age of poetry; and the poetry is remarkable for its
variety, its freshness, its youthful and romantic feeling. Both the poetry
and the drama were permeated by Italian influence, which was dominant in
English literature from Chaucer to the Restoration. The literature of this
age is often called the literature of the Renaissance, though, as we have
seen, the Renaissance itself began much earlier, and for a century and a
half added very little to our literary possessions.

In our study of this great age we have noted (1) the Non-dramatic Poets,
that is, poets who did not write for the stage. The center of this group is
Edmund Spenser, whose _Shepherd's Calendar_ (1579) marked the appearance of
the first national poet since Chaucer's death in 1400. His most famous work
is _The Faery Queen_. Associated with Spenser are the minor poets, Thomas
Sackville, Michael Drayton, George Chapman, and Philip Sidney. Chapman is
noted for his completion of Marlowe's poem, _Hero and Leander_, and for his
translation of Homer's _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_. Sidney, besides his poetry,
wrote his prose romance _Arcadia_, and _The Defense of Poesie_, one of our
earliest critical essays.

(2) The Rise of the Drama in England; the Miracle plays, Moralities, and
Interludes; our first play, "Ralph Royster Doyster"; the first true English
comedy, "Gammer Gurton's Needle," and the first tragedy, "Gorboduc"; the
conflict between classic and native ideals in the English drama.

(3) Shakespeare's Predecessors, Lyly, Kyd, Nash, Peele, Greene, Marlowe;
the types of drama with which they experimented,--the Marlowesque, one-man
type, or tragedy of passion, the popular Chronicle plays, the Domestic
drama, the Court or Lylian comedy, Romantic comedy and tragedy, Classical
plays, and the Melodrama. Marlowe is the greatest of Shakespeare's
predecessors. His four plays are "Tamburlaine," "Faustus," "The Jew of
Malta," and "Edward II."

(4) Shakespeare, his life, work, and influence.

(5) Shakespeare's Successors, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Webster,
Middleton, Heywood, Dekker; and the rapid decline of the drama. Ben Jonson
is the greatest of this group. His chief comedies are "Every Man in His
Humour," "The Silent Woman," and "The Alchemist"; his two extant tragedies
are "Sejanus" and "Catiline."

(6) The Prose Writers, of whom Bacon is the most notable. His chief
philosophical work is the _Instauratio Magna_ (incomplete), which includes
"The Advancement of Learning" and the "Novum Organum"; but he is known to
literary readers by his famous _Essays_. Minor prose writers are Richard
Hooker, John Foxe, the historians Camden and Knox, the editors Hakluyt and
Purchas, who gave us the stirring records of exploration, and Thomas North,
the translator of Plutarch's _Lives_.

SELECTIONS FOR READING. _Spenser_. Faery Queen, selections in Standard
English Classics; Bk. I, in Riverside Literature Series, etc.; Shepherd's
Calendar, in Cassell's National Library; Selected Poems, in Canterbury
Poets Series; Minor Poems, in Temple Classics; Selections in Manly's
English Poetry, or Ward's English Poets.

_Minor Poets_. Drayton, Sackville, Sidney, Chapman, Selections in Manly or
Ward; Elizabethan songs, in Schelling's Elizabethan Lyrics, and in
Palgrave's Golden Treasury; Chapman's Homer, in Temple Classics.

_The Early Drama_. Play of Noah's Flood, in Manly's Specimens of the
Pre-Shaksperean Drama, or in Pollard's English Miracle Plays, Moralities
and Interludes, or in Belles Lettres Series, sec. 2; L.T. Smith's The York
Miracle Plays.

_Lyly_. Endymion, in Holt's English Readings.

_Marlowe_. Faustus, in Temple Dramatists, or Mermaid Series, or Morley's
Universal Library, or Lamb's Specimens of English Dramatic Poets;
Selections in Manly's English Poetry, or Ward's English Poets; Edward II,
in Temple Dramatists, and in Holt's English Readings.

_Shakespeare_. Merchant of Venice, Julius Cæsar, Macbeth, etc., in Standard
English Classics (edited, with notes, with special reference to college-
entrance requirements). Good editions of single plays are numerous and
cheap. Hudson's and Rolfe's and the Arden Shakespeare are suggested as
satisfactory. The Sonnets, edited by Beeching, in Athenæum Press Series.

_Ben Jonson_. The Alchemist, in Canterbury Poets Series, or Morley's
Universal Library; Selections in Manly's English Poetry, or Ward's English
Poets, or Canterbury Poets Series; Selections from Jonson's Masques, in
Evans's English Masques; Timber, edited by Schelling, in Athenæum Press
Series.

_Bacon_. Essays, school edition (Ginn and Company); Northup's edition, in
Riverside Literature Series (various other inexpensive editions, in the
Pitt Press, Golden Treasury Series, etc.); Advancement of Learning, Bk. I,
edited by Cook (Ginn and Company). Compare selections from Bacon, Hooker,
Lyly, and Sidney, in Manly's English Prose.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.[159] _HISTORY. Text-book_, Montgomery, pp. 208-238; Cheyney,
pp. 330-410; Green, ch. 7; Traill, Macaulay, Froude.

_Special works_. Creighton's The Age of Elizabeth; Hall's Society in the
Elizabethan Age; Winter's Shakespeare's England; Goadby's The England of
Shakespeare; Lee's Stratford on Avon; Harrison's Elizabethan England.

_LITERATURE_. Saintsbury's History of Elizabethan Literature; Whipple's
Literature of the Age of Elizabeth; S. Lee's Great Englishmen of the
Sixteenth Century; Schilling's Elizabethan Lyrics, in Athenæum Press
Series; Vernon Lee's Euphorion.

_Spenser_. Texts, Cambridge, Globe, and Aldine editions; Noel's Selected
Poems of Spenser, in Canterbury Poets; Minor Poems, in Temple Classics;
Arber's Spenser Anthology; Church's Life of Spenser, in English Men of
Letters Series; Lowell's Essay, in Among My Books, or in Literary Essays,
vol. 4; Hazlitt's Chaucer and Spenser, in Lectures on the English Poets;
Dowden's Essay, in Transcripts and Studies.

_The Drama_. Texts, Manly's Specimens of the Pre-Shakesperean Drama, 2
vols., in Athenæum Press Series; Pollard's English Miracle Plays,
Moralities and Interludes; the Temple Dramatists; Morley's Universal
Library; Arber's English Reprints; Mermaid Series, etc.; Thayer's The Best
Elizabethan Plays.

Gayley's Plays of Our Forefathers (Miracles, Moralities, etc.); Bates's The
English Religious Drama; Schelling's The English Chronicle Play; Lowell's
Old English Dramatists; Boas's Shakespeare and his Predecessors; Symonds's
Shakespeare's Predecessors in the English Drama; Schelling's Elizabethan
Drama; Lamb's Specimens of English Dramatic Poets; Introduction to Hudson's
Shakespeare: His Life, Art, and Characters; Ward's History of English
Dramatic Literature; Dekker's The Gull's Hornbook, in King's Classics.

_Marlowe_. Works, edited by Bullen; chief plays in Temple Dramatists,
Mermaid Series of English Dramatists, Morley's Universal Library, etc.;
Lowell's Old English Dramatists; Symonds's introduction, in Mermaid Series;
Dowden's Essay, in Transcripts and Studies.

_Shakespeare_. Good texts are numerous. Furness's Variorum edition is at
present most useful for advanced work. Hudson's revised edition, each play
in a single volume, with notes and introductions, will, when complete, be
one of the very best for students' use.

Raleigh's Shakespeare, in English Men of Letters Series; Lee's Life of
Shakespeare; Hudson's Shakespeare: his Life, Art, and Characters;
Halliwell-Phillipps's Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare; Fleay's
Chronicle History of the Life and Work of Shakespeare; Dowden's
Shakespeare, a Critical Study of his Mind and Art; Shakespeare Primer (same
author); Baker's The Development of Shakespeare as a Dramatist; Lounsbury's
Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist; The Text of Shakespeare (same author);
Wendell's William Shakespeare; Bradley's Shakesperian Tragedy; Hazlitt's
Shakespeare and Milton, in Lectures on the English Poets; Emerson's Essay,
Shakespeare or the Poet; Lowell's Essay, in Among My Books; Lamb's Tales
from Shakespeare; Mrs. Jameson's Shakespeare's Female Characters (called
also Characteristics of Women); Rolfe's Shakespeare the Boy; Brandes's
William Shakespeare; Moulton's Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist; Mabie's
William Shakespeare, Poet, Dramatist, and Man; The Shakespeare Apocrypha,
edited by C. F. T. Brooke; Shakespeare's Holinshed, edited by Stone;
Shakespeare Lexicon, by Schmidt; Concordance, by Bartlett; Grammar, by
Abbott, or by Franz.

_Ben Jonson_. Texts in Mermaid Series, Temple Dramatists, Morley's
Universal Library, etc.; Masques and Entertainments of Ben Jonson, edited
by Morley, in Carisbrooke Library; Timber, edited by Schelling, in Athenæum
Press Series.

_Beaumont, Fletcher, etc_. Plays in Mermaid Series, Temple Dramatists,
etc.; Schelling's Elizabethan Drama; Lowell's Old English Dramatists;
Lamb's Specimens of English Dramatic Poets; Fleay's Biographical Chronicle
of the English Drama; Swinburne's Essays, in Essays in Prose and Poetry,
and in Essays and Studies.

_Bacon_. Texts, Essays in Everyman's Library, etc.; Advancement of Learning
in Clarendon Press Series, Library of English Classics, etc.; Church's Life
of Bacon, in English Men of Letters Series; Nichol's Bacon's Life and
Philosophy; Francis Bacon, translated from the German of K. Fischer
(excellent, but rare); Macaulay's Essay on Bacon.

_Minor Prose Writers_. Sidney's Arcadia, edited by Somers; Defense of
Poesy, edited by Cook, in Athenæum Press Series; Arber's Reprints, etc.;
Selections from Sidney's prose and poetry in the Elizabethan Library;
Symonds's Life of Sidney, in English Men of Letters; Bourne's Life of
Sidney, in Heroes of the Nations; Lamb's Essay on Sidney's Sonnets, in
Essays of Elia.

Raleigh's works, published by the Oxford Press; Selections by Grosart, in
Elizabethan Library; Raleigh's Last Fight of the _Revenge_, in Arber's
Reprints; Life of Raleigh, by Edwards and by Gosse. Richard Hooker's works,
edited by Keble, Oxford Press; Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, in Everyman's
Library, and in Morley's Universal Library; Life, in Walton's Lives, in
Morley's Universal Library; Dowden's Essay, in Puritan and Anglican.

Lyly's Euphues, in Arber's Reprints; Endymion, edited by Baker; Campaspe,
in Manly's Pre-Shaksperean Drama.

North's Plutarch's Lives, edited by Wyndham, in Tudor Library; school
edition, by Ginn and Company. Hakluyt's Voyages, in Everyman's Library;
Jones's introduction to Hakluyt's Diverse Voyages; Payne's Voyages of
Elizabethan Seamen; Froude's Essay, in Short Studies on Great Subjects.

SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS. 1. What historical conditions help to account for the
great literature of the Elizabethan age? What are the general
characteristics of Elizabethan literature? What type of literature
prevailed, and why? What work seems to you to express most perfectly the
Elizabethan spirit?

2. Tell briefly the story of Spenser's life. What is the story or argument
of the _Faery Queen_? What is meant by the Spenserian stanza? Read and
comment upon Spenser's "Epithalamion." Why does the "Shepherd's Calendar"
mark a literary epoch? What are the main qualities of Spenser's poetry? Can
you quote or refer to any passages which illustrate these qualities? Why is
he called the poets' poet?

3. For what is Sackville noted? What is the most significant thing about
his "Gorboduc"? Name other minor poets and tell what they wrote.

4. Give an outline of the origin and rise of the drama in England. What is
meant by Miracle and Mystery plays? What purposes did they serve among the
common people? How did they help the drama? What is meant by cycles of
Miracle plays? How did the Moralities differ from the Miracles? What was
the chief purpose of the Interludes? What type of drama did they develop?
Read a typical play, like "Noah's Flood" or "Everyman," and write a brief
analysis of it.

5. What were our first plays in the modern sense? What influence did the
classics exert on the English drama? What is meant by the dramatic unities?
In what important respect did the English differ from the classic drama?

6. Name some of Shakespeare's predecessors in the drama? What types of
drama did they develop? Name some plays of each type. Are any of these
plays still presented on the stage?

7. What are Marlowe's chief plays? What is the central motive in each? Why
are they called one-man plays? What is meant by Marlowe's "mighty line"?
What is the story of "Faustus"? Compare "Faustus" and Goethe's "Faust,"
having in mind the story, the dramatic interest, and the literary value of
each play.

8. Tell briefly the story of Shakespeare's life. What fact in his life most
impressed you? How does Shakespeare sum up the work of all his
predecessors? What are the four periods of his work, and the chief plays of
each? Where did he find his plots? What are his romantic plays? his
chronicle or historical plays? What is the difference between a tragedy and
a comedy? Name some of Shakespeare's best tragedies, comedies, and
historical plays. Which play of Shakespeare's seems to you to give the best
picture of human life? Why is he called the myriad-minded Shakespeare? For
what reasons is he considered the greatest of writers? Can you explain why
Shakespeare's plays are still acted, while other plays of his age are
rarely seen? If you have seen any of Shakespeare's plays on the stage, how
do they compare in interest with a modern play?

9. What are Ben Jonson's chief plays? In what important respects did they
differ from those of Shakespeare? Tell the story of "The Alchemist" or "The
Silent Woman." Name other contemporaries and successors of Shakespeare.
Give some reasons for the preëminence of the Elizabethan drama. What causes
led to its decline?

10. Tell briefly the story of Bacon's life. What is his chief literary
work? his chief educational work? Why is he called a pioneer of modern
science? Can you explain what is meant by the inductive method of learning?
What subjects are considered in Bacon's _Essays_? What is the central idea
of the essay you like best? What are the literary qualities of these
essays? Do they appeal to the intellect or the emotions? What is meant by
the word "essay," and how does Bacon illustrate the definition? Make a
comparison between Bacon's essays and those of some more recent writer,
such as Addison, Lamb, Carlyle, Emerson, or Stevenson, having in mind the
subjects, style, and interest of both essayists.

11. Who are the minor prose writers of the Elizabethan Age? What did they
write? Comment upon any work of theirs which you have read. What is the
literary value of North's Plutarch? What is the chief defect in Elizabethan
prose as a whole? What is meant by euphuism? Explain why Elizabethan poetry
is superior to the prose.


                              CHRONOLOGY
  _Last Half of the Sixteenth and First Half of the Seventeenth Centuries_
============================================================================
  HISTORY                           |  LITERATURE
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
                                    |
1558. Elizabeth (_d_. 1603)         | 1559. John Knox in Edinburgh
                                    | 1562(?). Gammer Gurton's      Needle.
                                    |       Gorboduc
                                    | 1564. Birth of Shakespeare
1571. Rise of English Puritans      | 1576. First Theater
1577. Drake's Voyage around the     | 1579. Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar.
      World                         |       Lyly's Euphues. North's Plutarch.
                                    |
                                    | 1587. Shakespeare in London.  Marlowe's
                                    |       Tamburlaine
                                    |
1588. Defeat of the Armada          |
                                    |
                                    | 1590. Spenser's Faery Queen. Sidney's
                                    |       Arcadia
                                    |
                                    | 1590-1595. Shakespeare's Early Plays
                                    |
                                    | 1597-1625. Bacon's Essays
                                    |
                                    | 1598-1614. Chapman's Homer
                                    |
                                    | 1598. Ben Jonson's Every Man in His
                                    |       Humour
                                    |
                                    | 1600-1607. Shakespeare's Tragedies
                                    |
1603. James I (_d_. 1625)           |
                                    |
1604. Divine Right of Kings         | 1605. Bacon's Advancement of Learning
      proclaimed                    |
                                    |
1607. Settlement at Jamestown,      | 1608. Birth of Milton
      Virginia                      |
                                    |
                                    | 1611. Translation (King James Version)
                                    |       of Bible
                                    |
                                    | 1614. Raleigh's History
                                    |
                                    | 1616. Death of Shakespeare
                                    |
1620. Pilgrim Fathers at            | 1620-1642. Shakespeare's successors.
      Plymouth                      |       End of drama
                                    |
                                    | 1620. Bacon's Novum Organum
                                    |
                                    | 1622. First regular newspaper, The
                                    |       Weekly News
                                    |
1625. Charles I                     | 1626. Death of Bacon
============================================================================


       *       *       *       *       *



CHAPTER VII

THE PURITAN AGE (1620-1660)

I. HISTORICAL SUMMARY

THE PURITAN MOVEMENT. In its broadest sense the Puritan movement may be
regarded as a second and greater Renaissance, a rebirth of the moral nature
of man following the intellectual awakening of Europe in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries. In Italy, whose influence had been uppermost in
Elizabethan literature, the Renaissance had been essentially pagan and
sensuous. It had hardly touched the moral nature of man, and it brought
little relief from the despotism of rulers. One can hardly read the
horrible records of the Medici or the Borgias, or the political
observations of Machiavelli, without marveling at the moral and political
degradation of a cultured nation. In the North, especially among the German
and English peoples, the Renaissance was accompanied by a moral awakening,
and it is precisely that awakening in England, "that greatest moral and
political reform which ever swept over a nation in the short space of half
a century," which is meant by the Puritan movement. We shall understand it
better if we remember that it had two chief objects: the first was personal
righteousness; the second was civil and religious liberty. In other words,
it aimed to make men honest and to make them free.

Such a movement should be cleared of all the misconceptions which have
clung to it since the Restoration, when the very name of Puritan was made
ridiculous by the jeers of the gay courtiers of Charles II. Though the
spirit of the movement was profoundly religious, the Puritans were not a
religious sect; neither was the Puritan a narrow-minded and gloomy
dogmatist, as he is still pictured even in the histories. Pym and Hampden
and Eliot and Milton were Puritans; and in the long struggle for human
liberty there are few names more honored by freemen everywhere. Cromwell
and Thomas Hooker were Puritans; yet Cromwell stood like a rock for
religious tolerance; and Thomas Hooker, in Connecticut, gave to the world
the first written constitution, in which freemen, before electing their
officers, laid down the strict limits of the offices to which they were
elected. That is a Puritan document, and it marks one of the greatest
achievements in the history of government.

From a religious view point Puritanism included all shades of belief. The
name was first given to those who advocated certain changes in the form of
worship of the reformed English Church under Elizabeth; but as the ideal of
liberty rose in men's minds, and opposed to it were the king and his evil
counselors and the band of intolerant churchmen of whom Laud is the great
example, then Puritanism became a great national movement. It included
English churchmen as well as extreme Separatists, Calvinists, Covenanters,
Catholic noblemen,--all bound together in resistance to despotism in Church
and State, and with a passion for liberty and righteousness such as the
world has never since seen. Naturally such a movement had its extremes and
excesses, and it is from a few zealots and fanatics that most of our
misconceptions about the Puritans arise. Life was stern in those days, too
stern perhaps, and the intensity of the struggle against despotism made men
narrow and hard. In the triumph of Puritanism under Cromwell severe laws
were passed, many simple pleasures were forbidden, and an austere standard
of living was forced upon an unwilling people. So the criticism is made
that the wild outbreak of immorality which followed the restoration of
Charles was partly due to the unnatural restrictions of the Puritan era.
The criticism is just; but we must not forget the whole spirit of the
movement. That the Puritan prohibited Maypole dancing and horse racing is
of small consequence beside the fact that he fought for liberty and
justice, that he overthrew despotism and made a man's life and property
safe from the tyranny of rulers. A great river is not judged by the foam on
its surface, and certain austere laws and doctrines which we have ridiculed
are but froth on the surface of the mighty Puritan current that has flowed
steadily, like a river of life, through English and American history since
the Age of Elizabeth.

CHANGING IDEALS. The political upheaval of the period is summed up in the
terrible struggle between the king and Parliament, which resulted in the
death of Charles at the block and the establishment of the Commonwealth
under Cromwell. For centuries the English people had been wonderfully loyal
to their sovereigns; but deeper than their loyalty to kings was the old
Saxon love for personal liberty. At times, as in the days of Alfred and
Elizabeth, the two ideals went hand in hand; but more often they were in
open strife, and a final struggle for supremacy was inevitable. The crisis
came when James I, who had received the right of royalty from an act of
Parliament, began, by the assumption of "divine right," to ignore the
Parliament which had created him. Of the civil war which followed in the
reign of Charles I, and of the triumph of English freedom, it is
unnecessary to write here. The blasphemy of a man's divine right to rule
his fellow-men was ended. Modern England began with the charge of
Cromwell's brigade of Puritans at Naseby.

Religiously the age was one of even greater ferment than that which marked
the beginning of the Reformation. A great ideal, the ideal of a national
church, was pounding to pieces, like a ship in the breakers, and in the
confusion of such an hour the action of the various sects was like that of
frantic passengers, each striving to save his possessions from the wreck.
The Catholic church, as its name implies, has always held true to the ideal
of a united church, a church which, like the great Roman government of the
early centuries, can bring the splendor and authority of Rome to bear upon
the humblest village church to the farthest ends of the earth. For a time
that mighty ideal dazzled the German and English reformers; but the
possibility of a united Protestant church perished with Elizabeth. Then,
instead of the world-wide church which was the ideal of Catholicism, came
the ideal of a purely national Protestantism. This was the ideal of Laud
and the reactionary bishops, no less than of the scholarly Richard Hooker,
of the rugged Scotch Covenanters, and of the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay.
It is intensely interesting to note that Charles called Irish rebels and
Scotch Highlanders to his aid by promising to restore their national
religions; and that the English Puritans, turning to Scotland for help,
entered into the solemn Covenant of 1643, establishing a national
Presbyterianism, whose object was:

To bring the churches of God in the three kingdoms to uniformity in
religion and government, to preserve the rights of Parliament and the
liberties of the Kingdom; ... that we and our posterity may as brethren
live in faith and love, and the Lord may delight to live in the midst of
us.

In this famous Covenant we see the national, the ecclesiastical, and the
personal dream of Puritanism, side by side, in all their grandeur and
simplicity.

Years passed, years of bitter struggle and heartache, before the
impossibility of uniting the various Protestant sects was generally
recognized. The ideal of a national church died hard, and to its death is
due all the religious unrest of the period. Only as we remember the
national ideal, and the struggle which it caused, can we understand the
amazing life and work of Bunyan, or appreciate the heroic spirit of the
American colonists who left home for a wilderness in order to give the new
ideal of a free church in a free state its practical demonstration.

LITERARY CHARACTERISTICS. In literature also the Puritan Age was one of
confusion, due to the breaking up of old ideals. Mediaeval standards of
chivalry, the impossible loves and romances of which Spenser furnished the
types, perished no less surely than the ideal of a national church; and in
the absence of any fixed standard of literary criticism there was nothing
to prevent the exaggeration of the "metaphysical" poets, who are the
literary parallels to religious sects like the Anabaptists. Poetry took new
and startling forms in Donne and Herbert, and prose became as somber as
Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_. The spiritual gloom which sooner or later
fastens upon all the writers of this age, and which is unjustly attributed
to Puritan influence, is due to the breaking up of accepted standards in
government and religion. No people, from the Greeks to those of our own
day, have suffered the loss of old ideals without causing its writers to
cry, "Ichabod! the glory has departed." That is the unconscious tendency of
literary men in all times, who look backward for their golden age; and it
need not concern the student of literature, who, even in the break-up of
cherished institutions, looks for some foregleams of a better light which
is to break upon the world. This so-called gloomy age produced some minor
poems of exquisite workmanship, and one great master of verse whose work
would glorify any age or people,--John Milton, in whom the indomitable
Puritan spirit finds its noblest expression.

There are three main characteristics in which Puritan literature differs
from that of the preceding age: (1) Elizabethan literature, with all its
diversity, had a marked unity in spirit, resulting from the patriotism of
all classes and their devotion to a queen who, with all her faults, sought
first the nation's welfare. Under the Stuarts all this was changed. The
kings were the open enemies of the people; the country was divided by the
struggle for political and religious liberty; and the literature was as
divided in spirit as were the struggling parties. (2) Elizabethan
literature is generally inspiring; it throbs with youth and hope and
vitality. That which follows speaks of age and sadness; even its brightest
hours are followed by gloom, and by the pessimism inseparable from the
passing of old standards. (3) Elizabethan literature is intensely romantic;
the romance springs from the heart of youth, and believes all things, even
the impossible. The great schoolman's _credo_, "I believe because it is
impossible," is a better expression of Elizabethan literature than of
mediæval theology. In the literature of the Puritan period one looks in
vain for romantic ardor. Even in the lyrics and love poems a critical,
intellectual spirit takes its place, and whatever romance asserts itself is
in form rather than in feeling, a fantastic and artificial adornment of
speech rather than the natural utterance of a heart in which sentiment is
so strong and true that poetry is its only expression.


II. LITERATURE OF THE PURITAN PERIOD

THE TRANSITION POETS. When one attempts to classify the literature of the
first half of the seventeenth century, from the death of Elizabeth (1603)
to the Restoration (1660), he realizes the impossibility of grouping poets
by any accurate standard. The classifications attempted here have small
dependence upon dates or sovereigns, and are suggestive rather than
accurate. Thus Shakespeare and Bacon wrote largely in the reign of James I,
but their work is Elizabethan in spirit; and Bunyan is no less a Puritan
because he happened to write after the Restoration. The name Metaphysical
poets, given by Dr. Johnson, is somewhat suggestive but not descriptive of
the followers of Donne; the name Caroline or Cavalier poets brings to mind
the careless temper of the Royalists who followed King Charles with a
devotion of which he was unworthy; and the name Spenserian poets recalls
the little band of dreamers who clung to Spenser's ideal, even while his
romantic mediæval castle was battered down by Science at the one gate and
Puritanism at the other. At the beginning of this bewildering confusion of
ideals expressed in literature, we note a few writers who are generally
known as Jacobean poets, but whom we have called the Transition poets
because, with the later dramatists, they show clearly the changing
standards of the age.

SAMUEL DANIEL (1562-1619). Daniel, who is often classed with the first
Metaphysical poets, is interesting to us for two reasons,--for his use of
the artificial sonnet, and for his literary desertion of Spenser as a model
for poets. His _Delia_, a cycle of sonnets modeled, perhaps, after Sidney's
_Astrophel and Stella_, helped to fix the custom of celebrating love or
friendship by a series of sonnets, to which some pastoral pseudonym was
affixed. In his sonnets, many of which rank with Shakespeare's, and in his
later poetry, especially the beautiful "Complaint of Rosamond" and his
"Civil Wars," he aimed solely at grace of expression, and became
influential in giving to English poetry a greater individuality and
independence than it had ever known. In matter he set himself squarely
against the mediæval tendency:

    Let others sing of kings and paladines
    In aged accents and untimely words,
    Paint shadows in imaginary lines.

This fling at Spenser and his followers marks the beginning of the modern
and realistic school, which sees in life as it is enough poetic material,
without the invention of allegories and impossible heroines. Daniel's
poetry, which was forgotten soon after his death, has received probably
more homage than it deserves in the praises of Wordsworth, Southey, Lamb,
and Coleridge. The latter says: "Read Daniel, the admirable Daniel. The
style and language are just such as any pure and manly writer of the
present day would use. It seems quite modern in comparison with the style
of Shakespeare."

THE SONG WRITERS. In strong contrast with the above are two distinct
groups, the Song Writers and the Spenserian poets. The close of the reign
of Elizabeth was marked by an outburst of English songs, as remarkable in
its sudden development as the rise of the drama. Two causes contributed to
this result,--the increasing influence of French instead of Italian verse,
and the rapid development of music as an art at the close of the sixteenth
century. The two song writers best worth studying are Thomas Campion
(1567?-1619) and Nicholas Breton (1545?-1626?). Like all the lyric poets of
the age, they are a curious mixture of the Elizabethan and the Puritan
standards. They sing of sacred and profane love with the same zest, and a
careless love song is often found on the same page with a plea for divine
grace.

THE SPENSERIAN POETS. Of the Spenserian poets Giles Fletcher and Wither are
best worth studying. Giles Fletcher (1588?-1623) has at times a strong
suggestion of Milton (who was also a follower of Spenser in his early
years) in the noble simplicity and majesty of his lines. His best known
work, "Christ's Victory and Triumph" (1610), was the greatest religious
poem that had appeared in England since "Piers Plowman," and is not an
unworthy predecessor of _Paradise Lost_.

The life of George Wither (1588-1667) covers the whole period of English
history from Elizabeth to the Restoration, and the enormous volume of his
work covers every phase of the literature of two great ages. His life was a
varied one; now as a Royalist leader against the Covenanters, and again
announcing his Puritan convictions, and suffering in prison for his faith.
At his best Wither is a lyric poet of great originality, rising at times to
positive genius; but the bulk of his poetry is intolerably dull. Students
of this period find him interesting as an epitome of the whole age in which
he lived; but the average reader is more inclined to note with interest
that he published in 1623 _Hymns and Songs of the Church_, the first hymn
book that ever appeared in the English language.

THE METAPHYSICAL POETS. This name--which was given by Dr. Johnson in
derision, because of the fantastic form of Donne's poetry--is often applied
to all minor poets of the Puritan Age. We use the term here in a narrower
sense, excluding the followers of Daniel and that later group known as the
Cavalier poets. It includes Donne, Herbert, Waller, Denham, Cowley,
Vaughan, Davenant, Marvell, and Crashaw. The advanced student finds them
all worthy of study, not only for their occasional excellent poetry, but
because of their influence on later literature. Thus Richard Crashaw
(1613?-1649), the Catholic mystic, is interesting because his troubled life
is singularly like Donne's, and his poetry is at times like Herbert's set
on fire.[160] Abraham Cowley (1618-1667), who blossomed young and who, at
twenty-five, was proclaimed the greatest poet in England, is now scarcely
known even by name, but his "Pindaric Odes"[161] set an example which
influenced English poetry throughout the eighteenth century. Henry Vaughan
(1622-1695) is worthy of study because he is in some respects the
forerunner of Wordsworth;[162] and Andrew Marvell (1621-1678), because of
his loyal friendship with Milton, and because his poetry shows the conflict
between the two schools of Spenser and Donne. Edmund Waller (1606-1687)
stands between the Puritan Age and the Restoration. He was the first to use
consistently the "closed" couplet which dominated our poetry for the next
century. By this, and especially by his influence over Dryden, the greatest
figure of the Restoration, he occupies a larger place in our literature
than a reading of his rather tiresome poetry would seem to warrant.

Of all these poets, each of whom has his special claim, we can consider
here only Donne and Herbert, who in different ways are the types of revolt
against earlier forms and standards of poetry. In feeling and imagery both
are poets of a high order, but in style and expression they are the leaders
of the fantastic school whose influence largely dominated poetry during the
half century of the Puritan period.


JOHN DONNE (1573-1631)

LIFE. The briefest outline of Donne's life shows its intense human
interest. He was born in London, the son of a rich iron merchant, at the
time when the merchants of England were creating a new and higher kind of
princes. On his father's side he came from an old Welsh family, and on his
mother's side from the Heywoods and Sir Thomas More's family. Both families
were Catholic, and in his early life persecution was brought near; for his
brother died in prison for harboring a proscribed priest, and his own
education could not be continued in Oxford and Cambridge because of his
religion. Such an experience generally sets a man's religious standards for
life; but presently Donne, as he studied law at Lincoln's Inn, was
investigating the philosophic grounds of all faith. Gradually he left the
church in which he was born, renounced all denominations, and called
himself simply Christian. Meanwhile he wrote poetry and shared his wealth
with needy Catholic relatives. He joined the expedition of Essex for Cadiz
in 1596, and for the Azores in 1597, and on sea and in camp found time to
write poetry. Two of his best poems, "The Storm" and "The Calm," belong to
this period. Next he traveled in Europe for three years, but occupied
himself with study and poetry. Returning home, he became secretary to Lord
Egerton, fell in love with the latter's young niece, Anne More, and married
her; for which cause Donne was cast into prison. Strangely enough his
poetical work at this time is not a song of youthful romance, but "The
Progress of the Soul," a study of transmigration. Years of wandering and
poverty followed, until Sir George More forgave the young lovers and made
an allowance to his daughter. Instead of enjoying his new comforts, Donne
grew more ascetic and intellectual in his tastes. He refused also the
nattering offer of entering the Church of England and of receiving a
comfortable "living." By his "Pseudo Martyr" he attracted the favor of
James I, who persuaded him to be ordained, yet left him without any place
or employment. When his wife died her allowance ceased, and Donne was left
with seven children in extreme poverty. Then he became a preacher, rose
rapidly by sheer intellectual force and genius, and in four years was the
greatest of English preachers and Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in London.
There he "carried some to heaven in holy raptures and led others to amend
their lives," and as he leans over the pulpit with intense earnestness is
likened by Izaak Walton to "an angel leaning from a cloud."

Here is variety enough to epitomize his age, and yet in all his life,
stronger than any impression of outward weal or woe, is the sense of
mystery that surrounds Donne. In all his work one finds a mystery, a hiding
of some deep thing which the world would gladly know and share, and which
is suggested in his haunting little poem, "The Undertaking":

    I have done one braver thing
    Than all the worthies did;
    And yet a braver thence doth spring,
    Which is, to keep that hid.

DONNE'S POETRY. Donne's poetry is so uneven, at times so startling and
fantastic, that few critics would care to recommend it to others. Only a
few will read his works, and they must be left to their own browsing, to
find what pleases them, like deer which, in the midst of plenty, take a
bite here and there and wander on, tasting twenty varieties of food in an
hour's feeding. One who reads much will probably bewail Donne's lack of any
consistent style or literary standard. For instance, Chaucer and Milton are
as different as two poets could well be; yet the work of each is marked by
a distinct and consistent style, and it is the style as much as the matter
which makes the _Tales_ or the _Paradise Lost_ a work for all time. Donne
threw style and all literary standards to the winds; and precisely for this
reason he is forgotten, though his great intellect and his genius had
marked him as one of those who should do things "worthy to be remembered."
While the tendency of literature is to exalt style at the expense of
thought, the world has many men and women who exalt feeling and thought
above expression; and to these Donne is good reading. Browning is of the
same school, and compels attention. While Donne played havoc with
Elizabethan style, he nevertheless influenced our literature in the way of
boldness and originality; and the present tendency is to give him a larger
place, nearer to the few great poets, than he has occupied since Ben Jonson
declared that he was "the first poet of the world in some things," but
likely to perish "for not being understood." For to much of his poetry we
must apply his own satiric verses on another's crudities:

    Infinite work! which doth so far extend
    That none can study it to any end.


GEORGE HERBERT (1593-1633)

"O day most calm, most bright," sang George Herbert, and we may safely take
that single line as expressive of the whole spirit of his writings.
Professor Palmer, whose scholarly edition of this poet's works is a model
for critics and editors, calls Herbert the first in English poetry who
spoke face to face with God. That may be true; but it is interesting to
note that not a poet of the first half of the seventeenth century, not even
the gayest of the Cavaliers, but has written some noble verse of prayer or
aspiration, which expresses the underlying Puritan spirit of his age.
Herbert is the greatest, the most consistent of them all. In all the others
the Puritan struggles against the Cavalier, or the Cavalier breaks loose
from the restraining Puritan; but in Herbert the struggle is past and peace
has come. That his life was not all calm, that the Puritan in him had
struggled desperately before it subdued the pride and idleness of the
Cavalier, is evident to one who reads between his lines:

    I struck the board and cry'd, No more!
         I will abroad.
    What? Shall I ever sigh and pine?
    My lines and life are free, free as the road,
    Loose as the wind.

There speaks the Cavalier of the university and the court; and as one reads
to the end of the little poem, which he calls by the suggestive name of
"The Collar," he may know that he is reading condensed biography.

Those who seek for faults, for strained imagery and fantastic verse forms
in Herbert's poetry, will find them in abundance; but it will better repay
the reader to look for the deep thought and fine feeling that are hidden in
these wonderful religious lyrics, even in those that appear most
artificial. The fact that Herbert's reputation was greater, at times, than
Milton's, and that his poems when published after his death had a large
sale and influence, shows certainly that he appealed to the men of his age;
and his poems will probably be read and appreciated, if only by the few,
just so long as men are strong enough to understand the Puritan's spiritual
convictions.

LIFE. Herbert's life is so quiet and uneventful that to relate a few
biographical facts can be of little advantage. Only as one reads the whole
story by Izaak Walton can he share the gentle spirit of Herbert's poetry.
He was born at Montgomery Castle,[163] Wales, 1593, of a noble Welsh
family. His university course was brilliant, and after graduation he waited
long years in the vain hope of preferment at court. All his life he had to
battle against disease, and this is undoubtedly the cause of the long delay
before each new step in his course. Not till he was thirty-seven was he
ordained and placed over the little church of Bemerton. How he lived here
among plain people, in "this happy corner of the Lord's field, hoping all
things and blessing all people, asking his own way to Sion and showing
others the way," should be read in Walton. It is a brief life, less than
three years of work before being cut off by consumption, but remarkable for
the single great purpose and the glorious spiritual strength that shine
through physical weakness. Just before his death he gave some manuscripts
to a friend, and his message is worthy of John Bunyan:

Deliver this little book to my dear brother Ferrar, and tell him he shall
find in it a picture of the many spiritual conflicts that have passed
betwixt God and my soul before I could subject mine to the will of Jesus my
master, in whose service I have now found perfect freedom. Desire him to
read it; and then, if he can think it may turn to the advantage of any
dejected poor soul, let it be made public; if not, let him burn it, for I
and it are less than the least of God's mercies.

HERBERT'S POEMS. Herbert's chief work, _The Temple_, consists of over one
hundred and fifty short poems suggested by the Church, her holidays and
ceremonials, and the experiences of the Christian life. The first poem,
"The Church Porch," is the longest and, though polished with a care that
foreshadows the classic school, the least poetical. It is a wonderful
collection of condensed sermons, wise precepts, and moral lessons,
suggesting Chaucer's "Good Counsel," Pope's "Essay on Man," and Polonius's
advice to Laertes, in _Hamlet;_ only it is more packed with thought than
any of these. Of truth-speaking he says:

    Dare to be true. Nothing can need a lie;
    A fault which needs it most grows two thereby.

and of calmness in argument:

    Calmness is great advantage: he that lets
    Another chafe may warm him at his fire.

Among the remaining poems of _The Temple_ one of the most suggestive is
"The Pilgrimage." Here in six short stanzas, every line close-packed with
thought, we have the whole of Bunyan's _Pilgrim's Progress_. The poem was
written probably before Bunyan was born, but remembering the wide influence
of Herbert's poetry, it is an interesting question whether Bunyan received
the idea of his immortal work from this "Pilgrimage." Probably the best
known of all his poems is the one called "The Pulley," which generally
appears, however under the name "Rest," or "The Gifts of God."

     When God at first made man,
    Having a glass of blessings standing by,
    Let us, said he, pour on him all we can:
    Let the world's riches, which dispersed lie,
      Contract into a span.
     So strength first made a way;
    Then beauty flowed; then wisdom, honor, pleasure.
    When almost all was out, God made a stay,
    Perceiving that, alone of all his treasure,
      Rest in the bottom lay.
     For, if I should, said he,
    Bestow this jewel also on my creature,
    He would adore my gifts instead of me,
    And rest in Nature, not the God of Nature:
      So both should losers be.
     Yet let him keep the rest,
    But keep them with repining restlessness:
    Let him be rich and weary, that at least,
    If goodness lead him not, yet weariness
      May toss him to my breast.

Among the poems which may be read as curiosities of versification, and
which arouse the wrath of the critics against the whole metaphysical
school, are those like "Easter Wings" and "The Altar," which suggest in the
printed form of the poem the thing of which the poet sings. More ingenious
is the poem in which rime is made by cutting off the first letter of a
preceding word, as in the five stanzas of "Paradise ":

    I bless thee, Lord, because I grow
    Among thy trees, which in a row
    To thee both fruit and order ow.

And more ingenious still are odd conceits like the poem "Heaven," in which
Echo, by repeating the last syllable of each line, gives an answer to the
poet's questions.

THE CAVALIER POETS. In the literature of any age there are generally found
two distinct tendencies. The first expresses the dominant spirit of the
times; the second, a secret or an open rebellion. So in this age, side by
side with the serious and rational Puritan, lives the gallant and trivial
Cavalier. The Puritan finds expression in the best poetry of the period,
from Donne to Milton, and in the prose of Baxter and Bunyan; the Cavalier
in a small group of poets,--Herrick, Lovelace, Suckling, and Carew,--who
write songs generally in lighter vein, gay, trivial, often licentious, but
who cannot altogether escape the tremendous seriousness of Puritanism.

THOMAS CAREW (1598?-1639?). Carew may be called the inventor of Cavalier
love poetry, and to him, more than to any other, is due the peculiar
combination of the sensual and the religious which marked most of the minor
poets of the seventeenth century. His poetry is the Spenserian pastoral
stripped of its refinement of feeling and made direct, coarse, vigorous.
His poems, published in 1640, are generally, like his life, trivial or
sensual; but here and there is found one, like the following, which
indicates that with the Metaphysical and Cavalier poets a new and
stimulating force had entered English literature:

    Ask me no more where Jove bestows,
    When June is past, the fading rose,
    For in your beauty's orient deep
    These flowers, as in their causes, sleep.
    Ask me no more where those stars light
    That downwards fall in dead of night,
    For in your eyes they sit, and there
    Fixèd become as in their sphere.
    Ask me no more if east or west
    The phoenix builds her spicy nest,
    For unto you at last she flies,
    And in your fragrant bosom dies.

ROBERT HERRICK (1591-1674). Herrick is the true Cavalier, gay, devil-may-
care in disposition, but by some freak of fate a clergyman of Dean Prior,
in South Devon, a county made famous by him and Blackmore. Here, in a
country parish, he lived discontentedly, longing for the joys of London and
the Mermaid Tavern, his bachelor establishment consisting of an old
housekeeper, a cat, a dog, a goose, a tame lamb, one hen,--for which he
thanked God in poetry because she laid an egg every day,--and a pet pig
that drank beer with Herrick out of a tankard. With admirable good nature,
Herrick made the best of these uncongenial surroundings. He watched with
sympathy the country life about him and caught its spirit in many lyrics, a
few of which, like "Corinna's Maying," "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,"
and "To Daffodils," are among the best known in our language. His poems
cover a wide range, from trivial love songs, pagan in spirit, to hymns of
deep religious feeling. Only the best of his poems should be read; and
these are remarkable for their exquisite sentiment and their graceful,
melodious expression. The rest, since they reflect something of the
coarseness of his audience, may be passed over in silence.

Late in life Herrick published his one book, _Hesperides and Noble Numbers_
(1648). The latter half contains his religious poems, and one has only to
read there the remarkable "Litany" to see how the religious terror that
finds expression in Bunyan's _Grace Abounding_ could master even the most
careless of Cavalier singers.

SUCKLING AND LOVELACE. Sir John Suckling (1609-1642) was one of the most
brilliant wits of the court of Charles I, who wrote poetry as he exercised
a horse or fought a duel, because it was considered a gentleman's
accomplishment in those days. His poems, "struck from his wild life like
sparks from his rapier," are utterly trivial, and, even in his best known
"Ballad Upon a Wedding," rarely rise above mere doggerel. It is only the
romance of his life--his rich, brilliant, careless youth, and his poverty
and suicide in Paris, whither he fled because of his devotion to the
Stuarts--that keeps his name alive in our literature.

In his life and poetry Sir Richard Lovelace (1618-1658) offers a remarkable
parallel to Suckling, and the two are often classed together as perfect
representatives of the followers of King Charles. Lovelace's _Lucasta_, a
volume of love lyrics, is generally on a higher plane than Suckling's work;
and a few of the poems like "To Lucasta," and "To Althea, from Prison,"
deserve the secure place they have won. In the latter occur the oft-quoted
lines:

    Stone walls do not a prison make,
      Nor iron bars a cage;
    Minds innocent and quiet take
      That for an hermitage.
    If I have freedom in my love,
      And in my soul am free,
    Angels alone that soar above
      Enjoy such liberty.

JOHN MILTON (1608-1674)

    Thy soul was like a star and dwelt apart;
    Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea--
    Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free;
    So didst thou travel on life's common way
    In cheerful godliness: and yet thy heart
    The lowliest duties on herself did lay.
        (From Wordsworth's "Sonnet on Milton")

Shakespeare and Milton are the two figures that tower conspicuously above
the goodly fellowship of men who have made our literature famous. Each is
representative of the age that produced him, and together they form a
suggestive commentary upon the two forces that rule our humanity,--the
force of impulse and the force of a fixed purpose. Shakespeare is the poet
of impulse, of the loves, hates, fears, jealousies, and ambitions that
swayed the men of his age. Milton is the poet of steadfast will and
purpose, who moves like a god amid the fears and hopes and changing
impulses of the world, regarding them as trivial and momentary things that
can never swerve a great soul from its course.

It is well to have some such comparison in mind while studying the
literature of the Elizabethan and the Puritan Age. While Shakespeare and
Ben Jonson and their unequaled company of wits make merry at the Mermaid
Tavern, there is already growing up on the same London street a poet who
shall bring a new force into literature, who shall add to the Renaissance
culture and love of beauty the tremendous moral earnestness of the Puritan.
Such a poet must begin, as the Puritan always began, with his own soul, to
discipline and enlighten it, before expressing its beauty in literature.
"He that would hope to write well hereafter in laudable things," says
Milton, "ought himself to be a true poem; that is, a composition and
pattern of the best and most honorable things." Here is a new proposition
in art which suggests the lofty ideal of Fra Angelico, that before one can
write literature, which is the expression of the ideal, he must first
develop in himself the ideal man. Because Milton is human he must know the
best in humanity; therefore he studies, giving his days to music, art, and
literature, his nights to profound research and meditation. But because he
knows that man is more than mortal he also prays, depending, as he tells
us, on "devout prayer to that Eternal Spirit who can enrich with all
utterance and knowledge." Such a poet is already in spirit far beyond the
Renaissance, though he lives in the autumn of its glory and associates with
its literary masters. "There is a spirit in man," says the old Hebrew poet,
"and the inspiration of the Almighty giveth him understanding." Here, in a
word, is the secret of Milton's life and writing. Hence his long silences,
years passing without a word; and when he speaks it is like the voice of a
prophet who begins with the sublime announcement, "The Spirit of the Lord
is upon me." Hence his style, producing an impression of sublimity, which
has been marked for wonder by every historian of our literature. His style
was unconsciously sublime because he lived and thought consciously in a
sublime atmosphere.

LIFE OF MILTON. Milton is like an ideal in the soul, like a lofty mountain
on the horizon. We never attain the ideal; we never climb the mountain; but
life would be inexpressibly poorer were either to be taken away.

From childhood Milton's parents set him apart for the attainment of noble
ends, and so left nothing to chance in the matter of training. His father,
John Milton, is said to have turned Puritan while a student at Oxford and
to have been disinherited by his family; whereupon he settled in London and
prospered greatly as a scrivener, that is, a kind of notary. In character
the elder Milton was a rare combination of scholar and business man, a
radical Puritan in politics and religion, yet a musician, whose hymn tunes
are still sung, and a lover of art and literature. The poet's mother was a
woman of refinement and social grace, with a deep interest in religion and
in local charities. So the boy grew up in a home which combined the culture
of the Renaissance with the piety and moral strength of early Puritanism.
He begins, therefore, as the heir of one great age and the prophet of
another.

Apparently the elder Milton shared Bacon's dislike for the educational
methods of the time and so took charge of his son's training, encouraging
his natural tastes, teaching him music, and seeking out a tutor who helped
the boy to what he sought most eagerly, not the grammar and mechanism of
Greek and Latin but rather the stories, the ideals, the poetry that hide in
their incomparable literatures. At twelve years we find the boy already a
scholar in spirit, unable to rest till after midnight because of the joy
with which his study was rewarded. From boyhood two great principles seem
to govern Milton's career: one, the love of beauty, of music, art,
literature, and indeed of every form of human culture; the other, a
steadfast devotion to duty as the highest object in human life.

A brief course at the famous St. Paul's school in London was the prelude to
Milton's entrance to Christ's College, Cambridge. Here again he followed
his natural bent and, like Bacon, found himself often in opposition to the
authorities. Aside from some Latin poems, the most noteworthy song of this
period of Milton's life is his splendid ode, '"On the Morning of Christ's
Nativity," which was begun on Christmas day, 1629. Milton, while deep in
the classics, had yet a greater love for his native literature. Spenser was
for years his master; in his verse we find every evidence of his "loving
study" of Shakespeare, and his last great poems show clearly how he had
been influenced by Fletcher's _Christ's Victory and Triumph_. But it is
significant that this first ode rises higher than anything of the kind
produced in the famous Age of Elizabeth.

While at Cambridge it was the desire of his parents that Milton should take
orders in the Church of England; but the intense love of mental liberty
which stamped the Puritan was too strong within him, and he refused to
consider the "oath of servitude," as he called it, which would mark his
ordination. Throughout his life Milton, though profoundly religious, held
aloof from the strife of sects. In belief, he belonged to the extreme
Puritans, called Separatists, Independents, Congregationalists, of which
our Pilgrim Fathers are the great examples; but he refused to be bound by
any creed or church discipline:

    As ever in my great Task-Master's eye.

In this last line of one of his sonnets[164] is found Milton's rejection of
every form of outward religious authority in face of the supreme Puritan
principle, the liberty of the individual soul before God.

A long period of retirement followed Milton's withdrawal from the
university in 1632. At his father's country home in Horton he gave himself
up for six years to solitary reading and study, roaming over the wide
fields of Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Spanish, French, Italian, and English
literatures, and studying hard at mathematics, science, theology, and
music,--a curious combination. To his love of music we owe the melody of
all his poetry, and we note it in the rhythm and balance which make even
his mighty prose arguments harmonious. In "Lycidas," "L'Allegro," "Il
Penseroso," "Arcades," "Comus," and a few "Sonnets," we have the poetic
results of this retirement at Horton,--few, indeed, but the most perfect of
their kind that our literature has recorded.

Out of solitude, where his talent was perfected, Milton entered the busy
world where his character was to be proved to the utmost. From Horton he
traveled abroad, through France, Switzerland, and Italy, everywhere
received with admiration for his learning and courtesy, winning the
friendship of the exiled Dutch scholar Grotius, in Paris, and of Galileo in
his sad imprisonment in Florence.[165] He was on his way to Greece when
news reached him of the break between king and parliament. With the
practical insight which never deserted him Milton saw clearly the meaning
of the news. His cordial reception in Italy, so chary of praise to anything
not Italian, had reawakened in Milton the old desire to write an epic which
England would "not willingly let die"; but at thought of the conflict for
human freedom all his dreams were flung to the winds. He gave up his
travels and literary ambitions and hurried to England. "For I thought it
base," he says, "to be traveling at my ease for intellectual culture while
my fellow-countrymen at home were fighting for liberty."

Then for nearly twenty years the poet of great achievement and still
greater promise disappears. We hear no more songs, but only the prose
denunciations and arguments which are as remarkable as his poetry. In all
our literature there is nothing more worthy of the Puritan spirit than this
laying aside of personal ambitions in order to join in the struggle for
human liberty. In his best known sonnet, "On His Blindness," which reflects
his grief, not at darkness, but at his abandoned dreams, we catch the
sublime spirit of this renunciation.

Milton's opportunity to serve came in the crisis of 1649. The king had been
sent to the scaffold, paying the penalty of his own treachery, and England
sat shivering at its own deed, like a child or a Russian peasant who in
sudden passion resists unbearable brutality and then is afraid of the
consequences. Two weeks of anxiety, of terror and silence followed; then
appeared Milton's _Tenure of Kings and Magistrates_. To England it was like
the coming of a strong man, not only to protect the child, but to justify
his blow for liberty. Kings no less than people are subject to the eternal
principle of law; the divine right of a people to defend and protect
themselves,--that was the mighty argument which calmed a people's dread and
proclaimed that a new man and a new principle had arisen in England. Milton
was called to be Secretary for Foreign Tongues in the new government; and
for the next few years, until the end of the Commonwealth, there were two
leaders in England, Cromwell the man of action, Milton the man of thought.
It is doubtful to which of the two humanity owes most for its emancipation
from the tyranny of kings and prelates.

Two things of personal interest deserve mention in this period of Milton's
life, his marriage and his blindness. In 1643 he married Mary Powell, a
shallow, pleasure-loving girl, the daughter of a Royalist; and that was the
beginning of sorrows. After a month, tiring of the austere life of a
Puritan household, she abandoned her husband, who, with the same radical
reasoning with which he dealt with affairs of state, promptly repudiated
the marriage. His _Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce_ and his
_Tetrachordon_ are the arguments to justify his position; but they aroused
a storm of protest in England, and they suggest to a modern reader that
Milton was perhaps as much to blame as his wife, and that he had scant
understanding of a woman's nature. When his wife, fearing for her position,
appeared before him in tears, all his ponderous arguments were swept aside
by a generous impulse; and though the marriage was never a happy one,
Milton never again mentioned his wife's desertion. The scene in _Paradise
Lost_, where Eve comes weeping to Adam, seeking peace and pardon, is
probably a reflection of a scene in Milton's own household. His wife died
in 1653, and a few years later he married another, whom we remember for the
sonnet, "Methought I saw my late espoused saint," in which she is
celebrated. She died after fifteen months, and in 1663 he married a third
wife, who helped the blind old man to manage his poor household.

From boyhood the strain on the poet's eyes had grown more and more severe;
but even when his sight was threatened he held steadily to his purpose of
using his pen in the service of his country. During the king's imprisonment
a book appeared called _Eikon Basilike_ (Royal Image), giving a rosy
picture of the king's piety, and condemning the Puritans. The book speedily
became famous and was the source of all Royalist arguments against the
Commonwealth. In 1649 appeared Milton's _Eikonoklastes_ (Image Breaker),
which demolished the flimsy arguments of the _Eikon Basilike_ as a charge
of Cromwell's Ironsides had overwhelmed the king's followers. After the
execution of the king appeared another famous attack upon the Puritans,
_Defensio Regia pro Carlo I_, instigated by Charles II, who was then living
in exile. It was written in Latin by Salmasius, a Dutch professor at
Leyden, and was hailed by the Royalists as an invincible argument. By order
of the Council of State Milton prepared a reply. His eyesight had sadly
failed, and he was warned that any further strain would be disastrous. His
reply was characteristic of the man and the Puritan. As he had once
sacrificed his poetry, so he was now ready, he said, to sacrifice his eyes
also on the altar of English liberty. His magnificent _Defensio pro Populo
Anglicano_ is one of the most masterly controversial works in literature.
The power of the press was already strongly felt in England, and the new
Commonwealth owed its standing partly to Milton's prose, and partly to
Cromwell's policy. The _Defensio_ was the last work that Milton saw.
Blindness fell upon him ere it was finished, and from 1652 until his death
he labored in total darkness.

The last part of Milton's life is a picture of solitary grandeur unequaled
in literary history. With the Restoration all his labors and sacrifices for
humanity were apparently wasted. From his retirement he could hear the
bells and the shouts that welcomed back a vicious monarch, whose first act
was to set his foot upon his people's neck. Milton was immediately marked
for persecution; he remained for months in hiding; he was reduced to
poverty, and his books were burned by the public hangman. His daughters,
upon whom he depended in his blindness, rebelled at the task of reading to
him and recording his thoughts. In the midst of all these sorrows we
understand, in _Samson_, the cry of the blind champion of Israel:

    Now blind, disheartened, shamed, dishonored, quelled,
    To what can I be useful? wherein serve
    My nation, and the work from Heaven imposed?
    But to sit idle on the household hearth,
    A burdenous drone; to visitants a gaze,
    Or pitied object.

Milton's answer is worthy of his own great life. Without envy or bitterness
he goes back to the early dream of an immortal poem and begins with superb
consciousness of power to dictate his great epic.

_Paradise Lost_ was finished in 1665, after seven years' labor in darkness.
With great difficulty he found a publisher, and for the great work, now the
most honored poem in our literature, he received less than certain verse
makers of our day receive for a little song in one of our popular
magazines. Its success was immediate, though, like all his work, it met
with venomous criticism. Dryden summed up the impression made on thoughtful
minds of his time when he said, "This man cuts us all out, and the ancients
too." Thereafter a bit of sunshine came into his darkened home, for the
work stamped him as one of the world's great writers, and from England and
the Continent pilgrims came in increasing numbers to speak their gratitude.

The next year Milton began his _Paradise Regained_. In 1671 appeared his
last important work, _Samson Agonistes_, the most powerful dramatic poem on
the Greek model which our language possesses. The picture of Israel's
mighty champion, blind, alone, afflicted by thoughtless enemies but
preserving a noble ideal to the end, is a fitting close to the life work of
the poet himself. For years he was silent, dreaming who shall say what
dreams in his darkness, and saying cheerfully to his friends, "Still guides
the heavenly vision." He died peacefully in 1674, the most sublime and the
most lonely figure in our literature.

MILTON'S EARLY POETRY.[166] In his early work Milton appears as the
inheritor of all that was best in Elizabethan literature, and his first
work, the ode "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity," approaches the
high-water mark of lyric poetry in England. In the next six years, from
1631 to 1637, he wrote but little, scarcely more than two thousand lines,
but these are among the most exquisite and the most perfectly finished in
our language.

"L'Allegro" and "II Penseroso" are twin poems, containing many lines and
short descriptive passages which linger in the mind like strains of music,
and which are known and loved wherever English is spoken. "L'Allegro" (the
joyous or happy man) is like an excursion into the English fields at
sunrise. The air is sweet; birds are singing; a multitude of sights,
sounds, fragrances, fill all the senses; and to this appeal of nature the
soul of man responds by being happy, seeing in every flower and hearing in
every harmony some exquisite symbol of human life. "Il Penseroso" takes us
over the same ground at twilight and at moonrise. The air is still fresh
and fragrant; the symbolism is, if possible, more tenderly beautiful than
before; but the gay mood is gone, though its memory lingers in the
afterglow of the sunset. A quiet thoughtfulness takes the place of the
pure, joyous sensation of the morning, a thoughtfulness which is not sad,
though like all quiet moods it is akin to sadness, and which sounds the
deeps of human emotion in the presence of nature. To quote scattered lines
of either poem is to do injustice to both. They should be read in their
entirety the same day, one at morning, the other at eventide, if one is to
appreciate their beauty and suggestiveness.

The "Masque of Comus" is in many respects the most perfect of Milton's
poems. It was written in 1634 to be performed at Ludlow Castle before the
earl of Bridgewater and his friends. There is a tradition that the earl's
three children had been lost in the woods, and, whether true or not, Milton
takes the simple theme of a person lost, calls in an Attendant Spirit to
protect the wanderer, and out of this, with its natural action and
melodious songs, makes the most exquisite pastoral drama that we possess.
In form it is a masque, like those gorgeous products of the Elizabethan age
of which Ben Jonson was the master. England had borrowed the idea of the
masque from Italy and had used it as the chief entertainment at all
festivals, until it had become to the nobles of England what the miracle
play had been to the common people of a previous generation. Milton, with
his strong Puritan spirit, could not be content with the mere entertainment
of an idle hour. "Comus" has the gorgeous scenic effects, the music and
dancing of other masques; but its moral purpose and its ideal teachings are
unmistakable. "The Triumph of Virtue" would be a better name for this
perfect little masque, for its theme is that virtue and innocence can walk
through any peril of this world without permanent harm. This eternal
triumph of good over evil is proclaimed by the Attendant Spirit who has
protected the innocent in this life and who now disappears from mortal
sight to resume its life of joy:

    Mortals, that would follow me,
    Love Virtue; she alone is free.
    She can teach ye how to climb
    Higher than the sphery chime;
    Or if Virtue feeble were,
    Heaven itself would stoop to her.

While there are undoubted traces of Jonson and John Fletcher in Milton's
"Comus," the poem far surpasses its predecessors in the airy beauty and
melody of its verses.

In the next poem, "Lycidas," a pastoral elegy written in 1637, and the last
of his Horton poems, Milton is no longer the inheritor of the old age, but
the prophet of a new. A college friend, Edward King, had been drowned in
the Irish Sea, and Milton follows the poetic custom of his age by
representing both his friend and himself in the guise of shepherds leading
the pastoral life. Milton also uses all the symbolism of his predecessors,
introducing fauns, satyrs, and sea nymphs; but again the Puritan is not
content with heathen symbolism, and so introduces a new symbol of the
Christian shepherd responsible for the souls of men, whom he likens to
hungry sheep that look up and are not fed. The Puritans and Royalists at
this time were drifting rapidly apart, and Milton uses his new symbolism to
denounce the abuses that had crept into the Church. In any other poet this
moral teaching would hinder the free use of the imagination; but Milton
seems equal to the task of combining high moral purpose with the noblest
poetry. In its exquisite finish and exhaustless imagery "Lycidas" surpasses
most of the poetry of what is often called the pagan Renaissance.

Besides these well-known poems, Milton wrote in this early period a
fragmentary masque called "Arcades"; several Latin poems which, like his
English, are exquisitely finished; and his famous "Sonnets," which brought
this Italian form of verse nearly to the point of perfection. In them he
seldom wrote of love, the usual subject with his predecessors, but of
patriotism, duty, music, and subjects of political interest suggested by
the struggle into which England was drifting. Among these sonnets each
reader must find his own favorites. Those best known and most frequently
quoted are "On His Deceased Wife," "To the Nightingale," "On Reaching the
Age of Twenty-three," "The Massacre in Piedmont," and the two "On His
Blindness."

MILTON'S PROSE. Of Milton's prose works there are many divergent opinions,
ranging from Macaulay's unbounded praise to the condemnation of some of our
modern critics. From a literary view point Milton's prose would be stronger
if less violent, and a modern writer would hardly be excused for using his
language or his methods; but we must remember the times and the methods of
his opponents. In his fiery zeal against injustice the poet is suddenly
dominated by the soldier's spirit. He first musters his facts in
battalions, and charges upon the enemy to crush and overpower without
mercy. For Milton hates injustice and, because it is an enemy of his
people, he cannot and will not spare it. When the victory is won, he exults
in a paean of victory as soul-stirring as the Song of Deborah. He is the
poet again, spite of himself, and his mind fills with magnificent images.
Even with a subject so dull, so barren of the bare possibilities of poetry,
as his "Animadversions upon the Remonstrants' Defense," he breaks out into
an invocation, "Oh, Thou that sittest in light and glory unapproachable,
parent of angels and men," which is like a chapter from the Apocalypse. In
such passages Milton's prose is, as Taine suggests, "an outpouring of
splendors," which suggests the noblest poetry.

On account of their controversial character these prose works are seldom
read, and it is probable that Milton never thought of them as worthy of a
place in literature. Of them all _Areopagitica_ has perhaps the most
permanent interest and is best worth reading. In Milton's time there was a
law forbidding the publication of books until they were indorsed by the
official censor. Needless to say, the censor, holding his office and salary
by favor, was naturally more concerned with the divine right of kings and
bishops than with the delights of literature, and many books were
suppressed for no better reason than that they were displeasing to the
authorities. Milton protested against this, as against every other form of
tyranny, and his _Areopagitica_--so called from the Areopagus or Forum of
Athens, the place of public appeal, and the Mars Hill of St. Paul's
address--is the most famous plea in English for the freedom of the press.

MILTON'S LATER POETRY. Undoubtedly the noblest of Milton's works, written
when he was blind and suffering, are _Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained_,
and _Samson Agonistes_. The first is the greatest, indeed the only
generally acknowledged epic in our literature since _Beowulf;_ the last is
the most perfect specimen of a drama after the Greek method in our
language.

Of the history of the great epic we have some interesting glimpses. In
Cambridge there is preserved a notebook of Milton's containing a list of
nearly one hundred subjects[167] for a great poem, selected while he was a
boy at the university. King Arthur attracted him at first; but his choice
finally settled upon the Fall of Man, and we have four separate outlines
showing Milton's proposed treatment of the subject. These outlines indicate
that he contemplated a mighty drama or miracle play; but whether because of
Puritan antipathy to plays and players, or because of the wretched dramatic
treatment of religious subjects which Milton had witnessed in Italy, he
abandoned the idea of a play and settled on the form of an epic poem; most
fortunately, it must be conceded, for Milton had not the knowledge of men
necessary for a drama. As a study of character _Paradise Lost_ would be a
grievous failure. Adam, the central character, is something of a prig;
while Satan looms up a magnificent figure, entirely different from the
devil of the miracle plays and completely overshadowing the hero both in
interest and in manliness. The other characters, the Almighty, the Son,
Raphael, Michael, the angels and fallen spirits, are merely mouthpieces for
Milton's declamations, without any personal or human interest. Regarded as
a drama, therefore, _Paradise Lost_ could never have been a success; but as
poetry, with its sublime imagery, its harmonious verse, its titanic
background of heaven, hell, and the illimitable void that lies between, it
is unsurpassed in any literature.

In 1658 Milton in his darkness sat down to dictate the work which he had
planned thirty years before. In order to understand the mighty sweep of the
poem it is necessary to sum up the argument of the twelve books, as
follows:

Book I opens with a statement of the subject, the Fall of Man, and a noble
invocation for light and divine guidance. Then begins the account of Satan
and the rebel angels, their banishment from heaven, and their plot to
oppose the design of the Almighty by dragging down his children, our first
parents, from their state of innocence. The book closes with a description
of the land of fire and endless pain where the fallen spirits abide, and
the erection of Pandemonium, the palace of Satan. Book II is a description
of the council of evil spirits, of Satan's consent to undertake the
temptation of Adam and Eve, and his journey to the gates of hell, which are
guarded by Sin and Death. Book III transports us to heaven again. God,
foreseeing the fall, sends Raphael to warn Adam and Eve, so that their
disobedience shall be upon their own heads. Then the Son offers himself a
sacrifice, to take away the sin of the coming disobedience of man. At the
end of this book Satan appears in a different scene, meets Uriel, the Angel
of the Sun, inquires from him the way to earth, and takes his journey
thither disguised as an angel of light. Book IV shows us Paradise and the
innocent state of man. An angel guard is set over Eden, and Satan is
arrested while tempting Eve in a dream, but is curiously allowed to go free
again. Book V shows us Eve relating her dream to Adam, and then the morning
prayer and the daily employment of our first parents. Raphael visits them,
is entertained by a banquet (which Eve proposes in order to show him that
all God's gifts are not kept in heaven), and tells them of the revolt of
the fallen spirits. His story is continued in Book VI. In Book VII we read
the story of the creation of the world as Raphael tells it to Adam and Eve.
In Book VIII Adam tells Raphael the story of his own life and of his
meeting with Eve. Book IX is the story of the temptation by Satan,
following the account in Genesis. Book X records the divine judgment upon
Adam and Eve; shows the construction by Sin and Death of a highway through
chaos to the earth, and Satan's return to Pandemonium. Adam and Eve repent
of their disobedience and Satan and his angels are turned into serpents. In
Book XI the Almighty accepts Adam's repentance, but condemns him to be
banished from Paradise, and the archangel Michael is sent to execute the
sentence. At the end of the book, after Eve's feminine grief at the loss of
Paradise, Michael begins a prophetic vision of the destiny of man. Book XII
continues Michael's vision. Adam and Eve are comforted by hearing of the
future redemption of their race. The poem ends as they wander forth out of
Paradise and the door closes behind them.

It will be seen that this is a colossal epic, not of a man or a hero, but
of the whole race of men; and that Milton's characters are such as no human
hand could adequately portray. But the scenes, the splendors of heaven, the
horrors of hell, the serene beauty of Paradise, the sun and planets
suspended between celestial light and gross darkness, are pictured with an
imagination that is almost superhuman. The abiding interest of the poem is
in these colossal pictures, and in the lofty thought and the marvelous
melody with which they are impressed on our minds. The poem is in blank
verse, and not until Milton used it did we learn the infinite variety and
harmony of which it is capable. He played with it, changing its melody and
movement on every page, "as an organist out of a single theme develops an
unending variety of harmony."

Lamartine has described _Paradise Lost_ as the dream of a Puritan fallen
asleep over his Bible, and this suggestive description leads us to the
curious fact that it is the dream, not the theology or the descriptions of
Bible scenes, that chiefly interests us. Thus Milton describes the
separation of earth and water, and there is little or nothing added to the
simplicity and strength of _Genesis_; but the sunset which follows is
Milton's own dream, and instantly we are transported to a land of beauty
and poetry:

    Now came still Evening on, and Twilight gray
    Had in her sober livery all things clad;
    Silence accompanied; for beast and bird,
    They to their grassy couch, these to their nests
    Were slunk, all but the wakeful nightingale.
    She all night long her amorous descant sung:
    Silence was pleased. Now glowed the firmament
    With living sapphires; Hesperus, that led
    The starry host, rode brightest, till the Moon,
    Rising in clouded majesty, at length
    Apparent queen, unveiled her peerless light,
    And o'er the dark her silver mantle threw.

So also Milton's Almighty, considered purely as a literary character, is
unfortunately tinged with the narrow and literal theology of the time. He
is a being enormously egotistic, the despot rather than the servant of the
universe, seated upon a throne with a chorus of angels about him eternally
singing his praises and ministering to a kind of divine vanity. It is not
necessary to search heaven for such a character; the type is too common
upon earth. But in Satan Milton breaks away from crude mediæval
conceptions; he follows the dream again, and gives us a character to admire
and understand:

    "Is this the region, this the soil, the clime,"
    Said then the lost Archangel, "this the seat
    That we must change for Heaven?--this mournful gloom
    For that celestial light? Be it so, since He
    Who now is sovran can dispose and bid
    What shall be right: farthest from Him is best,
    Whom reason hath equalled, force hath made supreme
    Above his equals. Farewell, happy fields,
    Where joy forever dwells! Hail, horrors! hail,
    Infernal World! and thou, profoundest Hell,
    Receive thy new possessor--one who brings
    A mind not to be changed by place or time.
    The mind is its own place, and in itself
    Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.
    What matter where, if I be still the same,
    And what I should be, all but less than he
    Whom thunder hath made greater? Here at least
    We shall be free; the Almighty hath not built
    Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
    Here we may reign secure; and, in my choice,
    To reign is worth ambition, though in Hell:
    Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven."

In this magnificent heroism Milton has unconsciously immortalized the
Puritan spirit, the same unconquerable spirit that set men to writing poems
and allegories when in prison for the faith, and that sent them over the
stormy sea in a cockleshell to found a free commonwealth in the wilds of
America.

For a modern reader the understanding of _Paradise Lost_ presupposes two
things,--a knowledge of the first chapters of the Scriptures, and of the
general principles of Calvinistic theology; but it is a pity to use the
poem, as has so often been done, to teach a literal acceptance of one or
the other. Of the theology of _Paradise Lost_ the least said the better;
but to the splendor of the Puritan dream and the glorious melody of its
expression no words can do justice. Even a slight acquaintance will make
the reader understand why it ranks with the _Divina Commedia_ of Dante, and
why it is generally accepted by critics as the greatest single poem in our
literature.

Soon after the completion of _Paradise Lost_, Thomas Ellwood, a friend of
Milton, asked one day after reading the Paradise manuscript, "But what hast
thou to say of Paradise Found?" It was in response to this suggestion that
Milton wrote the second part of the great epic, known to us as _Paradise
Regained_. The first tells how mankind, in the person of Adam, fell at the
first temptation by Satan and became an outcast from Paradise and from
divine grace; the second shows how mankind, in the person of Christ,
withstands the tempter and is established once more in the divine favor.
Christ's temptation in the wilderness is the theme, and Milton follows the
account in the fourth chapter of Matthew's gospel. Though _Paradise
Regained_ was Milton's favorite, and though it has many passages of noble
thought and splendid imagery equal to the best of _Paradise Lost_, the poem
as a whole falls below the level of the first, and is less interesting to
read.

In _Samson Agonistes_ Milton turns to a more vital and personal theme, and
his genius transfigures the story of Samson, the mighty champion of Israel,
now blind and scorned, working as a slave among the Philistines. The poet's
aim was to present in English a pure tragedy, with all the passion and
restraint which marked the old Greek dramas. That he succeeded where others
failed is due to two causes: first, Milton himself suggests the hero of one
of the Greek tragedies,--his sorrow and affliction give to his noble nature
that touch of melancholy and calm dignity which is in perfect keeping with
his subject. Second, Milton is telling his own story. Like Samson he had
struggled mightily against the enemies of his race; he had taken a wife
from the Philistines and had paid the penalty; he was blind, alone, scorned
by his vain and thoughtless masters. To the essential action of the tragedy
Milton could add, therefore, that touch of intense yet restrained personal
feeling which carries more conviction than any argument. _Samson_ is in
many respects the most convincing of his works. Entirely apart from the
interest of its subject and treatment, one may obtain from it a better idea
of what great tragedy was among the Greeks than from any other work in our
language.

    Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail
    Or knock the breast, no weakness, no contempt,
    Dispraise or blame,--nothing but well and fair,
    And what may quiet us in a death so noble.


III. PROSE WRITERS OF THE PURITAN PERIOD

JOHN BUNYAN (1628-1688)

As there is but one poet great enough to express the Puritan spirit, so
there is but one commanding prose writer, John Bunyan. Milton was the child
of the Renaissance, inheritor of all its culture, and the most profoundly
educated man of his age. Bunyan was a poor, uneducated tinker. From the
Renaissance he inherited nothing; but from the Reformation he received an
excess of that spiritual independence which had caused the Puritan struggle
for liberty. These two men, representing the extremes of English life in
the seventeenth century, wrote the two works that stand to-day for the
mighty Puritan spirit. One gave us the only epic since _Beowulf_; the other
gave us our only great allegory, which has been read more than any other
book in our language save the Bible.

LIFE OF BUNYAN. Bunyan is an extraordinary figure; we must study him, as
well as his books. Fortunately we have his life story in his own words,
written with the same lovable modesty and sincerity that marked all his
work. Reading that story now, in _Grace Abounding_, we see two great
influences at work in his life. One, from within, was his own vivid
imagination, which saw visions, allegories, parables, revelations, in every
common event. The other, from without, was the spiritual ferment of the
age, the multiplication of strange sects,--Quakers, Free-Willers, Ranters,
Anabaptists, Millenarians,--and the untempered zeal of all classes, like an
engine without a balance wheel, when men were breaking away from authority
and setting up their own religious standards. Bunyan's life is an epitome
of that astonishing religious individualism which marked the close of the
English Reformation.

He was born in the little village of Elstow, near Bedford, in 1628, the son
of a poor tinker. For a little while the boy was sent to school, where he
learned to read and write after a fashion; but he was soon busy in his
father's shop, where, amid the glowing pots and the fire and smoke of his
little forge, he saw vivid pictures of hell and the devils which haunted
him all his life. When he was sixteen years old his father married the
second time, whereupon Bunyan ran away and became a soldier in the
Parliamentary army.

The religious ferment of the age made a tremendous impression on Bunyan's
sensitive imagination. He went to church occasionally, only to find himself
wrapped in terrors and torments by some fiery itinerant preacher; and he
would rush violently away from church to forget his fears by joining in
Sunday sports on the village green. As night came on the sports were
forgotten, but the terrors returned, multiplied like the evil spirits of
the parable. Visions of hell and the demons swarmed in his brain. He would
groan aloud in his remorse, and even years afterwards he bemoans the sins
of his early life. When we look for them fearfully, expecting some shocking
crimes and misdemeanors, we find that they consisted of playing ball on
Sunday and swearing. The latter sin, sad to say, was begun by listening to
his father cursing some obstinate kettle which refused to be tinkered, and
it was perfected in the Parliamentary army. One day his terrible swearing
scared a woman, "a very loose and ungodly wretch," as he tells us, who
reprimanded him for his profanity. The reproach of the poor woman went
straight home, like the voice of a prophet. All his profanity left him; he
hung down his head with shame. "I wished with all my heart," he says, "that
I might be a little child again, that my father might learn me to speak
without this wicked way of swearing." With characteristic vehemence Bunyan
hurls himself upon a promise of Scripture, and instantly the reformation
begins to work in his soul. He casts out the habit, root and branch, and
finds to his astonishment that he can speak more freely and vigorously than
before. Nothing is more characteristic of the man than this sudden seizing
upon a text, which he had doubtless heard many times before, and being
suddenly raised up or cast down by its influence.

With Bunyan's marriage to a good woman the real reformation in his life
began. While still in his teens he married a girl as poor as himself. "We
came together," he says, "as poor as might be, having not so much household
stuff as a dish or spoon between us both." The only dowry which the girl
brought to her new home was two old, threadbare books, _The Plain Man's
Pathway to Heaven_, and _The Practice of Piety_[168] Bunyan read these
books, which instantly gave fire to his imagination. He saw new visions and
dreamed terrible new dreams of lost souls; his attendance at church grew
exemplary; he began slowly and painfully to read the Bible for himself, but
because of his own ignorance and the contradictory interpretations of
Scripture which he heard on every side, he was tossed about like a feather
by all the winds of doctrine.

The record of the next few years is like a nightmare, so terrible is
Bunyan's spiritual struggle. One day he feels himself an outcast; the next
the companion of angels; the third he tries experiments with the Almighty
in order to put his salvation to the proof. As he goes along the road to
Bedford he thinks he will work a miracle, like Gideon with his fleece. He
will say to the little puddles of water in the horses' tracks, "Be ye dry";
and to all the dry tracks he will say, "Be ye puddles." As he is about to
perform the miracle a thought occurs to him: "But go first under yonder
hedge and pray that the Lord will make you able to perform a miracle." He
goes promptly and prays. Then he is afraid of the test, and goes on his way
more troubled than before.

After years of such struggle, chased about between heaven and hell, Bunyan
at last emerges into a saner atmosphere, even as Pilgrim came out of the
horrible Valley of the Shadow. Soon, led by his intense feelings, he
becomes an open-air preacher, and crowds of laborers gather about him on
the village green. They listen in silence to his words; they end in groans
and tears; scores of them amend their sinful lives. For the Anglo-Saxon
people are remarkable for this, that however deeply they are engaged in
business or pleasure, they are still sensitive as barometers to any true
spiritual influence, whether of priest or peasant; they recognize what
Emerson calls the "accent of the Holy Ghost," and in this recognition of
spiritual leadership lies the secret of their democracy. So this village
tinker, with his strength and sincerity, is presently the acknowledged
leader of an immense congregation, and his influence is felt throughout
England. It is a tribute to his power that, after the return of Charles II,
Bunyan was the first to be prohibited from holding public meetings.

Concerning Bunyan's imprisonment in Bedford jail, which followed his
refusal to obey the law prohibiting religious meetings without the
authority of the Established Church, there is a difference of opinion. That
the law was unjust goes without saying; but there was no religious
persecution, as we understand the term. Bunyan was allowed to worship when
and how he pleased; he was simply forbidden to hold public meetings, which
frequently became fierce denunciations of the Established Church and
government. His judges pleaded with Bunyan to conform with the law. He
refused, saying that when the Spirit was upon him he must go up and down
the land, calling on men everywhere to repent. In his refusal we see much
heroism, a little obstinacy, and perhaps something of that desire for
martyrdom which tempts every spiritual leader. That his final sentence to
indefinite imprisonment was a hard blow to Bunyan is beyond question. He
groaned aloud at the thought of his poor family, and especially at the
thought of leaving his little blind daughter:

I found myself a man encompassed with infirmities; the parting was like
pulling the flesh from my bones.... Oh, the thoughts of the hardship I
thought my poor blind one might go under would break my heart to pieces.
Poor child, thought I, what sorrow thou art like to have for thy portion in
this world; thou must be beaten, must beg, suffer hunger, cold, nakedness,
and a thousand calamities, though I cannot now endure that the wind should
blow upon thee.[169]

And then, because he thinks always in parables and seeks out most curious
texts of Scripture, he speaks of "the two milch kine that were to carry the
ark of God into another country and leave their calves behind them." Poor
cows, poor Bunyan! Such is the mind of this extraordinary man.

With characteristic diligence Bunyan set to work in prison making shoe
laces, and so earned a living for his family. His imprisonment lasted for
nearly twelve years; but he saw his family frequently, and was for some
time a regular preacher in the Baptist church in Bedford. Occasionally he
even went about late at night, holding the proscribed meetings and
increasing his hold upon the common people. The best result of this
imprisonment was that it gave Bunyan long hours for the working of his
peculiar mind and for study of his two only books, the King James Bible and
Foxe's _Book of Martyrs_. The result of his study and meditation was _The
Pilgrim's Progress_, which was probably written in prison, but which for
some reason he did not publish till long after his release.

The years which followed are the most interesting part of Bunyan's strange
career. The publication of _Pilgrim's Progress_ in 1678 made him the most
popular writer, as he was already the most popular preacher, in England.
Books, tracts, sermons, nearly sixty works in all, came from his pen; and
when one remembers his ignorance, his painfully slow writing, and his
activity as an itinerant preacher, one can only marvel. His evangelistic
journeys carried him often as far as London, and wherever he went crowds
thronged to hear him. Scholars, bishops, statesmen went in secret to listen
among the laborers, and came away wondering and silent. At Southwark the
largest building could not contain the multitude of his hearers; and when
he preached in London, thousands would gather in the cold dusk of the
winter morning, before work began, and listen until he had made an end of
speaking. "Bishop Bunyan" he was soon called on account of his missionary
journeys and his enormous influence.

What we most admire in the midst of all this activity is his perfect mental
balance, his charity and humor in the strife of many sects. He was badgered
for years by petty enemies, and he arouses our enthusiasm by his tolerance,
his self-control, and especially by his sincerity. To the very end he
retained that simple modesty which no success could spoil. Once when he had
preached with unusual power some of his friends waited after the service to
congratulate him, telling him what a "sweet sermon" he had delivered.
"Aye," said Bunyan, "you need not remind me; the devil told me that before
I was out of the pulpit."

For sixteen years this wonderful activity continued without interruption.
Then, one day when riding through a cold storm on a labor of love, to
reconcile a stubborn man with his own stubborn son, he caught a severe cold
and appeared, ill and suffering but rejoicing in his success, at the house
of a friend in Reading. He died there a few days later, and was laid away
in Bunhill Fields burial ground, London, which has been ever since a _campo
santo_ to the faithful.

WORKS OF BUNYAN. The world's literature has three great
allegories,--Spenser's _Faery Queen_, Dante's _Divina Commedia_, and
Bunyan's _Pilgrim's Progress_. The first appeals to poets, the second to
scholars, the third to people of every age and condition. Here is a brief
outline of the famous work:

"As I walked through the wilderness of this world I lighted on a certain
place where was a den [Bedford jail] and laid me down in that place to
sleep; and, as I slept, I dreamed a dream." So the story begins. He sees a
man called Christian setting out with a book in his hand and a great load
on his back from the city of Destruction. Christian has two objects,--to
get rid of his burden, which holds the sins and fears of his life, and to
make his way to the Holy City. At the outset Evangelist finds him weeping
because he knows not where to go, and points him to a wicket gate on a hill
far away. As Christian goes forward his neighbors, friends, wife and
children call to him to come back; but he puts his fingers in his ears,
crying out, "Life, life, eternal life," and so rushes across the plain.

Then begins a journey in ten stages, which is a vivid picture of the
difficulties and triumphs of the Christian life. Every trial, every
difficulty, every experience of joy or sorrow, of peace or temptation, is
put into the form and discourse of a living character. Other allegorists
write in poetry and their characters are shadowy and unreal; but Bunyan
speaks in terse, idiomatic prose, and his characters are living men and
women. There are Mr. Worldly Wiseman, a self-satisfied and dogmatic kind of
man, youthful Ignorance, sweet Piety, courteous Demas, garrulous Talkative,
honest Faithful, and a score of others, who are not at all the bloodless
creatures of the _Romance of the Rose_, but men real enough to stop you on
the road and to hold your attention. Scene after scene follows, in which
are pictured many of our own spiritual experiences. There is the Slough of
Despond, into which we all have fallen, out of which Pliable scrambles on
the hither side and goes back grumbling, but through which Christian
struggles mightily till Helpful stretches him a hand and drags him out on
solid ground and bids him go on his way. Then come Interpreter's house, the
Palace Beautiful, the Lions in the way, the Valley of Humiliation, the hard
fight with the demon Apollyon, the more terrible Valley of the Shadow,
Vanity Fair, and the trial of Faithful. The latter is condemned to death by
a jury made up of Mr. Blindman, Mr. Nogood, Mr. Heady, Mr. Liveloose, Mr.
Hatelight, and others of their kind to whom questions of justice are
committed by the jury system. Most famous is Doubting Castle, where
Christian and Hopeful are thrown into a dungeon by Giant Despair. And then
at last the Delectable Mountains of Youth, the deep river that Christian
must cross, and the city of All Delight and the glorious company of angels
that come singing down the streets. At the very end, when in sight of the
city and while he can hear the welcome with which Christian is greeted,
Ignorance is snatched away to go to his own place; and Bunyan quaintly
observes, "Then I saw that there was a way to hell even from the gates of
heaven as well as from the city of Destruction. So I awoke, and behold it
was a dream!"

Such, in brief, is the story, the great epic of a Puritan's individual
experience in a rough world, just as _Paradise Lost_ was the epic of
mankind as dreamed by the great Puritan who had "fallen asleep over his
Bible."

The chief fact which confronts the student of literature as he pauses
before this great allegory is that it has been translated into seventy-five
languages and dialects, and has been read more than any other book save one
in the English language.

As for the secret of its popularity, Taine says, "Next to the Bible, the
book most widely read in England is the _Pilgrim's Progress_....
Protestantism is the doctrine of salvation by grace, and no writer has
equaled Bunyan in making this doctrine understood." And this opinion is
echoed by the majority of our literary historians. It is perhaps sufficient
answer to quote the simple fact that _Pilgrim's Progress_ is not
exclusively a Protestant study; it appeals to Christians of every name, and
to Mohammedans and Buddhists in precisely the same way that it appeals to
Christians. When it was translated into the languages of Catholic
countries, like France and Portugal, only one or two incidents were
omitted, and the story was almost as popular there as with English readers.
The secret of its success is probably simple. It is, first of all, not a
procession of shadows repeating the author's declamations, but a real
story, the first extended story in our language. Our Puritan fathers may
have read the story for religious instruction; but all classes of men have
read it because they found in it a true personal experience told with
strength, interest, humor,--in a word, with all the qualities that such a
story should possess. Young people have read it, first, for its intrinsic
worth, because the dramatic interest of the story lured them on to the very
end; and second, because it was their introduction to true allegory. The
child with his imaginative mind--the man also, who has preserved his
simplicity--naturally personifies objects, and takes pleasure in giving
them powers of thinking and speaking like himself. Bunyan was the first
writer to appeal to this pleasant and natural inclination in a way that all
could understand. Add to this the fact that _Pilgrim's Progress_ was the
only book having any story interest in the great majority of English and
American homes for a full century, and we have found the real reason for
its wide reading.

_The Holy War_, published in 1665, is the first important work of Bunyan.
It is a prose _Paradise Lost_, and would undoubtedly be known as a
remarkable allegory were it not overshadowed by its great rival. _Grace
Abounding to the Chief of Sinners_, published in 1666, twelve years before
_Pilgrim's Progress_, is the work from which we obtain the clearest insight
into Bunyan's remarkable life, and to a man with historical or antiquarian
tastes it is still excellent reading. In 1682 appeared _The Life and Death
of Mr. Badman_, a realistic character study which is a precursor of the
modern novel; and in 1684 the second part of _Pilgrim's Progress_, showing
the journey of Christiana and her children to the city of All Delight.
Besides these Bunyan published a multitude of treatises and sermons, all in
the same style,--direct, simple, convincing, expressing every thought and
emotion perfectly in words that even a child can understand. Many of these
are masterpieces, admired by workingmen and scholars alike for their
thought and expression. Take, for instance, "The Heavenly Footman," put it
side by side with the best work of Latimer, and the resemblance in style is
startling. It is difficult to realize that one work came from an ignorant
tinker and the other from a great scholar, both engaged in the same general
work. As Bunyan's one book was the Bible, we have here a suggestion of its
influence in all our prose literature.


MINOR PROSE WRITERS

The Puritan Period is generally regarded as one destitute of literary
interest; but that was certainly not the result of any lack of books or
writers. Says Burton in his _Anatomy of Melancholy:_

I have ... new books every day, pamphlets, currantoes, stories, whole
catalogues of volumes of all sorts, new paradoxes, opinions, schisms,
heresies, controversies in philosophy and religion. Now come tidings of
weddings, maskings, entertainments, jubilees, embassies, sports, plays;
then again, as in a new-shipped scene, treasons, cheatings, tricks,
robberies, enormous villainies in all kinds, funerals, deaths, new
discoveries, expeditions; now comical, then tragical matters.....

So the record continues, till one rubs his eyes and thinks he must have
picked up by mistake the last literary magazine. And for all these
kaleidoscopic events there were waiting a multitude of writers, ready to
seize the abundant material and turn it to literary account for a tract, an
article, a volume, or an encyclopedia.

If one were to recommend certain of these books as expressive of this age
of outward storm and inward calm, there are three that deserve more than a
passing notice, namely, the _Religio Medici_, _Holy Living_, and _The
Compleat Angler_. The first was written by a busy physician, a supposedly
scientific man at that time; the second by the most learned of English
churchmen; and the third by a simple merchant and fisherman. Strangely
enough, these three great books--the reflections of nature, science, and
revelation--all interpret human life alike and tell the same story of
gentleness, charity, and noble living. If the age had produced only these
three books, we could still be profoundly grateful to it for its inspiring
message.

ROBERT BURTON (1577-1640). Burton is famous chiefly as the author of the
_Anatomy of Melancholy_, one of the most astonishing books in all
literature, which appeared in 1621. Burton was a clergyman of the
Established Church, an incomprehensible genius, given to broodings and
melancholy and to reading of every conceivable kind of literature. Thanks
to his wonderful memory, everything he read was stored up for use or
ornament, till his mind resembled a huge curiosity shop. All his life he
suffered from hypochondria, but curiously traced his malady to the stars
rather than to his own liver. It is related of him that he used to suffer
so from despondency that no help was to be found in medicine or theology;
his only relief was to go down to the river and hear the bargemen swear at
one another.

Burton's _Anatomy_ was begun as a medical treatise on morbidness, arranged
and divided with all the exactness of the schoolmen's demonstration of
doctrines; but it turned out to be an enormous hodgepodge of quotations and
references to authors, known and unknown, living and dead, which seemed to
prove chiefly that "much study is a weariness to the flesh." By some freak
of taste it became instantly popular, and was proclaimed one of the
greatest books in literature. A few scholars still explore it with delight,
as a mine of classic wealth; but the style is hopelessly involved, and to
the ordinary reader most of his numerous references are now as unmeaning as
a hyper-jacobian surface.

SIR THOMAS BROWNE (1605-1682). Browne was a physician who, after much study
and travel, settled down to his profession in Norwich; but even then he
gave far more time to the investigation of natural phenomena than to the
barbarous practices which largely constituted the "art" of medicine in his
day. He was known far and wide as a learned doctor and an honest man, whose
scientific studies had placed him in advance of his age, and whose
religious views were liberal to the point of heresy. With this in mind, it
is interesting to note, as a sign of the times, that this most scientific
doctor was once called to give "expert" testimony in the case of two old
women who were being tried for the capital crime of witchcraft. He
testified under oath that "the fits were natural, but heightened by the
devil's coöperating with the witches, at whose instance he [the alleged
devil] did the villainies."

Browne's great work is the _Religio Medici_, i.e. The Religion of a
Physician (1642), which met with most unusual success. "Hardly ever was a
book published in Britain," says Oldys, a chronicler who wrote nearly a
century later, "that made more noise than the _Religio Medici_." Its
success may be due largely to the fact that, among thousands of religious
works, it was one of the few which saw in nature a profound revelation, and
which treated purely religious subjects in a reverent, kindly, tolerant
way, without ecclesiastical bias. It is still, therefore, excellent
reading; but it is not so much the matter as the manner--the charm, the
gentleness, the remarkable prose style--which has established the book as
one of the classics of our literature.

Two other works of Browne are _Vulgar Errors_ (1646), a curious combination
of scientific and credulous research in the matter of popular superstition,
and _Urn Burial_, a treatise suggested by the discovery of Roman burial
urns at Walsingham. It began as an inquiry into the various methods of
burial, but ended in a dissertation on the vanity of earthly hope and
ambitions. From a literary point of view it is Browne's best work, but is
less read than the _Religio Medici_.

THOMAS FULLER (1608-1661). Fuller was a clergyman and royalist whose lively
style and witty observations would naturally place him with the gay
Caroline poets. His best known works are _The Holy War, The Holy State and
the Profane State, Church History of Britain_, and the _History of the
Worthies of England. The Holy and Profane State_ is chiefly a biographical
record, the first part consisting of numerous historical examples to be
imitated, the second of examples to be avoided. The _Church History_ is not
a scholarly work, notwithstanding its author's undoubted learning, but is a
lively and gossipy account which has at least one virtue, that it
entertains the reader. The _Worthies_, the most widely read of his works,
is a racy account of the important men of England. Fuller traveled
constantly for years, collecting information from out-of-the-way sources
and gaining a minute knowledge of his own country. This, with his
overflowing humor and numerous anecdotes and illustrations, makes lively
and interesting reading. Indeed, we hardly find a dull page in any of his
numerous books.

JEREMY TAYLOR (1613-1667). Taylor was the greatest of the clergymen who
made this period famous, a man who, like Milton, upheld a noble ideal in
storm and calm, and himself lived it nobly. He has been called "the
Shakespeare of divines," and "a kind of Spenser in a cassock," and both
descriptions apply to him very well. His writings, with their exuberant
fancy and their noble diction, belong rather to the Elizabethan than to the
Puritan age.

From the large number of his works two stand out as representative of the
man himself: _The Liberty of Prophesying_ (1646), which Hallam calls the
first plea for tolerance in religion, on a comprehensive basis and on
deep-seated foundations; and _The Rules and Exercises of Holy Living_
(1650). To the latter might be added its companion volume, _Holy Dying_,
published in the following year. _The Holy Living and Dying_, as a single
volume, was for many years read in almost every English cottage. With
Baxter's _Saints' Rest, Pilgrim's Progress_, and the _King James Bible_, it
often constituted the entire library of multitudes of Puritan homes; and as
we read its noble words and breathe its gentle spirit, we cannot help
wishing that our modern libraries were gathered together on the same
thoughtful foundations.

RICHARD BAXTER (1615-1691). This "busiest man of his age" strongly suggests
Bunyan in his life and writings. Like Bunyan, he was poor and uneducated, a
nonconformist minister, exposed continually to insult and persecution; and,
like Bunyan, he threw himself heart and soul into the conflicts of his age,
and became by his public speech a mighty power among the common people.
Unlike Jeremy Taylor, who wrote for the learned, and whose involved
sentences and classical allusions are sometimes hard to follow, Baxter went
straight to his mark, appealing directly to the judgment and feeling of his
readers.

The number of his works is almost incredible when one thinks of his busy
life as a preacher and the slowness of manual writing. In all, he left
nearly one hundred and seventy different works, which if collected would
make fifty or sixty volumes. As he wrote chiefly to influence men on the
immediate questions of the day, most of this work has fallen into oblivion.
His two most famous books are _The Saints' Everlasting Rest_ and _A Call to
the Unconverted_, both of which were exceedingly popular, running through
scores of successive editions, and have been widely read in our own
generation.

IZAAK WALTON (1593-1683). Walton was a small tradesman of London, who
preferred trout brooks and good reading to the profits of business and the
doubtful joys of a city life; so at fifty years, when he had saved a little
money, he left the city and followed his heart out into the country. He
began his literary work, or rather his recreation, by writing his famous
_Lives_,--kindly and readable appreciations of Donne, Wotton, Hooker,
Herbert, and Sanderson, which stand at the beginning of modern biographical
writing.

In 1653 appeared _The Compleat Angler_, which has grown steadily in
appreciation, and which is probably more widely read than any other book on
the subject of fishing. It begins with a conversation between a falconer, a
hunter, and an angler; but the angler soon does most of the talking, as
fishermen sometimes do; the hunter becomes a disciple, and learns by the
easy method of hearing the fisherman discourse about his art. The
conversations, it must be confessed, are often diffuse and pedantic; but
they only make us feel most comfortably sleepy, as one invariably feels
after a good day's fishing. So kindly is the spirit of the angler, so
exquisite his appreciation of the beauty of the earth and sky, that one
returns to the book, as to a favorite trout stream, with the undying
expectation of catching something. Among a thousand books on angling it
stands almost alone in possessing a charming style, and so it will probably
be read as long as men go fishing. Best of all, it leads to a better
appreciation of nature, and it drops little moral lessons into the reader's
mind as gently as one casts a fly to a wary trout; so that one never
suspects his better nature is being angled for. Though we have sometimes
seen anglers catch more than they need, or sneak ahead of brother fishermen
to the best pools, we are glad, for Walton's sake, to overlook such
unaccountable exceptions, and agree with the milkmaid that "we love all
anglers, they be such honest, civil, quiet men."

SUMMARY OF THE PURITAN PERIOD. The half century between 1625 and 1675 is
called the Puritan period for two reasons: first, because Puritan standards
prevailed for a time in England; and second, because the greatest literary
figure during all these years was the Puritan, John Milton. Historically
the age was one of tremendous conflict. The Puritan struggled for
righteousness and liberty, and because he prevailed, the age is one of
moral and political revolution. In his struggle for liberty the Puritan
overthrew the corrupt monarchy, beheaded Charles I, and established the
Commonwealth under Cromwell. The Commonwealth lasted but a few years, and
the restoration of Charles II in 1660 is often put as the end of the
Puritan period. The age has no distinct limits, but overlaps the
Elizabethan period on one side, and the Restoration period on the other.

The age produced many writers, a few immortal books, and one of the world's
great literary leaders. The literature of the age is extremely diverse in
character, and the diversity is due to the breaking up of the ideals of
political and religious unity. This literature differs from that of the
preceding age in three marked ways: (1) It has no unity of spirit, as in
the days of Elizabeth, resulting from the patriotic enthusiasm of all
classes. (2) In contrast with the hopefulness and vigor of Elizabethan
writings, much of the literature of this period is somber in character; it
saddens rather than inspires us. (3) It has lost the romantic impulse of
youth, and become critical and intellectual; it makes us think, rather than
feel deeply.

In our study we have noted (1) the Transition Poets, of whom Daniel is
chief; (2) the Song Writers, Campion and Breton; (3) the Spenserian Poets,
Wither and Giles Fletcher; (4) the Metaphysical Poets, Donne and Herbert;
(5) the Cavalier Poets, Herrick, Carew, Lovelace, and Suckling; (6) John
Milton, his life, his early or Horton poems, his militant prose, and his
last great poetical works; (7) John Bunyan, his extraordinary life, and his
chief work, _The Pilgrim's Progress;_ (8) the Minor Prose Writers, Burton,
Browne, Fuller, Taylor, Baxter, and Walton. Three books selected from this
group are Browne's _Religio Medici_, Taylor's _Holy Living and Dying_, and
Walton's _Complete Angler_.

SELECTIONS FOR READING. _Milton_. Paradise Lost, books 1-2, L'Allegro, Il
Penseroso, Comus, Lycidas, and selected Sonnets,--all in Standard English
Classics; same poems, more or less complete, in various other series;
Areopagitica and Treatise on Education, selections, in Manly's English
Prose, or Areopagitica in Arber's English Reprints, Clarendon Press Series,
Morley's Universal Library, etc.

_Minor Poets_. Selections from Herrick, edited by Hale, in Athenaeum Press
Series; selections from Herrick, Lovelace, Donne, Herbert, etc., in Manly's
English Poetry, Golden Treasury, Oxford Book of English Verse, etc.;
Vaughan's Silex Scintillans, in Temple Classics, also in the Aldine Series;
Herbert's The Temple, in Everyman's Library, Temple Classics, etc.

_Bunyan_. The Pilgrim's Progress, in Standard English Classics, Pocket
Classics, etc.; Grace Abounding, in Cassell's National Library.

_Minor Prose Writers_. Wentworth's Selections from Jeremy Taylor; Browne's
Religio Medici, Walton's Complete Angler, both in Everyman's Library,
Temple Classics, etc.; selections from Taylor, Browne, and Walton in
Manly's English Prose, also in Garnett's English Prose.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.[170]

_HISTORY_. _Text-book_, Montgomery, pp. 238-257; Cheyney, pp. 431-464;
Green, ch. 8; Traill; Gardiner.

_Special Works_. Wakeling's King and Parliament (Oxford Manuals);
Gardiner's The First Two Stuarts and the Puritan Revolution; Tulloch's
English Puritanism and its Leaders; Lives of Cromwell by Harrison, by
Church, and by Morley; Carlyle's Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches.

_LITERATURE_. Saintsbury's Elizabethan Literature (extends to 1660);
Masterman's The Age of Milton; Dowden's Puritan and Anglican.

_Milton_. Texts, Poetical Works, Globe edition, edited by Masson; Cambridge
Poets edition, edited by Moody; English Prose Writings, edited by Morley,
in Carisbrooke Library; also in Bohn's Standard Library.

Masson's Life of John Milton (8 vols.); Life, by Garnett, by Pattison
(English Men of Letters). Raleigh's Milton; Trent's John Milton; Corson's
Introduction to Milton; Brooke's Milton, in Student's Library; Macaulay's
Milton; Lowell's Essays, in Among My Books, and in Latest Literary Essays;
M. Arnold's Essay, in Essays in Criticism; Dowden's Essay, in Puritan and
Anglican.

_Cavalier Poets_. Schelling's Seventeenth Century Lyrics, in Athenaeum
Press Series; Cavalier and Courtier Lyrists, in Canterbury Poets Series;
Gosse's Jacobean Poets; Lovelace, etc., in Library of Old Authors.

_Donne_. Poems, in Muses' Library; Life, in Walton's Lives, in Temple
Classics, and in Morley's Universal Library; Life, by Gosse; Jessup's John
Donne; Dowden's Essay, in New Studies; Stephen's Studies of a Biographer,
vol. 3.

_Herbert_. Palmer's George Herbert; Poems and Prose Selections, edited by
Rhys, in Canterbury Poets; Dowden's Essay, in Puritan and Anglican.

_Bunyan_. Brown's John Bunyan, His Life, Times, and Works; Life, by
Venables, and by Froude (English Men of Letters); Essays by Macaulay, by
Dowden, _supra_, and by Woodberry, in Makers of Literature.

_Jeremy Taylor_. Holy Living, Holy Dying, in Temple Classics, and in Bohn's
Standard Library; Selections, edited by Wentworth; Life, by Heber, and by
Gosse (English Men of Letters); Dowden's Essay, _supra_.

_Thomas Browne_. Works, edited by Wilkin; the same, in Temple Classics, and
in Bohn's Library; Religio Medici, in Everyman's Library; essay by Pater,
in Appreciations; by Dowden, _supra;_ and by L. Stephen, in Hours in a
Library; Life, by Gosse (English Men of Letters).

_Izaak Walton_. Works, in Temple Classics, Cassell's Library, and Morley's
Library; Introduction, in A. Lang's Walton's Complete Angler; Lowell's
Essay, in Latest Literary Essays.


SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS. 1. What is meant by the Puritan period? What were the
objects and the results of the Puritan movement in English history?

2. What are the main characteristics of the literature of this period?
Compare it with Elizabethan literature. How did religion and politics
affect Puritan literature? Can you quote any passages or name any works
which justify your opinion?

3. What is meant by the terms Cavalier poets, Spenserian poets,
Metaphysical poets? Name the chief writers of each group. To whom are we
indebted for our first English hymn book? Would you call this a work of
literature? Why?

4. What are the qualities of Herrick's poetry? What marked contrasts are
found in Herrick and in nearly all the poets of this period?

5. Who was George Herbert? For what purpose did he write? What qualities
are found in his poetry?

6. Tell briefly the story of Milton's life. What are the three periods of
his literary work? What is meant by the Horton poems? Compare "L'Allegro"
and "Il Penseroso." Are there any Puritan ideals in "Comus"? Why is
"Lycidas" often put at the summit of English lyrical poetry? Give the main
idea or argument of _Paradise Lost_. What are the chief qualities of the
poem? Describe in outline _Paradise Regained_ and _Samson Agonistes_. What
personal element entered into the latter? What quality strikes you most
forcibly in Milton's poetry? What occasioned Milton's prose works? Do they
properly belong to literature? Why? Compare Milton and Shakespsare with
regard to (1) knowledge of men, (2) ideals of life, (3) purpose in writing.

7. Tell the story of Bunyan's life. What unusual elements are found in his
life and writings? Give the main argument of _The Pilgrim's Progress_. If
you read the story before studying literature, tell why you liked or
disliked it. Why is it a work for all ages and for all races? What are the
chief qualities of Bunyan's style?

8. Who are the minor prose writers of this age? Name the chief works of
Jeremy Taylor, Thomas Browne, and Izaak Walton. Can you describe from your
own reading any of these works? How does the prose of this age compare in
interest with the poetry? (Milton is, of course, excepted in this
comparison.)


                             CHRONOLOGY
                        _Seventeenth Century_
=====================================================================
  HISTORY                        |  LITERATURE
---------------------------------------------------------------------
                                 | 1621. Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy
                                 |
                                 | 1623. Wither's Hymn Book
                                 |
1625. Charles I                  |
Parliament dissolved             |
                                 |
1628. Petition of Right          | 1629. Milton's Ode on the Nativity
                                 |
1630-1640. King rules without    |
Parliament. Puritan migration    |
to New England                   | 1630-1633. Herbert's poems
                                 |
                                 | 1632-1637. Milton's Horton poems
                                 |
1640. Long Parliament            |
                                 |
1642. Civil War begins           | 1642. Browne's Religio Medici
                                 |
1643. Scotch Covenant            |
                                 |
1643. Press censorship           | 1644. Milton's Areopagitica
                                 |
1645. Battle of Naseby;          |
triumph of Puritans              |
                                 |
1649. Execution of Charles I.    |
Cavalier migration to Virginia   |
                                 |
1649-1660. Commonwealth          | 1649. Milton's Tenure of Kings
                                 |
                                 | 1650. Baxter's Saints' Rest.
                                 |       Jeremy Taylor's Holy Living
                                 |
                                 | 1651. Hobbes's Leviathan
                                 |
1653-1658. Cromwell, Protector   | 1653. Walton's Complete Angler
                                 |
1658-1660. Richard Cromwell      |
                                 |
1660. Restoration of Charles II  | 1663-1694. Dryden's dramas
                                 |        (next chapter)
                                 |
                                 | 1666. Bunyan's Grace Abounding
                                 |
                                 | 1667. Paradise Lost
                                 |
                                 | 1674. Death of Milton
                                 |
                                 | 1678. Pilgrim's Progress published
                                 |        (written earlier)
=====================================================================

       *       *       *       *       *



CHAPTER VIII

PERIOD OF THE RESTORATION (1660-1700)

THE AGE OF FRENCH INFLUENCE

HISTORY OF THE PERIOD. It seems a curious contradiction, at first glance,
to place the return of Charles II at the beginning of modern England, as
our historians are wont to do; for there was never a time when the progress
of liberty, which history records, was more plainly turned backwards. The
Puritan régime had been too severe; it had repressed too many natural
pleasures. Now, released from restraint, society abandoned the decencies of
life and the reverence for law itself, and plunged into excesses more
unnatural than had been the restraints of Puritanism. The inevitable effect
of excess is disease, and for almost an entire generation following the
Restoration, in 1660, England lay sick of a fever. Socially, politically,
morally, London suggests an Italian city in the days of the Medici; and its
literature, especially its drama, often seems more like the delirium of
illness than the expression of a healthy mind. But even a fever has its
advantages. Whatever impurity is in the blood "is burnt and purged away,"
and a man rises from fever with a new strength and a new idea of the value
of life, like King Hezekiah, who after his sickness and fear of death
resolved to "go softly" all his days. The Restoration was the great crisis
in English history; and that England lived through it was due solely to the
strength and excellence of that Puritanism which she thought she had flung
to the winds when she welcomed back a vicious monarch at Dover. The chief
lesson of the Restoration was this,--that it showed by awful contrast the
necessity of truth and honesty, and of a strong government of free men, for
which the Puritan had stood like a rock in every hour of his rugged
history. Through fever, England came slowly back to health; through gross
corruption in society and in the state England learned that her people were
at heart sober, sincere, religious folk, and that their character was
naturally too strong to follow after pleasure and be satisfied. So
Puritanism suddenly gained all that it had struggled for, and gained it
even in the hour when all seemed lost, when Milton in his sorrow
unconsciously portrayed the government of Charles and his Cabal in that
tremendous scene of the council of the infernal peers in Pandemonium,
plotting the ruin of the world.

Of the king and his followers it is difficult to write temperately. Most of
the dramatic literature of the time is atrocious, and we can understand it
only as we remember the character of the court and society for which it was
written. Unspeakably vile in his private life, the king had no redeeming
patriotism, no sense of responsibility to his country for even his public
acts. He gave high offices to blackguards, stole from the exchequer like a
common thief, played off Catholics and Protestants against each other,
disregarding his pledges to both alike, broke his solemn treaty with the
Dutch and with his own ministers, and betrayed his country for French money
to spend on his own pleasures. It is useless to paint the dishonor of a
court which followed gayly after such a leader. The first Parliament, while
it contained some noble and patriotic members, was dominated by young men
who remembered the excess of Puritan zeal, but forgot the despotism and
injustice which had compelled Puritanism to stand up and assert the manhood
of England. These young politicians vied with the king in passing laws for
the subjugation of Church and State, and in their thirst for revenge upon
all who had been connected with Cromwell's iron government. Once more a
wretched formalism--that perpetual danger to the English Church--came to
the front and exercised authority over the free churches. The House of
Lords was largely increased by the creation of hereditary titles and
estates for ignoble men and shameless women who had flattered the king's
vanity. Even the Bench, that last strong refuge of English justice, was
corrupted by the appointment of judges, like the brutal Jeffreys, whose
aim, like that of their royal master, was to get money and to exercise
power without personal responsibility. Amid all this dishonor the foreign
influence and authority of Cromwell's strong government vanished like
smoke. The valiant little Dutch navy swept the English fleet from the sea,
and only the thunder of Dutch guns in the Thames, under the very windows of
London, awoke the nation to the realization of how low it had fallen.

Two considerations must modify our judgment of this disheartening
spectacle. First, the king and his court are not England. Though our
histories are largely filled with the records of kings and soldiers, of
intrigues and fighting, these no more express the real life of a people
than fever and delirium express a normal manhood. Though king and court and
high society arouse our disgust or pity, records are not wanting to show
that private life in England remained honest and pure even in the worst
days of the Restoration. While London society might be entertained by the
degenerate poetry of Rochester and the dramas of Dryden and Wycherley,
English scholars hailed Milton with delight; and the common people followed
Bunyan and Baxter with their tremendous appeal to righteousness and
liberty. Second, the king, with all his pretensions to divine right,
remained only a figurehead; and the Anglo-Saxon people, when they tire of
one figurehead, have always the will and the power to throw it overboard
and choose a better one. The country was divided into two political
parties: the Whigs, who sought to limit the royal power in the interests of
Parliament and the people; and the Tories, who strove to check the growing
power of the people in the interests of their hereditary rulers. Both
parties, however, were largely devoted to the Anglican Church; and when
James II, after four years of misrule, attempted to establish a national
Catholicism by intrigues which aroused the protest of the Pope[171] as well
as of Parliament, then Whigs and Tories, Catholics and Protestants, united
in England's last great revolution.

The complete and bloodless Revolution of 1688, which called William of
Orange to the throne, was simply the indication of England's restored
health and sanity. It proclaimed that she had not long forgotten, and could
never again forget, the lesson taught her by Puritanism in its hundred
years of struggle and sacrifice. Modern England was firmly established by
the Revolution, which was brought about by the excesses of the Restoration.

LITERARY CHARACTERISTICS. In the literature of the Restoration we note a
sudden breaking away from old standards, just as society broke away from
the restraints of Puritanism. Many of the literary men had been driven out
of England with Charles and his court, or else had followed their patrons
into exile in the days of the Commonwealth. On their return they renounced
old ideals and demanded that English poetry and drama should follow the
style to which they had become accustomed in the gayety of Paris. We read
with astonishment in Pepys's _Diary_ (1660-1669) that he has been to see a
play called _Midsummer Night's Dream_, but that he will never go again to
hear Shakespeare, "for it is the most insipid, ridiculous play that ever I
saw in my life." And again we read in the diary of Evelyn,--another writer
who reflects with wonderful accuracy the life and spirit of the
Restoration,--"I saw _Hamlet_ played; but now the old plays begin to
disgust this refined age, since his Majesty's being so long abroad." Since
Shakespeare and the Elizabethans were no longer interesting, literary men
began to imitate the French writers, with whose works they had just grown
familiar; and here begins the so-called period of French influence, which
shows itself in English literature for the next century, instead of the
Italian influence which had been dominant since Spenser and the
Elizabethans.

One has only to consider for a moment the French writers of this period,
Pascal, Bossuet, Fénelon, Malherbe, Corneille, Racine, Molière,--all that
brilliant company which makes the reign of Louis XIV the Elizabethan Age of
French literature,--to see how far astray the early writers of the
Restoration went in their wretched imitation. When a man takes another for
his model, he should copy virtues not vices; but unfortunately many English
writers reversed the rule, copying the vices of French comedy without any
of its wit or delicacy or abundant ideas. The poems of Rochester, the plays
of Dryden, Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar, all popular in
their day, are mostly unreadable. Milton's "sons of Belial, flown with
insolence and wine," is a good expression of the vile character of the
court writers and of the London theaters for thirty years following the
Restoration. Such work can never satisfy a people, and when Jeremy
Collier,[172] in 1698, published a vigorous attack upon the evil plays and
the playwrights of the day, all London, tired of the coarseness and
excesses of the Restoration, joined the literary revolution, and the
corrupt drama was driven from the stage.

With the final rejection of the Restoration drama we reach a crisis in the
history of our literature. The old Elizabethan spirit, with its patriotism,
its creative vigor, its love of romance, and the Puritan spirit with its
moral earnestness and individualism, were both things of the past; and at
first there was nothing to take their places. Dryden, the greatest writer
of the age, voiced a general complaint when he said that in his prose and
poetry he was "drawing the outlines" of a new art, but had no teacher to
instruct him. But literature is a progressive art, and soon the writers of
the age developed two marked tendencies of their own,--the tendency to
realism, and the tendency to that preciseness and elegance of expression
which marks our literature for the next hundred years.

In realism--that is, the representation of men exactly as they are, the
expression of the plain, unvarnished truth without regard to ideals or
romance--the tendency was at first thoroughly bad. The early Restoration
writers sought to paint realistic pictures of a corrupt court and society,
and, as we have suggested, they emphasized vices rather than virtues, and
gave us coarse, low plays without interest or moral significance. Like
Hobbes, they saw only the externals of man, his body and appetites, not his
soul and its ideals; and so, like most realists, they resemble a man lost
in the woods, who wanders aimlessly around in circles, seeing the confusing
trees but never the whole forest, and who seldom thinks of climbing the
nearest high hill to get his bearings. Later, however, this tendency to
realism became more wholesome. While it neglected romantic poetry, in which
youth is eternally interested, it led to a keener study of the practical
motives which govern human action.

The second tendency of the age was toward directness and simplicity of
expression, and to this excellent tendency our literature is greatly
indebted. In both the Elizabethan and the Puritan ages the general tendency
of writers was towards extravagance of thought and language. Sentences were
often involved, and loaded with Latin quotations and classical allusions.
The Restoration writers opposed this vigorously. From France they brought
back the tendency to regard established rules for writing, to emphasize
close reasoning rather than romantic fancy, and to use short, clean-cut
sentences without an unnecessary word. We see this French influence in the
Royal Society,[173] which had for one of its objects the reform of English
prose by getting rid of its "swellings of style," and which bound all its
members to use "a close, naked, natural way of speaking ... as near to
mathematical plainness as they can." Dryden accepted this excellent rule
for his prose, and adopted the heroic couplet, as the next best thing, for
the greater part of his poetry. As he tells us himself:

    And this unpolished rugged verse I chose
    As fittest for discourse, and nearest prose.

It is largely due to him that writers developed that formalism of style,
that precise, almost mathematical elegance, miscalled classicism, which
ruled English literature for the next century.[174]

Another thing which the reader will note with interest in Restoration
literature is the adoption of the heroic couplet; that is, two iambic
pentameter lines which rime together, as the most suitable form of poetry.
Waller,[175] who began to use it in 1623, is generally regarded as the
father of the couplet, for he is the first poet to use it consistently in
the bulk of his poetry. Chaucer had used the rimed couplet wonderfully well
in his _Canterbury Tales_, but in Chaucer it is the poetical thought more
than the expression which delights us. With the Restoration writers, form
counts for everything. Waller and Dryden made the couplet the prevailing
literary fashion, and in their hands the couplet becomes "closed"; that is,
each pair of lines must contain a complete thought, stated as precisely as
possible. Thus Waller writes:

    The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed,
    Lets in new light through chinks that time has made.[176]

That is a kind of aphorism such as Pope made in large quantities in the
following age. It contains a thought, is catchy, quotable, easy to
remember; and the Restoration writers delighted in it. Soon this mechanical
closed couplet, in which the second line was often made first,[177] almost
excluded all other forms of poetry. It was dominant in England for a full
century, and we have grown familiar with it, and somewhat weary of its
monotony, in such famous poems as Pope's "Essay on Man" and Goldsmith's
"Deserted Village." These, however, are essays rather than poems. That even
the couplet is capable of melody and variety is shown in Chaucer's _Tales_
and in Keats's exquisite _Endymion_.

These four things, the tendency to vulgar realism in the drama, a general
formalism which came from following set rules, the development of a simpler
and more direct prose style, and the prevalence of the heroic couplet in
poetry are the main characteristics of Restoration literature. They are all
exemplified in the work of one man, John Dryden.


JOHN DRYDEN (1631-1700)

Dryden is the greatest literary figure of the Restoration, and in his work
we have an excellent reflection of both the good and the evil tendencies of
the age in which he lived. If we can think for a moment of literature as a
canal of water, we may appreciate the figure that Dryden is the "lock by
which the waters of English poetry were let down from the mountains of
Shakespeare and Milton to the plain of Pope"; that is, he stands between
two very different ages, and serves as a transition from one to the other.

LIFE. Dryden's life contains so many conflicting elements of greatness and
littleness that the biographer is continually taken away from the facts,
which are his chief concern, to judge motives, which are manifestly outside
his knowledge and business. Judged by his own opinion of himself, as
expressed in the numerous prefaces to his works, Dryden was the soul of
candor, writing with no other master than literature, and with no other
object than to advance the welfare of his age and nation. Judged by his
acts, he was apparently a timeserver, catering to a depraved audience in
his dramas, and dedicating his work with much flattery to those who were
easily cajoled by their vanity into sharing their purse and patronage. In
this, however, he only followed the general custom of the time, and is
above many of his contemporaries.

Dryden was born in the village of Aldwinkle, Northamptonshire, in 1631. His
family were prosperous people, who brought him up in the strict Puritan
faith, and sent him first to the famous Westminster school and then to
Cambridge. He made excellent use of his opportunities and studied eagerly,
becoming one of the best educated men of his age, especially in the
classics. Though of remarkable literary taste, he showed little evidence of
literary ability up to the age of thirty. By his training and family
connections he was allied to the Puritan party, and his only well-known
work of this period, the "Heroic Stanzas," was written on the death of
Cromwell:

    His grandeur he derived from Heaven alone,
      For he was great ere Fortune made him so;
    And wars, like mists that rise against the sun,
      Made him but greater seem, not greater grow.

In these four lines, taken almost at random from the "Heroic Stanzas," we
have an epitome of the thought, the preciseness, and the polish that mark
all his literary work.

This poem made Dryden well known, and he was in a fair way to become the
new poet of Puritanism when the Restoration made a complete change in his
methods. He had come to London for a literary life, and when the Royalists
were again in power he placed himself promptly on the winning side. His
"Astraea Redux," a poem of welcome to Charles II, and his "Panegyric to his
Sacred Majesty," breathe more devotion to "the old goat," as the king was
known to his courtiers, than had his earlier poems to Puritanism.

In 1667 he became more widely known and popular by his "Annus Mirabilis," a
narrative poem describing the terrors of the great fire in London and some
events of the disgraceful war with Holland; but with the theaters reopened
and nightly filled, the drama offered the most attractive field to one who
made his living by literature; so Dryden turned to the stage and agreed to
furnish three plays yearly for the actors of the King's Theater. For nearly
twenty years, the best of his life, Dryden gave himself up to this
unfortunate work. Both by nature and habit he seems to have been clean in
his personal life; but the stage demanded unclean plays, and Dryden
followed his audience. That he deplored this is evident from some of his
later work, and we have his statement that he wrote only one play, his
best, to please himself. This was _All for Love_, which was written in
blank verse, most of the others being in rimed couplets.

During this time Dryden had become the best known literary man of London,
and was almost as much a dictator to the literary set which gathered in the
taverns and coffeehouses as Ben Jonson had been before him. His work,
meanwhile, was rewarded by large financial returns, and by his being
appointed poet laureate and collector of the port of London. The latter
office, it may be remembered, had once been held by Chaucer.

At fifty years of age, and before Jeremy Collier had driven his dramas from
the stage, Dryden turned from dramatic work to throw himself into the
strife of religion and politics, writing at this period his numerous prose
and poetical treatises. In 1682 appeared his _Religio Laici_ (Religion of a
Layman), defending the Anglican Church against all other sects, especially
the Catholics and Presbyterians; but three years later, when James II came
to the throne with schemes to establish the Roman faith, Dryden turned
Catholic and wrote his most famous religious poem, "The Hind and the
Panther," beginning:

    A milk-white Hind, immortal and unchanged,
    Fed on the lawns and in the forest ranged;
    Without unspotted, innocent within,
    She feared no danger, for she knew no sin.

This hind is a symbol for the Roman Church; and the Anglicans, as a
panther, are represented as persecuting the faithful. Numerous other
sects--Calvinists, Anabaptists, Quakers--were represented by the wolf,
boar, hare, and other animals, which gave the poet an excellent chance for
exercising his satire. Dryden's enemies made the accusation, often since
repeated, of hypocrisy in thus changing his church; but that he was sincere
in the matter can now hardly be questioned, for he knew how to "suffer for
the faith" and to be true to his religion, even when it meant misjudgment
and loss of fortune. At the Revolution of 1688 he refused allegiance to
William of Orange; he was deprived of all his offices and pensions, and as
an old man was again thrown back on literature as his only means of
livelihood. He went to work with extraordinary courage and energy, writing
plays, poems, prefaces for other men, eulogies for funeral occasions,--
every kind of literary work that men would pay for. His most successful
work at this time was his translations, which resulted in the complete
_Aeneid_ and many selections from Homer, Ovid, and Juvenal, appearing in
English rimed couplets. His most enduring poem, the splendid ode called
"Alexander's Feast," was written in 1697. Three years later he published
his last work, _Fables_, containing poetical paraphrases of the tales of
Boccaccio and Chaucer, and the miscellaneous poems of his last years. Long
prefaces were the fashion in Dryden's day, and his best critical work is
found in his introductions. The preface to the _Fables_ is generally
admired as an example of the new prose style developed by Dryden and his
followers.

From the literary view point these last troubled years were the best of
Dryden's life, though they were made bitter by obscurity and by the
criticism of his numerous enemies. He died in 1700 and was buried near
Chaucer in Westminster Abbey.

WORKS OF DRYDEN. The numerous dramatic works of Dryden are best left in
that obscurity into which they have fallen. Now and then they contain a bit
of excellent lyric poetry, and in _All for Love_, another version of
_Antony and Cleopatra_, where he leaves his cherished heroic couplet for
the blank verse of Marlowe and Shakespeare, he shows what he might have
done had he not sold his talents to a depraved audience. On the whole,
reading his plays is like nibbling at a rotting apple; even the good spots
are affected by the decay, and one ends by throwing the whole thing into
the garbage can, where most of the dramatic works of this period belong.

The controversial and satirical poems are on a higher plane; though, it
must be confessed, Dryden's satire often strikes us as cutting and
revengeful, rather than witty. The best known of these, and a masterpiece
of its kind, is "Absalom and Achitophel," which is undoubtedly the most
powerful political satire in our language. Taking the Bible story of David
and Absalom, he uses it to ridicule the Whig party and also to revenge
himself upon his enemies. Charles II appeared as King David; his natural
son, the Duke of Monmouth, who was mixed up in the Rye House Plot, paraded
as Absalom; Shaftesbury was Achitophel, the evil Counselor; and the Duke of
Buckingham was satirized as Zimri. The poem had enormous political
influence, and raised Dryden, in the opinion of his contemporaries, to the
front rank of English poets. Two extracts from the powerful
characterizations of Achitophel and Zimri are given here to show the style
and spirit of the whole work.

            (SHAFTESBURY)
    Of these the false Achitophel was first;
    A name to all succeeding ages cursed:
    For close designs and crooked counsels fit;
    Sagacious, bold, and turbulent of wit;
    Restless, unfixed in principles and place;
    In power unpleased, impatient of disgrace:
    A fiery soul, which, working out its way,
    Fretted the pygmy body to decay....
    A daring pilot in extremity,
    Pleased with the danger, when the waves went high
    He sought the storms: but for a calm unfit,
    Would steer too nigh the sands to boast his wit.
    Great wits are sure to madness near allied,
    And thin partitions do their bounds divide;
    Else why should he, with wealth and honor blest,
    Refuse his age the needful hours of rest?
    Punish a body which he could not please;
    Bankrupt of life, yet prodigal of ease?
    And all to leave what with his toil he won,
    To that unfeathered two-legged thing, a son....
    In friendship false, implacable in hate;
    Resolved to ruin or to rule the state;...
    Then seized with fear, yet still affecting fame,
    Usurped a patriot's all-atoning name.
    So easy still it proves in factious times
    With public zeal to cancel private crimes.
         (THE DUKE OF BUCKINGHAM)
    Some of their chiefs were princes of the land;
    In the first rank of these did Zimri stand,
    A man so various, that he seemed to be
    Not one, but all mankind's epitome:
    Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong,
    Was everything by starts and nothing long;
    But, in the course of one revolving moon,
    Was chymist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon;
    Then all for women, painting, rhyming, drinking,
    Besides ten thousand freaks that died in thinking.
    Blest madman, who could every hour employ
    With something new to wish or to enjoy!
    Railing and praising were his usual themes,
    And both, to show his judgment, in extremes:
    So over-violent, or over-civil,
    That every man with him was God or devil.

Of the many miscellaneous poems of Dryden, the curious reader will get an
idea of his sustained narrative power from the _Annus Mirabilis_. The best
expression of Dryden's literary genius, however, is found in "Alexander's
Feast," which is his most enduring ode, and one of the best in our
language.

As a prose writer Dryden had a very marked influence on our literature in
shortening his sentences, and especially in writing naturally, without
depending on literary ornamentation to give effect to what he is saying. If
we compare his prose with that of Milton, or Browne, or Jeremy Taylor, we
note that Dryden cares less for style than any of the others, but takes
more pains to state his thought clearly and concisely, as men speak when
they wish to be understood. The classical school, which followed the
Restoration, looked to Dryden as a leader, and to him we owe largely that
tendency to exactness of expression which marks our subsequent prose
writing. With his prose, Dryden rapidly developed his critical ability, and
became the foremost critic[178] of his age. His criticisms, instead of
being published as independent works, were generally used as prefaces or
introductions to his poetry. The best known of these criticisms are the
preface to the _Fables_, "Of Heroic Plays," "Discourse on Satire," and
especially the "Essay of Dramatic Poesy" (1668), which attempts to lay a
foundation for all literary criticism.

DRYDEN'S INFLUENCE ON LITERATURE. Dryden's place among authors is due
partly to his great influence on the succeeding age of classicism. Briefly,
this influence may be summed up by noting the three new elements which he
brought into our literature. These are: (1) the establishment of the heroic
couplet as the fashion for satiric, didactic, and descriptive poetry; (2)
his development of a direct, serviceable prose style such as we still
cultivate; and (3) his development of the art of literary criticism in his
essays and in the numerous prefaces to his poems. This is certainly a large
work for one man to accomplish, and Dryden is worthy of honor, though
comparatively little of what he wrote is now found on our bookshelves.

SAMUEL BUTLER (1612-1680). In marked contrast with Dryden, who devoted his
life to literature and won his success by hard work, is Samuel Butler, who
jumped into fame by a single, careless work, which represents not any
serious intent or effort, but the pastime of an idle hour. We are to
remember that, though the Royalists had triumphed in the Restoration, the
Puritan spirit was not dead, nor even sleeping, and that the Puritan held
steadfastly to his own principles. Against these principles of justice,
truth, and liberty there was no argument, since they expressed the manhood
of England; but many of the Puritan practices were open to ridicule, and
the Royalists, in revenge for their defeat, began to use ridicule without
mercy. During the early years of the Restoration doggerel verses ridiculing
Puritanism, and burlesque,--that is, a ridiculous representation of serious
subjects, or a serious representation of ridiculous subjects,--were the
most popular form of literature with London society. Of all this burlesque
and doggerel the most famous is Butler's _Hudibras_, a work to which we can
trace many of the prejudices that still prevail against Puritanism.

Of Butler himself we know little; he is one of the most obscure figures in
our literature. During the days of Cromwell's Protectorate he was in the
employ of Sir Samuel Luke, a crabbed and extreme type of Puritan nobleman,
and here he collected his material and probably wrote the first part of his
burlesque, which, of course, he did not dare to publish until after the
Restoration.

_Hudibras_ is plainly modeled upon the _Don Quixote_ of Cervantes. It
describes the adventures of a fanatical justice of the peace, Sir Hudibras,
and of his squire, Ralpho, in their endeavor to put down all innocent
pleasures. In Hudibras and Ralpho the two extreme types of the Puritan
party, Presbyterians and Independents, are mercilessly ridiculed. When the
poem first appeared in public, in 1663, after circulating secretly for
years in manuscript, it became at once enormously popular. The king carried
a copy in his pocket, and courtiers vied with each other in quoting its
most scurrilous passages. A second and a third part, continuing the
adventures of Hudibras, were published in 1664 and 1668. At best the work
is a wretched doggerel, but it was clever enough and strikingly original;
and since it expressed the Royalist spirit towards the Puritans, it
speedily found its place in a literature which reflects every phase of
human life. A few odd lines are given here to show the character of the
work, and to introduce the reader to the best known burlesque in our
language:

      He was in logic a great critic,
    Profoundly skilled in analytic;
    He could distinguish, and divide
    A hair 'twixt south and southwest side;
    On either which he would dispute,
    Confute, change hands, and still confute;
    He'd undertake to prove, by force
    Of argument, a man's no horse;
    He'd run in debt by disputation,
    And pay with ratiocination.
    For he was of that stubborn crew
    Of errant saints, whom all men grant
    To be the true Church Militant;
    Such as do build their faith upon
    The holy text of pike and gun;
    Decide all controversies by
    Infallible artillery;
    And prove their doctrine orthodox
    By apostolic blows and knocks;
    Compound for sins they are inclined to,
    By damning those they have no mind to.

HOBBES AND LOCKE. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) is one of the writers that
puzzle the historian with a doubt as to whether or not he should be
included in the story of literature. The one book for which he is famous is
called _Leviathan, or the Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth_
(1651). It is partly political, partly a philosophical book, combining two
central ideas which challenge and startle the attention, namely, that
self-interest is the only guiding power of humanity, and that blind
submission to rulers is the only true basis of government.[179] In a word,
Hobbes reduced human nature to its purely animal aspects, and then asserted
confidently that there was nothing more to study. Certainly, therefore, as
a reflection of the underlying spirit of Charles and his followers it has
no equal in any purely literary work of the time.

John Locke (1632-1704) is famous as the author of a single great
philosophical work, the _Essay concerning Human Understanding_ (1690). This
is a study of the nature of the human mind and of the origin of ideas,
which, far more than the work of Bacon and Hobbes, is the basis upon which
English philosophy has since been built. Aside from their subjects, both
works are models of the new prose, direct, simple, convincing, for which
Dryden and the Royal Society labored. They are known to every student of
philosophy, but are seldom included in a work of literature.[180]

EVELYN AND PEPYS. These two men, John Evelyn (1620-1706) and Samuel Pepys
(1633-1703), are famous as the writers of diaries, in which they jotted
down the daily occurrences of their own lives, without any thought that the
world would ever see or be interested in what they had written.

Evelyn was the author of _Sylva_, the first book on trees and forestry in
English, and _Terra_, which is the first attempt at a scientific study of
agriculture; but the world has lost sight of these two good books, while it
cherishes his diary, which extends over the greater part of his life and
gives us vivid pictures of society in his time, and especially of the
frightful corruption of the royal court.

Pepys began life in a small way as a clerk in a government office, but soon
rose by his diligence and industry to be Secretary of the Admiralty. Here
he was brought into contact with every grade of society, from the king's
ministers to the poor sailors of the fleet. Being inquisitive as a blue
jay, he investigated the rumors and gossip of the court, as well as the
small affairs of his neighbors, and wrote them all down in his diary with
evident interest. But because he chattered most freely, and told his little
book a great many secrets which it were not well for the world to know, he
concealed everything in shorthand,--and here again he was like the blue
jay, which carries off and hides every bright trinket it discovers. The
_Diary_ covers the years from 1660 to 1669, and gossips about everything,
from his own position and duties at the office, his dress and kitchen and
cook and children, to the great political intrigues of office and the
scandals of high society. No other such minute-picture of the daily life of
an age has been written. Yet for a century and a half it remained entirely
unknown, and not until 1825 was Pepys's shorthand deciphered and published.
Since then it has been widely read, and is still one of the most
interesting examples of diary writing that we possess. Following are a few
extracts,[181] covering only a few days in April, 1663, from which one may
infer the minute and interesting character of the work that this clerk,
politician, president of the Royal Society, and general busybody wrote to
please himself:

April 1st. I went to the Temple to my Cozen Roger Pepys, to see and talk
with him a little: who tells me that, with much ado, the Parliament do
agree to throw down Popery; but he says it is with so much spite and
passion, and an endeavor of bringing all Nonconformists into the same
condition, that he is afeard matters will not go so well as he could
wish.... To my office all the afternoon; Lord! how Sir J. Minnes, like a
mad coxcomb, did swear and stamp, swearing that Commissioner Pett hath
still the old heart against the King that ever he had, ... and all the
damnable reproaches in the world, at which I was ashamed, but said little;
but, upon the whole, I find him still a foole, led by the nose with stories
told by Sir W. Batten, whether with or without reason. So, vexed in my mind
to see things ordered so unlike gentlemen, or men of reason, I went home
and to bed.

3d. To White Hall and to Chappell, which being most monstrous full, I could
not go into my pew, but sat among the quire. Dr. Creeton, the Scotchman,
preached a most admirable, good, learned, honest, and most severe sermon,
yet comicall.... He railed bitterly ever and anon against John Calvin and
his brood, the Presbyterians, and against the present terme, now in use, of
"tender consciences." He ripped up Hugh Peters (calling him the execrable
skellum), his preaching and stirring up the mayds of the city to bring in
their bodkins and thimbles. Thence going out of White Hall, I met Captain
Grove, who did give me a letter directed to myself from himself. I
discerned money to be in it, and took it, knowing, as I found it to be, the
proceed of the place I have got him, the taking up of vessels for Tangier.
But I did not open it till I came home to my office, and there I broke it
open, not looking into it till all the money was out, that I might say I
saw no money in the paper, if ever I should be questioned about it. There
was a piece of gold and 4£ in silver.

4th. To my office. Home to dinner, whither by and by comes Roger Pepys,
etc. Very merry at, before, and after dinner, and the more for that my
dinner was great, and most neatly dressed by our owne only mayde. We had a
fricasee of rabbits and chickens, a leg of mutton boiled, three carps in a
dish, a great dish of a side of lambe, a dish of roasted pigeons, a dish of
four lobsters, three tarts, a lamprey pie (a most rare pie), a dish of
anchovies, good wine of several sorts, and all things mighty noble and to
my great content.

5th (Lord's day). Up and spent the morning, till the Barber came, in
reading in my chamber part of Osborne's Advice to his Son, which I shall
not never enough admire for sense and language, and being by and by
trimmed, to Church, myself, wife, Ashwell, etc. Home and, while dinner was
prepared, to my office to read over my vows with great affection and to
very good purpose. Then to church again, where a simple bawling young Scot
preached.

19th (Easter day). Up and this day put on my close-kneed coloured suit,
which, with new stockings of the colour, with belt and new gilt-handled
sword, is very handsome. To church alone, and after dinner to church again,
where the young Scotchman preaching, I slept all the while. After supper,
fell in discourse of dancing, and I find that Ashwell hath a very fine
carriage, which makes my wife almost ashamed of herself to see herself so
outdone, but to-morrow she begins to learn to dance for a month or two. So
to prayers and to bed. Will being gone, with my leave, to his father's this
day for a day or two, to take physique these holydays.

23d. St. George's day and Coronacion, the King and Court being at Windsor,
at the installing of the King of Denmarke by proxy and the Duke of
Monmouth.... Spent the evening with my father. At cards till late, and
being at supper, my boy being sent for some mustard to a neat's tongue, the
rogue staid half an houre in the streets, it seems at a bonfire, at which I
was very angry, and resolve to beat him to-morrow.

24th. Up betimes, and with my salt eele went down into the parler and there
got my boy and did beat him till I was fain to take breath two or three
times, yet for all I am afeard it will make the boy never the better, he is
grown so hardened in his tricks, which I am sorry for, he being capable of
making a brave man, and is a boy that I and my wife love very well.


SUMMARY OF THE RESTORATION PERIOD. The chief thing to note in England
during the Restoration is the tremendous social reaction from the
restraints of Puritanism, which suggests the wide swing of a pendulum from
one extreme to the other. For a generation many natural pleasures had been
suppressed; now the theaters were reopened, bull and bear baiting revived,
and sports, music, dancing,--a wild delight in the pleasures and vanities
of this world replaced that absorption in "other-worldliness" which
characterized the extreme of Puritanism.

In literature the change is no less marked. From the Elizabethan drama
playwrights turned to coarse, evil scenes, which presently disgusted the
people and were driven from the stage. From romance, writers turned to
realism; from Italian influence with its exuberance of imagination they
turned to France, and learned to repress the emotions, to follow the head
rather than the heart, and to write in a clear, concise, formal style,
according to set rules. Poets turned from the noble blank verse of
Shakespeare and Milton, from the variety and melody which had characterized
English poetry since Chaucer's day, to the monotonous heroic couplet with
its mechanical perfection.

The greatest writer of the age is John Dryden, who established the heroic
couplet as the prevailing verse form in English poetry, and who developed a
new and serviceable prose style suited to the practical needs of the age.
The popular ridicule of Puritanism in burlesque and doggerel is best
exemplified in Butler's _Hudibras_. The realistic tendency, the study of
facts and of men as they are, is shown in the work of the Royal Society, in
the philosophy of Hobbes and Locke, and in the diaries of Evelyn and Pepys,
with their minute pictures of social life. The age was one of transition
from the exuberance and vigor of Renaissance literature to the formality
and polish of the Augustan Age. In strong contrast with the preceding ages,
comparatively little of Restoration literature is familiar to modern
readers.


SELECTIONS FOR READING. _Dryden_. Alexander's Feast, Song for St. Cecilia's
Day, selections from Absalom and Achitophel, Religio Laici, Hind and
Panther, Annus Mirabilis,--in Manly's English Poetry, or Ward's English
Poets, or Cassell's National Library; Palamon and Arcite (Dryden's version
of Chaucer's tale), in Standard English Classics, Riverside Literature,
etc.; Dryden's An Essay of Dramatic Poesy, in Manly's, or Garnett's,
English Prose.

_Butler_. Selections from Hudibras, in Manly's English Poetry, Ward's
English Poets, or Morley's Universal Library.

_Pepys_. Selections in Manly's English Prose; the Diary in Everyman's
Library.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. _HISTORY_. _Text-book_, Montgomery, pp. 257-280; Cheyney, pp.
466-514; Green, ch. 9; Traill; Gardiner; Macaulay.

_Special Works_. Sydney's Social Life in England from the Restoration to
the Revolution; Airy's The English Restoration and Louis XIV; Hale's The
Fall of the Stuarts.

_LITERATURE_. Garnett's The Age of Dryden; Dowden's Puritan and Anglican.

_Dryden_. Poetical Works, with Life, edited by Christie; the same, edited
by Noyes, in Cambridge Poets Series; Life and Works (18 vols.), by Walter
Scott, revised (1893) by Saintsbury; Essays, edited by Ker; Life, by
Saintsbury (English Men of Letters); Macaulay's Essay; Lowell's Essay, in
Among My Books (or in Literary Essays, vol. 3); Dowden's Essay, _supra_.

_Butler_. Hudibras, in Morley's Universal Library; Poetical Works, edited
by Johnson; Dowden's Essay, _supra_.

_Pepys_. Diary in Everyman's Library; the same, edited by Wheatley (8
vols.); Wheatley's Samuel Pepys and the World He Lived In; Stevenson's
Essay, in Familiar Studies of Men and Books.

_The Restoration Drama_. Plays in the Mermaid Series; Hazlitt's Lectures on
the English Comic Writers; Meredith's Essay on Comedy and the Comic Spirit;
Lamb's Essay on the Artificial Comedy; Thackeray's Essay on Congreve, in
English Humorists.


SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS. 1. What marked change in social conditions followed
the Restoration? How are these changes reflected in literature?

2. What are the chief characteristics of Restoration literature? Why is
this period called the Age of French influence? What new tendencies were
introduced? What effect did the Royal Society and the study of science have
upon English prose? What is meant by realism? by formalism?

3. What is meant by the heroic couplet? Explain why it became the
prevailing form of English poetry. What are its good qualities and its
defects? Name some well-known poems which are written in couplets. How do
Dryden's couplets compare with Chaucer's? Can you explain the difference?

4. Give a brief account of Dryden's life. What are his chief poetical
works? For what new object did he use poetry? Is satire a poetical subject?
Why is a poetical satire more effective than a satire in prose? What was
Dryden's contribution to English prose? What influence did he exert on our
literature?

5. What is Butler's _Hudibras_? Explain its popularity. Read a passage and
comment upon it, first, as satire; second, as a description of the
Puritans. Is _Hudibras_ poetry? Why?

6. Name the philosophers and political economists of this period. Can you
explain why Hobbes should call his work _Leviathan_? What important
American documents show the influence of Locke?

7. Tell briefly the story of Pepys and his _Diary_. What light does the
latter throw on the life of the age? Is the _Diary_ a work of literature?
Why?


                               CHRONOLOGY
                 _Last Half of the Seventeenth Century_
=====================================================================
  HISTORY                            |  LITERATURE
---------------------------------------------------------------------
                                     |
1649. Execution of Charles I         |
                                     |
1649-1660. Commonwealth              | 1651. Hobbes's Leviathan
                                     |
1660. Restoration of Charles II      | 1660-1669, Pepys's Diary
                                     |
                                     | 1662. Royal Society founded
                                     |
                                     | 1663. Butler's Hudibras
1665-1666. Plague and Fire of London |
      War with Holland               |
                                     |
1667. Dutch fleet in the Thames      | 1667. Milton's Paradise Lost.
                                     |       Dryden's Annus Mirabilis
                                     |
                                     | 1663-1694. Dryden's dramas
                                     |
                                     | 1671. Paradise Regained
                                     |
                                     | 1678. Pilgrim's Progress
                                     |       published
1680. Rise of Whigs and Tories       |
                                     | 1681. Dryden's Absalom and
                                     |       Achitophel
1685. James II                       |
      Monmouth's Rebellion           |
                                     | 1687. Newton's Principia
                                     |       proves the law of
                                     |       gravitation
1688. English Revolution, William of |
      Orange called to throne        |
                                     |
1689. Bill of Rights. Toleration Act |
                                     | 1690. Locke's Human
                                     |       Understanding
                                     | 1698. Jeremy Collier attacks
                                     |       stage
                                     | 1700. Death of Dryden
=========================================================================

       *       *       *       *       *



CHAPTER IX

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE (1700-1800)

I. AUGUSTAN OR CLASSIC AGE

HISTORY OF THE PERIOD. The Revolution of 1688, which banished the last of
the Stuart kings and called William of Orange to the throne, marks the end
of the long struggle for political freedom in England. Thereafter the
Englishman spent his tremendous energy, which his forbears had largely
spent in fighting for freedom, in endless political discussions and in
efforts to improve his government. In order to bring about reforms, votes
were now necessary; and to get votes the people of England must be
approached with ideas, facts, arguments, information. So the newspaper was
born,[182] and literature in its widest sense, including the book, the
newspaper, and the magazine, became the chief instrument of a nation's
progress.

The first half of the eighteenth century is remarkable for the rapid social
development in England. Hitherto men had been more or less governed by the
narrow, isolated standards of the Middle Ages, and when they differed they
fell speedily to blows. Now for the first time they set themselves to the
task of learning the art of living together, while still holding different
opinions. In a single generation nearly two thousand public coffeehouses,
each a center of sociability, sprang up in London alone, and the number of
private clubs is quite as astonishing.[183] This new social life had a
marked effect in polishing men's words and manners. The typical Londoner of
Queen Anne's day was still rude, and a little vulgar in his tastes; the
city was still very filthy, the streets unlighted and infested at night by
bands of rowdies and "Mohawks"; but outwardly men sought to refine their
manners according to prevailing standards; and to be elegant, to have "good
form," was a man's first duty, whether he entered society or wrote
literature. One can hardly read a book or poem of the age without feeling
this superficial elegance. Government still had its opposing Tory and Whig
parties, and the Church was divided into Catholics, Anglicans, and
Dissenters; but the growing social life offset many antagonisms, producing
at least the outward impression of peace and unity. Nearly every writer of
the age busied himself with religion as well as with party politics, the
scientist Newton as sincerely as the churchman Barrow, the philosophical
Locke no less earnestly than the evangelical Wesley; but nearly all
tempered their zeal with moderation, and argued from reason and Scripture,
or used delicate satire upon their opponents, instead of denouncing them as
followers of Satan. There were exceptions, of course_;_ but the general
tendency of the age was toward toleration. Man had found himself in the
long struggle for personal liberty; now he turned to the task of
discovering his neighbor, of finding in Whig and Tory, in Catholic and
Protestant, in Anglican and Dissenter, the same general human
characteristics that he found in himself. This good work was helped,
moreover, by the spread of education and by the growth of the national
spfrit, following the victories of Marlborough on the Continent. In the
midst of heated argument it needed only a word--Gibraltar, Blenheim,
Ramillies, Malplaquet--or a poem of victory written in a garret[184] to
tell a patriotic people that under their many differences they were all
alike Englishmen.

In the latter half of the century the political and social progress is
almost bewildering. The modern form of cabinet government responsible to
Parliament and the people had been established under George I; and in 1757
the cynical and corrupt practices of Walpole, premier of the first Tory
cabinet, were replaced by the more enlightened policies of Pitt. Schools
were established; clubs and coffeehouses increased; books and magazines
multiplied until the press was the greatest visible power in England; the
modern great dailies, the _Chronicle, Post_, and _Times_, began their
career of public education. Religiously, all the churches of England felt
the quickening power of that tremendous spiritual revival known as
Methodism, under the preaching of Wesley and Whitefield. Outside her own
borders three great men--Clive in India, Wolfe on the Plains of Abraham,
Cook in Australia and the islands of the Pacific--were unfurling the banner
of St. George over the untold wealth of new lands, and spreading the
world-wide empire of the Anglo-Saxons.

LITERARY CHARACTERISTICS. In every preceding age we have noted especially
the poetical works, which constitute, according to Matthew Arnold, the
glory of English literature. Now for the first time we must chronicle the
triumph of English prose. A multitude of practical interests arising from
the new social and political conditions demanded expression, not simply in
books, but more especially in pamphlets, magazines, and newspapers. Poetry
was inadequate for such a task; hence the development of prose, of the
"unfettered word," as Dante calls it,--a development which astonishes us by
its rapidity and excellence. The graceful elegance of Addison's essays, the
terse vigor of Swift's satires, the artistic finish of Fielding's novels,
the sonorous eloquence of Gibbon's history and of Burke's orations,--these
have no parallel in the poetry of the age. Indeed, poetry itself became
prosaic in this respect, that it was used not for creative works of
imagination, but for essays, for satire, for criticism,--for exactly the
same practical ends as was prose. The poetry of the first half of the
century, as typified in the work of Pope, is polished and witty enough, but
artificial; it lacks fire, fine feeling, enthusiasm, the glow of the
Elizabethan Age and the moral earnestness of Puritanism. In a word, it
interests us as a study of life, rather than delights or inspires us by its
appeal to the imagination. The variety and excellence of prose works, and
the development of a serviceable prose style, which had been begun by
Dryden, until it served to express clearly every human interest and
emotion,--these are the chief literary glories of the eighteenth century.

In the literature of the preceding age we noted two marked tendencies,--the
tendency to realism in subject-matter, and the tendency to polish and
refinement of expression. Both these tendencies were continued in the
Augustan Age, and are seen clearly in the poetry of Pope, who brought the
couplet to perfection, and in the prose of Addison. A third tendency is
shown in the prevalence of satire, resulting from the unfortunate union of
politics with literature. We have already noted the power of the press in
this age, and the perpetual strife of political parties. Nearly every
writer of the first half of the century was used and rewarded by Whigs or
Tories for satirizing their enemies and for advancing their special
political interests. Pope was a marked exception, but he nevertheless
followed the prose writers in using satire too largely in his poetry. Now
satire--that is, a literary work which searches out the faults of men or
institutions in order to hold them up to ridicule--is at best a destructive
kind of criticism. A satirist is like a laborer who clears away the ruins
and rubbish of an old house before the architect and builders begin on a
new and beautiful structure. The work may sometimes be necessary, but it
rarely arouses our enthusiasm. While the satires of Pope, Swift, and
Addison are doubtless the best in our language, we hardly place them with
our great literature, which is always constructive in spirit; and we have
the feeling that all these men were capable of better things than they ever
wrote.

THE CLASSIC AGE. The period we are studying is known to us by various
names. It is often called the Age of Queen Anne; but, unlike Elizabeth,
this "meekly stupid" queen had practically no influence upon our
literature. The name Classic Age is more often heard; but in using it we
should remember clearly these three different ways in which the word
"classic" is applied to literature: (1) the term "classic" refers, in
general, to writers of the highest rank in any nation. As used in our
literature, it was first applied to the works of the great Greek and Roman
writers, like Homer and Virgil; and any English book which followed the
simple and noble method of these writers was said to have a classic style.
Later the term was enlarged to cover the great literary works of other
ancient nations; so that the Bible and the Avestas, as well as the Iliad
and the Aeneid, are called classics. (2) Every national literature has at
least one period in which an unusual number of great writers are producing
books, and this is called the classic period of a nation's literature. Thus
the reign of Augustus is the classic or golden age of Rome; the generation
of Dante is the classic age of Italian literature; the age of Louis XIV is
the French classic age; and the age of Queen Anne is often called the
classic age of England. (3) The word "classic" acquired an entirely
different meaning in the period we are studying; and we shall better
understand this by reference to the preceding ages. The Elizabethan writers
were led by patriotism, by enthusiasm, and, in general, by romantic
emotions. They wrote in a natural style, without regard to rules; and
though they exaggerated and used too many words, their works are delightful
because of their vigor and freshness and fine feeling. In the following age
patriotism had largely disappeared from politics and enthusiasm from
literature. Poets no longer wrote naturally, but artificially, with strange
and fantastic verse forms to give effect, since fine feeling was wanting.
And this is the general character of the poetry of the Puritan Age.[185]
Gradually our writers rebelled against the exaggerations of both the
natural and the fantastic style. They demanded that poetry should follow
exact rules; and in this they were influenced by French writers, especially
by Boileau and Rapin, who insisted on precise methods of writing poetry,
and who professed to have discovered their rules in the classics of Horace
and Aristotle. In our study of the Elizabethan drama we noted the good
influence of the classic movement in insisting upon that beauty of form and
definiteness of expression which characterize the dramas of Greece and
Rome; and in the work of Dryden and his followers we see a revival of
classicism in the effort to make English literature conform to rules
established by the great writers of other nations. At first the results
were excellent, especially in prose; but as the creative vigor of the
Elizabethans was lacking in this age, writing by rule soon developed a kind
of elegant formalism, which suggests the elaborate social code of the time.
Just as a gentleman might not act naturally, but must follow exact rules in
doffing his hat, or addressing a lady, or entering a room, or wearing a
wig, or offering his snuffbox to a friend, so our writers lost
individuality and became formal and artificial. The general tendency of
literature was to look at life critically, to emphasize intellect rather
than imagination, the form rather than the content of a sentence. Writers
strove to repress all emotion and enthusiasm, and to use only precise and
elegant methods of expression. This is what is often meant by the
"classicism" of the ages of Pope and Johnson. It refers to the critical,
intellectual spirit of many writers, to the fine polish of their heroic
couplets or the elegance of their prose, and not to any resemblance which
their work bears to true classic literature. In a word, the classic
movement had become pseudo-classic, i.e. a false or sham classicism; and
the latter term is now often used to designate a considerable part of
eighteenth-century literature.[186] To avoid this critical difficulty we
have adopted the term Augustan Age, a name chosen by the writers
themselves, who saw in Pope, Addison, Swift, Johnson, and Burke the modern
parallels to Horace, Virgil, Cicero, and all that brilliant company who
made Roman literature famous in the days of Augustus.


ALEXANDER POPE (1688-1744)

Pope is in many respects a unique figure. In the first place, he was for a
generation "the poet" of a great nation. To be sure, poetry was limited in
the early eighteenth century; there were few lyrics, little or no love
poetry, no epics, no dramas or songs of nature worth considering; but in
the narrow field of satiric and didactic verse Pope was the undisputed
master. His influence completely dominated the poetry of his age, and many
foreign writers, as well as the majority of English poets, looked to him as
their model. Second, he was a remarkably clear and adequate reflection of
the spirit of the age in which he lived. There is hardly an ideal, a
belief, a doubt, a fashion, a whim of Queen Anne's time, that is not neatly
expressed in his poetry. Third, he was the only important writer of that
age who gave his whole life to letters. Swift was a clergyman and
politician; Addison was secretary of state; other writers depended on
patrons or politics or pensions for fame and a livelihood; but Pope was
independent, and had no profession but literature. And fourth, by the sheer
force of his ambition he won his place, and held it, in spite of religious
prejudice, and in the face of physical and temperamental obstacles that
would have discouraged a stronger man. For Pope was deformed and sickly,
dwarfish in soul and body. He knew little of the world of nature or of the
world of the human heart. He was lacking, apparently, in noble feeling, and
instinctively chose a lie when the truth had manifestly more advantages.
Yet this jealous, peevish, waspish little man became the most famous poet
of his age and the acknowledged leader of English literature. We record the
fact with wonder and admiration; but we do not attempt to explain it.

LIFE. Pope was born in London in 1688, the year of the Revolution. His
parents were both Catholics, who presently removed from London and settled
in Binfield, near Windsor, where the poet's childhood was passed. Partly
because of an unfortunate prejudice against Catholics in the public
schools, partly because of his own weakness and deformity, Pope received
very little school education, but browsed for himself among English books
and picked up a smattering of the classics. Very early he began to write
poetry, and records the fact with his usual vanity:

    As yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame,
    I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came.

Being debarred by his religion from many desirable employments, he resolved
to make literature his life work; and in this he resembled Dryden, who, he
tells us, was his only master, though much of his work seems to depend on
Boileau, the French poet and critic.[187] When only sixteen years old he
had written his "Pastorals"; a few years later appeared his "Essay on
Criticism," which made him famous. With the publication of the _Rape of the
Lock_, in 1712, Pope's name was known and honored all over England, and
this dwarf of twenty-four years, by the sheer force of his own ambition,
had jumped to the foremost place in English letters. It was soon after this
that Voltaire called him "the best poet of England and, at present, of all
the world,"--which is about as near the truth as Voltaire generally gets in
his numerous universal judgments. For the next twelve years Pope was busy
with poetry, especially with his translations of Homer; and his work was so
successful financially that he bought a villa at Twickenham, on the Thames,
and remained happily independent of wealthy patrons for a livelihood.

Led by his success, Pope returned to London and for a time endeavored to
live the gay and dissolute life which was supposed to be suitable for a
literary genius; but he was utterly unfitted for it, mentally and
physically, and soon retired to Twickenham. There he gave himself up to
poetry, manufactured a little garden more artificial than his verses, and
cultivated his friendship with Martha Blount, with whom for many years he
spent a good part of each day, and who remained faithful to him to the end
of his life. At Twickenham he wrote his _Moral Epistles_ (poetical satires
modeled after Horace) and revenged himself upon all his critics in the
bitter abuse of the _Dunciad_. He died in 1744 and was buried at
Twickenham, his religion preventing him from the honor, which was certainly
his due, of a resting place in Westminster Abbey.

WORKS OF POPE. For convenience we may separate Pope's work into three
groups, corresponding to the early, middle, and later period of his life.
In the first he wrote his "Pastorals," "Windsor Forest," "Messiah," "Essay
on Criticism," "Eloise to Abelard," and the _Rape of the Lock;_ in the
second, his translations of Homer; in the third the _Dunciad_ and the
_Epistles_, the latter containing the famous "Essay on Man" and the
"Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot," which is in truth his "Apologia," and in which
alone we see Pope's life from his own view point.

The "Essay on Criticism" sums up the art of poetry as taught first by
Horace, then by Boileau and the eighteenth-century classicists. Though
written in heroic couplets, we hardly consider this as a poem but rather as
a storehouse of critical maxims. "For fools rush in where angels fear to
tread"; "To err is human, to forgive divine"; "A little learning is a
dangerous thing,"--these lines, and many more like them from the same
source, have found their way into our common speech, and are used, without
thinking of the author, whenever we need an apt quotation.

The _Rape of the Lock_ is a masterpiece of its kind, and comes nearer to
being a "creation" than anything else that Pope has written. The occasion
of the famous poem was trivial enough. A fop at the court of Queen Anne,
one Lord Petre, snipped a lock of hair from the abundant curls of a pretty
maid of honor named Arabella Fermor. The young lady resented it, and the
two families were plunged into a quarrel which was the talk of London.
Pope, being appealed to, seized the occasion to construct, not a ballad, as
the Cavaliers would have done, nor an epigram, as French poets love to do,
but a long poem in which all the mannerisms of society are pictured in
minutest detail and satirized with the most delicate wit. The first
edition, consisting of two cantos, was published in 1712; and it is amazing
now to read of the trivial character of London court life at the time when
English soldiers were battling for a great continent in the French and
Indian wars. Its instant success caused Pope to lengthen the poem by three
more cantos; and in order to make a more perfect burlesque of an epic poem,
he introduces gnomes, sprites, sylphs, and salamanders,[188] instead of the
gods of the great epics, with which his readers were familiar. The poem is
modeled after two foreign satires: Boileau's _Le Lutrin_ (reading desk), a
satire on the French clergy, who raised a huge quarrel over the location of
a lectern; and _La Secchia Rapita_ (stolen bucket), a famous Italian satire
on the petty causes of the endless Italian wars. Pope, however, went far
ahead of his masters in style and in delicacy of handling a mock-heroic
theme, and during his lifetime the _Rape of the Lock_ was considered as the
greatest poem of its kind in all literature. The poem is still well worth
reading; for as an expression of the artificial life of the age--of its
cards, parties, toilettes, lapdogs, tea-drinking, snuff-taking, and idle
vanities--it is as perfect in its way as _Tamburlaine_, which reflects the
boundless ambition of the Elizabethans.

The fame of Pope's _Iliad_, which was financially the most successful of
his books, was due to the fact that he interpreted Homer in the elegant,
artificial language of his own age. Not only do his words follow literary
fashions but even the Homeric characters lose their strength and become
fashionable men of the court. So the criticism of the scholar Bentley was
most appropriate when he said, "It is a pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must
not call it Homer." Pope translated the entire _Iliad_ and half of the
_Odyssey_; and the latter work was finished by two Cambridge scholars,
Elijah Fenton and William Broome, who imitated the mechanical couplets so
perfectly that it is difficult to distinguish their work from that of the
greatest poet of the age. A single selection is given to show how, in the
nobler passages, even Pope may faintly suggest the elemental grandeur of
Homer:

    The troops exulting sat in order round,
    And beaming fires illumined all the ground.
    As when the moon, refulgent lamp of night,
    O'er Heaven's clear azure spreads her sacred light,
    When not a breath disturbs the deep serene,
    And not a cloud o'ercasts the solemn scene;
    Around her throne the vivid planets roll,
    And stars unnumbered gild the glowing pole,
    O'er the dark trees a yellower verdure shed,
    And tip with silver every mountain's head.

The "Essay" is the best known and the most quoted of all Pope's works.
Except in form it is not poetry, and when one considers it as an essay and
reduces it to plain prose, it is found to consist of numerous literary
ornaments without any very solid structure of thought to rest upon. The
purpose of the essay is, in Pope's words, to "vindicate the ways of God to
Man"; and as there are no unanswered problems in Pope's philosophy, the
vindication is perfectly accomplished in four poetical epistles, concerning
man's relations to the universe, to himself, to society, and to happiness.
The final result is summed up in a few well-known lines:

    All nature is but art, unknown to thee;
    All chance, direction which thou canst not see;
    All discord, harmony not understood;
    All partial evil, universal good:
    And, spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,
    One truth is clear, whatever is, is right.

Like the "Essay on Criticism," the poem abounds in quotable lines, such as
the following, which make the entire work well worth reading:

    Hope springs eternal in the human breast:
    Man never is, but always to be blest.
    Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
    The proper study of Mankind is Man.
    The same ambition can destroy or save,
    And makes a patriot as it makes a knave.
    Honor and shame from no condition rise;
    Act well your part, there all the honor lies.
      Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,
    As, to be hated, needs but to be seen;
    Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,
    We first endure, then pity, then embrace.
      Behold the child, by Nature's kindly law,
    Pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw:
    Some livelier plaything gives his youth delight,
    A little louder, but as empty quite:
    Scarfs, garters, gold, amuse his riper stage,
    And beads and prayer books are the toys of age:
    Pleased with this bauble still, as that before;
    Till tired he sleeps, and Life's poor play is o'er.[189]

_The Dunciad_ (i.e. the "Iliad of the Dunces") began originally as a
controversy concerning Shakespeare, but turned out to be a coarse and
revengeful satire upon all the literary men of the age who had aroused
Pope's anger by their criticism or lack of appreciation of his genius.
Though brilliantly written and immensely popular at one time, its present
effect on the reader is to arouse a sense of pity that a man of such
acknowledged power and position should abuse both by devoting his talents
to personal spite and petty quarrels. Among the rest of his numerous works
the reader will find Pope's estimate of himself best set forth in his
"Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot," and it will be well to close our study of this
strange mixture of vanity and greatness with "The Universal Prayer," which
shows at least that Pope had considered, and judged himself, and that all
further judgment is consequently superfluous.


JONATHAN SWIFT (1667-1745)

In each of Marlowe's tragedies we have the picture of a man dominated by a
single passion, the lust of power for its own sake. In each we see that a
powerful man without self-control is like a dangerous instrument in the
hands of a child; and the tragedy ends in the destruction of the man by the
ungoverned power which he possesses. The life of Swift is just such a
living tragedy. He had the power of gaining wealth, like the hero of the
_Jew of Malta_; yet he used it scornfully, and in sad irony left what
remained to him of a large property to found a hospital for lunatics. By
hard work he won enormous literary power, and used it to satirize our
common humanity. He wrested political power from the hands of the Tories,
and used it to insult the very men who had helped him, and who held his
fate in their hands. By his dominant personality he exercised a curious
power over women, and used it brutally to make them feel their inferiority.
Being loved supremely by two good women, he brought sorrow and death to
both, and endless misery to himself. So his power brought always tragedy in
its wake. It is only when we remember his life of struggle and
disappointment and bitterness that we can appreciate the personal quality
in his satire, and perhaps find some sympathy for this greatest genius of
all the Augustan writers.

LIFE. Swift was born in Dublin, of English parents, in 1667. His father
died before he was born; his mother was poor, and Swift, though proud as
Lucifer, was compelled to accept aid from relatives, who gave it
grudgingly. At the Kilkenny school, and especially at Dublin University, he
detested the curriculum, reading only what appealed to his own nature; but,
since a degree was necessary to his success, he was compelled to accept it
as a favor from the examiners, whom he despised in his heart. After
graduation the only position open to him was with a distant relative, Sir
William Temple, who gave him the position of private secretary largely on
account of the unwelcome relationship.

Temple was a statesman and an excellent diplomatist; but he thought himself
to be a great writer as well, and he entered into a literary controversy
concerning the relative merits of the classics and modern literature.
Swift's first notable work, _The Battle of the Books_, written at this time
but not published, is a keen satire upon both parties in the controversy.
The first touch of bitterness shows itself here; for Swift was in a galling
position for a man of his pride, knowing his intellectual superiority to
the man who employed him, and yet being looked upon as a servant and eating
at the servants' table. Thus he spent ten of the best years of his life in
the pretty Moor Park, Surrey, growing more bitter each year and steadily
cursing his fate. Nevertheless he read and studied widely, and, after his
position with Temple grew unbearable, quarreled with his patron, took
orders, and entered the Church of England. Some years later we find him
settled in the little church of Laracor, Ireland,--a country which he
disliked intensely, but whither he went because no other "living" was open
to him.

In Ireland, faithful to his church duties, Swift labored to better the
condition of the unhappy people around him. Never before had the poor of
his parishes been so well cared for; but Swift chafed under his yoke,
growing more and more irritated as he saw small men advanced to large
positions, while he remained unnoticed in a little country church,--largely
because he was too proud and too blunt with those who might have advanced
him. While at Laracor he finished his _Tale of a Tub_, a satire on the
various churches of the day, which was published in London with the _Battle
of the Books_ in 1704. The work brought him into notice as the most
powerful satirist of the age, and he soon gave up his church to enter the
strife of party politics. The cheap pamphlet was then the most powerful
political weapon known; and as Swift had no equal at pamphlet writing, he
soon became a veritable dictator. For several years, especially from 1710
to 1713, Swift was one of the most important figures in London. The Whigs
feared the lash of his satire; the Tories feared to lose his support. He
was courted, flattered, cajoled on every side; but the use he made of his
new power is sad to contemplate. An unbearable arrogance took possession of
him. Lords, statesmen, even ladies were compelled to sue for his favor and
to apologize for every fancied slight to his egoism. It is at this time
that he writes in his _Journal to Stella:_

Mr. Secretary told me the Duke of Buckingham had been talking much about me
and desired my acquaintance. I answered it could not be, for he had not yet
made sufficient advances; then Shrewsbury said he thought the Duke was not
used to make advances. I said I could not help that, for I always expected
advances in proportion to men's quality, and more from a Duke than any
other man.

Writing to the Duchess of Queensberry he says:

I am glad you know your duty; for it has been a known and established rule
above twenty years in England that the first advances have been constantly
made me by all ladies who aspire to my acquaintance, and the greater their
quality the greater were their advances.

When the Tories went out of power Swift's position became uncertain. He
expected and had probably been promised a bishopric in England, with a seat
among the peers of the realm; but the Tories offered him instead the place
of dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin. It was galling to a man of
his proud spirit; but after his merciless satire on religion, in _The Tale
of a Tub_, any ecclesiastical position in England was rendered impossible.
Dublin was the best he could get, and he accepted it bitterly, once more
cursing the fate which he had brought upon himself.

With his return to Ireland begins the last act in the tragedy of his life.
His best known literary work, _Gulliver's Travels_, was done here; but the
bitterness of life grew slowly to insanity, and a frightful personal
sorrow, of which he never spoke, reached its climax in the death of Esther
Johnson, a beautiful young woman, who had loved Swift ever since the two
had met in Temple's household, and to whom he had written his _Journal to
Stella_. During the last years of his life a brain disease, of which he had
shown frequent symptoms, fastened its terrible hold upon Swift, and he
became by turns an idiot and a madman. He died in 1745, and when his will
was opened it was found that he had left all his property to found St.
Patrick's Asylum for lunatics and incurables. It stands to-day as the most
suggestive monument of his peculiar genius.

THE WORKS OF SWIFT. From Swift's life one can readily foresee the kind of
literature he will produce. Taken together his works are a monstrous satire
on humanity; and the spirit of that satire is shown clearly in a little
incident of his first days in London. There was in the city at that time a
certain astrologer named Partridge, who duped the public by calculating
nativities from the stars, and by selling a yearly almanac predicting
future events. Swift, who hated all shams, wrote, with a great show of
learning, his famous _Bickerstaff Almanac_, containing "Predictions for the
Year 1708, as Determined by the Unerring Stars." As Swift rarely signed his
name to any literary work, letting it stand or fall on its own merits, his
burlesque appeared over the pseudonym of Isaac Bickerstaff, a name
afterwards made famous by Steele in _The Tatler_. Among the predictions was
the following:

My first prediction is but a trifle; yet I will mention it to show how
ignorant those sottish pretenders to astrology are in their own concerns:
it relates to Partridge the almanack maker; I have consulted the star of
his nativity by my own rules, and find he will infallibly die upon the 29th
of March next, about eleven at night, of a raging fever; therefore I advise
him to consider of it, and settle his affairs in time.

On March 30, the day after the prediction was to be fulfilled, there
appeared in the newspapers a letter from a revenue officer giving the
details of Partridge's death, with the doings of the bailiff and the coffin
maker; and on the following morning appeared an elaborate "Elegy of Mr.
Partridge." When poor Partridge, who suddenly found himself without
customers, published a denial of the burial, Swift answered with an
elaborate "Vindication of Isaac Bickerstaff," in which he proved by
astrological rules that Partridge was dead, and that the man now in his
place was an impostor trying to cheat the heirs out of their inheritance.

This ferocious joke is suggestive of all Swift's satires. Against any case
of hypocrisy or injustice he sets up a remedy of precisely the same kind,
only more atrocious, and defends his plan with such seriousness that the
satire overwhelms the reader with a sense of monstrous falsity. Thus his
solemn "Argument to prove that the Abolishing of Christianity may be
attended with Some Inconveniences" is such a frightful satire upon the
abuses of Christianity by its professed followers that it is impossible for
us to say whether Swift intended to point out needed reforms, or to satisfy
his conscience,[190] or to perpetrate a joke on the Church, as he had done
on poor Partridge. So also with his "Modest Proposal," concerning the
children of Ireland, which sets up the proposition that poor Irish farmers
ought to raise children as dainties, to be eaten, like roast pigs, on the
tables of prosperous Englishmen. In this most characteristic work it is
impossible to find Swift or his motive. The injustice under which Ireland
suffered, her perversity in raising large families to certain poverty, and
the indifference of English politicians to her suffering and protests are
all mercilessly portrayed; but why? That is still the unanswered problem of
Swift's life and writings.

Swift's two greatest satires are his _Tale of a Tub_ and _Gulliver's
Travels_. The _Tale_ began as a grim exposure of the alleged weaknesses of
three principal forms of religious belief, Catholic, Lutheran, and
Calvinist, as opposed to the Anglican; but it ended in a satire upon all
science and philosophy.

Swift explains his whimsical title by the custom of mariners in throwing
out a tub to a whale, in order to occupy the monster's attention and divert
it from an attack upon the ship,--which only proves how little Swift knew
of whales or sailors. But let that pass. His book is a tub thrown out to
the enemies of Church and State to keep them occupied from further attacks
or criticism; and the substance of the argument is that all churches, and
indeed all religion and science and statesmanship, are arrant hypocrisy.
The best known part of the book is the allegory of the old man who died and
left a coat (which is Christian Truth) to each of his three sons, Peter,
Martin, and Jack, with minute directions for its care and use. These three
names stand for Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists; and the way in which
the sons evade their father's will and change the fashion of their garment
is part of the bitter satire upon all religious sects. Though it professes
to defend the Anglican Church, that institution fares perhaps worse than
the others; for nothing is left to her but a thin cloak of custom under
which to hide her alleged hypocrisy.

In _Gulliver's Travels_ the satire grows more unbearable. Strangely enough,
this book, upon which Swift's literary fame generally rests, was not
written from any literary motive, but rather as an outlet for the author's
own bitterness against fate and human society. It is still read with
pleasure, as _Robinson Crusoe_ is read, for the interesting adventures of
the hero; and fortunately those who read it generally overlook its
degrading influence and motive.

_Gulliver's Travels_ records the pretended four voyages of one Lemuel
Gulliver, and his adventures in four astounding countries. The first book
tells of his voyage and shipwreck in Lilliput, where the inhabitants are
about as tall as one's thumb, and all their acts and motives are on the
same dwarfish scale. In the petty quarrels of these dwarfs we are supposed
to see the littleness of humanity. The statesmen who obtain place and favor
by cutting monkey capers on the tight rope before their sovereign, and the
two great parties, the Littleendians and Bigendians, who plunge the country
into civil war over the momentous question of whether an egg should be
broken on its big or on its little end, are satires on the politics of
Swift's own day and generation. The style is simple and convincing; the
surprising situations and adventures are as absorbing as those of Defoe's
masterpiece; and altogether it is the most interesting of Swift's satires.

On the second voyage Gulliver is abandoned in Brobdingnag, where the
inhabitants are giants, and everything is done upon an enormous scale. The
meanness of humanity seems all the more detestable in view of the greatness
of these superior beings. When Gulliver tells about his own people, their
ambitions and wars and conquests, the giants can only wonder that such
great venom could exist in such little insects.

In the third voyage Gulliver continues his adventures in Laputa, and this
is a satire upon all the scientists and philosophers. Laputa is a flying
island, held up in the air by a loadstone; and all the professors of the
famous academy at Lagado are of the same airy constitution. The philosopher
who worked eight years to extract sunshine from cucumbers is typical of
Swift's satiric treatment of all scientific problems. It is in this voyage
that we hear of the Struldbrugs, a ghastly race of men who are doomed to
live upon earth after losing hope and the desire for life. The picture is
all the more terrible in view of the last years of Swift's own life, in
which he was compelled to live on, a burden to himself and his friends.

In these three voyages the evident purpose is to strip off the veil of
habit and custom, with which men deceive themselves, and show the crude
vices of humanity as Swift fancies he sees them. In the fourth voyage the
merciless satire is carried out to its logical conclusion. This brings us
to the land of the Houyhnhnms, in which horses, superior and intelligent
creatures, are the ruling animals. All our interest, however, is centered
on the Yahoos, a frightful race, having the form and appearance of men, but
living in unspeakable degradation.

The _Journal to Stella_, written chiefly in the years 1710-1713 for the
benefit of Esther Johnson, is interesting to us for two reasons. It is,
first, an excellent commentary on contemporary characters and political
events, by one of the most powerful and original minds of the age; and
second, in its love passages and purely personal descriptions it gives us
the best picture we possess of Swift himself at the summit of his power and
influence. As we read now its words of tenderness for the woman who loved
him, and who brought almost the only ray of sunlight into his life, we can
only wonder and be silent. Entirely different are his _Drapier's Letters_,
a model of political harangue and of popular argument, which roused an
unthinking English public and did much benefit to Ireland by preventing the
politicians' plan of debasing the Irish coinage. Swift's poems, though
vigorous and original (like Defoe's, of the same period), are generally
satirical, often coarse, and seldom rise above doggerel. Unlike his friend
Addison, Swift saw, in the growing polish and decency of society, only a
mask for hypocrisy; and he often used his verse to shock the new-born
modesty by pointing out some native ugliness which his diseased mind
discovered under every beautiful exterior.

That Swift is the most original writer of his time, and one of the greatest
masters of English prose, is undeniable. Directness, vigor, simplicity,
mark every page. Among writers of that age he stands almost alone in his
disdain of literary effects. Keeping his object steadily before him, he
drives straight on to the end, with a convincing power that has never been
surpassed in our language. Even in his most grotesque creations, the reader
never loses the sense of reality, of being present as an eyewitness of the
most impossible events, so powerful and convincing is Swift's prose. Defoe
had the same power; but in writing _Robinson Crusoe_, for instance, his
task was comparatively easy, since his hero and his adventures were both
natural; while Swift gives reality to pygmies, giants, and the most
impossible situations, as easily as if he were writing of facts.
Notwithstanding these excellent qualities, the ordinary reader will do well
to confine himself to _Gulliver's Travels_ and a book of well-chosen
selections. For, it must be confessed, the bulk of Swift's work is not
wholesome reading. It is too terribly satiric and destructive; it
emphasizes the faults and failings of humanity; and so runs counter to the
general course of our literature, which from Cynewulf to Tennyson follows
the Ideal, as Merlin followed the Gleam,[191] and is not satisfied till the
hidden beauty of man's soul and the divine purpose of his struggle are
manifest.


JOSEPH ADDISON (1672-1719)

In the pleasant art of living with one's fellows, Addison is easily a
master. It is due to his perfect expression of that art, of that new social
life which, as we have noted, was characteristic of the Age of Anne, that
Addison occupies such a large place in the history of literature. Of less
power and originality than Swift, he nevertheless wields, and deserves to
wield, a more lasting influence. Swift is the storm, roaring against the
ice and frost of the late spring of English life. Addison is the sunshine,
which melts the ice and dries the mud and makes the earth thrill with light
and hope. Like Swift, he despised shams, but unlike him, he never lost
faith in humanity; and in all his satires there is a gentle kindliness
which makes one think better of his fellow-men, even while he laughs at
their little vanities.

Two things Addison did for our literature which are of inestimable value.
First, he overcame a certain corrupt tendency bequeathed by Restoration
literature. It was the apparent aim of the low drama, and even of much of
the poetry of that age, to make virtue ridiculous and vice attractive.
Addison set himself squarely against this unworthy tendency. To strip off
the mask of vice, to show its ugliness and deformity, but to reveal virtue
in its own native loveliness,--that was Addison's purpose; and he succeeded
so well that never, since his day, has our English literature seriously
followed after false gods. As Macaulay says, "So effectually did he retort
on vice the mockery which had recently been directed against virtue, that
since his time the open violation of decency has always been considered
amongst us a sure mark of a fool." And second, prompted and aided by the
more original genius of his friend Steele, Addison seized upon the new
social life of the clubs and made it the subject of endless pleasant essays
upon types of men and manners. _The Tatler_ and _The Spectator_ are the
beginning of the modern essay; and their studies of human character, as
exemplified in Sir Roger de Coverley, are a preparation for the modern
novel.

LIFE. Addison's life, like his writings, is in marked contrast to that of
Swift. He was born in Milston, Wiltshire, in 1672. His father was a
scholarly English clergyman, and all his life Addison followed naturally
the quiet and cultured ways to which he was early accustomed. At the famous
Charterhouse School, in London, and in his university life at Oxford, he
excelled in character and scholarship and became known as a writer of
graceful verses. He had some intention, at one time, of entering the
Church, but was easily persuaded by his friends to take up the government
service instead. Unlike Swift, who abused his political superiors, Addison
took the more tactful way of winning the friendship of men in large places.
His lines to Dryden won that literary leader's instant favor, and one of
his Latin poems, "The Peace of Ryswick" (1697), with its kindly
appreciation of King William's statesmen, brought him into favorable
political notice. It brought him also a pension of three hundred pounds a
year, with a suggestion that he travel abroad and cultivate the art of
diplomacy; which he promptly did to his own great advantage.

From a literary view point the most interesting work of Addison's early
life is his _Account of the Greatest English Poets_ (1693), written while
he was a fellow of Oxford University. One rubs his eyes to find Dryden
lavishly praised, Spenser excused or patronized, while Shakespeare is not
even mentioned. But Addison was writing under Boileau's "classic" rules;
and the poet, like the age, was perhaps too artificial to appreciate
natural genius.

While he was traveling abroad, the death of William and the loss of power
by the Whigs suddenly stopped Addison's pension; necessity brought him
home, and for a time he lived in poverty and obscurity. Then occurred the
battle of Blenheim, and in the effort to find a poet to celebrate the
event, Addison was brought to the Tories' attention. His poem, "The
Campaign," celebrating the victory, took the country by storm. Instead of
making the hero slay his thousands and ten thousands, like the old epic
heroes, Addison had some sense of what is required in a modern general, and
so made Marlborough direct the battle from the outside, comparing him to an
angel riding on the whirlwind:

    'T was then great Marlbro's mighty soul was proved,
    That, in the shock of charging hosts unmoved,
    Amidst confusion, horror, and despair,
    Examined all the dreadful scenes of war;
    In peaceful thought the field of death surveyed,
    To fainting squadrons sent the timely aid,
    Inspired repulsed battalions to engage,
    And taught the doubtful battle where to rage.
    So when an angel by divine command
    With rising tempests shakes a guilty land,
    (Such as of late o'er pale Britannia past,)
    Calm and serene he drives the furious blast;
    And, pleased th' Almighty's orders to perform,
    Rides in the whirlwind, and directs the storm.

That one doubtful simile made Addison's fortune. Never before or since was
a poet's mechanical work so well rewarded. It was called the finest thing
ever written, and from that day Addison rose steadily in political favor
and office. He became in turn Undersecretary, member of Parliament,
Secretary for Ireland, and finally Secretary of State. Probably no other
literary man, aided by his pen alone, ever rose so rapidly and so high in
office.

The rest of Addison's life was divided between political duties and
literature. His essays for the _Tatler_ and _Spectator_, which we still
cherish, were written between 1709 and 1714; but he won more literary fame
by his classic tragedy _Cato_, which we have almost forgotten. In 1716 he
married a widow, the Countess of Warwick, and went to live at her home, the
famous Holland House. His married life lasted only three years, and was
probably not a happy one. Certainly he never wrote of women except with
gentle satire, and he became more and more a clubman, spending most of his
time in the clubs and coffeehouses of London. Up to this time his life had
been singularly peaceful; but his last years were shadowed by quarrels,
first with Pope, then with Swift, and finally with his lifelong friend
Steele. The first quarrel was on literary grounds, and was largely the
result of Pope's jealousy. The latter's venomous caricature of Addison as
Atticus shows how he took his petty revenge on a great and good man who had
been his friend. The other quarrels with Swift, and especially with his old
friend Steele, were the unfortunate result of political differences, and
show how impossible it is to mingle literary ideals with party politics. He
died serenely in 1719. A brief description from Thackeray's _English
Humorists_ is his best epitaph:

A life prosperous and beautiful, a calm death; an immense fame and
affection afterwards for his happy and spotless name.

WORKS OF ADDISON. The most enduring of Addison's works are his famous
_Essays_, collected from the _Tatler_ and _Spectator._ We have spoken of
him as a master of the art of gentle living, and these essays are a
perpetual inducement to others to know and to practice the same fine art.
To an age of fundamental coarseness and artificiality he came with a
wholesome message of refinement and simplicity, much as Ruskin and Arnold
spoke to a later age of materialism; only Addison's success was greater
than theirs because of his greater knowledge of life and his greater faith
in men. He attacks all the little vanities and all the big vices of his
time, not in Swift's terrible way, which makes us feel hopeless of
humanity, but with a kindly ridicule and gentle humor which takes speedy
improvement for granted. To read Swift's brutal "Letters to a Young Lady,"
and then to read Addison's "Dissection of a Beau's Head" and his
"Dissection of a Coquette's Heart," is to know at once the secret of the
latter's more enduring influence.

Three other results of these delightful essays are worthy of attention:
first, they are the best picture we possess of the new social life of
England, with its many new interests; second, they advanced the art of
literary criticism to a much higher stage than it had ever before reached,
and however much we differ from their judgment and their interpretation of
such a man as Milton, they certainly led Englishmen to a better knowledge
and appreciation of their own literature; and finally, in Ned Softly the
literary dabbler, Will Wimble the poor relation, Sir Andrew Freeport the
merchant, Will Honeycomb the fop, and Sir Roger the country gentleman, they
give us characters that live forever as part of that goodly company which
extends from Chaucer's country parson to Kipling's Mulvaney. Addison and
Steele not only introduced the modern essay, but in such characters as
these they herald the dawn of the modern novel. Of all his essays the best
known and loved are those which introduce us to Sir Roger de Coverley, the
genial dictator of life and manners in the quiet English country.

In style these essays are remarkable as showing the growing perfection of
the English language. Johnson says, "Whoever wishes to attain an English
style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give
his days and nights to the volumes of Addison." And again he says, "Give
nights and days, sir, to the study of Addison if you mean to be a good
writer, or, what is more worth, an honest man." That was good criticism for
its day, and even at the present time critics are agreed that Addison's
_Essays_ are well worth reading once for their own sake, and many times for
their influence in shaping a clear and graceful style of writing.

Addison's poems, which were enormously popular in his day, are now seldom
read. His _Cato_, with its classic unities and lack of dramatic power, must
be regarded as a failure, if we study it as tragedy; but it offers an
excellent example of the rhetoric and fine sentiment which were then
considered the essentials of good writing. The best scene from this tragedy
is in the fifth act, where Cato soliloquizes, with Plato's _Immortality of
the Soul_ open in his hand, and a drawn sword on the table before him:

    It must be so--Plato, thou reason'st well!--
    Else whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire,
    This longing after immortality?
    Or whence this secret dread, and inward horror,
    Of falling into nought? why shrinks the soul
    Back on herself, and startles at destruction?
    'Tis the divinity that stirs within us;
    'Tis heaven itself, that points out an hereafter,
    And intimates eternity to man.

Many readers make frequent use of one portion of Addison's poetry without
knowing to whom they are indebted. His devout nature found expression in
many hymns, a few of which are still used and loved in our churches. Many a
congregation thrills, as Thackeray did, to the splendid sweep of his "God
in Nature," beginning, "The spacious firmament on high." Almost as well
known and loved are his "Traveler's Hymn," and his "Continued Help,"
beginning, "When all thy mercies, O my God." The latter hymn--written in a
storm at sea off the Italian coast, when the captain and crew were
demoralized by terror--shows that poetry, especially a good hymn that one
can sing in the same spirit as one would say his prayers, is sometimes the
most practical and helpful thing in the world.

RICHARD STEELE (1672-1729). Steele was in almost every respect the
antithesis of his friend and fellow-worker,--a rollicking, good-hearted,
emotional, lovable Irishman. At the Charterhouse School and at Oxford he
shared everything with Addison, asking nothing but love in return. Unlike
Addison, he studied but little, and left the university to enter the Horse
Guards. He was in turn soldier, captain, poet, playwright, essayist, member
of Parliament, manager of a theater, publisher of a newspaper, and twenty
other things,--all of which he began joyously and then abandoned, sometimes
against his will, as when he was expelled from Parliament, and again
because some other interest of the moment had more attraction. His poems
and plays are now little known; but the reader who searches them out will
find one or two suggestive things about Steele himself. For instance, he
loves children; and he is one of the few writers of his time who show a
sincere and unswerving respect for womanhood. Even more than Addison he
ridicules vice and makes virtue lovely. He is the originator of the
_Tatler_, and joins with Addison in creating the _Spectator_,--the two
periodicals which, in the short space of less than four years, did more to
influence subsequent literature than all other magazines of the century
combined. Moreover, he is the original genius of Sir Roger, and of many
other characters and essays for which Addison usually receives the whole
credit. It is often impossible in the _Tatler_ essays to separate the work
of the two men; but the majority of critics hold that the more original
parts, the characters, the thought, the overflowing kindliness, are largely
Steele's creation; while to Addison fell the work of polishing and
perfecting the essays, and of adding that touch of humor which made them
the most welcome literary visitors that England had ever received.

THE TATLER AND THE SPECTATOR. On account of his talent in writing political
pamphlets, Steele was awarded the position of official gazetteer. While in
this position, and writing for several small newspapers, the idea occurred
to Steele to publish a paper which should contain not only the political
news, but also the gossip of the clubs and coffeehouses, with some light
essays on the life and manners of the age. The immediate result--for Steele
never let an idea remain idle--was the famous _Tatler_, the first number of
which appeared April 12, 1709. It was a small folio sheet, appearing on
post days, three times a week, and it sold for a penny a copy. That it had
a serious purpose is evident from this dedication to the first volume of
collected _Tatler_ essays:

The general purpose of this paper is to expose the false arts of life, to
pull off the disguises of cunning, vanity, and affectation, and to
recommend a general simplicity in our dress, our discourse, and our
behavior.

The success of this unheard-of combination of news, gossip, and essay was
instantaneous. Not a club or a coffeehouse in London could afford to be
without it, and over it's pages began the first general interest in
contemporary English life as expressed in literature. Steele at first wrote
the entire paper and signed his essays with the name of Isaac Bickerstaff,
which had been made famous by Swift a few years before. Addison is said to
have soon recognized one of his own remarks to Steele, and the secret of
the Authorship was out. From that time Addison was a regular contributor,
and occasionally other writers added essays on the new social life of
England.[192]

Steele lost his position as gazetteer, and the _Tatler_ was discontinued
after less than two years' life, but not till it won an astonishing
popularity and made ready the way for its successor. Two months later, on
March 1, 1711, appeared the first number of the _Spectator_. In the new
magazine politics and news, as such, were ignored; it was a literary
magazine, pure and simple, and its entire contents consisted of a single
light essay. It was considered a crazy venture at the time, but its instant
success proved that men were eager for some literary expression of the new
social ideals. The following whimsical letter to the editor may serve to
indicate the part played by the _Spectator_ in the daily life of London:

Mr. Spectator,--Your paper is a part of my tea equipage; and my servant
knows my humor so well, that in calling for my breakfast this morning (it
being past my usual hour) she answered, the _Spectator_ was not yet come
in, but the teakettle boiled, and she expected it every moment.

It is in the incomparable _Spectator_ papers that Addison shows himself
most "worthy to be remembered." He contributed the majority of its essays,
and in its first number appears this description of the Spectator, by which
name Addison is now generally known:

There is no place of general resort wherein I do not often make my
appearance; sometimes I am seen thrusting my head into a round of
politicians at Will's [Coffeehouse] and listening with great attention to
the narratives that are made in those little circular audiences. Sometimes
I smoke a pipe at Child's, and, whilst I seem attentive to nothing but _The
Postman_, overhear the conversation of every table in the room. I appear on
Sunday nights at St. James's, and sometimes join the little committee of
politics in the inner room, as one who comes to hear and improve. My face
is likewise very well known at the Grecian, the Cocoa Tree, and in the
theaters both of Drury Lane and the Haymarket. I have been taken for a
merchant upon the Exchange for above these ten years; and sometimes pass
for a Jew in the assembly of stock jobbers at Jonathan's.... Thus I live in
the world rather as a spectator of mankind than as one of the species,...
which is the character I intend to preserve in this paper.

The large place which these two little magazines hold in our literature
seems most disproportionate to their short span of days. In the short space
of four years in which Addison and Steele worked together the light essay
was established as one of the most important forms of modern literature,
and the literary magazine won its place as the expression of the social
life of a nation.


SAMUEL JOHNSON (1709-1784)

The reader of Boswell's _Johnson_, after listening to endless grumblings
and watching the clumsy actions of the hero, often finds himself wondering
why he should end his reading with a profound respect for this "old bear"
who is the object of Boswell's groveling attention. Here is a man who was
certainly not the greatest writer of his age, perhaps not even a great
writer at all, but who was nevertheless the dictator of English letters,
and who still looms across the centuries of a magnificent literature as its
most striking and original figure. Here, moreover, is a huge, fat, awkward
man, of vulgar manners and appearance, who monopolizes conversation, argues
violently, abuses everybody, clubs down opposition,--"Madam" (speaking to
his cultivated hostess at table), "talk no more nonsense"; "Sir" (turning
to a distinguished guest), "I perceive you are a vile Whig." While talking
he makes curious animal sounds, "sometimes giving a half whistle, sometimes
clucking like a hen"; and when he has concluded a violent dispute and laid
his opponents low by dogmatism or ridicule, he leans back to "blow out his
breath like a whale" and gulp down numberless cups of hot tea. Yet this
curious dictator of an elegant age was a veritable lion, much sought after
by society; and around him in his own poor house gathered the foremost
artists, scholars, actors, and literary men of London,--all honoring the
man, loving him, and listening to his dogmatism as the Greeks listened to
the voice of their oracle.

What is the secret of this astounding spectacle? If the reader turns
naturally to Johnson's works for an explanation, he will be disappointed.
Reading his verses, we find nothing to delight or inspire us, but rather
gloom and pessimism, with a few moral observations in rimed couplets:

    But, scarce observed, the knowing and the bold
    Fall in the general massacre of gold;
    Wide-wasting pest! that rages unconfined,
    And crowds with crimes the records of mankind;
    For gold his sword the hireling ruffian draws,
    For gold the hireling judge distorts the laws;
    Wealth heaped on wealth nor truth nor safety buys;
    The dangers gather as the treasures rise.[193]

That is excellent common sense, but it is not poetry; and it is not
necessary to hunt through Johnson's bulky volumes for the information,
since any moralist can give us offhand the same doctrine. As for his
_Rambler_ essays, once so successful, though we marvel at the big words,
the carefully balanced sentences, the classical allusions, one might as
well try to get interested in an old-fashioned, three-hour sermon. We read
a few pages listlessly, yawn, and go to bed.

Since the man's work fails to account for his leadership and influence, we
examine his personality; and here everything is interesting. Because of a
few oft-quoted passages from Boswell's biography, Johnson appears to us as
an eccentric bear, who amuses us by his growlings and clumsy antics. But
there is another Johnson, a brave, patient, kindly, religious soul, who, as
Goldsmith said, had "nothing of the bear but his skin"; a man who battled
like a hero against poverty and pain and melancholy and the awful fear of
death, and who overcame them manfully. "_That trouble passed away; so will
this,_" sang the sorrowing Deor in the first old Anglo-Saxon lyric; and
that expresses the great and suffering spirit of Johnson, who in the face
of enormous obstacles never lost faith in God or in himself. Though he was
a reactionary in politics, upholding the arbitrary power of kings and
opposing the growing liberty of the people, yet his political theories,
like his manners, were no deeper than his skin; for in all London there was
none more kind to the wretched, and none more ready to extend an open hand
to every struggling man and woman who crossed his path. When he passed poor
homeless Arabs sleeping in the streets he would slip a coin into their
hands, in order that they might have a happy awakening; for he himself knew
well what it meant to be hungry. Such was Johnson,--a "mass of genuine
manhood," as Carlyle called him, and as such, men loved and honored
him.[194]

Life of Johnson. Johnson was born in Lichfield, Staffordshire, in 1709. He
was the son of a small bookseller, a poor man, but intelligent and fond of
literature, as booksellers invariably were in the good days when every town
had its bookshop. From his childhood Johnson had to struggle against
physical deformity and disease and the consequent disinclination to hard
work. He prepared for the university, partly in the schools, but largely by
omnivorous reading in his father's shop, and when he entered Oxford he had
read more classical authors than had most of the graduates. Before
finishing his course he had to leave the university on account of his
poverty, and at once he began his long struggle as a hack writer to earn
his living.

At twenty-five years he married a woman old enough to be his mother,--a
genuine love match, he called it,--and with her dowry of £800 they started
a private school together, which was a dismal failure. Then, without money
or influential friends, he left his home and wife in Lichfield and tramped
to London, accompanied only by David Garrick, afterwards the famous actor,
who had been one of his pupils. Here, led by old associations, Johnson made
himself known to the booksellers, and now and then earned a penny by
writing prefaces, reviews, and translations.

It was a dog's life, indeed, that he led there with his literary brethren.
Many of the writers of the day, who are ridiculed in Pope's heartless
_Dunciad_, having no wealthy patrons to support them, lived largely in the
streets and taverns, sleeping on an ash heap or under a wharf, like rats;
glad of a crust, and happy over a single meal which enabled them to work
for a while without the reminder of hunger. A few favored ones lived in
wretched lodgings in Grub Street, which has since become a synonym for the
fortunes of struggling writers.[195] Often, Johnson tells us, he walked the
streets all night long, in dreary weather, when it was too cold to sleep,
without food or shelter. But he wrote steadily for the booksellers and for
the _Gentleman's Magazine_, and presently he became known in London and
received enough work to earn a bare living.

The works which occasioned this small success were his poem, "London," and
his _Life of the Poet Savage_, a wretched life, at best, which were perhaps
better left without a biographer. But his success was genuine, though
small, and presently the booksellers of London are coming to him to ask him
to write a dictionary of the English language. It was an enormous work,
taking nearly eight years of his time, and long before he had finished it
he had eaten up the money which he received for his labor. In the leisure
intervals of this work he wrote "The Vanity of Human Wishes" and other
poems, and finished his classic tragedy of _Irene_.

Led by the great success of the _Spectator_, Johnson started two magazines,
_The Rambler_ (1750--1752) and _The Idler_ (1758--1760). Later the
_Rambler_ essays were published in book form and ran rapidly through ten
editions; but the financial returns were small, and Johnson spent a large
part of his earnings in charity. When his mother died, in 1759, Johnson,
although one of the best known men in London, had no money, and hurriedly
finished _Rasselas_, his only romance, in order, it is said, to pay for his
mother's burial.

It was not till 1762, when Johnson was fifty-three years old, that his
literary labors were rewarded in the usual way by royalty, and he received
from George III a yearly pension of three hundred pounds. Then began a
little sunshine in his life. With Joshua Reynolds, the artist, he founded
the famous Literary Club, of which Burke, Pitt, Fox, Gibbon, Goldsmith, and
indeed all the great literary men and politicians of the time, were
members. This is the period of Johnson's famous conversations, which were
caught in minutest detail by Boswell and given to the world. His idea of
conversation, as shown in a hundred places in Boswell, is to overcome your
adversary at any cost; to knock him down by arguments, or, when these fail,
by personal ridicule; to dogmatize on every possible question, pronounce a
few oracles, and then desist with the air of victory. Concerning the
philosopher Hume's view of death he says: "Sir, if he really thinks so, his
perceptions are disturbed, he is mad. If he does not think so, he lies."
Exit opposition. There is nothing more to be said. Curiously enough, it is
often the palpable blunders of these monologues that now attract us, as if
we were enjoying a good joke at the dictator's expense. Once a lady asked
him, "Dr. Johnson, why did you define _pastern_ as the knee of a horse?"
"Ignorance, madame, pure ignorance," thundered the great authority.

When seventy years of age, Johnson was visited by several booksellers of
the city, who were about to bring out a new edition of the English poets,
and who wanted Johnson, as the leading literary man of London, to write the
prefaces to the several volumes. The result was his _Lives of the Poets_,
as it is now known, and this is his last literary work. He died in his poor
Fleet Street house, in 1784, and was buried among England's honored poets
in Westminster Abbey.

JOHNSON'S WORKS. "A book," says Dr. Johnson, "should help us either to
enjoy life or to endure it." Judged by this standard, one is puzzled what
to recommend among Johnson's numerous books. The two things which belong
among the things "worthy to be remembered" are his _Dictionary_ and his
_Lives of the Poets_, though both these are valuable, not as literature,
but rather as a study of literature. The _Dictionary_, as the first
ambitious attempt at an English lexicon, is extremely valuable,
notwithstanding the fact that his derivations are often faulty, and that he
frequently exercises his humor or prejudice in his curious definitions. In
defining "oats," for example, as a grain given in England to horses and in
Scotland to the people, he indulges his prejudice against the Scotch, whom
he never understood, just as, in his definition of "pension," he takes
occasion to rap the writers who had flattered their patrons since the days
of Elizabeth; though he afterwards accepted a comfortable pension for
himself. With characteristic honesty he refused to alter his definition in
subsequent editions of the _Dictionary_.

The _Lives of the Poets_ are the simplest and most readable of his literary
works. For ten years before beginning these biographies he had given
himself up to conversation, and the ponderous style of his _Rambler_ essays
here gives way to a lighter and more natural expression. As criticisms they
are often misleading, giving praise to artificial poets, like Cowley and
Pope, and doing scant justice or abundant injustice to nobler poets like
Gray and Milton; and they are not to be compared with those found in Thomas
Warton's _History of English Poetry_, which was published in the same
generation. As biographies, however, they are excellent reading, and we owe
to them some of our best known pictures of the early English poets.

Of Johnson's poems the reader will have enough if he glance over "The
Vanity of Human Wishes." His only story, _Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia_,
is a matter of rhetoric rather than of romance, but is interesting still to
the reader who wants to hear Johnson's personal views of society,
philosophy, and religion. Any one of his _Essays_, like that on "Reading,"
or "The Pernicious Effects of Revery," will be enough to acquaint the
reader with the Johnsonese style, which was once much admired and copied by
orators, but which happily has been replaced by a more natural way of
speaking. Most of his works, it must be confessed, are rather tiresome. It
is not to his books, but rather to the picture of the man himself, as given
by Boswell, that Johnson owes his great place in our literature.


BOSWELL'S "LIFE OF JOHNSON"

In James Boswell (1740-1795) we have another extraordinary figure,--a
shallow little Scotch barrister, who trots about like a dog at the heels of
his big master, frantic at a caress and groveling at a cuff, and abundantly
contented if only he can be near him and record his oracles. All his life
long Boswell's one ambition seems to have been to shine in the reflected
glory of great men, and his chief task to record their sayings and doings.
When he came to London, at twenty-two years of age, Johnson, then at the
beginning of his great fame, was to this insatiable little glory-seeker
like a Silver Doctor to a hungry trout. He sought an introduction as a man
seeks gold, haunted every place where Johnson declaimed, until in Davies's
bookstore the supreme opportunity came. This is his record of the great
event:

I was much agitated [says Boswell] and recollecting his prejudice against
the Scotch, of which I had heard much, I said to Davies, "Don't tell him
where I come from." "From Scotland," cried Davies roguishly. "Mr. Johnson,"
said I, "I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it."... "That,
sir" [cried Johnson], "I find is what a very great many of your countrymen
cannot help." This stroke stunned me a good deal; and when we had sat down
I felt myself not a little embarrassed, and apprehensive of what might come
next.

Then for several years, with a persistency that no rebuffs could abate, and
with a thick skin that no amount of ridicule could render sensitive, he
follows Johnson; forces his way into the Literary Club, where he is not
welcome, in order to be near his idol; carries him off on a visit to the
Hebrides; talks with him on every possible occasion; and, when he is not
invited to a feast, waits outside the house or tavern in order to walk home
with his master in the thick fog of the early morning. And the moment the
oracle is out of sight and in bed, Boswell patters home to record in detail
all that he has seen and heard. It is to his minute record that we owe our
only perfect picture of a great man; all his vanity as well as his
greatness, his prejudices, superstitions, and even the details of his
personal appearance:

There is the gigantic body, the huge face seamed with the scars of disease,
the brown coat, the black worsted stockings, the gray wig with the scorched
foretop, the dirty hands, the nails bitten and pared to the quick. We see
the eyes and mouth moving with convulsive twitches; we see the heavy form
rolling; we hear it puffing; and then comes the "Why, sir!" and the "What
then, sir?" and the "No, sir!" and the "You don't see your way through the
question, sir!"[196]

To Boswell's record we are indebted also for our knowledge of those famous
conversations, those wordy, knockdown battles, which made Johnson famous in
his time and which still move us to wonder. Here is a specimen
conversation, taken almost at random from a hundred such in Boswell's
incomparable biography. After listening to Johnson's prejudice against
Scotland, and his dogmatic utterances on Voltaire, Robertson, and twenty
others, an unfortunate theorist brings up a recent essay on the possible
future life of brutes, quoting some possible authority from the sacred
scriptures:

Johnson, who did not like to hear anything concerning a future state which
was not authorized by the regular canons of orthodoxy, discouraged this
talk; and being offended at its continuation, he watched an opportunity to
give the gentleman a blow of reprehension. So when the poor speculatist,
with a serious, metaphysical, pensive face, addressed him, "But really,
sir, when we see a very sensible dog, we don't know what to think of him";
Johnson, rolling with joy at the thought which beamed in his eye, turned
quickly round and replied, "True, sir; and when we see a very _foolish
fellow_, we don't know what to think of _him_." He then rose up, strided to
the fire, and stood for some time laughing and exulting.

Then the oracle proceeds to talk of scorpions and natural history, denying
facts, and demanding proofs which nobody could possibly furnish:

He seemed pleased to talk of natural philosophy. "That woodcocks," said he,
"fly over the northern countries is proved, because they have been observed
at sea. Swallows certainly sleep all the winter. A number of them
conglobulate together by flying round and round, and then all in a heap
throw themselves under water and lie in the bed of a river." He told us one
of his first essays was a Latin poem upon the glowworm: I am sorry I did
not ask where it was to be found.

Then follows an astonishing array of subjects and opinions. He catalogues
libraries, settles affairs in China, pronounces judgment on men who marry
women superior to themselves, flouts popular liberty, hammers Swift
unmercifully, and adds a few miscellaneous oracles, most of which are about
as reliable as his knowledge of the hibernation of swallows.

When I called upon Dr. Johnson next morning I found him highly satisfied
with his colloquial prowess the preceding evening. "Well," said he, "we had
good talk." "Yes, sir" [says I], "you tossed and gored several persons."

Far from resenting this curious mental dictatorship, his auditors never
seem to weary. They hang upon his words, praise him, flatter him, repeat
his judgments all over London the next day, and return in the evening
hungry for more. Whenever the conversation begins to flag, Boswell is like
a woman with a parrot, or like a man with a dancing bear. He must excite
the creature, make him talk or dance for the edification of the company. He
sidles obsequiously towards his hero and, with utter irrelevancy, propounds
a question of theology, a social theory, a fashion of dress or marriage, a
philosophical conundrum: "Do you think, sir, that natural affections are
born with us?" or, "Sir, if you were shut up in a castle and a newborn babe
with you, what would you do?" Then follow more Johnsonian laws, judgments,
oracles; the insatiable audience clusters around him and applauds; while
Boswell listens, with shining face, and presently goes home to write the
wonder down. It is an astonishing spectacle; one does not know whether to
laugh or grieve over it. But we know the man, and the audience, almost as
well as if we had been there; and that, unconsciously, is the superb art of
this matchless biographer.

When Johnson died the opportunity came for which Boswell had been watching
and waiting some twenty years. He would shine in the world now, not by
reflection, but by his own luminosity. He gathered together his endless
notes and records, and began to write his biography; but he did not hurry.
Several biographies of Johnson appeared, in the four years after his death,
without disturbing Boswell's perfect complacency. After seven years' labor
he gave the world his _Life of Johnson_. It is an immortal work; praise is
superfluous; it must be read to be appreciated. Like the Greek sculptors,
the little slave produced a more enduring work than the great master. The
man who reads it will know Johnson as he knows no other man who dwells
across the border; and he will lack sensitiveness, indeed, if he lay down
the work without a greater love and appreciation of all good literature.

LATER AUGUSTAN WRITERS. With Johnson, who succeeded Dryden and Pope in the
chief place of English letters, the classic movement had largely spent its
force; and the latter half of the eighteenth century gives us an imposing
array of writers who differ so widely that it is almost impossible to
classify them. In general, three schools of writers are noticeable: first,
the classicists, who, under Johnson's lead, insisted upon elegance and
regularity of style; second, the romantic poets, like Collins, Gray,
Thomson, and Burns, who revolted from Pope's artificial couplets and wrote
of nature and the human heart[197]; third, the early novelists, like Defoe
and Fielding, who introduced a new type of literature. The romantic poets
and the novelists are reserved for special chapters; and of the other
writers--Berkeley and Hume in philosophy; Robertson, Hume, and Gibbon in
history; Chesterfield and Lady Montagu in letter writing; Adam Smith in
economics; Pitt, Burke, Fox, and a score of lesser writers in politics--we
select only two, Burke and Gibbon, whose works are most typical of the
Augustan, i.e. the elegant, classic style of prose writing.


EDMUND BURKE (1729--1797)

To read all of Burke's collected works, and so to understand him
thoroughly, is something of a task. Few are equal to it. On the other hand,
to read selections here and there, as most of us do, is to get a wrong idea
of the man and to join either in fulsome praise of his brilliant oratory,
or in honest confession that his periods are ponderous and his ideas often
buried under Johnsonian verbiage. Such are the contrasts to be found on
successive pages of Burke's twelve volumes, which cover the enormous range
of the political and economic thought of the age, and which mingle fact and
fancy, philosophy, statistics, and brilliant flights of the imagination, to
a degree never before seen in English literature. For Burke belongs in
spirit to the new romantic school, while in style he is a model for the
formal classicists. We can only glance at the life of this marvelous
Irishman, and then consider his place in our literature.

LIFE. Burke was born in Dublin, the son of an Irish barrister, in 1729.
After his university course in Trinity College he came to London to study
law, but soon gave up the idea to follow literature, which in turn led him
to politics. He had the soul, the imagination of a poet, and the law was
only a clog to his progress. His two first works, _A Vindication of Natural
Society_ and _The Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful_,
brought him political as well as literary recognition, and several small
offices were in turn given to him. When thirty-six years old he was elected
to Parliament as member from Wendover; and for the next thirty years he was
the foremost figure in the House of Commons and the most eloquent orator
which that body has ever known. Pure and incorruptible in his politics as
in his personal life, no more learned or devoted servant of the
Commonwealth ever pleaded for justice and human liberty. He was at the
summit of his influence at the time when the colonies were struggling for
independence; and the fact that he championed their cause in one of his
greatest speeches, "On Conciliation with America," gives him an added
interest in the eyes of American readers. His championship of America is
all the more remarkable from the fact that, in other matters, Burke was far
from liberal. He set himself squarely against the teachings of the romantic
writers, who were enthusiastic over the French Revolution; he denounced the
principles of the Revolutionists, broke with the liberal Whig party to join
the Tories, and was largely instrumental in bringing on the terrible war
with France, which resulted in the downfall of Napoleon.

It is good to remember that, in all the strife and bitterness of party
politics, Burke held steadily to the noblest personal ideals of truth and
honesty; and that in all his work, whether opposing the slave trade, or
pleading for justice for America, or protecting the poor natives of India
from the greed of corporations, or setting himself against the popular
sympathy for France in her desperate struggle, he aimed solely at the
welfare of humanity. When he retired on a pension in 1794, he had won, and
he deserved, the gratitude and affection of the whole nation.

WORKS. There are three distinctly marked periods in Burke's career, and
these correspond closely to the years in which he was busied with the
affairs of America, India, and France successively. The first period was
one of prophecy. He had studied the history and temper of the American
colonies, and he warned England of the disaster which must follow her
persistence in ignoring the American demands, and especially the American
spirit. His great speeches, "On American Taxation" and "On Conciliation
with America," were delivered in 1774 and 1775, preceding the Declaration
of Independence. In this period Burke's labor seemed all in vain; he lost
his cause, and England her greatest colony.

The second period is one of denunciation rather than of prophecy. England
had won India; but when Burke studied the methods of her victory and
understood the soulless way in which millions of poor natives were made to
serve the interests of an English monopoly, his soul rose in revolt, and
again he was the champion of an oppressed people. His two greatest speeches
of this period are "The Nabob of Arcot's Debts" and his tremendous
"Impeachment of Warren Hastings." Again he apparently lost his cause,
though he was still fighting on the side of right. Hastings was acquitted,
and the spoliation of India went on; but the seeds of reform were sown, and
grew and bore fruit long after Burke's labors were ended.

The third period is, curiously enough, one of reaction. Whether because the
horrors of the French Revolution had frightened him with the danger of
popular liberty, or because his own advance in office and power had made
him side unconsciously with the upper classes, is unknown. That he was as
sincere and noble now as in all his previous life is not questioned. He
broke with the liberal Whigs and joined forces with the reactionary Tories.
He opposed the romantic writers, who were on fire with enthusiasm over the
French Revolution, and thundered against the dangers which the
revolutionary spirit must breed, forgetting that it was a revolution which
had made modern England possible. Here, where we must judge him to have
been mistaken in his cause, he succeeded for the first time. It was due
largely to Burke's influence that the growing sympathy for the French
people was checked in England, and war was declared, which ended in the
frightful victories of Trafalgar and Waterloo.

Burke's best known work of this period is his _Reflections on the French
Revolution_, which he polished and revised again Essay on and again before
it was finally printed. This ambitious literary essay, though it met with
remarkable success, is a disappointment to the reader. Though of Celtic
blood, Burke did not understand the French, or the principles for which the
common people were fighting in their own way[198]; and his denunciations
and apostrophes to France suggest a preacher without humor, hammering away
at sinners who are not present in his congregation. The essay has few
illuminating ideas, but a great deal of Johnsonian rhetoric, which make its
periods tiresome, notwithstanding our admiration for the brilliancy of its
author. More significant is one of Burke's first essays, _A Philosophical
Inquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful_, which
is sometimes read in order to show the contrast in style with Addison's
_Spectator_ essays on the "Pleasures of the Imagination."

Burke's best known speeches, "On Conciliation with America," "American
Taxation," and the "Impeachment of Warren Hastings," are still much studied
in our schools as models of English prose; and this fact tends to give them
an exaggerated literary importance. Viewed purely as literature, they have
faults enough; and the first of these, so characteristic of the Classic
Age, is that they abound in fine rhetoric but lack simplicity.[199] In a
strict sense, these eloquent speeches are not literature, to delight the
reader and to suggest ideas, but studies in rhetoric and in mental
concentration. All this, however, is on the surface. A careful study of any
of these three famous speeches reveals certain admirable qualities which
account for the important place they are given in the study of English.
First, as showing the stateliness and the rhetorical power of our language,
these speeches are almost unrivaled. Second, though Burke speaks in prose,
he is essentially a poet, whose imagery, like that of Milton's prose works,
is more remarkable than that of many of our writers of verse. He speaks in
figures, images, symbols; and the musical cadence of his sentences reflects
the influence of his wide reading of poetry. Not only in figurative
expression, but much more in spirit, he belongs with the poets of the
revival. At times his language is pseudo-classic, reflecting the influence
of Johnson and his school; but his thought is always romantic; he is
governed by ideal rather than by practical interests, and a profound
sympathy for humanity is perhaps his most marked characteristic.

Third, the supreme object of these orations, so different from the majority
of political speeches, is not to win approval or to gain votes, but to
establish the truth. Like our own Lincoln, Burke had a superb faith in the
compelling power of the truth, a faith in men also, who, if the history of
our race means anything, will not willingly follow a lie. The methods of
these two great leaders are strikingly similar in this respect, that each
repeats his idea in many ways, presenting the truth from different view
points, so that it will appeal to men of widely different experiences.
Otherwise the two men are in marked contrast. The uneducated Lincoln speaks
in simple, homely words, draws his illustrations from the farm, and often
adds a humorous story, so apt and "telling" that his hearers can never
forget the point of his argument. The scholarly Burke speaks in ornate,
majestic periods, and searches all history and all literature for his
illustrations. His wealth of imagery and allusions, together with his rare
combination of poetic and logical reasoning, make these orations
remarkable, entirely apart from their subject and purpose.

Fourth (and perhaps most significant of the man and his work), Burke takes
his stand squarely upon the principle of justice. He has studied history,
and he finds that to establish justice, between man and man and between
nation and nation, has been the supreme object of every reformer since the
world began. No small or merely temporary success attracts him; only the
truth will suffice for an argument; and nothing less than justice will ever
settle a question permanently. Such is his platform, simple as the Golden
Rule, unshakable as the moral law. Hence, though he apparently fails of his
immediate desire in each of these three orations, the principle for which
he contends cannot fail. As a modern writer says of Lincoln, "The full,
rich flood of his life through the nation's pulse is yet beating"; and his
words are still potent in shaping the course of English politics in the way
of justice.


EDWARD GIBBON (1737-1794)

To understand Burke or Johnson, one must read a multitude of books and be
wary in his judgment; but with Gibbon the task is comparatively easy, for
one has only to consider two books, his _Memoirs_ and the first volume of
his _History_, to understand the author. In his _Memoirs_ we have an
interesting reflection of Gibbon's own personality,--a man who looks with
satisfaction on the material side of things, who seeks always the easiest
path for himself, and avoids life's difficulties and responsibilities. "I
sighed as a lover; but I obeyed as a son," he says, when, to save his
inheritance, he gave up the woman he loved and came home to enjoy the
paternal loaves and fishes. That is suggestive of the man's whole life. His
_History_, on the other hand, is a remarkable work. It was the first in our
language to be written on scientific principles, and with a solid basis of
fact; and the style is the very climax of that classicism which had ruled
England for an entire century. Its combination of historical fact and
literary style makes _The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_ the one
thing of Gibbon's life that is "worthy to be remembered."

GIBBON'S HISTORY. For many years Gibbon had meditated, like Milton, upon an
immortal work, and had tried several historical subjects, only to give them
up idly. In his _Journal_ he tells us how his vague resolutions were
brought to a focus:

It was at Rome, on the fifteenth of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst
the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers
in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of
the city first started to my mind.

Twelve years later, in 1776, Gibbon published the first volume of _The
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire;_ and the enormous success of the work
encouraged him to go on with the other five volumes, which were published
at intervals during the next twelve years. The History begins with the
reign of Trajan, in A.D. 98, and "builds a straight Roman road" through the
confused histories of thirteen centuries, ending with the fall of the
Byzantine Empire in 1453. The scope of the History is enormous. It includes
not only the decline of the Roman Empire, but such movements as the descent
of the northern barbarians, the spread of Christianity, the reorganization
of the European nations, the establishment of the great Eastern Empire, the
rise of Mohammedanism, and the splendor of the Crusades. On the one hand it
lacks philosophical insight, being satisfied with facts without
comprehending the causes; and, as Gibbon seems lacking in ability to
understand spiritual and religious movements, it is utterly inadequate in
its treatment of the tremendous influence of Christianity. On the other
hand, Gibbon's scholarship leaves little to criticise; he read enormously,
sifted his facts out of multitudes of books and records, and then marshaled
them in the imposing array with which we have grown familiar. Moreover, he
is singularly just and discriminating in the use of all documents and
authorities at his command. Hence he has given us the first history in
English that has borne successfully the test of modern research and
scholarship.

The style of the work is as imposing as his great subject. Indeed, with
almost any other subject the sonorous roll of his majestic sentences would
be out of place. While it deserves all the adjectives that have been
applied to it by enthusiastic admirers,--finished, elegant, splendid,
rounded, massive, sonorous, copious, elaborate, ornate, exhaustive,--it
must be confessed, though one whispers the confession, that the style
sometimes obscures our interest in the narrative. As he sifted his facts
from a multitude of sources, so he often hides them again in endless
periods, and one must often sift them out again in order to be quite sure
of even the simple facts. Another drawback is that Gibbon is hopelessly
worldly in his point of view; he loves pageants and crowds rather than
individuals, and he is lacking in enthusiasm and in spiritual insight. The
result is so frankly material at times that one wonders if he is not
reading of forces or machines, rather than of human beings. A little
reading of his History here and there is an excellent thing, leaving one
impressed with the elegant classical style and the scholarship; but a
continued reading is very apt to leave us longing for simplicity, for
naturalness, and, above all, for the glow of enthusiasm which makes the
dead heroes live once more in the written pages.

This judgment, however, must not obscure the fact that the book had a
remarkably large sale; and that this, of itself, is an evidence that
multitudes of readers found it not only erudite, but readable and
interesting.

II. THE REVIVAL OF ROMANTIC POETRY

      The old order changeth, yielding place to new;
      And God fulfills Himself in many ways,
      Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
                     Tennyson's "The Passing of Arthur."

THE MEANING OF ROMANTICISM. While Dryden, Pope, and Johnson were
successively the dictators of English letters, and while, under their
leadership, the heroic couplet became the fashion of poetry, and literature
in general became satiric or critical in spirit, and formal in expression,
a new romantic movement quietly made its appearance. Thomson's _The
Seasons_ (1730) was the first noteworthy poem of the romantic revival; and
the poems and the poets increased steadily in number and importance till,
in the age of Wordsworth and Scott, the spirit of Romanticism dominated our
literature more completely than Classicism had ever done. This romantic
movement--which Victor Hugo calls "liberalism in literature"--is simply the
expression of life as seen by imagination, rather than by prosaic "common
sense," which was the central doctrine of English philosophy in the
eighteenth century. It has six prominent characteristics which distinguish
it from the so-called classic literature which we have just studied:

1. The romantic movement was marked, and is always marked, by a strong
reaction and protest against the bondage of rule and custom, which, in
science and theology, as well as in literature, generally tend to fetter
the free human spirit.

2. Romanticism returned to nature and to plain humanity for its material,
and so is in marked contrast to Classicism, which had confined itself
largely to the clubs and drawing-rooms, and to the social and political
life of London. Thomson's _Seasons_, whatever its defects, was a revelation
of the natural wealth and beauty which, for nearly a century, had been
hardly noticed by the great writers of England.

3. It brought again the dream of a golden age[200] in which the stern
realities of life were forgotten and the ideals of youth were established
as the only permanent realities. "For the dreamer lives forever, but the
toiler dies in a day," expresses, perhaps, only the wild fancy of a modern
poet; but, when we think of it seriously, the dreams and ideals of a people
are cherished possessions long after their stone monuments have crumbled
away and their battles are forgotten. The romantic movement emphasized
these eternal ideals of youth, and appealed to the human heart as the
classic elegance of Dryden and Pope could never do.

4. Romanticism was marked by intense human sympathy, and by a consequent
understanding of the human heart. Not to intellect or to science does the
heart unlock its treasures, but rather to the touch of a sympathetic
nature; and things that are hidden from the wise and prudent are revealed
unto children. Pope had no appreciable humanity; Swift's work is a
frightful satire; Addison delighted polite society, but had no message for
plain people; while even Johnson, with all his kindness, had no feeling for
men in the mass, but supported Sir Robert Walpole in his policy of letting
evils alone until forced by a revolution to take notice of humanity's
appeal. With the romantic revival all this was changed. While Howard was
working heroically for prison reform, and Wilberforce for the liberation of
the slaves, Gray wrote his "short and simple annals of the poor," and
Goldsmith his _Deserted Village_, and Cowper sang,

                     My ear is pained,
    My soul is sick with every day's report
    Of wrong and outrage with which earth is filled.
    There is no flesh in man's obdurate heart,
    It does not feel for man.[201]

This sympathy for the poor, and this cry against oppression, grew stronger
and stronger till it culminated in "Bobby" Burns, who, more than any other
writer in any language, is the poet of the unlettered human heart.

5. The romantic movement was the expression of individual genius rather
than of established rules. In consequence, the literature of the revival is
as varied as the characters and moods of the different writers. When we
read Pope, for instance, we have a general impression of sameness, as if
all his polished poems were made in the same machine; but in the work of
the best romanticists there is endless variety. To read them is like
passing through a new village, meeting a score of different human types,
and finding in each one something to love or to remember. Nature and the
heart of man are as new as if we had never studied them. Hence, in reading
the romanticists, who went to these sources for their material, we are
seldom wearied but often surprised; and the surprise is like that of the
sunrise, or the sea, which always offers some new beauty and stirs us
deeply, as if we had never seen it before.

6. The romantic movement, while it followed its own genius, was not
altogether unguided. Strictly speaking, there is no new movement either in
history or in literature; each grows out of some good thing which has
preceded it, and looks back with reverence to past masters. Spenser,
Shakespeare, and Milton were the inspiration of the romantic revival; and
we can hardly read a poem of the early romanticists without finding a
suggestion of the influence of one of these great leaders.[202]

There are various other characteristics of Romanticism, but these six--the
protest against the bondage of rules, the return to nature and the human
heart, the interest in old sagas and mediæval romances as suggestive of a
heroic age, the sympathy for the toilers of the world, the emphasis upon
individual genius, and the return to Milton and the Elizabethans, instead
of to Pope and Dryden, for literary models--are the most noticeable and
the most interesting. Remembering them, we shall better appreciate the work
of the following writers who, in varying degree, illustrate the revival of
romantic poetry in the eighteenth century.

THOMAS GRAY (1716-1771)

    The curfew tolls the knell of parting day;
    The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea;
    The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
    And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
    Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,
    And all the air a solemn stillness holds,
    Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,
    And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds.

So begins "the best known poem in the English language," a poem full of the
gentle melancholy which marks all early romantic poetry. It should be read
entire, as a perfect model of its kind. Not even Milton's "Il Penseroso,"
which it strongly suggests, excels it in beauty and suggestiveness.

LIFE OF GRAY. The author of the famous "Elegy" is the most scholarly and
well-balanced of all the early romantic poets. In his youth he was a
weakling, the only one of twelve children who survived infancy; and his
unhappy childhood, the tyranny of his father, and the separation from his
loved mother, gave to his whole life the stamp of melancholy which is
noticeable in all his poems. At the famous Eton school and again at
Cambridge, he seems to have followed his own scholarly tastes rather than
the curriculum, and was shocked, like Gibbon, at the general idleness and
aimlessness of university life. One happy result of his school life was his
friendship for Horace Walpole, who took him abroad for a three years' tour
of the Continent.

No better index of the essential difference between the classical and the
new romantic school can be imagined than that which is revealed in the
letters of Gray and Addison, as they record their impressions of foreign
travel. Thus, when Addison crossed the Alps, some twenty-five years before,
in good weather, he wrote: "A very troublesome journey.... You cannot
imagine how I am pleased with the sight of a plain." Gray crossed the Alps
in the beginning of winter, "wrapped in muffs, hoods and masks of beaver,
fur boots, and bearskins," but wrote ecstatically, "Not a precipice, not a
torrent, not a cliff but is pregnant with religion and poetry."

On his return to England, Gray lived for a short time at Stoke Poges, where
he wrote his "Ode on Eton," and probably sketched his "Elegy," which,
however, was not finished till 1750, eight years later. During the latter
years of his shy and scholarly life he was Professor of Modern History and
Languages at Cambridge, without any troublesome work of lecturing to
students. Here he gave himself up to study and to poetry, varying his work
by "prowlings" among the manuscripts of the new British Museum, and by his
"Lilliputian" travels in England and Scotland. He died in his rooms at
Pembroke College in 1771, and was buried in the little churchyard of Stoke
Poges.

WORKS OF GRAY. Gray's _Letters_, published in 1775, are excellent reading,
and his _Journal_ is still a model of natural description; but it is to a
single small volume of poems that he owes his fame and his place in
literature. These poems divide themselves naturally into three periods, in
which we may trace the progress of Gray's emancipation from the classic
rules which had so long governed English literature. In the first period he
wrote several minor poems, of which the best are his "Hymn to Adversity"
and the odes "To Spring" and "On a Distant Prospect of Eton College." These
early poems reveal two suggestive things: first, the appearance of that
melancholy which characterizes all the poetry of the period; and second,
the study of nature, not for its own beauty or truth, but rather as a
suitable background for the play of human emotions.

The second period shows the same tendencies more strongly developed. The
"Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" (1750), the most perfect poem of
the age, belongs to this period. To read Milton's "Il Penseroso" and Gray's
"Elegy" is to see the beginning and the perfection of that "literature of
melancholy" which largely occupied English poets for more than a century.
Two other well-known poems of this second period are the Pindaric odes,
"The Progress of Poesy" and "The Bard." The first is strongly suggestive of
Dryden's "Alexander's Feast," but shows Milton's influence in a greater
melody and variety of expression. "The Bard" is, in every way, more
romantic and original. An old minstrel, the last of the Welsh singers,
halts King Edward and his army in a wild mountain pass, and with fine
poetic frenzy prophesies the terror and desolation which must ever follow
the tyrant. From its first line, "Ruin seize thee, ruthless King!" to the
end, when the old bard plunges from his lofty crag and disappears in the
river's flood, the poem thrills with the fire of an ancient and noble race
of men. It breaks absolutely with the classical school and proclaims a
literary declaration of independence.

In the third period Gray turns momentarily from his Welsh material and
reveals a new field of romantic interest in two Norse poems, "The Fatal
Sisters" and "The Descent of Odin" (1761). Gray translated his material
from the Latin, and though these two poems lack much of the elemental
strength and grandeur of the Norse sagas, they are remarkable for calling
attention to the unused wealth of literary material that was hidden in
Northern mythologv. To Gray and to Percy (who published his _Northern
Antiquities_ in 1770) is due in large measure the profound interest in the
old Norse sagas which has continued to our own day.

Taken together, Gray's works form a most interesting commentary on the
varied life of the eighteenth century. He was a scholar, familiar with all
the intellectual interests of his age, and his work has much of the
precision and polish of the classical school; but he shares also the
reawakened interest in nature, in common man, and in mediæval culture, and
his work is generally romantic both in style and in spirit. The same
conflict between the classic and romantic schools, and the triumph of
Romanticism, is shown clearly in the most versatile of Gray's
contemporaries, Oliver Goldsmith.

OLIVER GOLDSMITH (1728-1774)

Because _The Deserted Village_ is one of the most familiar poems in our
language, Goldsmith is generally given a high place among the poets of the
romantic dawn. But the _Village_, when we read it carefully, turns out to
be a rimed essay in the style of Pope's famous _Essay on Man_; it owes its
popularity to the sympathetic memories which it awakens, rather than to its
poetic excellence. It is as a prose writer that Goldsmith excels. He is an
essayist, with Addison's fine polish but with more sympathy for human life;
he is a dramatist, one of the very few who have ever written a comedy that
can keep its popularity unchanged while a century rolls over its head; but
greater, perhaps, than the poet and essayist and dramatist is Goldsmith the
novelist, who set himself to the important work of purifying the early
novel of its brutal and indecent tendencies, and who has given us, in _The
Vicar of Wakefield_, one of the most enduring characters in English
fiction. In his manner, especially in his poetry, Goldsmith was too much
influenced by his friend Johnson and the classicists; but in his matter, in
his sympathy for nature and human life, he belongs unmistakably to the new
romantic school. Altogether he is the most versatile, the most charming,
the most inconsistent, and the most lovable genius of all the literary men
who made famous the age of Johnson.

LIFE. Goldsmith's career is that of an irresponsible, unbalanced genius,
which would make one despair if the man himself did not remain so lovable
in all his inconsistencies. He was born in the village of Pallas, Ireland,
the son of a poor Irish curate whose noble character is portrayed in Dr.
Primrose, of _The Vicar of Wakefield_, and in the country parson of _The
Deserted Village_. After an unsatisfactory course in various schools, where
he was regarded as hopelessly stupid, Goldsmith entered Trinity College,
Dublin, as a sizar, i.e. a student who pays with labor for his tuition. By
his escapades he was brought into disfavor with the authorities, but that
troubled him little. He was also wretchedly poor, which troubled him less;
for when he earned a few shillings by writing ballads for street singers,
his money went oftener to idle beggars than to the paying of his honest
debts. After three years of university life he ran away, in dime-novel
fashion, and nearly starved to death before he was found and brought back
in disgrace. Then he worked a little, and obtained his degree in 1749.

Strange that such an idle and irresponsible youth should have been urged by
his family to take holy orders; but such was the fact. For two years more
Goldsmith labored with theology, only to be rejected when he presented
himself as a candidate for the ministry. He tried teaching, and failed.
Then his fancy turned to America, and, provided with money and a good
horse, he started off for Cork, where he was to embark for the New World.
He loafed along the pleasant Irish ways, missed his ship, and presently
turned up cheerfully amongst his relatives, minus all his money, and riding
a sorry nag called Fiddleback, for which he had traded his own on the
way.[203] He borrowed fifty pounds more, and started for London to study
law, but speedily lost his money at cards, and again appeared, amiable and
irresponsible as ever, among his despairing relatives. The next year they
sent him to Edinburgh to study medicine. Here for a couple of years he
became popular as a singer of songs and a teller of tales, to whom medicine
was only a troublesome affliction. Suddenly the _Wanderlust_ seized him and
he started abroad, ostensibly to complete his medical education, but in
reality to wander like a cheerful beggar over Europe, singing and playing
his flute for food and lodging. He may have studied a little at Leyden and
at Padua, but that was only incidental. After a year or more of vagabondage
he returned to London with an alleged medical degree, said to have been
obtained at Louvain or Padua.

The next few years are a pitiful struggle to make a living as tutor,
apothecary's assistant, comedian, usher in a country school, and finally as
a physician in Southwark. Gradually he drifted into literature, and lived
from hand to mouth by doing hack work for the London booksellers. Some of
his essays and his _Citizen of the World_ (1760-1761) brought him to the
attention of Johnson, who looked him up, was attracted first by his poverty
and then by his genius, and presently declared him to be "one of the first
men we now have as an author." Johnson's friendship proved invaluable, and
presently Goldsmith found himself a member of the exclusive Literary Club.
He promptly justified Johnson's confidence by publishing _The Traveller_
(1764), which was hailed as one of the finest poems of the century. Money
now came to him liberally, with orders from the booksellers; he took new
quarters in Fleet Street and furnished them gorgeously; but he had an
inordinate vanity for bright-colored clothes, and faster than he earned
money he spent it on velvet cloaks and in indiscriminate charity. For a
time he resumed his practice as a physician, but his fine clothes did not
bring patients, as he expected; and presently he turned to writing again,
to pay his debts to the booksellers. He produced several superficial and
grossly inaccurate schoolbooks,--like his _Animated Nature_ and his
histories of England, Greece, and Rome,--which brought him bread and more
fine clothes, and his _Vicar of Wakefield, The Deserted Village_, and _She
Stoops to Conquer_, which brought him undying fame.

After meeting with Johnson, Goldsmith became the object of Boswell's magpie
curiosity; and to Boswell's _Life of Johnson_ we are indebted for many of
the details of Goldsmith's life,--his homeliness, his awkward ways, his
drolleries and absurdities, which made him alternately the butt and the wit
of the famous Literary Club. Boswell disliked Goldsmith, and so draws an
unflattering Portrait, but even this does not disguise the contagious good
humor which made men love him. When in his forty-seventh year, he fell sick
of a fever, and with childish confidence turned to a quack medicine to cure
himself. He died in 1774, and Johnson placed a tablet, with a sonorous
Latin epitaph, in Westminster Abbey, though Goldsmith was buried elsewhere.
"Let not his frailties be remembered; he was a very great man," said
Johnson; and the literary world--which, like that old dictator, is kind
enough at heart, though often rough in its methods--is glad to accept and
record the verdict.

WORKS OF GOLDSMITH. Of Goldsmith's early essays and his later school
histories little need be said. They have settled into their own place, far
out of sight of the ordinary reader. Perhaps the most interesting of these
is a series of letters for the _Public Ledger_ (afterwards published as
_The Citizen of the World_), written from the view point of an alleged
Chinese traveler, and giving the latter's comments on English
civilization.[204] The following five works are those upon which
Goldsmith's fame chiefly rests:

_The Traveller_ (1764) made Goldsmith's reputation among his
contemporaries, but is now seldom read, except by students who would
understand how Goldsmith was, at one time, dominated by Johnson and his
pseudo-classic ideals. It is a long poem, in rimed couplets, giving a
survey and criticism of the social life of various countries in Europe, and
reflects many of Goldsmith's own wanderings and impressions.

_The Deserted Village_ (1770), though written in the same mechanical style,
is so permeated with honest human sympathy, and voices so perfectly the
revolt of the individual man against institutions, that a multitude of
common people heard it gladly, without consulting the critics as to whether
they should call it good poetry. Notwithstanding its faults, to which
Matthew Arnold has called sufficient attention, it has become one of our
best known poems, though we cannot help wishing that the monotony of its
couplets had been broken by some of the Irish folk songs and ballads that
charmed street audiences in Dublin, and that brought Goldsmith a welcome
from the French peasants wherever he stopped to sing. In the village parson
and the schoolmaster, Goldsmith has increased Chaucer's list by two lovable
characters that will endure as long as the English language. The criticism
that the picture of prosperous "Sweet Auburn" never applied to any village
in Ireland is just, no doubt, but it is outside the question. Goldsmith was
a hopeless dreamer, bound to see everything, as he saw his debts and his
gay clothes, in a purely idealistic way.

_The Good-Natured Man_ and _She Stoops to Conquer_ are Goldsmith's two
comedies. The former, a comedy of character, though it has some laughable
scenes and one laughable character, Croaker, met with failure on the stage,
and has never been revived with any success. The latter, a comedy of
intrigue, is one of the few plays that has never lost its popularity. Its
lively, bustling scenes, and its pleasantly absurd characters, Marlowe, the
Hardcastles, and Tony Lumpkin, still hold the attention of modern theater
goers; and nearly every amateur dramatic club sooner or later places _She
Stoops to Conquer_ on its list of attractions.

_The Vicar of Wakefield_ is Goldsmith's only novel, and the first in any
language that gives to home life an enduring romantic interest. However
much we admire the beginnings of the English novel, to which we shall
presently refer, we are nevertheless shocked by its frequent brutalities
and indecencies. Goldsmith like Steele, had the Irish reverence for pure
womanhood, and this reverence made him shun as a pest the vulgarity and
coarseness in which contemporary novelists, like Smollett and Sterne,
seemed to delight. So he did for the novel what Addison and Steele had done
for the satire and the essay; he refined and elevated it, making it worthy
of the old Anglo-Saxon ideals which are our best literary heritage.

Briefly, _The Vicar of Wakefield_ is the story of a simple English
clergyman, Dr. Primrose, and his family, who pass from happiness through
great tribulation. Misfortunes, which are said never to come singly, appear
in this case in flocks; but through poverty, sorrow, imprisonment, and the
unspeakable loss of his daughters, the Vicar's faith in God and man emerges
triumphant. To the very end he is like one of the old martyrs, who sings
_Alleluia_ while the lions roar about him and his children in the arena.
Goldsmith's optimism, it must be confessed, is here stretched to the
breaking point. The reader is sometimes offered fine Johnsonian phrases
where he would naturally expect homely and vigorous language; and he is
continually haunted by the suspicion that, even in this best of all
possible worlds, the Vicar's clouds of affliction were somewhat too easily
converted into showers of blessing; yet he is forced to read on, and at the
end he confesses gladly that Goldsmith has succeeded in making a most
interesting story out of material that, in other hands, would have
developed either a burlesque or a brutal tragedy. Laying aside all romantic
passion, intrigue, and adventure, upon which other novelists depended,
Goldsmith, in this simple story of common life, has accomplished three
noteworthy results: he has made human fatherhood almost a divine thing; he
has glorified the moral sentiments which cluster about the family life as
the center of civilization; and he has given us, in Dr. Primrose, a
striking and enduring figure, which seems more like a personal acquaintance
than a character in a book.


WILLIAM COWPER (1731--1800)

In Cowper we have another interesting poet, who, like Gray and Goldsmith,
shows the struggle between romantic and classic ideals. In his first volume
of poems, Cowper is more hampered by literary fashions than was Goldsmith
in his _Traveller_ and his _Deserted Village_. In his second period,
however, Cowper uses blank verse freely; and his delight in nature and in
homely characters, like the teamster and the mail carrier of _The Task_,
shows that his classicism is being rapidly thawed out by romantic feeling.
In his later work, especially his immortal "John Gilpin," Cowper flings
fashions aside, gives Pegasus the reins, takes to the open road, and so
proves himself a worthy predecessor of Burns, who is the most spontaneous
and the most interesting of all the early romanticists.

LIFE. Cowper's life is a pathetic story of a shy and timid genius, who
found the world of men too rough, and who withdrew to nature like a wounded
animal. He was born at Great Berkhamstead, Hertfordshire, in 1731, the son
of an English clergyman. He was a delicate, sensitive child, whose early
life was saddened by the death of his mother and by his neglect at home. At
six years he was sent away to a boys' school, where he was terrified by
young barbarians who made his life miserable. There was one atrocious bully
into whose face Cowper could never look; he recognized his enemy by his
shoe buckles, and shivered at his approach. The fierce invectives of his
"Tirocinium, or a Review of Schools" (1784), shows how these school
experiences had affected his mind and health. For twelve years he studied
law, but at the approach of a public examination for an office he was so
terrified that he attempted suicide. The experience unsettled his reason,
and the next twelve months were spent in an asylum at St. Alban's. The
death of his father, in 1756, had brought the poet a small patrimony, which
placed him above the necessity of struggling, like Goldsmith, for his daily
bread. Upon his recovery he boarded for years at the house of the Unwins,
cultured people who recognized the genius hidden in this shy and melancholy
yet quaintly humorous man. Mrs. Unwin, in particular, cared for him as a
son; and whatever happiness he experienced in his poor life was the result
of the devotion of this good woman, who is the "Mary" of all his poems.

A second attack of insanity was brought on by Cowper's morbid interest in
religion, influenced, perhaps, by the untempered zeal of one John Newton, a
curate, with whom Cowper worked in the small parish of Olney, and with whom
he compiled the famous Olney Hymns. The rest of his life, between intervals
of melancholia or insanity, was spent in gardening, in the care of his
numerous pets, and in writing his poems, his translation of Homer, and his
charming letters. His two best known poems were suggested by a lively and
cultivated widow, Lady Austen, who told him the story of John Gilpin and
called for a ballad on the subject. She also urged him to write a long poem
in blank verse; and when he demanded a subject, she whimsically suggested
the sofa, which was a new article of furniture at that time. Cowper
immediately wrote "The Sofa," and, influenced by the poetic possibilities
that lie in unexpected places, he added to this poem from time to time, and
called his completed work _The Task_. This was published in 1785, and the
author was instantly recognized as one of the chief poets of his age. The
last years of his life were a long battle with insanity, until death
mercifully ended the struggle in 1800. His last poem, "The Castaway," is a
cry of despair, in which, under guise of a man washed overboard in a storm,
he describes himself perishing in the sight of friends who are powerless to
help.

COWPER'S WORKS. Cowper's first volume of poems, containing "The Progress of
Error," "Truth," "Table Talk," etc., is interesting chiefly as showing how
the poet was bound by the classical rules of his age. These poems are
dreary, on the whole, but a certain gentleness, and especially a vein of
pure humor, occasionally rewards the reader. For Cowper was a humorist, and
only the constant shadow of insanity kept him from becoming famous in that
line alone.

_The Task_, written in blank verse, and published in 1785, is Cowper's
longest poem. Used as we are to the natural poetry of Wordsworth and
Tennyson, it is hard for us to appreciate the striking originality of this
work. Much of it is conventional and "wooden," to be sure, like much of
Wordsworth's poetry; but when, after reading the rimed essays and the
artificial couplets of Johnson's age, we turn suddenly to Cowper's
description of homely scenes, of woods and brooks, of plowmen and teamsters
and the letter carrier on his rounds, we realize that we are at the dawn of
a better day in poetry:

    He comes, the herald of a noisy world,
    With spatter'd boots, strapp'd waist, and frozen locks:
    News from all nations lumbering at his back.
    True to his charge, the close-packed load behind,
    Yet careless what he brings, his one concern
    Is to conduct it to the destined inn,
    And, having dropped the expected bag, pass on.
    He whistles as he goes, light-hearted wretch,
    Cold and yet cheerful: messenger of grief
    Perhaps to thousands, and of joy to some;
    To him indifferent whether grief or joy.
    Houses in ashes, and the fall of stocks,
    Births, deaths, and marriages, epistles wet
    With tears that trickled down the writer's cheeks
    Fast as the periods from his fluent quill,
    Or charged with amorous sighs of absent swains,
    Or nymphs responsive, equally affect
    His horse and him, unconscious of them all.

Cowper's most laborious work, the translation of Homer in blank verse, was
published in 1791. Its stately, Milton-like movement, and its better
rendering of the Greek, make this translation far superior to Pope's
artificial couplets. It is also better, in many respects, than Chapman's
more famous and more fanciful rendering; but for some reason it was not
successful, and has never received the recognition which it deserves.
Entirely different in spirit are the poet's numerous hymns, which were
published in the Olney Collection in 1779 and which are still used in our
churches. It is only necessary to mention a few first lines--"God moves in
a mysterious way," "Oh, for a closer walk with God," "Sometimes a light
surprises"--to show how his gentle and devout spirit has left its impress
upon thousands who now hardly know his name. With Cowper's charming
_Letters_, published in 1803, we reach the end of his important works, and
the student who enjoys reading letters will find that these rank among the
best of their kind. It is not, however, for his ambitious works that Cowper
is remembered, but rather for his minor poems, which have found their own
way into so many homes. Among these, the one that brings quickest response
from hearts that understand is his little poem, "On the Receipt of My
Mother's Picture." beginning with the striking line, "Oh, that those lips
had language." Another, called "Alexander Selkirk," beginning, "I am
monarch of all I survey," suggests how Selkirk's experiences as a castaway
(which gave Defoe his inspiration for _Robinson Crusoe_) affected the
poet's timid nature and imagination. Last and most famous of all is his
immortal "John Gilpin." Cowper was in a terrible fit of melancholy when
Lady Austen told him the story, which proved to be better than medicine,
for all night long chuckles and suppressed laughter were heard in the
poet's bedroom. Next morning at breakfast he recited the ballad that had
afforded its author so much delight in the making. The student should read
it, even if he reads nothing else by Cowper; and he will be lacking in
humor or appreciation if he is not ready to echo heartily the last stanza:

    Now let us sing, Long live the King,
    And Gilpin, long live he!
    And when he next doth ride abroad
    May I be there to see.


ROBERT BURNS (1759-1796)

After a century and more of Classicism, we noted with interest the work of
three men, Gray, Goldsmith, and Cowper, whose poetry, like the chorus of
awakening birds, suggests the dawn of another day. Two other poets of the
same age suggest the sunrise. The first is the plowman Burns, who speaks
straight from the heart to the primitive emotions of the race; the second
is the mystic Blake, who only half understands his own thoughts, and whose
words stir a sensitive nature as music does, or the moon in midheaven,
rousing in the soul those vague desires and aspirations which ordinarily
sleep, and which can never be expressed because they have no names. Blake
lived his shy, mystic, spiritual life in the crowded city, and his message
is to the few who can understand. Burns lived his sad, toilsome, erring
life in the open air, with the sun and the rain, and his songs touch all
the world. The latter's poetry, so far as it has a philosophy, rests upon
two principles which the classic school never understood,--that common
people are at heart romantic and lovers of the ideal, and that simple human
emotions furnish the elements of true poetry. Largely because he follows
these two principles, Burns is probably the greatest song writer of the
world. His poetic creed may be summed up in one of his own stanzas:

    Give me ae spark o' Nature's fire,
    That's a' the learning I desire;
    Then, though I trudge thro' dub an' mire
           At pleugh or cart,
    My Muse, though hamely in attire,
           May touch the heart.

LIFE.[205] Burns's life is "a life of fragments," as Carlyle called it; and
the different fragments are as unlike as the noble "Cotter's Saturday
Night" and the rant and riot of "The Jolly Beggars." The details of this
sad and disjointed life were better, perhaps, forgotten. We call attention
only to the facts which help us to understand the man and his poetry.

Burns was born in a clay cottage at Alloway, Scotland, in the bleak winter
of 1759. His father was an excellent type of the Scotch peasant of those
days,--a poor, honest, God-fearing man, who toiled from dawn till dark to
wrest a living for his family from the stubborn soil. His tall figure was
bent with unceasing labor; his hair was thin and gray, and in his eyes was
the careworn, hunted look of a peasant driven by poverty and unpaid rents
from one poor farm to another. The family often fasted of necessity, and
lived in solitude to avoid the temptation of spending their hard-earned
money. The children went barefoot and bareheaded in all weathers, and
shared the parents' toil and their anxiety over the rents. At thirteen
Bobby, the eldest, was doing a peasant's full day's labor; at sixteen he
was chief laborer on his father's farm; and he describes the life as "the
cheerless gloom of a hermit, and the unceasing moil of a galley slave." In
1784 the father, after a lifetime of toil, was saved from a debtor's prison
by consumption and death. To rescue something from the wreck of the home,
and to win a poor chance of bread for the family, the two older boys set up
a claim for arrears of wages that had never been paid. With the small sum
allowed them, they buried their father, took another farm, Mossgiel, in
Mauchline, and began again the long struggle with poverty.

Such, in outline, is Burns's own story of his early life, taken mostly from
his letters. There is another and more pleasing side to the picture, of
which we have glimpses in his poems and in his Common-place Book. Here we
see the boy at school; for like most Scotch peasants, the father gave his
boys the best education he possibly could. We see him following the plow,
not like a slave, but like a free man, crooning over an old Scotch song and
making a better one to match the melody. We see him stop the plow to listen
to what the wind is saying, or turn aside lest he disturb the birds at
their singing and nest making. At supper we see the family about the table,
happy notwithstanding their scant fare, each child with a spoon in one hand
and a book in the other. We hear Betty Davidson reciting, from her great
store, some heroic ballad that fired the young hearts to enthusiasm and
made them forget the day's toil. And in "The Cotter's Saturday Night" we
have a glimpse of Scotch peasant life that makes us almost reverence these
heroic men and women, who kept their faith and their self-respect in the
face of poverty, and whose hearts, under their rough exteriors, were tender
and true as steel.

A most unfortunate change in Burns's life began when he left the farm, at
seventeen, and went to Kirkoswald to study surveying. The town was the
haunt of smugglers, rough-living, hard-drinking men; and Burns speedily
found his way into those scenes of "riot and roaring dissipation" which
were his bane ever afterwards. For a little while he studied diligently,
but one day, while taking the altitude of the sun, he saw a pretty girl in
the neighboring garden, and love put trigonometry to flight. Soon he gave
up his work and wandered back to the farm and poverty again.

When twenty-seven years of age Burns first attracted literary attention,
and in the same moment sprang to the first place in Scottish letters. In
despair over his poverty and personal habits, he resolved to emigrate to
Jamaica, and gathered together a few of his early poems, hoping to sell
them for enough to pay the expenses of his journey. The result was the
famous Kilmarnock edition of Burns, published in 1786, for which he was
offered twenty pounds. It is said that he even bought his ticket, and on
the night before the ship sailed wrote his "Farewell to Scotland,"
beginning, "The gloomy night is gathering fast," which he intended to be
his last song on Scottish soil.

In the morning he changed his mind, led partly by some dim foreshadowing of
the result of his literary adventure; for the little book took all Scotland
by storm. Not only scholars and literary men, but "even plowboys and maid
servants," says a contemporary, eagerly spent their hard-earned shillings
for the new book. Instead of going to Jamaica, the young poet hurried to
Edinburgh to arrange for another edition of his work. His journey was a
constant ovation, and in the capital he was welcomed and feasted by the
best of Scottish society. This inexpected triumph lasted only one winter.
Burns's fondness for taverns and riotous living shocked his cultured
entertainers, and when he returned to Edinburgh next winter, after a
pleasure jaunt through the Highlands, he received scant attention. He left
the city in anger and disappointment, and went back to the soil where he
was more at home.

The last few years of Burns's life are a sad tragedy, and we pass over them
hurriedly. He bought the farm Ellisland, Dumfriesshire, and married the
faithful Jean Armour, in 1788, That he could write of her,

    I see her in the dewy flowers,
    I see her sweet and fair;
    I hear her in the tunefu' birds,
    I hear her charm the air:
    There's not a bonie flower that springs
    By fountain, shaw, or green;
    There's not a bonie bird that sings,
    But minds me o' my Jean,

is enough for us to remember. The next year he was appointed exciseman,
i.e. collector of liquor revenues, and the small salary, with the return
from his poems, would have been sufficient to keep his family in modest
comfort, had he but kept away from taverns. For a few years his life of
alternate toil and dissipation was occasionally illumined by his splendid
lyric genius, and he produced many songs--"Bonnie Doon," "My Love's like a
Red, Red Rose," "Auld Lang Syne," "Highland Mary," and the soul-stirring
"Scots wha hae," composed while galloping over the moor in a storm--which
have made the name of Burns known wherever the English language is spoken,
and honored wherever Scotchmen gather together. He died miserably in 1796,
when only thirty-seven years old. His last letter was an appeal to a friend
for money to stave off the bailiff, and one of his last poems a tribute to
Jessie Lewars, a kind lassie who helped to care for him in his illness.
This last exquisite lyric, "O wert thou in the cauld blast," set to
Mendelssohn's music, is one of our best known songs, though its history is
seldom suspected by those who sing it.

THE POETRY OF BURNS. The publication of the Kilmarnock Burns, with the
title _Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect_ (1786), marks an epoch in the
history of English Literature, like the publication of Spenser's
_Shepherd's Calendar_. After a century of cold and formal poetry, relieved
only by the romanticism of Gray and Cowper, these fresh inspired songs went
straight to the heart, like the music of returning birds in springtime. It
was a little volume, but a great book; and we think of Marlowe's line,
"Infinite riches in a little room," in connection with it. Such poems as
"The Cotter's Saturday Night," "To a Mouse," "To Mountain Daisy," "Man was
Made To Mourn," "The Twa Dogs," "Address to the Deil," and "Halloween,"
suggest that the whole spirit of the romantic revival is embodied in this
obscure plowman. Love, humor, pathos, the response to nature,--all the
poetic qualities that touch the human heart are here; and the heart was
touched as it had not been since the days of Elizabeth. If the reader will
note again the six characteristics of the romantic movement, and then read
six poems of Burns, he will see at once how perfectly this one man
expresses the new idea. Or take a single suggestion,--

    Ae fond kiss, and then we sever!
    Ae farewell, and then forever!
    Deep in heart-wrung tears I'll pledge thee,
    Warring sighs and groans I'll wage thee.
    Who shall say that Fortune grieves him
    While the star of hope she leaves him?
    Me, nae cheerfu' twinkle lights me;
    Dark despair around benights me.
    I'll ne'er blame my partial fancy,
    Naething could resist my Nancy;
    But to see her was to love her;
    Love but her, and love forever.
    Had we never lov'd sae kindly,
    Had we never lov'd sae blindly,
    Never met--or never parted--
    We had ne'er been broken-hearted.

The "essence of a thousand love tales" is in that one little song. Because
he embodies the new spirit of romanticism, critics give him a high place in
the history of our literature; and because his songs go straight to the
heart, he is the poet of common men.

Of Burns's many songs for music little need be said. They have found their
way into the hearts of a whole people, and there they speak for themselves.
They range from the exquisite "O wert thou in the cauld blast," to the
tremendous appeal to Scottish patriotism in "Scots wha hae wi' Wallace
bled," which, Carlyle said, should be sung with the throat of the
whirlwind. Many of these songs were composed in his best days, when
following the plow or resting after his work, while the music of some old
Scotch song was ringing in his head. It is largely because he thought of
music while he composed that so many of his poems have the singing quality,
suggesting a melody as we read them.

Among his poems of nature, "To a Mouse" and "To a Mountain Daisy" are
unquestionably the best, suggesting the poetical possibilities that daily
pass unnoticed under our feet. These two poems are as near as Burns ever
comes to appreciating nature for its own sake. The majority of his poems,
like "Winter" and "Ye banks and braes o' bonie Doon," regard nature in the
same way that Gray regarded it, as a background for the play of human
emotions.

Of his poems of emotion there is an immense number. It is a curious fact
that the world is always laughing and crying at the same moment; and we can
hardly read a page of Burns without finding this natural juxtaposition of
smiles and tears. It is noteworthy also that all strong emotions, when
expressed naturally, lend themselves to poetry; and Burns, more than any
other writer, has an astonishing faculty of describing his own emotions
with vividness and simplicity, so that they appeal instantly to our own.
One cannot read, "I love my Jean," for instance, without being in love with
some idealized woman; or "To Mary in Heaven," without sharing the personal
grief of one who has loved and lost.

Besides the songs of nature and of human emotion, Burns has given us a
large number of poems for which no general title can be given. Noteworthy
among these are "A man's a man for a' that," which voices the new romantic
estimate of humanity; "The Vision," from which we get a strong impression
of Burns's early ideals; the "Epistle to a Young Friend," from which,
rather than from his satires, we learn Burns's personal views of religion
and honor; the "Address to the Unco Guid," which is the poet's plea for
mercy in judgment; and "A Bard's Epitaph," which, as a summary of his own
life, might well be written at the end of his poems. "Halloween," a picture
of rustic merrymaking, and "The Twa Dogs" a contrast between the rich and
poor, are generally classed among the poet's best works; but one unfamiliar
with the Scotch dialect will find them rather difficult.

Of Burns's longer poems the two best worth reading are "The Cotter's
Saturday Night" and "Tam o' Shanter,"--the one giving the most perfect
picture we possess of a noble poverty; the other being the most lively and
the least objectionable of his humorous works. It would be difficult to
find elsewhere such a combination of the grewsome and the ridiculous as is
packed up in "Tam o' Shanter." With the exception of these two, the longer
poems add little to the author's fame or to our own enjoyment. It is better
for the beginner to read Burns's exquisite songs and gladly to recognize
his place in the hearts of a people, and forget the rest, since they only
sadden us and obscure the poet's better nature.


WILLIAM BLAKE (1757-1827)

    Piping down the valleys wild,
      Piping songs of pleasant glee,
    On a cloud I saw a child,
      And he laughing said to me:
    "Pipe a song about a lamb;"
      So I piped with merry cheer.
    "Piper, pipe that song again;"
      So I piped:, he wept to hear.
    "Piper, sit thee down and write
      In a book, that all may read;"
    So he vanished from my sight,
      And I plucked a hollow reed,
    And I made a rural pen,
      And I stained the water clear,
    And I wrote my happy songs
      Every child may joy to hear.[206]

Of all the romantic poets of the eighteenth century, Blake is the most
independent and the most original. In his earliest work, written when he
was scarcely more than a child, he seems to go back to the Elizabethan song
writers for his models; but for the greater part of his life he was the
poet of inspiration alone, following no man's lead, and obeying no voice
but that which he heard in his own mystic soul. Though the most
extraordinary literary genius of his age, he had practically no influence
upon it. Indeed, we hardly yet understand this poet of pure fancy, this
mystic this transcendental madman, who remained to the end of his busy life
an incomprehensible child.

LIFE. Blake, the son of a London tradesman, was a strange, imaginative
child, whose soul was more at home with brooks and flowers and fairies than
with the crowd of the city streets. Beyond learning to read and write, he
received education; but he began, at ten years, to copy prints and to write
verses. He also began a long course of art study, which resulted in his
publishing his own books, adorned with marginal engravings colored by
hand,--an unusual setting, worthy of the strong artistic sense that shows
itself in many of his early verses. As a child he had visions of God and
the angels looking in at his window; and as a man he thought he received
visits from the souls of the great dead, Moses, Virgil, Homer, Dante,
Milton,--"majestic shadows, gray but luminous," he calls them. He seems
never to have asked himself the question how far these visions were pure
illusions, but believed and trusted them implicitly. To him all nature was
a vast spiritual symbolism, wherein he saw elves, fairies, devils,
angels,--all looking at him in friendship or enmity through the eyes of
flowers and stars:

    With the blue sky spread over with wings,
      And the mild sun that mounts and sings;
    With trees and fields full of fairy elves,
      And little devils who fight for themselves;
    With angels planted in hawthorne bowers,
      And God himself in the passing hours.

And this curious, pantheistic conception of nature was not a matter of
creed, but the very essence of Blake's life. Strangely enough, he made no
attempt to found a new religious cult, but followed his own way, singing
cheerfully, working patiently, in the face of discouragement and failure.
That writers of far less genius were exalted to favor, while he remained
poor and obscure, does not seem to have troubled him in the least. For over
forty years he labored diligently at book engraving, guided in his art by
Michael Angelo. but inventing his own curious designs, at which we still
wonder. The illustrations for Young's "Night Thoughts," for Blair's
"Grave," and the "Inventions to the Book of Job," show the peculiarity of
Blake's mind quite as clearly as his poems. While he worked at his trade he
flung off--for he never seemed to compose--disjointed visions and
incomprehensible rhapsodies, with an occasional little gem that still sets
our hearts to singing:

    Ah, sunflower, weary of time,
      Who countest the steps of the sun;
    Seeking after that sweet golden clime
      Where the traveller's journey is done;
    Where the youth pined away with desire,
      And the pale virgin shrouded in snow,
    Rise from their graves, and aspire
      Where my sunflower wishes to go!

That is a curious flower to find growing in the London street; but it
suggests Blake's own life, which was outwardly busy and quiet, but inwardly
full of adventure and excitement. His last huge prophetic works, like
_Jerusalem_ and _Milton_ (1804), were dictated to him, he declares, by
supernatural means, and even against his own will. They are only half
intelligible, but here and there one sees flashes of the same poetic beauty
that marks his little poems. Critics generally dismiss Blake with the word
"madman"; but that is only an evasion. At best, he is the writer of
exquisite lyrics; at worst, he is mad only "north-northwest," like Hamlet;
and the puzzle is to find the method in his madness. The most amazing thing
about him is the perfectly sane and cheerful way in which he moved through
poverty and obscurity, flinging out exquisite poems or senseless
rhapsodies, as a child might play with gems or straws or sunbeams
indifferently. He was a gentle, kindly, most unworldly little man, with
extraordinary eyes, which seem even in the lifeless portraits to reflect
some unusual hypnotic power. He died obscurely, smiling at a vision of
Paradise, in 1827. That was nearly a century ago, yet he still remains one
of the most incomprehensible figures in our literature.

WORKS OF BLAKE. The _Poetical Sketches_, published in 1783, is a collection
of Blake's earliest poetry, much of it written in boyhood. It contains much
crude and incoherent work, but also a few lyrics of striking originality.
Two later and better known volumes are _Songs of Innocence_ and _Songs of
Experience_, reflecting two widely different views of the human soul. As in
all his works, there is an abundance of apparently worthless stuff in these
songs; but, in the language of miners, it is all "pay dirt"; it shows
gleams of golden grains that await our sifting, and now and then we find a
nugget unexpectedly:

    My lord was like a flower upon the brows
    Of lusty May; ah life as frail as flower!
    My lord was like a star in highest heaven
    Drawn down to earth by spells and wickedness;
    My lord was like the opening eye of day;
    But he is darkened; like the summer moon
    Clouded; fall'n like the stately tree, cut down;
    The breath of heaven dwelt among his leaves.

On account of the chaotic character of most of Blake's work, it is well to
begin our reading with a short book of selections, containing the best
songs of these three little volumes. Swinburne calls Blake the only poet of
"supreme and simple poetic genius" of the eighteenth century, the one man
of that age fit, on all accounts, to rank with the old great masters.[207]
The praise is doubtless extravagant, and the criticism somewhat
intemperate; but when we have read "The Evening Star," "Memory," "Night,"
"Love," "To the Muses," "Spring," "Summer," "The Tiger," "The Lamb," "The
Clod and the Pebble," we may possibly share Swinburne's enthusiasm.
Certainly, in these three volumes we have some of the most perfect and the
most original songs in our language.

Of Blake's longer poems, his titanic prophecies and apocalyptic splendors,
it is impossible to write justly in such a brief work as this. Outwardly
they suggest a huge chaff pile, and the scattered grains of wheat hardly
warrant the labor of winnowing. The curious reader will get an idea of
Blake's amazing mysticism by dipping into any of the works of his middle
life,--_Urizen, Gates of Paradise, Marriage of Heaven and Hell, America,
The French Revolution_, or _The Vision of the Daughters of Albion_. His
latest works, like _Jerusalem_ and _Milton_, are too obscure to have any
literary value. To read any of these works casually is to call the author a
madman; to study them, remembering Blake's songs and his genius, is to
quote softly his own answer to the child who asked about the land of
dreams:

    "O what land is the land of dreams,
    What are its mountains and what are its streams?
    --O father, I saw my mother there,
    Among the lilies by waters fair."
    "Dear child, I also by pleasant streams
    Have wandered all night in the land of dreams;
    But though calm and warm the waters wide,
    I could not get to the other side."


MINOR POETS OF THE REVIVAL

We have chosen the five preceding poets, Gray, Goldsmith, Cowper, Burns,
and Blake, as the most typical and the most interesting of the writers who
proclaimed the dawn of Romanticism in the eighteenth century. With them we
associate a group of minor writers, whose works were immensely popular in
their own day. The ordinary reader will pass them by, but to the student
they are all significant as expressions of very different phases of the
romantic revival.

JAMES THOMSON (1700-1748). Thomson belongs among the pioneers of
Romanticism. Like Gray and Goldsmith, he wavered between Pseudo-classic and
the new romantic ideals, and for this reason, if for no other, his early
work is interesting, like the uncertainty of a child who hesitates whether
to creep safely on all fours or risk a fall by walking. He is "worthy to be
remembered" for three poems,--"Rule Britannia," which is still one of the
national songs of England _The Castle of Indolence_, and _The Seasons_. The
dreamy and romantic _Castle_ (1748), occupied by enchanter Indolence and
his willing captives in the land of Drowsyhed, is purely Spenserian in its
imagery, and is written in the Spenserian stanza. _The Seasons_ (1726-
1730), written in blank verse, describes the sights and sounds of the
changing year and the poet's own feelings in the presence of nature. These
two poems, though rather dull to a modern reader, were significant of the
early romantic revival in three ways: they abandoned the prevailing heroic
couplet; they went back to the Elizabethans, instead of to Pope, for their
models; and they called attention to the long-neglected life of nature as a
subject for poetry.

WILLIAM COLLINS (1721-1759). Collins, the friend and disciple of Thomson,
was of a delicate, nervous temperament, like Cowper; and over him also
brooded the awful shadow of insanity. His first work, _Oriental Eclogues_
(1742), is romantic in feeling, but is written in the prevailing mechanical
couplets. All his later work is romantic in both thought and expression.
His "Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands" (1750) is an
interesting event in the romantic revival, for it introduced a new world,
of witches, pygmies, fairies, and mediæval kings, for the imagination to
play in. Collins's best known poems are the odes "To Simplicity," "To
Fear," "To the Passions," the little unnamed lyric beginning "How sleep the
brave," and the exquisite "Ode to Evening." In reading the latter, one is
scarcely aware that the lines are so delicately balanced that they have no
need of rime to accentuate their melody.

GEORGE CRABBE (1754-1832). Crabbe is an interesting combination of realism
and romanticism, his work of depicting common life being, at times, vaguely
suggestive of Fielding's novels. _The Village_ (1783), a poem without a
rival as a picture of the workingmen of his age, is sometimes like Fielding
in its coarse vigor, and again like Dryden in its precise versification.
The poem was not successful at first, and Crabbe abandoned his literary
dreams. For over twenty years he settled down as a clergyman in a country
parish, observing keenly the common life about him. Then he published more
poems, exactly like _The Village_, which immediately brought him fame and
money. They brought him also the friendship of Walter Scott, who, like
others, regarded Crabbe as one of the first poets of the age. These later
poems, _The Parish Register_ (1807), _The Borough_ (1810), _Tales in Verse_
(1812), and _Tales of the Hall_ (1819), are in the same strain. They are
written in couplets; they are reflections of nature and of country life;
they contain much that is sordid and dull, but are nevertheless real
pictures of real men and women, just as Crabbe saw them, and as such they
are still interesting. Goldsmith and Burns had idealized the poor, and we
admire them for their sympathy and insight. It remained for Crabbe to show
that in wretched fishing villages, in the lives of hardworking men and
women, children, laborers, smugglers, paupers,--all sorts and conditions
of common men,--there is abundant romantic without exaggerating or
idealizing their vices and virtues.

JAMES MACPHERSON (1736-1796). In Macpherson we have an unusual figure, who
catered to the new romantic interest in the old epic heroes, and won
immense though momentary fame, by a series of literary forgeries.
Macpherson was a Scotch schoolmaster, an educated man, but evidently not
over-tender of conscience, whose imagination had been stirred by certain
old poems which he may have heard in Gaelic among the Highlanders. In 1760
he published his _Fragments of Ancient Poetry collected in the Highlands_,
and alleged that his work was but a translation of Gaelic manuscripts.
Whether the work of itself would have attracted attention is doubtful; but
the fact that an abundance of literary material might be awaiting discovery
led to an interest such as now attends the opening of an Egyptian tomb, and
a subscription was promptly raised in Edinburgh to send Macpherson through
the Highlands to collect more "manuscripts." The result was the epic
_Fingal_ (1762), "that lank and lamentable counterfeit of poetry," as
Swinburne calls it, which the author professed to have translated from the
Gaelic of the poet Ossian. Its success was astonishing, and Macpherson
followed it up with _Temora_ (1763), another epic in the same strain. In
both these works Macpherson succeeds in giving an air of primal grandeur to
his heroes; the characters are big and shadowy; the imagery is at times
magnificent; the language is a kind of chanting, bombastic prose:

Now Fingal arose in his might and thrice he reared his voice. Cromla
answered around, and the sons of the desert stood still. They bent their
red faces to earth, ashamed at the presence of Fingal. He came like a cloud
of rain in the days of the sun, when slow it rolls on the hill, and fields
expect the shower. Swaran beheld the terrible king of Morven, and stopped
in the midst of his course. Dark he leaned on his spear rolling his red
eyes around. Silent and tall he seemed as an oak on the banks of Lubar,
which had its branches blasted of old by the lightning of heaven. His
thousands pour around the hero, and the darkness of battle gathers on the
hill.[208]

The publication of this gloomy, imaginative work produced a literary storm.
A few critics, led by Dr. Johnson, demanded to see the original
manuscripts, and when Macpherson refused to produce them,[209] the Ossianic
poems were branded as a forgery; nevertheless they had enormous success.
Macpherson was honored as a literary explorer; he was given an official
position, carrying a salary for life; and at his death, in 1796, he was
buried in Westminster Abbey. Blake, Burns, and indeed most of the poets of
the age were influenced by this sham poetry. Even the scholarly Gray was
deceived and delighted with "Ossian"; and men as far apart as Goethe and
Napoleon praised it immoderately.

THOMAS CHATTERTON (1752-1770). This "marvelous boy," to whom Keats
dedicated his "Endymion," and who is celebrated in Shelley's "Adonais," is
one of the saddest and most interesting figures of the romantic revival.
During his childhood he haunted the old church of St. Mary Redcliffe, in
Bristol, where he was fascinated by the mediæval air of the place, and
especially by one old chest, known as Canynge's coffer, containing musty
documents which had been preserved for three hundred years. With strange,
uncanny intentness the child pored over these relics of the past, copying
them instead of his writing book, until he could imitate not only the
spelling and language but even the handwriting of the original. Soon after
the "Ossian" forgeries appeared, Chatterton began to produce documents,
apparently very old, containing mediæval poems, legends, and family
histories, centering around two characters,--Thomas Rowley, priest and
poet, and William Canynge, merchant of Bristol in the days of Henry VI. It
seems incredible that the whole design of these mediæval romances should
have been worked out by a child of eleven, and that he could reproduce the
style and the writing of Caxton's day so well that the printers were
deceived; but such is the fact. More and more _Rowley Papers_, as they were
called, were produced by Chatterton,--apparently from the archives of the
old church; in reality from his own imagination,--delighting a large circle
of readers, and deceiving all but Gray and a few scholars who recognized
the occasional misuse of fifteenth-century English words. All this work was
carefully finished, and bore the unmistakable stamp of literary genius.
Reading now his "Ælla," or the "Ballad of Charite," or the long poem in
ballad style called "Bristowe Tragedie," it is hard to realize that it is a
boy's work. At seventeen years of age Chatterton went for a literary career
to London, where he soon afterwards took poison and killed himself in a fit
of childish despondency, brought on by poverty and hunger.

THOMAS PERCY (1729-1811). To Percy, bishop of the Irish church, in Dromore,
we are indebted for the first attempt at a systematic collection of the
folk songs and ballads which are counted among the treasures of a nation's
literature.[210] In 1765 he published, in three volumes, his famous
_Reliques of Ancient English Poetry_. The most valuable part of this work
is the remarkable collection of old English and Scottish Ballads, such as
"Chevy Chase," the "Nut Brown Mayde," "Children of the Wood," "Battle of
Otterburn," and many more, which but for his labor might easily have
perished. We have now much better and more reliable editions of these same
ballads; for Percy garbled his materials, adding and subtracting freely,
and even inventing a few ballads of his own. Two motives probably
influenced him in this. First, the different versions of the same ballad
varied greatly; and Percy, in changing them to suit himself, took the same
liberty as had many other writers in dealing with the same material.
Second; Percy was under the influence of Johnson and his school, and
thought it necessary to add a few elegant ballads "to atone for the
rudeness of the more obsolete poems." That sounds queer now, used as we are
to exactness in dealing with historical and literary material; but it
expresses the general spirit of the age in which he lived.

Notwithstanding these drawbacks, Percy's _Reliques_ marks an epoch in the
history of Romanticism, and it is difficult to measure its influence on the
whole romantic movement. Scott says of it, "The first time I could scrape a
few shillings together, I bought myself a copy of these beloved volumes;
nor do I believe I ever read a book half so frequently, or with half the
enthusiasm." Scott's own poetry is strongly modeled upon these early
ballads, and his _Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border_ is due chiefly to the
influence of Percy's work.

Besides the _Reliques_, Percy has given us another good work in his
_Northern Antiquities_ (1770) translated from the French of Mallet's
_History of Denmark_. This also was of immense influence, since it
introduced to English readers a new and fascinating mythology, more rugged
and primitive than that of the Greeks; and we are still, in music as in
letters, under the spell of Thor and Odin, of Frea and the Valkyr maidens,
and of that stupendous drama of passion and tragedy which ended in the
"Twilight of the Gods." The literary world owes a debt of gratitude to
Percy, who wrote nothing of importance himself, but who, by collecting and
translating the works of other men, did much to hasten the triumph of
Romanticism in the nineteenth century.


III. THE FIRST ENGLISH NOVELISTS

The chief literary phenomena of the complex eighteenth century are the
reign of so-called Classicism, the revival of romantic poetry, and the
discovery of the modern novel. Of these three, the last is probably the
most important. Aside from the fact that the novel is the most modern, and
at present the most widely read and influential type of literature, we have
a certain pride in regarding it as England's original contribution to the
world of letters. Other great types of literature, like the epic, the
romance, and the drama, were first produced by other nations; but the idea
of the modern novel seems to have been worked out largely on English
soil;[211] and in the number and the fine quality of her novelists, England
has hardly been rivaled by any other nation. Before we study the writers
who developed this new type of literature, it is well to consider briefly
its meaning and history.

MEANING OF THE NOVEL. Probably the most significant remark made by the
ordinary reader concerning a work of fiction takes the form of a question:
Is it a good story? For the reader of to-day is much like the child and the
primitive man in this respect, that he must be attracted and held by the
story element of a narrative before he learns to appreciate its style or
moral significance. The story element is therefore essential to the novel;
but where the story originates is impossible to say. As well might we seek
for the origin of the race; for wherever primitive men are found, there we
see them gathering eagerly about the story-teller. In the halls of our
Saxon ancestors the scop and the tale-bringer were ever the most welcome
guests; and in the bark wigwams of the American Indians the man who told
the legends of Hiawatha had an audience quite as attentive as that which
gathered at the Greek festivals to hear the story of Ulysses's wanderings.
To man's instinct or innate love for a story we are indebted for all our
literature; and the novel must in some degree satisfy this instinct, or
fail of appreciation.

The second question which we ask concerning a work of fiction is, How far
does the element of imagination enter into it? For upon the element of
imagination depends, largely, our classification of works of fiction into
novels, romances, and mere adventure stories. The divisions here are as
indefinite as the border land between childhood and youth, between instinct
and reason; but there are certain principles to guide us. We note, in the
development of any normal child, that there comes a time when for his
stories he desires knights, giants, elves, fairies, witches, magic, and
marvelous adventures which have no basis in experience. He tells
extraordinary tales about himself, which may be only the vague remembrances
of a dream or the creations of a dawning imagination,--both of which are as
real to him as any other part of life. When we say that such a child
"romances," we give exactly the right name to it; for this sudden interest
in extraordinary beings and events marks the development of the human
imagination,--running riot at first, because it is not guided by reason,
which is a later development,--and to satisfy this new interest the
romance[212] was invented. The romance is, originally, a work of fiction in
which the imagination is given full play without being limited by facts or
probabilities. It deals with extraordinary events, with heroes whose powers
are exaggerated, and often adds the element of superhuman or supernatural
characters. It is impossible to draw the line where romance ends; but this
element of excessive imagination and of impossible heroes and incidents is
its distinguishing mark in every literature.

Where the novel begins it is likewise impossible to say; but again we have
a suggestion in the experience of every reader. There comes a time,
naturally and inevitably, in the life of every youth when the romance no
longer enthralls him. He lives in a world of facts; gets acquainted with
men and women, some good, some bad, but all human; and he demands that
literature shall express life as he knows it by experience. This is the
stage of the awakened intellect, and in our stories the intellect as well
as the imagination must now be satisfied. At the beginning of this stage we
delight in _Robinson Crusoe;_ we read eagerly a multitude of adventure
narratives and a few so-called historical novels; but in each case we must
be lured by a story, must find heroes and "moving accidents by flood and
field" to appeal to our imagination; and though the hero and the adventure
may be exaggerated, they must both be natural and within the bounds of
probability. Gradually the element of adventure or surprising incident
grows less and less important, as we learn that true life is not
adventurous, but a plain, heroic matter of work and duty, and the daily
choice between good and evil. Life is the most real thing in the world
now,--not the life of kings, or heroes, or superhuman creatures, but the
individual life with its struggles and temptations and triumphs or
failures, like our own; and any work that faithfully represents life
becomes interesting. So we drop the adventure story and turn to the novel.
For the novel is a work of fiction in which the imagination and the
intellect combine to express life in the form of a story and the
imagination is always directed and controlled by the intellect. It is
interested chiefly, not in romance or adventure, but in men and women as
they are; it aims to show the motives and influences which govern human
life, and the effects of personal choice upon character and destiny. Such
is the true novel,[213] and as such it opens a wider and more interesting
field than any other type of literature.

PRECURSORS OF THE NOVEL. Before the novel could reach its modern stage, of
a more or less sincere attempt to express human life and character, it had
to pass through several centuries of almost imperceptible development.
Among the early precursors of the novel we must place a collection of tales
known as the Greek Romances, dating from the second to the sixth centuries.
These are imaginative and delightful stories of ideal love and marvelous
adventure,[214] which profoundly affected romance writing for the next
thousand years. A second group of predecessors is found in the Italian and
Spanish pastoral romances, which were inspired by the _Eclogues_ of Virgil.
These were extremely popular in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and
their influence is seen later in Sidney's _Arcadia_, which is the best of
this type in English.

The third and most influential group of predecessors of the novel is made
up of the romances of chivalry, such as are found in Malory's _Morte
d'Arthur_. It is noticeable, in reading these beautiful old romances in
different languages, that each nation changes them somewhat, so as to make
them more expressive of national traits and ideals. In a word, the old
romance tends inevitably towards realism, especially in England, where the
excessive imagination is curbed and the heroes become more human. In
Malory, in the unknown author of _Sir Gawain and the Green Knight_, and
especially in Chaucer, we see the effect of the practical English mind in
giving these old romances a more natural setting, and in making the heroes
suggest, though faintly, the men and women of their own day. The
_Canterbury Tales_, with their story interest and their characters
delightfully true to nature, have in them the suggestion, at least, of a
connected story whose chief aim is to reflect life as it is.

In the Elizabethan Age the idea of the novel grows more definite. In
Sidney's _Arcadia_ (1580), a romance of chivalry, the pastoral setting at
least is generally true to nature; our credulity is not taxed, as in the
old romances, by the continual appearance of magic or miracles; and the
characters, though idealized till they become tiresome, occasionally give
the impression of being real men and women. In Bacon's _The New Atlantis_
(1627) we have the story of the discovery by mariners of an unknown
country, inhabited by a superior race of men, more civilized than
ourselves,--an idea which had been used by More in his _Utopia_ in 1516.
These two books are neither romances nor novels, in the strict sense, but
studies of social institutions. They use the connected story as a means of
teaching moral lessons, and of bringing about needed reforms; and this
valuable suggestion has been adopted by many of our modern writers in the
so-called problem novels and novels of purpose.

Nearer to the true novel is Lodge's romantic story of _Rosalynde_, which
was used by Shakespeare in _As You Like It_. This was modeled upon the
Italian novella, or short story, which became very popular in England
during the Elizabethan Age. In the same age we have introduced into England
the Spanish picaresque novel (from _picaro_, a knave or rascal), which at
first was a kind of burlesque on the mediæval romance, and which took for
its hero some low scoundrel or outcast, instead of a knight, and followed
him through a long career of scandals and villainies. One of the earliest
types of this picaresque novel in English is Nash's _The Unfortunate
Traveller, or the Life of Jack Wilton_ (1594), which is also a forerunner
of the historical novel, since its action takes place during that gorgeous
interview between Henry VIII and the king of France on the Field of the
Cloth of Gold. In all these short stories and picaresque novels the
emphasis was laid not so much on life and character as on the adventures of
the hero; and the interest consisted largely in wondering what would happen
next, and how the plot would end. The same method is employed in all trashy
novels and it is especially the bane of many modern story-writers. This
excessive interest in adventures or incidents for their own sake, and not
for their effect on character, is what distinguishes the modern adventure
story from the true novel.

In the Puritan Age we approach still nearer to the modern novel, especially
in the work of Bunyan; and as the Puritan always laid emphasis on
character, stories appeared having a definite moral purpose. Bunyan's _The
Pilgrim's Progress_ (1678) differs from the _Faery Queen_, and from all
other mediæval allegories, in this important respect,--that the characters,
far from being bloodless abstractions, are but thinly disguised men and
women. Indeed, many a modern man, reading the story of the Christian;--has
found in it the reflection of his own life and experience. In _The Life and
Death of Mr. Badman_ (1682) we have another and even more realistic study
of a man as he was in Bunyan's day. These two striking figures, Christian
and Mr. Badman, belong among the great characters of English fiction.
Bunyan's good work,--his keen insight, his delineation of character, and
his emphasis upon the moral effects of individual action,--was carried on
by Addison and Steele some thirty years later. The character of Sir Roger
de Coverley is a real reflection of English country life in the eighteenth
century; and with Steele's domestic sketches in _The Tatler, The
Spectator_, and _The Guardian_ (1709-1713), we definitely cross the border
land that lies outside of romance, and enter the region of character study
where the novel has its beginning.

THE DISCOVERY OF THE MODERN NOVEL. Notwithstanding this long history of
fiction, to which we have called attention, it is safe to say that, until
the publication of Richardson's _Pamela_ in 1740, no true novel had
appeared in any literature. By a true novel we mean simply a work of
fiction which relates the story of a plain human life, under stress of
emotion, which depends for its interest not on incident or adventure, but
on its truth to nature. A number of English novelists--Goldsmith,
Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne--all seem to have seized upon the
idea of reflecting life as it is, in the form of a story, and to have
developed it simultaneously. The result was an extraordinary awakening of
interest, especially among people who had never before been greatly
concerned with literature. We are to remember that, in previous periods,
the number of readers was comparatively small; and that, with the exception
of a few writers like Langland and Bunyan, authors wrote largely for the
upper classes. In the eighteenth century the spread of education and the
appearance of newspapers and magazines led to an immense increase in the
number of readers; and at the same time the middle-class people assumed a
foremost place in English life and history. These new readers and this new,
powerful middle class had no classic tradition to hamper them. They cared
little for the opinions of Dr. Johnson and the famous Literary Club; and,
so far as they read fiction at all, they apparently took little interest in
the exaggerated romances, of impossible heroes and the picaresque stories
of intrigue and villainy which had interested the upper classes. Some new
type of literature was demanded, this new type must express the new ideal
of the eighteenth century, namely, the value and the importance of the
individual life. So the novel was born, expressing, though in a different
way, exactly the same ideals of personality and of the dignity of common
life which were later proclaimed in the American and in the French
Revolution, and were welcomed with rejoicing by the poets of the romantic
revival. To tell men, not about knights or kings or types of heroes, but
about themselves in the guise of plain men and women, about their own
thoughts and motives and struggles, and the results of actions upon their
own characters,--this was the purpose of our first novelists. The eagerness
with which their chapters were read in England, and the rapidity with which
their work was copied abroad, show how powerfully the new discovery
appealed to readers everywhere.

Before we consider the work of these writers who first developed the modern
novel, we must glance at the work of a pioneer, Daniel Defoe, whom we place
among the early novelists for the simple reason that we do not know how
else to classify him.


DANIEL DEFOE (1661(?)-1731)

To Defoe is often given the credit for the discovery of the modern novel;
but whether or not he deserves that honor is an open question. Even a
casual reading of _Robinson Crusoe_ (1719), which generally heads the list
of modern fiction, shows that this exciting tale is largely an adventure
story, rather than the study of human character which Defoe probably
intended it to be. Young people still read it as they might a dime novel,
skipping its moralizing passages and hurrying on to more adventures; but
they seldom appreciate the excellent mature reasons which banish the dime
novel to a secret place in the haymow, while _Crusoe_ hangs proudly on the
Christmas tree or holds an honored place on the family bookshelf. Defoe's
_Apparition of Mrs. Veal, Memoirs of a Cavalier_, and _Journal of the
Plague Year_ are such mixtures of fact, fiction, and credulity that they
defy classification; while other so-called "novels," like _Captain
Singleton, Moll Flanders_, and _Roxana_, are but, little better than
picaresque stories, with a deal of unnatural moralizing and repentance
added for puritanical effect. In _Crusoe_, Defoe brought the realistic
adventure story to a very high stage of its development; but his works
hardly deserve, to be classed as true novels, which must subordinate
incident to the faithful portrayal of human life and character.

LIFE. Defoe was the son of a London butcher named Foe, and kept his family
name until he was forty years of age, when he added the aristocratic prefix
with which we have grown familiar. The events of his busy seventy years of
life, in which he passed through all extremes, from poverty to wealth, from
prosperous brickmaker to starveling journalist, from Newgate prison to
immense popularity and royal favor, are obscure enough in details; but four
facts stand out clearly, which help the reader to understand the character
of his work. First, Defoe was a jack-at-all-trades, as well as a writer;
his interest was largely with the working classes, and notwithstanding many
questionable practices, he seems to have had some continued purpose of
educating and uplifting the common people. This partially accounts for the
enormous popularity of his works, and for the fact that they were
criticised by literary men as being "fit only for the kitchen." Second, he
was a radical Nonconformist in religion, and was intended by his father for
the independent ministry. The Puritan zeal for reform possessed him, and he
tried to do by his pen what Wesley was doing by his preaching, without,
however, having any great measure of the latter's sincerity or singleness
of purpose. This zeal for reform marks all his numerous works, and accounts
for the moralizing to be found everywhere. Third, Defoe was a journalist
and pamphleteer, with a reporter's eye for the picturesque and a newspaper
man's instinct for making a "good story." He wrote an immense number of
pamphlets, poems, and magazine articles; conducted several papers,--one of
the most popular, the _Review_, being issued from prison,--and the fact
that they often blew hot and cold upon the same question was hardly
noticed. Indeed, so extraordinarily interesting and plausible were Defoe's
articles that he generally managed to keep employed by the party in power,
whether Whig or Tory. This long journalistic career, lasting half a
century, accounts for his direct, simple, narrative style, which holds us
even now by its intense reality. To Defoe's genius we are also indebted for
two discoveries, the "interview" and the leading editorial, both of which
are still in daily use in our best newspapers.

The fourth fact to remember is that Defoe knew prison life; and thereby
hangs a tale. In 1702 Defoe published a remarkable pamphlet called "The
Shortest Way with the Dissenters," supporting the claims of the free
churches against the "High Fliers," i.e. Tories and Anglicans. In a vein of
grim humor which recalls Swift's "Modest Proposal," Defoe advocated hanging
all dissenting ministers, and sending all members of the free churches into
exile; and so ferociously realistic was the satire that both Dissenters and
Tories took the author literally. Defoe was tried, found guilty of
seditious libel, and sentenced to be fined, to stand three days in the
pillory, and to be imprisoned. Hardly had the sentence been pronounced when
Defoe wrote his "Hymn to the Pillory,"--

    Hail hieroglyphic state machine,
    Contrived to punish fancy in,--

a set of doggerel verses ridiculing his prosecutors, which Defoe, with a
keen eye for advertising, scattered all over London. Crowds flocked to
cheer him in the pillory; and seeing that Defoe was making popularity out
of persecution, his enemies bundled him off to Newgate prison. He turned
this experience also to account by publishing a popular newspaper, and by
getting acquainted with rogues, pirates, smugglers, and miscellaneous
outcasts, each one with a "good story" to be used later. After his release
from prison, in 1704, he turned his knowledge of criminals to further
account, and entered the government employ as a kind of spy or secret-
service agent. His prison experience, and the further knowledge of
criminals gained in over twenty years as a spy, accounts for his numerous
stories of thieves and pirates, _Jonathan Wild_ and _Captain Avery_, and
also for his later novels, which deal almost exclusively with villains and
outcasts.

When Defoe was nearly sixty years of age he turned to fiction and wrote the
great work by which he is remembered. _Robinson Crusoe_ was an instant
success, and the author became famous all over Europe. Other stories
followed rapidly, and Defoe earned money enough to retire to Newington and
live in comfort; but not idly, for his activity in producing fiction is
rivaled only by that of Walter Scott. Thus, in 1720 appeared _Captain
Singleton, Duncan Campbell_, and _Memoirs of a Cavalier_; in 1722, _Colonel
Jack, Moll Flanders_, and the amazingly realistic _Journal of the Plague
Year_. So the list grows with astonishing rapidity, ending with the
_History of the Devil_ in 1726.

In the latter year Defoe's secret connection with the government became
known, and a great howl of indignation rose against him in the public
print, destroying in an hour the popularity which he had gained by a
lifetime of intrigue and labor. He fled from his home to London, where he
died obscurely, in 1731, while hiding from real or imaginary enemies.

WORKS OF DEFOE. At the head of the list stands _Robinson Crusoe_ (1719-
1720), one of the few books in any literature which has held its popularity
undiminished for nearly two centuries. The story is based upon the
experiences of Alexander Selkirk, or Selcraig, who had been marooned in the
island of Juan Fernandez, off the coast of Chile, and who had lived there
in solitude for five years. On his return to England in 1709, Selkirk's
experiences became known, and Steele published an account of them in _The
Englishman_, without, however, attracting any wide attention. That Defoe
used Selkirk's story is practically certain; but with his usual duplicity
he claimed to have written _Crusoe_ in 1708, a year before Selkirk's
return. However that may be, the story itself is real enough to have come
straight from a sailor's logbook. Defoe, as shown in his _Journal of the
Plague Year_ and his _Memoirs of a Cavalier_, had the art of describing
things he had never seen with the accuracy of an eyewitness.

The charm of the story is its intense reality, in the succession of
thoughts, feelings, incidents, which every reader recognizes to be
absolutely true to life. At first glance it would seem that one man on a
desert island could not possibly furnish the material for a long story; but
as we read we realize with amazement that every slightest thought and
action--the saving of the cargo of the shipwrecked vessel, the preparation
for defense against imaginary foes, the intense agitation over the
discovery of a footprint in the sand--is a record of what the reader
himself would do and feel if he were alone in such a place. Defoe's long
and varied experience now stood him in good stead; in fact, he "was the
only man of letters in his time who might have been thrown on a desert
island without finding himself at a loss what to do;"[215] and he puts
himself so perfectly in his hero's place that he repeats his blunders as
well as his triumphs. Thus, what reader ever followed Defoe's hero through
weary, feverish months of building a huge boat, which was too big to be
launched by one man, without recalling some boy who spent many stormy days
in shed or cellar building a boat or dog house, and who, when the thing was
painted and finished, found it a foot wider than the door, and had to knock
it to pieces? This absolute naturalness characterizes the whole story. It
is a study of the human will also,--of patience, fortitude, and the
indomitable Saxon spirit overcoming all obstacles; and it was this element
which made Rousseau recommend _Robinson Crusoe_ as a better treatise on
education than anything which Aristotle or the moderns had ever written.
And this suggests the most significant thing about Defoe's masterpiece,
namely, that the hero represents the whole of human society, doing with his
own hands all the things which, by the division of labor and the demands of
modern civilization, are now done by many different workers. He is
therefore the type of the whole civilized race of men.

In the remaining works of Defoe, more than two hundred in number, there is
an astonishing variety; but all are marked by the same simple, narrative
style, and the same intense realism. The best known of these are the
_Journal of the Plague Year_, in which the horrors of a frightful plague
are minutely recorded; the _Memoirs of a Cavalier_, so realistic that
Chatham quoted it as history in Parliament; and several picaresque novels,
like _Captain Singleton, Colonel Jack, Moll Flanders_, and _Roxana_. The
last work is by some critics given a very high place in realistic fiction,
but like the other three, and like Defoe's minor narratives of Jack
Sheppard and Cartouche, it is a disagreeable study of vice, ending with a
forced and unnatural repentance.


SAMUEL RICHARDSON (1689-1761)

To Richardson belongs the credit of writing the first modern novel. He was
the son of a London joiner, who, for economy's sake, resided in some
unknown town in Derbyshire, where Samuel was born in 1689. The boy received
very little education, but he had a natural talent for writing letters, and
even as a boy we find him frequently employed by working girls to write
their love letters for them. This early experience, together with his
fondness for the society of "his dearest ladies" rather than of men, gave
him that intimate knowledge of the hearts of sentimental and uneducated
women which is manifest in all his work. Moreover, he was a keen observer
of manners, and his surprisingly accurate descriptions often compel us to
listen, even when he is most tedious. At seventeen years of age he went to
London and learned the printer's trade, which he followed to the end of his
life. When fifty years of age he had a small reputation as a writer of
elegant epistles, and this reputation led certain publishers to approach
him with a proposal that he write a series of _Familiar Letters_, which
could be used as models by people unused to writing. Richardson gladly
accepted the proposal, and had the happy inspiration to make these letters
tell the connected story of a girl's life. Defoe had told an adventure
story of human life on a desert island, but Richardson would tell the story
of a girl's inner life in the midst of English neighbors. That sounds
simple enough now, but it marked an epoch in the history of literature.
Like every other great and simple discovery, it makes us wonder why some
one had not thought of it before.

RICHARDSON'S NOVELS. The result of Richardson's inspiration was _Pamela, or
Virtue Rewarded_, an endless series of letters[216] telling of the trials,
tribulations, and the final happy marriage of a too sweet young maiden,
published in four volumes extending over the years 1740 and 1741. Its chief
fame lies in the fact that it is our first novel in the modern sense. Aside
from this important fact, and viewed solely as a novel, it is sentimental,
grandiloquent, and wearisome. Its success at the time was enormous, and
Richardson began another series of letters (he could tell a story in no
other way) which occupied his leisure hours for the next six years. The
result was _Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady_, published in eight
volumes in 1747-1748. This was another, and somewhat better, sentimental
novel; and it was received with immense enthusiasm. Of all Richardson's
heroines Clarissa is the most human. In her doubts and scruples of
conscience, and especially in her bitter grief and humiliation, she is a
real woman, in marked contrast with the mechanical hero, Lovelace, who
simply illustrates the author's inability to portray a man's character. The
dramatic element in this novel is strong, and is increased by means of the
letters, which enable the reader to keep close to the characters of the
story and to see life from their different view points. Macaulay, who was
deeply impressed by _Clarissa_, is said to have made the remark that, were
the novel lost, he could restore almost the whole of it from memory.

Richardson now turned from his middle-class heroines, and in five or six
years completed another series of letters, in which he attempted to tell
the story of a man and an aristocrat. The result was _Sir Charles
Grandison_ (1754), a novel in seven volumes, whose hero was intended to be
a model of aristocratic manners and virtues for the middle-class people,
who largely constituted the novelist's readers. For Richardson, who began
in _Pamela_ with the purpose of teaching his hearers how to write, ended
with the deliberate purpose of teaching them how to live; and in most of
his work his chief object was, in his own words, to inculcate virtue and
good deportment. His novels, therefore, suffer as much from his purpose as
from his own limitations. Notwithstanding his tedious moralizing and his
other defects, Richardson in these three books gave something entirely new
to the literary world, and the world appreciated the gift. This was the
story of human life, told from within, and depending for its interest not
on incident or adventure, but on its truth to human nature. Reading his
work is, on the whole, like examining the antiquated model of a stern-wheel
steamer; it is interesting for its undeveloped possibilities rather than
for its achievement.


HENRY FIELDING (1707-1754)

LIFE. Judged by his ability alone, Fielding was the greatest of this new
group of novel writers, and one of the most artistic that our literature
has produced. He was born in East Stour, Dorsetshire, in 1707. In contrast
with Richardson, he was well educated, having spent several years at the
famous Eton school, and taken a degree in letters at the University of
Leyden in 1728. Moreover, he had a deeper knowledge of life, gained from
his own varied and sometimes riotous experience. For several years after
returning from Leyden he gained a precarious living by writing plays,
farces, and buffoneries for the stage. In 1735 he married an admirable
woman, of whom we have glimpses in two of his characters, Amelia, and
Sophia Western, and lived extravagantly on her little fortune at East
Stour. Having used up all his money, he returned to London and studied law,
gaining his living by occasional plays and by newspaper work. For ten
years, or more, little is definitely known of him, save that he published
his first novel, _Joseph Andrews_, in 1742, and that he was made justice of
the peace for Westminster in 1748. The remaining years of his life, in
which his best novels were written, were not given to literature, but
rather to his duties as magistrate, and especially to breaking up the gangs
of thieves and cutthroats which infested the streets of London after
nightfall. He died in Lisbon, whither he had gone for his health, in 1754,
and lies buried there in the English cemetery. The pathetic account of this
last journey, together with an inkling of the generosity and
kind-heartedness of the man, notwithstanding the scandals and
irregularities of his life, are found in his last work, the _Journal of a
Voyage to Lisbon_.

FIELDING'S WORK. Fielding's first novel, _Joseph Andrews_ (1742), was
inspired by the success of _Pamela_, and began as a burlesque of the false
sentimentality and the conventional virtues of Richardson's heroine. He
took for his hero the alleged brother of Pamela, who was exposed to the
same kind of temptations, but who, instead of being rewarded for his
virtue, was unceremoniously turned out of doors by his mistress. There the
burlesque ends; the hero takes to the open road, and Fielding forgets all
about Pamela in telling the adventures of Joseph and his companion, Parson
Adams. Unlike Richardson, who has no humor, who minces words, and
moralizes, and dotes on the sentimental woes of his heroines, Fielding is
direct, vigorous, hilarious, and coarse to the point of vulgarity. He is
full of animal spirits, and he tells the story of a vagabond life, not for
the sake of moralizing, like Richardson, or for emphasizing a forced
repentance, like Defoe, but simply because it interests him, and his only
concern is "to laugh men out of their follies." So his story, though it
abounds in unpleasant incidents, generally leaves the reader with the
strong impression of reality.

Fielding's later novels are _Jonathan Wild_, the story of a rogue, which
suggests Defoe's narrative; _The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling_ (1749),
his best work; and _Amelia_ (1751), the story of a good wife in contrast
with an unworthy husband. His strength in all these works is in the
vigorous but coarse figures, like those of Jan Steen's pictures, which fill
most of his pages; his weakness is in lack of taste, and in barrenness of
imagination or invention, which leads him to repeat his plots and incidents
with slight variations. In all his work sincerity is perhaps the most
marked characteristic. Fielding likes virile men, just as they are, good
and bad, but detests shams of every sort. His satire has none of Swift's
bitterness, but is subtle as that of Chaucer, and good-natured as that of
Steele. He never moralizes, though some of his powerfully drawn scenes
suggest a deeper moral lesson than anything in Defoe or Richardson; and he
never judges even the worst of his characters without remembering his own
frailty and tempering justice with mercy. On the whole, though much of his
work is perhaps in bad taste and is too coarse for pleasant or profitable
reading, Fielding must be regarded as an artist, a very great artist, in
realistic fiction; and the advanced student who reads him will probably
concur in the judgment of a modern critic that, by giving us genuine
pictures of men and women of his own age, without moralizing over their
vices and virtues, he became the real founder of the modern novel.


SMOLLETT AND STERNE

Tobias Smollett (1721-1771) apparently tried to carry on Fielding's work;
but he lacked Fielding's genius, as well as his humor and inherent
kindness, and so crowded his pages with the horrors and brutalities which
are sometimes mistaken for realism. Smollett was a physician, of eccentric
manners and ferocious instincts, who developed his unnatural peculiarities
by going as a surgeon on a battleship, where he seems to have picked up all
the evils of the navy and of the medical profession to use later in his
novels.

His three best known works are _Roderick Random_ (1748), a series of
adventures related by the hero; _Peregrine Pickle_ (1751) in which he
reflects with brutal directness the worst of his experiences at sea; and
_Humphrey Clinker_ (1771), his last work, recounting the mild adventures of
a Welsh family in a journey through England and Scotland. This last alone
can be generally read without arousing the readers profound disgust.
Without any particular ability, he models his novels on _Don Quixote_, and
the result is simply a series of coarse adventures which are characteristic
of the picaresque novel of his age. Were it not for the fact that he
unconsciously imitates Jonson's _Every Man in His Humour_, he would hardly
be named among our writers of fiction; but in seizing upon some grotesque
habit or peculiarity and making a character out of it--such as Commodore
Trunnion in _Peregrine Pickle_, Matthew Bramble in _Humphrey Clinker_, and
Bowling in _Roderick Random_--he laid the foundation for that exaggeration
in portraying human eccentricities which finds a climax in Dickens's
caricatures.

Lawrence Sterne (1713-1768) has been compared to a "little bronze satyr of
antiquity in whose hollow body exquisite odors were stored." That is true,
so far as the satyr is concerned; for a more weazened, unlovely personality
would be hard to find. The only question in the comparison is in regard to
the character of the odors, and that is a matter of taste. In his work he
is the reverse of Smollett, the latter being given over to coarse
vulgarities, which are often mistaken for realism; the former to whims and
vagaries and sentimental tears, which frequently only disguise a sneer at
human grief and pity.

The two books by which Sterne is remembered are _Tristram Shandy_ and _A
Sentimental Journey through France and Italy_. These are termed novels for
the simple reason that we know not what else to call them. The former was
begun, in his own words, "with no real idea of how it was to turn out"; its
nine volumes, published at intervals from 1760 to 1767, proceeded in the
most aimless way, recording the experiences of the eccentric Shandy family;
and the book was never finished. Its strength lies chiefly in its brilliant
style, the most remarkable of the age, and in its odd characters, like
Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim, which, with all their eccentricities, are so
humanized by the author's genius that they belong among the great
"creations" of our literature. The _Sentimental Journey_ is a curious
combination of fiction, sketches of travel, miscellaneous essays on odd
subjects,--all marked by the same brilliancy of style, and all stamped with
Sterne's false attitude towards everything in life. Many of its best
passages were either adapted or taken bodily from Burton, Rabelais, and a
score of other writers; so that, in reading Sterne, one is never quite sure
how much is his own work, though the mark of his grotesque genius is on
every page.

THE FIRST NOVELISTS AND THEIR WORK. With the publication of Goldsmith's
_Vicar of Wakefield_ in 1766 the first series of English novels came to a
suitable close. Of this work, with its abundance of homely sentiment
clustering about the family life as the most sacred of Anglo-Saxon
institutions, we have already spoken[217] If we except _Robinson Crusoe_,
as an adventure story, the _Vicar of Wakefield_ is the only novel of the
period which can be freely recommended to all readers, as giving an
excellent idea of the new literary type, which was perhaps more remarkable
for its promise than for its achievement. In the short space of twenty-five
years there suddenly appeared and flourished a new form of literature,
which influenced all Europe for nearly a century, and which still furnishes
the largest part of our literary enjoyment. Each successive novelist
brought some new element to the work, as when Fielding supplied animal
vigor and humor to Richardson's analysis of a human heart, and Sterne added
brilliancy, and Goldsmith emphasized purity and the honest domestic
sentiments which are still the greatest ruling force among men. So these
early workers were like men engaged in carving a perfect cameo from the
reverse side. One works the profile, another the eyes, a third the mouth
and the fine lines of character; and not till the work is finished, and the
cameo turned, do we see the complete human face and read its meaning. Such,
in a parable, is the story of the English novel.

SUMMARY OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. The period we are studying is included
between the English Revolution of 1688 and the beginning of the French
Revolution of 1789. Historically, the period begins in a remarkable way by
the adoption of the Bill of Rights in 1689. This famous bill was the third
and final step in the establishment of constitutional government, the first
step being the Great Charter (1215), and the second the Petition of Right
(1628). The modern form of cabinet government was established in the reign
of George I (1714-1727). The foreign prestige of England was strengthened
by the victories of Marlborough on the Continent, in the War of the Spanish
Succession; and the bounds of empire were enormously increased by Clive in
India, by Cook in Australia and the islands of the Pacific, and by English
victories over the French in Canada and the Mississippi Valley, during the
Seven Years', or French and Indian, Wars. Politically, the country was
divided into Whigs and Tories: the former seeking greater liberty for the
people; the latter upholding the king against popular government. The
continued strife between these two political parties had a direct (and
generally a harmful) influence on literature, as many of the great writers
were used by the Whig or Tory party to advance its own interests and to
satirize its enemies. Notwithstanding this perpetual strife of parties, the
age is remarkable for the rapid social development, which soon expressed
itself in literature. Clubs and coffeehouses multiplied, and the social
life of these clubs resulted in better manners, in a general feeling of
toleration, and especially in a kind of superficial elegance which shows
itself in most of the prose and poetry of the period. On the other hand,
the moral standard of the nation was very low; bands of rowdies infested
the city streets after nightfall; bribery and corruption were the rule in
politics; and drunkenness was frightfully prevalent among all classes.
Swift's degraded race of Yahoos is a reflection of the degradation to be
seen in multitudes of London saloons. This low standard of morals
emphasizes the importance of the great Methodist revival under Whitefield
and Wesley, which began in the second quarter of the eighteenth century.

The literature of the century is remarkably complex, but we may classify it
all under three general heads,--the Reign of so-called Classicism, the
Revival of Romantic Poetry, and the Beginning of the Modern Novel. The
first half of the century, especially, is an age of prose, owing largely to
the fact that the practical and social interests of the age demanded
expression. Modern newspapers, like the _Chronicle, Post_, and _Times_, and
literary magazines, like the _Tatler_ and _Spectator_, which began in this
age, greatly influenced the development of a serviceable prose style. The
poetry of the first half of the century, as typified in Pope, was polished,
unimaginative, formal; and the closed couplet was in general use,
supplanting all other forms of verse. Both prose and poetry were too
frequently satiric, and satire does not tend to produce a high type of
literature. These tendencies in poetry were modified, in the latter part of
the century, by the revival of romantic poetry.

In our study we have noted: (1) the Augustan or Classic Age; the meaning of
Classicism; the life and work of Alexander Pope, the greatest poet of the
age; of Jonathan Swift, the satirist; of Joseph Addison, the essayist; of
Richard Steele, who was the original genius of the _Tatler_ and the
_Spectator_; of Samuel Johnson, who for nearly half a century was the
dictator of English letters; of James Boswell, who gave us the immortal
_Life of Johnson_; of Edmund Burke, the greatest of English orators; and of
Edward Gibbon, the historian, famous for his _Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire_.

(2) The Revival of Romantic Poetry; the meaning of Romanticism; the life
and work of Thomas Gray; of Oliver Goldsmith, famous as poet, dramatist,
and novelist; of William Cowper; of Robert Burns, the greatest of Scottish
poets; of William Blake, the mystic; and the minor poets of the early
romantic movement,--James Thomson, William Collins, George Crabbe, James
Macpherson, author of the Ossian poems, Thomas Chatterton, the boy who
originated the Rowley Papers, and Thomas Percy, whose work for literature
was to collect the old ballads, which he called the _Reliques of Ancient
English Poetry_, and to translate the stories of Norse mythology in his
_Northern Antiquities_.

(3) The First English Novelists; the meaning and history of the modern
novel; the life and work of Daniel Defoe, author of _Robinson Crusoe_, who
is hardly to be called a novelist, but whom we placed among the pioneers;
and the novels of Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, and Goldsmith.


SELECTIONS FOR READING. Manly's English Poetry and Manly's English Prose
(Ginn and Company) are two excellent volumes containing selections from all
authors studied. Ward's English Poets (4 vols.), Craik's English Prose
Selections (5 vols.), and Garnett's English Prose from Elizabeth to
Victoria are useful for supplementary reading. All important works should
be read entire, in one of the following inexpensive editions, published for
school use. (For titles and publishers, see General Bibliography at end of
this book.)

_Pope_. Rape of the Lock and Other Poems, edited by Parrott, in Standard
English Classics. Various other school editions of the Essay on Man, and
Rape of the Lock, in Riverside Literature Series, Pocket Classics, etc.;
Pope's Iliad, I, VI, XXII, XXIV, in Standard English Classics, etc.
Selections from Pope, edited by Reed, in Holt's English Readings.

_Swift_. Gulliver's Travels, school edition by Ginn and Company; also in
Temple Classics, etc. Selections from Swift, edited by Winchester, in
Athenaeum Press (announced); the same, edited by Craik, in Clarendon Press;
the same, edited by Prescott, in Holt's English Readings. Battle of the
Books, in King's Classics, Bohn's Library, etc.

_Addison and Steele_. Sir Roger de Coverley Papers, in Standard English
Classics, Riverside Literature, etc.; Selections from Addison, edited by
Wendell and Greenough, and Selections from Steele, edited by Carpenter,
both in Athenaeum Press; various other selections, in Golden Treasury
Series, Camelot Series, Holt's English Readings, etc.

_Johnson_. Lives of the Poets, in Cassell's National Library; Selected
Essays, edited by G.B. Hill (Dent); Selections, in Little Masterpieces
Series; Rasselas, in Holt's English Readings, and in Morley's Universal
Library.

_Boswell_. Life of Johnson (2 vols.), in Everyman's Library; the same (3
vols.), in Library of English Classics; also in Temple Classics, and Bohn's
Library.

_Burke_. American Taxation, Conciliation with America, Letter to a Noble
Lord, in Standard English Classics; various speeches, in Pocket Classics,
Riverside Literature Series, etc.; Selections, edited by B. Perry (Holt);
Speeches on America (Heath, etc.).

_Gibbon_. The Student's Gibbon, abridged (Murray); Memoirs, edited by
Emerson, in Athenaeum Press.

_Gray_. Selections, edited by W.L. Phelps, in Athenaeum Press; Selections
from Gray and Cowper, in Canterbury Poets, Riverside Literature, etc.;
Gray's Elegy, in Selections from Five English Poets (Ginn and Company).

_Goldsmith_. Deserted Village, in Standard English Classics, etc.; Vicar of
Wakefield, in Standard English Classics, Everyman's Library, King's
Classics, etc.; She Stoops to Conquer, in Pocket Classics, Belles Lettres
Series, etc.

_Cowper_. Selections, edited by Murray, in Athenaeum Press; Selections, in
Cassell's National Library, Canterbury Poets, etc.; The Task, in Temple
Classics.

_Burns_. Representative Poems, with Carlyle's Essay on Burns, edited by
C.L. Hanson, in Standard English Classics; Selections, in Pocket Classics,
Riverside Literature, etc.

_Blake_. Poems, edited by W.B. Yeats, in Muses' Library; Selections, in
Canterbury Poets, etc.

_Minor Poets_. Thomson, Collins, Crabbe, etc. Selections, in Manly's
English Poetry. Thomson's The Seasons, and Castle of Indolence, in Modern
Classics; the same poems in Clarendon Press, and in Temple Classics;
Selections from Thomson, in Cassell's National Library. Chatterton's poems,
in Canterbury Poets. Macpherson's Ossian, in Canterbury Poets. Percy's
Reliques, in Everyman's Library, Chandos Classics, Bohn's Library, etc.
More recent and reliable collections of popular ballads, for school use,
are Gummere's Old English Ballads, in Athenaeum Press; The Ballad Book,
edited by Allingham, in Goldern Treasury Series; Gayley and Flaherty's
Poetry of the People (Ginn and Company), etc. See Bibliography on p. 64.

_Defoe_. Robinson Crusoe, school edition, by Ginn and Company; the same in
Pocket Classics, etc.; Journal of the Plague Year, edited by Hurlbut (Ginn
and Company); the same, in Everyman's Library, etc.; Essay on Projects, in
Cassell's National Library.

_The Novelists_. Manly's English Prose; Craik's English Prose Selections,
vol. 4; Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield (see above); Selected Essays of
Fielding, edited by Gerould, in Athenæum Press.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.[218]

_HISTORY_. _Text-book_, Montgomery, pp. 280-322; Cheyney, pp. 516-574.
_General Works_, Greene, ch. 9, sec. 7, to ch. 10, sec. 4; Traill,
Gardiner, Macaulay, etc. _Special Works_, Lecky's History of England in the
Eighteenth Century, vols. 1-3; Morris's The Age of Queen Anne and the Early
Hanoverians (Epochs of Modern History); Seeley's The Expansion of England;
Macaulay's Clive, and Chatham; Thackeray's The Four Georges, and the
English Humorists; Ashton's Social Life in the Reign of Queen Anne; Susan
Hale's Men and Manners of the Eighteenth Century; Sydney's England and the
English in the Eighteenth Century.

_LITERATURE. General Works_. The Cambridge Literature, Taine, Saintsbury,
etc. _Special Works_. Perry's English Literature in the Eighteenth Century;
L. Stephen's English Literature in the Eighteenth Century; Seccombe's The
Age of Johnson; Dennis's The Age of Pope; Gosse's History of English
Literature in the Eighteenth Century; Whitwell's Some Eighteenth Century
Men of Letters (Cowper, Sterne, Fielding, Goldsmith, Gray, Johnson, and
Boswell); Johnson's Eighteenth Century Letters and Letter Writers;
Williams's English Letters and Letter Writers of the Eighteenth Century;
Minto's Manual of English Prose Writers; Clark's Study of English Prose
Writers; Bourne's English Newspapers; J.B. Williams's A History of English
Journalism; L. Stephen's History of English Thought in the Eighteenth
Century.

_The Romantic Revival_. W.L. Phelps's The Beginnings of the English
Romantic Movement; Beers's English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century.

_The Novel_. Raleigh's The English Novel; Simonds's An Introduction to the
Study of English Fiction; Cross's The Development of the English Novel;
Jusserand's The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare; Stoddard's The
Evolution of the English Novel; Warren's The History of the English Novel
previous to the Seventeenth Century; Masson's British Novelists and their
Styles; S. Lanier's The English Novel; Hamilton's the Materials and Methods
of Fiction; Perry's A Study of Prose Fiction.

_Pope_. Texts: Works in Globe Edition, edited by A.W. Ward; in Cambridge
Poets, edited by H.W. Boynton; Satires and Epistles, in Clarendon Press;
Letters, in English Letters and Letter Writers of the Eighteenth Century,
edited by H. Williams (Bell). Life: by Courthope; by L. Stephen (English
Men of Letters Series); by Ward, in Globe Edition; by Johnson, in Lives of
the Poets (Cassell's National Library, etc.). Criticism: Essays, by L.
Stephen, in Hours in a Library; by Lowell, in My Study Windows; by De
Quincey, in Biographical Essays, and in Essays on the Poets; by Thackeray,
in English Humorists; by Sainte-Beuve, in English Portraits. Warton's
Genius and Writings of Pope (interesting chiefly from the historical view
point, as the first definite and extended attack on Pope's writings).

_Swift_. Texts: Works, 19 vols., ed. by Walter Scott (Edinburgh, 1814-
1824); best edition of prose works is edited by T. Scott, with introduction
by Lecky, 12 vols. (Bonn's Library); Selections, edited by Winchester (Ginn
and Company); also in Camelot Series, Carisbrooke Library, etc., Journal to
Stella, (Dutton, also Putnam); Letters, in Eighteenth Century Letters and
Letter Writers, ed. by T.B. Johnson. Life: by L. Stephen (English Men of
Letters); by Collins; by Craik; by J. Forster; by Macaulay; by Walter
Scott; by Johnson, in Lives of the Poets. Criticism: Essays, by Thackeray,
in English Humorists; by A. Dobson, in Eighteenth Century Vignettes; by
Masson, in the Three Devils and Other Essays.

_Addison_. Texts: Works, in Bohn's British Classics; Selections, in
Athenaeum Press, etc. Life: by Lucy Aiken; by Courthope (English Men of
Letters); by Johnson, in Lives of the Poets. Criticism: Essays, by
Macaulay; by Thackeray.

_Steele_. Texts: Selections, edited by Carpenter in Athenaeum Press (Ginn
and Company); various other Selections published by Putnam, Bangs, in
Camelot Series, etc.; Plays, edited by Aitken, in Mermaid Series. Life: by
Aitken; by A. Dobson (English Worthies Series). Criticism: Essays by
Thackeray; by Dobson, in Eighteenth Century Vignettes.

_Johnson_. Texts: Works, edited by Walesby, 11 vols. (Oxford, 1825); the
same, edited by G.B. Hill, in Clarendon Press. Essays, edited by G.B. Hill
(Dent); the same, in Camelot series; Rasselas, various school editions, by
Ginn and Company, Holt, etc.; Selections from Lives of the Poets, with
Macaulay's Life of Johnson, edited by Matthew Arnold (Macmillan). Life:
Boswell's Life of Johnson, in Everyman's Library, Temple Classics, Library
of English Classics, etc.; by L. Stephen (English Men of Letters); by
Grant. Criticism: G.B. Hill's Dr. Johnson, his Friends and Critics; Essays,
by L. Stephen, in Hours in a Library; by Macaulay, Birrell, etc.

_Boswell_. Texts: Life of Johnson, edited by G.B. Hill (London, 1874);
various other editions (see above). Life: by Fitzgerald (London, 1891);
Roger's Boswelliana (London, 1874). Whitfield's Some Eighteenth Century Men
of Letters.

_Burke_. Texts: Works, 12 vols. (Boston, 1871); reprinted, 6 vols., in
Bohn's Library; Selected Works, edited by Payne, in Clarendon Press; On the
Sublime and Beautiful, in Temple Classics. For various speeches, see
Selections for Reading, above. Life: by Prior; by Morley (English Men of
Letters). Criticism: Essay, by Birrell, in Obiter Dicta. See also Dowden's
French Revolution and English Literature, and Woodrow Wilson's Mere
Literature.

_Gibbon_. Texts: Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, edited by Bury, 7
vols. (London, 1896-1900); various other editions; The Student's Gibbon,
abridged (Murray); Memoirs, edited by Emerson, in Athenaeum Press (Ginn and
Company). Life: by Morison (English Men of Letters). Criticism: Essays, by
Birrell, in Collected Essays and Res Judicatae; by Stephen, in Studies of a
Biographer; by Robertson, in Pioneer Humanists; by Frederick Harrison, in
Ruskin and Other Literary Estimates; by Bagehot, in Literary Studies; by
Sainte-Beuve, in English Portraits. See also Anton's Masters in History.

_Sheridan_. Texts: Speeches, 5 vols. (London, 1816); Plays, edited by W.F.
Rae (London, 1902); the same, edited by R. Dircks, in Camelot Series; Major
Dramas, in Athenaeum Press; Plays also in Morley's Universal Library,
Macmillan's English Classics, etc. Life: by Rae; by M. Oliphant (English
Men of Letters); by L. Sanders (Great Writers).

_Gray_. Texts: Works, edited by Gosse (Macmillan); Poems, in Routledge's
Pocket Library, Chandos Classics, etc.; Selections, in Athenaeum Press,
etc.; Letters, edited by D.C. Tovey (Bohn). Life: by Gosse (English Men of
Letters). Criticism: Essays, by Lowell, in Latest Literary Essays; by M.
Arnold, in Essays in Criticism; by L. Stephen, in Hours in a Library; by A.
Dobson, in Eighteenth Century Vignettes.

_Goldsmith_. Texts: edited by Masson, Globe edition; Works, edited by Aiken
and Tuckerman (Crowell); the same, edited by A. Dobson (Dent); Morley's
Universal Library; Arber's The Goldsmith Anthology (Frowde). See also
Selections for Reading, above. Life: by Washington Irving; by A. Dobson
(Great Writer's Series); by Black (English Men of Letters); by J. Forster;
by Prior. Criticism: Essays, by Macaulay; by Thackeray; by De Quincey; by
A. Dobson, in Miscellanies.

_Cowper_. Texts: Works, Globe and Aldine editions; also in Chandos
Classics; Selections, in Athenasum Press, Canterbury Poets, etc. The
Correspondence of William Cowper, edited by T. Wright, 4 vols. (Dodd, Mead
& Company). Life: by Goldwin Smith (English Men of Letters); by Wright; by
Southey. Criticism: Essays, by L. Stephen; by Bagehot; by Sainte-Beuve; by
Birrell; by Stopford Brooke; by A. Dobson (see above). See also Woodberry's
Makers of Literature.

_Burns_. Texts: Works, Cambridge Poets Edition (containing Henley's Study
of Burns), Globe and Aldine editions, Clarendon Press, Canterbury Poets,
etc.; Selections, in Athenaeum Press, etc.; Letters, in Camelot Series.
Life: by Cunningham; by Henley; by Setoun; by Blackie (Great Writers); by
Shairp (English Men of Letters). Criticism: Essays, by Carlyle; by R.L.
Stevenson, in Familiar Studies; by Hazlitt, in Lectures on the English
Poets; by Stopford Brooke, in Theology in the English Poets; by J. Forster,
in Great Teachers.

_Blake_. Texts: Poems, Aldine edition; also in Canterbury Poets; Complete
Works, edited by Ellis and Yeats (London, 1893); Selections, edited by W.B.
Yeats, in the Muses' Library (Dutton); Letters, with Life by F. Tatham,
edited by A.G.B. Russell (Scribner's, 1896). Life: by Gilchrist; by Story;
by Symons. Criticism: Swinburne's William Blake, a Critical Study; Ellis's
The Real Blake (McClure, 1907); Elizabeth Cary's The Art of William Blake
(Moffat, Yard & Company, 1907). Essay, by A.C. Benson, in Essays.

_Thomson_. Texts: Works, Aldine edition; The Seasons, and Castle of
Indolence, in Clarendon Press, etc. Life: by Bayne; by G.B. Macaulay
(English Men of Letters). Essay, by Hazlitt, in Lectures on the English
Poets.

_Collins_. Works, edited by Bronson, in Athenaeum Press; also in Aldine
edition. Life: by Johnson, in Lives of the Poets. Essay, by Swinburne, in
Miscellanies. See also Beers's English Romanticism in the Eighteenth
Century.

_Crabbe_. Works, with memoir by his son, G. Crabbe, 8 vols. (London,
1834-1835); Poems, edited by A.W. Ward, 3 vols., in Cambridge English
Classics (Cambridge, 1905); Selections, in Temple Classics, Canterbury
Poets, etc. Life: by Kebbel (Great Writers); by Ainger (English Men of
Letters). Essays, by L. Stephen, in Hours in a Library; by Woodberry, in
Makers of Literature; by Saintsbury, in Essays in English Literature; by
Courthope, in Ward's English Poets; by Edward Fitzgerald, in Miscellanies;
by Hazlitt, in Spirit of the Age.

_Macpherson_. Texts: Ossian, in Canterbury Poets; Poems, translated by
Macpherson, edited by Todd (London, 1888). Life and Letters, edited by
Saunders (London, 1894). Criticism: J.S. Smart's James Macpherson (Nutt,
1905). See also Beers's English Romanticism. For relation of Macpherson's
work to the original Ossian, see Dean of Lismore's Book, edited by
MacLauchlan (Edinburgh, 1862); also Poems of Ossian, translated by Clerk
(Edinburgh, 1870).

_Chatterton_. Works, edited by Skeat (London, 1875); Poems, in Canterbury
Poets. Life: by Russell; by Wilson; Masson's Chatterton, a Biography.
Criticism: C.E. Russell's Thomas Chatterton (Moffatt, Yard & Company);
Essays, by Watts-Dunton, in Ward's English Poets; by Masson, in Essays
Biographical and Critical. See also Beers's English Romanticism.

_Percy_. Reliques, edited by Wheatley (London, 1891); the same, in
Everyman's Library, Chandos Classics, etc. Essay, by J.W. Hales, Revival of
Ballad Poetry, in Folia Literaria. See also Beers's English Romanticism,
etc. (Special works, above.)

_Defoe_. Texts: Romances and Narratives, edited by Aitken (Dent); Poems and
Pamphlets, in Arber's English Garner, vol. 8; school editions of Robinson
Crusoe, and Journal of the Plague Year (Ginn and Company, etc.); Captain
Singleton, and Memoirs of a Cavalier, in Everyman's Library; Early
Writings, in Carisbrooke Library (Routledge). Life: by W. Lee; by Minto
(English Men of Letters); by Wright; also in Westminster Biographies
(Small, Maynard). Essay, by L. Stephen, in Hours in a Library.

_Richardson_. Works: edited by L. Stephen (London, 1883); edited by
Philips, with life (New York, 1901); Correspondence, edited by A. Barbauld,
6 vols. (London, 1804). Life: by Thomson; by A. Dobson. Essays, by L.
Stephen, in Hours in a Library; by A. Dobson, in Eighteenth Century
Vignettes.

_Fielding_. Works: Temple Edition, edited by Saintsbury (Dent); Selected
Essays, in Athenaeum Press; Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, in Cassell's
National Library. Life: by Dobson (English Men of Letters); Lawrence's Life
and Times of Fielding. Essays, by Lowell; by Thackeray; by L. Stephen; by
A. Dobson (see above); by G.B. Smith, in Poets and Novelists.

_Smollett_. Works, edited by Saintsbury (London, 1895); Works, edited by
Henley (Scribner). Life: by Hannah (Great Writers); by Smeaton; by
Chambers. Essays, by Thackeray; by Henley; by Dobson, in Eighteenth Century
Vignettes.

_Sterne_. Works: edited by Saintsbury (Dent); Tristram Shandy, and A
Sentimental Journey, in Temple Classics, Morley's Universal Library, etc.
Life: by Fitzgerald; by Traill (English Men of Letters); Life and Times, by
W.L. Cross (Macmillan). Essays, by Thackeray; by Bagehot, in Literary
Studies.

_Horace Walpole_. Texts: Castle of Otranto, in King's Classics, Cassell's
National Library, etc. Letters, edited by C.D. Yonge. Morley's Walpole, in
Twelve English Statesmen (Macmillan). Essay, by L. Stephen, in Hours in a
Library. See also Beers's English Romanticism.

_Frances Burney_ (Madame d'Arblay). Texts: Evelina, in Temple Classics, 2
vols. (Macmillan). Diary and Letters, edited by S.C. Woolsey. Seeley's
Fanny Burney and her Friends. Essay, by Macaulay.


SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS. 1. Describe briefly the social development of the
eighteenth century. What effect did this have on literature? What accounts
for the prevalence of prose? What influence did the first newspapers exert
on life and literature? How do the readers of this age compare with those
of the Age of Elizabeth?

2. How do you explain the fact that satire was largely used in both prose
and poetry? Name the principal satires of the age. What is the chief object
of satire? of literature? How do the two objects conflict?

3. What is the meaning of the term "classicism," as applied to the
literature of this age? Did the classicism of Johnson, for instance, have
any relation to classic literature in its true sense? Why is this period
called the Augustan Age? Why was Shakespeare not regarded by this age as a
classical writer?

4. _Pope_. In what respect is Pope a unique writer? Tell briefly the story
of his life. What are his principal works? How does he reflect the critical
spirit of his age? What are the chief characteristics of his poetry? What
do you find to copy in his style? What is lacking in his poetry? Compare
his subjects with those of Burns of Tennyson or Milton, for instance. How
would Chaucer or Burns tell the story of the Rape of the Lock? What
similarity do you find between Pope's poetry and Addison's prose?

5. _Swift_. What is the general character of Swift's work? Name his chief
satires. What is there to copy in his style? Does he ever strive for
ornament or effect in writing? Compare Swift's _Gulliver's Travels_ with
Defoe's _Robinson Crusoe_, in style, purpose of writing, and interest. What
resemblances do you find in these two contemporary writers? Can you explain
the continued popularity of _Gulliver's Travels_?

6. _Addison and Steele_. What great work did Addison and Steele do for
literature? Make a brief comparison between these two men, having in mind
their purpose, humor, knowledge of life, and human sympathy, as shown, for
instance, in No. 112 and No. 2 of the Spectator Essays. Compare their humor
with that of Swift. How is their work a preparation for the novel?

7. _Johnson_. For what is Dr. Johnson famous in literature? Can you explain
his great influence? Compare his style with that of Swift or Defoe. What
are the remarkable elements in Boswell's _Life of Johnson_? Write a
description of an imaginary meeting of Johnson, Goldsmith, and Boswell in a
coffeehouse.

8. _Burke_. For what is Burke remarkable? What great objects influenced him
in the three periods of his life? Why has he been called a romantic poet
who speaks in prose? Compare his use of imagery with that of other writers
of the period. What is there to copy and what is there to avoid in his
style? Can you trace the influence of Burke's American speeches on later
English politics? What similarities do you find between Burke and Milton,
as revealed in their prose works?

9. _Gibbon_. For what is Gibbon "worthy to be remembered"? Why does he mark
an epoch in historical writing? What is meant by the scientific method of
writing history? Compare Gibbon's style with that of Johnson. Contrast it
with that of Swift, and also with that of some modern historian, Parkman,
for example.

10. What is meant by the term "romanticism?" What are its chief
characteristics? How does it differ from classicism? Illustrate the meaning
from the work of Gray, Cowper, or Burns. Can you explain the prevalence of
melancholy in romanticism?

11. _Gray_. What are the chief works of Gray? Can you explain the continued
popularity of his "Elegy"? What romantic elements are found in his poetry?
What resemblances and what differences do you find in the works of Gray and
of Goldsmith?

12. _Goldsmith_. Tell the story of Goldsmith's life. What are his chief
works? Show from _The Deserted Village_ the romantic and the so-called
classic elements in his work. What great work did he do for the early
novel, in _The Vicar of Wakefield_? Can you explain the popularity of _She
Stoops to Conquer_? Name some of Goldsmith's characters who have found a
permanent place in our literature. What personal reminiscences have you
noted in _The Traveller_, _The Deserted Village_, and _She Stoops to
Conquer_?

13. _Cowper_. Describe Cowper's _The Task_. How does it show the romantic
spirit? Give passages from "John Gilpin" to illustrate Cowper's humor.

14. _Burns_. Tell the story of Burns's life. Some one has said, "The
measure of a man's sin is the difference between what he is and what he
might be." Comment upon this, with reference to Burns. What is the general
character of his poetry? Why is he called the poet of common men? What
subjects does he choose for his poetry? Compare him, in this respect, with
Pope. What elements in the poet's character are revealed in such poems as
"To a Mouse" and "To a Mountain Daisy"? How do Burns and Gray regard
nature? What poems show his sympathy with the French Revolution, and with
democracy? Read "The Cotter's Saturday Night," and explain its enduring
interest. Can you explain the secret of Burns's great popularity?

15. _Blake_. What are the characteristics of Blake's poetry? Can you
explain why Blake, though the greatest poetic genius of the age, is so
little appreciated?

16. _Percy_. In what respect did Percy's _Reliques_ influence the romantic
movement? What are the defects in his collection of ballads? Can you
explain why such a crude poem as "Chevy Chase" should be popular with an
age that delighted in Pope's "Essay on Man"?

17. _Macpherson_. What is meant by Macpherson's "Ossian"? Can you account
for the remarkable success of the Ossianic forgeries?

18. _Chatterton_. Tell the story of Chatterton and the Rowley Poems. Read
Chatterton's "Bristowe Tragedie," and compare it, in style and interest,
with the old ballads, like "The Battle of Otterburn" or "The Hunting of the
Cheviot" (all in Manly's _English Poetry_).

19. _The First Novelists_. What is meant by the modern novel? How does it
differ from the early romance and from the adventure story? What are some
of the precursors of the novel? What was the purpose of stories modeled
after _Don Quixote_? What is the significance of _Pamela_? What elements
did Fielding add to the novel? What good work did Goldsmith's _Vicar of
Wakefield_ accomplish? Compare Goldsmith, in this respect, with Steele and
Addison.


                              CHRONOLOGY
            _End of Seventeenth and the Eighteenth Century_
============================================================================
  HISTORY                           |  LITERATURE
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
1689. William and Mary              | 1683-1719. Defoe's early writings
      Bill of Rights.               |
      Toleration Act                |
                                    | 1695. Press made free
1700(?) Beginning of London clubs   |
1702. Anne (d. 1714)                |
      War of Spanish Succession     |
                                    | 1702. First daily newspaper
1704. Battle of Blenheim            | 1704. Addison's The Campaign
                                    |       Swift's Tale of a Tub
1707. Union of England and Scotland |
                                    | 1709. The Tatler
                                    |       Johnson born (d. 1784)
                                    | 1710-1713. Swift in London. Journal
                                    |       to Stella
                                    | 1711. The Spectator
                                    | 1712. Pope's Rape of the Lock
1714. George I (d. 1727)            |
                                    | 1719. Robinson Crusoe
1721. Cabinet government, Walpole   |
      first prime minister          |
                                    | 1726. Gulliver's Travels
                                    | 1726-1730. Thomson's The Seasons
1727. George II (d. 1760)           |
                                    | 1732-1734. Essay on Man
1738. Rise of Methodism             |
                                    | 1740. Richardson's Pamela
1740. War of Austrian Succession    |
                                    | 1742. Fielding's Joesph Andrews
1746. Jacobite Rebellion            |
                                    | 1749. Fielding's Tom Jones
                                    | 1750-1752. Johnson's The Rambler
1750-1757. Conquest of India        | 1751. Gray's Elegy
                                    | 1755. Johnson's Dictionary
1756. War with France               |
1759. Wolf at Quebec                |
1760. George III (d. 1820)          | 1760-1767. Sterne's Tristram Shandy
                                    | 1764. Johnson's Literary Club
1765. Stamp Act                     | 1765. Percy's Reliques
                                    | 1766. Goldsmith's Vicar of
                                    |       Wakefield
                                    |
                                    | 1770. Goldsmith's Deserted Village
                                    | 1771. Beginning of great newspapers
1773. Boston Tea Party              |
1774. Howard's prison reforms       | 1774-1775. Burke's American speeches
1775. American Revolution           | 1776-1788. Gibbon's Rome
1776. Declaration of Independence   | 1779. Cowper's Olney Hymns
                                    | 1779-81. Johnson's Lives of the Poets
1783. Treaty of Paris               | 1783. Blake's Poetical Sketches
                                    | 1785. Cowper's The Task
                                    |       The London Times
1786. Trial of Warren Hastings      |
                                    | 1786. Burns's first poems (the
                                    |       Kilmarnock Burns)
                                    |       Burke's Warren Hastings
1789-1799. French Revolution        |
                                    | 1790. Burke's French Revolution
                                    | 1791. Boswell's Life of Johnson
1793. War with France               |
============================================================================


       *       *       *       *       *



CHAPTER X

THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM (1800-1850)


THE SECOND CREATIVE PERIOD OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

The first half of the nineteenth century records the triumph of Romanticism
in literature and of democracy in government; and the two movements are so
closely associated, in so many nations and in so many periods of history,
that one must wonder if there be not some relation of cause and effect
between them. Just as we understand the tremendous energizing influence of
Puritanism in the matter of English liberty by remembering that the common
people had begun to read, and that their book was the Bible, so we may
understand this age of popular government by remembering that the chief
subject of romantic literature was the essential nobleness of common men
and the value of the individual. As we read now that brief portion of
history which lies between the Declaration of Independence (1776) and the
English Reform Bill of 1832, we are in the presence of such mighty
political upheavals that "the age of revolution" is the only name by which
we can adequately characterize it. Its great historic movements become
intelligible only when we read what was written in this period; for the
French Revolution and the American commonwealth, as well as the
establishment of a true democracy in England by the Reform Bill, were the
inevitable results of ideas which literature had spread rapidly through the
civilized world. Liberty is fundamentally an ideal; and that
ideal--beautiful, inspiring, compelling, as a loved banner in the wind--was
kept steadily before men's minds by a multitude of books and pamphlets as
far apart as Burns's _Poems_ and Thomas Paine's _Rights of Man_,--all read
eagerly by the common people, all proclaiming the dignity of common life,
and all uttering the same passionate cry against every form of class or
caste oppression.

First the dream, the ideal in some human soul; then the written word which
proclaims it, and impresses other minds with its truth and beauty; then the
united and determined effort of men to make the dream a reality,--that
seems to be a fair estimate of the part that literature plays, even in our
political progress.

HISTORICAL SUMMARY. The period we are considering begins in the latter half
of the reign of George III and ends with the accession of Victoria in 1837.
When on a foggy morning in November, 1783, King George entered the House of
Lords and in a trembling voice recognized the independence of the United
States of America, he unconsciously proclaimed the triumph of that free
government by free men which had been the ideal of English literature for
more than a thousand years; though it was not till 1832, when the Reform
Bill became the law of the land, that England herself learned the lesson
taught her by America, and became the democracy of which her writers had
always dreamed.

The half century between these two events is one of great turmoil, yet of
steady advance in every department of English life. The storm center of the
political unrest was the French Revolution, that frightful uprising which
proclaimed the natural rights of man and the abolition of class
distinctions. Its effect on the whole civilized world is beyond
computation. Patriotic clubs and societies multiplied in England, all
asserting the doctrine of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, the watchwords of
the Revolution. Young England, led by Pitt the younger, hailed the new
French republic and offered it friendship; old England, which pardons no
revolutions but her own, looked with horror on the turmoil in France and,
misled by Burke and the nobles of the realm, forced the two nations into
war. Even Pitt saw a blessing in this at first; because the sudden zeal for
fighting a foreign nation--which by some horrible perversion is generally
called patriotism--might turn men's thoughts from their own to their
neighbors' affairs, and so prevent a threatened revolution at home.

The causes of this threatened revolution were not political but economic.
By her invention in steel and machinery, and by her monopoly of the
carrying trade, England had become the workshop of the world. Her wealth
had increased beyond her wildest dreams; but the unequal distribution of
that wealth was a spectacle to make angels weep. The invention of machinery
at first threw thousands of skilled hand workers out of employment; in
order to protect a few agriculturists, heavy duties were imposed on corn
and wheat, and bread rose to famine prices just when laboring men had the
least money to pay for it. There followed a curious spectacle. While
England increased in wealth, and spent vast sums to support her army and
subsidize her allies in Europe, and while nobles, landowners,
manufacturers, and merchants lived in increasing luxury, a multitude of
skilled laborers were clamoring for work. Fathers sent their wives and
little children into the mines and factories, where sixteen hours' labor
would hardly pay for the daily bread; and in every large city were riotous
mobs made up chiefly of hungry men and women. It was this unbearable
economic condition, and not any political theory, as Burke supposed, which
occasioned the danger of another English revolution.

It is only when we remember these conditions that we can understand two
books, Adam Smith's _Wealth of Nations_ and Thomas Paine's _Rights of Man_,
which can hardly be considered as literature, but which exercised an
enormous influence in England. Smith was a Scottish thinker, who wrote to
uphold the doctrine that labor is the only source of a nation's wealth, and
that any attempt to force labor into unnatural channels, or to prevent it
by protective duties from freely obtaining the raw materials for its
industry, is unjust and destructive. Paine was a curious combination of
Jekyll and Hyde, shallow and untrustworthy personally, but with a
passionate devotion to popular liberty. His _Rights of Man_ published in
London in 1791, was like one of Burns's lyric outcries against institutions
which oppressed humanity. Coming so soon after the destruction of the
Bastille, it added fuel to the flames kindled in England by the French
Revolution. The author was driven out of the country, on the curious ground
that he endangered the English constitution, but not until his book had
gained a wide sale and influence.

All these dangers, real and imaginary, passed away when England turned from
the affairs of France to remedy her own economic conditions. The long
Continental war came to an end with Napoleon's overthrow at Waterloo, in
1815; and England, having gained enormously in prestige abroad, now turned
to the work of reform at home. The destruction of the African slave trade;
the mitigation of horribly unjust laws, which included poor debtors and
petty criminals in the same class; the prevention of child labor; the
freedom of the press; the extension of manhood suffrage; the abolition of
restrictions against Catholics in Parliament; the establishment of hundreds
of popular schools, under the leadership of Andrew Bell and Joseph
Lancaster,--these are but a few of the reforms which mark the progress of
civilization in a single half century. When England, in 1833, proclaimed
the emancipation of all slaves in all her colonies, she unconsciously
proclaimed her final emancipation from barbarism.

LITERARY CHARACTERISTICS OF THE AGE. It is intensely interesting to note
how literature at first reflected the political turmoil of the age; and
then, when the turmoil was over and England began her mighty work of
reform, how literature suddenly developed a new creative spirit, which
shows itself in the poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats,
and in the prose of Scott, Jane Austen, Lamb, and De Quincey,--a wonderful
group of writers, whose patriotic enthusiasm suggests the Elizabethan days,
and whose genius has caused their age to be known as the second creative
period of our literature. Thus in the early days, when old institutions
seemed crumbling with the Bastille, Coleridge and Southey formed their
youthful scheme of a "Pantisocracy on the banks of the Susquehanna,"--an
ideal commonwealth, in which the principles of More's _Utopia_ should be
put in practice. Even Wordsworth, fired with political enthusiasm, could
write,

    Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
    But to be young was very heaven.

The essence of Romanticism was, it must be remembered, that literature must
reflect all that is spontaneous and unaffected in nature and in man, and be
free to follow its own fancy in its own way. We have already noted this
characteristic in the work of the Elizabethan dramatists, who followed
their own genius in opposition to all the laws of the critics. In Coleridge
we see this independence expressed in "Kubla Khan" and "The Ancient
Mariner," two dream pictures, one of the populous Orient, the other of the
lonely sea. In Wordsworth this literary independence led him inward to the
heart of common things. Following his own instinct, as Shakespeare does, he
too

    Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
    Sermons in stones, and good in everything.

And so, more than any other writer of the age, he invests the common life
of nature, and the souls of common men and women, with glorious
significance. These two poets, Coleridge and Wordsworth, best represent the
romantic genius of the age in which they lived, though Scott had a greater
literary reputation, and Byron and Shelley had larger audiences.

The second characteristic of this age is that it is emphatically an age of
poetry. The previous century, with its practical outlook on life, was
largely one of prose; but now, as in the Elizabethan Age, the young
enthusiasts turned as naturally to poetry as a happy man to singing. The
glory of the age is in the poetry of Scott, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron,
Shelley, Keats, Moore, and Southey. Of its prose works, those of Scott
alone have attained a very wide reading, though the essays of Charles Lamb
and the novels of Jane Austen have slowly won for their authors a secure
place in the history of our literature. Coleridge and Southey (who with
Wordsworth form the trio of so-called Lake Poets) wrote far more prose than
poetry; and Southey's prose is much better than his verse. It was
characteristic of the spirit of this age, so different from our own, that
Southey could say that, in order to earn money, he wrote in verse "what
would otherwise have been better written in prose."

It was during this period that woman assumed, for the first time, an
important place in our literature. Probably the chief reason for this
interesting phenomenon lies in the fact that woman was for the first time
given some slight chance of education, of entering into the intellectual
life of the race; and as is always the case when woman is given anything
like a fair opportunity she responded magnificently. A secondary reason may
be found in the nature of the age itself, which was intensely emotional.
The French Revolution stirred all Europe to its depths, and during the
following half century every great movement in literature, as in politics
and religion, was characterized by strong emotion; which is all the more
noticeable by contrast with the cold, formal, satiric spirit of the early
eighteenth century. As woman is naturally more emotional than man, it may
well be that the spirit of this emotional age attracted her, and gave her
the opportunity to express herself in literature.

As all strong emotions tend to extremes, the age produced a new type of
novel which seems rather hysterical now, but which in its own day delighted
multitudes of readers whose nerves were somewhat excited, and who reveled
in "bogey" stories of supernatural terror. Mrs. Anne Radcliffe (1764-1823)
was one of the most successful writers of this school of exaggerated
romance. Her novels, with their azure-eyed heroines, haunted castles,
trapdoors, bandits, abductions, rescues in the nick of time, and a general
medley of overwrought joys and horrors,[219] were immensely popular, not
only with the crowd of novel readers, but also with men of unquestioned
literary genius, like Scott and Byron.

In marked contrast to these extravagant stories is the enduring work of
Jane Austen, with her charming descriptions of everyday life, and of Maria
Edgeworth, whose wonderful pictures of Irish life suggested to Walter Scott
the idea of writing his Scottish romances. Two other women who attained a
more or less lasting fame were Hannah More, poet, dramatist, and novelist,
and Jane Porter, whose _Scottish Chiefs_ and _Thaddeus of Warsaw_ are still
in demand in our libraries. Beside these were Fanny Burney (Madame
D'Arblay) and several other writers whose works, in the early part of the
nineteenth century, raised woman to the high place in literature which she
has ever since maintained.

In this age literary criticism became firmly established by the appearance
of such magazines as the _Edinburgh Review_ (18O2), _The Quarterly Review_
(1808), _Blackwood's Magazine_ (1817), the _Westminster Review_ (1824),
_The Spectator_ (1828), _The Athenæum_ (1828), and _Fraser's Magazine_
(1830). These magazines, edited by such men as Francis Jeffrey, John Wilson
(who is known to us as Christopher North), and John Gibson Lockhart, who
gave us the _Life of Scott_, exercised an immense influence on all
subsequent literature. At first their criticisms were largely destructive,
as when Jeffrey hammered Scott, Wordsworth, and Byron most unmercifully;
and Lockhart could find no good in either Keats or Tennyson; but with added
wisdom, criticism assumed its true function of construction. And when these
magazines began to seek and to publish the works of unknown writers, like
Hazlitt, Lamb, and Leigh Hunt, they discovered the chief mission of the
modern magazine, which is to give every writer of ability the opportunity
to make his work known to the world.


I. THE POETS OF ROMANTICISM

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH (1770-1850)

It was in 1797 that the new romantic movement in our literature assumed
definite form. Wordsworth and Coleridge retired to the Quantock Hills,
Somerset, and there formed the deliberate purpose to make literature
"adapted to interest mankind permanently," which, they declared, classic
poetry could never do. Helping the two poets was Wordsworth's sister
Dorothy, with a woman's love for flowers and all beautiful things; and a
woman's divine sympathy for human life even in its lowliest forms. Though a
silent partner, she furnished perhaps the largest share of the inspiration
which resulted in the famous _Lyrical Ballads_ of 1798. In their
partnership Coleridge was to take up the "supernatural, or at least
romantic"; while Wordsworth was "to give the charm of novelty to things of
everyday ... by awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom
and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us."
The whole spirit of their work is reflected in two poems of this remarkable
little volume, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," which is Coleridge's
masterpiece, and "Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey," which
expresses Wordsworth's poetical creed, and which is one of the noblest and
most significant of our poems. That the _Lyrical Ballads_ attracted no
attention,[220] and was practically ignored by a public that would soon go
into raptures over Byron's _Childe Harold_ and _Don Juan_, is of small
consequence. Many men will hurry a mile to see skyrockets, who never notice
Orion and the Pleiades from their own doorstep. Had Wordsworth and
Coleridge written only this one little book, they would still be among the
representative writers of an age that proclaimed the final triumph of
Romanticism.

LIFE OF WORDSWORTH. To understand the life of him who, in Tennyson's words,
"uttered nothing base," it is well to read first _The Prelude_, which
records the impressions made upon Wordsworth's mind from his earliest
recollection until his full manhood, in 1805, when the poem was
completed.[221] Outwardly his long and uneventful life divides itself
naturally into four periods: (1) his childhood and youth, in the Cumberland
Hills, from 1770 to 1787; (2) a period of uncertainty, of storm and stress,
including his university life at Cambridge, his travels abroad, and his
revolutionary experience, from 1787 to 1797; (3) a short but significant
period of finding himself and his work, from 1797 to 1799; (4) a long
period of retirement in the northern lake region, where he was born, and
where for a full half century he lived so close to nature that her
influence is reflected in all his poetry. When one has outlined these four
periods he has told almost all that can be told of a life which is marked,
not by events, but largely by spiritual experiences.

Wordsworth was born in 1770 at Cockermouth, Cumberland, where the Derwent,

          Fairest of all rivers, loved
    To blend his murmurs with my nurse's song,
    And from his alder shades and rocky falls,
    And from his fords and shallows, sent a voice
    That flowed along my dreams.

It is almost a shock to one who knows Wordsworth only by his calm and noble
poetry to read that he was of a moody and violent temper, and that his
mother despaired of him alone among her five children. She died when he was
but eight years old, but not till she had exerted an influence which lasted
all his life, so that he could remember her as "the heart of all our
learnings and our loves." The father died some six years later, and the
orphan was taken in charge by relatives, who sent him to school at
Hawkshead, in the beautiful lake region. Here, apparently, the unroofed
school of nature attracted him more than the discipline of the classics,
and he learned more eagerly from the flowers and hills and stars than from
his books; but one must read Wordsworth's own record, in _The Prelude_, to
appreciate this. Three things in this poem must impress even the casual
reader: first, Wordsworth loves to be alone, and is never lonely, with
nature; second, like every other child who spends much time alone in the
woods and fields, he feels the presence of some living spirit, real though
unseen, and companionable though silent; third, his impressions are exactly
like our own, and delightfully familiar. When he tells of the long summer
day spent in swimming, basking in the sun, and questing over the hills; or
of the winter night when, on his skates, he chased the reflection of a star
in the black ice; or of his exploring the lake in a boat, and getting
suddenly frightened when the world grew big and strange,--in all this he is
simply recalling a multitude of our own vague, happy memories of childhood.
He goes out into the woods at night to tend his woodcock snares; he runs
across another boy's snares, follows them, finds a woodcock caught, takes
it, hurries away through the night. And then,

    I heard among the solitary hills
    Low breathings coming after me, and sounds
    Of undistinguishable motion.

That is like a mental photograph. Any boy who has come home through the
woods at night will recognize it instantly. Again he tells as of going
bird's-nesting on the cliffs:

            Oh, when I have hung
    Above the raven's nest, by knots of grass
    And half-inch fissures in the slippery rock
    But ill-sustained, and almost (so it seemed)
    Suspended by the blast that blew amain,
    Shouldering the naked crag,--oh, at that time,
    While on the perilous ridge I hung alone,
    With what strange utterance did the loud dry wind
    Blow through my ear! The sky seemed not a sky
    Of earth,--and with what motion moved the clouds!

No man can read such records without finding his own boyhood again, and his
own abounding joy of life, in the poet's early impressions.

The second period of Wordsworth's life begins with his university course at
Cambridge, in 1787. In the third book of _The Prelude_ we find a
dispassionate account of student life, with its trivial occupations, its
pleasures and general aimlessness. Wordsworth proved to be a very ordinary
scholar, following his own genius rather than the curriculum, and looking
forward more eagerly to his vacation among the hills than to his
examinations. Perhaps the most interesting thing in his life at Cambridge
was his fellowship with the young political enthusiasts, whose spirit is
expressed in his remarkable poem on the French Revolution,--a poem which is
better than a volume of history to show the hopes and ambitions that
stirred all Europe in the first days of that mighty upheaval. Wordsworth
made two trips to France, in 1790 and 1791, seeing things chiefly through
the rosy spectacles of the young Oxford Republicans. On his second visit he
joined the Girondists, or the moderate Republicans, and only the decision
of his relatives, who cut off his allowance and hurried him back to
England, prevented his going headlong to the guillotine with the leaders of
his party. Two things rapidly cooled Wordsworth's revolutionary enthusiasm,
and ended the only dramatic interest of his placid life. One was the
excesses of the Revolution itself, and especially the execution of Louis
XVI; the other was the rise of Napoleon, and the slavish adulation accorded
by France to this most vulgar and dangerous of tyrants. His coolness soon
grew to disgust and opposition, as shown by his subsequent poems; and this
brought upon him the censure of Shelley, Byron, and other extremists,
though it gained the friendship of Scott, who from the first had no
sympathy with the Revolution or with the young English enthusiasts.

Of the decisive period of Wordsworth's life, when he was living with his
sister Dorothy and with Coleridge at Alfoxden, we have already spoken. The
importance of this decision to give himself to poetry is evident when we
remember that, at thirty years of age, he was without money or any definite
aim or occupation in life. He considered the law, but confessed he had no
sympathy for its contradictory precepts and practices; he considered the
ministry, but though strongly inclined to the Church, he felt himself not
good enough for the sacred office; once he had wanted to be a soldier and
serve his country, but had wavered at the prospect of dying of disease in a
foreign land and throwing away his life without glory or profit to anybody.
An apparent accident, which looks more to us like a special Providence,
determined his course. He had taken care of a young friend, Raisley
Calvert, who died of consumption and left Wordsworth heir to a few hundred
pounds, and to the request that he should give his life to poetry. It was
this unexpected gift which enabled Wordsworth to retire from the world and
follow his genius. All his life he was poor, and lived in an atmosphere of
plain living and high thinking. His poetry brought him almost nothing in
the way of money rewards, and it was only by a series of happy accidents
that he was enabled to continue his work. One of these accidents was that
he became a Tory, and soon accepted the office of a distributor of stamps,
and was later appointed poet laureate by the government,--which occasioned
Browning's famous but ill-considered poem of "The Lost Leader":

    Just for a handful of silver he left us,
    Just for a riband to stick in his coat.

The last half century of Wordsworth's life, in which he retired to his
beloved lake district and lived successively at Grasmere and Rydal Mount,
remind one strongly of Browning's long struggle for literary recognition.
It was marked by the same steadfast purpose, the same trusted ideal, the
same continuous work, and the same tardy recognition by the public. His
poetry was mercilessly ridiculed by nearly all the magazine critics, who
seized upon the worst of his work as a standard of judgment; and book after
book of poems appeared without meeting any success save the approval of a
few loyal friends. Without doubt or impatience he continued his work,
trusting to the future to recognize and approve it. His attitude here
reminds one strongly of the poor old soldier whom he met in the hills,[222]
who refused to beg or to mention his long service or the neglect of his
country, saying with noble simplicity,

      My trust is in the God of Heaven
    And in the eye of him who passes me.

Such work and patience are certain of their reward, and long before
Wordsworth's death he felt the warm sunshine of general approval. The wave
of popular enthusiasm for Scott and Byron passed by, as their limitations
were recognized; and Wordsworth was hailed by critics as the first living
poet, and one of the greatest that England had ever produced. On the death
of Southey (1843) he was made poet laureate, against his own inclination.
The late excessive praise left him quite as unmoved as the first excessive
neglect. The steady decline in the quality of his work is due not, as might
be expected, to self-satisfaction at success, but rather to his intense
conservatism, to his living too much alone and failing to test his work by
the standards and judgment of other literary men. He died tranquilly in
1850, at the age of eighty years, and was buried in the churchyard at
Grasmere.

Such is the brief outward record of the world's greatest interpreter of
nature's message; and only one who is acquainted with both nature and the
poet can realize how inadequate is any biography; for the best thing about
Wordsworth must always remain unsaid. It is a comfort to know that his
life, noble, sincere, "heroically happy," never contradicted his message.
Poetry was his life; his soul was in all his work; and only by reading what
he has written can we understand the man.

THE POETRY OF WORDSWORTH. There is often a sense of disappointment when one
reads Wordsworth for the first time; and this leads us to speak first of
two difficulties which may easily prevent a just appreciation of the poet's
worth. The first difficulty is in the reader, who is often puzzled by
Wordsworth's absolute simplicity. We are so used to stage effects in
poetry, that beauty unadorned is apt to escape our notice,--like
Wordsworth's "Lucy":

    A violet by a mossy stone,
      Half hidden from the eye;
    Fair as a star, when only one
      Is shining in the sky.

Wordsworth set himself to the task of freeing poetry from all its
"conceits," of speaking the language of simple truth, and of portraying man
and nature as they are; and in this good work we are apt to miss the
beauty, the passion, the intensity, that hide themselves under his simplest
lines. The second difficulty is in the poet, not in the reader. It must be
confessed that Wordsworth is not always melodious; that he is seldom
graceful, and only occasionally inspired. When he is inspired, few poets
can be compared with him; at other times the bulk of his verse is so wooden
and prosy that we wonder how a poet could have written it. Moreover he is
absolutely without humor, and so he often fails to see the small step that
separates the sublime from the ridiculous. In no other way can we explain
"The Idiot Boy," or pardon the serious absurdity of "Peter Bell" and his
grieving jackass.

On account of these difficulties it is well to avoid at first the longer
works and begin with a good book of selections.[223] When we read these
exquisite shorter poems, with their noble lines that live forever in our
memory, we realize that Wordsworth is the greatest poet of nature that our
literature has produced. If we go further, and study the poems that impress
us, we shall find four remarkable characteristics: (1) Wordsworth is
sensitive as a barometer to every subtle change in the world about him. In
_The Prelude_ he compares himself to an æolian harp, which answers with
harmony to every touch of the wind; and the figure is strikingly accurate,
as well as interesting, for there is hardly a sight or a sound, from a
violet to a mountain and from a bird note to the thunder of the cataract,
that is not reflected in some beautiful way in Wordsworth's poetry.

(2) Of all the poets who have written of nature there is none that compares
with him in the truthfulness of his representation. Burns, like Gray, is
apt to read his own emotions into natural objects, so that there is more of
the poet than of nature even in his mouse and mountain daisy; but
Wordsworth gives you the bird and the flower, the wind and the tree and the
river, just as they are, and is content to let them speak their own
message.

(3) No other poet ever found such abundant beauty in the common world. He
had not only sight, but insight, that is, he not only sees clearly and
describes accurately, but penetrates to the heart of things and always
finds some exquisite meaning that is not written on the surface. It is idle
to specify or to quote lines on flowers or stars, on snow or vapor. Nothing
is ugly or commonplace in his world; on the contrary, there is hardly one
natural phenomenon which he has not glorified by pointing out some beauty
that was hidden from our eyes.

(4) It is the _life_ of nature which is everywhere recognized; not mere
growth and cell changes, but sentient, personal life; and the recognition
of this personality in nature characterizes all the world's great poetry.
In his childhood Wordsworth regarded natural objects, the streams, the
hills, the flowers, even the winds, as his companions; and with his mature
belief that all nature is the reflection of the living God, it was
inevitable that his poetry should thrill with the sense of a Spirit that
"rolls through all things." Cowper, Burns, Keats, Tennyson,--all these
poets give you the outward aspects of nature in varying degrees; but
Wordsworth gives you her very life, and the impression of some personal
living spirit that meets and accompanies the man who goes alone through the
woods and fields. We shall hardly find, even in the philosophy of Leibnitz,
or in the nature myths of our Indians, any such impression of living nature
as this poet awakens in us. And that suggests another delightful
characteristic of Wordsworth's poetry, namely, that he seems to awaken
rather than create an impression; he stirs our memory deeply, so that in
reading him we live once more in the vague, beautiful wonderland of our own
childhood.

Such is the philosophy of Wordsworth's nature poetry. If we search now for
his philosophy of human life, we shall find four more doctrines, which rest
upon his basal conception that man is not apart from nature, but is the
very "life of her life." (1) In childhood man is sensitive as a wind harp
to all natural influences; he is an epitome of the gladness and beauty of
the world. Wordsworth explains this gladness and this sensitiveness to
nature by the doctrine that the child comes straight from the Creator of
nature:

    Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
    The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
      Hath had elsewhere its setting,
        And cometh from afar:
      Not in entire forgetfulness
      And not in utter nakedness,
    But trailing clouds of glory do we come
      From God, who is our home.

In this exquisite ode, which he calls "Intimations of Immortality from
Recollections of Early Childhood" (1807), Wordsworth sums up his philosophy
of childhood; and he may possibly be indebted here to the poet Vaughan,
who, more than a century before, had proclaimed in "The Retreat" the same
doctrine. This kinship with nature and with God, which glorifies childhood,
ought to extend through a man's whole life and ennoble it. This is the
teaching of "Tintern Abbey," in which the best part of our life is shown to
be the result of natural influences. According to Wordsworth, society and
the crowded unnatural life of cities tend to weaken and pervert humanity;
and a return to natural and simple living is the only remedy for human
wretchedness.

(2) The natural instincts and pleasures of childhood are the true standards
of a man's happiness in this life. All artificial pleasures soon grow
tiresome. The natural pleasures, which a man so easily neglects in his
work, are the chief means by which we may expect permanent and increasing
joy. In "Tintern Abbey," "The Rainbow," "Ode to Duty," and "Intimations of
Immortality" we see this plain teaching; but we can hardly read one of
Wordsworth's pages without finding it slipped in unobtrusively, like the
fragrance of a wild flower.

(3) The _truth_ of humanity, that is, the common life which labors and loves
and shares the general heritage of smiles and tears, is the only subject of
permanent literary interest. Burns and the early poets of the Revival began
the good work of showing the romantic interest of common life; and
Wordsworth continued it in "Michael," "The Solitary Reaper," "To a Highland
Girl," "Stepping Westward," _The Excursion_, and a score of lesser poems.
Joy and sorrow, not of princes or heroes, but "in widest commonalty
spread," are his themes; and the hidden purpose of many of his poems is to
show that the keynote of all life is happiness,--not an occasional thing,
the result of chance or circumstance, but a heroic thing, to be won, as one
would win any other success, by work and patience.

(4) To this natural philosophy of man Wordsworth adds a mystic element, the
result of his own belief that in every natural object there is a reflection
of the living God. Nature is everywhere transfused and illumined by Spirit;
man also is a reflection of the divine Spirit; and we shall never
understand the emotions roused by a flower or a sunset until we learn that
nature appeals through the eye of man to his inner spirit. In a word,
nature must be "spiritually discerned." In "Tintern Abbey" the spiritual
appeal of nature is expressed in almost every line; but the mystic
conception of man is seen more clearly in "Intimations of Immortality,"
which Emerson calls "the high-water mark of poetry in the nineteenth
century." In this last splendid ode Wordsworth adds to his spiritual
interpretation of nature and man the alluring doctrine of preëxistence,
which has appealed so powerfully to Hindoo and Greek in turn, and which
makes of human life a continuous, immortal thing, without end or beginning.

Wordsworth's longer poems, since they contain much that is prosy and
uninteresting, may well be left till after we have read the odes, sonnets,
and short descriptive poems that have made him famous. As showing a certain
heroic cast of Wordsworth's mind, it is interesting to learn that the
greater part of his work, including _The Prelude_ and _The Excursion_, was
intended for a place in a single great poem, to be called _The Recluse_,
which should treat of nature, man, and society. _The Prelude_, treating of
the growth of a poet's mind, was to introduce the work. The _Home at
Grasmere_, which is the first book of _The Recluse_, was not published till
1888, long after the poet's death. _The Excursion_ (1814) is the second
book of _The Recluse_; and the third was never completed, though Wordsworth
intended to include most of his shorter poems in this third part, and so
make an immense personal epic of a poet's life and work. It is perhaps just
as well that the work remained unfinished. The best of his work appeared in
the _Lyrical Ballads_ (1798) and in the sonnets, odes, and lyrics of the
next ten years; though "The Duddon Sonnets" (1820), "To a Skylark" (1825),
and "Yarrow Revisited" (1831) show that he retained till past sixty much of
his youthful enthusiasm. In his later years, however, he perhaps wrote too
much; his poetry, like his prose, becomes dull and unimaginative; and we
miss the flashes of insight, the tender memories of childhood, and the
recurrence of noble lines--each one a poem--that constitutes the surprise
and the delight of reading Wordsworth.

    The outward shows of sky and earth,
      Of hill and valley, he has viewed;
    And impulses of deeper birth
      Have come to him in solitude.
    In common things that round us lie
      Some random truths he can impart--
    The harvest of a quiet eye
      That broods and sleeps on his own heart.


SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE (1772-1834)

    A grief without a pang, void, dark and drear,
      A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief,
    Which finds no natural outlet, no relief,
      In word, or sigh, or tear.

In the wonderful "Ode to Dejection," from which the above fragment is
taken, we have a single strong impression of Coleridge's whole life,--a
sad, broken, tragic life, in marked contrast with the peaceful existence of
his friend Wordsworth. For himself, during the greater part of his life,
the poet had only grief and remorse as his portion; but for everybody else,
for the audiences that were charmed by the brilliancy of his literary
lectures, for the friends who gathered about him to be inspired by his
ideals and conversation, and for all his readers who found unending delight
in the little volume which holds his poetry, he had and still has a
cheering message, full of beauty and hope and inspiration. Such is
Coleridge, a man of grief who makes the world glad.

LIFE. In 1772 there lived in Ottery St. Mary, Devonshire, a queer little
man, the Rev. John Coleridge, vicar of the parish church and master of the
local grammar school. In the former capacity he preached profound sermons,
quoting to open-mouthed rustics long passages from the Hebrew, which he
told them was the very tongue of the Holy Ghost. In the latter capacity he
wrote for his boys a new Latin grammar, to mitigate some of the
difficulties of traversing that terrible jungle by means of ingenious
bypaths and short cuts. For instance, when his boys found the ablative a
somewhat difficult case to understand, he told them to think of it as the
_quale-quare-quidditive_ case, which of course makes its meaning perfectly
clear. In both these capacities the elder Coleridge was a sincere man,
gentle and kindly, whose memory was "like a religion" to his sons and
daughters. In that same year was born Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the youngest
of thirteen children. He was an extraordinarily precocious child, who could
read at three years of age, and who, before he was five, had read the Bible
and the Arabian Nights, and could remember an astonishing amount from both
books. From three to six he attended a "dame" school; and from six till
nine (when his father died and left the family destitute) he was in his
father's school, learning the classics, reading an enormous quantity of
English books, avoiding novels, and delighting in cumbrous theological and
metaphysical treatises. At ten he was sent to the Charity School of
Christ's Hospital, London, where he met Charles Lamb, who records his
impression of the place and of Coleridge in one of his famous essays.[224]
Coleridge seems to have remained in this school for seven or eight years
without visiting his home,--a poor, neglected boy, whose comforts and
entertainments were all within himself. Just as, when a little child, he
used to wander over the fields with a stick in his hand, slashing the tops
from weeds and thistles, and thinking himself to be the mighty champion of
Christendom against the infidels, so now he would lie on the roof of the
school, forgetting the play of his fellows and the roar of the London
streets, watching the white clouds drifting over and following them in
spirit into all sorts of romantic adventures.

At nineteen this hopeless dreamer, who had read more books than an old
professor, entered Cambridge as a charity student. He remained for nearly
three years, then ran away because of a trifling debt and enlisted in the
Dragoons, where he served several months before he was discovered and
brought back to the university. He left in 1794 without taking his degree;
and presently we find him with the youthful Southey,--a kindred spirit, who
had been fired to wild enthusiasm by the French Revolution,--founding his
famous Pantisocracy for the regeneration of human society. "The Fall of
Robespierre," a poem composed by the two enthusiasts, is full of the new
revolutionary spirit. The Pantisocracy, on the banks of the Susquehanna,
was to be an ideal community, in which the citizens combined farming and
literature; and work was to be limited to two hours each day. Moreover,
each member of the community was to marry a good woman, and take her with
him. The two poets obeyed the latter injunction first, marrying two
sisters, and then found that they had no money to pay even their traveling
expenses to the new Utopia.

During all the rest of his career a tragic weakness of will takes
possession of Coleridge, making it impossible for him, with all his genius
and learning, to hold himself steadily to any one work or purpose. He
studied in Germany; worked as a private secretary, till the drudgery wore
upon his free spirit; then he went to Rome and remained for two years, lost
in study. Later he started _The Friend_, a paper devoted to truth and
liberty; lectured on poetry and the fine arts to enraptured audiences in
London, until his frequent failures to meet his engagements scattered his
hearers; was offered an excellent position and a half interest (amounting
to some £2000) in the _Morning Post_ and _The Courier_, but declined it,
saying "that I would not give up the country and the lazy reading of old
folios for two thousand times two thousand pounds,--in short, that beyond
£350 a year I considered money a real evil." His family, meanwhile, was
almost entirely neglected; he lived apart, following his own way, and the
wife and children were left in charge of his friend Southey. Needing money,
he was on the point of becoming a Unitarian minister, when a small pension
from two friends enabled him to live for a few years without regular
employment.

A terrible shadow in Coleridge's life was the apparent cause of most of his
dejection. In early life he suffered from neuralgia, and to ease the pain
began to use opiates. The result on such a temperament was almost
inevitable. He became a slave to the drug habit; his naturally weak will
lost all its directing and sustaining force, until, after fifteen years of
pain and struggle and despair, he gave up and put himself in charge of a
physician, one Mr. Gillman, of Highgate. Carlyle, who visited him at this
time, calls him "a king of men," but records that "he gave you the idea of
a life that had been full of sufferings, a life heavy-laden,
half-vanquished, still swimming painfully in seas of manifold physical and
other bewilderment."

The shadow is dark indeed; but there are gleams of sunshine that
occasionally break through the clouds. One of these is his association with
Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy, in the Quantock hills, out of which came
the famous _Lyrical Ballads_ of 1798. Another was his loyal devotion to
poetry for its own sake. With the exception of his tragedy _Remorse_, which
through Byron's influence was accepted at Drury Lane Theater, and for which
he was paid £400, he received almost nothing for his poetry. Indeed, he
seems not to have desired it; for he says: "Poetry has been to me its own
exceeding great reward; it has soothed my afflictions; it has multiplied
and refined my enjoyments; it has endeared solitude, and it has given me
the habit of wishing to discover the good and the beautiful in all that
meets and surrounds me." One can better understand his exquisite verse
after such a declaration. A third ray of sunlight came from the admiration
of his contemporaries; for though he wrote comparatively little, he was by
his talents and learning a leader among literary men, and his conversations
were as eagerly listened to as were those of Dr. Johnson. Wordsworth says
of him that, though other men of the age had done some wonderful things,
Coleridge was the only wonderful man he had ever known. Of his lectures on
literature a contemporary says: "His words seem to flow as from a person
repeating with grace and energy some delightful poem." And of his
conversation it is recorded: "Throughout a long-drawn summer's day would
this man talk to you in low, equable but clear and musical tones,
concerning things human and divine; marshalling all history, harmonizing
all experiment, probing the depths of your consciousness, and revealing
visions of glory and terror to the imagination."

The last bright ray of sunlight comes from Coleridge's own soul, from the
gentle, kindly nature which made men love and respect him in spite of his
weaknesses, and which caused Lamb to speak of him humorously as "an
archangel a little damaged." The universal law of suffering seems to be
that it refines and softens humanity; and Coleridge was no exception to the
law. In his poetry we find a note of human sympathy, more tender and
profound than can be found in Wordsworth or, indeed, in any other of the
great English poets. Even in his later poems, when he has lost his first
inspiration and something of the splendid imaginative power that makes his
work equal to the best of Blake's, we find a soul tender, triumphant,
quiet, "in the stillness of a great peace." He died in 1834, and was buried
in Highgate Church. The last stanza of the boatman's song, in _Remorse_,
serves better to express the world's judgment than any epitaph:

    Hark! the cadence dies away
    On the quiet moon-lit sea;
    The boatmen rest their oars and say,
      _Miserere Domini!_

WORKS OF COLERIDGE. The works of Coleridge naturally divide themselves into
three classes,--the poetic, the critical, and the philosophical,
corresponding to the early, the middle, and the later periods of his
career. Of his poetry Stopford Brooke well says: "All that he did
excellently might be bound up in twenty pages, but it should be bound in
pure gold." His early poems show the influence of Gray and Blake,
especially of the latter. When Coleridge begins his "Day Dream" with the
line, "My eyes make pictures when they're shut," we recall instantly
Blake's haunting _Songs of Innocence_. But there is this difference between
the two poets,--in Blake we have only a dreamer; in Coleridge we have the
rare combination of the dreamer and the profound scholar. The quality of
this early poetry, with its strong suggestion of Blake, may be seen in such
poems as "A Day Dream," "The Devil's Thoughts," "The Suicide's Argument,"
and "The Wanderings of Cain." His later poems, wherein we see his
imagination bridled by thought and study, but still running very freely,
may best be appreciated in "Kubla Khan," "Christabel," and "The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner." It is difficult to criticise such poems; one can only
read them and wonder at their melody, and at the vague suggestions which
they conjure up in the mind. "Kubla Khan" is a fragment, painting a
gorgeous Oriental dream picture, such as one might see in an October
sunset. The whole poem came to Coleridge one morning when he had fallen
asleep over Purchas, and upon awakening he began to write hastily,

    In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
    A stately pleasure-dome decree:
    Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
    Through caverns measureless to man
    Down to a sunless sea.

He was interrupted after fifty-four lines were written, and he never
finished the poem.

"Christabel" is also a fragment, which seems to have been planned as the
story of a pure young girl who fell under the spell of a sorcerer, in the
shape of the woman Geraldine. It is full of a strange melody, and contains
many passages of exquisite poetry; but it trembles with a strange, unknown
horror, and so suggests the supernatural terrors of the popular hysterical
novels, to which we have referred. On this account it is not wholesome
reading; though one flies in the face of Swinburne and of other critics by
venturing to suggest such a thing.

"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is Coleridge's chief contribution to the
_Lyrical Ballads_ of 1798, and is one of the world's masterpieces. Though
it introduces the reader to a supernatural realm, with a phantom ship, a
crew of dead men, the overhanging curse of the albatross, the polar spirit,
and the magic breeze, it nevertheless manages to create a sense of absolute
reality concerning these manifest absurdities. All the mechanisms of the
poem, its meter, rime, and melody are perfect; and some of its descriptions
of the lonely sea have never been equaled. Perhaps we should say
suggestions, rather than descriptions; for Coleridge never describes
things, but makes a suggestion, always brief and always exactly right, and
our own imagination instantly supplies the details. It is useless to quote
fragments; one must read the entire poem, if he reads nothing else of the
romantic school of poetry.

Among Coleridge's shorter poems there is a wide variety, and each reader
must be left largely to follow his own taste. The beginner will do well to
read a few of the early poems, to which we have referred, and then try the
"Ode to France," "Youth and Age," "Dejection," "Love Poems," "Fears in
Solitude," "Religious Musings," "Work Without Hope," and the glorious "Hymn
Before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni." One exquisite little poem from the
Latin, "The Virgin's Cradle Hymn," and his version of Schiller's
_Wallenstein_, show Coleridge's remarkable power as a translator. The
latter is one of the best poetical translations in our literature.

Of Coleridge's prose works, the _Biographia, Literaria, or Sketches of My
Literary Life and Opinions_ (1817), his collected _Lectures on Shakespeare_
(1849), and _Aids to Reflection_ (1825) are the most interesting from a
literary view point. The first is an explanation and criticism of
Wordsworth's theory of poetry, and contains more sound sense and
illuminating ideas on the general subject of poetry than any other book in
our language. The _Lectures_, as refreshing as a west wind in midsummer,
are remarkable for their attempt to sweep away the arbitrary rules which
for two centuries had stood in the way of literary criticism of
Shakespeare, in order to study the works themselves. No finer analysis and
appreciation of the master's genius has ever been written. In his
philosophical work Coleridge introduced the idealistic philosophy of
Germany into England. He set himself in line with Berkeley, and squarely
against Bentham, Malthus, Mill, and all the materialistic tendencies which
were and still are the bane of English philosophy. The _Aids to Reflection_
is Coleridge's most profound work, but is more interesting to the student
of religion and philosophy than to the readers of literature.


ROBERT SOUTHEY (1774-1843)

Closely associated with Wordsworth and Coleridge is Robert Southey; and the
three, on account of their residence in the northern lake district, were
referred to contemptuously as the "Lakers" by the Scottish magazine
reviewers. Southey holds his place in this group more by personal
association than by his literary gifts. He was born at Bristol, in 1774;
studied at Westminster School, and at Oxford, where he found himself in
perpetual conflict with the authorities on account of his independent
views. He finally left the university and joined Coleridge in his scheme of
a Pantisocracy. For more than fifty years he labored steadily at
literature, refusing to consider any other occupation. He considered
himself seriously as one of the greatest writers of the day, and a reading
of his ballads--which connected him at once with the romantic school--leads
us to think that, had he written less, he might possibly have justified his
own opinion of himself. Unfortunately he could not wait for inspiration,
being obliged to support not only his own family but also, in large
measure, that of his friend Coleridge.

Southey gradually surrounded himself with one of the most extensive
libraries in England, and set himself to the task of of writing something
every working day. The results of his industry were one hundred and nine
volumes, besides some hundred and fifty articles for the magazines, most of
which are now utterly forgotten. His most ambitious poems are _Thalaba_, a
tale of Arabian enchantment; _The Curse of Kehama_, a medley of Hindoo
mythology; _Madoc_, a legend of a Welsh prince who discovered the western
world; and _Roderick_, a tale of the last of the Goths. All these, and many
more, although containing some excellent passages, are on the whole
exaggerated and unreal, both in manner and in matter. Southey wrote far
better prose than poetry, and his admirable _Life of Nelson_ is still often
read. Besides these are his _Lives of British Admirals_, his lives of
Cowper and Wesley, and his histories of Brazil and of the Peninsular War.

Southey was made Poet Laureate in 1813, and was the first to raise that
office from the low estate into which it had fallen since the death of
Dryden. The opening lines of Thalaba, beginning,

    How beautiful is night!
    A dewy freshness fills the silent air,

are still sometimes quoted; and a few of his best known short poems, like
"The Scholar," "Auld Cloots," "The Well of St. Keyne," "The Inchcape Rock,"
and "Lodore," will repay the curious reader. The beauty of Southey's
character, his patience and helpfulness, make him a worthy associate of the
two greater poets with whom he is generally named.


WALTER SCOTT (1771-1832)

We have already called attention to two significant movements of the
eighteenth century, which we must for a moment recall if we are to
appreciate Scott, not simply as a delightful teller of tales, but as a
tremendous force in modern literature. The first is the triumph of romantic
poetry in Wordsworth and Coleridge; the second is the success of our first
English novelists, and the popularization of literature by taking it from
the control of a few patrons and critics and putting it into the hands of
the people as one of the forces which mold our modern life. Scott is an
epitome of both these movements. The poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge was
read by a select few, but Scott's _Marmion_ and _Lady of the Lake_ aroused
a whole nation to enthusiasm, and for the first time romantic poetry became
really popular. So also the novel had been content to paint men and women
of the present, until the wonderful series of Waverley novels appeared,
when suddenly, by the magic of this "Wizard of the North," all history
seemed changed. The past, which had hitherto appeared as a dreary region of
dead heroes, became alive again, and filled with a multitude of men and
women who had the surprising charm of reality. It is of small consequence
that Scott's poetry and prose are both faulty; that his poems are read
chiefly for the story, rather than for their poetic excellence; and that
much of the evident crudity and barbarism of the Middle Ages is ignored or
forgotten in Scott's writings. By their vigor, their freshness, their rapid
action, and their breezy, out-of-door atmosphere, Scott's novels attracted
thousands of readers who else had known nothing of the delights of
literature. He is, therefore, the greatest known factor in establishing and
in popularizing that romantic element in prose and poetry which has been
for a hundred years the chief characteristic of our literature.

LIFE. Scott was born in Edinburgh, on August 15, 1771. On both his mother's
and father's side he was descended from old Border families, distinguished
more for their feuds and fighting than for their intellectual attainments.
His father was a barrister, a just man, who often lost clients by advising
them to be, first of all, honest in their lawsuits. His mother was a woman
of character and education, strongly imaginative, a teller of tales which
stirred young Walter's enthusiasm by revealing the past as a world of
living heroes.

As a child, Scott was lame and delicate, and was therefore sent away from
the city to be with his grandmother in the open country at Sandy Knowe, in
Roxburghshire, near the Tweed. This grandmother was a perfect treasure-
house of legends concerning the old Border feuds. From her wonderful tales
Scott developed that intense love of Scottish history and tradition which
characterizes all his work.

By the time he was eight years old, when he returned to Edinburgh, Scott's
tastes were fixed for life. At the high school he was a fair scholar, but
without enthusiasm, being more interested in Border stories than in the
text-books. He remained at school only six or seven years, and then entered
his father's office to study law, at the same time attending lectures at
the university. He kept this up for some six years without developing any
interest in his profession, not even when he passed his examinations and
was admitted to the Bar, in 1792. After nineteen years of desultory work,
in which he showed far more zeal in gathering Highland legends than in
gaining clients, he had won two small legal offices which gave him enough
income to support him comfortably. His home, meanwhile, was at Ashestiel on
the Tweed, where all his best poetry was written.

Scott's literary work began with the translation from the German of
Bürger's romantic ballad of _Lenore_ (1796) and of Goethe's _Götz von
Berlichingen_ (1799); but there was romance enough in his own loved
Highlands, and in 1802-1803 appeared three volumes of his _Minstrelsy of
the Scottish Border_, which he had been collecting for many years. In 1805,
when Scott was 34 years old, appeared his first original work, _The Lay of
the Last Minstrel_. Its success was immediate, and when _Marmion_ (1808)
and _The Lady of the Lake_ (1810) aroused Scotland and England to intense
enthusiasm, and brought unexpected fame to the author,--without in the
least spoiling his honest and lovable nature,--Scott gladly resolved to
abandon the law, in which he had won scant success, and give himself wholly
to literature. Unfortunately, however, in order to increase his earnings,
he entered secretly into partnership with the firms of Constable and the
brothers Ballantyne, as printer-publishers,--a sad mistake, indeed, and the
cause of that tragedy which closed the life of Scotland's greatest writer.

The year 1811 is remarkable for two things in Scott's life. In this year he
seems to have realized that, notwithstanding the success of his poems, he
had not yet "found himself"; that he was not a poetic genius, like Burns;
that in his first three poems he had practically exhausted his material,
though he still continued to write verse; and that, if he was to keep his
popularity, he must find some other work. The fact that, only a year later,
Byron suddenly became the popular favorite, shows how correctly Scott had
judged himself and the reading public, which was even more fickle than
usual in this emotional age. In that same year, 1811, Scott bought the
estate of Abbotsford, on the Tweed, with which place his name is forever
associated. Here he began to spend large sums, and to dispense the generous
hospitality of a Scotch laird, of which he had been dreaming for years. In
1820 he was made a baronet; and his new title of Sir Walter came nearer to
turning his honest head than had all his literary success. His business
partnership was kept secret, and during all the years when the Waverley
novels were the most popular books in the world, their authorship remained
unknown; for Scott deemed it beneath the dignity of his title to earn money
by business or literature, and sought to give the impression that the
enormous sums spent at Abbotsford in improving the estate and in
entertaining lavishly were part of the dignity of the position and came
from ancestral sources.

It was the success of Byron's _Childe Harold_, and the comparative failure
of Scott's later poems, _Rokeby_, _The Bridal of Triermain_, and _The Lord
of the Isles_, which led our author into the new field, where he was to be
without a rival. Rummaging through a cabinet one day in search of some
fishing tackle, Scott found the manuscript of a story which he had begun
and laid aside nine years before. He read this old story eagerly, as if it
had been another's work; finished it within three weeks, and published it
without signing his name. The success of this first novel, _Waverley_
(1814), was immediate and unexpected. Its great sales and the general
chorus of praise for its unknown author were without precedent; and when
_Guy Mannering, The Antiquary, Black Dwarf, Old Mortality, Rob Roy_, and
_The Heart of Midlothian_ appeared within the next four years, England's
delight and wonder knew no bounds. Not only at home, but also on the
Continent, large numbers of these fresh and fascinating stories were sold
as fast as they could be printed.

During the seventeen years which followed the appearance of _Waverley_,
Scott wrote on an average nearly two novels per year, creating an unusual
number of characters and illustrating many periods of Scotch, English, and
French history, from the time of the Crusades to the fall of the Stuarts.
In addition to these historical novels, he wrote _Tales of a Grandfather,
Demonology and Witchcraft_, biographies of Dryden and of Swift, the _Life
of Napoleon_, in nine volumes, and a large number of articles for the
reviews and magazines. It was an extraordinary amount of literary work, but
it was not quite so rapid and spontaneous as it seemed. He had been very
diligent in looking up old records, and we must remember that, in nearly
all his poems and novels, Scott was drawing upon a fund of legend,
tradition, history, and poetry, which he had been gathering for forty
years, and which his memory enabled him to produce at will with almost the
accuracy of an encyclopedia.

For the first six years Scott held himself to Scottish history, giving us
in nine remarkable novels the whole of Scotland, its heroism, its superb
faith and enthusiasm, and especially its clannish loyalty to its hereditary
chiefs; giving us also all parties and characters, from Covenanters to
Royalists, and from kings to beggars. After reading these nine volumes we
know Scotland and Scotchmen as we can know them in no other way. In 1819 he
turned abruptly from Scotland, and in _Ivanhoe_, the most popular of his
works, showed what a mine of neglected wealth lay just beneath the surface
of English history. It is hard to realize now, as we read its rapid,
melodramatic action, its vivid portrayal of Saxon and Norman character, and
all its picturesque details, that it was written rapidly, at a time when
the author was suffering from disease and could hardly repress an
occasional groan from finding its way into the rapid dictation. It stands
to-day as the best example of the author's own theory that the will of a
man is enough to hold him steadily, against all obstacles, to the task of
"doing what he has a mind to do." _Kenilworth, Nigel, Peveril_, and
_Woodstock_, all written in the next few years, show his grasp of the
romantic side of English annals; _Count Robert_ and _The Talisman_ show his
enthusiasm for the heroic side of the Crusaders' nature; and _Quentin
Durward_ and _Anne of Geierstein_ suggest another mine of romance which he
discovered in French history.

For twenty years Scott labored steadily at literature, with the double
object of giving what was in him, and of earning large sums to support the
lavish display which he deemed essential to a laird of Scotland. In 1826,
while he was blithely at work on _Woodstock_, the crash came. Not even the
vast earnings of all these popular novels could longer keep the wretched
business of Ballantyne on its feet, and the firm failed, after years of
mismanagement. Though a silent partner, Scott assumed full responsibility,
and at fifty-five years of age, sick, suffering, and with all his best work
behind him, he found himself facing a debt of over half a million dollars.
The firm could easily have compromised with its creditors; but Scott
refused to hear of bankruptcy laws under which he could have taken refuge.
He assumed the entire debt as a personal one, and set resolutely to work to
pay every penny. Times were indeed changed in England when, instead of a
literary genius starving until some wealthy patron gave him a pension, this
man, aided by his pen alone, could confidently begin to earn that enormous
amount of money. And this is one of the unnoticed results of the
popularization of literature. Without a doubt Scott would have accomplished
the task, had he been granted only a few years of health. He still lived at
Abbotsford, which he had offered to his creditors, but which they
generously refused to accept; and in two years, by miscellaneous work, had
paid some two hundred thousand dollars of his debt, nearly half of this sum
coming from his _Life of Napoleon_. A new edition of the Waverley novels
appeared, which was very successful financially, and Scott had every reason
to hope that he would soon face the world owing no man a penny, when he
suddenly broke under the strain. In 1830 occurred a stroke of paralysis
from which he never fully recovered; though after a little time he was
again at work, dictating with splendid patience and resolution. He writes
in his diary at this time: "The blow is a stunning one, I suppose, for I
scarcely feel it. It is singular, but it comes with as little surprise as
if I had a remedy ready, yet God knows I am at sea in the dark, and the
vessel leaky."

It is good to remember that governments are not always ungrateful, and to
record that, when it became known that a voyage to Italy might improve
Scott's health, the British government promptly placed a naval vessel at
the disposal of a man who had led no armies to the slaughter, but had only
given pleasure to multitudes of peaceable men and women by his stories. He
visited Malta, Naples, and Rome; but in his heart he longed for Scotland,
and turned homeward after a few months of exile. The river Tweed, the
Scotch hills, the trees of Abbotsford, the joyous clamor of his dogs,
brought forth the first exclamation of delight which had passed Scott's
lips since he sailed away. He died in September of the same year, 1832, and
was buried with his ancestors in the old Dryburgh Abbey.

WORKS OF SCOTT. Scott's work is of a kind which the critic gladly passes
over, leaving each reader to his own joyous and uninstructed opinion. From
a literary view point the works are faulty enough, if one is looking for
faults; but it is well to remember that they were intended to give delight,
and that they rarely fail of their object. When one has read the stirring
_Marmion_ or the more enduring _Lady of the Lake_, felt the heroism of the
Crusaders in _The Talisman_, the picturesqueness of chivalry in _Ivanhoe_,
the nobleness of soul of a Scotch peasant girl in _The Heart of
Midlothian_, and the quality of Scotch faith in _Old Mortality_, then his
own opinion of Scott's genius will be of more value than all the criticisms
that have ever been written.

At the outset we must confess frankly that Scott's poetry is not artistic,
in the highest sense, and that it lacks the deeply imaginative and
suggestive qualities which make a poem the noblest and most enduring work
of humanity. We read it now, not for its poetic excellence, but for its
absorbing story interest. Even so, it serves an admirable purpose.
_Marmion_ and _The Lady of the Lake_, which are often the first long poems
read by the beginner in literature, almost invariably lead to a deeper
interest in the subject; and many readers owe to these poems an
introduction to the delights of poetry. They are an excellent beginning,
therefore, for young readers, since they are almost certain to hold the
attention, and to lead indirectly to an interest in other and better poems.
Aside from this, Scott's poetry is marked by vigor and youthful abandon;
its interest lies in its vivid pictures, its heroic characters, and
especially in its rapid action and succession of adventures, which hold and
delight us still, as they held and delighted the first wondering readers.
And one finds here and there terse descriptions, or snatches of song and
ballad, like the "Boat Song" and "Lochinvar," which are among the best
known in our literature.

In his novels Scott plainly wrote too rapidly and too much. While a genius
of the first magnitude, the definition of genius as "the infinite capacity
for taking pains" hardly belongs to him. For details of life and history,
for finely drawn characters, and for tracing the logical consequences of
human action, he has usually no inclination. He sketches a character
roughly, plunges him into the midst of stirring incidents, and the action
of the story carries us on breathlessly to the end. So his stories are
largely adventure stories, at the best; and it is this element of adventure
and glorious action, rather than the study of character, which makes Scott
a perennial favorite of the young. The same element of excitement is what
causes mature readers to turn from Scott to better novelists, who have more
power to delineate human character, and to create, or discover, a romantic
interest in the incidents of everyday life rather than in stirring
adventure.[225]

Notwithstanding these limitations, it is well--especially in these days,
when we hear that Scott is outgrown--to emphasize four noteworthy things
that he accomplished.

(1) He created the historical novel[226]; and all novelists of the last
century who draw upon history for their characters and events are followers
of Scott and acknowledge his mastery.

(2) His novels are on a vast scale, covering a very wide range of action,
and are concerned with public rather than with private interests. So, with
the exception of _The Bride of Lammermoor_, the love story in his novels is
generally pale and feeble; but the strife and passions of big parties are
magnificently portrayed. A glance over even the titles of his novels shows
how the heroic side of history for over six hundred years finds expression
in his pages; and all the parties of these six centuries--Crusaders,
Covenanters, Cavaliers, Roundheads, Papists, Jews, Gypsies, Rebels--start
into life again, and fight or give a reason for the faith that is in them.
No other novelist in England, and only Balzac in France, approaches Scott
in the scope of his narratives.

(3) Scott was the first novelist in any language to make the scene an
essential element in the action. He knew Scotland, and loved it; and there
is hardly an event in any of his Scottish novels in which we do not breathe
the very atmosphere of the place, and feel the presence of its moors and
mountains. The place, morever, is usually so well chosen and described that
the action seems almost to be the result of natural environment. Perhaps
the most striking illustration of this harmony between scene and incident
is found in _Old Mortality_, where Morton approaches the cave of the old
Covenanter, and where the spiritual terror inspired by the fanatic's
struggle with imaginary fiends is paralleled by the physical terror of a
gulf and a roaring flood spanned by a slippery tree trunk. A second
illustration of the same harmony of scene and incident is found in the
meeting of the arms and ideals of the East and West, when the two champions
fight in the burning desert, and then eat bread together in the cool shade
of the oasis, as described in the opening chapter of _The Talisman_. A
third illustration is found in that fascinating love scene, where Ivanhoe
lies wounded, raging at his helplessness, while the gentle Rebecca
alternately hides and reveals her love as she describes the terrific
assault on the castle, which goes on beneath her window. His thoughts are
all on the fight; hers on the man she loves; and both are natural, and both
are exactly what we expect under the circumstances. These are but striking
examples of the fact that, in all his work, Scott tries to preserve perfect
harmony between the scene and the action.

(4) Scott's chief claim to greatness lies in the fact that he was the first
novelist to recreate the past; that he changed our whole conception of
history by making it to be, not a record of dry facts, but a stage on which
living men and women played their parts. Carlyle's criticism is here most
pertinent: "These historical novels have taught this truth ... unknown to
writers of history: that the bygone ages of the world were actually filled
by living men, not by protocols, state papers, controversies, and
abstractions of men." Not only the pages of history, but all the hills and
vales of his beloved Scotland are filled with living characters,--lords and
ladies, soldiers, pirates, gypsies, preachers, schoolmasters, clansmen,
bailiffs, dependents,--all Scotland is here before our eyes, in the reality
of life itself. It is astonishing, with his large numbers of characters,
that Scott never repeats himself. Naturally he is most at home in Scotland,
and with humble people. Scott's own romantic interest in feudalism caused
him to make his lords altogether too lordly; his aristocratic maidens are
usually bloodless, conventional, exasperating creatures, who talk like
books and pose like figures in an old tapestry. But when he describes
characters like Jeanie Deans, in _The Heart of Midlothian_, and the old
clansman, Evan Dhu, in _Waverley_, we know the very soul of Scotch
womanhood and manhood.

Perhaps one thing more should be said, or rather repeated, of Scott's
enduring work. He is always sane, wholesome, manly, inspiring. We know the
essential nobility of human life better, and we are better men and women
ourselves, because of what he has written.


GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON (1788-1824)

There are two distinct sides to Byron and his poetry, one good, the other
bad; and those who write about him generally describe one side or the other
in superlatives. Thus one critic speaks of his "splendid and imperishable
excellence of sincerity and strength"; another of his "gaudy charlatanry,
blare of brass, and big bow-wowishness." As both critics are fundamentally
right, we shall not here attempt to reconcile their differences, which
arise from viewing one side of the man's nature and poetry to the exclusion
of the other. Before his exile from England, in 1816, the general
impression made by Byron is that of a man who leads an irregular life,
poses as a romantic hero, makes himself out much worse than he really is,
and takes delight in shocking not only the conventions but the ideals of
English society. His poetry of this first period is generally, though not
always, shallow and insincere in thought, and declamatory or bombastic in
expression. After his exile, and his meeting with Shelley in Italy, we note
a gradual improvement, due partly to Shelley's influence and partly to his
own mature thought and experience. We have the impression now of a
disillusioned man who recognizes his true character, and who, though
cynical and pessimistic, is at least honest in his unhappy outlook on
society. His poetry of this period is generally less shallow and
rhetorical, and though he still parades his feelings in public, he often
surprises us by being manly and sincere. Thus in the third canto of _Childe
Harold_, written just after his exile, he says:

    In my youth's summer I did sing of one,
    The wandering outlaw of his own dark mind;

and as we read on to the end of the splendid fourth canto--with its poetic
feeling for nature, and its stirring rhythm that grips and holds the reader
like martial music--we lay down the book with profound regret that this
gifted man should have devoted so much of his talent to describing trivial
or unwholesome intrigues and posing as the hero of his own verses. The real
tragedy of Byron's life is that he died just as he was beginning to find
himself.

LIFE. Byron was born in London in 1788, the year preceding the French
Revolution. We shall understand him better, and judge him more charitably,
if we remember the tainted stock from which he sprang. His father was a
dissipated spendthrift of unspeakable morals; his mother was a Scotch
heiress, passionate and unbalanced. The father deserted his wife after
squandering her fortune; and the boy was brought up by the mother who
"alternately petted and abused" him. In his eleventh year the death of a
granduncle left him heir to Newstead Abbey and to the baronial title of one
of the oldest houses in England. He was singularly handsome; and a lameness
resulting from a deformed foot lent a suggestion of pathos to his make-up.
All this, with his social position, his pseudo-heroic poetry, and his
dissipated life,--over which he contrived to throw a veil of romantic
secrecy,--made him a magnet of attraction to many thoughtless young men and
foolish women, who made the downhill path both easy and rapid to one whose
inclinations led him in that direction. Naturally he was generous, and
easily led by affection. He is, therefore, largely a victim of his own
weakness and of unfortunate surroundings.

At school at Harrow, and in the university at Cambridge, Byron led an
unbalanced life, and was more given to certain sports from which he was not
debarred by lameness, than to books and study. His school life, like his
infancy, is sadly marked by vanity, violence, and rebellion against every
form of authority; yet it was not without its hours of nobility and
generosity. Scott describes him as "a man of real goodness of heart, and
the kindest and best feelings, miserably thrown away by his foolish
contempt of public opinion." While at Cambridge, Byron published his first
volume of poems, _Hours of Idleness_, in 1807. A severe criticism of the
volume in the _Edinburgh Review_ wounded Byron's vanity, and threw him into
a violent passion, the result of which was the now famous satire called
_English Bards and Scotch Reviewers_, in which not only his enemies, but
also Scott, Wordsworth, and nearly all the literary men of his day, were
satirized in heroic couplets after the manner of Pope's _Dunciad_. It is
only just to say that he afterwards made friends with Scott and with others
whom he had abused without provocation; and it is interesting to note, in
view of his own romantic poetry, that he denounced all masters of romance
and accepted the artificial standards of Pope and Dryden. His two favorite
books were the Old Testament and a volume of Pope's poetry. Of the latter
he says, "His is the greatest name in poetry ... all the rest are
barbarians."

In 1809 Byron, when only twenty-one years of age, started on a tour of
Europe and the Orient. The poetic results of this trip were the first two
cantos of _Childe Harold's Pilgrimage_, with their famous descriptions of
romantic scenery. The work made him instantly popular, and his fame
overshadowed Scott's completely. As he says himself, "I awoke one morning
to find myself famous," and presently he styles himself "the grand Napoleon
of the realms of rhyme." The worst element in Byron at this time was his
insincerity, his continual posing as the hero of his poetry. His best works
were translated, and his fame spread almost as rapidly on the Continent as
in England. Even Goethe was deceived, and declared that a man so wonderful
in character had never before appeared in literature, and would never
appear again. Now that the tinsel has worn off, and we can judge the man
and his work dispassionately, we see how easily even the critics of the age
were governed by romantic impulses.

The adulation of Byron lasted only a few years in England. In 1815 he
married Miss Milbanke, an English heiress, who abruptly left him a year
later. With womanly reserve she kept silence; but the public was not slow
to imagine plenty of reasons for the separation. This, together with the
fact that men had begun to penetrate the veil of romantic secrecy with
which Byron surrounded himself and found a rather brassy idol beneath,
turned the tide of public opinion against him. He left England under a
cloud of distrust and disappointment, in 1816, and never returned. Eight
years were spent abroad, largely in Italy, where he was associated with
Shelley until the latter's tragic death in 1822. His house was ever the
meeting place for Revolutionists and malcontents calling themselves
patriots, whom he trusted too greatly, and with whom he shared his money
most generously. Curiously enough, while he trusted men too easily, he had
no faith in human society or government, and wrote in 1817: "I have
simplified my politics to an utter detestation of all existing
governments." During his exile he finished _Childe Harold, The Prisoner of
Chillon_, his dramas _Cain_ and _Manfred_, and numerous other works, in
some of which, as in _Don Juan_, he delighted in revenging himself upon his
countrymen by holding up to ridicule all that they held most sacred.

In 1824 Byron went to Greece to give himself and a large part of his
fortune to help that country in its struggle for liberty against the Turks.
How far he was led by his desire for posing as a hero, and how far by a
certain vigorous Viking spirit that was certainly in him, will never be
known. The Greeks welcomed him and made him a leader, and for a few months
he found himself in the midst of a wretched squabble of lies, selfishness,
insincerity, cowardice, and intrigue, instead of the heroic struggle for
liberty which he had anticipated. He died of fever, in Missolonghi, in
1824. One of his last poems, written there on his thirty-sixth birthday, a
few months before he died, expresses his own view of his disappointing
life:

    My days are in the yellow leaf,
    The flowers and fruits of love are gone:
    The worm, the canker, and the grief
        Are mine alone.

WORKS OF BYRON. In reading Byron it is well to remember that he was a
disappointed and embittered man, not only in his personal life, but also in
his expectation of a general transformation of human society. As he pours
out his own feelings, chiefly, in his poetry, he is the most expressive
writer of his age in voicing the discontent of a multitude of Europeans who
were disappointed at the failure of the French Revolution to produce an
entirely new form of government and society.

One who wishes to understand the whole scope of Byron's genius and poetry
will do well to begin with his first work, _Hours of Idleness_, written
when he was a young man at the university. There is very little poetry in
the volume, only a striking facility in rime, brightened by the devil-may-
care spirit of the Cavalier poets; but as a revelation of the man himself
it is remarkable. In a vain and sophomoric preface he declares that poetry
is to him an idle experiment, and that this is his first and last attempt
to amuse himself in that line. Curiously enough, as he starts for Greece on
his last, fatal journey, he again ridicules literature, and says that the
poet is a "mere babbler." It is this despising of the art which alone makes
him famous that occasions our deepest disappointment. Even in his
magnificent passages, in a glowing description of nature or of a Hindoo
woman's exquisite love, his work is frequently marred by a wretched pun, or
by some cheap buffoonery, which ruins our first splendid impression of his
poetry.

Byron's later volumes, _Manfred_ and _Cain_, the one a curious, and perhaps
unconscious, parody of _Faust_, the other of _Paradise Lost_, are his two
best known dramatic works. Aside from the question of their poetic value,
they are interesting as voicing Byron's excessive individualism and his
rebellion against society. The best known and the most readable of Byron's
works _Mazeppa, The Prisoner of Chillon_, and _Childe Harold's Pilgrimage_.
The first two cantos of _Childe Harold_ (1812) are perhaps more frequently
read than any other work of the same author, partly because of their
melodious verse, partly because of their descriptions of places along the
lines of European travel; but the last two cantos (1816-1818) written after
his exile from England, have more sincerity, and are in every way better
expressions of Byron's mature genius. Scattered through all his works one
finds magnificent descriptions of natural scenery, and exquisite lyrics of
love and despair; but they are mixed with such a deal of bombast and
rhetoric, together with much that is unwholesome, that the beginner will do
well to confine himself to a small volume of well-chosen selections.[227]

Byron is often compared with Scott, as having given to us Europe and the
Orient, just as Scott gave us Scotland and its people; but while there is a
certain resemblance in the swing and dash of the verses, the resemblance is
all on the surface, and the underlying difference between the two poets is
as great as that between Thackeray and Bulwer-Lytton. Scott knew his
country well,--its hills and valleys which are interesting as the abode of
living and lovable men and women. Byron pretended to know the secret,
unwholesome side of Europe, which generally hides itself in the dark; but
instead of giving us a variety of living men, he never gets away from his
own unbalanced and egotistical self. All his characters, in _Cain, Manfred,
The Corsair, The Giaour, Childe Harold, Don Juan_, are tiresome repetitions
of himself,--a vain, disappointed, cynical man, who finds no good in life
or love or anything. Naturally, with such a disposition, he is entirely
incapable of portraying a true woman. To nature alone, especially in her
magnificent moods, Byron remains faithful; and his portrayal of the night
and the storm and the ocean in _Childe Harold_ are unsurpassed in our
language.


PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY (1792-1822)

    Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
      What if my leaves are falling like its own!
    The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
      Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
    Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, spirit fierce,
      My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

In this fragment, from the "Ode to the West Wind," we have a suggestion of
Shelley's own spirit, as reflected in all his poetry. The very spirit of
nature, which appeals to us in the wind and the cloud, the sunset and the
moonrise, seems to have possessed him, at times, and made him a chosen
instrument of melody. At such times he is a true poet, and his work is
unrivaled. At other times, unfortunately, Shelley joins with Byron in
voicing a vain rebellion against society. His poetry, like his life,
divides itself into two distinct moods. In one he is the violent reformer,
seeking to overthrow our present institutions and to hurry the millennium
out of its slow walk into a gallop. Out of this mood come most of his
longer poems, like _Queen Mab, Revolt of Islam, Hellas_, and _The Witch of
Atlas_, which are somewhat violent diatribes against government, priests,
marriage, religion, even God as men supposed him to be. In a different
mood, which finds expression _Alastor, Adonais_, and his wonderful lyrics,
Shelley is like a wanderer following a vague, beautiful vision, forever sad
and forever unsatisfied. In the latter mood he appeals profoundly to all
men who have known what it is to follow after an unattainable ideal.

SHELLEY'S LIFE. There are three classes of men who see visions, and all
three are represented in our literature. The first is the mere dreamer,
like Blake, who stumbles through a world of reality without noticing it,
and is happy in his visions. The second is the seer, the prophet, like
Langland, or Wyclif, who sees a vision and quietly goes to work, in ways
that men understand, to make the present world a little more like the ideal
one which he sees in his vision. The third, who appears in many forms,--as
visionary, enthusiast, radical, anarchist, revolutionary, call him what you
will,--sees a vision and straightway begins to tear down all human
institutions, which have been built up by the slow toil of centuries,
simply because they seem to stand in the way of his dream. To the latter
class belongs Shelley, a man perpetually at war with the present world, a
martyr and exile, simply because of his inability to sympathize with men
and society as they are, and because of his own mistaken judgment as to the
value and purpose of a vision.

Shelley was born in Field Place, near Horsham, Sussex, in 1792. On both his
father's and his mother's side he was descended from noble old families,
famous in the political and literary history of England. From childhood he
lived, like Blake, in a world of fancy, so real that certain imaginary
dragons and headless creatures of the neighboring wood kept him and his
sisters in a state of fearful expectancy. He learned rapidly, absorbed the
classics as if by intuition, and, dissatisfied with ordinary processes of
learning, seems to have sought, like Faustus, the acquaintance of spirits,
as shown in his "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty":

    While yet a boy, I sought for ghosts, and sped
      Through many a listening chamber, cave and ruin,
      And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing
    Hopes of high talk with the departed dead.

Shelley's first public school, kept by a hard-headed Scotch master, with
its floggings and its general brutality, seemed to him like a combination
of hell and prison; and his active rebellion against existing institutions
was well under way when, at twelve years of age, he entered the famous
preparatory school at Eton. He was a delicate, nervous, marvelously
sensitive boy, of great physical beauty; and, like Cowper, he suffered
torments at the hands of his rough schoolfellows. Unlike Cowper, he was
positive, resentful, and brave to the point of rashness; soul and body rose
up against tyranny; and he promptly organized a rebellion against the
brutal fagging system. "Mad Shelley" the boys called him, and they chivied
him like dogs around a little coon that fights and cries defiance to the
end. One finds what he seeks in this world, and it is not strange that
Shelley, after his Eton experiences, found causes for rebellion in all
existing forms of human society, and that he left school "to war among
mankind," as he says of himself in the _Revolt of Islam_. His university
days are but a repetition of his earlier experiences. While a student at
Oxford he read some scraps of Hume's philosophy, and immediately published
a pamphlet called "The Necessity of Atheism." It was a crude, foolish piece
of work, and Shelley distributed it by post to every one to whom it might
give offense. Naturally this brought on a conflict with the authorities,
but Shelley would not listen to reason or make any explanation, and was
expelled from the university in 1811.

Shelley's marriage was even more unfortunate. While living in London, on a
generous sister's pocket money, a certain young schoolgirl, Harriet
Westbrook, was attracted by Shelley's crude revolutionary doctrines. She
promptly left school, as her own personal part in the general rebellion,
and refused to return or even to listen to her parents upon the subject.
Having been taught by Shelley, she threw herself upon his protection; and
this unbalanced couple were presently married, as they said, "in deference
to anarch custom." The two infants had already proclaimed a rebellion
against the institution of marriage, for which they proposed to substitute
the doctrine of elective affinity. For two years they wandered about
England, Ireland, and Wales, living on a small allowance from Shelley's
father, who had disinherited his son because of his ill-considered
marriage. The pair soon separated, and two years later Shelley, having
formed a strong friendship with one Godwin,--a leader of young enthusiasts
and a preacher of anarchy,--presently showed his belief in Godwin's
theories by eloping with his daughter Mary. It is a sad story, and the
details were perhaps better forgotten. We should remember that in Shelley
we are dealing with a tragic blend of high-mindedness and light-headedness.
Byron wrote of him, "The most gentle, the most amiable, and the least
worldly-minded person I ever met!"

Led partly by the general hostility against him, and partly by his own
delicate health, Shelley went to Italy in 1818, and never returned to
England. After wandering over Italy he finally settled in Pisa, beloved of
so many English poets,--beautiful, sleepy Pisa, where one looks out of his
window on the main street at the busiest hour of the day, and the only
living thing in sight is a donkey, dozing lazily, with his head in the
shade and his body in the sunshine. Here his best poetry was written, and
here he found comfort in the friendship of Byron, Hunt, and Trelawney, who
are forever associated with Shelley's Italian life. He still remained
hostile to English social institutions; but life is a good teacher, and
that Shelley dimly recognized the error of his rebellion is shown in the
increasing sadness of his later poems:

    O world, O life, O time!
    On whose last steps I climb,
      Trembling at that where I had stood before;
    When will return the glory of your prime?
      No more--oh, never more!
    Out of the day and night
    A joy has taken flight;
      Fresh spring, and summer, and winter hoar,
    Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight
      No more--oh, never more!

In 1822, when only thirty years of age, Shelley was drowned while sailing
in a small boat off the Italian coast. His body was washed ashore several
days later, and was cremated, near Viareggio, by his friends, Byron, Hunt,
and Trelawney. His ashes might, with all reverence, have been given to the
winds that he loved and that were a symbol of his restless spirit; instead,
they found a resting place near the grave of Keats, in the English cemetery
at Rome. One rarely visits the spot now without finding English and
American visitors standing in silence before the significant inscription,
_Cor Cordium_.

WORKS OF SHELLEY. As a lyric poet, Shelley is one of the supreme geniuses
of our literature; and the reader will do well to begin with the poems
which show him at his very best. "The Cloud," "To a Skylark," "Ode to the
West Wind," "To Night,"--poems like these must surely set the reader to
searching among Shelley's miscellaneous works, to find for himself the
things "worthy to be remembered."

In reading Shelley's longer poems one must remember that there are in this
poet two distinct men: one, the wanderer, seeking ideal beauty and forever
unsatisfied; the other, the unbalanced reformer, seeking the overthrow of
present institutions and the establishment of universal happiness.
_Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude_ (1816) is by far the best expression
of Shelley's greater mood. Here we see him wandering restlessly through the
vast silences of nature, in search of a loved dream-maiden who shall
satisfy his love of beauty. Here Shelley is the poet of the moonrise, and
of the tender exquisite fancies that can never be expressed. The charm of
the poem lies in its succession of dreamlike pictures; but it gives
absolutely no impressions of reality. It was written when Shelley, after
his long struggle, had begun to realize that the world was too strong for
him. _Alastor_ is therefore the poet's confession, not simply of failure,
but of undying hope in some better thing that is to come.

_Prometheus Unbound_ (1818-1820), a lyrical drama, is the best work of
Shelley's revolutionary enthusiasm, and the most characteristic of all his
poems. Shelley's philosophy (if one may dignify a hopeless dream by such a
name) was a curious aftergrowth of the French Revolution, namely, that it
is only the existing tyranny of State, Church, and society which keeps man
from growth into perfect happiness. Naturally Shelley forgot, like many
other enthusiasts, that Church and State and social laws were not imposed
upon man from without, but were created by himself to minister to his
necessities. In Shelley's poem the hero, Prometheus, represents mankind
itself,--a just and noble humanity, chained and tortured by Jove, who is
here the personification of human institutions.[228] In due time Demogorgon
(which is Shelley's name for Necessity) overthrows the tyrant Jove and
releases Prometheus (Mankind), who is presently united to Asia, the spirit
of love and goodness in nature, while the earth and the moon join in a
wedding song, and everything gives promise that they shall live together
happy ever afterwards.

Shelley here looks forward, not back, to the Golden Age, and is the prophet
of science and evolution. If we compare his Titan with similar characters
in _Faust_ and _Cain_, we shall find this interesting difference,--that
while Goethe's Titan is cultured and self-reliant, and Byron's stoic and
hopeless, Shelley's hero is patient under torture, seeing help and hope
beyond his suffering. And he marries Love that the earth may be peopled
with superior beings who shall substitute brotherly love for the present
laws and conventions of society. Such is his philosophy; but the beginner
will read this poem, not chiefly for its thought, but for its youthful
enthusiasm, for its marvelous imagery, and especially for its ethereal
music. Perhaps we should add here that _Prometheus_ is, and probably always
will be, a poem for the chosen few who can appreciate its peculiar
spiritlike beauty. In its purely pagan conception of the world, it
suggests, by contrast, Milton's Christian philosophy in _Paradise
Regained_.

Shelley's revolutionary works, _Queen Mab_ (1813), _The Revolt of Islam_
(1818), _Hellas_ (1821), and _The Witch of Atlas_ (1820), are to be judged
in much the same way as is _Prometheus Unbound_. They are largely
invectives against religion, marriage, kingcraft, and priestcraft, most
impractical when considered as schemes for reform, but abounding in
passages of exquisite beauty, for which alone they are worth reading. In
the drama called _The Cenci_ (1819), which is founded upon a morbid Italian
story, Shelley for the first and only time descends to reality. The
heroine, Beatrice, driven to desperation by the monstrous wickedness of her
father, kills him and suffers the death penalty in consequence. She is the
only one of Shelley's characters who seems to us entirely human.

Far different in character is _Epipsychidion_ (1821), a rhapsody
celebrating Platonic love, the most impalpable, and so one of the most
characteristic, of all Shelley's works. It was inspired by a beautiful
Italian girl, Emilia Viviani, who was put into a cloister against her will,
and in whom Shelley imagined he found his long-sought ideal of womanhood.
With this should be read _Adonais_ (1821), the best known of all Shelley's
longer poems. _Adonais_ is a wonderful threnody, or a song of grief, over
the death of the poet Keats. Even in his grief Shelley still preserves a
sense of unreality, and calls in many shadowy allegorical figures,--Sad
Spring, Weeping Hours, Glooms, Splendors, Destinies,--all uniting in
bewailing the loss of a loved one. The whole poem is a succession of dream
pictures, exquisitely beautiful, such as only Shelley could imagine; and it
holds its place with Milton's _Lycidas_ and Tennyson's _In Memoriam_ as one
of the three greatest elegies in our language.

In his interpretation of nature Shelley suggests Wordsworth, both by
resemblance and by contrast. To both poets all natural objects are symbols
of truth; both regard nature as permeated by the great spiritual life which
animates all things; but while Wordsworth finds a spirit of thought, and so
of communion between nature and the soul of man, Shelley finds a spirit of
love, which exists chiefly for its own delight; and so "The Cloud," "The
Skylark," and "The West Wind," three of the most beautiful poems in our
language, have no definite message for humanity. In his "Hymn to
Intellectual Beauty" Shelley is most like Wordsworth; but in his "Sensitive
Plant," with its fine symbolism and imagery, he is like nobody in the world
but himself. Comparison is sometimes an excellent thing; and if we compare
Shelley's exquisite "Lament," beginning "O world, O life, O time," with
Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality," we shall perhaps understand both
poets better. Both poems recall many happy memories of youth; both express
a very real mood of a moment; but while the beauty of one merely saddens
and disheartens us, the beauty of the other inspires us with something of
the poet's own faith and hopefulness. In a word, Wordsworth found and
Shelley lost himself in nature.


JOHN KEATS (1795-1821)

Keats was not only the last but also the most perfect of the Romanticists.
While Scott was merely telling stories, and Wordsworth reforming poetry or
upholding the moral law, and Shelley advocating impossible reforms, and
Byron voicing his own egoism and the political discontent of the times,
Keats lived apart from men and from all political measures, worshiping
beauty like a devotee, perfectly content to write what was in his own
heart, or to reflect some splendor of the natural world as he saw or
dreamed it to be. He had, moreover, the novel idea that poetry exists for
its own sake, and suffers loss by being devoted to philosophy or politics
or, indeed, to any cause, however great or small. As he says in "Lamia":

                ... Do not all charms fly
    At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
    There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
    We know her woof, her texture; she is given
    In the dull catalogue of common things.
    Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings,
    Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
    Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine--
    Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made
    The tender-person'd Lamia melt into a shade.

Partly because of this high ideal of poetry, partly because he studied and
unconsciously imitated the Greek classics and the best works of the
Elizabethans, Keats's last little volume of poetry is unequaled by the work
of any of his contemporaries. When we remember that all his work was
published in three short years, from 1817 to 1820, and that he died when
only twenty-five years old, we must judge him to be the most promising
figure of the early nineteenth century, and one of the most remarkable in
the history of literature.

LIFE. Keats's life of devotion to beauty and to poetry is all the more
remarkable in view of his lowly origin. He was the son of a hostler and
stable keeper, and was born in the stable of the Swan and Hoop Inn, London,
in 1795. One has only to read the rough stable scenes from our first
novelists, or even from Dickens, to understand how little there was in such
an atmosphere to develop poetic gifts. Before Keats was fifteen years old
both parents died, and he was placed with his brothers and sisters in
charge of guardians. Their first act seems to have been to take Keats from
school at Enfield, and to bind him as an apprentice to a surgeon at
Edmonton. For five years he served his apprenticeship, and for two years
more he was surgeon's helper in the hospitals; but though skillful enough
to win approval, he disliked his work, and his thoughts were on other
things. "The other day, during a lecture," he said to a friend, "there came
a sunbeam into the room, and with it a whole troop of creatures floating in
the ray; and I was off with them to Oberon and fairyland." A copy of
Spenser's _Faery Queen_, which had been given him by Charles Cowden Clark,
was the prime cause of his abstraction. He abandoned his profession in
1817, and early in the same year published his first volume of _Poems_. It
was modest enough in spirit, as was also his second volume, _Endymion_
(1818); but that did not prevent brutal attacks upon the author and his
work by the self-constituted critics of _Blackwood's Magazine_ and the
_Quarterly_. It is often alleged that the poet's spirit and ambition were
broken by these attacks;[229] but Keats was a man of strong character, and
instead of quarreling with his reviewers, or being crushed by their
criticism, he went quietly to work with the idea of producing poetry that
should live forever. As Matthew Arnold says, Keats "had flint and iron in
him"; and in his next volume he accomplished his own purpose and silenced
unfriendly criticism.

For the three years during which Keats wrote his poetry he lived chiefly in
London and in Hampstead, but wandered at times over England and Scotland,
living for brief spaces in the Isle of Wight, in Devonshire, and in the
Lake district, seeking to recover his own health, and especially to restore
that of his brother. His illness began with a severe cold, but soon
developed into consumption; and added to this sorrow was another,--his love
for Fannie Brawne, to whom he was engaged, but whom he could not marry on
account of his poverty and growing illness. When we remember all this
personal grief and the harsh criticism of literary men, the last small
volume, _Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems_ (1820), is
most significant, as showing not only Keats's wonderful poetic gifts, but
also his beautiful and indomitable spirit. Shelley, struck by the beauty
and promise of "Hyperion," sent a generous invitation to the author to come
to Pisa and live with him; but Keats refused, having little sympathy with
Shelley's revolt against society. The invitation had this effect, however,
that it turned Keats's thoughts to Italy, whither he soon went in the
effort to save his life. He settled in Rome with his friend Severn, the
artist, but died soon after his arrival, in February, 1821. His grave, in
the Protestant cemetery at Rome, is still an object of pilgrimage to
thousands of tourists; for among all our poets there is hardly another
whose heroic life and tragic death have so appealed to the hearts of poets
and young enthusiasts.

THE WORK OF KEATS. "None but the master shall praise us; and none but the
master shall blame" might well be written on the fly leaf of every volume
of Keats's poetry; for never was there a poet more devoted to his ideal,
entirely independent of success or failure. In strong contrast with his
contemporary, Byron, who professed to despise the art that made him famous,
Keats lived for poetry alone, and, as Lowell pointed out, a virtue went out
of him into everything he wrote. In all his work we have the impression of
this intense loyalty to his art; we have the impression also of a profound
dissatisfaction that the deed falls so far short of the splendid dream.
Thus after reading Chapman's translation of Homer he writes:

    Much have I travelled in the realms of gold,
    And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
    Round many western islands have I been
    Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
    Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
    That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;
    Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
    Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
    Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
    When a new planet swims into his ken;
    Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
    He stared at the Pacific--and all his men
    Looked at each other with a wild surmise--
    Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

In this striking sonnet we have a suggestion of Keats's high ideal, and of
his sadness because of his own ignorance, when he published his first
little volume of poems in 1817. He knew no Greek; yet Greek literature
absorbed and fascinated him, as he saw its broken and imperfect reflection
in an English translation. Like Shakespeare, who also was but poorly
educated in the schools, he had a marvelous faculty of discerning the real
spirit of the classics,--a faculty denied to many great scholars, and to
most of the "classic" writers of the preceding century,--and so he set
himself to the task of reflecting in modern English the spirit of the old
Greeks.

The imperfect results of this attempt are seen in his next volume,
_Endymion_, which is the story of a young shepherd beloved by a moon
goddess. The poem begins with the striking lines:

    A thing of beauty is a joy forever;
    Its loveliness increases; it will never
    Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
    A bower quiet for us; and a sleep
    Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing,

which well illustrate the spirit of Keats's later work, with its perfect
finish and melody. It has many quotable lines and passages, and its "Hymn
to Pan" should be read in connection with Wordsworth's famous sonnet
beginning, "The world is too much with us." The poem gives splendid
promise, but as a whole it is rather chaotic, with too much ornament and
too little design, like a modern house. That Keats felt this defect
strongly is evident from his modest preface, wherein he speaks of
_Endymion_, not as a deed accomplished, but only as an unsuccessful attempt
to suggest the underlying beauty of Greek mythology.

Keats's third and last volume, _Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and
Other Poems_ (1820), is the one with which the reader should begin his
acquaintance with this master of English verse. It has only two subjects,
Greek mythology and mediæval romance. "Hyperion" is a magnificent fragment,
suggesting the first arch of a cathedral that was never finished. Its theme
is the overthrow of the Titans by the young sun-god Apollo. Realizing his
own immaturity and lack of knowledge, Keats laid aside this work, and only
the pleadings of his publisher induced him to print the fragment with his
completed poems.

Throughout this last volume, and especially in "Hyperion," the influence of
Milton is apparent, while Spenser is more frequently suggested in reading
_Endymion_.

Of the longer poems in the volume, "Lamia" is the most suggestive. It is
the story of a beautiful enchantress, who turns from a serpent into a
glorious woman and fills every human sense with delight, until, as a result
of the foolish philosophy of old Apollonius, she vanishes forever from her
lover's sight. "The Eve of St. Agnes," the most perfect of Keats's mediæval
poems, is not a story after the manner of the metrical romances, but rather
a vivid painting of a romantic mood, such as comes to all men, at times, to
glorify a workaday world. Like all the work of Keats and Shelley, it has an
element of unreality; and when we read at the end,

    And they are gone; aye, ages long ago
    These lovers fled away into the storm,

it is as if we were waking from a dream,--which is the only possible ending
to all of Keats's Greek and mediæval fancies. We are to remember, however,
that no beautiful thing, though it be intangible as a dream, can enter a
man's life and leave him quite the same afterwards. Keats's own word is
here suggestive. "The imagination," he said, "may be likened to Adam's
dream; he awoke and found it true."

It is by his short poems that Keats is known to the majority of present-day
readers. Among these exquisite shorter poems we mention only the four odes,
"On a Grecian Urn," "To a Nightingale," "To Autumn," and "To Psyche." These
are like an invitation to a feast; one who reads them will hardly be
satisfied until he knows more of such delightful poetry. Those who study
only the "Ode to a Nightingale" may find four things,--a love of sensuous
beauty, a touch of pessimism, a purely pagan conception of nature, and a
strong individualism,--which are characteristic of this last of the
romantic poets.

As Wordsworth's work is too often marred by the moralizer, and Byron's by
the demagogue, and Shelley's by the reformer, so Keats's work suffers by
the opposite extreme of aloofness from every human interest; so much so,
that he is often accused of being indifferent to humanity. His work is also
criticised as being too effeminate for ordinary readers. Three things
should be remembered in this connection. First, that Keats sought to
express beauty for its own sake; that beauty is as essential to normal
humanity as is government or law; and that the higher man climbs in
civilization the more imperative becomes his need of beauty as a reward for
his labors. Second, that Keats's letters are as much an indication of the
man as is his poetry; and in his letters, with their human sympathy, their
eager interest in social problems, their humor, and their keen insight into
life, there is no trace of effeminacy, but rather every indication of a
strong and noble manhood. The third thing to remember is that all Keats's
work was done in three or four years, with small preparation, and that,
dying at twenty-five, he left us a body of poetry which will always be one
of our most cherished possessions. He is often compared with "the marvelous
boy" Chatterton, whom he greatly admired, and to whose memory he dedicated
his _Endymion_; but though both died young, Chatterton was but a child,
while Keats was in all respects a man. It is idle to prophesy what he might
have done, had he been granted a Tennyson's long life and scholarly
training. At twenty five his work was as mature as was Tennyson's at fifty,
though the maturity suggests the too rapid growth of a tropical plant which
under the warm rains and the flood of sunlight leaps into life, grows,
blooms in a day, and dies.

As we have stated, Keats's work was bitterly and unjustly condemned by the
critics of his day. He belonged to what was derisively called the cockney
school of poetry, of which Leigh Hunt was chief, and Proctor and Beddoes
were fellow-workmen. Not even from Wordsworth and Byron, who were ready
enough to recommend far less gifted writers, did Keats receive the
slightest encouragement. Like young Lochinvar, "he rode all unarmed and he
rode all alone." Shelley, with his sincerity and generosity, was the first
to recognize the young genius, and in his noble _Adonais_--written, alas,
like most of our tributes, when the subject of our praise is dead--he spoke
the first true word of appreciation, and placed Keats, where he
unquestionably belongs, among our greatest poets. The fame denied him in
his sad life was granted freely after his death. Most fitly does he close
the list of poets of the romantic revival, because in many respects he was
the best workman of them all. He seems to have studied words more carefully
than did his contemporaries, and so his poetic expression, or the harmony
of word and thought, is generally more perfect than theirs. More than any
other he lived for poetry, as the noblest of the arts. More than any other
he emphasized beauty, because to him, as shown by his "Grecian Urn," beauty
and truth were one and inseparable. And he enriched the whole romantic
movement by adding to its interest in common life the spirit, rather than
the letter, of the classics and of Elizabethan poetry. For these reasons
Keats is, like Spenser, a poet's poet; his work profoundly influenced
Tennyson and, indeed, most of the poets of the present era.


II. PROSE WRITERS OF THE ROMANTIC PERIOD

Aside from the splendid work of the novel writers--Walter Scott, whom we
have considered, and Jane Austen, to whom we shall presently return--the
early nineteenth century is remarkable for the development of a new and
valuable type of critical prose writing. If we except the isolated work of
Dryden and of Addison, it is safe to say that literary criticism, in its
modern sense, was hardly known in England until about the year 1825. Such
criticism as existed seems to us now to have been largely the result of
personal opinion or prejudice. Indeed we could hardly expect anything else
before some systematic study of our literature as a whole had been
attempted. In one age a poem was called good or bad according as it
followed or ran counter to so-called classic rules; in another we have the
dogmatism of Dr. Johnson; in a third the personal judgment of Lockhart and
the editors of the _Edinburgh Review_ and the _Quarterly_, who so violently
abused Keats and the Lake poets in the name of criticism. Early in the
nineteenth century there arose a new school of criticism which was guided
by knowledge of literature, on the one hand, and by what one might call the
fear of God on the other. The latter element showed itself in a profound
human sympathy,--the essence of the romantic movement,--and its importance
was summed up by De Quincey when he said, "Not to sympathize is not to
understand." These new critics, with abundant reverence for past masters,
could still lay aside the dogmatism and prejudice which marked Johnson and
the magazine editors, and read sympathetically the work of a new author,
with the sole idea of finding what he had contributed, or tried to
contribute, to the magnificent total of our literature. Coleridge, Hunt,
Hazlitt, Lamb, and De Quincey were the leaders in this new and immensely
important development; and we must not forget the importance of the new
periodicals, like the _Londen Magazine,_ founded in 1820, in which Lamb, De
Quincey, and Carlyle found their first real encouragement.

Of Coleridge's _Biographica Literaria_ and his _Lectures on Shakespeare_ we
have already spoken. Leigh Hunt (1784-1859) wrote continuously for more
than thirty years, as editor and essayist; and his chief object seems to
have been to make good literature known and appreciated. William Hazlitt
(1778-1830), in a long series of lectures and essays, treated all reading
as a kind of romantic journey into new and pleasant countries. To his work
largely, with that of Lamb, was due the new interest in Elizabethan
literature, which so strongly influenced Keats's last and best volume of
poetry. For those interested in the art of criticism, and in the
appreciation of literature, both Hunt and Hazlitt will well repay study;
but we must pass over their work to consider the larger literary interest
of Lamb and De Quincey, who were not simply critics of other men's labor,
but who also produced some delightful work of their own, which the world
has carefully put away among the "things worthy to be remembered."


CHARLES LAMB (1775-1834)

In Lamb and Wordsworth we have two widely different views of the romantic
movement; one shows the influence of nature and solitude, the other of
society. Lamb was a lifelong friend of Coleridge, and an admirer and
defender of the poetic creed of Wordsworth; but while the latter lived
apart from men, content with nature and with reading an occasional moral
lesson to society, Lamb was born and lived in the midst of the London
streets. The city crowd, with its pleasures and occupations, its endless
little comedies and tragedies, alone interested him. According to his own
account, when he paused in the crowded street tears would spring to his
eyes,--tears of pure pleasure at the abundance of so much good life; and
when he wrote, he simply interpreted that crowded human life of joy and
sorrow, as Wordsworth interpreted the woods and waters, without any desire
to change or to reform them. He has given us the best pictures we possess
of Coleridge, Hazlitt, Landor, Hood, Cowden Clarke, and many more of the
interesting men and women of his age; and it is due to his insight and
sympathy that the life of those far-off days seems almost as real to us as
if we ourselves remembered it. Of all our English essayists he is the most
lovable; partly because of his delicate, old-fashioned style and humor, but
more because of that cheery and heroic struggle against misfortune which
shines like a subdued light in all his writings.

LIFE. In the very heart of London there is a curious, old-fashioned place
known as the Temple,--an enormous, rambling, apparently forgotten
structure, dusty and still, in the midst of the endless roar of the city
streets. Originally it was a chapter house of the Knights Templars, and so
suggests to us the spirit of the Crusades and of the Middle Ages; but now
the building is given over almost entirely to the offices and lodgings of
London lawyers. It is this queer old place which, more than all others, is
associated with the name of Charles Lamb. "I was born," he says, "and
passed the first seven years of my life in the Temple. Its gardens, its
halls, its fountain, its river... these are my oldest recollections." He
was the son of a poor clerk, or rather servant, of one of the barristers,
and was the youngest of seven children, only three of whom survived
infancy. Of these three, John, the elder, was apparently a selfish
creature, who took no part in the heroic struggle of his brother and
sister. At seven years, Charles was sent to the famous "Bluecoat" charity
school of Christ's Hospital. Here he remained seven years; and here he
formed his lifelong friendship for another poor, neglected boy, whom the
world remembers as Coleridge.[230]

When only fourteen years old, Lamb left the charity school and was soon at
work as a clerk in the South Sea House. Two years later he became a clerk
in the famous India House, where he worked steadily for thirty-three years,
with the exception of six weeks, in the winter of 1795-1796, spent within
the walls of an asylum. In 1796 Lamb's sister Mary, who was as talented and
remarkable as Lamb himself, went violently insane and killed her own
mother. For a long time after this appalling tragedy she was in an asylum
at Hoxton; then Lamb, in 1797, brought her to his own little house, and for
the remainder of his life cared for her with a tenderness and devotion
which furnishes one of the most beautiful pages in our literary history. At
times the malady would return to Mary, giving sure warning of its terrible
approach; and then brother and sister might be seen walking silently, hand
in hand, to the gates of the asylum, their cheeks wet with tears. One must
remember this, as well as Lamb's humble lodgings and the drudgery of his
daily work in the-big commercial house, if he would appreciate the pathos
of "The Old Familiar Faces," or the heroism which shines through the most
human and the most delightful essays in our language.

When Lamb was fifty years of age the East India Company, led partly by his
literary fame following his first _Essays of Elia_, and partly by his
thirty-three years of faithful service, granted him a comfortable pension;
and happy as a boy turned loose from school he left India House forever to
give himself up to literary work.[231] He wrote to Wordsworth, in April,
1825, "I came home _forever_ on Tuesday of last week--it was like passing
from life into eternity." Curiously enough Lamb seems to lose power after
his release from drudgery, and his last essays, published in 1833, lack
something of the grace and charm of his earlier work. He died at Edmonton
in 1834; and his gifted sister Mary sank rapidly into the gulf from which
his strength and gentleness had so long held her back. No literary man was
ever more loved and honored by a rare circle of friends; and all who knew
him bear witness to the simplicity and goodness which any reader may find
for himself between the lines of his essays.

WORKS. The works of Lamb divide themselves naturally into three periods.
First, there are his early literary efforts, including the poems signed "C.
L." in Coleridge's _Poems on Various Subjects_ (1796); his romance
_Rosamund Gray_ (1798); his poetical drama _John Woodvil_ (1802); and
various other immature works in prose and poetry. This period comes to an
end in 1803, when he gave up his newspaper work, especially the
contribution of six jokes, puns, and squibs daily to the _Morning Post_ at
sixpence apiece. The second period was given largely to literary criticism;
and the _Tales from Shakespeare_ (1807)--written by Charles and Mary Lamb,
the former reproducing the tragedies, and the latter the comedies--may be
regarded as his first successful literary venture. The book was written
primarily for children; but so thoroughly had brother and sister steeped
themselves in the literature of the Elizabethan period that young and old
alike were delighted with this new version of Shakespeare's stories, and
the _Tales_ are still regarded as the best of their kind in our literature.
In 1808 appeared his _Specimens of English Dramatic Poets Contemporary with
Shakespeare_. This carried out the splendid critical work of Coleridge, and
was the most noticeable influence in developing the poetic qualities of
Keats, as shown in his last volume.

The third period includes Lamb's criticisms of life, which are gathered
together in his _Essays of Elia_ (1823), and his _Last Essays of Elia_,
which were published ten years later. These famous essays began in 1820
with the appearance of the new _London Magazine_[232] and were continued
for many years, such subjects as the "Dissertation on Roast Pig," "Old
China," "Praise of Chimney Sweepers," "Imperfect Sympathies," "A Chapter on
Ears," "Mrs. Battle's Opinions on Whist," "Mackery End," "Grace Before
Meat," "Dream Children," and many others being chosen apparently at random,
but all leading to a delightful interpretation of the life of London, as it
appeared to a quiet little man who walked unnoticed through its crowded
streets. In the first and last essays which we have mentioned,
"Dissertation on Roast Pig" and "Dream Children," we have the extremes of
Lamb's humor and pathos.

The style of all these essays is gentle, old-fashioned, irresistibly
attractive. Lamb was especially fond of old writers and borrowed
unconsciously from the style of Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_ and from
Browne's _Religio Medici_ and from the early English dramatists. But this
style had become a part of Lamb by long reading, and he was apparently
unable to express his new thought without using their old quaint
expressions. Though these essays are all criticisms or appreciations of the
life of his age, they are all intensely personal. In other words, they are
an excellent picture of Lamb and of humanity. Without a trace of vanity or
self-assertion, Lamb begins with himself, with some purely personal mood or
experience, and from this he leads the reader to see life and literature as
he saw it. It is this wonderful combination of personal and universal
interests, together with Lamb's rare old style and quaint humor, which make
the essays remarkable. They continue the best tradition of Addison and
Steele, our first great essayists; but their sympathies are broader and
deeper, and their humor more delicious than any which preceded them.


THOMAS DE QUINCY (1785-1859)

In De Quincey the romantic element is even more strongly developed than in
Lamb, not only in his critical work, but also in his erratic and
imaginative life. He was profoundly educated, even more so than Coleridge,
and was one of the keenest intellects of the age; yet his wonderful
intellect seems always subordinate to his passion for dreaming. Like Lamb,
he was a friend and associate of the Lake poets, making his headquarters in
Wordsworth's old cottage at Grasmere for nearly twenty years. Here the
resemblance ceases, and a marked contrast begins. As a man, Lamb is the
most human and lovable of all our essayists; while De Quincey is the most
uncanny and incomprehensible. Lamb's modest works breathe the two essential
qualities of sympathy and humor; the greater number of De Quincey's essays,
while possessing more or less of both these qualities, are characterized
chiefly by their brilliant style. Life, as seen through De Quincey's eyes,
is nebulous and chaotic, and there is a suspicion of the fabulous in all
that he wrote. Even in _The Revolt of the Tartars_ the romantic element is
uppermost, and in much of De Quincey's prose the element of unreality is
more noticeable than in Shelley's poetry. Of his subject-matter, his facts,
ideas, and criticisms, we are generally suspicious; but of his style,
sometimes stately and sometimes headlong, now gorgeous as an Oriental
dream, now musical as Keats's _Endymion_, and always, even in the most
violent contrasts, showing a harmony between the idea and the expression
such as no other English writer, with the possible exception of Newman, has
ever rivaled,--say what you will of the marvelous brilliancy of De
Quincey's style, you have still only half expressed the truth. It is the
style alone which makes these essays immortal.

LIFE. De Quincey was born in Manchester in 1785. In neither his father, who
was a prosperous merchant, nor his mother, who was a quiet, unsympathetic
woman, do we see any suggestion of the son's almost uncanny genius. As a
child he was given to dreams, more vivid and intense but less beautiful
than those of the young Blake to whom he bears a strong resemblance. In the
grammar school at Bath he displayed astonishing ability, and acquired Greek
and Latin with a rapidity that frightened his slow tutors. At fifteen he
not only read Greek, but spoke it fluently; and one of his astounded
teachers remarked, "That boy could harangue an Athenian mob better than you
or I could address an English one." From the grammar school at Manchester,
whither he was sent in 1800, he soon ran away, finding the instruction far
below his abilities, and the rough life absolutely intolerable to his
sensitive nature. An uncle, just home from India, interceded for the boy
lest he be sent back to the school, which he hated; and with an allowance
of a guinea a week he started a career of vagrancy, much like that of
Goldsmith, living on the open hills, in the huts of shepherds and charcoal
burners, in the tents of gypsies, wherever fancy led him. His fear of the
Manchester school finally led him to run away to London, where, without
money or friends, his life was even more extraordinary than his gypsy
wanderings. The details of this vagrancy are best learned in his
_Confessions of an English Opium-Eater_, where we meet not simply the facts
of his life, but also the confusion of dreams and fancies in the midst of
which he wandered like a man lost on the mountains, with storm clouds under
his feet hiding the familiar earth. After a year of vagrancy and starvation
he was found by his family and allowed to go to Oxford, where his career
was marked by the most brilliant and erratic scholarship. When ready for a
degree, in 1807, he passed his written tests successfully, but felt a
sudden terror at the thought of the oral examination and disappeared from
the university, never to return.

It was in Oxford that De Quincey began the use of opium; to relieve the
pains of neuralgia, and the habit increased until he was an almost hopeless
slave to the drug. Only his extraordinary will power enabled him to break
away from the habit, after some thirty years of misery. Some peculiarity of
his delicate constitution enabled De Quincey to take enormous quantities of
opium, enough to kill several ordinary men; and it was largely opium,
working upon a sensitive imagination, which produced his gorgeous dreams,
broken by intervals of weakness and profound depression. For twenty years
he resided at Grasmere in the companionship of the Lake poets; and here,
led by the loss of his small fortune, he began to write, with the idea of
supporting his family. In 1821 he published his first famous work, the
_Confessions of an English Opium-Eater_, and for nearly forty years
afterwards he wrote industriously, contributing to various magazines an
astonishing number of essays on a great variety of subjects. Without
thought of literary fame, he contributed these articles anonymously; but
fortunately, in 1853, he began to collect his own works, and the last of
fourteen volumes was published just after his death.

In 1830, led by his connection with _Blackwood's Magazine_, to which he was
the chief contributor, De Quincey removed with his family to Edinburgh,
where his erratic genius and his singularly childlike ways produced enough
amusing anecdotes to fill a volume. He would take a room in some place
unknown to his friends and family; would live in it for a few years, until
he had filled it, even to the bath tub, with books and with his own chaotic
manuscripts, allowing no one to enter or disturb his den; and then, when
the place became too crowded, he would lock the door and go away and take
another lodging, where he repeated the same extraordinary performance. He
died in Edinburgh in 1859. Like Lamb, he was a small, boyish figure,
gentle, and elaborately courteous. Though excessively shy, and escaping as
often as possible to solitude, he was nevertheless fond of society, and his
wide knowledge and vivid imagination made his conversations almost as
prized as those of his friend Coleridge.

WORKS. De Quincey's works may be divided into two general classes. The
first includes his numerous critical articles, and the second his
autobiographical sketches. All his works, it must be remembered, were
contributed to various magazines, and were hastily collected just before
his death. Hence the general impression of chaos which we get from reading
them.

From a literary view point the most illuminating of De Quincey's critical
works is his. _Literary Reminiscences_. This contains brilliant
appreciations of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb, Shelley, Keats, Hazlitt, and
Landor, as well as some interesting studies of the literary figures of the
age preceding. Among the best of his brilliant critical essays are _On the
Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth_ (1823), which is admirably suited to show
the man's critical genius, and _Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts_
(1827), which reveals his grotesque humor Other suggestive critical works,
if one must choose among such a multitude, are his _Letters to a Young Man_
(1823), _Joan of Arc_ (1847), _The Revolt of the Tartars_ (1840), and _The
English Mail-Coach_ (1849). In the last-named essay the "Dream Fugue" is
one of the most imaginative of all his curious works.

Of De Quincey's autobiographical sketches the best known is his
_Confessions of an English Opium-Eater_ (1821). This is only partly a
record of opium dreams, and its chief interest lies in glimpses it gives us
of De Quincey's own life and wanderings. This should be followed by
_Suspiria de Profundis_ (1845), which is chiefly a record of gloomy and
terrible dreams produced by opiates. The most interesting parts of his
_Suspiria_, showing De Quincey's marvelous insight into dreams, are those
in which we are brought face to face with the strange feminine creations
"Levana," "Madonna," "Our Lady of Sighs," and "Our Lady of Darkness." A
series of nearly thirty articles which he collected in 1853, called
_Autobiographic Sketches_, completes the revelation of the author's own
life. Among his miscellaneous works may be mentioned, in order to show his
wide range of subjects, _Klosterheim_, a novel, _Logic of Political
Economy_, the _Essays on Style and Rhetoric, Philosophy of Herodotus_, and
his articles on Goethe, Pope, Schiller, and Shakespeare which he
contributed to the _Encyclopedia Britannica_.

De Quincey's style is a revelation of the beauty of the English language,
and it profoundly influenced Ruskin and other prose writers of the
Victorian Age. It has two chief faults,--diffuseness, which continually
leads De Quincey away from his object, and triviality, which often makes
him halt in the midst of a marvelous paragraph to make some light jest or
witticism that has some humor but no mirth in it. Notwithstanding these
faults, De Quincey's prose is still among the few supreme examples of style
in our language. Though he was profoundly influenced by the seventeenth-
century writers, he attempted definitely to create a new style which should
combine the best elements of prose and poetry. In consequence, his prose
works are often, like those of Milton, more imaginative and melodious than
much of our poetry. He has been well called "the psychologist of style,"
and as such his works will never be popular; but to the few who can
appreciate him he will always be an inspiration to better writing. One has
a deeper respect for our English language and literature after reading him.

SECONDARY WRITERS OF ROMANTICISM. One has only to glance back over the
authors we have been studying--Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Byron,
Shelley, Keats, Scott, Lamb, De Quincey--to realize the great change which
swept over the life and literature of England in a single half century,
under two influences which we now know as the French Revolution in history
and the Romantic Movement in literature. In life men had rebelled against
the too strict authority of state and society; in literature they rebelled
even more vigorously against the bonds of classicism, which had sternly
repressed a writer's ambition to follow his own ideals and to express them
in his own way. Naturally such an age of revolution was essentially
poetic,--only the Elizabethan Age surpasses it in this respect,--and it
produced a large number of minor writers, who followed more or less closely
the example of its great leaders. Among novelists we have Jane Austen,
Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Jane Porter, and Susan Ferrier,--all
women, be it noted; among the poets, Campbell, Moore, Hogg ("the Ettrick
Shepherd"), Mrs. Hemans, Heber, Keble, Hood, and "Ingoldsby" (Richard
Barham); and among miscellaneous writers, Sidney Smith, "Christopher North"
(John Wilson), Chalmers, Lockhart, Leigh Hunt, Hazlitt, Hallam, and Landor.
Here is an astonishing variety of writers, and to consider all their claims
to remembrance would of itself require a volume. Though these are generally
classed as secondary writers, much of their work has claims to popularity,
and some of it to permanence. Moore's _Irish Melodies_, Campbell's lyrics,
Keble's _Christian Year_, and Jane Porter's _Thaddeus of Warsaw_ and
_Scottish Chiefs_ have still a multitude of readers, where Keats, Lamb, and
De Quincey are prized only by the cultured few; and Hallam's historical and
critical works are perhaps better known than those of Gibbon, who
nevertheless occupies a larger place in our literature. Among all these
writers we choose only two, Jane Austen and Walter Savage Landor, whose
works indicate a period of transition from the Romantic to the Victorian
Age.


JANE AUSTEN (1775-1817)

We have so lately rediscovered the charm and genius of this gifted young
woman that she seems to be a novelist of yesterday, rather than the
contemporary of Wordsworth and Coleridge; and few even of her readers
realize that she did for the English novel precisely what the Lake poets
did for English poetry,--she refined and simplified it, making it a true
reflection of English life. Like the Lake poets, she met with scanty
encouragement in her own generation. Her greatest novel, _Pride and
Prejudice_, was finished in 1797, a year before the appearance of the
famous _Lyrical Ballads_ of Wordsworth and Coleridge; but while the latter
book was published and found a few appreciative readers, the manuscript of
this wonderful novel went begging for sixteen years before it found a
publisher. As Wordsworth began with the deliberate purpose of making poetry
natural and truthful, so Miss Austen appears to have begun writing with the
idea of presenting the life of English country society exactly as it was,
in opposition to the romantic extravagance of Mrs. Radcliffe and her
school. But there was this difference,--that Miss Austen had in large
measure the saving gift of humor, which Wordsworth sadly lacked. Maria
Edgeworth, at the same time, set a sane and excellent example in her tales
of Irish life, _The Absentee_ and _Castle Rackrent;_ and Miss Austen
followed up the advantage with at least six works, which have grown
steadily in value until we place them gladly in the first rank of our
novels of common life. It is not simply for her exquisite charm, therefore,
that we admire her, but also for her influence in bringing our novels back
to their true place as an expression of human life. It is due partly, at
least, to her influence that a multitude of readers were ready to
appreciate Mrs. Gaskell's _Cranford_, and the powerful and enduring work of
George Eliot.

LIFE. Jane Austen's life gives little opportunity for the biographer,
unless, perchance, he has something of her own power to show the beauty and
charm of commonplace things. She was the seventh child of Rev. George
Austen, rector of Steventon, and was born in the parsonage of the village
in 1775. With her sisters she was educated at home, and passed her life
very quietly, cheerfully, in the doing of small domestic duties, to which
love lent the magic lamp that makes all things beautiful. She began to
write at an early age, and seems to have done her work on a little table in
the family sitting room, in the midst of the family life. When a visitor
entered, she would throw a paper or a piece of sewing over her work, and
she modestly refused to be known as the author of novels which we now count
among our treasured possessions. With the publishers she had little
success. _Pride and Prejudice_ went begging, as we have said, for sixteen
years; and _Northanger Abbey_ (1798) was sold for a trivial sum to a
publisher, who laid it aside and forgot it, until the appearance and
moderate success of _Sense and Sensibility_ in 1811. Then, after keeping
the manuscript some fifteen years, he sold it back to the family, who found
another publisher.

An anonymous article in the _Quarterly Review_, following the appearance of
_Emma_ in 1815, full of generous appreciation of the charm of the new
writer, was the beginning of Jane Austen's fame; and it is only within a
few years that we have learned that the friendly and discerning critic was
Walter Scott. He continued to be her admirer until her early death; but
these two, the greatest writers of fiction in their age, were never brought
together. Both were home-loving people, and Miss Austen especially was
averse to publicity and popularity. She died, quietly as she had lived, at
Winchester, in 1817, and was buried in the cathedral. She was a bright,
attractive little woman, whose sunny qualities are unconsciously reflected
in all her books.

WORKS. Very few English writers ever had so narrow a field of work as Jane
Austen. Like the French novelists, whose success seems to lie in choosing
the tiny field that they know best, her works have an exquisite perfection
that is lacking in most of our writers of fiction. With the exception of an
occasional visit to the watering place of Bath, her whole life was spent in
small country parishes, whose simple country people became the characters
of her novels. Her brothers were in the navy, and so naval officers furnish
the only exciting elements in her stories; but even these alleged heroes
lay aside their imposing martial ways and act like themselves and other
people. Such was her literary field, in which the chief duties were of the
household, the chief pleasures in country gatherings, and the chief
interests in matrimony. Life, with its mighty interests, its passions,
ambitions, and tragic struggles, swept by like a great river; while the
secluded interests of a country parish went round and round quietly, like
an eddy behind a sheltering rock. We can easily understand, therefore, the
limitations of Jane Austen; but within her own field she is unequaled. Her
characters are absolutely true to life, and all her work has the perfection
of a delicate miniature painting. The most widely read of her novels is
_Pride and Prejudice;_ but three others, _Sense and Sensibility, Emma_, and
_Mansfield Park_, have slowly won their way to the front rank of fiction.
From a literary view point _Northanger Abbey_ is perhaps the best; for in
it we find that touch of humor and delicate satire with which this gentle
little woman combated the grotesque popular novels of the _Udolpho_ type.
Reading any of these works, one is inclined to accept the hearty
indorsement of Sir Walter Scott: "That young lady has a talent for
describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life
which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The big bowwow strain I
can do myself, like any now going; but the exquisite touch which renders
ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of
the description and the sentiment, is denied to me. What a pity such a
gifted creature died so early!"


WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR (1775-1864)

While Hazlitt, Lamb, De Quincey, and other romantic critics went back to
early English literature for their inspiration, Landor shows a reaction
from the prevailing Romanticism by his imitation of the ancient classic
writers. His life was an extraordinary one and, like his work, abounded in
sharp contrasts. On the one hand, there are his egoism, his unncontrollable
anger, his perpetual lawsuits, and the last sad tragedy with his children,
which suggests _King Lear_ and his daughters; on the other hand there is
his steady devotion to the classics and to the cultivation of the deep
wisdom of the ancients, which suggests Pindar and Cicero. In his works we
find the wild extravagance of _Gebir_, followed by the superb classic style
and charm of _Pericles and Aspasia_. Such was Landor, a man of high ideals,
perpetually at war with himself and the world.

LIFE. Lander's stormy life covers the whole period from Wordsworth's
childhood to the middle of the Victorian Era. He was the son of a
physician, and was born at Warwick, in 1775. From his mother he inherited a
fortune; but it was soon scattered by large expenditures and law quarrels;
and in his old age, refused help by his own children, only Browning's
generosity kept Landor from actual want. At Rugby, and at Oxford, his
extreme Republicanism brought him into constant trouble; and his fitting
out a band of volunteers to assist the Spaniards against Napoleon, in 1808,
allies him with Byron and his Quixotic followers. The resemblance to Byron
is even more strikingly shown in the poem _Gebir_, published in 1798, a
year made famous by the _Lyrical Ballads_ of Wordsworth and Coleridge.

A remarkable change in Lander's life is noticeable in 1821, when, at
forty-six years of age, after having lost his magnificent estate of
Llanthony Abbey, in Glamorganshire, and after a stormy experience in Como,
he settled down for a time at Fiesole near Florence. To this period of calm
after storm we owe the classical prose works for which he is famous. The
calm, like that at the center of a whirlwind, lasted but a short time, and
Landor, leaving his family in great anger, returned to Bath, where he lived
alone for more than twenty years. Then, in order to escape a libel suit,
the choleric old man fled back to Italy. He died at Florence, in 1864. The
spirit of his whole life may be inferred from the defiant farewell which he
flung to it:

    I strove with none, for none was worth my strife;
       Nature I loved, and next to Nature Art;
    I warmed both hands before the fire of life;
       It sinks, and I am ready to depart.

WORKS. Landor's reaction from Romanticism is all the more remarkable in
view of his early efforts, such as _Gebir_, a wildly romantic poem, which
rivals any work of Byron or Shelley in its extravagance. Notwithstanding
its occasional beautiful and suggestive lines, the work was not and never
has been successful; and the same may be said of all his poetical works.
His first collection of poems was published in 1795, his last a full half
century later, in 1846. In the latter volume, _The Hellenics_,--which
included some translations of his earlier Latin poems, called _Idyllia
Heroica,--_one has only to read "The Hamadryad," and compare it with the
lyrics of the first volume, in order to realize the astonishing literary
vigor of a man who published two volumes, a half century apart, without any
appreciable diminution of poetical feeling. In all these poems one is
impressed by the striking and original figures of speech which Landor uses
to emphasize his meaning.

It is by his prose works, largely, that Landor has won a place in our
literature; partly because of their intrinsic worth, their penetrating
thought, and severe classic style; and partly because of their profound
influence upon the writers of the present age. The most noted of his prose
works are his six volumes of _Imaginary Conversations_ (1824-1846). For
these conversations Landor brings together, sometimes in groups, sometimes
in couples, well-known characters, or rather shadows, from the four corners
of the earth and from the remotest ages of recorded history. Thus Diogenes
talks with Plato, Æsop with a young slave girl in Egypt, Henry VIII with
Anne Boleyn in prison, Dante with Beatrice, Leofric with Lady Godiva,--all
these and many others, from Epictetus to Cromwell, are brought together and
speak of life and love and death, each from his own view point.
Occasionally, as in the meeting of Henry and Anne Boleyn, the situation is
tense and dramatic; but as a rule the characters simply meet and converse
in the same quiet strain, which becomes, after much reading, somewhat
monotonous. On the other hand, one who reads the _Imaginary Conversations_
is lifted at once into a calm and noble atmosphere which braces and
inspires him, making him forget petty things, like a view from a hilltop.
By its combination of lofty thought and severely classic style the book has
won, and deserves, a very high place among our literary records.

The same criticism applies to _Pericles and Aspasia_, which is a series of
imaginary letters, telling the experiences of Aspasia, a young lady from
Asia Minor, who visits Athens at the summit of its fame and glory, in the
great age of Pericles. This is, in our judgment, the best worth reading of
all Landor's works. One gets from it not only Landor's classic style,
but--what is well worth while--a better picture of Greece in the days of
its greatness than can be obtained from many historical volumes.


SUMMARY OF THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM. This period extends from the war with
the colonies, following the Declaration of Independence, in 1776, to the
accession of Victoria in 1837, both limits being very indefinite, as will
be seen by a glance at the Chronology following. During the first part of
the period especially, England was in a continual turmoil, produced by
political and economic agitation at home, and by the long wars that covered
two continents and the wide sea between them. The mighty changes resulting
from these two causes have given this period the name of the Age of
Revolution. The storm center of all the turmoil at home and abroad was the
French Revolution, which had a profound influence on the life and
literature of all Europe. On the Continent the overthrow of Napoleon at
Waterloo (1815) apparently checked the progress of liberty, which had
started with the French Revolution,[233] but in England the case was
reversed. The agitation for popular liberty, which at one time threatened a
revolution, went steadily forward till it resulted in the final triumph of
democracy, in the Reform Bill of 1832, and in a number of exceedingly
important reforms, such as the extension of manhood suffrage, the removal
of the last unjust restrictions against Catholics, the establishment of a
national system of schools, followed by a rapid increase in popular
education, and the abolition of slavery in all English colonies (1833). To
this we must add the changes produced by the discovery of steam and the
invention of machinery, which rapidly changed England from an agricultural
to a manufacturing nation, introduced the factory system, and caused this
period to be known as the Age of Industrial Revolution.

The literature of the age is largely poetical in form, and almost entirely
romantic in spirit. For, as we have noted, the triumph of democracy in
government is generally accompanied by the triumph of romanticism in
literature. At first the literature, as shown especially in the early work
of Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley, reflected the turmoil of the age and the
wild hopes of an ideal democracy occasioned by the French Revolution. Later
the extravagant enthusiasm subsided, and English writers produced so much
excellent literature that the age is often called the Second Creative
period, the first being the Age of Elizabeth. The six chief characteristics
of the age are: the prevalence of romantic poetry; the creation of the
historical novel by Scott; the first appearance of women novelists, such as
Mrs. Anne Radcliffe, Jane Porter, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen; the
development of literary criticism, in the work of Lamb, De Quincey,
Coleridge, and Hazlitt; the practical and economic bent of philosophy, as
shown in the work of Malthus, James Mill, and Adam Smith; and the
establishment of great literary magazines, like the _Edinburgh Review_, the
_Quarterly_, _Blackwood's_, and the _Athenaeum_.

In our study we have noted (1) the Poets of Romanticism: the importance of
the _Lyrical Ballads_ of 1798; the life and work of Wordsworth, Coleridge,
Scott, Byron, Shelley, and Keats; (2) the Prose Writers: the novels of
Scott; the development of literary criticism; the life and work of the
essayists, Lamb, De Quincey, Landor, and of the novelist Jane Austen.


SELECTIONS FOR READING. Manly's English Poetry and Manly's English Prose
(each one vol.) contain good selections from all authors studied. Ward's
English Poets (4 vols.), Craik's English Prose Selections (5 vols.),
Braithwaite's The Book of Georgian Verse, Page's British Poets of the
Nineteenth Century, and Garnett's English Prose from Elizabeth to Victoria,
may also be used to advantage. Important works, however, should be read
entire in one of the inexpensive school editions given below. (Full titles
and publishers may be found in the General Bibliography at the end of this
book.)

_Wordsworth_. Intimations of Immortality, Tintern Abbey, best lyrics and
sonnets, in Selections, edited by Dowden (Athenaeum Press Series);
selections and short poems, edited by M. Arnold, in Golden Treasury Series;
Selections, also in Everyman's Library, Riverside Literature Series,
Cassell's National Library, etc.

_Coleridge_. Ancient Mariner, edited by L. R. Gibbs, in Standard English
Classics; same poem, in Pocket Classics, Eclectic English Classics, etc.;
Poems, edited by J. M. Hart, in Athenæum Press (announced, 1909);
Selections, Golden Book of Coleridge, in Everyman's Library; Selections
from Coleridge and Campbell, in Riverside Literature; Prose Selections
(Ginn and Company, also Holt); Lectures on Shakespeare, in Everyman's
Library, Bohn's Standard Library, etc.

_Scott_. Lady of the Lake, Marmion, Ivanhoe, The Talisman, Guy Mannering,
Quentin Durward. Numerous inexpensive editions of Scott's best poems and
novels in Standard English Classics, Pocket Classics, Cassell's National
Library, Eclectic English Classics, Everyman's Library, etc.; thus, Lady of
the Lake, edited by Edwin Ginn, and Ivanhoe, edited by W. D. Lewis, both in
Standard English Classics; Marmion, edited by G. B. Acton, and The
Talisman, edited by F. Treudly, in Pocket Classics, etc.

_Byron_. Mazeppa and The Prisoner of Chillon, edited by S. M. Tucker, in
Standard English Classics; short poems, Selections from Childe Harold,
etc., in Canterbury Poets, Riverside Literature, Holt's English Readings,
Pocket Classics, etc.

_Shelley_. To a Cloud, To a Skylark, West Wind, Sensitive Plant, Adonais,
etc., all in Selections from Shelley, edited by Alexander, in Athenæum
Press Series; Selections, edited by Woodberry, in Belles Lettres Series;
Selections, also in Pocket Classics, Heath's English Classics, Golden
Treasury Series, etc.

_Keats_. Ode on a Grecian Urn, Eve of St. Agnes, Hyperion, Lamia, To a
Nightingale, etc., in Selections from Keats, in Athenæum Press; Selections
also in Muses' Library, Riverside Literature, Golden Treasury Series, etc.

_Lamb_. Essays: Dream Children, Old China, Dissertation on Roast Pig, etc.,
edited by Wauchope, in Standard English Classics; various essays also in
Camelot Series, Temple Classics, Everyman's Library, etc. Tales from
Shakespeare, in Home and School Library (Ginn and Company); also in
Riverside Literature, Pocket Classics, Golden Treasury, etc.

_De Quincey_. The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc, in Standard English
Classics, etc.; Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, in Temple Classics,
Morley's Universal Library, Everyman's Library, Pocket Classics, etc.;
Selections, edited by M. H. Turk, in Athenæum Press; Selections, edited by
B. Perry (Holt).

_Landor_. Selections, edited by W. Clymer, in Athenæum Press; Pericles and
Aspasia, in Camelot Series; Imaginary Conversations, selected (Ginn and
Company); the same, 2 vols., in Dutton's Universal Library; selected poems,
in Canterbury Poets; selections, prose and verse, in Golden Treasury
Series.

_Jane Austen_. Pride and Prejudice, in Everyman's Library, Pocket Classics,
etc.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.[234]

_HISTORY. Text-book_, Montgomery, pp. 323-357; Cheyney, 576-632. _General
Works_. Green, X, 2-4, Traill, Gardiner, Macaulay, etc. _Special Works_.
Cheyney's Industrial and Social History of England; Warner's Landmarks of
English Industrial History; Hassall's Making of the British Empire;
Macaulay's William Pitt; Trevelyan's Early Life of Charles James Fox;
Morley's Edmund Burke; Morris's Age of Queen Anne and the Early
Hanoverians.

_LITERATURE. General Works._ Mitchell, Courthope, Garnett and Gosse, Taine
(see General Bibliography). _Special Works_. Beers's English Romanticism in
the Nineteenth Century; A. Symons's The Romantic Movement in English
Poetry; Dowden's The French Revolution and English Literature, also Studies
in Literature, 1789-1877; Hancock's The French Revolution and the English
Poets; Herford's The Age of Wordsworth (Handbooks of English Literature);
Mrs. Oliphant's Literary History of England in the End of the Eighteenth
and Beginning of the Nineteenth Centuries; Saintsbury's History of
Nineteenth Century Literature; Masson's Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and
Other Essays; Poets and Poetry of the Nineteenth Century, vols. 1-3;
Gates's Studies and Appreciations; S. Brooke's Studies in Poetry;
Rawnsley's Literary Associations of the English Lakes (2 vols.).

_Wordsworth_. Texts: Globe, Aldine, Cambridge editions, etc.; Poetical and
Prose Works, with Dorothy Wordsworth's Journal, edited by Knight, Eversley
Edition (London and New York, 1896); Letters of the Wordsworth Family,
edited by Knight, 3 vols. (Ginn and Company); Poetical Selections, edited
by Dowden, in Athenaeum Press; various other selections, in Golden
Treasury, etc.; Prose Selections, edited by Gayley (Ginn and Company).
Life: Memoirs, 2 vols., by Christopher Wordsworth; by Knight, 3 vols.; by
Myers (English Men of Letters); by Elizabeth Wordsworth; Early Life (a
Study of the Prelude) by E. Legouis, translated by J. Matthews; Raleigh's
Wordsworth; N.C. Smith's Wordsworth's Literary Criticism; Rannie's
Wordsworth and His Circle. Criticism: Herford's The Age of Wordsworth;
Masson's Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats; Magnus's Primer of Wordsworth;
Wilson's Helps to the Study of Arnold's Wordsworth; Essays, by Lowell, in
Among My Books; by M. Arnold, in Essays in Criticism; by Hutton, in
Literary Essays; by L. Stephen, in Hours in a Library, and in Studies of a
Biographer; by Bagehot, in Literary Studies; by Hazlitt, in The Spirit of
the Age; by Pater, in Appreciations; by De Quincey, in Essays on the Poets;
by Fields, in Yesterdays with Authors; by Shairp, in Studies in Poetry and
Philosophy. See also Knight's Through the Wordsworth Country, and
Rawnsley's Literary Associations of the English Lakes.

_Coleridge_. Texts: Complete Works, edited by Shedd, 7 vols. (New York
1884); Poems, Globe, Aldine, and Cambridge editions, in Athenaeum Press
(announced, 1909), Muses' Library, Canterbury Poets, etc.; Biographia
Literaria, in Everyman's Library; the same, in Clarendon Press; Prose
Selections, Lectures on Shakespeare, etc. (see Selections for Reading,
above); Letters, edited by E.H. Coleridge (London, 1895). Life: by J.D.
Campbell; by Traill (English Men of Letters); by Dykes; by Hall Caine
(Great Writers Series); see also Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, and
Lamb's essay, Christ's Hospital, in Essays of Elia. Criticism: Brandl's
Coleridge and the English Romantic Movement. Essays, by Shairp, in Studies
in Poetry and Philosophy; by Woodberry, in Makers of Literature; by J.
Forster, in Great Teachers; by Dowden, in New Studies; by Swinburne, in
Essays and Studies; by Brooke, in Theology in the English Poets; by
Saintsbury, in Essays in English Literature; by Lowell in Democracy and
Other Essays; by Hazlitt, and by Pater (see Wordsworth, above). See also
Beers's English Romanticism; Carlyle's chapter on Coleridge, in Life of
John Sterling.

_Southey_. Texts: Poems, edited by Dowden (Macmillan); Poetical Works
(Crowell); Selections in Canterbury Poets; Life of Nelson, in Everyman's
Library, Temple Classics, Morley's Universal Library, etc. Life: by Dowden
(English Men of Letters). Essays, by L. Stephen, in Studies of a
Biographer; by Hazlitt and Saintsbury (see above).

_Scott_. Texts: Numerous good editions of novels and poems. For single
works, see Selections for Reading, above. Life: by Lockhart, 5 vols.
(several editions; best by Pollard, 1900); by Hutton (English Men of
Letters); by A. Lang, in Literary Lives; by C. D. Yonge (Great Writers); by
Hudson; by Saintsbury (Famous Scots Series). Criticism: Essays, by
Stevenson, Gossip on Romance, in Memories and Portraits; by Shairp, in
Aspects of Poetry; by Swinburne, in Studies in Prose and Poetry; by
Carlyle, in Miscellaneous Essays; by Hazlitt, Bagehot, L. Stephen, Brooke,
and Saintsbury (see Coleridge and Wordsworth, above).

_Byron_. Texts: Complete Works, Globe, Cambridge Poets, and Oxford
editions; Selections, edited by M. Arnold, in Golden Treasury (see also
Selections for Reading, above); Letters and Journals of Byron, edited by
Moore (unreliable). Life: by Noel (Great Writers); by Nichol (English Men
of Letters); The Real Lord Byron, by J. C. Jeaffreson; Trelawny's
Recollections of Shelley and Byron. Criticism: Hunt's Lord Byron and His
Contemporaries; Essays, by Morley, Macaulay, Hazlitt, Swinburne, and M.
Arnold.

_Shelley_. Texts: Centenary Edition, edited by Woodberry, 4 vols.; Globe
and Cambridge Poets editions; Essays and Letters, in Camelot Series (see
Selections for Reading, above). Life: by Symonds (English Men of Letters);
by Dowden, 2 vols.; by Sharp (Great Writers); by T. J. Hogg, 2 vols.; by W.
M. Rossetti. Criticism: Salt's A Shelley Primer; Essays, by Dowden, in
Transcripts and Studies; by M. Arnold, Woodberry, Bagehot, Forster, L.
Stephen, Brooke, De Quincey, and Hutton (see Coleridge and Wordsworth,
above).

_Keats_. Texts: Complete Works, edited by Forman, 4 vols. (London, 1883);
Cambridge Poets Edition, with Letters, edited by H. E. Scudder (Houghton,
Mifflin); Aldine Edition, with Life, edited by Lord Houghton (Macmillan);
Selected Poems, with introduction and notes by Arlo Bates (Ginn and
Company); Poems, also in Everyman's Library, Muses' Library, Golden
Treasury, etc.; Letters, edited by S. Colvin, in Eversley Edition. Life: by
Forman, in Complete Works; by Colvin (English Men of Letters); by W. M.
Rossetti (Great Writers); by A. E. Hancock. Criticism: H. C. Shelley's
Keats and His Circle; Masson's Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and Other
Essays; Essays, by M. Arnold, in Essays in Criticism, also in Ward's
English Poets, vol. 4; by Hudson, in Studies in Interpretation; by Lowell,
in Among My Books, or Literary Essays, vol. 2; by Brooke, De Quincey, and
Swinburne (above).

_Lamb_. Texts: Complete Works and Letters, edited by E. V. Lucas, 7 vols.
(Putnam); the same, edited by Ainger, 6 vols. (London, 1883-1888); Essays
of Elia, in Standard English Classics, etc. (see Selections for Reading);
Dramatic Essays, edited by B. Matthews (Dodd, Mead); Specimens of English
Dramatic Poets, in Bohn's Library. Life: by E. V. Lucas, 2 vols.; by Ainger
(English Men of Letters); by Barry Cornwall; Talfourd's Memoirs of Charles
Lamb. Criticism: Essays, by De Quincey, in Biographical Essays; by F.
Harrison, in Tennyson, Ruskin, Mill, and Other Literary Estimates; by
Pater, and Woodberry (see Wordsworth and Coleridge, above). See also
Fitzgerald's Charles Lamb, his Friends, his Haunts, and his Books.

_De Quincey_. Texts: Collected Writings, edited by Masson, 14 vols.
(London, 1889-1891); Confessions of an Opium-Eater, etc. (see Selections
for Reading). Life: by Masson (English Men of Letters); Life and Writings,
by H. A. Page, 2 vols.; Hogg's De Quincey and his Friends; Findlay's
Personal Recollections of De Quincey; see also De Quincey's
Autobiographical Sketches, and Confessions. Criticism: Essays, by
Saintsbury, in Essays in English Literature; by Masson, in Wordsworth,
Shelley, Keats, and Other Essays; by L. Stephen, in Hours in a Library. See
also Minto's Manual of English Prose Literature.

_Landor_. Texts: Works, with Life by Forster, 8 vols. (London, 1876);
Works, edited by Crump (London, 1897); Letters, etc., edited by Wheeler
(London, 1897 and 1899); Imaginary Conversations, etc. (see Selections for
Reading). Life: by Colvin (English Men of Letters); by Forster. Criticism:
Essays, by De Quincey, Woodberry, L. Stephen, Saintsbury, Swinburne,
Dow-den (see above). See also Stedman's Victorian Poets.

_Jane Austen_. Texts: Works, edited by R. B. Johnson (Dent); various other
editions of novels; Letters, edited by Woolsey (Roberts). Life: Austen-
Leigh's Memoir of Jane Austen; Hill's Jane Austen, her Home and her
Friends; Mitton's Jane Austen and her Times. Life, by Goldwin Smith; by
Maiden (Famous Women Series); by O. F. Adams. Criticism: Pollock's Jane
Austen; Pellew's Jane Austen's Novels; A. A. Jack's Essay on the Novel as
Illustrated by Scott and Miss Austen; H. H. Bonnell's Charlotte Brontë,
George Eliot, and Jane Austen; Essay, by Howells, in Heroines of Fiction.

_Maria Edgeworth_. Texts: Tales and Novels, New Langford Edition, 10 vols.
(London, 1893) various editions of novels (Dent, etc.); The Absentee, and
Castle Rackrent, in Morley's Universal Library. Life: by Helen Zimmerman;
Memoir, by Hare.

_Mrs. Anne Radclife_. Romances, with introduction by Scott, in Ballantynes'
Novelists Library (London, 1824); various editions of Udolpho, etc.;
Saintsbury's Tales of Mystery, vol. i. See Beers's English Romanticism.

_Moore_. Poetical Works, in Canterbury Poets, Chandos Classics, etc.;
Selected poems, in Golden Treasury; Gunning's Thomas Moore, Poet and
Patriot; Symington's Life and Works of Moore. Essay, by Saintsbury.

_Campbell_. Poems, Aldine edition; Selections, in Golden Treasury. Life, by
Hadden.

_Hazlitt_. Texts: Works, edited by Henley, 12 vols. (London, 1902);
Selected Essays, in Temple Classics, Camelot Series, etc. Life: by Birrell
(English Men of Letters); Memoirs, by W. C. Hazlitt. Essays, by Saintsbury;
by L. Stephen.

_Leigh Hunt_. Texts: Selected essays, in Camelot Series, also in Cavendish
Library (Warne); Stories from the Italian Poets (Putnam). Life: by
Monkhouse (Great Writers). Essays, by Macaulay; by Saintsbury; by Hazlitt.
See also Mrs. Field's A Shelf of Old Books.


SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS. (NOTE. In a period like the Age of Romanticism, the
poems and essays chosen for special study vary so widely that only a few
general questions on the selections for reading are attempted.)

1. Why is this period of Romanticism (1789-1837) called the Age of
Revolution? Give some reasons for the influence of the French Revolution on
English literature, and illustrate from poems or essays which you have
read. Explain the difference between Classicism and Romanticism. Which of
these two types of literature do you prefer?

2. What are the general characteristics of the literature of this period?
What two opposing tendencies are illustrated in the novels of Scott and
Jane Austen? in the poetry of Byron and Wordsworth?

3. _Wordsworth_. Tell briefly the story of Wordsworth's life, and name some
of his best poems. Why do the _Lyrical Ballads_ (1798) mark an important
literary epoch? Read carefully, and make an analysis of the "Intimations of
Immortality"; of "Tintern Abbey." Can you explain what political conditions
are referred to in Wordsworth's "Sonnet on Milton"? in his "French
Revolution"? Does he attempt to paint a picture in his sonnet on
Westminster Bridge, or has he some other object in view? What is the
central teaching of the "Ode to Duty"? Compare Wordsworth's two Skylark
poems with Shelley's. Make a brief comparison between Wordsworth's sonnets
and those of Shakespeare and of Milton, having in mind the thought, the
melody, the view of nature, and the imagery of the three poets. Quote from
Wordsworth's poems to show his belief that nature is conscious; to show the
influence of nature on man; to show his interest in children; his
sensitiveness to sounds; to illustrate the chastening influence of sorrow.
Make a brief comparison between the characters of Wordsworth's "Michael"
and of Burns's "The Cotter's Saturday Night." Compare Wordsworth's point of
view and method, in the three poems "To a Daisy," with Burns's view, as
expressed in his famous lines on the same subject.

4. _Coleridge_. What are the general characteristics of Coleridge's life?
What explains the profound sympathy for humanity that is reflected in his
poems? For what, beside his poems, is he remarkable? Can you quote any
passages from his poetry which show, the influence of Wordsworth? What are
the characters in "The Ancient Mariner"? In what respect is this poem
romantic? Give your own reasons for its popularity. Does the thought or the
style of this poem impress you? If you have read any of the _Lectures on
Shakespeare_, explain why Coleridge's work is called romantic criticism.

5. _Scott_. Tell the story of Scott's life, and name his chief poems and
novels. Do you recall any passage from his poetry which suggests his own
heroism? Why was he called "the wizard of the North"? What is the general
character of his poetry? Compare _Marmion_ with one of the old ballads,
having in mind the characters, the dramatic interest of the story, and the
style of writing. In what sense is he the creator of the historical novel?
Upon what does he depend to hold the reader's attention? Compare him, in
this respect, with Jane Austen. Which of his characters impress you as
being the most lifelike? Name any novels of the present day which copy
Scott or show his influence. Read _Ivanhoe_ and the _Lady of the Lake_;
make a brief analysis of each work, having in mind the style, the plot, the
dramatic interest, the use of adventure, and the truth to nature of the
different characters.

6. _Byron_. Why is Byron called the revolutionary poet? (Illustrate, if
possible, from his poetry.) What is the general character of his work? In
what kind of poetry does he excel? (Quote from _Childe Harold_ to
illustrate your opinion.) Describe the typical Byronic hero. Can you
explain his great popularity at first, and his subsequent loss of
influence? Why is he still popular on the Continent? Do you find more of
thought or of emotion in his poetry? Compare him, in this respect, with
Shelley; with Wordsworth. Which is the more brilliant writer, Byron or
Wordsworth? Which has the more humor? Which has the healthier mind? Which
has the higher ideal of poetry? Which is the more inspiring and helpful? Is
it fair to say that Byron's quality is power, not charm?

7. _Shelley_. What are the chief characteristics of Shelley's poetry? Is it
most remarkable for its thought, form, or imagery? What poems show the
influence of the French Revolution? What subjects are considered in "Lines
written among the Euganean Hills"? What does Shelley try to teach in "The
Sensitive Plant"? Compare Shelley's view of nature, as reflected in "The
Cloud" or "The West Wind," with Wordsworth's view, as reflected in "The
Prelude," "Tintern Abbey," "Daffodils," etc. To what class of poems does
"Adonais" belong? What is the subject of the poem? Name others of the same
class. How does Shelley describe himself in this poem? Compare Shelley's
"Adonais" and Milton's "Lycidas" with regard to the view of life after
death as expressed in the poems. What kinds of scenes does Shelley like
best to describe? Compare his characters with those of Wordsworth; of
Byron. Do you recall any poems in which he writes of ordinary people or of
ordinary experiences?

8. _Keats_. What is the essence of Keats's poetical creed, as expressed in
the "Ode on a Grecian Urn"? What are the remarkable elements in his life
and work? What striking difference do you find between his early poems and
those of Shelley and Byron? What are the chief subjects of his verse? What
poems show the influence of the classics? of Elizabethan literature? Can
you explain why his work has been called literary poetry? Keats and Shelley
are generally classed together. What similarities do you find in their
poems? Give some reasons why Keats introduces the old Bedesman in "The Eve
of Saint Agnes." Name some of the literary friends mentioned in Keats's
poetry.

Compare Keats's characters with those of Wordsworth; of Byron. Does Keats
ever remind you of Spenser? In what respects? Is your personal preference
for Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, or Keats? Why?

9. _Lamb_. Tell briefly the story of Lamb's life and name his principal
works. Why is he called the most human of essayists? His friends called him
"the last of the Elizabethans." Why? What is the general character of the
_Essays of Elia_? How is the personality of Lamb shown in all these essays?
Cite any passages showing Lamb's skill in portraying people. Make a brief
comparison between Lamb and Addison, having in mind the subjects treated,
the style, the humor, and the interest of both essayists. Which do you
prefer, and why?

10. _De Quincey_. What are the general characteristics of De Quincey's
essays? Explain why he is called the psychologist of style. What accounts
for a certain unreal element in all his work. Read a passage from _The
English Mail-Coach_, or from _Joan of Arc_, or from _Levana, Our Lady of
Sorrows_, and comment freely upon it, with regard to style, ideas,
interest, and the impression of reality or unreality which it leaves.

11. _Landor_. In what respect does Landor show a reaction from Romanticism?
What qualities make Landor's poems stand out so clearly in the memory? Why,
for instance, do you think Lamb was so haunted by "Rose Aylmer"? Quote from
Landor's poems to illustrate his tenderness, his sensitiveness to beauty,
his power of awakening emotion, his delicacy of characterization. Do you
find the same qualities in his prose? Can you explain why much of his prose
seems like a translation from the Greek? Compare a passage from the
_Imaginary Conversations_ with a passage from Gibbon or Johnson, to show
the difference between the classic and the pseudo-classic style. Compare
one of Landor's characters, in _Imaginary Conversations_, with the same
character in history.

12. _Jane Austen_. How does Jane Austen show a reaction from Romanticism?
What important work did she do for the novel? To what kind of fiction was
her work opposed? In what does the charm of her novels consist? Make a
brief comparison between Jane Austen and Scott (as illustrated in _Pride
and Prejudice_ and _Ivanhoe_), having in mind the subject, the characters,
the manner of treatment, and the interest of both narratives. Do Jane
Austen's characters have to be explained by the author, or do they explain
themselves? Which method calls for the greater literary skill? What does
Jane Austen say about Mrs. Radcliffe, in _Northanger Abbey_? Does she make
any other observations on eighteenth-century novelists?



                                CHRONOLOGY
      _End of the Eighteenth and Beginning of the Nineteenth Century_
============================================================================
  HISTORY                            |  LITERATURE
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
1760-1820. George III                |
                                     | 1770-1850. Wordsworth
                                     | 1771-1832. Scott
1789-1799. French Revolution         |
                                     | 1796-1816. Jane Austen's novels
                                     | 1798. Lyrical Balads of Wordsworth
                                     |       and Coleridge
1800. Union of Great Britain and     |
      Ireland                        |
1802. Colonization of Australia      | 1802. Scotts Minstrelsy of the Scottish
                                     |       Border
1805. Battle of Trafalgar            | 1805-1817. Scotts poems
                                     | 1807. Wordsworth's Intimations of
1807. Abolition of slave trade       |       Immortality. Lamb's Tales
                                     |       from Shakespeare
1808-1814. Peninsular War            |
                                     | 1809-1818. Byron's Childe Harold
1812. Second war with United States  | 1810-1813. Coleridge's Lectures on
                                     |       Shakespeare
1814. Congress of Vienna             | 1814-1831. Waverley Novels
1815. Battle of Waterloo             |
                                     | 1816. Shelley's Alastor
                                     | 1817. Coleridge's Biographia Literaria
                                     | 1817-1820. Keats's poems
                                     | 1818-1820. Shelley's Prometheus
1819. First Atlantic steamship       |
1820. George IV (_d_. 1830)          | 1820. Wordsworth's Duddon Sonnets
                                     | 1820-1833. Lamb's Essays of Elia
                                     | 1821. De Quincey's Confessions
                                     | 1824-1846. Landor's Imaginary
                                     |       Conversations.
1826. First Temperance Society       |
1829. Catholic Emancipation Bill     |
1830. William IV (_d_. 1837)         | 1830. Tennyson's first poems
      First railway                  |
                                     | 1831. Scott's last novel
1832. Reform Bill                    |
1833. Emancipation of slaves         | 1833. Carlyle's Sartor Resartus
                                     |       Browning's Pauline
1834. System of national education   |
1837. Victoria (_d_. 1901)           |
                                     | 1853-1861. De Quincey's Collected
                                     |       Essays
============================================================================


       *       *       *       *       *



CHAPTER XI

THE VICTORIAN AGE (1850-1900)

THE MODERN PERIOD OF PROGRESS AND UNREST

When Victoria became queen, in 1837, English literature seemed to have
entered upon a period of lean years, in marked contrast with the poetic
fruitfulness of the romantic age which we have just studied. Coleridge,
Shelley, Keats, Byron, and Scott had passed away, and it seemed as if there
were no writers in England to fill their places. Wordsworth had written, in
1835,

    Like clouds that rake, the mountain summits,
      Or waves that own no curbing hand,
    How fast has brother followed brother,
      From sunshine to the sunless land!

In these lines is reflected the sorrowful spirit of a literary man of the
early nineteenth century who remembered the glory that had passed away from
the earth. But the leanness of these first years is more apparent than
real. Keats and Shelley were dead, it is true, but already there had
appeared three disciples of these poets who were destined to be far more
widely, read than were their masters. Tennyson had been publishing poetry
since 1827, his first poems appearing almost simultaneously with the last
work of Byron, Shelley, and Keats; but it was not until 1842, with the
publication of his collected poems, in two volumes, that England recognized
in him one of her great literary leaders. So also Elizabeth Barrett had
been writing since 1820, but not till twenty years later did her poems
become deservedly popular; and Browning had published his _Pauline_ in
1833, but it was not until 1846, when he published the last of the series
called _Bells and Pomegranates_, that the reading public began to
appreciate his power and originality. Moreover, even as romanticism seemed
passing away, a group of great prose writers--Dickens, Thackeray, Carlyle,
and Ruskin--had already begun to proclaim the literary glory of a new age,
which now seems to rank only just below the Elizabethan and the Romantic
periods.

HISTORICAL SUMMARY. Amid the multitude of social and political forces of
this great age, four things stand out clearly. First, the long struggle of
the Anglo-Saxons for personal liberty is definitely settled, and democracy
becomes the established order of the day. The king, who appeared in an age
of popular weakness and ignorance, and the peers, who came with the Normans
in triumph, are both stripped of their power and left as figureheads of a
past civilization. The last vestige of personal government and of the
divine right of rulers disappears; the House of Commons becomes the ruling
power in England; and a series of new reform bills rapidly extend the
suffrage, until the whole body of English people choose for themselves the
men who shall represent them.

Second, because it is an age of democracy, it is an age of popular
education, of religious tolerance, of growing brotherhood, and of profound
social unrest. The slaves had been freed in 1833; but in the middle of the
century England awoke to the fact that slaves are not necessarily negroes,
stolen in Africa to be sold like cattle in the market place, but that
multitudes of men, women, and little children in the mines and factories
were victims of a more terrible industrial and social slavery. To free
these slaves also, the unwilling victims of our unnatural competitive
methods, has been the growing purpose of the Victorian Age until the
present day.

Third, because it is an age of democracy and education, it is an age of
comparative peace. England begins to think less of the pomp and false
glitter of fighting, and more of its moral evils, as the nation realizes
that it is the common people who bear the burden and the sorrow and the
poverty of war, while the privileged classes reap most of the financial and
political rewards. Moreover, with the growth of trade and of friendly
foreign relations, it becomes evident that the social equality for which
England was contending at home belongs to the whole race of men; that
brotherhood is universal, not insular; that a question of justice is never
settled by fighting; and that war is generally unmitigated horror and
barbarism. Tennyson, who came of age when the great Reform Bill occupied
attention, expresses the ideals of the Liberals of his day who proposed to
spread the gospel of peace,

    Till the war-drum throbb'd no longer, and the battle-flags were furled
    In the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the world.

Fourth, the Victorian Age is especially remarkable because of its rapid
progress in all the arts and sciences and in mechanical inventions. A
glance at any record of the industrial achievements of the nineteenth
century will show how vast they are, and it is unnecessary to repeat here
the list of the inventions, from spinning looms to steamboats, and from
matches to electric lights. All these material things, as well as the
growth of education, have their influence upon the life of a people, and it
is inevitable that they should react upon its prose and poetry; though as
yet we are too much absorbed in our sciences and mechanics to determine
accurately their influence upon literature. When these new things shall by
long use have became familiar as country roads, or have been replaced by
newer and better things, then they also will have their associations and
memories, and a poem on the railroads may be as suggestive as Wordsworth's
sonnet on Westminster Bridge; and the busy, practical workingmen who to-day
throng our streets and factories may seem, to a future and greater age, as
quaint and poetical as to us seem the slow toilers of the Middle Ages.

LITERARY CHARACTERISTICS. When one is interested enough to trace the
genealogy of Victoria he finds, to his surprise, that in her veins flowed
the blood both of William the Conqueror and of Cerdic, the first Saxon king
of England; and this seems to be symbolic of the literature of her age,
which embraces the whole realm of Saxon and Norman life,--the strength and
ideals of the one, and the culture and refinement of the other. The
romantic revival had done its work, and England entered upon a new free
period, in which every form of literature, from pure romance to gross
realism, struggled for expression. At this day it is obviously impossible
to judge the age as a whole; but we are getting far enough away from the
early half of it to notice certain definite characteristics. First, though
the age produced many poets, and two who deserve to rank among the
greatest, nevertheless this is emphatically an age of prose. And since the
number of readers has increased a thousandfold with the spread of popular
education, it is the age of the newspaper, the magazine, and the modern
novel,--the first two being the story of the world's daily life, and the
last our pleasantest form of literary entertainment, as well as our most
successful method of presenting modern problems and modern ideals. The
novel in this age fills a place which the drama held in the days of
Elizabeth; and never before, in any age or language, has the novel appeared
in such numbers and in such perfection.

[Moral Purpose] The second marked characteristic of the age is that
literature, both in prose and in poetry, seems to depart from the purely
artistic standard, of art for art's sake, and to be actuated by a definite
moral purpose Tennyson, Browning, Carlyle, Ruskin,--who and what were these
men if not the teachers of England, not vaguely but definitely, with superb
faith in their message, and with the conscious moral purpose to uplift and
to instruct? Even the novel breaks away from Scott's romantic influence,
and first studies life as it is, and then points out what life may and
ought to be. Whether we read the fun and sentiment of Dickens, the social
miniatures of Thackeray, or the psychological studies of George Eliot, we
find in almost every case a definite purpose to sweep away error and to
reveal the underlying truth of human life. So the novel sought to do for
society in this age precisely what Lyell and Darwin sought to do for
science, that is, to find the truth, and to show how it might be used to
uplift humanity. Perhaps for this reason the Victorian Age is emphatically
an age of realism rather than of romance,--not the realism of Zola and
Ibsen, but a deeper realism which strives to tell the whole truth, showing
moral and physical diseases as they are, but holding up health and hope as
the normal conditions of humanity.

It is somewhat customary to speak of this age as an age of doubt and
pessimism, following the new conception of man and of the universe which
was formulated by science under the name of involution. It is spoken of
also as a prosaic age, lacking in great ideals. Both these criticisms seem
to be the result of judging a large thing when we are too close to it to
get its true proportions, just as Cologne Cathedral, one of the world's
most perfect structures, seems to be a shapeless pile of stone when we
stand too close beneath its mighty walls and buttresses. Tennyson's
immature work, like that of the minor poets, is sometimes in a doubtful or
despairing strain; but his _In Memoriam_ is like the rainbow after storm;
and Browning seems better to express the spirit of his age in the strong,
manly faith of "Rabbi Ben Ezra," and in the courageous optimism of all his
poetry. Stedman's _Victorian Anthology_ is, on the whole, a most inspiring
book of poetry. It would be hard to collect more varied cheer from any age.
And the great essayists, like Macaulay, Carlyle, Ruskin, and the great
novelists, like Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, generally leave us with a
larger charity and with a deeper faith in our humanity.

So also the judgment that this age is too practical for great ideals may be
only a description of the husk that hides a very full ear of corn. It is
well to remember that Spenser and Sidney judged their own age (which we now
consider to be the greatest in our literary history) to be altogether given
over to materialism, and to be incapable of literary greatness. Just as
time has made us smile at their blindness, so the next century may correct
our judgment of this as a material age, and looking upon the enormous
growth of charity and brotherhood among us, and at the literature which
expresses our faith in men, may judge the Victorian Age to be, on the
whole, the noblest and most inspiring in the history of the world.


I. THE POETS OF THE VICTORIAN AGE

ALFRED TENNYSON (1809-1892)

    O young Mariner,
    You from the haven
    Under the sea-cliff,
    You that are watching
    The gray Magician
    With eyes of wonder,
    _I_ am Merlin,
    And _I_ am dying,
    _I_ am Merlin
    Who follow The Gleam.
      .  .  .  .  .  .  .
    O young Mariner,
    Down to the haven
    Call your companions,
    Launch your vessel,
    And crowd your canvas,
    And, ere it vanishes
    Over the margin,
    After it, follow it,
    Follow The Gleam.

One who reads this haunting poem of "Merlin and The Gleam" finds in it a
suggestion of the spirit of the poet's whole life,--his devotion to the
ideal as expressed in poetry, his early romantic impressions, his
struggles, doubts, triumphs, and his thrilling message to his race.
Throughout the entire Victorian period Tennyson stood at the summit of
poetry in England. Not in vain was he appointed laureate at the death of
Wordsworth, in 1850; for, almost alone among those who have held the
office, he felt the importance of his place, and filled and honored it. For
nearly half a century Tennyson was not only a man and a poet; he was a
voice, the voice of a whole people, expressing in exquisite melody their
doubts and their faith, their griefs and their triumphs. In the wonderful
variety of his verse he suggests all the qualities of England's greatest
poets. The dreaminess of Spenser, the majesty of Milton, the natural
simplicity of Wordsworth, the fantasy of Blake and Coleridge, the melody of
Keats and Shelley, the narrative vigor of Scott and Byron,--all these
striking qualities are evident on successive pages of Tennyson's poetry.
The only thing lacking is the dramatic power of the Elizabethans. In
reflecting the restless spirit of this progressive age Tennyson is as
remarkable as Pope was in voicing the artificiality of the early eighteenth
century. As a poet, therefore, who expresses not so much a personal as a
national spirit, he is probably the most representative literary man of the
Victorian era.

LIFE. Tennyson's life is a remarkable one in this respect, that from
beginning to end he seems to have been dominated by a single impulse, the
impulse of poetry. He had no large or remarkable experiences, no wild oats
to sow, no great successes or reverses, no business cares or public
offices. For sixty-six years, from the appearance of the _Poems by Two
Brothers_, in 1827, until his death in 1892, he studied and practiced his
art continually and exclusively. Only Browning, his fellow-worker,
resembles him in this; but the differences in the two men are world-wide.
Tennyson was naturally shy, retiring, indifferent to men, hating noise and
publicity, loving to be alone with nature, like Wordsworth. Browning was
sociable, delighting in applause, in society, in travel, in the noise and
bustle of the big world.

Tennyson was born in the rectory of Somersby, Lincolnshire, in 1809. The
sweet influences of his early natural surroundings can be better understood
from his early poems than from any biography. He was one of the twelve
children of the Rev. George Clayton Tennyson, a scholarly clergyman, and
his wife Elizabeth Fytche, a gentle, lovable woman, "not learned, save in
gracious household ways," to whom the poet pays a son's loyal tribute near
the close of _The Princess_. It is interesting to note that most of these
children were poetically inclined, and that two of the brothers, Charles
and Frederick, gave far greater promise than did Alfred.

When seven years old the boy went to his grandmother's house at Louth, in
order to attend a famous grammar school at that place. Not even a man's
memory, which generally makes light of hardship and glorifies early
experiences, could ever soften Tennyson's hatred of school life. His
complaint was not so much at the roughness of the boys, which had so
frightened Cowper, as at the brutality of the teachers, who put over the
school door a wretched Latin inscription translating Solomon's barbarous
advice about the rod and the child. In these psychologic days, when the
child is more important than the curriculum, and when we teach girls and
boys rather than Latin and arithmetic, we read with wonder Carlyle's
description of his own schoolmaster, evidently a type of his kind, who
"knew of the human soul thus much, that it had a faculty called memory, and
could be acted on through the muscular integument by appliance of birch
rods." After four years of most unsatisfactory school life, Tennyson
returned home, and was fitted for the university by his scholarly father.
With his brothers he wrote many verses, and his first efforts appeared in a
little volume called _Poems by Two Brothers_, in 1827. The next year he
entered Trinity College, Cambridge, where he became the center of a
brilliant circle of friends, chief of whom was the young poet Arthur Henry
Hallam.

At the university Tennyson soon became known for his poetical ability, and
two years after his entrance he gained the prize of the Chancellor's Medal
for a poem called "Timbuctoo," the subject, needless to say, being chosen
by the chancellor. Soon after winning this honor Tennyson published his
first signed work, called _Poems Chiefly Lyrical_ (1830), which, though it
seems somewhat crude and disappointing to us now, nevertheless contained
the germ of all his later poetry. One of the most noticeable things in this
volume is the influence which Byron evidently exerted over the poet in his
early days; and it was perhaps due largely to the same romantic influence
that Tennyson and his friend Hallam presently sailed away to Spain, with
the idea of joining the army of insurgents against King Ferdinand.
Considered purely as a revolutionary venture, this was something of a
fiasco, suggesting the noble Duke of York and his ten thousand men,--"he
marched them up a hill, one day; and he marched them down again." From a
literary view point, however, the experience was not without its value. The
deep impression which the wild beauty of the Pyrenees made upon the young
poet's mind is reflected clearly in the poem "Oenone."

In 1831 Tennyson left the university without taking his degree. The reasons
for this step are not clear; but the family was poor, and poverty may have
played a large part in his determination. His father died a few months
later; but, by a generous arrangement with the new rector, the family
retained the rectory at Somersby, and here, for nearly six years, Tennyson
lived in a retirement which strongly suggests Milton at Horton. He read and
studied widely, cultivated an intimate acquaintance with nature, thought
deeply on the problems suggested by the Reform Bill which was then
agitating England, and during his leisure hours wrote poetry. The first
fruits of this retirement appeared, late in 1832, in a wonderful little
volume bearing the simple name _Poems_. As the work of a youth only
twenty-three, this book is remarkable for the variety and melody of its
verse. Among its treasures we still read with delight "The Lotos Eaters,"
"Palace of Art," "A Dream of Fair Women," "The Miller's Daughter,"
"Oenone," and "The Lady of Shalott"; but the critics of the _Quarterly_,
who had brutally condemned his earlier work, were again unmercifully
severe. The effect of this harsh criticism upon a sensitive nature was most
unfortunate; and when his friend Hallam died, in 1833, Tennyson was plunged
into a period of gloom and sorrow. The sorrow may be read in the exquisite
little poem beginning, "Break, break, break, On thy cold gray stones, O
Sea!" which was his first published elegy for his friend; and the
depressing influence of the harsh and unjust criticism is suggested in
"Merlin and The Gleam," which the reader will understand only after he has
read Tennyson's biography.

For nearly ten years after Hallam's death Tennyson published nothing, and
his movements are hard to trace as the family went here and there, seeking
peace and a home in various parts of England. But though silent, he
continued to write poetry, and it was in these sad wandering days that he
began his immortal _In Memoriam_ and his _Idylls of the King_. In 1842 his
friends persuaded him to give his work to the world, and with some
hesitation he published his _Poems_. The success of this work was almost
instantaneous, and we can appreciate the favor with which it was received
when we read the noble blank verse of "Ulysses" and "Morte d'Arthur," the
perfect little song of grief for Hallam which we have already mentioned,
and the exquisite idyls like "Dora" and "The Gardener's Daughter," which
aroused even Wordsworth's enthusiasm and brought from him a letter saying
that he had been trying all his life to write such an English pastoral as
"Dora" and had failed. From this time forward Tennyson, with increasing
confidence in himself and his message, steadily maintained his place as the
best known and best loved poet in England.

The year 1850 was a happy one for Tennyson. He was appointed poet laureate,
to succeed Wordsworth; and he married Emily Sellwood,

    Her whose gentle will has changed my fate
      And made my life a perfumed altar flame,

whom he had loved for thirteen years, but whom his poverty had prevented
him from marrying. The year is made further remarkable by the publication
of _In Memoriam_, probably the most enduring of his poems, upon which he
had worked at intervals for sixteen years. Three years later, with the
money that his work now brought him, he leased the house Farringford, in
the Isle of Wight, and settled in the first permanent home he had known
since he left the rectory at Somersby.

For the remaining forty years of his life he lived, like Wordsworth, "in
the stillness of a great peace," writing steadily, and enjoying the
friendship of a large number of people, some distinguished, some obscure,
from the kindly and sympathetic Victoria to the servants on his own farm.
All of these he called with equal sincerity his friends, and to each one he
was the same man, simple, strong, kindly, and noble. Carlyle describes him
as "a fine, large-featured, dim-eyed, bronze-colored, shaggy-headed man,
... most restful, brotherly, solid-hearted." Loving solitude and hating
publicity as he did, the numerous tourists from both sides of the ocean,
who sought him out in his retreat and insisted upon seeing him, made his
life at times intolerable. Influenced partly by the desire to escape such
popularity, he bought land and built for himself a new house, Aldworth, in
Surrey, though he made his home in Farringford for the greater part of the
year.

His labor during these years and his marvelous freshness and youthfulness
of feeling are best understood by a glance at the contents of his complete
works. Inferior poems, like _The Princess_, which was written in the first
flush of his success, and his dramas, which were written against the advice
of his best friends, may easily be criticised; but the bulk of his verse
shows an astonishing originality and vigor to the very end. He died very
quietly at Aldworth, with his family about him in the moonlight, and beside
him a volume of Shakespeare, open at the dirge in _Cymbeline:_

    Fear no more the heat o' the sun,
      Nor the furious winter's rages;
    Thou thy worldly task hast done,
      Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages.

The strong and noble spirit of his life is reflected in one of his best
known poems, "Crossing the Bar," which was written in his eighty-first
year, and which he desired should be placed at the end of his collected
works:

    Sunset and evening star,
      And one clear call for me!
    And may there be no moaning of the bar,
      When I put out to sea,
    But such a tide as, moving, seems asleep,
      Too full for sound and foam,
    When that which drew from out the boundless deep
      Turns again home.
    Twilight and evening bell,
      And after that the dark!
    And may there be no sadness of farewell,
      When I embark;
    For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place
      The flood may bear me far,
    I hope to see my Pilot face to face
      When I have crost the bar.

WORKS. At the outset of our study of Tennyson's works it may be well to
record two things, by way of suggestion. First, Tennyson's poetry is not so
much to be studied as to be read and appreciated; he is a poet to have open
on one's table, and to enjoy as one enjoys his daily exercise. And second,
we should by all means begin to get acquainted with Tennyson in the days of
our youth. Unlike Browning, who is generally appreciated by more mature
minds, Tennyson is for enjoyment, for inspiration, rather than for
instruction. Only youth can fully appreciate him; and youth, unfortunately,
except in a few rare, beautiful cases, is something which does not dwell
with us long after our school days. The secret of poetry, especially of
Tennyson's poetry, is to be eternally young, and, like Adam in Paradise, to
find every morning a new world, fresh, wonderful, inspiring, as if just
from the hands of God.

Except by the student, eager to understand the whoje range of poetry in
this age, Tennyson's earlier poems and his later dramas may well be
omitted. Opinions vary about both; but the general judgment seems to be
that the earlier poems show too much of Byron's influence, and their
crudeness suffers by comparison with the exquisitely finished work of
Tennyson's middle life. Of dramatic works he wrote seven, his great
ambition being to present a large part of the history of England in a
series of dramas. _Becket_ was one of the best of these works and met with
considerable favor on the stage; but, like all the others, it indicates
that Tennyson lacked the dramatic power and the humor necessary for a
successful playwright.

Among the remaining poems there is such a wide variety that every reader
must be left largely to follow his own delightful choice.[235] Of the
_Poems_ of 1842 we have already mentioned those best worth reading. _The
Princess, a Medley_ (1847), a long poem of over three thousand lines of
blank verse, is Tennyson's answer to the question of woman's rights and
woman's sphere, which was then, as in our own day, strongly agitating the
public mind. In this poem a baby finally solves the problem which
philosophers have pondered ever since men began to think connectedly about
human society. A few exquisite songs, like "Tears, Idle Tears," "Bugle
Song," and "Sweet and Low," form the most delightful part of this poem,
which in general is hardly up to the standard of the poet's later work.
_Maud_ (1855) is what is called in literature a monodrama, telling the
story of a lover who passes from morbidness to ecstasy, then to anger and
murder, followed by insanity and recovery. This was Tennyson's favorite,
and among his friends he read aloud from it more than from any other poem.
Perhaps if we could hear Tennyson read it, we should appreciate it better;
but, on the whole, it seems overwrought and melodramatic. Even its lyrics,
like "Come into the Garden, Maud," which make this work a favorite with
young lovers, are characterized by "prettiness" rather than by beauty or
strength.

Perhaps the most loved of all Tennyson's works is _In Memoriam_, which, on
account of both its theme and its exquisite workmanship, is "one of the few
immortal names that were not born to die." The immediate occasion of this
remarkable poem was Tennyson's profound personal grief at the death of his
friend Hallam. As he wrote lyric after lyric, inspired by this sad subject,
the poet's grief became less personal, and the greater grief of humanity
mourning for its dead and questioning its immortality took possession of
him. Gradually the poem became an expression, first, of universal doubt,
and then of universal faith, a faith which rests ultimately not on reason
or philosophy but on the soul's instinct for immortality. The immortality
of human love is the theme of the poem, which is made up of over one
hundred different lyrics. The movement takes us through three years, rising
slowly from poignant sorrow and doubt to a calm peace and hope, and ending
with a noble hymn of courage and faith,--a modest courage and a humble
faith, love-inspired,--which will be a favorite as long as saddened men
turn to literature for consolation. Though Darwin's greatest books had not
yet been written, science had already overturned many old conceptions of
life; and Tennyson, who lived apart and thought deeply on all the problems
of his day, gave this poem to the world as his own answer to the doubts and
questionings of men. This universal human interest, together with its
exquisite form and melody, makes the poem, in popular favor at least, the
supreme threnody, or elegiac poem, of our literature; though Milton's
_Lycidas_ is, from the critical view point, undoubtedly a more artistic
work.

_The Idylls of the King_ ranks among the greatest of Tennyson's later
works. Its general subject is the Celtic legends of King Arthur and his
knights of the Round Table, and the chief source of its material is
Malory's _Morte d'Arthur_. Here, in this mass of beautiful legends, is
certainly the subject of a great national epic; yet after four hundred
years, during which many poets have used the material, the great epic is
still unwritten. Milton and Spenser, as we have already noted, considered
this material carefully; and Milton alone, of all English writers, had
perhaps the power to use it in a great epic. Tennyson began to use these
legends in his _Morte d'Arthur_ (1842); but the epic idea probably occurred
to him later, in 1856, when he began "Geraint and Enid," and he added the
stories of "Vivien," "Elaine," "Guinevere," and other heroes and heroines
at intervals, until "Balin," the last of the _Idylls_, appeared in 1885.
Later these works were gathered together and arranged with an attempt at
unity. The result is in no sense an epic poem, but rather a series of
single poems loosely connected by a thread of interest in Arthur, the
central personage, and in his unsuccessful attempt to found an ideal
kingdom.

Entirely different in spirit is another collection of poems called _English
Idyls,_[236] which began in the _Poems_ of 1842, and which Tennyson
intended should reflect the ideals of widely different types of English
life. Of these varied poems, "Dora," "The Gardener's Daughter," "Ulysses,"
"Locksley Hall" and "Sir Galahad" are the best; but all are worthy of
study. One of the most famous of this series is "Enoch Arden" (1864), in
which Tennyson turns from mediæval knights, from lords, heroes, and fair
ladies, to find the material for true poetry among the lowly people that
make up the bulk of English life. Its rare melody, its sympathy for common
life, and its revelation of the beauty and heroism which hide in humble men
and women everywhere, made this work an instant favorite. Judged by its
sales alone, it was the most popular of his works during the poet's
lifetime.

Tennyson's later volumes, like the _Ballads_ (1880) and _Demeter_ (1889),
should not be overlooked, since they contain some of his best work. The
former contains stirring war songs, like "The Defence of Lucknow," and
pictures of wild passionate grief, like "Rizpah"; the latter is notable for
"Romney's Remorse," a wonderful piece of work; "Merlin and The Gleam,"
which expresses the poet's lifelong ideal; and several exquisite little
songs, like "The Throstle," and "The Oak," which show how marvelously the
aged poet retained his youthful freshness and inspiration. Here certainly
is variety enough to give us long years of literary enjoyment; and we need
hardly mention miscellaneous poems, like "The Brook" and "The Charge of the
Light Brigade," which are known to every schoolboy; and "Wages" and "The
Higher Pantheism," which should be read by every man who thinks about the
old, old problem of life and death.

CHARACTERISTICS OF TENNYSON'S POETRY. If we attempt to sum up the quality
of Tennyson, as shown in all these works, the task is a difficult one; but
three things stand out more or less plainly. First, Tennyson is essentially
the artist. No other in his age studied the art of poetry so constantly or
with such singleness of purpose; and only Swinburne rivals him in melody
and the perfect finish of his verse. Second, like all the great writers of
his age, he is emphatically a teacher, often a leader. In the preceding
age, as the result of the turmoil produced by the French Revolution,
lawlessness was more or less common, and individuality was the rule in
literature. Tennyson's theme, so characteristic of his age, is the reign of
order,--of law in the physical world, producing evolution, and of law in
the spiritual world, working out the perfect man. _In Memoriam, Idylls of
the King, The Princess_,-here are three widely different poems; yet the
theme of each, so far as poetry is a kind of spiritual philosophy and
weighs its words before it utters them, is the orderly development of law
in the natural and in the spiritual world.

This certainly is a new doctrine in poetry, but the message does not end
here. Law implies a source, a method, an object. Tennyson, after facing his
doubts honestly and manfully, finds law even in the sorrows and losses of
humanity. He gives this law an infinite and personal source, and finds the
supreme purpose of all law to be a revelation of divine love. All earthly
love, therefore, becomes an image of the heavenly. What first perhaps
attracted readers to Tennyson, as to Shakespeare, was the character of his
women,--pure, gentle, refined beings, whom we must revere as our Anglo-
Saxon forefathers revered the women they loved. Like Browning, the poet had
loved one good woman supremely, and her love made clear the meaning of all
life. The message goes one step farther. Because law and love are in the
world, faith is the only reasonable attitude toward life and death, even
though we understand them not. Such, in a few words, seems to be Tennyson's
whole message and philosophy.

If we attempt now to fix Tennyson's permanent place in literature, as the
result of his life and work, we must apply to him the same test that we
applied to Milton and Wordsworth, and, indeed, to all our great poets, and
ask with the German critics, "What new thing has he said to the world or
even to his own country?" The answer is, frankly, that we do not yet know
surely; that we are still too near Tennyson to judge him impersonally. This
much, however, is clear. In a marvelously complex age, and amid a hundred
great men, he was regarded as a leader. For a full half century he was the
voice of England, loved and honored as a man and a poet, not simply by a
few discerning critics, but by a whole people that do not easily give their
allegiance to any one man. And that, for the present, is Tennyson's
sufficient eulogy.


ROBERT BROWNING (1812-1889)

    How good is man's life, the mere living! how fit to employ
    All the heart and the soul and the senses for ever in joy!

In this new song of David, from Browning's _Saul_, we have a suggestion of
the astonishing vigor and hope that characterize all the works of Browning,
the one poet of the age who, after thirty years of continuous work, was
finally recognized and placed beside Tennyson, and whom future ages may
judge to be a greater poet,--perhaps, even, the greatest in our literature
since Shakespeare.

The chief difficulty in reading Browning is the obscurity of his style,
which the critics of half a century ago held up to ridicule. Their attitude
towards the poet's early work may be inferred from Tennyson's humorous
criticism of _Sordello_. It may be remembered that the first line of this
obscure poem is, "Who will may hear Sordello's story told"; and that the
last line is, "Who would has heard Sordello's story told." Tennyson
remarked that these were the only lines in the whole poem that he
understood, and that they were evidently both lies. If we attempt to
explain this obscurity, which puzzled Tennyson and many less friendly
critics, we find that it has many sources. First, the poet's thought is
often obscure, or else so extremely subtle that language expresses it
imperfectly,--

    Thoughts hardly to be packed
    Into a narrow act,
    Fancies that broke through language and escaped.

Second, Browning is led from one thing to another by his own mental
associations, and forgets that the reader's associations may be of an
entirely different kind. Third, Browning is careless in his English, and
frequently clips his speech, giving us a series of ejaculations. As we do
not quite understand his processes of thought, we must stop between the
ejaculations to trace out the connections. Fourth, Browning's, allusions
are often far-fetched, referring to some odd scrap of information which he
has picked up in his wide reading, and the ordinary reader finds it
difficult to trace and understand them. Finally, Browning wrote too much
and revised too Little. The time which he should have given to making one
thought clear was used in expressing other thoughts that flitted through
his head like a flock of swallows. His field was the individual soul, never
exactly alike in any two men, and he sought to express the hidden motives
and principles which govern individual action. In this field he is like a
miner delving underground, sending up masses of mingled earth and ore; and
the reader must sift all this material to separate the gold from the dross.

Here, certainly, are sufficient reasons for Browning's obscurity; and we
must add the word that the fault seems unpardonable, for the simple reason
that Browning shows himself capable, at times, of writing directly,
melodiously, and with noble simplicity.

So much for the faults, which must be faced and overlooked before one finds
the treasure that is hidden in Browning's poetry. Of all the poets in our
literature, no other is so completely, so consciously, so magnificently a
teacher of men. He feels his mission of faith and courage in a world of
doubt and timidity. For thirty years he faced indifference or ridicule,
working bravely and cheerfully the while, until he made the world recognize
and follow him. The spirit of his whole life is well expressed in his
_Paracelsus_, written when he was only twenty-two years old:

    I see my way as birds their trackless way.
    I shall arrive,--what time, what circuit first,
    I ask not; but unless God send his hail
    Or blinding fire-balls, sleet or stifling snow,
    In some time, his good time, I shall arrive;
    He guides me and the bird. In his good time.

He is not, like so many others, an entertaining poet. One cannot read him
after dinner, or when settled in a comfortable easy-chair. One must sit up,
and think, and be alert when he reads Browning. If we accept these
conditions, we shall probably find that Browning is the most stimulating
poet in our language. His influence upon our life is positive and
tremendous. His strength, his joy of life, his robust faith, and his
invincible optimism enter into us, making us different and better men after
reading him. And perhaps the best thing he can say of Browning is that his
thought is slowly but surely taking possession of all well-educated men and
women.

LIFE. Browning's father was outwardly a business man, a clerk for fifty
years in the Bank of England; inwardly he was an interesting combination of
the scholar and the artist, with the best tastes of both. His mother was a
sensitive, musical woman, evidently very lovely in character, the daughter
of a German shipowner and merchant who had settled in Scotland. She was of
Celtic descent, and Carlyle describes her as the true type of a Scottish
gentlewoman. From his neck down, Browning was the typical Briton,--short,
stocky, large-chested, robust; but even in the lifeless portrait his face
changes as we view it from different angles. Now it is like an English
business man, now like a German scientist, and now it has a curious
suggestion of Uncle Remus,--these being, no doubt, so many different
reflections of his mixed and unremembered ancestors.

He was born in Camberwell, on the outskirts of London, in 1812. From his
home and from his first school, at Peckham, he could see London; and the
city lights by night and the smoky chimneys by day had the same powerful
fascination for the child that the woods and fields and the beautiful
country had for his friend Tennyson. His schooling was short and desultory,
his education being attended to by private tutors and by his father, who
left the boy largely to follow his own inclination. Like the young Milton,
Browning was fond of music, and in many of his poems, especially in "Abt
Vogler" and "A Toccata of Galuppi's," he interprets the musical temperament
better, perhaps, than any other writer in our literature. But unlike
Milton, through whose poetry there runs a great melody, music seems to have
had no consistent effect upon his verse, which is often so jarring that one
must wonder how a musical ear could have endured it.

Like Tennyson, this boy found his work very early, and for fifty years
hardly a week passed that he did not write poetry. He began at six to
produce verses, in imitation of Byron; but fortunately this early work has
been lost. Then he fell under the influence of Shelley, and his first known
work, _Pauline_ (1833), must be considered as a tribute to Shelley and his
poetry. Tennyson's earliest work, _Poems by Two Brothers_, had been
published and well paid for, five years before; but Browning could find no
publisher who would even consider _Pauline_, and the work was published by
means of money furnished by an indulgent relative. This poem received scant
notice from the reviewers, who had pounced like hawks on a dovecote upon
Tennyson's first two modest volumes. Two years later appeared _Paracelsus_,
and then his tragedy _Strafford_ was put upon the stage; but not till
_Sordello_ was published, in 1840, did he attract attention enough to be
denounced for the obscurity and vagaries of his style. Six years later, in
1846, he suddenly became famous, not because he finished in that year his
_Bells and Pomegranates_ (which is Browning's symbolic name for "poetry and
thought" or "singing and sermonizing"), but because he eloped with the best
known literary woman in England, Elizabeth Barrett, whose fame was for many
years, both before and after her marriage, much greater than Browning's,
and who was at first considered superior to Tennyson. Thereafter, until his
own work compelled attention, he was known chiefly as the man who married
Elizabeth Barrett. For years this lady had been an almost helpless invalid,
and it seemed a quixotic thing when Browning, having failed to gain her
family's consent to the marriage, carried her off romantically. Love and
Italy proved better than her physicians, and for fifteen years Browning and
his wife lived an ideally happy life in Pisa and in Florence. The exquisite
romance of their love is preserved in Mrs. Browning's _Sonnets from the
Portuguese_, and in the volume of _Letters_ recently published,--wonderful
letters, but so tender and intimate that it seems almost a sacrilege for
inquisitive eyes to read them.

Mrs. Browning died in Florence in 1861. The loss seemed at first too much
to bear, and Browning fled with his son to England. For the remainder of
his life he lived alternately in London and in various parts of Italy,
especially at the Palazzo Rezzonico, in Venice, which is now an object of
pilgrimage to almost every tourist who visits the beautiful city. Wherever
he went he mingled with men and women, sociable, well dressed, courteous,
loving crowds and popular applause, the very reverse of his friend
Tennyson. His earlier work had been much better appreciated in America than
in England; but with the publication of _The Ring and the Book_, in 1868,
he was at last recognized by his countrymen as one of the greatest of
English poets. He died in Venice, on December 12, 1889, the same day that
saw the publication of his last work, _Asolando_. Though Italy offered him
an honored resting place, England claimed him for her own, and he lies
buried beside Tennyson in Westminster Abbey. The spirit of his whole life
is magnificently expressed in his own lines, in the Epilogue of his last
book:

    One who never turned his back, but marched breast forward,
        Never doubted clouds would break,
    Never dreamed, tho' right were worsted, wrong would triumph,
        Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
                     Sleep to wake.

WORKS. A glance at even the titles which Browning gave to his best known
volumes--_Dramatic Lyrics_ (1842), _Dramatic Romances and Lyrics_ (1845),
_Men and Women_ (1853), _Dramatis Persona_ (1864)--will suggest how strong
the dramatic element is in all his work. Indeed, all his poems may be
divided into three classes,--pure dramas, like _Strafford_ and _A Blot in
the 'Scutcheon_; dramatic narratives, like _Pippa Passes_, which are
dramatic in form, but were not meant to be acted; and dramatic lyrics, like
_The Last Ride Together_, which are short poems expressing some strong
personal emotion, or describing some dramatic episode in human life, and in
which the hero himself generally tells the story.

Though Browning is often compared with Shakespeare, the reader will
understand that he has very little of Shakespeare's dramatic talent. He
cannot bring a group of people together and let the actions and words of
his characters show us the comedy and tragedy of human life. Neither can
the author be disinterested, satisfied, as Shakespeare was, with life
itself, without drawing any moral conclusions. Browning has always a moral
ready, and insists upon giving us his own views of life, which Shakespeare
never does. His dramatic power lies in depicting what he himself calls the
history of a soul. Sometimes, as in _Paracelsus_, he endeavors to trace the
progress of the human spirit. More often he takes some dramatic moment in
life, some crisis in the ceaseless struggle between good and evil, and
describes with wonderful insight the hero's own thoughts and feelings; but
he almost invariably tells us how, at such and such a point, the good or
the evil in his hero must inevitably have triumphed. And generally, as in
"My Last Duchess," the speaker adds a word here and there, aside from the
story, which unconsciously shows the kind of man he is. It is this power of
revealing the soul from within that causes Browning to fascinate those who
study him long enough. His range is enormous, and brings all sorts and
conditions of men under analysis. The musician in "Abt Vogler," the artist
in "Andrea del Sarto," the early Christian in "A Death in the Desert," the
Arab horseman in "Muteykeh," the sailor in "Herve Kiel," the mediæval
knight in "Childe Roland," the Hebrew in "Saul," the Greek in "Balaustion's
Adventure," the monster in "Caliban," the immortal dead in "Karshish,"--all
these and a hundred more histories of the soul show Browning's marvelous
versatility. It is this great range of sympathy with many different types
of life that constitutes Browning's chief likeness to Shakespeare, though
otherwise there is no comparison between the two men.

If we separate all these dramatic poems into three main periods,--the
early, from 1833 to 1841; the middle, from 1841 to 1868; and the late, from
1868 to 1889,--the work of the beginner will be much more easily
designated. Of his early soul studies, _Pauline_ (1833), _Paracelsus_
(1835), and _Sordello_ (1840), little need be said here, except perhaps
this: that if we begin with these works, we shall probably never read
anything else by Browning. And that were a pity. It is better to leave
these obscure works until his better poems have so attracted us to Browning
that we will cheerfully endure his worst faults for the sake of his
undoubted virtues. The same criticism applies, though in less degree, to
his first drama, _Strafford_ (1837), which belongs to the early period of
his work.

The merciless criticism which greeted _Sordello_ had a wholesome effect on
Browning, as is shown in the better work of his second period. Moreover,
his new power was developing rapidly, as may be seen by comparing the eight
numbers of his famous _Bells and Pomegranates_ series (1841-1846) with his
earlier work. Thus, the first number of this wonderful series, published in
1841, contains _Pippa Passes_, which is, on the whole, the most perfect of
his longer poems; and another number contains _A Blot in the 'Scutcheon_,
which is the most readable of his dramas. Even a beginner must be thrilled
by the beauty and the power of these two works. Two other noteworthy dramas
of the period are _Colombe's Birthday_ (1844) and _In a Balcony_ (1855),
which, however, met with scant appreciation on the stage, having too much
subtle analysis and too little action to satisfy the public. Nearly all his
best lyrics, dramas, and dramatic poems belong to this middle period of
labor; and when _The Ring and the Book_ appeared, in 1868, he had given to
the world the noblest expression of his poetic genius.

In the third period, beginning when Browning was nearly sixty years old, he
wrote even more industriously than before, and published on an average
nearly a volume of poetry a year. Such volumes as _Fifine at the Fair, Red
Cotton Night-Cap Country, The Inn Album, Jocoseria_, and many others, show
how Browning gains steadily in the power of revealing the hidden springs of
human action; but he often rambles most tiresomely, and in general his work
loses in sustained interest. It is perhaps significant that most of his
best work was done under Mrs. Browning's influence.

WHAT TO READ. Of the short miscellaneous poems there is such an unusual
variety that one must hesitate a little in suggesting this or that to the
beginner's attention. "My Star," "Evelyn Hope," "Wanting is--What?" "Home
Thoughts from Abroad," "Meeting at Night," "One Word More" (an exquisite
tribute to his dead wife), "Prospice" (Look Forward); songs from _Pippa
Passes;_ various love poems like "By the Fireside" and "The Last Ride
Together"; the inimitable "Pied Piper," and the ballads like "Hervé Riel"
and "How They Brought the Good News,"--these are a mere suggestion,
expressing only the writer's personal preference; but a glance at the
contents of Browning's volumes will reveal scores of other poems, which
another writer might recommend as being better in themselves or more
characteristic of Browning.[237]

Among Browning's dramatic soul studies there is also a very wide choice.
"Andrea del Sarto" is one of the best, revealing as it does the strength
and the weakness of "the perfect painter," whose love for a soulless woman
with a pretty face saddens his life and hampers his best work. Next in
importance to "Andrea" stands "An Epistle," reciting the experiences of
Karshish, an Arab physician, which is one of the best examples of
Browning's peculiar method of presenting the truth. The half-scoffing,
half-earnest, and wholly bewildered state of this Oriental scientist's mind
is clearly indicated between the lines of his letter to his old master. His
description of Lazarus, whom he meets by chance, and of the state of mind
of one who, having seen the glories of immortality, must live again in the
midst of the jumble of trivial and stupendous things which constitute our
life, forms one of the most original and suggestive poems in our
literature. "My Last Duchess" is a short but very keen analysis of the soul
of a selfish man, who reveals his character unconsciously by his words of
praise concerning his dead wife's picture. In "The Bishop Orders his Tomb"
we have another extraordinarily interesting revelation of the mind of a
vain and worldly man, this time a churchman, whose words tell you far more
than he dreams about his own character. "Abt Vogler," undoubtedly one of
Browning's finest poems, is the study of a musician's soul. "Muléykeh"
gives us the soul of an Arab, vain and proud of his fast horse, which was
never beaten in a race. A rival steals the horse and rides away upon her
back; but, used as she is to her master's touch, she will not show her best
pace to the stranger. Muléykeh rides up furiously; but instead of striking
the thief from his saddle, he boasts about his peerless mare, saying that
if a certain spot on her neck were touched with the rein, she could never
be overtaken. Instantly the robber touches the spot, and the mare answers
with a burst of speed that makes pursuit hopeless. Muléykeh has lost his
mare; but he has kept his pride in the unbeaten one, and is satisfied.
"Rabbi Ben Ezra," which refuses analysis, and which must be read entire to
be appreciated, is perhaps the most quoted of all Browning's works, and
contains the best expression of his own faith in life, both here and
hereafter. All these wonderful poems are, again, merely a suggestion. They
indicate simply the works to which one reader turns when he feels mentally
vigorous enough to pick up Browning. Another list of soul studies, citing
"A Toccata of Galuppi's," "A Grammarian's Funeral," "Fra Lippo Lippi,"
"Saul," "Cleon," "A Death in the Desert," and "Soliloquy of the Spanish
Cloister," might, in another's judgment, be more interesting and
suggestive.

[Pippa Passes] Among Browning's longer poems there are two, at least, that
well deserve our study. _Pippa Passes_, aside from its rare poetical
qualities, is a study of unconscious influence. The idea of the poem was
suggested to Browning while listening to a gypsy girl singing in the woods
near his home; but he transfers the scene of the action to the little
mountain town of Asolo, in Italy. Pippa is a little silk weaver, who goes
out in the morning to enjoy her one holiday of the whole year. As she
thinks of her own happiness she is vaguely wishing that she might share it,
and do some good. Then, with her childish imagination, she begins to weave
a little romance in which she shares in the happiness of the four greatest
and happiest people in Asolo. It never occurs to her that perhaps there is
more of misery than of happiness in the four great ones of whom she dreams;
and so she goes on her way singing,

    The year's at the spring
    And day's at the morn;
    Morning's at seven;
    The hillside's dew-pearled;
    The lark's on the wing;
    The snail's on the thorn:
    God's in his heaven--
    All's right with the world!

Fate wills it that the words and music of her little songs should come to
the ears of four different groups of people at the moment when they are
facing the greatest crises of their lives, and turn the scale from evil to
good. But Pippa knows nothing of this. She enjoys her holiday, and goes to
bed still singing, entirely ignorant of the good she has done in the world.
With one exception, it is the most perfect of all Browning's works. At best
it is not easy, nor merely entertaining reading; but it richly repays
whatever hours we spend in studying it.

_The Ring and the Book_ is Browning's masterpiece. It is an immense poem,
twice as long as _Paradise Lost_, and longer by some two thousand lines
than the _Iliad;_ and before we begin the undoubted task of reading it, we
must understand that there is no interesting story or dramatic development
to carry us along. In the beginning we have an outline of the story, such
as it is--a horrible story of Count Guido's murder of his beautiful young
wife; and Browning tells us in detail just when and how he found a book
containing the record of the crime and the trial. There the story element
ends, and the symbolism of the book begins. The title of the poem is
explained by the habit of the old Etruscan goldsmiths who, in making one of
their elaborately chased rings, would mix the pure gold with an alloy, in
order to harden it. When the ring was finished, acid was poured upon it;
and the acid ate out the alloy, leaving the beautiful design in pure gold.
Browning purposes to follow the same plan with his literary material, which
consists simply of the evidence given at the trial of Guido in Rome, in
1698. He intends to mix a poet's fancy with the crude facts, and create a
beautiful and artistic work.

The result of Browning's purpose is a series of monologues, in which the
same story is retold nine different times by the different actors in the
drama. The count, the young wife, the suspected priest, the lawyers, the
Pope who presides at the trial,--each tells the story, and each
unconsciously reveals the depths of his own nature in the recital. The most
interesting of the characters are Guido, the husband, who changes from bold
defiance to abject fear; Caponsacchi, the young priest, who aids the wife
in her flight from her brutal husband, and is unjustly accused of false
motives; Pompilia, the young wife, one of the noblest characters in
literature, fit in all respects to rank with Shakespeare's great heroines;
and the Pope, a splendid figure, the strongest of all Browning's masculine
characters. When we have read the story, as told by these four different
actors, we have the best of the poet's work, and of the most original poem
in our language.

BROWNING'S PLACE AND MESSAGE. Browning's place in our literature will be
better appreciated by comparison with his friend Tennyson, whom we have
just studied. In one respect, at least, these poets are in perfect accord.
Each finds in love the supreme purpose and meaning of life. In other
respects, especially in their methods of approaching the truth, the two men
are the exact opposites. Tennyson is first the artist and then the teacher;
but with Browning the message is always the important thing, and he is
careless, too careless, of the form in which it is expressed. Again,
Tennyson is under the influence of the romantic revival, and chooses his
subjects daintily; but "all's fish" that comes to Browning's net. He takes
comely and ugly subjects with equal pleasure, and aims to show that truth
lies hidden in both the evil and the good. This contrast is all the more
striking when we remember that Browning's essentially scientific attitude
was taken by a man who refused to study science. Tennyson, whose work is
always artistic, never studied art, but was devoted to the sciences; while
Browning, whose work is seldom artistic in form, thought that art was the
most suitable subject for a man's study.

The two poets differ even more widely in their respective messages.
Tennyson's message reflects the growing order of the age, and is summed up
in the word "law." in his view, the individual will must be suppressed; the
self must always be subordinate. His resignation is at times almost
Oriental in its fatalism, and occasionally it suggests Schopenhauer in its
mixture of fate and pessimism. Browning's message, on the other hand, is
the triumph of the individual will over all obstacles; the self is not
subordinate but supreme. There is nothing Oriental, nothing doubtful,
nothing pessimistic in the whole range of his poetry. His is the voice of
the Anglo-Saxon, standing up in the face of all obstacles and saying, "I
can and I will." He is, therefore, far more radically English than is
Tennyson; and it may be for this reason that he is the more studied, and
that, while youth delights in Tennyson, manhood is better satisfied with
Browning. Because of his invincible will and optimism, Browning is at
present regarded as the poet who has spoken the strongest word of faith to
an age of doubt. His energy, his cheerful courage, his faith in life and in
the development that awaits us beyond the portals of death, are like a
bugle-call to good living. This sums up his present influence upon the
minds of those who have learned to appreciate him. Of the future we can
only say that, both at home and abroad, he seems to be gaining steadily in
appreciation as the years go by.


MINOR POETS OF THE VISTORIAN AGE

ELIZABETH BARRETT. Among the minor poets of the past century Elizabeth
Barrett (Mrs. Browning) occupies perhaps the highest place in popular
favor. She was born at Coxhoe Hall, near Durham, in 1806; but her childhood
and early youth were spent in Herefordshire, among the Malvern Hills made
famous by _Piers Plowman_. In 1835 the Barrett family moved to London,
where Elizabeth gained a literary reputation by the publication of _The
Seraphim and Other Poems_ (1838). Then illness and the shock caused by the
tragic death of her brother, in 1840, placed her frail life in danger, and
for six years she was confined to her own room. The innate strength and
beauty of her spirit here showed itself strongly in her daily study, her
poetry, and especially in her interest in the social problems which sooner
or later occupied all the Victorian writers. "My mind to me a kingdom is"
might well have been written over the door of the room where this delicate
invalid worked and suffered in loneliness and in silence.

In 1844 Miss Barrett published her _Poems_, which, though somewhat
impulsive and overwrought, met with remarkable public favor. Such poems as
"The Cry of the Children," which voices the protest of humanity against
child labor, appealed tremendously to the readers of the age, and this
young woman's fame as a poet temporarily overshadowed that of Tennyson and
Browning. Indeed, as late as 1850, when Wordsworth died, she was seriously
considered for the position of poet laureate, which was finally given to
Tennyson. A reference to Browning, in "Lady Geraldine's Courtship," is
supposed to have first led the poet to write to Miss Barrett in 1845. Soon
afterwards he visited the invalid; they fell in love almost at first sight,
and the following year, against the wishes of her father,--who was
evidently a selfish old tyrant,--Browning carried her off and married her.
The exquisite romance of their love is reflected in Mrs. Browning's
_Sonnets from the Portuguese_ (1850). This is a noble and inspiring book of
love poems; and Stedman regards the opening sonnet, "I thought once how
Theocritus had sung," as equal to any in our language.

For fifteen years the Brownings lived an ideally happy life at Pisa, and at
Casa Guidi, Florence, sharing the same poetical ambitions. And love was the
greatest thing in the world,--

    How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
    I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
    My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
    For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
    I love thee to the level of everyday's
    Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
    I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
    I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise;
    I love thee with the passion put to use
    In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith;
    I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
    With my lost saints--I love thee with the breath,
    Smiles, tears, of all my life!--and, if God choose,
    I shall but love thee better after death.

Mrs. Browning entered with whole-souled enthusiasm into the aspirations of
Italy in its struggle against the tyranny of Austria; and her _Casa Guidi
Windows_ (1851) is a combination of poetry and politics, both, it must be
confessed, a little too emotional. In 1856 she published _Aurora Leigh_, a
novel in verse, having for its hero a young social reformer, and for its
heroine a young woman, poetical and enthusiastic, who strongly suggests
Elizabeth Barrett herself. It emphasizes in verse precisely the same moral
and social ideals which Dickens and George Eliot were proclaiming in all
their novels. Her last two volumes were _Poems before Congress_ (1860), and
_Last Poems_, published after her death. She died suddenly in 1861 and was
buried in Florence. Browning's famous line, "O lyric love, half angel and
half bird," may well apply to her frail life and aerial spirit.

ROSSETTI. Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882), the son of an exiled Italian
painter and scholar, was distinguished both as a painter and as a poet. He
was a leader in the Pre-Raphaelite movement[238] and published in the first
numbers of _The Germ_ his "Hand and Soul," a delicate prose study, and his
famous "The Blessed Damozel," beginning,

    The blessed damozel leaned out
      From the gold bar of Heaven;
    Her eyes were deeper than the depth
      Of waters stilled at even;
    She had three lilies in her hand,
      And the stars in her hair were seven.

These two early works, especially "The Blessed Damozel," with its
simplicity and exquisite spiritual quality, are characteristic of the
ideals of the Pre-Raphaelites.

In 1860, after a long engagement, Rossetti married Elizabeth Siddal, a
delicate, beautiful English girl, whom he has immortalized both in his
pictures and in his poetry. She died two years later, and Rossetti never
entirely recovered from the shock. At her burial he placed in her coffin
the manuscripts of all his unpublished poems, and only at the persistent
demands of his friends did he allow them to be exhumed and printed in 1870.
The publication of this volume of love poems created a sensation in
literary circles, and Rossetti was hailed as one of the greatest of living
poets. In 1881 he published his _Ballads and Sonnets_, a remarkable volume
containing, among other poems, "The Confession," modeled after Browning;
"The Ballad of Sister Helen," founded on a mediæval superstition; "The
King's Tragedy," a masterpiece of dramatic narrative; and "The House of
Life," a collection of one hundred and one sonnets reflecting the poet's
love and loss. This last collection deserves to rank with Mrs. Browning's
_Sonnets from the Portuguese_ and with Shakespeare's _Sonnets_, as one of
the three great cycles of love poems in our language. It has been well said
that both Rossetti and Morris paint pictures as well in their poems as on
their canvases, and this pictorial quality of their verse is its chief
characteristic.

MORRIS. William Morris (1834-1896) is a most interesting combination of
literary man and artist. In the latter capacity, as architect, designer,
and manufacturer of furniture, carpets, and wall paper, and as founder of
the Kelmscott Press for artistic printing and bookbinding, he has laid us
all under an immense debt of gratitude. From boyhood he had steeped himself
in the legends and ideals of the Middle Ages, and his best literary work is
wholly mediæval in spirit. _The Earthly Paradise_ (1868-1870) is generally
regarded as his masterpiece. This delightful collection of stories in verse
tells of a roving band of Vikings, who are wrecked on the fabled island of
Atlantis, and who discover there a superior race of men having the
characteristics of ideal Greeks. The Vikings remain for a year, telling
stories of their own Northland, and listening to the classic and Oriental
tales of their hosts. Morris's interest in Icelandic literature is further
shown by his _Sigurd the Volsung_, an epic founded upon one of the old
sagas, and by his prose romances, _The House of the Wolfings, The Story of
the Glittering Plain_, and _The Roots of the Mountains_. Later in life he
became deeply interested in socialism, and two other romances, _The Dream
of John Ball_ and _News from Nowhere_, are interesting as modern attempts
at depicting an ideal society governed by the principles of More's
_Utopia_.

SWINBURNE. Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) is, chronologically, the
last of the Victorian poets. As an artist in technique--having perfect
command of all old English verse forms and a remarkable faculty for
inventing new--he seems at the present time to rank among the best in our
literature. Indeed, as Stedman says, "before his advent we did not realize
the full scope of English verse." This refers to the melodious and
constantly changing form rather than to the content of Swinburne's poetry.
At the death of Tennyson, in 1892, he was undoubtedly the greatest living
poet, and only his liberal opinions, his scorn of royalty and of
conventions, and the prejudice aroused by the pagan spirit of his early
work prevented his appointment as poet laureate. He has written a very
large number of poems, dramas, and essays in literary criticism; but we are
still too near to judge of the permanence of his work or of his place in
literature. Those who would read and estimate his work for themselves will
do well to begin with a volume of selected poems, especially those which
show his love of the sea and his exquisite appreciation of child life. His
_Atalanta in Calydon_ (1864), a beautiful lyric drama modeled on the Greek
tragedy, is generally regarded as his masterpiece. In all his work
Swinburne carries Tennyson's love of melody to an extreme, and often
sacrifices sense to sound. His poetry is always musical, and, like music,
appeals almost exclusively to the emotions.

       *       *       *       *       *

We have chosen, somewhat arbitrarily, these four writers--Mrs. Browning, D.
G. Rossetti, Morris, and Swinburne--as representative of the minor poets of
the age; but there are many others who are worthy of study,--Arthur Hugh
Clough and Matthew Arnold,[239] who are often called the poets of
skepticism, but who in reality represent a reverent seeking for truth
through reason and human experience; Frederick William Faber, the Catholic
mystic, author of some exquisite hymns; and the scholarly John Keble,
author of _The Christian Year_, our best known book of devotional verse;
and among the women poets, Adelaide Procter, Jean Ingelow, and Christina
Rossetti, each of whom had a large, admiring circle of readers. It would be
a hopeless task at the present time to inquire into the relative merits of
all these minor poets. We note only their careful workmanship and exquisite
melody, their wide range of thought and feeling, their eager search for
truth, each in his own way, and especially the note of freshness and
vitality which they have given to English poetry.


II. THE NOVELISTS OF THE VICTORIAN AGE

CHARLES DICKENS (1812-1870)

When we consider Dickens's life and work, in comparison with that of the
two great poets we have been studying, the contrast is startling. While
Tennyson and Browning were being educated for the life of literature, and
shielded most tenderly from the hardships of the world, Dickens, a poor,
obscure, and suffering child, was helping to support a shiftless family by
pasting labels on blacking bottles, sleeping under a counter like a
homeless cat, and once a week timidly approaching the big prison where his
father was confined for debt. In 1836 his _Pickwick_ was published, and
life was changed as if a magician had waved his wand over him. While the
two great poets were slowly struggling for recognition, Dickens, with
plenty of money and too much fame, was the acknowledged literary hero of
England, the idol of immense audiences which gathered to applaud him
wherever he appeared. And there is also this striking contrast between the
novelist and the poets,--that while the whole tendency of the age was
toward realism, away from the extremes of the romanticists and from the
oddities and absurdities of the early novel writers, it was precisely by
emphasizing oddities and absurdities, by making caricatures rather than
characters, that Dickens first achieved his popularity.

LIFE. In Dickens's early life we see a stern but unrecognized preparation
for the work that he was to do. Never was there a better illustration of
the fact that a boy's early hardship and suffering are sometimes only
divine messengers disguised, and that circumstances which seem only evil
are often the source of a man's strength and of the influence which he is
to wield in the world. He was the second of eight poor children, and was
born at Landport in 1812. His father, who is supposed to be the original of
Mr. Micawber, was a clerk in a navy office. He could never make both ends
meet, and after struggling with debts in his native town for many years,
moved to London when Dickens was nine years old. The debts still pursued
him, and after two years of grandiloquent misfortune he was thrown into the
poor-debtors' prison. His wife, the original of Mrs. Micawber, then set up
the famous Boarding Establishment for Young Ladies; but, in Dickens's
words, no young ladies ever came. The only visitors were creditors, and
they were quite ferocious. In the picture of the Micawber family, with its
tears and smiles and general shiftlessness, we have a suggestion of
Dickens's own family life.

At eleven years of age the boy was taken out of school and went to work in
the cellar of a blacking factory. At this time he was, in his own words, a
"queer small boy," who suffered as he worked; and we can appreciate the boy
and the suffering more when we find both reflected in the character of
David Copperfield. It is a heart-rending picture, this sensitive child
working from dawn till dark for a few pennies, and associating with toughs
and waifs in his brief intervals of labor; but we can see in it the sources
of that intimate knowledge of the hearts of the poor and outcast which was
soon to be reflected in literature and to startle all England by its appeal
for sympathy. A small legacy ended this wretchedness, bringing the father
from the prison and sending the boy to Wellington House Academy,--a
worthless and brutal school, evidently, whose head master was, in Dickens's
words, a most ignorant fellow and a tyrant. He learned little at this
place, being interested chiefly in stories, and in acting out the heroic
parts which appealed to his imagination; but again his personal experience
was of immense value, and resulted in his famous picture of Dotheboys Hall,
in _Nicholas Nickleby_, which helped largely to mitigate the evils of
private schools in England. Wherever he went, Dickens was a marvelously
keen observer, with an active imagination which made stories out of
incidents and characters that ordinary men would have hardly noticed.
Moreover he was a born actor, and was at one time the leading spirit of a
band of amateurs who gave entertainments for charity all over England.
These three things, his keen observation, his active imagination, and the
actor's spirit which animated him, furnish a key to his life and writings.

When only fifteen years old, he left the school and again went to work,
this time as clerk in a lawyer's office. By night he studied shorthand, in
order to fit himself to be a reporter,--this in imitation of his father,
who was now engaged by a newspaper to report the speeches in Parliament.
Everything that Dickens attempted seems to have been done with vigor and
intensity, and within two years we find him reporting important speeches,
and writing out his notes as the heavy coach lurched and rolled through the
mud of country roads on its dark way to London town. It was largely during
this period that he gained his extraordinary knowledge of inns and stables
and "horsey" persons, which is reflected in his novels. He also grew
ambitious, and began to write on his own account. At the age of twenty-one
he dropped his first little sketch "stealthily, with fear and trembling,
into a dark letter-box, in a dark office up a dark court in Fleet Street."
The name of this first sketch was "Mr. Minns and his Cousin," and it
appeared with other stories in his first book, _Sketches by Boz_, in 1835.
One who reads these sketches now, with their intimate knowledge of the
hidden life of London, can understand Dickens's first newspaper success
perfectly. His best known work, _Pickwick_, was published serially in
1836-1837, and Dickens's fame and fortune were made. Never before had a
novel appeared so full of vitality and merriment. Though crude in design, a
mere jumble of exaggerated characters and incidents, it fairly bubbled over
with the kind of humor in which the British public delights, and it still
remains, after three quarters of a century, one of our most care-dispelling
books.

The remainder of Dickens's life is largely a record of personal triumphs.
_Pickwick_ was followed rapidly by _Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, Old
Curiosity Shop_, and by many other works which seemed to indicate that
there was no limit to the new author's invention of odd, grotesque,
uproarious, and sentimental characters. In the intervals of his novel
writing he attempted several times to edit a weekly paper; but his power
lay in other directions, and with the exception of _Household Words_, his
journalistic ventures were not a marked success. Again the actor came to
the surface, and after managing a company of amateur actors successfully,
Dickens began to give dramatic readings from his own works. As he was
already the most popular writer in the English language, these readings
were very successful. Crowds thronged to hear him, and his journeys became
a continuous ovation. Money poured into his pockets from his novels and
from his readings, and he bought for himself a home, Gadshill Place, which
he had always desired, and which is forever associated with his memory.
Though he spent the greater part of his time and strength in travel at this
period, nothing is more characteristic of the man than the intense energy
with which he turned from his lecturing to his novels, and then, for
relaxation, gave himself up to what he called the magic lantern of the
London streets.

In 1842, while still a young man, Dickens was invited to visit the United
States and Canada, where his works were even better known than in England,
and where he was received as the guest of the nation and treated with every
mark of honor and appreciation. At this time America was, to most
Europeans, a kind of huge fairyland, where money sprang out of the earth,
and life was happy as a long holiday. Dickens evidently shared this rosy
view, and his romantic expectations were naturally disappointed. The crude,
unfinished look of the big country seems to have roused a strong prejudice
in his mind, which was not overcome at the time of his second visit,
twenty-five years later, and which brought forth the harsh criticism of his
_American Notes_ (1842) and of _Martin Chuzzlewit_ (1843-1844). These two
unkind books struck a false note, and Dickens began to lose something of
his great popularity. In addition he had spent money beyond his income. His
domestic life, which had been at first very happy, became more and more
irritating, until he separated from his wife in 1858. To get inspiration,
which seemed for a time to have failed, he journeyed to Italy, but was
disappointed. Then he turned back to the London streets, and in the five
years from 1848 to 1853 appeared _Dombey and Son, David Copperfield_, and
_Bleak House_,--three remarkable novels, which indicate that he had
rediscovered his own power and genius. Later he resumed the public
readings, with their public triumph and applause, which soon came to be a
necessity to one who craved popularity as a hungry man craves bread. These
excitements exhausted Dickens, physically and spiritually, and death was
the inevitable result. He died in 1870, over his unfinished _Edwin Drood_,
and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

DICKENS'S WORK IN VIEW OF HIS LIFE. A glance through even this
unsatisfactory biography gives us certain illuminating suggestions in
regard to all of Dickens's work. First, as a child, poor and lonely,
longing for love and for society, he laid the foundation for those
heartrending pictures of children, which have moved so many readers to
unaccustomed tears. Second, as clerk in a lawyer's office and in the
courts, he gained his knowledge of an entirely different side of human
life. Here he learned to understand both the enemies and the victims of
society, between whom the harsh laws of that day frequently made no
distinction. Third, as a reporter, and afterwards as manager of various
newspapers, he learned the trick of racy writing, and of knowing to a
nicety what would suit the popular taste. Fourth, as an actor, always an
actor in spirit, he seized upon every dramatic possibility, every tense
situation, every peculiarity of voice and gesture in the people whom he
met, and reproduced these things in his novels, exaggerating them in the
way that most pleased his audience.

When we turn from his outward training to his inner disposition we find two
strongly marked elements. The first is his excessive imagination, which
made good stories out of incidents that ordinarily pass unnoticed, and
which described the commonest things--a street, a shop, a fog, a lamp-post,
a stagecoach--with a wealth of detail and of romantic suggestion that makes
many of his descriptions like lyric poems. The second element is his
extreme sensibility, which finds relief only in laughter and tears. Like
shadow and sunshine these follow one another closely throughout all his
books.

Remembering these two things, his training and disposition, we can easily
foresee the kind of novel he must produce. He will be sentimental,
especially over children and outcasts; he will excuse the individual in
view of the faults of society; he will be dramatic or melodramatic; and his
sensibility will keep him always close to the public, studying its tastes
and playing with its smiles and tears. If pleasing the public be in itself
an art, then Dickens is one of our greatest artists. And it is well to
remember that in pleasing his public there was nothing of the hypocrite or
demagogue in his make-up. He was essentially a part of the great drifting
panoramic crowd that he loved. His sympathetic soul made all their joys and
griefs his own. He fought against injustice; he championed the weak against
the strong; he gave courage to the faint, and hope to the weary in heart;
and in the love which the public gave him in return he found his best
reward. Here is the secret of Dickens's unprecedented popular success, and
we may note here a very significant parallel with Shakespeare. The great
different in the genius and work of the two men does not change the fact
that each won success largely because he studied and pleased his public.

GENERAL PLAN OF DICKENS'S NOVELS. An interesting suggestion comes to us
from a study of the conditions which led to Dickens's first three novels.
_Pickwick_ was written, at the suggestion of an editor, for serial
publication. Each chapter was to be accompanied by a cartoon by Seymor (a
comic artist of the day), and the object was to amuse the public, and,
incidentally, to sell the paper. The result was a series of characters and
scenes and incidents which for vigor and boundless fun have never been
equaled in our language. Thereafter, no matter what he wrote, Dickins was
lbeled a humorist. Like a certain American writer of our own generation,
everything he said, whether for a feast or a funeral, was spposed to
contain a laugh. In a word, he was the victim of his own book. Dickens was
keen enough to understand his danger, and his next novel, _Oliver Twist_,
had the serious purpose of  mitigating the evils under which the poor were
suffering. Its hero was a poor child, the unfortunate victim of society;
and, in order to draw attention to the real need, Dickens exaggerated the
woeful condition of the poor, and filled his pages with sentiment which
easily slipped over into sentimentality. This also was a popular success,
and in his third novel, _Nicholas Nickleby,_ and indeed in most of his
remaining works, Dickens combined the principles of his first two books,
giving us mirth on the one hand, injustice and suffering on the other;
mingling humor and pathos, tears and laughter, as we find them in life
itself. And in order to increase the lights and shadows in his scenes, and
to give greater dramatic effect to his narrative, he introduced odious and
lothsome characters, and made vice more hateful by contrasting it with
innocence and virtue.

We find, therefore, in most of Dickens's novels three or four widely
different types of character: first, the innocent little child, like
Oliver, Joe, Paul, Tiny Tim, and Little Nell, appealing powerfully to the
child love in every human heart; scond, the horrible or grotesque foil,
like Sqeers, Fagin, Quilp, Uriah Heep, and Bill Sykes; third, the
grandiloquent or broadly humorous fellow, the fun maker, like Micawber and
Sam Weller; and fourth, a tenderly or powerfully drawn figure, like Lady
Deadlock of _Bleak House,_ and Sydney Carton of _A Tale of Two Cities,_
which rise to the dignity of true characters. We note also that most of
Dickens's novels belong decidely to the class of purpose or problem novels.
Thus _Bleak House_ attacks "the law's delays"; _Little Dorrit,_ the
injustice which persecutes poor debtors; _Nicholas Nickleby,_ the abuses of
charity schools and brutal schoolmasters; and _Oliver Twist,_ the
unnecessary degradation and suffering of the poor in English workhouses.
Dickens's serious purpose was to make the novel the instrument of morality
and justice, and whatver we may think of the exaggeration of his
characters, it is certain that his stories did more to correct the general
selfishness and injustice of society toward the poor than all the works of
other literary men of his age combined.

THE LIMITATIONS OF DICKENS. Any severe criticism of Dickens as a novelist
must seem, at first glance, unkind an unnecessary. In almost every house he
is a welcome guest, a personal friend who has beguiled many an hour with
his stories, and who has furnished us much  good laughter and a few good
tears. Moreover, he has always a cheery message. He emphasizes the fact
that this is an excellant world; that some errors have crept into it, due
largely to thoughtlessness, but that they can be easily remedied by a
little human sympathy. That is a most welcome creed to an age overburdened
with social problems; and to criticise our cheery companion seems as
discourteous as to speak unkindly of a guest who has just left our home.
But we must consider Dickens not merely as a friend, but as a novelist, and
apply to his work the same standards of art which we apply to other
writers; and when we do this we are sometimes a little disappointed. We
must confess that his novels, while they contain many realistic details,
seldom give the impression of reality. His characters, though we laugh or
weep or shudder at them, are sometimes only caricatures, each one an
exaggeration of some peculiarity, which suggest Ben Jonson's _Every Man in
His Humour_. It is Dickens's art to give his heroes sufficient reality to
make them suggest certain types of men and women whom we know; but in
reading him we find ourselves often in the mental state of a man who is
watching through a microscope the swarming life of a water drop. Here are
lively, bustling, extraordinary creatures, some beautiful, some grotesque,
but all far apart from the life that we know in daily experience. It is
certainly not the reality of these characters, but rather the genius of the
author in managing them, which interests us and holds our attention.
Notwithstanding this criticism, which we would gladly have omitted, Dickens
is excellent reading, and his novels will continue to be popular just so
long as men enjoy a wholesome and absorbing story.

WHAT TO READ. Aside from the reforms in schools and prisons and workhouses
which Dickens accomplished, he has laid us all, rich and poor alike, under
a debt of gratitude. After the year 1843 the one literary work which he
never neglected was to furnish a Christmas story for his readers; and it is
due in some measure to the help of these stories, brimming over with good
cheer, that Christmas has become in all English-speaking countries a season
of gladness, of gift giving at home, and of remembering those less
fortunate than ourselves, who are still members of a common brotherhood. If
we read nothing else of Dickens, once a year, at Christmas time, we should
remember him and renew our youth by reading one of his holiday stories,--
_The Cricket on the Hearth, The Chimes_, and above all the unrivaled
_Christmas Carol_. The latter especially will be read and loved as long as
men are moved by the spirit of Christmas.

Of the novels, _David Copperfield_ is regarded by many as Dickens's
masterpiece. It is well to begin with this novel, not simply for the
unusual interest of the story, but also for the glimpse it gives us of the
author's own boyhood and family. For pure fun and hilarity _Pickwick_ will
always be a favorite; but for artistic finish, and for the portrayal of one
great character, Sydney Carton, nothing else that Dickens wrote is
comparable to _A Tale of Two Cities_. Here is an absorbing story, with a
carefully constructed plot, and the action moves swiftly to its thrilling,
inevitable conclusion. Usually Dickens introduces several pathetic or
grotesque or laughable characters besides the main actors, and records
various unnecessary dramatic episodes for their own sake; but in _A Tale of
Two Cities_ everything has its place in the development of the main story.
There are, as usual, many characters,--Sydney Carton, the outcast, who lays
down his life for the happiness of one whom he loves; Charles Darnay, an
exiled young French noble; Dr. Manette, who has been "recalled to life"
from a frightful imprisonment, and his gentle daughter Lucie, the heroine;
Jarvis Lorry, a lovable, old-fashioned clerk in the big banking house; the
terrible Madame Defarge, knitting calmly at the door of her wine shop and
recording, with the ferocity of a tiger licking its chops, the names of all
those who are marked for vengeance; and a dozen others, each well drawn,
who play minor parts in the tragedy. The scene is laid in London and Paris,
at the time of the French Revolution; and, though careless of historical
details, Dickens reproduces the spirit of the Reign of Terror so well that
_A Tale of Two Cities_ is an excellent supplement to the history of the
period. It is written in Dickens's usual picturesque style, and reveals his
usual imaginative outlook on life and his fondness for fine sentiments and
dramatic episodes. Indeed, all his qualities are here shown, not
brilliantly or garishly, as in other novels, but subdued and softened, like
a shaded light, for artistic effect.

Those who are interested in Dickens's growth and methods can hardly do
better than to read in succession his first three novels, _Pickwick, Oliver
Twist_, and _Nicholas Nickleby_, which, as we have indicated, show clearly
how he passed from fun to serious purpose, and which furnish in combination
the general plan of all his later works. For the rest, we can only indicate
those which, in our personal judgment, seem best worth reading,--_Bleak
House, Dombey and Son, Our Mutual Friend_, and _Old Curiosity Shop_,--but
we are not yet far enough away from the first popular success of these
works to determine their permanent value and influence.


WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY (1811-1863)

As the two most successful novelists of their day, it is natural for us, as
it was for their personal friends and admirers, to compare Dickens and
Thackeray with respect to their life and work, and their attitude toward
the world in which they lived. Dickens, after a desperately hard struggle
in his boyhood, without friends or higher education, comes into manhood
cheery, self-confident, energetic, filled with the joy of his work; and in
the world, which had at first treated him so harshly, he finds good
everywhere, even in the jails and in the slums, simply because he is
looking for it. Thackeray, after a boyhood spent in the best of English
schools, with money, friends, and comforts of every kind, faces life
timidly, distrustfully, and dislikes the literary work which makes him
famous. He has a gracious and lovable personality, is kind of heart, and
reveres all that is pure and good in life; yet he is almost cynical toward
the world which uses him so well, and finds shams, deceptions, vanities
everywhere, because he looks for them. One finds what one seeks in this
world, but it is perhaps significant that Dickens sought his golden fleece
among plain people, and Thackeray in high society. The chief difference
between the two novelists, however, is not one of environment but of
temperament. Put Thackeray in a workhouse, and he will still find material
for another _Book of Snobs;_ put Dickens in society, and he cannot help
finding undreamed-of possibilities among bewigged and bepowdered high lords
and ladies. For Dickens is romantic and emotional, and interprets the world
largely through his imagination; Thackeray is the realist and moralist, who
judges solely by observation and reflection. He aims to give us a true
picture of the society of his day, and as he finds it pervaded by intrigues
and snobbery he proceeds to satirize it and point out its moral evils. In
his novels he is influenced by Swift and Fielding, but he is entirely free
from the bitterness of the one and the coarseness of the other, and his
satire is generally softened by a noble tenderness. Taken together, the
novels of Dickens and Thackeray give us a remarkable picture of all classes
of English society in the middle of the nineteenth century.

LIFE. Thackeray was born in 1811, in Calcutta, where his father held a
civil position under the Indian government. When the boy was five years old
his father died, and the mother returned with her child to England.
Presently she married again, and Thackeray was sent to the famous
Charterhouse school, of which he has given us a vivid picture in _The
Newcomes_. Such a school would have been a veritable heaven to Dickens, who
at this time was tossed about between poverty and ambition; but Thackeray
detested it for its rude manners, and occasionally referred to it as the
"Slaughterhouse." Writing to his mother he says: "There are three hundred
and seventy boys in the school. I wish, there were only three hundred and
sixty-nine."

In 1829 Thackeray entered Trinity College, Cambridge, but left after less
than two years, without taking a degree, and went to Germany and France
where he studied with the idea of becoming an artist. When he became of
age, in 1832, he came into possession of a comfortable fortune, returned to
England, and settled down in the Temple to study law. Soon he began to
dislike the profession intensely, and we have in _Pendennis_ a reflection
of his mental attitude toward the law and the young men who studied it. He
soon lost his fortune, partly by gambling and speculation, partly by
unsuccessful attempts at running a newspaper, and at twenty-two began for
the first time to earn his own living, as an artist and illustrator. An
interesting meeting between Thackeray and Dickens at this time (1836)
suggests the relative importance of the two writers. Seymour, who was
illustrating the _Pickwick Papers_, had just died, and Thackeray called
upon Dickens with a few drawings and asked to be allowed to continue the
illustrations. Dickens was at this time at the beginning of his great
popularity. The better literary artist, whose drawings were refused, was
almost unknown, and had to work hard for more than ten years before he
received recognition. Disappointed by his failure as an illustrator, he
began his literary career by writing satires on society for _Fraser's
Magazine_. This was the beginning of his success; but though the
_Yellowplush Papers, The Great Hoggarty Diamond, Catherine, The Fitz
Boodlers, The Book of Snobs, Barry Lyndon_, and various other immature
works made him known to a few readers of _Punch_ and of _Fraser's
Magazine_, it was not till the publication of _Vanity Fair_ (1847-1848)
that he began to be recognized as one of the great novelists of his day.
All his earlier works are satires, some upon society, others upon the
popular novelists,--Bulwer, Disraeli, and especially Dickens,--with whose
sentimental heroes and heroines he had no patience whatever. He had
married, meanwhile, in 1836, and for a few years was very happy in his
home. Then disease and insanity fastened upon his young wife, and she was
placed in an asylum. The whole after life of our novelist was darkened by
this loss worse than death. He became a man of the clubs, rather than of
his own home, and though his wit and kindness made him the most welcome of
clubmen, there was an undercurrent of sadness in all that he wrote. Long
afterwards he said that, though his marriage ended in shipwreck, he "would
do it over again; for behold Love is the crown and completion of all
earthly good."

After the moderate success of _Vanity Fair_, Thackeray wrote the three
novels of his middle life upon which his fame chiefly rests,--_Pendennis_
in 1850, _Henry Esmond_ in 1852, and _The Newcomes_ in 1855. Dickens's
great popular success as a lecturer and dramatic reader had led to a
general desire on the part of the public to see and to hear literary men,
and Thackeray, to increase his income, gave two remarkable courses of
lectures, the first being _English Humorists of the Eighteenth Century_,
and the second _The Four Georges_,--both courses being delivered with
gratifying success in England and especially in America. Dickens, as we
have seen, was disappointed in America and vented his displeasure in
outrageous criticism; but Thackeray, with his usual good breeding, saw only
the best side of his generous entertainers, and in both his public and
private utterances emphasized the virtues of the new land, whose restless
energy seemed to fascinate him. Unlike Dickens, he had no confidence in
himself when he faced an audience, and like most literary men he disliked
lecturing, and soon gave it up. In 1860 he became editor of the _Cornhill
Magazine_, which prospered in his hands, and with a comfortable income he
seemed just ready to do his best work for the world (which has always
believed that he was capable of even better things than he ever wrote) when
he died suddenly in 1863. His body lies buried in Kensal Green, and only a
bust does honor to his memory in Westminster Abbey.

WORKS OF THACKERAY. The beginner will do well to omit the earlier satires
of Thackeray, written while he was struggling to earn a living from the
magazines, and open _Henry Esmond_ (1852), his most perfect novel, though
not the most widely known and read. The fine historical and literary,
flavor of this story is one of its most marked characteristics, and only
one who knows something of the history and literature of the eighteenth
century can appreciate its value. The hero, Colonel Esmond; relates his own
story, carrying the reader through the courts and camps of Queen Anne's
reign, and giving the most complete and accurate picture of a past age that
has ever appeared in a novel. Thackeray is, as we have said, a realist, and
he begins his story by adopting the style and manner of a scholarly
gentleman of the period he is describing. He has an extraordinary knowledge
of eighteenth-century literature, and he reproduces its style in detail,
going so far as to insert in his narrative an alleged essay from the
_Tatler_. And so perfectly is it done that it is impossible to say wherein
it differs from the style of Addison and Steele.

In his matter also Thackeray is realistic, reflecting not the pride and
pomp of war, which are largely delusions, but its brutality and barbarism,
which are all too real; painting generals and leaders, not as the newspaper
heroes to whom we are accustomed, but as moved by intrigues, petty
jealousies, and selfish ambitions; showing us the great Duke of Marlborough
not as the military hero, the idol of war-crazed multitudes, but as without
personal honor, and governed by despicable avarice. In a word, Thackeray
gives us the "back stairs" view of war, which is, as a rule, totally
neglected in our histories. When he deals with the literary men of the
period, he uses the same frank realism, showing us Steele and Addison and
other leaders, not with halos about their heads, as popular authors, but in
slippers and dressing gowns, smoking a pipe in their own rooms, or else
growing tipsy and hilarious in the taverns,--just as they appeared in daily
life. Both in style and in matter, therefore, _Esmond_ deserves to rank as
probably the best historical novel in our language.

The plot of the story is, like most of Thackeray's plots, very slight, but
perfectly suited to the novelist's purpose. The plans of his characters
fail; their ideals grow dim; there is a general disappearance of youthful
ambitions. There is a love story at the center; but the element of romance,
which furnishes the light and music and fragrance of love, is
inconspicuous. The hero, after ten years of devotion to a young woman, a
paragon of beauty, finally marries her mother, and ends with a few pious
observations concerning Heaven's mercy and his own happy lot. Such an
ending seems disappointing, almost bizarre, in view of the romantic novels
to which we are accustomed; but we must remember that Thackeray's purpose
was to paint life as he saw it, and that in life men and things often take
a different way from that described in romances. As we grow acquainted with
Thackeray's characters, we realize that no other ending was possible to his
story, and conclude that his plot, like his style, is perhaps as near
perfection as a realistic novelist can ever come.

_Vanity Fair_ (1847--1848) is the best known of Thackeray's novels. It was
his first great work, and was intended to express his own views of the
social life about him, and to protest against the overdrawn heroes of
popular novels. He takes for his subject that Vanity Fair to which
Christian and Faithful were conducted on their way to the Heavenly City, as
recorded in _Pilgrim's Progress_. In this fair there are many different
booths, given over to the sale of "all sorts of vanities," and as we go
from one to another we come in contact with "juggling, cheats, games,
plays, fools, apes, knaves, rogues, and that of every kind." Evidently this
is a picture of one side of social life; but the difference between Bunyan
and Thackeray is simply this,--that Bunyan made Vanity Fair a small
incident in a long journey, a place through which most of us pass on our
way to better things; while Thackeray, describing high society in his own
day, makes it a place of long sojourn, wherein his characters spend the
greater part of their lives. Thackeray styles this work "a novel without a
hero." The whole action of the story, which is without plot or development,
revolves about two women,--Amelia, a meek creature of the milk-and-water
type, and Becky Sharp, a keen, unprincipled intriguer, who lets nothing
stand in the way of her selfish desire to get the most out of the fools who
largely constitute society. On the whole, it is the most powerful but not
the most wholesome of Thackeray's works.

In his second important novel, _Pendennis_ (1849-1850), we have a
continuation of the satire on society begun in _Vanity Fair_. This novel,
which the beginner should read after _Esmond_, is interesting to us for two
reasons,--because it reflects more of the details of Thackeray's life than
all his other writings, and because it contains one powerfully drawn
character who is a perpetual reminder of the danger of selfishness. The
hero is "neither angel nor imp," in Thackeray's words, but the typical
young man of society, whom he knows thoroughly, and whom he paints exactly
as he is,--a careless, good-natured but essentially selfish person, who
goes through life intent on his own interests. _Pendennis_ is a profound
moral study, and the most powerful arraignment of well-meaning selfishness
in our literature, not even excepting George Eliot's _Romola_, which it
suggests.

Two other novels, _The Newcomes_ (1855) and _The Virginians_ (1859),
complete the list of Thackeray's great works of fiction. The former is a
sequel to _Pendennis_, and the latter to _Henry Esmond;_ and both share the
general fate of sequels in not being quite equal in power or interest to
their predecessors. _The Newcomes_, however, deserves a very high place,--
some critics, indeed, placing it at the head of the author's works. Like
all Thackeray's novels, it is a story of human frailty; but here the
author's innate gentleness and kindness are seen at their best, and the
hero is perhaps the most genuine and lovable of all his characters.

Thackeray is known in English literature as an essayist as well as a
novelist. His _English Humorists_ and _The Four Georges_ are among the
finest essays of the nineteenth century. In the former especially,
Thackeray shows not only a wide knowledge but an extraordinary
understanding of his subject. Apparently this nineteenth-century writer
knows Addison, Fielding, Swift, Smollett, and other great writers of the
past century almost as intimately as one knows his nearest friend; and he
gives us the fine flavor of their humor in a way which no other writer,
save perhaps Larnb, has ever rivaled.[240] _The Four Georges_ is in a vein
of delicate satire, and presents a rather unflattering picture of four of
England's rulers and of the courts in which they moved. Both these works
are remarkable for their exquisite style, their gentle humor, their keen
literary criticisms, and for the intimate knowledge and sympathy which
makes the' people of a past age live once more in the written pages.

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS. In treating of Thackeray's view of life, as
reflected in his novels, critics vary greatly, and the following summary
must be taken not as a positive judgment but only as an attempt to express
the general impression of his works on an uncritical reader. He is first of
a realist, who paints life as he sees it. As he says himself, "I have no
brains above my eyes; I describe what I see.". His pictures of certain
types, notably the weak and vicious elements of society, are accurate and
true to life, but they seem to play too large a part in his books, and have
perhaps too greatly influenced his general judgment of humanity. An
excessive sensibility, or the capacity for fine feelings and emotions, is a
marked characteristic of Thackeray, as it is of Dickens and Carlyle. He is
easily offended, as they are, by the shams of society; but he cannot find
an outlet, as Dickens does, in laughter and tears, and he is too gentle to
follow Carlyle in violent denunciations and prophecies. He turns to
satire,--influenced, doubtless, by eighteenth-century literature which he
knew so well, and in which satire played too large a part.[241] His satire
is never personal, like Pope's, or brutal, like Swift's, and is tempered by
kindness and humor; but it is used too freely, and generally lays too much
emphasis on faults and foibles to be considered a true picture of any large
class of English society.

Besides being a realist and satirist, Thackeray is essentially a moralist,
like Addison, aiming definitely in all his work at producing a moral
impression. So much does he revere goodness, and so determined is he that
his Pendennis or his Becky Sharp shall be judged at their true value, that
he is not content, like Shakespeare, to be simply an artist, to tell an
artistic tale and let it speak its own message; he must explain and
emphasize the moral significance of his work. There is no need to consult
our own conscience over the actions of Thackeray's characters; the beauty
of virtue and the ugliness of vice are evident on every page.

Whatever we may think of Thackeray's matter, there is one point in which
critics are agreed,--that he is master of a pure and simple English style.
Whether his thought be sad or humorous, commonplace or profound, he
expresses it perfectly, without effort or affectation. In all his work
there is a subtle charm, impossible to describe, which gives the impression
that we are listening to a gentleman. And it is the ease, the refinement,
the exquisite naturalness of Thackeray's style that furnishes a large part
of our pleasure in reading him.


MARY ANN EVANS, GEORGE ELIOT (1819-1880)

In nearly all the writers of the Victorian Age we note, on the one hand, a
strong intellectual tendency to analyze the problems of life, and on the
other a tendency to teach, that is, to explain to men the method by which
these problems may be solved. The novels especially seem to lose sight of
the purely artistic ideal of writing, and to aim definitely at moral
instruction. In George Eliot both these tendencies reach a climax. She is
more obviously, more consciously a preacher and moralizer than any of her
great contemporaries. Though profoundly religious at heart, she was largely
occupied by the scientific spirit of the age; and finding no religious
creed or political system satisfactory, she fell back upon duty as the
supreme law of life. All her novels aim, first, to show in individuals the
play of universal moral forces, and second, to establish the moral law as
the basis of human society. Aside from this moral teaching, we look to
George Eliot for the reflection of country life in England, just as we look
to Dickens for pictures of the city streets, and to Thackeray for the
vanities of society. Of all the women writer's who have helped and are
still helping to place our English novels at the head of the world's
fiction, she holds at present unquestionably the highest rank.

LIFE. Mary Ann (or Marian) Evans, known to us by her pen name of George
Eliot, began to write late in life, when nearly forty years of age, and
attained the leading position among living English novelists in the ten
years between 1870 and 1880, after Thackeray and Dickens had passed away.
She was born at Arbury Farm, Warwickshire, some twenty miles from
Stratford-on-Avon, in 1819. Her parents were plain, honest folk, of the
farmer class, who brought her up in the somewhat strict religious manner of
those days. Her father seems to have been a man of sterling integrity and
of practical English sense,--one of those essentially noble characters who
do the world's work silently and well, and who by their solid worth obtain
a position of influence among their fellow-men.

A few months after George Eliot's birth the family moved to another home,
in the parish of Griff, where her childhood was largely passed. The scenery
of the Midland counties and many details of her own family life are
reflected in her earlier novels. Thus we find her and her brother, as
Maggie and Tom Tulliver, in _The Mill on the Floss;_ her aunt, as Dinah
Morris, and her mother, as Mrs. Poyser, in _Adam Bede_. We have a
suggestion of her father in the hero of the latter novel, but the picture
is more fully drawn as Caleb Garth, in _Middlemarch_. For a few years she
studied at two private schools for young ladies, at Nuneaton and Coventry;
but the death of her mother called her, at seventeen years of age, to take
entire charge of the household. Thereafter her education was gained wholly
by miscellaneous reading. We have a suggestion of her method in one of her
early letters, in which she says: "My mind presents an assemblage of
disjointed specimens of history, ancient and modern; scraps of poetry
picked up from Shakespeare, Cowper, Wordsworth, and Milton; newspaper
topics, morsels of Addison and Bacon, Latin verbs, geometry, entomology,
and chemistry; reviews and metaphysics, all arrested and petrified and
smothered by the fast-thickening everyday accession of actual events,
relative anxieties, and household cares and vexations."

When Mary was twenty-one years old the family again moved, this time to
Foleshill Road, near Coventry. Here she became acquainted with the family
of Charles Bray, a prosperous ribbon manufacturer, whose house was a
gathering place for the freethinkers of the neighborhood. The effect of
this liberal atmosphere upon Miss Evans, brought up in a narrow way, with
no knowledge of the world, was to unsettle many of her youthful
convictions. From a narrow, intense dogmatism, she went to the other
extreme of radicalism; then (about 1860) she lost all sympathy with the
freethinkers, and, being instinctively religious, seemed to be groping
after a definite faith while following the ideal of duty. This spiritual
struggle, which suggests that of Carlyle, is undoubtedly the cause of that
gloom and depression which hang, like an English fog, over much of her
work; though her biographer, Cross, tells us that she was not by any means
a sad or gloomy woman.

In 1849 Miss Evans's father died, and the Brays took her abroad for a tour
of the continent. On her return to England she wrote several liberal
articles for the _Westminster Review_, and presently was made assistant
editor of that magazine. Her residence in London at this time marks a
turning point in her career and the real beginning of her literary life.
She made strong friendships with Spencer, Mill, and other scientists of the
day, and through Spencer met George Henry Lewes, a miscellaneous writer,
whom she afterwards married.

Under his sympathetic influence she began to write fiction for the
magazines, her first story being "Amos Barton" (1857), which was later
included in the _Scenes of Clerical Life_ (1858). Her first long novel,
_Adam Bede_, appeared early in 1859 and met with such popular favor that to
the end of her life she despaired of ever again repeating her triumph. But
the unexpected success proved to be an inspiration, and she completed _The
Mill on the Floss_ and began _Silas Marner_ during the following year. Not
until the great success of these works led to an insistent demand to know
the author did the English public learn that it was a woman, and not an
English clergyman, as they supposed, who had suddenly jumped to the front
rank of living writers.

Up to this point George Eliot had confined herself to English country life,
but now she suddenly abandoned the scenes and the people with whom she was
most familiar in order to write an historical novel. It was in 1860, while
traveling in Italy, that she formed "the great project" of _Romola_,--a
mingling of fiction and moral philosophy, against the background of the
mighty Renaissance movement. In this she was writing of things of which she
had no personal knowledge, and the book cost her many months of hard and
depressing labor. She said herself that she was a young woman when she
began the work, and an old woman when she finished it. _Romola_ (1862--
1863) was not successful with the public, and the same may be said of
_Felix Holt the Radical_ (1866) and _The Spanish Gypsy_ (1868). The
last-named work was the result of the author's ambition to write a dramatic
poem which should duplicate the lesson of _Romola_; and for the purpose of
gathering material she visited Spain, which she had decided upon as the
scene of her poetical effort. With the publication of _Middlemarch_
(1871-1872) George Eliot came back again into popular favor, though this
work is less spontaneous, and more labored and pedantic, than her earlier
novels. The fault of too much analysis and moralizing was even more
conspicuous in _Daniei Deronda_ (1876), which she regarded as her greatest
book. Her life during all this time was singularly uneventful, and the
chief milestones along the road mark the publication of her successive
novels.

During all the years of her literary success her husband Lewes had been a
most sympathetic friend and critic, and when he died, in 1878, the loss
seemed to be more than she could bear. Her letters of this period are
touching in their loneliness and their craving for sympathy. Later she
astonished everybody by marrying John Walter Cross, much younger than
herself, who is known as her biographer. "Deep down below there is a river
of sadness, but ... I am able to enjoy my newly re-opened life," writes
this woman of sixty, who, ever since she was the girl whom we know as
Maggie Tulliver, must always have some one to love and to depend upon. Her
new interest in life lasted but a few months, for she died in December of
the same year (1880). One of the best indications of her strength and her
limitations is her portrait, with its strong masculine features, suggesting
both by resemblance and by contrast that wonderful portrait of Savonarola
which hangs over his old desk in the monastery at Florence.

WORKS OF GEORGE ELIOT. These are conveniently divided into three groups,
corresponding to the three periods of her life. The first group includes
all her early essays and miscellaneous work, from her translation of
Strauss's _Leben Jesu_, in 1846, to her union with Lewes in 1854. The
second group includes _Scenes of Clerical Life, Adam Bede, Mill on the
Floss_, and _Silas Marner_, all published between 1858 and 1861. These four
novels of the middle period are founded on the author's own life and
experience; their scenes are laid in the country, and their characters are
taken from the stolid people of the Midlands, with whom George Eliot had
been familiar since childhood. They are probably the author's most enduring
works. They have a naturalness, a spontaneity, at times a flash of real
humor, which are lacking in her later novels; and they show a rapid
development of literary power which reaches a climax in _Silas Marner_.

The novel of Italian life, _Romola_ (1862-1863), marks a transition to the
third group, which includes three more novels,--_Felix Holt_ (1866),
_Middlemarch_ (1871-1872), _Daniel Deronda_ (1876), the ambitious dramatic
poem _The Spanish Gypsy_ (1868), and a collection of miscellaneous essays
called _The Impressions of Theophrastus Such_ (1879). The general
impression, of these works is not so favorable as that produced by the
novels of the middle period. They are more labored and less interesting;
they contain much deep reflection and analysis of character, but less
observation, less delight in picturing country life as it is, and very
little of what we call inspiration. We must add, however, that this does
not express a unanimous literary judgment, for critics are not wanting who
assert that _Daniel Deronda_ is the highest expression of the author's
genius.

The general character of all these novels may be described, in the author's
own term, as psychologic realism. This means that George Eliot sought to do
in her novels what Browning attempted in his poetry; that is, to represent
the inner struggle of a soul, and to reveal the motives, impulses, and
hereditary influences which govern human action. Browning generally stops
when he tells his story, and either lets you draw your own conclusion or
else gives you his in a few striking lines. But George Eliot is not content
until she has minutely explained the motives of her characters and the
moral lesson to be learned from them. Moreover, it is the development of a
soul, the slow growth or decline of moral power, which chiefly interests
her. Her heroes and heroines differ radically from those of Dickens and
Thackeray in this respect,--that when we meet the men and women of the
latter novelists, their characters are already formed, and we are
reasonably sure what they will do under given circumstances. In George
Eliot's novels the characters develop gradually as we come to know them.
They go from weakness to strength, or from strength to weakness, according
to the works that they do and the thoughts that they cherish. In _Romola_,
for instance, Tito, as we first meet him, may be either good or bad, and we
know not whether he will finally turn to the right hand or to the left. As
time passes, we see him degenerate steadily because he follows his selfish
impulses, while Romola, whose character is at first only faintly indicated,
grows into beauty and strength with every act of self-renunciation.

In these two characters, Tito and Romola, we have an epitome of our
author's moral teaching. The principle of law was in the air during the
Victorian era, and we have already noted how deeply Tennyson was influenced
by it. With George Eliot law is like fate; it overwhelms personal freedom
and inclination. Moral law was to her as inevitable, as automatic, as
gravitation. Tito's degeneration, and the sad failure of Dorothea and
Lydgate in _Middlemarch_, may be explained as simply as the fall of an
apple, or as a bruised knee when a man loses his balance. A certain act
produces a definite moral effect on the individual; and character is the
added sum of all, the acts of a man's; life,--just as the weight of a body
is the sum of the weights of many different atoms which constitute it. The
matter of rewards and punishments, therefore, needs no final judge or
judgment, since these things take care of themselves automatically in a
world of inviolable moral law.

Perhaps one thing more should be added to the general characteristics of
George Eliot's novels,--they are all rather depressing. The gladsomeness of
life, the sunshine of smiles and laughter, is denied her. It is said that
once, when her husband remarked that her novels were all essentially sad,
she wept, and answered that she must describe life as she had found it.

WHAT TO READ. George Eliot's first stories are in some respects her best,
though her literary power increases during her second period, culminating
in _Silas Marner_, and her psychological analysis is more evident in
_Daniel Deronda_. On the whole, it is an excellent way to begin with the
freshness and inspiration of the _Scenes of Clerical Life_ and read her
books in the order in which they were written. In the first group of novels
_Adam Bede_ is the most natural, and probably interests more readers than
all the others combined. _The Mill on the Floss_ has a larger personal
interest, because it reflects much of George Eliot's history and the scenes
and the friends of her early life. The lack of proportion in this story,
which gives rather too much space to the girl-and-boy experiences, is
naturally explained by the tendency in every man and woman to linger over
early memories.

_Silas Marner_ is artistically the most perfect of George Eliot's novels,
and we venture to analyze it as typical of her ideals and methods. We note
first the style, which is heavy and a little self-conscious, lacking the
vigor and picturesqueness of Dickens, and the grace and naturalness of
Thackeray. The characters are the common people of the Midlands, the hero
being a linen weaver, a lonely outcast who hoards and gloats over his
hard-earned money, is robbed, thrown into utter despair, and brought back
to life and happiness by the coming of an abandoned child to his fire. In
the development of her story the author shows herself, first, a realist, by
the naturalness of her characters and the minute accuracy with which she
reproduces their ways and even the accents of their speech; second, a
psychologist, by the continual analysis and explanation of motives; third,
a moralist, by showing in each individual the action and reaction of
universal moral forces, and especially by making every evil act bring
inevitable punishment to the man who does it. Tragedy, therefore, plays a
large part in the story; for, according to George Eliot, tragedy and
suffering walk close behind us, or lurk at every turn in the road of life.
Like all her novels, _Silas Marner_ is depressing. We turn away from even
the wedding of Eppie--which is just as it should be--with a sense of
sadness and incompleteness. Finally, as we close the book, we are conscious
of a powerful and enduring impression of reality. Silas, the poor weaver;
Godfrey Cass, the well-meaning, selfish man; Mr. Macey, the garrulous, and
observant parish clerk; Dolly Winthrop, the kind-hearted countrywoman who
cannot understand the mysteries of religion and so interprets God in terms
of human love,--these are real people, whom having once met we can never
forget.

_Romola_ has the same general moral theme as the English novels; but the
scenes are entirely different, and opinion is divided as to the comparative
merit of the work. It is a study, a very profound study of moral
development in one character and of moral degeneracy in another. Its
characters and its scenes are both Italian, and the action takes place
during a critical period of the Renaissance movement, when Savonarola was
at the height of his power in Florence. Here is a magnificent theme and a
superb background for a great novel, and George Eliot read and studied till
she felt sure that she understood the place, the time, and the people of
her story. _Romola_ is therefore interesting reading, in many respects the
most interesting of her works. It has been called one of our greatest
historical novels; but as such it has one grievous fault. It is not quite
true to the people or even to the locality which it endeavors to represent.
One who reads it here, in a new and different land, thinks only of the
story and of the novelist's power; but one who reads it on the spot which
it describes, and amidst the life which it pictures, is continually haunted
by the suggestion that George Eliot understood neither Italy nor the
Italians. It is this lack of harmony with Italian life itself which caused
Morris and Rossetti and even Browning, with all his admiration for the
author, to lay aside the book, unable to read it with pleasure or profit.
In a word, _Romola_ is a great moral study and a very interesting book; but
the characters are not Italian, and the novel as a whole lacks the strong
reality which marks George Eliot's English studies.


MINOR NOVELISTS OF THE VICTORIAN AGE

In the three great novelists just considered we have an epitome of the
fiction of the age, Dickens using the novel to solve social problems,
Thackeray to paint the life of society as he saw it, and George Eliot to
teach the fundamental principles of morality. The influence of these three
writers is reflected in all the minor novelists of the Victorian Age. Thus,
Dickens is reflected in Charles Reade, Thackeray in Anthony Trollope and
the Brontë sisters, and George Eliot's psychology finds artistic expression
in George Meredith. To these social and moral and realistic studies we
should add the element of romance, from which few of our modern novelist's
can long escape. The nineteenth century, which began with the romanticism
of Walter Scott, returns to its first love, like a man glad to be home, in
its delight over Blackmore's _Lorna Doone_ and the romances of Robert Louis
Stevenson.

CHARLES READE. In his fondness for stage effects, for picturing the
romantic side of common life, and for using the novel as the instrument of
social reform, there is a strong suggestion of Dickens in the work of
Charles Reade (1814-1884). Thus his _Peg Woffington_ is a study of stage
life from behind the scenes; _A Terrible Temptation_ is a study of social
reforms and reformers; and _Put yourself in his Place_ is the picture of a
workingman who struggles against the injustice of the trades unions. His
masterpiece, _The Cloister and the Hearth_ (1861), one of our best
historical novels, is a somewhat laborious study of student and vagabond
life in Europe in the days of the German Renaissance. It has small
resemblance to George Eliot's _Romola_, whose scene is laid in Italy during
the same period; but the two works may well be read in succession, as the
efforts of two very different novelists of the same period to restore the
life of an age long past.

ANTHONY TROLLOPE. In his realism, and especially in his conception of the
novel as the entertainment of an idle hour, Trollope (1815-1882) is a
reflection of Thackeray. It would be hard to find a better duplicate of
Becky Sharp, the heroine of _Vanity Fair_, for instance, than is found in
Lizzie Eustace, the heroine of _The Eustace Diamonds_. Trollope was the
most industrious and systematic of modern novelists, writing a definite
amount each day, and the wide range of his characters suggests the _Human
Comedy_ of Balzac. His masterpiece is _Barchester Towers_ (1857). This is a
study of life in a cathedral town, and is remarkable for its minute
pictures of bishops and clergymen, with their families and dependents. It
would be well to read this novel in connection with _The Warden_ (1855),
_The Last Chronicle of Barset_ (1867), and other novels of the same series,
since the scenes and characters are the same in all these books, and they
are undoubtedly the best expression of the author's genius. Hawthorne says
of his novels: "They precisely suit my taste,--solid and substantial, and
... just as real as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the earth
and put it under a glass case, with all the inhabitants going about their
daily business and not suspecting that they were being made a show of."

CHARLOTTE BRONTë. We have another suggestion of Thackeray in the work of
Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855). She aimed to make her novels a realistic
picture of society, but she added to Thackeray's realism the element of
passionate and somewhat unbalanced romanticism. The latter element was
partly the expression of Miss Brontë's own nature, and partly the result of
her lonely and grief-stricken life, which was darkened by a succession of
family tragedies. It will help us to understand her work if we remember
that both Charlotte Brontë and her sister Emily[242] turned to literature
because they found their work as governess and teacher unendurable, and
sought to relieve the loneliness and sadness of their own lot by creating a
new world of the imagination. In this new world, however, the sadness of
the old remains, and all the Brontë novels have behind them an aching
heart. Charlotte Brontë's best known work is _Jane Eyre_ (1847), which,
with all its faults, is a powerful and fascinating study of elemental love
and hate, reminding us vaguely of one of Marlowe's tragedies. This work won
instant favor with the public, and the author was placed in the front rank
of living novelists. Aside from its value as a novel, it is interesting, in
many of its early passages, as the reflection of the author's own life and
experience. _Shirley_ (1849) and _Villette_ (1853) make up the trio of
novels by which this gifted woman is generally remembered.

BULWER LYTTON. Edward Bulwer Lytton (1803-1873) was an extremely versatile
writer, who tried almost every kind of novel known to the nineteenth
century. In his early life he wrote poems and dramas, under the influence
of Byron; but his first notable work, _Pelham_ (1828), one of the best of
his novels, was a kind of burlesque on the Byronic type of gentleman. As a
study of contemporary manners in high society, _Pelham_ has a suggestion of
Thackeray, and the resemblance is more noticeable in other novels of the
same type, such as _Ernest Maltravers_ (1837), _The Caxtons_ (1848-1849),
_My Novel_ (1853), and _Kenelm Chillingly_ (1873). We have a suggestion of
Dickens in at least two of Lytton's novels, _Paul Clifford_ and _Eugene
Aram_, the heroes of which are criminals, pictured as the victims rather
than as the oppressors of society. Lytton essayed also, with considerable
popular success, the romantic novel in _The Pilgrims of the Rhine_ and
_Zanoni_, and tried the ghost story in _The Haunted and the Haunters_. His
fame at the present day rests largely upon his historical novels, in
imitation of Walter Scott, _The Last Days of Pompeii_ (1834), _Riettza_
(1835), and _Harold_ (1848), the last being his most ambitious attempt to
make the novel the supplement of history. In all his novels Lytton is
inclined to sentimentalism and sensationalism, and his works, though
generally interesting, seem hardly worthy of a high place in the history of
fiction.

KINGSLEY. Entirely different in spirit are the novels of the scholarly
clergyman, Charles Kingsley (1819-1875). His works naturally divide
themselves into three classes. In the first are his social studies and
problem novels, such as _Alton Locke_ (1850), having for its hero a London
tailor and poet, and _Yeast_ (1848), which deals with the problem of the
agricultural laborer. In the second class are his historical novels,
_Hereward the Wake, Hypatia_, and _Westward Ho! Hypatia_ is a dramatic
story of Christianity in contact with paganism, having its scene laid in
Alexandria at the beginning of the fifth century. _Westward Ho_! (1855),
his best known work, is a stirring tale of English conquest by land and sea
in the days of Elizabeth. In the third class are his various miscellaneous
works, not the least of which is _Water-Babies_, a fascinating story of a
chimney sweep, which mothers read to their children at bedtime,--to the
great delight of the round-eyed little listeners under the counterpane.

MRS. GASKELL. Mrs. Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865) began, like Kingsley, with
the idea of making the novel the instrument of social reform. As the wife
of a clergyman in Manchester, she had come in close contact with the
struggles and ideals of the industrial poor of a great city, and she
reflected her sympathy as well as her observation in _Mary Barton_ (1848)
and in _North and South_ (1855). Between these two problem novels she
published her masterpiece, _Cranford_, in 1853. The original of this
country village, which is given over to spinsters, is undoubtedly
Knutsford, in Cheshire, where Mrs. Gaskell had spent her childhood. The
sympathy, the keen observation, and the gentle humor with which the small
affairs of a country village are described make _Cranford_ one of the most
delightful stories in the English language. We are indebted to Mrs. Gaskell
also for the _Life of Charlotte Brontë_, which is one of our best
biographies.

BLACKMORE. Richard Doddridge Blackrhore (1825--1900) was a prolific writer,
but he owes his fame almost entirely to one splendid novel, _Lorna Doone_,
which was published in 1869. The scene of this fascinating romance is laid
in Exmoor in the seventeenth century. The story abounds in romantic scenes
and incidents; its descriptions of natural scenery are unsurpassed; the
rhythmic language is at times almost equal to poetry; and the whole tone of
the book is wholesome and refreshing. Altogether it would be hard to find a
more delightful romance in any language, and it well deserves the place it
has won as one of the classics of our literature. Other works of Blackmore
which will repay the reader are _Clara Vaughan_ (1864), his first novel,
_The Maid of Sker_ (1872), _Springhaven_ (1887), _Perlycross_ (1894), and
_Tales from the Telling House_ (1896); but none of these, though he counted
them his best work, has met with the same favor as _Lorna Doone_.

MEREDITH. So much does George Meredith (1828-1909) belong to our own day
that it is difficult to think of him as one of the Victorian novelists. His
first notable work, _The Ordeal of Richard Feverel_, was published in 1859,
the same year as George Eliot's _Adam Bede;_ but it was not till the
publication of _Diana of the Crossways_ in 1885, that his power as a
novelist was widely recognized. He resembles Browning not only in his
condensed style, packed with thought, but also in this respect,--that he
labored for years in obscurity, and after much of his best work was
published and apparently forgotten he slowly won the leading place in
English fiction. We are still too near him to speak of the permanence of
his work, but a casual reading of any of his novels suggests a comparison
and a contrast with George Eliot. Like her, he is a realist and a
psychologist; but while George Eliot uses tragedy to teach a moral lesson,
Meredith depends more upon comedy, making vice not terrible but ridiculous.
For the hero or heroine of her novel George Eliot invariably takes an
individual, and shows in each one the play of universal moral forces.
Meredith constructs a type-man as a hero, and makes this type express his
purpose and meaning. So his characters seldom speak naturally, as George
Eliot's do; they are more like Browning's characters in packing a whole
paragraph into a single sentence or an exclamation. On account of his
enigmatic style and his psychology, Meredith will never be popular; but by
thoughtful men and women he will probably be ranked among our greatest
writers of fiction. The simplest and easiest of his novels for a beginner
is _The Adventures of Henry Richmond_ (1871). Among the best of his works,
besides the two mentioned above, are _Beauchamp's Career_ (1876) and _The
Egoist_ (1879). The latter is, in our personal judgment, one of the
strongest and most convincing novels of the Victorian Age.

HARDY. Thomas Hardy (1840-) seems, like Meredith, to belong to the present
rather than to a past age, and an interesting comparison may be drawn
between these two novelists. In style, Meredith is obscure and difficult,
while Hardy is direct and simple, aiming at realism in all things. Meredith
makes man the most important phenomenon in the universe; and the struggles
of men are brightened by the hope of victory. Hardy makes man an
insignificant part of the world, struggling against powers greater than
himself,--sometimes against systems which he cannot reach or influence,
sometimes against a kind of grim world-spirit who delights in making human
affairs go wrong. He is, therefore, hardly a realist, but rather a man
blinded by pessimism; and his novels, though generally powerful and
sometimes fascinating, are not pleasant or wholesome reading. From the
reader's view point some of his earlier works, like the idyllic love story
_Under the Greenwood Tree_ (1872) and _A Pair of Blue Eyes_ (1873), are the
most interesting. Hardy became noted, however, when he published _Far from
the Madding Crowd_, a book which, when it appeared anonymously in the
_Cornhill Magazine_ (1874), was generally attributed to George Eliot, for
the simple reason that no other novelist was supposed to be capable of
writing it. _The Return of the Native_ (1878) and _The Woodlanders_ are
generally regarded as Hardy's masterpieces; but two novels of our own day,
_Tess of the D'Ubervilles_ (1891) and _Jude the Obscure_ (1895), are better
expressions of Hardy's literary art and of his gloomy philosophy.

STEVENSON. In pleasing contrast with Hardy is Robert Louis Stevenson
(1850-1894), a brave, cheery, wholesome spirit, who has made us all braver
and cheerier by what he has written. Aside from their intrinsic value,
Stevenson's novels are interesting in this respect,--that they mark a
return to the pure romanticism of Walter Scott. The novel of the nineteenth
century had, as we have shown, a very definite purpose. It aimed not only
to represent life but to correct it, and to offer a solution to pressing
moral and social problems. At the end of the century Hardy's gloom in the
face of modern social conditions became oppressive, and Stevenson broke
away from it into that land of delightful romance in which youth finds an
answer to all its questions. Problems differ, but youth is ever the same,
and therefore Stevenson will probably be regarded by future generations as
one of our most enduring writers. To his life, with its "heroically happy"
struggle, first against poverty, then against physical illness, it is
impossible to do justice in a short article. Even a longer biography is
inadequate, for Stevenson's spirit, not the incidents of his life, is the
important thing; and the spirit has no biographer. Though he had written
much better work earlier, he first gained fame by his _Treasure Island_
(1883), an absorbing story of pirates and of a hunt for buried gold. _Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_ (1886) is a profound ethical parable, in which,
however, Stevenson leaves the psychology and the minute analysis of
character to his readers, and makes the story the chief thing in his novel.
_Kidnapped_ (1886), _The Master of Ballantrae_ (1889), and _David Balfour_
(1893) are novels of adventure, giving us vivid pictures of Scotch life.
Two romances left unfinished by his early death in Samoa are _The Weir of
Hermiston_ and _St. Ives_. The latter was finished by Quiller-Couch in
1897; the former is happily just as Stevenson left it, and though
unfinished is generally regarded as his masterpiece. In addition to these
novels, Stevenson wrote a large number of essays, the best of which are
collected in _Virginibus Puerisque, Familiar Studies of Men and Books_, and
_Memories and Portraits_. Delightful sketches of his travels are found in
_An Inland Voyage_ (1878), _Travels with a Donkey_ (1879), _Across the
Plains_ (1892), and _The Amateur Emigrant_ (1894). _Underwoods_ (1887) is
an exquisite little volume of poetry, and _A Child's Garden of Verses_ is
one of the books that mothers will always keep to read to their children.

In all his books Stevenson gives the impression of a man at play rather
than at work, and the reader soon shares in the happy spirit of the author.
Because of his beautiful personality, and because of the love and
admiration he awakened for himself in multitudes of readers, we are
naturally inclined to exaggerate his importance as a writer. However that
may be, a study of his works shows him to be a consummate literary artist.
His style is always simple, often perfect, and both in his manner and in
his matter he exercises a profound influence, on the writers of the present
generation.


III. ESSAYISTS OF THE VICTORIAN AGE

THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY (1800-1859)

Macaulay is one of the most typical figures of the nineteenth century.
Though not a great writer, if we compare him with Browning or Thackeray, he
was more closely associated than any of his literary contemporaries with
the social and political struggles of the age. While Carlyle was
proclaiming the gospel of labor, and Dickens writing novels to better the
condition of the poor, Macaulay went vigorously to work on what he thought
to be the most important task of the hour, and by his brilliant speeches
did perhaps more than any other single man to force the passage of the
famous Reform Bill. Like many of the Elizabethans, he was a practical man
of affairs rather than a literary man, and though we miss in his writings
the imagination and the spiritual insight which stamp the literary genius,
we have the impression always of a keen, practical, honest mind, which
looks at present problems in the light of past experience. Moreover, the
man himself, with his marvelous mind, his happy spirit, and his absolute
integrity of character, is an inspiration to better living.

LIFE. Macaulay was born at Rothley Temple, Leicestershire, in 1800. His
father, of Scotch descent, was at one time governor of the Sierra Leone
colony for liberated negroes, and devoted a large part of his life to the
abolition of the slave trade. His mother, of Quaker parentage, was a
brilliant, sensitive woman, whose character is reflected in that of her
son. The influence of these two, and the son's loyal devotion to his
family, can best be read in Trevelyan's interesting biography.

As a child, Macaulay is strongly suggestive of Coleridge. At three years of
age he began to read eagerly; at five he "talked like a book"; at ten he
had written a compendium of universal history, besides various hymns, verse
romances, arguments for Christianity, and one ambitious epic poem. The
habit of rapid reading, begun in childhood, continued throughout his life,
and the number and vari ety of books which he read is almost incredible.
His memory was phenomenal. He could repeat long poems and essays after a
single reading; he could quote not only passages but the greater part of
many books, including _Pilgrim's Progress, Paradise Lost_, and various
novels like _Clarissa_. Once, to test his memory, he recited two newspaper
poems which he had read in a coffeehouse forty years before, and which he
had never thought of in the interval.

At twelve years of age this remarkable boy was sent to a private school at
Little Shelford, and at eighteen he eqgered Trinity College, Cambridge.
Here he made a reputation as a classical scholar and a brilliant talker,
but made a failure of his mathematics. In a letter to his mother he wrote:
"Oh for words to express my abomination of that science.... Discipline of
the mind! Say rather starvation, confinement, torture, annihilation!" We
quote this as a commentary on Macaulay's later writings, which are
frequently lacking in the exactness and the logical sequence of the science
which he detested.

After his college course Macaulay studied law, was admitted to the bar,
devoted himself largely to politics, entered Parliament in 1830, and almost
immediately won a reputation as the best debater and the most eloquent
speaker, of the Liberal or Whig party. Gladstone says of him: "Whenever he
arose to speak it was a summons like a trumpet call to fill the benches."
At the time of his election he was poor, and the loss of his father's
property threw upon him the support of his brothers and sisters; but he
took up the burden with cheerful courage, and by his own efforts soon
placed himself and his family in comfort. His political progress was rapid,
and was due not to favoritism or intrigue, but to his ability, his hard
work, and his sterling character. He was several times elected to
Parliament, was legal adviser to the Supreme Council of India, was a member
of the cabinet, and declined many offices for which other men labor a
lifetime. In 1857 his great ability and services to his country were
recognized by his being raised to the peerage with the title of Baron
Macaulay of Rothley.

Macaulay's literary work began in college with the contribution of various
ballads and essays to the magazines. In his later life practical affairs
claimed the greater part of his time, and his brilliant essays were written
in the early morning or late at night. His famous _Essay on Milton_
appeared in the _Edinburgh Review_ in 1825. It created a sensation, and
Macaulay, having gained the ear of the public, never once lost it during
the twenty years in which he was a contributor to the magazines. His _Lays
of Ancient Rome_ appeared in 1842, and in the following year three volumes
of his collected _Essays_. In 1847 he lost his seat in Parliament,
temporarily, through his zealous efforts in behalf of religious toleration;
and the loss was most fortunate, since it gave him opportunity to begin his
_History of England_,--a monumental work which he had been planning for
many years. The first two volumes appeared in 1848, and their success can
be compared only to that of the most popular novels. The third and fourth
volumes of the _History_ (1855) were even more successful, and Macaulay was
hard at work on the remaining volumes when he died, quite suddenly, in
1859. He was buried, near Addison, in the Poets' Corner of Westminster
Abbey. A paragraph from one of his letters, written at the height of his
fame and influence, may give us an insight into his life and work:

I can truly say that I have not, for many years, been so happy as I am at
present.... I am free. I am independent. I am in Parliament, as honorably
seated as man can be. My family is comfortably off. I have leisure for
literature, yet I am not reduced to the necessity of writing for money. If
I had to choose a lot from all that there are in human life, I am not sure
that I should prefer any to that which has fallen to me. I am sincerely and
thoroughly contented.

WORKS OF MACAULAY. Macaulay is famous in literature for his essays, for his
martial ballads, and for his _History of England_. His first important
work, the _Essay on Milton_ (1825), is worthy of study not only for itself,
as a critical estimate of the Puritan poet, but as a key to all Macaulay's
writings. Here, first of all, is an interesting work, which, however much
we differ from the author's opinion, holds our attention and generally
makes us regret that the end comes so soon. The second thing to note is the
historical flavor of the essay. We study not only Milton, but also the
times in which he lived, and the great movements of which he was a part.
History and literature properly belong together, and Macaulay was one of
the first writers to explain the historical conditions which partly account
for a writer's work and influence. The third thing to note is Macaulay's
enthusiasm for his subject,--an enthusiasm which is often partisan, but
which we gladly share for the moment as we follow the breathless narrative.
Macaulay generally makes a hero of his man, shows him battling against
odds, and the heroic side of our own nature awakens and responds to the
author's plea. The fourth, and perhaps most characteristic thing in the
essay is the style, which is remarkably clear, forceful, and convincing.
Jeffrey, the editor of the _Edinburgh Review_, wrote enthusiastically when
he received the manuscript, "The more I think, the less I can conceive
where you picked up that style." We still share in the editor's wonder; but
the more we think, the less we conceive that such a style could be picked
up. It was partly the result of a well-stored mind, partly of unconscious
imitation of other writers, and partly of that natural talent for clear
speaking and writing which is manifest in all Macaulay's work.

In the remaining essays we find the same general qualities which
characterize Macaulay's first attempt. They cover a wide range of subjects,
but they may be divided into two general classes, the literary or critical,
and the historical. Of the literary essays the best are those on Milton,
Addison, Goldsmith, Byron, Dryden, Leigh Hunt, Bunyan, Bacon, and Johnson.
Among the best known of the historical essays are those on Lord Clive,
Chatham, Warren Hastings, Hallam's Constitutional History, Von Ranke's
History of the Papacy, Frederick the Great, Horace Walpole, William Pitt,
Sir William Temple, Machiavelli, and Mirabeau. Most of these were produced
in the vigor of young manhood, between 1825 and 1845, while the writer was
busy with practical affairs of state. They are often one-sided and
inaccurate, but always interesting, and from them a large number of busy
people have derived their first knowledge of history and literature.

The best of Macaulay's poetical work is found in the _Lays of Ancient Rome_
(1842), a collection of ballads in the style of Scott, which sing of the
old heroic days of the Rome Roman republic. The ballad does not require
much thought or emotion. It demands clearness, vigor, enthusiasm, action;
and it suited Macaulay's genius perfectly. He was, however, much more
careful than other ballad writers in making his narrative true to
tradition. The stirring martial spirit of these ballads, their fine
workmanship, and their appeal to courage and patriotism made them instantly
popular. Even to-day, after more than fifty years, such ballads as those on
Virginius and Horatius at the Bridge are favorite pieces in many school
readers.

The _History of England_, Macaulay's masterpiece, is still one of the most
popular historical works in the English language. Originally it was
intended to cover the period from the accession of James II, in 1685, to
the death of George IV, in 1830. Only five volumes of the work were
finished, and so thoroughly did Macaulay go into details that these five
volumes cover only sixteen years. It has been estimated that to complete
the work on the same scale would require some fifty volumes and the labor
of one man for over a century.

In his historical method Macaulay suggests Gibbon. His own knowledge of
history was very great, but before writing he read numberless pages,
consulted original documents, and visited the scenes which he intended to
describe. Thackeray's remark, that "Macaulay reads twenty books to write a
sentence and travels one hundred miles to make a line of description," is,
in view of his industry, a well-warranted exaggeration.

As in his literary essays, he is fond of making heroes, and he throws
himself so heartily into the spirit of the scene he is describing that his
word pictures almost startle us by their vivid reality. The story of
Monmouth's rebellion, for instance, or the trial of the seven bishops, is
as fascinating as the best chapters of Scott's historical novels.

While Macaulay's search for original sources of information suggests the
scientific historian, his use of his material is much more like that of a
novelist or playwright. In his essay on Machiavelli he writes: "The best
portraits are perhaps those in which there is a slight mixture of
caricature, and we are not certain that the best histories are not those in
which a little of the exaggeration of fictitious narrative is judiciously
employed. Something is lost in accuracy, but much is gained in
effect."[243] Whether this estimate of historical writing be true or false,
Macaulay employed it in his own work and made his narrative as absorbing as
a novel. To all his characters he gives the reality of flesh and blood, and
in his own words he "shows us over their houses and seats us at their
tables." All that is excellent, but it has its disadvantages. In his
admiration for heroism, Macaulay makes some of his characters too good and
others too bad. In his zeal for details he misses the importance of great
movements, and of great leaders who are accustomed to ignore details; and
in his joy of describing events he often loses sight of underlying causes.
In a word, he is without historical insight, and his work, though
fascinating, is seldom placed among the reliable histories of England.

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS. To the reader who studies Macaulay's brilliant
essays and a few chosen chapters of his _History_, three things soon become
manifest. First, Macaulay's art is that of a public speaker rather than
that of a literary man. He has a wonderful command of language, and he
makes his meaning clear by striking phrases, vigorous antitheses,
anecdotes, and illustrations. His style is so clear that "he who runs may
read," and from beginning to end he never loses the attention of his
readers. Second, Macaulay's good spirits and enthusiasm are contagious. As
he said himself, he wrote "out of a full head," chiefly for his own
pleasure or recreation; and one who writes joyously generally awakens a
sense of pleasure in his readers. Third, Macaulay has "the defect of his
qualities." He reads and remembers so much that he has no time to think or
to form settled opinions. As Gladstone said, Macaulay is "always conversing
or recollecting or reading or composing, but reflecting never." So he wrote
his brilliant _Essay on Milton_, which took all England by storm, and said
of it afterward that it contained "scarcely a paragraph which his mature
judgment approved." Whether he speaks or writes, he has always before him
an eager audience, and he feels within him the born orator's power to hold
and fascinate. So he gives loose rein to his enthusiasm, quotes from a
hundred books, and in his delight at entertaining us forgets that the first
quality of a critical or historical work is to be accurate, and the second
to be interesting.


THOMAS CARLYLE (1795-1881)

In marked contrast with Macaulay, the brilliant and cheerful essayist, is
Thomas Carlyle, the prophet and censor of the nineteenth century. Macaulay
is the practical man of affairs, helping and rejoicing in the progress of
his beloved England. Carlyle lives apart from all practical interests,
looks with distrust on the progress of his age, and tells men that truth,
justice, and immortality are the only worthy objects of human endeavor.
Macaulay is delighted with material comforts; he is most at home in
brilliant and fashionable company; and he writes, even when ill and
suffering, with unfailing hopefulness and good nature. Carlyle is like a
Hebrew prophet just in from the desert, and the burden of his message is,
"Woe to them that are at ease in Zion!" Both men are, in different ways,
typical of the century, and somewhere between the two extremes--the
practical, helpful activity of Macaulay and the spiritual agony and
conflict of Carlyle--we shall find the measure of an age which has left the
deepest impress upon our own.

LIFE OF CARLYLE. Carlyle was born at Ecclefechan, Dumfriesshire, in 1795, a
few months before Burns's death, and before Scott had published his first
work. Like Burns, he came of peasant stock,--strong, simple, God-fearing
folk, whose influence in Carlyle's later life is beyond calculation. Of his
mother he says, "She was too mild and peaceful for the planet she lived
in"; and of his father, a stone mason, he writes, "Could I write my books
as he built his houses, walk my way so manfully through this shadow world,
and leave it with so little blame, it were more than all my hopes."

Of Carlyle's early school life we have some interesting glimpses in _Sartor
Resartus_. At nine years he entered the Annan grammar school, where he was
bullied by the older boys, who nicknamed him Tom the Tearful. For the
teachers of those days he has only ridicule, calling them "hide-bound
pedants," and he calls the school by the suggestive German name of
_Hinterschlag Gymnasium_. At the wish of his parents, who intended Carlyle
for the ministry, he endured this hateful school life till 1809, when he
entered Edinburgh University. There he spent five miserable years, of which
his own record is: "I was without friends, experience, or connection in the
sphere of human business, was of sly humor, proud enough and to spare, and
had begun my long curriculum of dyspepsia." This nagging illness was the
cause of much of that irritability of temper which frequently led him to
scold the public, and for which he has been harshly handled by unfriendly
critics.

The period following his university course was one of storm and stress for
Carlyle. Much to the grief of the father whom he loved, he had given up the
idea of entering the ministry. Wherever he turned, doubts like a thick fog
surrounded him,--doubts of God, of his fellow-men, of human progress, of
himself. He was poor, and to earn an honest living was his first problem.
He tried successively teaching school, tutoring, the study of law, and
writing miscellaneous articles for the _Edinburgh Encyclopedia_. All the
while he was fighting his doubts, living, as he says, "in a continual,
indefinite, pining fear." After six or seven years of mental agony, which
has at times a suggestion of Bunyan's spiritual struggle, the crisis came
in 1821, when Carlyle suddenly shook off his doubts and found himself. "All
at once," he says in _Sartor_, "there arose a thought in me, and I asked
myself: 'What _Art_ thou afraid of? Wherefore like a coward dost thou
forever pip and whimper, and go cowering and trembling? Despicable biped!
What is the sum total of the worst that lies before thee? Death? Well,
Death; and say the pangs of Tophet too, and all that the Devil and Man may,
will, or can do against thee! Hast thou not a heart; canst thou not suffer
whatsoever it be; and, as a Child of Freedom, though outcast, trample
Tophet itself under thy feet, while it consumes thee? Let it come then; I
will meet it and defy it!' And as I so thought, there rushed like a stream
of fire over my whole soul; and I shook base Fear away from me forever."
This struggle between fear and faith, and the triumph of the latter, is
recorded in two remarkable chapters, "The Everlasting No" and "The
Everlasting Yea," of _Sartor Resartus_.

Carlyle now definitely resolved on a literary life, and began with any work
that offered a bare livelihood. He translated Legendre's _Geometry_ from
the French, wrote numerous essays for the magazines, and continued his
study of German while making translations from that language. His
translation of Goethe's _Wilhelm Meister_ Appeared in 1824, his _Life of
Schiller_ in 1825, and his _Specimens of German Romance_ in 1827. He began
at this time a correspondence with Goethe, his literary hero, which lasted
till the German poet's death in 1832. While still busy with "hack work,"
Carlyle, in 1826, married Jane Welsh, a brilliant and beautiful woman,
whose literary genius almost equaled that of her husband. Soon afterwards,
influenced chiefly by poverty, the Carlyles retired to a farm, at Craigen-
puttoch (Hawks' Hill), a dreary and lonely spot, far from friends and even
neighbors. They remained here six years, during which time Carlyle wrote
many of his best essays, and _Sartor Resartus_, his most original work. The
latter went begging among publishers for two years, and was finally
published serially in _Fraser's Magazine_, in 1833-1834. By this time
Carlyle had begun to attract attention as a writer, and, thinking that one
who made his living by the magazines should be in close touch with the
editors, took his wife's advice and moved to London "to seek work and
bread." He settled in Cheyne Row, Chelsea,--a place made famous by More,
Erasmus, Bolingbroke, Smollett, Leigh Hunt, and many lesser lights of
literature,--and began to enjoy the first real peace he had known since
childhood. In 1837 appeared _The French Revolution_, which first made
Carlyle famous; and in the same year, led by the necessity of earning
money, he began the series of lectures--_German. Literature_ (1837),
_Periods of European Culture_ (1838), _Revolutions of Modern Europe_
(1839), _Heroes and Hero Worship_ (1841)--which created a sensation in
London. "It was," says Leigh Hunt, "as if some Puritan had come to life
again, liberalized by German philosophy and his own intense reflection and
experience."

Though Carlyle set himself against the spirit of his age, calling the
famous Reform Bill a "progress into darkness," and democracy "the rule of
the worst rather than the best," his rough sincerity was unquestioned, and
his remarks were more quoted than those of any other living man. He was
supported, moreover, by a rare circle of friends,--Edward Irving, Southey,
Sterling, Landor, Leigh Hunt, Dickens, Mill, Tennyson, Browning, and, most
helpful of all, Emerson, who had visited Carlyle at Craigenputtoch in 1833.
It was due largely to Emerson's influence that Carlyle's works were better
appreciated, and brought better financial rewards, in America than in
England.

Carlyle's fame reached its climax in the monumental _History of Frederick
the Great_ (1858-1865), published after thirteen years of solitary toil,
which, in his own words, "made entire devastation of home life and
happiness." The proudest moment of his life was when he was elected to
succeed Gladstone as lord rector of Edinburgh University, in 1865, the year
in which _Frederick the Great_ was finished. In the midst of his triumph,
and while he was in Scotland to deliver his inaugural address, his
happiness was suddenly destroyed by the death of his wife,--a terrible
blow, from which he never recovered. He lived on for fifteen years, shorn
of his strength and interest in life; and his closing hours were like the
dull sunset of a November day. Only as we remember his grief and remorse at
the death of the companion who had shared his toil but not his triumph, can
we understand the sorrow that pervades the pages of his _Reminiscences_. He
died in 1881, and at his own wish was buried, not in Westminster Abbey, but
among his humble kinsfolk in Ecclefechan. However much we may differ from
his philosophy or regret the harshness of his minor works, we shall
probably all agree in this sentiment from one of his own letters,--that the
object of all his struggle and writing was "that men should find out and
believe the truth, and match their lives to it."

WORKS OF CARLYLE. There are two widely different judgments of Carlyle as a
man and a writer. The first, which is founded largely on his minor
writings, like _Chartism, Latter-Day Pamphlets_, and _Shooting Niagara_,
declares that he is a misanthrope and dyspeptic with a barbarous style of
writing; that he denounces progress, democracy, science, America, Darwin,
--everybody and everything that he does not understand; that his literary
opinions are largely prejudices; that he began as a prophet and ended as a
scold; and that in denouncing shams of every sort he was something of a
sham himself, since his practice was not in accord with his own preaching.
The second judgment, which is founded upon _Heroes and Hero Worship,
Cromwell_, and _Sartor Resartus_, declares that these works are the supreme
manifestation of genius; that their rugged, picturesque style makes others
look feeble or colorless by comparison; and that the author is the greatest
teacher, leader, and prophet of the nineteenth century.

Somewhere between these two extremes will be found the truth about Carlyle.
We only note here that, while there are some grounds for the first
unfavorable criticism, we are to judge an author by his best rather than by
his worst work; and that a man's aims as well as his accomplishments must
be taken into consideration. As it is written, "Whereas it was in thine
heart to build an house unto my name, thou didst well that it was in thine
heart." Whatever the defects of Carlyle and his work, in his heart he was
always planning a house or temple to the God of truth and justice.

Carlyle's important works may be divided into three general classes,--
critical and literary essays, historical works, and _Sartor Resartus_, the
last being in a class by itself, since there is nothing like it in
literature. To these should be added a biography, the admirable _Life of
John Sterling_, and Carlyle's _Letters_ and _Reminiscences_, which are more
interesting and suggestive than some of his better known works. We omit
here all consideration of translations, and his intemperate denunciations
of men and institutions in _Chartism, Latter-Day Pamphlets_, and other
essays, which add nothing to the author's fame or influence.

Of the essays, which are all characterized by Carlyle's zeal to get at the
heart of things, and to reveal the soul rather than the works of a writer,
the best are those on "Burns," "Scott," "Novalis," "Goethe,"
"Characteristics," "Signs of the Times," and "Boswell's Life of
Johnson."[244] In the famous _Essay on Burns_, which is generally selected
for special study, we note four significant things: (1) Carlyle is
peculiarly well fitted for his task, having many points in common with his
hero. (2) In most of his work Carlyle, by his style and mannerisms and
positive opinions, generally attracts our attention away from his subject;
but in this essay he shows himself capable of forgetting himself for a
moment. To an unusual extent he sticks to his subject, and makes us think
of Burns rather than of Carlyle. The style, though unpolished, is fairly
simple and readable, and is free from the breaks, crudities, ejaculations,
and general "nodulosities" which disfigure much of his work. (3) Carlyle
has an original and interesting theory of biography and criticism. The
object of criticism is to show the man himself, his aims, ideals, and
outlook on the universe; the object of biography is "to show what and how
produced was the effect of society upon him; what and how produced was his
effect on society." (4) Carlyle is often severe, even harsh, in his
estimates of other men, but in this case the tragedy of Burns's "life of
fragments" attracts and softens him. He grows enthusiastic and--a rare
thing for Carlyle--apologizes for his enthusiasm in the striking sentence,
"We love Burns, and we pity him; and love and pity are prone to magnify."
So he gives us the most tender and appreciative of his essays, and one of
the most illuminating criticisms of Burns that has appeared in our
language.

The central idea of Carlyle's historical works is found in his _Heroes and
Hero Worship_ (1841), his most widely read book. "Universal history," he
says, "is at bottom the history of the great men who have worked here." To
get at the truth of history we must study not movements but men, and read
not state papers but the biographies of heroes. His summary of history as
presented in this work has six divisions: (1) The Hero as Divinity, having
for its general subject Odin, the "type Norseman," who, Carlyle thinks, was
some old heroic chief, afterwards deified by his countrymen; (2) The Hero
as Prophet, treating of Mahomet and the rise of Islam; (3) The Hero as
Poet, in which Dante and Shakespeare are taken as types; (4) The Hero as
Priest, or religious leader, in which Luther appears as the hero of the
Reformation, and Knox as the hero of Puritanism; (5) The Hero as Man of
Letters, in which we have the curious choice of Johnson, Rousseau, and
Burns; (6) The Hero as King, in which Cromwell and Napoleon appear as the
heroes of reform by revolution.

It is needless to say that _Heroes_ is not a book of history; neither is it
scientifically written in the manner of Gibbon. With science in any form
Carlyle had no patience; and he miscalculated the value of that patient
search for facts and evidence which science undertakes before building any
theories, either of kings or cabbages. The book, therefore, abounds in
errors; but they are the errors of carelessness and are perhaps of small
consequence. His misconception of history, however, is more serious. With
the modern idea of history, as the growth of freedom among all classes, he
has no sympathy. The progress of democracy was to him an evil thing, a
"turning of the face towards darkness and anarchy." At certain periods,
according to Carlyle, God sends us geniuses, sometimes as priests or poets,
sometimes as soldiers or statesmen; but in whatever guise they appear,
these are our real rulers. He shows, moreover, that whenever such men
appear, multitudes follow them, and that a man's following is a sure index
of his heroism and kingship.

Whether we agree with Carlyle or not, we must accept for the moment his
peculiar view of history, else _Heroes_ can never open its treasures to us.
The book abounds in startling ideas, expressed with originality and power,
and is pervaded throughout by an atmosphere of intense moral earnestness.
The more we read it, the more we find to admire and to remember.

Carlyle's _French Revolution_ (1837) is to be taken more seriously as a
historical work; but here again his hero worship comes to the front, and
his book is a series of flashlights thrown upon men in dramatic situations,
rather than a tracing of causes to their consequences. The very titles of
his chapters--"Astraea Redux," "Windbags," "Broglie the War God"--do
violence to our conception of history, and are more suggestive of Carlyle's
individualism than of French history. He is here the preacher rather than
the historian; his text is the eternal justice; and his message is that all
wrongdoing is inevitably followed by vengeance. His method is intensely
dramatic. From a mass of historical details he selects a few picturesque
incidents and striking figures, and his vivid pictures of the storming of
the Bastille, the rush of the mob to Versailles, the death of Louis XVI,
and the Reign of Terror, seem like the work of an eyewitness describing
some terrible catastrophe. At times, as it portrays Danton, Robespierre,
and the great characters of the tragedy, Carlyle's work is suggestive of an
historical play of Shakespeare; and again, as it describes the rush and
riot of men led by elemental passion, it is more like a great prose epic.
Though not a reliable history in any sense, it is one of the most dramatic
and stirring narratives in our language.

Two other historical works deserve at least a passing notice. The _History
of Frederick the Great_ (1858-1865), in six volumes, is a colossal picture
of the life and times of the hero of the Prussian Empire. _Oliver
Cromwell's Letters and Speeches_ is, in our personal judgment, Carlyle's
best historical work. His idea is to present the very soul of the great
Puritan leader. He gives us, as of first importance, Cromwell's own words,
and connects them by a commentary in which other men and events are
described with vigor and vividness. Cromwell was one of Carlyle's greatest
heroes, and in this case he is most careful to present the facts which
occasion his own enthusiasm. The result is, on the whole, the most lifelike
picture of a great historical character that we possess. Other historians
had heaped calumny upon Cromwell till the English public regarded him with
prejudice and horror; and it is an indication of Carlyle's power that by a
single book he revolutionized England's opinion of one of her greatest men.

Carlyle's _Sartor Resartus_ (1834), his only creative work, is a mixture of
philosophy and romance, of wisdom and nonsense,--a chaotic jumble of the
author's thoughts, feelings, and experiences during the first thirty-five
years of his life. The title, which means "The Tailor Patched-up," is taken
from an old Scotch song. The hero is Diogenes Teufelsdroeckh, a German
professor at the University of Weissnichtwo (don't know where); the
narrative concerns this queer professor's life and opinions; and the
central thought of the book is the philosophy of clothes, which are
considered symbolically as the outward expression of spirit. Thus, man's
body is the outward garment of his soul, and the universe is the visible
garment of the invisible God. The arrangement of _Sartor_ is clumsy and
hard to follow. In order to leave himself free to bring in everything he
thought about, Carlyle assumed the position of one who was translating and
editing the old professor's manuscripts, which are supposed to consist of
numerous sheets stuffed into twelve paper bags, each labeled with a sign of
the zodiac. The editor pretends to make order out of this chaos; but he is
free to jump from one subject to another and to state the most startling
opinion by simply using quotation marks and adding a note that he is not
responsible for Teufelsdroeckh's crazy notions,--which are in reality
Carlyle's own dreams and ideals. Partly because of the matter, which is
sometimes incoherent, partly because of the style, which, though
picturesque, is sometimes confused and ungrammatical, _Sartor_ is not easy
reading; but it amply repays whatever time and study we give to it. Many of
its passages are more like poetry than prose; and one cannot read such
chapters as "The Everlasting No," "The Everlasting Yea," "Reminiscences,"
and "Natural Supernaturalism," and be quite the same man afterwards; for
Carlyle's thought has entered into him, and he walks henceforth more
gently, more reverently through the world, as in the presence of the
Eternal.

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS. Concerning Carlyle's style there are almost as
many opinions as there are readers. This is partly because he impresses
different people in widely different ways, and partly because his
expression varies greatly. At times he is calm, persuasive, grimly
humorous, as if conversing; at other times, wildly exclamatory, as if he
were shouting and waving his arms at the reader. We have spoken of
Macaulay's style as that of the finished orator, and we might reasonably
speak of Carlyle's as that of the exhorter, who cares little for methods so
long as he makes a strong impression on his hearers. "Every sentence is
alive to its finger tips," writes a modern critic; and though Carlyle often
violates the rules of grammar and rhetoric, we can well afford to let an
original genius express his own intense conviction in his own vivid and
picturesque way.

Carlyle's message may be summed up in two imperatives,--labor, and be
sincere. He lectured and wrote chiefly for the upper classes who had begun
to think, somewhat sentimentally, of the conditions of the laboring men of
the world; and he demanded for the latter, not charity or pity, but justice
and honor. All labor, whether of head or hand, is divine; and labor alone
justifies a man as a son of earth and heaven. To society, which Carlyle
thought to be occupied wholly with conventional affairs, he came with the
stamp of sincerity, calling upon men to lay aside hypocrisy and to think
and speak and live the truth. He had none of Addison's delicate satire and
humor, and in his fury at what he thought was false he was generally
unsympathetic and often harsh; but we must not forget that Thackeray--who
knew society much better than did Carlyle--gave a very unflattering picture
of it in _Vanity Fair_ and _The Book of Snobs_. Apparently the age needed
plain speaking, and Carlyle furnished it in scripture measure. Harriet
Martineau, who knew the world for which Carlyle wrote, summed up his
influence when she said that he had "infused into the mind of the English
nation ... sincerity, earnestness, healthfulness, and courage." If we add
to the above message Carlyle's conceptions of the world as governed by a
God of justice who never forgets, and of human history as "an inarticulate
Bible," slowly revealing the divine purpose, we shall understand better the
force of his ethical appeal and the profound influence he exercised on the
moral and intellectual life of the past century.


JOHN RUSKIN (1819-1900)

In approaching the study of Ruskin we are to remember, first of all, that
we are dealing with a great and good man, who is himself more inspiring
than any of his books. In some respects he is like his friend Carlyle,
whose disciple he acknowledged himself to be; but he is broader in his
sympathies, and in every way more hopeful, helpful, and humane. Thus, in
the face of the drudgery and poverty of the competitive system, Carlyle
proposed, with the grim satire of Swift's "Modest Proposal," to organize an
annual hunt in which successful people should shoot the unfortunate, and to
use the game for the support of the army and navy. Ruskin, facing the same
problem, wrote: "I will endure it no longer quietly; but henceforward, with
any few or many who will help, do my best to abate this misery." Then,
leaving the field of art criticism, where he was the acknowledged leader,
he begins to write of labor and justice; gives his fortune in charity, in
establishing schools and libraries; and founds his St. George's Guild of
workingmen, to put in practice the principles of brotherhood and
cooperation for which he and Carlyle contended. Though his style marks him
as one of the masters of English prose, he is generally studied not as a
literary man but as an ethical teacher, and we shall hardly appreciate his
works unless we see behind every book the figure of the heroically sincere
man who wrote it.

LIFE. Ruskin was born in London, in 1819. His father was a prosperous wine
merchant who gained a fortune in trade, and who spent his leisure hours in
the company of good books and pictures. On his tombstone one may still read
this inscription written by Ruskin: "He was an entirely honest merchant and
his memory is to all who keep it dear and helpful. His son, whom he loved
to the uttermost and taught to speak truth, says this of him." Ruskin's
mother, a devout and somewhat austere woman, brought her son up with
Puritanical strictness, not forgetting Solomon's injunction that "the rod
and reproof give wisdom."

Of Ruskin's early years at Herne Hill, on the outskirts of London, it is
better to read his own interesting record in _Praeterita_. It was in some
respects a cramped and lonely childhood, but certain things which strongly
molded his character are worthy of mention. First, he was taught by word
and example in all things to speak the truth, and he never forgot the
lesson. Second, he had few toys, and spent much time in studying the
leaves, the flowers, the grass, the clouds, even the figures and colors of
the carpet, and so laid the foundation for that minute and accurate
observation which is manifest in all his writings. Third, he was educated
first by his mother, then by private tutors, and so missed the discipline
of the public schools. The influence of this lonely training is evident in
all his work. Like Carlyle, he is often too positive and dogmatic,--the
result of failing to test his work by the standards of other men of his
age. Fourth, he was obliged to read the Bible every day and to learn long
passages verbatim. The result of this training was, he says, "to make every
word of the Scriptures familiar to my ear in habitual music." We can hardly
read a page of his later work without finding some reflection of the noble
simplicity or vivid imagery of the sacred records. Fifth, he traveled much
with his father and mother, and his innate love of nature was intensified
by what he saw on his leisurely journeys through the most beautiful parts
of England and the Continent.

Ruskin entered Christ Church College, Oxford, in 1836, when only seventeen
years old. He was at this time a shy, sensitive boy, a lover of nature and
of every art which reflects nature, but almost entirely ignorant of the
ways of boys and men. An attack of consumption, with which he had long been
threatened, caused him to leave Oxford in 1840, and for nearly two years he
wandered over Italy searching for health and cheerfulness, and gathering
materials for the first volume of _Modern Painters_, the book that made him
famous.

Ruskin's literary work began in childhood, when he was encouraged to write
freely in prose and poetry. A volume of poems illustrated by his own
drawings was published in 1859, after he had won fame as a prose writer,
but, save for the drawings, it is of small importance. The first volume of
_Modern Painters_ (1843) was begun as a heated defense of the artist
Turner, but it developed into an essay on art as a true picture of nature,
"not only in her outward aspect but in her inward spirit." The work, which
was signed simply "Oxford Graduate," aroused a storm of mingled approval
and protest; but however much critics warred over its theories of art, all
were agreed that the unknown author was a master of descriptive prose.
Ruskin now made frequent trips to the art galleries of the Continent, and
produced four more volumes of _Modern Painters_ during the next seventeen
years. Meanwhile he wrote other books,--_Seven Lamps of Architecture_
(1849), _Stones of Venice_ (1851-1853), _Pre-Raphaelitism_, and numerous
lectures and essays, which gave him a place in the world of art similar to
that held by Matthew Arnold in the world of letters. In 1869 he was
appointed professor of art at Oxford, a position which greatly increased
his prestige and influence, not only among students but among a great
variety of people who heard his lectures and read his published works.
_Lectures on Art, Aratra Pentelici_ (lectures on sculpture), _Ariadne
Florentina_ (lectures on engraving), _Michael Angela and Tintoret, The Art
of England, Val d'Arno_ (lectures on Tuscan art), _St. Mark's Rest_ (a
history of Venice), _Mornings in Florence_ (studies in Christian art, now
much used as a guidebook to the picture galleries of Florence), _The Laws
of Fiesole_ (a treatise on drawing and painting for schools), _Academy of
Fine Arts in Venice, Pleasures of England_,--all these works on art show
Ruskin's literary industry. And we must also record _Love's Meinie_ (a
study of birds), _Proserpina_ (a study of flowers), _Deucalion_ (a study of
waves and stones), besides various essays on political economy which
indicate that Ruskin, like Arnold, had begun to consider the practical
problems of his age.

At the height of his fame, in 1860, Ruskin turned for a time from art, to
consider questions of wealth and labor,--terms which were used glibly by
the economists of the age without much thought for their fundamental
meaning. "There is no wealth but life," announced Ruskin,--"life, including
all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration. That country is the
richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human
beings." Such a doctrine, proclaimed by Goldsmith in his _Deserted
Village_, was regarded as a pretty sentiment, but coming from one of the
greatest leaders and teachers of England it was like a bombshell. Ruskin
wrote four essays establishing this doctrine and pleading for a more
socialistic form of government in which reform might be possible. The
essays were published in the _Cornhill Magazine_, of which Thackeray was
editor, and they aroused such a storm that the publication was
discontinued. Ruskin then published the essays in book form, with the title
_Unto This Last_, in 1862. _Munera Pulveris_ (1862) was another work in
which the principles of capital and labor and the evils of the competitive
system were discussed in such a way that the author was denounced as a
visionary or a madman. Other works of this practical period are _Time and
Tide, Fors Clavigera, Sesame and Lilies_, and the _Crown of Wild Olive_.

The latter part of Ruskin's life was a time of increasing sadness, due
partly to the failure of his plans, and partly to public attacks upon his
motives or upon his sanity. He grew bitter at first, as his critics
ridiculed or denounced his principles, and at times his voice is as
querulous as that of Carlyle. We are to remember, however, the conditions
under which he struggled. His health had been shattered by successive
attacks of disease; he had been disappointed in love; his marriage was
unhappy; and his work seemed a failure. He had given nearly all his fortune
in charity, and the poor were more numerous than ever before. His famous
St. George's Guild was not successful, and the tyranny of the competitive
system seemed too deeply rooted to be overthrown. On the death of his
mother he left London and, in 1879, retired to Brantwood, on Coniston Lake,
in the beautiful region beloved of Wordsworth. Here he passed the last
quiet years of his life under the care of his cousin, Mrs. Severn, the
"angel of the house," and wrote, at Professor Norton's suggestion,
_Praeterita_, one of his most interesting books, in which he describes the
events of his youth from his own view point. He died quietly in 1900, and
was buried, as he wished, without funeral pomp or public ceremony, in the
little churchyard at Coniston.

WORKS OF RUSKIN. There are three little books which, in popular favor,
stand first on the list of Ruskin's numerous works,--_Ethics-of-the-Dust_,
a series of Lectures to Little Housewives, which appeals most to women;
_Crown of Wild Olive_, three lectures on Work, Traffic, and War, which
appeals to thoughtful men facing the problems of work and duty; and _Sesame
and Lilies_, which appeals to men and women alike. The last is the most
widely known of Ruskin's works and the best with which to begin our
reading.

The first thing we notice in _Sesame and Lilies_ is the symbolical title.
"Sesame," taken from the story of the robbers' cave in the _Arabian
Nights_, means a secret word or talisman which unlocks a treasure house. It
was intended, no doubt, to introduce the first part of the work, called "Of
Kings' Treasuries," which treats of books and reading. "Lilies," taken from
Isaiah as a symbol of beauty, purity, and peace, introduces the second
lecture, "Of Queens' Gardens," which is an exquisite study of woman's life
and education. These two lectures properly constitute the book, but a third
is added, on "The Mystery of Life." The last begins in a monologue upon his
own failures in life, and is pervaded by an atmosphere of sadness,
sometimes of pessimism, quite different from the spirit of the other two
lectures.

Though the theme of the first lecture is books, Ruskin manages to present
to his audience his whole philosophy of life. He gives us, with a wealth of
detail, a description of what constitutes a real book; he looks into the
meaning of words, and teaches us how to read, using a selection from
Milton's _Lycidas_ as an illustration. This study of words gives us the key
with which we are to unlock "Kings' Treasuries," that is, the books which
contain the precious thoughts of the kingly minds of all ages. He shows the
real meaning and end of education, the value of labor and of a purpose in
life; he treats of nature, science, art, literature, religion; he defines
the purpose of government, showing that soul-life, not money or trade, is
the measure of national greatness; and he criticises the general injustice
of his age, quoting a heartrending story of toil and suffering from the
newspapers to show how close his theory is to daily needs. Here is an
astonishing variety in a small compass; but there is no confusion. Ruskin's
mind was wonderfully analytical, and one subject develops naturally from
the other.

In the second lecture, "Of Queens' Gardens," he considers the question of
woman's place and education, which Tennyson had attempted to answer in _The
Princess_. Ruskin's theory is that the purpose of all education is to
acquire power to bless and to redeem human society; and that in this noble
work woman must always play the leading part. He searches all literature
for illustrations, and his description of literary heroines, especially of
Shakespeare's perfect women, is unrivaled. Ruskin is always at his best in
writing of women or for women, and the lofty idealism of this essay,
together with its rare beauty of expression, makes it, on the whole, the
most delightful and inspiring of his works.

Among Ruskin's practical works the reader will find in _Fors Clavigera_, a
series of letters to workingmen, and _Unto This Last_, four essays on the
principles of political economy, the substance of his economic teachings.
In the latter work, starting with the proposition that our present
competitive system centers about the idea of wealth, Ruskin tries to find
out what wealth is; and the pith of his teaching is this,--that men are of
more account than money; that a man's real wealth is found in his soul; not
in his pocket; and that the prime object of life and labor is "the
producing of as many as possible full-breathed, bright-eyed, and happy-
hearted human creatures." To make this ideal practical, Ruskin makes four
suggestions: (1) that training schools be established to teach young men
and women three things,--the laws and practice of health, habits of
gentleness and justice, and the trade or calling by which they are to live;
(2) that the government establish farms and workshops for the production of
all the necessaries of life, where only good and honest work shall be
tolerated and where a standard of work and wages shall be maintained; (3)
that any person out of employment shall be received at the nearest
government school: if ignorant he shall be educated, and if competent to do
any work he shall have the opportunity to do it; (4) that comfortable homes
be provided for the sick and for the aged, and that this be done in
justice, not in charity. A laborer serves his country as truly as does a
soldier or a statesman, and a pension should be no more disgraceful in one
case than in the other.

Among Ruskin's numerous books treating of art, we recommend the _Seven
Lamps of Architecture_ (1849), _Stones of Venice_ (1851-1853), and the
first two volumes of _Modern Painters_ (1843-1846). With Ruskin's art
theories, which, as Sydney Smith prophesied, "worked a complete revolution
in the world of taste," we need not concern ourselves here. We simply point
out four principles that are manifest in all his work: (1) that the object
of art, as of every other human endeavor, is to find and to express the
truth; (2) that art, in order to be true, must break away from
conventionalities and copy nature; (3) that morality is closely allied with
art, and that a careful study of any art reveals the moral strength or
weakness of the people that produced it; (4) that the main purpose of art
is not to delight a few cultured people but to serve the daily uses of
common life. "The giving brightness to pictures is much," he says, "but the
giving brightness to life is more." In this attempt to make art serve the
practical ends of life, Ruskin is allied with all the great writers of the
period, who use literature as the instrument of human progress.

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS. One who reads Ruskin is in a state of mind
analogous to that of a man who goes through a picture gallery, pausing now
to admire a face or a landscape for its own sake, and again to marvel at
the technical skill of the artist, without regard to his subject. For
Ruskin is a great literary artist and a great ethical teacher, and we
admire one page for its style, and the next for its message to humanity.
The best of his prose, which one may find in the descriptive passages of
_Præterita_ and _Modern Painters_, is written in a richly ornate style,
with a wealth of figures and allusions, and at times a rhythmic, melodious
quality which makes it almost equal to poetry. Ruskin had a rare
sensitiveness to beauty in every form, and more, perhaps, than any other
writer in our language, he has helped us to see and appreciate the beauty
of the world around us.

As for Ruskin's ethical teaching, it appears in so many forms and in so
many different works that any summary must appear inadequate. For a full
half century he was "the apostle of beauty" in England, and the beauty for
which he pleaded was never sensuous or pagan, as in the Renaissance, but
always spiritual, appealing to the soul of man rather than to his eyes,
leading to better work and better living. In his economic essays Ruskin is
even more directly and positively ethical. To mitigate the evils of the
unreasonable competitive system under which we labor and sorrow; to bring
master and man together in mutual trust and helpfulness; to seek beauty,
truth, goodness as the chief ends of life, and, having found them, to make
our characters correspond; to share the best treasures of art and
literature with rich and poor alike; to labor always, and, whether we work
with hand or head, to do our work in praise of something that we love,--
this sums up Ruskin's purpose and message. And the best of it is that, like
Chaucer's country parson, he practiced his doctrine before he preached it.


MATTHEW ARNOLD (1822-1888)

In the world of literature Arnold has occupied for many years an
authoritative position as critic and teacher, similar to that held by
Ruskin in the world of art. In his literary work two very different moods
are manifest. In his poetry he reflects the doubt of an age which witnessed
the conflict between science and revealed religion. Apparently he never
passed through any such decisive personal struggle as is recorded in
_Sartor Resartus_, and he has no positive conviction such as is voiced in
"The Everlasting Yea." He is beset by doubts which he never settles, and
his poems generally express sorrow or regret or resignation. In his prose
he shows the cavalier spirit,--aggressive, light-hearted, self-confident.
Like Carlyle, he dislikes shams, and protests against what he calls the
barbarisms of society; but he writes with a light touch, using satire and
banter as the better part of his argument. Carlyle denounces with the zeal
of a Hebrew prophet, and lets you know that you are hopelessly lost if you
reject his message. Arnold is more like the cultivated Greek; his voice is
soft, his speech suave, but he leaves the impression, if you happen to
differ with him, that you must be deficient in culture. Both these men, so
different in spirit and methods, confronted the same problems, sought the
same ends, and were dominated by the same moral sincerity.

LIFE. Arnold was born in Laleham, in the valley of the Thames, in 1822. His
father was Dr. Thomas Arnold, head master of Rugby, with whom many of us
have grown familiar by reading _Tom Brown's School Days_. After fitting for
the university at Winchester and at Rugby, Arnold entered Balliol College,
Oxford, where he was distinguished by winning prizes in poetry and by
general excellence in the classics. More than any other poet Arnold
reflects the spirit of his university. "The Scholar-Gipsy" and "Thyrsis"
contain many references to Oxford and the surrounding country, but they are
more noticeable for their spirit of aloofness,--as if Oxford men were too
much occupied with classic dreams and ideals to concern themselves with the
practical affairs of life.

After leaving the university Arnold first taught the classics at Rugby;
then, in 1847, he became private secretary to Lord Lansdowne, who appointed
the young poet to the position of inspector of schools under the
government. In this position Arnold worked patiently for the next thirty-
five years, traveling about the country, examining teachers, and correcting
endless examination papers. For ten years (1857-1867) he was professor of
poetry at Oxford, where his famous lectures _On Translating Homer_ were
given. He made numerous reports on English and foreign schools, and was
three times sent abroad to study educational methods on the Continent. From
this it will be seen that Arnold led a busy, often a laborious life, and we
can appreciate his statement that all his best literary work was done late
at night, after a day of drudgery. It is well to remember that, while
Carlyle was preaching about labor, Arnold labored daily; that his work was
cheerfully and patiently done; and that after the day's work he hurried
away, like Lamb, to the Elysian fields of literature. He was happily
married, loved his home, and especially loved children, was free from all
bitterness and envy, and, notwithstanding his cold manner, was at heart
sincere, generous, and true. We shall appreciate his work better if we can
see the man himself behind all that he has written.

Arnold's literary work divides itself into three periods, which we may call
the poetical, the critical, and the practical. He had written poetry since
his school days, and his first volume, _The Strayed Reveller and Other
Poems_, appeared anonymously in 1849. Three years later he published
_Empedocles on Etna and other Poems;_ but only a few copies of these
volumes were sold, and presently both were withdrawn from circulation. In
1853-1855 he published his signed _Poems_, and twelve years later appeared
his last volume of poetry. Compared with the early work of Tennyson, these
works met with little favor, and Arnold practically abandoned poetry in
favor of critical writing.

The chief works of his critical period are the lectures _On Translating
Homer_ (1861) and the two volumes of _Essays in Criticism_ (1865-1888),
which made Arnold one of the best known literary men in England. Then, like
Ruskin, he turned to practical questions, and his _Friendship's Garland_
(1871) was intended to satirize and perhaps reform the great middle class
of England, whom he called the Philistines. _Culture and Anarchy_, the most
characteristic work of his practical period, appeared in 1869. These were
followed by four books on religious subjects,--_St. Paul and Protestantism_
(1870), _Literature and Dogma_ (1873), _God and the Bible_ (1875), and
_Last Essays on Church and Religion_ (1877). The _Discourses in America_
(1885) completes the list of his important works. At the height of his fame
and influence he died suddenly, in 1888, and was buried in the churchyard
at Laleham. The spirit of his whole life is well expressed in a few lines
of one of his own early sonnets:

    One lesson, Nature, let me learn of thee,
    One lesson which in every wind is blown,
    One lesson of two duties kept at one
    Though the loud world proclaim their enmity--
    Of toil unsever'd from tranquillity;
    Of labour, that in lasting fruit outgrows
    Far noisier schemes, accomplish'd in repose,
    Too great for haste, too high for rivalry.

WORKS OF MATTHEW ARNOLD. We shall better appreciate Arnold's poetry if we
remember two things: First, he had been taught in his home a simple and
devout faith in revealed religion, and in college he was thrown into a
world of doubt and questioning. He faced these doubts honestly,
reverently,--in his heart longing to accept the faith of his fathers, but
in his head demanding proof and scientific exactness. The same struggle
between head and heart, between reason and intuition, goes on to-day, and
that is one reason why Arnold's poetry, which wavers on the borderland
between doubt and faith, is a favorite with many readers. Second, Arnold,
as shown in his essay on _The Study of Poetry_, regarded poetry as "a
criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such criticism by the laws
of poetic truth and poetic beauty." Naturally, one who regards poetry as a
"criticism" will write very differently from one who regards poetry as the
natural language of the soul. He will write for the head rather than for
the heart, and will be cold and critical rather than enthusiastic.
According to Arnold, each poem should be a unit, and he protested against
the tendency of English poets to use brilliant phrases and figures of
speech which only detract attention from the poem as a whole. For his
models he went to Greek poetry, which he regarded as "the only sure
guidance to what is sound and true in poetical art." Arnold is, however,
more indebted than he thinks to English masters, especially to Wordsworth
and Milton, whose influence is noticeable in a large part of his poetry.

Of Arnold's narrative poems the two best known are _Balder Dead_ (1855), an
incursion into the field of Norse mythology which is suggestive of Gray,
and _Sohrab and Rustum_ (1853), which takes us into the field of legendary
Persian history. The theme of the latter poem is taken from the _Shah-
Namah_ (Book of Kings) of the Persian poet Firdausi, who lived and wrote in
the eleventh century.

Briefly, the story is of one Rustem or Rustum, a Persian Achilles, who fell
asleep one day when he had grown weary of hunting. While he slept a band of
robbers stole his favorite horse, Ruksh. In trailing the robbers Rustum
came to the palace of the king of Samengan, where he was royally welcomed,
and where he fell in love with the king's daughter, Temineh, and married
her. But he was of a roving, adventurous disposition, and soon went back to
fight among his own people, the Persians. While he was gone his son Sohrab
was born, grew to manhood, and became the hero of the Turan army. War arose
between the two peoples, and two hostile armies were encamped by the Oxus.
Each army chose a champion, and Rustum and Sohrab found themselves matched
in mortal combat between the lines. At this point Sohrab, whose chief
interest in life was to find his father, demanded to know if his enemy were
not Rustum; but the latter was disguised and denied his identity. On the
first day of the fight Rustum was overcome, but his life was spared by a
trick and by the generosity of Sohrab. On the second day Rustum prevailed,
and mortally wounded his antagonist. Then he recognized his own son by a
gold bracelet which he had long ago given to his wife Temineh. The two
armies, rushing into battle, were stopped by the sight of father and son
weeping in each other's arms. Sohrab died, the war ceased, and Rustum went
home to a life of sorrow and remorse.

Using this interesting material, Arnold produced a poem which has the rare
and difficult combination of classic reserve and romantic feeling. It is
written in blank verse, and one has only to read the first few lines to see
that the poet is not a master of his instrument. The lines are seldom
harmonious, and we must frequently change the accent of common words, or
lay stress on unimportant particles, to show the rhythm. Arnold frequently
copies Milton, especially in his repetition of ideas and phrases; but the
poem as a whole is lacking in Milton's wonderful melody.

The classic influence on _Sohrab and Rustum_ is especially noticeable in
Arnold's use of materials. Fights are short; grief is long; therefore the
poet gives few lines to the combat, but lingers over the son's joy at
finding his father, and the father's quenchless sorrow at the death of his
son. The last lines especially, with their "passionate grief set to solemn
music," make this poem one of the best, on the whole, that Arnold has
written. And the exquisite ending, where the Oxus, unmindful of the trivial
strifes of men, flows on sedately to join "his luminous home of waters" is
most suggestive of the poet's conception of the orderly life of nature, in
contrast with the doubt and restlessness of human life.

Next in importance to the narrative poems are the elegies, "Thyrsis," "The
Scholar-Gipsy," "Memorial Verses," "A Southern Night," "Obermann," "Stanzas
from the Grande Chartreuse," and "Rugby Chapel." All these are worthy of
careful reading, but the best is "Thyrsis," a lament for the poet Clough,
which is sometimes classed with Milton's _Lycidas_ and Shelley's _Adonais_.
Among the minor poems the reader will find the best expression of Arnold's
ideals and methods in "Dover Beach," the love lyrics entitled
"Switzerland," "Requiescat," "Shakespeare," "The Future," "Kensington
Gardens," "Philomela," "Human Life," "Callicles's Song," "Morality," and
"Geist's Grave."--the last being an exquisite tribute to a little dog
which, like all his kind, had repaid our scant crumbs of affection with a
whole life's devotion.

The first place among Arnold's prose works must be given to the _Essays in
Criticism_, which raised the author to the front rank of living critics.
His fundamental idea of criticism appeals to us strongly. The business of
criticism, he says, is neither to find fault nor to display the critic's
own learning or influence; it is to know "the best which has been thought
and said in the world," and by using this knowledge to create a current of
fresh and free thought. If a choice must be made among these essays, which
are all worthy of study, we would suggest "The Study of Poetry,"
"Wordsworth," "Byron," and "Emerson." The last-named essay, which is found
in the _Discourses in America_, is hardly a satisfactory estimate of
Emerson, but its singular charm of manner and its atmosphere of
intellectual culture make it perhaps the most characteristic of Arnold's
prose writings.

Among the works of Arnold's practical period there are two which may be
taken as typical of all the rest. _Literature and Dogma_ (1873) is, in
general, a plea for liberality in religion. Arnold would have us read the
Bible, for instance, as we would read any other great work, and apply to it
the ordinary standards of literary criticism.

_Culture and Anarchy_ (1869) contains most of the terms--culture, sweetness
and light, Barbarian, Philistine, Hebraism, and many others--which are now
associated with Arnold's work and influence. The term "Barbarian" refers to
the aristocratic classes, whom Arnold thought to be essentially crude in
soul, notwithstanding their good clothes and superficial graces.
"Philistine" refers to the middle classes,--narrow-minded and
self-satisfied people, according to Arnold, whom he satirizes with the idea
of opening their minds to new ideas. "Hebraism" is Arnold's term for moral
education. Carlyle had emphasized the Hebraic or moral element in life, and
Arnold undertook to preach the Hellenic or intellectual element, which
welcomes new ideas, and delights in the arts that reflect the beauty of the
world. "The uppermost idea with. Hellenism," he says, "is to see things as
they are; the uppermost idea with Hebraism is conduct and obedience." With
great clearness, sometimes with great force, and always with a play of
humor and raillery aimed at the "Philistines," Arnold pleads for both these
elements in life which together aim at "Culture," that is, at moral and
intellectual perfection.

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS. Arnold's influence in our literature may be summed
up, in a word, as intellectual rather than inspirational. One cannot be
enthusiastic over his poetry, for the simple reason that he himself lacked
enthusiasm. He is, however, a true reflection of a very real mood of the
past century, the mood of doubt and sorrow; and a future generation may
give him a higher place than he now holds as a poet. Though marked by "the
elemental note of sadness," all Arnold's poems are distinguished by
clearness, simplicity, and the restrained emotion of his classic models.

As a prose writer the cold intellectual quality, which mars his poetry by
restraining romantic feeling, is of first importance, since it leads him to
approach literature with an open mind and with the single desire to find
"the best which has been thought and said in the world." We cannot yet
speak with confidence of his rank in literature; but by his crystal-clear
style, his scientific spirit of inquiry and comparison, illumined here and
there by the play of humor, and especially by his broad sympathy and
intellectual culture, he seems destined to occupy a very high place among
the masters of literary criticism.


JOHN HENRY NEWMAN (1801-1890)

Any record of the prose literature of the Victorian era, which includes the
historical essays of Macaulay and the art criticism of Ruskin, should
contain also some notice of its spiritual leaders. For there was never a
time when the religious ideals that inspire the race were kept more
constantly before men's minds through the medium of literature.

Among the religious writers of the age the first place belongs
unquestionably to Cardinal Newman. Whether we consider him as a man, with
his powerful yet gracious personality, or as a religious reformer, who did
much to break down old religious prejudices by showing the underlying
beauty and consistency of the Roman church, or as a prose writer whose
style is as near perfection as we have ever reached, Newman is one of the
most interesting figures of the whole nineteenth century.

LIFE. Three things stand out clearly in Newman's life: first, his unshaken
faith in the divine companionship and guidance; second, his desire to find
and to teach the truth of revealed religion; third, his quest of an
authoritative standard of faith, which should remain steadfast through the
changing centuries and amid all sorts and conditions of men. The first led
to that rare and beautiful spiritual quality which shines in all his work;
the second to his frequent doctrinal and controversial essays; the third to
his conversion to the Catholic church, which he served as priest and
teacher for the last forty-five years of his life. Perhaps we should add
one more characteristic,--the practical bent of his religion; for he was
never so busy with study or controversy that he neglected to give a large
part of his time to gentle ministration among the poor and needy.

He was born in London, in 1801. His father was an English banker; his
mother, a member of a French Huguenot family, was a thoughtful, devout
woman, who brought up her son in a way which suggests the mother of Ruskin.
Of his early training, his reading of doctrinal and argumentative works,
and of his isolation from material things in the thought that there were
"two and only two absolute and luminously self-evident beings in the
world," himself and his Creator, it is better to read his own record in the
_Apologia_, which is a kind of spiritual biography.

At the age of fifteen Newman had begun his profound study of theological
subjects. For science, literature, art, nature,--all the broad interests
which attracted other literary men of his age,--he cared little, his mind
being wholly occupied with the history and doctrines of the Christian
church, to which he had already devoted his life. He was educated first at
the school in Ealing, then at Oxford, taking his degree in the latter place
in 1820. Though his college career was not more brilliant than that of many
unknown men, his unusual ability was recognized and he was made a fellow of
Oriel College, retaining the fellowship, and leading a scholarly life for
over twenty years. In 1824 he was ordained in the Anglican church, and four
years later was chosen vicar of St. Mary's, at Oxford, where his sermons
made a deep impression on the cultivated audiences that gathered from far
and near to hear him.

A change is noticeable in Newman's life after his trip to the Mediterranean
in 1832. He had begun his life as a Calvinist, but while in Oxford, then
the center of religious unrest, he described himself as "drifting in the
direction of Liberalism." Then study and bereavement and an innate
mysticism led him to a profound sympathy with the mediæval Church. He had
from the beginning opposed Catholicism; but during his visit to Italy,
where he saw the Roman church at the center of Its power and splendor, many
of his prejudices were overcome. In this enlargement of his spiritual
horizon Newman was greatly influenced by his friend Hurrell Froude, with
whom he made the first part of the journey. His poems of this period
(afterwards collected in the _Lyra Apostolica_), among which is the famous
"Lead, Kindly Light," are noticeable for their radiant spirituality; but
one who reads them carefully sees the beginning of that mental struggle
which ended in his leaving the church in which he was born. Thus he writes
of the Catholic church, whose services he had attended as "one who in a
foreign land receives the gifts of a good Samaritan":

    O that thy creed were sound!
      For thou dost soothe the heart, thou church of Rome,
    By thy unwearied watch and varied round
      Of service, in thy Saviour's holy home.
    I cannot walk the city's sultry streets,
    But the wide porch invites to still retreats,
      Where passion's thirst is calmed, and care's unthankful gloom.

On his return to England, in 1833, he entered into the religious struggle
known as the Oxford or Tractarian Movement,[245] and speedily became its
acknowledged leader. Those who wish to follow this attempt at religious
reform, which profoundly affected the life of the whole English church,
will find it recorded in the _Tracts for the Times_, twenty-nine of which
were written by Newman, and in his _Parochial and Plain Sermons_ (1837-
1843). After nine years of spiritual conflict Newman retired to Littlemore,
where, with a few followers, he led a life of almost monastic seclusion,
still striving to reconcile his changing belief with the doctrines of his
own church. Two years later he resigned his charge at St. Mary's and left
the Anglican communion,--not bitterly, but with a deep and tender regret.
His last sermon at Littlemore on "The Parting of Friends" still moves us
profoundly, like the cry of a prophet torn by personal anguish in the face
of duty. In 1845 he was received into the Catholic church, and the
following year, at Rome, he joined the community of St. Philip Neri, "the
saint of gentleness and kindness," as Newman describes him, and was
ordained to the Roman priesthood.

By his preaching and writing Newman had exercised a strong influence over
his cultivated English hearers, and the effect of his conversion was
tremendous. Into the theological controversy of the next twenty years we
have no mind to enter. Through it all Newman retained his serenity, and,
though a master of irony and satire, kept his literary power always
subordinate to his chief aim, which was to establish the truth as he saw
it. Whether or not we agree with his conclusions, we must all admire the
spirit of the man, which is above praise or criticism. His most widely read
work, _Apologia Pro Vita Sua_ (1864), was written in answer to an
unfortunate attack by Charles Kingsley, which would long since have been
forgotten had it not led to this remarkable book. In 1854 Newman was
appointed rector of the Catholic University in Dublin, but after four years
returned to England and founded a Catholic school at Edgbaston. In 1879 he
was made cardinal by Pope Leo XIII. The grace and dignity of his life,
quite as much as the sincerity of his _Apologia_, had long since disarmed
criticism, and at his death, in 1890, the thought of all England might well
be expressed by his own lines in "The Dream of Gerontius":

    I had a dream. Yes, some one softly said,
      "He's gone," and then a sigh went round the room;
    And then I surely heard a priestly voice
        Cry _Subvenite_; and they knelt in prayer.

WORKS OF NEWMAN. Readers approach Newman from so many different motives,
some for doctrine, some for argument, some for a pure prose style, that it
is difficult to recommend the best works for the beginner's use. As an
expression of Newman's spiritual struggle the _Apologia Pro Vita Sua_ is
perhaps the most significant. This book is not light reading and one who
opens it should understand clearly the reasons for which it was written.
Newman had been accused of insincerity, not only by Kingsley but by many
other men, in the public press. His retirement to solitude and meditation
at Littlemore had been outrageously misunderstood, and it was openly
charged that his conversion was a cunningly devised plot to win a large
number of his followers to the Catholic church. This charge involved
others, and it was to defend them, as well as to vindicate himself, that
Newman wrote the _Apologia_. The perfect sincerity with which he traced his
religious history, showing that his conversion was only the final step in a
course he had been following since boyhood, silenced his critics and
revolutionized public opinion concerning himself and the church which he
had joined. As the revelation of a soul's history, and as a model of pure,
simple, unaffected English, this book, entirely apart from its doctrinal
teaching, deserves a high place in our prose literature.

In Newman's doctrinal works, the _Via Media_, the _Grammar of Assent_, and
in numerous controversial essays the student of literature will have little
interest. Much more significant are his sermons, the unconscious reflection
of a rare spiritual nature, of which Professor Shairp said: "His power
shows itself clearly in the new and unlooked-for way in which he touched
into life old truths, moral or spiritual.... And as he spoke, how the old
truth became new! and how it came home with a meaning never felt before! He
laid his finger how gently yet how powerfully on some inner place in the
hearer's heart, and told him things about himself he had never known till
then. Subtlest truths, which would have taken philosophers pages of
circumlocution and big words to state, were dropped out by the way in a
sentence or two of the most transparent Saxon." Of greater interest to the
general reader are _The Idea of a University_, discourses delivered at
Dublin, and his two works of fiction, _Loss and Gain_, treating of a man's
conversion to Catholicism, and _Callista_, which is, in his own words, "an
attempt to express the feelings and mutual relations of Christians and
heathens in the middle of the third century." The latter is, in our
judgment, the most readable and interesting of Newman's works. The
character of Callista, a beautiful Greek sculptor of idols, is powerfully
delineated; the style is clear and transparent as air, and the story of the
heroine's conversion and death makes one of the most fascinating chapters
in fiction, though it is not the story so much as the author's unconscious
revelation of himself that charms us. It would be well to read this novel
in connection with Kingsley's _Hypatia_, which attempts to reconstruct the
life and ideals of the same period.

Newman's poems are not so well known as his prose, but the reader who
examines the _Lyra Apostolica_ and _Verses on Various Occasions_ will find
many short poems that stir a religious nature profoundly by their pure and
lofty imagination; and future generations may pronounce one of these poems,
"The Dream of Gerontius," to be Newman's most enduring work. This poem aims
to reproduce the thoughts and feelings of a man whose soul is just quitting
the body, and who is just beginning a new and greater life. Both in style
and in thought "The Dream" is a powerful and original poem and is worthy of
attention not only for itself but, as a modern critic suggests, "as a
revelation of that high spiritual purpose which animated Newman's life from
beginning to end."

Of Newman's style it is as difficult to write as it would be to describe
the dress of a gentleman we had met, who was so perfectly dressed that we
paid no attention to his clothes. His style is called transparent, because
at first we are not conscious of his manner; and unobtrusive, because we
never think of Newman himself, but only of the subject he is discussing. He
is like the best French prose writers in expressing his thought with such
naturalness and apparent ease that, without thinking of style, we receive
exactly the impression which he means to convey. In his sermons and essays
he is wonderfully simple and direct; in his controversial writings, gently
ironical and satiric, and the satire is pervaded by a delicate humor; but
when his feelings are aroused he speaks with poetic images and symbols, and
his eloquence is like that of the Old Testament prophets. Like Ruskin's,
his style is modeled largely on that of the Bible, but not even Ruskin
equals him in the poetic beauty and melody of his sentences. On the whole
he comes nearer than any other of his age to our ideal of a perfect prose
writer.

OTHER ESSAYISTS OF THE VICTORIAN AGE. We have selected the above five
essayists, Macaulay, Carlyle, Arnold, Newman, and Ruskin, as representative
writers of the Victorian Age; but there are many others who well repay our
study. Notable among these are John Addington Symonds, author of _The
Renaissance in Italy_, undoubtedly his greatest work, and of many critical
essays; Walter Pater, whose _Appreciations_ and numerous other works mark
him as one of our best literary critics; and Leslie Stephen, famous for his
work on the monumental _Dictionary of National Biography_, and for his
_Hours in a Library_, a series of impartial and excellent criticisms,
brightened by the play of an original and delightful humor.

Among the most famous writers of the age are the scientists, Lyell, Darwin,
Huxley, Spencer, Tyndall, and Wallace,--a wonderful group of men whose
works, though they hardly belong to our present study, have exercised an
incalculable influence on our life and literature. Darwin's _Origin of
Species_ (1859), which apparently established the theory of evolution, was
an epoch-making book. It revolutionized not only our conceptions of natural
history, but also our methods of thinking on all the problems of human
society. Those who would read a summary of the greatest scientific
discovery of the age will find it in Wallace's _Darwinism_,--a most
interesting book, written by the man who claims, with Darwin, the honor of
first announcing the principle of evolution. And, from a multitude of
scientific works, we recommend also to the general reader Huxley's
_Autobiography_ and his _Lay Sermons, Addresses, and Reviews_, partly
because they are excellent expressions of the spirit and methods of
science, and partly because Huxley as a writer is perhaps the clearest and
the most readable of the scientists.

THE SPIRIT OF MODERN LITERATURE. As we reflect on the varied work of the
Victorian writers, three marked characteristics invite our attention.
First, our great literary men, no less than our great scientists, have made
truth the supreme object of human endeavor. All these eager poets,
novelists, and essayists, questing over so many different ways, are equally
intent on discovering the truth of life. Men as far apart as Darwin and
Newman are strangely alike in spirit, one seeking truth in the natural, the
other in the spiritual history of the race. Second, literature has become
the mirror of truth; and the first requirement of every serious novel or
essay is to be true to the life or the facts which it represents. Third,
literature has become animated by a definite moral purpose. It is not
enough for the Victorian writers to create or attempt an artistic work for
its own sake; the work must have a definite lesson for humanity. The poets
are not only singers, but leaders; they hold up an ideal, and they compel
men to recognize and follow it. The novelists tell a story which pictures
human life, and at the same time call us to the work Of social reform, or
drive home a moral lesson. The essayists are nearly all prophets or
teachers, and use literature as the chief instrument of progress and
education. Among them all we find comparatively little of the exuberant
fancy, the romantic ardor, and the boyish gladness of the Elizabethans.
They write books not primarily to delight the artistic sense, but to give
bread to the hungry and water to the thirsty in soul. Milton's famous
sentence, "A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit,"
might be written across the whole Victorian era. We are still too near
these writers to judge how far their work suffers artistically from their
practical purpose; but this much is certain,--that whether or not they
created immortal works, their books have made the present world a better
and a happier place to live in. And that is perhaps the best that can be
said of the work of any artist or artisan.

SUMMARY OF THE VICTORIAN AGE. The year 1830 is generally placed at the
beginning of this period, but its limits are very indefinite. In general we
may think of it as covering the reign of Victoria (1837-1901). Historically
the age is remarkable for the growth of democracy following the Reform Bill
of 1832; for the spread of education among all classes; for the rapid
development of the arts and sciences; for important mechanical inventions;
and for the enormous extension of the bounds of human knowledge by the
discoveries of science.

At the accession of Victoria the romantic movement had spent its force;
Wordsworth had written his best work; the other romantic poets, Coleridge,
Shelley, Keats, and Byron, had passed away; and for a time no new
development was apparent in English poetry. Though the Victorian Age
produced two great poets, Tennyson and Browning, the age, as a whole, is
remarkable for the variety and excellence of its prose. A study of all the
great writers of the period reveals four general characteristics: (1)
Literature in this Age has come very close to daily life, reflecting its
practical problems and interests, and is a powerful instrument of human
progress. (2) The tendency of literature is strongly ethical; all the great
poets, novelists, and essayists of the age are moral teachers. (3) Science
in this age exercises an incalculable influence. On the one hand it
emphasizes truth as the sole object of human endeavor; it has established
the principle of law throughout the universe; and it has given us an
entirely new view of life, as summed up in the word "evolution," that is,
the principle of growth or development from simple to complex forms. On the
other hand, its first effect seems to be to discourage works of the
imagination. Though the age produced an incredible number of books, very
few of them belong among the great creative works of literature. (4) Though
the age is generally characterized as practical and materialistic, it is
significant that nearly all the writers whom the nation delights to honor
vigorously attack materialism, and exalt a purely ideal conception of life.
On the whole, we are inclined to call this an idealistic age fundamentally,
since love, truth, justice, brotherhood--all great ideals--are emphasized
as the chief ends of life, not only by its poets but also by its novelists
and essayists.

In our study we have considered: (1) The Poets; the life and works of
Tennyson and Browning; and the chief characteristics of the minor poets,
Elizabeth Barrett (Mrs. Browning), Rossetti, Morris, and Swinburne. (2) The
Novelists; the life and works of Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot; and
the chief works of Charles Reade, Anthony Trollope, Charlotte Brontë,
Bulwer-Lytton, Kingsley, Mrs. Gaskell, Blackmore, George Meredith, Hardy,
and Stevenson. (3) The Essayists; the life and works of Macaulay, Matthew
Arnold, Carlyle, Newman, and Ruskin. These were selected, from among many
essayists and miscellaneous writers, as most typical of the Victorian Age.
The great scientists, like Lyell, Darwin, Huxley, Wallace, Tyndall, and
Spencer, hardly belong to our study of literature, though their works are
of vast importance; and we omit the works of living writers who belong to
the present rather than to the past century.


SELECTIONS FOR READING. Manly's English Poetry and Manly's English Prose
(Ginn and Company) contain excellent selections from all authors of this
period. Many other collections, like Ward's English Poets, Garnett's
English Prose from Elizabeth to Victoria, Page's British Poets of the
Nineteenth Century, and Stedman's A Victorian Anthology, may be used to
advantage. All important works may be found in the convenient and
inexpensive school editions given below. (For full titles and publishers
see the General Bibliography.)

_Tennyson_. Short poems, and selections from Idylls of the King, In
Memoriam, Enoch Arden, and The Princess. These are found in various school
editions, Standard English Classics, Pocket Classics, Riverside Literature
Series, etc. Poems by Tennyson, selected and edited with notes by Henry Van
Dyke (Athenaeum Press Series), is an excellent little volume for beginners.

_Browning_. Selections, edited by R.M. Lovett, in Standard English
Classics. Other school editions in Everyman's Library, Belles Lettres
Series, etc.

_Elizabeth Barrett Browning_. Selections, edited by Elizabeth Lee, in
Standard English Classics. Selections also in Pocket Classics, etc.

_Matthew Arnold_. Sohrab and Rustum, edited by Trent and Brewster, in
Standard English Classics. The same poem in Riverside Literature Series,
etc. Selections in Golden Treasury Series, etc. Poems, students' edition
(Crowell). Essays in Everyman's Library, etc. Prose selections (Holt, Allyn
& Bacon, etc.).

_Dickens_. Tale of Two Cities, edited by J.W. Linn, in Standard English
Classics. A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, and Pickwick Papers.
Various good school editions of these novels in Everyman's Library, etc.

_Thackeray_. Henry Esmond, edited by H.B. Moore, in Standard English
Classics. The same novel, in Everyman's Library, Pocket Classics, etc.

_George Eliot_. Silas Marner, edited by R. Adelaide Witham, in Standard
English Classics. The same novel, in Pocket Classics, etc.

_Carlyle_. Essay on Burns, edited by C.L. Hanson, in Standard English
Classics, and Heroes and Hero Worship, edited by A. MacMechan, in Athenaeum
Press Series. Selections, edited by H.W. Boynton (Allyn & Bacon). Various
other inexpensive editions, in Pocket Classics, Eclectic English Classics,
etc.

_Ruskin_. Sesame and Lilies, edited by Lois G. Hufford, in Standard English
Classics. Other editions in Riverside Literature, Everyman's Library, etc.
Selected Essays and Letters, edited by Hufford, in Standard English
Classics. Selections, edited by Vida D. Scudder (Sibley); edited by C.B.
Tinker, in Riverside Literature.

_Macaulay_. Essays on Addison and Milton, edited by H.A. Smith, in Standard
English Classics. Same essays, in Cassell's National Library, Riverside
Literature, etc. Lays of Ancient Rome, in Standard English Classics, Pocket
Classics, etc.

_Newman_. Selections, with introduction by L.E. Gates (Holt); Selections
from prose and poetry, in Riverside Literature. The Idea of a University,
in Manly's English Prose.


BIBLIOGRAPHY. (note. For full titles and publishers of general reference
books, see General Bibliography.) _HISTORY. Text-book_, Montgomery, pp.
357-383; Cheyney, pp. 632-643. _General Works_. Gardiner, and Traill.
_Special Works_. McCarthy's History of Our Own Times; Bright's History of
England, vols. 4-5; Lee's Queen Victoria; Bryce's Studies in Contemporary
Biography.

_LITERATURE. General Works_. Garnett and Gosse, Taine. _Special Works_.
Harrison's Early Victorian Literature; Saintsbury's A History of Nineteenth
Century Literature; Walker's The Age of Tennyson; same author's The Greater
Victorian Poets; Morley's Literature of the Age of Victoria; Stedman's
Victorian Poets; Mrs. Oliphant's Literary History of England in the
Nineteenth Century; Beers's English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century;
Dowden's Victorian Literature, in Transcripts and Studies; Brownell's
Victorian Prose Masters.

_Tennyson_. Texts: Cabinet edition (London, 1897) is the standard. Various
good editions, Globe, Cambridge Poets, etc. Selections in Athenaeum Press
(Ginn and Company).

Life: Alfred Lord Tennyson, a Memoir by his son, is the standard; by Lyall
(in English Men of Letters); by Horton; by Waugh. See also Anne T.
Ritchie's Tennyson and His Friends; Napier's The Homes and Haunts of
Tennyson; Rawnsley's Memories of the Tennysons.

Criticism: Brooke's Tennyson, his Art and his Relation to Modern Life; A.
Lang's Alfred Tennyson; Van Dyke's The Poetry of Tennyson; Sneath's The
Mind of Tennyson; Gwynn's A Critical Study of Tennyson's Works; Luce's
Handbook to Tennyson's Works; Dixon's A Tennyson Primer; Masterman's
Tennyson as a Religious Teacher; Collins's The Early Poems of Tennyson;
Macallum's Tennyson's Idylls of the King and the Arthurian Story; Bradley's
Commentary on In Memoriam; Bagehot's Literary Studies, vol. 2; Brightwell's
Concordance; Shepherd's Bibliography.

Essays: By F. Harrison, in Tennyson, Ruskin, Mill, and Other Literary
Estimates; by Stedman, in Victorian Poets; by Hutton, in Literary Essays;
by Dowden, in Studies in Literature; by Gates, in Studies and
Appreciations; by Forster, in Great Teachers; by Forman, in Our Living
Poets. See also Myers's Science and a Future Life.

_Browning_. Texts: Cambridge and Globe editions, etc. Various editions of
selections. (See Selections for Reading, above.)

Life: by W. Sharp (Great Writers); by Chesterton (English Men of Letters);
Life and Letters, by Mrs. Sutherland Orr; by Waugh, in Westminster
Biographies (Small & Maynard).

Criticism: Symons's An Introduction to the Study of Browning; same title,
by Corson; Mrs. Orr's Handbook to the Works of Browning; Nettleship's
Robert Browning; Brooke's The Poetry of Robert Browning; Cooke's Browning
Guide Book; Revell's Browning's Criticism of Life; Berdoe's Browning's
Message to his Times; Berdoe's Browning Cyclopedia.

Essays: by Hutton, Stedman, Dowden, Forster (for titles, see Tennyson,
above); by Jacobs, in Literary Studies; by Chapman, in Emerson and Other
Essays; by Cooke, in Poets and Problems; by Birrell, in Obiter Dicta.

_Elizabeth Barrett Browning_. Texts: Globe and Cambridge editions, etc.;
various editions of selections. Life: by J. H. Ingram; see also Bayne's Two
Great Englishmen. Kenyon's Letters of E. B. Browning.

Criticism: Essays, by Stedman, in Victorian Poets; by Benson, in Essays.

_Matthew Arnold_. Texts: Poems, Globe edition, etc. See Selections for
Reading, above. Life: by Russell; by Saintsbury; by Paul (English Men of
Letters); Letters, by Russell.

Criticism: Essays by Woodberry, in Makers of Literature; by Gates, in Three
Studies in Literature; by Hutton, in Modern Guides of English Thought; by
Brownell, in Victorian Prose Masters; by F. Harrison (see Tennyson, above).

_Dickens_. Texts: numerous good editions of novels. Life: by J. Forster; by
Marzials (Great Writers); by Ward (English Men of Letters); Langton's The
Childhood and Youth of Dickens.

Criticism: Gissing's Charles Dickens; Chesterton's Charles Dickens;
Kitten's The Novels of Charles Dickens; Fitzgerald's The History of
Pickwick. Essays: by F. Harrison (see above); by Bagehot, in Literary
Studies; by Lilly, in Four English Humorists; by A. Lang, in Gadshill
edition of Dickens's works.

_Thackeray_. Texts: numerous good editions of novels and essays. Life: by
Melville; by Merivale and Marzials (Great Writers); by A. Trollope (English
Men of Letters); by L. Stephen, in Dictionary of National Biography. See
also Crowe's Homes and Haunts of Thackeray; Wilson's Thackeray in the
United States.

Criticism: Essays, by Lilly, in Four English Humorists; by Harrison, in
Studies in Early Victorian Literature; by Scudder, in Social Ideals in
English Letters; by Brownell, in Victorian Prose Masters.

_George Eliot_. Texts: numerous editions. Life: by L. Stephen (English Men
of Letters); by O. Browning (Great Writers); by her husband, J.W. Cross.

Criticism: Cooke's George Eliot, a Critical Study of her Life and Writings.
Essays: by J. Jacobs, in Literary Studies; by H. James, in Partial
Portraits; by Dowden, in Studies in Literature; by Hutton, Harrison,
Brownell, Lilly (see above). See also Parkinson's Scenes from the George
Eliot Country.

_Carlyle_. Texts: various editions of works. Heroes, and Sartor Resartus,
in Athenaeum Press (Ginn and Company); Sartor, and Past and Present, 1 vol.
(Harper); Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, 1 vol. (Appleton); Letters and
Reminiscences, edited by C. E. Norton, 6 vols. (Macmillan).

Life: by Garnett (Great Writers); by Nichol (English Men of Letters); by
Froude, 2 vols. (very full, but not trustworthy). See also Carlyle's
Reminiscences and Correspondence, and Craig's The Making of Carlyle.

Criticism: Masson's Carlyle Personally and in his Writings. Essays: by
Lowell, in My Study Windows; by Harrison, Brownell, Hutton, Lilly (see
above).

_Ruskin_. Texts: Brantwood edition, edited by C.E. Norton; various editions
of separate works. Life: by Harrison (English Men of Letters); by
Collingwood, 2 vols.; see also Ruskin's Praeterita.

Criticism: Mather's Ruskin, his Life and Teaching; Cooke's Studies in
Ruskin; Waldstein's The Work of John Ruskin; Hobson's John Ruskin, Social
Reformer; Mrs. Meynell's John Ruskin; Sizeranne's Ruskin and the Religion
of Beauty, translated from the French; White's Principles of Art; W. M.
Rossetti's Ruskin, Rossetti, and Pre-Raphaelitism.

Essays: by Robertson, in Modern Humanists; by Saintsbury, in Corrected
Impressions; by Brownell, Harrison, Forster (see above).

_Macaulay_. Texts: Complete works, edited by his sister, Lady Trevelyan
(London, 1866); various editions of separate works (see Selections for
Reading, above). Life: Life and Letters, by Trevelyan, 2 vols.; by Morrison
(English Men of Letters).

Criticism: Essays, by Bagehot, in Literary Studies; by L. Stephen, in Hours
in a Library; by Saintsbury, in Corrected Impressions; by Harrison, in
Studies in Early Victorian Literature; by Matthew Arnold.

_Newman_. Texts: Uniform edition of important works (London, 1868-1881);
Apologia (Longmans); Selections (Holt, Riverside Literature, etc.). Life:
Jennings's Cardinal Newman; Button's Cardinal Newman; Early Life, by F.
Newman; by Waller and Barrow, in Westminster Biographies. See also Church's
The Oxford Movement; Fitzgerald's Fifty Years of Catholic Life and
Progress.

Criticism: Essays, by Donaldson, in Five Great Oxford Leaders; by Church,
in Occasional Papers, vol. 2; by Gates, in Three Studies in Literature; by
Jacobs, in Literary Studies; by Hutton, in Modern Guides of English
Thought; by Lilly, in Essays and Speeches; by Shairp, in Studies in Poetry
and Philosophy. See also Button's Cardinal Newman.

_Rossetti_. Works, 2 vols. (London, 1901). Selections, in Golden Treasury
Series. Life: by Knight (Great Writers); by Sharp; Hall Caine's
Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti; Gary's The Rossettis; Marillier's
Rossetti; Wood's Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite Movement; W.M. Hunt's
Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

Criticism: Tirebuck's Rossetti, his Work and Influence. Essays: by
Swinburne, in Essays and Studies; by Forman, in Our Living Poets; by Pater,
in Ward's English Poets; by F.W.H. Myers, in Essays Modern.

_Morris_. Texts: Story of the Glittering Plain, House of the Wolfings, etc.
(Reeves & Turner); Early Romances, in Everyman's Library; Sigurd the
Volsung, in Camelot Series; Socialistic writings (Humboldt Publishing Co.).
Life: by Mackail; by Cary; by Vallance.

Criticism: Essays, by Symons, in Studies in Two Literatures; by Dawson, in
Makers of Modern English; by Saintsbury, in Corrected Impressions. See also
Nordby's Influence of Old Norse Literature.

_Swinburne_. Texts: Complete works (Chatto and Windus); Poems and Ballads
(Lovell); Selections (Rivington, Belles Lettres Series, etc.). Life:
Wratislaw's Algernon Charles Swinburne, a Study.

Criticism: Essays, by Forman, Saintsbury (see above); by Lowell, in My
Study Windows; see also Stedman's Victorian Poets.

_Charles Keade_. Texts: Cloister and the Hearth, in Everyman's Library;
various editions of separate novels. Life: by C. Reade.

Criticism: Essay, by Swinburne, in Miscellanies.

_Anthony Trollope_. Texts: Royal edition of principal novels (Philadelphia,
1900); Barchester Towers, etc., in Everyman's Library. Life: Autobiography
(Harper, 1883).

Criticism: H.T. Peck's Introduction to Royal edition, vol. 1. Essays: by H.
James, in Partial Portraits; by Harrison, in Early Victorian Literature.
See also Cross, The Development of the English Novel.

_Charlotte and Emily Brontë_. Texts: Works, Haworth edition, edited by Mrs.
H. Ward (Harper); Complete works (Dent, 1893); Jane Eyre, Shirley, and
Wuthering Heights, in Everyman's Library. Life of Charlotte Brontë: by Mrs.
Gaskell; by Shorter; by Birrell (Great Writers). Life of Emily Brontë: by
Robinson. See also Leyland's The Brontë Family.

Criticism: Essays, by L. Stephen, in Hours in a Library; by Gates, in
Studies and Appreciations; by Harrison, in Early Victorian Literature; by
G.B. Smith, in Poets and Novelists. See also Swinburne's A Note on
Charlotte Brontë.

_Bulwer-Lytton_. Texts: Works, Knebsworth edition (Routledge); various
editions of separate works; Last Days of Pompeii, etc., in Everyman's
Library. Life: by his son, the Earl of Lytton; by Cooper; by Ten Brink.

Criticism: Essay, by W. Senior, in Essays in Fiction.

_Mrs. Gaskell_. Various editions of separate works; Cranford, in Standard
English Classics, etc. Life: see Dictionary of National Biography.
Criticism: see Saintsbury's Nineteenth-Century Literature.

_Kingsley_. Texts: Works, Chester edition; Hypatia, Westward Ho! etc., in
Everyman's Library. Life: Letters and Memories, by his wife; by Kaufmann.

Criticism: Essays, by Harrison, in Early Victorian Literature; by L.
Stephen, in Hours in a Library.

_Stevenson_. Texts: Works (Scribner); Treasure Island, in Everyman's
Library; Master of Ballantrae, in Pocket Classics; Letters, edited by
Colvin (Scribner). Life: by Balfour; by Baildon; by Black; by Cornford. See
also Simpson's Edinburgh Days; Eraser's In Stevenson's Samoa; Osborne and
Strong's Memories of Vailima.

Criticism: Raleigh's Stevenson; Alice Brown's Stevenson. Essays: by H.
James, in Partial Portraits; by Chapman, in Emerson and Other Essays.

_Hardy_. Texts: Works (Harper). Criticism: Macdonnell's Thomas Hardy;
Johnson's The Art of Thomas Hardy. See also Windle's The Wessex of Thomas
Hardy; and Dawson's Makers of English Fiction.

_George Meredith_. Texts: Novels and Selected Poems (Scribner).

Criticism: Le Gallienne's George Meredith; Hannah Lynch's George Meredith.
Essays: by Henley, in Views and Reviews; by Brownell, in Victorian Prose
Masters; by Monkhouse, in Books and Plays. See also Bailey's The Novels of
George Meredith; Curie's Aspects of George Meredith; and Cross's The
Development of the English Novel.


SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS. (NOTE. The best questions are those which are based
upon the books, essays, and poems read by the pupil. As the works chosen
for special study vary greatly with different teachers and classes, we
insert here only a few questions of general interest.) 1. What are the
chief characteristics of Victorian literature? Name the chief writers of
the period in prose and poetry. What books of this period are, in your
judgment, worthy to be placed among the great works of literature? What
effect did the discoveries of science have upon the literature of the age?
What poet reflects the new conception of law and evolution? What historical
conditions account for the fact that most of the Victorian writers are
ethical teachers?

2. _Tennyson_. Give a brief sketch of Tennyson's life, and name his chief
works. Why is he, like Chaucer, a national poet? Is your pleasure in
reading Tennyson due chiefly to the thought or the melody of expression?
Note this figure in "The Lotos Eaters":

    Music that gentlier on the spirit lies
    Than tired eyelids upon tired eyes.

What does this suggest concerning Tennyson's figures of speech in general?
Compare "Locksley Hall" with "Locksley Hall Sixty Years After." What
differences do you find in thought, in workmanship, and in poetic
enthusiasm? What is Tennyson's idea of faith and immortality as expressed
in _In Memoriam_?

3. _Browning_. In what respects is Browning like Shakespeare? What is meant
by the optimism of his poetry? Can you explain why many thoughtful persons
prefer him to Tennyson? What is Browning's creed as expressed in "Rabbi Ben
Ezra"? Read "Fra Lippo Lippi" or "Andrea del Sarto," and tell what is meant
by a dramatic monologue. In "Andrea" what is meant by the lines,

    Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,
    Or what's a heaven for?

4. _Dickens_. What experiences in Dickens's life are reflected in his
novels? What are his favorite types of character? What is meant by the
exaggeration of Dickens? What was the serious purpose of his novels? Make a
brief analysis of the _Tale of Two Cities_, having in mind the plot, the
characters, and the style, as compared with Dickens's other novels.

5. _Thackeray_. Read _Henry Esmond_ and explain Thackeray's realism. What
is there remarkable in the style of this novel? Compare it with _Ivanhoe_
as a historical novel. What is the general character of Thackeray's satire?
What are the chief characteristics of his novels? Describe briefly the
works which show his great skill as a critical writer.

6. _George Eliot_. Read _Silas Marner_ and make a brief analysis, having in
mind the plot, the characters, the style, and the ethical teaching of the
novel. Is the moral teaching of George Eliot convincing; that is, does it
suggest itself from the story, or is it added for effect? What is the
general impression left by her books? How do her characters compare with
those of Dickens and Thackeray?

7. _Carlyle_. Why is Carlyle called a prophet, and why a censor? Read the
_Essay on Burns_ and make an analysis, having in mind the style, the idea
of criticism, and the picture which this essay presents of the Scotch poet.
Is Carlyle chiefly interested in Burns or in his poetry? Does he show any
marked appreciation of Burns's power as a lyric poet? What is Carlyle's
idea of history as shown in _Heroes and Hero Worship_? What experiences of
his own life are reflected in _Sartor Resartus_? What was Carlyle's message
to his age? What is meant by a "Carlylese" style?

8. _Macaulay_. In what respects is Macaulay typical of his age? Compare his
view of life with that of Carlyle. Read one of the essays, on Milton or
Addison, and make an analysis, having in mind the style, the interest, and
the accuracy of the essay. What useful purpose does Macaulay's historical
knowledge serve in writing his literary essays? What is the general
character of Macaulay's _History of England_? Rqad a chapter from
Macaulay's _History_, another from Carlyle's _French Revolution_, and
compare the two. How does each writer regard history and historical
writing? What differences do you note in their methods? What are the best
qualities of each work? Why are both unreliable?

9. _Arnold_. What elements of Victorian life are reflected in Arnold's
poetry? How do you account for the coldness and sadness of his verses? Read
_Sohrab and Rustum_ and write an account of it, having in mind the story,
Arnold's use of his material, the style, and the classic elements in the
poem. How does it compare in melody with the blank verse of Milton or
Tennyson? What marked contrasts do you find between the poetry and the
prose of Arnold?

10. _Ruskin_. In what respects is Ruskin "the prophet of modern society"?
Read the first two lectures in _Sesame and Lilies_ and then give Ruskin's
views of labor, wealth, books, education, woman's sphere, and human
society. How does he regard the commercialism of his age? What elements of
style do you find in these lectures? Give the chief resemblances and
differences between Carlyle and Ruskin.

11. Read Mrs. Gaskell's _Cranford_ and describe it, having in mind the
style, the interest, and the characters of the story. How does it compare,
as a picture of country life, with George Eliot's novels?

12. Read Blackmore's _Lorna Doone_ and describe it (as in the question
above). What are the romantic elements in the story? How does it compare
with Scott's romances in style, in plot, in interest, and in truthfulness
to life?



                            CHRONOLOGY
                       _Nineteenth Century_
============================================================================
  HISTORY                        |  LITERATURE
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
                                 | 1825. Macaulay's Essay on Milton
                                 | 1826. Mrs. Browning's early poems
1830. William IV                 | 1830. Tennyson's Poems, Chiefly Lyrical
1832. Reform Bill                |
                                 | 1833. Browning's Pauline
                                 | 1833-1834. Carlyle's Sartor Resartus
                                 | 1836-1865. Dickens's novels
1837. Victoria (_d_. 1901)       | 1837. Carlyle's French Revolution
                                 | 1843. Macaulay's essays
1844. Morse's Telegraph          | 1843-1860. Ruskin's Modern Painters
1846. Repeal of Corn Laws        |
                                 | 1847-1859. Thackeray's important novels
                                 | 1847-1857. Charlotte Brontë's novels
                                 | 1848-1861. Macaulay's History
                                 | 1853. Kingsley's Hypatia
                                 |       Mrs. Gaskell's Cranford
1854. Crimean War                |
                                 | 1853-1855. Matthew Arnold's poems
                                 | 1856. Mrs. Browning's Aurora Leigh
1857. Indian Mutiny              |
                                 | 1858-1876. George Eliot's novels
                                 | 1859-1888. Tennyson's Idylls of the King
                                 | 1859. Darwin's Origin of Species
                                 | 1864. Newman's Apologia
                                 |       Tennyson's Enoch Arden
                                 | 1865-1888. Arnold's Essays in Criticism
1867. Dominion of Canada         |
      established                | 1868. Browning's Ring and the Book
                                 | 1869. Blackmore's Lorna Doone
1870. Government schools         |
      established                |
                                 | 1879. Meredith's The Egoist
1880. Gladstone prime minister   |
                                 | 1883. Stevenson's Treasure Island
                                 | 1885. Ruskin's Praeterita begun
1887. Queen's jubilee            |
                                 | 1889. Browning's last work, Asolando
                                 | 1892. Death of Tennyson
1901. Edward VII                 |
============================================================================


       *       *       *       *       *



GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY

Every chapter in this book includes two lists, one of selected readings,
the other of special works treating of the history and literature of the
period under consideration. The following lists include the books most
useful for general reference work and for supplementary reading.

A knowledge of history is of great advantage in the study of literature. In
each of the preceding chapters we have given a brief summary of historical
events and social conditions, but the student should do more than simply
read these summaries. He should review rapidly the whole history of each
period by means of a good textbook. Montgomery's _English History_ and
Cheyney's _Short History of England_ are recommended, but any other
reliable text-book will serve the purpose.

For literary texts and selections for reading a few general collections,
such as are given below, are useful; but the important works of each author
may now be obtained in excellent and inexpensive school editions. At the
beginning of the course the teacher, or the home student, should write for
the latest catalogue of such publications as the Standard English Classics,
Everyman's Library, etc., which offer a very wide range of reading at small
cost. Nearly every publishing house issues a series of good English books
for school use, and the list is constantly increasing.

_HISTORY_

_Text-books:_ Montgomery's English History; Cheyney's Short History of
England (Ginn and Company).

_General Works:_ Green's Short History of the English People, 1 vol., or A
History of the English People, 4 vols. (American Book Co.).

Traill's Social England, 6 vols. (Putnam).

Bright's History, of England, 5 vols., and Gardiner's Students' History of
England (Longmans).

Gibbins's Industrial History of England, and Mitchell's English Lands,
Letters, and Kings, 5 vols. (Scribner).


Oxford Manuals of English History, Handbooks of English History, and
Kendall's Source Book of English History (Macmillan).

Lingard's History of England until 1688 (revised, 10 vols., 1855) is the
standard Catholic history.

Other histories of England are by Knight, Froude, Macaulay, etc. Special
works on the history of each period are recommended in the preceding
chapters.

_HISTORY OF LITERATURE_

Jusserand's Literary History of the English People, 2 vols. (Putnam).

Ten Brink's Early English Literature, 3 vols. (Holt).

Courthope's History of English Poetry (Macmillan).

The Cambridge History of English Literature, many vols., incomplete
(Putnam).

Handbooks of English Literature, 9 vols. (Macmillan).

Garnett and Gosse's Illustrated History of English Literature, 4 vols.
(Macmillan).

Morley's English Writers, 11 vols. (Cassell), extends through Elizabethan
literature. It is rather complex and not up to date, but has many
quotations from authors studied.

Taine's English Literature (many editions), is brilliant and interesting,
but unreliable.

_LITERARY CRITICISM_

Lowell's Literary Essays.

Hazlitt's Lectures on the English Poets.

Mackail's The Springs of Helicon (a study of English poetry from Chaucer to
Milton).

Dowden's Studies in Literature, and Dowden's Transcripts and Studies.

Minto's Characteristics of English Poets.

Matthew Arnold's Essays in Criticism.

Stevenson's Familiar Studies in Men and Books.

Leslie Stephen's Hours in a Library.

Birrell's Obiter Dicta.

Hales's Folia Litteraria.

Pater's Appreciations.

NOTE. Special works on criticism, the drama, the novel, etc., will be found
in the Bibliographies on pp. 9, 181, etc.


_TEXTS AND HELPS_ (inexpensive school editions).

Standard English Classics, and Athenaeum Press Series (Ginn and Company).

Everyman's Library (Dutton).

Pocket Classics, Golden Treasury Series, etc. (Macmillan).

Belles Lettres Series (Heath).

English Readings Series (Holt).

Riverside Literature Series (Houghton, Mifflin).

Canterbury Classics (Rand, McNally).

Academy Classics (Allyn & Bacon).

Cambridge Literature Series (Sanborn).

Silver Series (Silver, Burdett).

Student's Series (Sibley).

Lakeside Classics (Ainsworth).

Lake English Classics (Scott, Foresman).

Maynard's English Classics (Merrill).

Eclectic English Classics (American Book Co.).

Caxton Classics (Scribner).

The King's Classics (Luce).

The World's Classics (Clarendon Press).

Little Masterpieces Series (Doubleday, Page).

Arber's English Reprints (Macmillan).

New Mediaeval Library (Duffield).

Arthurian Romances Series (Nutt).

Morley's Universal Library (Routledge).

Cassell's National Library (Cassell).

Bohn Libraries (Macmillan).

Temple Dramatists (Macmillan).

Mermaid Series of English Dramatists (Scribner).

NOTE. We have included in the above list all the editions of which we have
any personal knowledge, but there are doubtless others that have escaped
attention.

       *       *       *       *       *

Biography

Dictionary of National Biography, 63 vols. (Macmillan), is the standard.

English Men of Letters Series (Macmillan).

Great Writers Series (Scribner).

Beacon Biographies (Houghton, Mifflin).

Westminster Biographies (Small, Maynard).

Hinchman and Gummere's Lives of Great English Writers (Houghton, Mifflin)
is a good single volume, containing thirty-eight biographies.

NOTE. For the best biographies of individual writers, see the
Bibliographies at the ends of the preceding chapters.

_SELECTIONS_

Manly's English Poetry and Manly's English Prose (Ginn and Company) are the
best single-volume collections, covering the whole field of English
literature.

Pancoast's Standard English Poetry, and Pancoast's Standard English Prose
(Holt).

Oxford Book of English Verse, and Oxford Treasury of English Literature, 3
vols. (Clarendon Press).

Page's British Poets of the Nineteenth Century (Sanborn).

Stedman's Victorian Anthology (Houghton, Mifflin).

Ward's English Poets, 4 vols.; Craik's English Prose Selections, 5 vols.;
Chambers's Encyclopedia of English Literature, etc.

_MISCELLANEOUS_

The Classic Myths in English Literature (Ginn and Company).

Adams's Dictionary of English Literature.

Ryland's Chronological Outlines of English Literature.

Brewer's Reader's Handbook.

Botta's Handbook of Universal Literature.

Ploetz's Epitome of Universal History.

Hutton's Literary Landmarks of London.

Heydrick's How to Study Literature.

For works on the English language see Bibliography of the Norman period, p.
65.

       *       *       *       *       *



INDEX


KEY TO PRONUNCIATION

[=a], as in fate; [)a], as in fat; ä, as in arm; [a:], as in all; [a.], as
in what; â, as in care

[=e], as in mete; [)e], as in met; ê, as in there

[=i], as in ice; [)i], as in it; ï, as in machine

[=o], as in old; [)o], as in not; [o:], as in move; [.o], as in son; ô, as
in horse; [=oo] as in food; [)oo], as in foot

[=u], as in use; [)u], as in up; û, as in fur; [:u], as in rule; [.u], as
in pull

[=y], as in fly; [)y], as in baby

c, as in call; ç, as in mice; ch, as in child; [-c]h, as in school

g, as in go; [.g], as in cage

s, as in saw; [s=], as in is

th, as in thin; th, as in then

x, as in vex; [x=], as in exact.

NOTE. Titles of books, poems, essays, etc., are in _italics_.


_Absalom and Achitophel_ ([=a]-chit'o-fel)
_Abt Vogler_ (äpt v[=o]g'ler)
Actors, in early plays;
  Elizabethan
Addison;
  life;
  works;
  hymns;
  influence;
  style
_Adonais_ (ad-[=o]-n[=a]'is)
Aesc (esk)
Aidan, St. ([=i]'dan)
_Aids to Reflection_
_Alastor_ ([)a]-l[)a]s-tôr)
_Alchemist, The_
_Alexander's Feast_
Alfred, King;
  life and times;
  works
_All for Love_
_Alysoun_, or Alisoun (äl'[)y]-sown or äl'[)y]-zoon), old form of Alice
_Amelia_
_American Taxation_, Burke's speech on
_An Epistle_
_Anatomy of Melancholy_
_Ancren Riwle_ (angk'ren rol)
_Andrea del Sarto_ (än-dr[=a]'yä del sär't[=o])
_Andreas_
Angeln
Angles, the
Anglo-Norman Period;
  literature;
  ballads;
  lyrics;
  summary;
  selections for reading;
  bibliography;
  questions on;
  chronology
_Anglo-Saxon Chronicle_
Anglo-Saxon Period;
  early poetry;
  springs of poetry;
  language;
  Christian writers;
  source books;
  summary;
  selections for reading;
  bibliography;
  questions on;
  chronology
Anglo-Saxons;
  the name;
  life;
  language;
  literature,
_see_ Anglo-Saxon Period.
_Annus Mirabilis_
Anselm
_Apologia_, Newman's
_Apologie for Poetrie_
_Arcadia_
_Areopagitica_ ([)a]r'=[=e]-[)o]p-[)a]-j[)i]t'[)i]-cä)
Arnold, Matthew;
  life;
  poetry;
  prose works;
  characteristics
Art, definition of
Arthurian romances
Artistic period of drama
Artistic quality of literature
Ascham, Roger
Assonance
_Astraea Redux_ ([)a]s-tr[=e]'ä r[=e]'duks)
_Astrophel and Stella_ ([)a]s'tr[=o]-fel)
_Atalanta in Calydon_ ([)a]t-[)a]-l[)a]n'tä, k[)a]l'[)i]-d[)o]n)
Augustan Age, meaning. _See_
  Eighteenth-century literature
_Aurora Leigh_ ([a:]-r[=o]'rä l[=e])
Austen, Jane; life;
  novels; Scott's criticism of

Bacon, Francis; life; works;
  place and influence
Bacon, Roger
Ballad, the
_Ballads and Sonnets_
_Barchester Towers_
_Bard, The_
_Bard of the Dimbovitza_ (dim-bo-vitz'ä),
  Roumanian folk songs
_Battle of Agincourt_ (English, [)a]j'in-k[=o]rt)
_Battle of Brunanburh_
_Battle of the Books_
Baxter, Richard
Beaumont, Francis (b[=o]'mont)
_Becket_
Bede; his history; his account
  of Cædmon
_Bells and Pomegranates_
Benefit of clergy
_Beowulf_ (b[=a]'[=o]-wulf), the poem;
  history; poetical form;
  manuscript of
Beowulf's Mount
Bibliographies, study of literature;
  Anglo-Saxon Period; Norman;
  Chaucer; Revival of Learning;
  Elizabethan; Puritan;
  Restoration; Eighteenth
  century; Romanticism;
  Victorian; general
_Bickerstaff Almanac_
_Biographia Literaria_
Blackmore, Richard
Blake, William; life; works
Blank verse
_Blessed Damozel_
_Blot in the 'Scutcheon, A_
Boethius (b[=o]-[=e]'thi-us)
Boileau (bwa-l[=o]'), French critic
_Boke of the Duchesse_
_Book of Martyrs_
_Borough, The_
Boswell, James. _See also_ Johnson
Boy actors
Breton, Nicholas
Brontë, Charlotte and Emily
Browne, Thomas; works
Browning, Mrs. Elizabeth Barrett
Browning, Robert; life;
  works; obscurity of; as
  a teacher; compared with
  Shakespeare; with Tennyson;
  periods of work; soul
  studies; place and message
_Brut_, Layamon's; quotation from
Brutus, alleged founder of Britain
Bulwer Lytton
Bunyan, John; life; works;
  his style
Burke, Edmund; life; works;
  analysis of his orations
Burney, Fanny (Madame D'Arblay)
Burns, Robert; life; poetry;
  Carlyle's essay on
Burton, Robert
Butler, Samuel
Byron; life; works;
  compared with Scott

Cædmon (k[)a]d'mon), life; works;
  his _Paraphrase_; school of
_Cain_
_Callista_
Calvert, Raisley
Camden, William
_Campaign, The_
Campion, Thomas
_Canterbury Tales_; plan of;
  prologue; Dryden's criticism
  of
Canynge's coffer
Carew, Thomas
Carlyle; life; works;
  style and message
Carols, in early plays
_Casa Guidi Windows_ (kä'sä gw[=e]'d[=e])
_Castell of Perseverance_
_Castle of Indolence_
_Cata_
Cavalier poets
Caxton; specimen of printing
Celtic legends
_Chanson de Gestes_
_Chanson de Roland_
Chapman, George; his _Homer_;
  Keats's sonnet on
Chatterton, Thomas
Chaucer, how to read; life;
  works; form of his poetry;
  melody; compared with Spenser
Chaucer, Age of: history; writers;
  summary; selections for reading;
  bibliography; questions on; chronology
Chester plays
Cheyne Row
_Childe Harold_
_Child's Garden of Verses_
Chocilaicus (k[=o]-kil-[=a]'[=i]-cus)
_Christ, The_, of Cynewulf
_Christabel_
_Christian Year_
_Christmas Carol, A_
Christ's Hospital, London
_Chronicle, The Anglo-Saxon_
Chronicle plays
Chronicles, riming
Chronology: Anglo-Saxon Period;
  Norman-French; Age of Chaucer;
  Revival of Learning; Elizabethan;
  Puritan; Restoration; Eighteenth Century;
  Romanticism; Victorian
_Citizen of the World_
_Clarissa_
Classic and classicism
Classic influence on the drama
_Cloister and the Hearth_
Clough, Arthur Hugh
_Cockaygne, Land of_ (k[=o]-k[=a]n')
Coleridge; life; works; critiqal writings
Collier, Jeremy
Collins, William
Comedy, definition; first English; of the court
_Complete Angler, The_
_Comus, Masque of_
_Conciliation with America_, Burke's speech
_Confessions of an English Opium-Eater_
_Consolations of Philosophy_
_Cotter's Saturday Night_
Couplet, the
Court comedies
Covenant of 1643
Coventry plays
Cowley, Abraham
Cowper, William; life; works
Crabbe, George
_Cranford_
Crashaw, Richard
Critic, meaning of
Critical writing, Dryden; Coleridge;
  in Age of Romanticism;
  in Victorian Age
Criticism, Arnold's definition
Cross, John Walter
_Crown of Wild Olive_
_Culture and Anarchy_
_Curse of Jfehama_ (k[=e]-hä'mä)
_Cursor Mundi_
Cycles, of plays; of romances
Cynewulf (kin'[)e]-wulf), 36-38
_Cynthia's Revels_ (sin'thi-ä)

Daniel, Samuel
_Daniel Deronda_
D'Arblay, Madame (Fanny Burney)
Darwin and _Darwinism_
Death, Raleigh's apostrophe to
_Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_
_Defense of Poesie_
_Defensio pro Populo Anglicano_
Defoe; life; works
Dekker, Thomas
_Delia_
Democracy and Romanticism;
  in Victorian Age
_Dear's Lament_
De Quincey; life; works; style
_De Sapientia Veterum_
_Deserted Village, The_
_Dethe of Blanche the Duchesse_
_Diary_, Evelyn's; Pepys's; selections from
Dickens;
   life;
   works;
   general plan of novels;
   his characters;
   his public;
   limitations
_Dictionary_, Johnson's
_Discoverie of Guiana_ (g[=e]-ä'nä)
_Divina Commedia_ (d[=e]-v[=e]'nä kom-m[=a]'d[=e]-ä)
_Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_
Domestic drama
Donne, John
  his poetry
Dotheboys Hall (do-the-boys)
Drama, in Elizabethan Age
  origin,
  periods of,
  miracle and mystery plays,
  interludes,
  classical influence on,
  unities,
  the English,
  types of,
  decline of.
  _See also_ Elizabethan Age, Shakespeare,
  Jonson, Marlowe, etc.
Dramatic unities
Dramatists, methods of _See_
  Shakespeare, Marlowe, etc.
_Drapier's Letters_
Drayton, Michael
_Dream of Gerontius, The_ (j[)e]-r[)o]n'sh[)i]-us)
Dryden
  life,
  works,
  influence,
  criticism of _Canterbury Tales_
_Duchess of Malfi_ (mäl'f[=e])
_Dunciad, The_ (dun's[)i]-ad)

Ealhild, queen ([=e]-äl'hild)
_Earthly Paradise_
_Eastward Ho_!
Economic conditions, in Age of Romanticism
Edgeworth, Maria
_Edward II_
_Egoist, The_
Eighteenth-Century Literature:
  history of the period,
  literary characteristics,
  the Classic Age,
  Augustan writers,
  romantic revival,
  the first novelists,
  summary,
  selections for reading,
  bibliography,
  questions,
  chronology,
_Eikon Basilike_ ([=i]'kon b[)a]-sil'[)i]-k[=e])
Eikonoklastes ([=i]-kon-[=o]-klas't[=e]z)
_Elegy_, Gray's
_Elene_
Elizabethan Age
  history,
  non-dramatic poets,
  first dramatists,
  Shakespeare's predecessors,
  Shakespeare,
  Shakespeare's contemporaries and successors,
  prose writers,
  summary,
  selections,
  bibliography,
  questions,
  chronology
_Endymion_
_English Bards and Scotch Reviewers_
_English Humorists_
_English Idyls_
Eormanric ([=e]-or'man-ric)
_Epicaene_ ([)e]p'[=i]-sen), or _The Silent Woman_
_Epithalamium_ ([)e]p-[)i]-th[=a]-l[=a]'m[)i]-um)
Erasmus
_Essay concerning Human Understanding_
_Essay of Dramatic Poesy_
_Essay on Burns_
_Essay on Criticism_
_Essay on Man_
_Essay on Milton_
_Essays_,
  Addison's,
  Bacon's
_Essays in Criticism_
_Essays of Elia_ ([=e]'l[)i]-ä)
_Ethics of the Dust_
_Euphues_ and euphuism ([=u]'f[=u]-[=e]z)
Evans, Mary Ann. _See_ George Eliot
Evelyn, John
_Everlasting No_, and _Yea, The_
_Every Man in His Humour_
_Everyman_
_Excursion, The_
_Exeter Book_

Faber, Frederick
_Fables_, Dryden's
_Faery Queen_
_Fall of Princes_
_Faust_ (foust), _Faustus_ (fas'tus)
_Ferrex and Porrex_
Fielding,
  novels,
  characteristics
_Fight at Finnsburgh_
_Fingal_ (fing'gal)
First-folio Shakespeare
Fletcher, Giles
Fletcher, John
Ford, John
Formalism
_Four Georges, The_
Foxe, John
_Fragments of Ancient Poetry_
French influence in Restoration literature
French language in England
French Revolution, influence of
_French Revolution_, Carlyle's
Fuller, Thomas

_Gammer Gurton's Needle_
Gaskell, Mrs. Elizabeth
_Gawain and the Green Knight_ (gä'-w[=a]n)
Gawain cycle of romances, 57
_Gebir_ (g[=a]-b[=e]r')
Geoffrey of Monmouth (jef'r[)i])
George Eliot;
  life;
  works;
  characteristics;
  as a moralist
Gest (_or_ jest) books
_Geste of Robin Hood_
Gibbon,
  his history
_Gifts of God, The_
Girondists (j[)i]-ron'dists)
Gleemen, _or_ minstrels
Goldsmith;
  life;
  works
_Good Counsel_
_Gorboduc_ (gôr'b[=o]-duk)
_Gorgeous Gallery_
Gower
_Grace Abounding_
Gray, Thomas;
  life;
  works
_Greatest English Poets_
Greene, Robert
Gregory, Pope
Grendel; story of;
  mother of
Grubb Street
_Gulliver's Travels_
_Gull's Hornbook_

Hakluyt, Richard (h[)a]k'loot)
Hallam,
  his criticism of Bacon
Hardy, Thomas
Hastings, battle of
Hathaway, Anne
Hazlitt, William
Hengist (h[)e]ng'gist)
_Henry Esmond_
Herbert, George;
  life;
  poetry of
_Hero and Leander_
_Heroes and Hero Worship_
Heroic couplet
_Heroic Stanzas_
Herrick, Robert
_Hesperides and Noble Numbers_ (h[)e]s-p[)e]r'[)i]-d[=e]z)
Heywood, John
Heywood, Thomas
Hilda, abbess
Hildgund (hild'gund)
Historical novel
_History, of England_, Macaulay's;
  _of Frederick the Great_, Carlyle's;
  _of Henry VIII_, Bacon's;
  _of the Reformation in Scotland_, Knox's;
  _of the Wortd_, Raleigh's
Hnæf (n[e=]f)
Hobbes, Thomas
Holofernes (hol-[=o]-fer'n[=e]z) in _Judith_
_Holy and Profane State_
_Holy Living_
_Holy War_
_Homer_, Chapman's;
  Dryden's;
  Pope's;
  Cowper's
Hooker, Richard
Hooker, Thomas
_Hours in a Library_
_Hours of Idleness_
_House of Fame_
_House of Life_
Hrothgar (r[)o]th'gar)
_Hudibras_ (h[=u]'d[)i]-bras)
Humanism
_Humphrey Clinker_
Hunt, Leigh
_Husband's Message_
Huxley,
Hygelac (h[=i]-j[=e]'lak)
Hymn book, first English
_Hymn to Intellectual Beauty_
_Hymns_, Addison's;
  Cowper's
_Hypatia_ (h[=i]-p[=a]'shia)
_Hyperion_ (h[=i]-p[=e]'r[)i]-on)

Idealism of Victorian Age
Ideals
Idols, of Bacon
_Idylls of the King_
_Il Penseroso_ (il pen-s[)e]-r[=o]'s[=o])
_Iliad_, Pope's translation;
  Chapman's;
  Dryden's
_Imaginary Conversations_
_Impeachment of Warren Hastings_
_In Memoriam_
_Instauratio Magna_ (in-sta-r[=a]'shi-o)
Interludes
_Intimations of Immortality_

Jacobean poets
_Jane Eyre_ (âr)
Jeffrey, Francis
Jest (_or_ gest) books
_Jew of Malta_
_John Gilpin_
Johnson, Samuel; life;
  works; his conversations;
  Boswell's _Life of Johnson_
_Jonathan Wild_
Jonson, Ben; life; works
_Joseph Andrews_
_Journal of the Plague Year_
_Journal to Stella_
_Judith_
_Juliana_

Keats; life; works;
  place in literature
Kilmarnock Burns, the
_Kings' Treasuries_
Kingsley, Charles
_Knight's Tale, The_
Knox, John
_Kubla Khan_ (kob'lä kän)
Kyd, Thomas

_L'Allegro_ (läl-[=a]'gr[=o])
_Lady of the Lake_
Lake poets, the
Lamb, Charles; life; works;
  style
Lamb, Mary
_Lamia_ (l[=a]'mi-ä)
_Land of Cockaygne_ (k[)o]-kän')
_Land of Dreams_
Landor, Walter Savage; life;
  works
Langland, William
Language, our first speech; dual
  character of; Teutonic origin
_Last Days of Pompeii_ (pom-p[=a]'y[=e])
Law, Hooker's idea of
_Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity,_
_Lay Sermons_
Layamon
_Lays of Ancient Rome_
_Lead, Kindly Light_
_Lectures on Shakespeare_
_Legends of Goode Wimmen_
_Leviathan_
Lewes, George Henry
_Liberty of Prophesying_
Life, compared to a sea voyage
_Life of Johnson_
_Life of Savage_
Lindsay, David
Literary Club, the
Literary criticism. _See also_
  Critical writing.
_Literary Reminiscences_
Literature, definition; qualities;
  tests; object in studying; importance;
  Goethe's definition;
  spirit of modern
_Literature and Dogma_
_Lives_, Plutarch's; Walton's
_Lives of the Poets_
Locke, John
Lockhart, John
_Lorna Doone_
_Lost Leader, The_
Lovelace, Richard
_Lycidas_ (lis'[)i]-das)
Lydgate, John
Lyly, John (lil'[)i])
_Lyra Apostolica_
_Lyrical Ballads_
Lytton, Edward Bulwer

Macaulay; life; works;
  characteristics
Macpherson, James (mak-fer'son)
Magazines, the modern
_Maldon, The Battle of_
Malory
_Mandeville's Travels_
_Manfred_
Marlowe; life; works;
  and Milton; and Shakespeare
_Marmion_
Marvell, Andrew
Massinger, Philip
Matter of France, Rome, and Britain
Melodrama
_Memoirs of a Cavalier_
Meredith, George
_Merlin and the Gleam_
Metaphysical poets
Metrical romances
Middleton, Thomas
_Miles Gloriosus_ (m[=e]'les gl[=o]-r[)i]-[=o]'s[u:]s)
_Mill on the Floss_
Milton; life; early or Horton
  poems; prose works;
  later poetry; and Shakespeare;
  Wordsworth's sonnet on
_Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border_
Miracle plays
_Mirror for Magistrates_
_Mr. Badman, Life and Death of_
Modern literature, spirit of
_Modern Painters_
_Modest Proposal, A_
_Moral Epistles_
Moral period of the drama
Moral purpose in Victorian literature
Morality plays
More, Hannah
More, Thomas
Morris, William
_Morte d'Arthur_ (mort där'ther)
_Mother Hubbard's Tale_
_Mulèykeh_ (m[=u]-l[=a]'k[)a])
_My Last Duchess_
_Mysteries of Udolpho, The_ ([=u]-dol'f[=o])
Mystery plays

_New Atalantis_
_Newcomes, The_
Newman, Cardinal; life;
  prose works; poems;
  style
Newspapers, the first
_Nibelungenlied_ (n[=e]'b[)e]-lung-en-l[=e]d)
_Noah, Play of_
Norman Conquest
Norman pageantry
Norman period. _See_ Anglo-Norman
Normans;
  union with Saxons;
  literature of
North, Christopher (John Wilson)
North, Thomas
Northanger Abbey (north'[=a]n-jer)
_Northern Antiquities_
Northumbrian literature; decline
  of; how saved
Novel, meaning and history;
  precursors of; discovery of
  modern
Novelists, the first English.
  _See_ Scott, Dickens, etc.
_Novum Organum_ (or'g[)a]-num)

_Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity_
_Ode to Dejection_
_Ode to the West Wind_
Odes, Pindaric
_Odyssey_, Pope's; Chapman's;
  Dryden's
_Old Fortunatus_ (for-t[=u]-n[=a]'tus)
_Oliver Cromwell_, Carlyle's
_Oliver Twist_
_Origin of Species_
_Orlando Furioso_ (or-lan'd[=o] foo-r[=e]-[=o]'s[=o])
Orm, _or_ Orme; his _Ormulum_
Orosius ([=o]-r[=o]'si-us), his history
Ossian (osh'ian) and Ossianic poems
_Owl and Nightingale, The_
Oxford movement

_P's, The Four_
_Palamon and Arcite_ (pal'a-mon, är'-s[=i]te)
_Pamela_ (pam'e-lä)
Pantisocracy (pan-t[=i]-sok'r[=a]-se), of Coleridge,
  Southey, etc.
_Paradise Lost_
_Paradise Regained_
_Paradyse of Daynty Devises_
_Paraphrase_, of Cædmon
_Parish Register, The_
_Pauline_
_Pearl, The_
_Pelham_
_Pendennis_
Pepys, Samuel (pep'is, peeps, pips)
Percy, Thomas
_Peregrine Pickle_ (per'e-grin)
_Pericles and Aspasia_ (per'i-kl[=e]z, as-p[=a]'shi-ä)
Philistines, the
_Phoenix_ (f[=e]'nix)
_Pickwick Papers_
_Piers Plowman_ (peers)
_Pilgrim's Progress_
Pindaric odes (pin-där'ic)
_Pippa Passes_
_Plain Man's Pathway to Heaven_
Plutarch's _Lives_
_Poems by Two Brothers_
_Poetaster, The_
_Polyolbion_ (pol-[)i]-ol'b[)i]-on)
Pope, Alexander; life;
  works
Porter, Jane
_Practice of Piety_
_Praeterita_ (pr[=e]-ter'[)i]-tä)
_Praise of Folly_
_Prelude, The_
_Pre-Raphaelites_ (rä'f[=a]-el-ites)
_Pride and Prejudice_
_Princess, The_
_Prometheus Unbound_ (pr[=o]-m[=e]'th[=u]s)
Prose development in eighteenth century
Pseudo-classicism (s[=u]'d[=o])
Purchas, Samuel; _Purchas His
  Pilgrimes_
Puritan Age: history; literary
  characteristics; poets;
  prose writers; compared with
  Elizabethan; summary;
  selections for reading; bibliography,
  questions;
  chronology
Puritan movement
Puritans, wrong ideas of

Queen Mab, in _Romeo and Juliet_
_Queen's Gardens_

_Rabbi Ben Ezra_
Radcliffe, Mrs. Anne
Raleigh, Walter
_Ralph Royster Doyster_
_Rambler_ essays
_Rape of the Lock_
Reade, Charles
Realism
_Recluse, The_
_Reflections on the French Revolution_
_Religio Laici_
_Religio Medici_
Religious period of the drama
_Reliques of Ancient English Poetry_
_Reminiscences_, Carlyle's
_Remorse_
Renaissance, the (re-n[=a]'säns, r[=e]'n[=a]s-sans, etc.)
Restoration Period: history; literary
  characteristics; writers;
  summary; selections for
  reading; bibliography;
  questions; chronology
Revival of Learning Period: history;
  literature; summary;
  selections for reading; bibliography;
  questions; chronology
_Revolt of Islam_
Revolution, French; of
  1688; age of
Richardson, Samuel; novels of
_Rights of Man_
_Rime of the Ancient Alariner_
Rime Royal
_Ring and the Book, The_
_Robin Hood_
_Robinson Crusoe_
_Roderick_
_Roderick Random_
Romance; Greek Romances
Romance languages
_Romance of the Rose_
Romantic comedy and tragedy
Romantic enthusiasm
Romantic poetry
Romanticism, Age of; history;
  literary characteristics;
  poets; prose writers; summary;
  selections for reading;
  bibliography; questions;
  chronology
Romanticism, meaning
_Romola_
_Rosalynde_
Rossetti, Christina (ros-set't[=e])
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel
_Rowley Papers_
Royal Society
Runes
Ruskin; life; works;
  characteristics; message

Sackville, Thomas
_St. Catherine, Play of_
St. George's Guild
_Saints' Everlasting Rest_
_Samson Agonistes_ (ag-o-nis't[=e]z)
_Sartor Resartus_ (sar'tor re-sar'tus)
  Satire; of Swift; of Thackeray
Saxon. _See_ Anglo-Saxon
_School of Shooting_
Science, in Victorian Age
Scop, _or_ poet (skop)
Scott, Walter; life; poetry;
  novels; criticism of Jane
  Austen
_Scottish Chiefs_
Scyld (skild), story of
Sea, names of, in Anglo-Saxon, 25
_Seafarer, The_
_Seasons, The_
Selections for reading:
  Anglo-Saxon period;
  Norman;
  Chaucer;
  Revival of Learning;
  Elizabethan;
  Puritan;
  Restoration;
  Eighteenth Century;
  Romanticism;
  Victorian
_Sentimental Journey_
_Sesame and Lilies_ (ses'a-m[=e])
Shakespeare;
  life;
  works;
  four periods;
  sources of plays;
  classification of plays;
  doubtful plays;
  poems;
  place and influence
_She Stoops to Conquer_
Shelley;
  life;
  works;
  compared with Wordsworth
_Shepherds' Book_
_Shepherd's Calendar_
Shirley, James
_Shoemaker's Holiday, The_
_Short View of the English Stage_
Sidney, Philip
_Sigurd the Volsung_
_Silas Marner_
_Silent Woman, The_
_Sir Charles Grandison_
Skelton, John
_Sketches by Boz_
Smollett, Tobias
Social development in eighteenth century
_Sohrab and Rustum_ (soo'rhab, _or_ s[=o]'hrab)
_Songs of Innocence_, and _Songs of Experience_
Sonnet, introduction of
_Sonnets_,
  of Shakespeare;
  of Milton
_Sonnets from the Portuguese_
Southey;
  works
_Spanish Gypsy_
_Spanish Tragedy_
_Specimens of English Dramatic Poets_
_Spectator, The_
Spenser;
  life;
  works;
  characteristics;
  compared with Chaucer
Spenserian poets
Spenserian stanza
Stage, in early plays;
  Elizabethan
Steele, Richard
Stephen, Leslie
Sterne, Lawrence
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Style, a test of literature
Suckling, John
Surrey, Henry Howard, Earl of
_Swan, The_
Swift;
  life;
  works;
  satire;
  characteristics
Swinburne
_Sylva_
Symonds, John Addington

Tabard Inn
_Tale of a Tub_
_Tale of Two Cities_
_Tales from Shakespeare_
_Tales in Verse_
_Tales of the Hall_
_Tam o' Shanter_
_Tamburlaine_ (tam'bur-lane)
_Task, The_
_Tatler, The_
Taylor, Jeremy
_Temora_ (te-m[=o]'rä)
_Tempest, The_
_Temple, The_
Tennyson;
  life;
  works;
  characteristics;
  message
_Tenure of Kings and Magistrates_
_Terra_
Tests of literature
Teufelsdroeckh (toy'felz-droek)
Thackeray;
  life;
  works;
  characteristics;
  style;
  and Dickens
_Thaddeus of Warsaw_
_Thalaba_ (täl-ä'bä)
Theater, the first
Thomson, James
_Thyrsis_ (ther'sis)
_Timber_
_Tintern Abbey_
_Tirocinium_ (t[=i]-r[=o]-sin'[)i]-um), _or A Review of Schools_
_Tom Jones_
Tories and Whigs
_Tottel's Miscellany_
Townley plays
_Toxophilus_ (tok-sof'[)i]-lus)
Tractarian movement
_Tracts for the Times_
Tragedy, definition,
  of blood
Transition poets
_Traveler, The_
_Treasure Island_
_Treatises on Government_
_Tristram Shandy_
_Troilus and Cressida_ (tr[=o]'[)i]-lus, kres'-[)i]-dä)
Trollope, Anthony
Troyes, Treaty of
_Truth_, or _Good Counsel_
Tyndale, William (tin'dal)

Udall, Nicholas ([=u]'dal)
_Udolpho_ ([=u]-dol'f[=o])
_Unfortunate Traveller, The_
Universality, a test of literature
University wits
_Unto This Last_
_Utopia_

_Vanity Fair_
_Vanity of Human Wishes_
Vaughan, Henry
_Vercelli Book_
_Vicar of Wakefield_
Vice, the, in old plays
Victorian Age,
  history,
  literary characteristics,
  poets,
  novelists,
  essayists, etc.,
  spirit of,
  summary,
  selections for reading,
  bibliography,
  questions,
  chronology
_View of the State of Ireland_
_Village, The_
_Vision of the Rood_
_Volpone_ (vol-p[=o]'ne)
_Voyages_, Hakluyt's

Wakefield plays
_Waldere_ (väl-d[=a]'re, _or_ väl'dare)
Waller, Edmund
Walton, Izaak
_Waverley_
_Wealth of Nations_
_Weather, The_, play of
Webster, John
Wedmore, Treaty of
_Westward Ho_
Whigs and Tories
Whitby (hwit'b[)i])
_Widsith_ (vid'sith)
Wiglaf (vig'läf)
Wilson, John (Christopher North),
Wither, George
Women, in literature
Wordsworth,
  life,
  poetry,
  poems of nature,
  poems of life,
  last works
Wordsworth, Dorothy
_Worthies of England_
_Wuthering Heights_ (wuth'er-ing)
Wyatt (w[=i]'at), Thomas
Wyclif (wik'lif)
Wyrd (vird), or fate

York plays


Footnote 1:   From _The Bard of the Dimbovitza_, First Series, p. 73.

Footnote 2:   There is a mystery about this old hero which stirs our
imagination, but which is never explained. It refers, probably, to some
legend of the Anglo-Saxons which we have supplied from other sources, aided
by some vague suggestions and glimpses of the past in the poem itself.

Footnote 3:   This is not the Beowulf who is hero of the poem.

Footnote 4:   _Beowulf_, ll. 26-50, a free rendering to suggest the
alliteration of the original.

Footnote 5:   Grendel, of the Eoten (giant) race, the death shadow, the
mark stalker, the shadow ganger, is also variously called god's foe, fiend
of hell, Cain's brood, etc. It need hardly be explained that the latter
terms are additions to the original poem, made, probably, by monks who
copied the manuscript. A belief in Wyrd, the mighty power controlling the
destinies of men, is the chief religious motive of the epic. In line 1056
we find a curious blending of pagan and Christian belief, where Wyrd is
withstood by the "wise God."

Footnote 6:   Summary of ll. 710-727. We have not indicated in our
translation (or in quotations from Garnett, Morley, Brooke, etc.) where
parts of the text are omitted.

Footnote 7:   Grendel's mother belongs also to the Eoten (giant) race. She
is called _brimwylf_ (sea wolf), _merewif_ (sea woman), _grundwyrgen_
(bottom master), etc.

Footnote 8:   From Garnett's _Beowulf_, ll. 1384-1394.

Footnote 9:   From Morley's version, ll. 1357-1376.

Footnote 10:   _Beowulf_, ll. 2417-2423, a free rendering.

Footnote 11:   Lines 2729-2740, a free rendering.

Footnote 12:   Morley's version, ll. 2799-2816.

Footnote 13:   Lines 3156-3182 (Morley's version).

Footnote 14:   Probably to the fourth century, though some parts of the
poem must have been added later. Thus the poet says (II. 88-102) that he
visited Eormanric, who died _cir_. 375, and Queen Ealhhild whose father,
Eadwin, died _cir_. 561. The difficulty of fixing a date to the poem is
apparent. It contains several references to scenes and characters in
_Beowulf_.

Footnote 15:   Lines 135-143 (Morley's version).

Footnote 16:   A lyric is a short poem reflecting some personal emotion,
like love or grief. Two other Anglo-Saxon poems, "The Wife's Complaint" and
"The Husband's Message," belong to this class.

Footnote 17:   First strophe of Brooke's version, _History of Early English
Literature_

Footnote 18:   _Seafarer_, Part I, Iddings' version, in _Translations from
Old English Poetry._

Footnote 19:   It is an open question whether this poem celebrates the
fight at which Hnæf, the Danish leader, fell, or a later fight led by
Hengist, to avenge Hnæf's death.

Footnote 20:   Brooke's translation, _History of Early English Literature_,
For another early battle-song see Tennyson's "Battle of Brunanburh."

Footnote 21:   William Camden (1551-1623), one of England's earliest and
greatest antiquarians. His first work, _Britannia_, a Latin history of
England, has been called "the common sun whereat our modern writers have
all kindled their little torches."

Footnote 22:   From Iddings' version of _The Seafarer_.

Footnote 23:   From _Andreas_, ll. 511 ff., a free translation. The whole
poem thrills with the Old Saxon love of the sea and of ships.

Footnote 24:   From _Beowulf_, ll. 1063 ff., a free translation.

Footnote 25:   Translated from _The Husband's Message_, written on a piece
of bark. With wonderful poetic insight the bark itself is represented as
telling its story to the wife, from the time when the birch tree grew
beside the sea until the exiled man found it and stripped the bark and
carved on its surface a message to the woman he loved. This first of all
English love songs deserves to rank with Valentine's description of Silvia:

               Why, man, she is mine own,
    And I as rich in having such a jewel
    As twenty seas, if all their sand were pearl,
    The water nectar and the rocks pure gold.
_Two Gentlemen of Verona_, II, 4.

Footnote 26:   From the _Anglo-Saxon Chronicle_, record of the year 457.

Footnote 27:   According to Sweet the original home of the Aryans is placed
in central or northern Europe, rather than in Asia, as was once assumed.
See _The History of Language_, p. 103.

Footnote 28:   "Cædmon's Hymn," Cook's version, in _Translations from Old
English Poetry_.

Footnote 29:   _Ecclesiastical History_, IV, xxiv.

Footnote 30:   Genesis, 112-131 (Morley).

Footnote 31:   Exodus, 155 ff. (Brooke).

Footnote 32:   Runes were primitive letters of the old northern alphabet.
In a few passages Cynewulf uses each rune to represent not only a letter
but a word beginning with that letter. Thus the rune-equivalent of C stands
for _cene_ (keen, courageous), Y for _yfel_ (evil, in the sense of
wretched), N for _nyd_ (need), W for _ivyn_ (joy), U for _ur_ (our), L for
_lagu_ (lake), F for _feoh_ (fee, wealth). Using the runes equivalent to
these seven letters, Cynewulf hides and at the same time reveals his name
in certain verses of _The Christ_, for instance:

    Then the _Courage-hearted_ quakes, when the King (Lord) he hears
    Speak to those who once on earth but obeyed Him weakly,
    While as yet their _Yearning fain_ and their _Need_
    most easily Comfort might discover.... Gone is then the _Winsomeness_
    Of the earth's adornments! What to _Us_ as men belonged
    Of the joys of life was locked, long ago, in _Lake-flood_.
    All the _Fee_ on earth.
See Brooke's _History of Early English Literature_, pp. 377-379, or _The
Christ of Cynewulf_, ed. by Cook, also by Gollancz.

Footnote 33:
    My robe is noiseless while I tread the earth,
    Or tarry 'neath the banks, or stir the shallows;
    But when these shining wings, this depth of air,
    Bear me aloft above the bending shores
    Where men abide, and far the welkin's strength
    Over the multitudes conveys me, then
    With rushing whir and clear melodious sound
    My raiment sings. And like a wandering spirit
    I float unweariedly o'er flood and field.
(Brougham's version, in _Transl. from Old Eng. Poetry_.)

Footnote 34:   The source of _Andreas_ is an early Greek legend of St.
Andrew that found its way to England and was probably known to Cynewulf in
some brief Latin form, now lost.

Footnote 35:   Our two chief sources are the famous Exeter Book, in Exeter
Cathedral, a collection of Anglo-Saxon poems presented by Bishop Leofric
(_c_. 1050), and the Vercelli Book, discovered in the monastery of
Vercelli, Italy, in 1822. The only known manuscript of _Beowulf_ was
discovered _c_. 1600, and is now in the Cotton Library of the British
Museum. All these are fragmentary copies, and show the marks of fire and of
hard usage. The Exeter Book contains _the Christ, Guthlac, the Phoenix,
Juliana, Widsith, The Seafarer, Deor's Lament, The Wife's Complaint, The
Lover's Message_, ninety-five Riddles, and many short hymns and
fragments,--an astonishing variety for a single manuscript.

Footnote 36:   From Alfred's _Boethius_.

Footnote 37:   It is not certain that the translation of Bede is the work
of Alfred.

Footnote 38:   See _Translations from Old English Poetry_. Only a brief
account of the fight is given in the _Chronicle_. The song known as "The
Battle of Maldon," or "Byrhtnoth's Death," is recorded in another
manuscript.

Footnote 39:   This is an admirable little book, containing the cream of
Anglo-Saxon poetry, in free translations, with notes. Translations from
_Old English Prose_ is a companion volume.

Footnote 40:   For full titles and publishers of general reference books,
and for a list of inexpensive texts and helps, see General Bibliography at
the end of this book.

Footnote 41:   The chief object of these questions is not to serve as a
review, or to prepare for examination, but rather to set the student
thinking for himself about what he has read. A few questions of an advanced
nature are inserted which call for special study and research in
interesting fields.

Footnote 42:   A Romance language is one whose basis is Latin,--not the
classic language of literature, but a vulgar or popular Latin spoken in the
military camps and provinces. Thus Italian, Spanish, and French were
originally different dialects of the vulgar Latin, slightly modified by the
mingling of the Roman soldiers with the natives of the conquered provinces.

Footnote 43:   See p. 51.

Footnote 44:   It is interesting to note that all the chroniclers of the
period, whether of English or Norman birth, unite in admiration of the
great figures of English history, as it was then understood. Brutus,
Arthur, Hengist, Horsa, Edward the Confessor, and William of Normandy are
all alike set down as English heroes. In a French poem of the thirteenth
century, for instance, we read that "there is no land in the world where so
many good kings and saints have lived as in the isle of the English ...
such as the strong and brave Arthur, Edmund, and Cnut." This national poem,
celebrating the English Edward, was written in French by a Norman monk of
Westminster Abbey, and its first heroes are a Celt, a Saxon, and a Dane.
(See Jusserand, _Literary History of the English People_, I, 112 ff.)

Footnote 45:   _English Literature from the Norman Conquest to Chaucer_.

Footnote 46:   Anselm was an Italian by birth, but wrote his famous work
while holding the see of Canterbury.

Footnote 47:   During the Roman occupancy of Britain occurred a curious
mingling of Celtic and Roman traditions. The Welsh began to associate their
national hero Arthur with Roman ancestors; hence the story of Brutus,
great-grandson of Aeneas, the first king of Britain, as related by Geoffrey
and Layamon.

Footnote 48:   Probably a Latin copy of Bede.

Footnote 49:   Wace's translation of Geoffrey.

Footnote 50:   Only one word in about three hundred and fifty is of French
origin. A century later Robert Mannyng uses one French word in eighty,
while Chaucer has one in six or seven. This includes repetitions, and is a
fair estimate rather than an exact computation.

Footnote 51:   The matter of Britain refers strictly to the Arthurian, i.e.
the Welsh romances; and so another division, the matter of England, may be
noted. This includes tales of popular English heroes, like Bevis of
Hampton, Guy of Warwick, Horn Child, etc.

Footnote 52:   According to mediæval literary custom these songs were
rarely signed. Later, when many songs were made over into a long poem, the
author signed his name to the entire work, without indicating what he had
borrowed

Footnote 53:   An English book in which such romances were written was
called a Gest or Jest Book. So also at the beginning of _Cursor Mundi_
(_c_. 1320) we read:

    Men yernen jestis for to here
    And romaunce rede in diverse manere,

and then follows a summary of the great cycles of romance, which we are
considering.

Footnote 54:   Tennyson goes farther than Malory in making Gawain false and
irreverent. That seems to be a mistake; for in all the earliest romances
Gawain is, next to Arthur, the noblest of knights, the most loved and
honored of all the heroes of the Round Table.

Footnote 55:   There were various French versions of the story; but it came
originally from the Irish, where the hero was called Cuchulinn.

Footnote 56:   It is often alleged that in this romance we have a very
poetical foundation for the Order of the Garter, which was instituted by
Edward III, in 1349; but the history of the order makes this extremely
doubtful. The reader will be chiefly interested in comparing this romance
with _Beowulf_, for instance, to see what new ideals have taken root in
England.

Footnote 57:   Originally Cockaygne (variously spelled) was intended to
ridicule the mythical country of Avalon, somewhat as Cervantes' _Don
Quixote_ later ridicules the romances of chivalry. In Luxury Land
everything was good to eat; houses were built of dainties and shingled with
cakes; buttered larks fell instead of rain; the streams ran with good wine;
and roast geese passed slowly down the streets, turning themselves as they
went.

Footnote 58:   Child's _English and Scottish Popular Ballads_ is the most
scholarly and complete collection in our language. Gummere's _Old English
Ballads_ is a good short work. Professor Kittredge's Introduction to the
Cambridge edition of Child's _Ballads_ is the best summary of a very
difficult subject. For an extended discussion of the literary character of
the ballad, see Gummere's _The Popular Ballad_.

Footnote 59:   little bird.

Footnote 60:   in her language.

Footnote 61:   I live

Footnote 62:   fairest

Footnote 63:   I am

Footnote 64:   power, bondage.

Footnote 65:   a pleasant fate I have attained.

Footnote 66:   I know

Footnote 67:   gone

Footnote 68:   lit, alighted

Footnote 69:   For titles and publishers of reference books see General
Bibliography at the end of this book.

Footnote 70:   The reader may perhaps be more interested in these final
letters, which are sometimes sounded and again silent, if he remembers that
they represent the decaying inflections of our old Anglo-Saxon speech.

Footnote 71:   _House of Fame_, II, 652 ff. The passage is more or less
autobiographical.

Footnote 72:   _Legend of Good Women_, Prologue, ll. 29 ff.

Footnote 73:   wealth.

Footnote 74:   the crowd.

Footnote 75:   success.

Footnote 76:   blinds.

Footnote 77:   act.

Footnote 78:   trouble.

Footnote 79:   i.e. the goddess Fortune.

Footnote 80:   kick.

Footnote 81:   awl.

Footnote 82:   judge.

Footnote 83:   For the typography of titles the author has adopted the plan
of putting the titles of all books, and of all important works generally
regarded as single books, in italics. Individual poems, essays, etc., are
in Roman letters with quotation marks. Thus we have the "Knight's Tale," or
the story of "Palamon and Arcite," in the _Canterbury Tales_. This system
seems on the whole the best, though it may result in some inconsistencies.

Footnote 84:   _Troilus and Criseyde_, III.

Footnote 85:   See p. 107.

Footnote 86:   For a summary of Chaucer's work and place in our literature,
see the Comparison with Spenser, p. 111.

Footnote 87:   clad.

Footnote 88:   wonder.

Footnote 89:   brook.

Footnote 90:   sounded.

Footnote 91:   theirs

Footnote 92:   rule

Footnote 93:   righteousness

Footnote 94:   called

Footnote 95:   theirs

Footnote 96:   yield

Footnote 97:   say

Footnote 98:   them

Footnote 99:   hate

Footnote 100:   persecute

Footnote 101:   slander

Footnote 102:   rains

Footnote 103:   In its English form the alleged Mandeville describes the
lands and customs he has seen, and brings in all the wonders he has heard
about. Many things he has seen himself, he tells us, and these are
certainly true; but others he has heard in his travels, and of these the
reader must judge for himself. Then he incidentally mentions a desert where
he saw devils as thick as grasshoppers. As for things that he has been told
by devout travelers, here are the dog-faced men, and birds that carry off
elephants, and giants twenty-eight feet tall, and dangerous women who have
bright jewels in their heads instead of eyes, "and if they behold any man
in wrath, they slay him with a look, as doth the basilisk." Here also are
the folk of Ethiopia, who have only one leg, but who hop about with
extraordinary rapidity. Their one foot is so big that, when they lie in the
sun, they raise it to shade their bodies; in rainy weather it is as good as
an umbrella. At the close of this interesting book of travel, which is a
guide for pilgrims, the author promises to all those who say a prayer for
him a share in whatever heavenly grace he may himself obtain for all his
holy pilgrimages.

Footnote 104:   For titles and publishers of reference works see General
Bibliography at the end of this book.

Footnote 105:   _Constitutional History of England_.

Footnote 106:   Symonds, _Revival of Learning_.

Footnote 107:   Sismondi attributes this to two causes: first, the lack of
general culture; and second, the absorption of the schools in the new study
of antiquity. See _Literature of the South of Europe_, II, 400 ff.

Footnote 108:   Erasmus, the greatest scholar of the Renaissance, was not
an Englishman, but seems to belong to every nation. He was born at
Rotterdam (_c_. 1466), but lived the greater part of his life in France,
Switzerland, England, and Italy. His _Encomium Moriae_ was sketched on a
journey from Italy (1509) and written while he was the guest of Sir Thomas
More in London.

Footnote 109:   Unless, perchance, the reader finds some points of
resemblance in Plato's "Republic."

Footnote 110:   See Wordsworth's sonnet, _On the Sonnet_. For a detailed
study of this most perfect verse form, see Tomlinson's _The Sonnet, Its
Origin, Structure, and Place in Poetry_.

Footnote 111:   William Caxton (_c_. 1422-1491) was the first English
printer. He learned the art abroad, probably at Cologne or Bruges, and
about the year 1476 set up the first wooden printing press in England. His
influence in fixing a national language to supersede the various dialects,
and in preparing the way for the literary renaissance of the Elizabethan
age, is beyond calculation.

Footnote 112:   Malory has, in our own day, been identified with an English
country gentleman and soldier, who was member of Parliament for
Warwickshire in 1445.

Footnote 113:   For titles and publishers of general works see General
Bibliography at the end of this book.

Footnote 114:   _Eastward Ho!_ a play given in Blackfriars Theater about
1603. The play was written by Marston and two collaborators.

Footnote 115:   Lie so faint.

Footnote 116:   The _View_ was not published till 1633.

Footnote 117:   clad.

Footnote 118:   handsome.

Footnote 119:   jousts, tournaments.

Footnote 120:   countenance.

Footnote 121:   dreaded.

Footnote 122:   took off.

Footnote 123:   pity.

Footnote 124:   know.

Footnote 125:   In the nineteenth century men learned again to appreciate
Chaucer.

Footnote 126:   The most dramatic part of the early ritual centered about
Christ's death and resurrection, on Good Fridays and Easter days. An
exquisite account of this most impressive service is preserved in St.
Ethelwold's Latin manual of church services, written about 965. The Latin
and English versions are found in Chambers's _Mediaeval Stage_, Vol. II.
For a brief, interesting description, see Gayley, _Plays of Our
Forefathers_, pp. 14 ff.

Footnote 127:   How much we are indebted to the Norman love of pageantry
for the development of the drama in England is an unanswered question.
During the Middle Ages it was customary, in welcoming a monarch or in
celebrating a royal wedding, to represent allegorical and mythological
scenes, like the combat of St. George and the dragon, for instance, on a
stage constructed for the purpose. These pageants were popular all over
Europe and developed during the Renaissance into the dramatic form known as
the Masque. Though the drama was of religious origin, we must not overlook
these secular pageants as an important factor in the development of
dramatic art.

Footnote 128:   Miracles were acted on the Continent earlier than this. The
Normans undoubtedly brought religious plays with them, but it is probable
that they began in England before the Conquest (1066). See Manly,
_Specimens of the Pre-Shaksperean Drama_, I, xix.

Footnote 129:   See Jusserand, _A Literary History of the English People_,
I, iii, vi. For our earliest plays and their authors see Gayley, _Plays of
Our Forefathers_.

Footnote 130:   These three periods are not historically accurate. The
author uses them to emphasize three different views of our earliest plays
rather than to suggest that there was any orderly or chronological
development from Miracle to Morality and thence to the Interludes. The
latter is a prevalent opinion, but it seems hardly warranted by the facts.
Thus, though the Miracles precede the Moralities by two centuries (the
first known Morality, "The Play of the Lord's Prayer," mentioned by Wyclif,
was given probably about 1375), some of the best known Moralities, like
"Pride of Life," precede many of the later York Miracles. And the term
Interlude, which is often used as symbolical of the transition from the
moral to the artistic period of the drama, was occasionally used in England
(fourteenth century) as synonymous with Miracle and again (sixteenth
century) as synonymous with Comedy. That the drama had these three stages
seems reasonably certain; but it is impossible to fix the limits of any one
of them, and all three are sometimes seen together in one of the later
Miracles of the Wakefield cycle.

Footnote 131:   In fact, Heywood "cribbed" from Chaucer's _Tales_ in
another Interlude called "The Pardoner and the Frere."

Footnote 132:   Schelling, _Elizabethan Drama_, I, 86.

Footnote 133:   That these gallants were an unmitigated nuisance, and had
frequently to be silenced by the common people who came to enjoy the play,
seems certain. Dekker's _Gull's Hornbook_ (1609) has an interesting chapter
on "How a Gallant should behave Himself in a Playhouse."

Footnote 134:   The first actors were classed with thieves and vagabonds;
but they speedily raised their profession to an art and won a reputation
which extended far abroad. Thus a contemporary, Fynes Moryson, writes in
his _Itinerary:_ "So I remember that when some of our cast despised stage
players came ... into Germany and played at Franckford ... having nether a
complete number of actors, nor any good aparell, nor any ornament of the
stage, yet the Germans, not understanding a worde they sayde, both men and
wemen, flocked wonderfully to see their gesture and action."

Footnote 135:   Schelling, _Elizabethan Drama_.

Footnote 136:   Baker, in his _Development of Shakespeare as a Dramatist_,
pp. 57-62, takes a different view, and shows how carefully many of the boy
actors were trained. It would require, however, a vigorous use of the
imagination to be satisfied with a boy's presentation of Portia, Juliet,
Cordelia, Rosalind, or any other of Shakespeare's wonderful women.

Footnote 137:   These choir masters had royal permits to take boys of good
voice, wherever found, and train them as singers and actors. The boys were
taken from their parents and were often half starved and most brutally
treated. The abuse of this unnatural privilege led to the final withdrawal
of all such permits.

Footnote 138:   So called from Euphues, the hero of Lyly's two prose works,
_Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit_ (1579), and _Euphues and his England_ (1580).
The style is affected and over-elegant, abounds in odd conceits, and uses
hopelessly involved sentences. It is found in nearly all Elizabethan prose
writers, and partially accounts for their general tendency to
artificiality. Shakespeare satirizes euphuism in the character of Don
Adriano of _Love's Labour's Lost_, but is himself tiresomely euphuistic at
times, especially in his early or "Lylian" comedies. Lyly, by the way, did
not invent the style, but did more than any other to diffuse it.

Footnote 139:   See Schelling, I, 211.

Footnote 140:   See p. 114.

Footnote 141:   In 1587 the first history of Johann Faust, a half-legendary
German necromancer, appeared in Frankfort. Where Marlowe found the story is
unknown; but he used it, as Goethe did two centuries later, for the basis
of his great tragedy.

Footnote 142:   We must remember, however, that our present version of
_Faustus_ is very much mutilated, and does not preserve the play as Marlowe
wrote it.

Footnote 143:   The two dramatists may have worked together in such
doubtful plays as _Richard III_, the hero of which is like Timur in an
English dress, and _Titus Andronicus_, with its violence and horror. In
many strong scenes in Shakespeare's works Marlowe's influence is manifest.

Footnote 144:   _Gammer Gurton's Needle_ appeared _c_. 1562; _Love's
Labour's Lost, c_. 1591.

Footnote 145:   _King John_, IV, 2.

Footnote 146:   Queen Mab, in _Romeo and Juliet_.

Footnote 147:   By Archdeacon Davies, in the seventeenth century.

Footnote 148:   In 1709, nearly a century after the poet's death.

Footnote 149:   Robert Greene, one of the popular playwrights of the time,
who attacked Shakespeare in a pamphlet called "A Groat's Worth of Wit
Bought with a Million of Repentance." The pamphlet, aside from its jealousy
of Shakespeare, is a sad picture of a man of genius dying of dissipation,
and contains a warning to other playwrights of the time, whose lives were
apparently almost as bad as that of Greene.

Footnote 150:   _Love's Labour's Lost, Comedy of Errors, Two Gentlemen of
Verona_.

Footnote 151:   _Henry VI, Richard III, Richard II, King John_. Prior to
1588 only three true Chronicle plays are known to have been acted. The
defeat of the Armada in that year led to an outburst of national feeling
which found one outlet in the theaters, and in the next ten years over
eighty Chronicle plays appeared. Of these Shakespeare furnished nine or
ten. It was the great popular success of _Henry VI_, a revision of an old
play, in 1592 that probably led to Greene's jealous attack.

Footnote 152:   See Lee's _Life of William Shakespeare_, pp. 188-196.

Footnote 153:   Like _Henry VIII_, and possibly the lost _Cardenio_.

Footnote 154:   A name given to the privilege--claimed by the mediæval
Church for its clergy--of being exempt from trial by the regular law
courts. After the Reformation the custom survived for a long time, and
special privileges were allowed to ministers and their families. Jonson
claimed the privilege as a minister's son.

Footnote 155:   A similar story of quackery is found in Chaucer, "The
Canon's Yeoman's Tale."

Footnote 156:   In this and in _A Fair Quarrel_ Middleton collaborated with
William Rowley, of whom little is known except that he was an actor from
_c_. 1607-1627.

Footnote 157:   The reader will find wholesome criticism of these writers,
and selections from their works, in Charles Lamb's _Specimens of English
Dramatic Poets_, an excellent book, which helps us to a better knowledge
and appreciation of the lesser Elizabethan dramatists.

Footnote 158:   The first five books were published 1594-1597, and are as
Hooker wrote them. The last three books, published after his death, are of
doubtful authorship, but they are thought to have been completed from
Hooker's notes.

Footnote 159:   For titles and publishers of reference works see General
Bibliography at the end of this book.

Footnote 160:   See, for instance, the "Hymn to St. Theresa" and "The
Flaming Heart."

Footnote 161:   So called from Pindar, the greatest lyric poet of Greece.

Footnote 162:   See, for instance, "Childhood," "The Retreat,"
"Corruption," "The Bird," "The Hidden Flower," for Vaughan's mystic
interpretation of childhood and nature.

Footnote 163:   There is some doubt as to whether he was born at the
Castle, or at Black Hall. Recent opinion inclines to the latter view.

Footnote 164:   "On his being arrived to the Age of Twenty-three."

Footnote 165:   "It is remarkable," says Lamartine, "how often in the
libraries of Italian princes and in the correspondence of great Italian
writers of this period you find mentioned the name and fame of this young
Englishman."

Footnote 166:   In Milton's work we see plainly the progressive influence
of the Puritan Age. Thus his Horton poems are joyous, almost Elizabethan in
character; his prose is stern, militant, unyielding, like the Puritan in
his struggle for liberty; his later poetry, following the apparent failure
of Puritanism in the Restoration, has a note of sadness, yet proclaims the
eternal principles of liberty and justice for which he had lived.

Footnote 167:   Of these sixty were taken from the Bible, thirty-three from
English and five from Scotch history.

Footnote 168:   The latter was by Lewis Bayly, bishop of Bangor. It is
interesting to note that this book, whose very title is unfamiliar to us,
was speedily translated into five different languages. It had an enormous
sale, and ran through fifty editions soon after publication.

Footnote 169:   Abridged from _Grace Abounding_, Part 3; _Works_ (ed.
1873), p. 71.

Footnote 170:   For titles and publishers of reference works, see General
Bibliography at the end of this book.

Footnote 171:   Guizot's _History of the Revolution in England_.

Footnote 172:   Jeremy Collier (1650-1726), a clergyman and author, noted
for his scholarly _Ecclesiastical History of Great Britain_ (1708-1714) and
his _Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage_
(1698). The latter was largely instrumental in correcting the low tendency
of the Restoration drama.

Footnote 173:   The Royal Society, for the investigation and discussion of
scientific questions, was founded in 1662, and soon included practically
all of the literary and scientific men of the age. It encouraged the work
of Isaac Newton, who was one of its members; and its influence for
truth--at a time when men were still trying to compound the philosopher's
stone, calculating men's actions from the stars, and hanging harmless old
women for witches--can hardly be overestimated.

Footnote 174:   If the reader would see this in concrete form, let him read
a paragraph of Milton's prose, or a stanza of his poetry, and compare its
exuberant, melodious diction with Dryden's concise method of writing.

Footnote 175:   Edmund Waller (1606-1687), the most noted poet of the
Restoration period until his pupil Dryden appeared. His works are now
seldom read.

Footnote 176:   From _Divine Poems_, "Old Age and Death."

Footnote 177:   Following the advice of Boileau (1676-1711), a noted French
critic, whom Voltaire called "the lawgiver of Parnassus."

Footnote 178:   By a critic we mean simply one who examines the literary
works of various ages, separates the good from the bad, and gives the
reasons for his classification. It is noticeable that critical writings
increase in an age, like that of the Restoration, when great creative works
are wanting.

Footnote 179:   Two other principles of this book should be noted: (1) that
all power originates in the people; and (2) that the object of all
government is the common good. Here evidently is a democratic doctrine,
which abolishes the divine right of kings; but Hobbes immediately destroys
democracy by another doctrine,--that the power given by the people to the
ruler could not be taken away. Hence the Royalists could use the book to
justify the despotism of the Stuarts on the ground that the people had
chosen them. This part of the book is in direct opposition to Milton's
_Defense of the English People_.

Footnote 180:   Locke's _Treatises on Government_ should also be mentioned,
for they are of profound interest to American students of history and
political science. It was from Locke that the framers of the Declaration of
Independence and of the Constitution drew many of their ideas, and even
some of their most striking phrases. "All men are endowed with certain
inalienable rights"; "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"; "the
origin and basis of government is in the consent of the governed,"--these
and many more familiar and striking expressions are from Locke. It is
interesting to note that he was appointed to draft a constitution for the
new province of Carolina; but his work was rejected,--probably because it
was too democratic for the age in which he lived.

Footnote 181:   A few slight changes and omissions from the original text,
as given in Wheatley's edition of Pepys (London, 1892, 9 vols.), are not
indicated in these brief quotations.

Footnote 182:   The first daily newspaper, _The Daily Courant_, appeared in
London in 1702.

Footnote 183:   See Lecky, _England in the Eighteenth Century_.

Footnote 184:   Addison's "Campaign" (1704), written to celebrate the
battle of Blenheim.

Footnote 185:   Great writers in every age, men like Shakespeare and
Milton, make their own style. They are therefore not included in this
summary. Among the minor writers also there are exceptions to the rule; and
fine feeling is often manifest in the poetry of Donne, Herbert, Vaughan,
and Herrick.

Footnote 186:   We have endeavored here simply to show the meaning of terms
in general use in our literature; but it must be remembered that it is
impossible to classify or to give a descriptive name to the writers of any
period or century. While "classic" or "pseudo-classic" may apply to a part
of eighteenth-century literature, every age has both its romantic and its
classic movements. In this period the revolt against classicism is shown in
the revival of romantic poetry under Gray, Collins, Burns, and Thomson, and
in the beginning of the English novel under Defoe, Richardson, and
Fielding. These poets and novelists, who have little or no connection with
classicism, belong chronologically to the period we are studying. They are
reserved for special treatment in the sections following.

Footnote 187:   Pope's satires, for instance, are strongly suggested in
Boileau; his _Rape of the Lock_ is much like the mock-heroic _Le Lutrin;_
and the "Essay on Criticism," which made him famous, is an English edition
and improvement of _L'Art Poétique_. The last was, in turn, a combination
of the _Ars Poetica_ of Horace and of many well-known rules of the
classicists.

Footnote 188:   These are the four kinds of spirits inhabiting the four
elements, according to the Rosicrucians,--a fantastic sect of spiritualists
of that age. In the dedication of the poem Pope says he took the idea from
a French book called _Le Comte de Gabalis_.

Footnote 189:   Compare this with Shakespeare's "All the world's a stage,"
in _As You Like it_, II, 7.

Footnote 190:   It is only fair to point out that Swift wrote this and two
other pamphlets on religion at a time when he knew that they would damage,
if not destroy, his own prospects of political advancement.

Footnote 191:   See Tennyson's "Merlin and the Gleam."

Footnote 192:   Of the _Tatler_ essays Addison contributed forty-two;
thirty-six others were written in collaboration with Steele; while at least
a hundred and eighty are the work of Steele alone.

Footnote 193:   From "The Vanity of Human Wishes"

Footnote 194:   A very lovable side of Johnson's nature is shown by his
doing penance in the public market place for his unfilial conduct as a boy.
(See, in Hawthorne's _Our Old Home_, the article on "Lichfield and
Johnson.") His sterling manhood is recalled in his famous letter to Lord
Chesterfield, refusing the latter's patronage for the _Dictionary_. The
student should read this incident entire, in Boswell's _Life of Johnson_.

Footnote 195:   In Johnson's _Dictionary_ we find this definition:
"Grub-street, the name of a street in London much inhabited by writers of
small histories, _dictionaries_, and temporary poems; whence any mean
production is called Grub-street."

Footnote 196:   From Macaulay's review of Boswell's _Life of Johnson_.

Footnote 197:   Many of the writers show a mingling of the classic and the
romantic tendencies. Thus Goldsmith followed Johnson and opposed the
romanticists; but his _Deserted Village_ is romantic in spirit, though its
classic couplets are almost as mechanical as Pope's. So Burke's orations
are "elegantly classic" in style, but are illumined by bursts of emotion
and romantic feeling.

Footnote 198:   A much more interesting work is Thomas Paine's _Rights of
Man_, which was written in answer to Burke's essay, and which had enormous
influence in England and America.

Footnote 199:   In the same year, 1775, in which Burke's magnificent
"Conciliation" oration was delivered, Patrick Henry made a remarkable
little speech before a gathering of delegates in Virginia. Both men were
pleading the same cause of justice, and were actuated by the same high
ideals. A very interesting contrast, however, may be drawn between the
methods and the effects of Henry's speech and of Burke's more brilliant
oration. Burke makes us wonder at his learning, his brilliancy, his
eloquence; but he does not move us to action. Patrick Henry calls us, and
we spring to follow him. That suggests the essential difference between the
two orators.

Footnote 200:   The romantic revival is marked by renewed interest in
mediæval ideals and literature; and to this interest is due the success of
Walpole's romance, _The Castle of Otranto_, and of Chatterton's forgeries
known as the _Rowley Papers_.

Footnote 201:   From _The Task_, Book II.

Footnote 202:   See, for instance, Phelps, _Beginnings of the Romantic
Movement_, for a list of Spenserian imitators from 1700 to 1775.

Footnote 203:   Such is Goldsmith's version of a somewhat suspicious
adventure, whose details are unknown.

Footnote 204:   Goldsmith's idea, which was borrowed from Walpole,
reappears in the pseudo _Letters from a Chinese Official_, which recently
attracted considerable attention.

Footnote 205:   Fitz-Greene Halleck's poem "To a Rose from near Alloway
Kirk" (1822) is a good appreciation of Burns and his poetry. It might be
well to read this poem before the sad story of Burns's life.

Footnote 206:   Introduction, _Songs of Innocence_.

Footnote 207:   Swinburne's _William Blake_.

Footnote 208:   There are several omissions from the text in this fragment
from _Fingal_.

Footnote 209:   Several fragments of Gaelic poetry, attributed to Ossian or
Oisin, are now known to have existed at that time in the Highlands.
Macpherson used these as a basis for his epic, but most of the details were
furnished by his own imagination. The alleged text of "Ossian" was
published in 1807, some eleven years after Macpherson's death. It only
added another mystery to the forgery; for, while it embodied a few old and
probably genuine fragments, the bulk of it seems to be Macpherson's work
translated back into Gaelic.

Footnote 210:   For various other collections of songs and ballads,
antedating Percy's, see Phelps's _Beginnings of the English Romantic
Movement_, ch. vii.

Footnote 211:   The first books to which the term "novel," in the modern
sense, may be applied, appeared almost simultaneously in England, France,
and Germany. The rapid development of the English novel had an immense
influence in all European nations.

Footnote 212:   The name "romance" was given at first to any story in one
of the Romance languages, like the French metrical romances, which we have
considered. Because these stories were brought to England at a time when
the childish mind of the Middle Ages delighted in the most impossible
stories, the name "romance" was retained to cover any work of the unbridled
imagination.

Footnote 213:   This division of works of fiction into romances and novels
is a somewhat arbitrary one, but it seems, on the whole, the most natural
and the most satisfactory. Many writers use the generic term "novel" to
include all prose fiction. They divide novels into two classes, stories and
romances; the story being a form of the novel which relates certain
incidents of life with as little complexity as possible; and the romance
being a form of novel which describes life as led by strong emotions into
complex and unusual circumstances. Novels are otherwise divided into novels
of personality, like _Vicar of Wakefield_ and _Silas Marner_; historical
novels, _Ivanhoe_; novels of romance, like _Lorna Doone_ and novels of
purpose, like _Oliver Twist_ and _Uncle Tom's Cabin_. All such
classifications are imperfect, and the best of them is open to objections.

Footnote 214:   One of these tales was called _The Wonderful Things beyond
Thule_. It is the story of a youth, Dinias, who for love of a girl,
Dercyllis, did heroic things and undertook many adventures, including a
journey to the frozen north, and another to the moon. A second tale,
_Ephesiaca_, is the story of a man and a maid, each of whom scoffs at love.
They meet and fall desperately in love; but the course of true love does
not run smooth, and they separate, and suffer, and go through many perils,
before they "live happily ever after." This tale is the source of the
mediæval story, _Apollonius of Tyre_, which is used in Gower's _Confessio
Amantis_ and in Shakespeare's _Pericles_. A third tale is the pastoral love
story, _Daphnis and Chloe_, which reappeared in many forms in subsequent
literature.

Footnote 215:   Minto's _Life of Defoe_, p. 139.

Footnote 216:   These were not what the booksellers expected. They wanted a
"handy letter writer," something like a book of etiquette; and it was
published in 1741, a few months after _Pamela_.

Footnote 217:   See p. 315.

Footnote 218:   For titles and publishers of general reference works, and
of inexpensive texts, see General Bibliography at end of this book.

Footnote 219:   Mrs. Radcliffe's best work is the _Mysteries of Udolpho_.
This is the story of a tender heroine shut up in a gloomy castle. Over her
broods the terrible shadow of an ancestor's crime. There are the usual
"goose-flesh" accompaniments of haunted rooms, secret doors, sliding
panels, mysterious figures behind old pictures, and a subterranean passage
leading to a vault, dark and creepy as a tomb. Here the heroine finds a
chest with blood-stained papers. By the light of a flickering candle she
reads, with chills and shivering, the record of long-buried crimes. At the
psychologic moment the little candle suddenly goes out. Then out of the
darkness a cold, clammy hand--ugh! Foolish as such stories seem to us now,
they show, first, a wild reaction from the skepticism of the preceding age;
and second, a development of the mediæval romance of adventure; only the
adventure is here inward rather than outward. It faces a ghost instead of a
dragon; and for this work a nun with her beads is better than a knight in
armor. So heroines abound, instead of heroes. The age was too educated for
medieval monsters and magic, but not educated enough to reject ghosts and
other bogeys.

Footnote 220:   The _Lyrical Ballads_ were better appreciated in America
than in England. The first edition was printed here in 1802.

Footnote 221:   _The Prelude_ was not published till after Wordsworth's
death, nearly half a century later.

Footnote 222:   _The Prelude_, Book IV.

Footnote 223:   Dowden's _Selections from Wordsworth_ is the best of many
such collections. See Selections for Reading, and Bibliography, at the end
of this chapter.

Footnote 224:   See "Christ's Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago," in
_Essays of Elia_.

Footnote 225:   See Scott's criticism of his own work, in comparison with
Jane Austen's, p. 439.

Footnote 226:   Scott's novels were not the first to have an historical
basis. For thirty years preceding the appearance of _Waverley_, historical
romances were popular; but it was due to Scott's genius that the historical
novel became a permanent type of literature. See Cross, _The Development of
the English Novel_.

Footnote 227:   See Selections for Reading, and Bibliography, at the end of
this chapter.

Footnote 228:   Shelley undoubtedly took his idea from a lost drama of
Aeschylus, a sequel to _Prometheus Bound_, in which the great friend of
mankind was unchained from a precipice, where he had been placed by the
tyrant Zeus.

Footnote 229:   This idea is suppported by Shelley's poem _Adonais_, and by
Byron's parody against the reviewers, beginning, "Who killed John Keats? I,
says the Quarterly."

Footnote 230:   See "Christ's Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago," in
_Essays of Elia_.

Footnote 231:   See _Essays of Elia,_ "The Superannuated Man."

Footnote 232:   In the first essay, "The South Sea House," Lamb assumed as
a joke the name of a former clerk, Elia. Other essays followed, and the
name was retained when several successful essays were published in book
form, in 1823. In these essays "Elia" is Lamb himself, and "Cousin Bridget"
is his sister Mary.

Footnote 233:   See histories for the Congress of Vienna (1814) and the
Holy Alliance (1815).

Footnote 234:   For full titles and publishers of general reference books,
see General Bibliography at end of this book.

Footnote 235:   An excellent little volume for the beginner is Van Dyke's
"Poems by Tennyson," which shows the entire range of the poet's work from
his earliest to his latest years. (See Selections for Reading, at the end
of this chapter.)

Footnote 236:   Tennyson made a distinction in spelling between the _Idylls
of the King_, and the _English Idyls_, like "Dora."

Footnote 237:   An excellent little book for the beginner is Lovett's
_Selections from Browning_. (See Selections for Reading, at the end of this
chapter.)

Footnote 238:   This term, which means simply Italian painters before
Raphael, is generally applied to an artistic movement in the middle of the
nineteenth century. The term was first used by a brotherhood of German
artists who worked together in the convent of San Isodoro, in Rome, with
the idea of restoring art to its mediæval purity and simplicity. The term
now generally refers to a company of seven young men,--Dante Gabriel
Rossetti and his brother William, William Holman Hunt, John Everett
Millais, James Collinson, Frederick George Stevens, and Thomas Woolner,--
who formed the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood in England in 1848. Their
official literary organ was called _The Germ_, in which much of the early
work of Morris and Rossetti appeared. They took for their models the early
Italian painters who, they declared, were "simple, sincere, and religious."
Their purpose was to encourage simplicity and naturalness in art and
literature; and one of their chief objects, in the face of doubt and
materialism, was to express the "wonder, reverence, and awe" which
characterizes mediæval art. In its return to the mysticism and symbolism of
the mediæval age, this Pre-Raphaelitism suggests the contemporary Oxford or
Tractarian movement in religion. (See footnote, p. 554).

Footnote 239:   Arnold was one of the best known poets of the age, but
because he has exerted a deeper influence on our literature as a critic, we
have reserved him for special study among the essayists. (See p. xxx)

Footnote 240:   It should be pointed out that the _English Humorists_ is
somewhat too highly colored to be strictly accurate. In certain cases also,
notably that of Steele, the reader may well object to Thackeray's
patronizing attitude toward his subject.

Footnote 241:   See pp. 260-261.

Footnote 242:   Emily Brontë (1818-1848) was only a little less gifted than
her famous sister. Her best known work is _Wuthering Heights_ (1847), a
strong but morbid novel of love and suffering. Matthew Arnold said of her
that, "for the portrayal of passion, vehemence, and grief," Emily Brontë
had no equal save Byron. An exquisite picture of Emily is given in
Charlotte Brontë's novel _Shirley_.

Footnote 243:   _Essays_, Riverside edition, I, 318.

Footnote 244:   The student should remember that Carlyle's literary
opinions, though very positive, are to be received with caution. Sometimes,
indeed, they are so one-sided and prejudiced that they are more valuable as
a revelation of Carlyle himself than as a study of the author he is
considering.

Footnote 245:   The Oxford movement in religion has many points of
resemblance to the Pre-Raphaelite movement in art. Both protested against
the materialism of the age, and both went back for their models to the
Middle Ages. Originally the movement was intended to bring new life to the
Anglican church by a revival of the doctrine and practices of an earlier
period. Recognizing the power of the press, the leaders chose literature
for their instrument of reform, and by their _Tracts for the Times_ they
became known as Tractarians. To oppose liberalism and to restore the
doctrine and authority of the early Church was the center of their
teaching. Their belief might be summed up in one great article of the
Creed, with all that it implies,--"I believe in one Catholic and Apostolic
Church." The movement began at Oxford with Keble's famous sermon on
"National Apostasy," in 1833; but Newman was the real leader of the
movement, which practically ended when he entered the Catholic church in
1845.







End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of English Literature, by William J. Long

*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ENGLISH LITERATURE ***

***** This file should be named 10609-8.txt or 10609-8.zip *****
This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
        http://www.gutenberg.net/1/0/6/0/10609/

Produced by Kevin Handy, Dave Maddock and PG Distributed Proofreaders

Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
will be renamed.

Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
redistribution.



*** START: FULL LICENSE ***

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK

To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
http://gutenberg.net/license).


Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
electronic works

1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.

1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
works.  See paragraph 1.E below.

1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.

1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
States.

1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:

1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
copied or distributed:

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
1.E.9.

1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.

1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.

1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
Gutenberg-tm License.

1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.net),
you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.

1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.

1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
that

- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."

- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
     License.  You must require such a user to return or
     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
     Project Gutenberg-tm works.

- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
     of receipt of the work.

- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.

1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.

1.F.

1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
your equipment.

1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
DAMAGE.

1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
opportunities to fix the problem.

1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS," WITH NO OTHER
WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.

1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.

1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.


Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm

Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
people in all walks of life.

Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.


Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation

The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
http://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.

The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
page at http://pglaf.org

For additional contact information:
     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
     Chief Executive and Director
     gbnewby@pglaf.org

Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation

Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
status with the IRS.

The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
particular state visit http://pglaf.org

While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
approach us with offers to donate.

International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.

Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
ways including including checks, online payments and credit card
donations.  To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate


Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
works.

Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.

Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.

Each eBook is in a subdirectory of the same number as the eBook's
eBook number, often in several formats including plain vanilla ASCII,
compressed (zipped), HTML and others.

Corrected EDITIONS of our eBooks replace the old file and take over
the old filename and etext number.  The replaced older file is renamed.
VERSIONS based on separate sources are treated as new eBooks receiving
new filenames and etext numbers.

Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:

     http://www.gutenberg.net

This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.

EBooks posted prior to November 2003, with eBook numbers BELOW #10000,
are filed in directories based on their release date.  If you want to
download any of these eBooks directly, rather than using the regular
search system you may utilize the following addresses and just
download by the etext year.

     http://www.gutenberg.net/etext06

    (Or /etext 05, 04, 03, 02, 01, 00, 99,
     98, 97, 96, 95, 94, 93, 92, 92, 91 or 90)

EBooks posted since November 2003, with etext numbers OVER #10000, are
filed in a different way.  The year of a release date is no longer part
of the directory path.  The path is based on the etext number (which is
identical to the filename).  The path to the file is made up of single
digits corresponding to all but the last digit in the filename.  For
example an eBook of filename 10234 would be found at:

     http://www.gutenberg.net/1/0/2/3/10234

or filename 24689 would be found at:
     http://www.gutenberg.net/2/4/6/8/24689

An alternative method of locating eBooks:
     http://www.gutenberg.net/GUTINDEX.ALL


The Project Gutenberg EBook of Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org


Title: Les Miserables
       Complete in Five Volumes

Author: Victor Hugo

Translator: Isabel F. Hapgood

Release Date: June 22, 2008 [EBook #135]
Last Updated: October 30, 2009

Language: English


*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LES MISERABLES ***




Produced by Judith Boss





LES MISERABLES

By Victor Hugo


Translated by Isabel F. Hapgood

Thomas Y. Crowell & Co.
No. 13, Astor Place
New York

Copyright 1887

[Illustration: Bookshelf  1spines]

[Illustration: Bookcover  1cover]

[Illustration: Frontpapers 1frontpapers]

[Illustration: Frontispiece 1frontispiece]

[Illustration: Titlepage Volume One 1titlepage]

[Illustration: Titlepage Verso  1verso]




CONTENTS


     VOLUME I

     BOOK FIRST.--A JUST MAN

     CHAPTER
         I.  M. Myriel
        II.  M. Myriel becomes M. Welcome
       III.  A Hard Bishopric for a Good Bishop
        IV.  Works corresponding to Words
         V.  Monseigneur Bienvenu made his Cassocks last too long
        VI.  Who guarded his House for him
       VII.  Cravatte
      VIII.  Philosophy after Drinking
        IX.  The Brother as depicted by the Sister
         X.  The Bishop in the Presence of an Unknown Light
        XI.  A Restriction
       XII.  The Solitude of Monseigneur Welcome
      XIII.  What he believed
       XIV.  What he thought

     BOOK SECOND.--THE FALL

         I.  The Evening of a Day of Walking
        II.  Prudence counselled to Wisdom
       III.  The Heroism of Passive Obedience
        IV.  Details concerning the Cheese-Dairies of Pontarlier
         V.  Tranquillity
        VI.  Jean Valjean
       VII.  The Interior of Despair
      VIII.  Billows and Shadows
        IX.  New Troubles
         X.  The Man aroused
        XI.  What he does
       XII.  The Bishop works
      XIII.  Little Gervais

     BOOK THIRD.--IN THE YEAR 1817

         I.  The Year 1817
        II.  A Double Quartette
       III.  Four and Four
        IV.  Tholomyes is so Merry that he sings a Spanish Ditty
         V.  At Bombardas
        VI.  A Chapter in which they adore Each Other
       VII.  The Wisdom of Tholomyes
      VIII.  The Death of a Horse
        IX.  A Merry End to Mirth

     BOOK FOURTH.--TO CONFIDE IS SOMETIMES TO DELIVER INTO A PERSON'S POWER

         I.  One Mother meets Another Mother
        II.  First Sketch of Two Unprepossessing Figures
       III.  The Lark

     BOOK FIFTH.--THE DESCENT

         I.  The History of a Progress in Black Glass Trinkets
        II.  Madeleine
       III.  Sums deposited with Laffitte
        IV.  M. Madeleine in Mourning
         V.  Vague Flashes on the Horizon
        VI.  Father Fauchelevent
       VII.  Fauchelevent becomes a Gardener in Paris
      VIII.  Madame Victurnien expends Thirty Francs on Morality
        IX.  Madame Victurnien's Success
         X.  Result of the Success
        XI.  Christus nos Liberavit
       XII.  M. Bamatabois's Inactivity
      XIII.  The Solution of Some Questions connected with the
                 Municipal Police

     BOOK SIXTH.--JAVERT

         I.  The Beginning of Repose
        II.  How Jean may become Champ

     BOOK SEVENTH.--THE CHAMPMATHIEU AFFAIR

         I.  Sister Simplice
        II.  The Perspicacity of Master Scaufflaire
       III.  A Tempest in a Skull
        IV.  Forms assumed by Suffering during Sleep
         V.  Hindrances
        VI.  Sister Simplice put to the Proof
       VII.  The Traveller on his Arrival takes Precautions
                 for Departure
      VIII.  An Entrance by Favor
        IX.  A Place where Convictions are in Process of Formation
         X.  The System of Denials
        XI.  Champmathieu more and more Astonished

     BOOK EIGHTH.--A COUNTER-BLOW

         I.  In what Mirror M. Madeleine contemplates his Hair
        II.  Fantine Happy
       III.  Javert Satisfied
        IV.  Authority reasserts its Rights
         V.  A Suitable Tomb



     VOLUME II

     BOOK FIRST.--WATERLOO

     CHAPTER
         I.  What is met with on the Way from Nivelles
        II.  Hougomont
       III.  The Eighteenth of June, 1815
        IV.  A
         V.  The Quid Obscurum of Battles
        VI.  Four o'clock in the Afternoon
       VII.  Napoleon in a Good Humor
      VIII.  The Emperor puts a Question to the Guide Lacoste
        IX.  The Unexpected
         X.  The Plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean
        XI.  A Bad Guide to Napoleon; a Good Guide to Bulow
       XII.  The Guard
      XIII.  The Catastrophe
       XIV.  The Last Square
        XV.  Cambronne
       XVI.  Quot Libras in Duce?
      XVII.  Is Waterloo to be considered Good?
     XVIII.  A Recrudescence of Divine Right
       XIX.  The Battle-Field at Night

     BOOK SECOND.--THE SHIP ORION

         I.  Number 24,601 becomes Number 9,430
        II.  In which the reader will peruse Two Verses which are
               of the Devil's Composition possibly
       III.  The Ankle-Chain must have undergone a Certain Preparatory
             Manipulation to be thus broken with a Blow from a Hammer

     BOOK THIRD.--ACCOMPLISHMENT OF THE PROMISE MADE TO THE DEAD WOMAN

         I.  The Water Question at Montfermeil
        II.  Two Complete Portraits
       III.  Men must have Wine, and Horses must have Water
        IV.  Entrance on the Scene of a Doll
         V.  The Little One All Alone
        VI.  Which possibly proves Boulatruelle's Intelligence
       VII.  Cosette Side by Side with the Stranger in the Dark
      VIII.  The Unpleasantness of receiving into One's House a Poor
               Man who may be a Rich Man
        IX.  Thenardier at his Manoeuvres
         X.  He who seeks to better himself may render his Situation Worse
        XI.  Number 9,430 reappears, and Cosette wins it in the Lottery

     BOOK FOURTH.--THE GORBEAU HOVEL

         I.  Master Gorbeau
        II.  A Nest for Owl and a Warbler
       III.  Two Misfortunes make One Piece of Good Fortune
        IV.  The Remarks of the Principal Tenant
         V.  A Five-Franc Piece falls on the Ground and produces a Tumult

     BOOK FIFTH.--FOR A BLACK HUNT, A MUTE PACK

         I.  The Zigzags of Strategy
        II.  It is Lucky that the Pont d'Austerlitz bears
               Carriages
       III.  To Wit, the Plan of Paris in 1727
        IV.  The Gropings of Flight
         V.  Which would be Impossible with Gas Lanterns
        VI.  The Beginning of an Enigma
       VII.  Continuation of the Enigma
      VIII.  The Enigma becomes Doubly Mysterious
        IX.  The Man with the Bell
         X.  Which explains how Javert got on the Scent

     BOOK SIXTH.--LE PETIT-PICPUS

         I.  Number 62 Rue Petit-Picpus
        II.  The Obedience of Martin Verga
       III.  Austerities
        IV.  Gayeties
         V.  Distractions
        VI.  The Little Convent
       VII.  Some Silhouettes of this Darkness
      VIII.  Post Corda Lapides
        IX.  A Century under a Guimpe
         X.  Origin of the Perpetual Adoration
        XI.  End of the Petit-Picpus

     BOOK SEVENTH.--PARENTHESIS

         I.  The Convent as an Abstract Idea
        II.  The Convent as an Historical Fact
       III.  On What Conditions One can respect the Past
        IV.  The Convent from the Point of View of Principles
         V.  Prayer
        VI.  The Absolute Goodness of Prayer
       VII.  Precautions to be observed in Blame
      VIII.  Faith, Law

     BOOK EIGHTH.--CEMETERIES TAKE THAT WHICH IS COMMITTED THEM

         I.  Which treats of the Manner of entering a Convent
        II.  Fauchelevent in the Presence of a Difficulty
       III.  Mother Innocente
        IV.  In which Jean Valjean has quite the Air of having read
               Austin Castillejo
         V.  It is not Necessary to be Drunk in order to be Immortal
        VI.  Between Four Planks
       VII.  In which will be found the Origin of the Saying: Don't
               lose the Card
      VIII.  A Successful Interrogatory
        IX.  Cloistered


     VOLUME III

     BOOK FIRST.--PARIS STUDIED IN ITS ATOM

          I.  Parvulus
         II.  Some of his Particular Characteristics
        III.  He is Agreeable
         IV.  He may be of Use
          V.  His Frontiers
         VI.  A Bit of History
        VII.  The Gamin should have his Place in the Classifications
                 of India
       VIII.  In which the Reader will find a Charming Saying of the
                 Last King
         IX.  The Old Soul of Gaul
          X.  Ecce Paris, ecce Homo
         XI.  To Scoff, to Reign
        XII.  The Future Latent in the People
       XIII.  Little Gavroche

     BOOK SECOND.--THE GREAT BOURGEOIS

          I.  Ninety Years and Thirty-two Teeth
         II.  Like Master, Like House
        III.  Luc-Esprit
         IV.  A Centenarian Aspirant
          V.  Basque and Nicolette
         VI.  In which Magnon and her Two Children are seen
        VII.  Rule: Receive No One except in the Evening
       VIII.  Two do not make a Pair

     BOOK THIRD.--THE  GRANDFATHER AND THE GRANDSON

          I.  An Ancient Salon
         II.  One of the Red Spectres of that Epoch
        III.  Requiescant
         IV.  End of the Brigand
          V.  The Utility of going to Mass, in order to become a
                 Revolutionist
         VI.  The Consequences of having met a Warden
        VII.  Some Petticoat
       VIII.  Marble against Granite

     BOOK FOURTH.--THE FRIENDS OF THE ABC

          I.  A Group which barely missed becoming Historic
         II.  Blondeau's Funeral Oration by Bossuet
        III.  Marius' Astonishments
         IV.  The Back Room of the Cafe Musain
          V.  Enlargement of Horizon
         VI.  Res Angusta

     BOOK FIFTH.--THE EXCELLENCE OF MISFORTUNE

          I.  Marius Indigent
         II.  Marius Poor
        III.  Marius Grown Up
         IV.  M. Mabeuf
          V.  Poverty a Good Neighbor for Misery
         VI.  The Substitute

     BOOK SIXTH.--THE CONJUNCTION OF TWO STARS

          I.  The Sobriquet; Mode of Formation of Family Names
         II.  Lux Facta Est
        III.  Effect of the Spring
         IV.  Beginning of a Great Malady
          V.  Divers Claps of Thunder fall on Ma'am Bougon
         VI.  Taken Prisoner
        VII.  Adventures of the Letter U delivered over to Conjectures
       VIII.  The Veterans themselves can be Happy
         IX.  Eclipse

     BOOK SEVENTH.--PATRON MINETTE

          I.  Mines and Miners
         II.  The Lowest Depths
        III.  Babet, Gueulemer, Claquesous, and Montparnasse
         IV.  Composition of the Troupe

     BOOK EIGHTH.--THE WICKED POOR MAN

          I.  Marius, while seeking a Girl in a Bonnet encounters a
                 Man in a Cap
         II.  Treasure Trove
        III.  Quadrifrons
         IV.  A Rose in Misery
          V.  A Providential Peep-Hole
         VI.  The Wild Man in his Lair
        VII.  Strategy and Tactics
       VIII.  The Ray of Light in the Hovel
         IX.  Jondrette comes near Weeping
          X.  Tariff of Licensed Cabs, Two Francs an Hour
         XI.  Offers of Service from Misery to Wretchedness
        XII.  The Use made of M. Leblanc's Five-Franc Piece
       XIII.  Solus cum Solo, in Loco Remoto, non cogitabuntur
                 orare Pater Noster
        XIV.  In which a Police Agent bestows Two Fistfuls on a Lawyer
         XV.  Jondrette makes his Purchases
        XVI.  In which will be found the Words to an English Air
                  which was in Fashion in 1832
       XVII.  The Use made of Marius' Five-Franc Piece
      XVIII.  Marius' Two Chairs form a Vis-a-Vis
        XIX.  Occupying One's Self with Obscure Depths
         XX.  The Trap
        XXI.  One should always begin by arresting the Victims
       XXII.  The Little One who was crying in Volume Two



     VOLUME IV

     BOOK FIRST.--A FEW PAGES OF HISTORY

        I.  Well Cut
       II.  Badly Sewed
      III.  Louis Philippe
       IV.  Cracks beneath the Foundation
        V.  Facts whence History springs and which History ignores
       VI.  Enjolras and his Lieutenants

     BOOK SECOND.--EPONINE

        I.  The Lark's Meadow
       II.  Embryonic Formation of Crimes in the Incubation of Prisons
      III.  Apparition to Father Mabeuf
       IV.  An Apparition to Marius

     BOOK THIRD.--THE HOUSE IN THE RUE PLUMET

        I.  The House with a Secret
       II.  Jean Valjean as a National Guard
      III.  Foliis ac Frondibus
       IV.  Change of Gate
        V.  The Rose perceives that it is an Engine of War
       VI.  The Battle Begun
      VII.  To One Sadness oppose a Sadness and a Half
     VIII.  The Chain-Gang

     BOOK FOURTH.--SUCCOR FROM BELOW MAY TURN OUT TO BE SUCCOR FROM ON HIGH

        I.  A Wound without, Healing within
       II.  Mother Plutarque finds no Difficulty in explaining a Phenomenon

     BOOK FIFTH.--THE END OF WHICH DOES NOT RESEMBLE THE BEGINNING

        I.  Solitude and Barracks Combined
       II.  Cosette's Apprehensions
      III.  Enriched with Commentaries by Toussaint
       IV.  A Heart beneath a Stone
        V.  Cosette after the Letter
       VI.  Old People are made to go out opportunely

     BOOK SIXTH.--LITTLE GAVROCHE

        I.  The Malicious Playfulness of the Wind
       II.  In which Little Gavroche extracts Profit from Napoleon the Great
      III.  The Vicissitudes of Flight

     BOOK SEVENTH.--SLANG

        I.  Origin
       II.  Roots
      III.  Slang which weeps and Slang which laughs
       IV.  The Two Duties: To Watch and to Hope

     BOOK EIGHTH.--ENCHANTMENTS AND DESOLATIONS

        I.  Full Light
       II.  The Bewilderment of Perfect Happiness
      III.  The Beginning of Shadow
       IV.  A Cab runs in English and barks in Slang
        V.  Things of the Night
       VI.  Marius becomes Practical once more to the Extent of
                Giving Cosette his Address
      VII. The Old Heart and the Young Heart in the Presence
                of Each Other

     BOOK NINTH.--WHITHER ARE THEY GOING?

        I.  Jean Valjean
       II.  Marius
      III.  M. Mabeuf

     BOOK TENTH.--THE 5TH OF JUNE, 1832

        I.  The Surface of the Question
       II.  The Root of the Matter
      III.  A Burial; an Occasion to be born again
       IV.  The Ebullitions of Former Days
        V.  Originality of Paris

     BOOK ELEVENTH.--THE ATOM FRATERNIZES WITH THE HURRICANE

        I.  Some Explanations with Regard to the Origin of Gavroche's
                Poetry.  The Influence of an Academician on this Poetry
       II.  Gavroche on the March
      III.  Just Indignation of a Hair-dresser
       IV.  The Child is amazed at the Old Man
        V.  The Old Man
       VI.  Recruits

     BOOK TWELFTH.--CORINTHE

        I.  History of Corinthe from its Foundation
       II.  Preliminary Gayeties
      III.  Night begins to descend upon Grantaire
       IV.  An Attempt to console the Widow Hucheloup
        V.  Preparations
       VI.  Waiting
      VII.  The Man recruited in the Rue des Billettes
     VIII.  Many Interrogation Points with Regard to a Certain
                Le Cabuc, whose Name may not have been Le Cabuc

     BOOK THIRTEENTH.--MARIUS ENTERS THE SHADOW

        I.  From the Rue Plumet to the Quartier Saint-Denis
       II.  An Owl's View of Paris
      III.  The Extreme Edge

     BOOK FOURTEENTH.--THE GRANDEURS OF DESPAIR

        I.  The Flag: Act First
       II.  The Flag: Act Second
      III.  Gavroche would have done better to accept Enjolras' Carbine
       IV.  The Barrel of Powder
        V.  End of the Verses of Jean Prouvaire
       VI.  The Agony of Death after the Agony of Life
      VII.  Gavroche as a Profound Calculator of Distances

     BOOK FIFTEENTH.--THE RUE DE L'HOMME ARME

        I.  A Drinker is a Babbler
       II.  The Street Urchin an Enemy of Light
      III.  While Cosette and Toussaint are Asleep
       IV.  Gavroche's Excess of Zeal



     VOLUME V

     BOOK FIRST.--THE WAR BETWEEN FOUR WALLS

         I.  The Charybdis of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine and the
               Scylla of the Faubourg du Temple
        II.  What Is to Be Done in the Abyss if One Does Not Converse
       III.  Light and Shadow
        IV.  Minus Five, Plus One
         V.  The Horizon Which One Beholds from the Summit of a Barricade
        VI.  Marius Haggard, Javert Laconic
       VII.  The Situation Becomes Aggravated
      VIII.  The Artillery-men Compel People to Take Them Seriously
        IX.  Employment of the Old Talents of a Poacher and That
               Infallible Marksmanship Which Influenced the
               Condemnation of 1796
         X.  Dawn
        XI.  The Shot Which Misses Nothing and Kills No One
       XII.  Disorder a Partisan of Order
      XIII.  Passing Gleams
       XIV.  Wherein Will Appear the Name of Enjolras' Mistress
        XV.  Gavroche Outside
       XVI.  How from a Brother One Becomes a Father
      XVII.  Mortuus Pater Filium Moriturum Expectat
     XVIII.  The Vulture Becomes Prey
       XIX.  Jean Valjean Takes His Revenge
        XX.  The Dead Are in the Right and the Living Are Not in the Wrong
       XXI.  The Heroes
      XXII.  Foot to Foot
     XXIII.  Orestes Fasting and Pylades Drunk
      XXIV.  Prisoner

     BOOK SECOND.--THE INTESTINE OF THE LEVIATHAN

         I.  The Land Impoverished by the Sea
        II.  Ancient History of the Sewer
       III.  Bruneseau
        IV.  Bruneseau
         V.  Present Progress
        VI.  Future Progress

     BOOK THIRD.--MUD BUT THE SOUL

         I.  The Sewer and Its Surprises
        II.  Explanation
       III.  The "Spun" Man
        IV.  He Also Bears His Cross
         V.  In the Case of Sand, as in That of Woman, There Is a
               Fineness Which Is Treacherous
        VI.  The Fontis
       VII.  One Sometimes Runs Aground When One Fancies That
               One Is Disembarking
      VIII.  The Torn Coat-Tail
        IX.  Marius Produces on Some One Who Is a Judge of the
               Matter, the Effect of Being Dead
         X.  Return of the Son Who Was Prodigal of His Life
        XI.  Concussion in the Absolute
       XII.  The Grandfather

     BOOK FOURTH.--JAVERT DERAILED

         I.  Javert

     BOOK FIFTH.--GRANDSON AND GRANDFATHER

         I.  In Which the Tree with the Zinc Plaster Appears Again
        II.  Marius, Emerging from Civil War, Makes Ready for
               Domestic War
       III.  Marius Attacked
        IV.  Mademoiselle Gillenormand Ends by No Longer Thinking
               It a Bad Thing That M. Fauchelevent Should Have
               Entered With Something Under His Arm
         V.  Deposit Your Money in a Forest Rather than with a Notary
        VI.  The Two Old Men Do Everything, Each One After His
               Own Fashion, to Render Cosette Happy
       VII.  The Effects of Dreams Mingled with Happiness
      VIII.  Two Men Impossible to Find

     BOOK SIXTH.--THE SLEEPLESS NIGHT

         I.  The 16th of February, 1833
        II.  Jean Valjean Still Wears His Arm in a Sling
       III.  The Inseparable
        IV.  The Immortal Liver

     BOOK SEVENTH.--THE LAST DRAUGHT FROM THE CUP

         I.  The Seventh Circle and the Eighth Heaven
        II.  The Obscurities Which a Revelation Can Contain

     BOOK EIGHTH.--FADING AWAY OF THE TWILIGHT

         I.  The Lower Chamber
        II.  Another Step Backwards
       III.  They Recall the Garden of the Rue Plumet
        IV.  Attraction and Extinction

     BOOK NINTH.--SUPREME SHADOW, SUPREME DAWN

         I.  Pity for the Unhappy, but Indulgence for the Happy
        II.  Last Flickerings of a Lamp Without Oil
       III.  A Pen Is Heavy to the Man Who Lifted the
               Fauchelevent's Cart
        IV.  A Bottle of Ink Which Only Succeeded in Whitening
         V.  A Night Behind Which There Is Day
        VI.  The Grass Covers and the Rain Effaces





LES MISERABLES





VOLUME I.--FANTINE.




PREFACE


So long as there shall exist, by virtue of law and custom, decrees of
damnation pronounced by society, artificially creating hells amid the
civilization of earth, and adding the element of human fate to divine
destiny; so long as the three great problems of the century--the
degradation of man through pauperism, the corruption of woman through
hunger, the crippling of children through lack of light--are unsolved;
so long as social asphyxia is possible in any part of the world;--in
other words, and with a still wider significance, so long as ignorance
and poverty exist on earth, books of the nature of Les Miserables cannot
fail to be of use.

HAUTEVILLE HOUSE, 1862.




FANTINE




BOOK FIRST--A JUST MAN




CHAPTER I--M. MYRIEL

In 1815, M. Charles-Francois-Bienvenu Myriel was Bishop of D---- He was
an old man of about seventy-five years of age; he had occupied the see
of D---- since 1806.

Although this detail has no connection whatever with the real substance
of what we are about to relate, it will not be superfluous, if merely
for the sake of exactness in all points, to mention here the various
rumors and remarks which had been in circulation about him from the very
moment when he arrived in the diocese. True or false, that which is said
of men often occupies as important a place in their lives, and above all
in their destinies, as that which they do. M. Myriel was the son of a
councillor of the Parliament of Aix; hence he belonged to the nobility
of the bar. It was said that his father, destining him to be the heir of
his own post, had married him at a very early age, eighteen or twenty,
in accordance with a custom which is rather widely prevalent in
parliamentary families. In spite of this marriage, however, it was said
that Charles Myriel created a great deal of talk. He was well formed,
though rather short in stature, elegant, graceful, intelligent; the
whole of the first portion of his life had been devoted to the world and
to gallantry.

The Revolution came; events succeeded each other with precipitation; the
parliamentary families, decimated, pursued, hunted down, were dispersed.
M. Charles Myriel emigrated to Italy at the very beginning of the
Revolution. There his wife died of a malady of the chest, from which she
had long suffered. He had no children. What took place next in the fate
of M. Myriel? The ruin of the French society of the olden days, the fall
of his own family, the tragic spectacles of '93, which were, perhaps,
even more alarming to the emigrants who viewed them from a distance,
with the magnifying powers of terror,--did these cause the ideas of
renunciation and solitude to germinate in him? Was he, in the midst of
these distractions, these affections which absorbed his life, suddenly
smitten with one of those mysterious and terrible blows which sometimes
overwhelm, by striking to his heart, a man whom public catastrophes
would not shake, by striking at his existence and his fortune? No one
could have told: all that was known was, that when he returned from
Italy he was a priest.

In 1804, M. Myriel was the Cure of B---- [Brignolles]. He was already
advanced in years, and lived in a very retired manner.

About the epoch of the coronation, some petty affair connected with
his curacy--just what, is not precisely known--took him to Paris.
Among other powerful persons to whom he went to solicit aid for his
parishioners was M. le Cardinal Fesch. One day, when the Emperor
had come to visit his uncle, the worthy Cure, who was waiting in the
anteroom, found himself present when His Majesty passed. Napoleon,
on finding himself observed with a certain curiosity by this old man,
turned round and said abruptly:--

"Who is this good man who is staring at me?"

"Sire," said M. Myriel, "you are looking at a good man, and I at a great
man. Each of us can profit by it."

That very evening, the Emperor asked the Cardinal the name of the Cure,
and some time afterwards M. Myriel was utterly astonished to learn that
he had been appointed Bishop of D----

What truth was there, after all, in the stories which were invented as
to the early portion of M. Myriel's life? No one knew. Very few families
had been acquainted with the Myriel family before the Revolution.

M. Myriel had to undergo the fate of every newcomer in a little town,
where there are many mouths which talk, and very few heads which think.
He was obliged to undergo it although he was a bishop, and because
he was a bishop. But after all, the rumors with which his name
was connected were rumors only,--noise, sayings, words; less than
words--palabres, as the energetic language of the South expresses it.

However that may be, after nine years of episcopal power and of
residence in D----, all the stories and subjects of conversation which
engross petty towns and petty people at the outset had fallen into
profound oblivion. No one would have dared to mention them; no one would
have dared to recall them.

M. Myriel had arrived at D---- accompanied by an elderly spinster,
Mademoiselle Baptistine, who was his sister, and ten years his junior.

Their only domestic was a female servant of the same age as Mademoiselle
Baptistine, and named Madame Magloire, who, after having been the
servant of M. le Cure, now assumed the double title of maid to
Mademoiselle and housekeeper to Monseigneur.

Mademoiselle Baptistine was a long, pale, thin, gentle creature; she
realized the ideal expressed by the word "respectable"; for it seems
that a woman must needs be a mother in order to be venerable. She
had never been pretty; her whole life, which had been nothing but a
succession of holy deeds, had finally conferred upon her a sort of
pallor and transparency; and as she advanced in years she had acquired
what may be called the beauty of goodness. What had been leanness in
her youth had become transparency in her maturity; and this diaphaneity
allowed the angel to be seen. She was a soul rather than a virgin. Her
person seemed made of a shadow; there was hardly sufficient body to
provide for sex; a little matter enclosing a light; large eyes forever
drooping;--a mere pretext for a soul's remaining on the earth.

Madame Magloire was a little, fat, white old woman, corpulent and
bustling; always out of breath,--in the first place, because of her
activity, and in the next, because of her asthma.

On his arrival, M. Myriel was installed in the episcopal palace with
the honors required by the Imperial decrees, which class a bishop
immediately after a major-general. The mayor and the president paid the
first call on him, and he, in turn, paid the first call on the general
and the prefect.

The installation over, the town waited to see its bishop at work.




CHAPTER II--M. MYRIEL BECOMES M. WELCOME


The episcopal palace of D---- adjoins the hospital.

The episcopal palace was a huge and beautiful house, built of stone at
the beginning of the last century by M. Henri Puget, Doctor of Theology
of the Faculty of Paris, Abbe of Simore, who had been Bishop of D---- in
1712. This palace was a genuine seignorial residence. Everything about
it had a grand air,--the apartments of the Bishop, the drawing-rooms,
the chambers, the principal courtyard, which was very large, with walks
encircling it under arcades in the old Florentine fashion, and gardens
planted with magnificent trees. In the dining-room, a long and superb
gallery which was situated on the ground-floor and opened on the
gardens, M. Henri Puget had entertained in state, on July 29, 1714, My
Lords Charles Brulart de Genlis, archbishop; Prince d'Embrun; Antoine
de Mesgrigny, the capuchin, Bishop of Grasse; Philippe de Vendome, Grand
Prior of France, Abbe of Saint Honore de Lerins; Francois de Berton de
Crillon, bishop, Baron de Vence; Cesar de Sabran de Forcalquier, bishop,
Seignor of Glandeve; and Jean Soanen, Priest of the Oratory, preacher in
ordinary to the king, bishop, Seignor of Senez. The portraits of these
seven reverend personages decorated this apartment; and this memorable
date, the 29th of July, 1714, was there engraved in letters of gold on a
table of white marble.

The hospital was a low and narrow building of a single story, with a
small garden.

Three days after his arrival, the Bishop visited the hospital. The visit
ended, he had the director requested to be so good as to come to his
house.

"Monsieur the director of the hospital," said he to him, "how many sick
people have you at the present moment?"

"Twenty-six, Monseigneur."

"That was the number which I counted," said the Bishop.

"The beds," pursued the director, "are very much crowded against each
other."

"That is what I observed."

"The halls are nothing but rooms, and it is with difficulty that the air
can be changed in them."

"So it seems to me."

"And then, when there is a ray of sun, the garden is very small for the
convalescents."

"That was what I said to myself."

"In case of epidemics,--we have had the typhus fever this year; we
had the sweating sickness two years ago, and a hundred patients at
times,--we know not what to do."

"That is the thought which occurred to me."

"What would you have, Monseigneur?" said the director. "One must resign
one's self."

This conversation took place in the gallery dining-room on the
ground-floor.

The Bishop remained silent for a moment; then he turned abruptly to the
director of the hospital.

"Monsieur," said he, "how many beds do you think this hall alone would
hold?"

"Monseigneur's dining-room?" exclaimed the stupefied director.

The Bishop cast a glance round the apartment, and seemed to be taking
measures and calculations with his eyes.

"It would hold full twenty beds," said he, as though speaking to
himself. Then, raising his voice:--

"Hold, Monsieur the director of the hospital, I will tell you something.
There is evidently a mistake here. There are thirty-six of you, in five
or six small rooms. There are three of us here, and we have room for
sixty. There is some mistake, I tell you; you have my house, and I have
yours. Give me back my house; you are at home here."

On the following day the thirty-six patients were installed in the
Bishop's palace, and the Bishop was settled in the hospital.

M. Myriel had no property, his family having been ruined by the
Revolution. His sister was in receipt of a yearly income of five hundred
francs, which sufficed for her personal wants at the vicarage. M. Myriel
received from the State, in his quality of bishop, a salary of fifteen
thousand francs. On the very day when he took up his abode in the
hospital, M. Myriel settled on the disposition of this sum once for
all, in the following manner. We transcribe here a note made by his own
hand:--


NOTE ON THE REGULATION OF MY HOUSEHOLD EXPENSES.

  For the little seminary . . . . . . . . . . . . . .    1,500 livres
  Society of the  mission . . . . . . . . . . . . . .      100   "
  For the Lazarists of Montdidier . . . . . . . . . .      100   "
  Seminary for foreign missions in Paris  . . . . . .      200   "
  Congregation of the Holy Spirit . . . . . . . . . .      150   "
  Religious establishments of the Holy Land . . . . .      100   "
  Charitable maternity societies  . . . . . . . . . .      300   "
  Extra, for that of Arles  . . . . . . . . . . . . .       50   "
  Work for the amelioration of prisons  . . . . . . .      400   "
  Work for the relief and delivery of prisoners . . .      500   "
  To liberate fathers of families incarcerated for debt  1,000   "
  Addition to the salary of the poor teachers of the
       diocese  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .    2,000   "
  Public granary of the Hautes-Alpes  . . . . . . . .      100   "
  Congregation of the ladies of D----, of Manosque, and of
       Sisteron, for the gratuitous instruction of poor
       girls  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .    1,500   "
  For the poor  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .    6,000   "
  My personal expenses  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .    1,000   "
                                                        ------
       Total  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   15,000   "


M. Myriel made no change in this arrangement during the entire period
that he occupied the see of D---- As has been seen, he called it
regulating his household expenses.

This arrangement was accepted with absolute submission by Mademoiselle
Baptistine. This holy woman regarded Monseigneur of D---- as at one and
the same time her brother and her bishop, her friend according to the
flesh and her superior according to the Church. She simply loved and
venerated him. When he spoke, she bowed; when he acted, she yielded her
adherence. Their only servant, Madame Magloire, grumbled a little. It
will be observed that Monsieur the Bishop had reserved for himself
only one thousand livres, which, added to the pension of Mademoiselle
Baptistine, made fifteen hundred francs a year. On these fifteen hundred
francs these two old women and the old man subsisted.

And when a village curate came to D----, the Bishop still found means to
entertain him, thanks to the severe economy of Madame Magloire, and to
the intelligent administration of Mademoiselle Baptistine.

One day, after he had been in D---- about three months, the Bishop
said:--

"And still I am quite cramped with it all!"

"I should think so!" exclaimed Madame Magloire. "Monseigneur has not
even claimed the allowance which the department owes him for the expense
of his carriage in town, and for his journeys about the diocese. It was
customary for bishops in former days."

"Hold!" cried the Bishop, "you are quite right, Madame Magloire."

And he made his demand.

Some time afterwards the General Council took this demand under
consideration, and voted him an annual sum of three thousand francs,
under this heading: Allowance to M. the Bishop for expenses of carriage,
expenses of posting, and expenses of pastoral visits.

This provoked a great outcry among the local burgesses; and a senator
of the Empire, a former member of the Council of the Five Hundred
which favored the 18 Brumaire, and who was provided with a magnificent
senatorial office in the vicinity of the town of D----, wrote to M.
Bigot de Preameneu, the minister of public worship, a very angry and
confidential note on the subject, from which we extract these authentic
lines:--

"Expenses of carriage? What can be done with it in a town of less than
four thousand inhabitants? Expenses of journeys? What is the use
of these trips, in the first place? Next, how can the posting be
accomplished in these mountainous parts? There are no roads. No one
travels otherwise than on horseback. Even the bridge between Durance and
Chateau-Arnoux can barely support ox-teams. These priests are all thus,
greedy and avaricious. This man played the good priest when he
first came. Now he does like the rest; he must have a carriage and a
posting-chaise, he must have luxuries, like the bishops of the olden
days. Oh, all this priesthood! Things will not go well, M. le Comte,
until the Emperor has freed us from these black-capped rascals. Down
with the Pope! [Matters were getting embroiled with Rome.] For my part,
I am for Caesar alone." Etc., etc.

On the other hand, this affair afforded great delight to Madame
Magloire. "Good," said she to Mademoiselle Baptistine; "Monseigneur
began with other people, but he has had to wind up with himself, after
all. He has regulated all his charities. Now here are three thousand
francs for us! At last!"

That same evening the Bishop wrote out and handed to his sister a
memorandum conceived in the following terms:--

EXPENSES OF CARRIAGE AND CIRCUIT.

  For furnishing meat soup to the patients in the hospital. 1,500 livres
  For the maternity charitable society of Aix . . . . . . .   250   "
  For the maternity charitable society of Draguignan  . . .   250   "
  For foundlings  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   500   "
  For orphans   . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   500   "
                                                            -----
       Total  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3,000   "

Such was M. Myriel's budget.

As for the chance episcopal perquisites, the fees for marriage bans,
dispensations, private baptisms, sermons, benedictions, of churches or
chapels, marriages, etc., the Bishop levied them on the wealthy with all
the more asperity, since he bestowed them on the needy.

After a time, offerings of money flowed in. Those who had and those who
lacked knocked at M. Myriel's door,--the latter in search of the alms
which the former came to deposit. In less than a year the Bishop had
become the treasurer of all benevolence and the cashier of all those
in distress. Considerable sums of money passed through his hands, but
nothing could induce him to make any change whatever in his mode of
life, or add anything superfluous to his bare necessities.

Far from it. As there is always more wretchedness below than there
is brotherhood above, all was given away, so to speak, before it was
received. It was like water on dry soil; no matter how much money he
received, he never had any. Then he stripped himself.

The usage being that bishops shall announce their baptismal names at the
head of their charges and their pastoral letters, the poor people of the
country-side had selected, with a sort of affectionate instinct, among
the names and prenomens of their bishop, that which had a meaning for
them; and they never called him anything except Monseigneur Bienvenu
[Welcome]. We will follow their example, and will also call him thus
when we have occasion to name him. Moreover, this appellation pleased
him.

"I like that name," said he. "Bienvenu makes up for the Monseigneur."

We do not claim that the portrait herewith presented is probable; we
confine ourselves to stating that it resembles the original.




CHAPTER III--A HARD BISHOPRIC FOR A GOOD BISHOP


The Bishop did not omit his pastoral visits because he had converted his
carriage into alms. The diocese of D---- is a fatiguing one. There are
very few plains and a great many mountains; hardly any roads, as we have
just seen; thirty-two curacies, forty-one vicarships, and two hundred
and eighty-five auxiliary chapels. To visit all these is quite a task.

The Bishop managed to do it. He went on foot when it was in the
neighborhood, in a tilted spring-cart when it was on the plain, and on
a donkey in the mountains. The two old women accompanied him. When the
trip was too hard for them, he went alone.

One day he arrived at Senez, which is an ancient episcopal city. He was
mounted on an ass. His purse, which was very dry at that moment, did not
permit him any other equipage. The mayor of the town came to receive
him at the gate of the town, and watched him dismount from his ass,
with scandalized eyes. Some of the citizens were laughing around him.
"Monsieur the Mayor," said the Bishop, "and Messieurs Citizens, I
perceive that I shock you. You think it very arrogant in a poor priest
to ride an animal which was used by Jesus Christ. I have done so from
necessity, I assure you, and not from vanity."

In the course of these trips he was kind and indulgent, and talked
rather than preached. He never went far in search of his arguments and
his examples. He quoted to the inhabitants of one district the example
of a neighboring district. In the cantons where they were harsh to the
poor, he said: "Look at the people of Briancon! They have conferred on
the poor, on widows and orphans, the right to have their meadows mown
three days in advance of every one else. They rebuild their houses for
them gratuitously when they are ruined. Therefore it is a country which
is blessed by God. For a whole century, there has not been a single
murderer among them."

In villages which were greedy for profit and harvest, he said: "Look at
the people of Embrun! If, at the harvest season, the father of a family
has his son away on service in the army, and his daughters at service in
the town, and if he is ill and incapacitated, the cure recommends him to
the prayers of the congregation; and on Sunday, after the mass, all the
inhabitants of the village--men, women, and children--go to the poor
man's field and do his harvesting for him, and carry his straw and his
grain to his granary." To families divided by questions of money and
inheritance he said: "Look at the mountaineers of Devolny, a country so
wild that the nightingale is not heard there once in fifty years.
Well, when the father of a family dies, the boys go off to seek their
fortunes, leaving the property to the girls, so that they may find
husbands." To the cantons which had a taste for lawsuits, and where the
farmers ruined themselves in stamped paper, he said: "Look at those good
peasants in the valley of Queyras! There are three thousand souls of
them. Mon Dieu! it is like a little republic. Neither judge nor bailiff
is known there. The mayor does everything. He allots the imposts,
taxes each person conscientiously, judges quarrels for nothing, divides
inheritances without charge, pronounces sentences gratuitously; and he
is obeyed, because he is a just man among simple men." To villages where
he found no schoolmaster, he quoted once more the people of Queyras: "Do
you know how they manage?" he said. "Since a little country of a
dozen or fifteen hearths cannot always support a teacher, they have
school-masters who are paid by the whole valley, who make the round
of the villages, spending a week in this one, ten days in that, and
instruct them. These teachers go to the fairs. I have seen them there.
They are to be recognized by the quill pens which they wear in the cord
of their hat. Those who teach reading only have one pen; those who teach
reading and reckoning have two pens; those who teach reading, reckoning,
and Latin have three pens. But what a disgrace to be ignorant! Do like
the people of Queyras!"

Thus he discoursed gravely and paternally; in default of examples, he
invented parables, going directly to the point, with few phrases and
many images, which characteristic formed the real eloquence of Jesus
Christ. And being convinced himself, he was persuasive.




CHAPTER IV--WORKS CORRESPONDING TO WORDS

His conversation was gay and affable. He put himself on a level with the
two old women who had passed their lives beside him. When he laughed,
it was the laugh of a schoolboy. Madame Magloire liked to call him Your
Grace [Votre Grandeur]. One day he rose from his arm-chair, and went
to his library in search of a book. This book was on one of the upper
shelves. As the bishop was rather short of stature, he could not
reach it. "Madame Magloire," said he, "fetch me a chair. My greatness
[grandeur] does not reach as far as that shelf."

One of his distant relatives, Madame la Comtesse de Lo, rarely allowed
an opportunity to escape of enumerating, in his presence, what she
designated as "the expectations" of her three sons. She had numerous
relatives, who were very old and near to death, and of whom her sons
were the natural heirs. The youngest of the three was to receive from a
grand-aunt a good hundred thousand livres of income; the second was the
heir by entail to the title of the Duke, his uncle; the eldest was to
succeed to the peerage of his grandfather. The Bishop was accustomed to
listen in silence to these innocent and pardonable maternal boasts. On
one occasion, however, he appeared to be more thoughtful than usual,
while Madame de Lo was relating once again the details of all these
inheritances and all these "expectations." She interrupted herself
impatiently: "Mon Dieu, cousin! What are you thinking about?" "I am
thinking," replied the Bishop, "of a singular remark, which is to be
found, I believe, in St. Augustine,--'Place your hopes in the man from
whom you do not inherit.'"

At another time, on receiving a notification of the decease of a
gentleman of the country-side, wherein not only the dignities of the
dead man, but also the feudal and noble qualifications of all his
relatives, spread over an entire page: "What a stout back Death has!"
he exclaimed. "What a strange burden of titles is cheerfully imposed
on him, and how much wit must men have, in order thus to press the tomb
into the service of vanity!"

He was gifted, on occasion, with a gentle raillery, which almost always
concealed a serious meaning. In the course of one Lent, a youthful vicar
came to D----, and preached in the cathedral. He was tolerably eloquent.
The subject of his sermon was charity. He urged the rich to give to the
poor, in order to avoid hell, which he depicted in the most frightful
manner of which he was capable, and to win paradise, which he
represented as charming and desirable. Among the audience there was
a wealthy retired merchant, who was somewhat of a usurer, named M.
Geborand, who had amassed two millions in the manufacture of coarse
cloth, serges, and woollen galloons. Never in his whole life had M.
Geborand bestowed alms on any poor wretch. After the delivery of that
sermon, it was observed that he gave a sou every Sunday to the poor old
beggar-women at the door of the cathedral. There were six of them to
share it. One day the Bishop caught sight of him in the act of bestowing
this charity, and said to his sister, with a smile, "There is M.
Geborand purchasing paradise for a sou."

When it was a question of charity, he was not to be rebuffed even by
a refusal, and on such occasions he gave utterance to remarks which
induced reflection. Once he was begging for the poor in a drawing-room
of the town; there was present the Marquis de Champtercier, a wealthy
and avaricious old man, who contrived to be, at one and the same time,
an ultra-royalist and an ultra-Voltairian. This variety of man has
actually existed. When the Bishop came to him, he touched his arm, "You
must give me something, M. le Marquis." The Marquis turned round and
answered dryly, "I have poor people of my own, Monseigneur." "Give them
to me," replied the Bishop.

One day he preached the following sermon in the cathedral:--


"My very dear brethren, my good friends, there are thirteen hundred
and twenty thousand peasants' dwellings in France which have but three
openings; eighteen hundred and seventeen thousand hovels which have but
two openings, the door and one window; and three hundred and forty-six
thousand cabins besides which have but one opening, the door. And this
arises from a thing which is called the tax on doors and windows. Just
put poor families, old women and little children, in those buildings,
and behold the fevers and maladies which result! Alas! God gives air to
men; the law sells it to them. I do not blame the law, but I bless God.
In the department of the Isere, in the Var, in the two departments
of the Alpes, the Hautes, and the Basses, the peasants have not even
wheelbarrows; they transport their manure on the backs of men; they have
no candles, and they burn resinous sticks, and bits of rope dipped in
pitch. That is the state of affairs throughout the whole of the hilly
country of Dauphine. They make bread for six months at one time; they
bake it with dried cow-dung. In the winter they break this bread up with
an axe, and they soak it for twenty-four hours, in order to render it
eatable. My brethren, have pity! behold the suffering on all sides of
you!"

Born a Provencal, he easily familiarized himself with the dialect of the
south. He said, "En be! moussu, ses sage?" as in lower Languedoc; "Onte
anaras passa?" as in the Basses-Alpes; "Puerte un bouen moutu embe un
bouen fromage grase," as in upper Dauphine. This pleased the people
extremely, and contributed not a little to win him access to all
spirits. He was perfectly at home in the thatched cottage and in the
mountains. He understood how to say the grandest things in the most
vulgar of idioms. As he spoke all tongues, he entered into all hearts.

Moreover, he was the same towards people of the world and towards
the lower classes. He condemned nothing in haste and without taking
circumstances into account. He said, "Examine the road over which the
fault has passed."

Being, as he described himself with a smile, an ex-sinner, he had none
of the asperities of austerity, and he professed, with a good deal
of distinctness, and without the frown of the ferociously virtuous, a
doctrine which may be summed up as follows:--

"Man has upon him his flesh, which is at once his burden and his
temptation. He drags it with him and yields to it. He must watch it,
check it, repress it, and obey it only at the last extremity. There may
be some fault even in this obedience; but the fault thus committed is
venial; it is a fall, but a fall on the knees which may terminate in
prayer.

"To be a saint is the exception; to be an upright man is the rule. Err,
fall, sin if you will, but be upright.

"The least possible sin is the law of man. No sin at all is the dream
of the angel. All which is terrestrial is subject to sin. Sin is a
gravitation."

When he saw everyone exclaiming very loudly, and growing angry very
quickly, "Oh! oh!" he said, with a smile; "to all appearance, this is
a great crime which all the world commits. These are hypocrisies
which have taken fright, and are in haste to make protest and to put
themselves under shelter."

He was indulgent towards women and poor people, on whom the burden of
human society rest. He said, "The faults of women, of children, of the
feeble, the indigent, and the ignorant, are the fault of the husbands,
the fathers, the masters, the strong, the rich, and the wise."

He said, moreover, "Teach those who are ignorant as many things as
possible; society is culpable, in that it does not afford instruction
gratis; it is responsible for the night which it produces. This soul
is full of shadow; sin is therein committed. The guilty one is not the
person who has committed the sin, but the person who has created the
shadow."

It will be perceived that he had a peculiar manner of his own of judging
things: I suspect that he obtained it from the Gospel.

One day he heard a criminal case, which was in preparation and on the
point of trial, discussed in a drawing-room. A wretched man, being at
the end of his resources, had coined counterfeit money, out of love for
a woman, and for the child which he had had by her. Counterfeiting was
still punishable with death at that epoch. The woman had been arrested
in the act of passing the first false piece made by the man. She was
held, but there were no proofs except against her. She alone could
accuse her lover, and destroy him by her confession. She denied; they
insisted. She persisted in her denial. Thereupon an idea occurred to
the attorney for the crown. He invented an infidelity on the part of
the lover, and succeeded, by means of fragments of letters cunningly
presented, in persuading the unfortunate woman that she had a rival, and
that the man was deceiving her. Thereupon, exasperated by jealousy, she
denounced her lover, confessed all, proved all.

The man was ruined. He was shortly to be tried at Aix with his
accomplice. They were relating the matter, and each one was expressing
enthusiasm over the cleverness of the magistrate. By bringing jealousy
into play, he had caused the truth to burst forth in wrath, he had
educed the justice of revenge. The Bishop listened to all this in
silence. When they had finished, he inquired,--

"Where are this man and woman to be tried?"

"At the Court of Assizes."

He went on, "And where will the advocate of the crown be tried?"

A tragic event occurred at D---- A man was condemned to death for
murder. He was a wretched fellow, not exactly educated, not exactly
ignorant, who had been a mountebank at fairs, and a writer for the
public. The town took a great interest in the trial. On the eve of the
day fixed for the execution of the condemned man, the chaplain of the
prison fell ill. A priest was needed to attend the criminal in his
last moments. They sent for the cure. It seems that he refused to come,
saying, "That is no affair of mine. I have nothing to do with that
unpleasant task, and with that mountebank: I, too, am ill; and besides,
it is not my place." This reply was reported to the Bishop, who said,
"Monsieur le Cure is right: it is not his place; it is mine."

He went instantly to the prison, descended to the cell of the
"mountebank," called him by name, took him by the hand, and spoke to
him. He passed the entire day with him, forgetful of food and sleep,
praying to God for the soul of the condemned man, and praying the
condemned man for his own. He told him the best truths, which are also
the most simple. He was father, brother, friend; he was bishop only to
bless. He taught him everything, encouraged and consoled him. The man
was on the point of dying in despair. Death was an abyss to him. As he
stood trembling on its mournful brink, he recoiled with horror. He
was not sufficiently ignorant to be absolutely indifferent. His
condemnation, which had been a profound shock, had, in a manner, broken
through, here and there, that wall which separates us from the mystery
of things, and which we call life. He gazed incessantly beyond this
world through these fatal breaches, and beheld only darkness. The Bishop
made him see light.

On the following day, when they came to fetch the unhappy wretch, the
Bishop was still there. He followed him, and exhibited himself to the
eyes of the crowd in his purple camail and with his episcopal cross upon
his neck, side by side with the criminal bound with cords.

He mounted the tumbril with him, he mounted the scaffold with him. The
sufferer, who had been so gloomy and cast down on the preceding day, was
radiant. He felt that his soul was reconciled, and he hoped in God. The
Bishop embraced him, and at the moment when the knife was about to fall,
he said to him: "God raises from the dead him whom man slays; he whom
his brothers have rejected finds his Father once more. Pray, believe,
enter into life: the Father is there." When he descended from the
scaffold, there was something in his look which made the people draw
aside to let him pass. They did not know which was most worthy of
admiration, his pallor or his serenity. On his return to the humble
dwelling, which he designated, with a smile, as his palace, he said to
his sister, "I have just officiated pontifically."

Since the most sublime things are often those which are the least
understood, there were people in the town who said, when commenting on
this conduct of the Bishop, "It is affectation."

This, however, was a remark which was confined to the drawing-rooms.
The populace, which perceives no jest in holy deeds, was touched, and
admired him.

As for the Bishop, it was a shock to him to have beheld the guillotine,
and it was a long time before he recovered from it.

In fact, when the scaffold is there, all erected and prepared, it has
something about it which produces hallucination. One may feel a certain
indifference to the death penalty, one may refrain from pronouncing upon
it, from saying yes or no, so long as one has not seen a guillotine with
one's own eyes: but if one encounters one of them, the shock is violent;
one is forced to decide, and to take part for or against. Some admire
it, like de Maistre; others execrate it, like Beccaria. The guillotine
is the concretion of the law; it is called vindicte; it is not neutral,
and it does not permit you to remain neutral. He who sees it shivers
with the most mysterious of shivers. All social problems erect their
interrogation point around this chopping-knife. The scaffold is a
vision. The scaffold is not a piece of carpentry; the scaffold is not
a machine; the scaffold is not an inert bit of mechanism constructed of
wood, iron and cords.

It seems as though it were a being, possessed of I know not what sombre
initiative; one would say that this piece of carpenter's work saw, that
this machine heard, that this mechanism understood, that this wood,
this iron, and these cords were possessed of will. In the frightful
meditation into which its presence casts the soul the scaffold appears
in terrible guise, and as though taking part in what is going on. The
scaffold is the accomplice of the executioner; it devours, it eats
flesh, it drinks blood; the scaffold is a sort of monster fabricated
by the judge and the carpenter, a spectre which seems to live with a
horrible vitality composed of all the death which it has inflicted.

Therefore, the impression was terrible and profound; on the day
following the execution, and on many succeeding days, the Bishop
appeared to be crushed. The almost violent serenity of the funereal
moment had disappeared; the phantom of social justice tormented him. He,
who generally returned from all his deeds with a radiant satisfaction,
seemed to be reproaching himself. At times he talked to himself, and
stammered lugubrious monologues in a low voice. This is one which his
sister overheard one evening and preserved: "I did not think that it was
so monstrous. It is wrong to become absorbed in the divine law to such a
degree as not to perceive human law. Death belongs to God alone. By what
right do men touch that unknown thing?"

In course of time these impressions weakened and probably vanished.
Nevertheless, it was observed that the Bishop thenceforth avoided
passing the place of execution.

M. Myriel could be summoned at any hour to the bedside of the sick and
dying. He did not ignore the fact that therein lay his greatest duty and
his greatest labor. Widowed and orphaned families had no need to summon
him; he came of his own accord. He understood how to sit down and hold
his peace for long hours beside the man who had lost the wife of his
love, of the mother who had lost her child. As he knew the moment for
silence he knew also the moment for speech. Oh, admirable consoler! He
sought not to efface sorrow by forgetfulness, but to magnify and dignify
it by hope. He said:--

"Have a care of the manner in which you turn towards the dead. Think
not of that which perishes. Gaze steadily. You will perceive the living
light of your well-beloved dead in the depths of heaven." He knew that
faith is wholesome. He sought to counsel and calm the despairing man, by
pointing out to him the resigned man, and to transform the grief which
gazes upon a grave by showing him the grief which fixes its gaze upon a
star.




CHAPTER V--MONSEIGNEUR BIENVENU MADE HIS CASSOCKS LAST TOO LONG


The private life of M. Myriel was filled with the same thoughts as his
public life. The voluntary poverty in which the Bishop of D---- lived,
would have been a solemn and charming sight for any one who could have
viewed it close at hand.

Like all old men, and like the majority of thinkers, he slept little.
This brief slumber was profound. In the morning he meditated for an
hour, then he said his mass, either at the cathedral or in his own
house. His mass said, he broke his fast on rye bread dipped in the milk
of his own cows. Then he set to work.

A Bishop is a very busy man: he must every day receive the secretary
of the bishopric, who is generally a canon, and nearly every day his
vicars-general. He has congregations to reprove, privileges to grant,
a whole ecclesiastical library to examine,--prayer-books, diocesan
catechisms, books of hours, etc.,--charges to write, sermons to
authorize, cures and mayors to reconcile, a clerical correspondence, an
administrative correspondence; on one side the State, on the other the
Holy See; and a thousand matters of business.

What time was left to him, after these thousand details of business, and
his offices and his breviary, he bestowed first on the necessitous,
the sick, and the afflicted; the time which was left to him from the
afflicted, the sick, and the necessitous, he devoted to work. Sometimes
he dug in his garden; again, he read or wrote. He had but one word
for both these kinds of toil; he called them gardening. "The mind is a
garden," said he.

Towards mid-day, when the weather was fine, he went forth and took a
stroll in the country or in town, often entering lowly dwellings. He
was seen walking alone, buried in his own thoughts, his eyes cast down,
supporting himself on his long cane, clad in his wadded purple garment
of silk, which was very warm, wearing purple stockings inside his coarse
shoes, and surmounted by a flat hat which allowed three golden tassels
of large bullion to droop from its three points.

It was a perfect festival wherever he appeared. One would have said that
his presence had something warming and luminous about it. The children
and the old people came out to the doorsteps for the Bishop as for the
sun. He bestowed his blessing, and they blessed him. They pointed out
his house to any one who was in need of anything.

[Illustration: The Comfortor  1b1-5-comfortor]

Here and there he halted, accosted the little boys and girls, and smiled
upon the mothers. He visited the poor so long as he had any money; when
he no longer had any, he visited the rich.

As he made his cassocks last a long while, and did not wish to have it
noticed, he never went out in the town without his wadded purple cloak.
This inconvenienced him somewhat in summer.

On his return, he dined. The dinner resembled his breakfast.

At half-past eight in the evening he supped with his sister, Madame
Magloire standing behind them and serving them at table. Nothing could
be more frugal than this repast. If, however, the Bishop had one of his
cures to supper, Madame Magloire took advantage of the opportunity to
serve Monseigneur with some excellent fish from the lake, or with some
fine game from the mountains. Every cure furnished the pretext for
a good meal: the Bishop did not interfere. With that exception, his
ordinary diet consisted only of vegetables boiled in water, and oil
soup. Thus it was said in the town, when the Bishop does not indulge in
the cheer of a cure, he indulges in the cheer of a trappist.

After supper he conversed for half an hour with Mademoiselle Baptistine
and Madame Magloire; then he retired to his own room and set to writing,
sometimes on loose sheets, and again on the margin of some folio. He was
a man of letters and rather learned. He left behind him five or six
very curious manuscripts; among others, a dissertation on this verse in
Genesis, In the beginning, the spirit of God floated upon the waters.
With this verse he compares three texts: the Arabic verse which says,
The winds of God blew; Flavius Josephus who says, A wind from above was
precipitated upon the earth; and finally, the Chaldaic paraphrase of
Onkelos, which renders it, A wind coming from God blew upon the face of
the waters. In another dissertation, he examines the theological works
of Hugo, Bishop of Ptolemais, great-grand-uncle to the writer of this
book, and establishes the fact, that to this bishop must be attributed
the divers little works published during the last century, under the
pseudonym of Barleycourt.

Sometimes, in the midst of his reading, no matter what the book might
be which he had in his hand, he would suddenly fall into a profound
meditation, whence he only emerged to write a few lines on the pages of
the volume itself. These lines have often no connection whatever with
the book which contains them. We now have under our eyes a note written
by him on the margin of a quarto entitled Correspondence of Lord Germain
with Generals Clinton, Cornwallis, and the Admirals on the American
station. Versailles, Poincot, book-seller; and Paris, Pissot,
bookseller, Quai des Augustins.

Here is the note:--

"Oh, you who are!

"Ecclesiastes calls you the All-powerful; the Maccabees call you the
Creator; the Epistle to the Ephesians calls you liberty; Baruch calls
you Immensity; the Psalms call you Wisdom and Truth; John calls you
Light; the Books of Kings call you Lord; Exodus calls you Providence;
Leviticus, Sanctity; Esdras, Justice; the creation calls you God; man
calls you Father; but Solomon calls you Compassion, and that is the most
beautiful of all your names."

Toward nine o'clock in the evening the two women retired and betook
themselves to their chambers on the first floor, leaving him alone until
morning on the ground floor.

It is necessary that we should, in this place, give an exact idea of the
dwelling of the Bishop of D----




CHAPTER VI--WHO GUARDED HIS HOUSE FOR HIM

The house in which he lived consisted, as we have said, of a ground
floor, and one story above; three rooms on the ground floor, three
chambers on the first, and an attic above. Behind the house was a
garden, a quarter of an acre in extent. The two women occupied the
first floor; the Bishop was lodged below. The first room, opening on the
street, served him as dining-room, the second was his bedroom, and the
third his oratory. There was no exit possible from this oratory, except
by passing through the bedroom, nor from the bedroom, without passing
through the dining-room. At the end of the suite, in the oratory, there
was a detached alcove with a bed, for use in cases of hospitality.
The Bishop offered this bed to country curates whom business or the
requirements of their parishes brought to D----

The pharmacy of the hospital, a small building which had been added
to the house, and abutted on the garden, had been transformed into
a kitchen and cellar. In addition to this, there was in the garden a
stable, which had formerly been the kitchen of the hospital, and in
which the Bishop kept two cows. No matter what the quantity of milk they
gave, he invariably sent half of it every morning to the sick people in
the hospital. "I am paying my tithes," he said.

His bedroom was tolerably large, and rather difficult to warm in bad
weather. As wood is extremely dear at D----, he hit upon the idea of
having a compartment of boards constructed in the cow-shed. Here he
passed his evenings during seasons of severe cold: he called it his
winter salon.

In this winter salon, as in the dining-room, there was no other
furniture than a square table in white wood, and four straw-seated
chairs. In addition to this the dining-room was ornamented with an
antique sideboard, painted pink, in water colors. Out of a similar
sideboard, properly draped with white napery and imitation lace, the
Bishop had constructed the altar which decorated his oratory.

His wealthy penitents and the sainted women of D---- had more than once
assessed themselves to raise the money for a new altar for Monseigneur's
oratory; on each occasion he had taken the money and had given it to
the poor. "The most beautiful of altars," he said, "is the soul of an
unhappy creature consoled and thanking God."

In his oratory there were two straw prie-Dieu, and there was an
arm-chair, also in straw, in his bedroom. When, by chance, he received
seven or eight persons at one time, the prefect, or the general, or the
staff of the regiment in garrison, or several pupils from the little
seminary, the chairs had to be fetched from the winter salon in the
stable, the prie-Dieu from the oratory, and the arm-chair from the
bedroom: in this way as many as eleven chairs could be collected for the
visitors. A room was dismantled for each new guest.

It sometimes happened that there were twelve in the party; the Bishop
then relieved the embarrassment of the situation by standing in front
of the chimney if it was winter, or by strolling in the garden if it was
summer.

There was still another chair in the detached alcove, but the straw was
half gone from it, and it had but three legs, so that it was of service
only when propped against the wall. Mademoiselle Baptistine had also in
her own room a very large easy-chair of wood, which had formerly been
gilded, and which was covered with flowered pekin; but they had been
obliged to hoist this bergere up to the first story through the window,
as the staircase was too narrow; it could not, therefore, be reckoned
among the possibilities in the way of furniture.

Mademoiselle Baptistine's ambition had been to be able to purchase a set
of drawing-room furniture in yellow Utrecht velvet, stamped with a rose
pattern, and with mahogany in swan's neck style, with a sofa. But this
would have cost five hundred francs at least, and in view of the fact
that she had only been able to lay by forty-two francs and ten sous for
this purpose in the course of five years, she had ended by renouncing
the idea. However, who is there who has attained his ideal?

Nothing is more easy to present to the imagination than the Bishop's
bedchamber. A glazed door opened on the garden; opposite this was the
bed,--a hospital bed of iron, with a canopy of green serge; in the
shadow of the bed, behind a curtain, were the utensils of the toilet,
which still betrayed the elegant habits of the man of the world: there
were two doors, one near the chimney, opening into the oratory; the
other near the bookcase, opening into the dining-room. The bookcase was
a large cupboard with glass doors filled with books; the chimney was of
wood painted to represent marble, and habitually without fire. In the
chimney stood a pair of firedogs of iron, ornamented above with two
garlanded vases, and flutings which had formerly been silvered
with silver leaf, which was a sort of episcopal luxury; above the
chimney-piece hung a crucifix of copper, with the silver worn off, fixed
on a background of threadbare velvet in a wooden frame from which the
gilding had fallen; near the glass door a large table with an inkstand,
loaded with a confusion of papers and with huge volumes; before the
table an arm-chair of straw; in front of the bed a prie-Dieu, borrowed
from the oratory.

Two portraits in oval frames were fastened to the wall on each side of
the bed. Small gilt inscriptions on the plain surface of the cloth at
the side of these figures indicated that the portraits represented,
one the Abbe of Chaliot, bishop of Saint Claude; the other, the Abbe
Tourteau, vicar-general of Agde, abbe of Grand-Champ, order of Citeaux,
diocese of Chartres. When the Bishop succeeded to this apartment, after
the hospital patients, he had found these portraits there, and had left
them. They were priests, and probably donors--two reasons for respecting
them. All that he knew about these two persons was, that they had
been appointed by the king, the one to his bishopric, the other to his
benefice, on the same day, the 27th of April, 1785. Madame Magloire
having taken the pictures down to dust, the Bishop had discovered these
particulars written in whitish ink on a little square of paper, yellowed
by time, and attached to the back of the portrait of the Abbe of
Grand-Champ with four wafers.

At his window he had an antique curtain of a coarse woollen stuff, which
finally became so old, that, in order to avoid the expense of a new one,
Madame Magloire was forced to take a large seam in the very middle
of it. This seam took the form of a cross. The Bishop often called
attention to it: "How delightful that is!" he said.

All the rooms in the house, without exception, those on the ground
floor as well as those on the first floor, were white-washed, which is a
fashion in barracks and hospitals.

However, in their latter years, Madame Magloire discovered beneath the
paper which had been washed over, paintings, ornamenting the apartment
of Mademoiselle Baptistine, as we shall see further on. Before becoming
a hospital, this house had been the ancient parliament house of the
Bourgeois. Hence this decoration. The chambers were paved in red bricks,
which were washed every week, with straw mats in front of all the beds.
Altogether, this dwelling, which was attended to by the two women, was
exquisitely clean from top to bottom. This was the sole luxury which the
Bishop permitted. He said, "That takes nothing from the poor."

It must be confessed, however, that he still retained from his former
possessions six silver knives and forks and a soup-ladle, which
Madame Magloire contemplated every day with delight, as they glistened
splendidly upon the coarse linen cloth. And since we are now painting
the Bishop of D---- as he was in reality, we must add that he had said
more than once, "I find it difficult to renounce eating from silver
dishes."

To this silverware must be added two large candlesticks of massive
silver, which he had inherited from a great-aunt. These candlesticks
held two wax candles, and usually figured on the Bishop's chimney-piece.
When he had any one to dinner, Madame Magloire lighted the two candles
and set the candlesticks on the table.

In the Bishop's own chamber, at the head of his bed, there was a small
cupboard, in which Madame Magloire locked up the six silver knives and
forks and the big spoon every night. But it is necessary to add, that
the key was never removed.

The garden, which had been rather spoiled by the ugly buildings which
we have mentioned, was composed of four alleys in cross-form, radiating
from a tank. Another walk made the circuit of the garden, and skirted
the white wall which enclosed it. These alleys left behind them four
square plots rimmed with box. In three of these, Madame Magloire
cultivated vegetables; in the fourth, the Bishop had planted some
flowers; here and there stood a few fruit-trees. Madame Magloire had
once remarked, with a sort of gentle malice: "Monseigneur, you who turn
everything to account, have, nevertheless, one useless plot. It would be
better to grow salads there than bouquets." "Madame Magloire," retorted
the Bishop, "you are mistaken. The beautiful is as useful as the
useful." He added after a pause, "More so, perhaps."

This plot, consisting of three or four beds, occupied the Bishop
almost as much as did his books. He liked to pass an hour or two there,
trimming, hoeing, and making holes here and there in the earth, into
which he dropped seeds. He was not as hostile to insects as a gardener
could have wished to see him. Moreover, he made no pretensions to
botany; he ignored groups and consistency; he made not the slightest
effort to decide between Tournefort and the natural method; he took part
neither with the buds against the cotyledons, nor with Jussieu against
Linnaeus. He did not study plants; he loved flowers. He respected
learned men greatly; he respected the ignorant still more; and, without
ever failing in these two respects, he watered his flower-beds every
summer evening with a tin watering-pot painted green.

The house had not a single door which could be locked. The door of the
dining-room, which, as we have said, opened directly on the cathedral
square, had formerly been ornamented with locks and bolts like the door
of a prison. The Bishop had had all this ironwork removed, and this door
was never fastened, either by night or by day, with anything except the
latch. All that the first passerby had to do at any hour, was to give it
a push. At first, the two women had been very much tried by this door,
which was never fastened, but Monsieur de D---- had said to them, "Have
bolts put on your rooms, if that will please you." They had ended by
sharing his confidence, or by at least acting as though they shared it.
Madame Magloire alone had frights from time to time. As for the Bishop,
his thought can be found explained, or at least indicated, in the three
lines which he wrote on the margin of a Bible, "This is the shade of
difference: the door of the physician should never be shut, the door of
the priest should always be open."

On another book, entitled Philosophy of the Medical Science, he had
written this other note: "Am not I a physician like them? I also have my
patients, and then, too, I have some whom I call my unfortunates."

Again he wrote: "Do not inquire the name of him who asks a shelter of
you. The very man who is embarrassed by his name is the one who needs
shelter."

It chanced that a worthy cure, I know not whether it was the cure of
Couloubroux or the cure of Pompierry, took it into his head to ask
him one day, probably at the instigation of Madame Magloire, whether
Monsieur was sure that he was not committing an indiscretion, to a
certain extent, in leaving his door unfastened day and night, at the
mercy of any one who should choose to enter, and whether, in short,
he did not fear lest some misfortune might occur in a house so little
guarded. The Bishop touched his shoulder, with gentle gravity, and
said to him, "Nisi Dominus custodierit domum, in vanum vigilant qui
custodiunt eam," Unless the Lord guard the house, in vain do they watch
who guard it.

Then he spoke of something else.

He was fond of saying, "There is a bravery of the priest as well as
the bravery of a colonel of dragoons,--only," he added, "ours must be
tranquil."




CHAPTER VII--CRAVATTE

It is here that a fact falls naturally into place, which we must not
omit, because it is one of the sort which show us best what sort of a
man the Bishop of D---- was.

After the destruction of the band of Gaspard Bes, who had infested the
gorges of Ollioules, one of his lieutenants, Cravatte, took refuge in
the mountains. He concealed himself for some time with his bandits, the
remnant of Gaspard Bes's troop, in the county of Nice; then he made his
way to Piedmont, and suddenly reappeared in France, in the vicinity
of Barcelonette. He was first seen at Jauziers, then at Tuiles. He hid
himself in the caverns of the Joug-de-l'Aigle, and thence he descended
towards the hamlets and villages through the ravines of Ubaye and
Ubayette.

He even pushed as far as Embrun, entered the cathedral one night,
and despoiled the sacristy. His highway robberies laid waste the
country-side. The gendarmes were set on his track, but in vain. He
always escaped; sometimes he resisted by main force. He was a bold
wretch. In the midst of all this terror the Bishop arrived. He was
making his circuit to Chastelar. The mayor came to meet him, and urged
him to retrace his steps. Cravatte was in possession of the mountains
as far as Arche, and beyond; there was danger even with an escort; it
merely exposed three or four unfortunate gendarmes to no purpose.

"Therefore," said the Bishop, "I intend to go without escort."

"You do not really mean that, Monseigneur!" exclaimed the mayor.

"I do mean it so thoroughly that I absolutely refuse any gendarmes, and
shall set out in an hour."

"Set out?"

"Set out."

"Alone?"

"Alone."

"Monseigneur, you will not do that!"

"There exists yonder in the mountains," said the Bishop, "a tiny
community no bigger than that, which I have not seen for three years.
They are my good friends, those gentle and honest shepherds. They own
one goat out of every thirty that they tend. They make very pretty
woollen cords of various colors, and they play the mountain airs on
little flutes with six holes. They need to be told of the good God now
and then. What would they say to a bishop who was afraid? What would
they say if I did not go?"

"But the brigands, Monseigneur?"

"Hold," said the Bishop, "I must think of that. You are right. I may
meet them. They, too, need to be told of the good God."

"But, Monseigneur, there is a band of them! A flock of wolves!"

"Monsieur le maire, it may be that it is of this very flock of wolves
that Jesus has constituted me the shepherd. Who knows the ways of
Providence?"

"They will rob you, Monseigneur."

"I have nothing."

"They will kill you."

"An old goodman of a priest, who passes along mumbling his prayers? Bah!
To what purpose?"

"Oh, mon Dieu! what if you should meet them!"

"I should beg alms of them for my poor."

"Do not go, Monseigneur. In the name of Heaven! You are risking your
life!"

"Monsieur le maire," said the Bishop, "is that really all? I am not in
the world to guard my own life, but to guard souls."

They had to allow him to do as he pleased. He set out, accompanied only
by a child who offered to serve as a guide. His obstinacy was bruited
about the country-side, and caused great consternation.

He would take neither his sister nor Madame Magloire. He traversed the
mountain on mule-back, encountered no one, and arrived safe and sound
at the residence of his "good friends," the shepherds. He remained
there for a fortnight, preaching, administering the sacrament, teaching,
exhorting. When the time of his departure approached, he resolved to
chant a Te Deum pontifically. He mentioned it to the cure. But what was
to be done? There were no episcopal ornaments. They could only place at
his disposal a wretched village sacristy, with a few ancient chasubles
of threadbare damask adorned with imitation lace.

"Bah!" said the Bishop. "Let us announce our Te Deum from the pulpit,
nevertheless, Monsieur le Cure. Things will arrange themselves."

They instituted a search in the churches of the neighborhood. All the
magnificence of these humble parishes combined would not have sufficed
to clothe the chorister of a cathedral properly.

While they were thus embarrassed, a large chest was brought and
deposited in the presbytery for the Bishop, by two unknown horsemen, who
departed on the instant. The chest was opened; it contained a cope of
cloth of gold, a mitre ornamented with diamonds, an archbishop's cross,
a magnificent crosier,--all the pontifical vestments which had been
stolen a month previously from the treasury of Notre Dame d'Embrun. In
the chest was a paper, on which these words were written, "From Cravatte
to Monseigneur Bienvenu."

"Did not I say that things would come right of themselves?" said the
Bishop. Then he added, with a smile, "To him who contents himself with
the surplice of a curate, God sends the cope of an archbishop."

"Monseigneur," murmured the cure, throwing back his head with a smile.
"God--or the Devil."

The Bishop looked steadily at the cure, and repeated with authority,
"God!"

When he returned to Chastelar, the people came out to stare at him as at
a curiosity, all along the road. At the priest's house in Chastelar he
rejoined Mademoiselle Baptistine and Madame Magloire, who were waiting
for him, and he said to his sister: "Well! was I in the right? The poor
priest went to his poor mountaineers with empty hands, and he returns
from them with his hands full. I set out bearing only my faith in God; I
have brought back the treasure of a cathedral."

That evening, before he went to bed, he said again: "Let us never fear
robbers nor murderers. Those are dangers from without, petty dangers.
Let us fear ourselves. Prejudices are the real robbers; vices are the
real murderers. The great dangers lie within ourselves. What matters it
what threatens our head or our purse! Let us think only of that which
threatens our soul."

Then, turning to his sister: "Sister, never a precaution on the part
of the priest, against his fellow-man. That which his fellow does, God
permits. Let us confine ourselves to prayer, when we think that a danger
is approaching us. Let us pray, not for ourselves, but that our brother
may not fall into sin on our account."

However, such incidents were rare in his life. We relate those of which
we know; but generally he passed his life in doing the same things at
the same moment. One month of his year resembled one hour of his day.

As to what became of "the treasure" of the cathedral of Embrun, we
should be embarrassed by any inquiry in that direction. It consisted of
very handsome things, very tempting things, and things which were very
well adapted to be stolen for the benefit of the unfortunate. Stolen
they had already been elsewhere. Half of the adventure was completed; it
only remained to impart a new direction to the theft, and to cause it
to take a short trip in the direction of the poor. However, we make no
assertions on this point. Only, a rather obscure note was found among
the Bishop's papers, which may bear some relation to this matter, and
which is couched in these terms, "The question is, to decide whether
this should be turned over to the cathedral or to the hospital."




CHAPTER VIII--PHILOSOPHY AFTER DRINKING

The senator above mentioned was a clever man, who had made his own way,
heedless of those things which present obstacles, and which are called
conscience, sworn faith, justice, duty: he had marched straight to his
goal, without once flinching in the line of his advancement and his
interest. He was an old attorney, softened by success; not a bad man by
any means, who rendered all the small services in his power to his sons,
his sons-in-law, his relations, and even to his friends, having wisely
seized upon, in life, good sides, good opportunities, good windfalls.
Everything else seemed to him very stupid. He was intelligent, and just
sufficiently educated to think himself a disciple of Epicurus; while he
was, in reality, only a product of Pigault-Lebrun. He laughed willingly
and pleasantly over infinite and eternal things, and at the "Crotchets
of that good old fellow the Bishop." He even sometimes laughed at him
with an amiable authority in the presence of M. Myriel himself, who
listened to him.

On some semi-official occasion or other, I do not recollect what,
Count*** [this senator] and M. Myriel were to dine with the prefect.
At dessert, the senator, who was slightly exhilarated, though still
perfectly dignified, exclaimed:--

"Egad, Bishop, let's have a discussion. It is hard for a senator and a
bishop to look at each other without winking. We are two augurs. I am
going to make a confession to you. I have a philosophy of my own."

"And you are right," replied the Bishop. "As one makes one's philosophy,
so one lies on it. You are on the bed of purple, senator."

The senator was encouraged, and went on:--

"Let us be good fellows."

"Good devils even," said the Bishop.

"I declare to you," continued the senator, "that the Marquis d'Argens,
Pyrrhon, Hobbes, and M. Naigeon are no rascals. I have all the
philosophers in my library gilded on the edges."

"Like yourself, Count," interposed the Bishop.

The senator resumed:--

"I hate Diderot; he is an ideologist, a declaimer, and a revolutionist,
a believer in God at bottom, and more bigoted than Voltaire. Voltaire
made sport of Needham, and he was wrong, for Needham's eels prove that
God is useless. A drop of vinegar in a spoonful of flour paste supplies
the fiat lux. Suppose the drop to be larger and the spoonful bigger;
you have the world. Man is the eel. Then what is the good of the Eternal
Father? The Jehovah hypothesis tires me, Bishop. It is good for nothing
but to produce shallow people, whose reasoning is hollow. Down with that
great All, which torments me! Hurrah for Zero which leaves me in peace!
Between you and me, and in order to empty my sack, and make confession
to my pastor, as it behooves me to do, I will admit to you that I
have good sense. I am not enthusiastic over your Jesus, who preaches
renunciation and sacrifice to the last extremity. 'Tis the counsel of an
avaricious man to beggars. Renunciation; why? Sacrifice; to what end?
I do not see one wolf immolating himself for the happiness of another
wolf. Let us stick to nature, then. We are at the top; let us have a
superior philosophy. What is the advantage of being at the top, if
one sees no further than the end of other people's noses? Let us live
merrily. Life is all. That man has another future elsewhere, on high,
below, anywhere, I don't believe; not one single word of it. Ah!
sacrifice and renunciation are recommended to me; I must take heed to
everything I do; I must cudgel my brains over good and evil, over the
just and the unjust, over the fas and the nefas. Why? Because I shall
have to render an account of my actions. When? After death. What a fine
dream! After my death it will be a very clever person who can catch me.
Have a handful of dust seized by a shadow-hand, if you can. Let us tell
the truth, we who are initiated, and who have raised the veil of Isis:
there is no such thing as either good or evil; there is vegetation.
Let us seek the real. Let us get to the bottom of it. Let us go into it
thoroughly. What the deuce! let us go to the bottom of it! We must scent
out the truth; dig in the earth for it, and seize it. Then it gives you
exquisite joys. Then you grow strong, and you laugh. I am square on the
bottom, I am. Immortality, Bishop, is a chance, a waiting for dead men's
shoes. Ah! what a charming promise! trust to it, if you like! What a
fine lot Adam has! We are souls, and we shall be angels, with blue wings
on our shoulder-blades. Do come to my assistance: is it not Tertullian
who says that the blessed shall travel from star to star? Very well. We
shall be the grasshoppers of the stars. And then, besides, we shall
see God. Ta, ta, ta! What twaddle all these paradises are! God is a
nonsensical monster. I would not say that in the Moniteur, egad! but I
may whisper it among friends. Inter pocula. To sacrifice the world to
paradise is to let slip the prey for the shadow. Be the dupe of the
infinite! I'm not such a fool. I am a nought. I call myself Monsieur le
Comte Nought, senator. Did I exist before my birth? No. Shall I exist
after death? No. What am I? A little dust collected in an organism. What
am I to do on this earth? The choice rests with me: suffer or enjoy.
Whither will suffering lead me? To nothingness; but I shall have
suffered. Whither will enjoyment lead me? To nothingness; but I shall
have enjoyed myself. My choice is made. One must eat or be eaten. I
shall eat. It is better to be the tooth than the grass. Such is my
wisdom. After which, go whither I push thee, the grave-digger is there;
the Pantheon for some of us: all falls into the great hole. End. Finis.
Total liquidation. This is the vanishing-point. Death is death, believe
me. I laugh at the idea of there being any one who has anything to tell
me on that subject. Fables of nurses; bugaboo for children; Jehovah for
men. No; our to-morrow is the night. Beyond the tomb there is nothing
but equal nothingness. You have been Sardanapalus, you have been Vincent
de Paul--it makes no difference. That is the truth. Then live your life,
above all things. Make use of your _I_ while you have it. In truth,
Bishop, I tell you that I have a philosophy of my own, and I have my
philosophers. I don't let myself be taken in with that nonsense.
Of course, there must be something for those who are down,--for the
barefooted beggars, knife-grinders, and miserable wretches. Legends,
chimeras, the soul, immortality, paradise, the stars, are provided for
them to swallow. They gobble it down. They spread it on their dry bread.
He who has nothing else has the good. God. That is the least he can
have. I oppose no objection to that; but I reserve Monsieur Naigeon for
myself. The good God is good for the populace."

The Bishop clapped his hands.

"That's talking!" he exclaimed. "What an excellent and really marvellous
thing is this materialism! Not every one who wants it can have it. Ah!
when one does have it, one is no longer a dupe, one does not stupidly
allow one's self to be exiled like Cato, nor stoned like Stephen, nor
burned alive like Jeanne d'Arc. Those who have succeeded in procuring
this admirable materialism have the joy of feeling themselves
irresponsible, and of thinking that they can devour everything without
uneasiness,--places, sinecures, dignities, power, whether well or
ill acquired, lucrative recantations, useful treacheries, savory
capitulations of conscience,--and that they shall enter the tomb with
their digestion accomplished. How agreeable that is! I do not say that
with reference to you, senator. Nevertheless, it is impossible for me
to refrain from congratulating you. You great lords have, so you say, a
philosophy of your own, and for yourselves, which is exquisite, refined,
accessible to the rich alone, good for all sauces, and which seasons
the voluptuousness of life admirably. This philosophy has been
extracted from the depths, and unearthed by special seekers. But you are
good-natured princes, and you do not think it a bad thing that belief in
the good God should constitute the philosophy of the people, very much
as the goose stuffed with chestnuts is the truffled turkey of the poor."




CHAPTER IX--THE BROTHER AS DEPICTED BY THE SISTER

In order to furnish an idea of the private establishment of the
Bishop of D----, and of the manner in which those two sainted women
subordinated their actions, their thoughts, their feminine instincts
even, which are easily alarmed, to the habits and purposes of the
Bishop, without his even taking the trouble of speaking in order to
explain them, we cannot do better than transcribe in this place a letter
from Mademoiselle Baptistine to Madame the Vicomtess de Boischevron, the
friend of her childhood. This letter is in our possession.


                                        D----, Dec. 16, 18--.
MY GOOD MADAM: Not a day passes without our speaking of you. It is our
established custom; but there is another reason besides. Just imagine,
while washing and dusting the ceilings and walls, Madam Magloire has
made some discoveries; now our two chambers hung with antique paper
whitewashed over, would not discredit a chateau in the style of yours.
Madam Magloire has pulled off all the paper. There were things beneath.
My drawing-room, which contains no furniture, and which we use for
spreading out the linen after washing, is fifteen feet in height,
eighteen square, with a ceiling which was formerly painted and gilded,
and with beams, as in yours. This was covered with a cloth while this
was the hospital. And the woodwork was of the era of our grandmothers.
But my room is the one you ought to see. Madam Magloire has discovered,
under at least ten thicknesses of paper pasted on top, some paintings,
which without being good are very tolerable. The subject is Telemachus
being knighted by Minerva in some gardens, the name of which escapes
me. In short, where the Roman ladies repaired on one single night. What
shall I say to you? I have Romans, and Roman ladies [here occurs an
illegible word], and the whole train. Madam Magloire has cleaned it all
off; this summer she is going to have some small injuries repaired, and
the whole revarnished, and my chamber will be a regular museum. She has
also found in a corner of the attic two wooden pier-tables of ancient
fashion. They asked us two crowns of six francs each to regild them, but
it is much better to give the money to the poor; and they are very ugly
besides, and I should much prefer a round table of mahogany.

I am always very happy. My brother is so good. He gives all he has to
the poor and sick. We are very much cramped. The country is trying in
the winter, and we really must do something for those who are in need.
We are almost comfortably lighted and warmed. You see that these are
great treats.

My brother has ways of his own. When he talks, he says that a bishop
ought to be so. Just imagine! the door of our house is never fastened.
Whoever chooses to enter finds himself at once in my brother's room. He
fears nothing, even at night. That is his sort of bravery, he says.

He does not wish me or Madame Magloire feel any fear for him. He exposes
himself to all sorts of dangers, and he does not like to have us even
seem to notice it. One must know how to understand him.

He goes out in the rain, he walks in the water, he travels in winter. He
fears neither suspicious roads nor dangerous encounters, nor night.

Last year he went quite alone into a country of robbers. He would
not take us. He was absent for a fortnight. On his return nothing had
happened to him; he was thought to be dead, but was perfectly well, and
said, "This is the way I have been robbed!" And then he opened a trunk
full of jewels, all the jewels of the cathedral of Embrun, which the
thieves had given him.

When he returned on that occasion, I could not refrain from scolding him
a little, taking care, however, not to speak except when the carriage
was making a noise, so that no one might hear me.

At first I used to say to myself, "There are no dangers which will stop
him; he is terrible." Now I have ended by getting used to it. I make a
sign to Madam Magloire that she is not to oppose him. He risks himself
as he sees fit. I carry off Madam Magloire, I enter my chamber, I pray
for him and fall asleep. I am at ease, because I know that if anything
were to happen to him, it would be the end of me. I should go to the
good God with my brother and my bishop. It has cost Madam Magloire
more trouble than it did me to accustom herself to what she terms his
imprudences. But now the habit has been acquired. We pray together, we
tremble together, and we fall asleep. If the devil were to enter this
house, he would be allowed to do so. After all, what is there for us
to fear in this house? There is always some one with us who is stronger
than we. The devil may pass through it, but the good God dwells here.

This suffices me. My brother has no longer any need of saying a word to
me. I understand him without his speaking, and we abandon ourselves to
the care of Providence. That is the way one has to do with a man who
possesses grandeur of soul.

I have interrogated my brother with regard to the information which you
desire on the subject of the Faux family. You are aware that he knows
everything, and that he has memories, because he is still a very
good royalist. They really are a very ancient Norman family of the
generalship of Caen. Five hundred years ago there was a Raoul de Faux, a
Jean de Faux, and a Thomas de Faux, who were gentlemen, and one of whom
was a seigneur de Rochefort. The last was Guy-Etienne-Alexandre, and was
commander of a regiment, and something in the light horse of Bretagne.
His daughter, Marie-Louise, married Adrien-Charles de Gramont, son of
the Duke Louis de Gramont, peer of France, colonel of the French guards,
and lieutenant-general of the army. It is written Faux, Fauq, and
Faoucq.

Good Madame, recommend us to the prayers of your sainted relative,
Monsieur the Cardinal. As for your dear Sylvanie, she has done well in
not wasting the few moments which she passes with you in writing to me.
She is well, works as you would wish, and loves me.

That is all that I desire. The souvenir which she sent through you
reached me safely, and it makes me very happy. My health is not so very
bad, and yet I grow thinner every day. Farewell; my paper is at an end,
and this forces me to leave you. A thousand good wishes.

BAPTISTINE.

P.S. Your grand nephew is charming. Do you know that he will soon be
five years old? Yesterday he saw some one riding by on horseback who
had on knee-caps, and he said, "What has he got on his knees?" He is a
charming child! His little brother is dragging an old broom about the
room, like a carriage, and saying, "Hu!"


As will be perceived from this letter, these two women understood how to
mould themselves to the Bishop's ways with that special feminine genius
which comprehends the man better than he comprehends himself. The Bishop
of D----, in spite of the gentle and candid air which never deserted
him, sometimes did things that were grand, bold, and magnificent,
without seeming to have even a suspicion of the fact. They trembled, but
they let him alone. Sometimes Madame Magloire essayed a remonstrance in
advance, but never at the time, nor afterwards. They never interfered
with him by so much as a word or sign, in any action once entered upon.
At certain moments, without his having occasion to mention it, when he
was not even conscious of it himself in all probability, so perfect was
his simplicity, they vaguely felt that he was acting as a bishop; then
they were nothing more than two shadows in the house. They served him
passively; and if obedience consisted in disappearing, they disappeared.
They understood, with an admirable delicacy of instinct, that certain
cares may be put under constraint. Thus, even when believing him to be
in peril, they understood, I will not say his thought, but his nature,
to such a degree that they no longer watched over him. They confided him
to God.

Moreover, Baptistine said, as we have just read, that her brother's end
would prove her own. Madame Magloire did not say this, but she knew it.




CHAPTER X--THE BISHOP IN THE PRESENCE OF AN UNKNOWN LIGHT

At an epoch a little later than the date of the letter cited in the
preceding pages, he did a thing which, if the whole town was to be
believed, was even more hazardous than his trip across the mountains
infested with bandits.

In the country near D---- a man lived quite alone. This man, we will
state at once, was a former member of the Convention. His name was G----

Member of the Convention, G---- was mentioned with a sort of horror in
the little world of D---- A member of the Convention--can you imagine
such a thing? That existed from the time when people called each other
thou, and when they said "citizen." This man was almost a monster.
He had not voted for the death of the king, but almost. He was a
quasi-regicide. He had been a terrible man. How did it happen that such
a man had not been brought before a provost's court, on the return of
the legitimate princes? They need not have cut off his head, if you
please; clemency must be exercised, agreed; but a good banishment for
life. An example, in short, etc. Besides, he was an atheist, like all
the rest of those people. Gossip of the geese about the vulture.

Was G---- a vulture after all? Yes; if he were to be judged by the
element of ferocity in this solitude of his. As he had not voted for the
death of the king, he had not been included in the decrees of exile, and
had been able to remain in France.

He dwelt at a distance of three-quarters of an hour from the city, far
from any hamlet, far from any road, in some hidden turn of a very wild
valley, no one knew exactly where. He had there, it was said, a sort
of field, a hole, a lair. There were no neighbors, not even passers-by.
Since he had dwelt in that valley, the path which led thither had
disappeared under a growth of grass. The locality was spoken of as
though it had been the dwelling of a hangman.

Nevertheless, the Bishop meditated on the subject, and from time to time
he gazed at the horizon at a point where a clump of trees marked the
valley of the former member of the Convention, and he said, "There is a
soul yonder which is lonely."

And he added, deep in his own mind, "I owe him a visit."

But, let us avow it, this idea, which seemed natural at the first blush,
appeared to him after a moment's reflection, as strange, impossible, and
almost repulsive. For, at bottom, he shared the general impression, and
the old member of the Convention inspired him, without his being clearly
conscious of the fact himself, with that sentiment which borders on
hate, and which is so well expressed by the word estrangement.

Still, should the scab of the sheep cause the shepherd to recoil? No.
But what a sheep!

The good Bishop was perplexed. Sometimes he set out in that direction;
then he returned.

Finally, the rumor one day spread through the town that a sort of young
shepherd, who served the member of the Convention in his hovel, had come
in quest of a doctor; that the old wretch was dying, that paralysis was
gaining on him, and that he would not live over night.--"Thank God!"
some added.

The Bishop took his staff, put on his cloak, on account of his too
threadbare cassock, as we have mentioned, and because of the evening
breeze which was sure to rise soon, and set out.

The sun was setting, and had almost touched the horizon when the Bishop
arrived at the excommunicated spot. With a certain beating of the heart,
he recognized the fact that he was near the lair. He strode over a
ditch, leaped a hedge, made his way through a fence of dead boughs,
entered a neglected paddock, took a few steps with a good deal of
boldness, and suddenly, at the extremity of the waste land, and behind
lofty brambles, he caught sight of the cavern.

It was a very low hut, poor, small, and clean, with a vine nailed
against the outside.

Near the door, in an old wheel-chair, the arm-chair of the peasants,
there was a white-haired man, smiling at the sun.

Near the seated man stood a young boy, the shepherd lad. He was offering
the old man a jar of milk.

While the Bishop was watching him, the old man spoke: "Thank you," he
said, "I need nothing." And his smile quitted the sun to rest upon the
child.

The Bishop stepped forward. At the sound which he made in walking, the
old man turned his head, and his face expressed the sum total of the
surprise which a man can still feel after a long life.

"This is the first time since I have been here," said he, "that any one
has entered here. Who are you, sir?"

The Bishop answered:--

"My name is Bienvenu Myriel."

"Bienvenu Myriel? I have heard that name. Are you the man whom the
people call Monseigneur Welcome?"

"I am."

The old man resumed with a half-smile

"In that case, you are my bishop?"

"Something of that sort."

"Enter, sir."

The member of the Convention extended his hand to the Bishop, but the
Bishop did not take it. The Bishop confined himself to the remark:--

"I am pleased to see that I have been misinformed. You certainly do not
seem to me to be ill."

"Monsieur," replied the old man, "I am going to recover."

He paused, and then said:--

"I shall die three hours hence."

Then he continued:--

"I am something of a doctor; I know in what fashion the last hour draws
on. Yesterday, only my feet were cold; to-day, the chill has ascended to
my knees; now I feel it mounting to my waist; when it reaches the heart,
I shall stop. The sun is beautiful, is it not? I had myself wheeled
out here to take a last look at things. You can talk to me; it does not
fatigue me. You have done well to come and look at a man who is on
the point of death. It is well that there should be witnesses at that
moment. One has one's caprices; I should have liked to last until the
dawn, but I know that I shall hardly live three hours. It will be night
then. What does it matter, after all? Dying is a simple affair. One has
no need of the light for that. So be it. I shall die by starlight."

The old man turned to the shepherd lad:--

"Go to thy bed; thou wert awake all last night; thou art tired."

The child entered the hut.

The old man followed him with his eyes, and added, as though speaking to
himself:--

"I shall die while he sleeps. The two slumbers may be good neighbors."

The Bishop was not touched as it seems that he should have been. He
did not think he discerned God in this manner of dying; let us say the
whole, for these petty contradictions of great hearts must be indicated
like the rest: he, who on occasion, was so fond of laughing at "His
Grace," was rather shocked at not being addressed as Monseigneur, and he
was almost tempted to retort "citizen." He was assailed by a fancy for
peevish familiarity, common enough to doctors and priests, but which
was not habitual with him. This man, after all, this member of the
Convention, this representative of the people, had been one of the
powerful ones of the earth; for the first time in his life, probably,
the Bishop felt in a mood to be severe.

Meanwhile, the member of the Convention had been surveying him with a
modest cordiality, in which one could have distinguished, possibly, that
humility which is so fitting when one is on the verge of returning to
dust.

The Bishop, on his side, although he generally restrained his curiosity,
which, in his opinion, bordered on a fault, could not refrain from
examining the member of the Convention with an attention which, as it
did not have its course in sympathy, would have served his conscience as
a matter of reproach, in connection with any other man. A member of the
Convention produced on him somewhat the effect of being outside the pale
of the law, even of the law of charity. G----, calm, his body almost
upright, his voice vibrating, was one of those octogenarians who form
the subject of astonishment to the physiologist. The Revolution had
many of these men, proportioned to the epoch. In this old man one was
conscious of a man put to the proof. Though so near to his end, he
preserved all the gestures of health. In his clear glance, in his firm
tone, in the robust movement of his shoulders, there was something
calculated to disconcert death. Azrael, the Mohammedan angel of the
sepulchre, would have turned back, and thought that he had mistaken
the door. G---- seemed to be dying because he willed it so. There was
freedom in his agony. His legs alone were motionless. It was there that
the shadows held him fast. His feet were cold and dead, but his head
survived with all the power of life, and seemed full of light. G----,
at this solemn moment, resembled the king in that tale of the Orient who
was flesh above and marble below.

There was a stone there. The Bishop sat down. The exordium was abrupt.

"I congratulate you," said he, in the tone which one uses for a
reprimand. "You did not vote for the death of the king, after all."

The old member of the Convention did not appear to notice the bitter
meaning underlying the words "after all." He replied. The smile had
quite disappeared from his face.

"Do not congratulate me too much, sir. I did vote for the death of the
tyrant."

It was the tone of austerity answering the tone of severity.

"What do you mean to say?" resumed the Bishop.

"I mean to say that man has a tyrant,--ignorance. I voted for the death
of that tyrant. That tyrant engendered royalty, which is authority
falsely understood, while science is authority rightly understood. Man
should be governed only by science."

"And conscience," added the Bishop.

"It is the same thing. Conscience is the quantity of innate science
which we have within us."

Monseigneur Bienvenu listened in some astonishment to this language,
which was very new to him.

The member of the Convention resumed:--

"So far as Louis XVI. was concerned, I said 'no.' I did not think that I
had the right to kill a man; but I felt it my duty to exterminate evil.
I voted the end of the tyrant, that is to say, the end of prostitution
for woman, the end of slavery for man, the end of night for the child.
In voting for the Republic, I voted for that. I voted for fraternity,
concord, the dawn. I have aided in the overthrow of prejudices and
errors. The crumbling away of prejudices and errors causes light. We
have caused the fall of the old world, and the old world, that vase of
miseries, has become, through its upsetting upon the human race, an urn
of joy."

"Mixed joy," said the Bishop.

"You may say troubled joy, and to-day, after that fatal return of the
past, which is called 1814, joy which has disappeared! Alas! The work
was incomplete, I admit: we demolished the ancient regime in deeds; we
were not able to suppress it entirely in ideas. To destroy abuses is not
sufficient; customs must be modified. The mill is there no longer; the
wind is still there."

"You have demolished. It may be of use to demolish, but I distrust a
demolition complicated with wrath."

"Right has its wrath, Bishop; and the wrath of right is an element of
progress. In any case, and in spite of whatever may be said, the French
Revolution is the most important step of the human race since the advent
of Christ. Incomplete, it may be, but sublime. It set free all the
unknown social quantities; it softened spirits, it calmed, appeased,
enlightened; it caused the waves of civilization to flow over the
earth. It was a good thing. The French Revolution is the consecration of
humanity."

The Bishop could not refrain from murmuring:--

"Yes? '93!"

The member of the Convention straightened himself up in his chair with
an almost lugubrious solemnity, and exclaimed, so far as a dying man is
capable of exclamation:--

"Ah, there you go; '93! I was expecting that word. A cloud had been
forming for the space of fifteen hundred years; at the end of fifteen
hundred years it burst. You are putting the thunderbolt on its trial."

The Bishop felt, without, perhaps, confessing it, that something within
him had suffered extinction. Nevertheless, he put a good face on the
matter. He replied:--

"The judge speaks in the name of justice; the priest speaks in the name
of pity, which is nothing but a more lofty justice. A thunderbolt should
commit no error." And he added, regarding the member of the Convention
steadily the while, "Louis XVII.?"

The conventionary stretched forth his hand and grasped the Bishop's arm.

"Louis XVII.! let us see. For whom do you mourn? is it for the innocent
child? very good; in that case I mourn with you. Is it for the royal
child? I demand time for reflection. To me, the brother of Cartouche,
an innocent child who was hung up by the armpits in the Place de Greve,
until death ensued, for the sole crime of having been the brother
of Cartouche, is no less painful than the grandson of Louis XV., an
innocent child, martyred in the tower of the Temple, for the sole crime
of having been grandson of Louis XV."

"Monsieur," said the Bishop, "I like not this conjunction of names."

"Cartouche? Louis XV.? To which of the two do you object?"

A momentary silence ensued. The Bishop almost regretted having come, and
yet he felt vaguely and strangely shaken.

The conventionary resumed:--

"Ah, Monsieur Priest, you love not the crudities of the true. Christ
loved them. He seized a rod and cleared out the Temple. His scourge,
full of lightnings, was a harsh speaker of truths. When he cried,
'Sinite parvulos,' he made no distinction between the little children.
It would not have embarrassed him to bring together the Dauphin of
Barabbas and the Dauphin of Herod. Innocence, Monsieur, is its own
crown. Innocence has no need to be a highness. It is as august in rags
as in fleurs de lys."

"That is true," said the Bishop in a low voice.

"I persist," continued the conventionary G---- "You have mentioned Louis
XVII. to me. Let us come to an understanding. Shall we weep for all the
innocent, all martyrs, all children, the lowly as well as the exalted?
I agree to that. But in that case, as I have told you, we must go back
further than '93, and our tears must begin before Louis XVII. I will
weep with you over the children of kings, provided that you will weep
with me over the children of the people."

"I weep for all," said the Bishop.

"Equally!" exclaimed conventionary G----; "and if the balance must
incline, let it be on the side of the people. They have been suffering
longer."

Another silence ensued. The conventionary was the first to break it. He
raised himself on one elbow, took a bit of his cheek between his thumb
and his forefinger, as one does mechanically when one interrogates and
judges, and appealed to the Bishop with a gaze full of all the forces of
the death agony. It was almost an explosion.

"Yes, sir, the people have been suffering a long while. And hold! that
is not all, either; why have you just questioned me and talked to me
about Louis XVII.? I know you not. Ever since I have been in these parts
I have dwelt in this enclosure alone, never setting foot outside, and
seeing no one but that child who helps me. Your name has reached me in
a confused manner, it is true, and very badly pronounced, I must admit;
but that signifies nothing: clever men have so many ways of imposing on
that honest goodman, the people. By the way, I did not hear the sound of
your carriage; you have left it yonder, behind the coppice at the fork
of the roads, no doubt. I do not know you, I tell you. You have told me
that you are the Bishop; but that affords me no information as to your
moral personality. In short, I repeat my question. Who are you? You are
a bishop; that is to say, a prince of the church, one of those gilded
men with heraldic bearings and revenues, who have vast prebends,--the
bishopric of D---- fifteen thousand francs settled income, ten thousand
in perquisites; total, twenty-five thousand francs,--who have kitchens,
who have liveries, who make good cheer, who eat moor-hens on Friday, who
strut about, a lackey before, a lackey behind, in a gala coach, and
who have palaces, and who roll in their carriages in the name of Jesus
Christ who went barefoot! You are a prelate,--revenues, palace, horses,
servants, good table, all the sensualities of life; you have this like
the rest, and like the rest, you enjoy it; it is well; but this says
either too much or too little; this does not enlighten me upon the
intrinsic and essential value of the man who comes with the probable
intention of bringing wisdom to me. To whom do I speak? Who are you?"

The Bishop hung his head and replied, "Vermis sum--I am a worm."

"A worm of the earth in a carriage?" growled the conventionary.

It was the conventionary's turn to be arrogant, and the Bishop's to be
humble.

The Bishop resumed mildly:--

"So be it, sir. But explain to me how my carriage, which is a few paces
off behind the trees yonder, how my good table and the moor-hens which I
eat on Friday, how my twenty-five thousand francs income, how my palace
and my lackeys prove that clemency is not a duty, and that '93 was not
inexorable."

The conventionary passed his hand across his brow, as though to sweep
away a cloud.

"Before replying to you," he said, "I beseech you to pardon me. I have
just committed a wrong, sir. You are at my house, you are my guest, I
owe you courtesy. You discuss my ideas, and it becomes me to confine
myself to combating your arguments. Your riches and your pleasures are
advantages which I hold over you in the debate; but good taste dictates
that I shall not make use of them. I promise you to make no use of them
in the future."

"I thank you," said the Bishop.

G---- resumed.

"Let us return to the explanation which you have asked of me. Where were
we? What were you saying to me? That '93 was inexorable?"

"Inexorable; yes," said the Bishop. "What think you of Marat clapping
his hands at the guillotine?"

"What think you of Bossuet chanting the Te Deum over the dragonnades?"

The retort was a harsh one, but it attained its mark with the directness
of a point of steel. The Bishop quivered under it; no reply occurred to
him; but he was offended by this mode of alluding to Bossuet. The best
of minds will have their fetiches, and they sometimes feel vaguely
wounded by the want of respect of logic.

The conventionary began to pant; the asthma of the agony which is
mingled with the last breaths interrupted his voice; still, there was a
perfect lucidity of soul in his eyes. He went on:--

"Let me say a few words more in this and that direction; I am willing.
Apart from the Revolution, which, taken as a whole, is an immense human
affirmation, '93 is, alas! a rejoinder. You think it inexorable, sir;
but what of the whole monarchy, sir? Carrier is a bandit; but what name
do you give to Montrevel? Fouquier-Tainville is a rascal; but what
is your opinion as to Lamoignon-Baville? Maillard is terrible; but
Saulx-Tavannes, if you please? Duchene senior is ferocious; but what
epithet will you allow me for the elder Letellier? Jourdan-Coupe-Tete
is a monster; but not so great a one as M. the Marquis de Louvois. Sir,
sir, I am sorry for Marie Antoinette, archduchess and queen; but I am
also sorry for that poor Huguenot woman, who, in 1685, under Louis the
Great, sir, while with a nursing infant, was bound, naked to the waist,
to a stake, and the child kept at a distance; her breast swelled with
milk and her heart with anguish; the little one, hungry and pale, beheld
that breast and cried and agonized; the executioner said to the woman, a
mother and a nurse, 'Abjure!' giving her her choice between the death of
her infant and the death of her conscience. What say you to that torture
of Tantalus as applied to a mother? Bear this well in mind sir: the
French Revolution had its reasons for existence; its wrath will be
absolved by the future; its result is the world made better. From its
most terrible blows there comes forth a caress for the human race. I
abridge, I stop, I have too much the advantage; moreover, I am dying."

And ceasing to gaze at the Bishop, the conventionary concluded his
thoughts in these tranquil words:--

"Yes, the brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are
over, this fact is recognized,--that the human race has been treated
harshly, but that it has progressed."

The conventionary doubted not that he had successively conquered all the
inmost intrenchments of the Bishop. One remained, however, and from this
intrenchment, the last resource of Monseigneur Bienvenu's resistance,
came forth this reply, wherein appeared nearly all the harshness of the
beginning:--

"Progress should believe in God. Good cannot have an impious servitor.
He who is an atheist is but a bad leader for the human race."

The former representative of the people made no reply. He was seized
with a fit of trembling. He looked towards heaven, and in his glance a
tear gathered slowly. When the eyelid was full, the tear trickled down
his livid cheek, and he said, almost in a stammer, quite low, and to
himself, while his eyes were plunged in the depths:--

"O thou! O ideal! Thou alone existest!"

The Bishop experienced an indescribable shock.

After a pause, the old man raised a finger heavenward and said:--

"The infinite is. He is there. If the infinite had no person, person
would be without limit; it would not be infinite; in other words, it
would not exist. There is, then, an _I_. That _I_ of the infinite is
God."

The dying man had pronounced these last words in a loud voice, and with
the shiver of ecstasy, as though he beheld some one. When he had spoken,
his eyes closed. The effort had exhausted him. It was evident that he
had just lived through in a moment the few hours which had been left to
him. That which he had said brought him nearer to him who is in death.
The supreme moment was approaching.

The Bishop understood this; time pressed; it was as a priest that he had
come: from extreme coldness he had passed by degrees to extreme emotion;
he gazed at those closed eyes, he took that wrinkled, aged and ice-cold
hand in his, and bent over the dying man.

"This hour is the hour of God. Do you not think that it would be
regrettable if we had met in vain?"

The conventionary opened his eyes again. A gravity mingled with gloom
was imprinted on his countenance.

"Bishop," said he, with a slowness which probably arose more from his
dignity of soul than from the failing of his strength, "I have passed my
life in meditation, study, and contemplation. I was sixty years of age
when my country called me and commanded me to concern myself with its
affairs. I obeyed. Abuses existed, I combated them; tyrannies existed,
I destroyed them; rights and principles existed, I proclaimed and
confessed them. Our territory was invaded, I defended it; France was
menaced, I offered my breast. I was not rich; I am poor. I have been one
of the masters of the state; the vaults of the treasury were encumbered
with specie to such a degree that we were forced to shore up the walls,
which were on the point of bursting beneath the weight of gold and
silver; I dined in Dead Tree Street, at twenty-two sous. I have succored
the oppressed, I have comforted the suffering. I tore the cloth from
the altar, it is true; but it was to bind up the wounds of my country. I
have always upheld the march forward of the human race, forward towards
the light, and I have sometimes resisted progress without pity. I have,
when the occasion offered, protected my own adversaries, men of your
profession. And there is at Peteghem, in Flanders, at the very spot
where the Merovingian kings had their summer palace, a convent of
Urbanists, the Abbey of Sainte Claire en Beaulieu, which I saved in
1793. I have done my duty according to my powers, and all the good
that I was able. After which, I was hunted down, pursued, persecuted,
blackened, jeered at, scorned, cursed, proscribed. For many years past,
I with my white hair have been conscious that many people think they
have the right to despise me; to the poor ignorant masses I present the
visage of one damned. And I accept this isolation of hatred, without
hating any one myself. Now I am eighty-six years old; I am on the point
of death. What is it that you have come to ask of me?"

"Your blessing," said the Bishop.

And he knelt down.

When the Bishop raised his head again, the face of the conventionary had
become august. He had just expired.

The Bishop returned home, deeply absorbed in thoughts which cannot
be known to us. He passed the whole night in prayer. On the following
morning some bold and curious persons attempted to speak to him about
member of the Convention G----; he contented himself with pointing
heavenward.

From that moment he redoubled his tenderness and brotherly feeling
towards all children and sufferers.

Any allusion to "that old wretch of a G----" caused him to fall into a
singular preoccupation. No one could say that the passage of that soul
before his, and the reflection of that grand conscience upon his, did
not count for something in his approach to perfection.

This "pastoral visit" naturally furnished an occasion for a murmur of
comment in all the little local coteries.

"Was the bedside of such a dying man as that the proper place for a
bishop? There was evidently no conversion to be expected. All those
revolutionists are backsliders. Then why go there? What was there to be
seen there? He must have been very curious indeed to see a soul carried
off by the devil."

One day a dowager of the impertinent variety who thinks herself
spiritual, addressed this sally to him, "Monseigneur, people are
inquiring when Your Greatness will receive the red cap!"--"Oh! oh!
that's a coarse color," replied the Bishop. "It is lucky that those who
despise it in a cap revere it in a hat."




CHAPTER XI--A RESTRICTION

We should incur a great risk of deceiving ourselves, were we to conclude
from this that Monseigneur Welcome was "a philosophical bishop," or a
"patriotic cure." His meeting, which may almost be designated as his
union, with conventionary G----, left behind it in his mind a sort of
astonishment, which rendered him still more gentle. That is all.

Although Monseigneur Bienvenu was far from being a politician, this is,
perhaps, the place to indicate very briefly what his attitude was in the
events of that epoch, supposing that Monseigneur Bienvenu ever dreamed
of having an attitude.

Let us, then, go back a few years.

Some time after the elevation of M. Myriel to the episcopate, the
Emperor had made him a baron of the Empire, in company with many other
bishops. The arrest of the Pope took place, as every one knows, on the
night of the 5th to the 6th of July, 1809; on this occasion, M. Myriel
was summoned by Napoleon to the synod of the bishops of France and Italy
convened at Paris. This synod was held at Notre-Dame, and assembled
for the first time on the 15th of June, 1811, under the presidency
of Cardinal Fesch. M. Myriel was one of the ninety-five bishops who
attended it. But he was present only at one sitting and at three or four
private conferences. Bishop of a mountain diocese, living so very close
to nature, in rusticity and deprivation, it appeared that he imported
among these eminent personages, ideas which altered the temperature of
the assembly. He very soon returned to D---- He was interrogated as to
this speedy return, and he replied: "I embarrassed them. The outside air
penetrated to them through me. I produced on them the effect of an open
door."

On another occasion he said, "What would you have? Those gentlemen are
princes. I am only a poor peasant bishop."

The fact is that he displeased them. Among other strange things, it is
said that he chanced to remark one evening, when he found himself at
the house of one of his most notable colleagues: "What beautiful clocks!
What beautiful carpets! What beautiful liveries! They must be a great
trouble. I would not have all those superfluities, crying incessantly
in my ears: 'There are people who are hungry! There are people who are
cold! There are poor people! There are poor people!'"

Let us remark, by the way, that the hatred of luxury is not an
intelligent hatred. This hatred would involve the hatred of the arts.
Nevertheless, in churchmen, luxury is wrong, except in connection with
representations and ceremonies. It seems to reveal habits which have
very little that is charitable about them. An opulent priest is a
contradiction. The priest must keep close to the poor. Now, can one come
in contact incessantly night and day with all this distress, all these
misfortunes, and this poverty, without having about one's own person a
little of that misery, like the dust of labor? Is it possible to imagine
a man near a brazier who is not warm? Can one imagine a workman who is
working near a furnace, and who has neither a singed hair, nor blackened
nails, nor a drop of sweat, nor a speck of ashes on his face? The first
proof of charity in the priest, in the bishop especially, is poverty.

This is, no doubt, what the Bishop of D---- thought.

It must not be supposed, however, that he shared what we call the "ideas
of the century" on certain delicate points. He took very little part
in the theological quarrels of the moment, and maintained silence on
questions in which Church and State were implicated; but if he had
been strongly pressed, it seems that he would have been found to be an
ultramontane rather than a gallican. Since we are making a portrait, and
since we do not wish to conceal anything, we are forced to add that he
was glacial towards Napoleon in his decline. Beginning with 1813, he
gave in his adherence to or applauded all hostile manifestations. He
refused to see him, as he passed through on his return from the island
of Elba, and he abstained from ordering public prayers for the Emperor
in his diocese during the Hundred Days.

Besides his sister, Mademoiselle Baptistine, he had two brothers, one a
general, the other a prefect. He wrote to both with tolerable frequency.
He was harsh for a time towards the former, because, holding a command
in Provence at the epoch of the disembarkation at Cannes, the general
had put himself at the head of twelve hundred men and had pursued the
Emperor as though the latter had been a person whom one is desirous
of allowing to escape. His correspondence with the other brother, the
ex-prefect, a fine, worthy man who lived in retirement at Paris, Rue
Cassette, remained more affectionate.

Thus Monseigneur Bienvenu also had his hour of party spirit, his hour
of bitterness, his cloud. The shadow of the passions of the moment
traversed this grand and gentle spirit occupied with eternal things.
Certainly, such a man would have done well not to entertain any
political opinions. Let there be no mistake as to our meaning: we are
not confounding what is called "political opinions" with the grand
aspiration for progress, with the sublime faith, patriotic, democratic,
humane, which in our day should be the very foundation of every generous
intellect. Without going deeply into questions which are only indirectly
connected with the subject of this book, we will simply say this: It
would have been well if Monseigneur Bienvenu had not been a Royalist,
and if his glance had never been, for a single instant, turned away from
that serene contemplation in which is distinctly discernible, above the
fictions and the hatreds of this world, above the stormy vicissitudes of
human things, the beaming of those three pure radiances, truth, justice,
and charity.

While admitting that it was not for a political office that God created
Monseigneur Welcome, we should have understood and admired his protest
in the name of right and liberty, his proud opposition, his just but
perilous resistance to the all-powerful Napoleon. But that which pleases
us in people who are rising pleases us less in the case of people who
are falling. We only love the fray so long as there is danger, and in
any case, the combatants of the first hour have alone the right to be
the exterminators of the last. He who has not been a stubborn accuser in
prosperity should hold his peace in the face of ruin. The denunciator of
success is the only legitimate executioner of the fall. As for us, when
Providence intervenes and strikes, we let it work. 1812 commenced to
disarm us. In 1813 the cowardly breach of silence of that taciturn
legislative body, emboldened by catastrophe, possessed only traits which
aroused indignation. And it was a crime to applaud, in 1814, in the
presence of those marshals who betrayed; in the presence of that senate
which passed from one dunghill to another, insulting after having
deified; in the presence of that idolatry which was loosing its footing
and spitting on its idol,--it was a duty to turn aside the head. In
1815, when the supreme disasters filled the air, when France was seized
with a shiver at their sinister approach, when Waterloo could be dimly
discerned opening before Napoleon, the mournful acclamation of the army
and the people to the condemned of destiny had nothing laughable in it,
and, after making all allowance for the despot, a heart like that of
the Bishop of D----, ought not perhaps to have failed to recognize the
august and touching features presented by the embrace of a great nation
and a great man on the brink of the abyss.

With this exception, he was in all things just, true, equitable,
intelligent, humble and dignified, beneficent and kindly, which is only
another sort of benevolence. He was a priest, a sage, and a man. It must
be admitted, that even in the political views with which we have just
reproached him, and which we are disposed to judge almost with severity,
he was tolerant and easy, more so, perhaps, than we who are speaking
here. The porter of the town-hall had been placed there by the Emperor.
He was an old non-commissioned officer of the old guard, a member of the
Legion of Honor at Austerlitz, as much of a Bonapartist as the eagle.
This poor fellow occasionally let slip inconsiderate remarks, which the
law then stigmatized as seditious speeches. After the imperial profile
disappeared from the Legion of Honor, he never dressed himself in his
regimentals, as he said, so that he should not be obliged to wear his
cross. He had himself devoutly removed the imperial effigy from the
cross which Napoleon had given him; this made a hole, and he would not
put anything in its place. "I will die," he said, "rather than wear the
three frogs upon my heart!" He liked to scoff aloud at Louis XVIII. "The
gouty old creature in English gaiters!" he said; "let him take himself
off to Prussia with that queue of his." He was happy to combine in the
same imprecation the two things which he most detested, Prussia and
England. He did it so often that he lost his place. There he was, turned
out of the house, with his wife and children, and without bread. The
Bishop sent for him, reproved him gently, and appointed him beadle in
the cathedral.

In the course of nine years Monseigneur Bienvenu had, by dint of holy
deeds and gentle manners, filled the town of D----with a sort of
tender and filial reverence. Even his conduct towards Napoleon had been
accepted and tacitly pardoned, as it were, by the people, the good and
weakly flock who adored their emperor, but loved their bishop.




CHAPTER XII--THE SOLITUDE OF MONSEIGNEUR WELCOME

A bishop is almost always surrounded by a full squadron of little abbes,
just as a general is by a covey of young officers. This is what
that charming Saint Francois de Sales calls somewhere "les pretres
blancs-becs," callow priests. Every career has its aspirants, who form
a train for those who have attained eminence in it. There is no power
which has not its dependents. There is no fortune which has not its
court. The seekers of the future eddy around the splendid present. Every
metropolis has its staff of officials. Every bishop who possesses the
least influence has about him his patrol of cherubim from the seminary,
which goes the round, and maintains good order in the episcopal palace,
and mounts guard over monseigneur's smile. To please a bishop is
equivalent to getting one's foot in the stirrup for a sub-diaconate.
It is necessary to walk one's path discreetly; the apostleship does not
disdain the canonship.

Just as there are bigwigs elsewhere, there are big mitres in the Church.
These are the bishops who stand well at Court, who are rich, well
endowed, skilful, accepted by the world, who know how to pray, no doubt,
but who know also how to beg, who feel little scruple at making a whole
diocese dance attendance in their person, who are connecting links
between the sacristy and diplomacy, who are abbes rather than priests,
prelates rather than bishops. Happy those who approach them! Being
persons of influence, they create a shower about them, upon the
assiduous and the favored, and upon all the young men who understand
the art of pleasing, of large parishes, prebends, archidiaconates,
chaplaincies, and cathedral posts, while awaiting episcopal honors. As
they advance themselves, they cause their satellites to progress also;
it is a whole solar system on the march. Their radiance casts a gleam
of purple over their suite. Their prosperity is crumbled up behind
the scenes, into nice little promotions. The larger the diocese of the
patron, the fatter the curacy for the favorite. And then, there is Rome.
A bishop who understands how to become an archbishop, an archbishop who
knows how to become a cardinal, carries you with him as conclavist;
you enter a court of papal jurisdiction, you receive the pallium, and
behold! you are an auditor, then a papal chamberlain, then monsignor,
and from a Grace to an Eminence is only a step, and between the Eminence
and the Holiness there is but the smoke of a ballot. Every skull-cap may
dream of the tiara. The priest is nowadays the only man who can become a
king in a regular manner; and what a king! the supreme king. Then what a
nursery of aspirations is a seminary! How many blushing choristers,
how many youthful abbes bear on their heads Perrette's pot of milk!
Who knows how easy it is for ambition to call itself vocation? in good
faith, perchance, and deceiving itself, devotee that it is.

Monseigneur Bienvenu, poor, humble, retiring, was not accounted among
the big mitres. This was plain from the complete absence of young
priests about him. We have seen that he "did not take" in Paris. Not a
single future dreamed of engrafting itself on this solitary old man.
Not a single sprouting ambition committed the folly of putting forth its
foliage in his shadow. His canons and grand-vicars were good old men,
rather vulgar like himself, walled up like him in this diocese, without
exit to a cardinalship, and who resembled their bishop, with this
difference, that they were finished and he was completed. The
impossibility of growing great under Monseigneur Bienvenu was so well
understood, that no sooner had the young men whom he ordained left the
seminary than they got themselves recommended to the archbishops of Aix
or of Auch, and went off in a great hurry. For, in short, we repeat it,
men wish to be pushed. A saint who dwells in a paroxysm of abnegation
is a dangerous neighbor; he might communicate to you, by contagion,
an incurable poverty, an anchylosis of the joints, which are useful in
advancement, and in short, more renunciation than you desire; and
this infectious virtue is avoided. Hence the isolation of Monseigneur
Bienvenu. We live in the midst of a gloomy society. Success; that is the
lesson which falls drop by drop from the slope of corruption.

Be it said in passing, that success is a very hideous thing. Its false
resemblance to merit deceives men. For the masses, success has almost
the same profile as supremacy. Success, that Menaechmus of talent, has
one dupe,--history. Juvenal and Tacitus alone grumble at it. In our
day, a philosophy which is almost official has entered into its
service, wears the livery of success, and performs the service of its
antechamber. Succeed: theory. Prosperity argues capacity. Win in the
lottery, and behold! you are a clever man. He who triumphs is venerated.
Be born with a silver spoon in your mouth! everything lies in that. Be
lucky, and you will have all the rest; be happy, and people will think
you great. Outside of five or six immense exceptions, which compose
the splendor of a century, contemporary admiration is nothing but
short-sightedness. Gilding is gold. It does no harm to be the first
arrival by pure chance, so long as you do arrive. The common herd is an
old Narcissus who adores himself, and who applauds the vulgar herd.
That enormous ability by virtue of which one is Moses, Aeschylus, Dante,
Michael Angelo, or Napoleon, the multitude awards on the spot, and by
acclamation, to whomsoever attains his object, in whatsoever it may
consist. Let a notary transfigure himself into a deputy: let a false
Corneille compose Tiridate; let a eunuch come to possess a harem; let a
military Prudhomme accidentally win the decisive battle of an epoch;
let an apothecary invent cardboard shoe-soles for the army of the
Sambre-and-Meuse, and construct for himself, out of this cardboard, sold
as leather, four hundred thousand francs of income; let a pork-packer
espouse usury, and cause it to bring forth seven or eight millions, of
which he is the father and of which it is the mother; let a preacher
become a bishop by force of his nasal drawl; let the steward of a fine
family be so rich on retiring from service that he is made minister
of finances,--and men call that Genius, just as they call the face
of Mousqueton Beauty, and the mien of Claude Majesty. With the
constellations of space they confound the stars of the abyss which are
made in the soft mire of the puddle by the feet of ducks.




CHAPTER XIII--WHAT HE BELIEVED

We are not obliged to sound the Bishop of D---- on the score of
orthodoxy. In the presence of such a soul we feel ourselves in no mood
but respect. The conscience of the just man should be accepted on his
word. Moreover, certain natures being given, we admit the possible
development of all beauties of human virtue in a belief that differs
from our own.

What did he think of this dogma, or of that mystery? These secrets of
the inner tribunal of the conscience are known only to the tomb, where
souls enter naked. The point on which we are certain is, that the
difficulties of faith never resolved themselves into hypocrisy in his
case. No decay is possible to the diamond. He believed to the extent
of his powers. "Credo in Patrem," he often exclaimed. Moreover, he
drew from good works that amount of satisfaction which suffices to the
conscience, and which whispers to a man, "Thou art with God!"

The point which we consider it our duty to note is, that outside of and
beyond his faith, as it were, the Bishop possessed an excess of love. It
was in that quarter, quia multum amavit,--because he loved much--that
he was regarded as vulnerable by "serious men," "grave persons" and
"reasonable people"; favorite locutions of our sad world where egotism
takes its word of command from pedantry. What was this excess of love?
It was a serene benevolence which overflowed men, as we have already
pointed out, and which, on occasion, extended even to things. He lived
without disdain. He was indulgent towards God's creation. Every man,
even the best, has within him a thoughtless harshness which he reserves
for animals. The Bishop of D---- had none of that harshness, which is
peculiar to many priests, nevertheless. He did not go as far as the
Brahmin, but he seemed to have weighed this saying of Ecclesiastes: "Who
knoweth whither the soul of the animal goeth?" Hideousness of aspect,
deformity of instinct, troubled him not, and did not arouse his
indignation. He was touched, almost softened by them. It seemed as
though he went thoughtfully away to seek beyond the bounds of life which
is apparent, the cause, the explanation, or the excuse for them. He
seemed at times to be asking God to commute these penalties. He examined
without wrath, and with the eye of a linguist who is deciphering a
palimpsest, that portion of chaos which still exists in nature. This
revery sometimes caused him to utter odd sayings. One morning he was in
his garden, and thought himself alone, but his sister was walking behind
him, unseen by him: suddenly he paused and gazed at something on the
ground; it was a large, black, hairy, frightful spider. His sister heard
him say:--

"Poor beast! It is not its fault!"

Why not mention these almost divinely childish sayings of kindness?
Puerile they may be; but these sublime puerilities were peculiar to
Saint Francis d'Assisi and of Marcus Aurelius. One day he sprained his
ankle in his effort to avoid stepping on an ant. Thus lived this just
man. Sometimes he fell asleep in his garden, and then there was nothing
more venerable possible.

Monseigneur Bienvenu had formerly been, if the stories anent his youth,
and even in regard to his manhood, were to be believed, a passionate,
and, possibly, a violent man. His universal suavity was less an instinct
of nature than the result of a grand conviction which had filtered into
his heart through the medium of life, and had trickled there slowly,
thought by thought; for, in a character, as in a rock, there may exist
apertures made by drops of water. These hollows are uneffaceable; these
formations are indestructible.

In 1815, as we think we have already said, he reached his seventy-fifth
birthday, but he did not appear to be more than sixty. He was not tall;
he was rather plump; and, in order to combat this tendency, he was fond
of taking long strolls on foot; his step was firm, and his form was
but slightly bent, a detail from which we do not pretend to draw any
conclusion. Gregory XVI., at the age of eighty, held himself erect and
smiling, which did not prevent him from being a bad bishop. Monseigneur
Welcome had what the people term a "fine head," but so amiable was he
that they forgot that it was fine.

When he conversed with that infantile gayety which was one of his
charms, and of which we have already spoken, people felt at their ease
with him, and joy seemed to radiate from his whole person. His fresh and
ruddy complexion, his very white teeth, all of which he had preserved,
and which were displayed by his smile, gave him that open and easy air
which cause the remark to be made of a man, "He's a good fellow"; and
of an old man, "He is a fine man." That, it will be recalled, was the
effect which he produced upon Napoleon. On the first encounter, and to
one who saw him for the first time, he was nothing, in fact, but a fine
man. But if one remained near him for a few hours, and beheld him in the
least degree pensive, the fine man became gradually transfigured, and
took on some imposing quality, I know not what; his broad and serious
brow, rendered august by his white locks, became august also by virtue
of meditation; majesty radiated from his goodness, though his goodness
ceased not to be radiant; one experienced something of the emotion which
one would feel on beholding a smiling angel slowly unfold his wings,
without ceasing to smile. Respect, an unutterable respect, penetrated
you by degrees and mounted to your heart, and one felt that one had
before him one of those strong, thoroughly tried, and indulgent souls
where thought is so grand that it can no longer be anything but gentle.

As we have seen, prayer, the celebration of the offices of religion,
alms-giving, the consolation of the afflicted, the cultivation of a bit
of land, fraternity, frugality, hospitality, renunciation, confidence,
study, work, filled every day of his life. Filled is exactly the word;
certainly the Bishop's day was quite full to the brim, of good words and
good deeds. Nevertheless, it was not complete if cold or rainy weather
prevented his passing an hour or two in his garden before going to bed,
and after the two women had retired. It seemed to be a sort of rite with
him, to prepare himself for slumber by meditation in the presence of
the grand spectacles of the nocturnal heavens. Sometimes, if the two old
women were not asleep, they heard him pacing slowly along the walks at
a very advanced hour of the night. He was there alone, communing with
himself, peaceful, adoring, comparing the serenity of his heart with the
serenity of the ether, moved amid the darkness by the visible splendor
of the constellations and the invisible splendor of God, opening his
heart to the thoughts which fall from the Unknown. At such moments,
while he offered his heart at the hour when nocturnal flowers offer
their perfume, illuminated like a lamp amid the starry night, as he
poured himself out in ecstasy in the midst of the universal radiance of
creation, he could not have told himself, probably, what was passing in
his spirit; he felt something take its flight from him, and something
descend into him. Mysterious exchange of the abysses of the soul with
the abysses of the universe!

He thought of the grandeur and presence of God; of the future eternity,
that strange mystery; of the eternity past, a mystery still more
strange; of all the infinities, which pierced their way into all
his senses, beneath his eyes; and, without seeking to comprehend the
incomprehensible, he gazed upon it. He did not study God; he was dazzled
by him. He considered those magnificent conjunctions of atoms, which
communicate aspects to matter, reveal forces by verifying them, create
individualities in unity, proportions in extent, the innumerable in the
infinite, and, through light, produce beauty. These conjunctions are
formed and dissolved incessantly; hence life and death.

He seated himself on a wooden bench, with his back against a decrepit
vine; he gazed at the stars, past the puny and stunted silhouettes
of his fruit-trees. This quarter of an acre, so poorly planted, so
encumbered with mean buildings and sheds, was dear to him, and satisfied
his wants.

What more was needed by this old man, who divided the leisure of his
life, where there was so little leisure, between gardening in the
daytime and contemplation at night? Was not this narrow enclosure, with
the heavens for a ceiling, sufficient to enable him to adore God in his
most divine works, in turn? Does not this comprehend all, in fact? and
what is there left to desire beyond it? A little garden in which to
walk, and immensity in which to dream. At one's feet that which can be
cultivated and plucked; over head that which one can study and meditate
upon: some flowers on earth, and all the stars in the sky.




CHAPTER XIV--WHAT HE THOUGHT


One last word.

Since this sort of details might, particularly at the present moment,
and to use an expression now in fashion, give to the Bishop of D---- a
certain "pantheistical" physiognomy, and induce the belief, either
to his credit or discredit, that he entertained one of those personal
philosophies which are peculiar to our century, which sometimes spring
up in solitary spirits, and there take on a form and grow until they
usurp the place of religion, we insist upon it, that not one of
those persons who knew Monseigneur Welcome would have thought himself
authorized to think anything of the sort. That which enlightened this
man was his heart. His wisdom was made of the light which comes from
there.

No systems; many works. Abstruse speculations contain vertigo; no,
there is nothing to indicate that he risked his mind in apocalypses. The
apostle may be daring, but the bishop must be timid. He would probably
have felt a scruple at sounding too far in advance certain problems
which are, in a manner, reserved for terrible great minds. There is a
sacred horror beneath the porches of the enigma; those gloomy openings
stand yawning there, but something tells you, you, a passer-by in life,
that you must not enter. Woe to him who penetrates thither!

Geniuses in the impenetrable depths of abstraction and pure speculation,
situated, so to speak, above all dogmas, propose their ideas to
God. Their prayer audaciously offers discussion. Their adoration
interrogates. This is direct religion, which is full of anxiety and
responsibility for him who attempts its steep cliffs.

Human meditation has no limits. At his own risk and peril, it analyzes
and digs deep into its own bedazzlement. One might almost say, that by
a sort of splendid reaction, it with it dazzles nature; the mysterious
world which surrounds us renders back what it has received; it is
probable that the contemplators are contemplated. However that may be,
there are on earth men who--are they men?--perceive distinctly at the
verge of the horizons of revery the heights of the absolute, and who
have the terrible vision of the infinite mountain. Monseigneur Welcome
was one of these men; Monseigneur Welcome was not a genius. He would
have feared those sublimities whence some very great men even, like
Swedenborg and Pascal, have slipped into insanity. Certainly, these
powerful reveries have their moral utility, and by these arduous paths
one approaches to ideal perfection. As for him, he took the path which
shortens,--the Gospel's.

He did not attempt to impart to his chasuble the folds of Elijah's
mantle; he projected no ray of future upon the dark groundswell of
events; he did not seek to condense in flame the light of things; he
had nothing of the prophet and nothing of the magician about him. This
humble soul loved, and that was all.

That he carried prayer to the pitch of a superhuman aspiration is
probable: but one can no more pray too much than one can love too much;
and if it is a heresy to pray beyond the texts, Saint Theresa and Saint
Jerome would be heretics.

He inclined towards all that groans and all that expiates. The universe
appeared to him like an immense malady; everywhere he felt fever,
everywhere he heard the sound of suffering, and, without seeking to
solve the enigma, he strove to dress the wound. The terrible spectacle
of created things developed tenderness in him; he was occupied only
in finding for himself, and in inspiring others with the best way to
compassionate and relieve. That which exists was for this good and rare
priest a permanent subject of sadness which sought consolation.

There are men who toil at extracting gold; he toiled at the extraction
of pity. Universal misery was his mine. The sadness which reigned
everywhere was but an excuse for unfailing kindness. Love each other; he
declared this to be complete, desired nothing further, and that was the
whole of his doctrine. One day, that man who believed himself to be a
"philosopher," the senator who has already been alluded to, said to the
Bishop: "Just survey the spectacle of the world: all war against
all; the strongest has the most wit. Your love each other is
nonsense."--"Well," replied Monseigneur Welcome, without contesting the
point, "if it is nonsense, the soul should shut itself up in it, as the
pearl in the oyster." Thus he shut himself up, he lived there, he
was absolutely satisfied with it, leaving on one side the prodigious
questions which attract and terrify, the fathomless perspectives of
abstraction, the precipices of metaphysics--all those profundities
which converge, for the apostle in God, for the atheist in nothingness;
destiny, good and evil, the way of being against being, the conscience
of man, the thoughtful somnambulism of the animal, the transformation
in death, the recapitulation of existences which the tomb contains, the
incomprehensible grafting of successive loves on the persistent _I_,
the essence, the substance, the Nile, and the Ens, the soul, nature,
liberty, necessity; perpendicular problems, sinister obscurities, where
lean the gigantic archangels of the human mind; formidable abysses,
which Lucretius, Manou, Saint Paul, Dante, contemplate with eyes
flashing lightning, which seems by its steady gaze on the infinite to
cause stars to blaze forth there.

Monseigneur Bienvenu was simply a man who took note of the exterior of
mysterious questions without scrutinizing them, and without troubling
his own mind with them, and who cherished in his own soul a grave
respect for darkness.




BOOK SECOND--THE FALL




CHAPTER I--THE EVENING OF A DAY OF WALKING

Early in the month of October, 1815, about an hour before sunset, a
man who was travelling on foot entered the little town of D----The few
inhabitants who were at their windows or on their thresholds at the
moment stared at this traveller with a sort of uneasiness. It was
difficult to encounter a wayfarer of more wretched appearance. He was
a man of medium stature, thickset and robust, in the prime of life.
He might have been forty-six or forty-eight years old. A cap with a
drooping leather visor partly concealed his face, burned and tanned by
sun and wind, and dripping with perspiration. His shirt of coarse yellow
linen, fastened at the neck by a small silver anchor, permitted a view
of his hairy breast: he had a cravat twisted into a string; trousers of
blue drilling, worn and threadbare, white on one knee and torn on the
other; an old gray, tattered blouse, patched on one of the elbows with
a bit of green cloth sewed on with twine; a tightly packed soldier
knapsack, well buckled and perfectly new, on his back; an enormous,
knotty stick in his hand; iron-shod shoes on his stockingless feet; a
shaved head and a long beard.

The sweat, the heat, the journey on foot, the dust, added I know not
what sordid quality to this dilapidated whole. His hair was closely cut,
yet bristling, for it had begun to grow a little, and did not seem to
have been cut for some time.

No one knew him. He was evidently only a chance passer-by. Whence came
he? From the south; from the seashore, perhaps, for he made his entrance
into D---- by the same street which, seven months previously, had
witnessed the passage of the Emperor Napoleon on his way from Cannes
to Paris. This man must have been walking all day. He seemed very much
fatigued. Some women of the ancient market town which is situated below
the city had seen him pause beneath the trees of the boulevard Gassendi,
and drink at the fountain which stands at the end of the promenade. He
must have been very thirsty: for the children who followed him saw him
stop again for a drink, two hundred paces further on, at the fountain in
the market-place.

On arriving at the corner of the Rue Poichevert, he turned to the left,
and directed his steps toward the town-hall. He entered, then came out
a quarter of an hour later. A gendarme was seated near the door, on the
stone bench which General Drouot had mounted on the 4th of March to read
to the frightened throng of the inhabitants of D---- the proclamation
of the Gulf Juan. The man pulled off his cap and humbly saluted the
gendarme.

The gendarme, without replying to his salute, stared attentively at him,
followed him for a while with his eyes, and then entered the town-hall.

There then existed at D---- a fine inn at the sign of the Cross of
Colbas. This inn had for a landlord a certain Jacquin Labarre, a man
of consideration in the town on account of his relationship to another
Labarre, who kept the inn of the Three Dauphins in Grenoble, and had
served in the Guides. At the time of the Emperor's landing, many rumors
had circulated throughout the country with regard to this inn of the
Three Dauphins. It was said that General Bertrand, disguised as a
carter, had made frequent trips thither in the month of January, and
that he had distributed crosses of honor to the soldiers and handfuls
of gold to the citizens. The truth is, that when the Emperor entered
Grenoble he had refused to install himself at the hotel of the
prefecture; he had thanked the mayor, saying, "I am going to the house
of a brave man of my acquaintance"; and he had betaken himself to the
Three Dauphins. This glory of the Labarre of the Three Dauphins was
reflected upon the Labarre of the Cross of Colbas, at a distance of five
and twenty leagues. It was said of him in the town, "That is the cousin
of the man of Grenoble."

The man bent his steps towards this inn, which was the best in the
country-side. He entered the kitchen, which opened on a level with the
street. All the stoves were lighted; a huge fire blazed gayly in the
fireplace. The host, who was also the chief cook, was going from one
stew-pan to another, very busily superintending an excellent dinner
designed for the wagoners, whose loud talking, conversation, and
laughter were audible from an adjoining apartment. Any one who has
travelled knows that there is no one who indulges in better cheer than
wagoners. A fat marmot, flanked by white partridges and heather-cocks,
was turning on a long spit before the fire; on the stove, two huge carps
from Lake Lauzet and a trout from Lake Alloz were cooking.

The host, hearing the door open and seeing a newcomer enter, said,
without raising his eyes from his stoves:--

"What do you wish, sir?"

"Food and lodging," said the man.

"Nothing easier," replied the host. At that moment he turned his head,
took in the traveller's appearance with a single glance, and added, "By
paying for it."

The man drew a large leather purse from the pocket of his blouse, and
answered, "I have money."

"In that case, we are at your service," said the host.

The man put his purse back in his pocket, removed his knapsack from
his back, put it on the ground near the door, retained his stick in his
hand, and seated himself on a low stool close to the fire. D---- is in
the mountains. The evenings are cold there in October.

But as the host went back and forth, he scrutinized the traveller.

"Will dinner be ready soon?" said the man.

"Immediately," replied the landlord.

While the newcomer was warming himself before the fire, with his back
turned, the worthy host, Jacquin Labarre, drew a pencil from his pocket,
then tore off the corner of an old newspaper which was lying on a small
table near the window. On the white margin he wrote a line or two,
folded it without sealing, and then intrusted this scrap of paper to
a child who seemed to serve him in the capacity both of scullion and
lackey. The landlord whispered a word in the scullion's ear, and the
child set off on a run in the direction of the town-hall.

The traveller saw nothing of all this.

Once more he inquired, "Will dinner be ready soon?"

"Immediately," responded the host.

The child returned. He brought back the paper. The host unfolded it
eagerly, like a person who is expecting a reply. He seemed to read it
attentively, then tossed his head, and remained thoughtful for a moment.
Then he took a step in the direction of the traveller, who appeared to
be immersed in reflections which were not very serene.

"I cannot receive you, sir," said he.

The man half rose.

"What! Are you afraid that I will not pay you? Do you want me to pay you
in advance? I have money, I tell you."

"It is not that."

"What then?"

"You have money--"

"Yes," said the man.

"And I," said the host, "have no room."

The man resumed tranquilly, "Put me in the stable."

"I cannot."

"Why?"

"The horses take up all the space."

"Very well!" retorted the man; "a corner of the loft then, a truss of
straw. We will see about that after dinner."

"I cannot give you any dinner."

This declaration, made in a measured but firm tone, struck the stranger
as grave. He rose.

"Ah! bah! But I am dying of hunger. I have been walking since sunrise. I
have travelled twelve leagues. I pay. I wish to eat."

"I have nothing," said the landlord.

The man burst out laughing, and turned towards the fireplace and the
stoves: "Nothing! and all that?"

"All that is engaged."

"By whom?"

"By messieurs the wagoners."

"How many are there of them?"

"Twelve."

"There is enough food there for twenty."

"They have engaged the whole of it and paid for it in advance."

The man seated himself again, and said, without raising his voice, "I am
at an inn; I am hungry, and I shall remain."

Then the host bent down to his ear, and said in a tone which made him
start, "Go away!"

At that moment the traveller was bending forward and thrusting some
brands into the fire with the iron-shod tip of his staff; he turned
quickly round, and as he opened his mouth to reply, the host gazed
steadily at him and added, still in a low voice: "Stop! there's enough
of that sort of talk. Do you want me to tell you your name? Your name is
Jean Valjean. Now do you want me to tell you who you are? When I saw you
come in I suspected something; I sent to the town-hall, and this was the
reply that was sent to me. Can you read?"

So saying, he held out to the stranger, fully unfolded, the paper which
had just travelled from the inn to the town-hall, and from the town-hall
to the inn. The man cast a glance upon it. The landlord resumed after a
pause.

"I am in the habit of being polite to every one. Go away!"

The man dropped his head, picked up the knapsack which he had deposited
on the ground, and took his departure.

He chose the principal street. He walked straight on at a venture,
keeping close to the houses like a sad and humiliated man. He did not
turn round a single time. Had he done so, he would have seen the host
of the Cross of Colbas standing on his threshold, surrounded by all
the guests of his inn, and all the passers-by in the street, talking
vivaciously, and pointing him out with his finger; and, from the glances
of terror and distrust cast by the group, he might have divined that his
arrival would speedily become an event for the whole town.

He saw nothing of all this. People who are crushed do not look behind
them. They know but too well the evil fate which follows them.

Thus he proceeded for some time, walking on without ceasing, traversing
at random streets of which he knew nothing, forgetful of his fatigue,
as is often the case when a man is sad. All at once he felt the pangs
of hunger sharply. Night was drawing near. He glanced about him, to see
whether he could not discover some shelter.

The fine hostelry was closed to him; he was seeking some very humble
public house, some hovel, however lowly.

Just then a light flashed up at the end of the streets; a pine branch
suspended from a cross-beam of iron was outlined against the white sky
of the twilight. He proceeded thither.

It proved to be, in fact, a public house. The public house which is in
the Rue de Chaffaut.

The wayfarer halted for a moment, and peeped through the window into the
interior of the low-studded room of the public house, illuminated by a
small lamp on a table and by a large fire on the hearth. Some men were
engaged in drinking there. The landlord was warming himself. An iron
pot, suspended from a crane, bubbled over the flame.

The entrance to this public house, which is also a sort of an inn, is by
two doors. One opens on the street, the other upon a small yard filled
with manure. The traveller dare not enter by the street door. He slipped
into the yard, halted again, then raised the latch timidly and opened
the door.

"Who goes there?" said the master.

"Some one who wants supper and bed."

"Good. We furnish supper and bed here."

He entered. All the men who were drinking turned round. The lamp
illuminated him on one side, the firelight on the other. They examined
him for some time while he was taking off his knapsack.

The host said to him, "There is the fire. The supper is cooking in the
pot. Come and warm yourself, comrade."

He approached and seated himself near the hearth. He stretched out his
feet, which were exhausted with fatigue, to the fire; a fine odor was
emitted by the pot. All that could be distinguished of his face, beneath
his cap, which was well pulled down, assumed a vague appearance
of comfort, mingled with that other poignant aspect which habitual
suffering bestows.

It was, moreover, a firm, energetic, and melancholy profile. This
physiognomy was strangely composed; it began by seeming humble, and
ended by seeming severe. The eye shone beneath its lashes like a fire
beneath brushwood.

One of the men seated at the table, however, was a fishmonger who,
before entering the public house of the Rue de Chaffaut, had been to
stable his horse at Labarre's. It chanced that he had that very morning
encountered this unprepossessing stranger on the road between Bras
d'Asse and--I have forgotten the name. I think it was Escoublon. Now,
when he met him, the man, who then seemed already extremely weary, had
requested him to take him on his crupper; to which the fishmonger had
made no reply except by redoubling his gait. This fishmonger had been
a member half an hour previously of the group which surrounded Jacquin
Labarre, and had himself related his disagreeable encounter of the
morning to the people at the Cross of Colbas. From where he sat he made
an imperceptible sign to the tavern-keeper. The tavern-keeper went to
him. They exchanged a few words in a low tone. The man had again become
absorbed in his reflections.

The tavern-keeper returned to the fireplace, laid his hand abruptly on
the shoulder of the man, and said to him:--

"You are going to get out of here."

The stranger turned round and replied gently, "Ah! You know?--"

"Yes."

"I was sent away from the other inn."

"And you are to be turned out of this one."

"Where would you have me go?"

"Elsewhere."

The man took his stick and his knapsack and departed.

As he went out, some children who had followed him from the Cross of
Colbas, and who seemed to be lying in wait for him, threw stones at him.
He retraced his steps in anger, and threatened them with his stick: the
children dispersed like a flock of birds.

He passed before the prison. At the door hung an iron chain attached to
a bell. He rang.

The wicket opened.

"Turnkey," said he, removing his cap politely, "will you have the
kindness to admit me, and give me a lodging for the night?"

A voice replied:--

"The prison is not an inn. Get yourself arrested, and you will be
admitted."

The wicket closed again.

He entered a little street in which there were many gardens. Some of
them are enclosed only by hedges, which lends a cheerful aspect to the
street. In the midst of these gardens and hedges he caught sight of a
small house of a single story, the window of which was lighted up. He
peered through the pane as he had done at the public house. Within was a
large whitewashed room, with a bed draped in printed cotton stuff, and
a cradle in one corner, a few wooden chairs, and a double-barrelled gun
hanging on the wall. A table was spread in the centre of the room. A
copper lamp illuminated the tablecloth of coarse white linen, the pewter
jug shining like silver, and filled with wine, and the brown, smoking
soup-tureen. At this table sat a man of about forty, with a merry and
open countenance, who was dandling a little child on his knees. Close by
a very young woman was nursing another child. The father was laughing,
the child was laughing, the mother was smiling.

The stranger paused a moment in revery before this tender and calming
spectacle. What was taking place within him? He alone could have
told. It is probable that he thought that this joyous house would be
hospitable, and that, in a place where he beheld so much happiness, he
would find perhaps a little pity.

He tapped on the pane with a very small and feeble knock.

They did not hear him.

He tapped again.

He heard the woman say, "It seems to me, husband, that some one is
knocking."

"No," replied the husband.

He tapped a third time.

The husband rose, took the lamp, and went to the door, which he opened.

He was a man of lofty stature, half peasant, half artisan. He wore a
huge leather apron, which reached to his left shoulder, and which a
hammer, a red handkerchief, a powder-horn, and all sorts of objects
which were upheld by the girdle, as in a pocket, caused to bulge out. He
carried his head thrown backwards; his shirt, widely opened and turned
back, displayed his bull neck, white and bare. He had thick eyelashes,
enormous black whiskers, prominent eyes, the lower part of his face
like a snout; and besides all this, that air of being on his own ground,
which is indescribable.

"Pardon me, sir," said the wayfarer, "Could you, in consideration of
payment, give me a plate of soup and a corner of that shed yonder in the
garden, in which to sleep? Tell me; can you? For money?"

"Who are you?" demanded the master of the house.

The man replied: "I have just come from Puy-Moisson. I have walked all
day long. I have travelled twelve leagues. Can you?--if I pay?"

"I would not refuse," said the peasant, "to lodge any respectable man
who would pay me. But why do you not go to the inn?"

"There is no room."

"Bah! Impossible. This is neither a fair nor a market day. Have you been
to Labarre?"

"Yes."

"Well?"

The traveller replied with embarrassment: "I do not know. He did not
receive me."

"Have you been to What's-his-name's, in the Rue Chaffaut?"

The stranger's embarrassment increased; he stammered, "He did not
receive me either."

The peasant's countenance assumed an expression of distrust; he surveyed
the newcomer from head to feet, and suddenly exclaimed, with a sort of
shudder:--

"Are you the man?--"

He cast a fresh glance upon the stranger, took three steps backwards,
placed the lamp on the table, and took his gun down from the wall.

Meanwhile, at the words, Are you the man? the woman had risen, had
clasped her two children in her arms, and had taken refuge precipitately
behind her husband, staring in terror at the stranger, with her bosom
uncovered, and with frightened eyes, as she murmured in a low tone,
"Tso-maraude."[1]

All this took place in less time than it requires to picture it to
one's self. After having scrutinized the man for several moments, as one
scrutinizes a viper, the master of the house returned to the door and
said:--

"Clear out!"

"For pity's sake, a glass of water," said the man.

"A shot from my gun!" said the peasant.

Then he closed the door violently, and the man heard him shoot two large
bolts. A moment later, the window-shutter was closed, and the sound of a
bar of iron which was placed against it was audible outside.

Night continued to fall. A cold wind from the Alps was blowing. By the
light of the expiring day the stranger perceived, in one of the gardens
which bordered the street, a sort of hut, which seemed to him to be
built of sods. He climbed over the wooden fence resolutely, and found
himself in the garden. He approached the hut; its door consisted of a
very low and narrow aperture, and it resembled those buildings which
road-laborers construct for themselves along the roads. He thought
without doubt, that it was, in fact, the dwelling of a road-laborer; he
was suffering from cold and hunger, but this was, at least, a shelter
from the cold. This sort of dwelling is not usually occupied at night.
He threw himself flat on his face, and crawled into the hut. It was warm
there, and he found a tolerably good bed of straw. He lay, for a moment,
stretched out on this bed, without the power to make a movement, so
fatigued was he. Then, as the knapsack on his back was in his way, and
as it furnished, moreover, a pillow ready to his hand, he set about
unbuckling one of the straps. At that moment, a ferocious growl became
audible. He raised his eyes. The head of an enormous dog was outlined in
the darkness at the entrance of the hut.

It was a dog's kennel.

He was himself vigorous and formidable; he armed himself with his staff,
made a shield of his knapsack, and made his way out of the kennel in the
best way he could, not without enlarging the rents in his rags.

He left the garden in the same manner, but backwards, being obliged,
in order to keep the dog respectful, to have recourse to that manoeuvre
with his stick which masters in that sort of fencing designate as la
rose couverte.

When he had, not without difficulty, repassed the fence, and found
himself once more in the street, alone, without refuge, without shelter,
without a roof over his head, chased even from that bed of straw and
from that miserable kennel, he dropped rather than seated himself on a
stone, and it appears that a passer-by heard him exclaim, "I am not even
a dog!"

He soon rose again and resumed his march. He went out of the town,
hoping to find some tree or haystack in the fields which would afford
him shelter.

He walked thus for some time, with his head still drooping. When he felt
himself far from every human habitation, he raised his eyes and gazed
searchingly about him. He was in a field. Before him was one of those
low hills covered with close-cut stubble, which, after the harvest,
resemble shaved heads.

The horizon was perfectly black. This was not alone the obscurity of
night; it was caused by very low-hanging clouds which seemed to rest
upon the hill itself, and which were mounting and filling the whole
sky. Meanwhile, as the moon was about to rise, and as there was still
floating in the zenith a remnant of the brightness of twilight, these
clouds formed at the summit of the sky a sort of whitish arch, whence a
gleam of light fell upon the earth.

The earth was thus better lighted than the sky, which produces a
particularly sinister effect, and the hill, whose contour was poor and
mean, was outlined vague and wan against the gloomy horizon. The whole
effect was hideous, petty, lugubrious, and narrow.

There was nothing in the field or on the hill except a deformed tree,
which writhed and shivered a few paces distant from the wayfarer.

This man was evidently very far from having those delicate habits of
intelligence and spirit which render one sensible to the mysterious
aspects of things; nevertheless, there was something in that sky,
in that hill, in that plain, in that tree, which was so profoundly
desolate, that after a moment of immobility and revery he turned back
abruptly. There are instants when nature seems hostile.

He retraced his steps; the gates of D---- were closed. D----, which had
sustained sieges during the wars of religion, was still surrounded
in 1815 by ancient walls flanked by square towers which have been
demolished since. He passed through a breach and entered the town again.

It might have been eight o'clock in the evening. As he was not
acquainted with the streets, he recommenced his walk at random.

In this way he came to the prefecture, then to the seminary. As he
passed through the Cathedral Square, he shook his fist at the church.

At the corner of this square there is a printing establishment. It is
there that the proclamations of the Emperor and of the Imperial Guard
to the army, brought from the Island of Elba and dictated by Napoleon
himself, were printed for the first time.

Worn out with fatigue, and no longer entertaining any hope, he lay down
on a stone bench which stands at the doorway of this printing office.

At that moment an old woman came out of the church. She saw the man
stretched out in the shadow. "What are you doing there, my friend?" said
she.

He answered harshly and angrily: "As you see, my good woman, I am
sleeping." The good woman, who was well worthy the name, in fact, was
the Marquise de R----

"On this bench?" she went on.

"I have had a mattress of wood for nineteen years," said the man;
"to-day I have a mattress of stone."

"You have been a soldier?"

"Yes, my good woman, a soldier."

"Why do you not go to the inn?"

"Because I have no money."

"Alas!" said Madame de R----, "I have only four sous in my purse."

"Give it to me all the same."

The man took the four sous. Madame de R---- continued: "You cannot
obtain lodgings in an inn for so small a sum. But have you tried? It is
impossible for you to pass the night thus. You are cold and hungry, no
doubt. Some one might have given you a lodging out of charity."

"I have knocked at all doors."

"Well?"

"I have been driven away everywhere."

The "good woman" touched the man's arm, and pointed out to him on the
other side of the street a small, low house, which stood beside the
Bishop's palace.

"You have knocked at all doors?"

"Yes."

"Have you knocked at that one?"

"No."

"Knock there."




CHAPTER II--PRUDENCE COUNSELLED TO WISDOM.

That evening, the Bishop of D----, after his promenade through the town,
remained shut up rather late in his room. He was busy over a great work
on Duties, which was never completed, unfortunately. He was carefully
compiling everything that the Fathers and the doctors have said on this
important subject. His book was divided into two parts: firstly, the
duties of all; secondly, the duties of each individual, according to the
class to which he belongs. The duties of all are the great duties. There
are four of these. Saint Matthew points them out: duties towards God
(Matt. vi.); duties towards one's self (Matt. v. 29, 30); duties towards
one's neighbor (Matt. vii. 12); duties towards animals (Matt. vi. 20,
25). As for the other duties the Bishop found them pointed out and
prescribed elsewhere: to sovereigns and subjects, in the Epistle to the
Romans; to magistrates, to wives, to mothers, to young men, by Saint
Peter; to husbands, fathers, children and servants, in the Epistle
to the Ephesians; to the faithful, in the Epistle to the Hebrews; to
virgins, in the Epistle to the Corinthians. Out of these precepts he was
laboriously constructing a harmonious whole, which he desired to present
to souls.

At eight o'clock he was still at work, writing with a good deal of
inconvenience upon little squares of paper, with a big book open on his
knees, when Madame Magloire entered, according to her wont, to get the
silver-ware from the cupboard near his bed. A moment later, the Bishop,
knowing that the table was set, and that his sister was probably
waiting for him, shut his book, rose from his table, and entered the
dining-room.

The dining-room was an oblong apartment, with a fireplace, which had a
door opening on the street (as we have said), and a window opening on
the garden.

Madame Magloire was, in fact, just putting the last touches to the
table.

As she performed this service, she was conversing with Mademoiselle
Baptistine.

A lamp stood on the table; the table was near the fireplace. A wood fire
was burning there.

One can easily picture to one's self these two women, both of whom
were over sixty years of age. Madame Magloire small, plump, vivacious;
Mademoiselle Baptistine gentle, slender, frail, somewhat taller than her
brother, dressed in a gown of puce-colored silk, of the fashion of 1806,
which she had purchased at that date in Paris, and which had lasted
ever since. To borrow vulgar phrases, which possess the merit of giving
utterance in a single word to an idea which a whole page would hardly
suffice to express, Madame Magloire had the air of a peasant, and
Mademoiselle Baptistine that of a lady. Madame Magloire wore a white
quilted cap, a gold Jeannette cross on a velvet ribbon upon her neck,
the only bit of feminine jewelry that there was in the house, a very
white fichu puffing out from a gown of coarse black woollen stuff, with
large, short sleeves, an apron of cotton cloth in red and green checks,
knotted round the waist with a green ribbon, with a stomacher of the
same attached by two pins at the upper corners, coarse shoes on her
feet, and yellow stockings, like the women of Marseilles. Mademoiselle
Baptistine's gown was cut on the patterns of 1806, with a short waist,
a narrow, sheath-like skirt, puffed sleeves, with flaps and buttons.
She concealed her gray hair under a frizzed wig known as the baby wig.
Madame Magloire had an intelligent, vivacious, and kindly air; the two
corners of her mouth unequally raised, and her upper lip, which was
larger than the lower, imparted to her a rather crabbed and imperious
look. So long as Monseigneur held his peace, she talked to him
resolutely with a mixture of respect and freedom; but as soon as
Monseigneur began to speak, as we have seen, she obeyed passively like
her mistress. Mademoiselle Baptistine did not even speak. She confined
herself to obeying and pleasing him. She had never been pretty, even
when she was young; she had large, blue, prominent eyes, and a long
arched nose; but her whole visage, her whole person, breathed forth an
ineffable goodness, as we stated in the beginning. She had always been
predestined to gentleness; but faith, charity, hope, those three virtues
which mildly warm the soul, had gradually elevated that gentleness to
sanctity. Nature had made her a lamb, religion had made her an angel.
Poor sainted virgin! Sweet memory which has vanished!

Mademoiselle Baptistine has so often narrated what passed at the
episcopal residence that evening, that there are many people now living
who still recall the most minute details.

At the moment when the Bishop entered, Madame Magloire was talking with
considerable vivacity. She was haranguing Mademoiselle Baptistine on
a subject which was familiar to her and to which the Bishop was also
accustomed. The question concerned the lock upon the entrance door.

It appears that while procuring some provisions for supper, Madame
Magloire had heard things in divers places. People had spoken of a
prowler of evil appearance; a suspicious vagabond had arrived who must
be somewhere about the town, and those who should take it into their
heads to return home late that night might be subjected to unpleasant
encounters. The police was very badly organized, moreover, because there
was no love lost between the Prefect and the Mayor, who sought to injure
each other by making things happen. It behooved wise people to play the
part of their own police, and to guard themselves well, and care must be
taken to duly close, bar and barricade their houses, and to fasten the
doors well.

Madame Magloire emphasized these last words; but the Bishop had just
come from his room, where it was rather cold. He seated himself in front
of the fire, and warmed himself, and then fell to thinking of other
things. He did not take up the remark dropped with design by Madame
Magloire. She repeated it. Then Mademoiselle Baptistine, desirous of
satisfying Madame Magloire without displeasing her brother, ventured to
say timidly:--

"Did you hear what Madame Magloire is saying, brother?"

"I have heard something of it in a vague way," replied the Bishop. Then
half-turning in his chair, placing his hands on his knees, and raising
towards the old servant woman his cordial face, which so easily grew
joyous, and which was illuminated from below by the firelight,--"Come,
what is the matter? What is the matter? Are we in any great danger?"

Then Madame Magloire began the whole story afresh, exaggerating it a
little without being aware of the fact. It appeared that a Bohemian, a
bare-footed vagabond, a sort of dangerous mendicant, was at that moment
in the town. He had presented himself at Jacquin Labarre's to obtain
lodgings, but the latter had not been willing to take him in. He had
been seen to arrive by the way of the boulevard Gassendi and roam about
the streets in the gloaming. A gallows-bird with a terrible face.

"Really!" said the Bishop.

This willingness to interrogate encouraged Madame Magloire; it seemed
to her to indicate that the Bishop was on the point of becoming alarmed;
she pursued triumphantly:--

"Yes, Monseigneur. That is how it is. There will be some sort of
catastrophe in this town to-night. Every one says so. And withal, the
police is so badly regulated" (a useful repetition). "The idea of living
in a mountainous country, and not even having lights in the streets at
night! One goes out. Black as ovens, indeed! And I say, Monseigneur, and
Mademoiselle there says with me--"

"I," interrupted his sister, "say nothing. What my brother does is well
done."

Madame Magloire continued as though there had been no protest:--

"We say that this house is not safe at all; that if Monseigneur will
permit, I will go and tell Paulin Musebois, the locksmith, to come and
replace the ancient locks on the doors; we have them, and it is only the
work of a moment; for I say that nothing is more terrible than a
door which can be opened from the outside with a latch by the first
passer-by; and I say that we need bolts, Monseigneur, if only for this
night; moreover, Monseigneur has the habit of always saying 'come in';
and besides, even in the middle of the night, O mon Dieu! there is no
need to ask permission."

At that moment there came a tolerably violent knock on the door.

"Come in," said the Bishop.




CHAPTER III--THE HEROISM OF PASSIVE OBEDIENCE.

The door opened.

It opened wide with a rapid movement, as though some one had given it an
energetic and resolute push.

A man entered.

We already know the man. It was the wayfarer whom we have seen wandering
about in search of shelter.

He entered, advanced a step, and halted, leaving the door open behind
him. He had his knapsack on his shoulders, his cudgel in his hand, a
rough, audacious, weary, and violent expression in his eyes. The fire on
the hearth lighted him up. He was hideous. It was a sinister apparition.

Madame Magloire had not even the strength to utter a cry. She trembled,
and stood with her mouth wide open.

Mademoiselle Baptistine turned round, beheld the man entering, and half
started up in terror; then, turning her head by degrees towards the
fireplace again, she began to observe her brother, and her face became
once more profoundly calm and serene.

The Bishop fixed a tranquil eye on the man.

As he opened his mouth, doubtless to ask the new-comer what he desired,
the man rested both hands on his staff, directed his gaze at the old man
and the two women, and without waiting for the Bishop to speak, he said,
in a loud voice:--

"See here. My name is Jean Valjean. I am a convict from the galleys.
I have passed nineteen years in the galleys. I was liberated four days
ago, and am on my way to Pontarlier, which is my destination. I have
been walking for four days since I left Toulon. I have travelled a dozen
leagues to-day on foot. This evening, when I arrived in these parts, I
went to an inn, and they turned me out, because of my yellow passport,
which I had shown at the town-hall. I had to do it. I went to an inn.
They said to me, 'Be off,' at both places. No one would take me. I
went to the prison; the jailer would not admit me. I went into a dog's
kennel; the dog bit me and chased me off, as though he had been a man.
One would have said that he knew who I was. I went into the fields,
intending to sleep in the open air, beneath the stars. There were no
stars. I thought it was going to rain, and I re-entered the town, to
seek the recess of a doorway. Yonder, in the square, I meant to sleep
on a stone bench. A good woman pointed out your house to me, and said
to me, 'Knock there!' I have knocked. What is this place? Do you keep
an inn? I have money--savings. One hundred and nine francs fifteen sous,
which I earned in the galleys by my labor, in the course of nineteen
years. I will pay. What is that to me? I have money. I am very weary;
twelve leagues on foot; I am very hungry. Are you willing that I should
remain?"

"Madame Magloire," said the Bishop, "you will set another place."

The man advanced three paces, and approached the lamp which was on
the table. "Stop," he resumed, as though he had not quite understood;
"that's not it. Did you hear? I am a galley-slave; a convict. I come
from the galleys." He drew from his pocket a large sheet of yellow
paper, which he unfolded. "Here's my passport. Yellow, as you see. This
serves to expel me from every place where I go. Will you read it? I know
how to read. I learned in the galleys. There is a school there for those
who choose to learn. Hold, this is what they put on this passport: 'Jean
Valjean, discharged convict, native of'--that is nothing to you--'has
been nineteen years in the galleys: five years for house-breaking
and burglary; fourteen years for having attempted to escape on four
occasions. He is a very dangerous man.' There! Every one has cast me
out. Are you willing to receive me? Is this an inn? Will you give me
something to eat and a bed? Have you a stable?"

"Madame Magloire," said the Bishop, "you will put white sheets on the
bed in the alcove." We have already explained the character of the two
women's obedience.

Madame Magloire retired to execute these orders.

The Bishop turned to the man.

"Sit down, sir, and warm yourself. We are going to sup in a few moments,
and your bed will be prepared while you are supping."

At this point the man suddenly comprehended. The expression of his face,
up to that time sombre and harsh, bore the imprint of stupefaction,
of doubt, of joy, and became extraordinary. He began stammering like a
crazy man:--

"Really? What! You will keep me? You do not drive me forth? A convict!
You call me sir! You do not address me as thou? 'Get out of here, you
dog!' is what people always say to me. I felt sure that you would expel
me, so I told you at once who I am. Oh, what a good woman that was who
directed me hither! I am going to sup! A bed with a mattress and sheets,
like the rest of the world! a bed! It is nineteen years since I have
slept in a bed! You actually do not want me to go! You are good
people. Besides, I have money. I will pay well. Pardon me, monsieur the
inn-keeper, but what is your name? I will pay anything you ask. You are
a fine man. You are an inn-keeper, are you not?"

"I am," replied the Bishop, "a priest who lives here."

"A priest!" said the man. "Oh, what a fine priest! Then you are not
going to demand any money of me? You are the cure, are you not? the cure
of this big church? Well! I am a fool, truly! I had not perceived your
skull-cap."

As he spoke, he deposited his knapsack and his cudgel in a corner,
replaced his passport in his pocket, and seated himself. Mademoiselle
Baptistine gazed mildly at him. He continued:

"You are humane, Monsieur le Cure; you have not scorned me. A good
priest is a very good thing. Then you do not require me to pay?"

"No," said the Bishop; "keep your money. How much have you? Did you not
tell me one hundred and nine francs?"

"And fifteen sous," added the man.

"One hundred and nine francs fifteen sous. And how long did it take you
to earn that?"

"Nineteen years."

"Nineteen years!"

The Bishop sighed deeply.

The man continued: "I have still the whole of my money. In four days I
have spent only twenty-five sous, which I earned by helping unload some
wagons at Grasse. Since you are an abbe, I will tell you that we had a
chaplain in the galleys. And one day I saw a bishop there. Monseigneur
is what they call him. He was the Bishop of Majore at Marseilles. He is
the cure who rules over the other cures, you understand. Pardon me,
I say that very badly; but it is such a far-off thing to me! You
understand what we are! He said mass in the middle of the galleys, on an
altar. He had a pointed thing, made of gold, on his head; it glittered
in the bright light of midday. We were all ranged in lines on the three
sides, with cannons with lighted matches facing us. We could not see
very well. He spoke; but he was too far off, and we did not hear. That
is what a bishop is like."

While he was speaking, the Bishop had gone and shut the door, which had
remained wide open.

Madame Magloire returned. She brought a silver fork and spoon, which she
placed on the table.

"Madame Magloire," said the Bishop, "place those things as near the fire
as possible." And turning to his guest: "The night wind is harsh on the
Alps. You must be cold, sir."

Each time that he uttered the word sir, in his voice which was so gently
grave and polished, the man's face lighted up. Monsieur to a convict is
like a glass of water to one of the shipwrecked of the Medusa. Ignominy
thirsts for consideration.

"This lamp gives a very bad light," said the Bishop.

Madame Magloire understood him, and went to get the two silver
candlesticks from the chimney-piece in Monseigneur's bed-chamber, and
placed them, lighted, on the table.

"Monsieur le Cure," said the man, "you are good; you do not despise me.
You receive me into your house. You light your candles for me. Yet I
have not concealed from you whence I come and that I am an unfortunate
man."

The Bishop, who was sitting close to him, gently touched his hand. "You
could not help telling me who you were. This is not my house; it is
the house of Jesus Christ. This door does not demand of him who enters
whether he has a name, but whether he has a grief. You suffer, you are
hungry and thirsty; you are welcome. And do not thank me; do not say
that I receive you in my house. No one is at home here, except the man
who needs a refuge. I say to you, who are passing by, that you are much
more at home here than I am myself. Everything here is yours. What need
have I to know your name? Besides, before you told me you had one which
I knew."

The man opened his eyes in astonishment.

"Really? You knew what I was called?"

"Yes," replied the Bishop, "you are called my brother."

"Stop, Monsieur le Cure," exclaimed the man. "I was very hungry when
I entered here; but you are so good, that I no longer know what has
happened to me."

The Bishop looked at him, and said,--

"You have suffered much?"

"Oh, the red coat, the ball on the ankle, a plank to sleep on, heat,
cold, toil, the convicts, the thrashings, the double chain for nothing,
the cell for one word; even sick and in bed, still the chain! Dogs, dogs
are happier! Nineteen years! I am forty-six. Now there is the yellow
passport. That is what it is like."

"Yes," resumed the Bishop, "you have come from a very sad place.
Listen. There will be more joy in heaven over the tear-bathed face of a
repentant sinner than over the white robes of a hundred just men. If you
emerge from that sad place with thoughts of hatred and of wrath against
mankind, you are deserving of pity; if you emerge with thoughts of
good-will and of peace, you are more worthy than any one of us."

In the meantime, Madame Magloire had served supper: soup, made with
water, oil, bread, and salt; a little bacon, a bit of mutton, figs, a
fresh cheese, and a large loaf of rye bread. She had, of her own accord,
added to the Bishop's ordinary fare a bottle of his old Mauves wine.

The Bishop's face at once assumed that expression of gayety which is
peculiar to hospitable natures. "To table!" he cried vivaciously. As was
his custom when a stranger supped with him, he made the man sit on his
right. Mademoiselle Baptistine, perfectly peaceable and natural, took
her seat at his left.

The Bishop asked a blessing; then helped the soup himself, according to
his custom. The man began to eat with avidity.

All at once the Bishop said: "It strikes me there is something missing
on this table."

Madame Magloire had, in fact, only placed the three sets of forks and
spoons which were absolutely necessary. Now, it was the usage of the
house, when the Bishop had any one to supper, to lay out the whole
six sets of silver on the table-cloth--an innocent ostentation. This
graceful semblance of luxury was a kind of child's play, which was full
of charm in that gentle and severe household, which raised poverty into
dignity.

Madame Magloire understood the remark, went out without saying a word,
and a moment later the three sets of silver forks and spoons demanded by
the Bishop were glittering upon the cloth, symmetrically arranged before
the three persons seated at the table.




CHAPTER IV--DETAILS CONCERNING THE CHEESE-DAIRIES OF PONTARLIER.

Now, in order to convey an idea of what passed at that table, we cannot
do better than to transcribe here a passage from one of Mademoiselle
Baptistine's letters to Madame Boischevron, wherein the conversation
between the convict and the Bishop is described with ingenious
minuteness.


". . . This man paid no attention to any one. He ate with the voracity
of a starving man. However, after supper he said:

"'Monsieur le Cure of the good God, all this is far too good for me; but
I must say that the carters who would not allow me to eat with them keep
a better table than you do.'

"Between ourselves, the remark rather shocked me. My brother replied:--

"'They are more fatigued than I.'

"'No,' returned the man, 'they have more money. You are poor; I see that
plainly. You cannot be even a curate. Are you really a cure? Ah, if the
good God were but just, you certainly ought to be a cure!'

"'The good God is more than just,' said my brother.

"A moment later he added:--

"'Monsieur Jean Valjean, is it to Pontarlier that you are going?'

"'With my road marked out for me.'

"I think that is what the man said. Then he went on:--

"'I must be on my way by daybreak to-morrow. Travelling is hard. If the
nights are cold, the days are hot.'

"'You are going to a good country,' said my brother. 'During the
Revolution my family was ruined. I took refuge in Franche-Comte at
first, and there I lived for some time by the toil of my hands. My will
was good. I found plenty to occupy me. One has only to choose. There are
paper mills, tanneries, distilleries, oil factories, watch factories
on a large scale, steel mills, copper works, twenty iron foundries at
least, four of which, situated at Lods, at Chatillon, at Audincourt, and
at Beure, are tolerably large.'

"I think I am not mistaken in saying that those are the names which my
brother mentioned. Then he interrupted himself and addressed me:--

"'Have we not some relatives in those parts, my dear sister?'

"I replied,--

"'We did have some; among others, M. de Lucenet, who was captain of the
gates at Pontarlier under the old regime.'

"'Yes,' resumed my brother; 'but in '93, one had no longer any
relatives, one had only one's arms. I worked. They have, in the
country of Pontarlier, whither you are going, Monsieur Valjean, a
truly patriarchal and truly charming industry, my sister. It is their
cheese-dairies, which they call fruitieres.'

"Then my brother, while urging the man to eat, explained to him, with
great minuteness, what these fruitieres of Pontarlier were; that they
were divided into two classes: the big barns which belong to the rich,
and where there are forty or fifty cows which produce from seven to
eight thousand cheeses each summer, and the associated fruitieres, which
belong to the poor; these are the peasants of mid-mountain, who hold
their cows in common, and share the proceeds. 'They engage the services
of a cheese-maker, whom they call the grurin; the grurin receives the
milk of the associates three times a day, and marks the quantity on
a double tally. It is towards the end of April that the work of the
cheese-dairies begins; it is towards the middle of June that the
cheese-makers drive their cows to the mountains.'

"The man recovered his animation as he ate. My brother made him drink
that good Mauves wine, which he does not drink himself, because he says
that wine is expensive. My brother imparted all these details with that
easy gayety of his with which you are acquainted, interspersing his
words with graceful attentions to me. He recurred frequently to that
comfortable trade of grurin, as though he wished the man to understand,
without advising him directly and harshly, that this would afford him
a refuge. One thing struck me. This man was what I have told you. Well,
neither during supper, nor during the entire evening, did my brother
utter a single word, with the exception of a few words about Jesus when
he entered, which could remind the man of what he was, nor of what my
brother was. To all appearances, it was an occasion for preaching him
a little sermon, and of impressing the Bishop on the convict, so that a
mark of the passage might remain behind. This might have appeared to any
one else who had this, unfortunate man in his hands to afford a chance
to nourish his soul as well as his body, and to bestow upon him
some reproach, seasoned with moralizing and advice, or a little
commiseration, with an exhortation to conduct himself better in the
future. My brother did not even ask him from what country he came,
nor what was his history. For in his history there is a fault, and my
brother seemed to avoid everything which could remind him of it. To such
a point did he carry it, that at one time, when my brother was speaking
of the mountaineers of Pontarlier, who exercise a gentle labor near
heaven, and who, he added, are happy because they are innocent, he
stopped short, fearing lest in this remark there might have escaped him
something which might wound the man. By dint of reflection, I think
I have comprehended what was passing in my brother's heart. He was
thinking, no doubt, that this man, whose name is Jean Valjean, had his
misfortune only too vividly present in his mind; that the best thing
was to divert him from it, and to make him believe, if only momentarily,
that he was a person like any other, by treating him just in his
ordinary way. Is not this indeed, to understand charity well? Is there
not, dear Madame, something truly evangelical in this delicacy which
abstains from sermon, from moralizing, from allusions? and is not the
truest pity, when a man has a sore point, not to touch it at all? It has
seemed to me that this might have been my brother's private thought. In
any case, what I can say is that, if he entertained all these ideas, he
gave no sign of them; from beginning to end, even to me he was the same
as he is every evening, and he supped with this Jean Valjean with the
same air and in the same manner in which he would have supped with M.
Gedeon le Provost, or with the curate of the parish.

"Towards the end, when he had reached the figs, there came a knock at
the door. It was Mother Gerbaud, with her little one in her arms. My
brother kissed the child on the brow, and borrowed fifteen sous which I
had about me to give to Mother Gerbaud. The man was not paying much
heed to anything then. He was no longer talking, and he seemed very much
fatigued. After poor old Gerbaud had taken her departure, my brother
said grace; then he turned to the man and said to him, 'You must be
in great need of your bed.' Madame Magloire cleared the table very
promptly. I understood that we must retire, in order to allow this
traveller to go to sleep, and we both went up stairs. Nevertheless, I
sent Madame Magloire down a moment later, to carry to the man's bed a
goat skin from the Black Forest, which was in my room. The nights are
frigid, and that keeps one warm. It is a pity that this skin is old; all
the hair is falling out. My brother bought it while he was in Germany,
at Tottlingen, near the sources of the Danube, as well as the little
ivory-handled knife which I use at table.

"Madame Magloire returned immediately. We said our prayers in the
drawing-room, where we hang up the linen, and then we each retired to
our own chambers, without saying a word to each other."




CHAPTER V--TRANQUILLITY

After bidding his sister good night, Monseigneur Bienvenu took one of
the two silver candlesticks from the table, handed the other to his
guest, and said to him,--

"Monsieur, I will conduct you to your room."

The man followed him.

As might have been observed from what has been said above, the house was
so arranged that in order to pass into the oratory where the alcove was
situated, or to get out of it, it was necessary to traverse the Bishop's
bedroom.

At the moment when he was crossing this apartment, Madame Magloire was
putting away the silverware in the cupboard near the head of the bed.
This was her last care every evening before she went to bed.

The Bishop installed his guest in the alcove. A fresh white bed had been
prepared there. The man set the candle down on a small table.

"Well," said the Bishop, "may you pass a good night. To-morrow morning,
before you set out, you shall drink a cup of warm milk from our cows."

"Thanks, Monsieur l'Abbe," said the man.

Hardly had he pronounced these words full of peace, when all of a
sudden, and without transition, he made a strange movement, which would
have frozen the two sainted women with horror, had they witnessed it.
Even at this day it is difficult for us to explain what inspired him at
that moment. Did he intend to convey a warning or to throw out a menace?
Was he simply obeying a sort of instinctive impulse which was obscure
even to himself? He turned abruptly to the old man, folded his arms, and
bending upon his host a savage gaze, he exclaimed in a hoarse voice:--

"Ah! really! You lodge me in your house, close to yourself like this?"

He broke off, and added with a laugh in which there lurked something
monstrous:--

"Have you really reflected well? How do you know that I have not been an
assassin?"

The Bishop replied:--

"That is the concern of the good God."

Then gravely, and moving his lips like one who is praying or talking
to himself, he raised two fingers of his right hand and bestowed his
benediction on the man, who did not bow, and without turning his head or
looking behind him, he returned to his bedroom.

When the alcove was in use, a large serge curtain drawn from wall to
wall concealed the altar. The Bishop knelt before this curtain as he
passed and said a brief prayer. A moment later he was in his garden,
walking, meditating, contemplating, his heart and soul wholly absorbed
in those grand and mysterious things which God shows at night to the
eyes which remain open.

As for the man, he was actually so fatigued that he did not even profit
by the nice white sheets. Snuffing out his candle with his nostrils
after the manner of convicts, he dropped, all dressed as he was, upon
the bed, where he immediately fell into a profound sleep.

Midnight struck as the Bishop returned from his garden to his apartment.

A few minutes later all were asleep in the little house.




CHAPTER VI--JEAN VALJEAN

Towards the middle of the night Jean Valjean woke.

Jean Valjean came from a poor peasant family of Brie. He had not learned
to read in his childhood. When he reached man's estate, he became a
tree-pruner at Faverolles. His mother was named Jeanne Mathieu; his
father was called Jean Valjean or Vlajean, probably a sobriquet, and a
contraction of viola Jean, "here's Jean."

Jean Valjean was of that thoughtful but not gloomy disposition which
constitutes the peculiarity of affectionate natures. On the whole,
however, there was something decidedly sluggish and insignificant about
Jean Valjean in appearance, at least. He had lost his father and mother
at a very early age. His mother had died of a milk fever, which had not
been properly attended to. His father, a tree-pruner, like himself, had
been killed by a fall from a tree. All that remained to Jean Valjean
was a sister older than himself,--a widow with seven children, boys and
girls. This sister had brought up Jean Valjean, and so long as she had a
husband she lodged and fed her young brother.

The husband died. The eldest of the seven children was eight years old.
The youngest, one.

Jean Valjean had just attained his twenty-fifth year. He took the
father's place, and, in his turn, supported the sister who had brought
him up. This was done simply as a duty and even a little churlishly
on the part of Jean Valjean. Thus his youth had been spent in rude and
ill-paid toil. He had never known a "kind woman friend" in his native
parts. He had not had the time to fall in love.

He returned at night weary, and ate his broth without uttering a word.
His sister, mother Jeanne, often took the best part of his repast from
his bowl while he was eating,--a bit of meat, a slice of bacon, the
heart of the cabbage,--to give to one of her children. As he went on
eating, with his head bent over the table and almost into his soup, his
long hair falling about his bowl and concealing his eyes, he had the air
of perceiving nothing and allowing it. There was at Faverolles, not
far from the Valjean thatched cottage, on the other side of the lane,
a farmer's wife named Marie-Claude; the Valjean children, habitually
famished, sometimes went to borrow from Marie-Claude a pint of milk, in
their mother's name, which they drank behind a hedge or in some alley
corner, snatching the jug from each other so hastily that the little
girls spilled it on their aprons and down their necks. If their mother
had known of this marauding, she would have punished the delinquents
severely. Jean Valjean gruffly and grumblingly paid Marie-Claude for
the pint of milk behind their mother's back, and the children were not
punished.

In pruning season he earned eighteen sous a day; then he hired out as
a hay-maker, as laborer, as neat-herd on a farm, as a drudge. He did
whatever he could. His sister worked also but what could she do with
seven little children? It was a sad group enveloped in misery, which was
being gradually annihilated. A very hard winter came. Jean had no work.
The family had no bread. No bread literally. Seven children!

One Sunday evening, Maubert Isabeau, the baker on the Church Square at
Faverolles, was preparing to go to bed, when he heard a violent blow on
the grated front of his shop. He arrived in time to see an arm passed
through a hole made by a blow from a fist, through the grating and the
glass. The arm seized a loaf of bread and carried it off. Isabeau ran
out in haste; the robber fled at the full speed of his legs. Isabeau ran
after him and stopped him. The thief had flung away the loaf, but his
arm was still bleeding. It was Jean Valjean.

This took place in 1795. Jean Valjean was taken before the tribunals
of the time for theft and breaking and entering an inhabited house at
night. He had a gun which he used better than any one else in the world,
he was a bit of a poacher, and this injured his case. There exists a
legitimate prejudice against poachers. The poacher, like the smuggler,
smacks too strongly of the brigand. Nevertheless, we will remark
cursorily, there is still an abyss between these races of men and the
hideous assassin of the towns. The poacher lives in the forest, the
smuggler lives in the mountains or on the sea. The cities make ferocious
men because they make corrupt men. The mountain, the sea, the forest,
make savage men; they develop the fierce side, but often without
destroying the humane side.

Jean Valjean was pronounced guilty. The terms of the Code were explicit.
There occur formidable hours in our civilization; there are moments when
the penal laws decree a shipwreck. What an ominous minute is that in
which society draws back and consummates the irreparable abandonment
of a sentient being! Jean Valjean was condemned to five years in the
galleys.

On the 22d of April, 1796, the victory of Montenotte, won by the
general-in-chief of the army of Italy, whom the message of the Directory
to the Five Hundred, of the 2d of Floreal, year IV., calls Buona-Parte,
was announced in Paris; on that same day a great gang of galley-slaves
was put in chains at Bicetre. Jean Valjean formed a part of that gang.
An old turnkey of the prison, who is now nearly eighty years old, still
recalls perfectly that unfortunate wretch who was chained to the end of
the fourth line, in the north angle of the courtyard. He was seated on
the ground like the others. He did not seem to comprehend his position,
except that it was horrible. It is probable that he, also, was
disentangling from amid the vague ideas of a poor man, ignorant of
everything, something excessive. While the bolt of his iron collar was
being riveted behind his head with heavy blows from the hammer, he wept,
his tears stifled him, they impeded his speech; he only managed to
say from time to time, "I was a tree-pruner at Faverolles." Then still
sobbing, he raised his right hand and lowered it gradually seven times,
as though he were touching in succession seven heads of unequal heights,
and from this gesture it was divined that the thing which he had done,
whatever it was, he had done for the sake of clothing and nourishing
seven little children.

He set out for Toulon. He arrived there, after a journey of twenty-seven
days, on a cart, with a chain on his neck. At Toulon he was clothed in
the red cassock. All that had constituted his life, even to his name,
was effaced; he was no longer even Jean Valjean; he was number 24,601.
What became of his sister? What became of the seven children? Who
troubled himself about that? What becomes of the handful of leaves from
the young tree which is sawed off at the root?

It is always the same story. These poor living beings, these creatures
of God, henceforth without support, without guide, without refuge,
wandered away at random,--who even knows?--each in his own direction
perhaps, and little by little buried themselves in that cold mist which
engulfs solitary destinies; gloomy shades, into which disappear in
succession so many unlucky heads, in the sombre march of the human race.
They quitted the country. The clock-tower of what had been their village
forgot them; the boundary line of what had been their field forgot them;
after a few years' residence in the galleys, Jean Valjean himself forgot
them. In that heart, where there had been a wound, there was a scar.
That is all. Only once, during all the time which he spent at Toulon,
did he hear his sister mentioned. This happened, I think, towards
the end of the fourth year of his captivity. I know not through what
channels the news reached him. Some one who had known them in their
own country had seen his sister. She was in Paris. She lived in a poor
street Rear Saint-Sulpice, in the Rue du Gindre. She had with her only
one child, a little boy, the youngest. Where were the other six? Perhaps
she did not know herself. Every morning she went to a printing office,
No. 3 Rue du Sabot, where she was a folder and stitcher. She was obliged
to be there at six o'clock in the morning--long before daylight in
winter. In the same building with the printing office there was a
school, and to this school she took her little boy, who was seven years
old. But as she entered the printing office at six, and the school only
opened at seven, the child had to wait in the courtyard, for the school
to open, for an hour--one hour of a winter night in the open air! They
would not allow the child to come into the printing office, because he
was in the way, they said. When the workmen passed in the morning, they
beheld this poor little being seated on the pavement, overcome with
drowsiness, and often fast asleep in the shadow, crouched down and
doubled up over his basket. When it rained, an old woman, the portress,
took pity on him; she took him into her den, where there was a pallet, a
spinning-wheel, and two wooden chairs, and the little one slumbered in a
corner, pressing himself close to the cat that he might suffer less from
cold. At seven o'clock the school opened, and he entered. That is what
was told to Jean Valjean.

They talked to him about it for one day; it was a moment, a flash,
as though a window had suddenly been opened upon the destiny of those
things whom he had loved; then all closed again. He heard nothing more
forever. Nothing from them ever reached him again; he never beheld
them; he never met them again; and in the continuation of this mournful
history they will not be met with any more.

Towards the end of this fourth year Jean Valjean's turn to escape
arrived. His comrades assisted him, as is the custom in that sad place.
He escaped. He wandered for two days in the fields at liberty, if being
at liberty is to be hunted, to turn the head every instant, to quake at
the slightest noise, to be afraid of everything,--of a smoking roof,
of a passing man, of a barking dog, of a galloping horse, of a striking
clock, of the day because one can see, of the night because one cannot
see, of the highway, of the path, of a bush, of sleep. On the evening
of the second day he was captured. He had neither eaten nor slept for
thirty-six hours. The maritime tribunal condemned him, for this crime,
to a prolongation of his term for three years, which made eight years.
In the sixth year his turn to escape occurred again; he availed himself
of it, but could not accomplish his flight fully. He was missing at
roll-call. The cannon were fired, and at night the patrol found him
hidden under the keel of a vessel in process of construction; he
resisted the galley guards who seized him. Escape and rebellion. This
case, provided for by a special code, was punished by an addition of
five years, two of them in the double chain. Thirteen years. In the
tenth year his turn came round again; he again profited by it; he
succeeded no better. Three years for this fresh attempt. Sixteen years.
Finally, I think it was during his thirteenth year, he made a last
attempt, and only succeeded in getting retaken at the end of four
hours of absence. Three years for those four hours. Nineteen years. In
October, 1815, he was released; he had entered there in 1796, for having
broken a pane of glass and taken a loaf of bread.

Room for a brief parenthesis. This is the second time, during his
studies on the penal question and damnation by law, that the author of
this book has come across the theft of a loaf of bread as the point of
departure for the disaster of a destiny. Claude Gueux had stolen a loaf;
Jean Valjean had stolen a loaf. English statistics prove the fact that
four thefts out of five in London have hunger for their immediate cause.

Jean Valjean had entered the galleys sobbing and shuddering; he emerged
impassive. He had entered in despair; he emerged gloomy.

What had taken place in that soul?




CHAPTER VII--THE INTERIOR OF DESPAIR


Let us try to say it.

It is necessary that society should look at these things, because it is
itself which creates them.

He was, as we have said, an ignorant man, but he was not a fool. The
light of nature was ignited in him. Unhappiness, which also possesses a
clearness of vision of its own, augmented the small amount of daylight
which existed in this mind. Beneath the cudgel, beneath the chain, in
the cell, in hardship, beneath the burning sun of the galleys, upon the
plank bed of the convict, he withdrew into his own consciousness and
meditated.

He constituted himself the tribunal.

He began by putting himself on trial.

He recognized the fact that he was not an innocent man unjustly
punished. He admitted that he had committed an extreme and blameworthy
act; that that loaf of bread would probably not have been refused to
him had he asked for it; that, in any case, it would have been better to
wait until he could get it through compassion or through work; that
it is not an unanswerable argument to say, "Can one wait when one is
hungry?" That, in the first place, it is very rare for any one to die of
hunger, literally; and next, that, fortunately or unfortunately, man
is so constituted that he can suffer long and much, both morally and
physically, without dying; that it is therefore necessary to have
patience; that that would even have been better for those poor little
children; that it had been an act of madness for him, a miserable,
unfortunate wretch, to take society at large violently by the collar,
and to imagine that one can escape from misery through theft; that that
is in any case a poor door through which to escape from misery through
which infamy enters; in short, that he was in the wrong.

Then he asked himself--

Whether he had been the only one in fault in his fatal history. Whether
it was not a serious thing, that he, a laborer, out of work, that he, an
industrious man, should have lacked bread. And whether, the fault once
committed and confessed, the chastisement had not been ferocious and
disproportioned. Whether there had not been more abuse on the part of
the law, in respect to the penalty, than there had been on the part
of the culprit in respect to his fault. Whether there had not been an
excess of weights in one balance of the scale, in the one which contains
expiation. Whether the over-weight of the penalty was not equivalent
to the annihilation of the crime, and did not result in reversing the
situation, of replacing the fault of the delinquent by the fault of the
repression, of converting the guilty man into the victim, and the debtor
into the creditor, and of ranging the law definitely on the side of the
man who had violated it.

Whether this penalty, complicated by successive aggravations for
attempts at escape, had not ended in becoming a sort of outrage
perpetrated by the stronger upon the feebler, a crime of society against
the individual, a crime which was being committed afresh every day, a
crime which had lasted nineteen years.

He asked himself whether human society could have the right to force its
members to suffer equally in one case for its own unreasonable lack
of foresight, and in the other case for its pitiless foresight; and to
seize a poor man forever between a defect and an excess, a default of
work and an excess of punishment.

Whether it was not outrageous for society to treat thus precisely those
of its members who were the least well endowed in the division of goods
made by chance, and consequently the most deserving of consideration.

These questions put and answered, he judged society and condemned it.

He condemned it to his hatred.

He made it responsible for the fate which he was suffering, and he said
to himself that it might be that one day he should not hesitate to call
it to account. He declared to himself that there was no equilibrium
between the harm which he had caused and the harm which was being done
to him; he finally arrived at the conclusion that his punishment was
not, in truth, unjust, but that it most assuredly was iniquitous.

Anger may be both foolish and absurd; one can be irritated wrongfully;
one is exasperated only when there is some show of right on one's side
at bottom. Jean Valjean felt himself exasperated.

And besides, human society had done him nothing but harm; he had never
seen anything of it save that angry face which it calls Justice, and
which it shows to those whom it strikes. Men had only touched him to
bruise him. Every contact with them had been a blow. Never, since
his infancy, since the days of his mother, of his sister, had he ever
encountered a friendly word and a kindly glance. From suffering to
suffering, he had gradually arrived at the conviction that life is a
war; and that in this war he was the conquered. He had no other weapon
than his hate. He resolved to whet it in the galleys and to bear it away
with him when he departed.

There was at Toulon a school for the convicts, kept by the Ignorantin
friars, where the most necessary branches were taught to those of the
unfortunate men who had a mind for them. He was of the number who had
a mind. He went to school at the age of forty, and learned to read,
to write, to cipher. He felt that to fortify his intelligence was to
fortify his hate. In certain cases, education and enlightenment can
serve to eke out evil.

This is a sad thing to say; after having judged society, which had
caused his unhappiness, he judged Providence, which had made society,
and he condemned it also.

Thus during nineteen years of torture and slavery, this soul mounted and
at the same time fell. Light entered it on one side, and darkness on the
other.

Jean Valjean had not, as we have seen, an evil nature. He was still good
when he arrived at the galleys. He there condemned society, and felt
that he was becoming wicked; he there condemned Providence, and was
conscious that he was becoming impious.

It is difficult not to indulge in meditation at this point.

Does human nature thus change utterly and from top to bottom? Can the
man created good by God be rendered wicked by man? Can the soul be
completely made over by fate, and become evil, fate being evil? Can
the heart become misshapen and contract incurable deformities and
infirmities under the oppression of a disproportionate unhappiness,
as the vertebral column beneath too low a vault? Is there not in every
human soul, was there not in the soul of Jean Valjean in particular, a
first spark, a divine element, incorruptible in this world, immortal in
the other, which good can develop, fan, ignite, and make to glow with
splendor, and which evil can never wholly extinguish?

Grave and obscure questions, to the last of which every physiologist
would probably have responded no, and that without hesitation, had
he beheld at Toulon, during the hours of repose, which were for Jean
Valjean hours of revery, this gloomy galley-slave, seated with folded
arms upon the bar of some capstan, with the end of his chain thrust into
his pocket to prevent its dragging, serious, silent, and thoughtful,
a pariah of the laws which regarded the man with wrath, condemned by
civilization, and regarding heaven with severity.

Certainly,--and we make no attempt to dissimulate the fact,--the
observing physiologist would have beheld an irremediable misery; he
would, perchance, have pitied this sick man, of the law's making; but
he would not have even essayed any treatment; he would have turned aside
his gaze from the caverns of which he would have caught a glimpse within
this soul, and, like Dante at the portals of hell, he would have effaced
from this existence the word which the finger of God has, nevertheless,
inscribed upon the brow of every man,--hope.

Was this state of his soul, which we have attempted to analyze, as
perfectly clear to Jean Valjean as we have tried to render it for
those who read us? Did Jean Valjean distinctly perceive, after their
formation, and had he seen distinctly during the process of their
formation, all the elements of which his moral misery was composed? Had
this rough and unlettered man gathered a perfectly clear perception of
the succession of ideas through which he had, by degrees, mounted and
descended to the lugubrious aspects which had, for so many years, formed
the inner horizon of his spirit? Was he conscious of all that passed
within him, and of all that was working there? That is something
which we do not presume to state; it is something which we do not even
believe. There was too much ignorance in Jean Valjean, even after his
misfortune, to prevent much vagueness from still lingering there. At
times he did not rightly know himself what he felt. Jean Valjean was in
the shadows; he suffered in the shadows; he hated in the shadows; one
might have said that he hated in advance of himself. He dwelt habitually
in this shadow, feeling his way like a blind man and a dreamer. Only, at
intervals, there suddenly came to him, from without and from within, an
access of wrath, a surcharge of suffering, a livid and rapid flash which
illuminated his whole soul, and caused to appear abruptly all around
him, in front, behind, amid the gleams of a frightful light, the hideous
precipices and the sombre perspective of his destiny.

The flash passed, the night closed in again; and where was he? He no
longer knew. The peculiarity of pains of this nature, in which
that which is pitiless--that is to say, that which is
brutalizing--predominates, is to transform a man, little by little, by
a sort of stupid transfiguration, into a wild beast; sometimes into a
ferocious beast.

Jean Valjean's successive and obstinate attempts at escape would alone
suffice to prove this strange working of the law upon the human soul.
Jean Valjean would have renewed these attempts, utterly useless and
foolish as they were, as often as the opportunity had presented itself,
without reflecting for an instant on the result, nor on the experiences
which he had already gone through. He escaped impetuously, like the wolf
who finds his cage open. Instinct said to him, "Flee!" Reason would have
said, "Remain!" But in the presence of so violent a temptation, reason
vanished; nothing remained but instinct. The beast alone acted. When
he was recaptured, the fresh severities inflicted on him only served to
render him still more wild.

One detail, which we must not omit, is that he possessed a physical
strength which was not approached by a single one of the denizens of the
galleys. At work, at paying out a cable or winding up a capstan, Jean
Valjean was worth four men. He sometimes lifted and sustained enormous
weights on his back; and when the occasion demanded it, he replaced that
implement which is called a jack-screw, and was formerly called orgueil
[pride], whence, we may remark in passing, is derived the name of the
Rue Montorgueil, near the Halles [Fishmarket] in Paris. His comrades had
nicknamed him Jean the Jack-screw. Once, when they were repairing the
balcony of the town-hall at Toulon, one of those admirable caryatids of
Puget, which support the balcony, became loosened, and was on the point
of falling. Jean Valjean, who was present, supported the caryatid with
his shoulder, and gave the workmen time to arrive.

His suppleness even exceeded his strength. Certain convicts who were
forever dreaming of escape, ended by making a veritable science of force
and skill combined. It is the science of muscles. An entire system of
mysterious statics is daily practised by prisoners, men who are forever
envious of the flies and birds. To climb a vertical surface, and to find
points of support where hardly a projection was visible, was play to
Jean Valjean. An angle of the wall being given, with the tension of his
back and legs, with his elbows and his heels fitted into the unevenness
of the stone, he raised himself as if by magic to the third story. He
sometimes mounted thus even to the roof of the galley prison.

He spoke but little. He laughed not at all. An excessive emotion was
required to wring from him, once or twice a year, that lugubrious laugh
of the convict, which is like the echo of the laugh of a demon. To all
appearance, he seemed to be occupied in the constant contemplation of
something terrible.

He was absorbed, in fact.

Athwart the unhealthy perceptions of an incomplete nature and a crushed
intelligence, he was confusedly conscious that some monstrous thing was
resting on him. In that obscure and wan shadow within which he crawled,
each time that he turned his neck and essayed to raise his glance,
he perceived with terror, mingled with rage, a sort of frightful
accumulation of things, collecting and mounting above him, beyond the
range of his vision,--laws, prejudices, men, and deeds,--whose outlines
escaped him, whose mass terrified him, and which was nothing else than
that prodigious pyramid which we call civilization. He distinguished,
here and there in that swarming and formless mass, now near him, now
afar off and on inaccessible table-lands, some group, some detail,
vividly illuminated; here the galley-sergeant and his cudgel; there the
gendarme and his sword; yonder the mitred archbishop; away at the top,
like a sort of sun, the Emperor, crowned and dazzling. It seemed to him
that these distant splendors, far from dissipating his night, rendered
it more funereal and more black. All this--laws, prejudices, deeds, men,
things--went and came above him, over his head, in accordance with the
complicated and mysterious movement which God imparts to civilization,
walking over him and crushing him with I know not what peacefulness
in its cruelty and inexorability in its indifference. Souls which have
fallen to the bottom of all possible misfortune, unhappy men lost in the
lowest of those limbos at which no one any longer looks, the reproved of
the law, feel the whole weight of this human society, so formidable for
him who is without, so frightful for him who is beneath, resting upon
their heads.

In this situation Jean Valjean meditated; and what could be the nature
of his meditation?

If the grain of millet beneath the millstone had thoughts, it would,
doubtless, think that same thing which Jean Valjean thought.

All these things, realities full of spectres, phantasmagories full of
realities, had eventually created for him a sort of interior state which
is almost indescribable.

At times, amid his convict toil, he paused. He fell to thinking. His
reason, at one and the same time riper and more troubled than of yore,
rose in revolt. Everything which had happened to him seemed to him
absurd; everything that surrounded him seemed to him impossible. He said
to himself, "It is a dream." He gazed at the galley-sergeant standing a
few paces from him; the galley-sergeant seemed a phantom to him. All of
a sudden the phantom dealt him a blow with his cudgel.

Visible nature hardly existed for him. It would almost be true to say
that there existed for Jean Valjean neither sun, nor fine summer days,
nor radiant sky, nor fresh April dawns. I know not what vent-hole
daylight habitually illumined his soul.

To sum up, in conclusion, that which can be summed up and translated
into positive results in all that we have just pointed out, we will
confine ourselves to the statement that, in the course of nineteen
years, Jean Valjean, the inoffensive tree-pruner of Faverolles, the
formidable convict of Toulon, had become capable, thanks to the manner
in which the galleys had moulded him, of two sorts of evil action:
firstly, of evil action which was rapid, unpremeditated, dashing,
entirely instinctive, in the nature of reprisals for the evil which
he had undergone; secondly, of evil action which was serious, grave,
consciously argued out and premeditated, with the false ideas which
such a misfortune can furnish. His deliberate deeds passed through
three successive phases, which natures of a certain stamp can alone
traverse,--reasoning, will, perseverance. He had for moving causes his
habitual wrath, bitterness of soul, a profound sense of indignities
suffered, the reaction even against the good, the innocent, and the
just, if there are any such. The point of departure, like the point
of arrival, for all his thoughts, was hatred of human law; that hatred
which, if it be not arrested in its development by some providential
incident, becomes, within a given time, the hatred of society, then
the hatred of the human race, then the hatred of creation, and which
manifests itself by a vague, incessant, and brutal desire to do harm to
some living being, no matter whom. It will be perceived that it was
not without reason that Jean Valjean's passport described him as a very
dangerous man.

From year to year this soul had dried away slowly, but with fatal
sureness. When the heart is dry, the eye is dry. On his departure from
the galleys it had been nineteen years since he had shed a tear.




CHAPTER VIII--BILLOWS AND SHADOWS


A man overboard!

What matters it? The vessel does not halt. The wind blows. That sombre
ship has a path which it is forced to pursue. It passes on.

The man disappears, then reappears; he plunges, he rises again to the
surface; he calls, he stretches out his arms; he is not heard. The
vessel, trembling under the hurricane, is wholly absorbed in its own
workings; the passengers and sailors do not even see the drowning man;
his miserable head is but a speck amid the immensity of the waves. He
gives vent to desperate cries from out of the depths. What a spectre is
that retreating sail! He gazes and gazes at it frantically. It retreats,
it grows dim, it diminishes in size. He was there but just now, he was
one of the crew, he went and came along the deck with the rest, he had
his part of breath and of sunlight, he was a living man. Now, what has
taken place? He has slipped, he has fallen; all is at an end.

He is in the tremendous sea. Under foot he has nothing but what flees
and crumbles. The billows, torn and lashed by the wind, encompass him
hideously; the tossings of the abyss bear him away; all the tongues of
water dash over his head; a populace of waves spits upon him; confused
openings half devour him; every time that he sinks, he catches glimpses
of precipices filled with night; frightful and unknown vegetations seize
him, knot about his feet, draw him to them; he is conscious that he is
becoming an abyss, that he forms part of the foam; the waves toss him
from one to another; he drinks in the bitterness; the cowardly ocean
attacks him furiously, to drown him; the enormity plays with his agony.
It seems as though all that water were hate.

Nevertheless, he struggles.

He tries to defend himself; he tries to sustain himself; he makes
an effort; he swims. He, his petty strength all exhausted instantly,
combats the inexhaustible.

Where, then, is the ship? Yonder. Barely visible in the pale shadows of
the horizon.

The wind blows in gusts; all the foam overwhelms him. He raises his eyes
and beholds only the lividness of the clouds. He witnesses, amid his
death-pangs, the immense madness of the sea. He is tortured by this
madness; he hears noises strange to man, which seem to come from beyond
the limits of the earth, and from one knows not what frightful region
beyond.

There are birds in the clouds, just as there are angels above human
distresses; but what can they do for him? They sing and fly and float,
and he, he rattles in the death agony.

He feels himself buried in those two infinities, the ocean and the sky,
at one and the same time: the one is a tomb; the other is a shroud.

Night descends; he has been swimming for hours; his strength is
exhausted; that ship, that distant thing in which there were men, has
vanished; he is alone in the formidable twilight gulf; he sinks, he
stiffens himself, he twists himself; he feels under him the monstrous
billows of the invisible; he shouts.

There are no more men. Where is God?

He shouts. Help! Help! He still shouts on.

Nothing on the horizon; nothing in heaven.

He implores the expanse, the waves, the seaweed, the reef; they are
deaf. He beseeches the tempest; the imperturbable tempest obeys only the
infinite.

Around him darkness, fog, solitude, the stormy and nonsentient tumult,
the undefined curling of those wild waters. In him horror and fatigue.
Beneath him the depths. Not a point of support. He thinks of the gloomy
adventures of the corpse in the limitless shadow. The bottomless cold
paralyzes him. His hands contract convulsively; they close, and grasp
nothingness. Winds, clouds, whirlwinds, gusts, useless stars! What is
to be done? The desperate man gives up; he is weary, he chooses the
alternative of death; he resists not; he lets himself go; he abandons
his grip; and then he tosses forevermore in the lugubrious dreary depths
of engulfment.

Oh, implacable march of human societies! Oh, losses of men and of
souls on the way! Ocean into which falls all that the law lets slip!
Disastrous absence of help! Oh, moral death!

The sea is the inexorable social night into which the penal laws fling
their condemned. The sea is the immensity of wretchedness.

The soul, going down stream in this gulf, may become a corpse. Who shall
resuscitate it?




CHAPTER IX--NEW TROUBLES

When the hour came for him to take his departure from the galleys, when
Jean Valjean heard in his ear the strange words, Thou art free! the
moment seemed improbable and unprecedented; a ray of vivid light, a ray
of the true light of the living, suddenly penetrated within him. But it
was not long before this ray paled. Jean Valjean had been dazzled by
the idea of liberty. He had believed in a new life. He very speedily
perceived what sort of liberty it is to which a yellow passport is
provided.

And this was encompassed with much bitterness. He had calculated that
his earnings, during his sojourn in the galleys, ought to amount to
a hundred and seventy-one francs. It is but just to add that he had
forgotten to include in his calculations the forced repose of Sundays
and festival days during nineteen years, which entailed a diminution
of about eighty francs. At all events, his hoard had been reduced by
various local levies to the sum of one hundred and nine francs fifteen
sous, which had been counted out to him on his departure. He had
understood nothing of this, and had thought himself wronged. Let us say
the word--robbed.

On the day following his liberation, he saw, at Grasse, in front of
an orange-flower distillery, some men engaged in unloading bales. He
offered his services. Business was pressing; they were accepted. He set
to work. He was intelligent, robust, adroit; he did his best; the master
seemed pleased. While he was at work, a gendarme passed, observed
him, and demanded his papers. It was necessary to show him the yellow
passport. That done, Jean Valjean resumed his labor. A little while
before he had questioned one of the workmen as to the amount which they
earned each day at this occupation; he had been told thirty sous. When
evening arrived, as he was forced to set out again on the following day,
he presented himself to the owner of the distillery and requested to be
paid. The owner did not utter a word, but handed him fifteen sous. He
objected. He was told, "That is enough for thee." He persisted. The
master looked him straight between the eyes, and said to him "Beware of
the prison."

There, again, he considered that he had been robbed.

Society, the State, by diminishing his hoard, had robbed him wholesale.
Now it was the individual who was robbing him at retail.

Liberation is not deliverance. One gets free from the galleys, but not
from the sentence.

That is what happened to him at Grasse. We have seen in what manner he
was received at D----




CHAPTER X--THE MAN AROUSED

As the Cathedral clock struck two in the morning, Jean Valjean awoke.

What woke him was that his bed was too good. It was nearly twenty years
since he had slept in a bed, and, although he had not undressed, the
sensation was too novel not to disturb his slumbers.

He had slept more than four hours. His fatigue had passed away. He was
accustomed not to devote many hours to repose.

He opened his eyes and stared into the gloom which surrounded him; then
he closed them again, with the intention of going to sleep once more.

When many varied sensations have agitated the day, when various matters
preoccupy the mind, one falls asleep once, but not a second time.
Sleep comes more easily than it returns. This is what happened to Jean
Valjean. He could not get to sleep again, and he fell to thinking.

He was at one of those moments when the thoughts which one has in one's
mind are troubled. There was a sort of dark confusion in his brain. His
memories of the olden time and of the immediate present floated there
pell-mell and mingled confusedly, losing their proper forms, becoming
disproportionately large, then suddenly disappearing, as in a muddy and
perturbed pool. Many thoughts occurred to him; but there was one which
kept constantly presenting itself afresh, and which drove away all
others. We will mention this thought at once: he had observed the six
sets of silver forks and spoons and the ladle which Madame Magloire had
placed on the table.

Those six sets of silver haunted him.--They were there.--A few paces
distant.--Just as he was traversing the adjoining room to reach the
one in which he then was, the old servant-woman had been in the act
of placing them in a little cupboard near the head of the bed.--He had
taken careful note of this cupboard.--On the right, as you entered from
the dining-room.--They were solid.--And old silver.--From the ladle one
could get at least two hundred francs.--Double what he had earned in
nineteen years.--It is true that he would have earned more if "the
administration had not robbed him."

His mind wavered for a whole hour in fluctuations with which there was
certainly mingled some struggle. Three o'clock struck. He opened his
eyes again, drew himself up abruptly into a sitting posture, stretched
out his arm and felt of his knapsack, which he had thrown down on a
corner of the alcove; then he hung his legs over the edge of the bed,
and placed his feet on the floor, and thus found himself, almost without
knowing it, seated on his bed.

He remained for a time thoughtfully in this attitude, which would have
been suggestive of something sinister for any one who had seen him
thus in the dark, the only person awake in that house where all were
sleeping. All of a sudden he stooped down, removed his shoes and placed
them softly on the mat beside the bed; then he resumed his thoughtful
attitude, and became motionless once more.

Throughout this hideous meditation, the thoughts which we have above
indicated moved incessantly through his brain; entered, withdrew,
re-entered, and in a manner oppressed him; and then he thought, also,
without knowing why, and with the mechanical persistence of revery, of
a convict named Brevet, whom he had known in the galleys, and whose
trousers had been upheld by a single suspender of knitted cotton. The
checkered pattern of that suspender recurred incessantly to his mind.

He remained in this situation, and would have so remained indefinitely,
even until daybreak, had not the clock struck one--the half or quarter
hour. It seemed to him that that stroke said to him, "Come on!"

He rose to his feet, hesitated still another moment, and listened; all
was quiet in the house; then he walked straight ahead, with short steps,
to the window, of which he caught a glimpse. The night was not very
dark; there was a full moon, across which coursed large clouds driven by
the wind. This created, outdoors, alternate shadow and gleams of light,
eclipses, then bright openings of the clouds; and indoors a sort of
twilight. This twilight, sufficient to enable a person to see his way,
intermittent on account of the clouds, resembled the sort of livid light
which falls through an air-hole in a cellar, before which the passersby
come and go. On arriving at the window, Jean Valjean examined it. It had
no grating; it opened in the garden and was fastened, according to the
fashion of the country, only by a small pin. He opened it; but as a
rush of cold and piercing air penetrated the room abruptly, he closed
it again immediately. He scrutinized the garden with that attentive gaze
which studies rather than looks. The garden was enclosed by a tolerably
low white wall, easy to climb. Far away, at the extremity, he perceived
tops of trees, spaced at regular intervals, which indicated that the
wall separated the garden from an avenue or lane planted with trees.

Having taken this survey, he executed a movement like that of a man who
has made up his mind, strode to his alcove, grasped his knapsack, opened
it, fumbled in it, pulled out of it something which he placed on the
bed, put his shoes into one of his pockets, shut the whole thing up
again, threw the knapsack on his shoulders, put on his cap, drew the
visor down over his eyes, felt for his cudgel, went and placed it in the
angle of the window; then returned to the bed, and resolutely seized the
object which he had deposited there. It resembled a short bar of
iron, pointed like a pike at one end. It would have been difficult to
distinguish in that darkness for what employment that bit of iron could
have been designed. Perhaps it was a lever; possibly it was a club.

In the daytime it would have been possible to recognize it as nothing
more than a miner's candlestick. Convicts were, at that period,
sometimes employed in quarrying stone from the lofty hills which environ
Toulon, and it was not rare for them to have miners' tools at their
command. These miners' candlesticks are of massive iron, terminated at
the lower extremity by a point, by means of which they are stuck into
the rock.

He took the candlestick in his right hand; holding his breath and trying
to deaden the sound of his tread, he directed his steps to the door of
the adjoining room, occupied by the Bishop, as we already know.

On arriving at this door, he found it ajar. The Bishop had not closed
it.




CHAPTER XI--WHAT HE DOES

Jean Valjean listened. Not a sound.

He gave the door a push.

He pushed it gently with the tip of his finger, lightly, with the
furtive and uneasy gentleness of a cat which is desirous of entering.

The door yielded to this pressure, and made an imperceptible and silent
movement, which enlarged the opening a little.

He waited a moment; then gave the door a second and a bolder push.

It continued to yield in silence. The opening was now large enough to
allow him to pass. But near the door there stood a little table, which
formed an embarrassing angle with it, and barred the entrance.

Jean Valjean recognized the difficulty. It was necessary, at any cost,
to enlarge the aperture still further.

He decided on his course of action, and gave the door a third push, more
energetic than the two preceding. This time a badly oiled hinge suddenly
emitted amid the silence a hoarse and prolonged cry.

Jean Valjean shuddered. The noise of the hinge rang in his ears with
something of the piercing and formidable sound of the trump of the Day
of Judgment.

In the fantastic exaggerations of the first moment he almost imagined
that that hinge had just become animated, and had suddenly assumed a
terrible life, and that it was barking like a dog to arouse every one,
and warn and to wake those who were asleep. He halted, shuddering,
bewildered, and fell back from the tips of his toes upon his heels. He
heard the arteries in his temples beating like two forge hammers, and
it seemed to him that his breath issued from his breast with the roar
of the wind issuing from a cavern. It seemed impossible to him that the
horrible clamor of that irritated hinge should not have disturbed the
entire household, like the shock of an earthquake; the door, pushed by
him, had taken the alarm, and had shouted; the old man would rise at
once; the two old women would shriek out; people would come to their
assistance; in less than a quarter of an hour the town would be in an
uproar, and the gendarmerie on hand. For a moment he thought himself
lost.

He remained where he was, petrified like the statue of salt, not daring
to make a movement. Several minutes elapsed. The door had fallen wide
open. He ventured to peep into the next room. Nothing had stirred there.
He lent an ear. Nothing was moving in the house. The noise made by the
rusty hinge had not awakened any one.

This first danger was past; but there still reigned a frightful tumult
within him. Nevertheless, he did not retreat. Even when he had thought
himself lost, he had not drawn back. His only thought now was to finish
as soon as possible. He took a step and entered the room.

This room was in a state of perfect calm. Here and there vague and
confused forms were distinguishable, which in the daylight were papers
scattered on a table, open folios, volumes piled upon a stool, an
arm-chair heaped with clothing, a prie-Dieu, and which at that hour
were only shadowy corners and whitish spots. Jean Valjean advanced with
precaution, taking care not to knock against the furniture. He could
hear, at the extremity of the room, the even and tranquil breathing of
the sleeping Bishop.

He suddenly came to a halt. He was near the bed. He had arrived there
sooner than he had thought for.

Nature sometimes mingles her effects and her spectacles with our actions
with sombre and intelligent appropriateness, as though she desired to
make us reflect. For the last half-hour a large cloud had covered the
heavens. At the moment when Jean Valjean paused in front of the bed,
this cloud parted, as though on purpose, and a ray of light, traversing
the long window, suddenly illuminated the Bishop's pale face. He was
sleeping peacefully. He lay in his bed almost completely dressed, on
account of the cold of the Basses-Alps, in a garment of brown wool,
which covered his arms to the wrists. His head was thrown back on the
pillow, in the careless attitude of repose; his hand, adorned with the
pastoral ring, and whence had fallen so many good deeds and so many
holy actions, was hanging over the edge of the bed. His whole face
was illumined with a vague expression of satisfaction, of hope, and of
felicity. It was more than a smile, and almost a radiance. He bore upon
his brow the indescribable reflection of a light which was invisible.
The soul of the just contemplates in sleep a mysterious heaven.

A reflection of that heaven rested on the Bishop.

It was, at the same time, a luminous transparency, for that heaven was
within him. That heaven was his conscience.

[Illustration: The Fall  1b2-10-the-fall]

At the moment when the ray of moonlight superposed itself, so to speak,
upon that inward radiance, the sleeping Bishop seemed as in a glory. It
remained, however, gentle and veiled in an ineffable half-light. That
moon in the sky, that slumbering nature, that garden without a quiver,
that house which was so calm, the hour, the moment, the silence, added
some solemn and unspeakable quality to the venerable repose of this man,
and enveloped in a sort of serene and majestic aureole that white
hair, those closed eyes, that face in which all was hope and all was
confidence, that head of an old man, and that slumber of an infant.

There was something almost divine in this man, who was thus august,
without being himself aware of it.

Jean Valjean was in the shadow, and stood motionless, with his iron
candlestick in his hand, frightened by this luminous old man. Never had
he beheld anything like this. This confidence terrified him. The
moral world has no grander spectacle than this: a troubled and
uneasy conscience, which has arrived on the brink of an evil action,
contemplating the slumber of the just.

That slumber in that isolation, and with a neighbor like himself, had
about it something sublime, of which he was vaguely but imperiously
conscious.

No one could have told what was passing within him, not even himself. In
order to attempt to form an idea of it, it is necessary to think of the
most violent of things in the presence of the most gentle. Even on
his visage it would have been impossible to distinguish anything with
certainty. It was a sort of haggard astonishment. He gazed at it, and
that was all. But what was his thought? It would have been impossible to
divine it. What was evident was, that he was touched and astounded. But
what was the nature of this emotion?

His eye never quitted the old man. The only thing which was clearly
to be inferred from his attitude and his physiognomy was a strange
indecision. One would have said that he was hesitating between the two
abysses,--the one in which one loses one's self and that in which one
saves one's self. He seemed prepared to crush that skull or to kiss that
hand.

At the expiration of a few minutes his left arm rose slowly towards
his brow, and he took off his cap; then his arm fell back with the same
deliberation, and Jean Valjean fell to meditating once more, his cap in
his left hand, his club in his right hand, his hair bristling all over
his savage head.

The Bishop continued to sleep in profound peace beneath that terrifying
gaze.

The gleam of the moon rendered confusedly visible the crucifix over the
chimney-piece, which seemed to be extending its arms to both of them,
with a benediction for one and pardon for the other.

Suddenly Jean Valjean replaced his cap on his brow; then stepped rapidly
past the bed, without glancing at the Bishop, straight to the cupboard,
which he saw near the head; he raised his iron candlestick as though to
force the lock; the key was there; he opened it; the first thing which
presented itself to him was the basket of silverware; he seized it,
traversed the chamber with long strides, without taking any precautions
and without troubling himself about the noise, gained the door,
re-entered the oratory, opened the window, seized his cudgel, bestrode
the window-sill of the ground-floor, put the silver into his knapsack,
threw away the basket, crossed the garden, leaped over the wall like a
tiger, and fled.




CHAPTER XII--THE BISHOP WORKS

The next morning at sunrise Monseigneur Bienvenu was strolling in his
garden. Madame Magloire ran up to him in utter consternation.

"Monseigneur, Monseigneur!" she exclaimed, "does your Grace know where
the basket of silver is?"

"Yes," replied the Bishop.

"Jesus the Lord be blessed!" she resumed; "I did not know what had
become of it."

The Bishop had just picked up the basket in a flower-bed. He presented
it to Madame Magloire.

"Here it is."

"Well!" said she. "Nothing in it! And the silver?"

"Ah," returned the Bishop, "so it is the silver which troubles you? I
don't know where it is."

"Great, good God! It is stolen! That man who was here last night has
stolen it."

In a twinkling, with all the vivacity of an alert old woman, Madame
Magloire had rushed to the oratory, entered the alcove, and returned
to the Bishop. The Bishop had just bent down, and was sighing as he
examined a plant of cochlearia des Guillons, which the basket had broken
as it fell across the bed. He rose up at Madame Magloire's cry.

"Monseigneur, the man is gone! The silver has been stolen!"

As she uttered this exclamation, her eyes fell upon a corner of the
garden, where traces of the wall having been scaled were visible. The
coping of the wall had been torn away.

"Stay! yonder is the way he went. He jumped over into Cochefilet Lane.
Ah, the abomination! He has stolen our silver!"

The Bishop remained silent for a moment; then he raised his grave eyes,
and said gently to Madame Magloire:--

"And, in the first place, was that silver ours?"

Madame Magloire was speechless. Another silence ensued; then the Bishop
went on:--

"Madame Magloire, I have for a long time detained that silver
wrongfully. It belonged to the poor. Who was that man? A poor man,
evidently."

"Alas! Jesus!" returned Madame Magloire. "It is not for my sake, nor for
Mademoiselle's. It makes no difference to us. But it is for the sake of
Monseigneur. What is Monseigneur to eat with now?"

The Bishop gazed at her with an air of amazement.

"Ah, come! Are there no such things as pewter forks and spoons?"

Madame Magloire shrugged her shoulders.

"Pewter has an odor."

"Iron forks and spoons, then."

Madame Magloire made an expressive grimace.

"Iron has a taste."

"Very well," said the Bishop; "wooden ones then."

A few moments later he was breakfasting at the very table at which
Jean Valjean had sat on the previous evening. As he ate his breakfast,
Monseigneur Welcome remarked gayly to his sister, who said nothing, and
to Madame Magloire, who was grumbling under her breath, that one really
does not need either fork or spoon, even of wood, in order to dip a bit
of bread in a cup of milk.

"A pretty idea, truly," said Madame Magloire to herself, as she went and
came, "to take in a man like that! and to lodge him close to one's self!
And how fortunate that he did nothing but steal! Ah, mon Dieu! it makes
one shudder to think of it!"

As the brother and sister were about to rise from the table, there came
a knock at the door.

"Come in," said the Bishop.

The door opened. A singular and violent group made its appearance on the
threshold. Three men were holding a fourth man by the collar. The three
men were gendarmes; the other was Jean Valjean.

A brigadier of gendarmes, who seemed to be in command of the group, was
standing near the door. He entered and advanced to the Bishop, making a
military salute.

"Monseigneur--" said he.

At this word, Jean Valjean, who was dejected and seemed overwhelmed,
raised his head with an air of stupefaction.

"Monseigneur!" he murmured. "So he is not the cure?"

"Silence!" said the gendarme. "He is Monseigneur the Bishop."

In the meantime, Monseigneur Bienvenu had advanced as quickly as his
great age permitted.

"Ah! here you are!" he exclaimed, looking at Jean Valjean. "I am glad to
see you. Well, but how is this? I gave you the candlesticks too, which
are of silver like the rest, and for which you can certainly get two
hundred francs. Why did you not carry them away with your forks and
spoons?"

Jean Valjean opened his eyes wide, and stared at the venerable Bishop
with an expression which no human tongue can render any account of.

"Monseigneur," said the brigadier of gendarmes, "so what this man said
is true, then? We came across him. He was walking like a man who is
running away. We stopped him to look into the matter. He had this
silver--"

"And he told you," interposed the Bishop with a smile, "that it had been
given to him by a kind old fellow of a priest with whom he had passed
the night? I see how the matter stands. And you have brought him back
here? It is a mistake."

"In that case," replied the brigadier, "we can let him go?"

"Certainly," replied the Bishop.

The gendarmes released Jean Valjean, who recoiled.

"Is it true that I am to be released?" he said, in an almost
inarticulate voice, and as though he were talking in his sleep.

"Yes, thou art released; dost thou not understand?" said one of the
gendarmes.

"My friend," resumed the Bishop, "before you go, here are your
candlesticks. Take them."

He stepped to the chimney-piece, took the two silver candlesticks, and
brought them to Jean Valjean. The two women looked on without uttering
a word, without a gesture, without a look which could disconcert the
Bishop.

Jean Valjean was trembling in every limb. He took the two candlesticks
mechanically, and with a bewildered air.

"Now," said the Bishop, "go in peace. By the way, when you return, my
friend, it is not necessary to pass through the garden. You can always
enter and depart through the street door. It is never fastened with
anything but a latch, either by day or by night."

Then, turning to the gendarmes:--

"You may retire, gentlemen."

The gendarmes retired.

Jean Valjean was like a man on the point of fainting.

The Bishop drew near to him, and said in a low voice:--

"Do not forget, never forget, that you have promised to use this money
in becoming an honest man."

Jean Valjean, who had no recollection of ever having promised anything,
remained speechless. The Bishop had emphasized the words when he uttered
them. He resumed with solemnity:--

"Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to evil, but to good. It
is your soul that I buy from you; I withdraw it from black thoughts and
the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God."




CHAPTER XIII--LITTLE GERVAIS

Jean Valjean left the town as though he were fleeing from it. He set out
at a very hasty pace through the fields, taking whatever roads and paths
presented themselves to him, without perceiving that he was incessantly
retracing his steps. He wandered thus the whole morning, without having
eaten anything and without feeling hungry. He was the prey of a throng
of novel sensations. He was conscious of a sort of rage; he did not
know against whom it was directed. He could not have told whether he was
touched or humiliated. There came over him at moments a strange emotion
which he resisted and to which he opposed the hardness acquired during
the last twenty years of his life. This state of mind fatigued him.
He perceived with dismay that the sort of frightful calm which the
injustice of his misfortune had conferred upon him was giving way within
him. He asked himself what would replace this. At times he would have
actually preferred to be in prison with the gendarmes, and that things
should not have happened in this way; it would have agitated him less.
Although the season was tolerably far advanced, there were still a few
late flowers in the hedge-rows here and there, whose odor as he passed
through them in his march recalled to him memories of his childhood.
These memories were almost intolerable to him, it was so long since they
had recurred to him.

Unutterable thoughts assembled within him in this manner all day long.

As the sun declined to its setting, casting long shadows athwart the
soil from every pebble, Jean Valjean sat down behind a bush upon a large
ruddy plain, which was absolutely deserted. There was nothing on the
horizon except the Alps. Not even the spire of a distant village. Jean
Valjean might have been three leagues distant from D---- A path which
intersected the plain passed a few paces from the bush.

In the middle of this meditation, which would have contributed not
a little to render his rags terrifying to any one who might have
encountered him, a joyous sound became audible.

He turned his head and saw a little Savoyard, about ten years of age,
coming up the path and singing, his hurdy-gurdy on his hip, and his
marmot-box on his back.

One of those gay and gentle children, who go from land to land affording
a view of their knees through the holes in their trousers.

Without stopping his song, the lad halted in his march from time to
time, and played at knuckle-bones with some coins which he had in his
hand--his whole fortune, probably.

Among this money there was one forty-sou piece.

The child halted beside the bush, without perceiving Jean Valjean, and
tossed up his handful of sous, which, up to that time, he had caught
with a good deal of adroitness on the back of his hand.

This time the forty-sou piece escaped him, and went rolling towards the
brushwood until it reached Jean Valjean.

Jean Valjean set his foot upon it.

In the meantime, the child had looked after his coin and had caught
sight of him.

He showed no astonishment, but walked straight up to the man.

The spot was absolutely solitary. As far as the eye could see there was
not a person on the plain or on the path. The only sound was the tiny,
feeble cries of a flock of birds of passage, which was traversing the
heavens at an immense height. The child was standing with his back to
the sun, which cast threads of gold in his hair and empurpled with its
blood-red gleam the savage face of Jean Valjean.

"Sir," said the little Savoyard, with that childish confidence which is
composed of ignorance and innocence, "my money."

"What is your name?" said Jean Valjean.

"Little Gervais, sir."

"Go away," said Jean Valjean.

"Sir," resumed the child, "give me back my money."

Jean Valjean dropped his head, and made no reply.

The child began again, "My money, sir."

Jean Valjean's eyes remained fixed on the earth.

"My piece of money!" cried the child, "my white piece! my silver!"

It seemed as though Jean Valjean did not hear him. The child grasped him
by the collar of his blouse and shook him. At the same time he made an
effort to displace the big iron-shod shoe which rested on his treasure.

"I want my piece of money! my piece of forty sous!"

The child wept. Jean Valjean raised his head. He still remained seated.
His eyes were troubled. He gazed at the child, in a sort of amazement,
then he stretched out his hand towards his cudgel and cried in a
terrible voice, "Who's there?"

"I, sir," replied the child. "Little Gervais! I! Give me back my forty
sous, if you please! Take your foot away, sir, if you please!"

Then irritated, though he was so small, and becoming almost menacing:--

"Come now, will you take your foot away? Take your foot away, or we'll
see!"

"Ah! It's still you!" said Jean Valjean, and rising abruptly to his
feet, his foot still resting on the silver piece, he added:--

"Will you take yourself off!"

The frightened child looked at him, then began to tremble from head to
foot, and after a few moments of stupor he set out, running at the top
of his speed, without daring to turn his neck or to utter a cry.

Nevertheless, lack of breath forced him to halt after a certain
distance, and Jean Valjean heard him sobbing, in the midst of his own
revery.

At the end of a few moments the child had disappeared.

The sun had set.

The shadows were descending around Jean Valjean. He had eaten nothing
all day; it is probable that he was feverish.

He had remained standing and had not changed his attitude after the
child's flight. The breath heaved his chest at long and irregular
intervals. His gaze, fixed ten or twelve paces in front of him, seemed
to be scrutinizing with profound attention the shape of an ancient
fragment of blue earthenware which had fallen in the grass. All at once
he shivered; he had just begun to feel the chill of evening.

He settled his cap more firmly on his brow, sought mechanically to
cross and button his blouse, advanced a step and stopped to pick up his
cudgel.

At that moment he caught sight of the forty-sou piece, which his foot
had half ground into the earth, and which was shining among the pebbles.
It was as though he had received a galvanic shock. "What is this?"
he muttered between his teeth. He recoiled three paces, then halted,
without being able to detach his gaze from the spot which his foot had
trodden but an instant before, as though the thing which lay glittering
there in the gloom had been an open eye riveted upon him.

At the expiration of a few moments he darted convulsively towards the
silver coin, seized it, and straightened himself up again and began to
gaze afar off over the plain, at the same time casting his eyes towards
all points of the horizon, as he stood there erect and shivering, like a
terrified wild animal which is seeking refuge.

He saw nothing. Night was falling, the plain was cold and vague, great
banks of violet haze were rising in the gleam of the twilight.

He said, "Ah!" and set out rapidly in the direction in which the child
had disappeared. After about thirty paces he paused, looked about him
and saw nothing.

Then he shouted with all his might:--

"Little Gervais! Little Gervais!"

He paused and waited.

There was no reply.

The landscape was gloomy and deserted. He was encompassed by space.
There was nothing around him but an obscurity in which his gaze was
lost, and a silence which engulfed his voice.

An icy north wind was blowing, and imparted to things around him a
sort of lugubrious life. The bushes shook their thin little arms with
incredible fury. One would have said that they were threatening and
pursuing some one.

He set out on his march again, then he began to run; and from time to
time he halted and shouted into that solitude, with a voice which was
the most formidable and the most disconsolate that it was possible to
hear, "Little Gervais! Little Gervais!"

Assuredly, if the child had heard him, he would have been alarmed and
would have taken good care not to show himself. But the child was no
doubt already far away.

He encountered a priest on horseback. He stepped up to him and said:--

"Monsieur le Cure, have you seen a child pass?"

"No," said the priest.

"One named Little Gervais?"

"I have seen no one."

He drew two five-franc pieces from his money-bag and handed them to the
priest.

"Monsieur le Cure, this is for your poor people. Monsieur le Cure, he
was a little lad, about ten years old, with a marmot, I think, and a
hurdy-gurdy. One of those Savoyards, you know?"

"I have not seen him."

"Little Gervais? There are no villages here? Can you tell me?"

"If he is like what you say, my friend, he is a little stranger. Such
persons pass through these parts. We know nothing of them."

Jean Valjean seized two more coins of five francs each with violence,
and gave them to the priest.

"For your poor," he said.

Then he added, wildly:--

"Monsieur l'Abbe, have me arrested. I am a thief."

The priest put spurs to his horse and fled in haste, much alarmed.

Jean Valjean set out on a run, in the direction which he had first
taken.

In this way he traversed a tolerably long distance, gazing, calling,
shouting, but he met no one. Two or three times he ran across the plain
towards something which conveyed to him the effect of a human being
reclining or crouching down; it turned out to be nothing but brushwood
or rocks nearly on a level with the earth. At length, at a spot where
three paths intersected each other, he stopped. The moon had risen. He
sent his gaze into the distance and shouted for the last time, "Little
Gervais! Little Gervais! Little Gervais!" His shout died away in the
mist, without even awakening an echo. He murmured yet once more, "Little
Gervais!" but in a feeble and almost inarticulate voice. It was his last
effort; his legs gave way abruptly under him, as though an invisible
power had suddenly overwhelmed him with the weight of his evil
conscience; he fell exhausted, on a large stone, his fists clenched in
his hair and his face on his knees, and he cried, "I am a wretch!"

Then his heart burst, and he began to cry. It was the first time that he
had wept in nineteen years.

When Jean Valjean left the Bishop's house, he was, as we have seen,
quite thrown out of everything that had been his thought hitherto. He
could not yield to the evidence of what was going on within him. He
hardened himself against the angelic action and the gentle words of the
old man. "You have promised me to become an honest man. I buy your soul.
I take it away from the spirit of perversity; I give it to the good
God."

This recurred to his mind unceasingly. To this celestial kindness
he opposed pride, which is the fortress of evil within us. He was
indistinctly conscious that the pardon of this priest was the greatest
assault and the most formidable attack which had moved him yet; that his
obduracy was finally settled if he resisted this clemency; that if he
yielded, he should be obliged to renounce that hatred with which the
actions of other men had filled his soul through so many years, and
which pleased him; that this time it was necessary to conquer or to be
conquered; and that a struggle, a colossal and final struggle, had been
begun between his viciousness and the goodness of that man.

In the presence of these lights, he proceeded like a man who is
intoxicated. As he walked thus with haggard eyes, did he have a distinct
perception of what might result to him from his adventure at D----? Did
he understand all those mysterious murmurs which warn or importune the
spirit at certain moments of life? Did a voice whisper in his ear that
he had just passed the solemn hour of his destiny; that there no longer
remained a middle course for him; that if he were not henceforth the
best of men, he would be the worst; that it behooved him now, so to
speak, to mount higher than the Bishop, or fall lower than the convict;
that if he wished to become good be must become an angel; that if he
wished to remain evil, he must become a monster?

Here, again, some questions must be put, which we have already put
to ourselves elsewhere: did he catch some shadow of all this in his
thought, in a confused way? Misfortune certainly, as we have said, does
form the education of the intelligence; nevertheless, it is doubtful
whether Jean Valjean was in a condition to disentangle all that we have
here indicated. If these ideas occurred to him, he but caught glimpses
of, rather than saw them, and they only succeeded in throwing him into
an unutterable and almost painful state of emotion. On emerging from
that black and deformed thing which is called the galleys, the Bishop
had hurt his soul, as too vivid a light would have hurt his eyes on
emerging from the dark. The future life, the possible life which offered
itself to him henceforth, all pure and radiant, filled him with tremors
and anxiety. He no longer knew where he really was. Like an owl, who
should suddenly see the sun rise, the convict had been dazzled and
blinded, as it were, by virtue.

That which was certain, that which he did not doubt, was that he was no
longer the same man, that everything about him was changed, that it was
no longer in his power to make it as though the Bishop had not spoken to
him and had not touched him.

In this state of mind he had encountered little Gervais, and had robbed
him of his forty sous. Why? He certainly could not have explained it;
was this the last effect and the supreme effort, as it were, of the
evil thoughts which he had brought away from the galleys,--a remnant of
impulse, a result of what is called in statics, acquired force? It
was that, and it was also, perhaps, even less than that. Let us say it
simply, it was not he who stole; it was not the man; it was the beast,
who, by habit and instinct, had simply placed his foot upon that money,
while the intelligence was struggling amid so many novel and hitherto
unheard-of thoughts besetting it.

When intelligence re-awakened and beheld that action of the brute, Jean
Valjean recoiled with anguish and uttered a cry of terror.

[Illustration: Awakened  1b2-11-awakened]

It was because,--strange phenomenon, and one which was possible only
in the situation in which he found himself,--in stealing the money from
that child, he had done a thing of which he was no longer capable.

However that may be, this last evil action had a decisive effect on
him; it abruptly traversed that chaos which he bore in his mind, and
dispersed it, placed on one side the thick obscurity, and on the other
the light, and acted on his soul, in the state in which it then was, as
certain chemical reagents act upon a troubled mixture by precipitating
one element and clarifying the other.

First of all, even before examining himself and reflecting, all
bewildered, like one who seeks to save himself, he tried to find the
child in order to return his money to him; then, when he recognized the
fact that this was impossible, he halted in despair. At the moment when
he exclaimed "I am a wretch!" he had just perceived what he was, and he
was already separated from himself to such a degree, that he seemed to
himself to be no longer anything more than a phantom, and as if he had,
there before him, in flesh and blood, the hideous galley-convict, Jean
Valjean, cudgel in hand, his blouse on his hips, his knapsack filled
with stolen objects on his back, with his resolute and gloomy visage,
with his thoughts filled with abominable projects.

Excess of unhappiness had, as we have remarked, made him in some sort
a visionary. This, then, was in the nature of a vision. He actually saw
that Jean Valjean, that sinister face, before him. He had almost reached
the point of asking himself who that man was, and he was horrified by
him.

His brain was going through one of those violent and yet perfectly calm
moments in which revery is so profound that it absorbs reality. One no
longer beholds the object which one has before one, and one sees, as
though apart from one's self, the figures which one has in one's own
mind.

Thus he contemplated himself, so to speak, face to face, and at the same
time, athwart this hallucination, he perceived in a mysterious depth a
sort of light which he at first took for a torch. On scrutinizing
this light which appeared to his conscience with more attention, he
recognized the fact that it possessed a human form and that this torch
was the Bishop.

His conscience weighed in turn these two men thus placed before it,--the
Bishop and Jean Valjean. Nothing less than the first was required to
soften the second. By one of those singular effects, which are peculiar
to this sort of ecstasies, in proportion as his revery continued, as the
Bishop grew great and resplendent in his eyes, so did Jean Valjean grow
less and vanish. After a certain time he was no longer anything more
than a shade. All at once he disappeared. The Bishop alone remained; he
filled the whole soul of this wretched man with a magnificent radiance.

Jean Valjean wept for a long time. He wept burning tears, he sobbed with
more weakness than a woman, with more fright than a child.

As he wept, daylight penetrated more and more clearly into his soul; an
extraordinary light; a light at once ravishing and terrible. His past
life, his first fault, his long expiation, his external brutishness, his
internal hardness, his dismissal to liberty, rejoicing in manifold plans
of vengeance, what had happened to him at the Bishop's, the last thing
that he had done, that theft of forty sous from a child, a crime all the
more cowardly, and all the more monstrous since it had come after the
Bishop's pardon,--all this recurred to his mind and appeared clearly
to him, but with a clearness which he had never hitherto witnessed.
He examined his life, and it seemed horrible to him; his soul, and it
seemed frightful to him. In the meantime a gentle light rested over this
life and this soul. It seemed to him that he beheld Satan by the light
of Paradise.

How many hours did he weep thus? What did he do after he had wept?
Whither did he go! No one ever knew. The only thing which seems to be
authenticated is that that same night the carrier who served Grenoble at
that epoch, and who arrived at D---- about three o'clock in the morning,
saw, as he traversed the street in which the Bishop's residence was
situated, a man in the attitude of prayer, kneeling on the pavement in
the shadow, in front of the door of Monseigneur Welcome.




BOOK THIRD.--IN THE YEAR 1817




CHAPTER I--THE YEAR 1817


1817 is the year which Louis XVIII., with a certain royal assurance
which was not wanting in pride, entitled the twenty-second of his reign.
It is the year in which M. Bruguiere de Sorsum was celebrated. All the
hairdressers' shops, hoping for powder and the return of the royal bird,
were besmeared with azure and decked with fleurs-de-lys. It was the
candid time at which Count Lynch sat every Sunday as church-warden in
the church-warden's pew of Saint-Germain-des-Pres, in his costume of a
peer of France, with his red ribbon and his long nose and the majesty
of profile peculiar to a man who has performed a brilliant action.
The brilliant action performed by M. Lynch was this: being mayor of
Bordeaux, on the 12th of March, 1814, he had surrendered the city a
little too promptly to M. the Duke d'Angouleme. Hence his peerage. In
1817 fashion swallowed up little boys of from four to six years of
age in vast caps of morocco leather with ear-tabs resembling Esquimaux
mitres. The French army was dressed in white, after the mode of the
Austrian; the regiments were called legions; instead of numbers they
bore the names of departments; Napoleon was at St. Helena; and since
England refused him green cloth, he was having his old coats turned.
In 1817 Pelligrini sang; Mademoiselle Bigottini danced; Potier reigned;
Odry did not yet exist. Madame Saqui had succeeded to Forioso. There
were still Prussians in France. M. Delalot was a personage. Legitimacy
had just asserted itself by cutting off the hand, then the head, of
Pleignier, of Carbonneau, and of Tolleron. The Prince de Talleyrand,
grand chamberlain, and the Abbe Louis, appointed minister of finance,
laughed as they looked at each other, with the laugh of the two augurs;
both of them had celebrated, on the 14th of July, 1790, the mass of
federation in the Champ de Mars; Talleyrand had said it as bishop, Louis
had served it in the capacity of deacon. In 1817, in the side-alleys
of this same Champ de Mars, two great cylinders of wood might have
been seen lying in the rain, rotting amid the grass, painted blue, with
traces of eagles and bees, from which the gilding was falling. These
were the columns which two years before had upheld the Emperor's
platform in the Champ de Mai. They were blackened here and there with
the scorches of the bivouac of Austrians encamped near Gros-Caillou. Two
or three of these columns had disappeared in these bivouac fires, and
had warmed the large hands of the Imperial troops. The Field of May had
this remarkable point: that it had been held in the month of June and in
the Field of March (Mars). In this year, 1817, two things were popular:
the Voltaire-Touquet and the snuff-box a la Charter. The most recent
Parisian sensation was the crime of Dautun, who had thrown his brother's
head into the fountain of the Flower-Market.

They had begun to feel anxious at the Naval Department, on account of
the lack of news from that fatal frigate, The Medusa, which was destined
to cover Chaumareix with infamy and Gericault with glory. Colonel Selves
was going to Egypt to become Soliman-Pasha. The palace of Thermes, in
the Rue de La Harpe, served as a shop for a cooper. On the platform of
the octagonal tower of the Hotel de Cluny, the little shed of boards,
which had served as an observatory to Messier, the naval astronomer
under Louis XVI., was still to be seen. The Duchesse de Duras read to
three or four friends her unpublished Ourika, in her boudoir furnished
by X. in sky-blue satin. The N's were scratched off the Louvre. The
bridge of Austerlitz had abdicated, and was entitled the bridge of the
King's Garden [du Jardin du Roi], a double enigma, which disguised the
bridge of Austerlitz and the Jardin des Plantes at one stroke. Louis
XVIII., much preoccupied while annotating Horace with the corner of his
finger-nail, heroes who have become emperors, and makers of wooden shoes
who have become dauphins, had two anxieties,--Napoleon and Mathurin
Bruneau. The French Academy had given for its prize subject, The
Happiness procured through Study. M. Bellart was officially eloquent.
In his shadow could be seen germinating that future advocate-general of
Broe, dedicated to the sarcasms of Paul-Louis Courier. There was a false
Chateaubriand, named Marchangy, in the interim, until there should be a
false Marchangy, named d'Arlincourt. Claire d'Albe and Malek-Adel were
masterpieces; Madame Cottin was proclaimed the chief writer of the
epoch. The Institute had the academician, Napoleon Bonaparte, stricken
from its list of members. A royal ordinance erected Angouleme into a
naval school; for the Duc d'Angouleme, being lord high admiral, it was
evident that the city of Angouleme had all the qualities of a seaport;
otherwise the monarchical principle would have received a wound. In
the Council of Ministers the question was agitated whether vignettes
representing slack-rope performances, which adorned Franconi's
advertising posters, and which attracted throngs of street urchins,
should be tolerated. M. Paer, the author of Agnese, a good sort of
fellow, with a square face and a wart on his cheek, directed the little
private concerts of the Marquise de Sasenaye in the Rue Ville l'Eveque.
All the young girls were singing the Hermit of Saint-Avelle, with words
by Edmond Geraud. The Yellow Dwarf was transferred into Mirror. The Cafe
Lemblin stood up for the Emperor, against the Cafe Valois, which upheld
the Bourbons. The Duc de Berri, already surveyed from the shadow by
Louvel, had just been married to a princess of Sicily. Madame de Stael
had died a year previously. The body-guard hissed Mademoiselle Mars.
The grand newspapers were all very small. Their form was restricted,
but their liberty was great. The Constitutionnel was constitutional.
La Minerve called Chateaubriand Chateaubriant. That made the good
middle-class people laugh heartily at the expense of the great writer.
In journals which sold themselves, prostituted journalists, insulted the
exiles of 1815. David had no longer any talent, Arnault had no longer
any wit, Carnot was no longer honest, Soult had won no battles; it is
true that Napoleon had no longer any genius. No one is ignorant of the
fact that letters sent to an exile by post very rarely reached him, as
the police made it their religious duty to intercept them. This is no
new fact; Descartes complained of it in his exile. Now David, having, in
a Belgian publication, shown some displeasure at not receiving letters
which had been written to him, it struck the royalist journals as
amusing; and they derided the prescribed man well on this occasion. What
separated two men more than an abyss was to say, the regicides, or
to say the voters; to say the enemies, or to say the allies; to say
Napoleon, or to say Buonaparte. All sensible people were agreed that the
era of revolution had been closed forever by King Louis XVIII., surnamed
"The Immortal Author of the Charter." On the platform of the Pont-Neuf,
the word Redivivus was carved on the pedestal that awaited the statue of
Henry IV. M. Piet, in the Rue Therese, No. 4, was making the rough draft
of his privy assembly to consolidate the monarchy. The leaders of the
Right said at grave conjunctures, "We must write to Bacot." MM. Canuel,
O'Mahoney, and De Chappedelaine were preparing the sketch, to some
extent with Monsieur's approval, of what was to become later on "The
Conspiracy of the Bord de l'Eau"--of the waterside. L'Epingle Noire was
already plotting in his own quarter. Delaverderie was conferring with
Trogoff. M. Decazes, who was liberal to a degree, reigned. Chateaubriand
stood every morning at his window at No. 27 Rue Saint-Dominique, clad in
footed trousers, and slippers, with a madras kerchief knotted over his
gray hair, with his eyes fixed on a mirror, a complete set of dentist's
instruments spread out before him, cleaning his teeth, which were
charming, while he dictated The Monarchy according to the Charter to
M. Pilorge, his secretary. Criticism, assuming an authoritative tone,
preferred Lafon to Talma. M. de Feletez signed himself A.; M. Hoffmann
signed himself Z. Charles Nodier wrote Therese Aubert. Divorce was
abolished. Lyceums called themselves colleges. The collegians, decorated
on the collar with a golden fleur-de-lys, fought each other apropos of
the King of Rome. The counter-police of the chateau had denounced to her
Royal Highness Madame, the portrait, everywhere exhibited, of M. the
Duc d'Orleans, who made a better appearance in his uniform of a
colonel-general of hussars than M. the Duc de Berri, in his uniform of
colonel-general of dragoons--a serious inconvenience. The city of
Paris was having the dome of the Invalides regilded at its own expense.
Serious men asked themselves what M. de Trinquelague would do on such or
such an occasion; M. Clausel de Montals differed on divers points
from M. Clausel de Coussergues; M. de Salaberry was not satisfied. The
comedian Picard, who belonged to the Academy, which the comedian Moliere
had not been able to do, had The Two Philiberts played at the Odeon,
upon whose pediment the removal of the letters still allowed THEATRE OF
THE EMPRESS to be plainly read. People took part for or against Cugnet
de Montarlot. Fabvier was factious; Bavoux was revolutionary. The
Liberal, Pelicier, published an edition of Voltaire, with the following
title: Works of Voltaire, of the French Academy. "That will attract
purchasers," said the ingenious editor. The general opinion was that M.
Charles Loyson would be the genius of the century; envy was beginning to
gnaw at him--a sign of glory; and this verse was composed on him:--

     "Even when Loyson steals, one feels that he has paws."

As Cardinal Fesch refused to resign, M. de Pins, Archbishop of Amasie,
administered the diocese of Lyons. The quarrel over the valley of Dappes
was begun between Switzerland and France by a memoir from Captain,
afterwards General Dufour. Saint-Simon, ignored, was erecting his
sublime dream. There was a celebrated Fourier at the Academy of Science,
whom posterity has forgotten; and in some garret an obscure Fourier,
whom the future will recall. Lord Byron was beginning to make his mark;
a note to a poem by Millevoye introduced him to France in these terms:
a certain Lord Baron. David d'Angers was trying to work in marble. The
Abbe Caron was speaking, in terms of praise, to a private gathering of
seminarists in the blind alley of Feuillantines, of an unknown priest,
named Felicite-Robert, who, at a latter date, became Lamennais. A thing
which smoked and clattered on the Seine with the noise of a swimming dog
went and came beneath the windows of the Tuileries, from the Pont Royal
to the Pont Louis XV.; it was a piece of mechanism which was not
good for much; a sort of plaything, the idle dream of a dream-ridden
inventor; an utopia--a steamboat. The Parisians stared indifferently at
this useless thing. M. de Vaublanc, the reformer of the Institute by
a coup d'etat, the distinguished author of numerous academicians,
ordinances, and batches of members, after having created them, could
not succeed in becoming one himself. The Faubourg Saint-Germain and the
pavilion de Marsan wished to have M. Delaveau for prefect of police, on
account of his piety. Dupuytren and Recamier entered into a quarrel in
the amphitheatre of the School of Medicine, and threatened each other
with their fists on the subject of the divinity of Jesus Christ. Cuvier,
with one eye on Genesis and the other on nature, tried to please bigoted
reaction by reconciling fossils with texts and by making mastodons
flatter Moses.

M. Francois de Neufchateau, the praiseworthy cultivator of the memory
of Parmentier, made a thousand efforts to have pomme de terre [potato]
pronounced parmentiere, and succeeded therein not at all. The Abbe
Gregoire, ex-bishop, ex-conventionary, ex-senator, had passed, in the
royalist polemics, to the state of "Infamous Gregoire." The locution of
which we have made use--passed to the state of--has been condemned as a
neologism by M. Royer Collard. Under the third arch of the Pont de Jena,
the new stone with which, the two years previously, the mining aperture
made by Blucher to blow up the bridge had been stopped up, was still
recognizable on account of its whiteness. Justice summoned to its bar a
man who, on seeing the Comte d'Artois enter Notre Dame, had said aloud:
"Sapristi! I regret the time when I saw Bonaparte and Talma enter the
Bel Sauvage, arm in arm." A seditious utterance. Six months in prison.
Traitors showed themselves unbuttoned; men who had gone over to the
enemy on the eve of battle made no secret of their recompense, and
strutted immodestly in the light of day, in the cynicism of riches and
dignities; deserters from Ligny and Quatre-Bras, in the brazenness of
their well-paid turpitude, exhibited their devotion to the monarchy in
the most barefaced manner.

This is what floats up confusedly, pell-mell, for the year 1817, and is
now forgotten. History neglects nearly all these particulars, and cannot
do otherwise; the infinity would overwhelm it. Nevertheless, these
details, which are wrongly called trivial,--there are no trivial facts
in humanity, nor little leaves in vegetation,--are useful. It is of
the physiognomy of the years that the physiognomy of the centuries is
composed. In this year of 1817 four young Parisians arranged "a fine
farce."




CHAPTER II--A DOUBLE QUARTETTE


These Parisians came, one from Toulouse, another from Limoges, the third
from Cahors, and the fourth from Montauban; but they were students; and
when one says student, one says Parisian: to study in Paris is to be
born in Paris.

These young men were insignificant; every one has seen such faces; four
specimens of humanity taken at random; neither good nor bad, neither
wise nor ignorant, neither geniuses nor fools; handsome, with that
charming April which is called twenty years. They were four Oscars; for,
at that epoch, Arthurs did not yet exist. Burn for him the perfumes of
Araby! exclaimed romance. Oscar advances. Oscar, I shall behold him!
People had just emerged from Ossian; elegance was Scandinavian and
Caledonian; the pure English style was only to prevail later, and
the first of the Arthurs, Wellington, had but just won the battle of
Waterloo.

These Oscars bore the names, one of Felix Tholomyes, of Toulouse; the
second, Listolier, of Cahors; the next, Fameuil, of Limoges; the last,
Blachevelle, of Montauban. Naturally, each of them had his mistress.
Blachevelle loved Favourite, so named because she had been in England;
Listolier adored Dahlia, who had taken for her nickname the name of a
flower; Fameuil idolized Zephine, an abridgment of Josephine; Tholomyes
had Fantine, called the Blonde, because of her beautiful, sunny hair.

Favourite, Dahlia, Zephine, and Fantine were four ravishing young women,
perfumed and radiant, still a little like working-women, and not yet
entirely divorced from their needles; somewhat disturbed by intrigues,
but still retaining on their faces something of the serenity of toil,
and in their souls that flower of honesty which survives the first fall
in woman. One of the four was called the young, because she was
the youngest of them, and one was called the old; the old one was
twenty-three. Not to conceal anything, the three first were more
experienced, more heedless, and more emancipated into the tumult of life
than Fantine the Blonde, who was still in her first illusions.

Dahlia, Zephine, and especially Favourite, could not have said as much.
There had already been more than one episode in their romance, though
hardly begun; and the lover who had borne the name of Adolph in the
first chapter had turned out to be Alphonse in the second, and Gustave
in the third. Poverty and coquetry are two fatal counsellors; one scolds
and the other flatters, and the beautiful daughters of the people have
both of them whispering in their ear, each on its own side. These badly
guarded souls listen. Hence the falls which they accomplish, and the
stones which are thrown at them. They are overwhelmed with splendor of
all that is immaculate and inaccessible. Alas! what if the Jungfrau were
hungry?

Favourite having been in England, was admired by Dahlia and Zephine. She
had had an establishment of her own very early in life. Her father was
an old unmarried professor of mathematics, a brutal man and a braggart,
who went out to give lessons in spite of his age. This professor, when
he was a young man, had one day seen a chambermaid's gown catch on
a fender; he had fallen in love in consequence of this accident. The
result had been Favourite. She met her father from time to time, and he
bowed to her. One morning an old woman with the air of a devotee,
had entered her apartments, and had said to her, "You do not know me,
Mamemoiselle?" "No." "I am your mother." Then the old woman opened the
sideboard, and ate and drank, had a mattress which she owned brought in,
and installed herself. This cross and pious old mother never spoke to
Favourite, remained hours without uttering a word, breakfasted, dined,
and supped for four, and went down to the porter's quarters for company,
where she spoke ill of her daughter.

It was having rosy nails that were too pretty which had drawn Dahlia to
Listolier, to others perhaps, to idleness. How could she make such nails
work? She who wishes to remain virtuous must not have pity on her hands.
As for Zephine, she had conquered Fameuil by her roguish and caressing
little way of saying "Yes, sir."

The young men were comrades; the young girls were friends. Such loves
are always accompanied by such friendships.

Goodness and philosophy are two distinct things; the proof of this
is that, after making all due allowances for these little irregular
households, Favourite, Zephine, and Dahlia were philosophical young
women, while Fantine was a good girl.

Good! some one will exclaim; and Tholomyes? Solomon would reply that
love forms a part of wisdom. We will confine ourselves to saying that
the love of Fantine was a first love, a sole love, a faithful love.

She alone, of all the four, was not called "thou" by a single one of
them.

Fantine was one of those beings who blossom, so to speak, from the dregs
of the people. Though she had emerged from the most unfathomable depths
of social shadow, she bore on her brow the sign of the anonymous and the
unknown. She was born at M. sur M. Of what parents? Who can say? She had
never known father or mother. She was called Fantine. Why Fantine? She
had never borne any other name. At the epoch of her birth the Directory
still existed. She had no family name; she had no family; no baptismal
name; the Church no longer existed. She bore the name which pleased
the first random passer-by, who had encountered her, when a very small
child, running bare-legged in the street. She received the name as she
received the water from the clouds upon her brow when it rained. She was
called little Fantine. No one knew more than that. This human creature
had entered life in just this way. At the age of ten, Fantine quitted
the town and went to service with some farmers in the neighborhood. At
fifteen she came to Paris "to seek her fortune." Fantine was beautiful,
and remained pure as long as she could. She was a lovely blonde, with
fine teeth. She had gold and pearls for her dowry; but her gold was on
her head, and her pearls were in her mouth.

She worked for her living; then, still for the sake of her living,--for
the heart, also, has its hunger,--she loved.

She loved Tholomyes.

An amour for him; passion for her. The streets of the Latin quarter,
filled with throngs of students and grisettes, saw the beginning of
their dream. Fantine had long evaded Tholomyes in the mazes of the hill
of the Pantheon, where so many adventurers twine and untwine, but in
such a way as constantly to encounter him again. There is a way of
avoiding which resembles seeking. In short, the eclogue took place.

Blachevelle, Listolier, and Fameuil formed a sort of group of which
Tholomyes was the head. It was he who possessed the wit.

Tholomyes was the antique old student; he was rich; he had an income of
four thousand francs; four thousand francs! a splendid scandal on
Mount Sainte-Genevieve. Tholomyes was a fast man of thirty, and badly
preserved. He was wrinkled and toothless, and he had the beginning of a
bald spot, of which he himself said with sadness, the skull at thirty,
the knee at forty. His digestion was mediocre, and he had been attacked
by a watering in one eye. But in proportion as his youth disappeared,
gayety was kindled; he replaced his teeth with buffooneries, his hair
with mirth, his health with irony, his weeping eye laughed incessantly.
He was dilapidated but still in flower. His youth, which was packing
up for departure long before its time, beat a retreat in good order,
bursting with laughter, and no one saw anything but fire. He had had a
piece rejected at the Vaudeville. He made a few verses now and then. In
addition to this he doubted everything to the last degree, which is a
vast force in the eyes of the weak. Being thus ironical and bald, he
was the leader. Iron is an English word. Is it possible that irony is
derived from it?

One day Tholomyes took the three others aside, with the gesture of an
oracle, and said to them:--

"Fantine, Dahlia, Zephine, and Favourite have been teasing us for nearly
a year to give them a surprise. We have promised them solemnly that we
would. They are forever talking about it to us, to me in particular,
just as the old women in Naples cry to Saint Januarius, 'Faccia
gialluta, fa o miracolo, Yellow face, perform thy miracle,' so our
beauties say to me incessantly, 'Tholomyes, when will you bring forth
your surprise?' At the same time our parents keep writing to us.
Pressure on both sides. The moment has arrived, it seems to me; let us
discuss the question."

Thereupon, Tholomyes lowered his voice and articulated something so
mirthful, that a vast and enthusiastic grin broke out upon the four
mouths simultaneously, and Blachevelle exclaimed, "That is an idea."

A smoky tap-room presented itself; they entered, and the remainder of
their confidential colloquy was lost in shadow.

The result of these shades was a dazzling pleasure party which took
place on the following Sunday, the four young men inviting the four
young girls.




CHAPTER III--FOUR AND FOUR

It is hard nowadays to picture to one's self what a pleasure-trip of
students and grisettes to the country was like, forty-five years ago.
The suburbs of Paris are no longer the same; the physiognomy of what
may be called circumparisian life has changed completely in the last
half-century; where there was the cuckoo, there is the railway car;
where there was a tender-boat, there is now the steamboat; people speak
of Fecamp nowadays as they spoke of Saint-Cloud in those days. The Paris
of 1862 is a city which has France for its outskirts.

The four couples conscientiously went through with all the country
follies possible at that time. The vacation was beginning, and it was a
warm, bright, summer day. On the preceding day, Favourite, the only one
who knew how to write, had written the following to Tholomyes in the
name of the four: "It is a good hour to emerge from happiness." That
is why they rose at five o'clock in the morning. Then they went to
Saint-Cloud by the coach, looked at the dry cascade and exclaimed, "This
must be very beautiful when there is water!" They breakfasted at the
Tete-Noir, where Castaing had not yet been; they treated themselves to a
game of ring-throwing under the quincunx of trees of the grand fountain;
they ascended Diogenes' lantern, they gambled for macaroons at the
roulette establishment of the Pont de Sevres, picked bouquets at
Pateaux, bought reed-pipes at Neuilly, ate apple tarts everywhere, and
were perfectly happy.

The young girls rustled and chatted like warblers escaped from their
cage. It was a perfect delirium. From time to time they bestowed little
taps on the young men. Matutinal intoxication of life! adorable years!
the wings of the dragonfly quiver. Oh, whoever you may be, do you not
remember? Have you rambled through the brushwood, holding aside the
branches, on account of the charming head which is coming on behind you?
Have you slid, laughing, down a slope all wet with rain, with a beloved
woman holding your hand, and crying, "Ah, my new boots! what a state
they are in!"

Let us say at once that that merry obstacle, a shower, was lacking in
the case of this good-humored party, although Favourite had said as they
set out, with a magisterial and maternal tone, "The slugs are crawling
in the paths,--a sign of rain, children."

All four were madly pretty. A good old classic poet, then famous, a good
fellow who had an Eleonore, M. le Chevalier de Labouisse, as he strolled
that day beneath the chestnut-trees of Saint-Cloud, saw them pass about
ten o'clock in the morning, and exclaimed, "There is one too many of
them," as he thought of the Graces. Favourite, Blachevelle's friend, the
one aged three and twenty, the old one, ran on in front under the great
green boughs, jumped the ditches, stalked distractedly over bushes, and
presided over this merry-making with the spirit of a young female faun.
Zephine and Dahlia, whom chance had made beautiful in such a way that
they set each off when they were together, and completed each other,
never left each other, more from an instinct of coquetry than from
friendship, and clinging to each other, they assumed English poses; the
first keepsakes had just made their appearance, melancholy was dawning
for women, as later on, Byronism dawned for men; and the hair of the
tender sex began to droop dolefully. Zephine and Dahlia had their hair
dressed in rolls. Listolier and Fameuil, who were engaged in discussing
their professors, explained to Fantine the difference that existed
between M. Delvincourt and M. Blondeau.

Blachevelle seemed to have been created expressly to carry Favourite's
single-bordered, imitation India shawl of Ternaux's manufacture, on his
arm on Sundays.

Tholomyes followed, dominating the group. He was very gay, but one felt
the force of government in him; there was dictation in his joviality;
his principal ornament was a pair of trousers of elephant-leg pattern of
nankeen, with straps of braided copper wire; he carried a stout rattan
worth two hundred francs in his hand, and, as he treated himself to
everything, a strange thing called a cigar in his mouth. Nothing was
sacred to him; he smoked.

"That Tholomyes is astounding!" said the others, with veneration. "What
trousers! What energy!"

As for Fantine, she was a joy to behold. Her splendid teeth had
evidently received an office from God,--laughter. She preferred to carry
her little hat of sewed straw, with its long white strings, in her hand
rather than on her head. Her thick blond hair, which was inclined to
wave, and which easily uncoiled, and which it was necessary to fasten
up incessantly, seemed made for the flight of Galatea under the
willows. Her rosy lips babbled enchantingly. The corners of her mouth
voluptuously turned up, as in the antique masks of Erigone, had an
air of encouraging the audacious; but her long, shadowy lashes drooped
discreetly over the jollity of the lower part of the face as though to
call a halt. There was something indescribably harmonious and striking
about her entire dress. She wore a gown of mauve barege, little reddish
brown buskins, whose ribbons traced an X on her fine, white, open-worked
stockings, and that sort of muslin spencer, a Marseilles invention,
whose name, canezou, a corruption of the words quinze aout, pronounced
after the fashion of the Canebiere, signifies fine weather, heat, and
midday. The three others, less timid, as we have already said,
wore low-necked dresses without disguise, which in summer, beneath
flower-adorned hats, are very graceful and enticing; but by the side
of these audacious outfits, blond Fantine's canezou, with its
transparencies, its indiscretion, and its reticence, concealing and
displaying at one and the same time, seemed an alluring godsend of
decency, and the famous Court of Love, presided over by the Vicomtesse
de Cette, with the sea-green eyes, would, perhaps, have awarded the
prize for coquetry to this canezou, in the contest for the prize of
modesty. The most ingenious is, at times, the wisest. This does happen.

Brilliant of face, delicate of profile, with eyes of a deep blue, heavy
lids, feet arched and small, wrists and ankles admirably formed, a white
skin which, here and there allowed the azure branching of the veins to
be seen, joy, a cheek that was young and fresh, the robust throat of the
Juno of AEgina, a strong and supple nape of the neck, shoulders modelled
as though by Coustou, with a voluptuous dimple in the middle, visible
through the muslin; a gayety cooled by dreaminess; sculptural and
exquisite--such was Fantine; and beneath these feminine adornments and
these ribbons one could divine a statue, and in that statue a soul.

Fantine was beautiful, without being too conscious of it. Those rare
dreamers, mysterious priests of the beautiful who silently confront
everything with perfection, would have caught a glimpse in this little
working-woman, through the transparency of her Parisian grace, of the
ancient sacred euphony. This daughter of the shadows was thoroughbred.
She was beautiful in the two ways--style and rhythm. Style is the form
of the ideal; rhythm is its movement.

We have said that Fantine was joy; she was also modesty.

To an observer who studied her attentively, that which breathed from
her athwart all the intoxication of her age, the season, and her
love affair, was an invincible expression of reserve and modesty. She
remained a little astonished. This chaste astonishment is the shade
of difference which separates Psyche from Venus. Fantine had the long,
white, fine fingers of the vestal virgin who stirs the ashes of the
sacred fire with a golden pin. Although she would have refused nothing
to Tholomyes, as we shall have more than ample opportunity to see, her
face in repose was supremely virginal; a sort of serious and almost
austere dignity suddenly overwhelmed her at certain times, and there
was nothing more singular and disturbing than to see gayety become so
suddenly extinct there, and meditation succeed to cheerfulness without
any transition state. This sudden and sometimes severely accentuated
gravity resembled the disdain of a goddess. Her brow, her nose, her
chin, presented that equilibrium of outline which is quite distinct
from equilibrium of proportion, and from which harmony of countenance
results; in the very characteristic interval which separates the base
of the nose from the upper lip, she had that imperceptible and charming
fold, a mysterious sign of chastity, which makes Barberousse fall in
love with a Diana found in the treasures of Iconia.

Love is a fault; so be it. Fantine was innocence floating high over
fault.




CHAPTER IV--THOLOMYES IS SO MERRY THAT HE SINGS A SPANISH DITTY


That day was composed of dawn, from one end to the other. All nature
seemed to be having a holiday, and to be laughing. The flower-beds of
Saint-Cloud perfumed the air; the breath of the Seine rustled the
leaves vaguely; the branches gesticulated in the wind, bees pillaged the
jasmines; a whole bohemia of butterflies swooped down upon the yarrow,
the clover, and the sterile oats; in the august park of the King of
France there was a pack of vagabonds, the birds.

The four merry couples, mingled with the sun, the fields, the flowers,
the trees, were resplendent.

And in this community of Paradise, talking, singing, running, dancing,
chasing butterflies, plucking convolvulus, wetting their pink, open-work
stockings in the tall grass, fresh, wild, without malice, all received,
to some extent, the kisses of all, with the exception of Fantine,
who was hedged about with that vague resistance of hers composed of
dreaminess and wildness, and who was in love. "You always have a queer
look about you," said Favourite to her.

Such things are joys. These passages of happy couples are a profound
appeal to life and nature, and make a caress and light spring forth from
everything. There was once a fairy who created the fields and forests
expressly for those in love,--in that eternal hedge-school of lovers,
which is forever beginning anew, and which will last as long as there
are hedges and scholars. Hence the popularity of spring among thinkers.
The patrician and the knife-grinder, the duke and the peer, the limb
of the law, the courtiers and townspeople, as they used to say in olden
times, all are subjects of this fairy. They laugh and hunt, and there
is in the air the brilliance of an apotheosis--what a transfiguration
effected by love! Notaries' clerks are gods. And the little cries,
the pursuits through the grass, the waists embraced on the fly, those
jargons which are melodies, those adorations which burst forth in the
manner of pronouncing a syllable, those cherries torn from one mouth by
another,--all this blazes forth and takes its place among the celestial
glories. Beautiful women waste themselves sweetly. They think that this
will never come to an end. Philosophers, poets, painters, observe these
ecstasies and know not what to make of it, so greatly are they dazzled
by it. The departure for Cythera! exclaims Watteau; Lancret, the painter
of plebeians, contemplates his bourgeois, who have flitted away into the
azure sky; Diderot stretches out his arms to all these love idyls, and
d'Urfe mingles druids with them.

After breakfast the four couples went to what was then called the King's
Square to see a newly arrived plant from India, whose name escapes our
memory at this moment, and which, at that epoch, was attracting all
Paris to Saint-Cloud. It was an odd and charming shrub with a long stem,
whose numerous branches, bristling and leafless and as fine as threads,
were covered with a million tiny white rosettes; this gave the shrub the
air of a head of hair studded with flowers. There was always an admiring
crowd about it.

After viewing the shrub, Tholomyes exclaimed, "I offer you asses!" and
having agreed upon a price with the owner of the asses, they returned
by way of Vanvres and Issy. At Issy an incident occurred. The truly
national park, at that time owned by Bourguin the contractor, happened
to be wide open. They passed the gates, visited the manikin anchorite in
his grotto, tried the mysterious little effects of the famous cabinet
of mirrors, the wanton trap worthy of a satyr become a millionaire or of
Turcaret metamorphosed into a Priapus. They had stoutly shaken the swing
attached to the two chestnut-trees celebrated by the Abbe de Bernis.
As he swung these beauties, one after the other, producing folds in the
fluttering skirts which Greuze would have found to his taste, amid peals
of laughter, the Toulousan Tholomyes, who was somewhat of a Spaniard,
Toulouse being the cousin of Tolosa, sang, to a melancholy chant, the
old ballad gallega, probably inspired by some lovely maid dashing in
full flight upon a rope between two trees:--

      "Soy de Badajoz,        "Badajoz is my home,
       Amor me llama,          And Love is my name;
       Toda mi alma,           To my eyes in flame,
       Es en mi ojos,          All my soul doth come;
       Porque ensenas,         For instruction meet
       A tuas piernas.         I receive at thy feet"


Fantine alone refused to swing.

"I don't like to have people put on airs like that," muttered Favourite,
with a good deal of acrimony.

After leaving the asses there was a fresh delight; they crossed the
Seine in a boat, and proceeding from Passy on foot they reached the
barrier of l'Etoile. They had been up since five o'clock that morning,
as the reader will remember; but bah! there is no such thing as fatigue
on Sunday, said Favourite; on Sunday fatigue does not work.

About three o'clock the four couples, frightened at their happiness,
were sliding down the Russian mountains, a singular edifice which then
occupied the heights of Beaujon, and whose undulating line was visible
above the trees of the Champs Elysees.

From time to time Favourite exclaimed:--

"And the surprise? I claim the surprise."

"Patience," replied Tholomyes.




CHAPTER V--AT BOMBARDA'S

The Russian mountains having been exhausted, they began to think about
dinner; and the radiant party of eight, somewhat weary at last, became
stranded in Bombarda's public house, a branch establishment which had
been set up in the Champs-Elysees by that famous restaurant-keeper,
Bombarda, whose sign could then be seen in the Rue de Rivoli, near
Delorme Alley.

A large but ugly room, with an alcove and a bed at the end (they had
been obliged to put up with this accommodation in view of the Sunday
crowd); two windows whence they could survey beyond the elms, the quay
and the river; a magnificent August sunlight lightly touching the panes;
two tables; upon one of them a triumphant mountain of bouquets, mingled
with the hats of men and women; at the other the four couples seated
round a merry confusion of platters, dishes, glasses, and bottles; jugs
of beer mingled with flasks of wine; very little order on the table,
some disorder beneath it;

               "They made beneath the table
     A noise, a clatter of the feet that was abominable,"

says Moliere.

This was the state which the shepherd idyl, begun at five o'clock in
the morning, had reached at half-past four in the afternoon. The sun was
setting; their appetites were satisfied.

The Champs-Elysees, filled with sunshine and with people, were nothing
but light and dust, the two things of which glory is composed. The
horses of Marly, those neighing marbles, were prancing in a cloud
of gold. Carriages were going and coming. A squadron of magnificent
body-guards, with their clarions at their head, were descending the
Avenue de Neuilly; the white flag, showing faintly rosy in the setting
sun, floated over the dome of the Tuileries. The Place de la Concorde,
which had become the Place Louis XV. once more, was choked with happy
promenaders. Many wore the silver fleur-de-lys suspended from the
white-watered ribbon, which had not yet wholly disappeared from
button-holes in the year 1817. Here and there choruses of little girls
threw to the winds, amid the passersby, who formed into circles and
applauded, the then celebrated Bourbon air, which was destined to strike
the Hundred Days with lightning, and which had for its refrain:--

               "Rendez-nous notre pere de Gand,
                    Rendez-nous notre pere."

               "Give us back our father from Ghent,
                    Give us back our father."


Groups of dwellers in the suburbs, in Sunday array, sometimes even
decorated with the fleur-de-lys, like the bourgeois, scattered over the
large square and the Marigny square, were playing at rings and revolving
on the wooden horses; others were engaged in drinking; some journeyman
printers had on paper caps; their laughter was audible. Every thing
was radiant. It was a time of undisputed peace and profound royalist
security; it was the epoch when a special and private report of Chief
of Police Angeles to the King, on the subject of the suburbs of Paris,
terminated with these lines:--

"Taking all things into consideration, Sire, there is nothing to be
feared from these people. They are as heedless and as indolent as cats.
The populace is restless in the provinces; it is not in Paris. These are
very pretty men, Sire. It would take all of two of them to make one
of your grenadiers. There is nothing to be feared on the part of the
populace of Paris the capital. It is remarkable that the stature of
this population should have diminished in the last fifty years; and
the populace of the suburbs is still more puny than at the time of the
Revolution. It is not dangerous. In short, it is an amiable rabble."

Prefects of the police do not deem it possible that a cat can transform
itself into a lion; that does happen, however, and in that lies the
miracle wrought by the populace of Paris. Moreover, the cat so despised
by Count Angles possessed the esteem of the republics of old. In their
eyes it was liberty incarnate; and as though to serve as pendant to
the Minerva Aptera of the Piraeus, there stood on the public square in
Corinth the colossal bronze figure of a cat. The ingenuous police of the
Restoration beheld the populace of Paris in too "rose-colored" a light;
it is not so much of "an amiable rabble" as it is thought. The Parisian
is to the Frenchman what the Athenian was to the Greek: no one sleeps
more soundly than he, no one is more frankly frivolous and lazy than
he, no one can better assume the air of forgetfulness; let him not be
trusted nevertheless; he is ready for any sort of cool deed; but when
there is glory at the end of it, he is worthy of admiration in every
sort of fury. Give him a pike, he will produce the 10th of August; give
him a gun, you will have Austerlitz. He is Napoleon's stay and Danton's
resource. Is it a question of country, he enlists; is it a question of
liberty, he tears up the pavements. Beware! his hair filled with wrath,
is epic; his blouse drapes itself like the folds of a chlamys. Take
care! he will make of the first Rue Grenetat which comes to hand Caudine
Forks. When the hour strikes, this man of the faubourgs will grow in
stature; this little man will arise, and his gaze will be terrible, and
his breath will become a tempest, and there will issue forth from that
slender chest enough wind to disarrange the folds of the Alps. It is,
thanks to the suburban man of Paris, that the Revolution, mixed with
arms, conquers Europe. He sings; it is his delight. Proportion his song
to his nature, and you will see! As long as he has for refrain nothing
but la Carmagnole, he only overthrows Louis XVI.; make him sing the
Marseillaise, and he will free the world.

This note jotted down on the margin of Angles' report, we will return to
our four couples. The dinner, as we have said, was drawing to its close.




CHAPTER VI--A CHAPTER IN WHICH THEY ADORE EACH OTHER

Chat at table, the chat of love; it is as impossible to reproduce one as
the other; the chat of love is a cloud; the chat at table is smoke.

Fameuil and Dahlia were humming. Tholomyes was drinking. Zephine was
laughing, Fantine smiling, Listolier blowing a wooden trumpet which he
had purchased at Saint-Cloud.

Favourite gazed tenderly at Blachevelle and said:--

"Blachevelle, I adore you."

This called forth a question from Blachevelle:--

"What would you do, Favourite, if I were to cease to love you?"

"I!" cried Favourite. "Ah! Do not say that even in jest! If you were
to cease to love me, I would spring after you, I would scratch you,
I should rend you, I would throw you into the water, I would have you
arrested."

Blachevelle smiled with the voluptuous self-conceit of a man who is
tickled in his self-love. Favourite resumed:--

"Yes, I would scream to the police! Ah! I should not restrain myself,
not at all! Rabble!"

Blachevelle threw himself back in his chair, in an ecstasy, and closed
both eyes proudly.

Dahlia, as she ate, said in a low voice to Favourite, amid the uproar:--

"So you really idolize him deeply, that Blachevelle of yours?"

"I? I detest him," replied Favourite in the same tone, seizing her fork
again. "He is avaricious. I love the little fellow opposite me in my
house. He is very nice, that young man; do you know him? One can see
that he is an actor by profession. I love actors. As soon as he comes
in, his mother says to him: 'Ah! mon Dieu! my peace of mind is gone.
There he goes with his shouting. But, my dear, you are splitting my
head!' So he goes up to rat-ridden garrets, to black holes, as high as
he can mount, and there he sets to singing, declaiming, how do I know
what? so that he can be heard down stairs! He earns twenty sous a day at
an attorney's by penning quibbles. He is the son of a former precentor
of Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas. Ah! he is very nice. He idolizes me so,
that one day when he saw me making batter for some pancakes, he said to
me: 'Mamselle, make your gloves into fritters, and I will eat them.' It
is only artists who can say such things as that. Ah! he is very nice.
I am in a fair way to go out of my head over that little fellow. Never
mind; I tell Blachevelle that I adore him--how I lie! Hey! How I do
lie!"

Favourite paused, and then went on:--

"I am sad, you see, Dahlia. It has done nothing but rain all summer; the
wind irritates me; the wind does not abate. Blachevelle is very stingy;
there are hardly any green peas in the market; one does not know what to
eat. I have the spleen, as the English say, butter is so dear! and then
you see it is horrible, here we are dining in a room with a bed in it,
and that disgusts me with life."




CHAPTER VII--THE WISDOM OF THOLOMYES

In the meantime, while some sang, the rest talked together tumultuously
all at once; it was no longer anything but noise. Tholomyes intervened.

"Let us not talk at random nor too fast," he exclaimed. "Let us reflect,
if we wish to be brilliant. Too much improvisation empties the mind in
a stupid way. Running beer gathers no froth. No haste, gentlemen. Let us
mingle majesty with the feast. Let us eat with meditation; let us make
haste slowly. Let us not hurry. Consider the springtime; if it makes
haste, it is done for; that is to say, it gets frozen. Excess of zeal
ruins peach-trees and apricot-trees. Excess of zeal kills the grace and
the mirth of good dinners. No zeal, gentlemen! Grimod de la Reyniere
agrees with Talleyrand."

A hollow sound of rebellion rumbled through the group.

"Leave us in peace, Tholomyes," said Blachevelle.

"Down with the tyrant!" said Fameuil.

"Bombarda, Bombance, and Bambochel!" cried Listolier.

"Sunday exists," resumed Fameuil.

"We are sober," added Listolier.

"Tholomyes," remarked Blachevelle, "contemplate my calmness [mon
calme]."

"You are the Marquis of that," retorted Tholomyes.

This mediocre play upon words produced the effect of a stone in a pool.
The Marquis de Montcalm was at that time a celebrated royalist. All the
frogs held their peace.

"Friends," cried Tholomyes, with the accent of a man who had recovered
his empire, "Come to yourselves. This pun which has fallen from the
skies must not be received with too much stupor. Everything which falls
in that way is not necessarily worthy of enthusiasm and respect. The pun
is the dung of the mind which soars. The jest falls, no matter where;
and the mind after producing a piece of stupidity plunges into the azure
depths. A whitish speck flattened against the rock does not prevent the
condor from soaring aloft. Far be it from me to insult the pun! I honor
it in proportion to its merits; nothing more. All the most august, the
most sublime, the most charming of humanity, and perhaps outside of
humanity, have made puns. Jesus Christ made a pun on St. Peter, Moses on
Isaac, AEschylus on Polynices, Cleopatra on Octavius. And observe that
Cleopatra's pun preceded the battle of Actium, and that had it not been
for it, no one would have remembered the city of Toryne, a Greek name
which signifies a ladle. That once conceded, I return to my exhortation.
I repeat, brothers, I repeat, no zeal, no hubbub, no excess; even in
witticisms, gayety, jollities, or plays on words. Listen to me. I have
the prudence of Amphiaraus and the baldness of Caesar. There must be a
limit, even to rebuses. Est modus in rebus.

"There must be a limit, even to dinners. You are fond of apple
turnovers, ladies; do not indulge in them to excess. Even in the matter
of turnovers, good sense and art are requisite. Gluttony chastises the
glutton, Gula punit Gulax. Indigestion is charged by the good God with
preaching morality to stomachs. And remember this: each one of our
passions, even love, has a stomach which must not be filled too full. In
all things the word finis must be written in good season; self-control
must be exercised when the matter becomes urgent; the bolt must be drawn
on appetite; one must set one's own fantasy to the violin, and carry
one's self to the post. The sage is the man who knows how, at a given
moment, to effect his own arrest. Have some confidence in me, for I
have succeeded to some extent in my study of the law, according to
the verdict of my examinations, for I know the difference between the
question put and the question pending, for I have sustained a thesis in
Latin upon the manner in which torture was administered at Rome at the
epoch when Munatius Demens was quaestor of the Parricide; because I
am going to be a doctor, apparently it does not follow that it is
absolutely necessary that I should be an imbecile. I recommend you to
moderation in your desires. It is true that my name is Felix Tholomyes;
I speak well. Happy is he who, when the hour strikes, takes a heroic
resolve, and abdicates like Sylla or Origenes."

Favourite listened with profound attention.

"Felix," said she, "what a pretty word! I love that name. It is Latin;
it means prosper."

Tholomyes went on:--

"Quirites, gentlemen, caballeros, my friends. Do you wish never to feel
the prick, to do without the nuptial bed, and to brave love? Nothing
more simple. Here is the receipt: lemonade, excessive exercise, hard
labor; work yourself to death, drag blocks, sleep not, hold vigil,
gorge yourself with nitrous beverages, and potions of nymphaeas; drink
emulsions of poppies and agnus castus; season this with a strict diet,
starve yourself, and add thereto cold baths, girdles of herbs, the
application of a plate of lead, lotions made with the subacetate of
lead, and fomentations of oxycrat."

"I prefer a woman," said Listolier.

"Woman," resumed Tholomyes; "distrust her. Woe to him who yields himself
to the unstable heart of woman! Woman is perfidious and disingenuous.
She detests the serpent from professional jealousy. The serpent is the
shop over the way."

"Tholomyes!" cried Blachevelle, "you are drunk!"

"Pardieu," said Tholomyes.

"Then be gay," resumed Blachevelle.

"I agree to that," responded Tholomyes.

And, refilling his glass, he rose.

"Glory to wine! Nunc te, Bacche, canam! Pardon me ladies; that is
Spanish. And the proof of it, senoras, is this: like people, like cask.
The arrobe of Castile contains sixteen litres; the cantaro of Alicante,
twelve; the almude of the Canaries, twenty-five; the cuartin of the
Balearic Isles, twenty-six; the boot of Tzar Peter, thirty. Long
live that Tzar who was great, and long live his boot, which was still
greater! Ladies, take the advice of a friend; make a mistake in your
neighbor if you see fit. The property of love is to err. A love
affair is not made to crouch down and brutalize itself like an English
serving-maid who has callouses on her knees from scrubbing. It is not
made for that; it errs gayly, our gentle love. It has been said, error
is human; I say, error is love. Ladies, I idolize you all. O Zephine, O
Josephine, face more than irregular, you would be charming were you not
all askew. You have the air of a pretty face upon which some one has
sat down by mistake. As for Favourite, O nymphs and muses! one day
when Blachevelle was crossing the gutter in the Rue Guerin-Boisseau,
he espied a beautiful girl with white stockings well drawn up, which
displayed her legs. This prologue pleased him, and Blachevelle fell
in love. The one he loved was Favourite. O Favourite, thou hast Ionian
lips. There was a Greek painter named Euphorion, who was surnamed the
painter of the lips. That Greek alone would have been worthy to paint
thy mouth. Listen! before thee, there was never a creature worthy of the
name. Thou wert made to receive the apple like Venus, or to eat it like
Eve; beauty begins with thee. I have just referred to Eve; it is thou
who hast created her. Thou deservest the letters-patent of the beautiful
woman. O Favourite, I cease to address you as 'thou,' because I pass
from poetry to prose. You were speaking of my name a little while ago.
That touched me; but let us, whoever we may be, distrust names. They may
delude us. I am called Felix, and I am not happy. Words are liars. Let
us not blindly accept the indications which they afford us. It would be
a mistake to write to Liege [2] for corks, and to Pau for gloves. Miss
Dahlia, were I in your place, I would call myself Rosa. A flower should
smell sweet, and woman should have wit. I say nothing of Fantine; she
is a dreamer, a musing, thoughtful, pensive person; she is a phantom
possessed of the form of a nymph and the modesty of a nun, who has
strayed into the life of a grisette, but who takes refuge in illusions,
and who sings and prays and gazes into the azure without very well
knowing what she sees or what she is doing, and who, with her eyes fixed
on heaven, wanders in a garden where there are more birds than are in
existence. O Fantine, know this: I, Tholomyes, I am all illusion; but
she does not even hear me, that blond maid of Chimeras! as for the rest,
everything about her is freshness, suavity, youth, sweet morning light.
O Fantine, maid worthy of being called Marguerite or Pearl, you are a
woman from the beauteous Orient. Ladies, a second piece of advice: do
not marry; marriage is a graft; it takes well or ill; avoid that risk.
But bah! what am I saying? I am wasting my words. Girls are incurable
on the subject of marriage, and all that we wise men can say will not
prevent the waistcoat-makers and the shoe-stitchers from dreaming
of husbands studded with diamonds. Well, so be it; but, my beauties,
remember this, you eat too much sugar. You have but one fault, O woman,
and that is nibbling sugar. O nibbling sex, your pretty little white
teeth adore sugar. Now, heed me well, sugar is a salt. All salts are
withering. Sugar is the most desiccating of all salts; it sucks the
liquids of the blood through the veins; hence the coagulation, and then
the solidification of the blood; hence tubercles in the lungs, hence
death. That is why diabetes borders on consumption. Then, do not crunch
sugar, and you will live. I turn to the men: gentlemen, make conquest,
rob each other of your well-beloved without remorse. Chassez across.
In love there are no friends. Everywhere where there is a pretty woman
hostility is open. No quarter, war to the death! a pretty woman is a
casus belli; a pretty woman is flagrant misdemeanor. All the invasions
of history have been determined by petticoats. Woman is man's right.
Romulus carried off the Sabines; William carried off the Saxon women;
Caesar carried off the Roman women. The man who is not loved soars like
a vulture over the mistresses of other men; and for my own part, to all
those unfortunate men who are widowers, I throw the sublime proclamation
of Bonaparte to the army of Italy: "Soldiers, you are in need of
everything; the enemy has it."

Tholomyes paused.

"Take breath, Tholomyes," said Blachevelle.

At the same moment Blachevelle, supported by Listolier and Fameuil,
struck up to a plaintive air, one of those studio songs composed of
the first words which come to hand, rhymed richly and not at all, as
destitute of sense as the gesture of the tree and the sound of the wind,
which have their birth in the vapor of pipes, and are dissipated and
take their flight with them. This is the couplet by which the group
replied to Tholomyes' harangue:--


           "The father turkey-cocks so grave
            Some money to an agent gave,
            That master good Clermont-Tonnerre
            Might be made pope on Saint Johns' day fair.
            But this good Clermont could not be
            Made pope, because no priest was he;
            And then their agent, whose wrath burned,
            With all their money back returned."


This was not calculated to calm Tholomyes' improvisation; he emptied his
glass, filled, refilled it, and began again:--

"Down with wisdom! Forget all that I have said. Let us be neither prudes
nor prudent men nor prudhommes. I propose a toast to mirth; be merry.
Let us complete our course of law by folly and eating! Indigestion and
the digest. Let Justinian be the male, and Feasting, the female! Joy in
the depths! Live, O creation! The world is a great diamond. I am happy.
The birds are astonishing. What a festival everywhere! The nightingale
is a gratuitous Elleviou. Summer, I salute thee! O Luxembourg! O
Georgics of the Rue Madame, and of the Allee de l'Observatoire! O
pensive infantry soldiers! O all those charming nurses who, while they
guard the children, amuse themselves! The pampas of America would please
me if I had not the arcades of the Odeon. My soul flits away into the
virgin forests and to the savannas. All is beautiful. The flies buzz in
the sun. The sun has sneezed out the humming bird. Embrace me, Fantine!"

He made a mistake and embraced Favourite.




CHAPTER VIII--THE DEATH OF A HORSE


"The dinners are better at Edon's than at Bombarda's," exclaimed
Zephine.

"I prefer Bombarda to Edon," declared Blachevelle. "There is more
luxury. It is more Asiatic. Look at the room downstairs; there are
mirrors [glaces] on the walls."

"I prefer them [glaces, ices] on my plate," said Favourite.

Blachevelle persisted:--

"Look at the knives. The handles are of silver at Bombarda's and of bone
at Edon's. Now, silver is more valuable than bone."

"Except for those who have a silver chin," observed Tholomyes.

He was looking at the dome of the Invalides, which was visible from
Bombarda's windows.

A pause ensued.

"Tholomyes," exclaimed Fameuil, "Listolier and I were having a
discussion just now."

"A discussion is a good thing," replied Tholomyes; "a quarrel is
better."

"We were disputing about philosophy."

"Well?"

"Which do you prefer, Descartes or Spinoza?"

"Desaugiers," said Tholomyes.

This decree pronounced, he took a drink, and went on:--

"I consent to live. All is not at an end on earth since we can still
talk nonsense. For that I return thanks to the immortal gods. We lie.
One lies, but one laughs. One affirms, but one doubts. The unexpected
bursts forth from the syllogism. That is fine. There are still human
beings here below who know how to open and close the surprise box of the
paradox merrily. This, ladies, which you are drinking with so tranquil
an air is Madeira wine, you must know, from the vineyard of Coural das
Freiras, which is three hundred and seventeen fathoms above the level of
the sea. Attention while you drink! three hundred and seventeen fathoms!
and Monsieur Bombarda, the magnificent eating-house keeper, gives you
those three hundred and seventeen fathoms for four francs and fifty
centimes."

Again Fameuil interrupted him:--

"Tholomyes, your opinions fix the law. Who is your favorite author?"

"Ber--"

"Quin?"

"No; Choux."

And Tholomyes continued:--

"Honor to Bombarda! He would equal Munophis of Elephanta if he could but
get me an Indian dancing-girl, and Thygelion of Chaeronea if he could
bring me a Greek courtesan; for, oh, ladies! there were Bombardas in
Greece and in Egypt. Apuleius tells us of them. Alas! always the same,
and nothing new; nothing more unpublished by the creator in creation!
Nil sub sole novum, says Solomon; amor omnibus idem, says Virgil; and
Carabine mounts with Carabin into the bark at Saint-Cloud, as Aspasia
embarked with Pericles upon the fleet at Samos. One last word. Do you
know what Aspasia was, ladies? Although she lived at an epoch when women
had, as yet, no soul, she was a soul; a soul of a rosy and purple
hue, more ardent hued than fire, fresher than the dawn. Aspasia was
a creature in whom two extremes of womanhood met; she was the goddess
prostitute; Socrates plus Manon Lescaut. Aspasia was created in case a
mistress should be needed for Prometheus."

Tholomyes, once started, would have found some difficulty in stopping,
had not a horse fallen down upon the quay just at that moment. The
shock caused the cart and the orator to come to a dead halt. It was a
Beauceron mare, old and thin, and one fit for the knacker, which was
dragging a very heavy cart. On arriving in front of Bombarda's, the
worn-out, exhausted beast had refused to proceed any further. This
incident attracted a crowd. Hardly had the cursing and indignant carter
had time to utter with proper energy the sacramental word, Matin (the
jade), backed up with a pitiless cut of the whip, when the jade fell,
never to rise again. On hearing the hubbub made by the passersby,
Tholomyes' merry auditors turned their heads, and Tholomyes took
advantage of the opportunity to bring his allocution to a close with
this melancholy strophe:--

      "Elle etait de ce monde ou coucous et carrosses [3]
          Ont le meme destin;
      Et, rosse, elle a vecu ce que vivant les rosses,
          L'espace d'un matin!"


"Poor horse!" sighed Fantine.

And Dahlia exclaimed:--

"There is Fantine on the point of crying over horses. How can one be
such a pitiful fool as that!"

At that moment Favourite, folding her arms and throwing her head back,
looked resolutely at Tholomyes and said:--

"Come, now! the surprise?"

"Exactly. The moment has arrived," replied Tholomyes. "Gentlemen,
the hour for giving these ladies a surprise has struck. Wait for us a
moment, ladies."

"It begins with a kiss," said Blachevelle.

"On the brow," added Tholomyes.

Each gravely bestowed a kiss on his mistress's brow; then all four filed
out through the door, with their fingers on their lips.

Favourite clapped her hands on their departure.

"It is beginning to be amusing already," said she.

"Don't be too long," murmured Fantine; "we are waiting for you."




CHAPTER IX--A MERRY END TO MIRTH

When the young girls were left alone, they leaned two by two on the
window-sills, chatting, craning out their heads, and talking from one
window to the other.

They saw the young men emerge from the Cafe Bombarda arm in arm. The
latter turned round, made signs to them, smiled, and disappeared in
that dusty Sunday throng which makes a weekly invasion into the
Champs-Elysees.

"Don't be long!" cried Fantine.

"What are they going to bring us?" said Zephine.

"It will certainly be something pretty," said Dahlia.

"For my part," said Favourite, "I want it to be of gold."

Their attention was soon distracted by the movements on the shore of the
lake, which they could see through the branches of the large trees, and
which diverted them greatly.

It was the hour for the departure of the mail-coaches and diligences.
Nearly all the stage-coaches for the south and west passed through the
Champs-Elysees. The majority followed the quay and went through the
Passy Barrier. From moment to moment, some huge vehicle, painted yellow
and black, heavily loaded, noisily harnessed, rendered shapeless
by trunks, tarpaulins, and valises, full of heads which immediately
disappeared, rushed through the crowd with all the sparks of a forge,
with dust for smoke, and an air of fury, grinding the pavements,
changing all the paving-stones into steels. This uproar delighted the
young girls. Favourite exclaimed:--

"What a row! One would say that it was a pile of chains flying away."

It chanced that one of these vehicles, which they could only see with
difficulty through the thick elms, halted for a moment, then set out
again at a gallop. This surprised Fantine.

"That's odd!" said she. "I thought the diligence never stopped."

Favourite shrugged her shoulders.

"This Fantine is surprising. I am coming to take a look at her out of
curiosity. She is dazzled by the simplest things. Suppose a case: I am
a traveller; I say to the diligence, 'I will go on in advance; you shall
pick me up on the quay as you pass.' The diligence passes, sees me,
halts, and takes me. That is done every day. You do not know life, my
dear."

In this manner a certain time elapsed. All at once Favourite made a
movement, like a person who is just waking up.

"Well," said she, "and the surprise?"

"Yes, by the way," joined in Dahlia, "the famous surprise?"

"They are a very long time about it!" said Fantine.

As Fantine concluded this sigh, the waiter who had served them at dinner
entered. He held in his hand something which resembled a letter.

"What is that?" demanded Favourite.

The waiter replied:--

"It is a paper that those gentlemen left for these ladies."

"Why did you not bring it at once?"

"Because," said the waiter, "the gentlemen ordered me not to deliver it
to the ladies for an hour."

Favourite snatched the paper from the waiter's hand. It was, in fact, a
letter.

"Stop!" said she; "there is no address; but this is what is written on
it--"

                 "THIS IS THE SURPRISE."

She tore the letter open hastily, opened it, and read [she knew how to
read]:--

"OUR BELOVED:--

"You must know that we have parents. Parents--you do not know much about
such things. They are called fathers and mothers by the civil code,
which is puerile and honest. Now, these parents groan, these old folks
implore us, these good men and these good women call us prodigal sons;
they desire our return, and offer to kill calves for us. Being virtuous,
we obey them. At the hour when you read this, five fiery horses will
be bearing us to our papas and mammas. We are pulling up our stakes, as
Bossuet says. We are going; we are gone. We flee in the arms of Lafitte
and on the wings of Caillard. The Toulouse diligence tears us from
the abyss, and the abyss is you, O our little beauties! We return to
society, to duty, to respectability, at full trot, at the rate of three
leagues an hour. It is necessary for the good of the country that we
should be, like the rest of the world, prefects, fathers of families,
rural police, and councillors of state. Venerate us. We are sacrificing
ourselves. Mourn for us in haste, and replace us with speed. If this
letter lacerates you, do the same by it. Adieu.

"For the space of nearly two years we have made you happy. We bear you
no grudge for that.                                 "Signed:
                                            BLACHEVELLE.
                                            FAMUEIL.
                                            LISTOLIER.
                                            FELIX THOLOMYES.

"Postscriptum. The dinner is paid for."


The four young women looked at each other.

Favourite was the first to break the silence.

"Well!" she exclaimed, "it's a very pretty farce, all the same."

"It is very droll," said Zephine.

"That must have been Blachevelle's idea," resumed Favourite. "It makes
me in love with him. No sooner is he gone than he is loved. This is an
adventure, indeed."

"No," said Dahlia; "it was one of Tholomyes' ideas. That is evident.

"In that case," retorted Favourite, "death to Blachevelle, and long live
Tholomyes!"

"Long live Tholomyes!" exclaimed Dahlia and Zephine.

And they burst out laughing.

Fantine laughed with the rest.

An hour later, when she had returned to her room, she wept. It was
her first love affair, as we have said; she had given herself to this
Tholomyes as to a husband, and the poor girl had a child.




BOOK FOURTH.--TO CONFIDE IS SOMETIMES TO DELIVER INTO A PERSON'S POWER




CHAPTER I--ONE MOTHER MEETS ANOTHER MOTHER

There was, at Montfermeil, near Paris, during the first quarter of this
century, a sort of cook-shop which no longer exists. This cook-shop was
kept by some people named Thenardier, husband and wife. It was situated
in Boulanger Lane. Over the door there was a board nailed flat against
the wall. Upon this board was painted something which resembled a
man carrying another man on his back, the latter wearing the big gilt
epaulettes of a general, with large silver stars; red spots represented
blood; the rest of the picture consisted of smoke, and probably
represented a battle. Below ran this inscription: AT THE SIGN OF
SERGEANT OF WATERLOO (Au Sargent de Waterloo).

Nothing is more common than a cart or a truck at the door of a hostelry.
Nevertheless, the vehicle, or, to speak more accurately, the fragment of
a vehicle, which encumbered the street in front of the cook-shop of the
Sergeant of Waterloo, one evening in the spring of 1818, would certainly
have attracted, by its mass, the attention of any painter who had passed
that way.

It was the fore-carriage of one of those trucks which are used in wooded
tracts of country, and which serve to transport thick planks and the
trunks of trees. This fore-carriage was composed of a massive iron
axle-tree with a pivot, into which was fitted a heavy shaft, and
which was supported by two huge wheels. The whole thing was compact,
overwhelming, and misshapen. It seemed like the gun-carriage of an
enormous cannon. The ruts of the road had bestowed on the wheels, the
fellies, the hub, the axle, and the shaft, a layer of mud, a hideous
yellowish daubing hue, tolerably like that with which people are fond
of ornamenting cathedrals. The wood was disappearing under mud, and the
iron beneath rust. Under the axle-tree hung, like drapery, a huge chain,
worthy of some Goliath of a convict. This chain suggested, not the
beams, which it was its office to transport, but the mastodons and
mammoths which it might have served to harness; it had the air of the
galleys, but of cyclopean and superhuman galleys, and it seemed to have
been detached from some monster. Homer would have bound Polyphemus with
it, and Shakespeare, Caliban.

Why was that fore-carriage of a truck in that place in the street? In
the first place, to encumber the street; next, in order that it might
finish the process of rusting. There is a throng of institutions in the
old social order, which one comes across in this fashion as one walks
about outdoors, and which have no other reasons for existence than the
above.

The centre of the chain swung very near the ground in the middle, and in
the loop, as in the rope of a swing, there were seated and grouped, on
that particular evening, in exquisite interlacement, two little girls;
one about two years and a half old, the other, eighteen months; the
younger in the arms of the other. A handkerchief, cleverly knotted about
them, prevented their falling out. A mother had caught sight of that
frightful chain, and had said, "Come! there's a plaything for my
children."

The two children, who were dressed prettily and with some elegance, were
radiant with pleasure; one would have said that they were two roses amid
old iron; their eyes were a triumph; their fresh cheeks were full of
laughter. One had chestnut hair; the other, brown. Their innocent faces
were two delighted surprises; a blossoming shrub which grew near wafted
to the passers-by perfumes which seemed to emanate from them; the child
of eighteen months displayed her pretty little bare stomach with the
chaste indecency of childhood. Above and around these two delicate
heads, all made of happiness and steeped in light, the gigantic
fore-carriage, black with rust, almost terrible, all entangled in curves
and wild angles, rose in a vault, like the entrance of a cavern. A few
paces apart, crouching down upon the threshold of the hostelry, the
mother, not a very prepossessing woman, by the way, though touching
at that moment, was swinging the two children by means of a long cord,
watching them carefully, for fear of accidents, with that animal and
celestial expression which is peculiar to maternity. At every backward
and forward swing the hideous links emitted a strident sound, which
resembled a cry of rage; the little girls were in ecstasies; the setting
sun mingled in this joy, and nothing could be more charming than this
caprice of chance which had made of a chain of Titans the swing of
cherubim.

As she rocked her little ones, the mother hummed in a discordant voice a
romance then celebrated:--


                 "It must be, said a warrior."


Her song, and the contemplation of her daughters, prevented her hearing
and seeing what was going on in the street.

In the meantime, some one had approached her, as she was beginning the
first couplet of the romance, and suddenly she heard a voice saying very
near her ear:--

"You have two beautiful children there, Madame."


                 "To the fair and tender Imogene--"


replied the mother, continuing her romance; then she turned her head.

A woman stood before her, a few paces distant. This woman also had a
child, which she carried in her arms.

She was carrying, in addition, a large carpet-bag, which seemed very
heavy.

This woman's child was one of the most divine creatures that it is
possible to behold. It was a girl, two or three years of age. She could
have entered into competition with the two other little ones, so far as
the coquetry of her dress was concerned; she wore a cap of fine linen,
ribbons on her bodice, and Valenciennes lace on her cap. The folds of
her skirt were raised so as to permit a view of her white, firm, and
dimpled leg. She was admirably rosy and healthy. The little beauty
inspired a desire to take a bite from the apples of her cheeks. Of her
eyes nothing could be known, except that they must be very large, and
that they had magnificent lashes. She was asleep.

She slept with that slumber of absolute confidence peculiar to her
age. The arms of mothers are made of tenderness; in them children sleep
profoundly.

As for the mother, her appearance was sad and poverty-stricken. She
was dressed like a working-woman who is inclined to turn into a peasant
again. She was young. Was she handsome? Perhaps; but in that attire it
was not apparent. Her hair, a golden lock of which had escaped, seemed
very thick, but was severely concealed beneath an ugly, tight, close,
nun-like cap, tied under the chin. A smile displays beautiful teeth when
one has them; but she did not smile. Her eyes did not seem to have been
dry for a very long time. She was pale; she had a very weary and rather
sickly appearance. She gazed upon her daughter asleep in her arms with
the air peculiar to a mother who has nursed her own child. A large blue
handkerchief, such as the Invalides use, was folded into a fichu, and
concealed her figure clumsily. Her hands were sunburnt and all dotted
with freckles, her forefinger was hardened and lacerated with the
needle; she wore a cloak of coarse brown woollen stuff, a linen gown,
and coarse shoes. It was Fantine.

It was Fantine, but difficult to recognize. Nevertheless, on
scrutinizing her attentively, it was evident that she still retained
her beauty. A melancholy fold, which resembled the beginning of irony,
wrinkled her right cheek. As for her toilette, that aerial toilette of
muslin and ribbons, which seemed made of mirth, of folly, and of music,
full of bells, and perfumed with lilacs had vanished like that beautiful
and dazzling hoar-frost which is mistaken for diamonds in the sunlight;
it melts and leaves the branch quite black.

Ten months had elapsed since the "pretty farce."

What had taken place during those ten months? It can be divined.

After abandonment, straightened circumstances. Fantine had immediately
lost sight of Favourite, Zephine and Dahlia; the bond once broken on the
side of the men, it was loosed between the women; they would have been
greatly astonished had any one told them a fortnight later, that they
had been friends; there no longer existed any reason for such a thing.
Fantine had remained alone. The father of her child gone,--alas! such
ruptures are irrevocable,--she found herself absolutely isolated, minus
the habit of work and plus the taste for pleasure. Drawn away by her
liaison with Tholomyes to disdain the pretty trade which she knew, she
had neglected to keep her market open; it was now closed to her. She had
no resource. Fantine barely knew how to read, and did not know how to
write; in her childhood she had only been taught to sign her name;
she had a public letter-writer indite an epistle to Tholomyes, then a
second, then a third. Tholomyes replied to none of them. Fantine heard
the gossips say, as they looked at her child: "Who takes those children
seriously! One only shrugs one's shoulders over such children!" Then she
thought of Tholomyes, who had shrugged his shoulders over his child,
and who did not take that innocent being seriously; and her heart grew
gloomy toward that man. But what was she to do? She no longer knew to
whom to apply. She had committed a fault, but the foundation of her
nature, as will be remembered, was modesty and virtue. She was vaguely
conscious that she was on the verge of falling into distress, and of
gliding into a worse state. Courage was necessary; she possessed it, and
held herself firm. The idea of returning to her native town of M. sur
M. occurred to her. There, some one might possibly know her and give her
work; yes, but it would be necessary to conceal her fault. In a confused
way she perceived the necessity of a separation which would be more
painful than the first one. Her heart contracted, but she took her
resolution. Fantine, as we shall see, had the fierce bravery of life.
She had already valiantly renounced finery, had dressed herself in
linen, and had put all her silks, all her ornaments, all her ribbons,
and all her laces on her daughter, the only vanity which was left to
her, and a holy one it was. She sold all that she had, which produced
for her two hundred francs; her little debts paid, she had only about
eighty francs left. At the age of twenty-two, on a beautiful spring
morning, she quitted Paris, bearing her child on her back. Any one who
had seen these two pass would have had pity on them. This woman had,
in all the world, nothing but her child, and the child had, in all the
world, no one but this woman. Fantine had nursed her child, and this had
tired her chest, and she coughed a little.

We shall have no further occasion to speak of M. Felix Tholomyes. Let us
confine ourselves to saying, that, twenty years later, under King Louis
Philippe, he was a great provincial lawyer, wealthy and influential, a
wise elector, and a very severe juryman; he was still a man of pleasure.

Towards the middle of the day, after having, from time to time, for the
sake of resting herself, travelled, for three or four sous a league, in
what was then known as the Petites Voitures des Environs de Paris, the
"little suburban coach service," Fantine found herself at Montfermeil,
in the alley Boulanger.

As she passed the Thenardier hostelry, the two little girls, blissful
in the monster swing, had dazzled her in a manner, and she had halted in
front of that vision of joy.

Charms exist. These two little girls were a charm to this mother.

She gazed at them in much emotion. The presence of angels is an
announcement of Paradise. She thought that, above this inn, she beheld
the mysterious HERE of Providence. These two little creatures were
evidently happy. She gazed at them, she admired them, in such emotion
that at the moment when their mother was recovering her breath between
two couplets of her song, she could not refrain from addressing to her
the remark which we have just read:--

"You have two pretty children, Madame."

The most ferocious creatures are disarmed by caresses bestowed on their
young.

The mother raised her head and thanked her, and bade the wayfarer
sit down on the bench at the door, she herself being seated on the
threshold. The two women began to chat.

"My name is Madame Thenardier," said the mother of the two little girls.
"We keep this inn."

Then, her mind still running on her romance, she resumed humming between
her teeth:--

                 "It must be so; I am a knight,
                  And I am off to Palestine."


This Madame Thenardier was a sandy-complexioned woman, thin and
angular--the type of the soldier's wife in all its unpleasantness; and
what was odd, with a languishing air, which she owed to her perusal
of romances. She was a simpering, but masculine creature. Old romances
produce that effect when rubbed against the imagination of cook-shop
woman. She was still young; she was barely thirty. If this crouching
woman had stood upright, her lofty stature and her frame of a
perambulating colossus suitable for fairs, might have frightened the
traveller at the outset, troubled her confidence, and disturbed what
caused what we have to relate to vanish. A person who is seated instead
of standing erect--destinies hang upon such a thing as that.

The traveller told her story, with slight modifications.

That she was a working-woman; that her husband was dead; that her
work in Paris had failed her, and that she was on her way to seek it
elsewhere, in her own native parts; that she had left Paris that morning
on foot; that, as she was carrying her child, and felt fatigued, she had
got into the Villemomble coach when she met it; that from Villemomble
she had come to Montfermeil on foot; that the little one had walked a
little, but not much, because she was so young, and that she had been
obliged to take her up, and the jewel had fallen asleep.

At this word she bestowed on her daughter a passionate kiss, which woke
her. The child opened her eyes, great blue eyes like her mother's, and
looked at--what? Nothing; with that serious and sometimes severe air of
little children, which is a mystery of their luminous innocence in
the presence of our twilight of virtue. One would say that they feel
themselves to be angels, and that they know us to be men. Then the child
began to laugh; and although the mother held fast to her, she slipped to
the ground with the unconquerable energy of a little being which wished
to run. All at once she caught sight of the two others in the swing,
stopped short, and put out her tongue, in sign of admiration.

Mother Thenardier released her daughters, made them descend from the
swing, and said:--

"Now amuse yourselves, all three of you."

Children become acquainted quickly at that age, and at the expiration
of a minute the little Thenardiers were playing with the new-comer at
making holes in the ground, which was an immense pleasure.

The new-comer was very gay; the goodness of the mother is written in the
gayety of the child; she had seized a scrap of wood which served her
for a shovel, and energetically dug a cavity big enough for a fly. The
grave-digger's business becomes a subject for laughter when performed by
a child.

The two women pursued their chat.

"What is your little one's name?"

"Cosette."

For Cosette, read Euphrasie. The child's name was Euphrasie. But out
of Euphrasie the mother had made Cosette by that sweet and graceful
instinct of mothers and of the populace which changes Josepha into
Pepita, and Francoise into Sillette. It is a sort of derivative which
disarranges and disconcerts the whole science of etymologists. We have
known a grandmother who succeeded in turning Theodore into Gnon.

"How old is she?"

"She is going on three."

"That is the age of my eldest."

In the meantime, the three little girls were grouped in an attitude of
profound anxiety and blissfulness; an event had happened; a big worm
had emerged from the ground, and they were afraid; and they were in
ecstasies over it.

Their radiant brows touched each other; one would have said that there
were three heads in one aureole.

"How easily children get acquainted at once!" exclaimed Mother
Thenardier; "one would swear that they were three sisters!"

This remark was probably the spark which the other mother had been
waiting for. She seized the Thenardier's hand, looked at her fixedly,
and said:--

"Will you keep my child for me?"

The Thenardier made one of those movements of surprise which signify
neither assent nor refusal.

Cosette's mother continued:--

"You see, I cannot take my daughter to the country. My work will not
permit it. With a child one can find no situation. People are ridiculous
in the country. It was the good God who caused me to pass your inn. When
I caught sight of your little ones, so pretty, so clean, and so happy,
it overwhelmed me. I said: 'Here is a good mother. That is just the
thing; that will make three sisters.' And then, it will not be long
before I return. Will you keep my child for me?"

"I must see about it," replied the Thenardier.

"I will give you six francs a month."

Here a man's voice called from the depths of the cook-shop:--

"Not for less than seven francs. And six months paid in advance."

"Six times seven makes forty-two," said the Thenardier.

"I will give it," said the mother.

"And fifteen francs in addition for preliminary expenses," added the
man's voice.

"Total, fifty-seven francs," said Madame Thenardier. And she hummed
vaguely, with these figures:--

                 "It must be, said a warrior."


"I will pay it," said the mother. "I have eighty francs. I shall have
enough left to reach the country, by travelling on foot. I shall
earn money there, and as soon as I have a little I will return for my
darling."

The man's voice resumed:--

"The little one has an outfit?"

"That is my husband," said the Thenardier.

"Of course she has an outfit, the poor treasure.--I understood perfectly
that it was your husband.--And a beautiful outfit, too! a senseless
outfit, everything by the dozen, and silk gowns like a lady. It is here,
in my carpet-bag."

"You must hand it over," struck in the man's voice again.

"Of course I shall give it to you," said the mother. "It would be very
queer if I were to leave my daughter quite naked!"

The master's face appeared.

"That's good," said he.

The bargain was concluded. The mother passed the night at the inn, gave
up her money and left her child, fastened her carpet-bag once more, now
reduced in volume by the removal of the outfit, and light henceforth
and set out on the following morning, intending to return soon. People
arrange such departures tranquilly; but they are despairs!

A neighbor of the Thenardiers met this mother as she was setting out,
and came back with the remark:--

"I have just seen a woman crying in the street so that it was enough to
rend your heart."

When Cosette's mother had taken her departure, the man said to the
woman:--

"That will serve to pay my note for one hundred and ten francs which
falls due to-morrow; I lacked fifty francs. Do you know that I should
have had a bailiff and a protest after me? You played the mouse-trap
nicely with your young ones."

"Without suspecting it," said the woman.




CHAPTER II--FIRST SKETCH OF TWO UNPREPOSSESSING FIGURES

The mouse which had been caught was a pitiful specimen; but the cat
rejoices even over a lean mouse.

Who were these Thenardiers?

Let us say a word or two of them now. We will complete the sketch later
on.

These beings belonged to that bastard class composed of coarse people
who have been successful, and of intelligent people who have descended
in the scale, which is between the class called "middle" and the class
denominated as "inferior," and which combines some of the defects of the
second with nearly all the vices of the first, without possessing
the generous impulse of the workingman nor the honest order of the
bourgeois.

They were of those dwarfed natures which, if a dull fire chances to warm
them up, easily become monstrous. There was in the woman a substratum
of the brute, and in the man the material for a blackguard. Both were
susceptible, in the highest degree, of the sort of hideous progress
which is accomplished in the direction of evil. There exist crab-like
souls which are continually retreating towards the darkness,
retrograding in life rather than advancing, employing experience to
augment their deformity, growing incessantly worse, and becoming more
and more impregnated with an ever-augmenting blackness. This man and
woman possessed such souls.

Thenardier, in particular, was troublesome for a physiognomist. One can
only look at some men to distrust them; for one feels that they are
dark in both directions. They are uneasy in the rear and threatening
in front. There is something of the unknown about them. One can no more
answer for what they have done than for what they will do. The shadow
which they bear in their glance denounces them. From merely hearing them
utter a word or seeing them make a gesture, one obtains a glimpse of
sombre secrets in their past and of sombre mysteries in their future.

This Thenardier, if he himself was to be believed, had been a soldier--a
sergeant, he said. He had probably been through the campaign of 1815,
and had even conducted himself with tolerable valor, it would seem. We
shall see later on how much truth there was in this. The sign of his
hostelry was in allusion to one of his feats of arms. He had painted it
himself; for he knew how to do a little of everything, and badly.

It was at the epoch when the ancient classical romance which, after
having been Clelie, was no longer anything but Lodoiska, still noble,
but ever more and more vulgar, having fallen from Mademoiselle de
Scuderi to Madame Bournon-Malarme, and from Madame de Lafayette to
Madame Barthelemy-Hadot, was setting the loving hearts of the portresses
of Paris aflame, and even ravaging the suburbs to some extent. Madame
Thenardier was just intelligent enough to read this sort of books. She
lived on them. In them she drowned what brains she possessed. This had
given her, when very young, and even a little later, a sort of pensive
attitude towards her husband, a scamp of a certain depth, a ruffian
lettered to the extent of the grammar, coarse and fine at one and the
same time, but, so far as sentimentalism was concerned, given to the
perusal of Pigault-Lebrun, and "in what concerns the sex," as he said
in his jargon--a downright, unmitigated lout. His wife was twelve or
fifteen years younger than he was. Later on, when her hair, arranged in
a romantically drooping fashion, began to grow gray, when the Magaera
began to be developed from the Pamela, the female Thenardier was nothing
but a coarse, vicious woman, who had dabbled in stupid romances. Now,
one cannot read nonsense with impunity. The result was that her eldest
daughter was named Eponine; as for the younger, the poor little thing
came near being called Gulnare; I know not to what diversion, effected
by a romance of Ducray-Dumenil, she owed the fact that she merely bore
the name of Azelma.

However, we will remark by the way, everything was not ridiculous and
superficial in that curious epoch to which we are alluding, and which
may be designated as the anarchy of baptismal names. By the side of
this romantic element which we have just indicated there is the social
symptom. It is not rare for the neatherd's boy nowadays to bear the name
of Arthur, Alfred, or Alphonse, and for the vicomte--if there are
still any vicomtes--to be called Thomas, Pierre, or Jacques. This
displacement, which places the "elegant" name on the plebeian and the
rustic name on the aristocrat, is nothing else than an eddy of equality.
The irresistible penetration of the new inspiration is there as
everywhere else. Beneath this apparent discord there is a great and a
profound thing,--the French Revolution.




CHAPTER III--THE LARK

It is not all in all sufficient to be wicked in order to prosper. The
cook-shop was in a bad way.

Thanks to the traveller's fifty-seven francs, Thenardier had been able
to avoid a protest and to honor his signature. On the following month
they were again in need of money. The woman took Cosette's outfit to
Paris, and pawned it at the pawnbroker's for sixty francs. As soon
as that sum was spent, the Thenardiers grew accustomed to look on the
little girl merely as a child whom they were caring for out of charity;
and they treated her accordingly. As she had no longer any clothes, they
dressed her in the cast-off petticoats and chemises of the Thenardier
brats; that is to say, in rags. They fed her on what all the rest
had left--a little better than the dog, a little worse than the cat.
Moreover, the cat and the dog were her habitual table-companions;
Cosette ate with them under the table, from a wooden bowl similar to
theirs.

The mother, who had established herself, as we shall see later on, at M.
sur M., wrote, or, more correctly, caused to be written, a letter every
month, that she might have news of her child. The Thenardiers replied
invariably, "Cosette is doing wonderfully well."

At the expiration of the first six months the mother sent seven francs
for the seventh month, and continued her remittances with tolerable
regularity from month to month. The year was not completed when
Thenardier said: "A fine favor she is doing us, in sooth! What does she
expect us to do with her seven francs?" and he wrote to demand twelve
francs. The mother, whom they had persuaded into the belief that her
child was happy, "and was coming on well," submitted, and forwarded the
twelve francs.

Certain natures cannot love on the one hand without hating on the other.
Mother Thenardier loved her two daughters passionately, which caused her
to hate the stranger.

It is sad to think that the love of a mother can possess villainous
aspects. Little as was the space occupied by Cosette, it seemed to
her as though it were taken from her own, and that that little child
diminished the air which her daughters breathed. This woman, like many
women of her sort, had a load of caresses and a burden of blows and
injuries to dispense each day. If she had not had Cosette, it is certain
that her daughters, idolized as they were, would have received the whole
of it; but the stranger did them the service to divert the blows to
herself. Her daughters received nothing but caresses. Cosette could not
make a motion which did not draw down upon her head a heavy shower of
violent blows and unmerited chastisement. The sweet, feeble being, who
should not have understood anything of this world or of God, incessantly
punished, scolded, ill-used, beaten, and seeing beside her two little
creatures like herself, who lived in a ray of dawn!

Madame Thenardier was vicious with Cosette. Eponine and Azelma were
vicious. Children at that age are only copies of their mother. The size
is smaller; that is all.

A year passed; then another.

People in the village said:--

"Those Thenardiers are good people. They are not rich, and yet they are
bringing up a poor child who was abandoned on their hands!"

They thought that Cosette's mother had forgotten her.

In the meanwhile, Thenardier, having learned, it is impossible to say by
what obscure means, that the child was probably a bastard, and that the
mother could not acknowledge it, exacted fifteen francs a month, saying
that "the creature" was growing and "eating," and threatening to send
her away. "Let her not bother me," he exclaimed, "or I'll fire her brat
right into the middle of her secrets. I must have an increase." The
mother paid the fifteen francs.

From year to year the child grew, and so did her wretchedness.

As long as Cosette was little, she was the scape-goat of the two other
children; as soon as she began to develop a little, that is to say,
before she was even five years old, she became the servant of the
household.

Five years old! the reader will say; that is not probable. Alas! it is
true. Social suffering begins at all ages. Have we not recently seen the
trial of a man named Dumollard, an orphan turned bandit, who, from the
age of five, as the official documents state, being alone in the world,
"worked for his living and stole"?

Cosette was made to run on errands, to sweep the rooms, the courtyard,
the street, to wash the dishes, to even carry burdens. The Thenardiers
considered themselves all the more authorized to behave in this manner,
since the mother, who was still at M. sur M., had become irregular in
her payments. Some months she was in arrears.

If this mother had returned to Montfermeil at the end of these three
years, she would not have recognized her child. Cosette, so pretty and
rosy on her arrival in that house, was now thin and pale. She had an
indescribably uneasy look. "The sly creature," said the Thenardiers.

Injustice had made her peevish, and misery had made her ugly. Nothing
remained to her except her beautiful eyes, which inspired pain, because,
large as they were, it seemed as though one beheld in them a still
larger amount of sadness.

It was a heart-breaking thing to see this poor child, not yet six years
old, shivering in the winter in her old rags of linen, full of holes,
sweeping the street before daylight, with an enormous broom in her tiny
red hands, and a tear in her great eyes.

[Illustration: Cossette Sweeping  1b4-1-cossette-sweeping]

She was called the Lark in the neighborhood. The populace, who are fond
of these figures of speech, had taken a fancy to bestow this name on
this trembling, frightened, and shivering little creature, no bigger
than a bird, who was awake every morning before any one else in the
house or the village, and was always in the street or the fields before
daybreak.

Only the little lark never sang.




BOOK FIFTH.--THE DESCENT.




CHAPTER I--THE HISTORY OF A PROGRESS IN BLACK GLASS TRINKETS

And in the meantime, what had become of that mother who according to
the people at Montfermeil, seemed to have abandoned her child? Where was
she? What was she doing?

After leaving her little Cosette with the Thenardiers, she had continued
her journey, and had reached M. sur M.

This, it will be remembered, was in 1818.

Fantine had quitted her province ten years before. M. sur M. had changed
its aspect. While Fantine had been slowly descending from wretchedness
to wretchedness, her native town had prospered.

About two years previously one of those industrial facts which are the
grand events of small districts had taken place.

This detail is important, and we regard it as useful to develop it at
length; we should almost say, to underline it.

From time immemorial, M. sur M. had had for its special industry the
imitation of English jet and the black glass trinkets of Germany. This
industry had always vegetated, on account of the high price of the raw
material, which reacted on the manufacture. At the moment when Fantine
returned to M. sur M., an unheard-of transformation had taken place
in the production of "black goods." Towards the close of 1815 a man,
a stranger, had established himself in the town, and had been inspired
with the idea of substituting, in this manufacture, gum-lac for resin,
and, for bracelets in particular, slides of sheet-iron simply laid
together, for slides of soldered sheet-iron.

This very small change had effected a revolution.

This very small change had, in fact, prodigiously reduced the cost of
the raw material, which had rendered it possible in the first place, to
raise the price of manufacture, a benefit to the country; in the second
place, to improve the workmanship, an advantage to the consumer; in the
third place, to sell at a lower price, while trebling the profit, which
was a benefit to the manufacturer.

Thus three results ensued from one idea.

In less than three years the inventor of this process had become rich,
which is good, and had made every one about him rich, which is better.
He was a stranger in the Department. Of his origin, nothing was known;
of the beginning of his career, very little. It was rumored that he had
come to town with very little money, a few hundred francs at the most.

It was from this slender capital, enlisted in the service of an
ingenious idea, developed by method and thought, that he had drawn his
own fortune, and the fortune of the whole countryside.

On his arrival at M. sur M. he had only the garments, the appearance,
and the language of a workingman.

It appears that on the very day when he made his obscure entry into
the little town of M. sur M., just at nightfall, on a December evening,
knapsack on back and thorn club in hand, a large fire had broken out
in the town-hall. This man had rushed into the flames and saved, at the
risk of his own life, two children who belonged to the captain of the
gendarmerie; this is why they had forgotten to ask him for his passport.
Afterwards they had learned his name. He was called Father Madeleine.




CHAPTER II--MADELEINE

He was a man about fifty years of age, who had a preoccupied air, and
who was good. That was all that could be said about him.

Thanks to the rapid progress of the industry which he had so admirably
re-constructed, M. sur M. had become a rather important centre of trade.
Spain, which consumes a good deal of black jet, made enormous purchases
there each year. M. sur M. almost rivalled London and Berlin in this
branch of commerce. Father Madeleine's profits were such, that at the
end of the second year he was able to erect a large factory, in which
there were two vast workrooms, one for the men, and the other for women.
Any one who was hungry could present himself there, and was sure of
finding employment and bread. Father Madeleine required of the men good
will, of the women pure morals, and of all, probity. He had separated
the work-rooms in order to separate the sexes, and so that the women and
girls might remain discreet. On this point he was inflexible. It was the
only thing in which he was in a manner intolerant. He was all the more
firmly set on this severity, since M. sur M., being a garrison town,
opportunities for corruption abounded. However, his coming had been a
boon, and his presence was a godsend. Before Father Madeleine's arrival,
everything had languished in the country; now everything lived with
a healthy life of toil. A strong circulation warmed everything and
penetrated everywhere. Slack seasons and wretchedness were unknown.
There was no pocket so obscure that it had not a little money in it; no
dwelling so lowly that there was not some little joy within it.

Father Madeleine gave employment to every one. He exacted but one thing:
Be an honest man. Be an honest woman.

As we have said, in the midst of this activity of which he was the cause
and the pivot, Father Madeleine made his fortune; but a singular thing
in a simple man of business, it did not seem as though that were his
chief care. He appeared to be thinking much of others, and little of
himself. In 1820 he was known to have a sum of six hundred and thirty
thousand francs lodged in his name with Laffitte; but before reserving
these six hundred and thirty thousand francs, he had spent more than a
million for the town and its poor.

The hospital was badly endowed; he founded six beds there. M. sur M. is
divided into the upper and the lower town. The lower town, in which he
lived, had but one school, a miserable hovel, which was falling to ruin:
he constructed two, one for girls, the other for boys. He allotted a
salary from his own funds to the two instructors, a salary twice as
large as their meagre official salary, and one day he said to some one
who expressed surprise, "The two prime functionaries of the state are
the nurse and the schoolmaster." He created at his own expense an infant
school, a thing then almost unknown in France, and a fund for aiding old
and infirm workmen. As his factory was a centre, a new quarter, in which
there were a good many indigent families, rose rapidly around him; he
established there a free dispensary.

At first, when they watched his beginnings, the good souls said, "He's
a jolly fellow who means to get rich." When they saw him enriching
the country before he enriched himself, the good souls said, "He is
an ambitious man." This seemed all the more probable since the man was
religious, and even practised his religion to a certain degree, a thing
which was very favorably viewed at that epoch. He went regularly to
low mass every Sunday. The local deputy, who nosed out all rivalry
everywhere, soon began to grow uneasy over this religion. This deputy
had been a member of the legislative body of the Empire, and shared the
religious ideas of a father of the Oratoire, known under the name
of Fouche, Duc d'Otrante, whose creature and friend he had been. He
indulged in gentle raillery at God with closed doors. But when he beheld
the wealthy manufacturer Madeleine going to low mass at seven o'clock,
he perceived in him a possible candidate, and resolved to outdo him; he
took a Jesuit confessor, and went to high mass and to vespers. Ambition
was at that time, in the direct acceptation of the word, a race to the
steeple. The poor profited by this terror as well as the good God, for
the honorable deputy also founded two beds in the hospital, which made
twelve.

Nevertheless, in 1819 a rumor one morning circulated through the town
to the effect that, on the representations of the prefect and in
consideration of the services rendered by him to the country, Father
Madeleine was to be appointed by the King, mayor of M. sur M. Those who
had pronounced this new-comer to be "an ambitious fellow," seized with
delight on this opportunity which all men desire, to exclaim, "There!
what did we say!" All M. sur M. was in an uproar. The rumor was well
founded. Several days later the appointment appeared in the Moniteur. On
the following day Father Madeleine refused.

In this same year of 1819 the products of the new process invented by
Madeleine figured in the industrial exhibition; when the jury made their
report, the King appointed the inventor a chevalier of the Legion of
Honor. A fresh excitement in the little town. Well, so it was the cross
that he wanted! Father Madeleine refused the cross.

Decidedly this man was an enigma. The good souls got out of their
predicament by saying, "After all, he is some sort of an adventurer."

We have seen that the country owed much to him; the poor owed him
everything; he was so useful and he was so gentle that people had been
obliged to honor and respect him. His workmen, in particular, adored
him, and he endured this adoration with a sort of melancholy gravity.
When he was known to be rich, "people in society" bowed to him, and
he received invitations in the town; he was called, in town, Monsieur
Madeleine; his workmen and the children continued to call him Father
Madeleine, and that was what was most adapted to make him smile. In
proportion as he mounted, throve, invitations rained down upon him.
"Society" claimed him for its own. The prim little drawing-rooms on
M. sur M., which, of course, had at first been closed to the artisan,
opened both leaves of their folding-doors to the millionnaire. They made
a thousand advances to him. He refused.

This time the good gossips had no trouble. "He is an ignorant man, of
no education. No one knows where he came from. He would not know how to
behave in society. It has not been absolutely proved that he knows how
to read."

When they saw him making money, they said, "He is a man of business."
When they saw him scattering his money about, they said, "He is an
ambitious man." When he was seen to decline honors, they said, "He is
an adventurer." When they saw him repulse society, they said, "He is a
brute."

In 1820, five years after his arrival in M. sur M., the services which
he had rendered to the district were so dazzling, the opinion of
the whole country round about was so unanimous, that the King again
appointed him mayor of the town. He again declined; but the prefect
resisted his refusal, all the notabilities of the place came to implore
him, the people in the street besought him; the urging was so vigorous
that he ended by accepting. It was noticed that the thing which seemed
chiefly to bring him to a decision was the almost irritated apostrophe
addressed to him by an old woman of the people, who called to him from
her threshold, in an angry way: "A good mayor is a useful thing. Is he
drawing back before the good which he can do?"

This was the third phase of his ascent. Father Madeleine had become
Monsieur Madeleine. Monsieur Madeleine became Monsieur le Maire.




CHAPTER III--SUMS DEPOSITED WITH LAFFITTE

On the other hand, he remained as simple as on the first day. He had
gray hair, a serious eye, the sunburned complexion of a laborer, the
thoughtful visage of a philosopher. He habitually wore a hat with a
wide brim, and a long coat of coarse cloth, buttoned to the chin. He
fulfilled his duties as mayor; but, with that exception, he lived in
solitude. He spoke to but few people. He avoided polite attentions;
he escaped quickly; he smiled to relieve himself of the necessity of
talking; he gave, in order to get rid of the necessity for smiling, The
women said of him, "What a good-natured bear!" His pleasure consisted in
strolling in the fields.

He always took his meals alone, with an open book before him, which he
read. He had a well-selected little library. He loved books; books
are cold but safe friends. In proportion as leisure came to him with
fortune, he seemed to take advantage of it to cultivate his mind. It had
been observed that, ever since his arrival at M. sur M.. his language
had grown more polished, more choice, and more gentle with every passing
year. He liked to carry a gun with him on his strolls, but he rarely
made use of it. When he did happen to do so, his shooting was something
so infallible as to inspire terror. He never killed an inoffensive
animal. He never shot at a little bird.

Although he was no longer young, it was thought that he was still
prodigiously strong. He offered his assistance to any one who was in
need of it, lifted a horse, released a wheel clogged in the mud, or
stopped a runaway bull by the horns. He always had his pockets full
of money when he went out; but they were empty on his return. When he
passed through a village, the ragged brats ran joyously after him, and
surrounded him like a swarm of gnats.

It was thought that he must, in the past, have lived a country life,
since he knew all sorts of useful secrets, which he taught to the
peasants. He taught them how to destroy scurf on wheat, by sprinkling it
and the granary and inundating the cracks in the floor with a solution
of common salt; and how to chase away weevils by hanging up orviot in
bloom everywhere, on the walls and the ceilings, among the grass and in
the houses.

He had "recipes" for exterminating from a field, blight, tares, foxtail,
and all parasitic growths which destroy the wheat. He defended a rabbit
warren against rats, simply by the odor of a guinea-pig which he placed
in it.

One day he saw some country people busily engaged in pulling up nettles;
he examined the plants, which were uprooted and already dried, and said:
"They are dead. Nevertheless, it would be a good thing to know how to
make use of them. When the nettle is young, the leaf makes an excellent
vegetable; when it is older, it has filaments and fibres like hemp and
flax. Nettle cloth is as good as linen cloth. Chopped up, nettles are
good for poultry; pounded, they are good for horned cattle. The seed of
the nettle, mixed with fodder, gives gloss to the hair of animals; the
root, mixed with salt, produces a beautiful yellow coloring-matter.
Moreover, it is an excellent hay, which can be cut twice. And what is
required for the nettle? A little soil, no care, no culture. Only the
seed falls as it is ripe, and it is difficult to collect it. That
is all. With the exercise of a little care, the nettle could be made
useful; it is neglected and it becomes hurtful. It is exterminated. How
many men resemble the nettle!" He added, after a pause: "Remember this,
my friends: there are no such things as bad plants or bad men. There are
only bad cultivators."

The children loved him because he knew how to make charming little
trifles of straw and cocoanuts.

When he saw the door of a church hung in black, he entered: he sought
out funerals as other men seek christenings. Widowhood and the grief of
others attracted him, because of his great gentleness; he mingled with
the friends clad in mourning, with families dressed in black, with
the priests groaning around a coffin. He seemed to like to give to his
thoughts for text these funereal psalmodies filled with the vision of
the other world. With his eyes fixed on heaven, he listened with a
sort of aspiration towards all the mysteries of the infinite, those sad
voices which sing on the verge of the obscure abyss of death.

He performed a multitude of good actions, concealing his agency in them
as a man conceals himself because of evil actions. He penetrated houses
privately, at night; he ascended staircases furtively. A poor wretch
on returning to his attic would find that his door had been opened,
sometimes even forced, during his absence. The poor man made a clamor
over it: some malefactor had been there! He entered, and the first
thing he beheld was a piece of gold lying forgotten on some piece of
furniture. The "malefactor" who had been there was Father Madeleine.

He was affable and sad. The people said: "There is a rich man who has
not a haughty air. There is a happy man who has not a contented air."

Some people maintained that he was a mysterious person, and that no
one ever entered his chamber, which was a regular anchorite's cell,
furnished with winged hour-glasses and enlivened by cross-bones and
skulls of dead men! This was much talked of, so that one of the elegant
and malicious young women of M. sur M. came to him one day, and asked:
"Monsieur le Maire, pray show us your chamber. It is said to be a
grotto." He smiled, and introduced them instantly into this "grotto."
They were well punished for their curiosity. The room was very simply
furnished in mahogany, which was rather ugly, like all furniture of
that sort, and hung with paper worth twelve sous. They could see nothing
remarkable about it, except two candlesticks of antique pattern which
stood on the chimney-piece and appeared to be silver, "for they were
hall-marked," an observation full of the type of wit of petty towns.

Nevertheless, people continued to say that no one ever got into the
room, and that it was a hermit's cave, a mysterious retreat, a hole, a
tomb.

It was also whispered about that he had "immense" sums deposited with
Laffitte, with this peculiar feature, that they were always at his
immediate disposal, so that, it was added, M. Madeleine could make his
appearance at Laffitte's any morning, sign a receipt, and carry off his
two or three millions in ten minutes. In reality, "these two or three
millions" were reducible, as we have said, to six hundred and thirty or
forty thousand francs.




CHAPTER IV--M. MADELEINE IN MOURNING

At the beginning of 1820 the newspapers announced the death of M.
Myriel, Bishop of D----, surnamed "Monseigneur Bienvenu," who had died
in the odor of sanctity at the age of eighty-two.

The Bishop of D---- to supply here a detail which the papers
omitted--had been blind for many years before his death, and content to
be blind, as his sister was beside him.

Let us remark by the way, that to be blind and to be loved, is, in fact,
one of the most strangely exquisite forms of happiness upon this earth,
where nothing is complete. To have continually at one's side a woman, a
daughter, a sister, a charming being, who is there because you need her
and because she cannot do without you; to know that we are indispensable
to a person who is necessary to us; to be able to incessantly measure
one's affection by the amount of her presence which she bestows on us,
and to say to ourselves, "Since she consecrates the whole of her time
to me, it is because I possess the whole of her heart"; to behold her
thought in lieu of her face; to be able to verify the fidelity of one
being amid the eclipse of the world; to regard the rustle of a gown
as the sound of wings; to hear her come and go, retire, speak, return,
sing, and to think that one is the centre of these steps, of this
speech; to manifest at each instant one's personal attraction; to feel
one's self all the more powerful because of one's infirmity; to become
in one's obscurity, and through one's obscurity, the star around which
this angel gravitates,--few felicities equal this. The supreme happiness
of life consists in the conviction that one is loved; loved for
one's own sake--let us say rather, loved in spite of one's self; this
conviction the blind man possesses. To be served in distress is to be
caressed. Does he lack anything? No. One does not lose the sight when
one has love. And what love! A love wholly constituted of virtue! There
is no blindness where there is certainty. Soul seeks soul, gropingly,
and finds it. And this soul, found and tested, is a woman. A hand
sustains you; it is hers: a mouth lightly touches your brow; it is her
mouth: you hear a breath very near you; it is hers. To have everything
of her, from her worship to her pity, never to be left, to have that
sweet weakness aiding you, to lean upon that immovable reed, to
touch Providence with one's hands, and to be able to take it in
one's arms,--God made tangible,--what bliss! The heart, that obscure,
celestial flower, undergoes a mysterious blossoming. One would not
exchange that shadow for all brightness! The angel soul is there,
uninterruptedly there; if she departs, it is but to return again; she
vanishes like a dream, and reappears like reality. One feels warmth
approaching, and behold! she is there. One overflows with serenity, with
gayety, with ecstasy; one is a radiance amid the night. And there are
a thousand little cares. Nothings, which are enormous in that void. The
most ineffable accents of the feminine voice employed to lull you, and
supplying the vanished universe to you. One is caressed with the soul.
One sees nothing, but one feels that one is adored. It is a paradise of
shadows.

It was from this paradise that Monseigneur Welcome had passed to the
other.

The announcement of his death was reprinted by the local journal of M.
sur M. On the following day, M. Madeleine appeared clad wholly in black,
and with crape on his hat.

This mourning was noticed in the town, and commented on. It seemed
to throw a light on M. Madeleine's origin. It was concluded that some
relationship existed between him and the venerable Bishop. "He has gone
into mourning for the Bishop of D----" said the drawing-rooms; this
raised M. Madeleine's credit greatly, and procured for him, instantly
and at one blow, a certain consideration in the noble world of M. sur
M. The microscopic Faubourg Saint-Germain of the place meditated raising
the quarantine against M. Madeleine, the probable relative of a bishop.
M. Madeleine perceived the advancement which he had obtained, by the
more numerous courtesies of the old women and the more plentiful smiles
of the young ones. One evening, a ruler in that petty great world, who
was curious by right of seniority, ventured to ask him, "M. le Maire is
doubtless a cousin of the late Bishop of D----?"

He said, "No, Madame."

"But," resumed the dowager, "you are wearing mourning for him."

He replied, "It is because I was a servant in his family in my youth."

Another thing which was remarked, was, that every time that he
encountered in the town a young Savoyard who was roaming about the
country and seeking chimneys to sweep, the mayor had him summoned,
inquired his name, and gave him money. The little Savoyards told each
other about it: a great many of them passed that way.




CHAPTER V--VAGUE FLASHES ON THE HORIZON

Little by little, and in the course of time, all this opposition
subsided. There had at first been exercised against M. Madeleine,
in virtue of a sort of law which all those who rise must submit to,
blackening and calumnies; then they grew to be nothing more than
ill-nature, then merely malicious remarks, then even this entirely
disappeared; respect became complete, unanimous, cordial, and towards
1821 the moment arrived when the word "Monsieur le Maire" was pronounced
at M. sur M. with almost the same accent as "Monseigneur the Bishop"
had been pronounced in D---- in 1815. People came from a distance of ten
leagues around to consult M. Madeleine. He put an end to differences,
he prevented lawsuits, he reconciled enemies. Every one took him for the
judge, and with good reason. It seemed as though he had for a soul the
book of the natural law. It was like an epidemic of veneration, which in
the course of six or seven years gradually took possession of the whole
district.

One single man in the town, in the arrondissement, absolutely escaped
this contagion, and, whatever Father Madeleine did, remained his
opponent as though a sort of incorruptible and imperturbable instinct
kept him on the alert and uneasy. It seems, in fact, as though there
existed in certain men a veritable bestial instinct, though pure and
upright, like all instincts, which creates antipathies and sympathies,
which fatally separates one nature from another nature, which does not
hesitate, which feels no disquiet, which does not hold its peace,
and which never belies itself, clear in its obscurity, infallible,
imperious, intractable, stubborn to all counsels of the intelligence
and to all the dissolvents of reason, and which, in whatever manner
destinies are arranged, secretly warns the man-dog of the presence of
the man-cat, and the man-fox of the presence of the man-lion.

It frequently happened that when M. Madeleine was passing along a
street, calm, affectionate, surrounded by the blessings of all, a man of
lofty stature, clad in an iron-gray frock-coat, armed with a heavy
cane, and wearing a battered hat, turned round abruptly behind him, and
followed him with his eyes until he disappeared, with folded arms and
a slow shake of the head, and his upper lip raised in company with
his lower to his nose, a sort of significant grimace which might be
translated by: "What is that man, after all? I certainly have seen him
somewhere. In any case, I am not his dupe."

This person, grave with a gravity which was almost menacing, was one
of those men who, even when only seen by a rapid glimpse, arrest the
spectator's attention.

His name was Javert, and he belonged to the police.

At M. sur M. he exercised the unpleasant but useful functions of an
inspector. He had not seen Madeleine's beginnings. Javert owed the post
which he occupied to the protection of M. Chabouillet, the secretary of
the Minister of State, Comte Angeles, then prefect of police at Paris.
When Javert arrived at M. sur M. the fortune of the great manufacturer
was already made, and Father Madeleine had become Monsieur Madeleine.

Certain police officers have a peculiar physiognomy, which is
complicated with an air of baseness mingled with an air of authority.
Javert possessed this physiognomy minus the baseness.

It is our conviction that if souls were visible to the eyes, we should
be able to see distinctly that strange thing that each one individual
of the human race corresponds to some one of the species of the animal
creation; and we could easily recognize this truth, hardly perceived
by the thinker, that from the oyster to the eagle, from the pig to the
tiger, all animals exist in man, and that each one of them is in a man.
Sometimes even several of them at a time.

Animals are nothing else than the figures of our virtues and our vices,
straying before our eyes, the visible phantoms of our souls. God shows
them to us in order to induce us to reflect. Only since animals are mere
shadows, God has not made them capable of education in the full sense
of the word; what is the use? On the contrary, our souls being realities
and having a goal which is appropriate to them, God has bestowed on
them intelligence; that is to say, the possibility of education. Social
education, when well done, can always draw from a soul, of whatever sort
it may be, the utility which it contains.

This, be it said, is of course from the restricted point of view of the
terrestrial life which is apparent, and without prejudging the profound
question of the anterior or ulterior personality of the beings which are
not man. The visible _I_ in nowise authorizes the thinker to deny the
latent _I_. Having made this reservation, let us pass on.

Now, if the reader will admit, for a moment, with us, that in every man
there is one of the animal species of creation, it will be easy for us
to say what there was in Police Officer Javert.

The peasants of Asturias are convinced that in every litter of wolves
there is one dog, which is killed by the mother because, otherwise, as
he grew up, he would devour the other little ones.

Give to this dog-son of a wolf a human face, and the result will be
Javert.

Javert had been born in prison, of a fortune-teller, whose husband was
in the galleys. As he grew up, he thought that he was outside the pale
of society, and he despaired of ever re-entering it. He observed that
society unpardoningly excludes two classes of men,--those who attack
it and those who guard it; he had no choice except between these
two classes; at the same time, he was conscious of an indescribable
foundation of rigidity, regularity, and probity, complicated with an
inexpressible hatred for the race of bohemians whence he was sprung. He
entered the police; he succeeded there. At forty years of age he was an
inspector.

During his youth he had been employed in the convict establishments of
the South.

Before proceeding further, let us come to an understanding as to the
words, "human face," which we have just applied to Javert.

The human face of Javert consisted of a flat nose, with two deep
nostrils, towards which enormous whiskers ascended on his cheeks. One
felt ill at ease when he saw these two forests and these two caverns
for the first time. When Javert laughed,--and his laugh was rare and
terrible,--his thin lips parted and revealed to view not only his teeth,
but his gums, and around his nose there formed a flattened and savage
fold, as on the muzzle of a wild beast. Javert, serious, was a watchdog;
when he laughed, he was a tiger. As for the rest, he had very little
skull and a great deal of jaw; his hair concealed his forehead and
fell over his eyebrows; between his eyes there was a permanent, central
frown, like an imprint of wrath; his gaze was obscure; his mouth pursed
up and terrible; his air that of ferocious command.

This man was composed of two very simple and two very good sentiments,
comparatively; but he rendered them almost bad, by dint of exaggerating
them,--respect for authority, hatred of rebellion; and in his eyes,
murder, robbery, all crimes, are only forms of rebellion. He enveloped
in a blind and profound faith every one who had a function in the state,
from the prime minister to the rural policeman. He covered with scorn,
aversion, and disgust every one who had once crossed the legal threshold
of evil. He was absolute, and admitted no exceptions. On the one hand,
he said, "The functionary can make no mistake; the magistrate is never
the wrong." On the other hand, he said, "These men are irremediably
lost. Nothing good can come from them." He fully shared the opinion of
those extreme minds which attribute to human law I know not what power
of making, or, if the reader will have it so, of authenticating, demons,
and who place a Styx at the base of society. He was stoical, serious,
austere; a melancholy dreamer, humble and haughty, like fanatics. His
glance was like a gimlet, cold and piercing. His whole life hung on
these two words: watchfulness and supervision. He had introduced a
straight line into what is the most crooked thing in the world;
he possessed the conscience of his usefulness, the religion of his
functions, and he was a spy as other men are priests. Woe to the man
who fell into his hands! He would have arrested his own father, if
the latter had escaped from the galleys, and would have denounced his
mother, if she had broken her ban. And he would have done it with that
sort of inward satisfaction which is conferred by virtue. And, withal,
a life of privation, isolation, abnegation, chastity, with never
a diversion. It was implacable duty; the police understood, as the
Spartans understood Sparta, a pitiless lying in wait, a ferocious
honesty, a marble informer, Brutus in Vidocq.

Javert's whole person was expressive of the man who spies and who
withdraws himself from observation. The mystical school of Joseph de
Maistre, which at that epoch seasoned with lofty cosmogony those things
which were called the ultra newspapers, would not have failed to declare
that Javert was a symbol. His brow was not visible; it disappeared
beneath his hat: his eyes were not visible, since they were lost under
his eyebrows: his chin was not visible, for it was plunged in his
cravat: his hands were not visible; they were drawn up in his sleeves:
and his cane was not visible; he carried it under his coat. But when the
occasion presented itself, there was suddenly seen to emerge from all
this shadow, as from an ambuscade, a narrow and angular forehead, a
baleful glance, a threatening chin, enormous hands, and a monstrous
cudgel.

In his leisure moments, which were far from frequent, he read, although
he hated books; this caused him to be not wholly illiterate. This could
be recognized by some emphasis in his speech.

As we have said, he had no vices. When he was pleased with himself,
he permitted himself a pinch of snuff. Therein lay his connection with
humanity.

The reader will have no difficulty in understanding that Javert was the
terror of that whole class which the annual statistics of the Ministry
of Justice designates under the rubric, Vagrants. The name of Javert
routed them by its mere utterance; the face of Javert petrified them at
sight.

Such was this formidable man.

Javert was like an eye constantly fixed on M. Madeleine. An eye full of
suspicion and conjecture. M. Madeleine had finally perceived the fact;
but it seemed to be of no importance to him. He did not even put a
question to Javert; he neither sought nor avoided him; he bore that
embarrassing and almost oppressive gaze without appearing to notice it.
He treated Javert with ease and courtesy, as he did all the rest of the
world.

It was divined, from some words which escaped Javert, that he had
secretly investigated, with that curiosity which belongs to the race,
and into which there enters as much instinct as will, all the anterior
traces which Father Madeleine might have left elsewhere. He seemed to
know, and he sometimes said in covert words, that some one had gleaned
certain information in a certain district about a family which had
disappeared. Once he chanced to say, as he was talking to himself, "I
think I have him!" Then he remained pensive for three days, and uttered
not a word. It seemed that the thread which he thought he held had
broken.

Moreover, and this furnishes the necessary corrective for the too
absolute sense which certain words might present, there can be nothing
really infallible in a human creature, and the peculiarity of instinct
is that it can become confused, thrown off the track, and defeated.
Otherwise, it would be superior to intelligence, and the beast would be
found to be provided with a better light than man.

Javert was evidently somewhat disconcerted by the perfect naturalness
and tranquillity of M. Madeleine.

One day, nevertheless, his strange manner appeared to produce an
impression on M. Madeleine. It was on the following occasion.




CHAPTER VI--FATHER FAUCHELEVENT

One morning M. Madeleine was passing through an unpaved alley of M. sur
M.; he heard a noise, and saw a group some distance away. He approached.
An old man named Father Fauchelevent had just fallen beneath his cart,
his horse having tumbled down.

This Fauchelevent was one of the few enemies whom M. Madeleine had at
that time. When Madeleine arrived in the neighborhood, Fauchelevent, an
ex-notary and a peasant who was almost educated, had a business which
was beginning to be in a bad way. Fauchelevent had seen this simple
workman grow rich, while he, a lawyer, was being ruined. This had filled
him with jealousy, and he had done all he could, on every occasion,
to injure Madeleine. Then bankruptcy had come; and as the old man had
nothing left but a cart and a horse, and neither family nor children, he
had turned carter.

The horse had two broken legs and could not rise. The old man was caught
in the wheels. The fall had been so unlucky that the whole weight of the
vehicle rested on his breast. The cart was quite heavily laden. Father
Fauchelevent was rattling in the throat in the most lamentable manner.
They had tried, but in vain, to drag him out. An unmethodical effort,
aid awkwardly given, a wrong shake, might kill him. It was impossible to
disengage him otherwise than by lifting the vehicle off of him.
Javert, who had come up at the moment of the accident, had sent for a
jack-screw.

M. Madeleine arrived. People stood aside respectfully.

"Help!" cried old Fauchelevent. "Who will be good and save the old man?"

M. Madeleine turned towards those present:--

"Is there a jack-screw to be had?"

"One has been sent for," answered the peasant.

"How long will it take to get it?"

"They have gone for the nearest, to Flachot's place, where there is a
farrier; but it makes no difference; it will take a good quarter of an
hour."

"A quarter of an hour!" exclaimed Madeleine.

It had rained on the preceding night; the soil was soaked.

The cart was sinking deeper into the earth every moment, and crushing
the old carter's breast more and more. It was evident that his ribs
would be broken in five minutes more.

"It is impossible to wait another quarter of an hour," said Madeleine to
the peasants, who were staring at him.

"We must!"

"But it will be too late then! Don't you see that the cart is sinking?"

"Well!"

"Listen," resumed Madeleine; "there is still room enough under the cart
to allow a man to crawl beneath it and raise it with his back. Only half
a minute, and the poor man can be taken out. Is there any one here who
has stout loins and heart? There are five louis d'or to be earned!"

Not a man in the group stirred.

"Ten louis," said Madeleine.

The persons present dropped their eyes. One of them muttered: "A man
would need to be devilish strong. And then he runs the risk of getting
crushed!"

"Come," began Madeleine again, "twenty louis."

The same silence.

"It is not the will which is lacking," said a voice.

M. Madeleine turned round, and recognized Javert. He had not noticed him
on his arrival.

Javert went on:--

"It is strength. One would have to be a terrible man to do such a thing
as lift a cart like that on his back."

Then, gazing fixedly at M. Madeleine, he went on, emphasizing every word
that he uttered:--

"Monsieur Madeleine, I have never known but one man capable of doing
what you ask."

Madeleine shuddered.

Javert added, with an air of indifference, but without removing his eyes
from Madeleine:--

"He was a convict."

"Ah!" said Madeleine.

"In the galleys at Toulon."

Madeleine turned pale.

Meanwhile, the cart continued to sink slowly. Father Fauchelevent
rattled in the throat, and shrieked:--

"I am strangling! My ribs are breaking! a screw! something! Ah!"

Madeleine glanced about him.

"Is there, then, no one who wishes to earn twenty louis and save the
life of this poor old man?"

No one stirred. Javert resumed:--

"I have never known but one man who could take the place of a screw, and
he was that convict."

"Ah! It is crushing me!" cried the old man.

Madeleine raised his head, met Javert's falcon eye still fixed upon
him, looked at the motionless peasants, and smiled sadly. Then, without
saying a word, he fell on his knees, and before the crowd had even had
time to utter a cry, he was underneath the vehicle.

A terrible moment of expectation and silence ensued.

They beheld Madeleine, almost flat on his stomach beneath that terrible
weight, make two vain efforts to bring his knees and his elbows
together. They shouted to him, "Father Madeleine, come out!" Old
Fauchelevent himself said to him, "Monsieur Madeleine, go away! You see
that I am fated to die! Leave me! You will get yourself crushed also!"
Madeleine made no reply.

All the spectators were panting. The wheels had continued to sink, and
it had become almost impossible for Madeleine to make his way from under
the vehicle.

Suddenly the enormous mass was seen to quiver, the cart rose slowly, the
wheels half emerged from the ruts. They heard a stifled voice crying,
"Make haste! Help!" It was Madeleine, who had just made a final effort.

They rushed forwards. The devotion of a single man had given force and
courage to all. The cart was raised by twenty arms. Old Fauchelevent was
saved.

Madeleine rose. He was pale, though dripping with perspiration. His
clothes were torn and covered with mud. All wept. The old man kissed
his knees and called him the good God. As for him, he bore upon
his countenance an indescribable expression of happy and celestial
suffering, and he fixed his tranquil eye on Javert, who was still
staring at him.




CHAPTER VII--FAUCHELEVENT BECOMES A GARDENER IN PARIS


Fauchelevent had dislocated his kneepan in his fall. Father Madeleine
had him conveyed to an infirmary which he had established for his
workmen in the factory building itself, and which was served by two
sisters of charity. On the following morning the old man found a
thousand-franc bank-note on his night-stand, with these words in Father
Madeleine's writing: "I purchase your horse and cart." The cart was
broken, and the horse was dead. Fauchelevent recovered, but his knee
remained stiff. M. Madeleine, on the recommendation of the sisters of
charity and of his priest, got the good man a place as gardener in a
female convent in the Rue Saint-Antoine in Paris.

Some time afterwards, M. Madeleine was appointed mayor. The first time
that Javert beheld M. Madeleine clothed in the scarf which gave him
authority over the town, he felt the sort of shudder which a watch-dog
might experience on smelling a wolf in his master's clothes. From
that time forth he avoided him as much as he possibly could. When the
requirements of the service imperatively demanded it, and he could
not do otherwise than meet the mayor, he addressed him with profound
respect.

This prosperity created at M. sur M. by Father Madeleine had, besides
the visible signs which we have mentioned, another symptom which was
none the less significant for not being visible. This never deceives.
When the population suffers, when work is lacking, when there is no
commerce, the tax-payer resists imposts through penury, he exhausts and
oversteps his respite, and the state expends a great deal of money in
the charges for compelling and collection. When work is abundant, when
the country is rich and happy, the taxes are paid easily and cost the
state nothing. It may be said, that there is one infallible thermometer
of the public misery and riches,--the cost of collecting the taxes.
In the course of seven years the expense of collecting the taxes had
diminished three-fourths in the arrondissement of M. sur M., and this
led to this arrondissement being frequently cited from all the rest by
M. de Villele, then Minister of Finance.

Such was the condition of the country when Fantine returned thither. No
one remembered her. Fortunately, the door of M. Madeleine's factory was
like the face of a friend. She presented herself there, and was admitted
to the women's workroom. The trade was entirely new to Fantine; she
could not be very skilful at it, and she therefore earned but little by
her day's work; but it was sufficient; the problem was solved; she was
earning her living.




CHAPTER VIII--MADAME VICTURNIEN EXPENDS THIRTY FRANCS ON MORALITY

When Fantine saw that she was making her living, she felt joyful for a
moment. To live honestly by her own labor, what mercy from heaven! The
taste for work had really returned to her. She bought a looking-glass,
took pleasure in surveying in it her youth, her beautiful hair, her fine
teeth; she forgot many things; she thought only of Cosette and of the
possible future, and was almost happy. She hired a little room and
furnished on credit on the strength of her future work--a lingering
trace of her improvident ways. As she was not able to say that she was
married she took good care, as we have seen, not to mention her little
girl.

At first, as the reader has seen, she paid the Thenardiers promptly. As
she only knew how to sign her name, she was obliged to write through a
public letter-writer.

She wrote often, and this was noticed. It began to be said in an
undertone, in the women's workroom, that Fantine "wrote letters" and
that "she had ways about her."

There is no one for spying on people's actions like those who are
not concerned in them. Why does that gentleman never come except at
nightfall? Why does Mr. So-and-So never hang his key on its nail on
Tuesday? Why does he always take the narrow streets? Why does Madame
always descend from her hackney-coach before reaching her house? Why
does she send out to purchase six sheets of note paper, when she has a
"whole stationer's shop full of it?" etc. There exist beings who, for
the sake of obtaining the key to these enigmas, which are, moreover, of
no consequence whatever to them, spend more money, waste more time,
take more trouble, than would be required for ten good actions, and
that gratuitously, for their own pleasure, without receiving any other
payment for their curiosity than curiosity. They will follow up such and
such a man or woman for whole days; they will do sentry duty for hours
at a time on the corners of the streets, under alley-way doors at night,
in cold and rain; they will bribe errand-porters, they will make the
drivers of hackney-coaches and lackeys tipsy, buy a waiting-maid, suborn
a porter. Why? For no reason. A pure passion for seeing, knowing,
and penetrating into things. A pure itch for talking. And often
these secrets once known, these mysteries made public, these enigmas
illuminated by the light of day, bring on catastrophies, duels,
failures, the ruin of families, and broken lives, to the great joy
of those who have "found out everything," without any interest in the
matter, and by pure instinct. A sad thing.

Certain persons are malicious solely through a necessity for talking.
Their conversation, the chat of the drawing-room, gossip of the
anteroom, is like those chimneys which consume wood rapidly; they need
a great amount of combustibles; and their combustibles are furnished by
their neighbors.

So Fantine was watched.

In addition, many a one was jealous of her golden hair and of her white
teeth.

It was remarked that in the workroom she often turned aside, in the
midst of the rest, to wipe away a tear. These were the moments when she
was thinking of her child; perhaps, also, of the man whom she had loved.

Breaking the gloomy bonds of the past is a mournful task.

It was observed that she wrote twice a month at least, and that she
paid the carriage on the letter. They managed to obtain the address:
Monsieur, Monsieur Thenardier, inn-keeper at Montfermeil. The public
writer, a good old man who could not fill his stomach with red wine
without emptying his pocket of secrets, was made to talk in the
wine-shop. In short, it was discovered that Fantine had a child. "She
must be a pretty sort of a woman." An old gossip was found, who made the
trip to Montfermeil, talked to the Thenardiers, and said on her return:
"For my five and thirty francs I have freed my mind. I have seen the
child."

The gossip who did this thing was a gorgon named Madame Victurnien, the
guardian and door-keeper of every one's virtue. Madame Victurnien was
fifty-six, and re-enforced the mask of ugliness with the mask of age.
A quavering voice, a whimsical mind. This old dame had once been
young--astonishing fact! In her youth, in '93, she had married a
monk who had fled from his cloister in a red cap, and passed from
the Bernardines to the Jacobins. She was dry, rough, peevish, sharp,
captious, almost venomous; all this in memory of her monk, whose widow
she was, and who had ruled over her masterfully and bent her to his
will. She was a nettle in which the rustle of the cassock was visible.
At the Restoration she had turned bigot, and that with so much energy
that the priests had forgiven her her monk. She had a small property,
which she bequeathed with much ostentation to a religious community.
She was in high favor at the episcopal palace of Arras. So this Madame
Victurnien went to Montfermeil, and returned with the remark, "I have
seen the child."

All this took time. Fantine had been at the factory for more than a
year, when, one morning, the superintendent of the workroom handed her
fifty francs from the mayor, told her that she was no longer employed
in the shop, and requested her, in the mayor's name, to leave the
neighborhood.

This was the very month when the Thenardiers, after having demanded
twelve francs instead of six, had just exacted fifteen francs instead of
twelve.

Fantine was overwhelmed. She could not leave the neighborhood; she was
in debt for her rent and furniture. Fifty francs was not sufficient
to cancel this debt. She stammered a few supplicating words. The
superintendent ordered her to leave the shop on the instant. Besides,
Fantine was only a moderately good workwoman. Overcome with shame, even
more than with despair, she quitted the shop, and returned to her room.
So her fault was now known to every one.

She no longer felt strong enough to say a word. She was advised to
see the mayor; she did not dare. The mayor had given her fifty francs
because he was good, and had dismissed her because he was just. She
bowed before the decision.




CHAPTER IX--MADAME VICTURNIEN'S SUCCESS

So the monk's widow was good for something.

But M. Madeleine had heard nothing of all this. Life is full of just
such combinations of events. M. Madeleine was in the habit of almost
never entering the women's workroom.

At the head of this room he had placed an elderly spinster, whom
the priest had provided for him, and he had full confidence in this
superintendent,--a truly respectable person, firm, equitable, upright,
full of the charity which consists in giving, but not having in the same
degree that charity which consists in understanding and in forgiving.
M. Madeleine relied wholly on her. The best men are often obliged
to delegate their authority. It was with this full power, and the
conviction that she was doing right, that the superintendent had
instituted the suit, judged, condemned, and executed Fantine.

As regards the fifty francs, she had given them from a fund which M.
Madeleine had intrusted to her for charitable purposes, and for giving
assistance to the workwomen, and of which she rendered no account.

Fantine tried to obtain a situation as a servant in the neighborhood;
she went from house to house. No one would have her. She could not
leave town. The second-hand dealer, to whom she was in debt for her
furniture--and what furniture!--said to her, "If you leave, I will have
you arrested as a thief." The householder, whom she owed for her rent,
said to her, "You are young and pretty; you can pay." She divided the
fifty francs between the landlord and the furniture-dealer, returned to
the latter three-quarters of his goods, kept only necessaries, and found
herself without work, without a trade, with nothing but her bed, and
still about fifty francs in debt.

She began to make coarse shirts for soldiers of the garrison, and earned
twelve sous a day. Her daughter cost her ten. It was at this point that
she began to pay the Thenardiers irregularly.

However, the old woman who lighted her candle for her when she returned
at night, taught her the art of living in misery. Back of living on
little, there is the living on nothing. These are the two chambers; the
first is dark, the second is black.

Fantine learned how to live without fire entirely in the winter; how to
give up a bird which eats a half a farthing's worth of millet every
two days; how to make a coverlet of one's petticoat, and a petticoat of
one's coverlet; how to save one's candle, by taking one's meals by
the light of the opposite window. No one knows all that certain feeble
creatures, who have grown old in privation and honesty, can get out of
a sou. It ends by being a talent. Fantine acquired this sublime talent,
and regained a little courage.

At this epoch she said to a neighbor, "Bah! I say to myself, by only
sleeping five hours, and working all the rest of the time at my sewing,
I shall always manage to nearly earn my bread. And, then, when one is
sad, one eats less. Well, sufferings, uneasiness, a little bread on one
hand, trouble on the other,--all this will support me."

It would have been a great happiness to have her little girl with her in
this distress. She thought of having her come. But what then! Make her
share her own destitution! And then, she was in debt to the Thenardiers!
How could she pay them? And the journey! How pay for that?

The old woman who had given her lessons in what may be called the life
of indigence, was a sainted spinster named Marguerite, who was pious
with a true piety, poor and charitable towards the poor, and even
towards the rich, knowing how to write just sufficiently to sign herself
Marguerite, and believing in God, which is science.

There are many such virtuous people in this lower world; some day they
will be in the world above. This life has a morrow.

At first, Fantine had been so ashamed that she had not dared to go out.

When she was in the street, she divined that people turned round behind
her, and pointed at her; every one stared at her and no one greeted her;
the cold and bitter scorn of the passers-by penetrated her very flesh
and soul like a north wind.

It seems as though an unfortunate woman were utterly bare beneath the
sarcasm and the curiosity of all in small towns. In Paris, at least, no
one knows you, and this obscurity is a garment. Oh! how she would have
liked to betake herself to Paris! Impossible!

She was obliged to accustom herself to disrepute, as she had accustomed
herself to indigence. Gradually she decided on her course. At the
expiration of two or three months she shook off her shame, and began to
go about as though there were nothing the matter. "It is all the same to
me," she said.

She went and came, bearing her head well up, with a bitter smile, and
was conscious that she was becoming brazen-faced.

Madame Victurnien sometimes saw her passing, from her window, noticed
the distress of "that creature" who, "thanks to her," had been "put back
in her proper place," and congratulated herself. The happiness of the
evil-minded is black.

Excess of toil wore out Fantine, and the little dry cough which troubled
her increased. She sometimes said to her neighbor, Marguerite, "Just
feel how hot my hands are!"

Nevertheless, when she combed her beautiful hair in the morning with
an old broken comb, and it flowed about her like floss silk, she
experienced a moment of happy coquetry.




CHAPTER X--RESULT OF THE SUCCESS

She had been dismissed towards the end of the winter; the summer passed,
but winter came again. Short days, less work. Winter: no warmth,
no light, no noonday, the evening joining on to the morning, fogs,
twilight; the window is gray; it is impossible to see clearly at it. The
sky is but a vent-hole. The whole day is a cavern. The sun has the air
of a beggar. A frightful season! Winter changes the water of heaven and
the heart of man into a stone. Her creditors harrassed her.

Fantine earned too little. Her debts had increased. The Thenardiers, who
were not promptly paid, wrote to her constantly letters whose contents
drove her to despair, and whose carriage ruined her. One day they wrote
to her that her little Cosette was entirely naked in that cold weather,
that she needed a woollen skirt, and that her mother must send at least
ten francs for this. She received the letter, and crushed it in her
hands all day long. That evening she went into a barber's shop at the
corner of the street, and pulled out her comb. Her admirable golden hair
fell to her knees.

"What splendid hair!" exclaimed the barber.

"How much will you give me for it?" said she.

"Ten francs."

"Cut it off."

She purchased a knitted petticoat and sent it to the Thenardiers. This
petticoat made the Thenardiers furious. It was the money that they
wanted. They gave the petticoat to Eponine. The poor Lark continued to
shiver.

Fantine thought: "My child is no longer cold. I have clothed her with my
hair." She put on little round caps which concealed her shorn head, and
in which she was still pretty.

Dark thoughts held possession of Fantine's heart.

When she saw that she could no longer dress her hair, she began to hate
every one about her. She had long shared the universal veneration for
Father Madeleine; yet, by dint of repeating to herself that it was he
who had discharged her, that he was the cause of her unhappiness, she
came to hate him also, and most of all. When she passed the factory in
working hours, when the workpeople were at the door, she affected to
laugh and sing.

An old workwoman who once saw her laughing and singing in this fashion
said, "There's a girl who will come to a bad end."

She took a lover, the first who offered, a man whom she did not love,
out of bravado and with rage in her heart. He was a miserable scamp,
a sort of mendicant musician, a lazy beggar, who beat her, and who
abandoned her as she had taken him, in disgust.

She adored her child.

The lower she descended, the darker everything grew about her, the more
radiant shone that little angel at the bottom of her heart. She said,
"When I get rich, I will have my Cosette with me;" and she laughed. Her
cough did not leave her, and she had sweats on her back.

One day she received from the Thenardiers a letter couched in the
following terms: "Cosette is ill with a malady which is going the rounds
of the neighborhood. A miliary fever, they call it. Expensive drugs are
required. This is ruining us, and we can no longer pay for them. If you
do not send us forty francs before the week is out, the little one will
be dead."

She burst out laughing, and said to her old neighbor: "Ah! they are
good! Forty francs! the idea! That makes two napoleons! Where do they
think I am to get them? These peasants are stupid, truly."

Nevertheless she went to a dormer window in the staircase and read the
letter once more. Then she descended the stairs and emerged, running and
leaping and still laughing.

Some one met her and said to her, "What makes you so gay?"

She replied: "A fine piece of stupidity that some country people have
written to me. They demand forty francs of me. So much for you, you
peasants!"

As she crossed the square, she saw a great many people collected around
a carriage of eccentric shape, upon the top of which stood a man dressed
in red, who was holding forth. He was a quack dentist on his rounds,
who was offering to the public full sets of teeth, opiates, powders and
elixirs.

Fantine mingled in the group, and began to laugh with the rest at
the harangue, which contained slang for the populace and jargon for
respectable people. The tooth-puller espied the lovely, laughing girl,
and suddenly exclaimed: "You have beautiful teeth, you girl there, who
are laughing; if you want to sell me your palettes, I will give you a
gold napoleon apiece for them."

"What are my palettes?" asked Fantine.

"The palettes," replied the dental professor, "are the front teeth, the
two upper ones."

"How horrible!" exclaimed Fantine.

"Two napoleons!" grumbled a toothless old woman who was present. "Here's
a lucky girl!"

Fantine fled and stopped her ears that she might not hear the hoarse
voice of the man shouting to her: "Reflect, my beauty! two napoleons;
they may prove of service. If your heart bids you, come this evening to
the inn of the Tillac d'Argent; you will find me there."

Fantine returned home. She was furious, and related the occurrence to
her good neighbor Marguerite: "Can you understand such a thing? Is he
not an abominable man? How can they allow such people to go about the
country! Pull out my two front teeth! Why, I should be horrible! My hair
will grow again, but my teeth! Ah! what a monster of a man! I should
prefer to throw myself head first on the pavement from the fifth story!
He told me that he should be at the Tillac d'Argent this evening."

"And what did he offer?" asked Marguerite.

"Two napoleons."

"That makes forty francs."

"Yes," said Fantine; "that makes forty francs."

She remained thoughtful, and began her work. At the expiration of a
quarter of an hour she left her sewing and went to read the Thenardiers'
letter once more on the staircase.

On her return, she said to Marguerite, who was at work beside her:--

"What is a miliary fever? Do you know?"

"Yes," answered the old spinster; "it is a disease."

"Does it require many drugs?"

"Oh! terrible drugs."

"How does one get it?"

"It is a malady that one gets without knowing how."

"Then it attacks children?"

"Children in particular."

"Do people die of it?"

"They may," said Marguerite.

Fantine left the room and went to read her letter once more on the
staircase.

That evening she went out, and was seen to turn her steps in the
direction of the Rue de Paris, where the inns are situated.

The next morning, when Marguerite entered Fantine's room before
daylight,--for they always worked together, and in this manner used only
one candle for the two,--she found Fantine seated on her bed, pale and
frozen. She had not lain down. Her cap had fallen on her knees.
Her candle had burned all night, and was almost entirely consumed.
Marguerite halted on the threshold, petrified at this tremendous
wastefulness, and exclaimed:--

"Lord! the candle is all burned out! Something has happened."

Then she looked at Fantine, who turned toward her her head bereft of its
hair.

Fantine had grown ten years older since the preceding night.

"Jesus!" said Marguerite, "what is the matter with you, Fantine?"

"Nothing," replied Fantine. "Quite the contrary. My child will not die
of that frightful malady, for lack of succor. I am content."

So saying, she pointed out to the spinster two napoleons which were
glittering on the table.

"Ah! Jesus God!" cried Marguerite. "Why, it is a fortune! Where did you
get those louis d'or?"

"I got them," replied Fantine.

At the same time she smiled. The candle illuminated her countenance. It
was a bloody smile. A reddish saliva soiled the corners of her lips, and
she had a black hole in her mouth.

The two teeth had been extracted.

She sent the forty francs to Montfermeil.

After all it was a ruse of the Thenardiers to obtain money. Cosette was
not ill.

Fantine threw her mirror out of the window. She had long since quitted
her cell on the second floor for an attic with only a latch to fasten
it, next the roof; one of those attics whose extremity forms an angle
with the floor, and knocks you on the head every instant. The poor
occupant can reach the end of his chamber as he can the end of his
destiny, only by bending over more and more.

She had no longer a bed; a rag which she called her coverlet, a mattress
on the floor, and a seatless chair still remained. A little rosebush
which she had, had dried up, forgotten, in one corner. In the other
corner was a butter-pot to hold water, which froze in winter, and in
which the various levels of the water remained long marked by these
circles of ice. She had lost her shame; she lost her coquetry. A final
sign. She went out, with dirty caps. Whether from lack of time or from
indifference, she no longer mended her linen. As the heels wore out,
she dragged her stockings down into her shoes. This was evident from the
perpendicular wrinkles. She patched her bodice, which was old and worn
out, with scraps of calico which tore at the slightest movement. The
people to whom she was indebted made "scenes" and gave her no peace.
She found them in the street, she found them again on her staircase. She
passed many a night weeping and thinking. Her eyes were very bright,
and she felt a steady pain in her shoulder towards the top of the
left shoulder-blade. She coughed a great deal. She deeply hated Father
Madeleine, but made no complaint. She sewed seventeen hours a day; but
a contractor for the work of prisons, who made the prisoners work at a
discount, suddenly made prices fall, which reduced the daily earnings
of working-women to nine sous. Seventeen hours of toil, and nine sous a
day! Her creditors were more pitiless than ever. The second-hand dealer,
who had taken back nearly all his furniture, said to her incessantly,
"When will you pay me, you hussy?" What did they want of her, good God!
She felt that she was being hunted, and something of the wild beast
developed in her. About the same time, Thenardier wrote to her that he
had waited with decidedly too much amiability and that he must have a
hundred francs at once; otherwise he would turn little Cosette out of
doors, convalescent as she was from her heavy illness, into the cold and
the streets, and that she might do what she liked with herself, and die
if she chose. "A hundred francs," thought Fantine. "But in what trade
can one earn a hundred sous a day?"

"Come!" said she, "let us sell what is left."

The unfortunate girl became a woman of the town.




CHAPTER XI--CHRISTUS NOS LIBERAVIT

What is this history of Fantine? It is society purchasing a slave.

From whom? From misery.

From hunger, cold, isolation, destitution. A dolorous bargain. A soul
for a morsel of bread. Misery offers; society accepts.

The sacred law of Jesus Christ governs our civilization, but it does
not, as yet, permeate it; it is said that slavery has disappeared from
European civilization. This is a mistake. It still exists; but it weighs
only upon the woman, and it is called prostitution.

It weighs upon the woman, that is to say, upon grace, weakness, beauty,
maternity. This is not one of the least of man's disgraces.

At the point in this melancholy drama which we have now reached, nothing
is left to Fantine of that which she had formerly been.

She has become marble in becoming mire. Whoever touches her feels cold.
She passes; she endures you; she ignores you; she is the severe and
dishonored figure. Life and the social order have said their last word
for her. All has happened to her that will happen to her. She has
felt everything, borne everything, experienced everything, suffered
everything, lost everything, mourned everything. She is resigned, with
that resignation which resembles indifference, as death resembles sleep.
She no longer avoids anything. Let all the clouds fall upon her, and all
the ocean sweep over her! What matters it to her? She is a sponge that
is soaked.

At least, she believes it to be so; but it is an error to imagine that
fate can be exhausted, and that one has reached the bottom of anything
whatever.

Alas! What are all these fates, driven on pell-mell? Whither are they
going? Why are they thus?

He who knows that sees the whole of the shadow.

He is alone. His name is God.




CHAPTER XII--M. BAMATABOIS'S INACTIVITY

There is in all small towns, and there was at M. sur M. in particular,
a class of young men who nibble away an income of fifteen hundred
francs with the same air with which their prototypes devour two hundred
thousand francs a year in Paris. These are beings of the great neuter
species: impotent men, parasites, cyphers, who have a little land, a
little folly, a little wit; who would be rustics in a drawing-room, and
who think themselves gentlemen in the dram-shop; who say, "My fields,
my peasants, my woods"; who hiss actresses at the theatre to prove that
they are persons of taste; quarrel with the officers of the garrison
to prove that they are men of war; hunt, smoke, yawn, drink, smell of
tobacco, play billiards, stare at travellers as they descend from the
diligence, live at the cafe, dine at the inn, have a dog which eats the
bones under the table, and a mistress who eats the dishes on the table;
who stick at a sou, exaggerate the fashions, admire tragedy, despise
women, wear out their old boots, copy London through Paris, and Paris
through the medium of Pont-A-Mousson, grow old as dullards, never work,
serve no use, and do no great harm.

M. Felix Tholomyes, had he remained in his own province and never beheld
Paris, would have been one of these men.

If they were richer, one would say, "They are dandies;" if they were
poorer, one would say, "They are idlers." They are simply men without
employment. Among these unemployed there are bores, the bored, dreamers,
and some knaves.

At that period a dandy was composed of a tall collar, a big cravat, a
watch with trinkets, three vests of different colors, worn one on top of
the other--the red and blue inside; of a short-waisted olive coat, with
a codfish tail, a double row of silver buttons set close to each other
and running up to the shoulder; and a pair of trousers of a lighter
shade of olive, ornamented on the two seams with an indefinite, but
always uneven, number of lines, varying from one to eleven--a limit
which was never exceeded. Add to this, high shoes with little irons
on the heels, a tall hat with a narrow brim, hair worn in a tuft, an
enormous cane, and conversation set off by puns of Potier. Over all,
spurs and a mustache. At that epoch mustaches indicated the bourgeois,
and spurs the pedestrian.

The provincial dandy wore the longest of spurs and the fiercest of
mustaches.

It was the period of the conflict of the republics of South America with
the King of Spain, of Bolivar against Morillo. Narrow-brimmed hats were
royalist, and were called morillos; liberals wore hats with wide brims,
which were called bolivars.

Eight or ten months, then, after that which is related in the preceding
pages, towards the first of January, 1823, on a snowy evening, one of
these dandies, one of these unemployed, a "right thinker," for he wore
a morillo, and was, moreover, warmly enveloped in one of those large
cloaks which completed the fashionable costume in cold weather, was
amusing himself by tormenting a creature who was prowling about in a
ball-dress, with neck uncovered and flowers in her hair, in front of
the officers' cafe. This dandy was smoking, for he was decidedly
fashionable.

Each time that the woman passed in front of him, he bestowed on her,
together with a puff from his cigar, some apostrophe which he considered
witty and mirthful, such as, "How ugly you are!--Will you get out of my
sight?--You have no teeth!" etc., etc. This gentleman was known as M.
Bamatabois. The woman, a melancholy, decorated spectre which went and
came through the snow, made him no reply, did not even glance at him,
and nevertheless continued her promenade in silence, and with a sombre
regularity, which brought her every five minutes within reach of this
sarcasm, like the condemned soldier who returns under the rods. The
small effect which he produced no doubt piqued the lounger; and taking
advantage of a moment when her back was turned, he crept up behind her
with the gait of a wolf, and stifling his laugh, bent down, picked up a
handful of snow from the pavement, and thrust it abruptly into her back,
between her bare shoulders. The woman uttered a roar, whirled round,
gave a leap like a panther, and hurled herself upon the man, burying her
nails in his face, with the most frightful words which could fall from
the guard-room into the gutter. These insults, poured forth in a voice
roughened by brandy, did, indeed, proceed in hideous wise from a mouth
which lacked its two front teeth. It was Fantine.

At the noise thus produced, the officers ran out in throngs from the
cafe, passers-by collected, and a large and merry circle, hooting and
applauding, was formed around this whirlwind composed of two beings,
whom there was some difficulty in recognizing as a man and a woman: the
man struggling, his hat on the ground; the woman striking out with feet
and fists, bareheaded, howling, minus hair and teeth, livid with wrath,
horrible.

Suddenly a man of lofty stature emerged vivaciously from the crowd,
seized the woman by her satin bodice, which was covered with mud, and
said to her, "Follow me!"

The woman raised her head; her furious voice suddenly died away. Her
eyes were glassy; she turned pale instead of livid, and she trembled
with a quiver of terror. She had recognized Javert.

The dandy took advantage of the incident to make his escape.




CHAPTER XIII--THE SOLUTION OF SOME QUESTIONS CONNECTED WITH THE
MUNICIPAL POLICE

Javert thrust aside the spectators, broke the circle, and set out
with long strides towards the police station, which is situated at the
extremity of the square, dragging the wretched woman after him. She
yielded mechanically. Neither he nor she uttered a word. The cloud of
spectators followed, jesting, in a paroxysm of delight. Supreme misery
an occasion for obscenity.

On arriving at the police station, which was a low room, warmed by a
stove, with a glazed and grated door opening on the street, and guarded
by a detachment, Javert opened the door, entered with Fantine, and shut
the door behind him, to the great disappointment of the curious, who
raised themselves on tiptoe, and craned their necks in front of the
thick glass of the station-house, in their effort to see. Curiosity is a
sort of gluttony. To see is to devour.

On entering, Fantine fell down in a corner, motionless and mute,
crouching down like a terrified dog.

The sergeant of the guard brought a lighted candle to the table. Javert
seated himself, drew a sheet of stamped paper from his pocket, and began
to write.

This class of women is consigned by our laws entirely to the discretion
of the police. The latter do what they please, punish them, as seems
good to them, and confiscate at their will those two sorry things which
they entitle their industry and their liberty. Javert was impassive; his
grave face betrayed no emotion whatever. Nevertheless, he was seriously
and deeply preoccupied. It was one of those moments when he was
exercising without control, but subject to all the scruples of a severe
conscience, his redoubtable discretionary power. At that moment he was
conscious that his police agent's stool was a tribunal. He was entering
judgment. He judged and condemned. He summoned all the ideas which could
possibly exist in his mind, around the great thing which he was doing.
The more he examined the deed of this woman, the more shocked he felt.
It was evident that he had just witnessed the commission of a crime.
He had just beheld, yonder, in the street, society, in the person of a
freeholder and an elector, insulted and attacked by a creature who was
outside all pales. A prostitute had made an attempt on the life of a
citizen. He had seen that, he, Javert. He wrote in silence.

When he had finished he signed the paper, folded it, and said to the
sergeant of the guard, as he handed it to him, "Take three men and
conduct this creature to jail."

Then, turning to Fantine, "You are to have six months of it." The
unhappy woman shuddered.

"Six months! six months of prison!" she exclaimed. "Six months in which
to earn seven sous a day! But what will become of Cosette? My daughter!
my daughter! But I still owe the Thenardiers over a hundred francs; do
you know that, Monsieur Inspector?"

She dragged herself across the damp floor, among the muddy boots of all
those men, without rising, with clasped hands, and taking great strides
on her knees.

"Monsieur Javert," said she, "I beseech your mercy. I assure you that
I was not in the wrong. If you had seen the beginning, you would have
seen. I swear to you by the good God that I was not to blame! That
gentleman, the bourgeois, whom I do not know, put snow in my back. Has
any one the right to put snow down our backs when we are walking along
peaceably, and doing no harm to any one? I am rather ill, as you see.
And then, he had been saying impertinent things to me for a long time:
'You are ugly! you have no teeth!' I know well that I have no longer
those teeth. I did nothing; I said to myself, 'The gentleman is amusing
himself.' I was honest with him; I did not speak to him. It was at that
moment that he put the snow down my back. Monsieur Javert, good Monsieur
Inspector! is there not some person here who saw it and can tell you
that this is quite true? Perhaps I did wrong to get angry. You know that
one is not master of one's self at the first moment. One gives way to
vivacity; and then, when some one puts something cold down your
back just when you are not expecting it! I did wrong to spoil that
gentleman's hat. Why did he go away? I would ask his pardon. Oh, my God!
It makes no difference to me whether I ask his pardon. Do me the favor
to-day, for this once, Monsieur Javert. Hold! you do not know that in
prison one can earn only seven sous a day; it is not the government's
fault, but seven sous is one's earnings; and just fancy, I must pay
one hundred francs, or my little girl will be sent to me. Oh, my God!
I cannot have her with me. What I do is so vile! Oh, my Cosette! Oh, my
little angel of the Holy Virgin! what will become of her, poor creature?
I will tell you: it is the Thenardiers, inn-keepers, peasants; and such
people are unreasonable. They want money. Don't put me in prison! You
see, there is a little girl who will be turned out into the street to
get along as best she may, in the very heart of the winter; and you must
have pity on such a being, my good Monsieur Javert. If she were older,
she might earn her living; but it cannot be done at that age. I am not a
bad woman at bottom. It is not cowardliness and gluttony that have made
me what I am. If I have drunk brandy, it was out of misery. I do not
love it; but it benumbs the senses. When I was happy, it was only
necessary to glance into my closets, and it would have been evident that
I was not a coquettish and untidy woman. I had linen, a great deal of
linen. Have pity on me, Monsieur Javert!"

She spoke thus, rent in twain, shaken with sobs, blinded with tears,
her neck bare, wringing her hands, and coughing with a dry, short cough,
stammering softly with a voice of agony. Great sorrow is a divine and
terrible ray, which transfigures the unhappy. At that moment Fantine had
become beautiful once more. From time to time she paused, and tenderly
kissed the police agent's coat. She would have softened a heart of
granite; but a heart of wood cannot be softened.

"Come!" said Javert, "I have heard you out. Have you entirely finished?
You will get six months. Now march! The Eternal Father in person could
do nothing more."

At these solemn words, "the Eternal Father in person could do nothing
more," she understood that her fate was sealed. She sank down,
murmuring, "Mercy!"

Javert turned his back.

The soldiers seized her by the arms.

A few moments earlier a man had entered, but no one had paid any heed
to him. He shut the door, leaned his back against it, and listened to
Fantine's despairing supplications.

At the instant when the soldiers laid their hands upon the unfortunate
woman, who would not rise, he emerged from the shadow, and said:--

"One moment, if you please."

Javert raised his eyes and recognized M. Madeleine. He removed his hat,
and, saluting him with a sort of aggrieved awkwardness:--

"Excuse me, Mr. Mayor--"

The words "Mr. Mayor" produced a curious effect upon Fantine. She rose
to her feet with one bound, like a spectre springing from the earth,
thrust aside the soldiers with both arms, walked straight up to M.
Madeleine before any one could prevent her, and gazing intently at him,
with a bewildered air, she cried:--

"Ah! so it is you who are M. le Maire!"

Then she burst into a laugh, and spit in his face.

M. Madeleine wiped his face, and said:--

"Inspector Javert, set this woman at liberty."

Javert felt that he was on the verge of going mad. He experienced at
that moment, blow upon blow and almost simultaneously, the most violent
emotions which he had ever undergone in all his life. To see a woman of
the town spit in the mayor's face was a thing so monstrous that, in his
most daring flights of fancy, he would have regarded it as a sacrilege
to believe it possible. On the other hand, at the very bottom of his
thought, he made a hideous comparison as to what this woman was, and as
to what this mayor might be; and then he, with horror, caught a glimpse
of I know not what simple explanation of this prodigious attack. But
when he beheld that mayor, that magistrate, calmly wipe his face and
say, "Set this woman at liberty," he underwent a sort of intoxication
of amazement; thought and word failed him equally; the sum total of
possible astonishment had been exceeded in his case. He remained mute.

The words had produced no less strange an effect on Fantine. She raised
her bare arm, and clung to the damper of the stove, like a person who
is reeling. Nevertheless, she glanced about her, and began to speak in a
low voice, as though talking to herself:--

"At liberty! I am to be allowed to go! I am not to go to prison for six
months! Who said that? It is not possible that any one could have said
that. I did not hear aright. It cannot have been that monster of a
mayor! Was it you, my good Monsieur Javert, who said that I was to be
set free? Oh, see here! I will tell you about it, and you will let me
go. That monster of a mayor, that old blackguard of a mayor, is the
cause of all. Just imagine, Monsieur Javert, he turned me out! all
because of a pack of rascally women, who gossip in the workroom. If that
is not a horror, what is? To dismiss a poor girl who is doing her
work honestly! Then I could no longer earn enough, and all this misery
followed. In the first place, there is one improvement which these
gentlemen of the police ought to make, and that is, to prevent prison
contractors from wronging poor people. I will explain it to you, you
see: you are earning twelve sous at shirt-making, the price falls to
nine sous; and it is not enough to live on. Then one has to become
whatever one can. As for me, I had my little Cosette, and I was actually
forced to become a bad woman. Now you understand how it is that that
blackguard of a mayor caused all the mischief. After that I stamped on
that gentleman's hat in front of the officers' cafe; but he had spoiled
my whole dress with snow. We women have but one silk dress for evening
wear. You see that I did not do wrong deliberately--truly, Monsieur
Javert; and everywhere I behold women who are far more wicked than I,
and who are much happier. O Monsieur Javert! it was you who gave orders
that I am to be set free, was it not? Make inquiries, speak to my
landlord; I am paying my rent now; they will tell you that I am
perfectly honest. Ah! my God! I beg your pardon; I have unintentionally
touched the damper of the stove, and it has made it smoke."

M. Madeleine listened to her with profound attention. While she was
speaking, he fumbled in his waistcoat, drew out his purse and opened
it. It was empty. He put it back in his pocket. He said to Fantine, "How
much did you say that you owed?"

Fantine, who was looking at Javert only, turned towards him:--

"Was I speaking to you?"

Then, addressing the soldiers:--

"Say, you fellows, did you see how I spit in his face? Ah! you old
wretch of a mayor, you came here to frighten me, but I'm not afraid of
you. I am afraid of Monsieur Javert. I am afraid of my good Monsieur
Javert!"

So saying, she turned to the inspector again:--

"And yet, you see, Mr. Inspector, it is necessary to be just. I
understand that you are just, Mr. Inspector; in fact, it is perfectly
simple: a man amuses himself by putting snow down a woman's back, and
that makes the officers laugh; one must divert themselves in some way;
and we--well, we are here for them to amuse themselves with, of course!
And then, you, you come; you are certainly obliged to preserve order,
you lead off the woman who is in the wrong; but on reflection, since you
are a good man, you say that I am to be set at liberty; it is for
the sake of the little one, for six months in prison would prevent my
supporting my child. 'Only, don't do it again, you hussy!' Oh! I won't
do it again, Monsieur Javert! They may do whatever they please to me
now; I will not stir. But to-day, you see, I cried because it hurt me.
I was not expecting that snow from the gentleman at all; and then as I
told you, I am not well; I have a cough; I seem to have a burning ball
in my stomach, and the doctor tells me, 'Take care of yourself.' Here,
feel, give me your hand; don't be afraid--it is here."

She no longer wept, her voice was caressing; she placed Javert's coarse
hand on her delicate, white throat and looked smilingly at him.

All at once she rapidly adjusted her disordered garments, dropped the
folds of her skirt, which had been pushed up as she dragged herself
along, almost to the height of her knee, and stepped towards the door,
saying to the soldiers in a low voice, and with a friendly nod:--

"Children, Monsieur l'Inspecteur has said that I am to be released, and
I am going."

She laid her hand on the latch of the door. One step more and she would
be in the street.

Javert up to that moment had remained erect, motionless, with his eyes
fixed on the ground, cast athwart this scene like some displaced statue,
which is waiting to be put away somewhere.

The sound of the latch roused him. He raised his head with an expression
of sovereign authority, an expression all the more alarming in
proportion as the authority rests on a low level, ferocious in the wild
beast, atrocious in the man of no estate.

"Sergeant!" he cried, "don't you see that that jade is walking off! Who
bade you let her go?"

"I," said Madeleine.

Fantine trembled at the sound of Javert's voice, and let go of the latch
as a thief relinquishes the article which he has stolen. At the sound
of Madeleine's voice she turned around, and from that moment forth she
uttered no word, nor dared so much as to breathe freely, but her glance
strayed from Madeleine to Javert, and from Javert to Madeleine in turn,
according to which was speaking.

It was evident that Javert must have been exasperated beyond measure
before he would permit himself to apostrophize the sergeant as he
had done, after the mayor's suggestion that Fantine should be set at
liberty. Had he reached the point of forgetting the mayor's presence?
Had he finally declared to himself that it was impossible that any
"authority" should have given such an order, and that the mayor must
certainly have said one thing by mistake for another, without intending
it? Or, in view of the enormities of which he had been a witness for the
past two hours, did he say to himself, that it was necessary to recur to
supreme resolutions, that it was indispensable that the small should
be made great, that the police spy should transform himself into a
magistrate, that the policeman should become a dispenser of justice, and
that, in this prodigious extremity, order, law, morality, government,
society in its entirety, was personified in him, Javert?

However that may be, when M. Madeleine uttered that word, _I_, as we
have just heard, Police Inspector Javert was seen to turn toward the
mayor, pale, cold, with blue lips, and a look of despair, his whole body
agitated by an imperceptible quiver and an unprecedented occurrence, and
say to him, with downcast eyes but a firm voice:--

"Mr. Mayor, that cannot be."

"Why not?" said M. Madeleine.

"This miserable woman has insulted a citizen."

"Inspector Javert," replied the mayor, in a calm and conciliating tone,
"listen. You are an honest man, and I feel no hesitation in explaining
matters to you. Here is the true state of the case: I was passing
through the square just as you were leading this woman away; there were
still groups of people standing about, and I made inquiries and learned
everything; it was the townsman who was in the wrong and who should have
been arrested by properly conducted police."

Javert retorted:--

"This wretch has just insulted Monsieur le Maire."

"That concerns me," said M. Madeleine. "My own insult belongs to me, I
think. I can do what I please about it."

"I beg Monsieur le Maire's pardon. The insult is not to him but to the
law."

"Inspector Javert," replied M. Madeleine, "the highest law is
conscience. I have heard this woman; I know what I am doing."

"And I, Mr. Mayor, do not know what I see."

"Then content yourself with obeying."

"I am obeying my duty. My duty demands that this woman shall serve six
months in prison."

M. Madeleine replied gently:--

"Heed this well; she will not serve a single day."

At this decisive word, Javert ventured to fix a searching look on the
mayor and to say, but in a tone of voice that was still profoundly
respectful:--

"I am sorry to oppose Monsieur le Maire; it is for the first time in my
life, but he will permit me to remark that I am within the bounds of my
authority. I confine myself, since Monsieur le Maire desires it, to the
question of the gentleman. I was present. This woman flung herself
on Monsieur Bamatabnois, who is an elector and the proprietor of that
handsome house with a balcony, which forms the corner of the esplanade,
three stories high and entirely of cut stone. Such things as there are
in the world! In any case, Monsieur le Maire, this is a question of
police regulations in the streets, and concerns me, and I shall detain
this woman Fantine."

Then M. Madeleine folded his arms, and said in a severe voice which no
one in the town had heard hitherto:--

"The matter to which you refer is one connected with the municipal
police. According to the terms of articles nine, eleven, fifteen, and
sixty-six of the code of criminal examination, I am the judge. I order
that this woman shall be set at liberty."

Javert ventured to make a final effort.

"But, Mr. Mayor--"

"I refer you to article eighty-one of the law of the 13th of December,
1799, in regard to arbitrary detention."

"Monsieur le Maire, permit me--"

"Not another word."

"But--"

"Leave the room," said M. Madeleine.

Javert received the blow erect, full in the face, in his breast, like
a Russian soldier. He bowed to the very earth before the mayor and left
the room.

Fantine stood aside from the door and stared at him in amazement as he
passed.

Nevertheless, she also was the prey to a strange confusion. She had just
seen herself a subject of dispute between two opposing powers. She had
seen two men who held in their hands her liberty, her life, her soul,
her child, in combat before her very eyes; one of these men was drawing
her towards darkness, the other was leading her back towards the light.
In this conflict, viewed through the exaggerations of terror, these two
men had appeared to her like two giants; the one spoke like her demon,
the other like her good angel. The angel had conquered the demon, and,
strange to say, that which made her shudder from head to foot was
the fact that this angel, this liberator, was the very man whom she
abhorred, that mayor whom she had so long regarded as the author of all
her woes, that Madeleine! And at the very moment when she had insulted
him in so hideous a fashion, he had saved her! Had she, then, been
mistaken? Must she change her whole soul? She did not know; she
trembled. She listened in bewilderment, she looked on in affright, and
at every word uttered by M. Madeleine she felt the frightful shades of
hatred crumble and melt within her, and something warm and ineffable,
indescribable, which was both joy, confidence and love, dawn in her
heart.

When Javert had taken his departure, M. Madeleine turned to her and said
to her in a deliberate voice, like a serious man who does not wish to
weep and who finds some difficulty in speaking:--

"I have heard you. I knew nothing about what you have mentioned. I
believe that it is true, and I feel that it is true. I was even ignorant
of the fact that you had left my shop. Why did you not apply to me? But
here; I will pay your debts, I will send for your child, or you shall go
to her. You shall live here, in Paris, or where you please. I undertake
the care of your child and yourself. You shall not work any longer if
you do not like. I will give all the money you require. You shall be
honest and happy once more. And listen! I declare to you that if all
is as you say,--and I do not doubt it,--you have never ceased to be
virtuous and holy in the sight of God. Oh! poor woman."

This was more than Fantine could bear. To have Cosette! To leave this
life of infamy. To live free, rich, happy, respectable with Cosette; to
see all these realities of paradise blossom of a sudden in the midst of
her misery. She stared stupidly at this man who was talking to her, and
could only give vent to two or three sobs, "Oh! Oh! Oh!"

Her limbs gave way beneath her, she knelt in front of M. Madeleine, and
before he could prevent her he felt her grasp his hand and press her
lips to it.

Then she fainted.




BOOK SIXTH.--JAVERT




CHAPTER I--THE BEGINNING OF REPOSE


M. Madeleine had Fantine removed to that infirmary which he had
established in his own house. He confided her to the sisters, who put
her to bed. A burning fever had come on. She passed a part of the night
in delirium and raving. At length, however, she fell asleep.

On the morrow, towards midday, Fantine awoke. She heard some one
breathing close to her bed; she drew aside the curtain and saw M.
Madeleine standing there and looking at something over her head. His
gaze was full of pity, anguish, and supplication. She followed its
direction, and saw that it was fixed on a crucifix which was nailed to
the wall.

Thenceforth, M. Madeleine was transfigured in Fantine's eyes. He seemed
to her to be clothed in light. He was absorbed in a sort of prayer. She
gazed at him for a long time without daring to interrupt him. At last
she said timidly:--

"What are you doing?"

M. Madeleine had been there for an hour. He had been waiting for Fantine
to awake. He took her hand, felt of her pulse, and replied:--

"How do you feel?"

"Well, I have slept," she replied; "I think that I am better, It is
nothing."

He answered, responding to the first question which she had put to him
as though he had just heard it:--

"I was praying to the martyr there on high."

And he added in his own mind, "For the martyr here below."

M. Madeleine had passed the night and the morning in making inquiries.
He knew all now. He knew Fantine's history in all its heart-rending
details. He went on:--

"You have suffered much, poor mother. Oh! do not complain; you now have
the dowry of the elect. It is thus that men are transformed into angels.
It is not their fault they do not know how to go to work otherwise.
You see this hell from which you have just emerged is the first form of
heaven. It was necessary to begin there."

He sighed deeply. But she smiled on him with that sublime smile in which
two teeth were lacking.

That same night, Javert wrote a letter. The next morning be posted it
himself at the office of M. sur M. It was addressed to Paris, and the
superscription ran: To Monsieur Chabouillet, Secretary of Monsieur le
Prefet of Police. As the affair in the station-house had been bruited
about, the post-mistress and some other persons who saw the letter
before it was sent off, and who recognized Javert's handwriting on the
cover, thought that he was sending in his resignation.

M. Madeleine made haste to write to the Thenardiers. Fantine owed
them one hundred and twenty francs. He sent them three hundred francs,
telling them to pay themselves from that sum, and to fetch the child
instantly to M. sur M., where her sick mother required her presence.

This dazzled Thenardier. "The devil!" said the man to his wife; "don't
let's allow the child to go. This lark is going to turn into a milch
cow. I see through it. Some ninny has taken a fancy to the mother."

He replied with a very well drawn-up bill for five hundred and some odd
francs. In this memorandum two indisputable items figured up over three
hundred francs,--one for the doctor, the other for the apothecary
who had attended and physicked Eponine and Azelma through two long
illnesses. Cosette, as we have already said, had not been ill. It was
only a question of a trifling substitution of names. At the foot of the
memorandum Thenardier wrote, Received on account, three hundred francs.

M. Madeleine immediately sent three hundred francs more, and wrote,
"Make haste to bring Cosette."

"Christi!" said Thenardier, "let's not give up the child."

In the meantime, Fantine did not recover. She still remained in the
infirmary.

The sisters had at first only received and nursed "that woman" with
repugnance. Those who have seen the bas-reliefs of Rheims will recall
the inflation of the lower lip of the wise virgins as they survey the
foolish virgins. The ancient scorn of the vestals for the ambubajae is
one of the most profound instincts of feminine dignity; the sisters
felt it with the double force contributed by religion. But in a few days
Fantine disarmed them. She said all kinds of humble and gentle things,
and the mother in her provoked tenderness. One day the sisters heard
her say amid her fever: "I have been a sinner; but when I have my child
beside me, it will be a sign that God has pardoned me. While I was
leading a bad life, I should not have liked to have my Cosette with me;
I could not have borne her sad, astonished eyes. It was for her sake
that I did evil, and that is why God pardons me. I shall feel the
benediction of the good God when Cosette is here. I shall gaze at her;
it will do me good to see that innocent creature. She knows nothing at
all. She is an angel, you see, my sisters. At that age the wings have
not fallen off."

M. Madeleine went to see her twice a day, and each time she asked him:--

"Shall I see my Cosette soon?"

He answered:--

"To-morrow, perhaps. She may arrive at any moment. I am expecting her."

And the mother's pale face grew radiant.

"Oh!" she said, "how happy I am going to be!"

We have just said that she did not recover her health. On the contrary,
her condition seemed to become more grave from week to week. That
handful of snow applied to her bare skin between her shoulder-blades had
brought about a sudden suppression of perspiration, as a consequence of
which the malady which had been smouldering within her for many years
was violently developed at last. At that time people were beginning to
follow the fine Laennec's fine suggestions in the study and treatment of
chest maladies. The doctor sounded Fantine's chest and shook his head.

M. Madeleine said to the doctor:--

"Well?"

"Has she not a child which she desires to see?" said the doctor.

"Yes."

"Well! Make haste and get it here!"

M. Madeleine shuddered.

Fantine inquired:--

"What did the doctor say?"

M. Madeleine forced himself to smile.

"He said that your child was to be brought speedily. That that would
restore your health."

"Oh!" she rejoined, "he is right! But what do those Thenardiers mean
by keeping my Cosette from me! Oh! she is coming. At last I behold
happiness close beside me!"

In the meantime Thenardier did not "let go of the child," and gave a
hundred insufficient reasons for it. Cosette was not quite well enough
to take a journey in the winter. And then, there still remained some
petty but pressing debts in the neighborhood, and they were collecting
the bills for them, etc., etc.

"I shall send some one to fetch Cosette!" said Father Madeleine. "If
necessary, I will go myself."

He wrote the following letter to Fantine's dictation, and made her sign
it:--

 "MONSIEUR THENARDIER:--
          You will deliver Cosette to this person.
          You will be paid for all the little things.
          I have the honor to salute you with respect.
                                                  "FANTINE."


In the meantime a serious incident occurred. Carve as we will the
mysterious block of which our life is made, the black vein of destiny
constantly reappears in it.




CHAPTER II--HOW JEAN MAY BECOME CHAMP


One morning M. Madeleine was in his study, occupied in arranging in
advance some pressing matters connected with the mayor's office, in case
he should decide to take the trip to Montfermeil, when he was informed
that Police Inspector Javert was desirous of speaking with him.
Madeleine could not refrain from a disagreeable impression on hearing
this name. Javert had avoided him more than ever since the affair of the
police-station, and M. Madeleine had not seen him.

"Admit him," he said.

Javert entered.

M. Madeleine had retained his seat near the fire, pen in hand, his eyes
fixed on the docket which he was turning over and annotating, and which
contained the trials of the commission on highways for the infraction of
police regulations. He did not disturb himself on Javert's account. He
could not help thinking of poor Fantine, and it suited him to be glacial
in his manner.

Javert bestowed a respectful salute on the mayor, whose back was turned
to him. The mayor did not look at him, but went on annotating this
docket.

Javert advanced two or three paces into the study, and halted, without
breaking the silence.

If any physiognomist who had been familiar with Javert, and who had
made a lengthy study of this savage in the service of civilization,
this singular composite of the Roman, the Spartan, the monk, and the
corporal, this spy who was incapable of a lie, this unspotted police
agent--if any physiognomist had known his secret and long-cherished
aversion for M. Madeleine, his conflict with the mayor on the subject of
Fantine, and had examined Javert at that moment, he would have said to
himself, "What has taken place?" It was evident to any one acquainted
with that clear, upright, sincere, honest, austere, and ferocious
conscience, that Javert had but just gone through some great interior
struggle. Javert had nothing in his soul which he had not also in his
countenance. Like violent people in general, he was subject to abrupt
changes of opinion. His physiognomy had never been more peculiar and
startling. On entering he bowed to M. Madeleine with a look in which
there was neither rancor, anger, nor distrust; he halted a few paces in
the rear of the mayor's arm-chair, and there he stood, perfectly erect,
in an attitude almost of discipline, with the cold, ingenuous roughness
of a man who has never been gentle and who has always been patient; he
waited without uttering a word, without making a movement, in genuine
humility and tranquil resignation, calm, serious, hat in hand, with
eyes cast down, and an expression which was half-way between that of a
soldier in the presence of his officer and a criminal in the presence
of his judge, until it should please the mayor to turn round. All the
sentiments as well as all the memories which one might have attributed
to him had disappeared. That face, as impenetrable and simple as
granite, no longer bore any trace of anything but a melancholy
depression. His whole person breathed lowliness and firmness and an
indescribable courageous despondency.

At last the mayor laid down his pen and turned half round.

"Well! What is it? What is the matter, Javert?"

Javert remained silent for an instant as though collecting his ideas,
then raised his voice with a sort of sad solemnity, which did not,
however, preclude simplicity.

"This is the matter, Mr. Mayor; a culpable act has been committed."

"What act?"

"An inferior agent of the authorities has failed in respect, and in the
gravest manner, towards a magistrate. I have come to bring the fact to
your knowledge, as it is my duty to do."

"Who is the agent?" asked M. Madeleine.

"I," said Javert.

"You?"

"I."

"And who is the magistrate who has reason to complain of the agent?"

"You, Mr. Mayor."

M. Madeleine sat erect in his arm-chair. Javert went on, with a severe
air and his eyes still cast down.

"Mr. Mayor, I have come to request you to instigate the authorities to
dismiss me."

M. Madeleine opened his mouth in amazement. Javert interrupted him:--

"You will say that I might have handed in my resignation, but that does
not suffice. Handing in one's resignation is honorable. I have failed in
my duty; I ought to be punished; I must be turned out."

And after a pause he added:--

"Mr. Mayor, you were severe with me the other day, and unjustly. Be so
to-day, with justice."

"Come, now! Why?" exclaimed M. Madeleine. "What nonsense is this?
What is the meaning of this? What culpable act have you been guilty of
towards me? What have you done to me? What are your wrongs with regard
to me? You accuse yourself; you wish to be superseded--"

"Turned out," said Javert.

"Turned out; so it be, then. That is well. I do not understand."

"You shall understand, Mr. Mayor."

Javert sighed from the very bottom of his chest, and resumed, still
coldly and sadly:--

"Mr. Mayor, six weeks ago, in consequence of the scene over that woman,
I was furious, and I informed against you."

"Informed against me!"

"At the Prefecture of Police in Paris."

M. Madeleine, who was not in the habit of laughing much oftener than
Javert himself, burst out laughing now:--

"As a mayor who had encroached on the province of the police?"

"As an ex-convict."

The mayor turned livid.

Javert, who had not raised his eyes, went on:--

"I thought it was so. I had had an idea for a long time; a resemblance;
inquiries which you had caused to be made at Faverolles; the strength
of your loins; the adventure with old Fauchelevant; your skill in
marksmanship; your leg, which you drag a little;--I hardly know what
all,--absurdities! But, at all events, I took you for a certain Jean
Valjean."

"A certain--What did you say the name was?"

"Jean Valjean. He was a convict whom I was in the habit of seeing twenty
years ago, when I was adjutant-guard of convicts at Toulon. On leaving
the galleys, this Jean Valjean, as it appears, robbed a bishop; then he
committed another theft, accompanied with violence, on a public highway
on the person of a little Savoyard. He disappeared eight years ago, no
one knows how, and he has been sought, I fancied. In short, I did this
thing! Wrath impelled me; I denounced you at the Prefecture!"

M. Madeleine, who had taken up the docket again several moments before
this, resumed with an air of perfect indifference:--

"And what reply did you receive?"

"That I was mad."

"Well?"

"Well, they were right."

"It is lucky that you recognize the fact."

"I am forced to do so, since the real Jean Valjean has been found."

The sheet of paper which M. Madeleine was holding dropped from his
hand; he raised his head, gazed fixedly at Javert, and said with his
indescribable accent:--

"Ah!"

Javert continued:--

"This is the way it is, Mr. Mayor. It seems that there was in the
neighborhood near Ailly-le-Haut-Clocher an old fellow who was called
Father Champmathieu. He was a very wretched creature. No one paid any
attention to him. No one knows what such people subsist on. Lately, last
autumn, Father Champmathieu was arrested for the theft of some cider
apples from--Well, no matter, a theft had been committed, a wall scaled,
branches of trees broken. My Champmathieu was arrested. He still had
the branch of apple-tree in his hand. The scamp is locked up. Up to
this point it was merely an affair of a misdemeanor. But here is where
Providence intervened.

"The jail being in a bad condition, the examining magistrate finds it
convenient to transfer Champmathieu to Arras, where the departmental
prison is situated. In this prison at Arras there is an ex-convict named
Brevet, who is detained for I know not what, and who has been appointed
turnkey of the house, because of good behavior. Mr. Mayor, no sooner had
Champmathieu arrived than Brevet exclaims: 'Eh! Why, I know that man!
He is a fagot![4] Take a good look at me, my good man! You are Jean
Valjean!' 'Jean Valjean! who's Jean Valjean?' Champmathieu feigns
astonishment. 'Don't play the innocent dodge,' says Brevet. 'You are
Jean Valjean! You have been in the galleys of Toulon; it was twenty
years ago; we were there together.' Champmathieu denies it. Parbleu! You
understand. The case is investigated. The thing was well ventilated for
me. This is what they discovered: This Champmathieu had been, thirty
years ago, a pruner of trees in various localities, notably at
Faverolles. There all trace of him was lost. A long time afterwards he
was seen again in Auvergne; then in Paris, where he is said to have been
a wheelwright, and to have had a daughter, who was a laundress; but that
has not been proved. Now, before going to the galleys for theft, what
was Jean Valjean? A pruner of trees. Where? At Faverolles. Another fact.
This Valjean's Christian name was Jean, and his mother's surname was
Mathieu. What more natural to suppose than that, on emerging from the
galleys, he should have taken his mother's name for the purpose of
concealing himself, and have called himself Jean Mathieu? He goes to
Auvergne. The local pronunciation turns Jean into Chan--he is called
Chan Mathieu. Our man offers no opposition, and behold him transformed
into Champmathieu. You follow me, do you not? Inquiries were made at
Faverolles. The family of Jean Valjean is no longer there. It is not
known where they have gone. You know that among those classes a family
often disappears. Search was made, and nothing was found. When such
people are not mud, they are dust. And then, as the beginning of the
story dates thirty years back, there is no longer any one at Faverolles
who knew Jean Valjean. Inquiries were made at Toulon. Besides Brevet,
there are only two convicts in existence who have seen Jean Valjean;
they are Cochepaille and Chenildieu, and are sentenced for life.
They are taken from the galleys and confronted with the pretended
Champmathieu. They do not hesitate; he is Jean Valjean for them as well
as for Brevet. The same age,--he is fifty-four,--the same height, the
same air, the same man; in short, it is he. It was precisely at this
moment that I forwarded my denunciation to the Prefecture in Paris. I
was told that I had lost my reason, and that Jean Valjean is at Arras,
in the power of the authorities. You can imagine whether this surprised
me, when I thought that I had that same Jean Valjean here. I write to
the examining judge; he sends for me; Champmathieu is conducted to me--"

"Well?" interposed M. Madeleine.

Javert replied, his face incorruptible, and as melancholy as ever:--

"Mr. Mayor, the truth is the truth. I am sorry; but that man is Jean
Valjean. I recognized him also."

M. Madeleine resumed in, a very low voice:--

"You are sure?"

Javert began to laugh, with that mournful laugh which comes from
profound conviction.

"O! Sure!"

He stood there thoughtfully for a moment, mechanically taking pinches of
powdered wood for blotting ink from the wooden bowl which stood on the
table, and he added:--

"And even now that I have seen the real Jean Valjean, I do not see how I
could have thought otherwise. I beg your pardon, Mr. Mayor."

Javert, as he addressed these grave and supplicating words to the man,
who six weeks before had humiliated him in the presence of the whole
station-house, and bade him "leave the room,"--Javert, that haughty man,
was unconsciously full of simplicity and dignity,--M. Madeleine made no
other reply to his prayer than the abrupt question:--

"And what does this man say?"

"Ah! Indeed, Mr. Mayor, it's a bad business. If he is Jean Valjean, he
has his previous conviction against him. To climb a wall, to break a
branch, to purloin apples, is a mischievous trick in a child; for a
man it is a misdemeanor; for a convict it is a crime. Robbing
and housebreaking--it is all there. It is no longer a question of
correctional police; it is a matter for the Court of Assizes. It is no
longer a matter of a few days in prison; it is the galleys for life. And
then, there is the affair with the little Savoyard, who will return, I
hope. The deuce! there is plenty to dispute in the matter, is there not?
Yes, for any one but Jean Valjean. But Jean Valjean is a sly dog. That
is the way I recognized him. Any other man would have felt that things
were getting hot for him; he would struggle, he would cry out--the
kettle sings before the fire; he would not be Jean Valjean, et
cetera. But he has not the appearance of understanding; he says, 'I am
Champmathieu, and I won't depart from that!' He has an astonished air,
he pretends to be stupid; it is far better. Oh! the rogue is clever! But
it makes no difference. The proofs are there. He has been recognized by
four persons; the old scamp will be condemned. The case has been taken
to the Assizes at Arras. I shall go there to give my testimony. I have
been summoned."

M. Madeleine had turned to his desk again, and taken up his docket, and
was turning over the leaves tranquilly, reading and writing by turns,
like a busy man. He turned to Javert:--

"That will do, Javert. In truth, all these details interest me but
little. We are wasting our time, and we have pressing business on hand.
Javert, you will betake yourself at once to the house of the woman
Buseaupied, who sells herbs at the corner of the Rue Saint-Saulve. You
will tell her that she must enter her complaint against carter Pierre
Chesnelong. The man is a brute, who came near crushing this woman and
her child. He must be punished. You will then go to M. Charcellay,
Rue Montre-de-Champigny. He complained that there is a gutter on the
adjoining house which discharges rain-water on his premises, and is
undermining the foundations of his house. After that, you will verify
the infractions of police regulations which have been reported to me in
the Rue Guibourg, at Widow Doris's, and Rue du Garraud-Blanc, at Madame
Renee le Bosse's, and you will prepare documents. But I am giving you a
great deal of work. Are you not to be absent? Did you not tell me that
you were going to Arras on that matter in a week or ten days?"

"Sooner than that, Mr. Mayor."

"On what day, then?"

"Why, I thought that I had said to Monsieur le Maire that the case was
to be tried to-morrow, and that I am to set out by diligence to-night."

M. Madeleine made an imperceptible movement.

"And how long will the case last?"

"One day, at the most. The judgment will be pronounced to-morrow evening
at latest. But I shall not wait for the sentence, which is certain; I
shall return here as soon as my deposition has been taken."

"That is well," said M. Madeleine.

And he dismissed Javert with a wave of the hand.

Javert did not withdraw.

"Excuse me, Mr. Mayor," said he.

"What is it now?" demanded M. Madeleine.

"Mr. Mayor, there is still something of which I must remind you."

"What is it?"

"That I must be dismissed."

M. Madeleine rose.

"Javert, you are a man of honor, and I esteem you. You exaggerate your
fault. Moreover, this is an offence which concerns me. Javert, you
deserve promotion instead of degradation. I wish you to retain your
post."

Javert gazed at M. Madeleine with his candid eyes, in whose depths his
not very enlightened but pure and rigid conscience seemed visible, and
said in a tranquil voice:--

"Mr. Mayor, I cannot grant you that."

"I repeat," replied M. Madeleine, "that the matter concerns me."

But Javert, heeding his own thought only, continued:--

"So far as exaggeration is concerned, I am not exaggerating. This is the
way I reason: I have suspected you unjustly. That is nothing. It is our
right to cherish suspicion, although suspicion directed above ourselves
is an abuse. But without proofs, in a fit of rage, with the object
of wreaking my vengeance, I have denounced you as a convict, you, a
respectable man, a mayor, a magistrate! That is serious, very serious. I
have insulted authority in your person, I, an agent of the authorities!
If one of my subordinates had done what I have done, I should have
declared him unworthy of the service, and have expelled him. Well? Stop,
Mr. Mayor; one word more. I have often been severe in the course of my
life towards others. That is just. I have done well. Now, if I were not
severe towards myself, all the justice that I have done would become
injustice. Ought I to spare myself more than others? No! What! I should
be good for nothing but to chastise others, and not myself! Why, I
should be a blackguard! Those who say, 'That blackguard of a Javert!'
would be in the right. Mr. Mayor, I do not desire that you should treat
me kindly; your kindness roused sufficient bad blood in me when it was
directed to others. I want none of it for myself. The kindness which
consists in upholding a woman of the town against a citizen, the police
agent against the mayor, the man who is down against the man who is
up in the world, is what I call false kindness. That is the sort of
kindness which disorganizes society. Good God! it is very easy to be
kind; the difficulty lies in being just. Come! if you had been what I
thought you, I should not have been kind to you, not I! You would have
seen! Mr. Mayor, I must treat myself as I would treat any other man.
When I have subdued malefactors, when I have proceeded with vigor
against rascals, I have often said to myself, 'If you flinch, if I ever
catch you in fault, you may rest at your ease!' I have flinched, I
have caught myself in a fault. So much the worse! Come, discharged,
cashiered, expelled! That is well. I have arms. I will till the soil; it
makes no difference to me. Mr. Mayor, the good of the service demands an
example. I simply require the discharge of Inspector Javert."

All this was uttered in a proud, humble, despairing, yet convinced tone,
which lent indescribable grandeur to this singular, honest man.

"We shall see," said M. Madeleine.

And he offered him his hand.

Javert recoiled, and said in a wild voice:--

"Excuse me, Mr. Mayor, but this must not be. A mayor does not offer his
hand to a police spy."

He added between his teeth:--

"A police spy, yes; from the moment when I have misused the police. I am
no more than a police spy."

Then he bowed profoundly, and directed his steps towards the door.

There he wheeled round, and with eyes still downcast:--

"Mr. Mayor," he said, "I shall continue to serve until I am superseded."

He withdrew. M. Madeleine remained thoughtfully listening to the firm,
sure step, which died away on the pavement of the corridor.




BOOK SEVENTH.--THE CHAMPMATHIEU AFFAIR




CHAPTER I--SISTER SIMPLICE

The incidents the reader is about to peruse were not all known at M. sur
M. But the small portion of them which became known left such a memory
in that town that a serious gap would exist in this book if we did
not narrate them in their most minute details. Among these details the
reader will encounter two or three improbable circumstances, which we
preserve out of respect for the truth.

On the afternoon following the visit of Javert, M. Madeleine went to see
Fantine according to his wont.

Before entering Fantine's room, he had Sister Simplice summoned.

The two nuns who performed the services of nurse in the infirmary,
Lazariste ladies, like all sisters of charity, bore the names of Sister
Perpetue and Sister Simplice.

Sister Perpetue was an ordinary villager, a sister of charity in a
coarse style, who had entered the service of God as one enters any other
service. She was a nun as other women are cooks. This type is not
so very rare. The monastic orders gladly accept this heavy peasant
earthenware, which is easily fashioned into a Capuchin or an Ursuline.
These rustics are utilized for the rough work of devotion. The
transition from a drover to a Carmelite is not in the least violent;
the one turns into the other without much effort; the fund of ignorance
common to the village and the cloister is a preparation ready at hand,
and places the boor at once on the same footing as the monk: a little
more amplitude in the smock, and it becomes a frock. Sister Perpetue
was a robust nun from Marines near Pontoise, who chattered her patois,
droned, grumbled, sugared the potion according to the bigotry or the
hypocrisy of the invalid, treated her patients abruptly, roughly, was
crabbed with the dying, almost flung God in their faces, stoned their
death agony with prayers mumbled in a rage; was bold, honest, and ruddy.

Sister Simplice was white, with a waxen pallor. Beside Sister Perpetue,
she was the taper beside the candle. Vincent de Paul has divinely traced
the features of the Sister of Charity in these admirable words, in which
he mingles as much freedom as servitude: "They shall have for their
convent only the house of the sick; for cell only a hired room; for
chapel only their parish church; for cloister only the streets of the
town and the wards of the hospitals; for enclosure only obedience; for
gratings only the fear of God; for veil only modesty." This ideal was
realized in the living person of Sister Simplice: she had never been
young, and it seemed as though she would never grow old. No one could
have told Sister Simplice's age. She was a person--we dare not say a
woman--who was gentle, austere, well-bred, cold, and who had never lied.
She was so gentle that she appeared fragile; but she was more solid than
granite. She touched the unhappy with fingers that were charmingly pure
and fine. There was, so to speak, silence in her speech; she said just
what was necessary, and she possessed a tone of voice which would
have equally edified a confessional or enchanted a drawing-room. This
delicacy accommodated itself to the serge gown, finding in this harsh
contact a continual reminder of heaven and of God. Let us emphasize
one detail. Never to have lied, never to have said, for any interest
whatever, even in indifference, any single thing which was not the
truth, the sacred truth, was Sister Simplice's distinctive trait; it was
the accent of her virtue. She was almost renowned in the congregation
for this imperturbable veracity. The Abbe Sicard speaks of Sister
Simplice in a letter to the deaf-mute Massieu. However pure and sincere
we may be, we all bear upon our candor the crack of the little, innocent
lie. She did not. Little lie, innocent lie--does such a thing exist? To
lie is the absolute form of evil. To lie a little is not possible: he
who lies, lies the whole lie. To lie is the very face of the demon.
Satan has two names; he is called Satan and Lying. That is what she
thought; and as she thought, so she did. The result was the whiteness
which we have mentioned--a whiteness which covered even her lips and her
eyes with radiance. Her smile was white, her glance was white. There was
not a single spider's web, not a grain of dust, on the glass window of
that conscience. On entering the order of Saint Vincent de Paul, she had
taken the name of Simplice by special choice. Simplice of Sicily, as we
know, is the saint who preferred to allow both her breasts to be torn
off rather than to say that she had been born at Segesta when she had
been born at Syracuse--a lie which would have saved her. This patron
saint suited this soul.

Sister Simplice, on her entrance into the order, had had two faults
which she had gradually corrected: she had a taste for dainties, and she
liked to receive letters. She never read anything but a book of prayers
printed in Latin, in coarse type. She did not understand Latin, but she
understood the book.

This pious woman had conceived an affection for Fantine, probably
feeling a latent virtue there, and she had devoted herself almost
exclusively to her care.

M. Madeleine took Sister Simplice apart and recommended Fantine to her
in a singular tone, which the sister recalled later on.

On leaving the sister, he approached Fantine.

Fantine awaited M. Madeleine's appearance every day as one awaits a ray
of warmth and joy. She said to the sisters, "I only live when Monsieur
le Maire is here."

She had a great deal of fever that day. As soon as she saw M. Madeleine
she asked him:--

"And Cosette?"

He replied with a smile:--

"Soon."

M. Madeleine was the same as usual with Fantine. Only he remained an
hour instead of half an hour, to Fantine's great delight. He urged every
one repeatedly not to allow the invalid to want for anything. It was
noticed that there was a moment when his countenance became very sombre.
But this was explained when it became known that the doctor had bent
down to his ear and said to him, "She is losing ground fast."

Then he returned to the town-hall, and the clerk observed him
attentively examining a road map of France which hung in his study. He
wrote a few figures on a bit of paper with a pencil.




CHAPTER II--THE PERSPICACITY OF MASTER SCAUFFLAIRE

From the town-hall he betook himself to the extremity of the town, to a
Fleming named Master Scaufflaer, French Scaufflaire, who let out "horses
and cabriolets as desired."

In order to reach this Scaufflaire, the shortest way was to take the
little-frequented street in which was situated the parsonage of the
parish in which M. Madeleine resided. The cure was, it was said, a
worthy, respectable, and sensible man. At the moment when M. Madeleine
arrived in front of the parsonage there was but one passer-by in the
street, and this person noticed this: After the mayor had passed the
priest's house he halted, stood motionless, then turned about, and
retraced his steps to the door of the parsonage, which had an iron
knocker. He laid his hand quickly on the knocker and lifted it; then
he paused again and stopped short, as though in thought, and after
the lapse of a few seconds, instead of allowing the knocker to fall
abruptly, he placed it gently, and resumed his way with a sort of haste
which had not been apparent previously.

M. Madeleine found Master Scaufflaire at home, engaged in stitching a
harness over.

"Master Scaufflaire," he inquired, "have you a good horse?"

"Mr. Mayor," said the Fleming, "all my horses are good. What do you mean
by a good horse?"

"I mean a horse which can travel twenty leagues in a day."

"The deuce!" said the Fleming. "Twenty leagues!"

"Yes."

"Hitched to a cabriolet?"

"Yes."

"And how long can he rest at the end of his journey?"

"He must be able to set out again on the next day if necessary."

"To traverse the same road?"

"Yes."

"The deuce! the deuce! And it is twenty leagues?"

M. Madeleine drew from his pocket the paper on which he had pencilled
some figures. He showed it to the Fleming. The figures were 5, 6, 8 1/2.

"You see," he said, "total, nineteen and a half; as well say twenty
leagues."

"Mr. Mayor," returned the Fleming, "I have just what you want. My little
white horse--you may have seen him pass occasionally; he is a small
beast from Lower Boulonnais. He is full of fire. They wanted to make
a saddle-horse of him at first. Bah! He reared, he kicked, he laid
everybody flat on the ground. He was thought to be vicious, and no one
knew what to do with him. I bought him. I harnessed him to a carriage.
That is what he wanted, sir; he is as gentle as a girl; he goes like the
wind. Ah! indeed he must not be mounted. It does not suit his ideas to
be a saddle-horse. Every one has his ambition. 'Draw? Yes. Carry? No.'
We must suppose that is what he said to himself."

"And he will accomplish the trip?"

"Your twenty leagues all at a full trot, and in less than eight hours.
But here are the conditions."

"State them."

"In the first place, you will give him half an hour's breathing spell
midway of the road; he will eat; and some one must be by while he is
eating to prevent the stable boy of the inn from stealing his oats; for
I have noticed that in inns the oats are more often drunk by the stable
men than eaten by the horses."

"Some one will be by."

"In the second place--is the cabriolet for Monsieur le Maire?"

"Yes."

"Does Monsieur le Maire know how to drive?"

"Yes."

"Well, Monsieur le Maire will travel alone and without baggage, in order
not to overload the horse?"

"Agreed."

"But as Monsieur le Maire will have no one with him, he will be obliged
to take the trouble himself of seeing that the oats are not stolen."

"That is understood."

"I am to have thirty francs a day. The days of rest to be paid for
also--not a farthing less; and the beast's food to be at Monsieur le
Maire's expense."

M. Madeleine drew three napoleons from his purse and laid them on the
table.

"Here is the pay for two days in advance."

"Fourthly, for such a journey a cabriolet would be too heavy, and would
fatigue the horse. Monsieur le Maire must consent to travel in a little
tilbury that I own."

"I consent to that."

"It is light, but it has no cover."

"That makes no difference to me."

"Has Monsieur le Maire reflected that we are in the middle of winter?"

M. Madeleine did not reply. The Fleming resumed:--

"That it is very cold?"

M. Madeleine preserved silence.

Master Scaufflaire continued:--

"That it may rain?"

M. Madeleine raised his head and said:--

"The tilbury and the horse will be in front of my door to-morrow morning
at half-past four o'clock."

"Of course, Monsieur le Maire," replied Scaufflaire; then, scratching a
speck in the wood of the table with his thumb-nail, he resumed with that
careless air which the Flemings understand so well how to mingle with
their shrewdness:--

"But this is what I am thinking of now: Monsieur le Maire has not told
me where he is going. Where is Monsieur le Maire going?"

He had been thinking of nothing else since the beginning of the
conversation, but he did not know why he had not dared to put the
question.

"Are your horse's forelegs good?" said M. Madeleine.

"Yes, Monsieur le Maire. You must hold him in a little when going down
hill. Are there many descends between here and the place whither you are
going?"

"Do not forget to be at my door at precisely half-past four o'clock
to-morrow morning," replied M. Madeleine; and he took his departure.

The Fleming remained "utterly stupid," as he himself said some time
afterwards.

The mayor had been gone two or three minutes when the door opened again;
it was the mayor once more.

He still wore the same impassive and preoccupied air.

"Monsieur Scaufflaire," said he, "at what sum do you estimate the value
of the horse and tilbury which you are to let to me,--the one bearing
the other?"

"The one dragging the other, Monsieur le Maire," said the Fleming, with
a broad smile.

"So be it. Well?"

"Does Monsieur le Maire wish to purchase them or me?"

"No; but I wish to guarantee you in any case. You shall give me back
the sum at my return. At what value do you estimate your horse and
cabriolet?"

"Five hundred francs, Monsieur le Maire."

"Here it is."

M. Madeleine laid a bank-bill on the table, then left the room; and this
time he did not return.

Master Scaufflaire experienced a frightful regret that he had not said a
thousand francs. Besides the horse and tilbury together were worth but a
hundred crowns.

The Fleming called his wife, and related the affair to her. "Where the
devil could Monsieur le Maire be going?" They held counsel together.
"He is going to Paris," said the wife. "I don't believe it," said the
husband.

M. Madeleine had forgotten the paper with the figures on it, and it lay
on the chimney-piece. The Fleming picked it up and studied it. "Five,
six, eight and a half? That must designate the posting relays." He
turned to his wife:--

"I have found out."

"What?"

"It is five leagues from here to Hesdin, six from Hesdin to Saint-Pol,
eight and a half from Saint-Pol to Arras. He is going to Arras."

Meanwhile, M. Madeleine had returned home. He had taken the longest way
to return from Master Scaufflaire's, as though the parsonage door had
been a temptation for him, and he had wished to avoid it. He ascended
to his room, and there he shut himself up, which was a very simple act,
since he liked to go to bed early. Nevertheless, the portress of the
factory, who was, at the same time, M. Madeleine's only servant, noticed
that the latter's light was extinguished at half-past eight, and she
mentioned it to the cashier when he came home, adding:--

"Is Monsieur le Maire ill? I thought he had a rather singular air."

This cashier occupied a room situated directly under M. Madeleine's
chamber. He paid no heed to the portress's words, but went to bed and
to sleep. Towards midnight he woke up with a start; in his sleep he had
heard a noise above his head. He listened; it was a footstep pacing back
and forth, as though some one were walking in the room above him. He
listened more attentively, and recognized M. Madeleine's step. This
struck him as strange; usually, there was no noise in M. Madeleine's
chamber until he rose in the morning. A moment later the cashier heard
a noise which resembled that of a cupboard being opened, and then shut
again; then a piece of furniture was disarranged; then a pause ensued;
then the step began again. The cashier sat up in bed, quite awake now,
and staring; and through his window-panes he saw the reddish gleam of a
lighted window reflected on the opposite wall; from the direction of the
rays, it could only come from the window of M. Madeleine's chamber. The
reflection wavered, as though it came rather from a fire which had
been lighted than from a candle. The shadow of the window-frame was not
shown, which indicated that the window was wide open. The fact that this
window was open in such cold weather was surprising. The cashier fell
asleep again. An hour or two later he waked again. The same step was
still passing slowly and regularly back and forth overhead.

The reflection was still visible on the wall, but now it was pale and
peaceful, like the reflection of a lamp or of a candle. The window was
still open.

This is what had taken place in M. Madeleine's room.




CHAPTER III--A TEMPEST IN A SKULL

The reader has, no doubt, already divined that M. Madeleine is no other
than Jean Valjean.

We have already gazed into the depths of this conscience; the moment has
now come when we must take another look into it. We do so not without
emotion and trepidation. There is nothing more terrible in existence
than this sort of contemplation. The eye of the spirit can nowhere find
more dazzling brilliance and more shadow than in man; it can fix itself
on no other thing which is more formidable, more complicated, more
mysterious, and more infinite. There is a spectacle more grand than the
sea; it is heaven: there is a spectacle more grand than heaven; it is
the inmost recesses of the soul.

To make the poem of the human conscience, were it only with reference to
a single man, were it only in connection with the basest of men, would
be to blend all epics into one superior and definitive epic. Conscience
is the chaos of chimeras, of lusts, and of temptations; the furnace of
dreams; the lair of ideas of which we are ashamed; it is the pandemonium
of sophisms; it is the battlefield of the passions. Penetrate, at
certain hours, past the livid face of a human being who is engaged
in reflection, and look behind, gaze into that soul, gaze into that
obscurity. There, beneath that external silence, battles of giants,
like those recorded in Homer, are in progress; skirmishes of dragons and
hydras and swarms of phantoms, as in Milton; visionary circles, as in
Dante. What a solemn thing is this infinity which every man bears within
him, and which he measures with despair against the caprices of his
brain and the actions of his life!

Alighieri one day met with a sinister-looking door, before which he
hesitated. Here is one before us, upon whose threshold we hesitate. Let
us enter, nevertheless.

We have but little to add to what the reader already knows of what had
happened to Jean Valjean after the adventure with Little Gervais. From
that moment forth he was, as we have seen, a totally different man. What
the Bishop had wished to make of him, that he carried out. It was more
than a transformation; it was a transfiguration.

He succeeded in disappearing, sold the Bishop's silver, reserving only
the candlesticks as a souvenir, crept from town to town, traversed
France, came to M. sur M., conceived the idea which we have mentioned,
accomplished what we have related, succeeded in rendering himself safe
from seizure and inaccessible, and, thenceforth, established at M. sur
M., happy in feeling his conscience saddened by the past and the first
half of his existence belied by the last, he lived in peace, reassured
and hopeful, having henceforth only two thoughts,--to conceal his name
and to sanctify his life; to escape men and to return to God.

These two thoughts were so closely intertwined in his mind that
they formed but a single one there; both were equally absorbing and
imperative and ruled his slightest actions. In general, they conspired
to regulate the conduct of his life; they turned him towards the gloom;
they rendered him kindly and simple; they counselled him to the same
things. Sometimes, however, they conflicted. In that case, as the reader
will remember, the man whom all the country of M. sur M. called M.
Madeleine did not hesitate to sacrifice the first to the second--his
security to his virtue. Thus, in spite of all his reserve and all his
prudence, he had preserved the Bishop's candlesticks, worn mourning for
him, summoned and interrogated all the little Savoyards who passed that
way, collected information regarding the families at Faverolles, and
saved old Fauchelevent's life, despite the disquieting insinuations of
Javert. It seemed, as we have already remarked, as though he thought,
following the example of all those who have been wise, holy, and just,
that his first duty was not towards himself.

At the same time, it must be confessed, nothing just like this had yet
presented itself.

Never had the two ideas which governed the unhappy man whose sufferings
we are narrating, engaged in so serious a struggle. He understood this
confusedly but profoundly at the very first words pronounced by Javert,
when the latter entered his study. At the moment when that name, which
he had buried beneath so many layers, was so strangely articulated,
he was struck with stupor, and as though intoxicated with the sinister
eccentricity of his destiny; and through this stupor he felt that
shudder which precedes great shocks. He bent like an oak at the approach
of a storm, like a soldier at the approach of an assault. He felt
shadows filled with thunders and lightnings descending upon his head.
As he listened to Javert, the first thought which occurred to him was to
go, to run and denounce himself, to take that Champmathieu out of prison
and place himself there; this was as painful and as poignant as an
incision in the living flesh. Then it passed away, and he said to
himself, "We will see! We will see!" He repressed this first, generous
instinct, and recoiled before heroism.

It would be beautiful, no doubt, after the Bishop's holy words, after
so many years of repentance and abnegation, in the midst of a penitence
admirably begun, if this man had not flinched for an instant, even in
the presence of so terrible a conjecture, but had continued to walk with
the same step towards this yawning precipice, at the bottom of which
lay heaven; that would have been beautiful; but it was not thus. We must
render an account of the things which went on in this soul, and we can
only tell what there was there. He was carried away, at first, by
the instinct of self-preservation; he rallied all his ideas in haste,
stifled his emotions, took into consideration Javert's presence, that
great danger, postponed all decision with the firmness of terror, shook
off thought as to what he had to do, and resumed his calmness as a
warrior picks up his buckler.

He remained in this state during the rest of the day, a whirlwind
within, a profound tranquillity without. He took no "preservative
measures," as they may be called. Everything was still confused, and
jostling together in his brain. His trouble was so great that he could
not perceive the form of a single idea distinctly, and he could have
told nothing about himself, except that he had received a great blow.

He repaired to Fantine's bed of suffering, as usual, and prolonged his
visit, through a kindly instinct, telling himself that he must behave
thus, and recommend her well to the sisters, in case he should be
obliged to be absent himself. He had a vague feeling that he might be
obliged to go to Arras; and without having the least in the world made
up his mind to this trip, he said to himself that being, as he was,
beyond the shadow of any suspicion, there could be nothing out of the
way in being a witness to what was to take place, and he engaged the
tilbury from Scaufflaire in order to be prepared in any event.

He dined with a good deal of appetite.

On returning to his room, he communed with himself.

He examined the situation, and found it unprecedented; so unprecedented
that in the midst of his revery he rose from his chair, moved by some
inexplicable impulse of anxiety, and bolted his door. He feared
lest something more should enter. He was barricading himself against
possibilities.

A moment later he extinguished his light; it embarrassed him.

It seemed to him as though he might be seen.

By whom?

Alas! That on which he desired to close the door had already entered;
that which he desired to blind was staring him in the face,--his
conscience.

His conscience; that is to say, God.

Nevertheless, he deluded himself at first; he had a feeling of security
and of solitude; the bolt once drawn, he thought himself impregnable;
the candle extinguished, he felt himself invisible. Then he took
possession of himself: he set his elbows on the table, leaned his head
on his hand, and began to meditate in the dark.

"Where do I stand? Am not I dreaming? What have I heard? Is it really
true that I have seen that Javert, and that he spoke to me in that
manner? Who can that Champmathieu be? So he resembles me! Is it
possible? When I reflect that yesterday I was so tranquil, and so far
from suspecting anything! What was I doing yesterday at this hour? What
is there in this incident? What will the end be? What is to be done?"

This was the torment in which he found himself. His brain had lost its
power of retaining ideas; they passed like waves, and he clutched his
brow in both hands to arrest them.

Nothing but anguish extricated itself from this tumult which overwhelmed
his will and his reason, and from which he sought to draw proof and
resolution.

His head was burning. He went to the window and threw it wide open.
There were no stars in the sky. He returned and seated himself at the
table.

The first hour passed in this manner.

Gradually, however, vague outlines began to take form and to fix
themselves in his meditation, and he was able to catch a glimpse with
precision of the reality,--not the whole situation, but some of
the details. He began by recognizing the fact that, critical and
extraordinary as was this situation, he was completely master of it.

This only caused an increase of his stupor.

Independently of the severe and religious aim which he had assigned to
his actions, all that he had made up to that day had been nothing but a
hole in which to bury his name. That which he had always feared most of
all in his hours of self-communion, during his sleepless nights, was to
ever hear that name pronounced; he had said to himself, that that would
be the end of all things for him; that on the day when that name made
its reappearance it would cause his new life to vanish from about
him, and--who knows?--perhaps even his new soul within him, also. He
shuddered at the very thought that this was possible. Assuredly, if any
one had said to him at such moments that the hour would come when that
name would ring in his ears, when the hideous words, Jean Valjean, would
suddenly emerge from the darkness and rise in front of him, when that
formidable light, capable of dissipating the mystery in which he had
enveloped himself, would suddenly blaze forth above his head, and that
that name would not menace him, that that light would but produce
an obscurity more dense, that this rent veil would but increase the
mystery, that this earthquake would solidify his edifice, that this
prodigious incident would have no other result, so far as he was
concerned, if so it seemed good to him, than that of rendering his
existence at once clearer and more impenetrable, and that, out of his
confrontation with the phantom of Jean Valjean, the good and worthy
citizen Monsieur Madeleine would emerge more honored, more peaceful, and
more respected than ever--if any one had told him that, he would have
tossed his head and regarded the words as those of a madman. Well, all
this was precisely what had just come to pass; all that accumulation of
impossibilities was a fact, and God had permitted these wild fancies to
become real things!

His revery continued to grow clearer. He came more and more to an
understanding of his position.

It seemed to him that he had but just waked up from some inexplicable
dream, and that he found himself slipping down a declivity in the middle
of the night, erect, shivering, holding back all in vain, on the very
brink of the abyss. He distinctly perceived in the darkness a stranger,
a man unknown to him, whom destiny had mistaken for him, and whom she
was thrusting into the gulf in his stead; in order that the gulf might
close once more, it was necessary that some one, himself or that other
man, should fall into it: he had only let things take their course.

The light became complete, and he acknowledged this to himself: That
his place was empty in the galleys; that do what he would, it was still
awaiting him; that the theft from little Gervais had led him back to it;
that this vacant place would await him, and draw him on until he filled
it; that this was inevitable and fatal; and then he said to himself,
"that, at this moment, he had a substitute; that it appeared that a
certain Champmathieu had that ill luck, and that, as regards himself,
being present in the galleys in the person of that Champmathieu, present
in society under the name of M. Madeleine, he had nothing more to fear,
provided that he did not prevent men from sealing over the head of
that Champmathieu this stone of infamy which, like the stone of the
sepulchre, falls once, never to rise again."

All this was so strange and so violent, that there suddenly took place
in him that indescribable movement, which no man feels more than two
or three times in the course of his life, a sort of convulsion of the
conscience which stirs up all that there is doubtful in the heart, which
is composed of irony, of joy, and of despair, and which may be called an
outburst of inward laughter.

He hastily relighted his candle.

"Well, what then?" he said to himself; "what am I afraid of? What is
there in all that for me to think about? I am safe; all is over. I had
but one partly open door through which my past might invade my life,
and behold that door is walled up forever! That Javert, who has been
annoying me so long; that terrible instinct which seemed to have divined
me, which had divined me--good God! and which followed me everywhere;
that frightful hunting-dog, always making a point at me, is thrown
off the scent, engaged elsewhere, absolutely turned from the trail:
henceforth he is satisfied; he will leave me in peace; he has his Jean
Valjean. Who knows? it is even probable that he will wish to leave town!
And all this has been brought about without any aid from me, and I count
for nothing in it! Ah! but where is the misfortune in this? Upon my
honor, people would think, to see me, that some catastrophe had happened
to me! After all, if it does bring harm to some one, that is not my
fault in the least: it is Providence which has done it all; it is
because it wishes it so to be, evidently. Have I the right to disarrange
what it has arranged? What do I ask now? Why should I meddle? It does
not concern me; what! I am not satisfied: but what more do I want? The
goal to which I have aspired for so many years, the dream of my nights,
the object of my prayers to Heaven,--security,--I have now attained; it
is God who wills it; I can do nothing against the will of God, and why
does God will it? In order that I may continue what I have begun, that I
may do good, that I may one day be a grand and encouraging example, that
it may be said at last, that a little happiness has been attached to
the penance which I have undergone, and to that virtue to which I have
returned. Really, I do not understand why I was afraid, a little while
ago, to enter the house of that good cure, and to ask his advice; this
is evidently what he would have said to me: It is settled; let things
take their course; let the good God do as he likes!"

Thus did he address himself in the depths of his own conscience, bending
over what may be called his own abyss; he rose from his chair, and began
to pace the room: "Come," said he, "let us think no more about it; my
resolve is taken!" but he felt no joy.

Quite the reverse.

One can no more prevent thought from recurring to an idea than one can
the sea from returning to the shore: the sailor calls it the tide; the
guilty man calls it remorse; God upheaves the soul as he does the ocean.

After the expiration of a few moments, do what he would, he resumed the
gloomy dialogue in which it was he who spoke and he who listened, saying
that which he would have preferred to ignore, and listened to that which
he would have preferred not to hear, yielding to that mysterious power
which said to him: "Think!" as it said to another condemned man, two
thousand years ago, "March on!"

Before proceeding further, and in order to make ourselves fully
understood, let us insist upon one necessary observation.

It is certain that people do talk to themselves; there is no living
being who has not done it. It may even be said that the word is never
a more magnificent mystery than when it goes from thought to conscience
within a man, and when it returns from conscience to thought; it is in
this sense only that the words so often employed in this chapter, he
said, he exclaimed, must be understood; one speaks to one's self, talks
to one's self, exclaims to one's self without breaking the external
silence; there is a great tumult; everything about us talks except the
mouth. The realities of the soul are none the less realities because
they are not visible and palpable.

So he asked himself where he stood. He interrogated himself upon that
"settled resolve." He confessed to himself that all that he had just
arranged in his mind was monstrous, that "to let things take their
course, to let the good God do as he liked," was simply horrible; to
allow this error of fate and of men to be carried out, not to hinder it,
to lend himself to it through his silence, to do nothing, in short,
was to do everything! that this was hypocritical baseness in the last
degree! that it was a base, cowardly, sneaking, abject, hideous crime!

For the first time in eight years, the wretched man had just tasted the
bitter savor of an evil thought and of an evil action.

He spit it out with disgust.

He continued to question himself. He asked himself severely what he had
meant by this, "My object is attained!" He declared to himself that
his life really had an object; but what object? To conceal his name?
To deceive the police? Was it for so petty a thing that he had done all
that he had done? Had he not another and a grand object, which was the
true one--to save, not his person, but his soul; to become honest and
good once more; to be a just man? Was it not that above all, that alone,
which he had always desired, which the Bishop had enjoined upon him--to
shut the door on his past? But he was not shutting it! great God! he was
re-opening it by committing an infamous action! He was becoming a thief
once more, and the most odious of thieves! He was robbing another of
his existence, his life, his peace, his place in the sunshine. He was
becoming an assassin. He was murdering, morally murdering, a wretched
man. He was inflicting on him that frightful living death, that death
beneath the open sky, which is called the galleys. On the other hand,
to surrender himself to save that man, struck down with so melancholy
an error, to resume his own name, to become once more, out of duty, the
convict Jean Valjean, that was, in truth, to achieve his resurrection,
and to close forever that hell whence he had just emerged; to fall back
there in appearance was to escape from it in reality. This must be
done! He had done nothing if he did not do all this; his whole life was
useless; all his penitence was wasted. There was no longer any need of
saying, "What is the use?" He felt that the Bishop was there, that the
Bishop was present all the more because he was dead, that the Bishop
was gazing fixedly at him, that henceforth Mayor Madeleine, with all his
virtues, would be abominable to him, and that the convict Jean Valjean
would be pure and admirable in his sight; that men beheld his mask, but
that the Bishop saw his face; that men saw his life, but that the Bishop
beheld his conscience. So he must go to Arras, deliver the false Jean
Valjean, and denounce the real one. Alas! that was the greatest of
sacrifices, the most poignant of victories, the last step to take; but
it must be done. Sad fate! he would enter into sanctity only in the eyes
of God when he returned to infamy in the eyes of men.

"Well," said he, "let us decide upon this; let us do our duty; let us
save this man." He uttered these words aloud, without perceiving that he
was speaking aloud.

He took his books, verified them, and put them in order. He flung in
the fire a bundle of bills which he had against petty and embarrassed
tradesmen. He wrote and sealed a letter, and on the envelope it might
have been read, had there been any one in his chamber at the moment,
To Monsieur Laffitte, Banker, Rue d'Artois, Paris. He drew from his
secretary a pocket-book which contained several bank-notes and the
passport of which he had made use that same year when he went to the
elections.

Any one who had seen him during the execution of these various acts,
into which there entered such grave thought, would have had no suspicion
of what was going on within him. Only occasionally did his lips move; at
other times he raised his head and fixed his gaze upon some point of the
wall, as though there existed at that point something which he wished to
elucidate or interrogate.

When he had finished the letter to M. Laffitte, he put it into his
pocket, together with the pocket-book, and began his walk once more.

His revery had not swerved from its course. He continued to see his duty
clearly, written in luminous letters, which flamed before his eyes and
changed its place as he altered the direction of his glance:--

"Go! Tell your name! Denounce yourself!"

In the same way he beheld, as though they had passed before him in
visible forms, the two ideas which had, up to that time, formed
the double rule of his soul,--the concealment of his name, the
sanctification of his life. For the first time they appeared to him as
absolutely distinct, and he perceived the distance which separated them.
He recognized the fact that one of these ideas was, necessarily, good,
while the other might become bad; that the first was self-devotion, and
that the other was personality; that the one said, my neighbor, and that
the other said, myself; that one emanated from the light, and the other
from darkness.

They were antagonistic. He saw them in conflict. In proportion as
he meditated, they grew before the eyes of his spirit. They had now
attained colossal statures, and it seemed to him that he beheld within
himself, in that infinity of which we were recently speaking, in the
midst of the darkness and the lights, a goddess and a giant contending.

He was filled with terror; but it seemed to him that the good thought
was getting the upper hand.

He felt that he was on the brink of the second decisive crisis of his
conscience and of his destiny; that the Bishop had marked the first
phase of his new life, and that Champmathieu marked the second. After
the grand crisis, the grand test.

But the fever, allayed for an instant, gradually resumed possession
of him. A thousand thoughts traversed his mind, but they continued to
fortify him in his resolution.

One moment he said to himself that he was, perhaps, taking the matter
too keenly; that, after all, this Champmathieu was not interesting, and
that he had actually been guilty of theft.

He answered himself: "If this man has, indeed, stolen a few apples, that
means a month in prison. It is a long way from that to the galleys. And
who knows? Did he steal? Has it been proved? The name of Jean Valjean
overwhelms him, and seems to dispense with proofs. Do not the attorneys
for the Crown always proceed in this manner? He is supposed to be a
thief because he is known to be a convict."

In another instant the thought had occurred to him that, when he
denounced himself, the heroism of his deed might, perhaps, be taken into
consideration, and his honest life for the last seven years, and what he
had done for the district, and that they would have mercy on him.

But this supposition vanished very quickly, and he smiled bitterly as he
remembered that the theft of the forty sous from little Gervais put him
in the position of a man guilty of a second offence after conviction,
that this affair would certainly come up, and, according to the precise
terms of the law, would render him liable to penal servitude for life.

He turned aside from all illusions, detached himself more and more from
earth, and sought strength and consolation elsewhere. He told himself
that he must do his duty; that perhaps he should not be more unhappy
after doing his duty than after having avoided it; that if he allowed
things to take their own course, if he remained at M. sur M., his
consideration, his good name, his good works, the deference and
veneration paid to him, his charity, his wealth, his popularity, his
virtue, would be seasoned with a crime. And what would be the taste of
all these holy things when bound up with this hideous thing? while, if
he accomplished his sacrifice, a celestial idea would be mingled with
the galleys, the post, the iron necklet, the green cap, unceasing toil,
and pitiless shame.

At length he told himself that it must be so, that his destiny was thus
allotted, that he had not authority to alter the arrangements made on
high, that, in any case, he must make his choice: virtue without and
abomination within, or holiness within and infamy without.

The stirring up of these lugubrious ideas did not cause his courage to
fail, but his brain grow weary. He began to think of other things, of
indifferent matters, in spite of himself.

The veins in his temples throbbed violently; he still paced to and fro;
midnight sounded first from the parish church, then from the town-hall;
he counted the twelve strokes of the two clocks, and compared the sounds
of the two bells; he recalled in this connection the fact that, a few
days previously, he had seen in an ironmonger's shop an ancient clock
for sale, upon which was written the name, Antoine-Albin de Romainville.

He was cold; he lighted a small fire; it did not occur to him to close
the window.

In the meantime he had relapsed into his stupor; he was obliged to make
a tolerably vigorous effort to recall what had been the subject of his
thoughts before midnight had struck; he finally succeeded in doing this.

"Ah! yes," he said to himself, "I had resolved to inform against
myself."

And then, all of a sudden, he thought of Fantine.

"Hold!" said he, "and what about that poor woman?"

Here a fresh crisis declared itself.

Fantine, by appearing thus abruptly in his revery, produced the effect
of an unexpected ray of light; it seemed to him as though everything
about him were undergoing a change of aspect: he exclaimed:--

"Ah! but I have hitherto considered no one but myself; it is proper for
me to hold my tongue or to denounce myself, to conceal my person or
to save my soul, to be a despicable and respected magistrate, or an
infamous and venerable convict; it is I, it is always I and nothing
but I: but, good God! all this is egotism; these are diverse forms
of egotism, but it is egotism all the same. What if I were to think a
little about others? The highest holiness is to think of others; come,
let us examine the matter. The _I_ excepted, the _I_ effaced, the _I_
forgotten, what would be the result of all this? What if I denounce
myself? I am arrested; this Champmathieu is released; I am put back in
the galleys; that is well--and what then? What is going on here? Ah!
here is a country, a town, here are factories, an industry, workers,
both men and women, aged grandsires, children, poor people! All this I
have created; all these I provide with their living; everywhere where
there is a smoking chimney, it is I who have placed the brand on the
hearth and meat in the pot; I have created ease, circulation, credit;
before me there was nothing; I have elevated, vivified, informed with
life, fecundated, stimulated, enriched the whole country-side; lacking
me, the soul is lacking; I take myself off, everything dies: and this
woman, who has suffered so much, who possesses so many merits in spite
of her fall; the cause of all whose misery I have unwittingly been! And
that child whom I meant to go in search of, whom I have promised to her
mother; do I not also owe something to this woman, in reparation for
the evil which I have done her? If I disappear, what happens? The mother
dies; the child becomes what it can; that is what will take place, if
I denounce myself. If I do not denounce myself? come, let us see how it
will be if I do not denounce myself."

After putting this question to himself, he paused; he seemed to undergo
a momentary hesitation and trepidation; but it did not last long, and he
answered himself calmly:--

"Well, this man is going to the galleys; it is true, but what the deuce!
he has stolen! There is no use in my saying that he has not been guilty
of theft, for he has! I remain here; I go on: in ten years I shall have
made ten millions; I scatter them over the country; I have nothing of
my own; what is that to me? It is not for myself that I am doing it;
the prosperity of all goes on augmenting; industries are aroused and
animated; factories and shops are multiplied; families, a hundred
families, a thousand families, are happy; the district becomes
populated; villages spring up where there were only farms before;
farms rise where there was nothing; wretchedness disappears, and
with wretchedness debauchery, prostitution, theft, murder; all vices
disappear, all crimes: and this poor mother rears her child; and behold
a whole country rich and honest! Ah! I was a fool! I was absurd!
what was that I was saying about denouncing myself? I really must pay
attention and not be precipitate about anything. What! because it would
have pleased me to play the grand and generous; this is melodrama, after
all; because I should have thought of no one but myself, the idea! for
the sake of saving from a punishment, a trifle exaggerated, perhaps,
but just at bottom, no one knows whom, a thief, a good-for-nothing,
evidently, a whole country-side must perish! a poor woman must die in
the hospital! a poor little girl must die in the street! like dogs; ah,
this is abominable! And without the mother even having seen her child
once more, almost without the child's having known her mother; and
all that for the sake of an old wretch of an apple-thief who, most
assuredly, has deserved the galleys for something else, if not for
that; fine scruples, indeed, which save a guilty man and sacrifice the
innocent, which save an old vagabond who has only a few years to live at
most, and who will not be more unhappy in the galleys than in his hovel,
and which sacrifice a whole population, mothers, wives, children. This
poor little Cosette who has no one in the world but me, and who is, no
doubt, blue with cold at this moment in the den of those Thenardiers;
those peoples are rascals; and I was going to neglect my duty towards
all these poor creatures; and I was going off to denounce myself; and I
was about to commit that unspeakable folly! Let us put it at the worst:
suppose that there is a wrong action on my part in this, and that my
conscience will reproach me for it some day, to accept, for the good of
others, these reproaches which weigh only on myself; this evil action
which compromises my soul alone; in that lies self-sacrifice; in that
alone there is virtue."

He rose and resumed his march; this time, he seemed to be content.

Diamonds are found only in the dark places of the earth; truths are
found only in the depths of thought. It seemed to him, that, after
having descended into these depths, after having long groped among the
darkest of these shadows, he had at last found one of these diamonds,
one of these truths, and that he now held it in his hand, and he was
dazzled as he gazed upon it.

"Yes," he thought, "this is right; I am on the right road; I have the
solution; I must end by holding fast to something; my resolve is taken;
let things take their course; let us no longer vacillate; let us no
longer hang back; this is for the interest of all, not for my own; I am
Madeleine, and Madeleine I remain. Woe to the man who is Jean Valjean!
I am no longer he; I do not know that man; I no longer know anything; it
turns out that some one is Jean Valjean at the present moment; let him
look out for himself; that does not concern me; it is a fatal name which
was floating abroad in the night; if it halts and descends on a head, so
much the worse for that head."

He looked into the little mirror which hung above his chimney-piece, and
said:--

"Hold! it has relieved me to come to a decision; I am quite another man
now."

He proceeded a few paces further, then he stopped short.

"Come!" he said, "I must not flinch before any of the consequences of
the resolution which I have once adopted; there are still threads which
attach me to that Jean Valjean; they must be broken; in this very room
there are objects which would betray me, dumb things which would bear
witness against me; it is settled; all these things must disappear."

He fumbled in his pocket, drew out his purse, opened it, and took out a
small key; he inserted the key in a lock whose aperture could hardly
be seen, so hidden was it in the most sombre tones of the design which
covered the wall-paper; a secret receptacle opened, a sort of
false cupboard constructed in the angle between the wall and the
chimney-piece; in this hiding-place there were some rags--a blue linen
blouse, an old pair of trousers, an old knapsack, and a huge thorn
cudgel shod with iron at both ends. Those who had seen Jean Valjean at
the epoch when he passed through D----in October, 1815, could easily
have recognized all the pieces of this miserable outfit.

He had preserved them as he had preserved the silver candlesticks, in
order to remind himself continually of his starting-point, but he
had concealed all that came from the galleys, and he had allowed the
candlesticks which came from the Bishop to be seen.

He cast a furtive glance towards the door, as though he feared that it
would open in spite of the bolt which fastened it; then, with a quick
and abrupt movement, he took the whole in his arms at once, without
bestowing so much as a glance on the things which he had so religiously
and so perilously preserved for so many years, and flung them all, rags,
cudgel, knapsack, into the fire.

[Illustration: Candlesticks Into the Fire  1b7-3-into-the-fire]

He closed the false cupboard again, and with redoubled precautions,
henceforth unnecessary, since it was now empty, he concealed the door
behind a heavy piece of furniture, which he pushed in front of it.

After the lapse of a few seconds, the room and the opposite wall were
lighted up with a fierce, red, tremulous glow. Everything was on fire;
the thorn cudgel snapped and threw out sparks to the middle of the
chamber.

As the knapsack was consumed, together with the hideous rags which it
contained, it revealed something which sparkled in the ashes. By bending
over, one could have readily recognized a coin,--no doubt the forty-sou
piece stolen from the little Savoyard.

He did not look at the fire, but paced back and forth with the same
step.

All at once his eye fell on the two silver candlesticks, which shone
vaguely on the chimney-piece, through the glow.

"Hold!" he thought; "the whole of Jean Valjean is still in them. They
must be destroyed also."

He seized the two candlesticks.

There was still fire enough to allow of their being put out of shape,
and converted into a sort of unrecognizable bar of metal.

He bent over the hearth and warmed himself for a moment. He felt a sense
of real comfort. "How good warmth is!" said he.

He stirred the live coals with one of the candlesticks.

A minute more, and they were both in the fire.

At that moment it seemed to him that he heard a voice within him
shouting: "Jean Valjean! Jean Valjean!"

His hair rose upright: he became like a man who is listening to some
terrible thing.

"Yes, that's it! finish!" said the voice. "Complete what you are about!
Destroy these candlesticks! Annihilate this souvenir! Forget the Bishop!
Forget everything! Destroy this Champmathieu, do! That is right! Applaud
yourself! So it is settled, resolved, fixed, agreed: here is an old man
who does not know what is wanted of him, who has, perhaps, done nothing,
an innocent man, whose whole misfortune lies in your name, upon whom
your name weighs like a crime, who is about to be taken for you, who
will be condemned, who will finish his days in abjectness and horror.
That is good! Be an honest man yourself; remain Monsieur le Maire;
remain honorable and honored; enrich the town; nourish the indigent;
rear the orphan; live happy, virtuous, and admired; and, during this
time, while you are here in the midst of joy and light, there will be a
man who will wear your red blouse, who will bear your name in ignominy,
and who will drag your chain in the galleys. Yes, it is well arranged
thus. Ah, wretch!"

The perspiration streamed from his brow. He fixed a haggard eye on the
candlesticks. But that within him which had spoken had not finished. The
voice continued:--

"Jean Valjean, there will be around you many voices, which will make a
great noise, which will talk very loud, and which will bless you, and
only one which no one will hear, and which will curse you in the dark.
Well! listen, infamous man! All those benedictions will fall back before
they reach heaven, and only the malediction will ascend to God."

This voice, feeble at first, and which had proceeded from the most
obscure depths of his conscience, had gradually become startling and
formidable, and he now heard it in his very ear. It seemed to him that
it had detached itself from him, and that it was now speaking outside
of him. He thought that he heard the last words so distinctly, that he
glanced around the room in a sort of terror.

"Is there any one here?" he demanded aloud, in utter bewilderment.

Then he resumed, with a laugh which resembled that of an idiot:--

"How stupid I am! There can be no one!"

There was some one; but the person who was there was of those whom the
human eye cannot see.

He placed the candlesticks on the chimney-piece.

Then he resumed his monotonous and lugubrious tramp, which troubled the
dreams of the sleeping man beneath him, and awoke him with a start.

This tramping to and fro soothed and at the same time intoxicated him.
It sometimes seems, on supreme occasions, as though people moved about
for the purpose of asking advice of everything that they may encounter
by change of place. After the lapse of a few minutes he no longer knew
his position.

He now recoiled in equal terror before both the resolutions at which he
had arrived in turn. The two ideas which counselled him appeared to him
equally fatal. What a fatality! What conjunction that that Champmathieu
should have been taken for him; to be overwhelmed by precisely the means
which Providence seemed to have employed, at first, to strengthen his
position!

There was a moment when he reflected on the future. Denounce himself,
great God! Deliver himself up! With immense despair he faced all that
he should be obliged to leave, all that he should be obliged to take up
once more. He should have to bid farewell to that existence which was so
good, so pure, so radiant, to the respect of all, to honor, to liberty.
He should never more stroll in the fields; he should never more hear the
birds sing in the month of May; he should never more bestow alms on the
little children; he should never more experience the sweetness of having
glances of gratitude and love fixed upon him; he should quit that house
which he had built, that little chamber! Everything seemed charming to
him at that moment. Never again should he read those books; never more
should he write on that little table of white wood; his old portress,
the only servant whom he kept, would never more bring him his coffee
in the morning. Great God! instead of that, the convict gang, the iron
necklet, the red waistcoat, the chain on his ankle, fatigue, the cell,
the camp bed all those horrors which he knew so well! At his age,
after having been what he was! If he were only young again! but to
be addressed in his old age as "thou" by any one who pleased; to
be searched by the convict-guard; to receive the galley-sergeant's
cudgellings; to wear iron-bound shoes on his bare feet; to have to
stretch out his leg night and morning to the hammer of the roundsman who
visits the gang; to submit to the curiosity of strangers, who would be
told: "That man yonder is the famous Jean Valjean, who was mayor of
M. sur M."; and at night, dripping with perspiration, overwhelmed with
lassitude, their green caps drawn over their eyes, to remount, two by
two, the ladder staircase of the galleys beneath the sergeant's whip.
Oh, what misery! Can destiny, then, be as malicious as an intelligent
being, and become as monstrous as the human heart?

And do what he would, he always fell back upon the heartrending dilemma
which lay at the foundation of his revery: "Should he remain in paradise
and become a demon? Should he return to hell and become an angel?"

What was to be done? Great God! what was to be done?

The torment from which he had escaped with so much difficulty was
unchained afresh within him. His ideas began to grow confused once
more; they assumed a kind of stupefied and mechanical quality which is
peculiar to despair. The name of Romainville recurred incessantly to his
mind, with the two verses of a song which he had heard in the past.
He thought that Romainville was a little grove near Paris, where young
lovers go to pluck lilacs in the month of April.

He wavered outwardly as well as inwardly. He walked like a little child
who is permitted to toddle alone.

At intervals, as he combated his lassitude, he made an effort to recover
the mastery of his mind. He tried to put to himself, for the last time,
and definitely, the problem over which he had, in a manner, fallen
prostrate with fatigue: Ought he to denounce himself? Ought he to hold
his peace? He could not manage to see anything distinctly. The vague
aspects of all the courses of reasoning which had been sketched out by
his meditations quivered and vanished, one after the other, into smoke.
He only felt that, to whatever course of action he made up his mind,
something in him must die, and that of necessity, and without his being
able to escape the fact; that he was entering a sepulchre on the
right hand as much as on the left; that he was passing through a death
agony,--the agony of his happiness, or the agony of his virtue.

Alas! all his resolution had again taken possession of him. He was no
further advanced than at the beginning.

Thus did this unhappy soul struggle in its anguish. Eighteen hundred
years before this unfortunate man, the mysterious Being in whom are
summed up all the sanctities and all the sufferings of humanity had also
long thrust aside with his hand, while the olive-trees quivered in
the wild wind of the infinite, the terrible cup which appeared to Him
dripping with darkness and overflowing with shadows in the depths all
studded with stars.




CHAPTER IV--FORMS ASSUMED BY SUFFERING DURING SLEEP

Three o'clock in the morning had just struck, and he had been walking
thus for five hours, almost uninterruptedly, when he at length allowed
himself to drop into his chair.

There he fell asleep and had a dream.

This dream, like the majority of dreams, bore no relation to the
situation, except by its painful and heart-rending character, but it
made an impression on him. This nightmare struck him so forcibly that he
wrote it down later on. It is one of the papers in his own handwriting
which he has bequeathed to us. We think that we have here reproduced the
thing in strict accordance with the text.

Of whatever nature this dream may be, the history of this night would
be incomplete if we were to omit it: it is the gloomy adventure of an
ailing soul.

Here it is. On the envelope we find this line inscribed, "The Dream I
had that Night."

"I was in a plain; a vast, gloomy plain, where there was no grass. It
did not seem to me to be daylight nor yet night.

"I was walking with my brother, the brother of my childish years,
the brother of whom, I must say, I never think, and whom I now hardly
remember.

"We were conversing and we met some passers-by. We were talking of a
neighbor of ours in former days, who had always worked with her window
open from the time when she came to live on the street. As we talked we
felt cold because of that open window.

"There were no trees in the plain. We saw a man passing close to us. He
was entirely nude, of the hue of ashes, and mounted on a horse which was
earth color. The man had no hair; we could see his skull and the veins
on it. In his hand he held a switch which was as supple as a vine-shoot
and as heavy as iron. This horseman passed and said nothing to us.

"My brother said to me, 'Let us take to the hollow road.'

"There existed a hollow way wherein one saw neither a single shrub nor
a spear of moss. Everything was dirt-colored, even the sky. After
proceeding a few paces, I received no reply when I spoke: I perceived
that my brother was no longer with me.

"I entered a village which I espied. I reflected that it must be
Romainville. (Why Romainville?)[5]

"The first street that I entered was deserted. I entered a second
street. Behind the angle formed by the two streets, a man was standing
erect against the wall. I said to this Man:--

"'What country is this? Where am I?' The man made no reply. I saw the
door of a house open, and I entered.

"The first chamber was deserted. I entered the second. Behind the door
of this chamber a man was standing erect against the wall. I inquired of
this man, 'Whose house is this? Where am I?' The man replied not.

"The house had a garden. I quitted the house and entered the garden.
The garden was deserted. Behind the first tree I found a man standing
upright. I said to this man, 'What garden is this? Where am I?' The man
did not answer.

"I strolled into the village, and perceived that it was a town. All
the streets were deserted, all the doors were open. Not a single living
being was passing in the streets, walking through the chambers or
strolling in the gardens. But behind each angle of the walls, behind
each door, behind each tree, stood a silent man. Only one was to be seen
at a time. These men watched me pass.

"I left the town and began to ramble about the fields.

"After the lapse of some time I turned back and saw a great crowd coming
up behind me. I recognized all the men whom I had seen in that town.
They had strange heads. They did not seem to be in a hurry, yet they
walked faster than I did. They made no noise as they walked. In an
instant this crowd had overtaken and surrounded me. The faces of these
men were earthen in hue.

"Then the first one whom I had seen and questioned on entering the town
said to me:--

"'Whither are you going! Do you not know that you have been dead this
long time?'

"I opened my mouth to reply, and I perceived that there was no one near
me."


He woke. He was icy cold. A wind which was chill like the breeze of dawn
was rattling the leaves of the window, which had been left open on their
hinges. The fire was out. The candle was nearing its end. It was still
black night.

He rose, he went to the window. There were no stars in the sky even yet.

From his window the yard of the house and the street were visible. A
sharp, harsh noise, which made him drop his eyes, resounded from the
earth.

Below him he perceived two red stars, whose rays lengthened and
shortened in a singular manner through the darkness.

As his thoughts were still half immersed in the mists of sleep, "Hold!"
said he, "there are no stars in the sky. They are on earth now."

But this confusion vanished; a second sound similar to the first roused
him thoroughly; he looked and recognized the fact that these two stars
were the lanterns of a carriage. By the light which they cast he was
able to distinguish the form of this vehicle. It was a tilbury harnessed
to a small white horse. The noise which he had heard was the trampling
of the horse's hoofs on the pavement.

"What vehicle is this?" he said to himself. "Who is coming here so early
in the morning?"

At that moment there came a light tap on the door of his chamber.

He shuddered from head to foot, and cried in a terrible voice:--

"Who is there?"

Some one said:--

"I, Monsieur le Maire."

He recognized the voice of the old woman who was his portress.

"Well!" he replied, "what is it?"

"Monsieur le Maire, it is just five o'clock in the morning."

"What is that to me?"

"The cabriolet is here, Monsieur le Maire."

"What cabriolet?"

"The tilbury."

"What tilbury?"

"Did not Monsieur le Maire order a tilbury?"

"No," said he.

"The coachman says that he has come for Monsieur le Maire."

"What coachman?"

"M. Scaufflaire's coachman."

"M. Scaufflaire?"

That name sent a shudder over him, as though a flash of lightning had
passed in front of his face.

"Ah! yes," he resumed; "M. Scaufflaire!"

If the old woman could have seen him at that moment, she would have been
frightened.

A tolerably long silence ensued. He examined the flame of the candle
with a stupid air, and from around the wick he took some of the burning
wax, which he rolled between his fingers. The old woman waited for him.
She even ventured to uplift her voice once more:--

"What am I to say, Monsieur le Maire?"

"Say that it is well, and that I am coming down."




CHAPTER V--HINDRANCES

The posting service from Arras to M. sur M. was still operated at this
period by small mail-wagons of the time of the Empire. These mail-wagons
were two-wheeled cabriolets, upholstered inside with fawn-colored
leather, hung on springs, and having but two seats, one for the postboy,
the other for the traveller. The wheels were armed with those long,
offensive axles which keep other vehicles at a distance, and which
may still be seen on the road in Germany. The despatch box, an immense
oblong coffer, was placed behind the vehicle and formed a part of it.
This coffer was painted black, and the cabriolet yellow.

These vehicles, which have no counterparts nowadays, had something
distorted and hunchbacked about them; and when one saw them passing in
the distance, and climbing up some road to the horizon, they resembled
the insects which are called, I think, termites, and which, though with
but little corselet, drag a great train behind them. But they travelled
at a very rapid rate. The post-wagon which set out from Arras at one
o'clock every night, after the mail from Paris had passed, arrived at M.
sur M. a little before five o'clock in the morning.

That night the wagon which was descending to M. sur M. by the Hesdin
road, collided at the corner of a street, just as it was entering the
town, with a little tilbury harnessed to a white horse, which was going
in the opposite direction, and in which there was but one person, a man
enveloped in a mantle. The wheel of the tilbury received quite a violent
shock. The postman shouted to the man to stop, but the traveller paid no
heed and pursued his road at full gallop.

"That man is in a devilish hurry!" said the postman.

The man thus hastening on was the one whom we have just seen struggling
in convulsions which are certainly deserving of pity.

Whither was he going? He could not have told. Why was he hastening?
He did not know. He was driving at random, straight ahead. Whither?
To Arras, no doubt; but he might have been going elsewhere as well.
At times he was conscious of it, and he shuddered. He plunged into the
night as into a gulf. Something urged him forward; something drew him
on. No one could have told what was taking place within him; every one
will understand it. What man is there who has not entered, at least once
in his life, into that obscure cavern of the unknown?

However, he had resolved on nothing, decided nothing, formed no plan,
done nothing. None of the actions of his conscience had been decisive.
He was, more than ever, as he had been at the first moment.

Why was he going to Arras?

He repeated what he had already said to himself when he had hired
Scaufflaire's cabriolet: that, whatever the result was to be, there was
no reason why he should not see with his own eyes, and judge of matters
for himself; that this was even prudent; that he must know what took
place; that no decision could be arrived at without having observed and
scrutinized; that one made mountains out of everything from a distance;
that, at any rate, when he should have seen that Champmathieu, some
wretch, his conscience would probably be greatly relieved to allow him
to go to the galleys in his stead; that Javert would indeed be there;
and that Brevet, that Chenildieu, that Cochepaille, old convicts who
had known him; but they certainly would not recognize him;--bah! what an
idea! that Javert was a hundred leagues from suspecting the truth; that
all conjectures and all suppositions were fixed on Champmathieu, and
that there is nothing so headstrong as suppositions and conjectures;
that accordingly there was no danger.

That it was, no doubt, a dark moment, but that he should emerge from it;
that, after all, he held his destiny, however bad it might be, in his
own hand; that he was master of it. He clung to this thought.

At bottom, to tell the whole truth, he would have preferred not to go to
Arras.

Nevertheless, he was going thither.

As he meditated, he whipped up his horse, which was proceeding at that
fine, regular, and even trot which accomplishes two leagues and a half
an hour.

In proportion as the cabriolet advanced, he felt something within him
draw back.

At daybreak he was in the open country; the town of M. sur M. lay far
behind him. He watched the horizon grow white; he stared at all the
chilly figures of a winter's dawn as they passed before his eyes,
but without seeing them. The morning has its spectres as well as the
evening. He did not see them; but without his being aware of it, and by
means of a sort of penetration which was almost physical, these black
silhouettes of trees and of hills added some gloomy and sinister quality
to the violent state of his soul.

Each time that he passed one of those isolated dwellings which sometimes
border on the highway, he said to himself, "And yet there are people
there within who are sleeping!"

The trot of the horse, the bells on the harness, the wheels on the road,
produced a gentle, monotonous noise. These things are charming when one
is joyous, and lugubrious when one is sad.

It was broad daylight when he arrived at Hesdin. He halted in front of
the inn, to allow the horse a breathing spell, and to have him given
some oats.

The horse belonged, as Scaufflaire had said, to that small race of the
Boulonnais, which has too much head, too much belly, and not enough neck
and shoulders, but which has a broad chest, a large crupper, thin, fine
legs, and solid hoofs--a homely, but a robust and healthy race. The
excellent beast had travelled five leagues in two hours, and had not a
drop of sweat on his loins.

He did not get out of the tilbury. The stableman who brought the oats
suddenly bent down and examined the left wheel.

"Are you going far in this condition?" said the man.

He replied, with an air of not having roused himself from his revery:--

"Why?"

"Have you come from a great distance?" went on the man.

"Five leagues."

"Ah!"

"Why do you say, 'Ah?'"

The man bent down once more, was silent for a moment, with his eyes
fixed on the wheel; then he rose erect and said:--

"Because, though this wheel has travelled five leagues, it certainly
will not travel another quarter of a league."

He sprang out of the tilbury.

"What is that you say, my friend?"

"I say that it is a miracle that you should have travelled five leagues
without you and your horse rolling into some ditch on the highway. Just
see here!"

The wheel really had suffered serious damage. The shock administered by
the mail-wagon had split two spokes and strained the hub, so that the
nut no longer held firm.

"My friend," he said to the stableman, "is there a wheelwright here?"

"Certainly, sir."

"Do me the service to go and fetch him."

"He is only a step from here. Hey! Master Bourgaillard!"

Master Bourgaillard, the wheelwright, was standing on his own threshold.
He came, examined the wheel and made a grimace like a surgeon when the
latter thinks a limb is broken.

"Can you repair this wheel immediately?"

"Yes, sir."

"When can I set out again?"

"To-morrow."

"To-morrow!"

"There is a long day's work on it. Are you in a hurry, sir?"

"In a very great hurry. I must set out again in an hour at the latest."

"Impossible, sir."

"I will pay whatever you ask."

"Impossible."

"Well, in two hours, then."

"Impossible to-day. Two new spokes and a hub must be made. Monsieur will
not be able to start before to-morrow morning."

"The matter cannot wait until to-morrow. What if you were to replace
this wheel instead of repairing it?"

"How so?"

"You are a wheelwright?"

"Certainly, sir."

"Have you not a wheel that you can sell me? Then I could start again at
once."

"A spare wheel?"

"Yes."

"I have no wheel on hand that would fit your cabriolet. Two wheels make
a pair. Two wheels cannot be put together hap-hazard."

"In that case, sell me a pair of wheels."

"Not all wheels fit all axles, sir."

"Try, nevertheless."

"It is useless, sir. I have nothing to sell but cart-wheels. We are but
a poor country here."

"Have you a cabriolet that you can let me have?"

The wheelwright had seen at the first glance that the tilbury was a
hired vehicle. He shrugged his shoulders.

"You treat the cabriolets that people let you so well! If I had one, I
would not let it to you!"

"Well, sell it to me, then."

"I have none."

"What! not even a spring-cart? I am not hard to please, as you see."

"We live in a poor country. There is, in truth," added the wheelwright,
"an old calash under the shed yonder, which belongs to a bourgeois of
the town, who gave it to me to take care of, and who only uses it on the
thirty-sixth of the month--never, that is to say. I might let that
to you, for what matters it to me? But the bourgeois must not see it
pass--and then, it is a calash; it would require two horses."

"I will take two post-horses."

"Where is Monsieur going?"

"To Arras."

"And Monsieur wishes to reach there to-day?"

"Yes, of course."

"By taking two post-horses?"

"Why not?"

"Does it make any difference whether Monsieur arrives at four o'clock
to-morrow morning?"

"Certainly not."

"There is one thing to be said about that, you see, by taking
post-horses--Monsieur has his passport?"

"Yes."

"Well, by taking post-horses, Monsieur cannot reach Arras before
to-morrow. We are on a cross-road. The relays are badly served, the
horses are in the fields. The season for ploughing is just beginning;
heavy teams are required, and horses are seized upon everywhere, from
the post as well as elsewhere. Monsieur will have to wait three or four
hours at the least at every relay. And, then, they drive at a walk.
There are many hills to ascend."

"Come then, I will go on horseback. Unharness the cabriolet. Some one
can surely sell me a saddle in the neighborhood."

"Without doubt. But will this horse bear the saddle?"

"That is true; you remind me of that; he will not bear it."

"Then--"

"But I can surely hire a horse in the village?"

"A horse to travel to Arras at one stretch?"

"Yes."

"That would require such a horse as does not exist in these parts. You
would have to buy it to begin with, because no one knows you. But you
will not find one for sale nor to let, for five hundred francs, or for a
thousand."

"What am I to do?"

"The best thing is to let me repair the wheel like an honest man, and
set out on your journey to-morrow."

"To-morrow will be too late."

"The deuce!"

"Is there not a mail-wagon which runs to Arras? When will it pass?"

"To-night. Both the posts pass at night; the one going as well as the
one coming."

"What! It will take you a day to mend this wheel?"

"A day, and a good long one."

"If you set two men to work?"

"If I set ten men to work."

"What if the spokes were to be tied together with ropes?"

"That could be done with the spokes, not with the hub; and the felly is
in a bad state, too."

"Is there any one in this village who lets out teams?"

"No."

"Is there another wheelwright?"

The stableman and the wheelwright replied in concert, with a toss of the
head.

"No."

He felt an immense joy.

It was evident that Providence was intervening. That it was it who had
broken the wheel of the tilbury and who was stopping him on the road.
He had not yielded to this sort of first summons; he had just made every
possible effort to continue the journey; he had loyally and scrupulously
exhausted all means; he had been deterred neither by the season, nor
fatigue, nor by the expense; he had nothing with which to reproach
himself. If he went no further, that was no fault of his. It did not
concern him further. It was no longer his fault. It was not the act of
his own conscience, but the act of Providence.

He breathed again. He breathed freely and to the full extent of his
lungs for the first time since Javert's visit. It seemed to him that the
hand of iron which had held his heart in its grasp for the last twenty
hours had just released him.

It seemed to him that God was for him now, and was manifesting Himself.

He said himself that he had done all he could, and that now he had
nothing to do but retrace his steps quietly.

If his conversation with the wheelwright had taken place in a chamber
of the inn, it would have had no witnesses, no one would have heard him,
things would have rested there, and it is probable that we should not
have had to relate any of the occurrences which the reader is about
to peruse; but this conversation had taken place in the street. Any
colloquy in the street inevitably attracts a crowd. There are always
people who ask nothing better than to become spectators. While he was
questioning the wheelwright, some people who were passing back and forth
halted around them. After listening for a few minutes, a young lad, to
whom no one had paid any heed, detached himself from the group and ran
off.

At the moment when the traveller, after the inward deliberation which we
have just described, resolved to retrace his steps, this child returned.
He was accompanied by an old woman.

"Monsieur," said the woman, "my boy tells me that you wish to hire a
cabriolet."

These simple words uttered by an old woman led by a child made the
perspiration trickle down his limbs. He thought that he beheld the hand
which had relaxed its grasp reappear in the darkness behind him, ready
to seize him once more.

He answered:--

"Yes, my good woman; I am in search of a cabriolet which I can hire."

And he hastened to add:--

"But there is none in the place."

"Certainly there is," said the old woman.

"Where?" interpolated the wheelwright.

"At my house," replied the old woman.

He shuddered. The fatal hand had grasped him again.

The old woman really had in her shed a sort of basket spring-cart.
The wheelwright and the stable-man, in despair at the prospect of the
traveller escaping their clutches, interfered.

"It was a frightful old trap; it rests flat on the axle; it is an actual
fact that the seats were suspended inside it by leather thongs; the rain
came into it; the wheels were rusted and eaten with moisture; it
would not go much further than the tilbury; a regular ramshackle old
stage-wagon; the gentleman would make a great mistake if he trusted
himself to it," etc., etc.

All this was true; but this trap, this ramshackle old vehicle, this
thing, whatever it was, ran on its two wheels and could go to Arras.

He paid what was asked, left the tilbury with the wheelwright to be
repaired, intending to reclaim it on his return, had the white horse
put to the cart, climbed into it, and resumed the road which he had been
travelling since morning.

At the moment when the cart moved off, he admitted that he had felt, a
moment previously, a certain joy in the thought that he should not
go whither he was now proceeding. He examined this joy with a sort of
wrath, and found it absurd. Why should he feel joy at turning back?
After all, he was taking this trip of his own free will. No one was
forcing him to it.

And assuredly nothing would happen except what he should choose.

As he left Hesdin, he heard a voice shouting to him: "Stop! Stop!" He
halted the cart with a vigorous movement which contained a feverish and
convulsive element resembling hope.

It was the old woman's little boy.

"Monsieur," said the latter, "it was I who got the cart for you."

"Well?"

"You have not given me anything."

He who gave to all so readily thought this demand exorbitant and almost
odious.

"Ah! it's you, you scamp?" said he; "you shall have nothing."

He whipped up his horse and set off at full speed.

He had lost a great deal of time at Hesdin. He wanted to make it good.
The little horse was courageous, and pulled for two; but it was the
month of February, there had been rain; the roads were bad. And then,
it was no longer the tilbury. The cart was very heavy, and in addition,
there were many ascents.

He took nearly four hours to go from Hesdin to Saint-Pol; four hours for
five leagues.

At Saint-Pol he had the horse unharnessed at the first inn he came to
and led to the stable; as he had promised Scaufflaire, he stood beside
the manger while the horse was eating; he thought of sad and confusing
things.

The inn-keeper's wife came to the stable.

"Does not Monsieur wish to breakfast?"

"Come, that is true; I even have a good appetite."

He followed the woman, who had a rosy, cheerful face; she led him to the
public room where there were tables covered with waxed cloth.

"Make haste!" said he; "I must start again; I am in a hurry."

A big Flemish servant-maid placed his knife and fork in all haste; he
looked at the girl with a sensation of comfort.

"That is what ailed me," he thought; "I had not breakfasted."

His breakfast was served; he seized the bread, took a mouthful, and then
slowly replaced it on the table, and did not touch it again.

A carter was eating at another table; he said to this man:--

"Why is their bread so bitter here?"

The carter was a German and did not understand him.

He returned to the stable and remained near the horse.

An hour later he had quitted Saint-Pol and was directing his course
towards Tinques, which is only five leagues from Arras.

What did he do during this journey? Of what was he thinking? As in the
morning, he watched the trees, the thatched roofs, the tilled fields
pass by, and the way in which the landscape, broken at every turn of the
road, vanished; this is a sort of contemplation which sometimes
suffices to the soul, and almost relieves it from thought. What is more
melancholy and more profound than to see a thousand objects for the
first and the last time? To travel is to be born and to die at every
instant; perhaps, in the vaguest region of his mind, he did make
comparisons between the shifting horizon and our human existence: all
the things of life are perpetually fleeing before us; the dark and
bright intervals are intermingled; after a dazzling moment, an eclipse;
we look, we hasten, we stretch out our hands to grasp what is passing;
each event is a turn in the road, and, all at once, we are old; we feel
a shock; all is black; we distinguish an obscure door; the gloomy
horse of life, which has been drawing us halts, and we see a veiled and
unknown person unharnessing amid the shadows.

Twilight was falling when the children who were coming out of school
beheld this traveller enter Tinques; it is true that the days were still
short; he did not halt at Tinques; as he emerged from the village, a
laborer, who was mending the road with stones, raised his head and said
to him:--

"That horse is very much fatigued."

The poor beast was, in fact, going at a walk.

"Are you going to Arras?" added the road-mender.

"Yes."

"If you go on at that rate you will not arrive very early."

He stopped his horse, and asked the laborer:--

"How far is it from here to Arras?"

"Nearly seven good leagues."

"How is that? the posting guide only says five leagues and a quarter."

"Ah!" returned the road-mender, "so you don't know that the road is
under repair? You will find it barred a quarter of an hour further on;
there is no way to proceed further."

"Really?"

"You will take the road on the left, leading to Carency; you will cross
the river; when you reach Camblin, you will turn to the right; that is
the road to Mont-Saint-Eloy which leads to Arras."

"But it is night, and I shall lose my way."

"You do not belong in these parts?"

"No."

"And, besides, it is all cross-roads; stop! sir," resumed the
road-mender; "shall I give you a piece of advice? your horse is tired;
return to Tinques; there is a good inn there; sleep there; you can reach
Arras to-morrow."

"I must be there this evening."

"That is different; but go to the inn all the same, and get an extra
horse; the stable-boy will guide you through the cross-roads."

He followed the road-mender's advice, retraced his steps, and, half an
hour later, he passed the same spot again, but this time at full speed,
with a good horse to aid; a stable-boy, who called himself a postilion,
was seated on the shaft of the cariole.

Still, he felt that he had lost time.

Night had fully come.

They turned into the cross-road; the way became frightfully bad; the
cart lurched from one rut to the other; he said to the postilion:--

"Keep at a trot, and you shall have a double fee."

In one of the jolts, the whiffle-tree broke.

"There's the whiffle-tree broken, sir," said the postilion; "I don't
know how to harness my horse now; this road is very bad at night; if
you wish to return and sleep at Tinques, we could be in Arras early
to-morrow morning."

He replied, "Have you a bit of rope and a knife?"

"Yes, sir."

He cut a branch from a tree and made a whiffle-tree of it.

This caused another loss of twenty minutes; but they set out again at a
gallop.

The plain was gloomy; low-hanging, black, crisp fogs crept over the
hills and wrenched themselves away like smoke: there were whitish gleams
in the clouds; a strong breeze which blew in from the sea produced a
sound in all quarters of the horizon, as of some one moving furniture;
everything that could be seen assumed attitudes of terror. How many
things shiver beneath these vast breaths of the night!

He was stiff with cold; he had eaten nothing since the night before;
he vaguely recalled his other nocturnal trip in the vast plain in
the neighborhood of D----, eight years previously, and it seemed but
yesterday.

The hour struck from a distant tower; he asked the boy:--

"What time is it?"

"Seven o'clock, sir; we shall reach Arras at eight; we have but three
leagues still to go."

At that moment, he for the first time indulged in this reflection,
thinking it odd the while that it had not occurred to him sooner: that
all this trouble which he was taking was, perhaps, useless; that he did
not know so much as the hour of the trial; that he should, at least,
have informed himself of that; that he was foolish to go thus straight
ahead without knowing whether he would be of any service or not; then
he sketched out some calculations in his mind: that, ordinarily, the
sittings of the Court of Assizes began at nine o'clock in the morning;
that it could not be a long affair; that the theft of the apples would
be very brief; that there would then remain only a question of identity,
four or five depositions, and very little for the lawyers to say; that
he should arrive after all was over.

The postilion whipped up the horses; they had crossed the river and left
Mont-Saint-Eloy behind them.

The night grew more profound.




CHAPTER VI--SISTER SIMPLICE PUT TO THE PROOF

But at that moment Fantine was joyous.

She had passed a very bad night; her cough was frightful; her fever
had doubled in intensity; she had had dreams: in the morning, when the
doctor paid his visit, she was delirious; he assumed an alarmed look,
and ordered that he should be informed as soon as M. Madeleine arrived.

All the morning she was melancholy, said but little, and laid plaits
in her sheets, murmuring the while, in a low voice, calculations
which seemed to be calculations of distances. Her eyes were hollow and
staring. They seemed almost extinguished at intervals, then lighted up
again and shone like stars. It seems as though, at the approach of a
certain dark hour, the light of heaven fills those who are quitting the
light of earth.

Each time that Sister Simplice asked her how she felt, she replied
invariably, "Well. I should like to see M. Madeleine."

Some months before this, at the moment when Fantine had just lost her
last modesty, her last shame, and her last joy, she was the shadow of
herself; now she was the spectre of herself. Physical suffering had
completed the work of moral suffering. This creature of five and twenty
had a wrinkled brow, flabby cheeks, pinched nostrils, teeth from which
the gums had receded, a leaden complexion, a bony neck, prominent
shoulder-blades, frail limbs, a clayey skin, and her golden hair was
growing out sprinkled with gray. Alas! how illness improvises old-age!

At mid-day the physician returned, gave some directions, inquired
whether the mayor had made his appearance at the infirmary, and shook
his head.

M. Madeleine usually came to see the invalid at three o'clock. As
exactness is kindness, he was exact.

About half-past two, Fantine began to be restless. In the course of
twenty minutes, she asked the nun more than ten times, "What time is it,
sister?"

Three o'clock struck. At the third stroke, Fantine sat up in bed; she
who could, in general, hardly turn over, joined her yellow, fleshless
hands in a sort of convulsive clasp, and the nun heard her utter one
of those profound sighs which seem to throw off dejection. Then Fantine
turned and looked at the door.

No one entered; the door did not open.

She remained thus for a quarter of an hour, her eyes riveted on the
door, motionless and apparently holding her breath. The sister dared not
speak to her. The clock struck a quarter past three. Fantine fell back
on her pillow.

She said nothing, but began to plait the sheets once more.

Half an hour passed, then an hour, no one came; every time the clock
struck, Fantine started up and looked towards the door, then fell back
again.

Her thought was clearly perceptible, but she uttered no name, she made
no complaint, she blamed no one. But she coughed in a melancholy way.
One would have said that something dark was descending upon her. She was
livid and her lips were blue. She smiled now and then.

Five o'clock struck. Then the sister heard her say, very low and gently,
"He is wrong not to come to-day, since I am going away to-morrow."

Sister Simplice herself was surprised at M. Madeleine's delay.

In the meantime, Fantine was staring at the tester of her bed. She
seemed to be endeavoring to recall something. All at once she began to
sing in a voice as feeble as a breath. The nun listened. This is what
Fantine was singing:--


          "Lovely things we will buy
           As we stroll the faubourgs through.
           Roses are pink, corn-flowers are blue,
           I love my love, corn-flowers are blue.


"Yestere'en the Virgin Mary came near my stove, in a broidered mantle
clad, and said to me, 'Here, hide 'neath my veil the child whom you
one day begged from me. Haste to the city, buy linen, buy a needle, buy
thread.'


          "Lovely things we will buy
           As we stroll the faubourgs through.


"Dear Holy Virgin, beside my stove I have set a cradle with ribbons
decked. God may give me his loveliest star; I prefer the child thou hast
granted me. 'Madame, what shall I do with this linen fine?'--'Make of it
clothes for thy new-born babe.'


          "Roses are pink and corn-flowers are blue,
           I love my love, and corn-flowers are blue.


"'Wash this linen.'--'Where?'--'In the stream. Make of it, soiling
not, spoiling not, a petticoat fair with its bodice fine, which I will
embroider and fill with flowers.'--'Madame, the child is no longer here;
what is to be done?'--'Then make of it a winding-sheet in which to bury
me.'


          "Lovely things we will buy
           As we stroll the faubourgs through,
           Roses are pink, corn-flowers are blue,
           I love my love, corn-flowers are blue."


This song was an old cradle romance with which she had, in former days,
lulled her little Cosette to sleep, and which had never recurred to her
mind in all the five years during which she had been parted from her
child. She sang it in so sad a voice, and to so sweet an air, that it
was enough to make any one, even a nun, weep. The sister, accustomed as
she was to austerities, felt a tear spring to her eyes.

The clock struck six. Fantine did not seem to hear it. She no longer
seemed to pay attention to anything about her.

Sister Simplice sent a serving-maid to inquire of the portress of the
factory, whether the mayor had returned, and if he would not come to the
infirmary soon. The girl returned in a few minutes.

Fantine was still motionless and seemed absorbed in her own thoughts.

The servant informed Sister Simplice in a very low tone, that the
mayor had set out that morning before six o'clock, in a little tilbury
harnessed to a white horse, cold as the weather was; that he had gone
alone, without even a driver; that no one knew what road he had taken;
that people said he had been seen to turn into the road to Arras; that
others asserted that they had met him on the road to Paris. That when he
went away he had been very gentle, as usual, and that he had merely told
the portress not to expect him that night.

While the two women were whispering together, with their backs turned
to Fantine's bed, the sister interrogating, the servant conjecturing,
Fantine, with the feverish vivacity of certain organic maladies, which
unite the free movements of health with the frightful emaciation of
death, had raised herself to her knees in bed, with her shrivelled hands
resting on the bolster, and her head thrust through the opening of the
curtains, and was listening. All at once she cried:--

"You are speaking of M. Madeleine! Why are you talking so low? What is
he doing? Why does he not come?"

Her voice was so abrupt and hoarse that the two women thought they heard
the voice of a man; they wheeled round in affright.

"Answer me!" cried Fantine.

The servant stammered:--

"The portress told me that he could not come to-day."

"Be calm, my child," said the sister; "lie down again."

Fantine, without changing her attitude, continued in a loud voice, and
with an accent that was both imperious and heart-rending:--

"He cannot come? Why not? You know the reason. You are whispering it to
each other there. I want to know it."

The servant-maid hastened to say in the nun's ear, "Say that he is busy
with the city council."

Sister Simplice blushed faintly, for it was a lie that the maid had
proposed to her.

On the other hand, it seemed to her that the mere communication of the
truth to the invalid would, without doubt, deal her a terrible blow, and
that this was a serious matter in Fantine's present state. Her flush
did not last long; the sister raised her calm, sad eyes to Fantine, and
said, "Monsieur le Maire has gone away."

Fantine raised herself and crouched on her heels in the bed: her eyes
sparkled; indescribable joy beamed from that melancholy face.

"Gone!" she cried; "he has gone to get Cosette."

Then she raised her arms to heaven, and her white face became ineffable;
her lips moved; she was praying in a low voice.

When her prayer was finished, "Sister," she said, "I am willing to lie
down again; I will do anything you wish; I was naughty just now; I beg
your pardon for having spoken so loud; it is very wrong to talk loudly;
I know that well, my good sister, but, you see, I am very happy: the
good God is good; M. Madeleine is good; just think! he has gone to
Montfermeil to get my little Cosette."

She lay down again, with the nun's assistance, helped the nun to arrange
her pillow, and kissed the little silver cross which she wore on her
neck, and which Sister Simplice had given her.

"My child," said the sister, "try to rest now, and do not talk any
more."

Fantine took the sister's hand in her moist hands, and the latter was
pained to feel that perspiration.

"He set out this morning for Paris; in fact, he need not even go through
Paris; Montfermeil is a little to the left as you come thence. Do you
remember how he said to me yesterday, when I spoke to him of Cosette,
Soon, soon? He wants to give me a surprise, you know! he made me sign a
letter so that she could be taken from the Thenardiers; they cannot
say anything, can they? they will give back Cosette, for they have been
paid; the authorities will not allow them to keep the child since they
have received their pay. Do not make signs to me that I must not talk,
sister! I am extremely happy; I am doing well; I am not ill at all any
more; I am going to see Cosette again; I am even quite hungry; it is
nearly five years since I saw her last; you cannot imagine how much
attached one gets to children, and then, she will be so pretty; you will
see! If you only knew what pretty little rosy fingers she had! In the
first place, she will have very beautiful hands; she had ridiculous
hands when she was only a year old; like this! she must be a big girl
now; she is seven years old; she is quite a young lady; I call her
Cosette, but her name is really Euphrasie. Stop! this morning I was
looking at the dust on the chimney-piece, and I had a sort of idea come
across me, like that, that I should see Cosette again soon. Mon Dieu!
how wrong it is not to see one's children for years! One ought to
reflect that life is not eternal. Oh, how good M. le Maire is to go! it
is very cold! it is true; he had on his cloak, at least? he will be
here to-morrow, will he not? to-morrow will be a festival day; to-morrow
morning, sister, you must remind me to put on my little cap that has
lace on it. What a place that Montfermeil is! I took that journey on
foot once; it was very long for me, but the diligences go very quickly!
he will be here to-morrow with Cosette: how far is it from here to
Montfermeil?"

The sister, who had no idea of distances, replied, "Oh, I think that he
will be here to-morrow."

"To-morrow! to-morrow!" said Fantine, "I shall see Cosette to-morrow!
you see, good sister of the good God, that I am no longer ill; I am mad;
I could dance if any one wished it."

A person who had seen her a quarter of an hour previously would not have
understood the change; she was all rosy now; she spoke in a lively and
natural voice; her whole face was one smile; now and then she talked,
she laughed softly; the joy of a mother is almost infantile.

"Well," resumed the nun, "now that you are happy, mind me, and do not
talk any more."

Fantine laid her head on her pillow and said in a low voice: "Yes,
lie down again; be good, for you are going to have your child; Sister
Simplice is right; every one here is right."

And then, without stirring, without even moving her head, she began to
stare all about her with wide-open eyes and a joyous air, and she said
nothing more.

The sister drew the curtains together again, hoping that she would
fall into a doze. Between seven and eight o'clock the doctor came; not
hearing any sound, he thought Fantine was asleep, entered softly, and
approached the bed on tiptoe; he opened the curtains a little, and, by
the light of the taper, he saw Fantine's big eyes gazing at him.

She said to him, "She will be allowed to sleep beside me in a little
bed, will she not, sir?"

The doctor thought that she was delirious. She added:--

"See! there is just room."

The doctor took Sister Simplice aside, and she explained matters to him;
that M. Madeleine was absent for a day or two, and that in their doubt
they had not thought it well to undeceive the invalid, who believed that
the mayor had gone to Montfermeil; that it was possible, after all, that
her guess was correct: the doctor approved.

He returned to Fantine's bed, and she went on:--

"You see, when she wakes up in the morning, I shall be able to say good
morning to her, poor kitten, and when I cannot sleep at night, I can
hear her asleep; her little gentle breathing will do me good."

"Give me your hand," said the doctor.

She stretched out her arm, and exclaimed with a laugh:--

"Ah, hold! in truth, you did not know it; I am cured; Cosette will
arrive to-morrow."

The doctor was surprised; she was better; the pressure on her chest
had decreased; her pulse had regained its strength; a sort of life had
suddenly supervened and reanimated this poor, worn-out creature.

"Doctor," she went on, "did the sister tell you that M. le Maire has
gone to get that mite of a child?"

The doctor recommended silence, and that all painful emotions should be
avoided; he prescribed an infusion of pure chinchona, and, in case the
fever should increase again during the night, a calming potion. As he
took his departure, he said to the sister:--

"She is doing better; if good luck willed that the mayor should
actually arrive to-morrow with the child, who knows? there are crises
so astounding; great joy has been known to arrest maladies; I know well
that this is an organic disease, and in an advanced state, but all those
things are such mysteries: we may be able to save her."




CHAPTER VII--THE TRAVELLER ON HIS ARRIVAL TAKES PRECAUTIONS FOR
DEPARTURE

It was nearly eight o'clock in the evening when the cart, which we
left on the road, entered the porte-cochere of the Hotel de la Poste in
Arras; the man whom we have been following up to this moment alighted
from it, responded with an abstracted air to the attentions of the
people of the inn, sent back the extra horse, and with his own hands
led the little white horse to the stable; then he opened the door of a
billiard-room which was situated on the ground floor, sat down there,
and leaned his elbows on a table; he had taken fourteen hours for
the journey which he had counted on making in six; he did himself the
justice to acknowledge that it was not his fault, but at bottom, he was
not sorry.

The landlady of the hotel entered.

"Does Monsieur wish a bed? Does Monsieur require supper?"

He made a sign of the head in the negative.

"The stableman says that Monsieur's horse is extremely fatigued."

Here he broke his silence.

"Will not the horse be in a condition to set out again to-morrow
morning?"

"Oh, Monsieur! he must rest for two days at least."

He inquired:--

"Is not the posting-station located here?"

"Yes, sir."

The hostess conducted him to the office; he showed his passport, and
inquired whether there was any way of returning that same night to M.
sur M. by the mail-wagon; the seat beside the post-boy chanced to be
vacant; he engaged it and paid for it. "Monsieur," said the clerk,
"do not fail to be here ready to start at precisely one o'clock in the
morning."

This done, he left the hotel and began to wander about the town.

He was not acquainted with Arras; the streets were dark, and he
walked on at random; but he seemed bent upon not asking the way of the
passers-by. He crossed the little river Crinchon, and found himself in a
labyrinth of narrow alleys where he lost his way. A citizen was passing
along with a lantern. After some hesitation, he decided to apply to this
man, not without having first glanced behind and in front of him, as
though he feared lest some one should hear the question which he was
about to put.

"Monsieur," said he, "where is the court-house, if you please."

"You do not belong in town, sir?" replied the bourgeois, who was an
oldish man; "well, follow me. I happen to be going in the direction of
the court-house, that is to say, in the direction of the hotel of the
prefecture; for the court-house is undergoing repairs just at this
moment, and the courts are holding their sittings provisionally in the
prefecture."

"Is it there that the Assizes are held?" he asked.

"Certainly, sir; you see, the prefecture of to-day was the bishop's
palace before the Revolution. M. de Conzie, who was bishop in '82, built
a grand hall there. It is in this grand hall that the court is held."

On the way, the bourgeois said to him:--

"If Monsieur desires to witness a case, it is rather late. The sittings
generally close at six o'clock."

When they arrived on the grand square, however, the man pointed out to
him four long windows all lighted up, in the front of a vast and gloomy
building.

"Upon my word, sir, you are in luck; you have arrived in season. Do you
see those four windows? That is the Court of Assizes. There is light
there, so they are not through. The matter must have been greatly
protracted, and they are holding an evening session. Do you take an
interest in this affair? Is it a criminal case? Are you a witness?"

He replied:--

"I have not come on any business; I only wish to speak to one of the
lawyers."

"That is different," said the bourgeois. "Stop, sir; here is the door
where the sentry stands. You have only to ascend the grand staircase."

He conformed to the bourgeois's directions, and a few minutes later he
was in a hall containing many people, and where groups, intermingled
with lawyers in their gowns, were whispering together here and there.

It is always a heart-breaking thing to see these congregations of men
robed in black, murmuring together in low voices, on the threshold of
the halls of justice. It is rare that charity and pity are the outcome
of these words. Condemnations pronounced in advance are more likely
to be the result. All these groups seem to the passing and thoughtful
observer so many sombre hives where buzzing spirits construct in concert
all sorts of dark edifices.

This spacious hall, illuminated by a single lamp, was the old hall of
the episcopal palace, and served as the large hall of the palace
of justice. A double-leaved door, which was closed at that moment,
separated it from the large apartment where the court was sitting.

The obscurity was such that he did not fear to accost the first lawyer
whom he met.

"What stage have they reached, sir?" he asked.

"It is finished," said the lawyer.

"Finished!"

This word was repeated in such accents that the lawyer turned round.

"Excuse me sir; perhaps you are a relative?"

"No; I know no one here. Has judgment been pronounced?"

"Of course. Nothing else was possible."

"To penal servitude?"

"For life."

He continued, in a voice so weak that it was barely audible:--

"Then his identity was established?"

"What identity?" replied the lawyer. "There was no identity to be
established. The matter was very simple. The woman had murdered her
child; the infanticide was proved; the jury threw out the question of
premeditation, and she was condemned for life."

"So it was a woman?" said he.

"Why, certainly. The Limosin woman. Of what are you speaking?"

"Nothing. But since it is all over, how comes it that the hall is still
lighted?"

"For another case, which was begun about two hours ago."

"What other case?"

"Oh! this one is a clear case also. It is about a sort of blackguard;
a man arrested for a second offence; a convict who has been guilty of
theft. I don't know his name exactly. There's a bandit's phiz for you!
I'd send him to the galleys on the strength of his face alone."

"Is there any way of getting into the court-room, sir?" said he.

"I really think that there is not. There is a great crowd. However,
the hearing has been suspended. Some people have gone out, and when the
hearing is resumed, you might make an effort."

"Where is the entrance?"

"Through yonder large door."

The lawyer left him. In the course of a few moments he had experienced,
almost simultaneously, almost intermingled with each other, all possible
emotions. The words of this indifferent spectator had, in turn, pierced
his heart like needles of ice and like blades of fire. When he saw that
nothing was settled, he breathed freely once more; but he could not have
told whether what he felt was pain or pleasure.

He drew near to many groups and listened to what they were saying. The
docket of the session was very heavy; the president had appointed
for the same day two short and simple cases. They had begun with the
infanticide, and now they had reached the convict, the old offender, the
"return horse." This man had stolen apples, but that did not appear to
be entirely proved; what had been proved was, that he had already been
in the galleys at Toulon. It was that which lent a bad aspect to
his case. However, the man's examination and the depositions of the
witnesses had been completed, but the lawyer's plea, and the speech
of the public prosecutor were still to come; it could not be
finished before midnight. The man would probably be condemned; the
attorney-general was very clever, and never missed his culprits; he was
a brilliant fellow who wrote verses.

An usher stood at the door communicating with the hall of the Assizes.
He inquired of this usher:--

"Will the door be opened soon, sir?"

"It will not be opened at all," replied the usher.

"What! It will not be opened when the hearing is resumed? Is not the
hearing suspended?"

"The hearing has just been begun again," replied the usher, "but the
door will not be opened again."

"Why?"

"Because the hall is full."

"What! There is not room for one more?"

"Not another one. The door is closed. No one can enter now."

The usher added after a pause: "There are, to tell the truth, two
or three extra places behind Monsieur le President, but Monsieur le
President only admits public functionaries to them."

So saying, the usher turned his back.

He retired with bowed head, traversed the antechamber, and slowly
descended the stairs, as though hesitating at every step. It is probable
that he was holding counsel with himself. The violent conflict which had
been going on within him since the preceding evening was not yet ended;
and every moment he encountered some new phase of it. On reaching the
landing-place, he leaned his back against the balusters and folded his
arms. All at once he opened his coat, drew out his pocket-book, took
from it a pencil, tore out a leaf, and upon that leaf he wrote rapidly,
by the light of the street lantern, this line: M. Madeleine, Mayor of M.
sur M.; then he ascended the stairs once more with great strides, made
his way through the crowd, walked straight up to the usher, handed him
the paper, and said in an authoritative manner:--

"Take this to Monsieur le President."

The usher took the paper, cast a glance upon it, and obeyed.




CHAPTER VIII--AN ENTRANCE BY FAVOR


Although he did not suspect the fact, the mayor of M. sur M. enjoyed
a sort of celebrity. For the space of seven years his reputation for
virtue had filled the whole of Bas Boulonnais; it had eventually passed
the confines of a small district and had been spread abroad through
two or three neighboring departments. Besides the service which he had
rendered to the chief town by resuscitating the black jet industry,
there was not one out of the hundred and forty communes of the
arrondissement of M. sur M. which was not indebted to him for some
benefit. He had even at need contrived to aid and multiply the
industries of other arrondissements. It was thus that he had, when
occasion offered, supported with his credit and his funds the linen
factory at Boulogne, the flax-spinning industry at Frevent, and the
hydraulic manufacture of cloth at Boubers-sur-Canche. Everywhere the
name of M. Madeleine was pronounced with veneration. Arras and Douai
envied the happy little town of M. sur M. its mayor.

The Councillor of the Royal Court of Douai, who was presiding over this
session of the Assizes at Arras, was acquainted, in common with the rest
of the world, with this name which was so profoundly and universally
honored. When the usher, discreetly opening the door which connected
the council-chamber with the court-room, bent over the back of the
President's arm-chair and handed him the paper on which was inscribed
the line which we have just perused, adding: "The gentleman desires to
be present at the trial," the President, with a quick and deferential
movement, seized a pen and wrote a few words at the bottom of the paper
and returned it to the usher, saying, "Admit him."

The unhappy man whose history we are relating had remained near the door
of the hall, in the same place and the same attitude in which the usher
had left him. In the midst of his revery he heard some one saying to
him, "Will Monsieur do me the honor to follow me?" It was the same usher
who had turned his back upon him but a moment previously, and who was
now bowing to the earth before him. At the same time, the usher handed
him the paper. He unfolded it, and as he chanced to be near the light,
he could read it.

"The President of the Court of Assizes presents his respects to M.
Madeleine."

He crushed the paper in his hand as though those words contained for him
a strange and bitter aftertaste.

He followed the usher.

A few minutes later he found himself alone in a sort of wainscoted
cabinet of severe aspect, lighted by two wax candles, placed upon a
table with a green cloth. The last words of the usher who had just
quitted him still rang in his ears: "Monsieur, you are now in the
council-chamber; you have only to turn the copper handle of yonder door,
and you will find yourself in the court-room, behind the President's
chair." These words were mingled in his thoughts with a vague memory of
narrow corridors and dark staircases which he had recently traversed.

The usher had left him alone. The supreme moment had arrived. He sought
to collect his faculties, but could not. It is chiefly at the moment
when there is the greatest need for attaching them to the painful
realities of life, that the threads of thought snap within the brain. He
was in the very place where the judges deliberated and condemned. With
stupid tranquillity he surveyed this peaceful and terrible apartment,
where so many lives had been broken, which was soon to ring with his
name, and which his fate was at that moment traversing. He stared at
the wall, then he looked at himself, wondering that it should be that
chamber and that it should be he.

He had eaten nothing for four and twenty hours; he was worn out by the
jolts of the cart, but he was not conscious of it. It seemed to him that
he felt nothing.

He approached a black frame which was suspended on the wall, and which
contained, under glass, an ancient autograph letter of Jean Nicolas
Pache, mayor of Paris and minister, and dated, through an error, no
doubt, the 9th of June, of the year II., and in which Pache forwarded to
the commune the list of ministers and deputies held in arrest by them.
Any spectator who had chanced to see him at that moment, and who had
watched him, would have imagined, doubtless, that this letter struck him
as very curious, for he did not take his eyes from it, and he read it
two or three times. He read it without paying any attention to it, and
unconsciously. He was thinking of Fantine and Cosette.

As he dreamed, he turned round, and his eyes fell upon the brass knob
of the door which separated him from the Court of Assizes. He had almost
forgotten that door. His glance, calm at first, paused there, remained
fixed on that brass handle, then grew terrified, and little by little
became impregnated with fear. Beads of perspiration burst forth among
his hair and trickled down upon his temples.

At a certain moment he made that indescribable gesture of a sort of
authority mingled with rebellion, which is intended to convey, and which
does so well convey, "Pardieu! who compels me to this?" Then he wheeled
briskly round, caught sight of the door through which he had entered in
front of him, went to it, opened it, and passed out. He was no longer
in that chamber; he was outside in a corridor, a long, narrow corridor,
broken by steps and gratings, making all sorts of angles, lighted
here and there by lanterns similar to the night taper of invalids, the
corridor through which he had approached. He breathed, he listened; not
a sound in front, not a sound behind him, and he fled as though pursued.

When he had turned many angles in this corridor, he still listened. The
same silence reigned, and there was the same darkness around him. He was
out of breath; he staggered; he leaned against the wall. The stone was
cold; the perspiration lay ice-cold on his brow; he straightened himself
up with a shiver.

Then, there alone in the darkness, trembling with cold and with
something else, too, perchance, he meditated.

He had meditated all night long; he had meditated all the day: he heard
within him but one voice, which said, "Alas!"

A quarter of an hour passed thus. At length he bowed his head, sighed
with agony, dropped his arms, and retraced his steps. He walked slowly,
and as though crushed. It seemed as though some one had overtaken him in
his flight and was leading him back.

He re-entered the council-chamber. The first thing he caught sight of
was the knob of the door. This knob, which was round and of polished
brass, shone like a terrible star for him. He gazed at it as a lamb
might gaze into the eye of a tiger.

He could not take his eyes from it. From time to time he advanced a step
and approached the door.

Had he listened, he would have heard the sound of the adjoining hall
like a sort of confused murmur; but he did not listen, and he did not
hear.

Suddenly, without himself knowing how it happened, he found himself near
the door; he grasped the knob convulsively; the door opened.

He was in the court-room.




CHAPTER IX--A PLACE WHERE CONVICTIONS ARE IN PROCESS OF FORMATION

He advanced a pace, closed the door mechanically behind him, and
remained standing, contemplating what he saw.

It was a vast and badly lighted apartment, now full of uproar, now full
of silence, where all the apparatus of a criminal case, with its petty
and mournful gravity in the midst of the throng, was in process of
development.

At the one end of the hall, the one where he was, were judges, with
abstracted air, in threadbare robes, who were gnawing their nails or
closing their eyelids; at the other end, a ragged crowd; lawyers in
all sorts of attitudes; soldiers with hard but honest faces; ancient,
spotted woodwork, a dirty ceiling, tables covered with serge that was
yellow rather than green; doors blackened by handmarks; tap-room
lamps which emitted more smoke than light, suspended from nails in
the wainscot; on the tables candles in brass candlesticks; darkness,
ugliness, sadness; and from all this there was disengaged an austere and
august impression, for one there felt that grand human thing which is
called the law, and that grand divine thing which is called justice.

No one in all that throng paid any attention to him; all glances were
directed towards a single point, a wooden bench placed against a small
door, in the stretch of wall on the President's left; on this bench,
illuminated by several candles, sat a man between two gendarmes.

This man was the man.

He did not seek him; he saw him; his eyes went thither naturally, as
though they had known beforehand where that figure was.

He thought he was looking at himself, grown old; not absolutely the same
in face, of course, but exactly similar in attitude and aspect, with his
bristling hair, with that wild and uneasy eye, with that blouse, just as
it was on the day when he entered D----, full of hatred, concealing
his soul in that hideous mass of frightful thoughts which he had spent
nineteen years in collecting on the floor of the prison.

He said to himself with a shudder, "Good God! shall I become like that
again?"

This creature seemed to be at least sixty; there was something
indescribably coarse, stupid, and frightened about him.

At the sound made by the opening door, people had drawn aside to make
way for him; the President had turned his head, and, understanding that
the personage who had just entered was the mayor of M. sur M., he had
bowed to him; the attorney-general, who had seen M. Madeleine at M.
sur M., whither the duties of his office had called him more than once,
recognized him and saluted him also: he had hardly perceived it; he was
the victim of a sort of hallucination; he was watching.

Judges, clerks, gendarmes, a throng of cruelly curious heads, all these
he had already beheld once, in days gone by, twenty-seven years before;
he had encountered those fatal things once more; there they were; they
moved; they existed; it was no longer an effort of his memory, a mirage
of his thought; they were real gendarmes and real judges, a real
crowd, and real men of flesh and blood: it was all over; he beheld the
monstrous aspects of his past reappear and live once more around him,
with all that there is formidable in reality.

All this was yawning before him.

He was horrified by it; he shut his eyes, and exclaimed in the deepest
recesses of his soul, "Never!"

And by a tragic play of destiny which made all his ideas tremble, and
rendered him nearly mad, it was another self of his that was there! all
called that man who was being tried Jean Valjean.

Under his very eyes, unheard-of vision, he had a sort of representation
of the most horrible moment of his life, enacted by his spectre.

Everything was there; the apparatus was the same, the hour of the night,
the faces of the judges, of soldiers, and of spectators; all were the
same, only above the President's head there hung a crucifix, something
which the courts had lacked at the time of his condemnation: God had
been absent when he had been judged.

There was a chair behind him; he dropped into it, terrified at the
thought that he might be seen; when he was seated, he took advantage of
a pile of cardboard boxes, which stood on the judge's desk, to conceal
his face from the whole room; he could now see without being seen; he
had fully regained consciousness of the reality of things; gradually he
recovered; he attained that phase of composure where it is possible to
listen.

M. Bamatabois was one of the jurors.

He looked for Javert, but did not see him; the seat of the witnesses was
hidden from him by the clerk's table, and then, as we have just said,
the hall was sparely lighted.

At the moment of this entrance, the defendant's lawyer had just finished
his plea.

The attention of all was excited to the highest pitch; the affair had
lasted for three hours: for three hours that crowd had been watching a
strange man, a miserable specimen of humanity, either profoundly stupid
or profoundly subtle, gradually bending beneath the weight of a terrible
likeness. This man, as the reader already knows, was a vagabond who had
been found in a field carrying a branch laden with ripe apples, broken
in the orchard of a neighbor, called the Pierron orchard. Who was this
man? an examination had been made; witnesses had been heard, and they
were unanimous; light had abounded throughout the entire debate; the
accusation said: "We have in our grasp not only a marauder, a stealer
of fruit; we have here, in our hands, a bandit, an old offender who
has broken his ban, an ex-convict, a miscreant of the most dangerous
description, a malefactor named Jean Valjean, whom justice has long been
in search of, and who, eight years ago, on emerging from the galleys
at Toulon, committed a highway robbery, accompanied by violence, on the
person of a child, a Savoyard named Little Gervais; a crime provided
for by article 383 of the Penal Code, the right to try him for which
we reserve hereafter, when his identity shall have been judicially
established. He has just committed a fresh theft; it is a case of a
second offence; condemn him for the fresh deed; later on he will be
judged for the old crime." In the face of this accusation, in the face
of the unanimity of the witnesses, the accused appeared to be astonished
more than anything else; he made signs and gestures which were meant to
convey No, or else he stared at the ceiling: he spoke with difficulty,
replied with embarrassment, but his whole person, from head to foot, was
a denial; he was an idiot in the presence of all these minds ranged in
order of battle around him, and like a stranger in the midst of this
society which was seizing fast upon him; nevertheless, it was a question
of the most menacing future for him; the likeness increased every
moment, and the entire crowd surveyed, with more anxiety than he did
himself, that sentence freighted with calamity, which descended
ever closer over his head; there was even a glimpse of a possibility
afforded; besides the galleys, a possible death penalty, in case his
identity were established, and the affair of Little Gervais were to end
thereafter in condemnation. Who was this man? what was the nature of his
apathy? was it imbecility or craft? Did he understand too well, or did
he not understand at all? these were questions which divided the crowd,
and seemed to divide the jury; there was something both terrible and
puzzling in this case: the drama was not only melancholy; it was also
obscure.

The counsel for the defence had spoken tolerably well, in that
provincial tongue which has long constituted the eloquence of the bar,
and which was formerly employed by all advocates, at Paris as well as at
Romorantin or at Montbrison, and which to-day, having become classic, is
no longer spoken except by the official orators of magistracy, to whom
it is suited on account of its grave sonorousness and its majestic
stride; a tongue in which a husband is called a consort, and a woman
a spouse; Paris, the centre of art and civilization; the king,
the monarch; Monseigneur the Bishop, a sainted pontiff; the
district-attorney, the eloquent interpreter of public prosecution; the
arguments, the accents which we have just listened to; the age of Louis
XIV., the grand age; a theatre, the temple of Melpomene; the reigning
family, the august blood of our kings; a concert, a musical solemnity;
the General Commandant of the province, the illustrious warrior, who,
etc.; the pupils in the seminary, these tender levities; errors imputed
to newspapers, the imposture which distills its venom through the
columns of those organs; etc. The lawyer had, accordingly, begun with an
explanation as to the theft of the apples,--an awkward matter couched
in fine style; but Benigne Bossuet himself was obliged to allude to a
chicken in the midst of a funeral oration, and he extricated himself
from the situation in stately fashion. The lawyer established the fact
that the theft of the apples had not been circumstantially proved.
His client, whom he, in his character of counsel, persisted in calling
Champmathieu, had not been seen scaling that wall nor breaking that
branch by any one. He had been taken with that branch (which the lawyer
preferred to call a bough) in his possession; but he said that he had
found it broken off and lying on the ground, and had picked it up.
Where was there any proof to the contrary? No doubt that branch had been
broken off and concealed after the scaling of the wall, then thrown away
by the alarmed marauder; there was no doubt that there had been a
thief in the case. But what proof was there that that thief had been
Champmathieu? One thing only. His character as an ex-convict. The
lawyer did not deny that that character appeared to be, unhappily,
well attested; the accused had resided at Faverolles; the accused had
exercised the calling of a tree-pruner there; the name of Champmathieu
might well have had its origin in Jean Mathieu; all that was true,--in
short, four witnesses recognize Champmathieu, positively and without
hesitation, as that convict, Jean Valjean; to these signs, to this
testimony, the counsel could oppose nothing but the denial of his
client, the denial of an interested party; but supposing that he was
the convict Jean Valjean, did that prove that he was the thief of the
apples? that was a presumption at the most, not a proof. The prisoner,
it was true, and his counsel, "in good faith," was obliged to admit it,
had adopted "a bad system of defence." He obstinately denied everything,
the theft and his character of convict. An admission upon this last
point would certainly have been better, and would have won for him the
indulgence of his judges; the counsel had advised him to do this; but
the accused had obstinately refused, thinking, no doubt, that he would
save everything by admitting nothing. It was an error; but ought not the
paucity of this intelligence to be taken into consideration? This man
was visibly stupid. Long-continued wretchedness in the galleys, long
misery outside the galleys, had brutalized him, etc. He defended himself
badly; was that a reason for condemning him? As for the affair with
Little Gervais, the counsel need not discuss it; it did not enter into
the case. The lawyer wound up by beseeching the jury and the court, if
the identity of Jean Valjean appeared to them to be evident, to apply
to him the police penalties which are provided for a criminal who has
broken his ban, and not the frightful chastisement which descends upon
the convict guilty of a second offence.

The district-attorney answered the counsel for the defence. He was
violent and florid, as district-attorneys usually are.

He congratulated the counsel for the defence on his "loyalty," and
skilfully took advantage of this loyalty. He reached the accused through
all the concessions made by his lawyer. The advocate had seemed to admit
that the prisoner was Jean Valjean. He took note of this. So this man
was Jean Valjean. This point had been conceded to the accusation and
could no longer be disputed. Here, by means of a clever
autonomasia which went back to the sources and causes of crime, the
district-attorney thundered against the immorality of the romantic
school, then dawning under the name of the Satanic school, which
had been bestowed upon it by the critics of the Quotidienne and the
Oriflamme; he attributed, not without some probability, to the influence
of this perverse literature the crime of Champmathieu, or rather,
to speak more correctly, of Jean Valjean. Having exhausted these
considerations, he passed on to Jean Valjean himself. Who was this Jean
Valjean? Description of Jean Valjean: a monster spewed forth, etc.
The model for this sort of description is contained in the tale of
Theramene, which is not useful to tragedy, but which every day renders
great services to judicial eloquence. The audience and the jury
"shuddered." The description finished, the district-attorney resumed
with an oratorical turn calculated to raise the enthusiasm of the
journal of the prefecture to the highest pitch on the following day: And
it is such a man, etc., etc., etc., vagabond, beggar, without means of
existence, etc., etc., inured by his past life to culpable deeds, and
but little reformed by his sojourn in the galleys, as was proved by the
crime committed against Little Gervais, etc., etc.; it is such a man,
caught upon the highway in the very act of theft, a few paces from a
wall that had been scaled, still holding in his hand the object
stolen, who denies the crime, the theft, the climbing the wall; denies
everything; denies even his own identity! In addition to a hundred
other proofs, to which we will not recur, four witnesses recognize
him--Javert, the upright inspector of police; Javert, and three of
his former companions in infamy, the convicts Brevet, Chenildieu, and
Cochepaille. What does he offer in opposition to this overwhelming
unanimity? His denial. What obduracy! You will do justice, gentlemen
of the jury, etc., etc. While the district-attorney was speaking, the
accused listened to him open-mouthed, with a sort of amazement in which
some admiration was assuredly blended. He was evidently surprised that
a man could talk like that. From time to time, at those "energetic"
moments of the prosecutor's speech, when eloquence which cannot contain
itself overflows in a flood of withering epithets and envelops the
accused like a storm, he moved his head slowly from right to left and
from left to right in the sort of mute and melancholy protest with which
he had contented himself since the beginning of the argument. Two or
three times the spectators who were nearest to him heard him say in
a low voice, "That is what comes of not having asked M. Baloup." The
district-attorney directed the attention of the jury to this stupid
attitude, evidently deliberate, which denoted not imbecility, but craft,
skill, a habit of deceiving justice, and which set forth in all its
nakedness the "profound perversity" of this man. He ended by making
his reserves on the affair of Little Gervais and demanding a severe
sentence.

At that time, as the reader will remember, it was penal servitude for
life.

The counsel for the defence rose, began by complimenting Monsieur
l'Avocat-General on his "admirable speech," then replied as best he
could; but he weakened; the ground was evidently slipping away from
under his feet.




CHAPTER X--THE SYSTEM OF DENIALS

The moment for closing the debate had arrived. The President had the
accused stand up, and addressed to him the customary question, "Have you
anything to add to your defence?"

The man did not appear to understand, as he stood there, twisting in his
hands a terrible cap which he had.

The President repeated the question.

This time the man heard it. He seemed to understand. He made a motion
like a man who is just waking up, cast his eyes about him, stared at
the audience, the gendarmes, his counsel, the jury, the court, laid
his monstrous fist on the rim of woodwork in front of his bench,
took another look, and all at once, fixing his glance upon the
district-attorney, he began to speak. It was like an eruption.
It seemed, from the manner in which the words escaped from his
mouth,--incoherent, impetuous, pell-mell, tumbling over each other,--as
though they were all pressing forward to issue forth at once. He said:--

"This is what I have to say. That I have been a wheelwright in Paris,
and that it was with Monsieur Baloup. It is a hard trade. In the
wheelwright's trade one works always in the open air, in courtyards,
under sheds when the masters are good, never in closed workshops,
because space is required, you see. In winter one gets so cold that one
beats one's arms together to warm one's self; but the masters don't like
it; they say it wastes time. Handling iron when there is ice between
the paving-stones is hard work. That wears a man out quickly. One is old
while he is still quite young in that trade. At forty a man is done for.
I was fifty-three. I was in a bad state. And then, workmen are so mean!
When a man is no longer young, they call him nothing but an old bird,
old beast! I was not earning more than thirty sous a day. They paid me
as little as possible. The masters took advantage of my age--and then I
had my daughter, who was a laundress at the river. She earned a little
also. It sufficed for us two. She had trouble, also; all day long up to
her waist in a tub, in rain, in snow. When the wind cuts your face, when
it freezes, it is all the same; you must still wash. There are people
who have not much linen, and wait until late; if you do not wash, you
lose your custom. The planks are badly joined, and water drops on you
from everywhere; you have your petticoats all damp above and below. That
penetrates. She has also worked at the laundry of the Enfants-Rouges,
where the water comes through faucets. You are not in the tub there; you
wash at the faucet in front of you, and rinse in a basin behind you. As
it is enclosed, you are not so cold; but there is that hot steam, which
is terrible, and which ruins your eyes. She came home at seven o'clock
in the evening, and went to bed at once, she was so tired. Her husband
beat her. She is dead. We have not been very happy. She was a good girl,
who did not go to the ball, and who was very peaceable. I remember
one Shrove-Tuesday when she went to bed at eight o'clock. There, I am
telling the truth; you have only to ask. Ah, yes! how stupid I am! Paris
is a gulf. Who knows Father Champmathieu there? But M. Baloup does, I
tell you. Go see at M. Baloup's; and after all, I don't know what is
wanted of me."

The man ceased speaking, and remained standing. He had said these things
in a loud, rapid, hoarse voice, with a sort of irritated and savage
ingenuousness. Once he paused to salute some one in the crowd. The sort
of affirmations which he seemed to fling out before him at random came
like hiccoughs, and to each he added the gesture of a wood-cutter who is
splitting wood. When he had finished, the audience burst into a laugh.
He stared at the public, and, perceiving that they were laughing, and
not understanding why, he began to laugh himself.

It was inauspicious.

The President, an attentive and benevolent man, raised his voice.

He reminded "the gentlemen of the jury" that "the sieur Baloup, formerly
a master-wheelwright, with whom the accused stated that he had served,
had been summoned in vain. He had become bankrupt, and was not to be
found." Then turning to the accused, he enjoined him to listen to what
he was about to say, and added: "You are in a position where reflection
is necessary. The gravest presumptions rest upon you, and may induce
vital results. Prisoner, in your own interests, I summon you for the
last time to explain yourself clearly on two points. In the first place,
did you or did you not climb the wall of the Pierron orchard, break
the branch, and steal the apples; that is to say, commit the crime
of breaking in and theft? In the second place, are you the discharged
convict, Jean Valjean--yes or no?"

The prisoner shook his head with a capable air, like a man who has
thoroughly understood, and who knows what answer he is going to make. He
opened his mouth, turned towards the President, and said:--

"In the first place--"

Then he stared at his cap, stared at the ceiling, and held his peace.

"Prisoner," said the district-attorney, in a severe voice; "pay
attention. You are not answering anything that has been asked of you.
Your embarrassment condemns you. It is evident that your name is not
Champmathieu; that you are the convict, Jean Valjean, concealed first
under the name of Jean Mathieu, which was the name of his mother; that
you went to Auvergne; that you were born at Faverolles, where you were
a pruner of trees. It is evident that you have been guilty of entering,
and of the theft of ripe apples from the Pierron orchard. The gentlemen
of the jury will form their own opinion."

[Illustration: Father Champmathieu on Trial]

The prisoner had finally resumed his seat; he arose abruptly when the
district-attorney had finished, and exclaimed:--

"You are very wicked; that you are! This what I wanted to say; I could
not find words for it at first. I have stolen nothing. I am a man who
does not have something to eat every day. I was coming from Ailly; I
was walking through the country after a shower, which had made the whole
country yellow: even the ponds were overflowed, and nothing sprang from
the sand any more but the little blades of grass at the wayside. I
found a broken branch with apples on the ground; I picked up the branch
without knowing that it would get me into trouble. I have been in
prison, and they have been dragging me about for the last three months;
more than that I cannot say; people talk against me, they tell me,
'Answer!' The gendarme, who is a good fellow, nudges my elbow, and says
to me in a low voice, 'Come, answer!' I don't know how to explain; I
have no education; I am a poor man; that is where they wrong me, because
they do not see this. I have not stolen; I picked up from the ground
things that were lying there. You say, Jean Valjean, Jean Mathieu! I
don't know those persons; they are villagers. I worked for M. Baloup,
Boulevard de l'Hopital; my name is Champmathieu. You are very clever to
tell me where I was born; I don't know myself: it's not everybody
who has a house in which to come into the world; that would be too
convenient. I think that my father and mother were people who strolled
along the highways; I know nothing different. When I was a child,
they called me young fellow; now they call me old fellow; those are my
baptismal names; take that as you like. I have been in Auvergne; I have
been at Faverolles. Pardi. Well! can't a man have been in Auvergne, or
at Faverolles, without having been in the galleys? I tell you that I
have not stolen, and that I am Father Champmathieu; I have been with M.
Baloup; I have had a settled residence. You worry me with your nonsense,
there! Why is everybody pursuing me so furiously?"

The district-attorney had remained standing; he addressed the
President:--

"Monsieur le President, in view of the confused but exceedingly clever
denials of the prisoner, who would like to pass himself off as an idiot,
but who will not succeed in so doing,--we shall attend to that,--we
demand that it shall please you and that it shall please the court to
summon once more into this place the convicts Brevet, Cochepaille, and
Chenildieu, and Police-Inspector Javert, and question them for the last
time as to the identity of the prisoner with the convict Jean Valjean."

"I would remind the district-attorney," said the President, "that
Police-Inspector Javert, recalled by his duties to the capital of a
neighboring arrondissement, left the court-room and the town as soon as
he had made his deposition; we have accorded him permission, with the
consent of the district-attorney and of the counsel for the prisoner."

"That is true, Mr. President," responded the district-attorney. "In the
absence of sieur Javert, I think it my duty to remind the gentlemen of
the jury of what he said here a few hours ago. Javert is an estimable
man, who does honor by his rigorous and strict probity to inferior but
important functions. These are the terms of his deposition: 'I do not
even stand in need of circumstantial proofs and moral presumptions to
give the lie to the prisoner's denial. I recognize him perfectly. The
name of this man is not Champmathieu; he is an ex-convict named Jean
Valjean, and is very vicious and much to be feared. It is only with
extreme regret that he was released at the expiration of his term. He
underwent nineteen years of penal servitude for theft. He made five or
six attempts to escape. Besides the theft from Little Gervais, and from
the Pierron orchard, I suspect him of a theft committed in the house of
His Grace the late Bishop of D---- I often saw him at the time when I
was adjutant of the galley-guard at the prison in Toulon. I repeat that
I recognize him perfectly.'"

This extremely precise statement appeared to produce a vivid impression
on the public and on the jury. The district-attorney concluded by
insisting, that in default of Javert, the three witnesses Brevet,
Chenildieu, and Cochepaille should be heard once more and solemnly
interrogated.

The President transmitted the order to an usher, and, a moment later,
the door of the witnesses' room opened. The usher, accompanied by a
gendarme ready to lend him armed assistance, introduced the convict
Brevet. The audience was in suspense; and all breasts heaved as though
they had contained but one soul.

The ex-convict Brevet wore the black and gray waistcoat of the central
prisons. Brevet was a person sixty years of age, who had a sort of
business man's face, and the air of a rascal. The two sometimes go
together. In prison, whither fresh misdeeds had led him, he had become
something in the nature of a turnkey. He was a man of whom his superiors
said, "He tries to make himself of use." The chaplains bore good
testimony as to his religious habits. It must not be forgotten that this
passed under the Restoration.

"Brevet," said the President, "you have undergone an ignominious
sentence, and you cannot take an oath."

Brevet dropped his eyes.

"Nevertheless," continued the President, "even in the man whom the law
has degraded, there may remain, when the divine mercy permits it, a
sentiment of honor and of equity. It is to this sentiment that I
appeal at this decisive hour. If it still exists in you,--and I hope
it does,--reflect before replying to me: consider on the one hand, this
man, whom a word from you may ruin; on the other hand, justice, which a
word from you may enlighten. The instant is solemn; there is still time
to retract if you think you have been mistaken. Rise, prisoner. Brevet,
take a good look at the accused, recall your souvenirs, and tell us on
your soul and conscience, if you persist in recognizing this man as your
former companion in the galleys, Jean Valjean?"

Brevet looked at the prisoner, then turned towards the court.

"Yes, Mr. President, I was the first to recognize him, and I stick to
it; that man is Jean Valjean, who entered at Toulon in 1796, and left in
1815. I left a year later. He has the air of a brute now; but it must be
because age has brutalized him; he was sly at the galleys: I recognize
him positively."

"Take your seat," said the President. "Prisoner, remain standing."

Chenildieu was brought in, a prisoner for life, as was indicated by his
red cassock and his green cap. He was serving out his sentence at the
galleys of Toulon, whence he had been brought for this case. He was a
small man of about fifty, brisk, wrinkled, frail, yellow, brazen-faced,
feverish, who had a sort of sickly feebleness about all his limbs and
his whole person, and an immense force in his glance. His companions in
the galleys had nicknamed him I-deny-God (Je-nie Dieu, Chenildieu).

The President addressed him in nearly the same words which he had
used to Brevet. At the moment when he reminded him of his infamy which
deprived him of the right to take an oath, Chenildieu raised his
head and looked the crowd in the face. The President invited him to
reflection, and asked him as he had asked Brevet, if he persisted in
recognition of the prisoner.

Chenildieu burst out laughing.

"Pardieu, as if I didn't recognize him! We were attached to the same
chain for five years. So you are sulking, old fellow?"

"Go take your seat," said the President.

The usher brought in Cochepaille. He was another convict for life, who
had come from the galleys, and was dressed in red, like Chenildieu, was
a peasant from Lourdes, and a half-bear of the Pyrenees. He had guarded
the flocks among the mountains, and from a shepherd he had slipped into
a brigand. Cochepaille was no less savage and seemed even more stupid
than the prisoner. He was one of those wretched men whom nature has
sketched out for wild beasts, and on whom society puts the finishing
touches as convicts in the galleys.

The President tried to touch him with some grave and pathetic words,
and asked him, as he had asked the other two, if he persisted, without
hesitation or trouble, in recognizing the man who was standing before
him.

"He is Jean Valjean," said Cochepaille. "He was even called
Jean-the-Screw, because he was so strong."

Each of these affirmations from these three men, evidently sincere and
in good faith, had raised in the audience a murmur of bad augury for the
prisoner,--a murmur which increased and lasted longer each time that a
fresh declaration was added to the proceeding.

The prisoner had listened to them, with that astounded face which was,
according to the accusation, his principal means of defence; at the
first, the gendarmes, his neighbors, had heard him mutter between his
teeth: "Ah, well, he's a nice one!" after the second, he said, a little
louder, with an air that was almost that of satisfaction, "Good!" at the
third, he cried, "Famous!"

The President addressed him:--

"Have you heard, prisoner? What have you to say?"

He replied:--

"I say, 'Famous!'"

An uproar broke out among the audience, and was communicated to the
jury; it was evident that the man was lost.

"Ushers," said the President, "enforce silence! I am going to sum up the
arguments."

At that moment there was a movement just beside the President; a voice
was heard crying:--

"Brevet! Chenildieu! Cochepaille! look here!"

All who heard that voice were chilled, so lamentable and terrible was
it; all eyes were turned to the point whence it had proceeded. A man,
placed among the privileged spectators who were seated behind the
court, had just risen, had pushed open the half-door which separated the
tribunal from the audience, and was standing in the middle of the hall;
the President, the district-attorney, M. Bamatabois, twenty persons,
recognized him, and exclaimed in concert:--

"M. Madeleine!"




CHAPTER XI--CHAMPMATHIEU MORE AND MORE ASTONISHED

It was he, in fact. The clerk's lamp illumined his countenance. He held
his hat in his hand; there was no disorder in his clothing; his coat
was carefully buttoned; he was very pale, and he trembled slightly;
his hair, which had still been gray on his arrival in Arras, was now
entirely white: it had turned white during the hour he had sat there.

All heads were raised: the sensation was indescribable; there was
a momentary hesitation in the audience, the voice had been so
heart-rending; the man who stood there appeared so calm that they did
not understand at first. They asked themselves whether he had indeed
uttered that cry; they could not believe that that tranquil man had been
the one to give that terrible outcry.

This indecision only lasted a few seconds. Even before the President
and the district-attorney could utter a word, before the ushers and the
gendarmes could make a gesture, the man whom all still called, at that
moment, M. Madeleine, had advanced towards the witnesses Cochepaille,
Brevet, and Chenildieu.

"Do you not recognize me?" said he.

All three remained speechless, and indicated by a sign of the head that
they did not know him. Cochepaille, who was intimidated, made a military
salute. M. Madeleine turned towards the jury and the court, and said in
a gentle voice:--

"Gentlemen of the jury, order the prisoner to be released! Mr.
President, have me arrested. He is not the man whom you are in search
of; it is I: I am Jean Valjean."

Not a mouth breathed; the first commotion of astonishment had been
followed by a silence like that of the grave; those within the hall
experienced that sort of religious terror which seizes the masses when
something grand has been done.

In the meantime, the face of the President was stamped with sympathy and
sadness; he had exchanged a rapid sign with the district-attorney and a
few low-toned words with the assistant judges; he addressed the public,
and asked in accents which all understood:--

"Is there a physician present?"

The district-attorney took the word:--

"Gentlemen of the jury, the very strange and unexpected incident
which disturbs the audience inspires us, like yourselves, only with a
sentiment which it is unnecessary for us to express. You all know, by
reputation at least, the honorable M. Madeleine, mayor of M. sur M.;
if there is a physician in the audience, we join the President in
requesting him to attend to M. Madeleine, and to conduct him to his
home."

M. Madeleine did not allow the district-attorney to finish; he
interrupted him in accents full of suavity and authority. These are the
words which he uttered; here they are literally, as they were written
down, immediately after the trial by one of the witnesses to this scene,
and as they now ring in the ears of those who heard them nearly forty
years ago:--

"I thank you, Mr. District-Attorney, but I am not mad; you shall see;
you were on the point of committing a great error; release this man! I
am fulfilling a duty; I am that miserable criminal. I am the only one
here who sees the matter clearly, and I am telling you the truth. God,
who is on high, looks down on what I am doing at this moment, and that
suffices. You can take me, for here I am: but I have done my best; I
concealed myself under another name; I have become rich; I have become
a mayor; I have tried to re-enter the ranks of the honest. It seems that
that is not to be done. In short, there are many things which I cannot
tell. I will not narrate the story of my life to you; you will hear it
one of these days. I robbed Monseigneur the Bishop, it is true; it is
true that I robbed Little Gervais; they were right in telling you that
Jean Valjean was a very vicious wretch. Perhaps it was not altogether
his fault. Listen, honorable judges! a man who has been so greatly
humbled as I have has neither any remonstrances to make to Providence,
nor any advice to give to society; but, you see, the infamy from which I
have tried to escape is an injurious thing; the galleys make the convict
what he is; reflect upon that, if you please. Before going to the
galleys, I was a poor peasant, with very little intelligence, a sort
of idiot; the galleys wrought a change in me. I was stupid; I became
vicious: I was a block of wood; I became a firebrand. Later on,
indulgence and kindness saved me, as severity had ruined me. But, pardon
me, you cannot understand what I am saying. You will find at my house,
among the ashes in the fireplace, the forty-sou piece which I stole,
seven years ago, from little Gervais. I have nothing farther to add;
take me. Good God! the district-attorney shakes his head; you say, 'M.
Madeleine has gone mad!' you do not believe me! that is distressing. Do
not, at least, condemn this man! What! these men do not recognize me! I
wish Javert were here; he would recognize me."

Nothing can reproduce the sombre and kindly melancholy of tone which
accompanied these words.

He turned to the three convicts, and said:--

"Well, I recognize you; do you remember, Brevet?"

He paused, hesitated for an instant, and said:--

"Do you remember the knitted suspenders with a checked pattern which you
wore in the galleys?"

Brevet gave a start of surprise, and surveyed him from head to foot with
a frightened air. He continued:--

"Chenildieu, you who conferred on yourself the name of 'Jenie-Dieu,'
your whole right shoulder bears a deep burn, because you one day laid
your shoulder against the chafing-dish full of coals, in order to efface
the three letters T. F. P., which are still visible, nevertheless;
answer, is this true?"

"It is true," said Chenildieu.

He addressed himself to Cochepaille:--

"Cochepaille, you have, near the bend in your left arm, a date stamped
in blue letters with burnt powder; the date is that of the landing of
the Emperor at Cannes, March 1, 1815; pull up your sleeve!"

Cochepaille pushed up his sleeve; all eyes were focused on him and on
his bare arm.

A gendarme held a light close to it; there was the date.

The unhappy man turned to the spectators and the judges with a smile
which still rends the hearts of all who saw it whenever they think of
it. It was a smile of triumph; it was also a smile of despair.

"You see plainly," he said, "that I am Jean Valjean."

In that chamber there were no longer either judges, accusers, nor
gendarmes; there was nothing but staring eyes and sympathizing hearts.
No one recalled any longer the part that each might be called upon
to play; the district-attorney forgot he was there for the purpose of
prosecuting, the President that he was there to preside, the counsel for
the defence that he was there to defend. It was a striking circumstance
that no question was put, that no authority intervened. The peculiarity
of sublime spectacles is, that they capture all souls and turn witnesses
into spectators. No one, probably, could have explained what he felt;
no one, probably, said to himself that he was witnessing the splendid
outburst of a grand light: all felt themselves inwardly dazzled.

It was evident that they had Jean Valjean before their eyes. That was
clear. The appearance of this man had sufficed to suffuse with light
that matter which had been so obscure but a moment previously, without
any further explanation: the whole crowd, as by a sort of electric
revelation, understood instantly and at a single glance the simple
and magnificent history of a man who was delivering himself up so
that another man might not be condemned in his stead. The details, the
hesitations, little possible oppositions, were swallowed up in that vast
and luminous fact.

It was an impression which vanished speedily, but which was irresistible
at the moment.

"I do not wish to disturb the court further," resumed Jean Valjean. "I
shall withdraw, since you do not arrest me. I have many things to do.
The district-attorney knows who I am; he knows whither I am going; he
can have me arrested when he likes."

He directed his steps towards the door. Not a voice was raised, not an
arm extended to hinder him. All stood aside. At that moment there was
about him that divine something which causes multitudes to stand aside
and make way for a man. He traversed the crowd slowly. It was never
known who opened the door, but it is certain that he found the door open
when he reached it. On arriving there he turned round and said:--

"I am at your command, Mr. District-Attorney."

Then he addressed the audience:--

"All of you, all who are present--consider me worthy of pity, do you
not? Good God! When I think of what I was on the point of doing, I
consider that I am to be envied. Nevertheless, I should have preferred
not to have had this occur."

He withdrew, and the door closed behind him as it had opened, for those
who do certain sovereign things are always sure of being served by some
one in the crowd.

Less than an hour after this, the verdict of the jury freed the said
Champmathieu from all accusations; and Champmathieu, being at once
released, went off in a state of stupefaction, thinking that all men
were fools, and comprehending nothing of this vision.




BOOK EIGHTH.--A COUNTER-BLOW




CHAPTER I--IN WHAT MIRROR M. MADELEINE CONTEMPLATES HIS HAIR

The day had begun to dawn. Fantine had passed a sleepless and feverish
night, filled with happy visions; at daybreak she fell asleep. Sister
Simplice, who had been watching with her, availed herself of this
slumber to go and prepare a new potion of chinchona. The worthy sister
had been in the laboratory of the infirmary but a few moments, bending
over her drugs and phials, and scrutinizing things very closely, on
account of the dimness which the half-light of dawn spreads over all
objects. Suddenly she raised her head and uttered a faint shriek. M.
Madeleine stood before her; he had just entered silently.

"Is it you, Mr. Mayor?" she exclaimed.

He replied in a low voice:--

"How is that poor woman?"

"Not so bad just now; but we have been very uneasy."

She explained to him what had passed: that Fantine had been very ill the
day before, and that she was better now, because she thought that the
mayor had gone to Montfermeil to get her child. The sister dared not
question the mayor; but she perceived plainly from his air that he had
not come from there.

"All that is good," said he; "you were right not to undeceive her."

"Yes," responded the sister; "but now, Mr. Mayor, she will see you and
will not see her child. What shall we say to her?"

He reflected for a moment.

"God will inspire us," said he.

"But we cannot tell a lie," murmured the sister, half aloud.

It was broad daylight in the room. The light fell full on M. Madeleine's
face. The sister chanced to raise her eyes to it.

"Good God, sir!" she exclaimed; "what has happened to you? Your hair is
perfectly white!"

"White!" said he.

Sister Simplice had no mirror. She rummaged in a drawer, and pulled out
the little glass which the doctor of the infirmary used to see whether
a patient was dead and whether he no longer breathed. M. Madeleine took
the mirror, looked at his hair, and said:--

"Well!"

He uttered the word indifferently, and as though his mind were on
something else.

The sister felt chilled by something strange of which she caught a
glimpse in all this.

He inquired:--

"Can I see her?"

"Is not Monsieur le Maire going to have her child brought back to her?"
said the sister, hardly venturing to put the question.

"Of course; but it will take two or three days at least."

"If she were not to see Monsieur le Maire until that time," went on
the sister, timidly, "she would not know that Monsieur le Maire had
returned, and it would be easy to inspire her with patience; and when
the child arrived, she would naturally think Monsieur le Maire had just
come with the child. We should not have to enact a lie."

M. Madeleine seemed to reflect for a few moments; then he said with his
calm gravity:--

"No, sister, I must see her. I may, perhaps, be in haste."

The nun did not appear to notice this word "perhaps," which communicated
an obscure and singular sense to the words of the mayor's speech. She
replied, lowering her eyes and her voice respectfully:--

"In that case, she is asleep; but Monsieur le Maire may enter."

He made some remarks about a door which shut badly, and the noise of
which might awaken the sick woman; then he entered Fantine's chamber,
approached the bed and drew aside the curtains. She was asleep. Her
breath issued from her breast with that tragic sound which is peculiar
to those maladies, and which breaks the hearts of mothers when they are
watching through the night beside their sleeping child who is condemned
to death. But this painful respiration hardly troubled a sort of
ineffable serenity which overspread her countenance, and which
transfigured her in her sleep. Her pallor had become whiteness; her
cheeks were crimson; her long golden lashes, the only beauty of her
youth and her virginity which remained to her, palpitated, though they
remained closed and drooping. Her whole person was trembling with an
indescribable unfolding of wings, all ready to open wide and bear her
away, which could be felt as they rustled, though they could not be
seen. To see her thus, one would never have dreamed that she was
an invalid whose life was almost despaired of. She resembled rather
something on the point of soaring away than something on the point of
dying.

The branch trembles when a hand approaches it to pluck a flower, and
seems to both withdraw and to offer itself at one and the same time.
The human body has something of this tremor when the instant arrives in
which the mysterious fingers of Death are about to pluck the soul.

M. Madeleine remained for some time motionless beside that bed, gazing
in turn upon the sick woman and the crucifix, as he had done two months
before, on the day when he had come for the first time to see her
in that asylum. They were both still there in the same attitude--she
sleeping, he praying; only now, after the lapse of two months, her hair
was gray and his was white.

The sister had not entered with him. He stood beside the bed, with his
finger on his lips, as though there were some one in the chamber whom he
must enjoin to silence.

She opened her eyes, saw him, and said quietly, with a smile:--

"And Cosette?"




CHAPTER II--FANTINE HAPPY

She made no movement of either surprise or of joy; she was joy itself.
That simple question, "And Cosette?" was put with so profound a faith,
with so much certainty, with such a complete absence of disquiet and of
doubt, that he found not a word of reply. She continued:--

"I knew that you were there. I was asleep, but I saw you. I have seen
you for a long, long time. I have been following you with my eyes all
night long. You were in a glory, and you had around you all sorts of
celestial forms."

He raised his glance to the crucifix.

"But," she resumed, "tell me where Cosette is. Why did not you place her
on my bed against the moment of my waking?"

He made some mechanical reply which he was never afterwards able to
recall.

Fortunately, the doctor had been warned, and he now made his appearance.
He came to the aid of M. Madeleine.

"Calm yourself, my child," said the doctor; "your child is here."

Fantine's eyes beamed and filled her whole face with light. She clasped
her hands with an expression which contained all that is possible to
prayer in the way of violence and tenderness.

"Oh!" she exclaimed, "bring her to me!"

Touching illusion of a mother! Cosette was, for her, still the little
child who is carried.

"Not yet," said the doctor, "not just now. You still have some fever.
The sight of your child would agitate you and do you harm. You must be
cured first."

She interrupted him impetuously:--

"But I am cured! Oh, I tell you that I am cured! What an ass that doctor
is! The idea! I want to see my child!"

"You see," said the doctor, "how excited you become. So long as you are
in this state I shall oppose your having your child. It is not enough
to see her; it is necessary that you should live for her. When you are
reasonable, I will bring her to you myself."

The poor mother bowed her head.

"I beg your pardon, doctor, I really beg your pardon. Formerly I should
never have spoken as I have just done; so many misfortunes have happened
to me, that I sometimes do not know what I am saying. I understand you;
you fear the emotion. I will wait as long as you like, but I swear to
you that it would not have harmed me to see my daughter. I have been
seeing her; I have not taken my eyes from her since yesterday evening.
Do you know? If she were brought to me now, I should talk to her very
gently. That is all. Is it not quite natural that I should desire to see
my daughter, who has been brought to me expressly from Montfermeil? I
am not angry. I know well that I am about to be happy. All night long I
have seen white things, and persons who smiled at me. When Monsieur le
Docteur pleases, he shall bring me Cosette. I have no longer any fever;
I am well. I am perfectly conscious that there is nothing the matter
with me any more; but I am going to behave as though I were ill, and not
stir, to please these ladies here. When it is seen that I am very calm,
they will say, 'She must have her child.'"

M. Madeleine was sitting on a chair beside the bed. She turned towards
him; she was making a visible effort to be calm and "very good," as she
expressed it in the feebleness of illness which resembles infancy, in
order that, seeing her so peaceable, they might make no difficulty about
bringing Cosette to her. But while she controlled herself she could not
refrain from questioning M. Madeleine.

"Did you have a pleasant trip, Monsieur le Maire? Oh! how good you were
to go and get her for me! Only tell me how she is. Did she stand the
journey well? Alas! she will not recognize me. She must have forgotten
me by this time, poor darling! Children have no memories. They are like
birds. A child sees one thing to-day and another thing to-morrow, and
thinks of nothing any longer. And did she have white linen? Did those
Thenardiers keep her clean? How have they fed her? Oh! if you only knew
how I have suffered, putting such questions as that to myself during all
the time of my wretchedness. Now, it is all past. I am happy. Oh, how I
should like to see her! Do you think her pretty, Monsieur le Maire?
Is not my daughter beautiful? You must have been very cold in that
diligence! Could she not be brought for just one little instant? She
might be taken away directly afterwards. Tell me; you are the master; it
could be so if you chose!"

He took her hand. "Cosette is beautiful," he said, "Cosette is well.
You shall see her soon; but calm yourself; you are talking with too much
vivacity, and you are throwing your arms out from under the clothes, and
that makes you cough."

In fact, fits of coughing interrupted Fantine at nearly every word.

Fantine did not murmur; she feared that she had injured by her too
passionate lamentations the confidence which she was desirous of
inspiring, and she began to talk of indifferent things.

"Montfermeil is quite pretty, is it not? People go there on pleasure
parties in summer. Are the Thenardiers prosperous? There are not many
travellers in their parts. That inn of theirs is a sort of a cook-shop."

M. Madeleine was still holding her hand, and gazing at her with anxiety;
it was evident that he had come to tell her things before which his mind
now hesitated. The doctor, having finished his visit, retired. Sister
Simplice remained alone with them.

But in the midst of this pause Fantine exclaimed:--

"I hear her! mon Dieu, I hear her!"

She stretched out her arm to enjoin silence about her, held her breath,
and began to listen with rapture.

There was a child playing in the yard--the child of the portress or
of some work-woman. It was one of those accidents which are always
occurring, and which seem to form a part of the mysterious stage-setting
of mournful scenes. The child--a little girl--was going and coming,
running to warm herself, laughing, singing at the top of her voice.
Alas! in what are the plays of children not intermingled. It was this
little girl whom Fantine heard singing.

"Oh!" she resumed, "it is my Cosette! I recognize her voice."

The child retreated as it had come; the voice died away. Fantine
listened for a while longer, then her face clouded over, and M.
Madeleine heard her say, in a low voice: "How wicked that doctor is not
to allow me to see my daughter! That man has an evil countenance, that
he has."

But the smiling background of her thoughts came to the front again. She
continued to talk to herself, with her head resting on the pillow: "How
happy we are going to be! We shall have a little garden the very first
thing; M. Madeleine has promised it to me. My daughter will play in the
garden. She must know her letters by this time. I will make her spell.
She will run over the grass after butterflies. I will watch her. Then
she will take her first communion. Ah! when will she take her first
communion?"

She began to reckon on her fingers.

"One, two, three, four--she is seven years old. In five years she will
have a white veil, and openwork stockings; she will look like a little
woman. O my good sister, you do not know how foolish I become when I
think of my daughter's first communion!"

She began to laugh.

He had released Fantine's hand. He listened to her words as one listens
to the sighing of the breeze, with his eyes on the ground, his mind
absorbed in reflection which had no bottom. All at once she ceased
speaking, and this caused him to raise his head mechanically. Fantine
had become terrible.

She no longer spoke, she no longer breathed; she had raised herself to
a sitting posture, her thin shoulder emerged from her chemise; her face,
which had been radiant but a moment before, was ghastly, and she
seemed to have fixed her eyes, rendered large with terror, on something
alarming at the other extremity of the room.

"Good God!" he exclaimed; "what ails you, Fantine?"

She made no reply; she did not remove her eyes from the object which
she seemed to see. She removed one hand from his arm, and with the other
made him a sign to look behind him.

He turned, and beheld Javert.




CHAPTER III--JAVERT SATISFIED

This is what had taken place.

The half-hour after midnight had just struck when M. Madeleine quitted
the Hall of Assizes in Arras. He regained his inn just in time to set
out again by the mail-wagon, in which he had engaged his place. A little
before six o'clock in the morning he had arrived at M. sur M., and his
first care had been to post a letter to M. Laffitte, then to enter the
infirmary and see Fantine.

However, he had hardly quitted the audience hall of the Court of
Assizes, when the district-attorney, recovering from his first shock,
had taken the word to deplore the mad deed of the honorable mayor of
M. sur M., to declare that his convictions had not been in the least
modified by that curious incident, which would be explained thereafter,
and to demand, in the meantime, the condemnation of that Champmathieu,
who was evidently the real Jean Valjean. The district-attorney's
persistence was visibly at variance with the sentiments of every one, of
the public, of the court, and of the jury. The counsel for the defence
had some difficulty in refuting this harangue and in establishing that,
in consequence of the revelations of M. Madeleine, that is to say, of
the real Jean Valjean, the aspect of the matter had been thoroughly
altered, and that the jury had before their eyes now only an innocent
man. Thence the lawyer had drawn some epiphonemas, not very fresh,
unfortunately, upon judicial errors, etc., etc.; the President, in his
summing up, had joined the counsel for the defence, and in a few minutes
the jury had thrown Champmathieu out of the case.

Nevertheless, the district-attorney was bent on having a Jean Valjean;
and as he had no longer Champmathieu, he took Madeleine.

Immediately after Champmathieu had been set at liberty, the
district-attorney shut himself up with the President. They conferred "as
to the necessity of seizing the person of M. le Maire of M. sur M."
This phrase, in which there was a great deal of of, is the
district-attorney's, written with his own hand, on the minutes of his
report to the attorney-general. His first emotion having passed off, the
President did not offer many objections. Justice must, after all, take
its course. And then, when all was said, although the President was
a kindly and a tolerably intelligent man, he was, at the same time, a
devoted and almost an ardent royalist, and he had been shocked to hear
the Mayor of M. sur M. say the Emperor, and not Bonaparte, when alluding
to the landing at Cannes.

The order for his arrest was accordingly despatched. The
district-attorney forwarded it to M. sur M. by a special messenger, at
full speed, and entrusted its execution to Police Inspector Javert.

The reader knows that Javert had returned to M. sur M. immediately after
having given his deposition.

Javert was just getting out of bed when the messenger handed him the
order of arrest and the command to produce the prisoner.

The messenger himself was a very clever member of the police, who, in
two words, informed Javert of what had taken place at Arras. The order
of arrest, signed by the district-attorney, was couched in these words:
"Inspector Javert will apprehend the body of the Sieur Madeleine, mayor
of M. sur M., who, in this day's session of the court, was recognized as
the liberated convict, Jean Valjean."

Any one who did not know Javert, and who had chanced to see him at the
moment when he penetrated the antechamber of the infirmary, could have
divined nothing of what had taken place, and would have thought his air
the most ordinary in the world. He was cool, calm, grave, his gray
hair was perfectly smooth upon his temples, and he had just mounted
the stairs with his habitual deliberation. Any one who was thoroughly
acquainted with him, and who had examined him attentively at the moment,
would have shuddered. The buckle of his leather stock was under his
left ear instead of at the nape of his neck. This betrayed unwonted
agitation.

Javert was a complete character, who never had a wrinkle in his duty or
in his uniform; methodical with malefactors, rigid with the buttons of
his coat.

That he should have set the buckle of his stock awry, it was
indispensable that there should have taken place in him one of those
emotions which may be designated as internal earthquakes.

He had come in a simple way, had made a requisition on the neighboring
post for a corporal and four soldiers, had left the soldiers in the
courtyard, had had Fantine's room pointed out to him by the portress,
who was utterly unsuspicious, accustomed as she was to seeing armed men
inquiring for the mayor.

On arriving at Fantine's chamber, Javert turned the handle, pushed
the door open with the gentleness of a sick-nurse or a police spy, and
entered.

Properly speaking, he did not enter. He stood erect in the half-open
door, his hat on his head and his left hand thrust into his coat, which
was buttoned up to the chin. In the bend of his elbow the leaden head of
his enormous cane, which was hidden behind him, could be seen.

Thus he remained for nearly a minute, without his presence being
perceived. All at once Fantine raised her eyes, saw him, and made M.
Madeleine turn round.

The instant that Madeleine's glance encountered Javert's glance, Javert,
without stirring, without moving from his post, without approaching him,
became terrible. No human sentiment can be as terrible as joy.

It was the visage of a demon who has just found his damned soul.

The satisfaction of at last getting hold of Jean Valjean caused all that
was in his soul to appear in his countenance. The depths having been
stirred up, mounted to the surface. The humiliation of having, in
some slight degree, lost the scent, and of having indulged, for a few
moments, in an error with regard to Champmathieu, was effaced by pride
at having so well and accurately divined in the first place, and of
having for so long cherished a just instinct. Javert's content shone
forth in his sovereign attitude. The deformity of triumph overspread
that narrow brow. All the demonstrations of horror which a satisfied
face can afford were there.

Javert was in heaven at that moment. Without putting the thing clearly
to himself, but with a confused intuition of the necessity of his
presence and of his success, he, Javert, personified justice, light, and
truth in their celestial function of crushing out evil. Behind him and
around him, at an infinite distance, he had authority, reason, the case
judged, the legal conscience, the public prosecution, all the stars; he
was protecting order, he was causing the law to yield up its thunders,
he was avenging society, he was lending a helping hand to the absolute,
he was standing erect in the midst of a glory. There existed in his
victory a remnant of defiance and of combat. Erect, haughty, brilliant,
he flaunted abroad in open day the superhuman bestiality of a ferocious
archangel. The terrible shadow of the action which he was accomplishing
caused the vague flash of the social sword to be visible in his clenched
fist; happy and indignant, he held his heel upon crime, vice, rebellion,
perdition, hell; he was radiant, he exterminated, he smiled, and there
was an incontestable grandeur in this monstrous Saint Michael.

Javert, though frightful, had nothing ignoble about him.

Probity, sincerity, candor, conviction, the sense of duty, are things
which may become hideous when wrongly directed; but which, even when
hideous, remain grand: their majesty, the majesty peculiar to the human
conscience, clings to them in the midst of horror; they are virtues
which have one vice,--error. The honest, pitiless joy of a fanatic
in the full flood of his atrocity preserves a certain lugubriously
venerable radiance. Without himself suspecting the fact, Javert in his
formidable happiness was to be pitied, as is every ignorant man who
triumphs. Nothing could be so poignant and so terrible as this face,
wherein was displayed all that may be designated as the evil of the
good.




CHAPTER IV--AUTHORITY REASSERTS ITS RIGHTS

Fantine had not seen Javert since the day on which the mayor had torn
her from the man. Her ailing brain comprehended nothing, but the only
thing which she did not doubt was that he had come to get her. She could
not endure that terrible face; she felt her life quitting her; she hid
her face in both hands, and shrieked in her anguish:--

"Monsieur Madeleine, save me!"

Jean Valjean--we shall henceforth not speak of him otherwise--had risen.
He said to Fantine in the gentlest and calmest of voices:--

"Be at ease; it is not for you that he is come."

Then he addressed Javert, and said:--

"I know what you want."

Javert replied:--

"Be quick about it!"

There lay in the inflection of voice which accompanied these words
something indescribably fierce and frenzied. Javert did not say, "Be
quick about it!" he said "Bequiabouit."

No orthography can do justice to the accent with which it was uttered:
it was no longer a human word: it was a roar.

He did not proceed according to his custom, he did not enter into the
matter, he exhibited no warrant of arrest. In his eyes, Jean Valjean
was a sort of mysterious combatant, who was not to be laid hands upon,
a wrestler in the dark whom he had had in his grasp for the last five
years, without being able to throw him. This arrest was not a beginning,
but an end. He confined himself to saying, "Be quick about it!"

As he spoke thus, he did not advance a single step; he hurled at Jean
Valjean a glance which he threw out like a grappling-hook, and with
which he was accustomed to draw wretches violently to him.

It was this glance which Fantine had felt penetrating to the very marrow
of her bones two months previously.

At Javert's exclamation, Fantine opened her eyes once more. But the
mayor was there; what had she to fear?

Javert advanced to the middle of the room, and cried:--

"See here now! Art thou coming?"

The unhappy woman glanced about her. No one was present excepting the
nun and the mayor. To whom could that abject use of "thou" be addressed?
To her only. She shuddered.

Then she beheld a most unprecedented thing, a thing so unprecedented
that nothing equal to it had appeared to her even in the blackest
deliriums of fever.

She beheld Javert, the police spy, seize the mayor by the collar; she
saw the mayor bow his head. It seemed to her that the world was coming
to an end.

Javert had, in fact, grasped Jean Valjean by the collar.

"Monsieur le Maire!" shrieked Fantine.

Javert burst out laughing with that frightful laugh which displayed all
his gums.

"There is no longer any Monsieur le Maire here!"

Jean Valjean made no attempt to disengage the hand which grasped the
collar of his coat. He said:--

"Javert--"

Javert interrupted him: "Call me Mr. Inspector."

"Monsieur," said Jean Valjean, "I should like to say a word to you in
private."

"Aloud! Say it aloud!" replied Javert; "people are in the habit of
talking aloud to me."

Jean Valjean went on in a lower tone:--

"I have a request to make of you--"

"I tell you to speak loud."

"But you alone should hear it--"

"What difference does that make to me? I shall not listen."

Jean Valjean turned towards him and said very rapidly and in a very low
voice:--

"Grant me three days' grace! three days in which to go and fetch the
child of this unhappy woman. I will pay whatever is necessary. You shall
accompany me if you choose."

"You are making sport of me!" cried Javert. "Come now, I did not think
you such a fool! You ask me to give you three days in which to run away!
You say that it is for the purpose of fetching that creature's child!
Ah! Ah! That's good! That's really capital!"

Fantine was seized with a fit of trembling.

"My child!" she cried, "to go and fetch my child! She is not here,
then! Answer me, sister; where is Cosette? I want my child! Monsieur
Madeleine! Monsieur le Maire!"

Javert stamped his foot.

"And now there's the other one! Will you hold your tongue, you hussy?
It's a pretty sort of a place where convicts are magistrates, and where
women of the town are cared for like countesses! Ah! But we are going to
change all that; it is high time!"

He stared intently at Fantine, and added, once more taking into his
grasp Jean Valjean's cravat, shirt and collar:--

"I tell you that there is no Monsieur Madeleine and that there is no
Monsieur le Maire. There is a thief, a brigand, a convict named Jean
Valjean! And I have him in my grasp! That's what there is!"

Fantine raised herself in bed with a bound, supporting herself on her
stiffened arms and on both hands: she gazed at Jean Valjean, she gazed
at Javert, she gazed at the nun, she opened her mouth as though to
speak; a rattle proceeded from the depths of her throat, her teeth
chattered; she stretched out her arms in her agony, opening her hands
convulsively, and fumbling about her like a drowning person; then
suddenly fell back on her pillow.

Her head struck the head-board of the bed and fell forwards on her
breast, with gaping mouth and staring, sightless eyes.

She was dead.

Jean Valjean laid his hand upon the detaining hand of Javert, and opened
it as he would have opened the hand of a baby; then he said to Javert:--

"You have murdered that woman."

"Let's have an end of this!" shouted Javert, in a fury; "I am not here
to listen to argument. Let us economize all that; the guard is below;
march on instantly, or you'll get the thumb-screws!"

In the corner of the room stood an old iron bedstead, which was in a
decidedly decrepit state, and which served the sisters as a camp-bed
when they were watching with the sick. Jean Valjean stepped up to this
bed, in a twinkling wrenched off the head-piece, which was already in a
dilapidated condition, an easy matter to muscles like his, grasped the
principal rod like a bludgeon, and glanced at Javert. Javert retreated
towards the door. Jean Valjean, armed with his bar of iron, walked
slowly up to Fantine's couch. When he arrived there he turned and said
to Javert, in a voice that was barely audible:--

"I advise you not to disturb me at this moment."

One thing is certain, and that is, that Javert trembled.

It did occur to him to summon the guard, but Jean Valjean might avail
himself of that moment to effect his escape; so he remained, grasped
his cane by the small end, and leaned against the door-post, without
removing his eyes from Jean Valjean.

Jean Valjean rested his elbow on the knob at the head of the bed, and
his brow on his hand, and began to contemplate the motionless body of
Fantine, which lay extended there. He remained thus, mute, absorbed,
evidently with no further thought of anything connected with this life.
Upon his face and in his attitude there was nothing but inexpressible
pity. After a few moments of this meditation he bent towards Fantine,
and spoke to her in a low voice.

What did he say to her? What could this man, who was reproved, say to
that woman, who was dead? What words were those? No one on earth heard
them. Did the dead woman hear them? There are some touching illusions
which are, perhaps, sublime realities. The point as to which there
exists no doubt is, that Sister Simplice, the sole witness of the
incident, often said that at the moment that Jean Valjean whispered in
Fantine's ear, she distinctly beheld an ineffable smile dawn on those
pale lips, and in those dim eyes, filled with the amazement of the tomb.

Jean Valjean took Fantine's head in both his hands, and arranged it on
the pillow as a mother might have done for her child; then he tied the
string of her chemise, and smoothed her hair back under her cap. That
done, he closed her eyes.

Fantine's face seemed strangely illuminated at that moment.

Death, that signifies entrance into the great light.

Fantine's hand was hanging over the side of the bed. Jean Valjean knelt
down before that hand, lifted it gently, and kissed it.

Then he rose, and turned to Javert.

"Now," said he, "I am at your disposal."




CHAPTER V--A SUITABLE TOMB

Javert deposited Jean Valjean in the city prison.

The arrest of M. Madeleine occasioned a sensation, or rather, an
extraordinary commotion in M. sur M. We are sorry that we cannot conceal
the fact, that at the single word, "He was a convict," nearly every one
deserted him. In less than two hours all the good that he had done had
been forgotten, and he was nothing but a "convict from the galleys." It
is just to add that the details of what had taken place at Arras were
not yet known. All day long conversations like the following were to be
heard in all quarters of the town:--

"You don't know? He was a liberated convict!" "Who?" "The mayor." "Bah!
M. Madeleine?" "Yes." "Really?" "His name was not Madeleine at all; he
had a frightful name, Bejean, Bojean, Boujean." "Ah! Good God!" "He
has been arrested." "Arrested!" "In prison, in the city prison, while
waiting to be transferred." "Until he is transferred!" "He is to be
transferred!" "Where is he to be taken?" "He will be tried at the
Assizes for a highway robbery which he committed long ago." "Well! I
suspected as much. That man was too good, too perfect, too affected.
He refused the cross; he bestowed sous on all the little scamps he came
across. I always thought there was some evil history back of all that."

The "drawing-rooms" particularly abounded in remarks of this nature.

One old lady, a subscriber to the Drapeau Blanc, made the following
remark, the depth of which it is impossible to fathom:--

"I am not sorry. It will be a lesson to the Bonapartists!"

It was thus that the phantom which had been called M. Madeleine vanished
from M. sur M. Only three or four persons in all the town remained
faithful to his memory. The old portress who had served him was among
the number.

On the evening of that day the worthy old woman was sitting in her
lodge, still in a thorough fright, and absorbed in sad reflections.
The factory had been closed all day, the carriage gate was bolted, the
street was deserted. There was no one in the house but the two nuns,
Sister Perpetue and Sister Simplice, who were watching beside the body
of Fantine.

Towards the hour when M. Madeleine was accustomed to return home,
the good portress rose mechanically, took from a drawer the key of
M. Madeleine's chamber, and the flat candlestick which he used every
evening to go up to his quarters; then she hung the key on the nail
whence he was accustomed to take it, and set the candlestick on one
side, as though she was expecting him. Then she sat down again on her
chair, and became absorbed in thought once more. The poor, good old
woman had done all this without being conscious of it.

It was only at the expiration of two hours that she roused herself from
her revery, and exclaimed, "Hold! My good God Jesus! And I hung his key
on the nail!"

At that moment the small window in the lodge opened, a hand passed
through, seized the key and the candlestick, and lighted the taper at
the candle which was burning there.

The portress raised her eyes, and stood there with gaping mouth, and a
shriek which she confined to her throat.

She knew that hand, that arm, the sleeve of that coat.

It was M. Madeleine.

It was several seconds before she could speak; she had a seizure, as she
said herself, when she related the adventure afterwards.

"Good God, Monsieur le Maire," she cried at last, "I thought you were--"

She stopped; the conclusion of her sentence would have been lacking in
respect towards the beginning. Jean Valjean was still Monsieur le Maire
to her.

He finished her thought.

"In prison," said he. "I was there; I broke a bar of one of the windows;
I let myself drop from the top of a roof, and here I am. I am going up
to my room; go and find Sister Simplice for me. She is with that poor
woman, no doubt."

The old woman obeyed in all haste.

He gave her no orders; he was quite sure that she would guard him better
than he should guard himself.

No one ever found out how he had managed to get into the courtyard
without opening the big gates. He had, and always carried about him,
a pass-key which opened a little side-door; but he must have been
searched, and his latch-key must have been taken from him. This point
was never explained.

He ascended the staircase leading to his chamber. On arriving at the
top, he left his candle on the top step of his stairs, opened his door
with very little noise, went and closed his window and his shutters by
feeling, then returned for his candle and re-entered his room.

It was a useful precaution; it will be recollected that his window could
be seen from the street.

He cast a glance about him, at his table, at his chair, at his bed which
had not been disturbed for three days. No trace of the disorder of the
night before last remained. The portress had "done up" his room; only
she had picked out of the ashes and placed neatly on the table the two
iron ends of the cudgel and the forty-sou piece which had been blackened
by the fire.

He took a sheet of paper, on which he wrote: "These are the two tips of
my iron-shod cudgel and the forty-sou piece stolen from Little Gervais,
which I mentioned at the Court of Assizes," and he arranged this piece
of paper, the bits of iron, and the coin in such a way that they were
the first things to be seen on entering the room. From a cupboard he
pulled out one of his old shirts, which he tore in pieces. In the
strips of linen thus prepared he wrapped the two silver candlesticks. He
betrayed neither haste nor agitation; and while he was wrapping up the
Bishop's candlesticks, he nibbled at a piece of black bread. It was
probably the prison-bread which he had carried with him in his flight.

This was proved by the crumbs which were found on the floor of the room
when the authorities made an examination later on.

There came two taps at the door.

"Come in," said he.

It was Sister Simplice.

She was pale; her eyes were red; the candle which she carried trembled
in her hand. The peculiar feature of the violences of destiny is, that
however polished or cool we may be, they wring human nature from our
very bowels, and force it to reappear on the surface. The emotions of
that day had turned the nun into a woman once more. She had wept, and
she was trembling.

Jean Valjean had just finished writing a few lines on a paper, which he
handed to the nun, saying, "Sister, you will give this to Monsieur le
Cure."

The paper was not folded. She cast a glance upon it.

"You can read it," said he.

She read:--

"I beg Monsieur le Cure to keep an eye on all that I leave behind me. He
will be so good as to pay out of it the expenses of my trial, and of the
funeral of the woman who died yesterday. The rest is for the poor."

The sister tried to speak, but she only managed to stammer a few
inarticulate sounds. She succeeded in saying, however:--

"Does not Monsieur le Maire desire to take a last look at that poor,
unhappy woman?"

"No," said he; "I am pursued; it would only end in their arresting me in
that room, and that would disturb her."

He had hardly finished when a loud noise became audible on the
staircase. They heard a tumult of ascending footsteps, and the old
portress saying in her loudest and most piercing tones:--

"My good sir, I swear to you by the good God, that not a soul has
entered this house all day, nor all the evening, and that I have not
even left the door."

A man responded:--

"But there is a light in that room, nevertheless."

They recognized Javert's voice.

The chamber was so arranged that the door in opening masked the corner
of the wall on the right. Jean Valjean blew out the light and placed
himself in this angle. Sister Simplice fell on her knees near the table.

The door opened.

Javert entered.

The whispers of many men and the protestations of the portress were
audible in the corridor.

The nun did not raise her eyes. She was praying.

The candle was on the chimney-piece, and gave but very little light.

Javert caught sight of the nun and halted in amazement.

It will be remembered that the fundamental point in Javert, his element,
the very air he breathed, was veneration for all authority. This was
impregnable, and admitted of neither objection nor restriction. In his
eyes, of course, the ecclesiastical authority was the chief of all; he
was religious, superficial and correct on this point as on all others.
In his eyes, a priest was a mind, who never makes a mistake; a nun was a
creature who never sins; they were souls walled in from this world,
with a single door which never opened except to allow the truth to pass
through.

On perceiving the sister, his first movement was to retire.

But there was also another duty which bound him and impelled him
imperiously in the opposite direction. His second movement was to remain
and to venture on at least one question.

This was Sister Simplice, who had never told a lie in her life. Javert
knew it, and held her in special veneration in consequence.

"Sister," said he, "are you alone in this room?"

A terrible moment ensued, during which the poor portress felt as though
she should faint.

The sister raised her eyes and answered:--

"Yes."

"Then," resumed Javert, "you will excuse me if I persist; it is my duty;
you have not seen a certain person--a man--this evening? He has escaped;
we are in search of him--that Jean Valjean; you have not seen him?"

The sister replied:--

"No."

She lied. She had lied twice in succession, one after the other, without
hesitation, promptly, as a person does when sacrificing herself.

"Pardon me," said Javert, and he retired with a deep bow.

O sainted maid! you left this world many years ago; you have rejoined
your sisters, the virgins, and your brothers, the angels, in the light;
may this lie be counted to your credit in paradise!

The sister's affirmation was for Javert so decisive a thing that he did
not even observe the singularity of that candle which had but just been
extinguished, and which was still smoking on the table.

An hour later, a man, marching amid trees and mists, was rapidly
departing from M. sur M. in the direction of Paris. That man was Jean
Valjean. It has been established by the testimony of two or three
carters who met him, that he was carrying a bundle; that he was dressed
in a blouse. Where had he obtained that blouse? No one ever found out.
But an aged workman had died in the infirmary of the factory a few days
before, leaving behind him nothing but his blouse. Perhaps that was the
one.

One last word about Fantine.

We all have a mother,--the earth. Fantine was given back to that mother.

The cure thought that he was doing right, and perhaps he really was, in
reserving as much money as possible from what Jean Valjean had left for
the poor. Who was concerned, after all? A convict and a woman of the
town. That is why he had a very simple funeral for Fantine, and reduced
it to that strictly necessary form known as the pauper's grave.

So Fantine was buried in the free corner of the cemetery which belongs
to anybody and everybody, and where the poor are lost. Fortunately, God
knows where to find the soul again. Fantine was laid in the shade,
among the first bones that came to hand; she was subjected to the
promiscuousness of ashes. She was thrown into the public grave. Her
grave resembled her bed.


[THE END OF VOLUME I. "FANTINE"]


[Illustration: Frontispiece Volume Two  2frontispiece]

[Illustration: Titlepage Volume Two  2titlepage]





VOLUME II.--COSETTE




BOOK FIRST.--WATERLOO




CHAPTER I--WHAT IS MET WITH ON THE WAY FROM NIVELLES

Last year (1861), on a beautiful May morning, a traveller, the person
who is telling this story, was coming from Nivelles, and directing his
course towards La Hulpe. He was on foot. He was pursuing a broad paved
road, which undulated between two rows of trees, over the hills which
succeed each other, raise the road and let it fall again, and produce
something in the nature of enormous waves.

He had passed Lillois and Bois-Seigneur-Isaac. In the west he perceived
the slate-roofed tower of Braine-l'Alleud, which has the form of a
reversed vase. He had just left behind a wood upon an eminence; and
at the angle of the cross-road, by the side of a sort of mouldy gibbet
bearing the inscription Ancient Barrier No. 4, a public house, bearing
on its front this sign: At the Four Winds (Aux Quatre Vents). Echabeau,
Private Cafe.

A quarter of a league further on, he arrived at the bottom of a little
valley, where there is water which passes beneath an arch made through
the embankment of the road. The clump of sparsely planted but very green
trees, which fills the valley on one side of the road, is dispersed over
the meadows on the other, and disappears gracefully and as in order in
the direction of Braine-l'Alleud.

On the right, close to the road, was an inn, with a four-wheeled cart
at the door, a large bundle of hop-poles, a plough, a heap of dried
brushwood near a flourishing hedge, lime smoking in a square hole, and
a ladder suspended along an old penthouse with straw partitions. A young
girl was weeding in a field, where a huge yellow poster, probably of
some outside spectacle, such as a parish festival, was fluttering in
the wind. At one corner of the inn, beside a pool in which a flotilla
of ducks was navigating, a badly paved path plunged into the bushes. The
wayfarer struck into this.

After traversing a hundred paces, skirting a wall of the fifteenth
century, surmounted by a pointed gable, with bricks set in contrast, he
found himself before a large door of arched stone, with a rectilinear
impost, in the sombre style of Louis XIV., flanked by two flat
medallions. A severe facade rose above this door; a wall, perpendicular
to the facade, almost touched the door, and flanked it with an abrupt
right angle. In the meadow before the door lay three harrows, through
which, in disorder, grew all the flowers of May. The door was closed.
The two decrepit leaves which barred it were ornamented with an old
rusty knocker.

The sun was charming; the branches had that soft shivering of May,
which seems to proceed rather from the nests than from the wind. A brave
little bird, probably a lover, was carolling in a distracted manner in a
large tree.

The wayfarer bent over and examined a rather large circular excavation,
resembling the hollow of a sphere, in the stone on the left, at the foot
of the pier of the door.

At this moment the leaves of the door parted, and a peasant woman
emerged.

She saw the wayfarer, and perceived what he was looking at.

"It was a French cannon-ball which made that," she said to him. And she
added:--

"That which you see there, higher up in the door, near a nail, is the
hole of a big iron bullet as large as an egg. The bullet did not pierce
the wood."

"What is the name of this place?" inquired the wayfarer.

"Hougomont," said the peasant woman.

The traveller straightened himself up. He walked on a few paces, and
went off to look over the tops of the hedges. On the horizon through the
trees, he perceived a sort of little elevation, and on this elevation
something which at that distance resembled a lion.

He was on the battle-field of Waterloo.




CHAPTER II--HOUGOMONT

Hougomont,--this was a funereal spot, the beginning of the obstacle,
the first resistance, which that great wood-cutter of Europe, called
Napoleon, encountered at Waterloo, the first knot under the blows of his
axe.

It was a chateau; it is no longer anything but a farm. For the
antiquary, Hougomont is Hugomons. This manor was built by Hugo, Sire
of Somerel, the same who endowed the sixth chaplaincy of the Abbey of
Villiers.

The traveller pushed open the door, elbowed an ancient calash under the
porch, and entered the courtyard.

The first thing which struck him in this paddock was a door of the
sixteenth century, which here simulates an arcade, everything else
having fallen prostrate around it. A monumental aspect often has its
birth in ruin. In a wall near the arcade opens another arched door, of
the time of Henry IV., permitting a glimpse of the trees of an orchard;
beside this door, a manure-hole, some pickaxes, some shovels, some
carts, an old well, with its flagstone and its iron reel, a chicken
jumping, and a turkey spreading its tail, a chapel surmounted by a small
bell-tower, a blossoming pear-tree trained in espalier against the
wall of the chapel--behold the court, the conquest of which was one of
Napoleon's dreams. This corner of earth, could he but have seized
it, would, perhaps, have given him the world likewise. Chickens are
scattering its dust abroad with their beaks. A growl is audible; it is a
huge dog, who shows his teeth and replaces the English.

The English behaved admirably there. Cooke's four companies of guards
there held out for seven hours against the fury of an army.

Hougomont viewed on the map, as a geometrical plan, comprising buildings
and enclosures, presents a sort of irregular rectangle, one angle of
which is nicked out. It is this angle which contains the southern
door, guarded by this wall, which commands it only a gun's length away.
Hougomont has two doors,--the southern door, that of the chateau; and
the northern door, belonging to the farm. Napoleon sent his brother
Jerome against Hougomont; the divisions of Foy, Guilleminot, and Bachelu
hurled themselves against it; nearly the entire corps of Reille was
employed against it, and miscarried; Kellermann's balls were exhausted
on this heroic section of wall. Bauduin's brigade was not strong enough
to force Hougomont on the north, and the brigade of Soye could not do
more than effect the beginning of a breach on the south, but without
taking it.

The farm buildings border the courtyard on the south. A bit of the north
door, broken by the French, hangs suspended to the wall. It consists of
four planks nailed to two cross-beams, on which the scars of the attack
are visible.

The northern door, which was beaten in by the French, and which has had
a piece applied to it to replace the panel suspended on the wall, stands
half-open at the bottom of the paddock; it is cut squarely in the wall,
built of stone below, of brick above which closes in the courtyard on
the north. It is a simple door for carts, such as exist in all farms,
with the two large leaves made of rustic planks: beyond lie the meadows.
The dispute over this entrance was furious. For a long time, all sorts
of imprints of bloody hands were visible on the door-posts. It was there
that Bauduin was killed.

The storm of the combat still lingers in this courtyard; its horror is
visible there; the confusion of the fray was petrified there; it lives
and it dies there; it was only yesterday. The walls are in the death
agony, the stones fall; the breaches cry aloud; the holes are wounds;
the drooping, quivering trees seem to be making an effort to flee.

This courtyard was more built up in 1815 than it is to-day. Buildings
which have since been pulled down then formed redans and angles.

The English barricaded themselves there; the French made their way in,
but could not stand their ground. Beside the chapel, one wing of the
chateau, the only ruin now remaining of the manor of Hougomont, rises in
a crumbling state,--disembowelled, one might say. The chateau served
for a dungeon, the chapel for a block-house. There men exterminated each
other. The French, fired on from every point,--from behind the walls,
from the summits of the garrets, from the depths of the cellars, through
all the casements, through all the air-holes, through every crack in the
stones,--fetched fagots and set fire to walls and men; the reply to the
grape-shot was a conflagration.

In the ruined wing, through windows garnished with bars of iron, the
dismantled chambers of the main building of brick are visible; the
English guards were in ambush in these rooms; the spiral of the
staircase, cracked from the ground floor to the very roof, appears
like the inside of a broken shell. The staircase has two stories; the
English, besieged on the staircase, and massed on its upper steps, had
cut off the lower steps. These consisted of large slabs of blue stone,
which form a heap among the nettles. Half a score of steps still
cling to the wall; on the first is cut the figure of a trident. These
inaccessible steps are solid in their niches. All the rest resembles a
jaw which has been denuded of its teeth. There are two old trees there:
one is dead; the other is wounded at its base, and is clothed with
verdure in April. Since 1815 it has taken to growing through the
staircase.

A massacre took place in the chapel. The interior, which has recovered
its calm, is singular. The mass has not been said there since the
carnage. Nevertheless, the altar has been left there--an altar of
unpolished wood, placed against a background of roughhewn stone. Four
whitewashed walls, a door opposite the altar, two small arched windows;
over the door a large wooden crucifix, below the crucifix a square
air-hole stopped up with a bundle of hay; on the ground, in one corner,
an old window-frame with the glass all broken to pieces--such is the
chapel. Near the altar there is nailed up a wooden statue of Saint Anne,
of the fifteenth century; the head of the infant Jesus has been carried
off by a large ball. The French, who were masters of the chapel for a
moment, and were then dislodged, set fire to it. The flames filled this
building; it was a perfect furnace; the door was burned, the floor was
burned, the wooden Christ was not burned. The fire preyed upon his
feet, of which only the blackened stumps are now to be seen; then it
stopped,--a miracle, according to the assertion of the people of the
neighborhood. The infant Jesus, decapitated, was less fortunate than the
Christ.

The walls are covered with inscriptions. Near the feet of Christ this
name is to be read: Henquinez. Then these others: Conde de Rio Maior
Marques y Marquesa de Almagro (Habana). There are French names with
exclamation points,--a sign of wrath. The wall was freshly whitewashed
in 1849. The nations insulted each other there.

It was at the door of this chapel that the corpse was picked up which
held an axe in its hand; this corpse was Sub-Lieutenant Legros.

On emerging from the chapel, a well is visible on the left. There are
two in this courtyard. One inquires, Why is there no bucket and pulley
to this? It is because water is no longer drawn there. Why is water not
drawn there? Because it is full of skeletons.

The last person who drew water from the well was named Guillaume van
Kylsom. He was a peasant who lived at Hougomont, and was gardener there.
On the 18th of June, 1815, his family fled and concealed themselves in
the woods.

The forest surrounding the Abbey of Villiers sheltered these unfortunate
people who had been scattered abroad, for many days and nights. There
are at this day certain traces recognizable, such as old boles of burned
trees, which mark the site of these poor bivouacs trembling in the
depths of the thickets.

Guillaume van Kylsom remained at Hougomont, "to guard the chateau," and
concealed himself in the cellar. The English discovered him there.
They tore him from his hiding-place, and the combatants forced this
frightened man to serve them, by administering blows with the flats of
their swords. They were thirsty; this Guillaume brought them water. It
was from this well that he drew it. Many drank there their last draught.
This well where drank so many of the dead was destined to die itself.

After the engagement, they were in haste to bury the dead bodies. Death
has a fashion of harassing victory, and she causes the pest to follow
glory. The typhus is a concomitant of triumph. This well was deep, and
it was turned into a sepulchre. Three hundred dead bodies were cast into
it. With too much haste perhaps. Were they all dead? Legend says they
were not. It seems that on the night succeeding the interment, feeble
voices were heard calling from the well.

This well is isolated in the middle of the courtyard. Three walls, part
stone, part brick, and simulating a small, square tower, and folded like
the leaves of a screen, surround it on all sides. The fourth side is
open. It is there that the water was drawn. The wall at the bottom has
a sort of shapeless loophole, possibly the hole made by a shell. This
little tower had a platform, of which only the beams remain. The iron
supports of the well on the right form a cross. On leaning over, the
eye is lost in a deep cylinder of brick which is filled with a heaped-up
mass of shadows. The base of the walls all about the well is concealed
in a growth of nettles.

This well has not in front of it that large blue slab which forms the
table for all wells in Belgium. The slab has here been replaced by a
cross-beam, against which lean five or six shapeless fragments of knotty
and petrified wood which resemble huge bones. There is no longer either
pail, chain, or pulley; but there is still the stone basin which served
the overflow. The rain-water collects there, and from time to time a
bird of the neighboring forests comes thither to drink, and then flies
away. One house in this ruin, the farmhouse, is still inhabited. The
door of this house opens on the courtyard. Upon this door, beside a
pretty Gothic lock-plate, there is an iron handle with trefoils placed
slanting. At the moment when the Hanoverian lieutenant, Wilda, grasped
this handle in order to take refuge in the farm, a French sapper hewed
off his hand with an axe.

The family who occupy the house had for their grandfather Guillaume van
Kylsom, the old gardener, dead long since. A woman with gray hair said
to us: "I was there. I was three years old. My sister, who was older,
was terrified and wept. They carried us off to the woods. I went there
in my mother's arms. We glued our ears to the earth to hear. I imitated
the cannon, and went boum! boum!"

A door opening from the courtyard on the left led into the orchard, so
we were told. The orchard is terrible.

It is in three parts; one might almost say, in three acts. The first
part is a garden, the second is an orchard, the third is a wood. These
three parts have a common enclosure: on the side of the entrance, the
buildings of the chateau and the farm; on the left, a hedge; on the
right, a wall; and at the end, a wall. The wall on the right is of
brick, the wall at the bottom is of stone. One enters the garden first.
It slopes downwards, is planted with gooseberry bushes, choked with a
wild growth of vegetation, and terminated by a monumental terrace of cut
stone, with balustrade with a double curve.

It was a seignorial garden in the first French style which preceded Le
Notre; to-day it is ruins and briars. The pilasters are surmounted by
globes which resemble cannon-balls of stone. Forty-three balusters can
still be counted on their sockets; the rest lie prostrate in the grass.
Almost all bear scratches of bullets. One broken baluster is placed on
the pediment like a fractured leg.

It was in this garden, further down than the orchard, that six
light-infantry men of the 1st, having made their way thither, and being
unable to escape, hunted down and caught like bears in their dens,
accepted the combat with two Hanoverian companies, one of which was
armed with carbines. The Hanoverians lined this balustrade and fired
from above. The infantry men, replying from below, six against two
hundred, intrepid and with no shelter save the currant-bushes, took a
quarter of an hour to die.

One mounts a few steps and passes from the garden into the orchard,
properly speaking. There, within the limits of those few square fathoms,
fifteen hundred men fell in less than an hour. The wall seems ready
to renew the combat. Thirty-eight loopholes, pierced by the English at
irregular heights, are there still. In front of the sixth are placed two
English tombs of granite. There are loopholes only in the south wall, as
the principal attack came from that quarter. The wall is hidden on the
outside by a tall hedge; the French came up, thinking that they had to
deal only with a hedge, crossed it, and found the wall both an obstacle
and an ambuscade, with the English guards behind it, the thirty-eight
loopholes firing at once a shower of grape-shot and balls, and Soye's
brigade was broken against it. Thus Waterloo began.

Nevertheless, the orchard was taken. As they had no ladders, the French
scaled it with their nails. They fought hand to hand amid the trees.
All this grass has been soaked in blood. A battalion of Nassau, seven
hundred strong, was overwhelmed there. The outside of the wall, against
which Kellermann's two batteries were trained, is gnawed by grape-shot.

This orchard is sentient, like others, in the month of May. It has its
buttercups and its daisies; the grass is tall there; the cart-horses
browse there; cords of hair, on which linen is drying, traverse the
spaces between the trees and force the passer-by to bend his head; one
walks over this uncultivated land, and one's foot dives into mole-holes.
In the middle of the grass one observes an uprooted tree-bole which lies
there all verdant. Major Blackmann leaned against it to die. Beneath
a great tree in the neighborhood fell the German general, Duplat,
descended from a French family which fled on the revocation of the Edict
of Nantes. An aged and falling apple-tree leans far over to one side,
its wound dressed with a bandage of straw and of clayey loam. Nearly all
the apple-trees are falling with age. There is not one which has not
had its bullet or its biscayan.[6] The skeletons of dead trees abound in
this orchard. Crows fly through their branches, and at the end of it is
a wood full of violets.

Bauduin, killed, Foy wounded, conflagration, massacre, carnage, a
rivulet formed of English blood, French blood, German blood mingled
in fury, a well crammed with corpses, the regiment of Nassau and the
regiment of Brunswick destroyed, Duplat killed, Blackmann killed, the
English Guards mutilated, twenty French battalions, besides the forty
from Reille's corps, decimated, three thousand men in that hovel of
Hougomont alone cut down, slashed to pieces, shot, burned, with their
throats cut,--and all this so that a peasant can say to-day to the
traveller: Monsieur, give me three francs, and if you like, I will
explain to you the affair of Waterloo!




CHAPTER III--THE EIGHTEENTH OF JUNE, 1815

Let us turn back,--that is one of the story-teller's rights,--and put
ourselves once more in the year 1815, and even a little earlier than
the epoch when the action narrated in the first part of this book took
place.

If it had not rained in the night between the 17th and the 18th of
June, 1815, the fate of Europe would have been different. A few drops
of water, more or less, decided the downfall of Napoleon. All that
Providence required in order to make Waterloo the end of Austerlitz
was a little more rain, and a cloud traversing the sky out of season
sufficed to make a world crumble.

The battle of Waterloo could not be begun until half-past eleven
o'clock, and that gave Blucher time to come up. Why? Because the ground
was wet. The artillery had to wait until it became a little firmer
before they could manoeuvre.

Napoleon was an artillery officer, and felt the effects of this. The
foundation of this wonderful captain was the man who, in the report to
the Directory on Aboukir, said: Such a one of our balls killed six men.
All his plans of battle were arranged for projectiles. The key to his
victory was to make the artillery converge on one point. He treated the
strategy of the hostile general like a citadel, and made a breach in it.
He overwhelmed the weak point with grape-shot; he joined and dissolved
battles with cannon. There was something of the sharpshooter in his
genius. To beat in squares, to pulverize regiments, to break lines, to
crush and disperse masses,--for him everything lay in this, to
strike, strike, strike incessantly,--and he intrusted this task to the
cannon-ball. A redoubtable method, and one which, united with genius,
rendered this gloomy athlete of the pugilism of war invincible for the
space of fifteen years.

On the 18th of June, 1815, he relied all the more on his artillery,
because he had numbers on his side. Wellington had only one hundred and
fifty-nine mouths of fire; Napoleon had two hundred and forty.

Suppose the soil dry, and the artillery capable of moving, the action
would have begun at six o'clock in the morning. The battle would have
been won and ended at two o'clock, three hours before the change of
fortune in favor of the Prussians. What amount of blame attaches to
Napoleon for the loss of this battle? Is the shipwreck due to the pilot?

Was it the evident physical decline of Napoleon that complicated this
epoch by an inward diminution of force? Had the twenty years of war worn
out the blade as it had worn the scabbard, the soul as well as the body?
Did the veteran make himself disastrously felt in the leader? In a word,
was this genius, as many historians of note have thought, suffering from
an eclipse? Did he go into a frenzy in order to disguise his weakened
powers from himself? Did he begin to waver under the delusion of
a breath of adventure? Had he become--a grave matter in a
general--unconscious of peril? Is there an age, in this class of
material great men, who may be called the giants of action, when genius
grows short-sighted? Old age has no hold on the geniuses of the ideal;
for the Dantes and Michael Angelos to grow old is to grow in greatness;
is it to grow less for the Hannibals and the Bonapartes? Had Napoleon
lost the direct sense of victory? Had he reached the point where he
could no longer recognize the reef, could no longer divine the snare, no
longer discern the crumbling brink of abysses? Had he lost his power of
scenting out catastrophes? He who had in former days known all the
roads to triumph, and who, from the summit of his chariot of lightning,
pointed them out with a sovereign finger, had he now reached that
state of sinister amazement when he could lead his tumultuous legions
harnessed to it, to the precipice? Was he seized at the age of forty-six
with a supreme madness? Was that titanic charioteer of destiny no longer
anything more than an immense dare-devil?

We do not think so.

His plan of battle was, by the confession of all, a masterpiece. To
go straight to the centre of the Allies' line, to make a breach in the
enemy, to cut them in two, to drive the British half back on Hal,
and the Prussian half on Tongres, to make two shattered fragments of
Wellington and Blucher, to carry Mont-Saint-Jean, to seize Brussels,
to hurl the German into the Rhine, and the Englishman into the sea. All
this was contained in that battle, according to Napoleon. Afterwards
people would see.

Of course, we do not here pretend to furnish a history of the battle of
Waterloo; one of the scenes of the foundation of the story which we
are relating is connected with this battle, but this history is not our
subject; this history, moreover, has been finished, and finished in a
masterly manner, from one point of view by Napoleon, and from another
point of view by a whole pleiad of historians.[7]

As for us, we leave the historians at loggerheads; we are but a distant
witness, a passer-by on the plain, a seeker bending over that soil all
made of human flesh, taking appearances for realities, perchance; we
have no right to oppose, in the name of science, a collection of facts
which contain illusions, no doubt; we possess neither military practice
nor strategic ability which authorize a system; in our opinion, a chain
of accidents dominated the two leaders at Waterloo; and when it becomes
a question of destiny, that mysterious culprit, we judge like that
ingenious judge, the populace.




CHAPTER IV--A

Those persons who wish to gain a clear idea of the battle of Waterloo
have only to place, mentally, on the ground, a capital A. The left limb
of the A is the road to Nivelles, the right limb is the road to Genappe,
the tie of the A is the hollow road to Ohain from Braine-l'Alleud. The
top of the A is Mont-Saint-Jean, where Wellington is; the lower left tip
is Hougomont, where Reille is stationed with Jerome Bonaparte; the right
tip is the Belle-Alliance, where Napoleon was. At the centre of this
chord is the precise point where the final word of the battle was
pronounced. It was there that the lion has been placed, the involuntary
symbol of the supreme heroism of the Imperial Guard.

The triangle included in the top of the A, between the two limbs and the
tie, is the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean. The dispute over this plateau
constituted the whole battle. The wings of the two armies extended to
the right and left of the two roads to Genappe and Nivelles; d'Erlon
facing Picton, Reille facing Hill.

Behind the tip of the A, behind the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean, is the
forest of Soignes.

As for the plain itself, let the reader picture to himself a vast
undulating sweep of ground; each rise commands the next rise, and all
the undulations mount towards Mont-Saint-Jean, and there end in the
forest.

Two hostile troops on a field of battle are two wrestlers. It is a
question of seizing the opponent round the waist. The one seeks to trip
up the other. They clutch at everything: a bush is a point of support;
an angle of the wall offers them a rest to the shoulder; for the lack
of a hovel under whose cover they can draw up, a regiment yields its
ground; an unevenness in the ground, a chance turn in the landscape, a
cross-path encountered at the right moment, a grove, a ravine, can
stay the heel of that colossus which is called an army, and prevent its
retreat. He who quits the field is beaten; hence the necessity devolving
on the responsible leader, of examining the most insignificant clump of
trees, and of studying deeply the slightest relief in the ground.

The two generals had attentively studied the plain of Mont-Saint-Jean,
now called the plain of Waterloo. In the preceding year, Wellington,
with the sagacity of foresight, had examined it as the possible seat of
a great battle. Upon this spot, and for this duel, on the 18th of June,
Wellington had the good post, Napoleon the bad post. The English army
was stationed above, the French army below.

It is almost superfluous here to sketch the appearance of Napoleon on
horseback, glass in hand, upon the heights of Rossomme, at daybreak, on
June 18, 1815. All the world has seen him before we can show him.
That calm profile under the little three-cornered hat of the school of
Brienne, that green uniform, the white revers concealing the star of the
Legion of Honor, his great coat hiding his epaulets, the corner of red
ribbon peeping from beneath his vest, his leather trousers, the white
horse with the saddle-cloth of purple velvet bearing on the corners
crowned N's and eagles, Hessian boots over silk stockings, silver spurs,
the sword of Marengo,--that whole figure of the last of the Caesars is
present to all imaginations, saluted with acclamations by some, severely
regarded by others.

That figure stood for a long time wholly in the light; this arose from
a certain legendary dimness evolved by the majority of heroes, and which
always veils the truth for a longer or shorter time; but to-day history
and daylight have arrived.

That light called history is pitiless; it possesses this peculiar and
divine quality, that, pure light as it is, and precisely because it
is wholly light, it often casts a shadow in places where people had
hitherto beheld rays; from the same man it constructs two different
phantoms, and the one attacks the other and executes justice on it, and
the shadows of the despot contend with the brilliancy of the leader.
Hence arises a truer measure in the definitive judgments of nations.
Babylon violated lessens Alexander, Rome enchained lessens Caesar,
Jerusalem murdered lessens Titus, tyranny follows the tyrant. It is a
misfortune for a man to leave behind him the night which bears his form.




CHAPTER V--THE QUID OBSCURUM OF BATTLES

Every one is acquainted with the first phase of this battle; a beginning
which was troubled, uncertain, hesitating, menacing to both armies, but
still more so for the English than for the French.

It had rained all night, the earth had been cut up by the downpour, the
water had accumulated here and there in the hollows of the plain as if
in casks; at some points the gear of the artillery carriages was buried
up to the axles, the circingles of the horses were dripping with liquid
mud. If the wheat and rye trampled down by this cohort of transports
on the march had not filled in the ruts and strewn a litter beneath the
wheels, all movement, particularly in the valleys, in the direction of
Papelotte would have been impossible.

The affair began late. Napoleon, as we have already explained, was in
the habit of keeping all his artillery well in hand, like a pistol,
aiming it now at one point, now at another, of the battle; and it had
been his wish to wait until the horse batteries could move and gallop
freely. In order to do that it was necessary that the sun should come
out and dry the soil. But the sun did not make its appearance. It was
no longer the rendezvous of Austerlitz. When the first cannon was fired,
the English general, Colville, looked at his watch, and noted that it
was thirty-five minutes past eleven.

The action was begun furiously, with more fury, perhaps, than the
Emperor would have wished, by the left wing of the French resting on
Hougomont. At the same time Napoleon attacked the centre by hurling
Quiot's brigade on La Haie-Sainte, and Ney pushed forward the right
wing of the French against the left wing of the English, which rested on
Papelotte.

The attack on Hougomont was something of a feint; the plan was to draw
Wellington thither, and to make him swerve to the left. This plan would
have succeeded if the four companies of the English guards and the brave
Belgians of Perponcher's division had not held the position solidly, and
Wellington, instead of massing his troops there, could confine himself
to despatching thither, as reinforcements, only four more companies of
guards and one battalion from Brunswick.

The attack of the right wing of the French on Papelotte was calculated,
in fact, to overthrow the English left, to cut off the road to Brussels,
to bar the passage against possible Prussians, to force Mont-Saint-Jean,
to turn Wellington back on Hougomont, thence on Braine-l'Alleud, thence
on Hal; nothing easier. With the exception of a few incidents this
attack succeeded Papelotte was taken; La Haie-Sainte was carried.

A detail to be noted. There was in the English infantry, particularly
in Kempt's brigade, a great many raw recruits. These young soldiers were
valiant in the presence of our redoubtable infantry; their inexperience
extricated them intrepidly from the dilemma; they performed particularly
excellent service as skirmishers: the soldier skirmisher, left somewhat
to himself, becomes, so to speak, his own general. These recruits
displayed some of the French ingenuity and fury. This novice of an
infantry had dash. This displeased Wellington.

After the taking of La Haie-Sainte the battle wavered.

There is in this day an obscure interval, from mid-day to four o'clock;
the middle portion of this battle is almost indistinct, and participates
in the sombreness of the hand-to-hand conflict. Twilight reigns over it.
We perceive vast fluctuations in that fog, a dizzy mirage, paraphernalia
of war almost unknown to-day, pendant colbacks, floating sabre-taches,
cross-belts, cartridge-boxes for grenades, hussar dolmans, red boots
with a thousand wrinkles, heavy shakos garlanded with torsades, the
almost black infantry of Brunswick mingled with the scarlet infantry
of England, the English soldiers with great, white circular pads on the
slopes of their shoulders for epaulets, the Hanoverian light-horse with
their oblong casques of leather, with brass hands and red horse-tails,
the Scotch with their bare knees and plaids, the great white gaiters
of our grenadiers; pictures, not strategic lines--what Salvator Rosa
requires, not what is suited to the needs of Gribeauval.

A certain amount of tempest is always mingled with a battle. Quid
obscurum, quid divinum. Each historian traces, to some extent, the
particular feature which pleases him amid this pell-mell. Whatever may
be the combinations of the generals, the shock of armed masses has an
incalculable ebb. During the action the plans of the two leaders enter
into each other and become mutually thrown out of shape. Such a point of
the field of battle devours more combatants than such another, just as
more or less spongy soils soak up more or less quickly the water which
is poured on them. It becomes necessary to pour out more soldiers than
one would like; a series of expenditures which are the unforeseen. The
line of battle waves and undulates like a thread, the trails of blood
gush illogically, the fronts of the armies waver, the regiments
form capes and gulfs as they enter and withdraw; all these reefs are
continually moving in front of each other. Where the infantry stood the
artillery arrives, the cavalry rushes in where the artillery was, the
battalions are like smoke. There was something there; seek it. It has
disappeared; the open spots change place, the sombre folds advance and
retreat, a sort of wind from the sepulchre pushes forward, hurls back,
distends, and disperses these tragic multitudes. What is a fray? an
oscillation? The immobility of a mathematical plan expresses a minute,
not a day. In order to depict a battle, there is required one of those
powerful painters who have chaos in their brushes. Rembrandt is better
than Vandermeulen; Vandermeulen, exact at noon, lies at three o'clock.
Geometry is deceptive; the hurricane alone is trustworthy. That is what
confers on Folard the right to contradict Polybius. Let us add, that
there is a certain instant when the battle degenerates into a combat,
becomes specialized, and disperses into innumerable detailed feats,
which, to borrow the expression of Napoleon himself, "belong rather to
the biography of the regiments than to the history of the army." The
historian has, in this case, the evident right to sum up the whole. He
cannot do more than seize the principal outlines of the struggle, and
it is not given to any one narrator, however conscientious he may be,
to fix, absolutely, the form of that horrible cloud which is called a
battle.

This, which is true of all great armed encounters, is particularly
applicable to Waterloo.

Nevertheless, at a certain moment in the afternoon the battle came to a
point.




CHAPTER VI--FOUR O'CLOCK IN THE AFTERNOON

Towards four o'clock the condition of the English army was serious. The
Prince of Orange was in command of the centre, Hill of the right wing,
Picton of the left wing. The Prince of Orange, desperate and intrepid,
shouted to the Hollando-Belgians: "Nassau! Brunswick! Never retreat!"
Hill, having been weakened, had come up to the support of Wellington;
Picton was dead. At the very moment when the English had captured from
the French the flag of the 105th of the line, the French had killed the
English general, Picton, with a bullet through the head. The battle
had, for Wellington, two bases of action, Hougomont and La Haie-Sainte;
Hougomont still held out, but was on fire; La Haie-Sainte was taken. Of
the German battalion which defended it, only forty-two men survived; all
the officers, except five, were either dead or captured. Three thousand
combatants had been massacred in that barn. A sergeant of the English
Guards, the foremost boxer in England, reputed invulnerable by his
companions, had been killed there by a little French drummer-boy. Baring
had been dislodged, Alten put to the sword. Many flags had been lost,
one from Alten's division, and one from the battalion of Lunenburg,
carried by a prince of the house of Deux-Ponts. The Scotch Grays no
longer existed; Ponsonby's great dragoons had been hacked to pieces.
That valiant cavalry had bent beneath the lancers of Bro and beneath
the cuirassiers of Travers; out of twelve hundred horses, six
hundred remained; out of three lieutenant-colonels, two lay on the
earth,--Hamilton wounded, Mater slain. Ponsonby had fallen, riddled by
seven lance-thrusts. Gordon was dead. Marsh was dead. Two divisions, the
fifth and the sixth, had been annihilated.

Hougomont injured, La Haie-Sainte taken, there now existed but one
rallying-point, the centre. That point still held firm. Wellington
reinforced it. He summoned thither Hill, who was at Merle-Braine; he
summoned Chasse, who was at Braine-l'Alleud.

The centre of the English army, rather concave, very dense, and
very compact, was strongly posted. It occupied the plateau of
Mont-Saint-Jean, having behind it the village, and in front of it the
slope, which was tolerably steep then. It rested on that stout stone
dwelling which at that time belonged to the domain of Nivelles, and
which marks the intersection of the roads--a pile of the sixteenth
century, and so robust that the cannon-balls rebounded from it without
injuring it. All about the plateau the English had cut the hedges here
and there, made embrasures in the hawthorn-trees, thrust the throat of
a cannon between two branches, embattled the shrubs. There artillery was
ambushed in the brushwood. This punic labor, incontestably authorized
by war, which permits traps, was so well done, that Haxo, who had been
despatched by the Emperor at nine o'clock in the morning to reconnoitre
the enemy's batteries, had discovered nothing of it, and had returned
and reported to Napoleon that there were no obstacles except the two
barricades which barred the road to Nivelles and to Genappe. It was
at the season when the grain is tall; on the edge of the plateau a
battalion of Kempt's brigade, the 95th, armed with carabines, was
concealed in the tall wheat.

Thus assured and buttressed, the centre of the Anglo-Dutch army was well
posted. The peril of this position lay in the forest of Soignes,
then adjoining the field of battle, and intersected by the ponds of
Groenendael and Boitsfort. An army could not retreat thither without
dissolving; the regiments would have broken up immediately there.
The artillery would have been lost among the morasses. The retreat,
according to many a man versed in the art,--though it is disputed by
others,--would have been a disorganized flight.

To this centre, Wellington added one of Chasse's brigades taken from the
right wing, and one of Wincke's brigades taken from the left wing, plus
Clinton's division. To his English, to the regiments of Halkett, to
the brigades of Mitchell, to the guards of Maitland, he gave as
reinforcements and aids, the infantry of Brunswick, Nassau's contingent,
Kielmansegg's Hanoverians, and Ompteda's Germans. This placed twenty-six
battalions under his hand. The right wing, as Charras says, was thrown
back on the centre. An enormous battery was masked by sacks of earth at
the spot where there now stands what is called the "Museum of Waterloo."
Besides this, Wellington had, behind a rise in the ground, Somerset's
Dragoon Guards, fourteen hundred horse strong. It was the remaining half
of the justly celebrated English cavalry. Ponsonby destroyed, Somerset
remained.

The battery, which, if completed, would have been almost a redoubt, was
ranged behind a very low garden wall, backed up with a coating of bags
of sand and a large slope of earth. This work was not finished; there
had been no time to make a palisade for it.

Wellington, uneasy but impassive, was on horseback, and there remained
the whole day in the same attitude, a little in advance of the old mill
of Mont-Saint-Jean, which is still in existence, beneath an elm, which
an Englishman, an enthusiastic vandal, purchased later on for two
hundred francs, cut down, and carried off. Wellington was coldly heroic.
The bullets rained about him. His aide-de-camp, Gordon, fell at his
side. Lord Hill, pointing to a shell which had burst, said to him: "My
lord, what are your orders in case you are killed?" "To do like me,"
replied Wellington. To Clinton he said laconically, "To hold this spot
to the last man." The day was evidently turning out ill. Wellington
shouted to his old companions of Talavera, of Vittoria, of Salamanca:
"Boys, can retreat be thought of? Think of old England!"

Towards four o'clock, the English line drew back. Suddenly nothing
was visible on the crest of the plateau except the artillery and the
sharpshooters; the rest had disappeared: the regiments, dislodged by
the shells and the French bullets, retreated into the bottom, now
intersected by the back road of the farm of Mont-Saint-Jean; a
retrograde movement took place, the English front hid itself, Wellington
drew back. "The beginning of retreat!" cried Napoleon.




CHAPTER VII--NAPOLEON IN A GOOD HUMOR

The Emperor, though ill and discommoded on horseback by a local trouble,
had never been in a better humor than on that day. His impenetrability
had been smiling ever since the morning. On the 18th of June, that
profound soul masked by marble beamed blindly. The man who had been
gloomy at Austerlitz was gay at Waterloo. The greatest favorites of
destiny make mistakes. Our joys are composed of shadow. The supreme
smile is God's alone.

Ridet Caesar, Pompeius flebit, said the legionaries of the Fulminatrix
Legion. Pompey was not destined to weep on that occasion, but it is
certain that Caesar laughed. While exploring on horseback at one o'clock
on the preceding night, in storm and rain, in company with Bertrand, the
communes in the neighborhood of Rossomme, satisfied at the sight of the
long line of the English camp-fires illuminating the whole horizon from
Frischemont to Braine-l'Alleud, it had seemed to him that fate, to
whom he had assigned a day on the field of Waterloo, was exact to
the appointment; he stopped his horse, and remained for some time
motionless, gazing at the lightning and listening to the thunder;
and this fatalist was heard to cast into the darkness this mysterious
saying, "We are in accord." Napoleon was mistaken. They were no longer
in accord.

He took not a moment for sleep; every instant of that night was marked
by a joy for him. He traversed the line of the principal outposts,
halting here and there to talk to the sentinels. At half-past two, near
the wood of Hougomont, he heard the tread of a column on the march; he
thought at the moment that it was a retreat on the part of Wellington.
He said: "It is the rear-guard of the English getting under way for the
purpose of decamping. I will take prisoners the six thousand English who
have just arrived at Ostend." He conversed expansively; he regained the
animation which he had shown at his landing on the first of March, when
he pointed out to the Grand-Marshal the enthusiastic peasant of the Gulf
Juan, and cried, "Well, Bertrand, here is a reinforcement already!" On
the night of the 17th to the 18th of June he rallied Wellington. "That
little Englishman needs a lesson," said Napoleon. The rain redoubled in
violence; the thunder rolled while the Emperor was speaking.

At half-past three o'clock in the morning, he lost one illusion;
officers who had been despatched to reconnoitre announced to him that
the enemy was not making any movement. Nothing was stirring; not a
bivouac-fire had been extinguished; the English army was asleep. The
silence on earth was profound; the only noise was in the heavens.
At four o'clock, a peasant was brought in to him by the scouts; this
peasant had served as guide to a brigade of English cavalry, probably
Vivian's brigade, which was on its way to take up a position in the
village of Ohain, at the extreme left. At five o'clock, two Belgian
deserters reported to him that they had just quitted their regiment,
and that the English army was ready for battle. "So much the better!"
exclaimed Napoleon. "I prefer to overthrow them rather than to drive
them back."

In the morning he dismounted in the mud on the slope which forms an
angle with the Plancenoit road, had a kitchen table and a peasant's
chair brought to him from the farm of Rossomme, seated himself, with a
truss of straw for a carpet, and spread out on the table the chart
of the battle-field, saying to Soult as he did so, "A pretty
checker-board."

In consequence of the rains during the night, the transports of
provisions, embedded in the soft roads, had not been able to arrive by
morning; the soldiers had had no sleep; they were wet and fasting. This
did not prevent Napoleon from exclaiming cheerfully to Ney, "We have
ninety chances out of a hundred." At eight o'clock the Emperor's
breakfast was brought to him. He invited many generals to it. During
breakfast, it was said that Wellington had been to a ball two nights
before, in Brussels, at the Duchess of Richmond's; and Soult, a rough
man of war, with a face of an archbishop, said, "The ball takes place
to-day." The Emperor jested with Ney, who said, "Wellington will not be
so simple as to wait for Your Majesty." That was his way, however. "He
was fond of jesting," says Fleury de Chaboulon. "A merry humor was
at the foundation of his character," says Gourgaud. "He abounded in
pleasantries, which were more peculiar than witty," says Benjamin
Constant. These gayeties of a giant are worthy of insistence. It was
he who called his grenadiers "his grumblers"; he pinched their ears; he
pulled their mustaches. "The Emperor did nothing but play pranks on us,"
is the remark of one of them. During the mysterious trip from the island
of Elba to France, on the 27th of February, on the open sea, the French
brig of war, Le Zephyr, having encountered the brig L'Inconstant, on
which Napoleon was concealed, and having asked the news of Napoleon
from L'Inconstant, the Emperor, who still wore in his hat the white and
amaranthine cockade sown with bees, which he had adopted at the isle of
Elba, laughingly seized the speaking-trumpet, and answered for himself,
"The Emperor is well." A man who laughs like that is on familiar terms
with events. Napoleon indulged in many fits of this laughter during the
breakfast at Waterloo. After breakfast he meditated for a quarter of an
hour; then two generals seated themselves on the truss of straw, pen in
hand and their paper on their knees, and the Emperor dictated to them
the order of battle.

At nine o'clock, at the instant when the French army, ranged in echelons
and set in motion in five columns, had deployed--the divisions in two
lines, the artillery between the brigades, the music at their head; as
they beat the march, with rolls on the drums and the blasts of trumpets,
mighty, vast, joyous, a sea of casques, of sabres, and of bayonets on
the horizon, the Emperor was touched, and twice exclaimed, "Magnificent!
Magnificent!"

Between nine o'clock and half-past ten the whole army, incredible as it
may appear, had taken up its position and ranged itself in six lines,
forming, to repeat the Emperor's expression, "the figure of six V's."
A few moments after the formation of the battle-array, in the midst of
that profound silence, like that which heralds the beginning of a storm,
which precedes engagements, the Emperor tapped Haxo on the shoulder, as
he beheld the three batteries of twelve-pounders, detached by his orders
from the corps of Erlon, Reille, and Lobau, and destined to begin the
action by taking Mont-Saint-Jean, which was situated at the intersection
of the Nivelles and the Genappe roads, and said to him, "There are four
and twenty handsome maids, General."

Sure of the issue, he encouraged with a smile, as they passed before
him, the company of sappers of the first corps, which he had appointed
to barricade Mont-Saint-Jean as soon as the village should be carried.
All this serenity had been traversed by but a single word of haughty
pity; perceiving on his left, at a spot where there now stands a large
tomb, those admirable Scotch Grays, with their superb horses, massing
themselves, he said, "It is a pity."

Then he mounted his horse, advanced beyond Rossomme, and selected for
his post of observation a contracted elevation of turf to the right of
the road from Genappe to Brussels, which was his second station during
the battle. The third station, the one adopted at seven o'clock in the
evening, between La Belle-Alliance and La Haie-Sainte, is formidable;
it is a rather elevated knoll, which still exists, and behind which the
guard was massed on a slope of the plain. Around this knoll the balls
rebounded from the pavements of the road, up to Napoleon himself. As at
Brienne, he had over his head the shriek of the bullets and of the
heavy artillery. Mouldy cannon-balls, old sword-blades, and shapeless
projectiles, eaten up with rust, were picked up at the spot where his
horse' feet stood. Scabra rubigine. A few years ago, a shell of sixty
pounds, still charged, and with its fuse broken off level with the bomb,
was unearthed. It was at this last post that the Emperor said to his
guide, Lacoste, a hostile and terrified peasant, who was attached to the
saddle of a hussar, and who turned round at every discharge of canister
and tried to hide behind Napoleon: "Fool, it is shameful! You'll get
yourself killed with a ball in the back." He who writes these lines has
himself found, in the friable soil of this knoll, on turning over
the sand, the remains of the neck of a bomb, disintegrated, by the
oxidization of six and forty years, and old fragments of iron which
parted like elder-twigs between the fingers.

Every one is aware that the variously inclined undulations of the
plains, where the engagement between Napoleon and Wellington took place,
are no longer what they were on June 18, 1815. By taking from this
mournful field the wherewithal to make a monument to it, its real relief
has been taken away, and history, disconcerted, no longer finds her
bearings there. It has been disfigured for the sake of glorifying
it. Wellington, when he beheld Waterloo once more, two years later,
exclaimed, "They have altered my field of battle!" Where the great
pyramid of earth, surmounted by the lion, rises to-day, there was a
hillock which descended in an easy slope towards the Nivelles road, but
which was almost an escarpment on the side of the highway to Genappe.
The elevation of this escarpment can still be measured by the height of
the two knolls of the two great sepulchres which enclose the road from
Genappe to Brussels: one, the English tomb, is on the left; the other,
the German tomb, is on the right. There is no French tomb. The whole
of that plain is a sepulchre for France. Thanks to the thousands upon
thousands of cartloads of earth employed in the hillock one hundred and
fifty feet in height and half a mile in circumference, the plateau
of Mont-Saint-Jean is now accessible by an easy slope. On the day of
battle, particularly on the side of La Haie-Sainte, it was abrupt and
difficult of approach. The slope there is so steep that the English
cannon could not see the farm, situated in the bottom of the valley,
which was the centre of the combat. On the 18th of June, 1815, the rains
had still farther increased this acclivity, the mud complicated the
problem of the ascent, and the men not only slipped back, but stuck fast
in the mire. Along the crest of the plateau ran a sort of trench whose
presence it was impossible for the distant observer to divine.

What was this trench? Let us explain. Braine-l'Alleud is a Belgian
village; Ohain is another. These villages, both of them concealed in
curves of the landscape, are connected by a road about a league and a
half in length, which traverses the plain along its undulating level,
and often enters and buries itself in the hills like a furrow, which
makes a ravine of this road in some places. In 1815, as at the present
day, this road cut the crest of the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean between
the two highways from Genappe and Nivelles; only, it is now on a level
with the plain; it was then a hollow way. Its two slopes have been
appropriated for the monumental hillock. This road was, and still is,
a trench throughout the greater portion of its course; a hollow trench,
sometimes a dozen feet in depth, and whose banks, being too steep,
crumbled away here and there, particularly in winter, under driving
rains. Accidents happened here. The road was so narrow at the
Braine-l'Alleud entrance that a passer-by was crushed by a cart, as is
proved by a stone cross which stands near the cemetery, and which gives
the name of the dead, Monsieur Bernard Debrye, Merchant of Brussels,
and the date of the accident, February, 1637.[8] It was so deep on
the table-land of Mont-Saint-Jean that a peasant, Mathieu Nicaise,
was crushed there, in 1783, by a slide from the slope, as is stated on
another stone cross, the top of which has disappeared in the process of
clearing the ground, but whose overturned pedestal is still visible on
the grassy slope to the left of the highway between La Haie-Sainte and
the farm of Mont-Saint-Jean.

On the day of battle, this hollow road whose existence was in no way
indicated, bordering the crest of Mont-Saint-Jean, a trench at the
summit of the escarpment, a rut concealed in the soil, was invisible;
that is to say, terrible.




CHAPTER VIII--THE EMPEROR PUTS A QUESTION TO THE GUIDE LACOSTE

So, on the morning of Waterloo, Napoleon was content.

He was right; the plan of battle conceived by him was, as we have seen,
really admirable.

The battle once begun, its very various changes,--the resistance of
Hougomont; the tenacity of La Haie-Sainte; the killing of Bauduin; the
disabling of Foy; the unexpected wall against which Soye's brigade was
shattered; Guilleminot's fatal heedlessness when he had neither petard
nor powder sacks; the miring of the batteries; the fifteen unescorted
pieces overwhelmed in a hollow way by Uxbridge; the small effect of the
bombs falling in the English lines, and there embedding themselves in
the rain-soaked soil, and only succeeding in producing volcanoes of mud,
so that the canister was turned into a splash; the uselessness of Pire's
demonstration on Braine-l'Alleud; all that cavalry, fifteen squadrons,
almost exterminated; the right wing of the English badly alarmed, the
left wing badly cut into; Ney's strange mistake in massing, instead of
echelonning the four divisions of the first corps; men delivered over to
grape-shot, arranged in ranks twenty-seven deep and with a frontage
of two hundred; the frightful holes made in these masses by the
cannon-balls; attacking columns disorganized; the side-battery suddenly
unmasked on their flank; Bourgeois, Donzelot, and Durutte compromised;
Quiot repulsed; Lieutenant Vieux, that Hercules graduated at the
Polytechnic School, wounded at the moment when he was beating in with an
axe the door of La Haie-Sainte under the downright fire of the English
barricade which barred the angle of the road from Genappe to Brussels;
Marcognet's division caught between the infantry and the cavalry, shot
down at the very muzzle of the guns amid the grain by Best and Pack, put
to the sword by Ponsonby; his battery of seven pieces spiked; the Prince
of Saxe-Weimar holding and guarding, in spite of the Comte d'Erlon, both
Frischemont and Smohain; the flag of the 105th taken, the flag of the
45th captured; that black Prussian hussar stopped by runners of the
flying column of three hundred light cavalry on the scout between Wavre
and Plancenoit; the alarming things that had been said by prisoners;
Grouchy's delay; fifteen hundred men killed in the orchard of Hougomont
in less than an hour; eighteen hundred men overthrown in a still shorter
time about La Haie-Sainte,--all these stormy incidents passing like the
clouds of battle before Napoleon, had hardly troubled his gaze and
had not overshadowed that face of imperial certainty. Napoleon was
accustomed to gaze steadily at war; he never added up the heart-rending
details, cipher by cipher; ciphers mattered little to him, provided that
they furnished the total, victory; he was not alarmed if the beginnings
did go astray, since he thought himself the master and the possessor
at the end; he knew how to wait, supposing himself to be out of the
question, and he treated destiny as his equal: he seemed to say to fate,
Thou wilt not dare.

Composed half of light and half of shadow, Napoleon thought himself
protected in good and tolerated in evil. He had, or thought that he had,
a connivance, one might almost say a complicity, of events in his favor,
which was equivalent to the invulnerability of antiquity.

Nevertheless, when one has Beresina, Leipzig, and Fontainebleau behind
one, it seems as though one might distrust Waterloo. A mysterious frown
becomes perceptible in the depths of the heavens.

At the moment when Wellington retreated, Napoleon shuddered. He suddenly
beheld the table-land of Mont-Saint-Jean cleared, and the van of the
English army disappear. It was rallying, but hiding itself. The Emperor
half rose in his stirrups. The lightning of victory flashed from his
eyes.

Wellington, driven into a corner at the forest of Soignes and
destroyed--that was the definitive conquest of England by France; it was
Crecy, Poitiers, Malplaquet, and Ramillies avenged. The man of Marengo
was wiping out Agincourt.

So the Emperor, meditating on this terrible turn of fortune, swept his
glass for the last time over all the points of the field of battle. His
guard, standing behind him with grounded arms, watched him from below
with a sort of religion. He pondered; he examined the slopes, noted the
declivities, scrutinized the clumps of trees, the square of rye, the
path; he seemed to be counting each bush. He gazed with some intentness
at the English barricades of the two highways,--two large abatis of
trees, that on the road to Genappe above La Haie-Sainte, armed with two
cannon, the only ones out of all the English artillery which commanded
the extremity of the field of battle, and that on the road to Nivelles
where gleamed the Dutch bayonets of Chasse's brigade. Near this
barricade he observed the old chapel of Saint Nicholas, painted white,
which stands at the angle of the cross-road near Braine-l'Alleud; he
bent down and spoke in a low voice to the guide Lacoste. The guide made
a negative sign with his head, which was probably perfidious.

The Emperor straightened himself up and fell to thinking.

Wellington had drawn back.

All that remained to do was to complete this retreat by crushing him.

Napoleon turning round abruptly, despatched an express at full speed to
Paris to announce that the battle was won.

Napoleon was one of those geniuses from whom thunder darts.

He had just found his clap of thunder.

He gave orders to Milhaud's cuirassiers to carry the table-land of
Mont-Saint-Jean.




CHAPTER IX--THE UNEXPECTED

There were three thousand five hundred of them. They formed a front a
quarter of a league in extent. They were giant men, on colossal horses.
There were six and twenty squadrons of them; and they had behind them to
support them Lefebvre-Desnouettes's division,--the one hundred and six
picked gendarmes, the light cavalry of the Guard, eleven hundred and
ninety-seven men, and the lancers of the guard of eight hundred and
eighty lances. They wore casques without horse-tails, and cuirasses
of beaten iron, with horse-pistols in their holsters, and long
sabre-swords. That morning the whole army had admired them, when, at
nine o'clock, with braying of trumpets and all the music playing "Let us
watch o'er the Safety of the Empire," they had come in a solid column,
with one of their batteries on their flank, another in their centre, and
deployed in two ranks between the roads to Genappe and Frischemont,
and taken up their position for battle in that powerful second line,
so cleverly arranged by Napoleon, which, having on its extreme left
Kellermann's cuirassiers and on its extreme right Milhaud's cuirassiers,
had, so to speak, two wings of iron.

Aide-de-camp Bernard carried them the Emperor's orders. Ney drew his
sword and placed himself at their head. The enormous squadrons were set
in motion.

Then a formidable spectacle was seen.

All their cavalry, with upraised swords, standards and trumpets flung to
the breeze, formed in columns by divisions, descended, by a simultaneous
movement and like one man, with the precision of a brazen battering-ram
which is effecting a breach, the hill of La Belle Alliance, plunged into
the terrible depths in which so many men had already fallen, disappeared
there in the smoke, then emerging from that shadow, reappeared on the
other side of the valley, still compact and in close ranks, mounting at
a full trot, through a storm of grape-shot which burst upon them,
the terrible muddy slope of the table-land of Mont-Saint-Jean. They
ascended, grave, threatening, imperturbable; in the intervals between
the musketry and the artillery, their colossal trampling was audible.
Being two divisions, there were two columns of them; Wathier's division
held the right, Delort's division was on the left. It seemed as though
two immense adders of steel were to be seen crawling towards the crest
of the table-land. It traversed the battle like a prodigy.

Nothing like it had been seen since the taking of the great redoubt of
the Muskowa by the heavy cavalry; Murat was lacking here, but Ney was
again present. It seemed as though that mass had become a monster and
had but one soul. Each column undulated and swelled like the ring of a
polyp. They could be seen through a vast cloud of smoke which was rent
here and there. A confusion of helmets, of cries, of sabres, a stormy
heaving of the cruppers of horses amid the cannons and the flourish of
trumpets, a terrible and disciplined tumult; over all, the cuirasses
like the scales on the hydra.

These narrations seemed to belong to another age. Something parallel to
this vision appeared, no doubt, in the ancient Orphic epics, which told
of the centaurs, the old hippanthropes, those Titans with human
heads and equestrian chests who scaled Olympus at a gallop, horrible,
invulnerable, sublime--gods and beasts.

Odd numerical coincidence,--twenty-six battalions rode to meet
twenty-six battalions. Behind the crest of the plateau, in the shadow of
the masked battery, the English infantry, formed into thirteen squares,
two battalions to the square, in two lines, with seven in the first
line, six in the second, the stocks of their guns to their shoulders,
taking aim at that which was on the point of appearing, waited, calm,
mute, motionless. They did not see the cuirassiers, and the cuirassiers
did not see them. They listened to the rise of this flood of men. They
heard the swelling noise of three thousand horse, the alternate and
symmetrical tramp of their hoofs at full trot, the jingling of the
cuirasses, the clang of the sabres and a sort of grand and savage
breathing. There ensued a most terrible silence; then, all at once,
a long file of uplifted arms, brandishing sabres, appeared above the
crest, and casques, trumpets, and standards, and three thousand heads
with gray mustaches, shouting, "Vive l'Empereur!" All this cavalry
debouched on the plateau, and it was like the appearance of an
earthquake.

All at once, a tragic incident; on the English left, on our right, the
head of the column of cuirassiers reared up with a frightful clamor. On
arriving at the culminating point of the crest, ungovernable, utterly
given over to fury and their course of extermination of the squares and
cannon, the cuirassiers had just caught sight of a trench,--a trench
between them and the English. It was the hollow road of Ohain.

It was a terrible moment. The ravine was there, unexpected, yawning,
directly under the horses' feet, two fathoms deep between its double
slopes; the second file pushed the first into it, and the third pushed
on the second; the horses reared and fell backward, landed on their
haunches, slid down, all four feet in the air, crushing and overwhelming
the riders; and there being no means of retreat,--the whole column being
no longer anything more than a projectile,--the force which had been
acquired to crush the English crushed the French; the inexorable ravine
could only yield when filled; horses and riders rolled there pell-mell,
grinding each other, forming but one mass of flesh in this gulf: when
this trench was full of living men, the rest marched over them and
passed on. Almost a third of Dubois's brigade fell into that abyss.

This began the loss of the battle.

A local tradition, which evidently exaggerates matters, says that two
thousand horses and fifteen hundred men were buried in the hollow road
of Ohain. This figure probably comprises all the other corpses which
were flung into this ravine the day after the combat.

Let us note in passing that it was Dubois's sorely tried brigade which,
an hour previously, making a charge to one side, had captured the flag
of the Lunenburg battalion.

Napoleon, before giving the order for this charge of Milhaud's
cuirassiers, had scrutinized the ground, but had not been able to see
that hollow road, which did not even form a wrinkle on the surface of
the plateau. Warned, nevertheless, and put on the alert by the little
white chapel which marks its angle of junction with the Nivelles
highway, he had probably put a question as to the possibility of an
obstacle, to the guide Lacoste. The guide had answered No. We might
almost affirm that Napoleon's catastrophe originated in that sign of a
peasant's head.

Other fatalities were destined to arise.

Was it possible that Napoleon should have won that battle? We answer No.
Why? Because of Wellington? Because of Blucher? No. Because of God.

Bonaparte victor at Waterloo; that does not come within the law of the
nineteenth century. Another series of facts was in preparation, in which
there was no longer any room for Napoleon. The ill will of events had
declared itself long before.

It was time that this vast man should fall.

The excessive weight of this man in human destiny disturbed the balance.
This individual alone counted for more than a universal group. These
plethoras of all human vitality concentrated in a single head; the world
mounting to the brain of one man,--this would be mortal to civilization
were it to last. The moment had arrived for the incorruptible and
supreme equity to alter its plan. Probably the principles and the
elements, on which the regular gravitations of the moral, as of the
material, world depend, had complained. Smoking blood, over-filled
cemeteries, mothers in tears,--these are formidable pleaders. When
the earth is suffering from too heavy a burden, there are mysterious
groanings of the shades, to which the abyss lends an ear.

Napoleon had been denounced in the infinite and his fall had been
decided on.

He embarrassed God.

Waterloo is not a battle; it is a change of front on the part of the
Universe.




CHAPTER X--THE PLATEAU OF MONT-SAINT-JEAN

The battery was unmasked at the same moment with the ravine.

Sixty cannons and the thirteen squares darted lightning point-blank on
the cuirassiers. The intrepid General Delort made the military salute to
the English battery.

The whole of the flying artillery of the English had re-entered the
squares at a gallop. The cuirassiers had not had even the time for a
halt. The disaster of the hollow road had decimated, but not discouraged
them. They belonged to that class of men who, when diminished in number,
increase in courage.

Wathier's column alone had suffered in the disaster; Delort's column,
which Ney had deflected to the left, as though he had a presentiment of
an ambush, had arrived whole.

The cuirassiers hurled themselves on the English squares.

At full speed, with bridles loose, swords in their teeth pistols in
fist,--such was the attack.

There are moments in battles in which the soul hardens the man until
the soldier is changed into a statue, and when all this flesh turns into
granite. The English battalions, desperately assaulted, did not stir.

Then it was terrible.

All the faces of the English squares were attacked at once. A frenzied
whirl enveloped them. That cold infantry remained impassive. The first
rank knelt and received the cuirassiers on their bayonets, the second
ranks shot them down; behind the second rank the cannoneers charged
their guns, the front of the square parted, permitted the passage of
an eruption of grape-shot, and closed again. The cuirassiers replied
by crushing them. Their great horses reared, strode across the ranks,
leaped over the bayonets and fell, gigantic, in the midst of these four
living wells. The cannon-balls ploughed furrows in these cuirassiers;
the cuirassiers made breaches in the squares. Files of men disappeared,
ground to dust under the horses. The bayonets plunged into the bellies
of these centaurs; hence a hideousness of wounds which has probably
never been seen anywhere else. The squares, wasted by this mad cavalry,
closed up their ranks without flinching. Inexhaustible in the matter of
grape-shot, they created explosions in their assailants' midst. The form
of this combat was monstrous. These squares were no longer battalions,
they were craters; those cuirassiers were no longer cavalry, they were
a tempest. Each square was a volcano attacked by a cloud; lava contended
with lightning.

The square on the extreme right, the most exposed of all, being in the
air, was almost annihilated at the very first shock. lt was formed
of the 75th regiment of Highlanders. The bagpipe-player in the centre
dropped his melancholy eyes, filled with the reflections of the
forests and the lakes, in profound inattention, while men were being
exterminated around him, and seated on a drum, with his pibroch under
his arm, played the Highland airs. These Scotchmen died thinking of Ben
Lothian, as did the Greeks recalling Argos. The sword of a cuirassier,
which hewed down the bagpipes and the arm which bore it, put an end to
the song by killing the singer.

The cuirassiers, relatively few in number, and still further diminished
by the catastrophe of the ravine, had almost the whole English army
against them, but they multiplied themselves so that each man of them
was equal to ten. Nevertheless, some Hanoverian battalions yielded.
Wellington perceived it, and thought of his cavalry. Had Napoleon at
that same moment thought of his infantry, he would have won the battle.
This forgetfulness was his great and fatal mistake.

All at once, the cuirassiers, who had been the assailants, found
themselves assailed. The English cavalry was at their back. Before
them two squares, behind them Somerset; Somerset meant fourteen hundred
dragoons of the guard. On the right, Somerset had Dornberg with the
German light-horse, and on his left, Trip with the Belgian carabineers;
the cuirassiers attacked on the flank and in front, before and in the
rear, by infantry and cavalry, had to face all sides. What mattered it
to them? They were a whirlwind. Their valor was something indescribable.

In addition to this, they had behind them the battery, which was still
thundering. It was necessary that it should be so, or they could never
have been wounded in the back. One of their cuirasses, pierced on the
shoulder by a ball from a biscayan,[9] is in the collection of the
Waterloo Museum.

For such Frenchmen nothing less than such Englishmen was needed. It
was no longer a hand-to-hand conflict; it was a shadow, a fury, a dizzy
transport of souls and courage, a hurricane of lightning swords. In an
instant the fourteen hundred dragoon guards numbered only eight hundred.
Fuller, their lieutenant-colonel, fell dead. Ney rushed up with
the lancers and Lefebvre-Desnouettes's light-horse. The plateau
of Mont-Saint-Jean was captured, recaptured, captured again. The
cuirassiers quitted the cavalry to return to the infantry; or, to put
it more exactly, the whole of that formidable rout collared each other
without releasing the other. The squares still held firm.

There were a dozen assaults. Ney had four horses killed under him. Half
the cuirassiers remained on the plateau. This conflict lasted two hours.

The English army was profoundly shaken. There is no doubt that, had they
not been enfeebled in their first shock by the disaster of the hollow
road the cuirassiers would have overwhelmed the centre and decided the
victory. This extraordinary cavalry petrified Clinton, who had seen
Talavera and Badajoz. Wellington, three-quarters vanquished, admired
heroically. He said in an undertone, "Sublime!"

The cuirassiers annihilated seven squares out of thirteen, took or
spiked sixty pieces of ordnance, and captured from the English regiments
six flags, which three cuirassiers and three chasseurs of the Guard bore
to the Emperor, in front of the farm of La Belle Alliance.

Wellington's situation had grown worse. This strange battle was like a
duel between two raging, wounded men, each of whom, still fighting and
still resisting, is expending all his blood.

Which of the two will be the first to fall?

The conflict on the plateau continued.

What had become of the cuirassiers? No one could have told. One thing
is certain, that on the day after the battle, a cuirassier and his
horse were found dead among the woodwork of the scales for vehicles at
Mont-Saint-Jean, at the very point where the four roads from Nivelles,
Genappe, La Hulpe, and Brussels meet and intersect each other. This
horseman had pierced the English lines. One of the men who picked up the
body still lives at Mont-Saint-Jean. His name is Dehaze. He was eighteen
years old at that time.

Wellington felt that he was yielding. The crisis was at hand.

The cuirassiers had not succeeded, since the centre was not broken
through. As every one was in possession of the plateau, no one held it,
and in fact it remained, to a great extent, with the English. Wellington
held the village and the culminating plain; Ney had only the crest and
the slope. They seemed rooted in that fatal soil on both sides.

But the weakening of the English seemed irremediable. The bleeding
of that army was horrible. Kempt, on the left wing, demanded
reinforcements. "There are none," replied Wellington; "he must let
himself be killed!" Almost at that same moment, a singular coincidence
which paints the exhaustion of the two armies, Ney demanded infantry
from Napoleon, and Napoleon exclaimed, "Infantry! Where does he expect
me to get it? Does he think I can make it?"

Nevertheless, the English army was in the worse case of the two. The
furious onsets of those great squadrons with cuirasses of iron and
breasts of steel had ground the infantry to nothing. A few men clustered
round a flag marked the post of a regiment; such and such a battalion
was commanded only by a captain or a lieutenant; Alten's division,
already so roughly handled at La Haie-Sainte, was almost destroyed;
the intrepid Belgians of Van Kluze's brigade strewed the rye-fields
all along the Nivelles road; hardly anything was left of those Dutch
grenadiers, who, intermingled with Spaniards in our ranks in 1811,
fought against Wellington; and who, in 1815, rallied to the
English standard, fought against Napoleon. The loss in officers was
considerable. Lord Uxbridge, who had his leg buried on the following
day, had his knee shattered. If, on the French side, in that tussle
of the cuirassiers, Delort, l'Heritier, Colbert, Dnop, Travers, and
Blancard were disabled, on the side of the English there was Alten
wounded, Barne wounded, Delancey killed, Van Meeren killed, Ompteda
killed, the whole of Wellington's staff decimated, and England had the
worse of it in that bloody scale. The second regiment of foot-guards
had lost five lieutenant-colonels, four captains, and three ensigns;
the first battalion of the 30th infantry had lost 24 officers and 1,200
soldiers; the 79th Highlanders had lost 24 officers wounded, 18 officers
killed, 450 soldiers killed. The Hanoverian hussars of Cumberland, a
whole regiment, with Colonel Hacke at its head, who was destined to be
tried later on and cashiered, had turned bridle in the presence of the
fray, and had fled to the forest of Soignes, sowing defeat all the way
to Brussels. The transports, ammunition-wagons, the baggage-wagons, the
wagons filled with wounded, on perceiving that the French were gaining
ground and approaching the forest, rushed headlong thither. The Dutch,
mowed down by the French cavalry, cried, "Alarm!" From Vert-Coucou to
Groentendael, for a distance of nearly two leagues in the direction
of Brussels, according to the testimony of eye-witnesses who are still
alive, the roads were encumbered with fugitives. This panic was such
that it attacked the Prince de Conde at Mechlin, and Louis XVIII. at
Ghent. With the exception of the feeble reserve echelonned behind the
ambulance established at the farm of Mont-Saint-Jean, and of Vivian's
and Vandeleur's brigades, which flanked the left wing, Wellington had
no cavalry left. A number of batteries lay unhorsed. These facts are
attested by Siborne; and Pringle, exaggerating the disaster, goes so far
as to say that the Anglo-Dutch army was reduced to thirty-four thousand
men. The Iron Duke remained calm, but his lips blanched. Vincent, the
Austrian commissioner, Alava, the Spanish commissioner, who were present
at the battle in the English staff, thought the Duke lost. At five
o'clock Wellington drew out his watch, and he was heard to murmur these
sinister words, "Blucher, or night!"

It was at about that moment that a distant line of bayonets gleamed on
the heights in the direction of Frischemont.

Here comes the change of face in this giant drama.




CHAPTER XI--A BAD GUIDE TO NAPOLEON; A GOOD GUIDE TO BULOW

The painful surprise of Napoleon is well known. Grouchy hoped for,
Blucher arriving. Death instead of life.

Fate has these turns; the throne of the world was expected; it was Saint
Helena that was seen.

If the little shepherd who served as guide to Bulow, Blucher's
lieutenant, had advised him to debouch from the forest above
Frischemont, instead of below Plancenoit, the form of the nineteenth
century might, perhaps, have been different. Napoleon would have won the
battle of Waterloo. By any other route than that below Plancenoit,
the Prussian army would have come out upon a ravine impassable for
artillery, and Bulow would not have arrived.

Now the Prussian general, Muffling, declares that one hour's delay, and
Blucher would not have found Wellington on his feet. "The battle was
lost."

It was time that Bulow should arrive, as will be seen. He had, moreover,
been very much delayed. He had bivouacked at Dion-le-Mont, and had set
out at daybreak; but the roads were impassable, and his divisions stuck
fast in the mire. The ruts were up to the hubs of the cannons. Moreover,
he had been obliged to pass the Dyle on the narrow bridge of Wavre;
the street leading to the bridge had been fired by the French, so
the caissons and ammunition-wagons could not pass between two rows of
burning houses, and had been obliged to wait until the conflagration was
extinguished. It was mid-day before Bulow's vanguard had been able to
reach Chapelle-Saint-Lambert.

Had the action been begun two hours earlier, it would have been over
at four o'clock, and Blucher would have fallen on the battle won by
Napoleon. Such are these immense risks proportioned to an infinite which
we cannot comprehend.

The Emperor had been the first, as early as mid-day, to descry with his
field-glass, on the extreme horizon, something which had attracted his
attention. He had said, "I see yonder a cloud, which seems to me to be
troops." Then he asked the Duc de Dalmatie, "Soult, what do you see in
the direction of Chapelle-Saint-Lambert?" The marshal, levelling his
glass, answered, "Four or five thousand men, Sire; evidently Grouchy."
But it remained motionless in the mist. All the glasses of the staff
had studied "the cloud" pointed out by the Emperor. Some said: "It is
trees." The truth is, that the cloud did not move. The Emperor detached
Domon's division of light cavalry to reconnoitre in that quarter.

Bulow had not moved, in fact. His vanguard was very feeble, and could
accomplish nothing. He was obliged to wait for the body of the army
corps, and he had received orders to concentrate his forces before
entering into line; but at five o'clock, perceiving Wellington's peril,
Blucher ordered Bulow to attack, and uttered these remarkable words: "We
must give air to the English army."

A little later, the divisions of Losthin, Hiller, Hacke, and Ryssel
deployed before Lobau's corps, the cavalry of Prince William of Prussia
debouched from the forest of Paris, Plancenoit was in flames, and the
Prussian cannon-balls began to rain even upon the ranks of the guard in
reserve behind Napoleon.




CHAPTER XII--THE GUARD

Every one knows the rest,--the irruption of a third army; the battle
broken to pieces; eighty-six mouths of fire thundering simultaneously;
Pirch the first coming up with Bulow; Zieten's cavalry led by Blucher
in person, the French driven back; Marcognet swept from the plateau of
Ohain; Durutte dislodged from Papelotte; Donzelot and Quiot retreating;
Lobau caught on the flank; a fresh battle precipitating itself on our
dismantled regiments at nightfall; the whole English line resuming the
offensive and thrust forward; the gigantic breach made in the French
army; the English grape-shot and the Prussian grape-shot aiding each
other; the extermination; disaster in front; disaster on the flank; the
Guard entering the line in the midst of this terrible crumbling of all
things.

Conscious that they were about to die, they shouted, "Vive l'Empereur!"
History records nothing more touching than that agony bursting forth in
acclamations.

The sky had been overcast all day long. All of a sudden, at that very
moment,--it was eight o'clock in the evening--the clouds on the horizon
parted, and allowed the grand and sinister glow of the setting sun to
pass through, athwart the elms on the Nivelles road. They had seen it
rise at Austerlitz.

Each battalion of the Guard was commanded by a general for this final
catastrophe. Friant, Michel, Roguet, Harlet, Mallet, Poret de Morvan,
were there. When the tall caps of the grenadiers of the Guard, with
their large plaques bearing the eagle appeared, symmetrical, in line,
tranquil, in the midst of that combat, the enemy felt a respect for
France; they thought they beheld twenty victories entering the field
of battle, with wings outspread, and those who were the conquerors,
believing themselves to be vanquished, retreated; but Wellington
shouted, "Up, Guards, and aim straight!" The red regiment of English
guards, lying flat behind the hedges, sprang up, a cloud of grape-shot
riddled the tricolored flag and whistled round our eagles; all hurled
themselves forwards, and the final carnage began. In the darkness, the
Imperial Guard felt the army losing ground around it, and in the vast
shock of the rout it heard the desperate flight which had taken the
place of the "Vive l'Empereur!" and, with flight behind it, it continued
to advance, more crushed, losing more men at every step that it took.
There were none who hesitated, no timid men in its ranks. The soldier in
that troop was as much of a hero as the general. Not a man was missing
in that suicide.

Ney, bewildered, great with all the grandeur of accepted death, offered
himself to all blows in that tempest. He had his fifth horse killed
under him there. Perspiring, his eyes aflame, foaming at the mouth, with
uniform unbuttoned, one of his epaulets half cut off by a sword-stroke
from a horseguard, his plaque with the great eagle dented by a bullet;
bleeding, bemired, magnificent, a broken sword in his hand, he said,
"Come and see how a Marshal of France dies on the field of battle!" But
in vain; he did not die. He was haggard and angry. At Drouet d'Erlon he
hurled this question, "Are you not going to get yourself killed?" In
the midst of all that artillery engaged in crushing a handful of men,
he shouted: "So there is nothing for me! Oh! I should like to have all
these English bullets enter my bowels!" Unhappy man, thou wert reserved
for French bullets!




CHAPTER XIII--THE CATASTROPHE

The rout behind the Guard was melancholy.

The army yielded suddenly on all sides at once,--Hougomont, La
Haie-Sainte, Papelotte, Plancenoit. The cry "Treachery!" was followed by
a cry of "Save yourselves who can!" An army which is disbanding is
like a thaw. All yields, splits, cracks, floats, rolls, falls, jostles,
hastens, is precipitated. The disintegration is unprecedented. Ney
borrows a horse, leaps upon it, and without hat, cravat, or sword,
places himself across the Brussels road, stopping both English and
French. He strives to detain the army, he recalls it to its duty, he
insults it, he clings to the rout. He is overwhelmed. The soldiers fly
from him, shouting, "Long live Marshal Ney!" Two of Durutte's regiments
go and come in affright as though tossed back and forth between the
swords of the Uhlans and the fusillade of the brigades of Kempt, Best,
Pack, and Rylandt; the worst of hand-to-hand conflicts is the defeat;
friends kill each other in order to escape; squadrons and battalions
break and disperse against each other, like the tremendous foam of
battle. Lobau at one extremity, and Reille at the other, are drawn into
the tide. In vain does Napoleon erect walls from what is left to him of
his Guard; in vain does he expend in a last effort his last serviceable
squadrons. Quiot retreats before Vivian, Kellermann before Vandeleur,
Lobau before Bulow, Morand before Pirch, Domon and Subervic before
Prince William of Prussia; Guyot, who led the Emperor's squadrons to the
charge, falls beneath the feet of the English dragoons. Napoleon gallops
past the line of fugitives, harangues, urges, threatens, entreats
them. All the mouths which in the morning had shouted, "Long live
the Emperor!" remain gaping; they hardly recognize him. The Prussian
cavalry, newly arrived, dashes forwards, flies, hews, slashes, kills,
exterminates. Horses lash out, the cannons flee; the soldiers of the
artillery-train unharness the caissons and use the horses to make their
escape; transports overturned, with all four wheels in the air, clog the
road and occasion massacres. Men are crushed, trampled down, others walk
over the dead and the living. Arms are lost. A dizzy multitude fills the
roads, the paths, the bridges, the plains, the hills, the valleys,
the woods, encumbered by this invasion of forty thousand men. Shouts
despair, knapsacks and guns flung among the rye, passages forced at
the point of the sword, no more comrades, no more officers, no more
generals, an inexpressible terror. Zieten putting France to the sword at
its leisure. Lions converted into goats. Such was the flight.

At Genappe, an effort was made to wheel about, to present a battle
front, to draw up in line. Lobau rallied three hundred men. The entrance
to the village was barricaded, but at the first volley of Prussian
canister, all took to flight again, and Lobau was taken. That volley of
grape-shot can be seen to-day imprinted on the ancient gable of a brick
building on the right of the road at a few minutes' distance before you
enter Genappe. The Prussians threw themselves into Genappe, furious, no
doubt, that they were not more entirely the conquerors. The pursuit was
stupendous. Blucher ordered extermination. Roguet had set the lugubrious
example of threatening with death any French grenadier who should bring
him a Prussian prisoner. Blucher outdid Roguet. Duhesme, the general
of the Young Guard, hemmed in at the doorway of an inn at Genappe,
surrendered his sword to a huzzar of death, who took the sword and slew
the prisoner. The victory was completed by the assassination of the
vanquished. Let us inflict punishment, since we are history: old
Blucher disgraced himself. This ferocity put the finishing touch to the
disaster. The desperate route traversed Genappe, traversed Quatre-Bras,
traversed Gosselies, traversed Frasnes, traversed Charleroi, traversed
Thuin, and only halted at the frontier. Alas! and who, then, was fleeing
in that manner? The Grand Army.

This vertigo, this terror, this downfall into ruin of the loftiest
bravery which ever astounded history,--is that causeless? No. The shadow
of an enormous right is projected athwart Waterloo. It is the day of
destiny. The force which is mightier than man produced that day. Hence
the terrified wrinkle of those brows; hence all those great souls
surrendering their swords. Those who had conquered Europe have fallen
prone on the earth, with nothing left to say nor to do, feeling the
present shadow of a terrible presence. Hoc erat in fatis. That day the
perspective of the human race underwent a change. Waterloo is the
hinge of the nineteenth century. The disappearance of the great man was
necessary to the advent of the great century. Some one, a person to whom
one replies not, took the responsibility on himself. The panic of heroes
can be explained. In the battle of Waterloo there is something more than
a cloud, there is something of the meteor. God has passed by.

At nightfall, in a meadow near Genappe, Bernard and Bertrand seized by
the skirt of his coat and detained a man, haggard, pensive, sinister,
gloomy, who, dragged to that point by the current of the rout, had just
dismounted, had passed the bridle of his horse over his arm, and with
wild eye was returning alone to Waterloo. It was Napoleon, the immense
somnambulist of this dream which had crumbled, essaying once more to
advance.




CHAPTER XIV--THE LAST SQUARE

Several squares of the Guard, motionless amid this stream of the defeat,
as rocks in running water, held their own until night. Night came,
death also; they awaited that double shadow, and, invincible, allowed
themselves to be enveloped therein. Each regiment, isolated from the
rest, and having no bond with the army, now shattered in every part,
died alone. They had taken up position for this final action, some on
the heights of Rossomme, others on the plain of Mont-Saint-Jean. There,
abandoned, vanquished, terrible, those gloomy squares endured their
death-throes in formidable fashion. Ulm, Wagram, Jena, Friedland, died
with them.

At twilight, towards nine o'clock in the evening, one of them was left
at the foot of the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean. In that fatal valley,
at the foot of that declivity which the cuirassiers had ascended, now
inundated by the masses of the English, under the converging fires
of the victorious hostile cavalry, under a frightful density of
projectiles, this square fought on. It was commanded by an obscure
officer named Cambronne. At each discharge, the square diminished and
replied. It replied to the grape-shot with a fusillade, continually
contracting its four walls. The fugitives pausing breathless for a
moment in the distance, listened in the darkness to that gloomy and
ever-decreasing thunder.

When this legion had been reduced to a handful, when nothing was left
of their flag but a rag, when their guns, the bullets all gone, were no
longer anything but clubs, when the heap of corpses was larger than the
group of survivors, there reigned among the conquerors, around those men
dying so sublimely, a sort of sacred terror, and the English artillery,
taking breath, became silent. This furnished a sort of respite. These
combatants had around them something in the nature of a swarm of
spectres, silhouettes of men on horseback, the black profiles of cannon,
the white sky viewed through wheels and gun-carriages, the colossal
death's-head, which the heroes saw constantly through the smoke, in the
depths of the battle, advanced upon them and gazed at them. Through the
shades of twilight they could hear the pieces being loaded; the matches
all lighted, like the eyes of tigers at night, formed a circle round
their heads; all the lintstocks of the English batteries approached the
cannons, and then, with emotion, holding the supreme moment suspended
above these men, an English general, Colville according to some,
Maitland according to others, shouted to them, "Surrender, brave
Frenchmen!" Cambronne replied, "-----."

{EDITOR'S COMMENTARY: Another edition of this book has the word "Merde!"
in lieu of the ----- above.}




CHAPTER XV--CAMBRONNE

If any French reader object to having his susceptibilities offended, one
would have to refrain from repeating in his presence what is perhaps
the finest reply that a Frenchman ever made. This would enjoin us from
consigning something sublime to History.

At our own risk and peril, let us violate this injunction.

Now, then, among those giants there was one Titan,--Cambronne.

To make that reply and then perish, what could be grander? For being
willing to die is the same as to die; and it was not this man's fault if
he survived after he was shot.

The winner of the battle of Waterloo was not Napoleon, who was put to
flight; nor Wellington, giving way at four o'clock, in despair at five;
nor Blucher, who took no part in the engagement. The winner of Waterloo
was Cambronne.

To thunder forth such a reply at the lightning-flash that kills you is
to conquer!

Thus to answer the Catastrophe, thus to speak to Fate, to give this
pedestal to the future lion, to hurl such a challenge to the midnight
rainstorm, to the treacherous wall of Hougomont, to the sunken road of
Ohain, to Grouchy's delay, to Blucher's arrival, to be Irony itself in
the tomb, to act so as to stand upright though fallen, to drown in
two syllables the European coalition, to offer kings privies which
the Caesars once knew, to make the lowest of words the most lofty by
entwining with it the glory of France, insolently to end Waterloo with
Mardigras, to finish Leonidas with Rabellais, to set the crown on this
victory by a word impossible to speak, to lose the field and preserve
history, to have the laugh on your side after such a carnage,--this is
immense!

It was an insult such as a thunder-cloud might hurl! It reaches the
grandeur of AEschylus!

Cambronne's reply produces the effect of a violent break. 'Tis like the
breaking of a heart under a weight of scorn. 'Tis the overflow of agony
bursting forth. Who conquered? Wellington? No! Had it not been for
Blucher, he was lost. Was it Blucher? No! If Wellington had not begun,
Blucher could not have finished. This Cambronne, this man spending his
last hour, this unknown soldier, this infinitesimal of war, realizes
that here is a falsehood, a falsehood in a catastrophe, and so doubly
agonizing; and at the moment when his rage is bursting forth because of
it, he is offered this mockery,--life! How could he restrain himself?
Yonder are all the kings of Europe, the general's flushed with victory,
the Jupiter's darting thunderbolts; they have a hundred thousand
victorious soldiers, and back of the hundred thousand a million; their
cannon stand with yawning mouths, the match is lighted; they grind down
under their heels the Imperial guards, and the grand army; they have
just crushed Napoleon, and only Cambronne remains,--only this earthworm
is left to protest. He will protest. Then he seeks for the appropriate
word as one seeks for a sword. His mouth froths, and the froth is the
word. In face of this mean and mighty victory, in face of this victory
which counts none victorious, this desperate soldier stands erect. He
grants its overwhelming immensity, but he establishes its triviality;
and he does more than spit upon it. Borne down by numbers, by superior
force, by brute matter, he finds in his soul an expression: "Excrement!"
We repeat it,--to use that word, to do thus, to invent such an
expression, is to be the conqueror!

The spirit of mighty days at that portentous moment made its descent
on that unknown man. Cambronne invents the word for Waterloo as Rouget
invents the "Marseillaise," under the visitation of a breath from on
high. An emanation from the divine whirlwind leaps forth and comes
sweeping over these men, and they shake, and one of them sings the song
supreme, and the other utters the frightful cry.

This challenge of titanic scorn Cambronne hurls not only at Europe in
the name of the Empire,--that would be a trifle: he hurls it at the past
in the name of the Revolution. It is heard, and Cambronne is recognized
as possessed by the ancient spirit of the Titans. Danton seems to be
speaking! Kleber seems to be bellowing!

At that word from Cambronne, the English voice responded, "Fire!"
The batteries flamed, the hill trembled, from all those brazen mouths
belched a last terrible gush of grape-shot; a vast volume of smoke,
vaguely white in the light of the rising moon, rolled out, and when the
smoke dispersed, there was no longer anything there. That formidable
remnant had been annihilated; the Guard was dead. The four walls of the
living redoubt lay prone, and hardly was there discernible, here and
there, even a quiver in the bodies; it was thus that the French legions,
greater than the Roman legions, expired on Mont-Saint-Jean, on the soil
watered with rain and blood, amid the gloomy grain, on the spot where
nowadays Joseph, who drives the post-wagon from Nivelles, passes
whistling, and cheerfully whipping up his horse at four o'clock in the
morning.




CHAPTER XVI--QUOT LIBRAS IN DUCE?

The battle of Waterloo is an enigma. It is as obscure to those who won
it as to those who lost it. For Napoleon it was a panic;[10] Blucher
sees nothing in it but fire; Wellington understands nothing in regard
to it. Look at the reports. The bulletins are confused, the commentaries
involved. Some stammer, others lisp. Jomini divides the battle of
Waterloo into four moments; Muffling cuts it up into three changes;
Charras alone, though we hold another judgment than his on some points,
seized with his haughty glance the characteristic outlines of that
catastrophe of human genius in conflict with divine chance. All the
other historians suffer from being somewhat dazzled, and in this dazzled
state they fumble about. It was a day of lightning brilliancy; in fact,
a crumbling of the military monarchy which, to the vast stupefaction of
kings, drew all the kingdoms after it--the fall of force, the defeat of
war.

In this event, stamped with superhuman necessity, the part played by men
amounts to nothing.

If we take Waterloo from Wellington and Blucher, do we thereby deprive
England and Germany of anything? No. Neither that illustrious England
nor that august Germany enter into the problem of Waterloo. Thank
Heaven, nations are great, independently of the lugubrious feats of
the sword. Neither England, nor Germany, nor France is contained in
a scabbard. At this epoch when Waterloo is only a clashing of swords,
above Blucher, Germany has Schiller; above Wellington, England has
Byron. A vast dawn of ideas is the peculiarity of our century, and in
that aurora England and Germany have a magnificent radiance. They
are majestic because they think. The elevation of level which they
contribute to civilization is intrinsic with them; it proceeds from
themselves and not from an accident. The aggrandizement which they have
brought to the nineteenth century has not Waterloo as its source. It is
only barbarous peoples who undergo rapid growth after a victory. That is
the temporary vanity of torrents swelled by a storm. Civilized people,
especially in our day, are neither elevated nor abased by the good or
bad fortune of a captain. Their specific gravity in the human species
results from something more than a combat. Their honor, thank God! their
dignity, their intelligence, their genius, are not numbers which those
gamblers, heroes and conquerors, can put in the lottery of battles.
Often a battle is lost and progress is conquered. There is less glory
and more liberty. The drum holds its peace; reason takes the word. It is
a game in which he who loses wins. Let us, therefore, speak of Waterloo
coldly from both sides. Let us render to chance that which is due
to chance, and to God that which is due to God. What is Waterloo? A
victory? No. The winning number in the lottery.

The quine [11] won by Europe, paid by France.

It was not worth while to place a lion there.

Waterloo, moreover, is the strangest encounter in history. Napoleon and
Wellington. They are not enemies; they are opposites. Never did God,
who is fond of antitheses, make a more striking contrast, a more
extraordinary comparison. On one side, precision, foresight, geometry,
prudence, an assured retreat, reserves spared, with an obstinate
coolness, an imperturbable method, strategy, which takes advantage
of the ground, tactics, which preserve the equilibrium of battalions,
carnage, executed according to rule, war regulated, watch in hand,
nothing voluntarily left to chance, the ancient classic courage,
absolute regularity; on the other, intuition, divination, military
oddity, superhuman instinct, a flaming glance, an indescribable
something which gazes like an eagle, and which strikes like the
lightning, a prodigious art in disdainful impetuosity, all the mysteries
of a profound soul, associated with destiny; the stream, the plain, the
forest, the hill, summoned, and in a manner, forced to obey, the despot
going even so far as to tyrannize over the field of battle; faith in
a star mingled with strategic science, elevating but perturbing it.
Wellington was the Bareme of war; Napoleon was its Michael Angelo; and
on this occasion, genius was vanquished by calculation. On both sides
some one was awaited. It was the exact calculator who succeeded.
Napoleon was waiting for Grouchy; he did not come. Wellington expected
Blucher; he came.

Wellington is classic war taking its revenge. Bonaparte, at his dawning,
had encountered him in Italy, and beaten him superbly. The old owl had
fled before the young vulture. The old tactics had been not only struck
as by lightning, but disgraced. Who was that Corsican of six and twenty?
What signified that splendid ignoramus, who, with everything against
him, nothing in his favor, without provisions, without ammunition,
without cannon, without shoes, almost without an army, with a mere
handful of men against masses, hurled himself on Europe combined,
and absurdly won victories in the impossible? Whence had issued that
fulminating convict, who almost without taking breath, and with the same
set of combatants in hand, pulverized, one after the other, the five
armies of the emperor of Germany, upsetting Beaulieu on Alvinzi, Wurmser
on Beaulieu, Melas on Wurmser, Mack on Melas? Who was this novice in
war with the effrontery of a luminary? The academical military school
excommunicated him, and as it lost its footing; hence, the implacable
rancor of the old Caesarism against the new; of the regular sword
against the flaming sword; and of the exchequer against genius. On the
18th of June, 1815, that rancor had the last word. and beneath Lodi,
Montebello, Montenotte, Mantua, Arcola, it wrote: Waterloo. A triumph of
the mediocres which is sweet to the majority. Destiny consented to this
irony. In his decline, Napoleon found Wurmser, the younger, again in
front of him.

In fact, to get Wurmser, it sufficed to blanch the hair of Wellington.

Waterloo is a battle of the first order, won by a captain of the second.

That which must be admired in the battle of Waterloo, is England; the
English firmness, the English resolution, the English blood; the superb
thing about England there, no offence to her, was herself. It was not
her captain; it was her army.

Wellington, oddly ungrateful, declares in a letter to Lord Bathurst,
that his army, the army which fought on the 18th of June, 1815, was a
"detestable army." What does that sombre intermingling of bones buried
beneath the furrows of Waterloo think of that?

England has been too modest in the matter of Wellington. To make
Wellington so great is to belittle England. Wellington is nothing but
a hero like many another. Those Scotch Grays, those Horse Guards, those
regiments of Maitland and of Mitchell, that infantry of Pack and Kempt,
that cavalry of Ponsonby and Somerset, those Highlanders playing the
pibroch under the shower of grape-shot, those battalions of Rylandt,
those utterly raw recruits, who hardly knew how to handle a musket
holding their own against Essling's and Rivoli's old troops,--that is
what was grand. Wellington was tenacious; in that lay his merit, and we
are not seeking to lessen it: but the least of his foot-soldiers and of
his cavalry would have been as solid as he. The iron soldier is worth
as much as the Iron Duke. As for us, all our glorification goes to the
English soldier, to the English army, to the English people. If trophy
there be, it is to England that the trophy is due. The column of
Waterloo would be more just, if, instead of the figure of a man, it bore
on high the statue of a people.

But this great England will be angry at what we are saying here. She
still cherishes, after her own 1688 and our 1789, the feudal illusion.
She believes in heredity and hierarchy. This people, surpassed by none
in power and glory, regards itself as a nation, and not as a people. And
as a people, it willingly subordinates itself and takes a lord for its
head. As a workman, it allows itself to be disdained; as a soldier, it
allows itself to be flogged.

It will be remembered, that at the battle of Inkermann a sergeant who
had, it appears, saved the army, could not be mentioned by Lord Paglan,
as the English military hierarchy does not permit any hero below the
grade of an officer to be mentioned in the reports.

That which we admire above all, in an encounter of the nature of
Waterloo, is the marvellous cleverness of chance. A nocturnal rain, the
wall of Hougomont, the hollow road of Ohain, Grouchy deaf to the cannon,
Napoleon's guide deceiving him, Bulow's guide enlightening him,--the
whole of this cataclysm is wonderfully conducted.

On the whole, let us say it plainly, it was more of a massacre than of a
battle at Waterloo.

Of all pitched battles, Waterloo is the one which has the smallest front
for such a number of combatants. Napoleon three-quarters of a league;
Wellington, half a league; seventy-two thousand combatants on each side.
From this denseness the carnage arose.

The following calculation has been made, and the following proportion
established: Loss of men: at Austerlitz, French, fourteen per cent;
Russians, thirty per cent; Austrians, forty-four per cent. At Wagram,
French, thirteen per cent; Austrians, fourteen. At the Moskowa, French,
thirty-seven per cent; Russians, forty-four. At Bautzen, French,
thirteen per cent; Russians and Prussians, fourteen. At Waterloo,
French, fifty-six per cent; the Allies, thirty-one. Total for Waterloo,
forty-one per cent; one hundred and forty-four thousand combatants;
sixty thousand dead.

To-day the field of Waterloo has the calm which belongs to the earth,
the impassive support of man, and it resembles all plains.

At night, moreover, a sort of visionary mist arises from it; and if a
traveller strolls there, if he listens, if he watches, if he dreams
like Virgil in the fatal plains of Philippi, the hallucination of the
catastrophe takes possession of him. The frightful 18th of June lives
again; the false monumental hillock disappears, the lion vanishes in
air, the battle-field resumes its reality, lines of infantry undulate
over the plain, furious gallops traverse the horizon; the frightened
dreamer beholds the flash of sabres, the gleam of bayonets, the flare of
bombs, the tremendous interchange of thunders; he hears, as it were,
the death rattle in the depths of a tomb, the vague clamor of the battle
phantom; those shadows are grenadiers, those lights are cuirassiers;
that skeleton Napoleon, that other skeleton is Wellington; all this no
longer exists, and yet it clashes together and combats still; and the
ravines are empurpled, and the trees quiver, and there is fury even in
the clouds and in the shadows; all those terrible heights, Hougomont,
Mont-Saint-Jean, Frischemont, Papelotte, Plancenoit, appear confusedly
crowned with whirlwinds of spectres engaged in exterminating each other.




CHAPTER XVII--IS WATERLOO TO BE CONSIDERED GOOD?

There exists a very respectable liberal school which does not hate
Waterloo. We do not belong to it. To us, Waterloo is but the stupefied
date of liberty. That such an eagle should emerge from such an egg is
certainly unexpected.

If one places one's self at the culminating point of view of the
question, Waterloo is intentionally a counter-revolutionary victory. It
is Europe against France; it is Petersburg, Berlin, and Vienna against
Paris; it is the statu quo against the initiative; it is the 14th
of July, 1789, attacked through the 20th of March, 1815; it is the
monarchies clearing the decks in opposition to the indomitable French
rioting. The final extinction of that vast people which had been in
eruption for twenty-six years--such was the dream. The solidarity of the
Brunswicks, the Nassaus, the Romanoffs, the Hohenzollerns, the Hapsburgs
with the Bourbons. Waterloo bears divine right on its crupper. It is
true, that the Empire having been despotic, the kingdom by the natural
reaction of things, was forced to be liberal, and that a constitutional
order was the unwilling result of Waterloo, to the great regret of the
conquerors. It is because revolution cannot be really conquered, and
that being providential and absolutely fatal, it is always cropping
up afresh: before Waterloo, in Bonaparte overthrowing the old thrones;
after Waterloo, in Louis XVIII. granting and conforming to the charter.
Bonaparte places a postilion on the throne of Naples, and a sergeant
on the throne of Sweden, employing inequality to demonstrate equality;
Louis XVIII. at Saint-Ouen countersigns the declaration of the rights
of man. If you wish to gain an idea of what revolution is, call it
Progress; and if you wish to acquire an idea of the nature of progress,
call it To-morrow. To-morrow fulfils its work irresistibly, and it is
already fulfilling it to-day. It always reaches its goal strangely. It
employs Wellington to make of Foy, who was only a soldier, an orator.
Foy falls at Hougomont and rises again in the tribune. Thus does
progress proceed. There is no such thing as a bad tool for that workman.
It does not become disconcerted, but adjusts to its divine work the
man who has bestridden the Alps, and the good old tottering invalid
of Father Elysee. It makes use of the gouty man as well as of the
conqueror; of the conqueror without, of the gouty man within. Waterloo,
by cutting short the demolition of European thrones by the sword, had
no other effect than to cause the revolutionary work to be continued in
another direction. The slashers have finished; it was the turn of the
thinkers. The century that Waterloo was intended to arrest has pursued
its march. That sinister victory was vanquished by liberty.

In short, and incontestably, that which triumphed at Waterloo; that
which smiled in Wellington's rear; that which brought him all the
marshals' staffs of Europe, including, it is said, the staff of a
marshal of France; that which joyously trundled the barrows full of
bones to erect the knoll of the lion; that which triumphantly inscribed
on that pedestal the date "June 18, 1815"; that which encouraged
Blucher, as he put the flying army to the sword; that which, from the
heights of the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean, hovered over France as over
its prey, was the counter-revolution. It was the counter-revolution
which murmured that infamous word "dismemberment." On arriving in Paris,
it beheld the crater close at hand; it felt those ashes which scorched
its feet, and it changed its mind; it returned to the stammer of a
charter.

Let us behold in Waterloo only that which is in Waterloo. Of intentional
liberty there is none. The counter-revolution was involuntarily liberal,
in the same manner as, by a corresponding phenomenon, Napoleon was
involuntarily revolutionary. On the 18th of June, 1815, the mounted
Robespierre was hurled from his saddle.




CHAPTER XVIII--A RECRUDESCENCE OF DIVINE RIGHT

End of the dictatorship. A whole European system crumbled away.

The Empire sank into a gloom which resembled that of the Roman world as
it expired. Again we behold the abyss, as in the days of the barbarians;
only the barbarism of 1815, which must be called by its pet name of the
counter-revolution, was not long breathed, soon fell to panting, and
halted short. The Empire was bewept,--let us acknowledge the fact,--and
bewept by heroic eyes. If glory lies in the sword converted into a
sceptre, the Empire had been glory in person. It had diffused over the
earth all the light which tyranny can give a sombre light. We will say
more; an obscure light. Compared to the true daylight, it is night. This
disappearance of night produces the effect of an eclipse.

Louis XVIII. re-entered Paris. The circling dances of the 8th of July
effaced the enthusiasms of the 20th of March. The Corsican became the
antithesis of the Bearnese. The flag on the dome of the Tuileries was
white. The exile reigned. Hartwell's pine table took its place in front
of the fleur-de-lys-strewn throne of Louis XIV. Bouvines and Fontenoy
were mentioned as though they had taken place on the preceding
day, Austerlitz having become antiquated. The altar and the throne
fraternized majestically. One of the most undisputed forms of the health
of society in the nineteenth century was established over France, and
over the continent. Europe adopted the white cockade. Trestaillon was
celebrated. The device non pluribus impar re-appeared on the stone rays
representing a sun upon the front of the barracks on the Quai d'Orsay.
Where there had been an Imperial Guard, there was now a red house. The
Arc du Carrousel, all laden with badly borne victories, thrown out
of its element among these novelties, a little ashamed, it may be, of
Marengo and Arcola, extricated itself from its predicament with the
statue of the Duc d'Angouleme. The cemetery of the Madeleine, a terrible
pauper's grave in 1793, was covered with jasper and marble, since the
bones of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette lay in that dust.

In the moat of Vincennes a sepulchral shaft sprang from the earth,
recalling the fact that the Duc d'Enghien had perished in the very
month when Napoleon was crowned. Pope Pius VII., who had performed the
coronation very near this death, tranquilly bestowed his blessing on the
fall as he had bestowed it on the elevation. At Schoenbrunn there was
a little shadow, aged four, whom it was seditious to call the King of
Rome. And these things took place, and the kings resumed their thrones,
and the master of Europe was put in a cage, and the old regime became
the new regime, and all the shadows and all the light of the earth
changed place, because, on the afternoon of a certain summer's day, a
shepherd said to a Prussian in the forest, "Go this way, and not that!"

This 1815 was a sort of lugubrious April. Ancient unhealthy and
poisonous realities were covered with new appearances. A lie wedded
1789; the right divine was masked under a charter; fictions became
constitutional; prejudices, superstitions and mental reservations, with
Article 14 in the heart, were varnished over with liberalism. It was the
serpent's change of skin.

Man had been rendered both greater and smaller by Napoleon. Under this
reign of splendid matter, the ideal had received the strange name of
ideology! It is a grave imprudence in a great man to turn the future
into derision. The populace, however, that food for cannon which is so
fond of the cannoneer, sought him with its glance. Where is he? What is
he doing? "Napoleon is dead," said a passer-by to a veteran of Marengo
and Waterloo. "He dead!" cried the soldier; "you don't know him."
Imagination distrusted this man, even when overthrown. The depths of
Europe were full of darkness after Waterloo. Something enormous remained
long empty through Napoleon's disappearance.

The kings placed themselves in this void. Ancient Europe profited by
it to undertake reforms. There was a Holy Alliance; Belle-Alliance,
Beautiful Alliance, the fatal field of Waterloo had said in advance.

In presence and in face of that antique Europe reconstructed, the
features of a new France were sketched out. The future, which the
Emperor had rallied, made its entry. On its brow it bore the star,
Liberty. The glowing eyes of all young generations were turned on it.
Singular fact! people were, at one and the same time, in love with
the future, Liberty, and the past, Napoleon. Defeat had rendered the
vanquished greater. Bonaparte fallen seemed more lofty than Napoleon
erect. Those who had triumphed were alarmed. England had him guarded by
Hudson Lowe, and France had him watched by Montchenu. His folded arms
became a source of uneasiness to thrones. Alexander called him "my
sleeplessness." This terror was the result of the quantity of
revolution which was contained in him. That is what explains and excuses
Bonapartist liberalism. This phantom caused the old world to tremble.
The kings reigned, but ill at their ease, with the rock of Saint Helena
on the horizon.

While Napoleon was passing through the death struggle at Longwood, the
sixty thousand men who had fallen on the field of Waterloo were quietly
rotting, and something of their peace was shed abroad over the world.
The Congress of Vienna made the treaties in 1815, and Europe called this
the Restoration.

This is what Waterloo was.

But what matters it to the Infinite? all that tempest, all that cloud,
that war, then that peace? All that darkness did not trouble for a
moment the light of that immense Eye before which a grub skipping from
one blade of grass to another equals the eagle soaring from belfry to
belfry on the towers of Notre Dame.




CHAPTER XIX--THE BATTLE-FIELD AT NIGHT

Let us return--it is a necessity in this book--to that fatal
battle-field.

On the 18th of June the moon was full. Its light favored Blucher's
ferocious pursuit, betrayed the traces of the fugitives, delivered
up that disastrous mass to the eager Prussian cavalry, and aided the
massacre. Such tragic favors of the night do occur sometimes during
catastrophes.

After the last cannon-shot had been fired, the plain of Mont-Saint-Jean
remained deserted.

The English occupied the encampment of the French; it is the usual sign
of victory to sleep in the bed of the vanquished. They established their
bivouac beyond Rossomme. The Prussians, let loose on the retreating
rout, pushed forward. Wellington went to the village of Waterloo to draw
up his report to Lord Bathurst.

If ever the sic vos non vobis was applicable, it certainly is to that
village of Waterloo. Waterloo took no part, and lay half a league from
the scene of action. Mont-Saint-Jean was cannonaded, Hougomont was
burned, La Haie-Sainte was taken by assault, Papelotte was burned,
Plancenoit was burned, La Belle-Alliance beheld the embrace of the two
conquerors; these names are hardly known, and Waterloo, which worked not
in the battle, bears off all the honor.

We are not of the number of those who flatter war; when the occasion
presents itself, we tell the truth about it. War has frightful beauties
which we have not concealed; it has also, we acknowledge, some hideous
features. One of the most surprising is the prompt stripping of the
bodies of the dead after the victory. The dawn which follows a battle
always rises on naked corpses.

Who does this? Who thus soils the triumph? What hideous, furtive hand is
that which is slipped into the pocket of victory? What pickpockets
are they who ply their trade in the rear of glory? Some
philosophers--Voltaire among the number--affirm that it is precisely
those persons have made the glory. It is the same men, they say; there
is no relief corps; those who are erect pillage those who are prone
on the earth. The hero of the day is the vampire of the night. One has
assuredly the right, after all, to strip a corpse a bit when one is the
author of that corpse. For our own part, we do not think so; it seems
to us impossible that the same hand should pluck laurels and purloin the
shoes from a dead man.

One thing is certain, which is, that generally after conquerors follow
thieves. But let us leave the soldier, especially the contemporary
soldier, out of the question.

Every army has a rear-guard, and it is that which must be blamed.
Bat-like creatures, half brigands and lackeys; all the sorts of
vespertillos that that twilight called war engenders; wearers of
uniforms, who take no part in the fighting; pretended invalids;
formidable limpers; interloping sutlers, trotting along in little carts,
sometimes accompanied by their wives, and stealing things which they
sell again; beggars offering themselves as guides to officers; soldiers'
servants; marauders; armies on the march in days gone by,--we are not
speaking of the present,--dragged all this behind them, so that in the
special language they are called "stragglers." No army, no nation,
was responsible for those beings; they spoke Italian and followed the
Germans, then spoke French and followed the English. It was by one of
these wretches, a Spanish straggler who spoke French, that the Marquis
of Fervacques, deceived by his Picard jargon, and taking him for one
of our own men, was traitorously slain and robbed on the battle-field
itself, in the course of the night which followed the victory of
Cerisoles. The rascal sprang from this marauding. The detestable maxim,
Live on the enemy! produced this leprosy, which a strict discipline
alone could heal. There are reputations which are deceptive; one does
not always know why certain generals, great in other directions, have
been so popular. Turenne was adored by his soldiers because he tolerated
pillage; evil permitted constitutes part of goodness. Turenne was so
good that he allowed the Palatinate to be delivered over to fire and
blood. The marauders in the train of an army were more or less in
number, according as the chief was more or less severe. Hoche and
Marceau had no stragglers; Wellington had few, and we do him the justice
to mention it.

Nevertheless, on the night from the 18th to the 19th of June, the dead
were robbed. Wellington was rigid; he gave orders that any one caught in
the act should be shot; but rapine is tenacious. The marauders stole in
one corner of the battlefield while others were being shot in another.

The moon was sinister over this plain.

Towards midnight, a man was prowling about, or rather, climbing in the
direction of the hollow road of Ohain. To all appearance he was one of
those whom we have just described,--neither English nor French, neither
peasant nor soldier, less a man than a ghoul attracted by the scent
of the dead bodies having theft for his victory, and come to rifle
Waterloo. He was clad in a blouse that was something like a great coat;
he was uneasy and audacious; he walked forwards and gazed behind him.
Who was this man? The night probably knew more of him than the day. He
had no sack, but evidently he had large pockets under his coat. From
time to time he halted, scrutinized the plain around him as though to
see whether he were observed, bent over abruptly, disturbed something
silent and motionless on the ground, then rose and fled. His sliding
motion, his attitudes, his mysterious and rapid gestures, caused him
to resemble those twilight larvae which haunt ruins, and which ancient
Norman legends call the Alleurs.

Certain nocturnal wading birds produce these silhouettes among the
marshes.

A glance capable of piercing all that mist deeply would have perceived
at some distance a sort of little sutler's wagon with a fluted wicker
hood, harnessed to a famished nag which was cropping the grass across
its bit as it halted, hidden, as it were, behind the hovel which adjoins
the highway to Nivelles, at the angle of the road from Mont-Saint-Jean
to Braine l'Alleud; and in the wagon, a sort of woman seated on coffers
and packages. Perhaps there was some connection between that wagon and
that prowler.

The darkness was serene. Not a cloud in the zenith. What matters it if
the earth be red! the moon remains white; these are the indifferences of
the sky. In the fields, branches of trees broken by grape-shot, but not
fallen, upheld by their bark, swayed gently in the breeze of night.
A breath, almost a respiration, moved the shrubbery. Quivers which
resembled the departure of souls ran through the grass.

In the distance the coming and going of patrols and the general rounds
of the English camp were audible.

Hougomont and La Haie-Sainte continued to burn, forming, one in the
west, the other in the east, two great flames which were joined by the
cordon of bivouac fires of the English, like a necklace of rubies
with two carbuncles at the extremities, as they extended in an immense
semicircle over the hills along the horizon.

We have described the catastrophe of the road of Ohain. The heart is
terrified at the thought of what that death must have been to so many
brave men.

If there is anything terrible, if there exists a reality which surpasses
dreams, it is this: to live, to see the sun; to be in full possession
of virile force; to possess health and joy; to laugh valiantly; to rush
towards a glory which one sees dazzling in front of one; to feel in
one's breast lungs which breathe, a heart which beats, a will which
reasons; to speak, think, hope, love; to have a mother, to have a wife,
to have children; to have the light--and all at once, in the space of a
shout, in less than a minute, to sink into an abyss; to fall, to
roll, to crush, to be crushed; to see ears of wheat, flowers, leaves,
branches; not to be able to catch hold of anything; to feel one's sword
useless, men beneath one, horses on top of one; to struggle in vain,
since one's bones have been broken by some kick in the darkness; to feel
a heel which makes one's eyes start from their sockets; to bite horses'
shoes in one's rage; to stifle, to yell, to writhe; to be beneath, and
to say to one's self, "But just a little while ago I was a living man!"

There, where that lamentable disaster had uttered its death-rattle,
all was silence now. The edges of the hollow road were encumbered with
horses and riders, inextricably heaped up. Terrible entanglement! There
was no longer any slope, for the corpses had levelled the road with the
plain, and reached the brim like a well-filled bushel of barley. A
heap of dead bodies in the upper part, a river of blood in the lower
part--such was that road on the evening of the 18th of June, 1815. The
blood ran even to the Nivelles highway, and there overflowed in a large
pool in front of the abatis of trees which barred the way, at a spot
which is still pointed out.

It will be remembered that it was at the opposite point, in the
direction of the Genappe road, that the destruction of the cuirassiers
had taken place. The thickness of the layer of bodies was proportioned
to the depth of the hollow road. Towards the middle, at the point
where it became level, where Delort's division had passed, the layer of
corpses was thinner.

The nocturnal prowler whom we have just shown to the reader was going
in that direction. He was searching that vast tomb. He gazed about. He
passed the dead in some sort of hideous review. He walked with his feet
in the blood.

All at once he paused.

A few paces in front of him, in the hollow road, at the point where
the pile of dead came to an end, an open hand, illumined by the moon,
projected from beneath that heap of men. That hand had on its finger
something sparkling, which was a ring of gold.

The man bent over, remained in a crouching attitude for a moment, and
when he rose there was no longer a ring on the hand.

He did not precisely rise; he remained in a stooping and frightened
attitude, with his back turned to the heap of dead, scanning the horizon
on his knees, with the whole upper portion of his body supported on his
two forefingers, which rested on the earth, and his head peering above
the edge of the hollow road. The jackal's four paws suit some actions.

Then coming to a decision, he rose to his feet.

At that moment, he gave a terrible start. He felt some one clutch him
from behind.

He wheeled round; it was the open hand, which had closed, and had seized
the skirt of his coat.

An honest man would have been terrified; this man burst into a laugh.

"Come," said he, "it's only a dead body. I prefer a spook to a
gendarme."

But the hand weakened and released him. Effort is quickly exhausted in
the grave.

"Well now," said the prowler, "is that dead fellow alive? Let's see."

He bent down again, fumbled among the heap, pushed aside everything that
was in his way, seized the hand, grasped the arm, freed the head, pulled
out the body, and a few moments later he was dragging the lifeless, or
at least the unconscious, man, through the shadows of hollow road. He
was a cuirassier, an officer, and even an officer of considerable rank;
a large gold epaulette peeped from beneath the cuirass; this officer
no longer possessed a helmet. A furious sword-cut had scarred his face,
where nothing was discernible but blood.

However, he did not appear to have any broken limbs, and, by some happy
chance, if that word is permissible here, the dead had been vaulted
above him in such a manner as to preserve him from being crushed. His
eyes were still closed.

On his cuirass he wore the silver cross of the Legion of Honor.

The prowler tore off this cross, which disappeared into one of the gulfs
which he had beneath his great coat.

Then he felt of the officer's fob, discovered a watch there, and took
possession of it. Next he searched his waistcoat, found a purse and
pocketed it.

When he had arrived at this stage of succor which he was administering
to this dying man, the officer opened his eyes.

"Thanks," he said feebly.

The abruptness of the movements of the man who was manipulating him, the
freshness of the night, the air which he could inhale freely, had roused
him from his lethargy.

The prowler made no reply. He raised his head. A sound of footsteps was
audible in the plain; some patrol was probably approaching.

The officer murmured, for the death agony was still in his voice:--

"Who won the battle?"

"The English," answered the prowler.

The officer went on:--

"Look in my pockets; you will find a watch and a purse. Take them."

It was already done.

The prowler executed the required feint, and said:--

"There is nothing there."

"I have been robbed," said the officer; "I am sorry for that. You should
have had them."

The steps of the patrol became more and more distinct.

"Some one is coming," said the prowler, with the movement of a man who
is taking his departure.

The officer raised his arm feebly, and detained him.

"You have saved my life. Who are you?"

The prowler answered rapidly, and in a low voice:--

"Like yourself, I belonged to the French army. I must leave you. If they
were to catch me, they would shoot me. I have saved your life. Now get
out of the scrape yourself."

"What is your rank?"

"Sergeant."

"What is your name?"

"Thenardier."

"I shall not forget that name," said the officer; "and do you remember
mine. My name is Pontmercy."




BOOK SECOND.--THE SHIP ORION




CHAPTER I--NUMBER 24,601 BECOMES NUMBER 9,430

Jean Valjean had been recaptured.

The reader will be grateful to us if we pass rapidly over the sad
details. We will confine ourselves to transcribing two paragraphs
published by the journals of that day, a few months after the surprising
events which had taken place at M. sur M.

These articles are rather summary. It must be remembered, that at that
epoch the Gazette des Tribunaux was not yet in existence.

We borrow the first from the Drapeau Blanc. It bears the date of July
25, 1823.


An arrondissement of the Pas de Calais has just been the theatre of an
event quite out of the ordinary course. A man, who was a stranger in the
Department, and who bore the name of M. Madeleine, had, thanks to the
new methods, resuscitated some years ago an ancient local industry, the
manufacture of jet and of black glass trinkets. He had made his fortune
in the business, and that of the arrondissement as well, we will admit.
He had been appointed mayor, in recognition of his services. The police
discovered that M. Madeleine was no other than an ex-convict who had
broken his ban, condemned in 1796 for theft, and named Jean Valjean.
Jean Valjean has been recommitted to prison. It appears that previous
to his arrest he had succeeded in withdrawing from the hands of M.
Laffitte, a sum of over half a million which he had lodged there, and
which he had, moreover, and by perfectly legitimate means, acquired in
his business. No one has been able to discover where Jean Valjean has
concealed this money since his return to prison at Toulon.


The second article, which enters a little more into detail, is an
extract from the Journal de Paris, of the same date.

A former convict, who had been liberated, named Jean Valjean, has just
appeared before the Court of Assizes of the Var, under circumstances
calculated to attract attention. This wretch had succeeded in escaping
the vigilance of the police, he had changed his name, and had succeeded
in getting himself appointed mayor of one of our small northern towns;
in this town he had established a considerable commerce. He has at last
been unmasked and arrested, thanks to the indefatigable zeal of the
public prosecutor. He had for his concubine a woman of the town, who
died of a shock at the moment of his arrest. This scoundrel, who is
endowed with Herculean strength, found means to escape; but three or
four days after his flight the police laid their hands on him once more,
in Paris itself, at the very moment when he was entering one of those
little vehicles which run between the capital and the village of
Montfermeil (Seine-et-Oise). He is said to have profited by this
interval of three or four days of liberty, to withdraw a considerable
sum deposited by him with one of our leading bankers. This sum has been
estimated at six or seven hundred thousand francs. If the indictment is
to be trusted, he has hidden it in some place known to himself alone,
and it has not been possible to lay hands on it. However that may be,
the said Jean Valjean has just been brought before the Assizes of the
Department of the Var as accused of highway robbery accompanied with
violence, about eight years ago, on the person of one of those honest
children who, as the patriarch of Ferney has said, in immortal verse,


          ". . . Arrive from Savoy every year,
           And who, with gentle hands, do clear
           Those long canals choked up with soot."


This bandit refused to defend himself. It was proved by the skilful and
eloquent representative of the public prosecutor, that the theft was
committed in complicity with others, and that Jean Valjean was a member
of a band of robbers in the south. Jean Valjean was pronounced guilty
and was condemned to the death penalty in consequence. This criminal
refused to lodge an appeal. The king, in his inexhaustible clemency, has
deigned to commute his penalty to that of penal servitude for life. Jean
Valjean was immediately taken to the prison at Toulon.


The reader has not forgotten that Jean Valjean had religious habits at
M. sur M. Some papers, among others the Constitutional, presented this
commutation as a triumph of the priestly party.

Jean Valjean changed his number in the galleys. He was called 9,430.

However, and we will mention it at once in order that we may not be
obliged to recur to the subject, the prosperity of M. sur M. vanished
with M. Madeleine; all that he had foreseen during his night of fever
and hesitation was realized; lacking him, there actually was a soul
lacking. After this fall, there took place at M. sur M. that egotistical
division of great existences which have fallen, that fatal dismemberment
of flourishing things which is accomplished every day, obscurely, in
the human community, and which history has noted only once, because it
occurred after the death of Alexander. Lieutenants are crowned kings;
superintendents improvise manufacturers out of themselves. Envious
rivalries arose. M. Madeleine's vast workshops were shut; his buildings
fell to ruin, his workmen were scattered. Some of them quitted the
country, others abandoned the trade. Thenceforth, everything was done
on a small scale, instead of on a grand scale; for lucre instead of
the general good. There was no longer a centre; everywhere there
was competition and animosity. M. Madeleine had reigned over all and
directed all. No sooner had he fallen, than each pulled things to
himself; the spirit of combat succeeded to the spirit of organization,
bitterness to cordiality, hatred of one another to the benevolence of
the founder towards all; the threads which M. Madeleine had set were
tangled and broken, the methods were adulterated, the products were
debased, confidence was killed; the market diminished, for lack of
orders; salaries were reduced, the workshops stood still, bankruptcy
arrived. And then there was nothing more for the poor. All had vanished.

The state itself perceived that some one had been crushed somewhere.
Less than four years after the judgment of the Court of Assizes
establishing the identity of Jean Valjean and M. Madeleine, for the
benefit of the galleys, the cost of collecting taxes had doubled in the
arrondissement of M. sur M.; and M. de Villele called attention to the
fact in the rostrum, in the month of February, 1827.




CHAPTER II--IN WHICH THE READER WILL PERUSE TWO VERSES, WHICH ARE OF THE
DEVIL'S COMPOSITION, POSSIBLY

Before proceeding further, it will be to the purpose to narrate in some
detail, a singular occurrence which took place at about the same epoch,
in Montfermeil, and which is not lacking in coincidence with certain
conjectures of the indictment.

There exists in the region of Montfermeil a very ancient superstition,
which is all the more curious and all the more precious, because
a popular superstition in the vicinity of Paris is like an aloe in
Siberia. We are among those who respect everything which is in the
nature of a rare plant. Here, then, is the superstition of Montfermeil:
it is thought that the devil, from time immemorial, has selected the
forest as a hiding-place for his treasures. Goodwives affirm that it is
no rarity to encounter at nightfall, in secluded nooks of the forest,
a black man with the air of a carter or a wood-chopper, wearing wooden
shoes, clad in trousers and a blouse of linen, and recognizable by the
fact, that, instead of a cap or hat, he has two immense horns on his
head. This ought, in fact, to render him recognizable. This man is
habitually engaged in digging a hole. There are three ways of profiting
by such an encounter. The first is to approach the man and speak to him.
Then it is seen that the man is simply a peasant, that he appears black
because it is nightfall; that he is not digging any hole whatever, but
is cutting grass for his cows, and that what had been taken for horns
is nothing but a dung-fork which he is carrying on his back, and whose
teeth, thanks to the perspective of evening, seemed to spring from his
head. The man returns home and dies within the week. The second way is
to watch him, to wait until he has dug his hole, until he has filled it
and has gone away; then to run with great speed to the trench, to
open it once more and to seize the "treasure" which the black man
has necessarily placed there. In this case one dies within the month.
Finally, the last method is not to speak to the black man, not to look
at him, and to flee at the best speed of one's legs. One then dies
within the year.

As all three methods are attended with their special inconveniences, the
second, which at all events, presents some advantages, among others that
of possessing a treasure, if only for a month, is the one most generally
adopted. So bold men, who are tempted by every chance, have quite
frequently, as we are assured, opened the holes excavated by the black
man, and tried to rob the devil. The success of the operation appears
to be but moderate. At least, if the tradition is to be believed, and in
particular the two enigmatical lines in barbarous Latin, which an
evil Norman monk, a bit of a sorcerer, named Tryphon has left on
this subject. This Tryphon is buried at the Abbey of Saint-Georges de
Bocherville, near Rouen, and toads spawn on his grave.

Accordingly, enormous efforts are made. Such trenches are ordinarily
extremely deep; a man sweats, digs, toils all night--for it must be done
at night; he wets his shirt, burns out his candle, breaks his mattock,
and when he arrives at the bottom of the hole, when he lays his hand on
the "treasure," what does he find? What is the devil's treasure? A sou,
sometimes a crown-piece, a stone, a skeleton, a bleeding body, sometimes
a spectre folded in four like a sheet of paper in a portfolio,
sometimes nothing. This is what Tryphon's verses seem to announce to the
indiscreet and curious:--

          "Fodit, et in fossa thesauros condit opaca,
           As, nummas, lapides, cadaver, simulacra, nihilque."


It seems that in our day there is sometimes found a powder-horn with
bullets, sometimes an old pack of cards greasy and worn, which has
evidently served the devil. Tryphon does not record these two finds,
since Tryphon lived in the twelfth century, and since the devil does not
appear to have had the wit to invent powder before Roger Bacon's time,
and cards before the time of Charles VI.

Moreover, if one plays at cards, one is sure to lose all that one
possesses! and as for the powder in the horn, it possesses the property
of making your gun burst in your face.

Now, a very short time after the epoch when it seemed to the prosecuting
attorney that the liberated convict Jean Valjean during his flight of
several days had been prowling around Montfermeil, it was remarked in
that village that a certain old road-laborer, named Boulatruelle, had
"peculiar ways" in the forest. People thereabouts thought they knew that
this Boulatruelle had been in the galleys. He was subjected to
certain police supervision, and, as he could find work nowhere, the
administration employed him at reduced rates as a road-mender on the
cross-road from Gagny to Lagny.

This Boulatruelle was a man who was viewed with disfavor by the
inhabitants of the district as too respectful, too humble, too prompt in
removing his cap to every one, and trembling and smiling in the presence
of the gendarmes,--probably affiliated to robber bands, they said;
suspected of lying in ambush at verge of copses at nightfall. The only
thing in his favor was that he was a drunkard.

This is what people thought they had noticed:--

Of late, Boulatruelle had taken to quitting his task of stone-breaking
and care of the road at a very early hour, and to betaking himself to
the forest with his pickaxe. He was encountered towards evening in
the most deserted clearings, in the wildest thickets; and he had the
appearance of being in search of something, and sometimes he was digging
holes. The goodwives who passed took him at first for Beelzebub; then
they recognized Boulatruelle, and were not in the least reassured
thereby. These encounters seemed to cause Boulatruelle a lively
displeasure. It was evident that he sought to hide, and that there was
some mystery in what he was doing.

It was said in the village: "It is clear that the devil has appeared.
Boulatruelle has seen him, and is on the search. In sooth, he is cunning
enough to pocket Lucifer's hoard."

The Voltairians added, "Will Boulatruelle catch the devil, or will the
devil catch Boulatruelle?" The old women made a great many signs of the
cross.

In the meantime, Boulatruelle's manoeuvres in the forest ceased; and he
resumed his regular occupation of roadmending; and people gossiped of
something else.

Some persons, however, were still curious, surmising that in all this
there was probably no fabulous treasure of the legends, but some
fine windfall of a more serious and palpable sort than the devil's
bank-bills, and that the road-mender had half discovered the secret. The
most "puzzled" were the school-master and Thenardier, the proprietor of
the tavern, who was everybody's friend, and had not disdained to ally
himself with Boulatruelle.

"He has been in the galleys," said Thenardier. "Eh! Good God! no one
knows who has been there or will be there."

One evening the schoolmaster affirmed that in former times the law would
have instituted an inquiry as to what Boulatruelle did in the forest,
and that the latter would have been forced to speak, and that he would
have been put to the torture in case of need, and that Boulatruelle
would not have resisted the water test, for example. "Let us put him to
the wine test," said Thenardier.

They made an effort, and got the old road-mender to drinking.
Boulatruelle drank an enormous amount, but said very little. He combined
with admirable art, and in masterly proportions, the thirst of a
gormandizer with the discretion of a judge. Nevertheless, by dint of
returning to the charge and of comparing and putting together the few
obscure words which he did allow to escape him, this is what Thenardier
and the schoolmaster imagined that they had made out:--

One morning, when Boulatruelle was on his way to his work, at daybreak,
he had been surprised to see, at a nook of the forest in the underbrush,
a shovel and a pickaxe, concealed, as one might say.

However, he might have supposed that they were probably the shovel and
pick of Father Six-Fours, the water-carrier, and would have thought no
more about it. But, on the evening of that day, he saw, without being
seen himself, as he was hidden by a large tree, "a person who did not
belong in those parts, and whom he, Boulatruelle, knew well," directing
his steps towards the densest part of the wood. Translation by
Thenardier: A comrade of the galleys. Boulatruelle obstinately refused
to reveal his name. This person carried a package--something square,
like a large box or a small trunk. Surprise on the part of Boulatruelle.
However, it was only after the expiration of seven or eight minutes that
the idea of following that "person" had occurred to him. But it was too
late; the person was already in the thicket, night had descended, and
Boulatruelle had not been able to catch up with him. Then he had
adopted the course of watching for him at the edge of the woods. "It was
moonlight." Two or three hours later, Boulatruelle had seen this person
emerge from the brushwood, carrying no longer the coffer, but a shovel
and pick. Boulatruelle had allowed the person to pass, and had not
dreamed of accosting him, because he said to himself that the other man
was three times as strong as he was, and armed with a pickaxe, and that
he would probably knock him over the head on recognizing him, and on
perceiving that he was recognized. Touching effusion of two old comrades
on meeting again. But the shovel and pick had served as a ray of light
to Boulatruelle; he had hastened to the thicket in the morning, and had
found neither shovel nor pick. From this he had drawn the inference that
this person, once in the forest, had dug a hole with his pick, buried
the coffer, and reclosed the hole with his shovel. Now, the coffer was
too small to contain a body; therefore it contained money. Hence his
researches. Boulatruelle had explored, sounded, searched the entire
forest and the thicket, and had dug wherever the earth appeared to him
to have been recently turned up. In vain.

He had "ferreted out" nothing. No one in Montfermeil thought any more
about it. There were only a few brave gossips, who said, "You may be
certain that the mender on the Gagny road did not take all that trouble
for nothing; he was sure that the devil had come."




CHAPTER III--THE ANKLE-CHAIN MUST HAVE UNDERGONE A CERTAIN PREPARATORY
MANIPULATION TO BE THUS BROKEN WITH A BLOW FROM A HAMMER

Towards the end of October, in that same year, 1823, the inhabitants of
Toulon beheld the entry into their port, after heavy weather, and for
the purpose of repairing some damages, of the ship Orion, which was
employed later at Brest as a school-ship, and which then formed a part
of the Mediterranean squadron.

This vessel, battered as it was,--for the sea had handled it
roughly,--produced a fine effect as it entered the roads. It flew some
colors which procured for it the regulation salute of eleven guns, which
it returned, shot for shot; total, twenty-two. It has been calculated
that what with salvos, royal and military politenesses, courteous
exchanges of uproar, signals of etiquette, formalities of roadsteads and
citadels, sunrises and sunsets, saluted every day by all fortresses and
all ships of war, openings and closings of ports, etc., the civilized
world, discharged all over the earth, in the course of four and twenty
hours, one hundred and fifty thousand useless shots. At six francs the
shot, that comes to nine hundred thousand francs a day, three hundred
millions a year, which vanish in smoke. This is a mere detail. All this
time the poor were dying of hunger.

The year 1823 was what the Restoration called "the epoch of the Spanish
war."

This war contained many events in one, and a quantity of peculiarities.
A grand family affair for the house of Bourbon; the branch of France
succoring and protecting the branch of Madrid, that is to say,
performing an act devolving on the elder; an apparent return to our
national traditions, complicated by servitude and by subjection to the
cabinets of the North; M. le Duc d'Angouleme, surnamed by the liberal
sheets the hero of Andujar, compressing in a triumphal attitude that
was somewhat contradicted by his peaceable air, the ancient and very
powerful terrorism of the Holy Office at variance with the chimerical
terrorism of the liberals; the sansculottes resuscitated, to the great
terror of dowagers, under the name of descamisados; monarchy opposing an
obstacle to progress described as anarchy; the theories of '89 roughly
interrupted in the sap; a European halt, called to the French idea,
which was making the tour of the world; beside the son of France as
generalissimo, the Prince de Carignan, afterwards Charles Albert,
enrolling himself in that crusade of kings against people as a
volunteer, with grenadier epaulets of red worsted; the soldiers of the
Empire setting out on a fresh campaign, but aged, saddened, after eight
years of repose, and under the white cockade; the tricolored standard
waved abroad by a heroic handful of Frenchmen, as the white standard had
been thirty years earlier at Coblentz; monks mingled with our troops;
the spirit of liberty and of novelty brought to its senses by bayonets;
principles slaughtered by cannonades; France undoing by her arms that
which she had done by her mind; in addition to this, hostile leaders
sold, soldiers hesitating, cities besieged by millions; no military
perils, and yet possible explosions, as in every mine which is surprised
and invaded; but little bloodshed, little honor won, shame for some,
glory for no one. Such was this war, made by the princes descended from
Louis XIV., and conducted by generals who had been under Napoleon. Its
sad fate was to recall neither the grand war nor grand politics.

Some feats of arms were serious; the taking of the Trocadero, among
others, was a fine military action; but after all, we repeat, the
trumpets of this war give back a cracked sound, the whole effect was
suspicious; history approves of France for making a difficulty about
accepting this false triumph. It seemed evident that certain Spanish
officers charged with resistance yielded too easily; the idea of
corruption was connected with the victory; it appears as though generals
and not battles had been won, and the conquering soldier returned
humiliated. A debasing war, in short, in which the Bank of France could
be read in the folds of the flag.

Soldiers of the war of 1808, on whom Saragossa had fallen in formidable
ruin, frowned in 1823 at the easy surrender of citadels, and began to
regret Palafox. It is the nature of France to prefer to have Rostopchine
rather than Ballesteros in front of her.

From a still more serious point of view, and one which it is also proper
to insist upon here, this war, which wounded the military spirit
of France, enraged the democratic spirit. It was an enterprise of
inthralment. In that campaign, the object of the French soldier, the
son of democracy, was the conquest of a yoke for others. A hideous
contradiction. France is made to arouse the soul of nations, not to
stifle it. All the revolutions of Europe since 1792 are the French
Revolution: liberty darts rays from France. That is a solar fact. Blind
is he who will not see! It was Bonaparte who said it.

The war of 1823, an outrage on the generous Spanish nation, was then,
at the same time, an outrage on the French Revolution. It was France
who committed this monstrous violence; by foul means, for, with the
exception of wars of liberation, everything that armies do is by foul
means. The words passive obedience indicate this. An army is a strange
masterpiece of combination where force results from an enormous sum
of impotence. Thus is war, made by humanity against humanity, despite
humanity, explained.

As for the Bourbons, the war of 1823 was fatal to them. They took it for
a success. They did not perceive the danger that lies in having an idea
slain to order. They went astray, in their innocence, to such a degree
that they introduced the immense enfeeblement of a crime into their
establishment as an element of strength. The spirit of the ambush
entered into their politics. 1830 had its germ in 1823. The Spanish
campaign became in their counsels an argument for force and for
adventures by right Divine. France, having re-established elrey netto
in Spain, might well have re-established the absolute king at home. They
fell into the alarming error of taking the obedience of the soldier for
the consent of the nation. Such confidence is the ruin of thrones. It is
not permitted to fall asleep, either in the shadow of a machineel tree,
nor in the shadow of an army.

Let us return to the ship Orion.

During the operations of the army commanded by the prince generalissimo,
a squadron had been cruising in the Mediterranean. We have just stated
that the Orion belonged to this fleet, and that accidents of the sea had
brought it into port at Toulon.

The presence of a vessel of war in a port has something about it which
attracts and engages a crowd. It is because it is great, and the crowd
loves what is great.

A ship of the line is one of the most magnificent combinations of the
genius of man with the powers of nature.

A ship of the line is composed, at the same time, of the heaviest and
the lightest of possible matter, for it deals at one and the same time
with three forms of substance,--solid, liquid, and fluid,--and it must
do battle with all three. It has eleven claws of iron with which to
seize the granite on the bottom of the sea, and more wings and more
antennae than winged insects, to catch the wind in the clouds. Its
breath pours out through its hundred and twenty cannons as through
enormous trumpets, and replies proudly to the thunder. The ocean seeks
to lead it astray in the alarming sameness of its billows, but the
vessel has its soul, its compass, which counsels it and always shows it
the north. In the blackest nights, its lanterns supply the place of
the stars. Thus, against the wind, it has its cordage and its canvas;
against the water, wood; against the rocks, its iron, brass, and lead;
against the shadows, its light; against immensity, a needle.

If one wishes to form an idea of all those gigantic proportions which,
taken as a whole, constitute the ship of the line, one has only to enter
one of the six-story covered construction stocks, in the ports of Brest
or Toulon. The vessels in process of construction are under a bell-glass
there, as it were. This colossal beam is a yard; that great column of
wood which stretches out on the earth as far as the eye can reach is
the main-mast. Taking it from its root in the stocks to its tip in the
clouds, it is sixty fathoms long, and its diameter at its base is
three feet. The English main-mast rises to a height of two hundred and
seventeen feet above the water-line. The navy of our fathers employed
cables, ours employs chains. The simple pile of chains on a ship of a
hundred guns is four feet high, twenty feet in breadth, and eight
feet in depth. And how much wood is required to make this ship? Three
thousand cubic metres. It is a floating forest.

And moreover, let this be borne in mind, it is only a question here of
the military vessel of forty years ago, of the simple sailing-vessel;
steam, then in its infancy, has since added new miracles to that prodigy
which is called a war vessel. At the present time, for example, the
mixed vessel with a screw is a surprising machine, propelled by three
thousand square metres of canvas and by an engine of two thousand five
hundred horse-power.

Not to mention these new marvels, the ancient vessel of Christopher
Columbus and of De Ruyter is one of the masterpieces of man. It is as
inexhaustible in force as is the Infinite in gales; it stores up
the wind in its sails, it is precise in the immense vagueness of the
billows, it floats, and it reigns.

There comes an hour, nevertheless, when the gale breaks that sixty-foot
yard like a straw, when the wind bends that mast four hundred feet tall,
when that anchor, which weighs tens of thousands, is twisted in the jaws
of the waves like a fisherman's hook in the jaws of a pike, when those
monstrous cannons utter plaintive and futile roars, which the hurricane
bears forth into the void and into night, when all that power and all
that majesty are engulfed in a power and majesty which are superior.

Every time that immense force is displayed to culminate in an immense
feebleness it affords men food for thought, Hence in the ports curious
people abound around these marvellous machines of war and of navigation,
without being able to explain perfectly to themselves why. Every day,
accordingly, from morning until night, the quays, sluices, and the
jetties of the port of Toulon were covered with a multitude of idlers
and loungers, as they say in Paris, whose business consisted in staring
at the Orion.

The Orion was a ship that had been ailing for a long time; in the course
of its previous cruises thick layers of barnacles had collected on its
keel to such a degree as to deprive it of half its speed; it had gone
into the dry dock the year before this, in order to have the barnacles
scraped off, then it had put to sea again; but this cleaning had
affected the bolts of the keel: in the neighborhood of the Balearic
Isles the sides had been strained and had opened; and, as the plating
in those days was not of sheet iron, the vessel had sprung a leak.
A violent equinoctial gale had come up, which had first staved in
a grating and a porthole on the larboard side, and damaged the
foretop-gallant-shrouds; in consequence of these injuries, the Orion had
run back to Toulon.

It anchored near the Arsenal; it was fully equipped, and repairs were
begun. The hull had received no damage on the starboard, but some of the
planks had been unnailed here and there, according to custom, to permit
of air entering the hold.

One morning the crowd which was gazing at it witnessed an accident.

[Illustration: The Ship Orion, An Accident 2b2-1-the-ship-orion]

The crew was busy bending the sails; the topman, who had to take the
upper corner of the main-top-sail on the starboard, lost his balance;
he was seen to waver; the multitude thronging the Arsenal quay uttered a
cry; the man's head overbalanced his body; the man fell around the yard,
with his hands outstretched towards the abyss; on his way he seized the
footrope, first with one hand, then with the other, and remained hanging
from it: the sea lay below him at a dizzy depth; the shock of his fall
had imparted to the foot-rope a violent swinging motion; the man swayed
back and forth at the end of that rope, like a stone in a sling.

It was incurring a frightful risk to go to his assistance; not one
of the sailors, all fishermen of the coast, recently levied for the
service, dared to attempt it. In the meantime, the unfortunate topman
was losing his strength; his anguish could not be discerned on his face,
but his exhaustion was visible in every limb; his arms were contracted
in horrible twitchings; every effort which he made to re-ascend served
but to augment the oscillations of the foot-rope; he did not shout, for
fear of exhausting his strength. All were awaiting the minute when he
should release his hold on the rope, and, from instant to instant, heads
were turned aside that his fall might not be seen. There are moments
when a bit of rope, a pole, the branch of a tree, is life itself, and
it is a terrible thing to see a living being detach himself from it and
fall like a ripe fruit.

All at once a man was seen climbing into the rigging with the agility
of a tiger-cat; this man was dressed in red; he was a convict; he wore a
green cap; he was a life convict. On arriving on a level with the top, a
gust of wind carried away his cap, and allowed a perfectly white head to
be seen: he was not a young man.

A convict employed on board with a detachment from the galleys had, in
fact, at the very first instant, hastened to the officer of the watch,
and, in the midst of the consternation and the hesitation of the crew,
while all the sailors were trembling and drawing back, he had asked
the officer's permission to risk his life to save the topman; at an
affirmative sign from the officer he had broken the chain riveted to his
ankle with one blow of a hammer, then he had caught up a rope, and had
dashed into the rigging: no one noticed, at the instant, with what ease
that chain had been broken; it was only later on that the incident was
recalled.

In a twinkling he was on the yard; he paused for a few seconds and
appeared to be measuring it with his eye; these seconds, during which
the breeze swayed the topman at the extremity of a thread, seemed
centuries to those who were looking on. At last, the convict raised his
eyes to heaven and advanced a step: the crowd drew a long breath. He was
seen to run out along the yard: on arriving at the point, he fastened
the rope which he had brought to it, and allowed the other end to hang
down, then he began to descend the rope, hand over hand, and then,--and
the anguish was indescribable,--instead of one man suspended over the
gulf, there were two.

One would have said it was a spider coming to seize a fly, only here the
spider brought life, not death. Ten thousand glances were fastened on
this group; not a cry, not a word; the same tremor contracted every
brow; all mouths held their breath as though they feared to add the
slightest puff to the wind which was swaying the two unfortunate men.

In the meantime, the convict had succeeded in lowering himself to a
position near the sailor. It was high time; one minute more, and the
exhausted and despairing man would have allowed himself to fall into
the abyss. The convict had moored him securely with the cord to which
he clung with one hand, while he was working with the other. At last, he
was seen to climb back on the yard, and to drag the sailor up after him;
he held him there a moment to allow him to recover his strength, then he
grasped him in his arms and carried him, walking on the yard himself to
the cap, and from there to the main-top, where he left him in the hands
of his comrades.

At that moment the crowd broke into applause: old convict-sergeants
among them wept, and women embraced each other on the quay, and all
voices were heard to cry with a sort of tender rage, "Pardon for that
man!"

He, in the meantime, had immediately begun to make his descent to rejoin
his detachment. In order to reach them the more speedily, he dropped
into the rigging, and ran along one of the lower yards; all eyes were
following him. At a certain moment fear assailed them; whether it was
that he was fatigued, or that his head turned, they thought they saw him
hesitate and stagger. All at once the crowd uttered a loud shout: the
convict had fallen into the sea.

The fall was perilous. The frigate Algesiras was anchored alongside the
Orion, and the poor convict had fallen between the two vessels: it was
to be feared that he would slip under one or the other of them. Four men
flung themselves hastily into a boat; the crowd cheered them on;
anxiety again took possession of all souls; the man had not risen to
the surface; he had disappeared in the sea without leaving a ripple, as
though he had fallen into a cask of oil: they sounded, they dived. In
vain. The search was continued until the evening: they did not even find
the body.

On the following day the Toulon newspaper printed these lines:--

"Nov. 17, 1823. Yesterday, a convict belonging to the detachment on
board of the Orion, on his return from rendering assistance to a sailor,
fell into the sea and was drowned. The body has not yet been found; it
is supposed that it is entangled among the piles of the Arsenal point:
this man was committed under the number 9,430, and his name was Jean
Valjean."





BOOK THIRD.--ACCOMPLISHMENT OF THE PROMISE MADE TO THE DEAD WOMAN




CHAPTER I--THE WATER QUESTION AT MONTFERMEIL

Montfermeil is situated between Livry and Chelles, on the southern edge
of that lofty table-land which separates the Ourcq from the Marne. At
the present day it is a tolerably large town, ornamented all the year
through with plaster villas, and on Sundays with beaming bourgeois. In
1823 there were at Montfermeil neither so many white houses nor so
many well-satisfied citizens: it was only a village in the forest. Some
pleasure-houses of the last century were to be met with there, to be
sure, which were recognizable by their grand air, their balconies in
twisted iron, and their long windows, whose tiny panes cast all sorts
of varying shades of green on the white of the closed shutters; but
Montfermeil was none the less a village. Retired cloth-merchants and
rusticating attorneys had not discovered it as yet; it was a peaceful
and charming place, which was not on the road to anywhere: there people
lived, and cheaply, that peasant rustic life which is so bounteous and
so easy; only, water was rare there, on account of the elevation of the
plateau.

It was necessary to fetch it from a considerable distance; the end of
the village towards Gagny drew its water from the magnificent ponds
which exist in the woods there. The other end, which surrounds the
church and which lies in the direction of Chelles, found drinking-water
only at a little spring half-way down the slope, near the road to
Chelles, about a quarter of an hour from Montfermeil.

Thus each household found it hard work to keep supplied with water. The
large houses, the aristocracy, of which the Thenardier tavern formed a
part, paid half a farthing a bucketful to a man who made a business of
it, and who earned about eight sous a day in his enterprise of supplying
Montfermeil with water; but this good man only worked until seven
o'clock in the evening in summer, and five in winter; and night once
come and the shutters on the ground floor once closed, he who had no
water to drink went to fetch it for himself or did without it.

This constituted the terror of the poor creature whom the reader has
probably not forgotten,--little Cosette. It will be remembered that
Cosette was useful to the Thenardiers in two ways: they made the mother
pay them, and they made the child serve them. So when the mother ceased
to pay altogether, the reason for which we have read in preceding
chapters, the Thenardiers kept Cosette. She took the place of a servant
in their house. In this capacity she it was who ran to fetch water when
it was required. So the child, who was greatly terrified at the idea of
going to the spring at night, took great care that water should never be
lacking in the house.

Christmas of the year 1823 was particularly brilliant at Montfermeil.
The beginning of the winter had been mild; there had been neither snow
nor frost up to that time. Some mountebanks from Paris had obtained
permission of the mayor to erect their booths in the principal street of
the village, and a band of itinerant merchants, under protection of the
same tolerance, had constructed their stalls on the Church Square,
and even extended them into Boulanger Alley, where, as the reader will
perhaps remember, the Thenardiers' hostelry was situated. These people
filled the inns and drinking-shops, and communicated to that tranquil
little district a noisy and joyous life. In order to play the part of
a faithful historian, we ought even to add that, among the curiosities
displayed in the square, there was a menagerie, in which frightful
clowns, clad in rags and coming no one knew whence, exhibited to
the peasants of Montfermeil in 1823 one of those horrible Brazilian
vultures, such as our Royal Museum did not possess until 1845, and which
have a tricolored cockade for an eye. I believe that naturalists call
this bird Caracara Polyborus; it belongs to the order of the Apicides,
and to the family of the vultures. Some good old Bonapartist soldiers,
who had retired to the village, went to see this creature with great
devotion. The mountebanks gave out that the tricolored cockade was a
unique phenomenon made by God expressly for their menagerie.

On Christmas eve itself, a number of men, carters, and peddlers, were
seated at table, drinking and smoking around four or five candles in
the public room of Thenardier's hostelry. This room resembled all
drinking-shop rooms,--tables, pewter jugs, bottles, drinkers, smokers;
but little light and a great deal of noise. The date of the year 1823
was indicated, nevertheless, by two objects which were then fashionable
in the bourgeois class: to wit, a kaleidoscope and a lamp of ribbed tin.
The female Thenardier was attending to the supper, which was roasting in
front of a clear fire; her husband was drinking with his customers and
talking politics.

Besides political conversations which had for their principal subjects
the Spanish war and M. le Duc d'Angouleme, strictly local parentheses,
like the following, were audible amid the uproar:--

"About Nanterre and Suresnes the vines have flourished greatly. When
ten pieces were reckoned on there have been twelve. They have yielded a
great deal of juice under the press." "But the grapes cannot be ripe?"
"In those parts the grapes should not be ripe; the wine turns oily as
soon as spring comes." "Then it is very thin wine?" "There are wines
poorer even than these. The grapes must be gathered while green." Etc.

Or a miller would call out:--

"Are we responsible for what is in the sacks? We find in them a quantity
of small seed which we cannot sift out, and which we are obliged to send
through the mill-stones; there are tares, fennel, vetches, hempseed,
fox-tail, and a host of other weeds, not to mention pebbles, which
abound in certain wheat, especially in Breton wheat. I am not fond of
grinding Breton wheat, any more than long-sawyers like to saw beams with
nails in them. You can judge of the bad dust that makes in grinding. And
then people complain of the flour. They are in the wrong. The flour is
no fault of ours."

In a space between two windows a mower, who was seated at table with a
landed proprietor who was fixing on a price for some meadow work to be
performed in the spring, was saying:--

"It does no harm to have the grass wet. It cuts better. Dew is a good
thing, sir. It makes no difference with that grass. Your grass is young
and very hard to cut still. It's terribly tender. It yields before the
iron." Etc.

Cosette was in her usual place, seated on the cross-bar of the kitchen
table near the chimney. She was in rags; her bare feet were thrust into
wooden shoes, and by the firelight she was engaged in knitting woollen
stockings destined for the young Thenardiers. A very young kitten was
playing about among the chairs. Laughter and chatter were audible in
the adjoining room, from two fresh children's voices: it was Eponine and
Azelma.

In the chimney-corner a cat-o'-nine-tails was hanging on a nail.

At intervals the cry of a very young child, which was somewhere in the
house, rang through the noise of the dram-shop. It was a little boy
who had been born to the Thenardiers during one of the preceding
winters,--"she did not know why," she said, "the result of the
cold,"--and who was a little more than three years old. The mother had
nursed him, but she did not love him. When the persistent clamor of the
brat became too annoying, "Your son is squalling," Thenardier would
say; "do go and see what he wants." "Bah!" the mother would reply, "he
bothers me." And the neglected child continued to shriek in the dark.




CHAPTER II--TWO COMPLETE PORTRAITS

So far in this book the Thenardiers have been viewed only in profile;
the moment has arrived for making the circuit of this couple, and
considering it under all its aspects.

Thenardier had just passed his fiftieth birthday; Madame Thenardier was
approaching her forties, which is equivalent to fifty in a woman; so
that there existed a balance of age between husband and wife.

Our readers have possibly preserved some recollection of this Thenardier
woman, ever since her first appearance,--tall, blond, red, fat, angular,
square, enormous, and agile; she belonged, as we have said, to the
race of those colossal wild women, who contort themselves at fairs with
paving-stones hanging from their hair. She did everything about the
house,--made the beds, did the washing, the cooking, and everything
else. Cosette was her only servant; a mouse in the service of an
elephant. Everything trembled at the sound of her voice,--window panes,
furniture, and people. Her big face, dotted with red blotches,
presented the appearance of a skimmer. She had a beard. She was an ideal
market-porter dressed in woman's clothes. She swore splendidly; she
boasted of being able to crack a nut with one blow of her fist. Except
for the romances which she had read, and which made the affected lady
peep through the ogress at times, in a very queer way, the idea would
never have occurred to any one to say of her, "That is a woman."
This Thenardier female was like the product of a wench engrafted on a
fishwife. When one heard her speak, one said, "That is a gendarme"; when
one saw her drink, one said, "That is a carter"; when one saw her handle
Cosette, one said, "That is the hangman." One of her teeth projected
when her face was in repose.

Thenardier was a small, thin, pale, angular, bony, feeble man, who had
a sickly air and who was wonderfully healthy. His cunning began here;
he smiled habitually, by way of precaution, and was almost polite to
everybody, even to the beggar to whom he refused half a farthing. He had
the glance of a pole-cat and the bearing of a man of letters. He greatly
resembled the portraits of the Abbe Delille. His coquetry consisted in
drinking with the carters. No one had ever succeeded in rendering him
drunk. He smoked a big pipe. He wore a blouse, and under his blouse an
old black coat. He made pretensions to literature and to materialism.
There were certain names which he often pronounced to support whatever
things he might be saying,--Voltaire, Raynal, Parny, and, singularly
enough, Saint Augustine. He declared that he had "a system." In
addition, he was a great swindler. A filousophe [philosophe], a
scientific thief. The species does exist. It will be remembered that he
pretended to have served in the army; he was in the habit of relating
with exuberance, how, being a sergeant in the 6th or the 9th light
something or other, at Waterloo, he had alone, and in the presence of a
squadron of death-dealing hussars, covered with his body and saved
from death, in the midst of the grape-shot, "a general, who had been
dangerously wounded." Thence arose for his wall the flaring sign, and
for his inn the name which it bore in the neighborhood, of "the cabaret
of the Sergeant of Waterloo." He was a liberal, a classic, and a
Bonapartist. He had subscribed for the Champ d'Asile. It was said in the
village that he had studied for the priesthood.

We believe that he had simply studied in Holland for an inn-keeper. This
rascal of composite order was, in all probability, some Fleming from
Lille, in Flanders, a Frenchman in Paris, a Belgian at Brussels, being
comfortably astride of both frontiers. As for his prowess at Waterloo,
the reader is already acquainted with that. It will be perceived that
he exaggerated it a trifle. Ebb and flow, wandering, adventure, was
the leven of his existence; a tattered conscience entails a fragmentary
life, and, apparently at the stormy epoch of June 18, 1815, Thenardier
belonged to that variety of marauding sutlers of which we have spoken,
beating about the country, selling to some, stealing from others, and
travelling like a family man, with wife and children, in a rickety
cart, in the rear of troops on the march, with an instinct for always
attaching himself to the victorious army. This campaign ended, and
having, as he said, "some quibus," he had come to Montfermeil and set up
an inn there.

This quibus, composed of purses and watches, of gold rings and silver
crosses, gathered in harvest-time in furrows sown with corpses, did
not amount to a large total, and did not carry this sutler turned
eating-house-keeper very far.

Thenardier had that peculiar rectilinear something about his gestures
which, accompanied by an oath, recalls the barracks, and by a sign
of the cross, the seminary. He was a fine talker. He allowed it to be
thought that he was an educated man. Nevertheless, the schoolmaster had
noticed that he pronounced improperly.[12]

He composed the travellers' tariff card in a superior manner, but
practised eyes sometimes spied out orthographical errors in it.
Thenardier was cunning, greedy, slothful, and clever. He did not disdain
his servants, which caused his wife to dispense with them. This giantess
was jealous. It seemed to her that that thin and yellow little man must
be an object coveted by all.

Thenardier, who was, above all, an astute and well-balanced man, was a
scamp of a temperate sort. This is the worst species; hypocrisy enters
into it.

It is not that Thenardier was not, on occasion, capable of wrath to
quite the same degree as his wife; but this was very rare, and at such
times, since he was enraged with the human race in general, as he bore
within him a deep furnace of hatred. And since he was one of those
people who are continually avenging their wrongs, who accuse everything
that passes before them of everything which has befallen them, and who
are always ready to cast upon the first person who comes to hand, as a
legitimate grievance, the sum total of the deceptions, the bankruptcies,
and the calamities of their lives,--when all this leaven was stirred up
in him and boiled forth from his mouth and eyes, he was terrible. Woe to
the person who came under his wrath at such a time!

In addition to his other qualities, Thenardier was attentive and
penetrating, silent or talkative, according to circumstances, and always
highly intelligent. He had something of the look of sailors, who are
accustomed to screw up their eyes to gaze through marine glasses.
Thenardier was a statesman.

Every new-comer who entered the tavern said, on catching sight of Madame
Thenardier, "There is the master of the house." A mistake. She was not
even the mistress. The husband was both master and mistress. She worked;
he created. He directed everything by a sort of invisible and constant
magnetic action. A word was sufficient for him, sometimes a sign; the
mastodon obeyed. Thenardier was a sort of special and sovereign being in
Madame Thenardier's eyes, though she did not thoroughly realize it.
She was possessed of virtues after her own kind; if she had ever had a
disagreement as to any detail with "Monsieur Thenardier,"--which was
an inadmissible hypothesis, by the way,--she would not have blamed
her husband in public on any subject whatever. She would never have
committed "before strangers" that mistake so often committed by women,
and which is called in parliamentary language, "exposing the crown."
Although their concord had only evil as its result, there was
contemplation in Madame Thenardier's submission to her husband. That
mountain of noise and of flesh moved under the little finger of that
frail despot. Viewed on its dwarfed and grotesque side, this was that
grand and universal thing, the adoration of mind by matter; for certain
ugly features have a cause in the very depths of eternal beauty. There
was an unknown quantity about Thenardier; hence the absolute empire
of the man over that woman. At certain moments she beheld him like a
lighted candle; at others she felt him like a claw.

This woman was a formidable creature who loved no one except her
children, and who did not fear any one except her husband. She was a
mother because she was mammiferous. But her maternity stopped short with
her daughters, and, as we shall see, did not extend to boys. The man had
but one thought,--how to enrich himself.

He did not succeed in this. A theatre worthy of this great talent was
lacking. Thenardier was ruining himself at Montfermeil, if ruin is
possible to zero; in Switzerland or in the Pyrenees this penniless scamp
would have become a millionaire; but an inn-keeper must browse where
fate has hitched him.

It will be understood that the word inn-keeper is here employed in a
restricted sense, and does not extend to an entire class.

In this same year, 1823, Thenardier was burdened with about fifteen
hundred francs' worth of petty debts, and this rendered him anxious.

Whatever may have been the obstinate injustice of destiny in this case,
Thenardier was one of those men who understand best, with the most
profundity and in the most modern fashion, that thing which is a virtue
among barbarous peoples and an object of merchandise among civilized
peoples,--hospitality. Besides, he was an admirable poacher, and quoted
for his skill in shooting. He had a certain cold and tranquil laugh,
which was particularly dangerous.

His theories as a landlord sometimes burst forth in lightning flashes.
He had professional aphorisms, which he inserted into his wife's mind.
"The duty of the inn-keeper," he said to her one day, violently, and in
a low voice, "is to sell to the first comer, stews, repose, light, fire,
dirty sheets, a servant, lice, and a smile; to stop passers-by, to empty
small purses, and to honestly lighten heavy ones; to shelter travelling
families respectfully: to shave the man, to pluck the woman, to pick
the child clean; to quote the window open, the window shut, the
chimney-corner, the arm-chair, the chair, the ottoman, the stool, the
feather-bed, the mattress and the truss of straw; to know how much
the shadow uses up the mirror, and to put a price on it; and, by five
hundred thousand devils, to make the traveller pay for everything, even
for the flies which his dog eats!"

This man and this woman were ruse and rage wedded--a hideous and
terrible team.

While the husband pondered and combined, Madame Thenardier thought not
of absent creditors, took no heed of yesterday nor of to-morrow, and
lived in a fit of anger, all in a minute.

Such were these two beings. Cosette was between them, subjected to their
double pressure, like a creature who is at the same time being ground up
in a mill and pulled to pieces with pincers. The man and the woman each
had a different method: Cosette was overwhelmed with blows--this was the
woman's; she went barefooted in winter--that was the man's doing.

Cosette ran up stairs and down, washed, swept, rubbed, dusted, ran,
fluttered about, panted, moved heavy articles, and weak as she was,
did the coarse work. There was no mercy for her; a fierce mistress and
venomous master. The Thenardier hostelry was like a spider's web, in
which Cosette had been caught, and where she lay trembling. The ideal
of oppression was realized by this sinister household. It was something
like the fly serving the spiders.

The poor child passively held her peace.

What takes place within these souls when they have but just quitted God,
find themselves thus, at the very dawn of life, very small and in the
midst of men all naked!




CHAPTER III--MEN MUST HAVE WINE, AND HORSES MUST HAVE WATER

Four new travellers had arrived.

Cosette was meditating sadly; for, although she was only eight years
old, she had already suffered so much that she reflected with the
lugubrious air of an old woman. Her eye was black in consequence of a
blow from Madame Thenardier's fist, which caused the latter to remark
from time to time, "How ugly she is with her fist-blow on her eye!"

Cosette was thinking that it was dark, very dark, that the pitchers and
caraffes in the chambers of the travellers who had arrived must have
been filled and that there was no more water in the cistern.

She was somewhat reassured because no one in the Thenardier
establishment drank much water. Thirsty people were never lacking there;
but their thirst was of the sort which applies to the jug rather than to
the pitcher. Any one who had asked for a glass of water among all those
glasses of wine would have appeared a savage to all these men. But there
came a moment when the child trembled; Madame Thenardier raised the
cover of a stew-pan which was boiling on the stove, then seized a glass
and briskly approached the cistern. She turned the faucet; the child
had raised her head and was following all the woman's movements. A thin
stream of water trickled from the faucet, and half filled the glass.
"Well," said she, "there is no more water!" A momentary silence ensued.
The child did not breathe.

"Bah!" resumed Madame Thenardier, examining the half-filled glass, "this
will be enough."

Cosette applied herself to her work once more, but for a quarter of an
hour she felt her heart leaping in her bosom like a big snow-flake.

She counted the minutes that passed in this manner, and wished it were
the next morning.

From time to time one of the drinkers looked into the street, and
exclaimed, "It's as black as an oven!" or, "One must needs be a cat
to go about the streets without a lantern at this hour!" And Cosette
trembled.

All at once one of the pedlers who lodged in the hostelry entered, and
said in a harsh voice:--

"My horse has not been watered."

"Yes, it has," said Madame Thenardier.

"I tell you that it has not," retorted the pedler.

Cosette had emerged from under the table.

"Oh, yes, sir!" said she, "the horse has had a drink; he drank out of a
bucket, a whole bucketful, and it was I who took the water to him, and I
spoke to him."

It was not true; Cosette lied.

"There's a brat as big as my fist who tells lies as big as the house,"
exclaimed the pedler. "I tell you that he has not been watered, you
little jade! He has a way of blowing when he has had no water, which I
know well."

Cosette persisted, and added in a voice rendered hoarse with anguish,
and which was hardly audible:--

"And he drank heartily."

"Come," said the pedler, in a rage, "this won't do at all, let my horse
be watered, and let that be the end of it!"

Cosette crept under the table again.

"In truth, that is fair!" said Madame Thenardier, "if the beast has not
been watered, it must be."

Then glancing about her:--

"Well, now! Where's that other beast?"

She bent down and discovered Cosette cowering at the other end of the
table, almost under the drinkers' feet.

"Are you coming?" shrieked Madame Thenardier.

Cosette crawled out of the sort of hole in which she had hidden herself.
The Thenardier resumed:--

"Mademoiselle Dog-lack-name, go and water that horse."

"But, Madame," said Cosette, feebly, "there is no water."

The Thenardier threw the street door wide open:--

"Well, go and get some, then!"

Cosette dropped her head, and went for an empty bucket which stood near
the chimney-corner.

This bucket was bigger than she was, and the child could have set down
in it at her ease.

The Thenardier returned to her stove, and tasted what was in the
stewpan, with a wooden spoon, grumbling the while:--

"There's plenty in the spring. There never was such a malicious creature
as that. I think I should have done better to strain my onions."

Then she rummaged in a drawer which contained sous, pepper, and
shallots.

"See here, Mam'selle Toad," she added, "on your way back, you will get a
big loaf from the baker. Here's a fifteen-sou piece."

Cosette had a little pocket on one side of her apron; she took the coin
without saying a word, and put it in that pocket.

Then she stood motionless, bucket in hand, the open door before her. She
seemed to be waiting for some one to come to her rescue.

"Get along with you!" screamed the Thenardier.

Cosette went out. The door closed behind her.




CHAPTER IV--ENTRANCE ON THE SCENE OF A DOLL

The line of open-air booths starting at the church, extended, as the
reader will remember, as far as the hostelry of the Thenardiers. These
booths were all illuminated, because the citizens would soon pass on
their way to the midnight mass, with candles burning in paper funnels,
which, as the schoolmaster, then seated at the table at the Thenardiers'
observed, produced "a magical effect." In compensation, not a star was
visible in the sky.

The last of these stalls, established precisely opposite the
Thenardiers' door, was a toy-shop all glittering with tinsel, glass,
and magnificent objects of tin. In the first row, and far forwards, the
merchant had placed on a background of white napkins, an immense doll,
nearly two feet high, who was dressed in a robe of pink crepe, with gold
wheat-ears on her head, which had real hair and enamel eyes. All that
day, this marvel had been displayed to the wonderment of all passers-by
under ten years of age, without a mother being found in Montfermeil
sufficiently rich or sufficiently extravagant to give it to her child.
Eponine and Azelma had passed hours in contemplating it, and Cosette
herself had ventured to cast a glance at it, on the sly, it is true.

At the moment when Cosette emerged, bucket in hand, melancholy and
overcome as she was, she could not refrain from lifting her eyes to
that wonderful doll, towards the lady, as she called it. The poor child
paused in amazement. She had not yet beheld that doll close to. The
whole shop seemed a palace to her: the doll was not a doll; it was a
vision. It was joy, splendor, riches, happiness, which appeared in
a sort of chimerical halo to that unhappy little being so profoundly
engulfed in gloomy and chilly misery. With the sad and innocent sagacity
of childhood, Cosette measured the abyss which separated her from
that doll. She said to herself that one must be a queen, or at least a
princess, to have a "thing" like that. She gazed at that beautiful pink
dress, that beautiful smooth hair, and she thought, "How happy that doll
must be!" She could not take her eyes from that fantastic stall. The
more she looked, the more dazzled she grew. She thought she was gazing
at paradise. There were other dolls behind the large one, which seemed
to her to be fairies and genii. The merchant, who was pacing back and
forth in front of his shop, produced on her somewhat the effect of being
the Eternal Father.

In this adoration she forgot everything, even the errand with which she
was charged.

All at once the Thenardier's coarse voice recalled her to reality:
"What, you silly jade! you have not gone? Wait! I'll give it to you! I
want to know what you are doing there! Get along, you little monster!"

The Thenardier had cast a glance into the street, and had caught sight
of Cosette in her ecstasy.

Cosette fled, dragging her pail, and taking the longest strides of which
she was capable.




CHAPTER V--THE LITTLE ONE ALL ALONE

As the Thenardier hostelry was in that part of the village which is
near the church, it was to the spring in the forest in the direction of
Chelles that Cosette was obliged to go for her water.

She did not glance at the display of a single other merchant. So long
as she was in Boulanger Lane and in the neighborhood of the church, the
lighted stalls illuminated the road; but soon the last light from the
last stall vanished. The poor child found herself in the dark. She
plunged into it. Only, as a certain emotion overcame her, she made as
much motion as possible with the handle of the bucket as she walked
along. This made a noise which afforded her company.

The further she went, the denser the darkness became. There was no one
in the streets. However, she did encounter a woman, who turned around
on seeing her, and stood still, muttering between her teeth: "Where can
that child be going? Is it a werewolf child?" Then the woman recognized
Cosette. "Well," said she, "it's the Lark!"

In this manner Cosette traversed the labyrinth of tortuous and deserted
streets which terminate in the village of Montfermeil on the side of
Chelles. So long as she had the houses or even the walls only on both
sides of her path, she proceeded with tolerable boldness. From time
to time she caught the flicker of a candle through the crack of a
shutter--this was light and life; there were people there, and it
reassured her. But in proportion as she advanced, her pace slackened
mechanically, as it were. When she had passed the corner of the last
house, Cosette paused. It had been hard to advance further than the last
stall; it became impossible to proceed further than the last house. She
set her bucket on the ground, thrust her hand into her hair, and
began slowly to scratch her head,--a gesture peculiar to children when
terrified and undecided what to do. It was no longer Montfermeil; it
was the open fields. Black and desert space was before her. She gazed in
despair at that darkness, where there was no longer any one, where there
were beasts, where there were spectres, possibly. She took a good
look, and heard the beasts walking on the grass, and she distinctly saw
spectres moving in the trees. Then she seized her bucket again; fear had
lent her audacity. "Bah!" said she; "I will tell him that there was no
more water!" And she resolutely re-entered Montfermeil.

Hardly had she gone a hundred paces when she paused and began to scratch
her head again. Now it was the Thenardier who appeared to her, with her
hideous, hyena mouth, and wrath flashing in her eyes. The child cast a
melancholy glance before her and behind her. What was she to do? What
was to become of her? Where was she to go? In front of her was the
spectre of the Thenardier; behind her all the phantoms of the night
and of the forest. It was before the Thenardier that she recoiled. She
resumed her path to the spring, and began to run. She emerged from
the village, she entered the forest at a run, no longer looking at or
listening to anything. She only paused in her course when her breath
failed her; but she did not halt in her advance. She went straight
before her in desperation.

As she ran she felt like crying.

The nocturnal quivering of the forest surrounded her completely.

She no longer thought, she no longer saw. The immensity of night was
facing this tiny creature. On the one hand, all shadow; on the other, an
atom.

It was only seven or eight minutes' walk from the edge of the woods to
the spring. Cosette knew the way, through having gone over it many times
in daylight. Strange to say, she did not get lost. A remnant of instinct
guided her vaguely. But she did not turn her eyes either to right or to
left, for fear of seeing things in the branches and in the brushwood. In
this manner she reached the spring.

It was a narrow, natural basin, hollowed out by the water in a clayey
soil, about two feet deep, surrounded with moss and with those tall,
crimped grasses which are called Henry IV.'s frills, and paved with
several large stones. A brook ran out of it, with a tranquil little
noise.

Cosette did not take time to breathe. It was very dark, but she was in
the habit of coming to this spring. She felt with her left hand in the
dark for a young oak which leaned over the spring, and which usually
served to support her, found one of its branches, clung to it, bent
down, and plunged the bucket in the water. She was in a state of such
violent excitement that her strength was trebled. While thus bent over,
she did not notice that the pocket of her apron had emptied itself into
the spring. The fifteen-sou piece fell into the water. Cosette neither
saw nor heard it fall. She drew out the bucket nearly full, and set it
on the grass.

That done, she perceived that she was worn out with fatigue. She would
have liked to set out again at once, but the effort required to fill the
bucket had been such that she found it impossible to take a step. She
was forced to sit down. She dropped on the grass, and remained crouching
there.

She shut her eyes; then she opened them again, without knowing why, but
because she could not do otherwise. The agitated water in the bucket
beside her was describing circles which resembled tin serpents.

Overhead the sky was covered with vast black clouds, which were like
masses of smoke. The tragic mask of shadow seemed to bend vaguely over
the child.

Jupiter was setting in the depths.

The child stared with bewildered eyes at this great star, with which she
was unfamiliar, and which terrified her. The planet was, in fact, very
near the horizon and was traversing a dense layer of mist which imparted
to it a horrible ruddy hue. The mist, gloomily empurpled, magnified the
star. One would have called it a luminous wound.

A cold wind was blowing from the plain. The forest was dark, not a leaf
was moving; there were none of the vague, fresh gleams of summertide.
Great boughs uplifted themselves in frightful wise. Slender and
misshapen bushes whistled in the clearings. The tall grasses undulated
like eels under the north wind. The nettles seemed to twist long arms
furnished with claws in search of prey. Some bits of dry heather, tossed
by the breeze, flew rapidly by, and had the air of fleeing in terror
before something which was coming after. On all sides there were
lugubrious stretches.

The darkness was bewildering. Man requires light. Whoever buries himself
in the opposite of day feels his heart contract. When the eye sees
black, the heart sees trouble. In an eclipse in the night, in the sooty
opacity, there is anxiety even for the stoutest of hearts. No one walks
alone in the forest at night without trembling. Shadows and trees--two
formidable densities. A chimerical reality appears in the indistinct
depths. The inconceivable is outlined a few paces distant from you with
a spectral clearness. One beholds floating, either in space or in one's
own brain, one knows not what vague and intangible thing, like the
dreams of sleeping flowers. There are fierce attitudes on the horizon.
One inhales the effluvia of the great black void. One is afraid to
glance behind him, yet desirous of doing so. The cavities of night,
things grown haggard, taciturn profiles which vanish when one advances,
obscure dishevelments, irritated tufts, livid pools, the lugubrious
reflected in the funereal, the sepulchral immensity of silence, unknown
but possible beings, bendings of mysterious branches, alarming torsos of
trees, long handfuls of quivering plants,--against all this one has no
protection. There is no hardihood which does not shudder and which does
not feel the vicinity of anguish. One is conscious of something hideous,
as though one's soul were becoming amalgamated with the darkness. This
penetration of the shadows is indescribably sinister in the case of a
child.

Forests are apocalypses, and the beating of the wings of a tiny soul
produces a sound of agony beneath their monstrous vault.

Without understanding her sensations, Cosette was conscious that she was
seized upon by that black enormity of nature; it was no longer terror
alone which was gaining possession of her; it was something more
terrible even than terror; she shivered. There are no words to express
the strangeness of that shiver which chilled her to the very bottom of
her heart; her eye grew wild; she thought she felt that she should not
be able to refrain from returning there at the same hour on the morrow.

Then, by a sort of instinct, she began to count aloud, one, two, three,
four, and so on up to ten, in order to escape from that singular state
which she did not understand, but which terrified her, and, when she had
finished, she began again; this restored her to a true perception of
the things about her. Her hands, which she had wet in drawing the water,
felt cold; she rose; her terror, a natural and unconquerable terror, had
returned: she had but one thought now,--to flee at full speed through
the forest, across the fields to the houses, to the windows, to the
lighted candles. Her glance fell upon the water which stood before her;
such was the fright which the Thenardier inspired in her, that she dared
not flee without that bucket of water: she seized the handle with both
hands; she could hardly lift the pail.

In this manner she advanced a dozen paces, but the bucket was full; it
was heavy; she was forced to set it on the ground once more. She took
breath for an instant, then lifted the handle of the bucket again, and
resumed her march, proceeding a little further this time, but again she
was obliged to pause. After some seconds of repose she set out again.
She walked bent forward, with drooping head, like an old woman; the
weight of the bucket strained and stiffened her thin arms. The iron
handle completed the benumbing and freezing of her wet and tiny hands;
she was forced to halt from time to time, and each time that she did so,
the cold water which splashed from the pail fell on her bare legs. This
took place in the depths of a forest, at night, in winter, far from all
human sight; she was a child of eight: no one but God saw that sad thing
at the moment.

And her mother, no doubt, alas!

For there are things that make the dead open their eyes in their graves.

She panted with a sort of painful rattle; sobs contracted her throat,
but she dared not weep, so afraid was she of the Thenardier, even at a
distance: it was her custom to imagine the Thenardier always present.

However, she could not make much headway in that manner, and she went
on very slowly. In spite of diminishing the length of her stops, and
of walking as long as possible between them, she reflected with anguish
that it would take her more than an hour to return to Montfermeil in
this manner, and that the Thenardier would beat her. This anguish was
mingled with her terror at being alone in the woods at night; she was
worn out with fatigue, and had not yet emerged from the forest. On
arriving near an old chestnut-tree with which she was acquainted, made
a last halt, longer than the rest, in order that she might get well
rested; then she summoned up all her strength, picked up her bucket
again, and courageously resumed her march, but the poor little desperate
creature could not refrain from crying, "O my God! my God!"

At that moment she suddenly became conscious that her bucket no longer
weighed anything at all: a hand, which seemed to her enormous, had just
seized the handle, and lifted it vigorously. She raised her head. A
large black form, straight and erect, was walking beside her through the
darkness; it was a man who had come up behind her, and whose approach
she had not heard. This man, without uttering a word, had seized the
handle of the bucket which she was carrying.

There are instincts for all the encounters of life.

The child was not afraid.




CHAPTER VI--WHICH POSSIBLY PROVES BOULATRUELLE'S INTELLIGENCE

On the afternoon of that same Christmas Day, 1823, a man had walked
for rather a long time in the most deserted part of the Boulevard de
l'Hopital in Paris. This man had the air of a person who is seeking
lodgings, and he seemed to halt, by preference, at the most modest
houses on that dilapidated border of the faubourg Saint-Marceau.

We shall see further on that this man had, in fact, hired a chamber in
that isolated quarter.

This man, in his attire, as in all his person, realized the type of what
may be called the well-bred mendicant,--extreme wretchedness combined
with extreme cleanliness. This is a very rare mixture which inspires
intelligent hearts with that double respect which one feels for the man
who is very poor, and for the man who is very worthy. He wore a very
old and very well brushed round hat; a coarse coat, worn perfectly
threadbare, of an ochre yellow, a color that was not in the least
eccentric at that epoch; a large waistcoat with pockets of a venerable
cut; black breeches, worn gray at the knee, stockings of black worsted;
and thick shoes with copper buckles. He would have been pronounced a
preceptor in some good family, returned from the emigration. He would
have been taken for more than sixty years of age, from his perfectly
white hair, his wrinkled brow, his livid lips, and his countenance,
where everything breathed depression and weariness of life. Judging from
his firm tread, from the singular vigor which stamped all his movements,
he would have hardly been thought fifty. The wrinkles on his brow were
well placed, and would have disposed in his favor any one who observed
him attentively. His lip contracted with a strange fold which seemed
severe, and which was humble. There was in the depth of his glance an
indescribable melancholy serenity. In his left hand he carried a little
bundle tied up in a handkerchief; in his right he leaned on a sort of a
cudgel, cut from some hedge. This stick had been carefully trimmed, and
had an air that was not too threatening; the most had been made of its
knots, and it had received a coral-like head, made from red wax: it was
a cudgel, and it seemed to be a cane.

There are but few passers-by on that boulevard, particularly in the
winter. The man seemed to avoid them rather than to seek them, but this
without any affectation.

At that epoch, King Louis XVIII. went nearly every day to Choisy-le-Roi:
it was one of his favorite excursions. Towards two o'clock, almost
invariably, the royal carriage and cavalcade was seen to pass at full
speed along the Boulevard de l'Hopital.

This served in lieu of a watch or clock to the poor women of the quarter
who said, "It is two o'clock; there he is returning to the Tuileries."

And some rushed forward, and others drew up in line, for a passing king
always creates a tumult; besides, the appearance and disappearance of
Louis XVIII. produced a certain effect in the streets of Paris. It was
rapid but majestic. This impotent king had a taste for a fast gallop;
as he was not able to walk, he wished to run: that cripple would gladly
have had himself drawn by the lightning. He passed, pacific and severe,
in the midst of naked swords. His massive coach, all covered with
gilding, with great branches of lilies painted on the panels, thundered
noisily along. There was hardly time to cast a glance upon it. In the
rear angle on the right there was visible on tufted cushions of white
satin a large, firm, and ruddy face, a brow freshly powdered a l'oiseau
royal, a proud, hard, crafty eye, the smile of an educated man, two
great epaulets with bullion fringe floating over a bourgeois coat, the
Golden Fleece, the cross of Saint Louis, the cross of the Legion of
Honor, the silver plaque of the Saint-Esprit, a huge belly, and a wide
blue ribbon: it was the king. Outside of Paris, he held his hat decked
with white ostrich plumes on his knees enwrapped in high English
gaiters; when he re-entered the city, he put on his hat and saluted
rarely; he stared coldly at the people, and they returned it in kind.
When he appeared for the first time in the Saint-Marceau quarter,
the whole success which he produced is contained in this remark of an
inhabitant of the faubourg to his comrade, "That big fellow yonder is
the government."

This infallible passage of the king at the same hour was, therefore, the
daily event of the Boulevard de l'Hopital.

The promenader in the yellow coat evidently did not belong in the
quarter, and probably did not belong in Paris, for he was ignorant as to
this detail. When, at two o'clock, the royal carriage, surrounded by a
squadron of the body-guard all covered with silver lace, debouched
on the boulevard, after having made the turn of the Salpetriere, he
appeared surprised and almost alarmed. There was no one but himself in
this cross-lane. He drew up hastily behind the corner of the wall of an
enclosure, though this did not prevent M. le Duc de Havre from spying
him out.

M. le Duc de Havre, as captain of the guard on duty that day, was seated
in the carriage, opposite the king. He said to his Majesty, "Yonder
is an evil-looking man." Members of the police, who were clearing the
king's route, took equal note of him: one of them received an order to
follow him. But the man plunged into the deserted little streets of the
faubourg, and as twilight was beginning to fall, the agent lost trace of
him, as is stated in a report addressed that same evening to M. le Comte
d'Angles, Minister of State, Prefect of Police.

When the man in the yellow coat had thrown the agent off his track,
he redoubled his pace, not without turning round many a time to assure
himself that he was not being followed. At a quarter-past four, that is
to say, when night was fully come, he passed in front of the theatre
of the Porte Saint-Martin, where The Two Convicts was being played that
day. This poster, illuminated by the theatre lanterns, struck him; for,
although he was walking rapidly, he halted to read it. An instant later
he was in the blind alley of La Planchette, and he entered the Plat
d'Etain [the Pewter Platter], where the office of the coach for Lagny
was then situated. This coach set out at half-past four. The horses were
harnessed, and the travellers, summoned by the coachman, were hastily
climbing the lofty iron ladder of the vehicle.

The man inquired:--

"Have you a place?"

"Only one--beside me on the box," said the coachman.

"I will take it."

"Climb up."

Nevertheless, before setting out, the coachman cast a glance at the
traveller's shabby dress, at the diminutive size of his bundle, and made
him pay his fare.

"Are you going as far as Lagny?" demanded the coachman.

"Yes," said the man.

The traveller paid to Lagny.

They started. When they had passed the barrier, the coachman tried
to enter into conversation, but the traveller only replied in
monosyllables. The coachman took to whistling and swearing at his
horses.

The coachman wrapped himself up in his cloak. It was cold. The man
did not appear to be thinking of that. Thus they passed Gournay and
Neuilly-sur-Marne.

Towards six o'clock in the evening they reached Chelles. The coachman
drew up in front of the carters' inn installed in the ancient buildings
of the Royal Abbey, to give his horses a breathing spell.

"I get down here," said the man.

He took his bundle and his cudgel and jumped down from the vehicle.

An instant later he had disappeared.

He did not enter the inn.

When the coach set out for Lagny a few minutes later, it did not
encounter him in the principal street of Chelles.

The coachman turned to the inside travellers.

"There," said he, "is a man who does not belong here, for I do not know
him. He had not the air of owning a sou, but he does not consider money;
he pays to Lagny, and he goes only as far as Chelles. It is night; all
the houses are shut; he does not enter the inn, and he is not to be
found. So he has dived through the earth."

The man had not plunged into the earth, but he had gone with great
strides through the dark, down the principal street of Chelles, then he
had turned to the right before reaching the church, into the cross-road
leading to Montfermeil, like a person who was acquainted with the
country and had been there before.

He followed this road rapidly. At the spot where it is intersected by
the ancient tree-bordered road which runs from Gagny to Lagny, he heard
people coming. He concealed himself precipitately in a ditch, and there
waited until the passers-by were at a distance. The precaution was
nearly superfluous, however; for, as we have already said, it was a very
dark December night. Not more than two or three stars were visible in
the sky.

It is at this point that the ascent of the hill begins. The man did not
return to the road to Montfermeil; he struck across the fields to the
right, and entered the forest with long strides.

Once in the forest he slackened his pace, and began a careful
examination of all the trees, advancing, step by step, as though seeking
and following a mysterious road known to himself alone. There came a
moment when he appeared to lose himself, and he paused in indecision. At
last he arrived, by dint of feeling his way inch by inch, at a clearing
where there was a great heap of whitish stones. He stepped up briskly to
these stones, and examined them attentively through the mists of night,
as though he were passing them in review. A large tree, covered with
those excrescences which are the warts of vegetation, stood a few paces
distant from the pile of stones. He went up to this tree and passed
his hand over the bark of the trunk, as though seeking to recognize and
count all the warts.

Opposite this tree, which was an ash, there was a chestnut-tree,
suffering from a peeling of the bark, to which a band of zinc had been
nailed by way of dressing. He raised himself on tiptoe and touched this
band of zinc.

Then he trod about for awhile on the ground comprised in the space
between the tree and the heap of stones, like a person who is trying to
assure himself that the soil has not recently been disturbed.

That done, he took his bearings, and resumed his march through the
forest.

It was the man who had just met Cosette.

As he walked through the thicket in the direction of Montfermeil, he had
espied that tiny shadow moving with a groan, depositing a burden on
the ground, then taking it up and setting out again. He drew near, and
perceived that it was a very young child, laden with an enormous bucket
of water. Then he approached the child, and silently grasped the handle
of the bucket.




CHAPTER VII--COSETTE SIDE BY SIDE WITH THE STRANGER IN THE DARK

Cosette, as we have said, was not frightened.

The man accosted her. He spoke in a voice that was grave and almost
bass.

"My child, what you are carrying is very heavy for you."

Cosette raised her head and replied:--

"Yes, sir."

"Give it to me," said the man; "I will carry it for you."

Cosette let go of the bucket-handle. The man walked along beside her.

"It really is very heavy," he muttered between his teeth. Then he
added:--

"How old are you, little one?"

"Eight, sir."

"And have you come from far like this?"

"From the spring in the forest."

"Are you going far?"

"A good quarter of an hour's walk from here."

The man said nothing for a moment; then he remarked abruptly:--

"So you have no mother."

"I don't know," answered the child.

Before the man had time to speak again, she added:--

"I don't think so. Other people have mothers. I have none."

And after a silence she went on:--

"I think that I never had any."

The man halted; he set the bucket on the ground, bent down and placed
both hands on the child's shoulders, making an effort to look at her and
to see her face in the dark.

Cosette's thin and sickly face was vaguely outlined by the livid light
in the sky.

"What is your name?" said the man.

"Cosette."

The man seemed to have received an electric shock. He looked at her once
more; then he removed his hands from Cosette's shoulders, seized the
bucket, and set out again.

After a moment he inquired:--

"Where do you live, little one?"

"At Montfermeil, if you know where that is."

"That is where we are going?"

"Yes, sir."

He paused; then began again:--

"Who sent you at such an hour to get water in the forest?"

"It was Madame Thenardier."

The man resumed, in a voice which he strove to render indifferent, but
in which there was, nevertheless, a singular tremor:--

"What does your Madame Thenardier do?"

"She is my mistress," said the child. "She keeps the inn."

"The inn?" said the man. "Well, I am going to lodge there to-night. Show
me the way."

"We are on the way there," said the child.

The man walked tolerably fast. Cosette followed him without difficulty.
She no longer felt any fatigue. From time to time she raised her eyes
towards the man, with a sort of tranquillity and an indescribable
confidence. She had never been taught to turn to Providence and to pray;
nevertheless, she felt within her something which resembled hope and
joy, and which mounted towards heaven.

Several minutes elapsed. The man resumed:--

"Is there no servant in Madame Thenardier's house?"

"No, sir."

"Are you alone there?"

"Yes, sir."

Another pause ensued. Cosette lifted up her voice:--

"That is to say, there are two little girls."

"What little girls?"

"Ponine and Zelma."

This was the way the child simplified the romantic names so dear to the
female Thenardier.

"Who are Ponine and Zelma?"

"They are Madame Thenardier's young ladies; her daughters, as you would
say."

"And what do those girls do?"

"Oh!" said the child, "they have beautiful dolls; things with gold in
them, all full of affairs. They play; they amuse themselves."

"All day long?"

"Yes, sir."

"And you?"

"I? I work."

"All day long?"

The child raised her great eyes, in which hung a tear, which was not
visible because of the darkness, and replied gently:--

"Yes, sir."

After an interval of silence she went on:--

"Sometimes, when I have finished my work and they let me, I amuse
myself, too."

"How do you amuse yourself?"

"In the best way I can. They let me alone; but I have not many
playthings. Ponine and Zelma will not let me play with their dolls. I
have only a little lead sword, no longer than that."

The child held up her tiny finger.

"And it will not cut?"

"Yes, sir," said the child; "it cuts salad and the heads of flies."

They reached the village. Cosette guided the stranger through the
streets. They passed the bakeshop, but Cosette did not think of the
bread which she had been ordered to fetch. The man had ceased to ply her
with questions, and now preserved a gloomy silence.

When they had left the church behind them, the man, on perceiving all
the open-air booths, asked Cosette:--

"So there is a fair going on here?"

"No, sir; it is Christmas."

As they approached the tavern, Cosette timidly touched his arm:--

"Monsieur?"

"What, my child?"

"We are quite near the house."

"Well?"

"Will you let me take my bucket now?"

"Why?"

"If Madame sees that some one has carried it for me, she will beat me."

The man handed her the bucket. An instant later they were at the tavern
door.




CHAPTER VIII--THE UNPLEASANTNESS OF RECEIVING INTO ONE'S HOUSE A POOR
MAN WHO MAY BE A RICH MAN


Cosette could not refrain from casting a sidelong glance at the big
doll, which was still displayed at the toy-merchant's; then she knocked.
The door opened. The Thenardier appeared with a candle in her hand.


"Ah! so it's you, you little wretch! good mercy, but you've taken your
time! The hussy has been amusing herself!"

"Madame," said Cosette, trembling all over, "here's a gentleman who
wants a lodging."

The Thenardier speedily replaced her gruff air by her amiable grimace,
a change of aspect common to tavern-keepers, and eagerly sought the
new-comer with her eyes.

"This is the gentleman?" said she.

"Yes, Madame," replied the man, raising his hand to his hat.

Wealthy travellers are not so polite. This gesture, and an inspection
of the stranger's costume and baggage, which the Thenardier passed in
review with one glance, caused the amiable grimace to vanish, and the
gruff mien to reappear. She resumed dryly:--

"Enter, my good man."

The "good man" entered. The Thenardier cast a second glance at him, paid
particular attention to his frock-coat, which was absolutely threadbare,
and to his hat, which was a little battered, and, tossing her head,
wrinkling her nose, and screwing up her eyes, she consulted her husband,
who was still drinking with the carters. The husband replied by that
imperceptible movement of the forefinger, which, backed up by an
inflation of the lips, signifies in such cases: A regular beggar.
Thereupon, the Thenardier exclaimed:--

"Ah! see here, my good man; I am very sorry, but I have no room left."

"Put me where you like," said the man; "in the attic, in the stable. I
will pay as though I occupied a room."

"Forty sous."

"Forty sous; agreed."

"Very well, then!"

"Forty sous!" said a carter, in a low tone, to the Thenardier woman;
"why, the charge is only twenty sous!"

"It is forty in his case," retorted the Thenardier, in the same tone. "I
don't lodge poor folks for less."

"That's true," added her husband, gently; "it ruins a house to have such
people in it."

In the meantime, the man, laying his bundle and his cudgel on a bench,
had seated himself at a table, on which Cosette made haste to place a
bottle of wine and a glass. The merchant who had demanded the bucket of
water took it to his horse himself. Cosette resumed her place under the
kitchen table, and her knitting.

The man, who had barely moistened his lips in the wine which he had
poured out for himself, observed the child with peculiar attention.

Cosette was ugly. If she had been happy, she might have been pretty. We
have already given a sketch of that sombre little figure. Cosette was
thin and pale; she was nearly eight years old, but she seemed to be
hardly six. Her large eyes, sunken in a sort of shadow, were almost put
out with weeping. The corners of her mouth had that curve of habitual
anguish which is seen in condemned persons and desperately sick people.
Her hands were, as her mother had divined, "ruined with chilblains." The
fire which illuminated her at that moment brought into relief all the
angles of her bones, and rendered her thinness frightfully apparent.
As she was always shivering, she had acquired the habit of pressing her
knees one against the other. Her entire clothing was but a rag which
would have inspired pity in summer, and which inspired horror in winter.
All she had on was hole-ridden linen, not a scrap of woollen. Her skin
was visible here and there and everywhere black and blue spots could be
descried, which marked the places where the Thenardier woman had touched
her. Her naked legs were thin and red. The hollows in her neck were
enough to make one weep. This child's whole person, her mien, her
attitude, the sound of her voice, the intervals which she allowed to
elapse between one word and the next, her glance, her silence, her
slightest gesture, expressed and betrayed one sole idea,--fear.

Fear was diffused all over her; she was covered with it, so to speak;
fear drew her elbows close to her hips, withdrew her heels under her
petticoat, made her occupy as little space as possible, allowed her only
the breath that was absolutely necessary, and had become what might be
called the habit of her body, admitting of no possible variation except
an increase. In the depths of her eyes there was an astonished nook
where terror lurked.

Her fear was such, that on her arrival, wet as she was, Cosette did not
dare to approach the fire and dry herself, but sat silently down to her
work again.

The expression in the glance of that child of eight years was habitually
so gloomy, and at times so tragic, that it seemed at certain moments as
though she were on the verge of becoming an idiot or a demon.

As we have stated, she had never known what it is to pray; she had never
set foot in a church. "Have I the time?" said the Thenardier.

The man in the yellow coat never took his eyes from Cosette.

All at once, the Thenardier exclaimed:--

"By the way, where's that bread?"

Cosette, according to her custom whenever the Thenardier uplifted her
voice, emerged with great haste from beneath the table.

She had completely forgotten the bread. She had recourse to the
expedient of children who live in a constant state of fear. She lied.

"Madame, the baker's shop was shut."

"You should have knocked."

"I did knock, Madame."

"Well?"

"He did not open the door."

"I'll find out to-morrow whether that is true," said the Thenardier;
"and if you are telling me a lie, I'll lead you a pretty dance. In the
meantime, give me back my fifteen-sou piece."

Cosette plunged her hand into the pocket of her apron, and turned green.
The fifteen-sou piece was not there.

"Ah, come now," said Madame Thenardier, "did you hear me?"

Cosette turned her pocket inside out; there was nothing in it. What
could have become of that money? The unhappy little creature could not
find a word to say. She was petrified.

"Have you lost that fifteen-sou piece?" screamed the Thenardier,
hoarsely, "or do you want to rob me of it?"

At the same time, she stretched out her arm towards the
cat-o'-nine-tails which hung on a nail in the chimney-corner.

This formidable gesture restored to Cosette sufficient strength to
shriek:--

"Mercy, Madame, Madame! I will not do so any more!"

The Thenardier took down the whip.

In the meantime, the man in the yellow coat had been fumbling in the fob
of his waistcoat, without any one having noticed his movements. Besides,
the other travellers were drinking or playing cards, and were not paying
attention to anything.

Cosette contracted herself into a ball, with anguish, within the angle
of the chimney, endeavoring to gather up and conceal her poor half-nude
limbs. The Thenardier raised her arm.

"Pardon me, Madame," said the man, "but just now I caught sight of
something which had fallen from this little one's apron pocket, and
rolled aside. Perhaps this is it."

At the same time he bent down and seemed to be searching on the floor
for a moment.

"Exactly; here it is," he went on, straightening himself up.

And he held out a silver coin to the Thenardier.

"Yes, that's it," said she.

It was not it, for it was a twenty-sou piece; but the Thenardier found
it to her advantage. She put the coin in her pocket, and confined
herself to casting a fierce glance at the child, accompanied with the
remark, "Don't let this ever happen again!"

Cosette returned to what the Thenardier called "her kennel," and her
large eyes, which were riveted on the traveller, began to take on an
expression such as they had never worn before. Thus far it was only an
innocent amazement, but a sort of stupefied confidence was mingled with
it.

"By the way, would you like some supper?" the Thenardier inquired of the
traveller.

He made no reply. He appeared to be absorbed in thought.

"What sort of a man is that?" she muttered between her teeth. "He's some
frightfully poor wretch. He hasn't a sou to pay for a supper. Will he
even pay me for his lodging? It's very lucky, all the same, that it did
not occur to him to steal the money that was on the floor."

In the meantime, a door had opened, and Eponine and Azelma entered.

They were two really pretty little girls, more bourgeois than peasant
in looks, and very charming; the one with shining chestnut tresses,
the other with long black braids hanging down her back, both vivacious,
neat, plump, rosy, and healthy, and a delight to the eye. They were
warmly clad, but with so much maternal art that the thickness of the
stuffs did not detract from the coquetry of arrangement. There was a
hint of winter, though the springtime was not wholly effaced. Light
emanated from these two little beings. Besides this, they were on the
throne. In their toilettes, in their gayety, in the noise which they
made, there was sovereignty. When they entered, the Thenardier said to
them in a grumbling tone which was full of adoration, "Ah! there you
are, you children!"

Then drawing them, one after the other to her knees, smoothing their
hair, tying their ribbons afresh, and then releasing them with
that gentle manner of shaking off which is peculiar to mothers, she
exclaimed, "What frights they are!"

They went and seated themselves in the chimney-corner. They had a doll,
which they turned over and over on their knees with all sorts of joyous
chatter. From time to time Cosette raised her eyes from her knitting,
and watched their play with a melancholy air.

Eponine and Azelma did not look at Cosette. She was the same as a dog
to them. These three little girls did not yet reckon up four and twenty
years between them, but they already represented the whole society of
man; envy on the one side, disdain on the other.

The doll of the Thenardier sisters was very much faded, very old, and
much broken; but it seemed none the less admirable to Cosette, who had
never had a doll in her life, a real doll, to make use of the expression
which all children will understand.

All at once, the Thenardier, who had been going back and forth in the
room, perceived that Cosette's mind was distracted, and that, instead of
working, she was paying attention to the little ones at their play.

"Ah! I've caught you at it!" she cried. "So that's the way you work!
I'll make you work to the tune of the whip; that I will."

The stranger turned to the Thenardier, without quitting his chair.

"Bah, Madame," he said, with an almost timid air, "let her play!"

Such a wish expressed by a traveller who had eaten a slice of mutton and
had drunk a couple of bottles of wine with his supper, and who had not
the air of being frightfully poor, would have been equivalent to an
order. But that a man with such a hat should permit himself such a
desire, and that a man with such a coat should permit himself to have a
will, was something which Madame Thenardier did not intend to tolerate.
She retorted with acrimony:--

"She must work, since she eats. I don't feed her to do nothing."

"What is she making?" went on the stranger, in a gentle voice which
contrasted strangely with his beggarly garments and his porter's
shoulders.

The Thenardier deigned to reply:--

"Stockings, if you please. Stockings for my little girls, who have none,
so to speak, and who are absolutely barefoot just now."

The man looked at Cosette's poor little red feet, and continued:--

"When will she have finished this pair of stockings?"

"She has at least three or four good days' work on them still, the lazy
creature!"

"And how much will that pair of stockings be worth when she has finished
them?"

The Thenardier cast a glance of disdain on him.

"Thirty sous at least."

"Will you sell them for five francs?" went on the man.

"Good heavens!" exclaimed a carter who was listening, with a loud laugh;
"five francs! the deuce, I should think so! five balls!"

Thenardier thought it time to strike in.

"Yes, sir; if such is your fancy, you will be allowed to have that pair
of stockings for five francs. We can refuse nothing to travellers."

"You must pay on the spot," said the Thenardier, in her curt and
peremptory fashion.

"I will buy that pair of stockings," replied the man, "and," he added,
drawing a five-franc piece from his pocket, and laying it on the table,
"I will pay for them."

Then he turned to Cosette.

"Now I own your work; play, my child."

The carter was so much touched by the five-franc piece, that he
abandoned his glass and hastened up.

"But it's true!" he cried, examining it. "A real hind wheel! and not
counterfeit!"

Thenardier approached and silently put the coin in his pocket.

The Thenardier had no reply to make. She bit her lips, and her face
assumed an expression of hatred.

In the meantime, Cosette was trembling. She ventured to ask:--

"Is it true, Madame? May I play?"

"Play!" said the Thenardier, in a terrible voice.

"Thanks, Madame," said Cosette.

And while her mouth thanked the Thenardier, her whole little soul
thanked the traveller.

Thenardier had resumed his drinking; his wife whispered in his ear:--

"Who can this yellow man be?"

"I have seen millionaires with coats like that," replied Thenardier, in
a sovereign manner.

Cosette had dropped her knitting, but had not left her seat. Cosette
always moved as little as possible. She picked up some old rags and her
little lead sword from a box behind her.

Eponine and Azelma paid no attention to what was going on. They had just
executed a very important operation; they had just got hold of the
cat. They had thrown their doll on the ground, and Eponine, who was
the elder, was swathing the little cat, in spite of its mewing and its
contortions, in a quantity of clothes and red and blue scraps. While
performing this serious and difficult work she was saying to her sister
in that sweet and adorable language of children, whose grace, like the
splendor of the butterfly's wing, vanishes when one essays to fix it
fast.

"You see, sister, this doll is more amusing than the other. She twists,
she cries, she is warm. See, sister, let us play with her. She shall be
my little girl. I will be a lady. I will come to see you, and you shall
look at her. Gradually, you will perceive her whiskers, and that will
surprise you. And then you will see her ears, and then you will see her
tail and it will amaze you. And you will say to me, 'Ah! Mon Dieu!' and
I will say to you: 'Yes, Madame, it is my little girl. Little girls are
made like that just at present.'"

Azelma listened admiringly to Eponine.

In the meantime, the drinkers had begun to sing an obscene song, and
to laugh at it until the ceiling shook. Thenardier accompanied and
encouraged them.

As birds make nests out of everything, so children make a doll out of
anything which comes to hand. While Eponine and Azelma were bundling up
the cat, Cosette, on her side, had dressed up her sword. That done, she
laid it in her arms, and sang to it softly, to lull it to sleep.

The doll is one of the most imperious needs and, at the same time, one
of the most charming instincts of feminine childhood. To care for, to
clothe, to deck, to dress, to undress, to redress, to teach, scold a
little, to rock, to dandle, to lull to sleep, to imagine that something
is some one,--therein lies the whole woman's future. While dreaming and
chattering, making tiny outfits, and baby clothes, while sewing little
gowns, and corsages and bodices, the child grows into a young girl, the
young girl into a big girl, the big girl into a woman. The first child
is the continuation of the last doll.

A little girl without a doll is almost as unhappy, and quite as
impossible, as a woman without children.

So Cosette had made herself a doll out of the sword.

Madame Thenardier approached the yellow man; "My husband is right," she
thought; "perhaps it is M. Laffitte; there are such queer rich men!"

She came and set her elbows on the table.

"Monsieur," said she. At this word, Monsieur, the man turned; up to that
time, the Thenardier had addressed him only as brave homme or bonhomme.

"You see, sir," she pursued, assuming a sweetish air that was even more
repulsive to behold than her fierce mien, "I am willing that the child
should play; I do not oppose it, but it is good for once, because you
are generous. You see, she has nothing; she must needs work."

"Then this child is not yours?" demanded the man.

"Oh! mon Dieu! no, sir! she is a little beggar whom we have taken in
through charity; a sort of imbecile child. She must have water on the
brain; she has a large head, as you see. We do what we can for her, for
we are not rich; we have written in vain to her native place, and have
received no reply these six months. It must be that her mother is dead."

"Ah!" said the man, and fell into his revery once more.

"Her mother didn't amount to much," added the Thenardier; "she abandoned
her child."

During the whole of this conversation Cosette, as though warned by some
instinct that she was under discussion, had not taken her eyes from the
Thenardier's face; she listened vaguely; she caught a few words here and
there.

Meanwhile, the drinkers, all three-quarters intoxicated, were repeating
their unclean refrain with redoubled gayety; it was a highly spiced and
wanton song, in which the Virgin and the infant Jesus were introduced.
The Thenardier went off to take part in the shouts of laughter. Cosette,
from her post under the table, gazed at the fire, which was reflected
from her fixed eyes. She had begun to rock the sort of baby which she
had made, and, as she rocked it, she sang in a low voice, "My mother is
dead! my mother is dead! my mother is dead!"

On being urged afresh by the hostess, the yellow man, "the millionaire,"
consented at last to take supper.

"What does Monsieur wish?"

"Bread and cheese," said the man.

"Decidedly, he is a beggar" thought Madame Thenardier.

The drunken men were still singing their song, and the child under the
table was singing hers.

All at once, Cosette paused; she had just turned round and caught sight
of the little Thenardiers' doll, which they had abandoned for the cat
and had left on the floor a few paces from the kitchen table.

Then she dropped the swaddled sword, which only half met her needs, and
cast her eyes slowly round the room. Madame Thenardier was whispering to
her husband and counting over some money; Ponine and Zelma were playing
with the cat; the travellers were eating or drinking or singing; not
a glance was fixed on her. She had not a moment to lose; she crept out
from under the table on her hands and knees, made sure once more that no
one was watching her; then she slipped quickly up to the doll and seized
it. An instant later she was in her place again, seated motionless, and
only turned so as to cast a shadow on the doll which she held in her
arms. The happiness of playing with a doll was so rare for her that it
contained all the violence of voluptuousness.

No one had seen her, except the traveller, who was slowly devouring his
meagre supper.

This joy lasted about a quarter of an hour.

But with all the precautions that Cosette had taken she did not perceive
that one of the doll's legs stuck out and that the fire on the hearth
lighted it up very vividly. That pink and shining foot, projecting from
the shadow, suddenly struck the eye of Azelma, who said to Eponine,
"Look! sister."

The two little girls paused in stupefaction; Cosette had dared to take
their doll!

Eponine rose, and, without releasing the cat, she ran to her mother, and
began to tug at her skirt.

"Let me alone!" said her mother; "what do you want?"

"Mother," said the child, "look there!"

And she pointed to Cosette.

Cosette, absorbed in the ecstasies of possession, no longer saw or heard
anything.

Madame Thenardier's countenance assumed that peculiar expression which
is composed of the terrible mingled with the trifles of life, and which
has caused this style of woman to be named megaeras.

On this occasion, wounded pride exasperated her wrath still further.
Cosette had overstepped all bounds; Cosette had laid violent hands on
the doll belonging to "these young ladies." A czarina who should see
a muzhik trying on her imperial son's blue ribbon would wear no other
face.

She shrieked in a voice rendered hoarse with indignation:--

"Cosette!"

Cosette started as though the earth had trembled beneath her; she turned
round.

"Cosette!" repeated the Thenardier.

Cosette took the doll and laid it gently on the floor with a sort of
veneration, mingled with despair; then, without taking her eyes from
it, she clasped her hands, and, what is terrible to relate of a child
of that age, she wrung them; then--not one of the emotions of the day,
neither the trip to the forest, nor the weight of the bucket of water,
nor the loss of the money, nor the sight of the whip, nor even the sad
words which she had heard Madame Thenardier utter had been able to wring
this from her--she wept; she burst out sobbing.

Meanwhile, the traveller had risen to his feet.

"What is the matter?" he said to the Thenardier.

"Don't you see?" said the Thenardier, pointing to the corpus delicti
which lay at Cosette's feet.

"Well, what of it?" resumed the man.

"That beggar," replied the Thenardier, "has permitted herself to touch
the children's doll!"

"All this noise for that!" said the man; "well, what if she did play
with that doll?"

"She touched it with her dirty hands!" pursued the Thenardier, "with her
frightful hands!"

Here Cosette redoubled her sobs.

"Will you stop your noise?" screamed the Thenardier.

The man went straight to the street door, opened it, and stepped out.

As soon as he had gone, the Thenardier profited by his absence to give
Cosette a hearty kick under the table, which made the child utter loud
cries.

The door opened again, the man re-appeared; he carried in both hands the
fabulous doll which we have mentioned, and which all the village brats
had been staring at ever since the morning, and he set it upright in
front of Cosette, saying:--

"Here; this is for you."

It must be supposed that in the course of the hour and more which he had
spent there he had taken confused notice through his revery of that
toy shop, lighted up by fire-pots and candles so splendidly that it was
visible like an illumination through the window of the drinking-shop.

Cosette raised her eyes; she gazed at the man approaching her with that
doll as she might have gazed at the sun; she heard the unprecedented
words, "It is for you"; she stared at him; she stared at the doll; then
she slowly retreated, and hid herself at the extreme end, under the
table in a corner of the wall.

She no longer cried; she no longer wept; she had the appearance of no
longer daring to breathe.

The Thenardier, Eponine, and Azelma were like statues also; the very
drinkers had paused; a solemn silence reigned through the whole room.

Madame Thenardier, petrified and mute, recommenced her conjectures: "Who
is that old fellow? Is he a poor man? Is he a millionaire? Perhaps he is
both; that is to say, a thief."

The face of the male Thenardier presented that expressive fold which
accentuates the human countenance whenever the dominant instinct appears
there in all its bestial force. The tavern-keeper stared alternately at
the doll and at the traveller; he seemed to be scenting out the man, as
he would have scented out a bag of money. This did not last longer than
the space of a flash of lightning. He stepped up to his wife and said to
her in a low voice:--

"That machine costs at least thirty francs. No nonsense. Down on your
belly before that man!"

Gross natures have this in common with naive natures, that they possess
no transition state.

"Well, Cosette," said the Thenardier, in a voice that strove to be
sweet, and which was composed of the bitter honey of malicious women,
"aren't you going to take your doll?"

Cosette ventured to emerge from her hole.

"The gentleman has given you a doll, my little Cosette," said
Thenardier, with a caressing air. "Take it; it is yours."

Cosette gazed at the marvellous doll in a sort of terror. Her face was
still flooded with tears, but her eyes began to fill, like the sky at
daybreak, with strange beams of joy. What she felt at that moment was
a little like what she would have felt if she had been abruptly told,
"Little one, you are the Queen of France."

It seemed to her that if she touched that doll, lightning would dart
from it.

This was true, up to a certain point, for she said to herself that the
Thenardier would scold and beat her.

Nevertheless, the attraction carried the day. She ended by drawing near
and murmuring timidly as she turned towards Madame Thenardier:--

"May I, Madame?"

No words can render that air, at once despairing, terrified, and
ecstatic.

"Pardi!" cried the Thenardier, "it is yours. The gentleman has given it
to you."

"Truly, sir?" said Cosette. "Is it true? Is the 'lady' mine?"

The stranger's eyes seemed to be full of tears. He appeared to have
reached that point of emotion where a man does not speak for fear lest
he should weep. He nodded to Cosette, and placed the "lady's" hand in
her tiny hand.

Cosette hastily withdrew her hand, as though that of the "lady" scorched
her, and began to stare at the floor. We are forced to add that at that
moment she stuck out her tongue immoderately. All at once she wheeled
round and seized the doll in a transport.

"I shall call her Catherine," she said.

It was an odd moment when Cosette's rags met and clasped the ribbons and
fresh pink muslins of the doll.

"Madame," she resumed, "may I put her on a chair?"

"Yes, my child," replied the Thenardier.

It was now the turn of Eponine and Azelma to gaze at Cosette with envy.

Cosette placed Catherine on a chair, then seated herself on the floor
in front of her, and remained motionless, without uttering a word, in an
attitude of contemplation.

"Play, Cosette," said the stranger.

"Oh! I am playing," returned the child.

This stranger, this unknown individual, who had the air of a visit which
Providence was making on Cosette, was the person whom the Thenardier
hated worse than any one in the world at that moment. However, it was
necessary to control herself. Habituated as she was to dissimulation
through endeavoring to copy her husband in all his actions, these
emotions were more than she could endure. She made haste to send her
daughters to bed, then she asked the man's permission to send Cosette
off also; "for she has worked hard all day," she added with a maternal
air. Cosette went off to bed, carrying Catherine in her arms.

From time to time the Thenardier went to the other end of the room where
her husband was, to relieve her soul, as she said. She exchanged with
her husband words which were all the more furious because she dared not
utter them aloud.

"Old beast! What has he got in his belly, to come and upset us in this
manner! To want that little monster to play! to give away forty-franc
dolls to a jade that I would sell for forty sous, so I would! A little
more and he will be saying Your Majesty to her, as though to the Duchess
de Berry! Is there any sense in it? Is he mad, then, that mysterious old
fellow?"

"Why! it is perfectly simple," replied Thenardier, "if that amuses him!
It amuses you to have the little one work; it amuses him to have her
play. He's all right. A traveller can do what he pleases when he pays
for it. If the old fellow is a philanthropist, what is that to you? If
he is an imbecile, it does not concern you. What are you worrying for,
so long as he has money?"

The language of a master, and the reasoning of an innkeeper, neither of
which admitted of any reply.

The man had placed his elbows on the table, and resumed his thoughtful
attitude. All the other travellers, both pedlers and carters, had
withdrawn a little, and had ceased singing. They were staring at him
from a distance, with a sort of respectful awe. This poorly dressed
man, who drew "hind-wheels" from his pocket with so much ease, and
who lavished gigantic dolls on dirty little brats in wooden shoes, was
certainly a magnificent fellow, and one to be feared.

Many hours passed. The midnight mass was over, the chimes had ceased,
the drinkers had taken their departure, the drinking-shop was closed,
the public room was deserted, the fire extinct, the stranger still
remained in the same place and the same attitude. From time to time he
changed the elbow on which he leaned. That was all; but he had not said
a word since Cosette had left the room.

The Thenardiers alone, out of politeness and curiosity, had remained in
the room.

"Is he going to pass the night in that fashion?" grumbled the
Thenardier. When two o'clock in the morning struck, she declared herself
vanquished, and said to her husband, "I'm going to bed. Do as you like."
Her husband seated himself at a table in the corner, lighted a candle,
and began to read the Courrier Francais.

A good hour passed thus. The worthy inn-keeper had perused the Courrier
Francais at least three times, from the date of the number to the
printer's name. The stranger did not stir.

Thenardier fidgeted, coughed, spit, blew his nose, and creaked his
chair. Not a movement on the man's part. "Is he asleep?" thought
Thenardier. The man was not asleep, but nothing could arouse him.

At last Thenardier took off his cap, stepped gently up to him, and
ventured to say:--

"Is not Monsieur going to his repose?"

Not going to bed would have seemed to him excessive and familiar. To
repose smacked of luxury and respect. These words possess the mysterious
and admirable property of swelling the bill on the following day. A
chamber where one sleeps costs twenty sous; a chamber in which one
reposes costs twenty francs.

"Well!" said the stranger, "you are right. Where is your stable?"

"Sir!" exclaimed Thenardier, with a smile, "I will conduct you, sir."

He took the candle; the man picked up his bundle and cudgel, and
Thenardier conducted him to a chamber on the first floor, which was of
rare splendor, all furnished in mahogany, with a low bedstead, curtained
with red calico.

"What is this?" said the traveller.

"It is really our bridal chamber," said the tavern-keeper. "My wife and
I occupy another. This is only entered three or four times a year."

"I should have liked the stable quite as well," said the man, abruptly.

Thenardier pretended not to hear this unamiable remark.

He lighted two perfectly fresh wax candles which figured on the
chimney-piece. A very good fire was flickering on the hearth.

On the chimney-piece, under a glass globe, stood a woman's head-dress in
silver wire and orange flowers.

"And what is this?" resumed the stranger.

"That, sir," said Thenardier, "is my wife's wedding bonnet."

The traveller surveyed the object with a glance which seemed to say,
"There really was a time, then, when that monster was a maiden?"

Thenardier lied, however. When he had leased this paltry building for
the purpose of converting it into a tavern, he had found this chamber
decorated in just this manner, and had purchased the furniture and
obtained the orange flowers at second hand, with the idea that this
would cast a graceful shadow on "his spouse," and would result in what
the English call respectability for his house.

When the traveller turned round, the host had disappeared. Thenardier
had withdrawn discreetly, without venturing to wish him a good night,
as he did not wish to treat with disrespectful cordiality a man whom he
proposed to fleece royally the following morning.

The inn-keeper retired to his room. His wife was in bed, but she was not
asleep. When she heard her husband's step she turned over and said to
him:--

"Do you know, I'm going to turn Cosette out of doors to-morrow."

Thenardier replied coldly:--

"How you do go on!"

They exchanged no further words, and a few moments later their candle
was extinguished.

As for the traveller, he had deposited his cudgel and his bundle in a
corner. The landlord once gone, he threw himself into an arm-chair and
remained for some time buried in thought. Then he removed his shoes,
took one of the two candles, blew out the other, opened the door, and
quitted the room, gazing about him like a person who is in search of
something. He traversed a corridor and came upon a staircase. There he
heard a very faint and gentle sound like the breathing of a child. He
followed this sound, and came to a sort of triangular recess built under
the staircase, or rather formed by the staircase itself. This recess was
nothing else than the space under the steps. There, in the midst of all
sorts of old papers and potsherds, among dust and spiders' webs, was a
bed--if one can call by the name of bed a straw pallet so full of holes
as to display the straw, and a coverlet so tattered as to show the
pallet. No sheets. This was placed on the floor.

In this bed Cosette was sleeping.

The man approached and gazed down upon her.

Cosette was in a profound sleep; she was fully dressed. In the winter
she did not undress, in order that she might not be so cold.

Against her breast was pressed the doll, whose large eyes, wide open,
glittered in the dark. From time to time she gave vent to a deep sigh as
though she were on the point of waking, and she strained the doll almost
convulsively in her arms. Beside her bed there was only one of her
wooden shoes.

A door which stood open near Cosette's pallet permitted a view of a
rather large, dark room. The stranger stepped into it. At the further
extremity, through a glass door, he saw two small, very white beds.
They belonged to Eponine and Azelma. Behind these beds, and half hidden,
stood an uncurtained wicker cradle, in which the little boy who had
cried all the evening lay asleep.

The stranger conjectured that this chamber connected with that of the
Thenardier pair. He was on the point of retreating when his eye fell
upon the fireplace--one of those vast tavern chimneys where there is
always so little fire when there is any fire at all, and which are
so cold to look at. There was no fire in this one, there was not even
ashes; but there was something which attracted the stranger's gaze,
nevertheless. It was two tiny children's shoes, coquettish in shape
and unequal in size. The traveller recalled the graceful and immemorial
custom in accordance with which children place their shoes in the
chimney on Christmas eve, there to await in the darkness some sparkling
gift from their good fairy. Eponine and Azelma had taken care not to
omit this, and each of them had set one of her shoes on the hearth.

The traveller bent over them.

The fairy, that is to say, their mother, had already paid her visit, and
in each he saw a brand-new and shining ten-sou piece.

The man straightened himself up, and was on the point of withdrawing,
when far in, in the darkest corner of the hearth, he caught sight
of another object. He looked at it, and recognized a wooden shoe, a
frightful shoe of the coarsest description, half dilapidated and all
covered with ashes and dried mud. It was Cosette's sabot. Cosette, with
that touching trust of childhood, which can always be deceived yet never
discouraged, had placed her shoe on the hearth-stone also.

Hope in a child who has never known anything but despair is a sweet and
touching thing.

There was nothing in this wooden shoe.

The stranger fumbled in his waistcoat, bent over and placed a louis d'or
in Cosette's shoe.

Then he regained his own chamber with the stealthy tread of a wolf.




CHAPTER IX--THENARDIER AND HIS MANOEUVRES

On the following morning, two hours at least before day-break,
Thenardier, seated beside a candle in the public room of the tavern, pen
in hand, was making out the bill for the traveller with the yellow coat.

His wife, standing beside him, and half bent over him, was following
him with her eyes. They exchanged not a word. On the one hand, there was
profound meditation, on the other, the religious admiration with which
one watches the birth and development of a marvel of the human mind. A
noise was audible in the house; it was the Lark sweeping the stairs.

After the lapse of a good quarter of an hour, and some erasures,
Thenardier produced the following masterpiece:--

          BILL OF THE GENTLEMAN IN No. 1.

  Supper . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .     3 francs.
  Chamber  . . . . . . . . . . . . . .    10   "
  Candle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .     5   "
  Fire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .     4   "
  Service  . . . . . . . . . . . . . .     1   "
                                          ----------
                     Total . . . . . .    23 francs.


Service was written servisse.

"Twenty-three francs!" cried the woman, with an enthusiasm which was
mingled with some hesitation.

Like all great artists, Thenardier was dissatisfied.

"Peuh!" he exclaimed.

It was the accent of Castlereagh auditing France's bill at the Congress
of Vienna.

"Monsieur Thenardier, you are right; he certainly owes that," murmured
the wife, who was thinking of the doll bestowed on Cosette in the
presence of her daughters. "It is just, but it is too much. He will not
pay it."

Thenardier laughed coldly, as usual, and said:--

"He will pay."

This laugh was the supreme assertion of certainty and authority. That
which was asserted in this manner must needs be so. His wife did not
insist.

She set about arranging the table; her husband paced the room. A moment
later he added:--

"I owe full fifteen hundred francs!"

He went and seated himself in the chimney-corner, meditating, with his
feet among the warm ashes.

"Ah! by the way," resumed his wife, "you don't forget that I'm going to
turn Cosette out of doors to-day? The monster! She breaks my heart with
that doll of hers! I'd rather marry Louis XVIII. than keep her another
day in the house!"

Thenardier lighted his pipe, and replied between two puffs:--

"You will hand that bill to the man."

Then he went out.

Hardly had he left the room when the traveller entered.

Thenardier instantly reappeared behind him and remained motionless in
the half-open door, visible only to his wife.

The yellow man carried his bundle and his cudgel in his hand.

"Up so early?" said Madame Thenardier; "is Monsieur leaving us already?"

As she spoke thus, she was twisting the bill about in her hands with an
embarrassed air, and making creases in it with her nails. Her hard
face presented a shade which was not habitual with it,--timidity and
scruples.

To present such a bill to a man who had so completely the air "of a poor
wretch" seemed difficult to her.

The traveller appeared to be preoccupied and absent-minded. He
replied:--

"Yes, Madame, I am going."

"So Monsieur has no business in Montfermeil?"

"No, I was passing through. That is all. What do I owe you, Madame," he
added.

The Thenardier silently handed him the folded bill.

The man unfolded the paper and glanced at it; but his thoughts were
evidently elsewhere.

"Madame," he resumed, "is business good here in Montfermeil?"

"So so, Monsieur," replied the Thenardier, stupefied at not witnessing
another sort of explosion.

She continued, in a dreary and lamentable tone:--

"Oh! Monsieur, times are so hard! and then, we have so few bourgeois in
the neighborhood! All the people are poor, you see. If we had not, now
and then, some rich and generous travellers like Monsieur, we should
not get along at all. We have so many expenses. Just see, that child is
costing us our very eyes."

"What child?"

"Why, the little one, you know! Cosette--the Lark, as she is called
hereabouts!"

"Ah!" said the man.

She went on:--

"How stupid these peasants are with their nicknames! She has more the
air of a bat than of a lark. You see, sir, we do not ask charity, and we
cannot bestow it. We earn nothing and we have to pay out a great deal.
The license, the imposts, the door and window tax, the hundredths!
Monsieur is aware that the government demands a terrible deal of money.
And then, I have my daughters. I have no need to bring up other people's
children."

The man resumed, in that voice which he strove to render indifferent,
and in which there lingered a tremor:--

"What if one were to rid you of her?"

"Who? Cosette?"

"Yes."

The landlady's red and violent face brightened up hideously.

"Ah! sir, my dear sir, take her, keep her, lead her off, carry her
away, sugar her, stuff her with truffles, drink her, eat her, and the
blessings of the good holy Virgin and of all the saints of paradise be
upon you!"

"Agreed."

"Really! You will take her away?"

"I will take her away."

"Immediately?"

"Immediately. Call the child."

"Cosette!" screamed the Thenardier.

"In the meantime," pursued the man, "I will pay you what I owe you. How
much is it?"

He cast a glance on the bill, and could not restrain a start of
surprise:--

"Twenty-three francs!"

He looked at the landlady, and repeated:--

"Twenty-three francs?"

There was in the enunciation of these words, thus repeated, an accent
between an exclamation and an interrogation point.

The Thenardier had had time to prepare herself for the shock. She
replied, with assurance:--

"Good gracious, yes, sir, it is twenty-three francs."

The stranger laid five five-franc pieces on the table.

"Go and get the child," said he.

At that moment Thenardier advanced to the middle of the room, and
said:--

"Monsieur owes twenty-six sous."

"Twenty-six sous!" exclaimed his wife.

"Twenty sous for the chamber," resumed Thenardier, coldly, "and six sous
for his supper. As for the child, I must discuss that matter a little
with the gentleman. Leave us, wife."

Madame Thenardier was dazzled as with the shock caused by unexpected
lightning flashes of talent. She was conscious that a great actor was
making his entrance on the stage, uttered not a word in reply, and left
the room.

As soon as they were alone, Thenardier offered the traveller a chair.
The traveller seated himself; Thenardier remained standing, and his face
assumed a singular expression of good-fellowship and simplicity.

"Sir," said he, "what I have to say to you is this, that I adore that
child."

The stranger gazed intently at him.

"What child?"

Thenardier continued:--

"How strange it is, one grows attached. What money is that? Take back
your hundred-sou piece. I adore the child."

"Whom do you mean?" demanded the stranger.

"Eh! our little Cosette! Are you not intending to take her away from
us? Well, I speak frankly; as true as you are an honest man, I will not
consent to it. I shall miss that child. I saw her first when she was a
tiny thing. It is true that she costs us money; it is true that she has
her faults; it is true that we are not rich; it is true that I have paid
out over four hundred francs for drugs for just one of her illnesses!
But one must do something for the good God's sake. She has neither
father nor mother. I have brought her up. I have bread enough for
her and for myself. In truth, I think a great deal of that child. You
understand, one conceives an affection for a person; I am a good sort
of a beast, I am; I do not reason; I love that little girl; my wife is
quick-tempered, but she loves her also. You see, she is just the same as
our own child. I want to keep her to babble about the house."

The stranger kept his eye intently fixed on Thenardier. The latter
continued:--

"Excuse me, sir, but one does not give away one's child to a passer-by,
like that. I am right, am I not? Still, I don't say--you are rich; you
have the air of a very good man,--if it were for her happiness. But one
must find out that. You understand: suppose that I were to let her go
and to sacrifice myself, I should like to know what becomes of her; I
should not wish to lose sight of her; I should like to know with whom
she is living, so that I could go to see her from time to time; so that
she may know that her good foster-father is alive, that he is watching
over her. In short, there are things which are not possible. I do not
even know your name. If you were to take her away, I should say: 'Well,
and the Lark, what has become of her?' One must, at least, see some
petty scrap of paper, some trifle in the way of a passport, you know!"

The stranger, still surveying him with that gaze which penetrates, as
the saying goes, to the very depths of the conscience, replied in a
grave, firm voice:--

"Monsieur Thenardier, one does not require a passport to travel five
leagues from Paris. If I take Cosette away, I shall take her away, and
that is the end of the matter. You will not know my name, you will not
know my residence, you will not know where she is; and my intention is
that she shall never set eyes on you again so long as she lives. I break
the thread which binds her foot, and she departs. Does that suit you?
Yes or no?"

Since geniuses, like demons, recognize the presence of a superior God by
certain signs, Thenardier comprehended that he had to deal with a very
strong person. It was like an intuition; he comprehended it with his
clear and sagacious promptitude. While drinking with the carters,
smoking, and singing coarse songs on the preceding evening, he had
devoted the whole of the time to observing the stranger, watching him
like a cat, and studying him like a mathematician. He had watched him,
both on his own account, for the pleasure of the thing, and through
instinct, and had spied upon him as though he had been paid for so
doing. Not a movement, not a gesture, on the part of the man in the
yellow great-coat had escaped him. Even before the stranger had so
clearly manifested his interest in Cosette, Thenardier had divined his
purpose. He had caught the old man's deep glances returning constantly
to the child. Who was this man? Why this interest? Why this hideous
costume, when he had so much money in his purse? Questions which he put
to himself without being able to solve them, and which irritated him. He
had pondered it all night long. He could not be Cosette's father. Was he
her grandfather? Then why not make himself known at once? When one has
a right, one asserts it. This man evidently had no right over Cosette.
What was it, then? Thenardier lost himself in conjectures. He caught
glimpses of everything, but he saw nothing. Be that as it may, on
entering into conversation with the man, sure that there was some secret
in the case, that the latter had some interest in remaining in the
shadow, he felt himself strong; when he perceived from the stranger's
clear and firm retort, that this mysterious personage was mysterious in
so simple a way, he became conscious that he was weak. He had expected
nothing of the sort. His conjectures were put to the rout. He rallied
his ideas. He weighed everything in the space of a second. Thenardier
was one of those men who take in a situation at a glance. He decided
that the moment had arrived for proceeding straightforward, and quickly
at that. He did as great leaders do at the decisive moment, which they
know that they alone recognize; he abruptly unmasked his batteries.

"Sir," said he, "I am in need of fifteen hundred francs."

The stranger took from his side pocket an old pocketbook of black
leather, opened it, drew out three bank-bills, which he laid on the
table. Then he placed his large thumb on the notes and said to the
inn-keeper:--

"Go and fetch Cosette."

While this was taking place, what had Cosette been doing?

On waking up, Cosette had run to get her shoe. In it she had found the
gold piece. It was not a Napoleon; it was one of those perfectly new
twenty-franc pieces of the Restoration, on whose effigy the little
Prussian queue had replaced the laurel wreath. Cosette was dazzled. Her
destiny began to intoxicate her. She did not know what a gold piece was;
she had never seen one; she hid it quickly in her pocket, as though
she had stolen it. Still, she felt that it really was hers; she guessed
whence her gift had come, but the joy which she experienced was full of
fear. She was happy; above all she was stupefied. Such magnificent and
beautiful things did not appear real. The doll frightened her, the
gold piece frightened her. She trembled vaguely in the presence of this
magnificence. The stranger alone did not frighten her. On the contrary,
he reassured her. Ever since the preceding evening, amid all her
amazement, even in her sleep, she had been thinking in her little
childish mind of that man who seemed to be so poor and so sad, and who
was so rich and so kind. Everything had changed for her since she had
met that good man in the forest. Cosette, less happy than the most
insignificant swallow of heaven, had never known what it was to take
refuge under a mother's shadow and under a wing. For the last five
years, that is to say, as far back as her memory ran, the poor child had
shivered and trembled. She had always been exposed completely naked
to the sharp wind of adversity; now it seemed to her she was clothed.
Formerly her soul had seemed cold, now it was warm. Cosette was no
longer afraid of the Thenardier. She was no longer alone; there was some
one there.

She hastily set about her regular morning duties. That louis, which she
had about her, in the very apron pocket whence the fifteen-sou piece had
fallen on the night before, distracted her thoughts. She dared not touch
it, but she spent five minutes in gazing at it, with her tongue hanging
out, if the truth must be told. As she swept the staircase, she paused,
remained standing there motionless, forgetful of her broom and of the
entire universe, occupied in gazing at that star which was blazing at
the bottom of her pocket.

It was during one of these periods of contemplation that the Thenardier
joined her. She had gone in search of Cosette at her husband's orders.
What was quite unprecedented, she neither struck her nor said an
insulting word to her.

"Cosette," she said, almost gently, "come immediately."

An instant later Cosette entered the public room.

The stranger took up the bundle which he had brought and untied it. This
bundle contained a little woollen gown, an apron, a fustian bodice, a
kerchief, a petticoat, woollen stockings, shoes--a complete outfit for a
girl of seven years. All was black.

"My child," said the man, "take these, and go and dress yourself
quickly."

Daylight was appearing when those of the inhabitants of Montfermeil who
had begun to open their doors beheld a poorly clad old man leading a
little girl dressed in mourning, and carrying a pink doll in her arms,
pass along the road to Paris. They were going in the direction of Livry.

It was our man and Cosette.

No one knew the man; as Cosette was no longer in rags, many did not
recognize her. Cosette was going away. With whom? She did not know.
Whither? She knew not. All that she understood was that she was leaving
the Thenardier tavern behind her. No one had thought of bidding her
farewell, nor had she thought of taking leave of any one. She was
leaving that hated and hating house.

Poor, gentle creature, whose heart had been repressed up to that hour!

Cosette walked along gravely, with her large eyes wide open, and gazing
at the sky. She had put her louis in the pocket of her new apron. From
time to time, she bent down and glanced at it; then she looked at the
good man. She felt something as though she were beside the good God.




CHAPTER X--HE WHO SEEKS TO BETTER HIMSELF MAY RENDER HIS SITUATION WORSE

Madame Thenardier had allowed her husband to have his own way, as was
her wont. She had expected great results. When the man and Cosette had
taken their departure, Thenardier allowed a full quarter of an hour
to elapse; then he took her aside and showed her the fifteen hundred
francs.

"Is that all?" said she.

It was the first time since they had set up housekeeping that she had
dared to criticise one of the master's acts.

The blow told.

"You are right, in sooth," said he; "I am a fool. Give me my hat."

He folded up the three bank-bills, thrust them into his pocket, and ran
out in all haste; but he made a mistake and turned to the right first.
Some neighbors, of whom he made inquiries, put him on the track again;
the Lark and the man had been seen going in the direction of Livry. He
followed these hints, walking with great strides, and talking to himself
the while:--

"That man is evidently a million dressed in yellow, and I am an animal.
First he gave twenty sous, then five francs, then fifty francs, then
fifteen hundred francs, all with equal readiness. He would have given
fifteen thousand francs. But I shall overtake him."

And then, that bundle of clothes prepared beforehand for the child; all
that was singular; many mysteries lay concealed under it. One does not
let mysteries out of one's hand when one has once grasped them. The
secrets of the wealthy are sponges of gold; one must know how to subject
them to pressure. All these thoughts whirled through his brain. "I am an
animal," said he.

When one leaves Montfermeil and reaches the turn which the road takes
that runs to Livry, it can be seen stretching out before one to a great
distance across the plateau. On arriving there, he calculated that he
ought to be able to see the old man and the child. He looked as far as
his vision reached, and saw nothing. He made fresh inquiries, but he had
wasted time. Some passers-by informed him that the man and child of whom
he was in search had gone towards the forest in the direction of Gagny.
He hastened in that direction.

They were far in advance of him; but a child walks slowly, and he walked
fast; and then, he was well acquainted with the country.

All at once he paused and dealt himself a blow on his forehead like a
man who has forgotten some essential point and who is ready to retrace
his steps.

"I ought to have taken my gun," said he to himself.

Thenardier was one of those double natures which sometimes pass through
our midst without our being aware of the fact, and who disappear without
our finding them out, because destiny has only exhibited one side of
them. It is the fate of many men to live thus half submerged. In a
calm and even situation, Thenardier possessed all that is required to
make--we will not say to be--what people have agreed to call an honest
trader, a good bourgeois. At the same time certain circumstances being
given, certain shocks arriving to bring his under-nature to the surface,
he had all the requisites for a blackguard. He was a shopkeeper in
whom there was some taint of the monster. Satan must have occasionally
crouched down in some corner of the hovel in which Thenardier dwelt, and
have fallen a-dreaming in the presence of this hideous masterpiece.

After a momentary hesitation:--

"Bah!" he thought; "they will have time to make their escape."

And he pursued his road, walking rapidly straight ahead, and with almost
an air of certainty, with the sagacity of a fox scenting a covey of
partridges.

In truth, when he had passed the ponds and had traversed in an oblique
direction the large clearing which lies on the right of the Avenue de
Bellevue, and reached that turf alley which nearly makes the circuit of
the hill, and covers the arch of the ancient aqueduct of the Abbey of
Chelles, he caught sight, over the top of the brushwood, of the hat on
which he had already erected so many conjectures; it was that man's hat.
The brushwood was not high. Thenardier recognized the fact that the man
and Cosette were sitting there. The child could not be seen on account
of her small size, but the head of her doll was visible.

Thenardier was not mistaken. The man was sitting there, and letting
Cosette get somewhat rested. The inn-keeper walked round the brushwood
and presented himself abruptly to the eyes of those whom he was in
search of.

"Pardon, excuse me, sir," he said, quite breathless, "but here are your
fifteen hundred francs."

So saying, he handed the stranger the three bank-bills.

The man raised his eyes.

"What is the meaning of this?"

Thenardier replied respectfully:--

"It means, sir, that I shall take back Cosette."

Cosette shuddered, and pressed close to the old man.

He replied, gazing to the very bottom of Thenardier's eyes the while,
and enunciating every syllable distinctly:--

"You are go-ing to take back Co-sette?"

"Yes, sir, I am. I will tell you; I have considered the matter. In fact,
I have not the right to give her to you. I am an honest man, you see;
this child does not belong to me; she belongs to her mother. It was her
mother who confided her to me; I can only resign her to her mother. You
will say to me, 'But her mother is dead.' Good; in that case I can only
give the child up to the person who shall bring me a writing, signed by
her mother, to the effect that I am to hand the child over to the person
therein mentioned; that is clear."

The man, without making any reply, fumbled in his pocket, and Thenardier
beheld the pocket-book of bank-bills make its appearance once more.

The tavern-keeper shivered with joy.

"Good!" thought he; "let us hold firm; he is going to bribe me!"

Before opening the pocket-book, the traveller cast a glance about him:
the spot was absolutely deserted; there was not a soul either in the
woods or in the valley. The man opened his pocket-book once more and
drew from it, not the handful of bills which Thenardier expected, but a
simple little paper, which he unfolded and presented fully open to the
inn-keeper, saying:--

"You are right; read!"

Thenardier took the paper and read:--

                              "M. SUR M., March 25, 1823.

 "MONSIEUR THENARDIER:--

               You will deliver Cosette to this person.
               You will be paid for all the little things.
               I have the honor to salute you with respect,
                                                  FANTINE."

"You know that signature?" resumed the man.

It certainly was Fantine's signature; Thenardier recognized it.

There was no reply to make; he experienced two violent vexations, the
vexation of renouncing the bribery which he had hoped for, and the
vexation of being beaten; the man added:--

"You may keep this paper as your receipt."

Thenardier retreated in tolerably good order.

"This signature is fairly well imitated," he growled between his teeth;
"however, let it go!"

Then he essayed a desperate effort.

"It is well, sir," he said, "since you are the person, but I must be
paid for all those little things. A great deal is owing to me."

The man rose to his feet, filliping the dust from his thread-bare
sleeve:--

"Monsieur Thenardier, in January last, the mother reckoned that she owed
you one hundred and twenty francs. In February, you sent her a bill of
five hundred francs; you received three hundred francs at the end of
February, and three hundred francs at the beginning of March. Since then
nine months have elapsed, at fifteen francs a month, the price agreed
upon, which makes one hundred and thirty-five francs. You had received
one hundred francs too much; that makes thirty-five still owing you. I
have just given you fifteen hundred francs."

Thenardier's sensations were those of the wolf at the moment when he
feels himself nipped and seized by the steel jaw of the trap.

"Who is this devil of a man?" he thought.

He did what the wolf does: he shook himself. Audacity had succeeded with
him once.

"Monsieur-I-don't-know-your-name," he said resolutely, and this time
casting aside all respectful ceremony, "I shall take back Cosette if you
do not give me a thousand crowns."

The stranger said tranquilly:--

"Come, Cosette."

He took Cosette by his left hand, and with his right he picked up his
cudgel, which was lying on the ground.

Thenardier noted the enormous size of the cudgel and the solitude of the
spot.

The man plunged into the forest with the child, leaving the inn-keeper
motionless and speechless.

While they were walking away, Thenardier scrutinized his huge shoulders,
which were a little rounded, and his great fists.

Then, bringing his eyes back to his own person, they fell upon his
feeble arms and his thin hands. "I really must have been exceedingly
stupid not to have thought to bring my gun," he said to himself, "since
I was going hunting!"

However, the inn-keeper did not give up.

"I want to know where he is going," said he, and he set out to follow
them at a distance. Two things were left on his hands, an irony in
the shape of the paper signed Fantine, and a consolation, the fifteen
hundred francs.

The man led Cosette off in the direction of Livry and Bondy. He walked
slowly, with drooping head, in an attitude of reflection and sadness.
The winter had thinned out the forest, so that Thenardier did not lose
them from sight, although he kept at a good distance. The man turned
round from time to time, and looked to see if he was being followed.
All at once he caught sight of Thenardier. He plunged suddenly into
the brushwood with Cosette, where they could both hide themselves. "The
deuce!" said Thenardier, and he redoubled his pace.

The thickness of the undergrowth forced him to draw nearer to them. When
the man had reached the densest part of the thicket, he wheeled
round. It was in vain that Thenardier sought to conceal himself in the
branches; he could not prevent the man seeing him. The man cast upon him
an uneasy glance, then elevated his head and continued his course. The
inn-keeper set out again in pursuit. Thus they continued for two or
three hundred paces. All at once the man turned round once more; he saw
the inn-keeper. This time he gazed at him with so sombre an air that
Thenardier decided that it was "useless" to proceed further. Thenardier
retraced his steps.




CHAPTER XI--NUMBER 9,430 REAPPEARS, AND COSETTE WINS IT IN THE LOTTERY

Jean Valjean was not dead.

When he fell into the sea, or rather, when he threw himself into it, he
was not ironed, as we have seen. He swam under water until he reached a
vessel at anchor, to which a boat was moored. He found means of hiding
himself in this boat until night. At night he swam off again, and
reached the shore a little way from Cape Brun. There, as he did not lack
money, he procured clothing. A small country-house in the neighborhood
of Balaguier was at that time the dressing-room of escaped convicts,--a
lucrative specialty. Then Jean Valjean, like all the sorry fugitives
who are seeking to evade the vigilance of the law and social fatality,
pursued an obscure and undulating itinerary. He found his first
refuge at Pradeaux, near Beausset. Then he directed his course towards
Grand-Villard, near Briancon, in the Hautes-Alpes. It was a fumbling and
uneasy flight,--a mole's track, whose branchings are untraceable. Later
on, some trace of his passage into Ain, in the territory of Civrieux,
was discovered; in the Pyrenees, at Accons; at the spot called
Grange-de-Doumec, near the market of Chavailles, and in the environs of
Perigueux at Brunies, canton of La Chapelle-Gonaguet. He reached Paris.
We have just seen him at Montfermeil.

His first care on arriving in Paris had been to buy mourning clothes
for a little girl of from seven to eight years of age; then to procure
a lodging. That done, he had betaken himself to Montfermeil. It will
be remembered that already, during his preceding escape, he had made a
mysterious trip thither, or somewhere in that neighborhood, of which the
law had gathered an inkling.

However, he was thought to be dead, and this still further increased the
obscurity which had gathered about him. At Paris, one of the journals
which chronicled the fact fell into his hands. He felt reassured and
almost at peace, as though he had really been dead.

On the evening of the day when Jean Valjean rescued Cosette from the
claws of the Thenardiers, he returned to Paris. He re-entered it at
nightfall, with the child, by way of the Barrier Monceaux. There
he entered a cabriolet, which took him to the esplanade of the
Observatoire. There he got out, paid the coachman, took Cosette by
the hand, and together they directed their steps through the
darkness,--through the deserted streets which adjoin the Ourcine and the
Glaciere, towards the Boulevard de l'Hopital.

The day had been strange and filled with emotions for Cosette. They
had eaten some bread and cheese purchased in isolated taverns, behind
hedges; they had changed carriages frequently; they had travelled short
distances on foot. She made no complaint, but she was weary, and Jean
Valjean perceived it by the way she dragged more and more on his hand
as she walked. He took her on his back. Cosette, without letting go
of Catherine, laid her head on Jean Valjean's shoulder, and there fell
asleep.




BOOK FOURTH.--THE GORBEAU HOVEL

[Illustration: The Gorbeau Hovel  2b3-10-gorbeau-house]




CHAPTER I--MASTER GORBEAU

Forty years ago, a rambler who had ventured into that unknown country of
the Salpetriere, and who had mounted to the Barriere d'Italie by way
of the boulevard, reached a point where it might be said that Paris
disappeared. It was no longer solitude, for there were passers-by; it
was not the country, for there were houses and streets; it was not the
city, for the streets had ruts like highways, and the grass grew in
them; it was not a village, the houses were too lofty. What was it,
then? It was an inhabited spot where there was no one; it was a desert
place where there was some one; it was a boulevard of the great city, a
street of Paris; more wild at night than the forest, more gloomy by day
than a cemetery.

It was the old quarter of the Marche-aux-Chevaux.

The rambler, if he risked himself outside the four decrepit walls of
this Marche-aux-Chevaux; if he consented even to pass beyond the Rue du
Petit-Banquier, after leaving on his right a garden protected by high
walls; then a field in which tan-bark mills rose like gigantic beaver
huts; then an enclosure encumbered with timber, with a heap of stumps,
sawdust, and shavings, on which stood a large dog, barking; then a long,
low, utterly dilapidated wall, with a little black door in mourning,
laden with mosses, which were covered with flowers in the spring; then,
in the most deserted spot, a frightful and decrepit building, on which
ran the inscription in large letters: POST NO BILLS,--this daring
rambler would have reached little known latitudes at the corner of the
Rue des Vignes-Saint-Marcel. There, near a factory, and between two
garden walls, there could be seen, at that epoch, a mean building,
which, at the first glance, seemed as small as a thatched hovel, and
which was, in reality, as large as a cathedral. It presented its side
and gable to the public road; hence its apparent diminutiveness. Nearly
the whole of the house was hidden. Only the door and one window could be
seen.

This hovel was only one story high.

The first detail that struck the observer was, that the door could never
have been anything but the door of a hovel, while the window, if it
had been carved out of dressed stone instead of being in rough masonry,
might have been the lattice of a lordly mansion.

The door was nothing but a collection of worm-eaten planks roughly bound
together by cross-beams which resembled roughly hewn logs. It
opened directly on a steep staircase of lofty steps, muddy, chalky,
plaster-stained, dusty steps, of the same width as itself, which
could be seen from the street, running straight up like a ladder and
disappearing in the darkness between two walls. The top of the shapeless
bay into which this door shut was masked by a narrow scantling in the
centre of which a triangular hole had been sawed, which served both as
wicket and air-hole when the door was closed. On the inside of the
door the figures 52 had been traced with a couple of strokes of a brush
dipped in ink, and above the scantling the same hand had daubed the
number 50, so that one hesitated. Where was one? Above the door it said,
"Number 50"; the inside replied, "no, Number 52." No one knows what
dust-colored figures were suspended like draperies from the triangular
opening.

The window was large, sufficiently elevated, garnished with Venetian
blinds, and with a frame in large square panes; only these large panes
were suffering from various wounds, which were both concealed and
betrayed by an ingenious paper bandage. And the blinds, dislocated and
unpasted, threatened passers-by rather than screened the occupants.
The horizontal slats were missing here and there and had been naively
replaced with boards nailed on perpendicularly; so that what began as
a blind ended as a shutter. This door with an unclean, and this window
with an honest though dilapidated air, thus beheld on the same house,
produced the effect of two incomplete beggars walking side by side,
with different miens beneath the same rags, the one having always been a
mendicant, and the other having once been a gentleman.

The staircase led to a very vast edifice which resembled a shed which
had been converted into a house. This edifice had, for its intestinal
tube, a long corridor, on which opened to right and left sorts of
compartments of varied dimensions which were inhabitable under stress
of circumstances, and rather more like stalls than cells. These chambers
received their light from the vague waste grounds in the neighborhood.

All this was dark, disagreeable, wan, melancholy, sepulchral; traversed
according as the crevices lay in the roof or in the door, by cold rays
or by icy winds. An interesting and picturesque peculiarity of this sort
of dwelling is the enormous size of the spiders.

To the left of the entrance door, on the boulevard side, at about the
height of a man from the ground, a small window which had been walled up
formed a square niche full of stones which the children had thrown there
as they passed by.

A portion of this building has recently been demolished. From what still
remains of it one can form a judgment as to what it was in former days.
As a whole, it was not over a hundred years old. A hundred years is
youth in a church and age in a house. It seems as though man's lodging
partook of his ephemeral character, and God's house of his eternity.

The postmen called the house Number 50-52; but it was known in the
neighborhood as the Gorbeau house.

Let us explain whence this appellation was derived.

Collectors of petty details, who become herbalists of anecdotes, and
prick slippery dates into their memories with a pin, know that there
was in Paris, during the last century, about 1770, two attorneys at the
Chatelet named, one Corbeau (Raven), the other Renard (Fox). The two
names had been forestalled by La Fontaine. The opportunity was too fine
for the lawyers; they made the most of it. A parody was immediately
put in circulation in the galleries of the court-house, in verses that
limped a little:--


          Maitre Corbeau, sur un dossier perche,[13]
               Tenait dans son bee une saisie executoire;
          Maitre Renard, par l'odeur alleche,
               Lui fit a peu pres cette histoire:
                    He! bonjour.  Etc.


The two honest practitioners, embarrassed by the jests, and finding the
bearing of their heads interfered with by the shouts of laughter which
followed them, resolved to get rid of their names, and hit upon the
expedient of applying to the king.

Their petition was presented to Louis XV. on the same day when the
Papal Nuncio, on the one hand, and the Cardinal de la Roche-Aymon on the
other, both devoutly kneeling, were each engaged in putting on, in his
Majesty's presence, a slipper on the bare feet of Madame du Barry, who
had just got out of bed. The king, who was laughing, continued to laugh,
passed gayly from the two bishops to the two lawyers, and bestowed on
these limbs of the law their former names, or nearly so. By the kings
command, Maitre Corbeau was permitted to add a tail to his initial
letter and to call himself Gorbeau. Maitre Renard was less lucky; all he
obtained was leave to place a P in front of his R, and to call himself
Prenard; so that the second name bore almost as much resemblance as the
first.

Now, according to local tradition, this Maitre Gorbeau had been the
proprietor of the building numbered 50-52 on the Boulevard de l'Hopital.
He was even the author of the monumental window.

Hence the edifice bore the name of the Gorbeau house.

Opposite this house, among the trees of the boulevard, rose a great elm
which was three-quarters dead; almost directly facing it opens the Rue
de la Barriere des Gobelins, a street then without houses, unpaved,
planted with unhealthy trees, which was green or muddy according to the
season, and which ended squarely in the exterior wall of Paris. An odor
of copperas issued in puffs from the roofs of the neighboring factory.

The barrier was close at hand. In 1823 the city wall was still in
existence.

This barrier itself evoked gloomy fancies in the mind. It was the
road to Bicetre. It was through it that, under the Empire and the
Restoration, prisoners condemned to death re-entered Paris on the day
of their execution. It was there, that, about 1829, was committed that
mysterious assassination, called "The assassination of the Fontainebleau
barrier," whose authors justice was never able to discover; a melancholy
problem which has never been elucidated, a frightful enigma which has
never been unriddled. Take a few steps, and you come upon that fatal Rue
Croulebarbe, where Ulbach stabbed the goat-girl of Ivry to the sound of
thunder, as in the melodramas. A few paces more, and you arrive at the
abominable pollarded elms of the Barriere Saint-Jacques, that expedient
of the philanthropist to conceal the scaffold, that miserable and
shameful Place de Grove of a shop-keeping and bourgeois society, which
recoiled before the death penalty, neither daring to abolish it with
grandeur, nor to uphold it with authority.

Leaving aside this Place Saint-Jacques, which was, as it were,
predestined, and which has always been horrible, probably the most
mournful spot on that mournful boulevard, seven and thirty years ago,
was the spot which even to-day is so unattractive, where stood the
building Number 50-52.

Bourgeois houses only began to spring up there twenty-five years later.
The place was unpleasant. In addition to the gloomy thoughts which
assailed one there, one was conscious of being between the Salpetriere,
a glimpse of whose dome could be seen, and Bicetre, whose outskirts one
was fairly touching; that is to say, between the madness of women and
the madness of men. As far as the eye could see, one could perceive
nothing but the abattoirs, the city wall, and the fronts of a few
factories, resembling barracks or monasteries; everywhere about stood
hovels, rubbish, ancient walls blackened like cerecloths, new white
walls like winding-sheets; everywhere parallel rows of trees, buildings
erected on a line, flat constructions, long, cold rows, and the
melancholy sadness of right angles. Not an unevenness of the ground,
not a caprice in the architecture, not a fold. The ensemble was glacial,
regular, hideous. Nothing oppresses the heart like symmetry. It is
because symmetry is ennui, and ennui is at the very foundation of grief.
Despair yawns. Something more terrible than a hell where one suffers
may be imagined, and that is a hell where one is bored. If such a hell
existed, that bit of the Boulevard de l'Hopital might have formed the
entrance to it.

Nevertheless, at nightfall, at the moment when the daylight is
vanishing, especially in winter, at the hour when the twilight breeze
tears from the elms their last russet leaves, when the darkness is deep
and starless, or when the moon and the wind are making openings in the
clouds and losing themselves in the shadows, this boulevard suddenly
becomes frightful. The black lines sink inwards and are lost in the
shades, like morsels of the infinite. The passer-by cannot refrain from
recalling the innumerable traditions of the place which are connected
with the gibbet. The solitude of this spot, where so many crimes have
been committed, had something terrible about it. One almost had a
presentiment of meeting with traps in that darkness; all the confused
forms of the darkness seemed suspicious, and the long, hollow square, of
which one caught a glimpse between each tree, seemed graves: by day it
was ugly; in the evening melancholy; by night it was sinister.

In summer, at twilight, one saw, here and there, a few old women seated
at the foot of the elm, on benches mouldy with rain. These good old
women were fond of begging.

However, this quarter, which had a superannuated rather than an antique
air, was tending even then to transformation. Even at that time any one
who was desirous of seeing it had to make haste. Each day some detail of
the whole effect was disappearing. For the last twenty years the station
of the Orleans railway has stood beside the old faubourg and distracted
it, as it does to-day. Wherever it is placed on the borders of a
capital, a railway station is the death of a suburb and the birth of a
city. It seems as though, around these great centres of the movements of
a people, the earth, full of germs, trembled and yawned, to engulf the
ancient dwellings of men and to allow new ones to spring forth, at the
rattle of these powerful machines, at the breath of these monstrous
horses of civilization which devour coal and vomit fire. The old houses
crumble and new ones rise.

Since the Orleans railway has invaded the region of the Salpetriere,
the ancient, narrow streets which adjoin the moats Saint-Victor and the
Jardin des Plantes tremble, as they are violently traversed three or
four times each day by those currents of coach fiacres and omnibuses
which, in a given time, crowd back the houses to the right and the left;
for there are things which are odd when said that are rigorously exact;
and just as it is true to say that in large cities the sun makes the
southern fronts of houses to vegetate and grow, it is certain that the
frequent passage of vehicles enlarges streets. The symptoms of a new
life are evident. In this old provincial quarter, in the wildest nooks,
the pavement shows itself, the sidewalks begin to crawl and to grow
longer, even where there are as yet no pedestrians. One morning,--a
memorable morning in July, 1845,--black pots of bitumen were seen
smoking there; on that day it might be said that civilization had
arrived in the Rue de l'Ourcine, and that Paris had entered the suburb
of Saint-Marceau.




CHAPTER II--A NEST FOR OWL AND A WARBLER

It was in front of this Gorbeau house that Jean Valjean halted. Like
wild birds, he had chosen this desert place to construct his nest.

He fumbled in his waistcoat pocket, drew out a sort of a pass-key,
opened the door, entered, closed it again carefully, and ascended the
staircase, still carrying Cosette.

At the top of the stairs he drew from his pocket another key, with
which he opened another door. The chamber which he entered, and which
he closed again instantly, was a kind of moderately spacious attic,
furnished with a mattress laid on the floor, a table, and several
chairs; a stove in which a fire was burning, and whose embers were
visible, stood in one corner. A lantern on the boulevard cast a vague
light into this poor room. At the extreme end there was a dressing-room
with a folding bed; Jean Valjean carried the child to this bed and laid
her down there without waking her.

He struck a match and lighted a candle. All this was prepared beforehand
on the table, and, as he had done on the previous evening, he began
to scrutinize Cosette's face with a gaze full of ecstasy, in which the
expression of kindness and tenderness almost amounted to aberration. The
little girl, with that tranquil confidence which belongs only to extreme
strength and extreme weakness, had fallen asleep without knowing with
whom she was, and continued to sleep without knowing where she was.

Jean Valjean bent down and kissed that child's hand.

Nine months before he had kissed the hand of the mother, who had also
just fallen asleep.

The same sad, piercing, religious sentiment filled his heart.

He knelt beside Cosette's bed.

lt was broad daylight, and the child still slept. A wan ray of the
December sun penetrated the window of the attic and lay upon the
ceiling in long threads of light and shade. All at once a heavily laden
carrier's cart, which was passing along the boulevard, shook the frail
bed, like a clap of thunder, and made it quiver from top to bottom.

"Yes, madame!" cried Cosette, waking with a start, "here I am! here I
am!"

And she sprang out of bed, her eyes still half shut with the heaviness
of sleep, extending her arms towards the corner of the wall.

"Ah! mon Dieu, my broom!" said she.

She opened her eyes wide now, and beheld the smiling countenance of Jean
Valjean.

"Ah! so it is true!" said the child. "Good morning, Monsieur."

Children accept joy and happiness instantly and familiarly, being
themselves by nature joy and happiness.

Cosette caught sight of Catherine at the foot of her bed, and took
possession of her, and, as she played, she put a hundred questions to
Jean Valjean. Where was she? Was Paris very large? Was Madame Thenardier
very far away? Was she to go back? etc., etc. All at once she exclaimed,
"How pretty it is here!"

It was a frightful hole, but she felt free.

"Must I sweep?" she resumed at last.

"Play!" said Jean Valjean.

The day passed thus. Cosette, without troubling herself to understand
anything, was inexpressibly happy with that doll and that kind man.




CHAPTER III--TWO MISFORTUNES MAKE ONE PIECE OF GOOD FORTUNE

On the following morning, at daybreak, Jean Valjean was still by
Cosette's bedside; he watched there motionless, waiting for her to wake.

Some new thing had come into his soul.

Jean Valjean had never loved anything; for twenty-five years he had been
alone in the world. He had never been father, lover, husband, friend. In
the prison he had been vicious, gloomy, chaste, ignorant, and shy.
The heart of that ex-convict was full of virginity. His sister and his
sister's children had left him only a vague and far-off memory which
had finally almost completely vanished; he had made every effort to
find them, and not having been able to find them, he had forgotten them.
Human nature is made thus; the other tender emotions of his youth, if he
had ever had any, had fallen into an abyss.

When he saw Cosette, when he had taken possession of her, carried her
off, and delivered her, he felt his heart moved within him.

All the passion and affection within him awoke, and rushed towards that
child. He approached the bed, where she lay sleeping, and trembled with
joy. He suffered all the pangs of a mother, and he knew not what it
meant; for that great and singular movement of a heart which begins to
love is a very obscure and a very sweet thing.

Poor old man, with a perfectly new heart!

Only, as he was five and fifty, and Cosette eight years of age, all that
might have been love in the whole course of his life flowed together
into a sort of ineffable light.

It was the second white apparition which he had encountered. The Bishop
had caused the dawn of virtue to rise on his horizon; Cosette caused the
dawn of love to rise.

The early days passed in this dazzled state.

Cosette, on her side, had also, unknown to herself, become another
being, poor little thing! She was so little when her mother left her,
that she no longer remembered her. Like all children, who resemble young
shoots of the vine, which cling to everything, she had tried to love;
she had not succeeded. All had repulsed her,--the Thenardiers, their
children, other children. She had loved the dog, and he had died, after
which nothing and nobody would have anything to do with her. It is a sad
thing to say, and we have already intimated it, that, at eight years of
age, her heart was cold. It was not her fault; it was not the faculty
of loving that she lacked; alas! it was the possibility. Thus, from the
very first day, all her sentient and thinking powers loved this kind
man. She felt that which she had never felt before--a sensation of
expansion.

The man no longer produced on her the effect of being old or poor; she
thought Jean Valjean handsome, just as she thought the hovel pretty.

These are the effects of the dawn, of childhood, of joy. The novelty of
the earth and of life counts for something here. Nothing is so charming
as the coloring reflection of happiness on a garret. We all have in our
past a delightful garret.

Nature, a difference of fifty years, had set a profound gulf between
Jean Valjean and Cosette; destiny filled in this gulf. Destiny suddenly
united and wedded with its irresistible power these two uprooted
existences, differing in age, alike in sorrow. One, in fact, completed
the other. Cosette's instinct sought a father, as Jean Valjean's
instinct sought a child. To meet was to find each other. At the
mysterious moment when their hands touched, they were welded together.
When these two souls perceived each other, they recognized each other as
necessary to each other, and embraced each other closely.

Taking the words in their most comprehensive and absolute sense, we
may say that, separated from every one by the walls of the tomb, Jean
Valjean was the widower, and Cosette was the orphan: this situation
caused Jean Valjean to become Cosette's father after a celestial
fashion.

And in truth, the mysterious impression produced on Cosette in the
depths of the forest of Chelles by the hand of Jean Valjean grasping
hers in the dark was not an illusion, but a reality. The entrance of
that man into the destiny of that child had been the advent of God.

Moreover, Jean Valjean had chosen his refuge well. There he seemed
perfectly secure.

The chamber with a dressing-room, which he occupied with Cosette, was
the one whose window opened on the boulevard. This being the only window
in the house, no neighbors' glances were to be feared from across the
way or at the side.

The ground-floor of Number 50-52, a sort of dilapidated penthouse,
served as a wagon-house for market-gardeners, and no communication
existed between it and the first story. It was separated by the
flooring, which had neither traps nor stairs, and which formed the
diaphragm of the building, as it were. The first story contained, as we
have said, numerous chambers and several attics, only one of which
was occupied by the old woman who took charge of Jean Valjean's
housekeeping; all the rest was uninhabited.

It was this old woman, ornamented with the name of the principal lodger,
and in reality intrusted with the functions of portress, who had let
him the lodging on Christmas eve. He had represented himself to her as a
gentleman of means who had been ruined by Spanish bonds, who was coming
there to live with his little daughter. He had paid her six months in
advance, and had commissioned the old woman to furnish the chamber and
dressing-room, as we have seen. It was this good woman who had lighted
the fire in the stove, and prepared everything on the evening of their
arrival.

Week followed week; these two beings led a happy life in that hovel.

Cosette laughed, chattered, and sang from daybreak. Children have their
morning song as well as birds.

It sometimes happened that Jean Valjean clasped her tiny red hand, all
cracked with chilblains, and kissed it. The poor child, who was used
to being beaten, did not know the meaning of this, and ran away in
confusion.

At times she became serious and stared at her little black gown. Cosette
was no longer in rags; she was in mourning. She had emerged from misery,
and she was entering into life.

Jean Valjean had undertaken to teach her to read. Sometimes, as he made
the child spell, he remembered that it was with the idea of doing evil
that he had learned to read in prison. This idea had ended in teaching a
child to read. Then the ex-convict smiled with the pensive smile of the
angels.

He felt in it a premeditation from on high, the will of some one who
was not man, and he became absorbed in revery. Good thoughts have their
abysses as well as evil ones.

To teach Cosette to read, and to let her play, this constituted nearly
the whole of Jean Valjean's existence. And then he talked of her mother,
and he made her pray.

She called him father, and knew no other name for him.

He passed hours in watching her dressing and undressing her doll, and in
listening to her prattle. Life, henceforth, appeared to him to be full
of interest; men seemed to him good and just; he no longer reproached
any one in thought; he saw no reason why he should not live to be a very
old man, now that this child loved him. He saw a whole future stretching
out before him, illuminated by Cosette as by a charming light. The best
of us are not exempt from egotistical thoughts. At times, he reflected
with a sort of joy that she would be ugly.

This is only a personal opinion; but, to utter our whole thought, at the
point where Jean Valjean had arrived when he began to love Cosette, it
is by no means clear to us that he did not need this encouragement in
order that he might persevere in well-doing. He had just viewed the
malice of men and the misery of society under a new aspect--incomplete
aspects, which unfortunately only exhibited one side of the truth,
the fate of woman as summed up in Fantine, and public authority as
personified in Javert. He had returned to prison, this time for having
done right; he had quaffed fresh bitterness; disgust and lassitude were
overpowering him; even the memory of the Bishop probably suffered
a temporary eclipse, though sure to reappear later on luminous and
triumphant; but, after all, that sacred memory was growing dim.
Who knows whether Jean Valjean had not been on the eve of growing
discouraged and of falling once more? He loved and grew strong again.
Alas! he walked with no less indecision than Cosette. He protected her,
and she strengthened him. Thanks to him, she could walk through life;
thanks to her, he could continue in virtue. He was that child's stay,
and she was his prop. Oh, unfathomable and divine mystery of the
balances of destiny!




CHAPTER IV--THE REMARKS OF THE PRINCIPAL TENANT

Jean Valjean was prudent enough never to go out by day. Every evening,
at twilight, he walked for an hour or two, sometimes alone, often with
Cosette, seeking the most deserted side alleys of the boulevard, and
entering churches at nightfall. He liked to go to Saint-Medard, which is
the nearest church. When he did not take Cosette with him, she remained
with the old woman; but the child's delight was to go out with the good
man. She preferred an hour with him to all her rapturous tete-a-tetes
with Catherine. He held her hand as they walked, and said sweet things
to her.

It turned out that Cosette was a very gay little person.

The old woman attended to the housekeeping and cooking and went to
market.

They lived soberly, always having a little fire, but like people in
very moderate circumstances. Jean Valjean had made no alterations in
the furniture as it was the first day; he had merely had the glass door
leading to Cosette's dressing-room replaced by a solid door.

He still wore his yellow coat, his black breeches, and his old hat.
In the street, he was taken for a poor man. It sometimes happened that
kind-hearted women turned back to bestow a sou on him. Jean Valjean
accepted the sou with a deep bow. It also happened occasionally that he
encountered some poor wretch asking alms; then he looked behind him
to make sure that no one was observing him, stealthily approached the
unfortunate man, put a piece of money into his hand, often a silver
coin, and walked rapidly away. This had its disadvantages. He began
to be known in the neighborhood under the name of the beggar who gives
alms.

The old principal lodger, a cross-looking creature, who was
thoroughly permeated, so far as her neighbors were concerned, with the
inquisitiveness peculiar to envious persons, scrutinized Jean Valjean
a great deal, without his suspecting the fact. She was a little deaf,
which rendered her talkative. There remained to her from her past, two
teeth,--one above, the other below,--which she was continually knocking
against each other. She had questioned Cosette, who had not been able
to tell her anything, since she knew nothing herself except that she had
come from Montfermeil. One morning, this spy saw Jean Valjean, with
an air which struck the old gossip as peculiar, entering one of the
uninhabited compartments of the hovel. She followed him with the step
of an old cat, and was able to observe him without being seen, through a
crack in the door, which was directly opposite him. Jean Valjean had his
back turned towards this door, by way of greater security, no doubt. The
old woman saw him fumble in his pocket and draw thence a case, scissors,
and thread; then he began to rip the lining of one of the skirts of his
coat, and from the opening he took a bit of yellowish paper, which he
unfolded. The old woman recognized, with terror, the fact that it was
a bank-bill for a thousand francs. It was the second or third only that
she had seen in the course of her existence. She fled in alarm.

A moment later, Jean Valjean accosted her, and asked her to go and
get this thousand-franc bill changed for him, adding that it was his
quarterly income, which he had received the day before. "Where?" thought
the old woman. "He did not go out until six o'clock in the evening, and
the government bank certainly is not open at that hour." The old
woman went to get the bill changed, and mentioned her surmises. That
thousand-franc note, commented on and multiplied, produced a vast
amount of terrified discussion among the gossips of the Rue des Vignes
Saint-Marcel.

A few days later, it chanced that Jean Valjean was sawing some wood, in
his shirt-sleeves, in the corridor. The old woman was in the chamber,
putting things in order. She was alone. Cosette was occupied in admiring
the wood as it was sawed. The old woman caught sight of the coat hanging
on a nail, and examined it. The lining had been sewed up again. The good
woman felt of it carefully, and thought she observed in the skirts and
revers thicknesses of paper. More thousand-franc bank-bills, no doubt!

She also noticed that there were all sorts of things in the pockets.
Not only the needles, thread, and scissors which she had seen, but a big
pocket-book, a very large knife, and--a suspicious circumstance--several
wigs of various colors. Each pocket of this coat had the air of being in
a manner provided against unexpected accidents.

Thus the inhabitants of the house reached the last days of winter.




CHAPTER V--A FIVE-FRANC PIECE FALLS ON THE GROUND AND PRODUCES A TUMULT

Near Saint-Medard's church there was a poor man who was in the habit of
crouching on the brink of a public well which had been condemned, and
on whom Jean Valjean was fond of bestowing charity. He never passed this
man without giving him a few sous. Sometimes he spoke to him. Those who
envied this mendicant said that he belonged to the police. He was an
ex-beadle of seventy-five, who was constantly mumbling his prayers.

One evening, as Jean Valjean was passing by, when he had not Cosette
with him, he saw the beggar in his usual place, beneath the lantern
which had just been lighted. The man seemed engaged in prayer, according
to his custom, and was much bent over. Jean Valjean stepped up to him
and placed his customary alms in his hand. The mendicant raised his
eyes suddenly, stared intently at Jean Valjean, then dropped his head
quickly. This movement was like a flash of lightning. Jean Valjean was
seized with a shudder. It seemed to him that he had just caught sight,
by the light of the street lantern, not of the placid and beaming
visage of the old beadle, but of a well-known and startling face. He
experienced the same impression that one would have on finding one's
self, all of a sudden, face to face, in the dark, with a tiger. He
recoiled, terrified, petrified, daring neither to breathe, to speak,
to remain, nor to flee, staring at the beggar who had dropped his head,
which was enveloped in a rag, and no longer appeared to know that he
was there. At this strange moment, an instinct--possibly the mysterious
instinct of self-preservation,--restrained Jean Valjean from uttering a
word. The beggar had the same figure, the same rags, the same appearance
as he had every day. "Bah!" said Jean Valjean, "I am mad! I am dreaming!
Impossible!" And he returned profoundly troubled.

He hardly dared to confess, even to himself, that the face which he
thought he had seen was the face of Javert.

That night, on thinking the matter over, he regretted not having
questioned the man, in order to force him to raise his head a second
time.

On the following day, at nightfall, he went back. The beggar was at his
post. "Good day, my good man," said Jean Valjean, resolutely, handing
him a sou. The beggar raised his head, and replied in a whining voice,
"Thanks, my good sir." It was unmistakably the ex-beadle.

Jean Valjean felt completely reassured. He began to laugh. "How the
deuce could I have thought that I saw Javert there?" he thought. "Am I
going to lose my eyesight now?" And he thought no more about it.

A few days afterwards,--it might have been at eight o'clock in the
evening,--he was in his room, and engaged in making Cosette spell aloud,
when he heard the house door open and then shut again. This struck him
as singular. The old woman, who was the only inhabitant of the house
except himself, always went to bed at nightfall, so that she might not
burn out her candles. Jean Valjean made a sign to Cosette to be quiet.
He heard some one ascending the stairs. It might possibly be the old
woman, who might have fallen ill and have been out to the apothecary's.
Jean Valjean listened.

The step was heavy, and sounded like that of a man; but the old woman
wore stout shoes, and there is nothing which so strongly resembles the
step of a man as that of an old woman. Nevertheless, Jean Valjean blew
out his candle.

He had sent Cosette to bed, saying to her in a low voice, "Get into bed
very softly"; and as he kissed her brow, the steps paused.

Jean Valjean remained silent, motionless, with his back towards the
door, seated on the chair from which he had not stirred, and holding his
breath in the dark.

After the expiration of a rather long interval, he turned round, as he
heard nothing more, and, as he raised his eyes towards the door of his
chamber, he saw a light through the keyhole. This light formed a sort
of sinister star in the blackness of the door and the wall. There was
evidently some one there, who was holding a candle in his hand and
listening.

Several minutes elapsed thus, and the light retreated. But he heard no
sound of footsteps, which seemed to indicate that the person who had
been listening at the door had removed his shoes.

Jean Valjean threw himself, all dressed as he was, on his bed, and could
not close his eyes all night.

At daybreak, just as he was falling into a doze through fatigue, he was
awakened by the creaking of a door which opened on some attic at the
end of the corridor, then he heard the same masculine footstep which had
ascended the stairs on the preceding evening. The step was approaching.
He sprang off the bed and applied his eye to the keyhole, which was
tolerably large, hoping to see the person who had made his way by night
into the house and had listened at his door, as he passed. It was a
man, in fact, who passed, this time without pausing, in front of Jean
Valjean's chamber. The corridor was too dark to allow of the person's
face being distinguished; but when the man reached the staircase, a
ray of light from without made it stand out like a silhouette, and Jean
Valjean had a complete view of his back. The man was of lofty stature,
clad in a long frock-coat, with a cudgel under his arm. The formidable
neck and shoulders belonged to Javert.

Jean Valjean might have attempted to catch another glimpse of him
through his window opening on the boulevard, but he would have been
obliged to open the window: he dared not.

It was evident that this man had entered with a key, and like himself.
Who had given him that key? What was the meaning of this?

When the old woman came to do the work, at seven o'clock in the morning,
Jean Valjean cast a penetrating glance on her, but he did not question
her. The good woman appeared as usual.

As she swept up she remarked to him:--

"Possibly Monsieur may have heard some one come in last night?"

At that age, and on that boulevard, eight o'clock in the evening was the
dead of the night.

"That is true, by the way," he replied, in the most natural tone
possible. "Who was it?"

"It was a new lodger who has come into the house," said the old woman.

"And what is his name?"

"I don't know exactly; Dumont, or Daumont, or some name of that sort."

"And who is this Monsieur Dumont?"

The old woman gazed at him with her little polecat eyes, and answered:--

"A gentleman of property, like yourself."

Perhaps she had no ulterior meaning. Jean Valjean thought he perceived
one.

When the old woman had taken her departure, he did up a hundred francs
which he had in a cupboard, into a roll, and put it in his pocket. In
spite of all the precautions which he took in this operation so that he
might not be heard rattling silver, a hundred-sou piece escaped from his
hands and rolled noisily on the floor.

When darkness came on, he descended and carefully scrutinized both sides
of the boulevard. He saw no one. The boulevard appeared to be absolutely
deserted. It is true that a person can conceal himself behind trees.

He went up stairs again.

"Come." he said to Cosette.

He took her by the hand, and they both went out.




BOOK FIFTH.--FOR A BLACK HUNT, A MUTE PACK




CHAPTER I--THE ZIGZAGS OF STRATEGY

An observation here becomes necessary, in view of the pages which the
reader is about to peruse, and of others which will be met with further
on.

The author of this book, who regrets the necessity of mentioning
himself, has been absent from Paris for many years. Paris has been
transformed since he quitted it. A new city has arisen, which is, after
a fashion, unknown to him. There is no need for him to say that he loves
Paris: Paris is his mind's natal city. In consequence of demolitions and
reconstructions, the Paris of his youth, that Paris which he bore away
religiously in his memory, is now a Paris of days gone by. He must
be permitted to speak of that Paris as though it still existed. It is
possible that when the author conducts his readers to a spot and says,
"In such a street there stands such and such a house," neither street
nor house will any longer exist in that locality. Readers may verify
the facts if they care to take the trouble. For his own part, he is
unacquainted with the new Paris, and he writes with the old Paris before
his eyes in an illusion which is precious to him. It is a delight to him
to dream that there still lingers behind him something of that which he
beheld when he was in his own country, and that all has not vanished.
So long as you go and come in your native land, you imagine that those
streets are a matter of indifference to you; that those windows,
those roofs, and those doors are nothing to you; that those walls are
strangers to you; that those trees are merely the first encountered
haphazard; that those houses, which you do not enter, are useless to
you; that the pavements which you tread are merely stones. Later on,
when you are no longer there, you perceive that the streets are dear to
you; that you miss those roofs, those doors; and that those walls are
necessary to you, those trees are well beloved by you; that you entered
those houses which you never entered, every day, and that you have left
a part of your heart, of your blood, of your soul, in those pavements.
All those places which you no longer behold, which you may never
behold again, perchance, and whose memory you have cherished, take on
a melancholy charm, recur to your mind with the melancholy of an
apparition, make the holy land visible to you, and are, so to speak,
the very form of France, and you love them; and you call them up as they
are, as they were, and you persist in this, and you will submit to no
change: for you are attached to the figure of your fatherland as to the
face of your mother.

May we, then, be permitted to speak of the past in the present? That
said, we beg the reader to take note of it, and we continue.

Jean Valjean instantly quitted the boulevard and plunged into the
streets, taking the most intricate lines which he could devise,
returning on his track at times, to make sure that he was not being
followed.

[Illustration: The Black Hunt  2b5-1-black-hunt]

This manoeuvre is peculiar to the hunted stag. On soil where an
imprint of the track may be left, this manoeuvre possesses, among other
advantages, that of deceiving the huntsmen and the dogs, by throwing
them on the wrong scent. In venery this is called false re-imbushment.

The moon was full that night. Jean Valjean was not sorry for this. The
moon, still very close to the horizon, cast great masses of light and
shadow in the streets. Jean Valjean could glide along close to the
houses on the dark side, and yet keep watch on the light side. He did
not, perhaps, take sufficiently into consideration the fact that the
dark side escaped him. Still, in the deserted lanes which lie near the
Rue Poliveau, he thought he felt certain that no one was following him.

Cosette walked on without asking any questions. The sufferings of the
first six years of her life had instilled something passive into her
nature. Moreover,--and this is a remark to which we shall frequently
have occasion to recur,--she had grown used, without being herself
aware of it, to the peculiarities of this good man and to the freaks of
destiny. And then she was with him, and she felt safe.

Jean Valjean knew no more where he was going than did Cosette. He
trusted in God, as she trusted in him. It seemed as though he also were
clinging to the hand of some one greater than himself; he thought he
felt a being leading him, though invisible. However, he had no settled
idea, no plan, no project. He was not even absolutely sure that it was
Javert, and then it might have been Javert, without Javert knowing that
he was Jean Valjean. Was not he disguised? Was not he believed to be
dead? Still, queer things had been going on for several days. He wanted
no more of them. He was determined not to return to the Gorbeau house.
Like the wild animal chased from its lair, he was seeking a hole in
which he might hide until he could find one where he might dwell.

Jean Valjean described many and varied labyrinths in the Mouffetard
quarter, which was already asleep, as though the discipline of the
Middle Ages and the yoke of the curfew still existed; he combined in
various manners, with cunning strategy, the Rue Censier and the Rue
Copeau, the Rue du Battoir-Saint-Victor and the Rue du Puits l'Ermite.
There are lodging houses in this locality, but he did not even enter
one, finding nothing which suited him. He had no doubt that if any one
had chanced to be upon his track, they would have lost it.

As eleven o'clock struck from Saint-Etienne-du-Mont, he was traversing
the Rue de Pontoise, in front of the office of the commissary of police,
situated at No. 14. A few moments later, the instinct of which we have
spoken above made him turn round. At that moment he saw distinctly,
thanks to the commissary's lantern, which betrayed them, three men
who were following him closely, pass, one after the other, under that
lantern, on the dark side of the street. One of the three entered the
alley leading to the commissary's house. The one who marched at their
head struck him as decidedly suspicious.

"Come, child," he said to Cosette; and he made haste to quit the Rue
Pontoise.

He took a circuit, turned into the Passage des Patriarches, which was
closed on account of the hour, strode along the Rue de l'Epee-de-Bois
and the Rue de l'Arbalete, and plunged into the Rue des Postes.

At that time there was a square formed by the intersection of
streets, where the College Rollin stands to-day, and where the Rue
Neuve-Sainte-Genevieve turns off.

It is understood, of course, that the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Genevieve is an
old street, and that a posting-chaise does not pass through the Rue des
Postes once in ten years. In the thirteenth century this Rue des Postes
was inhabited by potters, and its real name is Rue des Pots.

The moon cast a livid light into this open space. Jean Valjean went into
ambush in a doorway, calculating that if the men were still following
him, he could not fail to get a good look at them, as they traversed
this illuminated space.

In point of fact, three minutes had not elapsed when the men made their
appearance. There were four of them now. All were tall, dressed in long,
brown coats, with round hats, and huge cudgels in their hands. Their
great stature and their vast fists rendered them no less alarming
than did their sinister stride through the darkness. One would have
pronounced them four spectres disguised as bourgeois.

They halted in the middle of the space and formed a group, like men in
consultation. They had an air of indecision. The one who appeared to be
their leader turned round and pointed hastily with his right hand in the
direction which Jean Valjean had taken; another seemed to indicate the
contrary direction with considerable obstinacy. At the moment when the
first man wheeled round, the moon fell full in his face. Jean Valjean
recognized Javert perfectly.




CHAPTER II--IT IS LUCKY THAT THE PONT D'AUSTERLITZ BEARS CARRIAGES

Uncertainty was at an end for Jean Valjean: fortunately it still lasted
for the men. He took advantage of their hesitation. It was time lost for
them, but gained for him. He slipped from under the gate where he had
concealed himself, and went down the Rue des Postes, towards the region
of the Jardin des Plantes. Cosette was beginning to be tired. He took
her in his arms and carried her. There were no passers-by, and the
street lanterns had not been lighted on account of there being a moon.

He redoubled his pace.

In a few strides he had reached the Goblet potteries, on the front
of which the moonlight rendered distinctly legible the ancient
inscription:--

               De Goblet fils c'est ici la fabrique;[14]
               Venez choisir des cruches et des broos,
               Des pots a fleurs, des tuyaux, de la brique.
               A tout venant le Coeur vend des Carreaux.



He left behind him the Rue de la Clef, then the Fountain Saint-Victor,
skirted the Jardin des Plantes by the lower streets, and reached the
quay. There he turned round. The quay was deserted. The streets were
deserted. There was no one behind him. He drew a long breath.

He gained the Pont d'Austerlitz.

Tolls were still collected there at that epoch.

He presented himself at the toll office and handed over a sou.

"It is two sous," said the old soldier in charge of the bridge. "You are
carrying a child who can walk. Pay for two."

He paid, vexed that his passage should have aroused remark. Every flight
should be an imperceptible slipping away.

A heavy cart was crossing the Seine at the same time as himself, and on
its way, like him, to the right bank. This was of use to him. He could
traverse the bridge in the shadow of the cart.

Towards the middle of the Bridge, Cosette, whose feet were benumbed,
wanted to walk. He set her on the ground and took her hand again.

The bridge once crossed, he perceived some timber-yards on his right. He
directed his course thither. In order to reach them, it was necessary to
risk himself in a tolerably large unsheltered and illuminated space.
He did not hesitate. Those who were on his track had evidently lost the
scent, and Jean Valjean believed himself to be out of danger. Hunted,
yes; followed, no.

A little street, the Rue du Chemin-Vert-Saint-Antoine, opened out
between two timber-yards enclosed in walls. This street was dark and
narrow and seemed made expressly for him. Before entering it he cast a
glance behind him.

From the point where he stood he could see the whole extent of the Pont
d'Austerlitz.

Four shadows were just entering on the bridge.

These shadows had their backs turned to the Jardin des Plantes and were
on their way to the right bank.

These four shadows were the four men.

Jean Valjean shuddered like the wild beast which is recaptured.

One hope remained to him; it was, that the men had not, perhaps, stepped
on the bridge, and had not caught sight of him while he was crossing the
large illuminated space, holding Cosette by the hand.

In that case, by plunging into the little street before him, he
might escape, if he could reach the timber-yards, the marshes, the
market-gardens, the uninhabited ground which was not built upon.

It seemed to him that he might commit himself to that silent little
street. He entered it.




CHAPTER III--TO WIT, THE PLAN OF PARIS IN 1727

Three hundred paces further on, he arrived at a point where the street
forked. It separated into two streets, which ran in a slanting line, one
to the right, and the other to the left.

Jean Valjean had before him what resembled the two branches of a Y.
Which should he choose? He did not hesitate, but took the one on the
right.

Why?

Because that to the left ran towards a suburb, that is to say, towards
inhabited regions, and the right branch towards the open country, that
is to say, towards deserted regions.

However, they no longer walked very fast. Cosette's pace retarded Jean
Valjean's.

He took her up and carried her again. Cosette laid her head on the
shoulder of the good man and said not a word.

He turned round from time to time and looked behind him. He took care to
keep always on the dark side of the street. The street was straight
in his rear. The first two or three times that he turned round he saw
nothing; the silence was profound, and he continued his march somewhat
reassured. All at once, on turning round, he thought he perceived in the
portion of the street which he had just passed through, far off in the
obscurity, something which was moving.

He rushed forward precipitately rather than walked, hoping to find some
side-street, to make his escape through it, and thus to break his scent
once more.

He arrived at a wall.

This wall, however, did not absolutely prevent further progress; it was
a wall which bordered a transverse street, in which the one he had taken
ended.

Here again, he was obliged to come to a decision; should he go to the
right or to the left.

He glanced to the right. The fragmentary lane was prolonged between
buildings which were either sheds or barns, then ended at a blind alley.
The extremity of the cul-de-sac was distinctly visible,--a lofty white
wall.

He glanced to the left. On that side the lane was open, and about
two hundred paces further on, ran into a street of which it was the
affluent. On that side lay safety.

At the moment when Jean Valjean was meditating a turn to the left, in
an effort to reach the street which he saw at the end of the lane, he
perceived a sort of motionless, black statue at the corner of the lane
and the street towards which he was on the point of directing his steps.

It was some one, a man, who had evidently just been posted there, and
who was barring the passage and waiting.

Jean Valjean recoiled.

The point of Paris where Jean Valjean found himself, situated between
the Faubourg Saint-Antoine and la Rapee, is one of those which recent
improvements have transformed from top to bottom,--resulting in
disfigurement according to some, and in a transfiguration according to
others. The market-gardens, the timber-yards, and the old buildings
have been effaced. To-day, there are brand-new, wide streets, arenas,
circuses, hippodromes, railway stations, and a prison, Mazas, there;
progress, as the reader sees, with its antidote.

Half a century ago, in that ordinary, popular tongue, which is all
compounded of traditions, which persists in calling the Institut les
Quatre-Nations, and the Opera-Comique Feydeau, the precise spot
whither Jean Valjean had arrived was called le Petit Picpus. The
Porte Saint-Jacques, the Porte Paris, the Barriere des Sergents, the
Porcherons, la Galiote, les Celestins, les Capucins, le Mail, la Bourbe,
l'Arbre de Cracovie, la Petite-Pologne--these are the names of old Paris
which survive amid the new. The memory of the populace hovers over these
relics of the past.

Le Petit-Picpus, which, moreover, hardly ever had any existence, and
never was more than the outline of a quarter, had nearly the monkish
aspect of a Spanish town. The roads were not much paved; the streets
were not much built up. With the exception of the two or three streets,
of which we shall presently speak, all was wall and solitude there. Not
a shop, not a vehicle, hardly a candle lighted here and there in the
windows; all lights extinguished after ten o'clock. Gardens, convents,
timber-yards, marshes; occasional lowly dwellings and great walls as
high as the houses.

Such was this quarter in the last century. The Revolution snubbed
it soundly. The republican government demolished and cut through it.
Rubbish shoots were established there. Thirty years ago, this quarter
was disappearing under the erasing process of new buildings. To-day,
it has been utterly blotted out. The Petit-Picpus, of which no existing
plan has preserved a trace, is indicated with sufficient clearness
in the plan of 1727, published at Paris by Denis Thierry, Rue
Saint-Jacques, opposite the Rue du Platre; and at Lyons, by Jean Girin,
Rue Merciere, at the sign of Prudence. Petit-Picpus had, as
we have just mentioned, a Y of streets, formed by the Rue du
Chemin-Vert-Saint-Antoine, which spread out in two branches, taking on
the left the name of Little Picpus Street, and on the right the name of
the Rue Polonceau. The two limbs of the Y were connected at the apex
as by a bar; this bar was called Rue Droit-Mur. The Rue Polonceau ended
there; Rue Petit-Picpus passed on, and ascended towards the Lenoir
market. A person coming from the Seine reached the extremity of the Rue
Polonceau, and had on his right the Rue Droit-Mur, turning abruptly at a
right angle, in front of him the wall of that street, and on his right a
truncated prolongation of the Rue Droit-Mur, which had no issue and was
called the Cul-de-Sac Genrot.

It was here that Jean Valjean stood.

As we have just said, on catching sight of that black silhouette
standing on guard at the angle of the Rue Droit-Mur and the Rue
Petit-Picpus, he recoiled. There could be no doubt of it. That phantom
was lying in wait for him.

What was he to do?

The time for retreating was passed. That which he had perceived in
movement an instant before, in the distant darkness, was Javert and his
squad without a doubt. Javert was probably already at the commencement
of the street at whose end Jean Valjean stood. Javert, to all
appearances, was acquainted with this little labyrinth, and had taken
his precautions by sending one of his men to guard the exit. These
surmises, which so closely resembled proofs, whirled suddenly, like a
handful of dust caught up by an unexpected gust of wind, through Jean
Valjean's mournful brain. He examined the Cul-de-Sac Genrot; there he
was cut off. He examined the Rue Petit-Picpus; there stood a sentinel.
He saw that black form standing out in relief against the white
pavement, illuminated by the moon; to advance was to fall into this
man's hands; to retreat was to fling himself into Javert's arms. Jean
Valjean felt himself caught, as in a net, which was slowly contracting;
he gazed heavenward in despair.




CHAPTER IV--THE GROPINGS OF FLIGHT

In order to understand what follows, it is requisite to form an exact
idea of the Droit-Mur lane, and, in particular, of the angle which one
leaves on the left when one emerges from the Rue Polonceau into this
lane. Droit-Mur lane was almost entirely bordered on the right, as far
as the Rue Petit-Picpus, by houses of mean aspect; on the left by a
solitary building of severe outlines, composed of numerous parts which
grew gradually higher by a story or two as they approached the Rue
Petit-Picpus side; so that this building, which was very lofty on the
Rue Petit-Picpus side, was tolerably low on the side adjoining the Rue
Polonceau. There, at the angle of which we have spoken, it descended to
such a degree that it consisted of merely a wall. This wall did not abut
directly on the Street; it formed a deeply retreating niche, concealed
by its two corners from two observers who might have been, one in the
Rue Polonceau, the other in the Rue Droit-Mur.

Beginning with these angles of the niche, the wall extended along the
Rue Polonceau as far as a house which bore the number 49, and along the
Rue Droit-Mur, where the fragment was much shorter, as far as the gloomy
building which we have mentioned and whose gable it intersected, thus
forming another retreating angle in the street. This gable was sombre
of aspect; only one window was visible, or, to speak more correctly, two
shutters covered with a sheet of zinc and kept constantly closed.

The state of the places of which we are here giving a description is
rigorously exact, and will certainly awaken a very precise memory in the
mind of old inhabitants of the quarter.

The niche was entirely filled by a thing which resembled a colossal
and wretched door; it was a vast, formless assemblage of perpendicular
planks, the upper ones being broader than the lower, bound together by
long transverse strips of iron. At one side there was a carriage gate of
the ordinary dimensions, and which had evidently not been cut more than
fifty years previously.

A linden-tree showed its crest above the niche, and the wall was covered
with ivy on the side of the Rue Polonceau.

In the imminent peril in which Jean Valjean found himself, this sombre
building had about it a solitary and uninhabited look which tempted him.
He ran his eyes rapidly over it; he said to himself, that if he could
contrive to get inside it, he might save himself. First he conceived an
idea, then a hope.

In the central portion of the front of this building, on the Rue
Droit-Mur side, there were at all the windows of the different stories
ancient cistern pipes of lead. The various branches of the pipes which
led from one central pipe to all these little basins sketched out a sort
of tree on the front. These ramifications of pipes with their hundred
elbows imitated those old leafless vine-stocks which writhe over the
fronts of old farm-houses.

This odd espalier, with its branches of lead and iron, was the first
thing that struck Jean Valjean. He seated Cosette with her back against
a stone post, with an injunction to be silent, and ran to the spot where
the conduit touched the pavement. Perhaps there was some way of climbing
up by it and entering the house. But the pipe was dilapidated and past
service, and hardly hung to its fastenings. Moreover, all the windows
of this silent dwelling were grated with heavy iron bars, even the attic
windows in the roof. And then, the moon fell full upon that facade, and
the man who was watching at the corner of the street would have seen
Jean Valjean in the act of climbing. And finally, what was to be done
with Cosette? How was she to be drawn up to the top of a three-story
house?

He gave up all idea of climbing by means of the drain-pipe, and crawled
along the wall to get back into the Rue Polonceau.

When he reached the slant of the wall where he had left Cosette, he
noticed that no one could see him there. As we have just explained, he
was concealed from all eyes, no matter from which direction they were
approaching; besides this, he was in the shadow. Finally, there were
two doors; perhaps they might be forced. The wall above which he saw the
linden-tree and the ivy evidently abutted on a garden where he could, at
least, hide himself, although there were as yet no leaves on the trees,
and spend the remainder of the night.

Time was passing; he must act quickly.

He felt over the carriage door, and immediately recognized the fact that
it was impracticable outside and in.

He approached the other door with more hope; it was frightfully
decrepit; its very immensity rendered it less solid; the planks were
rotten; the iron bands--there were only three of them--were rusted. It
seemed as though it might be possible to pierce this worm-eaten barrier.

On examining it he found that the door was not a door; it had neither
hinges, cross-bars, lock, nor fissure in the middle; the iron bands
traversed it from side to side without any break. Through the crevices
in the planks he caught a view of unhewn slabs and blocks of stone
roughly cemented together, which passers-by might still have seen there
ten years ago. He was forced to acknowledge with consternation that this
apparent door was simply the wooden decoration of a building against
which it was placed. It was easy to tear off a plank; but then, one
found one's self face to face with a wall.




CHAPTER V--WHICH WOULD BE IMPOSSIBLE WITH GAS LANTERNS

At that moment a heavy and measured sound began to be audible at some
distance. Jean Valjean risked a glance round the corner of the street.
Seven or eight soldiers, drawn up in a platoon, had just debouched
into the Rue Polonceau. He saw the gleam of their bayonets. They were
advancing towards him; these soldiers, at whose head he distinguished
Javert's tall figure, advanced slowly and cautiously. They halted
frequently; it was plain that they were searching all the nooks of the
walls and all the embrasures of the doors and alleys.

This was some patrol that Javert had encountered--there could be no
mistake as to this surmise--and whose aid he had demanded.

Javert's two acolytes were marching in their ranks.

At the rate at which they were marching, and in consideration of the
halts which they were making, it would take them about a quarter of
an hour to reach the spot where Jean Valjean stood. It was a frightful
moment. A few minutes only separated Jean Valjean from that terrible
precipice which yawned before him for the third time. And the galleys
now meant not only the galleys, but Cosette lost to him forever; that is
to say, a life resembling the interior of a tomb.

There was but one thing which was possible.

Jean Valjean had this peculiarity, that he carried, as one might say,
two beggar's pouches: in one he kept his saintly thoughts; in the other
the redoubtable talents of a convict. He rummaged in the one or the
other, according to circumstances.

Among his other resources, thanks to his numerous escapes from the
prison at Toulon, he was, as it will be remembered, a past master in the
incredible art of crawling up without ladder or climbing-irons, by sheer
muscular force, by leaning on the nape of his neck, his shoulders, his
hips, and his knees, by helping himself on the rare projections of the
stone, in the right angle of a wall, as high as the sixth story, if need
be; an art which has rendered so celebrated and so alarming that corner
of the wall of the Conciergerie of Paris by which Battemolle, condemned
to death, made his escape twenty years ago.

Jean Valjean measured with his eyes the wall above which he espied the
linden; it was about eighteen feet in height. The angle which it formed
with the gable of the large building was filled, at its lower extremity,
by a mass of masonry of a triangular shape, probably intended to
preserve that too convenient corner from the rubbish of those dirty
creatures called the passers-by. This practice of filling up corners of
the wall is much in use in Paris.

This mass was about five feet in height; the space above the summit of
this mass which it was necessary to climb was not more than fourteen
feet.

The wall was surmounted by a flat stone without a coping.

Cosette was the difficulty, for she did not know how to climb a wall.
Should he abandon her? Jean Valjean did not once think of that. It
was impossible to carry her. A man's whole strength is required to
successfully carry out these singular ascents. The least burden would
disturb his centre of gravity and pull him downwards.

A rope would have been required; Jean Valjean had none. Where was he to
get a rope at midnight, in the Rue Polonceau? Certainly, if Jean Valjean
had had a kingdom, he would have given it for a rope at that moment.

All extreme situations have their lightning flashes which sometimes
dazzle, sometimes illuminate us.

Jean Valjean's despairing glance fell on the street lantern-post of the
blind alley Genrot.

At that epoch there were no gas-jets in the streets of Paris. At
nightfall lanterns placed at regular distances were lighted; they were
ascended and descended by means of a rope, which traversed the street
from side to side, and was adjusted in a groove of the post. The pulley
over which this rope ran was fastened underneath the lantern in a little
iron box, the key to which was kept by the lamp-lighter, and the rope
itself was protected by a metal case.

Jean Valjean, with the energy of a supreme struggle, crossed the street
at one bound, entered the blind alley, broke the latch of the little box
with the point of his knife, and an instant later he was beside Cosette
once more. He had a rope. These gloomy inventors of expedients work
rapidly when they are fighting against fatality.

We have already explained that the lanterns had not been lighted that
night. The lantern in the Cul-de-Sac Genrot was thus naturally extinct,
like the rest; and one could pass directly under it without even
noticing that it was no longer in its place.

Nevertheless, the hour, the place, the darkness, Jean Valjean's
absorption, his singular gestures, his goings and comings, all had begun
to render Cosette uneasy. Any other child than she would have given vent
to loud shrieks long before. She contented herself with plucking Jean
Valjean by the skirt of his coat. They could hear the sound of the
patrol's approach ever more and more distinctly.

"Father," said she, in a very low voice, "I am afraid. Who is coming
yonder?"

"Hush!" replied the unhappy man; "it is Madame Thenardier."

Cosette shuddered. He added:--

"Say nothing. Don't interfere with me. If you cry out, if you weep, the
Thenardier is lying in wait for you. She is coming to take you back."

Then, without haste, but without making a useless movement, with firm
and curt precision, the more remarkable at a moment when the patrol and
Javert might come upon him at any moment, he undid his cravat, passed it
round Cosette's body under the armpits, taking care that it should not
hurt the child, fastened this cravat to one end of the rope, by means of
that knot which seafaring men call a "swallow knot," took the other end
of the rope in his teeth, pulled off his shoes and stockings, which
he threw over the wall, stepped upon the mass of masonry, and began
to raise himself in the angle of the wall and the gable with as much
solidity and certainty as though he had the rounds of a ladder under his
feet and elbows. Half a minute had not elapsed when he was resting on
his knees on the wall.

Cosette gazed at him in stupid amazement, without uttering a word. Jean
Valjean's injunction, and the name of Madame Thenardier, had chilled her
blood.

All at once she heard Jean Valjean's voice crying to her, though in a
very low tone:--

"Put your back against the wall."

She obeyed.

"Don't say a word, and don't be alarmed," went on Jean Valjean.

And she felt herself lifted from the ground.

Before she had time to recover herself, she was on the top of the wall.

Jean Valjean grasped her, put her on his back, took her two tiny hands
in his large left hand, lay down flat on his stomach and crawled along
on top of the wall as far as the cant. As he had guessed, there stood
a building whose roof started from the top of the wooden barricade and
descended to within a very short distance of the ground, with a gentle
slope which grazed the linden-tree. A lucky circumstance, for the wall
was much higher on this side than on the street side. Jean Valjean could
only see the ground at a great depth below him.

He had just reached the slope of the roof, and had not yet left the
crest of the wall, when a violent uproar announced the arrival of the
patrol. The thundering voice of Javert was audible:--

"Search the blind alley! The Rue Droit-Mur is guarded! so is the Rue
Petit-Picpus. I'll answer for it that he is in the blind alley."

The soldiers rushed into the Genrot alley.

Jean Valjean allowed himself to slide down the roof, still holding fast
to Cosette, reached the linden-tree, and leaped to the ground. Whether
from terror or courage, Cosette had not breathed a sound, though her
hands were a little abraded.




CHAPTER VI--THE BEGINNING OF AN ENIGMA

Jean Valjean found himself in a sort of garden which was very vast and
of singular aspect; one of those melancholy gardens which seem made to
be looked at in winter and at night. This garden was oblong in shape,
with an alley of large poplars at the further end, tolerably tall forest
trees in the corners, and an unshaded space in the centre, where could
be seen a very large, solitary tree, then several fruit-trees, gnarled
and bristling like bushes, beds of vegetables, a melon patch, whose
glass frames sparkled in the moonlight, and an old well. Here and
there stood stone benches which seemed black with moss. The alleys were
bordered with gloomy and very erect little shrubs. The grass had half
taken possession of them, and a green mould covered the rest.

Jean Valjean had beside him the building whose roof had served him as
a means of descent, a pile of fagots, and, behind the fagots, directly
against the wall, a stone statue, whose mutilated face was no longer
anything more than a shapeless mask which loomed vaguely through the
gloom.

The building was a sort of ruin, where dismantled chambers were
distinguishable, one of which, much encumbered, seemed to serve as a
shed.

The large building of the Rue Droit-Mur, which had a wing on the Rue
Petit-Picpus, turned two facades, at right angles, towards this garden.
These interior facades were even more tragic than the exterior. All
the windows were grated. Not a gleam of light was visible at any one of
them. The upper story had scuttles like prisons. One of those facades
cast its shadow on the other, which fell over the garden like an immense
black pall.

No other house was visible. The bottom of the garden was lost in mist
and darkness. Nevertheless, walls could be confusedly made out, which
intersected as though there were more cultivated land beyond, and the
low roofs of the Rue Polonceau.

Nothing more wild and solitary than this garden could be imagined. There
was no one in it, which was quite natural in view of the hour; but it
did not seem as though this spot were made for any one to walk in, even
in broad daylight.

Jean Valjean's first care had been to get hold of his shoes and put them
on again, then to step under the shed with Cosette. A man who is fleeing
never thinks himself sufficiently hidden. The child, whose thoughts were
still on the Thenardier, shared his instinct for withdrawing from sight
as much as possible.

Cosette trembled and pressed close to him. They heard the tumultuous
noise of the patrol searching the blind alley and the streets; the blows
of their gun-stocks against the stones; Javert's appeals to the police
spies whom he had posted, and his imprecations mingled with words which
could not be distinguished.

At the expiration of a quarter of an hour it seemed as though that
species of stormy roar were becoming more distant. Jean Valjean held his
breath.

He had laid his hand lightly on Cosette's mouth.

However, the solitude in which he stood was so strangely calm, that this
frightful uproar, close and furious as it was, did not disturb him by so
much as the shadow of a misgiving. It seemed as though those walls had
been built of the deaf stones of which the Scriptures speak.

All at once, in the midst of this profound calm, a fresh sound arose; a
sound as celestial, divine, ineffable, ravishing, as the other had been
horrible. It was a hymn which issued from the gloom, a dazzling burst
of prayer and harmony in the obscure and alarming silence of the night;
women's voices, but voices composed at one and the same time of the pure
accents of virgins and the innocent accents of children,--voices which
are not of the earth, and which resemble those that the newborn infant
still hears, and which the dying man hears already. This song proceeded
from the gloomy edifice which towered above the garden. At the moment
when the hubbub of demons retreated, one would have said that a choir of
angels was approaching through the gloom.

Cosette and Jean Valjean fell on their knees.

They knew not what it was, they knew not where they were; but both of
them, the man and the child, the penitent and the innocent, felt that
they must kneel.

These voices had this strange characteristic, that they did not prevent
the building from seeming to be deserted. It was a supernatural chant in
an uninhabited house.

While these voices were singing, Jean Valjean thought of nothing. He no
longer beheld the night; he beheld a blue sky. It seemed to him that he
felt those wings which we all have within us, unfolding.

The song died away. It may have lasted a long time. Jean Valjean could
not have told. Hours of ecstasy are never more than a moment.

All fell silent again. There was no longer anything in the street;
there was nothing in the garden. That which had menaced, that which had
reassured him,--all had vanished. The breeze swayed a few dry weeds
on the crest of the wall, and they gave out a faint, sweet, melancholy
sound.




CHAPTER VII--CONTINUATION OF THE ENIGMA

The night wind had risen, which indicated that it must be between one
and two o'clock in the morning. Poor Cosette said nothing. As she had
seated herself beside him and leaned her head against him, Jean Valjean
had fancied that she was asleep. He bent down and looked at her.
Cosette's eyes were wide open, and her thoughtful air pained Jean
Valjean.

She was still trembling.

"Are you sleepy?" said Jean Valjean.

"I am very cold," she replied.

A moment later she resumed:--

"Is she still there?"

"Who?" said Jean Valjean.

"Madame Thenardier."

Jean Valjean had already forgotten the means which he had employed to
make Cosette keep silent.

"Ah!" said he, "she is gone. You need fear nothing further."

The child sighed as though a load had been lifted from her breast.

The ground was damp, the shed open on all sides, the breeze grew more
keen every instant. The goodman took off his coat and wrapped it round
Cosette.

"Are you less cold now?" said he.

"Oh, yes, father."

"Well, wait for me a moment. I will soon be back."

He quitted the ruin and crept along the large building, seeking a better
shelter. He came across doors, but they were closed. There were bars at
all the windows of the ground floor.

Just after he had turned the inner angle of the edifice, he observed
that he was coming to some arched windows, where he perceived a light.
He stood on tiptoe and peeped through one of these windows. They all
opened on a tolerably vast hall, paved with large flagstones, cut up
by arcades and pillars, where only a tiny light and great shadows were
visible. The light came from a taper which was burning in one
corner. The apartment was deserted, and nothing was stirring in it.
Nevertheless, by dint of gazing intently he thought he perceived on the
ground something which appeared to be covered with a winding-sheet, and
which resembled a human form. This form was lying face downward, flat
on the pavement, with the arms extended in the form of a cross, in the
immobility of death. One would have said, judging from a sort of serpent
which undulated over the floor, that this sinister form had a rope round
its neck.

The whole chamber was bathed in that mist of places which are sparely
illuminated, which adds to horror.

Jean Valjean often said afterwards, that, although many funereal
spectres had crossed his path in life, he had never beheld anything more
blood-curdling and terrible than that enigmatical form accomplishing
some inexplicable mystery in that gloomy place, and beheld thus at
night. It was alarming to suppose that that thing was perhaps dead; and
still more alarming to think that it was perhaps alive.

He had the courage to plaster his face to the glass, and to watch
whether the thing would move. In spite of his remaining thus what seemed
to him a very long time, the outstretched form made no movement. All
at once he felt himself overpowered by an inexpressible terror, and he
fled. He began to run towards the shed, not daring to look behind him.
It seemed to him, that if he turned his head, he should see that form
following him with great strides and waving its arms.

He reached the ruin all out of breath. His knees were giving way beneath
him; the perspiration was pouring from him.

Where was he? Who could ever have imagined anything like that sort of
sepulchre in the midst of Paris! What was this strange house? An edifice
full of nocturnal mystery, calling to souls through the darkness with
the voice of angels, and when they came, offering them abruptly that
terrible vision; promising to open the radiant portals of heaven, and
then opening the horrible gates of the tomb! And it actually was an
edifice, a house, which bore a number on the street! It was not a dream!
He had to touch the stones to convince himself that such was the fact.

Cold, anxiety, uneasiness, the emotions of the night, had given him a
genuine fever, and all these ideas were clashing together in his brain.

He stepped up to Cosette. She was asleep.




CHAPTER VIII--THE ENIGMA BECOMES DOUBLY MYSTERIOUS

The child had laid her head on a stone and fallen asleep.

He sat down beside her and began to think. Little by little, as he gazed
at her, he grew calm and regained possession of his freedom of mind.

He clearly perceived this truth, the foundation of his life henceforth,
that so long as she was there, so long as he had her near him, he should
need nothing except for her, he should fear nothing except for her. He
was not even conscious that he was very cold, since he had taken off his
coat to cover her.

Nevertheless, athwart this revery into which he had fallen he had heard
for some time a peculiar noise. It was like the tinkling of a bell. This
sound proceeded from the garden. It could be heard distinctly though
faintly. It resembled the faint, vague music produced by the bells of
cattle at night in the pastures.

This noise made Valjean turn round.

He looked and saw that there was some one in the garden.

A being resembling a man was walking amid the bell-glasses of the melon
beds, rising, stooping, halting, with regular movements, as though he
were dragging or spreading out something on the ground. This person
appeared to limp.

Jean Valjean shuddered with the continual tremor of the unhappy. For
them everything is hostile and suspicious. They distrust the day
because it enables people to see them, and the night because it aids
in surprising them. A little while before he had shivered because the
garden was deserted, and now he shivered because there was some one
there.

He fell back from chimerical terrors to real terrors. He said to himself
that Javert and the spies had, perhaps, not taken their departure; that
they had, no doubt, left people on the watch in the street; that if this
man should discover him in the garden, he would cry out for help against
thieves and deliver him up. He took the sleeping Cosette gently in his
arms and carried her behind a heap of old furniture, which was out of
use, in the most remote corner of the shed. Cosette did not stir.

From that point he scrutinized the appearance of the being in the
melon patch. The strange thing about it was, that the sound of the bell
followed each of this man's movements. When the man approached, the
sound approached; when the man retreated, the sound retreated; if he
made any hasty gesture, a tremolo accompanied the gesture; when he
halted, the sound ceased. It appeared evident that the bell was attached
to that man; but what could that signify? Who was this man who had a
bell suspended about him like a ram or an ox?

As he put these questions to himself, he touched Cosette's hands. They
were icy cold.

"Ah! good God!" he cried.

He spoke to her in a low voice:--

"Cosette!"

She did not open her eyes.

He shook her vigorously.

She did not wake.

"Is she dead?" he said to himself, and sprang to his feet, quivering
from head to foot.

The most frightful thoughts rushed pell-mell through his mind. There
are moments when hideous surmises assail us like a cohort of furies, and
violently force the partitions of our brains. When those we love are in
question, our prudence invents every sort of madness. He remembered that
sleep in the open air on a cold night may be fatal.

Cosette was pale, and had fallen at full length on the ground at his
feet, without a movement.

He listened to her breathing: she still breathed, but with a respiration
which seemed to him weak and on the point of extinction.


How was he to warm her back to life? How was he to rouse her? All that
was not connected with this vanished from his thoughts. He rushed wildly
from the ruin.

It was absolutely necessary that Cosette should be in bed and beside a
fire in less than a quarter of an hour.




CHAPTER IX--THE MAN WITH THE BELL

He walked straight up to the man whom he saw in the garden. He had taken
in his hand the roll of silver which was in the pocket of his waistcoat.

The man's head was bent down, and he did not see him approaching. In a
few strides Jean Valjean stood beside him.

Jean Valjean accosted him with the cry:--

"One hundred francs!"

The man gave a start and raised his eyes.

"You can earn a hundred francs," went on Jean Valjean, "if you will
grant me shelter for this night."

The moon shone full upon Jean Valjean's terrified countenance.

"What! so it is you, Father Madeleine!" said the man.

That name, thus pronounced, at that obscure hour, in that unknown spot,
by that strange man, made Jean Valjean start back.

He had expected anything but that. The person who thus addressed him was
a bent and lame old man, dressed almost like a peasant, who wore on his
left knee a leather knee-cap, whence hung a moderately large bell. His
face, which was in the shadow, was not distinguishable.

However, the goodman had removed his cap, and exclaimed, trembling all
over:--

"Ah, good God! How come you here, Father Madeleine? Where did you enter?
Dieu-Jesus! Did you fall from heaven? There is no trouble about that:
if ever you do fall, it will be from there. And what a state you are in!
You have no cravat; you have no hat; you have no coat! Do you know, you
would have frightened any one who did not know you? No coat! Lord God!
Are the saints going mad nowadays? But how did you get in here?"

His words tumbled over each other. The goodman talked with a rustic
volubility, in which there was nothing alarming. All this was uttered
with a mixture of stupefaction and naive kindliness.

"Who are you? and what house is this?" demanded Jean Valjean.

"Ah! pardieu, this is too much!" exclaimed the old man. "I am the person
for whom you got the place here, and this house is the one where you had
me placed. What! You don't recognize me?"

"No," said Jean Valjean; "and how happens it that you know me?"

"You saved my life," said the man.

He turned. A ray of moonlight outlined his profile, and Jean Valjean
recognized old Fauchelevent.

"Ah!" said Jean Valjean, "so it is you? Yes, I recollect you."

"That is very lucky," said the old man, in a reproachful tone.

"And what are you doing here?" resumed Jean Valjean.

"Why, I am covering my melons, of course!"

In fact, at the moment when Jean Valjean accosted him, old Fauchelevent
held in his hand the end of a straw mat which he was occupied in
spreading over the melon bed. During the hour or thereabouts that he had
been in the garden he had already spread out a number of them. It was
this operation which had caused him to execute the peculiar movements
observed from the shed by Jean Valjean.

He continued:--

"I said to myself, 'The moon is bright: it is going to freeze. What if I
were to put my melons into their greatcoats?' And," he added, looking at
Jean Valjean with a broad smile,--"pardieu! you ought to have done the
same! But how do you come here?"

Jean Valjean, finding himself known to this man, at least only under the
name of Madeleine, thenceforth advanced only with caution. He multiplied
his questions. Strange to say, their roles seemed to be reversed. It was
he, the intruder, who interrogated.

"And what is this bell which you wear on your knee?"

"This," replied Fauchelevent, "is so that I may be avoided."

"What! so that you may be avoided?"

Old Fauchelevent winked with an indescribable air.

"Ah, goodness! there are only women in this house--many young girls. It
appears that I should be a dangerous person to meet. The bell gives them
warning. When I come, they go."

"What house is this?"

"Come, you know well enough."

"But I do not."

"Not when you got me the place here as gardener?"

"Answer me as though I knew nothing."

"Well, then, this is the Petit-Picpus convent."

Memories recurred to Jean Valjean. Chance, that is to say, Providence,
had cast him into precisely that convent in the Quartier Saint-Antoine
where old Fauchelevent, crippled by the fall from his cart, had been
admitted on his recommendation two years previously. He repeated, as
though talking to himself:--

"The Petit-Picpus convent."

"Exactly," returned old Fauchelevent. "But to come to the point, how the
deuce did you manage to get in here, you, Father Madeleine? No matter if
you are a saint; you are a man as well, and no man enters here."

"You certainly are here."

"There is no one but me."

"Still," said Jean Valjean, "I must stay here."

"Ah, good God!" cried Fauchelevent.

Jean Valjean drew near to the old man, and said to him in a grave
voice:--

"Father Fauchelevent, I saved your life."

"I was the first to recall it," returned Fauchelevent.

"Well, you can do to-day for me that which I did for you in the olden
days."

Fauchelevent took in his aged, trembling, and wrinkled hands Jean
Valjean's two robust hands, and stood for several minutes as though
incapable of speaking. At length he exclaimed:--

"Oh! that would be a blessing from the good God, if I could make you
some little return for that! Save your life! Monsieur le Maire, dispose
of the old man!"

A wonderful joy had transfigured this old man. His countenance seemed to
emit a ray of light.

"What do you wish me to do?" he resumed.

"That I will explain to you. You have a chamber?"

"I have an isolated hovel yonder, behind the ruins of the old convent,
in a corner which no one ever looks into. There are three rooms in it."

The hut was, in fact, so well hidden behind the ruins, and so cleverly
arranged to prevent it being seen, that Jean Valjean had not perceived
it.

"Good," said Jean Valjean. "Now I am going to ask two things of you."

"What are they, Mr. Mayor?"

"In the first place, you are not to tell any one what you know about me.
In the second, you are not to try to find out anything more."

"As you please. I know that you can do nothing that is not honest,
that you have always been a man after the good God's heart. And then,
moreover, you it was who placed me here. That concerns you. I am at your
service."

"That is settled then. Now, come with me. We will go and get the child."

"Ah!" said Fauchelevent, "so there is a child?"

He added not a word further, and followed Jean Valjean as a dog follows
his master.

Less than half an hour afterwards Cosette, who had grown rosy again
before the flame of a good fire, was lying asleep in the old gardener's
bed. Jean Valjean had put on his cravat and coat once more; his hat,
which he had flung over the wall, had been found and picked up. While
Jean Valjean was putting on his coat, Fauchelevent had removed the
bell and kneecap, which now hung on a nail beside a vintage basket that
adorned the wall. The two men were warming themselves with their elbows
resting on a table upon which Fauchelevent had placed a bit of cheese,
black bread, a bottle of wine, and two glasses, and the old man was
saying to Jean Valjean, as he laid his hand on the latter's knee:
"Ah! Father Madeleine! You did not recognize me immediately; you save
people's lives, and then you forget them! That is bad! But they remember
you! You are an ingrate!"




CHAPTER X--WHICH EXPLAINS HOW JAVERT GOT ON THE SCENT

The events of which we have just beheld the reverse side, so to speak,
had come about in the simplest possible manner.

When Jean Valjean, on the evening of the very day when Javert had
arrested him beside Fantine's death-bed, had escaped from the town jail
of M. sur M., the police had supposed that he had betaken himself to
Paris. Paris is a maelstrom where everything is lost, and everything
disappears in this belly of the world, as in the belly of the sea. No
forest hides a man as does that crowd. Fugitives of every sort know
this. They go to Paris as to an abyss; there are gulfs which save. The
police know it also, and it is in Paris that they seek what they
have lost elsewhere. They sought the ex-mayor of M. sur M. Javert was
summoned to Paris to throw light on their researches. Javert had, in
fact, rendered powerful assistance in the recapture of Jean Valjean.
Javert's zeal and intelligence on that occasion had been remarked by
M. Chabouillet, secretary of the Prefecture under Comte Angles. M.
Chabouillet, who had, moreover, already been Javert's patron, had the
inspector of M. sur M. attached to the police force of Paris. There
Javert rendered himself useful in divers and, though the word may seem
strange for such services, honorable manners.

He no longer thought of Jean Valjean,--the wolf of to-day causes these
dogs who are always on the chase to forget the wolf of yesterday,--when,
in December, 1823, he read a newspaper, he who never read newspapers;
but Javert, a monarchical man, had a desire to know the particulars of
the triumphal entry of the "Prince Generalissimo" into Bayonne. Just as
he was finishing the article, which interested him; a name, the name of
Jean Valjean, attracted his attention at the bottom of a page. The paper
announced that the convict Jean Valjean was dead, and published the fact
in such formal terms that Javert did not doubt it. He confined himself
to the remark, "That's a good entry." Then he threw aside the paper, and
thought no more about it.

Some time afterwards, it chanced that a police report was transmitted
from the prefecture of the Seine-et-Oise to the prefecture of police in
Paris, concerning the abduction of a child, which had taken place, under
peculiar circumstances, as it was said, in the commune of Montfermeil.
A little girl of seven or eight years of age, the report said, who had
been intrusted by her mother to an inn-keeper of that neighborhood, had
been stolen by a stranger; this child answered to the name of Cosette,
and was the daughter of a girl named Fantine, who had died in the
hospital, it was not known where or when.

This report came under Javert's eye and set him to thinking.

The name of Fantine was well known to him. He remembered that Jean
Valjean had made him, Javert, burst into laughter, by asking him for a
respite of three days, for the purpose of going to fetch that creature's
child. He recalled the fact that Jean Valjean had been arrested in Paris
at the very moment when he was stepping into the coach for Montfermeil.
Some signs had made him suspect at the time that this was the second
occasion of his entering that coach, and that he had already, on the
previous day, made an excursion to the neighborhood of that village, for
he had not been seen in the village itself. What had he been intending
to do in that region of Montfermeil? It could not even be surmised.
Javert understood it now. Fantine's daughter was there. Jean Valjean was
going there in search of her. And now this child had been stolen by a
stranger! Who could that stranger be? Could it be Jean Valjean? But Jean
Valjean was dead. Javert, without saying anything to anybody, took the
coach from the Pewter Platter, Cul-de-Sac de la Planchette, and made a
trip to Montfermeil.

He expected to find a great deal of light on the subject there; he found
a great deal of obscurity.

For the first few days the Thenardiers had chattered in their rage. The
disappearance of the Lark had created a sensation in the village. He
immediately obtained numerous versions of the story, which ended in the
abduction of a child. Hence the police report. But their first vexation
having passed off, Thenardier, with his wonderful instinct, had
very quickly comprehended that it is never advisable to stir up the
prosecutor of the Crown, and that his complaints with regard to the
abduction of Cosette would have as their first result to fix upon
himself, and upon many dark affairs which he had on hand, the glittering
eye of justice. The last thing that owls desire is to have a candle
brought to them. And in the first place, how explain the fifteen hundred
francs which he had received? He turned squarely round, put a gag on
his wife's mouth, and feigned astonishment when the stolen child was
mentioned to him. He understood nothing about it; no doubt he had
grumbled for awhile at having that dear little creature "taken from him"
so hastily; he should have liked to keep her two or three days longer,
out of tenderness; but her "grandfather" had come for her in the most
natural way in the world. He added the "grandfather," which produced a
good effect. This was the story that Javert hit upon when he arrived at
Montfermeil. The grandfather caused Jean Valjean to vanish.

Nevertheless, Javert dropped a few questions, like plummets, into
Thenardier's history. "Who was that grandfather? and what was his name?"
Thenardier replied with simplicity: "He is a wealthy farmer. I saw his
passport. I think his name was M. Guillaume Lambert."

Lambert is a respectable and extremely reassuring name. Thereupon Javert
returned to Paris.

"Jean Valjean is certainly dead," said he, "and I am a ninny."

He had again begun to forget this history, when, in the course of
March, 1824, he heard of a singular personage who dwelt in the parish of
Saint-Medard and who had been surnamed "the mendicant who gives alms."
This person, the story ran, was a man of means, whose name no one knew
exactly, and who lived alone with a little girl of eight years, who
knew nothing about herself, save that she had come from Montfermeil.
Montfermeil! that name was always coming up, and it made Javert prick
up his ears. An old beggar police spy, an ex-beadle, to whom this person
had given alms, added a few more details. This gentleman of property was
very shy,--never coming out except in the evening, speaking to no one,
except, occasionally to the poor, and never allowing any one to approach
him. He wore a horrible old yellow frock-coat, which was worth many
millions, being all wadded with bank-bills. This piqued Javert's
curiosity in a decided manner. In order to get a close look at this
fantastic gentleman without alarming him, he borrowed the beadle's
outfit for a day, and the place where the old spy was in the habit of
crouching every evening, whining orisons through his nose, and playing
the spy under cover of prayer.

"The suspected individual" did indeed approach Javert thus disguised,
and bestow alms on him. At that moment Javert raised his head, and the
shock which Jean Valjean received on recognizing Javert was equal to the
one received by Javert when he thought he recognized Jean Valjean.

However, the darkness might have misled him; Jean Valjean's death was
official; Javert cherished very grave doubts; and when in doubt, Javert,
the man of scruples, never laid a finger on any one's collar.

He followed his man to the Gorbeau house, and got "the old woman" to
talking, which was no difficult matter. The old woman confirmed the fact
regarding the coat lined with millions, and narrated to him the episode
of the thousand-franc bill. She had seen it! She had handled it! Javert
hired a room; that evening he installed himself in it. He came and
listened at the mysterious lodger's door, hoping to catch the sound of
his voice, but Jean Valjean saw his candle through the key-hole, and
foiled the spy by keeping silent.

On the following day Jean Valjean decamped; but the noise made by the
fall of the five-franc piece was noticed by the old woman, who, hearing
the rattling of coin, suspected that he might be intending to leave, and
made haste to warn Javert. At night, when Jean Valjean came out, Javert
was waiting for him behind the trees of the boulevard with two men.

Javert had demanded assistance at the Prefecture, but he had not
mentioned the name of the individual whom he hoped to seize; that was
his secret, and he had kept it for three reasons: in the first place,
because the slightest indiscretion might put Jean Valjean on the alert;
next, because, to lay hands on an ex-convict who had made his escape
and was reputed dead, on a criminal whom justice had formerly classed
forever as among malefactors of the most dangerous sort, was a
magnificent success which the old members of the Parisian police would
assuredly not leave to a new-comer like Javert, and he was afraid of
being deprived of his convict; and lastly, because Javert, being an
artist, had a taste for the unforeseen. He hated those well-heralded
successes which are talked of long in advance and have had the bloom
brushed off. He preferred to elaborate his masterpieces in the dark and
to unveil them suddenly at the last.

Javert had followed Jean Valjean from tree to tree, then from corner
to corner of the street, and had not lost sight of him for a single
instant; even at the moments when Jean Valjean believed himself to
be the most secure Javert's eye had been on him. Why had not Javert
arrested Jean Valjean? Because he was still in doubt.

It must be remembered that at that epoch the police was not precisely
at its ease; the free press embarrassed it; several arbitrary arrests
denounced by the newspapers, had echoed even as far as the Chambers, and
had rendered the Prefecture timid. Interference with individual liberty
was a grave matter. The police agents were afraid of making a mistake;
the prefect laid the blame on them; a mistake meant dismissal. The
reader can imagine the effect which this brief paragraph, reproduced
by twenty newspapers, would have caused in Paris: "Yesterday, an aged
grandfather, with white hair, a respectable and well-to-do gentleman,
who was walking with his grandchild, aged eight, was arrested and
conducted to the agency of the Prefecture as an escaped convict!"

Let us repeat in addition that Javert had scruples of his own;
injunctions of his conscience were added to the injunctions of the
prefect. He was really in doubt.

Jean Valjean turned his back on him and walked in the dark.

Sadness, uneasiness, anxiety, depression, this fresh misfortune of being
forced to flee by night, to seek a chance refuge in Paris for Cosette
and himself, the necessity of regulating his pace to the pace of
the child--all this, without his being aware of it, had altered Jean
Valjean's walk, and impressed on his bearing such senility, that the
police themselves, incarnate in the person of Javert, might, and did in
fact, make a mistake. The impossibility of approaching too close, his
costume of an emigre preceptor, the declaration of Thenardier which made
a grandfather of him, and, finally, the belief in his death in prison,
added still further to the uncertainty which gathered thick in Javert's
mind.

For an instant it occurred to him to make an abrupt demand for his
papers; but if the man was not Jean Valjean, and if this man was not a
good, honest old fellow living on his income, he was probably some merry
blade deeply and cunningly implicated in the obscure web of Parisian
misdeeds, some chief of a dangerous band, who gave alms to conceal
his other talents, which was an old dodge. He had trusty fellows,
accomplices' retreats in case of emergencies, in which he would, no
doubt, take refuge. All these turns which he was making through the
streets seemed to indicate that he was not a simple and honest man. To
arrest him too hastily would be "to kill the hen that laid the golden
eggs." Where was the inconvenience in waiting? Javert was very sure that
he would not escape.

Thus he proceeded in a tolerably perplexed state of mind, putting to
himself a hundred questions about this enigmatical personage.

It was only quite late in the Rue de Pontoise, that, thanks to the
brilliant light thrown from a dram-shop, he decidedly recognized Jean
Valjean.

There are in this world two beings who give a profound start,--the
mother who recovers her child and the tiger who recovers his prey.
Javert gave that profound start.

As soon as he had positively recognized Jean Valjean, the formidable
convict, he perceived that there were only three of them, and he asked
for reinforcements at the police station of the Rue de Pontoise. One
puts on gloves before grasping a thorn cudgel.

This delay and the halt at the Carrefour Rollin to consult with his
agents came near causing him to lose the trail. He speedily divined,
however, that Jean Valjean would want to put the river between his
pursuers and himself. He bent his head and reflected like a blood-hound
who puts his nose to the ground to make sure that he is on the right
scent. Javert, with his powerful rectitude of instinct, went straight to
the bridge of Austerlitz. A word with the toll-keeper furnished him with
the information which he required: "Have you seen a man with a little
girl?" "I made him pay two sous," replied the toll-keeper. Javert
reached the bridge in season to see Jean Valjean traverse the small
illuminated spot on the other side of the water, leading Cosette by
the hand. He saw him enter the Rue du Chemin-Vert-Saint-Antoine; he
remembered the Cul-de-Sac Genrot arranged there like a trap, and of the
sole exit of the Rue Droit-Mur into the Rue Petit-Picpus. He made sure
of his back burrows, as huntsmen say; he hastily despatched one of his
agents, by a roundabout way, to guard that issue. A patrol which was
returning to the Arsenal post having passed him, he made a requisition
on it, and caused it to accompany him. In such games soldiers are aces.
Moreover, the principle is, that in order to get the best of a wild
boar, one must employ the science of venery and plenty of dogs. These
combinations having been effected, feeling that Jean Valjean was caught
between the blind alley Genrot on the right, his agent on the left, and
himself, Javert, in the rear, he took a pinch of snuff.

Then he began the game. He experienced one ecstatic and infernal moment;
he allowed his man to go on ahead, knowing that he had him safe, but
desirous of postponing the moment of arrest as long as possible, happy
at the thought that he was taken and yet at seeing him free, gloating
over him with his gaze, with that voluptuousness of the spider which
allows the fly to flutter, and of the cat which lets the mouse run.
Claws and talons possess a monstrous sensuality,--the obscure movements
of the creature imprisoned in their pincers. What a delight this
strangling is!

Javert was enjoying himself. The meshes of his net were stoutly knotted.
He was sure of success; all he had to do now was to close his hand.

Accompanied as he was, the very idea of resistance was impossible,
however vigorous, energetic, and desperate Jean Valjean might be.

[Illustration: Javert on the Hunt  2b5-10-javert-on-the-hunt]

Javert advanced slowly, sounding, searching on his way all the nooks of
the street like so many pockets of thieves.

When he reached the centre of the web he found the fly no longer there.

His exasperation can be imagined.

He interrogated his sentinel of the Rues Droit-Mur and Petit-Picpus;
that agent, who had remained imperturbably at his post, had not seen the
man pass.

It sometimes happens that a stag is lost head and horns; that is to
say, he escapes although he has the pack on his very heels, and then the
oldest huntsmen know not what to say. Duvivier, Ligniville, and Desprez
halt short. In a discomfiture of this sort, Artonge exclaims, "It was
not a stag, but a sorcerer." Javert would have liked to utter the same
cry.

His disappointment bordered for a moment on despair and rage.

It is certain that Napoleon made mistakes during the war with Russia,
that Alexander committed blunders in the war in India, that Caesar made
mistakes in the war in Africa, that Cyrus was at fault in the war
in Scythia, and that Javert blundered in this campaign against Jean
Valjean. He was wrong, perhaps, in hesitating in his recognition of the
exconvict. The first glance should have sufficed him. He was wrong in
not arresting him purely and simply in the old building; he was wrong
in not arresting him when he positively recognized him in the Rue de
Pontoise. He was wrong in taking counsel with his auxiliaries in the
full light of the moon in the Carrefour Rollin. Advice is certainly
useful; it is a good thing to know and to interrogate those of the dogs
who deserve confidence; but the hunter cannot be too cautious when he is
chasing uneasy animals like the wolf and the convict. Javert, by taking
too much thought as to how he should set the bloodhounds of the pack on
the trail, alarmed the beast by giving him wind of the dart, and so
made him run. Above all, he was wrong in that after he had picked up the
scent again on the bridge of Austerlitz, he played that formidable and
puerile game of keeping such a man at the end of a thread. He thought
himself stronger than he was, and believed that he could play at the
game of the mouse and the lion. At the same time, he reckoned himself
as too weak, when he judged it necessary to obtain reinforcement. Fatal
precaution, waste of precious time! Javert committed all these blunders,
and none the less was one of the cleverest and most correct spies that
ever existed. He was, in the full force of the term, what is called in
venery a knowing dog. But what is there that is perfect?

Great strategists have their eclipses.

The greatest follies are often composed, like the largest ropes, of
a multitude of strands. Take the cable thread by thread, take all the
petty determining motives separately, and you can break them one after
the other, and you say, "That is all there is of it!" Braid them, twist
them together; the result is enormous: it is Attila hesitating between
Marcian on the east and Valentinian on the west; it is Hannibal tarrying
at Capua; it is Danton falling asleep at Arcis-sur-Aube.

However that may be, even at the moment when he saw that Jean Valjean
had escaped him, Javert did not lose his head. Sure that the convict who
had broken his ban could not be far off, he established sentinels, he
organized traps and ambuscades, and beat the quarter all that night. The
first thing he saw was the disorder in the street lantern whose rope
had been cut. A precious sign which, however, led him astray, since it
caused him to turn all his researches in the direction of the Cul-de-Sac
Genrot. In this blind alley there were tolerably low walls which abutted
on gardens whose bounds adjoined the immense stretches of waste land.
Jean Valjean evidently must have fled in that direction. The fact is,
that had he penetrated a little further in the Cul-de-Sac Genrot, he
would probably have done so and have been lost. Javert explored these
gardens and these waste stretches as though he had been hunting for a
needle.

At daybreak he left two intelligent men on the outlook, and returned to
the Prefecture of Police, as much ashamed as a police spy who had been
captured by a robber might have been.




BOOK SIXTH.--LE PETIT-PICPUS




CHAPTER I--NUMBER 62 RUE PETIT-PICPUS

Nothing, half a century ago, more resembled every other carriage gate
than the carriage gate of Number 62 Rue Petit-Picpus. This entrance,
which usually stood ajar in the most inviting fashion, permitted a
view of two things, neither of which have anything very funereal about
them,--a courtyard surrounded by walls hung with vines, and the face
of a lounging porter. Above the wall, at the bottom of the court, tall
trees were visible. When a ray of sunlight enlivened the courtyard, when
a glass of wine cheered up the porter, it was difficult to pass Number
62 Little Picpus Street without carrying away a smiling impression of
it. Nevertheless, it was a sombre place of which one had had a glimpse.

The threshold smiled; the house prayed and wept.

If one succeeded in passing the porter, which was not easy,--which was
even nearly impossible for every one, for there was an open sesame!
which it was necessary to know,--if, the porter once passed, one entered
a little vestibule on the right, on which opened a staircase shut in
between two walls and so narrow that only one person could ascend it at
a time, if one did not allow one's self to be alarmed by a daubing of
canary yellow, with a dado of chocolate which clothed this staircase, if
one ventured to ascend it, one crossed a first landing, then a second,
and arrived on the first story at a corridor where the yellow wash and
the chocolate-hued plinth pursued one with a peaceable persistency.
Staircase and corridor were lighted by two beautiful windows. The
corridor took a turn and became dark. If one doubled this cape, one
arrived a few paces further on, in front of a door which was all the
more mysterious because it was not fastened. If one opened it, one
found one's self in a little chamber about six feet square, tiled,
well-scrubbed, clean, cold, and hung with nankin paper with green
flowers, at fifteen sous the roll. A white, dull light fell from a large
window, with tiny panes, on the left, which usurped the whole width
of the room. One gazed about, but saw no one; one listened, one heard
neither a footstep nor a human murmur. The walls were bare, the chamber
was not furnished; there was not even a chair.

One looked again, and beheld on the wall facing the door a quadrangular
hole, about a foot square, with a grating of interlacing iron bars,
black, knotted, solid, which formed squares--I had almost said
meshes--of less than an inch and a half in diagonal length. The little
green flowers of the nankin paper ran in a calm and orderly manner to
those iron bars, without being startled or thrown into confusion by
their funereal contact. Supposing that a living being had been so
wonderfully thin as to essay an entrance or an exit through the square
hole, this grating would have prevented it. It did not allow the passage
of the body, but it did allow the passage of the eyes; that is to
say, of the mind. This seems to have occurred to them, for it had been
re-enforced by a sheet of tin inserted in the wall a little in the rear,
and pierced with a thousand holes more microscopic than the holes of
a strainer. At the bottom of this plate, an aperture had been pierced
exactly similar to the orifice of a letter box. A bit of tape attached
to a bell-wire hung at the right of the grated opening.

If the tape was pulled, a bell rang, and one heard a voice very near at
hand, which made one start.

"Who is there?" the voice demanded.

It was a woman's voice, a gentle voice, so gentle that it was mournful.

Here, again, there was a magical word which it was necessary to know. If
one did not know it, the voice ceased, the wall became silent once more,
as though the terrified obscurity of the sepulchre had been on the other
side of it.

If one knew the password, the voice resumed, "Enter on the right."

One then perceived on the right, facing the window, a glass door
surmounted by a frame glazed and painted gray. On raising the latch and
crossing the threshold, one experienced precisely the same impression
as when one enters at the theatre into a grated baignoire, before the
grating is lowered and the chandelier is lighted. One was, in fact, in
a sort of theatre-box, narrow, furnished with two old chairs, and a
much-frayed straw matting, sparely illuminated by the vague light from
the glass door; a regular box, with its front just of a height to lean
upon, bearing a tablet of black wood. This box was grated, only
the grating of it was not of gilded wood, as at the opera; it was a
monstrous lattice of iron bars, hideously interlaced and riveted to the
wall by enormous fastenings which resembled clenched fists.

The first minutes passed; when one's eyes began to grow used to this
cellar-like half-twilight, one tried to pass the grating, but got no
further than six inches beyond it. There he encountered a barrier of
black shutters, re-enforced and fortified with transverse beams of wood
painted a gingerbread yellow. These shutters were divided into long,
narrow slats, and they masked the entire length of the grating. They
were always closed. At the expiration of a few moments one heard a voice
proceeding from behind these shutters, and saying:--

"I am here. What do you wish with me?"

It was a beloved, sometimes an adored, voice. No one was visible. Hardly
the sound of a breath was audible. It seemed as though it were a spirit
which had been evoked, that was speaking to you across the walls of the
tomb.

If one chanced to be within certain prescribed and very rare conditions,
the slat of one of the shutters opened opposite you; the evoked spirit
became an apparition. Behind the grating, behind the shutter, one
perceived so far as the grating permitted sight, a head, of which only
the mouth and the chin were visible; the rest was covered with a black
veil. One caught a glimpse of a black guimpe, and a form that was barely
defined, covered with a black shroud. That head spoke with you, but did
not look at you and never smiled at you.

The light which came from behind you was adjusted in such a manner that
you saw her in the white, and she saw you in the black. This light was
symbolical.

Nevertheless, your eyes plunged eagerly through that opening which
was made in that place shut off from all glances. A profound vagueness
enveloped that form clad in mourning. Your eyes searched that vagueness,
and sought to make out the surroundings of the apparition. At the
expiration of a very short time you discovered that you could see
nothing. What you beheld was night, emptiness, shadows, a wintry mist
mingled with a vapor from the tomb, a sort of terrible peace, a silence
from which you could gather nothing, not even sighs, a gloom in which
you could distinguish nothing, not even phantoms.

What you beheld was the interior of a cloister.

It was the interior of that severe and gloomy edifice which was called
the Convent of the Bernardines of the Perpetual Adoration. The box in
which you stood was the parlor. The first voice which had addressed you
was that of the portress who always sat motionless and silent, on the
other side of the wall, near the square opening, screened by the iron
grating and the plate with its thousand holes, as by a double visor.
The obscurity which bathed the grated box arose from the fact that the
parlor, which had a window on the side of the world, had none on the
side of the convent. Profane eyes must see nothing of that sacred place.

Nevertheless, there was something beyond that shadow; there was a light;
there was life in the midst of that death. Although this was the most
strictly walled of all convents, we shall endeavor to make our way into
it, and to take the reader in, and to say, without transgressing the
proper bounds, things which story-tellers have never seen, and have,
therefore, never described.




CHAPTER II--THE OBEDIENCE OF MARTIN VERGA

This convent, which in 1824 had already existed for many a long year in
the Rue Petit-Picpus, was a community of Bernardines of the obedience of
Martin Verga.

These Bernardines were attached, in consequence, not to Clairvaux, like
the Bernardine monks, but to Citeaux, like the Benedictine monks. In
other words, they were the subjects, not of Saint Bernard, but of Saint
Benoit.

Any one who has turned over old folios to any extent knows that Martin
Verga founded in 1425 a congregation of Bernardines-Benedictines,
with Salamanca for the head of the order, and Alcala as the branch
establishment.

This congregation had sent out branches throughout all the Catholic
countries of Europe.

There is nothing unusual in the Latin Church in these grafts of one
order on another. To mention only a single order of Saint-Benoit, which
is here in question: there are attached to this order, without counting
the obedience of Martin Verga, four congregations,--two in Italy,
Mont-Cassin and Sainte-Justine of Padua; two in France, Cluny and
Saint-Maur; and nine orders,--Vallombrosa, Granmont, the Celestins,
the Camaldules, the Carthusians, the Humilies, the Olivateurs, the
Silvestrins, and lastly, Citeaux; for Citeaux itself, a trunk for other
orders, is only an offshoot of Saint-Benoit. Citeaux dates from Saint
Robert, Abbe de Molesme, in the diocese of Langres, in 1098. Now it was
in 529 that the devil, having retired to the desert of Subiaco--he
was old--had he turned hermit?--was chased from the ancient temple of
Apollo, where he dwelt, by Saint-Benoit, then aged seventeen.

After the rule of the Carmelites, who go barefoot, wear a bit of willow
on their throats, and never sit down, the harshest rule is that of the
Bernardines-Benedictines of Martin Verga. They are clothed in black,
with a guimpe, which, in accordance with the express command of
Saint-Benoit, mounts to the chin. A robe of serge with large sleeves,
a large woollen veil, the guimpe which mounts to the chin cut square on
the breast, the band which descends over their brow to their eyes,--this
is their dress. All is black except the band, which is white. The
novices wear the same habit, but all in white. The professed nuns also
wear a rosary at their side.

The Bernardines-Benedictines of Martin Verga practise the Perpetual
Adoration, like the Benedictines called Ladies of the Holy Sacrament,
who, at the beginning of this century, had two houses in Paris,--one at
the Temple, the other in the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Genevieve. However, the
Bernardines-Benedictines of the Petit-Picpus, of whom we are speaking,
were a totally different order from the Ladies of the Holy Sacrament,
cloistered in the Rue Neuve-Sainte-Genevieve and at the Temple. There
were numerous differences in their rule; there were some in their
costume. The Bernardines-Benedictines of the Petit-Picpus wore the
black guimpe, and the Benedictines of the Holy Sacrament and of the
Rue Neuve-Sainte-Genevieve wore a white one, and had, besides, on their
breasts, a Holy Sacrament about three inches long, in silver gilt or
gilded copper. The nuns of the Petit-Picpus did not wear this Holy
Sacrament. The Perpetual Adoration, which was common to the house of
the Petit-Picpus and to the house of the Temple, leaves those two orders
perfectly distinct. Their only resemblance lies in this practice of the
Ladies of the Holy Sacrament and the Bernardines of Martin Verga, just
as there existed a similarity in the study and the glorification of
all the mysteries relating to the infancy, the life, and death of Jesus
Christ and the Virgin, between the two orders, which were, nevertheless,
widely separated, and on occasion even hostile. The Oratory of Italy,
established at Florence by Philip de Neri, and the Oratory of France,
established by Pierre de Berulle. The Oratory of France claimed the
precedence, since Philip de Neri was only a saint, while Berulle was a
cardinal.

Let us return to the harsh Spanish rule of Martin Verga.

The Bernardines-Benedictines of this obedience fast all the year
round, abstain from meat, fast in Lent and on many other days which are
peculiar to them, rise from their first sleep, from one to three o'clock
in the morning, to read their breviary and chant matins, sleep in all
seasons between serge sheets and on straw, make no use of the bath,
never light a fire, scourge themselves every Friday, observe the rule of
silence, speak to each other only during the recreation hours, which are
very brief, and wear drugget chemises for six months in the year, from
September 14th, which is the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, until Easter.
These six months are a modification: the rule says all the year, but
this drugget chemise, intolerable in the heat of summer, produced fevers
and nervous spasms. The use of it had to be restricted. Even with this
palliation, when the nuns put on this chemise on the 14th of September,
they suffer from fever for three or four days. Obedience, poverty,
chastity, perseverance in their seclusion,--these are their vows, which
the rule greatly aggravates.

The prioress is elected for three years by the mothers, who are called
meres vocales because they have a voice in the chapter. A prioress can
only be re-elected twice, which fixes the longest possible reign of a
prioress at nine years.

They never see the officiating priest, who is always hidden from them
by a serge curtain nine feet in height. During the sermon, when the
preacher is in the chapel, they drop their veils over their faces. They
must always speak low, walk with their eyes on the ground and their
heads bowed. One man only is allowed to enter the convent,--the
archbishop of the diocese.

There is really one other,--the gardener. But he is always an old man,
and, in order that he may always be alone in the garden, and that the
nuns may be warned to avoid him, a bell is attached to his knee.

Their submission to the prioress is absolute and passive. It is the
canonical subjection in the full force of its abnegation. As at the
voice of Christ, ut voci Christi, at a gesture, at the first sign,
ad nutum, ad primum signum, immediately, with cheerfulness, with
perseverance, with a certain blind obedience, prompte, hilariter,
perseveranter et caeca quadam obedientia, as the file in the hand of the
workman, quasi limam in manibus fabri, without power to read or to write
without express permission, legere vel scribere non addiscerit sine
expressa superioris licentia.

Each one of them in turn makes what they call reparation. The reparation
is the prayer for all the sins, for all the faults, for all the
dissensions, for all the violations, for all the iniquities, for all the
crimes committed on earth. For the space of twelve consecutive hours,
from four o'clock in the afternoon till four o'clock in the morning, or
from four o'clock in the morning until four o'clock in the afternoon,
the sister who is making reparation remains on her knees on the stone
before the Holy Sacrament, with hands clasped, a rope around her neck.
When her fatigue becomes unendurable, she prostrates herself flat on
her face against the earth, with her arms outstretched in the form of a
cross; this is her only relief. In this attitude she prays for all the
guilty in the universe. This is great to sublimity.

As this act is performed in front of a post on which burns a candle, it
is called without distinction, to make reparation or to be at the post.
The nuns even prefer, out of humility, this last expression, which
contains an idea of torture and abasement.

To make reparation is a function in which the whole soul is absorbed.
The sister at the post would not turn round were a thunderbolt to fall
directly behind her.

Besides this, there is always a sister kneeling before the Holy
Sacrament. This station lasts an hour. They relieve each other like
soldiers on guard. This is the Perpetual Adoration.

The prioresses and the mothers almost always bear names stamped with
peculiar solemnity, recalling, not the saints and martyrs, but moments
in the life of Jesus Christ: as Mother Nativity, Mother Conception,
Mother Presentation, Mother Passion. But the names of saints are not
interdicted.

When one sees them, one never sees anything but their mouths.

All their teeth are yellow. No tooth-brush ever entered that convent.
Brushing one's teeth is at the top of a ladder at whose bottom is the
loss of one's soul.

They never say my. They possess nothing of their own, and they must not
attach themselves to anything. They call everything our; thus: our veil,
our chaplet; if they were speaking of their chemise, they would say our
chemise. Sometimes they grow attached to some petty object,--to a book
of hours, a relic, a medal that has been blessed. As soon as they become
aware that they are growing attached to this object, they must give it
up. They recall the words of Saint Therese, to whom a great lady said,
as she was on the point of entering her order, "Permit me, mother, to
send for a Bible to which I am greatly attached." "Ah, you are attached
to something! In that case, do not enter our order!"

Every person whatever is forbidden to shut herself up, to have a place
of her own, a chamber. They live with their cells open. When they meet,
one says, "Blessed and adored be the most Holy Sacrament of the altar!"
The other responds, "Forever." The same ceremony when one taps at the
other's door. Hardly has she touched the door when a soft voice on the
other side is heard to say hastily, "Forever!" Like all practices, this
becomes mechanical by force of habit; and one sometimes says forever
before the other has had time to say the rather long sentence, "Praised
and adored be the most Holy Sacrament of the altar."

Among the Visitandines the one who enters says: "Ave Maria," and the one
whose cell is entered says, "Gratia plena." It is their way of saying
good day, which is in fact full of grace.

At each hour of the day three supplementary strokes sound from the
church bell of the convent. At this signal prioress, vocal mothers,
professed nuns, lay-sisters, novices, postulants, interrupt what they
are saying, what they are doing, or what they are thinking, and all say
in unison if it is five o'clock, for instance, "At five o'clock and at
all hours praised and adored be the most Holy Sacrament of the altar!"
If it is eight o'clock, "At eight o'clock and at all hours!" and so on,
according to the hour.

This custom, the object of which is to break the thread of thought
and to lead it back constantly to God, exists in many communities; the
formula alone varies. Thus at The Infant Jesus they say, "At this
hour and at every hour may the love of Jesus kindle my heart!" The
Bernardines-Benedictines of Martin Verga, cloistered fifty years ago at
Petit-Picpus, chant the offices to a solemn psalmody, a pure Gregorian
chant, and always with full voice during the whole course of the office.
Everywhere in the missal where an asterisk occurs they pause, and say in
a low voice, "Jesus-Marie-Joseph." For the office of the dead they adopt
a tone so low that the voices of women can hardly descend to such a
depth. The effect produced is striking and tragic.

The nuns of the Petit-Picpus had made a vault under their grand altar
for the burial of their community. The Government, as they say, does not
permit this vault to receive coffins so they leave the convent when they
die. This is an affliction to them, and causes them consternation as an
infraction of the rules.

They had obtained a mediocre consolation at best,--permission to be
interred at a special hour and in a special corner in the ancient
Vaugirard cemetery, which was made of land which had formerly belonged
to their community.

On Fridays the nuns hear high mass, vespers, and all the offices, as on
Sunday. They scrupulously observe in addition all the little festivals
unknown to people of the world, of which the Church of France was so
prodigal in the olden days, and of which it is still prodigal in Spain
and Italy. Their stations in the chapel are interminable. As for the
number and duration of their prayers we can convey no better idea of
them than by quoting the ingenuous remark of one of them: "The prayers
of the postulants are frightful, the prayers of the novices are still
worse, and the prayers of the professed nuns are still worse."

Once a week the chapter assembles: the prioress presides; the vocal
mothers assist. Each sister kneels in turn on the stones, and confesses
aloud, in the presence of all, the faults and sins which she has
committed during the week. The vocal mothers consult after each
confession and inflict the penance aloud.

Besides this confession in a loud tone, for which all faults in the
least serious are reserved, they have for their venial offences what
they call the coulpe. To make one's coulpe means to prostrate one's self
flat on one's face during the office in front of the prioress until
the latter, who is never called anything but our mother, notifies the
culprit by a slight tap of her foot against the wood of her stall that
she can rise. The coulpe or peccavi, is made for a very small matter--a
broken glass, a torn veil, an involuntary delay of a few seconds at an
office, a false note in church, etc.; this suffices, and the coulpe
is made. The coulpe is entirely spontaneous; it is the culpable person
herself (the word is etymologically in its place here) who judges
herself and inflicts it on herself. On festival days and Sundays four
mother precentors intone the offices before a large reading-desk with
four places. One day one of the mother precentors intoned a psalm
beginning with Ecce, and instead of Ecce she uttered aloud the three
notes do si sol; for this piece of absent-mindedness she underwent a
coulpe which lasted during the whole service: what rendered the fault
enormous was the fact that the chapter had laughed.

When a nun is summoned to the parlor, even were it the prioress herself,
she drops her veil, as will be remembered, so that only her mouth is
visible.

The prioress alone can hold communication with strangers. The others can
see only their immediate family, and that very rarely. If, by chance,
an outsider presents herself to see a nun, or one whom she has known and
loved in the outer world, a regular series of negotiations is required.
If it is a woman, the authorization may sometimes be granted; the nun
comes, and they talk to her through the shutters, which are opened only
for a mother or sister. It is unnecessary to say that permission is
always refused to men.

Such is the rule of Saint-Benoit, aggravated by Martin Verga.

These nuns are not gay, rosy, and fresh, as the daughters of other
orders often are. They are pale and grave. Between 1825 and 1830 three
of them went mad.




CHAPTER III--AUSTERITIES

One is a postulant for two years at least, often for four; a novice for
four. It is rare that the definitive vows can be pronounced
earlier than the age of twenty-three or twenty-four years. The
Bernardines-Benedictines of Martin Verga do not admit widows to their
order.

In their cells, they deliver themselves up to many unknown macerations,
of which they must never speak.

On the day when a novice makes her profession, she is dressed in her
handsomest attire, she is crowned with white roses, her hair is brushed
until it shines, and curled. Then she prostrates herself; a great black
veil is thrown over her, and the office for the dead is sung. Then the
nuns separate into two files; one file passes close to her, saying in
plaintive accents, "Our sister is dead"; and the other file responds in
a voice of ecstasy, "Our sister is alive in Jesus Christ!"

At the epoch when this story takes place, a boarding-school was attached
to the convent--a boarding-school for young girls of noble and
mostly wealthy families, among whom could be remarked Mademoiselle
de Saint-Aulaire and de Belissen, and an English girl bearing the
illustrious Catholic name of Talbot. These young girls, reared by these
nuns between four walls, grew up with a horror of the world and of the
age. One of them said to us one day, "The sight of the street pavement
made me shudder from head to foot." They were dressed in blue, with a
white cap and a Holy Spirit of silver gilt or of copper on their breast.
On certain grand festival days, particularly Saint Martha's day, they
were permitted, as a high favor and a supreme happiness, to dress
themselves as nuns and to carry out the offices and practice of
Saint-Benoit for a whole day. In the early days the nuns were in the
habit of lending them their black garments. This seemed profane, and
the prioress forbade it. Only the novices were permitted to lend. It is
remarkable that these performances, tolerated and encouraged, no doubt,
in the convent out of a secret spirit of proselytism and in order
to give these children a foretaste of the holy habit, were a genuine
happiness and a real recreation for the scholars. They simply amused
themselves with it. It was new; it gave them a change. Candid reasons
of childhood, which do not, however, succeed in making us worldlings
comprehend the felicity of holding a holy water sprinkler in one's hand
and standing for hours together singing hard enough for four in front of
a reading-desk.

The pupils conformed, with the exception of the austerities, to all the
practices of the convent. There was a certain young woman who entered
the world, and who after many years of married life had not succeeded in
breaking herself of the habit of saying in great haste whenever any
one knocked at her door, "forever!" Like the nuns, the pupils saw
their relatives only in the parlor. Their very mothers did not obtain
permission to embrace them. The following illustrates to what a degree
severity on that point was carried. One day a young girl received a
visit from her mother, who was accompanied by a little sister three
years of age. The young girl wept, for she wished greatly to embrace
her sister. Impossible. She begged that, at least, the child might be
permitted to pass her little hand through the bars so that she could
kiss it. This was almost indignantly refused.




CHAPTER IV--GAYETIES

None the less, these young girls filled this grave house with charming
souvenirs.

At certain hours childhood sparkled in that cloister. The recreation
hour struck. A door swung on its hinges. The birds said, "Good;
here come the children!" An irruption of youth inundated that garden
intersected with a cross like a shroud. Radiant faces, white foreheads,
innocent eyes, full of merry light, all sorts of auroras, were scattered
about amid these shadows. After the psalmodies, the bells, the peals,
and knells and offices, the sound of these little girls burst forth on a
sudden more sweetly than the noise of bees. The hive of joy was opened,
and each one brought her honey. They played, they called to each other,
they formed into groups, they ran about; pretty little white teeth
chattered in the corners; the veils superintended the laughs from a
distance, shades kept watch of the sunbeams, but what mattered it? Still
they beamed and laughed. Those four lugubrious walls had their moment
of dazzling brilliancy. They looked on, vaguely blanched with the
reflection of so much joy at this sweet swarming of the hives. It was
like a shower of roses falling athwart this house of mourning. The young
girls frolicked beneath the eyes of the nuns; the gaze of impeccability
does not embarrass innocence. Thanks to these children, there was,
among so many austere hours, one hour of ingenuousness. The little ones
skipped about; the elder ones danced. In this cloister play was mingled
with heaven. Nothing is so delightful and so august as all these fresh,
expanding young souls. Homer would have come thither to laugh with
Perrault; and there was in that black garden, youth, health, noise,
cries, giddiness, pleasure, happiness enough to smooth out the wrinkles
of all their ancestresses, those of the epic as well as those of the
fairy-tale, those of the throne as well as those of the thatched cottage
from Hecuba to la Mere-Grand.

In that house more than anywhere else, perhaps, arise those children's
sayings which are so graceful and which evoke a smile that is full of
thoughtfulness. It was between those four gloomy walls that a child of
five years exclaimed one day: "Mother! one of the big girls has just
told me that I have only nine years and ten months longer to remain
here. What happiness!"

It was here, too, that this memorable dialogue took place:--

A Vocal Mother. Why are you weeping, my child?

The child (aged six). I told Alix that I knew my French history. She
says that I do not know it, but I do.

Alix, the big girl (aged nine). No; she does not know it.

The Mother. How is that, my child?

Alix. She told me to open the book at random and to ask her any question
in the book, and she would answer it.

"Well?"

"She did not answer it."

"Let us see about it. What did you ask her?"

"I opened the book at random, as she proposed, and I put the first
question that I came across."

"And what was the question?"

"It was, 'What happened after that?'"

It was there that that profound remark was made anent a rather greedy
paroquet which belonged to a lady boarder:--

"How well bred! it eats the top of the slice of bread and butter just
like a person!"

It was on one of the flagstones of this cloister that there was once
picked up a confession which had been written out in advance, in order
that she might not forget it, by a sinner of seven years:--

"Father, I accuse myself of having been avaricious.

"Father, I accuse myself of having been an adulteress.

"Father, I accuse myself of having raised my eyes to the gentlemen."

It was on one of the turf benches of this garden that a rosy mouth six
years of age improvised the following tale, which was listened to by
blue eyes aged four and five years:--

"There were three little cocks who owned a country where there were
a great many flowers. They plucked the flowers and put them in their
pockets. After that they plucked the leaves and put them in their
playthings. There was a wolf in that country; there was a great deal of
forest; and the wolf was in the forest; and he ate the little cocks."

And this other poem:--

"There came a blow with a stick.

"It was Punchinello who bestowed it on the cat.

"It was not good for her; it hurt her.

"Then a lady put Punchinello in prison."

It was there that a little abandoned child, a foundling whom the convent
was bringing up out of charity, uttered this sweet and heart-breaking
saying. She heard the others talking of their mothers, and she murmured
in her corner:--

"As for me, my mother was not there when I was born!"

There was a stout portress who could always be seen hurrying through the
corridors with her bunch of keys, and whose name was Sister Agatha. The
big big girls--those over ten years of age--called her Agathocles.

The refectory, a large apartment of an oblong square form, which
received no light except through a vaulted cloister on a level with the
garden, was dark and damp, and, as the children say, full of beasts. All
the places round about furnished their contingent of insects.

Each of its four corners had received, in the language of the pupils,
a special and expressive name. There was Spider corner, Caterpillar
corner, Wood-louse corner, and Cricket corner.

Cricket corner was near the kitchen and was highly esteemed. It was not
so cold there as elsewhere. From the refectory the names had passed to
the boarding-school, and there served as in the old College Mazarin
to distinguish four nations. Every pupil belonged to one of these four
nations according to the corner of the refectory in which she sat at
meals. One day Monseigneur the Archbishop while making his pastoral
visit saw a pretty little rosy girl with beautiful golden hair enter the
class-room through which he was passing.

He inquired of another pupil, a charming brunette with rosy cheeks, who
stood near him:--

"Who is that?"

"She is a spider, Monseigneur."

"Bah! And that one yonder?"

"She is a cricket."

"And that one?"

"She is a caterpillar."

"Really! and yourself?"

"I am a wood-louse, Monseigneur."

Every house of this sort has its own peculiarities. At the beginning of
this century Ecouen was one of those strict and graceful places where
young girls pass their childhood in a shadow that is almost august. At
Ecouen, in order to take rank in the procession of the Holy Sacrament,
a distinction was made between virgins and florists. There were also the
"dais" and the "censors,"--the first who held the cords of the dais, and
the others who carried incense before the Holy Sacrament. The flowers
belonged by right to the florists. Four "virgins" walked in advance. On
the morning of that great day it was no rare thing to hear the question
put in the dormitory, "Who is a virgin?"

Madame Campan used to quote this saying of a "little one" of seven
years, to a "big girl" of sixteen, who took the head of the procession,
while she, the little one, remained at the rear, "You are a virgin, but
I am not."




CHAPTER V--DISTRACTIONS

Above the door of the refectory this prayer, which was called the white
Paternoster, and which possessed the property of bearing people straight
to paradise, was inscribed in large black letters:--

"Little white Paternoster, which God made, which God said, which God
placed in paradise. In the evening, when I went to bed, I found three
angels sitting on my bed, one at the foot, two at the head, the good
Virgin Mary in the middle, who told me to lie down without hesitation.
The good God is my father, the good Virgin is my mother, the three
apostles are my brothers, the three virgins are my sisters. The shirt in
which God was born envelopes my body; Saint Margaret's cross is written
on my breast. Madame the Virgin was walking through the meadows, weeping
for God, when she met M. Saint John. 'Monsieur Saint John, whence come
you?' 'I come from Ave Salus.' 'You have not seen the good God; where
is he?' 'He is on the tree of the Cross, his feet hanging, his hands
nailed, a little cap of white thorns on his head.' Whoever shall say
this thrice at eventide, thrice in the morning, shall win paradise at
the last."

In 1827 this characteristic orison had disappeared from the wall under
a triple coating of daubing paint. At the present time it is finally
disappearing from the memories of several who were young girls then, and
who are old women now.

A large crucifix fastened to the wall completed the decoration of this
refectory, whose only door, as we think we have mentioned, opened on the
garden. Two narrow tables, each flanked by two wooden benches, formed
two long parallel lines from one end to the other of the refectory.
The walls were white, the tables were black; these two mourning colors
constitute the only variety in convents. The meals were plain, and
the food of the children themselves severe. A single dish of meat and
vegetables combined, or salt fish--such was their luxury. This meagre
fare, which was reserved for the pupils alone, was, nevertheless, an
exception. The children ate in silence, under the eye of the mother
whose turn it was, who, if a fly took a notion to fly or to hum against
the rule, opened and shut a wooden book from time to time. This silence
was seasoned with the lives of the saints, read aloud from a little
pulpit with a desk, which was situated at the foot of the crucifix. The
reader was one of the big girls, in weekly turn. At regular distances,
on the bare tables, there were large, varnished bowls in which the
pupils washed their own silver cups and knives and forks, and into which
they sometimes threw some scrap of tough meat or spoiled fish; this was
punished. These bowls were called ronds d'eau. The child who broke the
silence "made a cross with her tongue." Where? On the ground. She licked
the pavement. The dust, that end of all joys, was charged with the
chastisement of those poor little rose-leaves which had been guilty of
chirping.

There was in the convent a book which has never been printed except as
a unique copy, and which it is forbidden to read. It is the rule of
Saint-Benoit. An arcanum which no profane eye must penetrate. Nemo
regulas, seu constitutiones nostras, externis communicabit.

The pupils one day succeeded in getting possession of this book, and set
to reading it with avidity, a reading which was often interrupted by
the fear of being caught, which caused them to close the volume
precipitately.

From the great danger thus incurred they derived but a very moderate
amount of pleasure. The most "interesting thing" they found were some
unintelligible pages about the sins of young boys.

They played in an alley of the garden bordered with a few shabby
fruit-trees. In spite of the extreme surveillance and the severity of
the punishments administered, when the wind had shaken the trees, they
sometimes succeeded in picking up a green apple or a spoiled apricot or
an inhabited pear on the sly. I will now cede the privilege of speech
to a letter which lies before me, a letter written five and twenty
years ago by an old pupil, now Madame la Duchesse de----one of the most
elegant women in Paris. I quote literally: "One hides one's pear or
one's apple as best one may. When one goes up stairs to put the veil on
the bed before supper, one stuffs them under one's pillow and at night
one eats them in bed, and when one cannot do that, one eats them in the
closet." That was one of their greatest luxuries.

Once--it was at the epoch of the visit from the archbishop to the
convent--one of the young girls, Mademoiselle Bouchard, who was
connected with the Montmorency family, laid a wager that she would ask
for a day's leave of absence--an enormity in so austere a community. The
wager was accepted, but not one of those who bet believed that she would
do it. When the moment came, as the archbishop was passing in front of
the pupils, Mademoiselle Bouchard, to the indescribable terror of her
companions, stepped out of the ranks, and said, "Monseigneur, a day's
leave of absence." Mademoiselle Bouchard was tall, blooming, with the
prettiest little rosy face in the world. M. de Quelen smiled and said,
"What, my dear child, a day's leave of absence! Three days if you like.
I grant you three days." The prioress could do nothing; the archbishop
had spoken. Horror of the convent, but joy of the pupil. The effect may
be imagined.

This stern cloister was not so well walled off, however, but that the
life of the passions of the outside world, drama, and even romance,
did not make their way in. To prove this, we will confine ourselves to
recording here and to briefly mentioning a real and incontestable fact,
which, however, bears no reference in itself to, and is not connected by
any thread whatever with the story which we are relating. We mention the
fact for the sake of completing the physiognomy of the convent in the
reader's mind.

About this time there was in the convent a mysterious person who was
not a nun, who was treated with great respect, and who was addressed as
Madame Albertine. Nothing was known about her, save that she was mad,
and that in the world she passed for dead. Beneath this history it
was said there lay the arrangements of fortune necessary for a great
marriage.

This woman, hardly thirty years of age, of dark complexion and tolerably
pretty, had a vague look in her large black eyes. Could she see? There
was some doubt about this. She glided rather than walked, she never
spoke; it was not quite known whether she breathed. Her nostrils were
livid and pinched as after yielding up their last sigh. To touch her
hand was like touching snow. She possessed a strange spectral grace.
Wherever she entered, people felt cold. One day a sister, on seeing her
pass, said to another sister, "She passes for a dead woman." "Perhaps
she is one," replied the other.

A hundred tales were told of Madame Albertine. This arose from the
eternal curiosity of the pupils. In the chapel there was a gallery
called L'OEil de Boeuf. It was in this gallery, which had only a
circular bay, an oeil de boeuf, that Madame Albertine listened to the
offices. She always occupied it alone because from this gallery, being
on the level of the first story, the preacher or the officiating priest
could be seen, which was interdicted to the nuns. One day the pulpit was
occupied by a young priest of high rank, M. Le Duc de Rohan, peer of
France, officer of the Red Musketeers in 1815 when he was Prince de
Leon, and who died afterward, in 1830, as cardinal and Archbishop of
Besancon. It was the first time that M. de Rohan had preached at the
Petit-Picpus convent. Madame Albertine usually preserved perfect
calmness and complete immobility during the sermons and services. That
day, as soon as she caught sight of M. de Rohan, she half rose, and
said, in a loud voice, amid the silence of the chapel, "Ah! Auguste!"
The whole community turned their heads in amazement, the preacher raised
his eyes, but Madame Albertine had relapsed into her immobility. A
breath from the outer world, a flash of life, had passed for an instant
across that cold and lifeless face and had then vanished, and the mad
woman had become a corpse again.

Those two words, however, had set every one in the convent who had the
privilege of speech to chattering. How many things were contained in
that "Ah! Auguste!" what revelations! M. de Rohan's name really was
Auguste. It was evident that Madame Albertine belonged to the very
highest society, since she knew M. de Rohan, and that her own rank there
was of the highest, since she spoke thus familiarly of so great a lord,
and that there existed between them some connection, of relationship,
perhaps, but a very close one in any case, since she knew his "pet
name."

Two very severe duchesses, Mesdames de Choiseul and de Serent, often
visited the community, whither they penetrated, no doubt, in virtue of
the privilege Magnates mulieres, and caused great consternation in the
boarding-school. When these two old ladies passed by, all the poor young
girls trembled and dropped their eyes.

Moreover, M. de Rohan, quite unknown to himself, was an object of
attention to the school-girls. At that epoch he had just been made,
while waiting for the episcopate, vicar-general of the Archbishop of
Paris. It was one of his habits to come tolerably often to celebrate the
offices in the chapel of the nuns of the Petit-Picpus. Not one of the
young recluses could see him, because of the serge curtain, but he had
a sweet and rather shrill voice, which they had come to know and to
distinguish. He had been a mousquetaire, and then, he was said to be
very coquettish, that his handsome brown hair was very well dressed in
a roll around his head, and that he had a broad girdle of magnificent
moire, and that his black cassock was of the most elegant cut in the
world. He held a great place in all these imaginations of sixteen years.

Not a sound from without made its way into the convent. But there was
one year when the sound of a flute penetrated thither. This was an
event, and the girls who were at school there at the time still recall
it.

It was a flute which was played in the neighborhood. This flute always
played the same air, an air which is very far away nowadays,--"My
Zetulbe, come reign o'er my soul,"--and it was heard two or three
times a day. The young girls passed hours in listening to it, the vocal
mothers were upset by it, brains were busy, punishments descended in
showers. This lasted for several months. The girls were all more or
less in love with the unknown musician. Each one dreamed that she was
Zetulbe. The sound of the flute proceeded from the direction of the Rue
Droit-Mur; and they would have given anything, compromised everything,
attempted anything for the sake of seeing, of catching a glance, if only
for a second, of the "young man" who played that flute so deliciously,
and who, no doubt, played on all these souls at the same time. There
were some who made their escape by a back door, and ascended to the
third story on the Rue Droit-Mur side, in order to attempt to catch a
glimpse through the gaps. Impossible! One even went so far as to thrust
her arm through the grating, and to wave her white handkerchief. Two
were still bolder. They found means to climb on a roof, and risked their
lives there, and succeeded at last in seeing "the young man." He was an
old emigre gentleman, blind and penniless, who was playing his flute in
his attic, in order to pass the time.




CHAPTER VI--THE LITTLE CONVENT

In this enclosure of the Petit-Picpus there were three perfectly
distinct buildings,--the Great Convent, inhabited by the nuns, the
Boarding-school, where the scholars were lodged; and lastly, what was
called the Little Convent. It was a building with a garden, in which
lived all sorts of aged nuns of various orders, the relics of cloisters
destroyed in the Revolution; a reunion of all the black, gray, and white
medleys of all communities and all possible varieties; what might be
called, if such a coupling of words is permissible, a sort of harlequin
convent.

When the Empire was established, all these poor old dispersed and exiled
women had been accorded permission to come and take shelter under the
wings of the Bernardines-Benedictines. The government paid them a small
pension, the ladies of the Petit-Picpus received them cordially. It was
a singular pell-mell. Each followed her own rule, Sometimes the pupils
of the boarding-school were allowed, as a great recreation, to pay them
a visit; the result is, that all those young memories have
retained among other souvenirs that of Mother Sainte-Bazile, Mother
Sainte-Scolastique, and Mother Jacob.

One of these refugees found herself almost at home. She was a nun of
Sainte-Aure, the only one of her order who had survived. The ancient
convent of the ladies of Sainte-Aure occupied, at the beginning of the
eighteenth century, this very house of the Petit-Picpus, which belonged
later to the Benedictines of Martin Verga. This holy woman, too poor to
wear the magnificent habit of her order, which was a white robe with
a scarlet scapulary, had piously put it on a little manikin, which she
exhibited with complacency and which she bequeathed to the house at
her death. In 1824, only one nun of this order remained; to-day, there
remains only a doll.

In addition to these worthy mothers, some old society women had obtained
permission of the prioress, like Madame Albertine, to retire into the
Little Convent. Among the number were Madame Beaufort d'Hautpoul and
Marquise Dufresne. Another was never known in the convent except by
the formidable noise which she made when she blew her nose. The pupils
called her Madame Vacarmini (hubbub).

About 1820 or 1821, Madame de Genlis, who was at that time editing a
little periodical publication called l'Intrepide, asked to be allowed
to enter the convent of the Petit-Picpus as lady resident. The Duc
d'Orleans recommended her. Uproar in the hive; the vocal-mothers were
all in a flutter; Madame de Genlis had made romances. But she declared
that she was the first to detest them, and then, she had reached her
fierce stage of devotion. With the aid of God, and of the Prince, she
entered. She departed at the end of six or eight months, alleging as a
reason, that there was no shade in the garden. The nuns were delighted.
Although very old, she still played the harp, and did it very well.

When she went away she left her mark in her cell. Madame de Genlis was
superstitious and a Latinist. These two words furnish a tolerably good
profile of her. A few years ago, there were still to be seen, pasted in
the inside of a little cupboard in her cell in which she locked up her
silverware and her jewels, these five lines in Latin, written with
her own hand in red ink on yellow paper, and which, in her opinion,
possessed the property of frightening away robbers:--


               Imparibus meritis pendent tria corpora ramis:[15]
               Dismas et Gesmas, media est divina potestas;
               Alta petit Dismas, infelix, infima, Gesmas;
               Nos et res nostras conservet summa potestas.
               Hos versus dicas, ne tu furto tua perdas.


These verses in sixth century Latin raise the question whether the
two thieves of Calvary were named, as is commonly believed, Dismas and
Gestas, or Dismas and Gesmas. This orthography might have confounded the
pretensions put forward in the last century by the Vicomte de Gestas, of
a descent from the wicked thief. However, the useful virtue attached to
these verses forms an article of faith in the order of the Hospitallers.

The church of the house, constructed in such a manner as to separate the
Great Convent from the Boarding-school like a veritable intrenchment,
was, of course, common to the Boarding-school, the Great Convent, and
the Little Convent. The public was even admitted by a sort of lazaretto
entrance on the street. But all was so arranged, that none of the
inhabitants of the cloister could see a face from the outside world.
Suppose a church whose choir is grasped in a gigantic hand, and
folded in such a manner as to form, not, as in ordinary churches, a
prolongation behind the altar, but a sort of hall, or obscure cellar, to
the right of the officiating priest; suppose this hall to be shut off by
a curtain seven feet in height, of which we have already spoken; in the
shadow of that curtain, pile up on wooden stalls the nuns in the choir
on the left, the school-girls on the right, the lay-sisters and the
novices at the bottom, and you will have some idea of the nuns of the
Petit-Picpus assisting at divine service. That cavern, which was called
the choir, communicated with the cloister by a lobby. The church was
lighted from the garden. When the nuns were present at services where
their rule enjoined silence, the public was warned of their presence
only by the folding seats of the stalls noisily rising and falling.




CHAPTER VII--SOME SILHOUETTES OF THIS DARKNESS

During the six years which separate 1819 from 1825, the prioress of the
Petit-Picpus was Mademoiselle de Blemeur, whose name, in religion,
was Mother Innocente. She came of the family of Marguerite de Blemeur,
author of Lives of the Saints of the Order of Saint-Benoit. She had
been re-elected. She was a woman about sixty years of age, short, thick,
"singing like a cracked pot," says the letter which we have already
quoted; an excellent woman, moreover, and the only merry one in the
whole convent, and for that reason adored. She was learned, erudite,
wise, competent, curiously proficient in history, crammed with Latin,
stuffed with Greek, full of Hebrew, and more of a Benedictine monk than
a Benedictine nun.

The sub-prioress was an old Spanish nun, Mother Cineres, who was almost
blind.

The most esteemed among the vocal mothers were Mother Sainte-Honorine;
the treasurer, Mother Sainte-Gertrude, the chief mistress of the
novices; Mother-Saint-Ange, the assistant mistress; Mother Annonciation,
the sacristan; Mother Saint-Augustin, the nurse, the only one in the
convent who was malicious; then Mother Sainte-Mechtilde (Mademoiselle
Gauvain), very young and with a beautiful voice; Mother des Anges
(Mademoiselle Drouet), who had been in the convent of the Filles-Dieu,
and in the convent du Tresor, between Gisors and Magny; Mother
Saint-Joseph (Mademoiselle de Cogolludo), Mother Sainte-Adelaide
(Mademoiselle d'Auverney), Mother Misericorde (Mademoiselle de
Cifuentes, who could not resist austerities), Mother Compassion
(Mademoiselle de la Miltiere, received at the age of sixty in defiance
of the rule, and very wealthy); Mother Providence (Mademoiselle de
Laudiniere), Mother Presentation (Mademoiselle de Siguenza), who was
prioress in 1847; and finally, Mother Sainte-Celigne (sister of the
sculptor Ceracchi), who went mad; Mother Sainte-Chantal (Mademoiselle de
Suzon), who went mad.

There was also, among the prettiest of them, a charming girl of three
and twenty, who was from the Isle de Bourbon, a descendant of the
Chevalier Roze, whose name had been Mademoiselle Roze, and who was
called Mother Assumption.

Mother Sainte-Mechtilde, intrusted with the singing and the choir, was
fond of making use of the pupils in this quarter. She usually took a
complete scale of them, that is to say, seven, from ten to sixteen years
of age, inclusive, of assorted voices and sizes, whom she made sing
standing, drawn up in a line, side by side, according to age, from the
smallest to the largest. This presented to the eye, something in the
nature of a reed-pipe of young girls, a sort of living Pan-pipe made of
angels.

Those of the lay-sisters whom the scholars loved most were Sister
Euphrasie, Sister Sainte-Marguerite, Sister Sainte-Marthe, who was in
her dotage, and Sister Sainte-Michel, whose long nose made them laugh.

All these women were gentle with the children. The nuns were severe only
towards themselves. No fire was lighted except in the school, and the
food was choice compared to that in the convent. Moreover, they lavished
a thousand cares on their scholars. Only, when a child passed near a nun
and addressed her, the nun never replied.

This rule of silence had had this effect, that throughout the whole
convent, speech had been withdrawn from human creatures, and bestowed
on inanimate objects. Now it was the church-bell which spoke, now it was
the gardener's bell. A very sonorous bell, placed beside the portress,
and which was audible throughout the house, indicated by its varied
peals, which formed a sort of acoustic telegraph, all the actions of
material life which were to be performed, and summoned to the parlor, in
case of need, such or such an inhabitant of the house. Each person
and each thing had its own peal. The prioress had one and one, the
sub-prioress one and two. Six-five announced lessons, so that the pupils
never said "to go to lessons," but "to go to six-five." Four-four was
Madame de Genlis's signal. It was very often heard. "C'est le diable
a quatre,"--it's the very deuce--said the uncharitable. Tennine strokes
announced a great event. It was the opening of the door of seclusion,
a frightful sheet of iron bristling with bolts which only turned on its
hinges in the presence of the archbishop.

With the exception of the archbishop and the gardener, no man entered
the convent, as we have already said. The schoolgirls saw two others:
one, the chaplain, the Abbe Banes, old and ugly, whom they were
permitted to contemplate in the choir, through a grating; the other the
drawing-master, M. Ansiaux, whom the letter, of which we have perused a
few lines, calls M. Anciot, and describes as a frightful old hunchback.

It will be seen that all these men were carefully chosen.

Such was this curious house.




CHAPTER VIII--POST CORDA LAPIDES

After having sketched its moral face, it will not prove unprofitable
to point out, in a few words, its material configuration. The reader
already has some idea of it.

The convent of the Petit-Picpus-Sainte-Antoine filled almost the whole
of the vast trapezium which resulted from the intersection of the Rue
Polonceau, the Rue Droit-Mur, the Rue Petit-Picpus, and the unused lane,
called Rue Aumarais on old plans. These four streets surrounded this
trapezium like a moat. The convent was composed of several buildings
and a garden. The principal building, taken in its entirety, was a
juxtaposition of hybrid constructions which, viewed from a bird's-eye
view, outlined, with considerable exactness, a gibbet laid flat on the
ground. The main arm of the gibbet occupied the whole of the fragment
of the Rue Droit-Mur comprised between the Rue Petit-Picpus and the Rue
Polonceau; the lesser arm was a lofty, gray, severe grated facade which
faced the Rue Petit-Picpus; the carriage entrance No. 62 marked its
extremity. Towards the centre of this facade was a low, arched door,
whitened with dust and ashes, where the spiders wove their webs,
and which was open only for an hour or two on Sundays, and on rare
occasions, when the coffin of a nun left the convent. This was the
public entrance of the church. The elbow of the gibbet was a square
hall which was used as the servants' hall, and which the nuns called the
buttery. In the main arm were the cells of the mothers, the sisters, and
the novices. In the lesser arm lay the kitchens, the refectory, backed
up by the cloisters and the church. Between the door No. 62 and the
corner of the closed lane Aumarais, was the school, which was not
visible from without. The remainder of the trapezium formed the garden,
which was much lower than the level of the Rue Polonceau, which caused
the walls to be very much higher on the inside than on the outside. The
garden, which was slightly arched, had in its centre, on the summit of
a hillock, a fine pointed and conical fir-tree, whence ran, as from
the peaked boss of a shield, four grand alleys, and, ranged by twos
in between the branchings of these, eight small ones, so that, if the
enclosure had been circular, the geometrical plan of the alleys would
have resembled a cross superposed on a wheel. As the alleys all ended
in the very irregular walls of the garden, they were of unequal length.
They were bordered with currant bushes. At the bottom, an alley of tall
poplars ran from the ruins of the old convent, which was at the angle of
the Rue Droit-Mur to the house of the Little Convent, which was at the
angle of the Aumarais lane. In front of the Little Convent was what was
called the little garden. To this whole, let the reader add a courtyard,
all sorts of varied angles formed by the interior buildings, prison
walls, the long black line of roofs which bordered the other side of the
Rue Polonceau for its sole perspective and neighborhood, and he will
be able to form for himself a complete image of what the house of the
Bernardines of the Petit-Picpus was forty years ago. This holy house
had been built on the precise site of a famous tennis-ground of the
fourteenth to the sixteenth century, which was called the "tennis-ground
of the eleven thousand devils."

All these streets, moreover, were more ancient than Paris. These names,
Droit-Mur and Aumarais, are very ancient; the streets which bear them
are very much more ancient still. Aumarais Lane was called Maugout Lane;
the Rue Droit-Mur was called the Rue des Eglantiers, for God opened
flowers before man cut stones.




CHAPTER IX--A CENTURY UNDER A GUIMPE

Since we are engaged in giving details as to what the convent of the
Petit-Picpus was in former times, and since we have ventured to open
a window on that discreet retreat, the reader will permit us one other
little digression, utterly foreign to this book, but characteristic and
useful, since it shows that the cloister even has its original figures.

In the Little Convent there was a centenarian who came from the Abbey
of Fontevrault. She had even been in society before the Revolution. She
talked a great deal of M. de Miromesnil, Keeper of the Seals under Louis
XVI. and of a Presidentess Duplat, with whom she had been very intimate.
It was her pleasure and her vanity to drag in these names on every
pretext. She told wonders of the Abbey of Fontevrault,--that it was like
a city, and that there were streets in the monastery.

She talked with a Picard accent which amused the pupils. Every year,
she solemnly renewed her vows, and at the moment of taking the oath, she
said to the priest, "Monseigneur Saint-Francois gave it to Monseigneur
Saint-Julien, Monseigneur Saint-Julien gave it to Monseigneur
Saint-Eusebius, Monseigneur Saint-Eusebius gave it to Monseigneur
Saint-Procopius, etc., etc.; and thus I give it to you, father." And the
school-girls would begin to laugh, not in their sleeves, but under
their veils; charming little stifled laughs which made the vocal mothers
frown.

On another occasion, the centenarian was telling stories. She said
that in her youth the Bernardine monks were every whit as good as the
mousquetaires. It was a century which spoke through her, but it was the
eighteenth century. She told about the custom of the four wines, which
existed before the Revolution in Champagne and Bourgogne. When a great
personage, a marshal of France, a prince, a duke, and a peer, traversed
a town in Burgundy or Champagne, the city fathers came out to harangue
him and presented him with four silver gondolas into which they
had poured four different sorts of wine. On the first goblet this
inscription could be read, monkey wine; on the second, lion wine; on the
third, sheep wine; on the fourth, hog wine. These four legends express
the four stages descended by the drunkard; the first, intoxication,
which enlivens; the second, that which irritates; the third, that which
dulls; and the fourth, that which brutalizes.

In a cupboard, under lock and key, she kept a mysterious object of which
she thought a great deal. The rule of Fontevrault did not forbid this.
She would not show this object to anyone. She shut herself up, which her
rule allowed her to do, and hid herself, every time that she desired to
contemplate it. If she heard a footstep in the corridor, she closed the
cupboard again as hastily as it was possible with her aged hands. As
soon as it was mentioned to her, she became silent, she who was so fond
of talking. The most curious were baffled by her silence and the most
tenacious by her obstinacy. Thus it furnished a subject of comment for
all those who were unoccupied or bored in the convent. What could that
treasure of the centenarian be, which was so precious and so secret?
Some holy book, no doubt? Some unique chaplet? Some authentic relic?
They lost themselves in conjectures. When the poor old woman died,
they rushed to her cupboard more hastily than was fitting, perhaps, and
opened it. They found the object beneath a triple linen cloth, like some
consecrated paten. It was a Faenza platter representing little Loves
flitting away pursued by apothecary lads armed with enormous syringes.
The chase abounds in grimaces and in comical postures. One of the
charming little Loves is already fairly spitted. He is resisting,
fluttering his tiny wings, and still making an effort to fly, but the
dancer is laughing with a satanical air. Moral: Love conquered by the
colic. This platter, which is very curious, and which had, possibly,
the honor of furnishing Moliere with an idea, was still in existence
in September, 1845; it was for sale by a bric-a-brac merchant in the
Boulevard Beaumarchais.

This good old woman would not receive any visits from outside because,
said she, the parlor is too gloomy.




CHAPTER X--ORIGIN OF THE PERPETUAL ADORATION

However, this almost sepulchral parlor, of which we have sought to
convey an idea, is a purely local trait which is not reproduced with the
same severity in other convents. At the convent of the Rue du Temple,
in particular, which belonged, in truth, to another order, the black
shutters were replaced by brown curtains, and the parlor itself was a
salon with a polished wood floor, whose windows were draped in white
muslin curtains and whose walls admitted all sorts of frames, a portrait
of a Benedictine nun with unveiled face, painted bouquets, and even the
head of a Turk.

It is in that garden of the Temple convent, that stood that famous
chestnut-tree which was renowned as the finest and the largest in
France, and which bore the reputation among the good people of the
eighteenth century of being the father of all the chestnut trees of the
realm.

As we have said, this convent of the Temple was occupied by Benedictines
of the Perpetual Adoration, Benedictines quite different from those who
depended on Citeaux. This order of the Perpetual Adoration is not very
ancient and does not go back more than two hundred years. In 1649 the
holy sacrament was profaned on two occasions a few days apart, in two
churches in Paris, at Saint-Sulpice and at Saint-Jean en Greve, a rare
and frightful sacrilege which set the whole town in an uproar. M. the
Prior and Vicar-General of Saint-Germain des Pres ordered a solemn
procession of all his clergy, in which the Pope's Nuncio officiated.
But this expiation did not satisfy two sainted women, Madame Courtin,
Marquise de Boucs, and the Comtesse de Chateauvieux. This outrage
committed on "the most holy sacrament of the altar," though but
temporary, would not depart from these holy souls, and it seemed to
them that it could only be extenuated by a "Perpetual Adoration" in some
female monastery. Both of them, one in 1652, the other in 1653, made
donations of notable sums to Mother Catherine de Bar, called of the Holy
Sacrament, a Benedictine nun, for the purpose of founding, to this pious
end, a monastery of the order of Saint-Benoit; the first permission for
this foundation was given to Mother Catherine de Bar by M. de Metz, Abbe
of Saint-Germain, "on condition that no woman could be received unless
she contributed three hundred livres income, which amounts to six
thousand livres, to the principal." After the Abbe of Saint-Germain, the
king accorded letters-patent; and all the rest, abbatial charter, and
royal letters, was confirmed in 1654 by the Chamber of Accounts and the
Parliament.

Such is the origin of the legal consecration of the establishment of the
Benedictines of the Perpetual Adoration of the Holy Sacrament at Paris.
Their first convent was "a new building" in the Rue Cassette, out of the
contributions of Mesdames de Boucs and de Chateauvieux.

This order, as it will be seen, was not to be confounded with
the Benedictine nuns of Citeaux. It mounted back to the Abbe of
Saint-Germain des Pres, in the same manner that the ladies of the Sacred
Heart go back to the general of the Jesuits, and the sisters of charity
to the general of the Lazarists.

It was also totally different from the Bernardines of the Petit-Picpus,
whose interior we have just shown. In 1657, Pope Alexander VII. had
authorized, by a special brief, the Bernardines of the Rue Petit-Picpus,
to practise the Perpetual Adoration like the Benedictine nuns of the
Holy Sacrament. But the two orders remained distinct none the less.




CHAPTER XI--END OF THE PETIT-PICPUS

At the beginning of the Restoration, the convent of the Petit-Picpus
was in its decay; this forms a part of the general death of the order,
which, after the eighteenth century, has been disappearing like all
the religious orders. Contemplation is, like prayer, one of humanity's
needs; but, like everything which the Revolution touched, it will be
transformed, and from being hostile to social progress, it will become
favorable to it.

The house of the Petit-Picpus was becoming rapidly depopulated. In 1840,
the Little Convent had disappeared, the school had disappeared. There
were no longer any old women, nor young girls; the first were dead, the
latter had taken their departure. Volaverunt.

The rule of the Perpetual Adoration is so rigid in its nature that it
alarms, vocations recoil before it, the order receives no recruits. In
1845, it still obtained lay-sisters here and there. But of professed
nuns, none at all. Forty years ago, the nuns numbered nearly a hundred;
fifteen years ago there were not more than twenty-eight of them. How
many are there to-day? In 1847, the prioress was young, a sign that
the circle of choice was restricted. She was not forty years old. In
proportion as the number diminishes, the fatigue increases, the service
of each becomes more painful; the moment could then be seen drawing near
when there would be but a dozen bent and aching shoulders to bear the
heavy rule of Saint-Benoit. The burden is implacable, and remains the
same for the few as for the many. It weighs down, it crushes. Thus they
die. At the period when the author of this book still lived in Paris,
two died. One was twenty-five years old, the other twenty-three. This
latter can say, like Julia Alpinula: "Hic jaceo. Vixi annos viginti et
tres." It is in consequence of this decay that the convent gave up the
education of girls.

We have not felt able to pass before this extraordinary house without
entering it, and without introducing the minds which accompany us, and
which are listening to our tale, to the profit of some, perchance, of
the melancholy history of Jean Valjean. We have penetrated into this
community, full of those old practices which seem so novel to-day. It
is the closed garden, hortus conclusus. We have spoken of this singular
place in detail, but with respect, in so far, at least, as detail and
respect are compatible. We do not understand all, but we insult nothing.
We are equally far removed from the hosanna of Joseph de Maistre, who
wound up by anointing the executioner, and from the sneer of Voltaire,
who even goes so far as to ridicule the cross.

An illogical act on Voltaire's part, we may remark, by the way; for
Voltaire would have defended Jesus as he defended Calas; and even
for those who deny superhuman incarnations, what does the crucifix
represent? The assassinated sage.

In this nineteenth century, the religious idea is undergoing a crisis.
People are unlearning certain things, and they do well, provided that,
while unlearning them they learn this: There is no vacuum in the human
heart. Certain demolitions take place, and it is well that they do, but
on condition that they are followed by reconstructions.

In the meantime, let us study things which are no more. It is necessary
to know them, if only for the purpose of avoiding them. The counterfeits
of the past assume false names, and gladly call themselves the future.
This spectre, this past, is given to falsifying its own passport. Let
us inform ourselves of the trap. Let us be on our guard. The past has a
visage, superstition, and a mask, hypocrisy. Let us denounce the visage
and let us tear off the mask.

As for convents, they present a complex problem,--a question of
civilization, which condemns them; a question of liberty, which protects
them.




BOOK SEVENTH.--PARENTHESIS




CHAPTER I--THE CONVENT AS AN ABSTRACT IDEA

This book is a drama, whose leading personage is the Infinite.

Man is the second.

Such being the case, and a convent having happened to be on our road, it
has been our duty to enter it. Why? Because the convent, which is common
to the Orient as well as to the Occident, to antiquity as well as to
modern times, to paganism, to Buddhism, to Mahometanism, as well as to
Christianity, is one of the optical apparatuses applied by man to the
Infinite.

This is not the place for enlarging disproportionately on certain
ideas; nevertheless, while absolutely maintaining our reserves, our
restrictions, and even our indignations, we must say that every time we
encounter man in the Infinite, either well or ill understood, we feel
ourselves overpowered with respect. There is, in the synagogue, in the
mosque, in the pagoda, in the wigwam, a hideous side which we execrate,
and a sublime side, which we adore. What a contemplation for the mind,
and what endless food for thought, is the reverberation of God upon the
human wall!




CHAPTER II--THE CONVENT AS AN HISTORICAL FACT

From the point of view of history, of reason, and of truth, monasticism
is condemned. Monasteries, when they abound in a nation, are clogs in
its circulation, cumbrous establishments, centres of idleness where
centres of labor should exist. Monastic communities are to the great
social community what the mistletoe is to the oak, what the wart is
to the human body. Their prosperity and their fatness mean the
impoverishment of the country. The monastic regime, good at the
beginning of civilization, useful in the reduction of the brutal by the
spiritual, is bad when peoples have reached their manhood. Moreover,
when it becomes relaxed, and when it enters into its period of disorder,
it becomes bad for the very reasons which rendered it salutary in its
period of purity, because it still continues to set the example.

Claustration has had its day. Cloisters, useful in the early education
of modern civilization, have embarrassed its growth, and are injurious
to its development. So far as institution and formation with relation
to man are concerned, monasteries, which were good in the tenth century,
questionable in the fifteenth, are detestable in the nineteenth. The
leprosy of monasticism has gnawed nearly to a skeleton two wonderful
nations, Italy and Spain; the one the light, the other the splendor of
Europe for centuries; and, at the present day, these two illustrious
peoples are but just beginning to convalesce, thanks to the healthy and
vigorous hygiene of 1789 alone.

The convent--the ancient female convent in particular, such as it still
presents itself on the threshold of this century, in Italy, in Austria,
in Spain--is one of the most sombre concretions of the Middle Ages. The
cloister, that cloister, is the point of intersection of horrors. The
Catholic cloister, properly speaking, is wholly filled with the black
radiance of death.

The Spanish convent is the most funereal of all. There rise, in
obscurity, beneath vaults filled with gloom, beneath domes vague with
shadow, massive altars of Babel, as high as cathedrals; there immense
white crucifixes hang from chains in the dark; there are extended, all
nude on the ebony, great Christs of ivory; more than bleeding,--bloody;
hideous and magnificent, with their elbows displaying the bones, their
knee-pans showing their integuments, their wounds showing their flesh,
crowned with silver thorns, nailed with nails of gold, with blood drops
of rubies on their brows, and diamond tears in their eyes. The diamonds
and rubies seem wet, and make veiled beings in the shadow below weep,
their sides bruised with the hair shirt and their iron-tipped scourges,
their breasts crushed with wicker hurdles, their knees excoriated with
prayer; women who think themselves wives, spectres who think themselves
seraphim. Do these women think? No. Have they any will? No. Do they
love? No. Do they live? No. Their nerves have turned to bone; their
bones have turned to stone. Their veil is of woven night. Their breath
under their veil resembles the indescribably tragic respiration of
death. The abbess, a spectre, sanctifies them and terrifies them.
The immaculate one is there, and very fierce. Such are the ancient
monasteries of Spain. Lairs of terrible devotion, caverns of virgins,
ferocious places.

Catholic Spain is more Roman than Rome herself. The Spanish convent was,
above all others, the Catholic convent. There was a flavor of the Orient
about it. The archbishop, the kislar-aga of heaven, locked up and kept
watch over this seraglio of souls reserved for God. The nun was the
odalisque, the priest was the eunuch. The fervent were chosen in dreams
and possessed Christ. At night, the beautiful, nude young man descended
from the cross and became the ecstasy of the cloistered one. Lofty walls
guarded the mystic sultana, who had the crucified for her sultan, from
all living distraction. A glance on the outer world was infidelity. The
in pace replaced the leather sack. That which was cast into the sea in
the East was thrown into the ground in the West. In both quarters, women
wrung their hands; the waves for the first, the grave for the last; here
the drowned, there the buried. Monstrous parallel.

To-day the upholders of the past, unable to deny these things, have
adopted the expedient of smiling at them. There has come into fashion
a strange and easy manner of suppressing the revelations of history, of
invalidating the commentaries of philosophy, of eliding all embarrassing
facts and all gloomy questions. A matter for declamations, say the
clever. Declamations, repeat the foolish. Jean-Jacques a declaimer;
Diderot a declaimer; Voltaire on Calas, Labarre, and Sirven, declaimers.
I know not who has recently discovered that Tacitus was a declaimer,
that Nero was a victim, and that pity is decidedly due to "that poor
Holofernes."

Facts, however, are awkward things to disconcert, and they are
obstinate. The author of this book has seen, with his own eyes, eight
leagues distant from Brussels,--there are relics of the Middle Ages
there which are attainable for everybody,--at the Abbey of Villers, the
hole of the oubliettes, in the middle of the field which was formerly
the courtyard of the cloister, and on the banks of the Thil, four stone
dungeons, half under ground, half under the water. They were in pace.
Each of these dungeons has the remains of an iron door, a vault, and a
grated opening which, on the outside, is two feet above the level of the
river, and on the inside, six feet above the level of the ground. Four
feet of river flow past along the outside wall. The ground is always
soaked. The occupant of the in pace had this wet soil for his bed. In
one of these dungeons, there is a fragment of an iron necklet riveted to
the wall; in another, there can be seen a square box made of four slabs
of granite, too short for a person to lie down in, too low for him to
stand upright in. A human being was put inside, with a coverlid of stone
on top. This exists. It can be seen. It can be touched. These in pace,
these dungeons, these iron hinges, these necklets, that lofty peep-hole
on a level with the river's current, that box of stone closed with a lid
of granite like a tomb, with this difference, that the dead man here
was a living being, that soil which is but mud, that vault hole, those
oozing walls,--what declaimers!




CHAPTER III--ON WHAT CONDITIONS ONE CAN RESPECT THE PAST

Monasticism, such as it existed in Spain, and such as it still exists in
Thibet, is a sort of phthisis for civilization. It stops life short. It
simply depopulates. Claustration, castration. It has been the scourge
of Europe. Add to this the violence so often done to the conscience, the
forced vocations, feudalism bolstered up by the cloister, the right of
the first-born pouring the excess of the family into monasticism, the
ferocities of which we have just spoken, the in pace, the closed mouths,
the walled-up brains, so many unfortunate minds placed in the dungeon
of eternal vows, the taking of the habit, the interment of living souls.
Add individual tortures to national degradations, and, whoever you
may be, you will shudder before the frock and the veil,--those two
winding-sheets of human devising. Nevertheless, at certain points and in
certain places, in spite of philosophy, in spite of progress, the spirit
of the cloister persists in the midst of the nineteenth century, and
a singular ascetic recrudescence is, at this moment, astonishing
the civilized world. The obstinacy of antiquated institutions in
perpetuating themselves resembles the stubbornness of the rancid perfume
which should claim our hair, the pretensions of the spoiled fish which
should persist in being eaten, the persecution of the child's garment
which should insist on clothing the man, the tenderness of corpses which
should return to embrace the living.

"Ingrates!" says the garment, "I protected you in inclement weather. Why
will you have nothing to do with me?" "I have just come from the deep
sea," says the fish. "I have been a rose," says the perfume. "I have
loved you," says the corpse. "I have civilized you," says the convent.

To this there is but one reply: "In former days."

To dream of the indefinite prolongation of defunct things, and of the
government of men by embalming, to restore dogmas in a bad condition,
to regild shrines, to patch up cloisters, to rebless reliquaries, to
refurnish superstitions, to revictual fanaticisms, to put new handles
on holy water brushes and militarism, to reconstitute monasticism and
militarism, to believe in the salvation of society by the multiplication
of parasites, to force the past on the present,--this seems strange.
Still, there are theorists who hold such theories. These theorists,
who are in other respects people of intelligence, have a very simple
process; they apply to the past a glazing which they call social
order, divine right, morality, family, the respect of elders, antique
authority, sacred tradition, legitimacy, religion; and they go about
shouting, "Look! take this, honest people." This logic was known to the
ancients. The soothsayers practise it. They rubbed a black heifer over
with chalk, and said, "She is white, Bos cretatus."

As for us, we respect the past here and there, and we spare it, above
all, provided that it consents to be dead. If it insists on being alive,
we attack it, and we try to kill it.

Superstitions, bigotries, affected devotion, prejudices, those forms all
forms as they are, are tenacious of life; they have teeth and nails in
their smoke, and they must be clasped close, body to body, and war must
be made on them, and that without truce; for it is one of the fatalities
of humanity to be condemned to eternal combat with phantoms. It is
difficult to seize darkness by the throat, and to hurl it to the earth.

A convent in France, in the broad daylight of the nineteenth century, is
a college of owls facing the light. A cloister, caught in the very act
of asceticism, in the very heart of the city of '89 and of 1830 and
of 1848, Rome blossoming out in Paris, is an anachronism. In ordinary
times, in order to dissolve an anachronism and to cause it to vanish,
one has only to make it spell out the date. But we are not in ordinary
times.

Let us fight.

Let us fight, but let us make a distinction. The peculiar property of
truth is never to commit excesses. What need has it of exaggeration?
There is that which it is necessary to destroy, and there is that which
it is simply necessary to elucidate and examine. What a force is kindly
and serious examination! Let us not apply a flame where only a light is
required.

So, given the nineteenth century, we are opposed, as a general
proposition, and among all peoples, in Asia as well as in Europe,
in India as well as in Turkey, to ascetic claustration. Whoever says
cloister, says marsh. Their putrescence is evident, their stagnation is
unhealthy, their fermentation infects people with fever, and etiolates
them; their multiplication becomes a plague of Egypt. We cannot think
without affright of those lands where fakirs, bonzes, santons, Greek
monks, marabouts, talapoins, and dervishes multiply even like swarms of
vermin.

This said, the religious question remains. This question has certain
mysterious, almost formidable sides; may we be permitted to look at it
fixedly.




CHAPTER IV--THE CONVENT FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF PRINCIPLES

Men unite themselves and dwell in communities. By virtue of what right?
By virtue of the right of association.

They shut themselves up at home. By virtue of what right? By virtue of
the right which every man has to open or shut his door.

They do not come forth. By virtue of what right? By virtue of the right
to go and come, which implies the right to remain at home.

There, at home, what do they do?

They speak in low tones; they drop their eyes; they toil. They renounce
the world, towns, sensualities, pleasures, vanities, pride, interests.
They are clothed in coarse woollen or coarse linen. Not one of them
possesses in his own right anything whatever. On entering there, each
one who was rich makes himself poor. What he has, he gives to all. He
who was what is called noble, a gentleman and a lord, is the equal of
him who was a peasant. The cell is identical for all. All undergo the
same tonsure, wear the same frock, eat the same black bread, sleep on
the same straw, die on the same ashes. The same sack on their backs, the
same rope around their loins. If the decision has been to go barefoot,
all go barefoot. There may be a prince among them; that prince is the
same shadow as the rest. No titles. Even family names have disappeared.
They bear only first names. All are bowed beneath the equality of
baptismal names. They have dissolved the carnal family, and constituted
in their community a spiritual family. They have no other relatives than
all men. They succor the poor, they care for the sick. They elect those
whom they obey. They call each other "my brother."

You stop me and exclaim, "But that is the ideal convent!"

It is sufficient that it may be the possible convent, that I should take
notice of it.

Thence it results that, in the preceding book, I have spoken of a
convent with respectful accents. The Middle Ages cast aside, Asia cast
aside, the historical and political question held in reserve, from the
purely philosophical point of view, outside the requirements of militant
policy, on condition that the monastery shall be absolutely a voluntary
matter and shall contain only consenting parties, I shall always
consider a cloistered community with a certain attentive, and, in some
respects, a deferential gravity.

Wherever there is a community, there is a commune; where there is a
commune, there is right. The monastery is the product of the formula:
Equality, Fraternity. Oh! how grand is liberty! And what a splendid
transfiguration! Liberty suffices to transform the monastery into a
republic.

Let us continue.

But these men, or these women who are behind these four walls. They
dress themselves in coarse woollen, they are equals, they call each
other brothers, that is well; but they do something else?

Yes.

What?

They gaze on the darkness, they kneel, and they clasp their hands.

What does this signify?




CHAPTER V--PRAYER

They pray.

To whom?

To God.

To pray to God,--what is the meaning of these words?

Is there an infinite beyond us? Is that infinite there, inherent,
permanent; necessarily substantial, since it is infinite; and because,
if it lacked matter it would be bounded; necessarily intelligent, since
it is infinite, and because, if it lacked intelligence, it would end
there? Does this infinite awaken in us the idea of essence, while we can
attribute to ourselves only the idea of existence? In other terms, is it
not the absolute, of which we are only the relative?

At the same time that there is an infinite without us, is there not
an infinite within us? Are not these two infinites (what an alarming
plural!) superposed, the one upon the other? Is not this second
infinite, so to speak, subjacent to the first? Is it not the latter's
mirror, reflection, echo, an abyss which is concentric with another
abyss? Is this second infinity intelligent also? Does it think? Does
it love? Does it will? If these two infinities are intelligent, each of
them has a will principle, and there is an _I_ in the upper infinity as
there is an _I_ in the lower infinity. The _I_ below is the soul; the
_I_ on high is God.

To place the infinity here below in contact, by the medium of thought,
with the infinity on high, is called praying.

Let us take nothing from the human mind; to suppress is bad. We must
reform and transform. Certain faculties in man are directed towards
the Unknown; thought, revery, prayer. The Unknown is an ocean. What
is conscience? It is the compass of the Unknown. Thought, revery,
prayer,--these are great and mysterious radiations. Let us respect them.
Whither go these majestic irradiations of the soul? Into the shadow;
that is to say, to the light.

The grandeur of democracy is to disown nothing and to deny nothing of
humanity. Close to the right of the man, beside it, at the least, there
exists the right of the soul.

To crush fanaticism and to venerate the infinite, such is the law. Let
us not confine ourselves to prostrating ourselves before the tree of
creation, and to the contemplation of its branches full of stars. We
have a duty to labor over the human soul, to defend the mystery against
the miracle, to adore the incomprehensible and reject the absurd,
to admit, as an inexplicable fact, only what is necessary, to purify
belief, to remove superstitions from above religion; to clear God of
caterpillars.




CHAPTER VI--THE ABSOLUTE GOODNESS OF PRAYER

With regard to the modes of prayer, all are good, provided that they are
sincere. Turn your book upside down and be in the infinite.

There is, as we know, a philosophy which denies the infinite. There is
also a philosophy, pathologically classified, which denies the sun; this
philosophy is called blindness.

To erect a sense which we lack into a source of truth, is a fine blind
man's self-sufficiency.

The curious thing is the haughty, superior, and compassionate airs which
this groping philosophy assumes towards the philosophy which beholds
God. One fancies he hears a mole crying, "I pity them with their sun!"

There are, as we know, powerful and illustrious atheists. At bottom, led
back to the truth by their very force, they are not absolutely sure that
they are atheists; it is with them only a question of definition, and in
any case, if they do not believe in God, being great minds, they prove
God.

We salute them as philosophers, while inexorably denouncing their
philosophy.

Let us go on.

The remarkable thing about it is, also, their facility in paying
themselves off with words. A metaphysical school of the North,
impregnated to some extent with fog, has fancied that it has worked a
revolution in human understanding by replacing the word Force with the
word Will.

To say: "the plant wills," instead of: "the plant grows": this would be
fecund in results, indeed, if we were to add: "the universe wills." Why?
Because it would come to this: the plant wills, therefore it has an _I_;
the universe wills, therefore it has a God.

As for us, who, however, in contradistinction to this school, reject
nothing a priori, a will in the plant, accepted by this school, appears
to us more difficult to admit than a will in the universe denied by it.

To deny the will of the infinite, that is to say, God, is impossible on
any other conditions than a denial of the infinite. We have demonstrated
this.

The negation of the infinite leads straight to nihilism. Everything
becomes "a mental conception."

With nihilism, no discussion is possible; for the nihilist logic doubts
the existence of its interlocutor, and is not quite sure that it exists
itself.

From its point of view, it is possible that it may be for itself, only
"a mental conception."

Only, it does not perceive that all which it has denied it admits in the
lump, simply by the utterance of the word, mind.

In short, no way is open to the thought by a philosophy which makes all
end in the monosyllable, No.

To No there is only one reply, Yes.

Nihilism has no point.

There is no such thing as nothingness. Zero does not exist. Everything
is something. Nothing is nothing.

Man lives by affirmation even more than by bread.

Even to see and to show does not suffice. Philosophy should be an
energy; it should have for effort and effect to ameliorate the condition
of man. Socrates should enter into Adam and produce Marcus Aurelius; in
other words, the man of wisdom should be made to emerge from the man
of felicity. Eden should be changed into a Lyceum. Science should be
a cordial. To enjoy,--what a sad aim, and what a paltry ambition! The
brute enjoys. To offer thought to the thirst of men, to give them all as
an elixir the notion of God, to make conscience and science fraternize
in them, to render them just by this mysterious confrontation; such is
the function of real philosophy. Morality is a blossoming out of truths.
Contemplation leads to action. The absolute should be practicable. It is
necessary that the ideal should be breathable, drinkable, and eatable to
the human mind. It is the ideal which has the right to say: Take, this!
It is on this condition that it ceases to be a sterile love of science
and becomes the one and sovereign mode of human rallying, and that
philosophy herself is promoted to religion.

Philosophy should not be a corbel erected on mystery to gaze upon it
at its ease, without any other result than that of being convenient to
curiosity.

For our part, adjourning the development of our thought to another
occasion, we will confine ourselves to saying that we neither understand
man as a point of departure nor progress as an end, without those two
forces which are their two motors: faith and love.

Progress is the goal, the ideal is the type.

What is this ideal? It is God.

Ideal, absolute, perfection, infinity: identical words.




CHAPTER VII--PRECAUTIONS TO BE OBSERVED IN BLAME

History and philosophy have eternal duties, which are, at the same time,
simple duties; to combat Caiphas the High-priest, Draco the Lawgiver,
Trimalcion the Legislator, Tiberius the Emperor; this is clear, direct,
and limpid, and offers no obscurity.

But the right to live apart, even with its inconveniences and its
abuses, insists on being stated and taken into account. Cenobitism is a
human problem.

When one speaks of convents, those abodes of error, but of innocence,
of aberration but of good-will, of ignorance but of devotion, of torture
but of martyrdom, it always becomes necessary to say either yes or no.

A convent is a contradiction. Its object, salvation; its means thereto,
sacrifice. The convent is supreme egoism having for its result supreme
abnegation.

To abdicate with the object of reigning seems to be the device of
monasticism.

In the cloister, one suffers in order to enjoy. One draws a bill of
exchange on death. One discounts in terrestrial gloom celestial light.
In the cloister, hell is accepted in advance as a post obit on paradise.

The taking of the veil or the frock is a suicide paid for with eternity.

It does not seem to us, that on such a subject mockery is permissible.
All about it is serious, the good as well as the bad.

The just man frowns, but never smiles with a malicious sneer. We
understand wrath, but not malice.




CHAPTER VIII--FAITH, LAW

A few words more.

We blame the church when she is saturated with intrigues, we despise the
spiritual which is harsh toward the temporal; but we everywhere honor
the thoughtful man.

We salute the man who kneels.

A faith; this is a necessity for man. Woe to him who believes nothing.

One is not unoccupied because one is absorbed. There is visible labor
and invisible labor.

To contemplate is to labor, to think is to act.

Folded arms toil, clasped hands work. A gaze fixed on heaven is a work.

Thales remained motionless for four years. He founded philosophy.

In our opinion, cenobites are not lazy men, and recluses are not idlers.

To meditate on the Shadow is a serious thing.

Without invalidating anything that we have just said, we believe that
a perpetual memory of the tomb is proper for the living. On this point,
the priest and the philosopher agree. We must die. The Abbe de la Trappe
replies to Horace.

To mingle with one's life a certain presence of the sepulchre,--this is
the law of the sage; and it is the law of the ascetic. In this respect,
the ascetic and the sage converge. There is a material growth; we
admit it. There is a moral grandeur; we hold to that. Thoughtless and
vivacious spirits say:--

"What is the good of those motionless figures on the side of mystery?
What purpose do they serve? What do they do?"

Alas! In the presence of the darkness which environs us, and which
awaits us, in our ignorance of what the immense dispersion will make of
us, we reply: "There is probably no work more divine than that performed
by these souls." And we add: "There is probably no work which is more
useful."

There certainly must be some who pray constantly for those who never
pray at all.

In our opinion the whole question lies in the amount of thought that is
mingled with prayer.

Leibnitz praying is grand, Voltaire adoring is fine. Deo erexit
Voltaire.

We are for religion as against religions.

We are of the number who believe in the wretchedness of orisons, and the
sublimity of prayer.

Moreover, at this minute which we are now traversing,--a minute which
will not, fortunately, leave its impress on the nineteenth century,--at
this hour, when so many men have low brows and souls but little
elevated, among so many mortals whose morality consists in enjoyment,
and who are busied with the brief and misshapen things of matter,
whoever exiles himself seems worthy of veneration to us.

The monastery is a renunciation. Sacrifice wrongly directed is still
sacrifice. To mistake a grave error for a duty has a grandeur of its
own.

Taken by itself, and ideally, and in order to examine the truth on all
sides until all aspects have been impartially exhausted, the monastery,
the female convent in particular,--for in our century it is woman who
suffers the most, and in this exile of the cloister there is something
of protestation,--the female convent has incontestably a certain
majesty.

This cloistered existence which is so austere, so depressing, a few of
whose features we have just traced, is not life, for it is not liberty;
it is not the tomb, for it is not plenitude; it is the strange place
whence one beholds, as from the crest of a lofty mountain, on one side
the abyss where we are, on the other, the abyss whither we shall go; it
is the narrow and misty frontier separating two worlds, illuminated
and obscured by both at the same time, where the ray of life which has
become enfeebled is mingled with the vague ray of death; it is the half
obscurity of the tomb.

We, who do not believe what these women believe, but who, like them,
live by faith,--we have never been able to think without a sort of
tender and religious terror, without a sort of pity, that is full of
envy, of those devoted, trembling and trusting creatures, of these
humble and august souls, who dare to dwell on the very brink of the
mystery, waiting between the world which is closed and heaven which is
not yet open, turned towards the light which one cannot see, possessing
the sole happiness of thinking that they know where it is, aspiring
towards the gulf, and the unknown, their eyes fixed motionless on the
darkness, kneeling, bewildered, stupefied, shuddering, half lifted, at
times, by the deep breaths of eternity.




BOOK EIGHTH.--CEMETERIES TAKE THAT WHICH IS COMMITTED THEM




CHAPTER I--WHICH TREATS OF THE MANNER OF ENTERING A CONVENT

It was into this house that Jean Valjean had, as Fauchelevent expressed
it, "fallen from the sky."

He had scaled the wall of the garden which formed the angle of the Rue
Polonceau. That hymn of the angels which he had heard in the middle
of the night, was the nuns chanting matins; that hall, of which he had
caught a glimpse in the gloom, was the chapel. That phantom which he had
seen stretched on the ground was the sister who was making reparation;
that bell, the sound of which had so strangely surprised him, was the
gardener's bell attached to the knee of Father Fauchelevent.

Cosette once put to bed, Jean Valjean and Fauchelevent had, as we have
already seen, supped on a glass of wine and a bit of cheese before a
good, crackling fire; then, the only bed in the hut being occupied by
Cosette, each threw himself on a truss of straw.

Before he shut his eyes, Jean Valjean said: "I must remain here
henceforth." This remark trotted through Fauchelevent's head all night
long.

To tell the truth, neither of them slept.

Jean Valjean, feeling that he was discovered and that Javert was on
his scent, understood that he and Cosette were lost if they returned to
Paris. Then the new storm which had just burst upon him had stranded
him in this cloister. Jean Valjean had, henceforth, but one thought,--to
remain there. Now, for an unfortunate man in his position, this
convent was both the safest and the most dangerous of places; the most
dangerous, because, as no men might enter there, if he were discovered,
it was a flagrant offence, and Jean Valjean would find but one step
intervening between the convent and prison; the safest, because, if he
could manage to get himself accepted there and remain there, who would
ever seek him in such a place? To dwell in an impossible place was
safety.

On his side, Fauchelevent was cudgelling his brains. He began by
declaring to himself that he understood nothing of the matter. How had
M. Madeleine got there, when the walls were what they were? Cloister
walls are not to be stepped over. How did he get there with a child? One
cannot scale a perpendicular wall with a child in one's arms. Who was
that child? Where did they both come from? Since Fauchelevent had lived
in the convent, he had heard nothing of M. sur M., and he knew nothing
of what had taken place there. Father Madeleine had an air which
discouraged questions; and besides, Fauchelevent said to himself: "One
does not question a saint." M. Madeleine had preserved all his prestige
in Fauchelevent's eyes. Only, from some words which Jean Valjean had let
fall, the gardener thought he could draw the inference that M. Madeleine
had probably become bankrupt through the hard times, and that he was
pursued by his creditors; or that he had compromised himself in some
political affair, and was in hiding; which last did not displease
Fauchelevent, who, like many of our peasants of the North, had an
old fund of Bonapartism about him. While in hiding, M. Madeleine had
selected the convent as a refuge, and it was quite simple that he should
wish to remain there. But the inexplicable point, to which Fauchelevent
returned constantly and over which he wearied his brain, was that M.
Madeleine should be there, and that he should have that little girl with
him. Fauchelevent saw them, touched them, spoke to them, and still did
not believe it possible. The incomprehensible had just made its entrance
into Fauchelevent's hut. Fauchelevent groped about amid conjectures, and
could see nothing clearly but this: "M. Madeleine saved my life."
This certainty alone was sufficient and decided his course. He said to
himself: "It is my turn now." He added in his conscience: "M. Madeleine
did not stop to deliberate when it was a question of thrusting himself
under the cart for the purpose of dragging me out." He made up his mind
to save M. Madeleine.

Nevertheless, he put many questions to himself and made himself divers
replies: "After what he did for me, would I save him if he were a thief?
Just the same. If he were an assassin, would I save him? Just the same.
Since he is a saint, shall I save him? Just the same."

But what a problem it was to manage to have him remain in the convent!
Fauchelevent did not recoil in the face of this almost chimerical
undertaking; this poor peasant of Picardy without any other ladder
than his self-devotion, his good will, and a little of that old
rustic cunning, on this occasion enlisted in the service of a generous
enterprise, undertook to scale the difficulties of the cloister, and the
steep escarpments of the rule of Saint-Benoit. Father Fauchelevent was
an old man who had been an egoist all his life, and who, towards the end
of his days, halt, infirm, with no interest left to him in the world,
found it sweet to be grateful, and perceiving a generous action to be
performed, flung himself upon it like a man, who at the moment when he
is dying, should find close to his hand a glass of good wine which he
had never tasted, and should swallow it with avidity. We may add,
that the air which he had breathed for many years in this convent had
destroyed all personality in him, and had ended by rendering a good
action of some kind absolutely necessary to him.

So he took his resolve: to devote himself to M. Madeleine.

We have just called him a poor peasant of Picardy. That description
is just, but incomplete. At the point of this story which we have now
reached, a little of Father Fauchelevent's physiology becomes useful.
He was a peasant, but he had been a notary, which added trickery to his
cunning, and penetration to his ingenuousness. Having, through various
causes, failed in his business, he had descended to the calling of a
carter and a laborer. But, in spite of oaths and lashings, which horses
seem to require, something of the notary had lingered in him. He had
some natural wit; he talked good grammar; he conversed, which is a rare
thing in a village; and the other peasants said of him: "He talks almost
like a gentleman with a hat." Fauchelevent belonged, in fact, to that
species, which the impertinent and flippant vocabulary of the last
century qualified as demi-bourgeois, demi-lout, and which the metaphors
showered by the chateau upon the thatched cottage ticketed in the
pigeon-hole of the plebeian: rather rustic, rather citified; pepper and
salt. Fauchelevent, though sorely tried and harshly used by fate,
worn out, a sort of poor, threadbare old soul, was, nevertheless, an
impulsive man, and extremely spontaneous in his actions; a precious
quality which prevents one from ever being wicked. His defects and his
vices, for he had some, were all superficial; in short, his physiognomy
was of the kind which succeeds with an observer. His aged face had none
of those disagreeable wrinkles at the top of the forehead, which signify
malice or stupidity.

At daybreak, Father Fauchelevent opened his eyes, after having done an
enormous deal of thinking, and beheld M. Madeleine seated on his truss
of straw, and watching Cosette's slumbers. Fauchelevent sat up and
said:--

"Now that you are here, how are you going to contrive to enter?"

This remark summed up the situation and aroused Jean Valjean from his
revery.

The two men took counsel together.

"In the first place," said Fauchelevent, "you will begin by not setting
foot outside of this chamber, either you or the child. One step in the
garden and we are done for."

"That is true."

"Monsieur Madeleine," resumed Fauchelevent, "you have arrived at a very
auspicious moment, I mean to say a very inauspicious moment; one of
the ladies is very ill. This will prevent them from looking much in our
direction. It seems that she is dying. The prayers of the forty hours
are being said. The whole community is in confusion. That occupies them.
The one who is on the point of departure is a saint. In fact, we are
all saints here; all the difference between them and me is that they say
'our cell,' and that I say 'my cabin.' The prayers for the dying are to
be said, and then the prayers for the dead. We shall be at peace here
for to-day; but I will not answer for to-morrow."

"Still," observed Jean Valjean, "this cottage is in the niche of the
wall, it is hidden by a sort of ruin, there are trees, it is not visible
from the convent."

"And I add that the nuns never come near it."

"Well?" said Jean Valjean.

The interrogation mark which accentuated this "well" signified:
"it seems to me that one may remain concealed here?" It was to this
interrogation point that Fauchelevent responded:--

"There are the little girls."

"What little girls?" asked Jean Valjean.

Just as Fauchelevent opened his mouth to explain the words which he had
uttered, a bell emitted one stroke.

"The nun is dead," said he. "There is the knell."

And he made a sign to Jean Valjean to listen.

The bell struck a second time.

"It is the knell, Monsieur Madeleine. The bell will continue to strike
once a minute for twenty-four hours, until the body is taken from the
church.--You see, they play. At recreation hours it suffices to have a
ball roll aside, to send them all hither, in spite of prohibitions, to
hunt and rummage for it all about here. Those cherubs are devils."

"Who?" asked Jean Valjean.

"The little girls. You would be very quickly discovered. They would
shriek: 'Oh! a man!' There is no danger to-day. There will be no
recreation hour. The day will be entirely devoted to prayers. You hear
the bell. As I told you, a stroke each minute. It is the death knell."

"I understand, Father Fauchelevent. There are pupils."

And Jean Valjean thought to himself:--

"Here is Cosette's education already provided."

Fauchelevent exclaimed:--

"Pardine! There are little girls indeed! And they would bawl around you!
And they would rush off! To be a man here is to have the plague. You see
how they fasten a bell to my paw as though I were a wild beast."

Jean Valjean fell into more and more profound thought.--"This convent
would be our salvation," he murmured.

Then he raised his voice:--

"Yes, the difficulty is to remain here."

"No," said Fauchelevent, "the difficulty is to get out."

Jean Valjean felt the blood rush back to his heart.

"To get out!"

"Yes, Monsieur Madeleine. In order to return here it is first necessary
to get out."

And after waiting until another stroke of the knell had sounded,
Fauchelevent went on:--

"You must not be found here in this fashion. Whence come you? For me,
you fall from heaven, because I know you; but the nuns require one to
enter by the door."

All at once they heard a rather complicated pealing from another bell.

"Ah!" said Fauchelevent, "they are ringing up the vocal mothers. They
are going to the chapter. They always hold a chapter when any one dies.
She died at daybreak. People generally do die at daybreak. But cannot
you get out by the way in which you entered? Come, I do not ask for the
sake of questioning you, but how did you get in?"

Jean Valjean turned pale; the very thought of descending again into
that terrible street made him shudder. You make your way out of a forest
filled with tigers, and once out of it, imagine a friendly counsel that
shall advise you to return thither! Jean Valjean pictured to himself the
whole police force still engaged in swarming in that quarter, agents on
the watch, sentinels everywhere, frightful fists extended towards his
collar, Javert at the corner of the intersection of the streets perhaps.

"Impossible!" said he. "Father Fauchelevent, say that I fell from the
sky."

"But I believe it, I believe it," retorted Fauchelevent. "You have no
need to tell me that. The good God must have taken you in his hand for
the purpose of getting a good look at you close to, and then dropped
you. Only, he meant to place you in a man's convent; he made a mistake.
Come, there goes another peal, that is to order the porter to go and
inform the municipality that the dead-doctor is to come here and view a
corpse. All that is the ceremony of dying. These good ladies are not
at all fond of that visit. A doctor is a man who does not believe in
anything. He lifts the veil. Sometimes he lifts something else too. How
quickly they have had the doctor summoned this time! What is the matter?
Your little one is still asleep. What is her name?"

"Cosette."

"She is your daughter? You are her grandfather, that is?"

"Yes."

"It will be easy enough for her to get out of here. I have my service
door which opens on the courtyard. I knock. The porter opens; I have
my vintage basket on my back, the child is in it, I go out. Father
Fauchelevent goes out with his basket--that is perfectly natural. You
will tell the child to keep very quiet. She will be under the cover. I
will leave her for whatever time is required with a good old friend, a
fruit-seller whom I know in the Rue Chemin-Vert, who is deaf, and who
has a little bed. I will shout in the fruit-seller's ear, that she is a
niece of mine, and that she is to keep her for me until to-morrow. Then
the little one will re-enter with you; for I will contrive to have you
re-enter. It must be done. But how will you manage to get out?"

Jean Valjean shook his head.

"No one must see me, the whole point lies there, Father Fauchelevent.
Find some means of getting me out in a basket, under cover, like
Cosette."

Fauchelevent scratched the lobe of his ear with the middle finger of his
left hand, a sign of serious embarrassment.

A third peal created a diversion.

"That is the dead-doctor taking his departure," said Fauchelevent. "He
has taken a look and said: 'She is dead, that is well.' When the doctor
has signed the passport for paradise, the undertaker's company sends a
coffin. If it is a mother, the mothers lay her out; if she is a sister,
the sisters lay her out. After which, I nail her up. That forms a part
of my gardener's duty. A gardener is a bit of a grave-digger. She is
placed in a lower hall of the church which communicates with the street,
and into which no man may enter save the doctor of the dead. I don't
count the undertaker's men and myself as men. It is in that hall that I
nail up the coffin. The undertaker's men come and get it, and whip
up, coachman! that's the way one goes to heaven. They fetch a box with
nothing in it, they take it away again with something in it. That's what
a burial is like. De profundis."

A horizontal ray of sunshine lightly touched the face of the sleeping
Cosette, who lay with her mouth vaguely open, and had the air of an
angel drinking in the light. Jean Valjean had fallen to gazing at her.
He was no longer listening to Fauchelevent.

That one is not listened to is no reason for preserving silence. The
good old gardener went on tranquilly with his babble:--

"The grave is dug in the Vaugirard cemetery. They declare that they are
going to suppress that Vaugirard cemetery. It is an ancient cemetery
which is outside the regulations, which has no uniform, and which is
going to retire. It is a shame, for it is convenient. I have a friend
there, Father Mestienne, the grave-digger. The nuns here possess one
privilege, it is to be taken to that cemetery at nightfall. There is
a special permission from the Prefecture on their behalf. But how many
events have happened since yesterday! Mother Crucifixion is dead, and
Father Madeleine--"

"Is buried," said Jean Valjean, smiling sadly.

Fauchelevent caught the word.

"Goodness! if you were here for good, it would be a real burial."

A fourth peal burst out. Fauchelevent hastily detached the belled
knee-cap from its nail and buckled it on his knee again.

"This time it is for me. The Mother Prioress wants me. Good, now I am
pricking myself on the tongue of my buckle. Monsieur Madeleine, don't
stir from here, and wait for me. Something new has come up. If you are
hungry, there is wine, bread and cheese."

And he hastened out of the hut, crying: "Coming! coming!"

Jean Valjean watched him hurrying across the garden as fast as his
crooked leg would permit, casting a sidelong glance by the way on his
melon patch.

Less than ten minutes later, Father Fauchelevent, whose bell put the
nuns in his road to flight, tapped gently at a door, and a gentle voice
replied: "Forever! Forever!" that is to say: "Enter."

The door was the one leading to the parlor reserved for seeing the
gardener on business. This parlor adjoined the chapter hall. The
prioress, seated on the only chair in the parlor, was waiting for
Fauchelevent.




CHAPTER II--FAUCHELEVENT IN THE PRESENCE OF A DIFFICULTY

It is the peculiarity of certain persons and certain professions,
notably priests and nuns, to wear a grave and agitated air on critical
occasions. At the moment when Fauchelevent entered, this double form of
preoccupation was imprinted on the countenance of the prioress, who was
that wise and charming Mademoiselle de Blemeur, Mother Innocente, who
was ordinarily cheerful.

The gardener made a timid bow, and remained at the door of the cell. The
prioress, who was telling her beads, raised her eyes and said:--

"Ah! it is you, Father Fauvent."

This abbreviation had been adopted in the convent.

Fauchelevent bowed again.

"Father Fauvent, I have sent for you."

"Here I am, reverend Mother."

"I have something to say to you."

"And so have I," said Fauchelevent with a boldness which caused him
inward terror, "I have something to say to the very reverend Mother."

The prioress stared at him.

"Ah! you have a communication to make to me."

"A request."

"Very well, speak."

Goodman Fauchelevent, the ex-notary, belonged to the category of
peasants who have assurance. A certain clever ignorance constitutes a
force; you do not distrust it, and you are caught by it. Fauchelevent
had been a success during the something more than two years which he had
passed in the convent. Always solitary and busied about his gardening,
he had nothing else to do than to indulge his curiosity. As he was at a
distance from all those veiled women passing to and fro, he saw before
him only an agitation of shadows. By dint of attention and sharpness
he had succeeded in clothing all those phantoms with flesh, and those
corpses were alive for him. He was like a deaf man whose sight grows
keener, and like a blind man whose hearing becomes more acute. He had
applied himself to riddling out the significance of the different peals,
and he had succeeded, so that this taciturn and enigmatical cloister
possessed no secrets for him; the sphinx babbled all her secrets in his
ear. Fauchelevent knew all and concealed all; that constituted his art.
The whole convent thought him stupid. A great merit in religion. The
vocal mothers made much of Fauchelevent. He was a curious mute. He
inspired confidence. Moreover, he was regular, and never went out except
for well-demonstrated requirements of the orchard and vegetable garden.
This discretion of conduct had inured to his credit. None the less, he
had set two men to chattering: the porter, in the convent, and he
knew the singularities of their parlor, and the grave-digger, at
the cemetery, and he was acquainted with the peculiarities of their
sepulture; in this way, he possessed a double light on the subject of
these nuns, one as to their life, the other as to their death. But he
did not abuse his knowledge. The congregation thought a great deal of
him. Old, lame, blind to everything, probably a little deaf into the
bargain,--what qualities! They would have found it difficult to replace
him.

The goodman, with the assurance of a person who feels that he is
appreciated, entered into a rather diffuse and very deep rustic harangue
to the reverend prioress. He talked a long time about his age, his
infirmities, the surcharge of years counting double for him henceforth,
of the increasing demands of his work, of the great size of the garden,
of nights which must be passed, like the last, for instance, when he had
been obliged to put straw mats over the melon beds, because of the moon,
and he wound up as follows: "That he had a brother"--(the prioress made
a movement),--"a brother no longer young"--(a second movement on the
part of the prioress, but one expressive of reassurance),--"that, if he
might be permitted, this brother would come and live with him and help
him, that he was an excellent gardener, that the community would receive
from him good service, better than his own; that, otherwise, if his
brother were not admitted, as he, the elder, felt that his health was
broken and that he was insufficient for the work, he should be obliged,
greatly to his regret, to go away; and that his brother had a little
daughter whom he would bring with him, who might be reared for God in
the house, and who might, who knows, become a nun some day."

When he had finished speaking, the prioress stayed the slipping of her
rosary between her fingers, and said to him:--

"Could you procure a stout iron bar between now and this evening?"

"For what purpose?"

"To serve as a lever."

"Yes, reverend Mother," replied Fauchelevent.

The prioress, without adding a word, rose and entered the adjoining
room, which was the hall of the chapter, and where the vocal mothers
were probably assembled. Fauchelevent was left alone.




CHAPTER III--MOTHER INNOCENTE

About a quarter of an hour elapsed. The prioress returned and seated
herself once more on her chair.

The two interlocutors seemed preoccupied. We will present a stenographic
report of the dialogue which then ensued, to the best of our ability.

"Father Fauvent!"

"Reverend Mother!"

"Do you know the chapel?"

"I have a little cage there, where I hear the mass and the offices."

"And you have been in the choir in pursuance of your duties?"

"Two or three times."

"There is a stone to be raised."

"Heavy?"

"The slab of the pavement which is at the side of the altar."

"The slab which closes the vault?"

"Yes."

"It would be a good thing to have two men for it."

"Mother Ascension, who is as strong as a man, will help you."

"A woman is never a man."

"We have only a woman here to help you. Each one does what he can.
Because Dom Mabillon gives four hundred and seventeen epistles of
Saint Bernard, while Merlonus Horstius only gives three hundred and
sixty-seven, I do not despise Merlonus Horstius."

"Neither do I."

"Merit consists in working according to one's strength. A cloister is
not a dock-yard."

"And a woman is not a man. But my brother is the strong one, though!"

"And can you get a lever?"

"That is the only sort of key that fits that sort of door."

"There is a ring in the stone."

"I will put the lever through it."

"And the stone is so arranged that it swings on a pivot."

"That is good, reverend Mother. I will open the vault."

"And the four Mother Precentors will help you."

"And when the vault is open?"

"It must be closed again."

"Will that be all?"

"No."

"Give me your orders, very reverend Mother."

"Fauvent, we have confidence in you."

"I am here to do anything you wish."

"And to hold your peace about everything!"

"Yes, reverend Mother."

"When the vault is open--"

"I will close it again."

"But before that--"

"What, reverend Mother?"

"Something must be lowered into it."

A silence ensued. The prioress, after a pout of the under lip which
resembled hesitation, broke it.

"Father Fauvent!"

"Reverend Mother!"

"You know that a mother died this morning?"

"No."

"Did you not hear the bell?"

"Nothing can be heard at the bottom of the garden."

"Really?"

"I can hardly distinguish my own signal."

"She died at daybreak."

"And then, the wind is not blowing in my direction this morning."

"It was Mother Crucifixion. A blessed woman."

The prioress paused, moved her lips, as though in mental prayer, and
resumed:--

"Three years ago, Madame de Bethune, a Jansenist, turned orthodox,
merely from having seen Mother Crucifixion at prayer."

"Ah! yes, now I hear the knell, reverend Mother."

"The mothers have taken her to the dead-room, which opens on the
church."

"I know."

"No other man than you can or must enter that chamber. See to that. A
fine sight it would be, to see a man enter the dead-room!"

"More often!"

"Hey?"

"More often!"

"What do you say?"

"I say more often."

"More often than what?"

"Reverend Mother, I did not say more often than what, I said more
often."

"I don't understand you. Why do you say more often?"

"In order to speak like you, reverend Mother."

"But I did not say 'more often.'"

At that moment, nine o'clock struck.

"At nine o'clock in the morning and at all hours, praised and adored be
the most Holy Sacrament of the altar," said the prioress.

"Amen," said Fauchelevent.

The clock struck opportunely. It cut "more often" short. It is probable,
that had it not been for this, the prioress and Fauchelevent would never
have unravelled that skein.

Fauchelevent mopped his forehead.

The prioress indulged in another little inward murmur, probably sacred,
then raised her voice:--

"In her lifetime, Mother Crucifixion made converts; after her death, she
will perform miracles."

"She will!" replied Father Fauchelevent, falling into step, and striving
not to flinch again.

"Father Fauvent, the community has been blessed in Mother Crucifixion.
No doubt, it is not granted to every one to die, like Cardinal de
Berulle, while saying the holy mass, and to breathe forth their souls to
God, while pronouncing these words: Hanc igitur oblationem. But without
attaining to such happiness, Mother Crucifixion's death was very
precious. She retained her consciousness to the very last moment.
She spoke to us, then she spoke to the angels. She gave us her last
commands. If you had a little more faith, and if you could have been
in her cell, she would have cured your leg merely by touching it.
She smiled. We felt that she was regaining her life in God. There was
something of paradise in that death."

Fauchelevent thought that it was an orison which she was finishing.

"Amen," said he.

"Father Fauvent, what the dead wish must be done."

The prioress took off several beads of her chaplet. Fauchelevent held
his peace.

She went on:--

"I have consulted upon this point many ecclesiastics laboring in Our
Lord, who occupy themselves in the exercises of the clerical life, and
who bear wonderful fruit."

"Reverend Mother, you can hear the knell much better here than in the
garden."

"Besides, she is more than a dead woman, she is a saint."

"Like yourself, reverend Mother."

"She slept in her coffin for twenty years, by express permission of our
Holy Father, Pius VII.--"

"The one who crowned the Emp--Buonaparte."

For a clever man like Fauchelevent, this allusion was an awkward one.
Fortunately, the prioress, completely absorbed in her own thoughts, did
not hear it. She continued:--

"Father Fauvent?"

"Reverend Mother?"

"Saint Didorus, Archbishop of Cappadocia, desired that this single word
might be inscribed on his tomb: Acarus, which signifies, a worm of the
earth; this was done. Is this true?"

"Yes, reverend Mother."

"The blessed Mezzocane, Abbot of Aquila, wished to be buried beneath the
gallows; this was done."

"That is true."

"Saint Terentius, Bishop of Port, where the mouth of the Tiber empties
into the sea, requested that on his tomb might be engraved the
sign which was placed on the graves of parricides, in the hope that
passers-by would spit on his tomb. This was done. The dead must be
obeyed."

"So be it."

"The body of Bernard Guidonis, born in France near Roche-Abeille, was,
as he had ordered, and in spite of the king of Castile, borne to the
church of the Dominicans in Limoges, although Bernard Guidonis was
Bishop of Tuy in Spain. Can the contrary be affirmed?"

"For that matter, no, reverend Mother."

"The fact is attested by Plantavit de la Fosse."

Several beads of the chaplet were told off, still in silence. The
prioress resumed:--

"Father Fauvent, Mother Crucifixion will be interred in the coffin in
which she has slept for the last twenty years."

"That is just."

"It is a continuation of her slumber."

"So I shall have to nail up that coffin?"

"Yes."

"And we are to reject the undertaker's coffin?"

"Precisely."

"I am at the orders of the very reverend community."

"The four Mother Precentors will assist you."

"In nailing up the coffin? I do not need them."

"No. In lowering the coffin."

"Where?"

"Into the vault."

"What vault?"

"Under the altar."

Fauchelevent started.

"The vault under the altar?"

"Under the altar."

"But--"

"You will have an iron bar."

"Yes, but--"

"You will raise the stone with the bar by means of the ring."

"But--"

"The dead must be obeyed. To be buried in the vault under the altar of
the chapel, not to go to profane earth; to remain there in death where
she prayed while living; such was the last wish of Mother Crucifixion.
She asked it of us; that is to say, commanded us."

"But it is forbidden."

"Forbidden by men, enjoined by God."

"What if it became known?"

"We have confidence in you."

"Oh! I am a stone in your walls."

"The chapter assembled. The vocal mothers, whom I have just consulted
again, and who are now deliberating, have decided that Mother
Crucifixion shall be buried, according to her wish, in her own coffin,
under our altar. Think, Father Fauvent, if she were to work miracles
here! What a glory of God for the community! And miracles issue from
tombs."

"But, reverend Mother, if the agent of the sanitary commission--"

"Saint Benoit II., in the matter of sepulture, resisted Constantine
Pogonatus."

"But the commissary of police--"

"Chonodemaire, one of the seven German kings who entered among the Gauls
under the Empire of Constantius, expressly recognized the right of nuns
to be buried in religion, that is to say, beneath the altar."

"But the inspector from the Prefecture--"

"The world is nothing in the presence of the cross. Martin, the eleventh
general of the Carthusians, gave to his order this device: Stat crux dum
volvitur orbis."

"Amen," said Fauchelevent, who imperturbably extricated himself in this
manner from the dilemma, whenever he heard Latin.

Any audience suffices for a person who has held his peace too long. On
the day when the rhetorician Gymnastoras left his prison, bearing in
his body many dilemmas and numerous syllogisms which had struck in, he
halted in front of the first tree which he came to, harangued it and
made very great efforts to convince it. The prioress, who was usually
subjected to the barrier of silence, and whose reservoir was overfull,
rose and exclaimed with the loquacity of a dam which has broken away:--

"I have on my right Benoit and on my left Bernard. Who was Bernard? The
first abbot of Clairvaux. Fontaines in Burgundy is a country that is
blest because it gave him birth. His father was named Tecelin, and his
mother Alethe. He began at Citeaux, to end in Clairvaux; he was ordained
abbot by the bishop of Chalon-sur-Saone, Guillaume de Champeaux; he had
seven hundred novices, and founded a hundred and sixty monasteries; he
overthrew Abeilard at the council of Sens in 1140, and Pierre de Bruys
and Henry his disciple, and another sort of erring spirits who were
called the Apostolics; he confounded Arnauld de Brescia, darted
lightning at the monk Raoul, the murderer of the Jews, dominated the
council of Reims in 1148, caused the condemnation of Gilbert de Porea,
Bishop of Poitiers, caused the condemnation of Eon de l'Etoile, arranged
the disputes of princes, enlightened King Louis the Young, advised Pope
Eugene III., regulated the Temple, preached the crusade, performed
two hundred and fifty miracles during his lifetime, and as many
as thirty-nine in one day. Who was Benoit? He was the patriarch of
Mont-Cassin; he was the second founder of the Saintete Claustrale,
he was the Basil of the West. His order has produced forty popes, two
hundred cardinals, fifty patriarchs, sixteen hundred archbishops, four
thousand six hundred bishops, four emperors, twelve empresses, forty-six
kings, forty-one queens, three thousand six hundred canonized saints,
and has been in existence for fourteen hundred years. On one side Saint
Bernard, on the other the agent of the sanitary department! On one side
Saint Benoit, on the other the inspector of public ways! The state,
the road commissioners, the public undertaker, regulations, the
administration, what do we know of all that? There is not a chance
passer-by who would not be indignant to see how we are treated. We
have not even the right to give our dust to Jesus Christ! Your sanitary
department is a revolutionary invention. God subordinated to the
commissary of police; such is the age. Silence, Fauvent!"

Fauchelevent was but ill at ease under this shower bath. The prioress
continued:--

"No one doubts the right of the monastery to sepulture. Only fanatics
and those in error deny it. We live in times of terrible confusion. We
do not know that which it is necessary to know, and we know that which
we should ignore. We are ignorant and impious. In this age there exist
people who do not distinguish between the very great Saint Bernard and
the Saint Bernard denominated of the poor Catholics, a certain good
ecclesiastic who lived in the thirteenth century. Others are so
blasphemous as to compare the scaffold of Louis XVI. to the cross of
Jesus Christ. Louis XVI. was merely a king. Let us beware of God! There
is no longer just nor unjust. The name of Voltaire is known, but not
the name of Cesar de Bus. Nevertheless, Cesar de Bus is a man of blessed
memory, and Voltaire one of unblessed memory. The last arch-bishop,
the Cardinal de Perigord, did not even know that Charles de
Gondren succeeded to Berulle, and Francois Bourgoin to Gondren,
and Jean-Francois Senault to Bourgoin, and Father Sainte-Marthe to
Jean-Francois Senault. The name of Father Coton is known, not because
he was one of the three who urged the foundation of the Oratorie, but
because he furnished Henri IV., the Huguenot king, with the material
for an oath. That which pleases people of the world in Saint Francois de
Sales, is that he cheated at play. And then, religion is attacked. Why?
Because there have been bad priests, because Sagittaire, Bishop of Gap,
was the brother of Salone, Bishop of Embrun, and because both of them
followed Mommol. What has that to do with the question? Does that
prevent Martin de Tours from being a saint, and giving half of his cloak
to a beggar? They persecute the saints. They shut their eyes to the
truth. Darkness is the rule. The most ferocious beasts are beasts which
are blind. No one thinks of hell as a reality. Oh! how wicked people
are! By order of the king signifies to-day, by order of the revolution.
One no longer knows what is due to the living or to the dead. A holy
death is prohibited. Burial is a civil matter. This is horrible. Saint
Leo II. wrote two special letters, one to Pierre Notaire, the other to
the king of the Visigoths, for the purpose of combating and rejecting,
in questions touching the dead, the authority of the exarch and the
supremacy of the Emperor. Gauthier, Bishop of Chalons, held his own
in this matter against Otho, Duke of Burgundy. The ancient magistracy
agreed with him. In former times we had voices in the chapter, even on
matters of the day. The Abbot of Citeaux, the general of the order, was
councillor by right of birth to the parliament of Burgundy. We do what
we please with our dead. Is not the body of Saint Benoit himself in
France, in the abbey of Fleury, called Saint Benoit-sur-Loire, although
he died in Italy at Mont-Cassin, on Saturday, the 21st of the month
of March, of the year 543? All this is incontestable. I abhor
psalm-singers, I hate priors, I execrate heretics, but I should detest
yet more any one who should maintain the contrary. One has only to
read Arnoul Wion, Gabriel Bucelin, Trithemus, Maurolics, and Dom Luc
d'Achery."

The prioress took breath, then turned to Fauchelevent.

"Is it settled, Father Fauvent?"

"It is settled, reverend Mother."

"We may depend on you?"

"I will obey."

"That is well."

"I am entirely devoted to the convent."

"That is understood. You will close the coffin. The sisters will carry
it to the chapel. The office for the dead will then be said. Then we
shall return to the cloister. Between eleven o'clock and midnight, you
will come with your iron bar. All will be done in the most profound
secrecy. There will be in the chapel only the four Mother Precentors,
Mother Ascension and yourself."

"And the sister at the post?"

"She will not turn round."

"But she will hear."

"She will not listen. Besides, what the cloister knows the world learns
not."

A pause ensued. The prioress went on:--

"You will remove your bell. It is not necessary that the sister at the
post should perceive your presence."

"Reverend Mother?"

"What, Father Fauvent?"

"Has the doctor for the dead paid his visit?"

"He will pay it at four o'clock to-day. The peal which orders the
doctor for the dead to be summoned has already been rung. But you do not
understand any of the peals?"

"I pay no attention to any but my own."

"That is well, Father Fauvent."

"Reverend Mother, a lever at least six feet long will be required."

"Where will you obtain it?"

"Where gratings are not lacking, iron bars are not lacking. I have my
heap of old iron at the bottom of the garden."

"About three-quarters of an hour before midnight; do not forget."

"Reverend Mother?"

"What?"

"If you were ever to have any other jobs of this sort, my brother is the
strong man for you. A perfect Turk!"

"You will do it as speedily as possible."

"I cannot work very fast. I am infirm; that is why I require an
assistant. I limp."

"To limp is no sin, and perhaps it is a blessing. The Emperor Henry II.,
who combated Antipope Gregory and re-established Benoit VIII., has two
surnames, the Saint and the Lame."

"Two surtouts are a good thing," murmured Fauchelevent, who really was a
little hard of hearing.

"Now that I think of it, Father Fauvent, let us give a whole hour to it.
That is not too much. Be near the principal altar, with your iron bar,
at eleven o'clock. The office begins at midnight. Everything must have
been completed a good quarter of an hour before that."

"I will do anything to prove my zeal towards the community. These are my
orders. I am to nail up the coffin. At eleven o'clock exactly, I am to
be in the chapel. The Mother Precentors will be there. Mother Ascension
will be there. Two men would be better. However, never mind! I shall
have my lever. We will open the vault, we will lower the coffin, and
we will close the vault again. After which, there will be no trace
of anything. The government will have no suspicion. Thus all has been
arranged, reverend Mother?"

"No!"

"What else remains?"

"The empty coffin remains."

This produced a pause. Fauchelevent meditated. The prioress meditated.

"What is to be done with that coffin, Father Fauvent?"

"It will be given to the earth."

"Empty?"

Another silence. Fauchelevent made, with his left hand, that sort of a
gesture which dismisses a troublesome subject.

"Reverend Mother, I am the one who is to nail up the coffin in the
basement of the church, and no one can enter there but myself, and I
will cover the coffin with the pall."

"Yes, but the bearers, when they place it in the hearse and lower it
into the grave, will be sure to feel that there is nothing in it."

"Ah! the de--!" exclaimed Fauchelevent.

The prioress began to make the sign of the cross, and looked fixedly at
the gardener. The vil stuck fast in his throat.

He made haste to improvise an expedient to make her forget the oath.

"I will put earth in the coffin, reverend Mother. That will produce the
effect of a corpse."

"You are right. Earth, that is the same thing as man. So you will manage
the empty coffin?"

"I will make that my special business."

The prioress's face, up to that moment troubled and clouded, grew serene
once more. She made the sign of a superior dismissing an inferior to
him. Fauchelevent went towards the door. As he was on the point of
passing out, the prioress raised her voice gently:--

"I am pleased with you, Father Fauvent; bring your brother to me
to-morrow, after the burial, and tell him to fetch his daughter."




CHAPTER IV--IN WHICH JEAN VALJEAN HAS QUITE THE AIR OF HAVING READ
AUSTIN CASTILLEJO

The strides of a lame man are like the ogling glances of a one-eyed man;
they do not reach their goal very promptly. Moreover, Fauchelevent
was in a dilemma. He took nearly a quarter of an hour to return to his
cottage in the garden. Cosette had waked up. Jean Valjean had placed her
near the fire. At the moment when Fauchelevent entered, Jean Valjean was
pointing out to her the vintner's basket on the wall, and saying to her,
"Listen attentively to me, my little Cosette. We must go away from this
house, but we shall return to it, and we shall be very happy here. The
good man who lives here is going to carry you off on his back in that.
You will wait for me at a lady's house. I shall come to fetch you. Obey,
and say nothing, above all things, unless you want Madame Thenardier to
get you again!"

Cosette nodded gravely.

Jean Valjean turned round at the noise made by Fauchelevent opening the
door.

"Well?"

"Everything is arranged, and nothing is," said Fauchelevent. "I have
permission to bring you in; but before bringing you in you must be
got out. That's where the difficulty lies. It is easy enough with the
child."

"You will carry her out?"

"And she will hold her tongue?"

"I answer for that."

"But you, Father Madeleine?"

And, after a silence, fraught with anxiety, Fauchelevent exclaimed:--

"Why, get out as you came in!"

Jean Valjean, as in the first instance, contented himself with saying,
"Impossible."

Fauchelevent grumbled, more to himself than to Jean Valjean:--

"There is another thing which bothers me. I have said that I would put
earth in it. When I come to think it over, the earth instead of the
corpse will not seem like the real thing, it won't do, it will get
displaced, it will move about. The men will bear it. You understand,
Father Madeleine, the government will notice it."

Jean Valjean stared him straight in the eye and thought that he was
raving.

Fauchelevent went on:--

"How the de--uce are you going to get out? It must all be done by
to-morrow morning. It is to-morrow that I am to bring you in. The
prioress expects you."

Then he explained to Jean Valjean that this was his recompense for a
service which he, Fauchelevent, was to render to the community. That it
fell among his duties to take part in their burials, that he nailed up
the coffins and helped the grave-digger at the cemetery. That the nun
who had died that morning had requested to be buried in the coffin which
had served her for a bed, and interred in the vault under the altar of
the chapel. That the police regulations forbade this, but that she was
one of those dead to whom nothing is refused. That the prioress and the
vocal mothers intended to fulfil the wish of the deceased. That it was
so much the worse for the government. That he, Fauchelevent, was to nail
up the coffin in the cell, raise the stone in the chapel, and lower the
corpse into the vault. And that, by way of thanks, the prioress was to
admit his brother to the house as a gardener, and his niece as a pupil.
That his brother was M. Madeleine, and that his niece was Cosette. That
the prioress had told him to bring his brother on the following evening,
after the counterfeit interment in the cemetery. But that he could not
bring M. Madeleine in from the outside if M. Madeleine was not outside.
That that was the first problem. And then, that there was another: the
empty coffin.

"What is that empty coffin?" asked Jean Valjean.

Fauchelevent replied:--

"The coffin of the administration."

"What coffin? What administration?"

"A nun dies. The municipal doctor comes and says, 'A nun has died.'
The government sends a coffin. The next day it sends a hearse and
undertaker's men to get the coffin and carry it to the cemetery. The
undertaker's men will come and lift the coffin; there will be nothing in
it."

"Put something in it."

"A corpse? I have none."

"No."

"What then?"

"A living person."

"What person?"

"Me!" said Jean Valjean.

Fauchelevent, who was seated, sprang up as though a bomb had burst under
his chair.

"You!"

"Why not?"

Jean Valjean gave way to one of those rare smiles which lighted up his
face like a flash from heaven in the winter.

"You know, Fauchelevent, what you have said: 'Mother Crucifixion is
dead.' and I add: 'and Father Madeleine is buried.'"

"Ah! good, you can laugh, you are not speaking seriously."

"Very seriously, I must get out of this place."

"Certainly."

"l have told you to find a basket, and a cover for me also."

"Well?"

"The basket will be of pine, and the cover a black cloth."

"In the first place, it will be a white cloth. Nuns are buried in
white."

"Let it be a white cloth, then."

"You are not like other men, Father Madeleine."

To behold such devices, which are nothing else than the savage and
daring inventions of the galleys, spring forth from the peaceable things
which surrounded him, and mingle with what he called the "petty course
of life in the convent," caused Fauchelevent as much amazement as a
gull fishing in the gutter of the Rue Saint-Denis would inspire in a
passer-by.

Jean Valjean went on:--

"The problem is to get out of here without being seen. This offers
the means. But give me some information, in the first place. How is it
managed? Where is this coffin?"

"The empty one?"

"Yes."

"Down stairs, in what is called the dead-room. It stands on two
trestles, under the pall."

"How long is the coffin?"

"Six feet."

"What is this dead-room?"

"It is a chamber on the ground floor which has a grated window opening
on the garden, which is closed on the outside by a shutter, and two
doors; one leads into the convent, the other into the church."

"What church?"

"The church in the street, the church which any one can enter."

"Have you the keys to those two doors?"

"No; I have the key to the door which communicates with the convent; the
porter has the key to the door which communicates with the church."

"When does the porter open that door?"

"Only to allow the undertaker's men to enter, when they come to get the
coffin. When the coffin has been taken out, the door is closed again."

"Who nails up the coffin?"

"I do."

"Who spreads the pall over it?"

"I do."

"Are you alone?"

"Not another man, except the police doctor, can enter the dead-room.
That is even written on the wall."

"Could you hide me in that room to-night when every one is asleep?"

"No. But I could hide you in a small, dark nook which opens on the
dead-room, where I keep my tools to use for burials, and of which I have
the key."

"At what time will the hearse come for the coffin to-morrow?"

"About three o'clock in the afternoon. The burial will take place at the
Vaugirard cemetery a little before nightfall. It is not very near."

"I will remain concealed in your tool-closet all night and all the
morning. And how about food? I shall be hungry."

"I will bring you something."

"You can come and nail me up in the coffin at two o'clock."

Fauchelevent recoiled and cracked his finger-joints.

"But that is impossible!"

"Bah! Impossible to take a hammer and drive some nails in a plank?"

What seemed unprecedented to Fauchelevent was, we repeat, a simple
matter to Jean Valjean. Jean Valjean had been in worse straits than
this. Any man who has been a prisoner understands how to contract
himself to fit the diameter of the escape. The prisoner is subject to
flight as the sick man is subject to a crisis which saves or kills him.
An escape is a cure. What does not a man undergo for the sake of a
cure? To have himself nailed up in a case and carried off like a bale
of goods, to live for a long time in a box, to find air where there is
none, to economize his breath for hours, to know how to stifle without
dying--this was one of Jean Valjean's gloomy talents.

Moreover, a coffin containing a living being,--that convict's
expedient,--is also an imperial expedient. If we are to credit the monk
Austin Castillejo, this was the means employed by Charles the Fifth,
desirous of seeing the Plombes for the last time after his abdication.

He had her brought into and carried out of the monastery of Saint-Yuste
in this manner.

Fauchelevent, who had recovered himself a little, exclaimed:--

"But how will you manage to breathe?"

"I will breathe."

"In that box! The mere thought of it suffocates me."

"You surely must have a gimlet, you will make a few holes here and
there, around my mouth, and you will nail the top plank on loosely."

"Good! And what if you should happen to cough or to sneeze?"

"A man who is making his escape does not cough or sneeze."

And Jean Valjean added:--

"Father Fauchelevent, we must come to a decision: I must either be
caught here, or accept this escape through the hearse."

Every one has noticed the taste which cats have for pausing and lounging
between the two leaves of a half-shut door. Who is there who has not
said to a cat, "Do come in!" There are men who, when an incident stands
half-open before them, have the same tendency to halt in indecision
between two resolutions, at the risk of getting crushed through the
abrupt closing of the adventure by fate. The over-prudent, cats as they
are, and because they are cats, sometimes incur more danger than
the audacious. Fauchelevent was of this hesitating nature. But
Jean Valjean's coolness prevailed over him in spite of himself. He
grumbled:--

"Well, since there is no other means."

Jean Valjean resumed:--

"The only thing which troubles me is what will take place at the
cemetery."

"That is the very point that is not troublesome," exclaimed
Fauchelevent. "If you are sure of coming out of the coffin all right, I
am sure of getting you out of the grave. The grave-digger is a drunkard,
and a friend of mine. He is Father Mestienne. An old fellow of the old
school. The grave-digger puts the corpses in the grave, and I put the
grave-digger in my pocket. I will tell you what will take place. They
will arrive a little before dusk, three-quarters of an hour before the
gates of the cemetery are closed. The hearse will drive directly up to
the grave. I shall follow; that is my business. I shall have a hammer,
a chisel, and some pincers in my pocket. The hearse halts, the
undertaker's men knot a rope around your coffin and lower you down. The
priest says the prayers, makes the sign of the cross, sprinkles the holy
water, and takes his departure. I am left alone with Father Mestienne.
He is my friend, I tell you. One of two things will happen, he will
either be sober, or he will not be sober. If he is not drunk, I shall
say to him: 'Come and drink a bout while the Bon Coing [the Good Quince]
is open.' I carry him off, I get him drunk,--it does not take long to
make Father Mestienne drunk, he always has the beginning of it about
him,--I lay him under the table, I take his card, so that I can get into
the cemetery again, and I return without him. Then you have no longer
any one but me to deal with. If he is drunk, I shall say to him: 'Be
off; I will do your work for you.' Off he goes, and I drag you out of
the hole."

Jean Valjean held out his hand, and Fauchelevent precipitated himself
upon it with the touching effusion of a peasant.

"That is settled, Father Fauchelevent. All will go well."

"Provided nothing goes wrong," thought Fauchelevent. "In that case, it
would be terrible."




CHAPTER V--IT IS NOT NECESSARY TO BE DRUNK IN ORDER TO BE IMMORTAL

On the following day, as the sun was declining, the very rare passers-by
on the Boulevard du Maine pulled off their hats to an old-fashioned
hearse, ornamented with skulls, cross-bones, and tears. This hearse
contained a coffin covered with a white cloth over which spread a large
black cross, like a huge corpse with drooping arms. A mourning-coach, in
which could be seen a priest in his surplice, and a choir boy in his red
cap, followed. Two undertaker's men in gray uniforms trimmed with black
walked on the right and the left of the hearse. Behind it came an old
man in the garments of a laborer, who limped along. The procession was
going in the direction of the Vaugirard cemetery.

The handle of a hammer, the blade of a cold chisel, and the antennae of
a pair of pincers were visible, protruding from the man's pocket.

The Vaugirard cemetery formed an exception among the cemeteries of
Paris. It had its peculiar usages, just as it had its carriage
entrance and its house door, which old people in the quarter, who clung
tenaciously to ancient words, still called the porte cavaliere and the
porte pietonne.[16] The Bernardines-Benedictines of the Rue Petit-Picpus
had obtained permission, as we have already stated, to be buried there
in a corner apart, and at night, the plot of land having formerly
belonged to their community. The grave-diggers being thus bound to
service in the evening in summer and at night in winter, in this
cemetery, they were subjected to a special discipline. The gates of the
Paris cemeteries closed, at that epoch, at sundown, and this being a
municipal regulation, the Vaugirard cemetery was bound by it like the
rest. The carriage gate and the house door were two contiguous grated
gates, adjoining a pavilion built by the architect Perronet, and
inhabited by the door-keeper of the cemetery. These gates, therefore,
swung inexorably on their hinges at the instant when the sun disappeared
behind the dome of the Invalides. If any grave-digger were delayed
after that moment in the cemetery, there was but one way for him to
get out--his grave-digger's card furnished by the department of public
funerals. A sort of letter-box was constructed in the porter's window.
The grave-digger dropped his card into this box, the porter heard it
fall, pulled the rope, and the small door opened. If the man had not his
card, he mentioned his name, the porter, who was sometimes in bed and
asleep, rose, came out and identified the man, and opened the gate with
his key; the grave-digger stepped out, but had to pay a fine of fifteen
francs.

This cemetery, with its peculiarities outside the regulations,
embarrassed the symmetry of the administration. It was suppressed
a little later than 1830. The cemetery of Mont-Parnasse, called the
Eastern cemetery, succeeded to it, and inherited that famous dram-shop
next to the Vaugirard cemetery, which was surmounted by a quince painted
on a board, and which formed an angle, one side on the drinkers' tables,
and the other on the tombs, with this sign: Au Bon Coing.

The Vaugirard cemetery was what may be called a faded cemetery. It
was falling into disuse. Dampness was invading it, the flowers were
deserting it. The bourgeois did not care much about being buried in
the Vaugirard; it hinted at poverty. Pere-Lachaise if you please! to be
buried in Pere-Lachaise is equivalent to having furniture of mahogany.
It is recognized as elegant. The Vaugirard cemetery was a venerable
enclosure, planted like an old-fashioned French garden. Straight alleys,
box, thuya-trees, holly, ancient tombs beneath aged cypress-trees, and
very tall grass. In the evening it was tragic there. There were very
lugubrious lines about it.

The sun had not yet set when the hearse with the white pall and the
black cross entered the avenue of the Vaugirard cemetery. The lame man
who followed it was no other than Fauchelevent.

The interment of Mother Crucifixion in the vault under the altar, the
exit of Cosette, the introduction of Jean Valjean to the dead-room,--all
had been executed without difficulty, and there had been no hitch.

Let us remark in passing, that the burial of Mother Crucifixion under
the altar of the convent is a perfectly venial offence in our sight. It
is one of the faults which resemble a duty. The nuns had committed it,
not only without difficulty, but even with the applause of their own
consciences. In the cloister, what is called the "government" is only
an intermeddling with authority, an interference which is always
questionable. In the first place, the rule; as for the code, we shall
see. Make as many laws as you please, men; but keep them for yourselves.
The tribute to Caesar is never anything but the remnants of the tribute
to God. A prince is nothing in the presence of a principle.

Fauchelevent limped along behind the hearse in a very contented frame
of mind. His twin plots, the one with the nuns, the one for the convent,
the other against it, the other with M. Madeleine, had succeeded, to
all appearance. Jean Valjean's composure was one of those powerful
tranquillities which are contagious. Fauchelevent no longer felt
doubtful as to his success.

What remained to be done was a mere nothing. Within the last two years,
he had made good Father Mestienne, a chubby-cheeked person, drunk at
least ten times. He played with Father Mestienne. He did what he liked
with him. He made him dance according to his whim. Mestienne's head
adjusted itself to the cap of Fauchelevent's will. Fauchelevent's
confidence was perfect.

At the moment when the convoy entered the avenue leading to the
cemetery, Fauchelevent glanced cheerfully at the hearse, and said half
aloud, as he rubbed his big hands:--

"Here's a fine farce!"

All at once the hearse halted; it had reached the gate. The permission
for interment must be exhibited. The undertaker's man addressed himself
to the porter of the cemetery. During this colloquy, which always is
productive of a delay of from one to two minutes, some one, a stranger,
came and placed himself behind the hearse, beside Fauchelevent. He was
a sort of laboring man, who wore a waistcoat with large pockets and
carried a mattock under his arm.

Fauchelevent surveyed this stranger.

"Who are you?" he demanded.

"The man replied:--

"The grave-digger."

If a man could survive the blow of a cannon-ball full in the breast, he
would make the same face that Fauchelevent made.

"The grave-digger?"

"Yes."

"You?"

"I."

"Father Mestienne is the grave-digger."

"He was."

"What! He was?"

"He is dead."

Fauchelevent had expected anything but this, that a grave-digger could
die. It is true, nevertheless, that grave-diggers do die themselves. By
dint of excavating graves for other people, one hollows out one's own.

Fauchelevent stood there with his mouth wide open. He had hardly the
strength to stammer:--

"But it is not possible!"

"It is so."

"But," he persisted feebly, "Father Mestienne is the grave-digger."

"After Napoleon, Louis XVIII. After Mestienne, Gribier. Peasant, my name
is Gribier."

Fauchelevent, who was deadly pale, stared at this Gribier.

He was a tall, thin, livid, utterly funereal man. He had the air of an
unsuccessful doctor who had turned grave-digger.

Fauchelevent burst out laughing.

"Ah!" said he, "what queer things do happen! Father Mestienne is dead,
but long live little Father Lenoir! Do you know who little Father Lenoir
is? He is a jug of red wine. It is a jug of Surene, morbigou! of real
Paris Surene? Ah! So old Mestienne is dead! I am sorry for it; he was
a jolly fellow. But you are a jolly fellow, too. Are you not, comrade?
We'll go and have a drink together presently."

The man replied:--

"I have been a student. I passed my fourth examination. I never drink."

The hearse had set out again, and was rolling up the grand alley of the
cemetery.

Fauchelevent had slackened his pace. He limped more out of anxiety than
from infirmity.

The grave-digger walked on in front of him.

Fauchelevent passed the unexpected Gribier once more in review.

He was one of those men who, though very young, have the air of age, and
who, though slender, are extremely strong.

"Comrade!" cried Fauchelevent.

The man turned round.

"I am the convent grave-digger."

"My colleague," said the man.

Fauchelevent, who was illiterate but very sharp, understood that he
had to deal with a formidable species of man, with a fine talker. He
muttered:

"So Father Mestienne is dead."

The man replied:--

"Completely. The good God consulted his note-book which shows when the
time is up. It was Father Mestienne's turn. Father Mestienne died."

Fauchelevent repeated mechanically: "The good God--"

"The good God," said the man authoritatively. "According to the
philosophers, the Eternal Father; according to the Jacobins, the Supreme
Being."

"Shall we not make each other's acquaintance?" stammered Fauchelevent.

"It is made. You are a peasant, I am a Parisian."

"People do not know each other until they have drunk together. He who
empties his glass empties his heart. You must come and have a drink with
me. Such a thing cannot be refused."

"Business first."

Fauchelevent thought: "I am lost."

They were only a few turns of the wheel distant from the small alley
leading to the nuns' corner.

The grave-digger resumed:--

"Peasant, I have seven small children who must be fed. As they must eat,
I cannot drink."

And he added, with the satisfaction of a serious man who is turning a
phrase well:--

"Their hunger is the enemy of my thirst."

The hearse skirted a clump of cypress-trees, quitted the grand alley,
turned into a narrow one, entered the waste land, and plunged into
a thicket. This indicated the immediate proximity of the place of
sepulture. Fauchelevent slackened his pace, but he could not detain the
hearse. Fortunately, the soil, which was light and wet with the winter
rains, clogged the wheels and retarded its speed.

He approached the grave-digger.

"They have such a nice little Argenteuil wine," murmured Fauchelevent.

"Villager," retorted the man, "I ought not be a grave-digger. My
father was a porter at the Prytaneum [Town-Hall]. He destined me for
literature. But he had reverses. He had losses on 'change. I was obliged
to renounce the profession of author. But I am still a public writer."

"So you are not a grave-digger, then?" returned Fauchelevent, clutching
at this branch, feeble as it was.

"The one does not hinder the other. I cumulate."

Fauchelevent did not understand this last word.

"Come have a drink," said he.

Here a remark becomes necessary. Fauchelevent, whatever his anguish,
offered a drink, but he did not explain himself on one point; who was to
pay? Generally, Fauchelevent offered and Father Mestienne paid. An offer
of a drink was the evident result of the novel situation created by the
new grave-digger, and it was necessary to make this offer, but the old
gardener left the proverbial quarter of an hour named after Rabelais in
the dark, and that not unintentionally. As for himself, Fauchelevent did
not wish to pay, troubled as he was.

The grave-digger went on with a superior smile:--

"One must eat. I have accepted Father Mestienne's reversion. One gets to
be a philosopher when one has nearly completed his classes. To the labor
of the hand I join the labor of the arm. I have my scrivener's stall in
the market of the Rue de Sevres. You know? the Umbrella Market. All the
cooks of the Red Cross apply to me. I scribble their declarations of
love to the raw soldiers. In the morning I write love letters; in the
evening I dig graves. Such is life, rustic."

The hearse was still advancing. Fauchelevent, uneasy to the last degree,
was gazing about him on all sides. Great drops of perspiration trickled
down from his brow.

"But," continued the grave-digger, "a man cannot serve two mistresses.
I must choose between the pen and the mattock. The mattock is ruining my
hand."

The hearse halted.

The choir boy alighted from the mourning-coach, then the priest.

One of the small front wheels of the hearse had run up a little on a
pile of earth, beyond which an open grave was visible.

"What a farce this is!" repeated Fauchelevent in consternation.




CHAPTER VI--BETWEEN FOUR PLANKS

Who was in the coffin? The reader knows. Jean Valjean.

Jean Valjean had arranged things so that he could exist there, and he
could almost breathe.

It is a strange thing to what a degree security of conscience confers
security of the rest. Every combination thought out by Jean Valjean had
been progressing, and progressing favorably, since the preceding day.
He, like Fauchelevent, counted on Father Mestienne. He had no doubt
as to the end. Never was there a more critical situation, never more
complete composure.

The four planks of the coffin breathe out a kind of terrible peace. It
seemed as though something of the repose of the dead entered into Jean
Valjean's tranquillity.

From the depths of that coffin he had been able to follow, and he had
followed, all the phases of the terrible drama which he was playing with
death.

Shortly after Fauchelevent had finished nailing on the upper plank, Jean
Valjean had felt himself carried out, then driven off. He knew, from the
diminution in the jolting, when they left the pavements and reached the
earth road. He had divined, from a dull noise, that they were crossing
the bridge of Austerlitz. At the first halt, he had understood that they
were entering the cemetery; at the second halt, he said to himself:--

"Here is the grave."

Suddenly, he felt hands seize the coffin, then a harsh grating against
the planks; he explained it to himself as the rope which was being
fastened round the casket in order to lower it into the cavity.

Then he experienced a giddiness.

The undertaker's man and the grave-digger had probably allowed the
coffin to lose its balance, and had lowered the head before the foot. He
recovered himself fully when he felt himself horizontal and motionless.
He had just touched the bottom.

He had a certain sensation of cold.

A voice rose above him, glacial and solemn. He heard Latin words, which
he did not understand, pass over him, so slowly that he was able to
catch them one by one:--

"Qui dormiunt in terrae pulvere, evigilabunt; alii in vitam aeternam, et
alii in approbrium, ut videant semper."

A child's voice said:--

"De profundis."

The grave voice began again:--

"Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine."

The child's voice responded:--

"Et lux perpetua luceat ei."

He heard something like the gentle patter of several drops of rain on
the plank which covered him. It was probably the holy water.

He thought: "This will be over soon now. Patience for a little while
longer. The priest will take his departure. Fauchelevent will take
Mestienne off to drink. I shall be left. Then Fauchelevent will return
alone, and I shall get out. That will be the work of a good hour."

The grave voice resumed

"Requiescat in pace."

And the child's voice said:--

"Amen."

Jean Valjean strained his ears, and heard something like retreating
footsteps.

"There, they are going now," thought he. "I am alone."

All at once, he heard over his head a sound which seemed to him to be a
clap of thunder.

It was a shovelful of earth falling on the coffin.

A second shovelful fell.

One of the holes through which he breathed had just been stopped up.

A third shovelful of earth fell.

Then a fourth.

There are things which are too strong for the strongest man. Jean
Valjean lost consciousness.




CHAPTER VII--IN WHICH WILL BE FOUND THE ORIGIN OF THE SAYING: DON'T LOSE
THE CARD

This is what had taken place above the coffin in which lay Jean Valjean.

When the hearse had driven off, when the priest and the choir boy had
entered the carriage again and taken their departure, Fauchelevent, who
had not taken his eyes from the grave-digger, saw the latter bend over
and grasp his shovel, which was sticking upright in the heap of dirt.

Then Fauchelevent took a supreme resolve.

He placed himself between the grave and the grave-digger, crossed his
arms and said:--

"I am the one to pay!"

The grave-digger stared at him in amazement, and replied:--

"What's that, peasant?"

Fauchelevent repeated:--

"I am the one who pays!"

"What?"

"For the wine."

"What wine?"

"That Argenteuil wine."

"Where is the Argenteuil?"

"At the Bon Coing."

"Go to the devil!" said the grave-digger.

And he flung a shovelful of earth on the coffin.

The coffin gave back a hollow sound. Fauchelevent felt himself stagger
and on the point of falling headlong into the grave himself. He shouted
in a voice in which the strangling sound of the death rattle began to
mingle:--

"Comrade! Before the Bon Coing is shut!"

The grave-digger took some more earth on his shovel. Fauchelevent
continued.

"I will pay."

And he seized the man's arm.

"Listen to me, comrade. I am the convent grave-digger, I have come
to help you. It is a business which can be performed at night. Let us
begin, then, by going for a drink."

And as he spoke, and clung to this desperate insistence, this melancholy
reflection occurred to him: "And if he drinks, will he get drunk?"

"Provincial," said the man, "if you positively insist upon it, I
consent. We will drink. After work, never before."

And he flourished his shovel briskly. Fauchelevent held him back.

"It is Argenteuil wine, at six."

"Oh, come," said the grave-digger, "you are a bell-ringer. Ding dong,
ding dong, that's all you know how to say. Go hang yourself."

And he threw in a second shovelful.

Fauchelevent had reached a point where he no longer knew what he was
saying.

"Come along and drink," he cried, "since it is I who pays the bill."

"When we have put the child to bed," said the grave-digger.

He flung in a third shovelful.

Then he thrust his shovel into the earth and added:--

"It's cold to-night, you see, and the corpse would shriek out after us
if we were to plant her there without a coverlet."

At that moment, as he loaded his shovel, the grave-digger bent over,
and the pocket of his waistcoat gaped. Fauchelevent's wild gaze fell
mechanically into that pocket, and there it stopped.

The sun was not yet hidden behind the horizon; there was still light
enough to enable him to distinguish something white at the bottom of
that yawning pocket.

The sum total of lightning that the eye of a Picard peasant can contain,
traversed Fauchelevent's pupils. An idea had just occurred to him.

He thrust his hand into the pocket from behind, without the
grave-digger, who was wholly absorbed in his shovelful of earth,
observing it, and pulled out the white object which lay at the bottom of
it.

The man sent a fourth shovelful tumbling into the grave.

Just as he turned round to get the fifth, Fauchelevent looked calmly at
him and said:--

"By the way, you new man, have you your card?"

The grave-digger paused.

"What card?"

"The sun is on the point of setting."

"That's good, it is going to put on its nightcap."

"The gate of the cemetery will close immediately."

"Well, what then?"

"Have you your card?"

"Ah! my card?" said the grave-digger.

And he fumbled in his pocket.

Having searched one pocket, he proceeded to search the other. He passed
on to his fobs, explored the first, returned to the second.

"Why, no," said he, "I have not my card. I must have forgotten it."

"Fifteen francs fine," said Fauchelevent.

The grave-digger turned green. Green is the pallor of livid people.

"Ah! Jesus-mon-Dieu-bancroche-a-bas-la-lune!"[17] he exclaimed. "Fifteen
francs fine!"

"Three pieces of a hundred sous," said Fauchelevent.

The grave-digger dropped his shovel.

Fauchelevent's turn had come.

"Ah, come now, conscript," said Fauchelevent, "none of this despair.
There is no question of committing suicide and benefiting the grave.
Fifteen francs is fifteen francs, and besides, you may not be able to
pay it. I am an old hand, you are a new one. I know all the ropes and
the devices. I will give you some friendly advice. One thing is clear,
the sun is on the point of setting, it is touching the dome now, the
cemetery will be closed in five minutes more."

"That is true," replied the man.

"Five minutes more and you will not have time to fill the grave, it is
as hollow as the devil, this grave, and to reach the gate in season to
pass it before it is shut."

"That is true."

"In that case, a fine of fifteen francs."

"Fifteen francs."

"But you have time. Where do you live?"

"A couple of steps from the barrier, a quarter of an hour from here. No.
87 Rue de Vaugirard."

"You have just time to get out by taking to your heels at your best
speed."

"That is exactly so."

"Once outside the gate, you gallop home, you get your card, you return,
the cemetery porter admits you. As you have your card, there will be
nothing to pay. And you will bury your corpse. I'll watch it for you in
the meantime, so that it shall not run away."

"I am indebted to you for my life, peasant."

"Decamp!" said Fauchelevent.

The grave-digger, overwhelmed with gratitude, shook his hand and set off
on a run.

When the man had disappeared in the thicket, Fauchelevent listened until
he heard his footsteps die away in the distance, then he leaned over the
grave, and said in a low tone:--

"Father Madeleine!"

There was no reply.

Fauchelevent was seized with a shudder. He tumbled rather than climbed
into the grave, flung himself on the head of the coffin and cried:--

"Are you there?"

Silence in the coffin.

Fauchelevent, hardly able to draw his breath for trembling, seized his
cold chisel and his hammer, and pried up the coffin lid.

Jean Valjean's face appeared in the twilight; it was pale and his eyes
were closed.

Fauchelevent's hair rose upright on his head, he sprang to his feet,
then fell back against the side of the grave, ready to swoon on the
coffin. He stared at Jean Valjean.

Jean Valjean lay there pallid and motionless.

Fauchelevent murmured in a voice as faint as a sigh:--

"He is dead!"

And, drawing himself up, and folding his arms with such violence that
his clenched fists came in contact with his shoulders, he cried:--

"And this is the way I save his life!"

Then the poor man fell to sobbing. He soliloquized the while, for it is
an error to suppose that the soliloquy is unnatural. Powerful emotion
often talks aloud.

"It is Father Mestienne's fault. Why did that fool die? What need was
there for him to give up the ghost at the very moment when no one was
expecting it? It is he who has killed M. Madeleine. Father Madeleine!
He is in the coffin. It is quite handy. All is over. Now, is there any
sense in these things? Ah! my God! he is dead! Well! and his little
girl, what am I to do with her? What will the fruit-seller say? The idea
of its being possible for a man like that to die like this! When I think
how he put himself under that cart! Father Madeleine! Father Madeleine!
Pardine! He was suffocated, I said so. He wouldn't believe me. Well!
Here's a pretty trick to play! He is dead, that good man, the very best
man out of all the good God's good folks! And his little girl! Ah! In
the first place, I won't go back there myself. I shall stay here. After
having done such a thing as that! What's the use of being two old men,
if we are two old fools! But, in the first place, how did he manage to
enter the convent? That was the beginning of it all. One should not
do such things. Father Madeleine! Father Madeleine! Father Madeleine!
Madeleine! Monsieur Madeleine! Monsieur le Maire! He does not hear me.
Now get out of this scrape if you can!"

And he tore his hair.

A grating sound became audible through the trees in the distance. It was
the cemetery gate closing.

Fauchelevent bent over Jean Valjean, and all at once he bounded back and
recoiled so far as the limits of a grave permit.

Jean Valjean's eyes were open and gazing at him.

To see a corpse is alarming, to behold a resurrection is almost as much
so. Fauchelevent became like stone, pale, haggard, overwhelmed by all
these excesses of emotion, not knowing whether he had to do with a
living man or a dead one, and staring at Jean Valjean, who was gazing at
him.

[Illustration: The Resurrection 2b8-7-resurrection]

"I fell asleep," said Jean Valjean.

And he raised himself to a sitting posture.

Fauchelevent fell on his knees.

"Just, good Virgin! How you frightened me!"

Then he sprang to his feet and cried:--

"Thanks, Father Madeleine!"

Jean Valjean had merely fainted. The fresh air had revived him.

Joy is the ebb of terror. Fauchelevent found almost as much difficulty
in recovering himself as Jean Valjean had.

"So you are not dead! Oh! How wise you are! I called you so much that
you came back. When I saw your eyes shut, I said: 'Good! there he is,
stifled,' I should have gone raving mad, mad enough for a strait jacket.
They would have put me in Bicetre. What do you suppose I should
have done if you had been dead? And your little girl? There's that
fruit-seller,--she would never have understood it! The child is thrust
into your arms, and then--the grandfather is dead! What a story! good
saints of paradise, what a tale! Ah! you are alive, that's the best of
it!"

"I am cold," said Jean Valjean.

This remark recalled Fauchelevent thoroughly to reality, and there was
pressing need of it. The souls of these two men were troubled even when
they had recovered themselves, although they did not realize it,
and there was about them something uncanny, which was the sinister
bewilderment inspired by the place.

"Let us get out of here quickly," exclaimed Fauchelevent.

He fumbled in his pocket, and pulled out a gourd with which he had
provided himself.

"But first, take a drop," said he.

The flask finished what the fresh air had begun, Jean Valjean swallowed
a mouthful of brandy, and regained full possession of his faculties.

He got out of the coffin, and helped Fauchelevent to nail on the lid
again.

Three minutes later they were out of the grave.

Moreover, Fauchelevent was perfectly composed. He took his time. The
cemetery was closed. The arrival of the grave-digger Gribier was not to
be apprehended. That "conscript" was at home busily engaged in looking
for his card, and at some difficulty in finding it in his lodgings,
since it was in Fauchelevent's pocket. Without a card, he could not get
back into the cemetery.

Fauchelevent took the shovel, and Jean Valjean the pick-axe, and
together they buried the empty coffin.

When the grave was full, Fauchelevent said to Jean Valjean:--

"Let us go. I will keep the shovel; do you carry off the mattock."

Night was falling.

Jean Valjean experienced rome difficulty in moving and in walking. He
had stiffened himself in that coffin, and had become a little like a
corpse. The rigidity of death had seized upon him between those four
planks. He had, in a manner, to thaw out, from the tomb.

"You are benumbed," said Fauchelevent. "It is a pity that I have a game
leg, for otherwise we might step out briskly."

"Bah!" replied Jean Valjean, "four paces will put life into my legs once
more."

They set off by the alleys through which the hearse had passed. On
arriving before the closed gate and the porter's pavilion Fauchelevent,
who held the grave-digger's card in his hand, dropped it into the box,
the porter pulled the rope, the gate opened, and they went out.

"How well everything is going!" said Fauchelevent; "what a capital idea
that was of yours, Father Madeleine!"

They passed the Vaugirard barrier in the simplest manner in the world.
In the neighborhood of the cemetery, a shovel and pick are equal to two
passports.

The Rue Vaugirard was deserted.

"Father Madeleine," said Fauchelevent as they went along, and raising
his eyes to the houses, "Your eyes are better than mine. Show me No.
87."

"Here it is," said Jean Valjean.

"There is no one in the street," said Fauchelevent. "Give me your
mattock and wait a couple of minutes for me."

Fauchelevent entered No. 87, ascended to the very top, guided by the
instinct which always leads the poor man to the garret, and knocked in
the dark, at the door of an attic.

A voice replied: "Come in."

It was Gribier's voice.

Fauchelevent opened the door. The grave-digger's dwelling was, like
all such wretched habitations, an unfurnished and encumbered garret.
A packing-case--a coffin, perhaps--took the place of a commode, a
butter-pot served for a drinking-fountain, a straw mattress served for
a bed, the floor served instead of tables and chairs. In a corner, on a
tattered fragment which had been a piece of an old carpet, a thin
woman and a number of children were piled in a heap. The whole of this
poverty-stricken interior bore traces of having been overturned. One
would have said that there had been an earthquake "for one." The covers
were displaced, the rags scattered about, the jug broken, the mother had
been crying, the children had probably been beaten; traces of a vigorous
and ill-tempered search. It was plain that the grave-digger had made
a desperate search for his card, and had made everybody in the garret,
from the jug to his wife, responsible for its loss. He wore an air of
desperation.

But Fauchelevent was in too great a hurry to terminate this adventure to
take any notice of this sad side of his success.

He entered and said:--

"I have brought you back your shovel and pick."

Gribier gazed at him in stupefaction.

"Is it you, peasant?"

"And to-morrow morning you will find your card with the porter of the
cemetery."

And he laid the shovel and mattock on the floor.

"What is the meaning of this?" demanded Gribier.

"The meaning of it is, that you dropped your card out of your pocket,
that I found it on the ground after you were gone, that I have buried
the corpse, that I have filled the grave, that I have done your work,
that the porter will return your card to you, and that you will not have
to pay fifteen francs. There you have it, conscript."

"Thanks, villager!" exclaimed Gribier, radiant. "The next time I will
pay for the drinks."




CHAPTER VIII--A SUCCESSFUL INTERROGATORY

An hour later, in the darkness of night, two men and a child presented
themselves at No. 62 Rue Petit-Picpus. The elder of the men lifted the
knocker and rapped.

They were Fauchelevent, Jean Valjean, and Cosette.

The two old men had gone to fetch Cosette from the fruiterer's in
the Rue du Chemin-Vert, where Fauchelevent had deposited her on the
preceding day. Cosette had passed these twenty-four hours trembling
silently and understanding nothing. She trembled to such a degree that
she wept. She had neither eaten nor slept. The worthy fruit-seller had
plied her with a hundred questions, without obtaining any other reply
than a melancholy and unvarying gaze. Cosette had betrayed nothing of
what she had seen and heard during the last two days. She divined that
they were passing through a crisis. She was deeply conscious that it was
necessary to "be good." Who has not experienced the sovereign power
of those two words, pronounced with a certain accent in the ear of a
terrified little being: Say nothing! Fear is mute. Moreover, no one
guards a secret like a child.

But when, at the expiration of these lugubrious twenty-four hours, she
beheld Jean Valjean again, she gave vent to such a cry of joy, that any
thoughtful person who had chanced to hear that cry, would have guessed
that it issued from an abyss.

Fauchelevent belonged to the convent and knew the pass-words. All the
doors opened.

Thus was solved the double and alarming problem of how to get out and
how to get in.

The porter, who had received his instructions, opened the little
servant's door which connected the courtyard with the garden, and which
could still be seen from the street twenty years ago, in the wall at the
bottom of the court, which faced the carriage entrance.

The porter admitted all three of them through this door, and from that
point they reached the inner, reserved parlor where Fauchelevent, on the
preceding day, had received his orders from the prioress.

The prioress, rosary in hand, was waiting for them. A vocal mother, with
her veil lowered, stood beside her.

A discreet candle lighted, one might almost say, made a show of lighting
the parlor.

The prioress passed Jean Valjean in review. There is nothing which
examines like a downcast eye.

Then she questioned him:--

"You are the brother?"

"Yes, reverend Mother," replied Fauchelevent.

"What is your name?"

Fauchelevent replied:--

"Ultime Fauchelevent."

He really had had a brother named Ultime, who was dead.

"Where do you come from?"

Fauchelevent replied:--

"From Picquigny, near Amiens."

"What is your age?"

Fauchelevent replied:--

"Fifty."

"What is your profession?"

Fauchelevent replied:--

"Gardener."

"Are you a good Christian?"

Fauchelevent replied:--

"Every one is in the family."

"Is this your little girl?"

Fauchelevent replied:--

"Yes, reverend Mother."

"You are her father?"

Fauchelevent replied:--

"Her grandfather."

The vocal mother said to the prioress in a low voice

"He answers well."

Jean Valjean had not uttered a single word.

The prioress looked attentively at Cosette, and said half aloud to the
vocal mother:--

"She will grow up ugly."

The two mothers consulted for a few moments in very low tones in the
corner of the parlor, then the prioress turned round and said:--

"Father Fauvent, you will get another knee-cap with a bell. Two will be
required now."

On the following day, therefore, two bells were audible in the garden,
and the nuns could not resist the temptation to raise the corner of
their veils. At the extreme end of the garden, under the trees, two
men, Fauvent and another man, were visible as they dug side by side. An
enormous event. Their silence was broken to the extent of saying to each
other: "He is an assistant gardener."

The vocal mothers added: "He is a brother of Father Fauvent."

Jean Valjean was, in fact, regularly installed; he had his belled
knee-cap; henceforth he was official. His name was Ultime Fauchelevent.

The most powerful determining cause of his admission had been the
prioress's observation upon Cosette: "She will grow up ugly."

The prioress, that pronounced prognosticator, immediately took a fancy
to Cosette and gave her a place in the school as a charity pupil.

There is nothing that is not strictly logical about this.

It is in vain that mirrors are banished from the convent, women are
conscious of their faces; now, girls who are conscious of their beauty
do not easily become nuns; the vocation being voluntary in inverse
proportion to their good looks, more is to be hoped from the ugly than
from the pretty. Hence a lively taste for plain girls.

The whole of this adventure increased the importance of good, old
Fauchelevent; he won a triple success; in the eyes of Jean Valjean, whom
he had saved and sheltered; in those of grave-digger Gribier, who said
to himself: "He spared me that fine"; with the convent, which, being
enabled, thanks to him, to retain the coffin of Mother Crucifixion
under the altar, eluded Caesar and satisfied God. There was a coffin
containing a body in the Petit-Picpus, and a coffin without a body in
the Vaugirard cemetery, public order had no doubt been deeply disturbed
thereby, but no one was aware of it.

As for the convent, its gratitude to Fauchelevent was very great.
Fauchelevent became the best of servitors and the most precious of
gardeners. Upon the occasion of the archbishop's next visit, the
prioress recounted the affair to his Grace, making something of a
confession at the same time, and yet boasting of her deed. On leaving
the convent, the archbishop mentioned it with approval, and in a whisper
to M. de Latil, Monsieur's confessor, afterwards Archbishop of Reims
and Cardinal. This admiration for Fauchelevent became widespread, for it
made its way to Rome. We have seen a note addressed by the then reigning
Pope, Leo XII., to one of his relatives, a Monsignor in the Nuncio's
establishment in Paris, and bearing, like himself, the name of Della
Genga; it contained these lines: "It appears that there is in a convent
in Paris an excellent gardener, who is also a holy man, named Fauvent."
Nothing of this triumph reached Fauchelevent in his hut; he went on
grafting, weeding, and covering up his melon beds, without in the least
suspecting his excellences and his sanctity. Neither did he suspect his
glory, any more than a Durham or Surrey bull whose portrait is published
in the London Illustrated News, with this inscription: "Bull which
carried off the prize at the Cattle Show."




CHAPTER IX--CLOISTERED

Cosette continued to hold her tongue in the convent.

It was quite natural that Cosette should think herself Jean Valjean's
daughter. Moreover, as she knew nothing, she could say nothing, and
then, she would not have said anything in any case. As we have just
observed, nothing trains children to silence like unhappiness. Cosette
had suffered so much, that she feared everything, even to speak or to
breathe. A single word had so often brought down an avalanche upon her.
She had hardly begun to regain her confidence since she had been with
Jean Valjean. She speedily became accustomed to the convent. Only she
regretted Catherine, but she dared not say so. Once, however, she did
say to Jean Valjean: "Father, if I had known, I would have brought her
away with me."

Cosette had been obliged, on becoming a scholar in the convent, to don
the garb of the pupils of the house. Jean Valjean succeeded in getting
them to restore to him the garments which she laid aside. This was the
same mourning suit which he had made her put on when she had quitted
the Thenardiers' inn. It was not very threadbare even now. Jean Valjean
locked up these garments, plus the stockings and the shoes, with a
quantity of camphor and all the aromatics in which convents abound, in a
little valise which he found means of procuring. He set this valise on
a chair near his bed, and he always carried the key about his person.
"Father," Cosette asked him one day, "what is there in that box which
smells so good?"

Father Fauchelevent received other recompense for his good action, in
addition to the glory which we just mentioned, and of which he knew
nothing; in the first place it made him happy; next, he had much less
work, since it was shared. Lastly, as he was very fond of snuff, he
found the presence of M. Madeleine an advantage, in that he used three
times as much as he had done previously, and that in an infinitely more
luxurious manner, seeing that M. Madeleine paid for it.

The nuns did not adopt the name of Ultime; they called Jean Valjean the
other Fauvent.

If these holy women had possessed anything of Javert's glance, they
would eventually have noticed that when there was any errand to be
done outside in the behalf of the garden, it was always the elder
Fauchelevent, the old, the infirm, the lame man, who went, and never the
other; but whether it is that eyes constantly fixed on God know not how
to spy, or whether they were, by preference, occupied in keeping watch
on each other, they paid no heed to this.

Moreover, it was well for Jean Valjean that he kept close and did not
stir out. Javert watched the quarter for more than a month.

This convent was for Jean Valjean like an island surrounded by gulfs.
Henceforth, those four walls constituted his world. He saw enough of the
sky there to enable him to preserve his serenity, and Cosette enough to
remain happy.

A very sweet life began for him.

He inhabited the old hut at the end of the garden, in company with
Fauchelevent. This hovel, built of old rubbish, which was still in
existence in 1845, was composed, as the reader already knows, of three
chambers, all of which were utterly bare and had nothing beyond the
walls. The principal one had been given up, by force, for Jean Valjean
had opposed it in vain, to M. Madeleine, by Father Fauchelevent. The
walls of this chamber had for ornament, in addition to the two nails
whereon to hang the knee-cap and the basket, a Royalist bank-note
of '93, applied to the wall over the chimney-piece, and of which the
following is an exact facsimile:--


[Illustration: Royalist Bank-note  2b8-9-banknote]


This specimen of Vendean paper money had been nailed to the wall by
the preceding gardener, an old Chouan, who had died in the convent, and
whose place Fauchelevent had taken.

Jean Valjean worked in the garden every day and made himself very
useful. He had formerly been a pruner of trees, and he gladly found
himself a gardener once more. It will be remembered that he knew all
sorts of secrets and receipts for agriculture. He turned these to
advantage. Almost all the trees in the orchard were ungrafted, and wild.
He budded them and made them produce excellent fruit.

Cosette had permission to pass an hour with him every day. As the
sisters were melancholy and he was kind, the child made comparisons and
adored him. At the appointed hour she flew to the hut. When she entered
the lowly cabin, she filled it with paradise. Jean Valjean blossomed
out and felt his happiness increase with the happiness which he afforded
Cosette. The joy which we inspire has this charming property, that, far
from growing meagre, like all reflections, it returns to us more radiant
than ever. At recreation hours, Jean Valjean watched her running and
playing in the distance, and he distinguished her laugh from that of the
rest.

For Cosette laughed now.

Cosette's face had even undergone a change, to a certain extent. The
gloom had disappeared from it. A smile is the same as sunshine; it
banishes winter from the human countenance.

Recreation over, when Cosette went into the house again, Jean Valjean
gazed at the windows of her class-room, and at night he rose to look at
the windows of her dormitory.

God has his own ways, moreover; the convent contributed, like Cosette,
to uphold and complete the Bishop's work in Jean Valjean. It is certain
that virtue adjoins pride on one side. A bridge built by the devil
exists there. Jean Valjean had been, unconsciously, perhaps, tolerably
near that side and that bridge, when Providence cast his lot in the
convent of the Petit-Picpus; so long as he had compared himself only to
the Bishop, he had regarded himself as unworthy and had remained humble;
but for some time past he had been comparing himself to men in general,
and pride was beginning to spring up. Who knows? He might have ended by
returning very gradually to hatred.

The convent stopped him on that downward path.

This was the second place of captivity which he had seen. In his youth,
in what had been for him the beginning of his life, and later on, quite
recently again, he had beheld another,--a frightful place, a terrible
place, whose severities had always appeared to him the iniquity of
justice, and the crime of the law. Now, after the galleys, he saw the
cloister; and when he meditated how he had formed a part of the galleys,
and that he now, so to speak, was a spectator of the cloister, he
confronted the two in his own mind with anxiety.

Sometimes he crossed his arms and leaned on his hoe, and slowly
descended the endless spirals of revery.

He recalled his former companions: how wretched they were; they rose at
dawn, and toiled until night; hardly were they permitted to sleep; they
lay on camp beds, where nothing was tolerated but mattresses two inches
thick, in rooms which were heated only in the very harshest months of
the year; they were clothed in frightful red blouses; they were allowed,
as a great favor, linen trousers in the hottest weather, and a woollen
carter's blouse on their backs when it was very cold; they drank no
wine, and ate no meat, except when they went on "fatigue duty." They
lived nameless, designated only by numbers, and converted, after a
manner, into ciphers themselves, with downcast eyes, with lowered
voices, with shorn heads, beneath the cudgel and in disgrace.

Then his mind reverted to the beings whom he had under his eyes.

These beings also lived with shorn heads, with downcast eyes, with
lowered voices, not in disgrace, but amid the scoffs of the world,
not with their backs bruised with the cudgel, but with their shoulders
lacerated with their discipline. Their names, also, had vanished from
among men; they no longer existed except under austere appellations.
They never ate meat and they never drank wine; they often remained until
evening without food; they were attired, not in a red blouse, but in a
black shroud, of woollen, which was heavy in summer and thin in winter,
without the power to add or subtract anything from it; without having
even, according to the season, the resource of the linen garment or the
woollen cloak; and for six months in the year they wore serge chemises
which gave them fever. They dwelt, not in rooms warmed only during
rigorous cold, but in cells where no fire was ever lighted; they slept,
not on mattresses two inches thick, but on straw. And finally, they were
not even allowed their sleep; every night, after a day of toil, they
were obliged, in the weariness of their first slumber, at the moment
when they were falling sound asleep and beginning to get warm, to rouse
themselves, to rise and to go and pray in an ice-cold and gloomy chapel,
with their knees on the stones.

On certain days each of these beings in turn had to remain for twelve
successive hours in a kneeling posture, or prostrate, with face upon the
pavement, and arms outstretched in the form of a cross.

The others were men; these were women.

What had those men done? They had stolen, violated, pillaged,
murdered, assassinated. They were bandits, counterfeiters, poisoners,
incendiaries, murderers, parricides. What had these women done? They had
done nothing whatever.

On the one hand, highway robbery, fraud, deceit, violence, sensuality,
homicide, all sorts of sacrilege, every variety of crime; on the other,
one thing only, innocence.

Perfect innocence, almost caught up into heaven in a mysterious
assumption, attached to the earth by virtue, already possessing
something of heaven through holiness.

On the one hand, confidences over crimes, which are exchanged in
whispers; on the other, the confession of faults made aloud. And what
crimes! And what faults!

On the one hand, miasms; on the other, an ineffable perfume. On the one
hand, a moral pest, guarded from sight, penned up under the range of
cannon, and literally devouring its plague-stricken victims; on
the other, the chaste flame of all souls on the same hearth. There,
darkness; here, the shadow; but a shadow filled with gleams of light,
and of gleams full of radiance.

Two strongholds of slavery; but in the first, deliverance possible,
a legal limit always in sight, and then, escape. In the second,
perpetuity; the sole hope, at the distant extremity of the future, that
faint light of liberty which men call death.

In the first, men are bound only with chains; in the other, chained by
faith.

What flowed from the first? An immense curse, the gnashing of teeth,
hatred, desperate viciousness, a cry of rage against human society, a
sarcasm against heaven.

What results flowed from the second? Blessings and love.

And in these two places, so similar yet so unlike, these two species
of beings who were so very unlike, were undergoing the same work,
expiation.

Jean Valjean understood thoroughly the expiation of the former; that
personal expiation, the expiation for one's self. But he did not
understand that of these last, that of creatures without reproach and
without stain, and he trembled as he asked himself: The expiation of
what? What expiation?

A voice within his conscience replied: "The most divine of human
generosities, the expiation for others."

Here all personal theory is withheld; we are only the narrator; we
place ourselves at Jean Valjean's point of view, and we translate his
impressions.

Before his eyes he had the sublime summit of abnegation, the highest
possible pitch of virtue; the innocence which pardons men their faults,
and which expiates in their stead; servitude submitted to, torture
accepted, punishment claimed by souls which have not sinned, for the
sake of sparing it to souls which have fallen; the love of humanity
swallowed up in the love of God, but even there preserving its distinct
and mediatorial character; sweet and feeble beings possessing the misery
of those who are punished and the smile of those who are recompensed.

And he remembered that he had dared to murmur!

Often, in the middle of the night, he rose to listen to the grateful
song of those innocent creatures weighed down with severities, and the
blood ran cold in his veins at the thought that those who were justly
chastised raised their voices heavenward only in blasphemy, and that he,
wretch that he was, had shaken his fist at God.

There was one striking thing which caused him to meditate deeply, like
a warning whisper from Providence itself: the scaling of that wall, the
passing of those barriers, the adventure accepted even at the risk of
death, the painful and difficult ascent, all those efforts even, which
he had made to escape from that other place of expiation, he had made in
order to gain entrance into this one. Was this a symbol of his destiny?
This house was a prison likewise and bore a melancholy resemblance to
that other one whence he had fled, and yet he had never conceived an
idea of anything similar.

Again he beheld gratings, bolts, iron bars--to guard whom? Angels.

These lofty walls which he had seen around tigers, he now beheld once
more around lambs.

This was a place of expiation, and not of punishment; and yet, it was
still more austere, more gloomy, and more pitiless than the other.

These virgins were even more heavily burdened than the convicts. A cold,
harsh wind, that wind which had chilled his youth, traversed the barred
and padlocked grating of the vultures; a still harsher and more biting
breeze blew in the cage of these doves.

Why?

When he thought on these things, all that was within him was lost in
amazement before this mystery of sublimity.

In these meditations, his pride vanished. He scrutinized his own heart
in all manner of ways; he felt his pettiness, and many a time he wept.
All that had entered into his life for the last six months had led him
back towards the Bishop's holy injunctions; Cosette through love, the
convent through humility.

Sometimes at eventide, in the twilight, at an hour when the garden was
deserted, he could be seen on his knees in the middle of the walk which
skirted the chapel, in front of the window through which he had gazed on
the night of his arrival, and turned towards the spot where, as he knew,
the sister was making reparation, prostrated in prayer. Thus he prayed
as he knelt before the sister.

It seemed as though he dared not kneel directly before God.

Everything that surrounded him, that peaceful garden, those fragrant
flowers, those children who uttered joyous cries, those grave and simple
women, that silent cloister, slowly permeated him, and little by little,
his soul became compounded of silence like the cloister, of perfume like
the flowers, of simplicity like the women, of joy like the children.
And then he reflected that these had been two houses of God which had
received him in succession at two critical moments in his life: the
first, when all doors were closed and when human society rejected him;
the second, at a moment when human society had again set out in pursuit
of him, and when the galleys were again yawning; and that, had it not
been for the first, he should have relapsed into crime, and had it not
been for the second, into torment.

His whole heart melted in gratitude, and he loved more and more.

Many years passed in this manner; Cosette was growing up.


[THE END OF VOLUME II. "COSETTE"]






VOLUME III--MARIUS.


[Illustration: Frontispiece Volume Three  3frontispiece]

[Illustration: Titlepage Volume Three  3titlepage]




BOOK FIRST.--PARIS STUDIED IN ITS ATOM




CHAPTER I--PARVULUS

Paris has a child, and the forest has a bird; the bird is called the
sparrow; the child is called the gamin.

Couple these two ideas which contain, the one all the furnace, the other
all the dawn; strike these two sparks together, Paris, childhood; there
leaps out from them a little being. Homuncio, Plautus would say.

This little being is joyous. He has not food every day, and he goes to
the play every evening, if he sees good. He has no shirt on his body,
no shoes on his feet, no roof over his head; he is like the flies of
heaven, who have none of these things. He is from seven to thirteen
years of age, he lives in bands, roams the streets, lodges in the open
air, wears an old pair of trousers of his father's, which descend below
his heels, an old hat of some other father, which descends below his
ears, a single suspender of yellow listing; he runs, lies in wait,
rummages about, wastes time, blackens pipes, swears like a convict,
haunts the wine-shop, knows thieves, calls gay women thou, talks slang,
sings obscene songs, and has no evil in his heart. This is because he
has in his heart a pearl, innocence; and pearls are not to be dissolved
in mud. So long as man is in his childhood, God wills that he shall be
innocent.

If one were to ask that enormous city: "What is this?" she would reply:
"It is my little one."




CHAPTER II--SOME OF HIS PARTICULAR CHARACTERISTICS

The gamin--the street Arab--of Paris is the dwarf of the giant.

Let us not exaggerate, this cherub of the gutter sometimes has a shirt,
but, in that case, he owns but one; he sometimes has shoes, but then
they have no soles; he sometimes has a lodging, and he loves it, for
he finds his mother there; but he prefers the street, because there he
finds liberty. He has his own games, his own bits of mischief, whose
foundation consists of hatred for the bourgeois; his peculiar metaphors:
to be dead is to eat dandelions by the root; his own occupations,
calling hackney-coaches, letting down carriage-steps, establishing means
of transit between the two sides of a street in heavy rains, which he
calls making the bridge of arts, crying discourses pronounced by the
authorities in favor of the French people, cleaning out the cracks
in the pavement; he has his own coinage, which is composed of all the
little morsels of worked copper which are found on the public streets.
This curious money, which receives the name of loques--rags--has
an invariable and well-regulated currency in this little Bohemia of
children.

Lastly, he has his own fauna, which he observes attentively in
the corners; the lady-bird, the death's-head plant-louse, the
daddy-long-legs, "the devil," a black insect, which menaces by twisting
about its tail armed with two horns. He has his fabulous monster, which
has scales under its belly, but is not a lizard, which has pustules on
its back, but is not a toad, which inhabits the nooks of old lime-kilns
and wells that have run dry, which is black, hairy, sticky, which crawls
sometimes slowly, sometimes rapidly, which has no cry, but which has a
look, and is so terrible that no one has ever beheld it; he calls this
monster "the deaf thing." The search for these "deaf things" among
the stones is a joy of formidable nature. Another pleasure consists in
suddenly prying up a paving-stone, and taking a look at the wood-lice.
Each region of Paris is celebrated for the interesting treasures which
are to be found there. There are ear-wigs in the timber-yards of the
Ursulines, there are millepeds in the Pantheon, there are tadpoles in
the ditches of the Champs-de-Mars.

As far as sayings are concerned, this child has as many of them as
Talleyrand. He is no less cynical, but he is more honest. He is endowed
with a certain indescribable, unexpected joviality; he upsets the
composure of the shopkeeper with his wild laughter. He ranges boldly
from high comedy to farce.

A funeral passes by. Among those who accompany the dead there is a
doctor. "Hey there!" shouts some street Arab, "how long has it been
customary for doctors to carry home their own work?"

Another is in a crowd. A grave man, adorned with spectacles and
trinkets, turns round indignantly: "You good-for-nothing, you have
seized my wife's waist!"--"I, sir? Search me!"




CHAPTER III--HE IS AGREEABLE

In the evening, thanks to a few sous, which he always finds means
to procure, the homuncio enters a theatre. On crossing that magic
threshold, he becomes transfigured; he was the street Arab, he becomes
the titi.[18] Theatres are a sort of ship turned upside down with the
keel in the air. It is in that keel that the titi huddle together.
The titi is to the gamin what the moth is to the larva; the same being
endowed with wings and soaring. It suffices for him to be there, with
his radiance of happiness, with his power of enthusiasm and joy, with
his hand-clapping, which resembles a clapping of wings, to confer on
that narrow, dark, fetid, sordid, unhealthy, hideous, abominable keel,
the name of Paradise.

Bestow on an individual the useless and deprive him of the necessary,
and you have the gamin.

The gamin is not devoid of literary intuition. His tendency, and we say
it with the proper amount of regret, would not constitute classic
taste. He is not very academic by nature. Thus, to give an example, the
popularity of Mademoiselle Mars among that little audience of stormy
children was seasoned with a touch of irony. The gamin called her
Mademoiselle Muche--"hide yourself."

This being bawls and scoffs and ridicules and fights, has rags like a
baby and tatters like a philosopher, fishes in the sewer, hunts in the
cesspool, extracts mirth from foulness, whips up the squares with his
wit, grins and bites, whistles and sings, shouts, and shrieks, tempers
Alleluia with Matantur-lurette, chants every rhythm from the De
Profundis to the Jack-pudding, finds without seeking, knows what he is
ignorant of, is a Spartan to the point of thieving, is mad to wisdom, is
lyrical to filth, would crouch down on Olympus, wallows in the dunghill
and emerges from it covered with stars. The gamin of Paris is Rabelais
in this youth.

He is not content with his trousers unless they have a watch-pocket.

He is not easily astonished, he is still less easily terrified, he makes
songs on superstitions, he takes the wind out of exaggerations, he twits
mysteries, he thrusts out his tongue at ghosts, he takes the poetry out
of stilted things, he introduces caricature into epic extravaganzas.
It is not that he is prosaic; far from that; but he replaces the solemn
vision by the farcical phantasmagoria. If Adamastor were to appear to
him, the street Arab would say: "Hi there! The bugaboo!"




CHAPTER IV--HE MAY BE OF USE

Paris begins with the lounger and ends with the street Arab, two
beings of which no other city is capable; the passive acceptance, which
contents itself with gazing, and the inexhaustible initiative; Prudhomme
and Fouillou. Paris alone has this in its natural history. The whole of
the monarchy is contained in the lounger; the whole of anarchy in the
gamin.

This pale child of the Parisian faubourgs lives and develops, makes
connections, "grows supple" in suffering, in the presence of social
realities and of human things, a thoughtful witness. He thinks himself
heedless; and he is not. He looks and is on the verge of laughter; he is
on the verge of something else also. Whoever you may be, if your name is
Prejudice, Abuse, Ignorance, Oppression, Iniquity, Despotism, Injustice,
Fanaticism, Tyranny, beware of the gaping gamin.

The little fellow will grow up.

Of what clay is he made? Of the first mud that comes to hand. A handful
of dirt, a breath, and behold Adam. It suffices for a God to pass by. A
God has always passed over the street Arab. Fortune labors at this tiny
being. By the word "fortune" we mean chance, to some extent. That pigmy
kneaded out of common earth, ignorant, unlettered, giddy, vulgar, low.
Will that become an Ionian or a Boeotian? Wait, currit rota, the Spirit
of Paris, that demon which creates the children of chance and the men
of destiny, reversing the process of the Latin potter, makes of a jug an
amphora.




CHAPTER V--HIS FRONTIERS

The gamin loves the city, he also loves solitude, since he has something
of the sage in him. Urbis amator, like Fuscus; ruris amator, like
Flaccus.

To roam thoughtfully about, that is to say, to lounge, is a fine
employment of time in the eyes of the philosopher; particularly in that
rather illegitimate species of campaign, which is tolerably ugly but
odd and composed of two natures, which surrounds certain great cities,
notably Paris. To study the suburbs is to study the amphibious animal.
End of the trees, beginning of the roofs; end of the grass, beginning
of the pavements; end of the furrows, beginning of the shops, end of
the wheel-ruts, beginning of the passions; end of the divine murmur,
beginning of the human uproar; hence an extraordinary interest.

Hence, in these not very attractive places, indelibly stamped by the
passing stroller with the epithet: melancholy, the apparently objectless
promenades of the dreamer.

He who writes these lines has long been a prowler about the barriers
of Paris, and it is for him a source of profound souvenirs. That
close-shaven turf, those pebbly paths, that chalk, those pools,
those harsh monotonies of waste and fallow lands, the plants of early
market-garden suddenly springing into sight in a bottom, that mixture of
the savage and the citizen, those vast desert nooks where the garrison
drums practise noisily, and produce a sort of lisping of battle, those
hermits by day and cut-throats by night, that clumsy mill which turns
in the wind, the hoisting-wheels of the quarries, the tea-gardens at the
corners of the cemeteries; the mysterious charm of great, sombre walls
squarely intersecting immense, vague stretches of land inundated with
sunshine and full of butterflies,--all this attracted him.

There is hardly any one on earth who is not acquainted with those
singular spots, the Glaciere, the Cunette, the hideous wall of Grenelle
all speckled with balls, Mont-Parnasse, the Fosse-aux-Loups, Aubiers on
the bank of the Marne, Mont-Souris, the Tombe-Issoire, the Pierre-Plate
de Chatillon, where there is an old, exhausted quarry which no longer
serves any purpose except to raise mushrooms, and which is closed, on a
level with the ground, by a trap-door of rotten planks. The campagna of
Rome is one idea, the banlieue of Paris is another; to behold nothing
but fields, houses, or trees in what a stretch of country offers us, is
to remain on the surface; all aspects of things are thoughts of God. The
spot where a plain effects its junction with a city is always stamped
with a certain piercing melancholy. Nature and humanity both appeal
to you at the same time there. Local originalities there make their
appearance.

Any one who, like ourselves, has wandered about in these solitudes
contiguous to our faubourgs, which may be designated as the limbos of
Paris, has seen here and there, in the most desert spot, at the
most unexpected moment, behind a meagre hedge, or in the corner of a
lugubrious wall, children grouped tumultuously, fetid, muddy,
dusty, ragged, dishevelled, playing hide-and-seek, and crowned with
corn-flowers. All of them are little ones who have made their escape
from poor families. The outer boulevard is their breathing space; the
suburbs belong to them. There they are eternally playing truant. There
they innocently sing their repertory of dirty songs. There they are, or
rather, there they exist, far from every eye, in the sweet light of
May or June, kneeling round a hole in the ground, snapping marbles with
their thumbs, quarrelling over half-farthings, irresponsible, volatile,
free and happy; and, no sooner do they catch sight of you than they
recollect that they have an industry, and that they must earn their
living, and they offer to sell you an old woollen stocking filled
with cockchafers, or a bunch of lilacs. These encounters with strange
children are one of the charming and at the same time poignant graces of
the environs of Paris.

Sometimes there are little girls among the throng of boys,--are they
their sisters?--who are almost young maidens, thin, feverish, with
sunburnt hands, covered with freckles, crowned with poppies and ears of
rye, gay, haggard, barefooted. They can be seen devouring cherries among
the wheat. In the evening they can be heard laughing. These groups,
warmly illuminated by the full glow of midday, or indistinctly seen in
the twilight, occupy the thoughtful man for a very long time, and these
visions mingle with his dreams.

Paris, centre, banlieue, circumference; this constitutes all the earth
to those children. They never venture beyond this. They can no more
escape from the Parisian atmosphere than fish can escape from the
water. For them, nothing exists two leagues beyond the barriers:
Ivry, Gentilly, Arcueil, Belleville, Aubervilliers, Menilmontant,
Choisy-le-Roi, Billancourt, Mendon, Issy, Vanvre, Sevres, Puteaux,
Neuilly, Gennevilliers, Colombes, Romainville, Chatou, Asnieres,
Bougival, Nanterre, Enghien, Noisy-le-Sec, Nogent, Gournay, Drancy,
Gonesse; the universe ends there.




CHAPTER VI--A BIT OF HISTORY

At the epoch, nearly contemporary by the way, when the action of this
book takes place, there was not, as there is to-day, a policeman at
the corner of every street (a benefit which there is no time to discuss
here); stray children abounded in Paris. The statistics give an average
of two hundred and sixty homeless children picked up annually at that
period, by the police patrols, in unenclosed lands, in houses in process
of construction, and under the arches of the bridges. One of these
nests, which has become famous, produced "the swallows of the bridge of
Arcola." This is, moreover, the most disastrous of social symptoms. All
crimes of the man begin in the vagabondage of the child.

Let us make an exception in favor of Paris, nevertheless. In a relative
measure, and in spite of the souvenir which we have just recalled, the
exception is just. While in any other great city the vagabond child is
a lost man, while nearly everywhere the child left to itself is, in
some sort, sacrificed and abandoned to a kind of fatal immersion in the
public vices which devour in him honesty and conscience, the street boy
of Paris, we insist on this point, however defaced and injured on the
surface, is almost intact on the interior. It is a magnificent thing to
put on record, and one which shines forth in the splendid probity of our
popular revolutions, that a certain incorruptibility results from the
idea which exists in the air of Paris, as salt exists in the water of
the ocean. To breathe Paris preserves the soul.

What we have just said takes away nothing of the anguish of heart which
one experiences every time that one meets one of these children around
whom one fancies that he beholds floating the threads of a broken
family. In the civilization of the present day, incomplete as it still
is, it is not a very abnormal thing to behold these fractured families
pouring themselves out into the darkness, not knowing clearly what has
become of their children, and allowing their own entrails to fall on the
public highway. Hence these obscure destinies. This is called, for this
sad thing has given rise to an expression, "to be cast on the pavements
of Paris."

Let it be said by the way, that this abandonment of children was not
discouraged by the ancient monarchy. A little of Egypt and Bohemia in
the lower regions suited the upper spheres, and compassed the aims of
the powerful. The hatred of instruction for the children of the people
was a dogma. What is the use of "half-lights"? Such was the countersign.
Now, the erring child is the corollary of the ignorant child.

Besides this, the monarchy sometimes was in need of children, and in
that case it skimmed the streets.

Under Louis XIV., not to go any further back, the king rightly desired
to create a fleet. The idea was a good one. But let us consider
the means. There can be no fleet, if, beside the sailing ship, that
plaything of the winds, and for the purpose of towing it, in case of
necessity, there is not the vessel which goes where it pleases, either
by means of oars or of steam; the galleys were then to the marine what
steamers are to-day. Therefore, galleys were necessary; but the galley
is moved only by the galley-slave; hence, galley-slaves were required.
Colbert had the commissioners of provinces and the parliaments make
as many convicts as possible. The magistracy showed a great deal of
complaisance in the matter. A man kept his hat on in the presence of a
procession--it was a Huguenot attitude; he was sent to the galleys. A
child was encountered in the streets; provided that he was fifteen
years of age and did not know where he was to sleep, he was sent to the
galleys. Grand reign; grand century.

Under Louis XV. children disappeared in Paris; the police carried them
off, for what mysterious purpose no one knew. People whispered with
terror monstrous conjectures as to the king's baths of purple. Barbier
speaks ingenuously of these things. It sometimes happened that the
exempts of the guard, when they ran short of children, took those who
had fathers. The fathers, in despair, attacked the exempts. In that
case, the parliament intervened and had some one hung. Who? The exempts?
No, the fathers.




CHAPTER VII--THE GAMIN SHOULD HAVE HIS PLACE IN THE CLASSIFICATIONS OF
INDIA

The body of street Arabs in Paris almost constitutes a caste. One might
almost say: Not every one who wishes to belong to it can do so.

This word gamin was printed for the first time, and reached popular
speech through the literary tongue, in 1834. It is in a little work
entitled Claude Gueux that this word made its appearance. The horror was
lively. The word passed into circulation.

The elements which constitute the consideration of the gamins for each
other are very various. We have known and associated with one who was
greatly respected and vastly admired because he had seen a man fall from
the top of the tower of Notre-Dame; another, because he had succeeded in
making his way into the rear courtyard where the statues of the dome
of the Invalides had been temporarily deposited, and had "prigged" some
lead from them; a third, because he had seen a diligence tip over; still
another, because he "knew" a soldier who came near putting out the eye
of a citizen.

This explains that famous exclamation of a Parisian gamin, a profound
epiphonema, which the vulgar herd laughs at without comprehending,--Dieu
de Dieu! What ill-luck I do have! to think that I have never yet seen
anybody tumble from a fifth-story window! (I have pronounced I'ave and
fifth pronounced fift'.)

Surely, this saying of a peasant is a fine one: "Father So-and-So, your
wife has died of her malady; why did you not send for the doctor?"
"What would you have, sir, we poor folks die of ourselves." But if
the peasant's whole passivity lies in this saying, the whole of the
free-thinking anarchy of the brat of the faubourgs is, assuredly,
contained in this other saying. A man condemned to death is listening
to his confessor in the tumbrel. The child of Paris exclaims: "He is
talking to his black cap! Oh, the sneak!"

A certain audacity on matters of religion sets off the gamin. To be
strong-minded is an important item.

To be present at executions constitutes a duty. He shows himself at the
guillotine, and he laughs. He calls it by all sorts of pet names: The
End of the Soup, The Growler, The Mother in the Blue (the sky), The Last
Mouthful, etc., etc. In order not to lose anything of the affair, he
scales the walls, he hoists himself to balconies, he ascends trees, he
suspends himself to gratings, he clings fast to chimneys. The gamin is
born a tiler as he is born a mariner. A roof inspires him with no more
fear than a mast. There is no festival which comes up to an execution
on the Place de Greve. Samson and the Abbe Montes are the truly popular
names. They hoot at the victim in order to encourage him. They sometimes
admire him. Lacenaire, when a gamin, on seeing the hideous Dautin die
bravely, uttered these words which contain a future: "I was jealous of
him." In the brotherhood of gamins Voltaire is not known, but Papavoine
is. "Politicians" are confused with assassins in the same legend.
They have a tradition as to everybody's last garment. It is known that
Tolleron had a fireman's cap, Avril an otter cap, Losvel a round hat,
that old Delaporte was bald and bare-headed, that Castaing was all ruddy
and very handsome, that Bories had a romantic small beard, that Jean
Martin kept on his suspenders, that Lecouffe and his mother quarrelled.
"Don't reproach each other for your basket," shouted a gamin to them.
Another, in order to get a look at Debacker as he passed, and being too
small in the crowd, caught sight of the lantern on the quay and climbed
it. A gendarme stationed opposite frowned. "Let me climb up, m'sieu le
gendarme," said the gamin. And, to soften the heart of the authorities
he added: "I will not fall." "I don't care if you do," retorted the
gendarme.

In the brotherhood of gamins, a memorable accident counts for a great
deal. One reaches the height of consideration if one chances to cut
one's self very deeply, "to the very bone."

The fist is no mediocre element of respect. One of the things that the
gamin is fondest of saying is: "I am fine and strong, come now!" To be
left-handed renders you very enviable. A squint is highly esteemed.




CHAPTER VIII--IN WHICH THE READER WILL FIND A CHARMING SAYING OF THE
LAST KING

In summer, he metamorphoses himself into a frog; and in the evening,
when night is falling, in front of the bridges of Austerlitz and Jena,
from the tops of coal wagons, and the washerwomen's boats, he hurls
himself headlong into the Seine, and into all possible infractions of
the laws of modesty and of the police. Nevertheless the police keep an
eye on him, and the result is a highly dramatic situation which
once gave rise to a fraternal and memorable cry; that cry which was
celebrated about 1830, is a strategic warning from gamin to gamin; it
scans like a verse from Homer, with a notation as inexpressible as the
eleusiac chant of the Panathenaea, and in it one encounters again the
ancient Evohe. Here it is: "Ohe, Titi, oheee! Here comes the bobby, here
comes the p'lice, pick up your duds and be off, through the sewer with
you!"

Sometimes this gnat--that is what he calls himself--knows how to read;
sometimes he knows how to write; he always knows how to daub. He
does not hesitate to acquire, by no one knows what mysterious mutual
instruction, all the talents which can be of use to the public; from
1815 to 1830, he imitated the cry of the turkey; from 1830 to 1848, he
scrawled pears on the walls. One summer evening, when Louis Philippe was
returning home on foot, he saw a little fellow, no higher than his knee,
perspiring and climbing up to draw a gigantic pear in charcoal on one
of the pillars of the gate of Neuilly; the King, with that good-nature
which came to him from Henry IV., helped the gamin, finished the pear,
and gave the child a louis, saying: "The pear is on that also."[19]
The gamin loves uproar. A certain state of violence pleases him. He
execrates "the cures." One day, in the Rue de l'Universite, one of these
scamps was putting his thumb to his nose at the carriage gate of No.
69. "Why are you doing that at the gate?" a passer-by asked. The boy
replied: "There is a cure there." It was there, in fact, that the Papal
Nuncio lived.

Nevertheless, whatever may be the Voltairianism of the small gamin, if
the occasion to become a chorister presents itself, it is quite possible
that he will accept, and in that case he serves the mass civilly. There
are two things to which he plays Tantalus, and which he always desires
without ever attaining them: to overthrow the government, and to get his
trousers sewed up again.

The gamin in his perfect state possesses all the policemen of Paris, and
can always put the name to the face of any one which he chances to
meet. He can tell them off on the tips of his fingers. He studies their
habits, and he has special notes on each one of them. He reads the souls
of the police like an open book. He will tell you fluently and without
flinching: "Such an one is a traitor; such another is very malicious;
such another is great; such another is ridiculous." (All these words:
traitor, malicious, great, ridiculous, have a particular meaning in his
mouth.) That one imagines that he owns the Pont-Neuf, and he prevents
people from walking on the cornice outside the parapet; that other has a
mania for pulling person's ears; etc., etc.




CHAPTER IX--THE OLD SOUL OF GAUL

There was something of that boy in Poquelin, the son of the fish-market;
Beaumarchais had something of it. Gaminerie is a shade of the Gallic
spirit. Mingled with good sense, it sometimes adds force to the latter,
as alcohol does to wine. Sometimes it is a defect. Homer repeats himself
eternally, granted; one may say that Voltaire plays the gamin. Camille
Desmoulins was a native of the faubourgs. Championnet, who treated
miracles brutally, rose from the pavements of Paris; he had, when a
small lad, inundated the porticos of Saint-Jean de Beauvais, and of
Saint-Etienne du Mont; he had addressed the shrine of Sainte-Genevieve
familiarly to give orders to the phial of Saint Januarius.

The gamin of Paris is respectful, ironical, and insolent. He has
villainous teeth, because he is badly fed and his stomach suffers, and
handsome eyes because he has wit. If Jehovah himself were present, he
would go hopping up the steps of paradise on one foot. He is strong on
boxing. All beliefs are possible to him. He plays in the gutter, and
straightens himself up with a revolt; his effrontery persists even in
the presence of grape-shot; he was a scapegrace, he is a hero; like the
little Theban, he shakes the skin from the lion; Barra the drummer-boy
was a gamin of Paris; he Shouts: "Forward!" as the horse of Scripture
says "Vah!" and in a moment he has passed from the small brat to the
giant.

This child of the puddle is also the child of the ideal. Measure that
spread of wings which reaches from Moliere to Barra.

To sum up the whole, and in one word, the gamin is a being who amuses
himself, because he is unhappy.




CHAPTER X--ECCE PARIS, ECCE HOMO

To sum it all up once more, the Paris gamin of to-day, like the
graeculus of Rome in days gone by, is the infant populace with the
wrinkle of the old world on his brow.

The gamin is a grace to the nation, and at the same time a disease; a
disease which must be cured, how? By light.

Light renders healthy.

Light kindles.

All generous social irradiations spring from science, letters, arts,
education. Make men, make men. Give them light that they may warm
you. Sooner or later the splendid question of universal education will
present itself with the irresistible authority of the absolute truth;
and then, those who govern under the superintendence of the French idea
will have to make this choice; the children of France or the gamins of
Paris; flames in the light or will-o'-the-wisps in the gloom.

The gamin expresses Paris, and Paris expresses the world.

For Paris is a total. Paris is the ceiling of the human race. The whole
of this prodigious city is a foreshortening of dead manners and living
manners. He who sees Paris thinks he sees the bottom of all history with
heaven and constellations in the intervals. Paris has a capital, the
Town-Hall, a Parthenon, Notre-Dame, a Mount Aventine, the Faubourg
Saint-Antoine, an Asinarium, the Sorbonne, a Pantheon, the Pantheon, a
Via Sacra, the Boulevard des Italiens, a temple of the winds, opinion;
and it replaces the Gemoniae by ridicule. Its majo is called "faraud,"
its Transteverin is the man of the faubourgs, its hammal is the
market-porter, its lazzarone is the pegre, its cockney is the native of
Ghent. Everything that exists elsewhere exists at Paris. The fishwoman
of Dumarsais can retort on the herb-seller of Euripides, the
discobols Vejanus lives again in the Forioso, the tight-rope dancer.
Therapontigonus Miles could walk arm in arm with Vadeboncoeur the
grenadier, Damasippus the second-hand dealer would be happy among
bric-a-brac merchants, Vincennes could grasp Socrates in its fist as
just as Agora could imprison Diderot, Grimod de la Reyniere discovered
larded roast beef, as Curtillus invented roast hedgehog, we see the
trapeze which figures in Plautus reappear under the vault of the Arc
of l'Etoile, the sword-eater of Poecilus encountered by Apuleius is a
sword-swallower on the Pont Neuf, the nephew of Rameau and Curculio
the parasite make a pair, Ergasilus could get himself presented to
Cambaceres by d'Aigrefeuille; the four dandies of Rome: Alcesimarchus,
Phoedromus, Diabolus, and Argyrippus, descend from Courtille in
Labatut's posting-chaise; Aulus Gellius would halt no longer in front of
Congrio than would Charles Nodier in front of Punchinello; Marto is not
a tigress, but Pardalisca was not a dragon; Pantolabus the wag jeers in
the Cafe Anglais at Nomentanus the fast liver, Hermogenus is a tenor
in the Champs-Elysees, and round him, Thracius the beggar, clad like
Bobeche, takes up a collection; the bore who stops you by the button
of your coat in the Tuileries makes you repeat after a lapse of two
thousand years Thesprion's apostrophe: Quis properantem me prehendit
pallio? The wine on Surene is a parody of the wine of Alba, the red
border of Desaugiers forms a balance to the great cutting of Balatro,
Pere Lachaise exhales beneath nocturnal rains same gleams as the
Esquiliae, and the grave of the poor bought for five years, is certainly
the equivalent of the slave's hived coffin.

Seek something that Paris has not. The vat of Trophonius contains
nothing that is not in Mesmer's tub; Ergaphilas lives again in
Cagliostro; the Brahmin Vasaphanta become incarnate in the Comte de
Saint-Germain; the cemetery of Saint-Medard works quite as good miracles
as the Mosque of Oumoumie at Damascus.

Paris has an AEsop-Mayeux, and a Canidia, Mademoiselle Lenormand. It is
terrified, like Delphos at the fulgurating realities of the vision; it
makes tables turn as Dodona did tripods. It places the grisette on the
throne, as Rome placed the courtesan there; and, taking it altogether,
if Louis XV. is worse than Claudian, Madame Dubarry is better than
Messalina. Paris combines in an unprecedented type, which has existed
and which we have elbowed, Grecian nudity, the Hebraic ulcer, and the
Gascon pun. It mingles Diogenes, Job, and Jack-pudding, dresses up a
spectre in old numbers of the Constitutional, and makes Chodruc Duclos.

Although Plutarch says: the tyrant never grows old, Rome, under Sylla as
under Domitian, resigned itself and willingly put water in its wine. The
Tiber was a Lethe, if the rather doctrinary eulogium made of it by Varus
Vibiscus is to be credited: Contra Gracchos Tiberim habemus, Bibere
Tiberim, id est seditionem oblivisci. Paris drinks a million litres of
water a day, but that does not prevent it from occasionally beating the
general alarm and ringing the tocsin.

With that exception, Paris is amiable. It accepts everything royally;
it is not too particular about its Venus; its Callipyge is Hottentot;
provided that it is made to laugh, it condones; ugliness cheers it,
deformity provokes it to laughter, vice diverts it; be eccentric and
you may be an eccentric; even hypocrisy, that supreme cynicism, does
not disgust it; it is so literary that it does not hold its nose before
Basile, and is no more scandalized by the prayer of Tartuffe than Horace
was repelled by the "hiccup" of Priapus. No trait of the universal face
is lacking in the profile of Paris. The bal Mabile is not the polymnia
dance of the Janiculum, but the dealer in ladies' wearing apparel there
devours the lorette with her eyes, exactly as the procuress Staphyla
lay in wait for the virgin Planesium. The Barriere du Combat is not
the Coliseum, but people are as ferocious there as though Caesar were
looking on. The Syrian hostess has more grace than Mother Saguet,
but, if Virgil haunted the Roman wine-shop, David d'Angers, Balzac
and Charlet have sat at the tables of Parisian taverns. Paris reigns.
Geniuses flash forth there, the red tails prosper there. Adonai passes
on his chariot with its twelve wheels of thunder and lightning; Silenus
makes his entry there on his ass. For Silenus read Ramponneau.

Paris is the synonym of Cosmos, Paris is Athens, Sybaris, Jerusalem,
Pantin. All civilizations are there in an abridged form, all barbarisms
also. Paris would greatly regret it if it had not a guillotine.

A little of the Place de Greve is a good thing. What would all that
eternal festival be without this seasoning? Our laws are wisely
provided, and thanks to them, this blade drips on this Shrove Tuesday.




CHAPTER XI--TO SCOFF, TO REIGN

There is no limit to Paris. No city has had that domination which
sometimes derides those whom it subjugates. To please you, O Athenians!
exclaimed Alexander. Paris makes more than the law, it makes the
fashion; Paris sets more than the fashion, it sets the routine. Paris
may be stupid, if it sees fit; it sometimes allows itself this luxury;
then the universe is stupid in company with it; then Paris awakes, rubs
its eyes, says: "How stupid I am!" and bursts out laughing in the face
of the human race. What a marvel is such a city! it is a strange thing
that this grandioseness and this burlesque should be amicable neighbors,
that all this majesty should not be thrown into disorder by all this
parody, and that the same mouth can to-day blow into the trump of the
Judgment Day, and to-morrow into the reed-flute! Paris has a sovereign
joviality. Its gayety is of the thunder and its farce holds a sceptre.

Its tempest sometimes proceeds from a grimace. Its explosions, its days,
its masterpieces, its prodigies, its epics, go forth to the bounds of
the universe, and so also do its cock-and-bull stories. Its laugh is the
mouth of a volcano which spatters the whole earth. Its jests are sparks.
It imposes its caricatures as well as its ideal on people; the highest
monuments of human civilization accept its ironies and lend their
eternity to its mischievous pranks. It is superb; it has a prodigious
14th of July, which delivers the globe; it forces all nations to take
the oath of tennis; its night of the 4th of August dissolves in three
hours a thousand years of feudalism; it makes of its logic the muscle
of unanimous will; it multiplies itself under all sorts of forms of
the sublime; it fills with its light Washington, Kosciusko, Bolivar,
Bozzaris, Riego, Bem, Manin, Lopez, John Brown, Garibaldi; it is
everywhere where the future is being lighted up, at Boston in 1779,
at the Isle de Leon in 1820, at Pesth in 1848, at Palermo in 1860, it
whispers the mighty countersign: Liberty, in the ear of the American
abolitionists grouped about the boat at Harper's Ferry, and in the ear
of the patriots of Ancona assembled in the shadow, to the Archi before
the Gozzi inn on the seashore; it creates Canaris; it creates Quiroga;
it creates Pisacane; it irradiates the great on earth; it was while
proceeding whither its breath urge them, that Byron perished at
Missolonghi, and that Mazet died at Barcelona; it is the tribune under
the feet of Mirabeau, and a crater under the feet of Robespierre;
its books, its theatre, its art, its science, its literature, its
philosophy, are the manuals of the human race; it has Pascal, Regnier,
Corneille, Descartes, Jean-Jacques: Voltaire for all moments, Moliere
for all centuries; it makes its language to be talked by the universal
mouth, and that language becomes the word; it constructs in all minds
the idea of progress, the liberating dogmas which it forges are for the
generations trusty friends, and it is with the soul of its thinkers and
its poets that all heroes of all nations have been made since 1789; this
does not prevent vagabondism, and that enormous genius which is called
Paris, while transfiguring the world by its light, sketches in charcoal
Bouginier's nose on the wall of the temple of Theseus and writes
Credeville the thief on the Pyramids.

Paris is always showing its teeth; when it is not scolding it is
laughing.

Such is Paris. The smoke of its roofs forms the ideas of the universe. A
heap of mud and stone, if you will, but, above all, a moral being. It is
more than great, it is immense. Why? Because it is daring.

To dare; that is the price of progress.

All sublime conquests are, more or less, the prizes of daring. In
order that the Revolution should take place, it does not suffice that
Montesquieu should foresee it, that Diderot should preach it, that
Beaumarchais should announce it, that Condorcet should calculate it,
that Arouet should prepare it, that Rousseau should premeditate it; it
is necessary that Danton should dare it.

The cry: Audacity! is a Fiat lux. It is necessary, for the sake of the
forward march of the human race, that there should be proud lessons of
courage permanently on the heights. Daring deeds dazzle history and are
one of man's great sources of light. The dawn dares when it rises. To
attempt, to brave, to persist, to persevere, to be faithful to one's
self, to grasp fate bodily, to astound catastrophe by the small amount
of fear that it occasions us, now to affront unjust power, again to
insult drunken victory, to hold one's position, to stand one's ground;
that is the example which nations need, that is the light which
electrifies them. The same formidable lightning proceeds from the torch
of Prometheus to Cambronne's short pipe.




CHAPTER XII--THE FUTURE LATENT IN THE PEOPLE

As for the Parisian populace, even when a man grown, it is always the
street Arab; to paint the child is to paint the city; and it is for that
reason that we have studied this eagle in this arrant sparrow. It is in
the faubourgs, above all, we maintain, that the Parisian race appears;
there is the pure blood; there is the true physiognomy; there this
people toils and suffers, and suffering and toil are the two faces of
man. There exist there immense numbers of unknown beings, among whom
swarm types of the strangest, from the porter of la Rapee to the knacker
of Montfaucon. Fex urbis, exclaims Cicero; mob, adds Burke, indignantly;
rabble, multitude, populace. These are words and quickly uttered. But
so be it. What does it matter? What is it to me if they do go barefoot!
They do not know how to read; so much the worse. Would you abandon them
for that? Would you turn their distress into a malediction? Cannot the
light penetrate these masses? Let us return to that cry: Light! and let
us obstinately persist therein! Light! Light! Who knows whether
these opacities will not become transparent? Are not revolutions
transfigurations? Come, philosophers, teach, enlighten, light up, think
aloud, speak aloud, hasten joyously to the great sun, fraternize with
the public place, announce the good news, spend your alphabets lavishly,
proclaim rights, sing the Marseillaises, sow enthusiasms, tear green
boughs from the oaks. Make a whirlwind of the idea. This crowd may
be rendered sublime. Let us learn how to make use of that vast
conflagration of principles and virtues, which sparkles, bursts forth
and quivers at certain hours. These bare feet, these bare arms, these
rags, these ignorances, these abjectnesses, these darknesses, may be
employed in the conquest of the ideal. Gaze past the people, and you
will perceive truth. Let that vile sand which you trample under foot be
cast into the furnace, let it melt and seethe there, it will become a
splendid crystal, and it is thanks to it that Galileo and Newton will
discover stars.




CHAPTER XIII--LITTLE GAVROCHE

[Illustration: Little Gavroche  3b1-13-gavroche]

Eight or nine years after the events narrated in the second part of this
story, people noticed on the Boulevard du Temple, and in the regions of
the Chateau-d'Eau, a little boy eleven or twelve years of age, who would
have realized with tolerable accuracy that ideal of the gamin sketched
out above, if, with the laugh of his age on his lips, he had not had a
heart absolutely sombre and empty. This child was well muffled up in a
pair of man's trousers, but he did not get them from his father, and a
woman's chemise, but he did not get it from his mother. Some people or
other had clothed him in rags out of charity. Still, he had a father and
a mother. But his father did not think of him, and his mother did not
love him.

He was one of those children most deserving of pity, among all, one of
those who have father and mother, and who are orphans nevertheless.

This child never felt so well as when he was in the street. The
pavements were less hard to him than his mother's heart.

His parents had despatched him into life with a kick.

He simply took flight.

He was a boisterous, pallid, nimble, wide-awake, jeering, lad, with a
vivacious but sickly air. He went and came, sang, played at hopscotch,
scraped the gutters, stole a little, but, like cats and sparrows, gayly
laughed when he was called a rogue, and got angry when called a thief.
He had no shelter, no bread, no fire, no love; but he was merry because
he was free.

When these poor creatures grow to be men, the millstones of the social
order meet them and crush them, but so long as they are children, they
escape because of their smallness. The tiniest hole saves them.

Nevertheless, abandoned as this child was, it sometimes happened, every
two or three months, that he said, "Come, I'll go and see mamma!" Then
he quitted the boulevard, the Cirque, the Porte Saint-Martin, descended
to the quays, crossed the bridges, reached the suburbs, arrived at the
Salpetriere, and came to a halt, where? Precisely at that double number
50-52 with which the reader is acquainted--at the Gorbeau hovel.

At that epoch, the hovel 50-52 generally deserted and eternally
decorated with the placard: "Chambers to let," chanced to be, a rare
thing, inhabited by numerous individuals who, however, as is always the
case in Paris, had no connection with each other. All belonged to
that indigent class which begins to separate from the lowest of petty
bourgeoisie in straitened circumstances, and which extends from misery
to misery into the lowest depths of society down to those two beings
in whom all the material things of civilization end, the sewer-man who
sweeps up the mud, and the ragpicker who collects scraps.

The "principal lodger" of Jean Valjean's day was dead and had been
replaced by another exactly like her. I know not what philosopher has
said: "Old women are never lacking."

This new old woman was named Madame Bourgon, and had nothing remarkable
about her life except a dynasty of three paroquets, who had reigned in
succession over her soul.

The most miserable of those who inhabited the hovel were a family of
four persons, consisting of father, mother, and two daughters, already
well grown, all four of whom were lodged in the same attic, one of the
cells which we have already mentioned.

At first sight, this family presented no very special feature except its
extreme destitution; the father, when he hired the chamber, had stated
that his name was Jondrette. Some time after his moving in, which had
borne a singular resemblance to the entrance of nothing at all, to
borrow the memorable expression of the principal tenant, this Jondrette
had said to the woman, who, like her predecessor, was at the same time
portress and stair-sweeper: "Mother So-and-So, if any one should chance
to come and inquire for a Pole or an Italian, or even a Spaniard,
perchance, it is I."

This family was that of the merry barefoot boy. He arrived there and
found distress, and, what is still sadder, no smile; a cold hearth
and cold hearts. When he entered, he was asked: "Whence come you?" He
replied: "From the street." When he went away, they asked him: "Whither
are you going?" He replied: "Into the streets." His mother said to him:
"What did you come here for?"

This child lived, in this absence of affection, like the pale plants
which spring up in cellars. It did not cause him suffering, and he
blamed no one. He did not know exactly how a father and mother should
be.

Nevertheless, his mother loved his sisters.

We have forgotten to mention, that on the Boulevard du Temple this child
was called Little Gavroche. Why was he called Little Gavroche?

Probably because his father's name was Jondrette.

It seems to be the instinct of certain wretched families to break the
thread.

The chamber which the Jondrettes inhabited in the Gorbeau hovel was the
last at the end of the corridor. The cell next to it was occupied by a
very poor young man who was called M. Marius.

Let us explain who this M. Marius was.




BOOK SECOND.--THE GREAT BOURGEOIS




CHAPTER I--NINETY YEARS AND THIRTY-TWO TEETH

In the Rue Boucherat, Rue de Normandie and the Rue de Saintonge there
still exist a few ancient inhabitants who have preserved the memory of a
worthy man named M. Gillenormand, and who mention him with complaisance.
This good man was old when they were young. This silhouette has not yet
entirely disappeared--for those who regard with melancholy that vague
swarm of shadows which is called the past--from the labyrinth of streets
in the vicinity of the Temple to which, under Louis XIV., the names of
all the provinces of France were appended exactly as in our day, the
streets of the new Tivoli quarter have received the names of all the
capitals of Europe; a progression, by the way, in which progress is
visible.

M.Gillenormand, who was as much alive as possible in 1831, was one of
those men who had become curiosities to be viewed, simply because
they have lived a long time, and who are strange because they formerly
resembled everybody, and now resemble nobody. He was a peculiar old man,
and in very truth, a man of another age, the real, complete and rather
haughty bourgeois of the eighteenth century, who wore his good, old
bourgeoisie with the air with which marquises wear their marquisates. He
was over ninety years of age, his walk was erect, he talked loudly, saw
clearly, drank neat, ate, slept, and snored. He had all thirty-two of
his teeth. He only wore spectacles when he read. He was of an amorous
disposition, but declared that, for the last ten years, he had wholly
and decidedly renounced women. He could no longer please, he said; he
did not add: "I am too old," but: "I am too poor." He said: "If I were
not ruined--Heee!" All he had left, in fact, was an income of about
fifteen thousand francs. His dream was to come into an inheritance and
to have a hundred thousand livres income for mistresses. He did
not belong, as the reader will perceive, to that puny variety of
octogenaries who, like M. de Voltaire, have been dying all their life;
his was no longevity of a cracked pot; this jovial old man had always
had good health. He was superficial, rapid, easily angered. He flew into
a passion at everything, generally quite contrary to all reason. When
contradicted, he raised his cane; he beat people as he had done in the
great century. He had a daughter over fifty years of age, and unmarried,
whom he chastised severely with his tongue, when in a rage, and whom he
would have liked to whip. She seemed to him to be eight years old. He
boxed his servants' ears soundly, and said: "Ah! carogne!" One of his
oaths was: "By the pantoufloche of the pantouflochade!" He had singular
freaks of tranquillity; he had himself shaved every day by a barber who
had been mad and who detested him, being jealous of M. Gillenormand on
account of his wife, a pretty and coquettish barberess. M. Gillenormand
admired his own discernment in all things, and declared that he was
extremely sagacious; here is one of his sayings: "I have, in truth, some
penetration; I am able to say when a flea bites me, from what woman it
came."

The words which he uttered the most frequently were: the sensible man,
and nature. He did not give to this last word the grand acceptation
which our epoch has accorded to it, but he made it enter, after his own
fashion, into his little chimney-corner satires: "Nature," he said, "in
order that civilization may have a little of everything, gives it even
specimens of its amusing barbarism. Europe possesses specimens of Asia
and Africa on a small scale. The cat is a drawing-room tiger, the lizard
is a pocket crocodile. The dancers at the opera are pink female savages.
They do not eat men, they crunch them; or, magicians that they are, they
transform them into oysters and swallow them. The Caribbeans leave only
the bones, they leave only the shell. Such are our morals. We do not
devour, we gnaw; we do not exterminate, we claw."




CHAPTER II--LIKE MASTER, LIKE HOUSE

He lived in the Marais, Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, No. 6. He owned the
house. This house has since been demolished and rebuilt, and the number
has probably been changed in those revolutions of numeration which the
streets of Paris undergo. He occupied an ancient and vast apartment
on the first floor, between street and gardens, furnished to the very
ceilings with great Gobelins and Beauvais tapestries representing
pastoral scenes; the subjects of the ceilings and the panels were
repeated in miniature on the arm-chairs. He enveloped his bed in a vast,
nine-leaved screen of Coromandel lacquer. Long, full curtains hung from
the windows, and formed great, broken folds that were very magnificent.
The garden situated immediately under his windows was attached to that
one of them which formed the angle, by means of a staircase twelve or
fifteen steps long, which the old gentleman ascended and descended with
great agility. In addition to a library adjoining his chamber, he had a
boudoir of which he thought a great deal, a gallant and elegant retreat,
with magnificent hangings of straw, with a pattern of flowers and
fleurs-de-lys made on the galleys of Louis XIV. and ordered of his
convicts by M. de Vivonne for his mistress. M. Gillenormand had
inherited it from a grim maternal great-aunt, who had died a
centenarian. He had had two wives. His manners were something between
those of the courtier, which he had never been, and the lawyer, which
he might have been. He was gay, and caressing when he had a mind. In
his youth he had been one of those men who are always deceived by their
wives and never by their mistresses, because they are, at the same
time, the most sullen of husbands and the most charming of lovers in
existence. He was a connoisseur of painting. He had in his chamber a
marvellous portrait of no one knows whom, painted by Jordaens, executed
with great dashes of the brush, with millions of details, in a confused
and hap-hazard manner. M. Gillenormand's attire was not the habit of
Louis XIV. nor yet that of Louis XVI.; it was that of the Incroyables
of the Directory. He had thought himself young up to that period and
had followed the fashions. His coat was of light-weight cloth with
voluminous revers, a long swallow-tail and large steel buttons. With
this he wore knee-breeches and buckle shoes. He always thrust his hands
into his fobs. He said authoritatively: "The French Revolution is a heap
of blackguards."




CHAPTER III--LUC-ESPRIT

At the age of sixteen, one evening at the opera, he had had the honor
to be stared at through opera-glasses by two beauties at the same
time--ripe and celebrated beauties then, and sung by Voltaire, the
Camargo and the Salle. Caught between two fires, he had beaten a heroic
retreat towards a little dancer, a young girl named Nahenry, who was
sixteen like himself, obscure as a cat, and with whom he was in love.
He abounded in memories. He was accustomed to exclaim: "How pretty she
was--that Guimard-Guimardini-Guimardinette, the last time I saw her
at Longchamps, her hair curled in sustained sentiments, with her
come-and-see of turquoises, her gown of the color of persons newly
arrived, and her little agitation muff!" He had worn in his young
manhood a waistcoat of Nain-Londrin, which he was fond of talking about
effusively. "I was dressed like a Turk of the Levant Levantin," said he.
Madame de Boufflers, having seen him by chance when he was twenty, had
described him as "a charming fool." He was horrified by all the names
which he saw in politics and in power, regarding them as vulgar and
bourgeois. He read the journals, the newspapers, the gazettes as he
said, stifling outbursts of laughter the while. "Oh!" he said, "what
people these are! Corbiere! Humann! Casimir Perier! There's a minister
for you! I can imagine this in a journal: 'M. Gillenorman, minister!'
that would be a farce. Well! They are so stupid that it would pass"; he
merrily called everything by its name, whether decent or indecent, and
did not restrain himself in the least before ladies. He uttered coarse
speeches, obscenities, and filth with a certain tranquillity and lack
of astonishment which was elegant. It was in keeping with the
unceremoniousness of his century. It is to be noted that the age of
periphrase in verse was the age of crudities in prose. His god-father
had predicted that he would turn out a man of genius, and had bestowed
on him these two significant names: Luc-Esprit.




CHAPTER IV--A CENTENARIAN ASPIRANT

He had taken prizes in his boyhood at the College of Moulins, where he
was born, and he had been crowned by the hand of the Duc de Nivernais,
whom he called the Duc de Nevers. Neither the Convention, nor the death
of Louis XVI., nor the Napoleon, nor the return of the Bourbons, nor
anything else had been able to efface the memory of this crowning. The
Duc de Nevers was, in his eyes, the great figure of the century. "What a
charming grand seigneur," he said, "and what a fine air he had with his
blue ribbon!"

In the eyes of M. Gillenormand, Catherine the Second had made reparation
for the crime of the partition of Poland by purchasing, for three
thousand roubles, the secret of the elixir of gold, from Bestucheff. He
grew animated on this subject: "The elixir of gold," he exclaimed, "the
yellow dye of Bestucheff, General Lamotte's drops, in the eighteenth
century,--this was the great remedy for the catastrophes of love, the
panacea against Venus, at one louis the half-ounce phial. Louis XV.
sent two hundred phials of it to the Pope." He would have been greatly
irritated and thrown off his balance, had any one told him that the
elixir of gold is nothing but the perchloride of iron. M. Gillenormand
adored the Bourbons, and had a horror of 1789; he was forever narrating
in what manner he had saved himself during the Terror, and how he had
been obliged to display a vast deal of gayety and cleverness in order to
escape having his head cut off. If any young man ventured to pronounce
an eulogium on the Republic in his presence, he turned purple and grew
so angry that he was on the point of swooning. He sometimes alluded to
his ninety years, and said, "I hope that I shall not see ninety-three
twice." On these occasions, he hinted to people that he meant to live to
be a hundred.




CHAPTER V--BASQUE AND NICOLETTE

He had theories. Here is one of them: "When a man is passionately fond
of women, and when he has himself a wife for whom he cares but little,
who is homely, cross, legitimate, with plenty of rights, perched on the
code, and jealous at need, there is but one way of extricating himself
from the quandry and of procuring peace, and that is to let his wife
control the purse-strings. This abdication sets him free. Then his
wife busies herself, grows passionately fond of handling coin, gets her
fingers covered with verdigris in the process, undertakes the education
of half-share tenants and the training of farmers, convokes lawyers,
presides over notaries, harangues scriveners, visits limbs of the law,
follows lawsuits, draws up leases, dictates contracts, feels herself the
sovereign, sells, buys, regulates, promises and compromises, binds fast
and annuls, yields, concedes and retrocedes, arranges, disarranges,
hoards, lavishes; she commits follies, a supreme and personal delight,
and that consoles her. While her husband disdains her, she has the
satisfaction of ruining her husband." This theory M. Gillenormand had
himself applied, and it had become his history. His wife--the second
one--had administered his fortune in such a manner that, one fine day,
when M. Gillenormand found himself a widower, there remained to him just
sufficient to live on, by sinking nearly the whole of it in an annuity
of fifteen thousand francs, three-quarters of which would expire with
him. He had not hesitated on this point, not being anxious to leave
a property behind him. Besides, he had noticed that patrimonies are
subject to adventures, and, for instance, become national property; he
had been present at the avatars of consolidated three per cents, and he
had no great faith in the Great Book of the Public Debt. "All that's
the Rue Quincampois!" he said. His house in the Rue Filles-du-Clavaire
belonged to him, as we have already stated. He had two servants, "a male
and a female." When a servant entered his establishment, M. Gillenormand
re-baptized him. He bestowed on the men the name of their province:
Nimois, Comtois, Poitevin, Picard. His last valet was a big, foundered,
short-winded fellow of fifty-five, who was incapable of running twenty
paces; but, as he had been born at Bayonne, M. Gillenormand called him
Basque. All the female servants in his house were called Nicolette (even
the Magnon, of whom we shall hear more farther on). One day, a haughty
cook, a cordon bleu, of the lofty race of porters, presented herself.
"How much wages do you want a month?" asked M. Gillenormand. "Thirty
francs." "What is your name?" "Olympie." "You shall have fifty francs,
and you shall be called Nicolette."




CHAPTER VI--IN WHICH MAGNON AND HER TWO CHILDREN ARE SEEN

With M. Gillenormand, sorrow was converted into wrath; he was furious at
being in despair. He had all sorts of prejudices and took all sorts
of liberties. One of the facts of which his exterior relief and his
internal satisfaction was composed, was, as we have just hinted, that he
had remained a brisk spark, and that he passed energetically for such.
This he called having "royal renown." This royal renown sometimes drew
down upon him singular windfalls. One day, there was brought to him in
a basket, as though it had been a basket of oysters, a stout, newly
born boy, who was yelling like the deuce, and duly wrapped in
swaddling-clothes, which a servant-maid, dismissed six months
previously, attributed to him. M. Gillenormand had, at that time,
fully completed his eighty-fourth year. Indignation and uproar in the
establishment. And whom did that bold hussy think she could persuade to
believe that? What audacity! What an abominable calumny! M. Gillenormand
himself was not at all enraged. He gazed at the brat with the amiable
smile of a good man who is flattered by the calumny, and said in an
aside: "Well, what now? What's the matter? You are finely taken aback,
and really, you are excessively ignorant. M. le Duc d'Angouleme, the
bastard of his Majesty Charles IX., married a silly jade of fifteen
when he was eighty-five; M. Virginal, Marquis d'Alluye, brother to
the Cardinal de Sourdis, Archbishop of Bordeaux, had, at the age of
eighty-three, by the maid of Madame la Presidente Jacquin, a son, a
real child of love, who became a Chevalier of Malta and a counsellor of
state; one of the great men of this century, the Abbe Tabaraud, is the
son of a man of eighty-seven. There is nothing out of the ordinary in
these things. And then, the Bible! Upon that I declare that this little
gentleman is none of mine. Let him be taken care of. It is not his
fault." This manner of procedure was good-tempered. The woman, whose
name was Magnon, sent him another parcel in the following year. It was a
boy again. Thereupon, M. Gillenormand capitulated. He sent the two brats
back to their mother, promising to pay eighty francs a month for their
maintenance, on the condition that the said mother would not do so any
more. He added: "I insist upon it that the mother shall treat them well.
I shall go to see them from time to time." And this he did. He had had
a brother who was a priest, and who had been rector of the Academy of
Poitiers for three and thirty years, and had died at seventy-nine.
"I lost him young," said he. This brother, of whom but little memory
remains, was a peaceable miser, who, being a priest, thought himself
bound to bestow alms on the poor whom he met, but he never gave them
anything except bad or demonetized sous, thereby discovering a means of
going to hell by way of paradise. As for M. Gillenormand the elder, he
never haggled over his alms-giving, but gave gladly and nobly. He was
kindly, abrupt, charitable, and if he had been rich, his turn of mind
would have been magnificent. He desired that all which concerned him
should be done in a grand manner, even his rogueries. One day, having
been cheated by a business man in a matter of inheritance, in a gross
and apparent manner, he uttered this solemn exclamation: "That was
indecently done! I am really ashamed of this pilfering. Everything has
degenerated in this century, even the rascals. Morbleu! this is not the
way to rob a man of my standing. I am robbed as though in a forest, but
badly robbed. Silva, sint consule dignae!" He had had two wives, as
we have already mentioned; by the first he had had a daughter, who had
remained unmarried, and by the second another daughter, who had died
at about the age of thirty, who had wedded, through love, or chance,
or otherwise, a soldier of fortune who had served in the armies of the
Republic and of the Empire, who had won the cross at Austerlitz and had
been made colonel at Waterloo. "He is the disgrace of my family,"
said the old bourgeois. He took an immense amount of snuff, and had a
particularly graceful manner of plucking at his lace ruffle with the
back of one hand. He believed very little in God.




CHAPTER VII--RULE: RECEIVE NO ONE EXCEPT IN THE EVENING

Such was M. Luc-Esprit Gillenormand, who had not lost his hair,--which
was gray rather than white,--and which was always dressed in "dog's
ears." To sum up, he was venerable in spite of all this.

He had something of the eighteenth century about him; frivolous and
great.

In 1814 and during the early years of the Restoration, M. Gillenormand,
who was still young,--he was only seventy-four,--lived in the Faubourg
Saint Germain, Rue Servandoni, near Saint-Sulpice. He had only retired
to the Marais when he quitted society, long after attaining the age of
eighty.

And, on abandoning society, he had immured himself in his habits. The
principal one, and that which was invariable, was to keep his door
absolutely closed during the day, and never to receive any one whatever
except in the evening. He dined at five o'clock, and after that his door
was open. That had been the fashion of his century, and he would not
swerve from it. "The day is vulgar," said he, "and deserves only a
closed shutter. Fashionable people only light up their minds when the
zenith lights up its stars." And he barricaded himself against every
one, even had it been the king himself. This was the antiquated elegance
of his day.




CHAPTER VIII--TWO DO NOT MAKE A PAIR

We have just spoken of M. Gillenormand's two daughters. They had come
into the world ten years apart. In their youth they had borne very
little resemblance to each other, either in character or countenance,
and had also been as little like sisters to each other as possible. The
youngest had a charming soul, which turned towards all that belongs to
the light, was occupied with flowers, with verses, with music, which
fluttered away into glorious space, enthusiastic, ethereal, and was
wedded from her very youth, in ideal, to a vague and heroic figure. The
elder had also her chimera; she espied in the azure some very wealthy
purveyor, a contractor, a splendidly stupid husband, a million made man,
or even a prefect; the receptions of the Prefecture, an usher in the
antechamber with a chain on his neck, official balls, the harangues
of the town-hall, to be "Madame la Prefete,"--all this had created a
whirlwind in her imagination. Thus the two sisters strayed, each in her
own dream, at the epoch when they were young girls. Both had wings, the
one like an angel, the other like a goose.

No ambition is ever fully realized, here below at least. No paradise
becomes terrestrial in our day. The younger wedded the man of her
dreams, but she died. The elder did not marry at all.

At the moment when she makes her entrance into this history which we are
relating, she was an antique virtue, an incombustible prude, with one of
the sharpest noses, and one of the most obtuse minds that it is possible
to see. A characteristic detail; outside of her immediate family, no one
had ever known her first name. She was called Mademoiselle Gillenormand,
the elder.

In the matter of cant, Mademoiselle Gillenormand could have given points
to a miss. Her modesty was carried to the other extreme of blackness.
She cherished a frightful memory of her life; one day, a man had beheld
her garter.

Age had only served to accentuate this pitiless modesty. Her guimpe was
never sufficiently opaque, and never ascended sufficiently high. She
multiplied clasps and pins where no one would have dreamed of looking.
The peculiarity of prudery is to place all the more sentinels in
proportion as the fortress is the less menaced.

Nevertheless, let him who can explain these antique mysteries of
innocence, she allowed an officer of the Lancers, her grand nephew,
named Theodule, to embrace her without displeasure.

In spite of this favored Lancer, the label: Prude, under which we
have classed her, suited her to absolute perfection. Mademoiselle
Gillenormand was a sort of twilight soul. Prudery is a demi-virtue and a
demi-vice.

To prudery she added bigotry, a well-assorted lining. She belonged
to the society of the Virgin, wore a white veil on certain festivals,
mumbled special orisons, revered "the holy blood," venerated "the sacred
heart," remained for hours in contemplation before a rococo-jesuit altar
in a chapel which was inaccessible to the rank and file of the faithful,
and there allowed her soul to soar among little clouds of marble, and
through great rays of gilded wood.

She had a chapel friend, an ancient virgin like herself, named
Mademoiselle Vaubois, who was a positive blockhead, and beside whom
Mademoiselle Gillenormand had the pleasure of being an eagle. Beyond
the Agnus Dei and Ave Maria, Mademoiselle Vaubois had no knowledge of
anything except of the different ways of making preserves. Mademoiselle
Vaubois, perfect in her style, was the ermine of stupidity without a
single spot of intelligence.

Let us say it plainly, Mademoiselle Gillenormand had gained rather than
lost as she grew older. This is the case with passive natures. She had
never been malicious, which is relative kindness; and then, years wear
away the angles, and the softening which comes with time had come to
her. She was melancholy with an obscure sadness of which she did not
herself know the secret. There breathed from her whole person the stupor
of a life that was finished, and which had never had a beginning.

She kept house for her father. M. Gillenormand had his daughter near
him, as we have seen that Monseigneur Bienvenu had his sister with him.
These households comprised of an old man and an old spinster are not
rare, and always have the touching aspect of two weaknesses leaning on
each other for support.

There was also in this house, between this elderly spinster and this
old man, a child, a little boy, who was always trembling and mute in the
presence of M. Gillenormand. M. Gillenormand never addressed this child
except in a severe voice, and sometimes, with uplifted cane: "Here, sir!
rascal, scoundrel, come here!--Answer me, you scamp! Just let me see
you, you good-for-nothing!" etc., etc. He idolized him.

This was his grandson. We shall meet with this child again later on.




BOOK THIRD.--THE GRANDFATHER AND THE GRANDSON




CHAPTER I--AN ANCIENT SALON

When M. Gillenormand lived in the Rue Servandoni, he had frequented
many very good and very aristocratic salons. Although a bourgeois, M.
Gillenormand was received in society. As he had a double measure of wit,
in the first place, that which was born with him, and secondly, that
which was attributed to him, he was even sought out and made much of. He
never went anywhere except on condition of being the chief person there.
There are people who will have influence at any price, and who will have
other people busy themselves over them; when they cannot be oracles,
they turn wags. M. Gillenormand was not of this nature; his domination
in the Royalist salons which he frequented cost his self-respect
nothing. He was an oracle everywhere. It had happened to him to hold his
own against M. de Bonald, and even against M. Bengy-Puy-Vallee.

About 1817, he invariably passed two afternoons a week in a house in
his own neighborhood, in the Rue Ferou, with Madame la Baronne de T.,
a worthy and respectable person, whose husband had been Ambassador of
France to Berlin under Louis XVI. Baron de T., who, during his lifetime,
had gone very passionately into ecstasies and magnetic visions, had died
bankrupt, during the emigration, leaving, as his entire fortune,
some very curious Memoirs about Mesmer and his tub, in ten manuscript
volumes, bound in red morocco and gilded on the edges. Madame de T. had
not published the memoirs, out of pride, and maintained herself on a
meagre income which had survived no one knew how.

Madame de T. lived far from the Court; "a very mixed society," as she
said, in a noble isolation, proud and poor. A few friends assembled
twice a week about her widowed hearth, and these constituted a purely
Royalist salon. They sipped tea there, and uttered groans or cries of
horror at the century, the charter, the Bonapartists, the prostitution
of the blue ribbon, or the Jacobinism of Louis XVIII., according as the
wind veered towards elegy or dithyrambs; and they spoke in low tones of
the hopes which were presented by Monsieur, afterwards Charles X.

The songs of the fishwomen, in which Napoleon was called Nicolas, were
received there with transports of joy. Duchesses, the most delicate and
charming women in the world, went into ecstasies over couplets like the
following, addressed to "the federates":--

               Refoncez dans vos culottes[20]
               Le bout d' chemis' qui vous pend.
               Qu'on n' dis' pas qu' les patriotes
               Ont arbore l' drapeau blanc?

There they amused themselves with puns which were considered terrible,
with innocent plays upon words which they supposed to be venomous, with
quatrains, with distiches even; thus, upon the Dessolles ministry, a
moderate cabinet, of which MM. Decazes and Deserre were members:--

          Pour raffermir le trone ebranle sur sa base,[21]
          Il faut changer de sol, et de serre et de case.

Or they drew up a list of the chamber of peers, "an abominably Jacobin
chamber," and from this list they combined alliances of names, in such
a manner as to form, for example, phrases like the following: Damas.
Sabran. Gouvion-Saint-Cyr.--All this was done merrily. In that society,
they parodied the Revolution. They used I know not what desires to give
point to the same wrath in inverse sense. They sang their little Ca
ira:--

               Ah! ca ira ca ira ca ira!
               Les Bonapartistes a la lanterne!

Songs are like the guillotine; they chop away indifferently, to-day this
head, to-morrow that. It is only a variation.

In the Fualdes affair, which belongs to this epoch, 1816, they took
part for Bastide and Jausion, because Fualdes was "a Buonapartist." They
designated the liberals as friends and brothers; this constituted the
most deadly insult.

Like certain church towers, Madame de T.'s salon had two cocks. One of
them was M. Gillenormand, the other was Comte de Lamothe-Valois, of whom
it was whispered about, with a sort of respect: "Do you know? That is
the Lamothe of the affair of the necklace." These singular amnesties do
occur in parties.

Let us add the following: in the bourgeoisie, honored situations decay
through too easy relations; one must beware whom one admits; in the same
way that there is a loss of caloric in the vicinity of those who are
cold, there is a diminution of consideration in the approach of despised
persons. The ancient society of the upper classes held themselves above
this law, as above every other. Marigny, the brother of the Pompadour,
had his entry with M. le Prince de Soubise. In spite of? No, because. Du
Barry, the god-father of the Vaubernier, was very welcome at the house
of M. le Marechal de Richelieu. This society is Olympus. Mercury and
the Prince de Guemenee are at home there. A thief is admitted there,
provided he be a god.

The Comte de Lamothe, who, in 1815, was an old man seventy-five years of
age, had nothing remarkable about him except his silent and sententious
air, his cold and angular face, his perfectly polished manners, his coat
buttoned up to his cravat, and his long legs always crossed in long,
flabby trousers of the hue of burnt sienna. His face was the same color
as his trousers.

This M. de Lamothe was "held in consideration" in this salon on account
of his "celebrity" and, strange to say, though true, because of his name
of Valois.

As for M. Gillenormand, his consideration was of absolutely first-rate
quality. He had, in spite of his levity, and without its interfering in
any way with his dignity, a certain manner about him which was imposing,
dignified, honest, and lofty, in a bourgeois fashion; and his great
age added to it. One is not a century with impunity. The years finally
produce around a head a venerable dishevelment.

In addition to this, he said things which had the genuine sparkle of the
old rock. Thus, when the King of Prussia, after having restored Louis
XVIII., came to pay the latter a visit under the name of the Count de
Ruppin, he was received by the descendant of Louis XIV. somewhat
as though he had been the Marquis de Brandebourg, and with the most
delicate impertinence. M. Gillenormand approved: "All kings who are
not the King of France," said he, "are provincial kings." One day, the
following question was put and the following answer returned in his
presence: "To what was the editor of the Courrier Francais condemned?"
"To be suspended." "Sus is superfluous," observed M. Gillenormand.[22]
Remarks of this nature found a situation.

At the Te Deum on the anniversary of the return of the Bourbons, he
said, on seeing M. de Talleyrand pass by: "There goes his Excellency the
Evil One."

M. Gillenormand was always accompanied by his daughter, that tall
mademoiselle, who was over forty and looked fifty, and by a handsome
little boy of seven years, white, rosy, fresh, with happy and trusting
eyes, who never appeared in that salon without hearing voices murmur
around him: "How handsome he is! What a pity! Poor child!" This child
was the one of whom we dropped a word a while ago. He was called "poor
child," because he had for a father "a brigand of the Loire."

This brigand of the Loire was M. Gillenormand's son-in-law, who has
already been mentioned, and whom M. Gillenormand called "the disgrace of
his family."




CHAPTER II--ONE OF THE RED SPECTRES OF THAT EPOCH

Any one who had chanced to pass through the little town of Vernon at
this epoch, and who had happened to walk across that fine monumental
bridge, which will soon be succeeded, let us hope, by some hideous iron
cable bridge, might have observed, had he dropped his eyes over the
parapet, a man about fifty years of age wearing a leather cap, and
trousers and a waistcoat of coarse gray cloth, to which something yellow
which had been a red ribbon, was sewn, shod with wooden sabots, tanned
by the sun, his face nearly black and his hair nearly white, a large
scar on his forehead which ran down upon his cheek, bowed, bent,
prematurely aged, who walked nearly every day, hoe and sickle in hand,
in one of those compartments surrounded by walls which abut on the
bridge, and border the left bank of the Seine like a chain of terraces,
charming enclosures full of flowers of which one could say, were they
much larger: "these are gardens," and were they a little smaller: "these
are bouquets." All these enclosures abut upon the river at one end, and
on a house at the other. The man in the waistcoat and the wooden shoes
of whom we have just spoken, inhabited the smallest of these enclosures
and the most humble of these houses about 1817. He lived there alone and
solitary, silently and poorly, with a woman who was neither young nor
old, neither homely nor pretty, neither a peasant nor a bourgeoise, who
served him. The plot of earth which he called his garden was celebrated
in the town for the beauty of the flowers which he cultivated there.
These flowers were his occupation.

By dint of labor, of perseverance, of attention, and of buckets of
water, he had succeeded in creating after the Creator, and he had
invented certain tulips and certain dahlias which seemed to have been
forgotten by nature. He was ingenious; he had forestalled Soulange
Bodin in the formation of little clumps of earth of heath mould, for the
cultivation of rare and precious shrubs from America and China. He
was in his alleys from the break of day, in summer, planting, cutting,
hoeing, watering, walking amid his flowers with an air of kindness,
sadness, and sweetness, sometimes standing motionless and thoughtful
for hours, listening to the song of a bird in the trees, the babble of a
child in a house, or with his eyes fixed on a drop of dew at the tip of
a spear of grass, of which the sun made a carbuncle. His table was very
plain, and he drank more milk than wine. A child could make him give
way, and his servant scolded him. He was so timid that he seemed shy, he
rarely went out, and he saw no one but the poor people who tapped at his
pane and his cure, the Abbe Mabeuf, a good old man. Nevertheless, if the
inhabitants of the town, or strangers, or any chance comers, curious to
see his tulips, rang at his little cottage, he opened his door with a
smile. He was the "brigand of the Loire."

Any one who had, at the same time, read military memoirs, biographies,
the Moniteur, and the bulletins of the grand army, would have been
struck by a name which occurs there with tolerable frequency, the name
of Georges Pontmercy. When very young, this Georges Pontmercy had been
a soldier in Saintonge's regiment. The revolution broke out. Saintonge's
regiment formed a part of the army of the Rhine; for the old regiments
of the monarchy preserved their names of provinces even after the fall
of the monarchy, and were only divided into brigades in 1794. Pontmercy
fought at Spire, at Worms, at Neustadt, at Turkheim, at Alzey, at
Mayence, where he was one of the two hundred who formed Houchard's
rearguard. It was the twelfth to hold its ground against the corps
of the Prince of Hesse, behind the old rampart of Andernach, and only
rejoined the main body of the army when the enemy's cannon had opened
a breach from the cord of the parapet to the foot of the glacis. He was
under Kleber at Marchiennes and at the battle of Mont-Palissel, where
a ball from a biscaien broke his arm. Then he passed to the frontier
of Italy, and was one of the thirty grenadiers who defended the Col
de Tende with Joubert. Joubert was appointed its adjutant-general, and
Pontmercy sub-lieutenant. Pontmercy was by Berthier's side in the midst
of the grape-shot of that day at Lodi which caused Bonaparte to say:
"Berthier has been cannoneer, cavalier, and grenadier." He beheld his
old general, Joubert, fall at Novi, at the moment when, with uplifted
sabre, he was shouting: "Forward!" Having been embarked with his
company in the exigencies of the campaign, on board a pinnace which was
proceeding from Genoa to some obscure port on the coast, he fell into
a wasps'-nest of seven or eight English vessels. The Genoese commander
wanted to throw his cannon into the sea, to hide the soldiers between
decks, and to slip along in the dark as a merchant vessel. Pontmercy had
the colors hoisted to the peak, and sailed proudly past under the guns
of the British frigates. Twenty leagues further on, his audacity having
increased, he attacked with his pinnace, and captured a large English
transport which was carrying troops to Sicily, and which was so loaded
down with men and horses that the vessel was sunk to the level of the
sea. In 1805 he was in that Malher division which took Gunzberg from the
Archduke Ferdinand. At Weltingen he received into his arms, beneath a
storm of bullets, Colonel Maupetit, mortally wounded at the head of the
9th Dragoons. He distinguished himself at Austerlitz in that admirable
march in echelons effected under the enemy's fire. When the cavalry of
the Imperial Russian Guard crushed a battalion of the 4th of the line,
Pontmercy was one of those who took their revenge and overthrew the
Guard. The Emperor gave him the cross. Pontmercy saw Wurmser at Mantua,
Melas, and Alexandria, Mack at Ulm, made prisoners in succession.
He formed a part of the eighth corps of the grand army which Mortier
commanded, and which captured Hamburg. Then he was transferred to the
55th of the line, which was the old regiment of Flanders. At Eylau
he was in the cemetery where, for the space of two hours, the heroic
Captain Louis Hugo, the uncle of the author of this book, sustained
alone with his company of eighty-three men every effort of the hostile
army. Pontmercy was one of the three who emerged alive from that
cemetery. He was at Friedland. Then he saw Moscow. Then La Beresina,
then Lutzen, Bautzen, Dresden, Wachau, Leipzig, and the defiles of
Gelenhausen; then Montmirail, Chateau-Thierry, Craon, the banks of the
Marne, the banks of the Aisne, and the redoubtable position of Laon. At
Arnay-Le-Duc, being then a captain, he put ten Cossacks to the sword,
and saved, not his general, but his corporal. He was well slashed up on
this occasion, and twenty-seven splinters were extracted from his left
arm alone. Eight days before the capitulation of Paris he had just
exchanged with a comrade and entered the cavalry. He had what was called
under the old regime, the double hand, that is to say, an equal aptitude
for handling the sabre or the musket as a soldier, or a squadron or
a battalion as an officer. It is from this aptitude, perfected by a
military education, which certain special branches of the service arise,
the dragoons, for example, who are both cavalry-men and infantry at one
and the same time. He accompanied Napoleon to the Island of Elba. At
Waterloo, he was chief of a squadron of cuirassiers, in Dubois' brigade.
It was he who captured the standard of the Lunenburg battalion. He came
and cast the flag at the Emperor's feet. He was covered with blood.
While tearing down the banner he had received a sword-cut across his
face. The Emperor, greatly pleased, shouted to him: "You are a colonel,
you are a baron, you are an officer of the Legion of Honor!" Pontmercy
replied: "Sire, I thank you for my widow." An hour later, he fell in the
ravine of Ohain. Now, who was this Georges Pontmercy? He was this same
"brigand of the Loire."

We have already seen something of his history. After Waterloo,
Pontmercy, who had been pulled out of the hollow road of Ohain, as it
will be remembered, had succeeded in joining the army, and had dragged
himself from ambulance to ambulance as far as the cantonments of the
Loire.

The Restoration had placed him on half-pay, then had sent him into
residence, that is to say, under surveillance, at Vernon. King Louis
XVIII., regarding all that which had taken place during the Hundred
Days as not having occurred at all, did not recognize his quality as an
officer of the Legion of Honor, nor his grade of colonel, nor his title
of baron. He, on his side, neglected no occasion of signing himself
"Colonel Baron Pontmercy." He had only an old blue coat, and he never
went out without fastening to it his rosette as an officer of the Legion
of Honor. The Attorney for the Crown had him warned that the authorities
would prosecute him for "illegal" wearing of this decoration. When this
notice was conveyed to him through an officious intermediary, Pontmercy
retorted with a bitter smile: "I do not know whether I no longer
understand French, or whether you no longer speak it; but the fact is
that I do not understand." Then he went out for eight successive days
with his rosette. They dared not interfere with him. Two or three times
the Minister of War and the general in command of the department wrote
to him with the following address: "A Monsieur le Commandant Pontmercy."
He sent back the letters with the seals unbroken. At the same moment,
Napoleon at Saint Helena was treating in the same fashion the missives
of Sir Hudson Lowe addressed to General Bonaparte. Pontmercy had ended,
may we be pardoned the expression, by having in his mouth the same
saliva as his Emperor.

In the same way, there were at Rome Carthaginian prisoners who refused
to salute Flaminius, and who had a little of Hannibal's spirit.

One day he encountered the district-attorney in one of the streets of
Vernon, stepped up to him, and said: "Mr. Crown Attorney, am I permitted
to wear my scar?"

He had nothing save his meagre half-pay as chief of squadron. He had
hired the smallest house which he could find at Vernon. He lived there
alone, we have just seen how. Under the Empire, between two wars, he
had found time to marry Mademoiselle Gillenormand. The old bourgeois,
thoroughly indignant at bottom, had given his consent with a sigh,
saying: "The greatest families are forced into it." In 1815, Madame
Pontmercy, an admirable woman in every sense, by the way, lofty in
sentiment and rare, and worthy of her husband, died, leaving a
child. This child had been the colonel's joy in his solitude; but the
grandfather had imperatively claimed his grandson, declaring that if
the child were not given to him he would disinherit him. The father had
yielded in the little one's interest, and had transferred his love to
flowers.

Moreover, he had renounced everything, and neither stirred up mischief
nor conspired. He shared his thoughts between the innocent things which
he was then doing and the great things which he had done. He passed his
time in expecting a pink or in recalling Austerlitz.

M. Gillenormand kept up no relations with his son-in-law. The colonel
was "a bandit" to him. M. Gillenormand never mentioned the colonel,
except when he occasionally made mocking allusions to "his Baronship."
It had been expressly agreed that Pontmercy should never attempt to see
his son nor to speak to him, under penalty of having the latter handed
over to him disowned and disinherited. For the Gillenormands, Pontmercy
was a man afflicted with the plague. They intended to bring up the
child in their own way. Perhaps the colonel was wrong to accept these
conditions, but he submitted to them, thinking that he was doing right
and sacrificing no one but himself.

The inheritance of Father Gillenormand did not amount to much; but the
inheritance of Mademoiselle Gillenormand the elder was considerable.
This aunt, who had remained unmarried, was very rich on the maternal
side, and her sister's son was her natural heir. The boy, whose name was
Marius, knew that he had a father, but nothing more. No one opened
his mouth to him about it. Nevertheless, in the society into which his
grandfather took him, whispers, innuendoes, and winks, had eventually
enlightened the little boy's mind; he had finally understood something
of the case, and as he naturally took in the ideas and opinions which
were, so to speak, the air he breathed, by a sort of infiltration and
slow penetration, he gradually came to think of his father only with
shame and with a pain at his heart.

While he was growing up in this fashion, the colonel slipped away every
two or three months, came to Paris on the sly, like a criminal breaking
his ban, and went and posted himself at Saint-Sulpice, at the hour when
Aunt Gillenormand led Marius to the mass. There, trembling lest the aunt
should turn round, concealed behind a pillar, motionless, not daring to
breathe, he gazed at his child. The scarred veteran was afraid of that
old spinster.

From this had arisen his connection with the cure of Vernon, M. l'Abbe
Mabeuf.

That worthy priest was the brother of a warden of Saint-Sulpice, who had
often observed this man gazing at his child, and the scar on his cheek,
and the large tears in his eyes. That man, who had so manly an air, yet
who was weeping like a woman, had struck the warden. That face had clung
to his mind. One day, having gone to Vernon to see his brother, he had
encountered Colonel Pontmercy on the bridge, and had recognized the man
of Saint-Sulpice. The warden had mentioned the circumstance to the cure,
and both had paid the colonel a visit, on some pretext or other. This
visit led to others. The colonel, who had been extremely reserved at
first, ended by opening his heart, and the cure and the warden finally
came to know the whole history, and how Pontmercy was sacrificing his
happiness to his child's future. This caused the cure to regard him with
veneration and tenderness, and the colonel, on his side, became fond
of the cure. And moreover, when both are sincere and good, no men so
penetrate each other, and so amalgamate with each other, as an old
priest and an old soldier. At bottom, the man is the same. The one has
devoted his life to his country here below, the other to his country on
high; that is the only difference.

Twice a year, on the first of January and on St. George's day, Marius
wrote duty letters to his father, which were dictated by his aunt, and
which one would have pronounced to be copied from some formula; this was
all that M. Gillenormand tolerated; and the father answered them with
very tender letters which the grandfather thrust into his pocket unread.




CHAPTER III--REQUIESCANT

Madame de T.'s salon was all that Marius Pontmercy knew of the world. It
was the only opening through which he could get a glimpse of life. This
opening was sombre, and more cold than warmth, more night than day, came
to him through this skylight. This child, who had been all joy and light
on entering this strange world, soon became melancholy, and, what is
still more contrary to his age, grave. Surrounded by all those singular
and imposing personages, he gazed about him with serious amazement.
Everything conspired to increase this astonishment in him. There were
in Madame de T.'s salon some very noble ladies named Mathan, Noe,
Levis,--which was pronounced Levi,--Cambis, pronounced Cambyse. These
antique visages and these Biblical names mingled in the child's mind
with the Old Testament which he was learning by heart, and when they
were all there, seated in a circle around a dying fire, sparely lighted
by a lamp shaded with green, with their severe profiles, their gray or
white hair, their long gowns of another age, whose lugubrious colors
could not be distinguished, dropping, at rare intervals, words which
were both majestic and severe, little Marius stared at them with
frightened eyes, in the conviction that he beheld not women, but
patriarchs and magi, not real beings, but phantoms.

With these phantoms, priests were sometimes mingled, frequenters of
this ancient salon, and some gentlemen; the Marquis de Sass****, private
secretary to Madame de Berry, the Vicomte de Val***, who published,
under the pseudonyme of Charles-Antoine, monorhymed odes, the Prince de
Beauff*******, who, though very young, had a gray head and a pretty and
witty wife, whose very low-necked toilettes of scarlet velvet with gold
torsades alarmed these shadows, the Marquis de C*****d'E******, the man
in all France who best understood "proportioned politeness," the Comte
d'Am*****, the kindly man with the amiable chin, and the Chevalier de
Port-de-Guy, a pillar of the library of the Louvre, called the King's
cabinet, M. de Port-de-Guy, bald, and rather aged than old, was wont
to relate that in 1793, at the age of sixteen, he had been put in the
galleys as refractory and chained with an octogenarian, the Bishop
of Mirepoix, also refractory, but as a priest, while he was so in the
capacity of a soldier. This was at Toulon. Their business was to go at
night and gather up on the scaffold the heads and bodies of the persons
who had been guillotined during the day; they bore away on their backs
these dripping corpses, and their red galley-slave blouses had a clot of
blood at the back of the neck, which was dry in the morning and wet at
night. These tragic tales abounded in Madame de T.'s salon, and by
dint of cursing Marat, they applauded Trestaillon. Some deputies of the
undiscoverable variety played their whist there; M. Thibord du Chalard,
M. Lemarchant de Gomicourt, and the celebrated scoffer of the right, M.
Cornet-Dincourt. The bailiff de Ferrette, with his short breeches
and his thin legs, sometimes traversed this salon on his way to M. de
Talleyrand. He had been M. le Comte d'Artois' companion in pleasures and
unlike Aristotle crouching under Campaspe, he had made the Guimard crawl
on all fours, and in that way he had exhibited to the ages a philosopher
avenged by a bailiff. As for the priests, there was the Abbe Halma, the
same to whom M. Larose, his collaborator on la Foudre, said: "Bah! Who
is there who is not fifty years old? a few greenhorns perhaps?" The Abbe
Letourneur, preacher to the King, the Abbe Frayssinous, who was not, as
yet, either count, or bishop, or minister, or peer, and who wore an old
cassock whose buttons were missing, and the Abbe Keravenant, Cure of
Saint-Germain-des-Pres; also the Pope's Nuncio, then Monsignor Macchi,
Archbishop of Nisibi, later on Cardinal, remarkable for his long,
pensive nose, and another Monsignor, entitled thus: Abbate Palmieri,
domestic prelate, one of the seven participant prothonotaries of the
Holy See, Canon of the illustrious Liberian basilica, Advocate of the
saints, Postulatore dei Santi, which refers to matters of canonization,
and signifies very nearly: Master of Requests of the section of
Paradise. Lastly, two cardinals, M. de la Luzerne, and M. de Cl******
T*******. The Cardinal of Luzerne was a writer and was destined to have,
a few years later, the honor of signing in the Conservateur articles
side by side with Chateaubriand; M. de Cl****** T******* was Archbishop
of Toul****, and often made trips to Paris, to his nephew, the Marquis
de T*******, who was Minister of Marine and War. The Cardinal of
Cl****** T******* was a merry little man, who displayed his red
stockings beneath his tucked-up cassock; his specialty was a hatred of
the Encyclopaedia, and his desperate play at billiards, and persons who,
at that epoch, passed through the Rue M***** on summer evenings, where
the hotel de Cl****** T******* then stood, halted to listen to the shock
of the balls and the piercing voice of the Cardinal shouting to his
conclavist, Monseigneur Cotiret, Bishop in partibus of Caryste: "Mark,
Abbe, I make a cannon." The Cardinal de Cl****** T******* had been
brought to Madame de T.'s by his most intimate friend, M. de Roquelaure,
former Bishop of Senlis, and one of the Forty. M. de Roquelaure was
notable for his lofty figure and his assiduity at the Academy; through
the glass door of the neighboring hall of the library where the French
Academy then held its meetings, the curious could, on every Tuesday,
contemplate the Ex-Bishop of Senlis, usually standing erect, freshly
powdered, in violet hose, with his back turned to the door, apparently
for the purpose of allowing a better view of his little collar. All
these ecclesiastics, though for the most part as much courtiers as
churchmen, added to the gravity of the T. salon, whose seigniorial
aspect was accentuated by five peers of France, the Marquis de Vib****,
the Marquis de Tal***, the Marquis de Herb*******, the Vicomte Damb***,
and the Duc de Val********. This Duc de Val********, although Prince de
Mon***, that is to say a reigning prince abroad, had so high an idea of
France and its peerage, that he viewed everything through their medium.
It was he who said: "The Cardinals are the peers of France of Rome;
the lords are the peers of France of England." Moreover, as it is
indispensable that the Revolution should be everywhere in this century,
this feudal salon was, as we have said, dominated by a bourgeois. M.
Gillenormand reigned there.

There lay the essence and quintessence of the Parisian white society.
There reputations, even Royalist reputations, were held in quarantine.
There is always a trace of anarchy in renown. Chateaubriand, had he
entered there, would have produced the effect of Pere Duchene. Some of
the scoffed-at did, nevertheless, penetrate thither on sufferance. Comte
Beug*** was received there, subject to correction.

The "noble" salons of the present day no longer resemble those salons.
The Faubourg Saint-Germain reeks of the fagot even now. The Royalists of
to-day are demagogues, let us record it to their credit.

At Madame de T.'s the society was superior, taste was exquisite and
haughty, under the cover of a great show of politeness. Manners there
admitted of all sorts of involuntary refinements which were the old
regime itself, buried but still alive. Some of these habits, especially
in the matter of language, seem eccentric. Persons but superficially
acquainted with them would have taken for provincial that which was only
antique. A woman was called Madame la Generale. Madame la Colonelle was
not entirely disused. The charming Madame de Leon, in memory, no
doubt, of the Duchesses de Longueville and de Chevreuse, preferred this
appellation to her title of Princesse. The Marquise de Crequy was also
called Madame la Colonelle.

It was this little high society which invented at the Tuileries the
refinement of speaking to the King in private as the King, in the third
person, and never as Your Majesty, the designation of Your Majesty
having been "soiled by the usurper."

Men and deeds were brought to judgment there. They jeered at the age,
which released them from the necessity of understanding it. They abetted
each other in amazement. They communicated to each other that modicum
of light which they possessed. Methuselah bestowed information on
Epimenides. The deaf man made the blind man acquainted with the course
of things. They declared that the time which had elasped since Coblentz
had not existed. In the same manner that Louis XVIII. was by the grace
of God, in the five and twentieth year of his reign, the emigrants were,
by rights, in the five and twentieth year of their adolescence.

All was harmonious; nothing was too much alive; speech hardly amounted
to a breath; the newspapers, agreeing with the salons, seemed a papyrus.
There were some young people, but they were rather dead. The liveries in
the antechamber were antiquated. These utterly obsolete personages were
served by domestics of the same stamp.

They all had the air of having lived a long time ago, and of obstinately
resisting the sepulchre. Nearly the whole dictionary consisted of
Conserver, Conservation, Conservateur; to be in good odor,--that was the
point. There are, in fact, aromatics in the opinions of these venerable
groups, and their ideas smelled of it. It was a mummified society. The
masters were embalmed, the servants were stuffed with straw.

A worthy old marquise, an emigree and ruined, who had but a solitary
maid, continued to say: "My people."

What did they do in Madame de T.'s salon? They were ultra.

To be ultra; this word, although what it represents may not have
disappeared, has no longer any meaning at the present day. Let us
explain it.

To be ultra is to go beyond. It is to attack the sceptre in the name of
the throne, and the mitre in the name of the attar; it is to ill-treat
the thing which one is dragging, it is to kick over the traces; it is
to cavil at the fagot on the score of the amount of cooking received by
heretics; it is to reproach the idol with its small amount of idolatry;
it is to insult through excess of respect; it is to discover that the
Pope is not sufficiently papish, that the King is not sufficiently
royal, and that the night has too much light; it is to be discontented
with alabaster, with snow, with the swan and the lily in the name of
whiteness; it is to be a partisan of things to the point of becoming
their enemy; it is to be so strongly for, as to be against.

The ultra spirit especially characterizes the first phase of the
Restoration.

Nothing in history resembles that quarter of an hour which begins in
1814 and terminates about 1820, with the advent of M. de Villele,
the practical man of the Right. These six years were an extraordinary
moment; at one and the same time brilliant and gloomy, smiling and
sombre, illuminated as by the radiance of dawn and entirely covered, at
the same time, with the shadows of the great catastrophes which still
filled the horizon and were slowly sinking into the past. There existed
in that light and that shadow, a complete little new and old world,
comic and sad, juvenile and senile, which was rubbing its eyes; nothing
resembles an awakening like a return; a group which regarded France
with ill-temper, and which France regarded with irony; good old owls
of marquises by the streetful, who had returned, and of ghosts, the
"former" subjects of amazement at everything, brave and noble gentlemen
who smiled at being in France but wept also, delighted to behold
their country once more, in despair at not finding their monarchy; the
nobility of the Crusades treating the nobility of the Empire, that is to
say, the nobility of the sword, with scorn; historic races who had
lost the sense of history; the sons of the companions of Charlemagne
disdaining the companions of Napoleon. The swords, as we have just
remarked, returned the insult; the sword of Fontenoy was laughable and
nothing but a scrap of rusty iron; the sword of Marengo was odious and
was only a sabre. Former days did not recognize Yesterday. People no
longer had the feeling for what was grand. There was some one who called
Bonaparte Scapin. This Society no longer exists. Nothing of it, we
repeat, exists to-day. When we select from it some one figure at random,
and attempt to make it live again in thought, it seems as strange to us
as the world before the Deluge. It is because it, too, as a matter of
fact, has been engulfed in a deluge. It has disappeared beneath two
Revolutions. What billows are ideas! How quickly they cover all that it
is their mission to destroy and to bury, and how promptly they create
frightful gulfs!

Such was the physiognomy of the salons of those distant and candid times
when M. Martainville had more wit than Voltaire.

These salons had a literature and politics of their own. They believed
in Fievee. M. Agier laid down the law in them. They commentated M.
Colnet, the old bookseller and publicist of the Quay Malaquais. Napoleon
was to them thoroughly the Corsican Ogre. Later on the introduction into
history of M. le Marquis de Bonaparte, Lieutenant-General of the King's
armies, was a concession to the spirit of the age.

These salons did not long preserve their purity. Beginning with 1818,
doctrinarians began to spring up in them, a disturbing shade. Their way
was to be Royalists and to excuse themselves for being so. Where the
ultras were very proud, the doctrinarians were rather ashamed. They had
wit; they had silence; their political dogma was suitably impregnated
with arrogance; they should have succeeded. They indulged, and usefully
too, in excesses in the matter of white neckties and tightly buttoned
coats. The mistake or the misfortune of the doctrinarian party was to
create aged youth. They assumed the poses of wise men. They dreamed of
engrafting a temperate power on the absolute and excessive principle.
They opposed, and sometimes with rare intelligence, conservative
liberalism to the liberalism which demolishes. They were heard to say:
"Thanks for Royalism! It has rendered more than one service. It has
brought back tradition, worship, religion, respect. It is faithful,
brave, chivalric, loving, devoted. It has mingled, though with regret,
the secular grandeurs of the monarchy with the new grandeurs of the
nation. Its mistake is not to understand the Revolution, the Empire,
glory, liberty, young ideas, young generations, the age. But this
mistake which it makes with regard to us,--have we not sometimes been
guilty of it towards them? The Revolution, whose heirs we are, ought to
be intelligent on all points. To attack Royalism is a misconstruction of
liberalism. What an error! And what blindness! Revolutionary France is
wanting in respect towards historic France, that is to say, towards its
mother, that is to say, towards itself. After the 5th of September, the
nobility of the monarchy is treated as the nobility of the Empire was
treated after the 5th of July. They were unjust to the eagle, we are
unjust to the fleur-de-lys. It seems that we must always have something
to proscribe! Does it serve any purpose to ungild the crown of Louis
XIV., to scrape the coat of arms of Henry IV.? We scoff at M. de
Vaublanc for erasing the N's from the bridge of Jena! What was it that
he did? What are we doing? Bouvines belongs to us as well as Marengo.
The fleurs-de-lys are ours as well as the N's. That is our patrimony. To
what purpose shall we diminish it? We must not deny our country in the
past any more than in the present. Why not accept the whole of history?
Why not love the whole of France?"

It is thus that doctrinarians criticised and protected Royalism, which
was displeased at criticism and furious at protection.

The ultras marked the first epoch of Royalism, congregation
characterized the second. Skill follows ardor. Let us confine ourselves
here to this sketch.

In the course of this narrative, the author of this book has encountered
in his path this curious moment of contemporary history; he has been
forced to cast a passing glance upon it, and to trace once more some of
the singular features of this society which is unknown to-day. But he
does it rapidly and without any bitter or derisive idea. Souvenirs both
respectful and affectionate, for they touch his mother, attach him to
this past. Moreover, let us remark, this same petty world had a grandeur
of its own. One may smile at it, but one can neither despise nor hate
it. It was the France of former days.

Marius Pontmercy pursued some studies, as all children do. When he
emerged from the hands of Aunt Gillenormand, his grandfather confided
him to a worthy professor of the most purely classic innocence. This
young soul which was expanding passed from a prude to a vulgar pedant.

Marius went through his years of college, then he entered the law
school. He was a Royalist, fanatical and severe. He did not love his
grandfather much, as the latter's gayety and cynicism repelled him, and
his feelings towards his father were gloomy.

He was, on the whole, a cold and ardent, noble, generous, proud,
religious, enthusiastic lad; dignified to harshness, pure to shyness.




CHAPTER IV--END OF THE BRIGAND

The conclusion of Marius' classical studies coincided with M.
Gillenormand's departure from society. The old man bade farewell to
the Faubourg Saint-Germain and to Madame de T.'s salon, and established
himself in the Mardis, in his house of the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire.
There he had for servants, in addition to the porter, that chambermaid,
Nicolette, who had succeeded to Magnon, and that short-breathed and
pursy Basque, who have been mentioned above.

In 1827, Marius had just attained his seventeenth year. One evening, on
his return home, he saw his grandfather holding a letter in his hand.

"Marius," said M. Gillenormand, "you will set out for Vernon to-morrow."

"Why?" said Marius.

"To see your father."

Marius was seized with a trembling fit. He had thought of everything
except this--that he should one day be called upon to see his father.
Nothing could be more unexpected, more surprising, and, let us admit
it, more disagreeable to him. It was forcing estrangement into
reconciliation. It was not an affliction, but it was an unpleasant duty.

Marius, in addition to his motives of political antipathy, was convinced
that his father, the slasher, as M. Gillenormand called him on his
amiable days, did not love him; this was evident, since he had abandoned
him to others. Feeling that he was not beloved, he did not love.
"Nothing is more simple," he said to himself.

He was so astounded that he did not question M. Gillenormand. The
grandfather resumed:--

"It appears that he is ill. He demands your presence."

And after a pause, he added:--

"Set out to-morrow morning. I think there is a coach which leaves the
Cour des Fontaines at six o'clock, and which arrives in the evening.
Take it. He says that here is haste."

Then he crushed the letter in his hand and thrust it into his pocket.
Marius might have set out that very evening and have been with his
father on the following morning. A diligence from the Rue du Bouloi
took the trip to Rouen by night at that date, and passed through Vernon.
Neither Marius nor M. Gillenormand thought of making inquiries about it.

The next day, at twilight, Marius reached Vernon. People were just
beginning to light their candles. He asked the first person whom he
met for "M. Pontmercy's house." For in his own mind, he agreed with the
Restoration, and like it, did not recognize his father's claim to the
title of either colonel or baron.

The house was pointed out to him. He rang; a woman with a little lamp in
her hand opened the door.

"M. Pontmercy?" said Marius.

The woman remained motionless.

"Is this his house?" demanded Marius.

The woman nodded affirmatively.

"Can I speak with him?"

The woman shook her head.

"But I am his son!" persisted Marius. "He is expecting me."

"He no longer expects you," said the woman.

Then he perceived that she was weeping.

She pointed to the door of a room on the ground-floor; he entered.

In that room, which was lighted by a tallow candle standing on the
chimney-piece, there were three men, one standing erect, another
kneeling, and one lying at full length, on the floor in his shirt. The
one on the floor was the colonel.

The other two were the doctor, and the priest, who was engaged in
prayer.

The colonel had been attacked by brain fever three days previously. As
he had a foreboding of evil at the very beginning of his illness, he
had written to M. Gillenormand to demand his son. The malady had grown
worse. On the very evening of Marius' arrival at Vernon, the colonel had
had an attack of delirium; he had risen from his bed, in spite of the
servant's efforts to prevent him, crying: "My son is not coming! I shall
go to meet him!" Then he ran out of his room and fell prostrate on the
floor of the antechamber. He had just expired.

The doctor had been summoned, and the cure. The doctor had arrived too
late. The son had also arrived too late.

By the dim light of the candle, a large tear could be distinguished on
the pale and prostrate colonel's cheek, where it had trickled from his
dead eye. The eye was extinguished, but the tear was not yet dry. That
tear was his son's delay.

Marius gazed upon that man whom he beheld for the first time, on that
venerable and manly face, on those open eyes which saw not, on those
white locks, those robust limbs, on which, here and there, brown
lines, marking sword-thrusts, and a sort of red stars, which indicated
bullet-holes, were visible. He contemplated that gigantic sear which
stamped heroism on that countenance upon which God had imprinted
goodness. He reflected that this man was his father, and that this man
was dead, and a chill ran over him.

The sorrow which he felt was the sorrow which he would have felt in the
presence of any other man whom he had chanced to behold stretched out in
death.

Anguish, poignant anguish, was in that chamber. The servant-woman was
lamenting in a corner, the cure was praying, and his sobs were audible,
the doctor was wiping his eyes; the corpse itself was weeping.

The doctor, the priest, and the woman gazed at Marius in the midst of
their affliction without uttering a word; he was the stranger there.
Marius, who was far too little affected, felt ashamed and embarrassed at
his own attitude; he held his hat in his hand; and he dropped it on the
floor, in order to produce the impression that grief had deprived him of
the strength to hold it.

At the same time, he experienced remorse, and he despised himself for
behaving in this manner. But was it his fault? He did not love his
father? Why should he!

The colonel had left nothing. The sale of big furniture barely paid the
expenses of his burial.

The servant found a scrap of paper, which she handed to Marius. It
contained the following, in the colonel's handwriting:--

"For my son.--The Emperor made me a Baron on the battle-field of
Waterloo. Since the Restoration disputes my right to this title which I
purchased with my blood, my son shall take it and bear it. That he will
be worthy of it is a matter of course." Below, the colonel had added:
"At that same battle of Waterloo, a sergeant saved my life. The man's
name was Thenardier. I think that he has recently been keeping a
little inn, in a village in the neighborhood of Paris, at Chelles or
Montfermeil. If my son meets him, he will do all the good he can to
Thenardier."

Marius took this paper and preserved it, not out of duty to his father,
but because of that vague respect for death which is always imperious in
the heart of man.

Nothing remained of the colonel. M. Gillenormand had his sword and
uniform sold to an old-clothes dealer. The neighbors devastated the
garden and pillaged the rare flowers. The other plants turned to nettles
and weeds, and died.

Marius remained only forty-eight hours at Vernon. After the interment he
returned to Paris, and applied himself again to his law studies, with
no more thought of his father than if the latter had never lived. In two
days the colonel was buried, and in three forgotten.

Marius wore crape on his hat. That was all.




CHAPTER V--THE UTILITY OF GOING TO MASS, IN ORDER TO BECOME A
REVOLUTIONIST

Marius had preserved the religious habits of his childhood. One Sunday,
when he went to hear mass at Saint-Sulpice, at that same chapel of the
Virgin whither his aunt had led him when a small lad, he placed himself
behind a pillar, being more absent-minded and thoughtful than usual on
that occasion, and knelt down, without paying any special heed, upon a
chair of Utrecht velvet, on the back of which was inscribed this name:
Monsieur Mabeuf, warden. Mass had hardly begun when an old man presented
himself and said to Marius:--

"This is my place, sir."

Marius stepped aside promptly, and the old man took possession of his
chair.

The mass concluded, Marius still stood thoughtfully a few paces distant;
the old man approached him again and said:--

"I beg your pardon, sir, for having disturbed you a while ago, and for
again disturbing you at this moment; you must have thought me intrusive,
and I will explain myself."

"There is no need of that, Sir," said Marius.

"Yes!" went on the old man, "I do not wish you to have a bad opinion of
me. You see, I am attached to this place. It seems to me that the mass
is better from here. Why? I will tell you. It is from this place, that
I have watched a poor, brave father come regularly, every two or three
months, for the last ten years, since he had no other opportunity and
no other way of seeing his child, because he was prevented by family
arrangements. He came at the hour when he knew that his son would be
brought to mass. The little one never suspected that his father was
there. Perhaps he did not even know that he had a father, poor innocent!
The father kept behind a pillar, so that he might not be seen. He gazed
at his child and he wept. He adored that little fellow, poor man! I
could see that. This spot has become sanctified in my sight, and I have
contracted a habit of coming hither to listen to the mass. I prefer it
to the stall to which I have a right, in my capacity of warden. I knew
that unhappy gentleman a little, too. He had a father-in-law, a wealthy
aunt, relatives, I don't know exactly what all, who threatened to
disinherit the child if he, the father, saw him. He sacrificed himself
in order that his son might be rich and happy some day. He was separated
from him because of political opinions. Certainly, I approve of
political opinions, but there are people who do not know where to stop.
Mon Dieu! a man is not a monster because he was at Waterloo; a father
is not separated from his child for such a reason as that. He was one of
Bonaparte's colonels. He is dead, I believe. He lived at Vernon, where I
have a brother who is a cure, and his name was something like Pontmarie
or Montpercy. He had a fine sword-cut, on my honor."

"Pontmercy," suggested Marius, turning pale.

"Precisely, Pontmercy. Did you know him?"

"Sir," said Marius, "he was my father."

The old warden clasped his hands and exclaimed:--

"Ah! you are the child! Yes, that's true, he must be a man by this
time. Well! poor child, you may say that you had a father who loved you
dearly!"

Marius offered his arm to the old man and conducted him to his lodgings.

On the following day, he said to M. Gillenormand:--

"I have arranged a hunting-party with some friends. Will you permit me
to be absent for three days?"

"Four!" replied his grandfather. "Go and amuse yourself."

And he said to his daughter in a low tone, and with a wink, "Some love
affair!"




CHAPTER VI--THE CONSEQUENCES OF HAVING MET A WARDEN

Where it was that Marius went will be disclosed a little further on.

Marius was absent for three days, then he returned to Paris, went
straight to the library of the law-school and asked for the files of the
Moniteur.

He read the Moniteur, he read all the histories of the Republic and
the Empire, the Memorial de Sainte-Helene, all the memoirs, all the
newspapers, the bulletins, the proclamations; he devoured everything.
The first time that he came across his father's name in the bulletins of
the grand army, he had a fever for a week. He went to see the generals
under whom Georges Pontmercy had served, among others, Comte H.
Church-warden Mabeuf, whom he went to see again, told him about the life
at Vernon, the colonel's retreat, his flowers, his solitude. Marius came
to a full knowledge of that rare, sweet, and sublime man, that species
of lion-lamb who had been his father.

In the meanwhile, occupied as he was with this study which absorbed all
his moments as well as his thoughts, he hardly saw the Gillenormands at
all. He made his appearance at meals; then they searched for him, and he
was not to be found. Father Gillenormand smiled. "Bah! bah! He is just
of the age for the girls!" Sometimes the old man added: "The deuce!
I thought it was only an affair of gallantry, It seems that it is an
affair of passion!"

It was a passion, in fact. Marius was on the high road to adoring his
father.

At the same time, his ideas underwent an extraordinary change. The
phases of this change were numerous and successive. As this is the
history of many minds of our day, we think it will prove useful to
follow these phases step by step and to indicate them all.

That history upon which he had just cast his eyes appalled him.

The first effect was to dazzle him.

Up to that time, the Republic, the Empire, had been to him only
monstrous words. The Republic, a guillotine in the twilight; the Empire,
a sword in the night. He had just taken a look at it, and where he had
expected to find only a chaos of shadows, he had beheld, with a sort
of unprecedented surprise, mingled with fear and joy, stars sparkling,
Mirabeau, Vergniaud, Saint-Just, Robespierre, Camille, Desmoulins,
Danton, and a sun arise, Napoleon. He did not know where he stood. He
recoiled, blinded by the brilliant lights. Little by little, when his
astonishment had passed off, he grew accustomed to this radiance, he
contemplated these deeds without dizziness, he examined these personages
without terror; the Revolution and the Empire presented themselves
luminously, in perspective, before his mind's eye; he beheld each of
these groups of events and of men summed up in two tremendous facts: the
Republic in the sovereignty of civil right restored to the masses,
the Empire in the sovereignty of the French idea imposed on Europe; he
beheld the grand figure of the people emerge from the Revolution, and
the grand figure of France spring forth from the Empire. He asserted
in his conscience, that all this had been good. What his dazzled state
neglected in this, his first far too synthetic estimation, we do not
think it necessary to point out here. It is the state of a mind on the
march that we are recording. Progress is not accomplished in one stage.
That stated, once for all, in connection with what precedes as well as
with what is to follow, we continue.

He then perceived that, up to that moment, he had comprehended his
country no more than he had comprehended his father. He had not known
either the one or the other, and a sort of voluntary night had obscured
his eyes. Now he saw, and on the one hand he admired, while on the other
he adored.

He was filled with regret and remorse, and he reflected in despair that
all he had in his soul could now be said only to the tomb. Oh! if his
father had still been in existence, if he had still had him, if God, in
his compassion and his goodness, had permitted his father to be still
among the living, how he would have run, how he would have precipitated
himself, how he would have cried to his father: "Father! Here I am! It
is I! I have the same heart as thou! I am thy son!" How he would have
embraced that white head, bathed his hair in tears, gazed upon his scar,
pressed his hands, adored his garment, kissed his feet! Oh! Why had his
father died so early, before his time, before the justice, the love of
his son had come to him? Marius had a continual sob in his heart, which
said to him every moment: "Alas!" At the same time, he became more truly
serious, more truly grave, more sure of his thought and his faith. At
each instant, gleams of the true came to complete his reason. An inward
growth seemed to be in progress within him. He was conscious of a sort
of natural enlargement, which gave him two things that were new to
him--his father and his country.

As everything opens when one has a key, so he explained to himself that
which he had hated, he penetrated that which he had abhorred; henceforth
he plainly perceived the providential, divine and human sense of the
great things which he had been taught to detest, and of the great men
whom he had been instructed to curse. When he reflected on his former
opinions, which were but those of yesterday, and which, nevertheless,
seemed to him already so very ancient, he grew indignant, yet he smiled.

From the rehabilitation of his father, he naturally passed to the
rehabilitation of Napoleon.

But the latter, we will confess, was not effected without labor.

From his infancy, he had been imbued with the judgments of the party of
1814, on Bonaparte. Now, all the prejudices of the Restoration, all its
interests, all its instincts tended to disfigure Napoleon. It execrated
him even more than it did Robespierre. It had very cleverly turned to
sufficiently good account the fatigue of the nation, and the hatred of
mothers. Bonaparte had become an almost fabulous monster, and in order
to paint him to the imagination of the people, which, as we lately
pointed out, resembles the imagination of children, the party of 1814
made him appear under all sorts of terrifying masks in succession, from
that which is terrible though it remains grandiose to that which is
terrible and becomes grotesque, from Tiberius to the bugaboo. Thus, in
speaking of Bonaparte, one was free to sob or to puff up with
laughter, provided that hatred lay at the bottom. Marius had never
entertained--about that man, as he was called--any other ideas in his
mind. They had combined with the tenacity which existed in his nature.
There was in him a headstrong little man who hated Napoleon.

On reading history, on studying him, especially in the documents and
materials for history, the veil which concealed Napoleon from the eyes
of Marius was gradually rent. He caught a glimpse of something immense,
and he suspected that he had been deceived up to that moment, on
the score of Bonaparte as about all the rest; each day he saw more
distinctly; and he set about mounting, slowly, step by step, almost
regretfully in the beginning, then with intoxication and as though
attracted by an irresistible fascination, first the sombre steps, then
the vaguely illuminated steps, at last the luminous and splendid steps
of enthusiasm.

One night, he was alone in his little chamber near the roof. His candle
was burning; he was reading, with his elbows resting on his table close
to the open window. All sorts of reveries reached him from space, and
mingled with his thoughts. What a spectacle is the night! One hears dull
sounds, without knowing whence they proceed; one beholds Jupiter, which
is twelve hundred times larger than the earth, glowing like a firebrand,
the azure is black, the stars shine; it is formidable.

He was perusing the bulletins of the grand army, those heroic strophes
penned on the field of battle; there, at intervals, he beheld his
father's name, always the name of the Emperor; the whole of that great
Empire presented itself to him; he felt a flood swelling and rising
within him; it seemed to him at moments that his father passed close
to him like a breath, and whispered in his ear; he gradually got into
a singular state; he thought that he heard drums, cannon, trumpets,
the measured tread of battalions, the dull and distant gallop of the
cavalry; from time to time, his eyes were raised heavenward, and gazed
upon the colossal constellations as they gleamed in the measureless
depths of space, then they fell upon his book once more, and there they
beheld other colossal things moving confusedly. His heart contracted
within him. He was in a transport, trembling, panting. All at once,
without himself knowing what was in him, and what impulse he was
obeying, he sprang to his feet, stretched both arms out of the window,
gazed intently into the gloom, the silence, the infinite darkness, the
eternal immensity, and exclaimed: "Long live the Emperor!"

From that moment forth, all was over; the Ogre of Corsica,--the
usurper,--the tyrant,--the monster who was the lover of his own
sisters,--the actor who took lessons of Talma,--the poisoner of
Jaffa,--the tiger,--Buonaparte,--all this vanished, and gave place
in his mind to a vague and brilliant radiance in which shone, at an
inaccessible height, the pale marble phantom of Caesar. The Emperor had
been for his father only the well-beloved captain whom one admires, for
whom one sacrifices one's self; he was something more to Marius. He was
the predestined constructor of the French group, succeeding the Roman
group in the domination of the universe. He was a prodigious architect,
of a destruction, the continuer of Charlemagne, of Louis XI., of Henry
IV., of Richelieu, of Louis XIV., and of the Committee of Public Safety,
having his spots, no doubt, his faults, his crimes even, being a man,
that is to say; but august in his faults, brilliant in his spots,
powerful in his crime.

He was the predestined man, who had forced all nations to say: "The
great nation!" He was better than that, he was the very incarnation of
France, conquering Europe by the sword which he grasped, and the world
by the light which he shed. Marius saw in Bonaparte the dazzling spectre
which will always rise upon the frontier, and which will guard the
future. Despot but dictator; a despot resulting from a republic and
summing up a revolution. Napoleon became for him the man-people as Jesus
Christ is the man-God.

It will be perceived, that like all new converts to a religion, his
conversion intoxicated him, he hurled himself headlong into adhesion
and he went too far. His nature was so constructed; once on the downward
slope, it was almost impossible for him to put on the drag. Fanaticism
for the sword took possession of him, and complicated in his mind his
enthusiasm for the idea. He did not perceive that, along with genius,
and pell-mell, he was admitting force, that is to say, that he was
installing in two compartments of his idolatry, on the one hand that
which is divine, on the other that which is brutal. In many respects, he
had set about deceiving himself otherwise. He admitted everything. There
is a way of encountering error while on one's way to the truth. He had a
violent sort of good faith which took everything in the lump. In the new
path which he had entered on, in judging the mistakes of the old regime,
as in measuring the glory of Napoleon, he neglected the attenuating
circumstances.

At all events, a tremendous step had been taken. Where he had formerly
beheld the fall of the monarchy, he now saw the advent of France. His
orientation had changed. What had been his East became the West. He had
turned squarely round.

All these revolutions were accomplished within him, without his family
obtaining an inkling of the case.

When, during this mysterious labor, he had entirely shed his old Bourbon
and ultra skin, when he had cast off the aristocrat, the Jacobite and
the Royalist, when he had become thoroughly a revolutionist, profoundly
democratic and republican, he went to an engraver on the Quai des
Orfevres and ordered a hundred cards bearing this name: Le Baron Marius
Pontmercy.

This was only the strictly logical consequence of the change which had
taken place in him, a change in which everything gravitated round his
father.

Only, as he did not know any one and could not sow his cards with any
porter, he put them in his pocket.

By another natural consequence, in proportion as he drew nearer to his
father, to the latter's memory, and to the things for which the
colonel had fought five and twenty years before, he receded from his
grandfather. We have long ago said, that M. Gillenormand's temper did
not please him. There already existed between them all the dissonances
of the grave young man and the frivolous old man. The gayety of Geronte
shocks and exasperates the melancholy of Werther. So long as the same
political opinions and the same ideas had been common to them both,
Marius had met M. Gillenormand there as on a bridge. When the bridge
fell, an abyss was formed. And then, over and above all, Marius
experienced unutterable impulses to revolt, when he reflected that it
was M. Gillenormand who had, from stupid motives, torn him ruthlessly
from the colonel, thus depriving the father of the child, and the child
of the father.

By dint of pity for his father, Marius had nearly arrived at aversion
for his grandfather.

Nothing of this sort, however, was betrayed on the exterior, as we have
already said. Only he grew colder and colder; laconic at meals, and rare
in the house. When his aunt scolded him for it, he was very gentle and
alleged his studies, his lectures, the examinations, etc., as a pretext.
His grandfather never departed from his infallible diagnosis: "In love!
I know all about it."

From time to time Marius absented himself.

"Where is it that he goes off like this?" said his aunt.

On one of these trips, which were always very brief, he went to
Montfermeil, in order to obey the injunction which his father had
left him, and he sought the old sergeant to Waterloo, the inn-keeper
Thenardier. Thenardier had failed, the inn was closed, and no one knew
what had become of him. Marius was away from the house for four days on
this quest.

"He is getting decidedly wild," said his grandfather.

They thought they had noticed that he wore something on his breast,
under his shirt, which was attached to his neck by a black ribbon.




CHAPTER VII--SOME PETTICOAT

We have mentioned a lancer.

He was a great-grand-nephew of M. Gillenormand, on the paternal side,
who led a garrison life, outside the family and far from the domestic
hearth. Lieutenant Theodule Gillenormand fulfilled all the conditions
required to make what is called a fine officer. He had "a lady's waist,"
a victorious manner of trailing his sword and of twirling his mustache
in a hook. He visited Paris very rarely, and so rarely that Marius had
never seen him. The cousins knew each other only by name. We think
we have said that Theodule was the favorite of Aunt Gillenormand, who
preferred him because she did not see him. Not seeing people permits one
to attribute to them all possible perfections.

One morning, Mademoiselle Gillenormand the elder returned to her
apartment as much disturbed as her placidity was capable of allowing.
Marius had just asked his grandfather's permission to take a little
trip, adding that he meant to set out that very evening. "Go!" had been
his grandfather's reply, and M. Gillenormand had added in an aside, as
he raised his eyebrows to the top of his forehead: "Here he is passing
the night out again." Mademoiselle Gillenormand had ascended to
her chamber greatly puzzled, and on the staircase had dropped this
exclamation: "This is too much!"--and this interrogation: "But where is
it that he goes?" She espied some adventure of the heart, more or less
illicit, a woman in the shadow, a rendezvous, a mystery, and she would
not have been sorry to thrust her spectacles into the affair. Tasting a
mystery resembles getting the first flavor of a scandal; sainted souls
do not detest this. There is some curiosity about scandal in the secret
compartments of bigotry.

So she was the prey of a vague appetite for learning a history.

In order to get rid of this curiosity which agitated her a little beyond
her wont, she took refuge in her talents, and set about scalloping,
with one layer of cotton after another, one of those embroideries of the
Empire and the Restoration, in which there are numerous cart-wheels.
The work was clumsy, the worker cross. She had been seated at this for
several hours when the door opened. Mademoiselle Gillenormand raised
her nose. Lieutenant Theodule stood before her, making the regulation
salute. She uttered a cry of delight. One may be old, one may be a
prude, one may be pious, one may be an aunt, but it is always agreeable
to see a lancer enter one's chamber.

"You here, Theodule!" she exclaimed.

"On my way through town, aunt."

"Embrace me."

"Here goes!" said Theodule.

And he kissed her. Aunt Gillenormand went to her writing-desk and opened
it.

"You will remain with us a week at least?"

"I leave this very evening, aunt."

"It is not possible!"

"Mathematically!"

"Remain, my little Theodule, I beseech you."

"My heart says 'yes,' but my orders say 'no.' The matter is simple.
They are changing our garrison; we have been at Melun, we are being
transferred to Gaillon. It is necessary to pass through Paris in order
to get from the old post to the new one. I said: 'I am going to see my
aunt.'"

"Here is something for your trouble."

And she put ten louis into his hand.

"For my pleasure, you mean to say, my dear aunt."

Theodule kissed her again, and she experienced the joy of having some of
the skin scratched from her neck by the braidings on his uniform.

"Are you making the journey on horseback, with your regiment?" she asked
him.

"No, aunt. I wanted to see you. I have special permission. My servant is
taking my horse; I am travelling by diligence. And, by the way, I want
to ask you something."

"What is it?"

"Is my cousin Marius Pontmercy travelling so, too?"

"How do you know that?" said his aunt, suddenly pricked to the quick
with a lively curiosity.

"On my arrival, I went to the diligence to engage my seat in the coupe."

"Well?"

"A traveller had already come to engage a seat in the imperial. I saw
his name on the card."

"What name?"

"Marius Pontmercy."

"The wicked fellow!" exclaimed his aunt. "Ah! your cousin is not a
steady lad like yourself. To think that he is to pass the night in a
diligence!"

"Just as I am going to do."

"But you--it is your duty; in his case, it is wildness."

"Bosh!" said Theodule.

Here an event occurred to Mademoiselle Gillenormand the elder,--an idea
struck her. If she had been a man, she would have slapped her brow. She
apostrophized Theodule:--

"Are you aware whether your cousin knows you?"

"No. I have seen him; but he has never deigned to notice me."

"So you are going to travel together?"

"He in the imperial, I in the coupe."

"Where does this diligence run?"

"To Andelys."

"Then that is where Marius is going?"

"Unless, like myself, he should stop on the way. I get down at Vernon,
in order to take the branch coach for Gaillon. I know nothing of Marius'
plan of travel."

"Marius! what an ugly name! what possessed them to name him Marius?
While you, at least, are called Theodule."

"I would rather be called Alfred," said the officer.

"Listen, Theodule."

"I am listening, aunt."

"Pay attention."

"I am paying attention."

"You understand?"

"Yes."

"Well, Marius absents himself!"

"Eh! eh!"

"He travels."

"Ah! ah!"

"He spends the night out."

"Oh! oh!"

"We should like to know what there is behind all this."

Theodule replied with the composure of a man of bronze:--

"Some petticoat or other."

And with that inward laugh which denotes certainty, he added:--

"A lass."

"That is evident," exclaimed his aunt, who thought she heard M.
Gillenormand speaking, and who felt her conviction become irresistible
at that word fillette, accentuated in almost the very same fashion by
the granduncle and the grandnephew. She resumed:--

"Do us a favor. Follow Marius a little. He does not know you, it will be
easy. Since a lass there is, try to get a sight of her. You must write
us the tale. It will amuse his grandfather."

Theodule had no excessive taste for this sort of spying; but he was much
touched by the ten louis, and he thought he saw a chance for a possible
sequel. He accepted the commission and said: "As you please, aunt."

And he added in an aside, to himself: "Here I am a duenna."

Mademoiselle Gillenormand embraced him.

"You are not the man to play such pranks, Theodule. You obey discipline,
you are the slave of orders, you are a man of scruples and duty, and you
would not quit your family to go and see a creature."

The lancer made the pleased grimace of Cartouche when praised for his
probity.

Marius, on the evening following this dialogue, mounted the diligence
without suspecting that he was watched. As for the watcher, the
first thing he did was to fall asleep. His slumber was complete and
conscientious. Argus snored all night long.

At daybreak, the conductor of the diligence shouted: "Vernon! relay of
Vernon! Travellers for Vernon!" And Lieutenant Theodule woke.

"Good," he growled, still half asleep, "this is where I get out."

Then, as his memory cleared by degrees, the effect of waking, he
recalled his aunt, the ten louis, and the account which he had
undertaken to render of the deeds and proceedings of Marius. This set
him to laughing.

"Perhaps he is no longer in the coach," he thought, as he rebuttoned the
waistcoat of his undress uniform. "He may have stopped at Poissy; he may
have stopped at Triel; if he did not get out at Meulan, he may have got
out at Mantes, unless he got out at Rolleboise, or if he did not go on
as far as Pacy, with the choice of turning to the left at Evreus, or to
the right at Laroche-Guyon. Run after him, aunty. What the devil am I to
write to that good old soul?"

At that moment a pair of black trousers descending from the imperial,
made its appearance at the window of the coupe.

"Can that be Marius?" said the lieutenant.

It was Marius.

A little peasant girl, all entangled with the horses and the postilions
at the end of the vehicle, was offering flowers to the travellers. "Give
your ladies flowers!" she cried.

Marius approached her and purchased the finest flowers in her flat
basket.

"Come now," said Theodule, leaping down from the coupe, "this piques my
curiosity. Who the deuce is he going to carry those flowers to? She
must be a splendidly handsome woman for so fine a bouquet. I want to see
her."

And no longer in pursuance of orders, but from personal curiosity, like
dogs who hunt on their own account, he set out to follow Marius.

Marius paid no attention to Theodule. Elegant women descended from the
diligence; he did not glance at them. He seemed to see nothing around
him.

"He is pretty deeply in love!" thought Theodule.

Marius directed his steps towards the church.

"Capital," said Theodule to himself. "Rendezvous seasoned with a bit of
mass are the best sort. Nothing is so exquisite as an ogle which passes
over the good God's head."

On arriving at the church, Marius did not enter it, but skirted the
apse. He disappeared behind one of the angles of the apse.

"The rendezvous is appointed outside," said Theodule. "Let's have a look
at the lass."

And he advanced on the tips of his boots towards the corner which Marius
had turned.

On arriving there, he halted in amazement.

Marius, with his forehead clasped in his hands, was kneeling upon the
grass on a grave. He had strewn his bouquet there. At the extremity of
the grave, on a little swelling which marked the head, there stood
a cross of black wood with this name in white letters: COLONEL BARON
PONTMERCY. Marius' sobs were audible.

The "lass" was a grave.




CHAPTER VIII--MARBLE AGAINST GRANITE

It was hither that Marius had come on the first occasion of his
absenting himself from Paris. It was hither that he had come every time
that M. Gillenormand had said: "He is sleeping out."

Lieutenant Theodule was absolutely put out of countenance by this
unexpected encounter with a sepulchre; he experienced a singular and
disagreeable sensation which he was incapable of analyzing, and which
was composed of respect for the tomb, mingled with respect for the
colonel. He retreated, leaving Marius alone in the cemetery, and
there was discipline in this retreat. Death appeared to him with large
epaulets, and he almost made the military salute to him. Not knowing
what to write to his aunt, he decided not to write at all; and it is
probable that nothing would have resulted from the discovery made
by Theodule as to the love affairs of Marius, if, by one of those
mysterious arrangements which are so frequent in chance, the scene at
Vernon had not had an almost immediate counter-shock at Paris.

Marius returned from Vernon on the third day, in the middle of the
morning, descended at his grandfather's door, and, wearied by the two
nights spent in the diligence, and feeling the need of repairing his
loss of sleep by an hour at the swimming-school, he mounted rapidly to
his chamber, took merely time enough to throw off his travelling-coat,
and the black ribbon which he wore round his neck, and went off to the
bath.

M. Gillenormand, who had risen betimes like all old men in good health,
had heard his entrance, and had made haste to climb, as quickly as his
old legs permitted, the stairs to the upper story where Marius lived,
in order to embrace him, and to question him while so doing, and to find
out where he had been.

But the youth had taken less time to descend than the old man had to
ascend, and when Father Gillenormand entered the attic, Marius was no
longer there.

The bed had not been disturbed, and on the bed lay, outspread, but not
defiantly the great-coat and the black ribbon.

"I like this better," said M. Gillenormand.

And a moment later, he made his entrance into the salon, where
Mademoiselle Gillenormand was already seated, busily embroidering her
cart-wheels.

The entrance was a triumphant one.

M. Gillenormand held in one hand the great-coat, and in the other the
neck-ribbon, and exclaimed:--

"Victory! We are about to penetrate the mystery! We are going to
learn the most minute details; we are going to lay our finger on the
debaucheries of our sly friend! Here we have the romance itself. I have
the portrait!"

In fact, a case of black shagreen, resembling a medallion portrait, was
suspended from the ribbon.

The old man took this case and gazed at it for some time without opening
it, with that air of enjoyment, rapture, and wrath, with which a poor
hungry fellow beholds an admirable dinner which is not for him, pass
under his very nose.

"For this evidently is a portrait. I know all about such things. That is
worn tenderly on the heart. How stupid they are! Some abominable fright
that will make us shudder, probably! Young men have such bad taste
nowadays!"

"Let us see, father," said the old spinster.

The case opened by the pressure of a spring. They found in it nothing
but a carefully folded paper.

"From the same to the same," said M. Gillenormand, bursting with
laughter. "I know what it is. A billet-doux."

"Ah! let us read it!" said the aunt.

And she put on her spectacles. They unfolded the paper and read as
follows:--

"For my son.--The Emperor made me a Baron on the battlefield of
Waterloo. Since the Restoration disputes my right to this title which I
purchased with my blood, my son shall take it and bear it. That he will
be worthy of it is a matter of course."

The feelings of father and daughter cannot be described. They felt
chilled as by the breath of a death's-head. They did not exchange a
word.

Only, M. Gillenormand said in a low voice and as though speaking to
himself:--

"It is the slasher's handwriting."

The aunt examined the paper, turned it about in all directions, then put
it back in its case.

At the same moment a little oblong packet, enveloped in blue paper, fell
from one of the pockets of the great-coat. Mademoiselle Gillenormand
picked it up and unfolded the blue paper.

It contained Marius' hundred cards. She handed one of them to M.
Gillenormand, who read: Le Baron Marius Pontmercy.

The old man rang the bell. Nicolette came. M. Gillenormand took the
ribbon, the case, and the coat, flung them all on the floor in the
middle of the room, and said:--

"Carry those duds away."

A full hour passed in the most profound silence. The old man and the old
spinster had seated themselves with their backs to each other, and were
thinking, each on his own account, the same things, in all probability.

At the expiration of this hour, Aunt Gillenormand said:--"A pretty state
of things!"

A few moments later, Marius made his appearance. He entered. Even before
he had crossed the threshold, he saw his grandfather holding one of
his own cards in his hand, and on catching sight of him, the latter
exclaimed with his air of bourgeois and grinning superiority which was
something crushing:--

"Well! well! well! well! well! so you are a baron now. I present you my
compliments. What is the meaning of this?"

Marius reddened slightly and replied:--

"It means that I am the son of my father."

M. Gillenormand ceased to laugh, and said harshly:--

"I am your father."

"My father," retorted Marius, with downcast eyes and a severe air, "was
a humble and heroic man, who served the Republic and France gloriously,
who was great in the greatest history that men have ever made, who
lived in the bivouac for a quarter of a century, beneath grape-shot and
bullets, in snow and mud by day, beneath rain at night, who captured two
flags, who received twenty wounds, who died forgotten and abandoned, and
who never committed but one mistake, which was to love too fondly two
ingrates, his country and myself."

This was more than M. Gillenormand could bear to hear. At the word
republic, he rose, or, to speak more correctly, he sprang to his feet.
Every word that Marius had just uttered produced on the visage of the
old Royalist the effect of the puffs of air from a forge upon a blazing
brand. From a dull hue he had turned red, from red, purple, and from
purple, flame-colored.

"Marius!" he cried. "Abominable child! I do not know what your father
was! I do not wish to know! I know nothing about that, and I do not know
him! But what I do know is, that there never was anything but scoundrels
among those men! They were all rascals, assassins, red-caps, thieves! I
say all! I say all! I know not one! I say all! Do you hear me, Marius!
See here, you are no more a baron than my slipper is! They were all
bandits in the service of Robespierre! All who served B-u-o-naparte were
brigands! They were all traitors who betrayed, betrayed, betrayed their
legitimate king! All cowards who fled before the Prussians and the
English at Waterloo! That is what I do know! Whether Monsieur your
father comes in that category, I do not know! I am sorry for it, so much
the worse, your humble servant!"

In his turn, it was Marius who was the firebrand and M. Gillenormand
who was the bellows. Marius quivered in every limb, he did not know what
would happen next, his brain was on fire. He was the priest who beholds
all his sacred wafers cast to the winds, the fakir who beholds a
passer-by spit upon his idol. It could not be that such things had been
uttered in his presence. What was he to do? His father had just been
trampled under foot and stamped upon in his presence, but by whom? By
his grandfather. How was he to avenge the one without outraging the
other? It was impossible for him to insult his grandfather and it was
equally impossible for him to leave his father unavenged. On the one
hand was a sacred grave, on the other hoary locks.

He stood there for several moments, staggering as though intoxicated,
with all this whirlwind dashing through his head; then he raised
his eyes, gazed fixedly at his grandfather, and cried in a voice of
thunder:--

"Down with the Bourbons, and that great hog of a Louis XVIII.!"

Louis XVIII. had been dead for four years; but it was all the same to
him.

The old man, who had been crimson, turned whiter than his hair. He
wheeled round towards a bust of M. le Duc de Berry, which stood on the
chimney-piece, and made a profound bow, with a sort of peculiar majesty.
Then he paced twice, slowly and in silence, from the fireplace to the
window and from the window to the fireplace, traversing the whole length
of the room, and making the polished floor creak as though he had been a
stone statue walking.

On his second turn, he bent over his daughter, who was watching this
encounter with the stupefied air of an antiquated lamb, and said to her
with a smile that was almost calm: "A baron like this gentleman, and a
bourgeois like myself cannot remain under the same roof."

And drawing himself up, all at once, pallid, trembling, terrible, with
his brow rendered more lofty by the terrible radiance of wrath, he
extended his arm towards Marius and shouted to him:--

"Be off!"

Marius left the house.

On the following day, M. Gillenormand said to his daughter:

"You will send sixty pistoles every six months to that blood-drinker,
and you will never mention his name to me."

Having an immense reserve fund of wrath to get rid of, and not knowing
what to do with it, he continued to address his daughter as you instead
of thou for the next three months.

Marius, on his side, had gone forth in indignation. There was one
circumstance which, it must be admitted, aggravated his exasperation.
There are always petty fatalities of the sort which complicate domestic
dramas. They augment the grievances in such cases, although, in reality,
the wrongs are not increased by them. While carrying Marius' "duds"
precipitately to his chamber, at his grandfather's command, Nicolette
had, inadvertently, let fall, probably, on the attic staircase, which
was dark, that medallion of black shagreen which contained the paper
penned by the colonel. Neither paper nor case could afterwards be found.
Marius was convinced that "Monsieur Gillenormand"--from that day forth
he never alluded to him otherwise--had flung "his father's testament" in
the fire. He knew by heart the few lines which the colonel had written,
and, consequently, nothing was lost. But the paper, the writing, that
sacred relic,--all that was his very heart. What had been done with it?

Marius had taken his departure without saying whither he was going, and
without knowing where, with thirty francs, his watch, and a few clothes
in a hand-bag. He had entered a hackney-coach, had engaged it by the
hour, and had directed his course at hap-hazard towards the Latin
quarter.

What was to become of Marius?




BOOK FOURTH.--THE FRIENDS OF THE A B C




CHAPTER I--A GROUP WHICH BARELY MISSED BECOMING HISTORIC

At that epoch, which was, to all appearances indifferent, a certain
revolutionary quiver was vaguely current. Breaths which had started
forth from the depths of '89 and '93 were in the air. Youth was on
the point, may the reader pardon us the word, of moulting. People were
undergoing a transformation, almost without being conscious of it,
through the movement of the age. The needle which moves round the
compass also moves in souls. Each person was taking that step in advance
which he was bound to take. The Royalists were becoming liberals,
liberals were turning democrats. It was a flood tide complicated with
a thousand ebb movements; the peculiarity of ebbs is to create
intermixtures; hence the combination of very singular ideas; people
adored both Napoleon and liberty. We are making history here. These
were the mirages of that period. Opinions traverse phases. Voltairian
royalism, a quaint variety, had a no less singular sequel, Bonapartist
liberalism.

Other groups of minds were more serious. In that direction, they
sounded principles, they attached themselves to the right. They
grew enthusiastic for the absolute, they caught glimpses of infinite
realizations; the absolute, by its very rigidity, urges spirits towards
the sky and causes them to float in illimitable space. There is nothing
like dogma for bringing forth dreams. And there is nothing like dreams
for engendering the future. Utopia to-day, flesh and blood to-morrow.

These advanced opinions had a double foundation. A beginning of mystery
menaced "the established order of things," which was suspicious and
underhand. A sign which was revolutionary to the highest degree. The
second thoughts of power meet the second thoughts of the populace in
the mine. The incubation of insurrections gives the retort to the
premeditation of coups d'etat.

There did not, as yet, exist in France any of those vast underlying
organizations, like the German tugendbund and Italian Carbonarism; but
here and there there were dark underminings, which were in process of
throwing off shoots. The Cougourde was being outlined at Aix; there
existed at Paris, among other affiliations of that nature, the society
of the Friends of the A B C.

What were these Friends of the A B C? A society which had for its object
apparently the education of children, in reality the elevation of man.

They declared themselves the Friends of the A B C,--the Abaisse,--the
debased,--that is to say, the people. They wished to elevate the people.
It was a pun which we should do wrong to smile at. Puns are sometimes
serious factors in politics; witness the Castratus ad castra, which made
a general of the army of Narses; witness: Barbari et Barberini; witness:
Tu es Petrus et super hanc petram, etc., etc.

The Friends of the A B C were not numerous, it was a secret society in
the state of embryo, we might almost say a coterie, if coteries ended in
heroes. They assembled in Paris in two localities, near the fish-market,
in a wine-shop called Corinthe, of which more will be heard later on,
and near the Pantheon in a little cafe in the Rue Saint-Michel called
the Cafe Musain, now torn down; the first of these meeting-places was
close to the workingman, the second to the students.

The assemblies of the Friends of the A B C were usually held in a back
room of the Cafe Musain.

This hall, which was tolerably remote from the cafe, with which it was
connected by an extremely long corridor, had two windows and an exit
with a private stairway on the little Rue des Gres. There they smoked
and drank, and gambled and laughed. There they conversed in very loud
tones about everything, and in whispers of other things. An old map
of France under the Republic was nailed to the wall,--a sign quite
sufficient to excite the suspicion of a police agent.

The greater part of the Friends of the A B C were students, who were
on cordial terms with the working classes. Here are the names of the
principal ones. They belong, in a certain measure, to history: Enjolras,
Combeferre, Jean Prouvaire, Feuilly, Courfeyrac, Bahorel, Lesgle or
Laigle, Joly, Grantaire.

These young men formed a sort of family, through the bond of friendship.
All, with the exception of Laigle, were from the South.

[Illustration: Friends of the A B C  3b4-1-abc-friends]

This was a remarkable group. It vanished in the invisible depths which
lie behind us. At the point of this drama which we have now reached,
it will not perhaps be superfluous to throw a ray of light upon these
youthful heads, before the reader beholds them plunging into the shadow
of a tragic adventure.

Enjolras, whose name we have mentioned first of all,--the reader shall
see why later on,--was an only son and wealthy.

Enjolras was a charming young man, who was capable of being terrible. He
was angelically handsome. He was a savage Antinous. One would have said,
to see the pensive thoughtfulness of his glance, that he had already,
in some previous state of existence, traversed the revolutionary
apocalypse. He possessed the tradition of it as though he had been a
witness. He was acquainted with all the minute details of the great
affair. A pontifical and warlike nature, a singular thing in a youth. He
was an officiating priest and a man of war; from the immediate point of
view, a soldier of the democracy; above the contemporary movement, the
priest of the ideal. His eyes were deep, his lids a little red, his
lower lip was thick and easily became disdainful, his brow was lofty. A
great deal of brow in a face is like a great deal of horizon in a view.
Like certain young men at the beginning of this century and the end of
the last, who became illustrious at an early age, he was endowed with
excessive youth, and was as rosy as a young girl, although subject to
hours of pallor. Already a man, he still seemed a child. His two and
twenty years appeared to be but seventeen; he was serious, it did not
seem as though he were aware there was on earth a thing called woman.
He had but one passion--the right; but one thought--to overthrow
the obstacle. On Mount Aventine, he would have been Gracchus; in the
Convention, he would have been Saint-Just. He hardly saw the roses, he
ignored spring, he did not hear the carolling of the birds; the bare
throat of Evadne would have moved him no more than it would have moved
Aristogeiton; he, like Harmodius, thought flowers good for nothing
except to conceal the sword. He was severe in his enjoyments. He
chastely dropped his eyes before everything which was not the Republic.
He was the marble lover of liberty. His speech was harshly inspired,
and had the thrill of a hymn. He was subject to unexpected outbursts of
soul. Woe to the love-affair which should have risked itself beside him!
If any grisette of the Place Cambrai or the Rue Saint-Jean-de-Beauvais,
seeing that face of a youth escaped from college, that page's mien,
those long, golden lashes, those blue eyes, that hair billowing in the
wind, those rosy cheeks, those fresh lips, those exquisite teeth, had
conceived an appetite for that complete aurora, and had tried her beauty
on Enjolras, an astounding and terrible glance would have promptly shown
her the abyss, and would have taught her not to confound the mighty
cherub of Ezekiel with the gallant Cherubino of Beaumarchais.

By the side of Enjolras, who represented the logic of the Revolution,
Combeferre represented its philosophy. Between the logic of the
Revolution and its philosophy there exists this difference--that its
logic may end in war, whereas its philosophy can end only in peace.
Combeferre complemented and rectified Enjolras. He was less lofty, but
broader. He desired to pour into all minds the extensive principles of
general ideas: he said: "Revolution, but civilization"; and around the
mountain peak he opened out a vast view of the blue sky. The Revolution
was more adapted for breathing with Combeferre than with Enjolras.
Enjolras expressed its divine right, and Combeferre its natural right.
The first attached himself to Robespierre; the second confined himself
to Condorcet. Combeferre lived the life of all the rest of the world
more than did Enjolras. If it had been granted to these two young men to
attain to history, the one would have been the just, the other the wise
man. Enjolras was the more virile, Combeferre the more humane. Homo and
vir, that was the exact effect of their different shades. Combeferre was
as gentle as Enjolras was severe, through natural whiteness. He loved
the word citizen, but he preferred the word man. He would gladly
have said: Hombre, like the Spanish. He read everything, went to
the theatres, attended the courses of public lecturers, learned the
polarization of light from Arago, grew enthusiastic over a lesson in
which Geoffrey Sainte-Hilaire explained the double function of the
external carotid artery, and the internal, the one which makes the face,
and the one which makes the brain; he kept up with what was going
on, followed science step by step, compared Saint-Simon with Fourier,
deciphered hieroglyphics, broke the pebble which he found and reasoned
on geology, drew from memory a silkworm moth, pointed out the faulty
French in the Dictionary of the Academy, studied Puysegur and Deleuze,
affirmed nothing, not even miracles; denied nothing, not even ghosts;
turned over the files of the Moniteur, reflected. He declared that the
future lies in the hand of the schoolmaster, and busied himself with
educational questions. He desired that society should labor without
relaxation at the elevation of the moral and intellectual level, at
coining science, at putting ideas into circulation, at increasing the
mind in youthful persons, and he feared lest the present poverty of
method, the paltriness from a literary point of view confined to two
or three centuries called classic, the tyrannical dogmatism of official
pedants, scholastic prejudices and routines should end by converting our
colleges into artificial oyster beds. He was learned, a purist, exact,
a graduate of the Polytechnic, a close student, and at the same time,
thoughtful "even to chimaeras," so his friends said. He believed in
all dreams, railroads, the suppression of suffering in chirurgical
operations, the fixing of images in the dark chamber, the electric
telegraph, the steering of balloons. Moreover, he was not much alarmed
by the citadels erected against the human mind in every direction, by
superstition, despotism, and prejudice. He was one of those who think
that science will eventually turn the position. Enjolras was a chief,
Combeferre was a guide. One would have liked to fight under the one and
to march behind the other. It is not that Combeferre was not capable of
fighting, he did not refuse a hand-to-hand combat with the obstacle, and
to attack it by main force and explosively; but it suited him better to
bring the human race into accord with its destiny gradually, by means of
education, the inculcation of axioms, the promulgation of positive laws;
and, between two lights, his preference was rather for illumination than
for conflagration. A conflagration can create an aurora, no doubt, but
why not await the dawn? A volcano illuminates, but daybreak furnishes a
still better illumination. Possibly, Combeferre preferred the whiteness
of the beautiful to the blaze of the sublime. A light troubled by smoke,
progress purchased at the expense of violence, only half satisfied this
tender and serious spirit. The headlong precipitation of a people into
the truth, a '93, terrified him; nevertheless, stagnation was still
more repulsive to him, in it he detected putrefaction and death; on the
whole, he preferred scum to miasma, and he preferred the torrent to the
cesspool, and the falls of Niagara to the lake of Montfaucon. In
short, he desired neither halt nor haste. While his tumultuous friends,
captivated by the absolute, adored and invoked splendid revolutionary
adventures, Combeferre was inclined to let progress, good progress, take
its own course; he may have been cold, but he was pure; methodical, but
irreproachable; phlegmatic, but imperturbable. Combeferre would have
knelt and clasped his hands to enable the future to arrive in all
its candor, and that nothing might disturb the immense and virtuous
evolution of the races. The good must be innocent, he repeated
incessantly. And in fact, if the grandeur of the Revolution consists
in keeping the dazzling ideal fixedly in view, and of soaring thither
athwart the lightnings, with fire and blood in its talons, the beauty
of progress lies in being spotless; and there exists between Washington,
who represents the one, and Danton, who incarnates the other, that
difference which separates the swan from the angel with the wings of an
eagle.

Jean Prouvaire was a still softer shade than Combeferre. His name
was Jehan, owing to that petty momentary freak which mingled with the
powerful and profound movement whence sprang the very essential study
of the Middle Ages. Jean Prouvaire was in love; he cultivated a pot
of flowers, played on the flute, made verses, loved the people, pitied
woman, wept over the child, confounded God and the future in the same
confidence, and blamed the Revolution for having caused the fall of a
royal head, that of Andre Chenier. His voice was ordinarily delicate,
but suddenly grew manly. He was learned even to erudition, and almost an
Orientalist. Above all, he was good; and, a very simple thing to those
who know how nearly goodness borders on grandeur, in the matter of
poetry, he preferred the immense. He knew Italian, Latin, Greek, and
Hebrew; and these served him only for the perusal of four poets: Dante,
Juvenal, AEschylus, and Isaiah. In French, he preferred Corneille to
Racine, and Agrippa d'Aubigne to Corneille. He loved to saunter through
fields of wild oats and corn-flowers, and busied himself with clouds
nearly as much as with events. His mind had two attitudes, one on
the side towards man, the other on that towards God; he studied or
he contemplated. All day long, he buried himself in social questions,
salary, capital, credit, marriage, religion, liberty of thought,
education, penal servitude, poverty, association, property, production
and sharing, the enigma of this lower world which covers the human
ant-hill with darkness; and at night, he gazed upon the planets, those
enormous beings. Like Enjolras, he was wealthy and an only son. He spoke
softly, bowed his head, lowered his eyes, smiled with embarrassment,
dressed badly, had an awkward air, blushed at a mere nothing, and was
very timid. Yet he was intrepid.

Feuilly was a workingman, a fan-maker, orphaned both of father and
mother, who earned with difficulty three francs a day, and had but
one thought, to deliver the world. He had one other preoccupation, to
educate himself; he called this also, delivering himself. He had taught
himself to read and write; everything that he knew, he had learned by
himself. Feuilly had a generous heart. The range of his embrace was
immense. This orphan had adopted the peoples. As his mother had
failed him, he meditated on his country. He brooded with the profound
divination of the man of the people, over what we now call the idea of
the nationality, had learned history with the express object of raging
with full knowledge of the case. In this club of young Utopians,
occupied chiefly with France, he represented the outside world. He had
for his specialty Greece, Poland, Hungary, Roumania, Italy. He uttered
these names incessantly, appropriately and inappropriately, with the
tenacity of right. The violations of Turkey on Greece and Thessaly, of
Russia on Warsaw, of Austria on Venice, enraged him. Above all things,
the great violence of 1772 aroused him. There is no more sovereign
eloquence than the true in indignation; he was eloquent with that
eloquence. He was inexhaustible on that infamous date of 1772, on the
subject of that noble and valiant race suppressed by treason, and that
three-sided crime, on that monstrous ambush, the prototype and pattern
of all those horrible suppressions of states, which, since that time,
have struck many a noble nation, and have annulled their certificate of
birth, so to speak. All contemporary social crimes have their origin in
the partition of Poland. The partition of Poland is a theorem of which
all present political outrages are the corollaries. There has not been
a despot, nor a traitor for nearly a century back, who has not signed,
approved, counter-signed, and copied, ne variatur, the partition of
Poland. When the record of modern treasons was examined, that was the
first thing which made its appearance. The congress of Vienna consulted
that crime before consummating its own. 1772 sounded the onset; 1815
was the death of the game. Such was Feuilly's habitual text. This
poor workingman had constituted himself the tutor of Justice, and she
recompensed him by rendering him great. The fact is, that there is
eternity in right. Warsaw can no more be Tartar than Venice can be
Teuton. Kings lose their pains and their honor in the attempt to make
them so. Sooner or later, the submerged part floats to the surface and
reappears. Greece becomes Greece again, Italy is once more Italy. The
protest of right against the deed persists forever. The theft of a
nation cannot be allowed by prescription. These lofty deeds of rascality
have no future. A nation cannot have its mark extracted like a pocket
handkerchief.

Courfeyrac had a father who was called M. de Courfeyrac. One of
the false ideas of the bourgeoisie under the Restoration as regards
aristocracy and the nobility was to believe in the particle. The
particle, as every one knows, possesses no significance. But the
bourgeois of the epoch of la Minerve estimated so highly that poor de,
that they thought themselves bound to abdicate it. M. de Chauvelin
had himself called M. Chauvelin; M. de Caumartin, M. Caumartin; M. de
Constant de Robecque, Benjamin Constant; M. de Lafayette, M. Lafayette.
Courfeyrac had not wished to remain behind the rest, and called himself
plain Courfeyrac.

We might almost, so far as Courfeyrac is concerned, stop here,
and confine ourselves to saying with regard to what remains: "For
Courfeyrac, see Tholomyes."

Courfeyrac had, in fact, that animation of youth which may be called
the beaute du diable of the mind. Later on, this disappears like the
playfulness of the kitten, and all this grace ends, with the bourgeois,
on two legs, and with the tomcat, on four paws.

This sort of wit is transmitted from generation to generation of the
successive levies of youth who traverse the schools, who pass it from
hand to hand, quasi cursores, and is almost always exactly the same;
so that, as we have just pointed out, any one who had listened to
Courfeyrac in 1828 would have thought he heard Tholomyes in 1817. Only,
Courfeyrac was an honorable fellow. Beneath the apparent similarities
of the exterior mind, the difference between him and Tholomyes was very
great. The latent man which existed in the two was totally different
in the first from what it was in the second. There was in Tholomyes a
district attorney, and in Courfeyrac a paladin.

Enjolras was the chief, Combeferre was the guide, Courfeyrac was the
centre. The others gave more light, he shed more warmth; the truth is,
that he possessed all the qualities of a centre, roundness and radiance.

Bahorel had figured in the bloody tumult of June, 1822, on the occasion
of the burial of young Lallemand.

Bahorel was a good-natured mortal, who kept bad company, brave, a
spendthrift, prodigal, and to the verge of generosity, talkative, and
at times eloquent, bold to the verge of effrontery; the best fellow
possible; he had daring waistcoats, and scarlet opinions; a wholesale
blusterer, that is to say, loving nothing so much as a quarrel, unless
it were an uprising; and nothing so much as an uprising, unless it were
a revolution; always ready to smash a window-pane, then to tear up the
pavement, then to demolish a government, just to see the effect of it;
a student in his eleventh year. He had nosed about the law, but did not
practise it. He had taken for his device: "Never a lawyer," and for his
armorial bearings a nightstand in which was visible a square cap. Every
time that he passed the law-school, which rarely happened, he buttoned
up his frock-coat,--the paletot had not yet been invented,--and took
hygienic precautions. Of the school porter he said: "What a fine
old man!" and of the dean, M. Delvincourt: "What a monument!" In his
lectures he espied subjects for ballads, and in his professors occasions
for caricature. He wasted a tolerably large allowance, something like
three thousand francs a year, in doing nothing.

He had peasant parents whom he had contrived to imbue with respect for
their son.

He said of them: "They are peasants and not bourgeois; that is the
reason they are intelligent."

Bahorel, a man of caprice, was scattered over numerous cafes; the others
had habits, he had none. He sauntered. To stray is human. To saunter
is Parisian. In reality, he had a penetrating mind and was more of a
thinker than appeared to view.

He served as a connecting link between the Friends of the A B C and
other still unorganized groups, which were destined to take form later
on.

In this conclave of young heads, there was one bald member.

The Marquis d'Avaray, whom Louis XVIII. made a duke for having assisted
him to enter a hackney-coach on the day when he emigrated, was wont
to relate, that in 1814, on his return to France, as the King was
disembarking at Calais, a man handed him a petition.

"What is your request?" said the King.

"Sire, a post-office."

"What is your name?"

"L'Aigle."

The King frowned, glanced at the signature of the petition and beheld
the name written thus: LESGLE. This non-Bonoparte orthography touched
the King and he began to smile. "Sire," resumed the man with the
petition, "I had for ancestor a keeper of the hounds surnamed
Lesgueules. This surname furnished my name. I am called Lesgueules, by
contraction Lesgle, and by corruption l'Aigle." This caused the King
to smile broadly. Later on he gave the man the posting office of Meaux,
either intentionally or accidentally.

The bald member of the group was the son of this Lesgle, or Legle, and
he signed himself, Legle [de Meaux]. As an abbreviation, his companions
called him Bossuet.

Bossuet was a gay but unlucky fellow. His specialty was not to succeed
in anything. As an offset, he laughed at everything. At five and twenty
he was bald. His father had ended by owning a house and a field; but
he, the son, had made haste to lose that house and field in a bad
speculation. He had nothing left. He possessed knowledge and wit, but
all he did miscarried. Everything failed him and everybody deceived him;
what he was building tumbled down on top of him. If he were splitting
wood, he cut off a finger. If he had a mistress, he speedily discovered
that he had a friend also. Some misfortune happened to him every moment,
hence his joviality. He said: "I live under falling tiles." He was
not easily astonished, because, for him, an accident was what he had
foreseen, he took his bad luck serenely, and smiled at the teasing of
fate, like a person who is listening to pleasantries. He was poor, but
his fund of good humor was inexhaustible. He soon reached his last sou,
never his last burst of laughter. When adversity entered his doors, he
saluted this old acquaintance cordially, he tapped all catastrophes on
the stomach; he was familiar with fatality to the point of calling it by
its nickname: "Good day, Guignon," he said to it.

These persecutions of fate had rendered him inventive. He was full of
resources. He had no money, but he found means, when it seemed good to
him, to indulge in "unbridled extravagance." One night, he went so far
as to eat a "hundred francs" in a supper with a wench, which inspired
him to make this memorable remark in the midst of the orgy: "Pull off my
boots, you five-louis jade."

Bossuet was slowly directing his steps towards the profession of a
lawyer; he was pursuing his law studies after the manner of Bahorel.
Bossuet had not much domicile, sometimes none at all. He lodged now with
one, now with another, most often with Joly. Joly was studying medicine.
He was two years younger than Bossuet.

Joly was the "malade imaginaire" junior. What he had won in medicine was
to be more of an invalid than a doctor. At three and twenty he thought
himself a valetudinarian, and passed his life in inspecting his tongue
in the mirror. He affirmed that man becomes magnetic like a needle, and
in his chamber he placed his bed with its head to the south, and the
foot to the north, so that, at night, the circulation of his blood
might not be interfered with by the great electric current of the globe.
During thunder storms, he felt his pulse. Otherwise, he was the gayest
of them all. All these young, maniacal, puny, merry incoherences lived
in harmony together, and the result was an eccentric and agreeable
being whom his comrades, who were prodigal of winged consonants, called
Jolllly. "You may fly away on the four L's," Jean Prouvaire said to
him.[23]

Joly had a trick of touching his nose with the tip of his cane, which is
an indication of a sagacious mind.

All these young men who differed so greatly, and who, on the whole, can
only be discussed seriously, held the same religion: Progress.

All were the direct sons of the French Revolution. The most giddy of
them became solemn when they pronounced that date: '89. Their fathers in
the flesh had been, either royalists, doctrinaires, it matters not what;
this confusion anterior to themselves, who were young, did not concern
them at all; the pure blood of principle ran in their veins. They
attached themselves, without intermediate shades, to incorruptible right
and absolute duty.

Affiliated and initiated, they sketched out the ideal underground.

Among all these glowing hearts and thoroughly convinced minds, there was
one sceptic. How came he there? By juxtaposition. This sceptic's name
was Grantaire, and he was in the habit of signing himself with this
rebus: R. Grantaire was a man who took good care not to believe in
anything. Moreover, he was one of the students who had learned the most
during their course at Paris; he knew that the best coffee was to be had
at the Cafe Lemblin, and the best billiards at the Cafe Voltaire, that
good cakes and lasses were to be found at the Ermitage, on the Boulevard
du Maine, spatchcocked chickens at Mother Sauget's, excellent matelotes
at the Barriere de la Cunette, and a certain thin white wine at the
Barriere du Com pat. He knew the best place for everything; in
addition, boxing and foot-fencing and some dances; and he was a thorough
single-stick player. He was a tremendous drinker to boot. He was
inordinately homely: the prettiest boot-stitcher of that day, Irma
Boissy, enraged with his homeliness, pronounced sentence on him as
follows: "Grantaire is impossible"; but Grantaire's fatuity was not to
be disconcerted. He stared tenderly and fixedly at all women, with the
air of saying to them all: "If I only chose!" and of trying to make his
comrades believe that he was in general demand.

All those words: rights of the people, rights of man, the social
contract, the French Revolution, the Republic, democracy, humanity,
civilization, religion, progress, came very near to signifying nothing
whatever to Grantaire. He smiled at them. Scepticism, that caries of the
intelligence, had not left him a single whole idea. He lived with irony.
This was his axiom: "There is but one certainty, my full glass." He
sneered at all devotion in all parties, the father as well as the
brother, Robespierre junior as well as Loizerolles. "They are greatly in
advance to be dead," he exclaimed. He said of the crucifix: "There is a
gibbet which has been a success." A rover, a gambler, a libertine,
often drunk, he displeased these young dreamers by humming incessantly:
"J'aimons les filles, et j'aimons le bon vin." Air: Vive Henri IV.

However, this sceptic had one fanaticism. This fanaticism was neither a
dogma, nor an idea, nor an art, nor a science; it was a man: Enjolras.
Grantaire admired, loved, and venerated Enjolras. To whom did this
anarchical scoffer unite himself in this phalanx of absolute minds? To
the most absolute. In what manner had Enjolras subjugated him? By his
ideas? No. By his character. A phenomenon which is often observable.
A sceptic who adheres to a believer is as simple as the law of
complementary colors. That which we lack attracts us. No one loves the
light like the blind man. The dwarf adores the drum-major. The toad
always has his eyes fixed on heaven. Why? In order to watch the bird in
its flight. Grantaire, in whom writhed doubt, loved to watch faith
soar in Enjolras. He had need of Enjolras. That chaste, healthy, firm,
upright, hard, candid nature charmed him, without his being clearly
aware of it, and without the idea of explaining it to himself having
occurred to him. He admired his opposite by instinct. His soft,
yielding, dislocated, sickly, shapeless ideas attached themselves
to Enjolras as to a spinal column. His moral backbone leaned on that
firmness. Grantaire in the presence of Enjolras became some one once
more. He was, himself, moreover, composed of two elements, which were,
to all appearance, incompatible. He was ironical and cordial. His
indifference loved. His mind could get along without belief, but his
heart could not get along without friendship. A profound contradiction;
for an affection is a conviction. His nature was thus constituted. There
are men who seem to be born to be the reverse, the obverse, the wrong
side. They are Pollux, Patrocles, Nisus, Eudamidas, Ephestion, Pechmeja.
They only exist on condition that they are backed up with another man;
their name is a sequel, and is only written preceded by the conjunction
and; and their existence is not their own; it is the other side of an
existence which is not theirs. Grantaire was one of these men. He was
the obverse of Enjolras.

One might almost say that affinities begin with the letters of the
alphabet. In the series O and P are inseparable. You can, at will,
pronounce O and P or Orestes and Pylades.

Grantaire, Enjolras' true satellite, inhabited this circle of young men;
he lived there, he took no pleasure anywhere but there; he followed them
everywhere. His joy was to see these forms go and come through the fumes
of wine. They tolerated him on account of his good humor.

Enjolras, the believer, disdained this sceptic; and, a sober man
himself, scorned this drunkard. He accorded him a little lofty pity.
Grantaire was an unaccepted Pylades. Always harshly treated by Enjolras,
roughly repulsed, rejected yet ever returning to the charge, he said of
Enjolras: "What fine marble!"




CHAPTER II--BLONDEAU'S FUNERAL ORATION BY BOSSUET

On a certain afternoon, which had, as will be seen hereafter, some
coincidence with the events heretofore related, Laigle de Meaux was to
be seen leaning in a sensual manner against the doorpost of the Cafe
Musain. He had the air of a caryatid on a vacation; he carried nothing
but his revery, however. He was staring at the Place Saint-Michel.
To lean one's back against a thing is equivalent to lying down while
standing erect, which attitude is not hated by thinkers. Laigle de Meaux
was pondering without melancholy, over a little misadventure which
had befallen him two days previously at the law-school, and which had
modified his personal plans for the future, plans which were rather
indistinct in any case.

Revery does not prevent a cab from passing by, nor the dreamer from
taking note of that cab. Laigle de Meaux, whose eyes were straying about
in a sort of diffuse lounging, perceived, athwart his somnambulism, a
two-wheeled vehicle proceeding through the place, at a foot pace and
apparently in indecision. For whom was this cabriolet? Why was it
driving at a walk? Laigle took a survey. In it, beside the coachman, sat
a young man, and in front of the young man lay a rather bulky hand-bag.
The bag displayed to passers-by the following name inscribed in large
black letters on a card which was sewn to the stuff: MARIUS PONTMERCY.

This name caused Laigle to change his attitude. He drew himself up and
hurled this apostrophe at the young man in the cabriolet:--

"Monsieur Marius Pontmercy!"

The cabriolet thus addressed came to a halt.

The young man, who also seemed deeply buried in thought, raised his
eyes:--

"Hey?" said he.

"You are M. Marius Pontmercy?"

"Certainly."

"I was looking for you," resumed Laigle de Meaux.

"How so?" demanded Marius; for it was he: in fact, he had just quitted
his grandfather's, and had before him a face which he now beheld for the
first time. "I do not know you."

"Neither do I know you," responded Laigle.

Marius thought he had encountered a wag, the beginning of a
mystification in the open street. He was not in a very good humor at the
moment. He frowned. Laigle de Meaux went on imperturbably:--

"You were not at the school day before yesterday."

"That is possible."

"That is certain."

"You are a student?" demanded Marius.

"Yes, sir. Like yourself. Day before yesterday, I entered the school, by
chance. You know, one does have such freaks sometimes. The professor was
just calling the roll. You are not unaware that they are very ridiculous
on such occasions. At the third call, unanswered, your name is erased
from the list. Sixty francs in the gulf."

Marius began to listen.

"It was Blondeau who was making the call. You know Blondeau, he has a
very pointed and very malicious nose, and he delights to scent out the
absent. He slyly began with the letter P. I was not listening, not being
compromised by that letter. The call was not going badly. No erasures;
the universe was present. Blondeau was grieved. I said to myself:
'Blondeau, my love, you will not get the very smallest sort of an
execution to-day.' All at once Blondeau calls, 'Marius Pontmercy!' No
one answers. Blondeau, filled with hope, repeats more loudly: 'Marius
Pontmercy!' And he takes his pen. Monsieur, I have bowels of compassion.
I said to myself hastily: 'Here's a brave fellow who is going to get
scratched out. Attention. Here is a veritable mortal who is not exact.
He's not a good student. Here is none of your heavy-sides, a student who
studies, a greenhorn pedant, strong on letters, theology, science, and
sapience, one of those dull wits cut by the square; a pin by profession.
He is an honorable idler who lounges, who practises country jaunts, who
cultivates the grisette, who pays court to the fair sex, who is at
this very moment, perhaps, with my mistress. Let us save him. Death to
Blondeau!' At that moment, Blondeau dipped his pen in, all black with
erasures in the ink, cast his yellow eyes round the audience room, and
repeated for the third time: 'Marius Pontmercy!' I replied: 'Present!'
This is why you were not crossed off."

"Monsieur!--" said Marius.

"And why I was," added Laigle de Meaux.

"I do not understand you," said Marius.

Laigle resumed:--

"Nothing is more simple. I was close to the desk to reply, and close
to the door for the purpose of flight. The professor gazed at me with a
certain intensity. All of a sudden, Blondeau, who must be the malicious
nose alluded to by Boileau, skipped to the letter L. L is my letter. I
am from Meaux, and my name is Lesgle."

"L'Aigle!" interrupted Marius, "what fine name!"

"Monsieur, Blondeau came to this fine name, and called: 'Laigle!' I
reply: 'Present!' Then Blondeau gazes at me, with the gentleness of a
tiger, and says to me: 'If you are Pontmercy, you are not Laigle.' A
phrase which has a disobliging air for you, but which was lugubrious
only for me. That said, he crossed me off."

Marius exclaimed:--

"I am mortified, sir--"

"First of all," interposed Laigle, "I demand permission to embalm
Blondeau in a few phrases of deeply felt eulogium. I will assume that he
is dead. There will be no great change required in his gauntness, in
his pallor, in his coldness, and in his smell. And I say: 'Erudimini
qui judicatis terram. Here lies Blondeau, Blondeau the Nose, Blondeau
Nasica, the ox of discipline, bos disciplinae, the bloodhound of the
password, the angel of the roll-call, who was upright, square exact,
rigid, honest, and hideous. God crossed him off as he crossed me off.'"

Marius resumed:--

"I am very sorry--"

"Young man," said Laigle de Meaux, "let this serve you as a lesson. In
future, be exact."

"I really beg you a thousand pardons."

"Do not expose your neighbor to the danger of having his name erased
again."

"I am extremely sorry--"

Laigle burst out laughing.

"And I am delighted. I was on the brink of becoming a lawyer. This
erasure saves me. I renounce the triumphs of the bar. I shall not defend
the widow, and I shall not attack the orphan. No more toga, no more
stage. Here is my erasure all ready for me. It is to you that I am
indebted for it, Monsieur Pontmercy. I intend to pay a solemn call of
thanks upon you. Where do you live?"

"In this cab," said Marius.

"A sign of opulence," retorted Laigle calmly. "I congratulate you. You
have there a rent of nine thousand francs per annum."

At that moment, Courfeyrac emerged from the cafe.

Marius smiled sadly.

"I have paid this rent for the last two hours, and I aspire to get rid
of it; but there is a sort of history attached to it, and I don't know
where to go."

"Come to my place, sir," said Courfeyrac.

"I have the priority," observed Laigle, "but I have no home."

"Hold your tongue, Bossuet," said Courfeyrac.

"Bossuet," said Marius, "but I thought that your name was Laigle."

"De Meaux," replied Laigle; "by metaphor, Bossuet."

Courfeyrac entered the cab.

"Coachman," said he, "hotel de la Porte-Saint-Jacques."

And that very evening, Marius found himself installed in a chamber of
the hotel de la Porte-Saint-Jacques side by side with Courfeyrac.




CHAPTER III--MARIUS' ASTONISHMENTS

In a few days, Marius had become Courfeyrac's friend. Youth is the
season for prompt welding and the rapid healing of scars. Marius
breathed freely in Courfeyrac's society, a decidedly new thing for him.
Courfeyrac put no questions to him. He did not even think of such a
thing. At that age, faces disclose everything on the spot. Words are
superfluous. There are young men of whom it can be said that their
countenances chatter. One looks at them and one knows them.

One morning, however, Courfeyrac abruptly addressed this interrogation
to him:--

"By the way, have you any political opinions?"

"The idea!" said Marius, almost affronted by the question.

"What are you?"

"A democrat-Bonapartist."

"The gray hue of a reassured rat," said Courfeyrac.

On the following day, Courfeyrac introduced Marius at the Cafe Musain.
Then he whispered in his ear, with a smile: "I must give you your entry
to the revolution." And he led him to the hall of the Friends of the A B
C. He presented him to the other comrades, saying this simple word which
Marius did not understand: "A pupil."

Marius had fallen into a wasps'-nest of wits. However, although he was
silent and grave, he was, none the less, both winged and armed.

Marius, up to that time solitary and inclined to soliloquy, and to
asides, both by habit and by taste, was a little fluttered by this covey
of young men around him. All these various initiatives solicited his
attention at once, and pulled him about. The tumultuous movements of
these minds at liberty and at work set his ideas in a whirl. Sometimes,
in his trouble, they fled so far from him, that he had difficulty in
recovering them. He heard them talk of philosophy, of literature, of
art, of history, of religion, in unexpected fashion. He caught glimpses
of strange aspects; and, as he did not place them in proper perspective,
he was not altogether sure that it was not chaos that he grasped. On
abandoning his grandfather's opinions for the opinions of his father,
he had supposed himself fixed; he now suspected, with uneasiness, and
without daring to avow it to himself, that he was not. The angle
at which he saw everything began to be displaced anew. A certain
oscillation set all the horizons of his brains in motion. An odd
internal upsetting. He almost suffered from it.

It seemed as though there were no "consecrated things" for those young
men. Marius heard singular propositions on every sort of subject, which
embarrassed his still timid mind.

A theatre poster presented itself, adorned with the title of a tragedy
from the ancient repertory called classic: "Down with tragedy dear to
the bourgeois!" cried Bahorel. And Marius heard Combeferre reply:--

"You are wrong, Bahorel. The bourgeoisie loves tragedy, and the
bourgeoisie must be left at peace on that score. Bewigged tragedy has
a reason for its existence, and I am not one of those who, by order of
AEschylus, contest its right to existence. There are rough outlines in
nature; there are, in creation, ready-made parodies; a beak which is not
a beak, wings which are not wings, gills which are not gills, paws which
are not paws, a cry of pain which arouses a desire to laugh, there is
the duck. Now, since poultry exists by the side of the bird, I do
not see why classic tragedy should not exist in the face of antique
tragedy."

Or chance decreed that Marius should traverse Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau
between Enjolras and Courfeyrac.

Courfeyrac took his arm:--

"Pay attention. This is the Rue Platriere, now called Rue Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, on account of a singular household which lived in it sixty
years ago. This consisted of Jean-Jacques and Therese. From time
to time, little beings were born there. Therese gave birth to them,
Jean-Jacques represented them as foundlings."

And Enjolras addressed Courfeyrac roughly:--

"Silence in the presence of Jean-Jacques! I admire that man. He denied
his own children, that may be; but he adopted the people."

Not one of these young men articulated the word: The Emperor.
Jean Prouvaire alone sometimes said Napoleon; all the others said
"Bonaparte." Enjolras pronounced it "Buonaparte."

Marius was vaguely surprised. Initium sapientiae.




CHAPTER IV--THE BACK ROOM OF THE CAFE MUSAIN

One of the conversations among the young men, at which Marius was
present and in which he sometimes joined, was a veritable shock to his
mind.

This took place in the back room of the Cafe Musain. Nearly all the
Friends of the A B C had convened that evening. The argand lamp was
solemnly lighted. They talked of one thing and another, without passion
and with noise. With the exception of Enjolras and Marius, who held
their peace, all were haranguing rather at hap-hazard. Conversations
between comrades sometimes are subject to these peaceable tumults. It
was a game and an uproar as much as a conversation. They tossed words
to each other and caught them up in turn. They were chattering in all
quarters.

No woman was admitted to this back room, except Louison, the dish-washer
of the cafe, who passed through it from time to time, to go to her
washing in the "lavatory."

Grantaire, thoroughly drunk, was deafening the corner of which he had
taken possession, reasoning and contradicting at the top of his lungs,
and shouting:--

"I am thirsty. Mortals, I am dreaming: that the tun of Heidelberg has an
attack of apoplexy, and that I am one of the dozen leeches which will
be applied to it. I want a drink. I desire to forget life. Life is a
hideous invention of I know not whom. It lasts no time at all, and is
worth nothing. One breaks one's neck in living. Life is a theatre set in
which there are but few practicable entrances. Happiness is an antique
reliquary painted on one side only. Ecclesiastes says: 'All is vanity.'
I agree with that good man, who never existed, perhaps. Zero not wishing
to go stark naked, clothed himself in vanity. O vanity! The patching up
of everything with big words! a kitchen is a laboratory, a dancer is a
professor, an acrobat is a gymnast, a boxer is a pugilist, an apothecary
is a chemist, a wigmaker is an artist, a hodman is an architect, a
jockey is a sportsman, a wood-louse is a pterigybranche. Vanity has a
right and a wrong side; the right side is stupid, it is the negro with
his glass beads; the wrong side is foolish, it is the philosopher with
his rags. I weep over the one and I laugh over the other. What are
called honors and dignities, and even dignity and honor, are generally
of pinchbeck. Kings make playthings of human pride. Caligula made a
horse a consul; Charles II. made a knight of a sirloin. Wrap yourself
up now, then, between Consul Incitatus and Baronet Roastbeef. As for
the intrinsic value of people, it is no longer respectable in the least.
Listen to the panegyric which neighbor makes of neighbor. White on white
is ferocious; if the lily could speak, what a setting down it would give
the dove! A bigoted woman prating of a devout woman is more venomous
than the asp and the cobra. It is a shame that I am ignorant, otherwise
I would quote to you a mass of things; but I know nothing. For instance,
I have always been witty; when I was a pupil of Gros, instead of
daubing wretched little pictures, I passed my time in pilfering apples;
rapin[24] is the masculine of rapine. So much for myself; as for
the rest of you, you are worth no more than I am. I scoff at your
perfections, excellencies, and qualities. Every good quality tends
towards a defect; economy borders on avarice, the generous man is next
door to the prodigal, the brave man rubs elbows with the braggart; he
who says very pious says a trifle bigoted; there are just as many vices
in virtue as there are holes in Diogenes' cloak. Whom do you admire, the
slain or the slayer, Caesar or Brutus? Generally men are in favor of the
slayer. Long live Brutus, he has slain! There lies the virtue. Virtue,
granted, but madness also. There are queer spots on those great men. The
Brutus who killed Caesar was in love with the statue of a little boy.
This statue was from the hand of the Greek sculptor Strongylion,
who also carved that figure of an Amazon known as the Beautiful Leg,
Eucnemos, which Nero carried with him in his travels. This Strongylion
left but two statues which placed Nero and Brutus in accord. Brutus was
in love with the one, Nero with the other. All history is nothing but
wearisome repetition. One century is the plagiarist of the other. The
battle of Marengo copies the battle of Pydna; the Tolbiac of Clovis and
the Austerlitz of Napoleon are as like each other as two drops of water.
I don't attach much importance to victory. Nothing is so stupid as to
conquer; true glory lies in convincing. But try to prove something! If
you are content with success, what mediocrity, and with conquering, what
wretchedness! Alas, vanity and cowardice everywhere. Everything obeys
success, even grammar. Si volet usus, says Horace. Therefore I disdain
the human race. Shall we descend to the party at all? Do you wish me
to begin admiring the peoples? What people, if you please? Shall it be
Greece? The Athenians, those Parisians of days gone by, slew Phocion,
as we might say Coligny, and fawned upon tyrants to such an extent that
Anacephorus said of Pisistratus: "His urine attracts the bees." The most
prominent man in Greece for fifty years was that grammarian Philetas,
who was so small and so thin that he was obliged to load his shoes with
lead in order not to be blown away by the wind. There stood on the great
square in Corinth a statue carved by Silanion and catalogued by Pliny;
this statue represented Episthates. What did Episthates do? He invented
a trip. That sums up Greece and glory. Let us pass on to others. Shall I
admire England? Shall I admire France? France? Why? Because of Paris?
I have just told you my opinion of Athens. England? Why? Because of
London? I hate Carthage. And then, London, the metropolis of luxury, is
the headquarters of wretchedness. There are a hundred deaths a year of
hunger in the parish of Charing-Cross alone. Such is Albion. I add,
as the climax, that I have seen an Englishwoman dancing in a wreath of
roses and blue spectacles. A fig then for England! If I do not admire
John Bull, shall I admire Brother Jonathan? I have but little taste for
that slave-holding brother. Take away Time is money, what remains of
England? Take away Cotton is king, what remains of America? Germany is
the lymph, Italy is the bile. Shall we go into ecstasies over Russia?
Voltaire admired it. He also admired China. I admit that Russia has its
beauties, among others, a stout despotism; but I pity the despots.
Their health is delicate. A decapitated Alexis, a poignarded Peter,
a strangled Paul, another Paul crushed flat with kicks, divers Ivans
strangled, with their throats cut, numerous Nicholases and Basils
poisoned, all this indicates that the palace of the Emperors of Russia
is in a condition of flagrant insalubrity. All civilized peoples offer
this detail to the admiration of the thinker; war; now, war, civilized
war, exhausts and sums up all the forms of ruffianism, from the
brigandage of the Trabuceros in the gorges of Mont Jaxa to the marauding
of the Comanche Indians in the Doubtful Pass. 'Bah!' you will say to
me, 'but Europe is certainly better than Asia?' I admit that Asia is a
farce; but I do not precisely see what you find to laugh at in the Grand
Lama, you peoples of the west, who have mingled with your fashions and
your elegances all the complicated filth of majesty, from the dirty
chemise of Queen Isabella to the chamber-chair of the Dauphin. Gentlemen
of the human race, I tell you, not a bit of it! It is at Brussels that
the most beer is consumed, at Stockholm the most brandy, at Madrid the
most chocolate, at Amsterdam the most gin, at London the most wine, at
Constantinople the most coffee, at Paris the most absinthe; there are
all the useful notions. Paris carries the day, in short. In Paris,
even the rag-pickers are sybarites; Diogenes would have loved to be a
rag-picker of the Place Maubert better than to be a philosopher at the
Piraeus. Learn this in addition; the wineshops of the ragpickers
are called bibines; the most celebrated are the Saucepan and The
Slaughter-House. Hence, tea-gardens, goguettes, caboulots, bouibuis,
mastroquets, bastringues, manezingues, bibines of the rag-pickers,
caravanseries of the caliphs, I certify to you, I am a voluptuary, I eat
at Richard's at forty sous a head, I must have Persian carpets to roll
naked Cleopatra in! Where is Cleopatra? Ah! So it is you, Louison. Good
day."

Thus did Grantaire, more than intoxicated, launch into speech, catching
at the dish-washer in her passage, from his corner in the back room of
the Cafe Musain.

Bossuet, extending his hand towards him, tried to impose silence on him,
and Grantaire began again worse than ever:--

"Aigle de Meaux, down with your paws. You produce on me no effect with
your gesture of Hippocrates refusing Artaxerxes' bric-a-brac. I excuse
you from the task of soothing me. Moreover, I am sad. What do you wish
me to say to you? Man is evil, man is deformed; the butterfly is a
success, man is a failure. God made a mistake with that animal. A
crowd offers a choice of ugliness. The first comer is a wretch,
Femme--woman--rhymes with infame,--infamous. Yes, I have the spleen,
complicated with melancholy, with homesickness, plus hypochondria, and
I am vexed and I rage, and I yawn, and I am bored, and I am tired to
death, and I am stupid! Let God go to the devil!"

"Silence then, capital R!" resumed Bossuet, who was discussing a point
of law behind the scenes, and who was plunged more than waist high in a
phrase of judicial slang, of which this is the conclusion:--

"--And as for me, although I am hardly a legist, and at the most, an
amateur attorney, I maintain this: that, in accordance with the terms
of the customs of Normandy, at Saint-Michel, and for each year, an
equivalent must be paid to the profit of the lord of the manor, saving
the rights of others, and by all and several, the proprietors as well
as those seized with inheritance, and that, for all emphyteuses, leases,
freeholds, contracts of domain, mortgages--"

"Echo, plaintive nymph," hummed Grantaire.

Near Grantaire, an almost silent table, a sheet of paper, an inkstand
and a pen between two glasses of brandy, announced that a vaudeville was
being sketched out.

This great affair was being discussed in a low voice, and the two heads
at work touched each other: "Let us begin by finding names. When one has
the names, one finds the subject."

"That is true. Dictate. I will write."

"Monsieur Dorimon."

"An independent gentleman?"

"Of course."

"His daughter, Celestine."

"--tine. What next?"

"Colonel Sainval."

"Sainval is stale. I should say Valsin."

Beside the vaudeville aspirants, another group, which was also taking
advantage of the uproar to talk low, was discussing a duel. An old
fellow of thirty was counselling a young one of eighteen, and explaining
to him what sort of an adversary he had to deal with.

"The deuce! Look out for yourself. He is a fine swordsman. His play is
neat. He has the attack, no wasted feints, wrist, dash, lightning, a
just parade, mathematical parries, bigre! and he is left-handed."

In the angle opposite Grantaire, Joly and Bahorel were playing dominoes,
and talking of love.

"You are in luck, that you are," Joly was saying. "You have a mistress
who is always laughing."

"That is a fault of hers," returned Bahorel. "One's mistress does wrong
to laugh. That encourages one to deceive her. To see her gay removes
your remorse; if you see her sad, your conscience pricks you."

"Ingrate! a woman who laughs is such a good thing! And you never
quarrel!"

"That is because of the treaty which we have made. On forming our little
Holy Alliance we assigned ourselves each our frontier, which we never
cross. What is situated on the side of winter belongs to Vaud, on the
side of the wind to Gex. Hence the peace."

"Peace is happiness digesting."

"And you, Jolllly, where do you stand in your entanglement with
Mamselle--you know whom I mean?"

"She sulks at me with cruel patience."

"Yet you are a lover to soften the heart with gauntness."

"Alas!"

"In your place, I would let her alone."

"That is easy enough to say."

"And to do. Is not her name Musichetta?"

"Yes. Ah! my poor Bahorel, she is a superb girl, very literary, with
tiny feet, little hands, she dresses well, and is white and dimpled,
with the eyes of a fortune-teller. I am wild over her."

"My dear fellow, then in order to please her, you must be elegant,
and produce effects with your knees. Buy a good pair of trousers of
double-milled cloth at Staub's. That will assist."

"At what price?" shouted Grantaire.

The third corner was delivered up to a poetical discussion. Pagan
mythology was giving battle to Christian mythology. The question was
about Olympus, whose part was taken by Jean Prouvaire, out of pure
romanticism.

Jean Prouvaire was timid only in repose. Once excited, he burst forth,
a sort of mirth accentuated his enthusiasm, and he was at once both
laughing and lyric.

"Let us not insult the gods," said he. "The gods may not have taken
their departure. Jupiter does not impress me as dead. The gods are
dreams, you say. Well, even in nature, such as it is to-day, after the
flight of these dreams, we still find all the grand old pagan myths.
Such and such a mountain with the profile of a citadel, like the
Vignemale, for example, is still to me the headdress of Cybele; it has
not been proved to me that Pan does not come at night to breathe into
the hollow trunks of the willows, stopping up the holes in turn with his
fingers, and I have always believed that Io had something to do with the
cascade of Pissevache."

In the last corner, they were talking politics. The Charter which had
been granted was getting roughly handled. Combeferre was upholding it
weakly. Courfeyrac was energetically making a breach in it. On the table
lay an unfortunate copy of the famous Touquet Charter. Courfeyrac had
seized it, and was brandishing it, mingling with his arguments the
rattling of this sheet of paper.

"In the first place, I won't have any kings; if it were only from an
economical point of view, I don't want any; a king is a parasite. One
does not have kings gratis. Listen to this: the dearness of kings. At
the death of Francois I., the national debt of France amounted to an
income of thirty thousand livres; at the death of Louis XIV. it was two
milliards, six hundred millions, at twenty-eight livres the mark, which
was equivalent in 1760, according to Desmarets, to four milliards, five
hundred millions, which would to-day be equivalent to twelve milliards.
In the second place, and no offence to Combeferre, a charter granted is
but a poor expedient of civilization. To save the transition, to soften
the passage, to deaden the shock, to cause the nation to pass insensibly
from the monarchy to democracy by the practice of constitutional
fictions,--what detestable reasons all those are! No! no! let us never
enlighten the people with false daylight. Principles dwindle and pale
in your constitutional cellar. No illegitimacy, no compromise, no grant
from the king to the people. In all such grants there is an Article 14.
By the side of the hand which gives there is the claw which snatches
back. I refuse your charter point-blank. A charter is a mask; the lie
lurks beneath it. A people which accepts a charter abdicates. The law is
only the law when entire. No! no charter!"

It was winter; a couple of fagots were crackling in the fireplace. This
was tempting, and Courfeyrac could not resist. He crumpled the poor
Touquet Charter in his fist, and flung it in the fire. The paper
flashed up. Combeferre watched the masterpiece of Louis XVIII. burn
philosophically, and contented himself with saying:--

"The charter metamorphosed into flame."

And sarcasms, sallies, jests, that French thing which is called entrain,
and that English thing which is called humor, good and bad taste,
good and bad reasons, all the wild pyrotechnics of dialogue, mounting
together and crossing from all points of the room, produced a sort of
merry bombardment over their heads.




CHAPTER V--ENLARGEMENT OF HORIZON

The shocks of youthful minds among themselves have this admirable
property, that one can never foresee the spark, nor divine the lightning
flash. What will dart out presently? No one knows. The burst of laughter
starts from a tender feeling.

At the moment of jest, the serious makes its entry. Impulses depend on
the first chance word. The spirit of each is sovereign, jest suffices
to open the field to the unexpected. These are conversations with
abrupt turns, in which the perspective changes suddenly. Chance is the
stage-manager of such conversations.

A severe thought, starting oddly from a clash of words, suddenly
traversed the conflict of quips in which Grantaire, Bahorel, Prouvaire,
Bossuet, Combeferre, and Courfeyrac were confusedly fencing.

How does a phrase crop up in a dialogue? Whence comes it that it
suddenly impresses itself on the attention of those who hear it? We
have just said, that no one knows anything about it. In the midst of the
uproar, Bossuet all at once terminated some apostrophe to Combeferre,
with this date:--

"June 18th, 1815, Waterloo."

At this name of Waterloo, Marius, who was leaning his elbows on a table,
beside a glass of water, removed his wrist from beneath his chin, and
began to gaze fixedly at the audience.

"Pardieu!" exclaimed Courfeyrac ("Parbleu" was falling into disuse
at this period), "that number 18 is strange and strikes me. It is
Bonaparte's fatal number. Place Louis in front and Brumaire behind, you
have the whole destiny of the man, with this significant peculiarity,
that the end treads close on the heels of the commencement."

Enjolras, who had remained mute up to that point, broke the silence and
addressed this remark to Combeferre:--

"You mean to say, the crime and the expiation."

This word crime overpassed the measure of what Marius, who was already
greatly agitated by the abrupt evocation of Waterloo, could accept.

He rose, walked slowly to the map of France spread out on the wall, and
at whose base an island was visible in a separate compartment, laid his
finger on this compartment and said:--

"Corsica, a little island which has rendered France very great."

This was like a breath of icy air. All ceased talking. They felt that
something was on the point of occurring.

Bahorel, replying to Bossuet, was just assuming an attitude of the torso
to which he was addicted. He gave it up to listen.

Enjolras, whose blue eye was not fixed on any one, and who seemed to be
gazing at space, replied, without glancing at Marius:--

"France needs no Corsica to be great. France is great because she is
France. Quia nomina leo."

Marius felt no desire to retreat; he turned towards Enjolras, and his
voice burst forth with a vibration which came from a quiver of his very
being:--

"God forbid that I should diminish France! But amalgamating Napoleon
with her is not diminishing her. Come! let us argue the question. I am
a new comer among you, but I will confess that you amaze me. Where do we
stand? Who are we? Who are you? Who am I? Let us come to an explanation
about the Emperor. I hear you say Buonaparte, accenting the u like the
Royalists. I warn you that my grandfather does better still; he
says Buonaparte'. I thought you were young men. Where, then, is your
enthusiasm? And what are you doing with it? Whom do you admire, if you
do not admire the Emperor? And what more do you want? If you will
have none of that great man, what great men would you like? He had
everything. He was complete. He had in his brain the sum of human
faculties. He made codes like Justinian, he dictated like Caesar, his
conversation was mingled with the lightning-flash of Pascal, with the
thunderclap of Tacitus, he made history and he wrote it, his bulletins
are Iliads, he combined the cipher of Newton with the metaphor of
Mahomet, he left behind him in the East words as great as the pyramids,
at Tilsit he taught Emperors majesty, at the Academy of Sciences he
replied to Laplace, in the Council of State be held his own against
Merlin, he gave a soul to the geometry of the first, and to the
chicanery of the last, he was a legist with the attorneys and sidereal
with the astronomers; like Cromwell blowing out one of two candles, he
went to the Temple to bargain for a curtain tassel; he saw everything;
he knew everything; which did not prevent him from laughing
good-naturedly beside the cradle of his little child; and all at once,
frightened Europe lent an ear, armies put themselves in motion, parks of
artillery rumbled, pontoons stretched over the rivers, clouds of cavalry
galloped in the storm, cries, trumpets, a trembling of thrones in every
direction, the frontiers of kingdoms oscillated on the map, the sound
of a superhuman sword was heard, as it was drawn from its sheath; they
beheld him, him, rise erect on the horizon with a blazing brand in his
hand, and a glow in his eyes, unfolding amid the thunder, his two wings,
the grand army and the old guard, and he was the archangel of war!"

All held their peace, and Enjolras bowed his head. Silence always
produces somewhat the effect of acquiescence, of the enemy being driven
to the wall. Marius continued with increased enthusiasm, and almost
without pausing for breath:--

"Let us be just, my friends! What a splendid destiny for a nation to be
the Empire of such an Emperor, when that nation is France and when it
adds its own genius to the genius of that man! To appear and to reign,
to march and to triumph, to have for halting-places all capitals, to
take his grenadiers and to make kings of them, to decree the falls of
dynasties, and to transfigure Europe at the pace of a charge; to make
you feel that when you threaten you lay your hand on the hilt of the
sword of God; to follow in a single man, Hannibal, Caesar, Charlemagne;
to be the people of some one who mingles with your dawns the startling
announcement of a battle won, to have the cannon of the Invalides to
rouse you in the morning, to hurl into abysses of light prodigious words
which flame forever, Marengo, Arcola, Austerlitz, Jena, Wagram! To cause
constellations of victories to flash forth at each instant from the
zenith of the centuries, to make the French Empire a pendant to the
Roman Empire, to be the great nation and to give birth to the grand
army, to make its legions fly forth over all the earth, as a mountain
sends out its eagles on all sides to conquer, to dominate, to strike
with lightning, to be in Europe a sort of nation gilded through glory,
to sound athwart the centuries a trumpet-blast of Titans, to conquer
the world twice, by conquest and by dazzling, that is sublime; and what
greater thing is there?"

"To be free," said Combeferre.

Marius lowered his head in his turn; that cold and simple word had
traversed his epic effusion like a blade of steel, and he felt it
vanishing within him. When he raised his eyes, Combeferre was no longer
there. Probably satisfied with his reply to the apotheosis, he had
just taken his departure, and all, with the exception of Enjolras,
had followed him. The room had been emptied. Enjolras, left alone with
Marius, was gazing gravely at him. Marius, however, having rallied his
ideas to some extent, did not consider himself beaten; there lingered in
him a trace of inward fermentation which was on the point, no doubt, of
translating itself into syllogisms arrayed against Enjolras, when all of
a sudden, they heard some one singing on the stairs as he went. It was
Combeferre, and this is what he was singing:--

               "Si Cesar m'avait donne[25]
                 La gloire et la guerre,
               Et qu'il me fallait quitter
                 L'amour de ma mere,
               Je dirais au grand Cesar:
                 Reprends ton sceptre et ton char,
               J'aime mieux ma mere, o gue!
                 J'aime mieux ma mere!"

The wild and tender accents with which Combeferre sang communicated to
this couplet a sort of strange grandeur. Marius, thoughtfully, and
with his eyes diked on the ceiling, repeated almost mechanically: "My
mother?--"

At that moment, he felt Enjolras' hand on his shoulder.

"Citizen," said Enjolras to him, "my mother is the Republic."




CHAPTER VI--RES ANGUSTA

That evening left Marius profoundly shaken, and with a melancholy shadow
in his soul. He felt what the earth may possibly feel, at the moment
when it is torn open with the iron, in order that grain may be deposited
within it; it feels only the wound; the quiver of the germ and the joy
of the fruit only arrive later.

Marius was gloomy. He had but just acquired a faith; must he then reject
it already? He affirmed to himself that he would not. He declared to
himself that he would not doubt, and he began to doubt in spite of
himself. To stand between two religions, from one of which you have
not as yet emerged, and another into which you have not yet entered, is
intolerable; and twilight is pleasing only to bat-like souls. Marius
was clear-eyed, and he required the true light. The half-lights of doubt
pained him. Whatever may have been his desire to remain where he was,
he could not halt there, he was irresistibly constrained to continue, to
advance, to examine, to think, to march further. Whither would this lead
him? He feared, after having taken so many steps which had brought him
nearer to his father, to now take a step which should estrange him from
that father. His discomfort was augmented by all the reflections which
occurred to him. An escarpment rose around him. He was in accord neither
with his grandfather nor with his friends; daring in the eyes of
the one, he was behind the times in the eyes of the others, and he
recognized the fact that he was doubly isolated, on the side of age and
on the side of youth. He ceased to go to the Cafe Musain.

In the troubled state of his conscience, he no longer thought of
certain serious sides of existence. The realities of life do not allow
themselves to be forgotten. They soon elbowed him abruptly.

One morning, the proprietor of the hotel entered Marius' room and said
to him:--

"Monsieur Courfeyrac answered for you."

"Yes."

"But I must have my money."

"Request Courfeyrac to come and talk with me," said Marius.

Courfeyrac having made his appearance, the host left them. Marius then
told him what it had not before occurred to him to relate, that he was
the same as alone in the world, and had no relatives.

"What is to become of you?" said Courfeyrac.

"I do not know in the least," replied Marius.

"What are you going to do?"

"I do not know."

"Have you any money?"

"Fifteen francs."

"Do you want me to lend you some?"

"Never."

"Have you clothes?"

"Here is what I have."

"Have you trinkets?"

"A watch."

"Silver?"

"Gold; here it is."

"I know a clothes-dealer who will take your frock-coat and a pair of
trousers."

"That is good."

"You will then have only a pair of trousers, a waistcoat, a hat and a
coat."

"And my boots."

"What! you will not go barefoot? What opulence!"

"That will be enough."

"I know a watchmaker who will buy your watch."

"That is good."

"No; it is not good. What will you do after that?"

"Whatever is necessary. Anything honest, that is to say."

"Do you know English?"

"No."

"Do you know German?"

"No."

"So much the worse."

"Why?"

"Because one of my friends, a publisher, is getting up a sort of an
encyclopaedia, for which you might have translated English or German
articles. It is badly paid work, but one can live by it."

"I will learn English and German."

"And in the meanwhile?"

"In the meanwhile I will live on my clothes and my watch."

The clothes-dealer was sent for. He paid twenty francs for the cast-off
garments. They went to the watchmaker's. He bought the watch for
forty-five francs.

"That is not bad," said Marius to Courfeyrac, on their return to the
hotel, "with my fifteen francs, that makes eighty."

"And the hotel bill?" observed Courfeyrac.

"Hello, I had forgotten that," said Marius.

The landlord presented his bill, which had to be paid on the spot. It
amounted to seventy francs.

"I have ten francs left," said Marius.

"The deuce," exclaimed Courfeyrac, "you will eat up five francs while
you are learning English, and five while learning German. That will be
swallowing a tongue very fast, or a hundred sous very slowly."

In the meantime Aunt Gillenormand, a rather good-hearted person at
bottom in difficulties, had finally hunted up Marius' abode.

One morning, on his return from the law-school, Marius found a letter
from his aunt, and the sixty pistoles, that is to say, six hundred
francs in gold, in a sealed box.

Marius sent back the thirty louis to his aunt, with a respectful letter,
in which he stated that he had sufficient means of subsistence and that
he should be able thenceforth to supply all his needs. At that moment,
he had three francs left.

His aunt did not inform his grandfather of this refusal for fear of
exasperating him. Besides, had he not said: "Let me never hear the name
of that blood-drinker again!"

Marius left the hotel de la Porte Saint-Jacques, as he did not wish to
run in debt there.




BOOK FIFTH.--THE EXCELLENCE OF MISFORTUNE




CHAPTER I--MARIUS INDIGENT

[Illustration: Excellence of Misfortune  3b5-1-misfortune]


Life became hard for Marius. It was nothing to eat his clothes and his
watch. He ate of that terrible, inexpressible thing that is called de la
vache enrage; that is to say, he endured great hardships and privations.
A terrible thing it is, containing days without bread, nights without
sleep, evenings without a candle, a hearth without a fire, weeks without
work, a future without hope, a coat out at the elbows, an old hat which
evokes the laughter of young girls, a door which one finds locked on one
at night because one's rent is not paid, the insolence of the porter
and the cook-shop man, the sneers of neighbors, humiliations, dignity
trampled on, work of whatever nature accepted, disgusts, bitterness,
despondency. Marius learned how all this is eaten, and how such are
often the only things which one has to devour. At that moment of his
existence when a man needs his pride, because he needs love, he felt
that he was jeered at because he was badly dressed, and ridiculous
because he was poor. At the age when youth swells the heart with
imperial pride, he dropped his eyes more than once on his dilapidated
boots, and he knew the unjust shame and the poignant blushes of
wretchedness. Admirable and terrible trial from which the feeble emerge
base, from which the strong emerge sublime. A crucible into which
destiny casts a man, whenever it desires a scoundrel or a demi-god.

For many great deeds are performed in petty combats. There are instances
of bravery ignored and obstinate, which defend themselves step by
step in that fatal onslaught of necessities and turpitudes. Noble and
mysterious triumphs which no eye beholds, which are requited with no
renown, which are saluted with no trumpet blast. Life, misfortune,
isolation, abandonment, poverty, are the fields of battle which have
their heroes; obscure heroes, who are, sometimes, grander than the
heroes who win renown.

Firm and rare natures are thus created; misery, almost always a
step-mother, is sometimes a mother; destitution gives birth to might of
soul and spirit; distress is the nurse of pride; unhappiness is a good
milk for the magnanimous.

There came a moment in Marius' life, when he swept his own landing, when
he bought his sou's worth of Brie cheese at the fruiterer's, when he
waited until twilight had fallen to slip into the baker's and purchase
a loaf, which he carried off furtively to his attic as though he had
stolen it. Sometimes there could be seen gliding into the butcher's shop
on the corner, in the midst of the bantering cooks who elbowed him, an
awkward young man, carrying big books under his arm, who had a timid yet
angry air, who, on entering, removed his hat from a brow whereon stood
drops of perspiration, made a profound bow to the butcher's astonished
wife, asked for a mutton cutlet, paid six or seven sous for it, wrapped
it up in a paper, put it under his arm, between two books, and went
away. It was Marius. On this cutlet, which he cooked for himself, he
lived for three days.

On the first day he ate the meat, on the second he ate the fat, on the
third he gnawed the bone. Aunt Gillenormand made repeated attempts, and
sent him the sixty pistoles several times. Marius returned them on every
occasion, saying that he needed nothing.

He was still in mourning for his father when the revolution which we
have just described was effected within him. From that time forth, he
had not put off his black garments. But his garments were quitting him.
The day came when he had no longer a coat. The trousers would go next.
What was to be done? Courfeyrac, to whom he had, on his side, done some
good turns, gave him an old coat. For thirty sous, Marius got it turned
by some porter or other, and it was a new coat. But this coat was green.
Then Marius ceased to go out until after nightfall. This made his coat
black. As he wished always to appear in mourning, he clothed himself
with the night.

In spite of all this, he got admitted to practice as a lawyer. He was
supposed to live in Courfeyrac's room, which was decent, and where
a certain number of law-books backed up and completed by several
dilapidated volumes of romance, passed as the library required by the
regulations. He had his letters addressed to Courfeyrac's quarters.

When Marius became a lawyer, he informed his grandfather of the fact
in a letter which was cold but full of submission and respect. M.
Gillenormand trembled as he took the letter, read it, tore it in four
pieces, and threw it into the waste-basket. Two or three days later,
Mademoiselle Gillenormand heard her father, who was alone in his room,
talking aloud to himself. He always did this whenever he was greatly
agitated. She listened, and the old man was saying: "If you were not a
fool, you would know that one cannot be a baron and a lawyer at the same
time."




CHAPTER II--MARIUS POOR

It is the same with wretchedness as with everything else. It ends by
becoming bearable. It finally assumes a form, and adjusts itself. One
vegetates, that is to say, one develops in a certain meagre fashion,
which is, however, sufficient for life. This is the mode in which the
existence of Marius Pontmercy was arranged:

He had passed the worst straits; the narrow pass was opening out a
little in front of him. By dint of toil, perseverance, courage, and
will, he had managed to draw from his work about seven hundred francs a
year. He had learned German and English; thanks to Courfeyrac, who had
put him in communication with his friend the publisher, Marius filled
the modest post of utility man in the literature of the publishing
house. He drew up prospectuses, translated newspapers, annotated
editions, compiled biographies, etc.; net product, year in and year
out, seven hundred francs. He lived on it. How? Not so badly. We will
explain.

Marius occupied in the Gorbeau house, for an annual sum of thirty
francs, a den minus a fireplace, called a cabinet, which contained only
the most indispensable articles of furniture. This furniture belonged
to him. He gave three francs a month to the old principal tenant to come
and sweep his hole, and to bring him a little hot water every morning,
a fresh egg, and a penny roll. He breakfasted on this egg and roll. His
breakfast varied in cost from two to four sous, according as eggs
were dear or cheap. At six o'clock in the evening he descended the
Rue Saint-Jacques to dine at Rousseau's, opposite Basset's, the
stamp-dealer's, on the corner of the Rue des Mathurins. He ate no soup.
He took a six-sou plate of meat, a half-portion of vegetables for three
sous, and a three-sou dessert. For three sous he got as much bread as
he wished. As for wine, he drank water. When he paid at the desk
where Madam Rousseau, at that period still plump and rosy majestically
presided, he gave a sou to the waiter, and Madam Rousseau gave him a
smile. Then he went away. For sixteen sous he had a smile and a dinner.

This Restaurant Rousseau, where so few bottles and so many water carafes
were emptied, was a calming potion rather than a restaurant. It no
longer exists. The proprietor had a fine nickname: he was called
Rousseau the Aquatic.

Thus, breakfast four sous, dinner sixteen sous; his food cost him twenty
sous a day; which made three hundred and sixty-five francs a year. Add
the thirty francs for rent, and the thirty-six francs to the old woman,
plus a few trifling expenses; for four hundred and fifty francs, Marius
was fed, lodged, and waited on. His clothing cost him a hundred francs,
his linen fifty francs, his washing fifty francs; the whole did not
exceed six hundred and fifty francs. He was rich. He sometimes lent ten
francs to a friend. Courfeyrac had once been able to borrow sixty francs
of him. As far as fire was concerned, as Marius had no fireplace, he had
"simplified matters."

Marius always had two complete suits of clothes, the one old, "for every
day"; the other, brand new for special occasions. Both were black. He
had but three shirts, one on his person, the second in the commode, and
the third in the washerwoman's hands. He renewed them as they wore out.
They were always ragged, which caused him to button his coat to the
chin.

It had required years for Marius to attain to this flourishing
condition. Hard years; difficult, some of them, to traverse, others to
climb. Marius had not failed for a single day. He had endured everything
in the way of destitution; he had done everything except contract debts.
He did himself the justice to say that he had never owed any one a sou.
A debt was, to him, the beginning of slavery. He even said to himself,
that a creditor is worse than a master; for the master possesses only
your person, a creditor possesses your dignity and can administer to
it a box on the ear. Rather than borrow, he went without food. He had
passed many a day fasting. Feeling that all extremes meet, and that,
if one is not on one's guard, lowered fortunes may lead to baseness of
soul, he kept a jealous watch on his pride. Such and such a formality
or action, which, in any other situation would have appeared merely a
deference to him, now seemed insipidity, and he nerved himself against
it. His face wore a sort of severe flush. He was timid even to rudeness.

During all these trials he had felt himself encouraged and even
uplifted, at times, by a secret force that he possessed within himself.
The soul aids the body, and at certain moments, raises it. It is the
only bird which bears up its own cage.

Besides his father's name, another name was graven in Marius' heart,
the name of Thenardier. Marius, with his grave and enthusiastic nature,
surrounded with a sort of aureole the man to whom, in his thoughts,
he owed his father's life,--that intrepid sergeant who had saved the
colonel amid the bullets and the cannon-balls of Waterloo. He never
separated the memory of this man from the memory of his father, and
he associated them in his veneration. It was a sort of worship in two
steps, with the grand altar for the colonel and the lesser one for
Thenardier. What redoubled the tenderness of his gratitude towards
Thenardier, was the idea of the distress into which he knew that
Thenardier had fallen, and which had engulfed the latter. Marius had
learned at Montfermeil of the ruin and bankruptcy of the unfortunate
inn-keeper. Since that time, he had made unheard-of efforts to find
traces of him and to reach him in that dark abyss of misery in which
Thenardier had disappeared. Marius had beaten the whole country; he
had gone to Chelles, to Bondy, to Gourney, to Nogent, to Lagny. He had
persisted for three years, expending in these explorations the little
money which he had laid by. No one had been able to give him any news of
Thenardier: he was supposed to have gone abroad. His creditors had also
sought him, with less love than Marius, but with as much assiduity, and
had not been able to lay their hands on him. Marius blamed himself, and
was almost angry with himself for his lack of success in his researches.
It was the only debt left him by the colonel, and Marius made it a
matter of honor to pay it. "What," he thought, "when my father lay dying
on the field of battle, did Thenardier contrive to find him amid the
smoke and the grape-shot, and bear him off on his shoulders, and yet he
owed him nothing, and I, who owe so much to Thenardier, cannot join him
in this shadow where he is lying in the pangs of death, and in my
turn bring him back from death to life! Oh! I will find him!" To find
Thenardier, in fact, Marius would have given one of his arms, to rescue
him from his misery, he would have sacrificed all his blood. To see
Thenardier, to render Thenardier some service, to say to him: "You do
not know me; well, I do know you! Here I am. Dispose of me!" This was
Marius' sweetest and most magnificent dream.




CHAPTER III--MARIUS GROWN UP

At this epoch, Marius was twenty years of age. It was three years since
he had left his grandfather. Both parties had remained on the same
terms, without attempting to approach each other, and without seeking to
see each other. Besides, what was the use of seeing each other? Marius
was the brass vase, while Father Gillenormand was the iron pot.

We admit that Marius was mistaken as to his grandfather's heart. He had
imagined that M. Gillenormand had never loved him, and that that crusty,
harsh, and smiling old fellow who cursed, shouted, and stormed
and brandished his cane, cherished for him, at the most, only that
affection, which is at once slight and severe, of the dotards of comedy.
Marius was in error. There are fathers who do not love their children;
there exists no grandfather who does not adore his grandson. At bottom,
as we have said, M. Gillenormand idolized Marius. He idolized him after
his own fashion, with an accompaniment of snappishness and boxes on the
ear; but, this child once gone, he felt a black void in his heart;
he would allow no one to mention the child to him, and all the while
secretly regretted that he was so well obeyed. At first, he hoped that
this Buonapartist, this Jacobin, this terrorist, this Septembrist, would
return. But the weeks passed by, years passed; to M. Gillenormand's
great despair, the "blood-drinker" did not make his appearance. "I could
not do otherwise than turn him out," said the grandfather to himself,
and he asked himself: "If the thing were to do over again, would I do
it?" His pride instantly answered "yes," but his aged head, which he
shook in silence, replied sadly "no." He had his hours of depression.
He missed Marius. Old men need affection as they need the sun. It is
warmth. Strong as his nature was, the absence of Marius had wrought some
change in him. Nothing in the world could have induced him to take a
step towards "that rogue"; but he suffered. He never inquired about him,
but he thought of him incessantly. He lived in the Marais in a more and
more retired manner; he was still merry and violent as of old, but
his merriment had a convulsive harshness, and his violences always
terminated in a sort of gentle and gloomy dejection. He sometimes said:
"Oh! if he only would return, what a good box on the ear I would give
him!"

As for his aunt, she thought too little to love much; Marius was no
longer for her much more than a vague black form; and she eventually
came to occupy herself with him much less than with the cat or the
paroquet which she probably had. What augmented Father Gillenormand's
secret suffering was, that he locked it all up within his breast, and
did not allow its existence to be divined. His sorrow was like those
recently invented furnaces which consume their own smoke. It sometimes
happened that officious busybodies spoke to him of Marius, and asked
him: "What is your grandson doing?" "What has become of him?" The old
bourgeois replied with a sigh, that he was a sad case, and giving a
fillip to his cuff, if he wished to appear gay: "Monsieur le Baron de
Pontmercy is practising pettifogging in some corner or other."

While the old man regretted, Marius applauded himself. As is the case
with all good-hearted people, misfortune had eradicated his bitterness.
He only thought of M. Gillenormand in an amiable light, but he had set
his mind on not receiving anything more from the man who had been
unkind to his father. This was the mitigated translation of his first
indignation. Moreover, he was happy at having suffered, and at suffering
still. It was for his father's sake. The hardness of his life satisfied
and pleased him. He said to himself with a sort of joy that--it was
certainly the least he could do; that it was an expiation;--that, had
it not been for that, he would have been punished in some other way and
later on for his impious indifference towards his father, and such a
father! that it would not have been just that his father should have all
the suffering, and he none of it; and that, in any case, what were his
toils and his destitution compared with the colonel's heroic life? that,
in short, the only way for him to approach his father and resemble him,
was to be brave in the face of indigence, as the other had been valiant
before the enemy; and that that was, no doubt, what the colonel had
meant to imply by the words: "He will be worthy of it." Words which
Marius continued to wear, not on his breast, since the colonel's writing
had disappeared, but in his heart.

And then, on the day when his grandfather had turned him out of doors,
he had been only a child, now he was a man. He felt it. Misery, we
repeat, had been good for him. Poverty in youth, when it succeeds, has
this magnificent property about it, that it turns the whole will towards
effort, and the whole soul towards aspiration. Poverty instantly lays
material life bare and renders it hideous; hence inexpressible bounds
towards the ideal life. The wealthy young man has a hundred coarse and
brilliant distractions, horse races, hunting, dogs, tobacco, gaming,
good repasts, and all the rest of it; occupations for the baser side
of the soul, at the expense of the loftier and more delicate sides.
The poor young man wins his bread with difficulty; he eats; when he has
eaten, he has nothing more but meditation. He goes to the spectacles
which God furnishes gratis; he gazes at the sky, space, the stars,
flowers, children, the humanity among which he is suffering, the
creation amid which he beams. He gazes so much on humanity that he
perceives its soul, he gazes upon creation to such an extent that he
beholds God. He dreams, he feels himself great; he dreams on, and feels
himself tender. From the egotism of the man who suffers he passes to the
compassion of the man who meditates. An admirable sentiment breaks forth
in him, forgetfulness of self and pity for all. As he thinks of the
innumerable enjoyments which nature offers, gives, and lavishes to souls
which stand open, and refuses to souls that are closed, he comes to
pity, he the millionnaire of the mind, the millionnaire of money. All
hatred departs from his heart, in proportion as light penetrates his
spirit. And is he unhappy? No. The misery of a young man is never
miserable. The first young lad who comes to hand, however poor he may
be, with his strength, his health, his rapid walk, his brilliant eyes,
his warmly circulating blood, his black hair, his red lips, his white
teeth, his pure breath, will always arouse the envy of an aged emperor.
And then, every morning, he sets himself afresh to the task of earning
his bread; and while his hands earn his bread, his dorsal column
gains pride, his brain gathers ideas. His task finished, he returns to
ineffable ecstasies, to contemplation, to joys; he beholds his feet set
in afflictions, in obstacles, on the pavement, in the nettles, sometimes
in the mire; his head in the light. He is firm, serene, gentle, peaceful,
attentive, serious, content with little, kindly; and he thanks God for
having bestowed on him those two forms of riches which many a rich
man lacks: work, which makes him free; and thought, which makes him
dignified.

This is what had happened with Marius. To tell the truth, he inclined a
little too much to the side of contemplation. From the day when he had
succeeded in earning his living with some approach to certainty, he had
stopped, thinking it good to be poor, and retrenching time from his work
to give to thought; that is to say, he sometimes passed entire days
in meditation, absorbed, engulfed, like a visionary, in the mute
voluptuousness of ecstasy and inward radiance. He had thus propounded
the problem of his life: to toil as little as possible at material
labor, in order to toil as much as possible at the labor which is
impalpable; in other words, to bestow a few hours on real life, and to
cast the rest to the infinite. As he believed that he lacked nothing, he
did not perceive that contemplation, thus understood, ends by becoming
one of the forms of idleness; that he was contenting himself with
conquering the first necessities of life, and that he was resting from
his labors too soon.

It was evident that, for this energetic and enthusiastic nature, this
could only be a transitory state, and that, at the first shock against
the inevitable complications of destiny, Marius would awaken.

In the meantime, although he was a lawyer, and whatever Father
Gillenormand thought about the matter, he was not practising, he was
not even pettifogging. Meditation had turned him aside from pleading. To
haunt attorneys, to follow the court, to hunt up cases--what a bore! Why
should he do it? He saw no reason for changing the manner of gaining his
livelihood! The obscure and ill-paid publishing establishment had come
to mean for him a sure source of work which did not involve too much
labor, as we have explained, and which sufficed for his wants.

One of the publishers for whom he worked, M. Magimel, I think, offered
to take him into his own house, to lodge him well, to furnish him with
regular occupation, and to give him fifteen hundred francs a year. To be
well lodged! Fifteen hundred francs! No doubt. But renounce his liberty!
Be on fixed wages! A sort of hired man of letters! According to Marius'
opinion, if he accepted, his position would become both better and worse
at the same time, he acquired comfort, and lost his dignity; it was a
fine and complete unhappiness converted into a repulsive and ridiculous
state of torture: something like the case of a blind man who should
recover the sight of one eye. He refused.

Marius dwelt in solitude. Owing to his taste for remaining outside of
everything, and through having been too much alarmed, he had not entered
decidedly into the group presided over by Enjolras. They had remained
good friends; they were ready to assist each other on occasion in every
possible way; but nothing more. Marius had two friends: one young,
Courfeyrac; and one old, M. Mabeuf. He inclined more to the old man.
In the first place, he owed to him the revolution which had taken
place within him; to him he was indebted for having known and loved his
father. "He operated on me for a cataract," he said.

The churchwarden had certainly played a decisive part.

It was not, however, that M. Mabeuf had been anything but the calm and
impassive agent of Providence in this connection. He had enlightened
Marius by chance and without being aware of the fact, as does a candle
which some one brings; he had been the candle and not the some one.

As for Marius' inward political revolution, M. Mabeuf was totally
incapable of comprehending it, of willing or of directing it.

As we shall see M. Mabeuf again, later on, a few words will not be
superfluous.




CHAPTER IV--M. MABEUF

On the day when M. Mabeuf said to Marius: "Certainly I approve of
political opinions," he expressed the real state of his mind. All
political opinions were matters of indifference to him, and he approved
them all, without distinction, provided they left him in peace, as the
Greeks called the Furies "the beautiful, the good, the charming," the
Eumenides. M. Mabeuf's political opinion consisted in a passionate love
for plants, and, above all, for books. Like all the rest of the world,
he possessed the termination in ist, without which no one could exist at
that time, but he was neither a Royalist, a Bonapartist, a Chartist,
an Orleanist, nor an Anarchist; he was a bouquinist, a collector of old
books. He did not understand how men could busy themselves with
hating each other because of silly stuff like the charter, democracy,
legitimacy, monarchy, the republic, etc., when there were in the world
all sorts of mosses, grasses, and shrubs which they might be looking at,
and heaps of folios, and even of 32mos, which they might turn over. He
took good care not to become useless; having books did not prevent his
reading, being a botanist did not prevent his being a gardener. When
he made Pontmercy's acquaintance, this sympathy had existed between the
colonel and himself--that what the colonel did for flowers, he did for
fruits. M. Mabeuf had succeeded in producing seedling pears as savory
as the pears of St. Germain; it is from one of his combinations,
apparently, that the October Mirabelle, now celebrated and no less
perfumed than the summer Mirabelle, owes its origin. He went to mass
rather from gentleness than from piety, and because, as he loved the
faces of men, but hated their noise, he found them assembled and silent
only in church. Feeling that he must be something in the State, he had
chosen the career of warden. However, he had never succeeded in loving
any woman as much as a tulip bulb, nor any man as much as an Elzevir.
He had long passed sixty, when, one day, some one asked him: "Have you
never been married?" "I have forgotten," said he. When it sometimes
happened to him--and to whom does it not happen?--to say: "Oh! if I were
only rich!" it was not when ogling a pretty girl, as was the case with
Father Gillenormand, but when contemplating an old book. He lived alone
with an old housekeeper. He was somewhat gouty, and when he was asleep,
his aged fingers, stiffened with rheumatism, lay crooked up in the folds
of his sheets. He had composed and published a Flora of the Environs of
Cauteretz, with colored plates, a work which enjoyed a tolerable
measure of esteem and which sold well. People rang his bell, in the Rue
Mesieres, two or three times a day, to ask for it. He drew as much as
two thousand francs a year from it; this constituted nearly the whole of
his fortune. Although poor, he had had the talent to form for himself,
by dint of patience, privations, and time, a precious collection of rare
copies of every sort. He never went out without a book under his arm,
and he often returned with two. The sole decoration of the four rooms
on the ground floor, which composed his lodgings, consisted of framed
herbariums, and engravings of the old masters. The sight of a sword or
a gun chilled his blood. He had never approached a cannon in his life,
even at the Invalides. He had a passable stomach, a brother who was a
cure, perfectly white hair, no teeth, either in his mouth or his mind, a
trembling in every limb, a Picard accent, an infantile laugh, the air of
an old sheep, and he was easily frightened. Add to this, that he had no
other friendship, no other acquaintance among the living, than an old
bookseller of the Porte-Saint-Jacques, named Royal. His dream was to
naturalize indigo in France.

His servant was also a sort of innocent. The poor good old woman was a
spinster. Sultan, her cat, which might have mewed Allegri's miserere in
the Sixtine Chapel, had filled her heart and sufficed for the quantity
of passion which existed in her. None of her dreams had ever proceeded
as far as man. She had never been able to get further than her cat. Like
him, she had a mustache. Her glory consisted in her caps, which were
always white. She passed her time, on Sundays, after mass, in counting
over the linen in her chest, and in spreading out on her bed the dresses
in the piece which she bought and never had made up. She knew how to
read. M. Mabeuf had nicknamed her Mother Plutarque.

M. Mabeuf had taken a fancy to Marius, because Marius, being young and
gentle, warmed his age without startling his timidity. Youth combined
with gentleness produces on old people the effect of the sun without
wind. When Marius was saturated with military glory, with gunpowder,
with marches and countermarches, and with all those prodigious battles
in which his father had given and received such tremendous blows of the
sword, he went to see M. Mabeuf, and M. Mabeuf talked to him of his hero
from the point of view of flowers.

His brother the cure died about 1830, and almost immediately, as when
the night is drawing on, the whole horizon grew dark for M. Mabeuf. A
notary's failure deprived him of the sum of ten thousand francs, which
was all that he possessed in his brother's right and his own. The
Revolution of July brought a crisis to publishing. In a period of
embarrassment, the first thing which does not sell is a Flora. The Flora
of the Environs of Cauteretz stopped short. Weeks passed by without a
single purchaser. Sometimes M. Mabeuf started at the sound of the bell.
"Monsieur," said Mother Plutarque sadly, "it is the water-carrier."
In short, one day, M. Mabeuf quitted the Rue Mesieres, abdicated the
functions of warden, gave up Saint-Sulpice, sold not a part of his
books, but of his prints,--that to which he was the least attached,--and
installed himself in a little house on the Rue Montparnasse, where,
however, he remained but one quarter for two reasons: in the first
place, the ground floor and the garden cost three hundred francs, and he
dared not spend more than two hundred francs on his rent; in the second,
being near Faton's shooting-gallery, he could hear the pistol-shots;
which was intolerable to him.

He carried off his Flora, his copper-plates, his herbariums, his
portfolios, and his books, and established himself near the Salpetriere,
in a sort of thatched cottage of the village of Austerlitz, where,
for fifty crowns a year, he got three rooms and a garden enclosed by a
hedge, and containing a well. He took advantage of this removal to sell
off nearly all his furniture. On the day of his entrance into his new
quarters, he was very gay, and drove the nails on which his engravings
and herbariums were to hang, with his own hands, dug in his garden the
rest of the day, and at night, perceiving that Mother Plutarque had a
melancholy air, and was very thoughtful, he tapped her on the shoulder
and said to her with a smile: "We have the indigo!"

Only two visitors, the bookseller of the Porte-Saint-Jacques and Marius,
were admitted to view the thatched cottage at Austerlitz, a brawling
name which was, to tell the truth, extremely disagreeable to him.

However, as we have just pointed out, brains which are absorbed in some
bit of wisdom, or folly, or, as it often happens, in both at once, are
but slowly accessible to the things of actual life. Their own destiny
is a far-off thing to them. There results from such concentration a
passivity, which, if it were the outcome of reasoning, would resemble
philosophy. One declines, descends, trickles away, even crumbles away,
and yet is hardly conscious of it one's self. It always ends, it is
true, in an awakening, but the awakening is tardy. In the meantime, it
seems as though we held ourselves neutral in the game which is going on
between our happiness and our unhappiness. We are the stake, and we look
on at the game with indifference.

It is thus that, athwart the cloud which formed about him, when all his
hopes were extinguished one after the other, M. Mabeuf remained rather
puerilely, but profoundly serene. His habits of mind had the regular
swing of a pendulum. Once mounted on an illusion, he went for a very
long time, even after the illusion had disappeared. A clock does not
stop short at the precise moment when the key is lost.

M. Mabeuf had his innocent pleasures. These pleasures were inexpensive
and unexpected; the merest chance furnished them. One day, Mother
Plutarque was reading a romance in one corner of the room. She was
reading aloud, finding that she understood better thus. To read aloud is
to assure one's self of what one is reading. There are people who read
very loud, and who have the appearance of giving themselves their word
of honor as to what they are perusing.

It was with this sort of energy that Mother Plutarque was reading the
romance which she had in hand. M. Mabeuf heard her without listening to
her.

In the course of her reading, Mother Plutarque came to this phrase. It
was a question of an officer of dragoons and a beauty:--

"--The beauty pouted, and the dragoon--"

Here she interrupted herself to wipe her glasses.

"Bouddha and the Dragon," struck in M. Mabeuf in a low voice. "Yes, it
is true that there was a dragon, which, from the depths of its cave,
spouted flame through his maw and set the heavens on fire. Many stars
had already been consumed by this monster, which, besides, had the claws
of a tiger. Bouddha went into its den and succeeded in converting the
dragon. That is a good book that you are reading, Mother Plutarque.
There is no more beautiful legend in existence."

And M. Mabeuf fell into a delicious revery.




CHAPTER V--POVERTY A GOOD NEIGHBOR FOR MISERY

Marius liked this candid old man who saw himself gradually falling into
the clutches of indigence, and who came to feel astonishment, little
by little, without, however, being made melancholy by it. Marius met
Courfeyrac and sought out M. Mabeuf. Very rarely, however; twice a month
at most.

Marius' pleasure consisted in taking long walks alone on the outer
boulevards, or in the Champs-de-Mars, or in the least frequented alleys
of the Luxembourg. He often spent half a day in gazing at a market
garden, the beds of lettuce, the chickens on the dung-heap, the horse
turning the water-wheel. The passers-by stared at him in surprise, and
some of them thought his attire suspicious and his mien sinister. He was
only a poor young man dreaming in an objectless way.

It was during one of his strolls that he had hit upon the Gorbeau house,
and, tempted by its isolation and its cheapness, had taken up his abode
there. He was known there only under the name of M. Marius.

Some of his father's old generals or old comrades had invited him to go
and see them, when they learned about him. Marius had not refused their
invitations. They afforded opportunities of talking about his father.
Thus he went from time to time, to Comte Pajol, to General Bellavesne,
to General Fririon, to the Invalides. There was music and dancing there.
On such evenings, Marius put on his new coat. But he never went to
these evening parties or balls except on days when it was freezing cold,
because he could not afford a carriage, and he did not wish to arrive
with boots otherwise than like mirrors.

He said sometimes, but without bitterness: "Men are so made that in a
drawing-room you may be soiled everywhere except on your shoes. In order
to insure a good reception there, only one irreproachable thing is asked
of you; your conscience? No, your boots."

All passions except those of the heart are dissipated by revery. Marius'
political fevers vanished thus. The Revolution of 1830 assisted in the
process, by satisfying and calming him. He remained the same, setting
aside his fits of wrath. He still held the same opinions. Only, they had
been tempered. To speak accurately, he had no longer any opinions, he
had sympathies. To what party did he belong? To the party of humanity.
Out of humanity he chose France; out of the Nation he chose the people;
out of the people he chose the woman. It was to that point above all,
that his pity was directed. Now he preferred an idea to a deed, a
poet to a hero, and he admired a book like Job more than an event like
Marengo. And then, when, after a day spent in meditation, he returned
in the evening through the boulevards, and caught a glimpse through
the branches of the trees of the fathomless space beyond, the nameless
gleams, the abyss, the shadow, the mystery, all that which is only human
seemed very petty indeed to him.

He thought that he had, and he really had, in fact, arrived at the truth
of life and of human philosophy, and he had ended by gazing at nothing
but heaven, the only thing which Truth can perceive from the bottom of
her well.

This did not prevent him from multiplying his plans, his combinations,
his scaffoldings, his projects for the future. In this state of revery,
an eye which could have cast a glance into Marius' interior would have
been dazzled with the purity of that soul. In fact, had it been given to
our eyes of the flesh to gaze into the consciences of others, we should
be able to judge a man much more surely according to what he dreams,
than according to what he thinks. There is will in thought, there is
none in dreams. Revery, which is utterly spontaneous, takes and keeps,
even in the gigantic and the ideal, the form of our spirit. Nothing
proceeds more directly and more sincerely from the very depth of our
soul, than our unpremeditated and boundless aspirations towards
the splendors of destiny. In these aspirations, much more than in
deliberate, rational coordinated ideas, is the real character of a man
to be found. Our chimeras are the things which the most resemble us.
Each one of us dreams of the unknown and the impossible in accordance
with his nature.

Towards the middle of this year 1831, the old woman who waited on Marius
told him that his neighbors, the wretched Jondrette family, had been
turned out of doors. Marius, who passed nearly the whole of his days out
of the house, hardly knew that he had any neighbors.

"Why are they turned out?" he asked.

"Because they do not pay their rent; they owe for two quarters."

"How much is it?"

"Twenty francs," said the old woman.

Marius had thirty francs saved up in a drawer.

"Here," he said to the old woman, "take these twenty-five francs. Pay
for the poor people and give them five francs, and do not tell them that
it was I."




CHAPTER VI--THE SUBSTITUTE

It chanced that the regiment to which Lieutenant Theodule belonged came
to perform garrison duty in Paris. This inspired Aunt Gillenormand with
a second idea. She had, on the first occasion, hit upon the plan of
having Marius spied upon by Theodule; now she plotted to have Theodule
take Marius' place.

At all events and in case the grandfather should feel the vague need of
a young face in the house,--these rays of dawn are sometimes sweet to
ruin,--it was expedient to find another Marius. "Take it as a simple
erratum," she thought, "such as one sees in books. For Marius, read
Theodule."

A grandnephew is almost the same as a grandson; in default of a lawyer
one takes a lancer.

One morning, when M. Gillenormand was about to read something in the
Quotidienne, his daughter entered and said to him in her sweetest voice;
for the question concerned her favorite:--

"Father, Theodule is coming to present his respects to you this
morning."

"Who's Theodule?"

"Your grandnephew."

"Ah!" said the grandfather.

Then he went back to his reading, thought no more of his grandnephew,
who was merely some Theodule or other, and soon flew into a rage, which
almost always happened when he read. The "sheet" which he held, although
Royalist, of course, announced for the following day, without any
softening phrases, one of these little events which were of daily
occurrence at that date in Paris: "That the students of the schools
of law and medicine were to assemble on the Place du Pantheon, at
midday,--to deliberate." The discussion concerned one of the questions
of the moment, the artillery of the National Guard, and a conflict
between the Minister of War and "the citizen's militia," on the subject
of the cannon parked in the courtyard of the Louvre. The students were
to "deliberate" over this. It did not take much more than this to swell
M. Gillenormand's rage.

He thought of Marius, who was a student, and who would probably go with
the rest, to "deliberate, at midday, on the Place du Pantheon."

As he was indulging in this painful dream, Lieutenant Theodule entered
clad in plain clothes as a bourgeois, which was clever of him, and
was discreetly introduced by Mademoiselle Gillenormand. The lancer had
reasoned as follows: "The old druid has not sunk all his money in a life
pension. It is well to disguise one's self as a civilian from time to
time."

Mademoiselle Gillenormand said aloud to her father:--

"Theodule, your grandnephew."

And in a low voice to the lieutenant:--

"Approve of everything."

And she withdrew.

The lieutenant, who was but little accustomed to such venerable
encounters, stammered with some timidity: "Good day, uncle,"--and made
a salute composed of the involuntary and mechanical outline of the
military salute finished off as a bourgeois salute.

"Ah! so it's you; that is well, sit down," said the old gentleman.

That said, he totally forgot the lancer.

Theodule seated himself, and M. Gillenormand rose.

M. Gillenormand began to pace back and forth, his hands in his pockets,
talking aloud, and twitching, with his irritated old fingers, at the two
watches which he wore in his two fobs.

"That pack of brats! they convene on the Place du Pantheon! by my life!
urchins who were with their nurses but yesterday! If one were to squeeze
their noses, milk would burst out. And they deliberate to-morrow, at
midday. What are we coming to? What are we coming to? It is clear that
we are making for the abyss. That is what the descamisados have brought
us to! To deliberate on the citizen artillery! To go and jabber in the
open air over the jibes of the National Guard! And with whom are they to
meet there? Just see whither Jacobinism leads. I will bet anything you
like, a million against a counter, that there will be no one there but
returned convicts and released galley-slaves. The Republicans and the
galley-slaves,--they form but one nose and one handkerchief. Carnot used
to say: 'Where would you have me go, traitor?' Fouche replied: 'Wherever
you please, imbecile!' That's what the Republicans are like."

"That is true," said Theodule.

M. Gillenormand half turned his head, saw Theodule, and went on:--

"When one reflects that that scoundrel was so vile as to turn carbonaro!
Why did you leave my house? To go and become a Republican! Pssst! In
the first place, the people want none of your republic, they have common
sense, they know well that there always have been kings, and that there
always will be; they know well that the people are only the people,
after all, they make sport of it, of your republic--do you understand,
idiot? Is it not a horrible caprice? To fall in love with Pere Duchesne,
to make sheep's-eyes at the guillotine, to sing romances, and play on
the guitar under the balcony of '93--it's enough to make one spit on all
these young fellows, such fools are they! They are all alike. Not one
escapes. It suffices for them to breathe the air which blows through the
street to lose their senses. The nineteenth century is poison. The
first scamp that happens along lets his beard grow like a goat's,
thinks himself a real scoundrel, and abandons his old relatives. He's
a Republican, he's a romantic. What does that mean, romantic? Do me the
favor to tell me what it is. All possible follies. A year ago, they ran
to Hernani. Now, I just ask you, Hernani! antitheses! abominations
which are not even written in French! And then, they have cannons in the
courtyard of the Louvre. Such are the rascalities of this age!"

"You are right, uncle," said Theodule.

M. Gillenormand resumed:--

"Cannons in the courtyard of the Museum! For what purpose? Do you want
to fire grape-shot at the Apollo Belvedere? What have those cartridges
to do with the Venus de Medici? Oh! the young men of the present day are
all blackguards! What a pretty creature is their Benjamin Constant! And
those who are not rascals are simpletons! They do all they can to make
themselves ugly, they are badly dressed, they are afraid of women, in
the presence of petticoats they have a mendicant air which sets the
girls into fits of laughter; on my word of honor, one would say the poor
creatures were ashamed of love. They are deformed, and they complete
themselves by being stupid; they repeat the puns of Tiercelin and
Potier, they have sack coats, stablemen's waistcoats, shirts of coarse
linen, trousers of coarse cloth, boots of coarse leather, and their
rigmarole resembles their plumage. One might make use of their jargon
to put new soles on their old shoes. And all this awkward batch of brats
has political opinions, if you please. Political opinions should be
strictly forbidden. They fabricate systems, they recast society, they
demolish the monarchy, they fling all laws to the earth, they put the
attic in the cellar's place and my porter in the place of the King, they
turn Europe topsy-turvy, they reconstruct the world, and all their love
affairs consist in staring slily at the ankles of the laundresses as
these women climb into their carts. Ah! Marius! Ah! you blackguard! to
go and vociferate on the public place! to discuss, to debate, to take
measures! They call that measures, just God! Disorder humbles itself
and becomes silly. I have seen chaos, I now see a mess. Students
deliberating on the National Guard,--such a thing could not be seen
among the Ogibewas nor the Cadodaches! Savages who go naked, with their
noddles dressed like a shuttlecock, with a club in their paws, are less
of brutes than those bachelors of arts! The four-penny monkeys! And they
set up for judges! Those creatures deliberate and ratiocinate! The
end of the world is come! This is plainly the end of this miserable
terraqueous globe! A final hiccough was required, and France has emitted
it. Deliberate, my rascals! Such things will happen so long as they go
and read the newspapers under the arcades of the Odeon. That costs them
a sou, and their good sense, and their intelligence, and their heart and
their soul, and their wits. They emerge thence, and decamp from their
families. All newspapers are pests; all, even the Drapeau Blanc! At
bottom, Martainville was a Jacobin. Ah! just Heaven! you may boast of
having driven your grandfather to despair, that you may!"

"That is evident," said Theodule.

And profiting by the fact that M. Gillenormand was taking breath, the
lancer added in a magisterial manner:--

"There should be no other newspaper than the Moniteur, and no other book
than the Annuaire Militaire."

M. Gillenormand continued:--

"It is like their Sieyes! A regicide ending in a senator; for that is
the way they always end. They give themselves a scar with the address
of thou as citizens, in order to get themselves called, eventually,
Monsieur le Comte. Monsieur le Comte as big as my arm, assassins of
September. The philosopher Sieyes! I will do myself the justice to say,
that I have never had any better opinion of the philosophies of all
those philosophers, than of the spectacles of the grimacer of Tivoli!
One day I saw the Senators cross the Quai Malplaquet in mantles of
violet velvet sown with bees, with hats a la Henri IV. They were
hideous. One would have pronounced them monkeys from the tiger's court.
Citizens, I declare to you, that your progress is madness, that your
humanity is a dream, that your revolution is a crime, that your republic
is a monster, that your young and virgin France comes from the brothel,
and I maintain it against all, whoever you may be, whether journalists,
economists, legists, or even were you better judges of liberty, of
equality, and fraternity than the knife of the guillotine! And that I
announce to you, my fine fellows!"

"Parbleu!" cried the lieutenant, "that is wonderfully true."

M. Gillenormand paused in a gesture which he had begun, wheeled round,
stared Lancer Theodule intently in the eyes, and said to him:--

"You are a fool."




BOOK SIXTH.--THE CONJUNCTION OF TWO STARS




CHAPTER I--THE SOBRIQUET: MODE OF FORMATION OF FAMILY NAMES

Marius was, at this epoch, a handsome young man, of medium stature,
with thick and intensely black hair, a lofty and intelligent brow,
well-opened and passionate nostrils, an air of calmness and sincerity,
and with something indescribably proud, thoughtful, and innocent over
his whole countenance. His profile, all of whose lines were rounded,
without thereby losing their firmness, had a certain Germanic sweetness,
which has made its way into the French physiognomy by way of Alsace
and Lorraine, and that complete absence of angles which rendered
the Sicambres so easily recognizable among the Romans, and which
distinguishes the leonine from the aquiline race. He was at that period
of life when the mind of men who think is composed, in nearly equal
parts, of depth and ingenuousness. A grave situation being given, he
had all that is required to be stupid: one more turn of the key, and he
might be sublime. His manners were reserved, cold, polished, not very
genial. As his mouth was charming, his lips the reddest, and his teeth
the whitest in the world, his smile corrected the severity of his face,
as a whole. At certain moments, that pure brow and that voluptuous smile
presented a singular contrast. His eyes were small, but his glance was
large.

At the period of his most abject misery, he had observed that young
girls turned round when he passed by, and he fled or hid, with death in
his soul. He thought that they were staring at him because of his old
clothes, and that they were laughing at them; the fact is, that they
stared at him because of his grace, and that they dreamed of him.

This mute misunderstanding between him and the pretty passers-by had
made him shy. He chose none of them for the excellent reason that
he fled from all of them. He lived thus indefinitely,--stupidly, as
Courfeyrac said.

Courfeyrac also said to him: "Do not aspire to be venerable" [they
called each other thou; it is the tendency of youthful friendships to
slip into this mode of address]. "Let me give you a piece of advice,
my dear fellow. Don't read so many books, and look a little more at the
lasses. The jades have some good points about them, O Marius! By dint of
fleeing and blushing, you will become brutalized."

On other occasions, Courfeyrac encountered him and said:--"Good morning,
Monsieur l'Abbe!"

When Courfeyrac had addressed to him some remark of this nature, Marius
avoided women, both young and old, more than ever for a week to come,
and he avoided Courfeyrac to boot.

Nevertheless, there existed in all the immensity of creation, two women
whom Marius did not flee, and to whom he paid no attention whatever. In
truth, he would have been very much amazed if he had been informed
that they were women. One was the bearded old woman who swept out his
chamber, and caused Courfeyrac to say: "Seeing that his servant woman
wears his beard, Marius does not wear his own beard." The other was a
sort of little girl whom he saw very often, and whom he never looked at.

For more than a year, Marius had noticed in one of the walks of the
Luxembourg, the one which skirts the parapet of the Pepiniere, a man
and a very young girl, who were almost always seated side by side on the
same bench, at the most solitary end of the alley, on the Rue de l'Ouest
side. Every time that that chance which meddles with the strolls of
persons whose gaze is turned inwards, led Marius to that walk,--and it
was nearly every day,--he found this couple there. The man appeared to
be about sixty years of age; he seemed sad and serious; his whole person
presented the robust and weary aspect peculiar to military men who have
retired from the service. If he had worn a decoration, Marius would have
said: "He is an ex-officer." He had a kindly but unapproachable air,
and he never let his glance linger on the eyes of any one. He wore
blue trousers, a blue frock coat and a broad-brimmed hat, which always
appeared to be new, a black cravat, a quaker shirt, that is to say, it
was dazzlingly white, but of coarse linen. A grisette who passed near
him one day, said: "Here's a very tidy widower." His hair was very
white.

The first time that the young girl who accompanied him came and seated
herself on the bench which they seemed to have adopted, she was a sort
of child thirteen or fourteen years of age, so thin as to be almost
homely, awkward, insignificant, and with a possible promise of
handsome eyes. Only, they were always raised with a sort of displeasing
assurance. Her dress was both aged and childish, like the dress of the
scholars in a convent; it consisted of a badly cut gown of black merino.
They had the air of being father and daughter.

Marius scanned this old man, who was not yet aged, and this little
girl, who was not yet a person, for a few days, and thereafter paid no
attention to them. They, on their side, did not appear even to see him.
They conversed together with a peaceful and indifferent air. The girl
chattered incessantly and merrily. The old man talked but little, and,
at times, he fixed on her eyes overflowing with an ineffable paternity.

Marius had acquired the mechanical habit of strolling in that walk. He
invariably found them there.

This is the way things went:--

Marius liked to arrive by the end of the alley which was furthest from
their bench; he walked the whole length of the alley, passed in front
of them, then returned to the extremity whence he had come, and began
again. This he did five or six times in the course of his promenade,
and the promenade was taken five or six times a week, without its
having occurred to him or to these people to exchange a greeting. That
personage, and that young girl, although they appeared,--and perhaps
because they appeared,--to shun all glances, had, naturally, caused some
attention on the part of the five or six students who strolled along
the Pepiniere from time to time; the studious after their lectures,
the others after their game of billiards. Courfeyrac, who was among the
last, had observed them several times, but, finding the girl homely, he
had speedily and carefully kept out of the way. He had fled, discharging
at them a sobriquet, like a Parthian dart. Impressed solely with
the child's gown and the old man's hair, he had dubbed the daughter
Mademoiselle Lanoire, and the father, Monsieur Leblanc, so that as no
one knew them under any other title, this nickname became a law in the
default of any other name. The students said: "Ah! Monsieur Leblanc is
on his bench." And Marius, like the rest, had found it convenient to
call this unknown gentleman Monsieur Leblanc.

We shall follow their example, and we shall say M. Leblanc, in order to
facilitate this tale.

So Marius saw them nearly every day, at the same hour, during the first
year. He found the man to his taste, but the girl insipid.




CHAPTER II--LUX FACTA EST

During the second year, precisely at the point in this history which the
reader has now reached, it chanced that this habit of the Luxembourg was
interrupted, without Marius himself being quite aware why, and nearly
six months elapsed, during which he did not set foot in the alley. One
day, at last, he returned thither once more; it was a serene summer
morning, and Marius was in joyous mood, as one is when the weather is
fine. It seemed to him that he had in his heart all the songs of the
birds that he was listening to, and all the bits of blue sky of which he
caught glimpses through the leaves of the trees.

He went straight to "his alley," and when he reached the end of it he
perceived, still on the same bench, that well-known couple. Only, when
he approached, it certainly was the same man; but it seemed to him that
it was no longer the same girl. The person whom he now beheld was a tall
and beautiful creature, possessed of all the most charming lines of a
woman at the precise moment when they are still combined with all the
most ingenuous graces of the child; a pure and fugitive moment, which
can be expressed only by these two words,--"fifteen years." She had
wonderful brown hair, shaded with threads of gold, a brow that seemed
made of marble, cheeks that seemed made of rose-leaf, a pale flush,
an agitated whiteness, an exquisite mouth, whence smiles darted like
sunbeams, and words like music, a head such as Raphael would have given
to Mary, set upon a neck that Jean Goujon would have attributed to a
Venus. And, in order that nothing might be lacking to this bewitching
face, her nose was not handsome--it was pretty; neither straight nor
curved, neither Italian nor Greek; it was the Parisian nose, that is
to say, spiritual, delicate, irregular, pure,--which drives painters to
despair, and charms poets.

When Marius passed near her, he could not see her eyes, which were
constantly lowered. He saw only her long chestnut lashes, permeated with
shadow and modesty.

This did not prevent the beautiful child from smiling as she listened
to what the white-haired old man was saying to her, and nothing could
be more fascinating than that fresh smile, combined with those drooping
eyes.

For a moment, Marius thought that she was another daughter of the same
man, a sister of the former, no doubt. But when the invariable habit of
his stroll brought him, for the second time, near the bench, and he had
examined her attentively, he recognized her as the same. In six months
the little girl had become a young maiden; that was all. Nothing is more
frequent than this phenomenon. There is a moment when girls blossom out
in the twinkling of an eye, and become roses all at once. One left
them children but yesterday; today, one finds them disquieting to the
feelings.

This child had not only grown, she had become idealized. As three days
in April suffice to cover certain trees with flowers, six months had
sufficed to clothe her with beauty. Her April had arrived.

One sometimes sees people, who, poor and mean, seem to wake up, pass
suddenly from indigence to luxury, indulge in expenditures of all sorts,
and become dazzling, prodigal, magnificent, all of a sudden. That is
the result of having pocketed an income; a note fell due yesterday. The
young girl had received her quarterly income.

And then, she was no longer the school-girl with her felt hat, her
merino gown, her scholar's shoes, and red hands; taste had come to her
with beauty; she was a well-dressed person, clad with a sort of rich
and simple elegance, and without affectation. She wore a dress of black
damask, a cape of the same material, and a bonnet of white crape. Her
white gloves displayed the delicacy of the hand which toyed with the
carved, Chinese ivory handle of a parasol, and her silken shoe outlined
the smallness of her foot. When one passed near her, her whole toilette
exhaled a youthful and penetrating perfume.

As for the man, he was the same as usual.

The second time that Marius approached her, the young girl raised her
eyelids; her eyes were of a deep, celestial blue, but in that veiled
azure, there was, as yet, nothing but the glance of a child. She looked
at Marius indifferently, as she would have stared at the brat running
beneath the sycamores, or the marble vase which cast a shadow on the
bench, and Marius, on his side, continued his promenade, and thought
about something else.

He passed near the bench where the young girl sat, five or six times,
but without even turning his eyes in her direction.

On the following days, he returned, as was his wont, to the Luxembourg;
as usual, he found there "the father and daughter;" but he paid no
further attention to them. He thought no more about the girl now that
she was beautiful than he had when she was homely. He passed very near
the bench where she sat, because such was his habit.




CHAPTER III--EFFECT OF THE SPRING

One day, the air was warm, the Luxembourg was inundated with light
and shade, the sky was as pure as though the angels had washed it that
morning, the sparrows were giving vent to little twitters in the depths
of the chestnut-trees. Marius had thrown open his whole soul to nature,
he was not thinking of anything, he simply lived and breathed, he passed
near the bench, the young girl raised her eyes to him, the two glances
met.

What was there in the young girl's glance on this occasion? Marius could
not have told. There was nothing and there was everything. It was a
strange flash.

She dropped her eyes, and he pursued his way.

What he had just seen was no longer the ingenuous and simple eye of a
child; it was a mysterious gulf which had half opened, then abruptly
closed again.

There comes a day when the young girl glances in this manner. Woe to him
who chances to be there!

That first gaze of a soul which does not, as yet, know itself, is
like the dawn in the sky. It is the awakening of something radiant
and strange. Nothing can give any idea of the dangerous charm of that
unexpected gleam, which flashes suddenly and vaguely forth from adorable
shadows, and which is composed of all the innocence of the present, and
of all the passion of the future. It is a sort of undecided tenderness
which reveals itself by chance, and which waits. It is a snare which
the innocent maiden sets unknown to herself, and in which she captures
hearts without either wishing or knowing it. It is a virgin looking like
a woman.

It is rare that a profound revery does not spring from that glance,
where it falls. All purities and all candors meet in that celestial
and fatal gleam which, more than all the best-planned tender glances of
coquettes, possesses the magic power of causing the sudden blossoming,
in the depths of the soul, of that sombre flower, impregnated with
perfume and with poison, which is called love.

That evening, on his return to his garret, Marius cast his eyes over
his garments, and perceived, for the first time, that he had been so
slovenly, indecorous, and inconceivably stupid as to go for his walk in
the Luxembourg with his "every-day clothes," that is to say, with a
hat battered near the band, coarse carter's boots, black trousers
which showed white at the knees, and a black coat which was pale at the
elbows.




CHAPTER IV--BEGINNING OF A GREAT MALADY

On the following day, at the accustomed hour, Marius drew from his
wardrobe his new coat, his new trousers, his new hat, and his new
boots; he clothed himself in this complete panoply, put on his gloves, a
tremendous luxury, and set off for the Luxembourg.

On the way thither, he encountered Courfeyrac, and pretended not to see
him. Courfeyrac, on his return home, said to his friends:--

"I have just met Marius' new hat and new coat, with Marius inside
them. He was going to pass an examination, no doubt. He looked utterly
stupid."

On arriving at the Luxembourg, Marius made the tour of the fountain
basin, and stared at the swans; then he remained for a long time in
contemplation before a statue whose head was perfectly black with mould,
and one of whose hips was missing. Near the basin there was a bourgeois
forty years of age, with a prominent stomach, who was holding by the
hand a little urchin of five, and saying to him: "Shun excess, my son,
keep at an equal distance from despotism and from anarchy." Marius
listened to this bourgeois. Then he made the circuit of the basin once
more. At last he directed his course towards "his alley," slowly, and as
if with regret. One would have said that he was both forced to go there
and withheld from doing so. He did not perceive it himself, and thought
that he was doing as he always did.

On turning into the walk, he saw M. Leblanc and the young girl at the
other end, "on their bench." He buttoned his coat up to the very top,
pulled it down on his body so that there might be no wrinkles, examined,
with a certain complaisance, the lustrous gleams of his trousers, and
marched on the bench. This march savored of an attack, and certainly
of a desire for conquest. So I say that he marched on the bench, as I
should say: "Hannibal marched on Rome."

However, all his movements were purely mechanical, and he had
interrupted none of the habitual preoccupations of his mind and labors.
At that moment, he was thinking that the Manuel du Baccalaureat was
a stupid book, and that it must have been drawn up by rare idiots, to
allow of three tragedies of Racine and only one comedy of Moliere being
analyzed therein as masterpieces of the human mind. There was a piercing
whistling going on in his ears. As he approached the bench, he held
fast to the folds in his coat, and fixed his eyes on the young girl. It
seemed to him that she filled the entire extremity of the alley with a
vague blue light.

In proportion as he drew near, his pace slackened more and more. On
arriving at some little distance from the bench, and long before he had
reached the end of the walk, he halted, and could not explain to himself
why he retraced his steps. He did not even say to himself that he would
not go as far as the end. It was only with difficulty that the young
girl could have perceived him in the distance and noted his fine
appearance in his new clothes. Nevertheless, he held himself very erect,
in case any one should be looking at him from behind.

He attained the opposite end, then came back, and this time he
approached a little nearer to the bench. He even got to within three
intervals of trees, but there he felt an indescribable impossibility of
proceeding further, and he hesitated. He thought he saw the young girl's
face bending towards him. But he exerted a manly and violent effort,
subdued his hesitation, and walked straight ahead. A few seconds later,
he rushed in front of the bench, erect and firm, reddening to the very
ears, without daring to cast a glance either to the right or to the
left, with his hand thrust into his coat like a statesman. At the moment
when he passed,--under the cannon of the place,--he felt his heart beat
wildly. As on the preceding day, she wore her damask gown and her crape
bonnet. He heard an ineffable voice, which must have been "her voice."
She was talking tranquilly. She was very pretty. He felt it, although he
made no attempt to see her. "She could not, however," he thought, "help
feeling esteem and consideration for me, if she only knew that I am
the veritable author of the dissertation on Marcos Obregon de la Ronde,
which M. Francois de Neufchateau put, as though it were his own, at the
head of his edition of Gil Blas." He went beyond the bench as far as the
extremity of the walk, which was very near, then turned on his heel and
passed once more in front of the lovely girl. This time, he was very
pale. Moreover, all his emotions were disagreeable. As he went further
from the bench and the young girl, and while his back was turned to her,
he fancied that she was gazing after him, and that made him stumble.

He did not attempt to approach the bench again; he halted near the
middle of the walk, and there, a thing which he never did, he sat down,
and reflecting in the most profoundly indistinct depths of his spirit,
that after all, it was hard that persons whose white bonnet and black
gown he admired should be absolutely insensible to his splendid trousers
and his new coat.

At the expiration of a quarter of an hour, he rose, as though he were
on the point of again beginning his march towards that bench which was
surrounded by an aureole. But he remained standing there, motionless.
For the first time in fifteen months, he said to himself that that
gentleman who sat there every day with his daughter, had, on his side,
noticed him, and probably considered his assiduity singular.

For the first time, also, he was conscious of some irreverence in
designating that stranger, even in his secret thoughts, by the sobriquet
of M. le Blanc.

He stood thus for several minutes, with drooping head, tracing figures
in the sand, with the cane which he held in his hand.

Then he turned abruptly in the direction opposite to the bench, to M.
Leblanc and his daughter, and went home.

That day he forgot to dine. At eight o'clock in the evening he perceived
this fact, and as it was too late to go down to the Rue Saint-Jacques,
he said: "Never mind!" and ate a bit of bread.

He did not go to bed until he had brushed his coat and folded it up with
great care.




CHAPTER V--DIVRS CLAPS OF THUNDER FALL ON MA'AM BOUGON

On the following day, Ma'am Bougon, as Courfeyrac styled the old
portress-principal-tenant, housekeeper of the Gorbeau hovel, Ma'am
Bougon, whose name was, in reality, Madame Burgon, as we have found
out, but this iconoclast, Courfeyrac, respected nothing,--Ma'am Bougon
observed, with stupefaction, that M. Marius was going out again in his
new coat.

He went to the Luxembourg again, but he did not proceed further than his
bench midway of the alley. He seated himself there, as on the preceding
day, surveying from a distance, and clearly making out, the white
bonnet, the black dress, and above all, that blue light. He did not stir
from it, and only went home when the gates of the Luxembourg closed. He
did not see M. Leblanc and his daughter retire. He concluded that they
had quitted the garden by the gate on the Rue de l'Ouest. Later on,
several weeks afterwards, when he came to think it over, he could never
recall where he had dined that evening.

On the following day, which was the third, Ma'am Bougon was
thunderstruck. Marius went out in his new coat. "Three days in
succession!" she exclaimed.

She tried to follow him, but Marius walked briskly, and with immense
strides; it was a hippopotamus undertaking the pursuit of a chamois.
She lost sight of him in two minutes, and returned breathless,
three-quarters choked with asthma, and furious. "If there is any sense,"
she growled, "in putting on one's best clothes every day, and making
people run like this!"

Marius betook himself to the Luxembourg.

The young girl was there with M. Leblanc. Marius approached as near as
he could, pretending to be busy reading a book, but he halted afar off,
then returned and seated himself on his bench, where he spent four hours
in watching the house-sparrows who were skipping about the walk, and who
produced on him the impression that they were making sport of him.

A fortnight passed thus. Marius went to the Luxembourg no longer for the
sake of strolling there, but to seat himself always in the same spot,
and that without knowing why. Once arrived there, he did not stir.
He put on his new coat every morning, for the purpose of not showing
himself, and he began all over again on the morrow.

She was decidedly a marvellous beauty. The only remark approaching a
criticism, that could be made, was, that the contradiction between
her gaze, which was melancholy, and her smile, which was merry, gave
a rather wild effect to her face, which sometimes caused this sweet
countenance to become strange without ceasing to be charming.




CHAPTER VI--TAKEN PRISONER

On one of the last days of the second week, Marius was seated on his
bench, as usual, holding in his hand an open book, of which he had not
turned a page for the last two hours. All at once he started. An event
was taking place at the other extremity of the walk. Leblanc and his
daughter had just left their seat, and the daughter had taken her
father's arm, and both were advancing slowly, towards the middle of the
alley where Marius was. Marius closed his book, then opened it again,
then forced himself to read; he trembled; the aureole was coming
straight towards him. "Ah! good Heavens!" thought he, "I shall not have
time to strike an attitude." Still the white-haired man and the girl
advanced. It seemed to him that this lasted for a century, and that it
was but a second. "What are they coming in this direction for?" he asked
himself. "What! She will pass here? Her feet will tread this sand, this
walk, two paces from me?" He was utterly upset, he would have liked to
be very handsome, he would have liked to own the cross. He heard the
soft and measured sound of their approaching footsteps. He imagined that
M. Leblanc was darting angry glances at him. "Is that gentleman going to
address me?" he thought to himself. He dropped his head; when he raised
it again, they were very near him. The young girl passed, and as she
passed, she glanced at him. She gazed steadily at him, with a pensive
sweetness which thrilled Marius from head to foot. It seemed to him
that she was reproaching him for having allowed so long a time to elapse
without coming as far as her, and that she was saying to him: "I am
coming myself." Marius was dazzled by those eyes fraught with rays and
abysses.

He felt his brain on fire. She had come to him, what joy! And then, how
she had looked at him! She appeared to him more beautiful than he had
ever seen her yet. Beautiful with a beauty which was wholly feminine and
angelic, with a complete beauty which would have made Petrarch sing and
Dante kneel. It seemed to him that he was floating free in the azure
heavens. At the same time, he was horribly vexed because there was dust
on his boots.

He thought he felt sure that she had looked at his boots too.

He followed her with his eyes until she disappeared. Then he started
up and walked about the Luxembourg garden like a madman. It is possible
that, at times, he laughed to himself and talked aloud. He was so dreamy
when he came near the children's nurses, that each one of them thought
him in love with her.

He quitted the Luxembourg, hoping to find her again in the street.

He encountered Courfeyrac under the arcades of the Odeon, and said to
him: "Come and dine with me." They went off to Rousseau's and spent
six francs. Marius ate like an ogre. He gave the waiter six sous. At
dessert, he said to Courfeyrac. "Have you read the paper? What a fine
discourse Audry de Puyraveau delivered!"

He was desperately in love.

After dinner, he said to Courfeyrac: "I will treat you to the play."
They went to the Porte-Sainte-Martin to see Frederick in l'Auberge des
Adrets. Marius was enormously amused.

At the same time, he had a redoubled attack of shyness. On emerging
from the theatre, he refused to look at the garter of a modiste who was
stepping across a gutter, and Courfeyrac, who said: "I should like to
put that woman in my collection," almost horrified him.

Courfeyrac invited him to breakfast at the Cafe Voltaire on the
following morning. Marius went thither, and ate even more than on the
preceding evening. He was very thoughtful and very merry. One would
have said that he was taking advantage of every occasion to laugh
uproariously. He tenderly embraced some man or other from the provinces,
who was presented to him. A circle of students formed round the table,
and they spoke of the nonsense paid for by the State which was uttered
from the rostrum in the Sorbonne, then the conversation fell upon the
faults and omissions in Guicherat's dictionaries and grammars. Marius
interrupted the discussion to exclaim: "But it is very agreeable, all
the same to have the cross!"

"That's queer!" whispered Courfeyrac to Jean Prouvaire.

"No," responded Prouvaire, "that's serious."

It was serious; in fact, Marius had reached that first violent and
charming hour with which grand passions begin.

A glance had wrought all this.

When the mine is charged, when the conflagration is ready, nothing is
more simple. A glance is a spark.

It was all over with him. Marius loved a woman. His fate was entering
the unknown.

The glance of women resembles certain combinations of wheels, which are
tranquil in appearance yet formidable. You pass close to them every
day, peaceably and with impunity, and without a suspicion of anything. A
moment arrives when you forget that the thing is there. You go and come,
dream, speak, laugh. All at once you feel yourself clutched; all is
over. The wheels hold you fast, the glance has ensnared you. It has
caught you, no matter where or how, by some portion of your thought
which was fluttering loose, by some distraction which had attacked you.
You are lost. The whole of you passes into it. A chain of mysterious
forces takes possession of you. You struggle in vain; no more human
succor is possible. You go on falling from gearing to gearing, from
agony to agony, from torture to torture, you, your mind, your fortune,
your future, your soul; and, according to whether you are in the power
of a wicked creature, or of a noble heart, you will not escape from this
terrifying machine otherwise than disfigured with shame, or transfigured
by passion.




CHAPTER VII--ADVENTURES OF THE LETTER U DELIVERED OVER TO CONJECTURES

Isolation, detachment from everything, pride, independence, the taste
of nature, the absence of daily and material activity, the life within
himself, the secret conflicts of chastity, a benevolent ecstasy towards
all creation, had prepared Marius for this possession which is called
passion. His worship of his father had gradually become a religion,
and, like all religions, it had retreated to the depths of his soul.
Something was required in the foreground. Love came.

A full month elapsed, during which Marius went every day to the
Luxembourg. When the hour arrived, nothing could hold him back.--"He
is on duty," said Courfeyrac. Marius lived in a state of delight. It is
certain that the young girl did look at him.

He had finally grown bold, and approached the bench. Still, he did not
pass in front of it any more, in obedience to the instinct of timidity
and to the instinct of prudence common to lovers. He considered it
better not to attract "the attention of the father." He combined his
stations behind the trees and the pedestals of the statues with a
profound diplomacy, so that he might be seen as much as possible by the
young girl and as little as possible by the old gentleman. Sometimes, he
remained motionless by the half-hour together in the shade of a Leonidas
or a Spartacus, holding in his hand a book, above which his eyes, gently
raised, sought the beautiful girl, and she, on her side, turned her
charming profile towards him with a vague smile. While conversing in the
most natural and tranquil manner in the world with the white-haired man,
she bent upon Marius all the reveries of a virginal and passionate eye.
Ancient and time-honored manoeuvre which Eve understood from the very
first day of the world, and which every woman understands from the very
first day of her life! her mouth replied to one, and her glance replied
to another.

It must be supposed, that M. Leblanc finally noticed something, for
often, when Marius arrived, he rose and began to walk about. He had
abandoned their accustomed place and had adopted the bench by the
Gladiator, near the other end of the walk, as though with the object
of seeing whether Marius would pursue them thither. Marius did not
understand, and committed this error. "The father" began to grow
inexact, and no longer brought "his daughter" every day. Sometimes, he
came alone. Then Marius did not stay. Another blunder.

Marius paid no heed to these symptoms. From the phase of timidity, he
had passed, by a natural and fatal progress, to the phase of blindness.
His love increased. He dreamed of it every night. And then, an
unexpected bliss had happened to him, oil on the fire, a redoubling of
the shadows over his eyes. One evening, at dusk, he had found, on
the bench which "M. Leblanc and his daughter" had just quitted, a
handkerchief, a very simple handkerchief, without embroidery, but white,
and fine, and which seemed to him to exhale ineffable perfume. He seized
it with rapture. This handkerchief was marked with the letters U. F.
Marius knew nothing about this beautiful child,--neither her family
name, her Christian name nor her abode; these two letters were the first
thing of her that he had gained possession of, adorable initials, upon
which he immediately began to construct his scaffolding. U was evidently
the Christian name. "Ursule!" he thought, "what a delicious name!" He
kissed the handkerchief, drank it in, placed it on his heart, on his
flesh, during the day, and at night, laid it beneath his lips that he
might fall asleep on it.

"I feel that her whole soul lies within it!" he exclaimed.

This handkerchief belonged to the old gentleman, who had simply let it
fall from his pocket.

In the days which followed the finding of this treasure, he only
displayed himself at the Luxembourg in the act of kissing the
handkerchief and laying it on his heart. The beautiful child understood
nothing of all this, and signified it to him by imperceptible signs.

"O modesty!" said Marius.




CHAPTER VIII--THE VETERANS THEMSELVES CAN BE HAPPY

Since we have pronounced the word modesty, and since we conceal nothing,
we ought to say that once, nevertheless, in spite of his ecstasies, "his
Ursule" caused him very serious grief. It was on one of the days when
she persuaded M. Leblanc to leave the bench and stroll along the walk.
A brisk May breeze was blowing, which swayed the crests of the
plaintain-trees. The father and daughter, arm in arm, had just passed
Marius' bench. Marius had risen to his feet behind them, and was
following them with his eyes, as was fitting in the desperate situation
of his soul.

All at once, a gust of wind, more merry than the rest, and probably
charged with performing the affairs of Springtime, swept down from
the nursery, flung itself on the alley, enveloped the young girl in
a delicious shiver, worthy of Virgil's nymphs, and the fawns of
Theocritus, and lifted her dress, the robe more sacred than that of
Isis, almost to the height of her garter. A leg of exquisite shape
appeared. Marius saw it. He was exasperated and furious.

The young girl had hastily thrust down her dress, with a divinely
troubled motion, but he was none the less angry for all that. He was
alone in the alley, it is true. But there might have been some one
there. And what if there had been some one there! Can any one comprehend
such a thing? What she had just done is horrible!--Alas, the poor child
had done nothing; there had been but one culprit, the wind; but Marius,
in whom quivered the Bartholo who exists in Cherubin, was determined to
be vexed, and was jealous of his own shadow. It is thus, in fact, that
the harsh and capricious jealousy of the flesh awakens in the human
heart, and takes possession of it, even without any right. Moreover,
setting aside even that jealousy, the sight of that charming leg had
contained nothing agreeable for him; the white stocking of the first
woman he chanced to meet would have afforded him more pleasure.

When "his Ursule," after having reached the end of the walk, retraced
her steps with M. Leblanc, and passed in front of the bench on which
Marius had seated himself once more, Marius darted a sullen and
ferocious glance at her. The young girl gave way to that slight
straightening up with a backward movement, accompanied by a raising of
the eyelids, which signifies: "Well, what is the matter?"

This was "their first quarrel."

Marius had hardly made this scene at her with his eyes, when some one
crossed the walk. It was a veteran, very much bent, extremely wrinkled,
and pale, in a uniform of the Louis XV. pattern, bearing on his breast
the little oval plaque of red cloth, with the crossed swords, the
soldier's cross of Saint-Louis, and adorned, in addition, with a
coat-sleeve, which had no arm within it, with a silver chin and a wooden
leg. Marius thought he perceived that this man had an extremely well
satisfied air. It even struck him that the aged cynic, as he hobbled
along past him, addressed to him a very fraternal and very merry wink,
as though some chance had created an understanding between them, and as
though they had shared some piece of good luck together. What did that
relic of Mars mean by being so contented? What had passed between
that wooden leg and the other? Marius reached a paroxysm of
jealousy.--"Perhaps he was there!" he said to himself; "perhaps he
saw!"--And he felt a desire to exterminate the veteran.

With the aid of time, all points grow dull. Marius' wrath against
"Ursule," just and legitimate as it was, passed off. He finally pardoned
her; but this cost him a great effort; he sulked for three days.

Nevertheless, in spite of all this, and because of all this, his passion
augmented and grew to madness.




CHAPTER IX--ECLIPSE

The reader has just seen how Marius discovered, or thought that he
discovered, that She was named Ursule.

Appetite grows with loving. To know that her name was Ursule was a great
deal; it was very little. In three or four weeks, Marius had devoured
this bliss. He wanted another. He wanted to know where she lived.

He had committed his first blunder, by falling into the ambush of the
bench by the Gladiator. He had committed a second, by not remaining at
the Luxembourg when M. Leblanc came thither alone. He now committed a
third, and an immense one. He followed "Ursule."

She lived in the Rue de l'Ouest, in the most unfrequented spot, in a
new, three-story house, of modest appearance.

From that moment forth, Marius added to his happiness of seeing her at
the Luxembourg the happiness of following her home.

His hunger was increasing. He knew her first name, at least, a charming
name, a genuine woman's name; he knew where she lived; he wanted to know
who she was.

One evening, after he had followed them to their dwelling, and had seen
them disappear through the carriage gate, he entered in their train and
said boldly to the porter:--

"Is that the gentleman who lives on the first floor, who has just come
in?"

"No," replied the porter. "He is the gentleman on the third floor."

Another step gained. This success emboldened Marius.

"On the front?" he asked.

"Parbleu!" said the porter, "the house is only built on the street."

"And what is that gentleman's business?" began Marius again.

"He is a gentleman of property, sir. A very kind man who does good to
the unfortunate, though not rich himself."

"What is his name?" resumed Marius.

The porter raised his head and said:--

"Are you a police spy, sir?"

Marius went off quite abashed, but delighted. He was getting on.

"Good," thought he, "I know that her name is Ursule, that she is the
daughter of a gentleman who lives on his income, and that she lives
there, on the third floor, in the Rue de l'Ouest."

On the following day, M. Leblanc and his daughter made only a very
brief stay in the Luxembourg; they went away while it was still broad
daylight. Marius followed them to the Rue de l'Ouest, as he had taken up
the habit of doing. On arriving at the carriage entrance M. Leblanc made
his daughter pass in first, then paused, before crossing the threshold,
and stared intently at Marius.

On the next day they did not come to the Luxembourg. Marius waited for
them all day in vain.

At nightfall, he went to the Rue de l'Ouest, and saw a light in the
windows of the third story.

He walked about beneath the windows until the light was extinguished.

The next day, no one at the Luxembourg. Marius waited all day, then went
and did sentinel duty under their windows. This carried him on to ten
o'clock in the evening.

His dinner took care of itself. Fever nourishes the sick man, and love
the lover.

He spent a week in this manner. M. Leblanc no longer appeared at the
Luxembourg.

Marius indulged in melancholy conjectures; he dared not watch the porte
cochere during the day; he contented himself with going at night to gaze
upon the red light of the windows. At times he saw shadows flit across
them, and his heart began to beat.

On the eighth day, when he arrived under the windows, there was no light
in them.

"Hello!" he said, "the lamp is not lighted yet. But it is dark. Can they
have gone out?" He waited until ten o'clock. Until midnight. Until one
in the morning. Not a light appeared in the windows of the third story,
and no one entered the house.

He went away in a very gloomy frame of mind.

On the morrow,--for he only existed from morrow to morrow, there was,
so to speak, no to-day for him,--on the morrow, he found no one at the
Luxembourg; he had expected this. At dusk, he went to the house.

No light in the windows; the shades were drawn; the third floor was
totally dark.

Marius rapped at the porte cochere, entered, and said to the porter:--

"The gentleman on the third floor?"

"Has moved away," replied the porter.

Marius reeled and said feebly:--

"How long ago?"

"Yesterday."

"Where is he living now?"

"I don't know anything about it."

"So he has not left his new address?"

"No."

And the porter, raising his eyes, recognized Marius.

"Come! So it's you!" said he; "but you are decidedly a spy then?"




BOOK SEVENTH.--PATRON MINETTE




CHAPTER I--MINES AND MINERS

Human societies all have what is called in theatrical parlance, a third
lower floor. The social soil is everywhere undermined, sometimes for
good, sometimes for evil. These works are superposed one upon the other.
There are superior mines and inferior mines. There is a top and a
bottom in this obscure sub-soil, which sometimes gives way beneath
civilization, and which our indifference and heedlessness trample under
foot. The Encyclopedia, in the last century, was a mine that was
almost open to the sky. The shades, those sombre hatchers of primitive
Christianity, only awaited an opportunity to bring about an explosion
under the Caesars and to inundate the human race with light. For in the
sacred shadows there lies latent light. Volcanoes are full of a shadow
that is capable of flashing forth. Every form begins by being night. The
catacombs, in which the first mass was said, were not alone the cellar
of Rome, they were the vaults of the world.

Beneath the social construction, that complicated marvel of a structure,
there are excavations of all sorts. There is the religious mine, the
philosophical mine, the economic mine, the revolutionary mine. Such and
such a pick-axe with the idea, such a pick with ciphers. Such another
with wrath. People hail and answer each other from one catacomb to
another. Utopias travel about underground, in the pipes. There they
branch out in every direction. They sometimes meet, and fraternize
there. Jean-Jacques lends his pick to Diogenes, who lends him his
lantern. Sometimes they enter into combat there. Calvin seizes Socinius
by the hair. But nothing arrests nor interrupts the tension of all these
energies toward the goal, and the vast, simultaneous activity, which
goes and comes, mounts, descends, and mounts again in these obscurities,
and which immense unknown swarming slowly transforms the top and the
bottom and the inside and the outside. Society hardly even suspects this
digging which leaves its surface intact and changes its bowels. There
are as many different subterranean stages as there are varying works,
as there are extractions. What emerges from these deep excavations? The
future.

The deeper one goes, the more mysterious are the toilers. The work
is good, up to a degree which the social philosophies are able to
recognize; beyond that degree it is doubtful and mixed; lower down,
it becomes terrible. At a certain depth, the excavations are no longer
penetrable by the spirit of civilization, the limit breathable by man
has been passed; a beginning of monsters is possible.

The descending scale is a strange one; and each one of the rungs of this
ladder corresponds to a stage where philosophy can find foothold, and
where one encounters one of these workmen, sometimes divine, sometimes
misshapen. Below John Huss, there is Luther; below Luther, there is
Descartes; below Descartes, there is Voltaire; below Voltaire, there
is Condorcet; below Condorcet, there is Robespierre; below Robespierre,
there is Marat; below Marat there is Babeuf. And so it goes on. Lower
down, confusedly, at the limit which separates the indistinct from the
invisible, one perceives other gloomy men, who perhaps do not exist as
yet. The men of yesterday are spectres; those of to-morrow are forms.
The eye of the spirit distinguishes them but obscurely. The embryonic
work of the future is one of the visions of philosophy.

A world in limbo, in the state of foetus, what an unheard-of spectre!

Saint-Simon, Owen, Fourier, are there also, in lateral galleries.

Surely, although a divine and invisible chain unknown to themselves,
binds together all these subterranean pioneers who, almost always, think
themselves isolated, and who are not so, their works vary greatly, and
the light of some contrasts with the blaze of others. The first are
paradisiacal, the last are tragic. Nevertheless, whatever may be the
contrast, all these toilers, from the highest to the most nocturnal,
from the wisest to the most foolish, possess one likeness, and this
is it: disinterestedness. Marat forgets himself like Jesus. They
throw themselves on one side, they omit themselves, they think not of
themselves. They have a glance, and that glance seeks the absolute. The
first has the whole heavens in his eyes; the last, enigmatical though he
may be, has still, beneath his eyelids, the pale beam of the infinite.
Venerate the man, whoever he may be, who has this sign--the starry eye.

The shadowy eye is the other sign.

With it, evil commences. Reflect and tremble in the presence of any one
who has no glance at all. The social order has its black miners.

There is a point where depth is tantamount to burial, and where light
becomes extinct.

Below all these mines which we have just mentioned, below all these
galleries, below this whole immense, subterranean, venous system of
progress and utopia, much further on in the earth, much lower than
Marat, lower than Babeuf, lower, much lower, and without any connection
with the upper levels, there lies the last mine. A formidable spot. This
is what we have designated as the le troisieme dessous. It is the grave
of shadows. It is the cellar of the blind. Inferi.

This communicates with the abyss.




CHAPTER II--THE LOWEST DEPTHS

There disinterestedness vanishes. The demon is vaguely outlined; each
one is for himself. The _I_ in the eyes howls, seeks, fumbles, and
gnaws. The social Ugolino is in this gulf.

The wild spectres who roam in this grave, almost beasts, almost
phantoms, are not occupied with universal progress; they are ignorant
both of the idea and of the word; they take no thought for anything
but the satisfaction of their individual desires. They are almost
unconscious, and there exists within them a sort of terrible
obliteration. They have two mothers, both step-mothers, ignorance and
misery. They have a guide, necessity; and for all forms of satisfaction,
appetite. They are brutally voracious, that is to say, ferocious, not
after the fashion of the tyrant, but after the fashion of the tiger.
From suffering these spectres pass to crime; fatal affiliation, dizzy
creation, logic of darkness. That which crawls in the social third lower
level is no longer complaint stifled by the absolute; it is the protest
of matter. Man there becomes a dragon. To be hungry, to be thirsty--that
is the point of departure; to be Satan--that is the point reached. From
that vault Lacenaire emerges.

We have just seen, in Book Fourth, one of the compartments of the
upper mine, of the great political, revolutionary, and philosophical
excavation. There, as we have just said, all is pure, noble, dignified,
honest. There, assuredly, one might be misled; but error is worthy of
veneration there, so thoroughly does it imply heroism. The work there
effected, taken as a whole has a name: Progress.

The moment has now come when we must take a look at other depths,
hideous depths. There exists beneath society, we insist upon this point,
and there will exist, until that day when ignorance shall be dissipated,
the great cavern of evil.

This cavern is below all, and is the foe of all. It is hatred, without
exception. This cavern knows no philosophers; its dagger has never cut
a pen. Its blackness has no connection with the sublime blackness of the
inkstand. Never have the fingers of night which contract beneath this
stifling ceiling, turned the leaves of a book nor unfolded a newspaper.
Babeuf is a speculator to Cartouche; Marat is an aristocrat to
Schinderhannes. This cavern has for its object the destruction of
everything.

Of everything. Including the upper superior mines, which it execrates.
It not only undermines, in its hideous swarming, the actual social
order; it undermines philosophy, it undermines human thought, it
undermines civilization, it undermines revolution, it undermines
progress. Its name is simply theft, prostitution, murder, assassination.
It is darkness, and it desires chaos. Its vault is formed of ignorance.

All the others, those above it, have but one object--to suppress it.
It is to this point that philosophy and progress tend, with all their
organs simultaneously, by their amelioration of the real, as well as by
their contemplation of the absolute. Destroy the cavern Ignorance and
you destroy the lair Crime.

Let us condense, in a few words, a part of what we have just written.
The only social peril is darkness.

Humanity is identity. All men are made of the same clay. There is no
difference, here below, at least, in predestination. The same shadow
in front, the same flesh in the present, the same ashes afterwards. But
ignorance, mingled with the human paste, blackens it. This incurable
blackness takes possession of the interior of a man and is there
converted into evil.




CHAPTER III--BABET, GUEULEMER, CLAQUESOUS, AND MONTPARNASSE

A quartette of ruffians, Claquesous, Gueulemer, Babet, and Montparnasse
governed the third lower floor of Paris, from 1830 to 1835.

Gueulemer was a Hercules of no defined position. For his lair he had the
sewer of the Arche-Marion. He was six feet high, his pectoral muscles
were of marble, his biceps of brass, his breath was that of a cavern,
his torso that of a colossus, his head that of a bird. One thought one
beheld the Farnese Hercules clad in duck trousers and a cotton velvet
waistcoat. Gueulemer, built after this sculptural fashion, might have
subdued monsters; he had found it more expeditious to be one. A low
brow, large temples, less than forty years of age, but with crow's-feet,
harsh, short hair, cheeks like a brush, a beard like that of a wild
boar; the reader can see the man before him. His muscles called for
work, his stupidity would have none of it. He was a great, idle force.
He was an assassin through coolness. He was thought to be a creole. He
had, probably, somewhat to do with Marshal Brune, having been a porter
at Avignon in 1815. After this stage, he had turned ruffian.

The diaphaneity of Babet contrasted with the grossness of Gueulemer.
Babet was thin and learned. He was transparent but impenetrable.
Daylight was visible through his bones, but nothing through his eyes. He
declared that he was a chemist. He had been a jack of all trades. He had
played in vaudeville at Saint-Mihiel. He was a man of purpose, a fine
talker, who underlined his smiles and accentuated his gestures. His
occupation consisted in selling, in the open air, plaster busts and
portraits of "the head of the State." In addition to this, he extracted
teeth. He had exhibited phenomena at fairs, and he had owned a booth
with a trumpet and this poster: "Babet, Dental Artist, Member of the
Academies, makes physical experiments on metals and metalloids, extracts
teeth, undertakes stumps abandoned by his brother practitioners. Price:
one tooth, one franc, fifty centimes; two teeth, two francs; three
teeth, two francs, fifty. Take advantage of this opportunity." This Take
advantage of this opportunity meant: Have as many teeth extracted as
possible. He had been married and had had children. He did not know what
had become of his wife and children. He had lost them as one loses his
handkerchief. Babet read the papers, a striking exception in the world
to which he belonged. One day, at the period when he had his family with
him in his booth on wheels, he had read in the Messager, that a woman
had just given birth to a child, who was doing well, and had a calf's
muzzle, and he exclaimed: "There's a fortune! my wife has not the wit to
present me with a child like that!"

Later on he had abandoned everything, in order to "undertake Paris."
This was his expression.

Who was Claquesous? He was night. He waited until the sky was daubed
with black, before he showed himself. At nightfall he emerged from the
hole whither he returned before daylight. Where was this hole? No one
knew. He only addressed his accomplices in the most absolute darkness,
and with his back turned to them. Was his name Claquesous? Certainly
not. If a candle was brought, he put on a mask. He was a ventriloquist.
Babet said: "Claquesous is a nocturne for two voices." Claquesous was
vague, terrible, and a roamer. No one was sure whether he had a name,
Claquesous being a sobriquet; none was sure that he had a voice, as his
stomach spoke more frequently than his voice; no one was sure that he
had a face, as he was never seen without his mask. He disappeared as
though he had vanished into thin air; when he appeared, it was as though
he sprang from the earth.

A lugubrious being was Montparnasse. Montparnasse was a child; less than
twenty years of age, with a handsome face, lips like cherries, charming
black hair, the brilliant light of springtime in his eyes; he had all
vices and aspired to all crimes.

The digestion of evil aroused in him an appetite for worse. It was the
street boy turned pickpocket, and a pickpocket turned garroter. He was
genteel, effeminate, graceful, robust, sluggish, ferocious. The rim of
his hat was curled up on the left side, in order to make room for a tuft
of hair, after the style of 1829. He lived by robbery with violence.
His coat was of the best cut, but threadbare. Montparnasse was a
fashion-plate in misery and given to the commission of murders. The
cause of all this youth's crimes was the desire to be well-dressed. The
first grisette who had said to him: "You are handsome!" had cast the
stain of darkness into his heart, and had made a Cain of this Abel.
Finding that he was handsome, he desired to be elegant: now, the
height of elegance is idleness; idleness in a poor man means crime. Few
prowlers were so dreaded as Montparnasse. At eighteen, he had already
numerous corpses in his past. More than one passer-by lay with
outstretched arms in the presence of this wretch, with his face in a
pool of blood. Curled, pomaded, with laced waist, the hips of a woman,
the bust of a Prussian officer, the murmur of admiration from the
boulevard wenches surrounding him, his cravat knowingly tied, a bludgeon
in his pocket, a flower in his buttonhole; such was this dandy of the
sepulchre.




CHAPTER IV--COMPOSITION OF THE TROUPE

These four ruffians formed a sort of Proteus, winding like a serpent
among the police, and striving to escape Vidocq's indiscreet glances
"under divers forms, tree, flame, fountain," lending each other their
names and their traps, hiding in their own shadows, boxes with
secret compartments and refuges for each other, stripping off their
personalities, as one removes his false nose at a masked ball, sometimes
simplifying matters to the point of consisting of but one individual,
sometimes multiplying themselves to such a point that Coco-Latour
himself took them for a whole throng.

These four men were not four men; they were a sort of mysterious robber
with four heads, operating on a grand scale on Paris; they were that
monstrous polyp of evil, which inhabits the crypt of society.

Thanks to their ramifications, and to the network underlying their
relations, Babet, Gueulemer, Claquesous, and Montparnasse were charged
with the general enterprise of the ambushes of the department of
the Seine. The inventors of ideas of that nature, men with nocturnal
imaginations, applied to them to have their ideas executed. They
furnished the canvas to the four rascals, and the latter undertook the
preparation of the scenery. They labored at the stage setting. They were
always in a condition to lend a force proportioned and suitable to
all crimes which demanded a lift of the shoulder, and which were
sufficiently lucrative. When a crime was in quest of arms, they
under-let their accomplices. They kept a troupe of actors of the shadows
at the disposition of all underground tragedies.

They were in the habit of assembling at nightfall, the hour when they
woke up, on the plains which adjoin the Salpetriere. There they held
their conferences. They had twelve black hours before them; they
regulated their employment accordingly.

Patron-Minette,--such was the name which was bestowed in the
subterranean circulation on the association of these four men. In the
fantastic, ancient, popular parlance, which is vanishing day by day,
Patron-Minette signifies the morning, the same as entre chien et
loup--between dog and wolf--signifies the evening. This appellation,
Patron-Minette, was probably derived from the hour at which their work
ended, the dawn being the vanishing moment for phantoms and for the
separation of ruffians. These four men were known under this title.
When the President of the Assizes visited Lacenaire in his prison, and
questioned him concerning a misdeed which Lacenaire denied, "Who did
it?" demanded the President. Lacenaire made this response, enigmatical
so far as the magistrate was concerned, but clear to the police:
"Perhaps it was Patron-Minette."

A piece can sometimes be divined on the enunciation of the personages;
in the same manner a band can almost be judged from the list of ruffians
composing it. Here are the appellations to which the principal members
of Patron-Minette answered,--for the names have survived in special
memoirs.

Panchaud, alias Printanier, alias Bigrenaille.

Brujon. [There was a Brujon dynasty; we cannot refrain from
interpolating this word.]

Boulatruelle, the road-mender already introduced.

Laveuve.

Finistere.

Homere-Hogu, a negro.

Mardisoir. (Tuesday evening.)

Depeche. (Make haste.)

Fauntleroy, alias Bouquetiere (the Flower Girl).

Glorieux, a discharged convict.

Barrecarrosse (Stop-carriage), called Monsieur Dupont.

L'Esplanade-du-Sud.

Poussagrive.

Carmagnolet.

Kruideniers, called Bizarro.

Mangedentelle. (Lace-eater.)

Les-pieds-en-l'Air. (Feet in the air.)

Demi-Liard, called Deux-Milliards.

Etc., etc.

We pass over some, and not the worst of them. These names have faces
attached. They do not express merely beings, but species. Each one of
these names corresponds to a variety of those misshapen fungi from the
under side of civilization.

Those beings, who were not very lavish with their countenances, were not
among the men whom one sees passing along the streets. Fatigued by the
wild nights which they passed, they went off by day to sleep, sometimes
in the lime-kilns, sometimes in the abandoned quarries of Montmatre or
Montrouge, sometimes in the sewers. They ran to earth.

What became of these men? They still exist. They have always existed.
Horace speaks of them: Ambubaiarum collegia, pharmacopolae, mendici,
mimae; and so long as society remains what it is, they will remain what
they are. Beneath the obscure roof of their cavern, they are continually
born again from the social ooze. They return, spectres, but always
identical; only, they no longer bear the same names and they are
no longer in the same skins. The individuals extirpated, the tribe
subsists.

They always have the same faculties. From the vagrant to the tramp, the
race is maintained in its purity. They divine purses in pockets, they
scent out watches in fobs. Gold and silver possess an odor for them.
There exist ingenuous bourgeois, of whom it might be said, that they
have a "stealable" air. These men patiently pursue these bourgeois. They
experience the quivers of a spider at the passage of a stranger or of a
man from the country.

These men are terrible, when one encounters them, or catches a glimpse
of them, towards midnight, on a deserted boulevard. They do not seem
to be men but forms composed of living mists; one would say that they
habitually constitute one mass with the shadows, that they are in
no wise distinct from them, that they possess no other soul than the
darkness, and that it is only momentarily and for the purpose of living
for a few minutes a monstrous life, that they have separated from the
night.

What is necessary to cause these spectres to vanish? Light. Light in
floods. Not a single bat can resist the dawn. Light up society from
below.




BOOK EIGHTH.--THE WICKED POOR MAN




CHAPTER I--MARIUS, WHILE SEEKING A GIRL IN A BONNET, ENCOUNTERS A MAN IN
A CAP

Summer passed, then the autumn; winter came. Neither M. Leblanc nor the
young girl had again set foot in the Luxembourg garden. Thenceforth,
Marius had but one thought,--to gaze once more on that sweet and
adorable face. He sought constantly, he sought everywhere; he found
nothing. He was no longer Marius, the enthusiastic dreamer, the firm,
resolute, ardent man, the bold defier of fate, the brain which erected
future on future, the young spirit encumbered with plans, with projects,
with pride, with ideas and wishes; he was a lost dog. He fell into a
black melancholy. All was over. Work disgusted him, walking tired him.
Vast nature, formerly so filled with forms, lights, voices, counsels,
perspectives, horizons, teachings, now lay empty before him. It seemed
to him that everything had disappeared.

He thought incessantly, for he could not do otherwise; but he no longer
took pleasure in his thoughts. To everything that they proposed to him
in a whisper, he replied in his darkness: "What is the use?"

He heaped a hundred reproaches on himself. "Why did I follow her? I
was so happy at the mere sight of her! She looked at me; was not that
immense? She had the air of loving me. Was not that everything? I wished
to have, what? There was nothing after that. I have been absurd. It is
my own fault," etc., etc. Courfeyrac, to whom he confided nothing,--it
was his nature,--but who made some little guess at everything,--that was
his nature,--had begun by congratulating him on being in love, though he
was amazed at it; then, seeing Marius fall into this melancholy state,
he ended by saying to him: "I see that you have been simply an animal.
Here, come to the Chaumiere."

Once, having confidence in a fine September sun, Marius had allowed
himself to be taken to the ball at Sceaux by Courfeyrac, Bossuet, and
Grantaire, hoping, what a dream! that he might, perhaps, find her there.
Of course he did not see the one he sought.--"But this is the place,
all the same, where all lost women are found," grumbled Grantaire in an
aside. Marius left his friends at the ball and returned home on foot,
alone, through the night, weary, feverish, with sad and troubled eyes,
stunned by the noise and dust of the merry wagons filled with singing
creatures on their way home from the feast, which passed close to
him, as he, in his discouragement, breathed in the acrid scent of the
walnut-trees, along the road, in order to refresh his head.

He took to living more and more alone, utterly overwhelmed, wholly given
up to his inward anguish, going and coming in his pain like the wolf in
the trap, seeking the absent one everywhere, stupefied by love.

On another occasion, he had an encounter which produced on him a
singular effect. He met, in the narrow streets in the vicinity of the
Boulevard des Invalides, a man dressed like a workingman and wearing a
cap with a long visor, which allowed a glimpse of locks of very
white hair. Marius was struck with the beauty of this white hair, and
scrutinized the man, who was walking slowly and as though absorbed in
painful meditation. Strange to say, he thought that he recognized M.
Leblanc. The hair was the same, also the profile, so far as the cap
permitted a view of it, the mien identical, only more depressed. But why
these workingman's clothes? What was the meaning of this? What signified
that disguise? Marius was greatly astonished. When he recovered himself,
his first impulse was to follow the man; who knows whether he did not
hold at last the clue which he was seeking? In any case, he must see the
man near at hand, and clear up the mystery. But the idea occurred to him
too late, the man was no longer there. He had turned into some little
side street, and Marius could not find him. This encounter occupied
his mind for three days and then was effaced. "After all," he said to
himself, "it was probably only a resemblance."




CHAPTER II--TREASURE TROVE

Marius had not left the Gorbeau house. He paid no attention to any one
there.

At that epoch, to tell the truth, there were no other inhabitants in the
house, except himself and those Jondrettes whose rent he had once paid,
without, moreover, ever having spoken to either father, mother, or
daughters. The other lodgers had moved away or had died, or had been
turned out in default of payment.

One day during that winter, the sun had shown itself a little in the
afternoon, but it was the 2d of February, that ancient Candlemas
day whose treacherous sun, the precursor of a six weeks' cold spell,
inspired Mathieu Laensberg with these two lines, which have with justice
remained classic:--


           Qu'il luise ou qu'il luiserne,
           L'ours rentre dans en sa caverne.[26]


Marius had just emerged from his: night was falling. It was the hour for
his dinner; for he had been obliged to take to dining again, alas! oh,
infirmities of ideal passions!

He had just crossed his threshold, where Ma'am Bougon was sweeping at
the moment, as she uttered this memorable monologue:--

"What is there that is cheap now? Everything is dear. There is nothing
in the world that is cheap except trouble; you can get that for nothing,
the trouble of the world!"

Marius slowly ascended the boulevard towards the barrier, in order to
reach the Rue Saint-Jacques. He was walking along with drooping head.

All at once, he felt some one elbow him in the dusk; he wheeled round,
and saw two young girls clad in rags, the one tall and slim, the other a
little shorter, who were passing rapidly, all out of breath, in terror,
and with the appearance of fleeing; they had been coming to meet him,
had not seen him, and had jostled him as they passed. Through the
twilight, Marius could distinguish their livid faces, their wild heads,
their dishevelled hair, their hideous bonnets, their ragged petticoats,
and their bare feet. They were talking as they ran. The taller said in a
very low voice:--

"The bobbies have come. They came near nabbing me at the half-circle."
The other answered: "I saw them. I bolted, bolted, bolted!"

Through this repulsive slang, Marius understood that gendarmes or the
police had come near apprehending these two children, and that the
latter had escaped.

They plunged among the trees of the boulevard behind him, and there
created, for a few minutes, in the gloom, a sort of vague white spot,
then disappeared.

Marius had halted for a moment.

He was about to pursue his way, when his eye lighted on a little grayish
package lying on the ground at his feet. He stooped and picked it up. It
was a sort of envelope which appeared to contain papers.

"Good," he said to himself, "those unhappy girls dropped it."

He retraced his steps, he called, he did not find them; he reflected
that they must already be far away, put the package in his pocket, and
went off to dine.

On the way, he saw in an alley of the Rue Mouffetard, a child's coffin,
covered with a black cloth resting on three chairs, and illuminated by a
candle. The two girls of the twilight recurred to his mind.

"Poor mothers!" he thought. "There is one thing sadder than to see one's
children die; it is to see them leading an evil life."

Then those shadows which had varied his melancholy vanished from his
thoughts, and he fell back once more into his habitual preoccupations.
He fell to thinking once more of his six months of love and happiness
in the open air and the broad daylight, beneath the beautiful trees of
Luxembourg.

"How gloomy my life has become!" he said to himself. "Young girls are
always appearing to me, only formerly they were angels and now they are
ghouls."




CHAPTER III--QUADRIFRONS

That evening, as he was undressing preparatory to going to bed, his hand
came in contact, in the pocket of his coat, with the packet which he
had picked up on the boulevard. He had forgotten it. He thought that it
would be well to open it, and that this package might possibly contain
the address of the young girls, if it really belonged to them, and, in
any case, the information necessary to a restitution to the person who
had lost it.

He opened the envelope.

It was not sealed and contained four letters, also unsealed.

They bore addresses.

All four exhaled a horrible odor of tobacco.

The first was addressed: "To Madame, Madame la Marquise de Grucheray,
the place opposite the Chamber of Deputies, No.--"

Marius said to himself, that he should probably find in it the
information which he sought, and that, moreover, the letter being open,
it was probable that it could be read without impropriety.

It was conceived as follows:--


Madame la Marquise: The virtue of clemency and piety is that which most
closely unites sosiety. Turn your Christian spirit and cast a look of
compassion on this unfortunate Spanish victim of loyalty and attachment
to the sacred cause of legitimacy, who has given with his blood,
consecrated his fortune, evverything, to defend that cause, and to-day
finds himself in the greatest missery. He doubts not that your honorable
person will grant succor to preserve an existence exteremely painful for
a military man of education and honor full of wounds, counts in advance
on the humanity which animates you and on the interest which Madame la
Marquise bears to a nation so unfortunate. Their prayer will not be in
vain, and their gratitude will preserve theirs charming souvenir.

 My respectful sentiments, with which I have the honor to be
                            Madame,
                                 Don Alvares, Spanish Captain
                                 of Cavalry, a royalist who
                                 has take refuge in France,
                                 who finds himself on travells
                                 for his country, and the
                                 resources are lacking him to
                                 continue his travells.


No address was joined to the signature. Marius hoped to find the address
in the second letter, whose superscription read: A Madame, Madame la
Comtesse de Montvernet, Rue Cassette, No. 9. This is what Marius read in
it:--


 Madame la Comtesse:  It is an unhappy mother of a family of six
 children the last of which is only eight months old.  I sick
 since my last confinement, abandoned by my husband five months ago,
 haveing no resources in the world the most frightful indigance.

 In the hope of Madame la Comtesse, she has the honor to be,
 Madame, with profound respect,
                                        Mistress Balizard.


Marius turned to the third letter, which was a petition like the
preceding; he read:--

        Monsieur Pabourgeot, Elector, wholesale stocking merchant,
           Rue Saint-Denis on the corner of the Rue aux Fers.

 I permit myself to address you this letter to beg you to grant me
 the pretious favor of your simpaties and to interest yourself in a man
 of letters who has just sent a drama to the Theatre-Francais. The subject
 is historical, and the action takes place in Auvergne in the time
 of the Empire; the style, I think, is natural, laconic, and may have
 some merit.  There are couplets to be sung in four places.  The comic,
 the serious, the unexpected, are mingled in a variety of characters,
 and a tinge of romanticism lightly spread through all the intrigue
 which proceeds misteriously, and ends, after striking altarations,
 in the midst of many beautiful strokes of brilliant scenes.

 My principal object is to satisfi the desire which progressively
 animates the man of our century, that is to say, the fashion,
 that capritious and bizarre weathervane which changes at almost
 every new wind.

 In spite of these qualities I have reason to fear that jealousy,
 the egotism of priviliged authors, may obtaine my exclusion from
 the theatre, for I am not ignorant of the mortifications with which
 new-comers are treated.

 Monsiuer Pabourgeot, your just reputation as an enlightened protector
 of men of litters emboldens me to send you my daughter who will
 explain our indigant situation to you, lacking bread and fire
 in this wynter season.  When I say to you that I beg you to accept
 the dedication of my drama which I desire to make to you and of all
 those that I shall make, is to prove to you how great is my ambition
 to have the honor of sheltering myself under your protection,
 and of adorning my writings with your name.  If you deign to honor
 me with the most modest offering, I shall immediately occupy myself
 in making a piesse of verse to pay you my tribute of gratitude.
 Which I shall endeavor to render this piesse as perfect as possible,
 will be sent to you before it is inserted at the beginning of the
 drama and delivered on the stage.
                             To Monsieur
                                and Madame Pabourgeot,
                                   My most respectful complements,
                                      Genflot, man of letters.
       P. S. Even if it is only forty sous.

 Excuse me for sending my daughter and not presenting myself,
 but sad motives connected with the toilet do not permit me,
 alas! to go out.


Finally, Marius opened the fourth letter. The address ran: To the
benevolent Gentleman of the church of Saint-Jacquesdu-haut-Pas. It
contained the following lines:--


 Benevolent Man:  If you deign to accompany my daughter, you will
 behold a misserable calamity, and I will show you my certificates.

 At the aspect of these writings your generous soul will be moved
 with a sentiment of obvious benevolence, for true philosophers
 always feel lively emotions.

 Admit, compassionate man, that it is necessary to suffer the most
 cruel need, and that it is very painful, for the sake of obtaining
 a little relief, to get oneself attested by the authorities as though
 one were not free to suffer and to die of inanition while waiting
 to have our misery relieved.  Destinies are very fatal for several
 and too prodigal or too protecting for others.

 I await your presence or your offering, if you deign to make one,
 and I beseech you to accept the respectful sentiments with which I
 have the honor to be,
                       truly magnanimous man,
                         your very humble
                           and very obedient servant,
                                        P. Fabantou, dramatic artist.


After perusing these four letters, Marius did not find himself much
further advanced than before.

In the first place, not one of the signers gave his address.

Then, they seemed to come from four different individuals, Don Alveras,
Mistress Balizard, the poet Genflot, and dramatic artist Fabantou; but
the singular thing about these letters was, that all four were written
by the same hand.

What conclusion was to be drawn from this, except that they all come
from the same person?

Moreover, and this rendered the conjecture all the more probable, the
coarse and yellow paper was the same in all four, the odor of tobacco
was the same, and, although an attempt had been made to vary the
style, the same orthographical faults were reproduced with the greatest
tranquillity, and the man of letters Genflot was no more exempt from
them than the Spanish captain.

It was waste of trouble to try to solve this petty mystery. Had it not
been a chance find, it would have borne the air of a mystification.
Marius was too melancholy to take even a chance pleasantry well, and to
lend himself to a game which the pavement of the street seemed desirous
of playing with him. It seemed to him that he was playing the part of
the blind man in blind man's buff between the four letters, and that
they were making sport of him.

Nothing, however, indicated that these letters belonged to the two
young girls whom Marius had met on the boulevard. After all, they were
evidently papers of no value. Marius replaced them in their envelope,
flung the whole into a corner and went to bed. About seven o'clock in
the morning, he had just risen and breakfasted, and was trying to settle
down to work, when there came a soft knock at his door.

As he owned nothing, he never locked his door, unless occasionally,
though very rarely, when he was engaged in some pressing work. Even when
absent he left his key in the lock. "You will be robbed," said Ma'am
Bougon. "Of what?" said Marius. The truth is, however, that he had, one
day, been robbed of an old pair of boots, to the great triumph of Ma'am
Bougon.

There came a second knock, as gentle as the first.

"Come in," said Marius.

The door opened.

"What do you want, Ma'am Bougon?" asked Marius, without raising his eyes
from the books and manuscripts on his table.

A voice which did not belong to Ma'am Bougon replied:--

"Excuse me, sir--"

It was a dull, broken, hoarse, strangled voice, the voice of an old man,
roughened with brandy and liquor.

Marius turned round hastily, and beheld a young girl.




CHAPTER IV--A ROSE IN MISERY

[Illustration: Rose in Misery  3b8-4-rose-in-misery]

A very young girl was standing in the half-open door. The dormer window
of the garret, through which the light fell, was precisely opposite
the door, and illuminated the figure with a wan light. She was a frail,
emaciated, slender creature; there was nothing but a chemise and a
petticoat upon that chilled and shivering nakedness. Her girdle was a
string, her head ribbon a string, her pointed shoulders emerged from her
chemise, a blond and lymphatic pallor, earth-colored collar-bones, red
hands, a half-open and degraded mouth, missing teeth, dull, bold, base
eyes; she had the form of a young girl who has missed her youth, and the
look of a corrupt old woman; fifty years mingled with fifteen; one of
those beings which are both feeble and horrible, and which cause those
to shudder whom they do not cause to weep.

Marius had risen, and was staring in a sort of stupor at this being, who
was almost like the forms of the shadows which traverse dreams.

The most heart-breaking thing of all was, that this young girl had not
come into the world to be homely. In her early childhood she must even
have been pretty. The grace of her age was still struggling against the
hideous, premature decrepitude of debauchery and poverty. The remains of
beauty were dying away in that face of sixteen, like the pale sunlight
which is extinguished under hideous clouds at dawn on a winter's day.

That face was not wholly unknown to Marius. He thought he remembered
having seen it somewhere.

"What do you wish, Mademoiselle?" he asked.

The young girl replied in her voice of a drunken convict:--

"Here is a letter for you, Monsieur Marius."

She called Marius by his name; he could not doubt that he was the person
whom she wanted; but who was this girl? How did she know his name?

Without waiting for him to tell her to advance, she entered. She entered
resolutely, staring, with a sort of assurance that made the heart bleed,
at the whole room and the unmade bed. Her feet were bare. Large holes
in her petticoat permitted glimpses of her long legs and her thin knees.
She was shivering.

She held a letter in her hand, which she presented to Marius.

Marius, as he opened the letter, noticed that the enormous wafer which
sealed it was still moist. The message could not have come from a
distance. He read:--


 My amiable neighbor, young man:  I have learned of your goodness to me,
 that you paid my rent six months ago.  I bless you, young man.
 My eldest daughter will tell you that we have been without a morsel
 of bread for two days, four persons and my spouse ill.  If I am
 not deseaved in my opinion, I think I may hope that your generous
 heart will melt at this statement and the desire will subjugate you
 to be propitious to me by daigning to lavish on me a slight favor.

 I am with the distinguished consideration which is due to the
 benefactors of humanity,--

 Jondrette.

 P.S. My eldest daughter will await your orders, dear Monsieur Marius.


This letter, coming in the very midst of the mysterious adventure which
had occupied Marius' thoughts ever since the preceding evening, was like
a candle in a cellar. All was suddenly illuminated.

This letter came from the same place as the other four. There was the
same writing, the same style, the same orthography, the same paper, the
same odor of tobacco.

There were five missives, five histories, five signatures, and a single
signer. The Spanish Captain Don Alvares, the unhappy Mistress Balizard,
the dramatic poet Genflot, the old comedian Fabantou, were all four
named Jondrette, if, indeed, Jondrette himself were named Jondrette.

Marius had lived in the house for a tolerably long time, and he had had,
as we have said, but very rare occasion to see, to even catch a glimpse
of, his extremely mean neighbors. His mind was elsewhere, and where the
mind is, there the eyes are also. He had been obliged more than once to
pass the Jondrettes in the corridor or on the stairs; but they were mere
forms to him; he had paid so little heed to them, that, on the preceding
evening, he had jostled the Jondrette girls on the boulevard, without
recognizing them, for it had evidently been they, and it was with great
difficulty that the one who had just entered his room had awakened in
him, in spite of disgust and pity, a vague recollection of having met
her elsewhere.

Now he saw everything clearly. He understood that his neighbor
Jondrette, in his distress, exercised the industry of speculating on the
charity of benevolent persons, that he procured addresses, and that he
wrote under feigned names to people whom he judged to be wealthy and
compassionate, letters which his daughters delivered at their risk
and peril, for this father had come to such a pass, that he risked his
daughters; he was playing a game with fate, and he used them as the
stake. Marius understood that probably, judging from their flight on the
evening before, from their breathless condition, from their terror
and from the words of slang which he had overheard, these unfortunate
creatures were plying some inexplicably sad profession, and that the
result of the whole was, in the midst of human society, as it is now
constituted, two miserable beings who were neither girls nor women, a
species of impure and innocent monsters produced by misery.

Sad creatures, without name, or sex, or age, to whom neither good nor
evil were any longer possible, and who, on emerging from childhood,
have already nothing in this world, neither liberty, nor virtue, nor
responsibility. Souls which blossomed out yesterday, and are faded
to-day, like those flowers let fall in the streets, which are soiled
with every sort of mire, while waiting for some wheel to crush them.
Nevertheless, while Marius bent a pained and astonished gaze on her, the
young girl was wandering back and forth in the garret with the audacity
of a spectre. She kicked about, without troubling herself as to her
nakedness. Occasionally her chemise, which was untied and torn, fell
almost to her waist. She moved the chairs about, she disarranged the
toilet articles which stood on the commode, she handled Marius' clothes,
she rummaged about to see what there was in the corners.

"Hullo!" said she, "you have a mirror!"

And she hummed scraps of vaudevilles, as though she had been alone,
frolicsome refrains which her hoarse and guttural voice rendered
lugubrious.

An indescribable constraint, weariness, and humiliation were perceptible
beneath this hardihood. Effrontery is a disgrace.

Nothing could be more melancholy than to see her sport about the room,
and, so to speak, flit with the movements of a bird which is frightened
by the daylight, or which has broken its wing. One felt that under other
conditions of education and destiny, the gay and over-free mien of this
young girl might have turned out sweet and charming. Never, even among
animals, does the creature born to be a dove change into an osprey. That
is only to be seen among men.

Marius reflected, and allowed her to have her way.

She approached the table.

"Ah!" said she, "books!"

A flash pierced her glassy eye. She resumed, and her accent expressed
the happiness which she felt in boasting of something, to which no human
creature is insensible:--

"I know how to read, I do!"

She eagerly seized a book which lay open on the table, and read with
tolerable fluency:--

"--General Bauduin received orders to take the chateau of Hougomont
which stands in the middle of the plain of Waterloo, with five
battalions of his brigade."

She paused.

"Ah! Waterloo! I know about that. It was a battle long ago. My father
was there. My father has served in the armies. We are fine Bonapartists
in our house, that we are! Waterloo was against the English."

She laid down the book, caught up a pen, and exclaimed:--

"And I know how to write, too!"

She dipped her pen in the ink, and turning to Marius:--

"Do you want to see? Look here, I'm going to write a word to show you."

And before he had time to answer, she wrote on a sheet of white paper,
which lay in the middle of the table: "The bobbies are here."

Then throwing down the pen:--

"There are no faults of orthography. You can look. We have received an
education, my sister and I. We have not always been as we are now. We
were not made--"

Here she paused, fixed her dull eyes on Marius, and burst out laughing,
saying, with an intonation which contained every form of anguish,
stifled by every form of cynicism:--

"Bah!"

And she began to hum these words to a gay air:--

      "J'ai faim, mon pere."      I am hungry, father.
       Pas de fricot.             I have no food.
       J'ai froid, ma mere.       I am cold, mother.
       Pas de tricot.             I have no clothes.
       Grelotte,                  Lolotte!
            Lolotte!                   Shiver,
            Sanglote,                  Sob,
            Jacquot!"                  Jacquot!"


She had hardly finished this couplet, when she exclaimed:--

"Do you ever go to the play, Monsieur Marius? I do. I have a little
brother who is a friend of the artists, and who gives me tickets
sometimes. But I don't like the benches in the galleries. One is cramped
and uncomfortable there. There are rough people there sometimes; and
people who smell bad."

Then she scrutinized Marius, assumed a singular air and said:--

"Do you know, Mr. Marius, that you are a very handsome fellow?"

And at the same moment the same idea occurred to them both, and made
her smile and him blush. She stepped up to him, and laid her hand on his
shoulder: "You pay no heed to me, but I know you, Mr. Marius. I meet you
here on the staircase, and then I often see you going to a person named
Father Mabeuf who lives in the direction of Austerlitz, sometimes when I
have been strolling in that quarter. It is very becoming to you to have
your hair tumbled thus."

She tried to render her voice soft, but only succeeded in making it very
deep. A portion of her words was lost in the transit from her larynx to
her lips, as though on a piano where some notes are missing.

Marius had retreated gently.

"Mademoiselle," said he, with his cool gravity, "I have here a package
which belongs to you, I think. Permit me to return it to you."

And he held out the envelope containing the four letters.

She clapped her hands and exclaimed:--

"We have been looking everywhere for that!"

Then she eagerly seized the package and opened the envelope, saying as
she did so:--

"Dieu de Dieu! how my sister and I have hunted! And it was you who found
it! On the boulevard, was it not? It must have been on the boulevard?
You see, we let it fall when we were running. It was that brat of a
sister of mine who was so stupid. When we got home, we could not find it
anywhere. As we did not wish to be beaten, as that is useless, as that
is entirely useless, as that is absolutely useless, we said that we had
carried the letters to the proper persons, and that they had said to us:
'Nix.' So here they are, those poor letters! And how did you find out
that they belonged to me? Ah! yes, the writing. So it was you that we
jostled as we passed last night. We couldn't see. I said to my sister:
'Is it a gentleman?' My sister said to me: 'I think it is a gentleman.'"

In the meanwhile she had unfolded the petition addressed to "the
benevolent gentleman of the church of Saint-Jacquesdu-Haut-Pas."

"Here!" said she, "this is for that old fellow who goes to mass. By the
way, this is his hour. I'll go and carry it to him. Perhaps he will give
us something to breakfast on."

Then she began to laugh again, and added:--

"Do you know what it will mean if we get a breakfast today? It will mean
that we shall have had our breakfast of the day before yesterday, our
breakfast of yesterday, our dinner of to-day, and all that at once, and
this morning. Come! Parbleu! if you are not satisfied, dogs, burst!"

This reminded Marius of the wretched girl's errand to himself. He
fumbled in his waistcoat pocket, and found nothing there.

The young girl went on, and seemed to have no consciousness of Marius'
presence.

"I often go off in the evening. Sometimes I don't come home again. Last
winter, before we came here, we lived under the arches of the bridges.
We huddled together to keep from freezing. My little sister cried. How
melancholy the water is! When I thought of drowning myself, I said
to myself: 'No, it's too cold.' I go out alone, whenever I choose, I
sometimes sleep in the ditches. Do you know, at night, when I walk along
the boulevard, I see the trees like forks, I see houses, all black and
as big as Notre Dame, I fancy that the white walls are the river, I say
to myself: 'Why, there's water there!' The stars are like the lamps in
illuminations, one would say that they smoked and that the wind blew
them out, I am bewildered, as though horses were breathing in my ears;
although it is night, I hear hand-organs and spinning-machines, and I
don't know what all. I think people are flinging stones at me, I flee
without knowing whither, everything whirls and whirls. You feel very
queer when you have had no food."

And then she stared at him with a bewildered air.

By dint of searching and ransacking his pockets, Marius had finally
collected five francs sixteen sous. This was all he owned in the world
for the moment. "At all events," he thought, "there is my dinner for
to-day, and to-morrow we will see." He kept the sixteen sous, and handed
the five francs to the young girl.

She seized the coin.

"Good!" said she, "the sun is shining!"

And, as though the sun had possessed the property of melting the
avalanches of slang in her brain, she went on:--

"Five francs! the shiner! a monarch! in this hole! Ain't this fine!
You're a jolly thief! I'm your humble servant! Bravo for the good
fellows! Two days' wine! and meat! and stew! we'll have a royal feast!
and a good fill!"

She pulled her chemise up on her shoulders, made a low bow to Marius,
then a familiar sign with her hand, and went towards the door, saying:--

"Good morning, sir. It's all right. I'll go and find my old man."

As she passed, she caught sight of a dry crust of bread on the commode,
which was moulding there amid the dust; she flung herself upon it and
bit into it, muttering:--

"That's good! it's hard! it breaks my teeth!"

Then she departed.




CHAPTER V--A PROVIDENTIAL PEEP-HOLE

Marius had lived for five years in poverty, in destitution, even in
distress, but he now perceived that he had not known real misery. True
misery he had but just had a view of. It was its spectre which had just
passed before his eyes. In fact, he who has only beheld the misery of
man has seen nothing; the misery of woman is what he must see; he who
has seen only the misery of woman has seen nothing; he must see the
misery of the child.

When a man has reached his last extremity, he has reached his last
resources at the same time. Woe to the defenceless beings who surround
him! Work, wages, bread, fire, courage, good will, all fail him
simultaneously. The light of day seems extinguished without, the moral
light within; in these shadows man encounters the feebleness of the
woman and the child, and bends them violently to ignominy.

Then all horrors become possible. Despair is surrounded with fragile
partitions which all open on either vice or crime.

Health, youth, honor, all the shy delicacies of the young body, the
heart, virginity, modesty, that epidermis of the soul, are manipulated
in sinister wise by that fumbling which seeks resources, which
encounters opprobrium, and which accommodates itself to it. Fathers,
mothers, children, brothers, sisters, men, women, daughters, adhere
and become incorporated, almost like a mineral formation, in that dusky
promiscuousness of sexes, relationships, ages, infamies, and innocences.
They crouch, back to back, in a sort of hut of fate. They exchange
woe-begone glances. Oh, the unfortunate wretches! How pale they are! How
cold they are! It seems as though they dwelt in a planet much further
from the sun than ours.

This young girl was to Marius a sort of messenger from the realm of sad
shadows. She revealed to him a hideous side of the night.

Marius almost reproached himself for the preoccupations of revery and
passion which had prevented his bestowing a glance on his neighbors up
to that day. The payment of their rent had been a mechanical movement,
which any one would have yielded to; but he, Marius, should have done
better than that. What! only a wall separated him from those abandoned
beings who lived gropingly in the dark outside the pale of the rest of
the world, he was elbow to elbow with them, he was, in some sort, the
last link of the human race which they touched, he heard them live, or
rather, rattle in the death agony beside him, and he paid no heed to
them! Every day, every instant, he heard them walking on the other side
of the wall, he heard them go, and come, and speak, and he did not even
lend an ear! And groans lay in those words, and he did not even listen
to them, his thoughts were elsewhere, given up to dreams, to impossible
radiances, to loves in the air, to follies; and all the while, human
creatures, his brothers in Jesus Christ, his brothers in the people,
were agonizing in vain beside him! He even formed a part of their
misfortune, and he aggravated it. For if they had had another neighbor
who was less chimerical and more attentive, any ordinary and charitable
man, evidently their indigence would have been noticed, their signals of
distress would have been perceived, and they would have been taken hold
of and rescued! They appeared very corrupt and very depraved, no
doubt, very vile, very odious even; but those who fall without becoming
degraded are rare; besides, there is a point where the unfortunate and
the infamous unite and are confounded in a single word, a fatal word,
the miserable; whose fault is this? And then should not the charity be
all the more profound, in proportion as the fall is great?

While reading himself this moral lesson, for there were occasions on
which Marius, like all truly honest hearts, was his own pedagogue and
scolded himself more than he deserved, he stared at the wall which
separated him from the Jondrettes, as though he were able to make his
gaze, full of pity, penetrate that partition and warm these wretched
people. The wall was a thin layer of plaster upheld by lathes and beams,
and, as the reader had just learned, it allowed the sound of voices and
words to be clearly distinguished. Only a man as dreamy as Marius could
have failed to perceive this long before. There was no paper pasted on
the wall, either on the side of the Jondrettes or on that of Marius; the
coarse construction was visible in its nakedness. Marius examined the
partition, almost unconsciously; sometimes revery examines, observes,
and scrutinizes as thought would. All at once he sprang up; he had just
perceived, near the top, close to the ceiling, a triangular hole, which
resulted from the space between three lathes. The plaster which should
have filled this cavity was missing, and by mounting on the commode,
a view could be had through this aperture into the Jondrettes' attic.
Commiseration has, and should have, its curiosity. This aperture formed
a sort of peep-hole. It is permissible to gaze at misfortune like a
traitor in order to succor it.[27]

"Let us get some little idea of what these people are like," thought
Marius, "and in what condition they are."

He climbed upon the commode, put his eye to the crevice, and looked.




CHAPTER VI--THE WILD MAN IN HIS LAIR

Cities, like forests, have their caverns in which all the most wicked
and formidable creatures which they contain conceal themselves. Only,
in cities, that which thus conceals itself is ferocious, unclean, and
petty, that is to say, ugly; in forests, that which conceals itself is
ferocious, savage, and grand, that is to say, beautiful. Taking one lair
with another, the beast's is preferable to the man's. Caverns are better
than hovels.

What Marius now beheld was a hovel.

Marius was poor, and his chamber was poverty-stricken, but as his
poverty was noble, his garret was neat. The den upon which his eye now
rested was abject, dirty, fetid, pestiferous, mean, sordid. The only
furniture consisted of a straw chair, an infirm table, some old bits of
crockery, and in two of the corners, two indescribable pallets; all
the light was furnished by a dormer window of four panes, draped with
spiders' webs. Through this aperture there penetrated just enough light
to make the face of a man appear like the face of a phantom. The walls
had a leprous aspect, and were covered with seams and scars, like a
visage disfigured by some horrible malady; a repulsive moisture exuded
from them. Obscene sketches roughly sketched with charcoal could be
distinguished upon them.

The chamber which Marius occupied had a dilapidated brick pavement; this
one was neither tiled nor planked; its inhabitants stepped directly
on the antique plaster of the hovel, which had grown black under the
long-continued pressure of feet. Upon this uneven floor, where the dirt
seemed to be fairly incrusted, and which possessed but one virginity,
that of the broom, were capriciously grouped constellations of old
shoes, socks, and repulsive rags; however, this room had a fireplace,
so it was let for forty francs a year. There was every sort of thing
in that fireplace, a brazier, a pot, broken boards, rags suspended
from nails, a bird-cage, ashes, and even a little fire. Two brands were
smouldering there in a melancholy way.

One thing which added still more to the horrors of this garret was, that
it was large. It had projections and angles and black holes, the lower
sides of roofs, bays, and promontories. Hence horrible, unfathomable
nooks where it seemed as though spiders as big as one's fist, wood-lice
as large as one's foot, and perhaps even--who knows?--some monstrous
human beings, must be hiding.

One of the pallets was near the door, the other near the window. One
end of each touched the fireplace and faced Marius. In a corner near the
aperture through which Marius was gazing, a colored engraving in a black
frame was suspended to a nail on the wall, and at its bottom, in large
letters, was the inscription: THE DREAM. This represented a sleeping
woman, and a child, also asleep, the child on the woman's lap, an eagle
in a cloud, with a crown in his beak, and the woman thrusting the
crown away from the child's head, without awaking the latter; in the
background, Napoleon in a glory, leaning on a very blue column with a
yellow capital ornamented with this inscription:

                            MARINGO
                           AUSTERLITS
                              IENA
                            WAGRAMME
                              ELOT

Beneath this frame, a sort of wooden panel, which was no longer than it
was broad, stood on the ground and rested in a sloping attitude against
the wall. It had the appearance of a picture with its face turned to
the wall, of a frame probably showing a daub on the other side, of some
pier-glass detached from a wall and lying forgotten there while waiting
to be rehung.

Near the table, upon which Marius descried a pen, ink, and paper, sat
a man about sixty years of age, small, thin, livid, haggard, with a
cunning, cruel, and uneasy air; a hideous scoundrel.

If Lavater had studied this visage, he would have found the vulture
mingled with the attorney there, the bird of prey and the pettifogger
rendering each other mutually hideous and complementing each other; the
pettifogger making the bird of prey ignoble, the bird of prey making the
pettifogger horrible.

This man had a long gray beard. He was clad in a woman's chemise, which
allowed his hairy breast and his bare arms, bristling with gray hair,
to be seen. Beneath this chemise, muddy trousers and boots through which
his toes projected were visible.

He had a pipe in his mouth and was smoking. There was no bread in the
hovel, but there was still tobacco.

He was writing probably some more letters like those which Marius had
read.

On the corner of the table lay an ancient, dilapidated, reddish volume,
and the size, which was the antique 12mo of reading-rooms, betrayed a
romance. On the cover sprawled the following title, printed in large
capitals: GOD; THE KING; HONOR AND THE LADIES; BY DUCRAY DUMINIL, 1814.

As the man wrote, he talked aloud, and Marius heard his words:--

"The idea that there is no equality, even when you are dead! Just look
at Pere Lachaise! The great, those who are rich, are up above, in the
acacia alley, which is paved. They can reach it in a carriage. The
little people, the poor, the unhappy, well, what of them? they are put
down below, where the mud is up to your knees, in the damp places. They
are put there so that they will decay the sooner! You cannot go to see
them without sinking into the earth."

He paused, smote the table with his fist, and added, as he ground his
teeth:--

"Oh! I could eat the whole world!"

A big woman, who might be forty years of age, or a hundred, was
crouching near the fireplace on her bare heels.

She, too, was clad only in a chemise and a knitted petticoat patched
with bits of old cloth. A coarse linen apron concealed the half of her
petticoat. Although this woman was doubled up and bent together, it
could be seen that she was of very lofty stature. She was a sort of
giant, beside her husband. She had hideous hair, of a reddish blond
which was turning gray, and which she thrust back from time to time,
with her enormous shining hands, with their flat nails.

Beside her, on the floor, wide open, lay a book of the same form as the
other, and probably a volume of the same romance.

On one of the pallets, Marius caught a glimpse of a sort of tall pale
young girl, who sat there half naked and with pendant feet, and who did
not seem to be listening or seeing or living.

No doubt the younger sister of the one who had come to his room.

She seemed to be eleven or twelve years of age. On closer scrutiny it
was evident that she really was fourteen. She was the child who had
said, on the boulevard the evening before: "I bolted, bolted, bolted!"

She was of that puny sort which remains backward for a long time,
then suddenly starts up rapidly. It is indigence which produces these
melancholy human plants. These creatures have neither childhood nor
youth. At fifteen years of age they appear to be twelve, at sixteen they
seem twenty. To-day a little girl, to-morrow a woman. One might say
that they stride through life, in order to get through with it the more
speedily.

At this moment, this being had the air of a child.

Moreover, no trace of work was revealed in that dwelling; no handicraft,
no spinning-wheel, not a tool. In one corner lay some ironmongery of
dubious aspect. It was the dull listlessness which follows despair and
precedes the death agony.

Marius gazed for a while at this gloomy interior, more terrifying than
the interior of a tomb, for the human soul could be felt fluttering
there, and life was palpitating there. The garret, the cellar, the lowly
ditch where certain indigent wretches crawl at the very bottom of the
social edifice, is not exactly the sepulchre, but only its antechamber;
but, as the wealthy display their greatest magnificence at the entrance
of their palaces, it seems that death, which stands directly side by
side with them, places its greatest miseries in that vestibule.

The man held his peace, the woman spoke no word, the young girl did
not even seem to breathe. The scratching of the pen on the paper was
audible.

The man grumbled, without pausing in his writing. "Canaille! canaille!
everybody is canaille!"

This variation to Solomon's exclamation elicited a sigh from the woman.

"Calm yourself, my little friend," she said. "Don't hurt yourself, my
dear. You are too good to write to all those people, husband."

Bodies press close to each other in misery, as in cold, but hearts draw
apart. This woman must have loved this man, to all appearance, judging
from the amount of love within her; but probably, in the daily and
reciprocal reproaches of the horrible distress which weighed on the
whole group, this had become extinct. There no longer existed in her
anything more than the ashes of affection for her husband. Nevertheless,
caressing appellations had survived, as is often the case. She called
him: My dear, my little friend, my good man, etc., with her mouth while
her heart was silent.

The man resumed his writing.




CHAPTER VII--STRATEGY AND TACTICS

Marius, with a load upon his breast, was on the point of descending
from the species of observatory which he had improvised, when a sound
attracted his attention and caused him to remain at his post.

The door of the attic had just burst open abruptly. The eldest girl made
her appearance on the threshold. On her feet, she had large, coarse,
men's shoes, bespattered with mud, which had splashed even to her red
ankles, and she was wrapped in an old mantle which hung in tatters.
Marius had not seen it on her an hour previously, but she had probably
deposited it at his door, in order that she might inspire the more pity,
and had picked it up again on emerging. She entered, pushed the door to
behind her, paused to take breath, for she was completely breathless,
then exclaimed with an expression of triumph and joy:--

"He is coming!"

The father turned his eyes towards her, the woman turned her head, the
little sister did not stir.

"Who?" demanded her father.

"The gentleman!"

"The philanthropist?"

"Yes."

"From the church of Saint-Jacques?"

"Yes."

"That old fellow?"

"Yes."

"And he is coming?"

"He is following me."

"You are sure?"

"I am sure."

"There, truly, he is coming?"

"He is coming in a fiacre."

"In a fiacre. He is Rothschild."

The father rose.

"How are you sure? If he is coming in a fiacre, how is it that you
arrive before him? You gave him our address at least? Did you tell him
that it was the last door at the end of the corridor, on the right? If
he only does not make a mistake! So you found him at the church? Did he
read my letter? What did he say to you?"

"Ta, ta, ta," said the girl, "how you do gallop on, my good man! See
here: I entered the church, he was in his usual place, I made him a
reverence, and I handed him the letter; he read it and said to me:
'Where do you live, my child?' I said: 'Monsieur, I will show you.' He
said to me: 'No, give me your address, my daughter has some purchases to
make, I will take a carriage and reach your house at the same time that
you do.' I gave him the address. When I mentioned the house, he seemed
surprised and hesitated for an instant, then he said: 'Never mind, I
will come.' When the mass was finished, I watched him leave the church
with his daughter, and I saw them enter a carriage. I certainly did tell
him the last door in the corridor, on the right."

"And what makes you think that he will come?"

"I have just seen the fiacre turn into the Rue Petit-Banquier. That is
what made me run so."

"How do you know that it was the same fiacre?"

"Because I took notice of the number, so there!"

"What was the number?"

"440."

"Good, you are a clever girl."

The girl stared boldly at her father, and showing the shoes which she
had on her feet:--

"A clever girl, possibly; but I tell you I won't put these shoes on
again, and that I won't, for the sake of my health, in the first place,
and for the sake of cleanliness, in the next. I don't know anything
more irritating than shoes that squelch, and go ghi, ghi, ghi, the whole
time. I prefer to go barefoot."

"You are right," said her father, in a sweet tone which contrasted with
the young girl's rudeness, "but then, you will not be allowed to enter
churches, for poor people must have shoes to do that. One cannot go
barefoot to the good God," he added bitterly.

Then, returning to the subject which absorbed him:--

"So you are sure that he will come?"

"He is following on my heels," said she.

The man started up. A sort of illumination appeared on his countenance.

"Wife!" he exclaimed, "you hear. Here is the philanthropist. Extinguish
the fire."

The stupefied mother did not stir.

The father, with the agility of an acrobat, seized a broken-nosed jug
which stood on the chimney, and flung the water on the brands.

Then, addressing his eldest daughter:--

"Here you! Pull the straw off that chair!"

His daughter did not understand.

He seized the chair, and with one kick he rendered it seatless. His leg
passed through it.

As he withdrew his leg, he asked his daughter:--

"Is it cold?"

"Very cold. It is snowing."

The father turned towards the younger girl who sat on the bed near the
window, and shouted to her in a thundering voice:--

"Quick! get off that bed, you lazy thing! will you never do anything?
Break a pane of glass!"

The little girl jumped off the bed with a shiver.

"Break a pane!" he repeated.

The child stood still in bewilderment.

"Do you hear me?" repeated her father, "I tell you to break a pane!"

The child, with a sort of terrified obedience, rose on tiptoe, and
struck a pane with her fist. The glass broke and fell with a loud
clatter.

"Good," said the father.

He was grave and abrupt. His glance swept rapidly over all the crannies
of the garret. One would have said that he was a general making the
final preparation at the moment when the battle is on the point of
beginning.

The mother, who had not said a word so far, now rose and demanded in
a dull, slow, languid voice, whence her words seemed to emerge in a
congealed state:--

"What do you mean to do, my dear?"

"Get into bed," replied the man.

His intonation admitted of no deliberation. The mother obeyed, and threw
herself heavily on one of the pallets.

In the meantime, a sob became audible in one corner.

"What's that?" cried the father.

The younger daughter exhibited her bleeding fist, without quitting the
corner in which she was cowering. She had wounded herself while breaking
the window; she went off, near her mother's pallet and wept silently.

It was now the mother's turn to start up and exclaim:--

"Just see there! What follies you commit! She has cut herself breaking
that pane for you!"

"So much the better!" said the man. "I foresaw that."

"What? So much the better?" retorted his wife.

"Peace!" replied the father, "I suppress the liberty of the press."

Then tearing the woman's chemise which he was wearing, he made a strip
of cloth with which he hastily swathed the little girl's bleeding wrist.

That done, his eye fell with a satisfied expression on his torn chemise.

"And the chemise too," said he, "this has a good appearance."

An icy breeze whistled through the window and entered the room. The
outer mist penetrated thither and diffused itself like a whitish sheet
of wadding vaguely spread by invisible fingers. Through the broken pane
the snow could be seen falling. The snow promised by the Candlemas sun
of the preceding day had actually come.

The father cast a glance about him as though to make sure that he had
forgotten nothing. He seized an old shovel and spread ashes over the wet
brands in such a manner as to entirely conceal them.

Then drawing himself up and leaning against the chimney-piece:--

"Now," said he, "we can receive the philanthropist."




CHAPTER VIII--THE RAY OF LIGHT IN THE HOVEL

The big girl approached and laid her hand in her father's.

"Feel how cold I am," said she.

"Bah!" replied the father, "I am much colder than that."

The mother exclaimed impetuously:--

"You always have something better than any one else, so you do! even bad
things."

"Down with you!" said the man.

The mother, being eyed after a certain fashion, held her tongue.

Silence reigned for a moment in the hovel. The elder girl was removing
the mud from the bottom of her mantle, with a careless air; her younger
sister continued to sob; the mother had taken the latter's head between
her hands, and was covering it with kisses, whispering to her the
while:--

"My treasure, I entreat you, it is nothing of consequence, don't cry,
you will anger your father."

"No!" exclaimed the father, "quite the contrary! sob! sob! that's
right."

Then turning to the elder:--

"There now! He is not coming! What if he were not to come! I shall have
extinguished my fire, wrecked my chair, torn my shirt, and broken my
pane all for nothing."

"And wounded the child!" murmured the mother.

"Do you know," went on the father, "that it's beastly cold in this
devil's garret! What if that man should not come! Oh! See there, you! He
makes us wait! He says to himself: 'Well! they will wait for me!
That's what they're there for.' Oh! how I hate them, and with what joy,
jubilation, enthusiasm, and satisfaction I could strangle all those rich
folks! all those rich folks! These men who pretend to be charitable,
who put on airs, who go to mass, who make presents to the priesthood,
preachy, preachy, in their skullcaps, and who think themselves above
us, and who come for the purpose of humiliating us, and to bring us
'clothes,' as they say! old duds that are not worth four sous! And
bread! That's not what I want, pack of rascals that they are, it's
money! Ah! money! Never! Because they say that we would go off and drink
it up, and that we are drunkards and idlers! And they! What are they,
then, and what have they been in their time! Thieves! They never could
have become rich otherwise! Oh! Society ought to be grasped by the four
corners of the cloth and tossed into the air, all of it! It would all
be smashed, very likely, but at least, no one would have anything,
and there would be that much gained! But what is that blockhead of
a benevolent gentleman doing? Will he come? Perhaps the animal has
forgotten the address! I'll bet that that old beast--"

At that moment there came a light tap at the door, the man rushed to it
and opened it, exclaiming, amid profound bows and smiles of adoration:--

"Enter, sir! Deign to enter, most respected benefactor, and your
charming young lady, also."

A man of ripe age and a young girl made their appearance on the
threshold of the attic.

Marius had not quitted his post. His feelings for the moment surpassed
the powers of the human tongue.

It was She!

Whoever has loved knows all the radiant meanings contained in those
three letters of that word: She.

It was certainly she. Marius could hardly distinguish her through the
luminous vapor which had suddenly spread before his eyes. It was that
sweet, absent being, that star which had beamed upon him for six months;
it was those eyes, that brow, that mouth, that lovely vanished face
which had created night by its departure. The vision had been eclipsed,
now it reappeared.

It reappeared in that gloom, in that garret, in that misshapen attic, in
all that horror.

Marius shuddered in dismay. What! It was she! The palpitations of his
heart troubled his sight. He felt that he was on the brink of bursting
into tears! What! He beheld her again at last, after having sought her
so long! It seemed to him that he had lost his soul, and that he had
just found it again.

She was the same as ever, only a little pale; her delicate face was
framed in a bonnet of violet velvet, her figure was concealed beneath
a pelisse of black satin. Beneath her long dress, a glimpse could be
caught of her tiny foot shod in a silken boot.

She was still accompanied by M. Leblanc.

She had taken a few steps into the room, and had deposited a tolerably
bulky parcel on the table.

The eldest Jondrette girl had retired behind the door, and was staring
with sombre eyes at that velvet bonnet, that silk mantle, and that
charming, happy face.




CHAPTER IX--JONDRETTE COMES NEAR WEEPING

The hovel was so dark, that people coming from without felt on entering
it the effect produced on entering a cellar. The two new-comers
advanced, therefore, with a certain hesitation, being hardly able
to distinguish the vague forms surrounding them, while they could be
clearly seen and scrutinized by the eyes of the inhabitants of the
garret, who were accustomed to this twilight.

M. Leblanc approached, with his sad but kindly look, and said to
Jondrette the father:--

"Monsieur, in this package you will find some new clothes and some
woollen stockings and blankets."

"Our angelic benefactor overwhelms us," said Jondrette, bowing to the
very earth.

Then, bending down to the ear of his eldest daughter, while the two
visitors were engaged in examining this lamentable interior, he added in
a low and rapid voice:--

"Hey? What did I say? Duds! No money! They are all alike! By the way,
how was the letter to that old blockhead signed?"

"Fabantou," replied the girl.

"The dramatic artist, good!"

It was lucky for Jondrette, that this had occurred to him, for at the
very moment, M. Leblanc turned to him, and said to him with the air of a
person who is seeking to recall a name:--

"I see that you are greatly to be pitied, Monsieur--"

"Fabantou," replied Jondrette quickly.

"Monsieur Fabantou, yes, that is it. I remember."

"Dramatic artist, sir, and one who has had some success."

Here Jondrette evidently judged the moment propitious for capturing the
"philanthropist." He exclaimed with an accent which smacked at the same
time of the vainglory of the mountebank at fairs, and the humility of
the mendicant on the highway:--

"A pupil of Talma! Sir! I am a pupil of Talma! Fortune formerly smiled
on me--Alas! Now it is misfortune's turn. You see, my benefactor, no
bread, no fire. My poor babes have no fire! My only chair has no seat! A
broken pane! And in such weather! My spouse in bed! Ill!"

"Poor woman!" said M. Leblanc.

"My child wounded!" added Jondrette.

The child, diverted by the arrival of the strangers, had fallen to
contemplating "the young lady," and had ceased to sob.

"Cry! bawl!" said Jondrette to her in a low voice.

At the same time he pinched her sore hand. All this was done with the
talent of a juggler.

The little girl gave vent to loud shrieks.

The adorable young girl, whom Marius, in his heart, called "his Ursule,"
approached her hastily.

"Poor, dear child!" said she.

"You see, my beautiful young lady," pursued Jondrette "her bleeding
wrist! It came through an accident while working at a machine to earn
six sous a day. It may be necessary to cut off her arm."

"Really?" said the old gentleman, in alarm.

The little girl, taking this seriously, fell to sobbing more violently
than ever.

"Alas! yes, my benefactor!" replied the father.

For several minutes, Jondrette had been scrutinizing "the benefactor"
in a singular fashion. As he spoke, he seemed to be examining the other
attentively, as though seeking to summon up his recollections. All at
once, profiting by a moment when the new-comers were questioning the
child with interest as to her injured hand, he passed near his wife,
who lay in her bed with a stupid and dejected air, and said to her in a
rapid but very low tone:--

"Take a look at that man!"

Then, turning to M. Leblanc, and continuing his lamentations:--

"You see, sir! All the clothing that I have is my wife's chemise! And
all torn at that! In the depths of winter! I can't go out for lack of a
coat. If I had a coat of any sort, I would go and see Mademoiselle Mars,
who knows me and is very fond of me. Does she not still reside in the
Rue de la Tour-des-Dames? Do you know, sir? We played together in the
provinces. I shared her laurels. Celimene would come to my succor, sir!
Elmire would bestow alms on Belisaire! But no, nothing! And not a sou in
the house! My wife ill, and not a sou! My daughter dangerously injured,
not a sou! My wife suffers from fits of suffocation. It comes from her
age, and besides, her nervous system is affected. She ought to have
assistance, and my daughter also! But the doctor! But the apothecary!
How am I to pay them? I would kneel to a penny, sir! Such is the
condition to which the arts are reduced. And do you know, my charming
young lady, and you, my generous protector, do you know, you who breathe
forth virtue and goodness, and who perfume that church where my daughter
sees you every day when she says her prayers?--For I have brought up my
children religiously, sir. I did not want them to take to the theatre.
Ah! the hussies! If I catch them tripping! I do not jest, that I don't!
I read them lessons on honor, on morality, on virtue! Ask them! They
have got to walk straight. They are none of your unhappy wretches who
begin by having no family, and end by espousing the public. One is
Mamselle Nobody, and one becomes Madame Everybody. Deuce take it! None
of that in the Fabantou family! I mean to bring them up virtuously, and
they shall be honest, and nice, and believe in God, by the sacred name!
Well, sir, my worthy sir, do you know what is going to happen to-morrow?
To-morrow is the fourth day of February, the fatal day, the last day of
grace allowed me by my landlord; if by this evening I have not paid my
rent, to-morrow my oldest daughter, my spouse with her fever, my child
with her wound,--we shall all four be turned out of here and thrown into
the street, on the boulevard, without shelter, in the rain, in the snow.
There, sir. I owe for four quarters--a whole year! that is to say, sixty
francs."

Jondrette lied. Four quarters would have amounted to only forty francs,
and he could not owe four, because six months had not elapsed since
Marius had paid for two.

M. Leblanc drew five francs from his pocket and threw them on the table.

Jondrette found time to mutter in the ear of his eldest daughter:--

"The scoundrel! What does he think I can do with his five francs?
That won't pay me for my chair and pane of glass! That's what comes of
incurring expenses!"

In the meanwhile, M. Leblanc had removed the large brown great-coat
which he wore over his blue coat, and had thrown it over the back of the
chair.

"Monsieur Fabantou," he said, "these five francs are all that I have
about me, but I shall now take my daughter home, and I will return this
evening,--it is this evening that you must pay, is it not?"

Jondrette's face lighted up with a strange expression. He replied
vivaciously:--

"Yes, respected sir. At eight o'clock, I must be at my landlord's."

"I will be here at six, and I will fetch you the sixty francs."

"My benefactor!" exclaimed Jondrette, overwhelmed. And he added, in a
low tone: "Take a good look at him, wife!"

M. Leblanc had taken the arm of the young girl, once more, and had
turned towards the door.

"Farewell until this evening, my friends!" said he.

"Six o'clock?" said Jondrette.

"Six o'clock precisely."

At that moment, the overcoat lying on the chair caught the eye of the
elder Jondrette girl.

"You are forgetting your coat, sir," said she.

Jondrette darted an annihilating look at his daughter, accompanied by a
formidable shrug of the shoulders.

M. Leblanc turned back and said, with a smile:--

"I have not forgotten it, I am leaving it."

"O my protector!" said Jondrette, "my august benefactor, I melt into
tears! Permit me to accompany you to your carriage."

"If you come out," answered M. Leblanc, "put on this coat. It really is
very cold."

Jondrette did not need to be told twice. He hastily donned the brown
great-coat. And all three went out, Jondrette preceding the two
strangers.




CHAPTER X--TARIFF OF LICENSED CABS: TWO FRANCS AN HOUR

Marius had lost nothing of this entire scene, and yet, in reality, had
seen nothing. His eyes had remained fixed on the young girl, his heart
had, so to speak, seized her and wholly enveloped her from the moment of
her very first step in that garret. During her entire stay there, he
had lived that life of ecstasy which suspends material perceptions and
precipitates the whole soul on a single point. He contemplated, not that
girl, but that light which wore a satin pelisse and a velvet bonnet. The
star Sirius might have entered the room, and he would not have been any
more dazzled.

While the young girl was engaged in opening the package, unfolding the
clothing and the blankets, questioning the sick mother kindly, and the
little injured girl tenderly, he watched her every movement, he sought
to catch her words. He knew her eyes, her brow, her beauty, her form,
her walk, he did not know the sound of her voice. He had once fancied
that he had caught a few words at the Luxembourg, but he was not
absolutely sure of the fact. He would have given ten years of his life
to hear it, in order that he might bear away in his soul a little of
that music. But everything was drowned in the lamentable exclamations
and trumpet bursts of Jondrette. This added a touch of genuine wrath
to Marius' ecstasy. He devoured her with his eyes. He could not believe
that it really was that divine creature whom he saw in the midst of
those vile creatures in that monstrous lair. It seemed to him that he
beheld a humming-bird in the midst of toads.

When she took her departure, he had but one thought, to follow her, to
cling to her trace, not to quit her until he learned where she
lived, not to lose her again, at least, after having so miraculously
re-discovered her. He leaped down from the commode and seized his hat.
As he laid his hand on the lock of the door, and was on the point of
opening it, a sudden reflection caused him to pause. The corridor was
long, the staircase steep, Jondrette was talkative, M. Leblanc had,
no doubt, not yet regained his carriage; if, on turning round in the
corridor, or on the staircase, he were to catch sight of him, Marius,
in that house, he would, evidently, take the alarm, and find means to
escape from him again, and this time it would be final. What was he
to do? Should he wait a little? But while he was waiting, the carriage
might drive off. Marius was perplexed. At last he accepted the risk and
quitted his room.

There was no one in the corridor. He hastened to the stairs. There was
no one on the staircase. He descended in all haste, and reached the
boulevard in time to see a fiacre turning the corner of the Rue du
Petit-Banquier, on its way back to Paris.

Marius rushed headlong in that direction. On arriving at the angle of
the boulevard, he caught sight of the fiacre again, rapidly descending
the Rue Mouffetard; the carriage was already a long way off, and there
was no means of overtaking it; what! run after it? Impossible; and
besides, the people in the carriage would assuredly notice an individual
running at full speed in pursuit of a fiacre, and the father would
recognize him. At that moment, wonderful and unprecedented good luck,
Marius perceived an empty cab passing along the boulevard. There was but
one thing to be done, to jump into this cab and follow the fiacre. That
was sure, efficacious, and free from danger.

Marius made the driver a sign to halt, and called to him:--

"By the hour?"

Marius wore no cravat, he had on his working-coat, which was destitute
of buttons, his shirt was torn along one of the plaits on the bosom.

The driver halted, winked, and held out his left hand to Marius, rubbing
his forefinger gently with his thumb.

"What is it?" said Marius.

"Pay in advance," said the coachman.

Marius recollected that he had but sixteen sous about him.

"How much?" he demanded.

"Forty sous."

"I will pay on my return."

The driver's only reply was to whistle the air of La Palisse and to whip
up his horse.

Marius stared at the retreating cabriolet with a bewildered air. For the
lack of four and twenty sous, he was losing his joy, his happiness,
his love! He had seen, and he was becoming blind again. He reflected
bitterly, and it must be confessed, with profound regret, on the five
francs which he had bestowed, that very morning, on that miserable girl.
If he had had those five francs, he would have been saved, he would have
been born again, he would have emerged from the limbo and darkness, he
would have made his escape from isolation and spleen, from his widowed
state; he might have re-knotted the black thread of his destiny to that
beautiful golden thread, which had just floated before his eyes and
had broken at the same instant, once more! He returned to his hovel in
despair.

He might have told himself that M. Leblanc had promised to return in
the evening, and that all he had to do was to set about the matter more
skilfully, so that he might follow him on that occasion; but, in his
contemplation, it is doubtful whether he had heard this.

As he was on the point of mounting the staircase, he perceived, on the
other side of the boulevard, near the deserted wall skirting the Rue De
la Barriere-des-Gobelins, Jondrette, wrapped in the "philanthropist's"
great-coat, engaged in conversation with one of those men of disquieting
aspect who have been dubbed by common consent, prowlers of the barriers;
people of equivocal face, of suspicious monologues, who present the
air of having evil minds, and who generally sleep in the daytime, which
suggests the supposition that they work by night.

These two men, standing there motionless and in conversation, in the
snow which was falling in whirlwinds, formed a group that a policeman
would surely have observed, but which Marius hardly noticed.

Still, in spite of his mournful preoccupation, he could not refrain from
saying to himself that this prowler of the barriers with whom Jondrette
was talking resembled a certain Panchaud, alias Printanier, alias
Bigrenaille, whom Courfeyrac had once pointed out to him as a very
dangerous nocturnal roamer. This man's name the reader has learned in
the preceding book. This Panchaud, alias Printanier, alias Bigrenaille,
figured later on in many criminal trials, and became a notorious rascal.
He was at that time only a famous rascal. To-day he exists in the state
of tradition among ruffians and assassins. He was at the head of
a school towards the end of the last reign. And in the evening, at
nightfall, at the hour when groups form and talk in whispers, he was
discussed at La Force in the Fosse-aux-Lions. One might even, in
that prison, precisely at the spot where the sewer which served the
unprecedented escape, in broad daylight, of thirty prisoners, in 1843,
passes under the culvert, read his name, PANCHAUD, audaciously carved
by his own hand on the wall of the sewer, during one of his attempts at
flight. In 1832, the police already had their eye on him, but he had not
as yet made a serious beginning.




CHAPTER XI--OFFERS OF SERVICE FROM MISERY TO WRETCHEDNESS

Marius ascended the stairs of the hovel with slow steps; at the moment
when he was about to re-enter his cell, he caught sight of the elder
Jondrette girl following him through the corridor. The very sight of
this girl was odious to him; it was she who had his five francs, it was
too late to demand them back, the cab was no longer there, the fiacre
was far away. Moreover, she would not have given them back. As for
questioning her about the residence of the persons who had just been
there, that was useless; it was evident that she did not know, since the
letter signed Fabantou had been addressed "to the benevolent gentleman
of the church of Saint-Jacquesdu-Haut-Pas."

Marius entered his room and pushed the door to after him.

It did not close; he turned round and beheld a hand which held the door
half open.

"What is it?" he asked, "who is there?"

It was the Jondrette girl.

"Is it you?" resumed Marius almost harshly, "still you! What do you want
with me?"

She appeared to be thoughtful and did not look at him. She no longer had
the air of assurance which had characterized her that morning. She did
not enter, but held back in the darkness of the corridor, where Marius
could see her through the half-open door.

"Come now, will you answer?" cried Marius. "What do you want with me?"

She raised her dull eyes, in which a sort of gleam seemed to flicker
vaguely, and said:--

"Monsieur Marius, you look sad. What is the matter with you?"

"With me!" said Marius.

"Yes, you."

"There is nothing the matter with me."

"Yes, there is!"

"No."

"I tell you there is!"

"Let me alone!"

Marius gave the door another push, but she retained her hold on it.

"Stop," said she, "you are in the wrong. Although you are not rich, you
were kind this morning. Be so again now. You gave me something to eat,
now tell me what ails you. You are grieved, that is plain. I do not want
you to be grieved. What can be done for it? Can I be of any service?
Employ me. I do not ask for your secrets, you need not tell them to me,
but I may be of use, nevertheless. I may be able to help you, since I
help my father. When it is necessary to carry letters, to go to houses,
to inquire from door to door, to find out an address, to follow any one,
I am of service. Well, you may assuredly tell me what is the matter with
you, and I will go and speak to the persons; sometimes it is enough if
some one speaks to the persons, that suffices to let them understand
matters, and everything comes right. Make use of me."

An idea flashed across Marius' mind. What branch does one disdain when
one feels that one is falling?

He drew near to the Jondrette girl.

"Listen--" he said to her.

She interrupted him with a gleam of joy in her eyes.

"Oh yes, do call me thou! I like that better."

"Well," he resumed, "thou hast brought hither that old gentleman and his
daughter!"

"Yes."

"Dost thou know their address?"

"No."

"Find it for me."

The Jondrette's dull eyes had grown joyous, and they now became gloomy.

"Is that what you want?" she demanded.

"Yes."

"Do you know them?"

"No."

"That is to say," she resumed quickly, "you do not know her, but you
wish to know her."

This them which had turned into her had something indescribably
significant and bitter about it.

"Well, can you do it?" said Marius.

"You shall have the beautiful lady's address."

There was still a shade in the words "the beautiful lady" which troubled
Marius. He resumed:--

"Never mind, after all, the address of the father and daughter. Their
address, indeed!"

She gazed fixedly at him.

"What will you give me?"

"Anything you like."

"Anything I like?"

"Yes."

"You shall have the address."

She dropped her head; then, with a brusque movement, she pulled to the
door, which closed behind her.

Marius found himself alone.

He dropped into a chair, with his head and both elbows on his bed,
absorbed in thoughts which he could not grasp, and as though a prey to
vertigo. All that had taken place since the morning, the appearance of
the angel, her disappearance, what that creature had just said to him, a
gleam of hope floating in an immense despair,--this was what filled his
brain confusedly.

All at once he was violently aroused from his revery.

He heard the shrill, hard voice of Jondrette utter these words, which
were fraught with a strange interest for him:--

"I tell you that I am sure of it, and that I recognized him."

Of whom was Jondrette speaking? Whom had he recognized? M. Leblanc? The
father of "his Ursule"? What! Did Jondrette know him? Was Marius about
to obtain in this abrupt and unexpected fashion all the information
without which his life was so dark to him? Was he about to learn at last
who it was that he loved, who that young girl was? Who her father
was? Was the dense shadow which enwrapped them on the point of being
dispelled? Was the veil about to be rent? Ah! Heavens!

He bounded rather than climbed upon his commode, and resumed his post
near the little peep-hole in the partition wall.

Again he beheld the interior of Jondrette's hovel.




CHAPTER XII--THE USE MADE OF M. LEBLANC'S FIVE-FRANC PIECE

Nothing in the aspect of the family was altered, except that the wife
and daughters had levied on the package and put on woollen stockings and
jackets. Two new blankets were thrown across the two beds.

Jondrette had evidently just returned. He still had the breathlessness
of out of doors. His daughters were seated on the floor near the
fireplace, the elder engaged in dressing the younger's wounded hand. His
wife had sunk back on the bed near the fireplace, with a face indicative
of astonishment. Jondrette was pacing up and down the garret with long
strides. His eyes were extraordinary.

The woman, who seemed timid and overwhelmed with stupor in the presence
of her husband, turned to say:--

"What, really? You are sure?"

"Sure! Eight years have passed! But I recognize him! Ah! I recognize
him. I knew him at once! What! Didn't it force itself on you?"

"No."

"But I told you: 'Pay attention!' Why, it is his figure, it is his face,
only older,--there are people who do not grow old, I don't know how they
manage it,--it is the very sound of his voice. He is better dressed,
that is all! Ah! you mysterious old devil, I've got you, that I have!"

He paused, and said to his daughters:--

"Get out of here, you!--It's queer that it didn't strike you!"

They arose to obey.

The mother stammered:--

"With her injured hand."

"The air will do it good," said Jondrette. "Be off."

It was plain that this man was of the sort to whom no one offers to
reply. The two girls departed.

At the moment when they were about to pass through the door, the father
detained the elder by the arm, and said to her with a peculiar accent:--

"You will be here at five o'clock precisely. Both of you. I shall need
you."

Marius redoubled his attention.

On being left alone with his wife, Jondrette began to pace the room
again, and made the tour of it two or three times in silence. Then he
spent several minutes in tucking the lower part of the woman's chemise
which he wore into his trousers.

All at once, he turned to the female Jondrette, folded his arms and
exclaimed:--

"And would you like to have me tell you something? The young lady--"

"Well, what?" retorted his wife, "the young lady?"

Marius could not doubt that it was really she of whom they were
speaking. He listened with ardent anxiety. His whole life was in his
ears.

But Jondrette had bent over and spoke to his wife in a whisper. Then he
straightened himself up and concluded aloud:--

"It is she!"

"That one?" said his wife.

"That very one," said the husband.

No expression can reproduce the significance of the mother's words.
Surprise, rage, hate, wrath, were mingled and combined in one monstrous
intonation. The pronunciation of a few words, the name, no doubt, which
her husband had whispered in her ear, had sufficed to rouse this huge,
somnolent woman, and from being repulsive she became terrible.

"It is not possible!" she cried. "When I think that my daughters are
going barefoot, and have not a gown to their backs! What! A satin
pelisse, a velvet bonnet, boots, and everything; more than two hundred
francs' worth of clothes! so that one would think she was a lady! No,
you are mistaken! Why, in the first place, the other was hideous, and
this one is not so bad-looking! She really is not bad-looking! It can't
be she!"

"I tell you that it is she. You will see."

At this absolute assertion, the Jondrette woman raised her large, red,
blonde face and stared at the ceiling with a horrible expression.
At that moment, she seemed to Marius even more to be feared than her
husband. She was a sow with the look of a tigress.

"What!" she resumed, "that horrible, beautiful young lady, who gazed at
my daughters with an air of pity,--she is that beggar brat! Oh! I should
like to kick her stomach in for her!"

She sprang off of the bed, and remained standing for a moment, her
hair in disorder, her nostrils dilating, her mouth half open, her fists
clenched and drawn back. Then she fell back on the bed once more. The
man paced to and fro and paid no attention to his female.

After a silence lasting several minutes, he approached the female
Jondrette, and halted in front of her, with folded arms, as he had done
a moment before:--

"And shall I tell you another thing?"

"What is it?" she asked.

He answered in a low, curt voice:--

"My fortune is made."

The woman stared at him with the look that signifies: "Is the person who
is addressing me on the point of going mad?"

He went on:--

"Thunder! It was not so very long ago that I was a parishioner of
the parish of
die-of-hunger-if-you-have-a-fire,-die-of-cold-if-you-have-bread! I have
had enough of misery! my share and other people's share! I am not joking
any longer, I don't find it comic any more, I've had enough of puns,
good God! no more farces, Eternal Father! I want to eat till I am full,
I want to drink my fill! to gormandize! to sleep! to do nothing! I want
to have my turn, so I do, come now! before I die! I want to be a bit of
a millionnaire!"

He took a turn round the hovel, and added:--

"Like other people."

"What do you mean by that?" asked the woman.

He shook his head, winked, screwed up one eye, and raised his voice like
a medical professor who is about to make a demonstration:--

"What do I mean by that? Listen!"

"Hush!" muttered the woman, "not so loud! These are matters which must
not be overheard."

"Bah! Who's here? Our neighbor? I saw him go out a little while ago.
Besides, he doesn't listen, the big booby. And I tell you that I saw him
go out."

Nevertheless, by a sort of instinct, Jondrette lowered his voice,
although not sufficiently to prevent Marius hearing his words. One
favorable circumstance, which enabled Marius not to lose a word of this
conversation was the falling snow which deadened the sound of vehicles
on the boulevard.

This is what Marius heard:--

"Listen carefully. The Croesus is caught, or as good as caught! That's
all settled already. Everything is arranged. I have seen some people. He
will come here this evening at six o'clock. To bring sixty francs, the
rascal! Did you notice how I played that game on him, my sixty francs,
my landlord, my fourth of February? I don't even owe for one quarter!
Isn't he a fool! So he will come at six o'clock! That's the hour when
our neighbor goes to his dinner. Mother Bougon is off washing dishes in
the city. There's not a soul in the house. The neighbor never comes home
until eleven o'clock. The children shall stand on watch. You shall help
us. He will give in."

"And what if he does not give in?" demanded his wife.

Jondrette made a sinister gesture, and said:--

"We'll fix him."

And he burst out laughing.

This was the first time Marius had seen him laugh. The laugh was cold
and sweet, and provoked a shudder.

Jondrette opened a cupboard near the fireplace, and drew from it an old
cap, which he placed on his head, after brushing it with his sleeve.

"Now," said he, "I'm going out. I have some more people that I must see.
Good ones. You'll see how well the whole thing will work. I shall be
away as short a time as possible, it's a fine stroke of business, do you
look after the house."

And with both fists thrust into the pockets of his trousers, he stood
for a moment in thought, then exclaimed:--

"Do you know, it's mighty lucky, by the way, that he didn't recognize
me! If he had recognized me on his side, he would not have come back
again. He would have slipped through our fingers! It was my beard that
saved us! my romantic beard! my pretty little romantic beard!"

And again he broke into a laugh.

He stepped to the window. The snow was still falling, and streaking the
gray of the sky.

"What beastly weather!" said he.

Then lapping his overcoat across his breast:--

"This rind is too large for me. Never mind," he added, "he did a
devilish good thing in leaving it for me, the old scoundrel! If it
hadn't been for that, I couldn't have gone out, and everything would
have gone wrong! What small points things hang on, anyway!"

And pulling his cap down over his eyes, he quitted the room.

He had barely had time to take half a dozen steps from the door, when
the door opened again, and his savage but intelligent face made its
appearance once more in the opening.

"I came near forgetting," said he. "You are to have a brazier of
charcoal ready."

And he flung into his wife's apron the five-franc piece which the
"philanthropist" had left with him.

"A brazier of charcoal?" asked his wife.

"Yes."

"How many bushels?"

"Two good ones."

"That will come to thirty sous. With the rest I will buy something for
dinner."

"The devil, no."

"Why?"

"Don't go and spend the hundred-sou piece."

"Why?"

"Because I shall have to buy something, too."

"What?"

"Something."

"How much shall you need?"

"Whereabouts in the neighborhood is there an ironmonger's shop?"

"Rue Mouffetard."

"Ah! yes, at the corner of a street; I can see the shop."

"But tell me how much you will need for what you have to purchase?"

"Fifty sous--three francs."

"There won't be much left for dinner."

"Eating is not the point to-day. There's something better to be done."

"That's enough, my jewel."

At this word from his wife, Jondrette closed the door again, and this
time, Marius heard his step die away in the corridor of the hovel, and
descend the staircase rapidly.

At that moment, one o'clock struck from the church of Saint-Medard.




CHAPTER XIII--SOLUS CUM SOLO, IN LOCO REMOTO, NON COGITABUNTUR ORARE
PATER NOSTER

Marius, dreamer as he was, was, as we have said, firm and energetic by
nature. His habits of solitary meditation, while they had developed in
him sympathy and compassion, had, perhaps, diminished the faculty for
irritation, but had left intact the power of waxing indignant; he had
the kindliness of a brahmin, and the severity of a judge; he took pity
upon a toad, but he crushed a viper. Now, it was into a hole of vipers
that his glance had just been directed, it was a nest of monsters that
he had beneath his eyes.

"These wretches must be stamped upon," said he.

Not one of the enigmas which he had hoped to see solved had been
elucidated; on the contrary, all of them had been rendered more dense,
if anything; he knew nothing more about the beautiful maiden of the
Luxembourg and the man whom he called M. Leblanc, except that Jondrette
was acquainted with them. Athwart the mysterious words which had been
uttered, the only thing of which he caught a distinct glimpse was the
fact that an ambush was in course of preparation, a dark but terrible
trap; that both of them were incurring great danger, she probably, her
father certainly; that they must be saved; that the hideous plots of the
Jondrettes must be thwarted, and the web of these spiders broken.

He scanned the female Jondrette for a moment. She had pulled an old
sheet-iron stove from a corner, and she was rummaging among the old heap
of iron.

He descended from the commode as softly as possible, taking care not to
make the least noise. Amid his terror as to what was in preparation, and
in the horror with which the Jondrettes had inspired him, he experienced
a sort of joy at the idea that it might be granted to him perhaps to
render a service to the one whom he loved.

But how was it to be done? How warn the persons threatened? He did not
know their address. They had reappeared for an instant before his eyes,
and had then plunged back again into the immense depths of Paris. Should
he wait for M. Leblanc at the door that evening at six o'clock, at the
moment of his arrival, and warn him of the trap? But Jondrette and his
men would see him on the watch, the spot was lonely, they were stronger
than he, they would devise means to seize him or to get him away, and
the man whom Marius was anxious to save would be lost. One o'clock had
just struck, the trap was to be sprung at six. Marius had five hours
before him.

There was but one thing to be done.

He put on his decent coat, knotted a silk handkerchief round his neck,
took his hat, and went out, without making any more noise than if he had
been treading on moss with bare feet.

Moreover, the Jondrette woman continued to rummage among her old iron.

Once outside of the house, he made for the Rue du Petit-Banquier.

He had almost reached the middle of this street, near a very low wall
which a man can easily step over at certain points, and which abuts on
a waste space, and was walking slowly, in consequence of his preoccupied
condition, and the snow deadened the sound of his steps; all at once he
heard voices talking very close by. He turned his head, the street was
deserted, there was not a soul in it, it was broad daylight, and yet he
distinctly heard voices.

It occurred to him to glance over the wall which he was skirting.

There, in fact, sat two men, flat on the snow, with their backs against
the wall, talking together in subdued tones.

These two persons were strangers to him; one was a bearded man in a
blouse, and the other a long-haired individual in rags. The bearded man
had on a fez, the other's head was bare, and the snow had lodged in his
hair.

By thrusting his head over the wall, Marius could hear their remarks.

The hairy one jogged the other man's elbow and said:--

"--With the assistance of Patron-Minette, it can't fail."

"Do you think so?" said the bearded man.

And the long-haired one began again:--

"It's as good as a warrant for each one, of five hundred balls, and the
worst that can happen is five years, six years, ten years at the most!"

The other replied with some hesitation, and shivering beneath his fez:--

"That's a real thing. You can't go against such things."

"I tell you that the affair can't go wrong," resumed the long-haired
man. "Father What's-his-name's team will be already harnessed."

Then they began to discuss a melodrama that they had seen on the
preceding evening at the Gaite Theatre.

Marius went his way.

It seemed to him that the mysterious words of these men, so strangely
hidden behind that wall, and crouching in the snow, could not but bear
some relation to Jondrette's abominable projects. That must be the
affair.

He directed his course towards the faubourg Saint-Marceau and asked at
the first shop he came to where he could find a commissary of police.

He was directed to Rue de Pontoise, No. 14.

Thither Marius betook himself.

As he passed a baker's shop, he bought a two-penny roll, and ate it,
foreseeing that he should not dine.

On the way, he rendered justice to Providence. He reflected that had he
not given his five francs to the Jondrette girl in the morning, he
would have followed M. Leblanc's fiacre, and consequently have remained
ignorant of everything, and that there would have been no obstacle to
the trap of the Jondrettes and that M. Leblanc would have been lost, and
his daughter with him, no doubt.




CHAPTER XIV--IN WHICH A POLICE AGENT BESTOWS TWO FISTFULS ON A LAWYER

On arriving at No. 14, Rue de Pontoise, he ascended to the first floor
and inquired for the commissary of police.

"The commissary of police is not here," said a clerk; "but there is an
inspector who takes his place. Would you like to speak to him? Are you
in haste?"

"Yes," said Marius.

The clerk introduced him into the commissary's office. There stood a
tall man behind a grating, leaning against a stove, and holding up with
both hands the tails of a vast topcoat, with three collars. His face
was square, with a thin, firm mouth, thick, gray, and very ferocious
whiskers, and a look that was enough to turn your pockets inside out.
Of that glance it might have been well said, not that it penetrated, but
that it searched.

This man's air was not much less ferocious nor less terrible than
Jondrette's; the dog is, at times, no less terrible to meet than the
wolf.

"What do you want?" he said to Marius, without adding "monsieur."

"Is this Monsieur le Commissaire de Police?"

"He is absent. I am here in his stead."

"The matter is very private."

"Then speak."

"And great haste is required."

"Then speak quick."

This calm, abrupt man was both terrifying and reassuring at one and the
same time. He inspired fear and confidence. Marius related the adventure
to him: That a person with whom he was not acquainted otherwise than by
sight, was to be inveigled into a trap that very evening; that, as he
occupied the room adjoining the den, he, Marius Pontmercy, a lawyer,
had heard the whole plot through the partition; that the wretch who
had planned the trap was a certain Jondrette; that there would be
accomplices, probably some prowlers of the barriers, among others a
certain Panchaud, alias Printanier, alias Bigrenaille; that Jondrette's
daughters were to lie in wait; that there was no way of warning the
threatened man, since he did not even know his name; and that, finally,
all this was to be carried out at six o'clock that evening, at the most
deserted point of the Boulevard de l'Hopital, in house No. 50-52.

At the sound of this number, the inspector raised his head, and said
coldly:--

"So it is in the room at the end of the corridor?"

"Precisely," answered Marius, and he added: "Are you acquainted with
that house?"

The inspector remained silent for a moment, then replied, as he warmed
the heel of his boot at the door of the stove:--

"Apparently."

He went on, muttering between his teeth, and not addressing Marius so
much as his cravat:--

"Patron-Minette must have had a hand in this."

This word struck Marius.

"Patron-Minette," said he, "I did hear that word pronounced, in fact."

And he repeated to the inspector the dialogue between the long-haired
man and the bearded man in the snow behind the wall of the Rue du
Petit-Banquier.

The inspector muttered:--

"The long-haired man must be Brujon, and the bearded one Demi-Liard,
alias Deux-Milliards."

He had dropped his eyelids again, and became absorbed in thought.

"As for Father What's-his-name, I think I recognize him. Here, I've
burned my coat. They always have too much fire in these cursed stoves.
Number 50-52. Former property of Gorbeau."

Then he glanced at Marius.

"You saw only that bearded and that long-haired man?"

"And Panchaud."

"You didn't see a little imp of a dandy prowling about the premises?"

"No."

"Nor a big lump of matter, resembling an elephant in the Jardin des
Plantes?"

"No."

"Nor a scamp with the air of an old red tail?"

"No."

"As for the fourth, no one sees him, not even his adjutants, clerks, and
employees. It is not surprising that you did not see him."

"No. Who are all those persons?" asked Marius.

The inspector answered:--

"Besides, this is not the time for them."

He relapsed into silence, then resumed:--

"50-52. I know that barrack. Impossible to conceal ourselves inside
it without the artists seeing us, and then they will get off simply
by countermanding the vaudeville. They are so modest! An audience
embarrasses them. None of that, none of that. I want to hear them sing
and make them dance."

This monologue concluded, he turned to Marius, and demanded, gazing at
him intently the while:--

"Are you afraid?"

"Of what?" said Marius.

"Of these men?"

"No more than yourself!" retorted Marius rudely, who had begun to notice
that this police agent had not yet said "monsieur" to him.

The inspector stared still more intently at Marius, and continued with
sententious solemnity:--

"There, you speak like a brave man, and like an honest man. Courage does
not fear crime, and honesty does not fear authority."

Marius interrupted him:--

"That is well, but what do you intend to do?"

The inspector contented himself with the remark:--

"The lodgers have pass-keys with which to get in at night. You must have
one."

"Yes," said Marius.

"Have you it about you?"

"Yes."

"Give it to me," said the inspector.

Marius took his key from his waistcoat pocket, handed it to the
inspector and added:--

"If you will take my advice, you will come in force."

The inspector cast on Marius such a glance as Voltaire might have
bestowed on a provincial academician who had suggested a rhyme to him;
with one movement he plunged his hands, which were enormous, into the
two immense pockets of his top-coat, and pulled out two small steel
pistols, of the sort called "knock-me-downs." Then he presented them to
Marius, saying rapidly, in a curt tone:--

"Take these. Go home. Hide in your chamber, so that you may be supposed
to have gone out. They are loaded. Each one carries two balls. You will
keep watch; there is a hole in the wall, as you have informed me. These
men will come. Leave them to their own devices for a time. When you
think matters have reached a crisis, and that it is time to put a stop
to them, fire a shot. Not too soon. The rest concerns me. A shot into
the ceiling, the air, no matter where. Above all things, not too soon.
Wait until they begin to put their project into execution; you are a
lawyer; you know the proper point." Marius took the pistols and put them
in the side pocket of his coat.

"That makes a lump that can be seen," said the inspector. "Put them in
your trousers pocket."

Marius hid the pistols in his trousers pockets.

"Now," pursued the inspector, "there is not a minute more to be lost by
any one. What time is it? Half-past two. Seven o'clock is the hour?"

"Six o'clock," answered Marius.

"I have plenty of time," said the inspector, "but no more than enough.
Don't forget anything that I have said to you. Bang. A pistol shot."

"Rest easy," said Marius.

And as Marius laid his hand on the handle of the door on his way out,
the inspector called to him:--

"By the way, if you have occasion for my services between now and then,
come or send here. You will ask for Inspector Javert."




CHAPTER XV--JONDRETTE MAKES HIS PURCHASES

A few moments later, about three o'clock, Courfeyrac chanced to be
passing along the Rue Mouffetard in company with Bossuet. The snow had
redoubled in violence, and filled the air. Bossuet was just saying to
Courfeyrac:--

"One would say, to see all these snow-flakes fall, that there was a
plague of white butterflies in heaven." All at once, Bossuet caught
sight of Marius coming up the street towards the barrier with a peculiar
air.

"Hold!" said Bossuet. "There's Marius."

"I saw him," said Courfeyrac. "Don't let's speak to him."

"Why?"

"He is busy."

"With what?"

"Don't you see his air?"

"What air?"

"He has the air of a man who is following some one."

"That's true," said Bossuet.

"Just see the eyes he is making!" said Courfeyrac.

"But who the deuce is he following?"

"Some fine, flowery bonneted wench! He's in love."

"But," observed Bossuet, "I don't see any wench nor any flowery bonnet
in the street. There's not a woman round."

Courfeyrac took a survey, and exclaimed:--

"He's following a man!"

A man, in fact, wearing a gray cap, and whose gray beard could be
distinguished, although they only saw his back, was walking along about
twenty paces in advance of Marius.

This man was dressed in a great-coat which was perfectly new and too
large for him, and in a frightful pair of trousers all hanging in rags
and black with mud.

Bossuet burst out laughing.

"Who is that man?"

"He?" retorted Courfeyrac, "he's a poet. Poets are very fond of wearing
the trousers of dealers in rabbit skins and the overcoats of peers of
France."

"Let's see where Marius will go," said Bossuet; "let's see where the man
is going, let's follow them, hey?"

"Bossuet!" exclaimed Courfeyrac, "eagle of Meaux! You are a prodigious
brute. Follow a man who is following another man, indeed!"

They retraced their steps.

Marius had, in fact, seen Jondrette passing along the Rue Mouffetard,
and was spying on his proceedings.

Jondrette walked straight ahead, without a suspicion that he was already
held by a glance.

He quitted the Rue Mouffetard, and Marius saw him enter one of the most
terrible hovels in the Rue Gracieuse; he remained there about a quarter
of an hour, then returned to the Rue Mouffetard. He halted at
an ironmonger's shop, which then stood at the corner of the Rue
Pierre-Lombard, and a few minutes later Marius saw him emerge from the
shop, holding in his hand a huge cold chisel with a white wood handle,
which he concealed beneath his great-coat. At the top of the Rue
Petit-Gentilly he turned to the left and proceeded rapidly to the Rue du
Petit-Banquier. The day was declining; the snow, which had ceased for a
moment, had just begun again. Marius posted himself on the watch at the
very corner of the Rue du Petit-Banquier, which was deserted, as usual,
and did not follow Jondrette into it. It was lucky that he did so,
for, on arriving in the vicinity of the wall where Marius had heard the
long-haired man and the bearded man conversing, Jondrette turned round,
made sure that no one was following him, did not see him, then sprang
across the wall and disappeared.

The waste land bordered by this wall communicated with the back yard of
an ex-livery stable-keeper of bad repute, who had failed and who still
kept a few old single-seated berlins under his sheds.

Marius thought that it would be wise to profit by Jondrette's absence to
return home; moreover, it was growing late; every evening, Ma'am Bougon
when she set out for her dish-washing in town, had a habit of locking
the door, which was always closed at dusk. Marius had given his key to
the inspector of police; it was important, therefore, that he should
make haste.

Evening had arrived, night had almost closed in; on the horizon and in
the immensity of space, there remained but one spot illuminated by the
sun, and that was the moon.

It was rising in a ruddy glow behind the low dome of Salpetriere.

Marius returned to No. 50-52 with great strides. The door was still open
when he arrived. He mounted the stairs on tip-toe and glided along the
wall of the corridor to his chamber. This corridor, as the reader will
remember, was bordered on both sides by attics, all of which were, for
the moment, empty and to let. Ma'am Bougon was in the habit of leaving
all the doors open. As he passed one of these attics, Marius thought
he perceived in the uninhabited cell the motionless heads of four men,
vaguely lighted up by a remnant of daylight, falling through a dormer
window.

Marius made no attempt to see, not wishing to be seen himself. He
succeeded in reaching his chamber without being seen and without making
any noise. It was high time. A moment later he heard Ma'am Bougon take
her departure, locking the door of the house behind her.




CHAPTER XVI--IN WHICH WILL BE FOUND THE WORDS TO AN ENGLISH AIR WHICH
WAS IN FASHION IN 1832

Marius seated himself on his bed. It might have been half-past five
o'clock. Only half an hour separated him from what was about to happen.
He heard the beating of his arteries as one hears the ticking of a watch
in the dark. He thought of the double march which was going on at that
moment in the dark,--crime advancing on one side, justice coming up on
the other. He was not afraid, but he could not think without a shudder
of what was about to take place. As is the case with all those who are
suddenly assailed by an unforeseen adventure, the entire day produced
upon him the effect of a dream, and in order to persuade himself that he
was not the prey of a nightmare, he had to feel the cold barrels of the
steel pistols in his trousers pockets.

It was no longer snowing; the moon disengaged itself more and more
clearly from the mist, and its light, mingled with the white reflection
of the snow which had fallen, communicated to the chamber a sort of
twilight aspect.

There was a light in the Jondrette den. Marius saw the hole in the wall
shining with a reddish glow which seemed bloody to him.

It was true that the light could not be produced by a candle. However,
there was not a sound in the Jondrette quarters, not a soul was moving
there, not a soul speaking, not a breath; the silence was glacial and
profound, and had it not been for that light, he might have thought
himself next door to a sepulchre.

Marius softly removed his boots and pushed them under his bed.

Several minutes elapsed. Marius heard the lower door turn on its hinges;
a heavy step mounted the staircase, and hastened along the corridor; the
latch of the hovel was noisily lifted; it was Jondrette returning.

Instantly, several voices arose. The whole family was in the garret.
Only, it had been silent in the master's absence, like wolf whelps in
the absence of the wolf.

"It's I," said he.

"Good evening, daddy," yelped the girls.

"Well?" said the mother.

"All's going first-rate," responded Jondrette, "but my feet are beastly
cold. Good! You have dressed up. You have done well! You must inspire
confidence."

"All ready to go out."

"Don't forget what I told you. You will do everything sure?"

"Rest easy."

"Because--" said Jondrette. And he left the phrase unfinished.

Marius heard him lay something heavy on the table, probably the chisel
which he had purchased.

"By the way," said Jondrette, "have you been eating here?"

"Yes," said the mother. "I got three large potatoes and some salt. I
took advantage of the fire to cook them."

"Good," returned Jondrette. "To-morrow I will take you out to dine with
me. We will have a duck and fixings. You shall dine like Charles the
Tenth; all is going well!"

Then he added:--

"The mouse-trap is open. The cats are there."

He lowered his voice still further, and said:--

"Put this in the fire."

Marius heard a sound of charcoal being knocked with the tongs or some
iron utensil, and Jondrette continued:--

"Have you greased the hinges of the door so that they will not squeak?"

"Yes," replied the mother.

"What time is it?"

"Nearly six. The half-hour struck from Saint-Medard a while ago."

"The devil!" ejaculated Jondrette; "the children must go and watch. Come
you, do you listen here."

A whispering ensued.

Jondrette's voice became audible again:--

"Has old Bougon left?"

"Yes," said the mother.

"Are you sure that there is no one in our neighbor's room?"

"He has not been in all day, and you know very well that this is his
dinner hour."

"You are sure?"

"Sure."

"All the same," said Jondrette, "there's no harm in going to see whether
he is there. Here, my girl, take the candle and go there."

Marius fell on his hands and knees and crawled silently under his bed.

Hardly had he concealed himself, when he perceived a light through the
crack of his door.

"P'pa," cried a voice, "he is not in here."

He recognized the voice of the eldest daughter.

"Did you go in?" demanded her father.

"No," replied the girl, "but as his key is in the door, he must be out."

The father exclaimed:--

"Go in, nevertheless."

The door opened, and Marius saw the tall Jondrette come in with a candle
in her hand. She was as she had been in the morning, only still more
repulsive in this light.

She walked straight up to the bed. Marius endured an indescribable
moment of anxiety; but near the bed there was a mirror nailed to the
wall, and it was thither that she was directing her steps. She raised
herself on tiptoe and looked at herself in it. In the neighboring room,
the sound of iron articles being moved was audible.

She smoothed her hair with the palm of her hand, and smiled into the
mirror, humming with her cracked and sepulchral voice:--

          Nos amours ont dure toute une semaine,[28]
          Mais que du bonheur les instants sont courts!
          S'adorer huit jours, c' etait bien la peine!
          Le temps des amours devait durer toujours!
          Devrait durer toujours! devrait durer toujours!


In the meantime, Marius trembled. It seemed impossible to him that she
should not hear his breathing.

She stepped to the window and looked out with the half-foolish way she
had.

"How ugly Paris is when it has put on a white chemise!" said she.

She returned to the mirror and began again to put on airs before it,
scrutinizing herself full-face and three-quarters face in turn.

"Well!" cried her father, "what are you about there?"

"I am looking under the bed and the furniture," she replied, continuing
to arrange her hair; "there's no one here."

"Booby!" yelled her father. "Come here this minute! And don't waste any
time about it!"

"Coming! Coming!" said she. "One has no time for anything in this
hovel!"

She hummed:--

          Vous me quittez pour aller a la gloire;[29]
          Mon triste coeur suivra partout.


She cast a parting glance in the mirror and went out, shutting the door
behind her.

A moment more, and Marius heard the sound of the two young girls' bare
feet in the corridor, and Jondrette's voice shouting to them:--

"Pay strict heed! One on the side of the barrier, the other at the
corner of the Rue du Petit-Banquier. Don't lose sight for a moment of
the door of this house, and the moment you see anything, rush here on
the instant! as hard as you can go! You have a key to get in."

The eldest girl grumbled:--

"The idea of standing watch in the snow barefoot!"

"To-morrow you shall have some dainty little green silk boots!" said the
father.

They ran down stairs, and a few seconds later the shock of the outer
door as it banged to announced that they were outside.

There now remained in the house only Marius, the Jondrettes and
probably, also, the mysterious persons of whom Marius had caught a
glimpse in the twilight, behind the door of the unused attic.




CHAPTER XVII--THE USE MADE OF MARIUS' FIVE-FRANC PIECE

Marius decided that the moment had now arrived when he must resume his
post at his observatory. In a twinkling, and with the agility of his
age, he had reached the hole in the partition.

He looked.

The interior of the Jondrette apartment presented a curious aspect, and
Marius found an explanation of the singular light which he had noticed.
A candle was burning in a candlestick covered with verdigris, but
that was not what really lighted the chamber. The hovel was completely
illuminated, as it were, by the reflection from a rather large
sheet-iron brazier standing in the fireplace, and filled with burning
charcoal, the brazier prepared by the Jondrette woman that morning. The
charcoal was glowing hot and the brazier was red; a blue flame flickered
over it, and helped him to make out the form of the chisel purchased by
Jondrette in the Rue Pierre-Lombard, where it had been thrust into the
brazier to heat. In one corner, near the door, and as though prepared
for some definite use, two heaps were visible, which appeared to be, the
one a heap of old iron, the other a heap of ropes. All this would have
caused the mind of a person who knew nothing of what was in preparation,
to waver between a very sinister and a very simple idea. The lair thus
lighted up more resembled a forge than a mouth of hell, but Jondrette,
in this light, had rather the air of a demon than of a smith.

The heat of the brazier was so great, that the candle on the table was
melting on the side next the chafing-dish, and was drooping over. An old
dark-lantern of copper, worthy of Diogenes turned Cartouche, stood on
the chimney-piece.

The brazier, placed in the fireplace itself, beside the nearly extinct
brands, sent its vapors up the chimney, and gave out no odor.

The moon, entering through the four panes of the window, cast its
whiteness into the crimson and flaming garret; and to the poetic spirit
of Marius, who was dreamy even in the moment of action, it was like a
thought of heaven mingled with the misshapen reveries of earth.

A breath of air which made its way in through the open pane, helped to
dissipate the smell of the charcoal and to conceal the presence of the
brazier.

The Jondrette lair was, if the reader recalls what we have said of the
Gorbeau building, admirably chosen to serve as the theatre of a violent
and sombre deed, and as the envelope for a crime. It was the most
retired chamber in the most isolated house on the most deserted
boulevard in Paris. If the system of ambush and traps had not already
existed, they would have been invented there.

The whole thickness of a house and a multitude of uninhabited rooms
separated this den from the boulevard, and the only window that existed
opened on waste lands enclosed with walls and palisades.

Jondrette had lighted his pipe, seated himself on the seatless chair,
and was engaged in smoking. His wife was talking to him in a low tone.

If Marius had been Courfeyrac, that is to say, one of those men who
laugh on every occasion in life, he would have burst with laughter when
his gaze fell on the Jondrette woman. She had on a black bonnet with
plumes not unlike the hats of the heralds-at-arms at the coronation of
Charles X., an immense tartan shawl over her knitted petticoat, and the
man's shoes which her daughter had scorned in the morning. It was this
toilette which had extracted from Jondrette the exclamation: "Good! You
have dressed up. You have done well. You must inspire confidence!"

As for Jondrette, he had not taken off the new surtout, which was too
large for him, and which M. Leblanc had given him, and his costume
continued to present that contrast of coat and trousers which
constituted the ideal of a poet in Courfeyrac's eyes.

All at once, Jondrette lifted up his voice:--

"By the way! Now that I think of it. In this weather, he will come in a
carriage. Light the lantern, take it and go down stairs. You will stand
behind the lower door. The very moment that you hear the carriage stop,
you will open the door, instantly, he will come up, you will light the
staircase and the corridor, and when he enters here, you will go down
stairs again as speedily as possible, you will pay the coachman, and
dismiss the fiacre."

"And the money?" inquired the woman.

Jondrette fumbled in his trousers pocket and handed her five francs.

"What's this?" she exclaimed.

Jondrette replied with dignity:--

"That is the monarch which our neighbor gave us this morning."

And he added:--

"Do you know what? Two chairs will be needed here."

"What for?"

"To sit on."

Marius felt a cold chill pass through his limbs at hearing this mild
answer from Jondrette.

"Pardieu! I'll go and get one of our neighbor's."

And with a rapid movement, she opened the door of the den, and went out
into the corridor.

Marius absolutely had not the time to descend from the commode, reach
his bed, and conceal himself beneath it.

"Take the candle," cried Jondrette.

"No," said she, "it would embarrass me, I have the two chairs to carry.
There is moonlight."

Marius heard Mother Jondrette's heavy hand fumbling at his lock in the
dark. The door opened. He remained nailed to the spot with the shock and
with horror.

The Jondrette entered.

The dormer window permitted the entrance of a ray of moonlight between
two blocks of shadow. One of these blocks of shadow entirely covered the
wall against which Marius was leaning, so that he disappeared within it.

Mother Jondrette raised her eyes, did not see Marius, took the two
chairs, the only ones which Marius possessed, and went away, letting the
door fall heavily to behind her.

She re-entered the lair.

"Here are the two chairs."

"And here is the lantern. Go down as quick as you can."

She hastily obeyed, and Jondrette was left alone.

He placed the two chairs on opposite sides of the table, turned the
chisel in the brazier, set in front of the fireplace an old screen which
masked the chafing-dish, then went to the corner where lay the pile
of rope, and bent down as though to examine something. Marius then
recognized the fact, that what he had taken for a shapeless mass was a
very well-made rope-ladder, with wooden rungs and two hooks with which
to attach it.

This ladder, and some large tools, veritable masses of iron, which were
mingled with the old iron piled up behind the door, had not been in the
Jondrette hovel in the morning, and had evidently been brought thither
in the afternoon, during Marius' absence.

"Those are the utensils of an edge-tool maker," thought Marius.

Had Marius been a little more learned in this line, he would have
recognized in what he took for the engines of an edge-tool maker,
certain instruments which will force a lock or pick a lock, and others
which will cut or slice, the two families of tools which burglars call
cadets and fauchants.

The fireplace and the two chairs were exactly opposite Marius. The
brazier being concealed, the only light in the room was now furnished
by the candle; the smallest bit of crockery on the table or on the
chimney-piece cast a large shadow. There was something indescribably
calm, threatening, and hideous about this chamber. One felt that there
existed in it the anticipation of something terrible.

Jondrette had allowed his pipe to go out, a serious sign of
preoccupation, and had again seated himself. The candle brought out the
fierce and the fine angles of his countenance. He indulged in scowls and
in abrupt unfoldings of the right hand, as though he were responding to
the last counsels of a sombre inward monologue. In the course of one of
these dark replies which he was making to himself, he pulled the table
drawer rapidly towards him, took out a long kitchen knife which was
concealed there, and tried the edge of its blade on his nail. That done,
he put the knife back in the drawer and shut it.

Marius, on his side, grasped the pistol in his right pocket, drew it out
and cocked it.

The pistol emitted a sharp, clear click, as he cocked it.

Jondrette started, half rose, listened a moment, then began to laugh and
said:--

"What a fool I am! It's the partition cracking!"

Marius kept the pistol in his hand.




CHAPTER XVIII--MARIUS' TWO CHAIRS FORM A VIS-A-VIS

Suddenly, the distant and melancholy vibration of a clock shook the
panes. Six o'clock was striking from Saint-Medard.

Jondrette marked off each stroke with a toss of his head. When the sixth
had struck, he snuffed the candle with his fingers.

Then he began to pace up and down the room, listened at the corridor,
walked on again, then listened once more.

"Provided only that he comes!" he muttered, then he returned to his
chair.

He had hardly reseated himself when the door opened.

Mother Jondrette had opened it, and now remained in the corridor making
a horrible, amiable grimace, which one of the holes of the dark-lantern
illuminated from below.

"Enter, sir," she said.

"Enter, my benefactor," repeated Jondrette, rising hastily.

M. Leblanc made his appearance.

He wore an air of serenity which rendered him singularly venerable.

He laid four louis on the table.

"Monsieur Fabantou," said he, "this is for your rent and your most
pressing necessities. We will attend to the rest hereafter."

"May God requite it to you, my generous benefactor!" said Jondrette.

And rapidly approaching his wife:--

"Dismiss the carriage!"

She slipped out while her husband was lavishing salutes and offering
M. Leblanc a chair. An instant later she returned and whispered in his
ear:--

"'Tis done."

The snow, which had not ceased falling since the morning, was so deep
that the arrival of the fiacre had not been audible, and they did not
now hear its departure.

Meanwhile, M. Leblanc had seated himself.

Jondrette had taken possession of the other chair, facing M. Leblanc.

Now, in order to form an idea of the scene which is to follow, let the
reader picture to himself in his own mind, a cold night, the solitudes
of the Salpetriere covered with snow and white as winding-sheets in
the moonlight, the taper-like lights of the street lanterns which shone
redly here and there along those tragic boulevards, and the long rows
of black elms, not a passer-by for perhaps a quarter of a league around,
the Gorbeau hovel, at its highest pitch of silence, of horror, and of
darkness; in that building, in the midst of those solitudes, in the
midst of that darkness, the vast Jondrette garret lighted by a single
candle, and in that den two men seated at a table, M. Leblanc tranquil,
Jondrette smiling and alarming, the Jondrette woman, the female wolf,
in one corner, and, behind the partition, Marius, invisible, erect, not
losing a word, not missing a single movement, his eye on the watch, and
pistol in hand.

However, Marius experienced only an emotion of horror, but no fear. He
clasped the stock of the pistol firmly and felt reassured. "I shall be
able to stop that wretch whenever I please," he thought.

He felt that the police were there somewhere in ambuscade, waiting for
the signal agreed upon and ready to stretch out their arm.

Moreover, he was in hopes, that this violent encounter between Jondrette
and M. Leblanc would cast some light on all the things which he was
interested in learning.




CHAPTER XIX--OCCUPYING ONE'S SELF WITH OBSCURE DEPTHS

Hardly was M. Leblanc seated, when he turned his eyes towards the
pallets, which were empty.

"How is the poor little wounded girl?" he inquired.

"Bad," replied Jondrette with a heart-broken and grateful smile, "very
bad, my worthy sir. Her elder sister has taken her to the Bourbe to
have her hurt dressed. You will see them presently; they will be back
immediately."

"Madame Fabantou seems to me to be better," went on M. Leblanc, casting
his eyes on the eccentric costume of the Jondrette woman, as she stood
between him and the door, as though already guarding the exit, and gazed
at him in an attitude of menace and almost of combat.

"She is dying," said Jondrette. "But what do you expect, sir! She has so
much courage, that woman has! She's not a woman, she's an ox."

The Jondrette, touched by his compliment, deprecated it with the
affected airs of a flattered monster.

"You are always too good to me, Monsieur Jondrette!"

"Jondrette!" said M. Leblanc, "I thought your name was Fabantou?"

"Fabantou, alias Jondrette!" replied the husband hurriedly. "An artistic
sobriquet!"

And launching at his wife a shrug of the shoulders which M. Leblanc did
not catch, he continued with an emphatic and caressing inflection of
voice:--

"Ah! we have had a happy life together, this poor darling and I! What
would there be left for us if we had not that? We are so wretched, my
respectable sir! We have arms, but there is no work! We have the will,
no work! I don't know how the government arranges that, but, on my word
of honor, sir, I am not Jacobin, sir, I am not a bousingot.[30] I don't
wish them any evil, but if I were the ministers, on my most sacred word,
things would be different. Here, for instance, I wanted to have my
girls taught the trade of paper-box makers. You will say to me: 'What!
a trade?' Yes! A trade! A simple trade! A bread-winner! What a fall,
my benefactor! What a degradation, when one has been what we have been!
Alas! There is nothing left to us of our days of prosperity! One thing
only, a picture, of which I think a great deal, but which I am willing
to part with, for I must live! Item, one must live!"

While Jondrette thus talked, with an apparent incoherence which
detracted nothing from the thoughtful and sagacious expression of his
physiognomy, Marius raised his eyes, and perceived at the other end of
the room a person whom he had not seen before. A man had just entered,
so softly that the door had not been heard to turn on its hinges. This
man wore a violet knitted vest, which was old, worn, spotted, cut and
gaping at every fold, wide trousers of cotton velvet, wooden shoes on
his feet, no shirt, had his neck bare, his bare arms tattooed, and his
face smeared with black. He had seated himself in silence on the nearest
bed, and, as he was behind Jondrette, he could only be indistinctly
seen.

That sort of magnetic instinct which turns aside the gaze, caused M.
Leblanc to turn round almost at the same moment as Marius. He could not
refrain from a gesture of surprise which did not escape Jondrette.

"Ah! I see!" exclaimed Jondrette, buttoning up his coat with an air of
complaisance, "you are looking at your overcoat? It fits me! My faith,
but it fits me!"

"Who is that man?" said M. Leblanc.

"Him?" ejaculated Jondrette, "he's a neighbor of mine. Don't pay any
attention to him."

The neighbor was a singular-looking individual. However, manufactories
of chemical products abound in the Faubourg Saint-Marceau. Many of the
workmen might have black faces. Besides this, M. Leblanc's whole person
was expressive of candid and intrepid confidence.

He went on:--

"Excuse me; what were you saying, M. Fabantou?"

"I was telling you, sir, and dear protector," replied Jondrette placing
his elbows on the table and contemplating M. Leblanc with steady and
tender eyes, not unlike the eyes of the boa-constrictor, "I was telling
you, that I have a picture to sell."

A slight sound came from the door. A second man had just entered and
seated himself on the bed, behind Jondrette.

Like the first, his arms were bare, and he had a mask of ink or
lampblack.

Although this man had, literally, glided into the room, he had not been
able to prevent M. Leblanc catching sight of him.

"Don't mind them," said Jondrette, "they are people who belong in the
house. So I was saying, that there remains in my possession a valuable
picture. But stop, sir, take a look at it."

He rose, went to the wall at the foot of which stood the panel which we
have already mentioned, and turned it round, still leaving it supported
against the wall. It really was something which resembled a picture, and
which the candle illuminated, somewhat. Marius could make nothing out of
it, as Jondrette stood between the picture and him; he only saw a coarse
daub, and a sort of principal personage colored with the harsh crudity
of foreign canvasses and screen paintings.

"What is that?" asked M. Leblanc.

Jondrette exclaimed:--

"A painting by a master, a picture of great value, my benefactor! I am
as much attached to it as I am to my two daughters; it recalls souvenirs
to me! But I have told you, and I will not take it back, that I am so
wretched that I will part with it."

Either by chance, or because he had begun to feel a dawning uneasiness,
M. Leblanc's glance returned to the bottom of the room as he examined
the picture.

There were now four men, three seated on the bed, one standing near the
door-post, all four with bare arms and motionless, with faces smeared
with black. One of those on the bed was leaning against the wall, with
closed eyes, and it might have been supposed that he was asleep. He
was old; his white hair contrasting with his blackened face produced a
horrible effect. The other two seemed to be young; one wore a beard, the
other wore his hair long. None of them had on shoes; those who did not
wear socks were barefooted.

Jondrette noticed that M. Leblanc's eye was fixed on these men.

"They are friends. They are neighbors," said he. "Their faces are black
because they work in charcoal. They are chimney-builders. Don't trouble
yourself about them, my benefactor, but buy my picture. Have pity on
my misery. I will not ask you much for it. How much do you think it is
worth?"

"Well," said M. Leblanc, looking Jondrette full in the eye, and with the
manner of a man who is on his guard, "it is some signboard for a tavern,
and is worth about three francs."

Jondrette replied sweetly:--

"Have you your pocket-book with you? I should be satisfied with a
thousand crowns."

M. Leblanc sprang up, placed his back against the wall, and cast a rapid
glance around the room. He had Jondrette on his left, on the side next
the window, and the Jondrette woman and the four men on his right, on
the side next the door. The four men did not stir, and did not even seem
to be looking on.

Jondrette had again begun to speak in a plaintive tone, with so vague
an eye, and so lamentable an intonation, that M. Leblanc might have
supposed that what he had before him was a man who had simply gone mad
with misery.

"If you do not buy my picture, my dear benefactor," said Jondrette, "I
shall be left without resources; there will be nothing left for me but
to throw myself into the river. When I think that I wanted to have my
two girls taught the middle-class paper-box trade, the making of boxes
for New Year's gifts! Well! A table with a board at the end to keep the
glasses from falling off is required, then a special stove is needed, a
pot with three compartments for the different degrees of strength of
the paste, according as it is to be used for wood, paper, or stuff, a
paring-knife to cut the cardboard, a mould to adjust it, a hammer to
nail the steels, pincers, how the devil do I know what all? And all that
in order to earn four sous a day! And you have to work fourteen hours a
day! And each box passes through the workwoman's hands thirteen times!
And you can't wet the paper! And you mustn't spot anything! And you must
keep the paste hot. The devil, I tell you! Four sous a day! How do you
suppose a man is to live?"

As he spoke, Jondrette did not look at M. Leblanc, who was observing
him. M. Leblanc's eye was fixed on Jondrette, and Jondrette's eye was
fixed on the door. Marius' eager attention was transferred from one
to the other. M. Leblanc seemed to be asking himself: "Is this man an
idiot?" Jondrette repeated two or three distinct times, with all manner
of varying inflections of the whining and supplicating order: "There
is nothing left for me but to throw myself into the river! I went down
three steps at the side of the bridge of Austerlitz the other day for
that purpose."

All at once his dull eyes lighted up with a hideous flash; the little
man drew himself up and became terrible, took a step toward M. Leblanc
and cried in a voice of thunder: "That has nothing to do with the
question! Do you know me?"




CHAPTER XX--THE TRAP

The door of the garret had just opened abruptly, and allowed a view of
three men clad in blue linen blouses, and masked with masks of black
paper. The first was thin, and had a long, iron-tipped cudgel; the
second, who was a sort of colossus, carried, by the middle of the
handle, with the blade downward, a butcher's pole-axe for slaughtering
cattle. The third, a man with thick-set shoulders, not so slender as
the first, held in his hand an enormous key stolen from the door of some
prison.

It appeared that the arrival of these men was what Jondrette had been
waiting for. A rapid dialogue ensued between him and the man with the
cudgel, the thin one.

"Is everything ready?" said Jondrette.

"Yes," replied the thin man.

"Where is Montparnasse?"

"The young principal actor stopped to chat with your girl."

"Which?"

"The eldest."

"Is there a carriage at the door?"

"Yes."

"Is the team harnessed?"

"Yes."

"With two good horses?"

"Excellent."

"Is it waiting where I ordered?"

"Yes."

"Good," said Jondrette.

M. Leblanc was very pale. He was scrutinizing everything around him in
the den, like a man who understands what he has fallen into, and his
head, directed in turn toward all the heads which surrounded him, moved
on his neck with an astonished and attentive slowness, but there
was nothing in his air which resembled fear. He had improvised
an intrenchment out of the table; and the man, who but an instant
previously, had borne merely the appearance of a kindly old man, had
suddenly become a sort of athlete, and placed his robust fist on the
back of his chair, with a formidable and surprising gesture.

This old man, who was so firm and so brave in the presence of such a
danger, seemed to possess one of those natures which are as courageous
as they are kind, both easily and simply. The father of a woman whom we
love is never a stranger to us. Marius felt proud of that unknown man.

Three of the men, of whom Jondrette had said: "They are
chimney-builders," had armed themselves from the pile of old iron, one
with a heavy pair of shears, the second with weighing-tongs, the third
with a hammer, and had placed themselves across the entrance without
uttering a syllable. The old man had remained on the bed, and had merely
opened his eyes. The Jondrette woman had seated herself beside him.

Marius decided that in a few seconds more the moment for intervention
would arrive, and he raised his right hand towards the ceiling, in the
direction of the corridor, in readiness to discharge his pistol.

Jondrette having terminated his colloquy with the man with the cudgel,
turned once more to M. Leblanc, and repeated his question, accompanying
it with that low, repressed, and terrible laugh which was peculiar to
him:--

"So you do not recognize me?"

M. Leblanc looked him full in the face, and replied:--

"No."

Then Jondrette advanced to the table. He leaned across the candle,
crossing his arms, putting his angular and ferocious jaw close to M.
Leblanc's calm face, and advancing as far as possible without forcing M.
Leblanc to retreat, and, in this posture of a wild beast who is about to
bite, he exclaimed:--

"My name is not Fabantou, my name is not Jondrette, my name is
Thenardier. I am the inn-keeper of Montfermeil! Do you understand?
Thenardier! Now do you know me?"

An almost imperceptible flush crossed M. Leblanc's brow, and he replied
with a voice which neither trembled nor rose above its ordinary level,
with his accustomed placidity:--

"No more than before."

Marius did not hear this reply. Any one who had seen him at that moment
through the darkness would have perceived that he was haggard,
stupid, thunder-struck. At the moment when Jondrette said: "My name is
Thenardier," Marius had trembled in every limb, and had leaned against
the wall, as though he felt the cold of a steel blade through his heart.
Then his right arm, all ready to discharge the signal shot, dropped
slowly, and at the moment when Jondrette repeated, "Thenardier, do you
understand?" Marius's faltering fingers had come near letting the pistol
fall. Jondrette, by revealing his identity, had not moved M. Leblanc,
but he had quite upset Marius. That name of Thenardier, with which M.
Leblanc did not seem to be acquainted, Marius knew well. Let the reader
recall what that name meant to him! That name he had worn on his heart,
inscribed in his father's testament! He bore it at the bottom of his
mind, in the depths of his memory, in that sacred injunction: "A certain
Thenardier saved my life. If my son encounters him, he will do him all
the good that lies in his power." That name, it will be remembered,
was one of the pieties of his soul; he mingled it with the name of
his father in his worship. What! This man was that Thenardier, that
inn-keeper of Montfermeil whom he had so long and so vainly sought! He
had found him at last, and how? His father's saviour was a ruffian!
That man, to whose service Marius was burning to devote himself, was
a monster! That liberator of Colonel Pontmercy was on the point
of committing a crime whose scope Marius did not, as yet, clearly
comprehend, but which resembled an assassination! And against whom,
great God! what a fatality! What a bitter mockery of fate! His father
had commanded him from the depths of his coffin to do all the good in
his power to this Thenardier, and for four years Marius had cherished
no other thought than to acquit this debt of his father's, and at the
moment when he was on the eve of having a brigand seized in the very
act of crime by justice, destiny cried to him: "This is Thenardier!"
He could at last repay this man for his father's life, saved amid a
hail-storm of grape-shot on the heroic field of Waterloo, and repay it
with the scaffold! He had sworn to himself that if ever he found that
Thenardier, he would address him only by throwing himself at his feet;
and now he actually had found him, but it was only to deliver him over
to the executioner! His father said to him: "Succor Thenardier!" And he
replied to that adored and sainted voice by crushing Thenardier! He was
about to offer to his father in his grave the spectacle of that man who
had torn him from death at the peril of his own life, executed on the
Place Saint-Jacques through the means of his son, of that Marius to whom
he had entrusted that man by his will! And what a mockery to have so
long worn on his breast his father's last commands, written in his own
hand, only to act in so horribly contrary a sense! But, on the other
hand, now look on that trap and not prevent it! Condemn the victim and
to spare the assassin! Could one be held to any gratitude towards so
miserable a wretch? All the ideas which Marius had cherished for the
last four years were pierced through and through, as it were, by this
unforeseen blow.

He shuddered. Everything depended on him. Unknown to themselves, he
held in his hand all those beings who were moving about there before his
eyes. If he fired his pistol, M. Leblanc was saved, and Thenardier lost;
if he did not fire, M. Leblanc would be sacrificed, and, who knows?
Thenardier would escape. Should he dash down the one or allow the other
to fall? Remorse awaited him in either case.

What was he to do? What should he choose? Be false to the most imperious
souvenirs, to all those solemn vows to himself, to the most sacred duty,
to the most venerated text! Should he ignore his father's testament,
or allow the perpetration of a crime! On the one hand, it seemed to him
that he heard "his Ursule" supplicating for her father and on the other,
the colonel commending Thenardier to his care. He felt that he was going
mad. His knees gave way beneath him. And he had not even the time for
deliberation, so great was the fury with which the scene before his eyes
was hastening to its catastrophe. It was like a whirlwind of which he
had thought himself the master, and which was now sweeping him away. He
was on the verge of swooning.

In the meantime, Thenardier, whom we shall henceforth call by no other
name, was pacing up and down in front of the table in a sort of frenzy
and wild triumph.

He seized the candle in his fist, and set it on the chimney-piece with
so violent a bang that the wick came near being extinguished, and the
tallow bespattered the wall.

Then he turned to M. Leblanc with a horrible look, and spit out these
words:--

"Done for! Smoked brown! Cooked! Spitchcocked!"

And again he began to march back and forth, in full eruption.

"Ah!" he cried, "so I've found you again at last, Mister philanthropist!
Mister threadbare millionnaire! Mister giver of dolls! you old
ninny! Ah! so you don't recognize me! No, it wasn't you who came to
Montfermeil, to my inn, eight years ago, on Christmas eve, 1823! It
wasn't you who carried off that Fantine's child from me! The Lark! It
wasn't you who had a yellow great-coat! No! Nor a package of duds in
your hand, as you had this morning here! Say, wife, it seems to be his
mania to carry packets of woollen stockings into houses! Old charity
monger, get out with you! Are you a hosier, Mister millionnaire? You
give away your stock in trade to the poor, holy man! What bosh! merry
Andrew! Ah! and you don't recognize me? Well, I recognize you, that I
do! I recognized you the very moment you poked your snout in here. Ah!
you'll find out presently, that it isn't all roses to thrust yourself
in that fashion into people's houses, under the pretext that they are
taverns, in wretched clothes, with the air of a poor man, to whom one
would give a sou, to deceive persons, to play the generous, to take away
their means of livelihood, and to make threats in the woods, and you
can't call things quits because afterwards, when people are ruined, you
bring a coat that is too large, and two miserable hospital blankets, you
old blackguard, you child-stealer!"

He paused, and seemed to be talking to himself for a moment. One would
have said that his wrath had fallen into some hole, like the Rhone;
then, as though he were concluding aloud the things which he had been
saying to himself in a whisper, he smote the table with his fist, and
shouted:--

"And with his goody-goody air!"

And, apostrophizing M. Leblanc:--

"Parbleu! You made game of me in the past! You are the cause of all my
misfortunes! For fifteen hundred francs you got a girl whom I had, and
who certainly belonged to rich people, and who had already brought in a
great deal of money, and from whom I might have extracted enough to live
on all my life! A girl who would have made up to me for everything that
I lost in that vile cook-shop, where there was nothing but one continual
row, and where, like a fool, I ate up my last farthing! Oh! I wish all
the wine folks drank in my house had been poison to those who drank it!
Well, never mind! Say, now! You must have thought me ridiculous when you
went off with the Lark! You had your cudgel in the forest. You were the
stronger. Revenge. I'm the one to hold the trumps to-day! You're in a
sorry case, my good fellow! Oh, but I can laugh! Really, I laugh! Didn't
he fall into the trap! I told him that I was an actor, that my name was
Fabantou, that I had played comedy with Mamselle Mars, with Mamselle
Muche, that my landlord insisted on being paid tomorrow, the 4th of
February, and he didn't even notice that the 8th of January, and not the
4th of February is the time when the quarter runs out! Absurd idiot!
And the four miserable Philippes which he has brought me! Scoundrel!
He hadn't the heart even to go as high as a hundred francs! And how
he swallowed my platitudes! That did amuse me. I said to myself:
'Blockhead! Come, I've got you! I lick your paws this morning, but I'll
gnaw your heart this evening!'"

Thenardier paused. He was out of breath. His little, narrow chest panted
like a forge bellows. His eyes were full of the ignoble happiness of a
feeble, cruel, and cowardly creature, which finds that it can, at last,
harass what it has feared, and insult what it has flattered, the joy of
a dwarf who should be able to set his heel on the head of Goliath, the
joy of a jackal which is beginning to rend a sick bull, so nearly dead
that he can no longer defend himself, but sufficiently alive to suffer
still.

M. Leblanc did not interrupt him, but said to him when he paused:--

"I do not know what you mean to say. You are mistaken in me. I am a very
poor man, and anything but a millionnaire. I do not know you. You are
mistaking me for some other person."

"Ah!" roared Thenardier hoarsely, "a pretty lie! You stick to that
pleasantry, do you! You're floundering, my old buck! Ah! You don't
remember! You don't see who I am?"

"Excuse me, sir," said M. Leblanc with a politeness of accent, which at
that moment seemed peculiarly strange and powerful, "I see that you are
a villain!"

Who has not remarked the fact that odious creatures possess a
susceptibility of their own, that monsters are ticklish! At this word
"villain," the female Thenardier sprang from the bed, Thenardier grasped
his chair as though he were about to crush it in his hands. "Don't you
stir!" he shouted to his wife; and, turning to M. Leblanc:--

"Villain! Yes, I know that you call us that, you rich gentlemen! Stop!
it's true that I became bankrupt, that I am in hiding, that I have no
bread, that I have not a single sou, that I am a villain! It's three
days since I have had anything to eat, so I'm a villain! Ah! you folks
warm your feet, you have Sakoski boots, you have wadded great-coats,
like archbishops, you lodge on the first floor in houses that have
porters, you eat truffles, you eat asparagus at forty francs the bunch
in the month of January, and green peas, you gorge yourselves, and when
you want to know whether it is cold, you look in the papers to see what
the engineer Chevalier's thermometer says about it. We, it is we who are
thermometers. We don't need to go out and look on the quay at the corner
of the Tour de l'Horologe, to find out the number of degrees of cold;
we feel our blood congealing in our veins, and the ice forming round our
hearts, and we say: 'There is no God!' And you come to our caverns, yes
our caverns, for the purpose of calling us villains! But we'll devour
you! But we'll devour you, poor little things! Just see here, Mister
millionnaire: I have been a solid man, I have held a license, I have
been an elector, I am a bourgeois, that I am! And it's quite possible
that you are not!"

Here Thenardier took a step towards the men who stood near the door, and
added with a shudder:--

"When I think that he has dared to come here and talk to me like a
cobbler!"

Then addressing M. Leblanc with a fresh outburst of frenzy:--

"And listen to this also, Mister philanthropist! I'm not a suspicious
character, not a bit of it! I'm not a man whose name nobody knows, and
who comes and abducts children from houses! I'm an old French soldier,
I ought to have been decorated! I was at Waterloo, so I was! And in the
battle I saved a general called the Comte of I don't know what. He told
me his name, but his beastly voice was so weak that I didn't hear. All I
caught was Merci [thanks]. I'd rather have had his name than his thanks.
That would have helped me to find him again. The picture that you see
here, and which was painted by David at Bruqueselles,--do you know what
it represents? It represents me. David wished to immortalize that
feat of prowess. I have that general on my back, and I am carrying him
through the grape-shot. There's the history of it! That general never
did a single thing for me; he was no better than the rest! But none the
less, I saved his life at the risk of my own, and I have the certificate
of the fact in my pocket! I am a soldier of Waterloo, by all the furies!
And now that I have had the goodness to tell you all this, let's have an
end of it. I want money, I want a deal of money, I must have an enormous
lot of money, or I'll exterminate you, by the thunder of the good God!"

Marius had regained some measure of control over his anguish, and was
listening. The last possibility of doubt had just vanished. It certainly
was the Thenardier of the will. Marius shuddered at that reproach of
ingratitude directed against his father, and which he was on the point
of so fatally justifying. His perplexity was redoubled.

Moreover, there was in all these words of Thenardier, in his accent, in
his gesture, in his glance which darted flames at every word, there
was, in this explosion of an evil nature disclosing everything, in that
mixture of braggadocio and abjectness, of pride and pettiness, of rage
and folly, in that chaos of real griefs and false sentiments, in
that immodesty of a malicious man tasting the voluptuous delights
of violence, in that shameless nudity of a repulsive soul, in that
conflagration of all sufferings combined with all hatreds, something
which was as hideous as evil, and as heart-rending as the truth.

The picture of the master, the painting by David which he had proposed
that M. Leblanc should purchase, was nothing else, as the reader has
divined, than the sign of his tavern painted, as it will be remembered,
by himself, the only relic which he had preserved from his shipwreck at
Montfermeil.

As he had ceased to intercept Marius' visual ray, Marius could examine
this thing, and in the daub, he actually did recognize a battle, a
background of smoke, and a man carrying another man. It was the group
composed of Pontmercy and Thenardier; the sergeant the rescuer, the
colonel rescued. Marius was like a drunken man; this picture restored
his father to life in some sort; it was no longer the signboard of the
wine-shop at Montfermeil, it was a resurrection; a tomb had yawned, a
phantom had risen there. Marius heard his heart beating in his temples,
he had the cannon of Waterloo in his ears, his bleeding father, vaguely
depicted on that sinister panel terrified him, and it seemed to him that
the misshapen spectre was gazing intently at him.

When Thenardier had recovered his breath, he turned his bloodshot eyes
on M. Leblanc, and said to him in a low, curt voice:--

"What have you to say before we put the handcuffs on you?"

M. Leblanc held his peace.

In the midst of this silence, a cracked voice launched this lugubrious
sarcasm from the corridor:--

"If there's any wood to be split, I'm there!"

It was the man with the axe, who was growing merry.

At the same moment, an enormous, bristling, and clayey face made its
appearance at the door, with a hideous laugh which exhibited not teeth,
but fangs.

It was the face of the man with the butcher's axe.

"Why have you taken off your mask?" cried Thenardier in a rage.

"For fun," retorted the man.

For the last few minutes M. Leblanc had appeared to be watching and
following all the movements of Thenardier, who, blinded and dazzled by
his own rage, was stalking to and fro in the den with full confidence
that the door was guarded, and of holding an unarmed man fast, he being
armed himself, of being nine against one, supposing that the female
Thenardier counted for but one man.

During his address to the man with the pole-axe, he had turned his back
to M. Leblanc.

M. Leblanc seized this moment, overturned the chair with his foot and
the table with his fist, and with one bound, with prodigious agility,
before Thenardier had time to turn round, he had reached the window. To
open it, to scale the frame, to bestride it, was the work of a second
only. He was half out when six robust fists seized him and dragged
him back energetically into the hovel. These were the three
"chimney-builders," who had flung themselves upon him. At the same time
the Thenardier woman had wound her hands in his hair.

At the trampling which ensued, the other ruffians rushed up from the
corridor. The old man on the bed, who seemed under the influence
of wine, descended from the pallet and came reeling up, with a
stone-breaker's hammer in his hand.

One of the "chimney-builders," whose smirched face was lighted up by
the candle, and in whom Marius recognized, in spite of his daubing,
Panchaud, alias Printanier, alias Bigrenaille, lifted above M. Leblanc's
head a sort of bludgeon made of two balls of lead, at the two ends of a
bar of iron.

Marius could not resist this sight. "My father," he thought, "forgive
me!"

And his finger sought the trigger of his pistol.

The shot was on the point of being discharged when Thenardier's voice
shouted:--

"Don't harm him!"

This desperate attempt of the victim, far from exasperating Thenardier,
had calmed him. There existed in him two men, the ferocious man and
the adroit man. Up to that moment, in the excess of his triumph in the
presence of the prey which had been brought down, and which did not
stir, the ferocious man had prevailed; when the victim struggled and
tried to resist, the adroit man reappeared and took the upper hand.

"Don't hurt him!" he repeated, and without suspecting it, his first
success was to arrest the pistol in the act of being discharged, and to
paralyze Marius, in whose opinion the urgency of the case disappeared,
and who, in the face of this new phase, saw no inconvenience in waiting
a while longer.

Who knows whether some chance would not arise which would deliver him
from the horrible alternative of allowing Ursule's father to perish, or
of destroying the colonel's saviour?

A herculean struggle had begun. With one blow full in the chest, M.
Leblanc had sent the old man tumbling, rolling in the middle of the
room, then with two backward sweeps of his hand he had overthrown two
more assailants, and he held one under each of his knees; the wretches
were rattling in the throat beneath this pressure as under a granite
millstone; but the other four had seized the formidable old man by both
arms and the back of his neck, and were holding him doubled up over the
two "chimney-builders" on the floor.

Thus, the master of some and mastered by the rest, crushing those
beneath him and stifling under those on top of him, endeavoring in vain
to shake off all the efforts which were heaped upon him, M. Leblanc
disappeared under the horrible group of ruffians like the wild boar
beneath a howling pile of dogs and hounds.

They succeeded in overthrowing him upon the bed nearest the window, and
there they held him in awe. The Thenardier woman had not released her
clutch on his hair.

"Don't you mix yourself up in this affair," said Thenardier. "You'll
tear your shawl."

The Thenardier obeyed, as the female wolf obeys the male wolf, with a
growl.

"Now," said Thenardier, "search him, you other fellows!"

M. Leblanc seemed to have renounced the idea of resistance.

They searched him.

He had nothing on his person except a leather purse containing six
francs, and his handkerchief.

Thenardier put the handkerchief into his own pocket.

"What! No pocket-book?" he demanded.

"No, nor watch," replied one of the "chimney-builders."

"Never mind," murmured the masked man who carried the big key, in the
voice of a ventriloquist, "he's a tough old fellow."

Thenardier went to the corner near the door, picked up a bundle of ropes
and threw them at the men.

"Tie him to the leg of the bed," said he.

And, catching sight of the old man who had been stretched across the
room by the blow from M. Leblanc's fist, and who made no movement, he
added:--

"Is Boulatruelle dead?"

"No," replied Bigrenaille, "he's drunk."

"Sweep him into a corner," said Thenardier.

Two of the "chimney-builders" pushed the drunken man into the corner
near the heap of old iron with their feet.

"Babet," said Thenardier in a low tone to the man with the cudgel, "why
did you bring so many; they were not needed."

"What can you do?" replied the man with the cudgel, "they all wanted to
be in it. This is a bad season. There's no business going on."

The pallet on which M. Leblanc had been thrown was a sort of hospital
bed, elevated on four coarse wooden legs, roughly hewn.

M. Leblanc let them take their own course.

The ruffians bound him securely, in an upright attitude, with his feet
on the ground at the head of the bed, the end which was most remote from
the window, and nearest to the fireplace.

When the last knot had been tied, Thenardier took a chair and seated
himself almost facing M. Leblanc.

Thenardier no longer looked like himself; in the course of a few moments
his face had passed from unbridled violence to tranquil and cunning
sweetness.

Marius found it difficult to recognize in that polished smile of a man
in official life the almost bestial mouth which had been foaming but a
moment before; he gazed with amazement on that fantastic and alarming
metamorphosis, and he felt as a man might feel who should behold a tiger
converted into a lawyer.

"Monsieur--" said Thenardier.

And dismissing with a gesture the ruffians who still kept their hands on
M. Leblanc:--

"Stand off a little, and let me have a talk with the gentleman."

All retired towards the door.

He went on:--

"Monsieur, you did wrong to try to jump out of the window. You might
have broken your leg. Now, if you will permit me, we will converse
quietly. In the first place, I must communicate to you an observation
which I have made which is, that you have not uttered the faintest cry."

Thenardier was right, this detail was correct, although it had escaped
Marius in his agitation. M. Leblanc had barely pronounced a few words,
without raising his voice, and even during his struggle with the six
ruffians near the window he had preserved the most profound and singular
silence.

Thenardier continued:--

"Mon Dieu! You might have shouted 'stop thief' a bit, and I should not
have thought it improper. 'Murder!' That, too, is said occasionally,
and, so far as I am concerned, I should not have taken it in bad part.
It is very natural that you should make a little row when you find
yourself with persons who don't inspire you with sufficient confidence.
You might have done that, and no one would have troubled you on that
account. You would not even have been gagged. And I will tell you why.
This room is very private. That's its only recommendation, but it has
that in its favor. You might fire off a mortar and it would produce
about as much noise at the nearest police station as the snores of a
drunken man. Here a cannon would make a boum, and the thunder would make
a pouf. It's a handy lodging. But, in short, you did not shout, and
it is better so. I present you my compliments, and I will tell you the
conclusion that I draw from that fact: My dear sir, when a man shouts,
who comes? The police. And after the police? Justice. Well! You have not
made an outcry; that is because you don't care to have the police and
the courts come in any more than we do. It is because,--I have long
suspected it,--you have some interest in hiding something. On our side
we have the same interest. So we can come to an understanding."

As he spoke thus, it seemed as though Thenardier, who kept his eyes
fixed on M. Leblanc, were trying to plunge the sharp points which darted
from the pupils into the very conscience of his prisoner. Moreover, his
language, which was stamped with a sort of moderated, subdued insolence
and crafty insolence, was reserved and almost choice, and in that
rascal, who had been nothing but a robber a short time previously, one
now felt "the man who had studied for the priesthood."

The silence preserved by the prisoner, that precaution which had been
carried to the point of forgetting all anxiety for his own life, that
resistance opposed to the first impulse of nature, which is to utter
a cry, all this, it must be confessed, now that his attention had
been called to it, troubled Marius, and affected him with painful
astonishment.

Thenardier's well-grounded observation still further obscured for Marius
the dense mystery which enveloped that grave and singular person on whom
Courfeyrac had bestowed the sobriquet of Monsieur Leblanc.

But whoever he was, bound with ropes, surrounded with executioners, half
plunged, so to speak, in a grave which was closing in upon him to the
extent of a degree with every moment that passed, in the presence
of Thenardier's wrath, as in the presence of his sweetness, this man
remained impassive; and Marius could not refrain from admiring at such a
moment the superbly melancholy visage.

Here, evidently, was a soul which was inaccessible to terror, and which
did not know the meaning of despair. Here was one of those men who
command amazement in desperate circumstances. Extreme as was the crisis,
inevitable as was the catastrophe, there was nothing here of the agony
of the drowning man, who opens his horror-filled eyes under the water.

Thenardier rose in an unpretending manner, went to the fireplace, shoved
aside the screen, which he leaned against the neighboring pallet, and
thus unmasked the brazier full of glowing coals, in which the prisoner
could plainly see the chisel white-hot and spotted here and there with
tiny scarlet stars.

Then Thenardier returned to his seat beside M. Leblanc.

"I continue," said he. "We can come to an understanding. Let us arrange
this matter in an amicable way. I was wrong to lose my temper just now,
I don't know what I was thinking of, I went a great deal too far, I said
extravagant things. For example, because you are a millionnaire, I told
you that I exacted money, a lot of money, a deal of money. That would
not be reasonable. Mon Dieu, in spite of your riches, you have expenses
of your own--who has not? I don't want to ruin you, I am not a greedy
fellow, after all. I am not one of those people who, because they have
the advantage of the position, profit by the fact to make themselves
ridiculous. Why, I'm taking things into consideration and making a
sacrifice on my side. I only want two hundred thousand francs."

M. Leblanc uttered not a word.

Thenardier went on:--

"You see that I put not a little water in my wine; I'm very moderate. I
don't know the state of your fortune, but I do know that you don't stick
at money, and a benevolent man like yourself can certainly give two
hundred thousand francs to the father of a family who is out of luck.
Certainly, you are reasonable, too; you haven't imagined that I should
take all the trouble I have to-day and organized this affair this
evening, which has been labor well bestowed, in the opinion of these
gentlemen, merely to wind up by asking you for enough to go and drink
red wine at fifteen sous and eat veal at Desnoyer's. Two hundred
thousand francs--it's surely worth all that. This trifle once out of
your pocket, I guarantee you that that's the end of the matter, and that
you have no further demands to fear. You will say to me: 'But I haven't
two hundred thousand francs about me.' Oh! I'm not extortionate. I don't
demand that. I only ask one thing of you. Have the goodness to write
what I am about to dictate to you."

Here Thenardier paused; then he added, emphasizing his words, and
casting a smile in the direction of the brazier:--

"I warn you that I shall not admit that you don't know how to write."

A grand inquisitor might have envied that smile.

Thenardier pushed the table close to M. Leblanc, and took an inkstand,
a pen, and a sheet of paper from the drawer which he left half open, and
in which gleamed the long blade of the knife.

He placed the sheet of paper before M. Leblanc.

"Write," said he.

The prisoner spoke at last.

"How do you expect me to write? I am bound."

"That's true, excuse me!" ejaculated Thenardier, "you are quite right."

And turning to Bigrenaille:--

"Untie the gentleman's right arm."

Panchaud, alias Printanier, alias Bigrenaille, executed Thenardier's
order.

When the prisoner's right arm was free, Thenardier dipped the pen in the
ink and presented it to him.

"Understand thoroughly, sir, that you are in our power, at our
discretion, that no human power can get you out of this, and that we
shall be really grieved if we are forced to proceed to disagreeable
extremities. I know neither your name, nor your address, but I warn you,
that you will remain bound until the person charged with carrying the
letter which you are about to write shall have returned. Now, be so good
as to write."

"What?" demanded the prisoner.

"I will dictate."

M. Leblanc took the pen.

Thenardier began to dictate:--

"My daughter--"

The prisoner shuddered, and raised his eyes to Thenardier.

"Put down 'My dear daughter'--" said Thenardier.

M. Leblanc obeyed.

Thenardier continued:--

"Come instantly--"

He paused:--

"You address her as thou, do you not?"

"Who?" asked M. Leblanc.

"Parbleu!" cried Thenardier, "the little one, the Lark."

M. Leblanc replied without the slightest apparent emotion:--

"I do not know what you mean."

"Go on, nevertheless," ejaculated Thenardier, and he continued to
dictate:--

"Come immediately, I am in absolute need of thee. The person who will
deliver this note to thee is instructed to conduct thee to me. I am
waiting for thee. Come with confidence."

M. Leblanc had written the whole of this.

Thenardier resumed:--

"Ah! erase 'come with confidence'; that might lead her to suppose that
everything was not as it should be, and that distrust is possible."

M. Leblanc erased the three words.

"Now," pursued Thenardier, "sign it. What's your name?"

The prisoner laid down the pen and demanded:--

"For whom is this letter?"

"You know well," retorted Thenardier, "for the little one I just told
you so."

It was evident that Thenardier avoided naming the young girl in
question. He said "the Lark," he said "the little one," but he did not
pronounce her name--the precaution of a clever man guarding his secret
from his accomplices. To mention the name was to deliver the whole
"affair" into their hands, and to tell them more about it than there was
any need of their knowing.

He went on:--

"Sign. What is your name?"

"Urbain Fabre," said the prisoner.

Thenardier, with the movement of a cat, dashed his hand into his pocket
and drew out the handkerchief which had been seized on M. Leblanc. He
looked for the mark on it, and held it close to the candle.

"U. F. That's it. Urbain Fabre. Well, sign it U. F."

The prisoner signed.

"As two hands are required to fold the letter, give it to me, I will
fold it."

That done, Thenardier resumed:--

"Address it, 'Mademoiselle Fabre,' at your house. I know that you live
a long distance from here, near Saint-Jacquesdu-Haut-Pas, because you go
to mass there every day, but I don't know in what street. I see that
you understand your situation. As you have not lied about your name, you
will not lie about your address. Write it yourself."

The prisoner paused thoughtfully for a moment, then he took the pen and
wrote:--

"Mademoiselle Fabre, at M. Urbain Fabre's, Rue Saint-Dominique-D'Enfer,
No. 17."

Thenardier seized the letter with a sort of feverish convulsion.

"Wife!" he cried.

The Thenardier woman hastened to him.

"Here's the letter. You know what you have to do. There is a carriage at
the door. Set out at once, and return ditto."

And addressing the man with the meat-axe:--

"Since you have taken off your nose-screen, accompany the mistress. You
will get up behind the fiacre. You know where you left the team?"

"Yes," said the man.

And depositing his axe in a corner, he followed Madame Thenardier.

As they set off, Thenardier thrust his head through the half-open door,
and shouted into the corridor:--

"Above all things, don't lose the letter! remember that you carry two
hundred thousand francs with you!"

The Thenardier's hoarse voice replied:--

"Be easy. I have it in my bosom."

A minute had not elapsed, when the sound of the cracking of a whip was
heard, which rapidly retreated and died away.

"Good!" growled Thenardier. "They're going at a fine pace. At such a
gallop, the bourgeoise will be back inside three-quarters of an hour."

He drew a chair close to the fireplace, folding his arms, and presenting
his muddy boots to the brazier.

"My feet are cold!" said he.

Only five ruffians now remained in the den with Thenardier and the
prisoner.

These men, through the black masks or paste which covered their faces,
and made of them, at fear's pleasure, charcoal-burners, negroes, or
demons, had a stupid and gloomy air, and it could be felt that they
perpetrated a crime like a bit of work, tranquilly, without either wrath
or mercy, with a sort of ennui. They were crowded together in one corner
like brutes, and remained silent.

Thenardier warmed his feet.

The prisoner had relapsed into his taciturnity. A sombre calm had
succeeded to the wild uproar which had filled the garret but a few
moments before.

The candle, on which a large "stranger" had formed, cast but a dim
light in the immense hovel, the brazier had grown dull, and all those
monstrous heads cast misshapen shadows on the walls and ceiling.

No sound was audible except the quiet breathing of the old drunken man,
who was fast asleep.

Marius waited in a state of anxiety that was augmented by every trifle.
The enigma was more impenetrable than ever.

Who was this "little one" whom Thenardier had called the Lark? Was she
his "Ursule"? The prisoner had not seemed to be affected by that word,
"the Lark," and had replied in the most natural manner in the world:
"I do not know what you mean." On the other hand, the two letters U. F.
were explained; they meant Urbain Fabre; and Ursule was no longer named
Ursule. This was what Marius perceived most clearly of all.

A sort of horrible fascination held him nailed to his post, from which
he was observing and commanding this whole scene. There he stood,
almost incapable of movement or reflection, as though annihilated by the
abominable things viewed at such close quarters. He waited, in the hope
of some incident, no matter of what nature, since he could not collect
his thoughts and did not know upon what course to decide.

"In any case," he said, "if she is the Lark, I shall see her, for the
Thenardier woman is to bring her hither. That will be the end, and then
I will give my life and my blood if necessary, but I will deliver her!
Nothing shall stop me."

Nearly half an hour passed in this manner. Thenardier seemed to be
absorbed in gloomy reflections, the prisoner did not stir. Still, Marius
fancied that at intervals, and for the last few moments, he had heard a
faint, dull noise in the direction of the prisoner.

All at once, Thenardier addressed the prisoner:

"By the way, Monsieur Fabre, I might as well say it to you at once."

These few words appeared to be the beginning of an explanation. Marius
strained his ears.

"My wife will be back shortly, don't get impatient. I think that the
Lark really is your daughter, and it seems to me quite natural that you
should keep her. Only, listen to me a bit. My wife will go and hunt her
up with your letter. I told my wife to dress herself in the way she did,
so that your young lady might make no difficulty about following her.
They will both enter the carriage with my comrade behind. Somewhere,
outside the barrier, there is a trap harnessed to two very good horses.
Your young lady will be taken to it. She will alight from the fiacre.
My comrade will enter the other vehicle with her, and my wife will come
back here to tell us: 'It's done.' As for the young lady, no harm will
be done to her; the trap will conduct her to a place where she will be
quiet, and just as soon as you have handed over to me those little two
hundred thousand francs, she will be returned to you. If you have me
arrested, my comrade will give a turn of his thumb to the Lark, that's
all."

The prisoner uttered not a syllable. After a pause, Thenardier
continued:--

"It's very simple, as you see. There'll be no harm done unless you wish
that there should be harm done. I'm telling you how things stand. I warn
you so that you may be prepared."

He paused: the prisoner did not break the silence, and Thenardier
resumed:--

"As soon as my wife returns and says to me: 'The Lark is on the way,' we
will release you, and you will be free to go and sleep at home. You see
that our intentions are not evil."

Terrible images passed through Marius' mind. What! That young girl whom
they were abducting was not to be brought back? One of those monsters
was to bear her off into the darkness? Whither? And what if it were she!

It was clear that it was she. Marius felt his heart stop beating.

What was he to do? Discharge the pistol? Place all those scoundrels in
the hands of justice? But the horrible man with the meat-axe would, none
the less, be out of reach with the young girl, and Marius reflected on
Thenardier's words, of which he perceived the bloody significance: "If
you have me arrested, my comrade will give a turn of his thumb to the
Lark."

Now, it was not alone by the colonel's testament, it was by his own
love, it was by the peril of the one he loved, that he felt himself
restrained.

This frightful situation, which had already lasted above half an hour,
was changing its aspect every moment.

Marius had sufficient strength of mind to review in succession all the
most heart-breaking conjectures, seeking hope and finding none.

The tumult of his thoughts contrasted with the funereal silence of the
den.

In the midst of this silence, the door at the bottom of the staircase
was heard to open and shut again.

The prisoner made a movement in his bonds.

"Here's the bourgeoise," said Thenardier.

He had hardly uttered the words, when the Thenardier woman did in fact
rush hastily into the room, red, panting, breathless, with flaming eyes,
and cried, as she smote her huge hands on her thighs simultaneously:--

"False address!"

The ruffian who had gone with her made his appearance behind her and
picked up his axe again.

She resumed:--

"Nobody there! Rue Saint-Dominique, No. 17, no Monsieur Urbain Fabre!
They know not what it means!"

She paused, choking, then went on:--

"Monsieur Thenardier! That old fellow has duped you! You are too good,
you see! If it had been me, I'd have chopped the beast in four quarters
to begin with! And if he had acted ugly, I'd have boiled him alive! He
would have been obliged to speak, and say where the girl is, and where
he keeps his shiners! That's the way I should have managed matters!
People are perfectly right when they say that men are a deal stupider
than women! Nobody at No. 17. It's nothing but a big carriage gate! No
Monsieur Fabre in the Rue Saint-Dominique! And after all that racing
and fee to the coachman and all! I spoke to both the porter and the
portress, a fine, stout woman, and they know nothing about him!"

Marius breathed freely once more.

She, Ursule or the Lark, he no longer knew what to call her, was safe.

While his exasperated wife vociferated, Thenardier had seated himself on
the table.

For several minutes he uttered not a word, but swung his right foot,
which hung down, and stared at the brazier with an air of savage revery.

Finally, he said to the prisoner, with a slow and singularly ferocious
tone:

"A false address? What did you expect to gain by that?"

"To gain time!" cried the prisoner in a thundering voice, and at the
same instant he shook off his bonds; they were cut. The prisoner was
only attached to the bed now by one leg.

Before the seven men had time to collect their senses and dash forward,
he had bent down into the fireplace, had stretched out his hand to the
brazier, and had then straightened himself up again, and now Thenardier,
the female Thenardier, and the ruffians, huddled in amazement at the
extremity of the hovel, stared at him in stupefaction, as almost free
and in a formidable attitude, he brandished above his head the red-hot
chisel, which emitted a threatening glow.

The judicial examination to which the ambush in the Gorbeau house
eventually gave rise, established the fact that a large sou piece, cut
and worked in a peculiar fashion, was found in the garret, when the
police made their descent on it. This sou piece was one of those marvels
of industry, which are engendered by the patience of the galleys in
the shadows and for the shadows, marvels which are nothing else than
instruments of escape. These hideous and delicate products of wonderful
art are to jewellers' work what the metaphors of slang are to poetry.
There are Benvenuto Cellinis in the galleys, just as there are Villons
in language. The unhappy wretch who aspires to deliverance finds means
sometimes without tools, sometimes with a common wooden-handled knife,
to saw a sou into two thin plates, to hollow out these plates without
affecting the coinage stamp, and to make a furrow on the edge of the sou
in such a manner that the plates will adhere again. This can be screwed
together and unscrewed at will; it is a box. In this box he hides a
watch-spring, and this watch-spring, properly handled, cuts good-sized
chains and bars of iron. The unfortunate convict is supposed to possess
merely a sou; not at all, he possesses liberty. It was a large sou of
this sort which, during the subsequent search of the police, was found
under the bed near the window. They also found a tiny saw of blue steel
which would fit the sou.

It is probable that the prisoner had this sou piece on his person at the
moment when the ruffians searched him, that he contrived to conceal
it in his hand, and that afterward, having his right hand free, he
unscrewed it, and used it as a saw to cut the cords which fastened him,
which would explain the faint noise and almost imperceptible movements
which Marius had observed.

As he had not been able to bend down, for fear of betraying himself, he
had not cut the bonds of his left leg.

The ruffians had recovered from their first surprise.

"Be easy," said Bigrenaille to Thenardier. "He still holds by one leg,
and he can't get away. I'll answer for that. I tied that paw for him."

In the meanwhile, the prisoner had begun to speak:--

"You are wretches, but my life is not worth the trouble of defending it.
When you think that you can make me speak, that you can make me write
what I do not choose to write, that you can make me say what I do not
choose to say--"

He stripped up his left sleeve, and added:--

"See here."

At the same moment he extended his arm, and laid the glowing chisel
which he held in his left hand by its wooden handle on his bare flesh.

The crackling of the burning flesh became audible, and the odor peculiar
to chambers of torture filled the hovel.

[Illustration: Red Hot Chisel  3b8-20-red-hot-chisel]

Marius reeled in utter horror, the very ruffians shuddered, hardly a
muscle of the old man's face contracted, and while the red-hot iron
sank into the smoking wound, impassive and almost august, he fixed on
Thenardier his beautiful glance, in which there was no hatred, and where
suffering vanished in serene majesty.

With grand and lofty natures, the revolts of the flesh and the senses
when subjected to physical suffering cause the soul to spring forth, and
make it appear on the brow, just as rebellions among the soldiery force
the captain to show himself.

"Wretches!" said he, "have no more fear of me than I have for you!"

And, tearing the chisel from the wound, he hurled it through the window,
which had been left open; the horrible, glowing tool disappeared into
the night, whirling as it flew, and fell far away on the snow.

The prisoner resumed:--

"Do what you please with me." He was disarmed.

"Seize him!" said Thenardier.

Two of the ruffians laid their hands on his shoulder, and the masked
man with the ventriloquist's voice took up his station in front of him,
ready to smash his skull at the slightest movement.

At the same time, Marius heard below him, at the base of the partition,
but so near that he could not see who was speaking, this colloquy
conducted in a low tone:--

"There is only one thing left to do."

"Cut his throat."

"That's it."

It was the husband and wife taking counsel together.

Thenardier walked slowly towards the table, opened the drawer, and
took out the knife. Marius fretted with the handle of his pistol.
Unprecedented perplexity! For the last hour he had had two voices in his
conscience, the one enjoining him to respect his father's testament, the
other crying to him to rescue the prisoner. These two voices continued
uninterruptedly that struggle which tormented him to agony. Up to that
moment he had cherished a vague hope that he should find some means
of reconciling these two duties, but nothing within the limits of
possibility had presented itself.

However, the peril was urgent, the last bounds of delay had been
reached; Thenardier was standing thoughtfully a few paces distant from
the prisoner.

Marius cast a wild glance about him, the last mechanical resource of
despair. All at once a shudder ran through him.

At his feet, on the table, a bright ray of light from the full moon
illuminated and seemed to point out to him a sheet of paper. On this
paper he read the following line written that very morning, in large
letters, by the eldest of the Thenardier girls:--

"THE BOBBIES ARE HERE."

An idea, a flash, crossed Marius' mind; this was the expedient of which
he was in search, the solution of that frightful problem which was
torturing him, of sparing the assassin and saving the victim.

He knelt down on his commode, stretched out his arm, seized the sheet of
paper, softly detached a bit of plaster from the wall, wrapped the paper
round it, and tossed the whole through the crevice into the middle of
the den.

It was high time. Thenardier had conquered his last fears or his last
scruples, and was advancing on the prisoner.

"Something is falling!" cried the Thenardier woman.

"What is it?" asked her husband.

The woman darted forward and picked up the bit of plaster. She handed it
to her husband.

"Where did this come from?" demanded Thenardier.

"Pardie!" ejaculated his wife, "where do you suppose it came from?
Through the window, of course."

"I saw it pass," said Bigrenaille.

Thenardier rapidly unfolded the paper and held it close to the candle.

"It's in Eponine's handwriting. The devil!"

He made a sign to his wife, who hastily drew near, and showed her the
line written on the sheet of paper, then he added in a subdued voice:--

"Quick! The ladder! Let's leave the bacon in the mousetrap and decamp!"

"Without cutting that man's throat?" asked, the Thenardier woman.

"We haven't the time."

"Through what?" resumed Bigrenaille.

"Through the window," replied Thenardier. "Since Ponine has thrown the
stone through the window, it indicates that the house is not watched on
that side."

The mask with the ventriloquist's voice deposited his huge key on the
floor, raised both arms in the air, and opened and clenched his fists,
three times rapidly without uttering a word.

This was the signal like the signal for clearing the decks for action on
board ship.

The ruffians who were holding the prisoner released him; in the
twinkling of an eye the rope ladder was unrolled outside the window, and
solidly fastened to the sill by the two iron hooks.

The prisoner paid no attention to what was going on around him. He
seemed to be dreaming or praying.

As soon as the ladder was arranged, Thenardier cried:

"Come! the bourgeoise first!"

And he rushed headlong to the window.

But just as he was about to throw his leg over, Bigrenaille seized him
roughly by the collar.

"Not much, come now, you old dog, after us!"

"After us!" yelled the ruffians.

"You are children," said Thenardier, "we are losing time. The police are
on our heels."

"Well," said the ruffians, "let's draw lots to see who shall go down
first."

Thenardier exclaimed:--

"Are you mad! Are you crazy! What a pack of boobies! You want to waste
time, do you? Draw lots, do you? By a wet finger, by a short straw! With
written names! Thrown into a hat!--"

"Would you like my hat?" cried a voice on the threshold.

All wheeled round. It was Javert.

He had his hat in his hand, and was holding it out to them with a smile.




CHAPTER XXI--ONE SHOULD ALWAYS BEGIN BY ARRESTING THE VICTIMS

At nightfall, Javert had posted his men and had gone into ambush himself
between the trees of the Rue de la Barrieredes-Gobelins which faced
the Gorbeau house, on the other side of the boulevard. He had begun
operations by opening "his pockets," and dropping into it the two young
girls who were charged with keeping a watch on the approaches to the
den. But he had only "caged" Azelma. As for Eponine, she was not at her
post, she had disappeared, and he had not been able to seize her. Then
Javert had made a point and had bent his ear to waiting for the signal
agreed upon. The comings and goings of the fiacres had greatly agitated
him. At last, he had grown impatient, and, sure that there was a nest
there, sure of being in "luck," having recognized many of the ruffians
who had entered, he had finally decided to go upstairs without waiting
for the pistol-shot.

It will be remembered that he had Marius' pass-key.

He had arrived just in the nick of time.

The terrified ruffians flung themselves on the arms which they had
abandoned in all the corners at the moment of flight. In less than a
second, these seven men, horrible to behold, had grouped themselves in
an attitude of defence, one with his meat-axe, another with his key,
another with his bludgeon, the rest with shears, pincers, and hammers.
Thenardier had his knife in his fist. The Thenardier woman snatched up
an enormous paving-stone which lay in the angle of the window and served
her daughters as an ottoman.

[Illustration: Snatched up a Paving Stone  3b8-21-paving-stone]

Javert put on his hat again, and advanced a couple of paces into the
room, with arms folded, his cane under one arm, his sword in its sheath.

"Halt there," said he. "You shall not go out by the window, you shall go
through the door. It's less unhealthy. There are seven of you, there
are fifteen of us. Don't let's fall to collaring each other like men of
Auvergne."

Bigrenaille drew out a pistol which he had kept concealed under his
blouse, and put it in Thenardier's hand, whispering in the latter's
ear:--

"It's Javert. I don't dare fire at that man. Do you dare?"

"Parbleu!" replied Thenardier.

"Well, then, fire."

Thenardier took the pistol and aimed at Javert.

Javert, who was only three paces from him, stared intently at him and
contented himself with saying:--

"Come now, don't fire. You'll miss fire."

Thenardier pulled the trigger. The pistol missed fire.

"Didn't I tell you so!" ejaculated Javert.

Bigrenaille flung his bludgeon at Javert's feet.

"You're the emperor of the fiends! I surrender."

"And you?" Javert asked the rest of the ruffians.

They replied:--

"So do we."

Javert began again calmly:--

"That's right, that's good, I said so, you are nice fellows."

"I only ask one thing," said Bigrenaille, "and that is, that I may not
be denied tobacco while I am in confinement."

"Granted," said Javert.

And turning round and calling behind him:--

"Come in now!"

A squad of policemen, sword in hand, and agents armed with bludgeons and
cudgels, rushed in at Javert's summons. They pinioned the ruffians.

This throng of men, sparely lighted by the single candle, filled the den
with shadows.

"Handcuff them all!" shouted Javert.

"Come on!" cried a voice which was not the voice of a man, but of which
no one would ever have said: "It is a woman's voice."

The Thenardier woman had entrenched herself in one of the angles of the
window, and it was she who had just given vent to this roar.

The policemen and agents recoiled.

She had thrown off her shawl, but retained her bonnet; her husband, who
was crouching behind her, was almost hidden under the discarded
shawl, and she was shielding him with her body, as she elevated the
paving-stone above her head with the gesture of a giantess on the point
of hurling a rock.

"Beware!" she shouted.

All crowded back towards the corridor. A broad open space was cleared in
the middle of the garret.

The Thenardier woman cast a glance at the ruffians who had allowed
themselves to be pinioned, and muttered in hoarse and guttural
accents:--

"The cowards!"

Javert smiled, and advanced across the open space which the Thenardier
was devouring with her eyes.

"Don't come near me," she cried, "or I'll crush you."

"What a grenadier!" ejaculated Javert; "you've got a beard like a man,
mother, but I have claws like a woman."

And he continued to advance.

The Thenardier, dishevelled and terrible, set her feet far apart, threw
herself backwards, and hurled the paving-stone at Javert's head. Javert
ducked, the stone passed over him, struck the wall behind, knocked off a
huge piece of plastering, and, rebounding from angle to angle across the
hovel, now luckily almost empty, rested at Javert's feet.

At the same moment, Javert reached the Thenardier couple. One of his
big hands descended on the woman's shoulder; the other on the husband's
head.

"The handcuffs!" he shouted.

The policemen trooped in in force, and in a few seconds Javert's order
had been executed.

The Thenardier female, overwhelmed, stared at her pinioned hands, and
at those of her husband, who had dropped to the floor, and exclaimed,
weeping:--

"My daughters!"

"They are in the jug," said Javert.

In the meanwhile, the agents had caught sight of the drunken man asleep
behind the door, and were shaking him:--

He awoke, stammering:--

"Is it all over, Jondrette?"

"Yes," replied Javert.

The six pinioned ruffians were standing, and still preserved their
spectral mien; all three besmeared with black, all three masked.

"Keep on your masks," said Javert.

And passing them in review with a glance of a Frederick II. at a Potsdam
parade, he said to the three "chimney-builders":--

"Good day, Bigrenaille! good day, Brujon! good day, Deuxmilliards!"

Then turning to the three masked men, he said to the man with the
meat-axe:--

"Good day, Gueulemer!"

And to the man with the cudgel:--

"Good day, Babet!"

And to the ventriloquist:--

"Your health, Claquesous."

At that moment, he caught sight of the ruffians' prisoner, who, ever
since the entrance of the police, had not uttered a word, and had held
his head down.

"Untie the gentleman!" said Javert, "and let no one go out!"

That said, he seated himself with sovereign dignity before the table,
where the candle and the writing-materials still remained, drew a
stamped paper from his pocket, and began to prepare his report.

When he had written the first lines, which are formulas that never vary,
he raised his eyes:--

"Let the gentleman whom these gentlemen bound step forward."

The policemen glanced round them.

"Well," said Javert, "where is he?"

The prisoner of the ruffians, M. Leblanc, M. Urbain Fabre, the father of
Ursule or the Lark, had disappeared.

The door was guarded, but the window was not. As soon as he had found
himself released from his bonds, and while Javert was drawing up his
report, he had taken advantage of confusion, the crowd, the darkness,
and of a moment when the general attention was diverted from him, to
dash out of the window.

An agent sprang to the opening and looked out. He saw no one outside.

The rope ladder was still shaking.

"The devil!" ejaculated Javert between his teeth, "he must have been the
most valuable of the lot."




CHAPTER XXII--THE LITTLE ONE WHO WAS CRYING IN VOLUME TWO

On the day following that on which these events took place in the house
on the Boulevard de l'Hopital, a child, who seemed to be coming from the
direction of the bridge of Austerlitz, was ascending the side-alley on
the right in the direction of the Barriere de Fontainebleau.

Night had fully come.

This lad was pale, thin, clad in rags, with linen trousers in the month
of February, and was singing at the top of his voice.

At the corner of the Rue du Petit-Banquier, a bent old woman was
rummaging in a heap of refuse by the light of a street lantern; the
child jostled her as he passed, then recoiled, exclaiming:--

"Hello! And I took it for an enormous, enormous dog!"

He pronounced the word enormous the second time with a jeering swell
of the voice which might be tolerably well represented by capitals: "an
enormous, ENORMOUS dog."

The old woman straightened herself up in a fury.

"Nasty brat!" she grumbled. "If I hadn't been bending over, I know well
where I would have planted my foot on you."

The boy was already far away.

"Kisss! kisss!" he cried. "After that, I don't think I was mistaken!"

The old woman, choking with indignation, now rose completely upright,
and the red gleam of the lantern fully lighted up her livid face, all
hollowed into angles and wrinkles, with crow's-feet meeting the corners
of her mouth.

Her body was lost in the darkness, and only her head was visible. One
would have pronounced her a mask of Decrepitude carved out by a light
from the night.

The boy surveyed her.

"Madame," said he, "does not possess that style of beauty which pleases
me."

He then pursued his road, and resumed his song:--

               "Le roi Coupdesabot
               S'en allait a la chasse,
               A la chasse aux corbeaux--"


At the end of these three lines he paused. He had arrived in front of
No. 50-52, and finding the door fastened, he began to assault it with
resounding and heroic kicks, which betrayed rather the man's shoes that
he was wearing than the child's feet which he owned.

In the meanwhile, the very old woman whom he had encountered at the
corner of the Rue du Petit-Banquier hastened up behind him, uttering
clamorous cries and indulging in lavish and exaggerated gestures.

"What's this? What's this? Lord God! He's battering the door down! He's
knocking the house down."

The kicks continued.

The old woman strained her lungs.

"Is that the way buildings are treated nowadays?"

All at once she paused.

She had recognized the gamin.

"What! so it's that imp!"

"Why, it's the old lady," said the lad. "Good day, Bougonmuche. I have
come to see my ancestors."

The old woman retorted with a composite grimace, and a wonderful
improvisation of hatred taking advantage of feebleness and ugliness,
which was, unfortunately, wasted in the dark:--

"There's no one here."

"Bah!" retorted the boy, "where's my father?"

"At La Force."

"Come, now! And my mother?"

"At Saint-Lazare."

"Well! And my sisters?"

"At the Madelonettes."

The lad scratched his head behind his ear, stared at Ma'am Bougon, and
said:--

"Ah!"

Then he executed a pirouette on his heel; a moment later, the old woman,
who had remained on the door-step, heard him singing in his clear, young
voice, as he plunged under the black elm-trees, in the wintry wind:--

               "Le roi Coupdesabot[31]
               S'en allait a la chasse,
               A la chasse aux corbeaux,
               Monte sur deux echasses.
               Quand on passait dessous,
               On lui payait deux sous."


[THE END OF VOLUME III. "MARIUS"]





VOLUME IV.--SAINT-DENIS.

[Illustration: Frontispiece Volume Four]

[Illustration: Titlepage Volume Four]


THE IDYL IN THE RUE PLUMET AND THE EPIC IN THE RUE SAINT-DENIS




BOOK FIRST.--A FEW PAGES OF HISTORY




CHAPTER I--WELL CUT

1831 and 1832, the two years which are immediately connected with the
Revolution of July, form one of the most peculiar and striking moments
of history. These two years rise like two mountains midway between those
which precede and those which follow them. They have a revolutionary
grandeur. Precipices are to be distinguished there. The social masses,
the very assizes of civilization, the solid group of superposed and
adhering interests, the century-old profiles of the ancient French
formation, appear and disappear in them every instant, athwart the storm
clouds of systems, of passions, and of theories. These appearances
and disappearances have been designated as movement and resistance.
At intervals, truth, that daylight of the human soul, can be descried
shining there.

This remarkable epoch is decidedly circumscribed and is beginning to
be sufficiently distant from us to allow of our grasping the principal
lines even at the present day.

We shall make the attempt.

The Restoration had been one of those intermediate phases, hard to
define, in which there is fatigue, buzzing, murmurs, sleep, tumult,
and which are nothing else than the arrival of a great nation at a
halting-place.

These epochs are peculiar and mislead the politicians who desire to
convert them to profit. In the beginning, the nation asks nothing but
repose; it thirsts for but one thing, peace; it has but one ambition,
to be small. Which is the translation of remaining tranquil. Of great
events, great hazards, great adventures, great men, thank God, we
have seen enough, we have them heaped higher than our heads. We would
exchange Caesar for Prusias, and Napoleon for the King of Yvetot. "What
a good little king was he!" We have marched since daybreak, we have
reached the evening of a long and toilsome day; we have made our first
change with Mirabeau, the second with Robespierre, the third with
Bonaparte; we are worn out. Each one demands a bed.

Devotion which is weary, heroism which has grown old, ambitions which
are sated, fortunes which are made, seek, demand, implore, solicit,
what? A shelter. They have it. They take possession of peace, of
tranquillity, of leisure; behold, they are content. But, at the same
time certain facts arise, compel recognition, and knock at the door in
their turn. These facts are the products of revolutions and wars, they
are, they exist, they have the right to install themselves in society,
and they do install themselves therein; and most of the time, facts
are the stewards of the household and fouriers[32] who do nothing but
prepare lodgings for principles.

This, then, is what appears to philosophical politicians:--

At the same time that weary men demand repose, accomplished facts demand
guarantees. Guarantees are the same to facts that repose is to men.

This is what England demanded of the Stuarts after the Protector; this
is what France demanded of the Bourbons after the Empire.

These guarantees are a necessity of the times. They must be accorded.
Princes "grant" them, but in reality, it is the force of things which
gives them. A profound truth, and one useful to know, which the Stuarts
did not suspect in 1662 and which the Bourbons did not even obtain a
glimpse of in 1814.

The predestined family, which returned to France when Napoleon fell, had
the fatal simplicity to believe that it was itself which bestowed, and
that what it had bestowed it could take back again; that the House of
Bourbon possessed the right divine, that France possessed nothing, and
that the political right conceded in the charter of Louis XVIII. was
merely a branch of the right divine, was detached by the House of
Bourbon and graciously given to the people until such day as it should
please the King to reassume it. Still, the House of Bourbon should have
felt, from the displeasure created by the gift, that it did not come
from it.

This house was churlish to the nineteenth century. It put on an
ill-tempered look at every development of the nation. To make use of a
trivial word, that is to say, of a popular and a true word, it looked
glum. The people saw this.

It thought it possessed strength because the Empire had been carried
away before it like a theatrical stage-setting. It did not perceive that
it had, itself, been brought in in the same fashion. It did not perceive
that it also lay in that hand which had removed Napoleon.

It thought that it had roots, because it was the past. It was mistaken;
it formed a part of the past, but the whole past was France. The roots
of French society were not fixed in the Bourbons, but in the nations.
These obscure and lively roots constituted, not the right of a family,
but the history of a people. They were everywhere, except under the
throne.

The House of Bourbon was to France the illustrious and bleeding knot in
her history, but was no longer the principal element of her destiny,
and the necessary base of her politics. She could get along without the
Bourbons; she had done without them for two and twenty years; there
had been a break of continuity; they did not suspect the fact. And how
should they have suspected it, they who fancied that Louis XVII. reigned
on the 9th of Thermidor, and that Louis XVIII. was reigning at the
battle of Marengo? Never, since the origin of history, had princes been
so blind in the presence of facts and the portion of divine authority
which facts contain and promulgate. Never had that pretension here below
which is called the right of kings denied to such a point the right from
on high.

A capital error which led this family to lay its hand once more on the
guarantees "granted" in 1814, on the concessions, as it termed them.
Sad. A sad thing! What it termed its concessions were our conquests;
what it termed our encroachments were our rights.

When the hour seemed to it to have come, the Restoration, supposing
itself victorious over Bonaparte and well-rooted in the country, that is
to say, believing itself to be strong and deep, abruptly decided on its
plan of action, and risked its stroke. One morning it drew itself up
before the face of France, and, elevating its voice, it contested the
collective title and the individual right of the nation to sovereignty,
of the citizen to liberty. In other words, it denied to the nation
that which made it a nation, and to the citizen that which made him a
citizen.

This is the foundation of those famous acts which are called the
ordinances of July. The Restoration fell.

It fell justly. But, we admit, it had not been absolutely hostile to
all forms of progress. Great things had been accomplished, with it
alongside.

Under the Restoration, the nation had grown accustomed to calm
discussion, which had been lacking under the Republic, and to grandeur
in peace, which had been wanting under the Empire. France free and
strong had offered an encouraging spectacle to the other peoples of
Europe. The Revolution had had the word under Robespierre; the cannon
had had the word under Bonaparte; it was under Louis XVIII. and Charles
X. that it was the turn of intelligence to have the word. The wind
ceased, the torch was lighted once more. On the lofty heights, the
pure light of mind could be seen flickering. A magnificent, useful, and
charming spectacle. For a space of fifteen years, those great principles
which are so old for the thinker, so new for the statesman, could be
seen at work in perfect peace, on the public square; equality before the
law, liberty of conscience, liberty of speech, liberty of the press, the
accessibility of all aptitudes to all functions. Thus it proceeded until
1830. The Bourbons were an instrument of civilization which broke in the
hands of Providence.

The fall of the Bourbons was full of grandeur, not on their side, but
on the side of the nation. They quitted the throne with gravity, but
without authority; their descent into the night was not one of those
solemn disappearances which leave a sombre emotion in history; it
was neither the spectral calm of Charles I., nor the eagle scream of
Napoleon. They departed, that is all. They laid down the crown, and
retained no aureole. They were worthy, but they were not august. They
lacked, in a certain measure, the majesty of their misfortune. Charles
X. during the voyage from Cherbourg, causing a round table to be cut
over into a square table, appeared to be more anxious about imperilled
etiquette than about the crumbling monarchy. This diminution saddened
devoted men who loved their persons, and serious men who honored their
race. The populace was admirable. The nation, attacked one morning with
weapons, by a sort of royal insurrection, felt itself in the possession
of so much force that it did not go into a rage. It defended itself,
restrained itself, restored things to their places, the government to
law, the Bourbons to exile, alas! and then halted! It took the old king
Charles X. from beneath that dais which had sheltered Louis XIV. and
set him gently on the ground. It touched the royal personages only with
sadness and precaution. It was not one man, it was not a few men, it
was France, France entire, France victorious and intoxicated with her
victory, who seemed to be coming to herself, and who put into practice,
before the eyes of the whole world, these grave words of Guillaume du
Vair after the day of the Barricades:--

"It is easy for those who are accustomed to skim the favors of the
great, and to spring, like a bird from bough to bough, from an afflicted
fortune to a flourishing one, to show themselves harsh towards their
Prince in his adversity; but as for me, the fortune of my Kings and
especially of my afflicted Kings, will always be venerable to me."

The Bourbons carried away with them respect, but not regret. As we have
just stated, their misfortune was greater than they were. They faded out
in the horizon.

The Revolution of July instantly had friends and enemies throughout the
entire world. The first rushed toward her with joy and enthusiasm, the
others turned away, each according to his nature. At the first blush,
the princes of Europe, the owls of this dawn, shut their eyes, wounded
and stupefied, and only opened them to threaten. A fright which can be
comprehended, a wrath which can be pardoned. This strange revolution had
hardly produced a shock; it had not even paid to vanquished royalty the
honor of treating it as an enemy, and of shedding its blood. In the eyes
of despotic governments, who are always interested in having liberty
calumniate itself, the Revolution of July committed the fault of being
formidable and of remaining gentle. Nothing, however, was attempted or
plotted against it. The most discontented, the most irritated, the most
trembling, saluted it; whatever our egotism and our rancor may be, a
mysterious respect springs from events in which we are sensible of the
collaboration of some one who is working above man.

The Revolution of July is the triumph of right overthrowing the fact. A
thing which is full of splendor.

Right overthrowing the fact. Hence the brilliancy of the Revolution of
1830, hence, also, its mildness. Right triumphant has no need of being
violent.

Right is the just and the true.

The property of right is to remain eternally beautiful and pure. The
fact, even when most necessary to all appearances, even when most
thoroughly accepted by contemporaries, if it exist only as a fact, and
if it contain only too little of right, or none at all, is infallibly
destined to become, in the course of time, deformed, impure, perhaps,
even monstrous. If one desires to learn at one blow, to what degree of
hideousness the fact can attain, viewed at the distance of centuries,
let him look at Machiavelli. Machiavelli is not an evil genius, nor a
demon, nor a miserable and cowardly writer; he is nothing but the fact.
And he is not only the Italian fact; he is the European fact, the
fact of the sixteenth century. He seems hideous, and so he is, in the
presence of the moral idea of the nineteenth.

This conflict of right and fact has been going on ever since the origin
of society. To terminate this duel, to amalgamate the pure idea with the
humane reality, to cause right to penetrate pacifically into the fact
and the fact into right, that is the task of sages.




CHAPTER II--BADLY SEWED

But the task of sages is one thing, the task of clever men is another.
The Revolution of 1830 came to a sudden halt.

As soon as a revolution has made the coast, the skilful make haste to
prepare the shipwreck.

The skilful in our century have conferred on themselves the title of
Statesmen; so that this word, statesmen, has ended by becoming somewhat
of a slang word. It must be borne in mind, in fact, that wherever
there is nothing but skill, there is necessarily pettiness. To say "the
skilful" amounts to saying "the mediocre."

In the same way, to say "statesmen" is sometimes equivalent to saying
"traitors." If, then, we are to believe the skilful, revolutions like
the Revolution of July are severed arteries; a prompt ligature is
indispensable. The right, too grandly proclaimed, is shaken. Also, right
once firmly fixed, the state must be strengthened. Liberty once assured,
attention must be directed to power.

Here the sages are not, as yet, separated from the skilful, but they
begin to be distrustful. Power, very good. But, in the first place, what
is power? In the second, whence comes it? The skilful do not seem to
hear the murmured objection, and they continue their manoeuvres.

According to the politicians, who are ingenious in putting the mask
of necessity on profitable fictions, the first requirement of a people
after a revolution, when this people forms part of a monarchical
continent, is to procure for itself a dynasty. In this way, say they,
peace, that is to say, time to dress our wounds, and to repair
the house, can be had after a revolution. The dynasty conceals the
scaffolding and covers the ambulance. Now, it is not always easy to
procure a dynasty.

If it is absolutely necessary, the first man of genius or even the first
man of fortune who comes to hand suffices for the manufacturing of a
king. You have, in the first case, Napoleon; in the second, Iturbide.

But the first family that comes to hand does not suffice to make a
dynasty. There is necessarily required a certain modicum of antiquity in
a race, and the wrinkle of the centuries cannot be improvised.

If we place ourselves at the point of view of the "statesmen," after
making all allowances, of course, after a revolution, what are the
qualities of the king which result from it? He may be and it is useful
for him to be a revolutionary; that is to say, a participant in his own
person in that revolution, that he should have lent a hand to it, that
he should have either compromised or distinguished himself therein, that
he should have touched the axe or wielded the sword in it.

What are the qualities of a dynasty? It should be national; that is to
say, revolutionary at a distance, not through acts committed, but by
reason of ideas accepted. It should be composed of past and be historic;
be composed of future and be sympathetic.

All this explains why the early revolutions contented themselves with
finding a man, Cromwell or Napoleon; and why the second absolutely
insisted on finding a family, the House of Brunswick or the House of
Orleans.

Royal houses resemble those Indian fig-trees, each branch of which,
bending over to the earth, takes root and becomes a fig-tree itself.
Each branch may become a dynasty. On the sole condition that it shall
bend down to the people.

Such is the theory of the skilful.

Here, then, lies the great art: to make a little render to success the
sound of a catastrophe in order that those who profit by it may tremble
from it also, to season with fear every step that is taken, to augment
the curve of the transition to the point of retarding progress, to dull
that aurora, to denounce and retrench the harshness of enthusiasm, to
cut all angles and nails, to wad triumph, to muffle up right, to envelop
the giant-people in flannel, and to put it to bed very speedily, to
impose a diet on that excess of health, to put Hercules on the treatment
of a convalescent, to dilute the event with the expedient, to offer to
spirits thirsting for the ideal that nectar thinned out with a potion,
to take one's precautions against too much success, to garnish the
revolution with a shade.

1830 practised this theory, already applied to England by 1688.

1830 is a revolution arrested midway. Half of progress, quasi-right.
Now, logic knows not the "almost," absolutely as the sun knows not the
candle.

Who arrests revolutions half-way? The bourgeoisie?

Why?

Because the bourgeoisie is interest which has reached satisfaction.
Yesterday it was appetite, to-day it is plenitude, to-morrow it will be
satiety.

The phenomenon of 1814 after Napoleon was reproduced in 1830 after
Charles X.

The attempt has been made, and wrongly, to make a class of the
bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie is simply the contented portion of the
people. The bourgeois is the man who now has time to sit down. A chair
is not a caste.

But through a desire to sit down too soon, one may arrest the very march
of the human race. This has often been the fault of the bourgeoisie.

One is not a class because one has committed a fault. Selfishness is not
one of the divisions of the social order.

Moreover, we must be just to selfishness. The state to which that part
of the nation which is called the bourgeoisie aspired after the shock
of 1830 was not the inertia which is complicated with indifference and
laziness, and which contains a little shame; it was not the slumber
which presupposes a momentary forgetfulness accessible to dreams; it was
the halt.

The halt is a word formed of a singular double and almost contradictory
sense: a troop on the march, that is to say, movement; a stand, that is
to say, repose.

The halt is the restoration of forces; it is repose armed and on the
alert; it is the accomplished fact which posts sentinels and holds
itself on its guard.

The halt presupposes the combat of yesterday and the combat of
to-morrow.

It is the partition between 1830 and 1848.

What we here call combat may also be designated as progress.

The bourgeoisie then, as well as the statesmen, required a man who
should express this word Halt. An Although-Because. A composite
individuality, signifying revolution and signifying stability, in other
terms, strengthening the present by the evident compatibility of the
past with the future.

This man was "already found." His name was Louis Philippe d'Orleans.

The 221 made Louis Philippe King. Lafayette undertook the coronation.

He called it the best of republics. The town-hall of Paris took the
place of the Cathedral of Rheims.

This substitution of a half-throne for a whole throne was "the work of
1830."

When the skilful had finished, the immense vice of their solution became
apparent. All this had been accomplished outside the bounds of absolute
right. Absolute right cried: "I protest!" then, terrible to say, it
retired into the darkness.




CHAPTER III--LOUIS PHILIPPE

Revolutions have a terrible arm and a happy hand, they strike firmly and
choose well. Even incomplete, even debased and abused and reduced to the
state of a junior revolution like the Revolution of 1830, they nearly
always retain sufficient providential lucidity to prevent them from
falling amiss. Their eclipse is never an abdication.

Nevertheless, let us not boast too loudly; revolutions also may be
deceived, and grave errors have been seen.

Let us return to 1830. 1830, in its deviation, had good luck. In the
establishment which entitled itself order after the revolution had been
cut short, the King amounted to more than royalty. Louis Philippe was a
rare man.

The son of a father to whom history will accord certain attenuating
circumstances, but also as worthy of esteem as that father had been of
blame; possessing all private virtues and many public virtues; careful
of his health, of his fortune, of his person, of his affairs, knowing
the value of a minute and not always the value of a year; sober, serene,
peaceable, patient; a good man and a good prince; sleeping with his
wife, and having in his palace lackeys charged with the duty of showing
the conjugal bed to the bourgeois, an ostentation of the regular
sleeping-apartment which had become useful after the former illegitimate
displays of the elder branch; knowing all the languages of Europe, and,
what is more rare, all the languages of all interests, and speaking
them; an admirable representative of the "middle class," but
outstripping it, and in every way greater than it; possessing excellent
sense, while appreciating the blood from which he had sprung, counting
most of all on his intrinsic worth, and, on the question of his race,
very particular, declaring himself Orleans and not Bourbon; thoroughly
the first Prince of the Blood Royal while he was still only a Serene
Highness, but a frank bourgeois from the day he became king; diffuse in
public, concise in private; reputed, but not proved to be a miser; at
bottom, one of those economists who are readily prodigal at their own
fancy or duty; lettered, but not very sensitive to letters; a gentleman,
but not a chevalier; simple, calm, and strong; adored by his family and
his household; a fascinating talker, an undeceived statesman, inwardly
cold, dominated by immediate interest, always governing at the shortest
range, incapable of rancor and of gratitude, making use without mercy of
superiority on mediocrity, clever in getting parliamentary majorities to
put in the wrong those mysterious unanimities which mutter dully under
thrones; unreserved, sometimes imprudent in his lack of reserve, but
with marvellous address in that imprudence; fertile in expedients, in
countenances, in masks; making France fear Europe and Europe France!
Incontestably fond of his country, but preferring his family; assuming
more domination than authority and more authority than dignity, a
disposition which has this unfortunate property, that as it turns
everything to success, it admits of ruse and does not absolutely
repudiate baseness, but which has this valuable side, that it preserves
politics from violent shocks, the state from fractures, and society
from catastrophes; minute, correct, vigilant, attentive, sagacious,
indefatigable; contradicting himself at times and giving himself the
lie; bold against Austria at Ancona, obstinate against England in Spain,
bombarding Antwerp, and paying off Pritchard; singing the Marseillaise
with conviction, inaccessible to despondency, to lassitude, to the taste
for the beautiful and the ideal, to daring generosity, to Utopia, to
chimeras, to wrath, to vanity, to fear; possessing all the forms
of personal intrepidity; a general at Valmy; a soldier at Jemappes;
attacked eight times by regicides and always smiling. Brave as a
grenadier, courageous as a thinker; uneasy only in the face of the
chances of a European shaking up, and unfitted for great political
adventures; always ready to risk his life, never his work; disguising
his will in influence, in order that he might be obeyed as an
intelligence rather than as a king; endowed with observation and not
with divination; not very attentive to minds, but knowing men, that is
to say requiring to see in order to judge; prompt and penetrating
good sense, practical wisdom, easy speech, prodigious memory; drawing
incessantly on this memory, his only point of resemblance with Caesar,
Alexander, and Napoleon; knowing deeds, facts, details, dates, proper
names, ignorant of tendencies, passions, the diverse geniuses of the
crowd, the interior aspirations, the hidden and obscure uprisings of
souls, in a word, all that can be designated as the invisible currents
of consciences; accepted by the surface, but little in accord with
France lower down; extricating himself by dint of tact; governing too
much and not enough; his own first minister; excellent at creating out
of the pettiness of realities an obstacle to the immensity of ideas;
mingling a genuine creative faculty of civilization, of order and
organization, an indescribable spirit of proceedings and chicanery, the
founder and lawyer of a dynasty; having something of Charlemagne and
something of an attorney; in short, a lofty and original figure, a
prince who understood how to create authority in spite of the uneasiness
of France, and power in spite of the jealousy of Europe. Louis Philippe
will be classed among the eminent men of his century, and would be
ranked among the most illustrious governors of history had he loved
glory but a little, and if he had had the sentiment of what is great to
the same degree as the feeling for what is useful.

Louis Philippe had been handsome, and in his old age he remained
graceful; not always approved by the nation, he always was so by the
masses; he pleased. He had that gift of charming. He lacked majesty; he
wore no crown, although a king, and no white hair, although an old man;
his manners belonged to the old regime and his habits to the new; a
mixture of the noble and the bourgeois which suited 1830; Louis Philippe
was transition reigning; he had preserved the ancient pronunciation
and the ancient orthography which he placed at the service of opinions
modern; he loved Poland and Hungary, but he wrote les Polonois, and he
pronounced les Hongrais. He wore the uniform of the national guard, like
Charles X., and the ribbon of the Legion of Honor, like Napoleon.

He went a little to chapel, not at all to the chase, never to the opera.
Incorruptible by sacristans, by whippers-in, by ballet-dancers; this
made a part of his bourgeois popularity. He had no heart. He went out
with his umbrella under his arm, and this umbrella long formed a part of
his aureole. He was a bit of a mason, a bit of a gardener, something
of a doctor; he bled a postilion who had tumbled from his horse; Louis
Philippe no more went about without his lancet, than did Henri IV.
without his poniard. The Royalists jeered at this ridiculous king, the
first who had ever shed blood with the object of healing.

For the grievances against Louis Philippe, there is one deduction to be
made; there is that which accuses royalty, that which accuses the reign,
that which accuses the King; three columns which all give different
totals. Democratic right confiscated, progress becomes a matter of
secondary interest, the protests of the street violently repressed,
military execution of insurrections, the rising passed over by arms, the
Rue Transnonain, the counsels of war, the absorption of the real
country by the legal country, on half shares with three hundred thousand
privileged persons,--these are the deeds of royalty; Belgium refused,
Algeria too harshly conquered, and, as in the case of India by the
English, with more barbarism than civilization, the breach of faith, to
Abd-el-Kader, Blaye, Deutz bought, Pritchard paid,--these are the doings
of the reign; the policy which was more domestic than national was the
doing of the King.

As will be seen, the proper deduction having been made, the King's
charge is decreased.

This is his great fault; he was modest in the name of France.

Whence arises this fault?

We will state it.

Louis Philippe was rather too much of a paternal king; that incubation
of a family with the object of founding a dynasty is afraid of
everything and does not like to be disturbed; hence excessive timidity,
which is displeasing to the people, who have the 14th of July in their
civil and Austerlitz in their military tradition.

Moreover, if we deduct the public duties which require to be fulfilled
first of all, that deep tenderness of Louis Philippe towards his
family was deserved by the family. That domestic group was worthy of
admiration. Virtues there dwelt side by side with talents. One of Louis
Philippe's daughters, Marie d'Orleans, placed the name of her race among
artists, as Charles d'Orleans had placed it among poets. She made of
her soul a marble which she named Jeanne d'Arc. Two of Louis Philippe's
daughters elicited from Metternich this eulogium: "They are young people
such as are rarely seen, and princes such as are never seen."

This, without any dissimulation, and also without any exaggeration, is
the truth about Louis Philippe.

To be Prince Equality, to bear in his own person the contradiction of
the Restoration and the Revolution, to have that disquieting side of the
revolutionary which becomes reassuring in governing power, therein lay
the fortune of Louis Philippe in 1830; never was there a more complete
adaptation of a man to an event; the one entered into the other, and the
incarnation took place. Louis Philippe is 1830 made man. Moreover, he
had in his favor that great recommendation to the throne, exile. He had
been proscribed, a wanderer, poor. He had lived by his own labor. In
Switzerland, this heir to the richest princely domains in France had
sold an old horse in order to obtain bread. At Reichenau, he gave
lessons in mathematics, while his sister Adelaide did wool work and
sewed. These souvenirs connected with a king rendered the bourgeoisie
enthusiastic. He had, with his own hands, demolished the iron cage of
Mont-Saint-Michel, built by Louis XI, and used by Louis XV. He was the
companion of Dumouriez, he was the friend of Lafayette; he had belonged
to the Jacobins' club; Mirabeau had slapped him on the shoulder; Danton
had said to him: "Young man!" At the age of four and twenty, in '93,
being then M. de Chartres, he had witnessed, from the depth of a box,
the trial of Louis XVI., so well named that poor tyrant. The blind
clairvoyance of the Revolution, breaking royalty in the King and the
King with royalty, did so almost without noticing the man in the fierce
crushing of the idea, the vast storm of the Assembly-Tribunal, the
public wrath interrogating, Capet not knowing what to reply, the
alarming, stupefied vacillation by that royal head beneath that sombre
breath, the relative innocence of all in that catastrophe, of those
who condemned as well as of the man condemned,--he had looked on those
things, he had contemplated that giddiness; he had seen the centuries
appear before the bar of the Assembly-Convention; he had beheld, behind
Louis XVI., that unfortunate passer-by who was made responsible, the
terrible culprit, the monarchy, rise through the shadows; and there had
lingered in his soul the respectful fear of these immense justices of
the populace, which are almost as impersonal as the justice of God.

The trace left in him by the Revolution was prodigious. Its memory was
like a living imprint of those great years, minute by minute. One day,
in the presence of a witness whom we are not permitted to doubt, he
rectified from memory the whole of the letter A in the alphabetical list
of the Constituent Assembly.

Louis Philippe was a king of the broad daylight. While he reigned the
press was free, the tribune was free, conscience and speech were free.
The laws of September are open to sight. Although fully aware of the
gnawing power of light on privileges, he left his throne exposed to the
light. History will do justice to him for this loyalty.

Louis Philippe, like all historical men who have passed from the scene,
is to-day put on his trial by the human conscience. His case is, as yet,
only in the lower court.

The hour when history speaks with its free and venerable accent, has
not yet sounded for him; the moment has not come to pronounce a definite
judgment on this king; the austere and illustrious historian Louis Blanc
has himself recently softened his first verdict; Louis Philippe was
elected by those two almosts which are called the 221 and 1830, that is
to say, by a half-Parliament, and a half-revolution; and in any case,
from the superior point of view where philosophy must place itself, we
cannot judge him here, as the reader has seen above, except with certain
reservations in the name of the absolute democratic principle; in the
eyes of the absolute, outside these two rights, the right of man in the
first place, the right of the people in the second, all is usurpation;
but what we can say, even at the present day, that after making these
reserves is, that to sum up the whole, and in whatever manner he is
considered, Louis Philippe, taken in himself, and from the point of view
of human goodness, will remain, to use the antique language of ancient
history, one of the best princes who ever sat on a throne.

What is there against him? That throne. Take away Louis Philippe the
king, there remains the man. And the man is good. He is good at times
even to the point of being admirable. Often, in the midst of his gravest
souvenirs, after a day of conflict with the whole diplomacy of the
continent, he returned at night to his apartments, and there, exhausted
with fatigue, overwhelmed with sleep, what did he do? He took a death
sentence and passed the night in revising a criminal suit, considering
it something to hold his own against Europe, but that it was a still
greater matter to rescue a man from the executioner. He obstinately
maintained his opinion against his keeper of the seals; he disputed the
ground with the guillotine foot by foot against the crown attorneys,
those chatterers of the law, as he called them. Sometimes the pile of
sentences covered his table; he examined them all; it was anguish to
him to abandon these miserable, condemned heads. One day, he said to
the same witness to whom we have recently referred: "I won seven last
night." During the early years of his reign, the death penalty was
as good as abolished, and the erection of a scaffold was a violence
committed against the King. The Greve having disappeared with the elder
branch, a bourgeois place of execution was instituted under the name
of the Barriere-Saint-Jacques; "practical men" felt the necessity of
a quasi-legitimate guillotine; and this was one of the victories of
Casimir Perier, who represented the narrow sides of the bourgeoisie,
over Louis Philippe, who represented its liberal sides. Louis Philippe
annotated Beccaria with his own hand. After the Fieschi machine, he
exclaimed: "What a pity that I was not wounded! Then I might have
pardoned!" On another occasion, alluding to the resistance offered by
his ministry, he wrote in connection with a political criminal, who is
one of the most generous figures of our day: "His pardon is granted; it
only remains for me to obtain it." Louis Philippe was as gentle as Louis
IX. and as kindly as Henri IV.

Now, to our mind, in history, where kindness is the rarest of pearls,
the man who is kindly almost takes precedence of the man who is great.

Louis Philippe having been severely judged by some, harshly, perhaps, by
others, it is quite natural that a man, himself a phantom at the present
day, who knew that king, should come and testify in his favor before
history; this deposition, whatever else it may be, is evidently and
above all things, entirely disinterested; an epitaph penned by a dead
man is sincere; one shade may console another shade; the sharing of the
same shadows confers the right to praise it; it is not greatly to
be feared that it will ever be said of two tombs in exile: "This one
flattered the other."




CHAPTER IV--CRACKS BENEATH THE FOUNDATION

At the moment when the drama which we are narrating is on the point of
penetrating into the depths of one of the tragic clouds which envelop
the beginning of Louis Philippe's reign, it was necessary that there
should be no equivoque, and it became requisite that this book should
offer some explanation with regard to this king.

Louis Philippe had entered into possession of his royal authority
without violence, without any direct action on his part, by virtue of a
revolutionary change, evidently quite distinct from the real aim of the
Revolution, but in which he, the Duc d'Orleans, exercised no personal
initiative. He had been born a Prince, and he believed himself to have
been elected King. He had not served this mandate on himself; he had not
taken it; it had been offered to him, and he had accepted it; convinced,
wrongly, to be sure, but convinced nevertheless, that the offer was in
accordance with right and that the acceptance of it was in accordance
with duty. Hence his possession was in good faith. Now, we say it in
good conscience, Louis Philippe being in possession in perfect good
faith, and the democracy being in good faith in its attack, the amount
of terror discharged by the social conflicts weighs neither on the
King nor on the democracy. A clash of principles resembles a clash of
elements. The ocean defends the water, the hurricane defends the
air, the King defends Royalty, the democracy defends the people; the
relative, which is the monarchy, resists the absolute, which is the
republic; society bleeds in this conflict, but that which constitutes
its suffering to-day will constitute its safety later on; and, in any
case, those who combat are not to be blamed; one of the two parties is
evidently mistaken; the right is not, like the Colossus of Rhodes, on
two shores at once, with one foot on the republic, and one in Royalty;
it is indivisible, and all on one side; but those who are in error are
so sincerely; a blind man is no more a criminal than a Vendean is a
ruffian. Let us, then, impute to the fatality of things alone these
formidable collisions. Whatever the nature of these tempests may be,
human irresponsibility is mingled with them.

Let us complete this exposition.

The government of 1830 led a hard life immediately. Born yesterday, it
was obliged to fight to-day.

Hardly installed, it was already everywhere conscious of vague movements
of traction on the apparatus of July so recently laid, and so lacking in
solidity.

Resistance was born on the morrow; perhaps even, it was born on the
preceding evening. From month to month the hostility increased, and from
being concealed it became patent.

The Revolution of July, which gained but little acceptance outside of
France by kings, had been diversely interpreted in France, as we have
said.

God delivers over to men his visible will in events, an obscure text
written in a mysterious tongue. Men immediately make translations of it;
translations hasty, incorrect, full of errors, of gaps, and of nonsense.
Very few minds comprehend the divine language. The most sagacious, the
calmest, the most profound, decipher slowly, and when they arrive with
their text, the task has long been completed; there are already twenty
translations on the public place. From each remaining springs a party,
and from each misinterpretation a faction; and each party thinks that it
alone has the true text, and each faction thinks that it possesses the
light.

Power itself is often a faction.

There are, in revolutions, swimmers who go against the current; they are
the old parties.

For the old parties who clung to heredity by the grace of God, think
that revolutions, having sprung from the right to revolt, one has the
right to revolt against them. Error. For in these revolutions, the one
who revolts is not the people; it is the king. Revolution is precisely
the contrary of revolt. Every revolution, being a normal outcome,
contains within itself its legitimacy, which false revolutionists
sometimes dishonor, but which remains even when soiled, which survives
even when stained with blood.

Revolutions spring not from an accident, but from necessity. A
revolution is a return from the fictitious to the real. It is because it
must be that it is.

None the less did the old legitimist parties assail the Revolution of
1830 with all the vehemence which arises from false reasoning. Errors
make excellent projectiles. They strike it cleverly in its vulnerable
spot, in default of a cuirass, in its lack of logic; they attacked this
revolution in its royalty. They shouted to it: "Revolution, why this
king?" Factions are blind men who aim correctly.

This cry was uttered equally by the republicans. But coming from
them, this cry was logical. What was blindness in the legitimists was
clearness of vision in the democrats. 1830 had bankrupted the people.
The enraged democracy reproached it with this.

Between the attack of the past and the attack of the future, the
establishment of July struggled. It represented the minute at
loggerheads on the one hand with the monarchical centuries, on the other
hand with eternal right.

In addition, and beside all this, as it was no longer revolution and had
become a monarchy, 1830 was obliged to take precedence of all Europe. To
keep the peace, was an increase of complication. A harmony established
contrary to sense is often more onerous than a war. From this secret
conflict, always muzzled, but always growling, was born armed peace,
that ruinous expedient of civilization which in the harness of the
European cabinets is suspicious in itself. The Royalty of July reared
up, in spite of the fact that it caught it in the harness of European
cabinets. Metternich would gladly have put it in kicking-straps. Pushed
on in France by progress, it pushed on the monarchies, those loiterers
in Europe. After having been towed, it undertook to tow.

Meanwhile, within her, pauperism, the proletariat, salary, education,
penal servitude, prostitution, the fate of the woman, wealth, misery,
production, consumption, division, exchange, coin, credit, the rights of
capital, the rights of labor,--all these questions were multiplied above
society, a terrible slope.

Outside of political parties properly so called, another movement became
manifest. Philosophical fermentation replied to democratic fermentation.
The elect felt troubled as well as the masses; in another manner, but
quite as much.

Thinkers meditated, while the soil, that is to say, the people,
traversed by revolutionary currents, trembled under them with
indescribably vague epileptic shocks. These dreamers, some isolated,
others united in families and almost in communion, turned over social
questions in a pacific but profound manner; impassive miners, who
tranquilly pushed their galleries into the depths of a volcano, hardly
disturbed by the dull commotion and the furnaces of which they caught
glimpses.

This tranquillity was not the least beautiful spectacle of this agitated
epoch.

These men left to political parties the question of rights, they
occupied themselves with the question of happiness.

The well-being of man, that was what they wanted to extract from
society.

They raised material questions, questions of agriculture, of industry,
of commerce, almost to the dignity of a religion. In civilization, such
as it has formed itself, a little by the command of God, a great deal by
the agency of man, interests combine, unite, and amalgamate in a
manner to form a veritable hard rock, in accordance with a dynamic law,
patiently studied by economists, those geologists of politics. These men
who grouped themselves under different appellations, but who may all be
designated by the generic title of socialists, endeavored to pierce that
rock and to cause it to spout forth the living waters of human felicity.

From the question of the scaffold to the question of war, their works
embraced everything. To the rights of man, as proclaimed by the French
Revolution, they added the rights of woman and the rights of the child.

The reader will not be surprised if, for various reasons, we do not
here treat in a thorough manner, from the theoretical point of view, the
questions raised by socialism. We confine ourselves to indicating them.

All the problems that the socialists proposed to themselves, cosmogonic
visions, revery and mysticism being cast aside, can be reduced to two
principal problems.

First problem: To produce wealth.

Second problem: To share it.

The first problem contains the question of work.

The second contains the question of salary.

In the first problem the employment of forces is in question.

In the second, the distribution of enjoyment.

From the proper employment of forces results public power.

From a good distribution of enjoyments results individual happiness.

By a good distribution, not an equal but an equitable distribution must
be understood.

From these two things combined, the public power without, individual
happiness within, results social prosperity.

Social prosperity means the man happy, the citizen free, the nation
great.

England solves the first of these two problems. She creates wealth
admirably, she divides it badly. This solution which is complete on
one side only leads her fatally to two extremes: monstrous opulence,
monstrous wretchedness. All enjoyments for some, all privations for the
rest, that is to say, for the people; privilege, exception, monopoly,
feudalism, born from toil itself. A false and dangerous situation, which
sates public power or private misery, which sets the roots of the State
in the sufferings of the individual. A badly constituted grandeur in
which are combined all the material elements and into which no moral
element enters.

Communism and agrarian law think that they solve the second problem.
They are mistaken. Their division kills production. Equal partition
abolishes emulation; and consequently labor. It is a partition made
by the butcher, which kills that which it divides. It is therefore
impossible to pause over these pretended solutions. Slaying wealth is
not the same thing as dividing it.

The two problems require to be solved together, to be well solved. The
two problems must be combined and made but one.

Solve only the first of the two problems; you will be Venice, you will
be England. You will have, like Venice, an artificial power, or, like
England, a material power; you will be the wicked rich man. You will die
by an act of violence, as Venice died, or by bankruptcy, as England
will fall. And the world will allow to die and fall all that is merely
selfishness, all that does not represent for the human race either a
virtue or an idea.

It is well understood here, that by the words Venice, England, we
designate not the peoples, but social structures; the oligarchies
superposed on nations, and not the nations themselves. The nations
always have our respect and our sympathy. Venice, as a people, will live
again; England, the aristocracy, will fall, but England, the nation, is
immortal. That said, we continue.

Solve the two problems, encourage the wealthy, and protect the poor,
suppress misery, put an end to the unjust farming out of the feeble by
the strong, put a bridle on the iniquitous jealousy of the man who
is making his way against the man who has reached the goal, adjust,
mathematically and fraternally, salary to labor, mingle gratuitous and
compulsory education with the growth of childhood, and make of science
the base of manliness, develop minds while keeping arms busy, be at one
and the same time a powerful people and a family of happy men, render
property democratic, not by abolishing it, but by making it universal,
so that every citizen, without exception, may be a proprietor, an easier
matter than is generally supposed; in two words, learn how to produce
wealth and how to distribute it, and you will have at once moral and
material greatness; and you will be worthy to call yourself France.

This is what socialism said outside and above a few sects which have
gone astray; that is what it sought in facts, that is what it sketched
out in minds.

Efforts worthy of admiration! Sacred attempts!

These doctrines, these theories, these resistances, the unforeseen
necessity for the statesman to take philosophers into account, confused
evidences of which we catch a glimpse, a new system of politics to be
created, which shall be in accord with the old world without too much
disaccord with the new revolutionary ideal, a situation in which it
became necessary to use Lafayette to defend Polignac, the intuition of
progress transparent beneath the revolt, the chambers and streets, the
competitions to be brought into equilibrium around him, his faith in
the Revolution, perhaps an eventual indefinable resignation born of the
vague acceptance of a superior definitive right, his desire to remain of
his race, his domestic spirit, his sincere respect for the people, his
own honesty, preoccupied Louis Philippe almost painfully, and there were
moments when strong and courageous as he was, he was overwhelmed by the
difficulties of being a king.

He felt under his feet a formidable disaggregation, which was not,
nevertheless, a reduction to dust, France being more France than ever.

Piles of shadows covered the horizon. A strange shade, gradually drawing
nearer, extended little by little over men, over things, over ideas;
a shade which came from wraths and systems. Everything which had been
hastily stifled was moving and fermenting. At times the conscience of
the honest man resumed its breathing, so great was the discomfort
of that air in which sophisms were intermingled with truths. Spirits
trembled in the social anxiety like leaves at the approach of a storm.
The electric tension was such that at certain instants, the first comer,
a stranger, brought light. Then the twilight obscurity closed in again.
At intervals, deep and dull mutterings allowed a judgment to be formed
as to the quantity of thunder contained by the cloud.

Twenty months had barely elapsed since the Revolution of July, the year
1832 had opened with an aspect of something impending and threatening.

The distress of the people, the laborers without bread, the last Prince
de Conde engulfed in the shadows, Brussels expelling the Nassaus as
Paris did the Bourbons, Belgium offering herself to a French Prince
and giving herself to an English Prince, the Russian hatred of Nicolas,
behind us the demons of the South, Ferdinand in Spain, Miguel in
Portugal, the earth quaking in Italy, Metternich extending his hand over
Bologna, France treating Austria sharply at Ancona, at the North no one
knew what sinister sound of the hammer nailing up Poland in her coffin,
irritated glances watching France narrowly all over Europe, England, a
suspected ally, ready to give a push to that which was tottering and to
hurl herself on that which should fall, the peerage sheltering itself
behind Beccaria to refuse four heads to the law, the fleurs-de-lys
erased from the King's carriage, the cross torn from Notre Dame,
Lafayette lessened, Laffitte ruined, Benjamin Constant dead in
indigence, Casimir Perier dead in the exhaustion of his power; political
and social malady breaking out simultaneously in the two capitals of the
kingdom, the one in the city of thought, the other in the city of toil;
at Paris civil war, at Lyons servile war; in the two cities, the same
glare of the furnace; a crater-like crimson on the brow of the people;
the South rendered fanatic, the West troubled, the Duchesse de Berry in
la Vendee, plots, conspiracies, risings, cholera, added the sombre roar
of tumult of events to the sombre roar of ideas.




CHAPTER V--FACTS WHENCE HISTORY SPRINGS AND WHICH HISTORY IGNORES

Towards the end of April, everything had become aggravated. The
fermentation entered the boiling state. Ever since 1830, petty partial
revolts had been going on here and there, which were quickly suppressed,
but ever bursting forth afresh, the sign of a vast underlying
conflagration. Something terrible was in preparation. Glimpses could be
caught of the features still indistinct and imperfectly lighted, of a
possible revolution. France kept an eye on Paris; Paris kept an eye on
the Faubourg Saint-Antoine.

The Faubourg Saint-Antoine, which was in a dull glow, was beginning its
ebullition.

[Illustration: A Street Orator  4b1-5-street-orator]

The wine-shops of the Rue de Charonne were, although the union of
the two epithets seems singular when applied to wine-shops, grave and
stormy.

The government was there purely and simply called in question. There
people publicly discussed the question of fighting or of keeping quiet.
There were back shops where workingmen were made to swear that they
would hasten into the street at the first cry of alarm, and "that they
would fight without counting the number of the enemy." This engagement
once entered into, a man seated in the corner of the wine-shop "assumed
a sonorous tone," and said, "You understand! You have sworn!"

Sometimes they went up stairs, to a private room on the first floor,
and there scenes that were almost masonic were enacted. They made the
initiated take oaths to render service to himself as well as to the
fathers of families. That was the formula.

In the tap-rooms, "subversive" pamphlets were read. They treated the
government with contempt, says a secret report of that time.

Words like the following could be heard there:--

"I don't know the names of the leaders. We folks shall not know the day
until two hours beforehand." One workman said: "There are three hundred
of us, let each contribute ten sous, that will make one hundred and
fifty francs with which to procure powder and shot."

Another said: "I don't ask for six months, I don't ask for even two.
In less than a fortnight we shall be parallel with the government. With
twenty-five thousand men we can face them." Another said: "I don't sleep
at night, because I make cartridges all night." From time to time,
men "of bourgeois appearance, and in good coats" came and "caused
embarrassment," and with the air of "command," shook hands with the most
important, and then went away. They never stayed more than ten minutes.
Significant remarks were exchanged in a low tone: "The plot is ripe, the
matter is arranged." "It was murmured by all who were there," to borrow
the very expression of one of those who were present. The exaltation was
such that one day, a workingman exclaimed, before the whole wine-shop:
"We have no arms!" One of his comrades replied: "The soldiers have!"
thus parodying without being aware of the fact, Bonaparte's proclamation
to the army in Italy: "When they had anything of a more secret nature on
hand," adds one report, "they did not communicate it to each other." It
is not easy to understand what they could conceal after what they said.

These reunions were sometimes periodical. At certain ones of them, there
were never more than eight or ten persons present, and they were always
the same. In others, any one entered who wished, and the room was
so full that they were forced to stand. Some went thither through
enthusiasm and passion; others because it was on their way to their
work. As during the Revolution, there were patriotic women in some of
these wine-shops who embraced new-comers.

Other expressive facts came to light.

A man would enter a shop, drink, and go his way with the remark:
"Wine-merchant, the revolution will pay what is due to you."

Revolutionary agents were appointed in a wine-shop facing the Rue de
Charonne. The balloting was carried on in their caps.

Workingmen met at the house of a fencing-master who gave lessons in
the Rue de Cotte. There there was a trophy of arms formed of wooden
broadswords, canes, clubs, and foils. One day, the buttons were removed
from the foils.

A workman said: "There are twenty-five of us, but they don't count
on me, because I am looked upon as a machine." Later on, that machine
became Quenisset.

The indefinite things which were brewing gradually acquired a strange
and indescribable notoriety. A woman sweeping off her doorsteps said
to another woman: "For a long time, there has been a strong force busy
making cartridges." In the open street, proclamation could be seen
addressed to the National Guard in the departments. One of these
proclamations was signed: Burtot, wine-merchant.

One day a man with his beard worn like a collar and with an Italian
accent mounted a stone post at the door of a liquor-seller in the Marche
Lenoir, and read aloud a singular document, which seemed to emanate from
an occult power. Groups formed around him, and applauded.

The passages which touched the crowd most deeply were collected and
noted down. "--Our doctrines are trammelled, our proclamations torn, our
bill-stickers are spied upon and thrown into prison."--"The breakdown
which has recently taken place in cottons has converted to us many
mediums."--"The future of nations is being worked out in our obscure
ranks."--"Here are the fixed terms: action or reaction, revolution or
counter-revolution. For, at our epoch, we no longer believe either in
inertia or in immobility. For the people against the people, that is the
question. There is no other."--"On the day when we cease to suit you,
break us, but up to that day, help us to march on." All this in broad
daylight.

Other deeds, more audacious still, were suspicious in the eyes of the
people by reason of their very audacity. On the 4th of April, 1832, a
passer-by mounted the post on the corner which forms the angle of the
Rue Sainte-Marguerite and shouted: "I am a Babouvist!" But beneath
Babeuf, the people scented Gisquet.

Among other things, this man said:--

"Down with property! The opposition of the left is cowardly and
treacherous. When it wants to be on the right side, it preaches
revolution, it is democratic in order to escape being beaten, and
royalist so that it may not have to fight. The republicans are beasts
with feathers. Distrust the republicans, citizens of the laboring
classes."

"Silence, citizen spy!" cried an artisan.

This shout put an end to the discourse.

Mysterious incidents occurred.

At nightfall, a workingman encountered near the canal a "very well
dressed man," who said to him: "Whither are you bound, citizen?" "Sir,"
replied the workingman, "I have not the honor of your acquaintance." "I
know you very well, however." And the man added: "Don't be alarmed, I
am an agent of the committee. You are suspected of not being quite
faithful. You know that if you reveal anything, there is an eye fixed on
you." Then he shook hands with the workingman and went away, saying: "We
shall meet again soon."

The police, who were on the alert, collected singular dialogues, not
only in the wine-shops, but in the street.

"Get yourself received very soon," said a weaver to a cabinet-maker.

"Why?"

"There is going to be a shot to fire."

Two ragged pedestrians exchanged these remarkable replies, fraught with
evident Jacquerie:--

"Who governs us?"

"M. Philippe."

"No, it is the bourgeoisie."

The reader is mistaken if he thinks that we take the word Jacquerie in a
bad sense. The Jacques were the poor.

On another occasion two men were heard to say to each other as they
passed by: "We have a good plan of attack."

Only the following was caught of a private conversation between four men
who were crouching in a ditch of the circle of the Barriere du Trone:--

"Everything possible will be done to prevent his walking about Paris any
more."

Who was the he? Menacing obscurity.

"The principal leaders," as they said in the faubourg, held themselves
apart. It was supposed that they met for consultation in a wine-shop
near the point Saint-Eustache. A certain Aug--, chief of the Society
aid for tailors, Rue Mondetour, had the reputation of serving as
intermediary central between the leaders and the Faubourg Saint-Antoine.

Nevertheless, there was always a great deal of mystery about these
leaders, and no certain fact can invalidate the singular arrogance of
this reply made later on by a man accused before the Court of Peers:--

"Who was your leader?"

"I knew of none and I recognized none."

There was nothing but words, transparent but vague; sometimes idle
reports, rumors, hearsay. Other indications cropped up.

A carpenter, occupied in nailing boards to a fence around the ground
on which a house was in process of construction, in the Rue de Reuilly
found on that plot the torn fragment of a letter on which were still
legible the following lines:--


The committee must take measures to prevent recruiting in the sections
for the different societies.


And, as a postscript:--


We have learned that there are guns in the Rue du Faubourg-Poissonniere,
No. 5 [bis], to the number of five or six thousand, in the house of a
gunsmith in that court. The section owns no arms.


What excited the carpenter and caused him to show this thing to his
neighbors was the fact, that a few paces further on he picked up another
paper, torn like the first, and still more significant, of which we
reproduce a facsimile, because of the historical interest attaching to
these strange documents:--

[Illustration: Code Table 4b1-5 page 26]

 +------------------------------------------------------------+
 | Q | C | D | E | Learn this list by heart.  After so doing
 | | | | | | you will tear it up.  The men admitted
 | | | | | | will do the same when you have transmitted
 | | | | | | their orders to them.
 | | | | | | Health and Fraternity,
 | | | | | | u og a fe L. |
 +------------------------------------------------------------+

It was only later on that the persons who were in the secret of this
find at the time, learned the significance of those four capital
letters: quinturions, centurions, decurions, eclaireurs [scouts], and
the sense of the letters: u og a fe, which was a date, and meant April
15th, 1832. Under each capital letter were inscribed names followed by
very characteristic notes. Thus: Q. Bannerel. 8 guns, 83 cartridges. A
safe man.--C. Boubiere. 1 pistol, 40 cartridges.--D. Rollet. 1 foil,
1 pistol, 1 pound of powder.--E. Tessier. 1 sword, 1 cartridge-box.
Exact.--Terreur. 8 guns. Brave, etc.

Finally, this carpenter found, still in the same enclosure, a third
paper on which was written in pencil, but very legibly, this sort of
enigmatical list:--

          Unite:  Blanchard: Arbre-Sec. 6.
          Barra.  Soize.  Salle-au-Comte.
          Kosciusko. Aubry the Butcher?
          J. J. R.
          Caius Gracchus.
          Right of revision.  Dufond.  Four.
          Fall of the Girondists.  Derbac.  Maubuee.
          Washington.  Pinson.  1 pistol, 86 cartridges.
          Marseillaise.
          Sovereignty of the people. Michel. Quincampoix. Sword.
          Hoche.
          Marceau.  Plato.  Arbre-Sec.
          Warsaw.  Tilly, crier of the Populaire.


The honest bourgeois into whose hands this list fell knew its
significance. It appears that this list was the complete nomenclature of
the sections of the fourth arondissement of the Society of the Rights
of Man, with the names and dwellings of the chiefs of sections. To-day,
when all these facts which were obscure are nothing more than history,
we may publish them. It should be added, that the foundation of the
Society of the Rights of Man seems to have been posterior to the date
when this paper was found. Perhaps this was only a rough draft.

Still, according to all the remarks and the words, according to written
notes, material facts begin to make their appearance.

In the Rue Popincourt, in the house of a dealer in bric-abrac, there
were seized seven sheets of gray paper, all folded alike lengthwise
and in four; these sheets enclosed twenty-six squares of this same
gray paper folded in the form of a cartridge, and a card, on which was
written the following:--

           Saltpetre . . . . . . . . . . .  12 ounces.
           Sulphur   . . . . . . . . . . .   2 ounces.
           Charcoal  . . . . . . . . . . .   2 ounces and a half.
           Water     . . . . . . . . . . .   2 ounces.


The report of the seizure stated that the drawer exhaled a strong smell
of powder.

A mason returning from his day's work, left behind him a little package
on a bench near the bridge of Austerlitz. This package was taken to
the police station. It was opened, and in it were found two printed
dialogues, signed Lahautiere, a song entitled: "Workmen, band together,"
and a tin box full of cartridges.

One artisan drinking with a comrade made the latter feel him to see how
warm he was; the other man felt a pistol under his waistcoat.

In a ditch on the boulevard, between Pere-Lachaise and the Barriere
du Trone, at the most deserted spot, some children, while playing,
discovered beneath a mass of shavings and refuse bits of wood, a
bag containing a bullet-mould, a wooden punch for the preparation of
cartridges, a wooden bowl, in which there were grains of hunting-powder,
and a little cast-iron pot whose interior presented evident traces of
melted lead.

Police agents, making their way suddenly and unexpectedly at five
o'clock in the morning, into the dwelling of a certain Pardon, who
was afterwards a member of the Barricade-Merry section and got himself
killed in the insurrection of April, 1834, found him standing near his
bed, and holding in his hand some cartridges which he was in the act of
preparing.

Towards the hour when workingmen repose, two men were seen to meet
between the Barriere Picpus and the Barriere Charenton in a little lane
between two walls, near a wine-shop, in front of which there was a "Jeu
de Siam."[33] One drew a pistol from beneath his blouse and handed it to
the other. As he was handing it to him, he noticed that the perspiration
of his chest had made the powder damp. He primed the pistol and added
more powder to what was already in the pan. Then the two men parted.

A certain Gallais, afterwards killed in the Rue Beaubourg in the affair
of April, boasted of having in his house seven hundred cartridges and
twenty-four flints.

The government one day received a warning that arms and two hundred
thousand cartridges had just been distributed in the faubourg. On
the following week thirty thousand cartridges were distributed. The
remarkable point about it was, that the police were not able to seize a
single one.

An intercepted letter read: "The day is not far distant when, within
four hours by the clock, eighty thousand patriots will be under arms."

All this fermentation was public, one might almost say tranquil. The
approaching insurrection was preparing its storm calmly in the face of
the government. No singularity was lacking to this still subterranean
crisis, which was already perceptible. The bourgeois talked peaceably to
the working-classes of what was in preparation. They said: "How is the
rising coming along?" in the same tone in which they would have said:
"How is your wife?"

A furniture-dealer, of the Rue Moreau, inquired: "Well, when are you
going to make the attack?"

Another shop-keeper said:--

"The attack will be made soon."

"I know it. A month ago, there were fifteen thousand of you, now there
are twenty-five thousand." He offered his gun, and a neighbor offered a
small pistol which he was willing to sell for seven francs.

Moreover, the revolutionary fever was growing. Not a point in Paris nor
in France was exempt from it. The artery was beating everywhere. Like
those membranes which arise from certain inflammations and form in the
human body, the network of secret societies began to spread all over the
country. From the associations of the Friends of the People, which was
at the same time public and secret, sprang the Society of the Rights of
Man, which also dated from one of the orders of the day: Pluviose, Year
40 of the republican era, which was destined to survive even the mandate
of the Court of Assizes which pronounced its dissolution, and which
did not hesitate to bestow on its sections significant names like the
following:--

     Pikes.
     Tocsin.
     Signal cannon.
     Phrygian cap.
     January 21.
     The beggars.
     The vagabonds.
     Forward march.
     Robespierre.
     Level.
     Ca Ira.

The Society of the Rights of Man engendered the Society of Action. These
were impatient individuals who broke away and hastened ahead. Other
associations sought to recruit themselves from the great mother
societies. The members of sections complained that they were torn
asunder. Thus, the Gallic Society, and the committee of organization of
the Municipalities. Thus the associations for the liberty of the press,
for individual liberty, for the instruction of the people against
indirect taxes. Then the Society of Equal Workingmen which was divided
into three fractions, the levellers, the communists, the reformers.
Then the Army of the Bastilles, a sort of cohort organized on a military
footing, four men commanded by a corporal, ten by a sergeant, twenty by
a sub-lieutenant, forty by a lieutenant; there were never more than
five men who knew each other. Creation where precaution is combined with
audacity and which seemed stamped with the genius of Venice.

The central committee, which was at the head, had two arms, the Society
of Action, and the Army of the Bastilles.

A legitimist association, the Chevaliers of Fidelity, stirred about
among these the republican affiliations. It was denounced and repudiated
there.

The Parisian societies had ramifications in the principal cities, Lyons,
Nantes, Lille, Marseilles, and each had its Society of the Rights of
Man, the Charbonniere, and The Free Men. All had a revolutionary society
which was called the Cougourde. We have already mentioned this word.

In Paris, the Faubourg Saint-Marceau kept up an equal buzzing with the
Faubourg Saint-Antoine, and the schools were no less moved than the
faubourgs. A cafe in the Rue Saint-Hyacinthe and the wine-shop of the
Seven Billiards, Rue des Mathurins-Saint-Jacques, served as rallying
points for the students. The Society of the Friends of the A B C
affiliated to the Mutualists of Angers, and to the Cougourde of Aix,
met, as we have seen, in the Cafe Musain. These same young men assembled
also, as we have stated already, in a restaurant wine-shop of the Rue
Mondetour which was called Corinthe. These meetings were secret. Others
were as public as possible, and the reader can judge of their boldness
from these fragments of an interrogatory undergone in one of the
ulterior prosecutions: "Where was this meeting held?" "In the Rue de la
Paix." "At whose house?" "In the street." "What sections were there?"
"Only one." "Which?" "The Manuel section." "Who was its leader?"
"I." "You are too young to have decided alone upon the bold course of
attacking the government. Where did your instructions come from?" "From
the central committee."

The army was mined at the same time as the population, as was proved
subsequently by the operations of Beford, Luneville, and Epinard. They
counted on the fifty-second regiment, on the fifth, on the eighth, on
the thirty-seventh, and on the twentieth light cavalry. In Burgundy and
in the southern towns they planted the liberty tree; that is to say, a
pole surmounted by a red cap.

Such was the situation.

The Faubourg Saint-Antoine, more than any other group of the population,
as we stated in the beginning, accentuated this situation and made
it felt. That was the sore point. This old faubourg, peopled like
an ant-hill, laborious, courageous, and angry as a hive of bees, was
quivering with expectation and with the desire for a tumult. Everything
was in a state of agitation there, without any interruption, however, of
the regular work. It is impossible to convey an idea of this lively yet
sombre physiognomy. In this faubourg exists poignant distress hidden
under attic roofs; there also exist rare and ardent minds. It is
particularly in the matter of distress and intelligence that it is
dangerous to have extremes meet.

The Faubourg Saint-Antoine had also other causes to tremble; for it
received the counter-shock of commercial crises, of failures, strikes,
slack seasons, all inherent to great political disturbances. In times
of revolution misery is both cause and effect. The blow which it deals
rebounds upon it. This population full of proud virtue, capable to the
highest degree of latent heat, always ready to fly to arms, prompt to
explode, irritated, deep, undermined, seemed to be only awaiting the
fall of a spark. Whenever certain sparks float on the horizon chased
by the wind of events, it is impossible not to think of the Faubourg
Saint-Antoine and of the formidable chance which has placed at the very
gates of Paris that powder-house of suffering and ideas.

The wine-shops of the Faubourg Antoine, which have been more than
once drawn in the sketches which the reader has just perused, possess
historical notoriety. In troublous times people grow intoxicated there
more on words than on wine. A sort of prophetic spirit and an afflatus
of the future circulates there, swelling hearts and enlarging souls. The
cabarets of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine resemble those taverns of Mont
Aventine erected on the cave of the Sibyl and communicating with
the profound and sacred breath; taverns where the tables were almost
tripods, and where was drunk what Ennius calls the sibylline wine.

The Faubourg Saint-Antoine is a reservoir of people. Revolutionary
agitations create fissures there, through which trickles the popular
sovereignty. This sovereignty may do evil; it can be mistaken like any
other; but, even when led astray, it remains great. We may say of it as
of the blind cyclops, Ingens.

In '93, according as the idea which was floating about was good or evil,
according as it was the day of fanaticism or of enthusiasm, there leaped
forth from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine now savage legions, now heroic
bands.

Savage. Let us explain this word. When these bristling men, who in the
early days of the revolutionary chaos, tattered, howling, wild, with
uplifted bludgeon, pike on high, hurled themselves upon ancient Paris in
an uproar, what did they want? They wanted an end to oppression, an
end to tyranny, an end to the sword, work for men, instruction for the
child, social sweetness for the woman, liberty, equality, fraternity,
bread for all, the idea for all, the Edenizing of the world. Progress;
and that holy, sweet, and good thing, progress, they claimed in terrible
wise, driven to extremities as they were, half naked, club in fist,
a roar in their mouths. They were savages, yes; but the savages of
civilization.

They proclaimed right furiously; they were desirous, if only with
fear and trembling, to force the human race to paradise. They seemed
barbarians, and they were saviours. They demanded light with the mask of
night.

Facing these men, who were ferocious, we admit, and terrifying, but
ferocious and terrifying for good ends, there are other men, smiling,
embroidered, gilded, beribboned, starred, in silk stockings, in white
plumes, in yellow gloves, in varnished shoes, who, with their elbows on
a velvet table, beside a marble chimney-piece, insist gently on demeanor
and the preservation of the past, of the Middle Ages, of divine right,
of fanaticism, of innocence, of slavery, of the death penalty, of war,
glorifying in low tones and with politeness, the sword, the stake, and
the scaffold. For our part, if we were forced to make a choice between
the barbarians of civilization and the civilized men of barbarism, we
should choose the barbarians.

But, thank Heaven, still another choice is possible. No perpendicular
fall is necessary, in front any more than in the rear.

Neither despotism nor terrorism. We desire progress with a gentle slope.

God takes care of that. God's whole policy consists in rendering slopes
less steep.




CHAPTER VI--ENJOLRAS AND HIS LIEUTENANTS

It was about this epoch that Enjolras, in view of a possible
catastrophe, instituted a kind of mysterious census.

All were present at a secret meeting at the Cafe Musain.

Enjolras said, mixing his words with a few half-enigmatical but
significant metaphors:--

"It is proper that we should know where we stand and on whom we may
count. If combatants are required, they must be provided. It can do no
harm to have something with which to strike. Passers-by always have more
chance of being gored when there are bulls on the road than when there
are none. Let us, therefore, reckon a little on the herd. How many of us
are there? There is no question of postponing this task until to-morrow.
Revolutionists should always be hurried; progress has no time to lose.
Let us mistrust the unexpected. Let us not be caught unprepared. We must
go over all the seams that we have made and see whether they hold fast.
This business ought to be concluded to-day. Courfeyrac, you will see the
polytechnic students. It is their day to go out. To-day is Wednesday.
Feuilly, you will see those of the Glaciere, will you not? Combeferre
has promised me to go to Picpus. There is a perfect swarm and an
excellent one there. Bahorel will visit the Estrapade. Prouvaire, the
masons are growing lukewarm; you will bring us news from the lodge of
the Rue de Grenelle-Saint-Honore. Joly will go to Dupuytren's clinical
lecture, and feel the pulse of the medical school. Bossuet will take a
little turn in the court and talk with the young law licentiates. I will
take charge of the Cougourde myself."

"That arranges everything," said Courfeyrac.

"No."

"What else is there?"

"A very important thing."

"What is that?" asked Courfeyrac.

"The Barriere du Maine," replied Enjolras.

Enjolras remained for a moment as though absorbed in reflection, then he
resumed:--

"At the Barriere du Maine there are marble-workers, painters, and
journeymen in the studios of sculptors. They are an enthusiastic family,
but liable to cool off. I don't know what has been the matter with
them for some time past. They are thinking of something else. They are
becoming extinguished. They pass their time playing dominoes. There is
urgent need that some one should go and talk with them a little, but
with firmness. They meet at Richefeu's. They are to be found there
between twelve and one o'clock. Those ashes must be fanned into a glow.
For that errand I had counted on that abstracted Marius, who is a good
fellow on the whole, but he no longer comes to us. I need some one for
the Barriere du Maine. I have no one."

"What about me?" said Grantaire. "Here am I."

"You?"

"I."

"You indoctrinate republicans! you warm up hearts that have grown cold
in the name of principle!"

"Why not?"

"Are you good for anything?"

"I have a vague ambition in that direction," said Grantaire.

"You do not believe in everything."

"I believe in you."

"Grantaire will you do me a service?"

"Anything. I'll black your boots."

"Well, don't meddle with our affairs. Sleep yourself sober from your
absinthe."

"You are an ingrate, Enjolras."

"You the man to go to the Barriere du Maine! You capable of it!"

"I am capable of descending the Rue de Gres, of crossing the Place
Saint-Michel, of sloping through the Rue Monsieur-le-Prince, of taking
the Rue de Vaugirard, of passing the Carmelites, of turning into the Rue
d'Assas, of reaching the Rue du Cherche-Midi, of leaving behind me the
Conseil de Guerre, of pacing the Rue des Vielles Tuileries, of striding
across the boulevard, of following the Chaussee du Maine, of passing
the barrier, and entering Richefeu's. I am capable of that. My shoes are
capable of that."

"Do you know anything of those comrades who meet at Richefeu's?"

"Not much. We only address each other as thou."

"What will you say to them?"

"I will speak to them of Robespierre, pardi! Of Danton. Of principles."

"You?"

"I. But I don't receive justice. When I set about it, I am terrible. I
have read Prudhomme, I know the Social Contract, I know my constitution
of the year Two by heart. 'The liberty of one citizen ends where the
liberty of another citizen begins.' Do you take me for a brute? I have
an old bank-bill of the Republic in my drawer. The Rights of Man, the
sovereignty of the people, sapristi! I am even a bit of a Hebertist. I
can talk the most superb twaddle for six hours by the clock, watch in
hand."

"Be serious," said Enjolras.

"I am wild," replied Grantaire.

Enjolras meditated for a few moments, and made the gesture of a man who
has taken a resolution.

"Grantaire," he said gravely, "I consent to try you. You shall go to the
Barriere du Maine."

Grantaire lived in furnished lodgings very near the Cafe Musain. He went
out, and five minutes later he returned. He had gone home to put on a
Robespierre waistcoat.

"Red," said he as he entered, and he looked intently at Enjolras. Then,
with the palm of his energetic hand, he laid the two scarlet points of
the waistcoat across his breast.

And stepping up to Enjolras, he whispered in his ear:--

"Be easy."

He jammed his hat on resolutely and departed.

A quarter of an hour later, the back room of the Cafe Musain was
deserted. All the friends of the A B C were gone, each in his own
direction, each to his own task. Enjolras, who had reserved the
Cougourde of Aix for himself, was the last to leave.

Those members of the Cougourde of Aix who were in Paris then met on the
plain of Issy, in one of the abandoned quarries which are so numerous in
that side of Paris.

As Enjolras walked towards this place, he passed the whole situation
in review in his own mind. The gravity of events was self-evident. When
facts, the premonitory symptoms of latent social malady, move heavily,
the slightest complication stops and entangles them. A phenomenon whence
arises ruin and new births. Enjolras descried a luminous uplifting
beneath the gloomy skirts of the future. Who knows? Perhaps the moment
was at hand. The people were again taking possession of right, and
what a fine spectacle! The revolution was again majestically taking
possession of France and saying to the world: "The sequel to-morrow!"
Enjolras was content. The furnace was being heated. He had at that
moment a powder train of friends scattered all over Paris. He composed,
in his own mind, with Combeferre's philosophical and penetrating
eloquence, Feuilly's cosmopolitan enthusiasm, Courfeyrac's dash,
Bahorel's smile, Jean Prouvaire's melancholy, Joly's science, Bossuet's
sarcasms, a sort of electric spark which took fire nearly everywhere at
once. All hands to work. Surely, the result would answer to the effort.
This was well. This made him think of Grantaire.

"Hold," said he to himself, "the Barriere du Maine will not take me far
out of my way. What if I were to go on as far as Richefeu's? Let us have
a look at what Grantaire is about, and see how he is getting on."

One o'clock was striking from the Vaugirard steeple when Enjolras
reached the Richefeu smoking-room.

He pushed open the door, entered, folded his arms, letting the door fall
to and strike his shoulders, and gazed at that room filled with tables,
men, and smoke.

A voice broke forth from the mist of smoke, interrupted by another
voice. It was Grantaire holding a dialogue with an adversary.

Grantaire was sitting opposite another figure, at a marble Saint-Anne
table, strewn with grains of bran and dotted with dominos. He was
hammering the table with his fist, and this is what Enjolras heard:--

"Double-six."

"Fours."

"The pig! I have no more."

"You are dead. A two."

"Six."

"Three."

"One."

"It's my move."

"Four points."

"Not much."

"It's your turn."

"I have made an enormous mistake."

"You are doing well."

"Fifteen."

"Seven more."

"That makes me twenty-two." [Thoughtfully, "Twenty-two!"]

"You weren't expecting that double-six. If I had placed it at the
beginning, the whole play would have been changed."

"A two again."

"One."

"One! Well, five."

"I haven't any."

"It was your play, I believe?"

"Yes."

"Blank."

"What luck he has! Ah! You are lucky! [Long revery.] Two."

"One."

"Neither five nor one. That's bad for you."

"Domino."

"Plague take it!"




BOOK SECOND.--EPONINE




CHAPTER I--THE LARK'S MEADOW

Marius had witnessed the unexpected termination of the ambush upon whose
track he had set Javert; but Javert had no sooner quitted the building,
bearing off his prisoners in three hackney-coaches, than Marius also
glided out of the house. It was only nine o'clock in the evening. Marius
betook himself to Courfeyrac. Courfeyrac was no longer the imperturbable
inhabitant of the Latin Quarter, he had gone to live in the Rue de la
Verrerie "for political reasons"; this quarter was one where, at that
epoch, insurrection liked to install itself. Marius said to Courfeyrac:
"I have come to sleep with you." Courfeyrac dragged a mattress off his
bed, which was furnished with two, spread it out on the floor, and said:
"There."

At seven o'clock on the following morning, Marius returned to the hovel,
paid the quarter's rent which he owed to Ma'am Bougon, had his books,
his bed, his table, his commode, and his two chairs loaded on a
hand-cart and went off without leaving his address, so that when Javert
returned in the course of the morning, for the purpose of questioning
Marius as to the events of the preceding evening, he found only Ma'am
Bougon, who answered: "Moved away!"

Ma'am Bougon was convinced that Marius was to some extent an accomplice
of the robbers who had been seized the night before. "Who would ever
have said it?" she exclaimed to the portresses of the quarter, "a young
man like that, who had the air of a girl!"

Marius had two reasons for this prompt change of residence. The first
was, that he now had a horror of that house, where he had beheld, so
close at hand, and in its most repulsive and most ferocious development,
a social deformity which is, perhaps, even more terrible than the wicked
rich man, the wicked poor man. The second was, that he did not wish
to figure in the lawsuit which would insue in all probability, and be
brought in to testify against Thenardier.

Javert thought that the young man, whose name he had forgotten, was
afraid, and had fled, or perhaps, had not even returned home at the time
of the ambush; he made some efforts to find him, however, but without
success.

A month passed, then another. Marius was still with Courfeyrac. He had
learned from a young licentiate in law, an habitual frequenter of the
courts, that Thenardier was in close confinement. Every Monday,
Marius had five francs handed in to the clerk's office of La Force for
Thenardier.

As Marius had no longer any money, he borrowed the five francs from
Courfeyrac. It was the first time in his life that he had ever borrowed
money. These periodical five francs were a double riddle to Courfeyrac
who lent and to Thenardier who received them. "To whom can they go?"
thought Courfeyrac. "Whence can this come to me?" Thenardier asked
himself.

Moreover, Marius was heart-broken. Everything had plunged through a
trap-door once more. He no longer saw anything before him; his life
was again buried in mystery where he wandered fumblingly. He had for a
moment beheld very close at hand, in that obscurity, the young girl whom
he loved, the old man who seemed to be her father, those unknown beings,
who were his only interest and his only hope in this world; and, at the
very moment when he thought himself on the point of grasping them, a
gust had swept all these shadows away. Not a spark of certainty and
truth had been emitted even in the most terrible of collisions. No
conjecture was possible. He no longer knew even the name that he thought
he knew. It certainly was not Ursule. And the Lark was a nickname. And
what was he to think of the old man? Was he actually in hiding from
the police? The white-haired workman whom Marius had encountered in the
vicinity of the Invalides recurred to his mind. It now seemed probable
that that workingman and M. Leblanc were one and the same person. So he
disguised himself? That man had his heroic and his equivocal sides. Why
had he not called for help? Why had he fled? Was he, or was he not,
the father of the young girl? Was he, in short, the man whom Thenardier
thought that he recognized? Thenardier might have been mistaken. These
formed so many insoluble problems. All this, it is true, detracted
nothing from the angelic charms of the young girl of the Luxembourg.
Heart-rending distress; Marius bore a passion in his heart, and night
over his eyes. He was thrust onward, he was drawn, and he could not
stir. All had vanished, save love. Of love itself he had lost the
instincts and the sudden illuminations. Ordinarily, this flame which
burns us lights us also a little, and casts some useful gleams without.
But Marius no longer even heard these mute counsels of passion. He never
said to himself: "What if I were to go to such a place? What if I were
to try such and such a thing?" The girl whom he could no longer call
Ursule was evidently somewhere; nothing warned Marius in what direction
he should seek her. His whole life was now summed up in two words;
absolute uncertainty within an impenetrable fog. To see her once again;
he still aspired to this, but he no longer expected it.

To crown all, his poverty had returned. He felt that icy breath close to
him, on his heels. In the midst of his torments, and long before
this, he had discontinued his work, and nothing is more dangerous than
discontinued work; it is a habit which vanishes. A habit which is easy
to get rid of, and difficult to take up again.

A certain amount of dreaming is good, like a narcotic in discreet doses.
It lulls to sleep the fevers of the mind at labor, which are sometimes
severe, and produces in the spirit a soft and fresh vapor which corrects
the over-harsh contours of pure thought, fills in gaps here and there,
binds together and rounds off the angles of the ideas. But too much
dreaming sinks and drowns. Woe to the brain-worker who allows himself to
fall entirely from thought into revery! He thinks that he can re-ascend
with equal ease, and he tells himself that, after all, it is the same
thing. Error!

Thought is the toil of the intelligence, revery its voluptuousness. To
replace thought with revery is to confound a poison with a food.

Marius had begun in that way, as the reader will remember. Passion had
supervened and had finished the work of precipitating him into chimaeras
without object or bottom. One no longer emerges from one's self except
for the purpose of going off to dream. Idle production. Tumultuous and
stagnant gulf. And, in proportion as labor diminishes, needs increase.
This is a law. Man, in a state of revery, is generally prodigal and
slack; the unstrung mind cannot hold life within close bounds.

There is, in that mode of life, good mingled with evil, for if
enervation is baleful, generosity is good and healthful. But the poor
man who is generous and noble, and who does not work, is lost. Resources
are exhausted, needs crop up.

Fatal declivity down which the most honest and the firmest as well as
the most feeble and most vicious are drawn, and which ends in one of two
holds, suicide or crime.

By dint of going outdoors to think, the day comes when one goes out to
throw one's self in the water.

Excess of revery breeds men like Escousse and Lebras.

Marius was descending this declivity at a slow pace, with his eyes
fixed on the girl whom he no longer saw. What we have just written seems
strange, and yet it is true. The memory of an absent being kindles in
the darkness of the heart; the more it has disappeared, the more it
beams; the gloomy and despairing soul sees this light on its horizon;
the star of the inner night. She--that was Marius' whole thought. He
meditated of nothing else; he was confusedly conscious that his old coat
was becoming an impossible coat, and that his new coat was growing old,
that his shirts were wearing out, that his hat was wearing out, that his
boots were giving out, and he said to himself: "If I could but see her
once again before I die!"

One sweet idea alone was left to him, that she had loved him, that her
glance had told him so, that she did not know his name, but that she did
know his soul, and that, wherever she was, however mysterious the place,
she still loved him perhaps. Who knows whether she were not thinking of
him as he was thinking of her? Sometimes, in those inexplicable hours
such as are experienced by every heart that loves, though he had no
reasons for anything but sadness and yet felt an obscure quiver of joy,
he said to himself: "It is her thoughts that are coming to me!" Then he
added: "Perhaps my thoughts reach her also."

This illusion, at which he shook his head a moment later, was
sufficient, nevertheless, to throw beams, which at times resembled hope,
into his soul. From time to time, especially at that evening hour which
is the most depressing to even the dreamy, he allowed the purest, the
most impersonal, the most ideal of the reveries which filled his brain,
to fall upon a notebook which contained nothing else. He called this
"writing to her."

It must not be supposed that his reason was deranged. Quite the
contrary. He had lost the faculty of working and of moving firmly
towards any fixed goal, but he was endowed with more clear-sightedness
and rectitude than ever. Marius surveyed by a calm and real, although
peculiar light, what passed before his eyes, even the most indifferent
deeds and men; he pronounced a just criticism on everything with a sort
of honest dejection and candid disinterestedness. His judgment, which
was almost wholly disassociated from hope, held itself aloof and soared
on high.

In this state of mind nothing escaped him, nothing deceived him, and
every moment he was discovering the foundation of life, of humanity, and
of destiny. Happy, even in the midst of anguish, is he to whom God has
given a soul worthy of love and of unhappiness! He who has not viewed
the things of this world and the heart of man under this double light
has seen nothing and knows nothing of the true.

The soul which loves and suffers is in a state of sublimity.

However, day followed day, and nothing new presented itself. It
merely seemed to him, that the sombre space which still remained to be
traversed by him was growing shorter with every instant. He thought that
he already distinctly perceived the brink of the bottomless abyss.

"What!" he repeated to himself, "shall I not see her again before then!"

When you have ascended the Rue Saint-Jacques, left the barrier on one
side and followed the old inner boulevard for some distance, you reach
the Rue de la Sante, then the Glaciere, and, a little while before
arriving at the little river of the Gobelins, you come to a sort of
field which is the only spot in the long and monotonous chain of the
boulevards of Paris, where Ruysdeel would be tempted to sit down.

There is something indescribable there which exhales grace, a green
meadow traversed by tightly stretched lines, from which flutter rags
drying in the wind, and an old market-gardener's house, built in the
time of Louis XIII., with its great roof oddly pierced with dormer
windows, dilapidated palisades, a little water amid poplar-trees,
women, voices, laughter; on the horizon the Pantheon, the pole of
the Deaf-Mutes, the Val-de-Grace, black, squat, fantastic, amusing,
magnificent, and in the background, the severe square crests of the
towers of Notre Dame.

As the place is worth looking at, no one goes thither. Hardly one cart
or wagoner passes in a quarter of an hour.

It chanced that Marius' solitary strolls led him to this plot of
ground, near the water. That day, there was a rarity on the boulevard,
a passer-by. Marius, vaguely impressed with the almost savage beauty of
the place, asked this passer-by:--"What is the name of this spot?"

The person replied: "It is the Lark's meadow."

And he added: "It was here that Ulbach killed the shepherdess of Ivry."

But after the word "Lark" Marius heard nothing more. These sudden
congealments in the state of revery, which a single word suffices to
evoke, do occur. The entire thought is abruptly condensed around an
idea, and it is no longer capable of perceiving anything else.

The Lark was the appellation which had replaced Ursule in the depths of
Marius' melancholy.--"Stop," said he with a sort of unreasoning stupor
peculiar to these mysterious asides, "this is her meadow. I shall know
where she lives now."

It was absurd, but irresistible.

And every day he returned to that meadow of the Lark.




CHAPTER II--EMBRYONIC FORMATION OF CRIMES IN THE INCUBATION OF PRISONS

Javert's triumph in the Gorbeau hovel seemed complete, but had not been
so.

In the first place, and this constituted the principal anxiety, Javert
had not taken the prisoner prisoner. The assassinated man who flees
is more suspicious than the assassin, and it is probable that this
personage, who had been so precious a capture for the ruffians, would be
no less fine a prize for the authorities.

And then, Montparnasse had escaped Javert.

Another opportunity of laying hands on that "devil's dandy" must be
waited for. Montparnasse had, in fact, encountered Eponine as she stood
on the watch under the trees of the boulevard, and had led her off,
preferring to play Nemorin with the daughter rather than Schinderhannes
with the father. It was well that he did so. He was free. As for
Eponine, Javert had caused her to be seized; a mediocre consolation.
Eponine had joined Azelma at Les Madelonettes.

And finally, on the way from the Gorbeau house to La Force, one of the
principal prisoners, Claquesous, had been lost. It was not known how
this had been effected, the police agents and the sergeants "could
not understand it at all." He had converted himself into vapor, he had
slipped through the handcuffs, he had trickled through the crevices of
the carriage, the fiacre was cracked, and he had fled; all that they
were able to say was, that on arriving at the prison, there was no
Claquesous. Either the fairies or the police had had a hand in it. Had
Claquesous melted into the shadows like a snow-flake in water? Had there
been unavowed connivance of the police agents? Did this man belong
to the double enigma of order and disorder? Was he concentric with
infraction and repression? Had this sphinx his fore paws in crime and
his hind paws in authority? Javert did not accept such comminations, and
would have bristled up against such compromises; but his squad included
other inspectors besides himself, who were more initiated than he,
perhaps, although they were his subordinates in the secrets of the
Prefecture, and Claquesous had been such a villain that he might make
a very good agent. It is an excellent thing for ruffianism and an
admirable thing for the police to be on such intimate juggling terms
with the night. These double-edged rascals do exist. However that may
be, Claquesous had gone astray and was not found again. Javert appeared
to be more irritated than amazed at this.

As for Marius, "that booby of a lawyer," who had probably become
frightened, and whose name Javert had forgotten, Javert attached very
little importance to him. Moreover, a lawyer can be hunted up at any
time. But was he a lawyer after all?

The investigation had begun.

The magistrate had thought it advisable not to put one of these men of
the band of Patron Minette in close confinement, in the hope that he
would chatter. This man was Brujon, the long-haired man of the Rue du
Petit-Banquier. He had been let loose in the Charlemagne courtyard, and
the eyes of the watchers were fixed on him.

This name of Brujon is one of the souvenirs of La Force. In that hideous
courtyard, called the court of the Batiment-Neuf (New Building), which
the administration called the court Saint-Bernard, and which the robbers
called the Fosseaux-Lions (The Lion's Ditch), on that wall covered with
scales and leprosy, which rose on the left to a level with the roofs,
near an old door of rusty iron which led to the ancient chapel of the
ducal residence of La Force, then turned in a dormitory for ruffians,
there could still be seen, twelve years ago, a sort of fortress roughly
carved in the stone with a nail, and beneath it this signature:--

                       BRUJON, 1811.


The Brujon of 1811 was the father of the Brujon of 1832.

The latter, of whom the reader caught but a glimpse at the Gorbeau
house, was a very cunning and very adroit young spark, with a bewildered
and plaintive air. It was in consequence of this plaintive air that the
magistrate had released him, thinking him more useful in the Charlemagne
yard than in close confinement.

Robbers do not interrupt their profession because they are in the hands
of justice. They do not let themselves be put out by such a trifle as
that. To be in prison for one crime is no reason for not beginning on
another crime. They are artists, who have one picture in the salon, and
who toil, none the less, on a new work in their studios.

Brujon seemed to be stupefied by prison. He could sometimes be seen
standing by the hour together in front of the sutler's window in the
Charlemagne yard, staring like an idiot at the sordid list of prices
which began with: garlic, 62 centimes, and ended with: cigar, 5
centimes. Or he passed his time in trembling, chattering his teeth,
saying that he had a fever, and inquiring whether one of the eight and
twenty beds in the fever ward was vacant.

All at once, towards the end of February, 1832, it was discovered that
Brujon, that somnolent fellow, had had three different commissions
executed by the errand-men of the establishment, not under his own name,
but in the name of three of his comrades; and they had cost him in all
fifty sous, an exorbitant outlay which attracted the attention of the
prison corporal.

Inquiries were instituted, and on consulting the tariff of commissions
posted in the convict's parlor, it was learned that the fifty sous could
be analyzed as follows: three commissions; one to the Pantheon, ten
sous; one to Val-de-Grace, fifteen sous; and one to the Barriere de
Grenelle, twenty-five sous. This last was the dearest of the whole
tariff. Now, at the Pantheon, at the Val-de-Grace, and at the Barriere
de Grenelle were situated the domiciles of the three very redoubtable
prowlers of the barriers, Kruideniers, alias Bizarre, Glorieux, an
ex-convict, and Barre-Carosse, upon whom the attention of the police was
directed by this incident. It was thought that these men were members
of Patron Minette; two of those leaders, Babet and Gueulemer, had been
captured. It was supposed that the messages, which had been addressed,
not to houses, but to people who were waiting for them in the street,
must have contained information with regard to some crime that had been
plotted. They were in possession of other indications; they laid hand on
the three prowlers, and supposed that they had circumvented some one or
other of Brujon's machinations.

About a week after these measures had been taken, one night, as the
superintendent of the watch, who had been inspecting the lower dormitory
in the Batiment-Neuf, was about to drop his chestnut in the box--this
was the means adopted to make sure that the watchmen performed their
duties punctually; every hour a chestnut must be dropped into all the
boxes nailed to the doors of the dormitories--a watchman looked through
the peep-hole of the dormitory and beheld Brujon sitting on his bed and
writing something by the light of the hall-lamp. The guardian entered,
Brujon was put in a solitary cell for a month, but they were not able to
seize what he had written. The police learned nothing further about it.

What is certain is, that on the following morning, a "postilion"
was flung from the Charlemagne yard into the Lions' Ditch, over the
five-story building which separated the two court-yards.

What prisoners call a "postilion" is a pellet of bread artistically
moulded, which is sent into Ireland, that is to say, over the roofs of a
prison, from one courtyard to another. Etymology: over England; from one
land to another; into Ireland. This little pellet falls in the yard. The
man who picks it up opens it and finds in it a note addressed to some
prisoner in that yard. If it is a prisoner who finds the treasure, he
forwards the note to its destination; if it is a keeper, or one of the
prisoners secretly sold who are called sheep in prisons and foxes in the
galleys, the note is taken to the office and handed over to the police.

On this occasion, the postilion reached its address, although the person
to whom it was addressed was, at that moment, in solitary confinement.
This person was no other than Babet, one of the four heads of Patron
Minette.

The postilion contained a roll of paper on which only these two lines
were written:--

"Babet. There is an affair in the Rue Plumet. A gate on a garden."

This is what Brujon had written the night before.

In spite of male and female searchers, Babet managed to pass the note on
from La Force to the Salpetriere, to a "good friend" whom he had and who
was shut up there. This woman in turn transmitted the note to another
woman of her acquaintance, a certain Magnon, who was strongly suspected
by the police, though not yet arrested. This Magnon, whose name the
reader has already seen, had relations with the Thenardier, which will
be described in detail later on, and she could, by going to see Eponine,
serve as a bridge between the Salpetriere and Les Madelonettes.

It happened, that at precisely that moment, as proofs were wanting
in the investigation directed against Thenardier in the matter of his
daughters, Eponine and Azelma were released. When Eponine came out,
Magnon, who was watching the gate of the Madelonettes, handed her
Brujon's note to Babet, charging her to look into the matter.

Eponine went to the Rue Plumet, recognized the gate and the garden,
observed the house, spied, lurked, and, a few days later, brought to
Magnon, who delivers in the Rue Clocheperce, a biscuit, which Magnon
transmitted to Babet's mistress in the Salpetriere. A biscuit, in the
shady symbolism of prisons, signifies: Nothing to be done.

So that in less than a week from that time, as Brujon and Babet met in
the circle of La Force, the one on his way to the examination, the other
on his way from it:--

"Well?" asked Brujon, "the Rue P.?"

"Biscuit," replied Babet. Thus did the foetus of crime engendered by
Brujon in La Force miscarry.

This miscarriage had its consequences, however, which were perfectly
distinct from Brujon's programme. The reader will see what they were.

Often when we think we are knotting one thread, we are tying quite
another.




CHAPTER III--APPARITION TO FATHER MABEUF

Marius no longer went to see any one, but he sometimes encountered
Father Mabeuf by chance.

While Marius was slowly descending those melancholy steps which may be
called the cellar stairs, and which lead to places without light, where
the happy can be heard walking overhead, M. Mabeuf was descending on his
side.

The Flora of Cauteretz no longer sold at all. The experiments on indigo
had not been successful in the little garden of Austerlitz, which had
a bad exposure. M. Mabeuf could cultivate there only a few plants which
love shade and dampness. Nevertheless, he did not become discouraged. He
had obtained a corner in the Jardin des Plantes, with a good exposure,
to make his trials with indigo "at his own expense." For this purpose he
had pawned his copperplates of the Flora. He had reduced his breakfast
to two eggs, and he left one of these for his old servant, to whom he
had paid no wages for the last fifteen months. And often his breakfast
was his only meal. He no longer smiled with his infantile smile, he had
grown morose and no longer received visitors. Marius did well not to
dream of going thither. Sometimes, at the hour when M. Mabeuf was on his
way to the Jardin des Plantes, the old man and the young man passed
each other on the Boulevard de l'Hopital. They did not speak, and only
exchanged a melancholy sign of the head. A heart-breaking thing it is
that there comes a moment when misery looses bonds! Two men who have
been friends become two chance passers-by.

Royal the bookseller was dead. M. Mabeuf no longer knew his books,
his garden, or his indigo: these were the three forms which happiness,
pleasure, and hope had assumed for him. This sufficed him for his
living. He said to himself: "When I shall have made my balls of blueing,
I shall be rich, I will withdraw my copperplates from the pawn-shop,
I will put my Flora in vogue again with trickery, plenty of money and
advertisements in the newspapers and I will buy, I know well where, a
copy of Pierre de Medine's Art de Naviguer, with wood-cuts, edition of
1655." In the meantime, he toiled all day over his plot of indigo, and
at night he returned home to water his garden, and to read his books. At
that epoch, M. Mabeuf was nearly eighty years of age.

One evening he had a singular apparition.

He had returned home while it was still broad daylight. Mother
Plutarque, whose health was declining, was ill and in bed. He had dined
on a bone, on which a little meat lingered, and a bit of bread that he
had found on the kitchen table, and had seated himself on an overturned
stone post, which took the place of a bench in his garden.

Near this bench there rose, after the fashion in orchard-gardens, a sort
of large chest, of beams and planks, much dilapidated, a rabbit-hutch on
the ground floor, a fruit-closet on the first. There was nothing in the
hutch, but there were a few apples in the fruit-closet,--the remains of
the winter's provision.

M. Mabeuf had set himself to turning over and reading, with the aid of
his glasses, two books of which he was passionately fond and in which,
a serious thing at his age, he was interested. His natural timidity
rendered him accessible to the acceptance of superstitions in a certain
degree. The first of these books was the famous treatise of President
Delancre, De l'inconstance des Demons; the other was a quarto by Mutor
de la Rubaudiere, Sur les Diables de Vauvert et les Gobelins de la
Bievre. This last-mentioned old volume interested him all the more,
because his garden had been one of the spots haunted by goblins in
former times. The twilight had begun to whiten what was on high and to
blacken all below. As he read, over the top of the book which he held
in his hand, Father Mabeuf was surveying his plants, and among others a
magnificent rhododendron which was one of his consolations; four days of
heat, wind, and sun without a drop of rain, had passed; the stalks were
bending, the buds drooping, the leaves falling; all this needed water,
the rhododendron was particularly sad. Father Mabeuf was one of those
persons for whom plants have souls. The old man had toiled all day over
his indigo plot, he was worn out with fatigue, but he rose, laid
his books on the bench, and walked, all bent over and with tottering
footsteps, to the well, but when he had grasped the chain, he could not
even draw it sufficiently to unhook it. Then he turned round and cast a
glance of anguish toward heaven which was becoming studded with stars.

The evening had that serenity which overwhelms the troubles of man
beneath an indescribably mournful and eternal joy. The night promised to
be as arid as the day had been.

"Stars everywhere!" thought the old man; "not the tiniest cloud! Not a
drop of water!"

And his head, which had been upraised for a moment, fell back upon his
breast.

He raised it again, and once more looked at the sky, murmuring:--

"A tear of dew! A little pity!"

He tried again to unhook the chain of the well, and could not.

At that moment, he heard a voice saying:--

"Father Mabeuf, would you like to have me water your garden for you?"

At the same time, a noise as of a wild animal passing became audible
in the hedge, and he beheld emerging from the shrubbery a sort of tall,
slender girl, who drew herself up in front of him and stared boldly at
him. She had less the air of a human being than of a form which had just
blossomed forth from the twilight.

Before Father Mabeuf, who was easily terrified, and who was, as we have
said, quick to take alarm, was able to reply by a single syllable, this
being, whose movements had a sort of odd abruptness in the darkness, had
unhooked the chain, plunged in and withdrawn the bucket, and filled the
watering-pot, and the goodman beheld this apparition, which had bare
feet and a tattered petticoat, running about among the flower-beds
distributing life around her. The sound of the watering-pot on the
leaves filled Father Mabeuf's soul with ecstasy. It seemed to him that
the rhododendron was happy now.

The first bucketful emptied, the girl drew a second, then a third. She
watered the whole garden.

There was something about her, as she thus ran about among paths, where
her outline appeared perfectly black, waving her angular arms, and with
her fichu all in rags, that resembled a bat.

When she had finished, Father Mabeuf approached her with tears in his
eyes, and laid his hand on her brow.

"God will bless you," said he, "you are an angel since you take care of
the flowers."

"No," she replied. "I am the devil, but that's all the same to me."

The old man exclaimed, without either waiting for or hearing her
response:--

"What a pity that I am so unhappy and so poor, and that I can do nothing
for you!"

"You can do something," said she.

"What?"

"Tell me where M. Marius lives."

The old man did not understand. "What Monsieur Marius?"

He raised his glassy eyes and seemed to be seeking something that had
vanished.

"A young man who used to come here."

In the meantime, M. Mabeuf had searched his memory.

"Ah! yes--" he exclaimed. "I know what you mean. Wait! Monsieur
Marius--the Baron Marius Pontmercy, parbleu! He lives,--or rather, he no
longer lives,--ah well, I don't know."

As he spoke, he had bent over to train a branch of rhododendron, and he
continued:--

"Hold, I know now. He very often passes along the boulevard, and goes in
the direction of the Glaciere, Rue Croulebarbe. The meadow of the Lark.
Go there. It is not hard to meet him."

When M. Mabeuf straightened himself up, there was no longer any one
there; the girl had disappeared.

He was decidedly terrified.

"Really," he thought, "if my garden had not been watered, I should think
that she was a spirit."

An hour later, when he was in bed, it came back to him, and as he fell
asleep, at that confused moment when thought, like that fabulous bird
which changes itself into a fish in order to cross the sea, little by
little assumes the form of a dream in order to traverse slumber, he said
to himself in a bewildered way:--

"In sooth, that greatly resembles what Rubaudiere narrates of the
goblins. Could it have been a goblin?"




CHAPTER IV--AN APPARITION TO MARIUS

Some days after this visit of a "spirit" to Farmer Mabeuf, one
morning,--it was on a Monday, the day when Marius borrowed the
hundred-sou piece from Courfeyrac for Thenardier--Marius had put this
coin in his pocket, and before carrying it to the clerk's office, he
had gone "to take a little stroll," in the hope that this would make him
work on his return. It was always thus, however. As soon as he rose, he
seated himself before a book and a sheet of paper in order to scribble
some translation; his task at that epoch consisted in turning into
French a celebrated quarrel between Germans, the Gans and Savigny
controversy; he took Savigny, he took Gans, read four lines, tried to
write one, could not, saw a star between him and his paper, and rose
from his chair, saying: "I shall go out. That will put me in spirits."

And off he went to the Lark's meadow.

There he beheld more than ever the star, and less than ever Savigny and
Gans.

He returned home, tried to take up his work again, and did not succeed;
there was no means of re-knotting a single one of the threads which
were broken in his brain; then he said to himself: "I will not go out
to-morrow. It prevents my working." And he went out every day.

He lived in the Lark's meadow more than in Courfeyrac's lodgings. That
was his real address: Boulevard de la Sante, at the seventh tree from
the Rue Croulebarbe.

That morning he had quitted the seventh tree and had seated himself on
the parapet of the River des Gobelins. A cheerful sunlight penetrated
the freshly unfolded and luminous leaves.

He was dreaming of "Her." And his meditation turning to a reproach, fell
back upon himself; he reflected dolefully on his idleness, his paralysis
of soul, which was gaining on him, and of that night which was growing
more dense every moment before him, to such a point that he no longer
even saw the sun.

Nevertheless, athwart this painful extrication of indistinct ideas which
was not even a monologue, so feeble had action become in him, and he
had no longer the force to care to despair, athwart this melancholy
absorption, sensations from without did reach him. He heard behind him,
beneath him, on both banks of the river, the laundresses of the Gobelins
beating their linen, and above his head, the birds chattering and
singing in the elm-trees. On the one hand, the sound of liberty, the
careless happiness of the leisure which has wings; on the other, the
sound of toil. What caused him to meditate deeply, and almost reflect,
were two cheerful sounds.

All at once, in the midst of his dejected ecstasy, he heard a familiar
voice saying:--

"Come! Here he is!"

He raised his eyes, and recognized that wretched child who had come to
him one morning, the elder of the Thenardier daughters, Eponine; he knew
her name now. Strange to say, she had grown poorer and prettier,
two steps which it had not seemed within her power to take. She had
accomplished a double progress, towards the light and towards distress.
She was barefooted and in rags, as on the day when she had so resolutely
entered his chamber, only her rags were two months older now, the holes
were larger, the tatters more sordid. It was the same harsh voice,
the same brow dimmed and wrinkled with tan, the same free, wild, and
vacillating glance. She had besides, more than formerly, in her face
that indescribably terrified and lamentable something which sojourn in a
prison adds to wretchedness.

She had bits of straw and hay in her hair, not like Ophelia through
having gone mad from the contagion of Hamlet's madness, but because she
had slept in the loft of some stable.

And in spite of it all, she was beautiful. What a star art thou, O
youth!

In the meantime, she had halted in front of Marius with a trace of joy
in her livid countenance, and something which resembled a smile.

She stood for several moments as though incapable of speech.

"So I have met you at last!" she said at length. "Father Mabeuf was
right, it was on this boulevard! How I have hunted for you! If you only
knew! Do you know? I have been in the jug. A fortnight! They let me out!
seeing that there was nothing against me, and that, moreover, I had not
reached years of discretion. I lack two months of it. Oh! how I have
hunted for you! These six weeks! So you don't live down there any more?"

"No," said Marius.

"Ah! I understand. Because of that affair. Those take-downs are
disagreeable. You cleared out. Come now! Why do you wear old hats like
this! A young man like you ought to have fine clothes. Do you know,
Monsieur Marius, Father Mabeuf calls you Baron Marius, I don't know
what. It isn't true that you are a baron? Barons are old fellows, they
go to the Luxembourg, in front of the chateau, where there is the most
sun, and they read the Quotidienne for a sou. I once carried a letter to
a baron of that sort. He was over a hundred years old. Say, where do you
live now?"

Marius made no reply.

"Ah!" she went on, "you have a hole in your shirt. I must sew it up for
you."

She resumed with an expression which gradually clouded over:--

"You don't seem glad to see me."

Marius held his peace; she remained silent for a moment, then
exclaimed:--

"But if I choose, nevertheless, I could force you to look glad!"

"What?" demanded Marius. "What do you mean?"

"Ah! you used to call me thou," she retorted.

"Well, then, what dost thou mean?"

She bit her lips; she seemed to hesitate, as though a prey to some sort
of inward conflict. At last she appeared to come to a decision.

"So much the worse, I don't care. You have a melancholy air, I want you
to be pleased. Only promise me that you will smile. I want to see you
smile and hear you say: 'Ah, well, that's good.' Poor Mr. Marius! you
know? You promised me that you would give me anything I like--"

"Yes! Only speak!"

She looked Marius full in the eye, and said:--

"I have the address."

Marius turned pale. All the blood flowed back to his heart.

"What address?"

"The address that you asked me to get!"

She added, as though with an effort:--

"The address--you know very well!"

"Yes!" stammered Marius.

"Of that young lady."

This word uttered, she sighed deeply.

Marius sprang from the parapet on which he had been sitting and seized
her hand distractedly.

"Oh! Well! lead me thither! Tell me! Ask of me anything you wish! Where
is it?"

"Come with me," she responded. "I don't know the street or number very
well; it is in quite the other direction from here, but I know the house
well, I will take you to it."

She withdrew her hand and went on, in a tone which could have rent
the heart of an observer, but which did not even graze Marius in his
intoxicated and ecstatic state:--

"Oh! how glad you are!"

A cloud swept across Marius' brow. He seized Eponine by the arm:--

"Swear one thing to me!"

"Swear!" said she, "what does that mean? Come! You want me to swear?"

And she laughed.

"Your father! promise me, Eponine! Swear to me that you will not give
this address to your father!"

She turned to him with a stupefied air.

"Eponine! How do you know that my name is Eponine?"

"Promise what I tell you!"

But she did not seem to hear him.

"That's nice! You have called me Eponine!"

Marius grasped both her arms at once.

"But answer me, in the name of Heaven! pay attention to what I am saying
to you, swear to me that you will not tell your father this address that
you know!"

"My father!" said she. "Ah yes, my father! Be at ease. He's in close
confinement. Besides, what do I care for my father!"

"But you do not promise me!" exclaimed Marius.

"Let go of me!" she said, bursting into a laugh, "how you do shake me!
Yes! Yes! I promise that! I swear that to you! What is that to me? I
will not tell my father the address. There! Is that right? Is that it?"

"Nor to any one?" said Marius.

"Nor to any one."

"Now," resumed Marius, "take me there."

"Immediately?"

"Immediately."

"Come along. Ah! how pleased he is!" said she.

After a few steps she halted.

"You are following me too closely, Monsieur Marius. Let me go on ahead,
and follow me so, without seeming to do it. A nice young man like you
must not be seen with a woman like me."

No tongue can express all that lay in that word, woman, thus pronounced
by that child.

She proceeded a dozen paces and then halted once more; Marius joined
her. She addressed him sideways, and without turning towards him:--

"By the way, you know that you promised me something?"

Marius fumbled in his pocket. All that he owned in the world was the
five francs intended for Thenardier the father. He took them and laid
them in Eponine's hand.

She opened her fingers and let the coin fall to the ground, and gazed at
him with a gloomy air.

"I don't want your money," said she.




BOOK THIRD.--THE HOUSE IN THE RUE PLUMET




CHAPTER I--THE HOUSE WITH A SECRET

About the middle of the last century, a chief justice in the Parliament
of Paris having a mistress and concealing the fact, for at that period
the grand seignors displayed their mistresses, and the bourgeois
concealed them, had "a little house" built in the Faubourg
Saint-Germain, in the deserted Rue Blomet, which is now called Rue
Plumet, not far from the spot which was then designated as Combat des
Animaux.

This house was composed of a single-storied pavilion; two rooms on the
ground floor, two chambers on the first floor, a kitchen down stairs,
a boudoir up stairs, an attic under the roof, the whole preceded by a
garden with a large gate opening on the street. This garden was about
an acre and a half in extent. This was all that could be seen by
passers-by; but behind the pavilion there was a narrow courtyard, and
at the end of the courtyard a low building consisting of two rooms and
a cellar, a sort of preparation destined to conceal a child and nurse
in case of need. This building communicated in the rear by a masked
door which opened by a secret spring, with a long, narrow, paved winding
corridor, open to the sky, hemmed in with two lofty walls, which, hidden
with wonderful art, and lost as it were between garden enclosures and
cultivated land, all of whose angles and detours it followed, ended in
another door, also with a secret lock which opened a quarter of a league
away, almost in another quarter, at the solitary extremity of the Rue du
Babylone.

Through this the chief justice entered, so that even those who were
spying on him and following him would merely have observed that the
justice betook himself every day in a mysterious way somewhere, and
would never have suspected that to go to the Rue de Babylone was to go
to the Rue Blomet. Thanks to clever purchasers of land, the magistrate
had been able to make a secret, sewer-like passage on his own property,
and consequently, without interference. Later on, he had sold in little
parcels, for gardens and market gardens, the lots of ground adjoining
the corridor, and the proprietors of these lots on both sides thought
they had a party wall before their eyes, and did not even suspect the
long, paved ribbon winding between two walls amid their flower-beds and
their orchards. Only the birds beheld this curiosity. It is probable
that the linnets and tomtits of the last century gossiped a great deal
about the chief justice.

The pavilion, built of stone in the taste of Mansard, wainscoted and
furnished in the Watteau style, rocaille on the inside, old-fashioned
on the outside, walled in with a triple hedge of flowers, had something
discreet, coquettish, and solemn about it, as befits a caprice of love
and magistracy.

This house and corridor, which have now disappeared, were in existence
fifteen years ago. In '93 a coppersmith had purchased the house with
the idea of demolishing it, but had not been able to pay the price; the
nation made him bankrupt. So that it was the house which demolished the
coppersmith. After that, the house remained uninhabited, and fell slowly
to ruin, as does every dwelling to which the presence of man does not
communicate life. It had remained fitted with its old furniture, was
always for sale or to let, and the ten or a dozen people who passed
through the Rue Plumet were warned of the fact by a yellow and illegible
bit of writing which had hung on the garden wall since 1819.

Towards the end of the Restoration, these same passers-by might have
noticed that the bill had disappeared, and even that the shutters on the
first floor were open. The house was occupied, in fact. The windows had
short curtains, a sign that there was a woman about.

In the month of October, 1829, a man of a certain age had presented
himself and had hired the house just as it stood, including, of course,
the back building and the lane which ended in the Rue de Babylone. He
had had the secret openings of the two doors to this passage repaired.
The house, as we have just mentioned, was still very nearly furnished
with the justice's old fitting; the new tenant had ordered some
repairs, had added what was lacking here and there, had replaced the
paving-stones in the yard, bricks in the floors, steps in the stairs,
missing bits in the inlaid floors and the glass in the lattice windows,
and had finally installed himself there with a young girl and an elderly
maid-servant, without commotion, rather like a person who is slipping
in than like a man who is entering his own house. The neighbors did not
gossip about him, for the reason that there were no neighbors.

This unobtrusive tenant was Jean Valjean, the young girl was Cosette.
The servant was a woman named Toussaint, whom Jean Valjean had saved
from the hospital and from wretchedness, and who was elderly, a
stammerer, and from the provinces, three qualities which had decided
Jean Valjean to take her with him. He had hired the house under the name
of M. Fauchelevent, independent gentleman. In all that has been
related heretofore, the reader has, doubtless, been no less prompt than
Thenardier to recognize Jean Valjean.

Why had Jean Valjean quitted the convent of the Petit-Picpus? What had
happened?

Nothing had happened.

It will be remembered that Jean Valjean was happy in the convent, so
happy that his conscience finally took the alarm. He saw Cosette every
day, he felt paternity spring up and develop within him more and more,
he brooded over the soul of that child, he said to himself that she
was his, that nothing could take her from him, that this would last
indefinitely, that she would certainly become a nun, being thereto
gently incited every day, that thus the convent was henceforth the
universe for her as it was for him, that he should grow old there, and
that she would grow up there, that she would grow old there, and that
he should die there; that, in short, delightful hope, no separation
was possible. On reflecting upon this, he fell into perplexity. He
interrogated himself. He asked himself if all that happiness were
really his, if it were not composed of the happiness of another, of
the happiness of that child which he, an old man, was confiscating and
stealing; if that were not theft? He said to himself, that this child
had a right to know life before renouncing it, that to deprive her in
advance, and in some sort without consulting her, of all joys, under
the pretext of saving her from all trials, to take advantage of her
ignorance of her isolation, in order to make an artificial vocation
germinate in her, was to rob a human creature of its nature and to lie
to God. And who knows if, when she came to be aware of all this some
day, and found herself a nun to her sorrow, Cosette would not come to
hate him? A last, almost selfish thought, and less heroic than the rest,
but which was intolerable to him. He resolved to quit the convent.

He resolved on this; he recognized with anguish, the fact that it was
necessary. As for objections, there were none. Five years' sojourn
between these four walls and of disappearance had necessarily destroyed
or dispersed the elements of fear. He could return tranquilly among men.
He had grown old, and all had undergone a change. Who would recognize
him now? And then, to face the worst, there was danger only for himself,
and he had no right to condemn Cosette to the cloister for the reason
that he had been condemned to the galleys. Besides, what is danger in
comparison with the right? Finally, nothing prevented his being prudent
and taking his precautions.

As for Cosette's education, it was almost finished and complete.

His determination once taken, he awaited an opportunity. It was not long
in presenting itself. Old Fauchelevent died.

Jean Valjean demanded an audience with the revered prioress and told her
that, having come into a little inheritance at the death of his brother,
which permitted him henceforth to live without working, he should leave
the service of the convent and take his daughter with him; but that, as
it was not just that Cosette, since she had not taken the vows, should
have received her education gratuitously, he humbly begged the Reverend
Prioress to see fit that he should offer to the community, as indemnity,
for the five years which Cosette had spent there, the sum of five
thousand francs.

It was thus that Jean Valjean quitted the convent of the Perpetual
Adoration.

On leaving the convent, he took in his own arms the little valise the
key to which he still wore on his person, and would permit no porter to
touch it. This puzzled Cosette, because of the odor of embalming which
proceeded from it.

Let us state at once, that this trunk never quitted him more. He always
had it in his chamber. It was the first and only thing sometimes, that
he carried off in his moving when he moved about. Cosette laughed at it,
and called this valise his inseparable, saying: "I am jealous of it."

Nevertheless, Jean Valjean did not reappear in the open air without
profound anxiety.

He discovered the house in the Rue Plumet, and hid himself from
sight there. Henceforth he was in the possession of the name:--Ultime
Fauchelevent.

At the same time he hired two other apartments in Paris, in order that
he might attract less attention than if he were to remain always in the
same quarter, and so that he could, at need, take himself off at the
slightest disquietude which should assail him, and in short, so that
he might not again be caught unprovided as on the night when he had
so miraculously escaped from Javert. These two apartments were very
pitiable, poor in appearance, and in two quarters which were far remote
from each other, the one in the Rue de l'Ouest, the other in the Rue de
l'Homme Arme.

He went from time to time, now to the Rue de l'Homme Arme, now to the
Rue de l'Ouest, to pass a month or six weeks, without taking Toussaint.
He had himself served by the porters, and gave himself out as a
gentleman from the suburbs, living on his funds, and having a little
temporary resting-place in town. This lofty virtue had three domiciles
in Paris for the sake of escaping from the police.




CHAPTER II--JEAN VALJEAN AS A NATIONAL GUARD

However, properly speaking, he lived in the Rue Plumet, and he had
arranged his existence there in the following fashion:--

Cosette and the servant occupied the pavilion; she had the big
sleeping-room with the painted pier-glasses, the boudoir with the gilded
fillets, the justice's drawing-room furnished with tapestries and vast
arm-chairs; she had the garden. Jean Valjean had a canopied bed of
antique damask in three colors and a beautiful Persian rug purchased in
the Rue du Figuier-Saint-Paul at Mother Gaucher's, put into Cosette's
chamber, and, in order to redeem the severity of these magnificent
old things, he had amalgamated with this bric-a-brac all the gay and
graceful little pieces of furniture suitable to young girls, an etagere,
a bookcase filled with gilt-edged books, an inkstand, a blotting-book,
paper, a work-table incrusted with mother of pearl, a silver-gilt
dressing-case, a toilet service in Japanese porcelain. Long damask
curtains with a red foundation and three colors, like those on the
bed, hung at the windows of the first floor. On the ground floor, the
curtains were of tapestry. All winter long, Cosette's little house was
heated from top to bottom. Jean Valjean inhabited the sort of porter's
lodge which was situated at the end of the back courtyard, with a
mattress on a folding-bed, a white wood table, two straw chairs, an
earthenware water-jug, a few old volumes on a shelf, his beloved valise
in one corner, and never any fire. He dined with Cosette, and he had a
loaf of black bread on the table for his own use.

When Toussaint came, he had said to her: "It is the young lady who is
the mistress of this house."--"And you, monsieur?" Toussaint replied in
amazement.--"I am a much better thing than the master, I am the father."

Cosette had been taught housekeeping in the convent, and she regulated
their expenditure, which was very modest. Every day, Jean Valjean put
his arm through Cosette's and took her for a walk. He led her to the
Luxembourg, to the least frequented walk, and every Sunday he took her
to mass at Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas, because that was a long way off.
As it was a very poor quarter, he bestowed alms largely there, and the
poor people surrounded him in church, which had drawn down upon him
Thenardier's epistle: "To the benevolent gentleman of the church of
Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas." He was fond of taking Cosette to visit the
poor and the sick. No stranger ever entered the house in the Rue Plumet.
Toussaint brought their provisions, and Jean Valjean went himself for
water to a fountain near by on the boulevard. Their wood and wine were
put into a half-subterranean hollow lined with rock-work which lay near
the Rue de Babylone and which had formerly served the chief-justice as
a grotto; for at the epoch of follies and "Little Houses" no love was
without a grotto.

In the door opening on the Rue de Babylone, there was a box destined for
the reception of letters and papers; only, as the three inhabitants of
the pavilion in the Rue Plumet received neither papers nor letters, the
entire usefulness of that box, formerly the go-between of a love
affair, and the confidant of a love-lorn lawyer, was now limited to
the tax-collector's notices, and the summons of the guard. For M.
Fauchelevent, independent gentleman, belonged to the national guard;
he had not been able to escape through the fine meshes of the census of
1831. The municipal information collected at that time had even reached
the convent of the Petit-Picpus, a sort of impenetrable and holy cloud,
whence Jean Valjean had emerged in venerable guise, and, consequently,
worthy of mounting guard in the eyes of the townhall.

Three or four times a year, Jean Valjean donned his uniform and mounted
guard; he did this willingly, however; it was a correct disguise which
mixed him with every one, and yet left him solitary. Jean Valjean had
just attained his sixtieth birthday, the age of legal exemption; but he
did not appear to be over fifty; moreover, he had no desire to escape
his sergeant-major nor to quibble with Comte de Lobau; he possessed
no civil status, he was concealing his name, he was concealing his
identity, so he concealed his age, he concealed everything; and, as we
have just said, he willingly did his duty as a national guard; the sum
of his ambition lay in resembling any other man who paid his taxes. This
man had for his ideal, within, the angel, without, the bourgeois.

Let us note one detail, however; when Jean Valjean went out with
Cosette, he dressed as the reader has already seen, and had the air of
a retired officer. When he went out alone, which was generally at night,
he was always dressed in a workingman's trousers and blouse, and wore
a cap which concealed his face. Was this precaution or humility? Both.
Cosette was accustomed to the enigmatical side of her destiny, and
hardly noticed her father's peculiarities. As for Toussaint, she
venerated Jean Valjean, and thought everything he did right.

One day, her butcher, who had caught a glimpse of Jean Valjean, said to
her: "That's a queer fish." She replied: "He's a saint."

Neither Jean Valjean nor Cosette nor Toussaint ever entered or emerged
except by the door on the Rue de Babylone. Unless seen through the
garden gate it would have been difficult to guess that they lived in
the Rue Plumet. That gate was always closed. Jean Valjean had left the
garden uncultivated, in order not to attract attention.

In this, possibly, he made a mistake.




CHAPTER III--FOLIIS AC FRONDIBUS

The garden thus left to itself for more than half a century had become
extraordinary and charming. The passers-by of forty years ago halted to
gaze at it, without a suspicion of the secrets which it hid in its fresh
and verdant depths. More than one dreamer of that epoch often allowed
his thoughts and his eyes to penetrate indiscreetly between the bars of
that ancient, padlocked gate, twisted, tottering, fastened to two
green and moss-covered pillars, and oddly crowned with a pediment of
undecipherable arabesque.

There was a stone bench in one corner, one or two mouldy statues,
several lattices which had lost their nails with time, were rotting on
the wall, and there were no walks nor turf; but there was enough grass
everywhere. Gardening had taken its departure, and nature had returned.
Weeds abounded, which was a great piece of luck for a poor corner of
land. The festival of gilliflowers was something splendid. Nothing
in this garden obstructed the sacred effort of things towards life;
venerable growth reigned there among them. The trees had bent over
towards the nettles, the plant had sprung upward, the branch had
inclined, that which crawls on the earth had gone in search of that
which expands in the air, that which floats on the wind had bent over
towards that which trails in the moss; trunks, boughs, leaves, fibres,
clusters, tendrils, shoots, spines, thorns, had mingled, crossed,
married, confounded themselves in each other; vegetation in a deep
and close embrace, had celebrated and accomplished there, under the
well-pleased eye of the Creator, in that enclosure three hundred feet
square, the holy mystery of fraternity, symbol of the human fraternity.
This garden was no longer a garden, it was a colossal thicket, that is
to say, something as impenetrable as a forest, as peopled as a city,
quivering like a nest, sombre like a cathedral, fragrant like a bouquet,
solitary as a tomb, living as a throng.

In Floreal[34] this enormous thicket, free behind its gate and within
its four walls, entered upon the secret labor of germination, quivered
in the rising sun, almost like an animal which drinks in the breaths of
cosmic love, and which feels the sap of April rising and boiling in
its veins, and shakes to the wind its enormous wonderful green locks,
sprinkled on the damp earth, on the defaced statues, on the crumbling
steps of the pavilion, and even on the pavement of the deserted street,
flowers like stars, dew like pearls, fecundity, beauty, life, joy,
perfumes. At midday, a thousand white butterflies took refuge there, and
it was a divine spectacle to see that living summer snow whirling about
there in flakes amid the shade. There, in those gay shadows of verdure,
a throng of innocent voices spoke sweetly to the soul, and what the
twittering forgot to say the humming completed. In the evening, a dreamy
vapor exhaled from the garden and enveloped it; a shroud of mist, a
calm and celestial sadness covered it; the intoxicating perfume of the
honeysuckles and convolvulus poured out from every part of it, like an
exquisite and subtle poison; the last appeals of the woodpeckers and
the wagtails were audible as they dozed among the branches; one felt the
sacred intimacy of the birds and the trees; by day the wings rejoice the
leaves, by night the leaves protect the wings.

In winter the thicket was black, dripping, bristling, shivering, and
allowed some glimpse of the house. Instead of flowers on the branches
and dew in the flowers, the long silvery tracks of the snails were
visible on the cold, thick carpet of yellow leaves; but in any fashion,
under any aspect, at all seasons, spring, winter, summer, autumn, this
tiny enclosure breathed forth melancholy, contemplation, solitude,
liberty, the absence of man, the presence of God; and the rusty old gate
had the air of saying: "This garden belongs to me."

It was of no avail that the pavements of Paris were there on every side,
the classic and splendid hotels of the Rue de Varennes a couple of paces
away, the dome of the Invalides close at hand, the Chamber of Deputies
not far off; the carriages of the Rue de Bourgogne and of the Rue
Saint-Dominique rumbled luxuriously, in vain, in the vicinity, in vain
did the yellow, brown, white, and red omnibuses cross each other's
course at the neighboring cross-roads; the Rue Plumet was the desert;
and the death of the former proprietors, the revolution which had passed
over it, the crumbling away of ancient fortunes, absence, forgetfulness,
forty years of abandonment and widowhood, had sufficed to restore to
this privileged spot ferns, mulleins, hemlock, yarrow, tall weeds, great
crimped plants, with large leaves of pale green cloth, lizards, beetles,
uneasy and rapid insects; to cause to spring forth from the depths
of the earth and to reappear between those four walls a certain
indescribable and savage grandeur; and for nature, which disconcerts
the petty arrangements of man, and which sheds herself always thoroughly
where she diffuses herself at all, in the ant as well as in the eagle,
to blossom out in a petty little Parisian garden with as much rude force
and majesty as in a virgin forest of the New World.

Nothing is small, in fact; any one who is subject to the profound
and penetrating influence of nature knows this. Although no absolute
satisfaction is given to philosophy, either to circumscribe the cause
or to limit the effect, the contemplator falls into those unfathomable
ecstasies caused by these decompositions of force terminating in unity.
Everything toils at everything.

Algebra is applied to the clouds; the radiation of the star profits
the rose; no thinker would venture to affirm that the perfume of the
hawthorn is useless to the constellations. Who, then, can calculate the
course of a molecule? How do we know that the creation of worlds is not
determined by the fall of grains of sand? Who knows the reciprocal
ebb and flow of the infinitely great and the infinitely little, the
reverberations of causes in the precipices of being, and the avalanches
of creation? The tiniest worm is of importance; the great is little, the
little is great; everything is balanced in necessity; alarming vision
for the mind. There are marvellous relations between beings and things;
in that inexhaustible whole, from the sun to the grub, nothing despises
the other; all have need of each other. The light does not bear away
terrestrial perfumes into the azure depths, without knowing what it is
doing; the night distributes stellar essences to the sleeping flowers.
All birds that fly have round their leg the thread of the infinite.
Germination is complicated with the bursting forth of a meteor and with
the peck of a swallow cracking its egg, and it places on one level the
birth of an earthworm and the advent of Socrates. Where the telescope
ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two possesses the larger field
of vision? Choose. A bit of mould is a pleiad of flowers; a nebula is an
ant-hill of stars. The same promiscuousness, and yet more unprecedented,
exists between the things of the intelligence and the facts of
substance. Elements and principles mingle, combine, wed, multiply with
each other, to such a point that the material and the moral world are
brought eventually to the same clearness. The phenomenon is perpetually
returning upon itself. In the vast cosmic exchanges the universal life
goes and comes in unknown quantities, rolling entirely in the invisible
mystery of effluvia, employing everything, not losing a single dream,
not a single slumber, sowing an animalcule here, crumbling to bits a
planet there, oscillating and winding, making of light a force and of
thought an element, disseminated and invisible, dissolving all,
except that geometrical point, the I; bringing everything back to the
soul-atom; expanding everything in God, entangling all activity, from
summit to base, in the obscurity of a dizzy mechanism, attaching the
flight of an insect to the movement of the earth, subordinating, who
knows? Were it only by the identity of the law, the evolution of the
comet in the firmament to the whirling of the infusoria in the drop
of water. A machine made of mind. Enormous gearing, the prime motor of
which is the gnat, and whose final wheel is the zodiac.




CHAPTER IV--CHANGE OF GATE

It seemed that this garden, created in olden days to conceal wanton
mysteries, had been transformed and become fitted to shelter chaste
mysteries. There were no longer either arbors, or bowling greens, or
tunnels, or grottos; there was a magnificent, dishevelled obscurity
falling like a veil over all. Paphos had been made over into Eden. It is
impossible to say what element of repentance had rendered this retreat
wholesome. This flower-girl now offered her blossom to the soul. This
coquettish garden, formerly decidedly compromised, had returned to
virginity and modesty. A justice assisted by a gardener, a goodman who
thought that he was a continuation of Lamoignon, and another goodman who
thought that he was a continuation of Lenotre, had turned it about, cut,
ruffled, decked, moulded it to gallantry; nature had taken possession of
it once more, had filled it with shade, and had arranged it for love.

There was, also, in this solitude, a heart which was quite ready. Love
had only to show himself; he had here a temple composed of verdure,
grass, moss, the sight of birds, tender shadows, agitated branches, and
a soul made of sweetness, of faith, of candor, of hope, of aspiration,
and of illusion.

Cosette had left the convent when she was still almost a child; she was
a little more than fourteen, and she was at the "ungrateful age"; we
have already said, that with the exception of her eyes, she was homely
rather than pretty; she had no ungraceful feature, but she was awkward,
thin, timid and bold at once, a grown-up little girl, in short.

Her education was finished, that is to say, she has been taught
religion, and even and above all, devotion; then "history," that is to
say the thing that bears that name in convents, geography, grammar,
the participles, the kings of France, a little music, a little drawing,
etc.; but in all other respects she was utterly ignorant, which is a
great charm and a great peril. The soul of a young girl should not be
left in the dark; later on, mirages that are too abrupt and too lively
are formed there, as in a dark chamber. She should be gently and
discreetly enlightened, rather with the reflection of realities than
with their harsh and direct light. A useful and graciously austere
half-light which dissipates puerile fears and obviates falls. There is
nothing but the maternal instinct, that admirable intuition composed of
the memories of the virgin and the experience of the woman, which knows
how this half-light is to be created and of what it should consist.

Nothing supplies the place of this instinct. All the nuns in the world
are not worth as much as one mother in the formation of a young girl's
soul.

Cosette had had no mother. She had only had many mothers, in the plural.

As for Jean Valjean, he was, indeed, all tenderness, all solicitude; but
he was only an old man and he knew nothing at all.

Now, in this work of education, in this grave matter of preparing a
woman for life, what science is required to combat that vast ignorance
which is called innocence!

Nothing prepares a young girl for passions like the convent. The convent
turns the thoughts in the direction of the unknown. The heart, thus
thrown back upon itself, works downward within itself, since it cannot
overflow, and grows deep, since it cannot expand. Hence visions,
suppositions, conjectures, outlines of romances, a desire for
adventures, fantastic constructions, edifices built wholly in the inner
obscurity of the mind, sombre and secret abodes where the passions
immediately find a lodgement as soon as the open gate permits them to
enter. The convent is a compression which, in order to triumph over the
human heart, should last during the whole life.

On quitting the convent, Cosette could have found nothing more sweet and
more dangerous than the house in the Rue Plumet. It was the continuation
of solitude with the beginning of liberty; a garden that was closed, but
a nature that was acrid, rich, voluptuous, and fragrant; the same dreams
as in the convent, but with glimpses of young men; a grating, but one
that opened on the street.

Still, when she arrived there, we repeat, she was only a child. Jean
Valjean gave this neglected garden over to her. "Do what you like with
it," he said to her. This amused Cosette; she turned over all the clumps
and all the stones, she hunted for "beasts"; she played in it, while
awaiting the time when she would dream in it; she loved this garden
for the insects that she found beneath her feet amid the grass, while
awaiting the day when she would love it for the stars that she would see
through the boughs above her head.

And then, she loved her father, that is to say, Jean Valjean, with
all her soul, with an innocent filial passion which made the goodman
a beloved and charming companion to her. It will be remembered that M.
Madeleine had been in the habit of reading a great deal. Jean Valjean
had continued this practice; he had come to converse well; he possessed
the secret riches and the eloquence of a true and humble mind which has
spontaneously cultivated itself. He retained just enough sharpness to
season his kindness; his mind was rough and his heart was soft. During
their conversations in the Luxembourg, he gave her explanations of
everything, drawing on what he had read, and also on what he had
suffered. As she listened to him, Cosette's eyes wandered vaguely about.

This simple man sufficed for Cosette's thought, the same as the wild
garden sufficed for her eyes. When she had had a good chase after the
butterflies, she came panting up to him and said: "Ah! How I have run!"
He kissed her brow.

Cosette adored the goodman. She was always at his heels. Where Jean
Valjean was, there happiness was. Jean Valjean lived neither in the
pavilion nor the garden; she took greater pleasure in the paved back
courtyard, than in the enclosure filled with flowers, and in his little
lodge furnished with straw-seated chairs than in the great drawing-room
hung with tapestry, against which stood tufted easy-chairs. Jean Valjean
sometimes said to her, smiling at his happiness in being importuned: "Do
go to your own quarters! Leave me alone a little!"

She gave him those charming and tender scoldings which are so graceful
when they come from a daughter to her father.

"Father, I am very cold in your rooms; why don't you have a carpet here
and a stove?"

"Dear child, there are so many people who are better than I and who have
not even a roof over their heads."

"Then why is there a fire in my rooms, and everything that is needed?"

"Because you are a woman and a child."

"Bah! must men be cold and feel uncomfortable?"

"Certain men."

"That is good, I shall come here so often that you will be obliged to
have a fire."

And again she said to him:--

"Father, why do you eat horrible bread like that?"

"Because, my daughter."

"Well, if you eat it, I will eat it too."

Then, in order to prevent Cosette eating black bread, Jean Valjean ate
white bread.

Cosette had but a confused recollection of her childhood. She prayed
morning and evening for her mother whom she had never known. The
Thenardiers had remained with her as two hideous figures in a dream. She
remembered that she had gone "one day, at night," to fetch water in a
forest. She thought that it had been very far from Paris. It seemed to
her that she had begun to live in an abyss, and that it was Jean Valjean
who had rescued her from it. Her childhood produced upon her the effect
of a time when there had been nothing around her but millepeds, spiders,
and serpents. When she meditated in the evening, before falling asleep,
as she had not a very clear idea that she was Jean Valjean's daughter,
and that he was her father, she fancied that the soul of her mother had
passed into that good man and had come to dwell near her.

When he was seated, she leaned her cheek against his white hair, and
dropped a silent tear, saying to herself: "Perhaps this man is my
mother."

Cosette, although this is a strange statement to make, in the profound
ignorance of a girl brought up in a convent,--maternity being also
absolutely unintelligible to virginity,--had ended by fancying that she
had had as little mother as possible. She did not even know her mother's
name. Whenever she asked Jean Valjean, Jean Valjean remained silent. If
she repeated her question, he responded with a smile. Once she insisted;
the smile ended in a tear.

This silence on the part of Jean Valjean covered Fantine with darkness.

Was it prudence? Was it respect? Was it a fear that he should deliver
this name to the hazards of another memory than his own?

So long as Cosette had been small, Jean Valjean had been willing to talk
to her of her mother; when she became a young girl, it was impossible
for him to do so. It seemed to him that he no longer dared. Was it
because of Cosette? Was it because of Fantine? He felt a certain
religious horror at letting that shadow enter Cosette's thought; and of
placing a third in their destiny. The more sacred this shade was to him,
the more did it seem that it was to be feared. He thought of Fantine,
and felt himself overwhelmed with silence.

Through the darkness, he vaguely perceived something which appeared
to have its finger on its lips. Had all the modesty which had been
in Fantine, and which had violently quitted her during her lifetime,
returned to rest upon her after her death, to watch in indignation over
the peace of that dead woman, and in its shyness, to keep her in her
grave? Was Jean Valjean unconsciously submitting to the pressure? We
who believe in death, are not among the number who will reject this
mysterious explanation.

Hence the impossibility of uttering, even for Cosette, that name of
Fantine.

One day Cosette said to him:--

"Father, I saw my mother in a dream last night. She had two big wings.
My mother must have been almost a saint during her life."

"Through martyrdom," replied Jean Valjean.

However, Jean Valjean was happy.

When Cosette went out with him, she leaned on his arm, proud and happy,
in the plenitude of her heart. Jean Valjean felt his heart melt within
him with delight, at all these sparks of a tenderness so exclusive, so
wholly satisfied with himself alone. The poor man trembled, inundated
with angelic joy; he declared to himself ecstatically that this would
last all their lives; he told himself that he really had not suffered
sufficiently to merit so radiant a bliss, and he thanked God, in the
depths of his soul, for having permitted him to be loved thus, he, a
wretch, by that innocent being.




CHAPTER V--THE ROSE PERCEIVES THAT IT IS AN ENGINE OF WAR

One day, Cosette chanced to look at herself in her mirror, and she said
to herself: "Really!" It seemed to her almost that she was pretty. This
threw her in a singularly troubled state of mind. Up to that moment she
had never thought of her face. She saw herself in her mirror, but she
did not look at herself. And then, she had so often been told that she
was homely; Jean Valjean alone said gently: "No indeed! no indeed!" At
all events, Cosette had always thought herself homely, and had grown up
in that belief with the easy resignation of childhood. And here, all
at once, was her mirror saying to her, as Jean Valjean had said: "No
indeed!" That night, she did not sleep. "What if I were pretty!" she
thought. "How odd it would be if I were pretty!" And she recalled those
of her companions whose beauty had produced a sensation in the convent,
and she said to herself: "What! Am I to be like Mademoiselle So-and-So?"

The next morning she looked at herself again, not by accident this time,
and she was assailed with doubts: "Where did I get such an idea?" said
she; "no, I am ugly." She had not slept well, that was all, her eyes
were sunken and she was pale. She had not felt very joyous on the
preceding evening in the belief that she was beautiful, but it made her
very sad not to be able to believe in it any longer. She did not look at
herself again, and for more than a fortnight she tried to dress her hair
with her back turned to the mirror.

In the evening, after dinner, she generally embroidered in wool or
did some convent needlework in the drawing-room, and Jean Valjean read
beside her. Once she raised her eyes from her work, and was rendered
quite uneasy by the manner in which her father was gazing at her.

On another occasion, she was passing along the street, and it seemed
to her that some one behind her, whom she did not see, said: "A pretty
woman! but badly dressed." "Bah!" she thought, "he does not mean me.
I am well dressed and ugly." She was then wearing a plush hat and her
merino gown.

At last, one day when she was in the garden, she heard poor old
Toussaint saying: "Do you notice how pretty Cosette is growing, sir?"
Cosette did not hear her father's reply, but Toussaint's words caused
a sort of commotion within her. She fled from the garden, ran up to
her room, flew to the looking-glass,--it was three months since she
had looked at herself,--and gave vent to a cry. She had just dazzled
herself.

She was beautiful and lovely; she could not help agreeing with Toussaint
and her mirror. Her figure was formed, her skin had grown white, her
hair was lustrous, an unaccustomed splendor had been lighted in her blue
eyes. The consciousness of her beauty burst upon her in an instant, like
the sudden advent of daylight; other people noticed it also, Toussaint
had said so, it was evidently she of whom the passer-by had spoken,
there could no longer be any doubt of that; she descended to the garden
again, thinking herself a queen, imagining that she heard the birds
singing, though it was winter, seeing the sky gilded, the sun among
the trees, flowers in the thickets, distracted, wild, in inexpressible
delight.

Jean Valjean, on his side, experienced a deep and undefinable oppression
at heart.

In fact, he had, for some time past, been contemplating with terror that
beauty which seemed to grow more radiant every day on Cosette's sweet
face. The dawn that was smiling for all was gloomy for him.

Cosette had been beautiful for a tolerably long time before she became
aware of it herself. But, from the very first day, that unexpected light
which was rising slowly and enveloping the whole of the young girl's
person, wounded Jean Valjean's sombre eye. He felt that it was a change
in a happy life, a life so happy that he did not dare to move for fear
of disarranging something. This man, who had passed through all manner
of distresses, who was still all bleeding from the bruises of fate, who
had been almost wicked and who had become almost a saint, who, after
having dragged the chain of the galleys, was now dragging the invisible
but heavy chain of indefinite misery, this man whom the law had not
released from its grasp and who could be seized at any moment and
brought back from the obscurity of his virtue to the broad daylight of
public opprobrium, this man accepted all, excused all, pardoned all, and
merely asked of Providence, of man, of the law, of society, of nature,
of the world, one thing, that Cosette might love him!

That Cosette might continue to love him! That God would not prevent
the heart of the child from coming to him, and from remaining with him!
Beloved by Cosette, he felt that he was healed, rested, appeased, loaded
with benefits, recompensed, crowned. Beloved by Cosette, it was well
with him! He asked nothing more! Had any one said to him: "Do you want
anything better?" he would have answered: "No." God might have said to
him: "Do you desire heaven?" and he would have replied: "I should lose
by it."

Everything which could affect this situation, if only on the surface,
made him shudder like the beginning of something new. He had never
known very distinctly himself what the beauty of a woman means; but he
understood instinctively, that it was something terrible.

He gazed with terror on this beauty, which was blossoming out ever more
triumphant and superb beside him, beneath his very eyes, on the innocent
and formidable brow of that child, from the depths of her homeliness, of
his old age, of his misery, of his reprobation.

He said to himself: "How beautiful she is! What is to become of me?"

There, moreover, lay the difference between his tenderness and the
tenderness of a mother. What he beheld with anguish, a mother would have
gazed upon with joy.

The first symptoms were not long in making their appearance.

On the very morrow of the day on which she had said to herself:
"Decidedly I am beautiful!" Cosette began to pay attention to her
toilet. She recalled the remark of that passer-by: "Pretty, but badly
dressed," the breath of an oracle which had passed beside her and had
vanished, after depositing in her heart one of the two germs which are
destined, later on, to fill the whole life of woman, coquetry. Love is
the other.

With faith in her beauty, the whole feminine soul expanded within her.
She conceived a horror for her merinos, and shame for her plush hat. Her
father had never refused her anything. She at once acquired the whole
science of the bonnet, the gown, the mantle, the boot, the cuff, the
stuff which is in fashion, the color which is becoming, that science
which makes of the Parisian woman something so charming, so deep, and so
dangerous. The words heady woman were invented for the Parisienne.

In less than a month, little Cosette, in that Thebaid of the Rue de
Babylone, was not only one of the prettiest, but one of the "best
dressed" women in Paris, which means a great deal more.

She would have liked to encounter her "passer-by," to see what he would
say, and to "teach him a lesson!" The truth is, that she was ravishing
in every respect, and that she distinguished the difference between a
bonnet from Gerard and one from Herbaut in the most marvellous way.

Jean Valjean watched these ravages with anxiety. He who felt that
he could never do anything but crawl, walk at the most, beheld wings
sprouting on Cosette.

Moreover, from the mere inspection of Cosette's toilet, a woman
would have recognized the fact that she had no mother. Certain little
proprieties, certain special conventionalities, were not observed by
Cosette. A mother, for instance, would have told her that a young girl
does not dress in damask.

The first day that Cosette went out in her black damask gown and mantle,
and her white crape bonnet, she took Jean Valjean's arm, gay, radiant,
rosy, proud, dazzling. "Father," she said, "how do you like me in this
guise?" Jean Valjean replied in a voice which resembled the bitter voice
of an envious man: "Charming!" He was the same as usual during their
walk. On their return home, he asked Cosette:--

"Won't you put on that other gown and bonnet again,--you know the ones I
mean?"

This took place in Cosette's chamber. Cosette turned towards the
wardrobe where her cast-off schoolgirl's clothes were hanging.

"That disguise!" said she. "Father, what do you want me to do with it?
Oh no, the idea! I shall never put on those horrors again. With that
machine on my head, I have the air of Madame Mad-dog."

Jean Valjean heaved a deep sigh.

From that moment forth, he noticed that Cosette, who had always
heretofore asked to remain at home, saying: "Father, I enjoy myself more
here with you," now was always asking to go out. In fact, what is the
use of having a handsome face and a delicious costume if one does not
display them?

He also noticed that Cosette had no longer the same taste for the back
garden. Now she preferred the garden, and did not dislike to promenade
back and forth in front of the railed fence. Jean Valjean, who was shy,
never set foot in the garden. He kept to his back yard, like a dog.

Cosette, in gaining the knowledge that she was beautiful, lost the grace
of ignoring it. An exquisite grace, for beauty enhanced by ingenuousness
is ineffable, and nothing is so adorable as a dazzling and innocent
creature who walks along, holding in her hand the key to paradise
without being conscious of it. But what she had lost in ingenuous grace,
she gained in pensive and serious charm. Her whole person, permeated
with the joy of youth, of innocence, and of beauty, breathed forth a
splendid melancholy.

It was at this epoch that Marius, after the lapse of six months, saw her
once more at the Luxembourg.




CHAPTER VI--THE BATTLE BEGUN

Cosette in her shadow, like Marius in his, was all ready to take fire.
Destiny, with its mysterious and fatal patience, slowly drew together
these two beings, all charged and all languishing with the stormy
electricity of passion, these two souls which were laden with love as
two clouds are laden with lightning, and which were bound to overflow
and mingle in a look like the clouds in a flash of fire.

The glance has been so much abused in love romances that it has finally
fallen into disrepute. One hardly dares to say, nowadays, that two
beings fell in love because they looked at each other. That is the way
people do fall in love, nevertheless, and the only way. The rest is
nothing, but the rest comes afterwards. Nothing is more real than these
great shocks which two souls convey to each other by the exchange of
that spark.

At that particular hour when Cosette unconsciously darted that glance
which troubled Marius, Marius had no suspicion that he had also launched
a look which disturbed Cosette.

He caused her the same good and the same evil.

She had been in the habit of seeing him for a long time, and she had
scrutinized him as girls scrutinize and see, while looking elsewhere.
Marius still considered Cosette ugly, when she had already begun to
think Marius handsome. But as he paid no attention to her, the young man
was nothing to her.

Still, she could not refrain from saying to herself that he had
beautiful hair, beautiful eyes, handsome teeth, a charming tone of voice
when she heard him conversing with his comrades, that he held himself
badly when he walked, if you like, but with a grace that was all his
own, that he did not appear to be at all stupid, that his whole person
was noble, gentle, simple, proud, and that, in short, though he seemed
to be poor, yet his air was fine.

On the day when their eyes met at last, and said to each other those
first, obscure, and ineffable things which the glance lisps, Cosette did
not immediately understand. She returned thoughtfully to the house in
the Rue de l'Ouest, where Jean Valjean, according to his custom, had
come to spend six weeks. The next morning, on waking, she thought of
that strange young man, so long indifferent and icy, who now seemed to
pay attention to her, and it did not appear to her that this attention
was the least in the world agreeable to her. She was, on the contrary,
somewhat incensed at this handsome and disdainful individual. A
substratum of war stirred within her. It struck her, and the idea caused
her a wholly childish joy, that she was going to take her revenge at
last.

Knowing that she was beautiful, she was thoroughly conscious, though
in an indistinct fashion, that she possessed a weapon. Women play with
their beauty as children do with a knife. They wound themselves.

The reader will recall Marius' hesitations, his palpitations, his
terrors. He remained on his bench and did not approach. This vexed
Cosette. One day, she said to Jean Valjean: "Father, let us stroll about
a little in that direction." Seeing that Marius did not come to her,
she went to him. In such cases, all women resemble Mahomet. And then,
strange to say, the first symptom of true love in a young man is
timidity; in a young girl it is boldness. This is surprising, and yet
nothing is more simple. It is the two sexes tending to approach each
other and assuming, each the other's qualities.

That day, Cosette's glance drove Marius beside himself, and Marius'
glance set Cosette to trembling. Marius went away confident, and Cosette
uneasy. From that day forth, they adored each other.

The first thing that Cosette felt was a confused and profound
melancholy. It seemed to her that her soul had become black since the
day before. She no longer recognized it. The whiteness of soul in young
girls, which is composed of coldness and gayety, resembles snow. It
melts in love, which is its sun.

Cosette did not know what love was. She had never heard the word uttered
in its terrestrial sense. On the books of profane music which entered
the convent, amour (love) was replaced by tambour (drum) or pandour.
This created enigmas which exercised the imaginations of the big girls,
such as: Ah, how delightful is the drum! or, Pity is not a pandour. But
Cosette had left the convent too early to have occupied herself much
with the "drum." Therefore, she did not know what name to give to what
she now felt. Is any one the less ill because one does not know the name
of one's malady?

She loved with all the more passion because she loved ignorantly. She
did not know whether it was a good thing or a bad thing, useful or
dangerous, eternal or temporary, allowable or prohibited; she loved. She
would have been greatly astonished, had any one said to her: "You do not
sleep? But that is forbidden! You do not eat? Why, that is very bad! You
have oppressions and palpitations of the heart? That must not be! You
blush and turn pale, when a certain being clad in black appears at the
end of a certain green walk? But that is abominable!" She would not have
understood, and she would have replied: "What fault is there of mine in
a matter in which I have no power and of which I know nothing?"

It turned out that the love which presented itself was exactly suited to
the state of her soul. It was a sort of admiration at a distance, a mute
contemplation, the deification of a stranger. It was the apparition of
youth to youth, the dream of nights become a reality yet remaining
a dream, the longed-for phantom realized and made flesh at last, but
having as yet, neither name, nor fault, nor spot, nor exigence, nor
defect; in a word, the distant lover who lingered in the ideal, a
chimaera with a form. Any nearer and more palpable meeting would have
alarmed Cosette at this first stage, when she was still half immersed in
the exaggerated mists of the cloister. She had all the fears of children
and all the fears of nuns combined. The spirit of the convent, with
which she had been permeated for the space of five years, was still in
the process of slow evaporation from her person, and made everything
tremble around her. In this situation he was not a lover, he was not
even an admirer, he was a vision. She set herself to adoring Marius as
something charming, luminous, and impossible.

As extreme innocence borders on extreme coquetry, she smiled at him with
all frankness.

Every day, she looked forward to the hour for their walk with
impatience, she found Marius there, she felt herself unspeakably happy,
and thought in all sincerity that she was expressing her whole thought
when she said to Jean Valjean:--

"What a delicious garden that Luxembourg is!"

Marius and Cosette were in the dark as to one another. They did not
address each other, they did not salute each other, they did not know
each other; they saw each other; and like stars of heaven which are
separated by millions of leagues, they lived by gazing at each other.

It was thus that Cosette gradually became a woman and developed,
beautiful and loving, with a consciousness of her beauty, and in
ignorance of her love. She was a coquette to boot through her ignorance.




CHAPTER VII--TO ONE SADNESS OPPOSE A SADNESS AND A HALF

All situations have their instincts. Old and eternal Mother Nature
warned Jean Valjean in a dim way of the presence of Marius. Jean Valjean
shuddered to the very bottom of his soul. Jean Valjean saw nothing, knew
nothing, and yet he scanned with obstinate attention, the darkness
in which he walked, as though he felt on one side of him something in
process of construction, and on the other, something which was crumbling
away. Marius, also warned, and, in accordance with the deep law of God,
by that same Mother Nature, did all he could to keep out of sight of
"the father." Nevertheless, it came to pass that Jean Valjean sometimes
espied him. Marius' manners were no longer in the least natural. He
exhibited ambiguous prudence and awkward daring. He no longer came quite
close to them as formerly. He seated himself at a distance and pretended
to be reading; why did he pretend that? Formerly he had come in his old
coat, now he wore his new one every day; Jean Valjean was not sure
that he did not have his hair curled, his eyes were very queer, he wore
gloves; in short, Jean Valjean cordially detested this young man.

Cosette allowed nothing to be divined. Without knowing just what was the
matter with her she was convinced that there was something in it, and
that it must be concealed.

There was a coincidence between the taste for the toilet which had
recently come to Cosette, and the habit of new clothes developed by
that stranger which was very repugnant to Jean Valjean. It might be
accidental, no doubt, certainly, but it was a menacing accident.

He never opened his mouth to Cosette about this stranger. One day,
however, he could not refrain from so doing, and, with that vague
despair which suddenly casts the lead into the depths of its despair, he
said to her: "What a very pedantic air that young man has!"

Cosette, but a year before only an indifferent little girl, would have
replied: "Why, no, he is charming." Ten years later, with the love
of Marius in her heart, she would have answered: "A pedant, and
insufferable to the sight! You are right!"--At the moment in life
and the heart which she had then attained, she contented herself with
replying, with supreme calmness: "That young man!"

As though she now beheld him for the first time in her life.

"How stupid I am!" thought Jean Valjean. "She had not noticed him. It is
I who have pointed him out to her."

Oh, simplicity of the old! oh, the depth of children!

It is one of the laws of those fresh years of suffering and trouble, of
those vivacious conflicts between a first love and the first obstacles,
that the young girl does not allow herself to be caught in any trap
whatever, and that the young man falls into every one. Jean Valjean
had instituted an undeclared war against Marius, which Marius, with
the sublime stupidity of his passion and his age, did not divine. Jean
Valjean laid a host of ambushes for him; he changed his hour, he changed
his bench, he forgot his handkerchief, he came alone to the Luxembourg;
Marius dashed headlong into all these snares; and to all the
interrogation marks planted by Jean Valjean in his pathway, he
ingenuously answered "yes." But Cosette remained immured in her apparent
unconcern and in her imperturbable tranquillity, so that Jean Valjean
arrived at the following conclusion: "That ninny is madly in love with
Cosette, but Cosette does not even know that he exists."

None the less did he bear in his heart a mournful tremor. The minute
when Cosette would love might strike at any moment. Does not everything
begin with indifference?

Only once did Cosette make a mistake and alarm him. He rose from his
seat to depart, after a stay of three hours, and she said: "What,
already?"

Jean Valjean had not discontinued his trips to the Luxembourg, as he
did not wish to do anything out of the way, and as, above all things,
he feared to arouse Cosette; but during the hours which were so sweet
to the lovers, while Cosette was sending her smile to the intoxicated
Marius, who perceived nothing else now, and who now saw nothing in all
the world but an adored and radiant face, Jean Valjean was fixing on
Marius flashing and terrible eyes. He, who had finally come to believe
himself incapable of a malevolent feeling, experienced moments when
Marius was present, in which he thought he was becoming savage and
ferocious once more, and he felt the old depths of his soul, which
had formerly contained so much wrath, opening once more and rising up
against that young man. It almost seemed to him that unknown craters
were forming in his bosom.

What! he was there, that creature! What was he there for? He came
creeping about, smelling out, examining, trying! He came, saying: "Hey!
Why not?" He came to prowl about his, Jean Valjean's, life! to prowl
about his happiness, with the purpose of seizing it and bearing it away!

Jean Valjean added: "Yes, that's it! What is he in search of? An
adventure! What does he want? A love affair! A love affair! And I? What!
I have been first, the most wretched of men, and then the most unhappy,
and I have traversed sixty years of life on my knees, I have suffered
everything that man can suffer, I have grown old without having been
young, I have lived without a family, without relatives, without
friends, without life, without children, I have left my blood on every
stone, on every bramble, on every mile-post, along every wall, I have
been gentle, though others have been hard to me, and kind, although
others have been malicious, I have become an honest man once more, in
spite of everything, I have repented of the evil that I have done and
have forgiven the evil that has been done to me, and at the moment
when I receive my recompense, at the moment when it is all over, at the
moment when I am just touching the goal, at the moment when I have what
I desire, it is well, it is good, I have paid, I have earned it, all
this is to take flight, all this will vanish, and I shall lose Cosette,
and I shall lose my life, my joy, my soul, because it has pleased a
great booby to come and lounge at the Luxembourg."

Then his eyes were filled with a sad and extraordinary gleam.

It was no longer a man gazing at a man; it was no longer an enemy
surveying an enemy. It was a dog scanning a thief.

The reader knows the rest. Marius pursued his senseless course. One day
he followed Cosette to the Rue de l'Ouest. Another day he spoke to
the porter. The porter, on his side, spoke, and said to Jean Valjean:
"Monsieur, who is that curious young man who is asking for you?" On the
morrow Jean Valjean bestowed on Marius that glance which Marius at last
perceived. A week later, Jean Valjean had taken his departure. He swore
to himself that he would never again set foot either in the Luxembourg
or in the Rue de l'Ouest. He returned to the Rue Plumet.

Cosette did not complain, she said nothing, she asked no questions, she
did not seek to learn his reasons; she had already reached the point
where she was afraid of being divined, and of betraying herself. Jean
Valjean had no experience of these miseries, the only miseries which
are charming and the only ones with which he was not acquainted; the
consequence was that he did not understand the grave significance of
Cosette's silence.

He merely noticed that she had grown sad, and he grew gloomy. On his
side and on hers, inexperience had joined issue.

Once he made a trial. He asked Cosette:--

"Would you like to come to the Luxembourg?"

A ray illuminated Cosette's pale face.

"Yes," said she.

They went thither. Three months had elapsed. Marius no longer went
there. Marius was not there.

On the following day, Jean Valjean asked Cosette again:--

"Would you like to come to the Luxembourg?"

She replied, sadly and gently:--

"No."

Jean Valjean was hurt by this sadness, and heart-broken at this
gentleness.

What was going on in that mind which was so young and yet already so
impenetrable? What was on its way there within? What was taking place
in Cosette's soul? Sometimes, instead of going to bed, Jean Valjean
remained seated on his pallet, with his head in his hands, and he passed
whole nights asking himself: "What has Cosette in her mind?" and in
thinking of the things that she might be thinking about.

Oh! at such moments, what mournful glances did he cast towards that
cloister, that chaste peak, that abode of angels, that inaccessible
glacier of virtue! How he contemplated, with despairing ecstasy, that
convent garden, full of ignored flowers and cloistered virgins, where
all perfumes and all souls mount straight to heaven! How he adored that
Eden forever closed against him, whence he had voluntarily and madly
emerged! How he regretted his abnegation and his folly in having brought
Cosette back into the world, poor hero of sacrifice, seized and hurled
to the earth by his very self-devotion! How he said to himself, "What
have I done?"

However, nothing of all this was perceptible to Cosette. No ill-temper,
no harshness. His face was always serene and kind. Jean Valjean's
manners were more tender and more paternal than ever. If anything could
have betrayed his lack of joy, it was his increased suavity.

On her side, Cosette languished. She suffered from the absence of Marius
as she had rejoiced in his presence, peculiarly, without exactly being
conscious of it. When Jean Valjean ceased to take her on their customary
strolls, a feminine instinct murmured confusedly, at the bottom of her
heart, that she must not seem to set store on the Luxembourg garden, and
that if this proved to be a matter of indifference to her, her father
would take her thither once more. But days, weeks, months, elapsed. Jean
Valjean had tacitly accepted Cosette's tacit consent. She regretted it.
It was too late. So Marius had disappeared; all was over. The day on
which she returned to the Luxembourg, Marius was no longer there. What
was to be done? Should she ever find him again? She felt an anguish at
her heart, which nothing relieved, and which augmented every day; she no
longer knew whether it was winter or summer, whether it was raining or
shining, whether the birds were singing, whether it was the season for
dahlias or daisies, whether the Luxembourg was more charming than
the Tuileries, whether the linen which the laundress brought home
was starched too much or not enough, whether Toussaint had done "her
marketing" well or ill; and she remained dejected, absorbed, attentive
to but a single thought, her eyes vague and staring as when one gazes by
night at a black and fathomless spot where an apparition has vanished.

However, she did not allow Jean Valjean to perceive anything of this,
except her pallor.

She still wore her sweet face for him.

This pallor sufficed but too thoroughly to trouble Jean Valjean.
Sometimes he asked her:--

"What is the matter with you?"

She replied: "There is nothing the matter with me."

And after a silence, when she divined that he was sad also, she would
add:--

"And you, father--is there anything wrong with you?"

"With me? Nothing," said he.

These two beings who had loved each other so exclusively, and with so
touching an affection, and who had lived so long for each other
now suffered side by side, each on the other's account; without
acknowledging it to each other, without anger towards each other, and
with a smile.




CHAPTER VIII--THE CHAIN-GANG

Jean Valjean was the more unhappy of the two. Youth, even in its
sorrows, always possesses its own peculiar radiance.

At times, Jean Valjean suffered so greatly that he became puerile. It is
the property of grief to cause the childish side of man to reappear. He
had an unconquerable conviction that Cosette was escaping from him. He
would have liked to resist, to retain her, to arouse her enthusiasm by
some external and brilliant matter. These ideas, puerile, as we have
just said, and at the same time senile, conveyed to him, by their very
childishness, a tolerably just notion of the influence of gold lace on
the imaginations of young girls. He once chanced to see a general on
horseback, in full uniform, pass along the street, Comte Coutard, the
commandant of Paris. He envied that gilded man; what happiness it
would be, he said to himself, if he could put on that suit which was an
incontestable thing; and if Cosette could behold him thus, she would be
dazzled, and when he had Cosette on his arm and passed the gates of the
Tuileries, the guard would present arms to him, and that would suffice
for Cosette, and would dispel her idea of looking at young men.

An unforeseen shock was added to these sad reflections.

In the isolated life which they led, and since they had come to dwell
in the Rue Plumet, they had contracted one habit. They sometimes took
a pleasure trip to see the sun rise, a mild species of enjoyment which
befits those who are entering life and those who are quitting it.

For those who love solitude, a walk in the early morning is equivalent
to a stroll by night, with the cheerfulness of nature added. The streets
are deserted and the birds are singing. Cosette, a bird herself, liked
to rise early. These matutinal excursions were planned on the preceding
evening. He proposed, and she agreed. It was arranged like a plot, they
set out before daybreak, and these trips were so many small delights for
Cosette. These innocent eccentricities please young people.

Jean Valjean's inclination led him, as we have seen, to the least
frequented spots, to solitary nooks, to forgotten places. There then
existed, in the vicinity of the barriers of Paris, a sort of poor
meadows, which were almost confounded with the city, where grew in
summer sickly grain, and which, in autumn, after the harvest had been
gathered, presented the appearance, not of having been reaped, but
peeled. Jean Valjean loved to haunt these fields. Cosette was not bored
there. It meant solitude to him and liberty to her. There, she became a
little girl once more, she could run and almost play; she took off her
hat, laid it on Jean Valjean's knees, and gathered bunches of flowers.
She gazed at the butterflies on the flowers, but did not catch them;
gentleness and tenderness are born with love, and the young girl who
cherishes within her breast a trembling and fragile ideal has mercy on
the wing of a butterfly. She wove garlands of poppies, which she placed
on her head, and which, crossed and penetrated with sunlight, glowing
until they flamed, formed for her rosy face a crown of burning embers.

Even after their life had grown sad, they kept up their custom of early
strolls.

One morning in October, therefore, tempted by the serene perfection of
the autumn of 1831, they set out, and found themselves at break of
day near the Barriere du Maine. It was not dawn, it was daybreak; a
delightful and stern moment. A few constellations here and there in the
deep, pale azure, the earth all black, the heavens all white, a quiver
amid the blades of grass, everywhere the mysterious chill of twilight. A
lark, which seemed mingled with the stars, was carolling at a prodigious
height, and one would have declared that that hymn of pettiness calmed
immensity. In the East, the Valde-Grace projected its dark mass on the
clear horizon with the sharpness of steel; Venus dazzlingly brilliant
was rising behind that dome and had the air of a soul making its escape
from a gloomy edifice.

All was peace and silence; there was no one on the road; a few stray
laborers, of whom they caught barely a glimpse, were on their way to
their work along the side-paths.

Jean Valjean was sitting in a cross-walk on some planks deposited at the
gate of a timber-yard. His face was turned towards the highway, his back
towards the light; he had forgotten the sun which was on the point of
rising; he had sunk into one of those profound absorptions in which the
mind becomes concentrated, which imprison even the eye, and which are
equivalent to four walls. There are meditations which may be called
vertical; when one is at the bottom of them, time is required to return
to earth. Jean Valjean had plunged into one of these reveries. He was
thinking of Cosette, of the happiness that was possible if nothing came
between him and her, of the light with which she filled his life, a
light which was but the emanation of her soul. He was almost happy in
his revery. Cosette, who was standing beside him, was gazing at the
clouds as they turned rosy.

All at once Cosette exclaimed: "Father, I should think some one was
coming yonder." Jean Valjean raised his eyes.

Cosette was right. The causeway which leads to the ancient Barriere du
Maine is a prolongation, as the reader knows, of the Rue de Sevres,
and is cut at right angles by the inner boulevard. At the elbow of the
causeway and the boulevard, at the spot where it branches, they heard a
noise which it was difficult to account for at that hour, and a sort of
confused pile made its appearance. Some shapeless thing which was coming
from the boulevard was turning into the road.

It grew larger, it seemed to move in an orderly manner, though it was
bristling and quivering; it seemed to be a vehicle, but its load could
not be distinctly made out. There were horses, wheels, shouts; whips
were cracking. By degrees the outlines became fixed, although bathed
in shadows. It was a vehicle, in fact, which had just turned from the
boulevard into the highway, and which was directing its course towards
the barrier near which sat Jean Valjean; a second, of the same aspect,
followed, then a third, then a fourth; seven chariots made their
appearance in succession, the heads of the horses touching the rear of
the wagon in front. Figures were moving on these vehicles, flashes were
visible through the dusk as though there were naked swords there, a
clanking became audible which resembled the rattling of chains, and as
this something advanced, the sound of voices waxed louder, and it turned
into a terrible thing such as emerges from the cave of dreams.

As it drew nearer, it assumed a form, and was outlined behind the trees
with the pallid hue of an apparition; the mass grew white; the day,
which was slowly dawning, cast a wan light on this swarming heap which
was at once both sepulchral and living, the heads of the figures turned
into the faces of corpses, and this is what it proved to be:--

Seven wagons were driving in a file along the road. The first six were
singularly constructed. They resembled coopers' drays; they consisted
of long ladders placed on two wheels and forming barrows at their rear
extremities. Each dray, or rather let us say, each ladder, was attached
to four horses harnessed tandem. On these ladders strange clusters of
men were being drawn. In the faint light, these men were to be divined
rather than seen. Twenty-four on each vehicle, twelve on a side, back to
back, facing the passers-by, their legs dangling in the air,--this was
the manner in which these men were travelling, and behind their backs
they had something which clanked, and which was a chain, and on their
necks something which shone, and which was an iron collar. Each man had
his collar, but the chain was for all; so that if these four and twenty
men had occasion to alight from the dray and walk, they were seized with
a sort of inexorable unity, and were obliged to wind over the ground
with the chain for a backbone, somewhat after the fashion of millepeds.
In the back and front of each vehicle, two men armed with muskets
stood erect, each holding one end of the chain under his foot. The iron
necklets were square. The seventh vehicle, a huge rack-sided baggage
wagon, without a hood, had four wheels and six horses, and carried a
sonorous pile of iron boilers, cast-iron pots, braziers, and chains,
among which were mingled several men who were pinioned and stretched at
full length, and who seemed to be ill. This wagon, all lattice-work,
was garnished with dilapidated hurdles which appeared to have served for
former punishments. These vehicles kept to the middle of the road. On
each side marched a double hedge of guards of infamous aspect, wearing
three-cornered hats, like the soldiers under the Directory, shabby,
covered with spots and holes, muffled in uniforms of veterans and the
trousers of undertakers' men, half gray, half blue, which were almost
hanging in rags, with red epaulets, yellow shoulder belts, short sabres,
muskets, and cudgels; they were a species of soldier-blackguards.
These myrmidons seemed composed of the abjectness of the beggar and the
authority of the executioner. The one who appeared to be their chief
held a postilion's whip in his hand. All these details, blurred by the
dimness of dawn, became more and more clearly outlined as the light
increased. At the head and in the rear of the convoy rode mounted
gendarmes, serious and with sword in fist.

This procession was so long that when the first vehicle reached the
barrier, the last was barely debauching from the boulevard. A throng,
sprung, it is impossible to say whence, and formed in a twinkling, as
is frequently the case in Paris, pressed forward from both sides of
the road and looked on. In the neighboring lanes the shouts of people
calling to each other and the wooden shoes of market-gardeners hastening
up to gaze were audible.

The men massed upon the drays allowed themselves to be jolted along in
silence. They were livid with the chill of morning. They all wore linen
trousers, and their bare feet were thrust into wooden shoes. The rest
of their costume was a fantasy of wretchedness. Their accoutrements were
horribly incongruous; nothing is more funereal than the harlequin in
rags. Battered felt hats, tarpaulin caps, hideous woollen nightcaps,
and, side by side with a short blouse, a black coat broken at the elbow;
many wore women's headgear, others had baskets on their heads; hairy
breasts were visible, and through the rent in their garments tattooed
designs could be descried; temples of Love, flaming hearts, Cupids;
eruptions and unhealthy red blotches could also be seen. Two or three
had a straw rope attached to the cross-bar of the dray, and suspended
under them like a stirrup, which supported their feet. One of them held
in his hand and raised to his mouth something which had the appearance
of a black stone and which he seemed to be gnawing; it was bread which
he was eating. There were no eyes there which were not either dry,
dulled, or flaming with an evil light. The escort troop cursed, the men
in chains did not utter a syllable; from time to time the sound of
a blow became audible as the cudgels descended on shoulder-blades or
skulls; some of these men were yawning; their rags were terrible;
their feet hung down, their shoulders oscillated, their heads clashed
together, their fetters clanked, their eyes glared ferociously, their
fists clenched or fell open inertly like the hands of corpses; in the
rear of the convoy ran a band of children screaming with laughter.

This file of vehicles, whatever its nature was, was mournful. It
was evident that to-morrow, that an hour hence, a pouring rain might
descend, that it might be followed by another and another, and that
their dilapidated garments would be drenched, that once soaked, these
men would not get dry again, that once chilled, they would not again
get warm, that their linen trousers would be glued to their bones by the
downpour, that the water would fill their shoes, that no lashes from
the whips would be able to prevent their jaws from chattering, that the
chain would continue to bind them by the neck, that their legs would
continue to dangle, and it was impossible not to shudder at the sight
of these human beings thus bound and passive beneath the cold clouds of
autumn, and delivered over to the rain, to the blast, to all the furies
of the air, like trees and stones.

Blows from the cudgel were not omitted even in the case of the sick men,
who lay there knotted with ropes and motionless on the seventh wagon,
and who appeared to have been tossed there like sacks filled with
misery.

Suddenly, the sun made its appearance; the immense light of the Orient
burst forth, and one would have said that it had set fire to all those
ferocious heads. Their tongues were unloosed; a conflagration of grins,
oaths, and songs exploded. The broad horizontal sheet of light severed
the file in two parts, illuminating heads and bodies, leaving feet and
wheels in the obscurity. Thoughts made their appearance on these faces;
it was a terrible moment; visible demons with their masks removed,
fierce souls laid bare. Though lighted up, this wild throng remained in
gloom. Some, who were gay, had in their mouths quills through which they
blew vermin over the crowd, picking out the women; the dawn accentuated
these lamentable profiles with the blackness of its shadows; there
was not one of these creatures who was not deformed by reason of
wretchedness; and the whole was so monstrous that one would have
said that the sun's brilliancy had been changed into the glare of the
lightning. The wagon-load which headed the line had struck up a song,
and were shouting at the top of their voices with a haggard joviality,
a potpourri by Desaugiers, then famous, called The Vestal; the trees
shivered mournfully; in the cross-lanes, countenances of bourgeois
listened in an idiotic delight to these coarse strains droned by
spectres.

All sorts of distress met in this procession as in chaos; here were to
be found the facial angles of every sort of beast, old men, youths,
bald heads, gray beards, cynical monstrosities, sour resignation, savage
grins, senseless attitudes, snouts surmounted by caps, heads like those
of young girls with corkscrew curls on the temples, infantile visages,
and by reason of that, horrible thin skeleton faces, to which death
alone was lacking. On the first cart was a negro, who had been a slave,
in all probability, and who could make a comparison of his chains. The
frightful leveller from below, shame, had passed over these brows; at
that degree of abasement, the last transformations were suffered by all
in their extremest depths, and ignorance, converted into dulness, was
the equal of intelligence converted into despair. There was no choice
possible between these men who appeared to the eye as the flower of the
mud. It was evident that the person who had had the ordering of that
unclean procession had not classified them. These beings had been
fettered and coupled pell-mell, in alphabetical disorder, probably, and
loaded hap-hazard on those carts. Nevertheless, horrors, when grouped
together, always end by evolving a result; all additions of wretched men
give a sum total, each chain exhaled a common soul, and each dray-load
had its own physiognomy. By the side of the one where they were singing,
there was one where they were howling; a third where they were begging;
one could be seen in which they were gnashing their teeth; another load
menaced the spectators, another blasphemed God; the last was as silent
as the tomb. Dante would have thought that he beheld his seven circles
of hell on the march. The march of the damned to their tortures,
performed in sinister wise, not on the formidable and flaming chariot
of the Apocalypse, but, what was more mournful than that, on the gibbet
cart.

One of the guards, who had a hook on the end of his cudgel, made a
pretence from time to time, of stirring up this mass of human filth.
An old woman in the crowd pointed them out to her little boy five years
old, and said to him: "Rascal, let that be a warning to you!"

As the songs and blasphemies increased, the man who appeared to be the
captain of the escort cracked his whip, and at that signal a fearful
dull and blind flogging, which produced the sound of hail, fell upon the
seven dray-loads; many roared and foamed at the mouth; which redoubled
the delight of the street urchins who had hastened up, a swarm of flies
on these wounds.

Jean Valjean's eyes had assumed a frightful expression. They were no
longer eyes; they were those deep and glassy objects which replace the
glance in the case of certain wretched men, which seem unconscious
of reality, and in which flames the reflection of terrors and of
catastrophes. He was not looking at a spectacle, he was seeing a vision.
He tried to rise, to flee, to make his escape; he could not move his
feet. Sometimes, the things that you see seize upon you and hold you
fast. He remained nailed to the spot, petrified, stupid, asking himself,
athwart confused and inexpressible anguish, what this sepulchral
persecution signified, and whence had come that pandemonium which was
pursuing him. All at once, he raised his hand to his brow, a gesture
habitual to those whose memory suddenly returns; he remembered that this
was, in fact, the usual itinerary, that it was customary to make this
detour in order to avoid all possibility of encountering royalty on the
road to Fontainebleau, and that, five and thirty years before, he had
himself passed through that barrier.

Cosette was no less terrified, but in a different way. She did not
understand; what she beheld did not seem to her to be possible; at
length she cried:--

"Father! What are those men in those carts?"

Jean Valjean replied: "Convicts."

"Whither are they going?"

"To the galleys."

At that moment, the cudgelling, multiplied by a hundred hands, became
zealous, blows with the flat of the sword were mingled with it, it was a
perfect storm of whips and clubs; the convicts bent before it, a hideous
obedience was evoked by the torture, and all held their peace, darting
glances like chained wolves.

Cosette trembled in every limb; she resumed:--

"Father, are they still men?"

"Sometimes," answered the unhappy man.

It was the chain-gang, in fact, which had set out before daybreak from
Bicetre, and had taken the road to Mans in order to avoid Fontainebleau,
where the King then was. This caused the horrible journey to last three
or four days longer; but torture may surely be prolonged with the object
of sparing the royal personage a sight of it.

Jean Valjean returned home utterly overwhelmed. Such encounters are
shocks, and the memory that they leave behind them resembles a thorough
shaking up.

Nevertheless, Jean Valjean did not observe that, on his way back to
the Rue de Babylone with Cosette, the latter was plying him with other
questions on the subject of what they had just seen; perhaps he was
too much absorbed in his own dejection to notice her words and reply to
them. But when Cosette was leaving him in the evening, to betake herself
to bed, he heard her say in a low voice, and as though talking to
herself: "It seems to me, that if I were to find one of those men in my
pathway, oh, my God, I should die merely from the sight of him close at
hand."

Fortunately, chance ordained that on the morrow of that tragic day,
there was some official solemnity apropos of I know not what,--fetes in
Paris, a review in the Champ de Mars, jousts on the Seine, theatrical
performances in the Champs-Elysees, fireworks at the Arc de l'Etoile,
illuminations everywhere. Jean Valjean did violence to his habits, and
took Cosette to see these rejoicings, for the purpose of diverting her
from the memory of the day before, and of effacing, beneath the smiling
tumult of all Paris, the abominable thing which had passed before her.
The review with which the festival was spiced made the presence of
uniforms perfectly natural; Jean Valjean donned his uniform of a
national guard with the vague inward feeling of a man who is betaking
himself to shelter. However, this trip seemed to attain its object.
Cosette, who made it her law to please her father, and to whom,
moreover, all spectacles were a novelty, accepted this diversion
with the light and easy good grace of youth, and did not pout too
disdainfully at that flutter of enjoyment called a public fete; so that
Jean Valjean was able to believe that he had succeeded, and that no
trace of that hideous vision remained.

Some days later, one morning, when the sun was shining brightly, and
they were both on the steps leading to the garden, another infraction of
the rules which Jean Valjean seemed to have imposed upon himself, and
to the custom of remaining in her chamber which melancholy had caused
Cosette to adopt, Cosette, in a wrapper, was standing erect in that
negligent attire of early morning which envelops young girls in an
adorable way and which produces the effect of a cloud drawn over a star;
and, with her head bathed in light, rosy after a good sleep, submitting
to the gentle glances of the tender old man, she was picking a daisy
to pieces. Cosette did not know the delightful legend, I love a little,
passionately, etc.--who was there who could have taught her? She was
handling the flower instinctively, innocently, without a suspicion that
to pluck a daisy apart is to do the same by a heart. If there were a
fourth, and smiling Grace called Melancholy, she would have worn the air
of that Grace. Jean Valjean was fascinated by the contemplation of those
tiny fingers on that flower, and forgetful of everything in the radiance
emitted by that child. A red-breast was warbling in the thicket, on one
side. White cloudlets floated across the sky, so gayly, that one would
have said that they had just been set at liberty. Cosette went on
attentively tearing the leaves from her flower; she seemed to be
thinking about something; but whatever it was, it must be something
charming; all at once she turned her head over her shoulder with the
delicate languor of a swan, and said to Jean Valjean: "Father, what are
the galleys like?"




BOOK FOURTH.--SUCCOR FROM BELOW MAY TURN OUT TO BE SUCCOR FROM ON HIGH




CHAPTER I--A WOUND WITHOUT, HEALING WITHIN

Thus their life clouded over by degrees.

But one diversion, which had formerly been a happiness, remained to
them, which was to carry bread to those who were hungry, and clothing
to those who were cold. Cosette often accompanied Jean Valjean on these
visits to the poor, on which they recovered some remnants of their
former free intercourse; and sometimes, when the day had been a good
one, and they had assisted many in distress, and cheered and warmed many
little children, Cosette was rather merry in the evening. It was at this
epoch that they paid their visit to the Jondrette den.

On the day following that visit, Jean Valjean made his appearance in the
pavilion in the morning, calm as was his wont, but with a large wound on
his left arm which was much inflamed, and very angry, which resembled a
burn, and which he explained in some way or other. This wound resulted
in his being detained in the house for a month with fever. He would not
call in a doctor. When Cosette urged him, "Call the dog-doctor," said
he.

Cosette dressed the wound morning and evening with so divine an air and
such angelic happiness at being of use to him, that Jean Valjean felt
all his former joy returning, his fears and anxieties dissipating, and
he gazed at Cosette, saying: "Oh! what a kindly wound! Oh! what a good
misfortune!"

Cosette on perceiving that her father was ill, had deserted the pavilion
and again taken a fancy to the little lodging and the back courtyard.
She passed nearly all her days beside Jean Valjean and read to him
the books which he desired. Generally they were books of travel. Jean
Valjean was undergoing a new birth; his happiness was reviving in these
ineffable rays; the Luxembourg, the prowling young stranger, Cosette's
coldness,--all these clouds upon his soul were growing dim. He had
reached the point where he said to himself: "I imagined all that. I am
an old fool."

His happiness was so great that the horrible discovery of the
Thenardiers made in the Jondrette hovel, unexpected as it was, had,
after a fashion, glided over him unnoticed. He had succeeded in making
his escape; all trace of him was lost--what more did he care for! he
only thought of those wretched beings to pity them. "Here they are in
prison, and henceforth they will be incapacitated for doing any harm,"
he thought, "but what a lamentable family in distress!"

As for the hideous vision of the Barriere du Maine, Cosette had not
referred to it again.

Sister Sainte-Mechtilde had taught Cosette music in the convent; Cosette
had the voice of a linnet with a soul, and sometimes, in the evening,
in the wounded man's humble abode, she warbled melancholy songs which
delighted Jean Valjean.

Spring came; the garden was so delightful at that season of the year,
that Jean Valjean said to Cosette:--

"You never go there; I want you to stroll in it."

"As you like, father," said Cosette.

And for the sake of obeying her father, she resumed her walks in the
garden, generally alone, for, as we have mentioned, Jean Valjean, who
was probably afraid of being seen through the fence, hardly ever went
there.

Jean Valjean's wound had created a diversion.

When Cosette saw that her father was suffering less, that he was
convalescing, and that he appeared to be happy, she experienced a
contentment which she did not even perceive, so gently and naturally
had it come. Then, it was in the month of March, the days were growing
longer, the winter was departing, the winter always bears away with it a
portion of our sadness; then came April, that daybreak of summer, fresh
as dawn always is, gay like every childhood; a little inclined to weep
at times like the new-born being that it is. In that month, nature
has charming gleams which pass from the sky, from the trees, from the
meadows and the flowers into the heart of man.

Cosette was still too young to escape the penetrating influence of that
April joy which bore so strong a resemblance to herself. Insensibly, and
without her suspecting the fact, the blackness departed from her spirit.
In spring, sad souls grow light, as light falls into cellars at midday.
Cosette was no longer sad. However, though this was so, she did not
account for it to herself. In the morning, about ten o'clock, after
breakfast, when she had succeeded in enticing her father into the garden
for a quarter of an hour, and when she was pacing up and down in the
sunlight in front of the steps, supporting his left arm for him, she did
not perceive that she laughed every moment and that she was happy.

Jean Valjean, intoxicated, beheld her growing fresh and rosy once more.

"Oh! What a good wound!" he repeated in a whisper.

And he felt grateful to the Thenardiers.

His wound once healed, he resumed his solitary twilight strolls.

It is a mistake to suppose that a person can stroll alone in that
fashion in the uninhabited regions of Paris without meeting with some
adventure.




CHAPTER II--MOTHER PLUTARQUE FINDS NO DIFFICULTY IN EXPLAINING A
PHENOMENON

One evening, little Gavroche had had nothing to eat; he remembered
that he had not dined on the preceding day either; this was becoming
tiresome. He resolved to make an effort to secure some supper. He
strolled out beyond the Salpetriere into deserted regions; that is
where windfalls are to be found; where there is no one, one always
finds something. He reached a settlement which appeared to him to be the
village of Austerlitz.

In one of his preceding lounges he had noticed there an old garden
haunted by an old man and an old woman, and in that garden, a passable
apple-tree. Beside the apple-tree stood a sort of fruit-house, which was
not securely fastened, and where one might contrive to get an apple. One
apple is a supper; one apple is life. That which was Adam's ruin might
prove Gavroche's salvation. The garden abutted on a solitary, unpaved
lane, bordered with brushwood while awaiting the arrival of houses; the
garden was separated from it by a hedge.

Gavroche directed his steps towards this garden; he found the lane, he
recognized the apple-tree, he verified the fruit-house, he examined the
hedge; a hedge means merely one stride. The day was declining, there was
not even a cat in the lane, the hour was propitious. Gavroche began
the operation of scaling the hedge, then suddenly paused. Some one was
talking in the garden. Gavroche peeped through one of the breaks in the
hedge.

[Illustration: Succor from Below 4b4-1-succor-from-below]

A couple of paces distant, at the foot of the hedge on the other side,
exactly at the point where the gap which he was meditating would have
been made, there was a sort of recumbent stone which formed a bench, and
on this bench was seated the old man of the garden, while the old woman
was standing in front of him. The old woman was grumbling. Gavroche, who
was not very discreet, listened.

"Monsieur Mabeuf!" said the old woman.

"Mabeuf!" thought Gavroche, "that name is a perfect farce."

The old man who was thus addressed, did not stir. The old woman
repeated:--

"Monsieur Mabeuf!"

The old man, without raising his eyes from the ground, made up his mind
to answer:--

"What is it, Mother Plutarque?"

"Mother Plutarque!" thought Gavroche, "another farcical name."

Mother Plutarque began again, and the old man was forced to accept the
conversation:--

"The landlord is not pleased."

"Why?"

"We owe three quarters rent."

"In three months, we shall owe him for four quarters."

"He says that he will turn you out to sleep."

"I will go."

"The green-grocer insists on being paid. She will no longer leave her
fagots. What will you warm yourself with this winter? We shall have no
wood."

"There is the sun."

"The butcher refuses to give credit; he will not let us have any more
meat."

"That is quite right. I do not digest meat well. It is too heavy."

"What shall we have for dinner?"

"Bread."

"The baker demands a settlement, and says, 'no money, no bread.'"

"That is well."

"What will you eat?"

"We have apples in the apple-room."

"But, Monsieur, we can't live like that without money."

"I have none."

The old woman went away, the old man remained alone. He fell into
thought. Gavroche became thoughtful also. It was almost dark.

The first result of Gavroche's meditation was, that instead of scaling
the hedge, he crouched down under it. The branches stood apart a little
at the foot of the thicket.

"Come," exclaimed Gavroche mentally, "here's a nook!" and he curled up
in it. His back was almost in contact with Father Mabeuf's bench. He
could hear the octogenarian breathe.

Then, by way of dinner, he tried to sleep.

It was a cat-nap, with one eye open. While he dozed, Gavroche kept on
the watch.

The twilight pallor of the sky blanched the earth, and the lane formed a
livid line between two rows of dark bushes.

All at once, in this whitish band, two figures made their appearance.
One was in front, the other some distance in the rear.

"There come two creatures," muttered Gavroche.

The first form seemed to be some elderly bourgeois, who was bent and
thoughtful, dressed more than plainly, and who was walking slowly
because of his age, and strolling about in the open evening air.

The second was straight, firm, slender. It regulated its pace by that
of the first; but in the voluntary slowness of its gait, suppleness
and agility were discernible. This figure had also something fierce and
disquieting about it, the whole shape was that of what was then called
an elegant; the hat was of good shape, the coat black, well cut,
probably of fine cloth, and well fitted in at the waist. The head was
held erect with a sort of robust grace, and beneath the hat the pale
profile of a young man could be made out in the dim light. The profile
had a rose in its mouth. This second form was well known to Gavroche; it
was Montparnasse.

He could have told nothing about the other, except that he was a
respectable old man.

Gavroche immediately began to take observations.

One of these two pedestrians evidently had a project connected with
the other. Gavroche was well placed to watch the course of events. The
bedroom had turned into a hiding-place at a very opportune moment.

Montparnasse on the hunt at such an hour, in such a place, betokened
something threatening. Gavroche felt his gamin's heart moved with
compassion for the old man.

What was he to do? Interfere? One weakness coming to the aid of another!
It would be merely a laughing matter for Montparnasse. Gavroche did not
shut his eyes to the fact that the old man, in the first place, and the
child in the second, would make but two mouthfuls for that redoubtable
ruffian eighteen years of age.

While Gavroche was deliberating, the attack took place, abruptly and
hideously. The attack of the tiger on the wild ass, the attack of the
spider on the fly. Montparnasse suddenly tossed away his rose, bounded
upon the old man, seized him by the collar, grasped and clung to him,
and Gavroche with difficulty restrained a scream. A moment later one of
these men was underneath the other, groaning, struggling, with a knee
of marble upon his breast. Only, it was not just what Gavroche had
expected. The one who lay on the earth was Montparnasse; the one who
was on top was the old man. All this took place a few paces distant from
Gavroche.

The old man had received the shock, had returned it, and that in such
a terrible fashion, that in a twinkling, the assailant and the assailed
had exchanged roles.

"Here's a hearty veteran!" thought Gavroche.

He could not refrain from clapping his hands. But it was applause
wasted. It did not reach the combatants, absorbed and deafened as they
were, each by the other, as their breath mingled in the struggle.

Silence ensued. Montparnasse ceased his struggles. Gavroche indulged in
this aside: "Can he be dead!"

The goodman had not uttered a word, nor given vent to a cry. He rose to
his feet, and Gavroche heard him say to Montparnasse:--

"Get up."

Montparnasse rose, but the goodman held him fast. Montparnasse's
attitude was the humiliated and furious attitude of the wolf who has
been caught by a sheep.

Gavroche looked on and listened, making an effort to reinforce his eyes
with his ears. He was enjoying himself immensely.

He was repaid for his conscientious anxiety in the character of a
spectator. He was able to catch on the wing a dialogue which borrowed
from the darkness an indescribably tragic accent. The goodman
questioned, Montparnasse replied.

"How old are you?"

"Nineteen."

"You are strong and healthy. Why do you not work?"

"It bores me."

"What is your trade?"

"An idler."

"Speak seriously. Can anything be done for you? What would you like to
be?"

"A thief."

A pause ensued. The old man seemed absorbed in profound thought. He
stood motionless, and did not relax his hold on Montparnasse.

Every moment the vigorous and agile young ruffian indulged in the
twitchings of a wild beast caught in a snare. He gave a jerk, tried a
crook of the knee, twisted his limbs desperately, and made efforts to
escape.

The old man did not appear to notice it, and held both his arms with one
hand, with the sovereign indifference of absolute force.

The old man's revery lasted for some time, then, looking steadily at
Montparnasse, he addressed to him in a gentle voice, in the midst of the
darkness where they stood, a solemn harangue, of which Gavroche did not
lose a single syllable:--

"My child, you are entering, through indolence, on one of the most
laborious of lives. Ah! You declare yourself to be an idler! prepare to
toil. There is a certain formidable machine, have you seen it? It is
the rolling-mill. You must be on your guard against it, it is crafty
and ferocious; if it catches hold of the skirt of your coat, you will be
drawn in bodily. That machine is laziness. Stop while there is yet time,
and save yourself! Otherwise, it is all over with you; in a short time
you will be among the gearing. Once entangled, hope for nothing more.
Toil, lazybones! there is no more repose for you! The iron hand of
implacable toil has seized you. You do not wish to earn your living, to
have a task, to fulfil a duty! It bores you to be like other men? Well!
You will be different. Labor is the law; he who rejects it will find
ennui his torment. You do not wish to be a workingman, you will be a
slave. Toil lets go of you on one side only to grasp you again on the
other. You do not desire to be its friend, you shall be its negro slave.
Ah! You would have none of the honest weariness of men, you shall have
the sweat of the damned. Where others sing, you will rattle in your
throat. You will see afar off, from below, other men at work; it will
seem to you that they are resting. The laborer, the harvester, the
sailor, the blacksmith, will appear to you in glory like the blessed
spirits in paradise. What radiance surrounds the forge! To guide the
plough, to bind the sheaves, is joy. The bark at liberty in the wind,
what delight! Do you, lazy idler, delve, drag on, roll, march! Drag your
halter. You are a beast of burden in the team of hell! Ah! To do nothing
is your object. Well, not a week, not a day, not an hour shall you have
free from oppression. You will be able to lift nothing without anguish.
Every minute that passes will make your muscles crack. What is a feather
to others will be a rock to you. The simplest things will become steep
acclivities. Life will become monstrous all about you. To go, to come,
to breathe, will be just so many terrible labors. Your lungs will
produce on you the effect of weighing a hundred pounds. Whether you
shall walk here rather than there, will become a problem that must be
solved. Any one who wants to go out simply gives his door a push, and
there he is in the open air. If you wish to go out, you will be obliged
to pierce your wall. What does every one who wants to step into the
street do? He goes down stairs; you will tear up your sheets, little
by little you will make of them a rope, then you will climb out of your
window, and you will suspend yourself by that thread over an abyss, and
it will be night, amid storm, rain, and the hurricane, and if the rope
is too short, but one way of descending will remain to you, to fall. To
drop hap-hazard into the gulf, from an unknown height, on what? On what
is beneath, on the unknown. Or you will crawl up a chimney-flue, at the
risk of burning; or you will creep through a sewer-pipe, at the risk of
drowning; I do not speak of the holes that you will be obliged to mask,
of the stones which you will have to take up and replace twenty times a
day, of the plaster that you will have to hide in your straw pallet. A
lock presents itself; the bourgeois has in his pocket a key made by a
locksmith. If you wish to pass out, you will be condemned to execute a
terrible work of art; you will take a large sou, you will cut it in
two plates; with what tools? You will have to invent them. That is your
business. Then you will hollow out the interior of these plates, taking
great care of the outside, and you will make on the edges a thread, so
that they can be adjusted one upon the other like a box and its cover.
The top and bottom thus screwed together, nothing will be suspected. To
the overseers it will be only a sou; to you it will be a box. What will
you put in this box? A small bit of steel. A watch-spring, in which you
will have cut teeth, and which will form a saw. With this saw, as long
as a pin, and concealed in a sou, you will cut the bolt of the lock, you
will sever bolts, the padlock of your chain, and the bar at your window,
and the fetter on your leg. This masterpiece finished, this prodigy
accomplished, all these miracles of art, address, skill, and patience
executed, what will be your recompense if it becomes known that you
are the author? The dungeon. There is your future. What precipices are
idleness and pleasure! Do you know that to do nothing is a melancholy
resolution? To live in idleness on the property of society! to be
useless, that is to say, pernicious! This leads straight to the depth
of wretchedness. Woe to the man who desires to be a parasite! He will
become vermin! Ah! So it does not please you to work? Ah! You have but
one thought, to drink well, to eat well, to sleep well. You will drink
water, you will eat black bread, you will sleep on a plank with a fetter
whose cold touch you will feel on your flesh all night long, riveted to
your limbs. You will break those fetters, you will flee. That is well.
You will crawl on your belly through the brushwood, and you will eat
grass like the beasts of the forest. And you will be recaptured. And
then you will pass years in a dungeon, riveted to a wall, groping for
your jug that you may drink, gnawing at a horrible loaf of darkness
which dogs would not touch, eating beans that the worms have eaten
before you. You will be a wood-louse in a cellar. Ah! Have pity on
yourself, you miserable young child, who were sucking at nurse less
than twenty years ago, and who have, no doubt, a mother still alive! I
conjure you, listen to me, I entreat you. You desire fine black cloth,
varnished shoes, to have your hair curled and sweet-smelling oils on
your locks, to please low women, to be handsome. You will be shaven
clean, and you will wear a red blouse and wooden shoes. You want rings
on your fingers, you will have an iron necklet on your neck. If you
glance at a woman, you will receive a blow. And you will enter there at
the age of twenty. And you will come out at fifty! You will enter young,
rosy, fresh, with brilliant eyes, and all your white teeth, and your
handsome, youthful hair; you will come out broken, bent, wrinkled,
toothless, horrible, with white locks! Ah! my poor child, you are on the
wrong road; idleness is counselling you badly; the hardest of all work
is thieving. Believe me, do not undertake that painful profession of
an idle man. It is not comfortable to become a rascal. It is less
disagreeable to be an honest man. Now go, and ponder on what I have said
to you. By the way, what did you want of me? My purse? Here it is."

And the old man, releasing Montparnasse, put his purse in the latter's
hand; Montparnasse weighed it for a moment, after which he allowed it to
slide gently into the back pocket of his coat, with the same mechanical
precaution as though he had stolen it.

All this having been said and done, the goodman turned his back and
tranquilly resumed his stroll.

"The blockhead!" muttered Montparnasse.

Who was this goodman? The reader has, no doubt, already divined.

Montparnasse watched him with amazement, as he disappeared in the dusk.
This contemplation was fatal to him.

While the old man was walking away, Gavroche drew near.

Gavroche had assured himself, with a sidelong glance, that Father Mabeuf
was still sitting on his bench, probably sound asleep. Then the gamin
emerged from his thicket, and began to crawl after Montparnasse in the
dark, as the latter stood there motionless. In this manner he came up
to Montparnasse without being seen or heard, gently insinuated his hand
into the back pocket of that frock-coat of fine black cloth, seized the
purse, withdrew his hand, and having recourse once more to his crawling,
he slipped away like an adder through the shadows. Montparnasse, who
had no reason to be on his guard, and who was engaged in thought for the
first time in his life, perceived nothing. When Gavroche had once more
attained the point where Father Mabeuf was, he flung the purse over the
hedge, and fled as fast as his legs would carry him.

The purse fell on Father Mabeuf's foot. This commotion roused him.

He bent over and picked up the purse.

He did not understand in the least, and opened it.

The purse had two compartments; in one of them there was some small
change; in the other lay six napoleons.

M. Mabeuf, in great alarm, referred the matter to his housekeeper.

"That has fallen from heaven," said Mother Plutarque.




BOOK FIFTH.--THE END OF WHICH DOES NOT RESEMBLE THE BEGINNING




CHAPTER I--SOLITUDE AND THE BARRACKS COMBINED

Cosette's grief, which had been so poignant and lively four or five
months previously, had, without her being conscious of the fact, entered
upon its convalescence. Nature, spring, youth, love for her father,
the gayety of the birds and flowers, caused something almost resembling
forgetfulness to filter gradually, drop by drop, into that soul, which
was so virgin and so young. Was the fire wholly extinct there? Or was
it merely that layers of ashes had formed? The truth is, that she hardly
felt the painful and burning spot any longer.

One day she suddenly thought of Marius: "Why!" said she, "I no longer
think of him."

That same week, she noticed a very handsome officer of lancers, with
a wasp-like waist, a delicious uniform, the cheeks of a young girl, a
sword under his arm, waxed mustaches, and a glazed schapka, passing the
gate. Moreover, he had light hair, prominent blue eyes, a round face,
was vain, insolent and good-looking; quite the reverse of Marius. He
had a cigar in his mouth. Cosette thought that this officer doubtless
belonged to the regiment in barracks in the Rue de Babylone.

On the following day, she saw him pass again. She took note of the hour.

From that time forth, was it chance? she saw him pass nearly every day.

The officer's comrades perceived that there was, in that "badly kept"
garden, behind that malicious rococo fence, a very pretty creature,
who was almost always there when the handsome lieutenant,--who is not
unknown to the reader, and whose name was Theodule Gillenormand,--passed
by.

"See here!" they said to him, "there's a little creature there who is
making eyes at you, look."

"Have I the time," replied the lancer, "to look at all the girls who
look at me?"

This was at the precise moment when Marius was descending heavily
towards agony, and was saying: "If I could but see her before I
die!"--Had his wish been realized, had he beheld Cosette at that moment
gazing at the lancer, he would not have been able to utter a word, and
he would have expired with grief.

Whose fault was it? No one's.

Marius possessed one of those temperaments which bury themselves in
sorrow and there abide; Cosette was one of those persons who plunge into
sorrow and emerge from it again.

Cosette was, moreover, passing through that dangerous period, the fatal
phase of feminine revery abandoned to itself, in which the isolated
heart of a young girl resembles the tendrils of the vine which cling,
as chance directs, to the capital of a marble column or to the post of
a wine-shop: A rapid and decisive moment, critical for every orphan, be
she rich or poor, for wealth does not prevent a bad choice; misalliances
are made in very high circles, real misalliance is that of souls; and as
many an unknown young man, without name, without birth, without fortune,
is a marble column which bears up a temple of grand sentiments and grand
ideas, so such and such a man of the world satisfied and opulent, who
has polished boots and varnished words, if looked at not outside, but
inside, a thing which is reserved for his wife, is nothing more than a
block obscurely haunted by violent, unclean, and vinous passions; the
post of a drinking-shop.

What did Cosette's soul contain? Passion calmed or lulled to sleep;
something limpid, brilliant, troubled to a certain depth, and gloomy
lower down. The image of the handsome officer was reflected in
the surface. Did a souvenir linger in the depths?--Quite at the
bottom?--Possibly. Cosette did not know.

A singular incident supervened.




CHAPTER II--COSETTE'S APPREHENSIONS

During the first fortnight in April, Jean Valjean took a journey. This,
as the reader knows, happened from time to time, at very long intervals.
He remained absent a day or two days at the utmost. Where did he go? No
one knew, not even Cosette. Once only, on the occasion of one of these
departures, she had accompanied him in a hackney-coach as far as a
little blind-alley at the corner of which she read: Impasse de la
Planchette. There he alighted, and the coach took Cosette back to the
Rue de Babylone. It was usually when money was lacking in the house that
Jean Valjean took these little trips.

So Jean Valjean was absent. He had said: "I shall return in three days."

That evening, Cosette was alone in the drawing-room. In order to get
rid of her ennui, she had opened her piano-organ, and had begun to sing,
accompanying herself the while, the chorus from Euryanthe: "Hunters
astray in the wood!" which is probably the most beautiful thing in all
the sphere of music. When she had finished, she remained wrapped in
thought.

All at once, it seemed to her that she heard the sound of footsteps in
the garden.

It could not be her father, he was absent; it could not be Toussaint,
she was in bed, and it was ten o'clock at night.

She stepped to the shutter of the drawing-room, which was closed, and
laid her ear against it.

It seemed to her that it was the tread of a man, and that he was walking
very softly.

She mounted rapidly to the first floor, to her own chamber, opened a
small wicket in her shutter, and peeped into the garden. The moon was at
the full. Everything could be seen as plainly as by day.

There was no one there.

She opened the window. The garden was absolutely calm, and all that was
visible was that the street was deserted as usual.

Cosette thought that she had been mistaken. She thought that she had
heard a noise. It was a hallucination produced by the melancholy and
magnificent chorus of Weber, which lays open before the mind terrified
depths, which trembles before the gaze like a dizzy forest, and in which
one hears the crackling of dead branches beneath the uneasy tread of the
huntsmen of whom one catches a glimpse through the twilight.

She thought no more about it.

Moreover, Cosette was not very timid by nature. There flowed in her
veins some of the blood of the bohemian and the adventuress who runs
barefoot. It will be remembered that she was more of a lark than a dove.
There was a foundation of wildness and bravery in her.

On the following day, at an earlier hour, towards nightfall, she was
strolling in the garden. In the midst of the confused thoughts which
occupied her, she fancied that she caught for an instant a sound similar
to that of the preceding evening, as though some one were walking
beneath the trees in the dusk, and not very far from her; but she told
herself that nothing so closely resembles a step on the grass as the
friction of two branches which have moved from side to side, and she
paid no heed to it. Besides, she could see nothing.

She emerged from "the thicket"; she had still to cross a small lawn to
regain the steps.

The moon, which had just risen behind her, cast Cosette's shadow in
front of her upon this lawn, as she came out from the shrubbery.

Cosette halted in alarm.

Beside her shadow, the moon outlined distinctly upon the turf another
shadow, which was particularly startling and terrible, a shadow which
had a round hat.

It was the shadow of a man, who must have been standing on the border of
the clump of shrubbery, a few paces in the rear of Cosette.

She stood for a moment without the power to speak, or cry, or call, or
stir, or turn her head.

Then she summoned up all her courage, and turned round resolutely.

There was no one there.

She glanced on the ground. The figure had disappeared.

She re-entered the thicket, searched the corners boldly, went as far as
the gate, and found nothing.

She felt herself absolutely chilled with terror. Was this another
hallucination? What! Two days in succession! One hallucination might
pass, but two hallucinations? The disquieting point about it was, that
the shadow had assuredly not been a phantom. Phantoms do not wear round
hats.

On the following day Jean Valjean returned. Cosette told him what she
thought she had heard and seen. She wanted to be reassured and to see
her father shrug his shoulders and say to her: "You are a little goose."

Jean Valjean grew anxious.

"It cannot be anything," said he.

He left her under some pretext, and went into the garden, and she saw
him examining the gate with great attention.

During the night she woke up; this time she was sure, and she distinctly
heard some one walking close to the flight of steps beneath her window.
She ran to her little wicket and opened it. In point of fact, there
was a man in the garden, with a large club in his hand. Just as she
was about to scream, the moon lighted up the man's profile. It was her
father. She returned to her bed, saying to herself: "He is very uneasy!"

Jean Valjean passed that night and the two succeeding nights in the
garden. Cosette saw him through the hole in her shutter.

On the third night, the moon was on the wane, and had begun to rise
later; at one o'clock in the morning, possibly, she heard a loud burst
of laughter and her father's voice calling her:--

"Cosette!"

She jumped out of bed, threw on her dressing-gown, and opened her
window.

Her father was standing on the grass-plot below.

"I have waked you for the purpose of reassuring you," said he; "look,
there is your shadow with the round hat."

And he pointed out to her on the turf a shadow cast by the moon, and
which did indeed, bear considerable resemblance to the spectre of a man
wearing a round hat. It was the shadow produced by a chimney-pipe of
sheet iron, with a hood, which rose above a neighboring roof.

Cosette joined in his laughter, all her lugubrious suppositions were
allayed, and the next morning, as she was at breakfast with her father,
she made merry over the sinister garden haunted by the shadows of iron
chimney-pots.

Jean Valjean became quite tranquil once more; as for Cosette, she did
not pay much attention to the question whether the chimney-pot was
really in the direction of the shadow which she had seen, or thought she
had seen, and whether the moon had been in the same spot in the sky.

She did not question herself as to the peculiarity of a chimney-pot
which is afraid of being caught in the act, and which retires when some
one looks at its shadow, for the shadow had taken the alarm when Cosette
had turned round, and Cosette had thought herself very sure of this.
Cosette's serenity was fully restored. The proof appeared to her to
be complete, and it quite vanished from her mind, whether there could
possibly be any one walking in the garden during the evening or at
night.

A few days later, however, a fresh incident occurred.




CHAPTER III--ENRICHED WITH COMMENTARIES BY TOUSSAINT

In the garden, near the railing on the street, there was a stone bench,
screened from the eyes of the curious by a plantation of yoke-elms,
but which could, in case of necessity, be reached by an arm from the
outside, past the trees and the gate.

One evening during that same month of April, Jean Valjean had gone out;
Cosette had seated herself on this bench after sundown. The breeze was
blowing briskly in the trees, Cosette was meditating; an objectless
sadness was taking possession of her little by little, that invincible
sadness evoked by the evening, and which arises, perhaps, who knows,
from the mystery of the tomb which is ajar at that hour.

Perhaps Fantine was within that shadow.

Cosette rose, slowly made the tour of the garden, walking on the
grass drenched in dew, and saying to herself, through the species of
melancholy somnambulism in which she was plunged: "Really, one needs
wooden shoes for the garden at this hour. One takes cold."

She returned to the bench.

As she was about to resume her seat there, she observed on the spot
which she had quitted, a tolerably large stone which had, evidently, not
been there a moment before.

Cosette gazed at the stone, asking herself what it meant. All at once
the idea occurred to her that the stone had not reached the bench all by
itself, that some one had placed it there, that an arm had been thrust
through the railing, and this idea appeared to alarm her. This time, the
fear was genuine; the stone was there. No doubt was possible; she did
not touch it, fled without glancing behind her, took refuge in the
house, and immediately closed with shutter, bolt, and bar the door-like
window opening on the flight of steps. She inquired of Toussaint:--

"Has my father returned yet?"

"Not yet, Mademoiselle."

[We have already noted once for all the fact that Toussaint stuttered.
May we be permitted to dispense with it for the future. The musical
notation of an infirmity is repugnant to us.]

Jean Valjean, a thoughtful man, and given to nocturnal strolls, often
returned quite late at night.

"Toussaint," went on Cosette, "are you careful to thoroughly barricade
the shutters opening on the garden, at least with bars, in the evening,
and to put the little iron things in the little rings that close them?"

"Oh! be easy on that score, Miss."

Toussaint did not fail in her duty, and Cosette was well aware of the
fact, but she could not refrain from adding:--

"It is so solitary here."

"So far as that is concerned," said Toussaint, "it is true. We might be
assassinated before we had time to say ouf! And Monsieur does not sleep
in the house, to boot. But fear nothing, Miss, I fasten the shutters up
like prisons. Lone women! That is enough to make one shudder, I believe
you! Just imagine, what if you were to see men enter your chamber at
night and say: 'Hold your tongue!' and begin to cut your throat. It's
not the dying so much; you die, for one must die, and that's all right;
it's the abomination of feeling those people touch you. And then, their
knives; they can't be able to cut well with them! Ah, good gracious!"

"Be quiet," said Cosette. "Fasten everything thoroughly."

Cosette, terrified by the melodrama improvised by Toussaint, and
possibly, also, by the recollection of the apparitions of the past week,
which recurred to her memory, dared not even say to her: "Go and look at
the stone which has been placed on the bench!" for fear of opening the
garden gate and allowing "the men" to enter. She saw that all the doors
and windows were carefully fastened, made Toussaint go all over the
house from garret to cellar, locked herself up in her own chamber,
bolted her door, looked under her couch, went to bed and slept badly.
All night long she saw that big stone, as large as a mountain and full
of caverns.

At sunrise,--the property of the rising sun is to make us laugh at all
our terrors of the past night, and our laughter is in direct proportion
to our terror which they have caused,--at sunrise Cosette, when she
woke, viewed her fright as a nightmare, and said to herself: "What have
I been thinking of? It is like the footsteps that I thought I heard a
week or two ago in the garden at night! It is like the shadow of the
chimney-pot! Am I becoming a coward?" The sun, which was glowing through
the crevices in her shutters, and turning the damask curtains crimson,
reassured her to such an extent that everything vanished from her
thoughts, even the stone.

"There was no more a stone on the bench than there was a man in a round
hat in the garden; I dreamed about the stone, as I did all the rest."

She dressed herself, descended to the garden, ran to the bench, and
broke out in a cold perspiration. The stone was there.

But this lasted only for a moment. That which is terror by night is
curiosity by day.

"Bah!" said she, "come, let us see what it is."

She lifted the stone, which was tolerably large. Beneath it was
something which resembled a letter. It was a white envelope. Cosette
seized it. There was no address on one side, no seal on the other.
Yet the envelope, though unsealed, was not empty. Papers could be seen
inside.

Cosette examined it. It was no longer alarm, it was no longer curiosity;
it was a beginning of anxiety.

Cosette drew from the envelope its contents, a little notebook of paper,
each page of which was numbered and bore a few lines in a very fine and
rather pretty handwriting, as Cosette thought.

Cosette looked for a name; there was none. To whom was this addressed?
To her, probably, since a hand had deposited the packet on her bench.
From whom did it come? An irresistible fascination took possession
of her; she tried to turn away her eyes from the leaflets which were
trembling in her hand, she gazed at the sky, the street, the acacias
all bathed in light, the pigeons fluttering over a neighboring roof,
and then her glance suddenly fell upon the manuscript, and she said to
herself that she must know what it contained.

This is what she read.




CHAPTER IV--A HEART BENEATH A STONE

[Illustration: Cosette with Letter  4b4-5-cosette-after-letter]

The reduction of the universe to a single being, the expansion of a
single being even to God, that is love.


Love is the salutation of the angels to the stars.


How sad is the soul, when it is sad through love!


What a void in the absence of the being who, by herself alone fills the
world! Oh! how true it is that the beloved being becomes God. One could
comprehend that God might be jealous of this had not God the Father of
all evidently made creation for the soul, and the soul for love.


The glimpse of a smile beneath a white crape bonnet with a lilac curtain
is sufficient to cause the soul to enter into the palace of dreams.


God is behind everything, but everything hides God. Things are
black, creatures are opaque. To love a being is to render that being
transparent.


Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the
attitude of the body may be, the soul is on its knees.


Parted lovers beguile absence by a thousand chimerical devices, which
possess, however, a reality of their own. They are prevented from seeing
each other, they cannot write to each other; they discover a multitude
of mysterious means to correspond. They send each other the song of the
birds, the perfume of the flowers, the smiles of children, the light of
the sun, the sighings of the breeze, the rays of stars, all creation.
And why not? All the works of God are made to serve love. Love is
sufficiently potent to charge all nature with its messages.

Oh Spring! Thou art a letter that I write to her.


The future belongs to hearts even more than it does to minds. Love, that
is the only thing that can occupy and fill eternity. In the infinite,
the inexhaustible is requisite.


Love participates of the soul itself. It is of the same nature. Like
it, it is the divine spark; like it, it is incorruptible, indivisible,
imperishable. It is a point of fire that exists within us, which is
immortal and infinite, which nothing can confine, and which nothing can
extinguish. We feel it burning even to the very marrow of our bones, and
we see it beaming in the very depths of heaven.


Oh Love! Adorations! voluptuousness of two minds which understand each
other, of two hearts which exchange with each other, of two glances
which penetrate each other! You will come to me, will you not, bliss!
strolls by twos in the solitudes! Blessed and radiant days! I have
sometimes dreamed that from time to time hours detached themselves from
the lives of the angels and came here below to traverse the destinies of
men.


God can add nothing to the happiness of those who love, except to give
them endless duration. After a life of love, an eternity of love is, in
fact, an augmentation; but to increase in intensity even the ineffable
felicity which love bestows on the soul even in this world, is
impossible, even to God. God is the plenitude of heaven; love is the
plenitude of man.


You look at a star for two reasons, because it is luminous, and because
it is impenetrable. You have beside you a sweeter radiance and a greater
mystery, woman.


All of us, whoever we may be, have our respirable beings. We lack
air and we stifle. Then we die. To die for lack of love is horrible.
Suffocation of the soul.


When love has fused and mingled two beings in a sacred and angelic
unity, the secret of life has been discovered so far as they are
concerned; they are no longer anything more than the two boundaries of
the same destiny; they are no longer anything but the two wings of the
same spirit. Love, soar.


On the day when a woman as she passes before you emits light as she
walks, you are lost, you love. But one thing remains for you to do: to
think of her so intently that she is constrained to think of you.


What love commences can be finished by God alone.


True love is in despair and is enchanted over a glove lost or a
handkerchief found, and eternity is required for its devotion and its
hopes. It is composed both of the infinitely great and the infinitely
little.


If you are a stone, be adamant; if you are a plant, be the sensitive
plant; if you are a man, be love.


Nothing suffices for love. We have happiness, we desire paradise; we
possess paradise, we desire heaven.

Oh ye who love each other, all this is contained in love. Understand
how to find it there. Love has contemplation as well as heaven, and more
than heaven, it has voluptuousness.


"Does she still come to the Luxembourg?" "No, sir." "This is the church
where she attends mass, is it not?" "She no longer comes here." "Does
she still live in this house?" "She has moved away." "Where has she gone
to dwell?"

"She did not say."

What a melancholy thing not to know the address of one's soul!

Love has its childishness, other passions have their pettinesses. Shame
on the passions which belittle man! Honor to the one which makes a child
of him!


There is one strange thing, do you know it? I dwell in the night. There
is a being who carried off my sky when she went away.


Oh! would that we were lying side by side in the same grave, hand
in hand, and from time to time, in the darkness, gently caressing a
finger,--that would suffice for my eternity!


Ye who suffer because ye love, love yet more. To die of love, is to live
in it.


Love. A sombre and starry transfiguration is mingled with this torture.
There is ecstasy in agony.


Oh joy of the birds! It is because they have nests that they sing.


Love is a celestial respiration of the air of paradise.


Deep hearts, sage minds, take life as God has made it; it is a long
trial, an incomprehensible preparation for an unknown destiny. This
destiny, the true one, begins for a man with the first step inside the
tomb. Then something appears to him, and he begins to distinguish the
definitive. The definitive, meditate upon that word. The living perceive
the infinite; the definitive permits itself to be seen only by the dead.
In the meanwhile, love and suffer, hope and contemplate. Woe, alas! to
him who shall have loved only bodies, forms, appearances! Death will
deprive him of all. Try to love souls, you will find them again.


I encountered in the street, a very poor young man who was in love. His
hat was old, his coat was worn, his elbows were in holes; water trickled
through his shoes, and the stars through his soul.


What a grand thing it is to be loved! What a far grander thing it is
to love! The heart becomes heroic, by dint of passion. It is no longer
composed of anything but what is pure; it no longer rests on anything
that is not elevated and great. An unworthy thought can no more
germinate in it, than a nettle on a glacier. The serene and lofty soul,
inaccessible to vulgar passions and emotions, dominating the clouds
and the shades of this world, its follies, its lies, its hatreds, its
vanities, its miseries, inhabits the blue of heaven, and no longer feels
anything but profound and subterranean shocks of destiny, as the crests
of mountains feel the shocks of earthquake.


If there did not exist some one who loved, the sun would become extinct.




CHAPTER V--COSETTE AFTER THE LETTER

As Cosette read, she gradually fell into thought. At the very moment
when she raised her eyes from the last line of the note-book, the
handsome officer passed triumphantly in front of the gate,--it was his
hour; Cosette thought him hideous.

She resumed her contemplation of the book. It was written in the most
charming of chirography, thought Cosette; in the same hand, but with
divers inks, sometimes very black, again whitish, as when ink has been
added to the inkstand, and consequently on different days. It was,
then, a mind which had unfolded itself there, sigh by sigh, irregularly,
without order, without choice, without object, hap-hazard. Cosette
had never read anything like it. This manuscript, in which she already
perceived more light than obscurity, produced upon her the effect of a
half-open sanctuary. Each one of these mysterious lines shone before
her eyes and inundated her heart with a strange radiance. The education
which she had received had always talked to her of the soul, and never
of love, very much as one might talk of the firebrand and not of the
flame. This manuscript of fifteen pages suddenly and sweetly revealed
to her all of love, sorrow, destiny, life, eternity, the beginning,
the end. It was as if a hand had opened and suddenly flung upon her
a handful of rays of light. In these few lines she felt a passionate,
ardent, generous, honest nature, a sacred will, an immense sorrow, and
an immense despair, a suffering heart, an ecstasy fully expanded. What
was this manuscript? A letter. A letter without name, without address,
without date, without signature, pressing and disinterested, an enigma
composed of truths, a message of love made to be brought by an angel and
read by a virgin, an appointment made beyond the bounds of earth, the
love-letter of a phantom to a shade. It was an absent one, tranquil and
dejected, who seemed ready to take refuge in death and who sent to the
absent love, his lady, the secret of fate, the key of life, love. This
had been written with one foot in the grave and one finger in heaven.
These lines, which had fallen one by one on the paper, were what might
be called drops of soul.

Now, from whom could these pages come? Who could have penned them?

Cosette did not hesitate a moment. One man only.

He!

Day had dawned once more in her spirit; all had reappeared. She felt an
unheard-of joy, and a profound anguish. It was he! he who had written!
he was there! it was he whose arm had been thrust through that railing!
While she was forgetful of him, he had found her again! But had she
forgotten him? No, never! She was foolish to have thought so for a
single moment. She had always loved him, always adored him. The fire had
been smothered, and had smouldered for a time, but she saw all plainly
now; it had but made headway, and now it had burst forth afresh, and
had inflamed her whole being. This note-book was like a spark which
had fallen from that other soul into hers. She felt the conflagration
starting up once more.

She imbued herself thoroughly with every word of the manuscript: "Oh
yes!" said she, "how perfectly I recognize all that! That is what I had
already read in his eyes." As she was finishing it for the third time,
Lieutenant Theodule passed the gate once more, and rattled his spurs
upon the pavement. Cosette was forced to raise her eyes. She thought him
insipid, silly, stupid, useless, foppish, displeasing, impertinent, and
extremely ugly. The officer thought it his duty to smile at her.

She turned away as in shame and indignation. She would gladly have
thrown something at his head.

She fled, re-entered the house, and shut herself up in her chamber to
peruse the manuscript once more, to learn it by heart, and to dream.
When she had thoroughly mastered it she kissed it and put it in her
bosom.

All was over, Cosette had fallen back into deep, seraphic love. The
abyss of Eden had yawned once more.

All day long, Cosette remained in a sort of bewilderment. She scarcely
thought, her ideas were in the state of a tangled skein in her brain,
she could not manage to conjecture anything, she hoped through a tremor,
what? vague things. She dared make herself no promises, and she did
not wish to refuse herself anything. Flashes of pallor passed over her
countenance, and shivers ran through her frame. It seemed to her, at
intervals, that she was entering the land of chimaeras; she said to
herself: "Is this reality?" Then she felt of the dear paper within her
bosom under her gown, she pressed it to her heart, she felt its angles
against her flesh; and if Jean Valjean had seen her at the moment, he
would have shuddered in the presence of that luminous and unknown joy,
which overflowed from beneath her eyelids.--"Oh yes!" she thought, "it
is certainly he! This comes from him, and is for me!"

And she told herself that an intervention of the angels, a celestial
chance, had given him back to her.

Oh transfiguration of love! Oh dreams! That celestial chance, that
intervention of the angels, was a pellet of bread tossed by one thief to
another thief, from the Charlemagne Courtyard to the Lion's Ditch, over
the roofs of La Force.




CHAPTER VI--OLD PEOPLE ARE MADE TO GO OUT OPPORTUNELY

When evening came, Jean Valjean went out; Cosette dressed herself. She
arranged her hair in the most becoming manner, and she put on a dress
whose bodice had received one snip of the scissors too much, and which,
through this slope, permitted a view of the beginning of her throat, and
was, as young girls say, "a trifle indecent." It was not in the least
indecent, but it was prettier than usual. She made her toilet thus
without knowing why she did so.

Did she mean to go out? No.

Was she expecting a visitor? No.

At dusk, she went down to the garden. Toussaint was busy in her kitchen,
which opened on the back yard.

She began to stroll about under the trees, thrusting aside the branches
from time to time with her hand, because there were some which hung very
low.

In this manner she reached the bench.

The stone was still there.

She sat down, and gently laid her white hand on this stone as though she
wished to caress and thank it.

All at once, she experienced that indefinable impression which one
undergoes when there is some one standing behind one, even when she does
not see the person.

She turned her head and rose to her feet.

It was he.

His head was bare. He appeared to have grown thin and pale. His black
clothes were hardly discernible. The twilight threw a wan light on
his fine brow, and covered his eyes in shadows. Beneath a veil of
incomparable sweetness, he had something about him that suggested death
and night. His face was illuminated by the light of the dying day, and
by the thought of a soul that is taking flight.

He seemed to be not yet a ghost, and he was no longer a man.

He had flung away his hat in the thicket, a few paces distant.

Cosette, though ready to swoon, uttered no cry. She retreated slowly,
for she felt herself attracted. He did not stir. By virtue of something
ineffable and melancholy which enveloped him, she felt the look in his
eyes which she could not see.

Cosette, in her retreat, encountered a tree and leaned against it. Had
it not been for this tree, she would have fallen.

Then she heard his voice, that voice which she had really never heard,
barely rising above the rustle of the leaves, and murmuring:--

"Pardon me, here I am. My heart is full. I could not live on as I was
living, and I have come. Have you read what I placed there on the bench?
Do you recognize me at all? Have no fear of me. It is a long time, you
remember the day, since you looked at me at the Luxembourg, near the
Gladiator. And the day when you passed before me? It was on the 16th of
June and the 2d of July. It is nearly a year ago. I have not seen you
for a long time. I inquired of the woman who let the chairs, and she
told me that she no longer saw you. You lived in the Rue de l'Ouest, on
the third floor, in the front apartments of a new house,--you see that
I know! I followed you. What else was there for me to do? And then you
disappeared. I thought I saw you pass once, while I was reading the
newspapers under the arcade of the Odeon. I ran after you. But no. It
was a person who had a bonnet like yours. At night I came hither. Do
not be afraid, no one sees me. I come to gaze upon your windows near
at hand. I walk very softly, so that you may not hear, for you might be
alarmed. The other evening I was behind you, you turned round, I fled.
Once, I heard you singing. I was happy. Did it affect you because I
heard you singing through the shutters? That could not hurt you. No,
it is not so? You see, you are my angel! Let me come sometimes; I think
that I am going to die. If you only knew! I adore you. Forgive me, I
speak to you, but I do not know what I am saying; I may have displeased
you; have I displeased you?"

"Oh! my mother!" said she.

And she sank down as though on the point of death.

He grasped her, she fell, he took her in his arms, he pressed her close,
without knowing what he was doing. He supported her, though he was
tottering himself. It was as though his brain were full of smoke;
lightnings darted between his lips; his ideas vanished; it seemed to him
that he was accomplishing some religious act, and that he was committing
a profanation. Moreover, he had not the least passion for this lovely
woman whose force he felt against his breast. He was beside himself with
love.

She took his hand and laid it on her heart. He felt the paper there, he
stammered:--

"You love me, then?"

She replied in a voice so low that it was no longer anything more than a
barely audible breath:--

"Hush! Thou knowest it!"

And she hid her blushing face on the breast of the superb and
intoxicated young man.

He fell upon the bench, and she beside him. They had no words more. The
stars were beginning to gleam. How did it come to pass that their lips
met? How comes it to pass that the birds sing, that snow melts, that
the rose unfolds, that May expands, that the dawn grows white behind the
black trees on the shivering crest of the hills?

A kiss, and that was all.

Both started, and gazed into the darkness with sparkling eyes.

They felt neither the cool night, nor the cold stone, nor the damp
earth, nor the wet grass; they looked at each other, and their hearts
were full of thoughts. They had clasped hands unconsciously.

She did not ask him, she did not even wonder, how he had entered there,
and how he had made his way into the garden. It seemed so simple to her
that he should be there!

From time to time, Marius' knee touched Cosette's knee, and both
shivered.

At intervals, Cosette stammered a word. Her soul fluttered on her lips
like a drop of dew on a flower.

Little by little they began to talk to each other. Effusion followed
silence, which is fulness. The night was serene and splendid overhead.
These two beings, pure as spirits, told each other everything, their
dreams, their intoxications, their ecstasies, their chimaeras, their
weaknesses, how they had adored each other from afar, how they had
longed for each other, their despair when they had ceased to see each
other. They confided to each other in an ideal intimacy, which nothing
could augment, their most secret and most mysterious thoughts. They
related to each other, with candid faith in their illusions, all that
love, youth, and the remains of childhood which still lingered about
them, suggested to their minds. Their two hearts poured themselves out
into each other in such wise, that at the expiration of a quarter of an
hour, it was the young man who had the young girl's soul, and the young
girl who had the young man's soul. Each became permeated with the other,
they were enchanted with each other, they dazzled each other.

When they had finished, when they had told each other everything, she
laid her head on his shoulder and asked him:--

"What is your name?"

"My name is Marius," said he. "And yours?"

"My name is Cosette."




BOOK SIXTH.--LITTLE GAVROCHE




CHAPTER I--THE MALICIOUS PLAYFULNESS OF THE WIND

Since 1823, when the tavern of Montfermeil was on the way to shipwreck
and was being gradually engulfed, not in the abyss of a bankruptcy, but
in the cesspool of petty debts, the Thenardier pair had had two other
children; both males. That made five; two girls and three boys.

Madame Thenardier had got rid of the last two, while they were still
young and very small, with remarkable luck.

Got rid of is the word. There was but a mere fragment of nature in that
woman. A phenomenon, by the way, of which there is more than one example
extant. Like the Marechale de La Mothe-Houdancourt, the Thenardier was
a mother to her daughters only. There her maternity ended. Her hatred of
the human race began with her own sons. In the direction of her sons her
evil disposition was uncompromising, and her heart had a lugubrious wall
in that quarter. As the reader has seen, she detested the eldest; she
cursed the other two. Why? Because. The most terrible of motives, the
most unanswerable of retorts--Because. "I have no need of a litter of
squalling brats," said this mother.

Let us explain how the Thenardiers had succeeded in getting rid of their
last two children; and even in drawing profit from the operation.

The woman Magnon, who was mentioned a few pages further back, was the
same one who had succeeded in making old Gillenormand support the two
children which she had had. She lived on the Quai des Celestins, at the
corner of this ancient street of the Petit-Musc which afforded her the
opportunity of changing her evil repute into good odor. The reader will
remember the great epidemic of croup which ravaged the river districts
of the Seine in Paris thirty-five years ago, and of which science took
advantage to make experiments on a grand scale as to the efficacy of
inhalations of alum, so beneficially replaced at the present day by the
external tincture of iodine. During this epidemic, the Magnon lost both
her boys, who were still very young, one in the morning, the other
in the evening of the same day. This was a blow. These children were
precious to their mother; they represented eighty francs a month. These
eighty francs were punctually paid in the name of M. Gillenormand, by
collector of his rents, M. Barge, a retired tip-staff, in the Rue du
Roi-de-Sicile. The children dead, the income was at an end. The Magnon
sought an expedient. In that dark free-masonry of evil of which she
formed a part, everything is known, all secrets are kept, and all lend
mutual aid. Magnon needed two children; the Thenardiers had two.
The same sex, the same age. A good arrangement for the one, a good
investment for the other. The little Thenardiers became little Magnons.
Magnon quitted the Quai des Celestins and went to live in the Rue
Clocheperce. In Paris, the identity which binds an individual to himself
is broken between one street and another.

The registry office being in no way warned, raised no objections, and
the substitution was effected in the most simple manner in the world.
Only, the Thenardier exacted for this loan of her children, ten francs a
month, which Magnon promised to pay, and which she actually did pay.
It is unnecessary to add that M. Gillenormand continued to perform
his compact. He came to see the children every six months. He did not
perceive the change. "Monsieur," Magnon said to him, "how much they
resemble you!"

Thenardier, to whom avatars were easy, seized this occasion to become
Jondrette. His two daughters and Gavroche had hardly had time to
discover that they had two little brothers. When a certain degree
of misery is reached, one is overpowered with a sort of spectral
indifference, and one regards human beings as though they were spectres.
Your nearest relations are often no more for you than vague shadowy
forms, barely outlined against a nebulous background of life and easily
confounded again with the invisible.

On the evening of the day when she had handed over her two little
ones to Magnon, with express intention of renouncing them forever, the
Thenardier had felt, or had appeared to feel, a scruple. She said to her
husband: "But this is abandoning our children!" Thenardier, masterful
and phlegmatic, cauterized the scruple with this saying: "Jean Jacques
Rousseau did even better!" From scruples, the mother proceeded to
uneasiness: "But what if the police were to annoy us? Tell me, Monsieur
Thenardier, is what we have done permissible?" Thenardier replied:
"Everything is permissible. No one will see anything but true blue in
it. Besides, no one has any interest in looking closely after children
who have not a sou."

Magnon was a sort of fashionable woman in the sphere of crime. She was
careful about her toilet. She shared her lodgings, which were furnished
in an affected and wretched style, with a clever gallicized English
thief. This English woman, who had become a naturalized Parisienne,
recommended by very wealthy relations, intimately connected with the
medals in the Library and Mademoiselle Mar's diamonds, became celebrated
later on in judicial accounts. She was called Mamselle Miss.

The two little creatures who had fallen to Magnon had no reason to
complain of their lot. Recommended by the eighty francs, they were well
cared for, as is everything from which profit is derived; they were
neither badly clothed, nor badly fed; they were treated almost like
"little gentlemen,"--better by their false mother than by their real
one. Magnon played the lady, and talked no thieves' slang in their
presence.

Thus passed several years. Thenardier augured well from the fact. One
day, he chanced to say to Magnon as she handed him his monthly stipend
of ten francs: "The father must give them some education."

All at once, these two poor children, who had up to that time been
protected tolerably well, even by their evil fate, were abruptly hurled
into life and forced to begin it for themselves.

A wholesale arrest of malefactors, like that in the Jondrette garret,
necessarily complicated by investigations and subsequent incarcerations,
is a veritable disaster for that hideous and occult counter-society
which pursues its existence beneath public society; an adventure of this
description entails all sorts of catastrophes in that sombre world. The
Thenardier catastrophe involved the catastrophe of Magnon.


One day, a short time after Magnon had handed to Eponine the note
relating to the Rue Plumet, a sudden raid was made by the police in the
Rue Clocheperce; Magnon was seized, as was also Mamselle Miss; and all
the inhabitants of the house, which was of a suspicious character, were
gathered into the net. While this was going on, the two little boys were
playing in the back yard, and saw nothing of the raid. When they tried
to enter the house again, they found the door fastened and the house
empty. A cobbler opposite called them to him, and delivered to them a
paper which "their mother" had left for them. On this paper there was an
address: M. Barge, collector of rents, Rue du Roi-de-Sicile, No. 8. The
proprietor of the stall said to them: "You cannot live here any longer.
Go there. It is near by. The first street on the left. Ask your way from
this paper."

The children set out, the elder leading the younger, and holding in his
hand the paper which was to guide them. It was cold, and his benumbed
little fingers could not close very firmly, and they did not keep a very
good hold on the paper. At the corner of the Rue Clocheperce, a gust of
wind tore it from him, and as night was falling, the child was not able
to find it again.

They began to wander aimlessly through the streets.




CHAPTER II--IN WHICH LITTLE GAVROCHE EXTRACTS PROFIT FROM NAPOLEON THE
GREAT

Spring in Paris is often traversed by harsh and piercing breezes which
do not precisely chill but freeze one; these north winds which sadden
the most beautiful days produce exactly the effect of those puffs of
cold air which enter a warm room through the cracks of a badly fitting
door or window. It seems as though the gloomy door of winter had
remained ajar, and as though the wind were pouring through it. In the
spring of 1832, the epoch when the first great epidemic of this century
broke out in Europe, these north gales were more harsh and piercing
than ever. It was a door even more glacial than that of winter which
was ajar. It was the door of the sepulchre. In these winds one felt the
breath of the cholera.

From a meteorological point of view, these cold winds possessed this
peculiarity, that they did not preclude a strong electric tension.
Frequent storms, accompanied by thunder and lightning, burst forth at
this epoch.

One evening, when these gales were blowing rudely, to such a degree that
January seemed to have returned and that the bourgeois had resumed their
cloaks, Little Gavroche, who was always shivering gayly under his rags,
was standing as though in ecstasy before a wig-maker's shop in the
vicinity of the Orme-Saint-Gervais. He was adorned with a woman's
woollen shawl, picked up no one knows where, and which he had converted
into a neck comforter. Little Gavroche appeared to be engaged in intent
admiration of a wax bride, in a low-necked dress, and crowned with
orange-flowers, who was revolving in the window, and displaying her
smile to passers-by, between two argand lamps; but in reality, he was
taking an observation of the shop, in order to discover whether he
could not "prig" from the shop-front a cake of soap, which he would then
proceed to sell for a sou to a "hair-dresser" in the suburbs. He had
often managed to breakfast off of such a roll. He called his species of
work, for which he possessed special aptitude, "shaving barbers."

While contemplating the bride, and eyeing the cake of soap, he muttered
between his teeth: "Tuesday. It was not Tuesday. Was it Tuesday? Perhaps
it was Tuesday. Yes, it was Tuesday."

No one has ever discovered to what this monologue referred.

Yes, perchance, this monologue had some connection with the last
occasion on which he had dined, three days before, for it was now
Friday.

The barber in his shop, which was warmed by a good stove, was shaving
a customer and casting a glance from time to time at the enemy, that
freezing and impudent street urchin both of whose hands were in his
pockets, but whose mind was evidently unsheathed.

While Gavroche was scrutinizing the shop-window and the cakes of windsor
soap, two children of unequal stature, very neatly dressed, and still
smaller than himself, one apparently about seven years of age, the other
five, timidly turned the handle and entered the shop, with a request for
something or other, alms possibly, in a plaintive murmur which resembled
a groan rather than a prayer. They both spoke at once, and their words
were unintelligible because sobs broke the voice of the younger, and the
teeth of the elder were chattering with cold. The barber wheeled round
with a furious look, and without abandoning his razor, thrust back the
elder with his left hand and the younger with his knee, and slammed
his door, saying: "The idea of coming in and freezing everybody for
nothing!"

The two children resumed their march in tears. In the meantime, a cloud
had risen; it had begun to rain.

Little Gavroche ran after them and accosted them:--

"What's the matter with you, brats?"

"We don't know where we are to sleep," replied the elder.

"Is that all?" said Gavroche. "A great matter, truly. The idea of
bawling about that. They must be greenies!"

And adopting, in addition to his superiority, which was rather
bantering, an accent of tender authority and gentle patronage:--

"Come along with me, young 'uns!"

"Yes, sir," said the elder.

And the two children followed him as they would have followed an
archbishop. They had stopped crying.

Gavroche led them up the Rue Saint-Antoine in the direction of the
Bastille.

As Gavroche walked along, he cast an indignant backward glance at the
barber's shop.

"That fellow has no heart, the whiting,"[35] he muttered. "He's an
Englishman."

A woman who caught sight of these three marching in a file, with
Gavroche at their head, burst into noisy laughter. This laugh was
wanting in respect towards the group.

"Good day, Mamselle Omnibus," said Gavroche to her.

An instant later, the wig-maker occurred to his mind once more, and he
added:--

"I am making a mistake in the beast; he's not a whiting, he's a serpent.
Barber, I'll go and fetch a locksmith, and I'll have a bell hung to your
tail."

This wig-maker had rendered him aggressive. As he strode over a gutter,
he apostrophized a bearded portress who was worthy to meet Faust on the
Brocken, and who had a broom in her hand.

"Madam," said he, "so you are going out with your horse?"

And thereupon, he spattered the polished boots of a pedestrian.

"You scamp!" shouted the furious pedestrian.

Gavroche elevated his nose above his shawl.

"Is Monsieur complaining?"

"Of you!" ejaculated the man.

"The office is closed," said Gavroche, "I do not receive any more
complaints."

In the meanwhile, as he went on up the street, he perceived a
beggar-girl, thirteen or fourteen years old, and clad in so short a
gown that her knees were visible, lying thoroughly chilled under a
porte-cochere. The little girl was getting to be too old for such a
thing. Growth does play these tricks. The petticoat becomes short at the
moment when nudity becomes indecent.

"Poor girl!" said Gavroche. "She hasn't even trousers. Hold on, take
this."

And unwinding all the comfortable woollen which he had around his neck,
he flung it on the thin and purple shoulders of the beggar-girl, where
the scarf became a shawl once more.

The child stared at him in astonishment, and received the shawl in
silence. When a certain stage of distress has been reached in his
misery, the poor man no longer groans over evil, no longer returns
thanks for good.

That done: "Brrr!" said Gavroche, who was shivering more than Saint
Martin, for the latter retained one-half of his cloak.

At this brrr! the downpour of rain, redoubled in its spite, became
furious. The wicked skies punish good deeds.

"Ah, come now!" exclaimed Gavroche, "what's the meaning of this? It's
re-raining! Good Heavens, if it goes on like this, I shall stop my
subscription."

And he set out on the march once more.

"It's all right," he resumed, casting a glance at the beggar-girl, as
she coiled up under the shawl, "she's got a famous peel."

And looking up at the clouds he exclaimed:--

"Caught!"

The two children followed close on his heels.

As they were passing one of these heavy grated lattices, which indicate
a baker's shop, for bread is put behind bars like gold, Gavroche turned
round:--

"Ah, by the way, brats, have we dined?"

"Monsieur," replied the elder, "we have had nothing to eat since this
morning."

"So you have neither father nor mother?" resumed Gavroche majestically.

"Excuse us, sir, we have a papa and a mamma, but we don't know where
they are."

"Sometimes that's better than knowing where they are," said Gavroche,
who was a thinker.

"We have been wandering about these two hours," continued the elder, "we
have hunted for things at the corners of the streets, but we have found
nothing."

"I know," ejaculated Gavroche, "it's the dogs who eat everything."

He went on, after a pause:--

"Ah! we have lost our authors. We don't know what we have done with
them. This should not be, gamins. It's stupid to let old people stray
off like that. Come now! we must have a snooze all the same."

However, he asked them no questions. What was more simple than that they
should have no dwelling place!

The elder of the two children, who had almost entirely recovered the
prompt heedlessness of childhood, uttered this exclamation:--

"It's queer, all the same. Mamma told us that she would take us to get a
blessed spray on Palm Sunday."

"Bosh," said Gavroche.

"Mamma," resumed the elder, "is a lady who lives with Mamselle Miss."

"Tanflute!" retorted Gavroche.

Meanwhile he had halted, and for the last two minutes he had been
feeling and fumbling in all sorts of nooks which his rags contained.

At last he tossed his head with an air intended to be merely satisfied,
but which was triumphant, in reality.

"Let us be calm, young 'uns. Here's supper for three."

And from one of his pockets he drew forth a sou.

Without allowing the two urchins time for amazement, he pushed both of
them before him into the baker's shop, and flung his sou on the counter,
crying:--

"Boy! five centimes' worth of bread."

The baker, who was the proprietor in person, took up a loaf and a knife.

"In three pieces, my boy!" went on Gavroche.

And he added with dignity:--

"There are three of us."

And seeing that the baker, after scrutinizing the three customers, had
taken down a black loaf, he thrust his finger far up his nose with
an inhalation as imperious as though he had had a pinch of the great
Frederick's snuff on the tip of his thumb, and hurled this indignant
apostrophe full in the baker's face:--

"Keksekca?"

Those of our readers who might be tempted to espy in this interpellation
of Gavroche's to the baker a Russian or a Polish word, or one of those
savage cries which the Yoways and the Botocudos hurl at each other from
bank to bank of a river, athwart the solitudes, are warned that it is a
word which they [our readers] utter every day, and which takes the place
of the phrase: "Qu'est-ce que c'est que cela?" The baker understood
perfectly, and replied:--

"Well! It's bread, and very good bread of the second quality."

"You mean larton brutal [black bread]!" retorted Gavroche, calmly and
coldly disdainful. "White bread, boy! white bread [larton savonne]! I'm
standing treat."

The baker could not repress a smile, and as he cut the white bread he
surveyed them in a compassionate way which shocked Gavroche.

"Come, now, baker's boy!" said he, "what are you taking our measure like
that for?"

All three of them placed end to end would have hardly made a measure.

When the bread was cut, the baker threw the sou into his drawer, and
Gavroche said to the two children:--

"Grub away."

The little boys stared at him in surprise.

Gavroche began to laugh.

"Ah! hullo, that's so! they don't understand yet, they're too small."

And he repeated:--

"Eat away."

At the same time, he held out a piece of bread to each of them.

And thinking that the elder, who seemed to him the more worthy of
his conversation, deserved some special encouragement and ought to be
relieved from all hesitation to satisfy his appetite, he added, as be
handed him the largest share:--

"Ram that into your muzzle."

One piece was smaller than the others; he kept this for himself.

The poor children, including Gavroche, were famished. As they tore their
bread apart in big mouthfuls, they blocked up the shop of the baker,
who, now that they had paid their money, looked angrily at them.

"Let's go into the street again," said Gavroche.

They set off once more in the direction of the Bastille.

From time to time, as they passed the lighted shop-windows, the smallest
halted to look at the time on a leaden watch which was suspended from
his neck by a cord.

"Well, he is a very green 'un," said Gavroche.

Then, becoming thoughtful, he muttered between his teeth:--

"All the same, if I had charge of the babes I'd lock 'em up better than
that."

Just as they were finishing their morsel of bread, and had reached the
angle of that gloomy Rue des Ballets, at the other end of which the low
and threatening wicket of La Force was visible:--

"Hullo, is that you, Gavroche?" said some one.

"Hullo, is that you, Montparnasse?" said Gavroche.

A man had just accosted the street urchin, and the man was no other
than Montparnasse in disguise, with blue spectacles, but recognizable to
Gavroche.

"The bow-wows!" went on Gavroche, "you've got a hide the color of a
linseed plaster, and blue specs like a doctor. You're putting on style,
'pon my word!"

"Hush!" ejaculated Montparnasse, "not so loud."

And he drew Gavroche hastily out of range of the lighted shops.

The two little ones followed mechanically, holding each other by the
hand.

When they were ensconced under the arch of a portecochere, sheltered
from the rain and from all eyes:--

"Do you know where I'm going?" demanded Montparnasse.

"To the Abbey of Ascend-with-Regret,"[36] replied Gavroche.

"Joker!"

And Montparnasse went on:--

"I'm going to find Babet."

"Ah!" exclaimed Gavroche, "so her name is Babet."

Montparnasse lowered his voice:--

"Not she, he."

"Ah! Babet."

"Yes, Babet."

"I thought he was buckled."

"He has undone the buckle," replied Montparnasse.

And he rapidly related to the gamin how, on the morning of that very
day, Babet, having been transferred to La Conciergerie, had made his
escape, by turning to the left instead of to the right in "the police
office."

Gavroche expressed his admiration for this skill.

"What a dentist!" he cried.

Montparnasse added a few details as to Babet's flight, and ended with:--

"Oh! That's not all."

Gavroche, as he listened, had seized a cane that Montparnasse held in
his hand, and mechanically pulled at the upper part, and the blade of a
dagger made its appearance.

"Ah!" he exclaimed, pushing the dagger back in haste, "you have brought
along your gendarme disguised as a bourgeois."

Montparnasse winked.

"The deuce!" resumed Gavroche, "so you're going to have a bout with the
bobbies?"

"You can't tell," replied Montparnasse with an indifferent air. "It's
always a good thing to have a pin about one."

Gavroche persisted:--

"What are you up to to-night?"

Again Montparnasse took a grave tone, and said, mouthing every syllable:
"Things."

And abruptly changing the conversation:--

"By the way!"

"What?"

"Something happened t'other day. Fancy. I meet a bourgeois. He makes
me a present of a sermon and his purse. I put it in my pocket. A minute
later, I feel in my pocket. There's nothing there."

"Except the sermon," said Gavroche.

"But you," went on Montparnasse, "where are you bound for now?"

Gavroche pointed to his two proteges, and said:--

"I'm going to put these infants to bed."

"Whereabouts is the bed?"

"At my house."

"Where's your house?"

"At my house."

"So you have a lodging?"

"Yes, I have."

"And where is your lodging?"

"In the elephant," said Gavroche.

Montparnasse, though not naturally inclined to astonishment, could not
restrain an exclamation.

"In the elephant!"

"Well, yes, in the elephant!" retorted Gavroche. "Kekcaa?"

This is another word of the language which no one writes, and which
every one speaks.

Kekcaa signifies: Quest que c'est que cela a? [What's the matter with
that?]

The urchin's profound remark recalled Montparnasse to calmness and
good sense. He appeared to return to better sentiments with regard to
Gavroche's lodging.

"Of course," said he, "yes, the elephant. Is it comfortable there?"

"Very," said Gavroche. "It's really bully there. There ain't any
draughts, as there are under the bridges."

"How do you get in?"

"Oh, I get in."

"So there is a hole?" demanded Montparnasse.

"Parbleu! I should say so. But you mustn't tell. It's between the fore
legs. The bobbies haven't seen it."

"And you climb up? Yes, I understand."

"A turn of the hand, cric, crac, and it's all over, no one there."

After a pause, Gavroche added:--

"I shall have a ladder for these children."

Montparnasse burst out laughing:--

"Where the devil did you pick up those young 'uns?"

Gavroche replied with great simplicity:--

"They are some brats that a wig-maker made me a present of."

Meanwhile, Montparnasse had fallen to thinking:--

"You recognized me very readily," he muttered.

He took from his pocket two small objects which were nothing more than
two quills wrapped in cotton, and thrust one up each of his nostrils.
This gave him a different nose.

"That changes you," remarked Gavroche, "you are less homely so, you
ought to keep them on all the time."

Montparnasse was a handsome fellow, but Gavroche was a tease.

"Seriously," demanded Montparnasse, "how do you like me so?"

The sound of his voice was different also. In a twinkling, Montparnasse
had become unrecognizable.

"Oh! Do play Porrichinelle for us!" exclaimed Gavroche.

The two children, who had not been listening up to this point, being
occupied themselves in thrusting their fingers up their noses, drew
near at this name, and stared at Montparnasse with dawning joy and
admiration.

Unfortunately, Montparnasse was troubled.

He laid his hand on Gavroche's shoulder, and said to him, emphasizing
his words: "Listen to what I tell you, boy! if I were on the square with
my dog, my knife, and my wife, and if you were to squander ten sous on
me, I wouldn't refuse to work, but this isn't Shrove Tuesday."

This odd phrase produced a singular effect on the gamin. He wheeled
round hastily, darted his little sparkling eyes about him with profound
attention, and perceived a police sergeant standing with his back to
them a few paces off. Gavroche allowed an: "Ah! good!" to escape him,
but immediately suppressed it, and shaking Montparnasse's hand:--

"Well, good evening," said he, "I'm going off to my elephant with my
brats. Supposing that you should need me some night, you can come and
hunt me up there. I lodge on the entresol. There is no porter. You will
inquire for Monsieur Gavroche."

"Very good," said Montparnasse.

And they parted, Montparnasse betaking himself in the direction of
the Greve, and Gavroche towards the Bastille. The little one of five,
dragged along by his brother who was dragged by Gavroche, turned his
head back several times to watch "Porrichinelle" as he went.

The ambiguous phrase by means of which Montparnasse had warned Gavroche
of the presence of the policeman, contained no other talisman than
the assonance dig repeated five or six times in different forms. This
syllable, dig, uttered alone or artistically mingled with the words of
a phrase, means: "Take care, we can no longer talk freely." There was
besides, in Montparnasse's sentence, a literary beauty which was
lost upon Gavroche, that is mon dogue, ma dague et ma digue, a slang
expression of the Temple, which signifies my dog, my knife, and my wife,
greatly in vogue among clowns and the red-tails in the great century
when Moliere wrote and Callot drew.

Twenty years ago, there was still to be seen in the southwest corner of
the Place de la Bastille, near the basin of the canal, excavated in the
ancient ditch of the fortress-prison, a singular monument, which has
already been effaced from the memories of Parisians, and which deserved
to leave some trace, for it was the idea of a "member of the Institute,
the General-in-chief of the army of Egypt."

We say monument, although it was only a rough model. But this model
itself, a marvellous sketch, the grandiose skeleton of an idea of
Napoleon's, which successive gusts of wind have carried away and thrown,
on each occasion, still further from us, had become historical and had
acquired a certain definiteness which contrasted with its provisional
aspect. It was an elephant forty feet high, constructed of timber and
masonry, bearing on its back a tower which resembled a house, formerly
painted green by some dauber, and now painted black by heaven, the wind,
and time. In this deserted and unprotected corner of the place, the
broad brow of the colossus, his trunk, his tusks, his tower, his
enormous crupper, his four feet, like columns produced, at night, under
the starry heavens, a surprising and terrible form. It was a sort of
symbol of popular force. It was sombre, mysterious, and immense. It was
some mighty, visible phantom, one knew not what, standing erect beside
the invisible spectre of the Bastille.

Few strangers visited this edifice, no passer-by looked at it. It was
falling into ruins; every season the plaster which detached itself
from its sides formed hideous wounds upon it. "The aediles," as the
expression ran in elegant dialect, had forgotten it ever since 1814.
There it stood in its corner, melancholy, sick, crumbling, surrounded
by a rotten palisade, soiled continually by drunken coachmen; cracks
meandered athwart its belly, a lath projected from its tail, tall grass
flourished between its legs; and, as the level of the place had been
rising all around it for a space of thirty years, by that slow and
continuous movement which insensibly elevates the soil of large towns,
it stood in a hollow, and it looked as though the ground were giving way
beneath it. It was unclean, despised, repulsive, and superb, ugly in the
eyes of the bourgeois, melancholy in the eyes of the thinker. There was
something about it of the dirt which is on the point of being swept out,
and something of the majesty which is on the point of being decapitated.
As we have said, at night, its aspect changed. Night is the real element
of everything that is dark. As soon as twilight descended, the old
elephant became transfigured; he assumed a tranquil and redoubtable
appearance in the formidable serenity of the shadows. Being of the past,
he belonged to night; and obscurity was in keeping with his grandeur.

This rough, squat, heavy, hard, austere, almost misshapen, but assuredly
majestic monument, stamped with a sort of magnificent and savage
gravity, has disappeared, and left to reign in peace, a sort of gigantic
stove, ornamented with its pipe, which has replaced the sombre fortress
with its nine towers, very much as the bourgeoisie replaces the feudal
classes. It is quite natural that a stove should be the symbol of an
epoch in which a pot contains power. This epoch will pass away, people
have already begun to understand that, if there can be force in a
boiler, there can be no force except in the brain; in other words,
that which leads and drags on the world, is not locomotives, but ideas.
Harness locomotives to ideas,--that is well done; but do not mistake the
horse for the rider.

At all events, to return to the Place de la Bastille, the architect
of this elephant succeeded in making a grand thing out of plaster; the
architect of the stove has succeeded in making a pretty thing out of
bronze.

This stove-pipe, which has been baptized by a sonorous name, and called
the column of July, this monument of a revolution that miscarried,
was still enveloped in 1832, in an immense shirt of woodwork, which we
regret, for our part, and by a vast plank enclosure, which completed the
task of isolating the elephant.

It was towards this corner of the place, dimly lighted by the reflection
of a distant street lamp, that the gamin guided his two "brats."

The reader must permit us to interrupt ourselves here and to remind him
that we are dealing with simple reality, and that twenty years ago, the
tribunals were called upon to judge, under the charge of vagabondage,
and mutilation of a public monument, a child who had been caught asleep
in this very elephant of the Bastille. This fact noted, we proceed.

On arriving in the vicinity of the colossus, Gavroche comprehended the
effect which the infinitely great might produce on the infinitely small,
and said:--

"Don't be scared, infants."

Then he entered through a gap in the fence into the elephant's enclosure
and helped the young ones to clamber through the breach. The two
children, somewhat frightened, followed Gavroche without uttering a
word, and confided themselves to this little Providence in rags which
had given them bread and had promised them a shelter.

There, extended along the fence, lay a ladder which by day served
the laborers in the neighboring timber-yard. Gavroche raised it with
remarkable vigor, and placed it against one of the elephant's forelegs.
Near the point where the ladder ended, a sort of black hole in the belly
of the colossus could be distinguished.

Gavroche pointed out the ladder and the hole to his guests, and said to
them:--

"Climb up and go in."

The two little boys exchanged terrified glances.

"You're afraid, brats!" exclaimed Gavroche.

And he added:--

"You shall see!"

He clasped the rough leg of the elephant, and in a twinkling, without
deigning to make use of the ladder, he had reached the aperture. He
entered it as an adder slips through a crevice, and disappeared within,
and an instant later, the two children saw his head, which looked pale,
appear vaguely, on the edge of the shadowy hole, like a wan and whitish
spectre.

"Well!" he exclaimed, "climb up, young 'uns! You'll see how snug it is
here! Come up, you!" he said to the elder, "I'll lend you a hand."

The little fellows nudged each other, the gamin frightened and inspired
them with confidence at one and the same time, and then, it was raining
very hard. The elder one undertook the risk. The younger, on seeing his
brother climbing up, and himself left alone between the paws of this
huge beast, felt greatly inclined to cry, but he did not dare.

The elder lad climbed, with uncertain steps, up the rungs of the ladder;
Gavroche, in the meanwhile, encouraging him with exclamations like a
fencing-master to his pupils, or a muleteer to his mules.

"Don't be afraid!--That's it!--Come on!--Put your feet there!--Give us
your hand here!--Boldly!"

And when the child was within reach, he seized him suddenly and
vigorously by the arm, and pulled him towards him.

"Nabbed!" said he.

The brat had passed through the crack.

"Now," said Gavroche, "wait for me. Be so good as to take a seat,
Monsieur."

And making his way out of the hole as he had entered it, he slipped down
the elephant's leg with the agility of a monkey, landed on his feet in
the grass, grasped the child of five round the body, and planted him
fairly in the middle of the ladder, then he began to climb up behind
him, shouting to the elder:--

"I'm going to boost him, do you tug."

And in another instant, the small lad was pushed, dragged, pulled,
thrust, stuffed into the hole, before he had time to recover himself,
and Gavroche, entering behind him, and repulsing the ladder with a kick
which sent it flat on the grass, began to clap his hands and to cry:--

"Here we are! Long live General Lafayette!"

This explosion over, he added:--

"Now, young 'uns, you are in my house."

Gavroche was at home, in fact.

Oh, unforeseen utility of the useless! Charity of great things! Goodness
of giants! This huge monument, which had embodied an idea of the
Emperor's, had become the box of a street urchin. The brat had been
accepted and sheltered by the colossus. The bourgeois decked out in
their Sunday finery who passed the elephant of the Bastille, were fond
of saying as they scanned it disdainfully with their prominent eyes:
"What's the good of that?" It served to save from the cold, the frost,
the hail, and rain, to shelter from the winds of winter, to preserve
from slumber in the mud which produces fever, and from slumber in the
snow which produces death, a little being who had no father, no mother,
no bread, no clothes, no refuge. It served to receive the innocent whom
society repulsed. It served to diminish public crime. It was a lair
open to one against whom all doors were shut. It seemed as though the
miserable old mastodon, invaded by vermin and oblivion, covered with
warts, with mould, and ulcers, tottering, worm-eaten, abandoned,
condemned, a sort of mendicant colossus, asking alms in vain with a
benevolent look in the midst of the cross-roads, had taken pity on that
other mendicant, the poor pygmy, who roamed without shoes to his feet,
without a roof over his head, blowing on his fingers, clad in rags, fed
on rejected scraps. That was what the elephant of the Bastille was good
for. This idea of Napoleon, disdained by men, had been taken back by
God. That which had been merely illustrious, had become august. In order
to realize his thought, the Emperor should have had porphyry, brass,
iron, gold, marble; the old collection of planks, beams and plaster
sufficed for God. The Emperor had had the dream of a genius; in that
Titanic elephant, armed, prodigious, with trunk uplifted, bearing its
tower and scattering on all sides its merry and vivifying waters, he
wished to incarnate the people. God had done a grander thing with it, he
had lodged a child there.

The hole through which Gavroche had entered was a breach which was
hardly visible from the outside, being concealed, as we have stated,
beneath the elephant's belly, and so narrow that it was only cats and
homeless children who could pass through it.

"Let's begin," said Gavroche, "by telling the porter that we are not at
home."

And plunging into the darkness with the assurance of a person who is
well acquainted with his apartments, he took a plank and stopped up the
aperture.

Again Gavroche plunged into the obscurity. The children heard the
crackling of the match thrust into the phosphoric bottle. The chemical
match was not yet in existence; at that epoch the Fumade steel
represented progress.

A sudden light made them blink; Gavroche had just managed to ignite one
of those bits of cord dipped in resin which are called cellar rats. The
cellar rat, which emitted more smoke than light, rendered the interior
of the elephant confusedly visible.

Gavroche's two guests glanced about them, and the sensation which they
experienced was something like that which one would feel if shut up in
the great tun of Heidelberg, or, better still, like what Jonah must have
felt in the biblical belly of the whale. An entire and gigantic skeleton
appeared enveloping them. Above, a long brown beam, whence started at
regular distances, massive, arching ribs, represented the vertebral
column with its sides, stalactites of plaster depended from them like
entrails, and vast spiders' webs stretching from side to side, formed
dirty diaphragms. Here and there, in the corners, were visible large
blackish spots which had the appearance of being alive, and which
changed places rapidly with an abrupt and frightened movement.

Fragments which had fallen from the elephant's back into his belly had
filled up the cavity, so that it was possible to walk upon it as on a
floor.

The smaller child nestled up against his brother, and whispered to
him:--

"It's black."

This remark drew an exclamation from Gavroche. The petrified air of the
two brats rendered some shock necessary.

"What's that you are gabbling about there?" he exclaimed. "Are
you scoffing at me? Are you turning up your noses? Do you want the
tuileries? Are you brutes? Come, say! I warn you that I don't belong to
the regiment of simpletons. Ah, come now, are you brats from the Pope's
establishment?"

A little roughness is good in cases of fear. It is reassuring. The two
children drew close to Gavroche.

Gavroche, paternally touched by this confidence, passed from grave to
gentle, and addressing the smaller:--

"Stupid," said he, accenting the insulting word, with a caressing
intonation, "it's outside that it is black. Outside it's raining, here
it does not rain; outside it's cold, here there's not an atom of wind;
outside there are heaps of people, here there's no one; outside there
ain't even the moon, here there's my candle, confound it!"

The two children began to look upon the apartment with less terror; but
Gavroche allowed them no more time for contemplation.

"Quick," said he.

And he pushed them towards what we are very glad to be able to call the
end of the room.

There stood his bed.

Gavroche's bed was complete; that is to say, it had a mattress, a
blanket, and an alcove with curtains.

The mattress was a straw mat, the blanket a rather large strip of
gray woollen stuff, very warm and almost new. This is what the alcove
consisted of:--

Three rather long poles, thrust into and consolidated, with the rubbish
which formed the floor, that is to say, the belly of the elephant, two
in front and one behind, and united by a rope at their summits, so as to
form a pyramidal bundle. This cluster supported a trellis-work of brass
wire which was simply placed upon it, but artistically applied, and held
by fastenings of iron wire, so that it enveloped all three holes. A row
of very heavy stones kept this network down to the floor so that nothing
could pass under it. This grating was nothing else than a piece of the
brass screens with which aviaries are covered in menageries. Gavroche's
bed stood as in a cage, behind this net. The whole resembled an
Esquimaux tent.

This trellis-work took the place of curtains.

Gavroche moved aside the stones which fastened the net down in front,
and the two folds of the net which lapped over each other fell apart.

"Down on all fours, brats!" said Gavroche.

He made his guests enter the cage with great precaution, then he crawled
in after them, pulled the stones together, and closed the opening
hermetically again.

All three had stretched out on the mat. Gavroche still had the cellar
rat in his hand.

"Now," said he, "go to sleep! I'm going to suppress the candelabra."

"Monsieur," the elder of the brothers asked Gavroche, pointing to the
netting, "what's that for?"

"That," answered Gavroche gravely, "is for the rats. Go to sleep!"

Nevertheless, he felt obliged to add a few words of instruction for the
benefit of these young creatures, and he continued:--

"It's a thing from the Jardin des Plantes. It's used for fierce animals.
There's a whole shopful of them there. All you've got to do is to climb
over a wall, crawl through a window, and pass through a door. You can
get as much as you want."

As he spoke, he wrapped the younger one up bodily in a fold of the
blanket, and the little one murmured:--

"Oh! how good that is! It's warm!"

Gavroche cast a pleased eye on the blanket.

"That's from the Jardin des Plantes, too," said he. "I took that from
the monkeys."

And, pointing out to the eldest the mat on which he was lying, a very
thick and admirably made mat, he added:--

"That belonged to the giraffe."

After a pause he went on:--

"The beasts had all these things. I took them away from them. It didn't
trouble them. I told them: 'It's for the elephant.'"

He paused, and then resumed:--

"You crawl over the walls and you don't care a straw for the government.
So there now!"

The two children gazed with timid and stupefied respect on this
intrepid and ingenious being, a vagabond like themselves, isolated
like themselves, frail like themselves, who had something admirable
and all-powerful about him, who seemed supernatural to them, and whose
physiognomy was composed of all the grimaces of an old mountebank,
mingled with the most ingenuous and charming smiles.

"Monsieur," ventured the elder timidly, "you are not afraid of the
police, then?"

Gavroche contented himself with replying:--

"Brat! Nobody says 'police,' they say 'bobbies.'"

The smaller had his eyes wide open, but he said nothing. As he was on
the edge of the mat, the elder being in the middle, Gavroche tucked the
blanket round him as a mother might have done, and heightened the mat
under his head with old rags, in such a way as to form a pillow for the
child. Then he turned to the elder:--

"Hey! We're jolly comfortable here, ain't we?"

"Ah, yes!" replied the elder, gazing at Gavroche with the expression of
a saved angel.

The two poor little children who had been soaked through, began to grow
warm once more.

"Ah, by the way," continued Gavroche, "what were you bawling about?"

And pointing out the little one to his brother:--

"A mite like that, I've nothing to say about, but the idea of a big
fellow like you crying! It's idiotic; you looked like a calf."

"Gracious," replied the child, "we have no lodging."

"Bother!" retorted Gavroche, "you don't say 'lodgings,' you say 'crib.'"

"And then, we were afraid of being alone like that at night."

"You don't say 'night,' you say 'darkmans.'"

"Thank you, sir," said the child.

"Listen," went on Gavroche, "you must never bawl again over anything.
I'll take care of you. You shall see what fun we'll have. In summer,
we'll go to the Glaciere with Navet, one of my pals, we'll bathe in
the Gare, we'll run stark naked in front of the rafts on the bridge at
Austerlitz,--that makes the laundresses raging. They scream, they get
mad, and if you only knew how ridiculous they are! We'll go and see the
man-skeleton. And then I'll take you to the play. I'll take you to see
Frederick Lemaitre. I have tickets, I know some of the actors, I even
played in a piece once. There were a lot of us fellers, and we ran
under a cloth, and that made the sea. I'll get you an engagement at my
theatre. We'll go to see the savages. They ain't real, those savages
ain't. They wear pink tights that go all in wrinkles, and you can see
where their elbows have been darned with white. Then, we'll go to the
Opera. We'll get in with the hired applauders. The Opera claque is well
managed. I wouldn't associate with the claque on the boulevard. At the
Opera, just fancy! some of them pay twenty sous, but they're ninnies.
They're called dishclouts. And then we'll go to see the guillotine work.
I'll show you the executioner. He lives in the Rue des Marais. Monsieur
Sanson. He has a letter-box at his door. Ah! we'll have famous fun!"

At that moment a drop of wax fell on Gavroche's finger, and recalled him
to the realities of life.

"The deuce!" said he, "there's the wick giving out. Attention! I can't
spend more than a sou a month on my lighting. When a body goes to bed,
he must sleep. We haven't the time to read M. Paul de Kock's
romances. And besides, the light might pass through the cracks of the
porte-cochere, and all the bobbies need to do is to see it."

"And then," remarked the elder timidly,--he alone dared talk to
Gavroche, and reply to him, "a spark might fall in the straw, and we
must look out and not burn the house down."

"People don't say 'burn the house down,'" remarked Gavroche, "they say
'blaze the crib.'"

The storm increased in violence, and the heavy downpour beat upon the
back of the colossus amid claps of thunder. "You're taken in, rain!"
said Gavroche. "It amuses me to hear the decanter run down the legs of
the house. Winter is a stupid; it wastes its merchandise, it loses
its labor, it can't wet us, and that makes it kick up a row, old
water-carrier that it is."

This allusion to the thunder, all the consequences of which Gavroche, in
his character of a philosopher of the nineteenth century, accepted, was
followed by a broad flash of lightning, so dazzling that a hint of it
entered the belly of the elephant through the crack. Almost at the same
instant, the thunder rumbled with great fury. The two little creatures
uttered a shriek, and started up so eagerly that the network came near
being displaced, but Gavroche turned his bold face to them, and took
advantage of the clap of thunder to burst into a laugh.

"Calm down, children. Don't topple over the edifice. That's fine,
first-class thunder; all right. That's no slouch of a streak of
lightning. Bravo for the good God! Deuce take it! It's almost as good as
it is at the Ambigu."

That said, he restored order in the netting, pushed the two children
gently down on the bed, pressed their knees, in order to stretch them
out at full length, and exclaimed:--

"Since the good God is lighting his candle, I can blow out mine. Now,
babes, now, my young humans, you must shut your peepers. It's very bad
not to sleep. It'll make you swallow the strainer, or, as they say, in
fashionable society, stink in the gullet. Wrap yourself up well in the
hide! I'm going to put out the light. Are you ready?"

"Yes," murmured the elder, "I'm all right. I seem to have feathers under
my head."

"People don't say 'head,'" cried Gavroche, "they say 'nut'."

The two children nestled close to each other, Gavroche finished
arranging them on the mat, drew the blanket up to their very ears, then
repeated, for the third time, his injunction in the hieratical tongue:--

"Shut your peepers!"

And he snuffed out his tiny light.

Hardly had the light been extinguished, when a peculiar trembling began
to affect the netting under which the three children lay.

It consisted of a multitude of dull scratches which produced a metallic
sound, as if claws and teeth were gnawing at the copper wire. This was
accompanied by all sorts of little piercing cries.

The little five-year-old boy, on hearing this hubbub overhead, and
chilled with terror, jogged his brother's elbow; but the elder brother
had already shut his peepers, as Gavroche had ordered. Then the little
one, who could no longer control his terror, questioned Gavroche, but in
a very low tone, and with bated breath:--

"Sir?"

"Hey?" said Gavroche, who had just closed his eyes.

"What is that?"

"It's the rats," replied Gavroche.

And he laid his head down on the mat again.

The rats, in fact, who swarmed by thousands in the carcass of the
elephant, and who were the living black spots which we have already
mentioned, had been held in awe by the flame of the candle, so long as
it had been lighted; but as soon as the cavern, which was the same
as their city, had returned to darkness, scenting what the good
story-teller Perrault calls "fresh meat," they had hurled themselves in
throngs on Gavroche's tent, had climbed to the top of it, and had begun
to bite the meshes as though seeking to pierce this new-fangled trap.

Still the little one could not sleep.

"Sir?" he began again.

"Hey?" said Gavroche.

"What are rats?"

"They are mice."

This explanation reassured the child a little. He had seen white mice in
the course of his life, and he was not afraid of them. Nevertheless, he
lifted up his voice once more.

"Sir?"

"Hey?" said Gavroche again.

"Why don't you have a cat?"

"I did have one," replied Gavroche, "I brought one here, but they ate
her."

This second explanation undid the work of the first, and the little
fellow began to tremble again.

The dialogue between him and Gavroche began again for the fourth time:--

"Monsieur?"

"Hey?"

"Who was it that was eaten?"

"The cat."

"And who ate the cat?"

"The rats."

"The mice?"

"Yes, the rats."

The child, in consternation, dismayed at the thought of mice which ate
cats, pursued:--

"Sir, would those mice eat us?"

"Wouldn't they just!" ejaculated Gavroche.

The child's terror had reached its climax. But Gavroche added:--

"Don't be afraid. They can't get in. And besides, I'm here! Here, catch
hold of my hand. Hold your tongue and shut your peepers!"

At the same time Gavroche grasped the little fellow's hand across his
brother. The child pressed the hand close to him, and felt reassured.
Courage and strength have these mysterious ways of communicating
themselves. Silence reigned round them once more, the sound of their
voices had frightened off the rats; at the expiration of a few minutes,
they came raging back, but in vain, the three little fellows were fast
asleep and heard nothing more.

The hours of the night fled away. Darkness covered the vast Place de la
Bastille. A wintry gale, which mingled with the rain, blew in gusts, the
patrol searched all the doorways, alleys, enclosures, and obscure nooks,
and in their search for nocturnal vagabonds they passed in silence
before the elephant; the monster, erect, motionless, staring open-eyed
into the shadows, had the appearance of dreaming happily over his good
deed; and sheltered from heaven and from men the three poor sleeping
children.

In order to understand what is about to follow, the reader must
remember, that, at that epoch, the Bastille guard-house was situated at
the other end of the square, and that what took place in the vicinity of
the elephant could neither be seen nor heard by the sentinel.

Towards the end of that hour which immediately precedes the dawn, a
man turned from the Rue Saint-Antoine at a run, made the circuit of the
enclosure of the column of July, and glided between the palings until he
was underneath the belly of the elephant. If any light had illuminated
that man, it might have been divined from the thorough manner in which
he was soaked that he had passed the night in the rain. Arrived beneath
the elephant, he uttered a peculiar cry, which did not belong to any
human tongue, and which a paroquet alone could have imitated. Twice he
repeated this cry, of whose orthography the following barely conveys an
idea:--

"Kirikikiou!"

At the second cry, a clear, young, merry voice responded from the belly
of the elephant:--

"Yes!"

Almost immediately, the plank which closed the hole was drawn aside,
and gave passage to a child who descended the elephant's leg, and fell
briskly near the man. It was Gavroche. The man was Montparnasse.

As for his cry of Kirikikiou,--that was, doubtless, what the child had
meant, when he said:--

"You will ask for Monsieur Gavroche."

On hearing it, he had waked with a start, had crawled out of his
"alcove," pushing apart the netting a little, and carefully drawing it
together again, then he had opened the trap, and descended.

The man and the child recognized each other silently amid the gloom:
Montparnasse confined himself to the remark:--

"We need you. Come, lend us a hand."

The lad asked for no further enlightenment.

"I'm with you," said he.

And both took their way towards the Rue Saint-Antoine, whence
Montparnasse had emerged, winding rapidly through the long file of
market-gardeners' carts which descend towards the markets at that hour.

The market-gardeners, crouching, half-asleep, in their wagons, amid the
salads and vegetables, enveloped to their very eyes in their mufflers
on account of the beating rain, did not even glance at these strange
pedestrians.




CHAPTER III--THE VICISSITUDES OF FLIGHT

This is what had taken place that same night at the La Force:--

An escape had been planned between Babet, Brujon, Guelemer, and
Thenardier, although Thenardier was in close confinement. Babet had
arranged the matter for his own benefit, on the same day, as the reader
has seen from Montparnasse's account to Gavroche. Montparnasse was to
help them from outside.

Brujon, after having passed a month in the punishment cell, had had
time, in the first place, to weave a rope, in the second, to mature a
plan. In former times, those severe places where the discipline of the
prison delivers the convict into his own hands, were composed of four
stone walls, a stone ceiling, a flagged pavement, a camp bed, a grated
window, and a door lined with iron, and were called dungeons; but the
dungeon was judged to be too terrible; nowadays they are composed of an
iron door, a grated window, a camp bed, a flagged pavement, four stone
walls, and a stone ceiling, and are called chambers of punishment. A
little light penetrates towards mid-day. The inconvenient point about
these chambers which, as the reader sees, are not dungeons, is that they
allow the persons who should be at work to think.

So Brujon meditated, and he emerged from the chamber of punishment with
a rope. As he had the name of being very dangerous in the Charlemagne
courtyard, he was placed in the New Building. The first thing he found
in the New Building was Guelemer, the second was a nail; Guelemer, that
is to say, crime; a nail, that is to say, liberty. Brujon, of whom it
is high time that the reader should have a complete idea, was, with an
appearance of delicate health and a profoundly premeditated languor, a
polished, intelligent sprig, and a thief, who had a caressing glance,
and an atrocious smile. His glance resulted from his will, and his
smile from his nature. His first studies in his art had been directed
to roofs. He had made great progress in the industry of the men who tear
off lead, who plunder the roofs and despoil the gutters by the process
called double pickings.

The circumstance which put the finishing touch on the moment peculiarly
favorable for an attempt at escape, was that the roofers were re-laying
and re-jointing, at that very moment, a portion of the slates on the
prison. The Saint-Bernard courtyard was no longer absolutely isolated
from the Charlemagne and the Saint-Louis courts. Up above there were
scaffoldings and ladders; in other words, bridges and stairs in the
direction of liberty.

The New Building, which was the most cracked and decrepit thing to be
seen anywhere in the world, was the weak point in the prison. The walls
were eaten by saltpetre to such an extent that the authorities had been
obliged to line the vaults of the dormitories with a sheathing of wood,
because stones were in the habit of becoming detached and falling on
the prisoners in their beds. In spite of this antiquity, the authorities
committed the error of confining in the New Building the most
troublesome prisoners, of placing there "the hard cases," as they say in
prison parlance.

The New Building contained four dormitories, one above the other, and a
top story which was called the Bel-Air (Fine Air). A large chimney-flue,
probably from some ancient kitchen of the Dukes de la Force, started
from the groundfloor, traversed all four stories, cut the dormitories,
where it figured as a flattened pillar, into two portions, and finally
pierced the roof.

Guelemer and Brujon were in the same dormitory. They had been placed, by
way of precaution, on the lower story. Chance ordained that the heads of
their beds should rest against the chimney.

Thenardier was directly over their heads in the top story known as
Fine-Air. The pedestrian who halts on the Rue Culture-Sainte-Catherine,
after passing the barracks of the firemen, in front of the porte-cochere
of the bathing establishment, beholds a yard full of flowers and shrubs
in wooden boxes, at the extremity of which spreads out a little white
rotunda with two wings, brightened up with green shutters, the bucolic
dream of Jean Jacques.

Not more than ten years ago, there rose above that rotunda an enormous
black, hideous, bare wall by which it was backed up.

This was the outer wall of La Force.

This wall, beside that rotunda, was Milton viewed through Berquin.

Lofty as it was, this wall was overtopped by a still blacker roof, which
could be seen beyond. This was the roof of the New Building. There
one could descry four dormer-windows, guarded with bars; they were the
windows of the Fine-Air.

A chimney pierced the roof; this was the chimney which traversed the
dormitories.

The Bel-Air, that top story of the New Building, was a sort of large
hall, with a Mansard roof, guarded with triple gratings and double doors
of sheet iron, which were studded with enormous bolts. When one entered
from the north end, one had on one's left the four dormer-windows, on
one's right, facing the windows, at regular intervals, four square,
tolerably vast cages, separated by narrow passages, built of masonry
to about the height of the elbow, and the rest, up to the roof, of iron
bars.

Thenardier had been in solitary confinement in one of these cages since
the night of the 3d of February. No one was ever able to discover how,
and by what connivance, he succeeded in procuring, and secreting a
bottle of wine, invented, so it is said, by Desrues, with which
a narcotic is mixed, and which the band of the Endormeurs, or
Sleep-compellers, rendered famous.

There are, in many prisons, treacherous employees, half-jailers,
half-thieves, who assist in escapes, who sell to the police an
unfaithful service, and who turn a penny whenever they can.

On that same night, then, when Little Gavroche picked up the two lost
children, Brujon and Guelemer, who knew that Babet, who had escaped that
morning, was waiting for them in the street as well as Montparnasse,
rose softly, and with the nail which Brujon had found, began to pierce
the chimney against which their beds stood. The rubbish fell on Brujon's
bed, so that they were not heard. Showers mingled with thunder shook
the doors on their hinges, and created in the prison a terrible and
opportune uproar. Those of the prisoners who woke, pretended to fall
asleep again, and left Guelemer and Brujon to their own devices. Brujon
was adroit; Guelemer was vigorous. Before any sound had reached the
watcher, who was sleeping in the grated cell which opened into the
dormitory, the wall had, been pierced, the chimney scaled, the iron
grating which barred the upper orifice of the flue forced, and the two
redoubtable ruffians were on the roof. The wind and rain redoubled, the
roof was slippery.

"What a good night to leg it!" said Brujon.

An abyss six feet broad and eighty feet deep separated them from the
surrounding wall. At the bottom of this abyss, they could see the musket
of a sentinel gleaming through the gloom. They fastened one end of the
rope which Brujon had spun in his dungeon to the stumps of the iron bars
which they had just wrenched off, flung the other over the outer wall,
crossed the abyss at one bound, clung to the coping of the wall, got
astride of it, let themselves slip, one after the other, along the rope,
upon a little roof which touches the bath-house, pulled their rope after
them, jumped down into the courtyard of the bath-house, traversed it,
pushed open the porter's wicket, beside which hung his rope, pulled
this, opened the porte-cochere, and found themselves in the street.

Three-quarters of an hour had not elapsed since they had risen in bed in
the dark, nail in hand, and their project in their heads.

A few moments later they had joined Babet and Montparnasse, who were
prowling about the neighborhood.

They had broken their rope in pulling it after them, and a bit of it
remained attached to the chimney on the roof. They had sustained no
other damage, however, than that of scratching nearly all the skin off
their hands.

That night, Thenardier was warned, without any one being able to explain
how, and was not asleep.

Towards one o'clock in the morning, the night being very dark, he saw
two shadows pass along the roof, in the rain and squalls, in front of
the dormer-window which was opposite his cage. One halted at the window,
long enough to dart in a glance. This was Brujon.

Thenardier recognized him, and understood. This was enough.

Thenardier, rated as a burglar, and detained as a measure of precaution
under the charge of organizing a nocturnal ambush, with armed force, was
kept in sight. The sentry, who was relieved every two hours, marched
up and down in front of his cage with loaded musket. The Fine-Air was
lighted by a skylight. The prisoner had on his feet fetters weighing
fifty pounds. Every day, at four o'clock in the afternoon, a jailer,
escorted by two dogs,--this was still in vogue at that time,--entered
his cage, deposited beside his bed a loaf of black bread weighing two
pounds, a jug of water, a bowl filled with rather thin bouillon, in
which swam a few Mayagan beans, inspected his irons and tapped the bars.
This man and his dogs made two visits during the night.

Thenardier had obtained permission to keep a sort of iron bolt which he
used to spike his bread into a crack in the wall, "in order to preserve
it from the rats," as he said. As Thenardier was kept in sight,
no objection had been made to this spike. Still, it was remembered
afterwards, that one of the jailers had said: "It would be better to let
him have only a wooden spike."

At two o'clock in the morning, the sentinel, who was an old soldier, was
relieved, and replaced by a conscript. A few moments later, the man with
the dogs paid his visit, and went off without noticing anything, except,
possibly, the excessive youth and "the rustic air" of the "raw recruit."
Two hours afterwards, at four o'clock, when they came to relieve the
conscript, he was found asleep on the floor, lying like a log near
Thenardier's cage. As for Thenardier, he was no longer there. There was
a hole in the ceiling of his cage, and, above it, another hole in the
roof. One of the planks of his bed had been wrenched off, and probably
carried away with him, as it was not found. They also seized in his cell
a half-empty bottle which contained the remains of the stupefying wine
with which the soldier had been drugged. The soldier's bayonet had
disappeared.

At the moment when this discovery was made, it was assumed that
Thenardier was out of reach. The truth is, that he was no longer in the
New Building, but that he was still in great danger.

Thenardier, on reaching the roof of the New Building, had found the
remains of Brujon's rope hanging to the bars of the upper trap of the
chimney, but, as this broken fragment was much too short, he had not
been able to escape by the outer wall, as Brujon and Guelemer had done.

When one turns from the Rue des Ballets into the Rue du Roi-de-Sicile,
one almost immediately encounters a repulsive ruin. There stood on
that spot, in the last century, a house of which only the back wall now
remains, a regular wall of masonry, which rises to the height of the
third story between the adjoining buildings. This ruin can be recognized
by two large square windows which are still to be seen there; the middle
one, that nearest the right gable, is barred with a worm-eaten beam
adjusted like a prop. Through these windows there was formerly visible a
lofty and lugubrious wall, which was a fragment of the outer wall of La
Force.

The empty space on the street left by the demolished house is
half-filled by a fence of rotten boards, shored up by five stone posts.
In this recess lies concealed a little shanty which leans against the
portion of the ruin which has remained standing. The fence has a gate,
which, a few years ago, was fastened only by a latch.

It was the crest of this ruin that Thenardier had succeeded in reaching,
a little after one o'clock in the morning.

How had he got there? That is what no one has ever been able to explain
or understand. The lightning must, at the same time, have hindered
and helped him. Had he made use of the ladders and scaffoldings of the
slaters to get from roof to roof, from enclosure to enclosure, from
compartment to compartment, to the buildings of the Charlemagne court,
then to the buildings of the Saint-Louis court, to the outer wall, and
thence to the hut on the Rue du Roi-de-Sicile? But in that itinerary
there existed breaks which seemed to render it an impossibility. Had
he placed the plank from his bed like a bridge from the roof of the
Fine-Air to the outer wall, and crawled flat, on his belly on the coping
of the outer wall the whole distance round the prison as far as the hut?
But the outer wall of La Force formed a crenellated and unequal line;
it mounted and descended, it dropped at the firemen's barracks, it rose
towards the bath-house, it was cut in twain by buildings, it was not
even of the same height on the Hotel Lamoignon as on the Rue Pavee;
everywhere occurred falls and right angles; and then, the sentinels must
have espied the dark form of the fugitive; hence, the route taken by
Thenardier still remains rather inexplicable. In two manners, flight was
impossible. Had Thenardier, spurred on by that thirst for liberty which
changes precipices into ditches, iron bars into wattles of osier, a
legless man into an athlete, a gouty man into a bird, stupidity into
instinct, instinct into intelligence, and intelligence into genius, had
Thenardier invented a third mode? No one has ever found out.

The marvels of escape cannot always be accounted for. The man who makes
his escape, we repeat, is inspired; there is something of the star and
of the lightning in the mysterious gleam of flight; the effort towards
deliverance is no less surprising than the flight towards the sublime,
and one says of the escaped thief: "How did he contrive to scale that
wall?" in the same way that one says of Corneille: "Where did he find
the means of dying?"

At all events, dripping with perspiration, drenched with rain, with his
clothes hanging in ribbons, his hands flayed, his elbows bleeding, his
knees torn, Thenardier had reached what children, in their figurative
language, call the edge of the wall of the ruin, there he had stretched
himself out at full length, and there his strength had failed him. A
steep escarpment three stories high separated him from the pavement of
the street.

The rope which he had was too short.

There he waited, pale, exhausted, desperate with all the despair which
he had undergone, still hidden by the night, but telling himself that
the day was on the point of dawning, alarmed at the idea of hearing the
neighboring clock of Saint-Paul strike four within a few minutes, an
hour when the sentinel was relieved and when the latter would be found
asleep under the pierced roof, staring in horror at a terrible depth, at
the light of the street lanterns, the wet, black pavement, that pavement
longed for yet frightful, which meant death, and which meant liberty.

He asked himself whether his three accomplices in flight had succeeded,
if they had heard him, and if they would come to his assistance. He
listened. With the exception of the patrol, no one had passed through
the street since he had been there. Nearly the whole of the descent of
the market-gardeners from Montreuil, from Charonne, from Vincennes,
and from Bercy to the markets was accomplished through the Rue
Saint-Antoine.

Four o'clock struck. Thenardier shuddered. A few moments later, that
terrified and confused uproar which follows the discovery of an escape
broke forth in the prison. The sound of doors opening and shutting, the
creaking of gratings on their hinges, a tumult in the guard-house, the
hoarse shouts of the turnkeys, the shock of musket-butts on the pavement
of the courts, reached his ears. Lights ascended and descended past the
grated windows of the dormitories, a torch ran along the ridge-pole of
the top story of the New Building, the firemen belonging in the barracks
on the right had been summoned. Their helmets, which the torch lighted
up in the rain, went and came along the roofs. At the same time,
Thenardier perceived in the direction of the Bastille a wan whiteness
lighting up the edge of the sky in doleful wise.

He was on top of a wall ten inches wide, stretched out under the heavy
rains, with two gulfs to right and left, unable to stir, subject to the
giddiness of a possible fall, and to the horror of a certain arrest,
and his thoughts, like the pendulum of a clock, swung from one of these
ideas to the other: "Dead if I fall, caught if I stay." In the midst of
this anguish, he suddenly saw, the street being still dark, a man who
was gliding along the walls and coming from the Rue Pavee, halt in the
recess above which Thenardier was, as it were, suspended. Here this
man was joined by a second, who walked with the same caution, then by
a third, then by a fourth. When these men were re-united, one of them
lifted the latch of the gate in the fence, and all four entered
the enclosure in which the shanty stood. They halted directly under
Thenardier. These men had evidently chosen this vacant space in order
that they might consult without being seen by the passers-by or by the
sentinel who guards the wicket of La Force a few paces distant. It
must be added, that the rain kept this sentinel blocked in his box.
Thenardier, not being able to distinguish their visages, lent an ear to
their words with the desperate attention of a wretch who feels himself
lost.

Thenardier saw something resembling a gleam of hope flash before his
eyes,--these men conversed in slang.

The first said in a low but distinct voice:--

"Let's cut. What are we up to here?"

The second replied: "It's raining hard enough to put out the very
devil's fire. And the bobbies will be along instanter. There's a soldier
on guard yonder. We shall get nabbed here."

These two words, icigo and icicaille, both of which mean ici, and which
belong, the first to the slang of the barriers, the second to the slang
of the Temple, were flashes of light for Thenardier. By the icigo he
recognized Brujon, who was a prowler of the barriers, by the icicaille
he knew Babet, who, among his other trades, had been an old-clothes
broker at the Temple.

The antique slang of the great century is no longer spoken except in
the Temple, and Babet was really the only person who spoke it in all
its purity. Had it not been for the icicaille, Thenardier would not have
recognized him, for he had entirely changed his voice.

In the meanwhile, the third man had intervened.

"There's no hurry yet, let's wait a bit. How do we know that he doesn't
stand in need of us?"

By this, which was nothing but French, Thenardier recognized
Montparnasse, who made it a point in his elegance to understand all
slangs and to speak none of them.

As for the fourth, he held his peace, but his huge shoulders betrayed
him. Thenardier did not hesitate. It was Guelemer.

Brujon replied almost impetuously but still in a low tone:--

"What are you jabbering about? The tavern-keeper hasn't managed to cut
his stick. He don't tumble to the racket, that he don't! You have to be
a pretty knowing cove to tear up your shirt, cut up your sheet to make
a rope, punch holes in doors, get up false papers, make false keys, file
your irons, hang out your cord, hide yourself, and disguise yourself!
The old fellow hasn't managed to play it, he doesn't understand how to
work the business."

Babet added, still in that classical slang which was spoken by
Poulailler and Cartouche, and which is to the bold, new, highly colored
and risky argot used by Brujon what the language of Racine is to the
language of Andre Chenier:--

"Your tavern-keeper must have been nabbed in the act. You have to be
knowing. He's only a greenhorn. He must have let himself be taken in
by a bobby, perhaps even by a sheep who played it on him as his pal.
Listen, Montparnasse, do you hear those shouts in the prison? You have
seen all those lights. He's recaptured, there! He'll get off with twenty
years. I ain't afraid, I ain't a coward, but there ain't anything more
to do, or otherwise they'd lead us a dance. Don't get mad, come with us,
let's go drink a bottle of old wine together."

"One doesn't desert one's friends in a scrape," grumbled Montparnasse.

"I tell you he's nabbed!" retorted Brujon. "At the present moment, the
inn-keeper ain't worth a ha'penny. We can't do nothing for him. Let's be
off. Every minute I think a bobby has got me in his fist."

Montparnasse no longer offered more than a feeble resistance; the fact
is, that these four men, with the fidelity of ruffians who never abandon
each other, had prowled all night long about La Force, great as was
their peril, in the hope of seeing Thenardier make his appearance on the
top of some wall. But the night, which was really growing too fine,--for
the downpour was such as to render all the streets deserted,--the cold
which was overpowering them, their soaked garments, their hole-ridden
shoes, the alarming noise which had just burst forth in the prison, the
hours which had elapsed, the patrol which they had encountered, the
hope which was vanishing, all urged them to beat a retreat. Montparnasse
himself, who was, perhaps, almost Thenardier's son-in-law, yielded. A
moment more, and they would be gone. Thenardier was panting on his wall
like the shipwrecked sufferers of the Meduse on their raft when they
beheld the vessel which had appeared in sight vanish on the horizon.

He dared not call to them; a cry might be heard and ruin everything. An
idea occurred to him, a last idea, a flash of inspiration; he drew from
his pocket the end of Brujon's rope, which he had detached from the
chimney of the New Building, and flung it into the space enclosed by the
fence.

This rope fell at their feet.

"A widow,"[37] said Babet.

"My tortouse!"[38] said Brujon.

"The tavern-keeper is there," said Montparnasse.

They raised their eyes. Thenardier thrust out his head a very little.

"Quick!" said Montparnasse, "have you the other end of the rope,
Brujon?"

"Yes."

"Knot the two pieces together, we'll fling him the rope, he can fasten
it to the wall, and he'll have enough of it to get down with."

Thenardier ran the risk, and spoke:--

"I am paralyzed with cold."

"We'll warm you up."

"I can't budge."

"Let yourself slide, we'll catch you."

"My hands are benumbed."

"Only fasten the rope to the wall."

"I can't."

"Then one of us must climb up," said Montparnasse.

"Three stories!" ejaculated Brujon.

An ancient plaster flue, which had served for a stove that had been used
in the shanty in former times, ran along the wall and mounted almost
to the very spot where they could see Thenardier. This flue, then much
damaged and full of cracks, has since fallen, but the marks of it are
still visible.

It was very narrow.

"One might get up by the help of that," said Montparnasse.

"By that flue?" exclaimed Babet, "a grown-up cove, never! it would take
a brat."

"A brat must be got," resumed Brujon.

"Where are we to find a young 'un?" said Guelemer.

"Wait," said Montparnasse. "I've got the very article."

He opened the gate of the fence very softly, made sure that no one was
passing along the street, stepped out cautiously, shut the gate behind
him, and set off at a run in the direction of the Bastille.

Seven or eight minutes elapsed, eight thousand centuries to Thenardier;
Babet, Brujon, and Guelemer did not open their lips; at last the gate
opened once more, and Montparnasse appeared, breathless, and followed by
Gavroche. The rain still rendered the street completely deserted.

Little Gavroche entered the enclosure and gazed at the forms of these
ruffians with a tranquil air. The water was dripping from his hair.
Guelemer addressed him:--

"Are you a man, young 'un?"

Gavroche shrugged his shoulders, and replied:--

"A young 'un like me's a man, and men like you are babes."

"The brat's tongue's well hung!" exclaimed Babet.

"The Paris brat ain't made of straw," added Brujon.

"What do you want?" asked Gavroche.

Montparnasse answered:--

"Climb up that flue."

"With this rope," said Babet.

"And fasten it," continued Brujon.

"To the top of the wall," went on Babet.

"To the cross-bar of the window," added Brujon.

"And then?" said Gavroche.

"There!" said Guelemer.

The gamin examined the rope, the flue, the wall, the windows, and made
that indescribable and disdainful noise with his lips which signifies:--

"Is that all!"

"There's a man up there whom you are to save," resumed Montparnasse.

"Will you?" began Brujon again.

"Greenhorn!" replied the lad, as though the question appeared a most
unprecedented one to him.

And he took off his shoes.

Guelemer seized Gavroche by one arm, set him on the roof of the shanty,
whose worm-eaten planks bent beneath the urchin's weight, and handed
him the rope which Brujon had knotted together during Montparnasse's
absence. The gamin directed his steps towards the flue, which it was
easy to enter, thanks to a large crack which touched the roof. At the
moment when he was on the point of ascending, Thenardier, who saw life
and safety approaching, bent over the edge of the wall; the first light
of dawn struck white upon his brow dripping with sweat, upon his livid
cheek-bones, his sharp and savage nose, his bristling gray beard, and
Gavroche recognized him.

"Hullo! it's my father! Oh, that won't hinder."

And taking the rope in his teeth, he resolutely began the ascent.

He reached the summit of the hut, bestrode the old wall as though it had
been a horse, and knotted the rope firmly to the upper cross-bar of the
window.

A moment later, Thenardier was in the street.

As soon as he touched the pavement, as soon as he found himself out
of danger, he was no longer either weary, or chilled or trembling; the
terrible things from which he had escaped vanished like smoke, all that
strange and ferocious mind awoke once more, and stood erect and free,
ready to march onward.

These were this man's first words:--

"Now, whom are we to eat?"

It is useless to explain the sense of this frightfully transparent
remark, which signifies both to kill, to assassinate, and to plunder. To
eat, true sense: to devour.

"Let's get well into a corner," said Brujon. "Let's settle it in three
words, and part at once. There was an affair that promised well in the
Rue Plumet, a deserted street, an isolated house, an old rotten gate on
a garden, and lone women."

"Well! why not?" demanded Thenardier.

"Your girl, Eponine, went to see about the matter," replied Babet.

"And she brought a biscuit to Magnon," added Guelemer. "Nothing to be
made there."

"The girl's no fool," said Thenardier. "Still, it must be seen to."

"Yes, yes," said Brujon, "it must be looked up."

In the meanwhile, none of the men seemed to see Gavroche, who, during
this colloquy, had seated himself on one of the fence-posts; he waited
a few moments, thinking that perhaps his father would turn towards him,
then he put on his shoes again, and said:--

"Is that all? You don't want any more, my men? Now you're out of your
scrape. I'm off. I must go and get my brats out of bed."

And off he went.

The five men emerged, one after another, from the enclosure.

When Gavroche had disappeared at the corner of the Rue des Ballets,
Babet took Thenardier aside.

"Did you take a good look at that young 'un?" he asked.

"What young 'un?"

"The one who climbed the wall and carried you the rope."

"Not particularly."

"Well, I don't know, but it strikes me that it was your son."

"Bah!" said Thenardier, "do you think so?"




BOOK SEVENTH.--SLANG

[Illustration: Slang b7-1-slang]




CHAPTER I--ORIGIN

Pigritia is a terrible word.

It engenders a whole world, la pegre, for which read theft, and a hell,
la pegrenne, for which read hunger.

Thus, idleness is the mother.

She has a son, theft, and a daughter, hunger.

Where are we at this moment? In the land of slang.

What is slang? It is at one and the same time, a nation and a dialect;
it is theft in its two kinds; people and language.

When, four and thirty years ago, the narrator of this grave and sombre
history introduced into a work written with the same aim as this[39] a
thief who talked argot, there arose amazement and clamor.--"What! How!
Argot! Why, argot is horrible! It is the language of prisons, galleys,
convicts, of everything that is most abominable in society!" etc., etc.

We have never understood this sort of objections.

Since that time, two powerful romancers, one of whom is a profound
observer of the human heart, the other an intrepid friend of the people,
Balzac and Eugene Sue, having represented their ruffians as talking
their natural language, as the author of The Last Day of a Condemned
Man did in 1828, the same objections have been raised. People repeated:
"What do authors mean by that revolting dialect? Slang is odious! Slang
makes one shudder!"

Who denies that? Of course it does.

When it is a question of probing a wound, a gulf, a society, since when
has it been considered wrong to go too far? to go to the bottom? We have
always thought that it was sometimes a courageous act, and, at least, a
simple and useful deed, worthy of the sympathetic attention which duty
accepted and fulfilled merits. Why should one not explore everything,
and study everything? Why should one halt on the way? The halt is a
matter depending on the sounding-line, and not on the leadsman.

Certainly, too, it is neither an attractive nor an easy task to
undertake an investigation into the lowest depths of the social order,
where terra firma comes to an end and where mud begins, to rummage in
those vague, murky waves, to follow up, to seize and to fling, still
quivering, upon the pavement that abject dialect which is dripping with
filth when thus brought to the light, that pustulous vocabulary each
word of which seems an unclean ring from a monster of the mire and the
shadows. Nothing is more lugubrious than the contemplation thus in
its nudity, in the broad light of thought, of the horrible swarming of
slang. It seems, in fact, to be a sort of horrible beast made for the
night which has just been torn from its cesspool. One thinks one beholds
a frightful, living, and bristling thicket which quivers, rustles,
wavers, returns to shadow, threatens and glares. One word resembles a
claw, another an extinguished and bleeding eye, such and such a phrase
seems to move like the claw of a crab. All this is alive with
the hideous vitality of things which have been organized out of
disorganization.

Now, when has horror ever excluded study? Since when has malady banished
medicine? Can one imagine a naturalist refusing to study the viper, the
bat, the scorpion, the centipede, the tarantula, and one who would
cast them back into their darkness, saying: "Oh! how ugly that is!" The
thinker who should turn aside from slang would resemble a surgeon
who should avert his face from an ulcer or a wart. He would be like
a philologist refusing to examine a fact in language, a philosopher
hesitating to scrutinize a fact in humanity. For, it must be stated
to those who are ignorant of the case, that argot is both a literary
phenomenon and a social result. What is slang, properly speaking? It is
the language of wretchedness.

We may be stopped; the fact may be put to us in general terms, which is
one way of attenuating it; we may be told, that all trades, professions,
it may be added, all the accidents of the social hierarchy and all
forms of intelligence, have their own slang. The merchant who says:
"Montpellier not active, Marseilles fine quality," the broker on 'change
who says: "Assets at end of current month," the gambler who says: "Tiers
et tout, refait de pique," the sheriff of the Norman Isles who says:
"The holder in fee reverting to his landed estate cannot claim the
fruits of that estate during the hereditary seizure of the real estate
by the mortgagor," the playwright who says: "The piece was hissed,"
the comedian who says: "I've made a hit," the philosopher who says:
"Phenomenal triplicity," the huntsman who says: "Voileci allais,
Voileci fuyant," the phrenologist who says: "Amativeness, combativeness,
secretiveness," the infantry soldier who says: "My shooting-iron," the
cavalry-man who says: "My turkey-cock," the fencing-master who says:
"Tierce, quarte, break," the printer who says: "My shooting-stick and
galley,"--all, printer, fencing-master, cavalry dragoon, infantry-man,
phrenologist, huntsman, philosopher, comedian, playwright, sheriff,
gambler, stock-broker, and merchant, speak slang. The painter who says:
"My grinder," the notary who says: "My Skip-the-Gutter," the hairdresser
who says: "My mealyback," the cobbler who says: "My cub," talks slang.
Strictly speaking, if one absolutely insists on the point, all the
different fashions of saying the right and the left, the sailor's port
and starboard, the scene-shifter's court-side, and garden-side, the
beadle's Gospel-side and Epistle-side, are slang. There is the slang of
the affected lady as well as of the precieuses. The Hotel Rambouillet
nearly adjoins the Cour des Miracles. There is a slang of duchesses,
witness this phrase contained in a love-letter from a very great lady
and a very pretty woman of the Restoration: "You will find in this
gossip a fultitude of reasons why I should libertize."[40] Diplomatic
ciphers are slang; the pontifical chancellery by using 26 for Rome,
grkztntgzyal for despatch, and abfxustgrnogrkzu tu XI. for the Due de
Modena, speaks slang. The physicians of the Middle Ages who, for
carrot, radish, and turnip, said Opoponach, perfroschinum,
reptitalmus, dracatholicum, angelorum, postmegorum, talked slang. The
sugar-manufacturer who says: "Loaf, clarified, lumps, bastard, common,
burnt,"--this honest manufacturer talks slang. A certain school of
criticism twenty years ago, which used to say: "Half of the works of
Shakespeare consists of plays upon words and puns,"--talked slang. The
poet, and the artist who, with profound understanding, would designate
M. de Montmorency as "a bourgeois," if he were not a judge of verses and
statues, speak slang. The classic Academician who calls flowers "Flora,"
fruits, "Pomona," the sea, "Neptune," love, "fires," beauty, "charms,"
a horse, "a courser," the white or tricolored cockade, "the rose of
Bellona," the three-cornered hat, "Mars' triangle,"--that classical
Academician talks slang. Algebra, medicine, botany, have each their
slang. The tongue which is employed on board ship, that wonderful
language of the sea, which is so complete and so picturesque, which was
spoken by Jean Bart, Duquesne, Suffren, and Duperre, which mingles with
the whistling of the rigging, the sound of the speaking-trumpets, the
shock of the boarding-irons, the roll of the sea, the wind, the gale,
the cannon, is wholly a heroic and dazzling slang, which is to the
fierce slang of the thieves what the lion is to the jackal.

No doubt. But say what we will, this manner of understanding the word
slang is an extension which every one will not admit. For our part,
we reserve to the word its ancient and precise, circumscribed and
determined significance, and we restrict slang to slang. The veritable
slang and the slang that is pre-eminently slang, if the two words can be
coupled thus, the slang immemorial which was a kingdom, is nothing
else, we repeat, than the homely, uneasy, crafty, treacherous, venomous,
cruel, equivocal, vile, profound, fatal tongue of wretchedness. There
exists, at the extremity of all abasement and all misfortunes, a last
misery which revolts and makes up its mind to enter into conflict
with the whole mass of fortunate facts and reigning rights; a fearful
conflict, where, now cunning, now violent, unhealthy and ferocious
at one and the same time, it attacks the social order with pin-pricks
through vice, and with club-blows through crime. To meet the needs of
this conflict, wretchedness has invented a language of combat, which is
slang.

To keep afloat and to rescue from oblivion, to hold above the gulf, were
it but a fragment of some language which man has spoken and which would,
otherwise, be lost, that is to say, one of the elements, good or bad, of
which civilization is composed, or by which it is complicated, to extend
the records of social observation; is to serve civilization itself. This
service Plautus rendered, consciously or unconsciously, by making two
Carthaginian soldiers talk Phoenician; that service Moliere rendered,
by making so many of his characters talk Levantine and all sorts of
dialects. Here objections spring up afresh. Phoenician, very good!
Levantine, quite right! Even dialect, let that pass! They are tongues
which have belonged to nations or provinces; but slang! What is the use
of preserving slang? What is the good of assisting slang "to survive"?

To this we reply in one word, only. Assuredly, if the tongue which a
nation or a province has spoken is worthy of interest, the language
which has been spoken by a misery is still more worthy of attention and
study.

It is the language which has been spoken, in France, for example, for
more than four centuries, not only by a misery, but by every possible
human misery.

And then, we insist upon it, the study of social deformities and
infirmities, and the task of pointing them out with a view to remedy,
is not a business in which choice is permitted. The historian of manners
and ideas has no less austere a mission than the historian of events.
The latter has the surface of civilization, the conflicts of crowns, the
births of princes, the marriages of kings, battles, assemblages, great
public men, revolutions in the daylight, everything on the exterior;
the other historian has the interior, the depths, the people who toil,
suffer, wait, the oppressed woman, the agonizing child, the secret war
between man and man, obscure ferocities, prejudices, plotted
iniquities, the subterranean, the indistinct tremors of multitudes, the
die-of-hunger, the counter-blows of the law, the secret evolution of
souls, the go-bare-foot, the bare-armed, the disinherited, the orphans,
the unhappy, and the infamous, all the forms which roam through the
darkness. He must descend with his heart full of charity, and severity
at the same time, as a brother and as a judge, to those impenetrable
casemates where crawl, pell-mell, those who bleed and those who deal the
blow, those who weep and those who curse, those who fast and those
who devour, those who endure evil and those who inflict it. Have these
historians of hearts and souls duties at all inferior to the historians
of external facts? Does any one think that Alighieri has any fewer
things to say than Machiavelli? Is the under side of civilization any
less important than the upper side merely because it is deeper and more
sombre? Do we really know the mountain well when we are not acquainted
with the cavern?

Let us say, moreover, parenthetically, that from a few words of what
precedes a marked separation might be inferred between the two classes
of historians which does not exist in our mind. No one is a good
historian of the patent, visible, striking, and public life of peoples,
if he is not, at the same time, in a certain measure, the historian
of their deep and hidden life; and no one is a good historian of the
interior unless he understands how, at need, to be the historian of the
exterior also. The history of manners and ideas permeates the history
of events, and this is true reciprocally. They constitute two different
orders of facts which correspond to each other, which are always
interlaced, and which often bring forth results. All the lineaments
which providence traces on the surface of a nation have their parallels,
sombre but distinct, in their depths, and all convulsions of the depths
produce ebullitions on the surface. True history being a mixture of all
things, the true historian mingles in everything.

Man is not a circle with a single centre; he is an ellipse with a double
focus. Facts form one of these, and ideas the other.

Slang is nothing but a dressing-room where the tongue having some
bad action to perform, disguises itself. There it clothes itself in
word-masks, in metaphor-rags. In this guise it becomes horrible.

One finds it difficult to recognize. Is it really the French tongue, the
great human tongue? Behold it ready to step upon the stage and to retort
upon crime, and prepared for all the employments of the repertory of
evil. It no longer walks, it hobbles; it limps on the crutch of the
Court of Miracles, a crutch metamorphosable into a club; it is called
vagrancy; every sort of spectre, its dressers, have painted its face, it
crawls and rears, the double gait of the reptile. Henceforth, it is apt
at all roles, it is made suspicious by the counterfeiter, covered with
verdigris by the forger, blacked by the soot of the incendiary; and the
murderer applies its rouge.

When one listens, by the side of honest men, at the portals of society,
one overhears the dialogues of those who are on the outside.
One distinguishes questions and replies. One perceives, without
understanding it, a hideous murmur, sounding almost like human accents,
but more nearly resembling a howl than an articulate word. It is slang.
The words are misshapen and stamped with an indescribable and fantastic
bestiality. One thinks one hears hydras talking.

It is unintelligible in the dark. It gnashes and whispers, completing
the gloom with mystery. It is black in misfortune, it is blacker still
in crime; these two blacknesses amalgamated, compose slang. Obscurity
in the atmosphere, obscurity in acts, obscurity in voices. Terrible,
toad-like tongue which goes and comes, leaps, crawls, slobbers, and
stirs about in monstrous wise in that immense gray fog composed of rain
and night, of hunger, of vice, of falsehood, of injustice, of nudity, of
suffocation, and of winter, the high noonday of the miserable.

Let us have compassion on the chastised. Alas! Who are we ourselves? Who
am I who now address you? Who are you who are listening to me? And are
you very sure that we have done nothing before we were born? The earth
is not devoid of resemblance to a jail. Who knows whether man is not a
recaptured offender against divine justice? Look closely at life. It is
so made, that everywhere we feel the sense of punishment.

Are you what is called a happy man? Well! you are sad every day. Each
day has its own great grief or its little care. Yesterday you were
trembling for a health that is dear to you, to-day you fear for your
own; to-morrow it will be anxiety about money, the day after to-morrow
the diatribe of a slanderer, the day after that, the misfortune of some
friend; then the prevailing weather, then something that has been broken
or lost, then a pleasure with which your conscience and your vertebral
column reproach you; again, the course of public affairs. This without
reckoning in the pains of the heart. And so it goes on. One cloud is
dispelled, another forms. There is hardly one day out of a hundred which
is wholly joyous and sunny. And you belong to that small class who are
happy! As for the rest of mankind, stagnating night rests upon them.

Thoughtful minds make but little use of the phrase: the fortunate and
the unfortunate. In this world, evidently the vestibule of another,
there are no fortunate.

The real human division is this: the luminous and the shady. To diminish
the number of the shady, to augment the number of the luminous,--that
is the object. That is why we cry: Education! science! To teach reading,
means to light the fire; every syllable spelled out sparkles.

However, he who says light does not, necessarily, say joy. People suffer
in the light; excess burns. The flame is the enemy of the wing. To burn
without ceasing to fly,--therein lies the marvel of genius.

When you shall have learned to know, and to love, you will still suffer.
The day is born in tears. The luminous weep, if only over those in
darkness.




CHAPTER II--ROOTS

Slang is the tongue of those who sit in darkness.

Thought is moved in its most sombre depths, social philosophy is bidden
to its most poignant meditations, in the presence of that enigmatic
dialect at once so blighted and rebellious. Therein lies chastisement
made visible. Every syllable has an air of being marked. The words of
the vulgar tongue appear therein wrinkled and shrivelled, as it were,
beneath the hot iron of the executioner. Some seem to be still smoking.
Such and such a phrase produces upon you the effect of the shoulder of a
thief branded with the fleur-de-lys, which has suddenly been laid bare.
Ideas almost refuse to be expressed in these substantives which are
fugitives from justice. Metaphor is sometimes so shameless, that one
feels that it has worn the iron neck-fetter.

Moreover, in spite of all this, and because of all this, this strange
dialect has by rights, its own compartment in that great impartial case
of pigeon-holes where there is room for the rusty farthing as well as
for the gold medal, and which is called literature. Slang, whether the
public admit the fact or not has its syntax and its poetry. It is a
language. Yes, by the deformity of certain terms, we recognize the
fact that it was chewed by Mandrin, and by the splendor of certain
metonymies, we feel that Villon spoke it.

That exquisite and celebrated verse--

          Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan?
          But where are the snows of years gone by?

is a verse of slang. Antam--ante annum--is a word of Thunes slang, which
signified the past year, and by extension, formerly. Thirty-five years
ago, at the epoch of the departure of the great chain-gang, there could
be read in one of the cells at Bicetre, this maxim engraved with a
nail on the wall by a king of Thunes condemned to the galleys: Les dabs
d'antan trimaient siempre pour la pierre du Coesre. This means Kings in
days gone by always went and had themselves anointed. In the opinion of
that king, anointment meant the galleys.

The word decarade, which expresses the departure of heavy vehicles at
a gallop, is attributed to Villon, and it is worthy of him. This word,
which strikes fire with all four of its feet, sums up in a masterly
onomatopoeia the whole of La Fontaine's admirable verse:--

          Six forts chevaux tiraient un coche.
          Six stout horses drew a coach.


From a purely literary point of view, few studies would prove more
curious and fruitful than the study of slang. It is a whole language
within a language, a sort of sickly excrescence, an unhealthy graft
which has produced a vegetation, a parasite which has its roots in the
old Gallic trunk, and whose sinister foliage crawls all over one side of
the language. This is what may be called the first, the vulgar aspect of
slang. But, for those who study the tongue as it should be studied, that
is to say, as geologists study the earth, slang appears like a veritable
alluvial deposit. According as one digs a longer or shorter distance
into it, one finds in slang, below the old popular French, Provencal,
Spanish, Italian, Levantine, that language of the Mediterranean ports,
English and German, the Romance language in its three varieties, French,
Italian, and Romance Romance, Latin, and finally Basque and Celtic. A
profound and unique formation. A subterranean edifice erected in common
by all the miserable. Each accursed race has deposited its layer, each
suffering has dropped its stone there, each heart has contributed its
pebble. A throng of evil, base, or irritated souls, who have traversed
life and have vanished into eternity, linger there almost entirely
visible still beneath the form of some monstrous word.

Do you want Spanish? The old Gothic slang abounded in it. Here is
boffete, a box on the ear, which is derived from bofeton; vantane,
window (later on vanterne), which comes from vantana; gat, cat, which
comes from gato; acite, oil, which comes from aceyte. Do you want
Italian? Here is spade, sword, which comes from spada; carvel, boat,
which comes from caravella. Do you want English? Here is bichot, which
comes from bishop; raille, spy, which comes from rascal, rascalion;
pilche, a case, which comes from pilcher, a sheath. Do you want German?
Here is the caleur, the waiter, kellner; the hers, the master, herzog
(duke). Do you want Latin? Here is frangir, to break, frangere; affurer,
to steal, fur; cadene, chain, catena. There is one word which crops up
in every language of the continent, with a sort of mysterious power and
authority. It is the word magnus; the Scotchman makes of it his mac,
which designates the chief of the clan; Mac-Farlane, Mac-Callumore, the
great Farlane, the great Callumore[41]; slang turns it into meck and
later le meg, that is to say, God. Would you like Basque? Here is
gahisto, the devil, which comes from gaiztoa, evil; sorgabon, good
night, which comes from gabon, good evening. Do you want Celtic? Here is
blavin, a handkerchief, which comes from blavet, gushing water; menesse,
a woman (in a bad sense), which comes from meinec, full of stones;
barant, brook, from baranton, fountain; goffeur, locksmith, from goff,
blacksmith; guedouze, death, which comes from guenn-du, black-white.
Finally, would you like history? Slang calls crowns les malteses, a
souvenir of the coin in circulation on the galleys of Malta.

In addition to the philological origins just indicated, slang possesses
other and still more natural roots, which spring, so to speak, from the
mind of man itself.

In the first place, the direct creation of words. Therein lies the
mystery of tongues. To paint with words, which contains figures
one knows not how or why, is the primitive foundation of all human
languages, what may be called their granite.

Slang abounds in words of this description, immediate words, words
created instantaneously no one knows either where or by whom, without
etymology, without analogies, without derivatives, solitary, barbarous,
sometimes hideous words, which at times possess a singular power of
expression and which live. The executioner, le taule; the forest,
le sabri; fear, flight, taf; the lackey, le larbin; the mineral,
the prefect, the minister, pharos; the devil, le rabouin. Nothing is
stranger than these words which both mask and reveal. Some, le rabouin,
for example, are at the same time grotesque and terrible, and produce on
you the effect of a cyclopean grimace.

In the second place, metaphor. The peculiarity of a language which is
desirous of saying all yet concealing all is that it is rich in figures.
Metaphor is an enigma, wherein the thief who is plotting a stroke,
the prisoner who is arranging an escape, take refuge. No idiom is more
metaphorical than slang: devisser le coco (to unscrew the nut), to twist
the neck; tortiller (to wriggle), to eat; etre gerbe, to be tried; a
rat, a bread thief; il lansquine, it rains, a striking, ancient figure
which partly bears its date about it, which assimilates long oblique
lines of rain, with the dense and slanting pikes of the lancers, and
which compresses into a single word the popular expression: it rains
halberds. Sometimes, in proportion as slang progresses from the first
epoch to the second, words pass from the primitive and savage sense to
the metaphorical sense. The devil ceases to be le rabouin, and becomes
le boulanger (the baker), who puts the bread into the oven. This is
more witty, but less grand, something like Racine after Corneille, like
Euripides after AEschylus. Certain slang phrases which participate
in the two epochs and have at once the barbaric character and the
metaphorical character resemble phantasmagories. Les sorgueuers vont
solliciter des gails a la lune--the prowlers are going to steal horses
by night,--this passes before the mind like a group of spectres. One
knows not what one sees.

In the third place, the expedient. Slang lives on the language. It uses
it in accordance with its fancy, it dips into it hap-hazard, and it
often confines itself, when occasion arises, to alter it in a gross and
summary fashion. Occasionally, with the ordinary words thus deformed and
complicated with words of pure slang, picturesque phrases are formed, in
which there can be felt the mixture of the two preceding elements, the
direct creation and the metaphor: le cab jaspine, je marronne que la
roulotte de Pantin trime dans le sabri, the dog is barking, I suspect
that the diligence for Paris is passing through the woods. Le dab est
sinve, la dabuge est merloussiere, la fee est bative, the bourgeois is
stupid, the bourgeoise is cunning, the daughter is pretty. Generally,
to throw listeners off the track, slang confines itself to adding to
all the words of the language without distinction, an ignoble tail, a
termination in aille, in orgue, in iergue, or in uche. Thus: Vousiergue
trouvaille bonorgue ce gigotmuche? Do you think that leg of mutton
good? A phrase addressed by Cartouche to a turnkey in order to find out
whether the sum offered for his escape suited him.

The termination in mar has been added recently.

Slang, being the dialect of corruption, quickly becomes corrupted
itself. Besides this, as it is always seeking concealment, as soon as
it feels that it is understood, it changes its form. Contrary to what
happens with every other vegetation, every ray of light which falls
upon it kills whatever it touches. Thus slang is in constant process of
decomposition and recomposition; an obscure and rapid work which never
pauses. It passes over more ground in ten years than a language in ten
centuries. Thus le larton (bread) becomes le lartif; le gail (horse)
becomes le gaye; la fertanche (straw) becomes la fertille; le momignard
(brat), le momacque; les fiques (duds), frusques; la chique (the
church), l'egrugeoir; le colabre (neck), le colas. The devil is at
first, gahisto, then le rabouin, then the baker; the priest is a
ratichon, then the boar (le sanglier); the dagger is le vingt-deux
(twenty-two), then le surin, then le lingre; the police are railles,
then roussins, then rousses, then marchands de lacets (dealers in
stay-laces), then coquers, then cognes; the executioner is le taule,
then Charlot, l'atigeur, then le becquillard. In the seventeenth
century, to fight was "to give each other snuff"; in the nineteenth
it is "to chew each other's throats." There have been twenty different
phrases between these two extremes. Cartouche's talk would have been
Hebrew to Lacenaire. All the words of this language are perpetually
engaged in flight like the men who utter them.

Still, from time to time, and in consequence of this very movement,
the ancient slang crops up again and becomes new once more. It has its
headquarters where it maintains its sway. The Temple preserved the slang
of the seventeenth century; Bicetre, when it was a prison, preserved the
slang of Thunes. There one could hear the termination in anche of
the old Thuneurs. Boyanches-tu (bois-tu), do you drink? But perpetual
movement remains its law, nevertheless.

If the philosopher succeeds in fixing, for a moment, for purposes of
observation, this language which is incessantly evaporating, he falls
into doleful and useful meditation. No study is more efficacious and
more fecund in instruction. There is not a metaphor, not an analogy, in
slang, which does not contain a lesson. Among these men, to beat means
to feign; one beats a malady; ruse is their strength.

For them, the idea of the man is not separated from the idea of
darkness. The night is called la sorgue; man, l'orgue. Man is a
derivative of the night.

They have taken up the practice of considering society in the light
of an atmosphere which kills them, of a fatal force, and they speak of
their liberty as one would speak of his health. A man under arrest is a
sick man; one who is condemned is a dead man.

The most terrible thing for the prisoner within the four walls in which
he is buried, is a sort of glacial chastity, and he calls the dungeon
the castus. In that funereal place, life outside always presents itself
under its most smiling aspect. The prisoner has irons on his feet; you
think, perhaps, that his thought is that it is with the feet that one
walks? No; he is thinking that it is with the feet that one dances; so,
when he has succeeded in severing his fetters, his first idea is that
now he can dance, and he calls the saw the bastringue (public-house
ball).--A name is a centre; profound assimilation.--The ruffian has two
heads, one of which reasons out his actions and leads him all his life
long, and the other which he has upon his shoulders on the day of his
death; he calls the head which counsels him in crime la sorbonne,
and the head which expiates it la tronche.--When a man has no longer
anything but rags upon his body and vices in his heart, when he has
arrived at that double moral and material degradation which the word
blackguard characterizes in its two acceptations, he is ripe for crime;
he is like a well-whetted knife; he has two cutting edges, his
distress and his malice; so slang does not say a blackguard, it says
un reguise.--What are the galleys? A brazier of damnation, a hell. The
convict calls himself a fagot.--And finally, what name do malefactors
give to their prison? The college. A whole penitentiary system can be
evolved from that word.

Does the reader wish to know where the majority of the songs of the
galleys, those refrains called in the special vocabulary lirlonfa, have
had their birth?

Let him listen to what follows:--

There existed at the Chatelet in Paris a large and long cellar. This
cellar was eight feet below the level of the Seine. It had neither
windows nor air-holes, its only aperture was the door; men could enter
there, air could not. This vault had for ceiling a vault of stone, and
for floor ten inches of mud. It was flagged; but the pavement had rotted
and cracked under the oozing of the water. Eight feet above the floor,
a long and massive beam traversed this subterranean excavation from side
to side; from this beam hung, at short distances apart, chains three
feet long, and at the end of these chains there were rings for the
neck. In this vault, men who had been condemned to the galleys were
incarcerated until the day of their departure for Toulon. They were
thrust under this beam, where each one found his fetters swinging in the
darkness and waiting for him.

The chains, those pendant arms, and the necklets, those open hands,
caught the unhappy wretches by the throat. They were rivetted and
left there. As the chain was too short, they could not lie down. They
remained motionless in that cavern, in that night, beneath that beam,
almost hanging, forced to unheard-of efforts to reach their bread, jug,
or their vault overhead, mud even to mid-leg, filth flowing to their
very calves, broken asunder with fatigue, with thighs and knees giving
way, clinging fast to the chain with their hands in order to obtain some
rest, unable to sleep except when standing erect, and awakened every
moment by the strangling of the collar; some woke no more. In order to
eat, they pushed the bread, which was flung to them in the mud, along
their leg with their heel until it reached their hand.

How long did they remain thus? One month, two months, six months
sometimes; one stayed a year. It was the antechamber of the galleys.
Men were put there for stealing a hare from the king. In this
sepulchre-hell, what did they do? What man can do in a sepulchre, they
went through the agonies of death, and what can man do in hell, they
sang; for song lingers where there is no longer any hope. In the waters
of Malta, when a galley was approaching, the song could be heard before
the sound of the oars. Poor Survincent, the poacher, who had gone
through the prison-cellar of the Chatelet, said: "It was the rhymes that
kept me up." Uselessness of poetry. What is the good of rhyme?

It is in this cellar that nearly all the slang songs had their birth.
It is from the dungeon of the Grand-Chatelet of Paris that comes
the melancholy refrain of the Montgomery galley: "Timaloumisaine,
timaloumison." The majority of these:

       Icicaille est la theatre        Here is the theatre
       Du petit dardant.               Of the little archer (Cupid).


Do what you will, you cannot annihilate that eternal relic in the heart
of man, love.

In this world of dismal deeds, people keep their secrets. The secret is
the thing above all others. The secret, in the eyes of these wretches,
is unity which serves as a base of union. To betray a secret is to
tear from each member of this fierce community something of his own
personality. To inform against, in the energetic slang dialect, is
called: "to eat the bit." As though the informer drew to himself a
little of the substance of all and nourished himself on a bit of each
one's flesh.

What does it signify to receive a box on the ear? Commonplace metaphor
replies: "It is to see thirty-six candles."

Here slang intervenes and takes it up: Candle, camoufle. Thereupon, the
ordinary tongue gives camouflet[42] as the synonym for soufflet. Thus,
by a sort of infiltration from below upwards, with the aid of metaphor,
that incalculable, trajectory slang mounts from the cavern to the
Academy; and Poulailler saying: "I light my camoufle," causes Voltaire
to write: "Langleviel La Beaumelle deserves a hundred camouflets."

Researches in slang mean discoveries at every step. Study and
investigation of this strange idiom lead to the mysterious point of
intersection of regular society with society which is accursed.

The thief also has his food for cannon, stealable matter, you, I,
whoever passes by; le pantre. (Pan, everybody.)

Slang is language turned convict.

That the thinking principle of man be thrust down ever so low, that it
can be dragged and pinioned there by obscure tyrannies of fatality,
that it can be bound by no one knows what fetters in that abyss, is
sufficient to create consternation.

Oh, poor thought of miserable wretches!

Alas! will no one come to the succor of the human soul in that darkness?
Is it her destiny there to await forever the mind, the liberator, the
immense rider of Pegasi and hippo-griffs, the combatant of heroes of
the dawn who shall descend from the azure between two wings, the radiant
knight of the future? Will she forever summon in vain to her assistance
the lance of light of the ideal? Is she condemned to hear the fearful
approach of Evil through the density of the gulf, and to catch glimpses,
nearer and nearer at hand, beneath the hideous water of that dragon's
head, that maw streaked with foam, and that writhing undulation of
claws, swellings, and rings? Must it remain there, without a gleam
of light, without hope, given over to that terrible approach, vaguely
scented out by the monster, shuddering, dishevelled, wringing its arms,
forever chained to the rock of night, a sombre Andromeda white and naked
amid the shadows!




CHAPTER III--SLANG WHICH WEEPS AND SLANG WHICH LAUGHS

As the reader perceives, slang in its entirety, slang of four hundred
years ago, like the slang of to-day, is permeated with that sombre,
symbolical spirit which gives to all words a mien which is now mournful,
now menacing. One feels in it the wild and ancient sadness of those
vagrants of the Court of Miracles who played at cards with packs of
their own, some of which have come down to us. The eight of clubs, for
instance, represented a huge tree bearing eight enormous trefoil leaves,
a sort of fantastic personification of the forest. At the foot of this
tree a fire was burning, over which three hares were roasting a huntsman
on a spit, and behind him, on another fire, hung a steaming pot, whence
emerged the head of a dog. Nothing can be more melancholy than these
reprisals in painting, by a pack of cards, in the presence of stakes
for the roasting of smugglers and of the cauldron for the boiling of
counterfeiters. The diverse forms assumed by thought in the realm
of slang, even song, even raillery, even menace, all partook of this
powerless and dejected character. All the songs, the melodies of some
of which have been collected, were humble and lamentable to the point of
evoking tears. The pegre is always the poor pegre, and he is always
the hare in hiding, the fugitive mouse, the flying bird. He hardly
complains, he contents himself with sighing; one of his moans has come
down to us: "I do not understand how God, the father of men, can torture
his children and his grandchildren and hear them cry, without himself
suffering torture."[43] The wretch, whenever he has time to think, makes
himself small before the low, and frail in the presence of society;
he lies down flat on his face, he entreats, he appeals to the side of
compassion; we feel that he is conscious of his guilt.

Towards the middle of the last century a change took place, prison songs
and thieves' ritournelles assumed, so to speak, an insolent and jovial
mien. The plaintive malure was replaced by the larifla. We find in the
eighteenth century, in nearly all the songs of the galleys and prisons,
a diabolical and enigmatical gayety. We hear this strident and lilting
refrain which we should say had been lighted up by a phosphorescent
gleam, and which seems to have been flung into the forest by a
will-o'-the-wisp playing the fife:--

                    Miralabi suslababo
                    Mirliton ribonribette
                    Surlababi mirlababo
                    Mirliton ribonribo.


This was sung in a cellar or in a nook of the forest while cutting a
man's throat.

A serious symptom. In the eighteenth century, the ancient melancholy of
the dejected classes vanishes. They began to laugh. They rally the grand
meg and the grand dab. Given Louis XV. they call the King of France "le
Marquis de Pantin." And behold, they are almost gay. A sort of gleam
proceeds from these miserable wretches, as though their consciences were
not heavy within them any more. These lamentable tribes of darkness have
no longer merely the desperate audacity of actions, they possess the
heedless audacity of mind. A sign that they are losing the sense of
their criminality, and that they feel, even among thinkers and dreamers,
some indefinable support which the latter themselves know not of. A
sign that theft and pillage are beginning to filter into doctrines and
sophisms, in such a way as to lose somewhat of their ugliness, while
communicating much of it to sophisms and doctrines. A sign, in short, of
some outbreak which is prodigious and near unless some diversion shall
arise.

Let us pause a moment. Whom are we accusing here? Is it the eighteenth
century? Is it philosophy? Certainly not. The work of the eighteenth
century is healthy and good and wholesome. The encyclopedists, Diderot
at their head; the physiocrates, Turgot at their head; the philosophers,
Voltaire at their head; the Utopians, Rousseau at their head,--these are
four sacred legions. Humanity's immense advance towards the light is due
to them. They are the four vanguards of the human race, marching towards
the four cardinal points of progress. Diderot towards the beautiful,
Turgot towards the useful, Voltaire towards the true, Rousseau towards
the just. But by the side of and above the philosophers, there were the
sophists, a venomous vegetation mingled with a healthy growth, hemlock
in the virgin forest. While the executioner was burning the great
books of the liberators of the century on the grand staircase of the
court-house, writers now forgotten were publishing, with the King's
sanction, no one knows what strangely disorganizing writings, which were
eagerly read by the unfortunate. Some of these publications, odd to
say, which were patronized by a prince, are to be found in the Secret
Library. These facts, significant but unknown, were imperceptible on the
surface. Sometimes, in the very obscurity of a fact lurks its danger.
It is obscure because it is underhand. Of all these writers, the one
who probably then excavated in the masses the most unhealthy gallery was
Restif de La Bretonne.

This work, peculiar to the whole of Europe, effected more ravages in
Germany than anywhere else. In Germany, during a given period, summed up
by Schiller in his famous drama The Robbers, theft and pillage rose up
in protest against property and labor, assimilated certain specious and
false elementary ideas, which, though just in appearance, were absurd in
reality, enveloped themselves in these ideas, disappeared within them,
after a fashion, assumed an abstract name, passed into the state of
theory, and in that shape circulated among the laborious, suffering, and
honest masses, unknown even to the imprudent chemists who had prepared
the mixture, unknown even to the masses who accepted it. Whenever a fact
of this sort presents itself, the case is grave. Suffering engenders
wrath; and while the prosperous classes blind themselves or fall asleep,
which is the same thing as shutting one's eyes, the hatred of the
unfortunate classes lights its torch at some aggrieved or ill-made
spirit which dreams in a corner, and sets itself to the scrutiny of
society. The scrutiny of hatred is a terrible thing.

Hence, if the ill-fortune of the times so wills it, those fearful
commotions which were formerly called jacqueries, beside which purely
political agitations are the merest child's play, which are no longer
the conflict of the oppressed and the oppressor, but the revolt of
discomfort against comfort. Then everything crumbles.

Jacqueries are earthquakes of the people.

It is this peril, possibly imminent towards the close of the eighteenth
century, which the French Revolution, that immense act of probity, cut
short.

The French Revolution, which is nothing else than the idea armed with
the sword, rose erect, and, with the same abrupt movement, closed the
door of ill and opened the door of good.

It put a stop to torture, promulgated the truth, expelled miasma,
rendered the century healthy, crowned the populace.

It may be said of it that it created man a second time, by giving him a
second soul, the right.

The nineteenth century has inherited and profited by its work, and
to-day, the social catastrophe to which we lately alluded is simply
impossible. Blind is he who announces it! Foolish is he who fears it!
Revolution is the vaccine of Jacquerie.

Thanks to the Revolution, social conditions have changed. Feudal and
monarchical maladies no longer run in our blood. There is no more of
the Middle Ages in our constitution. We no longer live in the days when
terrible swarms within made irruptions, when one heard beneath his feet
the obscure course of a dull rumble, when indescribable elevations from
mole-like tunnels appeared on the surface of civilization, where the
soil cracked open, where the roofs of caverns yawned, and where one
suddenly beheld monstrous heads emerging from the earth.

The revolutionary sense is a moral sense. The sentiment of right, once
developed, develops the sentiment of duty. The law of all is
liberty, which ends where the liberty of others begins, according to
Robespierre's admirable definition. Since '89, the whole people has
been dilating into a sublime individual; there is not a poor man, who,
possessing his right, has not his ray of sun; the die-of-hunger feels
within him the honesty of France; the dignity of the citizen is an
internal armor; he who is free is scrupulous; he who votes reigns. Hence
incorruptibility; hence the miscarriage of unhealthy lusts; hence eyes
heroically lowered before temptations. The revolutionary wholesomeness
is such, that on a day of deliverance, a 14th of July, a 10th of August,
there is no longer any populace. The first cry of the enlightened and
increasing throngs is: death to thieves! Progress is an honest man; the
ideal and the absolute do not filch pocket-handkerchiefs. By whom were
the wagons containing the wealth of the Tuileries escorted in 1848? By
the rag-pickers of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. Rags mounted guard over
the treasure. Virtue rendered these tatterdemalions resplendent. In
those wagons in chests, hardly closed, and some, even, half-open, amid a
hundred dazzling caskets, was that ancient crown of France, studded with
diamonds, surmounted by the carbuncle of royalty, by the Regent diamond,
which was worth thirty millions. Barefooted, they guarded that crown.

Hence, no more Jacquerie. I regret it for the sake of the skilful. The
old fear has produced its last effects in that quarter; and henceforth
it can no longer be employed in politics. The principal spring of the
red spectre is broken. Every one knows it now. The scare-crow scares
no longer. The birds take liberties with the mannikin, foul creatures
alight upon it, the bourgeois laugh at it.




CHAPTER IV--THE TWO DUTIES: TO WATCH AND TO HOPE

This being the case, is all social danger dispelled? Certainly not.
There is no Jacquerie; society may rest assured on that point; blood
will no longer rush to its head. But let society take heed to the manner
in which it breathes. Apoplexy is no longer to be feared, but phthisis
is there. Social phthisis is called misery.

One can perish from being undermined as well as from being struck by
lightning.

Let us not weary of repeating, and sympathetic souls must not forget
that this is the first of fraternal obligations, and selfish hearts must
understand that the first of political necessities consists in thinking
first of all of the disinherited and sorrowing throngs, in solacing,
airing, enlightening, loving them, in enlarging their horizon to a
magnificent extent, in lavishing upon them education in every form, in
offering them the example of labor, never the example of idleness,
in diminishing the individual burden by enlarging the notion of the
universal aim, in setting a limit to poverty without setting a limit
to wealth, in creating vast fields of public and popular activity, in
having, like Briareus, a hundred hands to extend in all directions to
the oppressed and the feeble, in employing the collective power for that
grand duty of opening workshops for all arms, schools for all aptitudes,
and laboratories for all degrees of intelligence, in augmenting
salaries, diminishing trouble, balancing what should be and what is,
that is to say, in proportioning enjoyment to effort and a glut to need;
in a word, in evolving from the social apparatus more light and more
comfort for the benefit of those who suffer and those who are ignorant.

And, let us say it, all this is but the beginning. The true question is
this: labor cannot be a law without being a right.

We will not insist upon this point; this is not the proper place for
that.

If nature calls itself Providence, society should call itself foresight.

Intellectual and moral growth is no less indispensable than material
improvement. To know is a sacrament, to think is the prime necessity,
truth is nourishment as well as grain. A reason which fasts from science
and wisdom grows thin. Let us enter equal complaint against stomachs and
minds which do not eat. If there is anything more heart-breaking than
a body perishing for lack of bread, it is a soul which is dying from
hunger for the light.

The whole of progress tends in the direction of solution. Some day we
shall be amazed. As the human race mounts upward, the deep layers emerge
naturally from the zone of distress. The obliteration of misery will be
accomplished by a simple elevation of level.

We should do wrong were we to doubt this blessed consummation.

The past is very strong, it is true, at the present moment. It censures.
This rejuvenation of a corpse is surprising. Behold, it is walking and
advancing. It seems a victor; this dead body is a conqueror. He arrives
with his legions, superstitions, with his sword, despotism, with his
banner, ignorance; a while ago, he won ten battles. He advances, he
threatens, he laughs, he is at our doors. Let us not despair, on our
side. Let us sell the field on which Hannibal is encamped.

What have we to fear, we who believe?

No such thing as a back-flow of ideas exists any more than there exists
a return of a river on its course.

But let those who do not desire a future reflect on this matter. When
they say "no" to progress, it is not the future but themselves that
they are condemning. They are giving themselves a sad malady; they are
inoculating themselves with the past. There is but one way of rejecting
To-morrow, and that is to die.

Now, no death, that of the body as late as possible, that of the soul
never,--this is what we desire.

Yes, the enigma will utter its word, the sphinx will speak, the problem
will be solved.

Yes, the people, sketched out by the eighteenth century, will be
finished by the nineteenth. He who doubts this is an idiot! The future
blossoming, the near blossoming forth of universal well-being, is a
divinely fatal phenomenon.

Immense combined propulsions direct human affairs and conduct them
within a given time to a logical state, that is to say, to a state of
equilibrium; that is to say, to equity. A force composed of earth and
heaven results from humanity and governs it; this force is a worker
of miracles; marvellous issues are no more difficult to it than
extraordinary vicissitudes. Aided by science, which comes from one man,
and by the event, which comes from another, it is not greatly alarmed
by these contradictions in the attitude of problems, which seem
impossibilities to the vulgar herd. It is no less skilful at causing a
solution to spring forth from the reconciliation of ideas, than a lesson
from the reconciliation of facts, and we may expect anything from that
mysterious power of progress, which brought the Orient and the Occident
face to face one fine day, in the depths of a sepulchre, and made the
imaums converse with Bonaparte in the interior of the Great Pyramid.

In the meantime, let there be no halt, no hesitation, no pause in the
grandiose onward march of minds. Social philosophy consists essentially
in science and peace. Its object is, and its result must be, to dissolve
wrath by the study of antagonisms. It examines, it scrutinizes, it
analyzes; then it puts together once more, it proceeds by means of
reduction, discarding all hatred.

More than once, a society has been seen to give way before the wind
which is let loose upon mankind; history is full of the shipwrecks of
nations and empires; manners, customs, laws, religions,--and some fine
day that unknown force, the hurricane, passes by and bears them all
away. The civilizations of India, of Chaldea, of Persia, of Syria, of
Egypt, have disappeared one after the other. Why? We know not. What are
the causes of these disasters? We do not know. Could these societies
have been saved? Was it their fault? Did they persist in the fatal vice
which destroyed them? What is the amount of suicide in these terrible
deaths of a nation and a race? Questions to which there exists no reply.
Darkness enwraps condemned civilizations. They sprung a leak, then they
sank. We have nothing more to say; and it is with a sort of terror that
we look on, at the bottom of that sea which is called the past, behind
those colossal waves, at the shipwreck of those immense vessels,
Babylon, Nineveh, Tarsus, Thebes, Rome, beneath the fearful gusts which
emerge from all the mouths of the shadows. But shadows are there, and
light is here. We are not acquainted with the maladies of these ancient
civilizations, we do not know the infirmities of our own. Everywhere
upon it we have the right of light, we contemplate its beauties, we
lay bare its defects. Where it is ill, we probe; and the sickness once
diagnosed, the study of the cause leads to the discovery of the remedy.
Our civilization, the work of twenty centuries, is its law and its
prodigy; it is worth the trouble of saving. It will be saved. It is
already much to have solaced it; its enlightenment is yet another point.
All the labors of modern social philosophies must converge towards
this point. The thinker of to-day has a great duty--to auscultate
civilization.

We repeat, that this auscultation brings encouragement; it is by this
persistence in encouragement that we wish to conclude these pages, an
austere interlude in a mournful drama. Beneath the social mortality, we
feel human imperishableness. The globe does not perish, because it has
these wounds, craters, eruptions, sulphur pits, here and there, nor
because of a volcano which ejects its pus. The maladies of the people do
not kill man.

And yet, any one who follows the course of social clinics shakes his
head at times. The strongest, the tenderest, the most logical have their
hours of weakness.

Will the future arrive? It seems as though we might almost put
this question, when we behold so much terrible darkness. Melancholy
face-to-face encounter of selfish and wretched. On the part of
the selfish, the prejudices, shadows of costly education, appetite
increasing through intoxication, a giddiness of prosperity which dulls,
a fear of suffering which, in some, goes as far as an aversion for the
suffering, an implacable satisfaction, the I so swollen that it bars the
soul; on the side of the wretched covetousness, envy, hatred of seeing
others enjoy, the profound impulses of the human beast towards assuaging
its desires, hearts full of mist, sadness, need, fatality, impure and
simple ignorance.

Shall we continue to raise our eyes to heaven? is the luminous point
which we distinguish there one of those which vanish? The ideal
is frightful to behold, thus lost in the depths, small, isolated,
imperceptible, brilliant, but surrounded by those great, black menaces,
monstrously heaped around it; yet no more in danger than a star in the
maw of the clouds.




BOOK EIGHTH.--ENCHANTMENTS AND DESOLATIONS




CHAPTER I--FULL LIGHT

The reader has probably understood that Eponine, having recognized
through the gate, the inhabitant of that Rue Plumet whither Magnon had
sent her, had begun by keeping the ruffians away from the Rue Plumet,
and had then conducted Marius thither, and that, after many days spent
in ecstasy before that gate, Marius, drawn on by that force which draws
the iron to the magnet and a lover towards the stones of which is built
the house of her whom he loves, had finally entered Cosette's garden as
Romeo entered the garden of Juliet. This had even proved easier for him
than for Romeo; Romeo was obliged to scale a wall, Marius had only
to use a little force on one of the bars of the decrepit gate which
vacillated in its rusty recess, after the fashion of old people's teeth.
Marius was slender and readily passed through.

As there was never any one in the street, and as Marius never entered
the garden except at night, he ran no risk of being seen.

Beginning with that blessed and holy hour when a kiss betrothed these
two souls, Marius was there every evening. If, at that period of
her existence, Cosette had fallen in love with a man in the least
unscrupulous or debauched, she would have been lost; for there are
generous natures which yield themselves, and Cosette was one of them.
One of woman's magnanimities is to yield. Love, at the height where it
is absolute, is complicated with some indescribably celestial blindness
of modesty. But what dangers you run, O noble souls! Often you give the
heart, and we take the body. Your heart remains with you, you gaze upon
it in the gloom with a shudder. Love has no middle course; it either
ruins or it saves. All human destiny lies in this dilemma. This dilemma,
ruin, or safety, is set forth no more inexorably by any fatality than
by love. Love is life, if it is not death. Cradle; also coffin. The same
sentiment says "yes" and "no" in the human heart. Of all the things that
God has made, the human heart is the one which sheds the most light,
alas! and the most darkness.

God willed that Cosette's love should encounter one of the loves which
save.

Throughout the whole of the month of May of that year 1832, there were
there, in every night, in that poor, neglected garden, beneath that
thicket which grew thicker and more fragrant day by day, two beings
composed of all chastity, all innocence, overflowing with all the
felicity of heaven, nearer to the archangels than to mankind, pure,
honest, intoxicated, radiant, who shone for each other amid the shadows.
It seemed to Cosette that Marius had a crown, and to Marius that Cosette
had a nimbus. They touched each other, they gazed at each other, they
clasped each other's hands, they pressed close to each other; but there
was a distance which they did not pass. Not that they respected it;
they did not know of its existence. Marius was conscious of a barrier,
Cosette's innocence; and Cosette of a support, Marius' loyalty. The
first kiss had also been the last. Marius, since that time, had not gone
further than to touch Cosette's hand, or her kerchief, or a lock of her
hair, with his lips. For him, Cosette was a perfume and not a woman.
He inhaled her. She refused nothing, and he asked nothing. Cosette was
happy, and Marius was satisfied. They lived in this ecstatic state which
can be described as the dazzling of one soul by another soul. It was
the ineffable first embrace of two maiden souls in the ideal. Two swans
meeting on the Jungfrau.

At that hour of love, an hour when voluptuousness is absolutely mute,
beneath the omnipotence of ecstasy, Marius, the pure and seraphic
Marius, would rather have gone to a woman of the town than have raised
Cosette's robe to the height of her ankle. Once, in the moonlight,
Cosette stooped to pick up something on the ground, her bodice fell
apart and permitted a glimpse of the beginning of her throat. Marius
turned away his eyes.

What took place between these two beings? Nothing. They adored each
other.

At night, when they were there, that garden seemed a living and a sacred
spot. All flowers unfolded around them and sent them incense; and they
opened their souls and scattered them over the flowers. The wanton and
vigorous vegetation quivered, full of strength and intoxication, around
these two innocents, and they uttered words of love which set the trees
to trembling.

What words were these? Breaths. Nothing more. These breaths sufficed to
trouble and to touch all nature round about. Magic power which we
should find it difficult to understand were we to read in a book these
conversations which are made to be borne away and dispersed like smoke
wreaths by the breeze beneath the leaves. Take from those murmurs of two
lovers that melody which proceeds from the soul and which accompanies
them like a lyre, and what remains is nothing more than a shade; you
say: "What! is that all!" eh! yes, childish prattle, repetitions,
laughter at nothing, nonsense, everything that is deepest and most
sublime in the world! The only things which are worth the trouble of
saying and hearing!

The man who has never heard, the man who has never uttered these
absurdities, these paltry remarks, is an imbecile and a malicious
fellow. Cosette said to Marius:--

"Dost thou know?--"

[In all this and athwart this celestial maidenliness, and without either
of them being able to say how it had come about, they had begun to call
each other thou.]

"Dost thou know? My name is Euphrasie."

"Euphrasie? Why, no, thy name is Cosette."

"Oh! Cosette is a very ugly name that was given to me when I was
a little thing. But my real name is Euphrasie. Dost thou like that
name--Euphrasie?"

"Yes. But Cosette is not ugly."

"Do you like it better than Euphrasie?"

"Why, yes."

"Then I like it better too. Truly, it is pretty, Cosette. Call me
Cosette."

And the smile that she added made of this dialogue an idyl worthy of a
grove situated in heaven. On another occasion she gazed intently at him
and exclaimed:--

"Monsieur, you are handsome, you are good-looking, you are witty, you
are not at all stupid, you are much more learned than I am, but I bid
you defiance with this word: I love you!"

And Marius, in the very heavens, thought he heard a strain sung by a
star.

Or she bestowed on him a gentle tap because he coughed, and she said to
him:--

"Don't cough, sir; I will not have people cough on my domain without my
permission. It's very naughty to cough and to disturb me. I want you to
be well, because, in the first place, if you were not well, I should be
very unhappy. What should I do then?"

And this was simply divine.

Once Marius said to Cosette:--

"Just imagine, I thought at one time that your name was Ursule."

This made both of them laugh the whole evening.

In the middle of another conversation, he chanced to exclaim:--

"Oh! One day, at the Luxembourg, I had a good mind to finish breaking
up a veteran!" But he stopped short, and went no further. He would have
been obliged to speak to Cosette of her garter, and that was impossible.
This bordered on a strange theme, the flesh, before which that immense
and innocent love recoiled with a sort of sacred fright.

Marius pictured life with Cosette to himself like this, without anything
else; to come every evening to the Rue Plumet, to displace the old and
accommodating bar of the chief-justice's gate, to sit elbow to elbow
on that bench, to gaze through the trees at the scintillation of the
on-coming night, to fit a fold of the knee of his trousers into the
ample fall of Cosette's gown, to caress her thumb-nail, to call her
thou, to smell of the same flower, one after the other, forever,
indefinitely. During this time, clouds passed above their heads. Every
time that the wind blows it bears with it more of the dreams of men than
of the clouds of heaven.

This chaste, almost shy love was not devoid of gallantry, by any means.
To pay compliments to the woman whom a man loves is the first method of
bestowing caresses, and he is half audacious who tries it. A compliment
is something like a kiss through a veil. Voluptuousness mingles there
with its sweet tiny point, while it hides itself. The heart draws back
before voluptuousness only to love the more. Marius' blandishments, all
saturated with fancy, were, so to speak, of azure hue. The birds when
they fly up yonder, in the direction of the angels, must hear such
words. There were mingled with them, nevertheless, life, humanity, all
the positiveness of which Marius was capable. It was what is said in
the bower, a prelude to what will be said in the chamber; a lyrical
effusion, strophe and sonnet intermingled, pleasing hyperboles of
cooing, all the refinements of adoration arranged in a bouquet and
exhaling a celestial perfume, an ineffable twitter of heart to heart.

"Oh!" murmured Marius, "how beautiful you are! I dare not look at you.
It is all over with me when I contemplate you. You are a grace. I know
not what is the matter with me. The hem of your gown, when the tip of
your shoe peeps from beneath, upsets me. And then, what an enchanted
gleam when you open your thought even but a little! You talk
astonishingly good sense. It seems to me at times that you are a
dream. Speak, I listen, I admire. Oh Cosette! how strange it is and how
charming! I am really beside myself. You are adorable, Mademoiselle. I
study your feet with the microscope and your soul with the telescope."

And Cosette answered:--

"I have been loving a little more all the time that has passed since
this morning."

Questions and replies took care of themselves in this dialogue, which
always turned with mutual consent upon love, as the little pith figures
always turn on their peg.

Cosette's whole person was ingenuousness, ingenuity, transparency,
whiteness, candor, radiance. It might have been said of Cosette that she
was clear. She produced on those who saw her the sensation of April
and dawn. There was dew in her eyes. Cosette was a condensation of the
auroral light in the form of a woman.

It was quite simple that Marius should admire her, since he adored her.
But the truth is, that this little school-girl, fresh from the convent,
talked with exquisite penetration and uttered, at times, all sorts of
true and delicate sayings. Her prattle was conversation. She never made
a mistake about anything, and she saw things justly. The woman feels and
speaks with the tender instinct of the heart, which is infallible.

No one understands so well as a woman, how to say things that are, at
once, both sweet and deep. Sweetness and depth, they are the whole of
woman; in them lies the whole of heaven.

In this full felicity, tears welled up to their eyes every instant. A
crushed lady-bug, a feather fallen from a nest, a branch of hawthorn
broken, aroused their pity, and their ecstasy, sweetly mingled with
melancholy, seemed to ask nothing better than to weep. The most
sovereign symptom of love is a tenderness that is, at times, almost
unbearable.

And, in addition to this,--all these contradictions are the lightning
play of love,--they were fond of laughing, they laughed readily and with
a delicious freedom, and so familiarly that they sometimes presented the
air of two boys.

Still, though unknown to hearts intoxicated with purity, nature is
always present and will not be forgotten. She is there with her brutal
and sublime object; and however great may be the innocence of souls, one
feels in the most modest private interview, the adorable and mysterious
shade which separates a couple of lovers from a pair of friends.

They idolized each other.

The permanent and the immutable are persistent. People live, they smile,
they laugh, they make little grimaces with the tips of their lips, they
interlace their fingers, they call each other thou, and that does not
prevent eternity.

Two lovers hide themselves in the evening, in the twilight, in the
invisible, with the birds, with the roses; they fascinate each other in
the darkness with their hearts which they throw into their eyes, they
murmur, they whisper, and in the meantime, immense librations of the
planets fill the infinite universe.




CHAPTER II--THE BEWILDERMENT OF PERFECT HAPPINESS

They existed vaguely, frightened at their happiness. They did not notice
the cholera which decimated Paris precisely during that very month. They
had confided in each other as far as possible, but this had not extended
much further than their names. Marius had told Cosette that he was an
orphan, that his name was Marius Pontmercy, that he was a lawyer, that
he lived by writing things for publishers, that his father had been a
colonel, that the latter had been a hero, and that he, Marius, was on
bad terms with his grandfather who was rich. He had also hinted at being
a baron, but this had produced no effect on Cosette. She did not
know the meaning of the word. Marius was Marius. On her side, she
had confided to him that she had been brought up at the Petit-Picpus
convent, that her mother, like his own, was dead, that her father's name
was M. Fauchelevent, that he was very good, that he gave a great deal
to the poor, but that he was poor himself, and that he denied himself
everything though he denied her nothing.

Strange to say, in the sort of symphony which Marius had lived since he
had been in the habit of seeing Cosette, the past, even the most recent
past, had become so confused and distant to him, that what Cosette told
him satisfied him completely. It did not even occur to him to tell her
about the nocturnal adventure in the hovel, about Thenardier, about the
burn, and about the strange attitude and singular flight of her father.
Marius had momentarily forgotten all this; in the evening he did not
even know that there had been a morning, what he had done, where he had
breakfasted, nor who had spoken to him; he had songs in his ears which
rendered him deaf to every other thought; he only existed at the hours
when he saw Cosette. Then, as he was in heaven, it was quite natural
that he should forget earth. Both bore languidly the indefinable burden
of immaterial pleasures. Thus lived these somnambulists who are called
lovers.

Alas! Who is there who has not felt all these things? Why does there
come an hour when one emerges from this azure, and why does life go on
afterwards?

Loving almost takes the place of thinking. Love is an ardent
forgetfulness of all the rest. Then ask logic of passion if you will.
There is no more absolute logical sequence in the human heart than there
is a perfect geometrical figure in the celestial mechanism. For Cosette
and Marius nothing existed except Marius and Cosette. The universe
around them had fallen into a hole. They lived in a golden minute. There
was nothing before them, nothing behind. It hardly occurred to Marius
that Cosette had a father. His brain was dazzled and obliterated. Of
what did these lovers talk then? We have seen, of the flowers, and
the swallows, the setting sun and the rising moon, and all sorts of
important things. They had told each other everything except everything.
The everything of lovers is nothing. But the father, the realities, that
lair, the ruffians, that adventure, to what purpose? And was he very
sure that this nightmare had actually existed? They were two, and they
adored each other, and beyond that there was nothing. Nothing else
existed. It is probable that this vanishing of hell in our rear is
inherent to the arrival of paradise. Have we beheld demons? Are there
any? Have we trembled? Have we suffered? We no longer know. A rosy cloud
hangs over it.

So these two beings lived in this manner, high aloft, with all that
improbability which is in nature; neither at the nadir nor at the
zenith, between man and seraphim, above the mire, below the ether, in
the clouds; hardly flesh and blood, soul and ecstasy from head to foot;
already too sublime to walk the earth, still too heavily charged with
humanity to disappear in the blue, suspended like atoms which are
waiting to be precipitated; apparently beyond the bounds of destiny;
ignorant of that rut; yesterday, to-day, to-morrow; amazed, rapturous,
floating, soaring; at times so light that they could take their flight
out into the infinite; almost prepared to soar away to all eternity.
They slept wide-awake, thus sweetly lulled. Oh! splendid lethargy of the
real overwhelmed by the ideal.

Sometimes, beautiful as Cosette was, Marius shut his eyes in her
presence. The best way to look at the soul is through closed eyes.

Marius and Cosette never asked themselves whither this was to lead them.
They considered that they had already arrived. It is a strange claim on
man's part to wish that love should lead to something.




CHAPTER III--THE BEGINNING OF SHADOW

Jean Valjean suspected nothing.

Cosette, who was rather less dreamy than Marius, was gay, and that
sufficed for Jean Valjean's happiness. The thoughts which Cosette
cherished, her tender preoccupations, Marius' image which filled her
heart, took away nothing from the incomparable purity of her beautiful,
chaste, and smiling brow. She was at the age when the virgin bears her
love as the angel his lily. So Jean Valjean was at ease. And then, when
two lovers have come to an understanding, things always go well; the
third party who might disturb their love is kept in a state of perfect
blindness by a restricted number of precautions which are always the
same in the case of all lovers. Thus, Cosette never objected to any of
Jean Valjean's proposals. Did she want to take a walk? "Yes, dear little
father." Did she want to stay at home? Very good. Did he wish to pass
the evening with Cosette? She was delighted. As he always went to bed at
ten o'clock, Marius did not come to the garden on such occasions until
after that hour, when, from the street, he heard Cosette open the long
glass door on the veranda. Of course, no one ever met Marius in the
daytime. Jean Valjean never even dreamed any longer that Marius was in
existence. Only once, one morning, he chanced to say to Cosette: "Why,
you have whitewash on your back!" On the previous evening, Marius, in a
transport, had pushed Cosette against the wall.

Old Toussaint, who retired early, thought of nothing but her sleep, and
was as ignorant of the whole matter as Jean Valjean.

Marius never set foot in the house. When he was with Cosette, they hid
themselves in a recess near the steps, in order that they might neither
be seen nor heard from the street, and there they sat, frequently
contenting themselves, by way of conversation, with pressing each
other's hands twenty times a minute as they gazed at the branches of the
trees. At such times, a thunderbolt might have fallen thirty paces from
them, and they would not have noticed it, so deeply was the revery of
the one absorbed and sunk in the revery of the other.

Limpid purity. Hours wholly white; almost all alike. This sort of love
is a recollection of lily petals and the plumage of the dove.

The whole extent of the garden lay between them and the street. Every
time that Marius entered and left, he carefully adjusted the bar of the
gate in such a manner that no displacement was visible.

He usually went away about midnight, and returned to Courfeyrac's
lodgings. Courfeyrac said to Bahorel:--

"Would you believe it? Marius comes home nowadays at one o'clock in the
morning."

Bahorel replied:--

"What do you expect? There's always a petard in a seminary fellow."

At times, Courfeyrac folded his arms, assumed a serious air, and said to
Marius:--

"You are getting irregular in your habits, young man."

Courfeyrac, being a practical man, did not take in good part this
reflection of an invisible paradise upon Marius; he was not much in the
habit of concealed passions; it made him impatient, and now and then he
called upon Marius to come back to reality.

One morning, he threw him this admonition:--

"My dear fellow, you produce upon me the effect of being located in
the moon, the realm of dreams, the province of illusions, capital,
soap-bubble. Come, be a good boy, what's her name?"

But nothing could induce Marius "to talk." They might have torn out his
nails before one of the two sacred syllables of which that ineffable
name, Cosette, was composed. True love is as luminous as the dawn and as
silent as the tomb. Only, Courfeyrac saw this change in Marius, that his
taciturnity was of the beaming order.

During this sweet month of May, Marius and Cosette learned to know these
immense delights. To dispute and to say you for thou, simply that they
might say thou the better afterwards. To talk at great length with very
minute details, of persons in whom they took not the slightest interest
in the world; another proof that in that ravishing opera called love,
the libretto counts for almost nothing.

For Marius, to listen to Cosette discussing finery.

For Cosette, to listen to Marius talk in politics;

To listen, knee pressed to knee, to the carriages rolling along the Rue
de Babylone;

To gaze upon the same planet in space, or at the same glowworm gleaming
in the grass;

To hold their peace together; a still greater delight than conversation;

Etc., etc.

In the meantime, divers complications were approaching.

One evening, Marius was on his way to the rendezvous, by way of the
Boulevard des Invalides. He habitually walked with drooping head. As he
was on the point of turning the corner of the Rue Plumet, he heard some
one quite close to him say:--

"Good evening, Monsieur Marius."

He raised his head and recognized Eponine.

This produced a singular effect upon him. He had not thought of that
girl a single time since the day when she had conducted him to the Rue
Plumet, he had not seen her again, and she had gone completely out of
his mind. He had no reasons for anything but gratitude towards her, he
owed her his happiness, and yet, it was embarrassing to him to meet her.

It is an error to think that passion, when it is pure and happy, leads
man to a state of perfection; it simply leads him, as we have noted, to
a state of oblivion. In this situation, man forgets to be bad, but
he also forgets to be good. Gratitude, duty, matters essential and
important to be remembered, vanish. At any other time, Marius would have
behaved quite differently to Eponine. Absorbed in Cosette, he had not
even clearly put it to himself that this Eponine was named Eponine
Thenardier, and that she bore the name inscribed in his father's will,
that name, for which, but a few months before, he would have so ardently
sacrificed himself. We show Marius as he was. His father himself was
fading out of his soul to some extent, under the splendor of his love.

He replied with some embarrassment:--

"Ah! so it's you, Eponine?"

"Why do you call me you? Have I done anything to you?"

"No," he answered.

Certainly, he had nothing against her. Far from it. Only, he felt that
he could not do otherwise, now that he used thou to Cosette, than say
you to Eponine.

As he remained silent, she exclaimed:--

"Say--"

Then she paused. It seemed as though words failed that creature formerly
so heedless and so bold. She tried to smile and could not. Then she
resumed:--

"Well?"

Then she paused again, and remained with downcast eyes.

"Good evening, Mr. Marius," said she suddenly and abruptly; and away she
went.




CHAPTER IV--A CAB RUNS IN ENGLISH AND BARKS IN SLANG

The following day was the 3d of June, 1832, a date which it is necessary
to indicate on account of the grave events which at that epoch hung on
the horizon of Paris in the state of lightning-charged clouds. Marius,
at nightfall, was pursuing the same road as on the preceding evening,
with the same thoughts of delight in his heart, when he caught sight
of Eponine approaching, through the trees of the boulevard. Two days
in succession--this was too much. He turned hastily aside, quitted the
boulevard, changed his course and went to the Rue Plumet through the Rue
Monsieur.

This caused Eponine to follow him to the Rue Plumet, a thing which
she had not yet done. Up to that time, she had contented herself with
watching him on his passage along the boulevard without ever seeking to
encounter him. It was only on the evening before that she had attempted
to address him.

So Eponine followed him, without his suspecting the fact. She saw him
displace the bar and slip into the garden.

She approached the railing, felt of the bars one after the other, and
readily recognized the one which Marius had moved.

She murmured in a low voice and in gloomy accents:--

"None of that, Lisette!"

She seated herself on the underpinning of the railing, close beside the
bar, as though she were guarding it. It was precisely at the point where
the railing touched the neighboring wall. There was a dim nook there, in
which Eponine was entirely concealed.

She remained thus for more than an hour, without stirring and without
breathing, a prey to her thoughts.

Towards ten o'clock in the evening, one of the two or three persons who
passed through the Rue Plumet, an old, belated bourgeois who was making
haste to escape from this deserted spot of evil repute, as he skirted
the garden railings and reached the angle which it made with the wall,
heard a dull and threatening voice saying:--

"I'm no longer surprised that he comes here every evening."

The passer-by cast a glance around him, saw no one, dared not peer into
the black niche, and was greatly alarmed. He redoubled his pace.

This passer-by had reason to make haste, for a very few instants later,
six men, who were marching separately and at some distance from each
other, along the wall, and who might have been taken for a gray patrol,
entered the Rue Plumet.

The first to arrive at the garden railing halted, and waited for the
others; a second later, all six were reunited.

These men began to talk in a low voice.

"This is the place," said one of them.

"Is there a cab [dog] in the garden?" asked another.

"I don't know. In any case, I have fetched a ball that we'll make him
eat."

"Have you some putty to break the pane with?"

"Yes."

"The railing is old," interpolated a fifth, who had the voice of a
ventriloquist.

"So much the better," said the second who had spoken. "It won't screech
under the saw, and it won't be hard to cut."

The sixth, who had not yet opened his lips, now began to inspect
the gate, as Eponine had done an hour earlier, grasping each bar in
succession, and shaking them cautiously.

Thus he came to the bar which Marius had loosened. As he was on the
point of grasping this bar, a hand emerged abruptly from the darkness,
fell upon his arm; he felt himself vigorously thrust aside by a push
in the middle of his breast, and a hoarse voice said to him, but not
loudly:--

"There's a dog."

At the same moment, he perceived a pale girl standing before him.

The man underwent that shock which the unexpected always brings. He
bristled up in hideous wise; nothing is so formidable to behold as
ferocious beasts who are uneasy; their terrified air evokes terror.

He recoiled and stammered:--

"What jade is this?"

"Your daughter."

It was, in fact, Eponine, who had addressed Thenardier.

At the apparition of Eponine, the other five, that is to say,
Claquesous, Guelemer, Babet, Brujon, and Montparnasse had noiselessly
drawn near, without precipitation, without uttering a word, with the
sinister slowness peculiar to these men of the night.

Some indescribable but hideous tools were visible in their hands.
Guelemer held one of those pairs of curved pincers which prowlers call
fanchons.

"Ah, see here, what are you about there? What do you want with us? Are
you crazy?" exclaimed Thenardier, as loudly as one can exclaim and still
speak low; "what have you come here to hinder our work for?"

Eponine burst out laughing, and threw herself on his neck.

"I am here, little father, because I am here. Isn't a person allowed to
sit on the stones nowadays? It's you who ought not to be here. What
have you come here for, since it's a biscuit? I told Magnon so. There's
nothing to be done here. But embrace me, my good little father! It's a
long time since I've seen you! So you're out?"

Thenardier tried to disentangle himself from Eponine's arms, and
grumbled:--

"That's good. You've embraced me. Yes, I'm out. I'm not in. Now, get
away with you."

But Eponine did not release her hold, and redoubled her caresses.

"But how did you manage it, little pa? You must have been very clever to
get out of that. Tell me about it! And my mother? Where is mother? Tell
me about mamma."

Thenardier replied:--

"She's well. I don't know, let me alone, and be off, I tell you."

"I won't go, so there now," pouted Eponine like a spoiled child; "you
send me off, and it's four months since I saw you, and I've hardly had
time to kiss you."

And she caught her father round the neck again.

"Come, now, this is stupid!" said Babet.

"Make haste!" said Guelemer, "the cops may pass."

The ventriloquist's voice repeated his distich:--


     "Nous n' sommes pas le jour de l'an,
                              "This isn't New Year's day
     A becoter papa, maman."
                               To peck at pa and ma."


Eponine turned to the five ruffians.

"Why, it's Monsieur Brujon. Good day, Monsieur Babet. Good day,
Monsieur Claquesous. Don't you know me, Monsieur Guelemer? How goes it,
Montparnasse?"

"Yes, they know you!" ejaculated Thenardier. "But good day, good
evening, sheer off! leave us alone!"

"It's the hour for foxes, not for chickens," said Montparnasse.

"You see the job we have on hand here," added Babet.

Eponine caught Montparnasse's hand.

"Take care," said he, "you'll cut yourself, I've a knife open."

"My little Montparnasse," responded Eponine very gently, "you must have
confidence in people. I am the daughter of my father, perhaps. Monsieur
Babet, Monsieur Guelemer, I'm the person who was charged to investigate
this matter."

It is remarkable that Eponine did not talk slang. That frightful tongue
had become impossible to her since she had known Marius.

She pressed in her hand, small, bony, and feeble as that of a skeleton,
Guelemer's huge, coarse fingers, and continued:--

"You know well that I'm no fool. Ordinarily, I am believed. I have
rendered you service on various occasions. Well, I have made inquiries;
you will expose yourselves to no purpose, you see. I swear to you that
there is nothing in this house."

"There are lone women," said Guelemer.

"No, the persons have moved away."

"The candles haven't, anyway!" ejaculated Babet.

And he pointed out to Eponine, across the tops of the trees, a light
which was wandering about in the mansard roof of the pavilion. It was
Toussaint, who had stayed up to spread out some linen to dry.

Eponine made a final effort.

"Well," said she, "they're very poor folks, and it's a hovel where there
isn't a sou."

"Go to the devil!" cried Thenardier. "When we've turned the house upside
down and put the cellar at the top and the attic below, we'll tell
you what there is inside, and whether it's francs or sous or
half-farthings."

And he pushed her aside with the intention of entering.

"My good friend, Mr. Montparnasse," said Eponine, "I entreat you, you
are a good fellow, don't enter."

"Take care, you'll cut yourself," replied Montparnasse.

Thenardier resumed in his decided tone:--

"Decamp, my girl, and leave men to their own affairs!"

Eponine released Montparnasse's hand, which she had grasped again, and
said:--

"So you mean to enter this house?"

"Rather!" grinned the ventriloquist.

Then she set her back against the gate, faced the six ruffians who were
armed to the teeth, and to whom the night lent the visages of demons,
and said in a firm, low voice:--

"Well, I don't mean that you shall."

They halted in amazement. The ventriloquist, however, finished his grin.
She went on:--

"Friends! Listen well. This is not what you want. Now I'm talking. In
the first place, if you enter this garden, if you lay a hand on this
gate, I'll scream, I'll beat on the door, I'll rouse everybody, I'll
have the whole six of you seized, I'll call the police."

"She'd do it, too," said Thenardier in a low tone to Brujon and the
ventriloquist.

She shook her head and added:--

"Beginning with my father!"

Thenardier stepped nearer.

"Not so close, my good man!" said she.

He retreated, growling between his teeth:--

"Why, what's the matter with her?"

And he added:--

"Bitch!"

She began to laugh in a terrible way:--

"As you like, but you shall not enter here. I'm not the daughter of
a dog, since I'm the daughter of a wolf. There are six of you, what
matters that to me? You are men. Well, I'm a woman. You don't frighten
me. I tell you that you shan't enter this house, because it doesn't suit
me. If you approach, I'll bark. I told you, I'm the dog, and I don't
care a straw for you. Go your way, you bore me! Go where you please, but
don't come here, I forbid it! You can use your knives. I'll use kicks;
it's all the same to me, come on!"

She advanced a pace nearer the ruffians, she was terrible, she burst out
laughing:--

"Pardine! I'm not afraid. I shall be hungry this summer, and I shall be
cold this winter. Aren't they ridiculous, these ninnies of men, to think
they can scare a girl! What! Scare? Oh, yes, much! Because you have
finical poppets of mistresses who hide under the bed when you put on a
big voice, forsooth! I ain't afraid of anything, that I ain't!"

She fastened her intent gaze upon Thenardier and said:--

"Not even of you, father!"

Then she continued, as she cast her blood-shot, spectre-like eyes upon
the ruffians in turn:--

"What do I care if I'm picked up to-morrow morning on the pavement of
the Rue Plumet, killed by the blows of my father's club, or whether I'm
found a year from now in the nets at Saint-Cloud or the Isle of Swans in
the midst of rotten old corks and drowned dogs?"

She was forced to pause; she was seized by a dry cough, her breath came
from her weak and narrow chest like the death-rattle.

She resumed:--

"I have only to cry out, and people will come, and then slap, bang!
There are six of you; I represent the whole world."

Thenardier made a movement towards her.

"Don't approach!" she cried.

He halted, and said gently:--

"Well, no; I won't approach, but don't speak so loud. So you intend to
hinder us in our work, my daughter? But we must earn our living all the
same. Have you no longer any kind feeling for your father?"

"You bother me," said Eponine.

"But we must live, we must eat--"

"Burst!"

So saying, she seated herself on the underpinning of the fence and
hummed:--

       "Mon bras si dodu,            "My arm so plump,
        Ma jambe bien faite           My leg well formed,
        Et le temps perdu."           And time wasted."


She had set her elbow on her knee and her chin in her hand, and she
swung her foot with an air of indifference. Her tattered gown permitted
a view of her thin shoulder-blades. The neighboring street lantern
illuminated her profile and her attitude. Nothing more resolute and more
surprising could be seen.

The six rascals, speechless and gloomy at being held in check by a girl,
retreated beneath the shadow cast by the lantern, and held counsel with
furious and humiliated shrugs.

In the meantime she stared at them with a stern but peaceful air.

"There's something the matter with her," said Babet. "A reason. Is she
in love with the dog? It's a shame to miss this, anyway. Two women, an
old fellow who lodges in the back-yard, and curtains that ain't so bad
at the windows. The old cove must be a Jew. I think the job's a good
one."

"Well, go in, then, the rest of you," exclaimed Montparnasse. "Do the
job. I'll stay here with the girl, and if she fails us--"

He flashed the knife, which he held open in his hand, in the light of
the lantern.

Thenardier said not a word, and seemed ready for whatever the rest
pleased.

Brujon, who was somewhat of an oracle, and who had, as the reader knows,
"put up the job," had not as yet spoken. He seemed thoughtful. He had
the reputation of not sticking at anything, and it was known that he
had plundered a police post simply out of bravado. Besides this he made
verses and songs, which gave him great authority.

Babet interrogated him:--

"You say nothing, Brujon?"

Brujon remained silent an instant longer, then he shook his head in
various ways, and finally concluded to speak:--

"See here; this morning I came across two sparrows fighting, this
evening I jostled a woman who was quarrelling. All that's bad. Let's
quit."

They went away.

As they went, Montparnasse muttered:--

"Never mind! if they had wanted, I'd have cut her throat."

Babet responded

"I wouldn't. I don't hit a lady."

At the corner of the street they halted and exchanged the following
enigmatical dialogue in a low tone:--

"Where shall we go to sleep to-night?"

"Under Pantin [Paris]."

"Have you the key to the gate, Thenardier?"

"Pardi."

Eponine, who never took her eyes off of them, saw them retreat by the
road by which they had come. She rose and began to creep after them
along the walls and the houses. She followed them thus as far as the
boulevard.

There they parted, and she saw these six men plunge into the gloom,
where they appeared to melt away.




CHAPTER V--THINGS OF THE NIGHT

After the departure of the ruffians, the Rue Plumet resumed its
tranquil, nocturnal aspect. That which had just taken place in this
street would not have astonished a forest. The lofty trees, the copses,
the heaths, the branches rudely interlaced, the tall grass, exist in
a sombre manner; the savage swarming there catches glimpses of sudden
apparitions of the invisible; that which is below man distinguishes,
through the mists, that which is beyond man; and the things of which we
living beings are ignorant there meet face to face in the night. Nature,
bristling and wild, takes alarm at certain approaches in which she
fancies that she feels the supernatural. The forces of the gloom know
each other, and are strangely balanced by each other. Teeth and claws
fear what they cannot grasp. Blood-drinking bestiality, voracious
appetites, hunger in search of prey, the armed instincts of nails
and jaws which have for source and aim the belly, glare and smell out
uneasily the impassive spectral forms straying beneath a shroud, erect
in its vague and shuddering robe, and which seem to them to live with
a dead and terrible life. These brutalities, which are only matter,
entertain a confused fear of having to deal with the immense obscurity
condensed into an unknown being. A black figure barring the way stops
the wild beast short. That which emerges from the cemetery intimidates
and disconcerts that which emerges from the cave; the ferocious fear the
sinister; wolves recoil when they encounter a ghoul.




CHAPTER VI--MARIUS BECOMES PRACTICAL ONCE MORE TO THE EXTENT OF GIVING
COSETTE HIS ADDRESS

While this sort of a dog with a human face was mounting guard over the
gate, and while the six ruffians were yielding to a girl, Marius was by
Cosette's side.

Never had the sky been more studded with stars and more charming, the
trees more trembling, the odor of the grass more penetrating; never had
the birds fallen asleep among the leaves with a sweeter noise; never had
all the harmonies of universal serenity responded more thoroughly to the
inward music of love; never had Marius been more captivated, more happy,
more ecstatic.

But he had found Cosette sad; Cosette had been weeping. Her eyes were
red.

This was the first cloud in that wonderful dream.

Marius' first word had been: "What is the matter?"

And she had replied: "This."

Then she had seated herself on the bench near the steps, and while he
tremblingly took his place beside her, she had continued:--

"My father told me this morning to hold myself in readiness, because he
has business, and we may go away from here."

Marius shivered from head to foot.

When one is at the end of one's life, to die means to go away; when one
is at the beginning of it, to go away means to die.

For the last six weeks, Marius had little by little, slowly, by degrees,
taken possession of Cosette each day. As we have already explained, in
the case of first love, the soul is taken long before the body; later
on, one takes the body long before the soul; sometimes one does not take
the soul at all; the Faublas and the Prudhommes add: "Because there is
none"; but the sarcasm is, fortunately, a blasphemy. So Marius possessed
Cosette, as spirits possess, but he enveloped her with all his soul, and
seized her jealously with incredible conviction. He possessed her smile,
her breath, her perfume, the profound radiance of her blue eyes, the
sweetness of her skin when he touched her hand, the charming mark which
she had on her neck, all her thoughts. Therefore, he possessed all
Cosette's dreams.

He incessantly gazed at, and he sometimes touched lightly with his
breath, the short locks on the nape of her neck, and he declared to
himself that there was not one of those short hairs which did not belong
to him, Marius. He gazed upon and adored the things that she wore, her
knot of ribbon, her gloves, her sleeves, her shoes, her cuffs, as sacred
objects of which he was the master. He dreamed that he was the lord of
those pretty shell combs which she wore in her hair, and he even said to
himself, in confused and suppressed stammerings of voluptuousness which
did not make their way to the light, that there was not a ribbon of her
gown, not a mesh in her stockings, not a fold in her bodice, which was
not his. Beside Cosette he felt himself beside his own property, his
own thing, his own despot and his slave. It seemed as though they had
so intermingled their souls, that it would have been impossible to tell
them apart had they wished to take them back again.--"This is mine."
"No, it is mine." "I assure you that you are mistaken. This is my
property." "What you are taking as your own is myself."--Marius was
something that made a part of Cosette, and Cosette was something which
made a part of Marius. Marius felt Cosette within him. To have Cosette,
to possess Cosette, this, to him, was not to be distinguished from
breathing. It was in the midst of this faith, of this intoxication, of
this virgin possession, unprecedented and absolute, of this sovereignty,
that these words: "We are going away," fell suddenly, at a blow, and
that the harsh voice of reality cried to him: "Cosette is not yours!"

Marius awoke. For six weeks Marius had been living, as we have said,
outside of life; those words, going away! caused him to re-enter it
harshly.

He found not a word to say. Cosette merely felt that his hand was very
cold. She said to him in her turn: "What is the matter?"

He replied in so low a tone that Cosette hardly heard him:--

"I did not understand what you said."

She began again:--

"This morning my father told me to settle all my little affairs and to
hold myself in readiness, that he would give me his linen to put in a
trunk, that he was obliged to go on a journey, that we were to go away,
that it is necessary to have a large trunk for me and a small one for
him, and that all is to be ready in a week from now, and that we might
go to England."

"But this is outrageous!" exclaimed Marius.

It is certain, that, at that moment, no abuse of power, no violence, not
one of the abominations of the worst tyrants, no action of Busiris, of
Tiberius, or of Henry VIII., could have equalled this in atrocity,
in the opinion of Marius; M. Fauchelevent taking his daughter off to
England because he had business there.

He demanded in a weak voice:--

"And when do you start?"

"He did not say when."

"And when shall you return?"

"He did not say when."

Marius rose and said coldly:--

"Cosette, shall you go?"

Cosette turned toward him her beautiful eyes, all filled with anguish,
and replied in a sort of bewilderment:--

"Where?"

"To England. Shall you go?"

"Why do you say you to me?"

"I ask you whether you will go?"

"What do you expect me to do?" she said, clasping her hands.

"So, you will go?"

"If my father goes."

"So, you will go?"

Cosette took Marius' hand, and pressed it without replying.

"Very well," said Marius, "then I will go elsewhere."

Cosette felt rather than understood the meaning of these words.
She turned so pale that her face shone white through the gloom. She
stammered:--

"What do you mean?"

Marius looked at her, then raised his eyes to heaven, and answered:
"Nothing."

When his eyes fell again, he saw Cosette smiling at him. The smile of a
woman whom one loves possesses a visible radiance, even at night.

"How silly we are! Marius, I have an idea."

"What is it?"

"If we go away, do you go too! I will tell you where! Come and join me
wherever I am."

Marius was now a thoroughly roused man. He had fallen back into reality.
He cried to Cosette:--

"Go away with you! Are you mad? Why, I should have to have money, and I
have none! Go to England? But I am in debt now, I owe, I don't know how
much, more than ten louis to Courfeyrac, one of my friends with whom you
are not acquainted! I have an old hat which is not worth three francs,
I have a coat which lacks buttons in front, my shirt is all ragged, my
elbows are torn, my boots let in the water; for the last six weeks I
have not thought about it, and I have not told you about it. You only
see me at night, and you give me your love; if you were to see me in the
daytime, you would give me a sou! Go to England! Eh! I haven't enough to
pay for a passport!"

He threw himself against a tree which was close at hand, erect, his brow
pressed close to the bark, feeling neither the wood which flayed his
skin, nor the fever which was throbbing in his temples, and there he
stood motionless, on the point of falling, like the statue of despair.

He remained a long time thus. One could remain for eternity in such
abysses. At last he turned round. He heard behind him a faint stifled
noise, which was sweet yet sad.

It was Cosette sobbing.

She had been weeping for more than two hours beside Marius as he
meditated.

He came to her, fell at her knees, and slowly prostrating himself, he
took the tip of her foot which peeped out from beneath her robe, and
kissed it.

She let him have his way in silence. There are moments when a woman
accepts, like a sombre and resigned goddess, the religion of love.

"Do not weep," he said.

She murmured:--

"Not when I may be going away, and you cannot come!"

He went on:--

"Do you love me?"

She replied, sobbing, by that word from paradise which is never more
charming than amid tears:--

"I adore you!"

He continued in a tone which was an indescribable caress:--

"Do not weep. Tell me, will you do this for me, and cease to weep?"

"Do you love me?" said she.

He took her hand.

"Cosette, I have never given my word of honor to any one, because my
word of honor terrifies me. I feel that my father is by my side. Well, I
give you my most sacred word of honor, that if you go away I shall die."

In the tone with which he uttered these words there lay a melancholy so
solemn and so tranquil, that Cosette trembled. She felt that chill which
is produced by a true and gloomy thing as it passes by. The shock made
her cease weeping.

"Now, listen," said he, "do not expect me to-morrow."

"Why?"

"Do not expect me until the day after to-morrow."

"Oh! Why?"

"You will see."

"A day without seeing you! But that is impossible!"

"Let us sacrifice one day in order to gain our whole lives, perhaps."

And Marius added in a low tone and in an aside:--

"He is a man who never changes his habits, and he has never received any
one except in the evening."

"Of what man are you speaking?" asked Cosette.

"I? I said nothing."

"What do you hope, then?"

"Wait until the day after to-morrow."

"You wish it?"

"Yes, Cosette."

She took his head in both her hands, raising herself on tiptoe in order
to be on a level with him, and tried to read his hope in his eyes.

Marius resumed:--

"Now that I think of it, you ought to know my address: something might
happen, one never knows; I live with that friend named Courfeyrac, Rue
de la Verrerie, No. 16."

He searched in his pocket, pulled out his penknife, and with the blade
he wrote on the plaster of the wall:--

"16 Rue de la Verrerie."

In the meantime, Cosette had begun to gaze into his eyes once more.

"Tell me your thought, Marius; you have some idea. Tell it to me. Oh!
tell me, so that I may pass a pleasant night."

"This is my idea: that it is impossible that God should mean to part us.
Wait; expect me the day after to-morrow."

"What shall I do until then?" said Cosette. "You are outside, you go,
and come! How happy men are! I shall remain entirely alone! Oh! How sad
I shall be! What is it that you are going to do to-morrow evening? tell
me."

"I am going to try something."

"Then I will pray to God and I will think of you here, so that you may
be successful. I will question you no further, since you do not wish it.
You are my master. I shall pass the evening to-morrow in singing that
music from Euryanthe that you love, and that you came one evening to
listen to, outside my shutters. But day after to-morrow you will come
early. I shall expect you at dusk, at nine o'clock precisely, I warn
you. Mon Dieu! how sad it is that the days are so long! On the stroke of
nine, do you understand, I shall be in the garden."

"And I also."

And without having uttered it, moved by the same thought, impelled by
those electric currents which place lovers in continual communication,
both being intoxicated with delight even in their sorrow, they fell into
each other's arms, without perceiving that their lips met while their
uplifted eyes, overflowing with rapture and full of tears, gazed upon
the stars.

When Marius went forth, the street was deserted. This was the moment
when Eponine was following the ruffians to the boulevard.

While Marius had been dreaming with his head pressed to the tree, an
idea had crossed his mind; an idea, alas! that he himself judged to be
senseless and impossible. He had come to a desperate decision.




CHAPTER VII--THE OLD HEART AND THE YOUNG HEART IN THE PRESENCE OF EACH
OTHER

At that epoch, Father Gillenormand was well past his ninety-first
birthday. He still lived with Mademoiselle Gillenormand in the Rue des
Filles-du-Calvaire, No. 6, in the old house which he owned. He was, as
the reader will remember, one of those antique old men who await death
perfectly erect, whom age bears down without bending, and whom even
sorrow cannot curve.

Still, his daughter had been saying for some time: "My father is
sinking." He no longer boxed the maids' ears; he no longer thumped
the landing-place so vigorously with his cane when Basque was slow in
opening the door. The Revolution of July had exasperated him for the
space of barely six months. He had viewed, almost tranquilly, that
coupling of words, in the Moniteur: M. Humblot-Conte, peer of France.
The fact is, that the old man was deeply dejected. He did not bend, he
did not yield; this was no more a characteristic of his physical than
of his moral nature, but he felt himself giving way internally. For four
years he had been waiting for Marius, with his foot firmly planted, that
is the exact word, in the conviction that that good-for-nothing young
scamp would ring at his door some day or other; now he had reached
the point, where, at certain gloomy hours, he said to himself, that
if Marius made him wait much longer--It was not death that was
insupportable to him; it was the idea that perhaps he should never see
Marius again. The idea of never seeing Marius again had never entered
his brain until that day; now the thought began to recur to him, and
it chilled him. Absence, as is always the case in genuine and natural
sentiments, had only served to augment the grandfather's love for the
ungrateful child, who had gone off like a flash. It is during December
nights, when the cold stands at ten degrees, that one thinks oftenest of
the son.

M. Gillenormand was, or thought himself, above all things, incapable
of taking a single step, he--the grandfather, towards his grandson; "I
would die rather," he said to himself. He did not consider himself
as the least to blame; but he thought of Marius only with profound
tenderness, and the mute despair of an elderly, kindly old man who is
about to vanish in the dark.

He began to lose his teeth, which added to his sadness.

M. Gillenormand, without however acknowledging it to himself, for it
would have rendered him furious and ashamed, had never loved a mistress
as he loved Marius.

He had had placed in his chamber, opposite the head of his bed, so that
it should be the first thing on which his eyes fell on waking, an
old portrait of his other daughter, who was dead, Madame Pontmercy,
a portrait which had been taken when she was eighteen. He gazed
incessantly at that portrait. One day, he happened to say, as he gazed
upon it:--

"I think the likeness is strong."

"To my sister?" inquired Mademoiselle Gillenormand. "Yes, certainly."

"The old man added:--

"And to him also."

Once as he sat with his knees pressed together, and his eyes almost
closed, in a despondent attitude, his daughter ventured to say to him:--

"Father, are you as angry with him as ever?"

She paused, not daring to proceed further.

"With whom?" he demanded.

"With that poor Marius."

He raised his aged head, laid his withered and emaciated fist on the
table, and exclaimed in his most irritated and vibrating tone:--

"Poor Marius, do you say! That gentleman is a knave, a wretched
scoundrel, a vain little ingrate, a heartless, soulless, haughty, and
wicked man!"

And he turned away so that his daughter might not see the tear that
stood in his eye.

Three days later he broke a silence which had lasted four hours, to say
to his daughter point-blank:--

"I had the honor to ask Mademoiselle Gillenormand never to mention him
to me."

Aunt Gillenormand renounced every effort, and pronounced this acute
diagnosis: "My father never cared very much for my sister after her
folly. It is clear that he detests Marius."

"After her folly" meant: "after she had married the colonel."

However, as the reader has been able to conjecture, Mademoiselle
Gillenormand had failed in her attempt to substitute her favorite, the
officer of lancers, for Marius. The substitute, Theodule, had not been a
success. M. Gillenormand had not accepted the quid pro quo. A vacancy
in the heart does not accommodate itself to a stop-gap. Theodule, on his
side, though he scented the inheritance, was disgusted at the task
of pleasing. The goodman bored the lancer; and the lancer shocked the
goodman. Lieutenant Theodule was gay, no doubt, but a chatter-box,
frivolous, but vulgar; a high liver, but a frequenter of bad company; he
had mistresses, it is true, and he had a great deal to say about them,
it is true also; but he talked badly. All his good qualities had a
defect. M. Gillenormand was worn out with hearing him tell about the
love affairs that he had in the vicinity of the barracks in the Rue
de Babylone. And then, Lieutenant Gillenormand sometimes came in his
uniform, with the tricolored cockade. This rendered him downright
intolerable. Finally, Father Gillenormand had said to his daughter:
"I've had enough of that Theodule. I haven't much taste for warriors
in time of peace. Receive him if you choose. I don't know but I prefer
slashers to fellows that drag their swords. The clash of blades in
battle is less dismal, after all, than the clank of the scabbard on
the pavement. And then, throwing out your chest like a bully and
lacing yourself like a girl, with stays under your cuirass, is doubly
ridiculous. When one is a veritable man, one holds equally aloof
from swagger and from affected airs. He is neither a blusterer nor a
finnicky-hearted man. Keep your Theodule for yourself."

It was in vain that his daughter said to him: "But he is your
grandnephew, nevertheless,"--it turned out that M. Gillenormand, who
was a grandfather to the very finger-tips, was not in the least a
grand-uncle.

In fact, as he had good sense, and as he had compared the two, Theodule
had only served to make him regret Marius all the more.

One evening,--it was the 24th of June, which did not prevent Father
Gillenormand having a rousing fire on the hearth,--he had dismissed his
daughter, who was sewing in a neighboring apartment. He was alone in
his chamber, amid its pastoral scenes, with his feet propped on the
andirons, half enveloped in his huge screen of coromandel lacquer, with
its nine leaves, with his elbow resting on a table where burned two
candles under a green shade, engulfed in his tapestry armchair, and in
his hand a book which he was not reading. He was dressed, according
to his wont, like an incroyable, and resembled an antique portrait by
Garat. This would have made people run after him in the street, had not
his daughter covered him up, whenever he went out, in a vast bishop's
wadded cloak, which concealed his attire. At home, he never wore a
dressing gown, except when he rose and retired. "It gives one a look of
age," said he.

Father Gillenormand was thinking of Marius lovingly and bitterly; and,
as usual, bitterness predominated. His tenderness once soured always
ended by boiling and turning to indignation. He had reached the point
where a man tries to make up his mind and to accept that which rends his
heart. He was explaining to himself that there was no longer any reason
why Marius should return, that if he intended to return, he should
have done it long ago, that he must renounce the idea. He was trying to
accustom himself to the thought that all was over, and that he should
die without having beheld "that gentleman" again. But his whole nature
revolted; his aged paternity would not consent to this. "Well!" said
he,--this was his doleful refrain,--"he will not return!" His bald head
had fallen upon his breast, and he fixed a melancholy and irritated gaze
upon the ashes on his hearth.

In the very midst of his revery, his old servant Basque entered, and
inquired:--

"Can Monsieur receive M. Marius?"

The old man sat up erect, pallid, and like a corpse which rises under
the influence of a galvanic shock. All his blood had retreated to his
heart. He stammered:--

"M. Marius what?"

"I don't know," replied Basque, intimidated and put out of countenance
by his master's air; "I have not seen him. Nicolette came in and said to
me: 'There's a young man here; say that it is M. Marius.'"

Father Gillenormand stammered in a low voice:--

"Show him in."

And he remained in the same attitude, with shaking head, and his eyes
fixed on the door. It opened once more. A young man entered. It was
Marius.

Marius halted at the door, as though waiting to be bidden to enter.

His almost squalid attire was not perceptible in the obscurity caused by
the shade. Nothing could be seen but his calm, grave, but strangely sad
face.

It was several minutes before Father Gillenormand, dulled with amazement
and joy, could see anything except a brightness as when one is in the
presence of an apparition. He was on the point of swooning; he saw
Marius through a dazzling light. It certainly was he, it certainly was
Marius.

At last! After the lapse of four years! He grasped him entire, so to
speak, in a single glance. He found him noble, handsome, distinguished,
well-grown, a complete man, with a suitable mien and a charming air. He
felt a desire to open his arms, to call him, to fling himself forward;
his heart melted with rapture, affectionate words swelled and overflowed
his breast; at length all his tenderness came to the light and reached
his lips, and, by a contrast which constituted the very foundation of
his nature, what came forth was harshness. He said abruptly:--

"What have you come here for?"

Marius replied with embarrassment:--

"Monsieur--"

M. Gillenormand would have liked to have Marius throw himself into his
arms. He was displeased with Marius and with himself. He was conscious
that he was brusque, and that Marius was cold. It caused the goodman
unendurable and irritating anxiety to feel so tender and forlorn
within, and only to be able to be hard outside. Bitterness returned. He
interrupted Marius in a peevish tone:--

"Then why did you come?"

That "then" signified: If you do not come to embrace me. Marius looked
at his grandfather, whose pallor gave him a face of marble.

"Monsieur--"

"Have you come to beg my pardon? Do you acknowledge your faults?"

He thought he was putting Marius on the right road, and that "the child"
would yield. Marius shivered; it was the denial of his father that was
required of him; he dropped his eyes and replied:--

"No, sir."

"Then," exclaimed the old man impetuously, with a grief that was
poignant and full of wrath, "what do you want of me?"

Marius clasped his hands, advanced a step, and said in a feeble and
trembling voice:--

"Sir, have pity on me."

These words touched M. Gillenormand; uttered a little sooner, they would
have rendered him tender, but they came too late. The grandfather rose;
he supported himself with both hands on his cane; his lips were white,
his brow wavered, but his lofty form towered above Marius as he bowed.

"Pity on you, sir! It is youth demanding pity of the old man of
ninety-one! You are entering into life, I am leaving it; you go to the
play, to balls, to the cafe, to the billiard-hall; you have wit, you
please the women, you are a handsome fellow; as for me, I spit on my
brands in the heart of summer; you are rich with the only riches that
are really such, I possess all the poverty of age; infirmity, isolation!
You have your thirty-two teeth, a good digestion, bright eyes, strength,
appetite, health, gayety, a forest of black hair; I have no longer even
white hair, I have lost my teeth, I am losing my legs, I am losing my
memory; there are three names of streets that I confound incessantly,
the Rue Charlot, the Rue du Chaume, and the Rue Saint-Claude, that
is what I have come to; you have before you the whole future, full of
sunshine, and I am beginning to lose my sight, so far am I advancing
into the night; you are in love, that is a matter of course, I am
beloved by no one in all the world; and you ask pity of me! Parbleu!
Moliere forgot that. If that is the way you jest at the courthouse,
Messieurs the lawyers, I sincerely compliment you. You are droll."

And the octogenarian went on in a grave and angry voice:--

"Come, now, what do you want of me?"

"Sir," said Marius, "I know that my presence is displeasing to you, but
I have come merely to ask one thing of you, and then I shall go away
immediately."

"You are a fool!" said the old man. "Who said that you were to go away?"

This was the translation of the tender words which lay at the bottom of
his heart:--

"Ask my pardon! Throw yourself on my neck!"

M. Gillenormand felt that Marius would leave him in a few moments, that
his harsh reception had repelled the lad, that his hardness was driving
him away; he said all this to himself, and it augmented his grief; and
as his grief was straightway converted into wrath, it increased his
harshness. He would have liked to have Marius understand, and Marius did
not understand, which made the goodman furious.

He began again:--

"What! you deserted me, your grandfather, you left my house to go no
one knows whither, you drove your aunt to despair, you went off, it is
easily guessed, to lead a bachelor life; it's more convenient, to play
the dandy, to come in at all hours, to amuse yourself; you have given me
no signs of life, you have contracted debts without even telling me to
pay them, you have become a smasher of windows and a blusterer, and, at
the end of four years, you come to me, and that is all you have to say
to me!"

This violent fashion of driving a grandson to tenderness was productive
only of silence on the part of Marius. M. Gillenormand folded his arms;
a gesture which with him was peculiarly imperious, and apostrophized
Marius bitterly:--

"Let us make an end of this. You have come to ask something of me, you
say? Well, what? What is it? Speak!"

"Sir," said Marius, with the look of a man who feels that he is falling
over a precipice, "I have come to ask your permission to marry."

M. Gillenormand rang the bell. Basque opened the door half-way.

"Call my daughter."

A second later, the door was opened once more, Mademoiselle Gillenormand
did not enter, but showed herself; Marius was standing, mute, with
pendant arms and the face of a criminal; M. Gillenormand was pacing back
and forth in the room. He turned to his daughter and said to her:--

"Nothing. It is Monsieur Marius. Say good day to him. Monsieur wishes to
marry. That's all. Go away."

The curt, hoarse sound of the old man's voice announced a strange degree
of excitement. The aunt gazed at Marius with a frightened air, hardly
appeared to recognize him, did not allow a gesture or a syllable to
escape her, and disappeared at her father's breath more swiftly than a
straw before the hurricane.

In the meantime, Father Gillenormand had returned and placed his back
against the chimney-piece once more.

"You marry! At one and twenty! You have arranged that! You have only
a permission to ask! a formality. Sit down, sir. Well, you have had a
revolution since I had the honor to see you last. The Jacobins got the
upper hand. You must have been delighted. Are you not a Republican since
you are a Baron? You can make that agree. The Republic makes a good
sauce for the barony. Are you one of those decorated by July? Have you
taken the Louvre at all, sir? Quite near here, in the Rue Saint-Antoine,
opposite the Rue des Nonamdieres, there is a cannon-ball incrusted in
the wall of the third story of a house with this inscription: 'July
28th, 1830.' Go take a look at that. It produces a good effect. Ah!
those friends of yours do pretty things. By the way, aren't they
erecting a fountain in the place of the monument of M. le Duc de Berry?
So you want to marry? Whom? Can one inquire without indiscretion?"

He paused, and, before Marius had time to answer, he added violently:--

"Come now, you have a profession? A fortune made? How much do you earn
at your trade of lawyer?"

"Nothing," said Marius, with a sort of firmness and resolution that was
almost fierce.

"Nothing? Then all that you have to live upon is the twelve hundred
livres that I allow you?"

Marius did not reply. M. Gillenormand continued:--

"Then I understand the girl is rich?"

"As rich as I am."

"What! No dowry?"

"No."

"Expectations?"

"I think not."

"Utterly naked! What's the father?"

"I don't know."

"And what's her name?"

"Mademoiselle Fauchelevent."

"Fauchewhat?"

"Fauchelevent."

"Pttt!" ejaculated the old gentleman.

"Sir!" exclaimed Marius.

M. Gillenormand interrupted him with the tone of a man who is speaking
to himself:--

"That's right, one and twenty years of age, no profession, twelve
hundred livres a year, Madame la Baronne de Pontmercy will go and
purchase a couple of sous' worth of parsley from the fruiterer."

"Sir," repeated Marius, in the despair at the last hope, which was
vanishing, "I entreat you! I conjure you in the name of Heaven, with
clasped hands, sir, I throw myself at your feet, permit me to marry
her!"

The old man burst into a shout of strident and mournful laughter,
coughing and laughing at the same time.

"Ah! ah! ah! You said to yourself: 'Pardine! I'll go hunt up that old
blockhead, that absurd numskull! What a shame that I'm not twenty-five!
How I'd treat him to a nice respectful summons! How nicely I'd get along
without him! It's nothing to me, I'd say to him: "You're only too happy
to see me, you old idiot, I want to marry, I desire to wed Mamselle
No-matter-whom, daughter of Monsieur No-matter-what, I have no shoes,
she has no chemise, that just suits; I want to throw my career, my
future, my youth, my life to the dogs; I wish to take a plunge into
wretchedness with a woman around my neck, that's an idea, and you must
consent to it!" and the old fossil will consent.' Go, my lad, do as
you like, attach your paving-stone, marry your Pousselevent, your
Coupelevent--Never, sir, never!"

"Father--"

"Never!"

At the tone in which that "never" was uttered, Marius lost all hope. He
traversed the chamber with slow steps, with bowed head, tottering and
more like a dying man than like one merely taking his departure. M.
Gillenormand followed him with his eyes, and at the moment when the
door opened, and Marius was on the point of going out, he advanced four
paces, with the senile vivacity of impetuous and spoiled old gentlemen,
seized Marius by the collar, brought him back energetically into the
room, flung him into an armchair and said to him:--

"Tell me all about it!"

"It was that single word "father" which had effected this revolution.

Marius stared at him in bewilderment. M. Gillenormand's mobile face was
no longer expressive of anything but rough and ineffable good-nature.
The grandsire had given way before the grandfather.

"Come, see here, speak, tell me about your love affairs, jabber, tell me
everything! Sapristi! how stupid young folks are!"

"Father--" repeated Marius.

The old man's entire countenance lighted up with indescribable radiance.

"Yes, that's right, call me father, and you'll see!"

There was now something so kind, so gentle, so openhearted, and so
paternal in this brusqueness, that Marius, in the sudden transition from
discouragement to hope, was stunned and intoxicated by it, as it were.
He was seated near the table, the light from the candles brought out
the dilapidation of his costume, which Father Gillenormand regarded with
amazement.

"Well, father--" said Marius.

"Ah, by the way," interrupted M. Gillenormand, "you really have not a
penny then? You are dressed like a pickpocket."

He rummaged in a drawer, drew forth a purse, which he laid on the table:
"Here are a hundred louis, buy yourself a hat."

"Father," pursued Marius, "my good father, if you only knew! I love her.
You cannot imagine it; the first time I saw her was at the Luxembourg,
she came there; in the beginning, I did not pay much heed to her, and
then, I don't know how it came about, I fell in love with her. Oh! how
unhappy that made me! Now, at last, I see her every day, at her own
home, her father does not know it, just fancy, they are going away, it
is in the garden that we meet, in the evening, her father means to take
her to England, then I said to myself: 'I'll go and see my grandfather
and tell him all about the affair. I should go mad first, I should die,
I should fall ill, I should throw myself into the water. I absolutely
must marry her, since I should go mad otherwise.' This is the whole
truth, and I do not think that I have omitted anything. She lives in a
garden with an iron fence, in the Rue Plumet. It is in the neighborhood
of the Invalides."

Father Gillenormand had seated himself, with a beaming countenance,
beside Marius. As he listened to him and drank in the sound of his
voice, he enjoyed at the same time a protracted pinch of snuff. At
the words "Rue Plumet" he interrupted his inhalation and allowed the
remainder of his snuff to fall upon his knees.

"The Rue Plumet, the Rue Plumet, did you say?--Let us see!--Are there
not barracks in that vicinity?--Why, yes, that's it. Your cousin
Theodule has spoken to me about it. The lancer, the officer. A gay girl,
my good friend, a gay girl!--Pardieu, yes, the Rue Plumet. It is what
used to be called the Rue Blomet.--It all comes back to me now. I have
heard of that little girl of the iron railing in the Rue Plumet. In a
garden, a Pamela. Your taste is not bad. She is said to be a very tidy
creature. Between ourselves, I think that simpleton of a lancer has been
courting her a bit. I don't know where he did it. However, that's not
to the purpose. Besides, he is not to be believed. He brags, Marius! I
think it quite proper that a young man like you should be in love. It's
the right thing at your age. I like you better as a lover than as a
Jacobin. I like you better in love with a petticoat, sapristi! with
twenty petticoats, than with M. de Robespierre. For my part, I will do
myself the justice to say, that in the line of sans-culottes, I have
never loved any one but women. Pretty girls are pretty girls, the deuce!
There's no objection to that. As for the little one, she receives you
without her father's knowledge. That's in the established order of
things. I have had adventures of that same sort myself. More than one.
Do you know what is done then? One does not take the matter ferociously;
one does not precipitate himself into the tragic; one does not make
one's mind to marriage and M. le Maire with his scarf. One simply
behaves like a fellow of spirit. One shows good sense. Slip along,
mortals; don't marry. You come and look up your grandfather, who is a
good-natured fellow at bottom, and who always has a few rolls of louis
in an old drawer; you say to him: 'See here, grandfather.' And the
grandfather says: 'That's a simple matter. Youth must amuse itself, and
old age must wear out. I have been young, you will be old. Come, my boy,
you shall pass it on to your grandson. Here are two hundred pistoles.
Amuse yourself, deuce take it!' Nothing better! That's the way the
affair should be treated. You don't marry, but that does no harm. You
understand me?"

Marius, petrified and incapable of uttering a syllable, made a sign with
his head that he did not.

The old man burst out laughing, winked his aged eye, gave him a slap on
the knee, stared him full in the face with a mysterious and beaming air,
and said to him, with the tenderest of shrugs of the shoulder:--

"Booby! make her your mistress."

Marius turned pale. He had understood nothing of what his grandfather
had just said. This twaddle about the Rue Blomet, Pamela, the barracks,
the lancer, had passed before Marius like a dissolving view. Nothing of
all that could bear any reference to Cosette, who was a lily. The good
man was wandering in his mind. But this wandering terminated in words
which Marius did understand, and which were a mortal insult to Cosette.
Those words, "make her your mistress," entered the heart of the strict
young man like a sword.

He rose, picked up his hat which lay on the floor, and walked to the
door with a firm, assured step. There he turned round, bowed deeply to
his grandfather, raised his head erect again, and said:--

"Five years ago you insulted my father; to-day you have insulted my
wife. I ask nothing more of you, sir. Farewell."

Father Gillenormand, utterly confounded, opened his mouth, extended his
arms, tried to rise, and before he could utter a word, the door closed
once more, and Marius had disappeared.

The old man remained for several minutes motionless and as though
struck by lightning, without the power to speak or breathe, as though
a clenched fist grasped his throat. At last he tore himself from his
arm-chair, ran, so far as a man can run at ninety-one, to the door,
opened it, and cried:--

"Help! Help!"

His daughter made her appearance, then the domestics. He began again,
with a pitiful rattle: "Run after him! Bring him back! What have I done
to him? He is mad! He is going away! Ah! my God! Ah! my God! This time
he will not come back!"

He went to the window which looked out on the street, threw it open with
his aged and palsied hands, leaned out more than half-way, while Basque
and Nicolette held him behind, and shouted:--

"Marius! Marius! Marius! Marius!"

But Marius could no longer hear him, for at that moment he was turning
the corner of the Rue Saint-Louis.

The octogenarian raised his hands to his temples two or three times
with an expression of anguish, recoiled tottering, and fell back into an
arm-chair, pulseless, voiceless, tearless, with quivering head and lips
which moved with a stupid air, with nothing in his eyes and nothing
any longer in his heart except a gloomy and profound something which
resembled night.




BOOK NINTH.--WHITHER ARE THEY GOING?




CHAPTER I--JEAN VALJEAN

That same day, towards four o'clock in the afternoon, Jean Valjean was
sitting alone on the back side of one of the most solitary slopes in the
Champ-de-Mars. Either from prudence, or from a desire to meditate, or
simply in consequence of one of those insensible changes of habit which
gradually introduce themselves into the existence of every one, he now
rarely went out with Cosette. He had on his workman's waistcoat,
and trousers of gray linen; and his long-visored cap concealed his
countenance.

He was calm and happy now beside Cosette; that which had, for a time,
alarmed and troubled him had been dissipated; but for the last week or
two, anxieties of another nature had come up. One day, while walking
on the boulevard, he had caught sight of Thenardier; thanks to his
disguise, Thenardier had not recognized him; but since that day, Jean
Valjean had seen him repeatedly, and he was now certain that Thenardier
was prowling about in their neighborhood.

This had been sufficient to make him come to a decision.

Moreover, Paris was not tranquil: political troubles presented this
inconvenient feature, for any one who had anything to conceal in his
life, that the police had grown very uneasy and very suspicious, and
that while seeking to ferret out a man like Pepin or Morey, they might
very readily discover a man like Jean Valjean.

Jean Valjean had made up his mind to quit Paris, and even France, and go
over to England.

He had warned Cosette. He wished to set out before the end of the week.

He had seated himself on the slope in the Champ-de-Mars, turning over
all sorts of thoughts in his mind,--Thenardier, the police, the journey,
and the difficulty of procuring a passport.

He was troubled from all these points of view.

Last of all, an inexplicable circumstance which had just attracted his
attention, and from which he had not yet recovered, had added to his
state of alarm.

On the morning of that very day, when he alone of the household was
stirring, while strolling in the garden before Cosette's shutters
were open, he had suddenly perceived on the wall, the following line,
engraved, probably with a nail:--

16 Rue de la Verrerie.

This was perfectly fresh, the grooves in the ancient black mortar were
white, a tuft of nettles at the foot of the wall was powdered with the
fine, fresh plaster.

This had probably been written on the preceding night.

What was this? A signal for others? A warning for himself?

In any case, it was evident that the garden had been violated, and that
strangers had made their way into it.

He recalled the odd incidents which had already alarmed the household.

His mind was now filling in this canvas.

He took good care not to speak to Cosette of the line written on the
wall, for fear of alarming her.

In the midst of his preoccupations, he perceived, from a shadow cast by
the sun, that some one had halted on the crest of the slope immediately
behind him.

He was on the point of turning round, when a paper folded in four fell
upon his knees as though a hand had dropped it over his head.

He took the paper, unfolded it, and read these words written in large
characters, with a pencil:--

"MOVE AWAY FROM YOUR HOUSE."

Jean Valjean sprang hastily to his feet; there was no one on the slope;
he gazed all around him and perceived a creature larger than a
child, not so large as a man, clad in a gray blouse and trousers of
dust-colored cotton velvet, who was jumping over the parapet and who
slipped into the moat of the Champde-Mars.

Jean Valjean returned home at once, in a very thoughtful mood.




CHAPTER II--MARIUS

Marius had left M. Gillenormand in despair. He had entered the house
with very little hope, and quitted it with immense despair.

However, and those who have observed the depths of the human heart will
understand this, the officer, the lancer, the ninny, Cousin Theodule,
had left no trace in his mind. Not the slightest. The dramatic poet
might, apparently, expect some complications from this revelation made
point-blank by the grandfather to the grandson. But what the drama would
gain thereby, truth would lose. Marius was at an age when one believes
nothing in the line of evil; later on comes the age when one believes
everything. Suspicions are nothing else than wrinkles. Early youth
has none of them. That which overwhelmed Othello glides innocuous over
Candide. Suspect Cosette! There are hosts of crimes which Marius could
sooner have committed.

He began to wander about the streets, the resource of those who suffer.
He thought of nothing, so far as he could afterwards remember. At two
o'clock in the morning he returned to Courfeyrac's quarters and flung
himself, without undressing, on his mattress. The sun was shining
brightly when he sank into that frightful leaden slumber which permits
ideas to go and come in the brain. When he awoke, he saw Courfeyrac,
Enjolras, Feuilly, and Combeferre standing in the room with their hats
on and all ready to go out.

Courfeyrac said to him:--

"Are you coming to General Lamarque's funeral?"

It seemed to him that Courfeyrac was speaking Chinese.

He went out some time after them. He put in his pocket the pistols which
Javert had given him at the time of the adventure on the 3d of February,
and which had remained in his hands. These pistols were still loaded. It
would be difficult to say what vague thought he had in his mind when he
took them with him.

All day long he prowled about, without knowing where he was going; it
rained at times, he did not perceive it; for his dinner, he purchased a
penny roll at a baker's, put it in his pocket and forgot it. It appears
that he took a bath in the Seine without being aware of it. There are
moments when a man has a furnace within his skull. Marius was passing
through one of those moments. He no longer hoped for anything; this
step he had taken since the preceding evening. He waited for night with
feverish impatience, he had but one idea clearly before his mind;--this
was, that at nine o'clock he should see Cosette. This last happiness
now constituted his whole future; after that, gloom. At intervals, as
he roamed through the most deserted boulevards, it seemed to him that he
heard strange noises in Paris. He thrust his head out of his revery and
said: "Is there fighting on hand?"

At nightfall, at nine o'clock precisely, as he had promised Cosette,
he was in the Rue Plumet. When he approached the grating he forgot
everything. It was forty-eight hours since he had seen Cosette; he was
about to behold her once more; every other thought was effaced, and
he felt only a profound and unheard-of joy. Those minutes in which one
lives centuries always have this sovereign and wonderful property, that
at the moment when they are passing they fill the heart completely.

Marius displaced the bar, and rushed headlong into the garden. Cosette
was not at the spot where she ordinarily waited for him. He traversed
the thicket, and approached the recess near the flight of steps: "She
is waiting for me there," said he. Cosette was not there. He raised his
eyes, and saw that the shutters of the house were closed. He made the
tour of the garden, the garden was deserted. Then he returned to
the house, and, rendered senseless by love, intoxicated, terrified,
exasperated with grief and uneasiness, like a master who returns home at
an evil hour, he tapped on the shutters. He knocked and knocked again,
at the risk of seeing the window open, and her father's gloomy face
make its appearance, and demand: "What do you want?" This was nothing in
comparison with what he dimly caught a glimpse of. When he had rapped,
he lifted up his voice and called Cosette.--"Cosette!" he cried;
"Cosette!" he repeated imperiously. There was no reply. All was over. No
one in the garden; no one in the house.

Marius fixed his despairing eyes on that dismal house, which was as
black and as silent as a tomb and far more empty. He gazed at the stone
seat on which he had passed so many adorable hours with Cosette. Then he
seated himself on the flight of steps, his heart filled with sweetness
and resolution, he blessed his love in the depths of his thought, and
he said to himself that, since Cosette was gone, all that there was left
for him was to die.

All at once he heard a voice which seemed to proceed from the street,
and which was calling to him through the trees:--

"Mr. Marius!"

He started to his feet.

"Hey?" said he.

"Mr. Marius, are you there?"

"Yes."

"Mr. Marius," went on the voice, "your friends are waiting for you at
the barricade of the Rue de la Chanvrerie."

This voice was not wholly unfamiliar to him. It resembled the hoarse,
rough voice of Eponine. Marius hastened to the gate, thrust aside the
movable bar, passed his head through the aperture, and saw some one who
appeared to him to be a young man, disappearing at a run into the gloom.




CHAPTER III--M. MABEUF

Jean Valjean's purse was of no use to M. Mabeuf. M. Mabeuf, in his
venerable, infantile austerity, had not accepted the gift of the stars;
he had not admitted that a star could coin itself into louis d'or. He
had not divined that what had fallen from heaven had come from Gavroche.
He had taken the purse to the police commissioner of the quarter, as
a lost article placed by the finder at the disposal of claimants. The
purse was actually lost. It is unnecessary to say that no one claimed
it, and that it did not succor M. Mabeuf.

Moreover, M. Mabeuf had continued his downward course.

His experiments on indigo had been no more successful in the Jardin des
Plantes than in his garden at Austerlitz. The year before he had owed
his housekeeper's wages; now, as we have seen, he owed three quarters
of his rent. The pawnshop had sold the plates of his Flora after the
expiration of thirteen months. Some coppersmith had made stewpans of
them. His copper plates gone, and being unable to complete even the
incomplete copies of his Flora which were in his possession, he had
disposed of the text, at a miserable price, as waste paper, to a
second-hand bookseller. Nothing now remained to him of his life's work.
He set to work to eat up the money for these copies. When he saw that
this wretched resource was becoming exhausted, he gave up his garden
and allowed it to run to waste. Before this, a long time before, he had
given up his two eggs and the morsel of beef which he ate from time
to time. He dined on bread and potatoes. He had sold the last of his
furniture, then all duplicates of his bedding, his clothing and his
blankets, then his herbariums and prints; but he still retained his most
precious books, many of which were of the greatest rarity, among others,
Les Quadrins Historiques de la Bible, edition of 1560; La Concordance
des Bibles, by Pierre de Besse; Les Marguerites de la Marguerite, of
Jean de La Haye, with a dedication to the Queen of Navarre; the book de
la Charge et Dignite de l'Ambassadeur, by the Sieur de Villiers
Hotman; a Florilegium Rabbinicum of 1644; a Tibullus of 1567, with this
magnificent inscription: Venetiis, in aedibus Manutianis; and lastly, a
Diogenes Laertius, printed at Lyons in 1644, which contained the famous
variant of the manuscript 411, thirteenth century, of the Vatican, and
those of the two manuscripts of Venice, 393 and 394, consulted with
such fruitful results by Henri Estienne, and all the passages in Doric
dialect which are only found in the celebrated manuscript of the twelfth
century belonging to the Naples Library. M. Mabeuf never had any fire
in his chamber, and went to bed at sundown, in order not to consume
any candles. It seemed as though he had no longer any neighbors: people
avoided him when he went out; he perceived the fact. The wretchedness of
a child interests a mother, the wretchedness of a young man interests a
young girl, the wretchedness of an old man interests no one. It is, of
all distresses, the coldest. Still, Father Mabeuf had not entirely lost
his childlike serenity. His eyes acquired some vivacity when they rested
on his books, and he smiled when he gazed at the Diogenes Laertius,
which was a unique copy. His bookcase with glass doors was the
only piece of furniture which he had kept beyond what was strictly
indispensable.

One day, Mother Plutarque said to him:--

"I have no money to buy any dinner."

What she called dinner was a loaf of bread and four or five potatoes.

"On credit?" suggested M. Mabeuf.

"You know well that people refuse me."

M. Mabeuf opened his bookcase, took a long look at all his books, one
after another, as a father obliged to decimate his children would gaze
upon them before making a choice, then seized one hastily, put it
in under his arm and went out. He returned two hours later, without
anything under his arm, laid thirty sous on the table, and said:--

"You will get something for dinner."

From that moment forth, Mother Plutarque saw a sombre veil, which was
never more lifted, descend over the old man's candid face.

On the following day, on the day after, and on the day after that, it
had to be done again.

M. Mabeuf went out with a book and returned with a coin. As the
second-hand dealers perceived that he was forced to sell, they purchased
of him for twenty sous that for which he had paid twenty francs,
sometimes at those very shops. Volume by volume, the whole library
went the same road. He said at times: "But I am eighty;" as though he
cherished some secret hope that he should arrive at the end of his days
before reaching the end of his books. His melancholy increased. Once,
however, he had a pleasure. He had gone out with a Robert Estienne,
which he had sold for thirty-five sous under the Quai Malaquais, and he
returned with an Aldus which he had bought for forty sous in the Rue des
Gres.--"I owe five sous," he said, beaming on Mother Plutarque. That day
he had no dinner.

He belonged to the Horticultural Society. His destitution became known
there. The president of the society came to see him, promised to
speak to the Minister of Agriculture and Commerce about him, and did
so.--"Why, what!" exclaimed the Minister, "I should think so! An old
savant! a botanist! an inoffensive man! Something must be done for him!"
On the following day, M. Mabeuf received an invitation to dine with the
Minister. Trembling with joy, he showed the letter to Mother Plutarque.
"We are saved!" said he. On the day appointed, he went to the Minister's
house. He perceived that his ragged cravat, his long, square coat, and
his waxed shoes astonished the ushers. No one spoke to him, not even the
Minister. About ten o'clock in the evening, while he was still waiting
for a word, he heard the Minister's wife, a beautiful woman in a
low-necked gown whom he had not ventured to approach, inquire: "Who is
that old gentleman?" He returned home on foot at midnight, in a driving
rain-storm. He had sold an Elzevir to pay for a carriage in which to go
thither.

He had acquired the habit of reading a few pages in his Diogenes
Laertius every night, before he went to bed. He knew enough Greek to
enjoy the peculiarities of the text which he owned. He had now no other
enjoyment. Several weeks passed. All at once, Mother Plutarque fell ill.
There is one thing sadder than having no money with which to buy bread
at the baker's and that is having no money to purchase drugs at the
apothecary's. One evening, the doctor had ordered a very expensive
potion. And the malady was growing worse; a nurse was required. M.
Mabeuf opened his bookcase; there was nothing there. The last volume had
taken its departure. All that was left to him was Diogenes Laertius.
He put this unique copy under his arm, and went out. It was the 4th of
June, 1832; he went to the Porte Saint-Jacques, to Royal's successor,
and returned with one hundred francs. He laid the pile of five-franc
pieces on the old serving-woman's nightstand, and returned to his
chamber without saying a word.

On the following morning, at dawn, he seated himself on the overturned
post in his garden, and he could be seen over the top of the hedge,
sitting the whole morning motionless, with drooping head, his eyes
vaguely fixed on the withered flower-beds. It rained at intervals; the
old man did not seem to perceive the fact.

In the afternoon, extraordinary noises broke out in Paris. They
resembled shots and the clamors of a multitude.

Father Mabeuf raised his head. He saw a gardener passing, and
inquired:--

"What is it?"

The gardener, spade on back, replied in the most unconcerned tone:--

"It is the riots."

"What riots?"

"Yes, they are fighting."

"Why are they fighting?"

"Ah, good Heavens!" ejaculated the gardener.

"In what direction?" went on M. Mabeuf.

"In the neighborhood of the Arsenal."

Father Mabeuf went to his room, took his hat, mechanically sought for a
book to place under his arm, found none, said: "Ah! truly!" and went off
with a bewildered air.




BOOK TENTH.--THE 5TH OF JUNE, 1832




CHAPTER I--THE SURFACE OF THE QUESTION

Of what is revolt composed? Of nothing and of everything. Of an
electricity disengaged, little by little, of a flame suddenly darting
forth, of a wandering force, of a passing breath. This breath encounters
heads which speak, brains which dream, souls which suffer, passions
which burn, wretchedness which howls, and bears them away.

Whither?

At random. Athwart the state, the laws, athwart prosperity and the
insolence of others.

Irritated convictions, embittered enthusiasms, agitated indignations,
instincts of war which have been repressed, youthful courage which has
been exalted, generous blindness; curiosity, the taste for change,
the thirst for the unexpected, the sentiment which causes one to
take pleasure in reading the posters for the new play, and love,
the prompter's whistle, at the theatre; the vague hatreds, rancors,
disappointments, every vanity which thinks that destiny has bankrupted
it; discomfort, empty dreams, ambitious that are hedged about, whoever
hopes for a downfall, some outcome, in short, at the very bottom, the
rabble, that mud which catches fire,--such are the elements of revolt.
That which is grandest and that which is basest; the beings who prowl
outside of all bounds, awaiting an occasion, bohemians, vagrants,
vagabonds of the cross-roads, those who sleep at night in a desert of
houses with no other roof than the cold clouds of heaven, those who,
each day, demand their bread from chance and not from toil, the unknown
of poverty and nothingness, the bare-armed, the bare-footed, belong to
revolt. Whoever cherishes in his soul a secret revolt against any deed
whatever on the part of the state, of life or of fate, is ripe for riot,
and, as soon as it makes its appearance, he begins to quiver, and to
feel himself borne away with the whirlwind.

Revolt is a sort of waterspout in the social atmosphere which forms
suddenly in certain conditions of temperature, and which, as it eddies
about, mounts, descends, thunders, tears, razes, crushes, demolishes,
uproots, bearing with it great natures and small, the strong man and the
feeble mind, the tree trunk and the stalk of straw. Woe to him whom it
bears away as well as to him whom it strikes! It breaks the one against
the other.

It communicates to those whom it seizes an indescribable and
extraordinary power. It fills the first-comer with the force of events;
it converts everything into projectiles. It makes a cannon-ball of a
rough stone, and a general of a porter.

If we are to believe certain oracles of crafty political views, a little
revolt is desirable from the point of view of power. System: revolt
strengthens those governments which it does not overthrow. It puts
the army to the test; it consecrates the bourgeoisie, it draws out
the muscles of the police; it demonstrates the force of the social
framework. It is an exercise in gymnastics; it is almost hygiene. Power
is in better health after a revolt, as a man is after a good rubbing
down.

Revolt, thirty years ago, was regarded from still other points of view.

There is for everything a theory, which proclaims itself "good sense";
Philintus against Alcestis; mediation offered between the false and the
true; explanation, admonition, rather haughty extenuation which, because
it is mingled with blame and excuse, thinks itself wisdom, and is often
only pedantry. A whole political school called "the golden mean" has
been the outcome of this. As between cold water and hot water, it is
the lukewarm water party. This school with its false depth, all on the
surface, which dissects effects without going back to first causes,
chides from its height of a demi-science, the agitation of the public
square.

If we listen to this school, "The riots which complicated the affair
of 1830 deprived that great event of a portion of its purity. The
Revolution of July had been a fine popular gale, abruptly followed
by blue sky. They made the cloudy sky reappear. They caused that
revolution, at first so remarkable for its unanimity, to degenerate into
a quarrel. In the Revolution of July, as in all progress accomplished by
fits and starts, there had been secret fractures; these riots rendered
them perceptible. It might have been said: 'Ah! this is broken.' After
the Revolution of July, one was sensible only of deliverance; after the
riots, one was conscious of a catastrophe.

"All revolt closes the shops, depresses the funds, throws the Exchange
into consternation, suspends commerce, clogs business, precipitates
failures; no more money, private fortunes rendered uneasy, public credit
shaken, industry disconcerted, capital withdrawing, work at a discount,
fear everywhere; counter-shocks in every town. Hence gulfs. It has been
calculated that the first day of a riot costs France twenty millions,
the second day forty, the third sixty, a three days' uprising costs
one hundred and twenty millions, that is to say, if only the financial
result be taken into consideration, it is equivalent to a disaster, a
shipwreck or a lost battle, which should annihilate a fleet of sixty
ships of the line.

"No doubt, historically, uprisings have their beauty; the war of the
pavements is no less grandiose, and no less pathetic, than the war of
thickets: in the one there is the soul of forests, in the other the
heart of cities; the one has Jean Chouan, the other has a Jeanne.
Revolts have illuminated with a red glare all the most original points
of the Parisian character, generosity, devotion, stormy gayety, students
proving that bravery forms part of intelligence, the National Guard
invincible, bivouacs of shopkeepers, fortresses of street urchins,
contempt of death on the part of passers-by. Schools and legions clashed
together. After all, between the combatants, there was only a difference
of age; the race is the same; it is the same stoical men who died at the
age of twenty for their ideas, at forty for their families. The
army, always a sad thing in civil wars, opposed prudence to audacity.
Uprisings, while proving popular intrepidity, also educated the courage
of the bourgeois.

"This is well. But is all this worth the bloodshed? And to the bloodshed
add the future darkness, progress compromised, uneasiness among the
best men, honest liberals in despair, foreign absolutism happy in these
wounds dealt to revolution by its own hand, the vanquished of 1830
triumphing and saying: 'We told you so!' Add Paris enlarged, possibly,
but France most assuredly diminished. Add, for all must needs be told,
the massacres which have too often dishonored the victory of order grown
ferocious over liberty gone mad. To sum up all, uprisings have been
disastrous."

Thus speaks that approximation to wisdom with which the bourgeoisie,
that approximation to the people, so willingly contents itself.

For our parts, we reject this word uprisings as too large, and
consequently as too convenient. We make a distinction between one
popular movement and another popular movement. We do not inquire whether
an uprising costs as much as a battle. Why a battle, in the first place?
Here the question of war comes up. Is war less of a scourge than an
uprising is of a calamity? And then, are all uprisings calamities? And
what if the revolt of July did cost a hundred and twenty millions? The
establishment of Philip V. in Spain cost France two milliards. Even at
the same price, we should prefer the 14th of July. However, we reject
these figures, which appear to be reasons and which are only words. An
uprising being given, we examine it by itself. In all that is said by
the doctrinarian objection above presented, there is no question of
anything but effect, we seek the cause.

We will be explicit.




CHAPTER II--THE ROOT OF THE MATTER

There is such a thing as an uprising, and there is such a thing as
insurrection; these are two separate phases of wrath; one is in the
wrong, the other is in the right. In democratic states, the only ones
which are founded on justice, it sometimes happens that the fraction
usurps; then the whole rises and the necessary claim of its rights may
proceed as far as resort to arms. In all questions which result from
collective sovereignty, the war of the whole against the fraction is
insurrection; the attack of the fraction against the whole is revolt;
according as the Tuileries contain a king or the Convention, they
are justly or unjustly attacked. The same cannon, pointed against the
populace, is wrong on the 10th of August, and right on the 14th of
Vendemiaire. Alike in appearance, fundamentally different in reality;
the Swiss defend the false, Bonaparte defends the true. That which
universal suffrage has effected in its liberty and in its sovereignty
cannot be undone by the street. It is the same in things pertaining
purely to civilization; the instinct of the masses, clear-sighted
to-day, may be troubled to-morrow. The same fury legitimate when
directed against Terray and absurd when directed against Turgot. The
destruction of machines, the pillage of warehouses, the breaking of
rails, the demolition of docks, the false routes of multitudes, the
refusal by the people of justice to progress, Ramus assassinated by
students, Rousseau driven out of Switzerland and stoned,--that is
revolt. Israel against Moses, Athens against Phocian, Rome against
Cicero,--that is an uprising; Paris against the Bastille,--that is
insurrection. The soldiers against Alexander, the sailors against
Christopher Columbus,--this is the same revolt; impious revolt;
why? Because Alexander is doing for Asia with the sword that which
Christopher Columbus is doing for America with the compass; Alexander
like Columbus, is finding a world. These gifts of a world to
civilization are such augmentations of light, that all resistance in
that case is culpable. Sometimes the populace counterfeits fidelity to
itself. The masses are traitors to the people. Is there, for example,
anything stranger than that long and bloody protest of dealers in
contraband salt, a legitimate chronic revolt, which, at the decisive
moment, on the day of salvation, at the very hour of popular victory,
espouses the throne, turns into chouannerie, and, from having been an
insurrection against, becomes an uprising for, sombre masterpieces of
ignorance! The contraband salt dealer escapes the royal gibbets, and
with a rope's end round his neck, mounts the white cockade. "Death to
the salt duties," brings forth, "Long live the King!" The assassins of
Saint-Barthelemy, the cut-throats of September, the manslaughterers of
Avignon, the assassins of Coligny, the assassins of Madam Lamballe, the
assassins of Brune, Miquelets, Verdets, Cadenettes, the companions of
Jehu, the chevaliers of Brassard,--behold an uprising. La Vendee is
a grand, catholic uprising. The sound of right in movement is
recognizable, it does not always proceed from the trembling of excited
masses; there are mad rages, there are cracked bells, all tocsins do not
give out the sound of bronze. The brawl of passions and ignorances
is quite another thing from the shock of progress. Show me in what
direction you are going. Rise, if you will, but let it be that you may
grow great. There is no insurrection except in a forward direction. Any
other sort of rising is bad; every violent step towards the rear is a
revolt; to retreat is to commit a deed of violence against the human
race. Insurrection is a fit of rage on the part of truth; the pavements
which the uprising disturbs give forth the spark of right. These
pavements bequeath to the uprising only their mud. Danton against Louis
XIV. is insurrection; Hebert against Danton is revolt.

Hence it results that if insurrection in given cases may be, as
Lafayette says, the most holy of duties, an uprising may be the most
fatal of crimes.

There is also a difference in the intensity of heat; insurrection is
often a volcano, revolt is often only a fire of straw.

Revolt, as we have said, is sometimes found among those in power.
Polignac is a rioter; Camille Desmoulins is one of the governing powers.

Insurrection is sometimes resurrection.

The solution of everything by universal suffrage being an absolutely
modern fact, and all history anterior to this fact being, for the space
of four thousand years, filled with violated right, and the suffering of
peoples, each epoch of history brings with it that protest of which it
is capable. Under the Caesars, there was no insurrection, but there was
Juvenal.

The facit indignatio replaces the Gracchi.

Under the Caesars, there is the exile to Syene; there is also the man of
the Annales. We do not speak of the immense exile of Patmos who, on his
part also, overwhelms the real world with a protest in the name of the
ideal world, who makes of his vision an enormous satire and casts on
Rome-Nineveh, on Rome-Babylon, on Rome-Sodom, the flaming reflection of
the Apocalypse. John on his rock is the sphinx on its pedestal; we may
understand him, he is a Jew, and it is Hebrew; but the man who writes
the Annales is of the Latin race, let us rather say he is a Roman.

As the Neros reign in a black way, they should be painted to match. The
work of the graving-tool alone would be too pale; there must be poured
into the channel a concentrated prose which bites.

Despots count for something in the question of philosophers. A word that
is chained is a terrible word. The writer doubles and trebles his style
when silence is imposed on a nation by its master. From this silence
there arises a certain mysterious plenitude which filters into thought
and there congeals into bronze. The compression of history produces
conciseness in the historian. The granite solidity of such and such a
celebrated prose is nothing but the accumulation effected by the tyrant.

Tyranny constrains the writer to conditions of diameter which are
augmentations of force. The Ciceronian period, which hardly sufficed
for Verres, would be blunted on Caligula. The less spread of sail in
the phrase, the more intensity in the blow. Tacitus thinks with all his
might.

The honesty of a great heart, condensed in justice and truth, overwhelms
as with lightning.

Be it remarked, in passing, that Tacitus is not historically superposed
upon Caesar. The Tiberii were reserved for him. Caesar and Tacitus
are two successive phenomena, a meeting between whom seems to be
mysteriously avoided, by the One who, when He sets the centuries on the
stage, regulates the entrances and the exits. Caesar is great, Tacitus
is great; God spares these two greatnesses by not allowing them to clash
with one another. The guardian of justice, in striking Caesar, might
strike too hard and be unjust. God does not will it. The great wars
of Africa and Spain, the pirates of Sicily destroyed, civilization
introduced into Gaul, into Britanny, into Germany,--all this glory
covers the Rubicon. There is here a sort of delicacy of the divine
justice, hesitating to let loose upon the illustrious usurper the
formidable historian, sparing Caesar Tacitus, and according extenuating
circumstances to genius.

Certainly, despotism remains despotism, even under the despot of genius.
There is corruption under all illustrious tyrants, but the moral pest is
still more hideous under infamous tyrants. In such reigns, nothing veils
the shame; and those who make examples, Tacitus as well as Juvenal,
slap this ignominy which cannot reply, in the face, more usefully in the
presence of all humanity.

Rome smells worse under Vitellius than under Sylla. Under Claudius and
under Domitian, there is a deformity of baseness corresponding to the
repulsiveness of the tyrant. The villainy of slaves is a direct product
of the despot; a miasma exhales from these cowering consciences wherein
the master is reflected; public powers are unclean; hearts are small;
consciences are dull, souls are like vermin; thus it is under Caracalla,
thus it is under Commodus, thus it is under Heliogabalus, while, from
the Roman Senate, under Caesar, there comes nothing but the odor of the
dung which is peculiar to the eyries of the eagles.

Hence the advent, apparently tardy, of the Tacituses and the Juvenals;
it is in the hour for evidence, that the demonstrator makes his
appearance.

But Juvenal and Tacitus, like Isaiah in Biblical times, like Dante in
the Middle Ages, is man; riot and insurrection are the multitude, which
is sometimes right and sometimes wrong.

In the majority of cases, riot proceeds from a material fact;
insurrection is always a moral phenomenon. Riot is Masaniello;
insurrection, Spartacus. Insurrection borders on mind, riot on the
stomach; Gaster grows irritated; but Gaster, assuredly, is not always in
the wrong. In questions of famine, riot, Buzancais, for example, holds a
true, pathetic, and just point of departure. Nevertheless, it remains
a riot. Why? It is because, right at bottom, it was wrong in form. Shy
although in the right, violent although strong, it struck at random; it
walked like a blind elephant; it left behind it the corpses of old
men, of women, and of children; it wished the blood of inoffensive and
innocent persons without knowing why. The nourishment of the people is a
good object; to massacre them is a bad means.

All armed protests, even the most legitimate, even that of the 10th of
August, even that of July 14th, begin with the same troubles. Before
the right gets set free, there is foam and tumult. In the beginning, the
insurrection is a riot, just as a river is a torrent. Ordinarily it ends
in that ocean: revolution. Sometimes, however, coming from those lofty
mountains which dominate the moral horizon, justice, wisdom, reason,
right, formed of the pure snow of the ideal, after a long fall from
rock to rock, after having reflected the sky in its transparency and
increased by a hundred affluents in the majestic mien of triumph,
insurrection is suddenly lost in some quagmire, as the Rhine is in a
swamp.

All this is of the past, the future is another thing. Universal suffrage
has this admirable property, that it dissolves riot in its inception,
and, by giving the vote to insurrection, it deprives it of its arms.
The disappearance of wars, of street wars as well as of wars on the
frontiers, such is the inevitable progression. Whatever To-day may be,
To-morrow will be peace.

However, insurrection, riot, and points of difference between the former
and the latter,--the bourgeois, properly speaking, knows nothing of such
shades. In his mind, all is sedition, rebellion pure and simple, the
revolt of the dog against his master, an attempt to bite whom must be
punished by the chain and the kennel, barking, snapping, until such day
as the head of the dog, suddenly enlarged, is outlined vaguely in the
gloom face to face with the lion.

Then the bourgeois shouts: "Long live the people!"

This explanation given, what does the movement of June, 1832, signify,
so far as history is concerned? Is it a revolt? Is it an insurrection?

It may happen to us, in placing this formidable event on the stage, to
say revolt now and then, but merely to distinguish superficial facts,
and always preserving the distinction between revolt, the form, and
insurrection, the foundation.

This movement of 1832 had, in its rapid outbreak and in its melancholy
extinction, so much grandeur, that even those who see in it only an
uprising, never refer to it otherwise than with respect. For them, it
is like a relic of 1830. Excited imaginations, say they, are not to be
calmed in a day. A revolution cannot be cut off short. It must needs
undergo some undulations before it returns to a state of rest, like a
mountain sinking into the plain. There are no Alps without their Jura,
nor Pyrenees without the Asturias.

This pathetic crisis of contemporary history which the memory of
Parisians calls "the epoch of the riots," is certainly a characteristic
hour amid the stormy hours of this century. A last word, before we enter
on the recital.

The facts which we are about to relate belong to that dramatic and
living reality, which the historian sometimes neglects for lack of time
and space. There, nevertheless, we insist upon it, is life, palpitation,
human tremor. Petty details, as we think we have already said, are, so
to speak, the foliage of great events, and are lost in the distance of
history. The epoch, surnamed "of the riots," abounds in details of
this nature. Judicial inquiries have not revealed, and perhaps have not
sounded the depths, for another reason than history. We shall therefore
bring to light, among the known and published peculiarities, things
which have not heretofore been known, about facts over which have passed
the forgetfulness of some, and the death of others. The majority of the
actors in these gigantic scenes have disappeared; beginning with the
very next day they held their peace; but of what we shall relate, we
shall be able to say: "We have seen this." We alter a few names, for
history relates and does not inform against, but the deed which we shall
paint will be genuine. In accordance with the conditions of the book
which we are now writing, we shall show only one side and one episode,
and certainly, the least known at that, of the two days, the 5th and the
6th of June, 1832, but we shall do it in such wise that the reader may
catch a glimpse, beneath the gloomy veil which we are about to lift, of
the real form of this frightful public adventure.




CHAPTER III--A BURIAL; AN OCCASION TO BE BORN AGAIN

In the spring of 1832, although the cholera had been chilling all
minds for the last three months and had cast over their agitation an
indescribable and gloomy pacification, Paris had already long been ripe
for commotion. As we have said, the great city resembles a piece of
artillery; when it is loaded, it suffices for a spark to fall, and the
shot is discharged. In June, 1832, the spark was the death of General
Lamarque.

Lamarque was a man of renown and of action. He had had in succession,
under the Empire and under the Restoration, the sorts of bravery
requisite for the two epochs, the bravery of the battle-field and the
bravery of the tribune. He was as eloquent as he had been valiant; a
sword was discernible in his speech. Like Foy, his predecessor, after
upholding the command, he upheld liberty; he sat between the left and
the extreme left, beloved of the people because he accepted the chances
of the future, beloved of the populace because he had served the
Emperor well; he was, in company with Comtes Gerard and Drouet, one
of Napoleon's marshals in petto. The treaties of 1815 removed him as
a personal offence. He hated Wellington with a downright hatred which
pleased the multitude; and, for seventeen years, he majestically
preserved the sadness of Waterloo, paying hardly any attention to
intervening events. In his death agony, at his last hour, he clasped to
his breast a sword which had been presented to him by the officers of
the Hundred Days. Napoleon had died uttering the word army, Lamarque
uttering the word country.

His death, which was expected, was dreaded by the people as a loss, and
by the government as an occasion. This death was an affliction. Like
everything that is bitter, affliction may turn to revolt. This is what
took place.

On the preceding evening, and on the morning of the 5th of June, the day
appointed for Lamarque's burial, the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, which the
procession was to touch at, assumed a formidable aspect. This tumultuous
network of streets was filled with rumors. They armed themselves as best
they might. Joiners carried off door-weights of their establishment
"to break down doors." One of them had made himself a dagger of a
stocking-weaver's hook by breaking off the hook and sharpening the
stump. Another, who was in a fever "to attack," slept wholly dressed
for three days. A carpenter named Lombier met a comrade, who asked him:
"Whither are you going?" "Eh! well, I have no weapons." "What then?"
"I'm going to my timber-yard to get my compasses." "What for?" "I don't
know," said Lombier. A certain Jacqueline, an expeditious man, accosted
some passing artisans: "Come here, you!" He treated them to ten sous'
worth of wine and said: "Have you work?" "No." "Go to Filspierre,
between the Barriere Charonne and the Barriere Montreuil, and you will
find work." At Filspierre's they found cartridges and arms. Certain
well-known leaders were going the rounds, that is to say, running from
one house to another, to collect their men. At Barthelemy's, near the
Barriere du Trone, at Capel's, near the Petit-Chapeau, the drinkers
accosted each other with a grave air. They were heard to say: "Have you
your pistol?" "Under my blouse." "And you?" "Under my shirt." In the
Rue Traversiere, in front of the Bland workshop, and in the yard of
the Maison-Brulee, in front of tool-maker Bernier's, groups whispered
together. Among them was observed a certain Mavot, who never remained
more than a week in one shop, as the masters always discharged him
"because they were obliged to dispute with him every day." Mavot was
killed on the following day at the barricade of the Rue Menilmontant.
Pretot, who was destined to perish also in the struggle, seconded Mavot,
and to the question: "What is your object?" he replied: "Insurrection."
Workmen assembled at the corner of the Rue de Bercy, waited for a
certain Lemarin, the revolutionary agent for the Faubourg Saint-Marceau.
Watchwords were exchanged almost publicly.

On the 5th of June, accordingly, a day of mingled rain and sun, General
Lamarque's funeral procession traversed Paris with official military
pomp, somewhat augmented through precaution. Two battalions, with draped
drums and reversed arms, ten thousand National Guards, with their swords
at their sides, escorted the coffin. The hearse was drawn by young men.
The officers of the Invalides came immediately behind it, bearing laurel
branches. Then came an innumerable, strange, agitated multitude, the
sectionaries of the Friends of the People, the Law School, the Medical
School, refugees of all nationalities, and Spanish, Italian, German,
and Polish flags, tricolored horizontal banners, every possible sort of
banner, children waving green boughs, stone-cutters and carpenters who
were on strike at the moment, printers who were recognizable by their
paper caps, marching two by two, three by three, uttering cries, nearly
all of them brandishing sticks, some brandishing sabres, without order
and yet with a single soul, now a tumultuous rout, again a column.
Squads chose themselves leaders; a man armed with a pair of pistols in
full view, seemed to pass the host in review, and the files separated
before him. On the side alleys of the boulevards, in the branches of the
trees, on balconies, in windows, on the roofs, swarmed the heads of men,
women, and children; all eyes were filled with anxiety. An armed throng
was passing, and a terrified throng looked on.

The Government, on its side, was taking observations. It observed with
its hand on its sword. Four squadrons of carabineers could be seen in
the Place Louis XV. in their saddles, with their trumpets at their head,
cartridge-boxes filled and muskets loaded, all in readiness to march;
in the Latin country and at the Jardin des Plantes, the Municipal Guard
echelonned from street to street; at the Halle-aux-Vins, a squadron of
dragoons; at the Greve half of the 12th Light Infantry, the other
half being at the Bastille; the 6th Dragoons at the Celestins; and the
courtyard of the Louvre full of artillery. The remainder of the troops
were confined to their barracks, without reckoning the regiments of the
environs of Paris. Power being uneasy, held suspended over the menacing
multitude twenty-four thousand soldiers in the city and thirty thousand
in the banlieue.

Divers reports were in circulation in the cortege. Legitimist tricks
were hinted at; they spoke of the Duc de Reichstadt, whom God had marked
out for death at that very moment when the populace were designating
him for the Empire. One personage, whose name has remained unknown,
announced that at a given hour two overseers who had been won over,
would throw open the doors of a factory of arms to the people. That
which predominated on the uncovered brows of the majority of those
present was enthusiasm mingled with dejection. Here and there, also, in
that multitude given over to such violent but noble emotions, there were
visible genuine visages of criminals and ignoble mouths which said: "Let
us plunder!" There are certain agitations which stir up the bottoms of
marshes and make clouds of mud rise through the water. A phenomenon to
which "well drilled" policemen are no strangers.

The procession proceeded, with feverish slowness, from the house of the
deceased, by way of the boulevards as far as the Bastille. It rained
from time to time; the rain mattered nothing to that throng. Many
incidents, the coffin borne round the Vendome column, stones thrown at
the Duc de Fitz-James, who was seen on a balcony with his hat on his
head, the Gallic cock torn from a popular flag and dragged in the mire,
a policeman wounded with a blow from a sword at the Porte Saint-Martin,
an officer of the 12th Light Infantry saying aloud: "I am a Republican,"
the Polytechnic School coming up unexpectedly against orders to remain
at home, the shouts of: "Long live the Polytechnique! Long live the
Republic!" marked the passage of the funeral train. At the Bastille,
long files of curious and formidable people who descended from the
Faubourg Saint-Antoine, effected a junction with the procession, and a
certain terrible seething began to agitate the throng.

One man was heard to say to another: "Do you see that fellow with a
red beard, he's the one who will give the word when we are to fire." It
appears that this red beard was present, at another riot, the Quenisset
affair, entrusted with this same function.

The hearse passed the Bastille, traversed the small bridge, and reached
the esplanade of the bridge of Austerlitz. There it halted. The crowd,
surveyed at that moment with a bird'seye view, would have presented the
aspect of a comet whose head was on the esplanade and whose tail spread
out over the Quai Bourdon, covered the Bastille, and was prolonged on
the boulevard as far as the Porte Saint-Martin. A circle was traced
around the hearse. The vast rout held their peace. Lafayette spoke and
bade Lamarque farewell. This was a touching and august instant, all
heads uncovered, all hearts beat high.

All at once, a man on horseback, clad in black, made his appearance
in the middle of the group with a red flag, others say, with a pike
surmounted with a red liberty-cap. Lafayette turned aside his head.
Exelmans quitted the procession.

This red flag raised a storm, and disappeared in the midst of it. From
the Boulevard Bourdon to the bridge of Austerlitz one of those clamors
which resemble billows stirred the multitude. Two prodigious shouts went
up: "Lamarque to the Pantheon!--Lafayette to the Town-hall!" Some young
men, amid the declamations of the throng, harnessed themselves and
began to drag Lamarque in the hearse across the bridge of Austerlitz and
Lafayette in a hackney-coach along the Quai Morland.

In the crowd which surrounded and cheered Lafayette, it was noticed
that a German showed himself named Ludwig Snyder, who died a centenarian
afterwards, who had also been in the war of 1776, and who had fought at
Trenton under Washington, and at Brandywine under Lafayette.

In the meantime, the municipal cavalry on the left bank had been set
in motion, and came to bar the bridge, on the right bank the dragoons
emerged from the Celestins and deployed along the Quai Morland. The men
who were dragging Lafayette suddenly caught sight of them at the corner
of the quay and shouted: "The dragoons!" The dragoons advanced at a
walk, in silence, with their pistols in their holsters, their swords in
their scabbards, their guns slung in their leather sockets, with an air
of gloomy expectation.

They halted two hundred paces from the little bridge. The carriage in
which sat Lafayette advanced to them, their ranks opened and allowed it
to pass, and then closed behind it. At that moment the dragoons and the
crowd touched. The women fled in terror. What took place during that
fatal minute? No one can say. It is the dark moment when two clouds come
together. Some declare that a blast of trumpets sounding the charge was
heard in the direction of the Arsenal others that a blow from a dagger
was given by a child to a dragoon. The fact is, that three shots were
suddenly discharged: the first killed Cholet, chief of the squadron,
the second killed an old deaf woman who was in the act of closing her
window, the third singed the shoulder of an officer; a woman screamed:
"They are beginning too soon!" and all at once, a squadron of dragoons
which had remained in the barracks up to this time, was seen to debouch
at a gallop with bared swords, through the Rue Bassompierre and the
Boulevard Bourdon, sweeping all before them.

Then all is said, the tempest is loosed, stones rain down, a fusillade
breaks forth, many precipitate themselves to the bottom of the bank, and
pass the small arm of the Seine, now filled in, the timber-yards of the
Isle Louviers, that vast citadel ready to hand, bristle with combatants,
stakes are torn up, pistol-shots fired, a barricade begun, the young men
who are thrust back pass the Austerlitz bridge with the hearse at a run,
and the municipal guard, the carabineers rush up, the dragoons ply their
swords, the crowd disperses in all directions, a rumor of war flies to
all four quarters of Paris, men shout: "To arms!" they run, tumble down,
flee, resist. Wrath spreads abroad the riot as wind spreads a fire.




CHAPTER IV--THE EBULLITIONS OF FORMER DAYS

Nothing is more extraordinary than the first breaking out of a riot.
Everything bursts forth everywhere at once. Was it foreseen? Yes. Was it
prepared? No. Whence comes it? From the pavements. Whence falls it? From
the clouds. Here insurrection assumes the character of a plot; there
of an improvisation. The first comer seizes a current of the throng
and leads it whither he wills. A beginning full of terror, in which is
mingled a sort of formidable gayety. First come clamors, the shops are
closed, the displays of the merchants disappear; then come isolated
shots; people flee; blows from gun-stocks beat against portes cocheres,
servants can be heard laughing in the courtyards of houses and saying:
"There's going to be a row!"

A quarter of an hour had not elapsed when this is what was taking place
at twenty different spots in Paris at once.

In the Rue Sainte-Croix-de-la-Bretonnerie, twenty young men, bearded and
with long hair, entered a dram-shop and emerged a moment later, carrying
a horizontal tricolored flag covered with crape, and having at their
head three men armed, one with a sword, one with a gun, and the third
with a pike.

In the Rue des Nonaindieres, a very well-dressed bourgeois, who had a
prominent belly, a sonorous voice, a bald head, a lofty brow, a black
beard, and one of these stiff mustaches which will not lie flat, offered
cartridges publicly to passers-by.

In the Rue Saint-Pierre-Montmartre, men with bare arms carried about a
black flag, on which could be read in white letters this inscription:
"Republic or Death!" In the Rue des Jeuneurs, Rue du Cadran, Rue
Montorgueil, Rue Mandar, groups appeared waving flags on which could be
distinguished in gold letters, the word section with a number. One of
these flags was red and blue with an almost imperceptible stripe of
white between.

They pillaged a factory of small-arms on the Boulevard Saint-Martin, and
three armorers' shops, the first in the Rue Beaubourg, the second in the
Rue Michel-le-Comte, the other in the Rue du Temple. In a few minutes,
the thousand hands of the crowd had seized and carried off two hundred
and thirty guns, nearly all double-barrelled, sixty-four swords, and
eighty-three pistols. In order to provide more arms, one man took the
gun, the other the bayonet.

Opposite the Quai de la Greve, young men armed with muskets installed
themselves in the houses of some women for the purpose of firing. One
of them had a flint-lock. They rang, entered, and set about making
cartridges. One of these women relates: "I did not know what cartridges
were; it was my husband who told me."

One cluster broke into a curiosity shop in the Rue des Vielles
Haudriettes, and seized yataghans and Turkish arms.

The body of a mason who had been killed by a gun-shot lay in the Rue de
la Perle.

And then on the right bank, the left bank, on the quays, on the
boulevards, in the Latin country, in the quarter of the Halles, panting
men, artisans, students, members of sections read proclamations and
shouted: "To arms!" broke street lanterns, unharnessed carriages,
unpaved the streets, broke in the doors of houses, uprooted trees,
rummaged cellars, rolled out hogsheads, heaped up paving-stones, rough
slabs, furniture and planks, and made barricades.

They forced the bourgeois to assist them in this. They entered the
dwellings of women, they forced them to hand over the swords and guns
of their absent husbands, and they wrote on the door, with whiting: "The
arms have been delivered"; some signed "their names" to receipts for
the guns and swords and said: "Send for them to-morrow at the Mayor's
office." They disarmed isolated sentinels and National Guardsmen in
the streets on their way to the Townhall. They tore the epaulets from
officers. In the Rue du Cimitiere-Saint-Nicholas, an officer of the
National Guard, on being pursued by a crowd armed with clubs and foils,
took refuge with difficulty in a house, whence he was only able to
emerge at nightfall and in disguise.

In the Quartier Saint-Jacques, the students swarmed out of their
hotels and ascended the Rue Saint-Hyacinthe to the Cafe du Progress,
or descended to the Cafe des Sept-Billards, in the Rue des Mathurins.
There, in front of the door, young men mounted on the stone
corner-posts, distributed arms. They plundered the timber-yard in the
Rue Transnonain in order to obtain material for barricades. On a single
point the inhabitants resisted, at the corner of the Rue Sainte-Avoye
and the Rue Simon-Le-Franc, where they destroyed the barricade with
their own hands. At a single point the insurgents yielded; they
abandoned a barricade begun in the Rue de Temple after having fired on
a detachment of the National Guard, and fled through the Rue de la
Corderie. The detachment picked up in the barricade a red flag, a
package of cartridges, and three hundred pistol-balls. The National
Guardsmen tore up the flag, and carried off its tattered remains on the
points of their bayonets.

All that we are here relating slowly and successively took place
simultaneously at all points of the city in the midst of a vast tumult,
like a mass of tongues of lightning in one clap of thunder. In less than
an hour, twenty-seven barricades sprang out of the earth in the quarter
of the Halles alone. In the centre was that famous house No. 50, which
was the fortress of Jeanne and her six hundred companions, and which,
flanked on the one hand by a barricade at Saint-Merry, and on the other
by a barricade of the Rue Maubuee, commanded three streets, the Rue
des Arcis, the Rue Saint-Martin, and the Rue Aubry-le-Boucher, which
it faced. The barricades at right angles fell back, the one of the
Rue Montorgueil on the Grande-Truanderie, the other of the Rue
Geoffroy-Langevin on the Rue Sainte-Avoye. Without reckoning innumerable
barricades in twenty other quarters of Paris, in the Marais, at
Mont-Sainte-Genevieve; one in the Rue Menilmontant, where was visible
a porte cochere torn from its hinges; another near the little bridge of
the Hotel-Dieu made with an "ecossais," which had been unharnessed and
overthrown, three hundred paces from the Prefecture of Police.

At the barricade of the Rue des Menetriers, a well-dressed man
distributed money to the workmen. At the barricade of the Rue Grenetat,
a horseman made his appearance and handed to the one who seemed to be
the commander of the barricade what had the appearance of a roll of
silver. "Here," said he, "this is to pay expenses, wine, et caetera."
A light-haired young man, without a cravat, went from barricade to
barricade, carrying pass-words. Another, with a naked sword, a blue
police cap on his head, placed sentinels. In the interior, beyond the
barricades, the wine-shops and porters' lodges were converted into
guard-houses. Otherwise the riot was conducted after the most scientific
military tactics. The narrow, uneven, sinuous streets, full of angles
and turns, were admirably chosen; the neighborhood of the Halles, in
particular, a network of streets more intricate than a forest. The
Society of the Friends of the People had, it was said, undertaken to
direct the insurrection in the Quartier Sainte-Avoye. A man killed in
the Rue du Ponceau who was searched had on his person a plan of Paris.

That which had really undertaken the direction of the uprising was a
sort of strange impetuosity which was in the air. The insurrection
had abruptly built barricades with one hand, and with the other seized
nearly all the posts of the garrison. In less than three hours, like a
train of powder catching fire, the insurgents had invaded and occupied,
on the right bank, the Arsenal, the Mayoralty of the Place Royale, the
whole of the Marais, the Popincourt arms manufactory, la Galiote, the
Chateau-d'Eau, and all the streets near the Halles; on the left bank,
the barracks of the Veterans, Sainte-Pelagie, the Place Maubert, the
powder magazine of the Deux-Moulins, and all the barriers. At five
o'clock in the evening, they were masters of the Bastille, of the
Lingerie, of the Blancs-Manteaux; their scouts had reached the Place
des Victoires, and menaced the Bank, the Petits-Peres barracks, and the
Post-Office. A third of Paris was in the hands of the rioters.

The conflict had been begun on a gigantic scale at all points; and, as a
result of the disarming domiciliary visits, and armorers' shops hastily
invaded, was, that the combat which had begun with the throwing of
stones was continued with gun-shots.

About six o'clock in the evening, the Passage du Saumon became the field
of battle. The uprising was at one end, the troops were at the other.
They fired from one gate to the other. An observer, a dreamer, the
author of this book, who had gone to get a near view of this volcano,
found himself in the passage between the two fires. All that he had to
protect him from the bullets was the swell of the two half-columns which
separate the shops; he remained in this delicate situation for nearly
half an hour.

Meanwhile the call to arms was beaten, the National Guard armed in
haste, the legions emerged from the Mayoralities, the regiments from
their barracks. Opposite the passage de l'Ancre a drummer received a
blow from a dagger. Another, in the Rue du Cygne, was assailed by thirty
young men who broke his instrument, and took away his sword. Another was
killed in the Rue Grenier-Saint-Lazare. In the Rue-Michelle-Comte, three
officers fell dead one after the other. Many of the Municipal Guards, on
being wounded, in the Rue des Lombards, retreated.

In front of the Cour-Batave, a detachment of National Guards found a red
flag bearing the following inscription: Republican revolution, No. 127.
Was this a revolution, in fact?

The insurrection had made of the centre of Paris a sort of inextricable,
tortuous, colossal citadel.

There was the hearth; there, evidently, was the question. All the rest
was nothing but skirmishes. The proof that all would be decided there
lay in the fact that there was no fighting going on there as yet.

In some regiments, the soldiers were uncertain, which added to the
fearful uncertainty of the crisis. They recalled the popular ovation
which had greeted the neutrality of the 53d of the Line in July, 1830.
Two intrepid men, tried in great wars, the Marshal Lobau and General
Bugeaud, were in command, Bugeaud under Lobau. Enormous patrols,
composed of battalions of the Line, enclosed in entire companies of the
National Guard, and preceded by a commissary of police wearing his scarf
of office, went to reconnoitre the streets in rebellion. The insurgents,
on their side, placed videttes at the corners of all open spaces, and
audaciously sent their patrols outside the barricades. Each side was
watching the other. The Government, with an army in its hand, hesitated;
the night was almost upon them, and the Saint-Merry tocsin began to make
itself heard. The Minister of War at that time, Marshal Soult, who had
seen Austerlitz, regarded this with a gloomy air.

These old sailors, accustomed to correct manoeuvres and having as
resource and guide only tactics, that compass of battles, are utterly
disconcerted in the presence of that immense foam which is called public
wrath.

The National Guards of the suburbs rushed up in haste and disorder. A
battalion of the 12th Light came at a run from Saint-Denis, the 14th of
the Line arrived from Courbevoie, the batteries of the Military School
had taken up their position on the Carrousel; cannons were descending
from Vincennes.

Solitude was formed around the Tuileries. Louis Philippe was perfectly
serene.




CHAPTER V--ORIGINALITY OF PARIS

During the last two years, as we have said, Paris had witnessed more
than one insurrection. Nothing is, generally, more singularly calm than
the physiognomy of Paris during an uprising beyond the bounds of
the rebellious quarters. Paris very speedily accustoms herself to
anything,--it is only a riot,--and Paris has so many affairs on hand,
that she does not put herself out for so small a matter. These colossal
cities alone can offer such spectacles. These immense enclosures alone
can contain at the same time civil war and an odd and indescribable
tranquillity. Ordinarily, when an insurrection commences, when the
shop-keeper hears the drum, the call to arms, the general alarm, he
contents himself with the remark:--

"There appears to be a squabble in the Rue Saint-Martin."

Or:--

"In the Faubourg Saint-Antoine."

Often he adds carelessly:--

"Or somewhere in that direction."

Later on, when the heart-rending and mournful hubbub of musketry and
firing by platoons becomes audible, the shopkeeper says:--

"It's getting hot! Hullo, it's getting hot!"

A moment later, the riot approaches and gains in force, he shuts up his
shop precipitately, hastily dons his uniform, that is to say, he places
his merchandise in safety and risks his own person.

Men fire in a square, in a passage, in a blind alley; they take and
re-take the barricade; blood flows, the grape-shot riddles the fronts
of the houses, the balls kill people in their beds, corpses encumber the
streets. A few streets away, the shock of billiard-balls can be heard in
the cafes.

The theatres open their doors and present vaudevilles; the curious laugh
and chat a couple of paces distant from these streets filled with
war. Hackney-carriages go their way; passers-by are going to a dinner
somewhere in town. Sometimes in the very quarter where the fighting is
going on.

In 1831, a fusillade was stopped to allow a wedding party to pass.

At the time of the insurrection of 1839, in the Rue Saint-Martin a
little, infirm old man, pushing a hand-cart surmounted by a tricolored
rag, in which he had carafes filled with some sort of liquid, went and
came from barricade to troops and from troops to the barricade, offering
his glasses of cocoa impartially,--now to the Government, now to
anarchy.

Nothing can be stranger; and this is the peculiar character of uprisings
in Paris, which cannot be found in any other capital. To this end, two
things are requisite, the size of Paris and its gayety. The city of
Voltaire and Napoleon is necessary.

On this occasion, however, in the resort to arms of June 25th, 1832, the
great city felt something which was, perhaps, stronger than itself. It
was afraid.

Closed doors, windows, and shutters were to be seen everywhere, in the
most distant and most "disinterested" quarters. The courageous took to
arms, the poltroons hid. The busy and heedless passer-by disappeared.
Many streets were empty at four o'clock in the morning.

Alarming details were hawked about, fatal news was disseminated,--that
they were masters of the Bank;--that there were six hundred of them
in the Cloister of Saint-Merry alone, entrenched and embattled in the
church; that the line was not to be depended on; that Armand Carrel
had been to see Marshal Clausel and that the Marshal had said: "Get a
regiment first"; that Lafayette was ill, but that he had said to them,
nevertheless: "I am with you. I will follow you wherever there is room
for a chair"; that one must be on one's guard; that at night there would
be people pillaging isolated dwellings in the deserted corners of Paris
(there the imagination of the police, that Anne Radcliffe mixed up with
the Government was recognizable); that a battery had been established
in the Rue Aubry le Boucher; that Lobau and Bugeaud were putting their
heads together, and that, at midnight, or at daybreak at latest, four
columns would march simultaneously on the centre of the uprising, the
first coming from the Bastille, the second from the Porte Saint-Martin,
the third from the Greve, the fourth from the Halles; that perhaps,
also, the troops would evacuate Paris and withdraw to the Champ-de-Mars;
that no one knew what would happen, but that this time, it certainly was
serious.

People busied themselves over Marshal Soult's hesitations. Why did not
he attack at once? It is certain that he was profoundly absorbed. The
old lion seemed to scent an unknown monster in that gloom.

Evening came, the theatres did not open; the patrols circulated with
an air of irritation; passers-by were searched; suspicious persons were
arrested. By nine o'clock, more than eight hundred persons had been
arrested, the Prefecture of Police was encumbered with them, so was the
Conciergerie, so was La Force.

At the Conciergerie in particular, the long vault which is called the
Rue de Paris was littered with trusses of straw upon which lay a heap
of prisoners, whom the man of Lyons, Lagrange, harangued valiantly.
All that straw rustled by all these men, produced the sound of a heavy
shower. Elsewhere prisoners slept in the open air in the meadows, piled
on top of each other.

Anxiety reigned everywhere, and a certain tremor which was not habitual
with Paris.

People barricaded themselves in their houses; wives and mothers were
uneasy; nothing was to be heard but this: "Ah! my God! He has not come
home!" There was hardly even the distant rumble of a vehicle to be
heard.

People listened on their thresholds, to the rumors, the shouts, the
tumult, the dull and indistinct sounds, to the things that were
said: "It is cavalry," or: "Those are the caissons galloping," to the
trumpets, the drums, the firing, and, above all, to that lamentable
alarm peal from Saint-Merry.

They waited for the first cannon-shot. Men sprang up at the corners of
the streets and disappeared, shouting: "Go home!" And people made haste
to bolt their doors. They said: "How will all this end?" From moment to
moment, in proportion as the darkness descended, Paris seemed to take on
a more mournful hue from the formidable flaming of the revolt.




BOOK ELEVENTH.--THE ATOM FRATERNIZES WITH THE HURRICANE




CHAPTER I--SOME EXPLANATIONS WITH REGARD TO THE ORIGIN OF GAVROCHE'S
POETRY. THE INFLUENCE OF AN ACADEMICIAN ON THIS POETRY

At the instant when the insurrection, arising from the shock of the
populace and the military in front of the Arsenal, started a movement
in advance and towards the rear in the multitude which was following the
hearse and which, through the whole length of the boulevards, weighed,
so to speak, on the head of the procession, there arose a frightful ebb.
The rout was shaken, their ranks were broken, all ran, fled, made their
escape, some with shouts of attack, others with the pallor of flight.
The great river which covered the boulevards divided in a twinkling,
overflowed to right and left, and spread in torrents over two hundred
streets at once with the roar of a sewer that has broken loose.

At that moment, a ragged child who was coming down through the Rue
Menilmontant, holding in his hand a branch of blossoming laburnum which
he had just plucked on the heights of Belleville, caught sight of an old
holster-pistol in the show-window of a bric-a-brac merchant's shop.

"Mother What's-your-name, I'm going to borrow your machine."

And off he ran with the pistol.

Two minutes later, a flood of frightened bourgeois who were fleeing
through the Rue Amelot and the Rue Basse, encountered the lad
brandishing his pistol and singing:--

               La nuit on ne voit rien,
               Le jour on voit tres bien,
               D'un ecrit apocrypha
               Le bourgeois s'ebouriffe,
               Pratiquez la vertu,
               Tutu, chapeau pointu![44]


It was little Gavroche on his way to the wars.

On the boulevard he noticed that the pistol had no trigger.

Who was the author of that couplet which served to punctuate his march,
and of all the other songs which he was fond of singing on occasion? We
know not. Who does know? Himself, perhaps. However, Gavroche was well
up in all the popular tunes in circulation, and he mingled with them his
own chirpings. An observing urchin and a rogue, he made a potpourri of
the voices of nature and the voices of Paris. He combined the repertory
of the birds with the repertory of the workshops. He was acquainted with
thieves, a tribe contiguous to his own. He had, it appears, been
for three months apprenticed to a printer. He had one day executed a
commission for M. Baour-Lormian, one of the Forty. Gavroche was a gamin
of letters.

Moreover, Gavroche had no suspicion of the fact that when he had offered
the hospitality of his elephant to two brats on that villainously
rainy night, it was to his own brothers that he had played the part of
Providence. His brothers in the evening, his father in the morning;
that is what his night had been like. On quitting the Rue des Ballets
at daybreak, he had returned in haste to the elephant, had artistically
extracted from it the two brats, had shared with them some sort of
breakfast which he had invented, and had then gone away, confiding
them to that good mother, the street, who had brought him up, almost
entirely. On leaving them, he had appointed to meet them at the same
spot in the evening, and had left them this discourse by way of a
farewell: "I break a cane, otherwise expressed, I cut my stick, or, as
they say at the court, I file off. If you don't find papa and mamma,
young 'uns, come back here this evening. I'll scramble you up some
supper, and I'll give you a shakedown." The two children, picked up by
some policeman and placed in the refuge, or stolen by some mountebank,
or having simply strayed off in that immense Chinese puzzle of a Paris,
did not return. The lowest depths of the actual social world are full of
these lost traces. Gavroche did not see them again. Ten or twelve weeks
had elapsed since that night. More than once he had scratched the back
of his head and said: "Where the devil are my two children?"

In the meantime, he had arrived, pistol in hand, in the Rue du
Pont-aux-Choux. He noticed that there was but one shop open in that
street, and, a matter worthy of reflection, that was a pastry-cook's
shop. This presented a providential occasion to eat another
apple-turnover before entering the unknown. Gavroche halted, fumbled in
his fob, turned his pocket inside out, found nothing, not even a sou,
and began to shout: "Help!"

It is hard to miss the last cake.

Nevertheless, Gavroche pursued his way.

Two minutes later he was in the Rue Saint-Louis. While traversing the
Rue du Parc-Royal, he felt called upon to make good the loss of the
apple-turnover which had been impossible, and he indulged himself in the
immense delight of tearing down the theatre posters in broad daylight.

A little further on, on catching sight of a group of comfortable-looking
persons, who seemed to be landed proprietors, he shrugged his shoulders
and spit out at random before him this mouthful of philosophical bile as
they passed:

"How fat those moneyed men are! They're drunk! They just wallow in good
dinners. Ask 'em what they do with their money. They don't know. They
eat it, that's what they do! As much as their bellies will hold."




CHAPTER II--GAVROCHE ON THE MARCH

The brandishing of a triggerless pistol, grasped in one's hand in the
open street, is so much of a public function that Gavroche felt his
fervor increasing with every moment. Amid the scraps of the Marseillaise
which he was singing, he shouted:--

"All goes well. I suffer a great deal in my left paw, I'm all broken
up with rheumatism, but I'm satisfied, citizens. All that the bourgeois
have to do is to bear themselves well, I'll sneeze them out subversive
couplets. What are the police spies? Dogs. And I'd just like to have
one of them at the end of my pistol. I'm just from the boulevard, my
friends. It's getting hot there, it's getting into a little boil, it's
simmering. It's time to skim the pot. Forward march, men! Let an impure
blood inundate the furrows! I give my days to my country, I shall never
see my concubine more, Nini, finished, yes, Nini? But never mind! Long
live joy! Let's fight, crebleu! I've had enough of despotism."

At that moment, the horse of a lancer of the National Guard having
fallen, Gavroche laid his pistol on the pavement, and picked up the
man, then he assisted in raising the horse. After which he picked up his
pistol and resumed his way. In the Rue de Thorigny, all was peace and
silence. This apathy, peculiar to the Marais, presented a contrast with
the vast surrounding uproar. Four gossips were chatting in a doorway.

Scotland has trios of witches, Paris has quartettes of old gossiping
hags; and the "Thou shalt be King" could be quite as mournfully hurled
at Bonaparte in the Carrefour Baudoyer as at Macbeth on the heath of
Armuyr. The croak would be almost identical.

The gossips of the Rue de Thorigny busied themselves only with their own
concerns. Three of them were portresses, and the fourth was a rag-picker
with her basket on her back.

All four of them seemed to be standing at the four corners of old age,
which are decrepitude, decay, ruin, and sadness.

The rag-picker was humble. In this open-air society, it is the
rag-picker who salutes and the portress who patronizes. This is caused
by the corner for refuse, which is fat or lean, according to the will of
the portresses, and after the fancy of the one who makes the heap. There
may be kindness in the broom.

This rag-picker was a grateful creature, and she smiled, with what a
smile! on the three portresses. Things of this nature were said:--

"Ah, by the way, is your cat still cross?"

"Good gracious, cats are naturally the enemies of dogs, you know. It's
the dogs who complain."

"And people also."

"But the fleas from a cat don't go after people."

"That's not the trouble, dogs are dangerous. I remember one year
when there were so many dogs that it was necessary to put it in the
newspapers. That was at the time when there were at the Tuileries great
sheep that drew the little carriage of the King of Rome. Do you remember
the King of Rome?"

"I liked the Duc de Bordeau better."

"I knew Louis XVIII. I prefer Louis XVIII."

"Meat is awfully dear, isn't it, Mother Patagon?"

"Ah! don't mention it, the butcher's shop is a horror. A horrible
horror--one can't afford anything but the poor cuts nowadays."

Here the rag-picker interposed:--

"Ladies, business is dull. The refuse heaps are miserable. No one throws
anything away any more. They eat everything."

"There are poorer people than you, la Vargouleme."

"Ah, that's true," replied the rag-picker, with deference, "I have a
profession."

A pause succeeded, and the rag-picker, yielding to that necessity for
boasting which lies at the bottom of man, added:--

"In the morning, on my return home, I pick over my basket, I sort my
things. This makes heaps in my room. I put the rags in a basket, the
cores and stalks in a bucket, the linen in my cupboard, the woollen
stuff in my commode, the old papers in the corner of the window,
the things that are good to eat in my bowl, the bits of glass in my
fireplace, the old shoes behind my door, and the bones under my bed."

Gavroche had stopped behind her and was listening.

"Old ladies," said he, "what do you mean by talking politics?"

He was assailed by a broadside, composed of a quadruple howl.

"Here's another rascal."

"What's that he's got in his paddle? A pistol?"

"Well, I'd like to know what sort of a beggar's brat this is?"

"That sort of animal is never easy unless he's overturning the
authorities."

Gavroche disdainfully contented himself, by way of reprisal, with
elevating the tip of his nose with his thumb and opening his hand wide.

The rag-picker cried:--

"You malicious, bare-pawed little wretch!"

The one who answered to the name of Patagon clapped her hands together
in horror.

"There's going to be evil doings, that's certain. The errand-boy next
door has a little pointed beard, I have seen him pass every day with a
young person in a pink bonnet on his arm; to-day I saw him pass, and
he had a gun on his arm. Mame Bacheux says, that last week there was a
revolution at--at--at--where's the calf!--at Pontoise. And then, there
you see him, that horrid scamp, with his pistol! It seems that the
Celestins are full of pistols. What do you suppose the Government can
do with good-for-nothings who don't know how to do anything but contrive
ways of upsetting the world, when we had just begun to get a little
quiet after all the misfortunes that have happened, good Lord! to that
poor queen whom I saw pass in the tumbril! And all this is going to
make tobacco dearer. It's infamous! And I shall certainly go to see him
beheaded on the guillotine, the wretch!"

"You've got the sniffles, old lady," said Gavroche. "Blow your
promontory."

And he passed on. When he was in the Rue Pavee, the rag-picker occurred
to his mind, and he indulged in this soliloquy:--

"You're in the wrong to insult the revolutionists, Mother
Dust-Heap-Corner. This pistol is in your interests. It's so that you may
have more good things to eat in your basket."

All at once, he heard a shout behind him; it was the portress Patagon
who had followed him, and who was shaking her fist at him in the
distance and crying:--

"You're nothing but a bastard."

"Oh! Come now," said Gavroche, "I don't care a brass farthing for that!"

Shortly afterwards, he passed the Hotel Lamoignon. There he uttered this
appeal:--

"Forward march to the battle!"

And he was seized with a fit of melancholy. He gazed at his pistol with
an air of reproach which seemed an attempt to appease it:--

"I'm going off," said he, "but you won't go off!"

One dog may distract the attention from another dog.[45] A very gaunt
poodle came along at the moment. Gavroche felt compassion for him.

"My poor doggy," said he, "you must have gone and swallowed a cask, for
all the hoops are visible."

Then he directed his course towards l'Orme-Saint-Gervais.




CHAPTER III--JUST INDIGNATION OF A HAIR-DRESSER

The worthy hair-dresser who had chased from his shop the two little
fellows to whom Gavroche had opened the paternal interior of the
elephant was at that moment in his shop engaged in shaving an old
soldier of the legion who had served under the Empire. They were
talking. The hair-dresser had, naturally, spoken to the veteran of the
riot, then of General Lamarque, and from Lamarque they had passed to
the Emperor. Thence sprang up a conversation between barber and
soldier which Prudhomme, had he been present, would have enriched with
arabesques, and which he would have entitled: "Dialogue between the
razor and the sword."

"How did the Emperor ride, sir?" said the barber.

"Badly. He did not know how to fall--so he never fell."

"Did he have fine horses? He must have had fine horses!"

"On the day when he gave me my cross, I noticed his beast. It was a
racing mare, perfectly white. Her ears were very wide apart, her saddle
deep, a fine head marked with a black star, a very long neck, strongly
articulated knees, prominent ribs, oblique shoulders and a powerful
crupper. A little more than fifteen hands in height."

"A pretty horse," remarked the hair-dresser.

"It was His Majesty's beast."

The hair-dresser felt, that after this observation, a short silence
would be fitting, so he conformed himself to it, and then went on:--

"The Emperor was never wounded but once, was he, sir?"

The old soldier replied with the calm and sovereign tone of a man who
had been there:--

"In the heel. At Ratisbon. I never saw him so well dressed as on that
day. He was as neat as a new sou."

"And you, Mr. Veteran, you must have been often wounded?"

"I?" said the soldier, "ah! not to amount to anything. At Marengo, I
received two sabre-blows on the back of my neck, a bullet in the right
arm at Austerlitz, another in the left hip at Jena. At Friedland,
a thrust from a bayonet, there,--at the Moskowa seven or eight
lance-thrusts, no matter where, at Lutzen a splinter of a shell crushed
one of my fingers. Ah! and then at Waterloo, a ball from a biscaien in
the thigh, that's all."

"How fine that is!" exclaimed the hair-dresser, in Pindaric accents, "to
die on the field of battle! On my word of honor, rather than die in bed,
of an illness, slowly, a bit by bit each day, with drugs, cataplasms,
syringes, medicines, I should prefer to receive a cannon-ball in my
belly!"

"You're not over fastidious," said the soldier.

He had hardly spoken when a fearful crash shook the shop. The
show-window had suddenly been fractured.

The wig-maker turned pale.

"Ah, good God!" he exclaimed, "it's one of them!"

"What?"

"A cannon-ball."

"Here it is," said the soldier.

And he picked up something that was rolling about the floor. It was a
pebble.

The hair-dresser ran to the broken window and beheld Gavroche fleeing
at the full speed, towards the Marche Saint-Jean. As he passed the
hair-dresser's shop Gavroche, who had the two brats still in his mind,
had not been able to resist the impulse to say good day to him, and had
flung a stone through his panes.

"You see!" shrieked the hair-dresser, who from white had turned blue,
"that fellow returns and does mischief for the pure pleasure of it. What
has any one done to that gamin?"




CHAPTER IV--THE CHILD IS AMAZED AT THE OLD MAN

In the meantime, in the Marche Saint-Jean, where the post had already
been disarmed, Gavroche had just "effected a junction" with a band led
by Enjolras, Courfeyrac, Combeferre, and Feuilly. They were armed after
a fashion. Bahorel and Jean Prouvaire had found them and swelled the
group. Enjolras had a double-barrelled hunting-gun, Combeferre the gun
of a National Guard bearing the number of his legion, and in his belt,
two pistols which his unbuttoned coat allowed to be seen, Jean Prouvaire
an old cavalry musket, Bahorel a rifle; Courfeyrac was brandishing an
unsheathed sword-cane. Feuilly, with a naked sword in his hand, marched
at their head shouting: "Long live Poland!"

They reached the Quai Morland. Cravatless, hatless, breathless, soaked
by the rain, with lightning in their eyes. Gavroche accosted them
calmly:--

"Where are we going?"

"Come along," said Courfeyrac.

Behind Feuilly marched, or rather bounded, Bahorel, who was like a fish
in water in a riot. He wore a scarlet waistcoat, and indulged in
the sort of words which break everything. His waistcoat astounded a
passer-by, who cried in bewilderment:--

"Here are the reds!"

"The reds, the reds!" retorted Bahorel. "A queer kind of fear,
bourgeois. For my part I don't tremble before a poppy, the little red
hat inspires me with no alarm. Take my advice, bourgeois, let's leave
fear of the red to horned cattle."

He caught sight of a corner of the wall on which was placarded the
most peaceable sheet of paper in the world, a permission to eat eggs, a
Lenten admonition addressed by the Archbishop of Paris to his "flock."

Bahorel exclaimed:--

"'Flock'; a polite way of saying geese."

And he tore the charge from the nail. This conquered Gavroche. From that
instant Gavroche set himself to study Bahorel.

"Bahorel," observed Enjolras, "you are wrong. You should have let that
charge alone, he is not the person with whom we have to deal, you are
wasting your wrath to no purpose. Take care of your supply. One does not
fire out of the ranks with the soul any more than with a gun."

"Each one in his own fashion, Enjolras," retorted Bahorel. "This
bishop's prose shocks me; I want to eat eggs without being permitted.
Your style is the hot and cold; I am amusing myself. Besides, I'm not
wasting myself, I'm getting a start; and if I tore down that charge,
Hercle! 'twas only to whet my appetite."

This word, Hercle, struck Gavroche. He sought all occasions for
learning, and that tearer-down of posters possessed his esteem. He
inquired of him:--

"What does Hercle mean?"

Bahorel answered:--

"It means cursed name of a dog, in Latin."

Here Bahorel recognized at a window a pale young man with a black beard
who was watching them as they passed, probably a Friend of the A B C. He
shouted to him:--

"Quick, cartridges, para bellum."

"A fine man! that's true," said Gavroche, who now understood Latin.

A tumultuous retinue accompanied them,--students, artists, young men
affiliated to the Cougourde of Aix, artisans, longshoremen, armed with
clubs and bayonets; some, like Combeferre, with pistols thrust into
their trousers.

An old man, who appeared to be extremely aged, was walking in the band.

He had no arms, and he made great haste, so that he might not be left
behind, although he had a thoughtful air.

Gavroche caught sight of him:--

"Keksekca?" said he to Courfeyrac.

"He's an old duffer."

It was M. Mabeuf.




CHAPTER V--THE OLD MAN

Let us recount what had taken place.

Enjolras and his friends had been on the Boulevard Bourdon, near the
public storehouses, at the moment when the dragoons had made their
charge. Enjolras, Courfeyrac, and Combeferre were among those who had
taken to the Rue Bassompierre, shouting: "To the barricades!" In the Rue
Lesdiguieres they had met an old man walking along. What had attracted
their attention was that the goodman was walking in a zig-zag, as though
he were intoxicated. Moreover, he had his hat in his hand, although it
had been raining all the morning, and was raining pretty briskly at the
very time. Courfeyrac had recognized Father Mabeuf. He knew him through
having many times accompanied Marius as far as his door. As he was
acquainted with the peaceful and more than timid habits of the old
beadle-book-collector, and was amazed at the sight of him in the midst
of that uproar, a couple of paces from the cavalry charges, almost in
the midst of a fusillade, hatless in the rain, and strolling about among
the bullets, he had accosted him, and the following dialogue had been
exchanged between the rioter of fire and the octogenarian:--

"M. Mabeuf, go to your home."

"Why?"

"There's going to be a row."

"That's well."

"Thrusts with the sword and firing, M. Mabeuf."

"That is well."

"Firing from cannon."

"That is good. Where are the rest of you going?"

"We are going to fling the government to the earth."

"That is good."

And he had set out to follow them. From that moment forth he had not
uttered a word. His step had suddenly become firm; artisans had offered
him their arms; he had refused with a sign of the head. He advanced
nearly to the front rank of the column, with the movement of a man who
is marching and the countenance of a man who is sleeping.

"What a fierce old fellow!" muttered the students. The rumor spread
through the troop that he was a former member of the Convention,--an old
regicide. The mob had turned in through the Rue de la Verrerie.

Little Gavroche marched in front with that deafening song which made of
him a sort of trumpet.

He sang:       "Voici la lune qui paratt,
        Quand irons-nous dans la foret?
        Demandait Charlot a Charlotte.

             Tou tou tou
             Pour Chatou.
        Je n'ai qu'un Dieu, qu'un roi, qu'un liard, et qu'une botte.

        "Pour avoir bu de grand matin
         La rosee a meme le thym,
         Deux moineaux etaient en ribotte.

             Zi zi zi
             Pour Passy.
        Je n'ai qu'un Dieu, qu'un roi, qu'un liard, et qu'une botte.

       "Et ces deux pauvres petits loups,
        Comme deux grives estaient souls;
        Une tigre en riait dans sa grotte.

             Don don don
             Pour Meudon.
        Je n'ai qu'un Dieu, qu'un roi, qu'un liard, et qu'une botte.

       "L'un jurait et l'autre sacrait.
        Quand irons nous dans la foret?
        Demandait Charlot a Charlotte.

             Tin tin tin
             Pour Pantin.
         Je n'ai qu'un Dieu, qu'un roi, qu'un liard, et qu'une botte."[46]

They directed their course towards Saint-Merry.




CHAPTER VI--RECRUITS

The band augmented every moment. Near the Rue des Billettes, a man of
lofty stature, whose hair was turning gray, and whose bold and daring
mien was remarked by Courfeyrac, Enjolras, and Combeferre, but whom
none of them knew, joined them. Gavroche, who was occupied in singing,
whistling, humming, running on ahead and pounding on the shutters of the
shops with the butt of his triggerless pistol; paid no attention to this
man.

It chanced that in the Rue de la Verrerie, they passed in front of
Courfeyrac's door.

"This happens just right," said Courfeyrac, "I have forgotten my purse,
and I have lost my hat."

He quitted the mob and ran up to his quarters at full speed. He seized
an old hat and his purse.

He also seized a large square coffer, of the dimensions of a large
valise, which was concealed under his soiled linen.

As he descended again at a run, the portress hailed him:--

"Monsieur de Courfeyrac!"

"What's your name, portress?"

The portress stood bewildered.

"Why, you know perfectly well, I'm the concierge; my name is Mother
Veuvain."

"Well, if you call me Monsieur de Courfeyrac again, I shall call you
Mother de Veuvain. Now speak, what's the matter? What do you want?"

"There is some one who wants to speak with you."

"Who is it?"

"I don't know."

"Where is he?"

"In my lodge."

"The devil!" ejaculated Courfeyrac.

"But the person has been waiting your return for over an hour," said the
portress.

At the same time, a sort of pale, thin, small, freckled, and youthful
artisan, clad in a tattered blouse and patched trousers of ribbed
velvet, and who had rather the air of a girl accoutred as a man than of
a man, emerged from the lodge and said to Courfeyrac in a voice which
was not the least in the world like a woman's voice:--

"Monsieur Marius, if you please."

"He is not here."

"Will he return this evening?"

"I know nothing about it."

And Courfeyrac added:--

"For my part, I shall not return."

The young man gazed steadily at him and said:--

"Why not?"

"Because."

"Where are you going, then?"

"What business is that of yours?"

"Would you like to have me carry your coffer for you?"

"I am going to the barricades."

"Would you like to have me go with you?"

"If you like!" replied Courfeyrac. "The street is free, the pavements
belong to every one."

And he made his escape at a run to join his friends. When he had
rejoined them, he gave the coffer to one of them to carry. It was only
a quarter of an hour after this that he saw the young man, who had
actually followed them.

A mob does not go precisely where it intends. We have explained that
a gust of wind carries it away. They overshot Saint-Merry and found
themselves, without precisely knowing how, in the Rue Saint-Denis.




BOOK TWELFTH.--CORINTHE




CHAPTER I--HISTORY OF CORINTHE FROM ITS FOUNDATION

The Parisians who nowadays on entering on the Rue Rambuteau at the end
near the Halles, notice on their right, opposite the Rue Mondetour, a
basket-maker's shop having for its sign a basket in the form of Napoleon
the Great with this inscription:--

                    NAPOLEON IS MADE
                    WHOLLY OF WILLOW,

have no suspicion of the terrible scenes which this very spot witnessed
hardly thirty years ago.

It was there that lay the Rue de la Chanvrerie, which ancient deeds
spell Chanverrerie, and the celebrated public-house called Corinthe.

The reader will remember all that has been said about the barricade
effected at this point, and eclipsed, by the way, by the barricade
Saint-Merry. It was on this famous barricade of the Rue de la
Chanvrerie, now fallen into profound obscurity, that we are about to
shed a little light.

May we be permitted to recur, for the sake of clearness in the recital,
to the simple means which we have already employed in the case of
Waterloo. Persons who wish to picture to themselves in a tolerably exact
manner the constitution of the houses which stood at that epoch near the
Pointe Saint-Eustache, at the northeast angle of the Halles of Paris,
where to-day lies the embouchure of the Rue Rambuteau, have only to
imagine an N touching the Rue Saint-Denis with its summit and the Halles
with its base, and whose two vertical bars should form the Rue de la
Grande-Truanderie, and the Rue de la Chanvrerie, and whose transverse
bar should be formed by the Rue de la Petite-Truanderie. The old Rue
Mondetour cut the three strokes of the N at the most crooked angles,
so that the labyrinthine confusion of these four streets sufficed to
form, on a space three fathoms square, between the Halles and the Rue
Saint-Denis on the one hand, and between the Rue du Cygne and the Rue
des Precheurs on the other, seven islands of houses, oddly cut up, of
varying sizes, placed crosswise and hap-hazard, and barely separated,
like the blocks of stone in a dock, by narrow crannies.

We say narrow crannies, and we can give no more just idea of those dark,
contracted, many-angled alleys, lined with eight-story buildings. These
buildings were so decrepit that, in the Rue de la Chanvrerie and the Rue
de la Petite-Truanderie, the fronts were shored up with beams running
from one house to another. The street was narrow and the gutter broad,
the pedestrian there walked on a pavement that was always wet, skirting
little stalls resembling cellars, big posts encircled with iron hoops,
excessive heaps of refuse, and gates armed with enormous, century-old
gratings. The Rue Rambuteau has devastated all that.

The name of Mondetour paints marvellously well the sinuosities of that
whole set of streets. A little further on, they are found still better
expressed by the Rue Pirouette, which ran into the Rue Mondetour.

The passer-by who got entangled from the Rue Saint-Denis in the Rue de
la Chanvrerie beheld it gradually close in before him as though he had
entered an elongated funnel. At the end of this street, which was very
short, he found further passage barred in the direction of the Halles
by a tall row of houses, and he would have thought himself in a blind
alley, had he not perceived on the right and left two dark cuts through
which he could make his escape. This was the Rue Mondetour, which on
one side ran into the Rue de Precheurs, and on the other into the Rue
du Cygne and the Petite-Truanderie. At the bottom of this sort of
cul-de-sac, at the angle of the cutting on the right, there was to be
seen a house which was not so tall as the rest, and which formed a sort
of cape in the street. It is in this house, of two stories only, that
an illustrious wine-shop had been merrily installed three hundred years
before. This tavern created a joyous noise in the very spot which old
Theophilus described in the following couplet:--

               La branle le squelette horrible
               D'un pauvre amant qui se pendit.[47]


The situation was good, and tavern-keepers succeeded each other there,
from father to son.

In the time of Mathurin Regnier, this cabaret was called the
Pot-aux-Roses, and as the rebus was then in fashion, it had for its
sign-board, a post (poteau) painted rose-color. In the last century, the
worthy Natoire, one of the fantastic masters nowadays despised by the
stiff school, having got drunk many times in this wine-shop at the
very table where Regnier had drunk his fill, had painted, by way of
gratitude, a bunch of Corinth grapes on the pink post. The keeper of the
cabaret, in his joy, had changed his device and had caused to be placed
in gilt letters beneath the bunch these words: "At the Bunch of Corinth
Grapes" ("Au Raisin de Corinthe"). Hence the name of Corinthe. Nothing
is more natural to drunken men than ellipses. The ellipsis is the
zig-zag of the phrase. Corinthe gradually dethroned the Pot-aux-Roses.
The last proprietor of the dynasty, Father Hucheloup, no longer
acquainted even with the tradition, had the post painted blue.

A room on the ground floor, where the bar was situated, one on the first
floor containing a billiard-table, a wooden spiral staircase piercing
the ceiling, wine on the tables, smoke on the walls, candles in broad
daylight,--this was the style of this cabaret. A staircase with a
trap-door in the lower room led to the cellar. On the second floor were
the lodgings of the Hucheloup family. They were reached by a staircase
which was a ladder rather than a staircase, and had for their entrance
only a private door in the large room on the first floor. Under the
roof, in two mansard attics, were the nests for the servants. The
kitchen shared the ground-floor with the tap-room.

Father Hucheloup had, possibly, been born a chemist, but the fact is
that he was a cook; people did not confine themselves to drinking alone
in his wine-shop, they also ate there. Hucheloup had invented a capital
thing which could be eaten nowhere but in his house, stuffed carps,
which he called carpes au gras. These were eaten by the light of a
tallow candle or of a lamp of the time of Louis XVI., on tables to which
were nailed waxed cloths in lieu of table-cloths. People came thither
from a distance. Hucheloup, one fine morning, had seen fit to notify
passers-by of this "specialty"; he had dipped a brush in a pot of black
paint, and as he was an orthographer on his own account, as well as
a cook after his own fashion, he had improvised on his wall this
remarkable inscription:--

                    CARPES HO GRAS.


One winter, the rain-storms and the showers had taken a fancy to
obliterate the S which terminated the first word, and the G which began
the third; this is what remained:--

                      CARPE HO RAS.


Time and rain assisting, a humble gastronomical announcement had become
a profound piece of advice.

In this way it came about, that though he knew no French, Father
Hucheloup understood Latin, that he had evoked philosophy from his
kitchen, and that, desirous simply of effacing Lent, he had equalled
Horace. And the striking thing about it was, that that also meant:
"Enter my wine-shop."

Nothing of all this is in existence now. The Mondetour labyrinth was
disembowelled and widely opened in 1847, and probably no longer exists
at the present moment. The Rue de la Chanvrerie and Corinthe have
disappeared beneath the pavement of the Rue Rambuteau.

As we have already said, Corinthe was the meeting-place if not the
rallying-point, of Courfeyrac and his friends. It was Grantaire who had
discovered Corinthe. He had entered it on account of the Carpe horas,
and had returned thither on account of the Carpes au gras. There they
drank, there they ate, there they shouted; they did not pay much, they
paid badly, they did not pay at all, but they were always welcome.
Father Hucheloup was a jovial host.

Hucheloup, that amiable man, as was just said, was a wine-shop-keeper
with a mustache; an amusing variety. He always had an ill-tempered air,
seemed to wish to intimidate his customers, grumbled at the people who
entered his establishment, and had rather the mien of seeking a quarrel
with them than of serving them with soup. And yet, we insist upon
the word, people were always welcome there. This oddity had attracted
customers to his shop, and brought him young men, who said to each
other: "Come hear Father Hucheloup growl." He had been a fencing-master.
All of a sudden, he would burst out laughing. A big voice, a good
fellow. He had a comic foundation under a tragic exterior, he asked
nothing better than to frighten you, very much like those snuff-boxes
which are in the shape of a pistol. The detonation makes one sneeze.

Mother Hucheloup, his wife, was a bearded and a very homely creature.

About 1830, Father Hucheloup died. With him disappeared the secret of
stuffed carps. His inconsolable widow continued to keep the wine-shop.
But the cooking deteriorated, and became execrable; the wine, which had
always been bad, became fearfully bad. Nevertheless, Courfeyrac and his
friends continued to go to Corinthe,--out of pity, as Bossuet said.

The Widow Hucheloup was breathless and misshapen and given to rustic
recollections. She deprived them of their flatness by her pronunciation.
She had a way of her own of saying things, which spiced her
reminiscences of the village and of her springtime. It had formerly been
her delight, so she affirmed, to hear the loups-de-gorge (rouges-gorges)
chanter dans les ogrepines (aubepines)--to hear the redbreasts sing in
the hawthorn-trees.

The hall on the first floor, where "the restaurant" was situated, was
a large and long apartment encumbered with stools, chairs, benches, and
tables, and with a crippled, lame, old billiard-table. It was reached
by a spiral staircase which terminated in the corner of the room at a
square hole like the hatchway of a ship.

This room, lighted by a single narrow window, and by a lamp that was
always burning, had the air of a garret. All the four-footed furniture
comported itself as though it had but three legs--the whitewashed walls
had for their only ornament the following quatrain in honor of Mame
Hucheloup:--

          Elle etonne a dix pas, elle epouvente a deux,
          Une verrue habite en son nez hasardeux;
          On tremble a chaque instant qu'elle ne vous la mouche
          Et qu'un beau jour son nez ne tombe dans sa bouche.[48]


This was scrawled in charcoal on the wall.

Mame Hucheloup, a good likeness, went and came from morning till
night before this quatrain with the most perfect tranquillity. Two
serving-maids, named Matelote and Gibelotte,[49] and who had never been
known by any other names, helped Mame Hucheloup to set on the tables
the jugs of poor wine, and the various broths which were served to the
hungry patrons in earthenware bowls. Matelote, large, plump, redhaired,
and noisy, the favorite ex-sultana of the defunct Hucheloup, was
homelier than any mythological monster, be it what it may; still, as it
becomes the servant to always keep in the rear of the mistress, she was
less homely than Mame Hucheloup. Gibelotte, tall, delicate, white with a
lymphatic pallor, with circles round her eyes, and drooping lids, always
languid and weary, afflicted with what may be called chronic lassitude,
the first up in the house and the last in bed, waited on every one, even
the other maid, silently and gently, smiling through her fatigue with a
vague and sleepy smile.

Before entering the restaurant room, the visitor read on the door the
following line written there in chalk by Courfeyrac:--

          Regale si tu peux et mange si tu l'oses.[50]




CHAPTER II--PRELIMINARY GAYETIES

Laigle de Meaux, as the reader knows, lived more with Joly than
elsewhere. He had a lodging, as a bird has one on a branch. The
two friends lived together, ate together, slept together. They had
everything in common, even Musichetta, to some extent. They were, what
the subordinate monks who accompany monks are called, bini. On the
morning of the 5th of June, they went to Corinthe to breakfast. Joly,
who was all stuffed up, had a catarrh which Laigle was beginning to
share. Laigle's coat was threadbare, but Joly was well dressed.

It was about nine o'clock in the morning, when they opened the door of
Corinthe.

They ascended to the first floor.

Matelote and Gibelotte received them.

"Oysters, cheese, and ham," said Laigle.

And they seated themselves at a table.

The wine-shop was empty; there was no one there but themselves.

Gibelotte, knowing Joly and Laigle, set a bottle of wine on the table.

While they were busy with their first oysters, a head appeared at the
hatchway of the staircase, and a voice said:--

"I am passing by. I smell from the street a delicious odor of Brie
cheese. I enter." It was Grantaire.

Grantaire took a stool and drew up to the table.

At the sight of Grantaire, Gibelotte placed two bottles of wine on the
table.

That made three.

"Are you going to drink those two bottles?" Laigle inquired of
Grantaire.

Grantaire replied:--

"All are ingenious, thou alone art ingenuous. Two bottles never yet
astonished a man."

The others had begun by eating, Grantaire began by drinking. Half a
bottle was rapidly gulped down.

"So you have a hole in your stomach?" began Laigle again.

"You have one in your elbow," said Grantaire.

And after having emptied his glass, he added:--

"Ah, by the way, Laigle of the funeral oration, your coat is old."

"I should hope so," retorted Laigle. "That's why we get on well
together, my coat and I. It has acquired all my folds, it does not bind
me anywhere, it is moulded on my deformities, it falls in with all my
movements, I am only conscious of it because it keeps me warm. Old coats
are just like old friends."

"That's true," ejaculated Joly, striking into the dialogue, "an old goat
is an old abi" (ami, friend).

"Especially in the mouth of a man whose head is stuffed up," said
Grantaire.

"Grantaire," demanded Laigle, "have you just come from the boulevard?"

"No."

"We have just seen the head of the procession pass, Joly and I."

"It's a marvellous sight," said Joly.

"How quiet this street is!" exclaimed Laigle. "Who would suspect that
Paris was turned upside down? How plainly it is to be seen that in
former days there were nothing but convents here! In this neighborhood!
Du Breul and Sauval give a list of them, and so does the Abbe Lebeuf.
They were all round here, they fairly swarmed, booted and barefooted,
shaven, bearded, gray, black, white, Franciscans, Minims, Capuchins,
Carmelites, Little Augustines, Great Augustines, old Augustines--there
was no end of them."

"Don't let's talk of monks," interrupted Grantaire, "it makes one want
to scratch one's self."

Then he exclaimed:--

"Bouh! I've just swallowed a bad oyster. Now hypochondria is taking
possession of me again. The oysters are spoiled, the servants are ugly.
I hate the human race. I just passed through the Rue Richelieu, in front
of the big public library. That pile of oyster-shells which is called
a library is disgusting even to think of. What paper! What ink! What
scrawling! And all that has been written! What rascal was it who said
that man was a featherless biped?[51] And then, I met a pretty girl of
my acquaintance, who is as beautiful as the spring, worthy to be called
Floreal, and who is delighted, enraptured, as happy as the angels,
because a wretch yesterday, a frightful banker all spotted with
small-pox, deigned to take a fancy to her! Alas! woman keeps on the
watch for a protector as much as for a lover; cats chase mice as well
as birds. Two months ago that young woman was virtuous in an attic, she
adjusted little brass rings in the eyelet-holes of corsets, what do
you call it? She sewed, she had a camp bed, she dwelt beside a pot
of flowers, she was contented. Now here she is a bankeress. This
transformation took place last night. I met the victim this morning in
high spirits. The hideous point about it is, that the jade is as pretty
to-day as she was yesterday. Her financier did not show in her face.
Roses have this advantage or disadvantage over women, that the traces
left upon them by caterpillars are visible. Ah! there is no morality on
earth. I call to witness the myrtle, the symbol of love, the laurel,
the symbol of air, the olive, that ninny, the symbol of peace, the
apple-tree which came nearest rangling Adam with its pips, and the
fig-tree, the grandfather of petticoats. As for right, do you know what
right is? The Gauls covet Clusium, Rome protects Clusium, and demands
what wrong Clusium has done to them. Brennus answers: 'The wrong that
Alba did to you, the wrong that Fidenae did to you, the wrong that the
Eques, the Volsci, and the Sabines have done to you. They were your
neighbors. The Clusians are ours. We understand neighborliness just as
you do. You have stolen Alba, we shall take Clusium.' Rome said: 'You
shall not take Clusium.' Brennus took Rome. Then he cried: 'Vae victis!'
That is what right is. Ah! what beasts of prey there are in this world!
What eagles! It makes my flesh creep."

He held out his glass to Joly, who filled it, then he drank and went on,
having hardly been interrupted by this glass of wine, of which no one,
not even himself, had taken any notice:--

"Brennus, who takes Rome, is an eagle; the banker who takes the grisette
is an eagle. There is no more modesty in the one case than in the other.
So we believe in nothing. There is but one reality: drink. Whatever your
opinion may be in favor of the lean cock, like the Canton of Uri, or
in favor of the fat cock, like the Canton of Glaris, it matters little,
drink. You talk to me of the boulevard, of that procession, et caetera,
et caetera. Come now, is there going to be another revolution? This
poverty of means on the part of the good God astounds me. He has to keep
greasing the groove of events every moment. There is a hitch, it won't
work. Quick, a revolution! The good God has his hands perpetually black
with that cart-grease. If I were in his place, I'd be perfectly simple
about it, I would not wind up my mechanism every minute, I'd lead the
human race in a straightforward way, I'd weave matters mesh by mesh,
without breaking the thread, I would have no provisional arrangements,
I would have no extraordinary repertory. What the rest of you call
progress advances by means of two motors, men and events. But, sad to
say, from time to time, the exceptional becomes necessary. The ordinary
troupe suffices neither for event nor for men: among men geniuses are
required, among events revolutions. Great accidents are the law; the
order of things cannot do without them; and, judging from the apparition
of comets, one would be tempted to think that Heaven itself finds actors
needed for its performance. At the moment when one expects it the least,
God placards a meteor on the wall of the firmament. Some queer star
turns up, underlined by an enormous tail. And that causes the death
of Caesar. Brutus deals him a blow with a knife, and God a blow with a
comet. Crac, and behold an aurora borealis, behold a revolution, behold
a great man; '93 in big letters, Napoleon on guard, the comet of 1811
at the head of the poster. Ah! what a beautiful blue theatre all studded
with unexpected flashes! Boum! Boum! extraordinary show! Raise your
eyes, boobies. Everything is in disorder, the star as well as the drama.
Good God, it is too much and not enough. These resources, gathered from
exception, seem magnificence and poverty. My friends, Providence has
come down to expedients. What does a revolution prove? That God is in a
quandry. He effects a coup d'etat because he, God, has not been able to
make both ends meet. In fact, this confirms me in my conjectures as
to Jehovah's fortune; and when I see so much distress in heaven and on
earth, from the bird who has not a grain of millet to myself without a
hundred thousand livres of income, when I see human destiny, which is
very badly worn, and even royal destiny, which is threadbare, witness
the Prince de Conde hung, when I see winter, which is nothing but a rent
in the zenith through which the wind blows, when I see so many rags even
in the perfectly new purple of the morning on the crests of hills, when
I see the drops of dew, those mock pearls, when I see the frost, that
paste, when I see humanity ripped apart and events patched up, and so
many spots on the sun and so many holes in the moon, when I see so
much misery everywhere, I suspect that God is not rich. The appearance
exists, it is true, but I feel that he is hard up. He gives a revolution
as a tradesman whose money-box is empty gives a ball. God must not be
judged from appearances. Beneath the gilding of heaven I perceive
a poverty-stricken universe. Creation is bankrupt. That is why I am
discontented. Here it is the 4th of June, it is almost night; ever since
this morning I have been waiting for daylight to come; it has not come,
and I bet that it won't come all day. This is the inexactness of an
ill-paid clerk. Yes, everything is badly arranged, nothing fits anything
else, this old world is all warped, I take my stand on the opposition,
everything goes awry; the universe is a tease. It's like children, those
who want them have none, and those who don't want them have them. Total:
I'm vexed. Besides, Laigle de Meaux, that bald-head, offends my sight.
It humiliates me to think that I am of the same age as that baldy.
However, I criticise, but I do not insult. The universe is what it is.
I speak here without evil intent and to ease my conscience. Receive,
Eternal Father, the assurance of my distinguished consideration. Ah!
by all the saints of Olympus and by all the gods of paradise, I was not
intended to be a Parisian, that is to say, to rebound forever, like a
shuttlecock between two battledores, from the group of the loungers to
the group of the roysterers. I was made to be a Turk, watching oriental
houris all day long, executing those exquisite Egyptian dances, as
sensuous as the dream of a chaste man, or a Beauceron peasant, or a
Venetian gentleman surrounded by gentlewomen, or a petty German prince,
furnishing the half of a foot-soldier to the Germanic confederation, and
occupying his leisure with drying his breeches on his hedge, that is to
say, his frontier. Those are the positions for which I was born! Yes, I
have said a Turk, and I will not retract. I do not understand how people
can habitually take Turks in bad part; Mohammed had his good points;
respect for the inventor of seraglios with houris and paradises with
odalisques! Let us not insult Mohammedanism, the only religion which is
ornamented with a hen-roost! Now, I insist on a drink. The earth is a
great piece of stupidity. And it appears that they are going to fight,
all those imbeciles, and to break each other's profiles and to massacre
each other in the heart of summer, in the month of June, when they might
go off with a creature on their arm, to breathe the immense heaps of
new-mown hay in the meadows! Really, people do commit altogether
too many follies. An old broken lantern which I have just seen at a
bric-a-brac merchant's suggests a reflection to my mind; it is time to
enlighten the human race. Yes, behold me sad again. That's what comes
of swallowing an oyster and a revolution the wrong way! I am growing
melancholy once more. Oh! frightful old world. People strive, turn each
other out, prostitute themselves, kill each other, and get used to it!"

And Grantaire, after this fit of eloquence, had a fit of coughing, which
was well earned.

"A propos of revolution," said Joly, "it is decidedly abberent that
Barius is in lub."

"Does any one know with whom?" demanded Laigle.

"Do."

"No?"

"Do! I tell you."

"Marius' love affairs!" exclaimed Grantaire. "I can imagine it. Marius
is a fog, and he must have found a vapor. Marius is of the race of
poets. He who says poet, says fool, madman, Tymbraeus Apollo. Marius and
his Marie, or his Marion, or his Maria, or his Mariette. They must make
a queer pair of lovers. I know just what it is like. Ecstasies in which
they forget to kiss. Pure on earth, but joined in heaven. They are souls
possessed of senses. They lie among the stars."

Grantaire was attacking his second bottle and, possibly, his second
harangue, when a new personage emerged from the square aperture of the
stairs. It was a boy less than ten years of age, ragged, very small,
yellow, with an odd phiz, a vivacious eye, an enormous amount of hair
drenched with rain, and wearing a contented air.

The child unhesitatingly making his choice among the three, addressed
himself to Laigle de Meaux.

"Are you Monsieur Bossuet?"

"That is my nickname," replied Laigle. "What do you want with me?"

"This. A tall blonde fellow on the boulevard said to me: 'Do you know
Mother Hucheloup?' I said: 'Yes, Rue Chanvrerie, the old man's widow;'
he said to me: 'Go there. There you will find M. Bossuet. Tell him from
me: "A B C".' It's a joke that they're playing on you, isn't it. He gave
me ten sous."

"Joly, lend me ten sous," said Laigle; and, turning to Grantaire:
"Grantaire, lend me ten sous."

This made twenty sous, which Laigle handed to the lad.

"Thank you, sir," said the urchin.

"What is your name?" inquired Laigle.

"Navet, Gavroche's friend."

"Stay with us," said Laigle.

"Breakfast with us," said Grantaire.

The child replied:--

"I can't, I belong in the procession, I'm the one to shout 'Down with
Polignac!'"

And executing a prolonged scrape of his foot behind him, which is the
most respectful of all possible salutes, he took his departure.

The child gone, Grantaire took the word:--

"That is the pure-bred gamin. There are a great many varieties of the
gamin species. The notary's gamin is called Skip-the-Gutter, the cook's
gamin is called a scullion, the baker's gamin is called a mitron,
the lackey's gamin is called a groom, the marine gamin is called the
cabin-boy, the soldier's gamin is called the drummer-boy, the painter's
gamin is called paint-grinder, the tradesman's gamin is called an
errand-boy, the courtesan gamin is called the minion, the kingly gamin
is called the dauphin, the god gamin is called the bambino."

In the meantime, Laigle was engaged in reflection; he said half aloud:--

"A B C, that is to say: the burial of Lamarque."

"The tall blonde," remarked Grantaire, "is Enjolras, who is sending you
a warning."

"Shall we go?" ejaculated Bossuet.

"It's raiding," said Joly. "I have sworn to go through fire, but not
through water. I don't wand to ged a gold."

"I shall stay here," said Grantaire. "I prefer a breakfast to a hearse."

"Conclusion: we remain," said Laigle. "Well, then, let us drink.
Besides, we might miss the funeral without missing the riot."

"Ah! the riot, I am with you!" cried Joly.

Laigle rubbed his hands.

"Now we're going to touch up the revolution of 1830. As a matter of
fact, it does hurt the people along the seams."

"I don't think much of your revolution," said Grantaire. "I don't
execrate this Government. It is the crown tempered by the cotton
night-cap. It is a sceptre ending in an umbrella. In fact, I think
that to-day, with the present weather, Louis Philippe might utilize his
royalty in two directions, he might extend the tip of the sceptre end
against the people, and open the umbrella end against heaven."

The room was dark, large clouds had just finished the extinction of
daylight. There was no one in the wine-shop, or in the street, every one
having gone off "to watch events."

"Is it mid-day or midnight?" cried Bossuet. "You can't see your hand
before your face. Gibelotte, fetch a light."

Grantaire was drinking in a melancholy way.

"Enjolras disdains me," he muttered. "Enjolras said: 'Joly is ill,
Grantaire is drunk.' It was to Bossuet that he sent Navet. If he had
come for me, I would have followed him. So much the worse for Enjolras!
I won't go to his funeral."

This resolution once arrived at, Bossuet, Joly, and Grantaire did not
stir from the wine-shop. By two o'clock in the afternoon, the table at
which they sat was covered with empty bottles. Two candles were burning
on it, one in a flat copper candlestick which was perfectly green, the
other in the neck of a cracked carafe. Grantaire had seduced Joly and
Bossuet to wine; Bossuet and Joly had conducted Grantaire back towards
cheerfulness.

As for Grantaire, he had got beyond wine, that merely moderate
inspirer of dreams, ever since mid-day. Wine enjoys only a conventional
popularity with serious drinkers. There is, in fact, in the matter
of inebriety, white magic and black magic; wine is only white magic.
Grantaire was a daring drinker of dreams. The blackness of a terrible
fit of drunkenness yawning before him, far from arresting him, attracted
him. He had abandoned the bottle and taken to the beerglass. The
beer-glass is the abyss. Having neither opium nor hashish on hand, and
being desirous of filling his brain with twilight, he had had recourse
to that fearful mixture of brandy, stout, absinthe, which produces the
most terrible of lethargies. It is of these three vapors, beer, brandy,
and absinthe, that the lead of the soul is composed. They are three
grooms; the celestial butterfly is drowned in them; and there are formed
there in a membranous smoke, vaguely condensed into the wing of the bat,
three mute furies, Nightmare, Night, and Death, which hover about the
slumbering Psyche.

Grantaire had not yet reached that lamentable phase; far from it. He was
tremendously gay, and Bossuet and Joly retorted. They clinked glasses.
Grantaire added to the eccentric accentuation of words and ideas,
a peculiarity of gesture; he rested his left fist on his knee with
dignity, his arm forming a right angle, and, with cravat untied, seated
astride a stool, his full glass in his right hand, he hurled solemn
words at the big maid-servant Matelote:--

"Let the doors of the palace be thrown open! Let every one be a member
of the French Academy and have the right to embrace Madame Hucheloup.
Let us drink."

And turning to Madame Hucheloup, he added:--

"Woman ancient and consecrated by use, draw near that I may contemplate
thee!"

And Joly exclaimed:--

"Matelote and Gibelotte, dod't gib Grantaire anything more to drink.
He has already devoured, since this bording, in wild prodigality, two
francs and ninety-five centibes."

And Grantaire began again:--

"Who has been unhooking the stars without my permission, and putting
them on the table in the guise of candles?"

Bossuet, though very drunk, preserved his equanimity.

He was seated on the sill of the open window, wetting his back in the
falling rain, and gazing at his two friends.

All at once, he heard a tumult behind him, hurried footsteps, cries of
"To arms!" He turned round and saw in the Rue Saint-Denis, at the end
of the Rue de la Chanvrerie, Enjolras passing, gun in hand, and Gavroche
with his pistol, Feuilly with his sword, Courfeyrac with his sword, and
Jean Prouvaire with his blunderbuss, Combeferre with his gun, Bahorel
with his gun, and the whole armed and stormy rabble which was following
them.

The Rue de la Chanvrerie was not more than a gunshot long. Bossuet
improvised a speaking-trumpet from his two hands placed around his
mouth, and shouted:--

"Courfeyrac! Courfeyrac! Hohee!"

Courfeyrac heard the shout, caught sight of Bossuet, and advanced a few
paces into the Rue de la Chanvrerie, shouting: "What do you want?" which
crossed a "Where are you going?"

"To make a barricade," replied Courfeyrac.

"Well, here! This is a good place! Make it here!"

"That's true, Aigle," said Courfeyrac.

And at a signal from Courfeyrac, the mob flung themselves into the Rue
de la Chanvrerie.




CHAPTER III--NIGHT BEGINS TO DESCEND UPON GRANTAIRE

The spot was, in fact, admirably adapted, the entrance to the street
widened out, the other extremity narrowed together into a pocket
without exit. Corinthe created an obstacle, the Rue Mondetour was easily
barricaded on the right and the left, no attack was possible except
from the Rue Saint-Denis, that is to say, in front, and in full sight.
Bossuet had the comprehensive glance of a fasting Hannibal.

Terror had seized on the whole street at the irruption of the mob. There
was not a passer-by who did not get out of sight. In the space of a
flash of lightning, in the rear, to right and left, shops, stables,
area-doors, windows, blinds, attic skylights, shutters of every
description were closed, from the ground floor to the roof. A terrified
old woman fixed a mattress in front of her window on two clothes-poles
for drying linen, in order to deaden the effect of musketry. The
wine-shop alone remained open; and that for a very good reason, that the
mob had rushed into it.--"Ah my God! Ah my God!" sighed Mame Hucheloup.

Bossuet had gone down to meet Courfeyrac.

Joly, who had placed himself at the window, exclaimed:--

"Courfeyrac, you ought to have brought an umbrella. You will gatch
gold."

In the meantime, in the space of a few minutes, twenty iron bars had
been wrenched from the grated front of the wine-shop, ten fathoms of
street had been unpaved; Gavroche and Bahorel had seized in its passage,
and overturned, the dray of a lime-dealer named Anceau; this dray
contained three barrels of lime, which they placed beneath the piles
of paving-stones: Enjolras raised the cellar trap, and all the widow
Hucheloup's empty casks were used to flank the barrels of lime; Feuilly,
with his fingers skilled in painting the delicate sticks of fans, had
backed up the barrels and the dray with two massive heaps of blocks of
rough stone. Blocks which were improvised like the rest and procured
no one knows where. The beams which served as props were torn from
the neighboring house-fronts and laid on the casks. When Bossuet and
Courfeyrac turned round, half the street was already barred with
a rampart higher than a man. There is nothing like the hand of the
populace for building everything that is built by demolishing.

Matelote and Gibelotte had mingled with the workers. Gibelotte went and
came loaded with rubbish. Her lassitude helped on the barricade. She
served the barricade as she would have served wine, with a sleepy air.

An omnibus with two white horses passed the end of the street.

Bossuet strode over the paving-stones, ran to it, stopped the driver,
made the passengers alight, offered his hand to "the ladies," dismissed
the conductor, and returned, leading the vehicle and the horses by the
bridle.

"Omnibuses," said he, "do not pass the Corinthe. Non licet omnibus adire
Corinthum."

An instant later, the horses were unharnessed and went off at their
will, through the Rue Mondetour, and the omnibus lying on its side
completed the bar across the street.

Mame Hucheloup, quite upset, had taken refuge in the first story.

Her eyes were vague, and stared without seeing anything, and she cried
in a low tone. Her terrified shrieks did not dare to emerge from her
throat.

"The end of the world has come," she muttered.

Joly deposited a kiss on Mame Hucheloup's fat, red, wrinkled neck, and
said to Grantaire: "My dear fellow, I have always regarded a woman's
neck as an infinitely delicate thing."

But Grantaire attained to the highest regions of dithryamb. Matelote
had mounted to the first floor once more, Grantaire seized her round her
waist, and gave vent to long bursts of laughter at the window.

"Matelote is homely!" he cried: "Matelote is of a dream of ugliness!
Matelote is a chimaera. This is the secret of her birth: a Gothic
Pygmalion, who was making gargoyles for cathedrals, fell in love with
one of them, the most horrible, one fine morning. He besought Love to
give it life, and this produced Matelote. Look at her, citizens! She has
chromate-of-lead-colored hair, like Titian's mistress, and she is a good
girl. I guarantee that she will fight well. Every good girl contains
a hero. As for Mother Hucheloup, she's an old warrior. Look at her
moustaches! She inherited them from her husband. A hussar indeed! She
will fight too. These two alone will strike terror to the heart of the
banlieue. Comrades, we shall overthrow the government as true as there
are fifteen intermediary acids between margaric acid and formic acid;
however, that is a matter of perfect indifference to me. Gentlemen, my
father always detested me because I could not understand mathematics.
I understand only love and liberty. I am Grantaire, the good fellow.
Having never had any money, I never acquired the habit of it, and the
result is that I have never lacked it; but, if I had been rich, there
would have been no more poor people! You would have seen! Oh, if the
kind hearts only had fat purses, how much better things would go! I
picture myself Jesus Christ with Rothschild's fortune! How much good he
would do! Matelote, embrace me! You are voluptuous and timid! You have
cheeks which invite the kiss of a sister, and lips which claim the kiss
of a lover."

"Hold your tongue, you cask!" said Courfeyrac.

Grantaire retorted:--

"I am the capitoul[52] and the master of the floral games!"

Enjolras, who was standing on the crest of the barricade, gun in hand,
raised his beautiful, austere face. Enjolras, as the reader knows, had
something of the Spartan and of the Puritan in his composition. He would
have perished at Thermopylae with Leonidas, and burned at Drogheda with
Cromwell.

"Grantaire," he shouted, "go get rid of the fumes of your wine somewhere
else than here. This is the place for enthusiasm, not for drunkenness.
Don't disgrace the barricade!"

This angry speech produced a singular effect on Grantaire. One would
have said that he had had a glass of cold water flung in his face. He
seemed to be rendered suddenly sober.

He sat down, put his elbows on a table near the window, looked at
Enjolras with indescribable gentleness, and said to him:--

"Let me sleep here."

"Go and sleep somewhere else," cried Enjolras.

But Grantaire, still keeping his tender and troubled eyes fixed on him,
replied:--

"Let me sleep here,--until I die."

Enjolras regarded him with disdainful eyes:--

"Grantaire, you are incapable of believing, of thinking, of willing, of
living, and of dying."

Grantaire replied in a grave tone:--

"You will see."

He stammered a few more unintelligible words, then his head fell heavily
on the table, and, as is the usual effect of the second period of
inebriety, into which Enjolras had roughly and abruptly thrust him, an
instant later he had fallen asleep.




CHAPTER IV--AN ATTEMPT TO CONSOLE THE WIDOW HUCHELOUP

Bahorel, in ecstasies over the barricade, shouted:--

"Here's the street in its low-necked dress! How well it looks!"

Courfeyrac, as he demolished the wine-shop to some extent, sought to
console the widowed proprietress.

"Mother Hucheloup, weren't you complaining the other day because you
had had a notice served on you for infringing the law, because Gibelotte
shook a counterpane out of your window?"

"Yes, my good Monsieur Courfeyrac. Ah! good Heavens, are you going
to put that table of mine in your horror, too? And it was for the
counterpane, and also for a pot of flowers which fell from the attic
window into the street, that the government collected a fine of a
hundred francs. If that isn't an abomination, what is!"

"Well, Mother Hucheloup, we are avenging you."

Mother Hucheloup did not appear to understand very clearly the benefit
which she was to derive from these reprisals made on her account. She
was satisfied after the manner of that Arab woman, who, having received
a box on the ear from her husband, went to complain to her father, and
cried for vengeance, saying: "Father, you owe my husband affront for
affront." The father asked: "On which cheek did you receive the blow?"
"On the left cheek." The father slapped her right cheek and said: "Now
you are satisfied. Go tell your husband that he boxed my daughter's
ears, and that I have accordingly boxed his wife's."

The rain had ceased. Recruits had arrived. Workmen had brought under
their blouses a barrel of powder, a basket containing bottles of
vitriol, two or three carnival torches, and a basket filled with
fire-pots, "left over from the King's festival." This festival was very
recent, having taken place on the 1st of May. It was said that these
munitions came from a grocer in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine named Pepin.
They smashed the only street lantern in the Rue de la Chanvrerie,
the lantern corresponding to one in the Rue Saint-Denis, and all
the lanterns in the surrounding streets, de Mondetour, du Cygne, des
Precheurs, and de la Grande and de la Petite-Truanderie.

Enjolras, Combeferre, and Courfeyrac directed everything. Two barricades
were now in process of construction at once, both of them resting on the
Corinthe house and forming a right angle; the larger shut off the Rue
de la Chanvrerie, the other closed the Rue Mondetour, on the side of
the Rue de Cygne. This last barricade, which was very narrow, was
constructed only of casks and paving-stones. There were about fifty
workers on it; thirty were armed with guns; for, on their way, they had
effected a wholesale loan from an armorer's shop.

Nothing could be more bizarre and at the same time more motley than this
troop. One had a round-jacket, a cavalry sabre, and two holster-pistols,
another was in his shirt-sleeves, with a round hat, and a powder-horn
slung at his side, a third wore a plastron of nine sheets of gray paper
and was armed with a saddler's awl. There was one who was shouting:
"Let us exterminate them to the last man and die at the point of our
bayonet." This man had no bayonet. Another spread out over his coat the
cross-belt and cartridge-box of a National Guardsman, the cover of the
cartridge-box being ornamented with this inscription in red worsted:
Public Order. There were a great many guns bearing the numbers of the
legions, few hats, no cravats, many bare arms, some pikes. Add to
this, all ages, all sorts of faces, small, pale young men, and bronzed
longshoremen. All were in haste; and as they helped each other, they
discussed the possible chances. That they would receive succor about
three o'clock in the morning--that they were sure of one regiment, that
Paris would rise. Terrible sayings with which was mingled a sort of
cordial joviality. One would have pronounced them brothers, but they did
not know each other's names. Great perils have this fine characteristic,
that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers. A fire had been
lighted in the kitchen, and there they were engaged in moulding into
bullets, pewter mugs, spoons, forks, and all the brass table-ware of
the establishment. In the midst of it all, they drank. Caps and
buckshot were mixed pell-mell on the tables with glasses of wine. In
the billiard-hall, Mame Hucheloup, Matelote, and Gibelotte, variously
modified by terror, which had stupefied one, rendered another
breathless, and roused the third, were tearing up old dish-cloths and
making lint; three insurgents were assisting them, three bushy-haired,
jolly blades with beards and moustaches, who plucked away at the linen
with the fingers of seamstresses and who made them tremble.

The man of lofty stature whom Courfeyrac, Combeferre, and Enjolras had
observed at the moment when he joined the mob at the corner of the
Rue des Billettes, was at work on the smaller barricade and was making
himself useful there. Gavroche was working on the larger one. As for the
young man who had been waiting for Courfeyrac at his lodgings, and who
had inquired for M. Marius, he had disappeared at about the time when
the omnibus had been overturned.

Gavroche, completely carried away and radiant, had undertaken to get
everything in readiness. He went, came, mounted, descended, re-mounted,
whistled, and sparkled. He seemed to be there for the encouragement of
all. Had he any incentive? Yes, certainly, his poverty; had he wings?
yes, certainly, his joy. Gavroche was a whirlwind. He was constantly
visible, he was incessantly audible. He filled the air, as he was
everywhere at once. He was a sort of almost irritating ubiquity; no halt
was possible with him. The enormous barricade felt him on its haunches.
He troubled the loungers, he excited the idle, he reanimated the weary,
he grew impatient over the thoughtful, he inspired gayety in some,
and breath in others, wrath in others, movement in all, now pricking
a student, now biting an artisan; he alighted, paused, flew off again,
hovered over the tumult, and the effort, sprang from one party to
another, murmuring and humming, and harassed the whole company; a fly on
the immense revolutionary coach.

Perpetual motion was in his little arms and perpetual clamor in his
little lungs.

"Courage! more paving-stones! more casks! more machines! Where are you
now? A hod of plaster for me to stop this hole with! Your barricade
is very small. It must be carried up. Put everything on it, fling
everything there, stick it all in. Break down the house. A barricade is
Mother Gibou's tea. Hullo, here's a glass door."

This elicited an exclamation from the workers.

"A glass door? what do you expect us to do with a glass door, tubercle?"

"Hercules yourselves!" retorted Gavroche. "A glass door is an excellent
thing in a barricade. It does not prevent an attack, but it prevents the
enemy taking it. So you've never prigged apples over a wall where there
were broken bottles? A glass door cuts the corns of the National Guard
when they try to mount on the barricade. Pardi! glass is a treacherous
thing. Well, you haven't a very wildly lively imagination, comrades."

However, he was furious over his triggerless pistol. He went from one to
another, demanding: "A gun, I want a gun! Why don't you give me a gun?"

"Give you a gun!" said Combeferre.

"Come now!" said Gavroche, "why not? I had one in 1830 when we had a
dispute with Charles X."

Enjolras shrugged his shoulders.

"When there are enough for the men, we will give some to the children."

Gavroche wheeled round haughtily, and answered:--

"If you are killed before me, I shall take yours."

"Gamin!" said Enjolras.

"Greenhorn!" said Gavroche.

A dandy who had lost his way and who lounged past the end of the street
created a diversion! Gavroche shouted to him:--

"Come with us, young fellow! well now, don't we do anything for this old
country of ours?"

The dandy fled.




CHAPTER V--PREPARATIONS

The journals of the day which said that that nearly impregnable
structure, of the barricade of the Rue de la Chanvrerie, as they call
it, reached to the level of the first floor, were mistaken. The fact is,
that it did not exceed an average height of six or seven feet. It was
built in such a manner that the combatants could, at their will, either
disappear behind it or dominate the barrier and even scale its crest by
means of a quadruple row of paving-stones placed on top of each other
and arranged as steps in the interior. On the outside, the front of the
barricade, composed of piles of paving-stones and casks bound together
by beams and planks, which were entangled in the wheels of Anceau's dray
and of the overturned omnibus, had a bristling and inextricable aspect.

An aperture large enough to allow a man to pass through had been made
between the wall of the houses and the extremity of the barricade which
was furthest from the wine-shop, so that an exit was possible at this
point. The pole of the omnibus was placed upright and held up with
ropes, and a red flag, fastened to this pole, floated over the
barricade.

The little Mondetour barricade, hidden behind the wine-shop building,
was not visible. The two barricades united formed a veritable redoubt.
Enjolras and Courfeyrac had not thought fit to barricade the other
fragment of the Rue Mondetour which opens through the Rue des Precheurs
an issue into the Halles, wishing, no doubt, to preserve a possible
communication with the outside, and not entertaining much fear of
an attack through the dangerous and difficult street of the Rue des
Precheurs.

With the exception of this issue which was left free, and which
constituted what Folard in his strategical style would have termed a
branch and taking into account, also, the narrow cutting arranged on the
Rue de la Chanvrerie, the interior of the barricade, where the wine-shop
formed a salient angle, presented an irregular square, closed on all
sides. There existed an interval of twenty paces between the grand
barrier and the lofty houses which formed the background of the street,
so that one might say that the barricade rested on these houses, all
inhabited, but closed from top to bottom.

All this work was performed without any hindrance, in less than an hour,
and without this handful of bold men seeing a single bear-skin cap or
a single bayonet make their appearance. The very bourgeois who still
ventured at this hour of riot to enter the Rue Saint-Denis cast a
glance at the Rue de la Chanvrerie, caught sight of the barricade, and
redoubled their pace.

The two barricades being finished, and the flag run up, a table was
dragged out of the wine-shop; and Courfeyrac mounted on the table.
Enjolras brought the square coffer, and Courfeyrac opened it. This
coffer was filled with cartridges. When the mob saw the cartridges, a
tremor ran through the bravest, and a momentary silence ensued.

Courfeyrac distributed them with a smile.

Each one received thirty cartridges. Many had powder, and set about
making others with the bullets which they had run. As for the barrel of
powder, it stood on a table on one side, near the door, and was held in
reserve.

The alarm beat which ran through all Paris, did not cease, but it had
finally come to be nothing more than a monotonous noise to which they no
longer paid any attention. This noise retreated at times, and again drew
near, with melancholy undulations.

They loaded the guns and carbines, all together, without haste, with
solemn gravity. Enjolras went and stationed three sentinels outside the
barricades, one in the Rue de la Chanvrerie, the second in the Rue des
Precheurs, the third at the corner of the Rue de la Petite Truanderie.

Then, the barricades having been built, the posts assigned, the guns
loaded, the sentinels stationed, they waited, alone in those redoubtable
streets through which no one passed any longer, surrounded by those
dumb houses which seemed dead and in which no human movement palpitated,
enveloped in the deepening shades of twilight which was drawing on,
in the midst of that silence through which something could be felt
advancing, and which had about it something tragic and terrifying,
isolated, armed, determined, and tranquil.




CHAPTER VI--WAITING

During those hours of waiting, what did they do?

We must needs tell, since this is a matter of history.

While the men made bullets and the women lint, while a large saucepan
of melted brass and lead, destined to the bullet-mould smoked over a
glowing brazier, while the sentinels watched, weapon in hand, on the
barricade, while Enjolras, whom it was impossible to divert, kept an
eye on the sentinels, Combeferre, Courfeyrac, Jean Prouvaire, Feuilly,
Bossuet, Joly, Bahorel, and some others, sought each other out and
united as in the most peaceful days of their conversations in their
student life, and, in one corner of this wine-shop which had been
converted into a casement, a couple of paces distant from the redoubt
which they had built, with their carbines loaded and primed resting
against the backs of their chairs, these fine young fellows, so close to
a supreme hour, began to recite love verses.

What verses? These:--

               Vous rappelez-vous notre douce vie,
                 Lorsque nous etions si jeunes tous deux,
               Et que nous n'avions au coeur d'autre envie
                 Que d'etre bien mis et d'etre amoureux,

               Lorsqu'en ajoutant votre age a mon age,
                 Nous ne comptions pas a deux quarante ans,
               Et que, dans notre humble et petit menage,
                 Tout, meme l'hiver, nous etait printemps?

               Beaux jours! Manuel etait fier et sage,
                 Paris s'asseyait a de saints banquets,
               Foy lancait la foudre, et votre corsage
                 Avait une epingle ou je me piquais.

               Tout vous contemplait. Avocat sans causes,
                 Quand je vous menais au Prado diner,
               Vous etiez jolie au point que les roses
                 Me faisaient l'effet de se retourner.

               Je les entendais dire: Est elle belle!
                 Comme elle sent bon!  Quels cheveux a flots!
               Sous son mantelet elle cache une aile,
                 Son bonnet charmant est a peine eclos.

               J'errais avec toi, pressant ton bras souple.
                 Les passants crovaient que l'amour charme
               Avait marie, dans notre heureux couple,
                 Le doux mois d'avril au beau mois de mai.

               Nous vivions caches, contents, porte close,
                 Devorant l'amour, bon fruit defendu,
               Ma bouche n'avait pas dit une chose
                 Que deja ton coeur avait repondu.

               La Sorbonne etait l'endroit bucolique
                 Ou je t'adorais du soir au matin.
               C'est ainsi qu'une ame amoureuse applique
                 La carte du Tendre au pays Latin.

               O place Maubert! o place Dauphine!
                 Quand, dans le taudis frais et printanier,
               Tu tirais ton bas sur ton jambe fine,
                 Je voyais un astre au fond du grenier.

               J'ai fort lu Platon, mais rien ne m'en reste;
                 Mieux que Malebranche et que Lamennais,
               Tu me demontrais la bonte celeste
                 Avec une fleur que tu me donnais.

               Je t'obeissais, tu m' etais soumise;
                 O grenier dore! te lacer! te voir
               Aller et venir des l'aube en chemise,
                 Mirant ton jeune front a ton vieux miroir.

               Et qui done pourrait perde la memoire
                 De ces temps d'aurore et de firmament,
               De rubans, de fleurs, de gaze et de moire,
                 Ou l'amour begaye un argot charmant?

               Nos jardins etaient un pot de tulipe;
                 Tu masquais la vitre avec un jupon;
               Je prenais le bol de terre de pipe,
                 Et je te donnais le tasse en japon.

               Et ces grands malheurs qui nous faisaient rire!
                 Ton manchon brule, ton boa perdu!
               Et ce cher portrait du divin Shakespeare
                 Qu'un soir pour souper nons avons vendu!

               J'etais mendiant et toi charitable.
                 Je baisais au vol tes bras frais et ronds.
               Dante in folio nous servait de table
                 Pour manger gaiment un cent de marrons.

               La premiere fois qu'en mon joyeux bouge
                 Je pris un baiser a ton levre en feu,
               Quand tu t'en allais decoiffee et rouge,
                 Je restai tout pale et je crus en Dieu!

               Te rappelles-tu nos bonheurs sans nombre,
                 Et tous ces fichus changes en chiffons?
               Oh que de soupirs, de nos coeurs pleins d'ombre,
                 Se sont envoles dans les cieux profonds![53]


The hour, the spot, these souvenirs of youth recalled, a few stars
which began to twinkle in the sky, the funeral repose of those deserted
streets, the imminence of the inexorable adventure, which was in
preparation, gave a pathetic charm to these verses murmured in a low
tone in the dusk by Jean Prouvaire, who, as we have said, was a gentle
poet.

In the meantime, a lamp had been lighted in the small barricade, and in
the large one, one of those wax torches such as are to be met with on
Shrove-Tuesday in front of vehicles loaded with masks, on their way
to la Courtille. These torches, as the reader has seen, came from the
Faubourg Saint-Antoine.

The torch had been placed in a sort of cage of paving-stones closed on
three sides to shelter it from the wind, and disposed in such a fashion
that all the light fell on the flag. The street and the barricade
remained sunk in gloom, and nothing was to be seen except the red flag
formidably illuminated as by an enormous dark-lantern.

This light enhanced the scarlet of the flag, with an indescribable and
terrible purple.




CHAPTER VII--THE MAN RECRUITED IN THE RUE DES BILLETTES

Night was fully come, nothing made its appearance. All that they heard
was confused noises, and at intervals, fusillades; but these were rare,
badly sustained and distant. This respite, which was thus prolonged,
was a sign that the Government was taking its time, and collecting its
forces. These fifty men were waiting for sixty thousand.

Enjolras felt attacked by that impatience which seizes on strong souls
on the threshold of redoubtable events. He went in search of Gavroche,
who had set to making cartridges in the tap-room, by the dubious light
of two candles placed on the counter by way of precaution, on account of
the powder which was scattered on the tables. These two candles cast no
gleam outside. The insurgents had, moreover, taken pains not to have any
light in the upper stories.

Gavroche was deeply preoccupied at that moment, but not precisely with
his cartridges. The man of the Rue des Billettes had just entered
the tap-room and had seated himself at the table which was the least
lighted. A musket of large model had fallen to his share, and he held it
between his legs. Gavroche, who had been, up to that moment, distracted
by a hundred "amusing" things, had not even seen this man.

When he entered, Gavroche followed him mechanically with his eyes,
admiring his gun; then, all at once, when the man was seated, the street
urchin sprang to his feet. Any one who had spied upon that man up to
that moment, would have seen that he was observing everything in the
barricade and in the band of insurgents, with singular attention; but,
from the moment when he had entered this room, he had fallen into a sort
of brown study, and no longer seemed to see anything that was going on.
The gamin approached this pensive personage, and began to step around
him on tiptoe, as one walks in the vicinity of a person whom one is
afraid of waking. At the same time, over his childish countenance which
was, at once so impudent and so serious, so giddy and so profound, so
gay and so heart-breaking, passed all those grimaces of an old man which
signify: Ah bah! impossible! My sight is bad! I am dreaming! can this
be? no, it is not! but yes! why, no! etc. Gavroche balanced on his
heels, clenched both fists in his pockets, moved his neck around like a
bird, expended in a gigantic pout all the sagacity of his lower lip. He
was astounded, uncertain, incredulous, convinced, dazzled. He had the
mien of the chief of the eunuchs in the slave mart, discovering a
Venus among the blowsy females, and the air of an amateur recognizing
a Raphael in a heap of daubs. His whole being was at work, the instinct
which scents out, and the intelligence which combines. It was evident
that a great event had happened in Gavroche's life.

It was at the most intense point of this preoccupation that Enjolras
accosted him.

"You are small," said Enjolras, "you will not be seen. Go out of the
barricade, slip along close to the houses, skirmish about a bit in the
streets, and come back and tell me what is going on."

Gavroche raised himself on his haunches.

"So the little chaps are good for something! that's very lucky! I'll
go! In the meanwhile, trust to the little fellows, and distrust the big
ones." And Gavroche, raising his head and lowering his voice, added,
as he indicated the man of the Rue des Billettes: "Do you see that big
fellow there?"

"Well?"

"He's a police spy."

"Are you sure of it?"

"It isn't two weeks since he pulled me off the cornice of the Port
Royal, where I was taking the air, by my ear."

Enjolras hastily quitted the urchin and murmured a few words in a very
low tone to a longshoreman from the winedocks who chanced to be at hand.
The man left the room, and returned almost immediately, accompanied by
three others. The four men, four porters with broad shoulders, went
and placed themselves without doing anything to attract his attention,
behind the table on which the man of the Rue des Billettes was leaning
with his elbows. They were evidently ready to hurl themselves upon him.

Then Enjolras approached the man and demanded of him:--

"Who are you?"

At this abrupt query, the man started. He plunged his gaze deep into
Enjolras' clear eyes and appeared to grasp the latter's meaning. He
smiled with a smile than which nothing more disdainful, more energetic,
and more resolute could be seen in the world, and replied with haughty
gravity:--

"I see what it is. Well, yes!"

"You are a police spy?"

"I am an agent of the authorities."

"And your name?"

"Javert."

Enjolras made a sign to the four men. In the twinkling of an eye, before
Javert had time to turn round, he was collared, thrown down, pinioned
and searched.

They found on him a little round card pasted between two pieces of
glass, and bearing on one side the arms of France, engraved, and with
this motto: Supervision and vigilance, and on the other this note:
"JAVERT, inspector of police, aged fifty-two," and the signature of the
Prefect of Police of that day, M. Gisquet.

Besides this, he had his watch and his purse, which contained several
gold pieces. They left him his purse and his watch. Under the watch,
at the bottom of his fob, they felt and seized a paper in an envelope,
which Enjolras unfolded, and on which he read these five lines, written
in the very hand of the Prefect of Police:--

"As soon as his political mission is accomplished, Inspector Javert
will make sure, by special supervision, whether it is true that the
malefactors have instituted intrigues on the right bank of the Seine,
near the Jena bridge."

The search ended, they lifted Javert to his feet, bound his arms behind
his back, and fastened him to that celebrated post in the middle of the
room which had formerly given the wine-shop its name.

Gavroche, who had looked on at the whole of this scene and had approved
of everything with a silent toss of his head, stepped up to Javert and
said to him:--

"It's the mouse who has caught the cat."

All this was so rapidly executed, that it was all over when those about
the wine-shop noticed it.

Javert had not uttered a single cry.

At the sight of Javert bound to the post, Courfeyrac, Bossuet, Joly,
Combeferre, and the men scattered over the two barricades came running
up.

Javert, with his back to the post, and so surrounded with ropes that he
could not make a movement, raised his head with the intrepid serenity of
the man who has never lied.

"He is a police spy," said Enjolras.

And turning to Javert: "You will be shot ten minutes before the
barricade is taken."

Javert replied in his most imperious tone:--

"Why not at once?"

"We are saving our powder."

"Then finish the business with a blow from a knife."

"Spy," said the handsome Enjolras, "we are judges and not assassins."

Then he called Gavroche:--

"Here you! go about your business! Do what I told you!"

"I'm going!" cried Gavroche.

And halting as he was on the point of setting out:--

"By the way, you will give me his gun!" and he added: "I leave you the
musician, but I want the clarionet."

The gamin made the military salute and passed gayly through the opening
in the large barricade.




CHAPTER VIII--MANY INTERROGATION POINTS WITH REGARD TO A CERTAIN LE
CABUC WHOSE NAME MAY NOT HAVE BEEN LE CABUC

The tragic picture which we have undertaken would not be complete, the
reader would not see those grand moments of social birth-pangs in a
revolutionary birth, which contain convulsion mingled with effort,
in their exact and real relief, were we to omit, in the sketch here
outlined, an incident full of epic and savage horror which occurred
almost immediately after Gavroche's departure.

Mobs, as the reader knows, are like a snowball, and collect as they
roll along, a throng of tumultuous men. These men do not ask each other
whence they come. Among the passers-by who had joined the rabble led by
Enjolras, Combeferre, and Courfeyrac, there had been a person wearing
the jacket of a street porter, which was very threadbare on the
shoulders, who gesticulated and vociferated, and who had the look of a
drunken savage. This man, whose name or nickname was Le Cabuc, and who
was, moreover, an utter stranger to those who pretended to know him,
was very drunk, or assumed the appearance of being so, and had seated
himself with several others at a table which they had dragged outside
of the wine-shop. This Cabuc, while making those who vied with him drunk
seemed to be examining with a thoughtful air the large house at the
extremity of the barricade, whose five stories commanded the whole
street and faced the Rue Saint-Denis. All at once he exclaimed:--

"Do you know, comrades, it is from that house yonder that we must fire.
When we are at the windows, the deuce is in it if any one can advance
into the street!"

"Yes, but the house is closed," said one of the drinkers.

"Let us knock!"

"They will not open."

"Let us break in the door!"

Le Cabuc runs to the door, which had a very massive knocker, and knocks.
The door opens not. He strikes a second blow. No one answers. A third
stroke. The same silence.

"Is there any one here?" shouts Cabuc.

Nothing stirs.

Then he seizes a gun and begins to batter the door with the butt end.

It was an ancient alley door, low, vaulted, narrow, solid, entirely of
oak, lined on the inside with a sheet of iron and iron stays, a genuine
prison postern. The blows from the butt end of the gun made the house
tremble, but did not shake the door.

Nevertheless, it is probable that the inhabitants were disturbed, for a
tiny, square window was finally seen to open on the third story, and at
this aperture appeared the reverend and terrified face of a gray-haired
old man, who was the porter, and who held a candle.

The man who was knocking paused.

"Gentlemen," said the porter, "what do you want?"

"Open!" said Cabuc.

"That cannot be, gentlemen."

"Open, nevertheless."

"Impossible, gentlemen."

Le Cabuc took his gun and aimed at the porter; but as he was below, and
as it was very dark, the porter did not see him.

"Will you open, yes or no?"

"No, gentlemen."

"Do you say no?"

"I say no, my goo--"

The porter did not finish. The shot was fired; the ball entered under
his chin and came out at the nape of his neck, after traversing the
jugular vein.

The old man fell back without a sigh. The candle fell and was
extinguished, and nothing more was to be seen except a motionless head
lying on the sill of the small window, and a little whitish smoke which
floated off towards the roof.

"There!" said Le Cabuc, dropping the butt end of his gun to the
pavement.

He had hardly uttered this word, when he felt a hand laid on his
shoulder with the weight of an eagle's talon, and he heard a voice
saying to him:--

"On your knees."

The murderer turned round and saw before him Enjolras' cold, white face.

Enjolras held a pistol in his hand.

He had hastened up at the sound of the discharge.

He had seized Cabuc's collar, blouse, shirt, and suspender with his left
hand.

"On your knees!" he repeated.

And, with an imperious motion, the frail young man of twenty years bent
the thickset and sturdy porter like a reed, and brought him to his knees
in the mire.

Le Cabuc attempted to resist, but he seemed to have been seized by a
superhuman hand.

Enjolras, pale, with bare neck and dishevelled hair, and his woman's
face, had about him at that moment something of the antique Themis.
His dilated nostrils, his downcast eyes, gave to his implacable Greek
profile that expression of wrath and that expression of Chastity which,
as the ancient world viewed the matter, befit Justice.

The whole barricade hastened up, then all ranged themselves in a circle
at a distance, feeling that it was impossible to utter a word in the
presence of the thing which they were about to behold.

Le Cabuc, vanquished, no longer tried to struggle, and trembled in every
limb.

Enjolras released him and drew out his watch.

"Collect yourself," said he. "Think or pray. You have one minute."

"Mercy!" murmured the murderer; then he dropped his head and stammered a
few inarticulate oaths.

Enjolras never took his eyes off of him: he allowed a minute to pass,
then he replaced his watch in his fob. That done, he grasped Le Cabuc
by the hair, as the latter coiled himself into a ball at his knees and
shrieked, and placed the muzzle of the pistol to his ear. Many of those
intrepid men, who had so tranquilly entered upon the most terrible of
adventures, turned aside their heads.

An explosion was heard, the assassin fell to the pavement face
downwards.

Enjolras straightened himself up, and cast a convinced and severe glance
around him. Then he spurned the corpse with his foot and said:--

"Throw that outside."

Three men raised the body of the unhappy wretch, which was still
agitated by the last mechanical convulsions of the life that had fled,
and flung it over the little barricade into the Rue Mondetour.

Enjolras was thoughtful. It is impossible to say what grandiose shadows
slowly spread over his redoubtable serenity. All at once he raised his
voice.

A silence fell upon them.

"Citizens," said Enjolras, "what that man did is frightful, what I have
done is horrible. He killed, therefore I killed him. I had to do it,
because insurrection must have its discipline. Assassination is even
more of a crime here than elsewhere; we are under the eyes of the
Revolution, we are the priests of the Republic, we are the victims of
duty, and must not be possible to slander our combat. I have, therefore,
tried that man, and condemned him to death. As for myself, constrained
as I am to do what I have done, and yet abhorring it, I have judged
myself also, and you shall soon see to what I have condemned myself."

Those who listened to him shuddered.

"We will share thy fate," cried Combeferre.

"So be it," replied Enjolras. "One word more. In executing this man,
I have obeyed necessity; but necessity is a monster of the old world,
necessity's name is Fatality. Now, the law of progress is, that monsters
shall disappear before the angels, and that Fatality shall vanish before
Fraternity. It is a bad moment to pronounce the word love. No matter, I
do pronounce it. And I glorify it. Love, the future is thine. Death, I
make use of thee, but I hate thee. Citizens, in the future there will
be neither darkness nor thunderbolts; neither ferocious ignorance, nor
bloody retaliation. As there will be no more Satan, there will be no
more Michael. In the future no one will kill any one else, the earth
will beam with radiance, the human race will love. The day will come,
citizens, when all will be concord, harmony, light, joy and life; it
will come, and it is in order that it may come that we are about to
die."

Enjolras ceased. His virgin lips closed; and he remained for some time
standing on the spot where he had shed blood, in marble immobility. His
staring eye caused those about him to speak in low tones.

Jean Prouvaire and Combeferre pressed each other's hands silently, and,
leaning against each other in an angle of the barricade, they watched
with an admiration in which there was some compassion, that grave young
man, executioner and priest, composed of light, like crystal, and also
of rock.

Let us say at once that later on, after the action, when the bodies were
taken to the morgue and searched, a police agent's card was found on Le
Cabuc. The author of this book had in his hands, in 1848, the special
report on this subject made to the Prefect of Police in 1832.

We will add, that if we are to believe a tradition of the police, which
is strange but probably well founded, Le Cabuc was Claquesous. The fact
is, that dating from the death of Le Cabuc, there was no longer any
question of Claquesous. Claquesous had nowhere left any trace of his
disappearance; he would seem to have amalgamated himself with the
invisible. His life had been all shadows, his end was night.

The whole insurgent group was still under the influence of the emotion
of that tragic case which had been so quickly tried and so quickly
terminated, when Courfeyrac again beheld on the barricade, the small
young man who had inquired of him that morning for Marius.

This lad, who had a bold and reckless air, had come by night to join the
insurgents.




BOOK THIRTEENTH.--MARIUS ENTERS THE SHADOW




CHAPTER I--FROM THE RUE PLUMET TO THE QUARTIER SAINT-DENIS

The voice which had summoned Marius through the twilight to the
barricade of the Rue de la Chanvrerie, had produced on him the effect
of the voice of destiny. He wished to die; the opportunity presented
itself; he knocked at the door of the tomb, a hand in the darkness
offered him the key. These melancholy openings which take place in the
gloom before despair, are tempting. Marius thrust aside the bar which
had so often allowed him to pass, emerged from the garden, and said: "I
will go."

Mad with grief, no longer conscious of anything fixed or solid in his
brain, incapable of accepting anything thenceforth of fate after those
two months passed in the intoxication of youth and love, overwhelmed at
once by all the reveries of despair, he had but one desire remaining, to
make a speedy end of all.

He set out at rapid pace. He found himself most opportunely armed, as he
had Javert's pistols with him.

The young man of whom he thought that he had caught a glimpse, had
vanished from his sight in the street.

Marius, who had emerged from the Rue Plumet by the boulevard, traversed
the Esplanade and the bridge of the Invalides, the Champs Elysees, the
Place Louis XV., and reached the Rue de Rivoli. The shops were open
there, the gas was burning under the arcades, women were making their
purchases in the stalls, people were eating ices in the Cafe Laiter,
and nibbling small cakes at the English pastry-cook's shop. Only a few
posting-chaises were setting out at a gallop from the Hotel des Princes
and the Hotel Meurice.

Marius entered the Rue Saint-Honore through the Passage Delorme. There
the shops were closed, the merchants were chatting in front of their
half-open doors, people were walking about, the street lanterns were
lighted, beginning with the first floor, all the windows were lighted as
usual. There was cavalry on the Place du Palais-Royal.

Marius followed the Rue Saint-Honore. In proportion as he left the
Palais-Royal behind him, there were fewer lighted windows, the shops
were fast shut, no one was chatting on the thresholds, the street grew
sombre, and, at the same time, the crowd increased in density. For the
passers-by now amounted to a crowd. No one could be seen to speak in
this throng, and yet there arose from it a dull, deep murmur.

Near the fountain of the Arbre-Sec, there were "assemblages", motionless
and gloomy groups which were to those who went and came as stones in the
midst of running water.

At the entrance to the Rue des Prouvaires, the crowd no longer walked.
It formed a resisting, massive, solid, compact, almost impenetrable
block of people who were huddled together, and conversing in low tones.
There were hardly any black coats or round hats now, but smock frocks,
blouses, caps, and bristling and cadaverous heads. This multitude
undulated confusedly in the nocturnal gloom. Its whisperings had the
hoarse accent of a vibration. Although not one of them was walking, a
dull trampling was audible in the mire. Beyond this dense portion of
the throng, in the Rue du Roule, in the Rue des Prouvaires, and in the
extension of the Rue Saint-Honore, there was no longer a single window
in which a candle was burning. Only the solitary and diminishing rows
of lanterns could be seen vanishing into the street in the distance. The
lanterns of that date resembled large red stars, hanging to ropes, and
shed upon the pavement a shadow which had the form of a huge spider.
These streets were not deserted. There could be descried piles of guns,
moving bayonets, and troops bivouacking. No curious observer passed that
limit. There circulation ceased. There the rabble ended and the army
began.

Marius willed with the will of a man who hopes no more. He had been
summoned, he must go. He found a means to traverse the throng and to
pass the bivouac of the troops, he shunned the patrols, he avoided the
sentinels. He made a circuit, reached the Rue de Bethisy, and directed
his course towards the Halles. At the corner of the Rue des Bourdonnais,
there were no longer any lanterns.

After having passed the zone of the crowd, he had passed the limits of
the troops; he found himself in something startling. There was no longer
a passer-by, no longer a soldier, no longer a light, there was no one;
solitude, silence, night, I know not what chill which seized hold upon
one. Entering a street was like entering a cellar.

He continued to advance.

He took a few steps. Some one passed close to him at a run. Was it a
man? Or a woman? Were there many of them? he could not have told. It had
passed and vanished.

Proceeding from circuit to circuit, he reached a lane which he judged
to be the Rue de la Poterie; near the middle of this street, he came in
contact with an obstacle. He extended his hands. It was an overturned
wagon; his foot recognized pools of water, gullies, and paving-stones
scattered and piled up. A barricade had been begun there and abandoned.
He climbed over the stones and found himself on the other side of the
barrier. He walked very near the street-posts, and guided himself along
the walls of the houses. A little beyond the barricade, it seemed to him
that he could make out something white in front of him. He approached,
it took on a form. It was two white horses; the horses of the omnibus
harnessed by Bossuet in the morning, who had been straying at random all
day from street to street, and had finally halted there, with the weary
patience of brutes who no more understand the actions of men, than man
understands the actions of Providence.

Marius left the horses behind him. As he was approaching a street which
seemed to him to be the Rue du Contrat-Social, a shot coming no one
knows whence, and traversing the darkness at random, whistled close by
him, and the bullet pierced a brass shaving-dish suspended above his
head over a hairdresser's shop. This pierced shaving-dish was still
to be seen in 1848, in the Rue du Contrat-Social, at the corner of the
pillars of the market.

This shot still betokened life. From that instant forth he encountered
nothing more.

The whole of this itinerary resembled a descent of black steps.

Nevertheless, Marius pressed forward.




CHAPTER II--AN OWL'S VIEW OF PARIS

A being who could have hovered over Paris that night with the wing of
the bat or the owl would have had beneath his eyes a gloomy spectacle.

All that old quarter of the Halles, which is like a city within a
city, through which run the Rues Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin, where a
thousand lanes cross, and of which the insurgents had made their
redoubt and their stronghold, would have appeared to him like a dark and
enormous cavity hollowed out in the centre of Paris. There the glance
fell into an abyss. Thanks to the broken lanterns, thanks to the closed
windows, there all radiance, all life, all sound, all movement ceased.
The invisible police of the insurrection were on the watch everywhere,
and maintained order, that is to say, night. The necessary tactics of
insurrection are to drown small numbers in a vast obscurity, to multiply
every combatant by the possibilities which that obscurity contains. At
dusk, every window where a candle was burning received a shot. The light
was extinguished, sometimes the inhabitant was killed. Hence nothing was
stirring. There was nothing but fright, mourning, stupor in the houses;
and in the streets, a sort of sacred horror. Not even the long rows of
windows and stores, the indentations of the chimneys, and the roofs,
and the vague reflections which are cast back by the wet and muddy
pavements, were visible. An eye cast upward at that mass of shadows
might, perhaps, have caught a glimpse here and there, at intervals,
of indistinct gleams which brought out broken and eccentric lines, and
profiles of singular buildings, something like the lights which go and
come in ruins; it was at such points that the barricades were situated.
The rest was a lake of obscurity, foggy, heavy, and funereal, above
which, in motionless and melancholy outlines, rose the tower of
Saint-Jacques, the church of Saint-Merry, and two or three more of those
grand edifices of which man makes giants and the night makes phantoms.

All around this deserted and disquieting labyrinth, in the quarters
where the Parisian circulation had not been annihilated, and where a
few street lanterns still burned, the aerial observer might have
distinguished the metallic gleam of swords and bayonets, the dull rumble
of artillery, and the swarming of silent battalions whose ranks were
swelling from minute to minute; a formidable girdle which was slowly
drawing in and around the insurrection.

The invested quarter was no longer anything more than a monstrous
cavern; everything there appeared to be asleep or motionless, and, as we
have just seen, any street which one might come to offered nothing but
darkness.

A wild darkness, full of traps, full of unseen and formidable shocks,
into which it was alarming to penetrate, and in which it was terrible to
remain, where those who entered shivered before those whom they awaited,
where those who waited shuddered before those who were coming. Invisible
combatants were entrenched at every corner of the street; snares of the
sepulchre concealed in the density of night. All was over. No more
light was to be hoped for, henceforth, except the lightning of guns,
no further encounter except the abrupt and rapid apparition of death.
Where? How? When? No one knew, but it was certain and inevitable. In
this place which had been marked out for the struggle, the Government
and the insurrection, the National Guard, and popular societies, the
bourgeois and the uprising, groping their way, were about to come into
contact. The necessity was the same for both. The only possible issue
thenceforth was to emerge thence killed or conquerors. A situation so
extreme, an obscurity so powerful, that the most timid felt themselves
seized with resolution, and the most daring with terror.

Moreover, on both sides, the fury, the rage, and the determination were
equal. For the one party, to advance meant death, and no one dreamed of
retreating; for the other, to remain meant death, and no one dreamed of
flight.

It was indispensable that all should be ended on the following day, that
triumph should rest either here or there, that the insurrection should
prove itself a revolution or a skirmish. The Government understood this
as well as the parties; the most insignificant bourgeois felt it. Hence
a thought of anguish which mingled with the impenetrable gloom of this
quarter where all was at the point of being decided; hence a redoubled
anxiety around that silence whence a catastrophe was on the point of
emerging. Here only one sound was audible, a sound as heart-rending
as the death rattle, as menacing as a malediction, the tocsin of
Saint-Merry. Nothing could be more blood-curdling than the clamor of
that wild and desperate bell, wailing amid the shadows.

As it often happens, nature seemed to have fallen into accord with what
men were about to do. Nothing disturbed the harmony of the whole effect.
The stars had disappeared, heavy clouds filled the horizon with their
melancholy folds. A black sky rested on these dead streets, as though an
immense winding-sheet were being outspread over this immense tomb.

While a battle that was still wholly political was in preparation in the
same locality which had already witnessed so many revolutionary events,
while youth, the secret associations, the schools, in the name of
principles, and the middle classes, in the name of interests, were
approaching preparatory to dashing themselves together, clasping and
throwing each other, while each one hastened and invited the last and
decisive hour of the crisis, far away and quite outside of this fatal
quarter, in the most profound depths of the unfathomable cavities of
that wretched old Paris which disappears under the splendor of happy
and opulent Paris, the sombre voice of the people could be heard giving
utterance to a dull roar.

A fearful and sacred voice which is composed of the roar of the brute
and of the word of God, which terrifies the weak and which warns the
wise, which comes both from below like the voice of the lion, and from
on high like the voice of the thunder.




CHAPTER III--THE EXTREME EDGE

Marius had reached the Halles.

There everything was still calmer, more obscure and more motionless than
in the neighboring streets. One would have said that the glacial peace
of the sepulchre had sprung forth from the earth and had spread over the
heavens.

Nevertheless, a red glow brought out against this black background the
lofty roofs of the houses which barred the Rue de la Chanvrerie on
the Saint-Eustache side. It was the reflection of the torch which was
burning in the Corinthe barricade. Marius directed his steps towards
that red light. It had drawn him to the Marche-aux-Poirees, and he
caught a glimpse of the dark mouth of the Rue des Precheurs. He entered
it. The insurgents' sentinel, who was guarding the other end, did not
see him. He felt that he was very close to that which he had come in
search of, and he walked on tiptoe. In this manner he reached the elbow
of that short section of the Rue Mondetour which was, as the reader will
remember, the only communication which Enjolras had preserved with the
outside world. At the corner of the last house, on his left, he thrust
his head forward, and looked into the fragment of the Rue Mondetour.

A little beyond the angle of the lane and the Rue de la Chanvrerie which
cast a broad curtain of shadow, in which he was himself engulfed,
he perceived some light on the pavement, a bit of the wine-shop, and
beyond, a flickering lamp within a sort of shapeless wall, and men
crouching down with guns on their knees. All this was ten fathoms
distant from him. It was the interior of the barricade.

The houses which bordered the lane on the right concealed the rest of
the wine-shop, the large barricade, and the flag from him.

Marius had but a step more to take.

Then the unhappy young man seated himself on a post, folded his arms,
and fell to thinking about his father.

He thought of that heroic Colonel Pontmercy, who had been so proud a
soldier, who had guarded the frontier of France under the Republic, and
had touched the frontier of Asia under Napoleon, who had beheld Genoa,
Alexandria, Milan, Turin, Madrid, Vienna, Dresden, Berlin, Moscow, who
had left on all the victorious battle-fields of Europe drops of that
same blood, which he, Marius, had in his veins, who had grown gray
before his time in discipline and command, who had lived with his
sword-belt buckled, his epaulets falling on his breast, his cockade
blackened with powder, his brow furrowed with his helmet, in barracks,
in camp, in the bivouac, in ambulances, and who, at the expiration of
twenty years, had returned from the great wars with a scarred cheek, a
smiling countenance, tranquil, admirable, pure as a child, having done
everything for France and nothing against her.

He said to himself that his day had also come now, that his hour had
struck, that following his father, he too was about to show himself
brave, intrepid, bold, to run to meet the bullets, to offer his breast
to bayonets, to shed his blood, to seek the enemy, to seek death, that
he was about to wage war in his turn and descend to the field of battle,
and that the field of battle upon which he was to descend was the
street, and that the war in which he was about to engage was civil war!

He beheld civil war laid open like a gulf before him, and into this he
was about to fall. Then he shuddered.

He thought of his father's sword, which his grandfather had sold to a
second-hand dealer, and which he had so mournfully regretted. He said to
himself that that chaste and valiant sword had done well to escape from
him, and to depart in wrath into the gloom; that if it had thus fled, it
was because it was intelligent and because it had foreseen the future;
that it had had a presentiment of this rebellion, the war of the
gutters, the war of the pavements, fusillades through cellar-windows,
blows given and received in the rear; it was because, coming from
Marengo and Friedland, it did not wish to go to the Rue de la
Chanvrerie; it was because, after what it had done with the father, it
did not wish to do this for the son! He told himself that if that sword
were there, if after taking possession of it at his father's pillow,
he had dared to take it and carry it off for this combat of darkness
between Frenchmen in the streets, it would assuredly have scorched his
hands and burst out aflame before his eyes, like the sword of the angel!
He told himself that it was fortunate that it was not there and that
it had disappeared, that that was well, that that was just, that his
grandfather had been the true guardian of his father's glory, and that
it was far better that the colonel's sword should be sold at auction,
sold to the old-clothes man, thrown among the old junk, than that it
should, to-day, wound the side of his country.

And then he fell to weeping bitterly.

This was horrible. But what was he to do? Live without Cosette he could
not. Since she was gone, he must needs die. Had he not given her his
word of honor that he would die? She had gone knowing that; this meant
that it pleased her that Marius should die. And then, it was clear that
she no longer loved him, since she had departed thus without warning,
without a word, without a letter, although she knew his address! What
was the good of living, and why should he live now? And then, what!
should he retreat after going so far? should he flee from danger after
having approached it? should he slip away after having come and peeped
into the barricade? slip away, all in a tremble, saying: "After all, I
have had enough of it as it is. I have seen it, that suffices, this is
civil war, and I shall take my leave!" Should he abandon his friends who
were expecting him? Who were in need of him possibly! who were a mere
handful against an army! Should he be untrue at once to his love, to
country, to his word? Should he give to his cowardice the pretext of
patriotism? But this was impossible, and if the phantom of his father
was there in the gloom, and beheld him retreating, he would beat him on
the loins with the flat of his sword, and shout to him: "March on, you
poltroon!"

Thus a prey to the conflicting movements of his thoughts, he dropped his
head.

All at once he raised it. A sort of splendid rectification had just been
effected in his mind. There is a widening of the sphere of thought which
is peculiar to the vicinity of the grave; it makes one see clearly to
be near death. The vision of the action into which he felt that he
was, perhaps, on the point of entering, appeared to him no more
as lamentable, but as superb. The war of the street was suddenly
transfigured by some unfathomable inward working of his soul, before the
eye of his thought. All the tumultuous interrogation points of revery
recurred to him in throngs, but without troubling him. He left none of
them unanswered.

Let us see, why should his father be indignant? Are there not cases
where insurrection rises to the dignity of duty? What was there that was
degrading for the son of Colonel Pontmercy in the combat which was about
to begin? It is no longer Montmirail nor Champaubert; it is something
quite different. The question is no longer one of sacred territory,--but
of a holy idea. The country wails, that may be, but humanity applauds.
But is it true that the country does wail? France bleeds, but liberty
smiles; and in the presence of liberty's smile, France forgets her
wound. And then if we look at things from a still more lofty point of
view, why do we speak of civil war?

Civil war--what does that mean? Is there a foreign war? Is not all war
between men, war between brothers? War is qualified only by its object.
There is no such thing as foreign or civil war; there is only just and
unjust war. Until that day when the grand human agreement is concluded,
war, that at least which is the effort of the future, which is hastening
on against the past, which is lagging in the rear, may be necessary.
What have we to reproach that war with? War does not become a disgrace,
the sword does not become a disgrace, except when it is used for
assassinating the right, progress, reason, civilization, truth. Then
war, whether foreign or civil, is iniquitous; it is called crime.
Outside the pale of that holy thing, justice, by what right does
one form of man despise another? By what right should the sword of
Washington disown the pike of Camille Desmoulins? Leonidas against the
stranger, Timoleon against the tyrant, which is the greater? the one is
the defender, the other the liberator. Shall we brand every appeal
to arms within a city's limits without taking the object into a
consideration? Then note the infamy of Brutus, Marcel, Arnould von
Blankenheim, Coligny, Hedgerow war? War of the streets? Why not? That
was the war of Ambiorix, of Artevelde, of Marnix, of Pelagius. But
Ambiorix fought against Rome, Artevelde against France, Marnix against
Spain, Pelagius against the Moors; all against the foreigner. Well, the
monarchy is a foreigner; oppression is a stranger; the right divine is
a stranger. Despotism violates the moral frontier, an invasion violates
the geographical frontier. Driving out the tyrant or driving out the
English, in both cases, regaining possession of one's own territory.
There comes an hour when protestation no longer suffices; after
philosophy, action is required; live force finishes what the idea
has sketched out; Prometheus chained begins, Arostogeiton ends; the
encyclopedia enlightens souls, the 10th of August electrifies them.
After AEschylus, Thrasybulus; after Diderot, Danton. Multitudes have
a tendency to accept the master. Their mass bears witness to apathy.
A crowd is easily led as a whole to obedience. Men must be stirred up,
pushed on, treated roughly by the very benefit of their deliverance,
their eyes must be wounded by the true, light must be hurled at them
in terrible handfuls. They must be a little thunderstruck themselves at
their own well-being; this dazzling awakens them. Hence the necessity
of tocsins and wars. Great combatants must rise, must enlighten nations
with audacity, and shake up that sad humanity which is covered
with gloom by the right divine, Caesarian glory, force, fanaticism,
irresponsible power, and absolute majesty; a rabble stupidly occupied in
the contemplation, in their twilight splendor, of these sombre triumphs
of the night. Down with the tyrant! Of whom are you speaking? Do you
call Louis Philippe the tyrant? No; no more than Louis XVI. Both of them
are what history is in the habit of calling good kings; but principles
are not to be parcelled out, the logic of the true is rectilinear, the
peculiarity of truth is that it lacks complaisance; no concessions,
then; all encroachments on man should be repressed. There is a divine
right in Louis XVI., there is because a Bourbon in Louis Philippe; both
represent in a certain measure the confiscation of right, and, in order
to clear away universal insurrection, they must be combated; it must
be done, France being always the one to begin. When the master falls
in France, he falls everywhere. In short, what cause is more just, and
consequently, what war is greater, than that which re-establishes
social truth, restores her throne to liberty, restores the people to the
people, restores sovereignty to man, replaces the purple on the head of
France, restores equity and reason in their plenitude, suppresses every
germ of antagonism by restoring each one to himself, annihilates the
obstacle which royalty presents to the whole immense universal concord,
and places the human race once more on a level with the right? These
wars build up peace. An enormous fortress of prejudices, privileges,
superstitions, lies, exactions, abuses, violences, iniquities, and
darkness still stands erect in this world, with its towers of hatred.
It must be cast down. This monstrous mass must be made to crumble. To
conquer at Austerlitz is grand; to take the Bastille is immense.

There is no one who has not noticed it in his own case--the soul,--and
therein lies the marvel of its unity complicated with ubiquity, has
a strange aptitude for reasoning almost coldly in the most violent
extremities, and it often happens that heartbroken passion and profound
despair in the very agony of their blackest monologues, treat subjects
and discuss theses. Logic is mingled with convulsion, and the thread
of the syllogism floats, without breaking, in the mournful storm of
thought. This was the situation of Marius' mind.

As he meditated thus, dejected but resolute, hesitating in every
direction, and, in short, shuddering at what he was about to do, his
glance strayed to the interior of the barricade. The insurgents
were here conversing in a low voice, without moving, and there
was perceptible that quasi-silence which marks the last stage of
expectation. Overhead, at the small window in the third story Marius
descried a sort of spectator who appeared to him to be singularly
attentive. This was the porter who had been killed by Le Cabuc. Below,
by the lights of the torch, which was thrust between the paving-stones,
this head could be vaguely distinguished. Nothing could be stranger, in
that sombre and uncertain gleam, than that livid, motionless, astonished
face, with its bristling hair, its eyes fixed and staring, and its
yawning mouth, bent over the street in an attitude of curiosity. One
would have said that the man who was dead was surveying those who were
about to die. A long trail of blood which had flowed from that head,
descended in reddish threads from the window to the height of the first
floor, where it stopped.




BOOK FOURTEENTH.--THE GRANDEURS OF DESPAIR

[Illustration: The Grandeurs of Despair 4b-14-1-despair]




CHAPTER I--THE FLAG: ACT FIRST

As yet, nothing had come. Ten o'clock had sounded from Saint-Merry.
Enjolras and Combeferre had gone and seated themselves, carbines in
hand, near the outlet of the grand barricade. They no longer addressed
each other, they listened, seeking to catch even the faintest and most
distant sound of marching.

Suddenly, in the midst of the dismal calm, a clear, gay, young voice,
which seemed to come from the Rue Saint-Denis, rose and began to sing
distinctly, to the old popular air of "By the Light of the Moon," this
bit of poetry, terminated by a cry like the crow of a cock:--

               Mon nez est en larmes,
               Mon ami Bugeaud,
               Prete moi tes gendarmes
               Pour leur dire un mot.

                  En capote bleue,
                  La poule au shako,
                  Voici la banlieue!
                  Co-cocorico![54]


They pressed each other's hands.

"That is Gavroche," said Enjolras.

"He is warning us," said Combeferre.

A hasty rush troubled the deserted street; they beheld a being more
agile than a clown climb over the omnibus, and Gavroche bounded into the
barricade, all breathless, saying:--

"My gun! Here they are!"

An electric quiver shot through the whole barricade, and the sound of
hands seeking their guns became audible.

"Would you like my carbine?" said Enjolras to the lad.

"I want a big gun," replied Gavroche.

And he seized Javert's gun.

Two sentinels had fallen back, and had come in almost at the same moment
as Gavroche. They were the sentinels from the end of the street, and the
vidette of the Rue de la Petite-Truanderie. The vidette of the Lane des
Precheurs had remained at his post, which indicated that nothing was
approaching from the direction of the bridges and Halles.

The Rue de la Chanvrerie, of which a few paving-stones alone were dimly
visible in the reflection of the light projected on the flag, offered
to the insurgents the aspect of a vast black door vaguely opened into a
smoke.

Each man had taken up his position for the conflict.

Forty-three insurgents, among whom were Enjolras, Combeferre,
Courfeyrac, Bossuet, Joly, Bahorel, and Gavroche, were kneeling inside
the large barricade, with their heads on a level with the crest of the
barrier, the barrels of their guns and carbines aimed on the stones as
though at loop-holes, attentive, mute, ready to fire. Six, commanded
by Feuilly, had installed themselves, with their guns levelled at their
shoulders, at the windows of the two stories of Corinthe.

Several minutes passed thus, then a sound of footsteps, measured, heavy,
and numerous, became distinctly audible in the direction of Saint-Leu.
This sound, faint at first, then precise, then heavy and sonorous,
approached slowly, without halt, without intermission, with a tranquil
and terrible continuity. Nothing was to be heard but this. It was that
combined silence and sound, of the statue of the commander, but this
stony step had something indescribably enormous and multiple about it
which awakened the idea of a throng, and, at the same time, the idea
of a spectre. One thought one heard the terrible statue Legion marching
onward. This tread drew near; it drew still nearer, and stopped. It
seemed as though the breathing of many men could be heard at the end of
the street. Nothing was to be seen, however, but at the bottom of that
dense obscurity there could be distinguished a multitude of metallic
threads, as fine as needles and almost imperceptible, which moved about
like those indescribable phosphoric networks which one sees beneath
one's closed eyelids, in the first mists of slumber at the moment
when one is dropping off to sleep. These were bayonets and gun-barrels
confusedly illuminated by the distant reflection of the torch.

A pause ensued, as though both sides were waiting. All at once, from the
depths of this darkness, a voice, which was all the more sinister, since
no one was visible, and which appeared to be the gloom itself speaking,
shouted:--

"Who goes there?"

At the same time, the click of guns, as they were lowered into position,
was heard.

Enjolras replied in a haughty and vibrating tone:--

"The French Revolution!"

"Fire!" shouted the voice.

A flash empurpled all the facades in the street as though the door of a
furnace had been flung open, and hastily closed again.

A fearful detonation burst forth on the barricade. The red flag fell.
The discharge had been so violent and so dense that it had cut the
staff, that is to say, the very tip of the omnibus pole.

Bullets which had rebounded from the cornices of the houses penetrated
the barricade and wounded several men.

The impression produced by this first discharge was freezing. The attack
had been rough, and of a nature to inspire reflection in the boldest.
It was evident that they had to deal with an entire regiment at the very
least.

"Comrades!" shouted Courfeyrac, "let us not waste our powder. Let us
wait until they are in the street before replying."

"And, above all," said Enjolras, "let us raise the flag again."

He picked up the flag, which had fallen precisely at his feet.

Outside, the clatter of the ramrods in the guns could be heard; the
troops were re-loading their arms.

Enjolras went on:--

"Who is there here with a bold heart? Who will plant the flag on the
barricade again?"

Not a man responded. To mount on the barricade at the very moment when,
without any doubt, it was again the object of their aim, was simply
death. The bravest hesitated to pronounce his own condemnation. Enjolras
himself felt a thrill. He repeated:--

"Does no one volunteer?"




CHAPTER II--THE FLAG: ACT SECOND

Since they had arrived at Corinthe, and had begun the construction of
the barricade, no attention had been paid to Father Mabeuf. M. Mabeuf
had not quitted the mob, however; he had entered the ground-floor of the
wine-shop and had seated himself behind the counter. There he had, so to
speak, retreated into himself. He no longer seemed to look or to think.
Courfeyrac and others had accosted him two or three times, warning him
of his peril, beseeching him to withdraw, but he did not hear them.
When they were not speaking to him, his mouth moved as though he were
replying to some one, and as soon as he was addressed, his lips became
motionless and his eyes no longer had the appearance of being alive.

Several hours before the barricade was attacked, he had assumed an
attitude which he did not afterwards abandon, with both fists planted
on his knees and his head thrust forward as though he were gazing over a
precipice. Nothing had been able to move him from this attitude; it did
not seem as though his mind were in the barricade. When each had gone
to take up his position for the combat, there remained in the tap-room
where Javert was bound to the post, only a single insurgent with a naked
sword, watching over Javert, and himself, Mabeuf. At the moment of the
attack, at the detonation, the physical shock had reached him and had,
as it were, awakened him; he started up abruptly, crossed the room,
and at the instant when Enjolras repeated his appeal: "Does no one
volunteer?" the old man was seen to make his appearance on the threshold
of the wine-shop. His presence produced a sort of commotion in the
different groups. A shout went up:--

"It is the voter! It is the member of the Convention! It is the
representative of the people!"

It is probable that he did not hear them.

He strode straight up to Enjolras, the insurgents withdrawing before him
with a religious fear; he tore the flag from Enjolras, who recoiled in
amazement and then, since no one dared to stop or to assist him, this
old man of eighty, with shaking head but firm foot, began slowly to
ascend the staircase of paving-stones arranged in the barricade. This
was so melancholy and so grand that all around him cried: "Off with your
hats!" At every step that he mounted, it was a frightful spectacle; his
white locks, his decrepit face, his lofty, bald, and wrinkled brow,
his amazed and open mouth, his aged arm upholding the red banner, rose
through the gloom and were enlarged in the bloody light of the torch,
and the bystanders thought that they beheld the spectre of '93 emerging
from the earth, with the flag of terror in his hand.

When he had reached the last step, when this trembling and terrible
phantom, erect on that pile of rubbish in the presence of twelve hundred
invisible guns, drew himself up in the face of death and as though
he were more powerful than it, the whole barricade assumed amid the
darkness, a supernatural and colossal form.

There ensued one of those silences which occur only in the presence of
prodigies. In the midst of this silence, the old man waved the red flag
and shouted:--

"Long live the Revolution! Long live the Republic! Fraternity! Equality!
and Death!"

Those in the barricade heard a low and rapid whisper, like the murmur
of a priest who is despatching a prayer in haste. It was probably the
commissary of police who was making the legal summons at the other end
of the street.

Then the same piercing voice which had shouted: "Who goes there?"
shouted:--

"Retire!"

M. Mabeuf, pale, haggard, his eyes lighted up with the mournful flame of
aberration, raised the flag above his head and repeated:--

"Long live the Republic!"

"Fire!" said the voice.

A second discharge, similar to the first, rained down upon the
barricade.

The old man fell on his knees, then rose again, dropped the flag
and fell backwards on the pavement, like a log, at full length, with
outstretched arms.

Rivulets of blood flowed beneath him. His aged head, pale and sad,
seemed to be gazing at the sky.

One of those emotions which are superior to man, which make him forget
even to defend himself, seized upon the insurgents, and they approached
the body with respectful awe.

"What men these regicides were!" said Enjolras.

Courfeyrac bent down to Enjolras' ear:--

"This is for yourself alone, I do not wish to dampen the enthusiasm. But
this man was anything rather than a regicide. I knew him. His name was
Father Mabeuf. I do not know what was the matter with him to-day. But he
was a brave blockhead. Just look at his head."

"The head of a blockhead and the heart of a Brutus," replied Enjolras.

Then he raised his voice:--

"Citizens! This is the example which the old give to the young. We
hesitated, he came! We were drawing back, he advanced! This is what
those who are trembling with age teach to those who tremble with fear!
This aged man is august in the eyes of his country. He has had a long
life and a magnificent death! Now, let us place the body under cover,
that each one of us may defend this old man dead as he would his
father living, and may his presence in our midst render the barricade
impregnable!"

A murmur of gloomy and energetic assent followed these words.

Enjolras bent down, raised the old man's head, and fierce as he was, he
kissed him on the brow, then, throwing wide his arms, and handling this
dead man with tender precaution, as though he feared to hurt it, he
removed his coat, showed the bloody holes in it to all, and said:--

"This is our flag now."




CHAPTER III--GAVROCHE WOULD HAVE DONE BETTER TO ACCEPT ENJOLRAS' CARBINE

They threw a long black shawl of Widow Hucheloup's over Father Mabeuf.
Six men made a litter of their guns; on this they laid the body, and
bore it, with bared heads, with solemn slowness, to the large table in
the tap-room.

These men, wholly absorbed in the grave and sacred task in which they
were engaged, thought no more of the perilous situation in which they
stood.

When the corpse passed near Javert, who was still impassive, Enjolras
said to the spy:--

"It will be your turn presently!"

During all this time, Little Gavroche, who alone had not quitted his
post, but had remained on guard, thought he espied some men stealthily
approaching the barricade. All at once he shouted:--

"Look out!"

Courfeyrac, Enjolras, Jean Prouvaire, Combeferre, Joly, Bahorel,
Bossuet, and all the rest ran tumultuously from the wine-shop. It was
almost too late. They saw a glistening density of bayonets undulating
above the barricade. Municipal guards of lofty stature were making
their way in, some striding over the omnibus, others through the cut,
thrusting before them the urchin, who retreated, but did not flee.

The moment was critical. It was that first, redoubtable moment of
inundation, when the stream rises to the level of the levee and when the
water begins to filter through the fissures of dike. A second more and
the barricade would have been taken.

Bahorel dashed upon the first municipal guard who was entering, and
killed him on the spot with a blow from his gun; the second killed
Bahorel with a blow from his bayonet. Another had already overthrown
Courfeyrac, who was shouting: "Follow me!" The largest of all, a sort of
colossus, marched on Gavroche with his bayonet fixed. The urchin took in
his arms Javert's immense gun, levelled it resolutely at the giant, and
fired. No discharge followed. Javert's gun was not loaded. The municipal
guard burst into a laugh and raised his bayonet at the child.

Before the bayonet had touched Gavroche, the gun slipped from the
soldier's grasp, a bullet had struck the municipal guardsman in the
centre of the forehead, and he fell over on his back. A second bullet
struck the other guard, who had assaulted Courfeyrac in the breast, and
laid him low on the pavement.

This was the work of Marius, who had just entered the barricade.




CHAPTER IV--THE BARREL OF POWDER

Marius, still concealed in the turn of the Rue Mondetour, had witnessed,
shuddering and irresolute, the first phase of the combat. But he had not
long been able to resist that mysterious and sovereign vertigo which may
be designated as the call of the abyss. In the presence of the imminence
of the peril, in the presence of the death of M. Mabeuf, that melancholy
enigma, in the presence of Bahorel killed, and Courfeyrac shouting:
"Follow me!" of that child threatened, of his friends to succor or to
avenge, all hesitation had vanished, and he had flung himself into the
conflict, his two pistols in hand. With his first shot he had saved
Gavroche, and with the second delivered Courfeyrac.

Amid the sound of the shots, amid the cries of the assaulted guards,
the assailants had climbed the entrenchment, on whose summit Municipal
Guards, soldiers of the line and National Guards from the suburbs could
now be seen, gun in hand, rearing themselves to more than half the
height of their bodies.

They already covered more than two-thirds of the barrier, but they did
not leap into the enclosure, as though wavering in the fear of some
trap. They gazed into the dark barricade as one would gaze into a lion's
den. The light of the torch illuminated only their bayonets, their
bear-skin caps, and the upper part of their uneasy and angry faces.

Marius had no longer any weapons; he had flung away his discharged
pistols after firing them; but he had caught sight of the barrel of
powder in the tap-room, near the door.

As he turned half round, gazing in that direction, a soldier took aim at
him. At the moment when the soldier was sighting Marius, a hand was laid
on the muzzle of the gun and obstructed it. This was done by some one
who had darted forward,--the young workman in velvet trousers. The shot
sped, traversed the hand and possibly, also, the workman, since he fell,
but the ball did not strike Marius. All this, which was rather to be
apprehended than seen through the smoke, Marius, who was entering the
tap-room, hardly noticed. Still, he had, in a confused way, perceived
that gun-barrel aimed at him, and the hand which had blocked it, and he
had heard the discharge. But in moments like this, the things which one
sees vacillate and are precipitated, and one pauses for nothing. One
feels obscurely impelled towards more darkness still, and all is cloud.

The insurgents, surprised but not terrified, had rallied. Enjolras had
shouted: "Wait! Don't fire at random!" In the first confusion, they
might, in fact, wound each other. The majority of them had ascended
to the window on the first story and to the attic windows, whence they
commanded the assailants.

The most determined, with Enjolras, Courfeyrac, Jean Prouvaire, and
Combeferre, had proudly placed themselves with their backs against the
houses at the rear, unsheltered and facing the ranks of soldiers and
guards who crowned the barricade.

All this was accomplished without haste, with that strange and
threatening gravity which precedes engagements. They took aim, point
blank, on both sides: they were so close that they could talk together
without raising their voices.

When they had reached this point where the spark is on the brink of
darting forth, an officer in a gorget extended his sword and said:--

"Lay down your arms!"

"Fire!" replied Enjolras.

The two discharges took place at the same moment, and all disappeared in
smoke.

An acrid and stifling smoke in which dying and wounded lay with weak,
dull groans. When the smoke cleared away, the combatants on both sides
could be seen to be thinned out, but still in the same positions,
reloading in silence. All at once, a thundering voice was heard,
shouting:--

"Be off with you, or I'll blow up the barricade!"

All turned in the direction whence the voice proceeded.

Marius had entered the tap-room, and had seized the barrel of powder,
then he had taken advantage of the smoke, and the sort of obscure mist
which filled the entrenched enclosure, to glide along the barricade as
far as that cage of paving-stones where the torch was fixed. To tear
it from the torch, to replace it by the barrel of powder, to thrust the
pile of stones under the barrel, which was instantly staved in, with
a sort of horrible obedience,--all this had cost Marius but the time
necessary to stoop and rise again; and now all, National Guards,
Municipal Guards, officers, soldiers, huddled at the other extremity of
the barricade, gazed stupidly at him, as he stood with his foot on the
stones, his torch in his hand, his haughty face illuminated by a fatal
resolution, drooping the flame of the torch towards that redoubtable
pile where they could make out the broken barrel of powder, and giving
vent to that startling cry:--

"Be off with you, or I'll blow up the barricade!"

Marius on that barricade after the octogenarian was the vision of the
young revolution after the apparition of the old.

"Blow up the barricade!" said a sergeant, "and yourself with it!"

Marius retorted: "And myself also."

And he dropped the torch towards the barrel of powder.

But there was no longer any one on the barrier. The assailants,
abandoning their dead and wounded, flowed back pell-mell and in disorder
towards the extremity of the street, and there were again lost in the
night. It was a headlong flight.

The barricade was free.




CHAPTER V--END OF THE VERSES OF JEAN PROUVAIRE

All flocked around Marius. Courfeyrac flung himself on his neck.

"Here you are!"

"What luck!" said Combeferre.

"You came in opportunely!" ejaculated Bossuet.

"If it had not been for you, I should have been dead!" began Courfeyrac
again.

"If it had not been for you, I should have been gobbled up!" added
Gavroche.

Marius asked:--

"Where is the chief?"

"You are he!" said Enjolras.

Marius had had a furnace in his brain all day long; now it was a
whirlwind. This whirlwind which was within him, produced on him the
effect of being outside of him and of bearing him away. It seemed to him
that he was already at an immense distance from life. His two luminous
months of joy and love, ending abruptly at that frightful precipice,
Cosette lost to him, that barricade, M. Mabeuf getting himself killed
for the Republic, himself the leader of the insurgents,--all these
things appeared to him like a tremendous nightmare. He was obliged to
make a mental effort to recall the fact that all that surrounded him was
real. Marius had already seen too much of life not to know that nothing
is more imminent than the impossible, and that what it is always
necessary to foresee is the unforeseen. He had looked on at his own
drama as a piece which one does not understand.

In the mists which enveloped his thoughts, he did not recognize Javert,
who, bound to his post, had not so much as moved his head during the
whole of the attack on the barricade, and who had gazed on the revolt
seething around him with the resignation of a martyr and the majesty of
a judge. Marius had not even seen him.

In the meanwhile, the assailants did not stir, they could be heard
marching and swarming through at the end of the street but they did not
venture into it, either because they were awaiting orders or because
they were awaiting reinforcements before hurling themselves afresh on
this impregnable redoubt. The insurgents had posted sentinels, and some
of them, who were medical students, set about caring for the wounded.

They had thrown the tables out of the wine-shop, with the exception of
the two tables reserved for lint and cartridges, and of the one on
which lay Father Mabeuf; they had added them to the barricade, and had
replaced them in the tap-room with mattresses from the bed of the
widow Hucheloup and her servants. On these mattresses they had laid the
wounded. As for the three poor creatures who inhabited Corinthe, no one
knew what had become of them. They were finally found, however, hidden
in the cellar.

A poignant emotion clouded the joy of the disencumbered barricade.

The roll was called. One of the insurgents was missing. And who was
it? One of the dearest. One of the most valiant. Jean Prouvaire. He
was sought among the wounded, he was not there. He was sought among the
dead, he was not there. He was evidently a prisoner. Combeferre said to
Enjolras:--

"They have our friend; we have their agent. Are you set on the death of
that spy?"

"Yes," replied Enjolras; "but less so than on the life of Jean
Prouvaire."

This took place in the tap-room near Javert's post.

"Well," resumed Combeferre, "I am going to fasten my handkerchief to
my cane, and go as a flag of truce, to offer to exchange our man for
theirs."

"Listen," said Enjolras, laying his hand on Combeferre's arm.

At the end of the street there was a significant clash of arms.

They heard a manly voice shout:--

"Vive la France! Long live France! Long live the future!"

They recognized the voice of Prouvaire.

A flash passed, a report rang out.

Silence fell again.

"They have killed him," exclaimed Combeferre.

Enjolras glanced at Javert, and said to him:--

"Your friends have just shot you."




CHAPTER VI--THE AGONY OF DEATH AFTER THE AGONY OF LIFE

A peculiarity of this species of war is, that the attack of the
barricades is almost always made from the front, and that the assailants
generally abstain from turning the position, either because they
fear ambushes, or because they are afraid of getting entangled in the
tortuous streets. The insurgents' whole attention had been directed,
therefore, to the grand barricade, which was, evidently, the spot always
menaced, and there the struggle would infallibly recommence. But Marius
thought of the little barricade, and went thither. It was deserted and
guarded only by the fire-pot which trembled between the paving-stones.
Moreover, the Mondetour alley, and the branches of the Rue de la Petite
Truanderie and the Rue du Cygne were profoundly calm.

As Marius was withdrawing, after concluding his inspection, he heard his
name pronounced feebly in the darkness.

"Monsieur Marius!"

He started, for he recognized the voice which had called to him two
hours before through the gate in the Rue Plumet.

Only, the voice now seemed to be nothing more than a breath.

He looked about him, but saw no one.

Marius thought he had been mistaken, that it was an illusion added by
his mind to the extraordinary realities which were clashing around
him. He advanced a step, in order to quit the distant recess where the
barricade lay.

"Monsieur Marius!" repeated the voice.

This time he could not doubt that he had heard it distinctly; he looked
and saw nothing.

"At your feet," said the voice.

He bent down, and saw in the darkness a form which was dragging itself
towards him.

It was crawling along the pavement. It was this that had spoken to him.

The fire-pot allowed him to distinguish a blouse, torn trousers of
coarse velvet, bare feet, and something which resembled a pool of blood.
Marius indistinctly made out a pale head which was lifted towards him
and which was saying to him:--

"You do not recognize me?"

"No."

"Eponine."

Marius bent hastily down. It was, in fact, that unhappy child. She was
dressed in men's clothes.

"How come you here? What are you doing here?"

"I am dying," said she.

There are words and incidents which arouse dejected beings. Marius cried
out with a start:--

"You are wounded! Wait, I will carry you into the room! They will attend
to you there. Is it serious? How must I take hold of you in order not
to hurt you? Where do you suffer? Help! My God! But why did you come
hither?"

And he tried to pass his arm under her, in order to raise her.

She uttered a feeble cry.

"Have I hurt you?" asked Marius.

"A little."

"But I only touched your hand."

She raised her hand to Marius, and in the middle of that hand Marius saw
a black hole.

"What is the matter with your hand?" said he.

"It is pierced."

"Pierced?"

"Yes."

"What with?"

"A bullet."

"How?"

"Did you see a gun aimed at you?"

"Yes, and a hand stopping it."

"It was mine."

Marius was seized with a shudder.

"What madness! Poor child! But so much the better, if that is all, it is
nothing, let me carry you to a bed. They will dress your wound; one does
not die of a pierced hand."

She murmured:--

"The bullet traversed my hand, but it came out through my back. It is
useless to remove me from this spot. I will tell you how you can care
for me better than any surgeon. Sit down near me on this stone."

He obeyed; she laid her head on Marius' knees, and, without looking at
him, she said:--

"Oh! How good this is! How comfortable this is! There; I no longer
suffer."

She remained silent for a moment, then she turned her face with an
effort, and looked at Marius.

"Do you know what, Monsieur Marius? It puzzled me because you entered
that garden; it was stupid, because it was I who showed you that house;
and then, I ought to have said to myself that a young man like you--"

She paused, and overstepping the sombre transitions that undoubtedly
existed in her mind, she resumed with a heartrending smile:--

"You thought me ugly, didn't you?"

She continued:--

"You see, you are lost! Now, no one can get out of the barricade. It was
I who led you here, by the way! You are going to die, I count upon that.
And yet, when I saw them taking aim at you, I put my hand on the muzzle
of the gun. How queer it is! But it was because I wanted to die before
you. When I received that bullet, I dragged myself here, no one saw
me, no one picked me up, I was waiting for you, I said: 'So he is not
coming!' Oh, if you only knew. I bit my blouse, I suffered so! Now I am
well. Do you remember the day I entered your chamber and when I
looked at myself in your mirror, and the day when I came to you on the
boulevard near the washerwomen? How the birds sang! That was a long time
ago. You gave me a hundred sous, and I said to you: 'I don't want your
money.' I hope you picked up your coin? You are not rich. I did not
think to tell you to pick it up. The sun was shining bright, and it was
not cold. Do you remember, Monsieur Marius? Oh! How happy I am! Every
one is going to die."

She had a mad, grave, and heart-breaking air. Her torn blouse disclosed
her bare throat.

As she talked, she pressed her pierced hand to her breast, where there
was another hole, and whence there spurted from moment to moment a
stream of blood, like a jet of wine from an open bung-hole.

Marius gazed at this unfortunate creature with profound compassion.

"Oh!" she resumed, "it is coming again, I am stifling!"

She caught up her blouse and bit it, and her limbs stiffened on the
pavement.

At that moment the young cock's crow executed by little Gavroche
resounded through the barricade.

The child had mounted a table to load his gun, and was singing gayly the
song then so popular:--


   "En voyant Lafayette,             "On beholding Lafayette,
    Le gendarme repete:--             The gendarme repeats:--
    Sauvons nous! sauvons nous!       Let us flee! let us flee!
          sauvons nous!"                     let us flee!


Eponine raised herself and listened; then she murmured:--

"It is he."

And turning to Marius:--

"My brother is here. He must not see me. He would scold me."

"Your brother?" inquired Marius, who was meditating in the most bitter
and sorrowful depths of his heart on the duties to the Thenardiers which
his father had bequeathed to him; "who is your brother?"

"That little fellow."

"The one who is singing?"

"Yes."

Marius made a movement.

"Oh! don't go away," said she, "it will not be long now."

She was sitting almost upright, but her voice was very low and broken by
hiccoughs.

At intervals, the death rattle interrupted her. She put her face as near
that of Marius as possible. She added with a strange expression:--

"Listen, I do not wish to play you a trick. I have a letter in my pocket
for you. I was told to put it in the post. I kept it. I did not want to
have it reach you. But perhaps you will be angry with me for it when we
meet again presently? Take your letter."

She grasped Marius' hand convulsively with her pierced hand, but she no
longer seemed to feel her sufferings. She put Marius' hand in the pocket
of her blouse. There, in fact, Marius felt a paper.

"Take it," said she.

Marius took the letter.

She made a sign of satisfaction and contentment.

"Now, for my trouble, promise me--"

And she stopped.

"What?" asked Marius.

"Promise me!"

"I promise."

"Promise to give me a kiss on my brow when I am dead.--I shall feel it."

She dropped her head again on Marius' knees, and her eyelids closed. He
thought the poor soul had departed. Eponine remained motionless. All
at once, at the very moment when Marius fancied her asleep forever, she
slowly opened her eyes in which appeared the sombre profundity of death,
and said to him in a tone whose sweetness seemed already to proceed from
another world:--

"And by the way, Monsieur Marius, I believe that I was a little bit in
love with you."

She tried to smile once more and expired.




CHAPTER VII--GAVROCHE AS A PROFOUND CALCULATOR OF DISTANCES

Marius kept his promise. He dropped a kiss on that livid brow, where the
icy perspiration stood in beads.

This was no infidelity to Cosette; it was a gentle and pensive farewell
to an unhappy soul.

It was not without a tremor that he had taken the letter which Eponine
had given him. He had immediately felt that it was an event of weight.
He was impatient to read it. The heart of man is so constituted that the
unhappy child had hardly closed her eyes when Marius began to think of
unfolding this paper.

He laid her gently on the ground, and went away. Something told him that
he could not peruse that letter in the presence of that body.

He drew near to a candle in the tap-room. It was a small note, folded
and sealed with a woman's elegant care. The address was in a woman's
hand and ran:--

"To Monsieur, Monsieur Marius Pontmercy, at M. Courfeyrac's, Rue de la
Verrerie, No. 16."

He broke the seal and read:--

 "My dearest, alas! my father insists on our setting out immediately.
 We shall be this evening in the Rue de l'Homme Arme, No. 7.
 In a week we shall be in England.  COSETTE.  June 4th."

Such was the innocence of their love that Marius was not even acquainted
with Cosette's handwriting.

What had taken place may be related in a few words. Eponine had been
the cause of everything. After the evening of the 3d of June she had
cherished a double idea, to defeat the projects of her father and the
ruffians on the house of the Rue Plumet, and to separate Marius and
Cosette. She had exchanged rags with the first young scamp she came
across who had thought it amusing to dress like a woman, while Eponine
disguised herself like a man. It was she who had conveyed to Jean
Valjean in the Champ de Mars the expressive warning: "Leave your house."
Jean Valjean had, in fact, returned home, and had said to Cosette:
"We set out this evening and we go to the Rue de l'Homme Arme with
Toussaint. Next week, we shall be in London." Cosette, utterly
overwhelmed by this unexpected blow, had hastily penned a couple of
lines to Marius. But how was she to get the letter to the post? She
never went out alone, and Toussaint, surprised at such a commission,
would certainly show the letter to M. Fauchelevent. In this dilemma,
Cosette had caught sight through the fence of Eponine in man's clothes,
who now prowled incessantly around the garden. Cosette had called to
"this young workman" and had handed him five francs and the letter,
saying: "Carry this letter immediately to its address." Eponine had put
the letter in her pocket. The next day, on the 5th of June, she went
to Courfeyrac's quarters to inquire for Marius, not for the purpose of
delivering the letter, but,--a thing which every jealous and loving soul
will comprehend,--"to see." There she had waited for Marius, or at least
for Courfeyrac, still for the purpose of seeing. When Courfeyrac had
told her: "We are going to the barricades," an idea flashed through her
mind, to fling herself into that death, as she would have done into any
other, and to thrust Marius into it also. She had followed Courfeyrac,
had made sure of the locality where the barricade was in process of
construction; and, quite certain, since Marius had received no warning,
and since she had intercepted the letter, that he would go at dusk to
his trysting place for every evening, she had betaken herself to the Rue
Plumet, had there awaited Marius, and had sent him, in the name of his
friends, the appeal which would, she thought, lead him to the barricade.
She reckoned on Marius' despair when he should fail to find Cosette; she
was not mistaken. She had returned to the Rue de la Chanvrerie herself.
What she did there the reader has just seen. She died with the tragic
joy of jealous hearts who drag the beloved being into their own death,
and who say: "No one shall have him!"

Marius covered Cosette's letter with kisses. So she loved him! For one
moment the idea occurred to him that he ought not to die now. Then
he said to himself: "She is going away. Her father is taking her to
England, and my grandfather refuses his consent to the marriage. Nothing
is changed in our fates." Dreamers like Marius are subject to supreme
attacks of dejection, and desperate resolves are the result. The fatigue
of living is insupportable; death is sooner over with. Then he reflected
that he had still two duties to fulfil: to inform Cosette of his
death and send her a final farewell, and to save from the impending
catastrophe which was in preparation, that poor child, Eponine's brother
and Thenardier's son.

He had a pocket-book about him; the same one which had contained
the note-book in which he had inscribed so many thoughts of love for
Cosette. He tore out a leaf and wrote on it a few lines in pencil:--

"Our marriage was impossible. I asked my grandfather, he refused; I have
no fortune, neither hast thou. I hastened to thee, thou wert no longer
there. Thou knowest the promise that I gave thee, I shall keep it. I
die. I love thee. When thou readest this, my soul will be near thee, and
thou wilt smile."

Having nothing wherewith to seal this letter, he contented himself with
folding the paper in four, and added the address:--

"To Mademoiselle Cosette Fauchelevent, at M. Fauchelevent's, Rue de
l'Homme Arme, No. 7."

Having folded the letter, he stood in thought for a moment, drew out
his pocket-book again, opened it, and wrote, with the same pencil, these
four lines on the first page:--

"My name is Marius Pontmercy. Carry my body to my grandfather, M.
Gillenormand, Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, No. 6, in the Marais."

He put his pocketbook back in his pocket, then he called Gavroche.

The gamin, at the sound of Marius' voice, ran up to him with his merry
and devoted air.

"Will you do something for me?"

"Anything," said Gavroche. "Good God! if it had not been for you, I
should have been done for."

"Do you see this letter?"

"Yes."

"Take it. Leave the barricade instantly" (Gavroche began to scratch his
ear uneasily) "and to-morrow morning, you will deliver it at its address
to Mademoiselle Cosette, at M. Fauchelevent's, Rue de l'Homme Arme, No.
7."

The heroic child replied

"Well, but! in the meanwhile the barricade will be taken, and I shall
not be there."

"The barricade will not be attacked until daybreak, according to all
appearances, and will not be taken before to-morrow noon."

The fresh respite which the assailants were granting to the barricade
had, in fact, been prolonged. It was one of those intermissions which
frequently occur in nocturnal combats, which are always followed by an
increase of rage.

"Well," said Gavroche, "what if I were to go and carry your letter
to-morrow?"

"It will be too late. The barricade will probably be blockaded, all
the streets will be guarded, and you will not be able to get out. Go at
once."

Gavroche could think of no reply to this, and stood there in indecision,
scratching his ear sadly.

All at once, he took the letter with one of those birdlike movements
which were common with him.

"All right," said he.

And he started off at a run through Mondetour lane.

An idea had occurred to Gavroche which had brought him to a decision,
but he had not mentioned it for fear that Marius might offer some
objection to it.

This was the idea:--

"It is barely midnight, the Rue de l'Homme Arme is not far off; I will
go and deliver the letter at once, and I shall get back in time."




BOOK FIFTEENTH.--THE RUE DE L'HOMME ARME




CHAPTER I--A DRINKER IS A BABBLER

What are the convulsions of a city in comparison with the insurrections
of the soul? Man is a depth still greater than the people. Jean Valjean
at that very moment was the prey of a terrible upheaval. Every sort of
gulf had opened again within him. He also was trembling, like Paris,
on the brink of an obscure and formidable revolution. A few hours
had sufficed to bring this about. His destiny and his conscience had
suddenly been covered with gloom. Of him also, as well as of Paris, it
might have been said: "Two principles are face to face. The white angel
and the black angel are about to seize each other on the bridge of the
abyss. Which of the two will hurl the other over? Who will carry the
day?"

On the evening preceding this same 5th of June, Jean Valjean,
accompanied by Cosette and Toussaint had installed himself in the Rue de
l'Homme Arme. A change awaited him there.

Cosette had not quitted the Rue Plumet without making an effort at
resistance. For the first time since they had lived side by side,
Cosette's will and the will of Jean Valjean had proved to be distinct,
and had been in opposition, at least, if they had not clashed. There had
been objections on one side and inflexibility on the other. The abrupt
advice: "Leave your house," hurled at Jean Valjean by a stranger, had
alarmed him to the extent of rendering him peremptory. He thought that
he had been traced and followed. Cosette had been obliged to give way.

Both had arrived in the Rue de l'Homme Arme without opening their lips,
and without uttering a word, each being absorbed in his own personal
preoccupation; Jean Valjean so uneasy that he did not notice Cosette's
sadness, Cosette so sad that she did not notice Jean Valjean's
uneasiness.

Jean Valjean had taken Toussaint with him, a thing which he had never
done in his previous absences. He perceived the possibility of not
returning to the Rue Plumet, and he could neither leave Toussaint behind
nor confide his secret to her. Besides, he felt that she was devoted and
trustworthy. Treachery between master and servant begins in curiosity.
Now Toussaint, as though she had been destined to be Jean Valjean's
servant, was not curious. She stammered in her peasant dialect of
Barneville: "I am made so; I do my work; the rest is no affair of mine."

In this departure from the Rue Plumet, which had been almost a flight,
Jean Valjean had carried away nothing but the little embalmed valise,
baptized by Cosette "the inseparable." Full trunks would have required
porters, and porters are witnesses. A fiacre had been summoned to the
door on the Rue de Babylone, and they had taken their departure.

It was with difficulty that Toussaint had obtained permission to pack up
a little linen and clothes and a few toilet articles. Cosette had taken
only her portfolio and her blotting-book.

Jean Valjean, with a view to augmenting the solitude and the mystery of
this departure, had arranged to quit the pavilion of the Rue Plumet only
at dusk, which had allowed Cosette time to write her note to Marius.
They had arrived in the Rue de l'Homme Arme after night had fully
fallen.

They had gone to bed in silence.

The lodgings in the Rue de l'Homme Arme were situated on a back
court, on the second floor, and were composed of two sleeping-rooms, a
dining-room and a kitchen adjoining the dining-room, with a garret
where there was a folding-bed, and which fell to Toussaint's share. The
dining-room was an antechamber as well, and separated the two bedrooms.
The apartment was provided with all necessary utensils.

People re-acquire confidence as foolishly as they lose it; human nature
is so constituted. Hardly had Jean Valjean reached the Rue de l'Homme
Arme when his anxiety was lightened and by degrees dissipated. There
are soothing spots which act in some sort mechanically on the mind.
An obscure street, peaceable inhabitants. Jean Valjean experienced an
indescribable contagion of tranquillity in that alley of ancient Paris,
which is so narrow that it is barred against carriages by a transverse
beam placed on two posts, which is deaf and dumb in the midst of the
clamorous city, dimly lighted at mid-day, and is, so to speak, incapable
of emotions between two rows of lofty houses centuries old, which hold
their peace like ancients as they are. There was a touch of stagnant
oblivion in that street. Jean Valjean drew his breath once more there.
How could he be found there?

His first care was to place the inseparable beside him.

He slept well. Night brings wisdom; we may add, night soothes. On the
following morning he awoke in a mood that was almost gay. He thought the
dining-room charming, though it was hideous, furnished with an old round
table, a long sideboard surmounted by a slanting mirror, a dilapidated
arm-chair, and several plain chairs which were encumbered with
Toussaint's packages. In one of these packages Jean Valjean's uniform of
a National Guard was visible through a rent.

As for Cosette, she had had Toussaint take some broth to her room, and
did not make her appearance until evening.

About five o'clock, Toussaint, who was going and coming and busying
herself with the tiny establishment, set on the table a cold chicken,
which Cosette, out of deference to her father, consented to glance at.

That done, Cosette, under the pretext of an obstinate sick headache,
had bade Jean Valjean good night and had shut herself up in her chamber.
Jean Valjean had eaten a wing of the chicken with a good appetite, and
with his elbows on the table, having gradually recovered his serenity,
had regained possession of his sense of security.

While he was discussing this modest dinner, he had, twice or thrice,
noticed in a confused way, Toussaint's stammering words as she said
to him: "Monsieur, there is something going on, they are fighting in
Paris." But absorbed in a throng of inward calculations, he had paid no
heed to it. To tell the truth, he had not heard her. He rose and began
to pace from the door to the window and from the window to the door,
growing ever more serene.

With this calm, Cosette, his sole anxiety, recurred to his thoughts. Not
that he was troubled by this headache, a little nervous crisis, a young
girl's fit of sulks, the cloud of a moment, there would be nothing left
of it in a day or two; but he meditated on the future, and, as was his
habit, he thought of it with pleasure. After all, he saw no obstacle to
their happy life resuming its course. At certain hours, everything seems
impossible, at others everything appears easy; Jean Valjean was in the
midst of one of these good hours. They generally succeed the bad
ones, as day follows night, by virtue of that law of succession and
of contrast which lies at the very foundation of nature, and which
superficial minds call antithesis. In this peaceful street where he had
taken refuge, Jean Valjean got rid of all that had been troubling him
for some time past. This very fact, that he had seen many shadows, made
him begin to perceive a little azure. To have quitted the Rue
Plumet without complications or incidents was one good step already
accomplished. Perhaps it would be wise to go abroad, if only for a few
months, and to set out for London. Well, they would go. What difference
did it make to him whether he was in France or in England, provided he
had Cosette beside him? Cosette was his nation. Cosette sufficed for
his happiness; the idea that he, perhaps, did not suffice for Cosette's
happiness, that idea which had formerly been the cause of his fever
and sleeplessness, did not even present itself to his mind. He was in a
state of collapse from all his past sufferings, and he was fully entered
on optimism. Cosette was by his side, she seemed to be his; an optical
illusion which every one has experienced. He arranged in his own mind,
with all sorts of felicitous devices, his departure for England with
Cosette, and he beheld his felicity reconstituted wherever he pleased,
in the perspective of his revery.

As he paced to and fro with long strides, his glance suddenly
encountered something strange.

In the inclined mirror facing him which surmounted the sideboard, he saw
the four lines which follow:--

"My dearest, alas! my father insists on our setting out immediately. We
shall be this evening in the Rue de l'Homme Arme, No. 7. In a week we
shall be in England. COSETTE. June 4th."

Jean Valjean halted, perfectly haggard.

Cosette on her arrival had placed her blotting-book on the sideboard in
front of the mirror, and, utterly absorbed in her agony of grief, had
forgotten it and left it there, without even observing that she had left
it wide open, and open at precisely the page on which she had laid to
dry the four lines which she had penned, and which she had given in
charge of the young workman in the Rue Plumet. The writing had been
printed off on the blotter.

The mirror reflected the writing.

The result was, what is called in geometry, the symmetrical image; so
that the writing, reversed on the blotter, was righted in the mirror and
presented its natural appearance; and Jean Valjean had beneath his eyes
the letter written by Cosette to Marius on the preceding evening.

It was simple and withering.

Jean Valjean stepped up to the mirror. He read the four lines again, but
he did not believe them. They produced on him the effect of appearing in
a flash of lightning. It was a hallucination, it was impossible. It was
not so.

Little by little, his perceptions became more precise; he looked at
Cosette's blotting-book, and the consciousness of the reality returned
to him. He caught up the blotter and said: "It comes from there."
He feverishly examined the four lines imprinted on the blotter, the
reversal of the letters converted into an odd scrawl, and he saw no
sense in it. Then he said to himself: "But this signifies nothing; there
is nothing written here." And he drew a long breath with inexpressible
relief. Who has not experienced those foolish joys in horrible instants?
The soul does not surrender to despair until it has exhausted all
illusions.

He held the blotter in his hand and contemplated it in stupid delight,
almost ready to laugh at the hallucination of which he had been the
dupe. All at once his eyes fell upon the mirror again, and again he
beheld the vision. There were the four lines outlined with inexorable
clearness. This time it was no mirage. The recurrence of a vision is a
reality; it was palpable, it was the writing restored in the mirror. He
understood.

Jean Valjean tottered, dropped the blotter, and fell into the old
arm-chair beside the buffet, with drooping head, and glassy eyes, in
utter bewilderment. He told himself that it was plain, that the light of
the world had been eclipsed forever, and that Cosette had written that
to some one. Then he heard his soul, which had become terrible once
more, give vent to a dull roar in the gloom. Try then the effect of
taking from the lion the dog which he has in his cage!

Strange and sad to say, at that very moment, Marius had not yet received
Cosette's letter; chance had treacherously carried it to Jean Valjean
before delivering it to Marius. Up to that day, Jean Valjean had not
been vanquished by trial. He had been subjected to fearful proofs; no
violence of bad fortune had been spared him; the ferocity of fate, armed
with all vindictiveness and all social scorn, had taken him for her prey
and had raged against him. He had accepted every extremity when it had
been necessary; he had sacrificed his inviolability as a reformed man,
had yielded up his liberty, risked his head, lost everything, suffered
everything, and he had remained disinterested and stoical to such a
point that he might have been thought to be absent from himself like a
martyr. His conscience inured to every assault of destiny, might have
appeared to be forever impregnable. Well, any one who had beheld his
spiritual self would have been obliged to concede that it weakened at
that moment. It was because, of all the tortures which he had undergone
in the course of this long inquisition to which destiny had doomed him,
this was the most terrible. Never had such pincers seized him hitherto.
He felt the mysterious stirring of all his latent sensibilities. He felt
the plucking at the strange chord. Alas! the supreme trial, let us say
rather, the only trial, is the loss of the beloved being.

Poor old Jean Valjean certainly did not love Cosette otherwise than as
a father; but we have already remarked, above, that into this paternity
the widowhood of his life had introduced all the shades of love; he
loved Cosette as his daughter, and he loved her as his mother, and he
loved her as his sister; and, as he had never had either a woman to
love or a wife, as nature is a creditor who accepts no protest, that
sentiment also, the most impossible to lose, was mingled with the
rest, vague, ignorant, pure with the purity of blindness, unconscious,
celestial, angelic, divine; less like a sentiment than like an instinct,
less like an instinct than like an imperceptible and invisible but real
attraction; and love, properly speaking, was, in his immense tenderness
for Cosette, like the thread of gold in the mountain, concealed and
virgin.

Let the reader recall the situation of heart which we have already
indicated. No marriage was possible between them; not even that of
souls; and yet, it is certain that their destinies were wedded. With the
exception of Cosette, that is to say, with the exception of a childhood,
Jean Valjean had never, in the whole of his long life, known anything of
that which may be loved. The passions and loves which succeed each other
had not produced in him those successive green growths, tender green or
dark green, which can be seen in foliage which passes through the winter
and in men who pass fifty. In short, and we have insisted on it more
than once, all this interior fusion, all this whole, of which the sum
total was a lofty virtue, ended in rendering Jean Valjean a father to
Cosette. A strange father, forged from the grandfather, the son, the
brother, and the husband, that existed in Jean Valjean; a father in whom
there was included even a mother; a father who loved Cosette and adored
her, and who held that child as his light, his home, his family, his
country, his paradise.

Thus when he saw that the end had absolutely come, that she was escaping
from him, that she was slipping from his hands, that she was gliding
from him, like a cloud, like water, when he had before his eyes this
crushing proof: "another is the goal of her heart, another is the wish
of her life; there is a dearest one, I am no longer anything but her
father, I no longer exist"; when he could no longer doubt, when he
said to himself: "She is going away from me!" the grief which he felt
surpassed the bounds of possibility. To have done all that he had done
for the purpose of ending like this! And the very idea of being nothing!
Then, as we have just said, a quiver of revolt ran through him from
head to foot. He felt, even in the very roots of his hair, the immense
reawakening of egotism, and the _I_ in this man's abyss howled.

There is such a thing as the sudden giving way of the inward subsoil. A
despairing certainty does not make its way into a man without thrusting
aside and breaking certain profound elements which, in some cases, are
the very man himself. Grief, when it attains this shape, is a headlong
flight of all the forces of the conscience. These are fatal crises. Few
among us emerge from them still like ourselves and firm in duty. When
the limit of endurance is overstepped, the most imperturbable virtue is
disconcerted. Jean Valjean took the blotter again, and convinced himself
afresh; he remained bowed and as though petrified and with staring eyes,
over those four unobjectionable lines; and there arose within him such
a cloud that one might have thought that everything in this soul was
crumbling away.

He examined this revelation, athwart the exaggerations of revery, with
an apparent and terrifying calmness, for it is a fearful thing when a
man's calmness reaches the coldness of the statue.

He measured the terrible step which his destiny had taken without his
having a suspicion of the fact; he recalled his fears of the preceding
summer, so foolishly dissipated; he recognized the precipice, it was
still the same; only, Jean Valjean was no longer on the brink, he was at
the bottom of it.

The unprecedented and heart-rending thing about it was that he had
fallen without perceiving it. All the light of his life had departed,
while he still fancied that he beheld the sun.

His instinct did not hesitate. He put together certain circumstances,
certain dates, certain blushes and certain pallors on Cosette's part,
and he said to himself: "It is he."

The divination of despair is a sort of mysterious bow which never misses
its aim. He struck Marius with his first conjecture. He did not know the
name, but he found the man instantly. He distinctly perceived, in the
background of the implacable conjuration of his memories, the unknown
prowler of the Luxembourg, that wretched seeker of love adventures, that
idler of romance, that idiot, that coward, for it is cowardly to come
and make eyes at young girls who have beside them a father who loves
them.

After he had thoroughly verified the fact that this young man was at
the bottom of this situation, and that everything proceeded from that
quarter, he, Jean Valjean, the regenerated man, the man who had so
labored over his soul, the man who had made so many efforts to resolve
all life, all misery, and all unhappiness into love, looked into his own
breast and there beheld a spectre, Hate.

Great griefs contain something of dejection. They discourage one with
existence. The man into whom they enter feels something within him
withdraw from him. In his youth, their visits are lugubrious; later on
they are sinister. Alas, if despair is a fearful thing when the blood is
hot, when the hair is black, when the head is erect on the body like
the flame on the torch, when the roll of destiny still retains its full
thickness, when the heart, full of desirable love, still possesses beats
which can be returned to it, when one has time for redress, when all
women and all smiles and all the future and all the horizon are before
one, when the force of life is complete, what is it in old age, when
the years hasten on, growing ever paler, to that twilight hour when one
begins to behold the stars of the tomb?

While he was meditating, Toussaint entered. Jean Valjean rose and asked
her:--

"In what quarter is it? Do you know?"

Toussaint was struck dumb, and could only answer him:--

"What is it, sir?"

Jean Valjean began again: "Did you not tell me that just now that there
is fighting going on?"

"Ah! yes, sir," replied Toussaint. "It is in the direction of
Saint-Merry."

There is a mechanical movement which comes to us, unconsciously, from
the most profound depths of our thought. It was, no doubt, under
the impulse of a movement of this sort, and of which he was hardly
conscious, that Jean Valjean, five minutes later, found himself in the
street.

Bareheaded, he sat upon the stone post at the door of his house. He
seemed to be listening.

Night had come.




CHAPTER II--THE STREET URCHIN AN ENEMY OF LIGHT

How long did he remain thus? What was the ebb and flow of this tragic
meditation? Did he straighten up? Did he remain bowed? Had he been
bent to breaking? Could he still rise and regain his footing in his
conscience upon something solid? He probably would not have been able to
tell himself.

The street was deserted. A few uneasy bourgeois, who were rapidly
returning home, hardly saw him. Each one for himself in times of peril.
The lamp-lighter came as usual to light the lantern which was situated
precisely opposite the door of No. 7, and then went away. Jean Valjean
would not have appeared like a living man to any one who had examined
him in that shadow. He sat there on the post of his door, motionless as
a form of ice. There is congealment in despair. The alarm bells and
a vague and stormy uproar were audible. In the midst of all these
convulsions of the bell mingled with the revolt, the clock of Saint-Paul
struck eleven, gravely and without haste; for the tocsin is man; the
hour is God. The passage of the hour produced no effect on Jean Valjean;
Jean Valjean did not stir. Still, at about that moment, a brusque report
burst forth in the direction of the Halles, a second yet more violent
followed; it was probably that attack on the barricade in the Rue de la
Chanvrerie which we have just seen repulsed by Marius. At this double
discharge, whose fury seemed augmented by the stupor of the night, Jean
Valjean started; he rose, turning towards the quarter whence the noise
proceeded; then he fell back upon the post again, folded his arms, and
his head slowly sank on his bosom again.

He resumed his gloomy dialogue with himself.

All at once, he raised his eyes; some one was walking in the street, he
heard steps near him. He looked, and by the light of the lanterns, in
the direction of the street which ran into the Rue-aux-Archives, he
perceived a young, livid, and beaming face.

Gavroche had just arrived in the Rue l'Homme Arme.

Gavroche was staring into the air, apparently in search of something. He
saw Jean Valjean perfectly well but he took no notice of him.

Gavroche after staring into the air, stared below; he raised himself on
tiptoe, and felt of the doors and windows of the ground floor; they were
all shut, bolted, and padlocked. After having authenticated the fronts
of five or six barricaded houses in this manner, the urchin shrugged his
shoulders, and took himself to task in these terms:--

"Pardi!"

Then he began to stare into the air again.

Jean Valjean, who, an instant previously, in his then state of mind,
would not have spoken to or even answered any one, felt irresistibly
impelled to accost that child.

"What is the matter with you, my little fellow?" he said.

"The matter with me is that I am hungry," replied Gavroche frankly. And
he added: "Little fellow yourself."

Jean Valjean fumbled in his fob and pulled out a five-franc piece.

But Gavroche, who was of the wagtail species, and who skipped
vivaciously from one gesture to another, had just picked up a stone. He
had caught sight of the lantern.

"See here," said he, "you still have your lanterns here. You are
disobeying the regulations, my friend. This is disorderly. Smash that
for me."

And he flung the stone at the lantern, whose broken glass fell with
such a clatter that the bourgeois in hiding behind their curtains in the
opposite house cried: "There is 'Ninety-three' come again."

The lantern oscillated violently, and went out. The street had suddenly
become black.

"That's right, old street," ejaculated Gavroche, "put on your
night-cap."

And turning to Jean Valjean:--

"What do you call that gigantic monument that you have there at the end
of the street? It's the Archives, isn't it? I must crumble up those big
stupids of pillars a bit and make a nice barricade out of them."

Jean Valjean stepped up to Gavroche.

"Poor creature," he said in a low tone, and speaking to himself, "he is
hungry."

And he laid the hundred-sou piece in his hand.

Gavroche raised his face, astonished at the size of this sou; he stared
at it in the darkness, and the whiteness of the big sou dazzled him.
He knew five-franc pieces by hearsay; their reputation was agreeable to
him; he was delighted to see one close to. He said:--

"Let us contemplate the tiger."

He gazed at it for several minutes in ecstasy; then, turning to Jean
Valjean, he held out the coin to him, and said majestically to him:--

"Bourgeois, I prefer to smash lanterns. Take back your ferocious beast.
You can't bribe me. That has got five claws; but it doesn't scratch me."

"Have you a mother?" asked Jean Valjean.

Gavroche replied:--

"More than you have, perhaps."

"Well," returned Jean Valjean, "keep the money for your mother!"

Gavroche was touched. Moreover, he had just noticed that the man who was
addressing him had no hat, and this inspired him with confidence.

"Truly," said he, "so it wasn't to keep me from breaking the lanterns?"

"Break whatever you please."

"You're a fine man," said Gavroche.

And he put the five-franc piece into one of his pockets.

His confidence having increased, he added:--

"Do you belong in this street?"

"Yes, why?"

"Can you tell me where No. 7 is?"

"What do you want with No. 7?"

Here the child paused, he feared that he had said too much; he thrust
his nails energetically into his hair and contented himself with
replying:--

"Ah! Here it is."

An idea flashed through Jean Valjean's mind. Anguish does have these
gleams. He said to the lad:--

"Are you the person who is bringing a letter that I am expecting?"

"You?" said Gavroche. "You are not a woman."

"The letter is for Mademoiselle Cosette, is it not?"

"Cosette," muttered Gavroche. "Yes, I believe that is the queer name."

"Well," resumed Jean Valjean, "I am the person to whom you are to
deliver the letter. Give it here."

"In that case, you must know that I was sent from the barricade."

"Of course," said Jean Valjean.

Gavroche engulfed his hand in another of his pockets and drew out a
paper folded in four.

Then he made the military salute.

"Respect for despatches," said he. "It comes from the Provisional
Government."

"Give it to me," said Jean Valjean.

Gavroche held the paper elevated above his head.

"Don't go and fancy it's a love letter. It is for a woman, but it's for
the people. We men fight and we respect the fair sex. We are not as
they are in fine society, where there are lions who send chickens[55] to
camels."

"Give it to me."

"After all," continued Gavroche, "you have the air of an honest man."

"Give it to me quick."

"Catch hold of it."

And he handed the paper to Jean Valjean.

"And make haste, Monsieur What's-your-name, for Mamselle Cosette is
waiting."

Gavroche was satisfied with himself for having produced this remark.

Jean Valjean began again:--

"Is it to Saint-Merry that the answer is to be sent?"

"There you are making some of those bits of pastry vulgarly called
brioches [blunders]. This letter comes from the barricade of the Rue de
la Chanvrerie, and I'm going back there. Good evening, citizen."

That said, Gavroche took himself off, or, to describe it more exactly,
fluttered away in the direction whence he had come with a flight like
that of an escaped bird. He plunged back into the gloom as though he
made a hole in it, with the rigid rapidity of a projectile; the alley of
l'Homme Arme became silent and solitary once more; in a twinkling, that
strange child, who had about him something of the shadow and of the
dream, had buried himself in the mists of the rows of black houses, and
was lost there, like smoke in the dark; and one might have thought that
he had dissipated and vanished, had there not taken place, a few minutes
after his disappearance, a startling shiver of glass, and had not the
magnificent crash of a lantern rattling down on the pavement once more
abruptly awakened the indignant bourgeois. It was Gavroche upon his way
through the Rue du Chaume.




CHAPTER III--WHILE COSETTE AND TOUSSAINT ARE ASLEEP

Jean Valjean went into the house with Marius' letter.

He groped his way up the stairs, as pleased with the darkness as an owl
who grips his prey, opened and shut his door softly, listened to see
whether he could hear any noise,--made sure that, to all appearances,
Cosette and Toussaint were asleep, and plunged three or four matches
into the bottle of the Fumade lighter before he could evoke a spark, so
greatly did his hand tremble. What he had just done smacked of theft. At
last the candle was lighted; he leaned his elbows on the table, unfolded
the paper, and read.

In violent emotions, one does not read, one flings to the earth, so to
speak, the paper which one holds, one clutches it like a victim, one
crushes it, one digs into it the nails of one's wrath, or of one's joy;
one hastens to the end, one leaps to the beginning; attention is at
fever heat; it takes up in the gross, as it were, the essential points;
it seizes on one point, and the rest disappears. In Marius' note to
Cosette, Jean Valjean saw only these words:--

"I die. When thou readest this, my soul will be near thee."

In the presence of these two lines, he was horribly dazzled; he remained
for a moment, crushed, as it were, by the change of emotion which
was taking place within him, he stared at Marius' note with a sort of
intoxicated amazement, he had before his eyes that splendor, the death
of a hated individual.

He uttered a frightful cry of inward joy. So it was all over. The
catastrophe had arrived sooner than he had dared to hope. The being who
obstructed his destiny was disappearing. That man had taken himself off
of his own accord, freely, willingly. This man was going to his death,
and he, Jean Valjean, had had no hand in the matter, and it was through
no fault of his. Perhaps, even, he is already dead. Here his fever
entered into calculations. No, he is not dead yet. The letter had
evidently been intended for Cosette to read on the following morning;
after the two discharges that were heard between eleven o'clock and
midnight, nothing more has taken place; the barricade will not be
attacked seriously until daybreak; but that makes no difference, from
the moment when "that man" is concerned in this war, he is lost; he is
caught in the gearing. Jean Valjean felt himself delivered. So he was
about to find himself alone with Cosette once more. The rivalry would
cease; the future was beginning again. He had but to keep this note in
his pocket. Cosette would never know what had become of that man. All
that there requires to be done is to let things take their own course.
This man cannot escape. If he is not already dead, it is certain that he
is about to die. What good fortune!

Having said all this to himself, he became gloomy.

Then he went down stairs and woke up the porter.

About an hour later, Jean Valjean went out in the complete costume of
a National Guard, and with his arms. The porter had easily found in the
neighborhood the wherewithal to complete his equipment. He had a loaded
gun and a cartridge-box filled with cartridges.

He strode off in the direction of the markets.




CHAPTER IV--GAVROCHE'S EXCESS OF ZEAL

In the meantime, Gavroche had had an adventure.

Gavroche, after having conscientiously stoned the lantern in the Rue du
Chaume, entered the Rue des Vielles-Haudriettes, and not seeing "even a
cat" there, he thought the opportunity a good one to strike up all the
song of which he was capable. His march, far from being retarded by his
singing, was accelerated by it. He began to sow along the sleeping or
terrified houses these incendiary couplets:--

               "L'oiseau medit dans les charmilles,
               Et pretend qu'hier Atala
               Avec un Russe s'en alla.
                    Ou vont les belles filles,
                         Lon la.

               "Mon ami Pierrot, tu babilles,
               Parce que l'autre jour Mila
               Cogna sa vitre et m'appela,
                    Ou vont les belles filles,
                         Lon la.

               "Les drolesses sont fort gentilles,
               Leur poison qui m'ensorcela
               Griserait Monsieur Orfila.
                    Ou vont les belles filles,
                         Lon la.

               "J'aime l'amour et les bisbilles,
               J'aime Agnes, j'aime Pamela,
               Lisa en m'allumant se brula.
                    Ou vont les belles filles,
                         Lon la.

               "Jadis, quand je vis les mantilles
               De Suzette et de Zeila,
               Mon ame aleurs plis se mela,
                    Ou vont les belles filles,
                         Lon la.

               "Amour, quand dans l'ombre ou tu brilles,
                Tu coiffes de roses Lola,
               Je me damnerais pour cela.
                    Ou vont les belles filles,
                         Lon la.

               "Jeanne a ton miroir tu t'habilles!
               Mon coeur un beau jour s'envola.
               Je crois que c'est Jeanne qui l'a.
                    Ou vont les belles filles,
                         Lon la.

               "Le soir, en sortant des quadrilles,
               Je montre aux etoiles Stella,
               Et je leur dis: 'Regardez-la.'
                    Ou vont les belles filles,
                         Lon la."[56]

Gavroche, as he sang, was lavish of his pantomime. Gesture is the strong
point of the refrain. His face, an inexhaustible repertory of masks,
produced grimaces more convulsing and more fantastic than the rents of a
cloth torn in a high gale. Unfortunately, as he was alone, and as it was
night, this was neither seen nor even visible. Such wastes of riches do
occur.

All at once, he stopped short.

"Let us interrupt the romance," said he.

His feline eye had just descried, in the recess of a carriage door,
what is called in painting, an ensemble, that is to say, a person and
a thing; the thing was a hand-cart, the person was a man from Auvergene
who was sleeping therein.

The shafts of the cart rested on the pavement, and the Auvergnat's head
was supported against the front of the cart. His body was coiled up on
this inclined plane and his feet touched the ground.

Gavroche, with his experience of the things of this world, recognized
a drunken man. He was some corner errand-man who had drunk too much and
was sleeping too much.

"There now," thought Gavroche, "that's what the summer nights are good
for. We'll take the cart for the Republic, and leave the Auvergnat for
the Monarchy."

His mind had just been illuminated by this flash of light:--

"How bully that cart would look on our barricade!"

The Auvergnat was snoring.

Gavroche gently tugged at the cart from behind, and at the Auvergnat
from the front, that is to say, by the feet, and at the expiration of
another minute the imperturbable Auvergnat was reposing flat on the
pavement.

The cart was free.

Gavroche, habituated to facing the unexpected in all quarters, had
everything about him. He fumbled in one of his pockets, and pulled from
it a scrap of paper and a bit of red pencil filched from some carpenter.

He wrote:--

                         "French Republic."

    "Received thy cart."

    And he signed it:  "GAVROCHE."

That done, he put the paper in the pocket of the still snoring
Auvergnat's velvet vest, seized the cart shafts in both hands, and set
off in the direction of the Halles, pushing the cart before him at a
hard gallop with a glorious and triumphant uproar.

This was perilous. There was a post at the Royal Printing Establishment.
Gavroche did not think of this. This post was occupied by the National
Guards of the suburbs. The squad began to wake up, and heads were raised
from camp beds. Two street lanterns broken in succession, that ditty
sung at the top of the lungs. This was a great deal for those cowardly
streets, which desire to go to sleep at sunset, and which put the
extinguisher on their candles at such an early hour. For the last hour,
that boy had been creating an uproar in that peaceable arrondissement,
the uproar of a fly in a bottle. The sergeant of the banlieue lent an
ear. He waited. He was a prudent man.

The mad rattle of the cart, filled to overflowing the possible measure
of waiting, and decided the sergeant to make a reconnaisance.

"There's a whole band of them there!" said he, "let us proceed gently."

It was clear that the hydra of anarchy had emerged from its box and that
it was stalking abroad through the quarter.

And the sergeant ventured out of the post with cautious tread.

All at once, Gavroche, pushing his cart in front of him, and at the very
moment when he was about to turn into the Rue des Vielles-Haudriettes,
found himself face to face with a uniform, a shako, a plume, and a gun.

For the second time, he stopped short.

"Hullo," said he, "it's him. Good day, public order."

Gavroche's amazement was always brief and speedily thawed.

"Where are you going, you rascal?" shouted the sergeant.

"Citizen," retorted Gavroche, "I haven't called you 'bourgeois' yet. Why
do you insult me?"

"Where are you going, you rogue?"

"Monsieur," retorted Gavroche, "perhaps you were a man of wit yesterday,
but you have degenerated this morning."

"I ask you where are you going, you villain?"

Gavroche replied:--

"You speak prettily. Really, no one would suppose you as old as you are.
You ought to sell all your hair at a hundred francs apiece. That would
yield you five hundred francs."

"Where are you going? Where are you going? Where are you going, bandit?"

Gavroche retorted again:--

"What villainous words! You must wipe your mouth better the first time
that they give you suck."

The sergeant lowered his bayonet.

"Will you tell me where you are going, you wretch?"

"General," said Gavroche "I'm on my way to look for a doctor for my wife
who is in labor."

"To arms!" shouted the sergeant.

The master-stroke of strong men consists in saving themselves by the
very means that have ruined them; Gavroche took in the whole situation
at a glance. It was the cart which had told against him, it was the
cart's place to protect him.

At the moment when the sergeant was on the point of making his descent
on Gavroche, the cart, converted into a projectile and launched with all
the latter's might, rolled down upon him furiously, and the sergeant,
struck full in the stomach, tumbled over backwards into the gutter while
his gun went off in the air.

The men of the post had rushed out pell-mell at the sergeant's shout;
the shot brought on a general random discharge, after which they
reloaded their weapons and began again.

This blind-man's-buff musketry lasted for a quarter of an hour and
killed several panes of glass.

In the meanwhile, Gavroche, who had retraced his steps at full speed,
halted five or six streets distant and seated himself, panting, on the
stone post which forms the corner of the Enfants-Rouges.

He listened.

After panting for a few minutes, he turned in the direction where the
fusillade was raging, lifted his left hand to a level with his nose and
thrust it forward three times, as he slapped the back of his head with
his right hand; an imperious gesture in which Parisian street-urchindom
has condensed French irony, and which is evidently efficacious, since it
has already lasted half a century.

This gayety was troubled by one bitter reflection.

"Yes," said he, "I'm splitting with laughter, I'm twisting with
delight, I abound in joy, but I'm losing my way, I shall have to take a
roundabout way. If I only reach the barricade in season!"

Thereupon he set out again on a run.

And as he ran:--

"Ah, by the way, where was I?" said he.

And he resumed his ditty, as he plunged rapidly through the streets, and
this is what died away in the gloom:--

               "Mais il reste encore des bastilles,
               Et je vais mettre le hola
               Dans l'orde public que voila.
                    Ou vont les belles filles,
                         Lon la.

               "Quelqu'un veut-il jouer aux quilles?
               Tout l'ancien monde s'ecroula
               Quand la grosse boule roula.
                    Ou vont les belles filles,
                         Lon la.

               "Vieux bon peuple, a coups de bequilles,
               Cassons ce Louvre ou s'etala
               La monarchie en falbala.
                    Ou vont les belles filles,
                         Lon la.

               "Nous en avons force les grilles,
               Le roi Charles-Dix ce jour la,
               Tenait mal et se decolla.
                    Ou vont les belles filles,
                         Lon la."[57]

The post's recourse to arms was not without result. The cart was
conquered, the drunken man was taken prisoner. The first was put in the
pound, the second was later on somewhat harassed before the councils
of war as an accomplice. The public ministry of the day proved its
indefatigable zeal in the defence of society, in this instance.

Gavroche's adventure, which has lingered as a tradition in the quarters
of the Temple, is one of the most terrible souvenirs of the elderly
bourgeois of the Marais, and is entitled in their memories: "The
nocturnal attack by the post of the Royal Printing Establishment."


[THE END OF VOLUME IV. "SAINT DENIS"]






VOLUME V--JEAN VALJEAN

[Illustration: Frontispiece Volume Five ]

[Illustration: Titlepage Volume Five ]




BOOK FIRST.--THE WAR BETWEEN FOUR WALLS




CHAPTER I--THE CHARYBDIS OF THE FAUBOURG SAINT ANTOINE AND THE SCYLLA OF
THE FAUBOURG DU TEMPLE

The two most memorable barricades which the observer of social maladies
can name do not belong to the period in which the action of this work
is laid. These two barricades, both of them symbols, under two different
aspects, of a redoubtable situation, sprang from the earth at the time
of the fatal insurrection of June, 1848, the greatest war of the streets
that history has ever beheld.

It sometimes happens that, even contrary to principles, even contrary to
liberty, equality, and fraternity, even contrary to the universal vote,
even contrary to the government, by all for all, from the depths of its
anguish, of its discouragements and its destitutions, of its fevers, of
its distresses, of its miasmas, of its ignorances, of its darkness, that
great and despairing body, the rabble, protests against, and that the
populace wages battle against, the people.

Beggars attack the common right; the ochlocracy rises against demos.

These are melancholy days; for there is always a certain amount of night
even in this madness, there is suicide in this duel, and those words
which are intended to be insults--beggars, canaille, ochlocracy,
populace--exhibit, alas! rather the fault of those who reign than the
fault of those who suffer; rather the fault of the privileged than the
fault of the disinherited.

For our own part, we never pronounce those words without pain and
without respect, for when philosophy fathoms the facts to which they
correspond, it often finds many a grandeur beside these miseries. Athens
was an ochlocracy; the beggars were the making of Holland; the populace
saved Rome more than once; and the rabble followed Jesus Christ.

There is no thinker who has not at times contemplated the magnificences
of the lower classes.

It was of this rabble that Saint Jerome was thinking, no doubt, and of
all these poor people and all these vagabonds and all these miserable
people whence sprang the apostles and the martyrs, when he uttered this
mysterious saying: "Fex urbis, lex orbis,"--the dregs of the city, the
law of the earth.

The exasperations of this crowd which suffers and bleeds, its violences
contrary to all sense, directed against the principles which are its
life, its masterful deeds against the right, are its popular coups
d'etat and should be repressed. The man of probity sacrifices himself,
and out of his very love for this crowd, he combats it. But how
excusable he feels it even while holding out against it! How he
venerates it even while resisting it! This is one of those rare moments
when, while doing that which it is one's duty to do, one feels something
which disconcerts one, and which would dissuade one from proceeding
further; one persists, it is necessary, but conscience, though
satisfied, is sad, and the accomplishment of duty is complicated with a
pain at the heart.

June, 1848, let us hasten to say, was an exceptional fact, and almost
impossible of classification, in the philosophy of history. All the
words which we have just uttered, must be discarded, when it becomes
a question of this extraordinary revolt, in which one feels the holy
anxiety of toil claiming its rights. It was necessary to combat it, and
this was a duty, for it attacked the republic. But what was June, 1848,
at bottom? A revolt of the people against itself.

Where the subject is not lost sight of, there is no digression; may we,
then, be permitted to arrest the reader's attention for a moment on the
two absolutely unique barricades of which we have just spoken and which
characterized this insurrection.

One blocked the entrance to the Faubourg Saint Antoine; the other
defended the approach to the Faubourg du Temple; those before whom these
two fearful masterpieces of civil war reared themselves beneath the
brilliant blue sky of June, will never forget them.

The Saint-Antoine barricade was tremendous; it was three stories high,
and seven hundred feet wide. It barred the vast opening of the faubourg,
that is to say, three streets, from angle to angle; ravined, jagged,
cut up, divided, crenelated, with an immense rent, buttressed with piles
that were bastions in themselves throwing out capes here and there,
powerfully backed up by two great promontories of houses of the
faubourg, it reared itself like a cyclopean dike at the end of the
formidable place which had seen the 14th of July. Nineteen barricades
were ranged, one behind the other, in the depths of the streets
behind this principal barricade. At the very sight of it, one felt the
agonizing suffering in the immense faubourg, which had reached that
point of extremity when a distress may become a catastrophe. Of what was
that barricade made? Of the ruins of three six-story houses demolished
expressly, said some. Of the prodigy of all wraths, said others. It wore
the lamentable aspect of all constructions of hatred, ruin. It might be
asked: Who built this? It might also be said: Who destroyed this? It was
the improvisation of the ebullition. Hold! take this door! this grating!
this penthouse! this chimney-piece! this broken brazier! this cracked
pot! Give all! cast away all! Push this roll, dig, dismantle, overturn,
ruin everything! It was the collaboration of the pavement, the block of
stone, the beam, the bar of iron, the rag, the scrap, the broken pane,
the unseated chair, the cabbage-stalk, the tatter, the rag, and the
malediction. It was grand and it was petty. It was the abyss parodied
on the public place by hubbub. The mass beside the atom; the strip of
ruined wall and the broken bowl,--threatening fraternization of
every sort of rubbish. Sisyphus had thrown his rock there and Job his
potsherd. Terrible, in short. It was the acropolis of the barefooted.
Overturned carts broke the uniformity of the slope; an immense dray was
spread out there crossways, its axle pointing heavenward, and seemed a
scar on that tumultuous facade; an omnibus hoisted gayly, by main force,
to the very summit of the heap, as though the architects of this bit of
savagery had wished to add a touch of the street urchin humor to their
terror, presented its horseless, unharnessed pole to no one knows what
horses of the air. This gigantic heap, the alluvium of the revolt,
figured to the mind an Ossa on Pelion of all revolutions; '93 on '89,
the 9th of Thermidor on the 10th of August, the 18th of Brumaire on the
11th of January, Vendemiaire on Prairial, 1848 on 1830. The situation
deserved the trouble and this barricade was worthy to figure on the very
spot whence the Bastille had disappeared. If the ocean made dikes, it
is thus that it would build. The fury of the flood was stamped upon this
shapeless mass. What flood? The crowd. One thought one beheld hubbub
petrified. One thought one heard humming above this barricade as though
there had been over their hive, enormous, dark bees of violent progress.
Was it a thicket? Was it a bacchanalia? Was it a fortress? Vertigo
seemed to have constructed it with blows of its wings. There was
something of the cess-pool in that redoubt and something Olympian in
that confusion. One there beheld in a pell-mell full of despair, the
rafters of roofs, bits of garret windows with their figured paper,
window sashes with their glass planted there in the ruins awaiting
the cannon, wrecks of chimneys, cupboards, tables, benches, howling
topsyturveydom, and those thousand poverty-stricken things, the very
refuse of the mendicant, which contain at the same time fury and
nothingness. One would have said that it was the tatters of a people,
rags of wood, of iron, of bronze, of stone, and that the Faubourg Saint
Antoine had thrust it there at its door, with a colossal flourish of the
broom making of its misery its barricade. Blocks resembling headsman's
blocks, dislocated chains, pieces of woodwork with brackets having
the form of gibbets, horizontal wheels projecting from the rubbish,
amalgamated with this edifice of anarchy the sombre figure of the old
tortures endured by the people. The barricade Saint Antoine converted
everything into a weapon; everything that civil war could throw at the
head of society proceeded thence; it was not combat, it was a paroxysm;
the carbines which defended this redoubt, among which there were some
blunderbusses, sent bits of earthenware bones, coat-buttons, even the
casters from night-stands, dangerous projectiles on account of
the brass. This barricade was furious; it hurled to the clouds an
inexpressible clamor; at certain moments, when provoking the army, it
was covered with throngs and tempest; a tumultuous crowd of flaming
heads crowned it; a swarm filled it; it had a thorny crest of guns, of
sabres, of cudgels, of axes, of pikes and of bayonets; a vast red flag
flapped in the wind; shouts of command, songs of attack, the roll of
drums, the sobs of women and bursts of gloomy laughter from the starving
were to be heard there. It was huge and living, and, like the back of an
electric beast, there proceeded from it little flashes of lightning. The
spirit of revolution covered with its cloud this summit where rumbled
that voice of the people which resembles the voice of God; a strange
majesty was emitted by this titanic basket of rubbish. It was a heap of
filth and it was Sinai.

As we have said previously, it attacked in the name of the
revolution--what? The revolution. It--that barricade, chance, hazard,
disorder, terror, misunderstanding, the unknown--had facing it the
Constituent Assembly, the sovereignty of the people, universal suffrage,
the nation, the republic; and it was the Carmagnole bidding defiance to
the Marseillaise.

Immense but heroic defiance, for the old faubourg is a hero.

The faubourg and its redoubt lent each other assistance. The faubourg
shouldered the redoubt, the redoubt took its stand under cover of the
faubourg. The vast barricade spread out like a cliff against which
the strategy of the African generals dashed itself. Its caverns, its
excrescences, its warts, its gibbosities, grimaced, so to speak, and
grinned beneath the smoke. The mitraille vanished in shapelessness; the
bombs plunged into it; bullets only succeeded in making holes in it;
what was the use of cannonading chaos? and the regiments, accustomed to
the fiercest visions of war, gazed with uneasy eyes on that species of
redoubt, a wild beast in its boar-like bristling and a mountain by its
enormous size.

A quarter of a league away, from the corner of the Rue du Temple which
debouches on the boulevard near the Chateaud'Eau, if one thrust one's
head bodily beyond the point formed by the front of the Dallemagne shop,
one perceived in the distance, beyond the canal, in the street which
mounts the slopes of Belleville at the culminating point of the rise, a
strange wall reaching to the second story of the house fronts, a sort
of hyphen between the houses on the right and the houses on the left, as
though the street had folded back on itself its loftiest wall in order
to close itself abruptly. This wall was built of paving-stones. It was
straight, correct, cold, perpendicular, levelled with the square, laid
out by rule and line. Cement was lacking, of course, but, as in the case
of certain Roman walls, without interfering with its rigid architecture.
The entablature was mathematically parallel with the base. From distance
to distance, one could distinguish on the gray surface, almost invisible
loopholes which resembled black threads. These loopholes were separated
from each other by equal spaces. The street was deserted as far as the
eye could reach. All windows and doors were closed. In the background
rose this barrier, which made a blind thoroughfare of the street, a
motionless and tranquil wall; no one was visible, nothing was audible;
not a cry, not a sound, not a breath. A sepulchre.

The dazzling sun of June inundated this terrible thing with light.

It was the barricade of the Faubourg of the Temple.

As soon as one arrived on the spot, and caught sight of it, it was
impossible, even for the boldest, not to become thoughtful before
this mysterious apparition. It was adjusted, jointed, imbricated,
rectilinear, symmetrical and funereal. Science and gloom met there. One
felt that the chief of this barricade was a geometrician or a spectre.
One looked at it and spoke low.

From time to time, if some soldier, an officer or representative of the
people, chanced to traverse the deserted highway, a faint, sharp whistle
was heard, and the passer-by fell dead or wounded, or, if he escaped the
bullet, sometimes a biscaien was seen to ensconce itself in some closed
shutter, in the interstice between two blocks of stone, or in the
plaster of a wall. For the men in the barricade had made themselves two
small cannons out of two cast-iron lengths of gas-pipe, plugged up at
one end with tow and fire-clay. There was no waste of useless powder.
Nearly every shot told. There were corpses here and there, and pools of
blood on the pavement. I remember a white butterfly which went and came
in the street. Summer does not abdicate.

In the neighborhood, the spaces beneath the portes cocheres were
encumbered with wounded.

One felt oneself aimed at by some person whom one did not see, and one
understood that guns were levelled at the whole length of the street.

Massed behind the sort of sloping ridge which the vaulted canal forms
at the entrance to the Faubourg du Temple, the soldiers of the attacking
column, gravely and thoughtfully, watched this dismal redoubt, this
immobility, this passivity, whence sprang death. Some crawled flat on
their faces as far as the crest of the curve of the bridge, taking care
that their shakos did not project beyond it.

The valiant Colonel Monteynard admired this barricade with a
shudder.--"How that is built!" he said to a Representative. "Not one
paving-stone projects beyond its neighbor. It is made of porcelain."--At
that moment, a bullet broke the cross on his breast, and he fell.

"The cowards!" people said. "Let them show themselves. Let us see them!
They dare not! They are hiding!"

The barricade of the Faubourg du Temple, defended by eighty men,
attacked by ten thousand, held out for three days. On the fourth, they
did as at Zaatcha, as at Constantine, they pierced the houses, they came
over the roofs, the barricade was taken. Not one of the eighty cowards
thought of flight, all were killed there with the exception of the
leader, Barthelemy, of whom we shall speak presently.

The Saint-Antoine barricade was the tumult of thunders; the barricade
of the Temple was silence. The difference between these two redoubts
was the difference between the formidable and the sinister. One seemed a
maw; the other a mask.

Admitting that the gigantic and gloomy insurrection of June was composed
of a wrath and of an enigma, one divined in the first barricade the
dragon, and behind the second the sphinx.

These two fortresses had been erected by two men named, the one,
Cournet, the other, Barthelemy. Cournet made the Saint-Antoine
barricade; Barthelemy the barricade of the Temple. Each was the image of
the man who had built it.

Cournet was a man of lofty stature; he had broad shoulders, a red face,
a crushing fist, a bold heart, a loyal soul, a sincere and terrible eye.
Intrepid, energetic, irascible, stormy; the most cordial of men, the
most formidable of combatants. War, strife, conflict, were the very air
he breathed and put him in a good humor. He had been an officer in the
navy, and, from his gestures and his voice, one divined that he sprang
from the ocean, and that he came from the tempest; he carried the
hurricane on into battle. With the exception of the genius, there was
in Cournet something of Danton, as, with the exception of the divinity,
there was in Danton something of Hercules.

Barthelemy, thin, feeble, pale, taciturn, was a sort of tragic street
urchin, who, having had his ears boxed by a policeman, lay in wait for
him, and killed him, and at seventeen was sent to the galleys. He came
out and made this barricade.

Later on, fatal circumstance, in London, proscribed by all, Barthelemy
slew Cournet. It was a funereal duel. Some time afterwards, caught in
the gearing of one of those mysterious adventures in which passion
plays a part, a catastrophe in which French justice sees extenuating
circumstances, and in which English justice sees only death, Barthelemy
was hanged. The sombre social construction is so made that, thanks to
material destitution, thanks to moral obscurity, that unhappy being
who possessed an intelligence, certainly firm, possibly great, began
in France with the galleys, and ended in England with the gallows.
Barthelemy, on occasion, flew but one flag, the black flag.




CHAPTER II--WHAT IS TO BE DONE IN THE ABYSS IF ONE DOES NOT CONVERSE

Sixteen years count in the subterranean education of insurrection, and
June, 1848, knew a great deal more about it than June, 1832. So the
barricade of the Rue de la Chanvrerie was only an outline, and an embryo
compared to the two colossal barricades which we have just sketched; but
it was formidable for that epoch.

The insurgents under the eye of Enjolras, for Marius no longer looked
after anything, had made good use of the night. The barricade had been
not only repaired, but augmented. They had raised it two feet. Bars
of iron planted in the pavement resembled lances in rest. All sorts of
rubbish brought and added from all directions complicated the external
confusion. The redoubt had been cleverly made over, into a wall on the
inside and a thicket on the outside.

The staircase of paving-stones which permitted one to mount it like the
wall of a citadel had been reconstructed.

The barricade had been put in order, the tap-room disencumbered, the
kitchen appropriated for the ambulance, the dressing of the wounded
completed, the powder scattered on the ground and on the tables had been
gathered up, bullets run, cartridges manufactured, lint scraped, the
fallen weapons re-distributed, the interior of the redoubt cleaned, the
rubbish swept up, corpses removed.

They laid the dead in a heap in the Mondetour lane, of which they were
still the masters. The pavement was red for a long time at that spot.
Among the dead there were four National Guardsmen of the suburbs.
Enjolras had their uniforms laid aside.

Enjolras had advised two hours of sleep. Advice from Enjolras was a
command. Still, only three or four took advantage of it.

Feuilly employed these two hours in engraving this inscription on the
wall which faced the tavern:--

                     LONG LIVE THE PEOPLES!

These four words, hollowed out in the rough stone with a nail, could be
still read on the wall in 1848.

The three women had profited by the respite of the night to vanish
definitely; which allowed the insurgents to breathe more freely.

They had found means of taking refuge in some neighboring house.

The greater part of the wounded were able, and wished, to fight still.
On a litter of mattresses and trusses of straw in the kitchen, which had
been converted into an ambulance, there were five men gravely wounded,
two of whom were municipal guardsmen. The municipal guardsmen were
attended to first.

In the tap-room there remained only Mabeuf under his black cloth and
Javert bound to his post.

"This is the hall of the dead," said Enjolras.

In the interior of this hall, barely lighted by a candle at one end, the
mortuary table being behind the post like a horizontal bar, a sort of
vast, vague cross resulted from Javert erect and Mabeuf lying prone.

The pole of the omnibus, although snapped off by the fusillade, was
still sufficiently upright to admit of their fastening the flag to it.

Enjolras, who possessed that quality of a leader, of always doing what
he said, attached to this staff the bullet-ridden and bloody coat of the
old man's.

No repast had been possible. There was neither bread nor meat. The fifty
men in the barricade had speedily exhausted the scanty provisions of
the wine-shop during the sixteen hours which they had passed there. At a
given moment, every barricade inevitably becomes the raft of la Meduse.
They were obliged to resign themselves to hunger. They had then reached
the first hours of that Spartan day of the 6th of June when, in the
barricade Saint-Merry, Jeanne, surrounded by the insurgents who demanded
bread, replied to all combatants crying: "Something to eat!" with: "Why?
It is three o'clock; at four we shall be dead."

As they could no longer eat, Enjolras forbade them to drink. He
interdicted wine, and portioned out the brandy.

They had found in the cellar fifteen full bottles hermetically sealed.
Enjolras and Combeferre examined them. Combeferre when he came up again
said:--"It's the old stock of Father Hucheloup, who began business as
a grocer."--"It must be real wine," observed Bossuet. "It's lucky that
Grantaire is asleep. If he were on foot, there would be a good deal of
difficulty in saving those bottles."--Enjolras, in spite of all murmurs,
placed his veto on the fifteen bottles, and, in order that no one might
touch them, he had them placed under the table on which Father Mabeuf
was lying.

About two o'clock in the morning, they reckoned up their strength. There
were still thirty-seven of them.

The day began to dawn. The torch, which had been replaced in its
cavity in the pavement, had just been extinguished. The interior of the
barricade, that species of tiny courtyard appropriated from the street,
was bathed in shadows, and resembled, athwart the vague, twilight
horror, the deck of a disabled ship. The combatants, as they went
and came, moved about there like black forms. Above that terrible
nesting-place of gloom the stories of the mute houses were lividly
outlined; at the very top, the chimneys stood palely out. The sky was of
that charming, undecided hue, which may be white and may be blue. Birds
flew about in it with cries of joy. The lofty house which formed the
back of the barricade, being turned to the East, had upon its roof a
rosy reflection. The morning breeze ruffled the gray hair on the head of
the dead man at the third-story window.

"I am delighted that the torch has been extinguished," said Courfeyrac
to Feuilly. "That torch flickering in the wind annoyed me. It had the
appearance of being afraid. The light of torches resembles the wisdom of
cowards; it gives a bad light because it trembles."

Dawn awakens minds as it does the birds; all began to talk.

Joly, perceiving a cat prowling on a gutter, extracted philosophy from
it.

"What is the cat?" he exclaimed. "It is a corrective. The good God,
having made the mouse, said: 'Hullo! I have committed a blunder.' And
so he made the cat. The cat is the erratum of the mouse. The mouse, plus
the cat, is the proof of creation revised and corrected."

Combeferre, surrounded by students and artisans, was speaking of the
dead, of Jean Prouvaire, of Bahorel, of Mabeuf, and even of Cabuc, and
of Enjolras' sad severity. He said:--

"Harmodius and Aristogiton, Brutus, Chereas, Stephanus, Cromwell,
Charlotte Corday, Sand, have all had their moment of agony when it was
too late. Our hearts quiver so, and human life is such a mystery that,
even in the case of a civic murder, even in a murder for liberation, if
there be such a thing, the remorse for having struck a man surpasses the
joy of having served the human race."

And, such are the windings of the exchange of speech, that, a moment
later, by a transition brought about through Jean Prouvaire's verses,
Combeferre was comparing the translators of the Georgics, Raux with
Cournand, Cournand with Delille, pointing out the passages translated
by Malfilatre, particularly the prodigies of Caesar's death; and at that
word, Caesar, the conversation reverted to Brutus.

"Caesar," said Combeferre, "fell justly. Cicero was severe towards
Caesar, and he was right. That severity is not diatribe. When Zoilus
insults Homer, when Maevius insults Virgil, when Vise insults Moliere,
when Pope insults Shakspeare, when Frederic insults Voltaire, it is an
old law of envy and hatred which is being carried out; genius attracts
insult, great men are always more or less barked at. But Zoilus and
Cicero are two different persons. Cicero is an arbiter in thought, just
as Brutus is an arbiter by the sword. For my own part, I blame that last
justice, the blade; but, antiquity admitted it. Caesar, the violator
of the Rubicon, conferring, as though they came from him, the dignities
which emanated from the people, not rising at the entrance of the
senate, committed the acts of a king and almost of a tyrant, regia ac
pene tyrannica. He was a great man; so much the worse, or so much the
better; the lesson is but the more exalted. His twenty-three wounds
touch me less than the spitting in the face of Jesus Christ. Caesar is
stabbed by the senators; Christ is cuffed by lackeys. One feels the God
through the greater outrage."

Bossuet, who towered above the interlocutors from the summit of a heap
of paving-stones, exclaimed, rifle in hand:--

"Oh Cydathenaeum, Oh Myrrhinus, Oh Probalinthus, Oh graces of the
AEantides! Oh! Who will grant me to pronounce the verses of Homer like a
Greek of Laurium or of Edapteon?"




CHAPTER III--LIGHT AND SHADOW

Enjolras had been to make a reconnaissance. He had made his way out
through Mondetour lane, gliding along close to the houses.

The insurgents, we will remark, were full of hope. The manner in which
they had repulsed the attack of the preceding night had caused them to
almost disdain in advance the attack at dawn. They waited for it with
a smile. They had no more doubt as to their success than as to their
cause. Moreover, succor was, evidently, on the way to them. They
reckoned on it. With that facility of triumphant prophecy which is one
of the sources of strength in the French combatant, they divided the
day which was at hand into three distinct phases. At six o'clock in the
morning a regiment "which had been labored with," would turn; at noon,
the insurrection of all Paris; at sunset, revolution.

They heard the alarm bell of Saint-Merry, which had not been silent for
an instant since the night before; a proof that the other barricade, the
great one, Jeanne's, still held out.

All these hopes were exchanged between the different groups in a sort of
gay and formidable whisper which resembled the warlike hum of a hive of
bees.

Enjolras reappeared. He returned from his sombre eagle flight into outer
darkness. He listened for a moment to all this joy with folded arms, and
one hand on his mouth. Then, fresh and rosy in the growing whiteness of
the dawn, he said:

"The whole army of Paris is to strike. A third of the army is bearing
down upon the barricades in which you now are. There is the National
Guard in addition. I have picked out the shakos of the fifth of the
line, and the standard-bearers of the sixth legion. In one hour you will
be attacked. As for the populace, it was seething yesterday, to-day
it is not stirring. There is nothing to expect; nothing to hope for.
Neither from a faubourg nor from a regiment. You are abandoned."

These words fell upon the buzzing of the groups, and produced on them
the effect caused on a swarm of bees by the first drops of a storm. A
moment of indescribable silence ensued, in which death might have been
heard flitting by.

This moment was brief.

A voice from the obscurest depths of the groups shouted to Enjolras:

"So be it. Let us raise the barricade to a height of twenty feet, and
let us all remain in it. Citizens, let us offer the protests of corpses.
Let us show that, if the people abandon the republicans, the republicans
do not abandon the people."

These words freed the thought of all from the painful cloud of
individual anxieties. It was hailed with an enthusiastic acclamation.

No one ever has known the name of the man who spoke thus; he was some
unknown blouse-wearer, a stranger, a man forgotten, a passing hero, that
great anonymous, always mingled in human crises and in social geneses
who, at a given moment, utters in a supreme fashion the decisive word,
and who vanishes into the shadows after having represented for a minute,
in a lightning flash, the people and God.

This inexorable resolution so thoroughly impregnated the air of the
6th of June, 1832, that, almost at the very same hour, on the barricade
Saint-Merry, the insurgents were raising that clamor which has become a
matter of history and which has been consigned to the documents in the
case:--"What matters it whether they come to our assistance or not? Let
us get ourselves killed here, to the very last man."

As the reader sees, the two barricades, though materially isolated, were
in communication with each other.




CHAPTER IV--MINUS FIVE, PLUS ONE

After the man who decreed the "protest of corpses" had spoken, and had
given this formula of their common soul, there issued from all mouths a
strangely satisfied and terrible cry, funereal in sense and triumphant
in tone:

"Long live death! Let us all remain here!"

"Why all?" said Enjolras.

"All! All!"

Enjolras resumed:

"The position is good; the barricade is fine. Thirty men are enough. Why
sacrifice forty?"

They replied:

"Because not one will go away."

"Citizens," cried Enjolras, and there was an almost irritated vibration
in his voice, "this republic is not rich enough in men to indulge in
useless expenditure of them. Vain-glory is waste. If the duty of some is
to depart, that duty should be fulfilled like any other."

Enjolras, the man-principle, had over his co-religionists that sort of
omnipotent power which emanates from the absolute. Still, great as was
this omnipotence, a murmur arose. A leader to the very finger-tips,
Enjolras, seeing that they murmured, insisted. He resumed haughtily:

"Let those who are afraid of not numbering more than thirty say so."

The murmurs redoubled.

"Besides," observed a voice in one group, "it is easy enough to talk
about leaving. The barricade is hemmed in."

"Not on the side of the Halles," said Enjolras. "The Rue Mondetour is
free, and through the Rue des Precheurs one can reach the Marche des
Innocents."

"And there," went on another voice, "you would be captured. You would
fall in with some grand guard of the line or the suburbs; they will spy
a man passing in blouse and cap. 'Whence come you?' 'Don't you belong to
the barricade?' And they will look at your hands. You smell of powder.
Shot."

Enjolras, without making any reply, touched Combeferre's shoulder, and
the two entered the tap-room.

They emerged thence a moment later. Enjolras held in his outstretched
hands the four uniforms which he had laid aside. Combeferre followed,
carrying the shoulder-belts and the shakos.

"With this uniform," said Enjolras, "you can mingle with the ranks and
escape; here is enough for four." And he flung on the ground, deprived
of its pavement, the four uniforms.

No wavering took place in his stoical audience. Combeferre took the
word.

"Come," said he, "you must have a little pity. Do you know what the
question is here? It is a question of women. See here. Are there
women or are there not? Are there children or are there not? Are there
mothers, yes or no, who rock cradles with their foot and who have a lot
of little ones around them? Let that man of you who has never beheld a
nurse's breast raise his hand. Ah! you want to get yourselves killed, so
do I--I, who am speaking to you; but I do not want to feel the phantoms
of women wreathing their arms around me. Die, if you will, but
don't make others die. Suicides like that which is on the brink of
accomplishment here are sublime; but suicide is narrow, and does not
admit of extension; and as soon as it touches your neighbors, suicide
is murder. Think of the little blond heads; think of the white locks.
Listen, Enjolras has just told me that he saw at the corner of the Rue
du Cygne a lighted casement, a candle in a poor window, on the fifth
floor, and on the pane the quivering shadow of the head of an old woman,
who had the air of having spent the night in watching. Perhaps she is
the mother of some one of you. Well, let that man go, and make haste, to
say to his mother: 'Here I am, mother!' Let him feel at ease, the task
here will be performed all the same. When one supports one's relatives
by one's toil, one has not the right to sacrifice one's self. That
is deserting one's family. And those who have daughters! what are you
thinking of? You get yourselves killed, you are dead, that is well. And
tomorrow? Young girls without bread--that is a terrible thing. Man begs,
woman sells. Ah! those charming and gracious beings, so gracious and so
sweet, who have bonnets of flowers, who fill the house with purity, who
sing and prattle, who are like a living perfume, who prove the existence
of angels in heaven by the purity of virgins on earth, that Jeanne,
that Lise, that Mimi, those adorable and honest creatures who are your
blessings and your pride, ah! good God, they will suffer hunger! What do
you want me to say to you? There is a market for human flesh; and it
is not with your shadowy hands, shuddering around them, that you
will prevent them from entering it! Think of the street, think of the
pavement covered with passers-by, think of the shops past which women
go and come with necks all bare, and through the mire. These women,
too, were pure once. Think of your sisters, those of you who have them.
Misery, prostitution, the police, Saint-Lazare--that is what those
beautiful, delicate girls, those fragile marvels of modesty, gentleness
and loveliness, fresher than lilacs in the month of May, will come to.
Ah! you have got yourselves killed! You are no longer on hand! That
is well; you have wished to release the people from Royalty, and you
deliver over your daughters to the police. Friends, have a care, have
mercy. Women, unhappy women, we are not in the habit of bestowing much
thought on them. We trust to the women not having received a man's
education, we prevent their reading, we prevent their thinking, we
prevent their occupying themselves with politics; will you prevent them
from going to the dead-house this evening, and recognizing your bodies?
Let us see, those who have families must be tractable, and shake hands
with us and take themselves off, and leave us here alone to attend to
this affair. I know well that courage is required to leave, that it is
hard; but the harder it is, the more meritorious. You say: 'I have a
gun, I am at the barricade; so much the worse, I shall remain there.' So
much the worse is easily said. My friends, there is a morrow; you will
not be here to-morrow, but your families will; and what sufferings! See,
here is a pretty, healthy child, with cheeks like an apple, who babbles,
prattles, chatters, who laughs, who smells sweet beneath your kiss,--and
do you know what becomes of him when he is abandoned? I have seen one,
a very small creature, no taller than that. His father was dead. Poor
people had taken him in out of charity, but they had bread only for
themselves. The child was always hungry. It was winter. He did not cry.
You could see him approach the stove, in which there was never any fire,
and whose pipe, you know, was of mastic and yellow clay. His breathing
was hoarse, his face livid, his limbs flaccid, his belly prominent. He
said nothing. If you spoke to him, he did not answer. He is dead. He was
taken to the Necker Hospital, where I saw him. I was house-surgeon in
that hospital. Now, if there are any fathers among you, fathers whose
happiness it is to stroll on Sundays holding their child's tiny hand in
their robust hand, let each one of those fathers imagine that this child
is his own. That poor brat, I remember, and I seem to see him now, when
he lay nude on the dissecting table, how his ribs stood out on his skin
like the graves beneath the grass in a cemetery. A sort of mud was found
in his stomach. There were ashes in his teeth. Come, let us examine
ourselves conscientiously and take counsel with our heart. Statistics
show that the mortality among abandoned children is fifty-five per cent.
I repeat, it is a question of women, it concerns mothers, it concerns
young girls, it concerns little children. Who is talking to you of
yourselves? We know well what you are; we know well that you are all
brave, parbleu! we know well that you all have in your souls the joy and
the glory of giving your life for the great cause; we know well that you
feel yourselves elected to die usefully and magnificently, and that each
one of you clings to his share in the triumph. Very well. But you are
not alone in this world. There are other beings of whom you must think.
You must not be egoists."

All dropped their heads with a gloomy air.

Strange contradictions of the human heart at its most sublime moments.
Combeferre, who spoke thus, was not an orphan. He recalled the mothers
of other men, and forgot his own. He was about to get himself killed. He
was "an egoist."

Marius, fasting, fevered, having emerged in succession from all hope,
and having been stranded in grief, the most sombre of shipwrecks, and
saturated with violent emotions and conscious that the end was near,
had plunged deeper and deeper into that visionary stupor which always
precedes the fatal hour voluntarily accepted.

A physiologist might have studied in him the growing symptoms of that
febrile absorption known to, and classified by, science, and which is
to suffering what voluptuousness is to pleasure. Despair, also, has its
ecstasy. Marius had reached this point. He looked on at everything as
from without; as we have said, things which passed before him seemed far
away; he made out the whole, but did not perceive the details. He beheld
men going and coming as through a flame. He heard voices speaking as at
the bottom of an abyss.

But this moved him. There was in this scene a point which pierced and
roused even him. He had but one idea now, to die; and he did not wish to
be turned aside from it, but he reflected, in his gloomy somnambulism,
that while destroying himself, he was not prohibited from saving some
one else.

He raised his voice.

"Enjolras and Combeferre are right," said he; "no unnecessary sacrifice.
I join them, and you must make haste. Combeferre has said convincing
things to you. There are some among you who have families, mothers,
sisters, wives, children. Let such leave the ranks."

No one stirred.

"Married men and the supporters of families, step out of the ranks!"
repeated Marius.

His authority was great. Enjolras was certainly the head of the
barricade, but Marius was its savior.

"I order it," cried Enjolras.

"I entreat you," said Marius.

Then, touched by Combeferre's words, shaken by Enjolras' order, touched
by Marius' entreaty, these heroic men began to denounce each other.--"It
is true," said one young man to a full grown man, "you are the father
of a family. Go."--"It is your duty rather," retorted the man, "you have
two sisters whom you maintain."--And an unprecedented controversy broke
forth. Each struggled to determine which should not allow himself to be
placed at the door of the tomb.

"Make haste," said Courfeyrac, "in another quarter of an hour it will be
too late."

"Citizens," pursued Enjolras, "this is the Republic, and universal
suffrage reigns. Do you yourselves designate those who are to go."

They obeyed. After the expiration of a few minutes, five were
unanimously selected and stepped out of the ranks.

"There are five of them!" exclaimed Marius.

There were only four uniforms.

"Well," began the five, "one must stay behind."

And then a struggle arose as to who should remain, and who should find
reasons for the others not remaining. The generous quarrel began afresh.

"You have a wife who loves you."--"You have your aged mother."--" You
have neither father nor mother, and what is to become of your three
little brothers?"--"You are the father of five children."--"You have a
right to live, you are only seventeen, it is too early for you to die."

These great revolutionary barricades were assembling points for heroism.
The improbable was simple there. These men did not astonish each other.

"Be quick," repeated Courfeyrac.

Men shouted to Marius from the groups:

"Do you designate who is to remain."

"Yes," said the five, "choose. We will obey you."

Marius did not believe that he was capable of another emotion. Still,
at this idea, that of choosing a man for death, his blood rushed back
to his heart. He would have turned pale, had it been possible for him to
become any paler.

He advanced towards the five, who smiled upon him, and each, with his
eyes full of that grand flame which one beholds in the depths of history
hovering over Thermopylae, cried to him:

"Me! me! me!"

And Marius stupidly counted them; there were still five of them! Then
his glance dropped to the four uniforms.

At that moment, a fifth uniform fell, as if from heaven, upon the other
four.

The fifth man was saved.

Marius raised his eyes and recognized M. Fauchelevent.

Jean Valjean had just entered the barricade.

He had arrived by way of Mondetour lane, whither by dint of inquiries
made, or by instinct, or chance. Thanks to his dress of a National
Guardsman, he had made his way without difficulty.

The sentinel stationed by the insurgents in the Rue Mondetour had no
occasion to give the alarm for a single National Guardsman, and he had
allowed the latter to entangle himself in the street, saying to himself:
"Probably it is a reinforcement, in any case it is a prisoner." The
moment was too grave to admit of the sentinel abandoning his duty and
his post of observation.

At the moment when Jean Valjean entered the redoubt, no one had noticed
him, all eyes being fixed on the five chosen men and the four uniforms.
Jean Valjean also had seen and heard, and he had silently removed his
coat and flung it on the pile with the rest.

The emotion aroused was indescribable.

"Who is this man?" demanded Bossuet.

"He is a man who saves others," replied Combeferre.

Marius added in a grave voice:

"I know him."

This guarantee satisfied every one.

Enjolras turned to Jean Valjean.

"Welcome, citizen."

And he added:

"You know that we are about to die."

Jean Valjean, without replying, helped the insurgent whom he was saving
to don his uniform.




CHAPTER V--THE HORIZON WHICH ONE BEHOLDS FROM THE SUMMIT OF A BARRICADE

The situation of all in that fatal hour and that pitiless place, had as
result and culminating point Enjolras' supreme melancholy.

Enjolras bore within him the plenitude of the revolution; he was
incomplete, however, so far as the absolute can be so; he had too much
of Saint-Just about him, and not enough of Anacharsis Cloots; still,
his mind, in the society of the Friends of the A B C, had ended by
undergoing a certain polarization from Combeferre's ideas; for some time
past, he had been gradually emerging from the narrow form of dogma, and
had allowed himself to incline to the broadening influence of progress,
and he had come to accept, as a definitive and magnificent evolution,
the transformation of the great French Republic, into the immense
human republic. As far as the immediate means were concerned, a violent
situation being given, he wished to be violent; on that point, he never
varied; and he remained of that epic and redoubtable school which is
summed up in the words: "Eighty-three." Enjolras was standing erect on
the staircase of paving-stones, one elbow resting on the stock of
his gun. He was engaged in thought; he quivered, as at the passage of
prophetic breaths; places where death is have these effects of tripods.
A sort of stifled fire darted from his eyes, which were filled with an
inward look. All at once he threw back his head, his blond locks fell
back like those of an angel on the sombre quadriga made of stars, they
were like the mane of a startled lion in the flaming of an halo, and
Enjolras cried:

"Citizens, do you picture the future to yourselves? The streets of
cities inundated with light, green branches on the thresholds, nations
sisters, men just, old men blessing children, the past loving the
present, thinkers entirely at liberty, believers on terms of full
equality, for religion heaven, God the direct priest, human conscience
become an altar, no more hatreds, the fraternity of the workshop and the
school, for sole penalty and recompense fame, work for all, right for
all, peace over all, no more bloodshed, no more wars, happy mothers! To
conquer matter is the first step; to realize the ideal is the second.
Reflect on what progress has already accomplished. Formerly, the
first human races beheld with terror the hydra pass before their eyes,
breathing on the waters, the dragon which vomited flame, the griffin who
was the monster of the air, and who flew with the wings of an eagle
and the talons of a tiger; fearful beasts which were above man. Man,
nevertheless, spread his snares, consecrated by intelligence, and
finally conquered these monsters. We have vanquished the hydra, and
it is called the locomotive; we are on the point of vanquishing the
griffin, we already grasp it, and it is called the balloon. On the day
when this Promethean task shall be accomplished, and when man shall have
definitely harnessed to his will the triple Chimaera of antiquity, the
hydra, the dragon and the griffin, he will be the master of water, fire,
and of air, and he will be for the rest of animated creation that which
the ancient gods formerly were to him. Courage, and onward! Citizens,
whither are we going? To science made government, to the force of things
become the sole public force, to the natural law, having in itself its
sanction and its penalty and promulgating itself by evidence, to a dawn
of truth corresponding to a dawn of day. We are advancing to the union
of peoples; we are advancing to the unity of man. No more fictions;
no more parasites. The real governed by the true, that is the goal.
Civilization will hold its assizes at the summit of Europe, and,
later on, at the centre of continents, in a grand parliament of the
intelligence. Something similar has already been seen. The amphictyons
had two sittings a year, one at Delphos the seat of the gods, the other
at Thermopylae, the place of heroes. Europe will have her amphictyons;
the globe will have its amphictyons. France bears this sublime future in
her breast. This is the gestation of the nineteenth century. That which
Greece sketched out is worthy of being finished by France. Listen to me,
you, Feuilly, valiant artisan, man of the people. I revere you. Yes, you
clearly behold the future, yes, you are right. You had neither father
nor mother, Feuilly; you adopted humanity for your mother and right
for your father. You are about to die, that is to say to triumph, here.
Citizens, whatever happens to-day, through our defeat as well as
through our victory, it is a revolution that we are about to create.
As conflagrations light up a whole city, so revolutions illuminate the
whole human race. And what is the revolution that we shall cause? I have
just told you, the Revolution of the True. From a political point of
view, there is but a single principle; the sovereignty of man over
himself. This sovereignty of myself over myself is called Liberty. Where
two or three of these sovereignties are combined, the state begins. But
in that association there is no abdication. Each sovereignty concedes a
certain quantity of itself, for the purpose of forming the common right.
This quantity is the same for all of us. This identity of concession
which each makes to all, is called Equality. Common right is nothing
else than the protection of all beaming on the right of each. This
protection of all over each is called Fraternity. The point of
intersection of all these assembled sovereignties is called society.
This intersection being a junction, this point is a knot. Hence what
is called the social bond. Some say social contract; which is the same
thing, the word contract being etymologically formed with the idea of a
bond. Let us come to an understanding about equality; for, if liberty
is the summit, equality is the base. Equality, citizens, is not wholly a
surface vegetation, a society of great blades of grass and tiny oaks; a
proximity of jealousies which render each other null and void; legally
speaking, it is all aptitudes possessed of the same opportunity;
politically, it is all votes possessed of the same weight; religiously,
it is all consciences possessed of the same right. Equality has an
organ: gratuitous and obligatory instruction. The right to the alphabet,
that is where the beginning must be made. The primary school imposed
on all, the secondary school offered to all, that is the law. From an
identical school, an identical society will spring. Yes, instruction!
light! light! everything comes from light, and to it everything returns.
Citizens, the nineteenth century is great, but the twentieth century
will be happy. Then, there will be nothing more like the history of old,
we shall no longer, as to-day, have to fear a conquest, an invasion,
a usurpation, a rivalry of nations, arms in hand, an interruption of
civilization depending on a marriage of kings, on a birth in hereditary
tyrannies, a partition of peoples by a congress, a dismemberment because
of the failure of a dynasty, a combat of two religions meeting face
to face, like two bucks in the dark, on the bridge of the infinite; we
shall no longer have to fear famine, farming out, prostitution arising
from distress, misery from the failure of work and the scaffold and the
sword, and battles and the ruffianism of chance in the forest of events.
One might almost say: There will be no more events. We shall be happy.
The human race will accomplish its law, as the terrestrial globe
accomplishes its law; harmony will be re-established between the soul
and the star; the soul will gravitate around the truth, as the planet
around the light. Friends, the present hour in which I am addressing
you, is a gloomy hour; but these are terrible purchases of the future.
A revolution is a toll. Oh! the human race will be delivered, raised up,
consoled! We affirm it on this barrier. Whence should proceed that cry
of love, if not from the heights of sacrifice? Oh my brothers, this is
the point of junction, of those who think and of those who suffer; this
barricade is not made of paving-stones, nor of joists, nor of bits of
iron; it is made of two heaps, a heap of ideas, and a heap of woes. Here
misery meets the ideal. The day embraces the night, and says to it: 'I
am about to die, and thou shalt be born again with me.' From the embrace
of all desolations faith leaps forth. Sufferings bring hither their
agony and ideas their immortality. This agony and this immortality are
about to join and constitute our death. Brothers, he who dies here dies
in the radiance of the future, and we are entering a tomb all flooded
with the dawn."

Enjolras paused rather than became silent; his lips continued to move
silently, as though he were talking to himself, which caused them all
to gaze attentively at him, in the endeavor to hear more. There was no
applause; but they whispered together for a long time. Speech being a
breath, the rustling of intelligences resembles the rustling of leaves.




CHAPTER VI--MARIUS HAGGARD, JAVERT LACONIC

Let us narrate what was passing in Marius' thoughts.

Let the reader recall the state of his soul. We have just recalled it,
everything was a vision to him now. His judgment was disturbed. Marius,
let us insist on this point, was under the shadow of the great, dark
wings which are spread over those in the death agony. He felt that he
had entered the tomb, it seemed to him that he was already on the other
side of the wall, and he no longer beheld the faces of the living except
with the eyes of one dead.

How did M. Fauchelevent come there? Why was he there? What had he come
there to do? Marius did not address all these questions to himself.
Besides, since our despair has this peculiarity, that it envelops others
as well as ourselves, it seemed logical to him that all the world should
come thither to die.

Only, he thought of Cosette with a pang at his heart.

However, M. Fauchelevent did not speak to him, did not look at him, and
had not even the air of hearing him, when Marius raised his voice to
say: "I know him."

As far as Marius was concerned, this attitude of M. Fauchelevent was
comforting, and, if such a word can be used for such impressions,
we should say that it pleased him. He had always felt the absolute
impossibility of addressing that enigmatical man, who was, in his eyes,
both equivocal and imposing. Moreover, it had been a long time since
he had seen him; and this still further augmented the impossibility for
Marius' timid and reserved nature.

The five chosen men left the barricade by way of Mondetour lane; they
bore a perfect resemblance to members of the National Guard. One of them
wept as he took his leave. Before setting out, they embraced those who
remained.

When the five men sent back to life had taken their departure, Enjolras
thought of the man who had been condemned to death.

He entered the tap-room. Javert, still bound to the post, was engaged in
meditation.

"Do you want anything?" Enjolras asked him.

Javert replied: "When are you going to kill me?"

"Wait. We need all our cartridges just at present."

"Then give me a drink," said Javert.

Enjolras himself offered him a glass of water, and, as Javert was
pinioned, he helped him to drink.

"Is that all?" inquired Enjolras.

"I am uncomfortable against this post," replied Javert. "You are not
tender to have left me to pass the night here. Bind me as you please,
but you surely might lay me out on a table like that other man."

And with a motion of the head, he indicated the body of M. Mabeuf.

There was, as the reader will remember, a long, broad table at the
end of the room, on which they had been running bullets and making
cartridges. All the cartridges having been made, and all the powder
used, this table was free.

At Enjolras' command, four insurgents unbound Javert from the post.
While they were loosing him, a fifth held a bayonet against his breast.

Leaving his arms tied behind his back, they placed about his feet a
slender but stout whip-cord, as is done to men on the point of mounting
the scaffold, which allowed him to take steps about fifteen inches in
length, and made him walk to the table at the end of the room, where
they laid him down, closely bound about the middle of the body.

By way of further security, and by means of a rope fastened to his neck,
they added to the system of ligatures which rendered every attempt
at escape impossible, that sort of bond which is called in prisons a
martingale, which, starting at the neck, forks on the stomach, and meets
the hands, after passing between the legs.

While they were binding Javert, a man standing on the threshold was
surveying him with singular attention. The shadow cast by this man made
Javert turn his head. He raised his eyes, and recognized Jean Valjean.
He did not even start, but dropped his lids proudly and confined himself
to the remark: "It is perfectly simple."




CHAPTER VII--THE SITUATION BECOMES AGGRAVATED

The daylight was increasing rapidly. Not a window was opened, not a door
stood ajar; it was the dawn but not the awaking. The end of the Rue de
la Chanvrerie, opposite the barricade, had been evacuated by the
troops, as we have stated it seemed to be free, and presented itself to
passers-by with a sinister tranquillity. The Rue Saint-Denis was as
dumb as the avenue of Sphinxes at Thebes. Not a living being in the
cross-roads, which gleamed white in the light of the sun. Nothing is so
mournful as this light in deserted streets. Nothing was to be seen, but
there was something to be heard. A mysterious movement was going on at
a certain distance. It was evident that the critical moment was
approaching. As on the previous evening, the sentinels had come in; but
this time all had come.

The barricade was stronger than on the occasion of the first attack.
Since the departure of the five, they had increased its height still
further.

On the advice of the sentinel who had examined the region of the
Halles, Enjolras, for fear of a surprise in the rear, came to a serious
decision. He had the small gut of the Mondetour lane, which had been
left open up to that time, barricaded. For this purpose, they tore up
the pavement for the length of several houses more. In this manner,
the barricade, walled on three streets, in front on the Rue de
la Chanvrerie, to the left on the Rues du Cygne and de la Petite
Truanderie, to the right on the Rue Mondetour, was really almost
impregnable; it is true that they were fatally hemmed in there. It
had three fronts, but no exit.--"A fortress but a rat hole too," said
Courfeyrac with a laugh.

Enjolras had about thirty paving-stones "torn up in excess," said
Bossuet, piled up near the door of the wine-shop.

The silence was now so profound in the quarter whence the attack must
needs come, that Enjolras had each man resume his post of battle.

An allowance of brandy was doled out to each.

Nothing is more curious than a barricade preparing for an assault. Each
man selects his place as though at the theatre. They jostle, and elbow
and crowd each other. There are some who make stalls of paving-stones.
Here is a corner of the wall which is in the way, it is removed; here
is a redan which may afford protection, they take shelter behind it.
Left-handed men are precious; they take the places that are inconvenient
to the rest. Many arrange to fight in a sitting posture. They wish to be
at ease to kill, and to die comfortably. In the sad war of June, 1848,
an insurgent who was a formidable marksman, and who was firing from the
top of a terrace upon a roof, had a reclining-chair brought there for
his use; a charge of grape-shot found him out there.

As soon as the leader has given the order to clear the decks for action,
all disorderly movements cease; there is no more pulling from one
another; there are no more coteries; no more asides, there is no more
holding aloof; everything in their spirits converges in, and changes
into, a waiting for the assailants. A barricade before the arrival of
danger is chaos; in danger, it is discipline itself. Peril produces
order.

As soon as Enjolras had seized his double-barrelled rifle, and had
placed himself in a sort of embrasure which he had reserved for himself,
all the rest held their peace. A series of faint, sharp noises resounded
confusedly along the wall of paving-stones. It was the men cocking their
guns.

Moreover, their attitudes were prouder, more confident than ever; the
excess of sacrifice strengthens; they no longer cherished any hope,
but they had despair, despair,--the last weapon, which sometimes gives
victory; Virgil has said so. Supreme resources spring from extreme
resolutions. To embark in death is sometimes the means of escaping a
shipwreck; and the lid of the coffin becomes a plank of safety.

As on the preceding evening, the attention of all was directed, we
might almost say leaned upon, the end of the street, now lighted up and
visible.

They had not long to wait. A stir began distinctly in the Saint-Leu
quarter, but it did not resemble the movement of the first attack. A
clashing of chains, the uneasy jolting of a mass, the click of brass
skipping along the pavement, a sort of solemn uproar, announced that
some sinister construction of iron was approaching. There arose a tremor
in the bosoms of these peaceful old streets, pierced and built for the
fertile circulation of interests and ideas, and which are not made for
the horrible rumble of the wheels of war.

The fixity of eye in all the combatants upon the extremity of the street
became ferocious.

A cannon made its appearance.

Artillery-men were pushing the piece; it was in firing trim; the
fore-carriage had been detached; two upheld the gun-carriage, four were
at the wheels; others followed with the caisson. They could see the
smoke of the burning lint-stock.

"Fire!" shouted Enjolras.

The whole barricade fired, the report was terrible; an avalanche of
smoke covered and effaced both cannon and men; after a few seconds, the
cloud dispersed, and the cannon and men re-appeared; the gun-crew had
just finished rolling it slowly, correctly, without haste, into position
facing the barricade. Not one of them had been struck. Then the captain
of the piece, bearing down upon the breech in order to raise the muzzle,
began to point the cannon with the gravity of an astronomer levelling a
telescope.

"Bravo for the cannoneers!" cried Bossuet.

And the whole barricade clapped their hands.

A moment later, squarely planted in the very middle of the street,
astride of the gutter, the piece was ready for action. A formidable pair
of jaws yawned on the barricade.

"Come, merrily now!" ejaculated Courfeyrac. "That's the brutal part of
it. After the fillip on the nose, the blow from the fist. The army is
reaching out its big paw to us. The barricade is going to be severely
shaken up. The fusillade tries, the cannon takes."

"It is a piece of eight, new model, brass," added Combeferre. "Those
pieces are liable to burst as soon as the proportion of ten parts of tin
to one hundred of brass is exceeded. The excess of tin renders them too
tender. Then it comes to pass that they have caves and chambers when
looked at from the vent hole. In order to obviate this danger, and
to render it possible to force the charge, it may become necessary
to return to the process of the fourteenth century, hooping, and to
encircle the piece on the outside with a series of unwelded steel bands,
from the breech to the trunnions. In the meantime, they remedy this
defect as best they may; they manage to discover where the holes are
located in the vent of a cannon, by means of a searcher. But there is a
better method, with Gribeauval's movable star."

"In the sixteenth century," remarked Bossuet, "they used to rifle
cannon."

"Yes," replied Combeferre, "that augments the projectile force, but
diminishes the accuracy of the firing. In firing at short range,
the trajectory is not as rigid as could be desired, the parabola is
exaggerated, the line of the projectile is no longer sufficiently
rectilinear to allow of its striking intervening objects, which is,
nevertheless, a necessity of battle, the importance of which increases
with the proximity of the enemy and the precipitation of the discharge.
This defect of the tension of the curve of the projectile in the rifled
cannon of the sixteenth century arose from the smallness of the charge;
small charges for that sort of engine are imposed by the ballistic
necessities, such, for instance, as the preservation of the
gun-carriage. In short, that despot, the cannon, cannot do all that
it desires; force is a great weakness. A cannon-ball only travels
six hundred leagues an hour; light travels seventy thousand leagues a
second. Such is the superiority of Jesus Christ over Napoleon."

"Reload your guns," said Enjolras.

How was the casing of the barricade going to behave under the
cannon-balls? Would they effect a breach? That was the question. While
the insurgents were reloading their guns, the artillery-men were loading
the cannon.

The anxiety in the redoubt was profound.

The shot sped the report burst forth.

"Present!" shouted a joyous voice.

And Gavroche flung himself into the barricade just as the ball dashed
against it.

He came from the direction of the Rue du Cygne, and he had nimbly
climbed over the auxiliary barricade which fronted on the labyrinth of
the Rue de la Petite Truanderie.

Gavroche produced a greater sensation in the barricade than the
cannon-ball.

The ball buried itself in the mass of rubbish. At the most there was an
omnibus wheel broken, and the old Anceau cart was demolished. On seeing
this, the barricade burst into a laugh.

"Go on!" shouted Bossuet to the artillerists.




CHAPTER VIII--THE ARTILLERY-MEN COMPEL PEOPLE TO TAKE THEM SERIOUSLY

They flocked round Gavroche. But he had no time to tell anything. Marius
drew him aside with a shudder.

"What are you doing here?"

"Hullo!" said the child, "what are you doing here yourself?"

And he stared at Marius intently with his epic effrontery. His eyes grew
larger with the proud light within them.

It was with an accent of severity that Marius continued:

"Who told you to come back? Did you deliver my letter at the address?"

Gavroche was not without some compunctions in the matter of that letter.
In his haste to return to the barricade, he had got rid of it rather
than delivered it. He was forced to acknowledge to himself that he had
confided it rather lightly to that stranger whose face he had not been
able to make out. It is true that the man was bareheaded, but that was
not sufficient. In short, he had been administering to himself little
inward remonstrances and he feared Marius' reproaches. In order to
extricate himself from the predicament, he took the simplest course; he
lied abominably.

"Citizen, I delivered the letter to the porter. The lady was asleep. She
will have the letter when she wakes up."

Marius had had two objects in sending that letter: to bid farewell to
Cosette and to save Gavroche. He was obliged to content himself with the
half of his desire.

The despatch of his letter and the presence of M. Fauchelevent in the
barricade, was a coincidence which occurred to him. He pointed out M.
Fauchelevent to Gavroche.

"Do you know that man?"

"No," said Gavroche.

Gavroche had, in fact, as we have just mentioned, seen Jean Valjean only
at night.

The troubled and unhealthy conjectures which had outlined themselves in
Marius' mind were dissipated. Did he know M. Fauchelevent's opinions?
Perhaps M. Fauchelevent was a republican. Hence his very natural
presence in this combat.

In the meanwhile, Gavroche was shouting, at the other end of the
barricade: "My gun!"

Courfeyrac had it returned to him.

Gavroche warned "his comrades" as he called them, that the barricade was
blocked. He had had great difficulty in reaching it. A battalion of the
line whose arms were piled in the Rue de la Petite Truanderie was on
the watch on the side of the Rue du Cygne; on the opposite side, the
municipal guard occupied the Rue des Precheurs. The bulk of the army was
facing them in front.

This information given, Gavroche added:

"I authorize you to hit 'em a tremendous whack."

Meanwhile, Enjolras was straining his ears and watching at his
embrasure.

The assailants, dissatisfied, no doubt, with their shot, had not
repeated it.

A company of infantry of the line had come up and occupied the end of
the street behind the piece of ordnance. The soldiers were tearing up
the pavement and constructing with the stones a small, low wall, a
sort of side-work not more than eighteen inches high, and facing the
barricade. In the angle at the left of this epaulement, there was
visible the head of the column of a battalion from the suburbs massed in
the Rue Saint-Denis.

Enjolras, on the watch, thought he distinguished the peculiar sound
which is produced when the shells of grape-shot are drawn from the
caissons, and he saw the commander of the piece change the elevation
and incline the mouth of the cannon slightly to the left. Then the
cannoneers began to load the piece. The chief seized the lint-stock
himself and lowered it to the vent.

"Down with your heads, hug the wall!" shouted Enjolras, "and all on your
knees along the barricade!"

The insurgents who were straggling in front of the wine-shop, and
who had quitted their posts of combat on Gavroche's arrival, rushed
pell-mell towards the barricade; but before Enjolras' order could be
executed, the discharge took place with the terrifying rattle of a round
of grape-shot. This is what it was, in fact.

The charge had been aimed at the cut in the redoubt, and had there
rebounded from the wall; and this terrible rebound had produced two dead
and three wounded.

If this were continued, the barricade was no longer tenable. The
grape-shot made its way in.

A murmur of consternation arose.

"Let us prevent the second discharge," said Enjolras.

And, lowering his rifle, he took aim at the captain of the gun, who, at
that moment, was bearing down on the breach of his gun and rectifying
and definitely fixing its pointing.

The captain of the piece was a handsome sergeant of artillery, very
young, blond, with a very gentle face, and the intelligent air peculiar
to that predestined and redoubtable weapon which, by dint of perfecting
itself in horror, must end in killing war.

Combeferre, who was standing beside Enjolras, scrutinized this young
man.

"What a pity!" said Combeferre. "What hideous things these butcheries
are! Come, when there are no more kings, there will be no more war.
Enjolras, you are taking aim at that sergeant, you are not looking at
him. Fancy, he is a charming young man; he is intrepid; it is evident
that he is thoughtful; those young artillery-men are very well educated;
he has a father, a mother, a family; he is probably in love; he is not
more than five and twenty at the most; he might be your brother."

"He is," said Enjolras.

"Yes," replied Combeferre, "he is mine too. Well, let us not kill him."

"Let me alone. It must be done."

And a tear trickled slowly down Enjolras' marble cheek.

At the same moment, he pressed the trigger of his rifle. The flame
leaped forth. The artillery-man turned round twice, his arms extended in
front of him, his head uplifted, as though for breath, then he fell with
his side on the gun, and lay there motionless. They could see his back,
from the centre of which there flowed directly a stream of blood. The
ball had traversed his breast from side to side. He was dead.

He had to be carried away and replaced by another. Several minutes were
thus gained, in fact.




CHAPTER IX--EMPLOYMENT OF THE OLD TALENTS OF A POACHER AND THAT
INFALLIBLE MARKSMANSHIP WHICH INFLUENCED THE CONDEMNATION OF 1796

Opinions were exchanged in the barricade. The firing from the gun was
about to begin again. Against that grape-shot, they could not hold out
a quarter of an hour longer. It was absolutely necessary to deaden the
blows.

Enjolras issued this command:

"We must place a mattress there."

"We have none," said Combeferre, "the wounded are lying on them."

Jean Valjean, who was seated apart on a stone post, at the corner of the
tavern, with his gun between his knees, had, up to that moment, taken
no part in anything that was going on. He did not appear to hear the
combatants saying around him: "Here is a gun that is doing nothing."

At the order issued by Enjolras, he rose.

It will be remembered that, on the arrival of the rabble in the Rue
de la Chanvrerie, an old woman, foreseeing the bullets, had placed her
mattress in front of her window. This window, an attic window, was on
the roof of a six-story house situated a little beyond the barricade.
The mattress, placed cross-wise, supported at the bottom on two poles
for drying linen, was upheld at the top by two ropes, which, at that
distance, looked like two threads, and which were attached to two nails
planted in the window frames. These ropes were distinctly visible, like
hairs, against the sky.

"Can some one lend me a double-barrelled rifle?" said Jean Valjean.

Enjolras, who had just re-loaded his, handed it to him.

Jean Valjean took aim at the attic window and fired.

One of the mattress ropes was cut.

The mattress now hung by one thread only.

Jean Valjean fired the second charge. The second rope lashed the panes
of the attic window. The mattress slipped between the two poles and fell
into the street.

The barricade applauded.

All voices cried:

"Here is a mattress!"

"Yes," said Combeferre, "but who will go and fetch it?"

The mattress had, in fact, fallen outside the barricade, between
besiegers and besieged. Now, the death of the sergeant of artillery
having exasperated the troop, the soldiers had, for several minutes,
been lying flat on their stomachs behind the line of paving-stones which
they had erected, and, in order to supply the forced silence of
the piece, which was quiet while its service was in course of
reorganization, they had opened fire on the barricade. The insurgents
did not reply to this musketry, in order to spare their ammunition The
fusillade broke against the barricade; but the street, which it filled,
was terrible.

Jean Valjean stepped out of the cut, entered the street, traversed the
storm of bullets, walked up to the mattress, hoisted it upon his back,
and returned to the barricade.

He placed the mattress in the cut with his own hands. He fixed it there
against the wall in such a manner that the artillery-men should not see
it.

That done, they awaited the next discharge of grape-shot.

It was not long in coming.

The cannon vomited forth its package of buck-shot with a roar. But there
was no rebound. The effect which they had foreseen had been attained.
The barricade was saved.

"Citizen," said Enjolras to Jean Valjean, "the Republic thanks you."

Bossuet admired and laughed. He exclaimed:

"It is immoral that a mattress should have so much power. Triumph of
that which yields over that which strikes with lightning. But never
mind, glory to the mattress which annuls a cannon!"




CHAPTER X--DAWN

At that moment, Cosette awoke.

Her chamber was narrow, neat, unobtrusive, with a long sash-window,
facing the East on the back court-yard of the house.

Cosette knew nothing of what was going on in Paris. She had not been
there on the preceding evening, and she had already retired to her
chamber when Toussaint had said:

"It appears that there is a row."

Cosette had slept only a few hours, but soundly. She had had sweet
dreams, which possibly arose from the fact that her little bed was very
white. Some one, who was Marius, had appeared to her in the light. She
awoke with the sun in her eyes, which, at first, produced on her the
effect of being a continuation of her dream. Her first thought on
emerging from this dream was a smiling one. Cosette felt herself
thoroughly reassured. Like Jean Valjean, she had, a few hours
previously, passed through that reaction of the soul which absolutely
will not hear of unhappiness. She began to cherish hope, with all her
might, without knowing why. Then she felt a pang at her heart. It was
three days since she had seen Marius. But she said to herself that he
must have received her letter, that he knew where she was, and that
he was so clever that he would find means of reaching her.--And that
certainly to-day, and perhaps that very morning.--It was broad daylight,
but the rays of light were very horizontal; she thought that it was very
early, but that she must rise, nevertheless, in order to receive Marius.

She felt that she could not live without Marius, and that, consequently,
that was sufficient and that Marius would come. No objection was valid.
All this was certain. It was monstrous enough already to have suffered
for three days. Marius absent three days, this was horrible on the part
of the good God. Now, this cruel teasing from on high had been gone
through with. Marius was about to arrive, and he would bring good news.
Youth is made thus; it quickly dries its eyes; it finds sorrow useless
and does not accept it. Youth is the smile of the future in the presence
of an unknown quantity, which is itself. It is natural to it to be
happy. It seems as though its respiration were made of hope.

Moreover, Cosette could not remember what Marius had said to her on
the subject of this absence which was to last only one day, and what
explanation of it he had given her. Every one has noticed with what
nimbleness a coin which one has dropped on the ground rolls away and
hides, and with what art it renders itself undiscoverable. There are
thoughts which play us the same trick; they nestle away in a corner of
our brain; that is the end of them; they are lost; it is impossible to
lay the memory on them. Cosette was somewhat vexed at the useless little
effort made by her memory. She told herself, that it was very naughty
and very wicked of her, to have forgotten the words uttered by Marius.

She sprang out of bed and accomplished the two ablutions of soul and
body, her prayers and her toilet.

One may, in a case of exigency, introduce the reader into a nuptial
chamber, not into a virginal chamber. Verse would hardly venture it,
prose must not.

It is the interior of a flower that is not yet unfolded, it is whiteness
in the dark, it is the private cell of a closed lily, which must not be
gazed upon by man so long as the sun has not gazed upon it. Woman in the
bud is sacred. That innocent bud which opens, that adorable half-nudity
which is afraid of itself, that white foot which takes refuge in a
slipper, that throat which veils itself before a mirror as though
a mirror were an eye, that chemise which makes haste to rise up and
conceal the shoulder for a creaking bit of furniture or a passing
vehicle, those cords tied, those clasps fastened, those laces drawn,
those tremors, those shivers of cold and modesty, that exquisite
affright in every movement, that almost winged uneasiness where there
is no cause for alarm, the successive phases of dressing, as charming as
the clouds of dawn,--it is not fitting that all this should be narrated,
and it is too much to have even called attention to it.

The eye of man must be more religious in the presence of the rising of a
young girl than in the presence of the rising of a star. The possibility
of hurting should inspire an augmentation of respect. The down on the
peach, the bloom on the plum, the radiated crystal of the snow, the wing
of the butterfly powdered with feathers, are coarse compared to that
chastity which does not even know that it is chaste. The young girl is
only the flash of a dream, and is not yet a statue. Her bed-chamber is
hidden in the sombre part of the ideal. The indiscreet touch of a glance
brutalizes this vague penumbra. Here, contemplation is profanation.

We shall, therefore, show nothing of that sweet little flutter of
Cosette's rising.

An oriental tale relates how the rose was made white by God, but that
Adam looked upon her when she was unfolding, and she was ashamed and
turned crimson. We are of the number who fall speechless in the presence
of young girls and flowers, since we think them worthy of veneration.

Cosette dressed herself very hastily, combed and dressed her hair, which
was a very simple matter in those days, when women did not swell out
their curls and bands with cushions and puffs, and did not put crinoline
in their locks. Then she opened the window and cast her eyes around her
in every direction, hoping to descry some bit of the street, an angle of
the house, an edge of pavement, so that she might be able to watch for
Marius there. But no view of the outside was to be had. The back court
was surrounded by tolerably high walls, and the outlook was only on
several gardens. Cosette pronounced these gardens hideous: for the first
time in her life, she found flowers ugly. The smallest scrap of the
gutter of the street would have met her wishes better. She decided to
gaze at the sky, as though she thought that Marius might come from that
quarter.

All at once, she burst into tears. Not that this was fickleness of
soul; but hopes cut in twain by dejection--that was her case. She had a
confused consciousness of something horrible. Thoughts were rife in the
air, in fact. She told herself that she was not sure of anything, that
to withdraw herself from sight was to be lost; and the idea that Marius
could return to her from heaven appeared to her no longer charming but
mournful.

Then, as is the nature of these clouds, calm returned to her, and hope
and a sort of unconscious smile, which yet indicated trust in God.

Every one in the house was still asleep. A country-like silence reigned.
Not a shutter had been opened. The porter's lodge was closed. Toussaint
had not risen, and Cosette, naturally, thought that her father was
asleep. She must have suffered much, and she must have still been
suffering greatly, for she said to herself, that her father had been
unkind; but she counted on Marius. The eclipse of such a light was
decidedly impossible. Now and then, she heard sharp shocks in the
distance, and she said: "It is odd that people should be opening and
shutting their carriage gates so early." They were the reports of the
cannon battering the barricade.

A few feet below Cosette's window, in the ancient and perfectly black
cornice of the wall, there was a martin's nest; the curve of this nest
formed a little projection beyond the cornice, so that from above it
was possible to look into this little paradise. The mother was there,
spreading her wings like a fan over her brood; the father fluttered
about, flew away, then came back, bearing in his beak food and kisses.
The dawning day gilded this happy thing, the great law, "Multiply," lay
there smiling and august, and that sweet mystery unfolded in the
glory of the morning. Cosette, with her hair in the sunlight, her
soul absorbed in chimeras, illuminated by love within and by the dawn
without, bent over mechanically, and almost without daring to avow to
herself that she was thinking at the same time of Marius, began to gaze
at these birds, at this family, at that male and female, that mother and
her little ones, with the profound trouble which a nest produces on a
virgin.




CHAPTER XI--THE SHOT WHICH MISSES NOTHING AND KILLS NO ONE

The assailants' fire continued. Musketry and grape-shot alternated, but
without committing great ravages, to tell the truth. The top alone of
the Corinthe facade suffered; the window on the first floor, and the
attic window in the roof, riddled with buck-shot and biscaiens, were
slowly losing their shape. The combatants who had been posted there had
been obliged to withdraw. However, this is according to the tactics
of barricades; to fire for a long while, in order to exhaust the
insurgents' ammunition, if they commit the mistake of replying. When it
is perceived, from the slackening of their fire, that they have no more
powder and ball, the assault is made. Enjolras had not fallen into this
trap; the barricade did not reply.

At every discharge by platoons, Gavroche puffed out his cheek with his
tongue, a sign of supreme disdain.

"Good for you," said he, "rip up the cloth. We want some lint."

Courfeyrac called the grape-shot to order for the little effect which it
produced, and said to the cannon:

"You are growing diffuse, my good fellow."

One gets puzzled in battle, as at a ball. It is probable that this
silence on the part of the redoubt began to render the besiegers uneasy,
and to make them fear some unexpected incident, and that they felt the
necessity of getting a clear view behind that heap of paving-stones, and
of knowing what was going on behind that impassable wall which received
blows without retorting. The insurgents suddenly perceived a helmet
glittering in the sun on a neighboring roof. A fireman had placed his
back against a tall chimney, and seemed to be acting as sentinel. His
glance fell directly down into the barricade.

"There's an embarrassing watcher," said Enjolras.

Jean Valjean had returned Enjolras' rifle, but he had his own gun.

Without saying a word, he took aim at the fireman, and, a second later,
the helmet, smashed by a bullet, rattled noisily into the street. The
terrified soldier made haste to disappear. A second observer took his
place. This one was an officer. Jean Valjean, who had re-loaded his
gun, took aim at the newcomer and sent the officer's casque to join the
soldier's. The officer did not persist, and retired speedily. This time
the warning was understood. No one made his appearance thereafter on
that roof; and the idea of spying on the barricade was abandoned.

"Why did you not kill the man?" Bossuet asked Jean Valjean.

Jean Valjean made no reply.




CHAPTER XII--DISORDER A PARTISAN OF ORDER

Bossuet muttered in Combeferre's ear:

"He did not answer my question."

"He is a man who does good by gun-shots," said Combeferre.

Those who have preserved some memory of this already distant epoch
know that the National Guard from the suburbs was valiant against
insurrections. It was particularly zealous and intrepid in the days of
June, 1832. A certain good dram-shop keeper of Pantin des Vertus or
la Cunette, whose "establishment" had been closed by the riots, became
leonine at the sight of his deserted dance-hall, and got himself killed
to preserve the order represented by a tea-garden. In that bourgeois and
heroic time, in the presence of ideas which had their knights, interests
had their paladins. The prosiness of the originators detracted nothing
from the bravery of the movement. The diminution of a pile of crowns
made bankers sing the Marseillaise. They shed their blood lyrically for
the counting-house; and they defended the shop, that immense diminutive
of the fatherland, with Lacedaemonian enthusiasm.

At bottom, we will observe, there was nothing in all this that was not
extremely serious. It was social elements entering into strife, while
awaiting the day when they should enter into equilibrium.

Another sign of the times was the anarchy mingled with governmentalism
[the barbarous name of the correct party]. People were for order in
combination with lack of discipline.

The drum suddenly beat capricious calls, at the command of such or
such a Colonel of the National Guard; such and such a captain went into
action through inspiration; such and such National Guardsmen fought,
"for an idea," and on their own account. At critical moments, on "days"
they took counsel less of their leaders than of their instincts. There
existed in the army of order, veritable guerilleros, some of the sword,
like Fannicot, others of the pen, like Henri Fonfrede.

Civilization, unfortunately, represented at this epoch rather by an
aggregation of interests than by a group of principles, was or thought
itself, in peril; it set up the cry of alarm; each, constituting himself
a centre, defended it, succored it, and protected it with his own head;
and the first comer took it upon himself to save society.

Zeal sometimes proceeded to extermination. A platoon of the National
Guard would constitute itself on its own authority a private council of
war, and judge and execute a captured insurgent in five minutes. It
was an improvisation of this sort that had slain Jean Prouvaire. Fierce
Lynch law, with which no one party had any right to reproach the rest,
for it has been applied by the Republic in America, as well as by the
monarchy in Europe. This Lynch law was complicated with mistakes. On one
day of rioting, a young poet, named Paul Aime Garnier, was pursued
in the Place Royale, with a bayonet at his loins, and only escaped by
taking refuge under the porte-cochere of No. 6. They shouted:--"There's
another of those Saint-Simonians!" and they wanted to kill him. Now, he
had under his arm a volume of the memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon.
A National Guard had read the words Saint-Simon on the book, and had
shouted: "Death!"

On the 6th of June, 1832, a company of the National Guards from the
suburbs, commanded by the Captain Fannicot, above mentioned, had itself
decimated in the Rue de la Chanvrerie out of caprice and its own good
pleasure. This fact, singular though it may seem, was proved at the
judicial investigation opened in consequence of the insurrection of
1832. Captain Fannicot, a bold and impatient bourgeois, a sort of
condottiere of the order of those whom we have just characterized,
a fanatical and intractable governmentalist, could not resist the
temptation to fire prematurely, and the ambition of capturing the
barricade alone and unaided, that is to say, with his company.
Exasperated by the successive apparition of the red flag and the old
coat which he took for the black flag, he loudly blamed the generals and
chiefs of the corps, who were holding council and did not think that the
moment for the decisive assault had arrived, and who were allowing "the
insurrection to fry in its own fat," to use the celebrated expression
of one of them. For his part, he thought the barricade ripe, and as that
which is ripe ought to fall, he made the attempt.

He commanded men as resolute as himself, "raging fellows," as a witness
said. His company, the same which had shot Jean Prouvaire the poet, was
the first of the battalion posted at the angle of the street. At the
moment when they were least expecting it, the captain launched his men
against the barricade. This movement, executed with more good will than
strategy, cost the Fannicot company dear. Before it had traversed two
thirds of the street it was received by a general discharge from the
barricade. Four, the most audacious, who were running on in front,
were mown down point-blank at the very foot of the redoubt, and this
courageous throng of National Guards, very brave men but lacking in
military tenacity, were forced to fall back, after some hesitation,
leaving fifteen corpses on the pavement. This momentary hesitation gave
the insurgents time to re-load their weapons, and a second and very
destructive discharge struck the company before it could regain the
corner of the street, its shelter. A moment more, and it was caught
between two fires, and it received the volley from the battery piece
which, not having received the order, had not discontinued its firing.

The intrepid and imprudent Fannicot was one of the dead from this
grape-shot. He was killed by the cannon, that is to say, by order.

This attack, which was more furious than serious, irritated
Enjolras.--"The fools!" said he. "They are getting their own men killed
and they are using up our ammunition for nothing."

Enjolras spoke like the real general of insurrection which he
was. Insurrection and repression do not fight with equal weapons.
Insurrection, which is speedily exhausted, has only a certain number
of shots to fire and a certain number of combatants to expend. An empty
cartridge-box, a man killed, cannot be replaced. As repression has the
army, it does not count its men, and, as it has Vincennes, it does not
count its shots. Repression has as many regiments as the barricade has
men, and as many arsenals as the barricade has cartridge-boxes. Thus
they are struggles of one against a hundred, which always end in
crushing the barricade; unless the revolution, uprising suddenly,
flings into the balance its flaming archangel's sword. This does happen
sometimes. Then everything rises, the pavements begin to seethe, popular
redoubts abound. Paris quivers supremely, the quid divinum is given
forth, a 10th of August is in the air, a 29th of July is in the air, a
wonderful light appears, the yawning maw of force draws back, and the
army, that lion, sees before it, erect and tranquil, that prophet,
France.




CHAPTER XIII--PASSING GLEAMS

In the chaos of sentiments and passions which defend a barricade, there
is a little of everything; there is bravery, there is youth, honor,
enthusiasm, the ideal, conviction, the rage of the gambler, and, above
all, intermittences of hope.

One of these intermittences, one of these vague quivers of hope suddenly
traversed the barricade of the Rue de la Chanvrerie at the moment when
it was least expected.

"Listen," suddenly cried Enjolras, who was still on the watch, "it seems
to me that Paris is waking up."

It is certain that, on the morning of the 6th of June, the insurrection
broke out afresh for an hour or two, to a certain extent. The obstinacy
of the alarm peal of Saint-Merry reanimated some fancies. Barricades
were begun in the Rue du Poirier and the Rue des Gravilliers. In front
of the Porte Saint-Martin, a young man, armed with a rifle, attacked
alone a squadron of cavalry. In plain sight, on the open boulevard, he
placed one knee on the ground, shouldered his weapon, fired, killed the
commander of the squadron, and turned away, saying: "There's another who
will do us no more harm."

He was put to the sword. In the Rue Saint-Denis, a woman fired on the
National Guard from behind a lowered blind. The slats of the blind could
be seen to tremble at every shot. A child fourteen years of age
was arrested in the Rue de la Cossonerie, with his pockets full of
cartridges. Many posts were attacked. At the entrance to the Rue
Bertin-Poiree, a very lively and utterly unexpected fusillade welcomed
a regiment of cuirrassiers, at whose head marched Marshal General
Cavaignac de Barague. In the Rue Planche-Mibray, they threw old pieces
of pottery and household utensils down on the soldiers from the roofs; a
bad sign; and when this matter was reported to Marshal Soult, Napoleon's
old lieutenant grew thoughtful, as he recalled Suchet's saying at
Saragossa: "We are lost when the old women empty their pots de chambre
on our heads."

These general symptoms which presented themselves at the moment when
it was thought that the uprising had been rendered local, this fever
of wrath, these sparks which flew hither and thither above those deep
masses of combustibles which are called the faubourgs of Paris,--all
this, taken together, disturbed the military chiefs. They made haste to
stamp out these beginnings of conflagration.

They delayed the attack on the barricades Maubuee, de la Chanvrerie and
Saint-Merry until these sparks had been extinguished, in order that they
might have to deal with the barricades only and be able to finish
them at one blow. Columns were thrown into the streets where there was
fermentation, sweeping the large, sounding the small, right and left,
now slowly and cautiously, now at full charge. The troops broke in
the doors of houses whence shots had been fired; at the same time,
manoeuvres by the cavalry dispersed the groups on the boulevards. This
repression was not effected without some commotion, and without that
tumultuous uproar peculiar to collisions between the army and the
people. This was what Enjolras had caught in the intervals of the
cannonade and the musketry. Moreover, he had seen wounded men passing
the end of the street in litters, and he said to Courfeyrac:--"Those
wounded do not come from us."

Their hope did not last long; the gleam was quickly eclipsed. In less
than half an hour, what was in the air vanished, it was a flash of
lightning unaccompanied by thunder, and the insurgents felt that sort of
leaden cope, which the indifference of the people casts over obstinate
and deserted men, fall over them once more.

The general movement, which seemed to have assumed a vague outline, had
miscarried; and the attention of the minister of war and the strategy of
the generals could now be concentrated on the three or four barricades
which still remained standing.

The sun was mounting above the horizon.

An insurgent hailed Enjolras.

"We are hungry here. Are we really going to die like this, without
anything to eat?"

Enjolras, who was still leaning on his elbows at his embrasure, made an
affirmative sign with his head, but without taking his eyes from the end
of the street.




CHAPTER XIV--WHEREIN WILL APPEAR THE NAME OF ENJOLRAS' MISTRESS

Courfeyrac, seated on a paving-stone beside Enjolras, continued to
insult the cannon, and each time that that gloomy cloud of projectiles
which is called grape-shot passed overhead with its terrible sound he
assailed it with a burst of irony.

"You are wearing out your lungs, poor, brutal, old fellow, you pain me,
you are wasting your row. That's not thunder, it's a cough."

And the bystanders laughed.

Courfeyrac and Bossuet, whose brave good humor increased with the peril,
like Madame Scarron, replaced nourishment with pleasantry, and, as wine
was lacking, they poured out gayety to all.

"I admire Enjolras," said Bossuet. "His impassive temerity astounds
me. He lives alone, which renders him a little sad, perhaps; Enjolras
complains of his greatness, which binds him to widowhood. The rest of us
have mistresses, more or less, who make us crazy, that is to say, brave.
When a man is as much in love as a tiger, the least that he can do is to
fight like a lion. That is one way of taking our revenge for the capers
that mesdames our grisettes play on us. Roland gets himself killed for
Angelique; all our heroism comes from our women. A man without a woman
is a pistol without a trigger; it is the woman that sets the man off.
Well, Enjolras has no woman. He is not in love, and yet he manages to be
intrepid. It is a thing unheard of that a man should be as cold as ice
and as bold as fire."

Enjolras did not appear to be listening, but had any one been near him,
that person would have heard him mutter in a low voice: "Patria."

Bossuet was still laughing when Courfeyrac exclaimed:

"News!"

And assuming the tone of an usher making an announcement, he added:

"My name is Eight-Pounder."

In fact, a new personage had entered on the scene. This was a second
piece of ordnance.

The artillery-men rapidly performed their manoeuvres in force and placed
this second piece in line with the first.

This outlined the catastrophe.

A few minutes later, the two pieces, rapidly served, were firing
point-blank at the redoubt; the platoon firing of the line and of the
soldiers from the suburbs sustained the artillery.

Another cannonade was audible at some distance. At the same time that
the two guns were furiously attacking the redoubt from the Rue de la
Chanvrerie, two other cannons, trained one from the Rue Saint-Denis,
the other from the Rue Aubry-le-Boucher, were riddling the Saint-Merry
barricade. The four cannons echoed each other mournfully.

The barking of these sombre dogs of war replied to each other.

One of the two pieces which was now battering the barricade on the Rue
de la Chanvrerie was firing grape-shot, the other balls.

The piece which was firing balls was pointed a little high, and the aim
was calculated so that the ball struck the extreme edge of the upper
crest of the barricade, and crumbled the stone down upon the insurgents,
mingled with bursts of grape-shot.

The object of this mode of firing was to drive the insurgents from
the summit of the redoubt, and to compel them to gather close in the
interior, that is to say, this announced the assault.

The combatants once driven from the crest of the barricade by balls,
and from the windows of the cabaret by grape-shot, the attacking columns
could venture into the street without being picked off, perhaps, even,
without being seen, could briskly and suddenly scale the redoubt, as on
the preceding evening, and, who knows? take it by surprise.

"It is absolutely necessary that the inconvenience of those guns
should be diminished," said Enjolras, and he shouted: "Fire on the
artillery-men!"

All were ready. The barricade, which had long been silent, poured forth
a desperate fire; seven or eight discharges followed, with a sort of
rage and joy; the street was filled with blinding smoke, and, at the end
of a few minutes, athwart this mist all streaked with flame, two thirds
of the gunners could be distinguished lying beneath the wheels of the
cannons. Those who were left standing continued to serve the pieces with
severe tranquillity, but the fire had slackened.

"Things are going well now," said Bossuet to Enjolras. "Success."

Enjolras shook his head and replied:

"Another quarter of an hour of this success, and there will not be any
cartridges left in the barricade."

It appears that Gavroche overheard this remark.




CHAPTER XV--GAVROCHE OUTSIDE

Courfeyrac suddenly caught sight of some one at the base of the
barricade, outside in the street, amid the bullets.

Gavroche had taken a bottle basket from the wine-shop, had made his
way out through the cut, and was quietly engaged in emptying the full
cartridge-boxes of the National Guardsmen who had been killed on the
slope of the redoubt, into his basket.

"What are you doing there?" asked Courfeyrac.

Gavroche raised his face:--

"I'm filling my basket, citizen."

"Don't you see the grape-shot?"

Gavroche replied:

"Well, it is raining. What then?"

Courfeyrac shouted:--"Come in!"

"Instanter," said Gavroche.

And with a single bound he plunged into the street.

It will be remembered that Fannicot's company had left behind it a trail
of bodies. Twenty corpses lay scattered here and there on the pavement,
through the whole length of the street. Twenty cartouches for Gavroche
meant a provision of cartridges for the barricade.

The smoke in the street was like a fog. Whoever has beheld a cloud which
has fallen into a mountain gorge between two peaked escarpments can
imagine this smoke rendered denser and thicker by two gloomy rows of
lofty houses. It rose gradually and was incessantly renewed; hence a
twilight which made even the broad daylight turn pale. The combatants
could hardly see each other from one end of the street to the other,
short as it was.

This obscurity, which had probably been desired and calculated on by the
commanders who were to direct the assault on the barricade, was useful
to Gavroche.

Beneath the folds of this veil of smoke, and thanks to his small size,
he could advance tolerably far into the street without being seen. He
rifled the first seven or eight cartridge-boxes without much danger.

He crawled flat on his belly, galloped on all fours, took his basket
in his teeth, twisted, glided, undulated, wound from one dead body to
another, and emptied the cartridge-box or cartouche as a monkey opens a
nut.

They did not dare to shout to him to return from the barricade, which
was quite near, for fear of attracting attention to him.

On one body, that of a corporal, he found a powder-flask.

"For thirst," said he, putting it in his pocket.

By dint of advancing, he reached a point where the fog of the fusillade
became transparent. So that the sharpshooters of the line ranged on
the outlook behind their paving-stone dike and the sharpshooters of the
banlieue massed at the corner of the street suddenly pointed out to each
other something moving through the smoke.

At the moment when Gavroche was relieving a sergeant, who was lying near
a stone door-post, of his cartridges, a bullet struck the body.

"Fichtre!" ejaculated Gavroche. "They are killing my dead men for me."

A second bullet struck a spark from the pavement beside him.--A third
overturned his basket.

Gavroche looked and saw that this came from the men of the banlieue.

He sprang to his feet, stood erect, with his hair flying in the wind,
his hands on his hips, his eyes fixed on the National Guardsmen who were
firing, and sang:

      "On est laid a Nanterre,       "Men are ugly at Nanterre,
       C'est la faute a Voltaire;     'Tis the  fault of Voltaire;
       Et bete a Palaiseau,           And dull at Palaiseau,
       C'est la faute a Rousseau."    'Tis the fault of Rousseau."


Then he picked up his basket, replaced the cartridges which had fallen
from it, without missing a single one, and, advancing towards the
fusillade, set about plundering another cartridge-box. There a fourth
bullet missed him, again. Gavroche sang:

       "Je ne suis pas notaire,      "I am not a notary,
        C'est la faute a Voltaire;    'Tis the fault of Voltaire;
        Je suis un petit oiseau,      I'm a little bird,
        C'est la faute a Rousseau."   'Tis the fault of Rousseau."

A fifth bullet only succeeded in drawing from him a third couplet.

       "Joie est mon caractere,      "Joy is my character,
        C'est la faute a Voltaire;    'Tis the fault of Voltaire;
        Misere est mon trousseau,     Misery is my trousseau,
        C'est la faute a Rousseau."   'Tis the fault of Rousseau."


Thus it went on for some time.

It was a charming and terrible sight. Gavroche, though shot at, was
teasing the fusillade. He had the air of being greatly diverted. It was
the sparrow pecking at the sportsmen. To each discharge he retorted
with a couplet. They aimed at him constantly, and always missed him. The
National Guardsmen and the soldiers laughed as they took aim at him. He
lay down, sprang to his feet, hid in the corner of a doorway, then made
a bound, disappeared, re-appeared, scampered away, returned, replied to
the grape-shot with his thumb at his nose, and, all the while, went on
pillaging the cartouches, emptying the cartridge-boxes, and filling his
basket. The insurgents, panting with anxiety, followed him with their
eyes. The barricade trembled; he sang. He was not a child, he was not
a man; he was a strange gamin-fairy. He might have been called the
invulnerable dwarf of the fray. The bullets flew after him, he was more
nimble than they. He played a fearful game of hide and seek with death;
every time that the flat-nosed face of the spectre approached, the
urchin administered to it a fillip.

One bullet, however, better aimed or more treacherous than the rest,
finally struck the will-o'-the-wisp of a child. Gavroche was seen to
stagger, then he sank to the earth. The whole barricade gave vent to a
cry; but there was something of Antaeus in that pygmy; for the gamin
to touch the pavement is the same as for the giant to touch the earth;
Gavroche had fallen only to rise again; he remained in a sitting
posture, a long thread of blood streaked his face, he raised both arms
in the air, glanced in the direction whence the shot had come, and began
to sing:


      "Je suis tombe par terre,     "I have fallen to the earth,
       C'est la faute a Voltaire;    'Tis the fault of Voltaire;
       Le nez dans le ruisseau,      With my nose in the gutter,
       C'est la faute a . . . "      'Tis the fault of . . . "


He did not finish. A second bullet from the same marksman stopped him
short. This time he fell face downward on the pavement, and moved no
more. This grand little soul had taken its flight.




CHAPTER XVI--HOW FROM A BROTHER ONE BECOMES A FATHER

At that same moment, in the garden of the Luxembourg,--for the gaze of
the drama must be everywhere present,--two children were holding each
other by the hand. One might have been seven years old, the other five.
The rain having soaked them, they were walking along the paths on
the sunny side; the elder was leading the younger; they were pale and
ragged; they had the air of wild birds. The smaller of them said: "I am
very hungry."

The elder, who was already somewhat of a protector, was leading his
brother with his left hand and in his right he carried a small stick.

They were alone in the garden. The garden was deserted, the gates had
been closed by order of the police, on account of the insurrection. The
troops who had been bivouacking there had departed for the exigencies of
combat.

How did those children come there? Perhaps they had escaped from some
guard-house which stood ajar; perhaps there was in the vicinity, at
the Barriere d'Enfer; or on the Esplanade de l'Observatoire, or in the
neighboring carrefour, dominated by the pediment on which could be read:
Invenerunt parvulum pannis involutum, some mountebank's booth from which
they had fled; perhaps they had, on the preceding evening, escaped the
eye of the inspectors of the garden at the hour of closing, and had
passed the night in some one of those sentry-boxes where people read the
papers? The fact is, they were stray lambs and they seemed free. To be
astray and to seem free is to be lost. These poor little creatures were,
in fact, lost.

These two children were the same over whom Gavroche had been put to
some trouble, as the reader will recollect. Children of the Thenardiers,
leased out to Magnon, attributed to M. Gillenormand, and now leaves
fallen from all these rootless branches, and swept over the ground by
the wind. Their clothing, which had been clean in Magnon's day, and
which had served her as a prospectus with M. Gillenormand, had been
converted into rags.

Henceforth these beings belonged to the statistics as "Abandoned
children," whom the police take note of, collect, mislay and find again
on the pavements of Paris.

It required the disturbance of a day like that to account for these
miserable little creatures being in that garden. If the superintendents
had caught sight of them, they would have driven such rags forth. Poor
little things do not enter public gardens; still, people should reflect
that, as children, they have a right to flowers.

These children were there, thanks to the locked gates. They were there
contrary to the regulations. They had slipped into the garden and there
they remained. Closed gates do not dismiss the inspectors, oversight
is supposed to continue, but it grows slack and reposes; and the
inspectors, moved by the public anxiety and more occupied with the
outside than the inside, no longer glanced into the garden, and had not
seen the two delinquents.

It had rained the night before, and even a little in the morning. But
in June, showers do not count for much. An hour after a storm, it can
hardly be seen that the beautiful blonde day has wept. The earth, in
summer, is as quickly dried as the cheek of a child. At that period of
the solstice, the light of full noonday is, so to speak, poignant. It
takes everything. It applies itself to the earth, and superposes itself
with a sort of suction. One would say that the sun was thirsty. A shower
is but a glass of water; a rainstorm is instantly drunk up. In the
morning everything was dripping, in the afternoon everything is powdered
over.

Nothing is so worthy of admiration as foliage washed by the rain and
wiped by the rays of sunlight; it is warm freshness. The gardens and
meadows, having water at their roots, and sun in their flowers, become
perfuming-pans of incense, and smoke with all their odors at
once. Everything smiles, sings and offers itself. One feels gently
intoxicated. The springtime is a provisional paradise, the sun helps man
to have patience.

There are beings who demand nothing further; mortals, who, having
the azure of heaven, say: "It is enough!" dreamers absorbed in the
wonderful, dipping into the idolatry of nature, indifferent to good and
evil, contemplators of cosmos and radiantly forgetful of man, who do not
understand how people can occupy themselves with the hunger of these,
and the thirst of those, with the nudity of the poor in winter, with the
lymphatic curvature of the little spinal column, with the pallet, the
attic, the dungeon, and the rags of shivering young girls, when they
can dream beneath the trees; peaceful and terrible spirits they, and
pitilessly satisfied. Strange to say, the infinite suffices them. That
great need of man, the finite, which admits of embrace, they ignore.
The finite which admits of progress and sublime toil, they do not
think about. The indefinite, which is born from the human and divine
combination of the infinite and the finite, escapes them. Provided that
they are face to face with immensity, they smile. Joy never, ecstasy
forever. Their life lies in surrendering their personality in
contemplation. The history of humanity is for them only a detailed
plan. All is not there; the true All remains without; what is the use
of busying oneself over that detail, man? Man suffers, that is quite
possible; but look at Aldebaran rising! The mother has no more milk, the
new-born babe is dying. I know nothing about that, but just look at this
wonderful rosette which a slice of wood-cells of the pine presents under
the microscope! Compare the most beautiful Mechlin lace to that if you
can! These thinkers forget to love. The zodiac thrives with them to such
a point that it prevents their seeing the weeping child. God eclipses
their souls. This is a family of minds which are, at once, great and
petty. Horace was one of them; so was Goethe. La Fontaine perhaps;
magnificent egoists of the infinite, tranquil spectators of sorrow, who
do not behold Nero if the weather be fair, for whom the sun conceals the
funeral pile, who would look on at an execution by the guillotine in the
search for an effect of light, who hear neither the cry nor the sob, nor
the death rattle, nor the alarm peal, for whom everything is well, since
there is a month of May, who, so long as there are clouds of purple
and gold above their heads, declare themselves content, and who are
determined to be happy until the radiance of the stars and the songs of
the birds are exhausted.

These are dark radiances. They have no suspicion that they are to be
pitied. Certainly they are so. He who does not weep does not see. They
are to be admired and pitied, as one would both pity and admire a being
at once night and day, without eyes beneath his lashes but with a star
on his brow.

The indifference of these thinkers, is, according to some, a superior
philosophy. That may be; but in this superiority there is some
infirmity. One may be immortal and yet limp: witness Vulcan. One may
be more than man and less than man. There is incomplete immensity in
nature. Who knows whether the sun is not a blind man?

But then, what? In whom can we trust? Solem quis dicere falsum audeat?
Who shall dare to say that the sun is false? Thus certain geniuses,
themselves, certain Very-Lofty mortals, man-stars, may be mistaken? That
which is on high at the summit, at the crest, at the zenith, that which
sends down so much light on the earth, sees but little, sees badly, sees
not at all? Is not this a desperate state of things? No. But what is
there, then, above the sun? The god.

On the 6th of June, 1832, about eleven o'clock in the morning, the
Luxembourg, solitary and depopulated, was charming. The quincunxes and
flower-beds shed forth balm and dazzling beauty into the sunlight. The
branches, wild with the brilliant glow of midday, seemed endeavoring
to embrace. In the sycamores there was an uproar of linnets, sparrows
triumphed, woodpeckers climbed along the chestnut trees, administering
little pecks on the bark. The flower-beds accepted the legitimate
royalty of the lilies; the most august of perfumes is that which
emanates from whiteness. The peppery odor of the carnations was
perceptible. The old crows of Marie de Medici were amorous in the tall
trees. The sun gilded, empurpled, set fire to and lighted up the tulips,
which are nothing but all the varieties of flame made into flowers. All
around the banks of tulips the bees, the sparks of these flame-flowers,
hummed. All was grace and gayety, even the impending rain; this relapse,
by which the lilies of the valley and the honeysuckles were destined to
profit, had nothing disturbing about it; the swallows indulged in the
charming threat of flying low. He who was there aspired to happiness;
life smelled good; all nature exhaled candor, help, assistance,
paternity, caress, dawn. The thoughts which fell from heaven were as
sweet as the tiny hand of a baby when one kisses it.

The statues under the trees, white and nude, had robes of shadow pierced
with light; these goddesses were all tattered with sunlight; rays hung
from them on all sides. Around the great fountain, the earth was already
dried up to the point of being burnt. There was sufficient breeze to
raise little insurrections of dust here and there. A few yellow leaves,
left over from the autumn, chased each other merrily, and seemed to be
playing tricks on each other.

This abundance of light had something indescribably reassuring about it.
Life, sap, heat, odors overflowed; one was conscious, beneath creation,
of the enormous size of the source; in all these breaths permeated with
love, in this interchange of reverberations and reflections, in this
marvellous expenditure of rays, in this infinite outpouring of liquid
gold, one felt the prodigality of the inexhaustible; and, behind this
splendor as behind a curtain of flame, one caught a glimpse of God, that
millionaire of stars.

Thanks to the sand, there was not a speck of mud; thanks to the rain,
there was not a grain of ashes. The clumps of blossoms had just been
bathed; every sort of velvet, satin, gold and varnish, which springs
from the earth in the form of flowers, was irreproachable. This
magnificence was cleanly. The grand silence of happy nature filled the
garden. A celestial silence that is compatible with a thousand sorts of
music, the cooing of nests, the buzzing of swarms, the flutterings of
the breeze. All the harmony of the season was complete in one gracious
whole; the entrances and exits of spring took place in proper order; the
lilacs ended; the jasmines began; some flowers were tardy, some insects
in advance of their time; the van-guard of the red June butterflies
fraternized with the rear-guard of the white butterflies of May. The
plantain trees were getting their new skins. The breeze hollowed out
undulations in the magnificent enormity of the chestnut-trees. It
was splendid. A veteran from the neighboring barracks, who was gazing
through the fence, said: "Here is the Spring presenting arms and in full
uniform."

All nature was breakfasting; creation was at table; this was its hour;
the great blue cloth was spread in the sky, and the great green cloth
on earth; the sun lighted it all up brilliantly. God was serving
the universal repast. Each creature had his pasture or his mess. The
ring-dove found his hemp-seed, the chaffinch found his millet, the
goldfinch found chickweed, the red-breast found worms, the green finch
found flies, the fly found infusoriae, the bee found flowers. They ate
each other somewhat, it is true, which is the misery of evil mixed with
good; but not a beast of them all had an empty stomach.

The two little abandoned creatures had arrived in the vicinity of the
grand fountain, and, rather bewildered by all this light, they tried to
hide themselves, the instinct of the poor and the weak in the presence
of even impersonal magnificence; and they kept behind the swans' hutch.

Here and there, at intervals, when the wind blew, shouts, clamor, a sort
of tumultuous death rattle, which was the firing, and dull blows, which
were discharges of cannon, struck the ear confusedly. Smoke hung over
the roofs in the direction of the Halles. A bell, which had the air of
an appeal, was ringing in the distance.

These children did not appear to notice these noises. The little one
repeated from time to time: "I am hungry."

Almost at the same instant with the children, another couple approached
the great basin. They consisted of a goodman, about fifty years of age,
who was leading by the hand a little fellow of six. No doubt, a father
and his son. The little man of six had a big brioche.

At that epoch, certain houses abutting on the river, in the Rues Madame
and d'Enfer, had keys to the Luxembourg garden, of which the lodgers
enjoyed the use when the gates were shut, a privilege which was
suppressed later on. This father and son came from one of these houses,
no doubt.

The two poor little creatures watched "that gentleman" approaching, and
hid themselves a little more thoroughly.

He was a bourgeois. The same person, perhaps, whom Marius had one day
heard, through his love fever, near the same grand basin, counselling
his son "to avoid excesses." He had an affable and haughty air, and a
mouth which was always smiling, since it did not shut. This mechanical
smile, produced by too much jaw and too little skin, shows the teeth
rather than the soul. The child, with his brioche, which he had bitten
into but had not finished eating, seemed satiated. The child was dressed
as a National Guardsman, owing to the insurrection, and the father had
remained clad as a bourgeois out of prudence.

Father and son halted near the fountain where two swans were sporting.
This bourgeois appeared to cherish a special admiration for the swans.
He resembled them in this sense, that he walked like them.

For the moment, the swans were swimming, which is their principal
talent, and they were superb.

If the two poor little beings had listened and if they had been of an
age to understand, they might have gathered the words of this grave man.
The father was saying to his son:

"The sage lives content with little. Look at me, my son. I do not love
pomp. I am never seen in clothes decked with gold lace and stones; I
leave that false splendor to badly organized souls."

Here the deep shouts which proceeded from the direction of the Halles
burst out with fresh force of bell and uproar.

"What is that?" inquired the child.

The father replied:

"It is the Saturnalia."

All at once, he caught sight of the two little ragged boys behind the
green swan-hutch.

"There is the beginning," said he.

And, after a pause, he added:

"Anarchy is entering this garden."

In the meanwhile, his son took a bite of his brioche, spit it out, and,
suddenly burst out crying.

"What are you crying about?" demanded his father.

"I am not hungry any more," said the child.

The father's smile became more accentuated.

"One does not need to be hungry in order to eat a cake."

"My cake tires me. It is stale."

"Don't you want any more of it?"

"No."

The father pointed to the swans.

"Throw it to those palmipeds."

The child hesitated. A person may not want any more of his cake; but
that is no reason for giving it away.

The father went on:

"Be humane. You must have compassion on animals."

And, taking the cake from his son, he flung it into the basin.

The cake fell very near the edge.

The swans were far away, in the centre of the basin, and busy with some
prey. They had seen neither the bourgeois nor the brioche.

The bourgeois, feeling that the cake was in danger of being wasted, and
moved by this useless shipwreck, entered upon a telegraphic agitation,
which finally attracted the attention of the swans.

They perceived something floating, steered for the edge like ships, as
they are, and slowly directed their course toward the brioche, with the
stupid majesty which befits white creatures.

"The swans [cygnes] understand signs [signes]," said the bourgeois,
delighted to make a jest.

At that moment, the distant tumult of the city underwent another sudden
increase. This time it was sinister. There are some gusts of wind which
speak more distinctly than others. The one which was blowing at that
moment brought clearly defined drum-beats, clamors, platoon firing, and
the dismal replies of the tocsin and the cannon. This coincided with a
black cloud which suddenly veiled the sun.

The swans had not yet reached the brioche.

"Let us return home," said the father, "they are attacking the
Tuileries."

He grasped his son's hand again. Then he continued:

"From the Tuileries to the Luxembourg, there is but the distance which
separates Royalty from the peerage; that is not far. Shots will soon
rain down."

He glanced at the cloud.

"Perhaps it is rain itself that is about to shower down; the sky
is joining in; the younger branch is condemned. Let us return home
quickly."

"I should like to see the swans eat the brioche," said the child.

The father replied:

"That would be imprudent."

And he led his little bourgeois away.

The son, regretting the swans, turned his head back toward the basin
until a corner of the quincunxes concealed it from him.

In the meanwhile, the two little waifs had approached the brioche at
the same time as the swans. It was floating on the water. The smaller of
them stared at the cake, the elder gazed after the retreating bourgeois.

Father and son entered the labyrinth of walks which leads to the grand
flight of steps near the clump of trees on the side of the Rue Madame.

As soon as they had disappeared from view, the elder child hastily
flung himself flat on his stomach on the rounding curb of the basin, and
clinging to it with his left hand, and leaning over the water, on the
verge of falling in, he stretched out his right hand with his stick
towards the cake. The swans, perceiving the enemy, made haste, and in so
doing, they produced an effect of their breasts which was of service to
the little fisher; the water flowed back before the swans, and one of
these gentle concentric undulations softly floated the brioche towards
the child's wand. Just as the swans came up, the stick touched the cake.
The child gave it a brisk rap, drew in the brioche, frightened away the
swans, seized the cake, and sprang to his feet. The cake was wet;
but they were hungry and thirsty. The elder broke the cake into two
portions, a large one and a small one, took the small one for himself,
gave the large one to his brother, and said to him:

"Ram that into your muzzle."




CHAPTER XVII--MORTUUS PATER FILIUM MORITURUM EXPECTAT

Marius dashed out of the barricade, Combeferre followed him. But he
was too late. Gavroche was dead. Combeferre brought back the basket of
cartridges; Marius bore the child.

"Alas!" he thought, "that which the father had done for his father, he
was requiting to the son; only, Thenardier had brought back his father
alive; he was bringing back the child dead."

When Marius re-entered the redoubt with Gavroche in his arms, his face,
like the child, was inundated with blood.

At the moment when he had stooped to lift Gavroche, a bullet had grazed
his head; he had not noticed it.

Courfeyrac untied his cravat and with it bandaged Marius' brow.

They laid Gavroche on the same table with Mabeuf, and spread over the
two corpses the black shawl. There was enough of it for both the old man
and the child.

Combeferre distributed the cartridges from the basket which he had
brought in.

This gave each man fifteen rounds to fire.

Jean Valjean was still in the same place, motionless on his stone post.
When Combeferre offered him his fifteen cartridges, he shook his head.

"Here's a rare eccentric," said Combeferre in a low voice to Enjolras.
"He finds a way of not fighting in this barricade."

"Which does not prevent him from defending it," responded Enjolras.

"Heroism has its originals," resumed Combeferre.

And Courfeyrac, who had overheard, added:

"He is another sort from Father Mabeuf."

One thing which must be noted is, that the fire which was battering the
barricade hardly disturbed the interior. Those who have never traversed
the whirlwind of this sort of war can form no idea of the singular
moments of tranquillity mingled with these convulsions. Men go and
come, they talk, they jest, they lounge. Some one whom we know heard a
combatant say to him in the midst of the grape-shot: "We are here as
at a bachelor breakfast." The redoubt of the Rue de la Chanvrerie, we
repeat, seemed very calm within. All mutations and all phases had been,
or were about to be, exhausted. The position, from critical, had become
menacing, and, from menacing, was probably about to become desperate. In
proportion as the situation grew gloomy, the glow of heroism empurpled
the barricade more and more. Enjolras, who was grave, dominated it,
in the attitude of a young Spartan sacrificing his naked sword to the
sombre genius, Epidotas.

Combeferre, wearing an apron, was dressing the wounds: Bossuet and
Feuilly were making cartridges with the powder-flask picked up by
Gavroche on the dead corporal, and Bossuet said to Feuilly: "We are soon
to take the diligence for another planet"; Courfeyrac was disposing and
arranging on some paving-stones which he had reserved for himself near
Enjolras, a complete arsenal, his sword-cane, his gun, two holster
pistols, and a cudgel, with the care of a young girl setting a small
dunkerque in order. Jean Valjean stared silently at the wall opposite
him. An artisan was fastening Mother Hucheloup's big straw hat on his
head with a string, "for fear of sun-stroke," as he said. The young
men from the Cougourde d'Aix were chatting merrily among themselves,
as though eager to speak patois for the last time. Joly, who had taken
Widow Hucheloup's mirror from the wall, was examining his tongue in it.
Some combatants, having discovered a few crusts of rather mouldy bread,
in a drawer, were eagerly devouring them. Marius was disturbed with
regard to what his father was about to say to him.




CHAPTER XVIII--THE VULTURE BECOME PREY

We must insist upon one psychological fact peculiar to barricades.
Nothing which is characteristic of that surprising war of the streets
should be omitted.

Whatever may have been the singular inward tranquillity which we have
just mentioned, the barricade, for those who are inside it, remains,
none the less, a vision.

There is something of the apocalypse in civil war, all the mists of the
unknown are commingled with fierce flashes, revolutions are sphinxes,
and any one who has passed through a barricade thinks he has traversed a
dream.

The feelings to which one is subject in these places we have pointed out
in the case of Marius, and we shall see the consequences; they are both
more and less than life. On emerging from a barricade, one no longer
knows what one has seen there. One has been terrible, but one knows
it not. One has been surrounded with conflicting ideas which had human
faces; one's head has been in the light of the future. There were
corpses lying prone there, and phantoms standing erect. The hours were
colossal and seemed hours of eternity. One has lived in death. Shadows
have passed by. What were they?

One has beheld hands on which there was blood; there was a deafening
horror; there was also a frightful silence; there were open mouths which
shouted, and other open mouths which held their peace; one was in the
midst of smoke, of night, perhaps. One fancied that one had touched the
sinister ooze of unknown depths; one stares at something red on one's
finger nails. One no longer remembers anything.

Let us return to the Rue de la Chanvrerie.

All at once, between two discharges, the distant sound of a clock
striking the hour became audible.

"It is midday," said Combeferre.

The twelve strokes had not finished striking when Enjolras sprang to his
feet, and from the summit of the barricade hurled this thundering shout:

"Carry stones up into the houses; line the windowsills and the
roofs with them. Half the men to their guns, the other half to the
paving-stones. There is not a minute to be lost."

A squad of sappers and miners, axe on shoulder, had just made their
appearance in battle array at the end of the street.

This could only be the head of a column; and of what column? The
attacking column, evidently; the sappers charged with the demolition of
the barricade must always precede the soldiers who are to scale it.

They were, evidently, on the brink of that moment which M.
Clermont-Tonnerre, in 1822, called "the tug of war."

Enjolras' order was executed with the correct haste which is peculiar
to ships and barricades, the only two scenes of combat where escape
is impossible. In less than a minute, two thirds of the stones which
Enjolras had had piled up at the door of Corinthe had been carried up to
the first floor and the attic, and before a second minute had elapsed,
these stones, artistically set one upon the other, walled up the
sash-window on the first floor and the windows in the roof to half their
height. A few loop-holes carefully planned by Feuilly, the principal
architect, allowed of the passage of the gun-barrels. This armament of
the windows could be effected all the more easily since the firing of
grape-shot had ceased. The two cannons were now discharging ball
against the centre of the barrier in order to make a hole there, and, if
possible, a breach for the assault.

When the stones destined to the final defence were in place, Enjolras
had the bottles which he had set under the table where Mabeuf lay,
carried to the first floor.

"Who is to drink that?" Bossuet asked him.

"They," replied Enjolras.

Then they barricaded the window below, and held in readiness the iron
cross-bars which served to secure the door of the wine-shop at night.

The fortress was complete. The barricade was the rampart, the wine-shop
was the dungeon. With the stones which remained they stopped up the
outlet.

As the defenders of a barricade are always obliged to be sparing of
their ammunition, and as the assailants know this, the assailants
combine their arrangements with a sort of irritating leisure, expose
themselves to fire prematurely, though in appearance more than in
reality, and take their ease. The preparations for attack are always
made with a certain methodical deliberation; after which, the lightning
strikes.

This deliberation permitted Enjolras to take a review of everything and
to perfect everything. He felt that, since such men were to die, their
death ought to be a masterpiece.

He said to Marius: "We are the two leaders. I will give the last orders
inside. Do you remain outside and observe."

Marius posted himself on the lookout upon the crest of the barricade.

Enjolras had the door of the kitchen, which was the ambulance, as the
reader will remember, nailed up.

"No splashing of the wounded," he said.

He issued his final orders in the tap-room in a curt, but profoundly
tranquil tone; Feuilly listened and replied in the name of all.

"On the first floor, hold your axes in readiness to cut the staircase.
Have you them?"

"Yes," said Feuilly.

"How many?"

"Two axes and a pole-axe."

"That is good. There are now twenty-six combatants of us on foot. How
many guns are there?"

"Thirty-four."

"Eight too many. Keep those eight guns loaded like the rest and at
hand. Swords and pistols in your belts. Twenty men to the barricade. Six
ambushed in the attic windows, and at the window on the first floor to
fire on the assailants through the loop-holes in the stones. Let not a
single worker remain inactive here. Presently, when the drum beats the
assault, let the twenty below stairs rush to the barricade. The first to
arrive will have the best places."

These arrangements made, he turned to Javert and said:

"I am not forgetting you."

And, laying a pistol on the table, he added:

"The last man to leave this room will smash the skull of this spy."

"Here?" inquired a voice.

"No, let us not mix their corpses with our own. The little barricade of
the Mondetour lane can be scaled. It is only four feet high. The man is
well pinioned. He shall be taken thither and put to death."

There was some one who was more impassive at that moment than Enjolras,
it was Javert. Here Jean Valjean made his appearance.

He had been lost among the group of insurgents. He stepped forth and
said to Enjolras:

"You are the commander?"

"Yes."

"You thanked me a while ago."

"In the name of the Republic. The barricade has two saviors, Marius
Pontmercy and yourself."

"Do you think that I deserve a recompense?"

"Certainly."

"Well, I request one."

"What is it?"

"That I may blow that man's brains out."

Javert raised his head, saw Jean Valjean, made an almost imperceptible
movement, and said:

"That is just."

As for Enjolras, he had begun to re-load his rifle; he cut his eyes
about him:

"No objections."

And he turned to Jean Valjean:

"Take the spy."

Jean Valjean did, in fact, take possession of Javert, by seating
himself on the end of the table. He seized the pistol, and a faint click
announced that he had cocked it.

Almost at the same moment, a blast of trumpets became audible.

"Take care!" shouted Marius from the top of the barricade.

Javert began to laugh with that noiseless laugh which was peculiar to
him, and gazing intently at the insurgents, he said to them:

"You are in no better case than I am."

"All out!" shouted Enjolras.

The insurgents poured out tumultuously, and, as they went, received in
the back,--may we be permitted the expression,--this sally of Javert's:

"We shall meet again shortly!"




CHAPTER XIX--JEAN VALJEAN TAKES HIS REVENGE

When Jean Valjean was left alone with Javert, he untied the rope which
fastened the prisoner across the middle of the body, and the knot of
which was under the table. After this he made him a sign to rise.

Javert obeyed with that indefinable smile in which the supremacy of
enchained authority is condensed.

Jean Valjean took Javert by the martingale, as one would take a beast of
burden by the breast-band, and, dragging the latter after him, emerged
from the wine-shop slowly, because Javert, with his impeded limbs, could
take only very short steps.

Jean Valjean had the pistol in his hand.

In this manner they crossed the inner trapezium of the barricade. The
insurgents, all intent on the attack, which was imminent, had their
backs turned to these two.

Marius alone, stationed on one side, at the extreme left of the
barricade, saw them pass. This group of victim and executioner was
illuminated by the sepulchral light which he bore in his own soul.

Jean Valjean with some difficulty, but without relaxing his hold for
a single instant, made Javert, pinioned as he was, scale the little
entrenchment in the Mondetour lane.

When they had crossed this barrier, they found themselves alone in the
lane. No one saw them. Among the heap they could distinguish a livid
face, streaming hair, a pierced hand and the half nude breast of a
woman. It was Eponine. The corner of the houses hid them from the
insurgents. The corpses carried away from the barricade formed a
terrible pile a few paces distant.

Javert gazed askance at this body, and, profoundly calm, said in a low
tone:

"It strikes me that I know that girl."

Then he turned to Jean Valjean.

Jean Valjean thrust the pistol under his arm and fixed on Javert a look
which it required no words to interpret: "Javert, it is I."

Javert replied:

"Take your revenge."

Jean Valjean drew from his pocket a knife, and opened it.

"A clasp-knife!" exclaimed Javert, "you are right. That suits you
better."

Jean Valjean cut the martingale which Javert had about his neck, then he
cut the cords on his wrists, then, stooping down, he cut the cord on his
feet; and, straightening himself up, he said to him:

"You are free."

Javert was not easily astonished. Still, master of himself though
he was, he could not repress a start. He remained open-mouthed and
motionless.

Jean Valjean continued:

"I do not think that I shall escape from this place. But if, by chance,
I do, I live, under the name of Fauchelevent, in the Rue de l'Homme
Arme, No. 7."

Javert snarled like a tiger, which made him half open one corner of his
mouth, and he muttered between his teeth:

"Have a care."

"Go," said Jean Valjean.

Javert began again:

"Thou saidst Fauchelevent, Rue de l'Homme Arme?"

"Number 7."

Javert repeated in a low voice:--"Number 7."

He buttoned up his coat once more, resumed the military stiffness
between his shoulders, made a half turn, folded his arms and, supporting
his chin on one of his hands, he set out in the direction of the Halles.
Jean Valjean followed him with his eyes:

A few minutes later, Javert turned round and shouted to Jean Valjean:

"You annoy me. Kill me, rather."

Javert himself did not notice that he no longer addressed Jean Valjean
as "thou."

"Be off with you," said Jean Valjean.

Javert retreated slowly. A moment later he turned the corner of the Rue
des Precheurs.

When Javert had disappeared, Jean Valjean fired his pistol in the air.

Then he returned to the barricade and said:

"It is done."

In the meanwhile, this is what had taken place.

Marius, more intent on the outside than on the interior, had not, up to
that time, taken a good look at the pinioned spy in the dark background
of the tap-room.

When he beheld him in broad daylight, striding over the barricade in
order to proceed to his death, he recognized him. Something suddenly
recurred to his mind. He recalled the inspector of the Rue de Pontoise,
and the two pistols which the latter had handed to him and which he,
Marius, had used in this very barricade, and not only did he recall his
face, but his name as well.

This recollection was misty and troubled, however, like all his ideas.

It was not an affirmation that he made, but a question which he put to
himself:

"Is not that the inspector of police who told me that his name was
Javert?"

Perhaps there was still time to intervene in behalf of that man. But, in
the first place, he must know whether this was Javert.

Marius called to Enjolras, who had just stationed himself at the other
extremity of the barricade:

"Enjolras!"

"What?"

"What is the name of yonder man?"

"What man?"

"The police agent. Do you know his name?"

"Of course. He told us."

"What is it?"

"Javert."

Marius sprang to his feet.

At that moment, they heard the report of the pistol.

Jean Valjean re-appeared and cried: "It is done."

A gloomy chill traversed Marius' heart.




CHAPTER XX--THE DEAD ARE IN THE RIGHT AND THE LIVING ARE NOT IN THE
WRONG

The death agony of the barricade was about to begin.

Everything contributed to its tragic majesty at that supreme moment; a
thousand mysterious crashes in the air, the breath of armed masses set
in movement in the streets which were not visible, the intermittent
gallop of cavalry, the heavy shock of artillery on the march, the firing
by squads, and the cannonades crossing each other in the labyrinth
of Paris, the smokes of battle mounting all gilded above the roofs,
indescribable and vaguely terrible cries, lightnings of menace
everywhere, the tocsin of Saint-Merry, which now had the accents of a
sob, the mildness of the weather, the splendor of the sky filled with
sun and clouds, the beauty of the day, and the alarming silence of the
houses.

For, since the preceding evening, the two rows of houses in the Rue
de la Chanvrerie had become two walls; ferocious walls, doors closed,
windows closed, shutters closed.

In those days, so different from those in which we live, when the hour
was come, when the people wished to put an end to a situation, which had
lasted too long, with a charter granted or with a legal country, when
universal wrath was diffused in the atmosphere, when the city consented
to the tearing up of the pavements, when insurrection made the
bourgeoisie smile by whispering its password in its ear, then the
inhabitant, thoroughly penetrated with the revolt, so to speak, was
the auxiliary of the combatant, and the house fraternized with the
improvised fortress which rested on it. When the situation was not
ripe, when the insurrection was not decidedly admitted, when the masses
disowned the movement, all was over with the combatants, the city was
changed into a desert around the revolt, souls grew chilled, refuges
were nailed up, and the street turned into a defile to help the army to
take the barricade.

A people cannot be forced, through surprise, to walk more quickly than
it chooses. Woe to whomsoever tries to force its hand! A people does not
let itself go at random. Then it abandons the insurrection to itself.
The insurgents become noxious, infected with the plague. A house is an
escarpment, a door is a refusal, a facade is a wall. This wall hears,
sees and will not. It might open and save you. No. This wall is a judge.
It gazes at you and condemns you. What dismal things are closed houses.
They seem dead, they are living. Life which is, as it were, suspended
there, persists there. No one has gone out of them for four and twenty
hours, but no one is missing from them. In the interior of that rock,
people go and come, go to bed and rise again; they are a family party
there; there they eat and drink; they are afraid, a terrible thing! Fear
excuses this fearful lack of hospitality; terror is mixed with it, an
extenuating circumstance. Sometimes, even, and this has been actually
seen, fear turns to passion; fright may change into fury, as prudence
does into rage; hence this wise saying: "The enraged moderates." There
are outbursts of supreme terror, whence springs wrath like a mournful
smoke.--"What do these people want? What have they come there to do?
Let them get out of the scrape. So much the worse for them. It is their
fault. They are only getting what they deserve. It does not concern
us. Here is our poor street all riddled with balls. They are a pack of
rascals. Above all things, don't open the door."--And the house assumes
the air of a tomb. The insurgent is in the death-throes in front of
that house; he sees the grape-shot and naked swords drawing near; if
he cries, he knows that they are listening to him, and that no one will
come; there stand walls which might protect him, there are men who might
save him; and these walls have ears of flesh, and these men have bowels
of stone.

Whom shall he reproach?

No one and every one.

The incomplete times in which we live.

It is always at its own risk and peril that Utopia is converted into
revolution, and from philosophical protest becomes an armed protest, and
from Minerva turns to Pallas.

The Utopia which grows impatient and becomes revolt knows what awaits
it; it almost always comes too soon. Then it becomes resigned, and
stoically accepts catastrophe in lieu of triumph. It serves those who
deny it without complaint, even excusing them, and even disculpates
them, and its magnanimity consists in consenting to abandonment. It is
indomitable in the face of obstacles and gentle towards ingratitude.

Is this ingratitude, however?

Yes, from the point of view of the human race.

No, from the point of view of the individual.

Progress is man's mode of existence. The general life of the human race
is called Progress, the collective stride of the human race is called
Progress. Progress advances; it makes the great human and terrestrial
journey towards the celestial and the divine; it has its halting
places where it rallies the laggard troop, it has its stations where it
meditates, in the presence of some splendid Canaan suddenly unveiled
on its horizon, it has its nights when it sleeps; and it is one of the
poignant anxieties of the thinker that he sees the shadow resting on the
human soul, and that he gropes in darkness without being able to awaken
that slumbering Progress.

"God is dead, perhaps," said Gerard de Nerval one day to the writer of
these lines, confounding progress with God, and taking the interruption
of movement for the death of Being.

He who despairs is in the wrong. Progress infallibly awakes, and, in
short, we may say that it marches on, even when it is asleep, for it has
increased in size. When we behold it erect once more, we find it taller.
To be always peaceful does not depend on progress any more than it does
on the stream; erect no barriers, cast in no boulders; obstacles make
water froth and humanity boil. Hence arise troubles; but after these
troubles, we recognize the fact that ground has been gained. Until
order, which is nothing else than universal peace, has been established,
until harmony and unity reign, progress will have revolutions as its
halting-places.

What, then, is progress? We have just enunciated it; the permanent life
of the peoples.

Now, it sometimes happens, that the momentary life of individuals offers
resistance to the eternal life of the human race.

Let us admit without bitterness, that the individual has his distinct
interests, and can, without forfeiture, stipulate for his interest, and
defend it; the present has its pardonable dose of egotism; momentary
life has its rights, and is not bound to sacrifice itself constantly to
the future. The generation which is passing in its turn over the earth,
is not forced to abridge it for the sake of the generations, its equal,
after all, who will have their turn later on.--"I exist," murmurs that
some one whose name is All. "I am young and in love, I am old and I
wish to repose, I am the father of a family, I toil, I prosper, I am
successful in business, I have houses to lease, I have money in the
government funds, I am happy, I have a wife and children, I have all
this, I desire to live, leave me in peace."--Hence, at certain hours, a
profound cold broods over the magnanimous vanguard of the human race.

Utopia, moreover, we must admit, quits its radiant sphere when it makes
war. It, the truth of to-morrow, borrows its mode of procedure, battle,
from the lie of yesterday. It, the future, behaves like the past. It,
pure idea, becomes a deed of violence. It complicates its heroism with
a violence for which it is just that it should be held to answer; a
violence of occasion and expedient, contrary to principle, and for which
it is fatally punished. The Utopia, insurrection, fights with the old
military code in its fist; it shoots spies, it executes traitors; it
suppresses living beings and flings them into unknown darkness. It makes
use of death, a serious matter. It seems as though Utopia had no longer
any faith in radiance, its irresistible and incorruptible force. It
strikes with the sword. Now, no sword is simple. Every blade has two
edges; he who wounds with the one is wounded with the other.

Having made this reservation, and made it with all severity, it is
impossible for us not to admire, whether they succeed or not, those the
glorious combatants of the future, the confessors of Utopia. Even when
they miscarry, they are worthy of veneration; and it is, perhaps, in
failure, that they possess the most majesty. Victory, when it is in
accord with progress, merits the applause of the people; but a heroic
defeat merits their tender compassion. The one is magnificent, the other
sublime. For our own part, we prefer martyrdom to success. John Brown is
greater than Washington, and Pisacane is greater than Garibaldi.

It certainly is necessary that some one should take the part of the
vanquished.

We are unjust towards these great men who attempt the future, when they
fail.

Revolutionists are accused of sowing fear abroad. Every barricade seems
a crime. Their theories are incriminated, their aim suspected, their
ulterior motive is feared, their conscience denounced. They are
reproached with raising, erecting, and heaping up, against the reigning
social state, a mass of miseries, of griefs, of iniquities, of wrongs,
of despairs, and of tearing from the lowest depths blocks of shadow
in order therein to embattle themselves and to combat. People shout
to them: "You are tearing up the pavements of hell!" They might reply:
"That is because our barricade is made of good intentions."

The best thing, assuredly, is the pacific solution. In short, let us
agree that when we behold the pavement, we think of the bear, and it is
a good will which renders society uneasy. But it depends on society
to save itself, it is to its own good will that we make our appeal.
No violent remedy is necessary. To study evil amiably, to prove its
existence, then to cure it. It is to this that we invite it.

However that may be, even when fallen, above all when fallen, these men,
who at every point of the universe, with their eyes fixed on France, are
striving for the grand work with the inflexible logic of the ideal,
are august; they give their life a free offering to progress; they
accomplish the will of providence; they perform a religious act. At the
appointed hour, with as much disinterestedness as an actor who answers
to his cue, in obedience to the divine stage-manager, they enter the
tomb. And this hopeless combat, this stoical disappearance they accept
in order to bring about the supreme and universal consequences, the
magnificent and irresistibly human movement begun on the 14th of July,
1789; these soldiers are priests. The French revolution is an act of
God.

Moreover, there are, and it is proper to add this distinction to the
distinctions already pointed out in another chapter,--there are accepted
revolutions, revolutions which are called revolutions; there are refused
revolutions, which are called riots.

An insurrection which breaks out, is an idea which is passing its
examination before the people. If the people lets fall a black ball, the
idea is dried fruit; the insurrection is a mere skirmish.

Waging war at every summons and every time that Utopia desires it, is
not the thing for the peoples. Nations have not always and at every hour
the temperament of heroes and martyrs.

They are positive. A priori, insurrection is repugnant to them, in the
first place, because it often results in a catastrophe, in the second
place, because it always has an abstraction as its point of departure.

Because, and this is a noble thing, it is always for the ideal, and for
the ideal alone, that those who sacrifice themselves do thus sacrifice
themselves. An insurrection is an enthusiasm. Enthusiasm may wax wroth;
hence the appeal to arms. But every insurrection, which aims at a
government or a regime, aims higher. Thus, for instance, and we
insist upon it, what the chiefs of the insurrection of 1832, and, in
particular, the young enthusiasts of the Rue de la Chanvrerie were
combating, was not precisely Louis Philippe. The majority of them,
when talking freely, did justice to this king who stood midway between
monarchy and revolution; no one hated him. But they attacked the younger
branch of the divine right in Louis Philippe as they had attacked its
elder branch in Charles X.; and that which they wished to overturn in
overturning royalty in France, was, as we have explained, the usurpation
of man over man, and of privilege over right in the entire universe.
Paris without a king has as result the world without despots. This is
the manner in which they reasoned. Their aim was distant no doubt,
vague perhaps, and it retreated in the face of their efforts; but it was
great.

Thus it is. And we sacrifice ourselves for these visions, which are
almost always illusions for the sacrificed, but illusions with which,
after all, the whole of human certainty is mingled. We throw ourselves
into these tragic affairs and become intoxicated with that which we are
about to do. Who knows? We may succeed. We are few in number, we have a
whole army arrayed against us; but we are defending right, the natural
law, the sovereignty of each one over himself from which no abdication
is possible, justice and truth, and in case of need, we die like the
three hundred Spartans. We do not think of Don Quixote but of Leonidas.
And we march straight before us, and once pledged, we do not draw
back, and we rush onwards with head held low, cherishing as our hope an
unprecedented victory, revolution completed, progress set free again,
the aggrandizement of the human race, universal deliverance; and in the
event of the worst, Thermopylae.

These passages of arms for the sake of progress often suffer shipwreck,
and we have just explained why. The crowd is restive in the presence of
the impulses of paladins. Heavy masses, the multitudes which are fragile
because of their very weight, fear adventures; and there is a touch of
adventure in the ideal.

Moreover, and we must not forget this, interests which are not very
friendly to the ideal and the sentimental are in the way. Sometimes the
stomach paralyzes the heart.

The grandeur and beauty of France lies in this, that she takes less from
the stomach than other nations: she more easily knots the rope about her
loins. She is the first awake, the last asleep. She marches forwards.
She is a seeker.

This arises from the fact that she is an artist.

The ideal is nothing but the culminating point of logic, the same as the
beautiful is nothing but the summit of the true. Artistic peoples are
also consistent peoples. To love beauty is to see the light. That is why
the torch of Europe, that is to say of civilization, was first borne by
Greece, who passed it on to Italy, who handed it on to France. Divine,
illuminating nations of scouts! Vitaelampada tradunt.

It is an admirable thing that the poetry of a people is the element of
its progress. The amount of civilization is measured by the quantity
of imagination. Only, a civilizing people should remain a manly people.
Corinth, yes; Sybaris, no. Whoever becomes effeminate makes himself a
bastard. He must be neither a dilettante nor a virtuoso: but he must be
artistic. In the matter of civilization, he must not refine, but he must
sublime. On this condition, one gives to the human race the pattern of
the ideal.

The modern ideal has its type in art, and its means is science. It is
through science that it will realize that august vision of the poets,
the socially beautiful. Eden will be reconstructed by A+B. At the point
which civilization has now reached, the exact is a necessary element
of the splendid, and the artistic sentiment is not only served, but
completed by the scientific organ; dreams must be calculated. Art, which
is the conqueror, should have for support science, which is the walker;
the solidity of the creature which is ridden is of importance. The
modern spirit is the genius of Greece with the genius of India as its
vehicle; Alexander on the elephant.

Races which are petrified in dogma or demoralized by lucre are unfit to
guide civilization. Genuflection before the idol or before money wastes
away the muscles which walk and the will which advances. Hieratic or
mercantile absorption lessens a people's power of radiance, lowers its
horizon by lowering its level, and deprives it of that intelligence,
at once both human and divine of the universal goal, which makes
missionaries of nations. Babylon has no ideal; Carthage has no ideal.
Athens and Rome have and keep, throughout all the nocturnal darkness of
the centuries, halos of civilization.

France is in the same quality of race as Greece and Italy. She is
Athenian in the matter of beauty, and Roman in her greatness. Moreover,
she is good. She gives herself. Oftener than is the case with other
races, is she in the humor for self-devotion and sacrifice. Only, this
humor seizes upon her, and again abandons her. And therein lies the
great peril for those who run when she desires only to walk, or who walk
on when she desires to halt. France has her relapses into materialism,
and, at certain instants, the ideas which obstruct that sublime brain
have no longer anything which recalls French greatness and are of the
dimensions of a Missouri or a South Carolina. What is to be done in
such a case? The giantess plays at being a dwarf; immense France has her
freaks of pettiness. That is all.

To this there is nothing to say. Peoples, like planets, possess the
right to an eclipse. And all is well, provided that the light
returns and that the eclipse does not degenerate into night. Dawn and
resurrection are synonymous. The reappearance of the light is identical
with the persistence of the _I_.

Let us state these facts calmly. Death on the barricade or the tomb in
exile, is an acceptable occasion for devotion. The real name of
devotion is disinterestedness. Let the abandoned allow themselves to
be abandoned, let the exiled allow themselves to be exiled, and let us
confine ourselves to entreating great nations not to retreat too far,
when they do retreat. One must not push too far in descent under pretext
of a return to reason.

Matter exists, the minute exists, interest exists, the stomach exists;
but the stomach must not be the sole wisdom. The life of the moment has
its rights, we admit, but permanent life has its rights also. Alas! the
fact that one is mounted does not preclude a fall. This can be seen in
history more frequently than is desirable: A nation is great, it tastes
the ideal, then it bites the mire, and finds it good; and if it be asked
how it happens that it has abandoned Socrates for Falstaff, it replies:
"Because I love statesmen."

One word more before returning to our subject, the conflict.

A battle like the one which we are engaged in describing is nothing else
than a convulsion towards the ideal. Progress trammelled is sickly, and
is subject to these tragic epilepsies. With that malady of progress,
civil war, we have been obliged to come in contact in our passage. This
is one of the fatal phases, at once act and entr'acte of that drama
whose pivot is a social condemnation, and whose veritable title is
Progress.

Progress!

The cry to which we frequently give utterance is our whole thought; and,
at the point of this drama which we have now reached, the idea which it
contains having still more than one trial to undergo, it is, perhaps,
permitted to us, if not to lift the veil from it, to at least allow its
light to shine through.

The book which the reader has under his eye at this moment is, from
one end to the other, as a whole and in detail, whatever may be its
intermittences, exceptions and faults, the march from evil to good, from
the unjust to the just, from night to day, from appetite to conscience,
from rottenness to life, from hell to heaven, from nothingness to God.
Point of departure: matter; point of arrival: the soul. The hydra at the
beginning, the angel at the end.




CHAPTER XXI--THE HEROES

All at once, the drum beat the charge.

The attack was a hurricane. On the evening before, in the darkness,
the barricade had been approached silently, as by a boa. Now, in broad
daylight, in that widening street, surprise was decidedly impossible,
rude force had, moreover, been unmasked, the cannon had begun the
roar, the army hurled itself on the barricade. Fury now became skill.
A powerful detachment of infantry of the line, broken at regular
intervals, by the National Guard and the Municipal Guard on foot,
and supported by serried masses which could be heard though not seen,
debauched into the street at a run, with drums beating, trumpets
braying, bayonets levelled, the sappers at their head, and,
imperturbable under the projectiles, charged straight for the barricade
with the weight of a brazen beam against a wall.

The wall held firm.

The insurgents fired impetuously. The barricade once scaled had a mane
of lightning flashes. The assault was so furious, that for one moment,
it was inundated with assailants; but it shook off the soldiers as the
lion shakes off the dogs, and it was only covered with besiegers as
the cliff is covered with foam, to re-appear, a moment later, beetling,
black and formidable.

The column, forced to retreat, remained massed in the street,
unprotected but terrible, and replied to the redoubt with a terrible
discharge of musketry. Any one who has seen fireworks will recall the
sheaf formed of interlacing lightnings which is called a bouquet. Let
the reader picture to himself this bouquet, no longer vertical but
horizontal, bearing a bullet, buck-shot or a biscaien at the tip of each
one of its jets of flame, and picking off dead men one after another
from its clusters of lightning. The barricade was underneath it.

On both sides, the resolution was equal. The bravery exhibited there
was almost barbarous and was complicated with a sort of heroic ferocity
which began by the sacrifice of self.

This was the epoch when a National Guardsman fought like a Zouave.
The troop wished to make an end of it, insurrection was desirous of
fighting. The acceptance of the death agony in the flower of youth and
in the flush of health turns intrepidity into frenzy. In this fray, each
one underwent the broadening growth of the death hour. The street was
strewn with corpses.

The barricade had Enjolras at one of its extremities and Marius at the
other. Enjolras, who carried the whole barricade in his head, reserved
and sheltered himself; three soldiers fell, one after the other, under
his embrasure, without having even seen him; Marius fought unprotected.
He made himself a target. He stood with more than half his body above
the breastworks. There is no more violent prodigal than the avaricious
man who takes the bit in his teeth; there is no man more terrible in
action than a dreamer. Marius was formidable and pensive. In battle he
was as in a dream. One would have pronounced him a phantom engaged in
firing a gun.

The insurgents' cartridges were giving out; but not their sarcasms. In
this whirlwind of the sepulchre in which they stood, they laughed.

Courfeyrac was bare-headed.

"What have you done with your hat?" Bossuet asked him.

Courfeyrac replied:

"They have finally taken it away from me with cannon-balls."

Or they uttered haughty comments.

"Can any one understand," exclaimed Feuilly bitterly, "those men,--[and
he cited names, well-known names, even celebrated names, some belonging
to the old army]--who had promised to join us, and taken an oath to aid
us, and who had pledged their honor to it, and who are our generals, and
who abandon us!"

And Combeferre restricted himself to replying with a grave smile.

"There are people who observe the rules of honor as one observes the
stars, from a great distance."

The interior of the barricade was so strewn with torn cartridges that
one would have said that there had been a snowstorm.

The assailants had numbers in their favor; the insurgents had position.
They were at the top of a wall, and they thundered point-blank upon
the soldiers tripping over the dead and wounded and entangled in
the escarpment. This barricade, constructed as it was and admirably
buttressed, was really one of those situations where a handful of men
hold a legion in check. Nevertheless, the attacking column, constantly
recruited and enlarged under the shower of bullets, drew inexorably
nearer, and now, little by little, step by step, but surely, the army
closed in around the barricade as the vice grasps the wine-press.

One assault followed another. The horror of the situation kept
increasing.

Then there burst forth on that heap of paving-stones, in that Rue de la
Chanvrerie, a battle worthy of a wall of Troy. These haggard, ragged,
exhausted men, who had had nothing to eat for four and twenty hours, who
had not slept, who had but a few more rounds to fire, who were fumbling
in their pockets which had been emptied of cartridges, nearly all
of whom were wounded, with head or arm bandaged with black and
blood-stained linen, with holes in their clothes from which the blood
trickled, and who were hardly armed with poor guns and notched swords,
became Titans. The barricade was ten times attacked, approached,
assailed, scaled, and never captured.

In order to form an idea of this struggle, it is necessary to imagine
fire set to a throng of terrible courages, and then to gaze at the
conflagration. It was not a combat, it was the interior of a furnace;
there mouths breathed the flame; there countenances were extraordinary.
The human form seemed impossible there, the combatants flamed forth
there, and it was formidable to behold the going and coming in that red
glow of those salamanders of the fray.

The successive and simultaneous scenes of this grand slaughter we
renounce all attempts at depicting. The epic alone has the right to fill
twelve thousand verses with a battle.

One would have pronounced this that hell of Brahmanism, the most
redoubtable of the seventeen abysses, which the Veda calls the Forest of
Swords.

They fought hand to hand, foot to foot, with pistol shots, with blows of
the sword, with their fists, at a distance, close at hand, from above,
from below, from everywhere, from the roofs of the houses, from the
windows of the wine-shop, from the cellar windows, whither some had
crawled. They were one against sixty.

The facade of Corinthe, half demolished, was hideous. The window,
tattooed with grape-shot, had lost glass and frame and was nothing now
but a shapeless hole, tumultuously blocked with paving-stones.

Bossuet was killed; Feuilly was killed; Courfeyrac was killed;
Combeferre, transfixed by three blows from a bayonet in the breast at
the moment when he was lifting up a wounded soldier, had only time to
cast a glance to heaven when he expired.

Marius, still fighting, was so riddled with wounds, particularly in the
head, that his countenance disappeared beneath the blood, and one would
have said that his face was covered with a red kerchief.

Enjolras alone was not struck. When he had no longer any weapon, he
reached out his hands to right and left and an insurgent thrust some arm
or other into his fist. All he had left was the stumps of four swords;
one more than Francois I. at Marignan. Homer says: "Diomedes cuts
the throat of Axylus, son of Teuthranis, who dwelt in happy Arisba;
Euryalus, son of Mecistaeus, exterminates Dresos and Opheltios,
Esepius, and that Pedasus whom the naiad Abarbarea bore to the blameless
Bucolion; Ulysses overthrows Pidytes of Percosius; Antilochus, Ablerus;
Polypaetes, Astyalus; Polydamas, Otos, of Cyllene; and Teucer, Aretaon.
Meganthios dies under the blows of Euripylus' pike. Agamemnon, king
of the heroes, flings to earth Elatos, born in the rocky city which
is laved by the sounding river Satnois." In our old poems of exploits,
Esplandian attacks the giant marquis Swantibore with a cobbler's
shoulder-stick of fire, and the latter defends himself by stoning the
hero with towers which he plucks up by the roots. Our ancient mural
frescoes show us the two Dukes of Bretagne and Bourbon, armed,
emblazoned and crested in war-like guise, on horseback and approaching
each other, their battle-axes in hand, masked with iron, gloved with
iron, booted with iron, the one caparisoned in ermine, the other draped
in azure: Bretagne with his lion between the two horns of his crown,
Bourbon helmeted with a monster fleur de lys on his visor. But, in order
to be superb, it is not necessary to wear, like Yvon, the ducal morion,
to have in the fist, like Esplandian, a living flame, or, like Phyles,
father of Polydamas, to have brought back from Ephyra a good suit of
mail, a present from the king of men, Euphetes; it suffices to give
one's life for a conviction or a loyalty. This ingenuous little
soldier, yesterday a peasant of Bauce or Limousin, who prowls with his
clasp-knife by his side, around the children's nurses in the Luxembourg
garden, this pale young student bent over a piece of anatomy or a book,
a blond youth who shaves his beard with scissors,--take both of them,
breathe upon them with a breath of duty, place them face to face in the
Carrefour Boucherat or in the blind alley Planche-Mibray, and let the
one fight for his flag, and the other for his ideal, and let both of
them imagine that they are fighting for their country; the struggle will
be colossal; and the shadow which this raw recruit and this sawbones
in conflict will produce in that grand epic field where humanity
is striving, will equal the shadow cast by Megaryon, King of Lycia,
tiger-filled, crushing in his embrace the immense body of Ajax, equal to
the gods.




CHAPTER XXII--FOOT TO FOOT

When there were no longer any of the leaders left alive, except Enjolras
and Marius at the two extremities of the barricade, the centre, which
had so long sustained Courfeyrac, Joly, Bossuet, Feuilly and Combeferre,
gave way. The cannon, though it had not effected a practicable breach,
had made a rather large hollow in the middle of the redoubt; there, the
summit of the wall had disappeared before the balls, and had crumbled
away; and the rubbish which had fallen, now inside, now outside, had,
as it accumulated, formed two piles in the nature of slopes on the two
sides of the barrier, one on the inside, the other on the outside. The
exterior slope presented an inclined plane to the attack.

A final assault was there attempted, and this assault succeeded. The
mass bristling with bayonets and hurled forward at a run, came up with
irresistible force, and the serried front of battle of the attacking
column made its appearance through the smoke on the crest of the
battlements. This time, it was decisive. The group of insurgents who
were defending the centre retreated in confusion.

Then the gloomy love of life awoke once more in some of them. Many,
finding themselves under the muzzles of this forest of guns, did not
wish to die. This is a moment when the instinct of self-preservation
emits howls, when the beast re-appears in men. They were hemmed in by
the lofty, six-story house which formed the background of their redoubt.
This house might prove their salvation. The building was barricaded, and
walled, as it were, from top to bottom. Before the troops of the line
had reached the interior of the redoubt, there was time for a door to
open and shut, the space of a flash of lightning was sufficient for
that, and the door of that house, suddenly opened a crack and closed
again instantly, was life for these despairing men. Behind this house,
there were streets, possible flight, space. They set to knocking at that
door with the butts of their guns, and with kicks, shouting, calling,
entreating, wringing their hands. No one opened. From the little window
on the third floor, the head of the dead man gazed down upon them.

But Enjolras and Marius, and the seven or eight rallied about them,
sprang forward and protected them. Enjolras had shouted to the soldiers:
"Don't advance!" and as an officer had not obeyed, Enjolras had killed
the officer. He was now in the little inner court of the redoubt, with
his back planted against the Corinthe building, a sword in one hand,
a rifle in the other, holding open the door of the wine-shop which he
barred against assailants. He shouted to the desperate men:--"There is
but one door open; this one."--And shielding them with his body, and
facing an entire battalion alone, he made them pass in behind him. All
precipitated themselves thither. Enjolras, executing with his rifle,
which he now used like a cane, what single-stick players call a "covered
rose" round his head, levelled the bayonets around and in front of him,
and was the last to enter; and then ensued a horrible moment, when the
soldiers tried to make their way in, and the insurgents strove to bar
them out. The door was slammed with such violence, that, as it fell back
into its frame, it showed the five fingers of a soldier who had been
clinging to it, cut off and glued to the post.

Marius remained outside. A shot had just broken his collar bone, he
felt that he was fainting and falling. At that moment, with eyes already
shut, he felt the shock of a vigorous hand seizing him, and the swoon
in which his senses vanished, hardly allowed him time for the thought,
mingled with a last memory of Cosette:--"I am taken prisoner. I shall be
shot."

Enjolras, not seeing Marius among those who had taken refuge in the
wine-shop, had the same idea. But they had reached a moment when each
man has not the time to meditate on his own death. Enjolras fixed the
bar across the door, and bolted it, and double-locked it with key and
chain, while those outside were battering furiously at it, the soldiers
with the butts of their muskets, the sappers with their axes. The
assailants were grouped about that door. The siege of the wine-shop was
now beginning.

The soldiers, we will observe, were full of wrath.

The death of the artillery-sergeant had enraged them, and then, a still
more melancholy circumstance. During the few hours which had preceded
the attack, it had been reported among them that the insurgents were
mutilating their prisoners, and that there was the headless body of
a soldier in the wine-shop. This sort of fatal rumor is the usual
accompaniment of civil wars, and it was a false report of this kind
which, later on, produced the catastrophe of the Rue Transnonain.

When the door was barricaded, Enjolras said to the others:

"Let us sell our lives dearly."

Then he approached the table on which lay Mabeuf and Gavroche. Beneath
the black cloth two straight and rigid forms were visible, one large,
the other small, and the two faces were vaguely outlined beneath the
cold folds of the shroud. A hand projected from beneath the winding
sheet and hung near the floor. It was that of the old man.

Enjolras bent down and kissed that venerable hand, just as he had kissed
his brow on the preceding evening.

These were the only two kisses which he had bestowed in the course of
his life.

Let us abridge the tale. The barricade had fought like a gate of Thebes;
the wine-shop fought like a house of Saragossa. These resistances are
dogged. No quarter. No flag of truce possible. Men are willing to die,
provided their opponent will kill them.

When Suchet says:--"Capitulate,"--Palafox replies: "After the war with
cannon, the war with knives." Nothing was lacking in the capture by
assault of the Hucheloup wine-shop; neither paving-stones raining from
the windows and the roof on the besiegers and exasperating the soldiers
by crushing them horribly, nor shots fired from the attic-windows and
the cellar, nor the fury of attack, nor, finally, when the door yielded,
the frenzied madness of extermination. The assailants, rushing into the
wine-shop, their feet entangled in the panels of the door which had been
beaten in and flung on the ground, found not a single combatant there.
The spiral staircase, hewn asunder with the axe, lay in the middle of
the tap-room, a few wounded men were just breathing their last, every
one who was not killed was on the first floor, and from there, through
the hole in the ceiling, which had formed the entrance of the stairs,
a terrific fire burst forth. It was the last of their cartridges. When
they were exhausted, when these formidable men on the point of death had
no longer either powder or ball, each grasped in his hands two of the
bottles which Enjolras had reserved, and of which we have spoken, and
held the scaling party in check with these frightfully fragile clubs.
They were bottles of aquafortis.

We relate these gloomy incidents of carnage as they occurred. The
besieged man, alas! converts everything into a weapon. Greek fire did
not disgrace Archimedes, boiling pitch did not disgrace Bayard. All war
is a thing of terror, and there is no choice in it. The musketry of the
besiegers, though confined and embarrassed by being directed from below
upwards, was deadly. The rim of the hole in the ceiling was speedily
surrounded by heads of the slain, whence dripped long, red and smoking
streams, the uproar was indescribable; a close and burning smoke almost
produced night over this combat. Words are lacking to express horror
when it has reached this pitch. There were no longer men in this
conflict, which was now infernal. They were no longer giants matched
with colossi. It resembled Milton and Dante rather than Homer. Demons
attacked, spectres resisted.

It was heroism become monstrous.




CHAPTER XXIII--ORESTES FASTING AND PYLADES DRUNK

At length, by dint of mounting on each other's backs, aiding themselves
with the skeleton of the staircase, climbing up the walls, clinging to
the ceiling, slashing away at the very brink of the trap-door, the last
one who offered resistance, a score of assailants, soldiers, National
Guardsmen, municipal guardsmen, in utter confusion, the majority
disfigured by wounds in the face during that redoubtable ascent, blinded
by blood, furious, rendered savage, made an irruption into the apartment
on the first floor. There they found only one man still on his feet,
Enjolras. Without cartridges, without sword, he had nothing in his hand
now but the barrel of his gun whose stock he had broken over the head
of those who were entering. He had placed the billiard table between his
assailants and himself; he had retreated into the corner of the room,
and there, with haughty eye, and head borne high, with this stump of a
weapon in his hand, he was still so alarming as to speedily create an
empty space around him. A cry arose:

"He is the leader! It was he who slew the artillery-man. It is well that
he has placed himself there. Let him remain there. Let us shoot him down
on the spot."

"Shoot me," said Enjolras.

And flinging away his bit of gun-barrel, and folding his arms, he
offered his breast.

The audacity of a fine death always affects men. As soon as Enjolras
folded his arms and accepted his end, the din of strife ceased in
the room, and this chaos suddenly stilled into a sort of sepulchral
solemnity. The menacing majesty of Enjolras disarmed and motionless,
appeared to oppress this tumult, and this young man, haughty, bloody,
and charming, who alone had not a wound, who was as indifferent as an
invulnerable being, seemed, by the authority of his tranquil glance, to
constrain this sinister rabble to kill him respectfully. His beauty, at
that moment augmented by his pride, was resplendent, and he was fresh
and rosy after the fearful four and twenty hours which had just elapsed,
as though he could no more be fatigued than wounded. It was of him,
possibly, that a witness spoke afterwards, before the council of
war: "There was an insurgent whom I heard called Apollo." A National
Guardsman who had taken aim at Enjolras, lowered his gun, saying: "It
seems to me that I am about to shoot a flower."

Twelve men formed into a squad in the corner opposite Enjolras, and
silently made ready their guns.

Then a sergeant shouted:

"Take aim!"

An officer intervened.

"Wait."

And addressing Enjolras:

"Do you wish to have your eyes bandaged?"

"No."

"Was it you who killed the artillery sergeant?"

"Yes."

Grantaire had waked up a few moments before.

Grantaire, it will be remembered, had been asleep ever since the
preceding evening in the upper room of the wine-shop, seated on a chair
and leaning on the table.

He realized in its fullest sense the old metaphor of "dead drunk." The
hideous potion of absinthe-porter and alcohol had thrown him into a
lethargy. His table being small, and not suitable for the barricade,
he had been left in possession of it. He was still in the same posture,
with his breast bent over the table, his head lying flat on his arms,
surrounded by glasses, beer-jugs and bottles. His was the overwhelming
slumber of the torpid bear and the satiated leech. Nothing had had any
effect upon it, neither the fusillade, nor the cannon-balls, nor the
grape-shot which had made its way through the window into the room where
he was. Nor the tremendous uproar of the assault. He merely replied to
the cannonade, now and then, by a snore. He seemed to be waiting there
for a bullet which should spare him the trouble of waking. Many corpses
were strewn around him; and, at the first glance, there was nothing to
distinguish him from those profound sleepers of death.

Noise does not rouse a drunken man; silence awakens him. The fall
of everything around him only augmented Grantaire's prostration; the
crumbling of all things was his lullaby. The sort of halt which the
tumult underwent in the presence of Enjolras was a shock to this heavy
slumber. It had the effect of a carriage going at full speed, which
suddenly comes to a dead stop. The persons dozing within it wake up.
Grantaire rose to his feet with a start, stretched out his arms, rubbed
his eyes, stared, yawned, and understood.

A fit of drunkenness reaching its end resembles a curtain which is torn
away. One beholds, at a single glance and as a whole, all that it has
concealed. All suddenly presents itself to the memory; and the drunkard
who has known nothing of what has been taking place during the last
twenty-four hours, has no sooner opened his eyes than he is perfectly
informed. Ideas recur to him with abrupt lucidity; the obliteration
of intoxication, a sort of steam which has obscured the brain, is
dissipated, and makes way for the clear and sharply outlined importunity
of realities.

Relegated, as he was, to one corner, and sheltered behind the
billiard-table, the soldiers whose eyes were fixed on Enjolras, had not
even noticed Grantaire, and the sergeant was preparing to repeat his
order: "Take aim!" when all at once, they heard a strong voice shout
beside them:

"Long live the Republic! I'm one of them."

Grantaire had risen. The immense gleam of the whole combat which he
had missed, and in which he had had no part, appeared in the brilliant
glance of the transfigured drunken man.

He repeated: "Long live the Republic!" crossed the room with a firm
stride and placed himself in front of the guns beside Enjolras.

"Finish both of us at one blow," said he.

And turning gently to Enjolras, he said to him:

"Do you permit it?"

Enjolras pressed his hand with a smile.

This smile was not ended when the report resounded.

Enjolras, pierced by eight bullets, remained leaning against the wall,
as though the balls had nailed him there. Only, his head was bowed.

Grantaire fell at his feet, as though struck by a thunderbolt.

A few moments later, the soldiers dislodged the last remaining
insurgents, who had taken refuge at the top of the house. They fired
into the attic through a wooden lattice. They fought under the very
roof. They flung bodies, some of them still alive, out through the
windows. Two light-infantrymen, who tried to lift the shattered omnibus,
were slain by two shots fired from the attic. A man in a blouse was
flung down from it, with a bayonet wound in the abdomen, and breathed
his last on the ground. A soldier and an insurgent slipped together
on the sloping slates of the roof, and, as they would not release each
other, they fell, clasped in a ferocious embrace. A similar conflict
went on in the cellar. Shouts, shots, a fierce trampling. Then silence.
The barricade was captured.

The soldiers began to search the houses round about, and to pursue the
fugitives.




CHAPTER XXIV--PRISONER

Marius was, in fact, a prisoner.

The hand which had seized him from behind and whose grasp he had felt
at the moment of his fall and his loss of consciousness was that of Jean
Valjean.

Jean Valjean had taken no other part in the combat than to expose
himself in it. Had it not been for him, no one, in that supreme phase
of agony, would have thought of the wounded. Thanks to him, everywhere
present in the carnage, like a providence, those who fell were picked
up, transported to the tap-room, and cared for. In the intervals, he
reappeared on the barricade. But nothing which could resemble a blow,
an attack or even personal defence proceeded from his hands. He held his
peace and lent succor. Moreover he had received only a few scratches.
The bullets would have none of him. If suicide formed part of what he
had meditated on coming to this sepulchre, to that spot, he had
not succeeded. But we doubt whether he had thought of suicide, an
irreligious act.

Jean Valjean, in the thick cloud of the combat, did not appear to see
Marius; the truth is, that he never took his eyes from the latter. When
a shot laid Marius low, Jean Valjean leaped forward with the agility of
a tiger, fell upon him as on his prey, and bore him off.

The whirlwind of the attack was, at that moment, so violently
concentrated upon Enjolras and upon the door of the wine-shop, that
no one saw Jean Valjean sustaining the fainting Marius in his arms,
traverse the unpaved field of the barricade and disappear behind the
angle of the Corinthe building.

The reader will recall this angle which formed a sort of cape on the
street; it afforded shelter from the bullets, the grape-shot, and all
eyes, and a few square feet of space. There is sometimes a chamber
which does not burn in the midst of a conflagration, and in the midst of
raging seas, beyond a promontory or at the extremity of a blind alley
of shoals, a tranquil nook. It was in this sort of fold in the interior
trapezium of the barricade, that Eponine had breathed her last.

There Jean Valjean halted, let Marius slide to the ground, placed his
back against the wall, and cast his eyes about him.

The situation was alarming.

For an instant, for two or three perhaps, this bit of wall was a
shelter, but how was he to escape from this massacre? He recalled the
anguish which he had suffered in the Rue Polonceau eight years before,
and in what manner he had contrived to make his escape; it was difficult
then, to-day it was impossible. He had before him that deaf and
implacable house, six stories in height, which appeared to be inhabited
only by a dead man leaning out of his window; he had on his right the
rather low barricade, which shut off the Rue de la Petite Truanderie;
to pass this obstacle seemed easy, but beyond the crest of the barrier a
line of bayonets was visible. The troops of the line were posted on the
watch behind that barricade. It was evident, that to pass the barricade
was to go in quest of the fire of the platoon, and that any head which
should run the risk of lifting itself above the top of that wall of
stones would serve as a target for sixty shots. On his left he had the
field of battle. Death lurked round the corner of that wall.

What was to be done?

Only a bird could have extricated itself from this predicament.

And it was necessary to decide on the instant, to devise some expedient,
to come to some decision. Fighting was going on a few paces away;
fortunately, all were raging around a single point, the door of the
wine-shop; but if it should occur to one soldier, to one single soldier,
to turn the corner of the house, or to attack him on the flank, all was
over.

Jean Valjean gazed at the house facing him, he gazed at the barricade at
one side of him, then he looked at the ground, with the violence of the
last extremity, bewildered, and as though he would have liked to pierce
a hole there with his eyes.

By dint of staring, something vaguely striking in such an agony began
to assume form and outline at his feet, as though it had been a power
of glance which made the thing desired unfold. A few paces distant he
perceived, at the base of the small barrier so pitilessly guarded and
watched on the exterior, beneath a disordered mass of paving-stones
which partly concealed it, an iron grating, placed flat and on a level
with the soil. This grating, made of stout, transverse bars, was about
two feet square. The frame of paving-stones which supported it had been
torn up, and it was, as it were, unfastened.

Through the bars a view could be had of a dark aperture, something like
the flue of a chimney, or the pipe of a cistern. Jean Valjean darted
forward. His old art of escape rose to his brain like an illumination.
To thrust aside the stones, to raise the grating, to lift Marius, who
was as inert as a dead body, upon his shoulders, to descend, with this
burden on his loins, and with the aid of his elbows and knees into that
sort of well, fortunately not very deep, to let the heavy trap, upon
which the loosened stones rolled down afresh, fall into its place behind
him, to gain his footing on a flagged surface three metres below the
surface,--all this was executed like that which one does in dreams, with
the strength of a giant and the rapidity of an eagle; this took only a
few minutes.

Jean Valjean found himself with Marius, who was still unconscious, in a
sort of long, subterranean corridor.

There reigned profound peace, absolute silence, night.

The impression which he had formerly experienced when falling from the
wall into the convent recurred to him. Only, what he was carrying to-day
was not Cosette; it was Marius. He could barely hear the formidable
tumult in the wine-shop, taken by assault, like a vague murmur overhead.




BOOK SECOND.--THE INTESTINE OF THE LEVIATHAN




CHAPTER I--THE LAND IMPOVERISHED BY THE SEA

Paris casts twenty-five millions yearly into the water. And this without
metaphor. How, and in what manner? Day and night. With what object? With
no object. With what intention? With no intention. Why? For no
reason. By means of what organ? By means of its intestine. What is its
intestine? The sewer.

Twenty-five millions is the most moderate approximative figure which the
valuations of special science have set upon it.

Science, after having long groped about, now knows that the most
fecundating and the most efficacious of fertilizers is human manure.
The Chinese, let us confess it to our shame, knew it before us. Not
a Chinese peasant--it is Eckberg who says this,--goes to town without
bringing back with him, at the two extremities of his bamboo pole, two
full buckets of what we designate as filth. Thanks to human dung, the
earth in China is still as young as in the days of Abraham. Chinese
wheat yields a hundred fold of the seed. There is no guano comparable
in fertility with the detritus of a capital. A great city is the most
mighty of dung-makers. Certain success would attend the experiment
of employing the city to manure the plain. If our gold is manure, our
manure, on the other hand, is gold.

What is done with this golden manure? It is swept into the abyss.

Fleets of vessels are despatched, at great expense, to collect the dung
of petrels and penguins at the South Pole, and the incalculable element
of opulence which we have on hand, we send to the sea. All the human and
animal manure which the world wastes, restored to the land instead of
being cast into the water, would suffice to nourish the world.

Those heaps of filth at the gate-posts, those tumbrils of mud which
jolt through the street by night, those terrible casks of the street
department, those fetid drippings of subterranean mire, which the
pavements hide from you,--do you know what they are? They are the meadow
in flower, the green grass, wild thyme, thyme and sage, they are game,
they are cattle, they are the satisfied bellows of great oxen in the
evening, they are perfumed hay, they are golden wheat, they are the
bread on your table, they are the warm blood in your veins, they are
health, they are joy, they are life. This is the will of that mysterious
creation which is transformation on earth and transfiguration in heaven.

Restore this to the great crucible; your abundance will flow forth from
it. The nutrition of the plains furnishes the nourishment of men.

You have it in your power to lose this wealth, and to consider me
ridiculous to boot. This will form the master-piece of your ignorance.

Statisticians have calculated that France alone makes a deposit of
half a milliard every year, in the Atlantic, through the mouths of her
rivers. Note this: with five hundred millions we could pay one quarter
of the expenses of our budget. The cleverness of man is such that he
prefers to get rid of these five hundred millions in the gutter. It is
the very substance of the people that is carried off, here drop by
drop, there wave after wave, the wretched outpour of our sewers into the
rivers, and the gigantic collection of our rivers into the ocean. Every
hiccough of our sewers costs us a thousand francs. From this spring two
results, the land impoverished, and the water tainted. Hunger arising
from the furrow, and disease from the stream.

It is notorious, for example, that at the present hour, the Thames is
poisoning London.

So far as Paris is concerned, it has become indispensable of late, to
transport the mouths of the sewers down stream, below the last bridge.

A double tubular apparatus, provided with valves and sluices, sucking up
and driving back, a system of elementary drainage, simple as the lungs
of a man, and which is already in full working order in many communities
in England, would suffice to conduct the pure water of the fields into
our cities, and to send back to the fields the rich water of the cities,
and this easy exchange, the simplest in the world, would retain among us
the five hundred millions now thrown away. People are thinking of other
things.

The process actually in use does evil, with the intention of doing good.
The intention is good, the result is melancholy. Thinking to purge the
city, the population is blanched like plants raised in cellars. A sewer
is a mistake. When drainage, everywhere, with its double function,
restoring what it takes, shall have replaced the sewer, which is a
simple impoverishing washing, then, this being combined with the data
of a now social economy, the product of the earth will be increased
tenfold, and the problem of misery will be singularly lightened. Add the
suppression of parasitism, and it will be solved.

In the meanwhile, the public wealth flows away to the river, and leakage
takes place. Leakage is the word. Europe is being ruined in this manner
by exhaustion.

As for France, we have just cited its figures. Now, Paris contains one
twenty-fifth of the total population of France, and Parisian guano being
the richest of all, we understate the truth when we value the loss on
the part of Paris at twenty-five millions in the half milliard which
France annually rejects. These twenty-five millions, employed in
assistance and enjoyment, would double the splendor of Paris. The
city spends them in sewers. So that we may say that Paris's great
prodigality, its wonderful festival, its Beaujon folly, its orgy, its
stream of gold from full hands, its pomp, its luxury, its magnificence,
is its sewer system.

It is in this manner that, in the blindness of a poor political economy,
we drown and allow to float down stream and to be lost in the gulfs the
well-being of all. There should be nets at Saint-Cloud for the public
fortune.

Economically considered, the matter can be summed up thus: Paris is
a spendthrift. Paris, that model city, that patron of well-arranged
capitals, of which every nation strives to possess a copy, that
metropolis of the ideal, that august country of the initiative, of
impulse and of effort, that centre and that dwelling of minds, that
nation-city, that hive of the future, that marvellous combination of
Babylon and Corinth, would make a peasant of the Fo-Kian shrug his
shoulders, from the point of view which we have just indicated.

Imitate Paris and you will ruin yourselves.

Moreover, and particularly in this immemorial and senseless waste, Paris
is itself an imitator.

These surprising exhibitions of stupidity are not novel; this is no
young folly. The ancients did like the moderns. "The sewers of Rome,"
says Liebig, "have absorbed all the well-being of the Roman peasant."
When the Campagna of Rome was ruined by the Roman sewer, Rome exhausted
Italy, and when she had put Italy in her sewer, she poured in Sicily,
then Sardinia, then Africa. The sewer of Rome has engulfed the world.
This cess-pool offered its engulfment to the city and the universe. Urbi
et orbi. Eternal city, unfathomable sewer.

Rome sets the example for these things as well as for others.

Paris follows this example with all the stupidity peculiar to
intelligent towns.

For the requirements of the operation upon the subject of which we have
just explained our views, Paris has beneath it another Paris; a Paris
of sewers; which has its streets, its cross-roads, its squares, its
blind-alleys, its arteries, and its circulation, which is of mire and
minus the human form.

For nothing must be flattered, not even a great people; where there
is everything there is also ignominy by the side of sublimity; and,
if Paris contains Athens, the city of light, Tyre, the city of might,
Sparta, the city of virtue, Nineveh, the city of marvels, it also
contains Lutetia, the city of mud.

However, the stamp of its power is there also, and the Titanic sink of
Paris realizes, among monuments, that strange ideal realized in humanity
by some men like Macchiavelli, Bacon and Mirabeau, grandiose vileness.

The sub-soil of Paris, if the eye could penetrate its surface, would
present the aspect of a colossal madrepore. A sponge has no more
partitions and ducts than the mound of earth for a circuit of six
leagues round about, on which rests the great and ancient city. Not to
mention its catacombs, which are a separate cellar, not to mention
the inextricable trellis-work of gas pipes, without reckoning the vast
tubular system for the distribution of fresh water which ends in the
pillar fountains, the sewers alone form a tremendous, shadowy net-work
under the two banks; a labyrinth which has its slope for its guiding
thread.

There appears, in the humid mist, the rat which seems the product to
which Paris has given birth.




CHAPTER II--ANCIENT HISTORY OF THE SEWER

Let the reader imagine Paris lifted off like a cover, the subterranean
net-work of sewers, from a bird's eye view, will outline on the banks
a species of large branch grafted on the river. On the right bank, the
belt sewer will form the trunk of this branch, the secondary ducts will
form the branches, and those without exit the twigs.

This figure is but a summary one and half exact, the right angle, which
is the customary angle of this species of subterranean ramifications,
being very rare in vegetation.

A more accurate image of this strange geometrical plan can be formed
by supposing that one is viewing some eccentric oriental alphabet,
as intricate as a thicket, against a background of shadows, and the
misshapen letters should be welded one to another in apparent confusion,
and as at haphazard, now by their angles, again by their extremities.

Sinks and sewers played a great part in the Middle Ages, in the Lower
Empire and in the Orient of old. The masses regarded these beds of
decomposition, these monstrous cradles of death, with a fear that was
almost religious. The vermin ditch of Benares is no less conducive to
giddiness than the lions' ditch of Babylon. Teglath-Phalasar, according
to the rabbinical books, swore by the sink of Nineveh. It was from the
sewer of Munster that John of Leyden produced his false moon, and it
was from the cess-pool of Kekscheb that oriental menalchme, Mokanna, the
veiled prophet of Khorassan, caused his false sun to emerge.

The history of men is reflected in the history of sewers. The
Germoniae[58] narrated Rome. The sewer of Paris has been an ancient and
formidable thing. It has been a sepulchre, it has served as an asylum.
Crime, intelligence, social protest, liberty of conscience, thought,
theft, all that human laws persecute or have persecuted, is hidden in
that hole; the maillotins in the fourteenth century, the tire-laine of
the fifteenth, the Huguenots in the sixteenth, Morin's illuminated in
the seventeenth, the chauffeurs [brigands] in the eighteenth. A
hundred years ago, the nocturnal blow of the dagger emerged thence, the
pickpocket in danger slipped thither; the forest had its cave, Paris had
its sewer. Vagrancy, that Gallic picareria, accepted the sewer as the
adjunct of the Cour des Miracles, and at evening, it returned thither,
fierce and sly, through the Maubuee outlet, as into a bed-chamber.

It was quite natural, that those who had the blind-alley Vide-Gousset,
[Empty-Pocket] or the Rue Coupe-Gorge [Cut-Throat], for the scene of
their daily labor, should have for their domicile by night the culvert
of the Chemin-Vert, or the catch basin of Hurepoix. Hence a throng of
souvenirs. All sorts of phantoms haunt these long, solitary
corridors; everywhere is putrescence and miasma; here and there are
breathing-holes, where Villon within converses with Rabelais without.

The sewer in ancient Paris is the rendezvous of all exhaustions and
of all attempts. Political economy therein spies a detritus, social
philosophy there beholds a residuum.

The sewer is the conscience of the city. Everything there converges
and confronts everything else. In that livid spot there are shades, but
there are no longer any secrets. Each thing bears its true form, or at
least, its definitive form. The mass of filth has this in its favor,
that it is not a liar. Ingenuousness has taken refuge there. The mask
of Basil is to be found there, but one beholds its cardboard and its
strings and the inside as well as the outside, and it is accentuated
by honest mud. Scapin's false nose is its next-door neighbor. All the
uncleannesses of civilization, once past their use, fall into this
trench of truth, where the immense social sliding ends. They are
there engulfed, but they display themselves there. This mixture is a
confession. There, no more false appearances, no plastering over is
possible, filth removes its shirt, absolute denudation puts to the rout
all illusions and mirages, there is nothing more except what really
exists, presenting the sinister form of that which is coming to an end.
There, the bottom of a bottle indicates drunkenness, a basket-handle
tells a tale of domesticity; there the core of an apple which has
entertained literary opinions becomes an apple-core once more; the
effigy on the big sou becomes frankly covered with verdigris, Caiphas'
spittle meets Falstaff's puking, the louis-d'or which comes from
the gaming-house jostles the nail whence hangs the rope's end of the
suicide. A livid foetus rolls along, enveloped in the spangles which
danced at the Opera last Shrove-Tuesday, a cap which has pronounced
judgment on men wallows beside a mass of rottenness which was formerly
Margoton's petticoat; it is more than fraternization, it is equivalent
to addressing each other as thou. All which was formerly rouged, is
washed free. The last veil is torn away. A sewer is a cynic. It tells
everything.

The sincerity of foulness pleases us, and rests the soul. When one has
passed one's time in enduring upon earth the spectacle of the great airs
which reasons of state, the oath, political sagacity, human justice,
professional probity, the austerities of situation, incorruptible robes
all assume, it solaces one to enter a sewer and to behold the mire which
befits it.

This is instructive at the same time. We have just said that history
passes through the sewer. The Saint-Barthelemys filter through there,
drop by drop, between the paving-stones. Great public assassinations,
political and religious butcheries, traverse this underground passage
of civilization, and thrust their corpses there. For the eye of the
thinker, all historic murderers are to be found there, in that hideous
penumbra, on their knees, with a scrap of their winding-sheet for
an apron, dismally sponging out their work. Louis XI. is there with
Tristan, Francois I. with Duprat, Charles IX. is there with his mother,
Richelieu is there with Louis XIII., Louvois is there, Letellier is
there, Hebert and Maillard are there, scratching the stones, and trying
to make the traces of their actions disappear. Beneath these vaults one
hears the brooms of spectres. One there breathes the enormous fetidness
of social catastrophes. One beholds reddish reflections in the corners.
There flows a terrible stream, in which bloody hands have been washed.

The social observer should enter these shadows. They form a part of
his laboratory. Philosophy is the microscope of the thought. Everything
desires to flee from it, but nothing escapes it. Tergiversation is
useless. What side of oneself does one display in evasions? the shameful
side. Philosophy pursues with its glance, probes the evil, and does
not permit it to escape into nothingness. In the obliteration of things
which disappear, in the watching of things which vanish, it recognizes
all. It reconstructs the purple from the rag, and the woman from the
scrap of her dress. From the cess-pool, it re-constitutes the city; from
mud, it reconstructs manners; from the potsherd it infers the amphora
or the jug. By the imprint of a finger-nail on a piece of parchment, it
recognizes the difference which separates the Jewry of the Judengasse
from the Jewry of the Ghetto. It re-discovers in what remains that
which has been, good, evil, the true, the blood-stain of the palace,
the ink-blot of the cavern, the drop of sweat from the brothel, trials
undergone, temptations welcomed, orgies cast forth, the turn which
characters have taken as they became abased, the trace of prostitution
in souls of which their grossness rendered them capable, and on the
vesture of the porters of Rome the mark of Messalina's elbowing.




CHAPTER III--BRUNESEAU

The sewer of Paris in the Middle Ages was legendary. In the sixteenth
century, Henri II. attempted a bore, which failed. Not a hundred years
ago, the cess-pool, Mercier attests the fact, was abandoned to itself,
and fared as best it might.

Such was this ancient Paris, delivered over to quarrels, to indecision,
and to gropings. It was tolerably stupid for a long time. Later on, '89
showed how understanding comes to cities. But in the good, old times,
the capital had not much head. It did not know how to manage its own
affairs either morally or materially, and could not sweep out filth
any better than it could abuses. Everything presented an obstacle,
everything raised a question. The sewer, for example, was refractory to
every itinerary. One could no more find one's bearings in the sewer
than one could understand one's position in the city; above the
unintelligible, below the inextricable; beneath the confusion of tongues
there reigned the confusion of caverns; Daedalus backed up Babel.

Sometimes the Paris sewer took a notion to overflow, as though this
misunderstood Nile were suddenly seized with a fit of rage. There
occurred, infamous to relate, inundations of the sewer. At times, that
stomach of civilization digested badly, the cess-pool flowed back into
the throat of the city, and Paris got an after-taste of her own filth.
These resemblances of the sewer to remorse had their good points; they
were warnings; very badly accepted, however; the city waxed indignant
at the audacity of its mire, and did not admit that the filth should
return. Drive it out better.

The inundation of 1802 is one of the actual memories of Parisians of
the age of eighty. The mud spread in cross-form over the Place des
Victoires, where stands the statue of Louis XIV.; it entered the Rue
Saint-Honore by the two mouths to the sewer in the Champs-Elysees,
the Rue Saint-Florentin through the Saint-Florentin sewer, the Rue
Pierre-a-Poisson through the sewer de la Sonnerie, the Rue Popincourt,
through the sewer of the Chemin-Vert, the Rue de la Roquette, through
the sewer of the Rue de Lappe; it covered the drain of the Rue des
Champs-Elysees to the height of thirty-five centimetres; and, to the
South, through the vent of the Seine, performing its functions in
inverse sense, it penetrated the Rue Mazarine, the Rue de l'Echaude, and
the Rue des Marais, where it stopped at a distance of one hundred and
nine metres, a few paces distant from the house in which Racine had
lived, respecting, in the seventeenth century, the poet more than the
King. It attained its maximum depth in the Rue Saint-Pierre, where
it rose to the height of three feet above the flag-stones of the
water-spout, and its maximum length in the Rue Saint-Sabin, where it
spread out over a stretch two hundred and thirty-eight metres in length.

At the beginning of this century, the sewer of Paris was still a
mysterious place. Mud can never enjoy a good fame; but in this case its
evil renown reached the verge of the terrible. Paris knew, in a confused
way, that she had under her a terrible cavern. People talked of it as
of that monstrous bed of Thebes in which swarmed centipedes fifteen long
feet in length, and which might have served Behemoth for a bathtub.
The great boots of the sewermen never ventured further than certain
well-known points. We were then very near the epoch when the scavenger's
carts, from the summit of which Sainte-Foix fraternized with the Marquis
de Crequi, discharged their loads directly into the sewer. As for
cleaning out,--that function was entrusted to the pouring rains which
encumbered rather than swept away. Rome left some poetry to her sewer,
and called it the Gemoniae; Paris insulted hers, and entitled it the
Polypus-Hole. Science and superstition were in accord, in horror. The
Polypus hole was no less repugnant to hygiene than to legend. The goblin
was developed under the fetid covering of the Mouffetard sewer; the
corpses of the Marmousets had been cast into the sewer de la Barillerie;
Fagon attributed the redoubtable malignant fever of 1685 to the great
hiatus of the sewer of the Marais, which remained yawning until 1833 in
the Rue Saint-Louis, almost opposite the sign of the Gallant Messenger.
The mouth of the sewer of the Rue de la Mortellerie was celebrated for
the pestilences which had their source there; with its grating of iron,
with points simulating a row of teeth, it was like a dragon's maw
in that fatal street, breathing forth hell upon men. The popular
imagination seasoned the sombre Parisian sink with some indescribably
hideous intermixture of the infinite. The sewer had no bottom. The sewer
was the lower world. The idea of exploring these leprous regions did not
even occur to the police. To try that unknown thing, to cast the plummet
into that shadow, to set out on a voyage of discovery in that abyss--who
would have dared? It was alarming. Nevertheless, some one did present
himself. The cess-pool had its Christopher Columbus.

One day, in 1805, during one of the rare apparitions which the Emperor
made in Paris, the Minister of the Interior, some Decres or Cretet or
other, came to the master's intimate levee. In the Carrousel there was
audible the clanking of swords of all those extraordinary soldiers of
the great Republic, and of the great Empire; then Napoleon's door was
blocked with heroes; men from the Rhine, from the Escaut, from the
Adige, and from the Nile; companions of Joubert, of Desaix, of Marceau,
of Hoche, of Kleber; the aerostiers of Fleurus, the grenadiers of
Mayence, the pontoon-builders of Genoa, hussars whom the Pyramids had
looked down upon, artillerists whom Junot's cannon-ball had spattered
with mud, cuirassiers who had taken by assault the fleet lying at anchor
in the Zuyderzee; some had followed Bonaparte upon the bridge of Lodi,
others had accompanied Murat in the trenches of Mantua, others had
preceded Lannes in the hollow road of Montebello. The whole army of that
day was present there, in the court-yard of the Tuileries, represented
by a squadron or a platoon, and guarding Napoleon in repose; and that
was the splendid epoch when the grand army had Marengo behind it and
Austerlitz before it.--"Sire," said the Minister of the Interior to
Napoleon, "yesterday I saw the most intrepid man in your Empire."--"What
man is that?" said the Emperor brusquely, "and what has he done?"--"He
wants to do something, Sire."--"What is it?"--"To visit the sewers of
Paris."

This man existed and his name was Bruneseau.




CHAPTER IV--BRUNESEAU.

The visit took place. It was a formidable campaign; a nocturnal battle
against pestilence and suffocation. It was, at the same time, a voyage
of discovery. One of the survivors of this expedition, an intelligent
workingman, who was very young at the time, related curious details with
regard to it, several years ago, which Bruneseau thought himself obliged
to omit in his report to the prefect of police, as unworthy of official
style. The processes of disinfection were, at that epoch, extremely
rudimentary. Hardly had Bruneseau crossed the first articulations of
that subterranean network, when eight laborers out of the twenty refused
to go any further. The operation was complicated; the visit entailed the
necessity of cleaning; hence it was necessary to cleanse and at the same
time, to proceed; to note the entrances of water, to count the gratings
and the vents, to lay out in detail the branches, to indicate the
currents at the point where they parted, to define the respective bounds
of the divers basins, to sound the small sewers grafted on the principal
sewer, to measure the height under the key-stone of each drain, and the
width, at the spring of the vaults as well as at the bottom, in order
to determine the arrangements with regard to the level of each
water-entrance, either of the bottom of the arch, or on the soil of the
street. They advanced with toil. The lanterns pined away in the foul
atmosphere. From time to time, a fainting sewerman was carried out.
At certain points, there were precipices. The soil had given away, the
pavement had crumbled, the sewer had changed into a bottomless well;
they found nothing solid; a man disappeared suddenly; they had great
difficulty in getting him out again. On the advice of Fourcroy, they
lighted large cages filled with tow steeped in resin, from time to time,
in spots which had been sufficiently disinfected. In some places, the
wall was covered with misshapen fungi,--one would have said tumors; the
very stone seemed diseased within this unbreathable atmosphere.

Bruneseau, in his exploration, proceeded down hill. At the point of
separation of the two water-conduits of the Grand-Hurleur, he deciphered
upon a projecting stone the date of 1550; this stone indicated the
limits where Philibert Delorme, charged by Henri II. with visiting the
subterranean drains of Paris, had halted. This stone was the mark of
the sixteenth century on the sewer; Bruneseau found the handiwork of
the seventeenth century once more in the Ponceau drain of the old Rue
Vielle-du-Temple, vaulted between 1600 and 1650; and the handiwork of
the eighteenth in the western section of the collecting canal, walled
and vaulted in 1740. These two vaults, especially the less ancient, that
of 1740, were more cracked and decrepit than the masonry of the belt
sewer, which dated from 1412, an epoch when the brook of fresh water of
Menilmontant was elevated to the dignity of the Grand Sewer of Paris, an
advancement analogous to that of a peasant who should become first valet
de chambre to the King; something like Gros-Jean transformed into Lebel.

Here and there, particularly beneath the Court-House, they thought they
recognized the hollows of ancient dungeons, excavated in the very sewer
itself. Hideous place! An iron neck-collar was hanging in one of these
cells. They walled them all up. Some of their finds were singular; among
others, the skeleton of an ourang-outan, who had disappeared from the
Jardin des Plantes in 1800, a disappearance probably connected with
the famous and indisputable apparition of the devil in the Rue des
Bernardins, in the last year of the eighteenth century. The poor devil
had ended by drowning himself in the sewer.

Beneath this long, arched drain which terminated at the Arche-Marion,
a perfectly preserved rag-picker's basket excited the admiration of all
connoisseurs. Everywhere, the mire, which the sewermen came to handle
with intrepidity, abounded in precious objects, jewels of gold and
silver, precious stones, coins. If a giant had filtered this cesspool,
he would have had the riches of centuries in his lair. At the point
where the two branches of the Rue du Temple and of the Rue Sainte-Avoye
separate, they picked up a singular Huguenot medal in copper, bearing on
one side the pig hooded with a cardinal's hat, and on the other, a wolf
with a tiara on his head.

The most surprising encounter was at the entrance to the Grand Sewer.
This entrance had formerly been closed by a grating of which nothing but
the hinges remained. From one of these hinges hung a dirty and shapeless
rag which, arrested there in its passage, no doubt, had floated there
in the darkness and finished its process of being torn apart. Bruneseau
held his lantern close to this rag and examined it. It was of very fine
batiste, and in one of the corners, less frayed than the rest, they
made out a heraldic coronet and embroidered above these seven letters:
LAVBESP. The crown was the coronet of a Marquis, and the seven letters
signified Laubespine. They recognized the fact, that what they had
before their eyes was a morsel of the shroud of Marat. Marat in his
youth had had amorous intrigues. This was when he was a member of the
household of the Comte d'Artois, in the capacity of physician to the
Stables. From these love affairs, historically proved, with a great
lady, he had retained this sheet. As a waif or a souvenir. At his death,
as this was the only linen of any fineness which he had in his house,
they buried him in it. Some old women had shrouded him for the tomb in
that swaddling-band in which the tragic Friend of the people had enjoyed
voluptuousness. Bruneseau passed on. They left that rag where it hung;
they did not put the finishing touch to it. Did this arise from scorn
or from respect? Marat deserved both. And then, destiny was there
sufficiently stamped to make them hesitate to touch it. Besides, the
things of the sepulchre must be left in the spot which they select. In
short, the relic was a strange one. A Marquise had slept in it; Marat
had rotted in it; it had traversed the Pantheon to end with the rats
of the sewer. This chamber rag, of which Watteau would formerly have
joyfully sketched every fold, had ended in becoming worthy of the fixed
gaze of Dante.

The whole visit to the subterranean stream of filth of Paris lasted
seven years, from 1805 to 1812. As he proceeded, Bruneseau drew,
directed, and completed considerable works; in 1808 he lowered the arch
of the Ponceau, and, everywhere creating new lines, he pushed the
sewer, in 1809, under the Rue Saint-Denis as far as the fountain of
the Innocents; in 1810, under the Rue Froidmanteau and under the
Salpetriere; in 1811 under the Rue Neuve-des-Petits-Peres, under the Rue
du Mail, under the Rue de l'Echarpe, under the Place Royale; in 1812,
under the Rue de la Paix, and under the Chaussee d'Antin. At the same
time, he had the whole net-work disinfected and rendered healthful. In
the second year of his work, Bruneseau engaged the assistance of his
son-in-law Nargaud.

It was thus that, at the beginning of the century, ancient society
cleansed its double bottom, and performed the toilet of its sewer. There
was that much clean, at all events.

Tortuous, cracked, unpaved, full of fissures, intersected by gullies,
jolted by eccentric elbows, mounting and descending illogically, fetid,
wild, fierce, submerged in obscurity, with cicatrices on its pavements
and scars on its walls, terrible,--such was, retrospectively viewed, the
antique sewer of Paris. Ramifications in every direction, crossings,
of trenches, branches, goose-feet, stars, as in military mines, coecum,
blind alleys, vaults lined with saltpetre, pestiferous pools, scabby
sweats, on the walls, drops dripping from the ceilings, darkness;
nothing could equal the horror of this old, waste crypt, the digestive
apparatus of Babylon, a cavern, ditch, gulf pierced with streets, a
titanic mole-burrow, where the mind seems to behold that enormous blind
mole, the past, prowling through the shadows, in the filth which has
been splendor.

This, we repeat, was the sewer of the past.




CHAPTER V--PRESENT PROGRESS

To-day the sewer is clean, cold, straight, correct. It almost realizes
the ideal of what is understood in England by the word "respectable." It
is proper and grayish; laid out by rule and line; one might almost say
as though it came out of a bandbox. It resembles a tradesman who has
become a councillor of state. One can almost see distinctly there. The
mire there comports itself with decency. At first, one might readily
mistake it for one of those subterranean corridors, which were so common
in former days, and so useful in flights of monarchs and princes, in
those good old times, "when the people loved their kings." The present
sewer is a beautiful sewer; the pure style reigns there; the classical
rectilinear alexandrine which, driven out of poetry, appears to have
taken refuge in architecture, seems mingled with all the stones of
that long, dark and whitish vault; each outlet is an arcade; the Rue de
Rivoli serves as pattern even in the sewer. However, if the geometrical
line is in place anywhere, it is certainly in the drainage trench of
a great city. There, everything should be subordinated to the shortest
road. The sewer has, nowadays, assumed a certain official aspect. The
very police reports, of which it sometimes forms the subject, no longer
are wanting in respect towards it. The words which characterize it in
administrative language are sonorous and dignified. What used to be
called a gut is now called a gallery; what used to be called a hole is
now called a surveying orifice. Villon would no longer meet with his
ancient temporary provisional lodging. This net-work of cellars has its
immemorial population of prowlers, rodents, swarming in greater numbers
than ever; from time to time, an aged and veteran rat risks his head at
the window of the sewer and surveys the Parisians; but even these vermin
grow tame, so satisfied are they with their subterranean palace. The
cesspool no longer retains anything of its primitive ferocity. The rain,
which in former days soiled the sewer, now washes it. Nevertheless, do
not trust yourself too much to it. Miasmas still inhabit it. It is
more hypocritical than irreproachable. The prefecture of police and
the commission of health have done their best. But, in spite of all the
processes of disinfection, it exhales, a vague, suspicious odor like
Tartuffe after confession.

Let us confess, that, taking it all in all, this sweeping is a homage
which the sewer pays to civilization, and as, from this point of view,
Tartuffe's conscience is a progress over the Augean stables, it is
certain that the sewers of Paris have been improved.

It is more than progress; it is transmutation. Between the ancient
and the present sewer there is a revolution. What has effected this
revolution?

The man whom all the world forgets, and whom we have mentioned,
Bruneseau.




CHAPTER VI--FUTURE PROGRESS

The excavation of the sewer of Paris has been no slight task. The last
ten centuries have toiled at it without being able to bring it to a
termination, any more than they have been able to finish Paris. The
sewer, in fact, receives all the counter-shocks of the growth of Paris.
Within the bosom of the earth, it is a sort of mysterious polyp with a
thousand antennae, which expands below as the city expands above. Every
time that the city cuts a street, the sewer stretches out an arm. The
old monarchy had constructed only twenty-three thousand three hundred
metres of sewers; that was where Paris stood in this respect on the
first of January, 1806. Beginning with this epoch, of which we shall
shortly speak, the work was usefully and energetically resumed and
prosecuted; Napoleon built--the figures are curious--four thousand eight
hundred and four metres; Louis XVIII., five thousand seven hundred
and nine; Charles X., ten thousand eight hundred and thirty-six;
Louis-Philippe, eighty-nine thousand and twenty; the Republic of
1848, twenty-three thousand three hundred and eighty-one; the present
government, seventy thousand five hundred; in all, at the present time,
two hundred and twenty-six thousand six hundred and ten metres;
sixty leagues of sewers; the enormous entrails of Paris. An obscure
ramification ever at work; a construction which is immense and ignored.

As the reader sees, the subterranean labyrinth of Paris is to-day
more than ten times what it was at the beginning of the century. It is
difficult to form any idea of all the perseverance and the efforts which
have been required to bring this cess-pool to the point of relative
perfection in which it now is. It was with great difficulty that the
ancient monarchical provostship and, during the last ten years of
the eighteenth century, the revolutionary mayoralty, had succeeded in
perforating the five leagues of sewer which existed previous to 1806.
All sorts of obstacles hindered this operation, some peculiar to the
soil, others inherent in the very prejudices of the laborious population
of Paris. Paris is built upon a soil which is singularly rebellious to
the pick, the hoe, the bore, and to human manipulation. There is nothing
more difficult to pierce and to penetrate than the geological formation
upon which is superposed the marvellous historical formation called
Paris; as soon as work in any form whatsoever is begun and adventures
upon this stretch of alluvium, subterranean resistances abound. There
are liquid clays, springs, hard rocks, and those soft and deep quagmires
which special science calls moutardes.[59] The pick advances laboriously
through the calcareous layers alternating with very slender threads of
clay, and schistose beds in plates incrusted with oyster-shells, the
contemporaries of the pre-Adamite oceans. Sometimes a rivulet suddenly
bursts through a vault that has been begun, and inundates the laborers;
or a layer of marl is laid bare, and rolls down with the fury of a
cataract, breaking the stoutest supporting beams like glass. Quite
recently, at Villette, when it became necessary to pass the collecting
sewer under the Saint-Martin canal without interrupting navigation or
emptying the canal, a fissure appeared in the basin of the canal, water
suddenly became abundant in the subterranean tunnel, which was beyond
the power of the pumping engines; it was necessary to send a diver to
explore the fissure which had been made in the narrow entrance of the
grand basin, and it was not without great difficulty that it was stopped
up. Elsewhere near the Seine, and even at a considerable distance
from the river, as for instance, at Belleville, Grand-Rue and Lumiere
Passage, quicksands are encountered in which one sticks fast, and in
which a man sinks visibly. Add suffocation by miasmas, burial by slides,
and sudden crumbling of the earth. Add the typhus, with which the
workmen become slowly impregnated. In our own day, after having
excavated the gallery of Clichy, with a banquette to receive the
principal water-conduit of Ourcq, a piece of work which was executed in
a trench ten metres deep; after having, in the midst of land-slides, and
with the aid of excavations often putrid, and of shoring up, vaulted
the Bievre from the Boulevard de l'Hopital, as far as the Seine; after
having, in order to deliver Paris from the floods of Montmartre and in
order to provide an outlet for that river-like pool nine hectares in
extent, which crouched near the Barriere des Martyrs, after having, let
us state, constructed the line of sewers from the Barriere Blanche to
the road of Aubervilliers, in four months, working day and night, at a
depth of eleven metres; after having--a thing heretofore unseen--made a
subterranean sewer in the Rue Barre-du-Bec, without a trench, six
metres below the surface, the superintendent, Monnot, died. After having
vaulted three thousand metres of sewer in all quarters of the city, from
the Rue Traversiere-Saint-Antoine to the Rue de l'Ourcine, after having
freed the Carrefour Censier-Mouffetard from inundations of rain by means
of the branch of the Arbalete, after having built the Saint-Georges
sewer, on rock and concrete in the fluid sands, after having directed
the formidable lowering of the flooring of the vault timber in the
Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth branch, Duleau the engineer died. There are no
bulletins for such acts of bravery as these, which are more useful,
nevertheless, than the brutal slaughter of the field of battle.

The sewers of Paris in 1832 were far from being what they are to-day.
Bruneseau had given the impulse, but the cholera was required to
bring about the vast reconstruction which took place later on. It is
surprising to say, for example, that in 1821, a part of the belt sewer,
called the Grand Canal, as in Venice, still stood stagnating uncovered
to the sky, in the Rue des Gourdes. It was only in 1821 that the city
of Paris found in its pocket the two hundred and sixty-thousand eighty
francs and six centimes required for covering this mass of filth. The
three absorbing wells, of the Combat, the Cunette, and Saint-Mande, with
their discharging mouths, their apparatus, their cesspools, and their
depuratory branches, only date from 1836. The intestinal sewer of Paris
has been made over anew, and, as we have said, it has been extended more
than tenfold within the last quarter of a century.

Thirty years ago, at the epoch of the insurrection of the 5th and 6th of
June, it was still, in many localities, nearly the same ancient sewer.
A very great number of streets which are now convex were then sunken
causeways. At the end of a slope, where the tributaries of a street or
cross-roads ended, there were often to be seen large, square gratings
with heavy bars, whose iron, polished by the footsteps of the throng,
gleamed dangerous and slippery for vehicles, and caused horses to fall.
The official language of the Roads and Bridges gave to these gratings
the expressive name of Cassis.[60]

In 1832, in a number of streets, in the Rue de l'Etoile, the Rue
Saint-Louis, the Rue du Temple, the Rue Vielle-duTemple, the Rue
Notre-Dame de Nazareth, the Rue Folie-Mericourt, the Quai aux Fleurs,
the Rue du Petit-Muse, the Rue du Normandie, the Rue Pont-Aux-Biches,
the Rue des Marais, the Faubourg Saint-Martin, the Rue Notre Dame
des-Victoires, the Faubourg Montmartre, the Rue Grange-Bateliere, in the
Champs-Elysees, the Rue Jacob, the Rue de Tournon, the ancient gothic
sewer still cynically displayed its maw. It consisted of enormous
voids of stone catch-basins sometimes surrounded by stone posts, with
monumental effrontery.

Paris in 1806 still had nearly the same sewers numerically as stated in
1663; five thousand three hundred fathoms. After Bruneseau, on the 1st
of January, 1832, it had forty thousand three hundred metres. Between
1806 and 1831, there had been built, on an average, seven hundred and
fifty metres annually, afterwards eight and even ten thousand metres of
galleries were constructed every year, in masonry, of small stones, with
hydraulic mortar which hardens under water, on a cement foundation. At
two hundred francs the metre, the sixty leagues of Paris' sewers of the
present day represent forty-eight millions.

In addition to the economic progress which we have indicated at the
beginning, grave problems of public hygiene are connected with that
immense question: the sewers of Paris.

Paris is the centre of two sheets, a sheet of water and a sheet of air.
The sheet of water, lying at a tolerably great depth underground, but
already sounded by two bores, is furnished by the layer of green clay
situated between the chalk and the Jurassic lime-stone; this layer may
be represented by a disk five and twenty leagues in circumference; a
multitude of rivers and brooks ooze there; one drinks the Seine, the
Marne, the Yonne, the Oise, the Aisne, the Cher, the Vienne and the
Loire in a glass of water from the well of Grenelle. The sheet of water
is healthy, it comes from heaven in the first place and next from the
earth; the sheet of air is unhealthy, it comes from the sewer. All the
miasms of the cess-pool are mingled with the breath of the city; hence
this bad breath. The air taken from above a dung-heap, as has been
scientifically proved, is purer than the air taken from above Paris. In
a given time, with the aid of progress, mechanisms become perfected, and
as light increases, the sheet of water will be employed to purify the
sheet of air; that is to say, to wash the sewer. The reader knows, that
by "washing the sewer" we mean: the restitution of the filth to the
earth; the return to the soil of dung and of manure to the fields.
Through this simple act, the entire social community will experience a
diminution of misery and an augmentation of health. At the present hour,
the radiation of diseases from Paris extends to fifty leagues around the
Louvre, taken as the hub of this pestilential wheel.

We might say that, for ten centuries, the cess-pool has been the disease
of Paris. The sewer is the blemish which Paris has in her blood. The
popular instinct has never been deceived in it. The occupation of
sewermen was formerly almost as perilous, and almost as repugnant to the
people, as the occupation of knacker, which was so long held in horror
and handed over to the executioner. High wages were necessary to induce
a mason to disappear in that fetid mine; the ladder of the cess-pool
cleaner hesitated to plunge into it; it was said, in proverbial form:
"to descend into the sewer is to enter the grave;" and all sorts of
hideous legends, as we have said, covered this colossal sink with
terror; a dread sink-hole which bears the traces of the revolutions
of the globe as of the revolutions of man, and where are to be found
vestiges of all cataclysms from the shells of the Deluge to the rag of
Marat.




BOOK THIRD.--MUD BUT THE SOUL




CHAPTER I--THE SEWER AND ITS SURPRISES

It was in the sewers of Paris that Jean Valjean found himself.

Still another resemblance between Paris and the sea. As in the ocean,
the diver may disappear there.

The transition was an unheard-of one. In the very heart of the city,
Jean Valjean had escaped from the city, and, in the twinkling of an eye,
in the time required to lift the cover and to replace it, he had passed
from broad daylight to complete obscurity, from midday to midnight, from
tumult to silence, from the whirlwind of thunders to the stagnation of
the tomb, and, by a vicissitude far more tremendous even than that of
the Rue Polonceau, from the most extreme peril to the most absolute
obscurity.

An abrupt fall into a cavern; a disappearance into the secret trap-door
of Paris; to quit that street where death was on every side, for that
sort of sepulchre where there was life, was a strange instant. He
remained for several seconds as though bewildered; listening, stupefied.
The waste-trap of safety had suddenly yawned beneath him. Celestial
goodness had, in a manner, captured him by treachery. Adorable
ambuscades of providence!

Only, the wounded man did not stir, and Jean Valjean did not know
whether that which he was carrying in that grave was a living being or a
dead corpse.

His first sensation was one of blindness. All of a sudden, he could see
nothing. It seemed to him too, that, in one instant, he had become deaf.
He no longer heard anything. The frantic storm of murder which had been
let loose a few feet above his head did not reach him, thanks to the
thickness of the earth which separated him from it, as we have said,
otherwise than faintly and indistinctly, and like a rumbling, in the
depths. He felt that the ground was solid under his feet; that was all;
but that was enough. He extended one arm and then the other, touched
the walls on both sides, and perceived that the passage was narrow; he
slipped, and thus perceived that the pavement was wet. He cautiously put
forward one foot, fearing a hole, a sink, some gulf; he discovered that
the paving continued. A gust of fetidness informed him of the place in
which he stood.

After the lapse of a few minutes, he was no longer blind. A little light
fell through the man-hole through which he had descended, and his eyes
became accustomed to this cavern. He began to distinguish something. The
passage in which he had burrowed--no other word can better express the
situation--was walled in behind him. It was one of those blind alleys,
which the special jargon terms branches. In front of him there was
another wall, a wall like night. The light of the air-hole died out ten
or twelve paces from the point where Jean Valjean stood, and barely cast
a wan pallor on a few metres of the damp walls of the sewer. Beyond,
the opaqueness was massive; to penetrate thither seemed horrible, an
entrance into it appeared like an engulfment. A man could, however,
plunge into that wall of fog and it was necessary so to do. Haste was
even requisite. It occurred to Jean Valjean that the grating which he
had caught sight of under the flag-stones might also catch the eye of
the soldiery, and that everything hung upon this chance. They also might
descend into that well and search it. There was not a minute to be lost.
He had deposited Marius on the ground, he picked him up again,--that is
the real word for it,--placed him on his shoulders once more, and set
out. He plunged resolutely into the gloom.

The truth is, that they were less safe than Jean Valjean fancied. Perils
of another sort and no less serious were awaiting them, perchance. After
the lightning-charged whirlwind of the combat, the cavern of miasmas and
traps; after chaos, the sewer. Jean Valjean had fallen from one circle
of hell into another.

When he had advanced fifty paces, he was obliged to halt. A problem
presented itself. The passage terminated in another gut which he
encountered across his path. There two ways presented themselves. Which
should he take? Ought he to turn to the left or to the right? How was he
to find his bearings in that black labyrinth? This labyrinth, to which
we have already called the reader's attention, has a clue, which is its
slope. To follow to the slope is to arrive at the river.

This Jean Valjean instantly comprehended.

He said to himself that he was probably in the sewer des Halles; that
if he were to choose the path to the left and follow the slope, he would
arrive, in less than a quarter of an hour, at some mouth on the Seine
between the Pont au Change and the Pont-Neuf, that is to say, he would
make his appearance in broad daylight on the most densely peopled spot
in Paris. Perhaps he would come out on some man-hole at the intersection
of streets. Amazement of the passers-by at beholding two bleeding men
emerge from the earth at their feet. Arrival of the police, a call to
arms of the neighboring post of guards. Thus they would be seized before
they had even got out. It would be better to plunge into that labyrinth,
to confide themselves to that black gloom, and to trust to Providence
for the outcome.

He ascended the incline, and turned to the right.

When he had turned the angle of the gallery, the distant glimmer of an
air-hole disappeared, the curtain of obscurity fell upon him once more,
and he became blind again. Nevertheless, he advanced as rapidly as
possible. Marius' two arms were passed round his neck, and the former's
feet dragged behind him. He held both these arms with one hand, and
groped along the wall with the other. Marius' cheek touched his, and
clung there, bleeding. He felt a warm stream which came from Marius
trickling down upon him and making its way under his clothes. But a
humid warmth near his ear, which the mouth of the wounded man touched,
indicated respiration, and consequently, life. The passage along which
Jean Valjean was now proceeding was not so narrow as the first. Jean
Valjean walked through it with considerable difficulty. The rain of the
preceding day had not, as yet, entirely run off, and it created a little
torrent in the centre of the bottom, and he was forced to hug the wall
in order not to have his feet in the water.

Thus he proceeded in the gloom. He resembled the beings of the night
groping in the invisible and lost beneath the earth in veins of shadow.

Still, little by little, whether it was that the distant air-holes
emitted a little wavering light in this opaque gloom, or whether his
eyes had become accustomed to the obscurity, some vague vision returned
to him, and he began once more to gain a confused idea, now of the wall
which he touched, now of the vault beneath which he was passing. The
pupil dilates in the dark, and the soul dilates in misfortune and ends
by finding God there.

It was not easy to direct his course.

The line of the sewer re-echoes, so to speak, the line of the streets
which lie above it. There were then in Paris two thousand two hundred
streets. Let the reader imagine himself beneath that forest of gloomy
branches which is called the sewer. The system of sewers existing at
that epoch, placed end to end, would have given a length of eleven
leagues. We have said above, that the actual net-work, thanks to the
special activity of the last thirty years, was no less than sixty
leagues in extent.

Jean Valjean began by committing a blunder. He thought that he was
beneath the Rue Saint-Denis, and it was a pity that it was not so. Under
the Rue Saint-Denis there is an old stone sewer which dates from Louis
XIII. and which runs straight to the collecting sewer, called the Grand
Sewer, with but a single elbow, on the right, on the elevation of the
ancient Cour des Miracles, and a single branch, the Saint-Martin sewer,
whose four arms describe a cross. But the gut of the Petite-Truanderie
the entrance to which was in the vicinity of the Corinthe wine-shop has
never communicated with the sewer of the Rue Saint-Denis; it ended
at the Montmartre sewer, and it was in this that Jean Valjean was
entangled. There opportunities of losing oneself abound. The Montmartre
sewer is one of the most labyrinthine of the ancient network.
Fortunately, Jean Valjean had left behind him the sewer of the markets
whose geometrical plan presents the appearance of a multitude of
parrots' roosts piled on top of each other; but he had before him more
than one embarrassing encounter and more than one street corner--for
they are streets--presenting itself in the gloom like an interrogation
point; first, on his left, the vast sewer of the Platriere, a sort of
Chinese puzzle, thrusting out and entangling its chaos of Ts and Zs
under the Post-Office and under the rotunda of the Wheat Market, as far
as the Seine, where it terminates in a Y; secondly, on his right, the
curving corridor of the Rue du Cadran with its three teeth, which
are also blind courts; thirdly, on his left, the branch of the
Mail, complicated, almost at its inception, with a sort of fork, and
proceeding from zig-zag to zig-zag until it ends in the grand crypt of
the outlet of the Louvre, truncated and ramified in every direction; and
lastly, the blind alley of a passage of the Rue des Jeuneurs, without
counting little ducts here and there, before reaching the belt sewer,
which alone could conduct him to some issue sufficiently distant to be
safe.

Had Jean Valjean had any idea of all that we have here pointed out, he
would speedily have perceived, merely by feeling the wall, that he was
not in the subterranean gallery of the Rue Saint-Denis. Instead of the
ancient stone, instead of the antique architecture, haughty and royal
even in the sewer, with pavement and string courses of granite and
mortar costing eight hundred livres the fathom, he would have felt under
his hand contemporary cheapness, economical expedients, porous stone
filled with mortar on a concrete foundation, which costs two hundred
francs the metre, and the bourgeoise masonry known as a petits
materiaux--small stuff; but of all this he knew nothing.

He advanced with anxiety, but with calmness, seeing nothing, knowing
nothing, buried in chance, that is to say, engulfed in providence.

By degrees, we will admit, a certain horror seized upon him. The gloom
which enveloped him penetrated his spirit. He walked in an enigma. This
aqueduct of the sewer is formidable; it interlaces in a dizzy fashion.
It is a melancholy thing to be caught in this Paris of shadows. Jean
Valjean was obliged to find and even to invent his route without seeing
it. In this unknown, every step that he risked might be his last. How
was he to get out? should he find an issue? should he find it in time?
would that colossal subterranean sponge with its stone cavities, allow
itself to be penetrated and pierced? should he there encounter some
unexpected knot in the darkness? should he arrive at the inextricable
and the impassable? would Marius die there of hemorrhage and he of
hunger? should they end by both getting lost, and by furnishing two
skeletons in a nook of that night? He did not know. He put all these
questions to himself without replying to them. The intestines of Paris
form a precipice. Like the prophet, he was in the belly of the monster.

All at once, he had a surprise. At the most unforeseen moment, and
without having ceased to walk in a straight line, he perceived that he
was no longer ascending; the water of the rivulet was beating against
his heels, instead of meeting him at his toes. The sewer was now
descending. Why? Was he about to arrive suddenly at the Seine? This
danger was a great one, but the peril of retreating was still greater.
He continued to advance.

It was not towards the Seine that he was proceeding. The ridge which
the soil of Paris forms on its right bank empties one of its water-sheds
into the Seine and the other into the Grand Sewer. The crest of this
ridge which determines the division of the waters describes a very
capricious line. The culminating point, which is the point of
separation of the currents, is in the Sainte-Avoye sewer, beyond the Rue
Michelle-Comte, in the sewer of the Louvre, near the boulevards, and
in the Montmartre sewer, near the Halles. It was this culminating point
that Jean Valjean had reached. He was directing his course towards the
belt sewer; he was on the right path. But he did not know it.

Every time that he encountered a branch, he felt of its angles, and if
he found that the opening which presented itself was smaller than the
passage in which he was, he did not enter but continued his route,
rightly judging that every narrower way must needs terminate in a blind
alley, and could only lead him further from his goal, that is to say,
the outlet. Thus he avoided the quadruple trap which was set for him in
the darkness by the four labyrinths which we have just enumerated.

At a certain moment, he perceived that he was emerging from beneath
the Paris which was petrified by the uprising, where the barricades had
suppressed circulation, and that he was entering beneath the living and
normal Paris. Overhead he suddenly heard a noise as of thunder, distant
but continuous. It was the rumbling of vehicles.

He had been walking for about half an hour, at least according to the
calculation which he made in his own mind, and he had not yet thought of
rest; he had merely changed the hand with which he was holding Marius.
The darkness was more profound than ever, but its very depth reassured
him.

All at once, he saw his shadow in front of him. It was outlined on
a faint, almost indistinct reddish glow, which vaguely empurpled the
flooring vault underfoot, and the vault overhead, and gilded to his
right and to his left the two viscous walls of the passage. Stupefied,
he turned round.

Behind him, in the portion of the passage which he had just passed
through, at a distance which appeared to him immense, piercing the dense
obscurity, flamed a sort of horrible star which had the air of surveying
him.

It was the gloomy star of the police which was rising in the sewer.

In the rear of that star eight or ten forms were moving about in a
confused way, black, upright, indistinct, horrible.




CHAPTER II--EXPLANATION

On the day of the sixth of June, a battue of the sewers had been
ordered. It was feared that the vanquished might have taken to them for
refuge, and Prefect Gisquet was to search occult Paris while General
Bugeaud swept public Paris; a double and connected operation which
exacted a double strategy on the part of the public force, represented
above by the army and below by the police. Three squads of agents and
sewermen explored the subterranean drain of Paris, the first on the
right bank, the second on the left bank, the third in the city. The
agents of police were armed with carabines, with bludgeons, swords and
poignards.

That which was directed at Jean Valjean at that moment, was the lantern
of the patrol of the right bank.

This patrol had just visited the curving gallery and the three blind
alleys which lie beneath the Rue du Cadran. While they were passing
their lantern through the depths of these blind alleys, Jean Valjean had
encountered on his path the entrance to the gallery, had perceived
that it was narrower than the principal passage and had not penetrated
thither. He had passed on. The police, on emerging from the gallery
du Cadran, had fancied that they heard the sound of footsteps in the
direction of the belt sewer. They were, in fact, the steps of Jean
Valjean. The sergeant in command of the patrol had raised his lantern,
and the squad had begun to gaze into the mist in the direction whence
the sound proceeded.

This was an indescribable moment for Jean Valjean.

Happily, if he saw the lantern well, the lantern saw him but ill. It
was light and he was shadow. He was very far off, and mingled with the
darkness of the place. He hugged the wall and halted. Moreover, he did
not understand what it was that was moving behind him. The lack of sleep
and food, and his emotions had caused him also to pass into the state of
a visionary. He beheld a gleam, and around that gleam, forms. What was
it? He did not comprehend.

Jean Valjean having paused, the sound ceased.

The men of the patrol listened, and heard nothing, they looked and saw
nothing. They held a consultation.

There existed at that epoch at this point of the Montmartre sewer a sort
of cross-roads called de service, which was afterwards suppressed, on
account of the little interior lake which formed there, swallowing up
the torrent of rain in heavy storms. The patrol could form a cluster in
this open space. Jean Valjean saw these spectres form a sort of circle.
These bull-dogs' heads approached each other closely and whispered
together.

The result of this council held by the watch dogs was, that they had
been mistaken, that there had been no noise, that it was useless to get
entangled in the belt sewer, that it would only be a waste of time,
but that they ought to hasten towards Saint-Merry; that if there
was anything to do, and any "bousingot" to track out, it was in that
quarter.

From time to time, parties re-sole their old insults. In 1832, the word
bousingot formed the interim between the word jacobin, which had become
obsolete, and the word demagogue which has since rendered such excellent
service.

The sergeant gave orders to turn to the left, towards the watershed of
the Seine.

If it had occurred to them to separate into two squads, and to go in
both directions, Jean Valjean would have been captured. All hung on
that thread. It is probable that the instructions of the prefecture,
foreseeing a possibility of combat and insurgents in force, had
forbidden the patrol to part company. The patrol resumed its march,
leaving Jean Valjean behind it. Of all this movement, Jean Valjean
perceived nothing, except the eclipse of the lantern which suddenly
wheeled round.

Before taking his departure, the Sergeant, in order to acquit his
policeman's conscience, discharged his gun in the direction of Jean
Valjean. The detonation rolled from echo to echo in the crypt, like the
rumbling of that titanic entrail. A bit of plaster which fell into the
stream and splashed up the water a few paces away from Jean Valjean,
warned him that the ball had struck the arch over his head.

Slow and measured steps resounded for some time on the timber work,
gradually dying away as they retreated to a greater distance; the group
of black forms vanished, a glimmer of light oscillated and floated,
communicating to the vault a reddish glow which grew fainter, then
disappeared; the silence became profound once more, the obscurity became
complete, blindness and deafness resumed possession of the shadows;
and Jean Valjean, not daring to stir as yet, remained for a long time
leaning with his back against the wall, with straining ears, and dilated
pupils, watching the disappearance of that phantom patrol.




CHAPTER III--THE "SPUN" MAN

This justice must be rendered to the police of that period, that even in
the most serious public junctures, it imperturbably fulfilled its duties
connected with the sewers and surveillance. A revolt was, in its eyes,
no pretext for allowing malefactors to take the bit in their own mouths,
and for neglecting society for the reason that the government was in
peril. The ordinary service was performed correctly in company with the
extraordinary service, and was not troubled by the latter. In the midst
of an incalculable political event already begun, under the pressure of
a possible revolution, a police agent, "spun" a thief without allowing
himself to be distracted by insurrection and barricades.

It was something precisely parallel which took place on the afternoon
of the 6th of June on the banks of the Seine, on the slope of the right
shore, a little beyond the Pont des Invalides.

There is no longer any bank there now. The aspect of the locality has
changed.

On that bank, two men, separated by a certain distance, seemed to be
watching each other while mutually avoiding each other. The one who was
in advance was trying to get away, the one in the rear was trying to
overtake the other.

It was like a game of checkers played at a distance and in silence.
Neither seemed to be in any hurry, and both walked slowly, as though
each of them feared by too much haste to make his partner redouble his
pace.

One would have said that it was an appetite following its prey, and
purposely without wearing the air of doing so. The prey was crafty and
on its guard.

The proper relations between the hunted pole-cat and the hunting dog
were observed. The one who was seeking to escape had an insignificant
mien and not an impressive appearance; the one who was seeking to seize
him was rude of aspect, and must have been rude to encounter.

The first, conscious that he was the more feeble, avoided the second;
but he avoided him in a manner which was deeply furious; any one who
could have observed him would have discerned in his eyes the sombre
hostility of flight, and all the menace that fear contains.

The shore was deserted; there were no passers-by; not even a boatman nor
a lighter-man was in the skiffs which were moored here and there.

It was not easy to see these two men, except from the quay opposite, and
to any person who had scrutinized them at that distance, the man who was
in advance would have appeared like a bristling, tattered, and equivocal
being, who was uneasy and trembling beneath a ragged blouse, and the
other like a classic and official personage, wearing the frock-coat of
authority buttoned to the chin.

Perchance the reader might recognize these two men, if he were to see
them closer at hand.

What was the object of the second man?

Probably to succeed in clothing the first more warmly.

When a man clothed by the state pursues a man in rags, it is in order
to make of him a man who is also clothed by the state. Only, the whole
question lies in the color. To be dressed in blue is glorious; to be
dressed in red is disagreeable.

There is a purple from below.

It is probably some unpleasantness and some purple of this sort which
the first man is desirous of shirking.

If the other allowed him to walk on, and had not seized him as yet, it
was, judging from all appearances, in the hope of seeing him lead up to
some significant meeting-place and to some group worth catching. This
delicate operation is called "spinning."

What renders this conjecture entirely probable is that the buttoned-up
man, on catching sight from the shore of a hackney-coach on the quay
as it was passing along empty, made a sign to the driver; the driver
understood, evidently recognized the person with whom he had to deal,
turned about and began to follow the two men at the top of the quay,
at a foot-pace. This was not observed by the slouching and tattered
personage who was in advance.

The hackney-coach rolled along the trees of the Champs-Elysees. The
bust of the driver, whip in hand, could be seen moving along above the
parapet.

One of the secret instructions of the police authorities to their agents
contains this article: "Always have on hand a hackney-coach, in case of
emergency."

While these two men were manoeuvring, each on his own side, with
irreproachable strategy, they approached an inclined plane on the quay
which descended to the shore, and which permitted cab-drivers arriving
from Passy to come to the river and water their horses. This inclined
plane was suppressed later on, for the sake of symmetry; horses may die
of thirst, but the eye is gratified.

It is probable that the man in the blouse had intended to ascend
this inclined plane, with a view to making his escape into the
Champs-Elysees, a place ornamented with trees, but, in return, much
infested with policemen, and where the other could easily exercise
violence.

This point on the quay is not very far distant from the house brought to
Paris from Moret in 1824, by Colonel Brack, and designated as "the house
of Francois I." A guard house is situated close at hand.

To the great surprise of his watcher, the man who was being tracked did
not mount by the inclined plane for watering. He continued to advance
along the quay on the shore.

His position was visibly becoming critical.

What was he intending to do, if not to throw himself into the Seine?

Henceforth, there existed no means of ascending to the quay; there was
no other inclined plane, no staircase; and they were near the spot,
marked by the bend in the Seine towards the Pont de Jena, where the
bank, growing constantly narrower, ended in a slender tongue, and
was lost in the water. There he would inevitably find himself blocked
between the perpendicular wall on his right, the river on his left and
in front of him, and the authorities on his heels.

It is true that this termination of the shore was hidden from sight by a
heap of rubbish six or seven feet in height, produced by some demolition
or other. But did this man hope to conceal himself effectually behind
that heap of rubbish, which one need but skirt? The expedient would
have been puerile. He certainly was not dreaming of such a thing. The
innocence of thieves does not extend to that point.

The pile of rubbish formed a sort of projection at the water's edge,
which was prolonged in a promontory as far as the wall of the quay.

The man who was being followed arrived at this little mound and went
round it, so that he ceased to be seen by the other.

The latter, as he did not see, could not be seen; he took advantage of
this fact to abandon all dissimulation and to walk very rapidly. In a
few moments, he had reached the rubbish heap and passed round it. There
he halted in sheer amazement. The man whom he had been pursuing was no
longer there.

Total eclipse of the man in the blouse.

The shore, beginning with the rubbish heap, was only about thirty paces
long, then it plunged into the water which beat against the wall of the
quay. The fugitive could not have thrown himself into the Seine without
being seen by the man who was following him. What had become of him?

The man in the buttoned-up coat walked to the extremity of the shore,
and remained there in thought for a moment, his fists clenched, his eyes
searching. All at once he smote his brow. He had just perceived, at the
point where the land came to an end and the water began, a large iron
grating, low, arched, garnished with a heavy lock and with three massive
hinges. This grating, a sort of door pierced at the base of the quay,
opened on the river as well as on the shore. A blackish stream passed
under it. This stream discharged into the Seine.

Beyond the heavy, rusty iron bars, a sort of dark and vaulted corridor
could be descried. The man folded his arms and stared at the grating
with an air of reproach.

As this gaze did not suffice, he tried to thrust it aside; he shook
it, it resisted solidly. It is probable that it had just been opened,
although no sound had been heard, a singular circumstance in so rusty a
grating; but it is certain that it had been closed again. This indicated
that the man before whom that door had just opened had not a hook but a
key.

This evidence suddenly burst upon the mind of the man who was trying to
move the grating, and evoked from him this indignant ejaculation:

"That is too much! A government key!"

Then, immediately regaining his composure, he expressed a whole world
of interior ideas by this outburst of monosyllables accented almost
ironically: "Come! Come! Come! Come!"

That said, and in the hope of something or other, either that he should
see the man emerge or other men enter, he posted himself on the watch
behind a heap of rubbish, with the patient rage of a pointer.

The hackney-coach, which regulated all its movements on his, had, in its
turn, halted on the quay above him, close to the parapet. The coachman,
foreseeing a prolonged wait, encased his horses' muzzles in the bag of
oats which is damp at the bottom, and which is so familiar to Parisians,
to whom, be it said in parenthesis, the Government sometimes applies it.
The rare passers-by on the Pont de Jena turned their heads, before they
pursued their way, to take a momentary glance at these two motionless
items in the landscape, the man on the shore, the carriage on the quay.




CHAPTER IV--HE ALSO BEARS HIS CROSS

Jean Valjean had resumed his march and had not again paused.

This march became more and more laborious. The level of these vaults
varies; the average height is about five feet, six inches, and has been
calculated for the stature of a man; Jean Valjean was forced to bend
over, in order not to strike Marius against the vault; at every step
he had to bend, then to rise, and to feel incessantly of the wall. The
moisture of the stones, and the viscous nature of the timber framework
furnished but poor supports to which to cling, either for hand or foot.
He stumbled along in the hideous dung-heap of the city. The intermittent
gleams from the air-holes only appeared at very long intervals, and were
so wan that the full sunlight seemed like the light of the moon; all
the rest was mist, miasma, opaqueness, blackness. Jean Valjean was both
hungry and thirsty; especially thirsty; and this, like the sea, was a
place full of water where a man cannot drink. His strength, which was
prodigious, as the reader knows, and which had been but little decreased
by age, thanks to his chaste and sober life, began to give way,
nevertheless. Fatigue began to gain on him; and as his strength
decreased, it made the weight of his burden increase. Marius, who was,
perhaps, dead, weighed him down as inert bodies weigh. Jean Valjean
held him in such a manner that his chest was not oppressed, and so that
respiration could proceed as well as possible. Between his legs he felt
the rapid gliding of the rats. One of them was frightened to such a
degree that he bit him. From time to time, a breath of fresh air reached
him through the vent-holes of the mouths of the sewer, and re-animated
him.

It might have been three hours past midday when he reached the
belt-sewer.

He was, at first, astonished at this sudden widening. He found himself,
all at once, in a gallery where his outstretched hands could not reach
the two walls, and beneath a vault which his head did not touch. The
Grand Sewer is, in fact, eight feet wide and seven feet high.

At the point where the Montmartre sewer joins the Grand Sewer, two other
subterranean galleries, that of the Rue de Provence, and that of the
Abattoir, form a square. Between these four ways, a less sagacious man
would have remained undecided. Jean Valjean selected the broadest, that
is to say, the belt-sewer. But here the question again came up--should
he descend or ascend? He thought that the situation required haste, and
that he must now gain the Seine at any risk. In other terms, he must
descend. He turned to the left.

It was well that he did so, for it is an error to suppose that the
belt-sewer has two outlets, the one in the direction of Bercy, the other
towards Passy, and that it is, as its name indicates, the subterranean
girdle of the Paris on the right bank. The Grand Sewer, which is, it
must be remembered, nothing else than the old brook of Menilmontant,
terminates, if one ascends it, in a blind sack, that is to say, at its
ancient point of departure which was its source, at the foot of the
knoll of Menilmontant. There is no direct communication with the
branch which collects the waters of Paris beginning with the Quartier
Popincourt, and which falls into the Seine through the Amelot sewer
above the ancient Isle Louviers. This branch, which completes the
collecting sewer, is separated from it, under the Rue Menilmontant
itself, by a pile which marks the dividing point of the waters, between
upstream and downstream. If Jean Valjean had ascended the gallery he
would have arrived, after a thousand efforts, and broken down with
fatigue, and in an expiring condition, in the gloom, at a wall. He would
have been lost.

In case of necessity, by retracing his steps a little way, and entering
the passage of the Filles-du-Calvaire, on condition that he did not
hesitate at the subterranean crossing of the Carrefour Boucherat, and by
taking the corridor Saint-Louis, then the Saint-Gilles gut on the left,
then turning to the right and avoiding the Saint-Sebastian gallery, he
might have reached the Amelot sewer, and thence, provided that he did
not go astray in the sort of F which lies under the Bastille, he might
have attained the outlet on the Seine near the Arsenal. But in order
to do this, he must have been thoroughly familiar with the enormous
madrepore of the sewer in all its ramifications and in all its openings.
Now, we must again insist that he knew nothing of that frightful drain
which he was traversing; and had any one asked him in what he was, he
would have answered: "In the night."

His instinct served him well. To descend was, in fact, possible safety.

He left on his right the two narrow passages which branch out in the
form of a claw under the Rue Laffitte and the Rue Saint-Georges and the
long, bifurcated corridor of the Chaussee d'Antin.

A little beyond an affluent, which was, probably, the Madeleine branch,
he halted. He was extremely weary. A passably large air-hole, probably
the man-hole in the Rue d'Anjou, furnished a light that was almost
vivid. Jean Valjean, with the gentleness of movement which a brother
would exercise towards his wounded brother, deposited Marius on the
banquette of the sewer. Marius' blood-stained face appeared under the
wan light of the air-hole like the ashes at the bottom of a tomb. His
eyes were closed, his hair was plastered down on his temples like a
painter's brushes dried in red wash; his hands hung limp and dead. A
clot of blood had collected in the knot of his cravat; his limbs were
cold, and blood was clotted at the corners of his mouth; his shirt had
thrust itself into his wounds, the cloth of his coat was chafing the
yawning gashes in the living flesh. Jean Valjean, pushing aside the
garments with the tips of his fingers, laid his hand upon Marius'
breast; his heart was still beating. Jean Valjean tore up his shirt,
bandaged the young man's wounds as well as he was able and stopped the
flowing blood; then bending over Marius, who still lay unconscious
and almost without breathing, in that half light, he gazed at him with
inexpressible hatred.

On disarranging Marius' garments, he had found two things in his
pockets, the roll which had been forgotten there on the preceding
evening, and Marius' pocketbook. He ate the roll and opened the
pocketbook. On the first page he found the four lines written by Marius.
The reader will recall them:

"My name is Marius Pontmercy. Carry my body to my grandfather, M.
Gillenormand, Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, No. 6, in the Marais."

Jean Valjean read these four lines by the light of the air-hole, and
remained for a moment as though absorbed in thought, repeating in a low
tone: "Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, number 6, Monsieur Gillenormand." He
replaced the pocketbook in Marius' pocket. He had eaten, his strength
had returned to him; he took Marius up once more upon his back, placed
the latter's head carefully on his right shoulder, and resumed his
descent of the sewer.

The Grand Sewer, directed according to the course of the valley of
Menilmontant, is about two leagues long. It is paved throughout a
notable portion of its extent.

This torch of the names of the streets of Paris, with which we are
illuminating for the reader Jean Valjean's subterranean march, Jean
Valjean himself did not possess. Nothing told him what zone of the city
he was traversing, nor what way he had made. Only the growing pallor of
the pools of light which he encountered from time to time indicated to
him that the sun was withdrawing from the pavement, and that the day
would soon be over; and the rolling of vehicles overhead, having become
intermittent instead of continuous, then having almost ceased, he
concluded that he was no longer under central Paris, and that he
was approaching some solitary region, in the vicinity of the outer
boulevards, or the extreme outer quays. Where there are fewer houses and
streets, the sewer has fewer air-holes. The gloom deepened around Jean
Valjean. Nevertheless, he continued to advance, groping his way in the
dark.

Suddenly this darkness became terrible.




CHAPTER V--IN THE CASE OF SAND AS IN THAT OF WOMAN, THERE IS A FINENESS
WHICH IS TREACHEROUS

He felt that he was entering the water, and that he no longer had a
pavement under his feet, but only mud.

It sometimes happens, that on certain shores of Bretagne or Scotland a
man, either a traveller or a fisherman, while walking at low tide on the
beach far from shore, suddenly notices that for several minutes past,
he has been walking with some difficulty. The beach under foot is
like pitch; his soles stick fast to it; it is no longer sand, it is
bird-lime. The strand is perfectly dry, but at every step that he takes,
as soon as the foot is raised, the print is filled with water. The
eye, however, has perceived no change; the immense beach is smooth and
tranquil, all the sand has the same aspect, nothing distinguishes the
soil that is solid from that which is not solid; the joyous little
cloud of sand-lice continues to leap tumultuously under the feet of the
passer-by.

The man pursues his way, he walks on, turns towards the land, endeavors
to approach the shore. He is not uneasy. Uneasy about what? Only he is
conscious that the heaviness of his feet seems to be increasing at every
step that he takes. All at once he sinks in. He sinks in two or three
inches. Decidedly, he is not on the right road; he halts to get his
bearings. Suddenly he glances at his feet; his feet have disappeared.
The sand has covered them. He draws his feet out of the sand, he tries
to retrace his steps, he turns back, he sinks in more deeply than
before. The sand is up to his ankles, he tears himself free from it
and flings himself to the left, the sand reaches to mid-leg, he flings
himself to the right, the sand comes up to his knees. Then, with
indescribable terror, he recognizes the fact that he is caught in a
quicksand, and that he has beneath him that frightful medium in which
neither man can walk nor fish can swim. He flings away his burden, if he
have one, he lightens himself, like a ship in distress; it is too late,
the sand is above his knees.

He shouts, he waves his hat, or his handkerchief, the sand continually
gains on him; if the beach is deserted, if the land is too far away, if
the bank of sand is too ill-famed, there is no hero in the neighborhood,
all is over, he is condemned to be engulfed. He is condemned to that
terrible interment, long, infallible, implacable, which it is impossible
to either retard or hasten, which lasts for hours, which will not come
to an end, which seizes you erect, free, in the flush of health, which
drags you down by the feet, which, at every effort that you attempt, at
every shout that you utter, draws you a little lower, which has the air
of punishing you for your resistance by a redoubled grasp, which forces
a man to return slowly to earth, while leaving him time to survey the
horizon, the trees, the verdant country, the smoke of the villages on
the plain, the sails of the ships on the sea, the birds which fly
and sing, the sun and the sky. This engulfment is the sepulchre which
assumes a tide, and which mounts from the depths of the earth towards
a living man. Each minute is an inexorable layer-out of the dead. The
wretched man tries to sit down, to lie down, to climb; every movement
that he makes buries him deeper; he straightens himself up, he sinks; he
feels that he is being swallowed up; he shrieks, implores, cries to the
clouds, wrings his hands, grows desperate. Behold him in the sand up
to his belly, the sand reaches to his breast, he is only a bust now.
He uplifts his hands, utters furious groans, clenches his nails on the
beach, tries to cling fast to that ashes, supports himself on his elbows
in order to raise himself from that soft sheath, and sobs frantically;
the sand mounts higher. The sand has reached his shoulders, the sand
reaches to his throat; only his face is visible now. His mouth cries
aloud, the sand fills it; silence. His eyes still gaze forth, the sand
closes them, night. Then his brow decreases, a little hair quivers above
the sand; a hand projects, pierces the surface of the beach, waves and
disappears. Sinister obliteration of a man.

Sometimes a rider is engulfed with his horse; sometimes the carter is
swallowed up with his cart; all founders in that strand. It is shipwreck
elsewhere than in the water. It is the earth drowning a man. The earth,
permeated with the ocean, becomes a pitfall. It presents itself in the
guise of a plain, and it yawns like a wave. The abyss is subject to
these treacheries.

This melancholy fate, always possible on certain sea beaches, was also
possible, thirty years ago, in the sewers of Paris.

Before the important works, undertaken in 1833, the subterranean drain
of Paris was subject to these sudden slides.

The water filtered into certain subjacent strata, which were
particularly friable; the foot-way, which was of flag-stones, as in
the ancient sewers, or of cement on concrete, as in the new galleries,
having no longer an underpinning, gave way. A fold in a flooring of this
sort means a crack, means crumbling. The framework crumbled away for a
certain length. This crevice, the hiatus of a gulf of mire, was called a
fontis, in the special tongue. What is a fontis? It is the quicksands of
the seashore suddenly encountered under the surface of the earth; it is
the beach of Mont Saint-Michel in a sewer. The soaked soil is in a
state of fusion, as it were; all its molecules are in suspension in soft
medium; it is not earth and it is not water. The depth is sometimes very
great. Nothing can be more formidable than such an encounter. If the
water predominates, death is prompt, the man is swallowed up; if earth
predominates, death is slow.

Can any one picture to himself such a death? If being swallowed by the
earth is terrible on the seashore, what is it in a cess-pool? Instead of
the open air, the broad daylight, the clear horizon, those vast sounds,
those free clouds whence rains life, instead of those barks descried
in the distance, of that hope under all sorts of forms, of probable
passers-by, of succor possible up to the very last moment,--instead
of all this, deafness, blindness, a black vault, the inside of a tomb
already prepared, death in the mire beneath a cover! slow suffocation
by filth, a stone box where asphyxia opens its claw in the mire and
clutches you by the throat; fetidness mingled with the death-rattle;
slime instead of the strand, sulfuretted hydrogen in place of the
hurricane, dung in place of the ocean! And to shout, to gnash one's
teeth, and to writhe, and to struggle, and to agonize, with that
enormous city which knows nothing of it all, over one's head!

Inexpressible is the horror of dying thus! Death sometimes redeems
his atrocity by a certain terrible dignity. On the funeral pile, in
shipwreck, one can be great; in the flames as in the foam, a superb
attitude is possible; one there becomes transfigured as one perishes.
But not here. Death is filthy. It is humiliating to expire. The supreme
floating visions are abject. Mud is synonymous with shame. It is
petty, ugly, infamous. To die in a butt of Malvoisie, like Clarence, is
permissible; in the ditch of a scavenger, like Escoubleau, is horrible.
To struggle therein is hideous; at the same time that one is going
through the death agony, one is floundering about. There are shadows
enough for hell, and mire enough to render it nothing but a slough, and
the dying man knows not whether he is on the point of becoming a spectre
or a frog.

Everywhere else the sepulchre is sinister; here it is deformed.

The depth of the fontis varied, as well as their length and their
density, according to the more or less bad quality of the sub-soil.
Sometimes a fontis was three or four feet deep, sometimes eight or ten;
sometimes the bottom was unfathomable. Here the mire was almost solid,
there almost liquid. In the Luniere fontis, it would have taken a man a
day to disappear, while he would have been devoured in five minutes by
the Philippeaux slough. The mire bears up more or less, according to its
density. A child can escape where a man will perish. The first law of
safety is to get rid of every sort of load. Every sewerman who felt the
ground giving way beneath him began by flinging away his sack of tools,
or his back-basket, or his hod.

The fontis were due to different causes: the friability of the soil;
some landslip at a depth beyond the reach of man; the violent summer
rains; the incessant flooding of winter; long, drizzling showers.
Sometimes the weight of the surrounding houses on a marly or sandy soil
forced out the vaults of the subterranean galleries and caused them to
bend aside, or it chanced that a flooring vault burst and split under
this crushing thrust. In this manner, the heaping up of the Parthenon,
obliterated, a century ago, a portion of the vaults of Saint-Genevieve
hill. When a sewer was broken in under the pressure of the houses, the
mischief was sometimes betrayed in the street above by a sort of space,
like the teeth of a saw, between the paving-stones; this crevice was
developed in an undulating line throughout the entire length of the
cracked vault, and then, the evil being visible, the remedy could be
promptly applied. It also frequently happened, that the interior ravages
were not revealed by any external scar, and in that case, woe to the
sewermen. When they entered without precaution into the sewer, they were
liable to be lost. Ancient registers make mention of several scavengers
who were buried in fontis in this manner. They give many names; among
others, that of the sewerman who was swallowed up in a quagmire under
the man-hole of the Rue Careme-Prenant, a certain Blaise Poutrain; this
Blaise Poutrain was the brother of Nicholas Poutrain, who was the last
grave-digger of the cemetery called the Charnier des Innocents, in 1785,
the epoch when that cemetery expired.

There was also that young and charming Vicomte d'Escoubleau, of whom we
have just spoken, one of the heroes of the siege of Lerida, where they
delivered the assault in silk stockings, with violins at their head.
D'Escoubleau, surprised one night at his cousin's, the Duchess de
Sourdis', was drowned in a quagmire of the Beautreillis sewer, in which
he had taken refuge in order to escape from the Duke. Madame de Sourdis,
when informed of his death, demanded her smelling-bottle, and forgot to
weep, through sniffling at her salts. In such cases, there is no love
which holds fast; the sewer extinguishes it. Hero refuses to wash the
body of Leander. Thisbe stops her nose in the presence of Pyramus and
says: "Phew!"




CHAPTER VI--THE FONTIS

Jean Valjean found himself in the presence of a fontis.

This sort of quagmire was common at that period in the subsoil of the
Champs-Elysees, difficult to handle in the hydraulic works and a bad
preservative of the subterranean constructions, on account of its
excessive fluidity. This fluidity exceeds even the inconsistency of the
sands of the Quartier Saint-Georges, which could only be conquered by
a stone construction on a concrete foundation, and the clayey strata,
infected with gas, of the Quartier des Martyrs, which are so liquid
that the only way in which a passage was effected under the gallery des
Martyrs was by means of a cast-iron pipe. When, in 1836, the old stone
sewer beneath the Faubourg Saint-Honore, in which we now see Jean
Valjean, was demolished for the purpose of reconstructing it, the
quicksand, which forms the subsoil of the Champs-Elysees as far as the
Seine, presented such an obstacle, that the operation lasted nearly
six months, to the great clamor of the dwellers on the riverside,
particularly those who had hotels and carriages. The work was more than
unhealthy; it was dangerous. It is true that they had four months and a
half of rain, and three floods of the Seine.

The fontis which Jean Valjean had encountered was caused by the downpour
of the preceding day. The pavement, badly sustained by the subjacent
sand, had given way and had produced a stoppage of the water.
Infiltration had taken place, a slip had followed. The dislocated bottom
had sunk into the ooze. To what extent? Impossible to say. The obscurity
was more dense there than elsewhere. It was a pit of mire in a cavern of
night.

Jean Valjean felt the pavement vanishing beneath his feet. He entered
this slime. There was water on the surface, slime at the bottom. He must
pass it. To retrace his steps was impossible. Marius was dying, and Jean
Valjean exhausted. Besides, where was he to go? Jean Valjean advanced.
Moreover, the pit seemed, for the first few steps, not to be very deep.
But in proportion as he advanced, his feet plunged deeper. Soon he had
the slime up to his calves and water above his knees. He walked on,
raising Marius in his arms, as far above the water as he could. The mire
now reached to his knees, and the water to his waist. He could no longer
retreat. This mud, dense enough for one man, could not, obviously,
uphold two. Marius and Jean Valjean would have stood a chance of
extricating themselves singly. Jean Valjean continued to advance,
supporting the dying man, who was, perhaps, a corpse.

The water came up to his arm-pits; he felt that he was sinking; it was
only with difficulty that he could move in the depth of ooze which
he had now reached. The density, which was his support, was also
an obstacle. He still held Marius on high, and with an unheard-of
expenditure of force, he advanced still; but he was sinking. He had only
his head above the water now and his two arms holding up Marius. In the
old paintings of the deluge there is a mother holding her child thus.

He sank still deeper, he turned his face to the rear, to escape the
water, and in order that he might be able to breathe; anyone who had
seen him in that gloom would have thought that what he beheld was a
mask floating on the shadows; he caught a faint glimpse above him of the
drooping head and livid face of Marius; he made a desperate effort and
launched his foot forward; his foot struck something solid; a point of
support. It was high time.

He straightened himself up, and rooted himself upon that point of
support with a sort of fury. This produced upon him the effect of the
first step in a staircase leading back to life.

The point of support, thus encountered in the mire at the supreme
moment, was the beginning of the other water-shed of the pavement, which
had bent but had not given way, and which had curved under the water
like a plank and in a single piece. Well built pavements form a vault
and possess this sort of firmness. This fragment of the vaulting, partly
submerged, but solid, was a veritable inclined plane, and, once on this
plane, he was safe. Jean Valjean mounted this inclined plane and reached
the other side of the quagmire.

As he emerged from the water, he came in contact with a stone and fell
upon his knees. He reflected that this was but just, and he remained
there for some time, with his soul absorbed in words addressed to God.

He rose to his feet, shivering, chilled, foul-smelling, bowed beneath
the dying man whom he was dragging after him, all dripping with slime,
and his soul filled with a strange light.




CHAPTER VII--ONE SOMETIMES RUNS AGROUND WHEN ONE FANCIES THAT ONE IS
DISEMBARKING

He set out on his way once more.

However, although he had not left his life in the fontis, he seemed
to have left his strength behind him there. That supreme effort had
exhausted him. His lassitude was now such that he was obliged to pause
for breath every three or four steps, and lean against the wall. Once
he was forced to seat himself on the banquette in order to alter Marius'
position, and he thought that he should have to remain there. But if his
vigor was dead, his energy was not. He rose again.

He walked on desperately, almost fast, proceeded thus for a hundred
paces, almost without drawing breath, and suddenly came in contact with
the wall. He had reached an elbow of the sewer, and, arriving at the
turn with head bent down, he had struck the wall. He raised his eyes,
and at the extremity of the vault, far, very far away in front of him,
he perceived a light. This time it was not that terrible light; it was
good, white light. It was daylight. Jean Valjean saw the outlet.

A damned soul, who, in the midst of the furnace, should suddenly
perceive the outlet of Gehenna, would experience what Jean Valjean felt.
It would fly wildly with the stumps of its burned wings towards that
radiant portal. Jean Valjean was no longer conscious of fatigue, he no
longer felt Marius' weight, he found his legs once more of steel, he ran
rather than walked. As he approached, the outlet became more and more
distinctly defined. It was a pointed arch, lower than the vault, which
gradually narrowed, and narrower than the gallery, which closed in as
the vault grew lower. The tunnel ended like the interior of a funnel;
a faulty construction, imitated from the wickets of penitentiaries,
logical in a prison, illogical in a sewer, and which has since been
corrected.

Jean Valjean reached the outlet.

There he halted.

It certainly was the outlet, but he could not get out.

The arch was closed by a heavy grating, and the grating, which, to all
appearance, rarely swung on its rusty hinges, was clamped to its stone
jamb by a thick lock, which, red with rust, seemed like an enormous
brick. The keyhole could be seen, and the robust latch, deeply sunk in
the iron staple. The door was plainly double-locked. It was one of those
prison locks which old Paris was so fond of lavishing.

Beyond the grating was the open air, the river, the daylight, the shore,
very narrow but sufficient for escape. The distant quays, Paris, that
gulf in which one so easily hides oneself, the broad horizon, liberty.
On the right, down stream, the bridge of Jena was discernible, on the
left, upstream, the bridge of the Invalides; the place would have been a
propitious one in which to await the night and to escape. It was one
of the most solitary points in Paris; the shore which faces the
Grand-Caillou. Flies were entering and emerging through the bars of the
grating.

It might have been half-past eight o'clock in the evening. The day was
declining.

Jean Valjean laid Marius down along the wall, on the dry portion of the
vaulting, then he went to the grating and clenched both fists round the
bars; the shock which he gave it was frenzied, but it did not move. The
grating did not stir. Jean Valjean seized the bars one after the other,
in the hope that he might be able to tear away the least solid, and to
make of it a lever wherewith to raise the door or to break the lock. Not
a bar stirred. The teeth of a tiger are not more firmly fixed in their
sockets. No lever; no prying possible. The obstacle was invincible.
There was no means of opening the gate.

Must he then stop there? What was he to do? What was to become of him?
He had not the strength to retrace his steps, to recommence the journey
which he had already taken. Besides, how was he to again traverse that
quagmire whence he had only extricated himself as by a miracle? And
after the quagmire, was there not the police patrol, which assuredly
could not be twice avoided? And then, whither was he to go? What
direction should he pursue? To follow the incline would not conduct
him to his goal. If he were to reach another outlet, he would find it
obstructed by a plug or a grating. Every outlet was, undoubtedly, closed
in that manner. Chance had unsealed the grating through which he had
entered, but it was evident that all the other sewer mouths were barred.
He had only succeeded in escaping into a prison.

All was over. Everything that Jean Valjean had done was useless.
Exhaustion had ended in failure.

They were both caught in the immense and gloomy web of death, and Jean
Valjean felt the terrible spider running along those black strands and
quivering in the shadows. He turned his back to the grating, and fell
upon the pavement, hurled to earth rather than seated, close to Marius,
who still made no movement, and with his head bent between his knees.
This was the last drop of anguish.

Of what was he thinking during this profound depression? Neither of
himself nor of Marius. He was thinking of Cosette.




CHAPTER VIII--THE TORN COAT-TAIL

In the midst of this prostration, a hand was laid on his shoulder, and a
low voice said to him:

"Half shares."

Some person in that gloom? Nothing so closely resembles a dream as
despair. Jean Valjean thought that he was dreaming. He had heard no
footsteps. Was it possible? He raised his eyes.

A man stood before him.

This man was clad in a blouse; his feet were bare; he held his shoes
in his left hand; he had evidently removed them in order to reach Jean
Valjean, without allowing his steps to be heard.

Jean Valjean did not hesitate for an instant. Unexpected as was this
encounter, this man was known to him. The man was Thenardier.

Although awakened, so to speak, with a start, Jean Valjean, accustomed
to alarms, and steeled to unforeseen shocks that must be promptly
parried, instantly regained possession of his presence of mind.
Moreover, the situation could not be made worse, a certain degree of
distress is no longer capable of a crescendo, and Thenardier himself
could add nothing to this blackness of this night.

A momentary pause ensued.

Thenardier, raising his right hand to a level with his forehead, formed
with it a shade, then he brought his eyelashes together, by screwing up
his eyes, a motion which, in connection with a slight contraction of the
mouth, characterizes the sagacious attention of a man who is endeavoring
to recognize another man. He did not succeed. Jean Valjean, as we have
just stated, had his back turned to the light, and he was, moreover,
so disfigured, so bemired, so bleeding that he would have been
unrecognizable in full noonday. On the contrary, illuminated by the
light from the grating, a cellar light, it is true, livid, yet precise
in its lividness, Thenardier, as the energetic popular metaphor
expresses it, immediately "leaped into" Jean Valjean's eyes. This
inequality of conditions sufficed to assure some advantage to Jean
Valjean in that mysterious duel which was on the point of beginning
between the two situations and the two men. The encounter took place
between Jean Valjean veiled and Thenardier unmasked.

Jean Valjean immediately perceived that Thenardier did not recognize
him.

They surveyed each other for a moment in that half-gloom, as though
taking each other's measure. Thenardier was the first to break the
silence.

"How are you going to manage to get out?"

Jean Valjean made no reply. Thenardier continued:

"It's impossible to pick the lock of that gate. But still you must get
out of this."

"That is true," said Jean Valjean.

"Well, half shares then."

"What do you mean by that?"

"You have killed that man; that's all right. I have the key."

Thenardier pointed to Marius. He went on:

"I don't know you, but I want to help you. You must be a friend."

Jean Valjean began to comprehend. Thenardier took him for an assassin.

Thenardier resumed:

"Listen, comrade. You didn't kill that man without looking to see what
he had in his pockets. Give me my half. I'll open the door for you."

And half drawing from beneath his tattered blouse a huge key, he added:

"Do you want to see how a key to liberty is made? Look here."

Jean Valjean "remained stupid"--the expression belongs to the elder
Corneille--to such a degree that he doubted whether what he beheld was
real. It was providence appearing in horrible guise, and his good angel
springing from the earth in the form of Thenardier.

Thenardier thrust his fist into a large pocket concealed under his
blouse, drew out a rope and offered it to Jean Valjean.

"Hold on," said he, "I'll give you the rope to boot."

"What is the rope for?"

"You will need a stone also, but you can find one outside. There's a
heap of rubbish."

"What am I to do with a stone?"

"Idiot, you'll want to sling that stiff into the river, you'll need a
stone and a rope, otherwise it would float on the water."

Jean Valjean took the rope. There is no one who does not occasionally
accept in this mechanical way.

Thenardier snapped his fingers as though an idea had suddenly occurred
to him.

"Ah, see here, comrade, how did you contrive to get out of that slough
yonder? I haven't dared to risk myself in it. Phew! you don't smell
good."

After a pause he added:

"I'm asking you questions, but you're perfectly right not to answer.
It's an apprenticeship against that cursed quarter of an hour before the
examining magistrate. And then, when you don't talk at all, you run no
risk of talking too loud. That's no matter, as I can't see your face and
as I don't know your name, you are wrong in supposing that I don't know
who you are and what you want. I twig. You've broken up that gentleman
a bit; now you want to tuck him away somewhere. The river, that great
hider of folly, is what you want. I'll get you out of your scrape.
Helping a good fellow in a pinch is what suits me to a hair."

While expressing his approval of Jean Valjean's silence, he endeavored
to force him to talk. He jostled his shoulder in an attempt to catch a
sight of his profile, and he exclaimed, without, however, raising his
tone:

"Apropos of that quagmire, you're a hearty animal. Why didn't you toss
the man in there?"

Jean Valjean preserved silence.

Thenardier resumed, pushing the rag which served him as a cravat to the
level of his Adam's apple, a gesture which completes the capable air of
a serious man:

"After all, you acted wisely. The workmen, when they come to-morrow to
stop up that hole, would certainly have found the stiff abandoned there,
and it might have been possible, thread by thread, straw by straw, to
pick up the scent and reach you. Some one has passed through the sewer.
Who? Where did he get out? Was he seen to come out? The police are full
of cleverness. The sewer is treacherous and tells tales of you. Such a
find is a rarity, it attracts attention, very few people make use of
the sewers for their affairs, while the river belongs to everybody. The
river is the true grave. At the end of a month they fish up your man
in the nets at Saint-Cloud. Well, what does one care for that? It's
carrion! Who killed that man? Paris. And justice makes no inquiries. You
have done well."

The more loquacious Thenardier became, the more mute was Jean Valjean.

Again Thenardier shook him by the shoulder.

"Now let's settle this business. Let's go shares. You have seen my key,
show me your money."

Thenardier was haggard, fierce, suspicious, rather menacing, yet
amicable.

There was one singular circumstance; Thenardier's manners were not
simple; he had not the air of being wholly at his ease; while affecting
an air of mystery, he spoke low; from time to time he laid his finger on
his mouth, and muttered, "hush!" It was difficult to divine why. There
was no one there except themselves. Jean Valjean thought that other
ruffians might possibly be concealed in some nook, not very far off, and
that Thenardier did not care to share with them.

Thenardier resumed:

"Let's settle up. How much did the stiff have in his bags?"

Jean Valjean searched his pockets.

It was his habit, as the reader will remember, to always have some
money about him. The mournful life of expedients to which he had been
condemned imposed this as a law upon him. On this occasion, however,
he had been caught unprepared. When donning his uniform of a National
Guardsman on the preceding evening, he had forgotten, dolefully absorbed
as he was, to take his pocket-book. He had only some small change in his
fob. He turned out his pocket, all soaked with ooze, and spread out on
the banquette of the vault one louis d'or, two five-franc pieces, and
five or six large sous.

Thenardier thrust out his lower lip with a significant twist of the
neck.

"You knocked him over cheap," said he.

He set to feeling the pockets of Jean Valjean and Marius, with the
greatest familiarity. Jean Valjean, who was chiefly concerned in keeping
his back to the light, let him have his way.

While handling Marius' coat, Thenardier, with the skill of a pickpocket,
and without being noticed by Jean Valjean, tore off a strip which he
concealed under his blouse, probably thinking that this morsel of
stuff might serve, later on, to identify the assassinated man and the
assassin. However, he found no more than the thirty francs.

"That's true," said he, "both of you together have no more than that."

And, forgetting his motto: "half shares," he took all.

He hesitated a little over the large sous. After due reflection, he took
them also, muttering:

"Never mind! You cut folks' throats too cheap altogether."

That done, he once more drew the big key from under his blouse.

"Now, my friend, you must leave. It's like the fair here, you pay when
you go out. You have paid, now clear out."

And he began to laugh.

Had he, in lending to this stranger the aid of his key, and in making
some other man than himself emerge from that portal, the pure and
disinterested intention of rescuing an assassin? We may be permitted to
doubt this.

Thenardier helped Jean Valjean to replace Marius on his shoulders, then
he betook himself to the grating on tiptoe, and barefooted, making Jean
Valjean a sign to follow him, looked out, laid his finger on his mouth,
and remained for several seconds, as though in suspense; his inspection
finished, he placed the key in the lock. The bolt slipped back and the
gate swung open. It neither grated nor squeaked. It moved very softly.

It was obvious that this gate and those hinges, carefully oiled, were
in the habit of opening more frequently than was supposed. This
softness was suspicious; it hinted at furtive goings and comings, silent
entrances and exits of nocturnal men, and the wolf-like tread of crime.

The sewer was evidently an accomplice of some mysterious band. This
taciturn grating was a receiver of stolen goods.

Thenardier opened the gate a little way, allowing just sufficient space
for Jean Valjean to pass out, closed the grating again, gave the key
a double turn in the lock and plunged back into the darkness, without
making any more noise than a breath. He seemed to walk with the velvet
paws of a tiger.

A moment later, that hideous providence had retreated into the
invisibility.

Jean Valjean found himself in the open air.




CHAPTER IX--MARIUS PRODUCES ON SOME ONE WHO IS A JUDGE OF THE MATTER,
THE EFFECT OF BEING DEAD

He allowed Marius to slide down upon the shore.

They were in the open air!

The miasmas, darkness, horror lay behind him. The pure, healthful,
living, joyous air that was easy to breathe inundated him. Everywhere
around him reigned silence, but that charming silence when the sun has
set in an unclouded azure sky. Twilight had descended; night was drawing
on, the great deliverer, the friend of all those who need a mantle of
darkness that they may escape from an anguish. The sky presented itself
in all directions like an enormous calm. The river flowed to his feet
with the sound of a kiss. The aerial dialogue of the nests bidding each
other good night in the elms of the Champs-Elysees was audible. A few
stars, daintily piercing the pale blue of the zenith, and visible to
revery alone, formed imperceptible little splendors amid the immensity.
Evening was unfolding over the head of Jean Valjean all the sweetness of
the infinite.

It was that exquisite and undecided hour which says neither yes nor no.
Night was already sufficiently advanced to render it possible to lose
oneself at a little distance and yet there was sufficient daylight to
permit of recognition at close quarters.

For several seconds, Jean Valjean was irresistibly overcome by that
august and caressing serenity; such moments of oblivion do come to men;
suffering refrains from harassing the unhappy wretch; everything is
eclipsed in the thoughts; peace broods over the dreamer like night; and,
beneath the twilight which beams and in imitation of the sky which is
illuminated, the soul becomes studded with stars. Jean Valjean could
not refrain from contemplating that vast, clear shadow which rested
over him; thoughtfully he bathed in the sea of ecstasy and prayer in the
majestic silence of the eternal heavens. Then he bent down swiftly
to Marius, as though the sentiment of duty had returned to him, and,
dipping up water in the hollow of his hand, he gently sprinkled a
few drops on the latter's face. Marius' eyelids did not open; but his
half-open mouth still breathed.

Jean Valjean was on the point of dipping his hand in the river once
more, when, all at once, he experienced an indescribable embarrassment,
such as a person feels when there is some one behind him whom he does
not see.

We have already alluded to this impression, with which everyone is
familiar.

He turned round.

Some one was, in fact, behind him, as there had been a short while
before.

A man of lofty stature, enveloped in a long coat, with folded arms,
and bearing in his right fist a bludgeon of which the leaden head was
visible, stood a few paces in the rear of the spot where Jean Valjean
was crouching over Marius.

With the aid of the darkness, it seemed a sort of apparition. An
ordinary man would have been alarmed because of the twilight, a
thoughtful man on account of the bludgeon. Jean Valjean recognized
Javert.

The reader has divined, no doubt, that Thenardier's pursuer was no other
than Javert. Javert, after his unlooked-for escape from the barricade,
had betaken himself to the prefecture of police, had rendered a
verbal account to the Prefect in person in a brief audience, had then
immediately gone on duty again, which implied--the note, the reader will
recollect, which had been captured on his person--a certain surveillance
of the shore on the right bank of the Seine near the Champs-Elysees,
which had, for some time past, aroused the attention of the police.
There he had caught sight of Thenardier and had followed him. The reader
knows the rest.

Thus it will be easily understood that that grating, so obligingly
opened to Jean Valjean, was a bit of cleverness on Thenardier's part.
Thenardier intuitively felt that Javert was still there; the man spied
upon has a scent which never deceives him; it was necessary to fling
a bone to that sleuth-hound. An assassin, what a godsend! Such an
opportunity must never be allowed to slip. Thenardier, by putting Jean
Valjean outside in his stead, provided a prey for the police, forced
them to relinquish his scent, made them forget him in a bigger
adventure, repaid Javert for his waiting, which always flatters a spy,
earned thirty francs, and counted with certainty, so far as he himself
was concerned, on escaping with the aid of this diversion.

Jean Valjean had fallen from one danger upon another.

These two encounters, this falling one after the other, from Thenardier
upon Javert, was a rude shock.

Javert did not recognize Jean Valjean, who, as we have stated, no longer
looked like himself. He did not unfold his arms, he made sure of his
bludgeon in his fist, by an imperceptible movement, and said in a curt,
calm voice:

"Who are you?"

"I."

"Who is 'I'?"

"Jean Valjean."

Javert thrust his bludgeon between his teeth, bent his knees, inclined
his body, laid his two powerful hands on the shoulders of Jean Valjean,
which were clamped within them as in a couple of vices, scrutinized
him, and recognized him. Their faces almost touched. Javert's look was
terrible.

Jean Valjean remained inert beneath Javert's grasp, like a lion
submitting to the claws of a lynx.

"Inspector Javert," said he, "you have me in your power. Moreover, I
have regarded myself as your prisoner ever since this morning. I did not
give you my address with any intention of escaping from you. Take me.
Only grant me one favor."

Javert did not appear to hear him. He kept his eyes riveted on Jean
Valjean. His chin being contracted, thrust his lips upwards towards
his nose, a sign of savage revery. At length he released Jean Valjean,
straightened himself stiffly up without bending, grasped his bludgeon
again firmly, and, as though in a dream, he murmured rather than uttered
this question:

"What are you doing here? And who is this man?"

He still abstained from addressing Jean Valjean as thou.

Jean Valjean replied, and the sound of his voice appeared to rouse
Javert:

"It is with regard to him that I desire to speak to you. Dispose of me
as you see fit; but first help me to carry him home. That is all that I
ask of you."

Javert's face contracted as was always the case when any one seemed to
think him capable of making a concession. Nevertheless, he did not say
"no."

Again he bent over, drew from his pocket a handkerchief which
he moistened in the water and with which he then wiped Marius'
blood-stained brow.

"This man was at the barricade," said he in a low voice and as though
speaking to himself. "He is the one they called Marius."

A spy of the first quality, who had observed everything, listened to
everything, and taken in everything, even when he thought that he was to
die; who had played the spy even in his agony, and who, with his elbows
leaning on the first step of the sepulchre, had taken notes.

He seized Marius' hand and felt his pulse.

"He is wounded," said Jean Valjean.

"He is a dead man," said Javert.

Jean Valjean replied:

"No. Not yet."

"So you have brought him thither from the barricade?" remarked Javert.

His preoccupation must indeed have been very profound for him not to
insist on this alarming rescue through the sewer, and for him not to
even notice Jean Valjean's silence after his question.

Jean Valjean, on his side, seemed to have but one thought. He resumed:

"He lives in the Marais, Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, with his
grandfather. I do not recollect his name."

Jean Valjean fumbled in Marius' coat, pulled out his pocket-book, opened
it at the page which Marius had pencilled, and held it out to Javert.

There was still sufficient light to admit of reading. Besides this,
Javert possessed in his eye the feline phosphorescence of night
birds. He deciphered the few lines written by Marius, and muttered:
"Gillenormand, Rue des Filles-du Calvaire, No. 6."

Then he exclaimed: "Coachman!"

The reader will remember that the hackney-coach was waiting in case of
need.

Javert kept Marius' pocket-book.

A moment later, the carriage, which had descended by the inclined plane
of the watering-place, was on the shore. Marius was laid upon the back
seat, and Javert seated himself on the front seat beside Jean Valjean.

The door slammed, and the carriage drove rapidly away, ascending the
quays in the direction of the Bastille.

They quitted the quays and entered the streets. The coachman, a black
form on his box, whipped up his thin horses. A glacial silence reigned
in the carriage. Marius, motionless, with his body resting in the
corner, and his head drooping on his breast, his arms hanging, his legs
stiff, seemed to be awaiting only a coffin; Jean Valjean seemed made of
shadow, and Javert of stone, and in that vehicle full of night, whose
interior, every time that it passed in front of a street lantern,
appeared to be turned lividly wan, as by an intermittent flash of
lightning, chance had united and seemed to be bringing face to face
the three forms of tragic immobility, the corpse, the spectre, and the
statue.




CHAPTER X--RETURN OF THE SON WHO WAS PRODIGAL OF HIS LIFE

At every jolt over the pavement, a drop of blood trickled from Marius'
hair.

Night had fully closed in when the carriage arrived at No. 6, Rue des
Filles-du-Calvaire.

Javert was the first to alight; he made sure with one glance of the
number on the carriage gate, and, raising the heavy knocker of beaten
iron, embellished in the old style, with a male goat and a satyr
confronting each other, he gave a violent peal. The gate opened a little
way and Javert gave it a push. The porter half made his appearance
yawning, vaguely awake, and with a candle in his hand.

Everyone in the house was asleep. People go to bed betimes in the
Marais, especially on days when there is a revolt. This good, old
quarter, terrified at the Revolution, takes refuge in slumber, as
children, when they hear the Bugaboo coming, hide their heads hastily
under their coverlet.

In the meantime Jean Valjean and the coachman had taken Marius out of
the carriage, Jean Valjean supporting him under the armpits, and the
coachman under the knees.

As they thus bore Marius, Jean Valjean slipped his hand under the
latter's clothes, which were broadly rent, felt his breast, and assured
himself that his heart was still beating. It was even beating a little
less feebly, as though the movement of the carriage had brought about a
certain fresh access of life.

Javert addressed the porter in a tone befitting the government, and the
presence of the porter of a factious person.

"Some person whose name is Gillenormand?"

"Here. What do you want with him?"

"His son is brought back."

"His son?" said the porter stupidly.

"He is dead."

Jean Valjean, who, soiled and tattered, stood behind Javert, and whom
the porter was surveying with some horror, made a sign to him with his
head that this was not so.

The porter did not appear to understand either Javert's words or Jean
Valjean's sign.

Javert continued:

"He went to the barricade, and here he is."

"To the barricade?" ejaculated the porter.

"He has got himself killed. Go waken his father."

The porter did not stir.

"Go along with you!" repeated Javert.

And he added:

"There will be a funeral here to-morrow."

For Javert, the usual incidents of the public highway were categorically
classed, which is the beginning of foresight and surveillance, and each
contingency had its own compartment; all possible facts were arranged
in drawers, as it were, whence they emerged on occasion, in variable
quantities; in the street, uproar, revolt, carnival, and funeral.

The porter contented himself with waking Basque. Basque woke Nicolette;
Nicolette roused great-aunt Gillenormand.

As for the grandfather, they let him sleep on, thinking that he would
hear about the matter early enough in any case.

Marius was carried up to the first floor, without any one in the other
parts of the house being aware of the fact, and deposited on an old sofa
in M. Gillenormand's antechamber; and while Basque went in search of a
physician, and while Nicolette opened the linen-presses, Jean Valjean
felt Javert touch him on the shoulder. He understood and descended the
stairs, having behind him the step of Javert who was following him.

The porter watched them take their departure as he had watched their
arrival, in terrified somnolence.

They entered the carriage once more, and the coachman mounted his box.

"Inspector Javert," said Jean, "grant me yet another favor."

"What is it?" demanded Javert roughly.

"Let me go home for one instant. Then you shall do whatever you like
with me."

Javert remained silent for a few moments, with his chin drawn back into
the collar of his great-coat, then he lowered the glass and front:

"Driver," said he, "Rue de l'Homme Arme, No. 7."




CHAPTER XI--CONCUSSION IN THE ABSOLUTE

They did not open their lips again during the whole space of their ride.

What did Jean Valjean want? To finish what he had begun; to warn
Cosette, to tell her where Marius was, to give her, possibly, some other
useful information, to take, if he could, certain final measures. As
for himself, so far as he was personally concerned, all was over; he had
been seized by Javert and had not resisted; any other man than himself
in like situation would, perhaps, have had some vague thoughts connected
with the rope which Thenardier had given him, and of the bars of the
first cell that he should enter; but, let us impress it upon the
reader, after the Bishop, there had existed in Jean Valjean a profound
hesitation in the presence of any violence, even when directed against
himself.

Suicide, that mysterious act of violence against the unknown which may
contain, in a measure, the death of the soul, was impossible to Jean
Valjean.

At the entrance to the Rue de l'Homme Arme, the carriage halted, the way
being too narrow to admit of the entrance of vehicles. Javert and Jean
Valjean alighted.

The coachman humbly represented to "monsieur l'Inspecteur," that the
Utrecht velvet of his carriage was all spotted with the blood of the
assassinated man, and with mire from the assassin. That is the way he
understood it. He added that an indemnity was due him. At the same time,
drawing his certificate book from his pocket, he begged the inspector to
have the goodness to write him "a bit of an attestation."

Javert thrust aside the book which the coachman held out to him, and
said:

"How much do you want, including your time of waiting and the drive?"

"It comes to seven hours and a quarter," replied the man, "and my velvet
was perfectly new. Eighty francs, Mr. Inspector."

Javert drew four napoleons from his pocket and dismissed the carriage.

Jean Valjean fancied that it was Javert's intention to conduct him on
foot to the post of the Blancs-Manteaux or to the post of the Archives,
both of which are close at hand.

They entered the street. It was deserted as usual. Javert followed Jean
Valjean. They reached No. 7. Jean Valjean knocked. The door opened.

"It is well," said Javert. "Go up stairs."

He added with a strange expression, and as though he were exerting an
effort in speaking in this manner:

"I will wait for you here."

Jean Valjean looked at Javert. This mode of procedure was but little in
accord with Javert's habits. However, he could not be greatly surprised
that Javert should now have a sort of haughty confidence in him, the
confidence of the cat which grants the mouse liberty to the length of
its claws, seeing that Jean Valjean had made up his mind to surrender
himself and to make an end of it. He pushed open the door, entered the
house, called to the porter who was in bed and who had pulled the cord
from his couch: "It is I!" and ascended the stairs.

On arriving at the first floor, he paused. All sorrowful roads
have their stations. The window on the landing-place, which was a
sash-window, was open. As in many ancient houses, the staircase got its
light from without and had a view on the street. The street-lantern,
situated directly opposite, cast some light on the stairs, and thus
effected some economy in illumination.

Jean Valjean, either for the sake of getting the air, or mechanically,
thrust his head out of this window. He leaned out over the street. It
is short, and the lantern lighted it from end to end. Jean Valjean was
overwhelmed with amazement; there was no longer any one there.

Javert had taken his departure.




CHAPTER XII--THE GRANDFATHER

Basque and the porter had carried Marius into the drawing-room, as he
still lay stretched out, motionless, on the sofa upon which he had been
placed on his arrival. The doctor who had been sent for had hastened
thither. Aunt Gillenormand had risen.

Aunt Gillenormand went and came, in affright, wringing her hands and
incapable of doing anything but saying: "Heavens! is it possible?" At
times she added: "Everything will be covered with blood." When her first
horror had passed off, a certain philosophy of the situation penetrated
her mind, and took form in the exclamation: "It was bound to end in this
way!" She did not go so far as: "I told you so!" which is customary on
this sort of occasion. At the physician's orders, a camp bed had been
prepared beside the sofa. The doctor examined Marius, and after having
found that his pulse was still beating, that the wounded man had no very
deep wound on his breast, and that the blood on the corners of his lips
proceeded from his nostrils, he had him placed flat on the bed, without
a pillow, with his head on the same level as his body, and even a
trifle lower, and with his bust bare in order to facilitate respiration.
Mademoiselle Gillenormand, on perceiving that they were undressing
Marius, withdrew. She set herself to telling her beads in her own
chamber.

The trunk had not suffered any internal injury; a bullet, deadened by
the pocket-book, had turned aside and made the tour of his ribs with a
hideous laceration, which was of no great depth, and consequently, not
dangerous. The long, underground journey had completed the dislocation
of the broken collar-bone, and the disorder there was serious. The arms
had been slashed with sabre cuts. Not a single scar disfigured his face;
but his head was fairly covered with cuts; what would be the result of
these wounds on the head? Would they stop short at the hairy cuticle, or
would they attack the brain? As yet, this could not be decided. A grave
symptom was that they had caused a swoon, and that people do not always
recover from such swoons. Moreover, the wounded man had been exhausted
by hemorrhage. From the waist down, the barricade had protected the
lower part of the body from injury.

Basque and Nicolette tore up linen and prepared bandages; Nicolette
sewed them, Basque rolled them. As lint was lacking, the doctor, for
the time being, arrested the bleeding with layers of wadding. Beside
the bed, three candles burned on a table where the case of surgical
instruments lay spread out. The doctor bathed Marius' face and hair with
cold water. A full pail was reddened in an instant. The porter, candle
in hand, lighted them.

The doctor seemed to be pondering sadly. From time to time, he made a
negative sign with his head, as though replying to some question which
he had inwardly addressed to himself.

A bad sign for the sick man are these mysterious dialogues of the doctor
with himself.

At the moment when the doctor was wiping Marius' face, and lightly
touching his still closed eyes with his finger, a door opened at the end
of the drawing-room, and a long, pallid figure made its appearance.

This was the grandfather.

The revolt had, for the past two days, deeply agitated, enraged and
engrossed the mind of M. Gillenormand. He had not been able to sleep
on the previous night, and he had been in a fever all day long. In the
evening, he had gone to bed very early, recommending that everything in
the house should be well barred, and he had fallen into a doze through
sheer fatigue.

Old men sleep lightly; M. Gillenormand's chamber adjoined the
drawing-room, and in spite of all the precautions that had been taken,
the noise had awakened him. Surprised at the rift of light which he
saw under his door, he had risen from his bed, and had groped his way
thither.

He stood astonished on the threshold, one hand on the handle of the
half-open door, with his head bent a little forward and quivering,
his body wrapped in a white dressing-gown, which was straight and as
destitute of folds as a winding-sheet; and he had the air of a phantom
who is gazing into a tomb.

He saw the bed, and on the mattress that young man, bleeding, white with
a waxen whiteness, with closed eyes and gaping mouth, and pallid lips,
stripped to the waist, slashed all over with crimson wounds, motionless
and brilliantly lighted up.

The grandfather trembled from head to foot as powerfully as ossified
limbs can tremble, his eyes, whose corneae were yellow on account of
his great age, were veiled in a sort of vitreous glitter, his whole
face assumed in an instant the earthy angles of a skull, his arms fell
pendent, as though a spring had broken, and his amazement was betrayed
by the outspreading of the fingers of his two aged hands, which quivered
all over, his knees formed an angle in front, allowing, through
the opening in his dressing-gown, a view of his poor bare legs, all
bristling with white hairs, and he murmured:

"Marius!"

"Sir," said Basque, "Monsieur has just been brought back. He went to the
barricade, and . . ."

"He is dead!" cried the old man in a terrible voice. "Ah! The rascal!"

Then a sort of sepulchral transformation straightened up this
centenarian as erect as a young man.

"Sir," said he, "you are the doctor. Begin by telling me one thing. He
is dead, is he not?"

The doctor, who was at the highest pitch of anxiety, remained silent.

M. Gillenormand wrung his hands with an outburst of terrible laughter.

"He is dead! He is dead! He is dead! He has got himself killed on
the barricades! Out of hatred to me! He did that to spite me! Ah! You
blood-drinker! This is the way he returns to me! Misery of my life, he
is dead!"

He went to the window, threw it wide open as though he were stifling,
and, erect before the darkness, he began to talk into the street, to the
night:

"Pierced, sabred, exterminated, slashed, hacked in pieces! Just look at
that, the villain! He knew well that I was waiting for him, and that I
had had his room arranged, and that I had placed at the head of my bed
his portrait taken when he was a little child! He knew well that he had
only to come back, and that I had been recalling him for years, and that
I remained by my fireside, with my hands on my knees, not knowing what
to do, and that I was mad over it! You knew well, that you had but to
return and to say: 'It is I,' and you would have been the master of the
house, and that I should have obeyed you, and that you could have done
whatever you pleased with your old numskull of a grandfather! you knew
that well, and you said:

"No, he is a Royalist, I will not go! And you went to the barricades,
and you got yourself killed out of malice! To revenge yourself for what
I said to you about Monsieur le Duc de Berry. It is infamous! Go to bed
then and sleep tranquilly! he is dead, and this is my awakening."

The doctor, who was beginning to be uneasy in both quarters, quitted
Marius for a moment, went to M. Gillenormand, and took his arm.
The grandfather turned round, gazed at him with eyes which seemed
exaggerated in size and bloodshot, and said to him calmly:

"I thank you, sir. I am composed, I am a man, I witnessed the death of
Louis XVI., I know how to bear events. One thing is terrible and that is
to think that it is your newspapers which do all the mischief. You will
have scribblers, chatterers, lawyers, orators, tribunes, discussions,
progress, enlightenment, the rights of man, the liberty of the press,
and this is the way that your children will be brought home to you. Ah!
Marius! It is abominable! Killed! Dead before me! A barricade! Ah, the
scamp! Doctor, you live in this quarter, I believe? Oh! I know you well.
I see your cabriolet pass my window. I am going to tell you. You are
wrong to think that I am angry. One does not fly into a rage against a
dead man. That would be stupid. This is a child whom I have reared.
I was already old while he was very young. He played in the Tuileries
garden with his little shovel and his little chair, and in order that
the inspectors might not grumble, I stopped up the holes that he made in
the earth with his shovel, with my cane. One day he exclaimed: Down with
Louis XVIII.! and off he went. It was no fault of mine. He was all rosy
and blond. His mother is dead. Have you ever noticed that all little
children are blond? Why is it so? He is the son of one of those brigands
of the Loire, but children are innocent of their fathers' crimes.
I remember when he was no higher than that. He could not manage
to pronounce his Ds. He had a way of talking that was so sweet and
indistinct that you would have thought it was a bird chirping. I
remember that once, in front of the Hercules Farnese, people formed a
circle to admire him and marvel at him, he was so handsome, was that
child! He had a head such as you see in pictures. I talked in a deep
voice, and I frightened him with my cane, but he knew very well that it
was only to make him laugh. In the morning, when he entered my room, I
grumbled, but he was like the sunlight to me, all the same. One cannot
defend oneself against those brats. They take hold of you, they hold you
fast, they never let you go again. The truth is, that there never was a
cupid like that child. Now, what can you say for your Lafayettes, your
Benjamin Constants, and your Tirecuir de Corcelles who have killed him?
This cannot be allowed to pass in this fashion."

He approached Marius, who still lay livid and motionless, and to whom
the physician had returned, and began once more to wring his hands. The
old man's pallid lips moved as though mechanically, and permitted the
passage of words that were barely audible, like breaths in the death
agony:

"Ah! heartless lad! Ah! clubbist! Ah! wretch! Ah! Septembrist!"

Reproaches in the low voice of an agonizing man, addressed to a corpse.

Little by little, as it is always indispensable that internal eruptions
should come to the light, the sequence of words returned, but the
grandfather appeared no longer to have the strength to utter them, his
voice was so weak, and extinct, that it seemed to come from the other
side of an abyss:

"It is all the same to me, I am going to die too, that I am. And
to think that there is not a hussy in Paris who would not have been
delighted to make this wretch happy! A scamp who, instead of amusing
himself and enjoying life, went off to fight and get himself shot down
like a brute! And for whom? Why? For the Republic! Instead of going to
dance at the Chaumiere, as it is the duty of young folks to do! What's
the use of being twenty years old? The Republic, a cursed pretty folly!
Poor mothers, beget fine boys, do! Come, he is dead. That will make two
funerals under the same carriage gate. So you have got yourself arranged
like this for the sake of General Lamarque's handsome eyes! What had
that General Lamarque done to you? A slasher! A chatter-box! To get
oneself killed for a dead man! If that isn't enough to drive any one
mad! Just think of it! At twenty! And without so much as turning his
head to see whether he was not leaving something behind him! That's the
way poor, good old fellows are forced to die alone, now-adays. Perish
in your corner, owl! Well, after all, so much the better, that is what
I was hoping for, this will kill me on the spot. I am too old, I am
a hundred years old, I am a hundred thousand years old, I ought, by
rights, to have been dead long ago. This blow puts an end to it. So all
is over, what happiness! What is the good of making him inhale ammonia
and all that parcel of drugs? You are wasting your trouble, you fool of
a doctor! Come, he's dead, completely dead. I know all about it, I
am dead myself too. He hasn't done things by half. Yes, this age is
infamous, infamous and that's what I think of you, of your ideas, of
your systems, of your masters, of your oracles, of your doctors, of your
scape-graces of writers, of your rascally philosophers, and of all the
revolutions which, for the last sixty years, have been frightening
the flocks of crows in the Tuileries! But you were pitiless in getting
yourself killed like this, I shall not even grieve over your death, do
you understand, you assassin?"

At that moment, Marius slowly opened his eyes, and his glance, still
dimmed by lethargic wonder, rested on M. Gillenormand.

"Marius!" cried the old man. "Marius! My little Marius! my child! my
well-beloved son! You open your eyes, you gaze upon me, you are alive,
thanks!"

And he fell fainting.




BOOK FOURTH.--JAVERT DERAILED




CHAPTER I--JAVERT

Javert passed slowly down the Rue de l'Homme Arme.

He walked with drooping head for the first time in his life, and
likewise, for the first time in his life, with his hands behind his
back.

Up to that day, Javert had borrowed from Napoleon's attitudes, only that
which is expressive of resolution, with arms folded across the chest;
that which is expressive of uncertainty--with the hands behind the
back--had been unknown to him. Now, a change had taken place; his whole
person, slow and sombre, was stamped with anxiety.

He plunged into the silent streets.

Nevertheless, he followed one given direction.

He took the shortest cut to the Seine, reached the Quai des Ormes,
skirted the quay, passed the Greve, and halted at some distance from
the post of the Place du Chatelet, at the angle of the Pont Notre-Dame.
There, between the Notre-Dame and the Pont au Change on the one hand,
and the Quai de la Megisserie and the Quai aux Fleurs on the other, the
Seine forms a sort of square lake, traversed by a rapid.

This point of the Seine is dreaded by mariners. Nothing is more
dangerous than this rapid, hemmed in, at that epoch, and irritated by
the piles of the mill on the bridge, now demolished. The two bridges,
situated thus close together, augment the peril; the water hurries in
formidable wise through the arches. It rolls in vast and terrible waves;
it accumulates and piles up there; the flood attacks the piles of the
bridges as though in an effort to pluck them up with great liquid ropes.
Men who fall in there never re-appear; the best of swimmers are drowned
there.

Javert leaned both elbows on the parapet, his chin resting in both
hands, and, while his nails were mechanically twined in the abundance of
his whiskers, he meditated.

A novelty, a revolution, a catastrophe had just taken place in the
depths of his being; and he had something upon which to examine himself.

Javert was undergoing horrible suffering.

For several hours, Javert had ceased to be simple. He was troubled;
that brain, so limpid in its blindness, had lost its transparency; that
crystal was clouded. Javert felt duty divided within his conscience, and
he could not conceal the fact from himself. When he had so unexpectedly
encountered Jean Valjean on the banks of the Seine, there had been in
him something of the wolf which regains his grip on his prey, and of the
dog who finds his master again.

He beheld before him two paths, both equally straight, but he beheld
two; and that terrified him; him, who had never in all his life known
more than one straight line. And, the poignant anguish lay in this, that
the two paths were contrary to each other. One of these straight lines
excluded the other. Which of the two was the true one?

His situation was indescribable.

To owe his life to a malefactor, to accept that debt and to repay it; to
be, in spite of himself, on a level with a fugitive from justice, and to
repay his service with another service; to allow it to be said to him,
"Go," and to say to the latter in his turn: "Be free"; to sacrifice to
personal motives duty, that general obligation, and to be conscious,
in those personal motives, of something that was also general, and,
perchance, superior, to betray society in order to remain true to his
conscience; that all these absurdities should be realized and should
accumulate upon him,--this was what overwhelmed him.

One thing had amazed him,--this was that Jean Valjean should have done
him a favor, and one thing petrified him,--that he, Javert, should have
done Jean Valjean a favor.

Where did he stand? He sought to comprehend his position, and could no
longer find his bearings.

What was he to do now? To deliver up Jean Valjean was bad; to leave Jean
Valjean at liberty was bad. In the first case, the man of authority fell
lower than the man of the galleys, in the second, a convict rose above
the law, and set his foot upon it. In both cases, dishonor for him,
Javert. There was disgrace in any resolution at which he might arrive.
Destiny has some extremities which rise perpendicularly from the
impossible, and beyond which life is no longer anything but a precipice.
Javert had reached one of those extremities.

One of his anxieties consisted in being constrained to think. The very
violence of all these conflicting emotions forced him to it. Thought was
something to which he was unused, and which was peculiarly painful.

In thought there always exists a certain amount of internal rebellion;
and it irritated him to have that within him.

Thought on any subject whatever, outside of the restricted circle of his
functions, would have been for him in any case useless and a fatigue;
thought on the day which had just passed was a torture. Nevertheless, it
was indispensable that he should take a look into his conscience, after
such shocks, and render to himself an account of himself.

What he had just done made him shudder. He, Javert, had seen fit to
decide, contrary to all the regulations of the police, contrary to the
whole social and judicial organization, contrary to the entire code,
upon a release; this had suited him; he had substituted his own affairs
for the affairs of the public; was not this unjustifiable? Every time
that he brought himself face to face with this deed without a name which
he had committed, he trembled from head to foot. Upon what should he
decide? One sole resource remained to him; to return in all haste to
the Rue de l'Homme Arme, and commit Jean Valjean to prison. It was clear
that that was what he ought to do. He could not.

Something barred his way in that direction.

Something? What? Is there in the world, anything outside of the
tribunals, executory sentences, the police and the authorities? Javert
was overwhelmed.

A galley-slave sacred! A convict who could not be touched by the law!
And that the deed of Javert!

Was it not a fearful thing that Javert and Jean Valjean, the man made to
proceed with vigor, the man made to submit,--that these two men who were
both the things of the law, should have come to such a pass, that both
of them had set themselves above the law? What then! such enormities
were to happen and no one was to be punished! Jean Valjean, stronger
than the whole social order, was to remain at liberty, and he, Javert,
was to go on eating the government's bread!

His revery gradually became terrible.

He might, athwart this revery, have also reproached himself on
the subject of that insurgent who had been taken to the Rue des
Filles-du-Calvaire; but he never even thought of that. The lesser fault
was lost in the greater. Besides, that insurgent was, obviously, a dead
man, and, legally, death puts an end to pursuit.

Jean Valjean was the load which weighed upon his spirit.

Jean Valjean disconcerted him. All the axioms which had served him as
points of support all his life long, had crumbled away in the presence
of this man. Jean Valjean's generosity towards him, Javert, crushed him.
Other facts which he now recalled, and which he had formerly treated
as lies and folly, now recurred to him as realities. M. Madeleine
re-appeared behind Jean Valjean, and the two figures were superposed in
such fashion that they now formed but one, which was venerable. Javert
felt that something terrible was penetrating his soul--admiration for
a convict. Respect for a galley-slave--is that a possible thing? He
shuddered at it, yet could not escape from it. In vain did he struggle,
he was reduced to confess, in his inmost heart, the sublimity of that
wretch. This was odious.

A benevolent malefactor, merciful, gentle, helpful, clement, a convict,
returning good for evil, giving back pardon for hatred, preferring pity
to vengeance, preferring to ruin himself rather than to ruin his enemy,
saving him who had smitten him, kneeling on the heights of virtue, more
nearly akin to an angel than to a man. Javert was constrained to admit
to himself that this monster existed.

Things could not go on in this manner.

Certainly, and we insist upon this point, he had not yielded without
resistance to that monster, to that infamous angel, to that hideous
hero, who enraged almost as much as he amazed him. Twenty times, as he
sat in that carriage face to face with Jean Valjean, the legal tiger had
roared within him. A score of times he had been tempted to fling himself
upon Jean Valjean, to seize him and devour him, that is to say, to
arrest him. What more simple, in fact? To cry out at the first post that
they passed:--"Here is a fugitive from justice, who has broken his ban!"
to summon the gendarmes and say to them: "This man is yours!" then to
go off, leaving that condemned man there, to ignore the rest and not to
meddle further in the matter. This man is forever a prisoner of the law;
the law may do with him what it will. What could be more just? Javert
had said all this to himself; he had wished to pass beyond, to act, to
apprehend the man, and then, as at present, he had not been able to do
it; and every time that his arm had been raised convulsively towards
Jean Valjean's collar, his hand had fallen back again, as beneath an
enormous weight, and in the depths of his thought he had heard a voice,
a strange voice crying to him:--"It is well. Deliver up your savior.
Then have the basin of Pontius Pilate brought and wash your claws."

Then his reflections reverted to himself and beside Jean Valjean
glorified he beheld himself, Javert, degraded.

A convict was his benefactor!

But then, why had he permitted that man to leave him alive? He had
the right to be killed in that barricade. He should have asserted that
right. It would have been better to summon the other insurgents to his
succor against Jean Valjean, to get himself shot by force.

His supreme anguish was the loss of certainty. He felt that he had been
uprooted. The code was no longer anything more than a stump in his hand.
He had to deal with scruples of an unknown species. There had taken
place within him a sentimental revelation entirely distinct from legal
affirmation, his only standard of measurement hitherto. To remain in his
former uprightness did not suffice. A whole order of unexpected facts
had cropped up and subjugated him. A whole new world was dawning on
his soul: kindness accepted and repaid, devotion, mercy, indulgence,
violences committed by pity on austerity, respect for persons, no more
definitive condemnation, no more conviction, the possibility of a tear
in the eye of the law, no one knows what justice according to God,
running in inverse sense to justice according to men. He perceived amid
the shadows the terrible rising of an unknown moral sun; it horrified
and dazzled him. An owl forced to the gaze of an eagle.

He said to himself that it was true that there were exceptional cases,
that authority might be put out of countenance, that the rule might
be inadequate in the presence of a fact, that everything could not
be framed within the text of the code, that the unforeseen compelled
obedience, that the virtue of a convict might set a snare for the virtue
of the functionary, that destiny did indulge in such ambushes, and
he reflected with despair that he himself had not even been fortified
against a surprise.

He was forced to acknowledge that goodness did exist. This convict had
been good. And he himself, unprecedented circumstance, had just been
good also. So he was becoming depraved.

He found that he was a coward. He conceived a horror of himself.

Javert's ideal, was not to be human, to be grand, to be sublime; it was
to be irreproachable.

Now, he had just failed in this.

How had he come to such a pass? How had all this happened? He could not
have told himself. He clasped his head in both hands, but in spite of
all that he could do, he could not contrive to explain it to himself.

He had certainly always entertained the intention of restoring Jean
Valjean to the law of which Jean Valjean was the captive, and of which
he, Javert, was the slave. Not for a single instant while he held him
in his grasp had he confessed to himself that he entertained the idea of
releasing him. It was, in some sort, without his consciousness, that his
hand had relaxed and had let him go free.

All sorts of interrogation points flashed before his eyes. He put
questions to himself, and made replies to himself, and his replies
frightened him. He asked himself: "What has that convict done, that
desperate fellow, whom I have pursued even to persecution, and who has
had me under his foot, and who could have avenged himself, and who
owed it both to his rancor and to his safety, in leaving me my life, in
showing mercy upon me? His duty? No. Something more. And I in showing
mercy upon him in my turn--what have I done? My duty? No. Something
more. So there is something beyond duty?" Here he took fright; his
balance became disjointed; one of the scales fell into the abyss, the
other rose heavenward, and Javert was no less terrified by the one which
was on high than by the one which was below. Without being in the least
in the world what is called Voltairian or a philosopher, or incredulous,
being, on the contrary, respectful by instinct, towards the established
church, he knew it only as an august fragment of the social whole; order
was his dogma, and sufficed for him; ever since he had attained to man's
estate and the rank of a functionary, he had centred nearly all his
religion in the police. Being,--and here we employ words without the
least irony and in their most serious acceptation, being, as we have
said, a spy as other men are priests. He had a superior, M. Gisquet; up
to that day he had never dreamed of that other superior, God.

This new chief, God, he became unexpectedly conscious of, and he felt
embarrassed by him. This unforeseen presence threw him off his bearings;
he did not know what to do with this superior, he, who was not ignorant
of the fact that the subordinate is bound always to bow, that he must
not disobey, nor find fault, nor discuss, and that, in the presence of a
superior who amazes him too greatly, the inferior has no other resource
than that of handing in his resignation.

But how was he to set about handing in his resignation to God?

However things might stand,--and it was to this point that he reverted
constantly,--one fact dominated everything else for him, and that was,
that he had just committed a terrible infraction of the law. He had just
shut his eyes on an escaped convict who had broken his ban. He had just
set a galley-slave at large. He had just robbed the laws of a man who
belonged to them. That was what he had done. He no longer understood
himself. The very reasons for his action escaped him; only their vertigo
was left with him. Up to that moment he had lived with that blind faith
which gloomy probity engenders. This faith had quitted him, this probity
had deserted him. All that he had believed in melted away. Truths which
he did not wish to recognize were besieging him, inexorably. Henceforth,
he must be a different man. He was suffering from the strange pains of
a conscience abruptly operated on for the cataract. He saw that which
it was repugnant to him to behold. He felt himself emptied, useless, put
out of joint with his past life, turned out, dissolved. Authority was
dead within him. He had no longer any reason for existing.

A terrible situation! to be touched.

To be granite and to doubt! to be the statue of Chastisement cast in one
piece in the mould of the law, and suddenly to become aware of the fact
that one cherishes beneath one's breast of bronze something absurd
and disobedient which almost resembles a heart! To come to the pass of
returning good for good, although one has said to oneself up to that day
that that good is evil! to be the watch-dog, and to lick the intruder's
hand! to be ice and melt! to be the pincers and to turn into a hand!
to suddenly feel one's fingers opening! to relax one's grip,--what a
terrible thing!

The man-projectile no longer acquainted with his route and retreating!

To be obliged to confess this to oneself: infallibility is not
infallible, there may exist error in the dogma, all has not been said
when a code speaks, society is not perfect, authority is complicated
with vacillation, a crack is possible in the immutable, judges are but
men, the law may err, tribunals may make a mistake! to behold a rift in
the immense blue pane of the firmament!

That which was passing in Javert was the Fampoux of a rectilinear
conscience, the derailment of a soul, the crushing of a probity which
had been irresistibly launched in a straight line and was breaking
against God. It certainly was singular that the stoker of order, that
the engineer of authority, mounted on the blind iron horse with its
rigid road, could be unseated by a flash of light! that the immovable,
the direct, the correct, the geometrical, the passive, the perfect,
could bend! that there should exist for the locomotive a road to
Damascus!

God, always within man, and refractory, He, the true conscience, to the
false; a prohibition to the spark to die out; an order to the ray to
remember the sun; an injunction to the soul to recognize the veritable
absolute when confronted with the fictitious absolute, humanity
which cannot be lost; the human heart indestructible; that splendid
phenomenon, the finest, perhaps, of all our interior marvels, did Javert
understand this? Did Javert penetrate it? Did Javert account for it
to himself? Evidently he did not. But beneath the pressure of that
incontestable incomprehensibility he felt his brain bursting.

He was less the man transfigured than the victim of this prodigy. In all
this he perceived only the tremendous difficulty of existence. It seemed
to him that, henceforth, his respiration was repressed forever. He was
not accustomed to having something unknown hanging over his head.

Up to this point, everything above him had been, to his gaze, merely a
smooth, limpid and simple surface; there was nothing incomprehensible,
nothing obscure; nothing that was not defined, regularly disposed,
linked, precise, circumscribed, exact, limited, closed, fully provided
for; authority was a plane surface; there was no fall in it, no
dizziness in its presence. Javert had never beheld the unknown except
from below. The irregular, the unforeseen, the disordered opening of
chaos, the possible slip over a precipice--this was the work of the
lower regions, of rebels, of the wicked, of wretches. Now Javert threw
himself back, and he was suddenly terrified by this unprecedented
apparition: a gulf on high.

What! one was dismantled from top to bottom! one was disconcerted,
absolutely! In what could one trust! That which had been agreed upon was
giving way! What! the defect in society's armor could be discovered by
a magnanimous wretch! What! an honest servitor of the law could suddenly
find himself caught between two crimes--the crime of allowing a man to
escape and the crime of arresting him! everything was not settled in
the orders given by the State to the functionary! There might be
blind alleys in duty! What,--all this was real! was it true that an
ex-ruffian, weighed down with convictions, could rise erect and end by
being in the right? Was this credible? were there cases in which the law
should retire before transfigured crime, and stammer its excuses?--Yes,
that was the state of the case! and Javert saw it! and Javert had
touched it! and not only could he not deny it, but he had taken part
in it. These were realities. It was abominable that actual facts could
reach such deformity. If facts did their duty, they would confine
themselves to being proofs of the law; facts--it is God who sends them.
Was anarchy, then, on the point of now descending from on high?

Thus,--and in the exaggeration of anguish, and the optical illusion
of consternation, all that might have corrected and restrained this
impression was effaced, and society, and the human race, and the
universe were, henceforth, summed up in his eyes, in one simple and
terrible feature,--thus the penal laws, the thing judged, the force due
to legislation, the decrees of the sovereign courts, the magistracy,
the government, prevention, repression, official cruelty, wisdom, legal
infallibility, the principle of authority, all the dogmas on which rest
political and civil security, sovereignty, justice, public truth, all
this was rubbish, a shapeless mass, chaos; he himself, Javert, the spy
of order, incorruptibility in the service of the police, the bull-dog
providence of society, vanquished and hurled to earth; and, erect, at
the summit of all that ruin, a man with a green cap on his head and a
halo round his brow; this was the astounding confusion to which he had
come; this was the fearful vision which he bore within his soul.

Was this to be endured? No.

A violent state, if ever such existed. There were only two ways of
escaping from it. One was to go resolutely to Jean Valjean, and restore
to his cell the convict from the galleys. The other . . .

Javert quitted the parapet, and, with head erect this time, betook
himself, with a firm tread, towards the station-house indicated by a
lantern at one of the corners of the Place du Chatelet.

On arriving there, he saw through the window a sergeant of police, and
he entered. Policemen recognize each other by the very way in which they
open the door of a station-house. Javert mentioned his name, showed his
card to the sergeant, and seated himself at the table of the post on
which a candle was burning. On a table lay a pen, a leaden inkstand and
paper, provided in the event of possible reports and the orders of the
night patrols. This table, still completed by its straw-seated chair,
is an institution; it exists in all police stations; it is invariably
ornamented with a box-wood saucer filled with sawdust and a wafer box
of cardboard filled with red wafers, and it forms the lowest stage of
official style. It is there that the literature of the State has its
beginning.

Javert took a pen and a sheet of paper, and began to write. This is what
he wrote:

      A FEW OBSERVATIONS FOR THE GOOD OF THE SERVICE.


 "In the first place:  I beg Monsieur le Prefet to cast his eyes
 on this.

 "Secondly:  prisoners, on arriving after examination, take off
 their shoes and stand barefoot on the flagstones while they are
 being searched.  Many of them cough on their return to prison.
 This entails hospital expenses.

 "Thirdly:  the mode of keeping track of a man with relays of police
 agents from distance to distance, is good, but, on important occasions,
 it is requisite that at least two agents should never lose sight
 of each other, so that, in case one agent should, for any cause,
 grow weak in his service, the other may supervise him and take
 his place.

 "Fourthly:  it is inexplicable why the special regulation of the prison
 of the Madelonettes interdicts the prisoner from having a chair,
 even by paying for it.

 "Fifthly:  in the Madelonettes there are only two bars to the canteen,
 so that the canteen woman can touch the prisoners with her hand.

 "Sixthly:  the prisoners called barkers, who summon the other
 prisoners to the parlor, force the prisoner to pay them two sous
 to call his name distinctly.  This is a theft.

 "Seventhly:  for a broken thread ten sous are withheld in the
 weaving shop; this is an abuse of the contractor, since the cloth
 is none the worse for it.

 "Eighthly:  it is annoying for visitors to La Force to be
 obliged to traverse the boys' court in order to reach the parlor
 of Sainte-Marie-l'Egyptienne.

 "Ninthly:  it is a fact that any day gendarmes can be overheard
 relating in the court-yard of the prefecture the interrogations put
 by the magistrates to prisoners.  For a gendarme, who should be
 sworn to secrecy, to repeat what he has heard in the examination
 room is a grave disorder.

 "Tenthly:  Mme. Henry is an honest woman; her canteen is very neat;
 but it is bad to have a woman keep the wicket to the mouse-trap
 of the secret cells.  This is unworthy of the Conciergerie of a
 great civilization."

 Javert wrote these lines in his calmest and most correct chirography,
 not omitting a single comma, and making the paper screech under his pen.
 Below the last line he signed:

                                               "JAVERT,
                                    "Inspector of the 1st class.
       "The Post of the Place du Chatelet.
                 "June 7th, 1832, about one o'clock in the morning."


Javert dried the fresh ink on the paper, folded it like a letter, sealed
it, wrote on the back: Note for the administration, left it on the
table, and quitted the post. The glazed and grated door fell to behind
him.

Again he traversed the Place du Chatelet diagonally, regained the quay,
and returned with automatic precision to the very point which he had
abandoned a quarter of an hour previously, leaned on his elbows and
found himself again in the same attitude on the same paving-stone of the
parapet. He did not appear to have stirred.

The darkness was complete. It was the sepulchral moment which follows
midnight. A ceiling of clouds concealed the stars. Not a single light
burned in the houses of the city; no one was passing; all of the streets
and quays which could be seen were deserted; Notre-Dame and the towers
of the Court-House seemed features of the night. A street lantern
reddened the margin of the quay. The outlines of the bridges lay
shapeless in the mist one behind the other. Recent rains had swollen the
river.

The spot where Javert was leaning was, it will be remembered, situated
precisely over the rapids of the Seine, perpendicularly above that
formidable spiral of whirlpools which loose and knot themselves again
like an endless screw.

Javert bent his head and gazed. All was black. Nothing was to be
distinguished. A sound of foam was audible; but the river could not be
seen. At moments, in that dizzy depth, a gleam of light appeared, and
undulated vaguely, water possessing the power of taking light, no one
knows whence, and converting it into a snake. The light vanished, and
all became indistinct once more. Immensity seemed thrown open there.
What lay below was not water, it was a gulf. The wall of the quay,
abrupt, confused, mingled with the vapors, instantly concealed from
sight, produced the effect of an escarpment of the infinite. Nothing was
to be seen, but the hostile chill of the water and the stale odor of
the wet stones could be felt. A fierce breath rose from this abyss. The
flood in the river, divined rather than perceived, the tragic whispering
of the waves, the melancholy vastness of the arches of the bridge, the
imaginable fall into that gloomy void, into all that shadow was full of
horror.

Javert remained motionless for several minutes, gazing at this opening
of shadow; he considered the invisible with a fixity that resembled
attention. The water roared. All at once he took off his hat and placed
it on the edge of the quay. A moment later, a tall black figure, which
a belated passer-by in the distance might have taken for a phantom,
appeared erect upon the parapet of the quay, bent over towards the
Seine, then drew itself up again, and fell straight down into the
shadows; a dull splash followed; and the shadow alone was in the secret
of the convulsions of that obscure form which had disappeared beneath
the water.




BOOK FIFTH.--GRANDSON AND GRANDFATHER




CHAPTER I--IN WHICH THE TREE WITH THE ZINC PLASTER APPEARS AGAIN

Some time after the events which we have just recorded, Sieur
Boulatruelle experienced a lively emotion.

Sieur Boulatruelle was that road-mender of Montfermeil whom the reader
has already seen in the gloomy parts of this book.

Boulatruelle, as the reader may, perchance, recall, was a man who
was occupied with divers and troublesome matters. He broke stones and
damaged travellers on the highway.

Road-mender and thief as he was, he cherished one dream; he believed in
the treasures buried in the forest of Montfermeil. He hoped some day to
find the money in the earth at the foot of a tree; in the meanwhile, he
lived to search the pockets of passers-by.

Nevertheless, for an instant, he was prudent. He had just escaped
neatly. He had been, as the reader is aware, picked up in Jondrette's
garret in company with the other ruffians. Utility of a vice: his
drunkenness had been his salvation. The authorities had never been able
to make out whether he had been there in the quality of a robber or a
man who had been robbed. An order of nolle prosequi, founded on his well
authenticated state of intoxication on the evening of the ambush, had
set him at liberty. He had taken to his heels. He had returned to his
road from Gagny to Lagny, to make, under administrative supervision,
broken stone for the good of the state, with downcast mien, in a very
pensive mood, his ardor for theft somewhat cooled; but he was addicted
none the less tenderly to the wine which had recently saved him.

As for the lively emotion which he had experienced a short time after
his return to his road-mender's turf-thatched cot, here it is:

One morning, Boulatruelle, while on his way as was his wont, to his
work, and possibly also to his ambush, a little before daybreak caught
sight, through the branches of the trees, of a man, whose back alone
he saw, but the shape of whose shoulders, as it seemed to him at that
distance and in the early dusk, was not entirely unfamiliar to him.
Boulatruelle, although intoxicated, had a correct and lucid memory, a
defensive arm that is indispensable to any one who is at all in conflict
with legal order.

"Where the deuce have I seen something like that man yonder?" he said
to himself. But he could make himself no answer, except that the man
resembled some one of whom his memory preserved a confused trace.

However, apart from the identity which he could not manage to catch,
Boulatruelle put things together and made calculations. This man did
not belong in the country-side. He had just arrived there. On foot,
evidently. No public conveyance passes through Montfermeil at that hour.
He had walked all night. Whence came he? Not from a very great distance;
for he had neither haversack, nor bundle. From Paris, no doubt. Why was
he in these woods? why was he there at such an hour? what had he come
there for?

Boulatruelle thought of the treasure. By dint of ransacking his memory,
he recalled in a vague way that he had already, many years before, had
a similar alarm in connection with a man who produced on him the effect
that he might well be this very individual.

"By the deuce," said Boulatruelle, "I'll find him again. I'll discover
the parish of that parishioner. This prowler of Patron-Minette has a
reason, and I'll know it. People can't have secrets in my forest if I
don't have a finger in the pie."

He took his pick-axe which was very sharply pointed.

"There now," he grumbled, "is something that will search the earth and a
man."

And, as one knots one thread to another thread, he took up the line of
march at his best pace in the direction which the man must follow, and
set out across the thickets.

When he had compassed a hundred strides, the day, which was already
beginning to break, came to his assistance. Footprints stamped in the
sand, weeds trodden down here and there, heather crushed, young branches
in the brushwood bent and in the act of straightening themselves up
again with the graceful deliberation of the arms of a pretty woman who
stretches herself when she wakes, pointed out to him a sort of track. He
followed it, then lost it. Time was flying. He plunged deeper into the
woods and came to a sort of eminence. An early huntsman who was passing
in the distance along a path, whistling the air of Guillery, suggested
to him the idea of climbing a tree. Old as he was, he was agile. There
stood close at hand a beech-tree of great size, worthy of Tityrus and of
Boulatruelle. Boulatruelle ascended the beech as high as he was able.

The idea was a good one. On scrutinizing the solitary waste on the side
where the forest is thoroughly entangled and wild, Boulatruelle suddenly
caught sight of his man.

Hardly had he got his eye upon him when he lost sight of him.

The man entered, or rather, glided into, an open glade, at a
considerable distance, masked by large trees, but with which
Boulatruelle was perfectly familiar, on account of having noticed, near
a large pile of porous stones, an ailing chestnut-tree bandaged with
a sheet of zinc nailed directly upon the bark. This glade was the one
which was formerly called the Blaru-bottom. The heap of stones, destined
for no one knows what employment, which was visible there thirty years
ago, is doubtless still there. Nothing equals a heap of stones in
longevity, unless it is a board fence. They are temporary expedients.
What a reason for lasting!

Boulatruelle, with the rapidity of joy, dropped rather than descended
from the tree. The lair was unearthed, the question now was to seize the
beast. That famous treasure of his dreams was probably there.

It was no small matter to reach that glade. By the beaten paths, which
indulge in a thousand teasing zigzags, it required a good quarter of an
hour. In a bee-line, through the underbrush, which is peculiarly dense,
very thorny, and very aggressive in that locality, a full half hour was
necessary. Boulatruelle committed the error of not comprehending this.
He believed in the straight line; a respectable optical illusion which
ruins many a man. The thicket, bristling as it was, struck him as the
best road.

"Let's take to the wolves' Rue de Rivoli," said he.

Boulatruelle, accustomed to taking crooked courses, was on this occasion
guilty of the fault of going straight.

He flung himself resolutely into the tangle of undergrowth.

He had to deal with holly bushes, nettles, hawthorns, eglantines,
thistles, and very irascible brambles. He was much lacerated.

At the bottom of the ravine he found water which he was obliged to
traverse.

At last he reached the Blaru-bottom, after the lapse of forty minutes,
sweating, soaked, breathless, scratched, and ferocious.

There was no one in the glade. Boulatruelle rushed to the heap of
stones. It was in its place. It had not been carried off.

As for the man, he had vanished in the forest. He had made his escape.
Where? in what direction? into what thicket? Impossible to guess.

And, heartrending to say, there, behind the pile of stones, in front of
the tree with the sheet of zinc, was freshly turned earth, a pick-axe,
abandoned or forgotten, and a hole.

The hole was empty.

"Thief!" shrieked Boulatruelle, shaking his fist at the horizon.




CHAPTER II--MARIUS, EMERGING FROM CIVIL WAR, MAKES READY FOR DOMESTIC
WAR

For a long time, Marius was neither dead nor alive. For many weeks he
lay in a fever accompanied by delirium, and by tolerably grave cerebral
symptoms, caused more by the shocks of the wounds on the head than by
the wounds themselves.

He repeated Cosette's name for whole nights in the melancholy loquacity
of fever, and with the sombre obstinacy of agony. The extent of some of
the lesions presented a serious danger, the suppuration of large wounds
being always liable to become re-absorbed, and consequently, to kill
the sick man, under certain atmospheric conditions; at every change of
weather, at the slightest storm, the physician was uneasy.

"Above all things," he repeated, "let the wounded man be subjected to no
emotion." The dressing of the wounds was complicated and difficult,
the fixation of apparatus and bandages by cerecloths not having been
invented as yet, at that epoch. Nicolette used up a sheet "as big as the
ceiling," as she put it, for lint. It was not without difficulty
that the chloruretted lotions and the nitrate of silver overcame the
gangrene. As long as there was any danger, M. Gillenormand, seated in
despair at his grandson's pillow, was, like Marius, neither alive nor
dead.

Every day, sometimes twice a day, a very well dressed gentleman with
white hair,--such was the description given by the porter,--came to
inquire about the wounded man, and left a large package of lint for the
dressings.

Finally, on the 7th of September, four months to a day, after the
sorrowful night when he had been brought back to his grandfather in a
dying condition, the doctor declared that he would answer for Marius.
Convalescence began. But Marius was forced to remain for two months more
stretched out on a long chair, on account of the results called up by
the fracture of his collar-bone. There always is a last wound like that
which will not close, and which prolongs the dressings indefinitely, to
the great annoyance of the sick person.

However, this long illness and this long convalescence saved him
from all pursuit. In France, there is no wrath, not even of a public
character, which six months will not extinguish. Revolts, in the present
state of society, are so much the fault of every one, that they are
followed by a certain necessity of shutting the eyes.

Let us add, that the inexcusable Gisquet order, which enjoined doctors
to lodge information against the wounded, having outraged public
opinion, and not opinion alone, but the King first of all, the wounded
were covered and protected by this indignation; and, with the exception
of those who had been made prisoners in the very act of combat, the
councils of war did not dare to trouble any one. So Marius was left in
peace.

M. Gillenormand first passed through all manner of anguish, and then
through every form of ecstasy. It was found difficult to prevent his
passing every night beside the wounded man; he had his big arm-chair
carried to Marius' bedside; he required his daughter to take the
finest linen in the house for compresses and bandages. Mademoiselle
Gillenormand, like a sage and elderly person, contrived to spare the
fine linen, while allowing the grandfather to think that he was obeyed.
M. Gillenormand would not permit any one to explain to him, that for the
preparation of lint batiste is not nearly so good as coarse linen,
nor new linen as old linen. He was present at all the dressings of the
wounds from which Mademoiselle Gillenormand modestly absented herself.
When the dead flesh was cut away with scissors, he said: "Aie! aie!"
Nothing was more touching than to see him with his gentle, senile palsy,
offer the wounded man a cup of his cooling-draught. He overwhelmed the
doctor with questions. He did not observe that he asked the same ones
over and over again.

On the day when the doctor announced to him that Marius was out of
danger, the good man was in a delirium. He made his porter a present of
three louis. That evening, on his return to his own chamber, he danced
a gavotte, using his thumb and forefinger as castanets, and he sang the
following song:

      "Jeanne est nee a Fougere     "Amour, tu vis en elle;
       Vrai nid d'une bergere;       Car c'est dans sa prunelle
       J'adore son jupon,            Que tu mets ton carquois.
           Fripon.                       Narquois!

                "Moi, je la chante, et j'aime,
                 Plus que Diane meme,
                 Jeanne et ses durs tetons
                     Bretons."[61]


"Love, thou dwellest in her; For 'tis in her eyes that thou placest thy
quiver, sly scamp!

"As for me, I sing her, and I love, more than Diana herself, Jeanne and
her firm Breton breasts."


Then he knelt upon a chair, and Basque, who was watching him through the
half-open door, made sure that he was praying.

Up to that time, he had not believed in God.

At each succeeding phase of improvement, which became more and more
pronounced, the grandfather raved. He executed a multitude of mechanical
actions full of joy; he ascended and descended the stairs, without
knowing why. A pretty female neighbor was amazed one morning at
receiving a big bouquet; it was M. Gillenormand who had sent it to
her. The husband made a jealous scene. M. Gillenormand tried to draw
Nicolette upon his knees. He called Marius, "M. le Baron." He shouted:
"Long live the Republic!"

Every moment, he kept asking the doctor: "Is he no longer in danger?"
He gazed upon Marius with the eyes of a grandmother. He brooded over him
while he ate. He no longer knew himself, he no longer rendered himself
an account of himself. Marius was the master of the house, there was
abdication in his joy, he was the grandson of his grandson.

In the state of joy in which he then was, he was the most venerable of
children. In his fear lest he might fatigue or annoy the convalescent,
he stepped behind him to smile. He was content, joyous, delighted,
charming, young. His white locks added a gentle majesty to the gay
radiance of his visage. When grace is mingled with wrinkles, it is
adorable. There is an indescribable aurora in beaming old age.

As for Marius, as he allowed them to dress his wounds and care for him,
he had but one fixed idea: Cosette.

After the fever and delirium had left him, he did not again pronounce
her name, and it might have been supposed that he no longer thought of
her. He held his peace, precisely because his soul was there.

He did not know what had become of Cosette; the whole affair of the
Rue de la Chanvrerie was like a cloud in his memory; shadows that were
almost indistinct, floated through his mind, Eponine, Gavroche, Mabeuf,
the Thenardiers, all his friends gloomily intermingled with the smoke
of the barricade; the strange passage of M. Fauchelevent through that
adventure produced on him the effect of a puzzle in a tempest; he
understood nothing connected with his own life, he did not know how nor
by whom he had been saved, and no one of those around him knew this; all
that they had been able to tell him was, that he had been brought home
at night in a hackney-coach, to the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire; past,
present, future were nothing more to him than the mist of a vague idea;
but in that fog there was one immovable point, one clear and precise
outline, something made of granite, a resolution, a will; to find
Cosette once more. For him, the idea of life was not distinct from the
idea of Cosette. He had decreed in his heart that he would not accept
the one without the other, and he was immovably resolved to exact of
any person whatever, who should desire to force him to live,--from his
grandfather, from fate, from hell,--the restitution of his vanished
Eden.

He did not conceal from himself the fact that obstacles existed.

Let us here emphasize one detail, he was not won over and was but little
softened by all the solicitude and tenderness of his grandfather. In
the first place, he was not in the secret; then, in his reveries of
an invalid, which were still feverish, possibly, he distrusted this
tenderness as a strange and novel thing, which had for its object his
conquest. He remained cold. The grandfather absolutely wasted his poor
old smile. Marius said to himself that it was all right so long as he,
Marius, did not speak, and let things take their course; but that when
it became a question of Cosette, he would find another face, and that
his grandfather's true attitude would be unmasked. Then there would
be an unpleasant scene; a recrudescence of family questions, a
confrontation of positions, every sort of sarcasm and all manner of
objections at one and the same time, Fauchelevent, Coupelevent, fortune,
poverty, a stone about his neck, the future. Violent resistance;
conclusion: a refusal. Marius stiffened himself in advance.

And then, in proportion as he regained life, the old ulcers of his
memory opened once more, he reflected again on the past, Colonel
Pontmercy placed himself once more between M. Gillenormand and him,
Marius, he told himself that he had no true kindness to expect from
a person who had been so unjust and so hard to his father. And
with health, there returned to him a sort of harshness towards his
grandfather. The old man was gently pained by this. M. Gillenormand,
without however allowing it to appear, observed that Marius, ever since
the latter had been brought back to him and had regained consciousness,
had not once called him father. It is true that he did not say
"monsieur" to him; but he contrived not to say either the one or the
other, by means of a certain way of turning his phrases. Obviously, a
crisis was approaching.

As almost always happens in such cases, Marius skirmished before giving
battle, by way of proving himself. This is called "feeling the ground."
One morning it came to pass that M. Gillenormand spoke slightingly of
the Convention, apropos of a newspaper which had fallen into his
hands, and gave vent to a Royalist harangue on Danton, Saint-Juste and
Robespierre.--"The men of '93 were giants," said Marius with severity.
The old man held his peace, and uttered not a sound during the remainder
of that day.

Marius, who had always present to his mind the inflexible grandfather of
his early years, interpreted this silence as a profound concentration
of wrath, augured from it a hot conflict, and augmented his preparations
for the fray in the inmost recesses of his mind.

He decided that, in case of a refusal, he would tear off his bandages,
dislocate his collar-bone, that he would lay bare all the wounds which
he had left, and would reject all food. His wounds were his munitions of
war. He would have Cosette or die.

He awaited the propitious moment with the crafty patience of the sick.

That moment arrived.




CHAPTER III--MARIUS ATTACKED

One day, M. Gillenormand, while his daughter was putting in order the
phials and cups on the marble of the commode, bent over Marius and said
to him in his tenderest accents: "Look here, my little Marius, if I were
in your place, I would eat meat now in preference to fish. A fried sole
is excellent to begin a convalescence with, but a good cutlet is needed
to put a sick man on his feet."

Marius, who had almost entirely recovered his strength, collected
the whole of it, drew himself up into a sitting posture, laid his two
clenched fists on the sheets of his bed, looked his grandfather in the
face, assumed a terrible air, and said:

"This leads me to say something to you."

"What is it?"

"That I wish to marry."

"Agreed," said his grandfather.--And he burst out laughing.

"How agreed?"

"Yes, agreed. You shall have your little girl."

Marius, stunned and overwhelmed with the dazzling shock, trembled in
every limb.

M. Gillenormand went on:

"Yes, you shall have her, that pretty little girl of yours. She comes
every day in the shape of an old gentleman to inquire after you. Ever
since you were wounded, she has passed her time in weeping and making
lint. I have made inquiries. She lives in the Rue de l'Homme Arme, No.
7. Ah! There we have it! Ah! so you want her! Well, you shall have
her. You're caught. You had arranged your little plot, you had said to
yourself:--'I'm going to signify this squarely to my grandfather, to
that mummy of the Regency and of the Directory, to that ancient beau,
to that Dorante turned Geronte; he has indulged in his frivolities also,
that he has, and he has had his love affairs, and his grisettes and his
Cosettes; he has made his rustle, he has had his wings, he has eaten of
the bread of spring; he certainly must remember it.' Ah! you take the
cockchafer by the horns. That's good. I offer you a cutlet and you
answer me: 'By the way, I want to marry.' There's a transition for
you! Ah! you reckoned on a bickering! You do not know that I am an old
coward. What do you say to that? You are vexed? You did not expect to
find your grandfather still more foolish than yourself, you are wasting
the discourse which you meant to bestow upon me, Mr. Lawyer, and that's
vexatious. Well, so much the worse, rage away. I'll do whatever
you wish, and that cuts you short, imbecile! Listen. I have made my
inquiries, I'm cunning too; she is charming, she is discreet, it is not
true about the lancer, she has made heaps of lint, she's a jewel, she
adores you, if you had died, there would have been three of us, her
coffin would have accompanied mine. I have had an idea, ever since you
have been better, of simply planting her at your bedside, but it is only
in romances that young girls are brought to the bedsides of handsome
young wounded men who interest them. It is not done. What would your
aunt have said to it? You were nude three quarters of the time, my good
fellow. Ask Nicolette, who has not left you for a moment, if there was
any possibility of having a woman here. And then, what would the doctor
have said? A pretty girl does not cure a man of fever. In short, it's
all right, let us say no more about it, all's said, all's done, it's all
settled, take her. Such is my ferocity. You see, I perceived that you
did not love me. I said to myself: 'Here now, I have my little Cosette
right under my hand, I'm going to give her to him, he will be obliged
to love me a little then, or he must tell the reason why.' Ah! so you
thought that the old man was going to storm, to put on a big voice,
to shout no, and to lift his cane at all that aurora. Not a bit of it.
Cosette, so be it; love, so be it; I ask nothing better. Pray take the
trouble of getting married, sir. Be happy, my well-beloved child."

That said, the old man burst forth into sobs.

And he seized Marius' head, and pressed it with both arms against his
breast, and both fell to weeping. This is one of the forms of supreme
happiness.

"Father!" cried Marius.

"Ah, so you love me!" said the old man.

An ineffable moment ensued. They were choking and could not speak.

At length the old man stammered:

"Come! his mouth is unstopped at last. He has said: 'Father' to me."

Marius disengaged his head from his grandfather's arms, and said gently:

"But, father, now that I am quite well, it seems to me that I might see
her."

"Agreed again, you shall see her to-morrow."

"Father!"

"What?"

"Why not to-day?"

"Well, to-day then. Let it be to-day. You have called me 'father' three
times, and it is worth it. I will attend to it. She shall be brought
hither. Agreed, I tell you. It has already been put into verse. This is
the ending of the elegy of the 'Jeune Malade' by Andre Chenier, by Andre
Chenier whose throat was cut by the ras . . . by the giants of '93."

M. Gillenormand fancied that he detected a faint frown on the part of
Marius, who, in truth, as we must admit, was no longer listening to him,
and who was thinking far more of Cosette than of 1793.

The grandfather, trembling at having so inopportunely introduced Andre
Chenier, resumed precipitately:

"Cut his throat is not the word. The fact is that the great
revolutionary geniuses, who were not malicious, that is incontestable,
who were heroes, pardi! found that Andre Chenier embarrassed them
somewhat, and they had him guillot . . . that is to say, those great
men on the 7th of Thermidor, besought Andre Chenier, in the interests of
public safety, to be so good as to go . . ."

M. Gillenormand, clutched by the throat by his own phrase, could not
proceed. Being able neither to finish it nor to retract it, while his
daughter arranged the pillow behind Marius, who was overwhelmed with so
many emotions, the old man rushed headlong, with as much rapidity as
his age permitted, from the bed-chamber, shut the door behind him, and,
purple, choking and foaming at the mouth, his eyes starting from his
head, he found himself nose to nose with honest Basque, who was blacking
boots in the anteroom. He seized Basque by the collar, and shouted full
in his face in fury:--"By the hundred thousand Javottes of the devil,
those ruffians did assassinate him!"

"Who, sir?"

"Andre Chenier!"

"Yes, sir," said Basque in alarm.




CHAPTER IV--MADEMOISELLE GILLENORMAND ENDS BY NO LONGER THINKING IT A
BAD THING THAT M. FAUCHELEVENT SHOULD HAVE ENTERED WITH SOMETHING UNDER
HIS ARM

Cosette and Marius beheld each other once more.

What that interview was like we decline to say. There are things which
one must not attempt to depict; the sun is one of them.

The entire family, including Basque and Nicolette, were assembled in
Marius' chamber at the moment when Cosette entered it.

Precisely at that moment, the grandfather was on the point of blowing
his nose; he stopped short, holding his nose in his handkerchief, and
gazing over it at Cosette.

She appeared on the threshold; it seemed to him that she was surrounded
by a glory.

"Adorable!" he exclaimed.

Then he blew his nose noisily.

Cosette was intoxicated, delighted, frightened, in heaven. She was as
thoroughly alarmed as any one can be by happiness. She stammered all
pale, yet flushed, she wanted to fling herself into Marius' arms, and
dared not. Ashamed of loving in the presence of all these people. People
are pitiless towards happy lovers; they remain when the latter most
desire to be left alone. Lovers have no need of any people whatever.

With Cosette, and behind her, there had entered a man with white hair
who was grave yet smiling, though with a vague and heartrending smile.
It was "Monsieur Fauchelevent"; it was Jean Valjean.

He was very well dressed, as the porter had said, entirely in black, in
perfectly new garments, and with a white cravat.

The porter was a thousand leagues from recognizing in this correct
bourgeois, in this probable notary, the fear-inspiring bearer of the
corpse, who had sprung up at his door on the night of the 7th of June,
tattered, muddy, hideous, haggard, his face masked in blood and mire,
supporting in his arms the fainting Marius; still, his porter's scent
was aroused. When M. Fauchelevent arrived with Cosette, the porter had
not been able to refrain from communicating to his wife this aside: "I
don't know why it is, but I can't help fancying that I've seen that face
before."

M. Fauchelevent in Marius' chamber, remained apart near the door. He
had under his arm, a package which bore considerable resemblance to an
octavo volume enveloped in paper. The enveloping paper was of a greenish
hue, and appeared to be mouldy.

"Does the gentleman always have books like that under his arm?"
Mademoiselle Gillenormand, who did not like books, demanded in a low
tone of Nicolette.

"Well," retorted M. Gillenormand, who had overheard her, in the same
tone, "he's a learned man. What then? Is that his fault? Monsieur
Boulard, one of my acquaintances, never walked out without a book under
his arm either, and he always had some old volume hugged to his heart
like that."

And, with a bow, he said aloud:

"Monsieur Tranchelevent . . ."

Father Gillenormand did not do it intentionally, but inattention to
proper names was an aristocratic habit of his.

"Monsieur Tranchelevent, I have the honor of asking you, on behalf of my
grandson, Baron Marius Pontmercy, for the hand of Mademoiselle."

Monsieur Tranchelevent bowed.

"That's settled," said the grandfather.

And, turning to Marius and Cosette, with both arms extended in blessing,
he cried:

"Permission to adore each other!"

They did not require him to repeat it twice. So much the worse! the
chirping began. They talked low. Marius, resting on his elbow on his
reclining chair, Cosette standing beside him. "Oh, heavens!" murmured
Cosette, "I see you once again! it is thou! it is you! The idea of going
and fighting like that! But why? It is horrible. I have been dead for
four months. Oh! how wicked it was of you to go to that battle! What had
I done to you? I pardon you, but you will never do it again. A little
while ago, when they came to tell us to come to you, I still thought
that I was about to die, but it was from joy. I was so sad! I have not
taken the time to dress myself, I must frighten people with my looks!
What will your relatives say to see me in a crumpled collar? Do speak!
You let me do all the talking. We are still in the Rue de l'Homme Arme.
It seems that your shoulder was terrible. They told me that you could
put your fist in it. And then, it seems that they cut your flesh with
the scissors. That is frightful. I have cried till I have no eyes left.
It is queer that a person can suffer like that. Your grandfather has a
very kindly air. Don't disturb yourself, don't rise on your elbow, you
will injure yourself. Oh! how happy I am! So our unhappiness is over!
I am quite foolish. I had things to say to you, and I no longer know in
the least what they were. Do you still love me? We live in the Rue de
l'Homme Arme. There is no garden. I made lint all the time; stay, sir,
look, it is your fault, I have a callous on my fingers."

"Angel!" said Marius.

Angel is the only word in the language which cannot be worn out. No
other word could resist the merciless use which lovers make of it.

Then as there were spectators, they paused and said not a word more,
contenting themselves with softly touching each other's hands.

M. Gillenormand turned towards those who were in the room and cried:

"Talk loud, the rest of you. Make a noise, you people behind the scenes.
Come, a little uproar, the deuce! so that the children can chatter at
their ease."

And, approaching Marius and Cosette, he said to them in a very low
voice:

"Call each other thou. Don't stand on ceremony."

Aunt Gillenormand looked on in amazement at this irruption of light
in her elderly household. There was nothing aggressive about this
amazement; it was not the least in the world like the scandalized and
envious glance of an owl at two turtle-doves, it was the stupid eye of a
poor innocent seven and fifty years of age; it was a life which had been
a failure gazing at that triumph, love.

"Mademoiselle Gillenormand senior," said her father to her, "I told you
that this is what would happen to you."

He remained silent for a moment, and then added:

"Look at the happiness of others."

Then he turned to Cosette.

"How pretty she is! how pretty she is! She's a Greuze. So you are going
to have that all to yourself, you scamp! Ah! my rogue, you are getting
off nicely with me, you are happy; if I were not fifteen years too old,
we would fight with swords to see which of us should have her. Come now!
I am in love with you, mademoiselle. It's perfectly simple. It is your
right. You are in the right. Ah! what a sweet, charming little wedding
this will make! Our parish is Saint-Denis du Saint Sacrament, but I will
get a dispensation so that you can be married at Saint-Paul. The church
is better. It was built by the Jesuits. It is more coquettish. It is
opposite the fountain of Cardinal de Birague. The masterpiece of Jesuit
architecture is at Namur. It is called Saint-Loup. You must go there
after you are married. It is worth the journey. Mademoiselle, I am quite
of your mind, I think girls ought to marry; that is what they are made
for. There is a certain Sainte-Catherine whom I should always like to
see uncoiffed.[62] It's a fine thing to remain a spinster, but it is
chilly. The Bible says: Multiply. In order to save the people, Jeanne
d'Arc is needed; but in order to make people, what is needed is Mother
Goose. So, marry, my beauties. I really do not see the use in remaining
a spinster! I know that they have their chapel apart in the church,
and that they fall back on the Society of the Virgin; but, sapristi, a
handsome husband, a fine fellow, and at the expiration of a year, a
big, blond brat who nurses lustily, and who has fine rolls of fat on his
thighs, and who musses up your breast in handfuls with his little rosy
paws, laughing the while like the dawn,--that's better than holding a
candle at vespers, and chanting Turris eburnea!"

The grandfather executed a pirouette on his eighty-year-old heels, and
began to talk again like a spring that has broken loose once more:

           "Ainsi, bornant les cours de tes revasseries,
            Alcippe, il est donc vrai, dans peu tu te maries."[63]


"By the way!"

"What is it, father?"

"Have not you an intimate friend?"

"Yes, Courfeyrac."

"What has become of him?"

"He is dead."

"That is good."

He seated himself near them, made Cosette sit down, and took their four
hands in his aged and wrinkled hands:

"She is exquisite, this darling. She's a masterpiece, this Cosette!
She is a very little girl and a very great lady. She will only be a
Baroness, which is a come down for her; she was born a Marquise. What
eyelashes she has! Get it well fixed in your noddles, my children, that
you are in the true road. Love each other. Be foolish about it. Love is
the folly of men and the wit of God. Adore each other. Only," he added,
suddenly becoming gloomy, "what a misfortune! It has just occurred to
me! More than half of what I possess is swallowed up in an annuity; so
long as I live, it will not matter, but after my death, a score of years
hence, ah! my poor children, you will not have a sou! Your beautiful
white hands, Madame la Baronne, will do the devil the honor of pulling
him by the tail."[64]

At this point they heard a grave and tranquil voice say:

"Mademoiselle Euphrasie Fauchelevent possesses six hundred thousand
francs."

It was the voice of Jean Valjean.

So far he had not uttered a single word, no one seemed to be aware that
he was there, and he had remained standing erect and motionless, behind
all these happy people.

"What has Mademoiselle Euphrasie to do with the question?" inquired the
startled grandfather.

"I am she," replied Cosette.

"Six hundred thousand francs?" resumed M. Gillenormand.

"Minus fourteen or fifteen thousand francs, possibly," said Jean
Valjean.

And he laid on the table the package which Mademoiselle Gillenormand had
mistaken for a book.

Jean Valjean himself opened the package; it was a bundle of bank-notes.
They were turned over and counted. There were five hundred notes for a
thousand francs each, and one hundred and sixty-eight of five hundred.
In all, five hundred and eighty-four thousand francs.

"This is a fine book," said M. Gillenormand.

"Five hundred and eighty-four thousand francs!" murmured the aunt.

"This arranges things well, does it not, Mademoiselle Gillenormand
senior?" said the grandfather. "That devil of a Marius has ferreted out
the nest of a millionaire grisette in his tree of dreams! Just trust
to the love affairs of young folks now, will you! Students find
studentesses with six hundred thousand francs. Cherubino works better
than Rothschild."

"Five hundred and eighty-four thousand francs!" repeated Mademoiselle
Gillenormand, in a low tone. "Five hundred and eighty-four! one might as
well say six hundred thousand!"

As for Marius and Cosette, they were gazing at each other while this was
going on; they hardly heeded this detail.




CHAPTER V--DEPOSIT YOUR MONEY IN A FOREST RATHER THAN WITH A NOTARY

The reader has, no doubt, understood, without necessitating a lengthy
explanation, that Jean Valjean, after the Champmathieu affair, had been
able, thanks to his first escape of a few days' duration, to come to
Paris and to withdraw in season, from the hands of Laffitte, the
sum earned by him, under the name of Monsieur Madeleine, at
Montreuil-sur-Mer; and that fearing that he might be recaptured,--which
eventually happened--he had buried and hidden that sum in the forest
of Montfermeil, in the locality known as the Blaru-bottom. The sum,
six hundred and thirty thousand francs, all in bank-bills, was not very
bulky, and was contained in a box; only, in order to preserve the
box from dampness, he had placed it in a coffer filled with chestnut
shavings. In the same coffer he had placed his other treasures, the
Bishop's candlesticks. It will be remembered that he had carried off
the candlesticks when he made his escape from Montreuil-sur-Mer. The man
seen one evening for the first time by Boulatruelle, was Jean Valjean.
Later on, every time that Jean Valjean needed money, he went to get it
in the Blaru-bottom. Hence the absences which we have mentioned. He had
a pickaxe somewhere in the heather, in a hiding-place known to himself
alone. When he beheld Marius convalescent, feeling that the hour was at
hand, when that money might prove of service, he had gone to get it;
it was he again, whom Boulatruelle had seen in the woods, but on
this occasion, in the morning instead of in the evening. Boulatreulle
inherited his pickaxe.

The actual sum was five hundred and eighty-four thousand, five hundred
francs. Jean Valjean withdrew the five hundred francs for himself.--"We
shall see hereafter," he thought.

The difference between that sum and the six hundred and thirty thousand
francs withdrawn from Laffitte represented his expenditure in ten years,
from 1823 to 1833. The five years of his stay in the convent had cost
only five thousand francs.

Jean Valjean set the two candlesticks on the chimney-piece, where they
glittered to the great admiration of Toussaint.

Moreover, Jean Valjean knew that he was delivered from Javert. The
story had been told in his presence, and he had verified the fact in
the Moniteur, how a police inspector named Javert had been found drowned
under a boat belonging to some laundresses, between the Pont au Change
and the Pont-Neuf, and that a writing left by this man, otherwise
irreproachable and highly esteemed by his superiors, pointed to a fit
of mental aberration and a suicide.--"In fact," thought Jean Valjean,
"since he left me at liberty, once having got me in his power, he must
have been already mad."




CHAPTER VI--THE TWO OLD MEN DO EVERYTHING, EACH ONE AFTER HIS OWN
FASHION, TO RENDER COSETTE HAPPY

Everything was made ready for the wedding. The doctor, on being
consulted, declared that it might take place in February. It was then
December. A few ravishing weeks of perfect happiness passed.

The grandfather was not the least happy of them all. He remained for a
quarter of an hour at a time gazing at Cosette.

"The wonderful, beautiful girl!" he exclaimed. "And she has so sweet and
good an air! she is, without exception, the most charming girl that I
have ever seen in my life. Later on, she'll have virtues with an odor of
violets. How graceful! one cannot live otherwise than nobly with such
a creature. Marius, my boy, you are a Baron, you are rich, don't go to
pettifogging, I beg of you."

Cosette and Marius had passed abruptly from the sepulchre to paradise.
The transition had not been softened, and they would have been stunned,
had they not been dazzled by it.

"Do you understand anything about it?" said Marius to Cosette.

"No," replied Cosette, "but it seems to me that the good God is caring
for us."

Jean Valjean did everything, smoothed away every difficulty, arranged
everything, made everything easy. He hastened towards Cosette's
happiness with as much ardor, and, apparently with as much joy, as
Cosette herself.

As he had been a mayor, he understood how to solve that delicate
problem, with the secret of which he alone was acquainted, Cosette's
civil status. If he were to announce her origin bluntly, it might
prevent the marriage, who knows? He extricated Cosette from all
difficulties. He concocted for her a family of dead people, a sure means
of not encountering any objections. Cosette was the only scion of an
extinct family; Cosette was not his own daughter, but the daughter of
the other Fauchelevent. Two brothers Fauchelevent had been gardeners to
the convent of the Petit-Picpus. Inquiry was made at that convent; the
very best information and the most respectable references abounded; the
good nuns, not very apt and but little inclined to fathom questions of
paternity, and not attaching any importance to the matter, had never
understood exactly of which of the two Fauchelevents Cosette was the
daughter. They said what was wanted and they said it with zeal. An
acte de notoriete was drawn up. Cosette became in the eyes of the law,
Mademoiselle Euphrasie Fauchelevent. She was declared an orphan, both
father and mother being dead. Jean Valjean so arranged it that he was
appointed, under the name of Fauchelevent, as Cosette's guardian, with
M. Gillenormand as supervising guardian over him.

As for the five hundred and eighty thousand francs, they constituted
a legacy bequeathed to Cosette by a dead person, who desired to
remain unknown. The original legacy had consisted of five hundred and
ninety-four thousand francs; but ten thousand francs had been expended
on the education of Mademoiselle Euphrasie, five thousand francs of that
amount having been paid to the convent. This legacy, deposited in
the hands of a third party, was to be turned over to Cosette at her
majority, or at the date of her marriage. This, taken as a whole, was
very acceptable, as the reader will perceive, especially when the sum
due was half a million. There were some peculiarities here and there,
it is true, but they were not noticed; one of the interested parties
had his eyes blindfolded by love, the others by the six hundred thousand
francs.

Cosette learned that she was not the daughter of that old man whom she
had so long called father. He was merely a kinsman; another Fauchelevent
was her real father. At any other time this would have broken her heart.
But at the ineffable moment which she was then passing through, it cast
but a slight shadow, a faint cloud, and she was so full of joy that the
cloud did not last long. She had Marius. The young man arrived, the old
man was effaced; such is life.

And then, Cosette had, for long years, been habituated to seeing enigmas
around her; every being who has had a mysterious childhood is always
prepared for certain renunciations.

Nevertheless, she continued to call Jean Valjean: Father.

Cosette, happy as the angels, was enthusiastic over Father Gillenormand.
It is true that he overwhelmed her with gallant compliments and
presents. While Jean Valjean was building up for Cosette a normal
situation in society and an unassailable status, M. Gillenormand was
superintending the basket of wedding gifts. Nothing so amused him as
being magnificent. He had given to Cosette a robe of Binche guipure
which had descended to him from his own grandmother.

"These fashions come up again," said he, "ancient things are the
rage, and the young women of my old age dress like the old women of my
childhood."

He rifled his respectable chests of drawers in Coromandel lacquer, with
swelling fronts, which had not been opened for years.--"Let us hear the
confession of these dowagers," he said, "let us see what they have in
their paunches." He noisily violated the pot-bellied drawers of all
his wives, of all his mistresses and of all his grandmothers. Pekins,
damasks, lampas, painted moires, robes of shot gros de Tours, India
kerchiefs embroidered in gold that could be washed, dauphines without a
right or wrong side, in the piece, Genoa and Alencon point lace,
parures in antique goldsmith's work, ivory bon-bon boxes ornamented
with microscopic battles, gewgaws and ribbons--he lavished everything on
Cosette. Cosette, amazed, desperately in love with Marius, and wild with
gratitude towards M. Gillenormand, dreamed of a happiness without limit
clothed in satin and velvet. Her wedding basket seemed to her to be
upheld by seraphim. Her soul flew out into the azure depths, with wings
of Mechlin lace.

The intoxication of the lovers was only equalled, as we have already
said, by the ecstasy of the grandfather. A sort of flourish of trumpets
went on in the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire.

Every morning, a fresh offering of bric-a-brac from the grandfather to
Cosette. All possible knickknacks glittered around her.

One day Marius, who was fond of talking gravely in the midst of his
bliss, said, apropos of I know not what incident:

"The men of the revolution are so great, that they have the prestige of
the ages, like Cato and like Phocion, and each one of them seems to me
an antique memory."

"Moire antique!" exclaimed the old gentleman. "Thanks, Marius. That is
precisely the idea of which I was in search."

And on the following day, a magnificent dress of tea-rose colored moire
antique was added to Cosette's wedding presents.

From these fripperies, the grandfather extracted a bit of wisdom.

"Love is all very well; but there must be something else to go with
it. The useless must be mingled with happiness. Happiness is only the
necessary. Season that enormously with the superfluous for me. A
palace and her heart. Her heart and the Louvre. Her heart and the grand
waterworks of Versailles. Give me my shepherdess and try to make her a
duchess. Fetch me Phyllis crowned with corn-flowers, and add a hundred
thousand francs income. Open for me a bucolic perspective as far as you
can see, beneath a marble colonnade. I consent to the bucolic and also
to the fairy spectacle of marble and gold. Dry happiness resembles dry
bread. One eats, but one does not dine. I want the superfluous, the
useless, the extravagant, excess, that which serves no purpose. I
remember to have seen, in the Cathedral of Strasburg, a clock, as tall
as a three-story house which marked the hours, which had the kindness to
indicate the hour, but which had not the air of being made for that; and
which, after having struck midday, or midnight,--midday, the hour of the
sun, or midnight, the hour of love,--or any other hour that you like,
gave you the moon and the stars, the earth and the sea, birds and
fishes, Phoebus and Phoebe, and a host of things which emerged from a
niche, and the twelve apostles, and the Emperor Charles the Fifth, and
Eponine, and Sabinus, and a throng of little gilded goodmen, who played
on the trumpet to boot. Without reckoning delicious chimes which it
sprinkled through the air, on every occasion, without any one's knowing
why. Is a petty bald clock-face which merely tells the hour equal to
that? For my part, I am of the opinion of the big clock of Strasburg,
and I prefer it to the cuckoo clock from the Black Forest."

M. Gillenormand talked nonsense in connection with the wedding, and all
the fripperies of the eighteenth century passed pell-mell through his
dithyrambs.

"You are ignorant of the art of festivals. You do not know how to
organize a day of enjoyment in this age," he exclaimed. "Your nineteenth
century is weak. It lacks excess. It ignores the rich, it ignores the
noble. In everything it is clean-shaven. Your third estate is insipid,
colorless, odorless, and shapeless. The dreams of your bourgeois who
set up, as they express it: a pretty boudoir freshly decorated, violet,
ebony and calico. Make way! Make way! the Sieur Curmudgeon is marrying
Mademoiselle Clutch-penny. Sumptuousness and splendor. A louis d'or has
been stuck to a candle. There's the epoch for you. My demand is that I
may flee from it beyond the Sarmatians. Ah! in 1787, I predict that all
was lost, from the day when I beheld the Duc de Rohan, Prince de Leon,
Duc de Chabot, Duc de Montbazon, Marquis de Sonbise, Vicomte de Thouars,
peer of France, go to Longchamps in a tapecu! That has borne its fruits.
In this century, men attend to business, they gamble on 'Change, they
win money, they are stingy. People take care of their surfaces and
varnish them; every one is dressed as though just out of a band-box,
washed, soaped, scraped, shaved, combed, waked, smoothed, rubbed,
brushed, cleaned on the outside, irreproachable, polished as a pebble,
discreet, neat, and at the same time, death of my life, in the depths of
their consciences they have dung-heaps and cesspools that are enough to
make a cow-herd who blows his nose in his fingers, recoil. I grant to
this age the device: 'Dirty Cleanliness.' Don't be vexed, Marius, give
me permission to speak; I say no evil of the people as you see, I am
always harping on your people, but do look favorably on my dealing a bit
of a slap to the bourgeoisie. I belong to it. He who loves well lashes
well. Thereupon, I say plainly, that now-a-days people marry, but that
they no longer know how to marry. Ah! it is true, I regret the grace
of the ancient manners. I regret everything about them, their elegance,
their chivalry, those courteous and delicate ways, that joyous luxury
which every one possessed, music forming part of the wedding, a symphony
above stairs, a beating of drums below stairs, the dances, the joyous
faces round the table, the fine-spun gallant compliments, the songs, the
fireworks, the frank laughter, the devil's own row, the huge knots of
ribbon. I regret the bride's garter. The bride's garter is cousin to the
girdle of Venus. On what does the war of Troy turn? On Helen's garter,
parbleu! Why did they fight, why did Diomed the divine break over
the head of Meriones that great brazen helmet of ten points? why did
Achilles and Hector hew each other up with vast blows of their lances?
Because Helen allowed Paris to take her garter. With Cosette's garter,
Homer would construct the Iliad. He would put in his poem, a loquacious
old fellow, like me, and he would call him Nestor. My friends, in bygone
days, in those amiable days of yore, people married wisely; they had a
good contract, and then they had a good carouse. As soon as Cujas had
taken his departure, Gamacho entered. But, in sooth! the stomach is
an agreeable beast which demands its due, and which wants to have its
wedding also. People supped well, and had at table a beautiful neighbor
without a guimpe so that her throat was only moderately concealed. Oh!
the large laughing mouths, and how gay we were in those days! youth was
a bouquet; every young man terminated in a branch of lilacs or a tuft
of roses; whether he was a shepherd or a warrior; and if, by chance,
one was a captain of dragoons, one found means to call oneself Florian.
People thought much of looking well. They embroidered and tinted
themselves. A bourgeois had the air of a flower, a Marquis had the air
of a precious stone. People had no straps to their boots, they had no
boots. They were spruce, shining, waved, lustrous, fluttering, dainty,
coquettish, which did not at all prevent their wearing swords by their
sides. The humming-bird has beak and claws. That was the day of the
Galland Indies. One of the sides of that century was delicate, the other
was magnificent; and by the green cabbages! people amused themselves.
To-day, people are serious. The bourgeois is avaricious, the bourgeoise
is a prude; your century is unfortunate. People would drive away the
Graces as being too low in the neck. Alas! beauty is concealed as
though it were ugliness. Since the revolution, everything, including the
ballet-dancers, has had its trousers; a mountebank dancer must be grave;
your rigadoons are doctrinarian. It is necessary to be majestic. People
would be greatly annoyed if they did not carry their chins in their
cravats. The ideal of an urchin of twenty when he marries, is to
resemble M. Royer-Collard. And do you know what one arrives at with
that majesty? at being petty. Learn this: joy is not only joyous; it is
great. But be in love gayly then, what the deuce! marry, when you marry,
with fever and giddiness, and tumult, and the uproar of happiness! Be
grave in church, well and good. But, as soon as the mass is finished,
sarpejou! you must make a dream whirl around the bride. A marriage
should be royal and chimerical; it should promenade its ceremony from
the cathedral of Rheims to the pagoda of Chanteloup. I have a horror
of a paltry wedding. Ventregoulette! be in Olympus for that one day,
at least. Be one of the gods. Ah! people might be sylphs. Games and
Laughter, argiraspides; they are stupids. My friends, every recently
made bridegroom ought to be Prince Aldobrandini. Profit by that unique
minute in life to soar away to the empyrean with the swans and the
eagles, even if you do have to fall back on the morrow into the
bourgeoisie of the frogs. Don't economize on the nuptials, do not prune
them of their splendors; don't scrimp on the day when you beam. The
wedding is not the housekeeping. Oh! if I were to carry out my fancy,
it would be gallant, violins would be heard under the trees. Here is
my programme: sky-blue and silver. I would mingle with the festival
the rural divinities, I would convoke the Dryads and the Nereids. The
nuptials of Amphitrite, a rosy cloud, nymphs with well dressed locks
and entirely naked, an Academician offering quatrains to the goddess, a
chariot drawn by marine monsters.

     "Triton trottait devant, et tirait de sa conque
      Des sons si ravissants qu'il ravissait quiconque!"[65]

--there's a festive programme, there's a good one, or else I know
nothing of such matters, deuce take it!"

While the grandfather, in full lyrical effusion, was listening to
himself, Cosette and Marius grew intoxicated as they gazed freely at
each other.

Aunt Gillenormand surveyed all this with her imperturbable placidity.
Within the last five or six months she had experienced a certain amount
of emotions. Marius returned, Marius brought back bleeding, Marius
brought back from a barricade, Marius dead, then living, Marius
reconciled, Marius betrothed, Marius wedding a poor girl, Marius wedding
a millionairess. The six hundred thousand francs had been her last
surprise. Then, her indifference of a girl taking her first communion
returned to her. She went regularly to service, told her beads, read her
euchology, mumbled Aves in one corner of the house, while I love you
was being whispered in the other, and she beheld Marius and Cosette in a
vague way, like two shadows. The shadow was herself.

There is a certain state of inert asceticism in which the soul,
neutralized by torpor, a stranger to that which may be designated as the
business of living, receives no impressions, either human, or pleasant
or painful, with the exception of earthquakes and catastrophes. This
devotion, as Father Gillenormand said to his daughter, corresponds to
a cold in the head. You smell nothing of life. Neither any bad, nor any
good odor.

Moreover, the six hundred thousand francs had settled the elderly
spinster's indecision. Her father had acquired the habit of taking her
so little into account, that he had not consulted her in the matter of
consent to Marius' marriage. He had acted impetuously, according to his
wont, having, a despot-turned slave, but a single thought,--to satisfy
Marius. As for the aunt,--it had not even occurred to him that the aunt
existed, and that she could have an opinion of her own, and, sheep as
she was, this had vexed her. Somewhat resentful in her inmost soul, but
impassive externally, she had said to herself: "My father has settled
the question of the marriage without reference to me; I shall settle the
question of the inheritance without consulting him." She was rich, in
fact, and her father was not. She had reserved her decision on this
point. It is probable that, had the match been a poor one, she would
have left him poor. "So much the worse for my nephew! he is wedding a
beggar, let him be a beggar himself!" But Cosette's half-million pleased
the aunt, and altered her inward situation so far as this pair of lovers
were concerned. One owes some consideration to six hundred thousand
francs, and it was evident that she could not do otherwise than leave
her fortune to these young people, since they did not need it.

It was arranged that the couple should live with the grandfather--M.
Gillenormand insisted on resigning to them his chamber, the finest in
the house. "That will make me young again," he said. "It's an old plan
of mine. I have always entertained the idea of having a wedding in my
chamber."

He furnished this chamber with a multitude of elegant trifles. He had
the ceiling and walls hung with an extraordinary stuff, which he had by
him in the piece, and which he believed to have emanated from Utrecht
with a buttercup-colored satin ground, covered with velvet auricula
blossoms.--"It was with that stuff," said he, "that the bed of the
Duchesse d'Anville at la Roche-Guyon was draped."--On the chimney-piece,
he set a little figure in Saxe porcelain, carrying a muff against her
nude stomach.

M. Gillenormand's library became the lawyer's study, which Marius
needed; a study, it will be remembered, being required by the council of
the order.




CHAPTER VII--THE EFFECTS OF DREAMS MINGLED WITH HAPPINESS

The lovers saw each other every day. Cosette came with M.
Fauchelevent.--"This is reversing things," said Mademoiselle
Gillenormand, "to have the bride come to the house to do the courting
like this." But Marius' convalescence had caused the habit to become
established, and the arm-chairs of the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire,
better adapted to interviews than the straw chairs of the Rue de l'Homme
Arme, had rooted it. Marius and M. Fauchelevent saw each other, but did
not address each other. It seemed as though this had been agreed upon.
Every girl needs a chaperon. Cosette could not have come without
M. Fauchelevent. In Marius' eyes, M. Fauchelevent was the condition
attached to Cosette. He accepted it. By dint of discussing political
matters, vaguely and without precision, from the point of view of the
general amelioration of the fate of all men, they came to say a little
more than "yes" and "no." Once, on the subject of education, which
Marius wished to have free and obligatory, multiplied under all forms
lavished on every one, like the air and the sun in a word, respirable
for the entire population, they were in unison, and they almost
conversed. M. Fauchelevent talked well, and even with a certain
loftiness of language--still he lacked something indescribable. M.
Fauchelevent possessed something less and also something more, than a
man of the world.

Marius, inwardly, and in the depths of his thought, surrounded with
all sorts of mute questions this M. Fauchelevent, who was to him simply
benevolent and cold. There were moments when doubts as to his own
recollections occurred to him. There was a void in his memory, a black
spot, an abyss excavated by four months of agony.--Many things had been
lost therein. He had come to the point of asking himself whether it were
really a fact that he had seen M. Fauchelevent, so serious and so calm a
man, in the barricade.

This was not, however, the only stupor which the apparitions and the
disappearances of the past had left in his mind. It must not be supposed
that he was delivered from all those obsessions of the memory which
force us, even when happy, even when satisfied, to glance sadly behind
us. The head which does not turn backwards towards horizons that have
vanished contains neither thought nor love. At times, Marius clasped his
face between his hands, and the vague and tumultuous past traversed the
twilight which reigned in his brain. Again he beheld Mabeuf fall, he
heard Gavroche singing amid the grape-shot, he felt beneath his lips the
cold brow of Eponine; Enjolras, Courfeyrac, Jean Prouvaire, Combeferre,
Bossuet, Grantaire, all his friends rose erect before him, then
dispersed into thin air. Were all those dear, sorrowful, valiant,
charming or tragic beings merely dreams? had they actually existed? The
revolt had enveloped everything in its smoke. These great fevers create
great dreams. He questioned himself; he felt himself; all these vanished
realities made him dizzy. Where were they all then? was it really true
that all were dead? A fall into the shadows had carried off all except
himself. It all seemed to him to have disappeared as though behind the
curtain of a theatre. There are curtains like this which drop in life.
God passes on to the following act.

And he himself--was he actually the same man? He, the poor man, was
rich; he, the abandoned, had a family; he, the despairing, was to marry
Cosette. It seemed to him that he had traversed a tomb, and that he had
entered into it black and had emerged from it white, and in that tomb
the others had remained. At certain moments, all these beings of the
past, returned and present, formed a circle around him, and overshadowed
him; then he thought of Cosette, and recovered his serenity; but nothing
less than this felicity could have sufficed to efface that catastrophe.

M. Fauchelevent almost occupied a place among these vanished beings.
Marius hesitated to believe that the Fauchelevent of the barricade was
the same as this Fauchelevent in flesh and blood, sitting so gravely
beside Cosette. The first was, probably, one of those nightmares
occasioned and brought back by his hours of delirium. However,
the natures of both men were rigid, no question from Marius to M.
Fauchelevent was possible. Such an idea had not even occurred to him. We
have already indicated this characteristic detail.

Two men who have a secret in common, and who, by a sort of tacit
agreement, exchange not a word on the subject, are less rare than is
commonly supposed.

Once only, did Marius make the attempt. He introduced into the
conversation the Rue de la Chanvrerie, and, turning to M. Fauchelevent,
he said to him:

"Of course, you are acquainted with that street?"

"What street?"

"The Rue de la Chanvrerie."

"I have no idea of the name of that street," replied M. Fauchelevent, in
the most natural manner in the world.

The response which bore upon the name of the street and not upon the
street itself, appeared to Marius to be more conclusive than it really
was.

"Decidedly," thought he, "I have been dreaming. I have been subject to
a hallucination. It was some one who resembled him. M. Fauchelevent was
not there."'




CHAPTER VIII--TWO MEN IMPOSSIBLE TO FIND

Marius' enchantment, great as it was, could not efface from his mind
other pre-occupations.

While the wedding was in preparation, and while awaiting the date fixed
upon, he caused difficult and scrupulous retrospective researches to be
made.

He owed gratitude in various quarters; he owed it on his father's
account, he owed it on his own.

There was Thenardier; there was the unknown man who had brought him,
Marius, back to M. Gillenormand.

Marius endeavored to find these two men, not intending to marry, to
be happy, and to forget them, and fearing that, were these debts of
gratitude not discharged, they would leave a shadow on his life, which
promised so brightly for the future.

It was impossible for him to leave all these arrears of suffering behind
him, and he wished, before entering joyously into the future, to obtain
a quittance from the past.

That Thenardier was a villain detracted nothing from the fact that he
had saved Colonel Pontmercy. Thenardier was a ruffian in the eyes of all
the world except Marius.

And Marius, ignorant of the real scene in the battle field of Waterloo,
was not aware of the peculiar detail, that his father, so far as
Thenardier was concerned was in the strange position of being indebted
to the latter for his life, without being indebted to him for any
gratitude.

None of the various agents whom Marius employed succeeded in discovering
any trace of Thenardier. Obliteration appeared to be complete in
that quarter. Madame Thenardier had died in prison pending the trial.
Thenardier and his daughter Azelma, the only two remaining of that
lamentable group, had plunged back into the gloom. The gulf of the
social unknown had silently closed above those beings. On the surface
there was not visible so much as that quiver, that trembling, those
obscure concentric circles which announce that something has fallen in,
and that the plummet may be dropped.

Madame Thenardier being dead, Boulatruelle being eliminated from the
case, Claquesous having disappeared, the principal persons accused
having escaped from prison, the trial connected with the ambush in the
Gorbeau house had come to nothing.

That affair had remained rather obscure. The bench of Assizes had been
obliged to content themselves with two subordinates. Panchaud, alias
Printanier, alias Bigrenaille, and Demi-Liard, alias Deux-Milliards, who
had been inconsistently condemned, after a hearing of both sides of
the case, to ten years in the galleys. Hard labor for life had been the
sentence pronounced against the escaped and contumacious accomplices.

Thenardier, the head and leader, had been, through contumacy, likewise
condemned to death.

This sentence was the only information remaining about Thenardier,
casting upon that buried name its sinister light like a candle beside a
bier.

Moreover, by thrusting Thenardier back into the very remotest depths,
through a fear of being re-captured, this sentence added to the density
of the shadows which enveloped this man.

As for the other person, as for the unknown man who had saved Marius,
the researches were at first to some extent successful, then came to
an abrupt conclusion. They succeeded in finding the carriage which had
brought Marius to the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire on the evening of the
6th of June.

The coachman declared that, on the 6th of June, in obedience to the
commands of a police-agent, he had stood from three o'clock in the
afternoon until nightfall on the Quai des Champs-Elysees, above the
outlet of the Grand Sewer; that, towards nine o'clock in the evening,
the grating of the sewer, which abuts on the bank of the river, had
opened; that a man had emerged therefrom, bearing on his shoulders
another man, who seemed to be dead; that the agent, who was on the watch
at that point, had arrested the living man and had seized the dead man;
that, at the order of the police-agent, he, the coachman, had taken "all
those folks" into his carriage; that they had first driven to the Rue
des Filles-du-Calvaire; that they had there deposited the dead man; that
the dead man was Monsieur Marius, and that he, the coachman, recognized
him perfectly, although he was alive "this time"; that afterwards, they
had entered the vehicle again, that he had whipped up his horses; a few
paces from the gate of the Archives, they had called to him to halt;
that there, in the street, they had paid him and left him, and that the
police-agent had led the other man away; that he knew nothing more; that
the night had been very dark.

Marius, as we have said, recalled nothing. He only remembered that he
had been seized from behind by an energetic hand at the moment when he
was falling backwards into the barricade; then, everything vanished so
far as he was concerned.

He had only regained consciousness at M. Gillenormand's.

He was lost in conjectures.

He could not doubt his own identity. Still, how had it come to pass
that, having fallen in the Rue de la Chanvrerie, he had been picked
up by the police-agent on the banks of the Seine, near the Pont des
Invalides?

Some one had carried him from the Quartier des Halles to the
Champs-Elysees. And how? Through the sewer. Unheard-of devotion!

Some one? Who?

This was the man for whom Marius was searching.

Of this man, who was his savior, nothing; not a trace; not the faintest
indication.

Marius, although forced to preserve great reserve, in that direction,
pushed his inquiries as far as the prefecture of police. There, no more
than elsewhere, did the information obtained lead to any enlightenment.

The prefecture knew less about the matter than did the hackney-coachman.
They had no knowledge of any arrest having been made on the 6th of June
at the mouth of the Grand Sewer.

No report of any agent had been received there upon this matter, which
was regarded at the prefecture as a fable. The invention of this fable
was attributed to the coachman.

A coachman who wants a gratuity is capable of anything, even of
imagination. The fact was assured, nevertheless, and Marius could not
doubt it, unless he doubted his own identity, as we have just said.

Everything about this singular enigma was inexplicable.

What had become of that man, that mysterious man, whom the coachman had
seen emerge from the grating of the Grand Sewer bearing upon his back
the unconscious Marius, and whom the police-agent on the watch had
arrested in the very act of rescuing an insurgent? What had become of
the agent himself?

Why had this agent preserved silence? Had the man succeeded in making
his escape? Had he bribed the agent? Why did this man give no sign of
life to Marius, who owed everything to him? His disinterestedness was no
less tremendous than his devotion. Why had not that man appeared again?
Perhaps he was above compensation, but no one is above gratitude. Was he
dead? Who was the man? What sort of a face had he? No one could tell him
this.

The coachman answered: "The night was very dark." Basque and Nicolette,
all in a flutter, had looked only at their young master all covered with
blood.

The porter, whose candle had lighted the tragic arrival of Marius, had
been the only one to take note of the man in question, and this is the
description that he gave:

"That man was terrible."

Marius had the blood-stained clothing which he had worn when he had been
brought back to his grandfather preserved, in the hope that it would
prove of service in his researches.

On examining the coat, it was found that one skirt had been torn in a
singular way. A piece was missing.

One evening, Marius was speaking in the presence of Cosette and Jean
Valjean of the whole of that singular adventure, of the innumerable
inquiries which he had made, and of the fruitlessness of his efforts.
The cold countenance of "Monsieur Fauchelevent" angered him.

He exclaimed, with a vivacity which had something of wrath in it:

"Yes, that man, whoever he may have been, was sublime. Do you know what
he did, sir? He intervened like an archangel. He must have flung himself
into the midst of the battle, have stolen me away, have opened the
sewer, have dragged me into it and have carried me through it! He
must have traversed more than a league and a half in those frightful
subterranean galleries, bent over, weighed down, in the dark, in the
cess-pool,--more than a league and a half, sir, with a corpse upon his
back! And with what object? With the sole object of saving the corpse.
And that corpse I was. He said to himself: 'There may still be a
glimpse of life there, perchance; I will risk my own existence for that
miserable spark!' And his existence he risked not once but twenty times!
And every step was a danger. The proof of it is, that on emerging from
the sewer, he was arrested. Do you know, sir, that that man did all
this? And he had no recompense to expect. What was I? An insurgent.
What was I? One of the conquered. Oh! if Cosette's six hundred thousand
francs were mine . . ."

"They are yours," interrupted Jean Valjean.

"Well," resumed Marius, "I would give them all to find that man once
more."

Jean Valjean remained silent.




BOOK SIXTH.--THE SLEEPLESS NIGHT




CHAPTER I--THE 16TH OF FEBRUARY, 1833

The night of the 16th to the 17th of February, 1833, was a blessed
night. Above its shadows heaven stood open. It was the wedding night of
Marius and Cosette.

The day had been adorable.

It had not been the grand festival dreamed by the grandfather, a fairy
spectacle, with a confusion of cherubim and Cupids over the heads of the
bridal pair, a marriage worthy to form the subject of a painting to be
placed over a door; but it had been sweet and smiling.

The manner of marriage in 1833 was not the same as it is to-day. France
had not yet borrowed from England that supreme delicacy of carrying off
one's wife, of fleeing, on coming out of church, of hiding oneself with
shame from one's happiness, and of combining the ways of a bankrupt with
the delights of the Song of Songs. People had not yet grasped to the
full the chastity, exquisiteness, and decency of jolting their paradise
in a posting-chaise, of breaking up their mystery with clic-clacs, of
taking for a nuptial bed the bed of an inn, and of leaving behind them,
in a commonplace chamber, at such a night, the most sacred of
the souvenirs of life mingled pell-mell with the tete-a-tete of the
conductor of the diligence and the maid-servant of the inn.

In this second half of the nineteenth century in which we are now
living, the mayor and his scarf, the priest and his chasuble, the law
and God no longer suffice; they must be eked out by the Postilion de
Lonjumeau; a blue waistcoat turned up with red, and with bell buttons,
a plaque like a vantbrace, knee-breeches of green leather, oaths to the
Norman horses with their tails knotted up, false galloons, varnished
hat, long powdered locks, an enormous whip and tall boots. France does
not yet carry elegance to the length of doing like the English nobility,
and raining down on the post-chaise of the bridal pair a hail storm
of slippers trodden down at heel and of worn-out shoes, in memory of
Churchill, afterwards Marlborough, or Malbrouck, who was assailed on
his wedding-day by the wrath of an aunt which brought him good luck.
Old shoes and slippers do not, as yet, form a part of our nuptial
celebrations; but patience, as good taste continues to spread, we shall
come to that.

In 1833, a hundred years ago, marriage was not conducted at a full trot.

Strange to say, at that epoch, people still imagined that a wedding was
a private and social festival, that a patriarchal banquet does not
spoil a domestic solemnity, that gayety, even in excess, provided it be
honest, and decent, does happiness no harm, and that, in short, it is a
good and a venerable thing that the fusion of these two destinies whence
a family is destined to spring, should begin at home, and that the
household should thenceforth have its nuptial chamber as its witness.

And people were so immodest as to marry in their own homes.

The marriage took place, therefore, in accordance with this now
superannuated fashion, at M. Gillenormand's house.

Natural and commonplace as this matter of marrying is, the banns to
publish, the papers to be drawn up, the mayoralty, and the church
produce some complication. They could not get ready before the 16th of
February.

Now, we note this detail, for the pure satisfaction of being exact, it
chanced that the 16th fell on Shrove Tuesday. Hesitations, scruples,
particularly on the part of Aunt Gillenormand.

"Shrove Tuesday!" exclaimed the grandfather, "so much the better. There
is a proverb:

                "'Mariage un Mardi gras
                  N'aura point enfants ingrats.'[66]


Let us proceed. Here goes for the 16th! Do you want to delay, Marius?"

"No, certainly not!" replied the lover.

"Let us marry, then," cried the grandfather.

Accordingly, the marriage took place on the 16th, notwithstanding the
public merrymaking. It rained that day, but there is always in the sky
a tiny scrap of blue at the service of happiness, which lovers see, even
when the rest of creation is under an umbrella.

On the preceding evening, Jean Valjean handed to Marius, in the presence
of M. Gillenormand, the five hundred and eighty-four thousand francs.

As the marriage was taking place under the regime of community of
property, the papers had been simple.

Henceforth, Toussaint was of no use to Jean Valjean; Cosette inherited
her and promoted her to the rank of lady's maid.

As for Jean Valjean, a beautiful chamber in the Gillenormand house had
been furnished expressly for him, and Cosette had said to him in such
an irresistible manner: "Father, I entreat you," that she had almost
persuaded him to promise that he would come and occupy it.

A few days before that fixed on for the marriage, an accident happened
to Jean Valjean; he crushed the thumb of his right hand. This was not a
serious matter; and he had not allowed any one to trouble himself
about it, nor to dress it, nor even to see his hurt, not even Cosette.
Nevertheless, this had forced him to swathe his hand in a linen bandage,
and to carry his arm in a sling, and had prevented his signing. M.
Gillenormand, in his capacity of Cosette's supervising-guardian, had
supplied his place.

We will not conduct the reader either to the mayor's office or to the
church. One does not follow a pair of lovers to that extent, and one is
accustomed to turn one's back on the drama as soon as it puts a wedding
nosegay in its buttonhole. We will confine ourselves to noting an
incident which, though unnoticed by the wedding party, marked the
transit from the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire to the church of Saint-Paul.

At that epoch, the northern extremity of the Rue Saint-Louis was in
process of repaving. It was barred off, beginning with the Rue du
Pare-Royal. It was impossible for the wedding carriages to go directly
to Saint-Paul. They were obliged to alter their course, and the simplest
way was to turn through the boulevard. One of the invited guests
observed that it was Shrove Tuesday, and that there would be a jam
of vehicles.--"Why?" asked M. Gillenormand--"Because of the
maskers."--"Capital," said the grandfather, "let us go that way. These
young folks are on the way to be married; they are about to enter the
serious part of life. This will prepare them for seeing a bit of the
masquerade."

They went by way of the boulevard. The first wedding coach held Cosette
and Aunt Gillenormand, M. Gillenormand and Jean Valjean. Marius, still
separated from his betrothed according to usage, did not come until
the second. The nuptial train, on emerging from the Rue des
Filles-du-Calvaire, became entangled in a long procession of vehicles
which formed an endless chain from the Madeleine to the Bastille, and
from the Bastille to the Madeleine. Maskers abounded on the boulevard.
In spite of the fact that it was raining at intervals, Merry-Andrew,
Pantaloon and Clown persisted. In the good humor of that winter of 1833,
Paris had disguised itself as Venice. Such Shrove Tuesdays are no
longer to be seen now-a-days. Everything which exists being a scattered
Carnival, there is no longer any Carnival.

The sidewalks were overflowing with pedestrians and the windows with
curious spectators. The terraces which crown the peristyles of the
theatres were bordered with spectators. Besides the maskers, they stared
at that procession--peculiar to Shrove Tuesday as to Longchamps,--of
vehicles of every description, citadines, tapissieres, carioles,
cabriolets marching in order, rigorously riveted to each other by the
police regulations, and locked into rails, as it were. Any one in
these vehicles is at once a spectator and a spectacle. Police-sergeants
maintained, on the sides of the boulevard, these two interminable
parallel files, moving in contrary directions, and saw to it that
nothing interfered with that double current, those two brooks of
carriages, flowing, the one down stream, the other up stream, the
one towards the Chaussee d'Antin, the other towards the Faubourg
Saint-Antoine. The carriages of the peers of France and of the
Ambassadors, emblazoned with coats of arms, held the middle of the way,
going and coming freely. Certain joyous and magnificent trains, notably
that of the Boeuf Gras, had the same privilege. In this gayety of Paris,
England cracked her whip; Lord Seymour's post-chaise, harassed by a
nickname from the populace, passed with great noise.

In the double file, along which the municipal guards galloped like
sheep-dogs, honest family coaches, loaded down with great-aunts and
grandmothers, displayed at their doors fresh groups of children in
disguise, Clowns of seven years of age, Columbines of six, ravishing
little creatures, who felt that they formed an official part of the
public mirth, who were imbued with the dignity of their harlequinade,
and who possessed the gravity of functionaries.

From time to time, a hitch arose somewhere in the procession of
vehicles; one or other of the two lateral files halted until the knot
was disentangled; one carriage delayed sufficed to paralyze the whole
line. Then they set out again on the march.

The wedding carriages were in the file proceeding towards the Bastille,
and skirting the right side of the Boulevard. At the top of the
Pont-aux-Choux, there was a stoppage. Nearly at the same moment, the
other file, which was proceeding towards the Madeleine, halted also. At
that point of the file there was a carriage-load of maskers.

These carriages, or to speak more correctly, these wagon-loads of
maskers are very familiar to Parisians. If they were missing on a Shrove
Tuesday, or at the Mid-Lent, it would be taken in bad part, and people
would say: "There's something behind that. Probably the ministry
is about to undergo a change." A pile of Cassandras, Harlequins and
Columbines, jolted along high above the passers-by, all possible
grotesquenesses, from the Turk to the savage, Hercules supporting
Marquises, fishwives who would have made Rabelais stop up his ears just
as the Maenads made Aristophanes drop his eyes, tow wigs, pink tights,
dandified hats, spectacles of a grimacer, three-cornered hats of Janot
tormented with a butterfly, shouts directed at pedestrians, fists on
hips, bold attitudes, bare shoulders, immodesty unchained; a chaos of
shamelessness driven by a coachman crowned with flowers; this is what
that institution was like.

Greece stood in need of the chariot of Thespis, France stands in need of
the hackney-coach of Vade.

Everything can be parodied, even parody. The Saturnalia, that grimace of
antique beauty, ends, through exaggeration after exaggeration, in Shrove
Tuesday; and the Bacchanal, formerly crowned with sprays of vine leaves
and grapes, inundated with sunshine, displaying her marble breast in a
divine semi-nudity, having at the present day lost her shape under
the soaked rags of the North, has finally come to be called the
Jack-pudding.

The tradition of carriage-loads of maskers runs back to the most ancient
days of the monarchy. The accounts of Louis XI. allot to the bailiff of
the palace "twenty sous, Tournois, for three coaches of mascarades
in the cross-roads." In our day, these noisy heaps of creatures are
accustomed to have themselves driven in some ancient cuckoo carriage,
whose imperial they load down, or they overwhelm a hired landau, with
its top thrown back, with their tumultuous groups. Twenty of them ride
in a carriage intended for six. They cling to the seats, to the rumble,
on the cheeks of the hood, on the shafts. They even bestride the
carriage lamps. They stand, sit, lie, with their knees drawn up in a
knot, and their legs hanging. The women sit on the men's laps. Far
away, above the throng of heads, their wild pyramid is visible. These
carriage-loads form mountains of mirth in the midst of the rout. Colle,
Panard and Piron flow from it, enriched with slang. This carriage which
has become colossal through its freight, has an air of conquest. Uproar
reigns in front, tumult behind. People vociferate, shout, howl, there
they break forth and writhe with enjoyment; gayety roars; sarcasm flames
forth, joviality is flaunted like a red flag; two jades there drag farce
blossomed forth into an apotheosis; it is the triumphal car of laughter.

A laughter that is too cynical to be frank. In truth, this laughter is
suspicious. This laughter has a mission. It is charged with proving the
Carnival to the Parisians.

These fishwife vehicles, in which one feels one knows not what shadows,
set the philosopher to thinking. There is government therein. There one
lays one's finger on a mysterious affinity between public men and public
women.

It certainly is sad that turpitude heaped up should give a sum total
of gayety, that by piling ignominy upon opprobrium the people should
be enticed, that the system of spying, and serving as caryatids to
prostitution should amuse the rabble when it confronts them, that the
crowd loves to behold that monstrous living pile of tinsel rags, half
dung, half light, roll by on four wheels howling and laughing, that they
should clap their hands at this glory composed of all shames, that there
would be no festival for the populace, did not the police promenade in
their midst these sorts of twenty-headed hydras of joy. But what can be
done about it? These be-ribboned and be-flowered tumbrils of mire are
insulted and pardoned by the laughter of the public. The laughter of all
is the accomplice of universal degradation. Certain unhealthy festivals
disaggregate the people and convert them into the populace. And
populaces, like tyrants, require buffoons. The King has Roquelaure,
the populace has the Merry-Andrew. Paris is a great, mad city on every
occasion that it is a great sublime city. There the Carnival forms
part of politics. Paris,--let us confess it--willingly allows infamy to
furnish it with comedy. She only demands of her masters--when she has
masters--one thing: "Paint me the mud." Rome was of the same mind. She
loved Nero. Nero was a titanic lighterman.

Chance ordained, as we have just said, that one of these shapeless
clusters of masked men and women, dragged about on a vast calash, should
halt on the left of the boulevard, while the wedding train halted on the
right. The carriage-load of masks caught sight of the wedding carriage
containing the bridal party opposite them on the other side of the
boulevard.

"Hullo!" said a masker, "here's a wedding."

"A sham wedding," retorted another. "We are the genuine article."

And, being too far off to accost the wedding party, and fearing also,
the rebuke of the police, the two maskers turned their eyes elsewhere.

At the end of another minute, the carriage-load of maskers had their
hands full, the multitude set to yelling, which is the crowd's caress
to masquerades; and the two maskers who had just spoken had to face the
throng with their comrades, and did not find the entire repertory of
projectiles of the fishmarkets too extensive to retort to the enormous
verbal attacks of the populace. A frightful exchange of metaphors took
place between the maskers and the crowd.

In the meanwhile, two other maskers in the same carriage, a Spaniard
with an enormous nose, an elderly air, and huge black moustache, and a
gaunt fishwife, who was quite a young girl, masked with a loup,[67] had
also noticed the wedding, and while their companions and the passers-by
were exchanging insults, they had held a dialogue in a low voice.

Their aside was covered by the tumult and was lost in it. The gusts of
rain had drenched the front of the vehicle, which was wide open; the
breezes of February are not warm; as the fishwife, clad in a low-necked
gown, replied to the Spaniard, she shivered, laughed and coughed.

Here is their dialogue:

"Say, now."

"What, daddy?"

"Do you see that old cove?"

"What old cove?"

"Yonder, in the first wedding-cart, on our side."

"The one with his arm hung up in a black cravat?"

"Yes."

"Well?"

"I'm sure that I know him."

"Ah!"

"I'm willing that they should cut my throat, and I'm ready to swear that
I never said either you, thou, or I, in my life, if I don't know that
Parisian." [pantinois.]

"Paris in Pantin to-day."

"Can you see the bride if you stoop down?"

"No."

"And the bridegroom?"

"There's no bridegroom in that trap."

"Bah!"

"Unless it's the old fellow."

"Try to get a sight of the bride by stooping very low."

"I can't."

"Never mind, that old cove who has something the matter with his paw I
know, and that I'm positive."

"And what good does it do to know him?"

"No one can tell. Sometimes it does!"

"I don't care a hang for old fellows, that I don't!"

"I know him."

"Know him, if you want to."

"How the devil does he come to be one of the wedding party?"

"We are in it, too."

"Where does that wedding come from?"

"How should I know?"

"Listen."

"Well, what?"

"There's one thing you ought to do."

"What's that?"

"Get off of our trap and spin that wedding."

"What for?"

"To find out where it goes, and what it is. Hurry up and jump down,
trot, my girl, your legs are young."

"I can't quit the vehicle."

"Why not?"

"I'm hired."

"Ah, the devil!"

"I owe my fishwife day to the prefecture."

"That's true."

"If I leave the cart, the first inspector who gets his eye on me will
arrest me. You know that well enough."

"Yes, I do."

"I'm bought by the government for to-day."

"All the same, that old fellow bothers me."

"Do the old fellows bother you? But you're not a young girl."

"He's in the first carriage."

"Well?"

"In the bride's trap."

"What then?"

"So he is the father."

"What concern is that of mine?"

"I tell you that he's the father."

"As if he were the only father."

"Listen."

"What?"

"I can't go out otherwise than masked. Here I'm concealed, no one knows
that I'm here. But to-morrow, there will be no more maskers. It's Ash
Wednesday. I run the risk of being nabbed. I must sneak back into my
hole. But you are free."

"Not particularly."

"More than I am, at any rate."

"Well, what of that?"

"You must try to find out where that wedding-party went to."

"Where it went?"

"Yes."

"I know."

"Where is it going then?"

"To the Cadran-Bleu."

"In the first place, it's not in that direction."

"Well! to la Rapee."

"Or elsewhere."

"It's free. Wedding-parties are at liberty."

"That's not the point at all. I tell you that you must try to learn for
me what that wedding is, who that old cove belongs to, and where that
wedding pair lives."

"I like that! that would be queer. It's so easy to find out a
wedding-party that passed through the street on a Shrove Tuesday, a week
afterwards. A pin in a hay-mow! It ain't possible!"

"That don't matter. You must try. You understand me, Azelma."

The two files resumed their movement on both sides of the boulevard, in
opposite directions, and the carriage of the maskers lost sight of the
"trap" of the bride.




CHAPTER II--JEAN VALJEAN STILL WEARS HIS ARM IN A SLING

To realize one's dream. To whom is this accorded? There must be
elections for this in heaven; we are all candidates, unknown to
ourselves; the angels vote. Cosette and Marius had been elected.

Cosette, both at the mayor's office and at church, was dazzling and
touching. Toussaint, assisted by Nicolette, had dressed her.

Cosette wore over a petticoat of white taffeta, her robe of Binche
guipure, a veil of English point, a necklace of fine pearls, a wreath
of orange flowers; all this was white, and, from the midst of that
whiteness she beamed forth. It was an exquisite candor expanding and
becoming transfigured in the light. One would have pronounced her a
virgin on the point of turning into a goddess.

Marius' handsome hair was lustrous and perfumed; here and there, beneath
the thick curls, pale lines--the scars of the barricade--were visible.

The grandfather, haughty, with head held high, amalgamating more than
ever in his toilet and his manners all the elegances of the epoch of
Barras, escorted Cosette. He took the place of Jean Valjean, who, on
account of his arm being still in a sling, could not give his hand to
the bride.

Jean Valjean, dressed in black, followed them with a smile.

"Monsieur Fauchelevent," said the grandfather to him, "this is a fine
day. I vote for the end of afflictions and sorrows. Henceforth, there
must be no sadness anywhere. Pardieu, I decree joy! Evil has no right to
exist. That there should be any unhappy men is, in sooth, a disgrace
to the azure of the sky. Evil does not come from man, who is good at
bottom. All human miseries have for their capital and central government
hell, otherwise, known as the Devil's Tuileries. Good, here I am
uttering demagogical words! As far as I am concerned, I have no longer
any political opinions; let all me be rich, that is to say, mirthful,
and I confine myself to that."

When, at the conclusion of all the ceremonies, after having pronounced
before the mayor and before the priest all possible "yesses," after
having signed the registers at the municipality and at the sacristy,
after having exchanged their rings, after having knelt side by side
under the pall of white moire in the smoke of the censer, they arrived,
hand in hand, admired and envied by all, Marius in black, she in white,
preceded by the suisse, with the epaulets of a colonel, tapping the
pavement with his halberd, between two rows of astonished spectators, at
the portals of the church, both leaves of which were thrown wide open,
ready to enter their carriage again, and all being finished, Cosette
still could not believe that it was real. She looked at Marius, she
looked at the crowd, she looked at the sky: it seemed as though she
feared that she should wake up from her dream. Her amazed and uneasy air
added something indescribably enchanting to her beauty. They entered the
same carriage to return home, Marius beside Cosette; M. Gillenormand
and Jean Valjean sat opposite them; Aunt Gillenormand had withdrawn one
degree, and was in the second vehicle.

"My children," said the grandfather, "here you are, Monsieur le Baron
and Madame la Baronne, with an income of thirty thousand livres."

And Cosette, nestling close to Marius, caressed his ear with an angelic
whisper: "So it is true. My name is Marius. I am Madame Thou."

These two creatures were resplendent. They had reached that irrevocable
and irrecoverable moment, at the dazzling intersection of all youth and
all joy. They realized the verses of Jean Prouvaire; they were forty
years old taken together. It was marriage sublimated; these two children
were two lilies. They did not see each other, they did not contemplate
each other. Cosette perceived Marius in the midst of a glory; Marius
perceived Cosette on an altar. And on that altar, and in that glory, the
two apotheoses mingling, in the background, one knows not how, behind a
cloud for Cosette, in a flash for Marius, there was the ideal thing, the
real thing, the meeting of the kiss and the dream, the nuptial pillow.
All the torments through which they had passed came back to them in
intoxication. It seemed to them that their sorrows, their sleepless
nights, their tears, their anguish, their terrors, their despair,
converted into caresses and rays of light, rendered still more charming
the charming hour which was approaching; and that their griefs were but
so many handmaidens who were preparing the toilet of joy. How good it is
to have suffered! Their unhappiness formed a halo round their happiness.
The long agony of their love was terminating in an ascension.

It was the same enchantment in two souls, tinged with voluptuousness
in Marius, and with modesty in Cosette. They said to each other in low
tones: "We will go back to take a look at our little garden in the Rue
Plumet." The folds of Cosette's gown lay across Marius.

Such a day is an ineffable mixture of dream and of reality. One
possesses and one supposes. One still has time before one to divine. The
emotion on that day, of being at mid-day and of dreaming of midnight
is indescribable. The delights of these two hearts overflowed upon the
crowd, and inspired the passers-by with cheerfulness.

People halted in the Rue Saint-Antoine, in front of Saint-Paul, to gaze
through the windows of the carriage at the orange-flowers quivering on
Cosette's head.

Then they returned home to the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire. Marius,
triumphant and radiant, mounted side by side with Cosette the staircase
up which he had been borne in a dying condition. The poor, who had
trooped to the door, and who shared their purses, blessed them. There
were flowers everywhere. The house was no less fragrant than the church;
after the incense, roses. They thought they heard voices carolling in
the infinite; they had God in their hearts; destiny appeared to them
like a ceiling of stars; above their heads they beheld the light of a
rising sun. All at once, the clock struck. Marius glanced at Cosette's
charming bare arm, and at the rosy things which were vaguely visible
through the lace of her bodice, and Cosette, intercepting Marius'
glance, blushed to her very hair.

Quite a number of old family friends of the Gillenormand family had
been invited; they pressed about Cosette. Each one vied with the rest in
saluting her as Madame la Baronne.

The officer, Theodule Gillenormand, now a captain, had come from
Chartres, where he was stationed in garrison, to be present at the
wedding of his cousin Pontmercy. Cosette did not recognize him.

He, on his side, habituated as he was to have women consider him
handsome, retained no more recollection of Cosette than of any other
woman.

"How right I was not to believe in that story about the lancer!" said
Father Gillenormand, to himself.

Cosette had never been more tender with Jean Valjean. She was in unison
with Father Gillenormand; while he erected joy into aphorisms and
maxims, she exhaled goodness like a perfume. Happiness desires that all
the world should be happy.

She regained, for the purpose of addressing Jean Valjean, inflections of
voice belonging to the time when she was a little girl. She caressed him
with her smile.

A banquet had been spread in the dining-room.

Illumination as brilliant as the daylight is the necessary seasoning of
a great joy. Mist and obscurity are not accepted by the happy. They do
not consent to be black. The night, yes; the shadows, no. If there is no
sun, one must be made.

The dining-room was full of gay things. In the centre, above the white
and glittering table, was a Venetian lustre with flat plates, with all
sorts of colored birds, blue, violet, red, and green, perched amid the
candles; around the chandelier, girandoles, on the walls, sconces with
triple and quintuple branches; mirrors, silverware, glassware, plate,
porcelain, faience, pottery, gold and silversmith's work, all was
sparkling and gay. The empty spaces between the candelabra were filled
in with bouquets, so that where there was not a light, there was a
flower.

In the antechamber, three violins and a flute softly played quartettes
by Haydn.

Jean Valjean had seated himself on a chair in the drawing-room, behind
the door, the leaf of which folded back upon him in such a manner as to
nearly conceal him. A few moments before they sat down to table, Cosette
came, as though inspired by a sudden whim, and made him a deep courtesy,
spreading out her bridal toilet with both hands, and with a tenderly
roguish glance, she asked him:

"Father, are you satisfied?"

"Yes," said Jean Valjean, "I am content!"

"Well, then, laugh."

Jean Valjean began to laugh.

A few moments later, Basque announced that dinner was served.

The guests, preceded by M. Gillenormand with Cosette on his arm, entered
the dining-room, and arranged themselves in the proper order around the
table.

Two large arm-chairs figured on the right and left of the bride, the
first for M. Gillenormand, the other for Jean Valjean. M. Gillenormand
took his seat. The other arm-chair remained empty.

They looked about for M. Fauchelevent.

He was no longer there.

M. Gillenormand questioned Basque.

"Do you know where M. Fauchelevent is?"

"Sir," replied Basque, "I do, precisely. M. Fauchelevent told me to say
to you, sir, that he was suffering, his injured hand was paining him
somewhat, and that he could not dine with Monsieur le Baron and Madame
la Baronne. That he begged to be excused, that he would come to-morrow.
He has just taken his departure."

That empty arm-chair chilled the effusion of the wedding feast for a
moment. But, if M. Fauchelevent was absent, M. Gillenormand was present,
and the grandfather beamed for two. He affirmed that M. Fauchelevent had
done well to retire early, if he were suffering, but that it was only a
slight ailment. This declaration sufficed. Moreover, what is an obscure
corner in such a submersion of joy? Cosette and Marius were passing
through one of those egotistical and blessed moments when no other
faculty is left to a person than that of receiving happiness. And then,
an idea occurred to M. Gillenormand.--"Pardieu, this armchair is empty.
Come hither, Marius. Your aunt will permit it, although she has a
right to you. This armchair is for you. That is legal and delightful.
Fortunatus beside Fortunata."--Applause from the whole table. Marius
took Jean Valjean's place beside Cosette, and things fell out so that
Cosette, who had, at first, been saddened by Jean Valjean's absence,
ended by being satisfied with it. From the moment when Marius took his
place, and was the substitute, Cosette would not have regretted God
himself. She set her sweet little foot, shod in white satin, on Marius'
foot.

The arm-chair being occupied, M. Fauchelevent was obliterated; and
nothing was lacking.

And, five minutes afterward, the whole table from one end to the other,
was laughing with all the animation of forgetfulness.

At dessert, M. Gillenormand, rising to his feet, with a glass of
champagne in his hand--only half full so that the palsy of his eighty
years might not cause an overflow,--proposed the health of the married
pair.

"You shall not escape two sermons," he exclaimed. "This morning you
had one from the cure, this evening you shall have one from your
grandfather. Listen to me; I will give you a bit of advice: Adore each
other. I do not make a pack of gyrations, I go straight to the mark,
be happy. In all creation, only the turtle-doves are wise. Philosophers
say: 'Moderate your joys.' I say: 'Give rein to your joys.' Be as
much smitten with each other as fiends. Be in a rage about it. The
philosophers talk stuff and nonsense. I should like to stuff their
philosophy down their gullets again. Can there be too many perfumes,
too many open rose-buds, too many nightingales singing, too many green
leaves, too much aurora in life? can people love each other too much?
can people please each other too much? Take care, Estelle, thou art too
pretty! Have a care, Nemorin, thou art too handsome! Fine stupidity,
in sooth! Can people enchant each other too much, cajole each other too
much, charm each other too much? Can one be too much alive, too happy?
Moderate your joys. Ah, indeed! Down with the philosophers! Wisdom
consists in jubilation. Make merry, let us make merry. Are we happy
because we are good, or are we good because we are happy? Is the Sancy
diamond called the Sancy because it belonged to Harley de Sancy, or
because it weighs six hundred carats? I know nothing about it, life is
full of such problems; the important point is to possess the Sancy and
happiness. Let us be happy without quibbling and quirking. Let us obey
the sun blindly. What is the sun? It is love. He who says love, says
woman. Ah! ah! behold omnipotence--women. Ask that demagogue of a Marius
if he is not the slave of that little tyrant of a Cosette. And of his
own free will, too, the coward! Woman! There is no Robespierre who keeps
his place but woman reigns. I am no longer Royalist except towards that
royalty. What is Adam? The kingdom of Eve. No '89 for Eve. There has
been the royal sceptre surmounted by a fleur-de-lys, there has been the
imperial sceptre surmounted by a globe, there has been the sceptre of
Charlemagne, which was of iron, there has been the sceptre of Louis the
Great, which was of gold,--the revolution twisted them between its thumb
and forefinger, ha'penny straws; it is done with, it is broken, it lies
on the earth, there is no longer any sceptre, but make me a revolution
against that little embroidered handkerchief, which smells of patchouli!
I should like to see you do it. Try. Why is it so solid? Because it is a
gewgaw. Ah! you are the nineteenth century? Well, what then? And we
have been as foolish as you. Do not imagine that you have effected
much change in the universe, because your trip-gallant is called the
cholera-morbus, and because your pourree is called the cachuca. In fact,
the women must always be loved. I defy you to escape from that. These
friends are our angels. Yes, love, woman, the kiss forms a circle from
which I defy you to escape; and, for my own part, I should be only
too happy to re-enter it. Which of you has seen the planet Venus, the
coquette of the abyss, the Celimene of the ocean, rise in the infinite,
calming all here below? The ocean is a rough Alcestis. Well, grumble
as he will, when Venus appears he is forced to smile. That brute beast
submits. We are all made so. Wrath, tempest, claps of thunder, foam to
the very ceiling. A woman enters on the scene, a planet rises; flat on
your face! Marius was fighting six months ago; to-day he is married.
That is well. Yes, Marius, yes, Cosette, you are in the right. Exist
boldly for each other, make us burst with rage that we cannot do the
same, idealize each other, catch in your beaks all the tiny blades of
felicity that exist on earth, and arrange yourselves a nest for life.
Pardi, to love, to be loved, what a fine miracle when one is young!
Don't imagine that you have invented that. I, too, have had my dream, I,
too, have meditated, I, too, have sighed; I, too, have had a moonlight
soul. Love is a child six thousand years old. Love has the right to a
long white beard. Methusalem is a street arab beside Cupid. For sixty
centuries men and women have got out of their scrape by loving. The
devil, who is cunning, took to hating man; man, who is still more
cunning, took to loving woman. In this way he does more good than
the devil does him harm. This craft was discovered in the days of
the terrestrial paradise. The invention is old, my friends, but it is
perfectly new. Profit by it. Be Daphnis and Chloe, while waiting to
become Philemon and Baucis. Manage so that, when you are with each
other, nothing shall be lacking to you, and that Cosette may be the sun
for Marius, and that Marius may be the universe to Cosette. Cosette, let
your fine weather be the smile of your husband; Marius, let your rain
be your wife's tears. And let it never rain in your household. You have
filched the winning number in the lottery; you have gained the great
prize, guard it well, keep it under lock and key, do not squander it,
adore each other and snap your fingers at all the rest. Believe what I
say to you. It is good sense. And good sense cannot lie. Be a religion
to each other. Each man has his own fashion of adoring God. Saperlotte!
the best way to adore God is to love one's wife. I love thee! that's
my catechism. He who loves is orthodox. The oath of Henri IV. places
sanctity somewhere between feasting and drunkenness. Ventre-saint-gris!
I don't belong to the religion of that oath. Woman is forgotten in it.
This astonishes me on the part of Henri IV. My friends, long live women!
I am old, they say; it's astonishing how much I feel in the mood to
be young. I should like to go and listen to the bagpipes in the woods.
Children who contrive to be beautiful and contented,--that intoxicates
me. I would like greatly to get married, if any one would have me. It is
impossible to imagine that God could have made us for anything but this:
to idolize, to coo, to preen ourselves, to be dove-like, to be dainty,
to bill and coo our loves from morn to night, to gaze at one's image in
one's little wife, to be proud, to be triumphant, to plume oneself; that
is the aim of life. There, let not that displease you which we used to
think in our day, when we were young folks. Ah! vertu-bamboche! what
charming women there were in those days, and what pretty little faces
and what lovely lasses! I committed my ravages among them. Then love
each other. If people did not love each other, I really do not see what
use there would be in having any springtime; and for my own part, I
should pray the good God to shut up all the beautiful things that he
shows us, and to take away from us and put back in his box, the flowers,
the birds, and the pretty maidens. My children, receive an old man's
blessing."

The evening was gay, lively and agreeable. The grandfather's sovereign
good humor gave the key-note to the whole feast, and each person
regulated his conduct on that almost centenarian cordiality. They danced
a little, they laughed a great deal; it was an amiable wedding. Goodman
Days of Yore might have been invited to it. However, he was present in
the person of Father Gillenormand.

There was a tumult, then silence.

The married pair disappeared.

A little after midnight, the Gillenormand house became a temple.

Here we pause. On the threshold of wedding nights stands a smiling angel
with his finger on his lips.

The soul enters into contemplation before that sanctuary where the
celebration of love takes place.

There should be flashes of light athwart such houses. The joy which
they contain ought to make its escape through the stones of the walls in
brilliancy, and vaguely illuminate the gloom. It is impossible that this
sacred and fatal festival should not give off a celestial radiance to
the infinite. Love is the sublime crucible wherein the fusion of the man
and the woman takes place; the being one, the being triple, the being
final, the human trinity proceeds from it. This birth of two souls into
one, ought to be an emotion for the gloom. The lover is the priest;
the ravished virgin is terrified. Something of that joy ascends to God.
Where true marriage is, that is to say, where there is love, the ideal
enters in. A nuptial bed makes a nook of dawn amid the shadows. If it
were given to the eye of the flesh to scan the formidable and charming
visions of the upper life, it is probable that we should behold the
forms of night, the winged unknowns, the blue passers of the invisible,
bend down, a throng of sombre heads, around the luminous house,
satisfied, showering benedictions, pointing out to each other the virgin
wife gently alarmed, sweetly terrified, and bearing the reflection of
human bliss upon their divine countenances. If at that supreme hour, the
wedded pair, dazzled with voluptuousness and believing themselves alone,
were to listen, they would hear in their chamber a confused rustling of
wings. Perfect happiness implies a mutual understanding with the angels.
That dark little chamber has all heaven for its ceiling. When two
mouths, rendered sacred by love, approach to create, it is impossible
that there should not be, above that ineffable kiss, a quivering
throughout the immense mystery of stars.

These felicities are the true ones. There is no joy outside of these
joys. Love is the only ecstasy. All the rest weeps.

To love, or to have loved,--this suffices. Demand nothing more. There
is no other pearl to be found in the shadowy folds of life. To love is a
fulfilment.




CHAPTER III--THE INSEPARABLE

What had become of Jean Valjean?

Immediately after having laughed, at Cosette's graceful command, when
no one was paying any heed to him, Jean Valjean had risen and had gained
the antechamber unperceived. This was the very room which, eight months
before, he had entered black with mud, with blood and powder, bringing
back the grandson to the grandfather. The old wainscoting was garlanded
with foliage and flowers; the musicians were seated on the sofa on which
they had laid Marius down. Basque, in a black coat, knee-breeches, white
stockings and white gloves, was arranging roses round all of the dishes
that were to be served. Jean Valjean pointed to his arm in its sling,
charged Basque to explain his absence, and went away.

The long windows of the dining-room opened on the street. Jean Valjean
stood for several minutes, erect and motionless in the darkness, beneath
those radiant windows. He listened. The confused sounds of the banquet
reached his ear. He heard the loud, commanding tones of the grandfather,
the violins, the clatter of the plates, the bursts of laughter, and
through all that merry uproar, he distinguished Cosette's sweet and
joyous voice.

He quitted the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, and returned to the Rue de
l'Homme Arme.

In order to return thither, he took the Rue Saint-Louis, the Rue
Culture-Sainte-Catherine, and the Blancs-Manteaux; it was a little
longer, but it was the road through which, for the last three months,
he had become accustomed to pass every day on his way from the Rue de
l'Homme Arme to the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, in order to avoid the
obstructions and the mud in the Rue Vielle-du-Temple.

This road, through which Cosette had passed, excluded for him all
possibility of any other itinerary.

Jean Valjean entered his lodgings. He lighted his candle and mounted
the stairs. The apartment was empty. Even Toussaint was no longer there.
Jean Valjean's step made more noise than usual in the chambers. All the
cupboards stood open. He penetrated to Cosette's bedroom. There were no
sheets on the bed. The pillow, covered with ticking, and without a case
or lace, was laid on the blankets folded up on the foot of the mattress,
whose covering was visible, and on which no one was ever to sleep again.
All the little feminine objects which Cosette was attached to had been
carried away; nothing remained except the heavy furniture and the four
walls. Toussaint's bed was despoiled in like manner. One bed only was
made up, and seemed to be waiting some one, and this was Jean Valjean's
bed.

Jean Valjean looked at the walls, closed some of the cupboard doors, and
went and came from one room to another.

Then he sought his own chamber once more, and set his candle on a table.

He had disengaged his arm from the sling, and he used his right hand as
though it did not hurt him.

He approached his bed, and his eyes rested, was it by chance? was it
intentionally? on the inseparable of which Cosette had been jealous, on
the little portmanteau which never left him. On his arrival in the Rue
de l'Homme Arme, on the 4th of June, he had deposited it on a round
table near the head of his bed. He went to this table with a sort of
vivacity, took a key from his pocket, and opened the valise.

From it he slowly drew forth the garments in which, ten years before,
Cosette had quitted Montfermeil; first the little gown, then the black
fichu, then the stout, coarse child's shoes which Cosette might almost
have worn still, so tiny were her feet, then the fustian bodice, which
was very thick, then the knitted petticoat, next the apron with pockets,
then the woollen stockings. These stockings, which still preserved the
graceful form of a tiny leg, were no longer than Jean Valjean's hand.
All this was black of hue. It was he who had brought those garments to
Montfermeil for her. As he removed them from the valise, he laid them on
the bed. He fell to thinking. He called up memories. It was in winter,
in a very cold month of December, she was shivering, half-naked, in
rags, her poor little feet were all red in their wooden shoes. He, Jean
Valjean, had made her abandon those rags to clothe herself in these
mourning habiliments. The mother must have felt pleased in her grave, to
see her daughter wearing mourning for her, and, above all, to see that
she was properly clothed, and that she was warm. He thought of that
forest of Montfermeil; they had traversed it together, Cosette and he;
he thought of what the weather had been, of the leafless trees, of the
wood destitute of birds, of the sunless sky; it mattered not, it was
charming. He arranged the tiny garments on the bed, the fichu next to
the petticoat, the stockings beside the shoes, and he looked at them,
one after the other. She was no taller than that, she had her big doll
in her arms, she had put her louis d'or in the pocket of that apron, she
had laughed, they walked hand in hand, she had no one in the world but
him.

Then his venerable, white head fell forward on the bed, that stoical old
heart broke, his face was engulfed, so to speak, in Cosette's garments,
and if any one had passed up the stairs at that moment, he would have
heard frightful sobs.




CHAPTER IV--THE IMMORTAL LIVER [68]

The old and formidable struggle, of which we have already witnessed so
many phases, began once more.

Jacob struggled with the angel but one night. Alas! how many times have
we beheld Jean Valjean seized bodily by his conscience, in the darkness,
and struggling desperately against it!

Unheard-of conflict! At certain moments the foot slips; at other moments
the ground crumbles away underfoot. How many times had that conscience,
mad for the good, clasped and overthrown him! How many times had the
truth set her knee inexorably upon his breast! How many times, hurled
to earth by the light, had he begged for mercy! How many times had
that implacable spark, lighted within him, and upon him by the Bishop,
dazzled him by force when he had wished to be blind! How many times
had he risen to his feet in the combat, held fast to the rock, leaning
against sophism, dragged in the dust, now getting the upper hand of his
conscience, again overthrown by it! How many times, after an equivoque,
after the specious and treacherous reasoning of egotism, had he heard
his irritated conscience cry in his ear: "A trip! you wretch!" How many
times had his refractory thoughts rattled convulsively in his throat,
under the evidence of duty! Resistance to God. Funereal sweats. What
secret wounds which he alone felt bleed! What excoriations in his
lamentable existence! How many times he had risen bleeding, bruised,
broken, enlightened, despair in his heart, serenity in his soul!
and, vanquished, he had felt himself the conqueror. And, after having
dislocated, broken, and rent his conscience with red-hot pincers, it had
said to him, as it stood over him, formidable, luminous, and tranquil:
"Now, go in peace!"

But on emerging from so melancholy a conflict, what a lugubrious peace,
alas!

Nevertheless, that night Jean Valjean felt that he was passing through
his final combat.

A heart-rending question presented itself.

Predestinations are not all direct; they do not open out in a straight
avenue before the predestined man; they have blind courts, impassable
alleys, obscure turns, disturbing crossroads offering the choice of many
ways. Jean Valjean had halted at that moment at the most perilous of
these crossroads.

He had come to the supreme crossing of good and evil. He had that
gloomy intersection beneath his eyes. On this occasion once more, as had
happened to him already in other sad vicissitudes, two roads opened out
before him, the one tempting, the other alarming.

Which was he to take?

He was counselled to the one which alarmed him by that mysterious index
finger which we all perceive whenever we fix our eyes on the darkness.

Once more, Jean Valjean had the choice between the terrible port and the
smiling ambush.

Is it then true? the soul may recover; but not fate. Frightful thing! an
incurable destiny!

This is the problem which presented itself to him:

In what manner was Jean Valjean to behave in relation to the happiness
of Cosette and Marius? It was he who had willed that happiness, it was
he who had brought it about; he had, himself, buried it in his entrails,
and at that moment, when he reflected on it, he was able to enjoy the
sort of satisfaction which an armorer would experience on recognizing
his factory mark on a knife, on withdrawing it, all smoking, from his
own breast.

Cosette had Marius, Marius possessed Cosette. They had everything, even
riches. And this was his doing.

But what was he, Jean Valjean, to do with this happiness, now that
it existed, now that it was there? Should he force himself on this
happiness? Should he treat it as belonging to him? No doubt, Cosette did
belong to another; but should he, Jean Valjean, retain of Cosette all
that he could retain? Should he remain the sort of father, half seen but
respected, which he had hitherto been? Should he, without saying a
word, bring his past to that future? Should he present himself there,
as though he had a right, and should he seat himself, veiled, at that
luminous fireside? Should he take those innocent hands into his tragic
hands, with a smile? Should he place upon the peaceful fender of the
Gillenormand drawing-room those feet of his, which dragged behind them
the disgraceful shadow of the law? Should he enter into participation in
the fair fortunes of Cosette and Marius? Should he render the obscurity
on his brow and the cloud upon theirs still more dense? Should he
place his catastrophe as a third associate in their felicity? Should he
continue to hold his peace? In a word, should he be the sinister mute of
destiny beside these two happy beings?

We must have become habituated to fatality and to encounters with it, in
order to have the daring to raise our eyes when certain questions appear
to us in all their horrible nakedness. Good or evil stands behind
this severe interrogation point. What are you going to do? demands the
sphinx.

This habit of trial Jean Valjean possessed. He gazed intently at the
sphinx.

He examined the pitiless problem under all its aspects.

Cosette, that charming existence, was the raft of this shipwreck. What
was he to do? To cling fast to it, or to let go his hold?

If he clung to it, he should emerge from disaster, he should ascend
again into the sunlight, he should let the bitter water drip from his
garments and his hair, he was saved, he should live.

And if he let go his hold?

Then the abyss.

Thus he took sad council with his thoughts. Or, to speak more correctly,
he fought; he kicked furiously internally, now against his will, now
against his conviction.

Happily for Jean Valjean that he had been able to weep. That relieved
him, possibly. But the beginning was savage. A tempest, more furious
than the one which had formerly driven him to Arras, broke loose within
him. The past surged up before him facing the present; he compared
them and sobbed. The silence of tears once opened, the despairing man
writhed.

He felt that he had been stopped short.

Alas! in this fight to the death between our egotism and our duty, when
we thus retreat step by step before our immutable ideal, bewildered,
furious, exasperated at having to yield, disputing the ground, hoping
for a possible flight, seeking an escape, what an abrupt and sinister
resistance does the foot of the wall offer in our rear!

To feel the sacred shadow which forms an obstacle!

The invisible inexorable, what an obsession!

Then, one is never done with conscience. Make your choice, Brutus; make
your choice, Cato. It is fathomless, since it is God. One flings into
that well the labor of one's whole life, one flings in one's fortune,
one flings in one's riches, one flings in one's success, one flings in
one's liberty or fatherland, one flings in one's well-being, one flings
in one's repose, one flings in one's joy! More! more! more! Empty the
vase! tip the urn! One must finish by flinging in one's heart.

Somewhere in the fog of the ancient hells, there is a tun like that.

Is not one pardonable, if one at last refuses! Can the inexhaustible
have any right? Are not chains which are endless above human strength?
Who would blame Sisyphus and Jean Valjean for saying: "It is enough!"

The obedience of matter is limited by friction; is there no limit to the
obedience of the soul? If perpetual motion is impossible, can perpetual
self-sacrifice be exacted?

The first step is nothing, it is the last which is difficult. What was
the Champmathieu affair in comparison with Cosette's marriage and of
that which it entailed? What is a re-entrance into the galleys, compared
to entrance into the void?

Oh, first step that must be descended, how sombre art thou! Oh, second
step, how black art thou!

How could he refrain from turning aside his head this time?

Martyrdom is sublimation, corrosive sublimation. It is a torture which
consecrates. One can consent to it for the first hour; one seats oneself
on the throne of glowing iron, one places on one's head the crown of hot
iron, one accepts the globe of red hot iron, one takes the sceptre of
red hot iron, but the mantle of flame still remains to be donned, and
comes there not a moment when the miserable flesh revolts and when one
abdicates from suffering?

At length, Jean Valjean entered into the peace of exhaustion.

He weighed, he reflected, he considered the alternatives, the mysterious
balance of light and darkness.

Should he impose his galleys on those two dazzling children, or should
he consummate his irremediable engulfment by himself? On one side lay
the sacrifice of Cosette, on the other that of himself.

At what solution should he arrive? What decision did he come to?

What resolution did he take? What was his own inward definitive response
to the unbribable interrogatory of fatality? What door did he decide to
open? Which side of his life did he resolve upon closing and condemning?
Among all the unfathomable precipices which surrounded him, which was
his choice? What extremity did he accept? To which of the gulfs did he
nod his head?

His dizzy revery lasted all night long.

He remained there until daylight, in the same attitude, bent double over
that bed, prostrate beneath the enormity of fate, crushed, perchance,
alas! with clenched fists, with arms outspread at right angles, like a
man crucified who has been un-nailed, and flung face down on the earth.
There he remained for twelve hours, the twelve long hours of a long
winter's night, ice-cold, without once raising his head, and without
uttering a word. He was as motionless as a corpse, while his thoughts
wallowed on the earth and soared, now like the hydra, now like the
eagle. Any one to behold him thus motionless would have pronounced him
dead; all at once he shuddered convulsively, and his mouth, glued to
Cosette's garments, kissed them; then it could be seen that he was
alive.

Who could see? Since Jean Valjean was alone, and there was no one there.

The One who is in the shadows.




BOOK SEVENTH.--THE LAST DRAUGHT FROM THE CUP

[Illustration: Last Drop from the Cup  5b7-1-last-drop]




CHAPTER I--THE SEVENTH CIRCLE AND THE EIGHTH HEAVEN

The days that follow weddings are solitary. People respect the
meditations of the happy pair. And also, their tardy slumbers, to some
degree. The tumult of visits and congratulations only begins later on.
On the morning of the 17th of February, it was a little past midday when
Basque, with napkin and feather-duster under his arm, busy in setting
his antechamber to rights, heard a light tap at the door. There had been
no ring, which was discreet on such a day. Basque opened the door, and
beheld M. Fauchelevent. He introduced him into the drawing-room, still
encumbered and topsy-turvy, and which bore the air of a field of battle
after the joys of the preceding evening.

"Dame, sir," remarked Basque, "we all woke up late."

"Is your master up?" asked Jean Valjean.

"How is Monsieur's arm?" replied Basque.

"Better. Is your master up?"

"Which one? the old one or the new one?"

"Monsieur Pontmercy."

"Monsieur le Baron," said Basque, drawing himself up.

A man is a Baron most of all to his servants. He counts for something
with them; they are what a philosopher would call, bespattered with the
title, and that flatters them. Marius, be it said in passing, a militant
republican as he had proved, was now a Baron in spite of himself. A
small revolution had taken place in the family in connection with
this title. It was now M. Gillenormand who clung to it, and Marius who
detached himself from it. But Colonel Pontmercy had written: "My son
will bear my title." Marius obeyed. And then, Cosette, in whom the woman
was beginning to dawn, was delighted to be a Baroness.

"Monsieur le Baron?" repeated Basque. "I will go and see. I will tell
him that M. Fauchelevent is here."

"No. Do not tell him that it is I. Tell him that some one wishes to
speak to him in private, and mention no name."

"Ah!" ejaculated Basque.

"I wish to surprise him."

"Ah!" ejaculated Basque once more, emitting his second "ah!" as an
explanation of the first.

And he left the room.

Jean Valjean remained alone.

The drawing-room, as we have just said, was in great disorder. It seemed
as though, by lending an air, one might still hear the vague noise of
the wedding. On the polished floor lay all sorts of flowers which
had fallen from garlands and head-dresses. The wax candles, burned
to stumps, added stalactites of wax to the crystal drops of the
chandeliers. Not a single piece of furniture was in its place. In the
corners, three or four arm-chairs, drawn close together in a circle,
had the appearance of continuing a conversation. The whole effect was
cheerful. A certain grace still lingers round a dead feast. It has been
a happy thing. On the chairs in disarray, among those fading flowers,
beneath those extinct lights, people have thought of joy. The sun
had succeeded to the chandelier, and made its way gayly into the
drawing-room.

Several minutes elapsed. Jean Valjean stood motionless on the spot where
Basque had left him. He was very pale. His eyes were hollow, and so
sunken in his head by sleeplessness that they nearly disappeared in
their orbits. His black coat bore the weary folds of a garment that
has been up all night. The elbows were whitened with the down which the
friction of cloth against linen leaves behind it.

Jean Valjean stared at the window outlined on the polished floor at his
feet by the sun.

There came a sound at the door, and he raised his eyes.

Marius entered, his head well up, his mouth smiling, an indescribable
light on his countenance, his brow expanded, his eyes triumphant. He had
not slept either.

"It is you, father!" he exclaimed, on catching sight of Jean Valjean;
"that idiot of a Basque had such a mysterious air! But you have come too
early. It is only half past twelve. Cosette is asleep."

That word: "Father," said to M. Fauchelevent by Marius, signified:
supreme felicity. There had always existed, as the reader knows, a lofty
wall, a coldness and a constraint between them; ice which must be broken
or melted. Marius had reached that point of intoxication when the wall
was lowered, when the ice dissolved, and when M. Fauchelevent was to
him, as to Cosette, a father.

He continued: his words poured forth, as is the peculiarity of divine
paroxysms of joy.

"How glad I am to see you! If you only knew how we missed you yesterday!
Good morning, father. How is your hand? Better, is it not?"

And, satisfied with the favorable reply which he had made to himself, he
pursued:

"We have both been talking about you. Cosette loves you so dearly! You
must not forget that you have a chamber here, We want nothing more to
do with the Rue de l'Homme Arme. We will have no more of it at all. How
could you go to live in a street like that, which is sickly, which is
disagreeable, which is ugly, which has a barrier at one end, where one
is cold, and into which one cannot enter? You are to come and install
yourself here. And this very day. Or you will have to deal with Cosette.
She means to lead us all by the nose, I warn you. You have your own
chamber here, it is close to ours, it opens on the garden; the trouble
with the clock has been attended to, the bed is made, it is all ready,
you have only to take possession of it. Near your bed Cosette has placed
a huge, old, easy-chair covered with Utrecht velvet and she has said to
it: 'Stretch out your arms to him.' A nightingale comes to the clump of
acacias opposite your windows, every spring. In two months more you will
have it. You will have its nest on your left and ours on your right. By
night it will sing, and by day Cosette will prattle. Your chamber faces
due South. Cosette will arrange your books for you, your Voyages of
Captain Cook and the other,--Vancouver's and all your affairs. I believe
that there is a little valise to which you are attached, I have fixed
upon a corner of honor for that. You have conquered my grandfather, you
suit him. We will live together. Do you play whist? you will overwhelm
my grandfather with delight if you play whist. It is you who shall take
Cosette to walk on the days when I am at the courts, you shall give her
your arm, you know, as you used to, in the Luxembourg. We are absolutely
resolved to be happy. And you shall be included in it, in our happiness,
do you hear, father? Come, will you breakfast with us to-day?"

"Sir," said Jean Valjean, "I have something to say to you. I am an
ex-convict."

The limit of shrill sounds perceptible can be overleaped, as well in
the case of the mind as in that of the ear. These words: "I am an
ex-convict," proceeding from the mouth of M. Fauchelevent and entering
the ear of Marius overshot the possible. It seemed to him that something
had just been said to him; but he did not know what. He stood with his
mouth wide open.

Then he perceived that the man who was addressing him was frightful.
Wholly absorbed in his own dazzled state, he had not, up to that moment,
observed the other man's terrible pallor.

Jean Valjean untied the black cravat which supported his right arm,
unrolled the linen from around his hand, bared his thumb and showed it
to Marius.

"There is nothing the matter with my hand," said he.

Marius looked at the thumb.

"There has not been anything the matter with it," went on Jean Valjean.

There was, in fact, no trace of any injury.

Jean Valjean continued:

"It was fitting that I should be absent from your marriage. I absented
myself as much as was in my power. So I invented this injury in order
that I might not commit a forgery, that I might not introduce a flaw
into the marriage documents, in order that I might escape from signing."

Marius stammered.

"What is the meaning of this?"

"The meaning of it is," replied Jean Valjean, "that I have been in the
galleys."

"You are driving me mad!" exclaimed Marius in terror.

"Monsieur Pontmercy," said Jean Valjean, "I was nineteen years in the
galleys. For theft. Then, I was condemned for life for theft, for a
second offence. At the present moment, I have broken my ban."

In vain did Marius recoil before the reality, refuse the fact, resist
the evidence, he was forced to give way. He began to understand, and, as
always happens in such cases, he understood too much. An inward shudder
of hideous enlightenment flashed through him; an idea which made him
quiver traversed his mind. He caught a glimpse of a wretched destiny for
himself in the future.

"Say all, say all!" he cried. "You are Cosette's father!"

And he retreated a couple of paces with a movement of indescribable
horror.

Jean Valjean elevated his head with so much majesty of attitude that he
seemed to grow even to the ceiling.

"It is necessary that you should believe me here, sir; although our oath
to others may not be received in law . . ."

Here he paused, then, with a sort of sovereign and sepulchral authority,
he added, articulating slowly, and emphasizing the syllables:

". . . You will believe me. I the father of Cosette! before God, no.
Monsieur le Baron Pontmercy, I am a peasant of Faverolles. I earned my
living by pruning trees. My name is not Fauchelevent, but Jean Valjean.
I am not related to Cosette. Reassure yourself."

Marius stammered:

"Who will prove that to me?"

"I. Since I tell you so."

Marius looked at the man. He was melancholy yet tranquil. No lie could
proceed from such a calm. That which is icy is sincere. The truth could
be felt in that chill of the tomb.

"I believe you," said Marius.

Jean Valjean bent his head, as though taking note of this, and
continued:

"What am I to Cosette? A passer-by. Ten years ago, I did not know that
she was in existence. I love her, it is true. One loves a child whom one
has seen when very young, being old oneself. When one is old, one feels
oneself a grandfather towards all little children. You may, it seems to
me, suppose that I have something which resembles a heart. She was an
orphan. Without either father or mother. She needed me. That is why I
began to love her. Children are so weak that the first comer, even a man
like me, can become their protector. I have fulfilled this duty towards
Cosette. I do not think that so slight a thing can be called a good
action; but if it be a good action, well, say that I have done it.
Register this attenuating circumstance. To-day, Cosette passes out of my
life; our two roads part. Henceforth, I can do nothing for her. She is
Madame Pontmercy. Her providence has changed. And Cosette gains by the
change. All is well. As for the six hundred thousand francs, you do not
mention them to me, but I forestall your thought, they are a deposit.
How did that deposit come into my hands? What does that matter? I
restore the deposit. Nothing more can be demanded of me. I complete
the restitution by announcing my true name. That concerns me. I have a
reason for desiring that you should know who I am."

And Jean Valjean looked Marius full in the face.

All that Marius experienced was tumultuous and incoherent. Certain gusts
of destiny produce these billows in our souls.

We have all undergone moments of trouble in which everything within us
is dispersed; we say the first things that occur to us, which are
not always precisely those which should be said. There are sudden
revelations which one cannot bear, and which intoxicate like baleful
wine. Marius was stupefied by the novel situation which presented itself
to him, to the point of addressing that man almost like a person who was
angry with him for this avowal.

"But why," he exclaimed, "do you tell me all this? Who forces you to
do so? You could have kept your secret to yourself. You are neither
denounced, nor tracked nor pursued. You have a reason for wantonly
making such a revelation. Conclude. There is something more. In what
connection do you make this confession? What is your motive?"

"My motive?" replied Jean Valjean in a voice so low and dull that one
would have said that he was talking to himself rather than to Marius.
"From what motive, in fact, has this convict just said 'I am a convict'?
Well, yes! the motive is strange. It is out of honesty. Stay, the
unfortunate point is that I have a thread in my heart, which keeps me
fast. It is when one is old that that sort of thread is particularly
solid. All life falls in ruin around one; one resists. Had I been able
to tear out that thread, to break it, to undo the knot or to cut it, to
go far away, I should have been safe. I had only to go away; there are
diligences in the Rue Bouloy; you are happy; I am going. I have tried
to break that thread, I have jerked at it, it would not break, I tore my
heart with it. Then I said: 'I cannot live anywhere else than here.' I
must stay. Well, yes, you are right, I am a fool, why not simply
remain here? You offer me a chamber in this house, Madame Pontmercy is
sincerely attached to me, she said to the arm-chair: 'Stretch out your
arms to him,' your grandfather demands nothing better than to have me, I
suit him, we shall live together, and take our meals in common, I shall
give Cosette my arm . . . Madame Pontmercy, excuse me, it is a habit, we
shall have but one roof, one table, one fire, the same chimney-corner
in winter, the same promenade in summer, that is joy, that is happiness,
that is everything. We shall live as one family. One family!"

At that word, Jean Valjean became wild. He folded his arms, glared at
the floor beneath his feet as though he would have excavated an abyss
therein, and his voice suddenly rose in thundering tones:

"As one family! No. I belong to no family. I do not belong to yours.
I do not belong to any family of men. In houses where people are among
themselves, I am superfluous. There are families, but there is nothing
of the sort for me. I am an unlucky wretch; I am left outside. Did I
have a father and mother? I almost doubt it. On the day when I gave that
child in marriage, all came to an end. I have seen her happy, and that
she is with a man whom she loves, and that there exists here a kind old
man, a household of two angels, and all joys in that house, and that it
was well, I said to myself: 'Enter thou not.' I could have lied, it is
true, have deceived you all, and remained Monsieur Fauchelevent. So long
as it was for her, I could lie; but now it would be for myself, and I
must not. It was sufficient for me to hold my peace, it is true, and all
would go on. You ask me what has forced me to speak? a very odd thing;
my conscience. To hold my peace was very easy, however. I passed the
night in trying to persuade myself to it; you questioned me, and what I
have just said to you is so extraordinary that you have the right to do
it; well, yes, I have passed the night in alleging reasons to myself,
and I gave myself very good reasons, I have done what I could. But there
are two things in which I have not succeeded; in breaking the thread
that holds me fixed, riveted and sealed here by the heart, or in
silencing some one who speaks softly to me when I am alone. That is why
I have come hither to tell you everything this morning. Everything or
nearly everything. It is useless to tell you that which concerns only
myself; I keep that to myself. You know the essential points. So I have
taken my mystery and have brought it to you. And I have disembowelled my
secret before your eyes. It was not a resolution that was easy to take.
I struggled all night long. Ah! you think that I did not tell myself
that this was no Champmathieu affair, that by concealing my name I was
doing no one any injury, that the name of Fauchelevent had been given to
me by Fauchelevent himself, out of gratitude for a service rendered to
him, and that I might assuredly keep it, and that I should be happy in
that chamber which you offer me, that I should not be in any one's way,
that I should be in my own little corner, and that, while you would have
Cosette, I should have the idea that I was in the same house with her.
Each one of us would have had his share of happiness. If I continued to
be Monsieur Fauchelevent, that would arrange everything. Yes, with the
exception of my soul. There was joy everywhere upon my surface, but the
bottom of my soul remained black. It is not enough to be happy, one must
be content. Thus I should have remained Monsieur Fauchelevent, thus
I should have concealed my true visage, thus, in the presence of your
expansion, I should have had an enigma, thus, in the midst of your full
noonday, I should have had shadows, thus, without crying ''ware,' I
should have simply introduced the galleys to your fireside, I should
have taken my seat at your table with the thought that if you knew who
I was, you would drive me from it, I should have allowed myself to
be served by domestics who, had they known, would have said: 'How
horrible!' I should have touched you with my elbow, which you have a
right to dislike, I should have filched your clasps of the hand! There
would have existed in your house a division of respect between venerable
white locks and tainted white locks; at your most intimate hours, when
all hearts thought themselves open to the very bottom to all the rest,
when we four were together, your grandfather, you two and myself, a
stranger would have been present! I should have been side by side with
you in your existence, having for my only care not to disarrange the
cover of my dreadful pit. Thus, I, a dead man, should have thrust myself
upon you who are living beings. I should have condemned her to myself
forever. You and Cosette and I would have had all three of our heads in
the green cap! Does it not make you shudder? I am only the most crushed
of men; I should have been the most monstrous of men. And I should have
committed that crime every day! And I should have had that face of night
upon my visage every day! every day! And I should have communicated to
you a share in my taint every day! every day! to you, my dearly beloved,
my children, to you, my innocent creatures! Is it nothing to hold one's
peace? is it a simple matter to keep silence? No, it is not simple.
There is a silence which lies. And my lie, and my fraud and my
indignity, and my cowardice and my treason and my crime, I should have
drained drop by drop, I should have spit it out, then swallowed it
again, I should have finished at midnight and have begun again at
midday, and my 'good morning' would have lied, and my 'good night' would
have lied, and I should have slept on it, I should have eaten it, with
my bread, and I should have looked Cosette in the face, and I should
have responded to the smile of the angel by the smile of the damned
soul, and I should have been an abominable villain! Why should I do
it? in order to be happy. In order to be happy. Have I the right to be
happy? I stand outside of life, Sir."

Jean Valjean paused. Marius listened. Such chains of ideas and of
anguishes cannot be interrupted. Jean Valjean lowered his voice once
more, but it was no longer a dull voice--it was a sinister voice.

"You ask why I speak? I am neither denounced, nor pursued, nor tracked,
you say. Yes! I am denounced! yes! I am tracked! By whom? By myself.
It is I who bar the passage to myself, and I drag myself, and I push
myself, and I arrest myself, and I execute myself, and when one holds
oneself, one is firmly held."

And, seizing a handful of his own coat by the nape of the neck and
extending it towards Marius:

"Do you see that fist?" he continued. "Don't you think that it holds
that collar in such a wise as not to release it? Well! conscience
is another grasp! If one desires to be happy, sir, one must never
understand duty; for, as soon as one has comprehended it, it is
implacable. One would say that it punished you for comprehending it;
but no, it rewards you; for it places you in a hell, where you feel God
beside you. One has no sooner lacerated his own entrails than he is at
peace with himself."

And, with a poignant accent, he added:

"Monsieur Pontmercy, this is not common sense, I am an honest man. It is
by degrading myself in your eyes that I elevate myself in my own. This
has happened to me once before, but it was less painful then; it was
a mere nothing. Yes, an honest man. I should not be so if, through my
fault, you had continued to esteem me; now that you despise me, I am so.
I have that fatality hanging over me that, not being able to ever have
anything but stolen consideration, that consideration humiliates me,
and crushes me inwardly, and, in order that I may respect myself, it is
necessary that I should be despised. Then I straighten up again. I am
a galley-slave who obeys his conscience. I know well that that is most
improbable. But what would you have me do about it? it is the fact.
I have entered into engagements with myself; I keep them. There are
encounters which bind us, there are chances which involve us in duties.
You see, Monsieur Pontmercy, various things have happened to me in the
course of my life."

Again Jean Valjean paused, swallowing his saliva with an effort, as
though his words had a bitter after-taste, and then he went on:

"When one has such a horror hanging over one, one has not the right to
make others share it without their knowledge, one has not the right to
make them slip over one's own precipice without their perceiving it,
one has not the right to let one's red blouse drag upon them, one has no
right to slyly encumber with one's misery the happiness of others. It is
hideous to approach those who are healthy, and to touch them in the dark
with one's ulcer. In spite of the fact that Fauchelevent lent me his
name, I have no right to use it; he could give it to me, but I could not
take it. A name is an _I_. You see, sir, that I have thought somewhat, I
have read a little, although I am a peasant; and you see that I
express myself properly. I understand things. I have procured myself an
education. Well, yes, to abstract a name and to place oneself under it
is dishonest. Letters of the alphabet can be filched, like a purse or a
watch. To be a false signature in flesh and blood, to be a living false
key, to enter the house of honest people by picking their lock, never
more to look straightforward, to forever eye askance, to be infamous
within the _I_, no! no! no! no! no! It is better to suffer, to bleed, to
weep, to tear one's skin from the flesh with one's nails, to pass nights
writhing in anguish, to devour oneself body and soul. That is why I have
just told you all this. Wantonly, as you say."

He drew a painful breath, and hurled this final word:

"In days gone by, I stole a loaf of bread in order to live; to-day, in
order to live, I will not steal a name."

"To live!" interrupted Marius. "You do not need that name in order to
live?"

"Ah! I understand the matter," said Jean Valjean, raising and lowering
his head several times in succession.

A silence ensued. Both held their peace, each plunged in a gulf of
thoughts. Marius was sitting near a table and resting the corner of his
mouth on one of his fingers, which was folded back. Jean Valjean was
pacing to and fro. He paused before a mirror, and remained motionless.
Then, as though replying to some inward course of reasoning, he said, as
he gazed at the mirror, which he did not see:

"While, at present, I am relieved."

He took up his march again, and walked to the other end of the
drawing-room. At the moment when he turned round, he perceived that
Marius was watching his walk. Then he said, with an inexpressible
intonation:

"I drag my leg a little. Now you understand why!"

Then he turned fully round towards Marius:

"And now, sir, imagine this: I have said nothing, I have remained
Monsieur Fauchelevent, I have taken my place in your house, I am one of
you, I am in my chamber, I come to breakfast in the morning in slippers,
in the evening all three of us go to the play, I accompany Madame
Pontmercy to the Tuileries, and to the Place Royale, we are together,
you think me your equal; one fine day you are there, and I am there, we
are conversing, we are laughing; all at once, you hear a voice shouting
this name: 'Jean Valjean!' and behold, that terrible hand, the police,
darts from the darkness, and abruptly tears off my mask!"

Again he paused; Marius had sprung to his feet with a shudder. Jean
Valjean resumed:

"What do you say to that?"

Marius' silence answered for him.

Jean Valjean continued:

"You see that I am right in not holding my peace. Be happy, be
in heaven, be the angel of an angel, exist in the sun, be content
therewith, and do not trouble yourself about the means which a poor
damned wretch takes to open his breast and force his duty to come forth;
you have before you, sir, a wretched man."

Marius slowly crossed the room, and, when he was quite close to Jean
Valjean, he offered the latter his hand.

But Marius was obliged to step up and take that hand which was not
offered, Jean Valjean let him have his own way, and it seemed to Marius
that he pressed a hand of marble.

"My grandfather has friends," said Marius; "I will procure your pardon."

"It is useless," replied Jean Valjean. "I am believed to be dead, and
that suffices. The dead are not subjected to surveillance. They are
supposed to rot in peace. Death is the same thing as pardon."

And, disengaging the hand which Marius held, he added, with a sort of
inexorable dignity:

"Moreover, the friend to whom I have recourse is the doing of my duty;
and I need but one pardon, that of my conscience."

At that moment, a door at the other end of the drawing-room opened
gently half way, and in the opening Cosette's head appeared. They saw
only her sweet face, her hair was in charming disorder, her eyelids were
still swollen with sleep. She made the movement of a bird, which thrusts
its head out of its nest, glanced first at her husband, then at Jean
Valjean, and cried to them with a smile, so that they seemed to behold a
smile at the heart of a rose:

"I will wager that you are talking politics. How stupid that is, instead
of being with me!"

Jean Valjean shuddered.

"Cosette! . . ." stammered Marius.

And he paused. One would have said that they were two criminals.

Cosette, who was radiant, continued to gaze at both of them. There was
something in her eyes like gleams of paradise.

"I have caught you in the very act," said Cosette. "Just now, I heard my
father Fauchelevent through the door saying: 'Conscience . . . doing my
duty . . .' That is politics, indeed it is. I will not have it. People
should not talk politics the very next day. It is not right."

"You are mistaken. Cosette," said Marius, "we are talking business. We
are discussing the best investment of your six hundred thousand
francs . . ."

"That is not it at all," interrupted Cosette. "I am coming. Does any
body want me here?"

And, passing resolutely through the door, she entered the drawing-room.
She was dressed in a voluminous white dressing-gown, with a thousand
folds and large sleeves which, starting from the neck, fell to her feet.
In the golden heavens of some ancient gothic pictures, there are these
charming sacks fit to clothe the angels.

She contemplated herself from head to foot in a long mirror, then
exclaimed, in an outburst of ineffable ecstasy:

"There was once a King and a Queen. Oh! how happy I am!"

That said, she made a curtsey to Marius and to Jean Valjean.

"There," said she, "I am going to install myself near you in an
easy-chair, we breakfast in half an hour, you shall say anything you
like, I know well that men must talk, and I will be very good."

Marius took her by the arm and said lovingly to her:

"We are talking business."

"By the way," said Cosette, "I have opened my window, a flock of
pierrots has arrived in the garden,--Birds, not maskers. To-day is
Ash-Wednesday; but not for the birds."

"I tell you that we are talking business, go, my little Cosette, leave
us alone for a moment. We are talking figures. That will bore you."

"You have a charming cravat on this morning, Marius. You are very
dandified, monseigneur. No, it will not bore me."

"I assure you that it will bore you."

"No. Since it is you. I shall not understand you, but I shall listen
to you. When one hears the voices of those whom one loves, one does not
need to understand the words that they utter. That we should be here
together--that is all that I desire. I shall remain with you, bah!"

"You are my beloved Cosette! Impossible."

"Impossible!"

"Yes."

"Very good," said Cosette. "I was going to tell you some news. I could
have told you that your grandfather is still asleep, that your aunt is
at mass, that the chimney in my father Fauchelevent's room smokes, that
Nicolette has sent for the chimney-sweep, that Toussaint and Nicolette
have already quarrelled, that Nicolette makes sport of Toussaint's
stammer. Well, you shall know nothing. Ah! it is impossible? you shall
see, gentlemen, that I, in my turn, can say: It is impossible. Then who
will be caught? I beseech you, my little Marius, let me stay here with
you two."

"I swear to you, that it is indispensable that we should be alone."

"Well, am I anybody?"

Jean Valjean had not uttered a single word. Cosette turned to him:

"In the first place, father, I want you to come and embrace me. What do
you mean by not saying anything instead of taking my part? who gave me
such a father as that? You must perceive that my family life is very
unhappy. My husband beats me. Come, embrace me instantly."

Jean Valjean approached.

Cosette turned toward Marius.

"As for you, I shall make a face at you."

Then she presented her brow to Jean Valjean.

Jean Valjean advanced a step toward her.

Cosette recoiled.

"Father, you are pale. Does your arm hurt you?"

"It is well," said Jean Valjean.

"Did you sleep badly?"

"No."

"Are you sad?"

"No."

"Embrace me if you are well, if you sleep well, if you are content, I
will not scold you."

And again she offered him her brow.

Jean Valjean dropped a kiss upon that brow whereon rested a celestial
gleam.

"Smile."

Jean Valjean obeyed. It was the smile of a spectre.

"Now, defend me against my husband."

"Cosette! . . ." ejaculated Marius.

"Get angry, father. Say that I must stay. You can certainly talk before
me. So you think me very silly. What you say is astonishing! business,
placing money in a bank a great matter truly. Men make mysteries out of
nothing. I am very pretty this morning. Look at me, Marius."

And with an adorable shrug of the shoulders, and an indescribably
exquisite pout, she glanced at Marius.

"I love you!" said Marius.

"I adore you!" said Cosette.

And they fell irresistibly into each other's arms.

"Now," said Cosette, adjusting a fold of her dressing-gown, with a
triumphant little grimace, "I shall stay."

"No, not that," said Marius, in a supplicating tone. "We have to finish
something."

"Still no?"

Marius assumed a grave tone:

"I assure you, Cosette, that it is impossible."

"Ah! you put on your man's voice, sir. That is well, I go. You, father,
have not upheld me. Monsieur my father, monsieur my husband, you are
tyrants. I shall go and tell grandpapa. If you think that I am going to
return and talk platitudes to you, you are mistaken. I am proud. I shall
wait for you now. You shall see, that it is you who are going to be
bored without me. I am going, it is well."

And she left the room.

Two seconds later, the door opened once more, her fresh and rosy head
was again thrust between the two leaves, and she cried to them:

"I am very angry indeed."

The door closed again, and the shadows descended once more.

It was as though a ray of sunlight should have suddenly traversed the
night, without itself being conscious of it.

Marius made sure that the door was securely closed.

"Poor Cosette!" he murmured, "when she finds out . . ."

At that word Jean Valjean trembled in every limb. He fixed on Marius a
bewildered eye.

"Cosette! oh yes, it is true, you are going to tell Cosette about this.
That is right. Stay, I had not thought of that. One has the strength for
one thing, but not for another. Sir, I conjure you, I entreat now, sir,
give me your most sacred word of honor, that you will not tell her. Is
it not enough that you should know it? I have been able to say it myself
without being forced to it, I could have told it to the universe, to the
whole world,--it was all one to me. But she, she does not know what
it is, it would terrify her. What, a convict! we should be obliged to
explain matters to her, to say to her: 'He is a man who has been in the
galleys.' She saw the chain-gang pass by one day. Oh! My God!" . . . He
dropped into an arm-chair and hid his face in his hands.

His grief was not audible, but from the quivering of his shoulders it
was evident that he was weeping. Silent tears, terrible tears.

There is something of suffocation in the sob. He was seized with a sort
of convulsion, he threw himself against the back of the chair as though
to gain breath, letting his arms fall, and allowing Marius to see his
face inundated with tears, and Marius heard him murmur, so low that his
voice seemed to issue from fathomless depths:

"Oh! would that I could die!"

"Be at your ease," said Marius, "I will keep your secret for myself
alone." And, less touched, perhaps, than he ought to have been, but
forced, for the last hour, to familiarize himself with something
as unexpected as it was dreadful, gradually beholding the convict
superposed before his very eyes, upon M. Fauchelevent, overcome,
little by little, by that lugubrious reality, and led, by the natural
inclination of the situation, to recognize the space which had just been
placed between that man and himself, Marius added:

"It is impossible that I should not speak a word to you with regard to
the deposit which you have so faithfully and honestly remitted. That is
an act of probity. It is just that some recompense should be bestowed on
you. Fix the sum yourself, it shall be counted out to you. Do not fear
to set it very high."

"I thank you, sir," replied Jean Valjean, gently.

He remained in thought for a moment, mechanically passing the tip of his
fore-finger across his thumb-nail, then he lifted up his voice:

"All is nearly over. But one last thing remains for me . . ."

"What is it?"

Jean Valjean struggled with what seemed a last hesitation, and, without
voice, without breath, he stammered rather than said:

"Now that you know, do you think, sir, you, who are the master, that I
ought not to see Cosette any more?"

"I think that would be better," replied Marius coldly.

"I shall never see her more," murmured Jean Valjean. And he directed his
steps towards the door.

He laid his hand on the knob, the latch yielded, the door opened. Jean
Valjean pushed it open far enough to pass through, stood motionless for
a second, then closed the door again and turned to Marius.

He was no longer pale, he was livid. There were no longer any tears
in his eyes, but only a sort of tragic flame. His voice had regained a
strange composure.

"Stay, sir," he said. "If you will allow it, I will come to see her. I
assure you that I desire it greatly. If I had not cared to see Cosette,
I should not have made to you the confession that I have made, I should
have gone away; but, as I desired to remain in the place where Cosette
is, and to continue to see her, I had to tell you about it honestly. You
follow my reasoning, do you not? it is a matter easily understood. You
see, I have had her with me for more than nine years. We lived first
in that hut on the boulevard, then in the convent, then near the
Luxembourg. That was where you saw her for the first time. You remember
her blue plush hat. Then we went to the Quartier des Invalides, where
there was a railing on a garden, the Rue Plumet. I lived in a little
back court-yard, whence I could hear her piano. That was my life. We
never left each other. That lasted for nine years and some months. I
was like her own father, and she was my child. I do not know whether
you understand, Monsieur Pontmercy, but to go away now, never to see her
again, never to speak to her again, to no longer have anything, would
be hard. If you do not disapprove of it, I will come to see Cosette from
time to time. I will not come often. I will not remain long. You shall
give orders that I am to be received in the little waiting-room. On the
ground floor. I could enter perfectly well by the back door, but that
might create surprise perhaps, and it would be better, I think, for me
to enter by the usual door. Truly, sir, I should like to see a little
more of Cosette. As rarely as you please. Put yourself in my place,
I have nothing left but that. And then, we must be cautious. If I
no longer come at all, it would produce a bad effect, it would be
considered singular. What I can do, by the way, is to come in the
afternoon, when night is beginning to fall."

"You shall come every evening," said Marius, "and Cosette will be
waiting for you."

"You are kind, sir," said Jean Valjean.

Marius saluted Jean Valjean, happiness escorted despair to the door, and
these two men parted.




CHAPTER II--THE OBSCURITIES WHICH A REVELATION CAN CONTAIN

Marius was quite upset.

The sort of estrangement which he had always felt towards the man beside
whom he had seen Cosette, was now explained to him. There was something
enigmatic about that person, of which his instinct had warned him.

This enigma was the most hideous of disgraces, the galleys. This M.
Fauchelevent was the convict Jean Valjean.

To abruptly find such a secret in the midst of one's happiness resembles
the discovery of a scorpion in a nest of turtledoves.

Was the happiness of Marius and Cosette thenceforth condemned to such a
neighborhood? Was this an accomplished fact? Did the acceptance of that
man form a part of the marriage now consummated? Was there nothing to be
done?

Had Marius wedded the convict as well?

In vain may one be crowned with light and joy, in vain may one taste the
grand purple hour of life, happy love, such shocks would force even the
archangel in his ecstasy, even the demigod in his glory, to shudder.

As is always the case in changes of view of this nature, Marius asked
himself whether he had nothing with which to reproach himself. Had he
been wanting in divination? Had he been wanting in prudence? Had he
involuntarily dulled his wits? A little, perhaps. Had he entered upon
this love affair, which had ended in his marriage to Cosette, without
taking sufficient precautions to throw light upon the surroundings? He
admitted,--it is thus, by a series of successive admissions of ourselves
in regard to ourselves, that life amends us, little by little,--he
admitted the chimerical and visionary side of his nature, a sort of
internal cloud peculiar to many organizations, and which, in paroxysms
of passion and sorrow, dilates as the temperature of the soul changes,
and invades the entire man, to such a degree as to render him nothing
more than a conscience bathed in a mist. We have more than once
indicated this characteristic element of Marius' individuality.

He recalled that, in the intoxication of his love, in the Rue Plumet,
during those six or seven ecstatic weeks, he had not even spoke to
Cosette of that drama in the Gorbeau hovel, where the victim had taken
up such a singular line of silence during the struggle and the ensuing
flight. How had it happened that he had not mentioned this to Cosette?
Yet it was so near and so terrible! How had it come to pass that he had
not even named the Thenardiers, and, particularly, on the day when he
had encountered Eponine? He now found it almost difficult to explain his
silence of that time. Nevertheless, he could account for it. He recalled
his benumbed state, his intoxication with Cosette, love absorbing
everything, that catching away of each other into the ideal, and perhaps
also, like the imperceptible quantity of reason mingled with this
violent and charming state of the soul, a vague, dull instinct impelling
him to conceal and abolish in his memory that redoubtable adventure,
contact with which he dreaded, in which he did not wish to play any
part, his agency in which he had kept secret, and in which he could be
neither narrator nor witness without being an accuser.

Moreover, these few weeks had been a flash of lightning; there had been
no time for anything except love.

In short, having weighed everything, turned everything over in his mind,
examined everything, whatever might have been the consequences if he had
told Cosette about the Gorbeau ambush, even if he had discovered that
Jean Valjean was a convict, would that have changed him, Marius? Would
that have changed her, Cosette? Would he have drawn back? Would he have
adored her any the less? Would he have refrained from marrying her? No.
Then there was nothing to regret, nothing with which he need reproach
himself. All was well. There is a deity for those drunken men who are
called lovers. Marius blind, had followed the path which he would have
chosen had he been in full possession of his sight. Love had bandaged
his eyes, in order to lead him whither? To paradise.

But this paradise was henceforth complicated with an infernal
accompaniment.

Marius' ancient estrangement towards this man, towards this Fauchelevent
who had turned into Jean Valjean, was at present mingled with horror.

In this horror, let us state, there was some pity, and even a certain
surprise.

This thief, this thief guilty of a second offence, had restored that
deposit. And what a deposit! Six hundred thousand francs.

He alone was in the secret of that deposit. He might have kept it all,
he had restored it all.

Moreover, he had himself revealed his situation. Nothing forced him to
this. If any one learned who he was, it was through himself. In this
avowal there was something more than acceptance of humiliation, there
was acceptance of peril. For a condemned man, a mask is not a mask, it
is a shelter. A false name is security, and he had rejected that false
name. He, the galley-slave, might have hidden himself forever in an
honest family; he had withstood this temptation. And with what motive?
Through a conscientious scruple. He himself explained this with the
irresistible accents of truth. In short, whatever this Jean Valjean
might be, he was, undoubtedly, a conscience which was awakening. There
existed some mysterious re-habilitation which had begun; and, to all
appearances, scruples had for a long time already controlled this man.
Such fits of justice and goodness are not characteristic of vulgar
natures. An awakening of conscience is grandeur of soul.

Jean Valjean was sincere. This sincerity, visible, palpable,
irrefragable, evident from the very grief that it caused him, rendered
inquiries useless, and conferred authority on all that that man had
said.

Here, for Marius, there was a strange reversal of situations. What
breathed from M. Fauchelevent? distrust. What did Jean Valjean inspire?
confidence.

In the mysterious balance of this Jean Valjean which the pensive Marius
struck, he admitted the active principle, he admitted the passive
principle, and he tried to reach a balance.

But all this went on as in a storm. Marius, while endeavoring to form a
clear idea of this man, and while pursuing Jean Valjean, so to speak, in
the depths of his thought, lost him and found him again in a fatal mist.

The deposit honestly restored, the probity of the confession--these were
good. This produced a lightening of the cloud, then the cloud became
black once more.

Troubled as were Marius' memories, a shadow of them returned to him.

After all, what was that adventure in the Jondrette attic? Why had that
man taken to flight on the arrival of the police, instead of entering a
complaint?

Here Marius found the answer. Because that man was a fugitive from
justice, who had broken his ban.

Another question: Why had that man come to the barricade?

For Marius now once more distinctly beheld that recollection which had
re-appeared in his emotions like sympathetic ink at the application of
heat. This man had been in the barricade. He had not fought there. What
had he come there for? In the presence of this question a spectre sprang
up and replied: "Javert."

Marius recalled perfectly now that funereal sight of Jean Valjean
dragging the pinioned Javert out of the barricade, and he still heard
behind the corner of the little Rue Mondetour that frightful pistol
shot. Obviously, there was hatred between that police spy and the
galley-slave. The one was in the other's way. Jean Valjean had gone to
the barricade for the purpose of revenging himself. He had arrived late.
He probably knew that Javert was a prisoner there. The Corsican vendetta
has penetrated to certain lower strata and has become the law there; it
is so simple that it does not astonish souls which are but half turned
towards good; and those hearts are so constituted that a criminal, who
is in the path of repentance, may be scrupulous in the matter of theft
and unscrupulous in the matter of vengeance. Jean Valjean had killed
Javert. At least, that seemed to be evident.

This was the final question, to be sure; but to this there was no reply.
This question Marius felt like pincers. How had it come to pass that
Jean Valjean's existence had elbowed that of Cosette for so long a
period?

What melancholy sport of Providence was that which had placed that child
in contact with that man? Are there then chains for two which are forged
on high? and does God take pleasure in coupling the angel with the
demon? So a crime and an innocence can be room-mates in the mysterious
galleys of wretchedness? In that defiling of condemned persons which
is called human destiny, can two brows pass side by side, the one
ingenuous, the other formidable, the one all bathed in the divine
whiteness of dawn, the other forever blemished by the flash of an
eternal lightning? Who could have arranged that inexplicable pairing
off? In what manner, in consequence of what prodigy, had any community
of life been established between this celestial little creature and that
old criminal?

Who could have bound the lamb to the wolf, and, what was still more
incomprehensible, have attached the wolf to the lamb? For the wolf loved
the lamb, for the fierce creature adored the feeble one, for, during
the space of nine years, the angel had had the monster as her point of
support. Cosette's childhood and girlhood, her advent in the daylight,
her virginal growth towards life and light, had been sheltered by
that hideous devotion. Here questions exfoliated, so to speak, into
innumerable enigmas, abysses yawned at the bottoms of abysses, and
Marius could no longer bend over Jean Valjean without becoming dizzy.
What was this man-precipice?

The old symbols of Genesis are eternal; in human society, such as it now
exists, and until a broader day shall effect a change in it, there will
always be two men, the one superior, the other subterranean; the one
which is according to good is Abel; the other which is according to evil
is Cain. What was this tender Cain? What was this ruffian religiously
absorbed in the adoration of a virgin, watching over her, rearing her,
guarding her, dignifying her, and enveloping her, impure as he was
himself, with purity?

What was that cess-pool which had venerated that innocence to such a
point as not to leave upon it a single spot? What was this Jean Valjean
educating Cosette? What was this figure of the shadows which had for its
only object the preservation of the rising of a star from every shadow
and from every cloud?

That was Jean Valjean's secret; that was also God's secret.

In the presence of this double secret, Marius recoiled. The one, in some
sort, reassured him as to the other. God was as visible in this affair
as was Jean Valjean. God has his instruments. He makes use of the tool
which he wills. He is not responsible to men. Do we know how God sets
about the work? Jean Valjean had labored over Cosette. He had, to some
extent, made that soul. That was incontestable. Well, what then? The
workman was horrible; but the work was admirable. God produces his
miracles as seems good to him. He had constructed that charming Cosette,
and he had employed Jean Valjean. It had pleased him to choose this
strange collaborator for himself. What account have we to demand of him?
Is this the first time that the dung-heap has aided the spring to create
the rose?

Marius made himself these replies, and declared to himself that they
were good. He had not dared to press Jean Valjean on all the points
which we have just indicated, but he did not confess to himself that he
did not dare to do it. He adored Cosette, he possessed Cosette, Cosette
was splendidly pure. That was sufficient for him. What enlightenment did
he need? Cosette was a light. Does light require enlightenment? He had
everything; what more could he desire? All,--is not that enough? Jean
Valjean's personal affairs did not concern him.

And bending over the fatal shadow of that man, he clung fast,
convulsively, to the solemn declaration of that unhappy wretch: "I
am nothing to Cosette. Ten years ago I did not know that she was in
existence."

Jean Valjean was a passer-by. He had said so himself. Well, he had
passed. Whatever he was, his part was finished.

Henceforth, there remained Marius to fulfil the part of Providence to
Cosette. Cosette had sought the azure in a person like herself, in her
lover, her husband, her celestial male. Cosette, as she took her flight,
winged and transfigured, left behind her on the earth her hideous and
empty chrysalis, Jean Valjean.

In whatever circle of ideas Marius revolved, he always returned to a
certain horror for Jean Valjean. A sacred horror, perhaps, for, as we
have just pointed out, he felt a quid divinum in that man. But do what
he would, and seek what extenuation he would, he was certainly forced to
fall back upon this: the man was a convict; that is to say, a being who
has not even a place in the social ladder, since he is lower than the
very lowest rung. After the very last of men comes the convict. The
convict is no longer, so to speak, in the semblance of the living. The
law has deprived him of the entire quantity of humanity of which it can
deprive a man.

Marius, on penal questions, still held to the inexorable system, though
he was a democrat and he entertained all the ideas of the law on the
subject of those whom the law strikes. He had not yet accomplished all
progress, we admit. He had not yet come to distinguish between that
which is written by man and that which is written by God, between law
and right. He had not examined and weighed the right which man takes to
dispose of the irrevocable and the irreparable. He was not shocked by
the word vindicte. He found it quite simple that certain breaches of the
written law should be followed by eternal suffering, and he accepted,
as the process of civilization, social damnation. He still stood at this
point, though safe to advance infallibly later on, since his nature was
good, and, at bottom, wholly formed of latent progress.

In this stage of his ideas, Jean Valjean appeared to him hideous and
repulsive. He was a man reproved, he was the convict. That word was
for him like the sound of the trump on the Day of Judgment; and, after
having reflected upon Jean Valjean for a long time, his final gesture
had been to turn away his head. Vade retro.

Marius, if we must recognize and even insist upon the fact, while
interrogating Jean Valjean to such a point that Jean Valjean had said:
"You are confessing me," had not, nevertheless, put to him two or three
decisive questions.

It was not that they had not presented themselves to his mind, but that
he had been afraid of them. The Jondrette attic? The barricade? Javert?
Who knows where these revelations would have stopped? Jean Valjean did
not seem like a man who would draw back, and who knows whether Marius,
after having urged him on, would not have himself desired to hold him
back?

Has it not happened to all of us, in certain supreme conjunctures, to
stop our ears in order that we may not hear the reply, after we have
asked a question? It is especially when one loves that one gives way
to these exhibitions of cowardice. It is not wise to question sinister
situations to the last point, particularly when the indissoluble side of
our life is fatally intermingled with them. What a terrible light might
have proceeded from the despairing explanations of Jean Valjean, and who
knows whether that hideous glare would not have darted forth as far
as Cosette? Who knows whether a sort of infernal glow would not have
lingered behind it on the brow of that angel? The spattering of a
lightning-flash is of the thunder also. Fatality has points of juncture
where innocence itself is stamped with crime by the gloomy law of the
reflections which give color. The purest figures may forever preserve
the reflection of a horrible association. Rightly or wrongly, Marius
had been afraid. He already knew too much. He sought to dull his senses
rather than to gain further light.

In dismay he bore off Cosette in his arms and shut his eyes to Jean
Valjean.

That man was the night, the living and horrible night. How should he
dare to seek the bottom of it? It is a terrible thing to interrogate
the shadow. Who knows what its reply will be? The dawn may be blackened
forever by it.

In this state of mind the thought that that man would, henceforth, come
into any contact whatever with Cosette was a heartrending perplexity to
Marius.

He now almost reproached himself for not having put those formidable
questions, before which he had recoiled, and from which an implacable
and definitive decision might have sprung. He felt that he was too good,
too gentle, too weak, if we must say the word. This weakness had led him
to an imprudent concession. He had allowed himself to be touched. He
had been in the wrong. He ought to have simply and purely rejected
Jean Valjean. Jean Valjean played the part of fire, and that is what he
should have done, and have freed his house from that man.

He was vexed with himself, he was angry with that whirlwind of emotions
which had deafened, blinded, and carried him away. He was displeased
with himself.

What was he to do now? Jean Valjean's visits were profoundly repugnant
to him. What was the use in having that man in his house? What did the
man want? Here, he became dismayed, he did not wish to dig down, he did
not wish to penetrate deeply; he did not wish to sound himself. He
had promised, he had allowed himself to be drawn into a promise; Jean
Valjean held his promise; one must keep one's word even to a convict,
above all to a convict. Still, his first duty was to Cosette. In short,
he was carried away by the repugnance which dominated him.

Marius turned over all this confusion of ideas in his mind, passing
from one to the other, and moved by all of them. Hence arose a profound
trouble.

It was not easy for him to hide this trouble from Cosette, but love is a
talent, and Marius succeeded in doing it.

However, without any apparent object, he questioned Cosette, who was as
candid as a dove is white and who suspected nothing; he talked of her
childhood and her youth, and he became more and more convinced that that
convict had been everything good, paternal and respectable that a man
can be towards Cosette. All that Marius had caught a glimpse of and had
surmised was real. That sinister nettle had loved and protected that
lily.




BOOK EIGHTH.--FADING AWAY OF THE TWILIGHT

[Illustration: The Twilight Decline  5b8-1-decline]




CHAPTER I--THE LOWER CHAMBER

On the following day, at nightfall, Jean Valjean knocked at the carriage
gate of the Gillenormand house. It was Basque who received him. Basque
was in the courtyard at the appointed hour, as though he had received
his orders. It sometimes happens that one says to a servant: "You will
watch for Mr. So and So, when he arrives."

Basque addressed Jean Valjean without waiting for the latter to approach
him:

"Monsieur le Baron has charged me to inquire whether monsieur desires to
go upstairs or to remain below?"

"I will remain below," replied Jean Valjean.

Basque, who was perfectly respectful, opened the door of the
waiting-room and said:

"I will go and inform Madame."

The room which Jean Valjean entered was a damp, vaulted room on the
ground floor, which served as a cellar on occasion, which opened on the
street, was paved with red squares and was badly lighted by a grated
window.

This chamber was not one of those which are harassed by the
feather-duster, the pope's head brush, and the broom. The dust rested
tranquilly there. Persecution of the spiders was not organized there. A
fine web, which spread far and wide, and was very black and ornamented
with dead flies, formed a wheel on one of the window-panes. The room,
which was small and low-ceiled, was furnished with a heap of empty
bottles piled up in one corner.

The wall, which was daubed with an ochre yellow wash, was scaling off in
large flakes. At one end there was a chimney-piece painted in black
with a narrow shelf. A fire was burning there; which indicated that Jean
Valjean's reply: "I will remain below," had been foreseen.

Two arm-chairs were placed at the two corners of the fireplace. Between
the chairs an old bedside rug, which displayed more foundation thread
than wool, had been spread by way of a carpet.

The chamber was lighted by the fire on the hearth and the twilight
falling through the window.

Jean Valjean was fatigued. For days he had neither eaten nor slept. He
threw himself into one of the arm-chairs.

Basque returned, set a lighted candle on the chimney-piece and retired.
Jean Valjean, his head drooping and his chin resting on his breast,
perceived neither Basque nor the candle.

All at once, he drew himself up with a start. Cosette was standing
beside him.

He had not seen her enter, but he had felt that she was there.

He turned round. He gazed at her. She was adorably lovely. But what he
was contemplating with that profound gaze was not her beauty but her
soul.

"Well," exclaimed Cosette, "father, I knew that you were peculiar, but
I never should have expected this. What an idea! Marius told me that you
wish me to receive you here."

"Yes, it is my wish."

"I expected that reply. Good. I warn you that I am going to make a scene
for you. Let us begin at the beginning. Embrace me, father."

And she offered him her cheek.

Jean Valjean remained motionless.

"You do not stir. I take note of it. Attitude of guilt. But never mind,
I pardon you. Jesus Christ said: Offer the other cheek. Here it is."

And she presented her other cheek.

Jean Valjean did not move. It seemed as though his feet were nailed to
the pavement.

"This is becoming serious," said Cosette. "What have I done to you? I
declare that I am perplexed. You owe me reparation. You will dine with
us."

"I have dined."

"That is not true. I will get M. Gillenormand to scold you. Grandfathers
are made to reprimand fathers. Come. Go upstairs with me to the
drawing-room. Immediately."

"Impossible."

Here Cosette lost ground a little. She ceased to command and passed to
questioning.

"But why? and you choose the ugliest chamber in the house in which to
see me. It's horrible here."

"Thou knowest . . ."

Jean Valjean caught himself up.

"You know, madame, that I am peculiar, I have my freaks."

Cosette struck her tiny hands together.

"Madame! . . . You know! . . . more novelties! What is the meaning of
this?"

Jean Valjean directed upon her that heartrending smile to which he
occasionally had recourse:

"You wished to be Madame. You are so."

"Not for you, father."

"Do not call me father."

"What?"

"Call me 'Monsieur Jean.' 'Jean,' if you like."

"You are no longer my father? I am no longer Cosette? 'Monsieur Jean'?
What does this mean? why, these are revolutions, aren't they? what has
taken place? come, look me in the face. And you won't live with us!
And you won't have my chamber! What have I done to you? Has anything
happened?"

"Nothing."

"Well then?"

"Everything is as usual."

"Why do you change your name?"

"You have changed yours, surely."

He smiled again with the same smile as before and added:

"Since you are Madame Pontmercy, I certainly can be Monsieur Jean."

"I don't understand anything about it. All this is idiotic. I shall ask
permission of my husband for you to be 'Monsieur Jean.' I hope that he
will not consent to it. You cause me a great deal of pain. One does
have freaks, but one does not cause one's little Cosette grief. That is
wrong. You have no right to be wicked, you who are so good."

He made no reply.

She seized his hands with vivacity, and raising them to her face with
an irresistible movement, she pressed them against her neck beneath her
chin, which is a gesture of profound tenderness.

"Oh!" she said to him, "be good!"

And she went on:

"This is what I call being good: being nice and coming and living
here,--there are birds here as there are in the Rue Plumet,--living with
us, quitting that hole of a Rue de l'Homme Arme, not giving us riddles
to guess, being like all the rest of the world, dining with us,
breakfasting with us, being my father."

He loosed her hands.

"You no longer need a father, you have a husband."

Cosette became angry.

"I no longer need a father! One really does not know what to say to
things like that, which are not common sense!"

"If Toussaint were here," resumed Jean Valjean, like a person who is
driven to seek authorities, and who clutches at every branch, "she would
be the first to agree that it is true that I have always had ways of my
own. There is nothing new in this. I always have loved my black corner."

"But it is cold here. One cannot see distinctly. It is abominable, that
it is, to wish to be Monsieur Jean! I will not have you say 'you' to me.

"Just now, as I was coming hither," replied Jean Valjean, "I saw a piece
of furniture in the Rue Saint Louis. It was at a cabinet-maker's. If I
were a pretty woman, I would treat myself to that bit of furniture. A
very neat toilet table in the reigning style. What you call rosewood, I
think. It is inlaid. The mirror is quite large. There are drawers. It is
pretty."

"Hou! the villainous bear!" replied Cosette.

And with supreme grace, setting her teeth and drawing back her lips, she
blew at Jean Valjean. She was a Grace copying a cat.

"I am furious," she resumed. "Ever since yesterday, you have made me
rage, all of you. I am greatly vexed. I don't understand. You do not
defend me against Marius. Marius will not uphold me against you. I am
all alone. I arrange a chamber prettily. If I could have put the good
God there I would have done it. My chamber is left on my hands. My
lodger sends me into bankruptcy. I order a nice little dinner of
Nicolette. We will have nothing to do with your dinner, Madame. And my
father Fauchelevent wants me to call him 'Monsieur Jean,' and to receive
him in a frightful, old, ugly cellar, where the walls have beards, and
where the crystal consists of empty bottles, and the curtains are of
spiders' webs! You are singular, I admit, that is your style, but people
who get married are granted a truce. You ought not to have begun being
singular again instantly. So you are going to be perfectly contented in
your abominable Rue de l'Homme Arme. I was very desperate indeed there,
that I was. What have you against me? You cause me a great deal of
grief. Fi!"

And, becoming suddenly serious, she gazed intently at Jean Valjean and
added:

"Are you angry with me because I am happy?"

Ingenuousness sometimes unconsciously penetrates deep. This question,
which was simple for Cosette, was profound for Jean Valjean. Cosette had
meant to scratch, and she lacerated.

Jean Valjean turned pale.

He remained for a moment without replying, then, with an inexpressible
intonation, and speaking to himself, he murmured:

"Her happiness was the object of my life. Now God may sign my dismissal.
Cosette, thou art happy; my day is over."

"Ah, you have said thou to me!" exclaimed Cosette.

And she sprang to his neck.

Jean Valjean, in bewilderment, strained her wildly to his breast. It
almost seemed to him as though he were taking her back.

"Thanks, father!" said Cosette.

This enthusiastic impulse was on the point of becoming poignant for Jean
Valjean. He gently removed Cosette's arms, and took his hat.

"Well?" said Cosette.

"I leave you, Madame, they are waiting for you."

And, from the threshold, he added:

"I have said thou to you. Tell your husband that this shall not happen
again. Pardon me."

Jean Valjean quitted the room, leaving Cosette stupefied at this
enigmatical farewell.




CHAPTER II--ANOTHER STEP BACKWARDS

On the following day, at the same hour, Jean Valjean came.

Cosette asked him no questions, was no longer astonished, no longer
exclaimed that she was cold, no longer spoke of the drawing-room, she
avoided saying either "father" or "Monsieur Jean." She allowed herself
to be addressed as you. She allowed herself to be called Madame. Only,
her joy had undergone a certain diminution. She would have been sad, if
sadness had been possible to her.

It is probable that she had had with Marius one of those conversations
in which the beloved man says what he pleases, explains nothing, and
satisfies the beloved woman. The curiosity of lovers does not extend
very far beyond their own love.

The lower room had made a little toilet. Basque had suppressed the
bottles, and Nicolette the spiders.

All the days which followed brought Jean Valjean at the same hour. He
came every day, because he had not the strength to take Marius' words
otherwise than literally. Marius arranged matters so as to be absent at
the hours when Jean Valjean came. The house grew accustomed to the novel
ways of M. Fauchelevent. Toussaint helped in this direction: "Monsieur
has always been like that," she repeated. The grandfather issued this
decree:--"He's an original." And all was said. Moreover, at the age of
ninety-six, no bond is any longer possible, all is merely juxtaposition;
a newcomer is in the way. There is no longer any room; all habits are
acquired. M. Fauchelevent, M. Tranchelevent, Father Gillenormand
asked nothing better than to be relieved from "that gentleman." He
added:--"Nothing is more common than those originals. They do all sorts
of queer things. They have no reason. The Marquis de Canaples was still
worse. He bought a palace that he might lodge in the garret. These are
fantastic appearances that people affect."

No one caught a glimpse of the sinister foundation. And moreover, who
could have guessed such a thing? There are marshes of this description
in India. The water seems extraordinary, inexplicable, rippling though
there is no wind, and agitated where it should be calm. One gazes at the
surface of these causeless ebullitions; one does not perceive the hydra
which crawls on the bottom.

Many men have a secret monster in this same manner, a dragon which gnaws
them, a despair which inhabits their night. Such a man resembles
other men, he goes and comes. No one knows that he bears within him a
frightful parasitic pain with a thousand teeth, which lives within the
unhappy man, and of which he is dying. No one knows that this man is a
gulf. He is stagnant but deep. From time to time, a trouble of which
the onlooker understands nothing appears on his surface. A mysterious
wrinkle is formed, then vanishes, then re-appears; an air-bubble rises
and bursts. It is the breathing of the unknown beast.

Certain strange habits: arriving at the hour when other people are
taking their leave, keeping in the background when other people
are displaying themselves, preserving on all occasions what may be
designated as the wall-colored mantle, seeking the solitary walk,
preferring the deserted street, avoiding any share in conversation,
avoiding crowds and festivals, seeming at one's ease and living poorly,
having one's key in one's pocket, and one's candle at the porter's
lodge, however rich one may be, entering by the side door, ascending
the private staircase,--all these insignificant singularities, fugitive
folds on the surface, often proceed from a formidable foundation.

Many weeks passed in this manner. A new life gradually took possession
of Cosette: the relations which marriage creates, visits, the care
of the house, pleasures, great matters. Cosette's pleasures were not
costly, they consisted in one thing: being with Marius. The great
occupation of her life was to go out with him, to remain with him. It
was for them a joy that was always fresh, to go out arm in arm, in the
face of the sun, in the open street, without hiding themselves, before
the whole world, both of them completely alone.

Cosette had one vexation. Toussaint could not get on with Nicolette, the
soldering of two elderly maids being impossible, and she went away.
The grandfather was well; Marius argued a case here and there; Aunt
Gillenormand peacefully led that life aside which sufficed for her,
beside the new household. Jean Valjean came every day.

The address as thou disappeared, the you, the "Madame," the "Monsieur
Jean," rendered him another person to Cosette. The care which he had
himself taken to detach her from him was succeeding. She became more and
more gay and less and less tender. Yet she still loved him sincerely,
and he felt it.

One day she said to him suddenly: "You used to be my father, you are
no longer my father, you were my uncle, you are no longer my uncle, you
were Monsieur Fauchelevent, you are Jean. Who are you then? I don't
like all this. If I did not know how good you are, I should be afraid of
you."

He still lived in the Rue de l'Homme Arme, because he could not make up
his mind to remove to a distance from the quarter where Cosette dwelt.

At first, he only remained a few minutes with Cosette, and then went
away.

Little by little he acquired the habit of making his visits less brief.
One would have said that he was taking advantage of the authorization of
the days which were lengthening, he arrived earlier and departed later.

One day Cosette chanced to say "father" to him. A flash of joy
illuminated Jean Valjean's melancholy old countenance. He caught her
up: "Say Jean."--"Ah! truly," she replied with a burst of laughter,
"Monsieur Jean."--"That is right," said he. And he turned aside so that
she might not see him wipe his eyes.




CHAPTER III--THEY RECALL THE GARDEN OF THE RUE PLUMET

This was the last time. After that last flash of light, complete
extinction ensued. No more familiarity, no more good-morning with a
kiss, never more that word so profoundly sweet: "My father!" He was at
his own request and through his own complicity driven out of all his
happinesses one after the other; and he had this sorrow, that after
having lost Cosette wholly in one day, he was afterwards obliged to lose
her again in detail.

The eye eventually becomes accustomed to the light of a cellar. In
short, it sufficed for him to have an apparition of Cosette every day.
His whole life was concentrated in that one hour.

He seated himself close to her, he gazed at her in silence, or he talked
to her of years gone by, of her childhood, of the convent, of her little
friends of those bygone days.

One afternoon,--it was on one of those early days in April, already
warm and fresh, the moment of the sun's great gayety, the gardens which
surrounded the windows of Marius and Cosette felt the emotion of waking,
the hawthorn was on the point of budding, a jewelled garniture of
gillyflowers spread over the ancient walls, snapdragons yawned through
the crevices of the stones, amid the grass there was a charming
beginning of daisies, and buttercups, the white butterflies of the
year were making their first appearance, the wind, that minstrel of the
eternal wedding, was trying in the trees the first notes of that grand,
auroral symphony which the old poets called the springtide,--Marius said
to Cosette:--"We said that we would go back to take a look at our garden
in the Rue Plumet. Let us go thither. We must not be ungrateful."--And
away they flitted, like two swallows towards the spring. This garden of
the Rue Plumet produced on them the effect of the dawn. They already
had behind them in life something which was like the springtime of their
love. The house in the Rue Plumet being held on a lease, still belonged
to Cosette. They went to that garden and that house. There they
found themselves again, there they forgot themselves. That
evening, at the usual hour, Jean Valjean came to the Rue des
Filles-du-Calvaire.--"Madame went out with Monsieur and has not yet
returned," Basque said to him. He seated himself in silence, and waited
an hour. Cosette did not return. He departed with drooping head.

Cosette was so intoxicated with her walk to "their garden," and so
joyous at having "lived a whole day in her past," that she talked of
nothing else on the morrow. She did not notice that she had not seen
Jean Valjean.

"In what way did you go thither?" Jean Valjean asked her."

"On foot."

"And how did you return?"

"In a hackney carriage."

For some time, Jean Valjean had noticed the economical life led by the
young people. He was troubled by it. Marius' economy was severe, and
that word had its absolute meaning for Jean Valjean. He hazarded a
query:

"Why do you not have a carriage of your own? A pretty coupe would only
cost you five hundred francs a month. You are rich."

"I don't know," replied Cosette.

"It is like Toussaint," resumed Jean Valjean. "She is gone. You have not
replaced her. Why?"

"Nicolette suffices."

"But you ought to have a maid."

"Have I not Marius?"

"You ought to have a house of your own, your own servants, a carriage, a
box at the theatre. There is nothing too fine for you. Why not profit by
your riches? Wealth adds to happiness."

Cosette made no reply.

Jean Valjean's visits were not abridged. Far from it. When it is the
heart which is slipping, one does not halt on the downward slope.

When Jean Valjean wished to prolong his visit and to induce
forgetfulness of the hour, he sang the praises of Marius; he pronounced
him handsome, noble, courageous, witty, eloquent, good. Cosette outdid
him. Jean Valjean began again. They were never weary. Marius--that word
was inexhaustible; those six letters contained volumes. In this manner,
Jean Valjean contrived to remain a long time.

It was so sweet to see Cosette, to forget by her side! It alleviated his
wounds. It frequently happened that Basque came twice to announce:
"M. Gillenormand sends me to remind Madame la Baronne that dinner is
served."

On those days, Jean Valjean was very thoughtful on his return home.

Was there, then, any truth in that comparison of the chrysalis which
had presented itself to the mind of Marius? Was Jean Valjean really a
chrysalis who would persist, and who would come to visit his butterfly?

One day he remained still longer than usual. On the following day he
observed that there was no fire on the hearth.--"Hello!" he thought. "No
fire."--And he furnished the explanation for himself.--"It is perfectly
simple. It is April. The cold weather has ceased."

"Heavens! how cold it is here!" exclaimed Cosette when she entered.

"Why, no," said Jean Valjean.

"Was it you who told Basque not to make a fire then?"

"Yes, since we are now in the month of May."

"But we have a fire until June. One is needed all the year in this
cellar."

"I thought that a fire was unnecessary."

"That is exactly like one of your ideas!" retorted Cosette.

On the following day there was a fire. But the two arm-chairs were
arranged at the other end of the room near the door. "--What is the
meaning of this?" thought Jean Valjean.

He went for the arm-chairs and restored them to their ordinary place
near the hearth.

This fire lighted once more encouraged him, however. He prolonged the
conversation even beyond its customary limits. As he rose to take his
leave, Cosette said to him:

"My husband said a queer thing to me yesterday."

"What was it?"

"He said to me: 'Cosette, we have an income of thirty thousand livres.
Twenty-seven that you own, and three that my grandfather gives me.' I
replied: 'That makes thirty.' He went on: 'Would you have the courage to
live on the three thousand?' I answered: 'Yes, on nothing. Provided
that it was with you.' And then I asked: 'Why do you say that to me?' He
replied: 'I wanted to know.'"

Jean Valjean found not a word to answer. Cosette probably expected some
explanation from him; he listened in gloomy silence. He went back to the
Rue de l'Homme Arme; he was so deeply absorbed that he mistook the
door and instead of entering his own house, he entered the adjoining
dwelling. It was only after having ascended nearly two stories that he
perceived his error and went down again.

His mind was swarming with conjectures. It was evident that Marius had
his doubts as to the origin of the six hundred thousand francs, that
he feared some source that was not pure, who knows? that he had even,
perhaps, discovered that the money came from him, Jean Valjean, that he
hesitated before this suspicious fortune, and was disinclined to take
it as his own,--preferring that both he and Cosette should remain poor,
rather than that they should be rich with wealth that was not clean.

Moreover, Jean Valjean began vaguely to surmise that he was being shown
the door.

On the following day, he underwent something like a shock on entering
the ground-floor room. The arm-chairs had disappeared. There was not a
single chair of any sort.

"Ah, what's this!" exclaimed Cosette as she entered, "no chairs! Where
are the arm-chairs?"

"They are no longer here," replied Jean Valjean.

"This is too much!"

Jean Valjean stammered:

"It was I who told Basque to remove them."

"And your reason?"

"I have only a few minutes to stay to-day."

"A brief stay is no reason for remaining standing."

"I think that Basque needed the chairs for the drawing-room."

"Why?"

"You have company this evening, no doubt."

"We expect no one."

Jean Valjean had not another word to say.

Cosette shrugged her shoulders.

"To have the chairs carried off! The other day you had the fire put out.
How odd you are!"

"Adieu!" murmured Jean Valjean.

He did not say: "Adieu, Cosette." But he had not the strength to say:
"Adieu, Madame."

He went away utterly overwhelmed.

This time he had understood.

On the following day he did not come. Cosette only observed the fact in
the evening.

"Why," said she, "Monsieur Jean has not been here today."

And she felt a slight twinge at her heart, but she hardly perceived it,
being immediately diverted by a kiss from Marius.

On the following day he did not come.

Cosette paid no heed to this, passed her evening and slept well that
night, as usual, and thought of it only when she woke. She was so happy!
She speedily despatched Nicolette to M. Jean's house to inquire whether
he were ill, and why he had not come on the previous evening. Nicolette
brought back the reply of M. Jean that he was not ill. He was busy. He
would come soon. As soon as he was able. Moreover, he was on the point
of taking a little journey. Madame must remember that it was his custom
to take trips from time to time. They were not to worry about him. They
were not to think of him.

Nicolette on entering M. Jean's had repeated to him her mistress' very
words. That Madame had sent her to inquire why M. Jean bad not come on
the preceding evening."--It is two days since I have been there," said
Jean Valjean gently.

But the remark passed unnoticed by Nicolette, who did not report it to
Cosette.




CHAPTER IV--ATTRACTION AND EXTINCTION

During the last months of spring and the first months of summer in 1833,
the rare passersby in the Marais, the petty shopkeepers, the loungers on
thresholds, noticed an old man neatly clad in black, who emerged every
day at the same hour, towards nightfall, from the Rue de l'Homme Arme,
on the side of the Rue Sainte-Croix-de-la-Bretonnerie, passed in front
of the Blancs Manteaux, gained the Rue Culture-Sainte-Catherine, and,
on arriving at the Rue de l'Echarpe, turned to the left, and entered the
Rue Saint-Louis.

There he walked at a slow pace, with his head strained forward, seeing
nothing, hearing nothing, his eye immovably fixed on a point which
seemed to be a star to him, which never varied, and which was no
other than the corner of the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire. The nearer he
approached the corner of the street the more his eye lighted up; a sort
of joy illuminated his pupils like an inward aurora, he had a fascinated
and much affected air, his lips indulged in obscure movements, as though
he were talking to some one whom he did not see, he smiled vaguely and
advanced as slowly as possible. One would have said that, while desirous
of reaching his destination, he feared the moment when he should be
close at hand. When only a few houses remained between him and that
street which appeared to attract him his pace slackened, to such a
degree that, at times, one might have thought that he was no longer
advancing at all. The vacillation of his head and the fixity of his
eyeballs suggested the thought of the magnetic needle seeking the pole.
Whatever time he spent on arriving, he was obliged to arrive at last; he
reached the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire; then he halted, he trembled, he
thrust his head with a sort of melancholy timidity round the corner of
the last house, and gazed into that street, and there was in that tragic
look something which resembled the dazzling light of the impossible,
and the reflection from a paradise that was closed to him. Then a tear,
which had slowly gathered in the corner of his lids, and had become
large enough to fall, trickled down his cheek, and sometimes stopped at
his mouth. The old man tasted its bitter flavor. Thus he remained for
several minutes as though made of stone, then he returned by the same
road and with the same step, and, in proportion as he retreated, his
glance died out.

Little by little, this old man ceased to go as far as the corner of the
Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire; he halted half way in the Rue Saint-Louis;
sometimes a little further off, sometimes a little nearer.

One day he stopped at the corner of the Rue Culture-Sainte-Catherine and
looked at the Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire from a distance. Then he
shook his head slowly from right to left, as though refusing himself
something, and retraced his steps.

Soon he no longer came as far as the Rue Saint-Louis. He got as far as
the Rue Pavee, shook his head and turned back; then he went no
further than the Rue des Trois-Pavillons; then he did not overstep the
Blancs-Manteaux. One would have said that he was a pendulum which was
no longer wound up, and whose oscillations were growing shorter before
ceasing altogether.

Every day he emerged from his house at the same hour, he undertook the
same trip, but he no longer completed it, and, perhaps without
himself being aware of the fact, he constantly shortened it. His whole
countenance expressed this single idea: What is the use?--His eye was
dim; no more radiance. His tears were also exhausted; they no longer
collected in the corner of his eye-lid; that thoughtful eye was dry. The
old man's head was still craned forward; his chin moved at times; the
folds in his gaunt neck were painful to behold. Sometimes, when the
weather was bad, he had an umbrella under his arm, but he never opened
it.

The good women of the quarter said: "He is an innocent." The children
followed him and laughed.




BOOK NINTH.--SUPREME SHADOW, SUPREME DAWN




CHAPTER I--PITY FOR THE UNHAPPY, BUT INDULGENCE FOR THE HAPPY

It is a terrible thing to be happy! How content one is! How
all-sufficient one finds it! How, being in possession of the false
object of life, happiness, one forgets the true object, duty!

Let us say, however, that the reader would do wrong were he to blame
Marius.

Marius, as we have explained, before his marriage, had put no questions
to M. Fauchelevent, and, since that time, he had feared to put any to
Jean Valjean. He had regretted the promise into which he had allowed
himself to be drawn. He had often said to himself that he had done
wrong in making that concession to despair. He had confined himself to
gradually estranging Jean Valjean from his house and to effacing him,
as much as possible, from Cosette's mind. He had, in a manner, always
placed himself between Cosette and Jean Valjean, sure that, in this
way, she would not perceive nor think of the latter. It was more than
effacement, it was an eclipse.

Marius did what he considered necessary and just. He thought that he had
serious reasons which the reader has already seen, and others which will
be seen later on, for getting rid of Jean Valjean without harshness, but
without weakness.

Chance having ordained that he should encounter, in a case which he had
argued, a former employee of the Laffitte establishment, he had acquired
mysterious information, without seeking it, which he had not been
able, it is true, to probe, out of respect for the secret which he had
promised to guard, and out of consideration for Jean Valjean's perilous
position. He believed at that moment that he had a grave duty to
perform: the restitution of the six hundred thousand francs to some
one whom he sought with all possible discretion. In the meanwhile, he
abstained from touching that money.

As for Cosette, she had not been initiated into any of these secrets;
but it would be harsh to condemn her also.

There existed between Marius and her an all-powerful magnetism, which
caused her to do, instinctively and almost mechanically, what Marius
wished. She was conscious of Marius' will in the direction of "Monsieur
Jean," she conformed to it. Her husband had not been obliged to say
anything to her; she yielded to the vague but clear pressure of his
tacit intentions, and obeyed blindly. Her obedience in this instance
consisted in not remembering what Marius forgot. She was not obliged to
make any effort to accomplish this. Without her knowing why herself, and
without his having any cause to accuse her of it, her soul had become
so wholly her husband's that that which was shrouded in gloom in Marius'
mind became overcast in hers.

Let us not go too far, however; in what concerns Jean Valjean, this
forgetfulness and obliteration were merely superficial. She was rather
heedless than forgetful. At bottom, she was sincerely attached to the
man whom she had so long called her father; but she loved her husband
still more dearly. This was what had somewhat disturbed the balance of
her heart, which leaned to one side only.

It sometimes happened that Cosette spoke of Jean Valjean and expressed
her surprise. Then Marius calmed her: "He is absent, I think. Did not
he say that he was setting out on a journey?"--"That is true," thought
Cosette. "He had a habit of disappearing in this fashion. But not for so
long." Two or three times she despatched Nicolette to inquire in the
Rue de l'Homme Arme whether M. Jean had returned from his journey. Jean
Valjean caused the answer "no" to be given.

Cosette asked nothing more, since she had but one need on earth, Marius.

Let us also say that, on their side, Cosette and Marius had also
been absent. They had been to Vernon. Marius had taken Cosette to his
father's grave.

Marius gradually won Cosette away from Jean Valjean. Cosette allowed it.

Moreover that which is called, far too harshly in certain cases, the
ingratitude of children, is not always a thing so deserving of reproach
as it is supposed. It is the ingratitude of nature. Nature, as we have
elsewhere said, "looks before her." Nature divides living beings into
those who are arriving and those who are departing. Those who are
departing are turned towards the shadows, those who are arriving towards
the light. Hence a gulf which is fatal on the part of the old, and
involuntary on the part of the young. This breach, at first insensible,
increases slowly, like all separations of branches. The boughs, without
becoming detached from the trunk, grow away from it. It is no fault of
theirs. Youth goes where there is joy, festivals, vivid lights, love.
Old age goes towards the end. They do not lose sight of each other, but
there is no longer a close connection. Young people feel the cooling
off of life; old people, that of the tomb. Let us not blame these poor
children.




CHAPTER II--LAST FLICKERINGS OF A LAMP WITHOUT OIL

One day, Jean Valjean descended his staircase, took three steps in the
street, seated himself on a post, on that same stone post where Gavroche
had found him meditating on the night between the 5th and the 6th of
June; he remained there a few moments, then went up stairs again. This
was the last oscillation of the pendulum. On the following day he did
not leave his apartment. On the day after that, he did not leave his
bed.

His portress, who prepared his scanty repasts, a few cabbages or
potatoes with bacon, glanced at the brown earthenware plate and
exclaimed:

"But you ate nothing yesterday, poor, dear man!"

"Certainly I did," replied Jean Valjean.

"The plate is quite full."

"Look at the water jug. It is empty."

"That proves that you have drunk; it does not prove that you have
eaten."

"Well," said Jean Valjean, "what if I felt hungry only for water?"

"That is called thirst, and, when one does not eat at the same time, it
is called fever."

"I will eat to-morrow."

"Or at Trinity day. Why not to-day? Is it the thing to say: 'I will eat
to-morrow'? The idea of leaving my platter without even touching it! My
ladyfinger potatoes were so good!"

Jean Valjean took the old woman's hand:

"I promise you that I will eat them," he said, in his benevolent voice.

"I am not pleased with you," replied the portress.

Jean Valjean saw no other human creature than this good woman. There are
streets in Paris through which no one ever passes, and houses to which
no one ever comes. He was in one of those streets and one of those
houses.

While he still went out, he had purchased of a coppersmith, for a few
sous, a little copper crucifix which he had hung up on a nail opposite
his bed. That gibbet is always good to look at.

A week passed, and Jean Valjean had not taken a step in his room. He
still remained in bed. The portress said to her husband:--"The good man
upstairs yonder does not get up, he no longer eats, he will not last
long. That man has his sorrows, that he has. You won't get it out of my
head that his daughter has made a bad marriage."

The porter replied, with the tone of marital sovereignty:

"If he's rich, let him have a doctor. If he is not rich, let him go
without. If he has no doctor he will die."

"And if he has one?"

"He will die," said the porter.

The portress set to scraping away the grass from what she called her
pavement, with an old knife, and, as she tore out the blades, she
grumbled:

"It's a shame. Such a neat old man! He's as white as a chicken."

She caught sight of the doctor of the quarter as he passed the end of
the street; she took it upon herself to request him to come up stairs.

"It's on the second floor," said she. "You have only to enter. As the
good man no longer stirs from his bed, the door is always unlocked."

The doctor saw Jean Valjean and spoke with him.

When he came down again the portress interrogated him:

"Well, doctor?"

"Your sick man is very ill indeed."

"What is the matter with him?"

"Everything and nothing. He is a man who, to all appearances, has lost
some person who is dear to him. People die of that."

"What did he say to you?"

"He told me that he was in good health."

"Shall you come again, doctor?"

"Yes," replied the doctor. "But some one else besides must come."




CHAPTER III--A PEN IS HEAVY TO THE MAN WHO LIFTED THE FAUCHELEVENT'S
CART

One evening Jean Valjean found difficulty in raising himself on his
elbow; he felt of his wrist and could not find his pulse; his breath
was short and halted at times; he recognized the fact that he was weaker
than he had ever been before. Then, no doubt under the pressure of some
supreme preoccupation, he made an effort, drew himself up into a sitting
posture and dressed himself. He put on his old workingman's clothes. As
he no longer went out, he had returned to them and preferred them. He
was obliged to pause many times while dressing himself; merely putting
his arms through his waistcoat made the perspiration trickle from his
forehead.

Since he had been alone, he had placed his bed in the antechamber, in
order to inhabit that deserted apartment as little as possible.

He opened the valise and drew from it Cosette's outfit.

He spread it out on his bed.

The Bishop's candlesticks were in their place on the chimney-piece. He
took from a drawer two wax candles and put them in the candlesticks.
Then, although it was still broad daylight,--it was summer,--he lighted
them. In the same way candles are to be seen lighted in broad daylight
in chambers where there is a corpse.

Every step that he took in going from one piece of furniture to another
exhausted him, and he was obliged to sit down. It was not ordinary
fatigue which expends the strength only to renew it; it was the remnant
of all movement possible to him, it was life drained which flows away
drop by drop in overwhelming efforts and which will never be renewed.

The chair into which he allowed himself to fall was placed in front of
that mirror, so fatal for him, so providential for Marius, in which
he had read Cosette's reversed writing on the blotting book. He caught
sight of himself in this mirror, and did not recognize himself. He was
eighty years old; before Marius' marriage, he would have hardly been
taken for fifty; that year had counted for thirty. What he bore on his
brow was no longer the wrinkles of age, it was the mysterious mark of
death. The hollowing of that pitiless nail could be felt there. His
cheeks were pendulous; the skin of his face had the color which would
lead one to think that it already had earth upon it; the corners of his
mouth drooped as in the mask which the ancients sculptured on tombs. He
gazed into space with an air of reproach; one would have said that he
was one of those grand tragic beings who have cause to complain of some
one.

He was in that condition, the last phase of dejection, in which sorrow
no longer flows; it is coagulated, so to speak; there is something on
the soul like a clot of despair.

Night had come. He laboriously dragged a table and the old arm-chair to
the fireside, and placed upon the table a pen, some ink and some paper.

That done, he had a fainting fit. When he recovered consciousness, he
was thirsty. As he could not lift the jug, he tipped it over painfully
towards his mouth, and swallowed a draught.

As neither the pen nor the ink had been used for a long time, the point
of the pen had curled up, the ink had dried away, he was forced to rise
and put a few drops of water in the ink, which he did not accomplish
without pausing and sitting down two or three times, and he was
compelled to write with the back of the pen. He wiped his brow from time
to time.

Then he turned towards the bed, and, still seated, for he could not
stand, he gazed at the little black gown and all those beloved objects.

These contemplations lasted for hours which seemed minutes.

All at once he shivered, he felt that a child was taking possession of
him; he rested his elbows on the table, which was illuminated by the
Bishop's candles and took up the pen. His hand trembled. He wrote slowly
the few following lines:

"Cosette, I bless thee. I am going to explain to thee. Thy husband was
right in giving me to understand that I ought to go away; but there is
a little error in what he believed, though he was in the right. He is
excellent. Love him well even after I am dead. Monsieur Pontmercy, love
my darling child well. Cosette, this paper will be found; this is what
I wish to say to thee, thou wilt see the figures, if I have the strength
to recall them, listen well, this money is really thine. Here is the
whole matter: White jet comes from Norway, black jet comes from England,
black glass jewellery comes from Germany. Jet is the lightest, the most
precious, the most costly. Imitations can be made in France as well as
in Germany. What is needed is a little anvil two inches square, and a
lamp burning spirits of wine to soften the wax. The wax was formerly
made with resin and lampblack, and cost four livres the pound. I
invented a way of making it with gum shellac and turpentine. It does not
cost more than thirty sous, and is much better. Buckles are made with
a violet glass which is stuck fast, by means of this wax, to a little
framework of black iron. The glass must be violet for iron jewellery,
and black for gold jewellery. Spain buys a great deal of it. It is the
country of jet . . ."

Here he paused, the pen fell from his fingers, he was seized by one of
those sobs which at times welled up from the very depths of his being;
the poor man clasped his head in both hands, and meditated.

"Oh!" he exclaimed within himself [lamentable cries, heard by God
alone], "all is over. I shall never see her more. She is a smile which
passed over me. I am about to plunge into the night without even seeing
her again. Oh! one minute, one instant, to hear her voice, to touch her
dress, to gaze upon her, upon her, the angel! and then to die! It is
nothing to die, what is frightful is to die without seeing her. She
would smile on me, she would say a word to me, would that do any harm to
any one? No, all is over, and forever. Here I am all alone. My God! My
God! I shall never see her again!" At that moment there came a knock at
the door.




CHAPTER IV--A BOTTLE OF INK WHICH ONLY SUCCEEDED IN WHITENING

That same day, or to speak more accurately, that same evening, as Marius
left the table, and was on the point of withdrawing to his study, having
a case to look over, Basque handed him a letter saying: "The person who
wrote the letter is in the antechamber."

Cosette had taken the grandfather's arm and was strolling in the garden.

A letter, like a man, may have an unprepossessing exterior. Coarse
paper, coarsely folded--the very sight of certain missives is
displeasing.

The letter which Basque had brought was of this sort.

Marius took it. It smelled of tobacco. Nothing evokes a memory like an
odor. Marius recognized that tobacco. He looked at the superscription:
"To Monsieur, Monsieur le Baron Pommerci. At his hotel." The recognition
of the tobacco caused him to recognize the writing as well. It may be
said that amazement has its lightning flashes.

Marius was, as it were, illuminated by one of these flashes.

The sense of smell, that mysterious aid to memory, had just revived a
whole world within him. This was certainly the paper, the fashion
of folding, the dull tint of ink; it was certainly the well-known
handwriting, especially was it the same tobacco.

The Jondrette garret rose before his mind.

Thus, strange freak of chance! one of the two scents which he had so
diligently sought, the one in connection with which he had lately again
exerted so many efforts and which he supposed to be forever lost, had
come and presented itself to him of its own accord.

He eagerly broke the seal, and read:


 "Monsieur le Baron:--If the Supreme Being had given me the talents,
 I might have been baron Thenard, member of the Institute [academy
 of ciences], but I am not.  I only bear the same as him, happy if
 this memory recommends me to the eccellence of your kindnesses.
 The benefit with which you will honor me will be reciprocle.
 I am in possession of a secret concerning an individual.
 This individual concerns you.  I hold the secret at your disposal
 desiring to have the honor to be huseful to you.  I will furnish
 you with the simple means of driving from your honorabel family
 that individual who has no right there, madame la baronne being
 of lofty birth.  The sanctuary of virtue cannot cohabit longer
 with crime without abdicating.

 "I awate in the entichamber the orders of monsieur le baron.

                                               "With respect."


The letter was signed "Thenard."

This signature was not false. It was merely a trifle abridged.

Moreover, the rigmarole and the orthography completed the revelation.
The certificate of origin was complete.

Marius' emotion was profound. After a start of surprise, he underwent a
feeling of happiness. If he could now but find that other man of whom he
was in search, the man who had saved him, Marius, there would be nothing
left for him to desire.

He opened the drawer of his secretary, took out several bank-notes,
put them in his pocket, closed the secretary again, and rang the bell.
Basque half opened the door.

"Show the man in," said Marius.

Basque announced:

"Monsieur Thenard."

A man entered.

A fresh surprise for Marius. The man who entered was an utter stranger
to him.

This man, who was old, moreover, had a thick nose, his chin swathed in a
cravat, green spectacles with a double screen of green taffeta over his
eyes, and his hair was plastered and flattened down on his brow on
a level with his eyebrows like the wigs of English coachmen in "high
life." His hair was gray. He was dressed in black from head to foot, in
garments that were very threadbare but clean; a bunch of seals depending
from his fob suggested the idea of a watch. He held in his hand an old
hat! He walked in a bent attitude, and the curve in his spine augmented
the profundity of his bow.

The first thing that struck the observer was, that this personage's
coat, which was too ample although carefully buttoned, had not been made
for him.

Here a short digression becomes necessary.

There was in Paris at that epoch, in a low-lived old lodging in the Rue
Beautreillis, near the Arsenal, an ingenious Jew whose profession was
to change villains into honest men. Not for too long, which might have
proved embarrassing for the villain. The change was on sight, for a day
or two, at the rate of thirty sous a day, by means of a costume which
resembled the honesty of the world in general as nearly as possible.
This costumer was called "the Changer"; the pickpockets of Paris
had given him this name and knew him by no other. He had a tolerably
complete wardrobe. The rags with which he tricked out people were almost
probable. He had specialties and categories; on each nail of his
shop hung a social status, threadbare and worn; here the suit of a
magistrate, there the outfit of a Cure, beyond the outfit of a banker,
in one corner the costume of a retired military man, elsewhere
the habiliments of a man of letters, and further on the dress of a
statesman.

This creature was the costumer of the immense drama which knavery plays
in Paris. His lair was the green-room whence theft emerged, and into
which roguery retreated. A tattered knave arrived at this dressing-room,
deposited his thirty sous and selected, according to the part which
he wished to play, the costume which suited him, and on descending the
stairs once more, the knave was a somebody. On the following day, the
clothes were faithfully returned, and the Changer, who trusted the
thieves with everything, was never robbed. There was one inconvenience
about these clothes, they "did not fit"; not having been made for those
who wore them, they were too tight for one, too loose for another and
did not adjust themselves to any one. Every pickpocket who exceeded or
fell short of the human average was ill at his ease in the Changer's
costumes. It was necessary that one should not be either too fat or
too lean. The changer had foreseen only ordinary men. He had taken the
measure of the species from the first rascal who came to hand, who is
neither stout nor thin, neither tall nor short. Hence adaptations which
were sometimes difficult and from which the Changer's clients extricated
themselves as best they might. So much the worse for the exceptions!
The suit of the statesman, for instance, black from head to foot, and
consequently proper, would have been too large for Pitt and too small
for Castelcicala. The costume of a statesman was designated as follows
in the Changer's catalogue; we copy:

"A coat of black cloth, trowsers of black wool, a silk waistcoat, boots
and linen." On the margin there stood: ex-ambassador, and a note
which we also copy: "In a separate box, a neatly frizzed peruke, green
glasses, seals, and two small quills an inch long, wrapped in cotton."
All this belonged to the statesman, the ex-ambassador. This whole
costume was, if we may so express ourselves, debilitated; the seams were
white, a vague button-hole yawned at one of the elbows; moreover, one of
the coat buttons was missing on the breast; but this was only detail; as
the hand of the statesman should always be thrust into his coat and laid
upon his heart, its function was to conceal the absent button.

If Marius had been familiar with the occult institutions of Paris, he
would instantly have recognized upon the back of the visitor whom
Basque had just shown in, the statesman's suit borrowed from the
pick-me-down-that shop of the Changer.

Marius' disappointment on beholding another man than the one whom he
expected to see turned to the newcomer's disadvantage.

He surveyed him from head to foot, while that personage made exaggerated
bows, and demanded in a curt tone:

"What do you want?"

The man replied with an amiable grin of which the caressing smile of a
crocodile will furnish some idea:

"It seems to me impossible that I should not have already had the honor
of seeing Monsieur le Baron in society. I think I actually did meet
monsieur personally, several years ago, at the house of Madame la
Princesse Bagration and in the drawing-rooms of his Lordship the Vicomte
Dambray, peer of France."

It is always a good bit of tactics in knavery to pretend to recognize
some one whom one does not know.

Marius paid attention to the manner of this man's speech. He spied
on his accent and gesture, but his disappointment increased; the
pronunciation was nasal and absolutely unlike the dry, shrill tone which
he had expected.

He was utterly routed.

"I know neither Madame Bagration nor M. Dambray," said he. "I have never
set foot in the house of either of them in my life."

The reply was ungracious. The personage, determined to be gracious at
any cost, insisted.

"Then it must have been at Chateaubriand's that I have seen Monsieur! I
know Chateaubriand very well. He is very affable. He sometimes says to
me: 'Thenard, my friend . . . won't you drink a glass of wine with me?'"

Marius' brow grew more and more severe:

"I have never had the honor of being received by M. de Chateaubriand.
Let us cut it short. What do you want?"

The man bowed lower at that harsh voice.

"Monsieur le Baron, deign to listen to me. There is in America, in a
district near Panama, a village called la Joya. That village is composed
of a single house, a large, square house of three stories, built of
bricks dried in the sun, each side of the square five hundred feet in
length, each story retreating twelve feet back of the story below, in
such a manner as to leave in front a terrace which makes the circuit
of the edifice, in the centre an inner court where the provisions and
munitions are kept; no windows, loopholes, no doors, ladders, ladders
to mount from the ground to the first terrace, and from the first to the
second, and from the second to the third, ladders to descend into the
inner court, no doors to the chambers, trap-doors, no staircases to the
chambers, ladders; in the evening the traps are closed, the ladders
are withdrawn carbines and blunderbusses trained from the loopholes;
no means of entering, a house by day, a citadel by night, eight hundred
inhabitants,--that is the village. Why so many precautions? because the
country is dangerous; it is full of cannibals. Then why do people go
there? because the country is marvellous; gold is found there."

"What are you driving at?" interrupted Marius, who had passed from
disappointment to impatience.

"At this, Monsieur le Baron. I am an old and weary diplomat. Ancient
civilization has thrown me on my own devices. I want to try savages."

"Well?"

"Monsieur le Baron, egotism is the law of the world. The proletarian
peasant woman, who toils by the day, turns round when the diligence
passes by, the peasant proprietress, who toils in her field, does not
turn round. The dog of the poor man barks at the rich man, the dog
of the rich man barks at the poor man. Each one for himself.
Self-interest--that's the object of men. Gold, that's the loadstone."

"What then? Finish."

"I should like to go and establish myself at la Joya. There are three
of us. I have my spouse and my young lady; a very beautiful girl. The
journey is long and costly. I need a little money."

"What concern is that of mine?" demanded Marius.

The stranger stretched his neck out of his cravat, a gesture
characteristic of the vulture, and replied with an augmented smile.

"Has not Monsieur le Baron perused my letter?"

There was some truth in this. The fact is, that the contents of the
epistle had slipped Marius' mind. He had seen the writing rather than
read the letter. He could hardly recall it. But a moment ago a fresh
start had been given him. He had noted that detail: "my spouse and my
young lady."

He fixed a penetrating glance on the stranger. An examining judge could
not have done the look better. He almost lay in wait for him.

He confined himself to replying:

"State the case precisely."

The stranger inserted his two hands in both his fobs, drew himself up
without straightening his dorsal column, but scrutinizing Marius in his
turn, with the green gaze of his spectacles.

"So be it, Monsieur le Baron. I will be precise. I have a secret to sell
to you."

"A secret?"

"A secret."

"Which concerns me?"

"Somewhat."

"What is the secret?"

Marius scrutinized the man more and more as he listened to him.

"I commence gratis," said the stranger. "You will see that I am
interesting."

"Speak."

"Monsieur le Baron, you have in your house a thief and an assassin."

Marius shuddered.

"In my house? no," said he.

The imperturbable stranger brushed his hat with his elbow and went on:

"An assassin and a thief. Remark, Monsieur le Baron, that I do not here
speak of ancient deeds, deeds of the past which have lapsed, which can
be effaced by limitation before the law and by repentance before God.
I speak of recent deeds, of actual facts as still unknown to justice
at this hour. I continue. This man has insinuated himself into your
confidence, and almost into your family under a false name. I am about
to tell you his real name. And to tell it to you for nothing."

"I am listening."

"His name is Jean Valjean."

"I know it."

"I am going to tell you, equally for nothing, who he is."

"Say on."

"He is an ex-convict."

"I know it."

"You know it since I have had the honor of telling you."

"No. I knew it before."

Marius' cold tone, that double reply of "I know it," his laconicism,
which was not favorable to dialogue, stirred up some smouldering wrath
in the stranger. He launched a furious glance on the sly at Marius,
which was instantly extinguished. Rapid as it was, this glance was of
the kind which a man recognizes when he has once beheld it; it did not
escape Marius. Certain flashes can only proceed from certain souls;
the eye, that vent-hole of the thought, glows with it; spectacles hide
nothing; try putting a pane of glass over hell!

The stranger resumed with a smile:

"I will not permit myself to contradict Monsieur le Baron. In any case,
you ought to perceive that I am well informed. Now what I have to tell
you is known to myself alone. This concerns the fortune of Madame la
Baronne. It is an extraordinary secret. It is for sale--I make you the
first offer of it. Cheap. Twenty thousand francs."

"I know that secret as well as the others," said Marius.

The personage felt the necessity of lowering his price a trifle.

"Monsieur le Baron, say ten thousand francs and I will speak."

"I repeat to you that there is nothing which you can tell me. I know
what you wish to say to me."

A fresh flash gleamed in the man's eye. He exclaimed:

"But I must dine to-day, nevertheless. It is an extraordinary secret,
I tell you. Monsieur le Baron, I will speak. I speak. Give me twenty
francs."

Marius gazed intently at him:

"I know your extraordinary secret, just as I knew Jean Valjean's name,
just as I know your name."

"My name?"

"Yes."

"That is not difficult, Monsieur le Baron. I had the honor to write to
you and to tell it to you. Thenard."

"--Dier."

"Hey?"

"Thenardier."

"Who's that?"

In danger the porcupine bristles up, the beetle feigns death, the old
guard forms in a square; this man burst into laughter.

Then he flicked a grain of dust from the sleeve of his coat with a
fillip.

Marius continued:

"You are also Jondrette the workman, Fabantou the comedian, Genflot the
poet, Don Alvares the Spaniard, and Mistress Balizard."

"Mistress what?"

"And you kept a pot-house at Montfermeil."

"A pot-house! Never."

"And I tell you that your name is Thenardier."

"I deny it."

"And that you are a rascal. Here."

And Marius drew a bank-note from his pocket and flung it in his face.

"Thanks! Pardon me! five hundred francs! Monsieur le Baron!"

And the man, overcome, bowed, seized the note and examined it.

"Five hundred francs!" he began again, taken aback. And he stammered in
a low voice: "An honest rustler."[69]

Then brusquely:

"Well, so be it!" he exclaimed. "Let us put ourselves at our ease."

And with the agility of a monkey, flinging back his hair, tearing off
his spectacles, and withdrawing from his nose by sleight of hand the two
quills of which mention was recently made, and which the reader has also
met with on another page of this book, he took off his face as the man
takes off his hat.

His eye lighted up; his uneven brow, with hollows in some places and
bumps in others, hideously wrinkled at the top, was laid bare, his nose
had become as sharp as a beak; the fierce and sagacious profile of the
man of prey reappeared.

"Monsieur le Baron is infallible," he said in a clear voice whence all
nasal twang had disappeared, "I am Thenardier."

And he straightened up his crooked back.

Thenardier, for it was really he, was strangely surprised; he would have
been troubled, had he been capable of such a thing. He had come to bring
astonishment, and it was he who had received it. This humiliation had
been worth five hundred francs to him, and, taking it all in all, he
accepted it; but he was none the less bewildered.

He beheld this Baron Pontmercy for the first time, and, in spite of
his disguise, this Baron Pontmercy recognized him, and recognized
him thoroughly. And not only was this Baron perfectly informed as to
Thenardier, but he seemed well posted as to Jean Valjean. Who was this
almost beardless young man, who was so glacial and so generous, who knew
people's names, who knew all their names, and who opened his purse to
them, who bullied rascals like a judge, and who paid them like a dupe?

Thenardier, the reader will remember, although he had been Marius'
neighbor, had never seen him, which is not unusual in Paris; he had
formerly, in a vague way, heard his daughters talk of a very poor young
man named Marius who lived in the house. He had written to him, without
knowing him, the letter with which the reader is acquainted.

No connection between that Marius and M. le Baron Pontmercy was possible
in his mind.

As for the name Pontmercy, it will be recalled that, on the battlefield
of Waterloo, he had only heard the last two syllables, for which he
always entertained the legitimate scorn which one owes to what is merely
an expression of thanks.

However, through his daughter Azelma, who had started on the scent of
the married pair on the 16th of February, and through his own personal
researches, he had succeeded in learning many things, and, from the
depths of his own gloom, he had contrived to grasp more than one
mysterious clew. He had discovered, by dint of industry, or, at least,
by dint of induction, he had guessed who the man was whom he had
encountered on a certain day in the Grand Sewer. From the man he had
easily reached the name. He knew that Madame la Baronne Pontmercy was
Cosette. But he meant to be discreet in that quarter.

Who was Cosette? He did not know exactly himself. He did, indeed, catch
an inkling of illegitimacy, the history of Fantine had always seemed to
him equivocal; but what was the use of talking about that? in order to
cause himself to be paid for his silence? He had, or thought he had,
better wares than that for sale. And, according to all appearances, if
he were to come and make to the Baron Pontmercy this revelation--and
without proof: "Your wife is a bastard," the only result would be to
attract the boot of the husband towards the loins of the revealer.

From Thenardier's point of view, the conversation with Marius had not
yet begun. He ought to have drawn back, to have modified his strategy,
to have abandoned his position, to have changed his front; but nothing
essential had been compromised as yet, and he had five hundred francs
in his pocket. Moreover, he had something decisive to say, and, even
against this very well-informed and well-armed Baron Pontmercy, he felt
himself strong. For men of Thenardier's nature, every dialogue is
a combat. In the one in which he was about to engage, what was his
situation? He did not know to whom he was speaking, but he did know of
what he was speaking, he made this rapid review of his inner forces, and
after having said: "I am Thenardier," he waited.

Marius had become thoughtful. So he had hold of Thenardier at last.
That man whom he had so greatly desired to find was before him. He could
honor Colonel Pontmercy's recommendation.

He felt humiliated that that hero should have owned anything to this
villain, and that the letter of change drawn from the depths of the tomb
by his father upon him, Marius, had been protested up to that day. It
also seemed to him, in the complex state of his mind towards Thenardier,
that there was occasion to avenge the Colonel for the misfortune of
having been saved by such a rascal. In any case, he was content. He
was about to deliver the Colonel's shade from this unworthy creditor
at last, and it seemed to him that he was on the point of rescuing his
father's memory from the debtors' prison. By the side of this duty there
was another--to elucidate, if possible, the source of Cosette's fortune.
The opportunity appeared to present itself. Perhaps Thenardier knew
something. It might prove useful to see the bottom of this man.

He commenced with this.

Thenardier had caused the "honest rustler" to disappear in his fob, and
was gazing at Marius with a gentleness that was almost tender.

Marius broke the silence.

"Thenardier, I have told you your name. Now, would you like to have me
tell you your secret--the one that you came here to reveal to me? I have
information of my own, also. You shall see that I know more about it
than you do. Jean Valjean, as you have said, is an assassin and a thief.
A thief, because he robbed a wealthy manufacturer, whose ruin he brought
about. An assassin, because he assassinated police-agent Javert."

"I don't understand, sir," ejaculated Thenardier.

"I will make myself intelligible. In a certain arrondissement of the Pas
de Calais, there was, in 1822, a man who had fallen out with justice,
and who, under the name of M. Madeleine, had regained his status and
rehabilitated himself. This man had become a just man in the full force
of the term. In a trade, the manufacture of black glass goods, he
made the fortune of an entire city. As far as his personal fortune was
concerned he made that also, but as a secondary matter, and in some
sort, by accident. He was the foster-father of the poor. He founded
hospitals, opened schools, visited the sick, dowered young girls,
supported widows, and adopted orphans; he was like the guardian angel of
the country. He refused the cross, he was appointed Mayor. A liberated
convict knew the secret of a penalty incurred by this man in former
days; he denounced him, and had him arrested, and profited by the arrest
to come to Paris and cause the banker Laffitte,--I have the fact from
the cashier himself,--by means of a false signature, to hand over to
him the sum of over half a million which belonged to M. Madeleine. This
convict who robbed M. Madeleine was Jean Valjean. As for the other fact,
you have nothing to tell me about it either. Jean Valjean killed the
agent Javert; he shot him with a pistol. I, the person who is speaking
to you, was present."

Thenardier cast upon Marius the sovereign glance of a conquered man who
lays his hand once more upon the victory, and who has just regained, in
one instant, all the ground which he has lost. But the smile returned
instantly. The inferior's triumph in the presence of his superior must
be wheedling.

Thenardier contented himself with saying to Marius:

"Monsieur le Baron, we are on the wrong track."

And he emphasized this phrase by making his bunch of seals execute an
expressive whirl.

"What!" broke forth Marius, "do you dispute that? These are facts."

"They are chimeras. The confidence with which Monsieur le Baron honors
me renders it my duty to tell him so. Truth and justice before all
things. I do not like to see folks accused unjustly. Monsieur le Baron,
Jean Valjean did not rob M. Madeleine and Jean Valjean did not kill
Javert."

"This is too much! How is this?"

"For two reasons."

"What are they? Speak."

"This is the first: he did not rob M. Madeleine, because it is Jean
Valjean himself who was M. Madeleine."

"What tale are you telling me?"

"And this is the second: he did not assassinate Javert, because the
person who killed Javert was Javert."

"What do you mean to say?"

"That Javert committed suicide."

"Prove it! prove it!" cried Marius beside himself.

Thenardier resumed, scanning his phrase after the manner of the ancient
Alexandrine measure:


"Police-agent-Ja-vert-was-found-drowned-un-der-a-boat-of-the-Pont-au-Change."

"But prove it!"

Thenardier drew from his pocket a large envelope of gray paper, which
seemed to contain sheets folded in different sizes.

"I have my papers," he said calmly.

And he added:

"Monsieur le Baron, in your interests I desired to know Jean Valjean
thoroughly. I say that Jean Valjean and M. Madeleine are one and the
same man, and I say that Javert had no other assassin than Javert. If
I speak, it is because I have proofs. Not manuscript proofs--writing is
suspicious, handwriting is complaisant,--but printed proofs."

As he spoke, Thenardier extracted from the envelope two copies of
newspapers, yellow, faded, and strongly saturated with tobacco. One of
these two newspapers, broken at every fold and falling into rags, seemed
much older than the other.

"Two facts, two proofs," remarked Thenardier. And he offered the two
newspapers, unfolded, to Marius.

The reader is acquainted with these two papers. One, the most ancient, a
number of the Drapeau Blanc of the 25th of July, 1823, the text of
which can be seen in the first volume, established the identity of M.
Madeleine and Jean Valjean.

The other, a Moniteur of the 15th of June, 1832, announced the suicide
of Javert, adding that it appeared from a verbal report of Javert to the
prefect that, having been taken prisoner in the barricade of the Rue de
la Chanvrerie, he had owed his life to the magnanimity of an insurgent
who, holding him under his pistol, had fired into the air, instead of
blowing out his brains.

Marius read. He had evidence, a certain date, irrefragable proof, these
two newspapers had not been printed expressly for the purpose of backing
up Thenardier's statements; the note printed in the Moniteur had been an
administrative communication from the Prefecture of Police. Marius could
not doubt.

The information of the cashier-clerk had been false, and he himself had
been deceived.

Jean Valjean, who had suddenly grown grand, emerged from his cloud.
Marius could not repress a cry of joy.

"Well, then this unhappy wretch is an admirable man! the whole of that
fortune really belonged to him! he is Madeleine, the providence of a
whole countryside! he is Jean Valjean, Javert's savior! he is a hero! he
is a saint!"

"He's not a saint, and he's not a hero!" said Thenardier. "He's an
assassin and a robber."

And he added, in the tone of a man who begins to feel that he possesses
some authority:

"Let us be calm."

Robber, assassin--those words which Marius thought had disappeared and
which returned, fell upon him like an ice-cold shower-bath.

"Again!" said he.

"Always," ejaculated Thenardier. "Jean Valjean did not rob Madeleine,
but he is a thief. He did not kill Javert, but he is a murderer."

"Will you speak," retorted Marius, "of that miserable theft, committed
forty years ago, and expiated, as your own newspapers prove, by a whole
life of repentance, of self-abnegation and of virtue?"

"I say assassination and theft, Monsieur le Baron, and I repeat that I
am speaking of actual facts. What I have to reveal to you is absolutely
unknown. It belongs to unpublished matter. And perhaps you will find in
it the source of the fortune so skilfully presented to Madame la Baronne
by Jean Valjean. I say skilfully, because, by a gift of that nature it
would not be so very unskilful to slip into an honorable house whose
comforts one would then share, and, at the same stroke, to conceal one's
crime, and to enjoy one's theft, to bury one's name and to create for
oneself a family."

"I might interrupt you at this point," said Marius, "but go on."

"Monsieur le Baron, I will tell you all, leaving the recompense to your
generosity. This secret is worth massive gold. You will say to me: 'Why
do not you apply to Jean Valjean?' For a very simple reason; I know
that he has stripped himself, and stripped himself in your favor, and I
consider the combination ingenious; but he has no longer a son, he would
show me his empty hands, and, since I am in need of some money for
my trip to la Joya, I prefer you, you who have it all, to him who has
nothing. I am a little fatigued, permit me to take a chair."

Marius seated himself and motioned to him to do the same.

Thenardier installed himself on a tufted chair, picked up his two
newspapers, thrust them back into their envelope, and murmured as he
pecked at the Drapeau Blanc with his nail: "It cost me a good deal of
trouble to get this one."

That done he crossed his legs and stretched himself out on the back of
the chair, an attitude characteristic of people who are sure of what
they are saying, then he entered upon his subject gravely, emphasizing
his words:

"Monsieur le Baron, on the 6th of June, 1832, about a year ago, on the
day of the insurrection, a man was in the Grand Sewer of Paris, at the
point where the sewer enters the Seine, between the Pont des Invalides
and the Pont de Jena."

Marius abruptly drew his chair closer to that of Thenardier. Thenardier
noticed this movement and continued with the deliberation of an orator
who holds his interlocutor and who feels his adversary palpitating under
his words:

"This man, forced to conceal himself, and for reasons, moreover, which
are foreign to politics, had adopted the sewer as his domicile and had
a key to it. It was, I repeat, on the 6th of June; it might have been
eight o'clock in the evening. The man hears a noise in the sewer.
Greatly surprised, he hides himself and lies in wait. It was the sound
of footsteps, some one was walking in the dark, and coming in his
direction. Strange to say, there was another man in the sewer besides
himself. The grating of the outlet from the sewer was not far off.
A little light which fell through it permitted him to recognize the
newcomer, and to see that the man was carrying something on his back.
He was walking in a bent attitude. The man who was walking in a bent
attitude was an ex-convict, and what he was dragging on his shoulders
was a corpse. Assassination caught in the very act, if ever there was
such a thing. As for the theft, that is understood; one does not kill
a man gratis. This convict was on his way to fling the body into the
river. One fact is to be noticed, that before reaching the exit
grating, this convict, who had come a long distance in the sewer, must,
necessarily, have encountered a frightful quagmire where it seems as
though he might have left the body, but the sewermen would have found
the assassinated man the very next day, while at work on the quagmire,
and that did not suit the assassin's plans. He had preferred to
traverse that quagmire with his burden, and his exertions must have been
terrible, for it is impossible to risk one's life more completely; I
don't understand how he could have come out of that alive."

Marius' chair approached still nearer. Thenardier took advantage of this
to draw a long breath. He went on:

"Monsieur le Baron, a sewer is not the Champ de Mars. One lacks
everything there, even room. When two men are there, they must meet.
That is what happened. The man domiciled there and the passer-by were
forced to bid each other good-day, greatly to the regret of both. The
passer-by said to the inhabitant:--"You see what I have on my back, I
must get out, you have the key, give it to me." That convict was a man
of terrible strength. There was no way of refusing. Nevertheless, the
man who had the key parleyed, simply to gain time. He examined the dead
man, but he could see nothing, except that the latter was young, well
dressed, with the air of being rich, and all disfigured with blood.
While talking, the man contrived to tear and pull off behind, without
the assassin perceiving it, a bit of the assassinated man's coat. A
document for conviction, you understand; a means of recovering the trace
of things and of bringing home the crime to the criminal. He put
this document for conviction in his pocket. After which he opened the
grating, made the man go out with his embarrassment on his back, closed
the grating again, and ran off, not caring to be mixed up with the
remainder of the adventure and above all, not wishing to be present
when the assassin threw the assassinated man into the river. Now you
comprehend. The man who was carrying the corpse was Jean Valjean; the
one who had the key is speaking to you at this moment; and the piece of
the coat . . ."

Thenardier completed his phrase by drawing from his pocket, and holding,
on a level with his eyes, nipped between his two thumbs and his two
forefingers, a strip of torn black cloth, all covered with dark spots.

Marius had sprung to his feet, pale, hardly able to draw his breath,
with his eyes riveted on the fragment of black cloth, and, without
uttering a word, without taking his eyes from that fragment, he
retreated to the wall and fumbled with his right hand along the wall for
a key which was in the lock of a cupboard near the chimney.

He found the key, opened the cupboard, plunged his arm into it without
looking, and without his frightened gaze quitting the rag which
Thenardier still held outspread.

But Thenardier continued:

"Monsieur le Baron, I have the strongest of reasons for believing that
the assassinated young man was an opulent stranger lured into a trap by
Jean Valjean, and the bearer of an enormous sum of money."

"The young man was myself, and here is the coat!" cried Marius, and he
flung upon the floor an old black coat all covered with blood.

Then, snatching the fragment from the hands of Thenardier, he crouched
down over the coat, and laid the torn morsel against the tattered skirt.
The rent fitted exactly, and the strip completed the coat.

Thenardier was petrified.

This is what he thought: "I'm struck all of a heap."

Marius rose to his feet trembling, despairing, radiant.

He fumbled in his pocket and stalked furiously to Thenardier, presenting
to him and almost thrusting in his face his fist filled with bank-notes
for five hundred and a thousand francs.

"You are an infamous wretch! you are a liar, a calumniator, a villain.
You came to accuse that man, you have only justified him; you wanted to
ruin him, you have only succeeded in glorifying him. And it is you who
are the thief! And it is you who are the assassin! I saw you, Thenardier
Jondrette, in that lair on the Rue de l'Hopital. I know enough about
you to send you to the galleys and even further if I choose. Here are a
thousand francs, bully that you are!"

And he flung a thousand franc note at Thenardier.

"Ah! Jondrette Thenardier, vile rascal! Let this serve you as a lesson,
you dealer in second-hand secrets, merchant of mysteries, rummager of
the shadows, wretch! Take these five hundred francs and get out of here!
Waterloo protects you."

"Waterloo!" growled Thenardier, pocketing the five hundred francs along
with the thousand.

"Yes, assassin! You there saved the life of a Colonel. . ."

"Of a General," said Thenardier, elevating his head.

"Of a Colonel!" repeated Marius in a rage. "I wouldn't give a ha'penny
for a general. And you come here to commit infamies! I tell you that
you have committed all crimes. Go! disappear! Only be happy, that is all
that I desire. Ah! monster! here are three thousand francs more. Take
them. You will depart to-morrow, for America, with your daughter;
for your wife is dead, you abominable liar. I shall watch over your
departure, you ruffian, and at that moment I will count out to you
twenty thousand francs. Go get yourself hung elsewhere!"

"Monsieur le Baron!" replied Thenardier, bowing to the very earth,
"eternal gratitude." And Thenardier left the room, understanding
nothing, stupefied and delighted with this sweet crushing beneath sacks
of gold, and with that thunder which had burst forth over his head in
bank-bills.

Struck by lightning he was, but he was also content; and he would
have been greatly angered had he had a lightning rod to ward off such
lightning as that.

Let us finish with this man at once.

Two days after the events which we are at this moment narrating, he set
out, thanks to Marius' care, for America under a false name, with his
daughter Azelma, furnished with a draft on New York for twenty thousand
francs.

The moral wretchedness of Thenardier, the bourgeois who had missed
his vocation, was irremediable. He was in America what he had been in
Europe. Contact with an evil man sometimes suffices to corrupt a good
action and to cause evil things to spring from it. With Marius' money,
Thenardier set up as a slave-dealer.

As soon as Thenardier had left the house, Marius rushed to the garden,
where Cosette was still walking.

"Cosette! Cosette!" he cried. "Come! come quick! Let us go. Basque, a
carriage! Cosette, come. Ah! My God! It was he who saved my life! Let us
not lose a minute! Put on your shawl."

Cosette thought him mad and obeyed.

He could not breathe, he laid his hand on his heart to restrain its
throbbing. He paced back and forth with huge strides, he embraced
Cosette:

"Ah! Cosette! I am an unhappy wretch!" said he.

Marius was bewildered. He began to catch a glimpse in Jean Valjean of
some indescribably lofty and melancholy figure. An unheard-of virtue,
supreme and sweet, humble in its immensity, appeared to him. The convict
was transfigured into Christ.

Marius was dazzled by this prodigy. He did not know precisely what he
beheld, but it was grand.

In an instant, a hackney-carriage stood in front of the door.

Marius helped Cosette in and darted in himself.

"Driver," said he, "Rue de l'Homme Arme, Number 7."

The carriage drove off.

"Ah! what happiness!" ejaculated Cosette. "Rue de l'Homme Arme, I did
not dare to speak to you of that. We are going to see M. Jean."

"Thy father! Cosette, thy father more than ever. Cosette, I guess it.
You told me that you had never received the letter that I sent you by
Gavroche. It must have fallen into his hands. Cosette, he went to the
barricade to save me. As it is a necessity with him to be an angel, he
saved others also; he saved Javert. He rescued me from that gulf to give
me to you. He carried me on his back through that frightful sewer. Ah! I
am a monster of ingratitude. Cosette, after having been your providence,
he became mine. Just imagine, there was a terrible quagmire enough to
drown one a hundred times over, to drown one in mire. Cosette! he made
me traverse it. I was unconscious; I saw nothing, I heard nothing, I
could know nothing of my own adventure. We are going to bring him back,
to take him with us, whether he is willing or not, he shall never leave
us again. If only he is at home! Provided only that we can find him,
I will pass the rest of my life in venerating him. Yes, that is how it
should be, do you see, Cosette? Gavroche must have delivered my letter
to him. All is explained. You understand."

Cosette did not understand a word.

"You are right," she said to him.

Meanwhile the carriage rolled on.




CHAPTER V--A NIGHT BEHIND WHICH THERE IS DAY

Jean Valjean turned round at the knock which he heard on his door.

"Come in," he said feebly.

The door opened.

Cosette and Marius made their appearance.

Cosette rushed into the room.

Marius remained on the threshold, leaning against the jamb of the door.

"Cosette!" said Jean Valjean.

And he sat erect in his chair, his arms outstretched and trembling,
haggard, livid, gloomy, an immense joy in his eyes.

Cosette, stifling with emotion, fell upon Jean Valjean's breast.

"Father!" said she.

Jean Valjean, overcome, stammered:

"Cosette! she! you! Madame! it is thou! Ah! my God!"

And, pressed close in Cosette's arms, he exclaimed:

"It is thou! thou art here! Thou dost pardon me then!"

Marius, lowering his eyelids, in order to keep his tears from flowing,
took a step forward and murmured between lips convulsively contracted to
repress his sobs:

"My father!"

"And you also, you pardon me!" Jean Valjean said to him.

Marius could find no words, and Jean Valjean added:

"Thanks."

Cosette tore off her shawl and tossed her hat on the bed.

"It embarrasses me," said she.

And, seating herself on the old man's knees, she put aside his white
locks with an adorable movement, and kissed his brow.

Jean Valjean, bewildered, let her have her own way.

Cosette, who only understood in a very confused manner, redoubled her
caresses, as though she desired to pay Marius' debt.

Jean Valjean stammered:

"How stupid people are! I thought that I should never see her again.
Imagine, Monsieur Pontmercy, at the very moment when you entered, I
was saying to myself: 'All is over. Here is her little gown, I am a
miserable man, I shall never see Cosette again,' and I was saying that
at the very moment when you were mounting the stairs. Was not I an
idiot? Just see how idiotic one can be! One reckons without the good
God. The good God says:

"'You fancy that you are about to be abandoned, stupid! No. No, things
will not go so. Come, there is a good man yonder who is in need of an
angel.' And the angel comes, and one sees one's Cosette again! and one
sees one's little Cosette once more! Ah! I was very unhappy."

For a moment he could not speak, then he went on:

"I really needed to see Cosette a little bit now and then. A heart needs
a bone to gnaw. But I was perfectly conscious that I was in the way. I
gave myself reasons: 'They do not want you, keep in your own course,
one has not the right to cling eternally.' Ah! God be praised, I see her
once more! Dost thou know, Cosette, thy husband is very handsome? Ah!
what a pretty embroidered collar thou hast on, luckily. I am fond of
that pattern. It was thy husband who chose it, was it not? And then,
thou shouldst have some cashmere shawls. Let me call her thou, Monsieur
Pontmercy. It will not be for long."

And Cosette began again:

"How wicked of you to have left us like that! Where did you go? Why have
you stayed away so long? Formerly your journeys only lasted three or
four days. I sent Nicolette, the answer always was: 'He is absent.' How
long have you been back? Why did you not let us know? Do you know that
you are very much changed? Ah! what a naughty father! he has been ill,
and we have not known it! Stay, Marius, feel how cold his hand is!"

"So you are here! Monsieur Pontmercy, you pardon me!" repeated Jean
Valjean.

At that word which Jean Valjean had just uttered once more, all that was
swelling Marius' heart found vent.

He burst forth:

"Cosette, do you hear? he has come to that! he asks my forgiveness! And
do you know what he has done for me, Cosette? He has saved my life. He
has done more--he has given you to me. And after having saved me, and
after having given you to me, Cosette, what has he done with himself? He
has sacrificed himself. Behold the man. And he says to me the ingrate,
to me the forgetful, to me the pitiless, to me the guilty one: Thanks!
Cosette, my whole life passed at the feet of this man would be too
little. That barricade, that sewer, that furnace, that cesspool,--all
that he traversed for me, for thee, Cosette! He carried me away through
all the deaths which he put aside before me, and accepted for himself.
Every courage, every virtue, every heroism, every sanctity he possesses!
Cosette, that man is an angel!"

"Hush! hush!" said Jean Valjean in a low voice. "Why tell all that?"

"But you!" cried Marius with a wrath in which there was veneration, "why
did you not tell it to me? It is your own fault, too. You save people's
lives, and you conceal it from them! You do more, under the pretext of
unmasking yourself, you calumniate yourself. It is frightful."

"I told the truth," replied Jean Valjean.

"No," retorted Marius, "the truth is the whole truth; and that you did
not tell. You were Monsieur Madeleine, why not have said so? You saved
Javert, why not have said so? I owed my life to you, why not have said
so?"

"Because I thought as you do. I thought that you were in the right. It
was necessary that I should go away. If you had known about that affair,
of the sewer, you would have made me remain near you. I was therefore
forced to hold my peace. If I had spoken, it would have caused
embarrassment in every way."

"It would have embarrassed what? embarrassed whom?" retorted Marius. "Do
you think that you are going to stay here? We shall carry you off. Ah!
good heavens! when I reflect that it was by an accident that I have
learned all this. You form a part of ourselves. You are her father,
and mine. You shall not pass another day in this dreadful house. Do not
imagine that you will be here to-morrow."

"To-morrow," said Jean Valjean, "I shall not be here, but I shall not be
with you."

"What do you mean?" replied Marius. "Ah! come now, we are not going to
permit any more journeys. You shall never leave us again. You belong to
us. We shall not loose our hold of you."

"This time it is for good," added Cosette. "We have a carriage at the
door. I shall run away with you. If necessary, I shall employ force."

And she laughingly made a movement to lift the old man in her arms.

"Your chamber still stands ready in our house," she went on. "If you
only knew how pretty the garden is now! The azaleas are doing very
well there. The walks are sanded with river sand; there are tiny violet
shells. You shall eat my strawberries. I water them myself. And no
more 'madame,' no more 'Monsieur Jean,' we are living under a Republic,
everybody says thou, don't they, Marius? The programme is changed. If
you only knew, father, I have had a sorrow, there was a robin redbreast
which had made her nest in a hole in the wall, and a horrible cat ate
her. My poor, pretty, little robin red-breast which used to put her head
out of her window and look at me! I cried over it. I should have liked
to kill the cat. But now nobody cries any more. Everybody laughs,
everybody is happy. You are going to come with us. How delighted
grandfather will be! You shall have your plot in the garden, you shall
cultivate it, and we shall see whether your strawberries are as fine as
mine. And, then, I shall do everything that you wish, and then, you will
obey me prettily."

Jean Valjean listened to her without hearing her. He heard the music of
her voice rather than the sense of her words; one of those large tears
which are the sombre pearls of the soul welled up slowly in his eyes.

He murmured:

"The proof that God is good is that she is here."

"Father!" said Cosette.

Jean Valjean continued:

"It is quite true that it would be charming for us to live together.
Their trees are full of birds. I would walk with Cosette. It is sweet to
be among living people who bid each other 'good-day,' who call to each
other in the garden. People see each other from early morning. We
should each cultivate our own little corner. She would make me eat her
strawberries. I would make her gather my roses. That would be charming.
Only . . ."

He paused and said gently:

"It is a pity."

The tear did not fall, it retreated, and Jean Valjean replaced it with a
smile.

Cosette took both the old man's hands in hers.

"My God!" said she, "your hands are still colder than before. Are you
ill? Do you suffer?"

"I? No," replied Jean Valjean. "I am very well. Only . . ."

He paused.

"Only what?"

"I am going to die presently."

Cosette and Marius shuddered.

"To die!" exclaimed Marius.

"Yes, but that is nothing," said Jean Valjean.

He took breath, smiled and resumed:

"Cosette, thou wert talking to me, go on, so thy little robin red-breast
is dead? Speak, so that I may hear thy voice."

Marius gazed at the old man in amazement.

Cosette uttered a heartrending cry.

"Father! my father! you will live. You are going to live. I insist upon
your living, do you hear?"

Jean Valjean raised his head towards her with adoration.

"Oh! yes, forbid me to die. Who knows? Perhaps I shall obey. I was on
the verge of dying when you came. That stopped me, it seemed to me that
I was born again."

"You are full of strength and life," cried Marius. "Do you imagine that
a person can die like this? You have had sorrow, you shall have no more.
It is I who ask your forgiveness, and on my knees! You are going to
live, and to live with us, and to live a long time. We take possession
of you once more. There are two of us here who will henceforth have no
other thought than your happiness."

"You see," resumed Cosette, all bathed in tears, "that Marius says that
you shall not die."

Jean Valjean continued to smile.

"Even if you were to take possession of me, Monsieur Pontmercy, would
that make me other than I am? No, God has thought like you and myself,
and he does not change his mind; it is useful for me to go. Death is
a good arrangement. God knows better than we what we need. May you be
happy, may Monsieur Pontmercy have Cosette, may youth wed the morning,
may there be around you, my children, lilacs and nightingales; may your
life be a beautiful, sunny lawn, may all the enchantments of heaven fill
your souls, and now let me, who am good for nothing, die; it is certain
that all this is right. Come, be reasonable, nothing is possible now, I
am fully conscious that all is over. And then, last night, I drank that
whole jug of water. How good thy husband is, Cosette! Thou art much
better off with him than with me."

A noise became audible at the door.

It was the doctor entering.

"Good-day, and farewell, doctor," said Jean Valjean. "Here are my poor
children."

Marius stepped up to the doctor. He addressed to him only this single
word: "Monsieur? . . ." But his manner of pronouncing it contained a
complete question.

The doctor replied to the question by an expressive glance.

"Because things are not agreeable," said Jean Valjean, "that is no
reason for being unjust towards God."

A silence ensued.

All breasts were oppressed.

Jean Valjean turned to Cosette. He began to gaze at her as though he
wished to retain her features for eternity.

In the depths of the shadow into which he had already descended, ecstasy
was still possible to him when gazing at Cosette. The reflection of that
sweet face lighted up his pale visage.

The doctor felt of his pulse.

"Ah! it was you that he wanted!" he murmured, looking at Cosette and
Marius.

And bending down to Marius' ear, he added in a very low voice:

"Too late."

Jean Valjean surveyed the doctor and Marius serenely, almost without
ceasing to gaze at Cosette.

These barely articulate words were heard to issue from his mouth:

"It is nothing to die; it is dreadful not to live."

All at once he rose to his feet. These accesses of strength are
sometimes the sign of the death agony. He walked with a firm step to
the wall, thrusting aside Marius and the doctor who tried to help him,
detached from the wall a little copper crucifix which was suspended
there, and returned to his seat with all the freedom of movement of
perfect health, and said in a loud voice, as he laid the crucifix on the
table:

"Behold the great martyr."

Then his chest sank in, his head wavered, as though the intoxication of
the tomb were seizing hold upon him.

His hands, which rested on his knees, began to press their nails into
the stuff of his trousers.

Cosette supported his shoulders, and sobbed, and tried to speak to him,
but could not.

Among the words mingled with that mournful saliva which accompanies
tears, they distinguished words like the following:

"Father, do not leave us. Is it possible that we have found you only to
lose you again?"

It might be said that agony writhes. It goes, comes, advances towards
the sepulchre, and returns towards life. There is groping in the action
of dying.

Jean Valjean rallied after this semi-swoon, shook his brow as though
to make the shadows fall away from it and became almost perfectly lucid
once more.

He took a fold of Cosette's sleeve and kissed it.

"He is coming back! doctor, he is coming back," cried Marius.

"You are good, both of you," said Jean Valjean. "I am going to tell you
what has caused me pain. What has pained me, Monsieur Pontmercy, is that
you have not been willing to touch that money. That money really belongs
to your wife. I will explain to you, my children, and for that reason,
also, I am glad to see you. Black jet comes from England, white jet
comes from Norway. All this is in this paper, which you will read. For
bracelets, I invented a way of substituting for slides of soldered sheet
iron, slides of iron laid together. It is prettier, better and less
costly. You will understand how much money can be made in that way. So
Cosette's fortune is really hers. I give you these details, in order
that your mind may be set at rest."

The portress had come upstairs and was gazing in at the half-open door.
The doctor dismissed her.

But he could not prevent this zealous woman from exclaiming to the dying
man before she disappeared: "Would you like a priest?"

"I have had one," replied Jean Valjean.

And with his finger he seemed to indicate a point above his head where
one would have said that he saw some one.

It is probable, in fact, that the Bishop was present at this death
agony.

Cosette gently slipped a pillow under his loins.

Jean Valjean resumed:

"Have no fear, Monsieur Pontmercy, I adjure you. The six hundred
thousand francs really belong to Cosette. My life will have been wasted
if you do not enjoy them! We managed to do very well with those glass
goods. We rivalled what is called Berlin jewellery. However, we could
not equal the black glass of England. A gross, which contains twelve
hundred very well cut grains, only costs three francs."

When a being who is dear to us is on the point of death, we gaze upon
him with a look which clings convulsively to him and which would fain
hold him back.

Cosette gave her hand to Marius, and both, mute with anguish, not
knowing what to say to the dying man, stood trembling and despairing
before him.

Jean Valjean sank moment by moment. He was failing; he was drawing near
to the gloomy horizon.

His breath had become intermittent; a little rattling interrupted it.
He found some difficulty in moving his forearm, his feet had lost all
movement, and in proportion as the wretchedness of limb and feebleness
of body increased, all the majesty of his soul was displayed and spread
over his brow. The light of the unknown world was already visible in his
eyes.

His face paled and smiled. Life was no longer there, it was something
else.

His breath sank, his glance grew grander. He was a corpse on which the
wings could be felt.

He made a sign to Cosette to draw near, then to Marius; the last minute
of the last hour had, evidently, arrived.

He began to speak to them in a voice so feeble that it seemed to come
from a distance, and one would have said that a wall now rose between
them and him.

"Draw near, draw near, both of you. I love you dearly. Oh! how good it
is to die like this! And thou lovest me also, my Cosette. I knew well
that thou still felt friendly towards thy poor old man. How kind it was
of thee to place that pillow under my loins! Thou wilt weep for me a
little, wilt thou not? Not too much. I do not wish thee to have any real
griefs. You must enjoy yourselves a great deal, my children. I forgot
to tell you that the profit was greater still on the buckles without
tongues than on all the rest. A gross of a dozen dozens cost ten francs
and sold for sixty. It really was a good business. So there is no
occasion for surprise at the six hundred thousand francs, Monsieur
Pontmercy. It is honest money. You may be rich with a tranquil mind.
Thou must have a carriage, a box at the theatres now and then, and
handsome ball dresses, my Cosette, and then, thou must give good dinners
to thy friends, and be very happy. I was writing to Cosette a while ago.
She will find my letter. I bequeath to her the two candlesticks which
stand on the chimney-piece. They are of silver, but to me they are gold,
they are diamonds; they change candles which are placed in them into
wax-tapers. I do not know whether the person who gave them to me is
pleased with me yonder on high. I have done what I could. My children,
you will not forget that I am a poor man, you will have me buried in the
first plot of earth that you find, under a stone to mark the spot. This
is my wish. No name on the stone. If Cosette cares to come for a little
while now and then, it will give me pleasure. And you too, Monsieur
Pontmercy. I must admit that I have not always loved you. I ask your
pardon for that. Now she and you form but one for me. I feel very
grateful to you. I am sure that you make Cosette happy. If you only
knew, Monsieur Pontmercy, her pretty rosy cheeks were my delight; when I
saw her in the least pale, I was sad. In the chest of drawers, there is
a bank-bill for five hundred francs. I have not touched it. It is for
the poor. Cosette, dost thou see thy little gown yonder on the bed? dost
thou recognize it? That was ten years ago, however. How time flies! We
have been very happy. All is over. Do not weep, my children, I am not
going very far, I shall see you from there, you will only have to
look at night, and you will see me smile. Cosette, dost thou remember
Montfermeil? Thou wert in the forest, thou wert greatly terrified; dost
thou remember how I took hold of the handle of the water-bucket? That
was the first time that I touched thy poor, little hand. It was so cold!
Ah! your hands were red then, mademoiselle, they are very white now. And
the big doll! dost thou remember? Thou didst call her Catherine. Thou
regrettedest not having taken her to the convent! How thou didst make
me laugh sometimes, my sweet angel! When it had been raining, thou didst
float bits of straw on the gutters, and watch them pass away. One day
I gave thee a willow battledore and a shuttlecock with yellow, blue and
green feathers. Thou hast forgotten it. Thou wert roguish so young! Thou
didst play. Thou didst put cherries in thy ears. Those are things of
the past. The forests through which one has passed with one's child, the
trees under which one has strolled, the convents where one has concealed
oneself, the games, the hearty laughs of childhood, are shadows. I
imagined that all that belonged to me. In that lay my stupidity. Those
Thenardiers were wicked. Thou must forgive them. Cosette, the moment
has come to tell thee the name of thy mother. She was called Fantine.
Remember that name--Fantine. Kneel whenever thou utterest it. She
suffered much. She loved thee dearly. She had as much unhappiness as
thou hast had happiness. That is the way God apportions things. He is
there on high, he sees us all, and he knows what he does in the midst of
his great stars. I am on the verge of departure, my children. Love each
other well and always. There is nothing else but that in the world: love
for each other. You will think sometimes of the poor old man who died
here. Oh my Cosette, it is not my fault, indeed, that I have not seen
thee all this time, it cut me to the heart; I went as far as the corner
of the street, I must have produced a queer effect on the people who
saw me pass, I was like a madman, I once went out without my hat. I no
longer see clearly, my children, I had still other things to say, but
never mind. Think a little of me. Come still nearer. I die happy. Give
me your dear and well-beloved heads, so that I may lay my hands upon
them."

Cosette and Marius fell on their knees, in despair, suffocating with
tears, each beneath one of Jean Valjean's hands. Those august hands no
longer moved.

He had fallen backwards, the light of the candles illuminated him.

His white face looked up to heaven, he allowed Cosette and Marius to
cover his hands with kisses.

He was dead.

The night was starless and extremely dark. No doubt, in the gloom, some
immense angel stood erect with wings outspread, awaiting that soul.

[Illustration: Darkness  5b9-1-Darkness]




CHAPTER VI--THE GRASS COVERS AND THE RAIN EFFACES

In the cemetery of Pere-Lachaise, in the vicinity of the common grave,
far from the elegant quarter of that city of sepulchres, far from all
the tombs of fancy which display in the presence of eternity all the
hideous fashions of death, in a deserted corner, beside an old wall,
beneath a great yew tree over which climbs the wild convolvulus, amid
dandelions and mosses, there lies a stone. That stone is no more exempt
than others from the leprosy of time, of dampness, of the lichens and
from the defilement of the birds. The water turns it green, the air
blackens it. It is not near any path, and people are not fond of
walking in that direction, because the grass is high and their feet
are immediately wet. When there is a little sunshine, the lizards
come thither. All around there is a quivering of weeds. In the spring,
linnets warble in the trees.

This stone is perfectly plain. In cutting it the only thought was the
requirements of the tomb, and no other care was taken than to make the
stone long enough and narrow enough to cover a man.

No name is to be read there.

Only, many years ago, a hand wrote upon it in pencil these four lines,
which have become gradually illegible beneath the rain and the dust, and
which are, to-day, probably effaced:

           Il dort. Quoique le sort fut pour lui bien etrange,
           Il vivait. Il mourut quand il n'eut plus son ange.
           La chose simplement d'elle-meme arriva,
           Comme la nuit se fait lorsque le jour s'en va.[70]





LETTER TO M. DAELLI

Publisher of the Italian translation of Les Miserables in Milan.

                               HAUTEVILLE-HOUSE, October 18, 1862.


You are right, sir, when you tell me that Les Miserables is written for
all nations. I do not know whether it will be read by all, but I wrote
it for all. It is addressed to England as well as to Spain, to Italy as
well as to France, to Germany as well as to Ireland, to Republics which
have slaves as well as to Empires which have serfs. Social problems
overstep frontiers. The sores of the human race, those great sores which
cover the globe, do not halt at the red or blue lines traced upon the
map. In every place where man is ignorant and despairing, in every place
where woman is sold for bread, wherever the child suffers for lack of
the book which should instruct him and of the hearth which should warm
him, the book of Les Miserables knocks at the door and says: "Open to
me, I come for you."

At the hour of civilization through which we are now passing, and which
is still so sombre, the miserable's name is Man; he is agonizing in all
climes, and he is groaning in all languages.

Your Italy is no more exempt from the evil than is our France. Your
admirable Italy has all miseries on the face of it. Does not banditism,
that raging form of pauperism, inhabit your mountains? Few nations are
more deeply eaten by that ulcer of convents which I have endeavored to
fathom. In spite of your possessing Rome, Milan, Naples, Palermo, Turin,
Florence, Sienna, Pisa, Mantua, Bologna, Ferrara, Genoa, Venice, a
heroic history, sublime ruins, magnificent ruins, and superb cities,
you are, like ourselves, poor. You are covered with marvels and vermin.
Assuredly, the sun of Italy is splendid, but, alas, azure in the sky
does not prevent rags on man.

Like us, you have prejudices, superstitions, tyrannies, fanaticisms,
blind laws lending assistance to ignorant customs. You taste nothing of
the present nor of the future without a flavor of the past being mingled
with it. You have a barbarian, the monk, and a savage, the lazzarone.
The social question is the same for you as for us. There are a few less
deaths from hunger with you, and a few more from fever; your social
hygiene is not much better than ours; shadows, which are Protestant in
England, are Catholic in Italy; but, under different names, the vescovo
is identical with the bishop, and it always means night, and of pretty
nearly the same quality. To explain the Bible badly amounts to the same
thing as to understand the Gospel badly.

Is it necessary to emphasize this? Must this melancholy parallelism
be yet more completely verified? Have you not indigent persons? Glance
below. Have you not parasites? Glance up. Does not that hideous balance,
whose two scales, pauperism and parasitism, so mournfully preserve their
mutual equilibrium, oscillate before you as it does before us? Where
is your army of schoolmasters, the only army which civilization
acknowledges?

Where are your free and compulsory schools? Does every one know how to
read in the land of Dante and of Michael Angelo? Have you made public
schools of your barracks? Have you not, like ourselves, an opulent
war-budget and a paltry budget of education? Have not you also that
passive obedience which is so easily converted into soldierly obedience?
military establishment which pushes the regulations to the extreme of
firing upon Garibaldi; that is to say, upon the living honor of Italy?
Let us subject your social order to examination, let us take it where it
stands and as it stands, let us view its flagrant offences, show me the
woman and the child. It is by the amount of protection with which these
two feeble creatures are surrounded that the degree of civilization
is to be measured. Is prostitution less heartrending in Naples than in
Paris? What is the amount of truth that springs from your laws, and what
amount of justice springs from your tribunals? Do you chance to be so
fortunate as to be ignorant of the meaning of those gloomy words: public
prosecution, legal infamy, prison, the scaffold, the executioner, the
death penalty? Italians, with you as with us, Beccaria is dead and
Farinace is alive. And then, let us scrutinize your state reasons.
Have you a government which comprehends the identity of morality and
politics? You have reached the point where you grant amnesty to heroes!
Something very similar has been done in France. Stay, let us pass
miseries in review, let each one contribute his pile, you are as rich
as we. Have you not, like ourselves, two condemnations, religious
condemnation pronounced by the priest, and social condemnation decreed
by the judge? Oh, great nation of Italy, thou resemblest the great
nation of France! Alas! our brothers, you are, like ourselves,
Miserables.

From the depths of the gloom wherein you dwell, you do not see much more
distinctly than we the radiant and distant portals of Eden. Only, the
priests are mistaken. These holy portals are before and not behind us.

I resume. This book, Les Miserables, is no less your mirror than ours.
Certain men, certain castes, rise in revolt against this book,--I
understand that. Mirrors, those revealers of the truth, are hated; that
does not prevent them from being of use.

As for myself, I have written for all, with a profound love for my own
country, but without being engrossed by France more than by any other
nation. In proportion as I advance in life, I grow more simple, and I
become more and more patriotic for humanity.

This is, moreover, the tendency of our age, and the law of radiance
of the French Revolution; books must cease to be exclusively French,
Italian, German, Spanish, or English, and become European, I say more,
human, if they are to correspond to the enlargement of civilization.

Hence a new logic of art, and of certain requirements of composition
which modify everything, even the conditions, formerly narrow, of taste
and language, which must grow broader like all the rest.

In France, certain critics have reproached me, to my great delight,
with having transgressed the bounds of what they call "French taste"; I
should be glad if this eulogium were merited.

In short, I am doing what I can, I suffer with the same universal
suffering, and I try to assuage it, I possess only the puny forces of a
man, and I cry to all: "Help me!"

This, sir, is what your letter prompts me to say; I say it for you and
for your country. If I have insisted so strongly, it is because of one
phrase in your letter. You write:--

"There are Italians, and they are numerous, who say: 'This book, Les
Miserables, is a French book. It does not concern us. Let the French
read it as a history, we read it as a romance.'"--Alas! I repeat,
whether we be Italians or Frenchmen, misery concerns us all. Ever since
history has been written, ever since philosophy has meditated, misery
has been the garment of the human race; the moment has at length arrived
for tearing off that rag, and for replacing, upon the naked limbs of the
Man-People, the sinister fragment of the past with the grand purple robe
of the dawn.

If this letter seems to you of service in enlightening some minds and
in dissipating some prejudices, you are at liberty to publish it,
sir. Accept, I pray you, a renewed assurance of my very distinguished
sentiments.

                                                  VICTOR HUGO.


*****

FOOTNOTES:


[Footnote 1: Patois of the French Alps: chat de maraude, rascally
marauder.]

[Footnote 2: Liege: a cork-tree. Pau: a jest on peau, skin.]

[Footnote 3: She belonged to that circle where cuckoos and carriages
share the same fate; and a jade herself, she lived, as jades live, for
the space of a morning (or jade).]

[Footnote 4: An ex-convict.]

[Footnote 5: This parenthesis is due to Jean Valjean.]

[Footnote 6: A bullet as large as an egg.]

[Footnote 7: Walter Scott, Lamartine, Vaulabelle, Charras, Quinet,
Thiers.]

[Footnote 8: This is the inscription:--

                       D. O. M.
                    CY A ETE ECRASE
                       PAR MALHEUR
                    SOUS UN CHARIOT,
                    MONSIEUR BERNARD
                    DE BRYE MARCHAND
               A BRUXELLE LE [Illegible]
                      FEVRIER 1637.]

[Footnote 9: A heavy rifled gun.]

[Footnote 10: "A battle terminated, a day finished, false measures
repaired, greater successes assured for the morrow,--all was lost by a
moment of panic, terror."--Napoleon, Dictees de Sainte Helene.]

[Footnote 11: Five winning numbers in a lottery]

[Footnote 12: Literally "made cuirs"; i. e., pronounced a t or an s at
the end of words where the opposite letter should occur, or used either
one of them where neither exists.]

[Footnote 13: Lawyer Corbeau, perched on a docket, held in his beak a
writ of execution; Lawyer Renard, attracted by the smell, addressed him
nearly as follows, etc.]

[Footnote 14:          This is the factory of Goblet Junior:
          Come choose your jugs and crocks,
          Flower-pots, pipes, bricks.
          The Heart sells Diamonds to every comer.]

[Footnote 15: On the boughs hang three bodies of unequal merits: Dismas
and Gesmas, between is the divine power. Dismas seeks the heights,
Gesmas, unhappy man, the lowest regions; the highest power will preserve
us and our effects. If you repeat this verse, you will not lose your
things by theft.]

[Footnote 16: Instead of porte cochere and porte batarde.]

[Footnote 17: Jesus-my-God-bandy-leg--down with the moon!]

[Footnote 18: Chicken: slang allusion to the noise made in calling
poultry.]

[Footnote 19: Louis XVIII. is represented in comic pictures of that day
as having a pear-shaped head.]

[Footnote 20: Tuck into your trousers the shirt-tail that is hanging
out. Let it not be said that patriots have hoisted the white flag.]

[Footnote 21: In order to re-establish the shaken throne firmly on
its base, soil (Des solles), greenhouse and house (Decazes) must be
changed.]

[Footnote 22: Suspendu, suspended; pendu, hung.]

[Footnote 23: L'Aile, wing.]

[Footnote 24: The slang term for a painter's assistant.]

[Footnote 25: If Cesar had given me glory and war, and I were obliged
to quit my mother's love, I would say to great Caesar, "Take back thy
sceptre and thy chariot; I prefer the love of my mother."]

[Footnote 26: Whether the sun shines brightly or dim, the bear returns
to his cave.]

[Footnote 27: The peep-hole is a Judas in French. Hence the half-punning
allusion.]

[Footnote 28: Our love has lasted a whole week, but how short are the
instants of happiness! To adore each other for eight days was hardly
worth the while! The time of love should last forever.]

[Footnote 29: You leave me to go to glory; my sad heart will follow you
everywhere.]

[Footnote 30: A democrat.]

[Footnote 31: King Bootkick went a-hunting after crows, mounted on two
stilts. When one passed beneath them, one paid him two sous.]

[Footnote 32: In olden times, fouriers were the officials who preceded
the Court and allotted the lodgings.]

[Footnote 33: A game of ninepins, in which one side of the ball is
smaller than the other, so that it does not roll straight, but describes
a curve on the ground.]

[Footnote 34: From April 19 to May 20.]

[Footnote 35: Merlan: a sobriquet given to hairdressers because they are
white with powder.]

[Footnote 36: The scaffold.]

[Footnote 37: Argot of the Temple.]

[Footnote 38: Argot of the barriers.]

[Footnote 39: The Last Day of a Condemned Man.]

[Footnote 40: "Vous trouverez dans ces potains-la, une foultitude de
raisons pour que je me libertise."]

[Footnote 41: It must be observed, however, that mac in Celtic means
son.]

[Footnote 42: Smoke puffed in the face of a person asleep.]

[Footnote 43: Je n'entrave que le dail comment meck, le daron des
orgues, peut atiger ses momes et ses momignards et les locher criblant
sans etre agite lui-meme.]

[Footnote 44: At night one sees nothing, by day one sees very well;
the bourgeois gets flurried over an apocryphal scrawl, practice virtue,
tutu, pointed hat!]

[Footnote 45: Chien, dog, trigger.]

[Footnote 46: Here is the morn appearing. When shall we go to the
forest, Charlot asked Charlotte. Tou, tou, tou, for Chatou, I have but
one God, one King, one half-farthing, and one boot. And these two poor
little wolves were as tipsy as sparrows from having drunk dew and thyme
very early in the morning. And these two poor little things were as
drunk as thrushes in a vineyard; a tiger laughed at them in his cave.
The one cursed, the other swore. When shall we go to the forest? Charlot
asked Charlotte.]

[Footnote 47: There swings the horrible skeleton of a poor lover who
hung himself.]

[Footnote 48: She astounds at ten paces, she frightens at two, a wart
inhabits her hazardous nose; you tremble every instant lest she should
blow it at you, and lest, some fine day, her nose should tumble into her
mouth.]

[Footnote 49: Matelote: a culinary preparation of various fishes.
Gibelotte: stewed rabbits.]

[Footnote 50: Treat if you can, and eat if you dare.]

[Footnote 51: Bipede sans plume: biped without feathers--pen.]

[Footnote 52: Municipal officer of Toulouse.]

[Footnote 53: Do you remember our sweet life, when we were both so
young, and when we had no other desire in our hearts than to be well
dressed and in love? When, by adding your age to my age, we could
not count forty years between us, and when, in our humble and tiny
household, everything was spring to us even in winter. Fair days!
Manuel was proud and wise, Paris sat at sacred banquets, Foy launched
thunderbolts, and your corsage had a pin on which I pricked myself.
Everything gazed upon you. A briefless lawyer, when I took you to the
Prado to dine, you were so beautiful that the roses seemed to me to turn
round, and I heard them say: Is she not beautiful! How good she smells!
What billowing hair! Beneath her mantle she hides a wing. Her charming
bonnet is hardly unfolded. I wandered with thee, pressing thy supple
arm. The passers-by thought that love bewitched had wedded, in our happy
couple, the gentle month of April to the fair month of May. We lived
concealed, content, with closed doors, devouring love, that sweet
forbidden fruit. My mouth had not uttered a thing when thy heart had
already responded. The Sorbonne was the bucolic spot where I adored thee
from eve till morn. 'Tis thus that an amorous soul applies the chart of
the Tender to the Latin country. O Place Maubert! O Place Dauphine!
When in the fresh spring-like hut thou didst draw thy stocking on thy
delicate leg, I saw a star in the depths of the garret. I have read
a great deal of Plato, but nothing of it remains by me; better than
Malebranche and then Lamennais thou didst demonstrate to me celestial
goodness with a flower which thou gavest to me, I obeyed thee, thou
didst submit to me; oh gilded garret! to lace thee! to behold thee going
and coming from dawn in thy chemise, gazing at thy young brow in thine
ancient mirror! And who, then, would forego the memory of those days of
aurora and the firmament, of flowers, of gauze and of moire, when love
stammers a charming slang? Our gardens consisted of a pot of tulips;
thou didst mask the window with thy petticoat; I took the earthenware
bowl and I gave thee the Japanese cup. And those great misfortunes which
made us laugh! Thy cuff scorched, thy boa lost! And that dear portrait
of the divine Shakespeare which we sold one evening that we might sup! I
was a beggar and thou wert charitable. I kissed thy fresh round arms
in haste. A folio Dante served us as a table on which to eat merrily a
centime's worth of chestnuts. The first time that, in my joyous den, I
snatched a kiss from thy fiery lip, when thou wentest forth, dishevelled
and blushing, I turned deathly pale and I believed in God. Dost thou
recall our innumerable joys, and all those fichus changed to rags? Oh!
what sighs from our hearts full of gloom fluttered forth to the heavenly
depths!]

[Footnote 54: My nose is in tears, my friend Bugeaud, lend me thy
gendarmes that I may say a word to them. With a blue capote and a
chicken in his shako, here's the banlieue, co-cocorico.]

[Footnote 55: Love letters.]

[Footnote 56:

               "The bird slanders in the elms,
                And pretends that yesterday, Atala
                Went off with a Russian,
                    Where fair maids go.
                         Lon la.

My friend Pierrot, thou pratest, because Mila knocked at her pane the
other day and called me. The jades are very charming, their poison which
bewitched me would intoxicate Monsieur Orfila. I'm fond of love and its
bickerings, I love Agnes, I love Pamela, Lise burned herself in setting
me aflame. In former days when I saw the mantillas of Suzette and of
Zeila, my soul mingled with their folds. Love, when thou gleamest in
the dark thou crownest Lola with roses, I would lose my soul for that.
Jeanne, at thy mirror thou deckest thyself! One fine day, my heart flew
forth. I think that it is Jeanne who has it. At night, when I come from
the quadrilles, I show Stella to the stars, and I say to them: "Behold
her." Where fair maids go, lon la.]


[Footnote 57: But some prisons still remain, and I am going to put
a stop to this sort of public order. Does any one wish to play at
skittles? The whole ancient world fell in ruin, when the big ball
rolled. Good old folks, let us smash with our crutches that Louvre where
the monarchy displayed itself in furbelows. We have forced its gates. On
that day, King Charles X. did not stick well and came unglued.]

[Footnote 58: Steps on the Aventine Hill, leading to the Tiber, to which
the bodies of executed criminals were dragged by hooks to be thrown into
the Tiber.]

[Footnote 59: Mustards.]

[Footnote 60: From casser, to break: break-necks.]

[Footnote 61: "Jeanne was born at Fougere, a true shepherd's nest; I
adore her petticoat, the rogue."]

[Footnote 62: In allusion to the expression, coiffer Sainte-Catherine,
"to remain unmarried."]

[Footnote 63: "Thus, hemming in the course of thy musings, Alcippus, it
is true that thou wilt wed ere long."]

[Footnote 64: Tirer le diable par la queue, "to live from hand to
mouth."]

[Footnote 65: "Triton trotted on before, and drew from his conch-shell
sounds so ravishing that he delighted everyone!"]

[Footnote 66: "A Shrove-Tuesday marriage will have no ungrateful
children."]

[Footnote 67: A short mask.]

[Footnote 68: In allusion to the story of Prometheus.]

[Footnote 69: Un fafiot serieux. Fafiot is the slang term for a
bank-bill, derived from its rustling noise.]

[Footnote 70: He sleeps. Although his fate was very strange, he lived.
He died when he had no longer his angel. The thing came to pass simply,
of itself, as the night comes when day is gone.]





End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo

*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LES MISERABLES ***

***** This file should be named 135.txt or 135.zip *****
This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
        http://www.gutenberg.org/1/3/135/

Produced by Judith Boss

Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
will be renamed.

Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
redistribution.



*** START: FULL LICENSE ***

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK

To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
http://gutenberg.org/license).


Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
electronic works

1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.

1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
works.  See paragraph 1.E below.

1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.

1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
States.

1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:

1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
copied or distributed:

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
1.E.9.

1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.

1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.

1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
Gutenberg-tm License.

1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.

1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.

1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
that

- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."

- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
     License.  You must require such a user to return or
     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
     Project Gutenberg-tm works.

- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
     of receipt of the work.

- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.

1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.

1.F.

1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
your equipment.

1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
DAMAGE.

1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
opportunities to fix the problem.

1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.

1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.

1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.


Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm

Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
people in all walks of life.

Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.


Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation

The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
http://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.

The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
page at http://pglaf.org

For additional contact information:
     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
     Chief Executive and Director
     gbnewby@pglaf.org


Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation

Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
status with the IRS.

The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
particular state visit http://pglaf.org

While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
approach us with offers to donate.

International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.

Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate


Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
works.

Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.


Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.


Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:

     http://www.gutenberg.org

This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
The Project Gutenberg EBook of Moby Dick; or The Whale, by Herman Melville

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org


Title: Moby Dick; or The Whale

Author: Herman Melville

Last Updated: January 3, 2009
Posting Date: December 25, 2008 [EBook #2701]
Release Date: June, 2001

Language: English


*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MOBY DICK; OR THE WHALE ***




Produced by Daniel Lazarus and Jonesey





MOBY DICK; OR THE WHALE

By Herman Melville




Original Transcriber's Notes:

This text is a combination of etexts, one from the now-defunct ERIS
project at Virginia Tech and one from Project Gutenberg's archives. The
proofreaders of this version are indebted to The University of Adelaide
Library for preserving the Virginia Tech version. The resulting etext
was compared with a public domain hard copy version of the text.

In chapters 24, 89, and 90, we substituted a capital L for the symbol
for the British pound, a unit of currency.




ETYMOLOGY.

(Supplied by a Late Consumptive Usher to a Grammar School)

The pale Usher--threadbare in coat, heart, body, and brain; I see him
now. He was ever dusting his old lexicons and grammars, with a queer
handkerchief, mockingly embellished with all the gay flags of all
the known nations of the world. He loved to dust his old grammars; it
somehow mildly reminded him of his mortality.

"While you take in hand to school others, and to teach them by what
name a whale-fish is to be called in our tongue leaving out, through
ignorance, the letter H, which almost alone maketh the signification of
the word, you deliver that which is not true." --HACKLUYT

"WHALE.... Sw. and Dan. HVAL. This animal is named from roundness or
rolling; for in Dan. HVALT is arched or vaulted." --WEBSTER'S DICTIONARY

"WHALE.... It is more immediately from the Dut. and Ger. WALLEN; A.S.
WALW-IAN, to roll, to wallow." --RICHARDSON'S DICTIONARY

     KETOS,               GREEK.
     CETUS,               LATIN.
     WHOEL,               ANGLO-SAXON.
     HVALT,               DANISH.
     WAL,                 DUTCH.
     HWAL,                SWEDISH.
     WHALE,               ICELANDIC.
     WHALE,               ENGLISH.
     BALEINE,             FRENCH.
     BALLENA,             SPANISH.
     PEKEE-NUEE-NUEE,     FEGEE.
     PEHEE-NUEE-NUEE,     ERROMANGOAN.




EXTRACTS (Supplied by a Sub-Sub-Librarian).

It will be seen that this mere painstaking burrower and grub-worm of a
poor devil of a Sub-Sub appears to have gone through the long Vaticans
and street-stalls of the earth, picking up whatever random allusions to
whales he could anyways find in any book whatsoever, sacred or
profane. Therefore you must not, in every case at least, take the
higgledy-piggledy whale statements, however authentic, in these
extracts, for veritable gospel cetology. Far from it. As touching the
ancient authors generally, as well as the poets here appearing, these
extracts are solely valuable or entertaining, as affording a glancing
bird's eye view of what has been promiscuously said, thought, fancied,
and sung of Leviathan, by many nations and generations, including our
own.

So fare thee well, poor devil of a Sub-Sub, whose commentator I am. Thou
belongest to that hopeless, sallow tribe which no wine of this world
will ever warm; and for whom even Pale Sherry would be too rosy-strong;
but with whom one sometimes loves to sit, and feel poor-devilish, too;
and grow convivial upon tears; and say to them bluntly, with full eyes
and empty glasses, and in not altogether unpleasant sadness--Give it up,
Sub-Subs! For by how much the more pains ye take to please the world,
by so much the more shall ye for ever go thankless! Would that I could
clear out Hampton Court and the Tuileries for ye! But gulp down your
tears and hie aloft to the royal-mast with your hearts; for your friends
who have gone before are clearing out the seven-storied heavens, and
making refugees of long-pampered Gabriel, Michael, and Raphael, against
your coming. Here ye strike but splintered hearts together--there, ye
shall strike unsplinterable glasses!


EXTRACTS.

"And God created great whales." --GENESIS.

"Leviathan maketh a path to shine after him; One would think the deep to
be hoary." --JOB.

"Now the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah." --JONAH.

"There go the ships; there is that Leviathan whom thou hast made to play
therein." --PSALMS.

"In that day, the Lord with his sore, and great, and strong sword,
shall punish Leviathan the piercing serpent, even Leviathan that crooked
serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea." --ISAIAH

"And what thing soever besides cometh within the chaos of this monster's
mouth, be it beast, boat, or stone, down it goes all incontinently that
foul great swallow of his, and perisheth in the bottomless gulf of his
paunch." --HOLLAND'S PLUTARCH'S MORALS.

"The Indian Sea breedeth the most and the biggest fishes that are: among
which the Whales and Whirlpooles called Balaene, take up as much in
length as four acres or arpens of land." --HOLLAND'S PLINY.

"Scarcely had we proceeded two days on the sea, when about sunrise a
great many Whales and other monsters of the sea, appeared. Among the
former, one was of a most monstrous size.... This came towards us,
open-mouthed, raising the waves on all sides, and beating the sea before
him into a foam." --TOOKE'S LUCIAN. "THE TRUE HISTORY."

"He visited this country also with a view of catching horse-whales,
which had bones of very great value for their teeth, of which he brought
some to the king.... The best whales were catched in his own country, of
which some were forty-eight, some fifty yards long. He said that he was
one of six who had killed sixty in two days." --OTHER OR OTHER'S VERBAL
NARRATIVE TAKEN DOWN FROM HIS MOUTH BY KING ALFRED, A.D. 890.

"And whereas all the other things, whether beast or vessel, that
enter into the dreadful gulf of this monster's (whale's) mouth, are
immediately lost and swallowed up, the sea-gudgeon retires into it in
great security, and there sleeps." --MONTAIGNE. --APOLOGY FOR RAIMOND
SEBOND.

"Let us fly, let us fly! Old Nick take me if is not Leviathan described
by the noble prophet Moses in the life of patient Job." --RABELAIS.

"This whale's liver was two cartloads." --STOWE'S ANNALS.

"The great Leviathan that maketh the seas to seethe like boiling pan."
--LORD BACON'S VERSION OF THE PSALMS.

"Touching that monstrous bulk of the whale or ork we have received
nothing certain. They grow exceeding fat, insomuch that an incredible
quantity of oil will be extracted out of one whale." --IBID. "HISTORY OF
LIFE AND DEATH."

"The sovereignest thing on earth is parmacetti for an inward bruise."
--KING HENRY.

"Very like a whale." --HAMLET.

     "Which to secure, no skill of leach's art
     Mote him availle, but to returne againe
     To his wound's worker, that with lowly dart,
     Dinting his breast, had bred his restless paine,
     Like as the wounded whale to shore flies thro' the maine."
     --THE FAERIE QUEEN.

"Immense as whales, the motion of whose vast bodies can in a peaceful
calm trouble the ocean til it boil." --SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT. PREFACE TO
GONDIBERT.

"What spermacetti is, men might justly doubt, since the learned
Hosmannus in his work of thirty years, saith plainly, Nescio quid sit."
--SIR T. BROWNE. OF SPERMA CETI AND THE SPERMA CETI WHALE. VIDE HIS V.
E.

     "Like Spencer's Talus with his modern flail
     He threatens ruin with his ponderous tail.
   ...
     Their fixed jav'lins in his side he wears,
     And on his back a grove of pikes appears."
     --WALLER'S BATTLE OF THE SUMMER ISLANDS.

"By art is created that great Leviathan, called a Commonwealth or
State--(in Latin, Civitas) which is but an artificial man." --OPENING
SENTENCE OF HOBBES'S LEVIATHAN.

"Silly Mansoul swallowed it without chewing, as if it had been a sprat
in the mouth of a whale." --PILGRIM'S PROGRESS.

     "That sea beast
     Leviathan, which God of all his works
     Created hugest that swim the ocean stream." --PARADISE LOST.

     ---"There Leviathan,
     Hugest of living creatures, in the deep
     Stretched like a promontory sleeps or swims,
     And seems a moving land; and at his gills
     Draws in, and at his breath spouts out a sea." --IBID.

"The mighty whales which swim in a sea of water, and have a sea of oil
swimming in them." --FULLLER'S PROFANE AND HOLY STATE.

     "So close behind some promontory lie
     The huge Leviathan to attend their prey,
     And give no chance, but swallow in the fry,
     Which through their gaping jaws mistake the way."
     --DRYDEN'S ANNUS MIRABILIS.

"While the whale is floating at the stern of the ship, they cut off his
head, and tow it with a boat as near the shore as it will come; but it
will be aground in twelve or thirteen feet water." --THOMAS EDGE'S TEN
VOYAGES TO SPITZBERGEN, IN PURCHAS.

"In their way they saw many whales sporting in the ocean, and in
wantonness fuzzing up the water through their pipes and vents, which
nature has placed on their shoulders." --SIR T. HERBERT'S VOYAGES INTO
ASIA AND AFRICA. HARRIS COLL.

"Here they saw such huge troops of whales, that they were forced to
proceed with a great deal of caution for fear they should run their ship
upon them." --SCHOUTEN'S SIXTH CIRCUMNAVIGATION.

"We set sail from the Elbe, wind N.E. in the ship called The
Jonas-in-the-Whale.... Some say the whale can't open his mouth, but that
is a fable.... They frequently climb up the masts to see whether they
can see a whale, for the first discoverer has a ducat for his pains....
I was told of a whale taken near Shetland, that had above a barrel of
herrings in his belly.... One of our harpooneers told me that he caught
once a whale in Spitzbergen that was white all over." --A VOYAGE TO
GREENLAND, A.D. 1671 HARRIS COLL.

"Several whales have come in upon this coast (Fife) Anno 1652, one
eighty feet in length of the whale-bone kind came in, which (as I was
informed), besides a vast quantity of oil, did afford 500 weight of
baleen. The jaws of it stand for a gate in the garden of Pitferren."
--SIBBALD'S FIFE AND KINROSS.

"Myself have agreed to try whether I can master and kill this
Sperma-ceti whale, for I could never hear of any of that sort that was
killed by any man, such is his fierceness and swiftness." --RICHARD
STRAFFORD'S LETTER FROM THE BERMUDAS. PHIL. TRANS. A.D. 1668.

"Whales in the sea God's voice obey." --N. E. PRIMER.

"We saw also abundance of large whales, there being more in those
southern seas, as I may say, by a hundred to one; than we have to the
northward of us." --CAPTAIN COWLEY'S VOYAGE ROUND THE GLOBE, A.D. 1729.

"... and the breath of the whale is frequently attended with such an
insupportable smell, as to bring on a disorder of the brain." --ULLOA'S
SOUTH AMERICA.

     "To fifty chosen sylphs of special note,
     We trust the important charge, the petticoat.
     Oft have we known that seven-fold fence to fail,
     Tho' stuffed with hoops and armed with ribs of whale."
     --RAPE OF THE LOCK.

"If we compare land animals in respect to magnitude, with those
that take up their abode in the deep, we shall find they will appear
contemptible in the comparison. The whale is doubtless the largest
animal in creation." --GOLDSMITH, NAT. HIST.

"If you should write a fable for little fishes, you would make them
speak like great wales." --GOLDSMITH TO JOHNSON.

"In the afternoon we saw what was supposed to be a rock, but it was
found to be a dead whale, which some Asiatics had killed, and were then
towing ashore. They seemed to endeavor to conceal themselves behind the
whale, in order to avoid being seen by us." --COOK'S VOYAGES.

"The larger whales, they seldom venture to attack. They stand in so
great dread of some of them, that when out at sea they are afraid to
mention even their names, and carry dung, lime-stone, juniper-wood,
and some other articles of the same nature in their boats, in order to
terrify and prevent their too near approach." --UNO VON TROIL'S LETTERS
ON BANKS'S AND SOLANDER'S VOYAGE TO ICELAND IN 1772.

"The Spermacetti Whale found by the Nantuckois, is an active, fierce
animal, and requires vast address and boldness in the fishermen."
--THOMAS JEFFERSON'S WHALE MEMORIAL TO THE FRENCH MINISTER IN 1778.

"And pray, sir, what in the world is equal to it?" --EDMUND BURKE'S
REFERENCE IN PARLIAMENT TO THE NANTUCKET WHALE-FISHERY.

"Spain--a great whale stranded on the shores of Europe." --EDMUND BURKE.
(SOMEWHERE.)

"A tenth branch of the king's ordinary revenue, said to be grounded on
the consideration of his guarding and protecting the seas from pirates
and robbers, is the right to royal fish, which are whale and sturgeon.
And these, when either thrown ashore or caught near the coast, are the
property of the king." --BLACKSTONE.

     "Soon to the sport of death the crews repair:
     Rodmond unerring o'er his head suspends
     The barbed steel, and every turn attends."
     --FALCONER'S SHIPWRECK.

     "Bright shone the roofs, the domes, the spires,
     And rockets blew self driven,
     To hang their momentary fire
     Around the vault of heaven.

     "So fire with water to compare,
     The ocean serves on high,
     Up-spouted by a whale in air,
     To express unwieldy joy." --COWPER, ON THE QUEEN'S
     VISIT TO LONDON.

"Ten or fifteen gallons of blood are thrown out of the heart at
a stroke, with immense velocity." --JOHN HUNTER'S ACCOUNT OF THE
DISSECTION OF A WHALE. (A SMALL SIZED ONE.)

"The aorta of a whale is larger in the bore than the main pipe of the
water-works at London Bridge, and the water roaring in its passage
through that pipe is inferior in impetus and velocity to the blood
gushing from the whale's heart." --PALEY'S THEOLOGY.

"The whale is a mammiferous animal without hind feet." --BARON CUVIER.

"In 40 degrees south, we saw Spermacetti Whales, but did not take
any till the first of May, the sea being then covered with them."
--COLNETT'S VOYAGE FOR THE PURPOSE OF EXTENDING THE SPERMACETI WHALE
FISHERY.

     "In the free element beneath me swam,
     Floundered and dived, in play, in chace, in battle,
     Fishes of every colour, form, and kind;
     Which language cannot paint, and mariner
     Had never seen; from dread Leviathan
     To insect millions peopling every wave:
     Gather'd in shoals immense, like floating islands,
     Led by mysterious instincts through that waste
     And trackless region, though on every side
     Assaulted by voracious enemies,
     Whales, sharks, and monsters, arm'd in front or jaw,
     With swords, saws, spiral horns, or hooked fangs."
     --MONTGOMERY'S WORLD BEFORE THE FLOOD.

     "Io!  Paean!  Io! sing.
     To the finny people's king.
     Not a mightier whale than this
     In the vast Atlantic is;
     Not a fatter fish than he,
     Flounders round the Polar Sea."
     --CHARLES LAMB'S TRIUMPH OF THE WHALE.

"In the year 1690 some persons were on a high hill observing the
whales spouting and sporting with each other, when one observed:
there--pointing to the sea--is a green pasture where our children's
grand-children will go for bread." --OBED MACY'S HISTORY OF NANTUCKET.

"I built a cottage for Susan and myself and made a gateway in the form
of a Gothic Arch, by setting up a whale's jaw bones." --HAWTHORNE'S
TWICE TOLD TALES.

"She came to bespeak a monument for her first love, who had been killed
by a whale in the Pacific ocean, no less than forty years ago." --IBID.

"No, Sir, 'tis a Right Whale," answered Tom; "I saw his sprout; he threw
up a pair of as pretty rainbows as a Christian would wish to look at.
He's a raal oil-butt, that fellow!" --COOPER'S PILOT.

"The papers were brought in, and we saw in the Berlin Gazette
that whales had been introduced on the stage there." --ECKERMANN'S
CONVERSATIONS WITH GOETHE.

"My God! Mr. Chace, what is the matter?" I answered, "we have been stove
by a whale." --"NARRATIVE OF THE SHIPWRECK OF THE WHALE SHIP ESSEX OF
NANTUCKET, WHICH WAS ATTACKED AND FINALLY DESTROYED BY A LARGE SPERM
WHALE IN THE PACIFIC OCEAN." BY OWEN CHACE OF NANTUCKET, FIRST MATE OF
SAID VESSEL. NEW YORK, 1821.

     "A mariner sat in the shrouds one night,
     The wind was piping free;
     Now bright, now dimmed, was the moonlight pale,
     And the phospher gleamed in the wake of the whale,
     As it floundered in the sea."
     --ELIZABETH OAKES SMITH.

"The quantity of line withdrawn from the boats engaged in the capture
of this one whale, amounted altogether to 10,440 yards or nearly six
English miles....

"Sometimes the whale shakes its tremendous tail in the air, which,
cracking like a whip, resounds to the distance of three or four miles."
--SCORESBY.

"Mad with the agonies he endures from these fresh attacks, the
infuriated Sperm Whale rolls over and over; he rears his enormous head,
and with wide expanded jaws snaps at everything around him; he rushes
at the boats with his head; they are propelled before him with vast
swiftness, and sometimes utterly destroyed.... It is a matter of great
astonishment that the consideration of the habits of so interesting,
and, in a commercial point of view, so important an animal (as the Sperm
Whale) should have been so entirely neglected, or should have excited
so little curiosity among the numerous, and many of them competent
observers, that of late years, must have possessed the most abundant
and the most convenient opportunities of witnessing their habitudes."
--THOMAS BEALE'S HISTORY OF THE SPERM WHALE, 1839.

"The Cachalot" (Sperm Whale) "is not only better armed than the True
Whale" (Greenland or Right Whale) "in possessing a formidable weapon
at either extremity of its body, but also more frequently displays a
disposition to employ these weapons offensively and in manner at once so
artful, bold, and mischievous, as to lead to its being regarded as the
most dangerous to attack of all the known species of the whale tribe."
--FREDERICK DEBELL BENNETT'S WHALING VOYAGE ROUND THE GLOBE, 1840.

     October 13.  "There she blows," was sung out from the mast-head.
     "Where away?" demanded the captain.
     "Three points off the lee bow, sir."
     "Raise up your wheel.  Steady!"  "Steady, sir."
     "Mast-head ahoy!  Do you see that whale now?"
     "Ay ay, sir!  A shoal of Sperm Whales!  There she blows!  There she
     breaches!"
     "Sing out! sing out every time!"
     "Ay Ay, sir!  There she blows! there--there--THAR she
     blows--bowes--bo-o-os!"
     "How far off?"
     "Two miles and a half."
     "Thunder and lightning! so near!  Call all hands."
     --J. ROSS BROWNE'S ETCHINGS OF A WHALING CRUIZE.  1846.

"The Whale-ship Globe, on board of which vessel occurred the horrid
transactions we are about to relate, belonged to the island of
Nantucket." --"NARRATIVE OF THE GLOBE," BY LAY AND HUSSEY SURVIVORS.
A.D. 1828.

Being once pursued by a whale which he had wounded, he parried the
assault for some time with a lance; but the furious monster at length
rushed on the boat; himself and comrades only being preserved by leaping
into the water when they saw the onset was inevitable." --MISSIONARY
JOURNAL OF TYERMAN AND BENNETT.

"Nantucket itself," said Mr. Webster, "is a very striking and peculiar
portion of the National interest. There is a population of eight or nine
thousand persons living here in the sea, adding largely every year
to the National wealth by the boldest and most persevering industry."
--REPORT OF DANIEL WEBSTER'S SPEECH IN THE U. S. SENATE, ON THE
APPLICATION FOR THE ERECTION OF A BREAKWATER AT NANTUCKET. 1828.

"The whale fell directly over him, and probably killed him in a moment."
--"THE WHALE AND HIS CAPTORS, OR THE WHALEMAN'S ADVENTURES AND THE
WHALE'S BIOGRAPHY, GATHERED ON THE HOMEWARD CRUISE OF THE COMMODORE
PREBLE." BY REV. HENRY T. CHEEVER.

"If you make the least damn bit of noise," replied Samuel, "I will send
you to hell." --LIFE OF SAMUEL COMSTOCK (THE MUTINEER), BY HIS BROTHER,
WILLIAM COMSTOCK. ANOTHER VERSION OF THE WHALE-SHIP GLOBE NARRATIVE.

"The voyages of the Dutch and English to the Northern Ocean, in order,
if possible, to discover a passage through it to India, though they
failed of their main object, laid-open the haunts of the whale."
--MCCULLOCH'S COMMERCIAL DICTIONARY.

"These things are reciprocal; the ball rebounds, only to bound forward
again; for now in laying open the haunts of the whale, the whalemen seem
to have indirectly hit upon new clews to that same mystic North-West
Passage." --FROM "SOMETHING" UNPUBLISHED.

"It is impossible to meet a whale-ship on the ocean without being struck
by her near appearance. The vessel under short sail, with look-outs at
the mast-heads, eagerly scanning the wide expanse around them, has a
totally different air from those engaged in regular voyage." --CURRENTS
AND WHALING. U.S. EX. EX.

"Pedestrians in the vicinity of London and elsewhere may recollect
having seen large curved bones set upright in the earth, either to form
arches over gateways, or entrances to alcoves, and they may perhaps
have been told that these were the ribs of whales." --TALES OF A WHALE
VOYAGER TO THE ARCTIC OCEAN.

"It was not till the boats returned from the pursuit of these whales,
that the whites saw their ship in bloody possession of the savages
enrolled among the crew." --NEWSPAPER ACCOUNT OF THE TAKING AND RETAKING
OF THE WHALE-SHIP HOBOMACK.

"It is generally well known that out of the crews of Whaling vessels
(American) few ever return in the ships on board of which they
departed." --CRUISE IN A WHALE BOAT.

"Suddenly a mighty mass emerged from the water, and shot up
perpendicularly into the air. It was the while." --MIRIAM COFFIN OR THE
WHALE FISHERMAN.

"The Whale is harpooned to be sure; but bethink you, how you would
manage a powerful unbroken colt, with the mere appliance of a rope tied
to the root of his tail." --A CHAPTER ON WHALING IN RIBS AND TRUCKS.

"On one occasion I saw two of these monsters (whales) probably male and
female, slowly swimming, one after the other, within less than a stone's
throw of the shore" (Terra Del Fuego), "over which the beech tree
extended its branches." --DARWIN'S VOYAGE OF A NATURALIST.

"'Stern all!' exclaimed the mate, as upon turning his head, he saw the
distended jaws of a large Sperm Whale close to the head of the boat,
threatening it with instant destruction;--'Stern all, for your lives!'"
--WHARTON THE WHALE KILLER.

"So be cheery, my lads, let your hearts never fail, While the bold
harpooneer is striking the whale!" --NANTUCKET SONG.

     "Oh, the rare old Whale, mid storm and gale
     In his ocean home will be
     A giant in might, where might is right,
     And King of the boundless sea."
     --WHALE SONG.




CHAPTER 1. Loomings.


Call me Ishmael. Some years ago--never mind how long precisely--having
little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on
shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of
the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating
the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth;
whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find
myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up
the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get
such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to
prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically
knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea
as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a
philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly
take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew
it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very
nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by
wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs--commerce surrounds it with
her surf. Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its extreme
downtown is the battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and
cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land.
Look at the crowds of water-gazers there.

Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears
Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What
do you see?--Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand
thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some
leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some
looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the
rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these
are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster--tied to
counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are
the green fields gone? What do they here?

But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and
seemingly bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will content them but the
extremest limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder
warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get just as nigh the water
as they possibly can without falling in. And there they stand--miles of
them--leagues. Inlanders all, they come from lanes and alleys, streets
and avenues--north, east, south, and west. Yet here they all unite.
Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the compasses of all
those ships attract them thither?

Once more. Say you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take
almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a
dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic
in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest
reveries--stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will
infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region.
Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this
experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical
professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for
ever.

But here is an artist. He desires to paint you the dreamiest, shadiest,
quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all the valley of
the Saco. What is the chief element he employs? There stand his trees,
each with a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a crucifix were within; and
here sleeps his meadow, and there sleep his cattle; and up from yonder
cottage goes a sleepy smoke. Deep into distant woodlands winds a
mazy way, reaching to overlapping spurs of mountains bathed in their
hill-side blue. But though the picture lies thus tranced, and though
this pine-tree shakes down its sighs like leaves upon this shepherd's
head, yet all were vain, unless the shepherd's eye were fixed upon the
magic stream before him. Go visit the Prairies in June, when for scores
on scores of miles you wade knee-deep among Tiger-lilies--what is the
one charm wanting?--Water--there is not a drop of water there! Were
Niagara but a cataract of sand, would you travel your thousand miles to
see it? Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two
handfuls of silver, deliberate whether to buy him a coat, which he sadly
needed, or invest his money in a pedestrian trip to Rockaway Beach? Why
is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at
some time or other crazy to go to sea? Why upon your first voyage as a
passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first
told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land? Why did the
old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate
deity, and own brother of Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning.
And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because
he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain,
plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see
in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of
life; and this is the key to it all.

Now, when I say that I am in the habit of going to sea whenever I begin
to grow hazy about the eyes, and begin to be over conscious of my lungs,
I do not mean to have it inferred that I ever go to sea as a passenger.
For to go as a passenger you must needs have a purse, and a purse is
but a rag unless you have something in it. Besides, passengers get
sea-sick--grow quarrelsome--don't sleep of nights--do not enjoy
themselves much, as a general thing;--no, I never go as a passenger;
nor, though I am something of a salt, do I ever go to sea as a
Commodore, or a Captain, or a Cook. I abandon the glory and distinction
of such offices to those who like them. For my part, I abominate all
honourable respectable toils, trials, and tribulations of every kind
whatsoever. It is quite as much as I can do to take care of myself,
without taking care of ships, barques, brigs, schooners, and what not.
And as for going as cook,--though I confess there is considerable glory
in that, a cook being a sort of officer on ship-board--yet, somehow,
I never fancied broiling fowls;--though once broiled, judiciously
buttered, and judgmatically salted and peppered, there is no one who
will speak more respectfully, not to say reverentially, of a broiled
fowl than I will. It is out of the idolatrous dotings of the old
Egyptians upon broiled ibis and roasted river horse, that you see the
mummies of those creatures in their huge bake-houses the pyramids.

No, when I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast,
plumb down into the forecastle, aloft there to the royal mast-head.
True, they rather order me about some, and make me jump from spar to
spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow. And at first, this sort
of thing is unpleasant enough. It touches one's sense of honour,
particularly if you come of an old established family in the land, the
Van Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes. And more than all,
if just previous to putting your hand into the tar-pot, you have been
lording it as a country schoolmaster, making the tallest boys stand
in awe of you. The transition is a keen one, I assure you, from a
schoolmaster to a sailor, and requires a strong decoction of Seneca and
the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear it. But even this wears off in
time.

What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a broom
and sweep down the decks? What does that indignity amount to, weighed,
I mean, in the scales of the New Testament? Do you think the archangel
Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, because I promptly and
respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular instance? Who ain't
a slave? Tell me that. Well, then, however the old sea-captains may
order me about--however they may thump and punch me about, I have the
satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is
one way or other served in much the same way--either in a physical
or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is
passed round, and all hands should rub each other's shoulder-blades, and
be content.

Again, I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point of
paying me for my trouble, whereas they never pay passengers a single
penny that I ever heard of. On the contrary, passengers themselves must
pay. And there is all the difference in the world between paying
and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable
infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. But BEING
PAID,--what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a man
receives money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly
believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account
can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves
to perdition!

Finally, I always go to sea as a sailor, because of the wholesome
exercise and pure air of the fore-castle deck. For as in this world,
head winds are far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is,
if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim), so for the most part the
Commodore on the quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at second hand from
the sailors on the forecastle. He thinks he breathes it first; but not
so. In much the same way do the commonalty lead their leaders in many
other things, at the same time that the leaders little suspect it.
But wherefore it was that after having repeatedly smelt the sea as a
merchant sailor, I should now take it into my head to go on a whaling
voyage; this the invisible police officer of the Fates, who has the
constant surveillance of me, and secretly dogs me, and influences me
in some unaccountable way--he can better answer than any one else. And,
doubtless, my going on this whaling voyage, formed part of the grand
programme of Providence that was drawn up a long time ago. It came in as
a sort of brief interlude and solo between more extensive performances.
I take it that this part of the bill must have run something like this:


"GRAND CONTESTED ELECTION FOR THE PRESIDENCY OF THE UNITED STATES.

"WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL.

"BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN."


Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the
Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage, when others
were set down for magnificent parts in high tragedies, and short and
easy parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in farces--though
I cannot tell why this was exactly; yet, now that I recall all the
circumstances, I think I can see a little into the springs and motives
which being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced
me to set about performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the
delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill
and discriminating judgment.

Chief among these motives was the overwhelming idea of the great
whale himself. Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all my
curiosity. Then the wild and distant seas where he rolled his island
bulk; the undeliverable, nameless perils of the whale; these, with all
the attending marvels of a thousand Patagonian sights and sounds, helped
to sway me to my wish. With other men, perhaps, such things would not
have been inducements; but as for me, I am tormented with an everlasting
itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on
barbarous coasts. Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to perceive a
horror, and could still be social with it--would they let me--since it
is but well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the place
one lodges in.

By reason of these things, then, the whaling voyage was welcome; the
great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild
conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two there floated into
my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and, mid most of them
all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.



CHAPTER 2. The Carpet-Bag.


I stuffed a shirt or two into my old carpet-bag, tucked it under my arm,
and started for Cape Horn and the Pacific. Quitting the good city of
old Manhatto, I duly arrived in New Bedford. It was a Saturday night in
December. Much was I disappointed upon learning that the little packet
for Nantucket had already sailed, and that no way of reaching that place
would offer, till the following Monday.

As most young candidates for the pains and penalties of whaling stop at
this same New Bedford, thence to embark on their voyage, it may as well
be related that I, for one, had no idea of so doing. For my mind was
made up to sail in no other than a Nantucket craft, because there was a
fine, boisterous something about everything connected with that famous
old island, which amazingly pleased me. Besides though New Bedford has
of late been gradually monopolising the business of whaling, and though
in this matter poor old Nantucket is now much behind her, yet Nantucket
was her great original--the Tyre of this Carthage;--the place where the
first dead American whale was stranded. Where else but from Nantucket
did those aboriginal whalemen, the Red-Men, first sally out in canoes to
give chase to the Leviathan? And where but from Nantucket, too, did that
first adventurous little sloop put forth, partly laden with imported
cobblestones--so goes the story--to throw at the whales, in order to
discover when they were nigh enough to risk a harpoon from the bowsprit?

Now having a night, a day, and still another night following before me
in New Bedford, ere I could embark for my destined port, it became a
matter of concernment where I was to eat and sleep meanwhile. It was a
very dubious-looking, nay, a very dark and dismal night, bitingly cold
and cheerless. I knew no one in the place. With anxious grapnels I had
sounded my pocket, and only brought up a few pieces of silver,--So,
wherever you go, Ishmael, said I to myself, as I stood in the middle of
a dreary street shouldering my bag, and comparing the gloom towards the
north with the darkness towards the south--wherever in your wisdom you
may conclude to lodge for the night, my dear Ishmael, be sure to inquire
the price, and don't be too particular.

With halting steps I paced the streets, and passed the sign of "The
Crossed Harpoons"--but it looked too expensive and jolly there. Further
on, from the bright red windows of the "Sword-Fish Inn," there came such
fervent rays, that it seemed to have melted the packed snow and ice from
before the house, for everywhere else the congealed frost lay ten inches
thick in a hard, asphaltic pavement,--rather weary for me, when I struck
my foot against the flinty projections, because from hard, remorseless
service the soles of my boots were in a most miserable plight. Too
expensive and jolly, again thought I, pausing one moment to watch the
broad glare in the street, and hear the sounds of the tinkling glasses
within. But go on, Ishmael, said I at last; don't you hear? get away
from before the door; your patched boots are stopping the way. So on I
went. I now by instinct followed the streets that took me waterward, for
there, doubtless, were the cheapest, if not the cheeriest inns.

Such dreary streets! blocks of blackness, not houses, on either hand,
and here and there a candle, like a candle moving about in a tomb. At
this hour of the night, of the last day of the week, that quarter of
the town proved all but deserted. But presently I came to a smoky light
proceeding from a low, wide building, the door of which stood invitingly
open. It had a careless look, as if it were meant for the uses of the
public; so, entering, the first thing I did was to stumble over an
ash-box in the porch. Ha! thought I, ha, as the flying particles almost
choked me, are these ashes from that destroyed city, Gomorrah? But "The
Crossed Harpoons," and "The Sword-Fish?"--this, then must needs be the
sign of "The Trap." However, I picked myself up and hearing a loud voice
within, pushed on and opened a second, interior door.

It seemed the great Black Parliament sitting in Tophet. A hundred black
faces turned round in their rows to peer; and beyond, a black Angel
of Doom was beating a book in a pulpit. It was a negro church; and the
preacher's text was about the blackness of darkness, and the weeping and
wailing and teeth-gnashing there. Ha, Ishmael, muttered I, backing out,
Wretched entertainment at the sign of 'The Trap!'

Moving on, I at last came to a dim sort of light not far from the docks,
and heard a forlorn creaking in the air; and looking up, saw a swinging
sign over the door with a white painting upon it, faintly representing
a tall straight jet of misty spray, and these words underneath--"The
Spouter Inn:--Peter Coffin."

Coffin?--Spouter?--Rather ominous in that particular connexion, thought
I. But it is a common name in Nantucket, they say, and I suppose this
Peter here is an emigrant from there. As the light looked so dim, and
the place, for the time, looked quiet enough, and the dilapidated little
wooden house itself looked as if it might have been carted here from
the ruins of some burnt district, and as the swinging sign had a
poverty-stricken sort of creak to it, I thought that here was the very
spot for cheap lodgings, and the best of pea coffee.

It was a queer sort of place--a gable-ended old house, one side palsied
as it were, and leaning over sadly. It stood on a sharp bleak corner,
where that tempestuous wind Euroclydon kept up a worse howling than ever
it did about poor Paul's tossed craft. Euroclydon, nevertheless, is a
mighty pleasant zephyr to any one in-doors, with his feet on the hob
quietly toasting for bed. "In judging of that tempestuous wind called
Euroclydon," says an old writer--of whose works I possess the only copy
extant--"it maketh a marvellous difference, whether thou lookest out at
it from a glass window where the frost is all on the outside, or whether
thou observest it from that sashless window, where the frost is on both
sides, and of which the wight Death is the only glazier." True enough,
thought I, as this passage occurred to my mind--old black-letter, thou
reasonest well. Yes, these eyes are windows, and this body of mine is
the house. What a pity they didn't stop up the chinks and the crannies
though, and thrust in a little lint here and there. But it's too late
to make any improvements now. The universe is finished; the copestone
is on, and the chips were carted off a million years ago. Poor Lazarus
there, chattering his teeth against the curbstone for his pillow, and
shaking off his tatters with his shiverings, he might plug up both ears
with rags, and put a corn-cob into his mouth, and yet that would not
keep out the tempestuous Euroclydon. Euroclydon! says old Dives, in his
red silken wrapper--(he had a redder one afterwards) pooh, pooh! What
a fine frosty night; how Orion glitters; what northern lights! Let them
talk of their oriental summer climes of everlasting conservatories; give
me the privilege of making my own summer with my own coals.

But what thinks Lazarus? Can he warm his blue hands by holding them up
to the grand northern lights? Would not Lazarus rather be in Sumatra
than here? Would he not far rather lay him down lengthwise along the
line of the equator; yea, ye gods! go down to the fiery pit itself, in
order to keep out this frost?

Now, that Lazarus should lie stranded there on the curbstone before the
door of Dives, this is more wonderful than that an iceberg should be
moored to one of the Moluccas. Yet Dives himself, he too lives like a
Czar in an ice palace made of frozen sighs, and being a president of a
temperance society, he only drinks the tepid tears of orphans.

But no more of this blubbering now, we are going a-whaling, and there is
plenty of that yet to come. Let us scrape the ice from our frosted feet,
and see what sort of a place this "Spouter" may be.



CHAPTER 3. The Spouter-Inn.


Entering that gable-ended Spouter-Inn, you found yourself in a wide,
low, straggling entry with old-fashioned wainscots, reminding one of
the bulwarks of some condemned old craft. On one side hung a very large
oilpainting so thoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced, that in the
unequal crosslights by which you viewed it, it was only by diligent
study and a series of systematic visits to it, and careful inquiry of
the neighbors, that you could any way arrive at an understanding of its
purpose. Such unaccountable masses of shades and shadows, that at first
you almost thought some ambitious young artist, in the time of the New
England hags, had endeavored to delineate chaos bewitched. But by dint
of much and earnest contemplation, and oft repeated ponderings, and
especially by throwing open the little window towards the back of the
entry, you at last come to the conclusion that such an idea, however
wild, might not be altogether unwarranted.

But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous,
black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three
blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. A boggy,
soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted.
Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable
sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily
took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting
meant. Ever and anon a bright, but, alas, deceptive idea would dart you
through.--It's the Black Sea in a midnight gale.--It's the unnatural
combat of the four primal elements.--It's a blasted heath.--It's a
Hyperborean winter scene.--It's the breaking-up of the icebound stream
of Time. But at last all these fancies yielded to that one portentous
something in the picture's midst. THAT once found out, and all the rest
were plain. But stop; does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic
fish? even the great leviathan himself?

In fact, the artist's design seemed this: a final theory of my own,
partly based upon the aggregated opinions of many aged persons with whom
I conversed upon the subject. The picture represents a Cape-Horner in a
great hurricane; the half-foundered ship weltering there with its three
dismantled masts alone visible; and an exasperated whale, purposing to
spring clean over the craft, is in the enormous act of impaling himself
upon the three mast-heads.

The opposite wall of this entry was hung all over with a heathenish
array of monstrous clubs and spears. Some were thickly set with
glittering teeth resembling ivory saws; others were tufted with knots of
human hair; and one was sickle-shaped, with a vast handle sweeping round
like the segment made in the new-mown grass by a long-armed mower. You
shuddered as you gazed, and wondered what monstrous cannibal and savage
could ever have gone a death-harvesting with such a hacking, horrifying
implement. Mixed with these were rusty old whaling lances and harpoons
all broken and deformed. Some were storied weapons. With this once long
lance, now wildly elbowed, fifty years ago did Nathan Swain kill fifteen
whales between a sunrise and a sunset. And that harpoon--so like a
corkscrew now--was flung in Javan seas, and run away with by a whale,
years afterwards slain off the Cape of Blanco. The original iron entered
nigh the tail, and, like a restless needle sojourning in the body of a
man, travelled full forty feet, and at last was found imbedded in the
hump.

Crossing this dusky entry, and on through yon low-arched way--cut
through what in old times must have been a great central chimney with
fireplaces all round--you enter the public room. A still duskier place
is this, with such low ponderous beams above, and such old wrinkled
planks beneath, that you would almost fancy you trod some old craft's
cockpits, especially of such a howling night, when this corner-anchored
old ark rocked so furiously. On one side stood a long, low, shelf-like
table covered with cracked glass cases, filled with dusty rarities
gathered from this wide world's remotest nooks. Projecting from the
further angle of the room stands a dark-looking den--the bar--a rude
attempt at a right whale's head. Be that how it may, there stands the
vast arched bone of the whale's jaw, so wide, a coach might almost drive
beneath it. Within are shabby shelves, ranged round with old decanters,
bottles, flasks; and in those jaws of swift destruction, like another
cursed Jonah (by which name indeed they called him), bustles a little
withered old man, who, for their money, dearly sells the sailors
deliriums and death.

Abominable are the tumblers into which he pours his poison. Though
true cylinders without--within, the villanous green goggling glasses
deceitfully tapered downwards to a cheating bottom. Parallel meridians
rudely pecked into the glass, surround these footpads' goblets. Fill to
THIS mark, and your charge is but a penny; to THIS a penny more; and so
on to the full glass--the Cape Horn measure, which you may gulp down for
a shilling.

Upon entering the place I found a number of young seamen gathered about
a table, examining by a dim light divers specimens of SKRIMSHANDER. I
sought the landlord, and telling him I desired to be accommodated with a
room, received for answer that his house was full--not a bed unoccupied.
"But avast," he added, tapping his forehead, "you haint no objections
to sharing a harpooneer's blanket, have ye? I s'pose you are goin'
a-whalin', so you'd better get used to that sort of thing."

I told him that I never liked to sleep two in a bed; that if I should
ever do so, it would depend upon who the harpooneer might be, and
that if he (the landlord) really had no other place for me, and the
harpooneer was not decidedly objectionable, why rather than wander
further about a strange town on so bitter a night, I would put up with
the half of any decent man's blanket.

"I thought so. All right; take a seat. Supper?--you want supper?
Supper'll be ready directly."

I sat down on an old wooden settle, carved all over like a bench on the
Battery. At one end a ruminating tar was still further adorning it with
his jack-knife, stooping over and diligently working away at the space
between his legs. He was trying his hand at a ship under full sail, but
he didn't make much headway, I thought.

At last some four or five of us were summoned to our meal in an
adjoining room. It was cold as Iceland--no fire at all--the landlord
said he couldn't afford it. Nothing but two dismal tallow candles, each
in a winding sheet. We were fain to button up our monkey jackets, and
hold to our lips cups of scalding tea with our half frozen fingers. But
the fare was of the most substantial kind--not only meat and potatoes,
but dumplings; good heavens! dumplings for supper! One young fellow in
a green box coat, addressed himself to these dumplings in a most direful
manner.

"My boy," said the landlord, "you'll have the nightmare to a dead
sartainty."

"Landlord," I whispered, "that aint the harpooneer is it?"

"Oh, no," said he, looking a sort of diabolically funny, "the harpooneer
is a dark complexioned chap. He never eats dumplings, he don't--he eats
nothing but steaks, and he likes 'em rare."

"The devil he does," says I. "Where is that harpooneer? Is he here?"

"He'll be here afore long," was the answer.

I could not help it, but I began to feel suspicious of this "dark
complexioned" harpooneer. At any rate, I made up my mind that if it so
turned out that we should sleep together, he must undress and get into
bed before I did.

Supper over, the company went back to the bar-room, when, knowing not
what else to do with myself, I resolved to spend the rest of the evening
as a looker on.

Presently a rioting noise was heard without. Starting up, the landlord
cried, "That's the Grampus's crew. I seed her reported in the offing
this morning; a three years' voyage, and a full ship. Hurrah, boys; now
we'll have the latest news from the Feegees."

A tramping of sea boots was heard in the entry; the door was flung open,
and in rolled a wild set of mariners enough. Enveloped in their shaggy
watch coats, and with their heads muffled in woollen comforters, all
bedarned and ragged, and their beards stiff with icicles, they seemed an
eruption of bears from Labrador. They had just landed from their boat,
and this was the first house they entered. No wonder, then, that they
made a straight wake for the whale's mouth--the bar--when the wrinkled
little old Jonah, there officiating, soon poured them out brimmers all
round. One complained of a bad cold in his head, upon which Jonah
mixed him a pitch-like potion of gin and molasses, which he swore was a
sovereign cure for all colds and catarrhs whatsoever, never mind of how
long standing, or whether caught off the coast of Labrador, or on the
weather side of an ice-island.

The liquor soon mounted into their heads, as it generally does even
with the arrantest topers newly landed from sea, and they began capering
about most obstreperously.

I observed, however, that one of them held somewhat aloof, and though
he seemed desirous not to spoil the hilarity of his shipmates by his own
sober face, yet upon the whole he refrained from making as much noise
as the rest. This man interested me at once; and since the sea-gods
had ordained that he should soon become my shipmate (though but a
sleeping-partner one, so far as this narrative is concerned), I will
here venture upon a little description of him. He stood full six feet
in height, with noble shoulders, and a chest like a coffer-dam. I have
seldom seen such brawn in a man. His face was deeply brown and burnt,
making his white teeth dazzling by the contrast; while in the deep
shadows of his eyes floated some reminiscences that did not seem to give
him much joy. His voice at once announced that he was a Southerner,
and from his fine stature, I thought he must be one of those tall
mountaineers from the Alleghanian Ridge in Virginia. When the revelry
of his companions had mounted to its height, this man slipped away
unobserved, and I saw no more of him till he became my comrade on the
sea. In a few minutes, however, he was missed by his shipmates, and
being, it seems, for some reason a huge favourite with them, they raised
a cry of "Bulkington! Bulkington! where's Bulkington?" and darted out of
the house in pursuit of him.

It was now about nine o'clock, and the room seeming almost
supernaturally quiet after these orgies, I began to congratulate myself
upon a little plan that had occurred to me just previous to the entrance
of the seamen.

No man prefers to sleep two in a bed. In fact, you would a good deal
rather not sleep with your own brother. I don't know how it is, but
people like to be private when they are sleeping. And when it comes to
sleeping with an unknown stranger, in a strange inn, in a strange
town, and that stranger a harpooneer, then your objections indefinitely
multiply. Nor was there any earthly reason why I as a sailor should
sleep two in a bed, more than anybody else; for sailors no more sleep
two in a bed at sea, than bachelor Kings do ashore. To be sure they
all sleep together in one apartment, but you have your own hammock, and
cover yourself with your own blanket, and sleep in your own skin.

The more I pondered over this harpooneer, the more I abominated the
thought of sleeping with him. It was fair to presume that being a
harpooneer, his linen or woollen, as the case might be, would not be of
the tidiest, certainly none of the finest. I began to twitch all over.
Besides, it was getting late, and my decent harpooneer ought to be
home and going bedwards. Suppose now, he should tumble in upon me at
midnight--how could I tell from what vile hole he had been coming?

"Landlord! I've changed my mind about that harpooneer.--I shan't sleep
with him. I'll try the bench here."

"Just as you please; I'm sorry I cant spare ye a tablecloth for a
mattress, and it's a plaguy rough board here"--feeling of the knots and
notches. "But wait a bit, Skrimshander; I've got a carpenter's plane
there in the bar--wait, I say, and I'll make ye snug enough." So saying
he procured the plane; and with his old silk handkerchief first dusting
the bench, vigorously set to planing away at my bed, the while grinning
like an ape. The shavings flew right and left; till at last the
plane-iron came bump against an indestructible knot. The landlord was
near spraining his wrist, and I told him for heaven's sake to quit--the
bed was soft enough to suit me, and I did not know how all the planing
in the world could make eider down of a pine plank. So gathering up the
shavings with another grin, and throwing them into the great stove in
the middle of the room, he went about his business, and left me in a
brown study.

I now took the measure of the bench, and found that it was a foot too
short; but that could be mended with a chair. But it was a foot too
narrow, and the other bench in the room was about four inches higher
than the planed one--so there was no yoking them. I then placed the
first bench lengthwise along the only clear space against the wall,
leaving a little interval between, for my back to settle down in. But I
soon found that there came such a draught of cold air over me from under
the sill of the window, that this plan would never do at all, especially
as another current from the rickety door met the one from the window,
and both together formed a series of small whirlwinds in the immediate
vicinity of the spot where I had thought to spend the night.

The devil fetch that harpooneer, thought I, but stop, couldn't I steal
a march on him--bolt his door inside, and jump into his bed, not to be
wakened by the most violent knockings? It seemed no bad idea; but upon
second thoughts I dismissed it. For who could tell but what the next
morning, so soon as I popped out of the room, the harpooneer might be
standing in the entry, all ready to knock me down!

Still, looking round me again, and seeing no possible chance of spending
a sufferable night unless in some other person's bed, I began to think
that after all I might be cherishing unwarrantable prejudices against
this unknown harpooneer. Thinks I, I'll wait awhile; he must be dropping
in before long. I'll have a good look at him then, and perhaps we may
become jolly good bedfellows after all--there's no telling.

But though the other boarders kept coming in by ones, twos, and threes,
and going to bed, yet no sign of my harpooneer.

"Landlord!" said I, "what sort of a chap is he--does he always keep such
late hours?" It was now hard upon twelve o'clock.

The landlord chuckled again with his lean chuckle, and seemed to
be mightily tickled at something beyond my comprehension. "No," he
answered, "generally he's an early bird--airley to bed and airley to
rise--yes, he's the bird what catches the worm. But to-night he went out
a peddling, you see, and I don't see what on airth keeps him so late,
unless, may be, he can't sell his head."

"Can't sell his head?--What sort of a bamboozingly story is this you
are telling me?" getting into a towering rage. "Do you pretend to say,
landlord, that this harpooneer is actually engaged this blessed Saturday
night, or rather Sunday morning, in peddling his head around this town?"

"That's precisely it," said the landlord, "and I told him he couldn't
sell it here, the market's overstocked."

"With what?" shouted I.

"With heads to be sure; ain't there too many heads in the world?"

"I tell you what it is, landlord," said I quite calmly, "you'd better
stop spinning that yarn to me--I'm not green."

"May be not," taking out a stick and whittling a toothpick, "but I
rayther guess you'll be done BROWN if that ere harpooneer hears you a
slanderin' his head."

"I'll break it for him," said I, now flying into a passion again at this
unaccountable farrago of the landlord's.

"It's broke a'ready," said he.

"Broke," said I--"BROKE, do you mean?"

"Sartain, and that's the very reason he can't sell it, I guess."

"Landlord," said I, going up to him as cool as Mt. Hecla in a
snow-storm--"landlord, stop whittling. You and I must understand one
another, and that too without delay. I come to your house and want a
bed; you tell me you can only give me half a one; that the other half
belongs to a certain harpooneer. And about this harpooneer, whom I
have not yet seen, you persist in telling me the most mystifying and
exasperating stories tending to beget in me an uncomfortable feeling
towards the man whom you design for my bedfellow--a sort of connexion,
landlord, which is an intimate and confidential one in the highest
degree. I now demand of you to speak out and tell me who and what this
harpooneer is, and whether I shall be in all respects safe to spend the
night with him. And in the first place, you will be so good as to unsay
that story about selling his head, which if true I take to be good
evidence that this harpooneer is stark mad, and I've no idea of sleeping
with a madman; and you, sir, YOU I mean, landlord, YOU, sir, by trying
to induce me to do so knowingly, would thereby render yourself liable to
a criminal prosecution."

"Wall," said the landlord, fetching a long breath, "that's a purty long
sarmon for a chap that rips a little now and then. But be easy, be easy,
this here harpooneer I have been tellin' you of has just arrived from
the south seas, where he bought up a lot of 'balmed New Zealand heads
(great curios, you know), and he's sold all on 'em but one, and that one
he's trying to sell to-night, cause to-morrow's Sunday, and it would not
do to be sellin' human heads about the streets when folks is goin' to
churches. He wanted to, last Sunday, but I stopped him just as he was
goin' out of the door with four heads strung on a string, for all the
airth like a string of inions."

This account cleared up the otherwise unaccountable mystery, and showed
that the landlord, after all, had had no idea of fooling me--but at
the same time what could I think of a harpooneer who stayed out of a
Saturday night clean into the holy Sabbath, engaged in such a cannibal
business as selling the heads of dead idolators?

"Depend upon it, landlord, that harpooneer is a dangerous man."

"He pays reg'lar," was the rejoinder. "But come, it's getting dreadful
late, you had better be turning flukes--it's a nice bed; Sal and me
slept in that ere bed the night we were spliced. There's plenty of room
for two to kick about in that bed; it's an almighty big bed that. Why,
afore we give it up, Sal used to put our Sam and little Johnny in the
foot of it. But I got a dreaming and sprawling about one night, and
somehow, Sam got pitched on the floor, and came near breaking his arm.
Arter that, Sal said it wouldn't do. Come along here, I'll give ye a
glim in a jiffy;" and so saying he lighted a candle and held it towards
me, offering to lead the way. But I stood irresolute; when looking at a
clock in the corner, he exclaimed "I vum it's Sunday--you won't see that
harpooneer to-night; he's come to anchor somewhere--come along then; DO
come; WON'T ye come?"

I considered the matter a moment, and then up stairs we went, and I was
ushered into a small room, cold as a clam, and furnished, sure enough,
with a prodigious bed, almost big enough indeed for any four harpooneers
to sleep abreast.

"There," said the landlord, placing the candle on a crazy old sea chest
that did double duty as a wash-stand and centre table; "there, make
yourself comfortable now, and good night to ye." I turned round from
eyeing the bed, but he had disappeared.

Folding back the counterpane, I stooped over the bed. Though none of the
most elegant, it yet stood the scrutiny tolerably well. I then glanced
round the room; and besides the bedstead and centre table, could see
no other furniture belonging to the place, but a rude shelf, the four
walls, and a papered fireboard representing a man striking a whale. Of
things not properly belonging to the room, there was a hammock lashed
up, and thrown upon the floor in one corner; also a large seaman's bag,
containing the harpooneer's wardrobe, no doubt in lieu of a land trunk.
Likewise, there was a parcel of outlandish bone fish hooks on the shelf
over the fire-place, and a tall harpoon standing at the head of the bed.

But what is this on the chest? I took it up, and held it close to the
light, and felt it, and smelt it, and tried every way possible to arrive
at some satisfactory conclusion concerning it. I can compare it to
nothing but a large door mat, ornamented at the edges with little
tinkling tags something like the stained porcupine quills round an
Indian moccasin. There was a hole or slit in the middle of this mat,
as you see the same in South American ponchos. But could it be possible
that any sober harpooneer would get into a door mat, and parade the
streets of any Christian town in that sort of guise? I put it on, to try
it, and it weighed me down like a hamper, being uncommonly shaggy and
thick, and I thought a little damp, as though this mysterious harpooneer
had been wearing it of a rainy day. I went up in it to a bit of glass
stuck against the wall, and I never saw such a sight in my life. I tore
myself out of it in such a hurry that I gave myself a kink in the neck.

I sat down on the side of the bed, and commenced thinking about this
head-peddling harpooneer, and his door mat. After thinking some time on
the bed-side, I got up and took off my monkey jacket, and then stood in
the middle of the room thinking. I then took off my coat, and thought
a little more in my shirt sleeves. But beginning to feel very cold now,
half undressed as I was, and remembering what the landlord said about
the harpooneer's not coming home at all that night, it being so very
late, I made no more ado, but jumped out of my pantaloons and boots, and
then blowing out the light tumbled into bed, and commended myself to the
care of heaven.

Whether that mattress was stuffed with corn-cobs or broken crockery,
there is no telling, but I rolled about a good deal, and could not sleep
for a long time. At last I slid off into a light doze, and had pretty
nearly made a good offing towards the land of Nod, when I heard a heavy
footfall in the passage, and saw a glimmer of light come into the room
from under the door.

Lord save me, thinks I, that must be the harpooneer, the infernal
head-peddler. But I lay perfectly still, and resolved not to say a word
till spoken to. Holding a light in one hand, and that identical New
Zealand head in the other, the stranger entered the room, and without
looking towards the bed, placed his candle a good way off from me on the
floor in one corner, and then began working away at the knotted cords
of the large bag I before spoke of as being in the room. I was all
eagerness to see his face, but he kept it averted for some time while
employed in unlacing the bag's mouth. This accomplished, however, he
turned round--when, good heavens! what a sight! Such a face! It was of
a dark, purplish, yellow colour, here and there stuck over with large
blackish looking squares. Yes, it's just as I thought, he's a terrible
bedfellow; he's been in a fight, got dreadfully cut, and here he is,
just from the surgeon. But at that moment he chanced to turn his face
so towards the light, that I plainly saw they could not be
sticking-plasters at all, those black squares on his cheeks. They were
stains of some sort or other. At first I knew not what to make of this;
but soon an inkling of the truth occurred to me. I remembered a story of
a white man--a whaleman too--who, falling among the cannibals, had been
tattooed by them. I concluded that this harpooneer, in the course of his
distant voyages, must have met with a similar adventure. And what is it,
thought I, after all! It's only his outside; a man can be honest in any
sort of skin. But then, what to make of his unearthly complexion, that
part of it, I mean, lying round about, and completely independent of the
squares of tattooing. To be sure, it might be nothing but a good coat of
tropical tanning; but I never heard of a hot sun's tanning a white man
into a purplish yellow one. However, I had never been in the South Seas;
and perhaps the sun there produced these extraordinary effects upon the
skin. Now, while all these ideas were passing through me like lightning,
this harpooneer never noticed me at all. But, after some difficulty
having opened his bag, he commenced fumbling in it, and presently pulled
out a sort of tomahawk, and a seal-skin wallet with the hair on. Placing
these on the old chest in the middle of the room, he then took the New
Zealand head--a ghastly thing enough--and crammed it down into the bag.
He now took off his hat--a new beaver hat--when I came nigh singing out
with fresh surprise. There was no hair on his head--none to speak of at
least--nothing but a small scalp-knot twisted up on his forehead. His
bald purplish head now looked for all the world like a mildewed skull.
Had not the stranger stood between me and the door, I would have bolted
out of it quicker than ever I bolted a dinner.

Even as it was, I thought something of slipping out of the window, but
it was the second floor back. I am no coward, but what to make of
this head-peddling purple rascal altogether passed my comprehension.
Ignorance is the parent of fear, and being completely nonplussed and
confounded about the stranger, I confess I was now as much afraid of him
as if it was the devil himself who had thus broken into my room at
the dead of night. In fact, I was so afraid of him that I was not
game enough just then to address him, and demand a satisfactory answer
concerning what seemed inexplicable in him.

Meanwhile, he continued the business of undressing, and at last showed
his chest and arms. As I live, these covered parts of him were checkered
with the same squares as his face; his back, too, was all over the same
dark squares; he seemed to have been in a Thirty Years' War, and just
escaped from it with a sticking-plaster shirt. Still more, his very
legs were marked, as if a parcel of dark green frogs were running up
the trunks of young palms. It was now quite plain that he must be some
abominable savage or other shipped aboard of a whaleman in the South
Seas, and so landed in this Christian country. I quaked to think of it.
A peddler of heads too--perhaps the heads of his own brothers. He might
take a fancy to mine--heavens! look at that tomahawk!

But there was no time for shuddering, for now the savage went about
something that completely fascinated my attention, and convinced me that
he must indeed be a heathen. Going to his heavy grego, or wrapall, or
dreadnaught, which he had previously hung on a chair, he fumbled in the
pockets, and produced at length a curious little deformed image with
a hunch on its back, and exactly the colour of a three days' old Congo
baby. Remembering the embalmed head, at first I almost thought that
this black manikin was a real baby preserved in some similar manner. But
seeing that it was not at all limber, and that it glistened a good deal
like polished ebony, I concluded that it must be nothing but a wooden
idol, which indeed it proved to be. For now the savage goes up to the
empty fire-place, and removing the papered fire-board, sets up this
little hunch-backed image, like a tenpin, between the andirons. The
chimney jambs and all the bricks inside were very sooty, so that I
thought this fire-place made a very appropriate little shrine or chapel
for his Congo idol.

I now screwed my eyes hard towards the half hidden image, feeling but
ill at ease meantime--to see what was next to follow. First he takes
about a double handful of shavings out of his grego pocket, and places
them carefully before the idol; then laying a bit of ship biscuit on
top and applying the flame from the lamp, he kindled the shavings into
a sacrificial blaze. Presently, after many hasty snatches into the fire,
and still hastier withdrawals of his fingers (whereby he seemed to be
scorching them badly), he at last succeeded in drawing out the biscuit;
then blowing off the heat and ashes a little, he made a polite offer of
it to the little negro. But the little devil did not seem to fancy such
dry sort of fare at all; he never moved his lips. All these strange
antics were accompanied by still stranger guttural noises from the
devotee, who seemed to be praying in a sing-song or else singing some
pagan psalmody or other, during which his face twitched about in the
most unnatural manner. At last extinguishing the fire, he took the idol
up very unceremoniously, and bagged it again in his grego pocket as
carelessly as if he were a sportsman bagging a dead woodcock.

All these queer proceedings increased my uncomfortableness, and
seeing him now exhibiting strong symptoms of concluding his business
operations, and jumping into bed with me, I thought it was high time,
now or never, before the light was put out, to break the spell in which
I had so long been bound.

But the interval I spent in deliberating what to say, was a fatal one.
Taking up his tomahawk from the table, he examined the head of it for an
instant, and then holding it to the light, with his mouth at the handle,
he puffed out great clouds of tobacco smoke. The next moment the light
was extinguished, and this wild cannibal, tomahawk between his teeth,
sprang into bed with me. I sang out, I could not help it now; and giving
a sudden grunt of astonishment he began feeling me.

Stammering out something, I knew not what, I rolled away from him
against the wall, and then conjured him, whoever or whatever he might
be, to keep quiet, and let me get up and light the lamp again. But his
guttural responses satisfied me at once that he but ill comprehended my
meaning.

"Who-e debel you?"--he at last said--"you no speak-e, dam-me, I kill-e."
And so saying the lighted tomahawk began flourishing about me in the
dark.

"Landlord, for God's sake, Peter Coffin!" shouted I. "Landlord! Watch!
Coffin! Angels! save me!"

"Speak-e! tell-ee me who-ee be, or dam-me, I kill-e!" again growled the
cannibal, while his horrid flourishings of the tomahawk scattered the
hot tobacco ashes about me till I thought my linen would get on fire.
But thank heaven, at that moment the landlord came into the room light
in hand, and leaping from the bed I ran up to him.

"Don't be afraid now," said he, grinning again, "Queequeg here wouldn't
harm a hair of your head."

"Stop your grinning," shouted I, "and why didn't you tell me that that
infernal harpooneer was a cannibal?"

"I thought ye know'd it;--didn't I tell ye, he was a peddlin' heads
around town?--but turn flukes again and go to sleep. Queequeg, look
here--you sabbee me, I sabbee--you this man sleepe you--you sabbee?"

"Me sabbee plenty"--grunted Queequeg, puffing away at his pipe and
sitting up in bed.

"You gettee in," he added, motioning to me with his tomahawk, and
throwing the clothes to one side. He really did this in not only a civil
but a really kind and charitable way. I stood looking at him a moment.
For all his tattooings he was on the whole a clean, comely looking
cannibal. What's all this fuss I have been making about, thought I to
myself--the man's a human being just as I am: he has just as much reason
to fear me, as I have to be afraid of him. Better sleep with a sober
cannibal than a drunken Christian.

"Landlord," said I, "tell him to stash his tomahawk there, or pipe, or
whatever you call it; tell him to stop smoking, in short, and I will
turn in with him. But I don't fancy having a man smoking in bed with me.
It's dangerous. Besides, I ain't insured."

This being told to Queequeg, he at once complied, and again politely
motioned me to get into bed--rolling over to one side as much as to
say--"I won't touch a leg of ye."

"Good night, landlord," said I, "you may go."

I turned in, and never slept better in my life.



CHAPTER 4. The Counterpane.


Upon waking next morning about daylight, I found Queequeg's arm thrown
over me in the most loving and affectionate manner. You had almost
thought I had been his wife. The counterpane was of patchwork, full of
odd little parti-coloured squares and triangles; and this arm of his
tattooed all over with an interminable Cretan labyrinth of a figure,
no two parts of which were of one precise shade--owing I suppose to
his keeping his arm at sea unmethodically in sun and shade, his shirt
sleeves irregularly rolled up at various times--this same arm of his, I
say, looked for all the world like a strip of that same patchwork quilt.
Indeed, partly lying on it as the arm did when I first awoke, I could
hardly tell it from the quilt, they so blended their hues together; and
it was only by the sense of weight and pressure that I could tell that
Queequeg was hugging me.

My sensations were strange. Let me try to explain them. When I was a
child, I well remember a somewhat similar circumstance that befell me;
whether it was a reality or a dream, I never could entirely settle.
The circumstance was this. I had been cutting up some caper or other--I
think it was trying to crawl up the chimney, as I had seen a little
sweep do a few days previous; and my stepmother who, somehow or other,
was all the time whipping me, or sending me to bed supperless,--my
mother dragged me by the legs out of the chimney and packed me off to
bed, though it was only two o'clock in the afternoon of the 21st June,
the longest day in the year in our hemisphere. I felt dreadfully. But
there was no help for it, so up stairs I went to my little room in the
third floor, undressed myself as slowly as possible so as to kill time,
and with a bitter sigh got between the sheets.

I lay there dismally calculating that sixteen entire hours must elapse
before I could hope for a resurrection. Sixteen hours in bed! the
small of my back ached to think of it. And it was so light too; the
sun shining in at the window, and a great rattling of coaches in the
streets, and the sound of gay voices all over the house. I felt worse
and worse--at last I got up, dressed, and softly going down in my
stockinged feet, sought out my stepmother, and suddenly threw myself
at her feet, beseeching her as a particular favour to give me a good
slippering for my misbehaviour; anything indeed but condemning me to lie
abed such an unendurable length of time. But she was the best and most
conscientious of stepmothers, and back I had to go to my room. For
several hours I lay there broad awake, feeling a great deal worse than I
have ever done since, even from the greatest subsequent misfortunes. At
last I must have fallen into a troubled nightmare of a doze; and slowly
waking from it--half steeped in dreams--I opened my eyes, and the before
sun-lit room was now wrapped in outer darkness. Instantly I felt a shock
running through all my frame; nothing was to be seen, and nothing was
to be heard; but a supernatural hand seemed placed in mine. My arm hung
over the counterpane, and the nameless, unimaginable, silent form
or phantom, to which the hand belonged, seemed closely seated by my
bed-side. For what seemed ages piled on ages, I lay there, frozen with
the most awful fears, not daring to drag away my hand; yet ever thinking
that if I could but stir it one single inch, the horrid spell would be
broken. I knew not how this consciousness at last glided away from me;
but waking in the morning, I shudderingly remembered it all, and for
days and weeks and months afterwards I lost myself in confounding
attempts to explain the mystery. Nay, to this very hour, I often puzzle
myself with it.

Now, take away the awful fear, and my sensations at feeling the
supernatural hand in mine were very similar, in their strangeness, to
those which I experienced on waking up and seeing Queequeg's pagan
arm thrown round me. But at length all the past night's events soberly
recurred, one by one, in fixed reality, and then I lay only alive to
the comical predicament. For though I tried to move his arm--unlock his
bridegroom clasp--yet, sleeping as he was, he still hugged me tightly,
as though naught but death should part us twain. I now strove to rouse
him--"Queequeg!"--but his only answer was a snore. I then rolled over,
my neck feeling as if it were in a horse-collar; and suddenly felt a
slight scratch. Throwing aside the counterpane, there lay the tomahawk
sleeping by the savage's side, as if it were a hatchet-faced baby. A
pretty pickle, truly, thought I; abed here in a strange house in the
broad day, with a cannibal and a tomahawk! "Queequeg!--in the name of
goodness, Queequeg, wake!" At length, by dint of much wriggling, and
loud and incessant expostulations upon the unbecomingness of his
hugging a fellow male in that matrimonial sort of style, I succeeded in
extracting a grunt; and presently, he drew back his arm, shook himself
all over like a Newfoundland dog just from the water, and sat up in bed,
stiff as a pike-staff, looking at me, and rubbing his eyes as if he
did not altogether remember how I came to be there, though a dim
consciousness of knowing something about me seemed slowly dawning over
him. Meanwhile, I lay quietly eyeing him, having no serious misgivings
now, and bent upon narrowly observing so curious a creature. When, at
last, his mind seemed made up touching the character of his bedfellow,
and he became, as it were, reconciled to the fact; he jumped out upon
the floor, and by certain signs and sounds gave me to understand that,
if it pleased me, he would dress first and then leave me to dress
afterwards, leaving the whole apartment to myself. Thinks I, Queequeg,
under the circumstances, this is a very civilized overture; but, the
truth is, these savages have an innate sense of delicacy, say what
you will; it is marvellous how essentially polite they are. I pay this
particular compliment to Queequeg, because he treated me with so much
civility and consideration, while I was guilty of great rudeness;
staring at him from the bed, and watching all his toilette motions; for
the time my curiosity getting the better of my breeding. Nevertheless,
a man like Queequeg you don't see every day, he and his ways were well
worth unusual regarding.

He commenced dressing at top by donning his beaver hat, a very tall one,
by the by, and then--still minus his trowsers--he hunted up his boots.
What under the heavens he did it for, I cannot tell, but his next
movement was to crush himself--boots in hand, and hat on--under the bed;
when, from sundry violent gaspings and strainings, I inferred he was
hard at work booting himself; though by no law of propriety that I ever
heard of, is any man required to be private when putting on his
boots. But Queequeg, do you see, was a creature in the transition
stage--neither caterpillar nor butterfly. He was just enough civilized
to show off his outlandishness in the strangest possible manners. His
education was not yet completed. He was an undergraduate. If he had not
been a small degree civilized, he very probably would not have troubled
himself with boots at all; but then, if he had not been still a savage,
he never would have dreamt of getting under the bed to put them on. At
last, he emerged with his hat very much dented and crushed down over his
eyes, and began creaking and limping about the room, as if, not
being much accustomed to boots, his pair of damp, wrinkled cowhide
ones--probably not made to order either--rather pinched and tormented
him at the first go off of a bitter cold morning.

Seeing, now, that there were no curtains to the window, and that the
street being very narrow, the house opposite commanded a plain view
into the room, and observing more and more the indecorous figure that
Queequeg made, staving about with little else but his hat and boots on;
I begged him as well as I could, to accelerate his toilet somewhat,
and particularly to get into his pantaloons as soon as possible. He
complied, and then proceeded to wash himself. At that time in the
morning any Christian would have washed his face; but Queequeg, to
my amazement, contented himself with restricting his ablutions to his
chest, arms, and hands. He then donned his waistcoat, and taking up a
piece of hard soap on the wash-stand centre table, dipped it into water
and commenced lathering his face. I was watching to see where he kept
his razor, when lo and behold, he takes the harpoon from the bed corner,
slips out the long wooden stock, unsheathes the head, whets it a little
on his boot, and striding up to the bit of mirror against the wall,
begins a vigorous scraping, or rather harpooning of his cheeks. Thinks
I, Queequeg, this is using Rogers's best cutlery with a vengeance.
Afterwards I wondered the less at this operation when I came to know of
what fine steel the head of a harpoon is made, and how exceedingly sharp
the long straight edges are always kept.

The rest of his toilet was soon achieved, and he proudly marched out of
the room, wrapped up in his great pilot monkey jacket, and sporting his
harpoon like a marshal's baton.



CHAPTER 5. Breakfast.


I quickly followed suit, and descending into the bar-room accosted the
grinning landlord very pleasantly. I cherished no malice towards him,
though he had been skylarking with me not a little in the matter of my
bedfellow.

However, a good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a
good thing; the more's the pity. So, if any one man, in his own
proper person, afford stuff for a good joke to anybody, let him not be
backward, but let him cheerfully allow himself to spend and be spent in
that way. And the man that has anything bountifully laughable about him,
be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for.

The bar-room was now full of the boarders who had been dropping in the
night previous, and whom I had not as yet had a good look at. They were
nearly all whalemen; chief mates, and second mates, and third mates, and
sea carpenters, and sea coopers, and sea blacksmiths, and harpooneers,
and ship keepers; a brown and brawny company, with bosky beards; an
unshorn, shaggy set, all wearing monkey jackets for morning gowns.

You could pretty plainly tell how long each one had been ashore. This
young fellow's healthy cheek is like a sun-toasted pear in hue, and
would seem to smell almost as musky; he cannot have been three days
landed from his Indian voyage. That man next him looks a few shades
lighter; you might say a touch of satin wood is in him. In the
complexion of a third still lingers a tropic tawn, but slightly bleached
withal; HE doubtless has tarried whole weeks ashore. But who could show
a cheek like Queequeg? which, barred with various tints, seemed like the
Andes' western slope, to show forth in one array, contrasting climates,
zone by zone.

"Grub, ho!" now cried the landlord, flinging open a door, and in we went
to breakfast.

They say that men who have seen the world, thereby become quite at ease
in manner, quite self-possessed in company. Not always, though: Ledyard,
the great New England traveller, and Mungo Park, the Scotch one; of all
men, they possessed the least assurance in the parlor. But perhaps the
mere crossing of Siberia in a sledge drawn by dogs as Ledyard did, or
the taking a long solitary walk on an empty stomach, in the negro heart
of Africa, which was the sum of poor Mungo's performances--this kind of
travel, I say, may not be the very best mode of attaining a high social
polish. Still, for the most part, that sort of thing is to be had
anywhere.

These reflections just here are occasioned by the circumstance that
after we were all seated at the table, and I was preparing to hear some
good stories about whaling; to my no small surprise, nearly every
man maintained a profound silence. And not only that, but they looked
embarrassed. Yes, here were a set of sea-dogs, many of whom without the
slightest bashfulness had boarded great whales on the high seas--entire
strangers to them--and duelled them dead without winking; and yet, here
they sat at a social breakfast table--all of the same calling, all of
kindred tastes--looking round as sheepishly at each other as though they
had never been out of sight of some sheepfold among the Green Mountains.
A curious sight; these bashful bears, these timid warrior whalemen!

But as for Queequeg--why, Queequeg sat there among them--at the head of
the table, too, it so chanced; as cool as an icicle. To be sure I cannot
say much for his breeding. His greatest admirer could not have cordially
justified his bringing his harpoon into breakfast with him, and using it
there without ceremony; reaching over the table with it, to the imminent
jeopardy of many heads, and grappling the beefsteaks towards him. But
THAT was certainly very coolly done by him, and every one knows that in
most people's estimation, to do anything coolly is to do it genteelly.

We will not speak of all Queequeg's peculiarities here; how he eschewed
coffee and hot rolls, and applied his undivided attention to beefsteaks,
done rare. Enough, that when breakfast was over he withdrew like the
rest into the public room, lighted his tomahawk-pipe, and was sitting
there quietly digesting and smoking with his inseparable hat on, when I
sallied out for a stroll.



CHAPTER 6. The Street.


If I had been astonished at first catching a glimpse of so outlandish
an individual as Queequeg circulating among the polite society of a
civilized town, that astonishment soon departed upon taking my first
daylight stroll through the streets of New Bedford.

In thoroughfares nigh the docks, any considerable seaport will
frequently offer to view the queerest looking nondescripts from foreign
parts. Even in Broadway and Chestnut streets, Mediterranean mariners
will sometimes jostle the affrighted ladies. Regent Street is not
unknown to Lascars and Malays; and at Bombay, in the Apollo Green, live
Yankees have often scared the natives. But New Bedford beats all Water
Street and Wapping. In these last-mentioned haunts you see only sailors;
but in New Bedford, actual cannibals stand chatting at street corners;
savages outright; many of whom yet carry on their bones unholy flesh. It
makes a stranger stare.

But, besides the Feegeeans, Tongatobooarrs, Erromanggoans, Pannangians,
and Brighggians, and, besides the wild specimens of the whaling-craft
which unheeded reel about the streets, you will see other sights still
more curious, certainly more comical. There weekly arrive in this town
scores of green Vermonters and New Hampshire men, all athirst for gain
and glory in the fishery. They are mostly young, of stalwart frames;
fellows who have felled forests, and now seek to drop the axe and snatch
the whale-lance. Many are as green as the Green Mountains whence they
came. In some things you would think them but a few hours old. Look
there! that chap strutting round the corner. He wears a beaver hat and
swallow-tailed coat, girdled with a sailor-belt and sheath-knife. Here
comes another with a sou'-wester and a bombazine cloak.

No town-bred dandy will compare with a country-bred one--I mean a
downright bumpkin dandy--a fellow that, in the dog-days, will mow his
two acres in buckskin gloves for fear of tanning his hands. Now when a
country dandy like this takes it into his head to make a distinguished
reputation, and joins the great whale-fishery, you should see the
comical things he does upon reaching the seaport. In bespeaking his
sea-outfit, he orders bell-buttons to his waistcoats; straps to his
canvas trowsers. Ah, poor Hay-Seed! how bitterly will burst those straps
in the first howling gale, when thou art driven, straps, buttons, and
all, down the throat of the tempest.

But think not that this famous town has only harpooneers, cannibals, and
bumpkins to show her visitors. Not at all. Still New Bedford is a queer
place. Had it not been for us whalemen, that tract of land would this
day perhaps have been in as howling condition as the coast of Labrador.
As it is, parts of her back country are enough to frighten one, they
look so bony. The town itself is perhaps the dearest place to live
in, in all New England. It is a land of oil, true enough: but not like
Canaan; a land, also, of corn and wine. The streets do not run with
milk; nor in the spring-time do they pave them with fresh eggs. Yet, in
spite of this, nowhere in all America will you find more patrician-like
houses; parks and gardens more opulent, than in New Bedford. Whence came
they? how planted upon this once scraggy scoria of a country?

Go and gaze upon the iron emblematical harpoons round yonder lofty
mansion, and your question will be answered. Yes; all these brave houses
and flowery gardens came from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans.
One and all, they were harpooned and dragged up hither from the bottom
of the sea. Can Herr Alexander perform a feat like that?

In New Bedford, fathers, they say, give whales for dowers to their
daughters, and portion off their nieces with a few porpoises a-piece.
You must go to New Bedford to see a brilliant wedding; for, they say,
they have reservoirs of oil in every house, and every night recklessly
burn their lengths in spermaceti candles.

In summer time, the town is sweet to see; full of fine maples--long
avenues of green and gold. And in August, high in air, the beautiful and
bountiful horse-chestnuts, candelabra-wise, proffer the passer-by their
tapering upright cones of congregated blossoms. So omnipotent is art;
which in many a district of New Bedford has superinduced bright terraces
of flowers upon the barren refuse rocks thrown aside at creation's final
day.

And the women of New Bedford, they bloom like their own red roses. But
roses only bloom in summer; whereas the fine carnation of their cheeks
is perennial as sunlight in the seventh heavens. Elsewhere match that
bloom of theirs, ye cannot, save in Salem, where they tell me the young
girls breathe such musk, their sailor sweethearts smell them miles off
shore, as though they were drawing nigh the odorous Moluccas instead of
the Puritanic sands.



CHAPTER 7. The Chapel.


In this same New Bedford there stands a Whaleman's Chapel, and few are
the moody fishermen, shortly bound for the Indian Ocean or Pacific, who
fail to make a Sunday visit to the spot. I am sure that I did not.

Returning from my first morning stroll, I again sallied out upon this
special errand. The sky had changed from clear, sunny cold, to driving
sleet and mist. Wrapping myself in my shaggy jacket of the cloth called
bearskin, I fought my way against the stubborn storm. Entering, I
found a small scattered congregation of sailors, and sailors' wives and
widows. A muffled silence reigned, only broken at times by the shrieks
of the storm. Each silent worshipper seemed purposely sitting apart from
the other, as if each silent grief were insular and incommunicable. The
chaplain had not yet arrived; and there these silent islands of men and
women sat steadfastly eyeing several marble tablets, with black borders,
masoned into the wall on either side the pulpit. Three of them ran
something like the following, but I do not pretend to quote:--

SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF JOHN TALBOT, Who, at the age of eighteen, was
lost overboard, Near the Isle of Desolation, off Patagonia, November
1st, 1836. THIS TABLET Is erected to his Memory BY HIS SISTER.

SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF ROBERT LONG, WILLIS ELLERY, NATHAN COLEMAN,
WALTER CANNY, SETH MACY, AND SAMUEL GLEIG, Forming one of the boats'
crews OF THE SHIP ELIZA Who were towed out of sight by a Whale, On the
Off-shore Ground in the PACIFIC, December 31st, 1839. THIS MARBLE Is
here placed by their surviving SHIPMATES.

SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF The late CAPTAIN EZEKIEL HARDY, Who in the bows
of his boat was killed by a Sperm Whale on the coast of Japan, AUGUST
3d, 1833. THIS TABLET Is erected to his Memory BY HIS WIDOW.

Shaking off the sleet from my ice-glazed hat and jacket, I seated myself
near the door, and turning sideways was surprised to see Queequeg near
me. Affected by the solemnity of the scene, there was a wondering gaze
of incredulous curiosity in his countenance. This savage was the only
person present who seemed to notice my entrance; because he was the only
one who could not read, and, therefore, was not reading those frigid
inscriptions on the wall. Whether any of the relatives of the seamen
whose names appeared there were now among the congregation, I knew not;
but so many are the unrecorded accidents in the fishery, and so plainly
did several women present wear the countenance if not the trappings
of some unceasing grief, that I feel sure that here before me were
assembled those, in whose unhealing hearts the sight of those bleak
tablets sympathetically caused the old wounds to bleed afresh.

Oh! ye whose dead lie buried beneath the green grass; who standing among
flowers can say--here, HERE lies my beloved; ye know not the desolation
that broods in bosoms like these. What bitter blanks in those
black-bordered marbles which cover no ashes! What despair in those
immovable inscriptions! What deadly voids and unbidden infidelities in
the lines that seem to gnaw upon all Faith, and refuse resurrections to
the beings who have placelessly perished without a grave. As well might
those tablets stand in the cave of Elephanta as here.

In what census of living creatures, the dead of mankind are included;
why it is that a universal proverb says of them, that they tell no
tales, though containing more secrets than the Goodwin Sands; how it is
that to his name who yesterday departed for the other world, we prefix
so significant and infidel a word, and yet do not thus entitle him, if
he but embarks for the remotest Indies of this living earth; why the
Life Insurance Companies pay death-forfeitures upon immortals; in what
eternal, unstirring paralysis, and deadly, hopeless trance, yet lies
antique Adam who died sixty round centuries ago; how it is that we
still refuse to be comforted for those who we nevertheless maintain are
dwelling in unspeakable bliss; why all the living so strive to hush all
the dead; wherefore but the rumor of a knocking in a tomb will terrify a
whole city. All these things are not without their meanings.

But Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these
dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.

It needs scarcely to be told, with what feelings, on the eve of a
Nantucket voyage, I regarded those marble tablets, and by the murky
light of that darkened, doleful day read the fate of the whalemen
who had gone before me. Yes, Ishmael, the same fate may be thine. But
somehow I grew merry again. Delightful inducements to embark, fine
chance for promotion, it seems--aye, a stove boat will make me an
immortal by brevet. Yes, there is death in this business of whaling--a
speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what
then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death.
Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true
substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too
much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that
thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my
better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not
me. And therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove boat and
stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot.



CHAPTER 8. The Pulpit.


I had not been seated very long ere a man of a certain venerable
robustness entered; immediately as the storm-pelted door flew back upon
admitting him, a quick regardful eyeing of him by all the congregation,
sufficiently attested that this fine old man was the chaplain. Yes, it
was the famous Father Mapple, so called by the whalemen, among whom he
was a very great favourite. He had been a sailor and a harpooneer in his
youth, but for many years past had dedicated his life to the ministry.
At the time I now write of, Father Mapple was in the hardy winter of a
healthy old age; that sort of old age which seems merging into a second
flowering youth, for among all the fissures of his wrinkles, there shone
certain mild gleams of a newly developing bloom--the spring verdure
peeping forth even beneath February's snow. No one having previously
heard his history, could for the first time behold Father Mapple without
the utmost interest, because there were certain engrafted clerical
peculiarities about him, imputable to that adventurous maritime life
he had led. When he entered I observed that he carried no umbrella, and
certainly had not come in his carriage, for his tarpaulin hat ran down
with melting sleet, and his great pilot cloth jacket seemed almost to
drag him to the floor with the weight of the water it had absorbed.
However, hat and coat and overshoes were one by one removed, and hung up
in a little space in an adjacent corner; when, arrayed in a decent suit,
he quietly approached the pulpit.

Like most old fashioned pulpits, it was a very lofty one, and since a
regular stairs to such a height would, by its long angle with the floor,
seriously contract the already small area of the chapel, the architect,
it seemed, had acted upon the hint of Father Mapple, and finished the
pulpit without a stairs, substituting a perpendicular side ladder, like
those used in mounting a ship from a boat at sea. The wife of a whaling
captain had provided the chapel with a handsome pair of red worsted
man-ropes for this ladder, which, being itself nicely headed, and
stained with a mahogany colour, the whole contrivance, considering what
manner of chapel it was, seemed by no means in bad taste. Halting for
an instant at the foot of the ladder, and with both hands grasping the
ornamental knobs of the man-ropes, Father Mapple cast a look upwards,
and then with a truly sailor-like but still reverential dexterity, hand
over hand, mounted the steps as if ascending the main-top of his vessel.

The perpendicular parts of this side ladder, as is usually the case with
swinging ones, were of cloth-covered rope, only the rounds were of wood,
so that at every step there was a joint. At my first glimpse of the
pulpit, it had not escaped me that however convenient for a ship,
these joints in the present instance seemed unnecessary. For I was not
prepared to see Father Mapple after gaining the height, slowly turn
round, and stooping over the pulpit, deliberately drag up the ladder
step by step, till the whole was deposited within, leaving him
impregnable in his little Quebec.

I pondered some time without fully comprehending the reason for this.
Father Mapple enjoyed such a wide reputation for sincerity and sanctity,
that I could not suspect him of courting notoriety by any mere tricks
of the stage. No, thought I, there must be some sober reason for this
thing; furthermore, it must symbolize something unseen. Can it be,
then, that by that act of physical isolation, he signifies his spiritual
withdrawal for the time, from all outward worldly ties and connexions?
Yes, for replenished with the meat and wine of the word, to the faithful
man of God, this pulpit, I see, is a self-containing stronghold--a lofty
Ehrenbreitstein, with a perennial well of water within the walls.

But the side ladder was not the only strange feature of the place,
borrowed from the chaplain's former sea-farings. Between the marble
cenotaphs on either hand of the pulpit, the wall which formed its back
was adorned with a large painting representing a gallant ship beating
against a terrible storm off a lee coast of black rocks and snowy
breakers. But high above the flying scud and dark-rolling clouds, there
floated a little isle of sunlight, from which beamed forth an angel's
face; and this bright face shed a distinct spot of radiance upon the
ship's tossed deck, something like that silver plate now inserted into
the Victory's plank where Nelson fell. "Ah, noble ship," the angel
seemed to say, "beat on, beat on, thou noble ship, and bear a hardy
helm; for lo! the sun is breaking through; the clouds are rolling
off--serenest azure is at hand."

Nor was the pulpit itself without a trace of the same sea-taste that
had achieved the ladder and the picture. Its panelled front was in
the likeness of a ship's bluff bows, and the Holy Bible rested on a
projecting piece of scroll work, fashioned after a ship's fiddle-headed
beak.

What could be more full of meaning?--for the pulpit is ever this earth's
foremost part; all the rest comes in its rear; the pulpit leads the
world. From thence it is the storm of God's quick wrath is first
descried, and the bow must bear the earliest brunt. From thence it is
the God of breezes fair or foul is first invoked for favourable winds.
Yes, the world's a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete;
and the pulpit is its prow.



CHAPTER 9. The Sermon.


Father Mapple rose, and in a mild voice of unassuming authority ordered
the scattered people to condense. "Starboard gangway, there! side away
to larboard--larboard gangway to starboard! Midships! midships!"

There was a low rumbling of heavy sea-boots among the benches, and a
still slighter shuffling of women's shoes, and all was quiet again, and
every eye on the preacher.

He paused a little; then kneeling in the pulpit's bows, folded his large
brown hands across his chest, uplifted his closed eyes, and offered
a prayer so deeply devout that he seemed kneeling and praying at the
bottom of the sea.

This ended, in prolonged solemn tones, like the continual tolling of
a bell in a ship that is foundering at sea in a fog--in such tones he
commenced reading the following hymn; but changing his manner towards
the concluding stanzas, burst forth with a pealing exultation and joy--

     "The ribs and terrors in the whale,
     Arched over me a dismal gloom,
     While all God's sun-lit waves rolled by,
     And lift me deepening down to doom.

     "I saw the opening maw of hell,
     With endless pains and sorrows there;
     Which none but they that feel can tell--
     Oh, I was plunging to despair.

     "In black distress, I called my God,
     When I could scarce believe him mine,
     He bowed his ear to my complaints--
     No more the whale did me confine.

     "With speed he flew to my relief,
     As on a radiant dolphin borne;
     Awful, yet bright, as lightning shone
     The face of my Deliverer God.

     "My song for ever shall record
     That terrible, that joyful hour;
     I give the glory to my God,
     His all the mercy and the power."


Nearly all joined in singing this hymn, which swelled high above the
howling of the storm. A brief pause ensued; the preacher slowly turned
over the leaves of the Bible, and at last, folding his hand down upon
the proper page, said: "Beloved shipmates, clinch the last verse of the
first chapter of Jonah--'And God had prepared a great fish to swallow up
Jonah.'"

"Shipmates, this book, containing only four chapters--four yarns--is one
of the smallest strands in the mighty cable of the Scriptures. Yet what
depths of the soul does Jonah's deep sealine sound! what a pregnant
lesson to us is this prophet! What a noble thing is that canticle in the
fish's belly! How billow-like and boisterously grand! We feel the floods
surging over us; we sound with him to the kelpy bottom of the waters;
sea-weed and all the slime of the sea is about us! But WHAT is this
lesson that the book of Jonah teaches? Shipmates, it is a two-stranded
lesson; a lesson to us all as sinful men, and a lesson to me as a pilot
of the living God. As sinful men, it is a lesson to us all, because it
is a story of the sin, hard-heartedness, suddenly awakened fears, the
swift punishment, repentance, prayers, and finally the deliverance and
joy of Jonah. As with all sinners among men, the sin of this son of
Amittai was in his wilful disobedience of the command of God--never
mind now what that command was, or how conveyed--which he found a hard
command. But all the things that God would have us do are hard for us to
do--remember that--and hence, he oftener commands us than endeavors to
persuade. And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; and it is in
this disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God consists.

"With this sin of disobedience in him, Jonah still further flouts at
God, by seeking to flee from Him. He thinks that a ship made by men will
carry him into countries where God does not reign, but only the Captains
of this earth. He skulks about the wharves of Joppa, and seeks a ship
that's bound for Tarshish. There lurks, perhaps, a hitherto unheeded
meaning here. By all accounts Tarshish could have been no other city
than the modern Cadiz. That's the opinion of learned men. And where is
Cadiz, shipmates? Cadiz is in Spain; as far by water, from Joppa,
as Jonah could possibly have sailed in those ancient days, when the
Atlantic was an almost unknown sea. Because Joppa, the modern Jaffa,
shipmates, is on the most easterly coast of the Mediterranean, the
Syrian; and Tarshish or Cadiz more than two thousand miles to the
westward from that, just outside the Straits of Gibraltar. See ye
not then, shipmates, that Jonah sought to flee world-wide from God?
Miserable man! Oh! most contemptible and worthy of all scorn; with
slouched hat and guilty eye, skulking from his God; prowling among the
shipping like a vile burglar hastening to cross the seas. So disordered,
self-condemning is his look, that had there been policemen in those
days, Jonah, on the mere suspicion of something wrong, had been arrested
ere he touched a deck. How plainly he's a fugitive! no baggage, not a
hat-box, valise, or carpet-bag,--no friends accompany him to the wharf
with their adieux. At last, after much dodging search, he finds the
Tarshish ship receiving the last items of her cargo; and as he steps on
board to see its Captain in the cabin, all the sailors for the moment
desist from hoisting in the goods, to mark the stranger's evil eye.
Jonah sees this; but in vain he tries to look all ease and confidence;
in vain essays his wretched smile. Strong intuitions of the man assure
the mariners he can be no innocent. In their gamesome but still serious
way, one whispers to the other--"Jack, he's robbed a widow;" or, "Joe,
do you mark him; he's a bigamist;" or, "Harry lad, I guess he's the
adulterer that broke jail in old Gomorrah, or belike, one of the missing
murderers from Sodom." Another runs to read the bill that's stuck
against the spile upon the wharf to which the ship is moored, offering
five hundred gold coins for the apprehension of a parricide, and
containing a description of his person. He reads, and looks from Jonah
to the bill; while all his sympathetic shipmates now crowd round Jonah,
prepared to lay their hands upon him. Frighted Jonah trembles, and
summoning all his boldness to his face, only looks so much the more a
coward. He will not confess himself suspected; but that itself is strong
suspicion. So he makes the best of it; and when the sailors find him
not to be the man that is advertised, they let him pass, and he descends
into the cabin.

"'Who's there?' cries the Captain at his busy desk, hurriedly making
out his papers for the Customs--'Who's there?' Oh! how that harmless
question mangles Jonah! For the instant he almost turns to flee again.
But he rallies. 'I seek a passage in this ship to Tarshish; how soon
sail ye, sir?' Thus far the busy Captain had not looked up to Jonah,
though the man now stands before him; but no sooner does he hear that
hollow voice, than he darts a scrutinizing glance. 'We sail with the
next coming tide,' at last he slowly answered, still intently eyeing
him. 'No sooner, sir?'--'Soon enough for any honest man that goes a
passenger.' Ha! Jonah, that's another stab. But he swiftly calls away
the Captain from that scent. 'I'll sail with ye,'--he says,--'the
passage money how much is that?--I'll pay now.' For it is particularly
written, shipmates, as if it were a thing not to be overlooked in this
history, 'that he paid the fare thereof' ere the craft did sail. And
taken with the context, this is full of meaning.

"Now Jonah's Captain, shipmates, was one whose discernment detects crime
in any, but whose cupidity exposes it only in the penniless. In this
world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without
a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers.
So Jonah's Captain prepares to test the length of Jonah's purse, ere he
judge him openly. He charges him thrice the usual sum; and it's assented
to. Then the Captain knows that Jonah is a fugitive; but at the same
time resolves to help a flight that paves its rear with gold. Yet when
Jonah fairly takes out his purse, prudent suspicions still molest the
Captain. He rings every coin to find a counterfeit. Not a forger, any
way, he mutters; and Jonah is put down for his passage. 'Point out my
state-room, Sir,' says Jonah now, 'I'm travel-weary; I need sleep.'
'Thou lookest like it,' says the Captain, 'there's thy room.' Jonah
enters, and would lock the door, but the lock contains no key. Hearing
him foolishly fumbling there, the Captain laughs lowly to himself, and
mutters something about the doors of convicts' cells being never allowed
to be locked within. All dressed and dusty as he is, Jonah throws
himself into his berth, and finds the little state-room ceiling almost
resting on his forehead. The air is close, and Jonah gasps. Then, in
that contracted hole, sunk, too, beneath the ship's water-line, Jonah
feels the heralding presentiment of that stifling hour, when the whale
shall hold him in the smallest of his bowels' wards.

"Screwed at its axis against the side, a swinging lamp slightly
oscillates in Jonah's room; and the ship, heeling over towards the wharf
with the weight of the last bales received, the lamp, flame and all,
though in slight motion, still maintains a permanent obliquity with
reference to the room; though, in truth, infallibly straight itself, it
but made obvious the false, lying levels among which it hung. The lamp
alarms and frightens Jonah; as lying in his berth his tormented eyes
roll round the place, and this thus far successful fugitive finds no
refuge for his restless glance. But that contradiction in the lamp more
and more appals him. The floor, the ceiling, and the side, are all awry.
'Oh! so my conscience hangs in me!' he groans, 'straight upwards, so it
burns; but the chambers of my soul are all in crookedness!'

"Like one who after a night of drunken revelry hies to his bed, still
reeling, but with conscience yet pricking him, as the plungings of the
Roman race-horse but so much the more strike his steel tags into him; as
one who in that miserable plight still turns and turns in giddy anguish,
praying God for annihilation until the fit be passed; and at last amid
the whirl of woe he feels, a deep stupor steals over him, as over the
man who bleeds to death, for conscience is the wound, and there's naught
to staunch it; so, after sore wrestlings in his berth, Jonah's prodigy
of ponderous misery drags him drowning down to sleep.

"And now the time of tide has come; the ship casts off her cables; and
from the deserted wharf the uncheered ship for Tarshish, all careening,
glides to sea. That ship, my friends, was the first of recorded
smugglers! the contraband was Jonah. But the sea rebels; he will not
bear the wicked burden. A dreadful storm comes on, the ship is like to
break. But now when the boatswain calls all hands to lighten her;
when boxes, bales, and jars are clattering overboard; when the wind
is shrieking, and the men are yelling, and every plank thunders with
trampling feet right over Jonah's head; in all this raging tumult, Jonah
sleeps his hideous sleep. He sees no black sky and raging sea, feels not
the reeling timbers, and little hears he or heeds he the far rush of the
mighty whale, which even now with open mouth is cleaving the seas after
him. Aye, shipmates, Jonah was gone down into the sides of the ship--a
berth in the cabin as I have taken it, and was fast asleep. But the
frightened master comes to him, and shrieks in his dead ear, 'What
meanest thou, O, sleeper! arise!' Startled from his lethargy by that
direful cry, Jonah staggers to his feet, and stumbling to the deck,
grasps a shroud, to look out upon the sea. But at that moment he is
sprung upon by a panther billow leaping over the bulwarks. Wave after
wave thus leaps into the ship, and finding no speedy vent runs roaring
fore and aft, till the mariners come nigh to drowning while yet afloat.
And ever, as the white moon shows her affrighted face from the steep
gullies in the blackness overhead, aghast Jonah sees the rearing
bowsprit pointing high upward, but soon beat downward again towards the
tormented deep.

"Terrors upon terrors run shouting through his soul. In all his cringing
attitudes, the God-fugitive is now too plainly known. The sailors mark
him; more and more certain grow their suspicions of him, and at last,
fully to test the truth, by referring the whole matter to high Heaven,
they fall to casting lots, to see for whose cause this great tempest was
upon them. The lot is Jonah's; that discovered, then how furiously they
mob him with their questions. 'What is thine occupation? Whence comest
thou? Thy country? What people? But mark now, my shipmates, the behavior
of poor Jonah. The eager mariners but ask him who he is, and where
from; whereas, they not only receive an answer to those questions,
but likewise another answer to a question not put by them, but the
unsolicited answer is forced from Jonah by the hard hand of God that is
upon him.

"'I am a Hebrew,' he cries--and then--'I fear the Lord the God of Heaven
who hath made the sea and the dry land!' Fear him, O Jonah? Aye, well
mightest thou fear the Lord God THEN! Straightway, he now goes on to
make a full confession; whereupon the mariners became more and more
appalled, but still are pitiful. For when Jonah, not yet supplicating
God for mercy, since he but too well knew the darkness of his
deserts,--when wretched Jonah cries out to them to take him and cast him
forth into the sea, for he knew that for HIS sake this great tempest
was upon them; they mercifully turn from him, and seek by other means to
save the ship. But all in vain; the indignant gale howls louder;
then, with one hand raised invokingly to God, with the other they not
unreluctantly lay hold of Jonah.

"And now behold Jonah taken up as an anchor and dropped into the sea;
when instantly an oily calmness floats out from the east, and the sea
is still, as Jonah carries down the gale with him, leaving smooth
water behind. He goes down in the whirling heart of such a masterless
commotion that he scarce heeds the moment when he drops seething into
the yawning jaws awaiting him; and the whale shoots-to all his ivory
teeth, like so many white bolts, upon his prison. Then Jonah prayed unto
the Lord out of the fish's belly. But observe his prayer, and learn a
weighty lesson. For sinful as he is, Jonah does not weep and wail for
direct deliverance. He feels that his dreadful punishment is just. He
leaves all his deliverance to God, contenting himself with this, that
spite of all his pains and pangs, he will still look towards His holy
temple. And here, shipmates, is true and faithful repentance; not
clamorous for pardon, but grateful for punishment. And how pleasing to
God was this conduct in Jonah, is shown in the eventual deliverance of
him from the sea and the whale. Shipmates, I do not place Jonah before
you to be copied for his sin but I do place him before you as a model
for repentance. Sin not; but if you do, take heed to repent of it like
Jonah."

While he was speaking these words, the howling of the shrieking,
slanting storm without seemed to add new power to the preacher, who,
when describing Jonah's sea-storm, seemed tossed by a storm himself.
His deep chest heaved as with a ground-swell; his tossed arms seemed the
warring elements at work; and the thunders that rolled away from off his
swarthy brow, and the light leaping from his eye, made all his simple
hearers look on him with a quick fear that was strange to them.

There now came a lull in his look, as he silently turned over the leaves
of the Book once more; and, at last, standing motionless, with closed
eyes, for the moment, seemed communing with God and himself.

But again he leaned over towards the people, and bowing his head lowly,
with an aspect of the deepest yet manliest humility, he spake these
words:

"Shipmates, God has laid but one hand upon you; both his hands press
upon me. I have read ye by what murky light may be mine the lesson that
Jonah teaches to all sinners; and therefore to ye, and still more to me,
for I am a greater sinner than ye. And now how gladly would I come down
from this mast-head and sit on the hatches there where you sit, and
listen as you listen, while some one of you reads ME that other and more
awful lesson which Jonah teaches to ME, as a pilot of the living God.
How being an anointed pilot-prophet, or speaker of true things, and
bidden by the Lord to sound those unwelcome truths in the ears of a
wicked Nineveh, Jonah, appalled at the hostility he should raise, fled
from his mission, and sought to escape his duty and his God by taking
ship at Joppa. But God is everywhere; Tarshish he never reached. As we
have seen, God came upon him in the whale, and swallowed him down to
living gulfs of doom, and with swift slantings tore him along 'into the
midst of the seas,' where the eddying depths sucked him ten thousand
fathoms down, and 'the weeds were wrapped about his head,' and all the
watery world of woe bowled over him. Yet even then beyond the reach of
any plummet--'out of the belly of hell'--when the whale grounded upon
the ocean's utmost bones, even then, God heard the engulphed, repenting
prophet when he cried. Then God spake unto the fish; and from the
shuddering cold and blackness of the sea, the whale came breeching
up towards the warm and pleasant sun, and all the delights of air and
earth; and 'vomited out Jonah upon the dry land;' when the word of the
Lord came a second time; and Jonah, bruised and beaten--his ears, like
two sea-shells, still multitudinously murmuring of the ocean--Jonah
did the Almighty's bidding. And what was that, shipmates? To preach the
Truth to the face of Falsehood! That was it!

"This, shipmates, this is that other lesson; and woe to that pilot of
the living God who slights it. Woe to him whom this world charms from
Gospel duty! Woe to him who seeks to pour oil upon the waters when God
has brewed them into a gale! Woe to him who seeks to please rather than
to appal! Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness! Woe
to him who, in this world, courts not dishonour! Woe to him who would
not be true, even though to be false were salvation! Yea, woe to him
who, as the great Pilot Paul has it, while preaching to others is
himself a castaway!"

He dropped and fell away from himself for a moment; then lifting his
face to them again, showed a deep joy in his eyes, as he cried out with
a heavenly enthusiasm,--"But oh! shipmates! on the starboard hand of
every woe, there is a sure delight; and higher the top of that delight,
than the bottom of the woe is deep. Is not the main-truck higher than
the kelson is low? Delight is to him--a far, far upward, and inward
delight--who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth, ever
stands forth his own inexorable self. Delight is to him whose strong
arms yet support him, when the ship of this base treacherous world has
gone down beneath him. Delight is to him, who gives no quarter in the
truth, and kills, burns, and destroys all sin though he pluck it out
from under the robes of Senators and Judges. Delight,--top-gallant
delight is to him, who acknowledges no law or lord, but the Lord his
God, and is only a patriot to heaven. Delight is to him, whom all the
waves of the billows of the seas of the boisterous mob can never shake
from this sure Keel of the Ages. And eternal delight and deliciousness
will be his, who coming to lay him down, can say with his final
breath--O Father!--chiefly known to me by Thy rod--mortal or immortal,
here I die. I have striven to be Thine, more than to be this world's, or
mine own. Yet this is nothing: I leave eternity to Thee; for what is man
that he should live out the lifetime of his God?"

He said no more, but slowly waving a benediction, covered his face with
his hands, and so remained kneeling, till all the people had departed,
and he was left alone in the place.



CHAPTER 10. A Bosom Friend.


Returning to the Spouter-Inn from the Chapel, I found Queequeg there
quite alone; he having left the Chapel before the benediction some time.
He was sitting on a bench before the fire, with his feet on the stove
hearth, and in one hand was holding close up to his face that little
negro idol of his; peering hard into its face, and with a jack-knife
gently whittling away at its nose, meanwhile humming to himself in his
heathenish way.

But being now interrupted, he put up the image; and pretty soon, going
to the table, took up a large book there, and placing it on his lap
began counting the pages with deliberate regularity; at every fiftieth
page--as I fancied--stopping a moment, looking vacantly around him, and
giving utterance to a long-drawn gurgling whistle of astonishment. He
would then begin again at the next fifty; seeming to commence at number
one each time, as though he could not count more than fifty, and it was
only by such a large number of fifties being found together, that his
astonishment at the multitude of pages was excited.

With much interest I sat watching him. Savage though he was, and
hideously marred about the face--at least to my taste--his countenance
yet had a something in it which was by no means disagreeable. You cannot
hide the soul. Through all his unearthly tattooings, I thought I saw
the traces of a simple honest heart; and in his large, deep eyes,
fiery black and bold, there seemed tokens of a spirit that would dare a
thousand devils. And besides all this, there was a certain lofty bearing
about the Pagan, which even his uncouthness could not altogether maim.
He looked like a man who had never cringed and never had had a creditor.
Whether it was, too, that his head being shaved, his forehead was drawn
out in freer and brighter relief, and looked more expansive than it
otherwise would, this I will not venture to decide; but certain it was
his head was phrenologically an excellent one. It may seem ridiculous,
but it reminded me of General Washington's head, as seen in the popular
busts of him. It had the same long regularly graded retreating slope
from above the brows, which were likewise very projecting, like two
long promontories thickly wooded on top. Queequeg was George Washington
cannibalistically developed.

Whilst I was thus closely scanning him, half-pretending meanwhile to be
looking out at the storm from the casement, he never heeded my presence,
never troubled himself with so much as a single glance; but appeared
wholly occupied with counting the pages of the marvellous book.
Considering how sociably we had been sleeping together the night
previous, and especially considering the affectionate arm I had found
thrown over me upon waking in the morning, I thought this indifference
of his very strange. But savages are strange beings; at times you do not
know exactly how to take them. At first they are overawing; their calm
self-collectedness of simplicity seems a Socratic wisdom. I had noticed
also that Queequeg never consorted at all, or but very little, with the
other seamen in the inn. He made no advances whatever; appeared to have
no desire to enlarge the circle of his acquaintances. All this struck
me as mighty singular; yet, upon second thoughts, there was something
almost sublime in it. Here was a man some twenty thousand miles from
home, by the way of Cape Horn, that is--which was the only way he could
get there--thrown among people as strange to him as though he were in
the planet Jupiter; and yet he seemed entirely at his ease; preserving
the utmost serenity; content with his own companionship; always equal to
himself. Surely this was a touch of fine philosophy; though no doubt he
had never heard there was such a thing as that. But, perhaps, to be
true philosophers, we mortals should not be conscious of so living or
so striving. So soon as I hear that such or such a man gives himself
out for a philosopher, I conclude that, like the dyspeptic old woman, he
must have "broken his digester."

As I sat there in that now lonely room; the fire burning low, in that
mild stage when, after its first intensity has warmed the air, it then
only glows to be looked at; the evening shades and phantoms gathering
round the casements, and peering in upon us silent, solitary twain;
the storm booming without in solemn swells; I began to be sensible of
strange feelings. I felt a melting in me. No more my splintered heart
and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world. This soothing
savage had redeemed it. There he sat, his very indifference speaking a
nature in which there lurked no civilized hypocrisies and bland deceits.
Wild he was; a very sight of sights to see; yet I began to feel myself
mysteriously drawn towards him. And those same things that would have
repelled most others, they were the very magnets that thus drew me. I'll
try a pagan friend, thought I, since Christian kindness has proved but
hollow courtesy. I drew my bench near him, and made some friendly signs
and hints, doing my best to talk with him meanwhile. At first he little
noticed these advances; but presently, upon my referring to his last
night's hospitalities, he made out to ask me whether we were again to be
bedfellows. I told him yes; whereat I thought he looked pleased, perhaps
a little complimented.

We then turned over the book together, and I endeavored to explain to
him the purpose of the printing, and the meaning of the few pictures
that were in it. Thus I soon engaged his interest; and from that we went
to jabbering the best we could about the various outer sights to be seen
in this famous town. Soon I proposed a social smoke; and, producing
his pouch and tomahawk, he quietly offered me a puff. And then we sat
exchanging puffs from that wild pipe of his, and keeping it regularly
passing between us.

If there yet lurked any ice of indifference towards me in the Pagan's
breast, this pleasant, genial smoke we had, soon thawed it out, and left
us cronies. He seemed to take to me quite as naturally and unbiddenly as
I to him; and when our smoke was over, he pressed his forehead against
mine, clasped me round the waist, and said that henceforth we were
married; meaning, in his country's phrase, that we were bosom friends;
he would gladly die for me, if need should be. In a countryman, this
sudden flame of friendship would have seemed far too premature, a thing
to be much distrusted; but in this simple savage those old rules would
not apply.

After supper, and another social chat and smoke, we went to our room
together. He made me a present of his embalmed head; took out his
enormous tobacco wallet, and groping under the tobacco, drew out
some thirty dollars in silver; then spreading them on the table, and
mechanically dividing them into two equal portions, pushed one of them
towards me, and said it was mine. I was going to remonstrate; but he
silenced me by pouring them into my trowsers' pockets. I let them stay.
He then went about his evening prayers, took out his idol, and removed
the paper fireboard. By certain signs and symptoms, I thought he seemed
anxious for me to join him; but well knowing what was to follow, I
deliberated a moment whether, in case he invited me, I would comply or
otherwise.

I was a good Christian; born and bred in the bosom of the infallible
Presbyterian Church. How then could I unite with this wild idolator in
worshipping his piece of wood? But what is worship? thought I. Do
you suppose now, Ishmael, that the magnanimous God of heaven and
earth--pagans and all included--can possibly be jealous of an
insignificant bit of black wood? Impossible! But what is worship?--to do
the will of God--THAT is worship. And what is the will of God?--to do to
my fellow man what I would have my fellow man to do to me--THAT is the
will of God. Now, Queequeg is my fellow man. And what do I wish that
this Queequeg would do to me? Why, unite with me in my particular
Presbyterian form of worship. Consequently, I must then unite with him
in his; ergo, I must turn idolator. So I kindled the shavings; helped
prop up the innocent little idol; offered him burnt biscuit with
Queequeg; salamed before him twice or thrice; kissed his nose; and that
done, we undressed and went to bed, at peace with our own consciences
and all the world. But we did not go to sleep without some little chat.

How it is I know not; but there is no place like a bed for confidential
disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the very
bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie
and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts'
honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg--a cosy, loving pair.



CHAPTER 11. Nightgown.


We had lain thus in bed, chatting and napping at short intervals, and
Queequeg now and then affectionately throwing his brown tattooed legs
over mine, and then drawing them back; so entirely sociable and free
and easy were we; when, at last, by reason of our confabulations, what
little nappishness remained in us altogether departed, and we felt like
getting up again, though day-break was yet some way down the future.

Yes, we became very wakeful; so much so that our recumbent position
began to grow wearisome, and by little and little we found ourselves
sitting up; the clothes well tucked around us, leaning against the
head-board with our four knees drawn up close together, and our two
noses bending over them, as if our kneepans were warming-pans. We felt
very nice and snug, the more so since it was so chilly out of doors;
indeed out of bed-clothes too, seeing that there was no fire in the
room. The more so, I say, because truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some
small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world
that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If
you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so
a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. But if,
like Queequeg and me in the bed, the tip of your nose or the crown
of your head be slightly chilled, why then, indeed, in the general
consciousness you feel most delightfully and unmistakably warm. For this
reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which
is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this
sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and
your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the
one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.

We had been sitting in this crouching manner for some time, when all at
once I thought I would open my eyes; for when between sheets, whether
by day or by night, and whether asleep or awake, I have a way of always
keeping my eyes shut, in order the more to concentrate the snugness
of being in bed. Because no man can ever feel his own identity aright
except his eyes be closed; as if darkness were indeed the proper element
of our essences, though light be more congenial to our clayey part. Upon
opening my eyes then, and coming out of my own pleasant and self-created
darkness into the imposed and coarse outer gloom of the unilluminated
twelve-o'clock-at-night, I experienced a disagreeable revulsion. Nor did
I at all object to the hint from Queequeg that perhaps it were best to
strike a light, seeing that we were so wide awake; and besides he felt
a strong desire to have a few quiet puffs from his Tomahawk. Be it said,
that though I had felt such a strong repugnance to his smoking in the
bed the night before, yet see how elastic our stiff prejudices grow when
love once comes to bend them. For now I liked nothing better than to
have Queequeg smoking by me, even in bed, because he seemed to be full
of such serene household joy then. I no more felt unduly concerned for
the landlord's policy of insurance. I was only alive to the condensed
confidential comfortableness of sharing a pipe and a blanket with a real
friend. With our shaggy jackets drawn about our shoulders, we now passed
the Tomahawk from one to the other, till slowly there grew over us a
blue hanging tester of smoke, illuminated by the flame of the new-lit
lamp.

Whether it was that this undulating tester rolled the savage away to far
distant scenes, I know not, but he now spoke of his native island; and,
eager to hear his history, I begged him to go on and tell it. He gladly
complied. Though at the time I but ill comprehended not a few of his
words, yet subsequent disclosures, when I had become more familiar with
his broken phraseology, now enable me to present the whole story such as
it may prove in the mere skeleton I give.



CHAPTER 12. Biographical.


Queequeg was a native of Rokovoko, an island far away to the West and
South. It is not down in any map; true places never are.

When a new-hatched savage running wild about his native woodlands in
a grass clout, followed by the nibbling goats, as if he were a green
sapling; even then, in Queequeg's ambitious soul, lurked a strong desire
to see something more of Christendom than a specimen whaler or two. His
father was a High Chief, a King; his uncle a High Priest; and on the
maternal side he boasted aunts who were the wives of unconquerable
warriors. There was excellent blood in his veins--royal stuff; though
sadly vitiated, I fear, by the cannibal propensity he nourished in his
untutored youth.

A Sag Harbor ship visited his father's bay, and Queequeg sought a
passage to Christian lands. But the ship, having her full complement of
seamen, spurned his suit; and not all the King his father's influence
could prevail. But Queequeg vowed a vow. Alone in his canoe, he paddled
off to a distant strait, which he knew the ship must pass through when
she quitted the island. On one side was a coral reef; on the other a low
tongue of land, covered with mangrove thickets that grew out into the
water. Hiding his canoe, still afloat, among these thickets, with its
prow seaward, he sat down in the stern, paddle low in hand; and when the
ship was gliding by, like a flash he darted out; gained her side; with
one backward dash of his foot capsized and sank his canoe; climbed up
the chains; and throwing himself at full length upon the deck, grappled
a ring-bolt there, and swore not to let it go, though hacked in pieces.

In vain the captain threatened to throw him overboard; suspended a
cutlass over his naked wrists; Queequeg was the son of a King, and
Queequeg budged not. Struck by his desperate dauntlessness, and his wild
desire to visit Christendom, the captain at last relented, and told
him he might make himself at home. But this fine young savage--this sea
Prince of Wales, never saw the Captain's cabin. They put him down among
the sailors, and made a whaleman of him. But like Czar Peter content to
toil in the shipyards of foreign cities, Queequeg disdained no seeming
ignominy, if thereby he might happily gain the power of enlightening his
untutored countrymen. For at bottom--so he told me--he was actuated by a
profound desire to learn among the Christians, the arts whereby to
make his people still happier than they were; and more than that,
still better than they were. But, alas! the practices of whalemen soon
convinced him that even Christians could be both miserable and wicked;
infinitely more so, than all his father's heathens. Arrived at last in
old Sag Harbor; and seeing what the sailors did there; and then going on
to Nantucket, and seeing how they spent their wages in that place also,
poor Queequeg gave it up for lost. Thought he, it's a wicked world in
all meridians; I'll die a pagan.

And thus an old idolator at heart, he yet lived among these Christians,
wore their clothes, and tried to talk their gibberish. Hence the queer
ways about him, though now some time from home.

By hints, I asked him whether he did not propose going back, and having
a coronation; since he might now consider his father dead and gone, he
being very old and feeble at the last accounts. He answered no, not yet;
and added that he was fearful Christianity, or rather Christians, had
unfitted him for ascending the pure and undefiled throne of thirty pagan
Kings before him. But by and by, he said, he would return,--as soon as
he felt himself baptized again. For the nonce, however, he proposed to
sail about, and sow his wild oats in all four oceans. They had made a
harpooneer of him, and that barbed iron was in lieu of a sceptre now.

I asked him what might be his immediate purpose, touching his future
movements. He answered, to go to sea again, in his old vocation. Upon
this, I told him that whaling was my own design, and informed him of my
intention to sail out of Nantucket, as being the most promising port for
an adventurous whaleman to embark from. He at once resolved to accompany
me to that island, ship aboard the same vessel, get into the same watch,
the same boat, the same mess with me, in short to share my every hap;
with both my hands in his, boldly dip into the Potluck of both worlds.
To all this I joyously assented; for besides the affection I now felt
for Queequeg, he was an experienced harpooneer, and as such, could not
fail to be of great usefulness to one, who, like me, was wholly ignorant
of the mysteries of whaling, though well acquainted with the sea, as
known to merchant seamen.

His story being ended with his pipe's last dying puff, Queequeg embraced
me, pressed his forehead against mine, and blowing out the light, we
rolled over from each other, this way and that, and very soon were
sleeping.


CHAPTER 13. Wheelbarrow.


Next morning, Monday, after disposing of the embalmed head to a barber,
for a block, I settled my own and comrade's bill; using, however, my
comrade's money. The grinning landlord, as well as the boarders, seemed
amazingly tickled at the sudden friendship which had sprung up between
me and Queequeg--especially as Peter Coffin's cock and bull stories
about him had previously so much alarmed me concerning the very person
whom I now companied with.

We borrowed a wheelbarrow, and embarking our things, including my own
poor carpet-bag, and Queequeg's canvas sack and hammock, away we went
down to "the Moss," the little Nantucket packet schooner moored at the
wharf. As we were going along the people stared; not at Queequeg
so much--for they were used to seeing cannibals like him in their
streets,--but at seeing him and me upon such confidential terms. But we
heeded them not, going along wheeling the barrow by turns, and Queequeg
now and then stopping to adjust the sheath on his harpoon barbs. I asked
him why he carried such a troublesome thing with him ashore, and
whether all whaling ships did not find their own harpoons. To this, in
substance, he replied, that though what I hinted was true enough, yet
he had a particular affection for his own harpoon, because it was of
assured stuff, well tried in many a mortal combat, and deeply intimate
with the hearts of whales. In short, like many inland reapers
and mowers, who go into the farmers' meadows armed with their own
scythes--though in no wise obliged to furnish them--even so, Queequeg,
for his own private reasons, preferred his own harpoon.

Shifting the barrow from my hand to his, he told me a funny story about
the first wheelbarrow he had ever seen. It was in Sag Harbor. The owners
of his ship, it seems, had lent him one, in which to carry his
heavy chest to his boarding house. Not to seem ignorant about the
thing--though in truth he was entirely so, concerning the precise way in
which to manage the barrow--Queequeg puts his chest upon it; lashes it
fast; and then shoulders the barrow and marches up the wharf. "Why,"
said I, "Queequeg, you might have known better than that, one would
think. Didn't the people laugh?"

Upon this, he told me another story. The people of his island of
Rokovoko, it seems, at their wedding feasts express the fragrant water
of young cocoanuts into a large stained calabash like a punchbowl; and
this punchbowl always forms the great central ornament on the braided
mat where the feast is held. Now a certain grand merchant ship once
touched at Rokovoko, and its commander--from all accounts, a very
stately punctilious gentleman, at least for a sea captain--this
commander was invited to the wedding feast of Queequeg's sister, a
pretty young princess just turned of ten. Well; when all the wedding
guests were assembled at the bride's bamboo cottage, this Captain
marches in, and being assigned the post of honour, placed himself over
against the punchbowl, and between the High Priest and his majesty the
King, Queequeg's father. Grace being said,--for those people have their
grace as well as we--though Queequeg told me that unlike us, who at such
times look downwards to our platters, they, on the contrary, copying the
ducks, glance upwards to the great Giver of all feasts--Grace, I say,
being said, the High Priest opens the banquet by the immemorial ceremony
of the island; that is, dipping his consecrated and consecrating fingers
into the bowl before the blessed beverage circulates. Seeing himself
placed next the Priest, and noting the ceremony, and thinking
himself--being Captain of a ship--as having plain precedence over a
mere island King, especially in the King's own house--the Captain coolly
proceeds to wash his hands in the punchbowl;--taking it I suppose for a
huge finger-glass. "Now," said Queequeg, "what you tink now?--Didn't our
people laugh?"

At last, passage paid, and luggage safe, we stood on board the schooner.
Hoisting sail, it glided down the Acushnet river. On one side, New
Bedford rose in terraces of streets, their ice-covered trees all
glittering in the clear, cold air. Huge hills and mountains of casks on
casks were piled upon her wharves, and side by side the world-wandering
whale ships lay silent and safely moored at last; while from others
came a sound of carpenters and coopers, with blended noises of fires and
forges to melt the pitch, all betokening that new cruises were on the
start; that one most perilous and long voyage ended, only begins a
second; and a second ended, only begins a third, and so on, for ever
and for aye. Such is the endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of all
earthly effort.

Gaining the more open water, the bracing breeze waxed fresh; the little
Moss tossed the quick foam from her bows, as a young colt his snortings.
How I snuffed that Tartar air!--how I spurned that turnpike earth!--that
common highway all over dented with the marks of slavish heels and
hoofs; and turned me to admire the magnanimity of the sea which will
permit no records.

At the same foam-fountain, Queequeg seemed to drink and reel with me.
His dusky nostrils swelled apart; he showed his filed and pointed teeth.
On, on we flew; and our offing gained, the Moss did homage to the
blast; ducked and dived her bows as a slave before the Sultan. Sideways
leaning, we sideways darted; every ropeyarn tingling like a wire; the
two tall masts buckling like Indian canes in land tornadoes. So full of
this reeling scene were we, as we stood by the plunging bowsprit, that
for some time we did not notice the jeering glances of the passengers, a
lubber-like assembly, who marvelled that two fellow beings should be so
companionable; as though a white man were anything more dignified than a
whitewashed negro. But there were some boobies and bumpkins there, who,
by their intense greenness, must have come from the heart and centre of
all verdure. Queequeg caught one of these young saplings mimicking him
behind his back. I thought the bumpkin's hour of doom was come. Dropping
his harpoon, the brawny savage caught him in his arms, and by an almost
miraculous dexterity and strength, sent him high up bodily into the air;
then slightly tapping his stern in mid-somerset, the fellow landed with
bursting lungs upon his feet, while Queequeg, turning his back upon him,
lighted his tomahawk pipe and passed it to me for a puff.

"Capting! Capting!" yelled the bumpkin, running towards that officer;
"Capting, Capting, here's the devil."

"Hallo, _you_ sir," cried the Captain, a gaunt rib of the sea, stalking
up to Queequeg, "what in thunder do you mean by that? Don't you know you
might have killed that chap?"

"What him say?" said Queequeg, as he mildly turned to me.

"He say," said I, "that you came near kill-e that man there," pointing
to the still shivering greenhorn.

"Kill-e," cried Queequeg, twisting his tattooed face into an unearthly
expression of disdain, "ah! him bevy small-e fish-e; Queequeg no kill-e
so small-e fish-e; Queequeg kill-e big whale!"

"Look you," roared the Captain, "I'll kill-e YOU, you cannibal, if you
try any more of your tricks aboard here; so mind your eye."

But it so happened just then, that it was high time for the Captain to
mind his own eye. The prodigious strain upon the main-sail had parted
the weather-sheet, and the tremendous boom was now flying from side to
side, completely sweeping the entire after part of the deck. The poor
fellow whom Queequeg had handled so roughly, was swept overboard; all
hands were in a panic; and to attempt snatching at the boom to stay it,
seemed madness. It flew from right to left, and back again, almost
in one ticking of a watch, and every instant seemed on the point of
snapping into splinters. Nothing was done, and nothing seemed capable of
being done; those on deck rushed towards the bows, and stood eyeing the
boom as if it were the lower jaw of an exasperated whale. In the
midst of this consternation, Queequeg dropped deftly to his knees, and
crawling under the path of the boom, whipped hold of a rope, secured one
end to the bulwarks, and then flinging the other like a lasso, caught it
round the boom as it swept over his head, and at the next jerk, the spar
was that way trapped, and all was safe. The schooner was run into the
wind, and while the hands were clearing away the stern boat, Queequeg,
stripped to the waist, darted from the side with a long living arc of
a leap. For three minutes or more he was seen swimming like a dog,
throwing his long arms straight out before him, and by turns revealing
his brawny shoulders through the freezing foam. I looked at the grand
and glorious fellow, but saw no one to be saved. The greenhorn had gone
down. Shooting himself perpendicularly from the water, Queequeg, now
took an instant's glance around him, and seeming to see just how matters
were, dived down and disappeared. A few minutes more, and he rose again,
one arm still striking out, and with the other dragging a lifeless form.
The boat soon picked them up. The poor bumpkin was restored. All hands
voted Queequeg a noble trump; the captain begged his pardon. From that
hour I clove to Queequeg like a barnacle; yea, till poor Queequeg took
his last long dive.

Was there ever such unconsciousness? He did not seem to think that he at
all deserved a medal from the Humane and Magnanimous Societies. He only
asked for water--fresh water--something to wipe the brine off; that
done, he put on dry clothes, lighted his pipe, and leaning against the
bulwarks, and mildly eyeing those around him, seemed to be saying
to himself--"It's a mutual, joint-stock world, in all meridians. We
cannibals must help these Christians."



CHAPTER 14. Nantucket.


Nothing more happened on the passage worthy the mentioning; so, after a
fine run, we safely arrived in Nantucket.

Nantucket! Take out your map and look at it. See what a real corner of
the world it occupies; how it stands there, away off shore, more lonely
than the Eddystone lighthouse. Look at it--a mere hillock, and elbow of
sand; all beach, without a background. There is more sand there than
you would use in twenty years as a substitute for blotting paper. Some
gamesome wights will tell you that they have to plant weeds there, they
don't grow naturally; that they import Canada thistles; that they have
to send beyond seas for a spile to stop a leak in an oil cask; that
pieces of wood in Nantucket are carried about like bits of the true
cross in Rome; that people there plant toadstools before their houses,
to get under the shade in summer time; that one blade of grass makes an
oasis, three blades in a day's walk a prairie; that they wear quicksand
shoes, something like Laplander snow-shoes; that they are so shut up,
belted about, every way inclosed, surrounded, and made an utter island
of by the ocean, that to their very chairs and tables small clams will
sometimes be found adhering, as to the backs of sea turtles. But these
extravaganzas only show that Nantucket is no Illinois.

Look now at the wondrous traditional story of how this island was
settled by the red-men. Thus goes the legend. In olden times an eagle
swooped down upon the New England coast, and carried off an infant
Indian in his talons. With loud lament the parents saw their child borne
out of sight over the wide waters. They resolved to follow in the same
direction. Setting out in their canoes, after a perilous passage they
discovered the island, and there they found an empty ivory casket,--the
poor little Indian's skeleton.

What wonder, then, that these Nantucketers, born on a beach, should take
to the sea for a livelihood! They first caught crabs and quohogs in
the sand; grown bolder, they waded out with nets for mackerel; more
experienced, they pushed off in boats and captured cod; and at last,
launching a navy of great ships on the sea, explored this watery world;
put an incessant belt of circumnavigations round it; peeped in
at Behring's Straits; and in all seasons and all oceans declared
everlasting war with the mightiest animated mass that has survived the
flood; most monstrous and most mountainous! That Himmalehan, salt-sea
Mastodon, clothed with such portentousness of unconscious power, that
his very panics are more to be dreaded than his most fearless and
malicious assaults!

And thus have these naked Nantucketers, these sea hermits, issuing from
their ant-hill in the sea, overrun and conquered the watery world like
so many Alexanders; parcelling out among them the Atlantic, Pacific, and
Indian oceans, as the three pirate powers did Poland. Let America add
Mexico to Texas, and pile Cuba upon Canada; let the English overswarm
all India, and hang out their blazing banner from the sun; two thirds
of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer's. For the sea is his; he
owns it, as Emperors own empires; other seamen having but a right of
way through it. Merchant ships are but extension bridges; armed ones but
floating forts; even pirates and privateers, though following the sea
as highwaymen the road, they but plunder other ships, other fragments of
the land like themselves, without seeking to draw their living from the
bottomless deep itself. The Nantucketer, he alone resides and riots on
the sea; he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and
fro ploughing it as his own special plantation. THERE is his home; THERE
lies his business, which a Noah's flood would not interrupt, though it
overwhelmed all the millions in China. He lives on the sea, as prairie
cocks in the prairie; he hides among the waves, he climbs them as
chamois hunters climb the Alps. For years he knows not the land; so
that when he comes to it at last, it smells like another world, more
strangely than the moon would to an Earthsman. With the landless gull,
that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows;
so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails,
and lays him to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of
walruses and whales.



CHAPTER 15. Chowder.


It was quite late in the evening when the little Moss came snugly
to anchor, and Queequeg and I went ashore; so we could attend to no
business that day, at least none but a supper and a bed. The landlord of
the Spouter-Inn had recommended us to his cousin Hosea Hussey of the
Try Pots, whom he asserted to be the proprietor of one of the best kept
hotels in all Nantucket, and moreover he had assured us that Cousin
Hosea, as he called him, was famous for his chowders. In short, he
plainly hinted that we could not possibly do better than try pot-luck at
the Try Pots. But the directions he had given us about keeping a yellow
warehouse on our starboard hand till we opened a white church to the
larboard, and then keeping that on the larboard hand till we made a
corner three points to the starboard, and that done, then ask the first
man we met where the place was: these crooked directions of his very
much puzzled us at first, especially as, at the outset, Queequeg
insisted that the yellow warehouse--our first point of departure--must
be left on the larboard hand, whereas I had understood Peter Coffin to
say it was on the starboard. However, by dint of beating about a little
in the dark, and now and then knocking up a peaceable inhabitant
to inquire the way, we at last came to something which there was no
mistaking.

Two enormous wooden pots painted black, and suspended by asses' ears,
swung from the cross-trees of an old top-mast, planted in front of an
old doorway. The horns of the cross-trees were sawed off on the other
side, so that this old top-mast looked not a little like a gallows.
Perhaps I was over sensitive to such impressions at the time, but I
could not help staring at this gallows with a vague misgiving. A sort of
crick was in my neck as I gazed up to the two remaining horns; yes, TWO
of them, one for Queequeg, and one for me. It's ominous, thinks I. A
Coffin my Innkeeper upon landing in my first whaling port; tombstones
staring at me in the whalemen's chapel; and here a gallows! and a pair
of prodigious black pots too! Are these last throwing out oblique hints
touching Tophet?

I was called from these reflections by the sight of a freckled woman
with yellow hair and a yellow gown, standing in the porch of the inn,
under a dull red lamp swinging there, that looked much like an injured
eye, and carrying on a brisk scolding with a man in a purple woollen
shirt.

"Get along with ye," said she to the man, "or I'll be combing ye!"

"Come on, Queequeg," said I, "all right. There's Mrs. Hussey."

And so it turned out; Mr. Hosea Hussey being from home, but leaving
Mrs. Hussey entirely competent to attend to all his affairs. Upon
making known our desires for a supper and a bed, Mrs. Hussey, postponing
further scolding for the present, ushered us into a little room, and
seating us at a table spread with the relics of a recently concluded
repast, turned round to us and said--"Clam or Cod?"

"What's that about Cods, ma'am?" said I, with much politeness.

"Clam or Cod?" she repeated.

"A clam for supper? a cold clam; is THAT what you mean, Mrs. Hussey?"
says I, "but that's a rather cold and clammy reception in the winter
time, ain't it, Mrs. Hussey?"

But being in a great hurry to resume scolding the man in the purple
Shirt, who was waiting for it in the entry, and seeming to hear nothing
but the word "clam," Mrs. Hussey hurried towards an open door leading to
the kitchen, and bawling out "clam for two," disappeared.

"Queequeg," said I, "do you think that we can make out a supper for us
both on one clam?"

However, a warm savory steam from the kitchen served to belie the
apparently cheerless prospect before us. But when that smoking chowder
came in, the mystery was delightfully explained. Oh, sweet friends!
hearken to me. It was made of small juicy clams, scarcely bigger than
hazel nuts, mixed with pounded ship biscuit, and salted pork cut up into
little flakes; the whole enriched with butter, and plentifully seasoned
with pepper and salt. Our appetites being sharpened by the frosty
voyage, and in particular, Queequeg seeing his favourite fishing food
before him, and the chowder being surpassingly excellent, we despatched
it with great expedition: when leaning back a moment and bethinking
me of Mrs. Hussey's clam and cod announcement, I thought I would try
a little experiment. Stepping to the kitchen door, I uttered the word
"cod" with great emphasis, and resumed my seat. In a few moments the
savoury steam came forth again, but with a different flavor, and in good
time a fine cod-chowder was placed before us.

We resumed business; and while plying our spoons in the bowl, thinks I
to myself, I wonder now if this here has any effect on the head?
What's that stultifying saying about chowder-headed people? "But look,
Queequeg, ain't that a live eel in your bowl? Where's your harpoon?"

Fishiest of all fishy places was the Try Pots, which well deserved
its name; for the pots there were always boiling chowders. Chowder for
breakfast, and chowder for dinner, and chowder for supper, till you
began to look for fish-bones coming through your clothes. The area
before the house was paved with clam-shells. Mrs. Hussey wore a polished
necklace of codfish vertebra; and Hosea Hussey had his account books
bound in superior old shark-skin. There was a fishy flavor to the milk,
too, which I could not at all account for, till one morning happening
to take a stroll along the beach among some fishermen's boats, I saw
Hosea's brindled cow feeding on fish remnants, and marching along the
sand with each foot in a cod's decapitated head, looking very slip-shod,
I assure ye.

Supper concluded, we received a lamp, and directions from Mrs. Hussey
concerning the nearest way to bed; but, as Queequeg was about to precede
me up the stairs, the lady reached forth her arm, and demanded his
harpoon; she allowed no harpoon in her chambers. "Why not?" said I;
"every true whaleman sleeps with his harpoon--but why not?" "Because
it's dangerous," says she. "Ever since young Stiggs coming from that
unfort'nt v'y'ge of his, when he was gone four years and a half, with
only three barrels of _ile_, was found dead in my first floor back, with
his harpoon in his side; ever since then I allow no boarders to take
sich dangerous weepons in their rooms at night. So, Mr. Queequeg" (for
she had learned his name), "I will just take this here iron, and keep
it for you till morning. But the chowder; clam or cod to-morrow for
breakfast, men?"

"Both," says I; "and let's have a couple of smoked herring by way of
variety."



CHAPTER 16. The Ship.


In bed we concocted our plans for the morrow. But to my surprise and
no small concern, Queequeg now gave me to understand, that he had been
diligently consulting Yojo--the name of his black little god--and Yojo
had told him two or three times over, and strongly insisted upon it
everyway, that instead of our going together among the whaling-fleet in
harbor, and in concert selecting our craft; instead of this, I say, Yojo
earnestly enjoined that the selection of the ship should rest wholly
with me, inasmuch as Yojo purposed befriending us; and, in order to
do so, had already pitched upon a vessel, which, if left to myself, I,
Ishmael, should infallibly light upon, for all the world as though it
had turned out by chance; and in that vessel I must immediately ship
myself, for the present irrespective of Queequeg.

I have forgotten to mention that, in many things, Queequeg placed great
confidence in the excellence of Yojo's judgment and surprising forecast
of things; and cherished Yojo with considerable esteem, as a rather good
sort of god, who perhaps meant well enough upon the whole, but in all
cases did not succeed in his benevolent designs.

Now, this plan of Queequeg's, or rather Yojo's, touching the selection
of our craft; I did not like that plan at all. I had not a little relied
upon Queequeg's sagacity to point out the whaler best fitted to carry
us and our fortunes securely. But as all my remonstrances produced
no effect upon Queequeg, I was obliged to acquiesce; and accordingly
prepared to set about this business with a determined rushing sort
of energy and vigor, that should quickly settle that trifling little
affair. Next morning early, leaving Queequeg shut up with Yojo in our
little bedroom--for it seemed that it was some sort of Lent or Ramadan,
or day of fasting, humiliation, and prayer with Queequeg and Yojo that
day; HOW it was I never could find out, for, though I applied myself
to it several times, I never could master his liturgies and XXXIX
Articles--leaving Queequeg, then, fasting on his tomahawk pipe, and Yojo
warming himself at his sacrificial fire of shavings, I sallied out among
the shipping. After much prolonged sauntering and many random inquiries,
I learnt that there were three ships up for three-years' voyages--The
Devil-dam, the Tit-bit, and the Pequod. DEVIL-DAM, I do not know the
origin of; TIT-BIT is obvious; PEQUOD, you will no doubt remember, was
the name of a celebrated tribe of Massachusetts Indians; now extinct
as the ancient Medes. I peered and pryed about the Devil-dam; from her,
hopped over to the Tit-bit; and finally, going on board the Pequod,
looked around her for a moment, and then decided that this was the very
ship for us.

You may have seen many a quaint craft in your day, for aught I
know;--square-toed luggers; mountainous Japanese junks; butter-box
galliots, and what not; but take my word for it, you never saw such a
rare old craft as this same rare old Pequod. She was a ship of the old
school, rather small if anything; with an old-fashioned claw-footed look
about her. Long seasoned and weather-stained in the typhoons and calms
of all four oceans, her old hull's complexion was darkened like a French
grenadier's, who has alike fought in Egypt and Siberia. Her venerable
bows looked bearded. Her masts--cut somewhere on the coast of Japan,
where her original ones were lost overboard in a gale--her masts stood
stiffly up like the spines of the three old kings of Cologne. Her
ancient decks were worn and wrinkled, like the pilgrim-worshipped
flag-stone in Canterbury Cathedral where Becket bled. But to all these
her old antiquities, were added new and marvellous features, pertaining
to the wild business that for more than half a century she had followed.
Old Captain Peleg, many years her chief-mate, before he commanded
another vessel of his own, and now a retired seaman, and one of the
principal owners of the Pequod,--this old Peleg, during the term of his
chief-mateship, had built upon her original grotesqueness, and inlaid
it, all over, with a quaintness both of material and device, unmatched
by anything except it be Thorkill-Hake's carved buckler or bedstead. She
was apparelled like any barbaric Ethiopian emperor, his neck heavy with
pendants of polished ivory. She was a thing of trophies. A cannibal of
a craft, tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies. All
round, her unpanelled, open bulwarks were garnished like one continuous
jaw, with the long sharp teeth of the sperm whale, inserted there for
pins, to fasten her old hempen thews and tendons to. Those thews ran not
through base blocks of land wood, but deftly travelled over sheaves of
sea-ivory. Scorning a turnstile wheel at her reverend helm, she sported
there a tiller; and that tiller was in one mass, curiously carved
from the long narrow lower jaw of her hereditary foe. The helmsman who
steered by that tiller in a tempest, felt like the Tartar, when he holds
back his fiery steed by clutching its jaw. A noble craft, but somehow a
most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that.

Now when I looked about the quarter-deck, for some one having authority,
in order to propose myself as a candidate for the voyage, at first I saw
nobody; but I could not well overlook a strange sort of tent, or
rather wigwam, pitched a little behind the main-mast. It seemed only
a temporary erection used in port. It was of a conical shape, some ten
feet high; consisting of the long, huge slabs of limber black bone taken
from the middle and highest part of the jaws of the right-whale.
Planted with their broad ends on the deck, a circle of these slabs laced
together, mutually sloped towards each other, and at the apex united in
a tufted point, where the loose hairy fibres waved to and fro like the
top-knot on some old Pottowottamie Sachem's head. A triangular opening
faced towards the bows of the ship, so that the insider commanded a
complete view forward.

And half concealed in this queer tenement, I at length found one who
by his aspect seemed to have authority; and who, it being noon, and
the ship's work suspended, was now enjoying respite from the burden of
command. He was seated on an old-fashioned oaken chair, wriggling all
over with curious carving; and the bottom of which was formed of a
stout interlacing of the same elastic stuff of which the wigwam was
constructed.

There was nothing so very particular, perhaps, about the appearance of
the elderly man I saw; he was brown and brawny, like most old seamen,
and heavily rolled up in blue pilot-cloth, cut in the Quaker style;
only there was a fine and almost microscopic net-work of the minutest
wrinkles interlacing round his eyes, which must have arisen from
his continual sailings in many hard gales, and always looking to
windward;--for this causes the muscles about the eyes to become pursed
together. Such eye-wrinkles are very effectual in a scowl.

"Is this the Captain of the Pequod?" said I, advancing to the door of
the tent.

"Supposing it be the captain of the Pequod, what dost thou want of him?"
he demanded.

"I was thinking of shipping."

"Thou wast, wast thou? I see thou art no Nantucketer--ever been in a
stove boat?"

"No, Sir, I never have."

"Dost know nothing at all about whaling, I dare say--eh?

"Nothing, Sir; but I have no doubt I shall soon learn. I've been several
voyages in the merchant service, and I think that--"

"Merchant service be damned. Talk not that lingo to me. Dost see that
leg?--I'll take that leg away from thy stern, if ever thou talkest of
the marchant service to me again. Marchant service indeed! I suppose now
ye feel considerable proud of having served in those marchant ships.
But flukes! man, what makes thee want to go a whaling, eh?--it looks
a little suspicious, don't it, eh?--Hast not been a pirate, hast
thou?--Didst not rob thy last Captain, didst thou?--Dost not think of
murdering the officers when thou gettest to sea?"

I protested my innocence of these things. I saw that under the mask
of these half humorous innuendoes, this old seaman, as an insulated
Quakerish Nantucketer, was full of his insular prejudices, and rather
distrustful of all aliens, unless they hailed from Cape Cod or the
Vineyard.

"But what takes thee a-whaling? I want to know that before I think of
shipping ye."

"Well, sir, I want to see what whaling is. I want to see the world."

"Want to see what whaling is, eh? Have ye clapped eye on Captain Ahab?"

"Who is Captain Ahab, sir?"

"Aye, aye, I thought so. Captain Ahab is the Captain of this ship."

"I am mistaken then. I thought I was speaking to the Captain himself."

"Thou art speaking to Captain Peleg--that's who ye are speaking to,
young man. It belongs to me and Captain Bildad to see the Pequod fitted
out for the voyage, and supplied with all her needs, including crew. We
are part owners and agents. But as I was going to say, if thou wantest
to know what whaling is, as thou tellest ye do, I can put ye in a way of
finding it out before ye bind yourself to it, past backing out. Clap
eye on Captain Ahab, young man, and thou wilt find that he has only one
leg."

"What do you mean, sir? Was the other one lost by a whale?"

"Lost by a whale! Young man, come nearer to me: it was devoured,
chewed up, crunched by the monstrousest parmacetty that ever chipped a
boat!--ah, ah!"

I was a little alarmed by his energy, perhaps also a little touched at
the hearty grief in his concluding exclamation, but said as calmly as I
could, "What you say is no doubt true enough, sir; but how could I know
there was any peculiar ferocity in that particular whale, though indeed
I might have inferred as much from the simple fact of the accident."

"Look ye now, young man, thy lungs are a sort of soft, d'ye see; thou
dost not talk shark a bit. SURE, ye've been to sea before now; sure of
that?"

"Sir," said I, "I thought I told you that I had been four voyages in the
merchant--"

"Hard down out of that! Mind what I said about the marchant
service--don't aggravate me--I won't have it. But let us understand each
other. I have given thee a hint about what whaling is; do ye yet feel
inclined for it?"

"I do, sir."

"Very good. Now, art thou the man to pitch a harpoon down a live whale's
throat, and then jump after it? Answer, quick!"

"I am, sir, if it should be positively indispensable to do so; not to be
got rid of, that is; which I don't take to be the fact."

"Good again. Now then, thou not only wantest to go a-whaling, to find
out by experience what whaling is, but ye also want to go in order to
see the world? Was not that what ye said? I thought so. Well then, just
step forward there, and take a peep over the weather-bow, and then back
to me and tell me what ye see there."

For a moment I stood a little puzzled by this curious request, not
knowing exactly how to take it, whether humorously or in earnest. But
concentrating all his crow's feet into one scowl, Captain Peleg started
me on the errand.

Going forward and glancing over the weather bow, I perceived that the
ship swinging to her anchor with the flood-tide, was now obliquely
pointing towards the open ocean. The prospect was unlimited, but
exceedingly monotonous and forbidding; not the slightest variety that I
could see.

"Well, what's the report?" said Peleg when I came back; "what did ye
see?"

"Not much," I replied--"nothing but water; considerable horizon though,
and there's a squall coming up, I think."

"Well, what does thou think then of seeing the world? Do ye wish to go
round Cape Horn to see any more of it, eh? Can't ye see the world where
you stand?"

I was a little staggered, but go a-whaling I must, and I would; and the
Pequod was as good a ship as any--I thought the best--and all this I now
repeated to Peleg. Seeing me so determined, he expressed his willingness
to ship me.

"And thou mayest as well sign the papers right off," he added--"come
along with ye." And so saying, he led the way below deck into the cabin.

Seated on the transom was what seemed to me a most uncommon and
surprising figure. It turned out to be Captain Bildad, who along with
Captain Peleg was one of the largest owners of the vessel; the other
shares, as is sometimes the case in these ports, being held by a crowd
of old annuitants; widows, fatherless children, and chancery wards; each
owning about the value of a timber head, or a foot of plank, or a nail
or two in the ship. People in Nantucket invest their money in whaling
vessels, the same way that you do yours in approved state stocks
bringing in good interest.

Now, Bildad, like Peleg, and indeed many other Nantucketers, was a
Quaker, the island having been originally settled by that sect; and to
this day its inhabitants in general retain in an uncommon measure the
peculiarities of the Quaker, only variously and anomalously modified
by things altogether alien and heterogeneous. For some of these same
Quakers are the most sanguinary of all sailors and whale-hunters. They
are fighting Quakers; they are Quakers with a vengeance.

So that there are instances among them of men, who, named with Scripture
names--a singularly common fashion on the island--and in childhood
naturally imbibing the stately dramatic thee and thou of the Quaker
idiom; still, from the audacious, daring, and boundless adventure
of their subsequent lives, strangely blend with these unoutgrown
peculiarities, a thousand bold dashes of character, not unworthy a
Scandinavian sea-king, or a poetical Pagan Roman. And when these things
unite in a man of greatly superior natural force, with a globular brain
and a ponderous heart; who has also by the stillness and seclusion
of many long night-watches in the remotest waters, and beneath
constellations never seen here at the north, been led to think
untraditionally and independently; receiving all nature's sweet or
savage impressions fresh from her own virgin voluntary and confiding
breast, and thereby chiefly, but with some help from accidental
advantages, to learn a bold and nervous lofty language--that man makes
one in a whole nation's census--a mighty pageant creature, formed for
noble tragedies. Nor will it at all detract from him, dramatically
regarded, if either by birth or other circumstances, he have what seems
a half wilful overruling morbidness at the bottom of his nature. For all
men tragically great are made so through a certain morbidness. Be sure
of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease. But,
as yet we have not to do with such an one, but with quite another; and
still a man, who, if indeed peculiar, it only results again from another
phase of the Quaker, modified by individual circumstances.

Like Captain Peleg, Captain Bildad was a well-to-do, retired whaleman.
But unlike Captain Peleg--who cared not a rush for what are called
serious things, and indeed deemed those self-same serious things the
veriest of all trifles--Captain Bildad had not only been originally
educated according to the strictest sect of Nantucket Quakerism, but all
his subsequent ocean life, and the sight of many unclad, lovely island
creatures, round the Horn--all that had not moved this native born
Quaker one single jot, had not so much as altered one angle of his
vest. Still, for all this immutableness, was there some lack of
common consistency about worthy Captain Peleg. Though refusing, from
conscientious scruples, to bear arms against land invaders, yet himself
had illimitably invaded the Atlantic and Pacific; and though a sworn foe
to human bloodshed, yet had he in his straight-bodied coat, spilled tuns
upon tuns of leviathan gore. How now in the contemplative evening of his
days, the pious Bildad reconciled these things in the reminiscence, I do
not know; but it did not seem to concern him much, and very probably
he had long since come to the sage and sensible conclusion that a man's
religion is one thing, and this practical world quite another. This
world pays dividends. Rising from a little cabin-boy in short clothes
of the drabbest drab, to a harpooneer in a broad shad-bellied waistcoat;
from that becoming boat-header, chief-mate, and captain, and finally a
ship owner; Bildad, as I hinted before, had concluded his adventurous
career by wholly retiring from active life at the goodly age of
sixty, and dedicating his remaining days to the quiet receiving of his
well-earned income.

Now, Bildad, I am sorry to say, had the reputation of being an
incorrigible old hunks, and in his sea-going days, a bitter, hard
task-master. They told me in Nantucket, though it certainly seems a
curious story, that when he sailed the old Categut whaleman, his crew,
upon arriving home, were mostly all carried ashore to the hospital, sore
exhausted and worn out. For a pious man, especially for a Quaker, he was
certainly rather hard-hearted, to say the least. He never used to swear,
though, at his men, they said; but somehow he got an inordinate
quantity of cruel, unmitigated hard work out of them. When Bildad was a
chief-mate, to have his drab-coloured eye intently looking at you, made
you feel completely nervous, till you could clutch something--a hammer
or a marling-spike, and go to work like mad, at something or other,
never mind what. Indolence and idleness perished before him. His own
person was the exact embodiment of his utilitarian character. On his
long, gaunt body, he carried no spare flesh, no superfluous beard,
his chin having a soft, economical nap to it, like the worn nap of his
broad-brimmed hat.

Such, then, was the person that I saw seated on the transom when I
followed Captain Peleg down into the cabin. The space between the decks
was small; and there, bolt-upright, sat old Bildad, who always sat so,
and never leaned, and this to save his coat tails. His broad-brim was
placed beside him; his legs were stiffly crossed; his drab vesture was
buttoned up to his chin; and spectacles on nose, he seemed absorbed in
reading from a ponderous volume.

"Bildad," cried Captain Peleg, "at it again, Bildad, eh? Ye have been
studying those Scriptures, now, for the last thirty years, to my certain
knowledge. How far ye got, Bildad?"

As if long habituated to such profane talk from his old shipmate,
Bildad, without noticing his present irreverence, quietly looked up, and
seeing me, glanced again inquiringly towards Peleg.

"He says he's our man, Bildad," said Peleg, "he wants to ship."

"Dost thee?" said Bildad, in a hollow tone, and turning round to me.

"I dost," said I unconsciously, he was so intense a Quaker.

"What do ye think of him, Bildad?" said Peleg.

"He'll do," said Bildad, eyeing me, and then went on spelling away at
his book in a mumbling tone quite audible.

I thought him the queerest old Quaker I ever saw, especially as Peleg,
his friend and old shipmate, seemed such a blusterer. But I said
nothing, only looking round me sharply. Peleg now threw open a chest,
and drawing forth the ship's articles, placed pen and ink before him,
and seated himself at a little table. I began to think it was high time
to settle with myself at what terms I would be willing to engage for the
voyage. I was already aware that in the whaling business they paid no
wages; but all hands, including the captain, received certain shares of
the profits called lays, and that these lays were proportioned to the
degree of importance pertaining to the respective duties of the ship's
company. I was also aware that being a green hand at whaling, my own
lay would not be very large; but considering that I was used to the sea,
could steer a ship, splice a rope, and all that, I made no doubt that
from all I had heard I should be offered at least the 275th lay--that
is, the 275th part of the clear net proceeds of the voyage, whatever
that might eventually amount to. And though the 275th lay was what they
call a rather LONG LAY, yet it was better than nothing; and if we had a
lucky voyage, might pretty nearly pay for the clothing I would wear out
on it, not to speak of my three years' beef and board, for which I would
not have to pay one stiver.

It might be thought that this was a poor way to accumulate a princely
fortune--and so it was, a very poor way indeed. But I am one of those
that never take on about princely fortunes, and am quite content if the
world is ready to board and lodge me, while I am putting up at this grim
sign of the Thunder Cloud. Upon the whole, I thought that the 275th lay
would be about the fair thing, but would not have been surprised had I
been offered the 200th, considering I was of a broad-shouldered make.

But one thing, nevertheless, that made me a little distrustful about
receiving a generous share of the profits was this: Ashore, I had heard
something of both Captain Peleg and his unaccountable old crony Bildad;
how that they being the principal proprietors of the Pequod, therefore
the other and more inconsiderable and scattered owners, left nearly the
whole management of the ship's affairs to these two. And I did not know
but what the stingy old Bildad might have a mighty deal to say about
shipping hands, especially as I now found him on board the Pequod,
quite at home there in the cabin, and reading his Bible as if at his
own fireside. Now while Peleg was vainly trying to mend a pen with his
jack-knife, old Bildad, to my no small surprise, considering that he was
such an interested party in these proceedings; Bildad never heeded
us, but went on mumbling to himself out of his book, "LAY not up for
yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth--"

"Well, Captain Bildad," interrupted Peleg, "what d'ye say, what lay
shall we give this young man?"

"Thou knowest best," was the sepulchral reply, "the seven hundred and
seventy-seventh wouldn't be too much, would it?--'where moth and rust do
corrupt, but LAY--'"

LAY, indeed, thought I, and such a lay! the seven hundred and
seventy-seventh! Well, old Bildad, you are determined that I, for one,
shall not LAY up many LAYS here below, where moth and rust do corrupt.
It was an exceedingly LONG LAY that, indeed; and though from the
magnitude of the figure it might at first deceive a landsman, yet
the slightest consideration will show that though seven hundred and
seventy-seven is a pretty large number, yet, when you come to make
a TEENTH of it, you will then see, I say, that the seven hundred and
seventy-seventh part of a farthing is a good deal less than seven
hundred and seventy-seven gold doubloons; and so I thought at the time.

"Why, blast your eyes, Bildad," cried Peleg, "thou dost not want to
swindle this young man! he must have more than that."

"Seven hundred and seventy-seventh," again said Bildad, without lifting
his eyes; and then went on mumbling--"for where your treasure is, there
will your heart be also."

"I am going to put him down for the three hundredth," said Peleg, "do ye
hear that, Bildad! The three hundredth lay, I say."

Bildad laid down his book, and turning solemnly towards him said,
"Captain Peleg, thou hast a generous heart; but thou must consider the
duty thou owest to the other owners of this ship--widows and orphans,
many of them--and that if we too abundantly reward the labors of this
young man, we may be taking the bread from those widows and those
orphans. The seven hundred and seventy-seventh lay, Captain Peleg."

"Thou Bildad!" roared Peleg, starting up and clattering about the
cabin. "Blast ye, Captain Bildad, if I had followed thy advice in these
matters, I would afore now had a conscience to lug about that would be
heavy enough to founder the largest ship that ever sailed round Cape
Horn."

"Captain Peleg," said Bildad steadily, "thy conscience may be drawing
ten inches of water, or ten fathoms, I can't tell; but as thou art still
an impenitent man, Captain Peleg, I greatly fear lest thy conscience be
but a leaky one; and will in the end sink thee foundering down to the
fiery pit, Captain Peleg."

"Fiery pit! fiery pit! ye insult me, man; past all natural bearing, ye
insult me. It's an all-fired outrage to tell any human creature that
he's bound to hell. Flukes and flames! Bildad, say that again to me, and
start my soul-bolts, but I'll--I'll--yes, I'll swallow a live goat with
all his hair and horns on. Out of the cabin, ye canting, drab-coloured
son of a wooden gun--a straight wake with ye!"

As he thundered out this he made a rush at Bildad, but with a marvellous
oblique, sliding celerity, Bildad for that time eluded him.

Alarmed at this terrible outburst between the two principal and
responsible owners of the ship, and feeling half a mind to give up
all idea of sailing in a vessel so questionably owned and temporarily
commanded, I stepped aside from the door to give egress to Bildad, who,
I made no doubt, was all eagerness to vanish from before the awakened
wrath of Peleg. But to my astonishment, he sat down again on the
transom very quietly, and seemed to have not the slightest intention of
withdrawing. He seemed quite used to impenitent Peleg and his ways. As
for Peleg, after letting off his rage as he had, there seemed no more
left in him, and he, too, sat down like a lamb, though he twitched a
little as if still nervously agitated. "Whew!" he whistled at last--"the
squall's gone off to leeward, I think. Bildad, thou used to be good at
sharpening a lance, mend that pen, will ye. My jack-knife here needs
the grindstone. That's he; thank ye, Bildad. Now then, my young man,
Ishmael's thy name, didn't ye say? Well then, down ye go here, Ishmael,
for the three hundredth lay."

"Captain Peleg," said I, "I have a friend with me who wants to ship
too--shall I bring him down to-morrow?"

"To be sure," said Peleg. "Fetch him along, and we'll look at him."

"What lay does he want?" groaned Bildad, glancing up from the book in
which he had again been burying himself.

"Oh! never thee mind about that, Bildad," said Peleg. "Has he ever
whaled it any?" turning to me.

"Killed more whales than I can count, Captain Peleg."

"Well, bring him along then."

And, after signing the papers, off I went; nothing doubting but that I
had done a good morning's work, and that the Pequod was the identical
ship that Yojo had provided to carry Queequeg and me round the Cape.

But I had not proceeded far, when I began to bethink me that the Captain
with whom I was to sail yet remained unseen by me; though, indeed, in
many cases, a whale-ship will be completely fitted out, and receive all
her crew on board, ere the captain makes himself visible by arriving
to take command; for sometimes these voyages are so prolonged, and the
shore intervals at home so exceedingly brief, that if the captain have
a family, or any absorbing concernment of that sort, he does not trouble
himself much about his ship in port, but leaves her to the owners till
all is ready for sea. However, it is always as well to have a look at
him before irrevocably committing yourself into his hands. Turning back
I accosted Captain Peleg, inquiring where Captain Ahab was to be found.

"And what dost thou want of Captain Ahab? It's all right enough; thou
art shipped."

"Yes, but I should like to see him."

"But I don't think thou wilt be able to at present. I don't know exactly
what's the matter with him; but he keeps close inside the house; a sort
of sick, and yet he don't look so. In fact, he ain't sick; but no, he
isn't well either. Any how, young man, he won't always see me, so I
don't suppose he will thee. He's a queer man, Captain Ahab--so some
think--but a good one. Oh, thou'lt like him well enough; no fear, no
fear. He's a grand, ungodly, god-like man, Captain Ahab; doesn't speak
much; but, when he does speak, then you may well listen. Mark ye, be
forewarned; Ahab's above the common; Ahab's been in colleges, as well as
'mong the cannibals; been used to deeper wonders than the waves; fixed
his fiery lance in mightier, stranger foes than whales. His lance!
aye, the keenest and the surest that out of all our isle! Oh! he ain't
Captain Bildad; no, and he ain't Captain Peleg; HE'S AHAB, boy; and Ahab
of old, thou knowest, was a crowned king!"

"And a very vile one. When that wicked king was slain, the dogs, did
they not lick his blood?"

"Come hither to me--hither, hither," said Peleg, with a significance in
his eye that almost startled me. "Look ye, lad; never say that on board
the Pequod. Never say it anywhere. Captain Ahab did not name himself.
'Twas a foolish, ignorant whim of his crazy, widowed mother, who died
when he was only a twelvemonth old. And yet the old squaw Tistig, at
Gayhead, said that the name would somehow prove prophetic. And, perhaps,
other fools like her may tell thee the same. I wish to warn thee. It's a
lie. I know Captain Ahab well; I've sailed with him as mate years ago;
I know what he is--a good man--not a pious, good man, like Bildad, but
a swearing good man--something like me--only there's a good deal more of
him. Aye, aye, I know that he was never very jolly; and I know that on
the passage home, he was a little out of his mind for a spell; but it
was the sharp shooting pains in his bleeding stump that brought that
about, as any one might see. I know, too, that ever since he lost
his leg last voyage by that accursed whale, he's been a kind of
moody--desperate moody, and savage sometimes; but that will all pass
off. And once for all, let me tell thee and assure thee, young man, it's
better to sail with a moody good captain than a laughing bad one. So
good-bye to thee--and wrong not Captain Ahab, because he happens to
have a wicked name. Besides, my boy, he has a wife--not three voyages
wedded--a sweet, resigned girl. Think of that; by that sweet girl that
old man has a child: hold ye then there can be any utter, hopeless
harm in Ahab? No, no, my lad; stricken, blasted, if he be, Ahab has his
humanities!"

As I walked away, I was full of thoughtfulness; what had been
incidentally revealed to me of Captain Ahab, filled me with a certain
wild vagueness of painfulness concerning him. And somehow, at the time,
I felt a sympathy and a sorrow for him, but for I don't know what,
unless it was the cruel loss of his leg. And yet I also felt a strange
awe of him; but that sort of awe, which I cannot at all describe, was
not exactly awe; I do not know what it was. But I felt it; and it did
not disincline me towards him; though I felt impatience at what seemed
like mystery in him, so imperfectly as he was known to me then. However,
my thoughts were at length carried in other directions, so that for the
present dark Ahab slipped my mind.



CHAPTER 17. The Ramadan.


As Queequeg's Ramadan, or Fasting and Humiliation, was to continue all
day, I did not choose to disturb him till towards night-fall; for I
cherish the greatest respect towards everybody's religious obligations,
never mind how comical, and could not find it in my heart to undervalue
even a congregation of ants worshipping a toad-stool; or those other
creatures in certain parts of our earth, who with a degree of footmanism
quite unprecedented in other planets, bow down before the torso of
a deceased landed proprietor merely on account of the inordinate
possessions yet owned and rented in his name.

I say, we good Presbyterian Christians should be charitable in these
things, and not fancy ourselves so vastly superior to other mortals,
pagans and what not, because of their half-crazy conceits on these
subjects. There was Queequeg, now, certainly entertaining the most
absurd notions about Yojo and his Ramadan;--but what of that? Queequeg
thought he knew what he was about, I suppose; he seemed to be content;
and there let him rest. All our arguing with him would not avail; let
him be, I say: and Heaven have mercy on us all--Presbyterians and Pagans
alike--for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and
sadly need mending.

Towards evening, when I felt assured that all his performances and
rituals must be over, I went up to his room and knocked at the door; but
no answer. I tried to open it, but it was fastened inside. "Queequeg,"
said I softly through the key-hole:--all silent. "I say, Queequeg! why
don't you speak? It's I--Ishmael." But all remained still as before. I
began to grow alarmed. I had allowed him such abundant time; I thought
he might have had an apoplectic fit. I looked through the key-hole; but
the door opening into an odd corner of the room, the key-hole prospect
was but a crooked and sinister one. I could only see part of the
foot-board of the bed and a line of the wall, but nothing more. I
was surprised to behold resting against the wall the wooden shaft of
Queequeg's harpoon, which the landlady the evening previous had taken
from him, before our mounting to the chamber. That's strange, thought I;
but at any rate, since the harpoon stands yonder, and he seldom or
never goes abroad without it, therefore he must be inside here, and no
possible mistake.

"Queequeg!--Queequeg!"--all still. Something must have happened.
Apoplexy! I tried to burst open the door; but it stubbornly resisted.
Running down stairs, I quickly stated my suspicions to the first person
I met--the chamber-maid. "La! la!" she cried, "I thought something must
be the matter. I went to make the bed after breakfast, and the door was
locked; and not a mouse to be heard; and it's been just so silent ever
since. But I thought, may be, you had both gone off and locked your
baggage in for safe keeping. La! la, ma'am!--Mistress! murder! Mrs.
Hussey! apoplexy!"--and with these cries, she ran towards the kitchen, I
following.

Mrs. Hussey soon appeared, with a mustard-pot in one hand and a
vinegar-cruet in the other, having just broken away from the occupation
of attending to the castors, and scolding her little black boy meantime.

"Wood-house!" cried I, "which way to it? Run for God's sake, and fetch
something to pry open the door--the axe!--the axe! he's had a stroke;
depend upon it!"--and so saying I was unmethodically rushing up stairs
again empty-handed, when Mrs. Hussey interposed the mustard-pot and
vinegar-cruet, and the entire castor of her countenance.

"What's the matter with you, young man?"

"Get the axe! For God's sake, run for the doctor, some one, while I pry
it open!"

"Look here," said the landlady, quickly putting down the vinegar-cruet,
so as to have one hand free; "look here; are you talking about prying
open any of my doors?"--and with that she seized my arm. "What's the
matter with you? What's the matter with you, shipmate?"

In as calm, but rapid a manner as possible, I gave her to understand the
whole case. Unconsciously clapping the vinegar-cruet to one side of her
nose, she ruminated for an instant; then exclaimed--"No! I haven't seen
it since I put it there." Running to a little closet under the landing
of the stairs, she glanced in, and returning, told me that Queequeg's
harpoon was missing. "He's killed himself," she cried. "It's unfort'nate
Stiggs done over again there goes another counterpane--God pity his poor
mother!--it will be the ruin of my house. Has the poor lad a sister?
Where's that girl?--there, Betty, go to Snarles the Painter, and tell
him to paint me a sign, with--"no suicides permitted here, and no
smoking in the parlor;"--might as well kill both birds at once. Kill?
The Lord be merciful to his ghost! What's that noise there? You, young
man, avast there!"

And running up after me, she caught me as I was again trying to force
open the door.

"I don't allow it; I won't have my premises spoiled. Go for the
locksmith, there's one about a mile from here. But avast!" putting her
hand in her side-pocket, "here's a key that'll fit, I guess; let's
see." And with that, she turned it in the lock; but, alas! Queequeg's
supplemental bolt remained unwithdrawn within.

"Have to burst it open," said I, and was running down the entry a
little, for a good start, when the landlady caught at me, again vowing
I should not break down her premises; but I tore from her, and with a
sudden bodily rush dashed myself full against the mark.

With a prodigious noise the door flew open, and the knob slamming
against the wall, sent the plaster to the ceiling; and there, good
heavens! there sat Queequeg, altogether cool and self-collected; right
in the middle of the room; squatting on his hams, and holding Yojo on
top of his head. He looked neither one way nor the other way, but sat
like a carved image with scarce a sign of active life.

"Queequeg," said I, going up to him, "Queequeg, what's the matter with
you?"

"He hain't been a sittin' so all day, has he?" said the landlady.

But all we said, not a word could we drag out of him; I almost felt
like pushing him over, so as to change his position, for it was almost
intolerable, it seemed so painfully and unnaturally constrained;
especially, as in all probability he had been sitting so for upwards of
eight or ten hours, going too without his regular meals.

"Mrs. Hussey," said I, "he's ALIVE at all events; so leave us, if you
please, and I will see to this strange affair myself."

Closing the door upon the landlady, I endeavored to prevail upon
Queequeg to take a chair; but in vain. There he sat; and all he could
do--for all my polite arts and blandishments--he would not move a peg,
nor say a single word, nor even look at me, nor notice my presence in
the slightest way.

I wonder, thought I, if this can possibly be a part of his Ramadan; do
they fast on their hams that way in his native island. It must be so;
yes, it's part of his creed, I suppose; well, then, let him rest; he'll
get up sooner or later, no doubt. It can't last for ever, thank God,
and his Ramadan only comes once a year; and I don't believe it's very
punctual then.

I went down to supper. After sitting a long time listening to the long
stories of some sailors who had just come from a plum-pudding voyage, as
they called it (that is, a short whaling-voyage in a schooner or brig,
confined to the north of the line, in the Atlantic Ocean only); after
listening to these plum-puddingers till nearly eleven o'clock, I went
up stairs to go to bed, feeling quite sure by this time Queequeg must
certainly have brought his Ramadan to a termination. But no; there he
was just where I had left him; he had not stirred an inch. I began to
grow vexed with him; it seemed so downright senseless and insane to be
sitting there all day and half the night on his hams in a cold room,
holding a piece of wood on his head.

"For heaven's sake, Queequeg, get up and shake yourself; get up and have
some supper. You'll starve; you'll kill yourself, Queequeg." But not a
word did he reply.

Despairing of him, therefore, I determined to go to bed and to sleep;
and no doubt, before a great while, he would follow me. But previous to
turning in, I took my heavy bearskin jacket, and threw it over him, as
it promised to be a very cold night; and he had nothing but his ordinary
round jacket on. For some time, do all I would, I could not get into
the faintest doze. I had blown out the candle; and the mere thought
of Queequeg--not four feet off--sitting there in that uneasy position,
stark alone in the cold and dark; this made me really wretched. Think of
it; sleeping all night in the same room with a wide awake pagan on his
hams in this dreary, unaccountable Ramadan!

But somehow I dropped off at last, and knew nothing more till break of
day; when, looking over the bedside, there squatted Queequeg, as if he
had been screwed down to the floor. But as soon as the first glimpse of
sun entered the window, up he got, with stiff and grating joints,
but with a cheerful look; limped towards me where I lay; pressed his
forehead again against mine; and said his Ramadan was over.

Now, as I before hinted, I have no objection to any person's religion,
be it what it may, so long as that person does not kill or insult any
other person, because that other person don't believe it also. But when
a man's religion becomes really frantic; when it is a positive torment
to him; and, in fine, makes this earth of ours an uncomfortable inn to
lodge in; then I think it high time to take that individual aside and
argue the point with him.

And just so I now did with Queequeg. "Queequeg," said I, "get into bed
now, and lie and listen to me." I then went on, beginning with the rise
and progress of the primitive religions, and coming down to the various
religions of the present time, during which time I labored to show
Queequeg that all these Lents, Ramadans, and prolonged ham-squattings in
cold, cheerless rooms were stark nonsense; bad for the health; useless
for the soul; opposed, in short, to the obvious laws of Hygiene and
common sense. I told him, too, that he being in other things such an
extremely sensible and sagacious savage, it pained me, very badly pained
me, to see him now so deplorably foolish about this ridiculous Ramadan
of his. Besides, argued I, fasting makes the body cave in; hence the
spirit caves in; and all thoughts born of a fast must necessarily be
half-starved. This is the reason why most dyspeptic religionists cherish
such melancholy notions about their hereafters. In one word, Queequeg,
said I, rather digressively; hell is an idea first born on an undigested
apple-dumpling; and since then perpetuated through the hereditary
dyspepsias nurtured by Ramadans.

I then asked Queequeg whether he himself was ever troubled with
dyspepsia; expressing the idea very plainly, so that he could take it
in. He said no; only upon one memorable occasion. It was after a great
feast given by his father the king, on the gaining of a great battle
wherein fifty of the enemy had been killed by about two o'clock in the
afternoon, and all cooked and eaten that very evening.

"No more, Queequeg," said I, shuddering; "that will do;" for I knew the
inferences without his further hinting them. I had seen a sailor who had
visited that very island, and he told me that it was the custom, when
a great battle had been gained there, to barbecue all the slain in the
yard or garden of the victor; and then, one by one, they were placed
in great wooden trenchers, and garnished round like a pilau, with
breadfruit and cocoanuts; and with some parsley in their mouths, were
sent round with the victor's compliments to all his friends, just as
though these presents were so many Christmas turkeys.

After all, I do not think that my remarks about religion made much
impression upon Queequeg. Because, in the first place, he somehow seemed
dull of hearing on that important subject, unless considered from his
own point of view; and, in the second place, he did not more than one
third understand me, couch my ideas simply as I would; and, finally, he
no doubt thought he knew a good deal more about the true religion than
I did. He looked at me with a sort of condescending concern and
compassion, as though he thought it a great pity that such a sensible
young man should be so hopelessly lost to evangelical pagan piety.

At last we rose and dressed; and Queequeg, taking a prodigiously hearty
breakfast of chowders of all sorts, so that the landlady should not
make much profit by reason of his Ramadan, we sallied out to board the
Pequod, sauntering along, and picking our teeth with halibut bones.



CHAPTER 18. His Mark.


As we were walking down the end of the wharf towards the ship, Queequeg
carrying his harpoon, Captain Peleg in his gruff voice loudly hailed us
from his wigwam, saying he had not suspected my friend was a cannibal,
and furthermore announcing that he let no cannibals on board that craft,
unless they previously produced their papers.

"What do you mean by that, Captain Peleg?" said I, now jumping on the
bulwarks, and leaving my comrade standing on the wharf.

"I mean," he replied, "he must show his papers."

"Yes," said Captain Bildad in his hollow voice, sticking his head from
behind Peleg's, out of the wigwam. "He must show that he's converted.
Son of darkness," he added, turning to Queequeg, "art thou at present in
communion with any Christian church?"

"Why," said I, "he's a member of the first Congregational Church." Here
be it said, that many tattooed savages sailing in Nantucket ships at
last come to be converted into the churches.

"First Congregational Church," cried Bildad, "what! that worships in
Deacon Deuteronomy Coleman's meeting-house?" and so saying, taking
out his spectacles, he rubbed them with his great yellow bandana
handkerchief, and putting them on very carefully, came out of the
wigwam, and leaning stiffly over the bulwarks, took a good long look at
Queequeg.

"How long hath he been a member?" he then said, turning to me; "not very
long, I rather guess, young man."

"No," said Peleg, "and he hasn't been baptized right either, or it would
have washed some of that devil's blue off his face."

"Do tell, now," cried Bildad, "is this Philistine a regular member of
Deacon Deuteronomy's meeting? I never saw him going there, and I pass it
every Lord's day."

"I don't know anything about Deacon Deuteronomy or his meeting," said
I; "all I know is, that Queequeg here is a born member of the First
Congregational Church. He is a deacon himself, Queequeg is."

"Young man," said Bildad sternly, "thou art skylarking with me--explain
thyself, thou young Hittite. What church dost thee mean? answer me."

Finding myself thus hard pushed, I replied. "I mean, sir, the same
ancient Catholic Church to which you and I, and Captain Peleg there,
and Queequeg here, and all of us, and every mother's son and soul of
us belong; the great and everlasting First Congregation of this whole
worshipping world; we all belong to that; only some of us cherish some
queer crotchets no ways touching the grand belief; in THAT we all join
hands."

"Splice, thou mean'st SPLICE hands," cried Peleg, drawing nearer. "Young
man, you'd better ship for a missionary, instead of a fore-mast hand;
I never heard a better sermon. Deacon Deuteronomy--why Father Mapple
himself couldn't beat it, and he's reckoned something. Come aboard, come
aboard; never mind about the papers. I say, tell Quohog there--what's
that you call him? tell Quohog to step along. By the great anchor, what
a harpoon he's got there! looks like good stuff that; and he handles it
about right. I say, Quohog, or whatever your name is, did you ever stand
in the head of a whale-boat? did you ever strike a fish?"

Without saying a word, Queequeg, in his wild sort of way, jumped upon
the bulwarks, from thence into the bows of one of the whale-boats
hanging to the side; and then bracing his left knee, and poising his
harpoon, cried out in some such way as this:--

"Cap'ain, you see him small drop tar on water dere? You see him? well,
spose him one whale eye, well, den!" and taking sharp aim at it, he
darted the iron right over old Bildad's broad brim, clean across the
ship's decks, and struck the glistening tar spot out of sight.

"Now," said Queequeg, quietly hauling in the line, "spos-ee him whale-e
eye; why, dad whale dead."

"Quick, Bildad," said Peleg, his partner, who, aghast at the close
vicinity of the flying harpoon, had retreated towards the cabin gangway.
"Quick, I say, you Bildad, and get the ship's papers. We must have
Hedgehog there, I mean Quohog, in one of our boats. Look ye, Quohog,
we'll give ye the ninetieth lay, and that's more than ever was given a
harpooneer yet out of Nantucket."

So down we went into the cabin, and to my great joy Queequeg was soon
enrolled among the same ship's company to which I myself belonged.

When all preliminaries were over and Peleg had got everything ready for
signing, he turned to me and said, "I guess, Quohog there don't know how
to write, does he? I say, Quohog, blast ye! dost thou sign thy name or
make thy mark?"

But at this question, Queequeg, who had twice or thrice before taken
part in similar ceremonies, looked no ways abashed; but taking the
offered pen, copied upon the paper, in the proper place, an exact
counterpart of a queer round figure which was tattooed upon his arm; so
that through Captain Peleg's obstinate mistake touching his appellative,
it stood something like this:--

Quohog. his X mark.

Meanwhile Captain Bildad sat earnestly and steadfastly eyeing Queequeg,
and at last rising solemnly and fumbling in the huge pockets of his
broad-skirted drab coat, took out a bundle of tracts, and selecting
one entitled "The Latter Day Coming; or No Time to Lose," placed it in
Queequeg's hands, and then grasping them and the book with both his,
looked earnestly into his eyes, and said, "Son of darkness, I must do my
duty by thee; I am part owner of this ship, and feel concerned for the
souls of all its crew; if thou still clingest to thy Pagan ways, which I
sadly fear, I beseech thee, remain not for aye a Belial bondsman. Spurn
the idol Bell, and the hideous dragon; turn from the wrath to come; mind
thine eye, I say; oh! goodness gracious! steer clear of the fiery pit!"

Something of the salt sea yet lingered in old Bildad's language,
heterogeneously mixed with Scriptural and domestic phrases.

"Avast there, avast there, Bildad, avast now spoiling our harpooneer,"
Peleg. "Pious harpooneers never make good voyagers--it takes the shark
out of 'em; no harpooneer is worth a straw who aint pretty sharkish.
There was young Nat Swaine, once the bravest boat-header out of all
Nantucket and the Vineyard; he joined the meeting, and never came to
good. He got so frightened about his plaguy soul, that he shrinked and
sheered away from whales, for fear of after-claps, in case he got stove
and went to Davy Jones."

"Peleg! Peleg!" said Bildad, lifting his eyes and hands, "thou thyself,
as I myself, hast seen many a perilous time; thou knowest, Peleg, what
it is to have the fear of death; how, then, can'st thou prate in this
ungodly guise. Thou beliest thine own heart, Peleg. Tell me, when this
same Pequod here had her three masts overboard in that typhoon on Japan,
that same voyage when thou went mate with Captain Ahab, did'st thou not
think of Death and the Judgment then?"

"Hear him, hear him now," cried Peleg, marching across the cabin, and
thrusting his hands far down into his pockets,--"hear him, all of ye.
Think of that! When every moment we thought the ship would sink!
Death and the Judgment then? What? With all three masts making such an
everlasting thundering against the side; and every sea breaking over us,
fore and aft. Think of Death and the Judgment then? No! no time to think
about Death then. Life was what Captain Ahab and I was thinking of;
and how to save all hands--how to rig jury-masts--how to get into the
nearest port; that was what I was thinking of."

Bildad said no more, but buttoning up his coat, stalked on deck,
where we followed him. There he stood, very quietly overlooking some
sailmakers who were mending a top-sail in the waist. Now and then
he stooped to pick up a patch, or save an end of tarred twine, which
otherwise might have been wasted.



CHAPTER 19. The Prophet.


"Shipmates, have ye shipped in that ship?"

Queequeg and I had just left the Pequod, and were sauntering away from
the water, for the moment each occupied with his own thoughts, when
the above words were put to us by a stranger, who, pausing before us,
levelled his massive forefinger at the vessel in question. He was but
shabbily apparelled in faded jacket and patched trowsers; a rag of a
black handkerchief investing his neck. A confluent small-pox had in all
directions flowed over his face, and left it like the complicated ribbed
bed of a torrent, when the rushing waters have been dried up.

"Have ye shipped in her?" he repeated.

"You mean the ship Pequod, I suppose," said I, trying to gain a little
more time for an uninterrupted look at him.

"Aye, the Pequod--that ship there," he said, drawing back his whole
arm, and then rapidly shoving it straight out from him, with the fixed
bayonet of his pointed finger darted full at the object.

"Yes," said I, "we have just signed the articles."

"Anything down there about your souls?"

"About what?"

"Oh, perhaps you hav'n't got any," he said quickly. "No matter though,
I know many chaps that hav'n't got any,--good luck to 'em; and they are
all the better off for it. A soul's a sort of a fifth wheel to a wagon."

"What are you jabbering about, shipmate?" said I.

"HE'S got enough, though, to make up for all deficiencies of that sort
in other chaps," abruptly said the stranger, placing a nervous emphasis
upon the word HE.

"Queequeg," said I, "let's go; this fellow has broken loose from
somewhere; he's talking about something and somebody we don't know."

"Stop!" cried the stranger. "Ye said true--ye hav'n't seen Old Thunder
yet, have ye?"

"Who's Old Thunder?" said I, again riveted with the insane earnestness
of his manner.

"Captain Ahab."

"What! the captain of our ship, the Pequod?"

"Aye, among some of us old sailor chaps, he goes by that name. Ye
hav'n't seen him yet, have ye?"

"No, we hav'n't. He's sick they say, but is getting better, and will be
all right again before long."

"All right again before long!" laughed the stranger, with a solemnly
derisive sort of laugh. "Look ye; when Captain Ahab is all right, then
this left arm of mine will be all right; not before."

"What do you know about him?"

"What did they TELL you about him? Say that!"

"They didn't tell much of anything about him; only I've heard that he's
a good whale-hunter, and a good captain to his crew."

"That's true, that's true--yes, both true enough. But you must jump when
he gives an order. Step and growl; growl and go--that's the word with
Captain Ahab. But nothing about that thing that happened to him off Cape
Horn, long ago, when he lay like dead for three days and nights;
nothing about that deadly skrimmage with the Spaniard afore the altar in
Santa?--heard nothing about that, eh? Nothing about the silver calabash
he spat into? And nothing about his losing his leg last voyage,
according to the prophecy. Didn't ye hear a word about them matters and
something more, eh? No, I don't think ye did; how could ye? Who knows
it? Not all Nantucket, I guess. But hows'ever, mayhap, ye've heard tell
about the leg, and how he lost it; aye, ye have heard of that, I dare
say. Oh yes, THAT every one knows a'most--I mean they know he's only one
leg; and that a parmacetti took the other off."

"My friend," said I, "what all this gibberish of yours is about, I
don't know, and I don't much care; for it seems to me that you must be a
little damaged in the head. But if you are speaking of Captain Ahab, of
that ship there, the Pequod, then let me tell you, that I know all about
the loss of his leg."

"ALL about it, eh--sure you do?--all?"

"Pretty sure."

With finger pointed and eye levelled at the Pequod, the beggar-like
stranger stood a moment, as if in a troubled reverie; then starting a
little, turned and said:--"Ye've shipped, have ye? Names down on the
papers? Well, well, what's signed, is signed; and what's to be, will be;
and then again, perhaps it won't be, after all. Anyhow, it's all fixed
and arranged a'ready; and some sailors or other must go with him, I
suppose; as well these as any other men, God pity 'em! Morning to ye,
shipmates, morning; the ineffable heavens bless ye; I'm sorry I stopped
ye."

"Look here, friend," said I, "if you have anything important to tell
us, out with it; but if you are only trying to bamboozle us, you are
mistaken in your game; that's all I have to say."

"And it's said very well, and I like to hear a chap talk up that way;
you are just the man for him--the likes of ye. Morning to ye, shipmates,
morning! Oh! when ye get there, tell 'em I've concluded not to make one
of 'em."

"Ah, my dear fellow, you can't fool us that way--you can't fool us. It
is the easiest thing in the world for a man to look as if he had a great
secret in him."

"Morning to ye, shipmates, morning."

"Morning it is," said I. "Come along, Queequeg, let's leave this crazy
man. But stop, tell me your name, will you?"

"Elijah."

Elijah! thought I, and we walked away, both commenting, after each
other's fashion, upon this ragged old sailor; and agreed that he was
nothing but a humbug, trying to be a bugbear. But we had not gone
perhaps above a hundred yards, when chancing to turn a corner, and
looking back as I did so, who should be seen but Elijah following us,
though at a distance. Somehow, the sight of him struck me so, that I
said nothing to Queequeg of his being behind, but passed on with my
comrade, anxious to see whether the stranger would turn the same corner
that we did. He did; and then it seemed to me that he was dogging
us, but with what intent I could not for the life of me imagine. This
circumstance, coupled with his ambiguous, half-hinting, half-revealing,
shrouded sort of talk, now begat in me all kinds of vague wonderments
and half-apprehensions, and all connected with the Pequod; and Captain
Ahab; and the leg he had lost; and the Cape Horn fit; and the silver
calabash; and what Captain Peleg had said of him, when I left the ship
the day previous; and the prediction of the squaw Tistig; and the voyage
we had bound ourselves to sail; and a hundred other shadowy things.

I was resolved to satisfy myself whether this ragged Elijah was really
dogging us or not, and with that intent crossed the way with Queequeg,
and on that side of it retraced our steps. But Elijah passed on, without
seeming to notice us. This relieved me; and once more, and finally as it
seemed to me, I pronounced him in my heart, a humbug.



CHAPTER 20. All Astir.


A day or two passed, and there was great activity aboard the Pequod.
Not only were the old sails being mended, but new sails were coming on
board, and bolts of canvas, and coils of rigging; in short, everything
betokened that the ship's preparations were hurrying to a close. Captain
Peleg seldom or never went ashore, but sat in his wigwam keeping a sharp
look-out upon the hands: Bildad did all the purchasing and providing
at the stores; and the men employed in the hold and on the rigging were
working till long after night-fall.

On the day following Queequeg's signing the articles, word was given at
all the inns where the ship's company were stopping, that their chests
must be on board before night, for there was no telling how soon
the vessel might be sailing. So Queequeg and I got down our traps,
resolving, however, to sleep ashore till the last. But it seems they
always give very long notice in these cases, and the ship did not sail
for several days. But no wonder; there was a good deal to be done, and
there is no telling how many things to be thought of, before the Pequod
was fully equipped.

Every one knows what a multitude of things--beds, sauce-pans, knives
and forks, shovels and tongs, napkins, nut-crackers, and what not, are
indispensable to the business of housekeeping. Just so with whaling,
which necessitates a three-years' housekeeping upon the wide ocean,
far from all grocers, costermongers, doctors, bakers, and bankers. And
though this also holds true of merchant vessels, yet not by any means
to the same extent as with whalemen. For besides the great length of the
whaling voyage, the numerous articles peculiar to the prosecution of the
fishery, and the impossibility of replacing them at the remote harbors
usually frequented, it must be remembered, that of all ships, whaling
vessels are the most exposed to accidents of all kinds, and especially
to the destruction and loss of the very things upon which the success of
the voyage most depends. Hence, the spare boats, spare spars, and spare
lines and harpoons, and spare everythings, almost, but a spare Captain
and duplicate ship.

At the period of our arrival at the Island, the heaviest storage of the
Pequod had been almost completed; comprising her beef, bread, water,
fuel, and iron hoops and staves. But, as before hinted, for some time
there was a continual fetching and carrying on board of divers odds and
ends of things, both large and small.

Chief among those who did this fetching and carrying was Captain
Bildad's sister, a lean old lady of a most determined and indefatigable
spirit, but withal very kindhearted, who seemed resolved that, if SHE
could help it, nothing should be found wanting in the Pequod, after once
fairly getting to sea. At one time she would come on board with a jar
of pickles for the steward's pantry; another time with a bunch of quills
for the chief mate's desk, where he kept his log; a third time with a
roll of flannel for the small of some one's rheumatic back. Never did
any woman better deserve her name, which was Charity--Aunt Charity, as
everybody called her. And like a sister of charity did this charitable
Aunt Charity bustle about hither and thither, ready to turn her hand
and heart to anything that promised to yield safety, comfort, and
consolation to all on board a ship in which her beloved brother
Bildad was concerned, and in which she herself owned a score or two of
well-saved dollars.

But it was startling to see this excellent hearted Quakeress coming on
board, as she did the last day, with a long oil-ladle in one hand, and
a still longer whaling lance in the other. Nor was Bildad himself nor
Captain Peleg at all backward. As for Bildad, he carried about with him
a long list of the articles needed, and at every fresh arrival, down
went his mark opposite that article upon the paper. Every once in a
while Peleg came hobbling out of his whalebone den, roaring at the men
down the hatchways, roaring up to the riggers at the mast-head, and then
concluded by roaring back into his wigwam.

During these days of preparation, Queequeg and I often visited the
craft, and as often I asked about Captain Ahab, and how he was, and when
he was going to come on board his ship. To these questions they would
answer, that he was getting better and better, and was expected aboard
every day; meantime, the two captains, Peleg and Bildad, could attend
to everything necessary to fit the vessel for the voyage. If I had been
downright honest with myself, I would have seen very plainly in my heart
that I did but half fancy being committed this way to so long a voyage,
without once laying my eyes on the man who was to be the absolute
dictator of it, so soon as the ship sailed out upon the open sea.
But when a man suspects any wrong, it sometimes happens that if he be
already involved in the matter, he insensibly strives to cover up his
suspicions even from himself. And much this way it was with me. I said
nothing, and tried to think nothing.

At last it was given out that some time next day the ship would
certainly sail. So next morning, Queequeg and I took a very early start.



CHAPTER 21. Going Aboard.


It was nearly six o'clock, but only grey imperfect misty dawn, when we
drew nigh the wharf.

"There are some sailors running ahead there, if I see right," said I to
Queequeg, "it can't be shadows; she's off by sunrise, I guess; come on!"

"Avast!" cried a voice, whose owner at the same time coming close behind
us, laid a hand upon both our shoulders, and then insinuating himself
between us, stood stooping forward a little, in the uncertain twilight,
strangely peering from Queequeg to me. It was Elijah.

"Going aboard?"

"Hands off, will you," said I.

"Lookee here," said Queequeg, shaking himself, "go 'way!"

"Ain't going aboard, then?"

"Yes, we are," said I, "but what business is that of yours? Do you know,
Mr. Elijah, that I consider you a little impertinent?"

"No, no, no; I wasn't aware of that," said Elijah, slowly and
wonderingly looking from me to Queequeg, with the most unaccountable
glances.

"Elijah," said I, "you will oblige my friend and me by withdrawing. We
are going to the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and would prefer not to be
detained."

"Ye be, be ye? Coming back afore breakfast?"

"He's cracked, Queequeg," said I, "come on."

"Holloa!" cried stationary Elijah, hailing us when we had removed a few
paces.

"Never mind him," said I, "Queequeg, come on."

But he stole up to us again, and suddenly clapping his hand on my
shoulder, said--"Did ye see anything looking like men going towards that
ship a while ago?"

Struck by this plain matter-of-fact question, I answered, saying, "Yes,
I thought I did see four or five men; but it was too dim to be sure."

"Very dim, very dim," said Elijah. "Morning to ye."

Once more we quitted him; but once more he came softly after us; and
touching my shoulder again, said, "See if you can find 'em now, will ye?

"Find who?"

"Morning to ye! morning to ye!" he rejoined, again moving off. "Oh! I
was going to warn ye against--but never mind, never mind--it's all one,
all in the family too;--sharp frost this morning, ain't it? Good-bye to
ye. Shan't see ye again very soon, I guess; unless it's before the Grand
Jury." And with these cracked words he finally departed, leaving me, for
the moment, in no small wonderment at his frantic impudence.

At last, stepping on board the Pequod, we found everything in profound
quiet, not a soul moving. The cabin entrance was locked within; the
hatches were all on, and lumbered with coils of rigging. Going forward
to the forecastle, we found the slide of the scuttle open. Seeing a
light, we went down, and found only an old rigger there, wrapped in a
tattered pea-jacket. He was thrown at whole length upon two chests, his
face downwards and inclosed in his folded arms. The profoundest slumber
slept upon him.

"Those sailors we saw, Queequeg, where can they have gone to?" said I,
looking dubiously at the sleeper. But it seemed that, when on the wharf,
Queequeg had not at all noticed what I now alluded to; hence I would
have thought myself to have been optically deceived in that matter,
were it not for Elijah's otherwise inexplicable question. But I beat the
thing down; and again marking the sleeper, jocularly hinted to Queequeg
that perhaps we had best sit up with the body; telling him to establish
himself accordingly. He put his hand upon the sleeper's rear, as though
feeling if it was soft enough; and then, without more ado, sat quietly
down there.

"Gracious! Queequeg, don't sit there," said I.

"Oh! perry dood seat," said Queequeg, "my country way; won't hurt him
face."

"Face!" said I, "call that his face? very benevolent countenance then;
but how hard he breathes, he's heaving himself; get off, Queequeg, you
are heavy, it's grinding the face of the poor. Get off, Queequeg! Look,
he'll twitch you off soon. I wonder he don't wake."

Queequeg removed himself to just beyond the head of the sleeper, and
lighted his tomahawk pipe. I sat at the feet. We kept the pipe passing
over the sleeper, from one to the other. Meanwhile, upon questioning him
in his broken fashion, Queequeg gave me to understand that, in his
land, owing to the absence of settees and sofas of all sorts, the king,
chiefs, and great people generally, were in the custom of fattening some
of the lower orders for ottomans; and to furnish a house comfortably in
that respect, you had only to buy up eight or ten lazy fellows, and lay
them round in the piers and alcoves. Besides, it was very convenient on
an excursion; much better than those garden-chairs which are convertible
into walking-sticks; upon occasion, a chief calling his attendant, and
desiring him to make a settee of himself under a spreading tree, perhaps
in some damp marshy place.

While narrating these things, every time Queequeg received the tomahawk
from me, he flourished the hatchet-side of it over the sleeper's head.

"What's that for, Queequeg?"

"Perry easy, kill-e; oh! perry easy!"

He was going on with some wild reminiscences about his tomahawk-pipe,
which, it seemed, had in its two uses both brained his foes and soothed
his soul, when we were directly attracted to the sleeping rigger. The
strong vapour now completely filling the contracted hole, it began
to tell upon him. He breathed with a sort of muffledness; then seemed
troubled in the nose; then revolved over once or twice; then sat up and
rubbed his eyes.

"Holloa!" he breathed at last, "who be ye smokers?"

"Shipped men," answered I, "when does she sail?"

"Aye, aye, ye are going in her, be ye? She sails to-day. The Captain
came aboard last night."

"What Captain?--Ahab?"

"Who but him indeed?"

I was going to ask him some further questions concerning Ahab, when we
heard a noise on deck.

"Holloa! Starbuck's astir," said the rigger. "He's a lively chief mate,
that; good man, and a pious; but all alive now, I must turn to." And so
saying he went on deck, and we followed.

It was now clear sunrise. Soon the crew came on board in twos and
threes; the riggers bestirred themselves; the mates were actively
engaged; and several of the shore people were busy in bringing various
last things on board. Meanwhile Captain Ahab remained invisibly
enshrined within his cabin.



CHAPTER 22. Merry Christmas.


At length, towards noon, upon the final dismissal of the ship's riggers,
and after the Pequod had been hauled out from the wharf, and after the
ever-thoughtful Charity had come off in a whale-boat, with her last
gift--a night-cap for Stubb, the second mate, her brother-in-law, and a
spare Bible for the steward--after all this, the two Captains, Peleg
and Bildad, issued from the cabin, and turning to the chief mate, Peleg
said:

"Now, Mr. Starbuck, are you sure everything is right? Captain Ahab is
all ready--just spoke to him--nothing more to be got from shore, eh?
Well, call all hands, then. Muster 'em aft here--blast 'em!"

"No need of profane words, however great the hurry, Peleg," said Bildad,
"but away with thee, friend Starbuck, and do our bidding."

How now! Here upon the very point of starting for the voyage, Captain
Peleg and Captain Bildad were going it with a high hand on the
quarter-deck, just as if they were to be joint-commanders at sea, as
well as to all appearances in port. And, as for Captain Ahab, no sign of
him was yet to be seen; only, they said he was in the cabin. But then,
the idea was, that his presence was by no means necessary in getting the
ship under weigh, and steering her well out to sea. Indeed, as that was
not at all his proper business, but the pilot's; and as he was not
yet completely recovered--so they said--therefore, Captain Ahab stayed
below. And all this seemed natural enough; especially as in the merchant
service many captains never show themselves on deck for a considerable
time after heaving up the anchor, but remain over the cabin table,
having a farewell merry-making with their shore friends, before they
quit the ship for good with the pilot.

But there was not much chance to think over the matter, for Captain
Peleg was now all alive. He seemed to do most of the talking and
commanding, and not Bildad.

"Aft here, ye sons of bachelors," he cried, as the sailors lingered at
the main-mast. "Mr. Starbuck, drive'em aft."

"Strike the tent there!"--was the next order. As I hinted before, this
whalebone marquee was never pitched except in port; and on board the
Pequod, for thirty years, the order to strike the tent was well known to
be the next thing to heaving up the anchor.

"Man the capstan! Blood and thunder!--jump!"--was the next command, and
the crew sprang for the handspikes.

Now in getting under weigh, the station generally occupied by the pilot
is the forward part of the ship. And here Bildad, who, with Peleg, be it
known, in addition to his other officers, was one of the licensed pilots
of the port--he being suspected to have got himself made a pilot in
order to save the Nantucket pilot-fee to all the ships he was concerned
in, for he never piloted any other craft--Bildad, I say, might now
be seen actively engaged in looking over the bows for the approaching
anchor, and at intervals singing what seemed a dismal stave of psalmody,
to cheer the hands at the windlass, who roared forth some sort of
a chorus about the girls in Booble Alley, with hearty good will.
Nevertheless, not three days previous, Bildad had told them that no
profane songs would be allowed on board the Pequod, particularly in
getting under weigh; and Charity, his sister, had placed a small choice
copy of Watts in each seaman's berth.

Meantime, overseeing the other part of the ship, Captain Peleg ripped
and swore astern in the most frightful manner. I almost thought he would
sink the ship before the anchor could be got up; involuntarily I paused
on my handspike, and told Queequeg to do the same, thinking of the
perils we both ran, in starting on the voyage with such a devil for a
pilot. I was comforting myself, however, with the thought that in pious
Bildad might be found some salvation, spite of his seven hundred and
seventy-seventh lay; when I felt a sudden sharp poke in my rear, and
turning round, was horrified at the apparition of Captain Peleg in the
act of withdrawing his leg from my immediate vicinity. That was my first
kick.

"Is that the way they heave in the marchant service?" he roared.
"Spring, thou sheep-head; spring, and break thy backbone! Why don't ye
spring, I say, all of ye--spring! Quohog! spring, thou chap with the red
whiskers; spring there, Scotch-cap; spring, thou green pants. Spring, I
say, all of ye, and spring your eyes out!" And so saying, he moved
along the windlass, here and there using his leg very freely, while
imperturbable Bildad kept leading off with his psalmody. Thinks I,
Captain Peleg must have been drinking something to-day.

At last the anchor was up, the sails were set, and off we glided. It
was a short, cold Christmas; and as the short northern day merged into
night, we found ourselves almost broad upon the wintry ocean, whose
freezing spray cased us in ice, as in polished armor. The long rows of
teeth on the bulwarks glistened in the moonlight; and like the white
ivory tusks of some huge elephant, vast curving icicles depended from
the bows.

Lank Bildad, as pilot, headed the first watch, and ever and anon, as the
old craft deep dived into the green seas, and sent the shivering frost
all over her, and the winds howled, and the cordage rang, his steady
notes were heard,--

"Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood, Stand dressed in living green.
So to the Jews old Canaan stood, While Jordan rolled between."


Never did those sweet words sound more sweetly to me than then. They
were full of hope and fruition. Spite of this frigid winter night in the
boisterous Atlantic, spite of my wet feet and wetter jacket, there was
yet, it then seemed to me, many a pleasant haven in store; and meads
and glades so eternally vernal, that the grass shot up by the spring,
untrodden, unwilted, remains at midsummer.

At last we gained such an offing, that the two pilots were needed
no longer. The stout sail-boat that had accompanied us began ranging
alongside.

It was curious and not unpleasing, how Peleg and Bildad were affected at
this juncture, especially Captain Bildad. For loath to depart, yet;
very loath to leave, for good, a ship bound on so long and perilous a
voyage--beyond both stormy Capes; a ship in which some thousands of
his hard earned dollars were invested; a ship, in which an old shipmate
sailed as captain; a man almost as old as he, once more starting to
encounter all the terrors of the pitiless jaw; loath to say good-bye to
a thing so every way brimful of every interest to him,--poor old Bildad
lingered long; paced the deck with anxious strides; ran down into the
cabin to speak another farewell word there; again came on deck, and
looked to windward; looked towards the wide and endless waters, only
bounded by the far-off unseen Eastern Continents; looked towards
the land; looked aloft; looked right and left; looked everywhere
and nowhere; and at last, mechanically coiling a rope upon its pin,
convulsively grasped stout Peleg by the hand, and holding up a lantern,
for a moment stood gazing heroically in his face, as much as to say,
"Nevertheless, friend Peleg, I can stand it; yes, I can."

As for Peleg himself, he took it more like a philosopher; but for all
his philosophy, there was a tear twinkling in his eye, when the lantern
came too near. And he, too, did not a little run from cabin to deck--now
a word below, and now a word with Starbuck, the chief mate.

But, at last, he turned to his comrade, with a final sort of look
about him,--"Captain Bildad--come, old shipmate, we must go. Back the
main-yard there! Boat ahoy! Stand by to come close alongside, now!
Careful, careful!--come, Bildad, boy--say your last. Luck to ye,
Starbuck--luck to ye, Mr. Stubb--luck to ye, Mr. Flask--good-bye and
good luck to ye all--and this day three years I'll have a hot supper
smoking for ye in old Nantucket. Hurrah and away!"

"God bless ye, and have ye in His holy keeping, men," murmured old
Bildad, almost incoherently. "I hope ye'll have fine weather now, so
that Captain Ahab may soon be moving among ye--a pleasant sun is all
he needs, and ye'll have plenty of them in the tropic voyage ye go.
Be careful in the hunt, ye mates. Don't stave the boats needlessly,
ye harpooneers; good white cedar plank is raised full three per cent.
within the year. Don't forget your prayers, either. Mr. Starbuck, mind
that cooper don't waste the spare staves. Oh! the sail-needles are in
the green locker! Don't whale it too much a' Lord's days, men; but don't
miss a fair chance either, that's rejecting Heaven's good gifts. Have an
eye to the molasses tierce, Mr. Stubb; it was a little leaky, I thought.
If ye touch at the islands, Mr. Flask, beware of fornication. Good-bye,
good-bye! Don't keep that cheese too long down in the hold, Mr.
Starbuck; it'll spoil. Be careful with the butter--twenty cents the
pound it was, and mind ye, if--"

"Come, come, Captain Bildad; stop palavering,--away!" and with that,
Peleg hurried him over the side, and both dropt into the boat.

Ship and boat diverged; the cold, damp night breeze blew between; a
screaming gull flew overhead; the two hulls wildly rolled; we gave
three heavy-hearted cheers, and blindly plunged like fate into the lone
Atlantic.



CHAPTER 23. The Lee Shore.


Some chapters back, one Bulkington was spoken of, a tall, newlanded
mariner, encountered in New Bedford at the inn.

When on that shivering winter's night, the Pequod thrust her vindictive
bows into the cold malicious waves, who should I see standing at her
helm but Bulkington! I looked with sympathetic awe and fearfulness upon
the man, who in mid-winter just landed from a four years' dangerous
voyage, could so unrestingly push off again for still another
tempestuous term. The land seemed scorching to his feet. Wonderfullest
things are ever the unmentionable; deep memories yield no epitaphs; this
six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of Bulkington. Let me only say
that it fared with him as with the storm-tossed ship, that miserably
drives along the leeward land. The port would fain give succor; the port
is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm
blankets, friends, all that's kind to our mortalities. But in that gale,
the port, the land, is that ship's direst jeopardy; she must fly all
hospitality; one touch of land, though it but graze the keel, would make
her shudder through and through. With all her might she crowds all sail
off shore; in so doing, fights 'gainst the very winds that fain would
blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed sea's landlessness again;
for refuge's sake forlornly rushing into peril; her only friend her
bitterest foe!

Know ye now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally
intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid
effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while
the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the
treacherous, slavish shore?

But as in landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless,
indefinite as God--so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite,
than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety!
For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of
the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart,
O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy
ocean-perishing--straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!



CHAPTER 24. The Advocate.


As Queequeg and I are now fairly embarked in this business of whaling;
and as this business of whaling has somehow come to be regarded among
landsmen as a rather unpoetical and disreputable pursuit; therefore, I
am all anxiety to convince ye, ye landsmen, of the injustice hereby done
to us hunters of whales.

In the first place, it may be deemed almost superfluous to establish
the fact, that among people at large, the business of whaling is not
accounted on a level with what are called the liberal professions. If a
stranger were introduced into any miscellaneous metropolitan society,
it would but slightly advance the general opinion of his merits, were
he presented to the company as a harpooneer, say; and if in emulation
of the naval officers he should append the initials S.W.F. (Sperm
Whale Fishery) to his visiting card, such a procedure would be deemed
pre-eminently presuming and ridiculous.

Doubtless one leading reason why the world declines honouring us
whalemen, is this: they think that, at best, our vocation amounts to a
butchering sort of business; and that when actively engaged therein, we
are surrounded by all manner of defilements. Butchers we are, that is
true. But butchers, also, and butchers of the bloodiest badge have been
all Martial Commanders whom the world invariably delights to honour. And
as for the matter of the alleged uncleanliness of our business, ye shall
soon be initiated into certain facts hitherto pretty generally unknown,
and which, upon the whole, will triumphantly plant the sperm whale-ship
at least among the cleanliest things of this tidy earth. But even
granting the charge in question to be true; what disordered slippery
decks of a whale-ship are comparable to the unspeakable carrion of those
battle-fields from which so many soldiers return to drink in all ladies'
plaudits? And if the idea of peril so much enhances the popular conceit
of the soldier's profession; let me assure ye that many a veteran
who has freely marched up to a battery, would quickly recoil at the
apparition of the sperm whale's vast tail, fanning into eddies the air
over his head. For what are the comprehensible terrors of man compared
with the interlinked terrors and wonders of God!

But, though the world scouts at us whale hunters, yet does it
unwittingly pay us the profoundest homage; yea, an all-abounding
adoration! for almost all the tapers, lamps, and candles that burn round
the globe, burn, as before so many shrines, to our glory!

But look at this matter in other lights; weigh it in all sorts of
scales; see what we whalemen are, and have been.

Why did the Dutch in De Witt's time have admirals of their whaling
fleets? Why did Louis XVI. of France, at his own personal expense, fit
out whaling ships from Dunkirk, and politely invite to that town some
score or two of families from our own island of Nantucket? Why did
Britain between the years 1750 and 1788 pay to her whalemen in bounties
upwards of L1,000,000? And lastly, how comes it that we whalemen of
America now outnumber all the rest of the banded whalemen in the world;
sail a navy of upwards of seven hundred vessels; manned by eighteen
thousand men; yearly consuming 4,000,000 of dollars; the ships worth,
at the time of sailing, $20,000,000! and every year importing into our
harbors a well reaped harvest of $7,000,000. How comes all this, if
there be not something puissant in whaling?

But this is not the half; look again.

I freely assert, that the cosmopolite philosopher cannot, for his life,
point out one single peaceful influence, which within the last sixty
years has operated more potentially upon the whole broad world, taken in
one aggregate, than the high and mighty business of whaling. One way
and another, it has begotten events so remarkable in themselves, and so
continuously momentous in their sequential issues, that whaling may
well be regarded as that Egyptian mother, who bore offspring themselves
pregnant from her womb. It would be a hopeless, endless task to
catalogue all these things. Let a handful suffice. For many years past
the whale-ship has been the pioneer in ferreting out the remotest and
least known parts of the earth. She has explored seas and archipelagoes
which had no chart, where no Cook or Vancouver had ever sailed. If
American and European men-of-war now peacefully ride in once savage
harbors, let them fire salutes to the honour and glory of the
whale-ship, which originally showed them the way, and first interpreted
between them and the savages. They may celebrate as they will the heroes
of Exploring Expeditions, your Cooks, your Krusensterns; but I say that
scores of anonymous Captains have sailed out of Nantucket, that were
as great, and greater than your Cook and your Krusenstern. For in their
succourless empty-handedness, they, in the heathenish sharked waters,
and by the beaches of unrecorded, javelin islands, battled with virgin
wonders and terrors that Cook with all his marines and muskets would
not willingly have dared. All that is made such a flourish of in the old
South Sea Voyages, those things were but the life-time commonplaces of
our heroic Nantucketers. Often, adventures which Vancouver dedicates
three chapters to, these men accounted unworthy of being set down in the
ship's common log. Ah, the world! Oh, the world!

Until the whale fishery rounded Cape Horn, no commerce but colonial,
scarcely any intercourse but colonial, was carried on between Europe and
the long line of the opulent Spanish provinces on the Pacific coast.
It was the whaleman who first broke through the jealous policy of the
Spanish crown, touching those colonies; and, if space permitted, it
might be distinctly shown how from those whalemen at last eventuated the
liberation of Peru, Chili, and Bolivia from the yoke of Old Spain, and
the establishment of the eternal democracy in those parts.

That great America on the other side of the sphere, Australia, was given
to the enlightened world by the whaleman. After its first blunder-born
discovery by a Dutchman, all other ships long shunned those shores
as pestiferously barbarous; but the whale-ship touched there. The
whale-ship is the true mother of that now mighty colony. Moreover,
in the infancy of the first Australian settlement, the emigrants were
several times saved from starvation by the benevolent biscuit of the
whale-ship luckily dropping an anchor in their waters. The uncounted
isles of all Polynesia confess the same truth, and do commercial homage
to the whale-ship, that cleared the way for the missionary and the
merchant, and in many cases carried the primitive missionaries to their
first destinations. If that double-bolted land, Japan, is ever to become
hospitable, it is the whale-ship alone to whom the credit will be due;
for already she is on the threshold.

But if, in the face of all this, you still declare that whaling has no
aesthetically noble associations connected with it, then am I ready to
shiver fifty lances with you there, and unhorse you with a split helmet
every time.

The whale has no famous author, and whaling no famous chronicler, you
will say.

THE WHALE NO FAMOUS AUTHOR, AND WHALING NO FAMOUS CHRONICLER? Who wrote
the first account of our Leviathan? Who but mighty Job! And who composed
the first narrative of a whaling-voyage? Who, but no less a prince than
Alfred the Great, who, with his own royal pen, took down the words from
Other, the Norwegian whale-hunter of those times! And who pronounced our
glowing eulogy in Parliament? Who, but Edmund Burke!

True enough, but then whalemen themselves are poor devils; they have no
good blood in their veins.

NO GOOD BLOOD IN THEIR VEINS? They have something better than royal
blood there. The grandmother of Benjamin Franklin was Mary Morrel;
afterwards, by marriage, Mary Folger, one of the old settlers
of Nantucket, and the ancestress to a long line of Folgers and
harpooneers--all kith and kin to noble Benjamin--this day darting the
barbed iron from one side of the world to the other.

Good again; but then all confess that somehow whaling is not
respectable.

WHALING NOT RESPECTABLE? Whaling is imperial! By old English statutory
law, the whale is declared "a royal fish."*

Oh, that's only nominal! The whale himself has never figured in any
grand imposing way.

THE WHALE NEVER FIGURED IN ANY GRAND IMPOSING WAY? In one of the mighty
triumphs given to a Roman general upon his entering the world's capital,
the bones of a whale, brought all the way from the Syrian coast, were
the most conspicuous object in the cymballed procession.*


*See subsequent chapters for something more on this head.


Grant it, since you cite it; but, say what you will, there is no real
dignity in whaling.

NO DIGNITY IN WHALING? The dignity of our calling the very heavens
attest. Cetus is a constellation in the South! No more! Drive down your
hat in presence of the Czar, and take it off to Queequeg! No more! I
know a man that, in his lifetime, has taken three hundred and fifty
whales. I account that man more honourable than that great captain of
antiquity who boasted of taking as many walled towns.

And, as for me, if, by any possibility, there be any as yet undiscovered
prime thing in me; if I shall ever deserve any real repute in that small
but high hushed world which I might not be unreasonably ambitious of; if
hereafter I shall do anything that, upon the whole, a man might rather
have done than to have left undone; if, at my death, my executors, or
more properly my creditors, find any precious MSS. in my desk, then here
I prospectively ascribe all the honour and the glory to whaling; for a
whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.



CHAPTER 25. Postscript.


In behalf of the dignity of whaling, I would fain advance naught but
substantiated facts. But after embattling his facts, an advocate who
should wholly suppress a not unreasonable surmise, which might
tell eloquently upon his cause--such an advocate, would he not be
blameworthy?

It is well known that at the coronation of kings and queens, even modern
ones, a certain curious process of seasoning them for their functions is
gone through. There is a saltcellar of state, so called, and there
may be a castor of state. How they use the salt, precisely--who knows?
Certain I am, however, that a king's head is solemnly oiled at his
coronation, even as a head of salad. Can it be, though, that they
anoint it with a view of making its interior run well, as they anoint
machinery? Much might be ruminated here, concerning the essential
dignity of this regal process, because in common life we esteem but
meanly and contemptibly a fellow who anoints his hair, and palpably
smells of that anointing. In truth, a mature man who uses hair-oil,
unless medicinally, that man has probably got a quoggy spot in him
somewhere. As a general rule, he can't amount to much in his totality.

But the only thing to be considered here, is this--what kind of oil is
used at coronations? Certainly it cannot be olive oil, nor macassar oil,
nor castor oil, nor bear's oil, nor train oil, nor cod-liver oil. What
then can it possibly be, but sperm oil in its unmanufactured, unpolluted
state, the sweetest of all oils?

Think of that, ye loyal Britons! we whalemen supply your kings and
queens with coronation stuff!



CHAPTER 26. Knights and Squires.


The chief mate of the Pequod was Starbuck, a native of Nantucket, and a
Quaker by descent. He was a long, earnest man, and though born on an icy
coast, seemed well adapted to endure hot latitudes, his flesh being hard
as twice-baked biscuit. Transported to the Indies, his live blood would
not spoil like bottled ale. He must have been born in some time of
general drought and famine, or upon one of those fast days for which
his state is famous. Only some thirty arid summers had he seen; those
summers had dried up all his physical superfluousness. But this, his
thinness, so to speak, seemed no more the token of wasting anxieties and
cares, than it seemed the indication of any bodily blight. It was merely
the condensation of the man. He was by no means ill-looking; quite the
contrary. His pure tight skin was an excellent fit; and closely wrapped
up in it, and embalmed with inner health and strength, like a revivified
Egyptian, this Starbuck seemed prepared to endure for long ages to come,
and to endure always, as now; for be it Polar snow or torrid sun, like
a patent chronometer, his interior vitality was warranted to do well
in all climates. Looking into his eyes, you seemed to see there the yet
lingering images of those thousand-fold perils he had calmly confronted
through life. A staid, steadfast man, whose life for the most part was a
telling pantomime of action, and not a tame chapter of sounds. Yet, for
all his hardy sobriety and fortitude, there were certain qualities
in him which at times affected, and in some cases seemed well nigh to
overbalance all the rest. Uncommonly conscientious for a seaman, and
endued with a deep natural reverence, the wild watery loneliness of his
life did therefore strongly incline him to superstition; but to that
sort of superstition, which in some organizations seems rather to
spring, somehow, from intelligence than from ignorance. Outward portents
and inward presentiments were his. And if at times these things bent the
welded iron of his soul, much more did his far-away domestic memories
of his young Cape wife and child, tend to bend him still more from the
original ruggedness of his nature, and open him still further to those
latent influences which, in some honest-hearted men, restrain the gush
of dare-devil daring, so often evinced by others in the more perilous
vicissitudes of the fishery. "I will have no man in my boat," said
Starbuck, "who is not afraid of a whale." By this, he seemed to mean,
not only that the most reliable and useful courage was that which arises
from the fair estimation of the encountered peril, but that an utterly
fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward.

"Aye, aye," said Stubb, the second mate, "Starbuck, there, is as careful
a man as you'll find anywhere in this fishery." But we shall ere long
see what that word "careful" precisely means when used by a man like
Stubb, or almost any other whale hunter.

Starbuck was no crusader after perils; in him courage was not a
sentiment; but a thing simply useful to him, and always at hand upon all
mortally practical occasions. Besides, he thought, perhaps, that in this
business of whaling, courage was one of the great staple outfits of
the ship, like her beef and her bread, and not to be foolishly wasted.
Wherefore he had no fancy for lowering for whales after sun-down; nor
for persisting in fighting a fish that too much persisted in fighting
him. For, thought Starbuck, I am here in this critical ocean to kill
whales for my living, and not to be killed by them for theirs; and that
hundreds of men had been so killed Starbuck well knew. What doom was
his own father's? Where, in the bottomless deeps, could he find the torn
limbs of his brother?

With memories like these in him, and, moreover, given to a certain
superstitiousness, as has been said; the courage of this Starbuck which
could, nevertheless, still flourish, must indeed have been extreme. But
it was not in reasonable nature that a man so organized, and with such
terrible experiences and remembrances as he had; it was not in nature
that these things should fail in latently engendering an element in
him, which, under suitable circumstances, would break out from its
confinement, and burn all his courage up. And brave as he might be, it
was that sort of bravery chiefly, visible in some intrepid men, which,
while generally abiding firm in the conflict with seas, or winds, or
whales, or any of the ordinary irrational horrors of the world, yet
cannot withstand those more terrific, because more spiritual terrors,
which sometimes menace you from the concentrating brow of an enraged and
mighty man.

But were the coming narrative to reveal in any instance, the complete
abasement of poor Starbuck's fortitude, scarce might I have the heart to
write it; for it is a thing most sorrowful, nay shocking, to expose
the fall of valour in the soul. Men may seem detestable as joint
stock-companies and nations; knaves, fools, and murderers there may be;
men may have mean and meagre faces; but man, in the ideal, is so noble
and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that over any
ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their
costliest robes. That immaculate manliness we feel within ourselves,
so far within us, that it remains intact though all the outer character
seem gone; bleeds with keenest anguish at the undraped spectacle of
a valor-ruined man. Nor can piety itself, at such a shameful sight,
completely stifle her upbraidings against the permitting stars. But this
august dignity I treat of, is not the dignity of kings and robes, but
that abounding dignity which has no robed investiture. Thou shalt see it
shining in the arm that wields a pick or drives a spike; that democratic
dignity which, on all hands, radiates without end from God; Himself! The
great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy! His
omnipresence, our divine equality!

If, then, to meanest mariners, and renegades and castaways, I shall
hereafter ascribe high qualities, though dark; weave round them tragic
graces; if even the most mournful, perchance the most abased, among them
all, shall at times lift himself to the exalted mounts; if I shall touch
that workman's arm with some ethereal light; if I shall spread a rainbow
over his disastrous set of sun; then against all mortal critics bear
me out in it, thou Just Spirit of Equality, which hast spread one royal
mantle of humanity over all my kind! Bear me out in it, thou great
democratic God! who didst not refuse to the swart convict, Bunyan, the
pale, poetic pearl; Thou who didst clothe with doubly hammered leaves
of finest gold, the stumped and paupered arm of old Cervantes; Thou who
didst pick up Andrew Jackson from the pebbles; who didst hurl him upon a
war-horse; who didst thunder him higher than a throne! Thou who, in all
Thy mighty, earthly marchings, ever cullest Thy selectest champions from
the kingly commons; bear me out in it, O God!



CHAPTER 27. Knights and Squires.


Stubb was the second mate. He was a native of Cape Cod; and hence,
according to local usage, was called a Cape-Cod-man. A happy-go-lucky;
neither craven nor valiant; taking perils as they came with an
indifferent air; and while engaged in the most imminent crisis of the
chase, toiling away, calm and collected as a journeyman joiner engaged
for the year. Good-humored, easy, and careless, he presided over his
whale-boat as if the most deadly encounter were but a dinner, and his
crew all invited guests. He was as particular about the comfortable
arrangement of his part of the boat, as an old stage-driver is about the
snugness of his box. When close to the whale, in the very death-lock of
the fight, he handled his unpitying lance coolly and off-handedly, as
a whistling tinker his hammer. He would hum over his old rigadig tunes
while flank and flank with the most exasperated monster. Long usage had,
for this Stubb, converted the jaws of death into an easy chair. What he
thought of death itself, there is no telling. Whether he ever thought of
it at all, might be a question; but, if he ever did chance to cast his
mind that way after a comfortable dinner, no doubt, like a good sailor,
he took it to be a sort of call of the watch to tumble aloft, and bestir
themselves there, about something which he would find out when he obeyed
the order, and not sooner.

What, perhaps, with other things, made Stubb such an easy-going,
unfearing man, so cheerily trudging off with the burden of life in a
world full of grave pedlars, all bowed to the ground with their packs;
what helped to bring about that almost impious good-humor of his; that
thing must have been his pipe. For, like his nose, his short, black
little pipe was one of the regular features of his face. You would
almost as soon have expected him to turn out of his bunk without his
nose as without his pipe. He kept a whole row of pipes there ready
loaded, stuck in a rack, within easy reach of his hand; and, whenever he
turned in, he smoked them all out in succession, lighting one from
the other to the end of the chapter; then loading them again to be in
readiness anew. For, when Stubb dressed, instead of first putting his
legs into his trowsers, he put his pipe into his mouth.

I say this continual smoking must have been one cause, at least, of his
peculiar disposition; for every one knows that this earthly air, whether
ashore or afloat, is terribly infected with the nameless miseries of
the numberless mortals who have died exhaling it; and as in time of the
cholera, some people go about with a camphorated handkerchief to their
mouths; so, likewise, against all mortal tribulations, Stubb's tobacco
smoke might have operated as a sort of disinfecting agent.

The third mate was Flask, a native of Tisbury, in Martha's Vineyard. A
short, stout, ruddy young fellow, very pugnacious concerning whales,
who somehow seemed to think that the great leviathans had personally
and hereditarily affronted him; and therefore it was a sort of point of
honour with him, to destroy them whenever encountered. So utterly lost
was he to all sense of reverence for the many marvels of their majestic
bulk and mystic ways; and so dead to anything like an apprehension of
any possible danger from encountering them; that in his poor opinion,
the wondrous whale was but a species of magnified mouse, or at least
water-rat, requiring only a little circumvention and some small
application of time and trouble in order to kill and boil. This
ignorant, unconscious fearlessness of his made him a little waggish in
the matter of whales; he followed these fish for the fun of it; and a
three years' voyage round Cape Horn was only a jolly joke that lasted
that length of time. As a carpenter's nails are divided into wrought
nails and cut nails; so mankind may be similarly divided. Little Flask
was one of the wrought ones; made to clinch tight and last long. They
called him King-Post on board of the Pequod; because, in form, he could
be well likened to the short, square timber known by that name in Arctic
whalers; and which by the means of many radiating side timbers inserted
into it, serves to brace the ship against the icy concussions of those
battering seas.

Now these three mates--Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, were momentous
men. They it was who by universal prescription commanded three of the
Pequod's boats as headsmen. In that grand order of battle in which
Captain Ahab would probably marshal his forces to descend on the whales,
these three headsmen were as captains of companies. Or, being armed with
their long keen whaling spears, they were as a picked trio of lancers;
even as the harpooneers were flingers of javelins.

And since in this famous fishery, each mate or headsman, like a Gothic
Knight of old, is always accompanied by his boat-steerer or harpooneer,
who in certain conjunctures provides him with a fresh lance, when
the former one has been badly twisted, or elbowed in the assault; and
moreover, as there generally subsists between the two, a close intimacy
and friendliness; it is therefore but meet, that in this place we set
down who the Pequod's harpooneers were, and to what headsman each of
them belonged.

First of all was Queequeg, whom Starbuck, the chief mate, had selected
for his squire. But Queequeg is already known.

Next was Tashtego, an unmixed Indian from Gay Head, the most westerly
promontory of Martha's Vineyard, where there still exists the last
remnant of a village of red men, which has long supplied the neighboring
island of Nantucket with many of her most daring harpooneers. In the
fishery, they usually go by the generic name of Gay-Headers. Tashtego's
long, lean, sable hair, his high cheek bones, and black rounding
eyes--for an Indian, Oriental in their largeness, but Antarctic in their
glittering expression--all this sufficiently proclaimed him an inheritor
of the unvitiated blood of those proud warrior hunters, who, in quest
of the great New England moose, had scoured, bow in hand, the aboriginal
forests of the main. But no longer snuffing in the trail of the wild
beasts of the woodland, Tashtego now hunted in the wake of the great
whales of the sea; the unerring harpoon of the son fitly replacing the
infallible arrow of the sires. To look at the tawny brawn of his lithe
snaky limbs, you would almost have credited the superstitions of some of
the earlier Puritans, and half-believed this wild Indian to be a son
of the Prince of the Powers of the Air. Tashtego was Stubb the second
mate's squire.

Third among the harpooneers was Daggoo, a gigantic, coal-black
negro-savage, with a lion-like tread--an Ahasuerus to behold. Suspended
from his ears were two golden hoops, so large that the sailors called
them ring-bolts, and would talk of securing the top-sail halyards to
them. In his youth Daggoo had voluntarily shipped on board of a whaler,
lying in a lonely bay on his native coast. And never having been
anywhere in the world but in Africa, Nantucket, and the pagan harbors
most frequented by whalemen; and having now led for many years the bold
life of the fishery in the ships of owners uncommonly heedful of what
manner of men they shipped; Daggoo retained all his barbaric virtues,
and erect as a giraffe, moved about the decks in all the pomp of six
feet five in his socks. There was a corporeal humility in looking up at
him; and a white man standing before him seemed a white flag come to
beg truce of a fortress. Curious to tell, this imperial negro, Ahasuerus
Daggoo, was the Squire of little Flask, who looked like a chess-man
beside him. As for the residue of the Pequod's company, be it said, that
at the present day not one in two of the many thousand men before the
mast employed in the American whale fishery, are Americans born, though
pretty nearly all the officers are. Herein it is the same with the
American whale fishery as with the American army and military and
merchant navies, and the engineering forces employed in the construction
of the American Canals and Railroads. The same, I say, because in all
these cases the native American liberally provides the brains, the rest
of the world as generously supplying the muscles. No small number of
these whaling seamen belong to the Azores, where the outward bound
Nantucket whalers frequently touch to augment their crews from the hardy
peasants of those rocky shores. In like manner, the Greenland whalers
sailing out of Hull or London, put in at the Shetland Islands, to
receive the full complement of their crew. Upon the passage homewards,
they drop them there again. How it is, there is no telling, but
Islanders seem to make the best whalemen. They were nearly all Islanders
in the Pequod, ISOLATOES too, I call such, not acknowledging the common
continent of men, but each ISOLATO living on a separate continent of his
own. Yet now, federated along one keel, what a set these Isolatoes were!
An Anacharsis Clootz deputation from all the isles of the sea, and all
the ends of the earth, accompanying Old Ahab in the Pequod to lay the
world's grievances before that bar from which not very many of them ever
come back. Black Little Pip--he never did--oh, no! he went before. Poor
Alabama boy! On the grim Pequod's forecastle, ye shall ere long see him,
beating his tambourine; prelusive of the eternal time, when sent for,
to the great quarter-deck on high, he was bid strike in with angels, and
beat his tambourine in glory; called a coward here, hailed a hero there!



CHAPTER 28. Ahab.


For several days after leaving Nantucket, nothing above hatches was seen
of Captain Ahab. The mates regularly relieved each other at the watches,
and for aught that could be seen to the contrary, they seemed to be the
only commanders of the ship; only they sometimes issued from the cabin
with orders so sudden and peremptory, that after all it was plain they
but commanded vicariously. Yes, their supreme lord and dictator was
there, though hitherto unseen by any eyes not permitted to penetrate
into the now sacred retreat of the cabin.

Every time I ascended to the deck from my watches below, I instantly
gazed aft to mark if any strange face were visible; for my first vague
disquietude touching the unknown captain, now in the seclusion of the
sea, became almost a perturbation. This was strangely heightened
at times by the ragged Elijah's diabolical incoherences uninvitedly
recurring to me, with a subtle energy I could not have before conceived
of. But poorly could I withstand them, much as in other moods I was
almost ready to smile at the solemn whimsicalities of that outlandish
prophet of the wharves. But whatever it was of apprehensiveness or
uneasiness--to call it so--which I felt, yet whenever I came to look
about me in the ship, it seemed against all warrantry to cherish such
emotions. For though the harpooneers, with the great body of the crew,
were a far more barbaric, heathenish, and motley set than any of the
tame merchant-ship companies which my previous experiences had made me
acquainted with, still I ascribed this--and rightly ascribed it--to the
fierce uniqueness of the very nature of that wild Scandinavian vocation
in which I had so abandonedly embarked. But it was especially the aspect
of the three chief officers of the ship, the mates, which was most
forcibly calculated to allay these colourless misgivings, and induce
confidence and cheerfulness in every presentment of the voyage. Three
better, more likely sea-officers and men, each in his own different way,
could not readily be found, and they were every one of them Americans; a
Nantucketer, a Vineyarder, a Cape man. Now, it being Christmas when the
ship shot from out her harbor, for a space we had biting Polar weather,
though all the time running away from it to the southward; and by every
degree and minute of latitude which we sailed, gradually leaving that
merciless winter, and all its intolerable weather behind us. It was one
of those less lowering, but still grey and gloomy enough mornings of the
transition, when with a fair wind the ship was rushing through the water
with a vindictive sort of leaping and melancholy rapidity, that as I
mounted to the deck at the call of the forenoon watch, so soon as I
levelled my glance towards the taffrail, foreboding shivers ran over me.
Reality outran apprehension; Captain Ahab stood upon his quarter-deck.

There seemed no sign of common bodily illness about him, nor of the
recovery from any. He looked like a man cut away from the stake, when
the fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them,
or taking away one particle from their compacted aged robustness. His
whole high, broad form, seemed made of solid bronze, and shaped in an
unalterable mould, like Cellini's cast Perseus. Threading its way out
from among his grey hairs, and continuing right down one side of his
tawny scorched face and neck, till it disappeared in his clothing,
you saw a slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish. It resembled that
perpendicular seam sometimes made in the straight, lofty trunk of
a great tree, when the upper lightning tearingly darts down it, and
without wrenching a single twig, peels and grooves out the bark from top
to bottom, ere running off into the soil, leaving the tree still greenly
alive, but branded. Whether that mark was born with him, or whether it
was the scar left by some desperate wound, no one could certainly say.
By some tacit consent, throughout the voyage little or no allusion was
made to it, especially by the mates. But once Tashtego's senior, an old
Gay-Head Indian among the crew, superstitiously asserted that not till
he was full forty years old did Ahab become that way branded, and
then it came upon him, not in the fury of any mortal fray, but in
an elemental strife at sea. Yet, this wild hint seemed inferentially
negatived, by what a grey Manxman insinuated, an old sepulchral man,
who, having never before sailed out of Nantucket, had never ere this
laid eye upon wild Ahab. Nevertheless, the old sea-traditions, the
immemorial credulities, popularly invested this old Manxman with
preternatural powers of discernment. So that no white sailor seriously
contradicted him when he said that if ever Captain Ahab should
be tranquilly laid out--which might hardly come to pass, so he
muttered--then, whoever should do that last office for the dead, would
find a birth-mark on him from crown to sole.

So powerfully did the whole grim aspect of Ahab affect me, and the livid
brand which streaked it, that for the first few moments I hardly noted
that not a little of this overbearing grimness was owing to the barbaric
white leg upon which he partly stood. It had previously come to me that
this ivory leg had at sea been fashioned from the polished bone of
the sperm whale's jaw. "Aye, he was dismasted off Japan," said the old
Gay-Head Indian once; "but like his dismasted craft, he shipped another
mast without coming home for it. He has a quiver of 'em."

I was struck with the singular posture he maintained. Upon each side of
the Pequod's quarter deck, and pretty close to the mizzen shrouds, there
was an auger hole, bored about half an inch or so, into the plank.
His bone leg steadied in that hole; one arm elevated, and holding by a
shroud; Captain Ahab stood erect, looking straight out beyond the
ship's ever-pitching prow. There was an infinity of firmest fortitude,
a determinate, unsurrenderable wilfulness, in the fixed and fearless,
forward dedication of that glance. Not a word he spoke; nor did his
officers say aught to him; though by all their minutest gestures
and expressions, they plainly showed the uneasy, if not painful,
consciousness of being under a troubled master-eye. And not only that,
but moody stricken Ahab stood before them with a crucifixion in his
face; in all the nameless regal overbearing dignity of some mighty woe.

Ere long, from his first visit in the air, he withdrew into his cabin.
But after that morning, he was every day visible to the crew; either
standing in his pivot-hole, or seated upon an ivory stool he had; or
heavily walking the deck. As the sky grew less gloomy; indeed, began to
grow a little genial, he became still less and less a recluse; as
if, when the ship had sailed from home, nothing but the dead wintry
bleakness of the sea had then kept him so secluded. And, by and by, it
came to pass, that he was almost continually in the air; but, as yet,
for all that he said, or perceptibly did, on the at last sunny deck,
he seemed as unnecessary there as another mast. But the Pequod was
only making a passage now; not regularly cruising; nearly all whaling
preparatives needing supervision the mates were fully competent to, so
that there was little or nothing, out of himself, to employ or excite
Ahab, now; and thus chase away, for that one interval, the clouds that
layer upon layer were piled upon his brow, as ever all clouds choose the
loftiest peaks to pile themselves upon.

Nevertheless, ere long, the warm, warbling persuasiveness of the
pleasant, holiday weather we came to, seemed gradually to charm him from
his mood. For, as when the red-cheeked, dancing girls, April and May,
trip home to the wintry, misanthropic woods; even the barest, ruggedest,
most thunder-cloven old oak will at least send forth some few green
sprouts, to welcome such glad-hearted visitants; so Ahab did, in the
end, a little respond to the playful allurings of that girlish air. More
than once did he put forth the faint blossom of a look, which, in any
other man, would have soon flowered out in a smile.



CHAPTER 29. Enter Ahab; to Him, Stubb.


Some days elapsed, and ice and icebergs all astern, the Pequod now
went rolling through the bright Quito spring, which, at sea, almost
perpetually reigns on the threshold of the eternal August of the Tropic.
The warmly cool, clear, ringing, perfumed, overflowing, redundant days,
were as crystal goblets of Persian sherbet, heaped up--flaked up, with
rose-water snow. The starred and stately nights seemed haughty dames in
jewelled velvets, nursing at home in lonely pride, the memory of their
absent conquering Earls, the golden helmeted suns! For sleeping man,
'twas hard to choose between such winsome days and such seducing nights.
But all the witcheries of that unwaning weather did not merely lend new
spells and potencies to the outward world. Inward they turned upon the
soul, especially when the still mild hours of eve came on; then, memory
shot her crystals as the clear ice most forms of noiseless twilights.
And all these subtle agencies, more and more they wrought on Ahab's
texture.

Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less
man has to do with aught that looks like death. Among sea-commanders,
the old greybeards will oftenest leave their berths to visit the
night-cloaked deck. It was so with Ahab; only that now, of late, he
seemed so much to live in the open air, that truly speaking, his visits
were more to the cabin, than from the cabin to the planks. "It feels
like going down into one's tomb,"--he would mutter to himself--"for an
old captain like me to be descending this narrow scuttle, to go to my
grave-dug berth."

So, almost every twenty-four hours, when the watches of the night were
set, and the band on deck sentinelled the slumbers of the band below;
and when if a rope was to be hauled upon the forecastle, the sailors
flung it not rudely down, as by day, but with some cautiousness dropt
it to its place for fear of disturbing their slumbering shipmates; when
this sort of steady quietude would begin to prevail, habitually, the
silent steersman would watch the cabin-scuttle; and ere long the old man
would emerge, gripping at the iron banister, to help his crippled way.
Some considering touch of humanity was in him; for at times like these,
he usually abstained from patrolling the quarter-deck; because to his
wearied mates, seeking repose within six inches of his ivory heel, such
would have been the reverberating crack and din of that bony step, that
their dreams would have been on the crunching teeth of sharks. But once,
the mood was on him too deep for common regardings; and as with heavy,
lumber-like pace he was measuring the ship from taffrail to mainmast,
Stubb, the old second mate, came up from below, with a certain
unassured, deprecating humorousness, hinted that if Captain Ahab was
pleased to walk the planks, then, no one could say nay; but there might
be some way of muffling the noise; hinting something indistinctly and
hesitatingly about a globe of tow, and the insertion into it, of the
ivory heel. Ah! Stubb, thou didst not know Ahab then.

"Am I a cannon-ball, Stubb," said Ahab, "that thou wouldst wad me that
fashion? But go thy ways; I had forgot. Below to thy nightly grave;
where such as ye sleep between shrouds, to use ye to the filling one at
last.--Down, dog, and kennel!"

Starting at the unforseen concluding exclamation of the so suddenly
scornful old man, Stubb was speechless a moment; then said excitedly, "I
am not used to be spoken to that way, sir; I do but less than half like
it, sir."

"Avast! gritted Ahab between his set teeth, and violently moving away,
as if to avoid some passionate temptation.

"No, sir; not yet," said Stubb, emboldened, "I will not tamely be called
a dog, sir."

"Then be called ten times a donkey, and a mule, and an ass, and begone,
or I'll clear the world of thee!"

As he said this, Ahab advanced upon him with such overbearing terrors in
his aspect, that Stubb involuntarily retreated.

"I was never served so before without giving a hard blow for it,"
muttered Stubb, as he found himself descending the cabin-scuttle. "It's
very queer. Stop, Stubb; somehow, now, I don't well know whether to go
back and strike him, or--what's that?--down here on my knees and pray
for him? Yes, that was the thought coming up in me; but it would be the
first time I ever DID pray. It's queer; very queer; and he's queer too;
aye, take him fore and aft, he's about the queerest old man Stubb ever
sailed with. How he flashed at me!--his eyes like powder-pans! is he
mad? Anyway there's something on his mind, as sure as there must be
something on a deck when it cracks. He aint in his bed now, either, more
than three hours out of the twenty-four; and he don't sleep then. Didn't
that Dough-Boy, the steward, tell me that of a morning he always finds
the old man's hammock clothes all rumpled and tumbled, and the sheets
down at the foot, and the coverlid almost tied into knots, and the
pillow a sort of frightful hot, as though a baked brick had been on
it? A hot old man! I guess he's got what some folks ashore call
a conscience; it's a kind of Tic-Dolly-row they say--worse nor a
toothache. Well, well; I don't know what it is, but the Lord keep me
from catching it. He's full of riddles; I wonder what he goes into the
after hold for, every night, as Dough-Boy tells me he suspects; what's
that for, I should like to know? Who's made appointments with him in
the hold? Ain't that queer, now? But there's no telling, it's the old
game--Here goes for a snooze. Damn me, it's worth a fellow's while to be
born into the world, if only to fall right asleep. And now that I think
of it, that's about the first thing babies do, and that's a sort of
queer, too. Damn me, but all things are queer, come to think of 'em. But
that's against my principles. Think not, is my eleventh commandment; and
sleep when you can, is my twelfth--So here goes again. But how's that?
didn't he call me a dog? blazes! he called me ten times a donkey, and
piled a lot of jackasses on top of THAT! He might as well have kicked
me, and done with it. Maybe he DID kick me, and I didn't observe it,
I was so taken all aback with his brow, somehow. It flashed like a
bleached bone. What the devil's the matter with me? I don't stand right
on my legs. Coming afoul of that old man has a sort of turned me wrong
side out. By the Lord, I must have been dreaming, though--How? how?
how?--but the only way's to stash it; so here goes to hammock again;
and in the morning, I'll see how this plaguey juggling thinks over by
daylight."



CHAPTER 30. The Pipe.


When Stubb had departed, Ahab stood for a while leaning over the
bulwarks; and then, as had been usual with him of late, calling a sailor
of the watch, he sent him below for his ivory stool, and also his pipe.
Lighting the pipe at the binnacle lamp and planting the stool on the
weather side of the deck, he sat and smoked.

In old Norse times, the thrones of the sea-loving Danish kings were
fabricated, saith tradition, of the tusks of the narwhale. How could one
look at Ahab then, seated on that tripod of bones, without bethinking
him of the royalty it symbolized? For a Khan of the plank, and a king of
the sea, and a great lord of Leviathans was Ahab.

Some moments passed, during which the thick vapour came from his mouth
in quick and constant puffs, which blew back again into his face. "How
now," he soliloquized at last, withdrawing the tube, "this smoking no
longer soothes. Oh, my pipe! hard must it go with me if thy charm be
gone! Here have I been unconsciously toiling, not pleasuring--aye, and
ignorantly smoking to windward all the while; to windward, and with
such nervous whiffs, as if, like the dying whale, my final jets were the
strongest and fullest of trouble. What business have I with this pipe?
This thing that is meant for sereneness, to send up mild white vapours
among mild white hairs, not among torn iron-grey locks like mine. I'll
smoke no more--"

He tossed the still lighted pipe into the sea. The fire hissed in the
waves; the same instant the ship shot by the bubble the sinking pipe
made. With slouched hat, Ahab lurchingly paced the planks.



CHAPTER 31. Queen Mab.


Next morning Stubb accosted Flask.

"Such a queer dream, King-Post, I never had. You know the old man's
ivory leg, well I dreamed he kicked me with it; and when I tried to kick
back, upon my soul, my little man, I kicked my leg right off! And then,
presto! Ahab seemed a pyramid, and I, like a blazing fool, kept kicking
at it. But what was still more curious, Flask--you know how curious all
dreams are--through all this rage that I was in, I somehow seemed to be
thinking to myself, that after all, it was not much of an insult, that
kick from Ahab. 'Why,' thinks I, 'what's the row? It's not a real leg,
only a false leg.' And there's a mighty difference between a living
thump and a dead thump. That's what makes a blow from the hand, Flask,
fifty times more savage to bear than a blow from a cane. The living
member--that makes the living insult, my little man. And thinks I to
myself all the while, mind, while I was stubbing my silly toes against
that cursed pyramid--so confoundedly contradictory was it all, all
the while, I say, I was thinking to myself, 'what's his leg now, but
a cane--a whalebone cane. Yes,' thinks I, 'it was only a playful
cudgelling--in fact, only a whaleboning that he gave me--not a base
kick. Besides,' thinks I, 'look at it once; why, the end of it--the foot
part--what a small sort of end it is; whereas, if a broad footed farmer
kicked me, THERE'S a devilish broad insult. But this insult is whittled
down to a point only.' But now comes the greatest joke of the
dream, Flask. While I was battering away at the pyramid, a sort of
badger-haired old merman, with a hump on his back, takes me by the
shoulders, and slews me round. 'What are you 'bout?' says he. Slid! man,
but I was frightened. Such a phiz! But, somehow, next moment I was over
the fright. 'What am I about?' says I at last. 'And what business is
that of yours, I should like to know, Mr. Humpback? Do YOU want a kick?'
By the lord, Flask, I had no sooner said that, than he turned round his
stern to me, bent over, and dragging up a lot of seaweed he had for a
clout--what do you think, I saw?--why thunder alive, man, his stern
was stuck full of marlinspikes, with the points out. Says I, on second
thoughts, 'I guess I won't kick you, old fellow.' 'Wise Stubb,' said he,
'wise Stubb;' and kept muttering it all the time, a sort of eating of
his own gums like a chimney hag. Seeing he wasn't going to stop saying
over his 'wise Stubb, wise Stubb,' I thought I might as well fall to
kicking the pyramid again. But I had only just lifted my foot for it,
when he roared out, 'Stop that kicking!' 'Halloa,' says I, 'what's
the matter now, old fellow?' 'Look ye here,' says he; 'let's argue
the insult. Captain Ahab kicked ye, didn't he?' 'Yes, he did,' says
I--'right HERE it was.' 'Very good,' says he--'he used his ivory leg,
didn't he?' 'Yes, he did,' says I. 'Well then,' says he, 'wise Stubb,
what have you to complain of? Didn't he kick with right good will? it
wasn't a common pitch pine leg he kicked with, was it? No, you were
kicked by a great man, and with a beautiful ivory leg, Stubb. It's an
honour; I consider it an honour. Listen, wise Stubb. In old England the
greatest lords think it great glory to be slapped by a queen, and made
garter-knights of; but, be YOUR boast, Stubb, that ye were kicked by
old Ahab, and made a wise man of. Remember what I say; BE kicked by him;
account his kicks honours; and on no account kick back; for you can't
help yourself, wise Stubb. Don't you see that pyramid?' With that, he
all of a sudden seemed somehow, in some queer fashion, to swim off into
the air. I snored; rolled over; and there I was in my hammock! Now, what
do you think of that dream, Flask?"

"I don't know; it seems a sort of foolish to me, tho.'"

"May be; may be. But it's made a wise man of me, Flask. D'ye see Ahab
standing there, sideways looking over the stern? Well, the best thing
you can do, Flask, is to let the old man alone; never speak to him,
whatever he says. Halloa! What's that he shouts? Hark!"

"Mast-head, there! Look sharp, all of ye! There are whales hereabouts!

"If ye see a white one, split your lungs for him!

"What do you think of that now, Flask? ain't there a small drop of
something queer about that, eh? A white whale--did ye mark that, man?
Look ye--there's something special in the wind. Stand by for it, Flask.
Ahab has that that's bloody on his mind. But, mum; he comes this way."



CHAPTER 32. Cetology.


Already we are boldly launched upon the deep; but soon we shall be lost
in its unshored, harbourless immensities. Ere that come to pass; ere the
Pequod's weedy hull rolls side by side with the barnacled hulls of the
leviathan; at the outset it is but well to attend to a matter almost
indispensable to a thorough appreciative understanding of the more
special leviathanic revelations and allusions of all sorts which are to
follow.

It is some systematized exhibition of the whale in his broad genera,
that I would now fain put before you. Yet is it no easy task. The
classification of the constituents of a chaos, nothing less is here
essayed. Listen to what the best and latest authorities have laid down.

"No branch of Zoology is so much involved as that which is entitled
Cetology," says Captain Scoresby, A.D. 1820.

"It is not my intention, were it in my power, to enter into the
inquiry as to the true method of dividing the cetacea into groups and
families.... Utter confusion exists among the historians of this animal"
(sperm whale), says Surgeon Beale, A.D. 1839.

"Unfitness to pursue our research in the unfathomable waters."
"Impenetrable veil covering our knowledge of the cetacea." "A field
strewn with thorns." "All these incomplete indications but serve to
torture us naturalists."

Thus speak of the whale, the great Cuvier, and John Hunter, and Lesson,
those lights of zoology and anatomy. Nevertheless, though of real
knowledge there be little, yet of books there are a plenty; and so in
some small degree, with cetology, or the science of whales. Many are
the men, small and great, old and new, landsmen and seamen, who have at
large or in little, written of the whale. Run over a few:--The Authors
of the Bible; Aristotle; Pliny; Aldrovandi; Sir Thomas Browne; Gesner;
Ray; Linnaeus; Rondeletius; Willoughby; Green; Artedi; Sibbald; Brisson;
Marten; Lacepede; Bonneterre; Desmarest; Baron Cuvier; Frederick Cuvier;
John Hunter; Owen; Scoresby; Beale; Bennett; J. Ross Browne; the
Author of Miriam Coffin; Olmstead; and the Rev. T. Cheever. But to what
ultimate generalizing purpose all these have written, the above cited
extracts will show.

Of the names in this list of whale authors, only those following Owen
ever saw living whales; and but one of them was a real professional
harpooneer and whaleman. I mean Captain Scoresby. On the separate
subject of the Greenland or right-whale, he is the best existing
authority. But Scoresby knew nothing and says nothing of the great
sperm whale, compared with which the Greenland whale is almost unworthy
mentioning. And here be it said, that the Greenland whale is an usurper
upon the throne of the seas. He is not even by any means the largest
of the whales. Yet, owing to the long priority of his claims, and the
profound ignorance which, till some seventy years back, invested the
then fabulous or utterly unknown sperm-whale, and which ignorance to
this present day still reigns in all but some few scientific retreats
and whale-ports; this usurpation has been every way complete. Reference
to nearly all the leviathanic allusions in the great poets of past days,
will satisfy you that the Greenland whale, without one rival, was to
them the monarch of the seas. But the time has at last come for a new
proclamation. This is Charing Cross; hear ye! good people all,--the
Greenland whale is deposed,--the great sperm whale now reigneth!

There are only two books in being which at all pretend to put the living
sperm whale before you, and at the same time, in the remotest degree
succeed in the attempt. Those books are Beale's and Bennett's; both in
their time surgeons to English South-Sea whale-ships, and both exact and
reliable men. The original matter touching the sperm whale to be found
in their volumes is necessarily small; but so far as it goes, it is of
excellent quality, though mostly confined to scientific description. As
yet, however, the sperm whale, scientific or poetic, lives not complete
in any literature. Far above all other hunted whales, his is an
unwritten life.

Now the various species of whales need some sort of popular
comprehensive classification, if only an easy outline one for the
present, hereafter to be filled in all its departments by subsequent
laborers. As no better man advances to take this matter in hand, I
hereupon offer my own poor endeavors. I promise nothing complete;
because any human thing supposed to be complete, must for that very
reason infallibly be faulty. I shall not pretend to a minute anatomical
description of the various species, or--in this place at least--to much
of any description. My object here is simply to project the draught of a
systematization of cetology. I am the architect, not the builder.

But it is a ponderous task; no ordinary letter-sorter in the Post-Office
is equal to it. To grope down into the bottom of the sea after them;
to have one's hands among the unspeakable foundations, ribs, and very
pelvis of the world; this is a fearful thing. What am I that I should
essay to hook the nose of this leviathan! The awful tauntings in Job
might well appal me. Will he the (leviathan) make a covenant with thee?
Behold the hope of him is vain! But I have swam through libraries and
sailed through oceans; I have had to do with whales with these visible
hands; I am in earnest; and I will try. There are some preliminaries to
settle.

First: The uncertain, unsettled condition of this science of Cetology
is in the very vestibule attested by the fact, that in some quarters it
still remains a moot point whether a whale be a fish. In his System of
Nature, A.D. 1776, Linnaeus declares, "I hereby separate the whales from
the fish." But of my own knowledge, I know that down to the year 1850,
sharks and shad, alewives and herring, against Linnaeus's express edict,
were still found dividing the possession of the same seas with the
Leviathan.

The grounds upon which Linnaeus would fain have banished the whales from
the waters, he states as follows: "On account of their warm bilocular
heart, their lungs, their movable eyelids, their hollow ears, penem
intrantem feminam mammis lactantem," and finally, "ex lege naturae jure
meritoque." I submitted all this to my friends Simeon Macey and Charley
Coffin, of Nantucket, both messmates of mine in a certain voyage, and
they united in the opinion that the reasons set forth were altogether
insufficient. Charley profanely hinted they were humbug.

Be it known that, waiving all argument, I take the good old fashioned
ground that the whale is a fish, and call upon holy Jonah to back me.
This fundamental thing settled, the next point is, in what internal
respect does the whale differ from other fish. Above, Linnaeus has given
you those items. But in brief, they are these: lungs and warm blood;
whereas, all other fish are lungless and cold blooded.

Next: how shall we define the whale, by his obvious externals, so as
conspicuously to label him for all time to come? To be short, then, a
whale is A SPOUTING FISH WITH A HORIZONTAL TAIL. There you have
him. However contracted, that definition is the result of expanded
meditation. A walrus spouts much like a whale, but the walrus is not a
fish, because he is amphibious. But the last term of the definition is
still more cogent, as coupled with the first. Almost any one must have
noticed that all the fish familiar to landsmen have not a flat, but a
vertical, or up-and-down tail. Whereas, among spouting fish the tail,
though it may be similarly shaped, invariably assumes a horizontal
position.

By the above definition of what a whale is, I do by no means exclude
from the leviathanic brotherhood any sea creature hitherto identified
with the whale by the best informed Nantucketers; nor, on the other
hand, link with it any fish hitherto authoritatively regarded as alien.*
Hence, all the smaller, spouting, and horizontal tailed fish must be
included in this ground-plan of Cetology. Now, then, come the grand
divisions of the entire whale host.


*I am aware that down to the present time, the fish styled Lamatins and
Dugongs (Pig-fish and Sow-fish of the Coffins of Nantucket) are included
by many naturalists among the whales. But as these pig-fish are a noisy,
contemptible set, mostly lurking in the mouths of rivers, and feeding on
wet hay, and especially as they do not spout, I deny their credentials
as whales; and have presented them with their passports to quit the
Kingdom of Cetology.


First: According to magnitude I divide the whales into three primary
BOOKS (subdivisible into CHAPTERS), and these shall comprehend them all,
both small and large.

I. THE FOLIO WHALE; II. the OCTAVO WHALE; III. the DUODECIMO WHALE.

As the type of the FOLIO I present the SPERM WHALE; of the OCTAVO, the
GRAMPUS; of the DUODECIMO, the PORPOISE.

FOLIOS. Among these I here include the following chapters:--I. The SPERM
WHALE; II. the RIGHT WHALE; III. the FIN-BACK WHALE; IV. the HUMP-BACKED
WHALE; V. the RAZOR-BACK WHALE; VI. the SULPHUR-BOTTOM WHALE.

BOOK I. (FOLIO), CHAPTER I. (SPERM WHALE).--This whale, among the
English of old vaguely known as the Trumpa whale, and the Physeter
whale, and the Anvil Headed whale, is the present Cachalot of the
French, and the Pottsfich of the Germans, and the Macrocephalus of the
Long Words. He is, without doubt, the largest inhabitant of the globe;
the most formidable of all whales to encounter; the most majestic in
aspect; and lastly, by far the most valuable in commerce; he being
the only creature from which that valuable substance, spermaceti, is
obtained. All his peculiarities will, in many other places, be enlarged
upon. It is chiefly with his name that I now have to do. Philologically
considered, it is absurd. Some centuries ago, when the Sperm whale was
almost wholly unknown in his own proper individuality, and when his oil
was only accidentally obtained from the stranded fish; in those days
spermaceti, it would seem, was popularly supposed to be derived from a
creature identical with the one then known in England as the Greenland
or Right Whale. It was the idea also, that this same spermaceti was that
quickening humor of the Greenland Whale which the first syllable of
the word literally expresses. In those times, also, spermaceti was
exceedingly scarce, not being used for light, but only as an ointment
and medicament. It was only to be had from the druggists as you nowadays
buy an ounce of rhubarb. When, as I opine, in the course of time, the
true nature of spermaceti became known, its original name was still
retained by the dealers; no doubt to enhance its value by a notion so
strangely significant of its scarcity. And so the appellation must at
last have come to be bestowed upon the whale from which this spermaceti
was really derived.

BOOK I. (FOLIO), CHAPTER II. (RIGHT WHALE).--In one respect this is the
most venerable of the leviathans, being the one first regularly hunted
by man. It yields the article commonly known as whalebone or baleen; and
the oil specially known as "whale oil," an inferior article in commerce.
Among the fishermen, he is indiscriminately designated by all the
following titles: The Whale; the Greenland Whale; the Black Whale;
the Great Whale; the True Whale; the Right Whale. There is a deal of
obscurity concerning the identity of the species thus multitudinously
baptised. What then is the whale, which I include in the second species
of my Folios? It is the Great Mysticetus of the English naturalists; the
Greenland Whale of the English whalemen; the Baliene Ordinaire of the
French whalemen; the Growlands Walfish of the Swedes. It is the whale
which for more than two centuries past has been hunted by the Dutch and
English in the Arctic seas; it is the whale which the American fishermen
have long pursued in the Indian ocean, on the Brazil Banks, on the Nor'
West Coast, and various other parts of the world, designated by them
Right Whale Cruising Grounds.

Some pretend to see a difference between the Greenland whale of the
English and the right whale of the Americans. But they precisely agree
in all their grand features; nor has there yet been presented a single
determinate fact upon which to ground a radical distinction. It is by
endless subdivisions based upon the most inconclusive differences, that
some departments of natural history become so repellingly intricate. The
right whale will be elsewhere treated of at some length, with reference
to elucidating the sperm whale.

BOOK I. (FOLIO), CHAPTER III. (FIN-BACK).--Under this head I reckon
a monster which, by the various names of Fin-Back, Tall-Spout, and
Long-John, has been seen almost in every sea and is commonly the whale
whose distant jet is so often descried by passengers crossing the
Atlantic, in the New York packet-tracks. In the length he attains, and
in his baleen, the Fin-back resembles the right whale, but is of a less
portly girth, and a lighter colour, approaching to olive. His great lips
present a cable-like aspect, formed by the intertwisting, slanting folds
of large wrinkles. His grand distinguishing feature, the fin, from which
he derives his name, is often a conspicuous object. This fin is some
three or four feet long, growing vertically from the hinder part of the
back, of an angular shape, and with a very sharp pointed end. Even if
not the slightest other part of the creature be visible, this isolated
fin will, at times, be seen plainly projecting from the surface. When
the sea is moderately calm, and slightly marked with spherical ripples,
and this gnomon-like fin stands up and casts shadows upon the wrinkled
surface, it may well be supposed that the watery circle surrounding it
somewhat resembles a dial, with its style and wavy hour-lines graved on
it. On that Ahaz-dial the shadow often goes back. The Fin-Back is not
gregarious. He seems a whale-hater, as some men are man-haters. Very
shy; always going solitary; unexpectedly rising to the surface in the
remotest and most sullen waters; his straight and single lofty jet
rising like a tall misanthropic spear upon a barren plain; gifted with
such wondrous power and velocity in swimming, as to defy all present
pursuit from man; this leviathan seems the banished and unconquerable
Cain of his race, bearing for his mark that style upon his back. From
having the baleen in his mouth, the Fin-Back is sometimes included with
the right whale, among a theoretic species denominated WHALEBONE WHALES,
that is, whales with baleen. Of these so called Whalebone whales, there
would seem to be several varieties, most of which, however, are little
known. Broad-nosed whales and beaked whales; pike-headed whales; bunched
whales; under-jawed whales and rostrated whales, are the fishermen's
names for a few sorts.

In connection with this appellative of "Whalebone whales," it is of
great importance to mention, that however such a nomenclature may be
convenient in facilitating allusions to some kind of whales, yet it is
in vain to attempt a clear classification of the Leviathan, founded upon
either his baleen, or hump, or fin, or teeth; notwithstanding that those
marked parts or features very obviously seem better adapted to afford
the basis for a regular system of Cetology than any other detached
bodily distinctions, which the whale, in his kinds, presents. How
then? The baleen, hump, back-fin, and teeth; these are things whose
peculiarities are indiscriminately dispersed among all sorts of whales,
without any regard to what may be the nature of their structure in other
and more essential particulars. Thus, the sperm whale and the humpbacked
whale, each has a hump; but there the similitude ceases. Then, this same
humpbacked whale and the Greenland whale, each of these has baleen;
but there again the similitude ceases. And it is just the same with the
other parts above mentioned. In various sorts of whales, they form such
irregular combinations; or, in the case of any one of them detached,
such an irregular isolation; as utterly to defy all general
methodization formed upon such a basis. On this rock every one of the
whale-naturalists has split.

But it may possibly be conceived that, in the internal parts of the
whale, in his anatomy--there, at least, we shall be able to hit the
right classification. Nay; what thing, for example, is there in the
Greenland whale's anatomy more striking than his baleen? Yet we have
seen that by his baleen it is impossible correctly to classify the
Greenland whale. And if you descend into the bowels of the various
leviathans, why there you will not find distinctions a fiftieth part as
available to the systematizer as those external ones already enumerated.
What then remains? nothing but to take hold of the whales bodily, in
their entire liberal volume, and boldly sort them that way. And this is
the Bibliographical system here adopted; and it is the only one that can
possibly succeed, for it alone is practicable. To proceed.

BOOK I. (FOLIO) CHAPTER IV. (HUMP-BACK).--This whale is often seen on
the northern American coast. He has been frequently captured there, and
towed into harbor. He has a great pack on him like a peddler; or you
might call him the Elephant and Castle whale. At any rate, the popular
name for him does not sufficiently distinguish him, since the sperm
whale also has a hump though a smaller one. His oil is not very
valuable. He has baleen. He is the most gamesome and light-hearted of
all the whales, making more gay foam and white water generally than any
other of them.

BOOK I. (FOLIO), CHAPTER V. (RAZOR-BACK).--Of this whale little is known
but his name. I have seen him at a distance off Cape Horn. Of a retiring
nature, he eludes both hunters and philosophers. Though no coward, he
has never yet shown any part of him but his back, which rises in a long
sharp ridge. Let him go. I know little more of him, nor does anybody
else.

BOOK I. (FOLIO), CHAPTER VI. (SULPHUR-BOTTOM).--Another retiring
gentleman, with a brimstone belly, doubtless got by scraping along the
Tartarian tiles in some of his profounder divings. He is seldom seen;
at least I have never seen him except in the remoter southern seas,
and then always at too great a distance to study his countenance. He is
never chased; he would run away with rope-walks of line. Prodigies are
told of him. Adieu, Sulphur Bottom! I can say nothing more that is true
of ye, nor can the oldest Nantucketer.

Thus ends BOOK I. (FOLIO), and now begins BOOK II. (OCTAVO).

OCTAVOES.*--These embrace the whales of middling magnitude, among which
present may be numbered:--I., the GRAMPUS; II., the BLACK FISH; III.,
the NARWHALE; IV., the THRASHER; V., the KILLER.


*Why this book of whales is not denominated the Quarto is very plain.
Because, while the whales of this order, though smaller than those of
the former order, nevertheless retain a proportionate likeness to them
in figure, yet the bookbinder's Quarto volume in its dimensioned form
does not preserve the shape of the Folio volume, but the Octavo volume
does.


BOOK II. (OCTAVO), CHAPTER I. (GRAMPUS).--Though this fish, whose
loud sonorous breathing, or rather blowing, has furnished a proverb
to landsmen, is so well known a denizen of the deep, yet is he not
popularly classed among whales. But possessing all the grand distinctive
features of the leviathan, most naturalists have recognised him for one.
He is of moderate octavo size, varying from fifteen to twenty-five feet
in length, and of corresponding dimensions round the waist. He swims in
herds; he is never regularly hunted, though his oil is considerable in
quantity, and pretty good for light. By some fishermen his approach is
regarded as premonitory of the advance of the great sperm whale.

BOOK II. (OCTAVO), CHAPTER II. (BLACK FISH).--I give the popular
fishermen's names for all these fish, for generally they are the best.
Where any name happens to be vague or inexpressive, I shall say so,
and suggest another. I do so now, touching the Black Fish, so-called,
because blackness is the rule among almost all whales. So, call him the
Hyena Whale, if you please. His voracity is well known, and from the
circumstance that the inner angles of his lips are curved upwards, he
carries an everlasting Mephistophelean grin on his face. This whale
averages some sixteen or eighteen feet in length. He is found in almost
all latitudes. He has a peculiar way of showing his dorsal hooked fin
in swimming, which looks something like a Roman nose. When not more
profitably employed, the sperm whale hunters sometimes capture the Hyena
whale, to keep up the supply of cheap oil for domestic employment--as
some frugal housekeepers, in the absence of company, and quite alone by
themselves, burn unsavory tallow instead of odorous wax. Though their
blubber is very thin, some of these whales will yield you upwards of
thirty gallons of oil.

BOOK II. (OCTAVO), CHAPTER III. (NARWHALE), that is, NOSTRIL
WHALE.--Another instance of a curiously named whale, so named I suppose
from his peculiar horn being originally mistaken for a peaked nose. The
creature is some sixteen feet in length, while its horn averages five
feet, though some exceed ten, and even attain to fifteen feet. Strictly
speaking, this horn is but a lengthened tusk, growing out from the jaw
in a line a little depressed from the horizontal. But it is only
found on the sinister side, which has an ill effect, giving its owner
something analogous to the aspect of a clumsy left-handed man. What
precise purpose this ivory horn or lance answers, it would be hard to
say. It does not seem to be used like the blade of the sword-fish and
bill-fish; though some sailors tell me that the Narwhale employs it for
a rake in turning over the bottom of the sea for food. Charley Coffin
said it was used for an ice-piercer; for the Narwhale, rising to the
surface of the Polar Sea, and finding it sheeted with ice, thrusts his
horn up, and so breaks through. But you cannot prove either of these
surmises to be correct. My own opinion is, that however this one-sided
horn may really be used by the Narwhale--however that may be--it would
certainly be very convenient to him for a folder in reading pamphlets.
The Narwhale I have heard called the Tusked whale, the Horned whale, and
the Unicorn whale. He is certainly a curious example of the Unicornism
to be found in almost every kingdom of animated nature. From certain
cloistered old authors I have gathered that this same sea-unicorn's horn
was in ancient days regarded as the great antidote against poison,
and as such, preparations of it brought immense prices. It was also
distilled to a volatile salts for fainting ladies, the same way that the
horns of the male deer are manufactured into hartshorn. Originally it
was in itself accounted an object of great curiosity. Black Letter tells
me that Sir Martin Frobisher on his return from that voyage, when
Queen Bess did gallantly wave her jewelled hand to him from a window
of Greenwich Palace, as his bold ship sailed down the Thames; "when Sir
Martin returned from that voyage," saith Black Letter, "on bended knees
he presented to her highness a prodigious long horn of the Narwhale,
which for a long period after hung in the castle at Windsor." An Irish
author avers that the Earl of Leicester, on bended knees, did likewise
present to her highness another horn, pertaining to a land beast of the
unicorn nature.

The Narwhale has a very picturesque, leopard-like look, being of a
milk-white ground colour, dotted with round and oblong spots of black.
His oil is very superior, clear and fine; but there is little of it, and
he is seldom hunted. He is mostly found in the circumpolar seas.

BOOK II. (OCTAVO), CHAPTER IV. (KILLER).--Of this whale little is
precisely known to the Nantucketer, and nothing at all to the professed
naturalist. From what I have seen of him at a distance, I should say
that he was about the bigness of a grampus. He is very savage--a sort of
Feegee fish. He sometimes takes the great Folio whales by the lip, and
hangs there like a leech, till the mighty brute is worried to death. The
Killer is never hunted. I never heard what sort of oil he has. Exception
might be taken to the name bestowed upon this whale, on the ground
of its indistinctness. For we are all killers, on land and on sea;
Bonapartes and Sharks included.

BOOK II. (OCTAVO), CHAPTER V. (THRASHER).--This gentleman is famous for
his tail, which he uses for a ferule in thrashing his foes. He mounts
the Folio whale's back, and as he swims, he works his passage by
flogging him; as some schoolmasters get along in the world by a similar
process. Still less is known of the Thrasher than of the Killer. Both
are outlaws, even in the lawless seas.

Thus ends BOOK II. (OCTAVO), and begins BOOK III. (DUODECIMO).

DUODECIMOES.--These include the smaller whales. I. The Huzza Porpoise.
II. The Algerine Porpoise. III. The Mealy-mouthed Porpoise.

To those who have not chanced specially to study the subject, it may
possibly seem strange, that fishes not commonly exceeding four or five
feet should be marshalled among WHALES--a word, which, in the popular
sense, always conveys an idea of hugeness. But the creatures set
down above as Duodecimoes are infallibly whales, by the terms of my
definition of what a whale is--i.e. a spouting fish, with a horizontal
tail.

BOOK III. (DUODECIMO), CHAPTER 1. (HUZZA PORPOISE).--This is the
common porpoise found almost all over the globe. The name is of my own
bestowal; for there are more than one sort of porpoises, and something
must be done to distinguish them. I call him thus, because he always
swims in hilarious shoals, which upon the broad sea keep tossing
themselves to heaven like caps in a Fourth-of-July crowd. Their
appearance is generally hailed with delight by the mariner. Full of fine
spirits, they invariably come from the breezy billows to windward. They
are the lads that always live before the wind. They are accounted a
lucky omen. If you yourself can withstand three cheers at beholding
these vivacious fish, then heaven help ye; the spirit of godly
gamesomeness is not in ye. A well-fed, plump Huzza Porpoise will
yield you one good gallon of good oil. But the fine and delicate fluid
extracted from his jaws is exceedingly valuable. It is in request among
jewellers and watchmakers. Sailors put it on their hones. Porpoise
meat is good eating, you know. It may never have occurred to you that
a porpoise spouts. Indeed, his spout is so small that it is not very
readily discernible. But the next time you have a chance, watch him; and
you will then see the great Sperm whale himself in miniature.

BOOK III. (DUODECIMO), CHAPTER II. (ALGERINE PORPOISE).--A pirate. Very
savage. He is only found, I think, in the Pacific. He is somewhat larger
than the Huzza Porpoise, but much of the same general make. Provoke him,
and he will buckle to a shark. I have lowered for him many times, but
never yet saw him captured.

BOOK III. (DUODECIMO), CHAPTER III. (MEALY-MOUTHED PORPOISE).--The
largest kind of Porpoise; and only found in the Pacific, so far as it is
known. The only English name, by which he has hitherto been designated,
is that of the fishers--Right-Whale Porpoise, from the circumstance that
he is chiefly found in the vicinity of that Folio. In shape, he differs
in some degree from the Huzza Porpoise, being of a less rotund and jolly
girth; indeed, he is of quite a neat and gentleman-like figure. He has
no fins on his back (most other porpoises have), he has a lovely tail,
and sentimental Indian eyes of a hazel hue. But his mealy-mouth spoils
all. Though his entire back down to his side fins is of a deep sable,
yet a boundary line, distinct as the mark in a ship's hull, called
the "bright waist," that line streaks him from stem to stern, with two
separate colours, black above and white below. The white comprises part
of his head, and the whole of his mouth, which makes him look as if he
had just escaped from a felonious visit to a meal-bag. A most mean and
mealy aspect! His oil is much like that of the common porpoise.


Beyond the DUODECIMO, this system does not proceed, inasmuch as
the Porpoise is the smallest of the whales. Above, you have all the
Leviathans of note. But there are a rabble of uncertain, fugitive,
half-fabulous whales, which, as an American whaleman, I know by
reputation, but not personally. I shall enumerate them by their
fore-castle appellations; for possibly such a list may be valuable to
future investigators, who may complete what I have here but begun. If
any of the following whales, shall hereafter be caught and marked, then
he can readily be incorporated into this System, according to his Folio,
Octavo, or Duodecimo magnitude:--The Bottle-Nose Whale; the Junk Whale;
the Pudding-Headed Whale; the Cape Whale; the Leading Whale; the Cannon
Whale; the Scragg Whale; the Coppered Whale; the Elephant Whale; the
Iceberg Whale; the Quog Whale; the Blue Whale; etc. From Icelandic,
Dutch, and old English authorities, there might be quoted other lists of
uncertain whales, blessed with all manner of uncouth names. But I omit
them as altogether obsolete; and can hardly help suspecting them for
mere sounds, full of Leviathanism, but signifying nothing.

Finally: It was stated at the outset, that this system would not be
here, and at once, perfected. You cannot but plainly see that I have
kept my word. But I now leave my cetological System standing thus
unfinished, even as the great Cathedral of Cologne was left, with the
crane still standing upon the top of the uncompleted tower. For small
erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true
ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever
completing anything. This whole book is but a draught--nay, but the
draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!



CHAPTER 33. The Specksnyder.


Concerning the officers of the whale-craft, this seems as good a place
as any to set down a little domestic peculiarity on ship-board, arising
from the existence of the harpooneer class of officers, a class unknown
of course in any other marine than the whale-fleet.

The large importance attached to the harpooneer's vocation is evinced
by the fact, that originally in the old Dutch Fishery, two centuries
and more ago, the command of a whale ship was not wholly lodged in
the person now called the captain, but was divided between him and an
officer called the Specksnyder. Literally this word means Fat-Cutter;
usage, however, in time made it equivalent to Chief Harpooneer. In
those days, the captain's authority was restricted to the navigation
and general management of the vessel; while over the whale-hunting
department and all its concerns, the Specksnyder or Chief Harpooneer
reigned supreme. In the British Greenland Fishery, under the corrupted
title of Specksioneer, this old Dutch official is still retained, but
his former dignity is sadly abridged. At present he ranks simply
as senior Harpooneer; and as such, is but one of the captain's more
inferior subalterns. Nevertheless, as upon the good conduct of the
harpooneers the success of a whaling voyage largely depends, and since
in the American Fishery he is not only an important officer in the boat,
but under certain circumstances (night watches on a whaling ground) the
command of the ship's deck is also his; therefore the grand political
maxim of the sea demands, that he should nominally live apart from
the men before the mast, and be in some way distinguished as their
professional superior; though always, by them, familiarly regarded as
their social equal.

Now, the grand distinction drawn between officer and man at sea, is
this--the first lives aft, the last forward. Hence, in whale-ships and
merchantmen alike, the mates have their quarters with the captain; and
so, too, in most of the American whalers the harpooneers are lodged in
the after part of the ship. That is to say, they take their meals in the
captain's cabin, and sleep in a place indirectly communicating with it.

Though the long period of a Southern whaling voyage (by far the longest
of all voyages now or ever made by man), the peculiar perils of it, and
the community of interest prevailing among a company, all of whom, high
or low, depend for their profits, not upon fixed wages, but upon their
common luck, together with their common vigilance, intrepidity, and
hard work; though all these things do in some cases tend to beget a less
rigorous discipline than in merchantmen generally; yet, never mind
how much like an old Mesopotamian family these whalemen may, in some
primitive instances, live together; for all that, the punctilious
externals, at least, of the quarter-deck are seldom materially relaxed,
and in no instance done away. Indeed, many are the Nantucket ships in
which you will see the skipper parading his quarter-deck with an elated
grandeur not surpassed in any military navy; nay, extorting almost
as much outward homage as if he wore the imperial purple, and not the
shabbiest of pilot-cloth.

And though of all men the moody captain of the Pequod was the least
given to that sort of shallowest assumption; and though the only homage
he ever exacted, was implicit, instantaneous obedience; though he
required no man to remove the shoes from his feet ere stepping upon
the quarter-deck; and though there were times when, owing to peculiar
circumstances connected with events hereafter to be detailed, he
addressed them in unusual terms, whether of condescension or IN
TERROREM, or otherwise; yet even Captain Ahab was by no means
unobservant of the paramount forms and usages of the sea.

Nor, perhaps, will it fail to be eventually perceived, that behind those
forms and usages, as it were, he sometimes masked himself; incidentally
making use of them for other and more private ends than they were
legitimately intended to subserve. That certain sultanism of his brain,
which had otherwise in a good degree remained unmanifested; through
those forms that same sultanism became incarnate in an irresistible
dictatorship. For be a man's intellectual superiority what it will,
it can never assume the practical, available supremacy over other men,
without the aid of some sort of external arts and entrenchments, always,
in themselves, more or less paltry and base. This it is, that for ever
keeps God's true princes of the Empire from the world's hustings; and
leaves the highest honours that this air can give, to those men who
become famous more through their infinite inferiority to the choice
hidden handful of the Divine Inert, than through their undoubted
superiority over the dead level of the mass. Such large virtue lurks
in these small things when extreme political superstitions invest them,
that in some royal instances even to idiot imbecility they have imparted
potency. But when, as in the case of Nicholas the Czar, the ringed crown
of geographical empire encircles an imperial brain; then, the plebeian
herds crouch abased before the tremendous centralization. Nor, will the
tragic dramatist who would depict mortal indomitableness in its fullest
sweep and direct swing, ever forget a hint, incidentally so important in
his art, as the one now alluded to.

But Ahab, my Captain, still moves before me in all his Nantucket
grimness and shagginess; and in this episode touching Emperors and
Kings, I must not conceal that I have only to do with a poor old
whale-hunter like him; and, therefore, all outward majestical trappings
and housings are denied me. Oh, Ahab! what shall be grand in thee, it
must needs be plucked at from the skies, and dived for in the deep, and
featured in the unbodied air!



CHAPTER 34. The Cabin-Table.


It is noon; and Dough-Boy, the steward, thrusting his pale loaf-of-bread
face from the cabin-scuttle, announces dinner to his lord and
master; who, sitting in the lee quarter-boat, has just been taking an
observation of the sun; and is now mutely reckoning the latitude on the
smooth, medallion-shaped tablet, reserved for that daily purpose on
the upper part of his ivory leg. From his complete inattention to the
tidings, you would think that moody Ahab had not heard his menial. But
presently, catching hold of the mizen shrouds, he swings himself to
the deck, and in an even, unexhilarated voice, saying, "Dinner, Mr.
Starbuck," disappears into the cabin.

When the last echo of his sultan's step has died away, and Starbuck, the
first Emir, has every reason to suppose that he is seated, then Starbuck
rouses from his quietude, takes a few turns along the planks, and, after
a grave peep into the binnacle, says, with some touch of pleasantness,
"Dinner, Mr. Stubb," and descends the scuttle. The second Emir lounges
about the rigging awhile, and then slightly shaking the main brace, to
see whether it will be all right with that important rope, he likewise
takes up the old burden, and with a rapid "Dinner, Mr. Flask," follows
after his predecessors.

But the third Emir, now seeing himself all alone on the quarter-deck,
seems to feel relieved from some curious restraint; for, tipping all
sorts of knowing winks in all sorts of directions, and kicking off his
shoes, he strikes into a sharp but noiseless squall of a hornpipe right
over the Grand Turk's head; and then, by a dexterous sleight, pitching
his cap up into the mizentop for a shelf, he goes down rollicking so
far at least as he remains visible from the deck, reversing all other
processions, by bringing up the rear with music. But ere stepping into
the cabin doorway below, he pauses, ships a new face altogether, and,
then, independent, hilarious little Flask enters King Ahab's presence,
in the character of Abjectus, or the Slave.

It is not the least among the strange things bred by the intense
artificialness of sea-usages, that while in the open air of the deck
some officers will, upon provocation, bear themselves boldly and
defyingly enough towards their commander; yet, ten to one, let those
very officers the next moment go down to their customary dinner in that
same commander's cabin, and straightway their inoffensive, not to say
deprecatory and humble air towards him, as he sits at the head of
the table; this is marvellous, sometimes most comical. Wherefore this
difference? A problem? Perhaps not. To have been Belshazzar, King of
Babylon; and to have been Belshazzar, not haughtily but courteously,
therein certainly must have been some touch of mundane grandeur. But he
who in the rightly regal and intelligent spirit presides over his own
private dinner-table of invited guests, that man's unchallenged power
and dominion of individual influence for the time; that man's royalty of
state transcends Belshazzar's, for Belshazzar was not the greatest. Who
has but once dined his friends, has tasted what it is to be Caesar. It
is a witchery of social czarship which there is no withstanding. Now,
if to this consideration you superadd the official supremacy of a
ship-master, then, by inference, you will derive the cause of that
peculiarity of sea-life just mentioned.

Over his ivory-inlaid table, Ahab presided like a mute, maned
sea-lion on the white coral beach, surrounded by his warlike but still
deferential cubs. In his own proper turn, each officer waited to be
served. They were as little children before Ahab; and yet, in Ahab,
there seemed not to lurk the smallest social arrogance. With one mind,
their intent eyes all fastened upon the old man's knife, as he carved
the chief dish before him. I do not suppose that for the world they
would have profaned that moment with the slightest observation, even
upon so neutral a topic as the weather. No! And when reaching out his
knife and fork, between which the slice of beef was locked, Ahab thereby
motioned Starbuck's plate towards him, the mate received his meat as
though receiving alms; and cut it tenderly; and a little started
if, perchance, the knife grazed against the plate; and chewed it
noiselessly; and swallowed it, not without circumspection. For, like
the Coronation banquet at Frankfort, where the German Emperor profoundly
dines with the seven Imperial Electors, so these cabin meals were
somehow solemn meals, eaten in awful silence; and yet at table old Ahab
forbade not conversation; only he himself was dumb. What a relief it was
to choking Stubb, when a rat made a sudden racket in the hold below. And
poor little Flask, he was the youngest son, and little boy of this weary
family party. His were the shinbones of the saline beef; his would have
been the drumsticks. For Flask to have presumed to help himself, this
must have seemed to him tantamount to larceny in the first degree. Had
he helped himself at that table, doubtless, never more would he have
been able to hold his head up in this honest world; nevertheless,
strange to say, Ahab never forbade him. And had Flask helped himself,
the chances were Ahab had never so much as noticed it. Least of all, did
Flask presume to help himself to butter. Whether he thought the owners
of the ship denied it to him, on account of its clotting his clear,
sunny complexion; or whether he deemed that, on so long a voyage in such
marketless waters, butter was at a premium, and therefore was not for
him, a subaltern; however it was, Flask, alas! was a butterless man!

Another thing. Flask was the last person down at the dinner, and Flask
is the first man up. Consider! For hereby Flask's dinner was badly
jammed in point of time. Starbuck and Stubb both had the start of him;
and yet they also have the privilege of lounging in the rear. If Stubb
even, who is but a peg higher than Flask, happens to have but a small
appetite, and soon shows symptoms of concluding his repast, then Flask
must bestir himself, he will not get more than three mouthfuls that day;
for it is against holy usage for Stubb to precede Flask to the deck.
Therefore it was that Flask once admitted in private, that ever since he
had arisen to the dignity of an officer, from that moment he had never
known what it was to be otherwise than hungry, more or less. For what
he ate did not so much relieve his hunger, as keep it immortal in him.
Peace and satisfaction, thought Flask, have for ever departed from
my stomach. I am an officer; but, how I wish I could fish a bit of
old-fashioned beef in the forecastle, as I used to when I was before the
mast. There's the fruits of promotion now; there's the vanity of glory:
there's the insanity of life! Besides, if it were so that any mere
sailor of the Pequod had a grudge against Flask in Flask's official
capacity, all that sailor had to do, in order to obtain ample vengeance,
was to go aft at dinner-time, and get a peep at Flask through the cabin
sky-light, sitting silly and dumfoundered before awful Ahab.

Now, Ahab and his three mates formed what may be called the first table
in the Pequod's cabin. After their departure, taking place in inverted
order to their arrival, the canvas cloth was cleared, or rather was
restored to some hurried order by the pallid steward. And then the three
harpooneers were bidden to the feast, they being its residuary legatees.
They made a sort of temporary servants' hall of the high and mighty
cabin.

In strange contrast to the hardly tolerable constraint and nameless
invisible domineerings of the captain's table, was the entire care-free
license and ease, the almost frantic democracy of those inferior fellows
the harpooneers. While their masters, the mates, seemed afraid of the
sound of the hinges of their own jaws, the harpooneers chewed their food
with such a relish that there was a report to it. They dined like lords;
they filled their bellies like Indian ships all day loading with spices.
Such portentous appetites had Queequeg and Tashtego, that to fill out
the vacancies made by the previous repast, often the pale Dough-Boy was
fain to bring on a great baron of salt-junk, seemingly quarried out of
the solid ox. And if he were not lively about it, if he did not go with
a nimble hop-skip-and-jump, then Tashtego had an ungentlemanly way of
accelerating him by darting a fork at his back, harpoon-wise. And once
Daggoo, seized with a sudden humor, assisted Dough-Boy's memory by
snatching him up bodily, and thrusting his head into a great empty
wooden trencher, while Tashtego, knife in hand, began laying out the
circle preliminary to scalping him. He was naturally a very nervous,
shuddering sort of little fellow, this bread-faced steward; the progeny
of a bankrupt baker and a hospital nurse. And what with the standing
spectacle of the black terrific Ahab, and the periodical tumultuous
visitations of these three savages, Dough-Boy's whole life was one
continual lip-quiver. Commonly, after seeing the harpooneers furnished
with all things they demanded, he would escape from their clutches into
his little pantry adjoining, and fearfully peep out at them through the
blinds of its door, till all was over.

It was a sight to see Queequeg seated over against Tashtego, opposing
his filed teeth to the Indian's: crosswise to them, Daggoo seated on the
floor, for a bench would have brought his hearse-plumed head to the low
carlines; at every motion of his colossal limbs, making the low cabin
framework to shake, as when an African elephant goes passenger in a
ship. But for all this, the great negro was wonderfully abstemious,
not to say dainty. It seemed hardly possible that by such comparatively
small mouthfuls he could keep up the vitality diffused through so broad,
baronial, and superb a person. But, doubtless, this noble savage fed
strong and drank deep of the abounding element of air; and through his
dilated nostrils snuffed in the sublime life of the worlds. Not by
beef or by bread, are giants made or nourished. But Queequeg, he had a
mortal, barbaric smack of the lip in eating--an ugly sound enough--so
much so, that the trembling Dough-Boy almost looked to see whether
any marks of teeth lurked in his own lean arms. And when he would hear
Tashtego singing out for him to produce himself, that his bones might be
picked, the simple-witted steward all but shattered the crockery hanging
round him in the pantry, by his sudden fits of the palsy. Nor did the
whetstone which the harpooneers carried in their pockets, for their
lances and other weapons; and with which whetstones, at dinner, they
would ostentatiously sharpen their knives; that grating sound did not at
all tend to tranquillize poor Dough-Boy. How could he forget that in his
Island days, Queequeg, for one, must certainly have been guilty of some
murderous, convivial indiscretions. Alas! Dough-Boy! hard fares the
white waiter who waits upon cannibals. Not a napkin should he carry on
his arm, but a buckler. In good time, though, to his great delight,
the three salt-sea warriors would rise and depart; to his credulous,
fable-mongering ears, all their martial bones jingling in them at every
step, like Moorish scimetars in scabbards.

But, though these barbarians dined in the cabin, and nominally lived
there; still, being anything but sedentary in their habits, they were
scarcely ever in it except at mealtimes, and just before sleeping-time,
when they passed through it to their own peculiar quarters.

In this one matter, Ahab seemed no exception to most American whale
captains, who, as a set, rather incline to the opinion that by rights
the ship's cabin belongs to them; and that it is by courtesy alone that
anybody else is, at any time, permitted there. So that, in real truth,
the mates and harpooneers of the Pequod might more properly be said to
have lived out of the cabin than in it. For when they did enter it, it
was something as a street-door enters a house; turning inwards for
a moment, only to be turned out the next; and, as a permanent thing,
residing in the open air. Nor did they lose much hereby; in the cabin
was no companionship; socially, Ahab was inaccessible. Though nominally
included in the census of Christendom, he was still an alien to it. He
lived in the world, as the last of the Grisly Bears lived in settled
Missouri. And as when Spring and Summer had departed, that wild Logan of
the woods, burying himself in the hollow of a tree, lived out the winter
there, sucking his own paws; so, in his inclement, howling old age,
Ahab's soul, shut up in the caved trunk of his body, there fed upon the
sullen paws of its gloom!



CHAPTER 35. The Mast-Head.


It was during the more pleasant weather, that in due rotation with the
other seamen my first mast-head came round.

In most American whalemen the mast-heads are manned almost
simultaneously with the vessel's leaving her port; even though she may
have fifteen thousand miles, and more, to sail ere reaching her proper
cruising ground. And if, after a three, four, or five years' voyage
she is drawing nigh home with anything empty in her--say, an empty vial
even--then, her mast-heads are kept manned to the last; and not till her
skysail-poles sail in among the spires of the port, does she altogether
relinquish the hope of capturing one whale more.

Now, as the business of standing mast-heads, ashore or afloat, is a very
ancient and interesting one, let us in some measure expatiate here.
I take it, that the earliest standers of mast-heads were the old
Egyptians; because, in all my researches, I find none prior to them.
For though their progenitors, the builders of Babel, must doubtless, by
their tower, have intended to rear the loftiest mast-head in all Asia,
or Africa either; yet (ere the final truck was put to it) as that great
stone mast of theirs may be said to have gone by the board, in the dread
gale of God's wrath; therefore, we cannot give these Babel builders
priority over the Egyptians. And that the Egyptians were a nation of
mast-head standers, is an assertion based upon the general belief among
archaeologists, that the first pyramids were founded for astronomical
purposes: a theory singularly supported by the peculiar stair-like
formation of all four sides of those edifices; whereby, with prodigious
long upliftings of their legs, those old astronomers were wont to mount
to the apex, and sing out for new stars; even as the look-outs of a
modern ship sing out for a sail, or a whale just bearing in sight. In
Saint Stylites, the famous Christian hermit of old times, who built him
a lofty stone pillar in the desert and spent the whole latter portion of
his life on its summit, hoisting his food from the ground with a
tackle; in him we have a remarkable instance of a dauntless
stander-of-mast-heads; who was not to be driven from his place by fogs
or frosts, rain, hail, or sleet; but valiantly facing everything out to
the last, literally died at his post. Of modern standers-of-mast-heads
we have but a lifeless set; mere stone, iron, and bronze men; who,
though well capable of facing out a stiff gale, are still entirely
incompetent to the business of singing out upon discovering any strange
sight. There is Napoleon; who, upon the top of the column of Vendome,
stands with arms folded, some one hundred and fifty feet in the air;
careless, now, who rules the decks below; whether Louis Philippe, Louis
Blanc, or Louis the Devil. Great Washington, too, stands high aloft on
his towering main-mast in Baltimore, and like one of Hercules' pillars,
his column marks that point of human grandeur beyond which few mortals
will go. Admiral Nelson, also, on a capstan of gun-metal, stands his
mast-head in Trafalgar Square; and ever when most obscured by that
London smoke, token is yet given that a hidden hero is there; for
where there is smoke, must be fire. But neither great Washington, nor
Napoleon, nor Nelson, will answer a single hail from below, however
madly invoked to befriend by their counsels the distracted decks
upon which they gaze; however it may be surmised, that their spirits
penetrate through the thick haze of the future, and descry what shoals
and what rocks must be shunned.

It may seem unwarrantable to couple in any respect the mast-head
standers of the land with those of the sea; but that in truth it is
not so, is plainly evinced by an item for which Obed Macy, the sole
historian of Nantucket, stands accountable. The worthy Obed tells us,
that in the early times of the whale fishery, ere ships were regularly
launched in pursuit of the game, the people of that island erected lofty
spars along the sea-coast, to which the look-outs ascended by means
of nailed cleats, something as fowls go upstairs in a hen-house. A few
years ago this same plan was adopted by the Bay whalemen of New Zealand,
who, upon descrying the game, gave notice to the ready-manned boats nigh
the beach. But this custom has now become obsolete; turn we then to the
one proper mast-head, that of a whale-ship at sea. The three mast-heads
are kept manned from sun-rise to sun-set; the seamen taking their
regular turns (as at the helm), and relieving each other every two
hours. In the serene weather of the tropics it is exceedingly pleasant
the mast-head; nay, to a dreamy meditative man it is delightful. There
you stand, a hundred feet above the silent decks, striding along the
deep, as if the masts were gigantic stilts, while beneath you and
between your legs, as it were, swim the hugest monsters of the sea, even
as ships once sailed between the boots of the famous Colossus at old
Rhodes. There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with
nothing ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship indolently rolls; the
drowsy trade winds blow; everything resolves you into languor. For the
most part, in this tropic whaling life, a sublime uneventfulness invests
you; you hear no news; read no gazettes; extras with startling accounts
of commonplaces never delude you into unnecessary excitements; you hear
of no domestic afflictions; bankrupt securities; fall of stocks; are
never troubled with the thought of what you shall have for dinner--for
all your meals for three years and more are snugly stowed in casks, and
your bill of fare is immutable.

In one of those southern whalesmen, on a long three or four years'
voyage, as often happens, the sum of the various hours you spend at the
mast-head would amount to several entire months. And it is much to be
deplored that the place to which you devote so considerable a portion
of the whole term of your natural life, should be so sadly destitute
of anything approaching to a cosy inhabitiveness, or adapted to breed a
comfortable localness of feeling, such as pertains to a bed, a hammock,
a hearse, a sentry box, a pulpit, a coach, or any other of those small
and snug contrivances in which men temporarily isolate themselves. Your
most usual point of perch is the head of the t' gallant-mast, where you
stand upon two thin parallel sticks (almost peculiar to whalemen) called
the t' gallant cross-trees. Here, tossed about by the sea, the beginner
feels about as cosy as he would standing on a bull's horns. To be sure,
in cold weather you may carry your house aloft with you, in the shape of
a watch-coat; but properly speaking the thickest watch-coat is no more
of a house than the unclad body; for as the soul is glued inside of its
fleshy tabernacle, and cannot freely move about in it, nor even move out
of it, without running great risk of perishing (like an ignorant pilgrim
crossing the snowy Alps in winter); so a watch-coat is not so much of
a house as it is a mere envelope, or additional skin encasing you. You
cannot put a shelf or chest of drawers in your body, and no more can you
make a convenient closet of your watch-coat.

Concerning all this, it is much to be deplored that the mast-heads of a
southern whale ship are unprovided with those enviable little tents
or pulpits, called CROW'S-NESTS, in which the look-outs of a Greenland
whaler are protected from the inclement weather of the frozen seas. In
the fireside narrative of Captain Sleet, entitled "A Voyage among the
Icebergs, in quest of the Greenland Whale, and incidentally for the
re-discovery of the Lost Icelandic Colonies of Old Greenland;" in
this admirable volume, all standers of mast-heads are furnished with
a charmingly circumstantial account of the then recently invented
CROW'S-NEST of the Glacier, which was the name of Captain Sleet's good
craft. He called it the SLEET'S CROW'S-NEST, in honour of himself; he
being the original inventor and patentee, and free from all ridiculous
false delicacy, and holding that if we call our own children after our
own names (we fathers being the original inventors and patentees), so
likewise should we denominate after ourselves any other apparatus we
may beget. In shape, the Sleet's crow's-nest is something like a large
tierce or pipe; it is open above, however, where it is furnished with
a movable side-screen to keep to windward of your head in a hard gale.
Being fixed on the summit of the mast, you ascend into it through a
little trap-hatch in the bottom. On the after side, or side next the
stern of the ship, is a comfortable seat, with a locker underneath for
umbrellas, comforters, and coats. In front is a leather rack, in which
to keep your speaking trumpet, pipe, telescope, and other nautical
conveniences. When Captain Sleet in person stood his mast-head in this
crow's-nest of his, he tells us that he always had a rifle with him
(also fixed in the rack), together with a powder flask and shot, for
the purpose of popping off the stray narwhales, or vagrant sea unicorns
infesting those waters; for you cannot successfully shoot at them from
the deck owing to the resistance of the water, but to shoot down upon
them is a very different thing. Now, it was plainly a labor of love
for Captain Sleet to describe, as he does, all the little detailed
conveniences of his crow's-nest; but though he so enlarges upon many
of these, and though he treats us to a very scientific account of his
experiments in this crow's-nest, with a small compass he kept there for
the purpose of counteracting the errors resulting from what is called
the "local attraction" of all binnacle magnets; an error ascribable to
the horizontal vicinity of the iron in the ship's planks, and in the
Glacier's case, perhaps, to there having been so many broken-down
blacksmiths among her crew; I say, that though the Captain is very
discreet and scientific here, yet, for all his learned "binnacle
deviations," "azimuth compass observations," and "approximate errors,"
he knows very well, Captain Sleet, that he was not so much immersed
in those profound magnetic meditations, as to fail being attracted
occasionally towards that well replenished little case-bottle, so nicely
tucked in on one side of his crow's nest, within easy reach of his hand.
Though, upon the whole, I greatly admire and even love the brave, the
honest, and learned Captain; yet I take it very ill of him that he
should so utterly ignore that case-bottle, seeing what a faithful friend
and comforter it must have been, while with mittened fingers and hooded
head he was studying the mathematics aloft there in that bird's nest
within three or four perches of the pole.

But if we Southern whale-fishers are not so snugly housed aloft as
Captain Sleet and his Greenlandmen were; yet that disadvantage is
greatly counter-balanced by the widely contrasting serenity of those
seductive seas in which we South fishers mostly float. For one, I used
to lounge up the rigging very leisurely, resting in the top to have a
chat with Queequeg, or any one else off duty whom I might find there;
then ascending a little way further, and throwing a lazy leg over the
top-sail yard, take a preliminary view of the watery pastures, and so at
last mount to my ultimate destination.

Let me make a clean breast of it here, and frankly admit that I kept but
sorry guard. With the problem of the universe revolving in me, how
could I--being left completely to myself at such a thought-engendering
altitude--how could I but lightly hold my obligations to observe all
whale-ships' standing orders, "Keep your weather eye open, and sing out
every time."

And let me in this place movingly admonish you, ye ship-owners of
Nantucket! Beware of enlisting in your vigilant fisheries any lad with
lean brow and hollow eye; given to unseasonable meditativeness; and who
offers to ship with the Phaedon instead of Bowditch in his head. Beware
of such an one, I say; your whales must be seen before they can be
killed; and this sunken-eyed young Platonist will tow you ten wakes
round the world, and never make you one pint of sperm the richer. Nor
are these monitions at all unneeded. For nowadays, the whale-fishery
furnishes an asylum for many romantic, melancholy, and absent-minded
young men, disgusted with the carking cares of earth, and seeking
sentiment in tar and blubber. Childe Harold not unfrequently perches
himself upon the mast-head of some luckless disappointed whale-ship, and
in moody phrase ejaculates:--

"Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll! Ten thousand
blubber-hunters sweep over thee in vain."

Very often do the captains of such ships take those absent-minded
young philosophers to task, upbraiding them with not feeling sufficient
"interest" in the voyage; half-hinting that they are so hopelessly lost
to all honourable ambition, as that in their secret souls they would
rather not see whales than otherwise. But all in vain; those young
Platonists have a notion that their vision is imperfect; they are
short-sighted; what use, then, to strain the visual nerve? They have
left their opera-glasses at home.

"Why, thou monkey," said a harpooneer to one of these lads, "we've been
cruising now hard upon three years, and thou hast not raised a whale
yet. Whales are scarce as hen's teeth whenever thou art up here."
Perhaps they were; or perhaps there might have been shoals of them in
the far horizon; but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of
vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending
cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity;
takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep,
blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every
strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every
dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him
the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by
continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs
away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like
Crammer's sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every
shore the round globe over.

There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a
gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from
the inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep, this dream is on ye,
move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity
comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps,
at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you
drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise
for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists!



CHAPTER 36. The Quarter-Deck.


(ENTER AHAB: THEN, ALL)


It was not a great while after the affair of the pipe, that one
morning shortly after breakfast, Ahab, as was his wont, ascended the
cabin-gangway to the deck. There most sea-captains usually walk at that
hour, as country gentlemen, after the same meal, take a few turns in the
garden.

Soon his steady, ivory stride was heard, as to and fro he paced his old
rounds, upon planks so familiar to his tread, that they were all over
dented, like geological stones, with the peculiar mark of his walk. Did
you fixedly gaze, too, upon that ribbed and dented brow; there also,
you would see still stranger foot-prints--the foot-prints of his one
unsleeping, ever-pacing thought.

But on the occasion in question, those dents looked deeper, even as
his nervous step that morning left a deeper mark. And, so full of his
thought was Ahab, that at every uniform turn that he made, now at the
main-mast and now at the binnacle, you could almost see that thought
turn in him as he turned, and pace in him as he paced; so completely
possessing him, indeed, that it all but seemed the inward mould of every
outer movement.

"D'ye mark him, Flask?" whispered Stubb; "the chick that's in him pecks
the shell. 'Twill soon be out."

The hours wore on;--Ahab now shut up within his cabin; anon, pacing the
deck, with the same intense bigotry of purpose in his aspect.

It drew near the close of day. Suddenly he came to a halt by the
bulwarks, and inserting his bone leg into the auger-hole there, and with
one hand grasping a shroud, he ordered Starbuck to send everybody aft.

"Sir!" said the mate, astonished at an order seldom or never given on
ship-board except in some extraordinary case.

"Send everybody aft," repeated Ahab. "Mast-heads, there! come down!"

When the entire ship's company were assembled, and with curious and not
wholly unapprehensive faces, were eyeing him, for he looked not unlike
the weather horizon when a storm is coming up, Ahab, after rapidly
glancing over the bulwarks, and then darting his eyes among the crew,
started from his standpoint; and as though not a soul were nigh him
resumed his heavy turns upon the deck. With bent head and half-slouched
hat he continued to pace, unmindful of the wondering whispering among
the men; till Stubb cautiously whispered to Flask, that Ahab must have
summoned them there for the purpose of witnessing a pedestrian feat. But
this did not last long. Vehemently pausing, he cried:--

"What do ye do when ye see a whale, men?"

"Sing out for him!" was the impulsive rejoinder from a score of clubbed
voices.

"Good!" cried Ahab, with a wild approval in his tones; observing the
hearty animation into which his unexpected question had so magnetically
thrown them.

"And what do ye next, men?"

"Lower away, and after him!"

"And what tune is it ye pull to, men?"

"A dead whale or a stove boat!"

More and more strangely and fiercely glad and approving, grew the
countenance of the old man at every shout; while the mariners began
to gaze curiously at each other, as if marvelling how it was that they
themselves became so excited at such seemingly purposeless questions.

But, they were all eagerness again, as Ahab, now half-revolving in his
pivot-hole, with one hand reaching high up a shroud, and tightly, almost
convulsively grasping it, addressed them thus:--

"All ye mast-headers have before now heard me give orders about a white
whale. Look ye! d'ye see this Spanish ounce of gold?"--holding up a
broad bright coin to the sun--"it is a sixteen dollar piece, men. D'ye
see it? Mr. Starbuck, hand me yon top-maul."

While the mate was getting the hammer, Ahab, without speaking, was
slowly rubbing the gold piece against the skirts of his jacket, as if
to heighten its lustre, and without using any words was meanwhile
lowly humming to himself, producing a sound so strangely muffled and
inarticulate that it seemed the mechanical humming of the wheels of his
vitality in him.

Receiving the top-maul from Starbuck, he advanced towards the main-mast
with the hammer uplifted in one hand, exhibiting the gold with the
other, and with a high raised voice exclaiming: "Whosoever of ye
raises me a white-headed whale with a wrinkled brow and a crooked jaw;
whosoever of ye raises me that white-headed whale, with three holes
punctured in his starboard fluke--look ye, whosoever of ye raises me
that same white whale, he shall have this gold ounce, my boys!"

"Huzza! huzza!" cried the seamen, as with swinging tarpaulins they
hailed the act of nailing the gold to the mast.

"It's a white whale, I say," resumed Ahab, as he threw down the topmaul:
"a white whale. Skin your eyes for him, men; look sharp for white water;
if ye see but a bubble, sing out."

All this while Tashtego, Daggoo, and Queequeg had looked on with even
more intense interest and surprise than the rest, and at the mention
of the wrinkled brow and crooked jaw they had started as if each was
separately touched by some specific recollection.

"Captain Ahab," said Tashtego, "that white whale must be the same that
some call Moby Dick."

"Moby Dick?" shouted Ahab. "Do ye know the white whale then, Tash?"

"Does he fan-tail a little curious, sir, before he goes down?" said the
Gay-Header deliberately.

"And has he a curious spout, too," said Daggoo, "very bushy, even for a
parmacetty, and mighty quick, Captain Ahab?"

"And he have one, two, three--oh! good many iron in him hide, too,
Captain," cried Queequeg disjointedly, "all twiske-tee be-twisk, like
him--him--" faltering hard for a word, and screwing his hand round and
round as though uncorking a bottle--"like him--him--"

"Corkscrew!" cried Ahab, "aye, Queequeg, the harpoons lie all twisted
and wrenched in him; aye, Daggoo, his spout is a big one, like a whole
shock of wheat, and white as a pile of our Nantucket wool after the
great annual sheep-shearing; aye, Tashtego, and he fan-tails like a
split jib in a squall. Death and devils! men, it is Moby Dick ye have
seen--Moby Dick--Moby Dick!"

"Captain Ahab," said Starbuck, who, with Stubb and Flask, had thus far
been eyeing his superior with increasing surprise, but at last seemed
struck with a thought which somewhat explained all the wonder. "Captain
Ahab, I have heard of Moby Dick--but it was not Moby Dick that took off
thy leg?"

"Who told thee that?" cried Ahab; then pausing, "Aye, Starbuck; aye, my
hearties all round; it was Moby Dick that dismasted me; Moby Dick that
brought me to this dead stump I stand on now. Aye, aye," he shouted with
a terrific, loud, animal sob, like that of a heart-stricken moose;
"Aye, aye! it was that accursed white whale that razeed me; made a poor
pegging lubber of me for ever and a day!" Then tossing both arms, with
measureless imprecations he shouted out: "Aye, aye! and I'll chase him
round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and
round perdition's flames before I give him up. And this is what ye have
shipped for, men! to chase that white whale on both sides of land, and
over all sides of earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out.
What say ye, men, will ye splice hands on it, now? I think ye do look
brave."

"Aye, aye!" shouted the harpooneers and seamen, running closer to the
excited old man: "A sharp eye for the white whale; a sharp lance for
Moby Dick!"

"God bless ye," he seemed to half sob and half shout. "God bless ye,
men. Steward! go draw the great measure of grog. But what's this long
face about, Mr. Starbuck; wilt thou not chase the white whale? art not
game for Moby Dick?"

"I am game for his crooked jaw, and for the jaws of Death too, Captain
Ahab, if it fairly comes in the way of the business we follow; but I
came here to hunt whales, not my commander's vengeance. How many barrels
will thy vengeance yield thee even if thou gettest it, Captain Ahab? it
will not fetch thee much in our Nantucket market."

"Nantucket market! Hoot! But come closer, Starbuck; thou requirest
a little lower layer. If money's to be the measurer, man, and the
accountants have computed their great counting-house the globe, by
girdling it with guineas, one to every three parts of an inch; then, let
me tell thee, that my vengeance will fetch a great premium HERE!"

"He smites his chest," whispered Stubb, "what's that for? methinks it
rings most vast, but hollow."

"Vengeance on a dumb brute!" cried Starbuck, "that simply smote thee
from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing,
Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous."

"Hark ye yet again--the little lower layer. All visible objects, man,
are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event--in the living act, the
undoubted deed--there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth
the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man
will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside
except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that
wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there's naught beyond. But
'tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength,
with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is
chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale
principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy,
man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that,
then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play
herein, jealousy presiding over all creations. But not my master, man,
is even that fair play. Who's over me? Truth hath no confines. Take off
thine eye! more intolerable than fiends' glarings is a doltish
stare! So, so; thou reddenest and palest; my heat has melted thee to
anger-glow. But look ye, Starbuck, what is said in heat, that thing
unsays itself. There are men from whom warm words are small indignity. I
meant not to incense thee. Let it go. Look! see yonder Turkish cheeks of
spotted tawn--living, breathing pictures painted by the sun. The Pagan
leopards--the unrecking and unworshipping things, that live; and seek,
and give no reasons for the torrid life they feel! The crew, man, the
crew! Are they not one and all with Ahab, in this matter of the whale?
See Stubb! he laughs! See yonder Chilian! he snorts to think of it.
Stand up amid the general hurricane, thy one tost sapling cannot,
Starbuck! And what is it? Reckon it. 'Tis but to help strike a fin; no
wondrous feat for Starbuck. What is it more? From this one poor hunt,
then, the best lance out of all Nantucket, surely he will not hang back,
when every foremast-hand has clutched a whetstone? Ah! constrainings
seize thee; I see! the billow lifts thee! Speak, but speak!--Aye, aye!
thy silence, then, THAT voices thee. (ASIDE) Something shot from my
dilated nostrils, he has inhaled it in his lungs. Starbuck now is mine;
cannot oppose me now, without rebellion."

"God keep me!--keep us all!" murmured Starbuck, lowly.

But in his joy at the enchanted, tacit acquiescence of the mate, Ahab
did not hear his foreboding invocation; nor yet the low laugh from the
hold; nor yet the presaging vibrations of the winds in the cordage;
nor yet the hollow flap of the sails against the masts, as for a moment
their hearts sank in. For again Starbuck's downcast eyes lighted up with
the stubbornness of life; the subterranean laugh died away; the winds
blew on; the sails filled out; the ship heaved and rolled as before. Ah,
ye admonitions and warnings! why stay ye not when ye come? But
rather are ye predictions than warnings, ye shadows! Yet not so much
predictions from without, as verifications of the foregoing things
within. For with little external to constrain us, the innermost
necessities in our being, these still drive us on.

"The measure! the measure!" cried Ahab.

Receiving the brimming pewter, and turning to the harpooneers, he
ordered them to produce their weapons. Then ranging them before him near
the capstan, with their harpoons in their hands, while his three mates
stood at his side with their lances, and the rest of the ship's company
formed a circle round the group; he stood for an instant searchingly
eyeing every man of his crew. But those wild eyes met his, as the
bloodshot eyes of the prairie wolves meet the eye of their leader, ere
he rushes on at their head in the trail of the bison; but, alas! only to
fall into the hidden snare of the Indian.

"Drink and pass!" he cried, handing the heavy charged flagon to the
nearest seaman. "The crew alone now drink. Round with it, round! Short
draughts--long swallows, men; 'tis hot as Satan's hoof. So, so; it
goes round excellently. It spiralizes in ye; forks out at the
serpent-snapping eye. Well done; almost drained. That way it went, this
way it comes. Hand it me--here's a hollow! Men, ye seem the years; so
brimming life is gulped and gone. Steward, refill!

"Attend now, my braves. I have mustered ye all round this capstan; and
ye mates, flank me with your lances; and ye harpooneers, stand there
with your irons; and ye, stout mariners, ring me in, that I may in some
sort revive a noble custom of my fisherman fathers before me. O men, you
will yet see that--Ha! boy, come back? bad pennies come not sooner. Hand
it me. Why, now, this pewter had run brimming again, were't not thou St.
Vitus' imp--away, thou ague!

"Advance, ye mates! Cross your lances full before me. Well done! Let
me touch the axis." So saying, with extended arm, he grasped the
three level, radiating lances at their crossed centre; while so doing,
suddenly and nervously twitched them; meanwhile, glancing intently from
Starbuck to Stubb; from Stubb to Flask. It seemed as though, by some
nameless, interior volition, he would fain have shocked into them the
same fiery emotion accumulated within the Leyden jar of his own magnetic
life. The three mates quailed before his strong, sustained, and mystic
aspect. Stubb and Flask looked sideways from him; the honest eye of
Starbuck fell downright.

"In vain!" cried Ahab; "but, maybe, 'tis well. For did ye three but
once take the full-forced shock, then mine own electric thing, THAT had
perhaps expired from out me. Perchance, too, it would have dropped ye
dead. Perchance ye need it not. Down lances! And now, ye mates, I do
appoint ye three cupbearers to my three pagan kinsmen there--yon three
most honourable gentlemen and noblemen, my valiant harpooneers. Disdain
the task? What, when the great Pope washes the feet of beggars, using
his tiara for ewer? Oh, my sweet cardinals! your own condescension, THAT
shall bend ye to it. I do not order ye; ye will it. Cut your seizings
and draw the poles, ye harpooneers!"

Silently obeying the order, the three harpooneers now stood with the
detached iron part of their harpoons, some three feet long, held, barbs
up, before him.

"Stab me not with that keen steel! Cant them; cant them over! know ye
not the goblet end? Turn up the socket! So, so; now, ye cup-bearers,
advance. The irons! take them; hold them while I fill!" Forthwith,
slowly going from one officer to the other, he brimmed the harpoon
sockets with the fiery waters from the pewter.

"Now, three to three, ye stand. Commend the murderous chalices! Bestow
them, ye who are now made parties to this indissoluble league. Ha!
Starbuck! but the deed is done! Yon ratifying sun now waits to sit upon
it. Drink, ye harpooneers! drink and swear, ye men that man the deathful
whaleboat's bow--Death to Moby Dick! God hunt us all, if we do not hunt
Moby Dick to his death!" The long, barbed steel goblets were lifted;
and to cries and maledictions against the white whale, the spirits were
simultaneously quaffed down with a hiss. Starbuck paled, and turned, and
shivered. Once more, and finally, the replenished pewter went the rounds
among the frantic crew; when, waving his free hand to them, they all
dispersed; and Ahab retired within his cabin.



CHAPTER 37. Sunset.


THE CABIN; BY THE STERN WINDOWS; AHAB SITTING ALONE, AND GAZING OUT.


I leave a white and turbid wake; pale waters, paler cheeks, where'er I
sail. The envious billows sidelong swell to whelm my track; let them;
but first I pass.

Yonder, by ever-brimming goblet's rim, the warm waves blush like wine.
The gold brow plumbs the blue. The diver sun--slow dived from noon--goes
down; my soul mounts up! she wearies with her endless hill. Is, then,
the crown too heavy that I wear? this Iron Crown of Lombardy. Yet is
it bright with many a gem; I the wearer, see not its far flashings; but
darkly feel that I wear that, that dazzlingly confounds. 'Tis iron--that
I know--not gold. 'Tis split, too--that I feel; the jagged edge galls
me so, my brain seems to beat against the solid metal; aye, steel skull,
mine; the sort that needs no helmet in the most brain-battering fight!

Dry heat upon my brow? Oh! time was, when as the sunrise nobly spurred
me, so the sunset soothed. No more. This lovely light, it lights not me;
all loveliness is anguish to me, since I can ne'er enjoy. Gifted with
the high perception, I lack the low, enjoying power; damned, most subtly
and most malignantly! damned in the midst of Paradise! Good night--good
night! (WAVING HIS HAND, HE MOVES FROM THE WINDOW.)

'Twas not so hard a task. I thought to find one stubborn, at the least;
but my one cogged circle fits into all their various wheels, and they
revolve. Or, if you will, like so many ant-hills of powder, they all
stand before me; and I their match. Oh, hard! that to fire others, the
match itself must needs be wasting! What I've dared, I've willed; and
what I've willed, I'll do! They think me mad--Starbuck does; but I'm
demoniac, I am madness maddened! That wild madness that's only calm
to comprehend itself! The prophecy was that I should be dismembered;
and--Aye! I lost this leg. I now prophesy that I will dismember my
dismemberer. Now, then, be the prophet and the fulfiller one. That's
more than ye, ye great gods, ever were. I laugh and hoot at ye, ye
cricket-players, ye pugilists, ye deaf Burkes and blinded Bendigoes!
I will not say as schoolboys do to bullies--Take some one of your own
size; don't pommel ME! No, ye've knocked me down, and I am up again; but
YE have run and hidden. Come forth from behind your cotton bags! I have
no long gun to reach ye. Come, Ahab's compliments to ye; come and see
if ye can swerve me. Swerve me? ye cannot swerve me, else ye swerve
yourselves! man has ye there. Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is
laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded
gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents' beds,
unerringly I rush! Naught's an obstacle, naught's an angle to the iron
way!



CHAPTER 38. Dusk.


BY THE MAINMAST; STARBUCK LEANING AGAINST IT.


My soul is more than matched; she's overmanned; and by a madman!
Insufferable sting, that sanity should ground arms on such a field! But
he drilled deep down, and blasted all my reason out of me! I think I see
his impious end; but feel that I must help him to it. Will I, nill I,
the ineffable thing has tied me to him; tows me with a cable I have no
knife to cut. Horrible old man! Who's over him, he cries;--aye, he would
be a democrat to all above; look, how he lords it over all below! Oh! I
plainly see my miserable office,--to obey, rebelling; and worse yet,
to hate with touch of pity! For in his eyes I read some lurid woe would
shrivel me up, had I it. Yet is there hope. Time and tide flow wide.
The hated whale has the round watery world to swim in, as the small
gold-fish has its glassy globe. His heaven-insulting purpose, God may
wedge aside. I would up heart, were it not like lead. But my whole
clock's run down; my heart the all-controlling weight, I have no key to
lift again.


[A BURST OF REVELRY FROM THE FORECASTLE.]


Oh, God! to sail with such a heathen crew that have small touch of human
mothers in them! Whelped somewhere by the sharkish sea. The white whale
is their demigorgon. Hark! the infernal orgies! that revelry is forward!
mark the unfaltering silence aft! Methinks it pictures life. Foremost
through the sparkling sea shoots on the gay, embattled, bantering
bow, but only to drag dark Ahab after it, where he broods within his
sternward cabin, builded over the dead water of the wake, and further
on, hunted by its wolfish gurglings. The long howl thrills me through!
Peace! ye revellers, and set the watch! Oh, life! 'tis in an hour like
this, with soul beat down and held to knowledge,--as wild, untutored
things are forced to feed--Oh, life! 'tis now that I do feel the latent
horror in thee! but 'tis not me! that horror's out of me! and with the
soft feeling of the human in me, yet will I try to fight ye, ye grim,
phantom futures! Stand by me, hold me, bind me, O ye blessed influences!



CHAPTER 39. First Night Watch.

Fore-Top.

(STUBB SOLUS, AND MENDING A BRACE.)


Ha! ha! ha! ha! hem! clear my throat!--I've been thinking over it
ever since, and that ha, ha's the final consequence. Why so? Because a
laugh's the wisest, easiest answer to all that's queer; and come what
will, one comfort's always left--that unfailing comfort is, it's all
predestinated. I heard not all his talk with Starbuck; but to my poor
eye Starbuck then looked something as I the other evening felt. Be sure
the old Mogul has fixed him, too. I twigged it, knew it; had had the
gift, might readily have prophesied it--for when I clapped my eye upon
his skull I saw it. Well, Stubb, WISE Stubb--that's my title--well,
Stubb, what of it, Stubb? Here's a carcase. I know not all that may be
coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing. Such a waggish
leering as lurks in all your horribles! I feel funny. Fa, la! lirra,
skirra! What's my juicy little pear at home doing now? Crying its eyes
out?--Giving a party to the last arrived harpooneers, I dare say, gay as
a frigate's pennant, and so am I--fa, la! lirra, skirra! Oh--

We'll drink to-night with hearts as light, To love, as gay and fleeting
As bubbles that swim, on the beaker's brim, And break on the lips while
meeting.


A brave stave that--who calls? Mr. Starbuck? Aye, aye, sir--(ASIDE) he's
my superior, he has his too, if I'm not mistaken.--Aye, aye, sir, just
through with this job--coming.



CHAPTER 40. Midnight, Forecastle.

HARPOONEERS AND SAILORS.

(FORESAIL RISES AND DISCOVERS THE WATCH STANDING, LOUNGING, LEANING, AND
LYING IN VARIOUS ATTITUDES, ALL SINGING IN CHORUS.)

     Farewell and adieu to you, Spanish ladies!
     Farewell and adieu to you, ladies of Spain!
     Our captain's commanded.--

1ST NANTUCKET SAILOR. Oh, boys, don't be sentimental; it's bad for the
digestion! Take a tonic, follow me! (SINGS, AND ALL FOLLOW)

    Our captain stood upon the deck,
    A spy-glass in his hand,
    A viewing of those gallant whales
    That blew at every strand.
    Oh, your tubs in your boats, my boys,
    And by your braces stand,
    And we'll have one of those fine whales,
    Hand, boys, over hand!
    So, be cheery, my lads! may your hearts never fail!
    While the bold harpooner is striking the whale!

MATE'S VOICE FROM THE QUARTER-DECK. Eight bells there, forward!

2ND NANTUCKET SAILOR. Avast the chorus! Eight bells there! d'ye hear,
bell-boy? Strike the bell eight, thou Pip! thou blackling! and let me
call the watch. I've the sort of mouth for that--the hogshead mouth.
So, so, (THRUSTS HIS HEAD DOWN THE SCUTTLE,) Star-bo-l-e-e-n-s, a-h-o-y!
Eight bells there below! Tumble up!

DUTCH SAILOR. Grand snoozing to-night, maty; fat night for that. I
mark this in our old Mogul's wine; it's quite as deadening to some as
filliping to others. We sing; they sleep--aye, lie down there, like
ground-tier butts. At 'em again! There, take this copper-pump, and hail
'em through it. Tell 'em to avast dreaming of their lasses. Tell 'em
it's the resurrection; they must kiss their last, and come to judgment.
That's the way--THAT'S it; thy throat ain't spoiled with eating
Amsterdam butter.

FRENCH SAILOR. Hist, boys! let's have a jig or two before we ride to
anchor in Blanket Bay. What say ye? There comes the other watch. Stand
by all legs! Pip! little Pip! hurrah with your tambourine!

PIP. (SULKY AND SLEEPY) Don't know where it is.

FRENCH SAILOR. Beat thy belly, then, and wag thy ears. Jig it, men,
I say; merry's the word; hurrah! Damn me, won't you dance? Form, now,
Indian-file, and gallop into the double-shuffle? Throw yourselves! Legs!
legs!

ICELAND SAILOR. I don't like your floor, maty; it's too springy to my
taste. I'm used to ice-floors. I'm sorry to throw cold water on the
subject; but excuse me.

MALTESE SAILOR. Me too; where's your girls? Who but a fool would take
his left hand by his right, and say to himself, how d'ye do? Partners! I
must have partners!

SICILIAN SAILOR. Aye; girls and a green!--then I'll hop with ye; yea,
turn grasshopper!

LONG-ISLAND SAILOR. Well, well, ye sulkies, there's plenty more of us.
Hoe corn when you may, say I. All legs go to harvest soon. Ah! here
comes the music; now for it!

AZORE SAILOR. (ASCENDING, AND PITCHING THE TAMBOURINE UP THE SCUTTLE.)
Here you are, Pip; and there's the windlass-bitts; up you mount! Now,
boys! (THE HALF OF THEM DANCE TO THE TAMBOURINE; SOME GO BELOW; SOME
SLEEP OR LIE AMONG THE COILS OF RIGGING. OATHS A-PLENTY.)

AZORE SAILOR. (DANCING) Go it, Pip! Bang it, bell-boy! Rig it, dig it,
stig it, quig it, bell-boy! Make fire-flies; break the jinglers!

PIP. Jinglers, you say?--there goes another, dropped off; I pound it so.

CHINA SAILOR. Rattle thy teeth, then, and pound away; make a pagoda of
thyself.


FRENCH SAILOR. Merry-mad! Hold up thy hoop, Pip, till I jump through it!
Split jibs! tear yourselves!

TASHTEGO. (QUIETLY SMOKING) That's a white man; he calls that fun:
humph! I save my sweat.

OLD MANX SAILOR. I wonder whether those jolly lads bethink them of what
they are dancing over. I'll dance over your grave, I will--that's
the bitterest threat of your night-women, that beat head-winds round
corners. O Christ! to think of the green navies and the green-skulled
crews! Well, well; belike the whole world's a ball, as you scholars have
it; and so 'tis right to make one ballroom of it. Dance on, lads, you're
young; I was once.

3D NANTUCKET SAILOR. Spell oh!--whew! this is worse than pulling after
whales in a calm--give us a whiff, Tash.

(THEY CEASE DANCING, AND GATHER IN CLUSTERS. MEANTIME THE SKY
DARKENS--THE WIND RISES.)

LASCAR SAILOR. By Brahma! boys, it'll be douse sail soon. The sky-born,
high-tide Ganges turned to wind! Thou showest thy black brow, Seeva!

MALTESE SAILOR. (RECLINING AND SHAKING HIS CAP.) It's the waves--the
snow's caps turn to jig it now. They'll shake their tassels soon. Now
would all the waves were women, then I'd go drown, and chassee with them
evermore! There's naught so sweet on earth--heaven may not match
it!--as those swift glances of warm, wild bosoms in the dance, when the
over-arboring arms hide such ripe, bursting grapes.

SICILIAN SAILOR. (RECLINING.) Tell me not of it! Hark ye, lad--fleet
interlacings of the limbs--lithe swayings--coyings--flutterings! lip!
heart! hip! all graze: unceasing touch and go! not taste, observe ye,
else come satiety. Eh, Pagan? (NUDGING.)

TAHITAN SAILOR. (RECLINING ON A MAT.) Hail, holy nakedness of our
dancing girls!--the Heeva-Heeva! Ah! low veiled, high palmed Tahiti! I
still rest me on thy mat, but the soft soil has slid! I saw thee woven
in the wood, my mat! green the first day I brought ye thence; now worn
and wilted quite. Ah me!--not thou nor I can bear the change! How
then, if so be transplanted to yon sky? Hear I the roaring streams from
Pirohitee's peak of spears, when they leap down the crags and drown the
villages?--The blast! the blast! Up, spine, and meet it! (LEAPS TO HIS
FEET.)

PORTUGUESE SAILOR. How the sea rolls swashing 'gainst the side! Stand
by for reefing, hearties! the winds are just crossing swords, pell-mell
they'll go lunging presently.

DANISH SAILOR. Crack, crack, old ship! so long as thou crackest, thou
holdest! Well done! The mate there holds ye to it stiffly. He's no more
afraid than the isle fort at Cattegat, put there to fight the Baltic
with storm-lashed guns, on which the sea-salt cakes!

4TH NANTUCKET SAILOR. He has his orders, mind ye that. I heard old
Ahab tell him he must always kill a squall, something as they burst a
waterspout with a pistol--fire your ship right into it!

ENGLISH SAILOR. Blood! but that old man's a grand old cove! We are the
lads to hunt him up his whale!

ALL. Aye! aye!

OLD MANX SAILOR. How the three pines shake! Pines are the hardest sort
of tree to live when shifted to any other soil, and here there's none
but the crew's cursed clay. Steady, helmsman! steady. This is the sort
of weather when brave hearts snap ashore, and keeled hulls split at sea.
Our captain has his birthmark; look yonder, boys, there's another in the
sky--lurid-like, ye see, all else pitch black.

DAGGOO. What of that? Who's afraid of black's afraid of me! I'm quarried
out of it!

SPANISH SAILOR. (ASIDE.) He wants to bully, ah!--the old grudge makes
me touchy (ADVANCING.) Aye, harpooneer, thy race is the undeniable dark
side of mankind--devilish dark at that. No offence.

DAGGOO (GRIMLY). None.

ST. JAGO'S SAILOR. That Spaniard's mad or drunk. But that can't be, or
else in his one case our old Mogul's fire-waters are somewhat long in
working.

5TH NANTUCKET SAILOR. What's that I saw--lightning? Yes.

SPANISH SAILOR. No; Daggoo showing his teeth.

DAGGOO (SPRINGING). Swallow thine, mannikin! White skin, white liver!

SPANISH SAILOR (MEETING HIM). Knife thee heartily! big frame, small
spirit!

ALL. A row! a row! a row!

TASHTEGO (WITH A WHIFF). A row a'low, and a row aloft--Gods and
men--both brawlers! Humph!

BELFAST SAILOR. A row! arrah a row! The Virgin be blessed, a row! Plunge
in with ye!

ENGLISH SAILOR. Fair play! Snatch the Spaniard's knife! A ring, a ring!

OLD MANX SAILOR. Ready formed. There! the ringed horizon. In that ring
Cain struck Abel. Sweet work, right work! No? Why then, God, mad'st thou
the ring?

MATE'S VOICE FROM THE QUARTER-DECK. Hands by the halyards! in
top-gallant sails! Stand by to reef topsails!

ALL. The squall! the squall! jump, my jollies! (THEY SCATTER.)


PIP (SHRINKING UNDER THE WINDLASS). Jollies? Lord help such jollies!
Crish, crash! there goes the jib-stay! Blang-whang! God! Duck lower,
Pip, here comes the royal yard! It's worse than being in the whirled
woods, the last day of the year! Who'd go climbing after chestnuts now?
But there they go, all cursing, and here I don't. Fine prospects to 'em;
they're on the road to heaven. Hold on hard! Jimmini, what a squall!
But those chaps there are worse yet--they are your white squalls, they.
White squalls? white whale, shirr! shirr! Here have I heard all their
chat just now, and the white whale--shirr! shirr!--but spoken of
once! and only this evening--it makes me jingle all over like my
tambourine--that anaconda of an old man swore 'em in to hunt him! Oh,
thou big white God aloft there somewhere in yon darkness, have mercy on
this small black boy down here; preserve him from all men that have no
bowels to feel fear!



CHAPTER 41. Moby Dick.


I, Ishmael, was one of that crew; my shouts had gone up with the rest;
my oath had been welded with theirs; and stronger I shouted, and more
did I hammer and clinch my oath, because of the dread in my soul. A
wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me; Ahab's quenchless feud
seemed mine. With greedy ears I learned the history of that murderous
monster against whom I and all the others had taken our oaths of
violence and revenge.

For some time past, though at intervals only, the unaccompanied,
secluded White Whale had haunted those uncivilized seas mostly
frequented by the Sperm Whale fishermen. But not all of them knew of his
existence; only a few of them, comparatively, had knowingly seen him;
while the number who as yet had actually and knowingly given battle to
him, was small indeed. For, owing to the large number of whale-cruisers;
the disorderly way they were sprinkled over the entire watery
circumference, many of them adventurously pushing their quest along
solitary latitudes, so as seldom or never for a whole twelvemonth or
more on a stretch, to encounter a single news-telling sail of any sort;
the inordinate length of each separate voyage; the irregularity of the
times of sailing from home; all these, with other circumstances, direct
and indirect, long obstructed the spread through the whole world-wide
whaling-fleet of the special individualizing tidings concerning Moby
Dick. It was hardly to be doubted, that several vessels reported to have
encountered, at such or such a time, or on such or such a meridian,
a Sperm Whale of uncommon magnitude and malignity, which whale, after
doing great mischief to his assailants, had completely escaped them; to
some minds it was not an unfair presumption, I say, that the whale in
question must have been no other than Moby Dick. Yet as of late the
Sperm Whale fishery had been marked by various and not unfrequent
instances of great ferocity, cunning, and malice in the monster
attacked; therefore it was, that those who by accident ignorantly gave
battle to Moby Dick; such hunters, perhaps, for the most part, were
content to ascribe the peculiar terror he bred, more, as it were, to
the perils of the Sperm Whale fishery at large, than to the individual
cause. In that way, mostly, the disastrous encounter between Ahab and
the whale had hitherto been popularly regarded.

And as for those who, previously hearing of the White Whale, by chance
caught sight of him; in the beginning of the thing they had every one of
them, almost, as boldly and fearlessly lowered for him, as for any other
whale of that species. But at length, such calamities did ensue in these
assaults--not restricted to sprained wrists and ankles, broken limbs, or
devouring amputations--but fatal to the last degree of fatality; those
repeated disastrous repulses, all accumulating and piling their terrors
upon Moby Dick; those things had gone far to shake the fortitude of many
brave hunters, to whom the story of the White Whale had eventually come.

Nor did wild rumors of all sorts fail to exaggerate, and still the more
horrify the true histories of these deadly encounters. For not only do
fabulous rumors naturally grow out of the very body of all surprising
terrible events,--as the smitten tree gives birth to its fungi; but, in
maritime life, far more than in that of terra firma, wild rumors abound,
wherever there is any adequate reality for them to cling to. And as the
sea surpasses the land in this matter, so the whale fishery surpasses
every other sort of maritime life, in the wonderfulness and fearfulness
of the rumors which sometimes circulate there. For not only are whalemen
as a body unexempt from that ignorance and superstitiousness hereditary
to all sailors; but of all sailors, they are by all odds the most
directly brought into contact with whatever is appallingly astonishing
in the sea; face to face they not only eye its greatest marvels, but,
hand to jaw, give battle to them. Alone, in such remotest waters, that
though you sailed a thousand miles, and passed a thousand shores, you
would not come to any chiseled hearth-stone, or aught hospitable beneath
that part of the sun; in such latitudes and longitudes, pursuing too
such a calling as he does, the whaleman is wrapped by influences all
tending to make his fancy pregnant with many a mighty birth.

No wonder, then, that ever gathering volume from the mere transit over
the widest watery spaces, the outblown rumors of the White Whale did
in the end incorporate with themselves all manner of morbid hints,
and half-formed foetal suggestions of supernatural agencies, which
eventually invested Moby Dick with new terrors unborrowed from anything
that visibly appears. So that in many cases such a panic did he finally
strike, that few who by those rumors, at least, had heard of the White
Whale, few of those hunters were willing to encounter the perils of his
jaw.

But there were still other and more vital practical influences at work.
Not even at the present day has the original prestige of the Sperm
Whale, as fearfully distinguished from all other species of the
leviathan, died out of the minds of the whalemen as a body. There are
those this day among them, who, though intelligent and courageous
enough in offering battle to the Greenland or Right whale, would
perhaps--either from professional inexperience, or incompetency, or
timidity, decline a contest with the Sperm Whale; at any rate, there are
plenty of whalemen, especially among those whaling nations not sailing
under the American flag, who have never hostilely encountered the Sperm
Whale, but whose sole knowledge of the leviathan is restricted to
the ignoble monster primitively pursued in the North; seated on their
hatches, these men will hearken with a childish fireside interest
and awe, to the wild, strange tales of Southern whaling. Nor is the
pre-eminent tremendousness of the great Sperm Whale anywhere more
feelingly comprehended, than on board of those prows which stem him.

And as if the now tested reality of his might had in former
legendary times thrown its shadow before it; we find some book
naturalists--Olassen and Povelson--declaring the Sperm Whale not only to
be a consternation to every other creature in the sea, but also to be so
incredibly ferocious as continually to be athirst for human blood. Nor
even down to so late a time as Cuvier's, were these or almost similar
impressions effaced. For in his Natural History, the Baron himself
affirms that at sight of the Sperm Whale, all fish (sharks included) are
"struck with the most lively terrors," and "often in the precipitancy of
their flight dash themselves against the rocks with such violence as to
cause instantaneous death." And however the general experiences in the
fishery may amend such reports as these; yet in their full terribleness,
even to the bloodthirsty item of Povelson, the superstitious belief in
them is, in some vicissitudes of their vocation, revived in the minds of
the hunters.

So that overawed by the rumors and portents concerning him, not a few of
the fishermen recalled, in reference to Moby Dick, the earlier days
of the Sperm Whale fishery, when it was oftentimes hard to induce long
practised Right whalemen to embark in the perils of this new and daring
warfare; such men protesting that although other leviathans might be
hopefully pursued, yet to chase and point lance at such an apparition
as the Sperm Whale was not for mortal man. That to attempt it, would
be inevitably to be torn into a quick eternity. On this head, there are
some remarkable documents that may be consulted.

Nevertheless, some there were, who even in the face of these things
were ready to give chase to Moby Dick; and a still greater number who,
chancing only to hear of him distantly and vaguely, without the
specific details of any certain calamity, and without superstitious
accompaniments, were sufficiently hardy not to flee from the battle if
offered.

One of the wild suggestions referred to, as at last coming to be linked
with the White Whale in the minds of the superstitiously inclined,
was the unearthly conceit that Moby Dick was ubiquitous; that he had
actually been encountered in opposite latitudes at one and the same
instant of time.

Nor, credulous as such minds must have been, was this conceit altogether
without some faint show of superstitious probability. For as the secrets
of the currents in the seas have never yet been divulged, even to
the most erudite research; so the hidden ways of the Sperm Whale
when beneath the surface remain, in great part, unaccountable to his
pursuers; and from time to time have originated the most curious and
contradictory speculations regarding them, especially concerning the
mystic modes whereby, after sounding to a great depth, he transports
himself with such vast swiftness to the most widely distant points.

It is a thing well known to both American and English whale-ships, and
as well a thing placed upon authoritative record years ago by Scoresby,
that some whales have been captured far north in the Pacific, in whose
bodies have been found the barbs of harpoons darted in the Greenland
seas. Nor is it to be gainsaid, that in some of these instances it has
been declared that the interval of time between the two assaults could
not have exceeded very many days. Hence, by inference, it has been
believed by some whalemen, that the Nor' West Passage, so long a problem
to man, was never a problem to the whale. So that here, in the real
living experience of living men, the prodigies related in old times of
the inland Strello mountain in Portugal (near whose top there was said
to be a lake in which the wrecks of ships floated up to the surface);
and that still more wonderful story of the Arethusa fountain near
Syracuse (whose waters were believed to have come from the Holy Land
by an underground passage); these fabulous narrations are almost fully
equalled by the realities of the whalemen.

Forced into familiarity, then, with such prodigies as these; and knowing
that after repeated, intrepid assaults, the White Whale had escaped
alive; it cannot be much matter of surprise that some whalemen should
go still further in their superstitions; declaring Moby Dick not only
ubiquitous, but immortal (for immortality is but ubiquity in time); that
though groves of spears should be planted in his flanks, he would still
swim away unharmed; or if indeed he should ever be made to spout thick
blood, such a sight would be but a ghastly deception; for again in
unensanguined billows hundreds of leagues away, his unsullied jet would
once more be seen.

But even stripped of these supernatural surmisings, there was enough in
the earthly make and incontestable character of the monster to strike
the imagination with unwonted power. For, it was not so much his
uncommon bulk that so much distinguished him from other sperm whales,
but, as was elsewhere thrown out--a peculiar snow-white wrinkled
forehead, and a high, pyramidical white hump. These were his prominent
features; the tokens whereby, even in the limitless, uncharted seas, he
revealed his identity, at a long distance, to those who knew him.

The rest of his body was so streaked, and spotted, and marbled with
the same shrouded hue, that, in the end, he had gained his distinctive
appellation of the White Whale; a name, indeed, literally justified by
his vivid aspect, when seen gliding at high noon through a dark blue
sea, leaving a milky-way wake of creamy foam, all spangled with golden
gleamings.

Nor was it his unwonted magnitude, nor his remarkable hue, nor yet his
deformed lower jaw, that so much invested the whale with natural terror,
as that unexampled, intelligent malignity which, according to specific
accounts, he had over and over again evinced in his assaults. More than
all, his treacherous retreats struck more of dismay than perhaps aught
else. For, when swimming before his exulting pursuers, with every
apparent symptom of alarm, he had several times been known to turn
round suddenly, and, bearing down upon them, either stave their boats to
splinters, or drive them back in consternation to their ship.

Already several fatalities had attended his chase. But though similar
disasters, however little bruited ashore, were by no means unusual
in the fishery; yet, in most instances, such seemed the White Whale's
infernal aforethought of ferocity, that every dismembering or death
that he caused, was not wholly regarded as having been inflicted by an
unintelligent agent.

Judge, then, to what pitches of inflamed, distracted fury the minds of
his more desperate hunters were impelled, when amid the chips of chewed
boats, and the sinking limbs of torn comrades, they swam out of the
white curds of the whale's direful wrath into the serene, exasperating
sunlight, that smiled on, as if at a birth or a bridal.

His three boats stove around him, and oars and men both whirling in the
eddies; one captain, seizing the line-knife from his broken prow, had
dashed at the whale, as an Arkansas duellist at his foe, blindly seeking
with a six inch blade to reach the fathom-deep life of the whale.
That captain was Ahab. And then it was, that suddenly sweeping his
sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath him, Moby Dick had reaped away Ahab's
leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the field. No turbaned Turk, no
hired Venetian or Malay, could have smote him with more seeming malice.
Small reason was there to doubt, then, that ever since that almost fatal
encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale,
all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came
to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his
intellectual and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam before
him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which
some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with
half a heart and half a lung. That intangible malignity which has been
from the beginning; to whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribe
one-half of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the east reverenced
in their statue devil;--Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them;
but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred white whale, he
pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that most maddens and
torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice
in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle
demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly
personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon
the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt
by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a
mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it.

It is not probable that this monomania in him took its instant rise at
the precise time of his bodily dismemberment. Then, in darting at the
monster, knife in hand, he had but given loose to a sudden, passionate,
corporal animosity; and when he received the stroke that tore him, he
probably but felt the agonizing bodily laceration, but nothing more.
Yet, when by this collision forced to turn towards home, and for long
months of days and weeks, Ahab and anguish lay stretched together in one
hammock, rounding in mid winter that dreary, howling Patagonian Cape;
then it was, that his torn body and gashed soul bled into one another;
and so interfusing, made him mad. That it was only then, on the homeward
voyage, after the encounter, that the final monomania seized him, seems
all but certain from the fact that, at intervals during the passage,
he was a raving lunatic; and, though unlimbed of a leg, yet such vital
strength yet lurked in his Egyptian chest, and was moreover intensified
by his delirium, that his mates were forced to lace him fast, even
there, as he sailed, raving in his hammock. In a strait-jacket, he swung
to the mad rockings of the gales. And, when running into more sufferable
latitudes, the ship, with mild stun'sails spread, floated across the
tranquil tropics, and, to all appearances, the old man's delirium seemed
left behind him with the Cape Horn swells, and he came forth from his
dark den into the blessed light and air; even then, when he bore that
firm, collected front, however pale, and issued his calm orders once
again; and his mates thanked God the direful madness was now gone; even
then, Ahab, in his hidden self, raved on. Human madness is oftentimes a
cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but
become transfigured into some still subtler form. Ahab's full lunacy
subsided not, but deepeningly contracted; like the unabated Hudson,
when that noble Northman flows narrowly, but unfathomably through the
Highland gorge. But, as in his narrow-flowing monomania, not one jot of
Ahab's broad madness had been left behind; so in that broad madness, not
one jot of his great natural intellect had perished. That before living
agent, now became the living instrument. If such a furious trope may
stand, his special lunacy stormed his general sanity, and carried it,
and turned all its concentred cannon upon its own mad mark; so that far
from having lost his strength, Ahab, to that one end, did now possess a
thousand fold more potency than ever he had sanely brought to bear upon
any one reasonable object.

This is much; yet Ahab's larger, darker, deeper part remains unhinted.
But vain to popularize profundities, and all truth is profound. Winding
far down from within the very heart of this spiked Hotel de Cluny where
we here stand--however grand and wonderful, now quit it;--and take your
way, ye nobler, sadder souls, to those vast Roman halls of Thermes;
where far beneath the fantastic towers of man's upper earth, his root
of grandeur, his whole awful essence sits in bearded state; an antique
buried beneath antiquities, and throned on torsoes! So with a broken
throne, the great gods mock that captive king; so like a Caryatid, he
patient sits, upholding on his frozen brow the piled entablatures of
ages. Wind ye down there, ye prouder, sadder souls! question that proud,
sad king! A family likeness! aye, he did beget ye, ye young exiled
royalties; and from your grim sire only will the old State-secret come.

Now, in his heart, Ahab had some glimpse of this, namely: all my means
are sane, my motive and my object mad. Yet without power to kill, or
change, or shun the fact; he likewise knew that to mankind he did long
dissemble; in some sort, did still. But that thing of his dissembling
was only subject to his perceptibility, not to his will determinate.
Nevertheless, so well did he succeed in that dissembling, that when
with ivory leg he stepped ashore at last, no Nantucketer thought him
otherwise than but naturally grieved, and that to the quick, with the
terrible casualty which had overtaken him.

The report of his undeniable delirium at sea was likewise popularly
ascribed to a kindred cause. And so too, all the added moodiness which
always afterwards, to the very day of sailing in the Pequod on the
present voyage, sat brooding on his brow. Nor is it so very unlikely,
that far from distrusting his fitness for another whaling voyage, on
account of such dark symptoms, the calculating people of that prudent
isle were inclined to harbor the conceit, that for those very reasons he
was all the better qualified and set on edge, for a pursuit so full
of rage and wildness as the bloody hunt of whales. Gnawed within and
scorched without, with the infixed, unrelenting fangs of some incurable
idea; such an one, could he be found, would seem the very man to dart
his iron and lift his lance against the most appalling of all brutes.
Or, if for any reason thought to be corporeally incapacitated for that,
yet such an one would seem superlatively competent to cheer and howl on
his underlings to the attack. But be all this as it may, certain it is,
that with the mad secret of his unabated rage bolted up and keyed in
him, Ahab had purposely sailed upon the present voyage with the one only
and all-engrossing object of hunting the White Whale. Had any one of his
old acquaintances on shore but half dreamed of what was lurking in him
then, how soon would their aghast and righteous souls have wrenched the
ship from such a fiendish man! They were bent on profitable cruises, the
profit to be counted down in dollars from the mint. He was intent on an
audacious, immitigable, and supernatural revenge.

Here, then, was this grey-headed, ungodly old man, chasing with curses a
Job's whale round the world, at the head of a crew, too, chiefly made
up of mongrel renegades, and castaways, and cannibals--morally enfeebled
also, by the incompetence of mere unaided virtue or right-mindedness in
Starbuck, the invunerable jollity of indifference and recklessness in
Stubb, and the pervading mediocrity in Flask. Such a crew, so officered,
seemed specially picked and packed by some infernal fatality to help him
to his monomaniac revenge. How it was that they so aboundingly responded
to the old man's ire--by what evil magic their souls were possessed,
that at times his hate seemed almost theirs; the White Whale as much
their insufferable foe as his; how all this came to be--what the White
Whale was to them, or how to their unconscious understandings, also, in
some dim, unsuspected way, he might have seemed the gliding great demon
of the seas of life,--all this to explain, would be to dive deeper than
Ishmael can go. The subterranean miner that works in us all, how can one
tell whither leads his shaft by the ever shifting, muffled sound of his
pick? Who does not feel the irresistible arm drag? What skiff in tow
of a seventy-four can stand still? For one, I gave myself up to the
abandonment of the time and the place; but while yet all a-rush to
encounter the whale, could see naught in that brute but the deadliest
ill.



CHAPTER 42. The Whiteness of The Whale.


What the white whale was to Ahab, has been hinted; what, at times, he
was to me, as yet remains unsaid.

Aside from those more obvious considerations touching Moby Dick, which
could not but occasionally awaken in any man's soul some alarm, there
was another thought, or rather vague, nameless horror concerning him,
which at times by its intensity completely overpowered all the rest; and
yet so mystical and well nigh ineffable was it, that I almost despair of
putting it in a comprehensible form. It was the whiteness of the whale
that above all things appalled me. But how can I hope to explain myself
here; and yet, in some dim, random way, explain myself I must, else all
these chapters might be naught.

Though in many natural objects, whiteness refiningly enhances beauty, as
if imparting some special virtue of its own, as in marbles, japonicas,
and pearls; and though various nations have in some way recognised a
certain royal preeminence in this hue; even the barbaric, grand old
kings of Pegu placing the title "Lord of the White Elephants" above all
their other magniloquent ascriptions of dominion; and the modern kings
of Siam unfurling the same snow-white quadruped in the royal standard;
and the Hanoverian flag bearing the one figure of a snow-white charger;
and the great Austrian Empire, Caesarian, heir to overlording Rome,
having for the imperial colour the same imperial hue; and though this
pre-eminence in it applies to the human race itself, giving the white
man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe; and though, besides, all
this, whiteness has been even made significant of gladness, for among
the Romans a white stone marked a joyful day; and though in other mortal
sympathies and symbolizings, this same hue is made the emblem of many
touching, noble things--the innocence of brides, the benignity of age;
though among the Red Men of America the giving of the white belt
of wampum was the deepest pledge of honour; though in many climes,
whiteness typifies the majesty of Justice in the ermine of the Judge,
and contributes to the daily state of kings and queens drawn by
milk-white steeds; though even in the higher mysteries of the most
august religions it has been made the symbol of the divine spotlessness
and power; by the Persian fire worshippers, the white forked flame being
held the holiest on the altar; and in the Greek mythologies, Great Jove
himself being made incarnate in a snow-white bull; and though to the
noble Iroquois, the midwinter sacrifice of the sacred White Dog was
by far the holiest festival of their theology, that spotless, faithful
creature being held the purest envoy they could send to the Great Spirit
with the annual tidings of their own fidelity; and though directly from
the Latin word for white, all Christian priests derive the name of
one part of their sacred vesture, the alb or tunic, worn beneath the
cassock; and though among the holy pomps of the Romish faith, white is
specially employed in the celebration of the Passion of our Lord; though
in the Vision of St. John, white robes are given to the redeemed, and
the four-and-twenty elders stand clothed in white before the great-white
throne, and the Holy One that sitteth there white like wool; yet for all
these accumulated associations, with whatever is sweet, and honourable,
and sublime, there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea
of this hue, which strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness
which affrights in blood.

This elusive quality it is, which causes the thought of whiteness, when
divorced from more kindly associations, and coupled with any object
terrible in itself, to heighten that terror to the furthest bounds.
Witness the white bear of the poles, and the white shark of the tropics;
what but their smooth, flaky whiteness makes them the transcendent
horrors they are? That ghastly whiteness it is which imparts such an
abhorrent mildness, even more loathsome than terrific, to the dumb
gloating of their aspect. So that not the fierce-fanged tiger in his
heraldic coat can so stagger courage as the white-shrouded bear or
shark.*


*With reference to the Polar bear, it may possibly be urged by him
who would fain go still deeper into this matter, that it is not
the whiteness, separately regarded, which heightens the intolerable
hideousness of that brute; for, analysed, that heightened hideousness,
it might be said, only rises from the circumstance, that the
irresponsible ferociousness of the creature stands invested in the
fleece of celestial innocence and love; and hence, by bringing together
two such opposite emotions in our minds, the Polar bear frightens us
with so unnatural a contrast. But even assuming all this to be true;
yet, were it not for the whiteness, you would not have that intensified
terror.

As for the white shark, the white gliding ghostliness of repose in that
creature, when beheld in his ordinary moods, strangely tallies with the
same quality in the Polar quadruped. This peculiarity is most vividly
hit by the French in the name they bestow upon that fish. The Romish
mass for the dead begins with "Requiem eternam" (eternal rest), whence
REQUIEM denominating the mass itself, and any other funeral music. Now,
in allusion to the white, silent stillness of death in this shark, and
the mild deadliness of his habits, the French call him REQUIN.


Bethink thee of the albatross, whence come those clouds of spiritual
wonderment and pale dread, in which that white phantom sails in all
imaginations? Not Coleridge first threw that spell; but God's great,
unflattering laureate, Nature.*


*I remember the first albatross I ever saw. It was during a prolonged
gale, in waters hard upon the Antarctic seas. From my forenoon watch
below, I ascended to the overclouded deck; and there, dashed upon the
main hatches, I saw a regal, feathery thing of unspotted whiteness, and
with a hooked, Roman bill sublime. At intervals, it arched forth
its vast archangel wings, as if to embrace some holy ark. Wondrous
flutterings and throbbings shook it. Though bodily unharmed, it uttered
cries, as some king's ghost in supernatural distress. Through its
inexpressible, strange eyes, methought I peeped to secrets which took
hold of God. As Abraham before the angels, I bowed myself; the white
thing was so white, its wings so wide, and in those for ever exiled
waters, I had lost the miserable warping memories of traditions and of
towns. Long I gazed at that prodigy of plumage. I cannot tell, can only
hint, the things that darted through me then. But at last I awoke; and
turning, asked a sailor what bird was this. A goney, he replied. Goney!
never had heard that name before; is it conceivable that this glorious
thing is utterly unknown to men ashore! never! But some time after, I
learned that goney was some seaman's name for albatross. So that by no
possibility could Coleridge's wild Rhyme have had aught to do with those
mystical impressions which were mine, when I saw that bird upon our
deck. For neither had I then read the Rhyme, nor knew the bird to be
an albatross. Yet, in saying this, I do but indirectly burnish a little
brighter the noble merit of the poem and the poet.

I assert, then, that in the wondrous bodily whiteness of the bird
chiefly lurks the secret of the spell; a truth the more evinced in this,
that by a solecism of terms there are birds called grey albatrosses;
and these I have frequently seen, but never with such emotions as when I
beheld the Antarctic fowl.

But how had the mystic thing been caught? Whisper it not, and I will
tell; with a treacherous hook and line, as the fowl floated on the sea.
At last the Captain made a postman of it; tying a lettered, leathern
tally round its neck, with the ship's time and place; and then letting
it escape. But I doubt not, that leathern tally, meant for man, was
taken off in Heaven, when the white fowl flew to join the wing-folding,
the invoking, and adoring cherubim!


Most famous in our Western annals and Indian traditions is that of
the White Steed of the Prairies; a magnificent milk-white charger,
large-eyed, small-headed, bluff-chested, and with the dignity of a
thousand monarchs in his lofty, overscorning carriage. He was the
elected Xerxes of vast herds of wild horses, whose pastures in those
days were only fenced by the Rocky Mountains and the Alleghanies. At
their flaming head he westward trooped it like that chosen star which
every evening leads on the hosts of light. The flashing cascade of his
mane, the curving comet of his tail, invested him with housings more
resplendent than gold and silver-beaters could have furnished him. A
most imperial and archangelical apparition of that unfallen, western
world, which to the eyes of the old trappers and hunters revived the
glories of those primeval times when Adam walked majestic as a god,
bluff-browed and fearless as this mighty steed. Whether marching amid
his aides and marshals in the van of countless cohorts that endlessly
streamed it over the plains, like an Ohio; or whether with his
circumambient subjects browsing all around at the horizon, the White
Steed gallopingly reviewed them with warm nostrils reddening through his
cool milkiness; in whatever aspect he presented himself, always to the
bravest Indians he was the object of trembling reverence and awe. Nor
can it be questioned from what stands on legendary record of this noble
horse, that it was his spiritual whiteness chiefly, which so clothed him
with divineness; and that this divineness had that in it which, though
commanding worship, at the same time enforced a certain nameless terror.

But there are other instances where this whiteness loses all that
accessory and strange glory which invests it in the White Steed and
Albatross.

What is it that in the Albino man so peculiarly repels and often shocks
the eye, as that sometimes he is loathed by his own kith and kin! It
is that whiteness which invests him, a thing expressed by the name
he bears. The Albino is as well made as other men--has no substantive
deformity--and yet this mere aspect of all-pervading whiteness makes him
more strangely hideous than the ugliest abortion. Why should this be so?

Nor, in quite other aspects, does Nature in her least palpable but
not the less malicious agencies, fail to enlist among her forces
this crowning attribute of the terrible. From its snowy aspect, the
gauntleted ghost of the Southern Seas has been denominated the White
Squall. Nor, in some historic instances, has the art of human malice
omitted so potent an auxiliary. How wildly it heightens the effect of
that passage in Froissart, when, masked in the snowy symbol of their
faction, the desperate White Hoods of Ghent murder their bailiff in the
market-place!

Nor, in some things, does the common, hereditary experience of all
mankind fail to bear witness to the supernaturalism of this hue. It
cannot well be doubted, that the one visible quality in the aspect of
the dead which most appals the gazer, is the marble pallor lingering
there; as if indeed that pallor were as much like the badge of
consternation in the other world, as of mortal trepidation here. And
from that pallor of the dead, we borrow the expressive hue of the shroud
in which we wrap them. Nor even in our superstitions do we fail to
throw the same snowy mantle round our phantoms; all ghosts rising in a
milk-white fog--Yea, while these terrors seize us, let us add, that even
the king of terrors, when personified by the evangelist, rides on his
pallid horse.

Therefore, in his other moods, symbolize whatever grand or gracious
thing he will by whiteness, no man can deny that in its profoundest
idealized significance it calls up a peculiar apparition to the soul.

But though without dissent this point be fixed, how is mortal man to
account for it? To analyse it, would seem impossible. Can we, then,
by the citation of some of those instances wherein this thing of
whiteness--though for the time either wholly or in great part stripped
of all direct associations calculated to impart to it aught fearful,
but nevertheless, is found to exert over us the same sorcery, however
modified;--can we thus hope to light upon some chance clue to conduct us
to the hidden cause we seek?

Let us try. But in a matter like this, subtlety appeals to subtlety,
and without imagination no man can follow another into these halls. And
though, doubtless, some at least of the imaginative impressions about
to be presented may have been shared by most men, yet few perhaps were
entirely conscious of them at the time, and therefore may not be able to
recall them now.

Why to the man of untutored ideality, who happens to be but loosely
acquainted with the peculiar character of the day, does the bare mention
of Whitsuntide marshal in the fancy such long, dreary, speechless
processions of slow-pacing pilgrims, down-cast and hooded with
new-fallen snow? Or, to the unread, unsophisticated Protestant of the
Middle American States, why does the passing mention of a White Friar or
a White Nun, evoke such an eyeless statue in the soul?

Or what is there apart from the traditions of dungeoned warriors and
kings (which will not wholly account for it) that makes the White
Tower of London tell so much more strongly on the imagination of
an untravelled American, than those other storied structures, its
neighbors--the Byward Tower, or even the Bloody? And those sublimer
towers, the White Mountains of New Hampshire, whence, in peculiar moods,
comes that gigantic ghostliness over the soul at the bare mention of
that name, while the thought of Virginia's Blue Ridge is full of a soft,
dewy, distant dreaminess? Or why, irrespective of all latitudes and
longitudes, does the name of the White Sea exert such a spectralness
over the fancy, while that of the Yellow Sea lulls us with mortal
thoughts of long lacquered mild afternoons on the waves, followed by
the gaudiest and yet sleepiest of sunsets? Or, to choose a wholly
unsubstantial instance, purely addressed to the fancy, why, in reading
the old fairy tales of Central Europe, does "the tall pale man" of the
Hartz forests, whose changeless pallor unrustlingly glides through the
green of the groves--why is this phantom more terrible than all the
whooping imps of the Blocksburg?

Nor is it, altogether, the remembrance of her cathedral-toppling
earthquakes; nor the stampedoes of her frantic seas; nor the
tearlessness of arid skies that never rain; nor the sight of her wide
field of leaning spires, wrenched cope-stones, and crosses all adroop
(like canted yards of anchored fleets); and her suburban avenues of
house-walls lying over upon each other, as a tossed pack of cards;--it
is not these things alone which make tearless Lima, the strangest,
saddest city thou can'st see. For Lima has taken the white veil; and
there is a higher horror in this whiteness of her woe. Old as Pizarro,
this whiteness keeps her ruins for ever new; admits not the cheerful
greenness of complete decay; spreads over her broken ramparts the rigid
pallor of an apoplexy that fixes its own distortions.

I know that, to the common apprehension, this phenomenon of whiteness
is not confessed to be the prime agent in exaggerating the terror of
objects otherwise terrible; nor to the unimaginative mind is there aught
of terror in those appearances whose awfulness to another mind almost
solely consists in this one phenomenon, especially when exhibited under
any form at all approaching to muteness or universality. What I mean
by these two statements may perhaps be respectively elucidated by the
following examples.

First: The mariner, when drawing nigh the coasts of foreign lands, if by
night he hear the roar of breakers, starts to vigilance, and feels just
enough of trepidation to sharpen all his faculties; but under precisely
similar circumstances, let him be called from his hammock to view his
ship sailing through a midnight sea of milky whiteness--as if from
encircling headlands shoals of combed white bears were swimming round
him, then he feels a silent, superstitious dread; the shrouded phantom
of the whitened waters is horrible to him as a real ghost; in vain the
lead assures him he is still off soundings; heart and helm they both go
down; he never rests till blue water is under him again. Yet where is
the mariner who will tell thee, "Sir, it was not so much the fear of
striking hidden rocks, as the fear of that hideous whiteness that so
stirred me?"

Second: To the native Indian of Peru, the continual sight of the
snowhowdahed Andes conveys naught of dread, except, perhaps, in the
mere fancying of the eternal frosted desolateness reigning at such vast
altitudes, and the natural conceit of what a fearfulness it would be
to lose oneself in such inhuman solitudes. Much the same is it with the
backwoodsman of the West, who with comparative indifference views an
unbounded prairie sheeted with driven snow, no shadow of tree or twig
to break the fixed trance of whiteness. Not so the sailor, beholding the
scenery of the Antarctic seas; where at times, by some infernal trick
of legerdemain in the powers of frost and air, he, shivering and half
shipwrecked, instead of rainbows speaking hope and solace to his misery,
views what seems a boundless churchyard grinning upon him with its lean
ice monuments and splintered crosses.

But thou sayest, methinks that white-lead chapter about whiteness is but
a white flag hung out from a craven soul; thou surrenderest to a hypo,
Ishmael.

Tell me, why this strong young colt, foaled in some peaceful valley of
Vermont, far removed from all beasts of prey--why is it that upon the
sunniest day, if you but shake a fresh buffalo robe behind him, so that
he cannot even see it, but only smells its wild animal muskiness--why
will he start, snort, and with bursting eyes paw the ground in phrensies
of affright? There is no remembrance in him of any gorings of wild
creatures in his green northern home, so that the strange muskiness he
smells cannot recall to him anything associated with the experience of
former perils; for what knows he, this New England colt, of the black
bisons of distant Oregon?

No; but here thou beholdest even in a dumb brute, the instinct of the
knowledge of the demonism in the world. Though thousands of miles from
Oregon, still when he smells that savage musk, the rending, goring bison
herds are as present as to the deserted wild foal of the prairies, which
this instant they may be trampling into dust.

Thus, then, the muffled rollings of a milky sea; the bleak rustlings
of the festooned frosts of mountains; the desolate shiftings of the
windrowed snows of prairies; all these, to Ishmael, are as the shaking
of that buffalo robe to the frightened colt!

Though neither knows where lie the nameless things of which the mystic
sign gives forth such hints; yet with me, as with the colt, somewhere
those things must exist. Though in many of its aspects this visible
world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright.

But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and
learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and more strange
and far more portentous--why, as we have seen, it is at once the
most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the
Christian's Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in
things the most appalling to mankind.

Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids
and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the
thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky
way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a colour as
the visible absence of colour; and at the same time the concrete of all
colours; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness,
full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows--a colourless, all-colour
of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory
of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues--every stately
or lovely emblazoning--the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea,
and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of
young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent
in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature
absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but
the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that
the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great
principle of light, for ever remains white or colourless in itself, and
if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even
tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge--pondering all this, the
palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in
Lapland, who refuse to wear coloured and colouring glasses upon their
eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental
white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these
things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery
hunt?



CHAPTER 43. Hark!


"HIST! Did you hear that noise, Cabaco?"

It was the middle-watch; a fair moonlight; the seamen were standing in a
cordon, extending from one of the fresh-water butts in the waist, to the
scuttle-butt near the taffrail. In this manner, they passed the buckets
to fill the scuttle-butt. Standing, for the most part, on the hallowed
precincts of the quarter-deck, they were careful not to speak or rustle
their feet. From hand to hand, the buckets went in the deepest silence,
only broken by the occasional flap of a sail, and the steady hum of the
unceasingly advancing keel.

It was in the midst of this repose, that Archy, one of the cordon, whose
post was near the after-hatches, whispered to his neighbor, a Cholo, the
words above.

"Hist! did you hear that noise, Cabaco?"

"Take the bucket, will ye, Archy? what noise d'ye mean?"

"There it is again--under the hatches--don't you hear it--a cough--it
sounded like a cough."

"Cough be damned! Pass along that return bucket."

"There again--there it is!--it sounds like two or three sleepers turning
over, now!"

"Caramba! have done, shipmate, will ye? It's the three soaked biscuits
ye eat for supper turning over inside of ye--nothing else. Look to the
bucket!"

"Say what ye will, shipmate; I've sharp ears."

"Aye, you are the chap, ain't ye, that heard the hum of the old
Quakeress's knitting-needles fifty miles at sea from Nantucket; you're
the chap."

"Grin away; we'll see what turns up. Hark ye, Cabaco, there is somebody
down in the after-hold that has not yet been seen on deck; and I suspect
our old Mogul knows something of it too. I heard Stubb tell Flask, one
morning watch, that there was something of that sort in the wind."

"Tish! the bucket!"



CHAPTER 44. The Chart.


Had you followed Captain Ahab down into his cabin after the squall that
took place on the night succeeding that wild ratification of his purpose
with his crew, you would have seen him go to a locker in the transom,
and bringing out a large wrinkled roll of yellowish sea charts, spread
them before him on his screwed-down table. Then seating himself before
it, you would have seen him intently study the various lines and
shadings which there met his eye; and with slow but steady pencil trace
additional courses over spaces that before were blank. At intervals, he
would refer to piles of old log-books beside him, wherein were set down
the seasons and places in which, on various former voyages of various
ships, sperm whales had been captured or seen.

While thus employed, the heavy pewter lamp suspended in chains over his
head, continually rocked with the motion of the ship, and for ever threw
shifting gleams and shadows of lines upon his wrinkled brow, till it
almost seemed that while he himself was marking out lines and courses
on the wrinkled charts, some invisible pencil was also tracing lines and
courses upon the deeply marked chart of his forehead.

But it was not this night in particular that, in the solitude of his
cabin, Ahab thus pondered over his charts. Almost every night they were
brought out; almost every night some pencil marks were effaced, and
others were substituted. For with the charts of all four oceans before
him, Ahab was threading a maze of currents and eddies, with a view to
the more certain accomplishment of that monomaniac thought of his soul.

Now, to any one not fully acquainted with the ways of the leviathans,
it might seem an absurdly hopeless task thus to seek out one solitary
creature in the unhooped oceans of this planet. But not so did it
seem to Ahab, who knew the sets of all tides and currents; and thereby
calculating the driftings of the sperm whale's food; and, also, calling
to mind the regular, ascertained seasons for hunting him in particular
latitudes; could arrive at reasonable surmises, almost approaching to
certainties, concerning the timeliest day to be upon this or that ground
in search of his prey.

So assured, indeed, is the fact concerning the periodicalness of the
sperm whale's resorting to given waters, that many hunters believe that,
could he be closely observed and studied throughout the world; were the
logs for one voyage of the entire whale fleet carefully collated,
then the migrations of the sperm whale would be found to correspond in
invariability to those of the herring-shoals or the flights of swallows.
On this hint, attempts have been made to construct elaborate migratory
charts of the sperm whale.*

     *Since the above was written, the statement is happily borne
     out by an official circular, issued by Lieutenant Maury, of
     the National Observatory, Washington, April 16th, 1851. By
     that circular, it appears that precisely such a chart is in
     course of completion; and portions of it are presented in
     the circular. "This chart divides the ocean into districts
     of five degrees of latitude by five degrees of longitude;
     perpendicularly through each of which districts are twelve
     columns for the twelve months; and horizontally through each
     of which districts are three lines; one to show the number
     of days that have been spent in each month in every
     district, and the two others to show the number of days in
     which whales, sperm or right, have been seen."

Besides, when making a passage from one feeding-ground to another, the
sperm whales, guided by some infallible instinct--say, rather, secret
intelligence from the Deity--mostly swim in VEINS, as they are called;
continuing their way along a given ocean-line with such undeviating
exactitude, that no ship ever sailed her course, by any chart, with
one tithe of such marvellous precision. Though, in these cases, the
direction taken by any one whale be straight as a surveyor's parallel,
and though the line of advance be strictly confined to its own
unavoidable, straight wake, yet the arbitrary VEIN in which at these
times he is said to swim, generally embraces some few miles in width
(more or less, as the vein is presumed to expand or contract); but
never exceeds the visual sweep from the whale-ship's mast-heads,
when circumspectly gliding along this magic zone. The sum is, that at
particular seasons within that breadth and along that path, migrating
whales may with great confidence be looked for.

And hence not only at substantiated times, upon well known separate
feeding-grounds, could Ahab hope to encounter his prey; but in crossing
the widest expanses of water between those grounds he could, by his
art, so place and time himself on his way, as even then not to be wholly
without prospect of a meeting.

There was a circumstance which at first sight seemed to entangle his
delirious but still methodical scheme. But not so in the reality,
perhaps. Though the gregarious sperm whales have their regular seasons
for particular grounds, yet in general you cannot conclude that the
herds which haunted such and such a latitude or longitude this year,
say, will turn out to be identically the same with those that were found
there the preceding season; though there are peculiar and unquestionable
instances where the contrary of this has proved true. In general, the
same remark, only within a less wide limit, applies to the solitaries
and hermits among the matured, aged sperm whales. So that though Moby
Dick had in a former year been seen, for example, on what is called the
Seychelle ground in the Indian ocean, or Volcano Bay on the Japanese
Coast; yet it did not follow, that were the Pequod to visit either of
those spots at any subsequent corresponding season, she would infallibly
encounter him there. So, too, with some other feeding grounds, where
he had at times revealed himself. But all these seemed only his casual
stopping-places and ocean-inns, so to speak, not his places of prolonged
abode. And where Ahab's chances of accomplishing his object have
hitherto been spoken of, allusion has only been made to whatever
way-side, antecedent, extra prospects were his, ere a particular
set time or place were attained, when all possibilities would become
probabilities, and, as Ahab fondly thought, every possibility the next
thing to a certainty. That particular set time and place were conjoined
in the one technical phrase--the Season-on-the-Line. For there and then,
for several consecutive years, Moby Dick had been periodically descried,
lingering in those waters for awhile, as the sun, in its annual round,
loiters for a predicted interval in any one sign of the Zodiac. There
it was, too, that most of the deadly encounters with the white whale had
taken place; there the waves were storied with his deeds; there also was
that tragic spot where the monomaniac old man had found the awful motive
to his vengeance. But in the cautious comprehensiveness and unloitering
vigilance with which Ahab threw his brooding soul into this unfaltering
hunt, he would not permit himself to rest all his hopes upon the one
crowning fact above mentioned, however flattering it might be to those
hopes; nor in the sleeplessness of his vow could he so tranquillize his
unquiet heart as to postpone all intervening quest.

Now, the Pequod had sailed from Nantucket at the very beginning of the
Season-on-the-Line. No possible endeavor then could enable her commander
to make the great passage southwards, double Cape Horn, and then running
down sixty degrees of latitude arrive in the equatorial Pacific in time
to cruise there. Therefore, he must wait for the next ensuing season.
Yet the premature hour of the Pequod's sailing had, perhaps, been
correctly selected by Ahab, with a view to this very complexion of
things. Because, an interval of three hundred and sixty-five days
and nights was before him; an interval which, instead of impatiently
enduring ashore, he would spend in a miscellaneous hunt; if by chance
the White Whale, spending his vacation in seas far remote from his
periodical feeding-grounds, should turn up his wrinkled brow off the
Persian Gulf, or in the Bengal Bay, or China Seas, or in any other
waters haunted by his race. So that Monsoons, Pampas, Nor'-Westers,
Harmattans, Trades; any wind but the Levanter and Simoon, might
blow Moby Dick into the devious zig-zag world-circle of the Pequod's
circumnavigating wake.

But granting all this; yet, regarded discreetly and coolly, seems it not
but a mad idea, this; that in the broad boundless ocean, one solitary
whale, even if encountered, should be thought capable of individual
recognition from his hunter, even as a white-bearded Mufti in the
thronged thoroughfares of Constantinople? Yes. For the peculiar
snow-white brow of Moby Dick, and his snow-white hump, could not but
be unmistakable. And have I not tallied the whale, Ahab would mutter
to himself, as after poring over his charts till long after midnight he
would throw himself back in reveries--tallied him, and shall he escape?
His broad fins are bored, and scalloped out like a lost sheep's ear! And
here, his mad mind would run on in a breathless race; till a weariness
and faintness of pondering came over him; and in the open air of the
deck he would seek to recover his strength. Ah, God! what trances
of torments does that man endure who is consumed with one unachieved
revengeful desire. He sleeps with clenched hands; and wakes with his own
bloody nails in his palms.

Often, when forced from his hammock by exhausting and intolerably vivid
dreams of the night, which, resuming his own intense thoughts through
the day, carried them on amid a clashing of phrensies, and whirled them
round and round and round in his blazing brain, till the very throbbing
of his life-spot became insufferable anguish; and when, as was sometimes
the case, these spiritual throes in him heaved his being up from its
base, and a chasm seemed opening in him, from which forked flames and
lightnings shot up, and accursed fiends beckoned him to leap down among
them; when this hell in himself yawned beneath him, a wild cry would be
heard through the ship; and with glaring eyes Ahab would burst from his
state room, as though escaping from a bed that was on fire. Yet these,
perhaps, instead of being the unsuppressable symptoms of some latent
weakness, or fright at his own resolve, were but the plainest tokens
of its intensity. For, at such times, crazy Ahab, the scheming,
unappeasedly steadfast hunter of the white whale; this Ahab that had
gone to his hammock, was not the agent that so caused him to burst from
it in horror again. The latter was the eternal, living principle or
soul in him; and in sleep, being for the time dissociated from the
characterizing mind, which at other times employed it for its outer
vehicle or agent, it spontaneously sought escape from the scorching
contiguity of the frantic thing, of which, for the time, it was no
longer an integral. But as the mind does not exist unless leagued with
the soul, therefore it must have been that, in Ahab's case, yielding up
all his thoughts and fancies to his one supreme purpose; that purpose,
by its own sheer inveteracy of will, forced itself against gods and
devils into a kind of self-assumed, independent being of its own. Nay,
could grimly live and burn, while the common vitality to which it was
conjoined, fled horror-stricken from the unbidden and unfathered birth.
Therefore, the tormented spirit that glared out of bodily eyes, when
what seemed Ahab rushed from his room, was for the time but a vacated
thing, a formless somnambulistic being, a ray of living light, to be
sure, but without an object to colour, and therefore a blankness in
itself. God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature
in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a
vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature
he creates.



CHAPTER 45. The Affidavit.


So far as what there may be of a narrative in this book; and, indeed, as
indirectly touching one or two very interesting and curious particulars
in the habits of sperm whales, the foregoing chapter, in its earlier
part, is as important a one as will be found in this volume; but the
leading matter of it requires to be still further and more familiarly
enlarged upon, in order to be adequately understood, and moreover to
take away any incredulity which a profound ignorance of the entire
subject may induce in some minds, as to the natural verity of the main
points of this affair.

I care not to perform this part of my task methodically; but shall
be content to produce the desired impression by separate citations of
items, practically or reliably known to me as a whaleman; and from these
citations, I take it--the conclusion aimed at will naturally follow of
itself.

First: I have personally known three instances where a whale, after
receiving a harpoon, has effected a complete escape; and, after an
interval (in one instance of three years), has been again struck by
the same hand, and slain; when the two irons, both marked by the same
private cypher, have been taken from the body. In the instance where
three years intervened between the flinging of the two harpoons; and I
think it may have been something more than that; the man who darted
them happening, in the interval, to go in a trading ship on a voyage to
Africa, went ashore there, joined a discovery party, and penetrated far
into the interior, where he travelled for a period of nearly two years,
often endangered by serpents, savages, tigers, poisonous miasmas,
with all the other common perils incident to wandering in the heart of
unknown regions. Meanwhile, the whale he had struck must also have
been on its travels; no doubt it had thrice circumnavigated the globe,
brushing with its flanks all the coasts of Africa; but to no purpose.
This man and this whale again came together, and the one vanquished the
other. I say I, myself, have known three instances similar to this; that
is in two of them I saw the whales struck; and, upon the second attack,
saw the two irons with the respective marks cut in them, afterwards
taken from the dead fish. In the three-year instance, it so fell out
that I was in the boat both times, first and last, and the last time
distinctly recognised a peculiar sort of huge mole under the whale's
eye, which I had observed there three years previous. I say three years,
but I am pretty sure it was more than that. Here are three instances,
then, which I personally know the truth of; but I have heard of many
other instances from persons whose veracity in the matter there is no
good ground to impeach.

Secondly: It is well known in the Sperm Whale Fishery, however ignorant
the world ashore may be of it, that there have been several memorable
historical instances where a particular whale in the ocean has been at
distant times and places popularly cognisable. Why such a whale became
thus marked was not altogether and originally owing to his bodily
peculiarities as distinguished from other whales; for however peculiar
in that respect any chance whale may be, they soon put an end to his
peculiarities by killing him, and boiling him down into a peculiarly
valuable oil. No: the reason was this: that from the fatal experiences
of the fishery there hung a terrible prestige of perilousness about
such a whale as there did about Rinaldo Rinaldini, insomuch that
most fishermen were content to recognise him by merely touching their
tarpaulins when he would be discovered lounging by them on the sea,
without seeking to cultivate a more intimate acquaintance. Like some
poor devils ashore that happen to know an irascible great man, they
make distant unobtrusive salutations to him in the street, lest if they
pursued the acquaintance further, they might receive a summary thump for
their presumption.

But not only did each of these famous whales enjoy great individual
celebrity--Nay, you may call it an ocean-wide renown; not only was he
famous in life and now is immortal in forecastle stories after death,
but he was admitted into all the rights, privileges, and distinctions of
a name; had as much a name indeed as Cambyses or Caesar. Was it not so,
O Timor Tom! thou famed leviathan, scarred like an iceberg, who so long
did'st lurk in the Oriental straits of that name, whose spout was oft
seen from the palmy beach of Ombay? Was it not so, O New Zealand Jack!
thou terror of all cruisers that crossed their wakes in the vicinity of
the Tattoo Land? Was it not so, O Morquan! King of Japan, whose lofty
jet they say at times assumed the semblance of a snow-white cross
against the sky? Was it not so, O Don Miguel! thou Chilian whale, marked
like an old tortoise with mystic hieroglyphics upon the back! In plain
prose, here are four whales as well known to the students of Cetacean
History as Marius or Sylla to the classic scholar.

But this is not all. New Zealand Tom and Don Miguel, after at various
times creating great havoc among the boats of different vessels, were
finally gone in quest of, systematically hunted out, chased and killed
by valiant whaling captains, who heaved up their anchors with
that express object as much in view, as in setting out through the
Narragansett Woods, Captain Butler of old had it in his mind to capture
that notorious murderous savage Annawon, the headmost warrior of the
Indian King Philip.

I do not know where I can find a better place than just here, to make
mention of one or two other things, which to me seem important, as in
printed form establishing in all respects the reasonableness of the
whole story of the White Whale, more especially the catastrophe. For
this is one of those disheartening instances where truth requires full
as much bolstering as error. So ignorant are most landsmen of some of
the plainest and most palpable wonders of the world, that without
some hints touching the plain facts, historical and otherwise, of the
fishery, they might scout at Moby Dick as a monstrous fable, or still
worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory.

First: Though most men have some vague flitting ideas of the general
perils of the grand fishery, yet they have nothing like a fixed, vivid
conception of those perils, and the frequency with which they recur.
One reason perhaps is, that not one in fifty of the actual disasters and
deaths by casualties in the fishery, ever finds a public record at home,
however transient and immediately forgotten that record. Do you suppose
that that poor fellow there, who this moment perhaps caught by the
whale-line off the coast of New Guinea, is being carried down to the
bottom of the sea by the sounding leviathan--do you suppose that that
poor fellow's name will appear in the newspaper obituary you will read
to-morrow at your breakfast? No: because the mails are very irregular
between here and New Guinea. In fact, did you ever hear what might be
called regular news direct or indirect from New Guinea? Yet I tell you
that upon one particular voyage which I made to the Pacific, among many
others we spoke thirty different ships, every one of which had had a
death by a whale, some of them more than one, and three that had each
lost a boat's crew. For God's sake, be economical with your lamps and
candles! not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of man's blood was
spilled for it.

Secondly: People ashore have indeed some indefinite idea that a whale is
an enormous creature of enormous power; but I have ever found that when
narrating to them some specific example of this two-fold enormousness,
they have significantly complimented me upon my facetiousness; when, I
declare upon my soul, I had no more idea of being facetious than Moses,
when he wrote the history of the plagues of Egypt.

But fortunately the special point I here seek can be established upon
testimony entirely independent of my own. That point is this: The Sperm
Whale is in some cases sufficiently powerful, knowing, and judiciously
malicious, as with direct aforethought to stave in, utterly destroy, and
sink a large ship; and what is more, the Sperm Whale HAS done it.

First: In the year 1820 the ship Essex, Captain Pollard, of Nantucket,
was cruising in the Pacific Ocean. One day she saw spouts, lowered her
boats, and gave chase to a shoal of sperm whales. Ere long, several of
the whales were wounded; when, suddenly, a very large whale escaping
from the boats, issued from the shoal, and bore directly down upon the
ship. Dashing his forehead against her hull, he so stove her in, that in
less than "ten minutes" she settled down and fell over. Not a surviving
plank of her has been seen since. After the severest exposure, part of
the crew reached the land in their boats. Being returned home at last,
Captain Pollard once more sailed for the Pacific in command of another
ship, but the gods shipwrecked him again upon unknown rocks and
breakers; for the second time his ship was utterly lost, and forthwith
forswearing the sea, he has never tempted it since. At this day Captain
Pollard is a resident of Nantucket. I have seen Owen Chace, who was
chief mate of the Essex at the time of the tragedy; I have read his
plain and faithful narrative; I have conversed with his son; and all
this within a few miles of the scene of the catastrophe.*


*The following are extracts from Chace's narrative: "Every fact seemed
to warrant me in concluding that it was anything but chance which
directed his operations; he made two several attacks upon the ship, at
a short interval between them, both of which, according to their
direction, were calculated to do us the most injury, by being made
ahead, and thereby combining the speed of the two objects for the shock;
to effect which, the exact manoeuvres which he made were necessary. His
aspect was most horrible, and such as indicated resentment and fury. He
came directly from the shoal which we had just before entered, and in
which we had struck three of his companions, as if fired with revenge
for their sufferings." Again: "At all events, the whole circumstances
taken together, all happening before my own eyes, and producing, at the
time, impressions in my mind of decided, calculating mischief, on the
part of the whale (many of which impressions I cannot now recall),
induce me to be satisfied that I am correct in my opinion."

Here are his reflections some time after quitting the ship, during
a black night an open boat, when almost despairing of reaching any
hospitable shore. "The dark ocean and swelling waters were nothing; the
fears of being swallowed up by some dreadful tempest, or dashed
upon hidden rocks, with all the other ordinary subjects of fearful
contemplation, seemed scarcely entitled to a moment's thought; the
dismal looking wreck, and THE HORRID ASPECT AND REVENGE OF THE WHALE,
wholly engrossed my reflections, until day again made its appearance."

In another place--p. 45,--he speaks of "THE MYSTERIOUS AND MORTAL ATTACK
OF THE ANIMAL."


Secondly: The ship Union, also of Nantucket, was in the year 1807
totally lost off the Azores by a similar onset, but the authentic
particulars of this catastrophe I have never chanced to encounter,
though from the whale hunters I have now and then heard casual allusions
to it.

Thirdly: Some eighteen or twenty years ago Commodore J---, then
commanding an American sloop-of-war of the first class, happened to be
dining with a party of whaling captains, on board a Nantucket ship in
the harbor of Oahu, Sandwich Islands. Conversation turning upon whales,
the Commodore was pleased to be sceptical touching the amazing strength
ascribed to them by the professional gentlemen present. He peremptorily
denied for example, that any whale could so smite his stout sloop-of-war
as to cause her to leak so much as a thimbleful. Very good; but there
is more coming. Some weeks after, the Commodore set sail in this
impregnable craft for Valparaiso. But he was stopped on the way by a
portly sperm whale, that begged a few moments' confidential business
with him. That business consisted in fetching the Commodore's craft such
a thwack, that with all his pumps going he made straight for the nearest
port to heave down and repair. I am not superstitious, but I consider
the Commodore's interview with that whale as providential. Was not Saul
of Tarsus converted from unbelief by a similar fright? I tell you, the
sperm whale will stand no nonsense.

I will now refer you to Langsdorff's Voyages for a little circumstance
in point, peculiarly interesting to the writer hereof. Langsdorff, you
must know by the way, was attached to the Russian Admiral Krusenstern's
famous Discovery Expedition in the beginning of the present century.
Captain Langsdorff thus begins his seventeenth chapter:

"By the thirteenth of May our ship was ready to sail, and the next day
we were out in the open sea, on our way to Ochotsh. The weather was very
clear and fine, but so intolerably cold that we were obliged to keep on
our fur clothing. For some days we had very little wind; it was not
till the nineteenth that a brisk gale from the northwest sprang up. An
uncommon large whale, the body of which was larger than the ship itself,
lay almost at the surface of the water, but was not perceived by any
one on board till the moment when the ship, which was in full sail,
was almost upon him, so that it was impossible to prevent its striking
against him. We were thus placed in the most imminent danger, as this
gigantic creature, setting up its back, raised the ship three feet at
least out of the water. The masts reeled, and the sails fell altogether,
while we who were below all sprang instantly upon the deck, concluding
that we had struck upon some rock; instead of this we saw the monster
sailing off with the utmost gravity and solemnity. Captain D'Wolf
applied immediately to the pumps to examine whether or not the vessel
had received any damage from the shock, but we found that very happily
it had escaped entirely uninjured."

Now, the Captain D'Wolf here alluded to as commanding the ship in
question, is a New Englander, who, after a long life of unusual
adventures as a sea-captain, this day resides in the village of
Dorchester near Boston. I have the honour of being a nephew of his. I
have particularly questioned him concerning this passage in Langsdorff.
He substantiates every word. The ship, however, was by no means a large
one: a Russian craft built on the Siberian coast, and purchased by my
uncle after bartering away the vessel in which he sailed from home.

In that up and down manly book of old-fashioned adventure, so full, too,
of honest wonders--the voyage of Lionel Wafer, one of ancient Dampier's
old chums--I found a little matter set down so like that just quoted
from Langsdorff, that I cannot forbear inserting it here for a
corroborative example, if such be needed.

Lionel, it seems, was on his way to "John Ferdinando," as he calls
the modern Juan Fernandes. "In our way thither," he says, "about four
o'clock in the morning, when we were about one hundred and fifty leagues
from the Main of America, our ship felt a terrible shock, which put our
men in such consternation that they could hardly tell where they were
or what to think; but every one began to prepare for death. And, indeed,
the shock was so sudden and violent, that we took it for granted the
ship had struck against a rock; but when the amazement was a little
over, we cast the lead, and sounded, but found no ground..... The
suddenness of the shock made the guns leap in their carriages, and
several of the men were shaken out of their hammocks. Captain Davis, who
lay with his head on a gun, was thrown out of his cabin!" Lionel then
goes on to impute the shock to an earthquake, and seems to substantiate
the imputation by stating that a great earthquake, somewhere about
that time, did actually do great mischief along the Spanish land. But
I should not much wonder if, in the darkness of that early hour of the
morning, the shock was after all caused by an unseen whale vertically
bumping the hull from beneath.

I might proceed with several more examples, one way or another known to
me, of the great power and malice at times of the sperm whale. In more
than one instance, he has been known, not only to chase the assailing
boats back to their ships, but to pursue the ship itself, and long
withstand all the lances hurled at him from its decks. The English ship
Pusie Hall can tell a story on that head; and, as for his strength,
let me say, that there have been examples where the lines attached to a
running sperm whale have, in a calm, been transferred to the ship, and
secured there; the whale towing her great hull through the water, as a
horse walks off with a cart. Again, it is very often observed that, if
the sperm whale, once struck, is allowed time to rally, he then acts,
not so often with blind rage, as with wilful, deliberate designs of
destruction to his pursuers; nor is it without conveying some eloquent
indication of his character, that upon being attacked he will frequently
open his mouth, and retain it in that dread expansion for several
consecutive minutes. But I must be content with only one more and a
concluding illustration; a remarkable and most significant one, by which
you will not fail to see, that not only is the most marvellous event in
this book corroborated by plain facts of the present day, but that these
marvels (like all marvels) are mere repetitions of the ages; so that for
the millionth time we say amen with Solomon--Verily there is nothing new
under the sun.

In the sixth Christian century lived Procopius, a Christian magistrate
of Constantinople, in the days when Justinian was Emperor and Belisarius
general. As many know, he wrote the history of his own times, a work
every way of uncommon value. By the best authorities, he has always been
considered a most trustworthy and unexaggerating historian, except in
some one or two particulars, not at all affecting the matter presently
to be mentioned.

Now, in this history of his, Procopius mentions that, during the term
of his prefecture at Constantinople, a great sea-monster was captured
in the neighboring Propontis, or Sea of Marmora, after having destroyed
vessels at intervals in those waters for a period of more than fifty
years. A fact thus set down in substantial history cannot easily be
gainsaid. Nor is there any reason it should be. Of what precise species
this sea-monster was, is not mentioned. But as he destroyed ships, as
well as for other reasons, he must have been a whale; and I am strongly
inclined to think a sperm whale. And I will tell you why. For a long
time I fancied that the sperm whale had been always unknown in the
Mediterranean and the deep waters connecting with it. Even now I am
certain that those seas are not, and perhaps never can be, in the
present constitution of things, a place for his habitual gregarious
resort. But further investigations have recently proved to me, that in
modern times there have been isolated instances of the presence of the
sperm whale in the Mediterranean. I am told, on good authority, that
on the Barbary coast, a Commodore Davis of the British navy found
the skeleton of a sperm whale. Now, as a vessel of war readily passes
through the Dardanelles, hence a sperm whale could, by the same route,
pass out of the Mediterranean into the Propontis.

In the Propontis, as far as I can learn, none of that peculiar substance
called BRIT is to be found, the aliment of the right whale. But I have
every reason to believe that the food of the sperm whale--squid or
cuttle-fish--lurks at the bottom of that sea, because large creatures,
but by no means the largest of that sort, have been found at its
surface. If, then, you properly put these statements together, and
reason upon them a bit, you will clearly perceive that, according to all
human reasoning, Procopius's sea-monster, that for half a century stove
the ships of a Roman Emperor, must in all probability have been a sperm
whale.



CHAPTER 46. Surmises.


Though, consumed with the hot fire of his purpose, Ahab in all his
thoughts and actions ever had in view the ultimate capture of Moby Dick;
though he seemed ready to sacrifice all mortal interests to that one
passion; nevertheless it may have been that he was by nature and long
habituation far too wedded to a fiery whaleman's ways, altogether to
abandon the collateral prosecution of the voyage. Or at least if
this were otherwise, there were not wanting other motives much more
influential with him. It would be refining too much, perhaps, even
considering his monomania, to hint that his vindictiveness towards the
White Whale might have possibly extended itself in some degree to all
sperm whales, and that the more monsters he slew by so much the more he
multiplied the chances that each subsequently encountered whale would
prove to be the hated one he hunted. But if such an hypothesis be indeed
exceptionable, there were still additional considerations which, though
not so strictly according with the wildness of his ruling passion, yet
were by no means incapable of swaying him.

To accomplish his object Ahab must use tools; and of all tools used in
the shadow of the moon, men are most apt to get out of order. He knew,
for example, that however magnetic his ascendency in some respects was
over Starbuck, yet that ascendency did not cover the complete spiritual
man any more than mere corporeal superiority involves intellectual
mastership; for to the purely spiritual, the intellectual but stand in a
sort of corporeal relation. Starbuck's body and Starbuck's coerced will
were Ahab's, so long as Ahab kept his magnet at Starbuck's brain; still
he knew that for all this the chief mate, in his soul, abhorred his
captain's quest, and could he, would joyfully disintegrate himself from
it, or even frustrate it. It might be that a long interval would elapse
ere the White Whale was seen. During that long interval Starbuck
would ever be apt to fall into open relapses of rebellion against his
captain's leadership, unless some ordinary, prudential, circumstantial
influences were brought to bear upon him. Not only that, but the subtle
insanity of Ahab respecting Moby Dick was noways more significantly
manifested than in his superlative sense and shrewdness in foreseeing
that, for the present, the hunt should in some way be stripped of that
strange imaginative impiousness which naturally invested it; that
the full terror of the voyage must be kept withdrawn into the obscure
background (for few men's courage is proof against protracted meditation
unrelieved by action); that when they stood their long night watches,
his officers and men must have some nearer things to think of than Moby
Dick. For however eagerly and impetuously the savage crew had hailed the
announcement of his quest; yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less
capricious and unreliable--they live in the varying outer weather, and
they inhale its fickleness--and when retained for any object remote and
blank in the pursuit, however promissory of life and passion in the
end, it is above all things requisite that temporary interests and
employments should intervene and hold them healthily suspended for the
final dash.

Nor was Ahab unmindful of another thing. In times of strong emotion
mankind disdain all base considerations; but such times are evanescent.
The permanent constitutional condition of the manufactured man, thought
Ahab, is sordidness. Granting that the White Whale fully incites the
hearts of this my savage crew, and playing round their savageness even
breeds a certain generous knight-errantism in them, still, while for the
love of it they give chase to Moby Dick, they must also have food
for their more common, daily appetites. For even the high lifted and
chivalric Crusaders of old times were not content to traverse two
thousand miles of land to fight for their holy sepulchre, without
committing burglaries, picking pockets, and gaining other pious
perquisites by the way. Had they been strictly held to their one final
and romantic object--that final and romantic object, too many would have
turned from in disgust. I will not strip these men, thought Ahab, of all
hopes of cash--aye, cash. They may scorn cash now; but let some months
go by, and no perspective promise of it to them, and then this same
quiescent cash all at once mutinying in them, this same cash would soon
cashier Ahab.

Nor was there wanting still another precautionary motive more related
to Ahab personally. Having impulsively, it is probable, and perhaps
somewhat prematurely revealed the prime but private purpose of the
Pequod's voyage, Ahab was now entirely conscious that, in so doing,
he had indirectly laid himself open to the unanswerable charge of
usurpation; and with perfect impunity, both moral and legal, his crew
if so disposed, and to that end competent, could refuse all further
obedience to him, and even violently wrest from him the command. From
even the barely hinted imputation of usurpation, and the possible
consequences of such a suppressed impression gaining ground, Ahab must
of course have been most anxious to protect himself. That protection
could only consist in his own predominating brain and heart and hand,
backed by a heedful, closely calculating attention to every minute
atmospheric influence which it was possible for his crew to be subjected
to.

For all these reasons then, and others perhaps too analytic to be
verbally developed here, Ahab plainly saw that he must still in a good
degree continue true to the natural, nominal purpose of the Pequod's
voyage; observe all customary usages; and not only that, but force
himself to evince all his well known passionate interest in the general
pursuit of his profession.

Be all this as it may, his voice was now often heard hailing the three
mast-heads and admonishing them to keep a bright look-out, and not omit
reporting even a porpoise. This vigilance was not long without reward.



CHAPTER 47. The Mat-Maker.


It was a cloudy, sultry afternoon; the seamen were lazily lounging
about the decks, or vacantly gazing over into the lead-coloured waters.
Queequeg and I were mildly employed weaving what is called a sword-mat,
for an additional lashing to our boat. So still and subdued and yet
somehow preluding was all the scene, and such an incantation of reverie
lurked in the air, that each silent sailor seemed resolved into his own
invisible self.

I was the attendant or page of Queequeg, while busy at the mat. As I
kept passing and repassing the filling or woof of marline between
the long yarns of the warp, using my own hand for the shuttle, and as
Queequeg, standing sideways, ever and anon slid his heavy oaken sword
between the threads, and idly looking off upon the water, carelessly and
unthinkingly drove home every yarn: I say so strange a dreaminess did
there then reign all over the ship and all over the sea, only broken by
the intermitting dull sound of the sword, that it seemed as if this were
the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically weaving
and weaving away at the Fates. There lay the fixed threads of the warp
subject to but one single, ever returning, unchanging vibration, and
that vibration merely enough to admit of the crosswise interblending
of other threads with its own. This warp seemed necessity; and here,
thought I, with my own hand I ply my own shuttle and weave my own
destiny into these unalterable threads. Meantime, Queequeg's impulsive,
indifferent sword, sometimes hitting the woof slantingly, or crookedly,
or strongly, or weakly, as the case might be; and by this difference
in the concluding blow producing a corresponding contrast in the final
aspect of the completed fabric; this savage's sword, thought I,
which thus finally shapes and fashions both warp and woof; this
easy, indifferent sword must be chance--aye, chance, free will, and
necessity--nowise incompatible--all interweavingly working together.
The straight warp of necessity, not to be swerved from its ultimate
course--its every alternating vibration, indeed, only tending to that;
free will still free to ply her shuttle between given threads; and
chance, though restrained in its play within the right lines of
necessity, and sideways in its motions directed by free will, though
thus prescribed to by both, chance by turns rules either, and has the
last featuring blow at events.


Thus we were weaving and weaving away when I started at a sound so
strange, long drawn, and musically wild and unearthly, that the ball
of free will dropped from my hand, and I stood gazing up at the clouds
whence that voice dropped like a wing. High aloft in the cross-trees was
that mad Gay-Header, Tashtego. His body was reaching eagerly forward,
his hand stretched out like a wand, and at brief sudden intervals he
continued his cries. To be sure the same sound was that very moment
perhaps being heard all over the seas, from hundreds of whalemen's
look-outs perched as high in the air; but from few of those lungs could
that accustomed old cry have derived such a marvellous cadence as from
Tashtego the Indian's.

As he stood hovering over you half suspended in air, so wildly and
eagerly peering towards the horizon, you would have thought him some
prophet or seer beholding the shadows of Fate, and by those wild cries
announcing their coming.

"There she blows! there! there! there! she blows! she blows!"

"Where-away?"

"On the lee-beam, about two miles off! a school of them!"

Instantly all was commotion.

The Sperm Whale blows as a clock ticks, with the same undeviating and
reliable uniformity. And thereby whalemen distinguish this fish from
other tribes of his genus.

"There go flukes!" was now the cry from Tashtego; and the whales
disappeared.

"Quick, steward!" cried Ahab. "Time! time!"

Dough-Boy hurried below, glanced at the watch, and reported the exact
minute to Ahab.

The ship was now kept away from the wind, and she went gently rolling
before it. Tashtego reporting that the whales had gone down heading to
leeward, we confidently looked to see them again directly in advance of
our bows. For that singular craft at times evinced by the Sperm Whale
when, sounding with his head in one direction, he nevertheless, while
concealed beneath the surface, mills round, and swiftly swims off in the
opposite quarter--this deceitfulness of his could not now be in action;
for there was no reason to suppose that the fish seen by Tashtego had
been in any way alarmed, or indeed knew at all of our vicinity. One of
the men selected for shipkeepers--that is, those not appointed to the
boats, by this time relieved the Indian at the main-mast head. The
sailors at the fore and mizzen had come down; the line tubs were fixed
in their places; the cranes were thrust out; the mainyard was backed,
and the three boats swung over the sea like three samphire baskets over
high cliffs. Outside of the bulwarks their eager crews with one hand
clung to the rail, while one foot was expectantly poised on the gunwale.
So look the long line of man-of-war's men about to throw themselves on
board an enemy's ship.

But at this critical instant a sudden exclamation was heard that took
every eye from the whale. With a start all glared at dark Ahab, who was
surrounded by five dusky phantoms that seemed fresh formed out of air.



CHAPTER 48. The First Lowering.


The phantoms, for so they then seemed, were flitting on the other side
of the deck, and, with a noiseless celerity, were casting loose the
tackles and bands of the boat which swung there. This boat had always
been deemed one of the spare boats, though technically called the
captain's, on account of its hanging from the starboard quarter. The
figure that now stood by its bows was tall and swart, with one white
tooth evilly protruding from its steel-like lips. A rumpled Chinese
jacket of black cotton funereally invested him, with wide black trowsers
of the same dark stuff. But strangely crowning this ebonness was a
glistening white plaited turban, the living hair braided and coiled
round and round upon his head. Less swart in aspect, the companions of
this figure were of that vivid, tiger-yellow complexion peculiar to
some of the aboriginal natives of the Manillas;--a race notorious for
a certain diabolism of subtilty, and by some honest white mariners
supposed to be the paid spies and secret confidential agents on the
water of the devil, their lord, whose counting-room they suppose to be
elsewhere.

While yet the wondering ship's company were gazing upon these strangers,
Ahab cried out to the white-turbaned old man at their head, "All ready
there, Fedallah?"

"Ready," was the half-hissed reply.

"Lower away then; d'ye hear?" shouting across the deck. "Lower away
there, I say."

Such was the thunder of his voice, that spite of their amazement the men
sprang over the rail; the sheaves whirled round in the blocks; with a
wallow, the three boats dropped into the sea; while, with a dexterous,
off-handed daring, unknown in any other vocation, the sailors,
goat-like, leaped down the rolling ship's side into the tossed boats
below.

Hardly had they pulled out from under the ship's lee, when a fourth
keel, coming from the windward side, pulled round under the stern, and
showed the five strangers rowing Ahab, who, standing erect in the stern,
loudly hailed Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, to spread themselves widely,
so as to cover a large expanse of water. But with all their eyes again
riveted upon the swart Fedallah and his crew, the inmates of the other
boats obeyed not the command.

"Captain Ahab?--" said Starbuck.

"Spread yourselves," cried Ahab; "give way, all four boats. Thou, Flask,
pull out more to leeward!"

"Aye, aye, sir," cheerily cried little King-Post, sweeping round
his great steering oar. "Lay back!" addressing his crew.
"There!--there!--there again! There she blows right ahead, boys!--lay
back!"

"Never heed yonder yellow boys, Archy."

"Oh, I don't mind'em, sir," said Archy; "I knew it all before now.
Didn't I hear 'em in the hold? And didn't I tell Cabaco here of it? What
say ye, Cabaco? They are stowaways, Mr. Flask."

"Pull, pull, my fine hearts-alive; pull, my children; pull, my little
ones," drawlingly and soothingly sighed Stubb to his crew, some of whom
still showed signs of uneasiness. "Why don't you break your backbones,
my boys? What is it you stare at? Those chaps in yonder boat? Tut! They
are only five more hands come to help us--never mind from where--the
more the merrier. Pull, then, do pull; never mind the brimstone--devils
are good fellows enough. So, so; there you are now; that's the stroke
for a thousand pounds; that's the stroke to sweep the stakes! Hurrah
for the gold cup of sperm oil, my heroes! Three cheers, men--all hearts
alive! Easy, easy; don't be in a hurry--don't be in a hurry. Why don't
you snap your oars, you rascals? Bite something, you dogs! So, so, so,
then:--softly, softly! That's it--that's it! long and strong. Give way
there, give way! The devil fetch ye, ye ragamuffin rapscallions; ye are
all asleep. Stop snoring, ye sleepers, and pull. Pull, will ye? pull,
can't ye? pull, won't ye? Why in the name of gudgeons and ginger-cakes
don't ye pull?--pull and break something! pull, and start your eyes out!
Here!" whipping out the sharp knife from his girdle; "every mother's son
of ye draw his knife, and pull with the blade between his teeth. That's
it--that's it. Now ye do something; that looks like it, my steel-bits.
Start her--start her, my silver-spoons! Start her, marling-spikes!"

Stubb's exordium to his crew is given here at large, because he had
rather a peculiar way of talking to them in general, and especially in
inculcating the religion of rowing. But you must not suppose from this
specimen of his sermonizings that he ever flew into downright passions
with his congregation. Not at all; and therein consisted his chief
peculiarity. He would say the most terrific things to his crew, in a
tone so strangely compounded of fun and fury, and the fury seemed so
calculated merely as a spice to the fun, that no oarsman could hear such
queer invocations without pulling for dear life, and yet pulling for
the mere joke of the thing. Besides he all the time looked so easy and
indolent himself, so loungingly managed his steering-oar, and so broadly
gaped--open-mouthed at times--that the mere sight of such a yawning
commander, by sheer force of contrast, acted like a charm upon the crew.
Then again, Stubb was one of those odd sort of humorists, whose jollity
is sometimes so curiously ambiguous, as to put all inferiors on their
guard in the matter of obeying them.

In obedience to a sign from Ahab, Starbuck was now pulling obliquely
across Stubb's bow; and when for a minute or so the two boats were
pretty near to each other, Stubb hailed the mate.

"Mr. Starbuck! larboard boat there, ahoy! a word with ye, sir, if ye
please!"

"Halloa!" returned Starbuck, turning round not a single inch as he
spoke; still earnestly but whisperingly urging his crew; his face set
like a flint from Stubb's.

"What think ye of those yellow boys, sir!

"Smuggled on board, somehow, before the ship sailed. (Strong, strong,
boys!)" in a whisper to his crew, then speaking out loud again: "A sad
business, Mr. Stubb! (seethe her, seethe her, my lads!) but never mind,
Mr. Stubb, all for the best. Let all your crew pull strong, come what
will. (Spring, my men, spring!) There's hogsheads of sperm ahead, Mr.
Stubb, and that's what ye came for. (Pull, my boys!) Sperm, sperm's the
play! This at least is duty; duty and profit hand in hand."

"Aye, aye, I thought as much," soliloquized Stubb, when the boats
diverged, "as soon as I clapt eye on 'em, I thought so. Aye, and that's
what he went into the after hold for, so often, as Dough-Boy long
suspected. They were hidden down there. The White Whale's at the bottom
of it. Well, well, so be it! Can't be helped! All right! Give way, men!
It ain't the White Whale to-day! Give way!"

Now the advent of these outlandish strangers at such a critical instant
as the lowering of the boats from the deck, this had not unreasonably
awakened a sort of superstitious amazement in some of the ship's
company; but Archy's fancied discovery having some time previous got
abroad among them, though indeed not credited then, this had in some
small measure prepared them for the event. It took off the extreme edge
of their wonder; and so what with all this and Stubb's confident way
of accounting for their appearance, they were for the time freed from
superstitious surmisings; though the affair still left abundant room for
all manner of wild conjectures as to dark Ahab's precise agency in the
matter from the beginning. For me, I silently recalled the mysterious
shadows I had seen creeping on board the Pequod during the dim Nantucket
dawn, as well as the enigmatical hintings of the unaccountable Elijah.

Meantime, Ahab, out of hearing of his officers, having sided the
furthest to windward, was still ranging ahead of the other boats; a
circumstance bespeaking how potent a crew was pulling him. Those tiger
yellow creatures of his seemed all steel and whalebone; like five
trip-hammers they rose and fell with regular strokes of strength, which
periodically started the boat along the water like a horizontal burst
boiler out of a Mississippi steamer. As for Fedallah, who was seen
pulling the harpooneer oar, he had thrown aside his black jacket, and
displayed his naked chest with the whole part of his body above the
gunwale, clearly cut against the alternating depressions of the watery
horizon; while at the other end of the boat Ahab, with one arm, like a
fencer's, thrown half backward into the air, as if to counterbalance any
tendency to trip; Ahab was seen steadily managing his steering oar as in
a thousand boat lowerings ere the White Whale had torn him. All at once
the outstretched arm gave a peculiar motion and then remained fixed,
while the boat's five oars were seen simultaneously peaked. Boat and
crew sat motionless on the sea. Instantly the three spread boats in the
rear paused on their way. The whales had irregularly settled bodily
down into the blue, thus giving no distantly discernible token of the
movement, though from his closer vicinity Ahab had observed it.

"Every man look out along his oars!" cried Starbuck. "Thou, Queequeg,
stand up!"

Nimbly springing up on the triangular raised box in the bow, the savage
stood erect there, and with intensely eager eyes gazed off towards the
spot where the chase had last been descried. Likewise upon the extreme
stern of the boat where it was also triangularly platformed level with
the gunwale, Starbuck himself was seen coolly and adroitly balancing
himself to the jerking tossings of his chip of a craft, and silently
eyeing the vast blue eye of the sea.

Not very far distant Flask's boat was also lying breathlessly still; its
commander recklessly standing upon the top of the loggerhead, a stout
sort of post rooted in the keel, and rising some two feet above the
level of the stern platform. It is used for catching turns with the
whale line. Its top is not more spacious than the palm of a man's hand,
and standing upon such a base as that, Flask seemed perched at the
mast-head of some ship which had sunk to all but her trucks. But little
King-Post was small and short, and at the same time little King-Post was
full of a large and tall ambition, so that this loggerhead stand-point
of his did by no means satisfy King-Post.

"I can't see three seas off; tip us up an oar there, and let me on to
that."

Upon this, Daggoo, with either hand upon the gunwale to steady his
way, swiftly slid aft, and then erecting himself volunteered his lofty
shoulders for a pedestal.

"Good a mast-head as any, sir. Will you mount?"

"That I will, and thank ye very much, my fine fellow; only I wish you
fifty feet taller."

Whereupon planting his feet firmly against two opposite planks of the
boat, the gigantic negro, stooping a little, presented his flat palm to
Flask's foot, and then putting Flask's hand on his hearse-plumed head
and bidding him spring as he himself should toss, with one dexterous
fling landed the little man high and dry on his shoulders. And here was
Flask now standing, Daggoo with one lifted arm furnishing him with a
breastband to lean against and steady himself by.

At any time it is a strange sight to the tyro to see with what wondrous
habitude of unconscious skill the whaleman will maintain an erect
posture in his boat, even when pitched about by the most riotously
perverse and cross-running seas. Still more strange to see him giddily
perched upon the loggerhead itself, under such circumstances. But the
sight of little Flask mounted upon gigantic Daggoo was yet more curious;
for sustaining himself with a cool, indifferent, easy, unthought of,
barbaric majesty, the noble negro to every roll of the sea harmoniously
rolled his fine form. On his broad back, flaxen-haired Flask seemed
a snow-flake. The bearer looked nobler than the rider. Though truly
vivacious, tumultuous, ostentatious little Flask would now and then
stamp with impatience; but not one added heave did he thereby give to
the negro's lordly chest. So have I seen Passion and Vanity stamping the
living magnanimous earth, but the earth did not alter her tides and her
seasons for that.

Meanwhile Stubb, the third mate, betrayed no such far-gazing
solicitudes. The whales might have made one of their regular soundings,
not a temporary dive from mere fright; and if that were the case,
Stubb, as his wont in such cases, it seems, was resolved to solace the
languishing interval with his pipe. He withdrew it from his hatband,
where he always wore it aslant like a feather. He loaded it, and rammed
home the loading with his thumb-end; but hardly had he ignited his match
across the rough sandpaper of his hand, when Tashtego, his harpooneer,
whose eyes had been setting to windward like two fixed stars, suddenly
dropped like light from his erect attitude to his seat, crying out in a
quick phrensy of hurry, "Down, down all, and give way!--there they are!"

To a landsman, no whale, nor any sign of a herring, would have been
visible at that moment; nothing but a troubled bit of greenish white
water, and thin scattered puffs of vapour hovering over it, and
suffusingly blowing off to leeward, like the confused scud from white
rolling billows. The air around suddenly vibrated and tingled, as it
were, like the air over intensely heated plates of iron. Beneath this
atmospheric waving and curling, and partially beneath a thin layer of
water, also, the whales were swimming. Seen in advance of all the other
indications, the puffs of vapour they spouted, seemed their forerunning
couriers and detached flying outriders.

All four boats were now in keen pursuit of that one spot of troubled
water and air. But it bade fair to outstrip them; it flew on and on,
as a mass of interblending bubbles borne down a rapid stream from the
hills.

"Pull, pull, my good boys," said Starbuck, in the lowest possible but
intensest concentrated whisper to his men; while the sharp fixed glance
from his eyes darted straight ahead of the bow, almost seemed as two
visible needles in two unerring binnacle compasses. He did not say much
to his crew, though, nor did his crew say anything to him. Only the
silence of the boat was at intervals startlingly pierced by one of his
peculiar whispers, now harsh with command, now soft with entreaty.

How different the loud little King-Post. "Sing out and say something,
my hearties. Roar and pull, my thunderbolts! Beach me, beach me on their
black backs, boys; only do that for me, and I'll sign over to you my
Martha's Vineyard plantation, boys; including wife and children, boys.
Lay me on--lay me on! O Lord, Lord! but I shall go stark, staring mad!
See! see that white water!" And so shouting, he pulled his hat from his
head, and stamped up and down on it; then picking it up, flirted it far
off upon the sea; and finally fell to rearing and plunging in the boat's
stern like a crazed colt from the prairie.

"Look at that chap now," philosophically drawled Stubb, who, with his
unlighted short pipe, mechanically retained between his teeth, at a
short distance, followed after--"He's got fits, that Flask has. Fits?
yes, give him fits--that's the very word--pitch fits into 'em. Merrily,
merrily, hearts-alive. Pudding for supper, you know;--merry's the word.
Pull, babes--pull, sucklings--pull, all. But what the devil are you
hurrying about? Softly, softly, and steadily, my men. Only pull, and
keep pulling; nothing more. Crack all your backbones, and bite your
knives in two--that's all. Take it easy--why don't ye take it easy, I
say, and burst all your livers and lungs!"

But what it was that inscrutable Ahab said to that tiger-yellow crew of
his--these were words best omitted here; for you live under the blessed
light of the evangelical land. Only the infidel sharks in the audacious
seas may give ear to such words, when, with tornado brow, and eyes of
red murder, and foam-glued lips, Ahab leaped after his prey.

Meanwhile, all the boats tore on. The repeated specific allusions of
Flask to "that whale," as he called the fictitious monster which
he declared to be incessantly tantalizing his boat's bow with its
tail--these allusions of his were at times so vivid and life-like, that
they would cause some one or two of his men to snatch a fearful look
over the shoulder. But this was against all rule; for the oarsmen
must put out their eyes, and ram a skewer through their necks; usage
pronouncing that they must have no organs but ears, and no limbs but
arms, in these critical moments.

It was a sight full of quick wonder and awe! The vast swells of the
omnipotent sea; the surging, hollow roar they made, as they rolled along
the eight gunwales, like gigantic bowls in a boundless bowling-green;
the brief suspended agony of the boat, as it would tip for an instant on
the knife-like edge of the sharper waves, that almost seemed threatening
to cut it in two; the sudden profound dip into the watery glens and
hollows; the keen spurrings and goadings to gain the top of the opposite
hill; the headlong, sled-like slide down its other side;--all these,
with the cries of the headsmen and harpooneers, and the shuddering gasps
of the oarsmen, with the wondrous sight of the ivory Pequod bearing
down upon her boats with outstretched sails, like a wild hen after her
screaming brood;--all this was thrilling.

Not the raw recruit, marching from the bosom of his wife into the fever
heat of his first battle; not the dead man's ghost encountering the
first unknown phantom in the other world;--neither of these can feel
stranger and stronger emotions than that man does, who for the first
time finds himself pulling into the charmed, churned circle of the
hunted sperm whale.

The dancing white water made by the chase was now becoming more and more
visible, owing to the increasing darkness of the dun cloud-shadows
flung upon the sea. The jets of vapour no longer blended, but tilted
everywhere to right and left; the whales seemed separating their wakes.
The boats were pulled more apart; Starbuck giving chase to three whales
running dead to leeward. Our sail was now set, and, with the still
rising wind, we rushed along; the boat going with such madness through
the water, that the lee oars could scarcely be worked rapidly enough to
escape being torn from the row-locks.

Soon we were running through a suffusing wide veil of mist; neither ship
nor boat to be seen.

"Give way, men," whispered Starbuck, drawing still further aft the sheet
of his sail; "there is time to kill a fish yet before the squall comes.
There's white water again!--close to! Spring!"

Soon after, two cries in quick succession on each side of us denoted
that the other boats had got fast; but hardly were they overheard, when
with a lightning-like hurtling whisper Starbuck said: "Stand up!" and
Queequeg, harpoon in hand, sprang to his feet.

Though not one of the oarsmen was then facing the life and death peril
so close to them ahead, yet with their eyes on the intense countenance
of the mate in the stern of the boat, they knew that the imminent
instant had come; they heard, too, an enormous wallowing sound as of
fifty elephants stirring in their litter. Meanwhile the boat was still
booming through the mist, the waves curling and hissing around us like
the erected crests of enraged serpents.

"That's his hump. THERE, THERE, give it to him!" whispered Starbuck.

A short rushing sound leaped out of the boat; it was the darted iron of
Queequeg. Then all in one welded commotion came an invisible push from
astern, while forward the boat seemed striking on a ledge; the sail
collapsed and exploded; a gush of scalding vapour shot up near by;
something rolled and tumbled like an earthquake beneath us. The whole
crew were half suffocated as they were tossed helter-skelter into the
white curdling cream of the squall. Squall, whale, and harpoon had all
blended together; and the whale, merely grazed by the iron, escaped.

Though completely swamped, the boat was nearly unharmed. Swimming round
it we picked up the floating oars, and lashing them across the gunwale,
tumbled back to our places. There we sat up to our knees in the sea, the
water covering every rib and plank, so that to our downward gazing eyes
the suspended craft seemed a coral boat grown up to us from the bottom
of the ocean.

The wind increased to a howl; the waves dashed their bucklers together;
the whole squall roared, forked, and crackled around us like a white
fire upon the prairie, in which, unconsumed, we were burning; immortal
in these jaws of death! In vain we hailed the other boats; as well roar
to the live coals down the chimney of a flaming furnace as hail those
boats in that storm. Meanwhile the driving scud, rack, and mist, grew
darker with the shadows of night; no sign of the ship could be seen.
The rising sea forbade all attempts to bale out the boat. The oars were
useless as propellers, performing now the office of life-preservers.
So, cutting the lashing of the waterproof match keg, after many failures
Starbuck contrived to ignite the lamp in the lantern; then stretching
it on a waif pole, handed it to Queequeg as the standard-bearer of this
forlorn hope. There, then, he sat, holding up that imbecile candle in
the heart of that almighty forlornness. There, then, he sat, the sign
and symbol of a man without faith, hopelessly holding up hope in the
midst of despair.

Wet, drenched through, and shivering cold, despairing of ship or boat,
we lifted up our eyes as the dawn came on. The mist still spread over
the sea, the empty lantern lay crushed in the bottom of the boat.
Suddenly Queequeg started to his feet, hollowing his hand to his ear.
We all heard a faint creaking, as of ropes and yards hitherto muffled by
the storm. The sound came nearer and nearer; the thick mists were dimly
parted by a huge, vague form. Affrighted, we all sprang into the sea as
the ship at last loomed into view, bearing right down upon us within a
distance of not much more than its length.

Floating on the waves we saw the abandoned boat, as for one instant it
tossed and gaped beneath the ship's bows like a chip at the base of a
cataract; and then the vast hull rolled over it, and it was seen no
more till it came up weltering astern. Again we swam for it, were dashed
against it by the seas, and were at last taken up and safely landed on
board. Ere the squall came close to, the other boats had cut loose from
their fish and returned to the ship in good time. The ship had given us
up, but was still cruising, if haply it might light upon some token of
our perishing,--an oar or a lance pole.



CHAPTER 49. The Hyena.


There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair
we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical
joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than
suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own. However,
nothing dispirits, and nothing seems worth while disputing. He bolts
down all events, all creeds, and beliefs, and persuasions, all hard
things visible and invisible, never mind how knobby; as an ostrich of
potent digestion gobbles down bullets and gun flints. And as for small
difficulties and worryings, prospects of sudden disaster, peril of
life and limb; all these, and death itself, seem to him only sly,
good-natured hits, and jolly punches in the side bestowed by the unseen
and unaccountable old joker. That odd sort of wayward mood I am speaking
of, comes over a man only in some time of extreme tribulation; it comes
in the very midst of his earnestness, so that what just before might
have seemed to him a thing most momentous, now seems but a part of the
general joke. There is nothing like the perils of whaling to breed this
free and easy sort of genial, desperado philosophy; and with it I now
regarded this whole voyage of the Pequod, and the great White Whale its
object.

"Queequeg," said I, when they had dragged me, the last man, to the deck,
and I was still shaking myself in my jacket to fling off the water;
"Queequeg, my fine friend, does this sort of thing often happen?"
Without much emotion, though soaked through just like me, he gave me to
understand that such things did often happen.

"Mr. Stubb," said I, turning to that worthy, who, buttoned up in his
oil-jacket, was now calmly smoking his pipe in the rain; "Mr. Stubb, I
think I have heard you say that of all whalemen you ever met, our chief
mate, Mr. Starbuck, is by far the most careful and prudent. I suppose
then, that going plump on a flying whale with your sail set in a foggy
squall is the height of a whaleman's discretion?"

"Certain. I've lowered for whales from a leaking ship in a gale off Cape
Horn."

"Mr. Flask," said I, turning to little King-Post, who was standing close
by; "you are experienced in these things, and I am not. Will you tell
me whether it is an unalterable law in this fishery, Mr. Flask, for an
oarsman to break his own back pulling himself back-foremost into death's
jaws?"

"Can't you twist that smaller?" said Flask. "Yes, that's the law.
I should like to see a boat's crew backing water up to a whale face
foremost. Ha, ha! the whale would give them squint for squint, mind
that!"

Here then, from three impartial witnesses, I had a deliberate statement
of the entire case. Considering, therefore, that squalls and capsizings
in the water and consequent bivouacks on the deep, were matters
of common occurrence in this kind of life; considering that at the
superlatively critical instant of going on to the whale I must resign my
life into the hands of him who steered the boat--oftentimes a fellow who
at that very moment is in his impetuousness upon the point of scuttling
the craft with his own frantic stampings; considering that the
particular disaster to our own particular boat was chiefly to be imputed
to Starbuck's driving on to his whale almost in the teeth of a squall,
and considering that Starbuck, notwithstanding, was famous for his
great heedfulness in the fishery; considering that I belonged to this
uncommonly prudent Starbuck's boat; and finally considering in what a
devil's chase I was implicated, touching the White Whale: taking all
things together, I say, I thought I might as well go below and make a
rough draft of my will. "Queequeg," said I, "come along, you shall be my
lawyer, executor, and legatee."

It may seem strange that of all men sailors should be tinkering at their
last wills and testaments, but there are no people in the world more
fond of that diversion. This was the fourth time in my nautical life
that I had done the same thing. After the ceremony was concluded upon
the present occasion, I felt all the easier; a stone was rolled away
from my heart. Besides, all the days I should now live would be as good
as the days that Lazarus lived after his resurrection; a supplementary
clean gain of so many months or weeks as the case might be. I survived
myself; my death and burial were locked up in my chest. I looked
round me tranquilly and contentedly, like a quiet ghost with a clean
conscience sitting inside the bars of a snug family vault.

Now then, thought I, unconsciously rolling up the sleeves of my frock,
here goes for a cool, collected dive at death and destruction, and the
devil fetch the hindmost.



CHAPTER 50. Ahab's Boat and Crew. Fedallah.


"Who would have thought it, Flask!" cried Stubb; "if I had but one leg
you would not catch me in a boat, unless maybe to stop the plug-hole
with my timber toe. Oh! he's a wonderful old man!"

"I don't think it so strange, after all, on that account," said Flask.
"If his leg were off at the hip, now, it would be a different thing.
That would disable him; but he has one knee, and good part of the other
left, you know."

"I don't know that, my little man; I never yet saw him kneel."


Among whale-wise people it has often been argued whether, considering
the paramount importance of his life to the success of the voyage, it is
right for a whaling captain to jeopardize that life in the active perils
of the chase. So Tamerlane's soldiers often argued with tears in their
eyes, whether that invaluable life of his ought to be carried into the
thickest of the fight.

But with Ahab the question assumed a modified aspect. Considering
that with two legs man is but a hobbling wight in all times of danger;
considering that the pursuit of whales is always under great and
extraordinary difficulties; that every individual moment, indeed, then
comprises a peril; under these circumstances is it wise for any
maimed man to enter a whale-boat in the hunt? As a general thing, the
joint-owners of the Pequod must have plainly thought not.

Ahab well knew that although his friends at home would think little of
his entering a boat in certain comparatively harmless vicissitudes of
the chase, for the sake of being near the scene of action and giving
his orders in person, yet for Captain Ahab to have a boat actually
apportioned to him as a regular headsman in the hunt--above all for
Captain Ahab to be supplied with five extra men, as that same boat's
crew, he well knew that such generous conceits never entered the heads
of the owners of the Pequod. Therefore he had not solicited a boat's
crew from them, nor had he in any way hinted his desires on that head.
Nevertheless he had taken private measures of his own touching all
that matter. Until Cabaco's published discovery, the sailors had little
foreseen it, though to be sure when, after being a little while out
of port, all hands had concluded the customary business of fitting the
whaleboats for service; when some time after this Ahab was now and then
found bestirring himself in the matter of making thole-pins with his
own hands for what was thought to be one of the spare boats, and even
solicitously cutting the small wooden skewers, which when the line is
running out are pinned over the groove in the bow: when all this was
observed in him, and particularly his solicitude in having an extra
coat of sheathing in the bottom of the boat, as if to make it better
withstand the pointed pressure of his ivory limb; and also the anxiety
he evinced in exactly shaping the thigh board, or clumsy cleat, as it is
sometimes called, the horizontal piece in the boat's bow for bracing the
knee against in darting or stabbing at the whale; when it was observed
how often he stood up in that boat with his solitary knee fixed in the
semi-circular depression in the cleat, and with the carpenter's chisel
gouged out a little here and straightened it a little there; all these
things, I say, had awakened much interest and curiosity at the time. But
almost everybody supposed that this particular preparative heedfulness
in Ahab must only be with a view to the ultimate chase of Moby Dick;
for he had already revealed his intention to hunt that mortal monster
in person. But such a supposition did by no means involve the remotest
suspicion as to any boat's crew being assigned to that boat.

Now, with the subordinate phantoms, what wonder remained soon waned
away; for in a whaler wonders soon wane. Besides, now and then such
unaccountable odds and ends of strange nations come up from the unknown
nooks and ash-holes of the earth to man these floating outlaws of
whalers; and the ships themselves often pick up such queer castaway
creatures found tossing about the open sea on planks, bits of wreck,
oars, whaleboats, canoes, blown-off Japanese junks, and what not; that
Beelzebub himself might climb up the side and step down into the cabin
to chat with the captain, and it would not create any unsubduable
excitement in the forecastle.

But be all this as it may, certain it is that while the subordinate
phantoms soon found their place among the crew, though still as it were
somehow distinct from them, yet that hair-turbaned Fedallah remained
a muffled mystery to the last. Whence he came in a mannerly world like
this, by what sort of unaccountable tie he soon evinced himself to be
linked with Ahab's peculiar fortunes; nay, so far as to have some sort
of a half-hinted influence; Heaven knows, but it might have been even
authority over him; all this none knew. But one cannot sustain
an indifferent air concerning Fedallah. He was such a creature as
civilized, domestic people in the temperate zone only see in their
dreams, and that but dimly; but the like of whom now and then glide
among the unchanging Asiatic communities, especially the Oriental isles
to the east of the continent--those insulated, immemorial, unalterable
countries, which even in these modern days still preserve much of the
ghostly aboriginalness of earth's primal generations, when the memory of
the first man was a distinct recollection, and all men his descendants,
unknowing whence he came, eyed each other as real phantoms, and asked of
the sun and the moon why they were created and to what end; when though,
according to Genesis, the angels indeed consorted with the daughters of
men, the devils also, add the uncanonical Rabbins, indulged in mundane
amours.



CHAPTER 51. The Spirit-Spout.


Days, weeks passed, and under easy sail, the ivory Pequod had slowly
swept across four several cruising-grounds; that off the Azores; off the
Cape de Verdes; on the Plate (so called), being off the mouth of the
Rio de la Plata; and the Carrol Ground, an unstaked, watery locality,
southerly from St. Helena.

It was while gliding through these latter waters that one serene and
moonlight night, when all the waves rolled by like scrolls of silver;
and, by their soft, suffusing seethings, made what seemed a silvery
silence, not a solitude; on such a silent night a silvery jet was seen
far in advance of the white bubbles at the bow. Lit up by the moon, it
looked celestial; seemed some plumed and glittering god uprising from
the sea. Fedallah first descried this jet. For of these moonlight
nights, it was his wont to mount to the main-mast head, and stand a
look-out there, with the same precision as if it had been day. And yet,
though herds of whales were seen by night, not one whaleman in a hundred
would venture a lowering for them. You may think with what emotions,
then, the seamen beheld this old Oriental perched aloft at such unusual
hours; his turban and the moon, companions in one sky. But when, after
spending his uniform interval there for several successive nights
without uttering a single sound; when, after all this silence, his
unearthly voice was heard announcing that silvery, moon-lit jet, every
reclining mariner started to his feet as if some winged spirit had
lighted in the rigging, and hailed the mortal crew. "There she blows!"
Had the trump of judgment blown, they could not have quivered more; yet
still they felt no terror; rather pleasure. For though it was a most
unwonted hour, yet so impressive was the cry, and so deliriously
exciting, that almost every soul on board instinctively desired a
lowering.

Walking the deck with quick, side-lunging strides, Ahab commanded the
t'gallant sails and royals to be set, and every stunsail spread. The
best man in the ship must take the helm. Then, with every mast-head
manned, the piled-up craft rolled down before the wind. The strange,
upheaving, lifting tendency of the taffrail breeze filling the hollows
of so many sails, made the buoyant, hovering deck to feel like air
beneath the feet; while still she rushed along, as if two antagonistic
influences were struggling in her--one to mount direct to heaven, the
other to drive yawingly to some horizontal goal. And had you watched
Ahab's face that night, you would have thought that in him also two
different things were warring. While his one live leg made lively echoes
along the deck, every stroke of his dead limb sounded like a coffin-tap.
On life and death this old man walked. But though the ship so swiftly
sped, and though from every eye, like arrows, the eager glances shot,
yet the silvery jet was no more seen that night. Every sailor swore he
saw it once, but not a second time.

This midnight-spout had almost grown a forgotten thing, when, some days
after, lo! at the same silent hour, it was again announced: again it
was descried by all; but upon making sail to overtake it, once more it
disappeared as if it had never been. And so it served us night after
night, till no one heeded it but to wonder at it. Mysteriously
jetted into the clear moonlight, or starlight, as the case might be;
disappearing again for one whole day, or two days, or three; and somehow
seeming at every distinct repetition to be advancing still further and
further in our van, this solitary jet seemed for ever alluring us on.

Nor with the immemorial superstition of their race, and in accordance
with the preternaturalness, as it seemed, which in many things invested
the Pequod, were there wanting some of the seamen who swore that
whenever and wherever descried; at however remote times, or in however
far apart latitudes and longitudes, that unnearable spout was cast
by one self-same whale; and that whale, Moby Dick. For a time, there
reigned, too, a sense of peculiar dread at this flitting apparition,
as if it were treacherously beckoning us on and on, in order that the
monster might turn round upon us, and rend us at last in the remotest
and most savage seas.

These temporary apprehensions, so vague but so awful, derived a wondrous
potency from the contrasting serenity of the weather, in which, beneath
all its blue blandness, some thought there lurked a devilish charm, as
for days and days we voyaged along, through seas so wearily, lonesomely
mild, that all space, in repugnance to our vengeful errand, seemed
vacating itself of life before our urn-like prow.

But, at last, when turning to the eastward, the Cape winds began howling
around us, and we rose and fell upon the long, troubled seas that are
there; when the ivory-tusked Pequod sharply bowed to the blast, and
gored the dark waves in her madness, till, like showers of silver chips,
the foam-flakes flew over her bulwarks; then all this desolate vacuity
of life went away, but gave place to sights more dismal than before.

Close to our bows, strange forms in the water darted hither and thither
before us; while thick in our rear flew the inscrutable sea-ravens. And
every morning, perched on our stays, rows of these birds were seen; and
spite of our hootings, for a long time obstinately clung to the hemp,
as though they deemed our ship some drifting, uninhabited craft; a thing
appointed to desolation, and therefore fit roosting-place for their
homeless selves. And heaved and heaved, still unrestingly heaved the
black sea, as if its vast tides were a conscience; and the great mundane
soul were in anguish and remorse for the long sin and suffering it had
bred.

Cape of Good Hope, do they call ye? Rather Cape Tormentoto, as called
of yore; for long allured by the perfidious silences that before had
attended us, we found ourselves launched into this tormented sea,
where guilty beings transformed into those fowls and these fish, seemed
condemned to swim on everlastingly without any haven in store, or beat
that black air without any horizon. But calm, snow-white, and unvarying;
still directing its fountain of feathers to the sky; still beckoning us
on from before, the solitary jet would at times be descried.

During all this blackness of the elements, Ahab, though assuming for the
time the almost continual command of the drenched and dangerous deck,
manifested the gloomiest reserve; and more seldom than ever addressed
his mates. In tempestuous times like these, after everything above and
aloft has been secured, nothing more can be done but passively to await
the issue of the gale. Then Captain and crew become practical fatalists.
So, with his ivory leg inserted into its accustomed hole, and with one
hand firmly grasping a shroud, Ahab for hours and hours would stand
gazing dead to windward, while an occasional squall of sleet or snow
would all but congeal his very eyelashes together. Meantime, the crew
driven from the forward part of the ship by the perilous seas that
burstingly broke over its bows, stood in a line along the bulwarks in
the waist; and the better to guard against the leaping waves, each man
had slipped himself into a sort of bowline secured to the rail, in which
he swung as in a loosened belt. Few or no words were spoken; and the
silent ship, as if manned by painted sailors in wax, day after day tore
on through all the swift madness and gladness of the demoniac waves.
By night the same muteness of humanity before the shrieks of the
ocean prevailed; still in silence the men swung in the bowlines; still
wordless Ahab stood up to the blast. Even when wearied nature seemed
demanding repose he would not seek that repose in his hammock. Never
could Starbuck forget the old man's aspect, when one night going down
into the cabin to mark how the barometer stood, he saw him with
closed eyes sitting straight in his floor-screwed chair; the rain
and half-melted sleet of the storm from which he had some time before
emerged, still slowly dripping from the unremoved hat and coat. On the
table beside him lay unrolled one of those charts of tides and currents
which have previously been spoken of. His lantern swung from his tightly
clenched hand. Though the body was erect, the head was thrown back so
that the closed eyes were pointed towards the needle of the tell-tale
that swung from a beam in the ceiling.*


*The cabin-compass is called the tell-tale, because without going to the
compass at the helm, the Captain, while below, can inform himself of the
course of the ship.


Terrible old man! thought Starbuck with a shudder, sleeping in this
gale, still thou steadfastly eyest thy purpose.



CHAPTER 52. The Albatross.


South-eastward from the Cape, off the distant Crozetts, a good cruising
ground for Right Whalemen, a sail loomed ahead, the Goney (Albatross)
by name. As she slowly drew nigh, from my lofty perch at the
fore-mast-head, I had a good view of that sight so remarkable to a tyro
in the far ocean fisheries--a whaler at sea, and long absent from home.

As if the waves had been fullers, this craft was bleached like the
skeleton of a stranded walrus. All down her sides, this spectral
appearance was traced with long channels of reddened rust, while all her
spars and her rigging were like the thick branches of trees furred over
with hoar-frost. Only her lower sails were set. A wild sight it was to
see her long-bearded look-outs at those three mast-heads. They seemed
clad in the skins of beasts, so torn and bepatched the raiment that had
survived nearly four years of cruising. Standing in iron hoops nailed to
the mast, they swayed and swung over a fathomless sea; and though, when
the ship slowly glided close under our stern, we six men in the air
came so nigh to each other that we might almost have leaped from the
mast-heads of one ship to those of the other; yet, those forlorn-looking
fishermen, mildly eyeing us as they passed, said not one word to our own
look-outs, while the quarter-deck hail was being heard from below.

"Ship ahoy! Have ye seen the White Whale?"

But as the strange captain, leaning over the pallid bulwarks, was in the
act of putting his trumpet to his mouth, it somehow fell from his hand
into the sea; and the wind now rising amain, he in vain strove to make
himself heard without it. Meantime his ship was still increasing the
distance between. While in various silent ways the seamen of the Pequod
were evincing their observance of this ominous incident at the first
mere mention of the White Whale's name to another ship, Ahab for a
moment paused; it almost seemed as though he would have lowered a boat
to board the stranger, had not the threatening wind forbade. But taking
advantage of his windward position, he again seized his trumpet, and
knowing by her aspect that the stranger vessel was a Nantucketer and
shortly bound home, he loudly hailed--"Ahoy there! This is the Pequod,
bound round the world! Tell them to address all future letters to the
Pacific ocean! and this time three years, if I am not at home, tell them
to address them to--"

At that moment the two wakes were fairly crossed, and instantly, then,
in accordance with their singular ways, shoals of small harmless fish,
that for some days before had been placidly swimming by our side, darted
away with what seemed shuddering fins, and ranged themselves fore and
aft with the stranger's flanks. Though in the course of his continual
voyagings Ahab must often before have noticed a similar sight, yet, to
any monomaniac man, the veriest trifles capriciously carry meanings.

"Swim away from me, do ye?" murmured Ahab, gazing over into the water.
There seemed but little in the words, but the tone conveyed more of deep
helpless sadness than the insane old man had ever before evinced. But
turning to the steersman, who thus far had been holding the ship in the
wind to diminish her headway, he cried out in his old lion voice,--"Up
helm! Keep her off round the world!"

Round the world! There is much in that sound to inspire proud feelings;
but whereto does all that circumnavigation conduct? Only through
numberless perils to the very point whence we started, where those that
we left behind secure, were all the time before us.

Were this world an endless plain, and by sailing eastward we could for
ever reach new distances, and discover sights more sweet and strange
than any Cyclades or Islands of King Solomon, then there were promise
in the voyage. But in pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of, or in
tormented chase of that demon phantom that, some time or other, swims
before all human hearts; while chasing such over this round globe, they
either lead us on in barren mazes or midway leave us whelmed.



CHAPTER 53. The Gam.


The ostensible reason why Ahab did not go on board of the whaler we had
spoken was this: the wind and sea betokened storms. But even had
this not been the case, he would not after all, perhaps, have boarded
her--judging by his subsequent conduct on similar occasions--if so it
had been that, by the process of hailing, he had obtained a negative
answer to the question he put. For, as it eventually turned out, he
cared not to consort, even for five minutes, with any stranger captain,
except he could contribute some of that information he so absorbingly
sought. But all this might remain inadequately estimated, were not
something said here of the peculiar usages of whaling-vessels when
meeting each other in foreign seas, and especially on a common
cruising-ground.

If two strangers crossing the Pine Barrens in New York State, or the
equally desolate Salisbury Plain in England; if casually encountering
each other in such inhospitable wilds, these twain, for the life of
them, cannot well avoid a mutual salutation; and stopping for a moment
to interchange the news; and, perhaps, sitting down for a while
and resting in concert: then, how much more natural that upon the
illimitable Pine Barrens and Salisbury Plains of the sea, two whaling
vessels descrying each other at the ends of the earth--off lone
Fanning's Island, or the far away King's Mills; how much more natural,
I say, that under such circumstances these ships should not only
interchange hails, but come into still closer, more friendly and
sociable contact. And especially would this seem to be a matter of
course, in the case of vessels owned in one seaport, and whose captains,
officers, and not a few of the men are personally known to each other;
and consequently, have all sorts of dear domestic things to talk about.

For the long absent ship, the outward-bounder, perhaps, has letters on
board; at any rate, she will be sure to let her have some papers of a
date a year or two later than the last one on her blurred and thumb-worn
files. And in return for that courtesy, the outward-bound ship would
receive the latest whaling intelligence from the cruising-ground to
which she may be destined, a thing of the utmost importance to her. And
in degree, all this will hold true concerning whaling vessels crossing
each other's track on the cruising-ground itself, even though they
are equally long absent from home. For one of them may have received a
transfer of letters from some third, and now far remote vessel; and
some of those letters may be for the people of the ship she now meets.
Besides, they would exchange the whaling news, and have an agreeable
chat. For not only would they meet with all the sympathies of sailors,
but likewise with all the peculiar congenialities arising from a common
pursuit and mutually shared privations and perils.

Nor would difference of country make any very essential difference;
that is, so long as both parties speak one language, as is the case
with Americans and English. Though, to be sure, from the small number of
English whalers, such meetings do not very often occur, and when they
do occur there is too apt to be a sort of shyness between them; for your
Englishman is rather reserved, and your Yankee, he does not fancy that
sort of thing in anybody but himself. Besides, the English whalers
sometimes affect a kind of metropolitan superiority over the American
whalers; regarding the long, lean Nantucketer, with his nondescript
provincialisms, as a sort of sea-peasant. But where this superiority
in the English whalemen does really consist, it would be hard to say,
seeing that the Yankees in one day, collectively, kill more whales than
all the English, collectively, in ten years. But this is a harmless
little foible in the English whale-hunters, which the Nantucketer does
not take much to heart; probably, because he knows that he has a few
foibles himself.

So, then, we see that of all ships separately sailing the sea, the
whalers have most reason to be sociable--and they are so. Whereas, some
merchant ships crossing each other's wake in the mid-Atlantic, will
oftentimes pass on without so much as a single word of recognition,
mutually cutting each other on the high seas, like a brace of dandies in
Broadway; and all the time indulging, perhaps, in finical criticism upon
each other's rig. As for Men-of-War, when they chance to meet at sea,
they first go through such a string of silly bowings and scrapings, such
a ducking of ensigns, that there does not seem to be much right-down
hearty good-will and brotherly love about it at all. As touching
Slave-ships meeting, why, they are in such a prodigious hurry, they run
away from each other as soon as possible. And as for Pirates, when they
chance to cross each other's cross-bones, the first hail is--"How many
skulls?"--the same way that whalers hail--"How many barrels?" And that
question once answered, pirates straightway steer apart, for they are
infernal villains on both sides, and don't like to see overmuch of each
other's villanous likenesses.

But look at the godly, honest, unostentatious, hospitable, sociable,
free-and-easy whaler! What does the whaler do when she meets another
whaler in any sort of decent weather? She has a "GAM," a thing so
utterly unknown to all other ships that they never heard of the name
even; and if by chance they should hear of it, they only grin at it, and
repeat gamesome stuff about "spouters" and "blubber-boilers," and such
like pretty exclamations. Why it is that all Merchant-seamen, and also
all Pirates and Man-of-War's men, and Slave-ship sailors, cherish such
a scornful feeling towards Whale-ships; this is a question it would be
hard to answer. Because, in the case of pirates, say, I should like to
know whether that profession of theirs has any peculiar glory about
it. It sometimes ends in uncommon elevation, indeed; but only at the
gallows. And besides, when a man is elevated in that odd fashion, he has
no proper foundation for his superior altitude. Hence, I conclude,
that in boasting himself to be high lifted above a whaleman, in that
assertion the pirate has no solid basis to stand on.

But what is a GAM? You might wear out your index-finger running up and
down the columns of dictionaries, and never find the word. Dr. Johnson
never attained to that erudition; Noah Webster's ark does not hold it.
Nevertheless, this same expressive word has now for many years been in
constant use among some fifteen thousand true born Yankees. Certainly,
it needs a definition, and should be incorporated into the Lexicon. With
that view, let me learnedly define it.

GAM. NOUN--A SOCIAL MEETING OF TWO (OR MORE) WHALESHIPS, GENERALLY ON A
CRUISING-GROUND; WHEN, AFTER EXCHANGING HAILS, THEY EXCHANGE VISITS BY
BOATS' CREWS; THE TWO CAPTAINS REMAINING, FOR THE TIME, ON BOARD OF ONE
SHIP, AND THE TWO CHIEF MATES ON THE OTHER.

There is another little item about Gamming which must not be forgotten
here. All professions have their own little peculiarities of detail; so
has the whale fishery. In a pirate, man-of-war, or slave ship, when
the captain is rowed anywhere in his boat, he always sits in the stern
sheets on a comfortable, sometimes cushioned seat there, and often
steers himself with a pretty little milliner's tiller decorated with
gay cords and ribbons. But the whale-boat has no seat astern, no sofa of
that sort whatever, and no tiller at all. High times indeed, if whaling
captains were wheeled about the water on castors like gouty old aldermen
in patent chairs. And as for a tiller, the whale-boat never admits of
any such effeminacy; and therefore as in gamming a complete boat's crew
must leave the ship, and hence as the boat steerer or harpooneer is of
the number, that subordinate is the steersman upon the occasion, and
the captain, having no place to sit in, is pulled off to his visit
all standing like a pine tree. And often you will notice that being
conscious of the eyes of the whole visible world resting on him from
the sides of the two ships, this standing captain is all alive to the
importance of sustaining his dignity by maintaining his legs. Nor is
this any very easy matter; for in his rear is the immense projecting
steering oar hitting him now and then in the small of his back, the
after-oar reciprocating by rapping his knees in front. He is thus
completely wedged before and behind, and can only expand himself
sideways by settling down on his stretched legs; but a sudden, violent
pitch of the boat will often go far to topple him, because length of
foundation is nothing without corresponding breadth. Merely make a
spread angle of two poles, and you cannot stand them up. Then, again,
it would never do in plain sight of the world's riveted eyes, it would
never do, I say, for this straddling captain to be seen steadying
himself the slightest particle by catching hold of anything with
his hands; indeed, as token of his entire, buoyant self-command, he
generally carries his hands in his trowsers' pockets; but perhaps being
generally very large, heavy hands, he carries them there for ballast.
Nevertheless there have occurred instances, well authenticated ones too,
where the captain has been known for an uncommonly critical moment or
two, in a sudden squall say--to seize hold of the nearest oarsman's
hair, and hold on there like grim death.



CHAPTER 54. The Town-Ho's Story.


(AS TOLD AT THE GOLDEN INN)


The Cape of Good Hope, and all the watery region round about there, is
much like some noted four corners of a great highway, where you meet
more travellers than in any other part.

It was not very long after speaking the Goney that another
homeward-bound whaleman, the Town-Ho,* was encountered. She was manned
almost wholly by Polynesians. In the short gam that ensued she gave
us strong news of Moby Dick. To some the general interest in the White
Whale was now wildly heightened by a circumstance of the Town-Ho's
story, which seemed obscurely to involve with the whale a certain
wondrous, inverted visitation of one of those so called judgments of God
which at times are said to overtake some men. This latter circumstance,
with its own particular accompaniments, forming what may be called the
secret part of the tragedy about to be narrated, never reached the ears
of Captain Ahab or his mates. For that secret part of the story was
unknown to the captain of the Town-Ho himself. It was the private
property of three confederate white seamen of that ship, one of whom, it
seems, communicated it to Tashtego with Romish injunctions of secrecy,
but the following night Tashtego rambled in his sleep, and revealed
so much of it in that way, that when he was wakened he could not well
withhold the rest. Nevertheless, so potent an influence did this thing
have on those seamen in the Pequod who came to the full knowledge of
it, and by such a strange delicacy, to call it so, were they governed in
this matter, that they kept the secret among themselves so that it never
transpired abaft the Pequod's main-mast. Interweaving in its proper
place this darker thread with the story as publicly narrated on the
ship, the whole of this strange affair I now proceed to put on lasting
record.


*The ancient whale-cry upon first sighting a whale from the mast-head,
still used by whalemen in hunting the famous Gallipagos terrapin.


For my humor's sake, I shall preserve the style in which I once narrated
it at Lima, to a lounging circle of my Spanish friends, one saint's eve,
smoking upon the thick-gilt tiled piazza of the Golden Inn. Of those
fine cavaliers, the young Dons, Pedro and Sebastian, were on the closer
terms with me; and hence the interluding questions they occasionally
put, and which are duly answered at the time.

"Some two years prior to my first learning the events which I am about
rehearsing to you, gentlemen, the Town-Ho, Sperm Whaler of Nantucket,
was cruising in your Pacific here, not very many days' sail eastward
from the eaves of this good Golden Inn. She was somewhere to the
northward of the Line. One morning upon handling the pumps, according to
daily usage, it was observed that she made more water in her hold than
common. They supposed a sword-fish had stabbed her, gentlemen. But the
captain, having some unusual reason for believing that rare good luck
awaited him in those latitudes; and therefore being very averse to quit
them, and the leak not being then considered at all dangerous, though,
indeed, they could not find it after searching the hold as low down
as was possible in rather heavy weather, the ship still continued her
cruisings, the mariners working at the pumps at wide and easy intervals;
but no good luck came; more days went by, and not only was the leak yet
undiscovered, but it sensibly increased. So much so, that now taking
some alarm, the captain, making all sail, stood away for the nearest
harbor among the islands, there to have his hull hove out and repaired.

"Though no small passage was before her, yet, if the commonest chance
favoured, he did not at all fear that his ship would founder by the way,
because his pumps were of the best, and being periodically relieved at
them, those six-and-thirty men of his could easily keep the ship free;
never mind if the leak should double on her. In truth, well nigh the
whole of this passage being attended by very prosperous breezes, the
Town-Ho had all but certainly arrived in perfect safety at her port
without the occurrence of the least fatality, had it not been for the
brutal overbearing of Radney, the mate, a Vineyarder, and the bitterly
provoked vengeance of Steelkilt, a Lakeman and desperado from Buffalo.

"'Lakeman!--Buffalo! Pray, what is a Lakeman, and where is Buffalo?'
said Don Sebastian, rising in his swinging mat of grass.

"On the eastern shore of our Lake Erie, Don; but--I crave your
courtesy--may be, you shall soon hear further of all that. Now,
gentlemen, in square-sail brigs and three-masted ships, well-nigh as
large and stout as any that ever sailed out of your old Callao to far
Manilla; this Lakeman, in the land-locked heart of our America, had yet
been nurtured by all those agrarian freebooting impressions popularly
connected with the open ocean. For in their interflowing aggregate,
those grand fresh-water seas of ours,--Erie, and Ontario, and Huron, and
Superior, and Michigan,--possess an ocean-like expansiveness, with many
of the ocean's noblest traits; with many of its rimmed varieties of
races and of climes. They contain round archipelagoes of romantic isles,
even as the Polynesian waters do; in large part, are shored by two great
contrasting nations, as the Atlantic is; they furnish long maritime
approaches to our numerous territorial colonies from the East, dotted
all round their banks; here and there are frowned upon by batteries,
and by the goat-like craggy guns of lofty Mackinaw; they have heard the
fleet thunderings of naval victories; at intervals, they yield their
beaches to wild barbarians, whose red painted faces flash from out
their peltry wigwams; for leagues and leagues are flanked by ancient
and unentered forests, where the gaunt pines stand like serried lines
of kings in Gothic genealogies; those same woods harboring wild Afric
beasts of prey, and silken creatures whose exported furs give robes
to Tartar Emperors; they mirror the paved capitals of Buffalo and
Cleveland, as well as Winnebago villages; they float alike the
full-rigged merchant ship, the armed cruiser of the State, the steamer,
and the beech canoe; they are swept by Borean and dismasting blasts as
direful as any that lash the salted wave; they know what shipwrecks are,
for out of sight of land, however inland, they have drowned full many
a midnight ship with all its shrieking crew. Thus, gentlemen, though
an inlander, Steelkilt was wild-ocean born, and wild-ocean nurtured;
as much of an audacious mariner as any. And for Radney, though in his
infancy he may have laid him down on the lone Nantucket beach, to nurse
at his maternal sea; though in after life he had long followed our
austere Atlantic and your contemplative Pacific; yet was he quite as
vengeful and full of social quarrel as the backwoods seaman, fresh
from the latitudes of buck-horn handled bowie-knives. Yet was this
Nantucketer a man with some good-hearted traits; and this Lakeman, a
mariner, who though a sort of devil indeed, might yet by inflexible
firmness, only tempered by that common decency of human recognition
which is the meanest slave's right; thus treated, this Steelkilt had
long been retained harmless and docile. At all events, he had proved
so thus far; but Radney was doomed and made mad, and Steelkilt--but,
gentlemen, you shall hear.

"It was not more than a day or two at the furthest after pointing
her prow for her island haven, that the Town-Ho's leak seemed again
increasing, but only so as to require an hour or more at the pumps
every day. You must know that in a settled and civilized ocean like our
Atlantic, for example, some skippers think little of pumping their whole
way across it; though of a still, sleepy night, should the officer of
the deck happen to forget his duty in that respect, the probability
would be that he and his shipmates would never again remember it, on
account of all hands gently subsiding to the bottom. Nor in the
solitary and savage seas far from you to the westward, gentlemen, is it
altogether unusual for ships to keep clanging at their pump-handles in
full chorus even for a voyage of considerable length; that is, if it lie
along a tolerably accessible coast, or if any other reasonable retreat
is afforded them. It is only when a leaky vessel is in some very out of
the way part of those waters, some really landless latitude, that her
captain begins to feel a little anxious.

"Much this way had it been with the Town-Ho; so when her leak was found
gaining once more, there was in truth some small concern manifested by
several of her company; especially by Radney the mate. He commanded
the upper sails to be well hoisted, sheeted home anew, and every way
expanded to the breeze. Now this Radney, I suppose, was as little of a
coward, and as little inclined to any sort of nervous apprehensiveness
touching his own person as any fearless, unthinking creature on land or
on sea that you can conveniently imagine, gentlemen. Therefore when
he betrayed this solicitude about the safety of the ship, some of the
seamen declared that it was only on account of his being a part owner in
her. So when they were working that evening at the pumps, there was on
this head no small gamesomeness slily going on among them, as they stood
with their feet continually overflowed by the rippling clear water;
clear as any mountain spring, gentlemen--that bubbling from the pumps
ran across the deck, and poured itself out in steady spouts at the lee
scupper-holes.

"Now, as you well know, it is not seldom the case in this conventional
world of ours--watery or otherwise; that when a person placed in command
over his fellow-men finds one of them to be very significantly his
superior in general pride of manhood, straightway against that man he
conceives an unconquerable dislike and bitterness; and if he have a
chance he will pull down and pulverize that subaltern's tower, and
make a little heap of dust of it. Be this conceit of mine as it may,
gentlemen, at all events Steelkilt was a tall and noble animal with a
head like a Roman, and a flowing golden beard like the tasseled housings
of your last viceroy's snorting charger; and a brain, and a heart, and
a soul in him, gentlemen, which had made Steelkilt Charlemagne, had he
been born son to Charlemagne's father. But Radney, the mate, was ugly
as a mule; yet as hardy, as stubborn, as malicious. He did not love
Steelkilt, and Steelkilt knew it.

"Espying the mate drawing near as he was toiling at the pump with the
rest, the Lakeman affected not to notice him, but unawed, went on with
his gay banterings.

"'Aye, aye, my merry lads, it's a lively leak this; hold a cannikin, one
of ye, and let's have a taste. By the Lord, it's worth bottling! I tell
ye what, men, old Rad's investment must go for it! he had best cut away
his part of the hull and tow it home. The fact is, boys, that sword-fish
only began the job; he's come back again with a gang of ship-carpenters,
saw-fish, and file-fish, and what not; and the whole posse of 'em
are now hard at work cutting and slashing at the bottom; making
improvements, I suppose. If old Rad were here now, I'd tell him to jump
overboard and scatter 'em. They're playing the devil with his estate, I
can tell him. But he's a simple old soul,--Rad, and a beauty too. Boys,
they say the rest of his property is invested in looking-glasses. I
wonder if he'd give a poor devil like me the model of his nose.'

"'Damn your eyes! what's that pump stopping for?' roared Radney,
pretending not to have heard the sailors' talk. 'Thunder away at it!'

"'Aye, aye, sir,' said Steelkilt, merry as a cricket. 'Lively, boys,
lively, now!' And with that the pump clanged like fifty fire-engines;
the men tossed their hats off to it, and ere long that peculiar gasping
of the lungs was heard which denotes the fullest tension of life's
utmost energies.

"Quitting the pump at last, with the rest of his band, the Lakeman went
forward all panting, and sat himself down on the windlass; his face
fiery red, his eyes bloodshot, and wiping the profuse sweat from his
brow. Now what cozening fiend it was, gentlemen, that possessed Radney
to meddle with such a man in that corporeally exasperated state, I know
not; but so it happened. Intolerably striding along the deck, the mate
commanded him to get a broom and sweep down the planks, and also a
shovel, and remove some offensive matters consequent upon allowing a pig
to run at large.

"Now, gentlemen, sweeping a ship's deck at sea is a piece of household
work which in all times but raging gales is regularly attended to every
evening; it has been known to be done in the case of ships actually
foundering at the time. Such, gentlemen, is the inflexibility of
sea-usages and the instinctive love of neatness in seamen; some of whom
would not willingly drown without first washing their faces. But in all
vessels this broom business is the prescriptive province of the boys,
if boys there be aboard. Besides, it was the stronger men in the Town-Ho
that had been divided into gangs, taking turns at the pumps; and being
the most athletic seaman of them all, Steelkilt had been regularly
assigned captain of one of the gangs; consequently he should have
been freed from any trivial business not connected with truly nautical
duties, such being the case with his comrades. I mention all these
particulars so that you may understand exactly how this affair stood
between the two men.

"But there was more than this: the order about the shovel was almost as
plainly meant to sting and insult Steelkilt, as though Radney had spat
in his face. Any man who has gone sailor in a whale-ship will
understand this; and all this and doubtless much more, the Lakeman fully
comprehended when the mate uttered his command. But as he sat still for
a moment, and as he steadfastly looked into the mate's malignant eye and
perceived the stacks of powder-casks heaped up in him and the slow-match
silently burning along towards them; as he instinctively saw all
this, that strange forbearance and unwillingness to stir up the deeper
passionateness in any already ireful being--a repugnance most felt, when
felt at all, by really valiant men even when aggrieved--this nameless
phantom feeling, gentlemen, stole over Steelkilt.

"Therefore, in his ordinary tone, only a little broken by the bodily
exhaustion he was temporarily in, he answered him saying that sweeping
the deck was not his business, and he would not do it. And then, without
at all alluding to the shovel, he pointed to three lads as the customary
sweepers; who, not being billeted at the pumps, had done little or
nothing all day. To this, Radney replied with an oath, in a most
domineering and outrageous manner unconditionally reiterating his
command; meanwhile advancing upon the still seated Lakeman, with an
uplifted cooper's club hammer which he had snatched from a cask near by.

"Heated and irritated as he was by his spasmodic toil at the pumps, for
all his first nameless feeling of forbearance the sweating Steelkilt
could but ill brook this bearing in the mate; but somehow still
smothering the conflagration within him, without speaking he remained
doggedly rooted to his seat, till at last the incensed Radney shook the
hammer within a few inches of his face, furiously commanding him to do
his bidding.

"Steelkilt rose, and slowly retreating round the windlass, steadily
followed by the mate with his menacing hammer, deliberately repeated his
intention not to obey. Seeing, however, that his forbearance had not
the slightest effect, by an awful and unspeakable intimation with his
twisted hand he warned off the foolish and infatuated man; but it was to
no purpose. And in this way the two went once slowly round the windlass;
when, resolved at last no longer to retreat, bethinking him that he had
now forborne as much as comported with his humor, the Lakeman paused on
the hatches and thus spoke to the officer:

"'Mr. Radney, I will not obey you. Take that hammer away, or look to
yourself.' But the predestinated mate coming still closer to him, where
the Lakeman stood fixed, now shook the heavy hammer within an inch of
his teeth; meanwhile repeating a string of insufferable maledictions.
Retreating not the thousandth part of an inch; stabbing him in the eye
with the unflinching poniard of his glance, Steelkilt, clenching
his right hand behind him and creepingly drawing it back, told his
persecutor that if the hammer but grazed his cheek he (Steelkilt) would
murder him. But, gentlemen, the fool had been branded for the slaughter
by the gods. Immediately the hammer touched the cheek; the next instant
the lower jaw of the mate was stove in his head; he fell on the hatch
spouting blood like a whale.

"Ere the cry could go aft Steelkilt was shaking one of the backstays
leading far aloft to where two of his comrades were standing their
mastheads. They were both Canallers.

"'Canallers!' cried Don Pedro. 'We have seen many whale-ships in our
harbours, but never heard of your Canallers. Pardon: who and what are
they?'

"'Canallers, Don, are the boatmen belonging to our grand Erie Canal. You
must have heard of it.'

"'Nay, Senor; hereabouts in this dull, warm, most lazy, and hereditary
land, we know but little of your vigorous North.'

"'Aye? Well then, Don, refill my cup. Your chicha's very fine; and
ere proceeding further I will tell ye what our Canallers are; for such
information may throw side-light upon my story.'

"For three hundred and sixty miles, gentlemen, through the entire
breadth of the state of New York; through numerous populous cities and
most thriving villages; through long, dismal, uninhabited swamps, and
affluent, cultivated fields, unrivalled for fertility; by billiard-room
and bar-room; through the holy-of-holies of great forests; on Roman
arches over Indian rivers; through sun and shade; by happy hearts or
broken; through all the wide contrasting scenery of those noble Mohawk
counties; and especially, by rows of snow-white chapels, whose spires
stand almost like milestones, flows one continual stream of Venetianly
corrupt and often lawless life. There's your true Ashantee, gentlemen;
there howl your pagans; where you ever find them, next door to you;
under the long-flung shadow, and the snug patronising lee of churches.
For by some curious fatality, as it is often noted of your metropolitan
freebooters that they ever encamp around the halls of justice, so
sinners, gentlemen, most abound in holiest vicinities.

"'Is that a friar passing?' said Don Pedro, looking downwards into the
crowded plazza, with humorous concern.

"'Well for our northern friend, Dame Isabella's Inquisition wanes in
Lima,' laughed Don Sebastian. 'Proceed, Senor.'

"'A moment! Pardon!' cried another of the company. 'In the name of all
us Limeese, I but desire to express to you, sir sailor, that we have by
no means overlooked your delicacy in not substituting present Lima
for distant Venice in your corrupt comparison. Oh! do not bow and look
surprised; you know the proverb all along this coast--"Corrupt as
Lima." It but bears out your saying, too; churches more plentiful than
billiard-tables, and for ever open--and "Corrupt as Lima." So, too,
Venice; I have been there; the holy city of the blessed evangelist, St.
Mark!--St. Dominic, purge it! Your cup! Thanks: here I refill; now, you
pour out again.'

"Freely depicted in his own vocation, gentlemen, the Canaller would make
a fine dramatic hero, so abundantly and picturesquely wicked is he. Like
Mark Antony, for days and days along his green-turfed, flowery Nile,
he indolently floats, openly toying with his red-cheeked Cleopatra,
ripening his apricot thigh upon the sunny deck. But ashore, all this
effeminacy is dashed. The brigandish guise which the Canaller so proudly
sports; his slouched and gaily-ribboned hat betoken his grand features.
A terror to the smiling innocence of the villages through which he
floats; his swart visage and bold swagger are not unshunned in cities.
Once a vagabond on his own canal, I have received good turns from one of
these Canallers; I thank him heartily; would fain be not ungrateful;
but it is often one of the prime redeeming qualities of your man of
violence, that at times he has as stiff an arm to back a poor stranger
in a strait, as to plunder a wealthy one. In sum, gentlemen, what the
wildness of this canal life is, is emphatically evinced by this; that
our wild whale-fishery contains so many of its most finished graduates,
and that scarce any race of mankind, except Sydney men, are so much
distrusted by our whaling captains. Nor does it at all diminish the
curiousness of this matter, that to many thousands of our rural boys and
young men born along its line, the probationary life of the Grand Canal
furnishes the sole transition between quietly reaping in a Christian
corn-field, and recklessly ploughing the waters of the most barbaric
seas.

"'I see! I see!' impetuously exclaimed Don Pedro, spilling his chicha
upon his silvery ruffles. 'No need to travel! The world's one Lima. I
had thought, now, that at your temperate North the generations were cold
and holy as the hills.--But the story.'

"I left off, gentlemen, where the Lakeman shook the backstay. Hardly
had he done so, when he was surrounded by the three junior mates and the
four harpooneers, who all crowded him to the deck. But sliding down the
ropes like baleful comets, the two Canallers rushed into the uproar, and
sought to drag their man out of it towards the forecastle. Others of the
sailors joined with them in this attempt, and a twisted turmoil ensued;
while standing out of harm's way, the valiant captain danced up and down
with a whale-pike, calling upon his officers to manhandle that atrocious
scoundrel, and smoke him along to the quarter-deck. At intervals, he ran
close up to the revolving border of the confusion, and prying into
the heart of it with his pike, sought to prick out the object of his
resentment. But Steelkilt and his desperadoes were too much for them
all; they succeeded in gaining the forecastle deck, where, hastily
slewing about three or four large casks in a line with the windlass,
these sea-Parisians entrenched themselves behind the barricade.

"'Come out of that, ye pirates!' roared the captain, now menacing them
with a pistol in each hand, just brought to him by the steward. 'Come
out of that, ye cut-throats!'

"Steelkilt leaped on the barricade, and striding up and down there,
defied the worst the pistols could do; but gave the captain to
understand distinctly, that his (Steelkilt's) death would be the signal
for a murderous mutiny on the part of all hands. Fearing in his heart
lest this might prove but too true, the captain a little desisted, but
still commanded the insurgents instantly to return to their duty.

"'Will you promise not to touch us, if we do?' demanded their
ringleader.

"'Turn to! turn to!--I make no promise;--to your duty! Do you want to
sink the ship, by knocking off at a time like this? Turn to!' and he
once more raised a pistol.

"'Sink the ship?' cried Steelkilt. 'Aye, let her sink. Not a man of us
turns to, unless you swear not to raise a rope-yarn against us. What say
ye, men?' turning to his comrades. A fierce cheer was their response.

"The Lakeman now patrolled the barricade, all the while keeping his eye
on the Captain, and jerking out such sentences as these:--'It's not our
fault; we didn't want it; I told him to take his hammer away; it was
boy's business; he might have known me before this; I told him not to
prick the buffalo; I believe I have broken a finger here against his
cursed jaw; ain't those mincing knives down in the forecastle there,
men? look to those handspikes, my hearties. Captain, by God, look to
yourself; say the word; don't be a fool; forget it all; we are ready
to turn to; treat us decently, and we're your men; but we won't be
flogged.'

"'Turn to! I make no promises, turn to, I say!'

"'Look ye, now,' cried the Lakeman, flinging out his arm towards him,
'there are a few of us here (and I am one of them) who have shipped
for the cruise, d'ye see; now as you well know, sir, we can claim our
discharge as soon as the anchor is down; so we don't want a row; it's
not our interest; we want to be peaceable; we are ready to work, but we
won't be flogged.'

"'Turn to!' roared the Captain.

"Steelkilt glanced round him a moment, and then said:--'I tell you what
it is now, Captain, rather than kill ye, and be hung for such a shabby
rascal, we won't lift a hand against ye unless ye attack us; but till
you say the word about not flogging us, we don't do a hand's turn.'

"'Down into the forecastle then, down with ye, I'll keep ye there till
ye're sick of it. Down ye go.'

"'Shall we?' cried the ringleader to his men. Most of them were against
it; but at length, in obedience to Steelkilt, they preceded him down
into their dark den, growlingly disappearing, like bears into a cave.

"As the Lakeman's bare head was just level with the planks, the Captain
and his posse leaped the barricade, and rapidly drawing over the slide
of the scuttle, planted their group of hands upon it, and loudly called
for the steward to bring the heavy brass padlock belonging to the
companionway.

"Then opening the slide a little, the Captain whispered something
down the crack, closed it, and turned the key upon them--ten in
number--leaving on deck some twenty or more, who thus far had remained
neutral.

"All night a wide-awake watch was kept by all the officers, forward and
aft, especially about the forecastle scuttle and fore hatchway; at which
last place it was feared the insurgents might emerge, after breaking
through the bulkhead below. But the hours of darkness passed in peace;
the men who still remained at their duty toiling hard at the pumps,
whose clinking and clanking at intervals through the dreary night
dismally resounded through the ship.

"At sunrise the Captain went forward, and knocking on the deck, summoned
the prisoners to work; but with a yell they refused. Water was then
lowered down to them, and a couple of handfuls of biscuit were tossed
after it; when again turning the key upon them and pocketing it, the
Captain returned to the quarter-deck. Twice every day for three days
this was repeated; but on the fourth morning a confused wrangling, and
then a scuffling was heard, as the customary summons was delivered; and
suddenly four men burst up from the forecastle, saying they were ready
to turn to. The fetid closeness of the air, and a famishing diet, united
perhaps to some fears of ultimate retribution, had constrained them to
surrender at discretion. Emboldened by this, the Captain reiterated his
demand to the rest, but Steelkilt shouted up to him a terrific hint to
stop his babbling and betake himself where he belonged. On the fifth
morning three others of the mutineers bolted up into the air from the
desperate arms below that sought to restrain them. Only three were left.

"'Better turn to, now?' said the Captain with a heartless jeer.

"'Shut us up again, will ye!' cried Steelkilt.

"'Oh certainly,' the Captain, and the key clicked.

"It was at this point, gentlemen, that enraged by the defection of seven
of his former associates, and stung by the mocking voice that had last
hailed him, and maddened by his long entombment in a place as black as
the bowels of despair; it was then that Steelkilt proposed to the two
Canallers, thus far apparently of one mind with him, to burst out of
their hole at the next summoning of the garrison; and armed with their
keen mincing knives (long, crescentic, heavy implements with a handle
at each end) run amuck from the bowsprit to the taffrail; and if by any
devilishness of desperation possible, seize the ship. For himself, he
would do this, he said, whether they joined him or not. That was the
last night he should spend in that den. But the scheme met with no
opposition on the part of the other two; they swore they were ready for
that, or for any other mad thing, for anything in short but a surrender.
And what was more, they each insisted upon being the first man on deck,
when the time to make the rush should come. But to this their leader as
fiercely objected, reserving that priority for himself; particularly as
his two comrades would not yield, the one to the other, in the matter;
and both of them could not be first, for the ladder would but admit one
man at a time. And here, gentlemen, the foul play of these miscreants
must come out.

"Upon hearing the frantic project of their leader, each in his own
separate soul had suddenly lighted, it would seem, upon the same piece
of treachery, namely: to be foremost in breaking out, in order to be
the first of the three, though the last of the ten, to surrender; and
thereby secure whatever small chance of pardon such conduct might merit.
But when Steelkilt made known his determination still to lead them to
the last, they in some way, by some subtle chemistry of villany, mixed
their before secret treacheries together; and when their leader
fell into a doze, verbally opened their souls to each other in three
sentences; and bound the sleeper with cords, and gagged him with cords;
and shrieked out for the Captain at midnight.

"Thinking murder at hand, and smelling in the dark for the blood, he and
all his armed mates and harpooneers rushed for the forecastle. In a
few minutes the scuttle was opened, and, bound hand and foot, the still
struggling ringleader was shoved up into the air by his perfidious
allies, who at once claimed the honour of securing a man who had been
fully ripe for murder. But all these were collared, and dragged along
the deck like dead cattle; and, side by side, were seized up into the
mizzen rigging, like three quarters of meat, and there they hung till
morning. 'Damn ye,' cried the Captain, pacing to and fro before them,
'the vultures would not touch ye, ye villains!'

"At sunrise he summoned all hands; and separating those who had rebelled
from those who had taken no part in the mutiny, he told the former that
he had a good mind to flog them all round--thought, upon the whole,
he would do so--he ought to--justice demanded it; but for the present,
considering their timely surrender, he would let them go with a
reprimand, which he accordingly administered in the vernacular.

"'But as for you, ye carrion rogues,' turning to the three men in the
rigging--'for you, I mean to mince ye up for the try-pots;' and,
seizing a rope, he applied it with all his might to the backs of the
two traitors, till they yelled no more, but lifelessly hung their heads
sideways, as the two crucified thieves are drawn.

"'My wrist is sprained with ye!' he cried, at last; 'but there is still
rope enough left for you, my fine bantam, that wouldn't give up. Take
that gag from his mouth, and let us hear what he can say for himself.'

"For a moment the exhausted mutineer made a tremulous motion of his
cramped jaws, and then painfully twisting round his head, said in a sort
of hiss, 'What I say is this--and mind it well--if you flog me, I murder
you!'

"'Say ye so? then see how ye frighten me'--and the Captain drew off with
the rope to strike.

"'Best not,' hissed the Lakeman.

"'But I must,'--and the rope was once more drawn back for the stroke.

"Steelkilt here hissed out something, inaudible to all but the Captain;
who, to the amazement of all hands, started back, paced the deck rapidly
two or three times, and then suddenly throwing down his rope, said, 'I
won't do it--let him go--cut him down: d'ye hear?'

"But as the junior mates were hurrying to execute the order, a pale man,
with a bandaged head, arrested them--Radney the chief mate. Ever since
the blow, he had lain in his berth; but that morning, hearing the tumult
on the deck, he had crept out, and thus far had watched the whole
scene. Such was the state of his mouth, that he could hardly speak;
but mumbling something about his being willing and able to do what the
captain dared not attempt, he snatched the rope and advanced to his
pinioned foe.

"'You are a coward!' hissed the Lakeman.

"'So I am, but take that.' The mate was in the very act of striking,
when another hiss stayed his uplifted arm. He paused: and then pausing
no more, made good his word, spite of Steelkilt's threat, whatever that
might have been. The three men were then cut down, all hands were turned
to, and, sullenly worked by the moody seamen, the iron pumps clanged as
before.

"Just after dark that day, when one watch had retired below, a clamor
was heard in the forecastle; and the two trembling traitors running up,
besieged the cabin door, saying they durst not consort with the crew.
Entreaties, cuffs, and kicks could not drive them back, so at their own
instance they were put down in the ship's run for salvation. Still, no
sign of mutiny reappeared among the rest. On the contrary, it seemed,
that mainly at Steelkilt's instigation, they had resolved to maintain
the strictest peacefulness, obey all orders to the last, and, when the
ship reached port, desert her in a body. But in order to insure the
speediest end to the voyage, they all agreed to another thing--namely,
not to sing out for whales, in case any should be discovered. For,
spite of her leak, and spite of all her other perils, the Town-Ho still
maintained her mast-heads, and her captain was just as willing to
lower for a fish that moment, as on the day his craft first struck the
cruising ground; and Radney the mate was quite as ready to change his
berth for a boat, and with his bandaged mouth seek to gag in death the
vital jaw of the whale.

"But though the Lakeman had induced the seamen to adopt this sort of
passiveness in their conduct, he kept his own counsel (at least till all
was over) concerning his own proper and private revenge upon the man who
had stung him in the ventricles of his heart. He was in Radney the chief
mate's watch; and as if the infatuated man sought to run more than
half way to meet his doom, after the scene at the rigging, he insisted,
against the express counsel of the captain, upon resuming the head
of his watch at night. Upon this, and one or two other circumstances,
Steelkilt systematically built the plan of his revenge.

"During the night, Radney had an unseamanlike way of sitting on the
bulwarks of the quarter-deck, and leaning his arm upon the gunwale of
the boat which was hoisted up there, a little above the ship's side.
In this attitude, it was well known, he sometimes dozed. There was a
considerable vacancy between the boat and the ship, and down between
this was the sea. Steelkilt calculated his time, and found that his next
trick at the helm would come round at two o'clock, in the morning of the
third day from that in which he had been betrayed. At his leisure,
he employed the interval in braiding something very carefully in his
watches below.

"'What are you making there?' said a shipmate.

"'What do you think? what does it look like?'

"'Like a lanyard for your bag; but it's an odd one, seems to me.'

"'Yes, rather oddish,' said the Lakeman, holding it at arm's length
before him; 'but I think it will answer. Shipmate, I haven't enough
twine,--have you any?'

"But there was none in the forecastle.

"'Then I must get some from old Rad;' and he rose to go aft.

"'You don't mean to go a begging to HIM!' said a sailor.

"'Why not? Do you think he won't do me a turn, when it's to help himself
in the end, shipmate?' and going to the mate, he looked at him
quietly, and asked him for some twine to mend his hammock. It was given
him--neither twine nor lanyard were seen again; but the next night
an iron ball, closely netted, partly rolled from the pocket of the
Lakeman's monkey jacket, as he was tucking the coat into his hammock for
a pillow. Twenty-four hours after, his trick at the silent helm--nigh
to the man who was apt to doze over the grave always ready dug to
the seaman's hand--that fatal hour was then to come; and in the
fore-ordaining soul of Steelkilt, the mate was already stark and
stretched as a corpse, with his forehead crushed in.

"But, gentlemen, a fool saved the would-be murderer from the bloody
deed he had planned. Yet complete revenge he had, and without being the
avenger. For by a mysterious fatality, Heaven itself seemed to step in
to take out of his hands into its own the damning thing he would have
done.

"It was just between daybreak and sunrise of the morning of the second
day, when they were washing down the decks, that a stupid Teneriffe man,
drawing water in the main-chains, all at once shouted out, 'There she
rolls! there she rolls!' Jesu, what a whale! It was Moby Dick.

"'Moby Dick!' cried Don Sebastian; 'St. Dominic! Sir sailor, but do
whales have christenings? Whom call you Moby Dick?'

"'A very white, and famous, and most deadly immortal monster, Don;--but
that would be too long a story.'

"'How? how?' cried all the young Spaniards, crowding.

"'Nay, Dons, Dons--nay, nay! I cannot rehearse that now. Let me get more
into the air, Sirs.'

"'The chicha! the chicha!' cried Don Pedro; 'our vigorous friend looks
faint;--fill up his empty glass!'

"No need, gentlemen; one moment, and I proceed.--Now, gentlemen,
so suddenly perceiving the snowy whale within fifty yards of the
ship--forgetful of the compact among the crew--in the excitement of the
moment, the Teneriffe man had instinctively and involuntarily lifted
his voice for the monster, though for some little time past it had been
plainly beheld from the three sullen mast-heads. All was now a phrensy.
'The White Whale--the White Whale!' was the cry from captain, mates,
and harpooneers, who, undeterred by fearful rumours, were all anxious
to capture so famous and precious a fish; while the dogged crew eyed
askance, and with curses, the appalling beauty of the vast milky mass,
that lit up by a horizontal spangling sun, shifted and glistened like
a living opal in the blue morning sea. Gentlemen, a strange fatality
pervades the whole career of these events, as if verily mapped out
before the world itself was charted. The mutineer was the bowsman of the
mate, and when fast to a fish, it was his duty to sit next him, while
Radney stood up with his lance in the prow, and haul in or slacken
the line, at the word of command. Moreover, when the four boats were
lowered, the mate's got the start; and none howled more fiercely with
delight than did Steelkilt, as he strained at his oar. After a stiff
pull, their harpooneer got fast, and, spear in hand, Radney sprang to
the bow. He was always a furious man, it seems, in a boat. And now his
bandaged cry was, to beach him on the whale's topmost back. Nothing
loath, his bowsman hauled him up and up, through a blinding foam that
blent two whitenesses together; till of a sudden the boat struck as
against a sunken ledge, and keeling over, spilled out the standing mate.
That instant, as he fell on the whale's slippery back, the boat righted,
and was dashed aside by the swell, while Radney was tossed over into the
sea, on the other flank of the whale. He struck out through the spray,
and, for an instant, was dimly seen through that veil, wildly seeking to
remove himself from the eye of Moby Dick. But the whale rushed round
in a sudden maelstrom; seized the swimmer between his jaws; and rearing
high up with him, plunged headlong again, and went down.

"Meantime, at the first tap of the boat's bottom, the Lakeman had
slackened the line, so as to drop astern from the whirlpool; calmly
looking on, he thought his own thoughts. But a sudden, terrific,
downward jerking of the boat, quickly brought his knife to the line. He
cut it; and the whale was free. But, at some distance, Moby Dick rose
again, with some tatters of Radney's red woollen shirt, caught in the
teeth that had destroyed him. All four boats gave chase again; but the
whale eluded them, and finally wholly disappeared.

"In good time, the Town-Ho reached her port--a savage, solitary
place--where no civilized creature resided. There, headed by the
Lakeman, all but five or six of the foremastmen deliberately deserted
among the palms; eventually, as it turned out, seizing a large double
war-canoe of the savages, and setting sail for some other harbor.

"The ship's company being reduced to but a handful, the captain called
upon the Islanders to assist him in the laborious business of heaving
down the ship to stop the leak. But to such unresting vigilance over
their dangerous allies was this small band of whites necessitated, both
by night and by day, and so extreme was the hard work they underwent,
that upon the vessel being ready again for sea, they were in such a
weakened condition that the captain durst not put off with them in so
heavy a vessel. After taking counsel with his officers, he anchored the
ship as far off shore as possible; loaded and ran out his two cannon
from the bows; stacked his muskets on the poop; and warning the
Islanders not to approach the ship at their peril, took one man with
him, and setting the sail of his best whale-boat, steered straight
before the wind for Tahiti, five hundred miles distant, to procure a
reinforcement to his crew.

"On the fourth day of the sail, a large canoe was descried, which seemed
to have touched at a low isle of corals. He steered away from it; but
the savage craft bore down on him; and soon the voice of Steelkilt
hailed him to heave to, or he would run him under water. The captain
presented a pistol. With one foot on each prow of the yoked war-canoes,
the Lakeman laughed him to scorn; assuring him that if the pistol so
much as clicked in the lock, he would bury him in bubbles and foam.

"'What do you want of me?' cried the captain.

"'Where are you bound? and for what are you bound?' demanded Steelkilt;
'no lies.'

"'I am bound to Tahiti for more men.'

"'Very good. Let me board you a moment--I come in peace.' With that he
leaped from the canoe, swam to the boat; and climbing the gunwale, stood
face to face with the captain.

"'Cross your arms, sir; throw back your head. Now, repeat after me.
As soon as Steelkilt leaves me, I swear to beach this boat on yonder
island, and remain there six days. If I do not, may lightning strike
me!'

"'A pretty scholar,' laughed the Lakeman. 'Adios, Senor!' and leaping
into the sea, he swam back to his comrades.

"Watching the boat till it was fairly beached, and drawn up to the
roots of the cocoa-nut trees, Steelkilt made sail again, and in due time
arrived at Tahiti, his own place of destination. There, luck befriended
him; two ships were about to sail for France, and were providentially
in want of precisely that number of men which the sailor headed. They
embarked; and so for ever got the start of their former captain, had he
been at all minded to work them legal retribution.

"Some ten days after the French ships sailed, the whale-boat arrived,
and the captain was forced to enlist some of the more civilized
Tahitians, who had been somewhat used to the sea. Chartering a small
native schooner, he returned with them to his vessel; and finding all
right there, again resumed his cruisings.

"Where Steelkilt now is, gentlemen, none know; but upon the island of
Nantucket, the widow of Radney still turns to the sea which refuses
to give up its dead; still in dreams sees the awful white whale that
destroyed him.

"'Are you through?' said Don Sebastian, quietly.

"'I am, Don.'

"'Then I entreat you, tell me if to the best of your own convictions,
this your story is in substance really true? It is so passing wonderful!
Did you get it from an unquestionable source? Bear with me if I seem to
press.'

"'Also bear with all of us, sir sailor; for we all join in Don
Sebastian's suit,' cried the company, with exceeding interest.

"'Is there a copy of the Holy Evangelists in the Golden Inn, gentlemen?'

"'Nay,' said Don Sebastian; 'but I know a worthy priest near by, who
will quickly procure one for me. I go for it; but are you well advised?
this may grow too serious.'

"'Will you be so good as to bring the priest also, Don?'

"'Though there are no Auto-da-Fe's in Lima now,' said one of the company
to another; 'I fear our sailor friend runs risk of the archiepiscopacy.
Let us withdraw more out of the moonlight. I see no need of this.'

"'Excuse me for running after you, Don Sebastian; but may I also beg
that you will be particular in procuring the largest sized Evangelists
you can.'

"'This is the priest, he brings you the Evangelists,' said Don Sebastian,
gravely, returning with a tall and solemn figure.

"'Let me remove my hat. Now, venerable priest, further into the light,
and hold the Holy Book before me that I may touch it.

"'So help me Heaven, and on my honour the story I have told ye,
gentlemen, is in substance and its great items, true. I know it to be
true; it happened on this ball; I trod the ship; I knew the crew; I have
seen and talked with Steelkilt since the death of Radney.'"



CHAPTER 55. Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales.


I shall ere long paint to you as well as one can without canvas,
something like the true form of the whale as he actually appears to the
eye of the whaleman when in his own absolute body the whale is moored
alongside the whale-ship so that he can be fairly stepped upon there.
It may be worth while, therefore, previously to advert to those
curious imaginary portraits of him which even down to the present day
confidently challenge the faith of the landsman. It is time to set the
world right in this matter, by proving such pictures of the whale all
wrong.

It may be that the primal source of all those pictorial delusions will
be found among the oldest Hindoo, Egyptian, and Grecian sculptures. For
ever since those inventive but unscrupulous times when on the marble
panellings of temples, the pedestals of statues, and on shields,
medallions, cups, and coins, the dolphin was drawn in scales of
chain-armor like Saladin's, and a helmeted head like St. George's; ever
since then has something of the same sort of license prevailed, not
only in most popular pictures of the whale, but in many scientific
presentations of him.

Now, by all odds, the most ancient extant portrait anyways purporting to
be the whale's, is to be found in the famous cavern-pagoda of Elephanta,
in India. The Brahmins maintain that in the almost endless sculptures of
that immemorial pagoda, all the trades and pursuits, every conceivable
avocation of man, were prefigured ages before any of them actually came
into being. No wonder then, that in some sort our noble profession of
whaling should have been there shadowed forth. The Hindoo whale
referred to, occurs in a separate department of the wall, depicting the
incarnation of Vishnu in the form of leviathan, learnedly known as the
Matse Avatar. But though this sculpture is half man and half whale, so
as only to give the tail of the latter, yet that small section of him is
all wrong. It looks more like the tapering tail of an anaconda, than the
broad palms of the true whale's majestic flukes.

But go to the old Galleries, and look now at a great Christian painter's
portrait of this fish; for he succeeds no better than the antediluvian
Hindoo. It is Guido's picture of Perseus rescuing Andromeda from the
sea-monster or whale. Where did Guido get the model of such a strange
creature as that? Nor does Hogarth, in painting the same scene in his
own "Perseus Descending," make out one whit better. The huge corpulence
of that Hogarthian monster undulates on the surface, scarcely drawing
one inch of water. It has a sort of howdah on its back, and its
distended tusked mouth into which the billows are rolling, might be
taken for the Traitors' Gate leading from the Thames by water into the
Tower. Then, there are the Prodromus whales of old Scotch Sibbald, and
Jonah's whale, as depicted in the prints of old Bibles and the cuts of
old primers. What shall be said of these? As for the book-binder's whale
winding like a vine-stalk round the stock of a descending anchor--as
stamped and gilded on the backs and title-pages of many books both
old and new--that is a very picturesque but purely fabulous creature,
imitated, I take it, from the like figures on antique vases.
Though universally denominated a dolphin, I nevertheless call this
book-binder's fish an attempt at a whale; because it was so intended
when the device was first introduced. It was introduced by an old
Italian publisher somewhere about the 15th century, during the Revival
of Learning; and in those days, and even down to a comparatively
late period, dolphins were popularly supposed to be a species of the
Leviathan.

In the vignettes and other embellishments of some ancient books you will
at times meet with very curious touches at the whale, where all manner
of spouts, jets d'eau, hot springs and cold, Saratoga and Baden-Baden,
come bubbling up from his unexhausted brain. In the title-page of the
original edition of the "Advancement of Learning" you will find some
curious whales.

But quitting all these unprofessional attempts, let us glance at those
pictures of leviathan purporting to be sober, scientific delineations,
by those who know. In old Harris's collection of voyages there are some
plates of whales extracted from a Dutch book of voyages, A.D. 1671,
entitled "A Whaling Voyage to Spitzbergen in the ship Jonas in the
Whale, Peter Peterson of Friesland, master." In one of those plates the
whales, like great rafts of logs, are represented lying among ice-isles,
with white bears running over their living backs. In another plate, the
prodigious blunder is made of representing the whale with perpendicular
flukes.

Then again, there is an imposing quarto, written by one Captain Colnett,
a Post Captain in the English navy, entitled "A Voyage round Cape Horn
into the South Seas, for the purpose of extending the Spermaceti Whale
Fisheries." In this book is an outline purporting to be a "Picture of
a Physeter or Spermaceti whale, drawn by scale from one killed on the
coast of Mexico, August, 1793, and hoisted on deck." I doubt not the
captain had this veracious picture taken for the benefit of his marines.
To mention but one thing about it, let me say that it has an eye which
applied, according to the accompanying scale, to a full grown sperm
whale, would make the eye of that whale a bow-window some five feet
long. Ah, my gallant captain, why did ye not give us Jonah looking out
of that eye!

Nor are the most conscientious compilations of Natural History for
the benefit of the young and tender, free from the same heinousness of
mistake. Look at that popular work "Goldsmith's Animated Nature." In the
abridged London edition of 1807, there are plates of an alleged "whale"
and a "narwhale." I do not wish to seem inelegant, but this unsightly
whale looks much like an amputated sow; and, as for the narwhale, one
glimpse at it is enough to amaze one, that in this nineteenth century
such a hippogriff could be palmed for genuine upon any intelligent
public of schoolboys.

Then, again, in 1825, Bernard Germain, Count de Lacepede, a great
naturalist, published a scientific systemized whale book, wherein are
several pictures of the different species of the Leviathan. All these
are not only incorrect, but the picture of the Mysticetus or Greenland
whale (that is to say, the Right whale), even Scoresby, a long
experienced man as touching that species, declares not to have its
counterpart in nature.

But the placing of the cap-sheaf to all this blundering business was
reserved for the scientific Frederick Cuvier, brother to the famous
Baron. In 1836, he published a Natural History of Whales, in which he
gives what he calls a picture of the Sperm Whale. Before showing that
picture to any Nantucketer, you had best provide for your summary
retreat from Nantucket. In a word, Frederick Cuvier's Sperm Whale is not
a Sperm Whale, but a squash. Of course, he never had the benefit of
a whaling voyage (such men seldom have), but whence he derived that
picture, who can tell? Perhaps he got it as his scientific predecessor
in the same field, Desmarest, got one of his authentic abortions; that
is, from a Chinese drawing. And what sort of lively lads with the pencil
those Chinese are, many queer cups and saucers inform us.

As for the sign-painters' whales seen in the streets hanging over the
shops of oil-dealers, what shall be said of them? They are generally
Richard III. whales, with dromedary humps, and very savage; breakfasting
on three or four sailor tarts, that is whaleboats full of mariners:
their deformities floundering in seas of blood and blue paint.

But these manifold mistakes in depicting the whale are not so very
surprising after all. Consider! Most of the scientific drawings have
been taken from the stranded fish; and these are about as correct as a
drawing of a wrecked ship, with broken back, would correctly represent
the noble animal itself in all its undashed pride of hull and spars.
Though elephants have stood for their full-lengths, the living Leviathan
has never yet fairly floated himself for his portrait. The living whale,
in his full majesty and significance, is only to be seen at sea in
unfathomable waters; and afloat the vast bulk of him is out of sight,
like a launched line-of-battle ship; and out of that element it is a
thing eternally impossible for mortal man to hoist him bodily into the
air, so as to preserve all his mighty swells and undulations. And, not
to speak of the highly presumable difference of contour between a young
sucking whale and a full-grown Platonian Leviathan; yet, even in the
case of one of those young sucking whales hoisted to a ship's deck, such
is then the outlandish, eel-like, limbered, varying shape of him, that
his precise expression the devil himself could not catch.

But it may be fancied, that from the naked skeleton of the stranded
whale, accurate hints may be derived touching his true form. Not at all.
For it is one of the more curious things about this Leviathan, that
his skeleton gives very little idea of his general shape. Though Jeremy
Bentham's skeleton, which hangs for candelabra in the library of one of
his executors, correctly conveys the idea of a burly-browed utilitarian
old gentleman, with all Jeremy's other leading personal characteristics;
yet nothing of this kind could be inferred from any leviathan's
articulated bones. In fact, as the great Hunter says, the mere skeleton
of the whale bears the same relation to the fully invested and padded
animal as the insect does to the chrysalis that so roundingly envelopes
it. This peculiarity is strikingly evinced in the head, as in some
part of this book will be incidentally shown. It is also very curiously
displayed in the side fin, the bones of which almost exactly answer to
the bones of the human hand, minus only the thumb. This fin has four
regular bone-fingers, the index, middle, ring, and little finger. But
all these are permanently lodged in their fleshy covering, as the human
fingers in an artificial covering. "However recklessly the whale may
sometimes serve us," said humorous Stubb one day, "he can never be truly
said to handle us without mittens."

For all these reasons, then, any way you may look at it, you must needs
conclude that the great Leviathan is that one creature in the world
which must remain unpainted to the last. True, one portrait may hit
the mark much nearer than another, but none can hit it with any very
considerable degree of exactness. So there is no earthly way of finding
out precisely what the whale really looks like. And the only mode in
which you can derive even a tolerable idea of his living contour, is
by going a whaling yourself; but by so doing, you run no small risk of
being eternally stove and sunk by him. Wherefore, it seems to me you had
best not be too fastidious in your curiosity touching this Leviathan.



CHAPTER 56. Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales, and the True
Pictures of Whaling Scenes.


In connexion with the monstrous pictures of whales, I am strongly
tempted here to enter upon those still more monstrous stories of
them which are to be found in certain books, both ancient and modern,
especially in Pliny, Purchas, Hackluyt, Harris, Cuvier, etc. But I pass
that matter by.

I know of only four published outlines of the great Sperm Whale;
Colnett's, Huggins's, Frederick Cuvier's, and Beale's. In the previous
chapter Colnett and Cuvier have been referred to. Huggins's is far
better than theirs; but, by great odds, Beale's is the best. All Beale's
drawings of this whale are good, excepting the middle figure in the
picture of three whales in various attitudes, capping his second
chapter. His frontispiece, boats attacking Sperm Whales, though no
doubt calculated to excite the civil scepticism of some parlor men, is
admirably correct and life-like in its general effect. Some of the Sperm
Whale drawings in J. Ross Browne are pretty correct in contour; but they
are wretchedly engraved. That is not his fault though.

Of the Right Whale, the best outline pictures are in Scoresby; but they
are drawn on too small a scale to convey a desirable impression. He has
but one picture of whaling scenes, and this is a sad deficiency, because
it is by such pictures only, when at all well done, that you can derive
anything like a truthful idea of the living whale as seen by his living
hunters.

But, taken for all in all, by far the finest, though in some details
not the most correct, presentations of whales and whaling scenes to
be anywhere found, are two large French engravings, well executed,
and taken from paintings by one Garnery. Respectively, they represent
attacks on the Sperm and Right Whale. In the first engraving a noble
Sperm Whale is depicted in full majesty of might, just risen beneath
the boat from the profundities of the ocean, and bearing high in the air
upon his back the terrific wreck of the stoven planks. The prow of
the boat is partially unbroken, and is drawn just balancing upon
the monster's spine; and standing in that prow, for that one single
incomputable flash of time, you behold an oarsman, half shrouded by the
incensed boiling spout of the whale, and in the act of leaping, as if
from a precipice. The action of the whole thing is wonderfully good and
true. The half-emptied line-tub floats on the whitened sea; the wooden
poles of the spilled harpoons obliquely bob in it; the heads of the
swimming crew are scattered about the whale in contrasting expressions
of affright; while in the black stormy distance the ship is bearing down
upon the scene. Serious fault might be found with the anatomical details
of this whale, but let that pass; since, for the life of me, I could not
draw so good a one.

In the second engraving, the boat is in the act of drawing alongside
the barnacled flank of a large running Right Whale, that rolls his black
weedy bulk in the sea like some mossy rock-slide from the Patagonian
cliffs. His jets are erect, full, and black like soot; so that from so
abounding a smoke in the chimney, you would think there must be a brave
supper cooking in the great bowels below. Sea fowls are pecking at the
small crabs, shell-fish, and other sea candies and maccaroni, which the
Right Whale sometimes carries on his pestilent back. And all the while
the thick-lipped leviathan is rushing through the deep, leaving tons of
tumultuous white curds in his wake, and causing the slight boat to rock
in the swells like a skiff caught nigh the paddle-wheels of an ocean
steamer. Thus, the foreground is all raging commotion; but behind, in
admirable artistic contrast, is the glassy level of a sea becalmed, the
drooping unstarched sails of the powerless ship, and the inert mass of
a dead whale, a conquered fortress, with the flag of capture lazily
hanging from the whale-pole inserted into his spout-hole.

Who Garnery the painter is, or was, I know not. But my life for it he
was either practically conversant with his subject, or else marvellously
tutored by some experienced whaleman. The French are the lads for
painting action. Go and gaze upon all the paintings of Europe, and
where will you find such a gallery of living and breathing commotion
on canvas, as in that triumphal hall at Versailles; where the beholder
fights his way, pell-mell, through the consecutive great battles of
France; where every sword seems a flash of the Northern Lights, and the
successive armed kings and Emperors dash by, like a charge of crowned
centaurs? Not wholly unworthy of a place in that gallery, are these sea
battle-pieces of Garnery.

The natural aptitude of the French for seizing the picturesqueness of
things seems to be peculiarly evinced in what paintings and engravings
they have of their whaling scenes. With not one tenth of England's
experience in the fishery, and not the thousandth part of that of the
Americans, they have nevertheless furnished both nations with the only
finished sketches at all capable of conveying the real spirit of
the whale hunt. For the most part, the English and American whale
draughtsmen seem entirely content with presenting the mechanical outline
of things, such as the vacant profile of the whale; which, so far as
picturesqueness of effect is concerned, is about tantamount to sketching
the profile of a pyramid. Even Scoresby, the justly renowned Right
whaleman, after giving us a stiff full length of the Greenland whale,
and three or four delicate miniatures of narwhales and porpoises, treats
us to a series of classical engravings of boat hooks, chopping knives,
and grapnels; and with the microscopic diligence of a Leuwenhoeck
submits to the inspection of a shivering world ninety-six fac-similes of
magnified Arctic snow crystals. I mean no disparagement to the excellent
voyager (I honour him for a veteran), but in so important a matter it
was certainly an oversight not to have procured for every crystal a
sworn affidavit taken before a Greenland Justice of the Peace.

In addition to those fine engravings from Garnery, there are two other
French engravings worthy of note, by some one who subscribes himself
"H. Durand." One of them, though not precisely adapted to our present
purpose, nevertheless deserves mention on other accounts. It is a quiet
noon-scene among the isles of the Pacific; a French whaler anchored,
inshore, in a calm, and lazily taking water on board; the loosened sails
of the ship, and the long leaves of the palms in the background, both
drooping together in the breezeless air. The effect is very fine, when
considered with reference to its presenting the hardy fishermen under
one of their few aspects of oriental repose. The other engraving is
quite a different affair: the ship hove-to upon the open sea, and in the
very heart of the Leviathanic life, with a Right Whale alongside; the
vessel (in the act of cutting-in) hove over to the monster as if to a
quay; and a boat, hurriedly pushing off from this scene of activity, is
about giving chase to whales in the distance. The harpoons and lances
lie levelled for use; three oarsmen are just setting the mast in its
hole; while from a sudden roll of the sea, the little craft stands
half-erect out of the water, like a rearing horse. From the ship, the
smoke of the torments of the boiling whale is going up like the smoke
over a village of smithies; and to windward, a black cloud, rising up
with earnest of squalls and rains, seems to quicken the activity of the
excited seamen.



CHAPTER 57. Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in
Stone; in Mountains; in Stars.


On Tower-hill, as you go down to the London docks, you may have seen a
crippled beggar (or KEDGER, as the sailors say) holding a painted board
before him, representing the tragic scene in which he lost his leg.
There are three whales and three boats; and one of the boats (presumed
to contain the missing leg in all its original integrity) is being
crunched by the jaws of the foremost whale. Any time these ten years,
they tell me, has that man held up that picture, and exhibited that
stump to an incredulous world. But the time of his justification has
now come. His three whales are as good whales as were ever published in
Wapping, at any rate; and his stump as unquestionable a stump as any you
will find in the western clearings. But, though for ever mounted on
that stump, never a stump-speech does the poor whaleman make; but, with
downcast eyes, stands ruefully contemplating his own amputation.

Throughout the Pacific, and also in Nantucket, and New Bedford, and
Sag Harbor, you will come across lively sketches of whales and
whaling-scenes, graven by the fishermen themselves on Sperm Whale-teeth,
or ladies' busks wrought out of the Right Whale-bone, and other
like skrimshander articles, as the whalemen call the numerous little
ingenious contrivances they elaborately carve out of the rough material,
in their hours of ocean leisure. Some of them have little boxes
of dentistical-looking implements, specially intended for the
skrimshandering business. But, in general, they toil with their
jack-knives alone; and, with that almost omnipotent tool of the sailor,
they will turn you out anything you please, in the way of a mariner's
fancy.

Long exile from Christendom and civilization inevitably restores a man
to that condition in which God placed him, i.e. what is called savagery.
Your true whale-hunter is as much a savage as an Iroquois. I myself am a
savage, owning no allegiance but to the King of the Cannibals; and ready
at any moment to rebel against him.

Now, one of the peculiar characteristics of the savage in his domestic
hours, is his wonderful patience of industry. An ancient Hawaiian
war-club or spear-paddle, in its full multiplicity and elaboration of
carving, is as great a trophy of human perseverance as a Latin lexicon.
For, with but a bit of broken sea-shell or a shark's tooth, that
miraculous intricacy of wooden net-work has been achieved; and it has
cost steady years of steady application.

As with the Hawaiian savage, so with the white sailor-savage. With the
same marvellous patience, and with the same single shark's tooth, of
his one poor jack-knife, he will carve you a bit of bone sculpture, not
quite as workmanlike, but as close packed in its maziness of design,
as the Greek savage, Achilles's shield; and full of barbaric spirit
and suggestiveness, as the prints of that fine old Dutch savage, Albert
Durer.

Wooden whales, or whales cut in profile out of the small dark slabs of
the noble South Sea war-wood, are frequently met with in the forecastles
of American whalers. Some of them are done with much accuracy.

At some old gable-roofed country houses you will see brass whales hung
by the tail for knockers to the road-side door. When the porter is
sleepy, the anvil-headed whale would be best. But these knocking
whales are seldom remarkable as faithful essays. On the spires of some
old-fashioned churches you will see sheet-iron whales placed there for
weather-cocks; but they are so elevated, and besides that are to all
intents and purposes so labelled with "HANDS OFF!" you cannot examine
them closely enough to decide upon their merit.

In bony, ribby regions of the earth, where at the base of high broken
cliffs masses of rock lie strewn in fantastic groupings upon the
plain, you will often discover images as of the petrified forms of the
Leviathan partly merged in grass, which of a windy day breaks against
them in a surf of green surges.

Then, again, in mountainous countries where the traveller is continually
girdled by amphitheatrical heights; here and there from some lucky
point of view you will catch passing glimpses of the profiles of
whales defined along the undulating ridges. But you must be a thorough
whaleman, to see these sights; and not only that, but if you wish
to return to such a sight again, you must be sure and take the exact
intersecting latitude and longitude of your first stand-point, else
so chance-like are such observations of the hills, that your precise,
previous stand-point would require a laborious re-discovery; like the
Soloma Islands, which still remain incognita, though once high-ruffed
Mendanna trod them and old Figuera chronicled them.

Nor when expandingly lifted by your subject, can you fail to trace out
great whales in the starry heavens, and boats in pursuit of them; as
when long filled with thoughts of war the Eastern nations saw armies
locked in battle among the clouds. Thus at the North have I chased
Leviathan round and round the Pole with the revolutions of the bright
points that first defined him to me. And beneath the effulgent Antarctic
skies I have boarded the Argo-Navis, and joined the chase against the
starry Cetus far beyond the utmost stretch of Hydrus and the Flying
Fish.

With a frigate's anchors for my bridle-bitts and fasces of harpoons for
spurs, would I could mount that whale and leap the topmost skies, to
see whether the fabled heavens with all their countless tents really lie
encamped beyond my mortal sight!



CHAPTER 58. Brit.


Steering north-eastward from the Crozetts, we fell in with vast meadows
of brit, the minute, yellow substance, upon which the Right Whale
largely feeds. For leagues and leagues it undulated round us, so that we
seemed to be sailing through boundless fields of ripe and golden wheat.

On the second day, numbers of Right Whales were seen, who, secure from
the attack of a Sperm Whaler like the Pequod, with open jaws sluggishly
swam through the brit, which, adhering to the fringing fibres of that
wondrous Venetian blind in their mouths, was in that manner separated
from the water that escaped at the lip.

As morning mowers, who side by side slowly and seethingly advance
their scythes through the long wet grass of marshy meads; even so these
monsters swam, making a strange, grassy, cutting sound; and leaving
behind them endless swaths of blue upon the yellow sea.*


*That part of the sea known among whalemen as the "Brazil Banks" does
not bear that name as the Banks of Newfoundland do, because of there
being shallows and soundings there, but because of this remarkable
meadow-like appearance, caused by the vast drifts of brit continually
floating in those latitudes, where the Right Whale is often chased.


But it was only the sound they made as they parted the brit which at all
reminded one of mowers. Seen from the mast-heads, especially when they
paused and were stationary for a while, their vast black forms looked
more like lifeless masses of rock than anything else. And as in the
great hunting countries of India, the stranger at a distance will
sometimes pass on the plains recumbent elephants without knowing them
to be such, taking them for bare, blackened elevations of the soil; even
so, often, with him, who for the first time beholds this species of the
leviathans of the sea. And even when recognised at last, their immense
magnitude renders it very hard really to believe that such bulky masses
of overgrowth can possibly be instinct, in all parts, with the same sort
of life that lives in a dog or a horse.

Indeed, in other respects, you can hardly regard any creatures of the
deep with the same feelings that you do those of the shore. For though
some old naturalists have maintained that all creatures of the land are
of their kind in the sea; and though taking a broad general view of
the thing, this may very well be; yet coming to specialties, where, for
example, does the ocean furnish any fish that in disposition answers to
the sagacious kindness of the dog? The accursed shark alone can in any
generic respect be said to bear comparative analogy to him.

But though, to landsmen in general, the native inhabitants of the
seas have ever been regarded with emotions unspeakably unsocial and
repelling; though we know the sea to be an everlasting terra incognita,
so that Columbus sailed over numberless unknown worlds to discover his
one superficial western one; though, by vast odds, the most terrific
of all mortal disasters have immemorially and indiscriminately befallen
tens and hundreds of thousands of those who have gone upon the waters;
though but a moment's consideration will teach, that however baby man
may brag of his science and skill, and however much, in a flattering
future, that science and skill may augment; yet for ever and for ever,
to the crack of doom, the sea will insult and murder him, and pulverize
the stateliest, stiffest frigate he can make; nevertheless, by the
continual repetition of these very impressions, man has lost that sense
of the full awfulness of the sea which aboriginally belongs to it.

The first boat we read of, floated on an ocean, that with Portuguese
vengeance had whelmed a whole world without leaving so much as a widow.
That same ocean rolls now; that same ocean destroyed the wrecked ships
of last year. Yea, foolish mortals, Noah's flood is not yet subsided;
two thirds of the fair world it yet covers.

Wherein differ the sea and the land, that a miracle upon one is not a
miracle upon the other? Preternatural terrors rested upon the Hebrews,
when under the feet of Korah and his company the live ground opened
and swallowed them up for ever; yet not a modern sun ever sets, but in
precisely the same manner the live sea swallows up ships and crews.

But not only is the sea such a foe to man who is an alien to it, but it
is also a fiend to its own off-spring; worse than the Persian host who
murdered his own guests; sparing not the creatures which itself hath
spawned. Like a savage tigress that tossing in the jungle overlays her
own cubs, so the sea dashes even the mightiest whales against the rocks,
and leaves them there side by side with the split wrecks of ships. No
mercy, no power but its own controls it. Panting and snorting like a mad
battle steed that has lost its rider, the masterless ocean overruns the
globe.

Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide
under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden
beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish
brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the
dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more,
the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each
other, carrying on eternal war since the world began.

Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile
earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a
strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean
surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular
Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the
half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst
never return!


CHAPTER 59. Squid.


Slowly wading through the meadows of brit, the Pequod still held on her
way north-eastward towards the island of Java; a gentle air impelling
her keel, so that in the surrounding serenity her three tall tapering
masts mildly waved to that languid breeze, as three mild palms on a
plain. And still, at wide intervals in the silvery night, the lonely,
alluring jet would be seen.

But one transparent blue morning, when a stillness almost preternatural
spread over the sea, however unattended with any stagnant calm; when
the long burnished sun-glade on the waters seemed a golden finger laid
across them, enjoining some secrecy; when the slippered waves whispered
together as they softly ran on; in this profound hush of the visible
sphere a strange spectre was seen by Daggoo from the main-mast-head.

In the distance, a great white mass lazily rose, and rising higher and
higher, and disentangling itself from the azure, at last gleamed before
our prow like a snow-slide, new slid from the hills. Thus glistening
for a moment, as slowly it subsided, and sank. Then once more arose,
and silently gleamed. It seemed not a whale; and yet is this Moby Dick?
thought Daggoo. Again the phantom went down, but on re-appearing once
more, with a stiletto-like cry that startled every man from his nod, the
negro yelled out--"There! there again! there she breaches! right ahead!
The White Whale, the White Whale!"

Upon this, the seamen rushed to the yard-arms, as in swarming-time the
bees rush to the boughs. Bare-headed in the sultry sun, Ahab stood on
the bowsprit, and with one hand pushed far behind in readiness to wave
his orders to the helmsman, cast his eager glance in the direction
indicated aloft by the outstretched motionless arm of Daggoo.

Whether the flitting attendance of the one still and solitary jet had
gradually worked upon Ahab, so that he was now prepared to connect the
ideas of mildness and repose with the first sight of the particular
whale he pursued; however this was, or whether his eagerness betrayed
him; whichever way it might have been, no sooner did he distinctly
perceive the white mass, than with a quick intensity he instantly gave
orders for lowering.

The four boats were soon on the water; Ahab's in advance, and all
swiftly pulling towards their prey. Soon it went down, and while, with
oars suspended, we were awaiting its reappearance, lo! in the same
spot where it sank, once more it slowly rose. Almost forgetting for
the moment all thoughts of Moby Dick, we now gazed at the most wondrous
phenomenon which the secret seas have hitherto revealed to mankind.
A vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length and breadth, of a glancing
cream-colour, lay floating on the water, innumerable long arms radiating
from its centre, and curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas, as
if blindly to clutch at any hapless object within reach. No perceptible
face or front did it have; no conceivable token of either sensation or
instinct; but undulated there on the billows, an unearthly, formless,
chance-like apparition of life.

As with a low sucking sound it slowly disappeared again, Starbuck still
gazing at the agitated waters where it had sunk, with a wild voice
exclaimed--"Almost rather had I seen Moby Dick and fought him, than to
have seen thee, thou white ghost!"

"What was it, Sir?" said Flask.

"The great live squid, which, they say, few whale-ships ever beheld, and
returned to their ports to tell of it."

But Ahab said nothing; turning his boat, he sailed back to the vessel;
the rest as silently following.

Whatever superstitions the sperm whalemen in general have connected with
the sight of this object, certain it is, that a glimpse of it being
so very unusual, that circumstance has gone far to invest it with
portentousness. So rarely is it beheld, that though one and all of them
declare it to be the largest animated thing in the ocean, yet very few
of them have any but the most vague ideas concerning its true nature and
form; notwithstanding, they believe it to furnish to the sperm whale
his only food. For though other species of whales find their food above
water, and may be seen by man in the act of feeding, the spermaceti
whale obtains his whole food in unknown zones below the surface; and
only by inference is it that any one can tell of what, precisely, that
food consists. At times, when closely pursued, he will disgorge what
are supposed to be the detached arms of the squid; some of them thus
exhibited exceeding twenty and thirty feet in length. They fancy that
the monster to which these arms belonged ordinarily clings by them to
the bed of the ocean; and that the sperm whale, unlike other species, is
supplied with teeth in order to attack and tear it.

There seems some ground to imagine that the great Kraken of Bishop
Pontoppodan may ultimately resolve itself into Squid. The manner in
which the Bishop describes it, as alternately rising and sinking, with
some other particulars he narrates, in all this the two correspond.
But much abatement is necessary with respect to the incredible bulk he
assigns it.

By some naturalists who have vaguely heard rumors of the mysterious
creature, here spoken of, it is included among the class of cuttle-fish,
to which, indeed, in certain external respects it would seem to belong,
but only as the Anak of the tribe.



CHAPTER 60. The Line.


With reference to the whaling scene shortly to be described, as well as
for the better understanding of all similar scenes elsewhere presented,
I have here to speak of the magical, sometimes horrible whale-line.

The line originally used in the fishery was of the best hemp, slightly
vapoured with tar, not impregnated with it, as in the case of ordinary
ropes; for while tar, as ordinarily used, makes the hemp more pliable to
the rope-maker, and also renders the rope itself more convenient to the
sailor for common ship use; yet, not only would the ordinary quantity
too much stiffen the whale-line for the close coiling to which it must
be subjected; but as most seamen are beginning to learn, tar in general
by no means adds to the rope's durability or strength, however much it
may give it compactness and gloss.

Of late years the Manilla rope has in the American fishery almost
entirely superseded hemp as a material for whale-lines; for, though not
so durable as hemp, it is stronger, and far more soft and elastic; and
I will add (since there is an aesthetics in all things), is much more
handsome and becoming to the boat, than hemp. Hemp is a dusky, dark
fellow, a sort of Indian; but Manilla is as a golden-haired Circassian
to behold.

The whale-line is only two-thirds of an inch in thickness. At first
sight, you would not think it so strong as it really is. By experiment
its one and fifty yarns will each suspend a weight of one hundred and
twenty pounds; so that the whole rope will bear a strain nearly equal
to three tons. In length, the common sperm whale-line measures something
over two hundred fathoms. Towards the stern of the boat it is spirally
coiled away in the tub, not like the worm-pipe of a still though, but so
as to form one round, cheese-shaped mass of densely bedded "sheaves," or
layers of concentric spiralizations, without any hollow but the "heart,"
or minute vertical tube formed at the axis of the cheese. As the least
tangle or kink in the coiling would, in running out, infallibly take
somebody's arm, leg, or entire body off, the utmost precaution is used
in stowing the line in its tub. Some harpooneers will consume almost an
entire morning in this business, carrying the line high aloft and then
reeving it downwards through a block towards the tub, so as in the act
of coiling to free it from all possible wrinkles and twists.

In the English boats two tubs are used instead of one; the same line
being continuously coiled in both tubs. There is some advantage in this;
because these twin-tubs being so small they fit more readily into the
boat, and do not strain it so much; whereas, the American tub, nearly
three feet in diameter and of proportionate depth, makes a rather bulky
freight for a craft whose planks are but one half-inch in thickness; for
the bottom of the whale-boat is like critical ice, which will bear up
a considerable distributed weight, but not very much of a concentrated
one. When the painted canvas cover is clapped on the American line-tub,
the boat looks as if it were pulling off with a prodigious great
wedding-cake to present to the whales.

Both ends of the line are exposed; the lower end terminating in an
eye-splice or loop coming up from the bottom against the side of the
tub, and hanging over its edge completely disengaged from everything.
This arrangement of the lower end is necessary on two accounts. First:
In order to facilitate the fastening to it of an additional line from a
neighboring boat, in case the stricken whale should sound so deep as
to threaten to carry off the entire line originally attached to the
harpoon. In these instances, the whale of course is shifted like a mug
of ale, as it were, from the one boat to the other; though the
first boat always hovers at hand to assist its consort. Second: This
arrangement is indispensable for common safety's sake; for were the
lower end of the line in any way attached to the boat, and were the
whale then to run the line out to the end almost in a single, smoking
minute as he sometimes does, he would not stop there, for the doomed
boat would infallibly be dragged down after him into the profundity of
the sea; and in that case no town-crier would ever find her again.

Before lowering the boat for the chase, the upper end of the line is
taken aft from the tub, and passing round the loggerhead there, is again
carried forward the entire length of the boat, resting crosswise upon
the loom or handle of every man's oar, so that it jogs against his wrist
in rowing; and also passing between the men, as they alternately sit at
the opposite gunwales, to the leaded chocks or grooves in the extreme
pointed prow of the boat, where a wooden pin or skewer the size of a
common quill, prevents it from slipping out. From the chocks it hangs
in a slight festoon over the bows, and is then passed inside the boat
again; and some ten or twenty fathoms (called box-line) being coiled
upon the box in the bows, it continues its way to the gunwale still a
little further aft, and is then attached to the short-warp--the rope
which is immediately connected with the harpoon; but previous to that
connexion, the short-warp goes through sundry mystifications too tedious
to detail.

Thus the whale-line folds the whole boat in its complicated coils,
twisting and writhing around it in almost every direction. All the
oarsmen are involved in its perilous contortions; so that to the timid
eye of the landsman, they seem as Indian jugglers, with the deadliest
snakes sportively festooning their limbs. Nor can any son of mortal
woman, for the first time, seat himself amid those hempen intricacies,
and while straining his utmost at the oar, bethink him that at any
unknown instant the harpoon may be darted, and all these horrible
contortions be put in play like ringed lightnings; he cannot be thus
circumstanced without a shudder that makes the very marrow in his bones
to quiver in him like a shaken jelly. Yet habit--strange thing! what
cannot habit accomplish?--Gayer sallies, more merry mirth, better jokes,
and brighter repartees, you never heard over your mahogany, than you
will hear over the half-inch white cedar of the whale-boat, when thus
hung in hangman's nooses; and, like the six burghers of Calais before
King Edward, the six men composing the crew pull into the jaws of death,
with a halter around every neck, as you may say.

Perhaps a very little thought will now enable you to account for
those repeated whaling disasters--some few of which are casually
chronicled--of this man or that man being taken out of the boat by the
line, and lost. For, when the line is darting out, to be seated then in
the boat, is like being seated in the midst of the manifold whizzings
of a steam-engine in full play, when every flying beam, and shaft, and
wheel, is grazing you. It is worse; for you cannot sit motionless in the
heart of these perils, because the boat is rocking like a cradle, and
you are pitched one way and the other, without the slightest warning;
and only by a certain self-adjusting buoyancy and simultaneousness of
volition and action, can you escape being made a Mazeppa of, and run
away with where the all-seeing sun himself could never pierce you out.

Again: as the profound calm which only apparently precedes and
prophesies of the storm, is perhaps more awful than the storm itself;
for, indeed, the calm is but the wrapper and envelope of the storm; and
contains it in itself, as the seemingly harmless rifle holds the fatal
powder, and the ball, and the explosion; so the graceful repose of the
line, as it silently serpentines about the oarsmen before being brought
into actual play--this is a thing which carries more of true terror than
any other aspect of this dangerous affair. But why say more? All men
live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their
necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death,
that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life.
And if you be a philosopher, though seated in the whale-boat, you would
not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though seated before
your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side.



CHAPTER 61. Stubb Kills a Whale.


If to Starbuck the apparition of the Squid was a thing of portents, to
Queequeg it was quite a different object.

"When you see him 'quid," said the savage, honing his harpoon in the bow
of his hoisted boat, "then you quick see him 'parm whale."

The next day was exceedingly still and sultry, and with nothing special
to engage them, the Pequod's crew could hardly resist the spell of sleep
induced by such a vacant sea. For this part of the Indian Ocean through
which we then were voyaging is not what whalemen call a lively ground;
that is, it affords fewer glimpses of porpoises, dolphins, flying-fish,
and other vivacious denizens of more stirring waters, than those off the
Rio de la Plata, or the in-shore ground off Peru.

It was my turn to stand at the foremast-head; and with my shoulders
leaning against the slackened royal shrouds, to and fro I idly swayed in
what seemed an enchanted air. No resolution could withstand it; in that
dreamy mood losing all consciousness, at last my soul went out of my
body; though my body still continued to sway as a pendulum will, long
after the power which first moved it is withdrawn.

Ere forgetfulness altogether came over me, I had noticed that the seamen
at the main and mizzen-mast-heads were already drowsy. So that at last
all three of us lifelessly swung from the spars, and for every swing
that we made there was a nod from below from the slumbering helmsman.
The waves, too, nodded their indolent crests; and across the wide trance
of the sea, east nodded to west, and the sun over all.

Suddenly bubbles seemed bursting beneath my closed eyes; like vices my
hands grasped the shrouds; some invisible, gracious agency preserved me;
with a shock I came back to life. And lo! close under our lee, not forty
fathoms off, a gigantic Sperm Whale lay rolling in the water like the
capsized hull of a frigate, his broad, glossy back, of an Ethiopian hue,
glistening in the sun's rays like a mirror. But lazily undulating in
the trough of the sea, and ever and anon tranquilly spouting his vapoury
jet, the whale looked like a portly burgher smoking his pipe of a warm
afternoon. But that pipe, poor whale, was thy last. As if struck by some
enchanter's wand, the sleepy ship and every sleeper in it all at once
started into wakefulness; and more than a score of voices from all parts
of the vessel, simultaneously with the three notes from aloft, shouted
forth the accustomed cry, as the great fish slowly and regularly spouted
the sparkling brine into the air.

"Clear away the boats! Luff!" cried Ahab. And obeying his own order, he
dashed the helm down before the helmsman could handle the spokes.

The sudden exclamations of the crew must have alarmed the whale; and ere
the boats were down, majestically turning, he swam away to the leeward,
but with such a steady tranquillity, and making so few ripples as he
swam, that thinking after all he might not as yet be alarmed, Ahab gave
orders that not an oar should be used, and no man must speak but in
whispers. So seated like Ontario Indians on the gunwales of the boats,
we swiftly but silently paddled along; the calm not admitting of the
noiseless sails being set. Presently, as we thus glided in chase, the
monster perpendicularly flitted his tail forty feet into the air, and
then sank out of sight like a tower swallowed up.

"There go flukes!" was the cry, an announcement immediately followed by
Stubb's producing his match and igniting his pipe, for now a respite was
granted. After the full interval of his sounding had elapsed, the whale
rose again, and being now in advance of the smoker's boat, and much
nearer to it than to any of the others, Stubb counted upon the honour
of the capture. It was obvious, now, that the whale had at length become
aware of his pursuers. All silence of cautiousness was therefore no
longer of use. Paddles were dropped, and oars came loudly into play. And
still puffing at his pipe, Stubb cheered on his crew to the assault.

Yes, a mighty change had come over the fish. All alive to his jeopardy,
he was going "head out"; that part obliquely projecting from the mad
yeast which he brewed.*


*It will be seen in some other place of what a very light substance
the entire interior of the sperm whale's enormous head consists. Though
apparently the most massive, it is by far the most buoyant part about
him. So that with ease he elevates it in the air, and invariably does
so when going at his utmost speed. Besides, such is the breadth of the
upper part of the front of his head, and such the tapering cut-water
formation of the lower part, that by obliquely elevating his head, he
thereby may be said to transform himself from a bluff-bowed sluggish
galliot into a sharppointed New York pilot-boat.


"Start her, start her, my men! Don't hurry yourselves; take plenty of
time--but start her; start her like thunder-claps, that's all," cried
Stubb, spluttering out the smoke as he spoke. "Start her, now; give 'em
the long and strong stroke, Tashtego. Start her, Tash, my boy--start
her, all; but keep cool, keep cool--cucumbers is the word--easy,
easy--only start her like grim death and grinning devils, and raise the
buried dead perpendicular out of their graves, boys--that's all. Start
her!"

"Woo-hoo! Wa-hee!" screamed the Gay-Header in reply, raising some
old war-whoop to the skies; as every oarsman in the strained boat
involuntarily bounced forward with the one tremendous leading stroke
which the eager Indian gave.

But his wild screams were answered by others quite as wild. "Kee-hee!
Kee-hee!" yelled Daggoo, straining forwards and backwards on his seat,
like a pacing tiger in his cage.

"Ka-la! Koo-loo!" howled Queequeg, as if smacking his lips over a
mouthful of Grenadier's steak. And thus with oars and yells the keels
cut the sea. Meanwhile, Stubb retaining his place in the van, still
encouraged his men to the onset, all the while puffing the smoke from
his mouth. Like desperadoes they tugged and they strained, till the
welcome cry was heard--"Stand up, Tashtego!--give it to him!" The
harpoon was hurled. "Stern all!" The oarsmen backed water; the same
moment something went hot and hissing along every one of their wrists.
It was the magical line. An instant before, Stubb had swiftly caught two
additional turns with it round the loggerhead, whence, by reason of its
increased rapid circlings, a hempen blue smoke now jetted up and mingled
with the steady fumes from his pipe. As the line passed round and
round the loggerhead; so also, just before reaching that point, it
blisteringly passed through and through both of Stubb's hands, from
which the hand-cloths, or squares of quilted canvas sometimes worn at
these times, had accidentally dropped. It was like holding an enemy's
sharp two-edged sword by the blade, and that enemy all the time striving
to wrest it out of your clutch.

"Wet the line! wet the line!" cried Stubb to the tub oarsman (him seated
by the tub) who, snatching off his hat, dashed sea-water into it.* More
turns were taken, so that the line began holding its place. The boat now
flew through the boiling water like a shark all fins. Stubb and Tashtego
here changed places--stem for stern--a staggering business truly in that
rocking commotion.


*Partly to show the indispensableness of this act, it may here be
stated, that, in the old Dutch fishery, a mop was used to dash the
running line with water; in many other ships, a wooden piggin, or
bailer, is set apart for that purpose. Your hat, however, is the most
convenient.


From the vibrating line extending the entire length of the upper part of
the boat, and from its now being more tight than a harpstring, you would
have thought the craft had two keels--one cleaving the water, the other
the air--as the boat churned on through both opposing elements at once.
A continual cascade played at the bows; a ceaseless whirling eddy in
her wake; and, at the slightest motion from within, even but of a little
finger, the vibrating, cracking craft canted over her spasmodic gunwale
into the sea. Thus they rushed; each man with might and main clinging
to his seat, to prevent being tossed to the foam; and the tall form of
Tashtego at the steering oar crouching almost double, in order to bring
down his centre of gravity. Whole Atlantics and Pacifics seemed passed
as they shot on their way, till at length the whale somewhat slackened
his flight.

"Haul in--haul in!" cried Stubb to the bowsman! and, facing round
towards the whale, all hands began pulling the boat up to him, while yet
the boat was being towed on. Soon ranging up by his flank, Stubb, firmly
planting his knee in the clumsy cleat, darted dart after dart into the
flying fish; at the word of command, the boat alternately sterning
out of the way of the whale's horrible wallow, and then ranging up for
another fling.

The red tide now poured from all sides of the monster like brooks down a
hill. His tormented body rolled not in brine but in blood, which bubbled
and seethed for furlongs behind in their wake. The slanting sun playing
upon this crimson pond in the sea, sent back its reflection into every
face, so that they all glowed to each other like red men. And all
the while, jet after jet of white smoke was agonizingly shot from the
spiracle of the whale, and vehement puff after puff from the mouth of
the excited headsman; as at every dart, hauling in upon his crooked
lance (by the line attached to it), Stubb straightened it again and
again, by a few rapid blows against the gunwale, then again and again
sent it into the whale.

"Pull up--pull up!" he now cried to the bowsman, as the waning whale
relaxed in his wrath. "Pull up!--close to!" and the boat ranged along
the fish's flank. When reaching far over the bow, Stubb slowly churned
his long sharp lance into the fish, and kept it there, carefully
churning and churning, as if cautiously seeking to feel after some gold
watch that the whale might have swallowed, and which he was fearful of
breaking ere he could hook it out. But that gold watch he sought was the
innermost life of the fish. And now it is struck; for, starting from
his trance into that unspeakable thing called his "flurry," the monster
horribly wallowed in his blood, overwrapped himself in impenetrable,
mad, boiling spray, so that the imperilled craft, instantly dropping
astern, had much ado blindly to struggle out from that phrensied
twilight into the clear air of the day.

And now abating in his flurry, the whale once more rolled out into view;
surging from side to side; spasmodically dilating and contracting his
spout-hole, with sharp, cracking, agonized respirations. At last, gush
after gush of clotted red gore, as if it had been the purple lees of red
wine, shot into the frighted air; and falling back again, ran dripping
down his motionless flanks into the sea. His heart had burst!

"He's dead, Mr. Stubb," said Daggoo.

"Yes; both pipes smoked out!" and withdrawing his own from his mouth,
Stubb scattered the dead ashes over the water; and, for a moment, stood
thoughtfully eyeing the vast corpse he had made.



CHAPTER 62. The Dart.


A word concerning an incident in the last chapter.

According to the invariable usage of the fishery, the whale-boat pushes
off from the ship, with the headsman or whale-killer as temporary
steersman, and the harpooneer or whale-fastener pulling the foremost
oar, the one known as the harpooneer-oar. Now it needs a strong, nervous
arm to strike the first iron into the fish; for often, in what is called
a long dart, the heavy implement has to be flung to the distance of
twenty or thirty feet. But however prolonged and exhausting the chase,
the harpooneer is expected to pull his oar meanwhile to the uttermost;
indeed, he is expected to set an example of superhuman activity to the
rest, not only by incredible rowing, but by repeated loud and intrepid
exclamations; and what it is to keep shouting at the top of one's
compass, while all the other muscles are strained and half started--what
that is none know but those who have tried it. For one, I cannot bawl
very heartily and work very recklessly at one and the same time. In this
straining, bawling state, then, with his back to the fish, all at once
the exhausted harpooneer hears the exciting cry--"Stand up, and give it
to him!" He now has to drop and secure his oar, turn round on his
centre half way, seize his harpoon from the crotch, and with what little
strength may remain, he essays to pitch it somehow into the whale. No
wonder, taking the whole fleet of whalemen in a body, that out of fifty
fair chances for a dart, not five are successful; no wonder that so many
hapless harpooneers are madly cursed and disrated; no wonder that some
of them actually burst their blood-vessels in the boat; no wonder that
some sperm whalemen are absent four years with four barrels; no wonder
that to many ship owners, whaling is but a losing concern; for it is the
harpooneer that makes the voyage, and if you take the breath out of his
body how can you expect to find it there when most wanted!

Again, if the dart be successful, then at the second critical instant,
that is, when the whale starts to run, the boatheader and harpooneer
likewise start to running fore and aft, to the imminent jeopardy of
themselves and every one else. It is then they change places; and
the headsman, the chief officer of the little craft, takes his proper
station in the bows of the boat.

Now, I care not who maintains the contrary, but all this is both foolish
and unnecessary. The headsman should stay in the bows from first to
last; he should both dart the harpoon and the lance, and no rowing
whatever should be expected of him, except under circumstances obvious
to any fisherman. I know that this would sometimes involve a slight loss
of speed in the chase; but long experience in various whalemen of more
than one nation has convinced me that in the vast majority of failures
in the fishery, it has not by any means been so much the speed of the
whale as the before described exhaustion of the harpooneer that has
caused them.

To insure the greatest efficiency in the dart, the harpooneers of this
world must start to their feet from out of idleness, and not from out of
toil.



CHAPTER 63. The Crotch.


Out of the trunk, the branches grow; out of them, the twigs. So, in
productive subjects, grow the chapters.

The crotch alluded to on a previous page deserves independent mention.
It is a notched stick of a peculiar form, some two feet in length, which
is perpendicularly inserted into the starboard gunwale near the bow,
for the purpose of furnishing a rest for the wooden extremity of the
harpoon, whose other naked, barbed end slopingly projects from the prow.
Thereby the weapon is instantly at hand to its hurler, who snatches it
up as readily from its rest as a backwoodsman swings his rifle from
the wall. It is customary to have two harpoons reposing in the crotch,
respectively called the first and second irons.

But these two harpoons, each by its own cord, are both connected with
the line; the object being this: to dart them both, if possible, one
instantly after the other into the same whale; so that if, in the coming
drag, one should draw out, the other may still retain a hold. It is a
doubling of the chances. But it very often happens that owing to the
instantaneous, violent, convulsive running of the whale upon receiving
the first iron, it becomes impossible for the harpooneer, however
lightning-like in his movements, to pitch the second iron into him.
Nevertheless, as the second iron is already connected with the line,
and the line is running, hence that weapon must, at all events, be
anticipatingly tossed out of the boat, somehow and somewhere; else the
most terrible jeopardy would involve all hands. Tumbled into the water,
it accordingly is in such cases; the spare coils of box line (mentioned
in a preceding chapter) making this feat, in most instances, prudently
practicable. But this critical act is not always unattended with the
saddest and most fatal casualties.

Furthermore: you must know that when the second iron is thrown
overboard, it thenceforth becomes a dangling, sharp-edged terror,
skittishly curvetting about both boat and whale, entangling the lines,
or cutting them, and making a prodigious sensation in all directions.
Nor, in general, is it possible to secure it again until the whale is
fairly captured and a corpse.

Consider, now, how it must be in the case of four boats all engaging
one unusually strong, active, and knowing whale; when owing to these
qualities in him, as well as to the thousand concurring accidents of
such an audacious enterprise, eight or ten loose second irons may be
simultaneously dangling about him. For, of course, each boat is supplied
with several harpoons to bend on to the line should the first one
be ineffectually darted without recovery. All these particulars are
faithfully narrated here, as they will not fail to elucidate several
most important, however intricate passages, in scenes hereafter to be
painted.



CHAPTER 64. Stubb's Supper.


Stubb's whale had been killed some distance from the ship. It was
a calm; so, forming a tandem of three boats, we commenced the slow
business of towing the trophy to the Pequod. And now, as we eighteen men
with our thirty-six arms, and one hundred and eighty thumbs and fingers,
slowly toiled hour after hour upon that inert, sluggish corpse in the
sea; and it seemed hardly to budge at all, except at long intervals;
good evidence was hereby furnished of the enormousness of the mass we
moved. For, upon the great canal of Hang-Ho, or whatever they call
it, in China, four or five laborers on the foot-path will draw a bulky
freighted junk at the rate of a mile an hour; but this grand argosy we
towed heavily forged along, as if laden with pig-lead in bulk.

Darkness came on; but three lights up and down in the Pequod's
main-rigging dimly guided our way; till drawing nearer we saw Ahab
dropping one of several more lanterns over the bulwarks. Vacantly eyeing
the heaving whale for a moment, he issued the usual orders for securing
it for the night, and then handing his lantern to a seaman, went his way
into the cabin, and did not come forward again until morning.

Though, in overseeing the pursuit of this whale, Captain Ahab had
evinced his customary activity, to call it so; yet now that the creature
was dead, some vague dissatisfaction, or impatience, or despair, seemed
working in him; as if the sight of that dead body reminded him that
Moby Dick was yet to be slain; and though a thousand other whales were
brought to his ship, all that would not one jot advance his grand,
monomaniac object. Very soon you would have thought from the sound on
the Pequod's decks, that all hands were preparing to cast anchor in
the deep; for heavy chains are being dragged along the deck, and thrust
rattling out of the port-holes. But by those clanking links, the vast
corpse itself, not the ship, is to be moored. Tied by the head to the
stern, and by the tail to the bows, the whale now lies with its black
hull close to the vessel's and seen through the darkness of the night,
which obscured the spars and rigging aloft, the two--ship and whale,
seemed yoked together like colossal bullocks, whereof one reclines while
the other remains standing.*


*A little item may as well be related here. The strongest and most
reliable hold which the ship has upon the whale when moored alongside,
is by the flukes or tail; and as from its greater density that part
is relatively heavier than any other (excepting the side-fins), its
flexibility even in death, causes it to sink low beneath the surface; so
that with the hand you cannot get at it from the boat, in order to
put the chain round it. But this difficulty is ingeniously overcome: a
small, strong line is prepared with a wooden float at its outer end, and
a weight in its middle, while the other end is secured to the ship. By
adroit management the wooden float is made to rise on the other side
of the mass, so that now having girdled the whale, the chain is readily
made to follow suit; and being slipped along the body, is at last locked
fast round the smallest part of the tail, at the point of junction with
its broad flukes or lobes.


If moody Ahab was now all quiescence, at least so far as could be known
on deck, Stubb, his second mate, flushed with conquest, betrayed an
unusual but still good-natured excitement. Such an unwonted bustle was
he in that the staid Starbuck, his official superior, quietly resigned
to him for the time the sole management of affairs. One small, helping
cause of all this liveliness in Stubb, was soon made strangely manifest.
Stubb was a high liver; he was somewhat intemperately fond of the whale
as a flavorish thing to his palate.

"A steak, a steak, ere I sleep! You, Daggoo! overboard you go, and cut
me one from his small!"

Here be it known, that though these wild fishermen do not, as a general
thing, and according to the great military maxim, make the enemy defray
the current expenses of the war (at least before realizing the proceeds
of the voyage), yet now and then you find some of these Nantucketers
who have a genuine relish for that particular part of the Sperm Whale
designated by Stubb; comprising the tapering extremity of the body.

About midnight that steak was cut and cooked; and lighted by two
lanterns of sperm oil, Stubb stoutly stood up to his spermaceti supper
at the capstan-head, as if that capstan were a sideboard. Nor was Stubb
the only banqueter on whale's flesh that night. Mingling their mumblings
with his own mastications, thousands on thousands of sharks, swarming
round the dead leviathan, smackingly feasted on its fatness. The few
sleepers below in their bunks were often startled by the sharp slapping
of their tails against the hull, within a few inches of the sleepers'
hearts. Peering over the side you could just see them (as before you
heard them) wallowing in the sullen, black waters, and turning over on
their backs as they scooped out huge globular pieces of the whale of the
bigness of a human head. This particular feat of the shark seems all
but miraculous. How at such an apparently unassailable surface, they
contrive to gouge out such symmetrical mouthfuls, remains a part of the
universal problem of all things. The mark they thus leave on the whale,
may best be likened to the hollow made by a carpenter in countersinking
for a screw.

Though amid all the smoking horror and diabolism of a sea-fight, sharks
will be seen longingly gazing up to the ship's decks, like hungry dogs
round a table where red meat is being carved, ready to bolt down
every killed man that is tossed to them; and though, while the valiant
butchers over the deck-table are thus cannibally carving each other's
live meat with carving-knives all gilded and tasselled, the sharks,
also, with their jewel-hilted mouths, are quarrelsomely carving away
under the table at the dead meat; and though, were you to turn the whole
affair upside down, it would still be pretty much the same thing, that
is to say, a shocking sharkish business enough for all parties; and
though sharks also are the invariable outriders of all slave ships
crossing the Atlantic, systematically trotting alongside, to be handy in
case a parcel is to be carried anywhere, or a dead slave to be decently
buried; and though one or two other like instances might be set down,
touching the set terms, places, and occasions, when sharks do most
socially congregate, and most hilariously feast; yet is there no
conceivable time or occasion when you will find them in such countless
numbers, and in gayer or more jovial spirits, than around a dead sperm
whale, moored by night to a whaleship at sea. If you have never
seen that sight, then suspend your decision about the propriety of
devil-worship, and the expediency of conciliating the devil.

But, as yet, Stubb heeded not the mumblings of the banquet that was
going on so nigh him, no more than the sharks heeded the smacking of his
own epicurean lips.

"Cook, cook!--where's that old Fleece?" he cried at length, widening
his legs still further, as if to form a more secure base for his supper;
and, at the same time darting his fork into the dish, as if stabbing
with his lance; "cook, you cook!--sail this way, cook!"

The old black, not in any very high glee at having been previously
roused from his warm hammock at a most unseasonable hour, came shambling
along from his galley, for, like many old blacks, there was something
the matter with his knee-pans, which he did not keep well scoured like
his other pans; this old Fleece, as they called him, came shuffling and
limping along, assisting his step with his tongs, which, after a clumsy
fashion, were made of straightened iron hoops; this old Ebony floundered
along, and in obedience to the word of command, came to a dead stop on
the opposite side of Stubb's sideboard; when, with both hands folded
before him, and resting on his two-legged cane, he bowed his arched back
still further over, at the same time sideways inclining his head, so as
to bring his best ear into play.

"Cook," said Stubb, rapidly lifting a rather reddish morsel to his
mouth, "don't you think this steak is rather overdone? You've been
beating this steak too much, cook; it's too tender. Don't I always say
that to be good, a whale-steak must be tough? There are those sharks
now over the side, don't you see they prefer it tough and rare? What a
shindy they are kicking up! Cook, go and talk to 'em; tell 'em they are
welcome to help themselves civilly, and in moderation, but they must
keep quiet. Blast me, if I can hear my own voice. Away, cook, and
deliver my message. Here, take this lantern," snatching one from his
sideboard; "now then, go and preach to 'em!"

Sullenly taking the offered lantern, old Fleece limped across the deck
to the bulwarks; and then, with one hand dropping his light low over the
sea, so as to get a good view of his congregation, with the other hand
he solemnly flourished his tongs, and leaning far over the side in a
mumbling voice began addressing the sharks, while Stubb, softly crawling
behind, overheard all that was said.

"Fellow-critters: I'se ordered here to say dat you must stop dat dam
noise dare. You hear? Stop dat dam smackin' ob de lips! Massa Stubb say
dat you can fill your dam bellies up to de hatchings, but by Gor! you
must stop dat dam racket!"

"Cook," here interposed Stubb, accompanying the word with a sudden slap
on the shoulder,--"Cook! why, damn your eyes, you mustn't swear that way
when you're preaching. That's no way to convert sinners, cook!"

"Who dat? Den preach to him yourself," sullenly turning to go.

"No, cook; go on, go on."

"Well, den, Belubed fellow-critters:"--

"Right!" exclaimed Stubb, approvingly, "coax 'em to it; try that," and
Fleece continued.

"Do you is all sharks, and by natur wery woracious, yet I zay to you,
fellow-critters, dat dat woraciousness--'top dat dam slappin' ob de
tail! How you tink to hear, spose you keep up such a dam slappin' and
bitin' dare?"

"Cook," cried Stubb, collaring him, "I won't have that swearing. Talk to
'em gentlemanly."

Once more the sermon proceeded.

"Your woraciousness, fellow-critters, I don't blame ye so much for; dat
is natur, and can't be helped; but to gobern dat wicked natur, dat is de
pint. You is sharks, sartin; but if you gobern de shark in you, why den
you be angel; for all angel is not'ing more dan de shark well goberned.
Now, look here, bred'ren, just try wonst to be cibil, a helping
yourselbs from dat whale. Don't be tearin' de blubber out your
neighbour's mout, I say. Is not one shark dood right as toder to dat
whale? And, by Gor, none on you has de right to dat whale; dat whale
belong to some one else. I know some o' you has berry brig mout, brigger
dan oders; but den de brig mouts sometimes has de small bellies; so dat
de brigness of de mout is not to swaller wid, but to bit off de blubber
for de small fry ob sharks, dat can't get into de scrouge to help
demselves."

"Well done, old Fleece!" cried Stubb, "that's Christianity; go on."

"No use goin' on; de dam willains will keep a scougin' and slappin' each
oder, Massa Stubb; dey don't hear one word; no use a-preaching to
such dam g'uttons as you call 'em, till dare bellies is full, and dare
bellies is bottomless; and when dey do get 'em full, dey wont hear you
den; for den dey sink in the sea, go fast to sleep on de coral, and
can't hear noting at all, no more, for eber and eber."

"Upon my soul, I am about of the same opinion; so give the benediction,
Fleece, and I'll away to my supper."

Upon this, Fleece, holding both hands over the fishy mob, raised his
shrill voice, and cried--

"Cussed fellow-critters! Kick up de damndest row as ever you can; fill
your dam bellies 'till dey bust--and den die."

"Now, cook," said Stubb, resuming his supper at the capstan; "stand
just where you stood before, there, over against me, and pay particular
attention."

"All 'dention," said Fleece, again stooping over upon his tongs in the
desired position.

"Well," said Stubb, helping himself freely meanwhile; "I shall now go
back to the subject of this steak. In the first place, how old are you,
cook?"

"What dat do wid de 'teak," said the old black, testily.

"Silence! How old are you, cook?"

"'Bout ninety, dey say," he gloomily muttered.

"And you have lived in this world hard upon one hundred years, cook,
and don't know yet how to cook a whale-steak?" rapidly bolting another
mouthful at the last word, so that morsel seemed a continuation of the
question. "Where were you born, cook?"

"'Hind de hatchway, in ferry-boat, goin' ober de Roanoke."

"Born in a ferry-boat! That's queer, too. But I want to know what
country you were born in, cook!"

"Didn't I say de Roanoke country?" he cried sharply.

"No, you didn't, cook; but I'll tell you what I'm coming to, cook.
You must go home and be born over again; you don't know how to cook a
whale-steak yet."

"Bress my soul, if I cook noder one," he growled, angrily, turning round
to depart.

"Come back here, cook;--here, hand me those tongs;--now take that bit of
steak there, and tell me if you think that steak cooked as it should be?
Take it, I say"--holding the tongs towards him--"take it, and taste it."

Faintly smacking his withered lips over it for a moment, the old negro
muttered, "Best cooked 'teak I eber taste; joosy, berry joosy."

"Cook," said Stubb, squaring himself once more; "do you belong to the
church?"

"Passed one once in Cape-Down," said the old man sullenly.

"And you have once in your life passed a holy church in Cape-Town, where
you doubtless overheard a holy parson addressing his hearers as his
beloved fellow-creatures, have you, cook! And yet you come here, and
tell me such a dreadful lie as you did just now, eh?" said Stubb. "Where
do you expect to go to, cook?"

"Go to bed berry soon," he mumbled, half-turning as he spoke.

"Avast! heave to! I mean when you die, cook. It's an awful question. Now
what's your answer?"

"When dis old brack man dies," said the negro slowly, changing his whole
air and demeanor, "he hisself won't go nowhere; but some bressed angel
will come and fetch him."

"Fetch him? How? In a coach and four, as they fetched Elijah? And fetch
him where?"

"Up dere," said Fleece, holding his tongs straight over his head, and
keeping it there very solemnly.

"So, then, you expect to go up into our main-top, do you, cook, when you
are dead? But don't you know the higher you climb, the colder it gets?
Main-top, eh?"

"Didn't say dat t'all," said Fleece, again in the sulks.

"You said up there, didn't you? and now look yourself, and see where
your tongs are pointing. But, perhaps you expect to get into heaven by
crawling through the lubber's hole, cook; but, no, no, cook, you don't
get there, except you go the regular way, round by the rigging. It's a
ticklish business, but must be done, or else it's no go. But none of
us are in heaven yet. Drop your tongs, cook, and hear my orders. Do ye
hear? Hold your hat in one hand, and clap t'other a'top of your heart,
when I'm giving my orders, cook. What! that your heart, there?--that's
your gizzard! Aloft! aloft!--that's it--now you have it. Hold it there
now, and pay attention."

"All 'dention," said the old black, with both hands placed as desired,
vainly wriggling his grizzled head, as if to get both ears in front at
one and the same time.

"Well then, cook, you see this whale-steak of yours was so very bad,
that I have put it out of sight as soon as possible; you see that, don't
you? Well, for the future, when you cook another whale-steak for my
private table here, the capstan, I'll tell you what to do so as not to
spoil it by overdoing. Hold the steak in one hand, and show a live coal
to it with the other; that done, dish it; d'ye hear? And now to-morrow,
cook, when we are cutting in the fish, be sure you stand by to get
the tips of his fins; have them put in pickle. As for the ends of the
flukes, have them soused, cook. There, now ye may go."

But Fleece had hardly got three paces off, when he was recalled.

"Cook, give me cutlets for supper to-morrow night in the mid-watch.
D'ye hear? away you sail, then.--Halloa! stop! make a bow before you
go.--Avast heaving again! Whale-balls for breakfast--don't forget."

"Wish, by gor! whale eat him, 'stead of him eat whale. I'm bressed if
he ain't more of shark dan Massa Shark hisself," muttered the old man,
limping away; with which sage ejaculation he went to his hammock.



CHAPTER 65. The Whale as a Dish.


That mortal man should feed upon the creature that feeds his lamp, and,
like Stubb, eat him by his own light, as you may say; this seems so
outlandish a thing that one must needs go a little into the history and
philosophy of it.

It is upon record, that three centuries ago the tongue of the Right
Whale was esteemed a great delicacy in France, and commanded large
prices there. Also, that in Henry VIIIth's time, a certain cook of the
court obtained a handsome reward for inventing an admirable sauce to be
eaten with barbacued porpoises, which, you remember, are a species of
whale. Porpoises, indeed, are to this day considered fine eating. The
meat is made into balls about the size of billiard balls, and being well
seasoned and spiced might be taken for turtle-balls or veal balls.
The old monks of Dunfermline were very fond of them. They had a great
porpoise grant from the crown.

The fact is, that among his hunters at least, the whale would by all
hands be considered a noble dish, were there not so much of him; but
when you come to sit down before a meat-pie nearly one hundred feet
long, it takes away your appetite. Only the most unprejudiced of men
like Stubb, nowadays partake of cooked whales; but the Esquimaux are not
so fastidious. We all know how they live upon whales, and have rare
old vintages of prime old train oil. Zogranda, one of their most famous
doctors, recommends strips of blubber for infants, as being exceedingly
juicy and nourishing. And this reminds me that certain Englishmen, who
long ago were accidentally left in Greenland by a whaling vessel--that
these men actually lived for several months on the mouldy scraps of
whales which had been left ashore after trying out the blubber. Among
the Dutch whalemen these scraps are called "fritters"; which, indeed,
they greatly resemble, being brown and crisp, and smelling something
like old Amsterdam housewives' dough-nuts or oly-cooks, when fresh. They
have such an eatable look that the most self-denying stranger can hardly
keep his hands off.

But what further depreciates the whale as a civilized dish, is his
exceeding richness. He is the great prize ox of the sea, too fat to be
delicately good. Look at his hump, which would be as fine eating as
the buffalo's (which is esteemed a rare dish), were it not such a solid
pyramid of fat. But the spermaceti itself, how bland and creamy that
is; like the transparent, half-jellied, white meat of a cocoanut in the
third month of its growth, yet far too rich to supply a substitute for
butter. Nevertheless, many whalemen have a method of absorbing it into
some other substance, and then partaking of it. In the long try
watches of the night it is a common thing for the seamen to dip their
ship-biscuit into the huge oil-pots and let them fry there awhile. Many
a good supper have I thus made.

In the case of a small Sperm Whale the brains are accounted a fine dish.
The casket of the skull is broken into with an axe, and the two plump,
whitish lobes being withdrawn (precisely resembling two large puddings),
they are then mixed with flour, and cooked into a most delectable mess,
in flavor somewhat resembling calves' head, which is quite a dish among
some epicures; and every one knows that some young bucks among the
epicures, by continually dining upon calves' brains, by and by get to
have a little brains of their own, so as to be able to tell a
calf's head from their own heads; which, indeed, requires uncommon
discrimination. And that is the reason why a young buck with an
intelligent looking calf's head before him, is somehow one of the
saddest sights you can see. The head looks a sort of reproachfully at
him, with an "Et tu Brute!" expression.

It is not, perhaps, entirely because the whale is so excessively
unctuous that landsmen seem to regard the eating of him with abhorrence;
that appears to result, in some way, from the consideration before
mentioned: i.e. that a man should eat a newly murdered thing of the sea,
and eat it too by its own light. But no doubt the first man that ever
murdered an ox was regarded as a murderer; perhaps he was hung; and if
he had been put on his trial by oxen, he certainly would have been; and
he certainly deserved it if any murderer does. Go to the meat-market
of a Saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the
long rows of dead quadrupeds. Does not that sight take a tooth out of
the cannibal's jaw? Cannibals? who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will
be more tolerable for the Fejee that salted down a lean missionary in
his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that
provident Fejee, I say, in the day of judgment, than for thee, civilized
and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground and feastest
on their bloated livers in thy pate-de-foie-gras.

But Stubb, he eats the whale by its own light, does he? and that is
adding insult to injury, is it? Look at your knife-handle, there, my
civilized and enlightened gourmand dining off that roast beef, what is
that handle made of?--what but the bones of the brother of the very ox
you are eating? And what do you pick your teeth with, after devouring
that fat goose? With a feather of the same fowl. And with what quill did
the Secretary of the Society for the Suppression of Cruelty to Ganders
formally indite his circulars? It is only within the last month or two
that that society passed a resolution to patronise nothing but steel
pens.



CHAPTER 66. The Shark Massacre.


When in the Southern Fishery, a captured Sperm Whale, after long and
weary toil, is brought alongside late at night, it is not, as a general
thing at least, customary to proceed at once to the business of cutting
him in. For that business is an exceedingly laborious one; is not very
soon completed; and requires all hands to set about it. Therefore, the
common usage is to take in all sail; lash the helm a'lee; and then send
every one below to his hammock till daylight, with the reservation that,
until that time, anchor-watches shall be kept; that is, two and two for
an hour, each couple, the crew in rotation shall mount the deck to see
that all goes well.

But sometimes, especially upon the Line in the Pacific, this plan will
not answer at all; because such incalculable hosts of sharks gather
round the moored carcase, that were he left so for six hours, say, on a
stretch, little more than the skeleton would be visible by morning.
In most other parts of the ocean, however, where these fish do not so
largely abound, their wondrous voracity can be at times considerably
diminished, by vigorously stirring them up with sharp whaling-spades,
a procedure notwithstanding, which, in some instances, only seems to
tickle them into still greater activity. But it was not thus in the
present case with the Pequod's sharks; though, to be sure, any man
unaccustomed to such sights, to have looked over her side that night,
would have almost thought the whole round sea was one huge cheese, and
those sharks the maggots in it.

Nevertheless, upon Stubb setting the anchor-watch after his supper was
concluded; and when, accordingly, Queequeg and a forecastle seaman
came on deck, no small excitement was created among the sharks; for
immediately suspending the cutting stages over the side, and lowering
three lanterns, so that they cast long gleams of light over the turbid
sea, these two mariners, darting their long whaling-spades, kept up an
incessant murdering of the sharks,* by striking the keen steel deep
into their skulls, seemingly their only vital part. But in the foamy
confusion of their mixed and struggling hosts, the marksmen could not
always hit their mark; and this brought about new revelations of the
incredible ferocity of the foe. They viciously snapped, not only at each
other's disembowelments, but like flexible bows, bent round, and bit
their own; till those entrails seemed swallowed over and over again by
the same mouth, to be oppositely voided by the gaping wound. Nor was
this all. It was unsafe to meddle with the corpses and ghosts of these
creatures. A sort of generic or Pantheistic vitality seemed to lurk in
their very joints and bones, after what might be called the individual
life had departed. Killed and hoisted on deck for the sake of his skin,
one of these sharks almost took poor Queequeg's hand off, when he tried
to shut down the dead lid of his murderous jaw.


*The whaling-spade used for cutting-in is made of the very best steel;
is about the bigness of a man's spread hand; and in general shape,
corresponds to the garden implement after which it is named; only its
sides are perfectly flat, and its upper end considerably narrower than
the lower. This weapon is always kept as sharp as possible; and when
being used is occasionally honed, just like a razor. In its socket, a
stiff pole, from twenty to thirty feet long, is inserted for a handle.


"Queequeg no care what god made him shark," said the savage, agonizingly
lifting his hand up and down; "wedder Fejee god or Nantucket god; but de
god wat made shark must be one dam Ingin."



CHAPTER 67. Cutting In.


It was a Saturday night, and such a Sabbath as followed! Ex officio
professors of Sabbath breaking are all whalemen. The ivory Pequod was
turned into what seemed a shamble; every sailor a butcher. You would
have thought we were offering up ten thousand red oxen to the sea gods.

In the first place, the enormous cutting tackles, among other ponderous
things comprising a cluster of blocks generally painted green, and which
no single man can possibly lift--this vast bunch of grapes was swayed up
to the main-top and firmly lashed to the lower mast-head, the strongest
point anywhere above a ship's deck. The end of the hawser-like rope
winding through these intricacies, was then conducted to the windlass,
and the huge lower block of the tackles was swung over the whale; to
this block the great blubber hook, weighing some one hundred pounds, was
attached. And now suspended in stages over the side, Starbuck and Stubb,
the mates, armed with their long spades, began cutting a hole in the
body for the insertion of the hook just above the nearest of the two
side-fins. This done, a broad, semicircular line is cut round the hole,
the hook is inserted, and the main body of the crew striking up a wild
chorus, now commence heaving in one dense crowd at the windlass. When
instantly, the entire ship careens over on her side; every bolt in
her starts like the nail-heads of an old house in frosty weather; she
trembles, quivers, and nods her frighted mast-heads to the sky. More
and more she leans over to the whale, while every gasping heave of the
windlass is answered by a helping heave from the billows; till at last,
a swift, startling snap is heard; with a great swash the ship rolls
upwards and backwards from the whale, and the triumphant tackle rises
into sight dragging after it the disengaged semicircular end of the
first strip of blubber. Now as the blubber envelopes the whale precisely
as the rind does an orange, so is it stripped off from the body
precisely as an orange is sometimes stripped by spiralizing it. For the
strain constantly kept up by the windlass continually keeps the whale
rolling over and over in the water, and as the blubber in one strip
uniformly peels off along the line called the "scarf," simultaneously
cut by the spades of Starbuck and Stubb, the mates; and just as fast as
it is thus peeled off, and indeed by that very act itself, it is all the
time being hoisted higher and higher aloft till its upper end grazes the
main-top; the men at the windlass then cease heaving, and for a moment
or two the prodigious blood-dripping mass sways to and fro as if let
down from the sky, and every one present must take good heed to dodge
it when it swings, else it may box his ears and pitch him headlong
overboard.

One of the attending harpooneers now advances with a long, keen weapon
called a boarding-sword, and watching his chance he dexterously slices
out a considerable hole in the lower part of the swaying mass. Into this
hole, the end of the second alternating great tackle is then hooked
so as to retain a hold upon the blubber, in order to prepare for what
follows. Whereupon, this accomplished swordsman, warning all hands to
stand off, once more makes a scientific dash at the mass, and with a few
sidelong, desperate, lunging slicings, severs it completely in twain;
so that while the short lower part is still fast, the long upper strip,
called a blanket-piece, swings clear, and is all ready for lowering.
The heavers forward now resume their song, and while the one tackle is
peeling and hoisting a second strip from the whale, the other is slowly
slackened away, and down goes the first strip through the main hatchway
right beneath, into an unfurnished parlor called the blubber-room. Into
this twilight apartment sundry nimble hands keep coiling away the long
blanket-piece as if it were a great live mass of plaited serpents.
And thus the work proceeds; the two tackles hoisting and lowering
simultaneously; both whale and windlass heaving, the heavers singing,
the blubber-room gentlemen coiling, the mates scarfing, the ship
straining, and all hands swearing occasionally, by way of assuaging the
general friction.



CHAPTER 68. The Blanket.


I have given no small attention to that not unvexed subject, the skin of
the whale. I have had controversies about it with experienced whalemen
afloat, and learned naturalists ashore. My original opinion remains
unchanged; but it is only an opinion.

The question is, what and where is the skin of the whale? Already you
know what his blubber is. That blubber is something of the consistence
of firm, close-grained beef, but tougher, more elastic and compact, and
ranges from eight or ten to twelve and fifteen inches in thickness.

Now, however preposterous it may at first seem to talk of any creature's
skin as being of that sort of consistence and thickness, yet in point
of fact these are no arguments against such a presumption; because you
cannot raise any other dense enveloping layer from the whale's body but
that same blubber; and the outermost enveloping layer of any animal, if
reasonably dense, what can that be but the skin? True, from the unmarred
dead body of the whale, you may scrape off with your hand an infinitely
thin, transparent substance, somewhat resembling the thinnest shreds
of isinglass, only it is almost as flexible and soft as satin; that is,
previous to being dried, when it not only contracts and thickens, but
becomes rather hard and brittle. I have several such dried bits, which
I use for marks in my whale-books. It is transparent, as I said before;
and being laid upon the printed page, I have sometimes pleased myself
with fancying it exerted a magnifying influence. At any rate, it is
pleasant to read about whales through their own spectacles, as you may
say. But what I am driving at here is this. That same infinitely thin,
isinglass substance, which, I admit, invests the entire body of the
whale, is not so much to be regarded as the skin of the creature, as
the skin of the skin, so to speak; for it were simply ridiculous to say,
that the proper skin of the tremendous whale is thinner and more tender
than the skin of a new-born child. But no more of this.

Assuming the blubber to be the skin of the whale; then, when this skin,
as in the case of a very large Sperm Whale, will yield the bulk of one
hundred barrels of oil; and, when it is considered that, in quantity, or
rather weight, that oil, in its expressed state, is only three fourths,
and not the entire substance of the coat; some idea may hence be had
of the enormousness of that animated mass, a mere part of whose mere
integument yields such a lake of liquid as that. Reckoning ten barrels
to the ton, you have ten tons for the net weight of only three quarters
of the stuff of the whale's skin.

In life, the visible surface of the Sperm Whale is not the least among
the many marvels he presents. Almost invariably it is all over obliquely
crossed and re-crossed with numberless straight marks in thick array,
something like those in the finest Italian line engravings. But these
marks do not seem to be impressed upon the isinglass substance above
mentioned, but seem to be seen through it, as if they were engraved
upon the body itself. Nor is this all. In some instances, to the quick,
observant eye, those linear marks, as in a veritable engraving, but
afford the ground for far other delineations. These are hieroglyphical;
that is, if you call those mysterious cyphers on the walls of pyramids
hieroglyphics, then that is the proper word to use in the present
connexion. By my retentive memory of the hieroglyphics upon one Sperm
Whale in particular, I was much struck with a plate representing the old
Indian characters chiselled on the famous hieroglyphic palisades on
the banks of the Upper Mississippi. Like those mystic rocks, too, the
mystic-marked whale remains undecipherable. This allusion to the Indian
rocks reminds me of another thing. Besides all the other phenomena which
the exterior of the Sperm Whale presents, he not seldom displays the
back, and more especially his flanks, effaced in great part of the
regular linear appearance, by reason of numerous rude scratches,
altogether of an irregular, random aspect. I should say that those New
England rocks on the sea-coast, which Agassiz imagines to bear the marks
of violent scraping contact with vast floating icebergs--I should say,
that those rocks must not a little resemble the Sperm Whale in this
particular. It also seems to me that such scratches in the whale are
probably made by hostile contact with other whales; for I have most
remarked them in the large, full-grown bulls of the species.

A word or two more concerning this matter of the skin or blubber of
the whale. It has already been said, that it is stript from him in long
pieces, called blanket-pieces. Like most sea-terms, this one is very
happy and significant. For the whale is indeed wrapt up in his blubber
as in a real blanket or counterpane; or, still better, an Indian poncho
slipt over his head, and skirting his extremity. It is by reason of this
cosy blanketing of his body, that the whale is enabled to keep himself
comfortable in all weathers, in all seas, times, and tides. What would
become of a Greenland whale, say, in those shuddering, icy seas of the
North, if unsupplied with his cosy surtout? True, other fish are
found exceedingly brisk in those Hyperborean waters; but these, be it
observed, are your cold-blooded, lungless fish, whose very bellies
are refrigerators; creatures, that warm themselves under the lee of
an iceberg, as a traveller in winter would bask before an inn fire;
whereas, like man, the whale has lungs and warm blood. Freeze his blood,
and he dies. How wonderful is it then--except after explanation--that
this great monster, to whom corporeal warmth is as indispensable as it
is to man; how wonderful that he should be found at home, immersed
to his lips for life in those Arctic waters! where, when seamen fall
overboard, they are sometimes found, months afterwards, perpendicularly
frozen into the hearts of fields of ice, as a fly is found glued
in amber. But more surprising is it to know, as has been proved by
experiment, that the blood of a Polar whale is warmer than that of a
Borneo negro in summer.

It does seem to me, that herein we see the rare virtue of a strong
individual vitality, and the rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare
virtue of interior spaciousness. Oh, man! admire and model thyself after
the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in
this world without being of it. Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood
fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter's, and like the
great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own.

But how easy and how hopeless to teach these fine things! Of erections,
how few are domed like St. Peter's! of creatures, how few vast as the
whale!



CHAPTER 69. The Funeral.


Haul in the chains! Let the carcase go astern!

The vast tackles have now done their duty. The peeled white body of the
beheaded whale flashes like a marble sepulchre; though changed in hue,
it has not perceptibly lost anything in bulk. It is still colossal.
Slowly it floats more and more away, the water round it torn and
splashed by the insatiate sharks, and the air above vexed with rapacious
flights of screaming fowls, whose beaks are like so many insulting
poniards in the whale. The vast white headless phantom floats further
and further from the ship, and every rod that it so floats, what seem
square roods of sharks and cubic roods of fowls, augment the murderous
din. For hours and hours from the almost stationary ship that hideous
sight is seen. Beneath the unclouded and mild azure sky, upon the fair
face of the pleasant sea, wafted by the joyous breezes, that great mass
of death floats on and on, till lost in infinite perspectives.

There's a most doleful and most mocking funeral! The sea-vultures all in
pious mourning, the air-sharks all punctiliously in black or speckled.
In life but few of them would have helped the whale, I ween, if
peradventure he had needed it; but upon the banquet of his funeral they
most piously do pounce. Oh, horrible vultureism of earth! from which not
the mightiest whale is free.

Nor is this the end. Desecrated as the body is, a vengeful ghost
survives and hovers over it to scare. Espied by some timid man-of-war or
blundering discovery-vessel from afar, when the distance obscuring the
swarming fowls, nevertheless still shows the white mass floating in
the sun, and the white spray heaving high against it; straightway the
whale's unharming corpse, with trembling fingers is set down in the
log--SHOALS, ROCKS, AND BREAKERS HEREABOUTS: BEWARE! And for years
afterwards, perhaps, ships shun the place; leaping over it as silly
sheep leap over a vacuum, because their leader originally leaped there
when a stick was held. There's your law of precedents; there's your
utility of traditions; there's the story of your obstinate survival of
old beliefs never bottomed on the earth, and now not even hovering in
the air! There's orthodoxy!

Thus, while in life the great whale's body may have been a real terror
to his foes, in his death his ghost becomes a powerless panic to a
world.

Are you a believer in ghosts, my friend? There are other ghosts than
the Cock-Lane one, and far deeper men than Doctor Johnson who believe in
them.



CHAPTER 70. The Sphynx.


It should not have been omitted that previous to completely stripping
the body of the leviathan, he was beheaded. Now, the beheading of the
Sperm Whale is a scientific anatomical feat, upon which experienced
whale surgeons very much pride themselves: and not without reason.

Consider that the whale has nothing that can properly be called a neck;
on the contrary, where his head and body seem to join, there, in that
very place, is the thickest part of him. Remember, also, that the
surgeon must operate from above, some eight or ten feet intervening
between him and his subject, and that subject almost hidden in a
discoloured, rolling, and oftentimes tumultuous and bursting sea. Bear
in mind, too, that under these untoward circumstances he has to cut many
feet deep in the flesh; and in that subterraneous manner, without so
much as getting one single peep into the ever-contracting gash thus
made, he must skilfully steer clear of all adjacent, interdicted parts,
and exactly divide the spine at a critical point hard by its insertion
into the skull. Do you not marvel, then, at Stubb's boast, that he
demanded but ten minutes to behead a sperm whale?

When first severed, the head is dropped astern and held there by a cable
till the body is stripped. That done, if it belong to a small whale
it is hoisted on deck to be deliberately disposed of. But, with a full
grown leviathan this is impossible; for the sperm whale's head embraces
nearly one third of his entire bulk, and completely to suspend such a
burden as that, even by the immense tackles of a whaler, this were as
vain a thing as to attempt weighing a Dutch barn in jewellers' scales.

The Pequod's whale being decapitated and the body stripped, the head was
hoisted against the ship's side--about half way out of the sea, so that
it might yet in great part be buoyed up by its native element. And there
with the strained craft steeply leaning over to it, by reason of the
enormous downward drag from the lower mast-head, and every yard-arm
on that side projecting like a crane over the waves; there, that
blood-dripping head hung to the Pequod's waist like the giant
Holofernes's from the girdle of Judith.

When this last task was accomplished it was noon, and the seamen went
below to their dinner. Silence reigned over the before tumultuous but
now deserted deck. An intense copper calm, like a universal yellow
lotus, was more and more unfolding its noiseless measureless leaves upon
the sea.

A short space elapsed, and up into this noiselessness came Ahab alone
from his cabin. Taking a few turns on the quarter-deck, he paused to
gaze over the side, then slowly getting into the main-chains he
took Stubb's long spade--still remaining there after the whale's
Decapitation--and striking it into the lower part of the half-suspended
mass, placed its other end crutch-wise under one arm, and so stood
leaning over with eyes attentively fixed on this head.

It was a black and hooded head; and hanging there in the midst of so
intense a calm, it seemed the Sphynx's in the desert. "Speak, thou vast
and venerable head," muttered Ahab, "which, though ungarnished with a
beard, yet here and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head,
and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all divers, thou hast
dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has
moved amid this world's foundations. Where unrecorded names and navies
rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this
frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there,
in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home. Thou hast
been where bell or diver never went; hast slept by many a sailor's side,
where sleepless mothers would give their lives to lay them down. Thou
saw'st the locked lovers when leaping from their flaming ship; heart
to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave; true to each other, when
heaven seemed false to them. Thou saw'st the murdered mate when tossed
by pirates from the midnight deck; for hours he fell into the deeper
midnight of the insatiate maw; and his murderers still sailed on
unharmed--while swift lightnings shivered the neighboring ship that
would have borne a righteous husband to outstretched, longing arms. O
head! thou hast seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of
Abraham, and not one syllable is thine!"

"Sail ho!" cried a triumphant voice from the main-mast-head.

"Aye? Well, now, that's cheering," cried Ahab, suddenly erecting
himself, while whole thunder-clouds swept aside from his brow.
"That lively cry upon this deadly calm might almost convert a better
man.--Where away?"

"Three points on the starboard bow, sir, and bringing down her breeze to
us!

"Better and better, man. Would now St. Paul would come along that way,
and to my breezelessness bring his breeze! O Nature, and O soul of man!
how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies! not the smallest
atom stirs or lives on matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind."



CHAPTER 71. The Jeroboam's Story.


Hand in hand, ship and breeze blew on; but the breeze came faster than
the ship, and soon the Pequod began to rock.

By and by, through the glass the stranger's boats and manned mast-heads
proved her a whale-ship. But as she was so far to windward, and shooting
by, apparently making a passage to some other ground, the Pequod could
not hope to reach her. So the signal was set to see what response would
be made.

Here be it said, that like the vessels of military marines, the ships of
the American Whale Fleet have each a private signal; all which signals
being collected in a book with the names of the respective vessels
attached, every captain is provided with it. Thereby, the whale
commanders are enabled to recognise each other upon the ocean, even at
considerable distances and with no small facility.

The Pequod's signal was at last responded to by the stranger's setting
her own; which proved the ship to be the Jeroboam of Nantucket. Squaring
her yards, she bore down, ranged abeam under the Pequod's lee, and
lowered a boat; it soon drew nigh; but, as the side-ladder was being
rigged by Starbuck's order to accommodate the visiting captain, the
stranger in question waved his hand from his boat's stern in token
of that proceeding being entirely unnecessary. It turned out that
the Jeroboam had a malignant epidemic on board, and that Mayhew, her
captain, was fearful of infecting the Pequod's company. For, though
himself and boat's crew remained untainted, and though his ship was half
a rifle-shot off, and an incorruptible sea and air rolling and flowing
between; yet conscientiously adhering to the timid quarantine of the
land, he peremptorily refused to come into direct contact with the
Pequod.

But this did by no means prevent all communications. Preserving an
interval of some few yards between itself and the ship, the Jeroboam's
boat by the occasional use of its oars contrived to keep parallel to the
Pequod, as she heavily forged through the sea (for by this time it blew
very fresh), with her main-topsail aback; though, indeed, at times by
the sudden onset of a large rolling wave, the boat would be pushed some
way ahead; but would be soon skilfully brought to her proper bearings
again. Subject to this, and other the like interruptions now and then, a
conversation was sustained between the two parties; but at intervals not
without still another interruption of a very different sort.

Pulling an oar in the Jeroboam's boat, was a man of a singular
appearance, even in that wild whaling life where individual notabilities
make up all totalities. He was a small, short, youngish man, sprinkled
all over his face with freckles, and wearing redundant yellow hair. A
long-skirted, cabalistically-cut coat of a faded walnut tinge enveloped
him; the overlapping sleeves of which were rolled up on his wrists. A
deep, settled, fanatic delirium was in his eyes.

So soon as this figure had been first descried, Stubb had
exclaimed--"That's he! that's he!--the long-togged scaramouch the
Town-Ho's company told us of!" Stubb here alluded to a strange story
told of the Jeroboam, and a certain man among her crew, some time
previous when the Pequod spoke the Town-Ho. According to this account
and what was subsequently learned, it seemed that the scaramouch in
question had gained a wonderful ascendency over almost everybody in the
Jeroboam. His story was this:

He had been originally nurtured among the crazy society of Neskyeuna
Shakers, where he had been a great prophet; in their cracked, secret
meetings having several times descended from heaven by the way of a
trap-door, announcing the speedy opening of the seventh vial, which he
carried in his vest-pocket; but, which, instead of containing gunpowder,
was supposed to be charged with laudanum. A strange, apostolic whim
having seized him, he had left Neskyeuna for Nantucket, where, with
that cunning peculiar to craziness, he assumed a steady, common-sense
exterior, and offered himself as a green-hand candidate for the
Jeroboam's whaling voyage. They engaged him; but straightway upon
the ship's getting out of sight of land, his insanity broke out in a
freshet. He announced himself as the archangel Gabriel, and commanded
the captain to jump overboard. He published his manifesto, whereby
he set himself forth as the deliverer of the isles of the sea and
vicar-general of all Oceanica. The unflinching earnestness with which he
declared these things;--the dark, daring play of his sleepless, excited
imagination, and all the preternatural terrors of real delirium, united
to invest this Gabriel in the minds of the majority of the ignorant
crew, with an atmosphere of sacredness. Moreover, they were afraid of
him. As such a man, however, was not of much practical use in the ship,
especially as he refused to work except when he pleased, the incredulous
captain would fain have been rid of him; but apprised that that
individual's intention was to land him in the first convenient port, the
archangel forthwith opened all his seals and vials--devoting the ship
and all hands to unconditional perdition, in case this intention was
carried out. So strongly did he work upon his disciples among the crew,
that at last in a body they went to the captain and told him if Gabriel
was sent from the ship, not a man of them would remain. He was therefore
forced to relinquish his plan. Nor would they permit Gabriel to be any
way maltreated, say or do what he would; so that it came to pass that
Gabriel had the complete freedom of the ship. The consequence of all
this was, that the archangel cared little or nothing for the captain and
mates; and since the epidemic had broken out, he carried a higher hand
than ever; declaring that the plague, as he called it, was at his sole
command; nor should it be stayed but according to his good pleasure.
The sailors, mostly poor devils, cringed, and some of them fawned before
him; in obedience to his instructions, sometimes rendering him personal
homage, as to a god. Such things may seem incredible; but, however
wondrous, they are true. Nor is the history of fanatics half so striking
in respect to the measureless self-deception of the fanatic himself, as
his measureless power of deceiving and bedevilling so many others. But
it is time to return to the Pequod.

"I fear not thy epidemic, man," said Ahab from the bulwarks, to Captain
Mayhew, who stood in the boat's stern; "come on board."

But now Gabriel started to his feet.

"Think, think of the fevers, yellow and bilious! Beware of the horrible
plague!"

"Gabriel! Gabriel!" cried Captain Mayhew; "thou must either--" But
that instant a headlong wave shot the boat far ahead, and its seethings
drowned all speech.

"Hast thou seen the White Whale?" demanded Ahab, when the boat drifted
back.

"Think, think of thy whale-boat, stoven and sunk! Beware of the horrible
tail!"

"I tell thee again, Gabriel, that--" But again the boat tore ahead as if
dragged by fiends. Nothing was said for some moments, while a succession
of riotous waves rolled by, which by one of those occasional caprices
of the seas were tumbling, not heaving it. Meantime, the hoisted sperm
whale's head jogged about very violently, and Gabriel was seen eyeing
it with rather more apprehensiveness than his archangel nature seemed to
warrant.

When this interlude was over, Captain Mayhew began a dark story
concerning Moby Dick; not, however, without frequent interruptions from
Gabriel, whenever his name was mentioned, and the crazy sea that seemed
leagued with him.

It seemed that the Jeroboam had not long left home, when upon speaking
a whale-ship, her people were reliably apprised of the existence of Moby
Dick, and the havoc he had made. Greedily sucking in this intelligence,
Gabriel solemnly warned the captain against attacking the White
Whale, in case the monster should be seen; in his gibbering insanity,
pronouncing the White Whale to be no less a being than the Shaker God
incarnated; the Shakers receiving the Bible. But when, some year or two
afterwards, Moby Dick was fairly sighted from the mast-heads, Macey, the
chief mate, burned with ardour to encounter him; and the captain himself
being not unwilling to let him have the opportunity, despite all
the archangel's denunciations and forewarnings, Macey succeeded in
persuading five men to man his boat. With them he pushed off; and, after
much weary pulling, and many perilous, unsuccessful onsets, he at last
succeeded in getting one iron fast. Meantime, Gabriel, ascending to
the main-royal mast-head, was tossing one arm in frantic gestures, and
hurling forth prophecies of speedy doom to the sacrilegious assailants
of his divinity. Now, while Macey, the mate, was standing up in his
boat's bow, and with all the reckless energy of his tribe was venting
his wild exclamations upon the whale, and essaying to get a fair chance
for his poised lance, lo! a broad white shadow rose from the sea; by its
quick, fanning motion, temporarily taking the breath out of the bodies
of the oarsmen. Next instant, the luckless mate, so full of furious
life, was smitten bodily into the air, and making a long arc in his
descent, fell into the sea at the distance of about fifty yards. Not a
chip of the boat was harmed, nor a hair of any oarsman's head; but the
mate for ever sank.

It is well to parenthesize here, that of the fatal accidents in the
Sperm-Whale Fishery, this kind is perhaps almost as frequent as any.
Sometimes, nothing is injured but the man who is thus annihilated;
oftener the boat's bow is knocked off, or the thigh-board, in which the
headsman stands, is torn from its place and accompanies the body. But
strangest of all is the circumstance, that in more instances than one,
when the body has been recovered, not a single mark of violence is
discernible; the man being stark dead.

The whole calamity, with the falling form of Macey, was plainly descried
from the ship. Raising a piercing shriek--"The vial! the vial!" Gabriel
called off the terror-stricken crew from the further hunting of the
whale. This terrible event clothed the archangel with added influence;
because his credulous disciples believed that he had specifically
fore-announced it, instead of only making a general prophecy, which any
one might have done, and so have chanced to hit one of many marks in the
wide margin allowed. He became a nameless terror to the ship.

Mayhew having concluded his narration, Ahab put such questions to
him, that the stranger captain could not forbear inquiring whether he
intended to hunt the White Whale, if opportunity should offer. To which
Ahab answered--"Aye." Straightway, then, Gabriel once more started
to his feet, glaring upon the old man, and vehemently exclaimed, with
downward pointed finger--"Think, think of the blasphemer--dead, and down
there!--beware of the blasphemer's end!"

Ahab stolidly turned aside; then said to Mayhew, "Captain, I have
just bethought me of my letter-bag; there is a letter for one of thy
officers, if I mistake not. Starbuck, look over the bag."

Every whale-ship takes out a goodly number of letters for various ships,
whose delivery to the persons to whom they may be addressed, depends
upon the mere chance of encountering them in the four oceans. Thus,
most letters never reach their mark; and many are only received after
attaining an age of two or three years or more.

Soon Starbuck returned with a letter in his hand. It was sorely tumbled,
damp, and covered with a dull, spotted, green mould, in consequence
of being kept in a dark locker of the cabin. Of such a letter, Death
himself might well have been the post-boy.

"Can'st not read it?" cried Ahab. "Give it me, man. Aye, aye, it's but
a dim scrawl;--what's this?" As he was studying it out, Starbuck took a
long cutting-spade pole, and with his knife slightly split the end, to
insert the letter there, and in that way, hand it to the boat, without
its coming any closer to the ship.

Meantime, Ahab holding the letter, muttered, "Mr. Har--yes, Mr.
Harry--(a woman's pinny hand,--the man's wife, I'll wager)--Aye--Mr.
Harry Macey, Ship Jeroboam;--why it's Macey, and he's dead!"

"Poor fellow! poor fellow! and from his wife," sighed Mayhew; "but let
me have it."

"Nay, keep it thyself," cried Gabriel to Ahab; "thou art soon going that
way."

"Curses throttle thee!" yelled Ahab. "Captain Mayhew, stand by now to
receive it"; and taking the fatal missive from Starbuck's hands, he
caught it in the slit of the pole, and reached it over towards the boat.
But as he did so, the oarsmen expectantly desisted from rowing; the boat
drifted a little towards the ship's stern; so that, as if by magic, the
letter suddenly ranged along with Gabriel's eager hand. He clutched it
in an instant, seized the boat-knife, and impaling the letter on it,
sent it thus loaded back into the ship. It fell at Ahab's feet. Then
Gabriel shrieked out to his comrades to give way with their oars, and in
that manner the mutinous boat rapidly shot away from the Pequod.

As, after this interlude, the seamen resumed their work upon the jacket
of the whale, many strange things were hinted in reference to this wild
affair.



CHAPTER 72. The Monkey-Rope.


In the tumultuous business of cutting-in and attending to a whale, there
is much running backwards and forwards among the crew. Now hands are
wanted here, and then again hands are wanted there. There is no staying
in any one place; for at one and the same time everything has to be done
everywhere. It is much the same with him who endeavors the description
of the scene. We must now retrace our way a little. It was mentioned
that upon first breaking ground in the whale's back, the blubber-hook
was inserted into the original hole there cut by the spades of the
mates. But how did so clumsy and weighty a mass as that same hook
get fixed in that hole? It was inserted there by my particular friend
Queequeg, whose duty it was, as harpooneer, to descend upon the
monster's back for the special purpose referred to. But in very many
cases, circumstances require that the harpooneer shall remain on the
whale till the whole tensing or stripping operation is concluded. The
whale, be it observed, lies almost entirely submerged, excepting the
immediate parts operated upon. So down there, some ten feet below the
level of the deck, the poor harpooneer flounders about, half on the
whale and half in the water, as the vast mass revolves like a tread-mill
beneath him. On the occasion in question, Queequeg figured in the
Highland costume--a shirt and socks--in which to my eyes, at least,
he appeared to uncommon advantage; and no one had a better chance to
observe him, as will presently be seen.

Being the savage's bowsman, that is, the person who pulled the bow-oar
in his boat (the second one from forward), it was my cheerful duty to
attend upon him while taking that hard-scrabble scramble upon the dead
whale's back. You have seen Italian organ-boys holding a dancing-ape by
a long cord. Just so, from the ship's steep side, did I hold Queequeg
down there in the sea, by what is technically called in the fishery
a monkey-rope, attached to a strong strip of canvas belted round his
waist.

It was a humorously perilous business for both of us. For, before we
proceed further, it must be said that the monkey-rope was fast at
both ends; fast to Queequeg's broad canvas belt, and fast to my narrow
leather one. So that for better or for worse, we two, for the time, were
wedded; and should poor Queequeg sink to rise no more, then both usage
and honour demanded, that instead of cutting the cord, it should drag
me down in his wake. So, then, an elongated Siamese ligature united us.
Queequeg was my own inseparable twin brother; nor could I any way get
rid of the dangerous liabilities which the hempen bond entailed.

So strongly and metaphysically did I conceive of my situation then, that
while earnestly watching his motions, I seemed distinctly to perceive
that my own individuality was now merged in a joint stock company of
two; that my free will had received a mortal wound; and that another's
mistake or misfortune might plunge innocent me into unmerited disaster
and death. Therefore, I saw that here was a sort of interregnum in
Providence; for its even-handed equity never could have so gross an
injustice. And yet still further pondering--while I jerked him now
and then from between the whale and ship, which would threaten to jam
him--still further pondering, I say, I saw that this situation of mine
was the precise situation of every mortal that breathes; only, in most
cases, he, one way or other, has this Siamese connexion with a plurality
of other mortals. If your banker breaks, you snap; if your apothecary by
mistake sends you poison in your pills, you die. True, you may say
that, by exceeding caution, you may possibly escape these and the
multitudinous other evil chances of life. But handle Queequeg's
monkey-rope heedfully as I would, sometimes he jerked it so, that I came
very near sliding overboard. Nor could I possibly forget that, do what I
would, I only had the management of one end of it.*


*The monkey-rope is found in all whalers; but it was only in the Pequod
that the monkey and his holder were ever tied together. This improvement
upon the original usage was introduced by no less a man than Stubb,
in order to afford the imperilled harpooneer the strongest possible
guarantee for the faithfulness and vigilance of his monkey-rope holder.


I have hinted that I would often jerk poor Queequeg from between the
whale and the ship--where he would occasionally fall, from the incessant
rolling and swaying of both. But this was not the only jamming jeopardy
he was exposed to. Unappalled by the massacre made upon them during the
night, the sharks now freshly and more keenly allured by the before pent
blood which began to flow from the carcass--the rabid creatures swarmed
round it like bees in a beehive.

And right in among those sharks was Queequeg; who often pushed them
aside with his floundering feet. A thing altogether incredible were
it not that attracted by such prey as a dead whale, the otherwise
miscellaneously carnivorous shark will seldom touch a man.

Nevertheless, it may well be believed that since they have such a
ravenous finger in the pie, it is deemed but wise to look sharp to them.
Accordingly, besides the monkey-rope, with which I now and then jerked
the poor fellow from too close a vicinity to the maw of what seemed
a peculiarly ferocious shark--he was provided with still another
protection. Suspended over the side in one of the stages, Tashtego
and Daggoo continually flourished over his head a couple of keen
whale-spades, wherewith they slaughtered as many sharks as they could
reach. This procedure of theirs, to be sure, was very disinterested and
benevolent of them. They meant Queequeg's best happiness, I admit; but
in their hasty zeal to befriend him, and from the circumstance that both
he and the sharks were at times half hidden by the blood-muddled water,
those indiscreet spades of theirs would come nearer amputating a leg
than a tall. But poor Queequeg, I suppose, straining and gasping there
with that great iron hook--poor Queequeg, I suppose, only prayed to his
Yojo, and gave up his life into the hands of his gods.

Well, well, my dear comrade and twin-brother, thought I, as I drew in
and then slacked off the rope to every swell of the sea--what matters
it, after all? Are you not the precious image of each and all of us men
in this whaling world? That unsounded ocean you gasp in, is Life; those
sharks, your foes; those spades, your friends; and what between sharks
and spades you are in a sad pickle and peril, poor lad.

But courage! there is good cheer in store for you, Queequeg. For now, as
with blue lips and blood-shot eyes the exhausted savage at last climbs
up the chains and stands all dripping and involuntarily trembling over
the side; the steward advances, and with a benevolent, consolatory
glance hands him--what? Some hot Cognac? No! hands him, ye gods! hands
him a cup of tepid ginger and water!

"Ginger? Do I smell ginger?" suspiciously asked Stubb, coming near.
"Yes, this must be ginger," peering into the as yet untasted cup. Then
standing as if incredulous for a while, he calmly walked towards the
astonished steward slowly saying, "Ginger? ginger? and will you have
the goodness to tell me, Mr. Dough-Boy, where lies the virtue of ginger?
Ginger! is ginger the sort of fuel you use, Dough-boy, to kindle a fire
in this shivering cannibal? Ginger!--what the devil is ginger?
Sea-coal? firewood?--lucifer matches?--tinder?--gunpowder?--what the
devil is ginger, I say, that you offer this cup to our poor Queequeg
here."

"There is some sneaking Temperance Society movement about this
business," he suddenly added, now approaching Starbuck, who had just
come from forward. "Will you look at that kannakin, sir; smell of it,
if you please." Then watching the mate's countenance, he added, "The
steward, Mr. Starbuck, had the face to offer that calomel and jalap
to Queequeg, there, this instant off the whale. Is the steward an
apothecary, sir? and may I ask whether this is the sort of bitters by
which he blows back the life into a half-drowned man?"

"I trust not," said Starbuck, "it is poor stuff enough."

"Aye, aye, steward," cried Stubb, "we'll teach you to drug a
harpooneer; none of your apothecary's medicine here; you want to poison
us, do ye? You have got out insurances on our lives and want to murder
us all, and pocket the proceeds, do ye?"

"It was not me," cried Dough-Boy, "it was Aunt Charity that brought the
ginger on board; and bade me never give the harpooneers any spirits, but
only this ginger-jub--so she called it."

"Ginger-jub! you gingerly rascal! take that! and run along with ye
to the lockers, and get something better. I hope I do no wrong, Mr.
Starbuck. It is the captain's orders--grog for the harpooneer on a
whale."

"Enough," replied Starbuck, "only don't hit him again, but--"

"Oh, I never hurt when I hit, except when I hit a whale or something of
that sort; and this fellow's a weazel. What were you about saying, sir?"

"Only this: go down with him, and get what thou wantest thyself."

When Stubb reappeared, he came with a dark flask in one hand, and a sort
of tea-caddy in the other. The first contained strong spirits, and was
handed to Queequeg; the second was Aunt Charity's gift, and that was
freely given to the waves.



CHAPTER 73. Stubb and Flask Kill a Right Whale; and Then Have a Talk
Over Him.


It must be borne in mind that all this time we have a Sperm Whale's
prodigious head hanging to the Pequod's side. But we must let it
continue hanging there a while till we can get a chance to attend to it.
For the present other matters press, and the best we can do now for the
head, is to pray heaven the tackles may hold.

Now, during the past night and forenoon, the Pequod had gradually
drifted into a sea, which, by its occasional patches of yellow brit,
gave unusual tokens of the vicinity of Right Whales, a species of the
Leviathan that but few supposed to be at this particular time lurking
anywhere near. And though all hands commonly disdained the capture of
those inferior creatures; and though the Pequod was not commissioned to
cruise for them at all, and though she had passed numbers of them near
the Crozetts without lowering a boat; yet now that a Sperm Whale
had been brought alongside and beheaded, to the surprise of all, the
announcement was made that a Right Whale should be captured that day, if
opportunity offered.

Nor was this long wanting. Tall spouts were seen to leeward; and two
boats, Stubb's and Flask's, were detached in pursuit. Pulling further
and further away, they at last became almost invisible to the men at
the mast-head. But suddenly in the distance, they saw a great heap of
tumultuous white water, and soon after news came from aloft that one or
both the boats must be fast. An interval passed and the boats were in
plain sight, in the act of being dragged right towards the ship by the
towing whale. So close did the monster come to the hull, that at
first it seemed as if he meant it malice; but suddenly going down in a
maelstrom, within three rods of the planks, he wholly disappeared from
view, as if diving under the keel. "Cut, cut!" was the cry from the
ship to the boats, which, for one instant, seemed on the point of being
brought with a deadly dash against the vessel's side. But having plenty
of line yet in the tubs, and the whale not sounding very rapidly, they
paid out abundance of rope, and at the same time pulled with all their
might so as to get ahead of the ship. For a few minutes the struggle was
intensely critical; for while they still slacked out the tightened line
in one direction, and still plied their oars in another, the contending
strain threatened to take them under. But it was only a few feet advance
they sought to gain. And they stuck to it till they did gain it; when
instantly, a swift tremor was felt running like lightning along the
keel, as the strained line, scraping beneath the ship, suddenly rose
to view under her bows, snapping and quivering; and so flinging off its
drippings, that the drops fell like bits of broken glass on the water,
while the whale beyond also rose to sight, and once more the boats were
free to fly. But the fagged whale abated his speed, and blindly altering
his course, went round the stern of the ship towing the two boats after
him, so that they performed a complete circuit.

Meantime, they hauled more and more upon their lines, till close
flanking him on both sides, Stubb answered Flask with lance for
lance; and thus round and round the Pequod the battle went, while the
multitudes of sharks that had before swum round the Sperm Whale's body,
rushed to the fresh blood that was spilled, thirstily drinking at every
new gash, as the eager Israelites did at the new bursting fountains that
poured from the smitten rock.

At last his spout grew thick, and with a frightful roll and vomit, he
turned upon his back a corpse.

While the two headsmen were engaged in making fast cords to his flukes,
and in other ways getting the mass in readiness for towing, some
conversation ensued between them.

"I wonder what the old man wants with this lump of foul lard," said
Stubb, not without some disgust at the thought of having to do with so
ignoble a leviathan.

"Wants with it?" said Flask, coiling some spare line in the boat's bow,
"did you never hear that the ship which but once has a Sperm Whale's
head hoisted on her starboard side, and at the same time a Right Whale's
on the larboard; did you never hear, Stubb, that that ship can never
afterwards capsize?"

"Why not?

"I don't know, but I heard that gamboge ghost of a Fedallah saying so,
and he seems to know all about ships' charms. But I sometimes think
he'll charm the ship to no good at last. I don't half like that chap,
Stubb. Did you ever notice how that tusk of his is a sort of carved into
a snake's head, Stubb?"

"Sink him! I never look at him at all; but if ever I get a chance of a
dark night, and he standing hard by the bulwarks, and no one by; look
down there, Flask"--pointing into the sea with a peculiar motion of
both hands--"Aye, will I! Flask, I take that Fedallah to be the devil in
disguise. Do you believe that cock and bull story about his having been
stowed away on board ship? He's the devil, I say. The reason why you
don't see his tail, is because he tucks it up out of sight; he carries
it coiled away in his pocket, I guess. Blast him! now that I think of
it, he's always wanting oakum to stuff into the toes of his boots."

"He sleeps in his boots, don't he? He hasn't got any hammock; but I've
seen him lay of nights in a coil of rigging."

"No doubt, and it's because of his cursed tail; he coils it down, do ye
see, in the eye of the rigging."

"What's the old man have so much to do with him for?"

"Striking up a swap or a bargain, I suppose."

"Bargain?--about what?"

"Why, do ye see, the old man is hard bent after that White Whale, and
the devil there is trying to come round him, and get him to swap away
his silver watch, or his soul, or something of that sort, and then he'll
surrender Moby Dick."

"Pooh! Stubb, you are skylarking; how can Fedallah do that?"

"I don't know, Flask, but the devil is a curious chap, and a wicked
one, I tell ye. Why, they say as how he went a sauntering into the
old flag-ship once, switching his tail about devilish easy and
gentlemanlike, and inquiring if the old governor was at home. Well, he
was at home, and asked the devil what he wanted. The devil, switching
his hoofs, up and says, 'I want John.' 'What for?' says the old
governor. 'What business is that of yours,' says the devil, getting
mad,--'I want to use him.' 'Take him,' says the governor--and by the
Lord, Flask, if the devil didn't give John the Asiatic cholera before
he got through with him, I'll eat this whale in one mouthful. But look
sharp--ain't you all ready there? Well, then, pull ahead, and let's get
the whale alongside."

"I think I remember some such story as you were telling," said Flask,
when at last the two boats were slowly advancing with their burden
towards the ship, "but I can't remember where."

"Three Spaniards? Adventures of those three bloody-minded soladoes? Did
ye read it there, Flask? I guess ye did?"

"No: never saw such a book; heard of it, though. But now, tell me,
Stubb, do you suppose that that devil you was speaking of just now, was
the same you say is now on board the Pequod?"

"Am I the same man that helped kill this whale? Doesn't the devil live
for ever; who ever heard that the devil was dead? Did you ever see
any parson a wearing mourning for the devil? And if the devil has a
latch-key to get into the admiral's cabin, don't you suppose he can
crawl into a porthole? Tell me that, Mr. Flask?"

"How old do you suppose Fedallah is, Stubb?"

"Do you see that mainmast there?" pointing to the ship; "well, that's
the figure one; now take all the hoops in the Pequod's hold, and string
along in a row with that mast, for oughts, do you see; well, that
wouldn't begin to be Fedallah's age. Nor all the coopers in creation
couldn't show hoops enough to make oughts enough."

"But see here, Stubb, I thought you a little boasted just now, that you
meant to give Fedallah a sea-toss, if you got a good chance. Now, if
he's so old as all those hoops of yours come to, and if he is going
to live for ever, what good will it do to pitch him overboard--tell me
that?

"Give him a good ducking, anyhow."

"But he'd crawl back."

"Duck him again; and keep ducking him."

"Suppose he should take it into his head to duck you, though--yes, and
drown you--what then?"

"I should like to see him try it; I'd give him such a pair of black eyes
that he wouldn't dare to show his face in the admiral's cabin again for
a long while, let alone down in the orlop there, where he lives, and
hereabouts on the upper decks where he sneaks so much. Damn the devil,
Flask; so you suppose I'm afraid of the devil? Who's afraid of
him, except the old governor who daresn't catch him and put him in
double-darbies, as he deserves, but lets him go about kidnapping
people; aye, and signed a bond with him, that all the people the devil
kidnapped, he'd roast for him? There's a governor!"

"Do you suppose Fedallah wants to kidnap Captain Ahab?"

"Do I suppose it? You'll know it before long, Flask. But I am going now
to keep a sharp look-out on him; and if I see anything very suspicious
going on, I'll just take him by the nape of his neck, and say--Look
here, Beelzebub, you don't do it; and if he makes any fuss, by the Lord
I'll make a grab into his pocket for his tail, take it to the capstan,
and give him such a wrenching and heaving, that his tail will come short
off at the stump--do you see; and then, I rather guess when he finds
himself docked in that queer fashion, he'll sneak off without the poor
satisfaction of feeling his tail between his legs."

"And what will you do with the tail, Stubb?"

"Do with it? Sell it for an ox whip when we get home;--what else?"

"Now, do you mean what you say, and have been saying all along, Stubb?"

"Mean or not mean, here we are at the ship."

The boats were here hailed, to tow the whale on the larboard side, where
fluke chains and other necessaries were already prepared for securing
him.

"Didn't I tell you so?" said Flask; "yes, you'll soon see this right
whale's head hoisted up opposite that parmacetti's."

In good time, Flask's saying proved true. As before, the Pequod steeply
leaned over towards the sperm whale's head, now, by the counterpoise of
both heads, she regained her even keel; though sorely strained, you may
well believe. So, when on one side you hoist in Locke's head, you go
over that way; but now, on the other side, hoist in Kant's and you come
back again; but in very poor plight. Thus, some minds for ever keep
trimming boat. Oh, ye foolish! throw all these thunder-heads overboard,
and then you will float light and right.

In disposing of the body of a right whale, when brought alongside the
ship, the same preliminary proceedings commonly take place as in the
case of a sperm whale; only, in the latter instance, the head is cut off
whole, but in the former the lips and tongue are separately removed and
hoisted on deck, with all the well known black bone attached to what is
called the crown-piece. But nothing like this, in the present case,
had been done. The carcases of both whales had dropped astern; and
the head-laden ship not a little resembled a mule carrying a pair of
overburdening panniers.

Meantime, Fedallah was calmly eyeing the right whale's head, and ever
and anon glancing from the deep wrinkles there to the lines in his own
hand. And Ahab chanced so to stand, that the Parsee occupied his shadow;
while, if the Parsee's shadow was there at all it seemed only to
blend with, and lengthen Ahab's. As the crew toiled on, Laplandish
speculations were bandied among them, concerning all these passing
things.



CHAPTER 74. The Sperm Whale's Head--Contrasted View.


Here, now, are two great whales, laying their heads together; let us
join them, and lay together our own.

Of the grand order of folio leviathans, the Sperm Whale and the Right
Whale are by far the most noteworthy. They are the only whales regularly
hunted by man. To the Nantucketer, they present the two extremes of all
the known varieties of the whale. As the external difference between
them is mainly observable in their heads; and as a head of each is this
moment hanging from the Pequod's side; and as we may freely go from one
to the other, by merely stepping across the deck:--where, I should like
to know, will you obtain a better chance to study practical cetology
than here?

In the first place, you are struck by the general contrast between these
heads. Both are massive enough in all conscience; but there is a certain
mathematical symmetry in the Sperm Whale's which the Right Whale's sadly
lacks. There is more character in the Sperm Whale's head. As you behold
it, you involuntarily yield the immense superiority to him, in point
of pervading dignity. In the present instance, too, this dignity is
heightened by the pepper and salt colour of his head at the summit,
giving token of advanced age and large experience. In short, he is what
the fishermen technically call a "grey-headed whale."

Let us now note what is least dissimilar in these heads--namely, the two
most important organs, the eye and the ear. Far back on the side of
the head, and low down, near the angle of either whale's jaw, if you
narrowly search, you will at last see a lashless eye, which you would
fancy to be a young colt's eye; so out of all proportion is it to the
magnitude of the head.

Now, from this peculiar sideway position of the whale's eyes, it is
plain that he can never see an object which is exactly ahead, no more
than he can one exactly astern. In a word, the position of the whale's
eyes corresponds to that of a man's ears; and you may fancy, for
yourself, how it would fare with you, did you sideways survey objects
through your ears. You would find that you could only command some
thirty degrees of vision in advance of the straight side-line of sight;
and about thirty more behind it. If your bitterest foe were walking
straight towards you, with dagger uplifted in broad day, you would not
be able to see him, any more than if he were stealing upon you from
behind. In a word, you would have two backs, so to speak; but, at the
same time, also, two fronts (side fronts): for what is it that makes the
front of a man--what, indeed, but his eyes?

Moreover, while in most other animals that I can now think of, the eyes
are so planted as imperceptibly to blend their visual power, so as to
produce one picture and not two to the brain; the peculiar position of
the whale's eyes, effectually divided as they are by many cubic feet of
solid head, which towers between them like a great mountain separating
two lakes in valleys; this, of course, must wholly separate the
impressions which each independent organ imparts. The whale, therefore,
must see one distinct picture on this side, and another distinct
picture on that side; while all between must be profound darkness and
nothingness to him. Man may, in effect, be said to look out on the world
from a sentry-box with two joined sashes for his window. But with the
whale, these two sashes are separately inserted, making two distinct
windows, but sadly impairing the view. This peculiarity of the whale's
eyes is a thing always to be borne in mind in the fishery; and to be
remembered by the reader in some subsequent scenes.

A curious and most puzzling question might be started concerning this
visual matter as touching the Leviathan. But I must be content with a
hint. So long as a man's eyes are open in the light, the act of seeing
is involuntary; that is, he cannot then help mechanically seeing
whatever objects are before him. Nevertheless, any one's experience
will teach him, that though he can take in an undiscriminating sweep of
things at one glance, it is quite impossible for him, attentively,
and completely, to examine any two things--however large or however
small--at one and the same instant of time; never mind if they lie side
by side and touch each other. But if you now come to separate these two
objects, and surround each by a circle of profound darkness; then, in
order to see one of them, in such a manner as to bring your mind to
bear on it, the other will be utterly excluded from your contemporary
consciousness. How is it, then, with the whale? True, both his eyes,
in themselves, must simultaneously act; but is his brain so much more
comprehensive, combining, and subtle than man's, that he can at the same
moment of time attentively examine two distinct prospects, one on one
side of him, and the other in an exactly opposite direction? If he
can, then is it as marvellous a thing in him, as if a man were able
simultaneously to go through the demonstrations of two distinct problems
in Euclid. Nor, strictly investigated, is there any incongruity in this
comparison.

It may be but an idle whim, but it has always seemed to me, that the
extraordinary vacillations of movement displayed by some whales when
beset by three or four boats; the timidity and liability to queer
frights, so common to such whales; I think that all this indirectly
proceeds from the helpless perplexity of volition, in which their
divided and diametrically opposite powers of vision must involve them.

But the ear of the whale is full as curious as the eye. If you are an
entire stranger to their race, you might hunt over these two heads
for hours, and never discover that organ. The ear has no external leaf
whatever; and into the hole itself you can hardly insert a quill, so
wondrously minute is it. It is lodged a little behind the eye. With
respect to their ears, this important difference is to be observed
between the sperm whale and the right. While the ear of the former has
an external opening, that of the latter is entirely and evenly covered
over with a membrane, so as to be quite imperceptible from without.

Is it not curious, that so vast a being as the whale should see the
world through so small an eye, and hear the thunder through an ear which
is smaller than a hare's? But if his eyes were broad as the lens of
Herschel's great telescope; and his ears capacious as the porches of
cathedrals; would that make him any longer of sight, or sharper of
hearing? Not at all.--Why then do you try to "enlarge" your mind?
Subtilize it.

Let us now with whatever levers and steam-engines we have at hand, cant
over the sperm whale's head, that it may lie bottom up; then, ascending
by a ladder to the summit, have a peep down the mouth; and were it not
that the body is now completely separated from it, with a lantern we
might descend into the great Kentucky Mammoth Cave of his stomach. But
let us hold on here by this tooth, and look about us where we are. What
a really beautiful and chaste-looking mouth! from floor to ceiling,
lined, or rather papered with a glistening white membrane, glossy as
bridal satins.

But come out now, and look at this portentous lower jaw, which seems
like the long narrow lid of an immense snuff-box, with the hinge at one
end, instead of one side. If you pry it up, so as to get it overhead,
and expose its rows of teeth, it seems a terrific portcullis; and such,
alas! it proves to many a poor wight in the fishery, upon whom these
spikes fall with impaling force. But far more terrible is it to behold,
when fathoms down in the sea, you see some sulky whale, floating there
suspended, with his prodigious jaw, some fifteen feet long, hanging
straight down at right-angles with his body, for all the world like a
ship's jib-boom. This whale is not dead; he is only dispirited; out of
sorts, perhaps; hypochondriac; and so supine, that the hinges of his
jaw have relaxed, leaving him there in that ungainly sort of plight, a
reproach to all his tribe, who must, no doubt, imprecate lock-jaws upon
him.

In most cases this lower jaw--being easily unhinged by a practised
artist--is disengaged and hoisted on deck for the purpose of extracting
the ivory teeth, and furnishing a supply of that hard white whalebone
with which the fishermen fashion all sorts of curious articles,
including canes, umbrella-stocks, and handles to riding-whips.

With a long, weary hoist the jaw is dragged on board, as if it were an
anchor; and when the proper time comes--some few days after the other
work--Queequeg, Daggoo, and Tashtego, being all accomplished dentists,
are set to drawing teeth. With a keen cutting-spade, Queequeg lances
the gums; then the jaw is lashed down to ringbolts, and a tackle being
rigged from aloft, they drag out these teeth, as Michigan oxen drag
stumps of old oaks out of wild wood lands. There are generally forty-two
teeth in all; in old whales, much worn down, but undecayed; nor filled
after our artificial fashion. The jaw is afterwards sawn into slabs, and
piled away like joists for building houses.



CHAPTER 75. The Right Whale's Head--Contrasted View.


Crossing the deck, let us now have a good long look at the Right Whale's
head.

As in general shape the noble Sperm Whale's head may be compared to a
Roman war-chariot (especially in front, where it is so broadly rounded);
so, at a broad view, the Right Whale's head bears a rather inelegant
resemblance to a gigantic galliot-toed shoe. Two hundred years ago an
old Dutch voyager likened its shape to that of a shoemaker's last. And
in this same last or shoe, that old woman of the nursery tale, with
the swarming brood, might very comfortably be lodged, she and all her
progeny.

But as you come nearer to this great head it begins to assume different
aspects, according to your point of view. If you stand on its summit and
look at these two F-shaped spoutholes, you would take the whole head
for an enormous bass-viol, and these spiracles, the apertures in its
sounding-board. Then, again, if you fix your eye upon this strange,
crested, comb-like incrustation on the top of the mass--this green,
barnacled thing, which the Greenlanders call the "crown," and the
Southern fishers the "bonnet" of the Right Whale; fixing your eyes
solely on this, you would take the head for the trunk of some huge oak,
with a bird's nest in its crotch. At any rate, when you watch those live
crabs that nestle here on this bonnet, such an idea will be almost
sure to occur to you; unless, indeed, your fancy has been fixed by the
technical term "crown" also bestowed upon it; in which case you will
take great interest in thinking how this mighty monster is actually a
diademed king of the sea, whose green crown has been put together for
him in this marvellous manner. But if this whale be a king, he is a very
sulky looking fellow to grace a diadem. Look at that hanging lower lip!
what a huge sulk and pout is there! a sulk and pout, by carpenter's
measurement, about twenty feet long and five feet deep; a sulk and pout
that will yield you some 500 gallons of oil and more.

A great pity, now, that this unfortunate whale should be hare-lipped.
The fissure is about a foot across. Probably the mother during an
important interval was sailing down the Peruvian coast, when earthquakes
caused the beach to gape. Over this lip, as over a slippery threshold,
we now slide into the mouth. Upon my word were I at Mackinaw, I should
take this to be the inside of an Indian wigwam. Good Lord! is this the
road that Jonah went? The roof is about twelve feet high, and runs to a
pretty sharp angle, as if there were a regular ridge-pole there; while
these ribbed, arched, hairy sides, present us with those wondrous, half
vertical, scimetar-shaped slats of whalebone, say three hundred on a
side, which depending from the upper part of the head or crown
bone, form those Venetian blinds which have elsewhere been cursorily
mentioned. The edges of these bones are fringed with hairy fibres,
through which the Right Whale strains the water, and in whose
intricacies he retains the small fish, when openmouthed he goes through
the seas of brit in feeding time. In the central blinds of bone, as they
stand in their natural order, there are certain curious marks, curves,
hollows, and ridges, whereby some whalemen calculate the creature's age,
as the age of an oak by its circular rings. Though the certainty of this
criterion is far from demonstrable, yet it has the savor of analogical
probability. At any rate, if we yield to it, we must grant a far greater
age to the Right Whale than at first glance will seem reasonable.

In old times, there seem to have prevailed the most curious fancies
concerning these blinds. One voyager in Purchas calls them the wondrous
"whiskers" inside of the whale's mouth;* another, "hogs' bristles"; a
third old gentleman in Hackluyt uses the following elegant language:
"There are about two hundred and fifty fins growing on each side of his
upper CHOP, which arch over his tongue on each side of his mouth."


*This reminds us that the Right Whale really has a sort of whisker, or
rather a moustache, consisting of a few scattered white hairs on the
upper part of the outer end of the lower jaw. Sometimes these
tufts impart a rather brigandish expression to his otherwise solemn
countenance.


As every one knows, these same "hogs' bristles," "fins," "whiskers,"
"blinds," or whatever you please, furnish to the ladies their busks and
other stiffening contrivances. But in this particular, the demand has
long been on the decline. It was in Queen Anne's time that the bone was
in its glory, the farthingale being then all the fashion. And as those
ancient dames moved about gaily, though in the jaws of the whale, as
you may say; even so, in a shower, with the like thoughtlessness, do we
nowadays fly under the same jaws for protection; the umbrella being a
tent spread over the same bone.

But now forget all about blinds and whiskers for a moment, and, standing
in the Right Whale's mouth, look around you afresh. Seeing all these
colonnades of bone so methodically ranged about, would you not think
you were inside of the great Haarlem organ, and gazing upon its
thousand pipes? For a carpet to the organ we have a rug of the softest
Turkey--the tongue, which is glued, as it were, to the floor of the
mouth. It is very fat and tender, and apt to tear in pieces in hoisting
it on deck. This particular tongue now before us; at a passing glance I
should say it was a six-barreler; that is, it will yield you about that
amount of oil.

Ere this, you must have plainly seen the truth of what I started
with--that the Sperm Whale and the Right Whale have almost entirely
different heads. To sum up, then: in the Right Whale's there is no great
well of sperm; no ivory teeth at all; no long, slender mandible of a
lower jaw, like the Sperm Whale's. Nor in the Sperm Whale are there any
of those blinds of bone; no huge lower lip; and scarcely anything of a
tongue. Again, the Right Whale has two external spout-holes, the Sperm
Whale only one.

Look your last, now, on these venerable hooded heads, while they yet lie
together; for one will soon sink, unrecorded, in the sea; the other will
not be very long in following.

Can you catch the expression of the Sperm Whale's there? It is the same
he died with, only some of the longer wrinkles in the forehead seem
now faded away. I think his broad brow to be full of a prairie-like
placidity, born of a speculative indifference as to death. But mark the
other head's expression. See that amazing lower lip, pressed by accident
against the vessel's side, so as firmly to embrace the jaw. Does not
this whole head seem to speak of an enormous practical resolution in
facing death? This Right Whale I take to have been a Stoic; the Sperm
Whale, a Platonian, who might have taken up Spinoza in his latter years.



CHAPTER 76. The Battering-Ram.


Ere quitting, for the nonce, the Sperm Whale's head, I would have
you, as a sensible physiologist, simply--particularly remark its front
aspect, in all its compacted collectedness. I would have you investigate
it now with the sole view of forming to yourself some unexaggerated,
intelligent estimate of whatever battering-ram power may be lodged
there. Here is a vital point; for you must either satisfactorily settle
this matter with yourself, or for ever remain an infidel as to one of
the most appalling, but not the less true events, perhaps anywhere to be
found in all recorded history.

You observe that in the ordinary swimming position of the Sperm Whale,
the front of his head presents an almost wholly vertical plane to the
water; you observe that the lower part of that front slopes considerably
backwards, so as to furnish more of a retreat for the long socket which
receives the boom-like lower jaw; you observe that the mouth is entirely
under the head, much in the same way, indeed, as though your own mouth
were entirely under your chin. Moreover you observe that the whale has
no external nose; and that what nose he has--his spout hole--is on the
top of his head; you observe that his eyes and ears are at the sides
of his head, nearly one third of his entire length from the front.
Wherefore, you must now have perceived that the front of the Sperm
Whale's head is a dead, blind wall, without a single organ or tender
prominence of any sort whatsoever. Furthermore, you are now to consider
that only in the extreme, lower, backward sloping part of the front of
the head, is there the slightest vestige of bone; and not till you
get near twenty feet from the forehead do you come to the full cranial
development. So that this whole enormous boneless mass is as one wad.
Finally, though, as will soon be revealed, its contents partly comprise
the most delicate oil; yet, you are now to be apprised of the nature of
the substance which so impregnably invests all that apparent effeminacy.
In some previous place I have described to you how the blubber wraps the
body of the whale, as the rind wraps an orange. Just so with the head;
but with this difference: about the head this envelope, though not so
thick, is of a boneless toughness, inestimable by any man who has not
handled it. The severest pointed harpoon, the sharpest lance darted by
the strongest human arm, impotently rebounds from it. It is as though
the forehead of the Sperm Whale were paved with horses' hoofs. I do not
think that any sensation lurks in it.

Bethink yourself also of another thing. When two large, loaded Indiamen
chance to crowd and crush towards each other in the docks, what do the
sailors do? They do not suspend between them, at the point of coming
contact, any merely hard substance, like iron or wood. No, they hold
there a large, round wad of tow and cork, enveloped in the thickest
and toughest of ox-hide. That bravely and uninjured takes the jam which
would have snapped all their oaken handspikes and iron crow-bars. By
itself this sufficiently illustrates the obvious fact I drive at. But
supplementary to this, it has hypothetically occurred to me, that
as ordinary fish possess what is called a swimming bladder in them,
capable, at will, of distension or contraction; and as the Sperm Whale,
as far as I know, has no such provision in him; considering, too,
the otherwise inexplicable manner in which he now depresses his head
altogether beneath the surface, and anon swims with it high elevated out
of the water; considering the unobstructed elasticity of its envelope;
considering the unique interior of his head; it has hypothetically
occurred to me, I say, that those mystical lung-celled honeycombs there
may possibly have some hitherto unknown and unsuspected connexion with
the outer air, so as to be susceptible to atmospheric distension and
contraction. If this be so, fancy the irresistibleness of that might, to
which the most impalpable and destructive of all elements contributes.

Now, mark. Unerringly impelling this dead, impregnable, uninjurable
wall, and this most buoyant thing within; there swims behind it all a
mass of tremendous life, only to be adequately estimated as piled wood
is--by the cord; and all obedient to one volition, as the smallest
insect. So that when I shall hereafter detail to you all the
specialities and concentrations of potency everywhere lurking in this
expansive monster; when I shall show you some of his more inconsiderable
braining feats; I trust you will have renounced all ignorant
incredulity, and be ready to abide by this; that though the Sperm Whale
stove a passage through the Isthmus of Darien, and mixed the Atlantic
with the Pacific, you would not elevate one hair of your eye-brow. For
unless you own the whale, you are but a provincial and sentimentalist
in Truth. But clear Truth is a thing for salamander giants only to
encounter; how small the chances for the provincials then? What befell
the weakling youth lifting the dread goddess's veil at Lais?



CHAPTER 77. The Great Heidelburgh Tun.


Now comes the Baling of the Case. But to comprehend it aright, you must
know something of the curious internal structure of the thing operated
upon.

Regarding the Sperm Whale's head as a solid oblong, you may, on an
inclined plane, sideways divide it into two quoins,* whereof the lower
is the bony structure, forming the cranium and jaws, and the upper an
unctuous mass wholly free from bones; its broad forward end forming the
expanded vertical apparent forehead of the whale. At the middle of the
forehead horizontally subdivide this upper quoin, and then you have two
almost equal parts, which before were naturally divided by an internal
wall of a thick tendinous substance.


*Quoin is not a Euclidean term. It belongs to the pure nautical
mathematics. I know not that it has been defined before. A quoin is a
solid which differs from a wedge in having its sharp end formed by the
steep inclination of one side, instead of the mutual tapering of both
sides.


The lower subdivided part, called the junk, is one immense honeycomb
of oil, formed by the crossing and recrossing, into ten thousand
infiltrated cells, of tough elastic white fibres throughout its whole
extent. The upper part, known as the Case, may be regarded as the great
Heidelburgh Tun of the Sperm Whale. And as that famous great tierce is
mystically carved in front, so the whale's vast plaited forehead forms
innumerable strange devices for the emblematical adornment of his
wondrous tun. Moreover, as that of Heidelburgh was always replenished
with the most excellent of the wines of the Rhenish valleys, so the tun
of the whale contains by far the most precious of all his oily vintages;
namely, the highly-prized spermaceti, in its absolutely pure, limpid,
and odoriferous state. Nor is this precious substance found unalloyed
in any other part of the creature. Though in life it remains perfectly
fluid, yet, upon exposure to the air, after death, it soon begins to
concrete; sending forth beautiful crystalline shoots, as when the
first thin delicate ice is just forming in water. A large whale's
case generally yields about five hundred gallons of sperm, though from
unavoidable circumstances, considerable of it is spilled, leaks, and
dribbles away, or is otherwise irrevocably lost in the ticklish business
of securing what you can.

I know not with what fine and costly material the Heidelburgh Tun
was coated within, but in superlative richness that coating could not
possibly have compared with the silken pearl-coloured membrane, like the
lining of a fine pelisse, forming the inner surface of the Sperm Whale's
case.

It will have been seen that the Heidelburgh Tun of the Sperm Whale
embraces the entire length of the entire top of the head; and since--as
has been elsewhere set forth--the head embraces one third of the whole
length of the creature, then setting that length down at eighty feet for
a good sized whale, you have more than twenty-six feet for the depth
of the tun, when it is lengthwise hoisted up and down against a ship's
side.

As in decapitating the whale, the operator's instrument is brought close
to the spot where an entrance is subsequently forced into the spermaceti
magazine; he has, therefore, to be uncommonly heedful, lest a careless,
untimely stroke should invade the sanctuary and wastingly let out its
invaluable contents. It is this decapitated end of the head, also, which
is at last elevated out of the water, and retained in that position by
the enormous cutting tackles, whose hempen combinations, on one side,
make quite a wilderness of ropes in that quarter.

Thus much being said, attend now, I pray you, to that marvellous and--in
this particular instance--almost fatal operation whereby the Sperm
Whale's great Heidelburgh Tun is tapped.



CHAPTER 78. Cistern and Buckets.


Nimble as a cat, Tashtego mounts aloft; and without altering his erect
posture, runs straight out upon the overhanging mainyard-arm, to the
part where it exactly projects over the hoisted Tun. He has carried
with him a light tackle called a whip, consisting of only two parts,
travelling through a single-sheaved block. Securing this block, so that
it hangs down from the yard-arm, he swings one end of the rope, till it
is caught and firmly held by a hand on deck. Then, hand-over-hand, down
the other part, the Indian drops through the air, till dexterously he
lands on the summit of the head. There--still high elevated above the
rest of the company, to whom he vivaciously cries--he seems some Turkish
Muezzin calling the good people to prayers from the top of a tower. A
short-handled sharp spade being sent up to him, he diligently searches
for the proper place to begin breaking into the Tun. In this business
he proceeds very heedfully, like a treasure-hunter in some old house,
sounding the walls to find where the gold is masoned in. By the time
this cautious search is over, a stout iron-bound bucket, precisely like
a well-bucket, has been attached to one end of the whip; while the other
end, being stretched across the deck, is there held by two or three
alert hands. These last now hoist the bucket within grasp of the Indian,
to whom another person has reached up a very long pole. Inserting this
pole into the bucket, Tashtego downward guides the bucket into the Tun,
till it entirely disappears; then giving the word to the seamen at the
whip, up comes the bucket again, all bubbling like a dairy-maid's pail
of new milk. Carefully lowered from its height, the full-freighted
vessel is caught by an appointed hand, and quickly emptied into a large
tub. Then remounting aloft, it again goes through the same round until
the deep cistern will yield no more. Towards the end, Tashtego has to
ram his long pole harder and harder, and deeper and deeper into the Tun,
until some twenty feet of the pole have gone down.

Now, the people of the Pequod had been baling some time in this way;
several tubs had been filled with the fragrant sperm; when all at once a
queer accident happened. Whether it was that Tashtego, that wild Indian,
was so heedless and reckless as to let go for a moment his one-handed
hold on the great cabled tackles suspending the head; or whether the
place where he stood was so treacherous and oozy; or whether the Evil
One himself would have it to fall out so, without stating his particular
reasons; how it was exactly, there is no telling now; but, on a sudden,
as the eightieth or ninetieth bucket came suckingly up--my God! poor
Tashtego--like the twin reciprocating bucket in a veritable well,
dropped head-foremost down into this great Tun of Heidelburgh, and with
a horrible oily gurgling, went clean out of sight!

"Man overboard!" cried Daggoo, who amid the general consternation first
came to his senses. "Swing the bucket this way!" and putting one foot
into it, so as the better to secure his slippery hand-hold on the whip
itself, the hoisters ran him high up to the top of the head, almost
before Tashtego could have reached its interior bottom. Meantime,
there was a terrible tumult. Looking over the side, they saw the before
lifeless head throbbing and heaving just below the surface of the sea,
as if that moment seized with some momentous idea; whereas it was only
the poor Indian unconsciously revealing by those struggles the perilous
depth to which he had sunk.

At this instant, while Daggoo, on the summit of the head, was clearing
the whip--which had somehow got foul of the great cutting tackles--a
sharp cracking noise was heard; and to the unspeakable horror of all,
one of the two enormous hooks suspending the head tore out, and with
a vast vibration the enormous mass sideways swung, till the drunk ship
reeled and shook as if smitten by an iceberg. The one remaining hook,
upon which the entire strain now depended, seemed every instant to be
on the point of giving way; an event still more likely from the violent
motions of the head.

"Come down, come down!" yelled the seamen to Daggoo, but with one hand
holding on to the heavy tackles, so that if the head should drop, he
would still remain suspended; the negro having cleared the foul line,
rammed down the bucket into the now collapsed well, meaning that the
buried harpooneer should grasp it, and so be hoisted out.

"In heaven's name, man," cried Stubb, "are you ramming home a cartridge
there?--Avast! How will that help him; jamming that iron-bound bucket on
top of his head? Avast, will ye!"

"Stand clear of the tackle!" cried a voice like the bursting of a
rocket.

Almost in the same instant, with a thunder-boom, the enormous mass
dropped into the sea, like Niagara's Table-Rock into the whirlpool; the
suddenly relieved hull rolled away from it, to far down her glittering
copper; and all caught their breath, as half swinging--now over the
sailors' heads, and now over the water--Daggoo, through a thick mist of
spray, was dimly beheld clinging to the pendulous tackles, while poor,
buried-alive Tashtego was sinking utterly down to the bottom of the sea!
But hardly had the blinding vapour cleared away, when a naked figure
with a boarding-sword in his hand, was for one swift moment seen
hovering over the bulwarks. The next, a loud splash announced that my
brave Queequeg had dived to the rescue. One packed rush was made to the
side, and every eye counted every ripple, as moment followed moment, and
no sign of either the sinker or the diver could be seen. Some hands now
jumped into a boat alongside, and pushed a little off from the ship.

"Ha! ha!" cried Daggoo, all at once, from his now quiet, swinging perch
overhead; and looking further off from the side, we saw an arm thrust
upright from the blue waves; a sight strange to see, as an arm thrust
forth from the grass over a grave.

"Both! both!--it is both!"--cried Daggoo again with a joyful shout; and
soon after, Queequeg was seen boldly striking out with one hand, and
with the other clutching the long hair of the Indian. Drawn into the
waiting boat, they were quickly brought to the deck; but Tashtego was
long in coming to, and Queequeg did not look very brisk.

Now, how had this noble rescue been accomplished? Why, diving after
the slowly descending head, Queequeg with his keen sword had made
side lunges near its bottom, so as to scuttle a large hole there; then
dropping his sword, had thrust his long arm far inwards and upwards,
and so hauled out poor Tash by the head. He averred, that upon first
thrusting in for him, a leg was presented; but well knowing that that
was not as it ought to be, and might occasion great trouble;--he had
thrust back the leg, and by a dexterous heave and toss, had wrought a
somerset upon the Indian; so that with the next trial, he came forth in
the good old way--head foremost. As for the great head itself, that was
doing as well as could be expected.

And thus, through the courage and great skill in obstetrics of Queequeg,
the deliverance, or rather, delivery of Tashtego, was successfully
accomplished, in the teeth, too, of the most untoward and apparently
hopeless impediments; which is a lesson by no means to be forgotten.
Midwifery should be taught in the same course with fencing and boxing,
riding and rowing.

I know that this queer adventure of the Gay-Header's will be sure to
seem incredible to some landsmen, though they themselves may have either
seen or heard of some one's falling into a cistern ashore; an accident
which not seldom happens, and with much less reason too than the
Indian's, considering the exceeding slipperiness of the curb of the
Sperm Whale's well.

But, peradventure, it may be sagaciously urged, how is this? We thought
the tissued, infiltrated head of the Sperm Whale, was the lightest and
most corky part about him; and yet thou makest it sink in an element of
a far greater specific gravity than itself. We have thee there. Not at
all, but I have ye; for at the time poor Tash fell in, the case had been
nearly emptied of its lighter contents, leaving little but the dense
tendinous wall of the well--a double welded, hammered substance, as I
have before said, much heavier than the sea water, and a lump of which
sinks in it like lead almost. But the tendency to rapid sinking in this
substance was in the present instance materially counteracted by the
other parts of the head remaining undetached from it, so that it sank
very slowly and deliberately indeed, affording Queequeg a fair chance
for performing his agile obstetrics on the run, as you may say. Yes, it
was a running delivery, so it was.

Now, had Tashtego perished in that head, it had been a very precious
perishing; smothered in the very whitest and daintiest of fragrant
spermaceti; coffined, hearsed, and tombed in the secret inner chamber
and sanctum sanctorum of the whale. Only one sweeter end can readily be
recalled--the delicious death of an Ohio honey-hunter, who seeking honey
in the crotch of a hollow tree, found such exceeding store of it, that
leaning too far over, it sucked him in, so that he died embalmed.
How many, think ye, have likewise fallen into Plato's honey head, and
sweetly perished there?



CHAPTER 79. The Prairie.


To scan the lines of his face, or feel the bumps on the head of this
Leviathan; this is a thing which no Physiognomist or Phrenologist has as
yet undertaken. Such an enterprise would seem almost as hopeful as for
Lavater to have scrutinized the wrinkles on the Rock of Gibraltar,
or for Gall to have mounted a ladder and manipulated the Dome of the
Pantheon. Still, in that famous work of his, Lavater not only treats
of the various faces of men, but also attentively studies the faces
of horses, birds, serpents, and fish; and dwells in detail upon the
modifications of expression discernible therein. Nor have Gall and
his disciple Spurzheim failed to throw out some hints touching the
phrenological characteristics of other beings than man. Therefore,
though I am but ill qualified for a pioneer, in the application of these
two semi-sciences to the whale, I will do my endeavor. I try all things;
I achieve what I can.

Physiognomically regarded, the Sperm Whale is an anomalous creature.
He has no proper nose. And since the nose is the central and most
conspicuous of the features; and since it perhaps most modifies and
finally controls their combined expression; hence it would seem that its
entire absence, as an external appendage, must very largely affect
the countenance of the whale. For as in landscape gardening, a spire,
cupola, monument, or tower of some sort, is deemed almost indispensable
to the completion of the scene; so no face can be physiognomically in
keeping without the elevated open-work belfry of the nose. Dash the nose
from Phidias's marble Jove, and what a sorry remainder! Nevertheless,
Leviathan is of so mighty a magnitude, all his proportions are so
stately, that the same deficiency which in the sculptured Jove were
hideous, in him is no blemish at all. Nay, it is an added grandeur. A
nose to the whale would have been impertinent. As on your physiognomical
voyage you sail round his vast head in your jolly-boat, your noble
conceptions of him are never insulted by the reflection that he has a
nose to be pulled. A pestilent conceit, which so often will insist upon
obtruding even when beholding the mightiest royal beadle on his throne.

In some particulars, perhaps the most imposing physiognomical view to
be had of the Sperm Whale, is that of the full front of his head. This
aspect is sublime.

In thought, a fine human brow is like the East when troubled with the
morning. In the repose of the pasture, the curled brow of the bull has a
touch of the grand in it. Pushing heavy cannon up mountain defiles, the
elephant's brow is majestic. Human or animal, the mystical brow is as
that great golden seal affixed by the German Emperors to their decrees.
It signifies--"God: done this day by my hand." But in most creatures,
nay in man himself, very often the brow is but a mere strip of alpine
land lying along the snow line. Few are the foreheads which like
Shakespeare's or Melancthon's rise so high, and descend so low, that the
eyes themselves seem clear, eternal, tideless mountain lakes; and all
above them in the forehead's wrinkles, you seem to track the antlered
thoughts descending there to drink, as the Highland hunters track the
snow prints of the deer. But in the great Sperm Whale, this high and
mighty god-like dignity inherent in the brow is so immensely amplified,
that gazing on it, in that full front view, you feel the Deity and the
dread powers more forcibly than in beholding any other object in living
nature. For you see no one point precisely; not one distinct feature is
revealed; no nose, eyes, ears, or mouth; no face; he has none, proper;
nothing but that one broad firmament of a forehead, pleated with
riddles; dumbly lowering with the doom of boats, and ships, and men.
Nor, in profile, does this wondrous brow diminish; though that way
viewed its grandeur does not domineer upon you so. In profile, you
plainly perceive that horizontal, semi-crescentic depression in the
forehead's middle, which, in man, is Lavater's mark of genius.

But how? Genius in the Sperm Whale? Has the Sperm Whale ever written
a book, spoken a speech? No, his great genius is declared in his
doing nothing particular to prove it. It is moreover declared in his
pyramidical silence. And this reminds me that had the great Sperm Whale
been known to the young Orient World, he would have been deified by
their child-magian thoughts. They deified the crocodile of the Nile,
because the crocodile is tongueless; and the Sperm Whale has no
tongue, or at least it is so exceedingly small, as to be incapable of
protrusion. If hereafter any highly cultured, poetical nation shall lure
back to their birth-right, the merry May-day gods of old; and livingly
enthrone them again in the now egotistical sky; in the now unhaunted
hill; then be sure, exalted to Jove's high seat, the great Sperm Whale
shall lord it.

Champollion deciphered the wrinkled granite hieroglyphics. But there is
no Champollion to decipher the Egypt of every man's and every being's
face. Physiognomy, like every other human science, is but a passing
fable. If then, Sir William Jones, who read in thirty languages, could
not read the simplest peasant's face in its profounder and more subtle
meanings, how may unlettered Ishmael hope to read the awful Chaldee of
the Sperm Whale's brow? I but put that brow before you. Read it if you
can.



CHAPTER 80. The Nut.


If the Sperm Whale be physiognomically a Sphinx, to the phrenologist his
brain seems that geometrical circle which it is impossible to square.

In the full-grown creature the skull will measure at least twenty feet
in length. Unhinge the lower jaw, and the side view of this skull is as
the side of a moderately inclined plane resting throughout on a level
base. But in life--as we have elsewhere seen--this inclined plane is
angularly filled up, and almost squared by the enormous superincumbent
mass of the junk and sperm. At the high end the skull forms a crater to
bed that part of the mass; while under the long floor of this crater--in
another cavity seldom exceeding ten inches in length and as many in
depth--reposes the mere handful of this monster's brain. The brain is at
least twenty feet from his apparent forehead in life; it is hidden
away behind its vast outworks, like the innermost citadel within the
amplified fortifications of Quebec. So like a choice casket is it
secreted in him, that I have known some whalemen who peremptorily deny
that the Sperm Whale has any other brain than that palpable semblance
of one formed by the cubic-yards of his sperm magazine. Lying in strange
folds, courses, and convolutions, to their apprehensions, it seems more
in keeping with the idea of his general might to regard that mystic part
of him as the seat of his intelligence.

It is plain, then, that phrenologically the head of this Leviathan, in
the creature's living intact state, is an entire delusion. As for his
true brain, you can then see no indications of it, nor feel any. The
whale, like all things that are mighty, wears a false brow to the common
world.

If you unload his skull of its spermy heaps and then take a rear view
of its rear end, which is the high end, you will be struck by its
resemblance to the human skull, beheld in the same situation, and from
the same point of view. Indeed, place this reversed skull (scaled down
to the human magnitude) among a plate of men's skulls, and you would
involuntarily confound it with them; and remarking the depressions on
one part of its summit, in phrenological phrase you would say--This
man had no self-esteem, and no veneration. And by those negations,
considered along with the affirmative fact of his prodigious bulk and
power, you can best form to yourself the truest, though not the most
exhilarating conception of what the most exalted potency is.

But if from the comparative dimensions of the whale's proper brain, you
deem it incapable of being adequately charted, then I have another idea
for you. If you attentively regard almost any quadruped's spine,
you will be struck with the resemblance of its vertebrae to a strung
necklace of dwarfed skulls, all bearing rudimental resemblance to the
skull proper. It is a German conceit, that the vertebrae are absolutely
undeveloped skulls. But the curious external resemblance, I take it
the Germans were not the first men to perceive. A foreign friend once
pointed it out to me, in the skeleton of a foe he had slain, and with
the vertebrae of which he was inlaying, in a sort of basso-relievo, the
beaked prow of his canoe. Now, I consider that the phrenologists have
omitted an important thing in not pushing their investigations from the
cerebellum through the spinal canal. For I believe that much of a man's
character will be found betokened in his backbone. I would rather feel
your spine than your skull, whoever you are. A thin joist of a spine
never yet upheld a full and noble soul. I rejoice in my spine, as in the
firm audacious staff of that flag which I fling half out to the world.

Apply this spinal branch of phrenology to the Sperm Whale. His cranial
cavity is continuous with the first neck-vertebra; and in that vertebra
the bottom of the spinal canal will measure ten inches across, being
eight in height, and of a triangular figure with the base downwards. As
it passes through the remaining vertebrae the canal tapers in size, but
for a considerable distance remains of large capacity. Now, of course,
this canal is filled with much the same strangely fibrous substance--the
spinal cord--as the brain; and directly communicates with the brain.
And what is still more, for many feet after emerging from the brain's
cavity, the spinal cord remains of an undecreasing girth, almost
equal to that of the brain. Under all these circumstances, would it be
unreasonable to survey and map out the whale's spine phrenologically?
For, viewed in this light, the wonderful comparative smallness of his
brain proper is more than compensated by the wonderful comparative
magnitude of his spinal cord.

But leaving this hint to operate as it may with the phrenologists, I
would merely assume the spinal theory for a moment, in reference to the
Sperm Whale's hump. This august hump, if I mistake not, rises over one
of the larger vertebrae, and is, therefore, in some sort, the outer
convex mould of it. From its relative situation then, I should call this
high hump the organ of firmness or indomitableness in the Sperm Whale.
And that the great monster is indomitable, you will yet have reason to
know.



CHAPTER 81. The Pequod Meets The Virgin.


The predestinated day arrived, and we duly met the ship Jungfrau, Derick
De Deer, master, of Bremen.

At one time the greatest whaling people in the world, the Dutch and
Germans are now among the least; but here and there at very wide
intervals of latitude and longitude, you still occasionally meet with
their flag in the Pacific.

For some reason, the Jungfrau seemed quite eager to pay her respects.
While yet some distance from the Pequod, she rounded to, and dropping a
boat, her captain was impelled towards us, impatiently standing in the
bows instead of the stern.

"What has he in his hand there?" cried Starbuck, pointing to something
wavingly held by the German. "Impossible!--a lamp-feeder!"

"Not that," said Stubb, "no, no, it's a coffee-pot, Mr. Starbuck; he's
coming off to make us our coffee, is the Yarman; don't you see that big
tin can there alongside of him?--that's his boiling water. Oh! he's all
right, is the Yarman."

"Go along with you," cried Flask, "it's a lamp-feeder and an oil-can.
He's out of oil, and has come a-begging."

However curious it may seem for an oil-ship to be borrowing oil on the
whale-ground, and however much it may invertedly contradict the old
proverb about carrying coals to Newcastle, yet sometimes such a thing
really happens; and in the present case Captain Derick De Deer did
indubitably conduct a lamp-feeder as Flask did declare.

As he mounted the deck, Ahab abruptly accosted him, without at all
heeding what he had in his hand; but in his broken lingo, the German
soon evinced his complete ignorance of the White Whale; immediately
turning the conversation to his lamp-feeder and oil can, with some
remarks touching his having to turn into his hammock at night in
profound darkness--his last drop of Bremen oil being gone, and not a
single flying-fish yet captured to supply the deficiency; concluding
by hinting that his ship was indeed what in the Fishery is technically
called a CLEAN one (that is, an empty one), well deserving the name of
Jungfrau or the Virgin.

His necessities supplied, Derick departed; but he had not gained his
ship's side, when whales were almost simultaneously raised from the
mast-heads of both vessels; and so eager for the chase was Derick, that
without pausing to put his oil-can and lamp-feeder aboard, he slewed
round his boat and made after the leviathan lamp-feeders.

Now, the game having risen to leeward, he and the other three German
boats that soon followed him, had considerably the start of the Pequod's
keels. There were eight whales, an average pod. Aware of their danger,
they were going all abreast with great speed straight before the wind,
rubbing their flanks as closely as so many spans of horses in harness.
They left a great, wide wake, as though continually unrolling a great
wide parchment upon the sea.

Full in this rapid wake, and many fathoms in the rear, swam a huge,
humped old bull, which by his comparatively slow progress, as well as
by the unusual yellowish incrustations overgrowing him, seemed afflicted
with the jaundice, or some other infirmity. Whether this whale belonged
to the pod in advance, seemed questionable; for it is not customary for
such venerable leviathans to be at all social. Nevertheless, he stuck
to their wake, though indeed their back water must have retarded him,
because the white-bone or swell at his broad muzzle was a dashed one,
like the swell formed when two hostile currents meet. His spout was
short, slow, and laborious; coming forth with a choking sort of gush,
and spending itself in torn shreds, followed by strange subterranean
commotions in him, which seemed to have egress at his other buried
extremity, causing the waters behind him to upbubble.

"Who's got some paregoric?" said Stubb, "he has the stomach-ache, I'm
afraid. Lord, think of having half an acre of stomach-ache! Adverse
winds are holding mad Christmas in him, boys. It's the first foul wind
I ever knew to blow from astern; but look, did ever whale yaw so before?
it must be, he's lost his tiller."

As an overladen Indiaman bearing down the Hindostan coast with a deck
load of frightened horses, careens, buries, rolls, and wallows on her
way; so did this old whale heave his aged bulk, and now and then partly
turning over on his cumbrous rib-ends, expose the cause of his devious
wake in the unnatural stump of his starboard fin. Whether he had lost
that fin in battle, or had been born without it, it were hard to say.

"Only wait a bit, old chap, and I'll give ye a sling for that wounded
arm," cried cruel Flask, pointing to the whale-line near him.

"Mind he don't sling thee with it," cried Starbuck. "Give way, or the
German will have him."

With one intent all the combined rival boats were pointed for this
one fish, because not only was he the largest, and therefore the most
valuable whale, but he was nearest to them, and the other whales were
going with such great velocity, moreover, as almost to defy pursuit
for the time. At this juncture the Pequod's keels had shot by the three
German boats last lowered; but from the great start he had had, Derick's
boat still led the chase, though every moment neared by his foreign
rivals. The only thing they feared, was, that from being already so
nigh to his mark, he would be enabled to dart his iron before they
could completely overtake and pass him. As for Derick, he seemed quite
confident that this would be the case, and occasionally with a deriding
gesture shook his lamp-feeder at the other boats.

"The ungracious and ungrateful dog!" cried Starbuck; "he mocks and dares
me with the very poor-box I filled for him not five minutes ago!"--then
in his old intense whisper--"Give way, greyhounds! Dog to it!"

"I tell ye what it is, men"--cried Stubb to his crew--"it's against
my religion to get mad; but I'd like to eat that villainous
Yarman--Pull--won't ye? Are ye going to let that rascal beat ye? Do
ye love brandy? A hogshead of brandy, then, to the best man. Come,
why don't some of ye burst a blood-vessel? Who's that been dropping an
anchor overboard--we don't budge an inch--we're becalmed. Halloo, here's
grass growing in the boat's bottom--and by the Lord, the mast there's
budding. This won't do, boys. Look at that Yarman! The short and long of
it is, men, will ye spit fire or not?"

"Oh! see the suds he makes!" cried Flask, dancing up and down--"What
a hump--Oh, DO pile on the beef--lays like a log! Oh! my lads, DO
spring--slap-jacks and quahogs for supper, you know, my lads--baked
clams and muffins--oh, DO, DO, spring,--he's a hundred barreller--don't
lose him now--don't oh, DON'T!--see that Yarman--Oh, won't ye pull for
your duff, my lads--such a sog! such a sogger! Don't ye love sperm?
There goes three thousand dollars, men!--a bank!--a whole bank! The bank
of England!--Oh, DO, DO, DO!--What's that Yarman about now?"

At this moment Derick was in the act of pitching his lamp-feeder at the
advancing boats, and also his oil-can; perhaps with the double view
of retarding his rivals' way, and at the same time economically
accelerating his own by the momentary impetus of the backward toss.

"The unmannerly Dutch dogger!" cried Stubb. "Pull now, men, like fifty
thousand line-of-battle-ship loads of red-haired devils. What d'ye say,
Tashtego; are you the man to snap your spine in two-and-twenty pieces
for the honour of old Gayhead? What d'ye say?"

"I say, pull like god-dam,"--cried the Indian.

Fiercely, but evenly incited by the taunts of the German, the Pequod's
three boats now began ranging almost abreast; and, so disposed,
momentarily neared him. In that fine, loose, chivalrous attitude of
the headsman when drawing near to his prey, the three mates stood up
proudly, occasionally backing the after oarsman with an exhilarating cry
of, "There she slides, now! Hurrah for the white-ash breeze! Down with
the Yarman! Sail over him!"

But so decided an original start had Derick had, that spite of all
their gallantry, he would have proved the victor in this race, had not
a righteous judgment descended upon him in a crab which caught the blade
of his midship oarsman. While this clumsy lubber was striving to free
his white-ash, and while, in consequence, Derick's boat was nigh to
capsizing, and he thundering away at his men in a mighty rage;--that was
a good time for Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask. With a shout, they took a
mortal start forwards, and slantingly ranged up on the German's quarter.
An instant more, and all four boats were diagonically in the whale's
immediate wake, while stretching from them, on both sides, was the
foaming swell that he made.

It was a terrific, most pitiable, and maddening sight. The whale was
now going head out, and sending his spout before him in a continual
tormented jet; while his one poor fin beat his side in an agony of
fright. Now to this hand, now to that, he yawed in his faltering flight,
and still at every billow that he broke, he spasmodically sank in the
sea, or sideways rolled towards the sky his one beating fin. So have I
seen a bird with clipped wing making affrighted broken circles in the
air, vainly striving to escape the piratical hawks. But the bird has a
voice, and with plaintive cries will make known her fear; but the fear
of this vast dumb brute of the sea, was chained up and enchanted in him;
he had no voice, save that choking respiration through his spiracle,
and this made the sight of him unspeakably pitiable; while still, in his
amazing bulk, portcullis jaw, and omnipotent tail, there was enough to
appal the stoutest man who so pitied.

Seeing now that but a very few moments more would give the Pequod's
boats the advantage, and rather than be thus foiled of his game, Derick
chose to hazard what to him must have seemed a most unusually long dart,
ere the last chance would for ever escape.

But no sooner did his harpooneer stand up for the stroke, than all three
tigers--Queequeg, Tashtego, Daggoo--instinctively sprang to their feet,
and standing in a diagonal row, simultaneously pointed their barbs; and
darted over the head of the German harpooneer, their three Nantucket
irons entered the whale. Blinding vapours of foam and white-fire! The
three boats, in the first fury of the whale's headlong rush, bumped
the German's aside with such force, that both Derick and his baffled
harpooneer were spilled out, and sailed over by the three flying keels.

"Don't be afraid, my butter-boxes," cried Stubb, casting a passing
glance upon them as he shot by; "ye'll be picked up presently--all
right--I saw some sharks astern--St. Bernard's dogs, you know--relieve
distressed travellers. Hurrah! this is the way to sail now. Every keel a
sunbeam! Hurrah!--Here we go like three tin kettles at the tail of a mad
cougar! This puts me in mind of fastening to an elephant in a tilbury on
a plain--makes the wheel-spokes fly, boys, when you fasten to him that
way; and there's danger of being pitched out too, when you strike a
hill. Hurrah! this is the way a fellow feels when he's going to Davy
Jones--all a rush down an endless inclined plane! Hurrah! this whale
carries the everlasting mail!"

But the monster's run was a brief one. Giving a sudden gasp, he
tumultuously sounded. With a grating rush, the three lines flew round
the loggerheads with such a force as to gouge deep grooves in them;
while so fearful were the harpooneers that this rapid sounding would
soon exhaust the lines, that using all their dexterous might, they
caught repeated smoking turns with the rope to hold on; till at
last--owing to the perpendicular strain from the lead-lined chocks of
the boats, whence the three ropes went straight down into the blue--the
gunwales of the bows were almost even with the water, while the three
sterns tilted high in the air. And the whale soon ceasing to sound,
for some time they remained in that attitude, fearful of expending more
line, though the position was a little ticklish. But though boats have
been taken down and lost in this way, yet it is this "holding on," as it
is called; this hooking up by the sharp barbs of his live flesh from
the back; this it is that often torments the Leviathan into soon rising
again to meet the sharp lance of his foes. Yet not to speak of the peril
of the thing, it is to be doubted whether this course is always the
best; for it is but reasonable to presume, that the longer the stricken
whale stays under water, the more he is exhausted. Because, owing to the
enormous surface of him--in a full grown sperm whale something less than
2000 square feet--the pressure of the water is immense. We all know
what an astonishing atmospheric weight we ourselves stand up under; even
here, above-ground, in the air; how vast, then, the burden of a whale,
bearing on his back a column of two hundred fathoms of ocean! It must at
least equal the weight of fifty atmospheres. One whaleman has estimated
it at the weight of twenty line-of-battle ships, with all their guns,
and stores, and men on board.

As the three boats lay there on that gently rolling sea, gazing down
into its eternal blue noon; and as not a single groan or cry of any
sort, nay, not so much as a ripple or a bubble came up from its depths;
what landsman would have thought, that beneath all that silence and
placidity, the utmost monster of the seas was writhing and wrenching in
agony! Not eight inches of perpendicular rope were visible at the bows.
Seems it credible that by three such thin threads the great Leviathan
was suspended like the big weight to an eight day clock. Suspended? and
to what? To three bits of board. Is this the creature of whom it was
once so triumphantly said--"Canst thou fill his skin with barbed irons?
or his head with fish-spears? The sword of him that layeth at him cannot
hold, the spear, the dart, nor the habergeon: he esteemeth iron as
straw; the arrow cannot make him flee; darts are counted as stubble;
he laugheth at the shaking of a spear!" This the creature? this he? Oh!
that unfulfilments should follow the prophets. For with the strength
of a thousand thighs in his tail, Leviathan had run his head under the
mountains of the sea, to hide him from the Pequod's fish-spears!

In that sloping afternoon sunlight, the shadows that the three boats
sent down beneath the surface, must have been long enough and broad
enough to shade half Xerxes' army. Who can tell how appalling to the
wounded whale must have been such huge phantoms flitting over his head!

"Stand by, men; he stirs," cried Starbuck, as the three lines suddenly
vibrated in the water, distinctly conducting upwards to them, as by
magnetic wires, the life and death throbs of the whale, so that every
oarsman felt them in his seat. The next moment, relieved in great part
from the downward strain at the bows, the boats gave a sudden bounce
upwards, as a small icefield will, when a dense herd of white bears are
scared from it into the sea.

"Haul in! Haul in!" cried Starbuck again; "he's rising."

The lines, of which, hardly an instant before, not one hand's breadth
could have been gained, were now in long quick coils flung back all
dripping into the boats, and soon the whale broke water within two
ship's lengths of the hunters.

His motions plainly denoted his extreme exhaustion. In most land animals
there are certain valves or flood-gates in many of their veins, whereby
when wounded, the blood is in some degree at least instantly shut off in
certain directions. Not so with the whale; one of whose peculiarities
it is to have an entire non-valvular structure of the blood-vessels, so
that when pierced even by so small a point as a harpoon, a deadly
drain is at once begun upon his whole arterial system; and when this is
heightened by the extraordinary pressure of water at a great distance
below the surface, his life may be said to pour from him in incessant
streams. Yet so vast is the quantity of blood in him, and so distant
and numerous its interior fountains, that he will keep thus bleeding and
bleeding for a considerable period; even as in a drought a river will
flow, whose source is in the well-springs of far-off and undiscernible
hills. Even now, when the boats pulled upon this whale, and perilously
drew over his swaying flukes, and the lances were darted into him,
they were followed by steady jets from the new made wound, which kept
continually playing, while the natural spout-hole in his head was only
at intervals, however rapid, sending its affrighted moisture into the
air. From this last vent no blood yet came, because no vital part of him
had thus far been struck. His life, as they significantly call it, was
untouched.

As the boats now more closely surrounded him, the whole upper part of
his form, with much of it that is ordinarily submerged, was plainly
revealed. His eyes, or rather the places where his eyes had been, were
beheld. As strange misgrown masses gather in the knot-holes of the
noblest oaks when prostrate, so from the points which the whale's eyes
had once occupied, now protruded blind bulbs, horribly pitiable to see.
But pity there was none. For all his old age, and his one arm, and his
blind eyes, he must die the death and be murdered, in order to light the
gay bridals and other merry-makings of men, and also to illuminate the
solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all.
Still rolling in his blood, at last he partially disclosed a strangely
discoloured bunch or protuberance, the size of a bushel, low down on the
flank.

"A nice spot," cried Flask; "just let me prick him there once."

"Avast!" cried Starbuck, "there's no need of that!"

But humane Starbuck was too late. At the instant of the dart an
ulcerous jet shot from this cruel wound, and goaded by it into more than
sufferable anguish, the whale now spouting thick blood, with swift fury
blindly darted at the craft, bespattering them and their glorying crews
all over with showers of gore, capsizing Flask's boat and marring the
bows. It was his death stroke. For, by this time, so spent was he by
loss of blood, that he helplessly rolled away from the wreck he had
made; lay panting on his side, impotently flapped with his stumped fin,
then over and over slowly revolved like a waning world; turned up
the white secrets of his belly; lay like a log, and died. It was most
piteous, that last expiring spout. As when by unseen hands the water
is gradually drawn off from some mighty fountain, and with half-stifled
melancholy gurglings the spray-column lowers and lowers to the
ground--so the last long dying spout of the whale.

Soon, while the crews were awaiting the arrival of the ship, the body
showed symptoms of sinking with all its treasures unrifled. Immediately,
by Starbuck's orders, lines were secured to it at different points, so
that ere long every boat was a buoy; the sunken whale being suspended a
few inches beneath them by the cords. By very heedful management, when
the ship drew nigh, the whale was transferred to her side, and was
strongly secured there by the stiffest fluke-chains, for it was plain
that unless artificially upheld, the body would at once sink to the
bottom.

It so chanced that almost upon first cutting into him with the spade,
the entire length of a corroded harpoon was found imbedded in his flesh,
on the lower part of the bunch before described. But as the stumps of
harpoons are frequently found in the dead bodies of captured whales,
with the flesh perfectly healed around them, and no prominence of any
kind to denote their place; therefore, there must needs have been
some other unknown reason in the present case fully to account for
the ulceration alluded to. But still more curious was the fact of a
lance-head of stone being found in him, not far from the buried iron,
the flesh perfectly firm about it. Who had darted that stone lance? And
when? It might have been darted by some Nor' West Indian long before
America was discovered.

What other marvels might have been rummaged out of this monstrous
cabinet there is no telling. But a sudden stop was put to further
discoveries, by the ship's being unprecedentedly dragged over sideways
to the sea, owing to the body's immensely increasing tendency to sink.
However, Starbuck, who had the ordering of affairs, hung on to it to the
last; hung on to it so resolutely, indeed, that when at length the ship
would have been capsized, if still persisting in locking arms with the
body; then, when the command was given to break clear from it, such was
the immovable strain upon the timber-heads to which the fluke-chains and
cables were fastened, that it was impossible to cast them off. Meantime
everything in the Pequod was aslant. To cross to the other side of the
deck was like walking up the steep gabled roof of a house. The ship
groaned and gasped. Many of the ivory inlayings of her bulwarks and
cabins were started from their places, by the unnatural dislocation.
In vain handspikes and crows were brought to bear upon the immovable
fluke-chains, to pry them adrift from the timberheads; and so low
had the whale now settled that the submerged ends could not be at all
approached, while every moment whole tons of ponderosity seemed added to
the sinking bulk, and the ship seemed on the point of going over.

"Hold on, hold on, won't ye?" cried Stubb to the body, "don't be in such
a devil of a hurry to sink! By thunder, men, we must do something or go
for it. No use prying there; avast, I say with your handspikes, and run
one of ye for a prayer book and a pen-knife, and cut the big chains."

"Knife? Aye, aye," cried Queequeg, and seizing the carpenter's heavy
hatchet, he leaned out of a porthole, and steel to iron, began slashing
at the largest fluke-chains. But a few strokes, full of sparks, were
given, when the exceeding strain effected the rest. With a terrific
snap, every fastening went adrift; the ship righted, the carcase sank.

Now, this occasional inevitable sinking of the recently killed Sperm
Whale is a very curious thing; nor has any fisherman yet adequately
accounted for it. Usually the dead Sperm Whale floats with great
buoyancy, with its side or belly considerably elevated above the
surface. If the only whales that thus sank were old, meagre, and
broken-hearted creatures, their pads of lard diminished and all their
bones heavy and rheumatic; then you might with some reason assert that
this sinking is caused by an uncommon specific gravity in the fish so
sinking, consequent upon this absence of buoyant matter in him. But it
is not so. For young whales, in the highest health, and swelling with
noble aspirations, prematurely cut off in the warm flush and May of
life, with all their panting lard about them; even these brawny, buoyant
heroes do sometimes sink.

Be it said, however, that the Sperm Whale is far less liable to this
accident than any other species. Where one of that sort go down, twenty
Right Whales do. This difference in the species is no doubt imputable in
no small degree to the greater quantity of bone in the Right Whale;
his Venetian blinds alone sometimes weighing more than a ton; from this
incumbrance the Sperm Whale is wholly free. But there are instances
where, after the lapse of many hours or several days, the sunken whale
again rises, more buoyant than in life. But the reason of this
is obvious. Gases are generated in him; he swells to a prodigious
magnitude; becomes a sort of animal balloon. A line-of-battle ship could
hardly keep him under then. In the Shore Whaling, on soundings, among
the Bays of New Zealand, when a Right Whale gives token of sinking, they
fasten buoys to him, with plenty of rope; so that when the body has gone
down, they know where to look for it when it shall have ascended again.

It was not long after the sinking of the body that a cry was heard from
the Pequod's mast-heads, announcing that the Jungfrau was again lowering
her boats; though the only spout in sight was that of a Fin-Back,
belonging to the species of uncapturable whales, because of its
incredible power of swimming. Nevertheless, the Fin-Back's spout is so
similar to the Sperm Whale's, that by unskilful fishermen it is often
mistaken for it. And consequently Derick and all his host were now in
valiant chase of this unnearable brute. The Virgin crowding all sail,
made after her four young keels, and thus they all disappeared far to
leeward, still in bold, hopeful chase.

Oh! many are the Fin-Backs, and many are the Dericks, my friend.



CHAPTER 82. The Honour and Glory of Whaling.


There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true
method.

The more I dive into this matter of whaling, and push my researches up
to the very spring-head of it so much the more am I impressed with its
great honourableness and antiquity; and especially when I find so many
great demi-gods and heroes, prophets of all sorts, who one way or other
have shed distinction upon it, I am transported with the reflection
that I myself belong, though but subordinately, to so emblazoned a
fraternity.

The gallant Perseus, a son of Jupiter, was the first whaleman; and
to the eternal honour of our calling be it said, that the first whale
attacked by our brotherhood was not killed with any sordid intent. Those
were the knightly days of our profession, when we only bore arms to
succor the distressed, and not to fill men's lamp-feeders. Every one
knows the fine story of Perseus and Andromeda; how the lovely Andromeda,
the daughter of a king, was tied to a rock on the sea-coast, and as
Leviathan was in the very act of carrying her off, Perseus, the prince
of whalemen, intrepidly advancing, harpooned the monster, and delivered
and married the maid. It was an admirable artistic exploit, rarely
achieved by the best harpooneers of the present day; inasmuch as this
Leviathan was slain at the very first dart. And let no man doubt this
Arkite story; for in the ancient Joppa, now Jaffa, on the Syrian coast,
in one of the Pagan temples, there stood for many ages the vast skeleton
of a whale, which the city's legends and all the inhabitants asserted to
be the identical bones of the monster that Perseus slew. When the Romans
took Joppa, the same skeleton was carried to Italy in triumph. What
seems most singular and suggestively important in this story, is this:
it was from Joppa that Jonah set sail.

Akin to the adventure of Perseus and Andromeda--indeed, by some supposed
to be indirectly derived from it--is that famous story of St. George and
the Dragon; which dragon I maintain to have been a whale; for in many
old chronicles whales and dragons are strangely jumbled together, and
often stand for each other. "Thou art as a lion of the waters, and as a
dragon of the sea," saith Ezekiel; hereby, plainly meaning a whale;
in truth, some versions of the Bible use that word itself. Besides, it
would much subtract from the glory of the exploit had St. George but
encountered a crawling reptile of the land, instead of doing battle
with the great monster of the deep. Any man may kill a snake, but only a
Perseus, a St. George, a Coffin, have the heart in them to march boldly
up to a whale.

Let not the modern paintings of this scene mislead us; for though
the creature encountered by that valiant whaleman of old is vaguely
represented of a griffin-like shape, and though the battle is depicted
on land and the saint on horseback, yet considering the great ignorance
of those times, when the true form of the whale was unknown to artists;
and considering that as in Perseus' case, St. George's whale might have
crawled up out of the sea on the beach; and considering that the animal
ridden by St. George might have been only a large seal, or sea-horse;
bearing all this in mind, it will not appear altogether incompatible
with the sacred legend and the ancientest draughts of the scene, to
hold this so-called dragon no other than the great Leviathan himself. In
fact, placed before the strict and piercing truth, this whole story will
fare like that fish, flesh, and fowl idol of the Philistines, Dagon by
name; who being planted before the ark of Israel, his horse's head and
both the palms of his hands fell off from him, and only the stump or
fishy part of him remained. Thus, then, one of our own noble stamp, even
a whaleman, is the tutelary guardian of England; and by good rights, we
harpooneers of Nantucket should be enrolled in the most noble order
of St. George. And therefore, let not the knights of that honourable
company (none of whom, I venture to say, have ever had to do with a
whale like their great patron), let them never eye a Nantucketer with
disdain, since even in our woollen frocks and tarred trowsers we are
much better entitled to St. George's decoration than they.

Whether to admit Hercules among us or not, concerning this I long
remained dubious: for though according to the Greek mythologies, that
antique Crockett and Kit Carson--that brawny doer of rejoicing good
deeds, was swallowed down and thrown up by a whale; still, whether
that strictly makes a whaleman of him, that might be mooted. It nowhere
appears that he ever actually harpooned his fish, unless, indeed,
from the inside. Nevertheless, he may be deemed a sort of involuntary
whaleman; at any rate the whale caught him, if he did not the whale. I
claim him for one of our clan.

But, by the best contradictory authorities, this Grecian story of
Hercules and the whale is considered to be derived from the still more
ancient Hebrew story of Jonah and the whale; and vice versa; certainly
they are very similar. If I claim the demigod then, why not the prophet?

Nor do heroes, saints, demigods, and prophets alone comprise the whole
roll of our order. Our grand master is still to be named; for like royal
kings of old times, we find the head waters of our fraternity in nothing
short of the great gods themselves. That wondrous oriental story is now
to be rehearsed from the Shaster, which gives us the dread Vishnoo, one
of the three persons in the godhead of the Hindoos; gives us this divine
Vishnoo himself for our Lord;--Vishnoo, who, by the first of his ten
earthly incarnations, has for ever set apart and sanctified the whale.
When Brahma, or the God of Gods, saith the Shaster, resolved to recreate
the world after one of its periodical dissolutions, he gave birth to
Vishnoo, to preside over the work; but the Vedas, or mystical books,
whose perusal would seem to have been indispensable to Vishnoo before
beginning the creation, and which therefore must have contained
something in the shape of practical hints to young architects, these
Vedas were lying at the bottom of the waters; so Vishnoo became
incarnate in a whale, and sounding down in him to the uttermost depths,
rescued the sacred volumes. Was not this Vishnoo a whaleman, then? even
as a man who rides a horse is called a horseman?

Perseus, St. George, Hercules, Jonah, and Vishnoo! there's a member-roll
for you! What club but the whaleman's can head off like that?



CHAPTER 83. Jonah Historically Regarded.


Reference was made to the historical story of Jonah and the whale in the
preceding chapter. Now some Nantucketers rather distrust this historical
story of Jonah and the whale. But then there were some sceptical Greeks
and Romans, who, standing out from the orthodox pagans of their times,
equally doubted the story of Hercules and the whale, and Arion and the
dolphin; and yet their doubting those traditions did not make those
traditions one whit the less facts, for all that.

One old Sag-Harbor whaleman's chief reason for questioning the Hebrew
story was this:--He had one of those quaint old-fashioned Bibles,
embellished with curious, unscientific plates; one of which represented
Jonah's whale with two spouts in his head--a peculiarity only true
with respect to a species of the Leviathan (the Right Whale, and the
varieties of that order), concerning which the fishermen have this
saying, "A penny roll would choke him"; his swallow is so very small.
But, to this, Bishop Jebb's anticipative answer is ready. It is not
necessary, hints the Bishop, that we consider Jonah as tombed in the
whale's belly, but as temporarily lodged in some part of his mouth. And
this seems reasonable enough in the good Bishop. For truly, the
Right Whale's mouth would accommodate a couple of whist-tables, and
comfortably seat all the players. Possibly, too, Jonah might have
ensconced himself in a hollow tooth; but, on second thoughts, the Right
Whale is toothless.

Another reason which Sag-Harbor (he went by that name) urged for his
want of faith in this matter of the prophet, was something obscurely in
reference to his incarcerated body and the whale's gastric juices. But
this objection likewise falls to the ground, because a German exegetist
supposes that Jonah must have taken refuge in the floating body of a
DEAD whale--even as the French soldiers in the Russian campaign turned
their dead horses into tents, and crawled into them. Besides, it has
been divined by other continental commentators, that when Jonah was
thrown overboard from the Joppa ship, he straightway effected his escape
to another vessel near by, some vessel with a whale for a figure-head;
and, I would add, possibly called "The Whale," as some craft are
nowadays christened the "Shark," the "Gull," the "Eagle." Nor have there
been wanting learned exegetists who have opined that the whale mentioned
in the book of Jonah merely meant a life-preserver--an inflated bag
of wind--which the endangered prophet swam to, and so was saved from a
watery doom. Poor Sag-Harbor, therefore, seems worsted all round. But
he had still another reason for his want of faith. It was this, if I
remember right: Jonah was swallowed by the whale in the Mediterranean
Sea, and after three days he was vomited up somewhere within three days'
journey of Nineveh, a city on the Tigris, very much more than three
days' journey across from the nearest point of the Mediterranean coast.
How is that?

But was there no other way for the whale to land the prophet within that
short distance of Nineveh? Yes. He might have carried him round by the
way of the Cape of Good Hope. But not to speak of the passage through
the whole length of the Mediterranean, and another passage up the
Persian Gulf and Red Sea, such a supposition would involve the complete
circumnavigation of all Africa in three days, not to speak of the Tigris
waters, near the site of Nineveh, being too shallow for any whale to
swim in. Besides, this idea of Jonah's weathering the Cape of Good Hope
at so early a day would wrest the honour of the discovery of that great
headland from Bartholomew Diaz, its reputed discoverer, and so make
modern history a liar.

But all these foolish arguments of old Sag-Harbor only evinced his
foolish pride of reason--a thing still more reprehensible in him, seeing
that he had but little learning except what he had picked up from the
sun and the sea. I say it only shows his foolish, impious pride, and
abominable, devilish rebellion against the reverend clergy. For by a
Portuguese Catholic priest, this very idea of Jonah's going to Nineveh
via the Cape of Good Hope was advanced as a signal magnification of
the general miracle. And so it was. Besides, to this day, the highly
enlightened Turks devoutly believe in the historical story of Jonah. And
some three centuries ago, an English traveller in old Harris's Voyages,
speaks of a Turkish Mosque built in honour of Jonah, in which Mosque was
a miraculous lamp that burnt without any oil.



CHAPTER 84. Pitchpoling.


To make them run easily and swiftly, the axles of carriages are
anointed; and for much the same purpose, some whalers perform an
analogous operation upon their boat; they grease the bottom. Nor is it
to be doubted that as such a procedure can do no harm, it may possibly
be of no contemptible advantage; considering that oil and water are
hostile; that oil is a sliding thing, and that the object in view is to
make the boat slide bravely. Queequeg believed strongly in anointing
his boat, and one morning not long after the German ship Jungfrau
disappeared, took more than customary pains in that occupation; crawling
under its bottom, where it hung over the side, and rubbing in the
unctuousness as though diligently seeking to insure a crop of hair from
the craft's bald keel. He seemed to be working in obedience to some
particular presentiment. Nor did it remain unwarranted by the event.

Towards noon whales were raised; but so soon as the ship sailed down to
them, they turned and fled with swift precipitancy; a disordered flight,
as of Cleopatra's barges from Actium.

Nevertheless, the boats pursued, and Stubb's was foremost. By great
exertion, Tashtego at last succeeded in planting one iron; but the
stricken whale, without at all sounding, still continued his horizontal
flight, with added fleetness. Such unintermitted strainings upon the
planted iron must sooner or later inevitably extract it. It became
imperative to lance the flying whale, or be content to lose him. But
to haul the boat up to his flank was impossible, he swam so fast and
furious. What then remained?

Of all the wondrous devices and dexterities, the sleights of hand and
countless subtleties, to which the veteran whaleman is so often forced,
none exceed that fine manoeuvre with the lance called pitchpoling. Small
sword, or broad sword, in all its exercises boasts nothing like it. It
is only indispensable with an inveterate running whale; its grand
fact and feature is the wonderful distance to which the long lance is
accurately darted from a violently rocking, jerking boat, under extreme
headway. Steel and wood included, the entire spear is some ten or twelve
feet in length; the staff is much slighter than that of the harpoon,
and also of a lighter material--pine. It is furnished with a small rope
called a warp, of considerable length, by which it can be hauled back to
the hand after darting.

But before going further, it is important to mention here, that though
the harpoon may be pitchpoled in the same way with the lance, yet it
is seldom done; and when done, is still less frequently successful,
on account of the greater weight and inferior length of the harpoon as
compared with the lance, which in effect become serious drawbacks. As a
general thing, therefore, you must first get fast to a whale, before any
pitchpoling comes into play.

Look now at Stubb; a man who from his humorous, deliberate coolness and
equanimity in the direst emergencies, was specially qualified to excel
in pitchpoling. Look at him; he stands upright in the tossed bow of the
flying boat; wrapt in fleecy foam, the towing whale is forty feet ahead.
Handling the long lance lightly, glancing twice or thrice along its
length to see if it be exactly straight, Stubb whistlingly gathers up
the coil of the warp in one hand, so as to secure its free end in his
grasp, leaving the rest unobstructed. Then holding the lance full before
his waistband's middle, he levels it at the whale; when, covering
him with it, he steadily depresses the butt-end in his hand, thereby
elevating the point till the weapon stands fairly balanced upon his
palm, fifteen feet in the air. He minds you somewhat of a juggler,
balancing a long staff on his chin. Next moment with a rapid, nameless
impulse, in a superb lofty arch the bright steel spans the foaming
distance, and quivers in the life spot of the whale. Instead of
sparkling water, he now spouts red blood.

"That drove the spigot out of him!" cried Stubb. "'Tis July's immortal
Fourth; all fountains must run wine today! Would now, it were old
Orleans whiskey, or old Ohio, or unspeakable old Monongahela! Then,
Tashtego, lad, I'd have ye hold a canakin to the jet, and we'd drink
round it! Yea, verily, hearts alive, we'd brew choice punch in the
spread of his spout-hole there, and from that live punch-bowl quaff the
living stuff."

Again and again to such gamesome talk, the dexterous dart is repeated,
the spear returning to its master like a greyhound held in skilful
leash. The agonized whale goes into his flurry; the tow-line is
slackened, and the pitchpoler dropping astern, folds his hands, and
mutely watches the monster die.



CHAPTER 85. The Fountain.


That for six thousand years--and no one knows how many millions of ages
before--the great whales should have been spouting all over the sea,
and sprinkling and mistifying the gardens of the deep, as with so
many sprinkling or mistifying pots; and that for some centuries back,
thousands of hunters should have been close by the fountain of the
whale, watching these sprinklings and spoutings--that all this should
be, and yet, that down to this blessed minute (fifteen and a quarter
minutes past one o'clock P.M. of this sixteenth day of December, A.D.
1851), it should still remain a problem, whether these spoutings
are, after all, really water, or nothing but vapour--this is surely a
noteworthy thing.

Let us, then, look at this matter, along with some interesting items
contingent. Every one knows that by the peculiar cunning of their
gills, the finny tribes in general breathe the air which at all times is
combined with the element in which they swim; hence, a herring or a cod
might live a century, and never once raise its head above the surface.
But owing to his marked internal structure which gives him regular
lungs, like a human being's, the whale can only live by inhaling the
disengaged air in the open atmosphere. Wherefore the necessity for
his periodical visits to the upper world. But he cannot in any degree
breathe through his mouth, for, in his ordinary attitude, the Sperm
Whale's mouth is buried at least eight feet beneath the surface; and
what is still more, his windpipe has no connexion with his mouth. No, he
breathes through his spiracle alone; and this is on the top of his head.

If I say, that in any creature breathing is only a function
indispensable to vitality, inasmuch as it withdraws from the air a
certain element, which being subsequently brought into contact with the
blood imparts to the blood its vivifying principle, I do not think I
shall err; though I may possibly use some superfluous scientific words.
Assume it, and it follows that if all the blood in a man could be
aerated with one breath, he might then seal up his nostrils and not
fetch another for a considerable time. That is to say, he would then
live without breathing. Anomalous as it may seem, this is precisely the
case with the whale, who systematically lives, by intervals, his full
hour and more (when at the bottom) without drawing a single breath, or
so much as in any way inhaling a particle of air; for, remember, he has
no gills. How is this? Between his ribs and on each side of his spine
he is supplied with a remarkable involved Cretan labyrinth of
vermicelli-like vessels, which vessels, when he quits the surface, are
completely distended with oxygenated blood. So that for an hour or more,
a thousand fathoms in the sea, he carries a surplus stock of vitality in
him, just as the camel crossing the waterless desert carries a surplus
supply of drink for future use in its four supplementary stomachs.
The anatomical fact of this labyrinth is indisputable; and that the
supposition founded upon it is reasonable and true, seems the more
cogent to me, when I consider the otherwise inexplicable obstinacy of
that leviathan in HAVING HIS SPOUTINGS OUT, as the fishermen phrase
it. This is what I mean. If unmolested, upon rising to the surface, the
Sperm Whale will continue there for a period of time exactly uniform
with all his other unmolested risings. Say he stays eleven minutes, and
jets seventy times, that is, respires seventy breaths; then whenever he
rises again, he will be sure to have his seventy breaths over again, to
a minute. Now, if after he fetches a few breaths you alarm him, so that
he sounds, he will be always dodging up again to make good his regular
allowance of air. And not till those seventy breaths are told, will he
finally go down to stay out his full term below. Remark, however, that
in different individuals these rates are different; but in any one
they are alike. Now, why should the whale thus insist upon having his
spoutings out, unless it be to replenish his reservoir of air, ere
descending for good? How obvious is it, too, that this necessity for the
whale's rising exposes him to all the fatal hazards of the chase. For
not by hook or by net could this vast leviathan be caught, when sailing
a thousand fathoms beneath the sunlight. Not so much thy skill, then, O
hunter, as the great necessities that strike the victory to thee!

In man, breathing is incessantly going on--one breath only serving
for two or three pulsations; so that whatever other business he has to
attend to, waking or sleeping, breathe he must, or die he will. But the
Sperm Whale only breathes about one seventh or Sunday of his time.

It has been said that the whale only breathes through his spout-hole; if
it could truthfully be added that his spouts are mixed with water, then
I opine we should be furnished with the reason why his sense of smell
seems obliterated in him; for the only thing about him that at all
answers to his nose is that identical spout-hole; and being so clogged
with two elements, it could not be expected to have the power of
smelling. But owing to the mystery of the spout--whether it be water or
whether it be vapour--no absolute certainty can as yet be arrived at on
this head. Sure it is, nevertheless, that the Sperm Whale has no proper
olfactories. But what does he want of them? No roses, no violets, no
Cologne-water in the sea.

Furthermore, as his windpipe solely opens into the tube of his spouting
canal, and as that long canal--like the grand Erie Canal--is furnished
with a sort of locks (that open and shut) for the downward retention of
air or the upward exclusion of water, therefore the whale has no voice;
unless you insult him by saying, that when he so strangely rumbles,
he talks through his nose. But then again, what has the whale to say?
Seldom have I known any profound being that had anything to say to
this world, unless forced to stammer out something by way of getting a
living. Oh! happy that the world is such an excellent listener!

Now, the spouting canal of the Sperm Whale, chiefly intended as it
is for the conveyance of air, and for several feet laid along,
horizontally, just beneath the upper surface of his head, and a little
to one side; this curious canal is very much like a gas-pipe laid down
in a city on one side of a street. But the question returns whether this
gas-pipe is also a water-pipe; in other words, whether the spout of the
Sperm Whale is the mere vapour of the exhaled breath, or whether that
exhaled breath is mixed with water taken in at the mouth, and
discharged through the spiracle. It is certain that the mouth indirectly
communicates with the spouting canal; but it cannot be proved that this
is for the purpose of discharging water through the spiracle. Because
the greatest necessity for so doing would seem to be, when in feeding he
accidentally takes in water. But the Sperm Whale's food is far beneath
the surface, and there he cannot spout even if he would. Besides, if
you regard him very closely, and time him with your watch, you will find
that when unmolested, there is an undeviating rhyme between the periods
of his jets and the ordinary periods of respiration.

But why pester one with all this reasoning on the subject? Speak out!
You have seen him spout; then declare what the spout is; can you not
tell water from air? My dear sir, in this world it is not so easy to
settle these plain things. I have ever found your plain things the
knottiest of all. And as for this whale spout, you might almost stand in
it, and yet be undecided as to what it is precisely.

The central body of it is hidden in the snowy sparkling mist enveloping
it; and how can you certainly tell whether any water falls from it,
when, always, when you are close enough to a whale to get a close view
of his spout, he is in a prodigious commotion, the water cascading
all around him. And if at such times you should think that you really
perceived drops of moisture in the spout, how do you know that they are
not merely condensed from its vapour; or how do you know that they
are not those identical drops superficially lodged in the spout-hole
fissure, which is countersunk into the summit of the whale's head? For
even when tranquilly swimming through the mid-day sea in a calm, with
his elevated hump sun-dried as a dromedary's in the desert; even then,
the whale always carries a small basin of water on his head, as under
a blazing sun you will sometimes see a cavity in a rock filled up with
rain.

Nor is it at all prudent for the hunter to be over curious touching the
precise nature of the whale spout. It will not do for him to be peering
into it, and putting his face in it. You cannot go with your pitcher to
this fountain and fill it, and bring it away. For even when coming into
slight contact with the outer, vapoury shreds of the jet, which will
often happen, your skin will feverishly smart, from the acridness of
the thing so touching it. And I know one, who coming into still closer
contact with the spout, whether with some scientific object in view,
or otherwise, I cannot say, the skin peeled off from his cheek and arm.
Wherefore, among whalemen, the spout is deemed poisonous; they try to
evade it. Another thing; I have heard it said, and I do not much doubt
it, that if the jet is fairly spouted into your eyes, it will blind you.
The wisest thing the investigator can do then, it seems to me, is to let
this deadly spout alone.

Still, we can hypothesize, even if we cannot prove and establish. My
hypothesis is this: that the spout is nothing but mist. And besides
other reasons, to this conclusion I am impelled, by considerations
touching the great inherent dignity and sublimity of the Sperm Whale;
I account him no common, shallow being, inasmuch as it is an undisputed
fact that he is never found on soundings, or near shores; all other
whales sometimes are. He is both ponderous and profound. And I am
convinced that from the heads of all ponderous profound beings, such as
Plato, Pyrrho, the Devil, Jupiter, Dante, and so on, there always goes
up a certain semi-visible steam, while in the act of thinking deep
thoughts. While composing a little treatise on Eternity, I had the
curiosity to place a mirror before me; and ere long saw reflected there,
a curious involved worming and undulation in the atmosphere over my
head. The invariable moisture of my hair, while plunged in deep thought,
after six cups of hot tea in my thin shingled attic, of an August noon;
this seems an additional argument for the above supposition.

And how nobly it raises our conceit of the mighty, misty monster, to
behold him solemnly sailing through a calm tropical sea; his vast, mild
head overhung by a canopy of vapour, engendered by his incommunicable
contemplations, and that vapour--as you will sometimes see it--glorified
by a rainbow, as if Heaven itself had put its seal upon his thoughts.
For, d'ye see, rainbows do not visit the clear air; they only irradiate
vapour. And so, through all the thick mists of the dim doubts in my
mind, divine intuitions now and then shoot, enkindling my fog with a
heavenly ray. And for this I thank God; for all have doubts; many deny;
but doubts or denials, few along with them, have intuitions. Doubts
of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this
combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who
regards them both with equal eye.



CHAPTER 86. The Tail.


Other poets have warbled the praises of the soft eye of the antelope,
and the lovely plumage of the bird that never alights; less celestial, I
celebrate a tail.

Reckoning the largest sized Sperm Whale's tail to begin at that point of
the trunk where it tapers to about the girth of a man, it comprises
upon its upper surface alone, an area of at least fifty square feet. The
compact round body of its root expands into two broad, firm, flat palms
or flukes, gradually shoaling away to less than an inch in thickness.
At the crotch or junction, these flukes slightly overlap, then sideways
recede from each other like wings, leaving a wide vacancy between. In
no living thing are the lines of beauty more exquisitely defined than in
the crescentic borders of these flukes. At its utmost expansion in the
full grown whale, the tail will considerably exceed twenty feet across.

The entire member seems a dense webbed bed of welded sinews; but cut
into it, and you find that three distinct strata compose it:--upper,
middle, and lower. The fibres in the upper and lower layers, are
long and horizontal; those of the middle one, very short, and running
crosswise between the outside layers. This triune structure, as much as
anything else, imparts power to the tail. To the student of old Roman
walls, the middle layer will furnish a curious parallel to the thin
course of tiles always alternating with the stone in those wonderful
relics of the antique, and which undoubtedly contribute so much to the
great strength of the masonry.

But as if this vast local power in the tendinous tail were not enough,
the whole bulk of the leviathan is knit over with a warp and woof of
muscular fibres and filaments, which passing on either side the loins
and running down into the flukes, insensibly blend with them, and
largely contribute to their might; so that in the tail the confluent
measureless force of the whole whale seems concentrated to a point.
Could annihilation occur to matter, this were the thing to do it.

Nor does this--its amazing strength, at all tend to cripple the graceful
flexion of its motions; where infantileness of ease undulates through
a Titanism of power. On the contrary, those motions derive their most
appalling beauty from it. Real strength never impairs beauty or harmony,
but it often bestows it; and in everything imposingly beautiful,
strength has much to do with the magic. Take away the tied tendons that
all over seem bursting from the marble in the carved Hercules, and its
charm would be gone. As devout Eckerman lifted the linen sheet from the
naked corpse of Goethe, he was overwhelmed with the massive chest of the
man, that seemed as a Roman triumphal arch. When Angelo paints even God
the Father in human form, mark what robustness is there. And whatever
they may reveal of the divine love in the Son, the soft, curled,
hermaphroditical Italian pictures, in which his idea has been most
successfully embodied; these pictures, so destitute as they are of all
brawniness, hint nothing of any power, but the mere negative, feminine
one of submission and endurance, which on all hands it is conceded, form
the peculiar practical virtues of his teachings.

Such is the subtle elasticity of the organ I treat of, that whether
wielded in sport, or in earnest, or in anger, whatever be the mood it
be in, its flexions are invariably marked by exceeding grace. Therein no
fairy's arm can transcend it.

Five great motions are peculiar to it. First, when used as a fin for
progression; Second, when used as a mace in battle; Third, in sweeping;
Fourth, in lobtailing; Fifth, in peaking flukes.

First: Being horizontal in its position, the Leviathan's tail acts in
a different manner from the tails of all other sea creatures. It never
wriggles. In man or fish, wriggling is a sign of inferiority. To the
whale, his tail is the sole means of propulsion. Scroll-wise coiled
forwards beneath the body, and then rapidly sprung backwards, it is this
which gives that singular darting, leaping motion to the monster when
furiously swimming. His side-fins only serve to steer by.

Second: It is a little significant, that while one sperm whale only
fights another sperm whale with his head and jaw, nevertheless, in his
conflicts with man, he chiefly and contemptuously uses his tail. In
striking at a boat, he swiftly curves away his flukes from it, and the
blow is only inflicted by the recoil. If it be made in the unobstructed
air, especially if it descend to its mark, the stroke is then simply
irresistible. No ribs of man or boat can withstand it. Your only
salvation lies in eluding it; but if it comes sideways through the
opposing water, then partly owing to the light buoyancy of the whale
boat, and the elasticity of its materials, a cracked rib or a dashed
plank or two, a sort of stitch in the side, is generally the most
serious result. These submerged side blows are so often received in the
fishery, that they are accounted mere child's play. Some one strips off
a frock, and the hole is stopped.

Third: I cannot demonstrate it, but it seems to me, that in the whale
the sense of touch is concentrated in the tail; for in this respect
there is a delicacy in it only equalled by the daintiness of the
elephant's trunk. This delicacy is chiefly evinced in the action of
sweeping, when in maidenly gentleness the whale with a certain soft
slowness moves his immense flukes from side to side upon the surface
of the sea; and if he feel but a sailor's whisker, woe to that sailor,
whiskers and all. What tenderness there is in that preliminary touch!
Had this tail any prehensile power, I should straightway bethink me of
Darmonodes' elephant that so frequented the flower-market, and with
low salutations presented nosegays to damsels, and then caressed their
zones. On more accounts than one, a pity it is that the whale does not
possess this prehensile virtue in his tail; for I have heard of yet
another elephant, that when wounded in the fight, curved round his trunk
and extracted the dart.

Fourth: Stealing unawares upon the whale in the fancied security of the
middle of solitary seas, you find him unbent from the vast corpulence
of his dignity, and kitten-like, he plays on the ocean as if it were a
hearth. But still you see his power in his play. The broad palms of
his tail are flirted high into the air; then smiting the surface, the
thunderous concussion resounds for miles. You would almost think a great
gun had been discharged; and if you noticed the light wreath of vapour
from the spiracle at his other extremity, you would think that that was
the smoke from the touch-hole.

Fifth: As in the ordinary floating posture of the leviathan the flukes
lie considerably below the level of his back, they are then completely
out of sight beneath the surface; but when he is about to plunge into
the deeps, his entire flukes with at least thirty feet of his body are
tossed erect in the air, and so remain vibrating a moment, till they
downwards shoot out of view. Excepting the sublime BREACH--somewhere
else to be described--this peaking of the whale's flukes is perhaps the
grandest sight to be seen in all animated nature. Out of the bottomless
profundities the gigantic tail seems spasmodically snatching at the
highest heaven. So in dreams, have I seen majestic Satan thrusting forth
his tormented colossal claw from the flame Baltic of Hell. But in
gazing at such scenes, it is all in all what mood you are in; if in
the Dantean, the devils will occur to you; if in that of Isaiah, the
archangels. Standing at the mast-head of my ship during a sunrise that
crimsoned sky and sea, I once saw a large herd of whales in the east,
all heading towards the sun, and for a moment vibrating in concert with
peaked flukes. As it seemed to me at the time, such a grand embodiment
of adoration of the gods was never beheld, even in Persia, the home of
the fire worshippers. As Ptolemy Philopater testified of the African
elephant, I then testified of the whale, pronouncing him the most devout
of all beings. For according to King Juba, the military elephants of
antiquity often hailed the morning with their trunks uplifted in the
profoundest silence.

The chance comparison in this chapter, between the whale and the
elephant, so far as some aspects of the tail of the one and the trunk
of the other are concerned, should not tend to place those two
opposite organs on an equality, much less the creatures to which they
respectively belong. For as the mightiest elephant is but a terrier
to Leviathan, so, compared with Leviathan's tail, his trunk is but the
stalk of a lily. The most direful blow from the elephant's trunk were as
the playful tap of a fan, compared with the measureless crush and crash
of the sperm whale's ponderous flukes, which in repeated instances have
one after the other hurled entire boats with all their oars and crews
into the air, very much as an Indian juggler tosses his balls.*


*Though all comparison in the way of general bulk between the whale
and the elephant is preposterous, inasmuch as in that particular the
elephant stands in much the same respect to the whale that a dog does to
the elephant; nevertheless, there are not wanting some points of curious
similitude; among these is the spout. It is well known that the elephant
will often draw up water or dust in his trunk, and then elevating it,
jet it forth in a stream.


The more I consider this mighty tail, the more do I deplore my inability
to express it. At times there are gestures in it, which, though they
would well grace the hand of man, remain wholly inexplicable. In an
extensive herd, so remarkable, occasionally, are these mystic gestures,
that I have heard hunters who have declared them akin to Free-Mason
signs and symbols; that the whale, indeed, by these methods
intelligently conversed with the world. Nor are there wanting other
motions of the whale in his general body, full of strangeness, and
unaccountable to his most experienced assailant. Dissect him how I may,
then, I but go skin deep; I know him not, and never will. But if I know
not even the tail of this whale, how understand his head? much more,
how comprehend his face, when face he has none? Thou shalt see my back
parts, my tail, he seems to say, but my face shall not be seen. But I
cannot completely make out his back parts; and hint what he will about
his face, I say again he has no face.



CHAPTER 87. The Grand Armada.


The long and narrow peninsula of Malacca, extending south-eastward from
the territories of Birmah, forms the most southerly point of all Asia.
In a continuous line from that peninsula stretch the long islands of
Sumatra, Java, Bally, and Timor; which, with many others, form a
vast mole, or rampart, lengthwise connecting Asia with Australia,
and dividing the long unbroken Indian ocean from the thickly studded
oriental archipelagoes. This rampart is pierced by several sally-ports
for the convenience of ships and whales; conspicuous among which are the
straits of Sunda and Malacca. By the straits of Sunda, chiefly, vessels
bound to China from the west, emerge into the China seas.

Those narrow straits of Sunda divide Sumatra from Java; and standing
midway in that vast rampart of islands, buttressed by that bold green
promontory, known to seamen as Java Head; they not a little correspond
to the central gateway opening into some vast walled empire: and
considering the inexhaustible wealth of spices, and silks, and jewels,
and gold, and ivory, with which the thousand islands of that oriental
sea are enriched, it seems a significant provision of nature, that such
treasures, by the very formation of the land, should at least bear the
appearance, however ineffectual, of being guarded from the all-grasping
western world. The shores of the Straits of Sunda are unsupplied
with those domineering fortresses which guard the entrances to the
Mediterranean, the Baltic, and the Propontis. Unlike the Danes, these
Orientals do not demand the obsequious homage of lowered top-sails from
the endless procession of ships before the wind, which for centuries
past, by night and by day, have passed between the islands of Sumatra
and Java, freighted with the costliest cargoes of the east. But while
they freely waive a ceremonial like this, they do by no means renounce
their claim to more solid tribute.

Time out of mind the piratical proas of the Malays, lurking among
the low shaded coves and islets of Sumatra, have sallied out upon the
vessels sailing through the straits, fiercely demanding tribute at the
point of their spears. Though by the repeated bloody chastisements they
have received at the hands of European cruisers, the audacity of these
corsairs has of late been somewhat repressed; yet, even at the present
day, we occasionally hear of English and American vessels, which, in
those waters, have been remorselessly boarded and pillaged.

With a fair, fresh wind, the Pequod was now drawing nigh to these
straits; Ahab purposing to pass through them into the Javan sea, and
thence, cruising northwards, over waters known to be frequented here and
there by the Sperm Whale, sweep inshore by the Philippine Islands, and
gain the far coast of Japan, in time for the great whaling season there.
By these means, the circumnavigating Pequod would sweep almost all the
known Sperm Whale cruising grounds of the world, previous to descending
upon the Line in the Pacific; where Ahab, though everywhere else foiled
in his pursuit, firmly counted upon giving battle to Moby Dick, in the
sea he was most known to frequent; and at a season when he might most
reasonably be presumed to be haunting it.

But how now? in this zoned quest, does Ahab touch no land? does his crew
drink air? Surely, he will stop for water. Nay. For a long time, now,
the circus-running sun has raced within his fiery ring, and needs
no sustenance but what's in himself. So Ahab. Mark this, too, in the
whaler. While other hulls are loaded down with alien stuff, to be
transferred to foreign wharves; the world-wandering whale-ship carries
no cargo but herself and crew, their weapons and their wants. She has a
whole lake's contents bottled in her ample hold. She is ballasted with
utilities; not altogether with unusable pig-lead and kentledge. She
carries years' water in her. Clear old prime Nantucket water; which,
when three years afloat, the Nantucketer, in the Pacific, prefers to
drink before the brackish fluid, but yesterday rafted off in casks, from
the Peruvian or Indian streams. Hence it is, that, while other ships may
have gone to China from New York, and back again, touching at a score
of ports, the whale-ship, in all that interval, may not have sighted
one grain of soil; her crew having seen no man but floating seamen like
themselves. So that did you carry them the news that another flood had
come; they would only answer--"Well, boys, here's the ark!"

Now, as many Sperm Whales had been captured off the western coast of
Java, in the near vicinity of the Straits of Sunda; indeed, as most of
the ground, roundabout, was generally recognised by the fishermen as an
excellent spot for cruising; therefore, as the Pequod gained more
and more upon Java Head, the look-outs were repeatedly hailed, and
admonished to keep wide awake. But though the green palmy cliffs of the
land soon loomed on the starboard bow, and with delighted nostrils
the fresh cinnamon was snuffed in the air, yet not a single jet was
descried. Almost renouncing all thought of falling in with any game
hereabouts, the ship had well nigh entered the straits, when the
customary cheering cry was heard from aloft, and ere long a spectacle of
singular magnificence saluted us.

But here be it premised, that owing to the unwearied activity with which
of late they have been hunted over all four oceans, the Sperm Whales,
instead of almost invariably sailing in small detached companies, as in
former times, are now frequently met with in extensive herds, sometimes
embracing so great a multitude, that it would almost seem as if
numerous nations of them had sworn solemn league and covenant for mutual
assistance and protection. To this aggregation of the Sperm Whale into
such immense caravans, may be imputed the circumstance that even in the
best cruising grounds, you may now sometimes sail for weeks and months
together, without being greeted by a single spout; and then be suddenly
saluted by what sometimes seems thousands on thousands.

Broad on both bows, at the distance of some two or three miles, and
forming a great semicircle, embracing one half of the level horizon,
a continuous chain of whale-jets were up-playing and sparkling in the
noon-day air. Unlike the straight perpendicular twin-jets of the Right
Whale, which, dividing at top, fall over in two branches, like the cleft
drooping boughs of a willow, the single forward-slanting spout of the
Sperm Whale presents a thick curled bush of white mist, continually
rising and falling away to leeward.

Seen from the Pequod's deck, then, as she would rise on a high hill of
the sea, this host of vapoury spouts, individually curling up into the
air, and beheld through a blending atmosphere of bluish haze, showed
like the thousand cheerful chimneys of some dense metropolis, descried
of a balmy autumnal morning, by some horseman on a height.

As marching armies approaching an unfriendly defile in the mountains,
accelerate their march, all eagerness to place that perilous passage in
their rear, and once more expand in comparative security upon the plain;
even so did this vast fleet of whales now seem hurrying forward through
the straits; gradually contracting the wings of their semicircle, and
swimming on, in one solid, but still crescentic centre.

Crowding all sail the Pequod pressed after them; the harpooneers
handling their weapons, and loudly cheering from the heads of their
yet suspended boats. If the wind only held, little doubt had they, that
chased through these Straits of Sunda, the vast host would only deploy
into the Oriental seas to witness the capture of not a few of their
number. And who could tell whether, in that congregated caravan, Moby
Dick himself might not temporarily be swimming, like the worshipped
white-elephant in the coronation procession of the Siamese! So with
stun-sail piled on stun-sail, we sailed along, driving these leviathans
before us; when, of a sudden, the voice of Tashtego was heard, loudly
directing attention to something in our wake.

Corresponding to the crescent in our van, we beheld another in our rear.
It seemed formed of detached white vapours, rising and falling something
like the spouts of the whales; only they did not so completely come and
go; for they constantly hovered, without finally disappearing. Levelling
his glass at this sight, Ahab quickly revolved in his pivot-hole,
crying, "Aloft there, and rig whips and buckets to wet the
sails;--Malays, sir, and after us!"

As if too long lurking behind the headlands, till the Pequod should
fairly have entered the straits, these rascally Asiatics were now in hot
pursuit, to make up for their over-cautious delay. But when the swift
Pequod, with a fresh leading wind, was herself in hot chase; how very
kind of these tawny philanthropists to assist in speeding her on to
her own chosen pursuit,--mere riding-whips and rowels to her, that they
were. As with glass under arm, Ahab to-and-fro paced the deck; in his
forward turn beholding the monsters he chased, and in the after one the
bloodthirsty pirates chasing him; some such fancy as the above seemed
his. And when he glanced upon the green walls of the watery defile in
which the ship was then sailing, and bethought him that through that
gate lay the route to his vengeance, and beheld, how that through that
same gate he was now both chasing and being chased to his deadly end;
and not only that, but a herd of remorseless wild pirates and
inhuman atheistical devils were infernally cheering him on with their
curses;--when all these conceits had passed through his brain, Ahab's
brow was left gaunt and ribbed, like the black sand beach after some
stormy tide has been gnawing it, without being able to drag the firm
thing from its place.

But thoughts like these troubled very few of the reckless crew; and
when, after steadily dropping and dropping the pirates astern, the
Pequod at last shot by the vivid green Cockatoo Point on the Sumatra
side, emerging at last upon the broad waters beyond; then, the
harpooneers seemed more to grieve that the swift whales had been gaining
upon the ship, than to rejoice that the ship had so victoriously gained
upon the Malays. But still driving on in the wake of the whales, at
length they seemed abating their speed; gradually the ship neared them;
and the wind now dying away, word was passed to spring to the boats. But
no sooner did the herd, by some presumed wonderful instinct of the Sperm
Whale, become notified of the three keels that were after them,--though
as yet a mile in their rear,--than they rallied again, and forming
in close ranks and battalions, so that their spouts all looked like
flashing lines of stacked bayonets, moved on with redoubled velocity.

Stripped to our shirts and drawers, we sprang to the white-ash, and
after several hours' pulling were almost disposed to renounce the chase,
when a general pausing commotion among the whales gave animating
token that they were now at last under the influence of that strange
perplexity of inert irresolution, which, when the fishermen perceive
it in the whale, they say he is gallied. The compact martial columns
in which they had been hitherto rapidly and steadily swimming, were now
broken up in one measureless rout; and like King Porus' elephants in the
Indian battle with Alexander, they seemed going mad with consternation.
In all directions expanding in vast irregular circles, and aimlessly
swimming hither and thither, by their short thick spoutings, they
plainly betrayed their distraction of panic. This was still more
strangely evinced by those of their number, who, completely paralysed
as it were, helplessly floated like water-logged dismantled ships on the
sea. Had these Leviathans been but a flock of simple sheep, pursued over
the pasture by three fierce wolves, they could not possibly have evinced
such excessive dismay. But this occasional timidity is characteristic
of almost all herding creatures. Though banding together in tens of
thousands, the lion-maned buffaloes of the West have fled before a
solitary horseman. Witness, too, all human beings, how when herded
together in the sheepfold of a theatre's pit, they will, at the
slightest alarm of fire, rush helter-skelter for the outlets, crowding,
trampling, jamming, and remorselessly dashing each other to death. Best,
therefore, withhold any amazement at the strangely gallied whales
before us, for there is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not
infinitely outdone by the madness of men.

Though many of the whales, as has been said, were in violent motion,
yet it is to be observed that as a whole the herd neither advanced nor
retreated, but collectively remained in one place. As is customary in
those cases, the boats at once separated, each making for some one
lone whale on the outskirts of the shoal. In about three minutes' time,
Queequeg's harpoon was flung; the stricken fish darted blinding spray
in our faces, and then running away with us like light, steered straight
for the heart of the herd. Though such a movement on the part of the
whale struck under such circumstances, is in no wise unprecedented; and
indeed is almost always more or less anticipated; yet does it present
one of the more perilous vicissitudes of the fishery. For as the swift
monster drags you deeper and deeper into the frantic shoal, you bid
adieu to circumspect life and only exist in a delirious throb.

As, blind and deaf, the whale plunged forward, as if by sheer power of
speed to rid himself of the iron leech that had fastened to him; as we
thus tore a white gash in the sea, on all sides menaced as we flew, by
the crazed creatures to and fro rushing about us; our beset boat was
like a ship mobbed by ice-isles in a tempest, and striving to steer
through their complicated channels and straits, knowing not at what
moment it may be locked in and crushed.

But not a bit daunted, Queequeg steered us manfully; now sheering off
from this monster directly across our route in advance; now edging away
from that, whose colossal flukes were suspended overhead, while all the
time, Starbuck stood up in the bows, lance in hand, pricking out of our
way whatever whales he could reach by short darts, for there was no time
to make long ones. Nor were the oarsmen quite idle, though their wonted
duty was now altogether dispensed with. They chiefly attended to the
shouting part of the business. "Out of the way, Commodore!" cried one,
to a great dromedary that of a sudden rose bodily to the surface,
and for an instant threatened to swamp us. "Hard down with your tail,
there!" cried a second to another, which, close to our gunwale, seemed
calmly cooling himself with his own fan-like extremity.

All whaleboats carry certain curious contrivances, originally invented
by the Nantucket Indians, called druggs. Two thick squares of wood
of equal size are stoutly clenched together, so that they cross each
other's grain at right angles; a line of considerable length is then
attached to the middle of this block, and the other end of the line
being looped, it can in a moment be fastened to a harpoon. It is chiefly
among gallied whales that this drugg is used. For then, more whales
are close round you than you can possibly chase at one time. But sperm
whales are not every day encountered; while you may, then, you must
kill all you can. And if you cannot kill them all at once, you must wing
them, so that they can be afterwards killed at your leisure. Hence it
is, that at times like these the drugg, comes into requisition. Our boat
was furnished with three of them. The first and second were successfully
darted, and we saw the whales staggeringly running off, fettered by the
enormous sidelong resistance of the towing drugg. They were cramped like
malefactors with the chain and ball. But upon flinging the third, in the
act of tossing overboard the clumsy wooden block, it caught under one
of the seats of the boat, and in an instant tore it out and carried it
away, dropping the oarsman in the boat's bottom as the seat slid from
under him. On both sides the sea came in at the wounded planks, but we
stuffed two or three drawers and shirts in, and so stopped the leaks for
the time.

It had been next to impossible to dart these drugged-harpoons, were
it not that as we advanced into the herd, our whale's way greatly
diminished; moreover, that as we went still further and further from the
circumference of commotion, the direful disorders seemed waning. So that
when at last the jerking harpoon drew out, and the towing whale sideways
vanished; then, with the tapering force of his parting momentum, we
glided between two whales into the innermost heart of the shoal, as if
from some mountain torrent we had slid into a serene valley lake. Here
the storms in the roaring glens between the outermost whales, were heard
but not felt. In this central expanse the sea presented that smooth
satin-like surface, called a sleek, produced by the subtle moisture
thrown off by the whale in his more quiet moods. Yes, we were now
in that enchanted calm which they say lurks at the heart of every
commotion. And still in the distracted distance we beheld the tumults of
the outer concentric circles, and saw successive pods of whales, eight
or ten in each, swiftly going round and round, like multiplied spans of
horses in a ring; and so closely shoulder to shoulder, that a Titanic
circus-rider might easily have over-arched the middle ones, and so have
gone round on their backs. Owing to the density of the crowd of reposing
whales, more immediately surrounding the embayed axis of the herd, no
possible chance of escape was at present afforded us. We must watch for
a breach in the living wall that hemmed us in; the wall that had only
admitted us in order to shut us up. Keeping at the centre of the lake,
we were occasionally visited by small tame cows and calves; the women
and children of this routed host.

Now, inclusive of the occasional wide intervals between the revolving
outer circles, and inclusive of the spaces between the various pods in
any one of those circles, the entire area at this juncture, embraced by
the whole multitude, must have contained at least two or three square
miles. At any rate--though indeed such a test at such a time might be
deceptive--spoutings might be discovered from our low boat that
seemed playing up almost from the rim of the horizon. I mention this
circumstance, because, as if the cows and calves had been purposely
locked up in this innermost fold; and as if the wide extent of the
herd had hitherto prevented them from learning the precise cause of its
stopping; or, possibly, being so young, unsophisticated, and every way
innocent and inexperienced; however it may have been, these smaller
whales--now and then visiting our becalmed boat from the margin of the
lake--evinced a wondrous fearlessness and confidence, or else a still
becharmed panic which it was impossible not to marvel at. Like household
dogs they came snuffling round us, right up to our gunwales, and
touching them; till it almost seemed that some spell had suddenly
domesticated them. Queequeg patted their foreheads; Starbuck scratched
their backs with his lance; but fearful of the consequences, for the
time refrained from darting it.

But far beneath this wondrous world upon the surface, another and still
stranger world met our eyes as we gazed over the side. For, suspended
in those watery vaults, floated the forms of the nursing mothers of the
whales, and those that by their enormous girth seemed shortly to
become mothers. The lake, as I have hinted, was to a considerable depth
exceedingly transparent; and as human infants while suckling will calmly
and fixedly gaze away from the breast, as if leading two different
lives at the time; and while yet drawing mortal nourishment, be still
spiritually feasting upon some unearthly reminiscence;--even so did the
young of these whales seem looking up towards us, but not at us, as if
we were but a bit of Gulfweed in their new-born sight. Floating on their
sides, the mothers also seemed quietly eyeing us. One of these little
infants, that from certain queer tokens seemed hardly a day old, might
have measured some fourteen feet in length, and some six feet in
girth. He was a little frisky; though as yet his body seemed scarce yet
recovered from that irksome position it had so lately occupied in the
maternal reticule; where, tail to head, and all ready for the final
spring, the unborn whale lies bent like a Tartar's bow. The delicate
side-fins, and the palms of his flukes, still freshly retained the
plaited crumpled appearance of a baby's ears newly arrived from foreign
parts.

"Line! line!" cried Queequeg, looking over the gunwale; "him fast! him
fast!--Who line him! Who struck?--Two whale; one big, one little!"

"What ails ye, man?" cried Starbuck.

"Look-e here," said Queequeg, pointing down.

As when the stricken whale, that from the tub has reeled out hundreds of
fathoms of rope; as, after deep sounding, he floats up again, and shows
the slackened curling line buoyantly rising and spiralling towards the
air; so now, Starbuck saw long coils of the umbilical cord of Madame
Leviathan, by which the young cub seemed still tethered to its dam. Not
seldom in the rapid vicissitudes of the chase, this natural line, with
the maternal end loose, becomes entangled with the hempen one, so that
the cub is thereby trapped. Some of the subtlest secrets of the seas
seemed divulged to us in this enchanted pond. We saw young Leviathan
amours in the deep.*


*The sperm whale, as with all other species of the Leviathan, but unlike
most other fish, breeds indifferently at all seasons; after a gestation
which may probably be set down at nine months, producing but one at a
time; though in some few known instances giving birth to an Esau and
Jacob:--a contingency provided for in suckling by two teats, curiously
situated, one on each side of the anus; but the breasts themselves
extend upwards from that. When by chance these precious parts in a
nursing whale are cut by the hunter's lance, the mother's pouring milk
and blood rivallingly discolour the sea for rods. The milk is very sweet
and rich; it has been tasted by man; it might do well with strawberries.
When overflowing with mutual esteem, the whales salute MORE HOMINUM.


And thus, though surrounded by circle upon circle of consternations
and affrights, did these inscrutable creatures at the centre freely and
fearlessly indulge in all peaceful concernments; yea, serenely revelled
in dalliance and delight. But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of
my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and
while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and
deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy.

Meanwhile, as we thus lay entranced, the occasional sudden frantic
spectacles in the distance evinced the activity of the other boats,
still engaged in drugging the whales on the frontier of the host; or
possibly carrying on the war within the first circle, where abundance of
room and some convenient retreats were afforded them. But the sight
of the enraged drugged whales now and then blindly darting to and fro
across the circles, was nothing to what at last met our eyes. It is
sometimes the custom when fast to a whale more than commonly powerful
and alert, to seek to hamstring him, as it were, by sundering or
maiming his gigantic tail-tendon. It is done by darting a short-handled
cutting-spade, to which is attached a rope for hauling it back again.
A whale wounded (as we afterwards learned) in this part, but not
effectually, as it seemed, had broken away from the boat, carrying along
with him half of the harpoon line; and in the extraordinary agony of
the wound, he was now dashing among the revolving circles like the lone
mounted desperado Arnold, at the battle of Saratoga, carrying dismay
wherever he went.

But agonizing as was the wound of this whale, and an appalling spectacle
enough, any way; yet the peculiar horror with which he seemed to
inspire the rest of the herd, was owing to a cause which at first the
intervening distance obscured from us. But at length we perceived that
by one of the unimaginable accidents of the fishery, this whale had
become entangled in the harpoon-line that he towed; he had also run
away with the cutting-spade in him; and while the free end of the rope
attached to that weapon, had permanently caught in the coils of the
harpoon-line round his tail, the cutting-spade itself had worked loose
from his flesh. So that tormented to madness, he was now churning
through the water, violently flailing with his flexible tail, and
tossing the keen spade about him, wounding and murdering his own
comrades.

This terrific object seemed to recall the whole herd from their
stationary fright. First, the whales forming the margin of our lake
began to crowd a little, and tumble against each other, as if lifted
by half spent billows from afar; then the lake itself began faintly to
heave and swell; the submarine bridal-chambers and nurseries vanished;
in more and more contracting orbits the whales in the more central
circles began to swim in thickening clusters. Yes, the long calm was
departing. A low advancing hum was soon heard; and then like to the
tumultuous masses of block-ice when the great river Hudson breaks up in
Spring, the entire host of whales came tumbling upon their inner centre,
as if to pile themselves up in one common mountain. Instantly Starbuck
and Queequeg changed places; Starbuck taking the stern.

"Oars! Oars!" he intensely whispered, seizing the helm--"gripe your
oars, and clutch your souls, now! My God, men, stand by! Shove him off,
you Queequeg--the whale there!--prick him!--hit him! Stand up--stand
up, and stay so! Spring, men--pull, men; never mind their backs--scrape
them!--scrape away!"

The boat was now all but jammed between two vast black bulks, leaving a
narrow Dardanelles between their long lengths. But by desperate endeavor
we at last shot into a temporary opening; then giving way rapidly,
and at the same time earnestly watching for another outlet. After many
similar hair-breadth escapes, we at last swiftly glided into what had
just been one of the outer circles, but now crossed by random whales,
all violently making for one centre. This lucky salvation was cheaply
purchased by the loss of Queequeg's hat, who, while standing in the bows
to prick the fugitive whales, had his hat taken clean from his head by
the air-eddy made by the sudden tossing of a pair of broad flukes close
by.

Riotous and disordered as the universal commotion now was, it soon
resolved itself into what seemed a systematic movement; for having
clumped together at last in one dense body, they then renewed their
onward flight with augmented fleetness. Further pursuit was useless; but
the boats still lingered in their wake to pick up what drugged whales
might be dropped astern, and likewise to secure one which Flask had
killed and waifed. The waif is a pennoned pole, two or three of which
are carried by every boat; and which, when additional game is at hand,
are inserted upright into the floating body of a dead whale, both to
mark its place on the sea, and also as token of prior possession, should
the boats of any other ship draw near.

The result of this lowering was somewhat illustrative of that sagacious
saying in the Fishery,--the more whales the less fish. Of all the
drugged whales only one was captured. The rest contrived to escape for
the time, but only to be taken, as will hereafter be seen, by some other
craft than the Pequod.



CHAPTER 88. Schools and Schoolmasters.


The previous chapter gave account of an immense body or herd of Sperm
Whales, and there was also then given the probable cause inducing those
vast aggregations.

Now, though such great bodies are at times encountered, yet, as must
have been seen, even at the present day, small detached bands are
occasionally observed, embracing from twenty to fifty individuals each.
Such bands are known as schools. They generally are of two sorts; those
composed almost entirely of females, and those mustering none but young
vigorous males, or bulls, as they are familiarly designated.

In cavalier attendance upon the school of females, you invariably see a
male of full grown magnitude, but not old; who, upon any alarm, evinces
his gallantry by falling in the rear and covering the flight of his
ladies. In truth, this gentleman is a luxurious Ottoman, swimming about
over the watery world, surroundingly accompanied by all the solaces
and endearments of the harem. The contrast between this Ottoman and
his concubines is striking; because, while he is always of the largest
leviathanic proportions, the ladies, even at full growth, are not
more than one-third of the bulk of an average-sized male. They are
comparatively delicate, indeed; I dare say, not to exceed half a dozen
yards round the waist. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied, that upon the
whole they are hereditarily entitled to EMBONPOINT.

It is very curious to watch this harem and its lord in their indolent
ramblings. Like fashionables, they are for ever on the move in leisurely
search of variety. You meet them on the Line in time for the full flower
of the Equatorial feeding season, having just returned, perhaps, from
spending the summer in the Northern seas, and so cheating summer of all
unpleasant weariness and warmth. By the time they have lounged up and
down the promenade of the Equator awhile, they start for the Oriental
waters in anticipation of the cool season there, and so evade the other
excessive temperature of the year.

When serenely advancing on one of these journeys, if any strange
suspicious sights are seen, my lord whale keeps a wary eye on his
interesting family. Should any unwarrantably pert young Leviathan coming
that way, presume to draw confidentially close to one of the ladies,
with what prodigious fury the Bashaw assails him, and chases him away!
High times, indeed, if unprincipled young rakes like him are to be
permitted to invade the sanctity of domestic bliss; though do what the
Bashaw will, he cannot keep the most notorious Lothario out of his bed;
for, alas! all fish bed in common. As ashore, the ladies often cause the
most terrible duels among their rival admirers; just so with the whales,
who sometimes come to deadly battle, and all for love. They fence with
their long lower jaws, sometimes locking them together, and so striving
for the supremacy like elks that warringly interweave their antlers. Not
a few are captured having the deep scars of these encounters,--furrowed
heads, broken teeth, scolloped fins; and in some instances, wrenched and
dislocated mouths.

But supposing the invader of domestic bliss to betake himself away at
the first rush of the harem's lord, then is it very diverting to watch
that lord. Gently he insinuates his vast bulk among them again and
revels there awhile, still in tantalizing vicinity to young Lothario,
like pious Solomon devoutly worshipping among his thousand concubines.
Granting other whales to be in sight, the fishermen will seldom give
chase to one of these Grand Turks; for these Grand Turks are too lavish
of their strength, and hence their unctuousness is small. As for the
sons and the daughters they beget, why, those sons and daughters must
take care of themselves; at least, with only the maternal help. For
like certain other omnivorous roving lovers that might be named, my Lord
Whale has no taste for the nursery, however much for the bower; and so,
being a great traveller, he leaves his anonymous babies all over the
world; every baby an exotic. In good time, nevertheless, as the ardour
of youth declines; as years and dumps increase; as reflection lends
her solemn pauses; in short, as a general lassitude overtakes the sated
Turk; then a love of ease and virtue supplants the love for maidens; our
Ottoman enters upon the impotent, repentant, admonitory stage of life,
forswears, disbands the harem, and grown to an exemplary, sulky old
soul, goes about all alone among the meridians and parallels saying his
prayers, and warning each young Leviathan from his amorous errors.

Now, as the harem of whales is called by the fishermen a school, so
is the lord and master of that school technically known as the
schoolmaster. It is therefore not in strict character, however admirably
satirical, that after going to school himself, he should then go abroad
inculcating not what he learned there, but the folly of it. His title,
schoolmaster, would very naturally seem derived from the name bestowed
upon the harem itself, but some have surmised that the man who first
thus entitled this sort of Ottoman whale, must have read the memoirs of
Vidocq, and informed himself what sort of a country-schoolmaster that
famous Frenchman was in his younger days, and what was the nature of
those occult lessons he inculcated into some of his pupils.

The same secludedness and isolation to which the schoolmaster whale
betakes himself in his advancing years, is true of all aged Sperm
Whales. Almost universally, a lone whale--as a solitary Leviathan is
called--proves an ancient one. Like venerable moss-bearded Daniel Boone,
he will have no one near him but Nature herself; and her he takes to
wife in the wilderness of waters, and the best of wives she is, though
she keeps so many moody secrets.

The schools composing none but young and vigorous males, previously
mentioned, offer a strong contrast to the harem schools. For while
those female whales are characteristically timid, the young males, or
forty-barrel-bulls, as they call them, are by far the most pugnacious
of all Leviathans, and proverbially the most dangerous to encounter;
excepting those wondrous grey-headed, grizzled whales, sometimes met,
and these will fight you like grim fiends exasperated by a penal gout.

The Forty-barrel-bull schools are larger than the harem schools. Like
a mob of young collegians, they are full of fight, fun, and wickedness,
tumbling round the world at such a reckless, rollicking rate, that no
prudent underwriter would insure them any more than he would a riotous
lad at Yale or Harvard. They soon relinquish this turbulence though,
and when about three-fourths grown, break up, and separately go about in
quest of settlements, that is, harems.

Another point of difference between the male and female schools is
still more characteristic of the sexes. Say you strike a
Forty-barrel-bull--poor devil! all his comrades quit him. But strike
a member of the harem school, and her companions swim around her with
every token of concern, sometimes lingering so near her and so long, as
themselves to fall a prey.



CHAPTER 89. Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish.


The allusion to the waif and waif-poles in the last chapter but one,
necessitates some account of the laws and regulations of the whale
fishery, of which the waif may be deemed the grand symbol and badge.

It frequently happens that when several ships are cruising in company,
a whale may be struck by one vessel, then escape, and be finally killed
and captured by another vessel; and herein are indirectly comprised
many minor contingencies, all partaking of this one grand feature. For
example,--after a weary and perilous chase and capture of a whale,
the body may get loose from the ship by reason of a violent storm; and
drifting far away to leeward, be retaken by a second whaler, who, in a
calm, snugly tows it alongside, without risk of life or line. Thus
the most vexatious and violent disputes would often arise between
the fishermen, were there not some written or unwritten, universal,
undisputed law applicable to all cases.

Perhaps the only formal whaling code authorized by legislative
enactment, was that of Holland. It was decreed by the States-General in
A.D. 1695. But though no other nation has ever had any written whaling
law, yet the American fishermen have been their own legislators and
lawyers in this matter. They have provided a system which for terse
comprehensiveness surpasses Justinian's Pandects and the By-laws of
the Chinese Society for the Suppression of Meddling with other People's
Business. Yes; these laws might be engraven on a Queen Anne's farthing,
or the barb of a harpoon, and worn round the neck, so small are they.

I. A Fast-Fish belongs to the party fast to it.

II. A Loose-Fish is fair game for anybody who can soonest catch it.

But what plays the mischief with this masterly code is the admirable
brevity of it, which necessitates a vast volume of commentaries to
expound it.

First: What is a Fast-Fish? Alive or dead a fish is technically fast,
when it is connected with an occupied ship or boat, by any medium at all
controllable by the occupant or occupants,--a mast, an oar, a nine-inch
cable, a telegraph wire, or a strand of cobweb, it is all the same.
Likewise a fish is technically fast when it bears a waif, or any other
recognised symbol of possession; so long as the party waifing it plainly
evince their ability at any time to take it alongside, as well as their
intention so to do.

These are scientific commentaries; but the commentaries of the whalemen
themselves sometimes consist in hard words and harder knocks--the
Coke-upon-Littleton of the fist. True, among the more upright and
honourable whalemen allowances are always made for peculiar cases,
where it would be an outrageous moral injustice for one party to claim
possession of a whale previously chased or killed by another party. But
others are by no means so scrupulous.

Some fifty years ago there was a curious case of whale-trover litigated
in England, wherein the plaintiffs set forth that after a hard chase of
a whale in the Northern seas; and when indeed they (the plaintiffs) had
succeeded in harpooning the fish; they were at last, through peril of
their lives, obliged to forsake not only their lines, but their boat
itself. Ultimately the defendants (the crew of another ship) came up
with the whale, struck, killed, seized, and finally appropriated it
before the very eyes of the plaintiffs. And when those defendants were
remonstrated with, their captain snapped his fingers in the plaintiffs'
teeth, and assured them that by way of doxology to the deed he had done,
he would now retain their line, harpoons, and boat, which had remained
attached to the whale at the time of the seizure. Wherefore the
plaintiffs now sued for the recovery of the value of their whale, line,
harpoons, and boat.

Mr. Erskine was counsel for the defendants; Lord Ellenborough was
the judge. In the course of the defence, the witty Erskine went on
to illustrate his position, by alluding to a recent crim. con.
case, wherein a gentleman, after in vain trying to bridle his wife's
viciousness, had at last abandoned her upon the seas of life; but in
the course of years, repenting of that step, he instituted an action to
recover possession of her. Erskine was on the other side; and he
then supported it by saying, that though the gentleman had originally
harpooned the lady, and had once had her fast, and only by reason of the
great stress of her plunging viciousness, had at last abandoned her; yet
abandon her he did, so that she became a loose-fish; and therefore
when a subsequent gentleman re-harpooned her, the lady then became that
subsequent gentleman's property, along with whatever harpoon might have
been found sticking in her.

Now in the present case Erskine contended that the examples of the whale
and the lady were reciprocally illustrative of each other.

These pleadings, and the counter pleadings, being duly heard, the very
learned Judge in set terms decided, to wit,--That as for the boat, he
awarded it to the plaintiffs, because they had merely abandoned it
to save their lives; but that with regard to the controverted whale,
harpoons, and line, they belonged to the defendants; the whale, because
it was a Loose-Fish at the time of the final capture; and the harpoons
and line because when the fish made off with them, it (the fish)
acquired a property in those articles; and hence anybody who afterwards
took the fish had a right to them. Now the defendants afterwards took
the fish; ergo, the aforesaid articles were theirs.

A common man looking at this decision of the very learned Judge, might
possibly object to it. But ploughed up to the primary rock of the
matter, the two great principles laid down in the twin whaling laws
previously quoted, and applied and elucidated by Lord Ellenborough in
the above cited case; these two laws touching Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish,
I say, will, on reflection, be found the fundamentals of all human
jurisprudence; for notwithstanding its complicated tracery of sculpture,
the Temple of the Law, like the Temple of the Philistines, has but two
props to stand on.

Is it not a saying in every one's mouth, Possession is half of the law:
that is, regardless of how the thing came into possession? But often
possession is the whole of the law. What are the sinews and souls of
Russian serfs and Republican slaves but Fast-Fish, whereof possession is
the whole of the law? What to the rapacious landlord is the widow's last
mite but a Fast-Fish? What is yonder undetected villain's marble mansion
with a door-plate for a waif; what is that but a Fast-Fish? What is the
ruinous discount which Mordecai, the broker, gets from poor Woebegone,
the bankrupt, on a loan to keep Woebegone's family from starvation;
what is that ruinous discount but a Fast-Fish? What is the Archbishop of
Savesoul's income of L100,000 seized from the scant bread and cheese
of hundreds of thousands of broken-backed laborers (all sure of heaven
without any of Savesoul's help) what is that globular L100,000 but a
Fast-Fish? What are the Duke of Dunder's hereditary towns and hamlets
but Fast-Fish? What to that redoubted harpooneer, John Bull, is poor
Ireland, but a Fast-Fish? What to that apostolic lancer, Brother
Jonathan, is Texas but a Fast-Fish? And concerning all these, is not
Possession the whole of the law?

But if the doctrine of Fast-Fish be pretty generally applicable,
the kindred doctrine of Loose-Fish is still more widely so. That is
internationally and universally applicable.

What was America in 1492 but a Loose-Fish, in which Columbus struck the
Spanish standard by way of waifing it for his royal master and mistress?
What was Poland to the Czar? What Greece to the Turk? What India
to England? What at last will Mexico be to the United States? All
Loose-Fish.

What are the Rights of Man and the Liberties of the World but
Loose-Fish? What all men's minds and opinions but Loose-Fish? What is
the principle of religious belief in them but a Loose-Fish? What to
the ostentatious smuggling verbalists are the thoughts of thinkers but
Loose-Fish? What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish? And what
are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too?



CHAPTER 90. Heads or Tails.


"De balena vero sufficit, si rex habeat caput, et regina caudam."
BRACTON, L. 3, C. 3.


Latin from the books of the Laws of England, which taken along with the
context, means, that of all whales captured by anybody on the coast of
that land, the King, as Honourary Grand Harpooneer, must have the head,
and the Queen be respectfully presented with the tail. A division which,
in the whale, is much like halving an apple; there is no intermediate
remainder. Now as this law, under a modified form, is to this day in
force in England; and as it offers in various respects a strange anomaly
touching the general law of Fast and Loose-Fish, it is here treated of
in a separate chapter, on the same courteous principle that prompts
the English railways to be at the expense of a separate car, specially
reserved for the accommodation of royalty. In the first place, in
curious proof of the fact that the above-mentioned law is still in
force, I proceed to lay before you a circumstance that happened within
the last two years.

It seems that some honest mariners of Dover, or Sandwich, or some one
of the Cinque Ports, had after a hard chase succeeded in killing and
beaching a fine whale which they had originally descried afar off from
the shore. Now the Cinque Ports are partially or somehow under the
jurisdiction of a sort of policeman or beadle, called a Lord Warden.
Holding the office directly from the crown, I believe, all the royal
emoluments incident to the Cinque Port territories become by assignment
his. By some writers this office is called a sinecure. But not so.
Because the Lord Warden is busily employed at times in fobbing his
perquisites; which are his chiefly by virtue of that same fobbing of
them.

Now when these poor sun-burnt mariners, bare-footed, and with their
trowsers rolled high up on their eely legs, had wearily hauled their fat
fish high and dry, promising themselves a good L150 from the precious
oil and bone; and in fantasy sipping rare tea with their wives, and good
ale with their cronies, upon the strength of their respective shares; up
steps a very learned and most Christian and charitable gentleman, with
a copy of Blackstone under his arm; and laying it upon the whale's head,
he says--"Hands off! this fish, my masters, is a Fast-Fish. I seize it
as the Lord Warden's." Upon this the poor mariners in their respectful
consternation--so truly English--knowing not what to say, fall to
vigorously scratching their heads all round; meanwhile ruefully glancing
from the whale to the stranger. But that did in nowise mend the matter,
or at all soften the hard heart of the learned gentleman with the copy
of Blackstone. At length one of them, after long scratching about for
his ideas, made bold to speak,

"Please, sir, who is the Lord Warden?"

"The Duke."

"But the duke had nothing to do with taking this fish?"

"It is his."

"We have been at great trouble, and peril, and some expense, and is
all that to go to the Duke's benefit; we getting nothing at all for our
pains but our blisters?"

"It is his."

"Is the Duke so very poor as to be forced to this desperate mode of
getting a livelihood?"

"It is his."

"I thought to relieve my old bed-ridden mother by part of my share of
this whale."

"It is his."

"Won't the Duke be content with a quarter or a half?"

"It is his."

In a word, the whale was seized and sold, and his Grace the Duke of
Wellington received the money. Thinking that viewed in some particular
lights, the case might by a bare possibility in some small degree be
deemed, under the circumstances, a rather hard one, an honest clergyman
of the town respectfully addressed a note to his Grace, begging him to
take the case of those unfortunate mariners into full consideration. To
which my Lord Duke in substance replied (both letters were published)
that he had already done so, and received the money, and would be
obliged to the reverend gentleman if for the future he (the reverend
gentleman) would decline meddling with other people's business. Is
this the still militant old man, standing at the corners of the three
kingdoms, on all hands coercing alms of beggars?

It will readily be seen that in this case the alleged right of the
Duke to the whale was a delegated one from the Sovereign. We must needs
inquire then on what principle the Sovereign is originally invested with
that right. The law itself has already been set forth. But Plowdon gives
us the reason for it. Says Plowdon, the whale so caught belongs to
the King and Queen, "because of its superior excellence." And by the
soundest commentators this has ever been held a cogent argument in such
matters.

But why should the King have the head, and the Queen the tail? A reason
for that, ye lawyers!

In his treatise on "Queen-Gold," or Queen-pinmoney, an old King's Bench
author, one William Prynne, thus discourseth: "Ye tail is ye Queen's,
that ye Queen's wardrobe may be supplied with ye whalebone." Now this
was written at a time when the black limber bone of the Greenland or
Right whale was largely used in ladies' bodices. But this same bone
is not in the tail; it is in the head, which is a sad mistake for
a sagacious lawyer like Prynne. But is the Queen a mermaid, to be
presented with a tail? An allegorical meaning may lurk here.

There are two royal fish so styled by the English law writers--the whale
and the sturgeon; both royal property under certain limitations, and
nominally supplying the tenth branch of the crown's ordinary revenue.
I know not that any other author has hinted of the matter; but by
inference it seems to me that the sturgeon must be divided in the same
way as the whale, the King receiving the highly dense and elastic head
peculiar to that fish, which, symbolically regarded, may possibly be
humorously grounded upon some presumed congeniality. And thus there
seems a reason in all things, even in law.



CHAPTER 91. The Pequod Meets The Rose-Bud.


"In vain it was to rake for Ambergriese in the paunch of this Leviathan,
insufferable fetor denying not inquiry." SIR T. BROWNE, V.E.


It was a week or two after the last whaling scene recounted, and when we
were slowly sailing over a sleepy, vapoury, mid-day sea, that the many
noses on the Pequod's deck proved more vigilant discoverers than the
three pairs of eyes aloft. A peculiar and not very pleasant smell was
smelt in the sea.

"I will bet something now," said Stubb, "that somewhere hereabouts are
some of those drugged whales we tickled the other day. I thought they
would keel up before long."

Presently, the vapours in advance slid aside; and there in the distance
lay a ship, whose furled sails betokened that some sort of whale must be
alongside. As we glided nearer, the stranger showed French colours from
his peak; and by the eddying cloud of vulture sea-fowl that circled, and
hovered, and swooped around him, it was plain that the whale alongside
must be what the fishermen call a blasted whale, that is, a whale that
has died unmolested on the sea, and so floated an unappropriated corpse.
It may well be conceived, what an unsavory odor such a mass must
exhale; worse than an Assyrian city in the plague, when the living are
incompetent to bury the departed. So intolerable indeed is it regarded
by some, that no cupidity could persuade them to moor alongside of it.
Yet are there those who will still do it; notwithstanding the fact that
the oil obtained from such subjects is of a very inferior quality, and
by no means of the nature of attar-of-rose.

Coming still nearer with the expiring breeze, we saw that the Frenchman
had a second whale alongside; and this second whale seemed even more
of a nosegay than the first. In truth, it turned out to be one of
those problematical whales that seem to dry up and die with a sort
of prodigious dyspepsia, or indigestion; leaving their defunct bodies
almost entirely bankrupt of anything like oil. Nevertheless, in the
proper place we shall see that no knowing fisherman will ever turn
up his nose at such a whale as this, however much he may shun blasted
whales in general.

The Pequod had now swept so nigh to the stranger, that Stubb vowed
he recognised his cutting spade-pole entangled in the lines that were
knotted round the tail of one of these whales.

"There's a pretty fellow, now," he banteringly laughed, standing in the
ship's bows, "there's a jackal for ye! I well know that these Crappoes
of Frenchmen are but poor devils in the fishery; sometimes lowering
their boats for breakers, mistaking them for Sperm Whale spouts; yes,
and sometimes sailing from their port with their hold full of boxes of
tallow candles, and cases of snuffers, foreseeing that all the oil they
will get won't be enough to dip the Captain's wick into; aye, we all
know these things; but look ye, here's a Crappo that is content with our
leavings, the drugged whale there, I mean; aye, and is content too with
scraping the dry bones of that other precious fish he has there. Poor
devil! I say, pass round a hat, some one, and let's make him a present
of a little oil for dear charity's sake. For what oil he'll get from
that drugged whale there, wouldn't be fit to burn in a jail; no, not
in a condemned cell. And as for the other whale, why, I'll agree to get
more oil by chopping up and trying out these three masts of ours, than
he'll get from that bundle of bones; though, now that I think of it, it
may contain something worth a good deal more than oil; yes, ambergris.
I wonder now if our old man has thought of that. It's worth trying. Yes,
I'm for it;" and so saying he started for the quarter-deck.

By this time the faint air had become a complete calm; so that whether
or no, the Pequod was now fairly entrapped in the smell, with no hope of
escaping except by its breezing up again. Issuing from the cabin, Stubb
now called his boat's crew, and pulled off for the stranger. Drawing
across her bow, he perceived that in accordance with the fanciful French
taste, the upper part of her stem-piece was carved in the likeness of a
huge drooping stalk, was painted green, and for thorns had copper
spikes projecting from it here and there; the whole terminating in a
symmetrical folded bulb of a bright red colour. Upon her head boards, in
large gilt letters, he read "Bouton de Rose,"--Rose-button, or Rose-bud;
and this was the romantic name of this aromatic ship.

Though Stubb did not understand the BOUTON part of the inscription, yet
the word ROSE, and the bulbous figure-head put together, sufficiently
explained the whole to him.

"A wooden rose-bud, eh?" he cried with his hand to his nose, "that will
do very well; but how like all creation it smells!"

Now in order to hold direct communication with the people on deck, he
had to pull round the bows to the starboard side, and thus come close to
the blasted whale; and so talk over it.

Arrived then at this spot, with one hand still to his nose, he
bawled--"Bouton-de-Rose, ahoy! are there any of you Bouton-de-Roses that
speak English?"

"Yes," rejoined a Guernsey-man from the bulwarks, who turned out to be
the chief-mate.

"Well, then, my Bouton-de-Rose-bud, have you seen the White Whale?"

"WHAT whale?"

"The WHITE Whale--a Sperm Whale--Moby Dick, have ye seen him?

"Never heard of such a whale. Cachalot Blanche! White Whale--no."

"Very good, then; good bye now, and I'll call again in a minute."

Then rapidly pulling back towards the Pequod, and seeing Ahab leaning
over the quarter-deck rail awaiting his report, he moulded his two hands
into a trumpet and shouted--"No, Sir! No!" Upon which Ahab retired, and
Stubb returned to the Frenchman.

He now perceived that the Guernsey-man, who had just got into the
chains, and was using a cutting-spade, had slung his nose in a sort of
bag.

"What's the matter with your nose, there?" said Stubb. "Broke it?"

"I wish it was broken, or that I didn't have any nose at all!" answered
the Guernsey-man, who did not seem to relish the job he was at very
much. "But what are you holding YOURS for?"

"Oh, nothing! It's a wax nose; I have to hold it on. Fine day, ain't it?
Air rather gardenny, I should say; throw us a bunch of posies, will ye,
Bouton-de-Rose?"

"What in the devil's name do you want here?" roared the Guernseyman,
flying into a sudden passion.

"Oh! keep cool--cool? yes, that's the word! why don't you pack those
whales in ice while you're working at 'em? But joking aside, though; do
you know, Rose-bud, that it's all nonsense trying to get any oil out of
such whales? As for that dried up one, there, he hasn't a gill in his
whole carcase."

"I know that well enough; but, d'ye see, the Captain here won't believe
it; this is his first voyage; he was a Cologne manufacturer before. But
come aboard, and mayhap he'll believe you, if he won't me; and so I'll
get out of this dirty scrape."

"Anything to oblige ye, my sweet and pleasant fellow," rejoined Stubb,
and with that he soon mounted to the deck. There a queer scene presented
itself. The sailors, in tasselled caps of red worsted, were getting the
heavy tackles in readiness for the whales. But they worked rather slow
and talked very fast, and seemed in anything but a good humor. All their
noses upwardly projected from their faces like so many jib-booms.
Now and then pairs of them would drop their work, and run up to the
mast-head to get some fresh air. Some thinking they would catch the
plague, dipped oakum in coal-tar, and at intervals held it to their
nostrils. Others having broken the stems of their pipes almost short
off at the bowl, were vigorously puffing tobacco-smoke, so that it
constantly filled their olfactories.

Stubb was struck by a shower of outcries and anathemas proceeding from
the Captain's round-house abaft; and looking in that direction saw a
fiery face thrust from behind the door, which was held ajar from within.
This was the tormented surgeon, who, after in vain remonstrating
against the proceedings of the day, had betaken himself to the Captain's
round-house (CABINET he called it) to avoid the pest; but still, could
not help yelling out his entreaties and indignations at times.

Marking all this, Stubb argued well for his scheme, and turning to the
Guernsey-man had a little chat with him, during which the stranger mate
expressed his detestation of his Captain as a conceited ignoramus,
who had brought them all into so unsavory and unprofitable a pickle.
Sounding him carefully, Stubb further perceived that the Guernsey-man
had not the slightest suspicion concerning the ambergris. He therefore
held his peace on that head, but otherwise was quite frank and
confidential with him, so that the two quickly concocted a little plan
for both circumventing and satirizing the Captain, without his at all
dreaming of distrusting their sincerity. According to this little plan
of theirs, the Guernsey-man, under cover of an interpreter's office, was
to tell the Captain what he pleased, but as coming from Stubb; and as
for Stubb, he was to utter any nonsense that should come uppermost in
him during the interview.

By this time their destined victim appeared from his cabin. He was a
small and dark, but rather delicate looking man for a sea-captain, with
large whiskers and moustache, however; and wore a red cotton velvet vest
with watch-seals at his side. To this gentleman, Stubb was now politely
introduced by the Guernsey-man, who at once ostentatiously put on the
aspect of interpreting between them.

"What shall I say to him first?" said he.

"Why," said Stubb, eyeing the velvet vest and the watch and seals, "you
may as well begin by telling him that he looks a sort of babyish to me,
though I don't pretend to be a judge."

"He says, Monsieur," said the Guernsey-man, in French, turning to his
captain, "that only yesterday his ship spoke a vessel, whose captain
and chief-mate, with six sailors, had all died of a fever caught from a
blasted whale they had brought alongside."

Upon this the captain started, and eagerly desired to know more.

"What now?" said the Guernsey-man to Stubb.

"Why, since he takes it so easy, tell him that now I have eyed him
carefully, I'm quite certain that he's no more fit to command a
whale-ship than a St. Jago monkey. In fact, tell him from me he's a
baboon."

"He vows and declares, Monsieur, that the other whale, the dried one, is
far more deadly than the blasted one; in fine, Monsieur, he conjures us,
as we value our lives, to cut loose from these fish."

Instantly the captain ran forward, and in a loud voice commanded his
crew to desist from hoisting the cutting-tackles, and at once cast loose
the cables and chains confining the whales to the ship.

"What now?" said the Guernsey-man, when the Captain had returned to
them.

"Why, let me see; yes, you may as well tell him now that--that--in
fact, tell him I've diddled him, and (aside to himself) perhaps somebody
else."

"He says, Monsieur, that he's very happy to have been of any service to
us."

Hearing this, the captain vowed that they were the grateful parties
(meaning himself and mate) and concluded by inviting Stubb down into his
cabin to drink a bottle of Bordeaux.

"He wants you to take a glass of wine with him," said the interpreter.

"Thank him heartily; but tell him it's against my principles to drink
with the man I've diddled. In fact, tell him I must go."

"He says, Monsieur, that his principles won't admit of his drinking; but
that if Monsieur wants to live another day to drink, then Monsieur had
best drop all four boats, and pull the ship away from these whales, for
it's so calm they won't drift."

By this time Stubb was over the side, and getting into his boat, hailed
the Guernsey-man to this effect,--that having a long tow-line in his
boat, he would do what he could to help them, by pulling out the lighter
whale of the two from the ship's side. While the Frenchman's boats,
then, were engaged in towing the ship one way, Stubb benevolently towed
away at his whale the other way, ostentatiously slacking out a most
unusually long tow-line.

Presently a breeze sprang up; Stubb feigned to cast off from the whale;
hoisting his boats, the Frenchman soon increased his distance, while the
Pequod slid in between him and Stubb's whale. Whereupon Stubb quickly
pulled to the floating body, and hailing the Pequod to give notice of
his intentions, at once proceeded to reap the fruit of his unrighteous
cunning. Seizing his sharp boat-spade, he commenced an excavation in the
body, a little behind the side fin. You would almost have thought he was
digging a cellar there in the sea; and when at length his spade struck
against the gaunt ribs, it was like turning up old Roman tiles and
pottery buried in fat English loam. His boat's crew were all in high
excitement, eagerly helping their chief, and looking as anxious as
gold-hunters.

And all the time numberless fowls were diving, and ducking, and
screaming, and yelling, and fighting around them. Stubb was beginning
to look disappointed, especially as the horrible nosegay increased, when
suddenly from out the very heart of this plague, there stole a faint
stream of perfume, which flowed through the tide of bad smells without
being absorbed by it, as one river will flow into and then along with
another, without at all blending with it for a time.

"I have it, I have it," cried Stubb, with delight, striking something in
the subterranean regions, "a purse! a purse!"

Dropping his spade, he thrust both hands in, and drew out handfuls
of something that looked like ripe Windsor soap, or rich mottled old
cheese; very unctuous and savory withal. You might easily dent it with
your thumb; it is of a hue between yellow and ash colour. And this, good
friends, is ambergris, worth a gold guinea an ounce to any druggist.
Some six handfuls were obtained; but more was unavoidably lost in the
sea, and still more, perhaps, might have been secured were it not for
impatient Ahab's loud command to Stubb to desist, and come on board,
else the ship would bid them good bye.



CHAPTER 92. Ambergris.


Now this ambergris is a very curious substance, and so important as
an article of commerce, that in 1791 a certain Nantucket-born Captain
Coffin was examined at the bar of the English House of Commons on that
subject. For at that time, and indeed until a comparatively late day,
the precise origin of ambergris remained, like amber itself, a problem
to the learned. Though the word ambergris is but the French compound for
grey amber, yet the two substances are quite distinct. For amber, though
at times found on the sea-coast, is also dug up in some far inland
soils, whereas ambergris is never found except upon the sea. Besides,
amber is a hard, transparent, brittle, odorless substance, used for
mouth-pieces to pipes, for beads and ornaments; but ambergris is soft,
waxy, and so highly fragrant and spicy, that it is largely used in
perfumery, in pastiles, precious candles, hair-powders, and pomatum.
The Turks use it in cooking, and also carry it to Mecca, for the same
purpose that frankincense is carried to St. Peter's in Rome. Some wine
merchants drop a few grains into claret, to flavor it.

Who would think, then, that such fine ladies and gentlemen should regale
themselves with an essence found in the inglorious bowels of a sick
whale! Yet so it is. By some, ambergris is supposed to be the cause, and
by others the effect, of the dyspepsia in the whale. How to cure such
a dyspepsia it were hard to say, unless by administering three or four
boat loads of Brandreth's pills, and then running out of harm's way, as
laborers do in blasting rocks.

I have forgotten to say that there were found in this ambergris, certain
hard, round, bony plates, which at first Stubb thought might be sailors'
trowsers buttons; but it afterwards turned out that they were nothing
more than pieces of small squid bones embalmed in that manner.

Now that the incorruption of this most fragrant ambergris should be
found in the heart of such decay; is this nothing? Bethink thee of that
saying of St. Paul in Corinthians, about corruption and incorruption;
how that we are sown in dishonour, but raised in glory. And likewise
call to mind that saying of Paracelsus about what it is that maketh
the best musk. Also forget not the strange fact that of all things of
ill-savor, Cologne-water, in its rudimental manufacturing stages, is the
worst.

I should like to conclude the chapter with the above appeal, but cannot,
owing to my anxiety to repel a charge often made against whalemen,
and which, in the estimation of some already biased minds, might be
considered as indirectly substantiated by what has been said of
the Frenchman's two whales. Elsewhere in this volume the slanderous
aspersion has been disproved, that the vocation of whaling is throughout
a slatternly, untidy business. But there is another thing to rebut. They
hint that all whales always smell bad. Now how did this odious stigma
originate?

I opine, that it is plainly traceable to the first arrival of the
Greenland whaling ships in London, more than two centuries ago. Because
those whalemen did not then, and do not now, try out their oil at sea as
the Southern ships have always done; but cutting up the fresh blubber in
small bits, thrust it through the bung holes of large casks, and carry
it home in that manner; the shortness of the season in those Icy Seas,
and the sudden and violent storms to which they are exposed, forbidding
any other course. The consequence is, that upon breaking into the hold,
and unloading one of these whale cemeteries, in the Greenland dock, a
savor is given forth somewhat similar to that arising from excavating an
old city grave-yard, for the foundations of a Lying-in-Hospital.

I partly surmise also, that this wicked charge against whalers may be
likewise imputed to the existence on the coast of Greenland, in former
times, of a Dutch village called Schmerenburgh or Smeerenberg, which
latter name is the one used by the learned Fogo Von Slack, in his great
work on Smells, a text-book on that subject. As its name imports (smeer,
fat; berg, to put up), this village was founded in order to afford a
place for the blubber of the Dutch whale fleet to be tried out, without
being taken home to Holland for that purpose. It was a collection of
furnaces, fat-kettles, and oil sheds; and when the works were in full
operation certainly gave forth no very pleasant savor. But all this is
quite different with a South Sea Sperm Whaler; which in a voyage of four
years perhaps, after completely filling her hold with oil, does not,
perhaps, consume fifty days in the business of boiling out; and in the
state that it is casked, the oil is nearly scentless. The truth is, that
living or dead, if but decently treated, whales as a species are by
no means creatures of ill odor; nor can whalemen be recognised, as the
people of the middle ages affected to detect a Jew in the company, by
the nose. Nor indeed can the whale possibly be otherwise than fragrant,
when, as a general thing, he enjoys such high health; taking abundance
of exercise; always out of doors; though, it is true, seldom in the
open air. I say, that the motion of a Sperm Whale's flukes above water
dispenses a perfume, as when a musk-scented lady rustles her dress in a
warm parlor. What then shall I liken the Sperm Whale to for fragrance,
considering his magnitude? Must it not be to that famous elephant, with
jewelled tusks, and redolent with myrrh, which was led out of an Indian
town to do honour to Alexander the Great?



CHAPTER 93. The Castaway.


It was but some few days after encountering the Frenchman, that a most
significant event befell the most insignificant of the Pequod's crew; an
event most lamentable; and which ended in providing the sometimes
madly merry and predestinated craft with a living and ever accompanying
prophecy of whatever shattered sequel might prove her own.

Now, in the whale ship, it is not every one that goes in the boats. Some
few hands are reserved called ship-keepers, whose province it is to work
the vessel while the boats are pursuing the whale. As a general thing,
these ship-keepers are as hardy fellows as the men comprising the boats'
crews. But if there happen to be an unduly slender, clumsy, or timorous
wight in the ship, that wight is certain to be made a ship-keeper. It
was so in the Pequod with the little negro Pippin by nick-name, Pip by
abbreviation. Poor Pip! ye have heard of him before; ye must remember
his tambourine on that dramatic midnight, so gloomy-jolly.

In outer aspect, Pip and Dough-Boy made a match, like a black pony and a
white one, of equal developments, though of dissimilar colour, driven in
one eccentric span. But while hapless Dough-Boy was by nature dull and
torpid in his intellects, Pip, though over tender-hearted, was at bottom
very bright, with that pleasant, genial, jolly brightness peculiar to
his tribe; a tribe, which ever enjoy all holidays and festivities with
finer, freer relish than any other race. For blacks, the year's calendar
should show naught but three hundred and sixty-five Fourth of Julys and
New Year's Days. Nor smile so, while I write that this little black was
brilliant, for even blackness has its brilliancy; behold yon lustrous
ebony, panelled in king's cabinets. But Pip loved life, and all life's
peaceable securities; so that the panic-striking business in which he
had somehow unaccountably become entrapped, had most sadly blurred his
brightness; though, as ere long will be seen, what was thus temporarily
subdued in him, in the end was destined to be luridly illumined by
strange wild fires, that fictitiously showed him off to ten times the
natural lustre with which in his native Tolland County in Connecticut,
he had once enlivened many a fiddler's frolic on the green; and at
melodious even-tide, with his gay ha-ha! had turned the round horizon
into one star-belled tambourine. So, though in the clear air of day,
suspended against a blue-veined neck, the pure-watered diamond drop
will healthful glow; yet, when the cunning jeweller would show you
the diamond in its most impressive lustre, he lays it against a gloomy
ground, and then lights it up, not by the sun, but by some unnatural
gases. Then come out those fiery effulgences, infernally superb; then
the evil-blazing diamond, once the divinest symbol of the crystal skies,
looks like some crown-jewel stolen from the King of Hell. But let us to
the story.

It came to pass, that in the ambergris affair Stubb's after-oarsman
chanced so to sprain his hand, as for a time to become quite maimed;
and, temporarily, Pip was put into his place.

The first time Stubb lowered with him, Pip evinced much nervousness;
but happily, for that time, escaped close contact with the whale; and
therefore came off not altogether discreditably; though Stubb observing
him, took care, afterwards, to exhort him to cherish his courageousness
to the utmost, for he might often find it needful.

Now upon the second lowering, the boat paddled upon the whale; and as
the fish received the darted iron, it gave its customary rap, which
happened, in this instance, to be right under poor Pip's seat. The
involuntary consternation of the moment caused him to leap, paddle in
hand, out of the boat; and in such a way, that part of the slack whale
line coming against his chest, he breasted it overboard with him, so as
to become entangled in it, when at last plumping into the water. That
instant the stricken whale started on a fierce run, the line swiftly
straightened; and presto! poor Pip came all foaming up to the chocks
of the boat, remorselessly dragged there by the line, which had taken
several turns around his chest and neck.

Tashtego stood in the bows. He was full of the fire of the hunt. He
hated Pip for a poltroon. Snatching the boat-knife from its sheath,
he suspended its sharp edge over the line, and turning towards Stubb,
exclaimed interrogatively, "Cut?" Meantime Pip's blue, choked face
plainly looked, Do, for God's sake! All passed in a flash. In less than
half a minute, this entire thing happened.

"Damn him, cut!" roared Stubb; and so the whale was lost and Pip was
saved.

So soon as he recovered himself, the poor little negro was assailed
by yells and execrations from the crew. Tranquilly permitting these
irregular cursings to evaporate, Stubb then in a plain, business-like,
but still half humorous manner, cursed Pip officially; and that done,
unofficially gave him much wholesome advice. The substance was, Never
jump from a boat, Pip, except--but all the rest was indefinite, as the
soundest advice ever is. Now, in general, STICK TO THE BOAT, is your
true motto in whaling; but cases will sometimes happen when LEAP FROM
THE BOAT, is still better. Moreover, as if perceiving at last that if he
should give undiluted conscientious advice to Pip, he would be leaving
him too wide a margin to jump in for the future; Stubb suddenly dropped
all advice, and concluded with a peremptory command, "Stick to the boat,
Pip, or by the Lord, I won't pick you up if you jump; mind that. We
can't afford to lose whales by the likes of you; a whale would sell for
thirty times what you would, Pip, in Alabama. Bear that in mind, and
don't jump any more." Hereby perhaps Stubb indirectly hinted, that
though man loved his fellow, yet man is a money-making animal, which
propensity too often interferes with his benevolence.

But we are all in the hands of the Gods; and Pip jumped again. It was
under very similar circumstances to the first performance; but this time
he did not breast out the line; and hence, when the whale started to
run, Pip was left behind on the sea, like a hurried traveller's trunk.
Alas! Stubb was but too true to his word. It was a beautiful, bounteous,
blue day; the spangled sea calm and cool, and flatly stretching away,
all round, to the horizon, like gold-beater's skin hammered out to the
extremest. Bobbing up and down in that sea, Pip's ebon head showed
like a head of cloves. No boat-knife was lifted when he fell so rapidly
astern. Stubb's inexorable back was turned upon him; and the whale was
winged. In three minutes, a whole mile of shoreless ocean was between
Pip and Stubb. Out from the centre of the sea, poor Pip turned his
crisp, curling, black head to the sun, another lonely castaway, though
the loftiest and the brightest.

Now, in calm weather, to swim in the open ocean is as easy to the
practised swimmer as to ride in a spring-carriage ashore. But the awful
lonesomeness is intolerable. The intense concentration of self in the
middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it? Mark, how
when sailors in a dead calm bathe in the open sea--mark how closely they
hug their ship and only coast along her sides.

But had Stubb really abandoned the poor little negro to his fate? No; he
did not mean to, at least. Because there were two boats in his wake,
and he supposed, no doubt, that they would of course come up to Pip very
quickly, and pick him up; though, indeed, such considerations towards
oarsmen jeopardized through their own timidity, is not always manifested
by the hunters in all similar instances; and such instances not
unfrequently occur; almost invariably in the fishery, a coward, so
called, is marked with the same ruthless detestation peculiar to
military navies and armies.

But it so happened, that those boats, without seeing Pip, suddenly
spying whales close to them on one side, turned, and gave chase; and
Stubb's boat was now so far away, and he and all his crew so intent
upon his fish, that Pip's ringed horizon began to expand around him
miserably. By the merest chance the ship itself at last rescued him; but
from that hour the little negro went about the deck an idiot; such, at
least, they said he was. The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body
up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though.
Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of
the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes;
and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the
joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous,
God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters
heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the
loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man's
insanity is heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man
comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and
frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his
God.

For the rest, blame not Stubb too hardly. The thing is common in that
fishery; and in the sequel of the narrative, it will then be seen what
like abandonment befell myself.



CHAPTER 94. A Squeeze of the Hand.


That whale of Stubb's, so dearly purchased, was duly brought to
the Pequod's side, where all those cutting and hoisting operations
previously detailed, were regularly gone through, even to the baling of
the Heidelburgh Tun, or Case.

While some were occupied with this latter duty, others were employed
in dragging away the larger tubs, so soon as filled with the sperm; and
when the proper time arrived, this same sperm was carefully manipulated
ere going to the try-works, of which anon.

It had cooled and crystallized to such a degree, that when, with several
others, I sat down before a large Constantine's bath of it, I found
it strangely concreted into lumps, here and there rolling about in the
liquid part. It was our business to squeeze these lumps back into fluid.
A sweet and unctuous duty! No wonder that in old times this sperm was
such a favourite cosmetic. Such a clearer! such a sweetener! such a
softener! such a delicious molifier! After having my hands in it for
only a few minutes, my fingers felt like eels, and began, as it were, to
serpentine and spiralise.

As I sat there at my ease, cross-legged on the deck; after the bitter
exertion at the windlass; under a blue tranquil sky; the ship under
indolent sail, and gliding so serenely along; as I bathed my hands among
those soft, gentle globules of infiltrated tissues, woven almost within
the hour; as they richly broke to my fingers, and discharged all their
opulence, like fully ripe grapes their wine; as I snuffed up that
uncontaminated aroma,--literally and truly, like the smell of spring
violets; I declare to you, that for the time I lived as in a musky
meadow; I forgot all about our horrible oath; in that inexpressible
sperm, I washed my hands and my heart of it; I almost began to credit
the old Paracelsan superstition that sperm is of rare virtue in allaying
the heat of anger; while bathing in that bath, I felt divinely free from
all ill-will, or petulance, or malice, of any sort whatsoever.

Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm
till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a
strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly
squeezing my co-laborers' hands in it, mistaking their hands for the
gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving
feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually
squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as
much as to say,--Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish
any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come;
let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into
each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and
sperm of kindness.

Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever! For now, since by
many prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in all cases
man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable
felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in
the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fireside, the
country; now that I have perceived all this, I am ready to squeeze case
eternally. In thoughts of the visions of the night, I saw long rows of
angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti.

Now, while discoursing of sperm, it behooves to speak of other things
akin to it, in the business of preparing the sperm whale for the
try-works.

First comes white-horse, so called, which is obtained from the tapering
part of the fish, and also from the thicker portions of his flukes. It
is tough with congealed tendons--a wad of muscle--but still contains
some oil. After being severed from the whale, the white-horse is first
cut into portable oblongs ere going to the mincer. They look much like
blocks of Berkshire marble.

Plum-pudding is the term bestowed upon certain fragmentary parts of the
whale's flesh, here and there adhering to the blanket of blubber, and
often participating to a considerable degree in its unctuousness. It is
a most refreshing, convivial, beautiful object to behold. As its name
imports, it is of an exceedingly rich, mottled tint, with a bestreaked
snowy and golden ground, dotted with spots of the deepest crimson and
purple. It is plums of rubies, in pictures of citron. Spite of reason,
it is hard to keep yourself from eating it. I confess, that once I stole
behind the foremast to try it. It tasted something as I should conceive
a royal cutlet from the thigh of Louis le Gros might have tasted,
supposing him to have been killed the first day after the venison
season, and that particular venison season contemporary with an
unusually fine vintage of the vineyards of Champagne.

There is another substance, and a very singular one, which turns up in
the course of this business, but which I feel it to be very puzzling
adequately to describe. It is called slobgollion; an appellation
original with the whalemen, and even so is the nature of the substance.
It is an ineffably oozy, stringy affair, most frequently found in the
tubs of sperm, after a prolonged squeezing, and subsequent decanting.
I hold it to be the wondrously thin, ruptured membranes of the case,
coalescing.

Gurry, so called, is a term properly belonging to right whalemen, but
sometimes incidentally used by the sperm fishermen. It designates the
dark, glutinous substance which is scraped off the back of the Greenland
or right whale, and much of which covers the decks of those inferior
souls who hunt that ignoble Leviathan.

Nippers. Strictly this word is not indigenous to the whale's vocabulary.
But as applied by whalemen, it becomes so. A whaleman's nipper is
a short firm strip of tendinous stuff cut from the tapering part of
Leviathan's tail: it averages an inch in thickness, and for the rest, is
about the size of the iron part of a hoe. Edgewise moved along the
oily deck, it operates like a leathern squilgee; and by nameless
blandishments, as of magic, allures along with it all impurities.

But to learn all about these recondite matters, your best way is at once
to descend into the blubber-room, and have a long talk with its inmates.
This place has previously been mentioned as the receptacle for the
blanket-pieces, when stript and hoisted from the whale. When the proper
time arrives for cutting up its contents, this apartment is a scene of
terror to all tyros, especially by night. On one side, lit by a dull
lantern, a space has been left clear for the workmen. They generally
go in pairs,--a pike-and-gaffman and a spade-man. The whaling-pike is
similar to a frigate's boarding-weapon of the same name. The gaff is
something like a boat-hook. With his gaff, the gaffman hooks on to a
sheet of blubber, and strives to hold it from slipping, as the ship
pitches and lurches about. Meanwhile, the spade-man stands on the sheet
itself, perpendicularly chopping it into the portable horse-pieces. This
spade is sharp as hone can make it; the spademan's feet are shoeless;
the thing he stands on will sometimes irresistibly slide away from
him, like a sledge. If he cuts off one of his own toes, or one of his
assistants', would you be very much astonished? Toes are scarce among
veteran blubber-room men.



CHAPTER 95. The Cassock.


Had you stepped on board the Pequod at a certain juncture of this
post-mortemizing of the whale; and had you strolled forward nigh the
windlass, pretty sure am I that you would have scanned with no small
curiosity a very strange, enigmatical object, which you would have seen
there, lying along lengthwise in the lee scuppers. Not the wondrous
cistern in the whale's huge head; not the prodigy of his unhinged lower
jaw; not the miracle of his symmetrical tail; none of these would so
surprise you, as half a glimpse of that unaccountable cone,--longer than
a Kentuckian is tall, nigh a foot in diameter at the base, and jet-black
as Yojo, the ebony idol of Queequeg. And an idol, indeed, it is; or,
rather, in old times, its likeness was. Such an idol as that found in
the secret groves of Queen Maachah in Judea; and for worshipping which,
King Asa, her son, did depose her, and destroyed the idol, and burnt it
for an abomination at the brook Kedron, as darkly set forth in the 15th
chapter of the First Book of Kings.

Look at the sailor, called the mincer, who now comes along, and assisted
by two allies, heavily backs the grandissimus, as the mariners call it,
and with bowed shoulders, staggers off with it as if he were a grenadier
carrying a dead comrade from the field. Extending it upon the forecastle
deck, he now proceeds cylindrically to remove its dark pelt, as an
African hunter the pelt of a boa. This done he turns the pelt inside
out, like a pantaloon leg; gives it a good stretching, so as almost to
double its diameter; and at last hangs it, well spread, in the rigging,
to dry. Ere long, it is taken down; when removing some three feet of it,
towards the pointed extremity, and then cutting two slits for arm-holes
at the other end, he lengthwise slips himself bodily into it. The mincer
now stands before you invested in the full canonicals of his calling.
Immemorial to all his order, this investiture alone will adequately
protect him, while employed in the peculiar functions of his office.

That office consists in mincing the horse-pieces of blubber for the
pots; an operation which is conducted at a curious wooden horse, planted
endwise against the bulwarks, and with a capacious tub beneath it, into
which the minced pieces drop, fast as the sheets from a rapt orator's
desk. Arrayed in decent black; occupying a conspicuous pulpit; intent
on bible leaves; what a candidate for an archbishopric, what a lad for a
Pope were this mincer!*


*Bible leaves! Bible leaves! This is the invariable cry from the mates
to the mincer. It enjoins him to be careful, and cut his work into as
thin slices as possible, inasmuch as by so doing the business of
boiling out the oil is much accelerated, and its quantity considerably
increased, besides perhaps improving it in quality.



CHAPTER 96. The Try-Works.


Besides her hoisted boats, an American whaler is outwardly distinguished
by her try-works. She presents the curious anomaly of the most solid
masonry joining with oak and hemp in constituting the completed ship.
It is as if from the open field a brick-kiln were transported to her
planks.

The try-works are planted between the foremast and mainmast, the most
roomy part of the deck. The timbers beneath are of a peculiar strength,
fitted to sustain the weight of an almost solid mass of brick and
mortar, some ten feet by eight square, and five in height. The
foundation does not penetrate the deck, but the masonry is firmly
secured to the surface by ponderous knees of iron bracing it on all
sides, and screwing it down to the timbers. On the flanks it is cased
with wood, and at top completely covered by a large, sloping, battened
hatchway. Removing this hatch we expose the great try-pots, two in
number, and each of several barrels' capacity. When not in use, they are
kept remarkably clean. Sometimes they are polished with soapstone
and sand, till they shine within like silver punch-bowls. During the
night-watches some cynical old sailors will crawl into them and coil
themselves away there for a nap. While employed in polishing them--one
man in each pot, side by side--many confidential communications
are carried on, over the iron lips. It is a place also for profound
mathematical meditation. It was in the left hand try-pot of the Pequod,
with the soapstone diligently circling round me, that I was first
indirectly struck by the remarkable fact, that in geometry all bodies
gliding along the cycloid, my soapstone for example, will descend from
any point in precisely the same time.

Removing the fire-board from the front of the try-works, the bare
masonry of that side is exposed, penetrated by the two iron mouths of
the furnaces, directly underneath the pots. These mouths are fitted
with heavy doors of iron. The intense heat of the fire is prevented
from communicating itself to the deck, by means of a shallow reservoir
extending under the entire inclosed surface of the works. By a tunnel
inserted at the rear, this reservoir is kept replenished with water as
fast as it evaporates. There are no external chimneys; they open direct
from the rear wall. And here let us go back for a moment.

It was about nine o'clock at night that the Pequod's try-works were
first started on this present voyage. It belonged to Stubb to oversee
the business.

"All ready there? Off hatch, then, and start her. You cook, fire the
works." This was an easy thing, for the carpenter had been thrusting his
shavings into the furnace throughout the passage. Here be it said that
in a whaling voyage the first fire in the try-works has to be fed for a
time with wood. After that no wood is used, except as a means of quick
ignition to the staple fuel. In a word, after being tried out, the
crisp, shrivelled blubber, now called scraps or fritters, still contains
considerable of its unctuous properties. These fritters feed the flames.
Like a plethoric burning martyr, or a self-consuming misanthrope, once
ignited, the whale supplies his own fuel and burns by his own body.
Would that he consumed his own smoke! for his smoke is horrible to
inhale, and inhale it you must, and not only that, but you must live in
it for the time. It has an unspeakable, wild, Hindoo odor about it, such
as may lurk in the vicinity of funereal pyres. It smells like the left
wing of the day of judgment; it is an argument for the pit.

By midnight the works were in full operation. We were clear from the
carcase; sail had been made; the wind was freshening; the wild ocean
darkness was intense. But that darkness was licked up by the fierce
flames, which at intervals forked forth from the sooty flues, and
illuminated every lofty rope in the rigging, as with the famed Greek
fire. The burning ship drove on, as if remorselessly commissioned to
some vengeful deed. So the pitch and sulphur-freighted brigs of the
bold Hydriote, Canaris, issuing from their midnight harbors, with broad
sheets of flame for sails, bore down upon the Turkish frigates, and
folded them in conflagrations.

The hatch, removed from the top of the works, now afforded a wide hearth
in front of them. Standing on this were the Tartarean shapes of the
pagan harpooneers, always the whale-ship's stokers. With huge pronged
poles they pitched hissing masses of blubber into the scalding pots, or
stirred up the fires beneath, till the snaky flames darted, curling, out
of the doors to catch them by the feet. The smoke rolled away in sullen
heaps. To every pitch of the ship there was a pitch of the boiling oil,
which seemed all eagerness to leap into their faces. Opposite the mouth
of the works, on the further side of the wide wooden hearth, was the
windlass. This served for a sea-sofa. Here lounged the watch, when not
otherwise employed, looking into the red heat of the fire, till their
eyes felt scorched in their heads. Their tawny features, now all
begrimed with smoke and sweat, their matted beards, and the contrasting
barbaric brilliancy of their teeth, all these were strangely revealed in
the capricious emblazonings of the works. As they narrated to each other
their unholy adventures, their tales of terror told in words of mirth;
as their uncivilized laughter forked upwards out of them, like the
flames from the furnace; as to and fro, in their front, the harpooneers
wildly gesticulated with their huge pronged forks and dippers; as the
wind howled on, and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and dived, and
yet steadfastly shot her red hell further and further into the blackness
of the sea and the night, and scornfully champed the white bone in
her mouth, and viciously spat round her on all sides; then the rushing
Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning
a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the
material counterpart of her monomaniac commander's soul.

So seemed it to me, as I stood at her helm, and for long hours silently
guided the way of this fire-ship on the sea. Wrapped, for that interval,
in darkness myself, I but the better saw the redness, the madness, the
ghastliness of others. The continual sight of the fiend shapes before
me, capering half in smoke and half in fire, these at last begat kindred
visions in my soul, so soon as I began to yield to that unaccountable
drowsiness which ever would come over me at a midnight helm.

But that night, in particular, a strange (and ever since inexplicable)
thing occurred to me. Starting from a brief standing sleep, I was
horribly conscious of something fatally wrong. The jaw-bone tiller smote
my side, which leaned against it; in my ears was the low hum of sails,
just beginning to shake in the wind; I thought my eyes were open; I
was half conscious of putting my fingers to the lids and mechanically
stretching them still further apart. But, spite of all this, I could see
no compass before me to steer by; though it seemed but a minute since I
had been watching the card, by the steady binnacle lamp illuminating it.
Nothing seemed before me but a jet gloom, now and then made ghastly by
flashes of redness. Uppermost was the impression, that whatever swift,
rushing thing I stood on was not so much bound to any haven ahead as
rushing from all havens astern. A stark, bewildered feeling, as of
death, came over me. Convulsively my hands grasped the tiller, but with
the crazy conceit that the tiller was, somehow, in some enchanted way,
inverted. My God! what is the matter with me? thought I. Lo! in my brief
sleep I had turned myself about, and was fronting the ship's stern, with
my back to her prow and the compass. In an instant I faced back, just
in time to prevent the vessel from flying up into the wind, and very
probably capsizing her. How glad and how grateful the relief from this
unnatural hallucination of the night, and the fatal contingency of being
brought by the lee!

Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man! Never dream with thy
hand on the helm! Turn not thy back to the compass; accept the first
hint of the hitching tiller; believe not the artificial fire, when its
redness makes all things look ghastly. To-morrow, in the natural sun,
the skies will be bright; those who glared like devils in the forking
flames, the morn will show in far other, at least gentler, relief; the
glorious, golden, glad sun, the only true lamp--all others but liars!

Nevertheless the sun hides not Virginia's Dismal Swamp, nor Rome's
accursed Campagna, nor wide Sahara, nor all the millions of miles of
deserts and of griefs beneath the moon. The sun hides not the ocean,
which is the dark side of this earth, and which is two thirds of this
earth. So, therefore, that mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow
in him, that mortal man cannot be true--not true, or undeveloped. With
books the same. The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows, and the
truest of all books is Solomon's, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered
steel of woe. "All is vanity." ALL. This wilful world hath not got hold
of unchristian Solomon's wisdom yet. But he who dodges hospitals and
jails, and walks fast crossing graveyards, and would rather talk of
operas than hell; calls Cowper, Young, Pascal, Rousseau, poor devils all
of sick men; and throughout a care-free lifetime swears by Rabelais as
passing wise, and therefore jolly;--not that man is fitted to sit
down on tomb-stones, and break the green damp mould with unfathomably
wondrous Solomon.

But even Solomon, he says, "the man that wandereth out of the way
of understanding shall remain" (I.E., even while living) "in the
congregation of the dead." Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it
invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom
that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill
eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges,
and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces.
And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the
mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still
higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.



CHAPTER 97. The Lamp.


Had you descended from the Pequod's try-works to the Pequod's
forecastle, where the off duty watch were sleeping, for one single
moment you would have almost thought you were standing in some
illuminated shrine of canonized kings and counsellors. There they lay
in their triangular oaken vaults, each mariner a chiselled muteness; a
score of lamps flashing upon his hooded eyes.

In merchantmen, oil for the sailor is more scarce than the milk of
queens. To dress in the dark, and eat in the dark, and stumble in
darkness to his pallet, this is his usual lot. But the whaleman, as he
seeks the food of light, so he lives in light. He makes his berth an
Aladdin's lamp, and lays him down in it; so that in the pitchiest night
the ship's black hull still houses an illumination.

See with what entire freedom the whaleman takes his handful of
lamps--often but old bottles and vials, though--to the copper cooler at
the try-works, and replenishes them there, as mugs of ale at a vat. He
burns, too, the purest of oil, in its unmanufactured, and, therefore,
unvitiated state; a fluid unknown to solar, lunar, or astral
contrivances ashore. It is sweet as early grass butter in April. He
goes and hunts for his oil, so as to be sure of its freshness and
genuineness, even as the traveller on the prairie hunts up his own
supper of game.



CHAPTER 98. Stowing Down and Clearing Up.


Already has it been related how the great leviathan is afar off
descried from the mast-head; how he is chased over the watery moors, and
slaughtered in the valleys of the deep; how he is then towed alongside
and beheaded; and how (on the principle which entitled the headsman of
old to the garments in which the beheaded was killed) his great padded
surtout becomes the property of his executioner; how, in due time, he
is condemned to the pots, and, like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, his
spermaceti, oil, and bone pass unscathed through the fire;--but now it
remains to conclude the last chapter of this part of the description by
rehearsing--singing, if I may--the romantic proceeding of decanting off
his oil into the casks and striking them down into the hold, where
once again leviathan returns to his native profundities, sliding along
beneath the surface as before; but, alas! never more to rise and blow.

While still warm, the oil, like hot punch, is received into the
six-barrel casks; and while, perhaps, the ship is pitching and rolling
this way and that in the midnight sea, the enormous casks are slewed
round and headed over, end for end, and sometimes perilously scoot
across the slippery deck, like so many land slides, till at last
man-handled and stayed in their course; and all round the hoops, rap,
rap, go as many hammers as can play upon them, for now, EX OFFICIO,
every sailor is a cooper.

At length, when the last pint is casked, and all is cool, then the great
hatchways are unsealed, the bowels of the ship are thrown open, and down
go the casks to their final rest in the sea. This done, the hatches are
replaced, and hermetically closed, like a closet walled up.

In the sperm fishery, this is perhaps one of the most remarkable
incidents in all the business of whaling. One day the planks stream with
freshets of blood and oil; on the sacred quarter-deck enormous masses of
the whale's head are profanely piled; great rusty casks lie about, as
in a brewery yard; the smoke from the try-works has besooted all the
bulwarks; the mariners go about suffused with unctuousness; the entire
ship seems great leviathan himself; while on all hands the din is
deafening.

But a day or two after, you look about you, and prick your ears in this
self-same ship; and were it not for the tell-tale boats and try-works,
you would all but swear you trod some silent merchant vessel, with a
most scrupulously neat commander. The unmanufactured sperm oil possesses
a singularly cleansing virtue. This is the reason why the decks never
look so white as just after what they call an affair of oil. Besides,
from the ashes of the burned scraps of the whale, a potent lye is
readily made; and whenever any adhesiveness from the back of the whale
remains clinging to the side, that lye quickly exterminates it. Hands
go diligently along the bulwarks, and with buckets of water and rags
restore them to their full tidiness. The soot is brushed from the lower
rigging. All the numerous implements which have been in use are likewise
faithfully cleansed and put away. The great hatch is scrubbed and placed
upon the try-works, completely hiding the pots; every cask is out of
sight; all tackles are coiled in unseen nooks; and when by the combined
and simultaneous industry of almost the entire ship's company, the
whole of this conscientious duty is at last concluded, then the crew
themselves proceed to their own ablutions; shift themselves from top to
toe; and finally issue to the immaculate deck, fresh and all aglow, as
bridegrooms new-leaped from out the daintiest Holland.

Now, with elated step, they pace the planks in twos and threes, and
humorously discourse of parlors, sofas, carpets, and fine cambrics;
propose to mat the deck; think of having hanging to the top; object not
to taking tea by moonlight on the piazza of the forecastle. To hint to
such musked mariners of oil, and bone, and blubber, were little short
of audacity. They know not the thing you distantly allude to. Away, and
bring us napkins!

But mark: aloft there, at the three mast heads, stand three men intent
on spying out more whales, which, if caught, infallibly will again
soil the old oaken furniture, and drop at least one small grease-spot
somewhere. Yes; and many is the time, when, after the severest
uninterrupted labors, which know no night; continuing straight through
for ninety-six hours; when from the boat, where they have swelled their
wrists with all day rowing on the Line,--they only step to the deck to
carry vast chains, and heave the heavy windlass, and cut and slash, yea,
and in their very sweatings to be smoked and burned anew by the combined
fires of the equatorial sun and the equatorial try-works; when, on the
heel of all this, they have finally bestirred themselves to cleanse the
ship, and make a spotless dairy room of it; many is the time the poor
fellows, just buttoning the necks of their clean frocks, are startled by
the cry of "There she blows!" and away they fly to fight another whale,
and go through the whole weary thing again. Oh! my friends, but this
is man-killing! Yet this is life. For hardly have we mortals by long
toilings extracted from this world's vast bulk its small but valuable
sperm; and then, with weary patience, cleansed ourselves from its
defilements, and learned to live here in clean tabernacles of the soul;
hardly is this done, when--THERE SHE BLOWS!--the ghost is spouted up,
and away we sail to fight some other world, and go through young life's
old routine again.

Oh! the metempsychosis! Oh! Pythagoras, that in bright Greece, two
thousand years ago, did die, so good, so wise, so mild; I sailed with
thee along the Peruvian coast last voyage--and, foolish as I am, taught
thee, a green simple boy, how to splice a rope!



CHAPTER 99. The Doubloon.


Ere now it has been related how Ahab was wont to pace his quarter-deck,
taking regular turns at either limit, the binnacle and mainmast; but
in the multiplicity of other things requiring narration it has not been
added how that sometimes in these walks, when most plunged in his mood,
he was wont to pause in turn at each spot, and stand there strangely
eyeing the particular object before him. When he halted before the
binnacle, with his glance fastened on the pointed needle in the compass,
that glance shot like a javelin with the pointed intensity of his
purpose; and when resuming his walk he again paused before the mainmast,
then, as the same riveted glance fastened upon the riveted gold coin
there, he still wore the same aspect of nailed firmness, only dashed
with a certain wild longing, if not hopefulness.

But one morning, turning to pass the doubloon, he seemed to be newly
attracted by the strange figures and inscriptions stamped on it, as
though now for the first time beginning to interpret for himself in
some monomaniac way whatever significance might lurk in them. And some
certain significance lurks in all things, else all things are little
worth, and the round world itself but an empty cipher, except to sell by
the cartload, as they do hills about Boston, to fill up some morass in
the Milky Way.

Now this doubloon was of purest, virgin gold, raked somewhere out of the
heart of gorgeous hills, whence, east and west, over golden sands, the
head-waters of many a Pactolus flows. And though now nailed amidst all
the rustiness of iron bolts and the verdigris of copper spikes, yet,
untouchable and immaculate to any foulness, it still preserved its Quito
glow. Nor, though placed amongst a ruthless crew and every hour passed
by ruthless hands, and through the livelong nights shrouded with thick
darkness which might cover any pilfering approach, nevertheless every
sunrise found the doubloon where the sunset left it last. For it was
set apart and sanctified to one awe-striking end; and however wanton
in their sailor ways, one and all, the mariners revered it as the white
whale's talisman. Sometimes they talked it over in the weary watch by
night, wondering whose it was to be at last, and whether he would ever
live to spend it.

Now those noble golden coins of South America are as medals of the sun
and tropic token-pieces. Here palms, alpacas, and volcanoes; sun's disks
and stars; ecliptics, horns-of-plenty, and rich banners waving, are in
luxuriant profusion stamped; so that the precious gold seems almost to
derive an added preciousness and enhancing glories, by passing through
those fancy mints, so Spanishly poetic.

It so chanced that the doubloon of the Pequod was a most wealthy example
of these things. On its round border it bore the letters, REPUBLICA DEL
ECUADOR: QUITO. So this bright coin came from a country planted in the
middle of the world, and beneath the great equator, and named after it;
and it had been cast midway up the Andes, in the unwaning clime that
knows no autumn. Zoned by those letters you saw the likeness of three
Andes' summits; from one a flame; a tower on another; on the third a
crowing cock; while arching over all was a segment of the partitioned
zodiac, the signs all marked with their usual cabalistics, and the
keystone sun entering the equinoctial point at Libra.

Before this equatorial coin, Ahab, not unobserved by others, was now
pausing.

"There's something ever egotistical in mountain-tops and towers, and
all other grand and lofty things; look here,--three peaks as proud as
Lucifer. The firm tower, that is Ahab; the volcano, that is Ahab; the
courageous, the undaunted, and victorious fowl, that, too, is Ahab; all
are Ahab; and this round gold is but the image of the rounder globe,
which, like a magician's glass, to each and every man in turn but
mirrors back his own mysterious self. Great pains, small gains for those
who ask the world to solve them; it cannot solve itself. Methinks now
this coined sun wears a ruddy face; but see! aye, he enters the sign
of storms, the equinox! and but six months before he wheeled out of a
former equinox at Aries! From storm to storm! So be it, then. Born in
throes, 't is fit that man should live in pains and die in pangs! So be
it, then! Here's stout stuff for woe to work on. So be it, then."

"No fairy fingers can have pressed the gold, but devil's claws must
have left their mouldings there since yesterday," murmured Starbuck
to himself, leaning against the bulwarks. "The old man seems to read
Belshazzar's awful writing. I have never marked the coin inspectingly.
He goes below; let me read. A dark valley between three mighty,
heaven-abiding peaks, that almost seem the Trinity, in some faint
earthly symbol. So in this vale of Death, God girds us round; and over
all our gloom, the sun of Righteousness still shines a beacon and a
hope. If we bend down our eyes, the dark vale shows her mouldy soil;
but if we lift them, the bright sun meets our glance half way, to cheer.
Yet, oh, the great sun is no fixture; and if, at midnight, we would fain
snatch some sweet solace from him, we gaze for him in vain! This coin
speaks wisely, mildly, truly, but still sadly to me. I will quit it,
lest Truth shake me falsely."

"There now's the old Mogul," soliloquized Stubb by the try-works, "he's
been twigging it; and there goes Starbuck from the same, and both with
faces which I should say might be somewhere within nine fathoms long.
And all from looking at a piece of gold, which did I have it now on
Negro Hill or in Corlaer's Hook, I'd not look at it very long ere
spending it. Humph! in my poor, insignificant opinion, I regard this as
queer. I have seen doubloons before now in my voyagings; your doubloons
of old Spain, your doubloons of Peru, your doubloons of Chili, your
doubloons of Bolivia, your doubloons of Popayan; with plenty of gold
moidores and pistoles, and joes, and half joes, and quarter joes. What
then should there be in this doubloon of the Equator that is so killing
wonderful? By Golconda! let me read it once. Halloa! here's signs and
wonders truly! That, now, is what old Bowditch in his Epitome calls the
zodiac, and what my almanac below calls ditto. I'll get the almanac and
as I have heard devils can be raised with Daboll's arithmetic, I'll try
my hand at raising a meaning out of these queer curvicues here with
the Massachusetts calendar. Here's the book. Let's see now. Signs and
wonders; and the sun, he's always among 'em. Hem, hem, hem; here they
are--here they go--all alive:--Aries, or the Ram; Taurus, or the Bull
and Jimimi! here's Gemini himself, or the Twins. Well; the sun he
wheels among 'em. Aye, here on the coin he's just crossing the threshold
between two of twelve sitting-rooms all in a ring. Book! you lie there;
the fact is, you books must know your places. You'll do to give us the
bare words and facts, but we come in to supply the thoughts. That's my
small experience, so far as the Massachusetts calendar, and Bowditch's
navigator, and Daboll's arithmetic go. Signs and wonders, eh? Pity if
there is nothing wonderful in signs, and significant in wonders! There's
a clue somewhere; wait a bit; hist--hark! By Jove, I have it! Look you,
Doubloon, your zodiac here is the life of man in one round chapter;
and now I'll read it off, straight out of the book. Come, Almanack! To
begin: there's Aries, or the Ram--lecherous dog, he begets us; then,
Taurus, or the Bull--he bumps us the first thing; then Gemini, or the
Twins--that is, Virtue and Vice; we try to reach Virtue, when lo! comes
Cancer the Crab, and drags us back; and here, going from Virtue, Leo,
a roaring Lion, lies in the path--he gives a few fierce bites and surly
dabs with his paw; we escape, and hail Virgo, the Virgin! that's our
first love; we marry and think to be happy for aye, when pop comes
Libra, or the Scales--happiness weighed and found wanting; and while we
are very sad about that, Lord! how we suddenly jump, as Scorpio, or the
Scorpion, stings us in the rear; we are curing the wound, when whang
come the arrows all round; Sagittarius, or the Archer, is amusing
himself. As we pluck out the shafts, stand aside! here's the
battering-ram, Capricornus, or the Goat; full tilt, he comes rushing,
and headlong we are tossed; when Aquarius, or the Water-bearer, pours
out his whole deluge and drowns us; and to wind up with Pisces, or the
Fishes, we sleep. There's a sermon now, writ in high heaven, and the
sun goes through it every year, and yet comes out of it all alive and
hearty. Jollily he, aloft there, wheels through toil and trouble; and
so, alow here, does jolly Stubb. Oh, jolly's the word for aye! Adieu,
Doubloon! But stop; here comes little King-Post; dodge round the
try-works, now, and let's hear what he'll have to say. There; he's
before it; he'll out with something presently. So, so; he's beginning."

"I see nothing here, but a round thing made of gold, and whoever raises
a certain whale, this round thing belongs to him. So, what's all this
staring been about? It is worth sixteen dollars, that's true; and at
two cents the cigar, that's nine hundred and sixty cigars. I won't smoke
dirty pipes like Stubb, but I like cigars, and here's nine hundred and
sixty of them; so here goes Flask aloft to spy 'em out."

"Shall I call that wise or foolish, now; if it be really wise it has a
foolish look to it; yet, if it be really foolish, then has it a sort
of wiseish look to it. But, avast; here comes our old Manxman--the old
hearse-driver, he must have been, that is, before he took to the sea. He
luffs up before the doubloon; halloa, and goes round on the other side
of the mast; why, there's a horse-shoe nailed on that side; and now he's
back again; what does that mean? Hark! he's muttering--voice like an old
worn-out coffee-mill. Prick ears, and listen!"

"If the White Whale be raised, it must be in a month and a day, when
the sun stands in some one of these signs. I've studied signs, and know
their marks; they were taught me two score years ago, by the old witch
in Copenhagen. Now, in what sign will the sun then be? The horse-shoe
sign; for there it is, right opposite the gold. And what's the
horse-shoe sign? The lion is the horse-shoe sign--the roaring and
devouring lion. Ship, old ship! my old head shakes to think of thee."

"There's another rendering now; but still one text. All sorts of men
in one kind of world, you see. Dodge again! here comes Queequeg--all
tattooing--looks like the signs of the Zodiac himself. What says the
Cannibal? As I live he's comparing notes; looking at his thigh bone;
thinks the sun is in the thigh, or in the calf, or in the bowels, I
suppose, as the old women talk Surgeon's Astronomy in the back country.
And by Jove, he's found something there in the vicinity of his thigh--I
guess it's Sagittarius, or the Archer. No: he don't know what to make
of the doubloon; he takes it for an old button off some king's trowsers.
But, aside again! here comes that ghost-devil, Fedallah; tail coiled out
of sight as usual, oakum in the toes of his pumps as usual. What does he
say, with that look of his? Ah, only makes a sign to the sign and bows
himself; there is a sun on the coin--fire worshipper, depend upon it.
Ho! more and more. This way comes Pip--poor boy! would he had died,
or I; he's half horrible to me. He too has been watching all of these
interpreters--myself included--and look now, he comes to read, with that
unearthly idiot face. Stand away again and hear him. Hark!"

"I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look."

"Upon my soul, he's been studying Murray's Grammar! Improving his mind,
poor fellow! But what's that he says now--hist!"

"I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look."

"Why, he's getting it by heart--hist! again."

"I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look."

"Well, that's funny."

"And I, you, and he; and we, ye, and they, are all bats; and I'm a crow,
especially when I stand a'top of this pine tree here. Caw! caw! caw!
caw! caw! caw! Ain't I a crow? And where's the scare-crow? There he
stands; two bones stuck into a pair of old trowsers, and two more poked
into the sleeves of an old jacket."

"Wonder if he means me?--complimentary!--poor lad!--I could go hang
myself. Any way, for the present, I'll quit Pip's vicinity. I can stand
the rest, for they have plain wits; but he's too crazy-witty for my
sanity. So, so, I leave him muttering."

"Here's the ship's navel, this doubloon here, and they are all on fire
to unscrew it. But, unscrew your navel, and what's the consequence? Then
again, if it stays here, that is ugly, too, for when aught's nailed to
the mast it's a sign that things grow desperate. Ha, ha! old Ahab!
the White Whale; he'll nail ye! This is a pine tree. My father, in old
Tolland county, cut down a pine tree once, and found a silver ring grown
over in it; some old darkey's wedding ring. How did it get there? And
so they'll say in the resurrection, when they come to fish up this old
mast, and find a doubloon lodged in it, with bedded oysters for the
shaggy bark. Oh, the gold! the precious, precious, gold! the green
miser'll hoard ye soon! Hish! hish! God goes 'mong the worlds
blackberrying. Cook! ho, cook! and cook us! Jenny! hey, hey, hey, hey,
hey, Jenny, Jenny! and get your hoe-cake done!"



CHAPTER 100. Leg and Arm.

The Pequod, of Nantucket, Meets the Samuel Enderby, of London.


"Ship, ahoy! Hast seen the White Whale?"

So cried Ahab, once more hailing a ship showing English colours, bearing
down under the stern. Trumpet to mouth, the old man was standing in his
hoisted quarter-boat, his ivory leg plainly revealed to the stranger
captain, who was carelessly reclining in his own boat's bow. He was
a darkly-tanned, burly, good-natured, fine-looking man, of sixty or
thereabouts, dressed in a spacious roundabout, that hung round him in
festoons of blue pilot-cloth; and one empty arm of this jacket streamed
behind him like the broidered arm of a hussar's surcoat.

"Hast seen the White Whale!"

"See you this?" and withdrawing it from the folds that had hidden it,
he held up a white arm of sperm whale bone, terminating in a wooden head
like a mallet.

"Man my boat!" cried Ahab, impetuously, and tossing about the oars near
him--"Stand by to lower!"

In less than a minute, without quitting his little craft, he and his
crew were dropped to the water, and were soon alongside of the stranger.
But here a curious difficulty presented itself. In the excitement of the
moment, Ahab had forgotten that since the loss of his leg he had never
once stepped on board of any vessel at sea but his own, and then it was
always by an ingenious and very handy mechanical contrivance peculiar to
the Pequod, and a thing not to be rigged and shipped in any other
vessel at a moment's warning. Now, it is no very easy matter
for anybody--except those who are almost hourly used to it, like
whalemen--to clamber up a ship's side from a boat on the open sea; for
the great swells now lift the boat high up towards the bulwarks, and
then instantaneously drop it half way down to the kelson. So, deprived
of one leg, and the strange ship of course being altogether unsupplied
with the kindly invention, Ahab now found himself abjectly reduced to a
clumsy landsman again; hopelessly eyeing the uncertain changeful height
he could hardly hope to attain.

It has before been hinted, perhaps, that every little untoward
circumstance that befell him, and which indirectly sprang from his
luckless mishap, almost invariably irritated or exasperated Ahab. And
in the present instance, all this was heightened by the sight of the
two officers of the strange ship, leaning over the side, by the
perpendicular ladder of nailed cleets there, and swinging towards him a
pair of tastefully-ornamented man-ropes; for at first they did not seem
to bethink them that a one-legged man must be too much of a cripple to
use their sea bannisters. But this awkwardness only lasted a minute,
because the strange captain, observing at a glance how affairs stood,
cried out, "I see, I see!--avast heaving there! Jump, boys, and swing
over the cutting-tackle."

As good luck would have it, they had had a whale alongside a day or two
previous, and the great tackles were still aloft, and the massive curved
blubber-hook, now clean and dry, was still attached to the end. This
was quickly lowered to Ahab, who at once comprehending it all, slid his
solitary thigh into the curve of the hook (it was like sitting in the
fluke of an anchor, or the crotch of an apple tree), and then giving the
word, held himself fast, and at the same time also helped to hoist his
own weight, by pulling hand-over-hand upon one of the running parts of
the tackle. Soon he was carefully swung inside the high bulwarks, and
gently landed upon the capstan head. With his ivory arm frankly thrust
forth in welcome, the other captain advanced, and Ahab, putting out his
ivory leg, and crossing the ivory arm (like two sword-fish blades)
cried out in his walrus way, "Aye, aye, hearty! let us shake bones
together!--an arm and a leg!--an arm that never can shrink, d'ye
see; and a leg that never can run. Where did'st thou see the White
Whale?--how long ago?"

"The White Whale," said the Englishman, pointing his ivory arm towards
the East, and taking a rueful sight along it, as if it had been a
telescope; "there I saw him, on the Line, last season."

"And he took that arm off, did he?" asked Ahab, now sliding down from
the capstan, and resting on the Englishman's shoulder, as he did so.

"Aye, he was the cause of it, at least; and that leg, too?"

"Spin me the yarn," said Ahab; "how was it?"

"It was the first time in my life that I ever cruised on the Line,"
began the Englishman. "I was ignorant of the White Whale at that time.
Well, one day we lowered for a pod of four or five whales, and my boat
fastened to one of them; a regular circus horse he was, too, that went
milling and milling round so, that my boat's crew could only trim dish,
by sitting all their sterns on the outer gunwale. Presently up breaches
from the bottom of the sea a bouncing great whale, with a milky-white
head and hump, all crows' feet and wrinkles."

"It was he, it was he!" cried Ahab, suddenly letting out his suspended
breath.

"And harpoons sticking in near his starboard fin."

"Aye, aye--they were mine--MY irons," cried Ahab, exultingly--"but on!"

"Give me a chance, then," said the Englishman, good-humoredly. "Well,
this old great-grandfather, with the white head and hump, runs all afoam
into the pod, and goes to snapping furiously at my fast-line!

"Aye, I see!--wanted to part it; free the fast-fish--an old trick--I
know him."

"How it was exactly," continued the one-armed commander, "I do not know;
but in biting the line, it got foul of his teeth, caught there somehow;
but we didn't know it then; so that when we afterwards pulled on the
line, bounce we came plump on to his hump! instead of the other whale's;
that went off to windward, all fluking. Seeing how matters stood, and
what a noble great whale it was--the noblest and biggest I ever saw,
sir, in my life--I resolved to capture him, spite of the boiling rage
he seemed to be in. And thinking the hap-hazard line would get loose, or
the tooth it was tangled to might draw (for I have a devil of a boat's
crew for a pull on a whale-line); seeing all this, I say, I jumped
into my first mate's boat--Mr. Mounttop's here (by the way,
Captain--Mounttop; Mounttop--the captain);--as I was saying, I jumped
into Mounttop's boat, which, d'ye see, was gunwale and gunwale
with mine, then; and snatching the first harpoon, let this old
great-grandfather have it. But, Lord, look you, sir--hearts and souls
alive, man--the next instant, in a jiff, I was blind as a bat--both
eyes out--all befogged and bedeadened with black foam--the whale's tail
looming straight up out of it, perpendicular in the air, like a marble
steeple. No use sterning all, then; but as I was groping at midday, with
a blinding sun, all crown-jewels; as I was groping, I say, after the
second iron, to toss it overboard--down comes the tail like a Lima
tower, cutting my boat in two, leaving each half in splinters; and,
flukes first, the white hump backed through the wreck, as though it was
all chips. We all struck out. To escape his terrible flailings, I seized
hold of my harpoon-pole sticking in him, and for a moment clung to that
like a sucking fish. But a combing sea dashed me off, and at the same
instant, the fish, taking one good dart forwards, went down like a
flash; and the barb of that cursed second iron towing along near me
caught me here" (clapping his hand just below his shoulder); "yes,
caught me just here, I say, and bore me down to Hell's flames, I was
thinking; when, when, all of a sudden, thank the good God, the barb ript
its way along the flesh--clear along the whole length of my arm--came
out nigh my wrist, and up I floated;--and that gentleman there will tell
you the rest (by the way, captain--Dr. Bunger, ship's surgeon: Bunger,
my lad,--the captain). Now, Bunger boy, spin your part of the yarn."

The professional gentleman thus familiarly pointed out, had been all the
time standing near them, with nothing specific visible, to denote his
gentlemanly rank on board. His face was an exceedingly round but sober
one; he was dressed in a faded blue woollen frock or shirt, and patched
trowsers; and had thus far been dividing his attention between a
marlingspike he held in one hand, and a pill-box held in the other,
occasionally casting a critical glance at the ivory limbs of the two
crippled captains. But, at his superior's introduction of him to Ahab,
he politely bowed, and straightway went on to do his captain's bidding.

"It was a shocking bad wound," began the whale-surgeon; "and, taking my
advice, Captain Boomer here, stood our old Sammy--"

"Samuel Enderby is the name of my ship," interrupted the one-armed
captain, addressing Ahab; "go on, boy."

"Stood our old Sammy off to the northward, to get out of the blazing hot
weather there on the Line. But it was no use--I did all I could; sat up
with him nights; was very severe with him in the matter of diet--"

"Oh, very severe!" chimed in the patient himself; then suddenly altering
his voice, "Drinking hot rum toddies with me every night, till he
couldn't see to put on the bandages; and sending me to bed, half seas
over, about three o'clock in the morning. Oh, ye stars! he sat up with
me indeed, and was very severe in my diet. Oh! a great watcher, and very
dietetically severe, is Dr. Bunger. (Bunger, you dog, laugh out! why
don't ye? You know you're a precious jolly rascal.) But, heave ahead,
boy, I'd rather be killed by you than kept alive by any other man."

"My captain, you must have ere this perceived, respected sir"--said the
imperturbable godly-looking Bunger, slightly bowing to Ahab--"is apt to
be facetious at times; he spins us many clever things of that sort. But
I may as well say--en passant, as the French remark--that I myself--that
is to say, Jack Bunger, late of the reverend clergy--am a strict total
abstinence man; I never drink--"

"Water!" cried the captain; "he never drinks it; it's a sort of fits to
him; fresh water throws him into the hydrophobia; but go on--go on with
the arm story."

"Yes, I may as well," said the surgeon, coolly. "I was about observing,
sir, before Captain Boomer's facetious interruption, that spite of my
best and severest endeavors, the wound kept getting worse and worse; the
truth was, sir, it was as ugly gaping wound as surgeon ever saw; more
than two feet and several inches long. I measured it with the lead line.
In short, it grew black; I knew what was threatened, and off it came.
But I had no hand in shipping that ivory arm there; that thing is
against all rule"--pointing at it with the marlingspike--"that is the
captain's work, not mine; he ordered the carpenter to make it; he had
that club-hammer there put to the end, to knock some one's brains
out with, I suppose, as he tried mine once. He flies into diabolical
passions sometimes. Do ye see this dent, sir"--removing his hat, and
brushing aside his hair, and exposing a bowl-like cavity in his skull,
but which bore not the slightest scarry trace, or any token of ever
having been a wound--"Well, the captain there will tell you how that
came here; he knows."

"No, I don't," said the captain, "but his mother did; he was born with
it. Oh, you solemn rogue, you--you Bunger! was there ever such another
Bunger in the watery world? Bunger, when you die, you ought to die in
pickle, you dog; you should be preserved to future ages, you rascal."

"What became of the White Whale?" now cried Ahab, who thus far had been
impatiently listening to this by-play between the two Englishmen.

"Oh!" cried the one-armed captain, "oh, yes! Well; after he sounded,
we didn't see him again for some time; in fact, as I before hinted, I
didn't then know what whale it was that had served me such a trick, till
some time afterwards, when coming back to the Line, we heard about Moby
Dick--as some call him--and then I knew it was he."

"Did'st thou cross his wake again?"

"Twice."

"But could not fasten?"

"Didn't want to try to: ain't one limb enough? What should I do without
this other arm? And I'm thinking Moby Dick doesn't bite so much as he
swallows."

"Well, then," interrupted Bunger, "give him your left arm for bait to
get the right. Do you know, gentlemen"--very gravely and mathematically
bowing to each Captain in succession--"Do you know, gentlemen, that the
digestive organs of the whale are so inscrutably constructed by Divine
Providence, that it is quite impossible for him to completely digest
even a man's arm? And he knows it too. So that what you take for the
White Whale's malice is only his awkwardness. For he never means
to swallow a single limb; he only thinks to terrify by feints. But
sometimes he is like the old juggling fellow, formerly a patient of mine
in Ceylon, that making believe swallow jack-knives, once upon a time let
one drop into him in good earnest, and there it stayed for a twelvemonth
or more; when I gave him an emetic, and he heaved it up in small tacks,
d'ye see. No possible way for him to digest that jack-knife, and fully
incorporate it into his general bodily system. Yes, Captain Boomer, if
you are quick enough about it, and have a mind to pawn one arm for the
sake of the privilege of giving decent burial to the other, why in that
case the arm is yours; only let the whale have another chance at you
shortly, that's all."

"No, thank ye, Bunger," said the English Captain, "he's welcome to the
arm he has, since I can't help it, and didn't know him then; but not to
another one. No more White Whales for me; I've lowered for him once, and
that has satisfied me. There would be great glory in killing him, I know
that; and there is a ship-load of precious sperm in him, but, hark ye,
he's best let alone; don't you think so, Captain?"--glancing at the
ivory leg.

"He is. But he will still be hunted, for all that. What is best let
alone, that accursed thing is not always what least allures. He's all a
magnet! How long since thou saw'st him last? Which way heading?"

"Bless my soul, and curse the foul fiend's," cried Bunger, stoopingly
walking round Ahab, and like a dog, strangely snuffing; "this man's
blood--bring the thermometer!--it's at the boiling point!--his pulse
makes these planks beat!--sir!"--taking a lancet from his pocket, and
drawing near to Ahab's arm.

"Avast!" roared Ahab, dashing him against the bulwarks--"Man the boat!
Which way heading?"

"Good God!" cried the English Captain, to whom the question was put.
"What's the matter? He was heading east, I think.--Is your Captain
crazy?" whispering Fedallah.

But Fedallah, putting a finger on his lip, slid over the bulwarks to
take the boat's steering oar, and Ahab, swinging the cutting-tackle
towards him, commanded the ship's sailors to stand by to lower.

In a moment he was standing in the boat's stern, and the Manilla men
were springing to their oars. In vain the English Captain hailed him.
With back to the stranger ship, and face set like a flint to his own,
Ahab stood upright till alongside of the Pequod.



CHAPTER 101. The Decanter.


Ere the English ship fades from sight, be it set down here, that
she hailed from London, and was named after the late Samuel Enderby,
merchant of that city, the original of the famous whaling house of
Enderby & Sons; a house which in my poor whaleman's opinion, comes not
far behind the united royal houses of the Tudors and Bourbons, in point
of real historical interest. How long, prior to the year of our
Lord 1775, this great whaling house was in existence, my numerous
fish-documents do not make plain; but in that year (1775) it fitted
out the first English ships that ever regularly hunted the Sperm Whale;
though for some score of years previous (ever since 1726) our valiant
Coffins and Maceys of Nantucket and the Vineyard had in large fleets
pursued that Leviathan, but only in the North and South Atlantic: not
elsewhere. Be it distinctly recorded here, that the Nantucketers were
the first among mankind to harpoon with civilized steel the great Sperm
Whale; and that for half a century they were the only people of the
whole globe who so harpooned him.

In 1778, a fine ship, the Amelia, fitted out for the express purpose,
and at the sole charge of the vigorous Enderbys, boldly rounded Cape
Horn, and was the first among the nations to lower a whale-boat of any
sort in the great South Sea. The voyage was a skilful and lucky one;
and returning to her berth with her hold full of the precious sperm, the
Amelia's example was soon followed by other ships, English and American,
and thus the vast Sperm Whale grounds of the Pacific were thrown open.
But not content with this good deed, the indefatigable house again
bestirred itself: Samuel and all his Sons--how many, their mother only
knows--and under their immediate auspices, and partly, I think, at their
expense, the British government was induced to send the sloop-of-war
Rattler on a whaling voyage of discovery into the South Sea. Commanded
by a naval Post-Captain, the Rattler made a rattling voyage of it, and
did some service; how much does not appear. But this is not all. In
1819, the same house fitted out a discovery whale ship of their own, to
go on a tasting cruise to the remote waters of Japan. That ship--well
called the "Syren"--made a noble experimental cruise; and it was thus
that the great Japanese Whaling Ground first became generally known.
The Syren in this famous voyage was commanded by a Captain Coffin, a
Nantucketer.

All honour to the Enderbies, therefore, whose house, I think, exists to
the present day; though doubtless the original Samuel must long ago have
slipped his cable for the great South Sea of the other world.

The ship named after him was worthy of the honour, being a very fast
sailer and a noble craft every way. I boarded her once at midnight
somewhere off the Patagonian coast, and drank good flip down in the
forecastle. It was a fine gam we had, and they were all trumps--every
soul on board. A short life to them, and a jolly death. And that fine
gam I had--long, very long after old Ahab touched her planks with his
ivory heel--it minds me of the noble, solid, Saxon hospitality of that
ship; and may my parson forget me, and the devil remember me, if I ever
lose sight of it. Flip? Did I say we had flip? Yes, and we flipped it
at the rate of ten gallons the hour; and when the squall came (for it's
squally off there by Patagonia), and all hands--visitors and all--were
called to reef topsails, we were so top-heavy that we had to swing each
other aloft in bowlines; and we ignorantly furled the skirts of our
jackets into the sails, so that we hung there, reefed fast in the
howling gale, a warning example to all drunken tars. However, the masts
did not go overboard; and by and by we scrambled down, so sober, that we
had to pass the flip again, though the savage salt spray bursting down
the forecastle scuttle, rather too much diluted and pickled it to my
taste.

The beef was fine--tough, but with body in it. They said it was
bull-beef; others, that it was dromedary beef; but I do not know, for
certain, how that was. They had dumplings too; small, but substantial,
symmetrically globular, and indestructible dumplings. I fancied that you
could feel them, and roll them about in you after they were swallowed.
If you stooped over too far forward, you risked their pitching out
of you like billiard-balls. The bread--but that couldn't be helped;
besides, it was an anti-scorbutic; in short, the bread contained the
only fresh fare they had. But the forecastle was not very light, and it
was very easy to step over into a dark corner when you ate it. But all
in all, taking her from truck to helm, considering the dimensions of the
cook's boilers, including his own live parchment boilers; fore and aft,
I say, the Samuel Enderby was a jolly ship; of good fare and plenty;
fine flip and strong; crack fellows all, and capital from boot heels to
hat-band.

But why was it, think ye, that the Samuel Enderby, and some other
English whalers I know of--not all though--were such famous, hospitable
ships; that passed round the beef, and the bread, and the can, and the
joke; and were not soon weary of eating, and drinking, and laughing?
I will tell you. The abounding good cheer of these English whalers
is matter for historical research. Nor have I been at all sparing of
historical whale research, when it has seemed needed.

The English were preceded in the whale fishery by the Hollanders,
Zealanders, and Danes; from whom they derived many terms still extant
in the fishery; and what is yet more, their fat old fashions,
touching plenty to eat and drink. For, as a general thing, the English
merchant-ship scrimps her crew; but not so the English whaler. Hence, in
the English, this thing of whaling good cheer is not normal and natural,
but incidental and particular; and, therefore, must have some special
origin, which is here pointed out, and will be still further elucidated.

During my researches in the Leviathanic histories, I stumbled upon an
ancient Dutch volume, which, by the musty whaling smell of it, I
knew must be about whalers. The title was, "Dan Coopman," wherefore I
concluded that this must be the invaluable memoirs of some Amsterdam
cooper in the fishery, as every whale ship must carry its cooper. I was
reinforced in this opinion by seeing that it was the production of one
"Fitz Swackhammer." But my friend Dr. Snodhead, a very learned man,
professor of Low Dutch and High German in the college of Santa Claus and
St. Pott's, to whom I handed the work for translation, giving him a box
of sperm candles for his trouble--this same Dr. Snodhead, so soon as he
spied the book, assured me that "Dan Coopman" did not mean "The Cooper,"
but "The Merchant." In short, this ancient and learned Low Dutch book
treated of the commerce of Holland; and, among other subjects, contained
a very interesting account of its whale fishery. And in this chapter it
was, headed, "Smeer," or "Fat," that I found a long detailed list of the
outfits for the larders and cellars of 180 sail of Dutch whalemen; from
which list, as translated by Dr. Snodhead, I transcribe the following:

400,000 lbs. of beef. 60,000 lbs. Friesland pork. 150,000 lbs. of stock
fish. 550,000 lbs. of biscuit. 72,000 lbs. of soft bread. 2,800 firkins
of butter. 20,000 lbs. Texel & Leyden cheese. 144,000 lbs. cheese
(probably an inferior article). 550 ankers of Geneva. 10,800 barrels of
beer.

Most statistical tables are parchingly dry in the reading; not so in
the present case, however, where the reader is flooded with whole pipes,
barrels, quarts, and gills of good gin and good cheer.

At the time, I devoted three days to the studious digesting of all
this beer, beef, and bread, during which many profound thoughts were
incidentally suggested to me, capable of a transcendental and Platonic
application; and, furthermore, I compiled supplementary tables of my
own, touching the probable quantity of stock-fish, etc., consumed by
every Low Dutch harpooneer in that ancient Greenland and Spitzbergen
whale fishery. In the first place, the amount of butter, and Texel and
Leyden cheese consumed, seems amazing. I impute it, though, to their
naturally unctuous natures, being rendered still more unctuous by the
nature of their vocation, and especially by their pursuing their game
in those frigid Polar Seas, on the very coasts of that Esquimaux country
where the convivial natives pledge each other in bumpers of train oil.

The quantity of beer, too, is very large, 10,800 barrels. Now, as those
polar fisheries could only be prosecuted in the short summer of that
climate, so that the whole cruise of one of these Dutch whalemen,
including the short voyage to and from the Spitzbergen sea, did not much
exceed three months, say, and reckoning 30 men to each of their fleet
of 180 sail, we have 5,400 Low Dutch seamen in all; therefore, I say,
we have precisely two barrels of beer per man, for a twelve weeks'
allowance, exclusive of his fair proportion of that 550 ankers of gin.
Now, whether these gin and beer harpooneers, so fuddled as one might
fancy them to have been, were the right sort of men to stand up in
a boat's head, and take good aim at flying whales; this would seem
somewhat improbable. Yet they did aim at them, and hit them too. But
this was very far North, be it remembered, where beer agrees well with
the constitution; upon the Equator, in our southern fishery, beer would
be apt to make the harpooneer sleepy at the mast-head and boozy in his
boat; and grievous loss might ensue to Nantucket and New Bedford.

But no more; enough has been said to show that the old Dutch whalers
of two or three centuries ago were high livers; and that the English
whalers have not neglected so excellent an example. For, say they, when
cruising in an empty ship, if you can get nothing better out of the
world, get a good dinner out of it, at least. And this empties the
decanter.



CHAPTER 102. A Bower in the Arsacides.


Hitherto, in descriptively treating of the Sperm Whale, I have chiefly
dwelt upon the marvels of his outer aspect; or separately and in detail
upon some few interior structural features. But to a large and thorough
sweeping comprehension of him, it behooves me now to unbutton him still
further, and untagging the points of his hose, unbuckling his garters,
and casting loose the hooks and the eyes of the joints of his innermost
bones, set him before you in his ultimatum; that is to say, in his
unconditional skeleton.

But how now, Ishmael? How is it, that you, a mere oarsman in the
fishery, pretend to know aught about the subterranean parts of the
whale? Did erudite Stubb, mounted upon your capstan, deliver lectures
on the anatomy of the Cetacea; and by help of the windlass, hold up a
specimen rib for exhibition? Explain thyself, Ishmael. Can you land
a full-grown whale on your deck for examination, as a cook dishes a
roast-pig? Surely not. A veritable witness have you hitherto been,
Ishmael; but have a care how you seize the privilege of Jonah alone;
the privilege of discoursing upon the joists and beams; the rafters,
ridge-pole, sleepers, and under-pinnings, making up the frame-work of
leviathan; and belike of the tallow-vats, dairy-rooms, butteries, and
cheeseries in his bowels.

I confess, that since Jonah, few whalemen have penetrated very far
beneath the skin of the adult whale; nevertheless, I have been blessed
with an opportunity to dissect him in miniature. In a ship I belonged
to, a small cub Sperm Whale was once bodily hoisted to the deck for his
poke or bag, to make sheaths for the barbs of the harpoons, and for the
heads of the lances. Think you I let that chance go, without using my
boat-hatchet and jack-knife, and breaking the seal and reading all the
contents of that young cub?

And as for my exact knowledge of the bones of the leviathan in their
gigantic, full grown development, for that rare knowledge I am indebted
to my late royal friend Tranquo, king of Tranque, one of the Arsacides.
For being at Tranque, years ago, when attached to the trading-ship Dey
of Algiers, I was invited to spend part of the Arsacidean holidays with
the lord of Tranque, at his retired palm villa at Pupella; a sea-side
glen not very far distant from what our sailors called Bamboo-Town, his
capital.

Among many other fine qualities, my royal friend Tranquo, being gifted
with a devout love for all matters of barbaric vertu, had brought
together in Pupella whatever rare things the more ingenious of his
people could invent; chiefly carved woods of wonderful devices,
chiselled shells, inlaid spears, costly paddles, aromatic canoes;
and all these distributed among whatever natural wonders, the
wonder-freighted, tribute-rendering waves had cast upon his shores.

Chief among these latter was a great Sperm Whale, which, after an
unusually long raging gale, had been found dead and stranded, with his
head against a cocoa-nut tree, whose plumage-like, tufted droopings
seemed his verdant jet. When the vast body had at last been stripped of
its fathom-deep enfoldings, and the bones become dust dry in the sun,
then the skeleton was carefully transported up the Pupella glen, where a
grand temple of lordly palms now sheltered it.

The ribs were hung with trophies; the vertebrae were carved with
Arsacidean annals, in strange hieroglyphics; in the skull, the priests
kept up an unextinguished aromatic flame, so that the mystic head
again sent forth its vapoury spout; while, suspended from a bough, the
terrific lower jaw vibrated over all the devotees, like the hair-hung
sword that so affrighted Damocles.

It was a wondrous sight. The wood was green as mosses of the Icy
Glen; the trees stood high and haughty, feeling their living sap; the
industrious earth beneath was as a weaver's loom, with a gorgeous carpet
on it, whereof the ground-vine tendrils formed the warp and woof, and
the living flowers the figures. All the trees, with all their laden
branches; all the shrubs, and ferns, and grasses; the message-carrying
air; all these unceasingly were active. Through the lacings of the
leaves, the great sun seemed a flying shuttle weaving the unwearied
verdure. Oh, busy weaver! unseen weaver!--pause!--one word!--whither
flows the fabric? what palace may it deck? wherefore all these ceaseless
toilings? Speak, weaver!--stay thy hand!--but one single word with
thee! Nay--the shuttle flies--the figures float from forth the loom; the
freshet-rushing carpet for ever slides away. The weaver-god, he weaves;
and by that weaving is he deafened, that he hears no mortal voice; and
by that humming, we, too, who look on the loom are deafened; and only
when we escape it shall we hear the thousand voices that speak through
it. For even so it is in all material factories. The spoken words that
are inaudible among the flying spindles; those same words are plainly
heard without the walls, bursting from the opened casements. Thereby
have villainies been detected. Ah, mortal! then, be heedful; for so, in
all this din of the great world's loom, thy subtlest thinkings may be
overheard afar.

Now, amid the green, life-restless loom of that Arsacidean wood, the
great, white, worshipped skeleton lay lounging--a gigantic idler! Yet,
as the ever-woven verdant warp and woof intermixed and hummed around
him, the mighty idler seemed the cunning weaver; himself all woven
over with the vines; every month assuming greener, fresher verdure; but
himself a skeleton. Life folded Death; Death trellised Life; the grim
god wived with youthful Life, and begat him curly-headed glories.

Now, when with royal Tranquo I visited this wondrous whale, and saw the
skull an altar, and the artificial smoke ascending from where the real
jet had issued, I marvelled that the king should regard a chapel as
an object of vertu. He laughed. But more I marvelled that the priests
should swear that smoky jet of his was genuine. To and fro I paced
before this skeleton--brushed the vines aside--broke through the
ribs--and with a ball of Arsacidean twine, wandered, eddied long amid
its many winding, shaded colonnades and arbours. But soon my line was
out; and following it back, I emerged from the opening where I entered.
I saw no living thing within; naught was there but bones.

Cutting me a green measuring-rod, I once more dived within the skeleton.
From their arrow-slit in the skull, the priests perceived me taking the
altitude of the final rib, "How now!" they shouted; "Dar'st thou measure
this our god! That's for us." "Aye, priests--well, how long do ye make
him, then?" But hereupon a fierce contest rose among them, concerning
feet and inches; they cracked each other's sconces with their
yard-sticks--the great skull echoed--and seizing that lucky chance, I
quickly concluded my own admeasurements.

These admeasurements I now propose to set before you. But first, be
it recorded, that, in this matter, I am not free to utter any fancied
measurement I please. Because there are skeleton authorities you can
refer to, to test my accuracy. There is a Leviathanic Museum, they tell
me, in Hull, England, one of the whaling ports of that country, where
they have some fine specimens of fin-backs and other whales. Likewise, I
have heard that in the museum of Manchester, in New Hampshire, they have
what the proprietors call "the only perfect specimen of a Greenland or
River Whale in the United States." Moreover, at a place in Yorkshire,
England, Burton Constable by name, a certain Sir Clifford Constable has
in his possession the skeleton of a Sperm Whale, but of moderate size,
by no means of the full-grown magnitude of my friend King Tranquo's.

In both cases, the stranded whales to which these two skeletons
belonged, were originally claimed by their proprietors upon similar
grounds. King Tranquo seizing his because he wanted it; and Sir
Clifford, because he was lord of the seignories of those parts. Sir
Clifford's whale has been articulated throughout; so that, like a
great chest of drawers, you can open and shut him, in all his bony
cavities--spread out his ribs like a gigantic fan--and swing all day
upon his lower jaw. Locks are to be put upon some of his trap-doors and
shutters; and a footman will show round future visitors with a bunch of
keys at his side. Sir Clifford thinks of charging twopence for a peep at
the whispering gallery in the spinal column; threepence to hear the echo
in the hollow of his cerebellum; and sixpence for the unrivalled view
from his forehead.

The skeleton dimensions I shall now proceed to set down are copied
verbatim from my right arm, where I had them tattooed; as in my wild
wanderings at that period, there was no other secure way of preserving
such valuable statistics. But as I was crowded for space, and wished
the other parts of my body to remain a blank page for a poem I was
then composing--at least, what untattooed parts might remain--I did not
trouble myself with the odd inches; nor, indeed, should inches at all
enter into a congenial admeasurement of the whale.



CHAPTER 103. Measurement of The Whale's Skeleton.


In the first place, I wish to lay before you a particular, plain
statement, touching the living bulk of this leviathan, whose skeleton we
are briefly to exhibit. Such a statement may prove useful here.

According to a careful calculation I have made, and which I partly base
upon Captain Scoresby's estimate, of seventy tons for the largest
sized Greenland whale of sixty feet in length; according to my careful
calculation, I say, a Sperm Whale of the largest magnitude, between
eighty-five and ninety feet in length, and something less than forty
feet in its fullest circumference, such a whale will weigh at least
ninety tons; so that, reckoning thirteen men to a ton, he would
considerably outweigh the combined population of a whole village of one
thousand one hundred inhabitants.

Think you not then that brains, like yoked cattle, should be put to this
leviathan, to make him at all budge to any landsman's imagination?

Having already in various ways put before you his skull, spout-hole,
jaw, teeth, tail, forehead, fins, and divers other parts, I shall now
simply point out what is most interesting in the general bulk of his
unobstructed bones. But as the colossal skull embraces so very large
a proportion of the entire extent of the skeleton; as it is by far the
most complicated part; and as nothing is to be repeated concerning it in
this chapter, you must not fail to carry it in your mind, or under your
arm, as we proceed, otherwise you will not gain a complete notion of the
general structure we are about to view.

In length, the Sperm Whale's skeleton at Tranque measured seventy-two
Feet; so that when fully invested and extended in life, he must have
been ninety feet long; for in the whale, the skeleton loses about one
fifth in length compared with the living body. Of this seventy-two feet,
his skull and jaw comprised some twenty feet, leaving some fifty feet of
plain back-bone. Attached to this back-bone, for something less than a
third of its length, was the mighty circular basket of ribs which once
enclosed his vitals.

To me this vast ivory-ribbed chest, with the long, unrelieved spine,
extending far away from it in a straight line, not a little resembled
the hull of a great ship new-laid upon the stocks, when only some twenty
of her naked bow-ribs are inserted, and the keel is otherwise, for the
time, but a long, disconnected timber.

The ribs were ten on a side. The first, to begin from the neck,
was nearly six feet long; the second, third, and fourth were each
successively longer, till you came to the climax of the fifth, or one
of the middle ribs, which measured eight feet and some inches. From
that part, the remaining ribs diminished, till the tenth and last only
spanned five feet and some inches. In general thickness, they all bore
a seemly correspondence to their length. The middle ribs were the most
arched. In some of the Arsacides they are used for beams whereon to lay
footpath bridges over small streams.

In considering these ribs, I could not but be struck anew with the
circumstance, so variously repeated in this book, that the skeleton of
the whale is by no means the mould of his invested form. The largest of
the Tranque ribs, one of the middle ones, occupied that part of the fish
which, in life, is greatest in depth. Now, the greatest depth of the
invested body of this particular whale must have been at least sixteen
feet; whereas, the corresponding rib measured but little more than eight
feet. So that this rib only conveyed half of the true notion of the
living magnitude of that part. Besides, for some way, where I now saw
but a naked spine, all that had been once wrapped round with tons of
added bulk in flesh, muscle, blood, and bowels. Still more, for the
ample fins, I here saw but a few disordered joints; and in place of the
weighty and majestic, but boneless flukes, an utter blank!

How vain and foolish, then, thought I, for timid untravelled man to try
to comprehend aright this wondrous whale, by merely poring over his dead
attenuated skeleton, stretched in this peaceful wood. No. Only in the
heart of quickest perils; only when within the eddyings of his angry
flukes; only on the profound unbounded sea, can the fully invested whale
be truly and livingly found out.

But the spine. For that, the best way we can consider it is, with a
crane, to pile its bones high up on end. No speedy enterprise. But now
it's done, it looks much like Pompey's Pillar.

There are forty and odd vertebrae in all, which in the skeleton are
not locked together. They mostly lie like the great knobbed blocks on
a Gothic spire, forming solid courses of heavy masonry. The largest,
a middle one, is in width something less than three feet, and in depth
more than four. The smallest, where the spine tapers away into the
tail, is only two inches in width, and looks something like a white
billiard-ball. I was told that there were still smaller ones, but they
had been lost by some little cannibal urchins, the priest's children,
who had stolen them to play marbles with. Thus we see how that the
spine of even the hugest of living things tapers off at last into simple
child's play.



CHAPTER 104. The Fossil Whale.


From his mighty bulk the whale affords a most congenial theme whereon
to enlarge, amplify, and generally expatiate. Would you, you could not
compress him. By good rights he should only be treated of in imperial
folio. Not to tell over again his furlongs from spiracle to tail,
and the yards he measures about the waist; only think of the gigantic
involutions of his intestines, where they lie in him like great
cables and hawsers coiled away in the subterranean orlop-deck of a
line-of-battle-ship.

Since I have undertaken to manhandle this Leviathan, it behooves me
to approve myself omnisciently exhaustive in the enterprise; not
overlooking the minutest seminal germs of his blood, and spinning him
out to the uttermost coil of his bowels. Having already described him
in most of his present habitatory and anatomical peculiarities, it
now remains to magnify him in an archaeological, fossiliferous, and
antediluvian point of view. Applied to any other creature than the
Leviathan--to an ant or a flea--such portly terms might justly be deemed
unwarrantably grandiloquent. But when Leviathan is the text, the case is
altered. Fain am I to stagger to this emprise under the weightiest
words of the dictionary. And here be it said, that whenever it has been
convenient to consult one in the course of these dissertations, I have
invariably used a huge quarto edition of Johnson, expressly purchased
for that purpose; because that famous lexicographer's uncommon personal
bulk more fitted him to compile a lexicon to be used by a whale author
like me.

One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject,
though it may seem but an ordinary one. How, then, with me, writing
of this Leviathan? Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard
capitals. Give me a condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius' crater for an
inkstand! Friends, hold my arms! For in the mere act of penning my
thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their
outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole
circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and
mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas
of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its
suburbs. Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal
theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty book, you must choose
a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the
flea, though many there be who have tried it.

Ere entering upon the subject of Fossil Whales, I present my credentials
as a geologist, by stating that in my miscellaneous time I have been
a stone-mason, and also a great digger of ditches, canals and wells,
wine-vaults, cellars, and cisterns of all sorts. Likewise, by way of
preliminary, I desire to remind the reader, that while in the earlier
geological strata there are found the fossils of monsters now almost
completely extinct; the subsequent relics discovered in what are called
the Tertiary formations seem the connecting, or at any rate intercepted
links, between the antichronical creatures, and those whose remote
posterity are said to have entered the Ark; all the Fossil Whales
hitherto discovered belong to the Tertiary period, which is the last
preceding the superficial formations. And though none of them
precisely answer to any known species of the present time, they are yet
sufficiently akin to them in general respects, to justify their taking
rank as Cetacean fossils.

Detached broken fossils of pre-adamite whales, fragments of their bones
and skeletons, have within thirty years past, at various intervals, been
found at the base of the Alps, in Lombardy, in France, in England, in
Scotland, and in the States of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.
Among the more curious of such remains is part of a skull, which in the
year 1779 was disinterred in the Rue Dauphine in Paris, a short street
opening almost directly upon the palace of the Tuileries; and bones
disinterred in excavating the great docks of Antwerp, in Napoleon's
time. Cuvier pronounced these fragments to have belonged to some utterly
unknown Leviathanic species.

But by far the most wonderful of all Cetacean relics was the almost
complete vast skeleton of an extinct monster, found in the year 1842, on
the plantation of Judge Creagh, in Alabama. The awe-stricken credulous
slaves in the vicinity took it for the bones of one of the fallen
angels. The Alabama doctors declared it a huge reptile, and bestowed
upon it the name of Basilosaurus. But some specimen bones of it being
taken across the sea to Owen, the English Anatomist, it turned out
that this alleged reptile was a whale, though of a departed species. A
significant illustration of the fact, again and again repeated in this
book, that the skeleton of the whale furnishes but little clue to the
shape of his fully invested body. So Owen rechristened the monster
Zeuglodon; and in his paper read before the London Geological Society,
pronounced it, in substance, one of the most extraordinary creatures
which the mutations of the globe have blotted out of existence.

When I stand among these mighty Leviathan skeletons, skulls, tusks,
jaws, ribs, and vertebrae, all characterized by partial resemblances to
the existing breeds of sea-monsters; but at the same time bearing on
the other hand similar affinities to the annihilated antichronical
Leviathans, their incalculable seniors; I am, by a flood, borne back
to that wondrous period, ere time itself can be said to have begun;
for time began with man. Here Saturn's grey chaos rolls over me, and I
obtain dim, shuddering glimpses into those Polar eternities; when wedged
bastions of ice pressed hard upon what are now the Tropics; and in
all the 25,000 miles of this world's circumference, not an inhabitable
hand's breadth of land was visible. Then the whole world was the
whale's; and, king of creation, he left his wake along the present lines
of the Andes and the Himmalehs. Who can show a pedigree like Leviathan?
Ahab's harpoon had shed older blood than the Pharaoh's. Methuselah seems
a school-boy. I look round to shake hands with Shem. I am horror-struck
at this antemosaic, unsourced existence of the unspeakable terrors of
the whale, which, having been before all time, must needs exist after
all humane ages are over.

But not alone has this Leviathan left his pre-adamite traces in the
stereotype plates of nature, and in limestone and marl bequeathed his
ancient bust; but upon Egyptian tablets, whose antiquity seems to claim
for them an almost fossiliferous character, we find the unmistakable
print of his fin. In an apartment of the great temple of Denderah,
some fifty years ago, there was discovered upon the granite ceiling a
sculptured and painted planisphere, abounding in centaurs, griffins, and
dolphins, similar to the grotesque figures on the celestial globe of the
moderns. Gliding among them, old Leviathan swam as of yore; was there
swimming in that planisphere, centuries before Solomon was cradled.

Nor must there be omitted another strange attestation of the antiquity
of the whale, in his own osseous post-diluvian reality, as set down by
the venerable John Leo, the old Barbary traveller.

"Not far from the Sea-side, they have a Temple, the Rafters and Beams
of which are made of Whale-Bones; for Whales of a monstrous size are
oftentimes cast up dead upon that shore. The Common People imagine, that
by a secret Power bestowed by God upon the temple, no Whale can pass it
without immediate death. But the truth of the Matter is, that on either
side of the Temple, there are Rocks that shoot two Miles into the Sea,
and wound the Whales when they light upon 'em. They keep a Whale's Rib
of an incredible length for a Miracle, which lying upon the Ground with
its convex part uppermost, makes an Arch, the Head of which cannot be
reached by a Man upon a Camel's Back. This Rib (says John Leo) is said
to have layn there a hundred Years before I saw it. Their Historians
affirm, that a Prophet who prophesy'd of Mahomet, came from this Temple,
and some do not stand to assert, that the Prophet Jonas was cast forth
by the Whale at the Base of the Temple."

In this Afric Temple of the Whale I leave you, reader, and if you be a
Nantucketer, and a whaleman, you will silently worship there.



CHAPTER 105. Does the Whale's Magnitude Diminish?--Will He Perish?


Inasmuch, then, as this Leviathan comes floundering down upon us from
the head-waters of the Eternities, it may be fitly inquired, whether,
in the long course of his generations, he has not degenerated from the
original bulk of his sires.

But upon investigation we find, that not only are the whales of the
present day superior in magnitude to those whose fossil remains are
found in the Tertiary system (embracing a distinct geological period
prior to man), but of the whales found in that Tertiary system, those
belonging to its latter formations exceed in size those of its earlier
ones.

Of all the pre-adamite whales yet exhumed, by far the largest is the
Alabama one mentioned in the last chapter, and that was less than
seventy feet in length in the skeleton. Whereas, we have already seen,
that the tape-measure gives seventy-two feet for the skeleton of a large
sized modern whale. And I have heard, on whalemen's authority, that
Sperm Whales have been captured near a hundred feet long at the time of
capture.

But may it not be, that while the whales of the present hour are an
advance in magnitude upon those of all previous geological periods; may
it not be, that since Adam's time they have degenerated?

Assuredly, we must conclude so, if we are to credit the accounts of such
gentlemen as Pliny, and the ancient naturalists generally. For Pliny
tells us of Whales that embraced acres of living bulk, and Aldrovandus
of others which measured eight hundred feet in length--Rope Walks and
Thames Tunnels of Whales! And even in the days of Banks and Solander,
Cooke's naturalists, we find a Danish member of the Academy of Sciences
setting down certain Iceland Whales (reydan-siskur, or Wrinkled Bellies)
at one hundred and twenty yards; that is, three hundred and sixty feet.
And Lacepede, the French naturalist, in his elaborate history of whales,
in the very beginning of his work (page 3), sets down the Right Whale at
one hundred metres, three hundred and twenty-eight feet. And this work
was published so late as A.D. 1825.

But will any whaleman believe these stories? No. The whale of to-day is
as big as his ancestors in Pliny's time. And if ever I go where Pliny
is, I, a whaleman (more than he was), will make bold to tell him so.
Because I cannot understand how it is, that while the Egyptian mummies
that were buried thousands of years before even Pliny was born, do not
measure so much in their coffins as a modern Kentuckian in his socks;
and while the cattle and other animals sculptured on the oldest Egyptian
and Nineveh tablets, by the relative proportions in which they are
drawn, just as plainly prove that the high-bred, stall-fed, prize cattle
of Smithfield, not only equal, but far exceed in magnitude the fattest
of Pharaoh's fat kine; in the face of all this, I will not admit that of
all animals the whale alone should have degenerated.

But still another inquiry remains; one often agitated by the more
recondite Nantucketers. Whether owing to the almost omniscient look-outs
at the mast-heads of the whaleships, now penetrating even through
Behring's straits, and into the remotest secret drawers and lockers
of the world; and the thousand harpoons and lances darted along all
continental coasts; the moot point is, whether Leviathan can long endure
so wide a chase, and so remorseless a havoc; whether he must not at last
be exterminated from the waters, and the last whale, like the last man,
smoke his last pipe, and then himself evaporate in the final puff.

Comparing the humped herds of whales with the humped herds of buffalo,
which, not forty years ago, overspread by tens of thousands the prairies
of Illinois and Missouri, and shook their iron manes and scowled with
their thunder-clotted brows upon the sites of populous river-capitals,
where now the polite broker sells you land at a dollar an inch; in such
a comparison an irresistible argument would seem furnished, to show that
the hunted whale cannot now escape speedy extinction.

But you must look at this matter in every light. Though so short a
period ago--not a good lifetime--the census of the buffalo in Illinois
exceeded the census of men now in London, and though at the present day
not one horn or hoof of them remains in all that region; and though the
cause of this wondrous extermination was the spear of man; yet the far
different nature of the whale-hunt peremptorily forbids so inglorious an
end to the Leviathan. Forty men in one ship hunting the Sperm Whales for
forty-eight months think they have done extremely well, and thank God,
if at last they carry home the oil of forty fish. Whereas, in the days
of the old Canadian and Indian hunters and trappers of the West, when
the far west (in whose sunset suns still rise) was a wilderness and
a virgin, the same number of moccasined men, for the same number of
months, mounted on horse instead of sailing in ships, would have slain
not forty, but forty thousand and more buffaloes; a fact that, if need
were, could be statistically stated.

Nor, considered aright, does it seem any argument in favour of the
gradual extinction of the Sperm Whale, for example, that in former years
(the latter part of the last century, say) these Leviathans, in
small pods, were encountered much oftener than at present, and, in
consequence, the voyages were not so prolonged, and were also much more
remunerative. Because, as has been elsewhere noticed, those whales,
influenced by some views to safety, now swim the seas in immense
caravans, so that to a large degree the scattered solitaries, yokes, and
pods, and schools of other days are now aggregated into vast but widely
separated, unfrequent armies. That is all. And equally fallacious seems
the conceit, that because the so-called whale-bone whales no longer
haunt many grounds in former years abounding with them, hence that
species also is declining. For they are only being driven from
promontory to cape; and if one coast is no longer enlivened with
their jets, then, be sure, some other and remoter strand has been very
recently startled by the unfamiliar spectacle.

Furthermore: concerning these last mentioned Leviathans, they have two
firm fortresses, which, in all human probability, will for ever remain
impregnable. And as upon the invasion of their valleys, the frosty Swiss
have retreated to their mountains; so, hunted from the savannas and
glades of the middle seas, the whale-bone whales can at last resort to
their Polar citadels, and diving under the ultimate glassy barriers and
walls there, come up among icy fields and floes; and in a charmed circle
of everlasting December, bid defiance to all pursuit from man.

But as perhaps fifty of these whale-bone whales are harpooned for one
cachalot, some philosophers of the forecastle have concluded that this
positive havoc has already very seriously diminished their battalions.
But though for some time past a number of these whales, not less than
13,000, have been annually slain on the nor'-west coast by the Americans
alone; yet there are considerations which render even this circumstance
of little or no account as an opposing argument in this matter.

Natural as it is to be somewhat incredulous concerning the populousness
of the more enormous creatures of the globe, yet what shall we say to
Harto, the historian of Goa, when he tells us that at one hunting the
King of Siam took 4,000 elephants; that in those regions elephants are
numerous as droves of cattle in the temperate climes. And there seems no
reason to doubt that if these elephants, which have now been hunted for
thousands of years, by Semiramis, by Porus, by Hannibal, and by all the
successive monarchs of the East--if they still survive there in great
numbers, much more may the great whale outlast all hunting, since he
has a pasture to expatiate in, which is precisely twice as large as all
Asia, both Americas, Europe and Africa, New Holland, and all the Isles
of the sea combined.

Moreover: we are to consider, that from the presumed great longevity
of whales, their probably attaining the age of a century and more,
therefore at any one period of time, several distinct adult generations
must be contemporary. And what that is, we may soon gain some idea
of, by imagining all the grave-yards, cemeteries, and family vaults of
creation yielding up the live bodies of all the men, women, and children
who were alive seventy-five years ago; and adding this countless host to
the present human population of the globe.

Wherefore, for all these things, we account the whale immortal in his
species, however perishable in his individuality. He swam the seas
before the continents broke water; he once swam over the site of the
Tuileries, and Windsor Castle, and the Kremlin. In Noah's flood he
despised Noah's Ark; and if ever the world is to be again flooded, like
the Netherlands, to kill off its rats, then the eternal whale will still
survive, and rearing upon the topmost crest of the equatorial flood,
spout his frothed defiance to the skies.



CHAPTER 106. Ahab's Leg.


The precipitating manner in which Captain Ahab had quitted the Samuel
Enderby of London, had not been unattended with some small violence to
his own person. He had lighted with such energy upon a thwart of his
boat that his ivory leg had received a half-splintering shock. And
when after gaining his own deck, and his own pivot-hole there, he so
vehemently wheeled round with an urgent command to the steersman (it
was, as ever, something about his not steering inflexibly enough); then,
the already shaken ivory received such an additional twist and wrench,
that though it still remained entire, and to all appearances lusty, yet
Ahab did not deem it entirely trustworthy.

And, indeed, it seemed small matter for wonder, that for all his
pervading, mad recklessness, Ahab did at times give careful heed to the
condition of that dead bone upon which he partly stood. For it had not
been very long prior to the Pequod's sailing from Nantucket, that he
had been found one night lying prone upon the ground, and insensible;
by some unknown, and seemingly inexplicable, unimaginable casualty, his
ivory limb having been so violently displaced, that it had stake-wise
smitten, and all but pierced his groin; nor was it without extreme
difficulty that the agonizing wound was entirely cured.

Nor, at the time, had it failed to enter his monomaniac mind, that all
the anguish of that then present suffering was but the direct issue of a
former woe; and he too plainly seemed to see, that as the most poisonous
reptile of the marsh perpetuates his kind as inevitably as the sweetest
songster of the grove; so, equally with every felicity, all miserable
events do naturally beget their like. Yea, more than equally, thought
Ahab; since both the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than the
ancestry and posterity of Joy. For, not to hint of this: that it is
an inference from certain canonic teachings, that while some natural
enjoyments here shall have no children born to them for the other world,
but, on the contrary, shall be followed by the joy-childlessness of
all hell's despair; whereas, some guilty mortal miseries shall still
fertilely beget to themselves an eternally progressive progeny of griefs
beyond the grave; not at all to hint of this, there still seems an
inequality in the deeper analysis of the thing. For, thought Ahab, while
even the highest earthly felicities ever have a certain unsignifying
pettiness lurking in them, but, at bottom, all heartwoes, a mystic
significance, and, in some men, an archangelic grandeur; so do their
diligent tracings-out not belie the obvious deduction. To trail the
genealogies of these high mortal miseries, carries us at last among the
sourceless primogenitures of the gods; so that, in the face of all the
glad, hay-making suns, and soft cymballing, round harvest-moons, we must
needs give in to this: that the gods themselves are not for ever glad.
The ineffaceable, sad birth-mark in the brow of man, is but the stamp of
sorrow in the signers.

Unwittingly here a secret has been divulged, which perhaps might more
properly, in set way, have been disclosed before. With many other
particulars concerning Ahab, always had it remained a mystery to some,
why it was, that for a certain period, both before and after the sailing
of the Pequod, he had hidden himself away with such Grand-Lama-like
exclusiveness; and, for that one interval, sought speechless refuge, as
it were, among the marble senate of the dead. Captain Peleg's bruited
reason for this thing appeared by no means adequate; though, indeed,
as touching all Ahab's deeper part, every revelation partook more of
significant darkness than of explanatory light. But, in the end, it all
came out; this one matter did, at least. That direful mishap was at
the bottom of his temporary recluseness. And not only this, but to that
ever-contracting, dropping circle ashore, who, for any reason, possessed
the privilege of a less banned approach to him; to that timid circle the
above hinted casualty--remaining, as it did, moodily unaccounted for by
Ahab--invested itself with terrors, not entirely underived from the land
of spirits and of wails. So that, through their zeal for him, they had
all conspired, so far as in them lay, to muffle up the knowledge of
this thing from others; and hence it was, that not till a considerable
interval had elapsed, did it transpire upon the Pequod's decks.

But be all this as it may; let the unseen, ambiguous synod in the air,
or the vindictive princes and potentates of fire, have to do or not
with earthly Ahab, yet, in this present matter of his leg, he took plain
practical procedures;--he called the carpenter.

And when that functionary appeared before him, he bade him without delay
set about making a new leg, and directed the mates to see him supplied
with all the studs and joists of jaw-ivory (Sperm Whale) which had thus
far been accumulated on the voyage, in order that a careful selection
of the stoutest, clearest-grained stuff might be secured. This done, the
carpenter received orders to have the leg completed that night; and to
provide all the fittings for it, independent of those pertaining to
the distrusted one in use. Moreover, the ship's forge was ordered to be
hoisted out of its temporary idleness in the hold; and, to accelerate
the affair, the blacksmith was commanded to proceed at once to the
forging of whatever iron contrivances might be needed.



CHAPTER 107. The Carpenter.


Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high
abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But
from the same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they
seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary.
But most humble though he was, and far from furnishing an example of
the high, humane abstraction; the Pequod's carpenter was no duplicate;
hence, he now comes in person on this stage.

Like all sea-going ship carpenters, and more especially those belonging
to whaling vessels, he was, to a certain off-handed, practical extent,
alike experienced in numerous trades and callings collateral to his own;
the carpenter's pursuit being the ancient and outbranching trunk of all
those numerous handicrafts which more or less have to do with wood as an
auxiliary material. But, besides the application to him of the generic
remark above, this carpenter of the Pequod was singularly efficient in
those thousand nameless mechanical emergencies continually recurring
in a large ship, upon a three or four years' voyage, in uncivilized
and far-distant seas. For not to speak of his readiness in ordinary
duties:--repairing stove boats, sprung spars, reforming the shape of
clumsy-bladed oars, inserting bull's eyes in the deck, or new tree-nails
in the side planks, and other miscellaneous matters more directly
pertaining to his special business; he was moreover unhesitatingly
expert in all manner of conflicting aptitudes, both useful and
capricious.

The one grand stage where he enacted all his various parts so manifold,
was his vice-bench; a long rude ponderous table furnished with several
vices, of different sizes, and both of iron and of wood. At all times
except when whales were alongside, this bench was securely lashed
athwartships against the rear of the Try-works.

A belaying pin is found too large to be easily inserted into its hole:
the carpenter claps it into one of his ever-ready vices, and straightway
files it smaller. A lost land-bird of strange plumage strays on board,
and is made a captive: out of clean shaved rods of right-whale bone, and
cross-beams of sperm whale ivory, the carpenter makes a pagoda-looking
cage for it. An oarsman sprains his wrist: the carpenter concocts a
soothing lotion. Stubb longed for vermillion stars to be painted upon
the blade of his every oar; screwing each oar in his big vice of wood,
the carpenter symmetrically supplies the constellation. A sailor takes
a fancy to wear shark-bone ear-rings: the carpenter drills his ears.
Another has the toothache: the carpenter out pincers, and clapping
one hand upon his bench bids him be seated there; but the poor fellow
unmanageably winces under the unconcluded operation; whirling round the
handle of his wooden vice, the carpenter signs him to clap his jaw in
that, if he would have him draw the tooth.

Thus, this carpenter was prepared at all points, and alike indifferent
and without respect in all. Teeth he accounted bits of ivory; heads he
deemed but top-blocks; men themselves he lightly held for capstans. But
while now upon so wide a field thus variously accomplished and with such
liveliness of expertness in him, too; all this would seem to argue some
uncommon vivacity of intelligence. But not precisely so. For nothing was
this man more remarkable, than for a certain impersonal stolidity as
it were; impersonal, I say; for it so shaded off into the surrounding
infinite of things, that it seemed one with the general stolidity
discernible in the whole visible world; which while pauselessly active
in uncounted modes, still eternally holds its peace, and ignores you,
though you dig foundations for cathedrals. Yet was this half-horrible
stolidity in him, involving, too, as it appeared, an all-ramifying
heartlessness;--yet was it oddly dashed at times, with an old,
crutch-like, antediluvian, wheezing humorousness, not unstreaked now
and then with a certain grizzled wittiness; such as might have served
to pass the time during the midnight watch on the bearded forecastle
of Noah's ark. Was it that this old carpenter had been a life-long
wanderer, whose much rolling, to and fro, not only had gathered no moss;
but what is more, had rubbed off whatever small outward clingings
might have originally pertained to him? He was a stript abstract; an
unfractioned integral; uncompromised as a new-born babe; living without
premeditated reference to this world or the next. You might almost
say, that this strange uncompromisedness in him involved a sort of
unintelligence; for in his numerous trades, he did not seem to work so
much by reason or by instinct, or simply because he had been tutored to
it, or by any intermixture of all these, even or uneven; but merely by
a kind of deaf and dumb, spontaneous literal process. He was a pure
manipulator; his brain, if he had ever had one, must have early
oozed along into the muscles of his fingers. He was like one of
those unreasoning but still highly useful, MULTUM IN PARVO, Sheffield
contrivances, assuming the exterior--though a little swelled--of a
common pocket knife; but containing, not only blades of various sizes,
but also screw-drivers, cork-screws, tweezers, awls, pens, rulers,
nail-filers, countersinkers. So, if his superiors wanted to use the
carpenter for a screw-driver, all they had to do was to open that part
of him, and the screw was fast: or if for tweezers, take him up by the
legs, and there they were.

Yet, as previously hinted, this omnitooled, open-and-shut carpenter,
was, after all, no mere machine of an automaton. If he did not have a
common soul in him, he had a subtle something that somehow anomalously
did its duty. What that was, whether essence of quicksilver, or a few
drops of hartshorn, there is no telling. But there it was; and there it
had abided for now some sixty years or more. And this it was, this same
unaccountable, cunning life-principle in him; this it was, that kept
him a great part of the time soliloquizing; but only like an unreasoning
wheel, which also hummingly soliloquizes; or rather, his body was a
sentry-box and this soliloquizer on guard there, and talking all the
time to keep himself awake.



CHAPTER 108. Ahab and the Carpenter.

The Deck--First Night Watch.


(CARPENTER STANDING BEFORE HIS VICE-BENCH, AND BY THE LIGHT OF TWO
LANTERNS BUSILY FILING THE IVORY JOIST FOR THE LEG, WHICH JOIST IS
FIRMLY FIXED IN THE VICE. SLABS OF IVORY, LEATHER STRAPS, PADS, SCREWS,
AND VARIOUS TOOLS OF ALL SORTS LYING ABOUT THE BENCH. FORWARD, THE RED
FLAME OF THE FORGE IS SEEN, WHERE THE BLACKSMITH IS AT WORK.)


Drat the file, and drat the bone! That is hard which should be soft,
and that is soft which should be hard. So we go, who file old jaws and
shinbones. Let's try another. Aye, now, this works better (SNEEZES).
Halloa, this bone dust is (SNEEZES)--why it's (SNEEZES)--yes it's
(SNEEZES)--bless my soul, it won't let me speak! This is what an old
fellow gets now for working in dead lumber. Saw a live tree, and
you don't get this dust; amputate a live bone, and you don't get it
(SNEEZES). Come, come, you old Smut, there, bear a hand, and let's have
that ferule and buckle-screw; I'll be ready for them presently. Lucky
now (SNEEZES) there's no knee-joint to make; that might puzzle a little;
but a mere shinbone--why it's easy as making hop-poles; only I should
like to put a good finish on. Time, time; if I but only had the time, I
could turn him out as neat a leg now as ever (SNEEZES) scraped to a lady
in a parlor. Those buckskin legs and calves of legs I've seen in shop
windows wouldn't compare at all. They soak water, they do; and of
course get rheumatic, and have to be doctored (SNEEZES) with washes and
lotions, just like live legs. There; before I saw it off, now, I must
call his old Mogulship, and see whether the length will be all right;
too short, if anything, I guess. Ha! that's the heel; we are in luck;
here he comes, or it's somebody else, that's certain.

AHAB (ADVANCING)

(DURING THE ENSUING SCENE, THE CARPENTER CONTINUES SNEEZING AT TIMES)


Well, manmaker!

Just in time, sir. If the captain pleases, I will now mark the length.
Let me measure, sir.

Measured for a leg! good. Well, it's not the first time. About it!
There; keep thy finger on it. This is a cogent vice thou hast here,
carpenter; let me feel its grip once. So, so; it does pinch some.

Oh, sir, it will break bones--beware, beware!

No fear; I like a good grip; I like to feel something in this
slippery world that can hold, man. What's Prometheus about there?--the
blacksmith, I mean--what's he about?

He must be forging the buckle-screw, sir, now.

Right. It's a partnership; he supplies the muscle part. He makes a
fierce red flame there!

Aye, sir; he must have the white heat for this kind of fine work.

Um-m. So he must. I do deem it now a most meaning thing, that that
old Greek, Prometheus, who made men, they say, should have been a
blacksmith, and animated them with fire; for what's made in fire must
properly belong to fire; and so hell's probable. How the soot flies!
This must be the remainder the Greek made the Africans of. Carpenter,
when he's through with that buckle, tell him to forge a pair of steel
shoulder-blades; there's a pedlar aboard with a crushing pack.

Sir?

Hold; while Prometheus is about it, I'll order a complete man after a
desirable pattern. Imprimis, fifty feet high in his socks; then, chest
modelled after the Thames Tunnel; then, legs with roots to 'em, to stay
in one place; then, arms three feet through the wrist; no heart at all,
brass forehead, and about a quarter of an acre of fine brains; and let
me see--shall I order eyes to see outwards? No, but put a sky-light on
top of his head to illuminate inwards. There, take the order, and away.

Now, what's he speaking about, and who's he speaking to, I should like
to know? Shall I keep standing here? (ASIDE).

'Tis but indifferent architecture to make a blind dome; here's one. No,
no, no; I must have a lantern.

Ho, ho! That's it, hey? Here are two, sir; one will serve my turn.

What art thou thrusting that thief-catcher into my face for, man?
Thrusted light is worse than presented pistols.

I thought, sir, that you spoke to carpenter.


Carpenter? why that's--but no;--a very tidy, and, I may say,
an extremely gentlemanlike sort of business thou art in here,
carpenter;--or would'st thou rather work in clay?

Sir?--Clay? clay, sir? That's mud; we leave clay to ditchers, sir.

The fellow's impious! What art thou sneezing about?

Bone is rather dusty, sir.

Take the hint, then; and when thou art dead, never bury thyself under
living people's noses.

Sir?--oh! ah!--I guess so;--yes--dear!

Look ye, carpenter, I dare say thou callest thyself a right good
workmanlike workman, eh? Well, then, will it speak thoroughly well
for thy work, if, when I come to mount this leg thou makest, I shall
nevertheless feel another leg in the same identical place with it; that
is, carpenter, my old lost leg; the flesh and blood one, I mean. Canst
thou not drive that old Adam away?

Truly, sir, I begin to understand somewhat now. Yes, I have heard
something curious on that score, sir; how that a dismasted man never
entirely loses the feeling of his old spar, but it will be still
pricking him at times. May I humbly ask if it be really so, sir?

It is, man. Look, put thy live leg here in the place where mine once
was; so, now, here is only one distinct leg to the eye, yet two to the
soul. Where thou feelest tingling life; there, exactly there, there to a
hair, do I. Is't a riddle?

I should humbly call it a poser, sir.

Hist, then. How dost thou know that some entire, living, thinking thing
may not be invisibly and uninterpenetratingly standing precisely where
thou now standest; aye, and standing there in thy spite? In thy most
solitary hours, then, dost thou not fear eavesdroppers? Hold, don't
speak! And if I still feel the smart of my crushed leg, though it be now
so long dissolved; then, why mayst not thou, carpenter, feel the fiery
pains of hell for ever, and without a body? Hah!

Good Lord! Truly, sir, if it comes to that, I must calculate over again;
I think I didn't carry a small figure, sir.

Look ye, pudding-heads should never grant premises.--How long before the
leg is done?

Perhaps an hour, sir.

Bungle away at it then, and bring it to me (TURNS TO GO). Oh, Life! Here
I am, proud as Greek god, and yet standing debtor to this blockhead for
a bone to stand on! Cursed be that mortal inter-indebtedness which will
not do away with ledgers. I would be free as air; and I'm down in the
whole world's books. I am so rich, I could have given bid for bid with
the wealthiest Praetorians at the auction of the Roman empire (which was
the world's); and yet I owe for the flesh in the tongue I brag with. By
heavens! I'll get a crucible, and into it, and dissolve myself down to
one small, compendious vertebra. So.

CARPENTER (RESUMING HIS WORK).


Well, well, well! Stubb knows him best of all, and Stubb always says
he's queer; says nothing but that one sufficient little word queer; he's
queer, says Stubb; he's queer--queer, queer; and keeps dinning it into
Mr. Starbuck all the time--queer--sir--queer, queer, very queer. And
here's his leg! Yes, now that I think of it, here's his bedfellow! has
a stick of whale's jaw-bone for a wife! And this is his leg; he'll stand
on this. What was that now about one leg standing in three places, and
all three places standing in one hell--how was that? Oh! I don't wonder
he looked so scornful at me! I'm a sort of strange-thoughted sometimes,
they say; but that's only haphazard-like. Then, a short, little old body
like me, should never undertake to wade out into deep waters with tall,
heron-built captains; the water chucks you under the chin pretty quick,
and there's a great cry for life-boats. And here's the heron's leg!
long and slim, sure enough! Now, for most folks one pair of legs lasts
a lifetime, and that must be because they use them mercifully, as a
tender-hearted old lady uses her roly-poly old coach-horses. But Ahab;
oh he's a hard driver. Look, driven one leg to death, and spavined the
other for life, and now wears out bone legs by the cord. Halloa, there,
you Smut! bear a hand there with those screws, and let's finish it
before the resurrection fellow comes a-calling with his horn for
all legs, true or false, as brewery-men go round collecting old beer
barrels, to fill 'em up again. What a leg this is! It looks like a real
live leg, filed down to nothing but the core; he'll be standing on this
to-morrow; he'll be taking altitudes on it. Halloa! I almost forgot the
little oval slate, smoothed ivory, where he figures up the latitude. So,
so; chisel, file, and sand-paper, now!



CHAPTER 109. Ahab and Starbuck in the Cabin.


According to usage they were pumping the ship next morning; and lo! no
inconsiderable oil came up with the water; the casks below must have
sprung a bad leak. Much concern was shown; and Starbuck went down into
the cabin to report this unfavourable affair.*


*In Sperm-whalemen with any considerable quantity of oil on board, it
is a regular semiweekly duty to conduct a hose into the hold, and drench
the casks with sea-water; which afterwards, at varying intervals, is
removed by the ship's pumps. Hereby the casks are sought to be kept
damply tight; while by the changed character of the withdrawn water, the
mariners readily detect any serious leakage in the precious cargo.


Now, from the South and West the Pequod was drawing nigh to Formosa and
the Bashee Isles, between which lies one of the tropical outlets from
the China waters into the Pacific. And so Starbuck found Ahab with
a general chart of the oriental archipelagoes spread before him;
and another separate one representing the long eastern coasts of the
Japanese islands--Niphon, Matsmai, and Sikoke. With his snow-white new
ivory leg braced against the screwed leg of his table, and with a long
pruning-hook of a jack-knife in his hand, the wondrous old man, with his
back to the gangway door, was wrinkling his brow, and tracing his old
courses again.

"Who's there?" hearing the footstep at the door, but not turning round
to it. "On deck! Begone!"

"Captain Ahab mistakes; it is I. The oil in the hold is leaking, sir. We
must up Burtons and break out."

"Up Burtons and break out? Now that we are nearing Japan; heave-to here
for a week to tinker a parcel of old hoops?"

"Either do that, sir, or waste in one day more oil than we may make good
in a year. What we come twenty thousand miles to get is worth saving,
sir."

"So it is, so it is; if we get it."

"I was speaking of the oil in the hold, sir."

"And I was not speaking or thinking of that at all. Begone! Let it leak!
I'm all aleak myself. Aye! leaks in leaks! not only full of leaky casks,
but those leaky casks are in a leaky ship; and that's a far worse plight
than the Pequod's, man. Yet I don't stop to plug my leak; for who can
find it in the deep-loaded hull; or how hope to plug it, even if
found, in this life's howling gale? Starbuck! I'll not have the Burtons
hoisted."

"What will the owners say, sir?"

"Let the owners stand on Nantucket beach and outyell the Typhoons. What
cares Ahab? Owners, owners? Thou art always prating to me, Starbuck,
about those miserly owners, as if the owners were my conscience. But
look ye, the only real owner of anything is its commander; and hark ye,
my conscience is in this ship's keel.--On deck!"

"Captain Ahab," said the reddening mate, moving further into the cabin,
with a daring so strangely respectful and cautious that it almost seemed
not only every way seeking to avoid the slightest outward manifestation
of itself, but within also seemed more than half distrustful of itself;
"A better man than I might well pass over in thee what he would quickly
enough resent in a younger man; aye, and in a happier, Captain Ahab."

"Devils! Dost thou then so much as dare to critically think of me?--On
deck!"

"Nay, sir, not yet; I do entreat. And I do dare, sir--to be forbearing!
Shall we not understand each other better than hitherto, Captain Ahab?"

Ahab seized a loaded musket from the rack (forming part of most
South-Sea-men's cabin furniture), and pointing it towards Starbuck,
exclaimed: "There is one God that is Lord over the earth, and one
Captain that is lord over the Pequod.--On deck!"

For an instant in the flashing eyes of the mate, and his fiery cheeks,
you would have almost thought that he had really received the blaze of
the levelled tube. But, mastering his emotion, he half calmly rose,
and as he quitted the cabin, paused for an instant and said: "Thou hast
outraged, not insulted me, sir; but for that I ask thee not to beware of
Starbuck; thou wouldst but laugh; but let Ahab beware of Ahab; beware of
thyself, old man."

"He waxes brave, but nevertheless obeys; most careful bravery that!"
murmured Ahab, as Starbuck disappeared. "What's that he said--Ahab
beware of Ahab--there's something there!" Then unconsciously using the
musket for a staff, with an iron brow he paced to and fro in the little
cabin; but presently the thick plaits of his forehead relaxed, and
returning the gun to the rack, he went to the deck.

"Thou art but too good a fellow, Starbuck," he said lowly to the mate;
then raising his voice to the crew: "Furl the t'gallant-sails, and
close-reef the top-sails, fore and aft; back the main-yard; up Burton,
and break out in the main-hold."

It were perhaps vain to surmise exactly why it was, that as respecting
Starbuck, Ahab thus acted. It may have been a flash of honesty in him;
or mere prudential policy which, under the circumstance, imperiously
forbade the slightest symptom of open disaffection, however transient,
in the important chief officer of his ship. However it was, his orders
were executed; and the Burtons were hoisted.



CHAPTER 110. Queequeg in His Coffin.


Upon searching, it was found that the casks last struck into the hold
were perfectly sound, and that the leak must be further off. So, it
being calm weather, they broke out deeper and deeper, disturbing the
slumbers of the huge ground-tier butts; and from that black midnight
sending those gigantic moles into the daylight above. So deep did they
go; and so ancient, and corroded, and weedy the aspect of the lowermost
puncheons, that you almost looked next for some mouldy corner-stone cask
containing coins of Captain Noah, with copies of the posted placards,
vainly warning the infatuated old world from the flood. Tierce after
tierce, too, of water, and bread, and beef, and shooks of staves, and
iron bundles of hoops, were hoisted out, till at last the piled decks
were hard to get about; and the hollow hull echoed under foot, as if
you were treading over empty catacombs, and reeled and rolled in the sea
like an air-freighted demijohn. Top-heavy was the ship as a dinnerless
student with all Aristotle in his head. Well was it that the Typhoons
did not visit them then.

Now, at this time it was that my poor pagan companion, and fast
bosom-friend, Queequeg, was seized with a fever, which brought him nigh
to his endless end.

Be it said, that in this vocation of whaling, sinecures are unknown;
dignity and danger go hand in hand; till you get to be Captain, the
higher you rise the harder you toil. So with poor Queequeg, who, as
harpooneer, must not only face all the rage of the living whale, but--as
we have elsewhere seen--mount his dead back in a rolling sea; and
finally descend into the gloom of the hold, and bitterly sweating
all day in that subterraneous confinement, resolutely manhandle the
clumsiest casks and see to their stowage. To be short, among whalemen,
the harpooneers are the holders, so called.

Poor Queequeg! when the ship was about half disembowelled, you should
have stooped over the hatchway, and peered down upon him there; where,
stripped to his woollen drawers, the tattooed savage was crawling about
amid that dampness and slime, like a green spotted lizard at the bottom
of a well. And a well, or an ice-house, it somehow proved to him, poor
pagan; where, strange to say, for all the heat of his sweatings, he
caught a terrible chill which lapsed into a fever; and at last, after
some days' suffering, laid him in his hammock, close to the very sill
of the door of death. How he wasted and wasted away in those few
long-lingering days, till there seemed but little left of him but his
frame and tattooing. But as all else in him thinned, and his cheek-bones
grew sharper, his eyes, nevertheless, seemed growing fuller and fuller;
they became of a strange softness of lustre; and mildly but deeply
looked out at you there from his sickness, a wondrous testimony to that
immortal health in him which could not die, or be weakened. And like
circles on the water, which, as they grow fainter, expand; so his eyes
seemed rounding and rounding, like the rings of Eternity. An awe that
cannot be named would steal over you as you sat by the side of this
waning savage, and saw as strange things in his face, as any beheld who
were bystanders when Zoroaster died. For whatever is truly wondrous and
fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books. And the drawing
near of Death, which alike levels all, alike impresses all with a last
revelation, which only an author from the dead could adequately tell.
So that--let us say it again--no dying Chaldee or Greek had higher and
holier thoughts than those, whose mysterious shades you saw creeping
over the face of poor Queequeg, as he quietly lay in his swaying
hammock, and the rolling sea seemed gently rocking him to his final
rest, and the ocean's invisible flood-tide lifted him higher and higher
towards his destined heaven.

Not a man of the crew but gave him up; and, as for Queequeg himself,
what he thought of his case was forcibly shown by a curious favour he
asked. He called one to him in the grey morning watch, when the day was
just breaking, and taking his hand, said that while in Nantucket he
had chanced to see certain little canoes of dark wood, like the rich
war-wood of his native isle; and upon inquiry, he had learned that all
whalemen who died in Nantucket, were laid in those same dark canoes,
and that the fancy of being so laid had much pleased him; for it was not
unlike the custom of his own race, who, after embalming a dead warrior,
stretched him out in his canoe, and so left him to be floated away to
the starry archipelagoes; for not only do they believe that the stars
are isles, but that far beyond all visible horizons, their own mild,
uncontinented seas, interflow with the blue heavens; and so form the
white breakers of the milky way. He added, that he shuddered at
the thought of being buried in his hammock, according to the usual
sea-custom, tossed like something vile to the death-devouring sharks.
No: he desired a canoe like those of Nantucket, all the more congenial
to him, being a whaleman, that like a whale-boat these coffin-canoes
were without a keel; though that involved but uncertain steering, and
much lee-way adown the dim ages.

Now, when this strange circumstance was made known aft, the carpenter
was at once commanded to do Queequeg's bidding, whatever it might
include. There was some heathenish, coffin-coloured old lumber aboard,
which, upon a long previous voyage, had been cut from the aboriginal
groves of the Lackaday islands, and from these dark planks the coffin
was recommended to be made. No sooner was the carpenter apprised of
the order, than taking his rule, he forthwith with all the indifferent
promptitude of his character, proceeded into the forecastle and took
Queequeg's measure with great accuracy, regularly chalking Queequeg's
person as he shifted the rule.

"Ah! poor fellow! he'll have to die now," ejaculated the Long Island
sailor.

Going to his vice-bench, the carpenter for convenience sake and general
reference, now transferringly measured on it the exact length the coffin
was to be, and then made the transfer permanent by cutting two notches
at its extremities. This done, he marshalled the planks and his tools,
and to work.

When the last nail was driven, and the lid duly planed and fitted,
he lightly shouldered the coffin and went forward with it, inquiring
whether they were ready for it yet in that direction.

Overhearing the indignant but half-humorous cries with which the
people on deck began to drive the coffin away, Queequeg, to every one's
consternation, commanded that the thing should be instantly brought to
him, nor was there any denying him; seeing that, of all mortals, some
dying men are the most tyrannical; and certainly, since they will
shortly trouble us so little for evermore, the poor fellows ought to be
indulged.

Leaning over in his hammock, Queequeg long regarded the coffin with
an attentive eye. He then called for his harpoon, had the wooden stock
drawn from it, and then had the iron part placed in the coffin along
with one of the paddles of his boat. All by his own request, also,
biscuits were then ranged round the sides within: a flask of fresh water
was placed at the head, and a small bag of woody earth scraped up in
the hold at the foot; and a piece of sail-cloth being rolled up for a
pillow, Queequeg now entreated to be lifted into his final bed, that he
might make trial of its comforts, if any it had. He lay without moving
a few minutes, then told one to go to his bag and bring out his little
god, Yojo. Then crossing his arms on his breast with Yojo between, he
called for the coffin lid (hatch he called it) to be placed over him.
The head part turned over with a leather hinge, and there lay Queequeg
in his coffin with little but his composed countenance in view. "Rarmai"
(it will do; it is easy), he murmured at last, and signed to be replaced
in his hammock.

But ere this was done, Pip, who had been slily hovering near by all this
while, drew nigh to him where he lay, and with soft sobbings, took him
by the hand; in the other, holding his tambourine.

"Poor rover! will ye never have done with all this weary roving? where
go ye now? But if the currents carry ye to those sweet Antilles where
the beaches are only beat with water-lilies, will ye do one little
errand for me? Seek out one Pip, who's now been missing long: I think
he's in those far Antilles. If ye find him, then comfort him; for he
must be very sad; for look! he's left his tambourine behind;--I found
it. Rig-a-dig, dig, dig! Now, Queequeg, die; and I'll beat ye your dying
march."

"I have heard," murmured Starbuck, gazing down the scuttle, "that in
violent fevers, men, all ignorance, have talked in ancient tongues;
and that when the mystery is probed, it turns out always that in their
wholly forgotten childhood those ancient tongues had been really spoken
in their hearing by some lofty scholars. So, to my fond faith, poor Pip,
in this strange sweetness of his lunacy, brings heavenly vouchers of all
our heavenly homes. Where learned he that, but there?--Hark! he speaks
again: but more wildly now."

"Form two and two! Let's make a General of him! Ho, where's his harpoon?
Lay it across here.--Rig-a-dig, dig, dig! huzza! Oh for a game cock
now to sit upon his head and crow! Queequeg dies game!--mind ye that;
Queequeg dies game!--take ye good heed of that; Queequeg dies game! I
say; game, game, game! but base little Pip, he died a coward; died all
a'shiver;--out upon Pip! Hark ye; if ye find Pip, tell all the Antilles
he's a runaway; a coward, a coward, a coward! Tell them he jumped from
a whale-boat! I'd never beat my tambourine over base Pip, and hail
him General, if he were once more dying here. No, no! shame upon all
cowards--shame upon them! Let 'em go drown like Pip, that jumped from a
whale-boat. Shame! shame!"

During all this, Queequeg lay with closed eyes, as if in a dream. Pip
was led away, and the sick man was replaced in his hammock.

But now that he had apparently made every preparation for death; now
that his coffin was proved a good fit, Queequeg suddenly rallied; soon
there seemed no need of the carpenter's box: and thereupon, when some
expressed their delighted surprise, he, in substance, said, that the
cause of his sudden convalescence was this;--at a critical moment, he
had just recalled a little duty ashore, which he was leaving undone;
and therefore had changed his mind about dying: he could not die yet,
he averred. They asked him, then, whether to live or die was a matter of
his own sovereign will and pleasure. He answered, certainly. In a word,
it was Queequeg's conceit, that if a man made up his mind to live, mere
sickness could not kill him: nothing but a whale, or a gale, or some
violent, ungovernable, unintelligent destroyer of that sort.

Now, there is this noteworthy difference between savage and civilized;
that while a sick, civilized man may be six months convalescing,
generally speaking, a sick savage is almost half-well again in a day.
So, in good time my Queequeg gained strength; and at length after
sitting on the windlass for a few indolent days (but eating with a
vigorous appetite) he suddenly leaped to his feet, threw out his arms
and legs, gave himself a good stretching, yawned a little bit, and then
springing into the head of his hoisted boat, and poising a harpoon,
pronounced himself fit for a fight.

With a wild whimsiness, he now used his coffin for a sea-chest; and
emptying into it his canvas bag of clothes, set them in order there.
Many spare hours he spent, in carving the lid with all manner of
grotesque figures and drawings; and it seemed that hereby he was
striving, in his rude way, to copy parts of the twisted tattooing on
his body. And this tattooing had been the work of a departed prophet and
seer of his island, who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written out on
his body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical
treatise on the art of attaining truth; so that Queequeg in his own
proper person was a riddle to unfold; a wondrous work in one volume; but
whose mysteries not even himself could read, though his own live heart
beat against them; and these mysteries were therefore destined in
the end to moulder away with the living parchment whereon they were
inscribed, and so be unsolved to the last. And this thought it must
have been which suggested to Ahab that wild exclamation of his, when
one morning turning away from surveying poor Queequeg--"Oh, devilish
tantalization of the gods!"



CHAPTER 111. The Pacific.


When gliding by the Bashee isles we emerged at last upon the great South
Sea; were it not for other things, I could have greeted my dear Pacific
with uncounted thanks, for now the long supplication of my youth was
answered; that serene ocean rolled eastwards from me a thousand leagues
of blue.

There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently
awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath; like those
fabled undulations of the Ephesian sod over the buried Evangelist St.
John. And meet it is, that over these sea-pastures, wide-rolling watery
prairies and Potters' Fields of all four continents, the waves should
rise and fall, and ebb and flow unceasingly; for here, millions of mixed
shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that
we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like
slumberers in their beds; the ever-rolling waves but made so by their
restlessness.

To any meditative Magian rover, this serene Pacific, once beheld, must
ever after be the sea of his adoption. It rolls the midmost waters of
the world, the Indian ocean and Atlantic being but its arms. The same
waves wash the moles of the new-built Californian towns, but yesterday
planted by the recentest race of men, and lave the faded but still
gorgeous skirts of Asiatic lands, older than Abraham; while all between
float milky-ways of coral isles, and low-lying, endless, unknown
Archipelagoes, and impenetrable Japans. Thus this mysterious, divine
Pacific zones the world's whole bulk about; makes all coasts one bay
to it; seems the tide-beating heart of earth. Lifted by those eternal
swells, you needs must own the seductive god, bowing your head to Pan.

But few thoughts of Pan stirred Ahab's brain, as standing like an
iron statue at his accustomed place beside the mizen rigging, with one
nostril he unthinkingly snuffed the sugary musk from the Bashee isles
(in whose sweet woods mild lovers must be walking), and with the other
consciously inhaled the salt breath of the new found sea; that sea in
which the hated White Whale must even then be swimming. Launched at
length upon these almost final waters, and gliding towards the Japanese
cruising-ground, the old man's purpose intensified itself. His firm lips
met like the lips of a vice; the Delta of his forehead's veins swelled
like overladen brooks; in his very sleep, his ringing cry ran through
the vaulted hull, "Stern all! the White Whale spouts thick blood!"



CHAPTER 112. The Blacksmith.


Availing himself of the mild, summer-cool weather that now reigned in
these latitudes, and in preparation for the peculiarly active
pursuits shortly to be anticipated, Perth, the begrimed, blistered old
blacksmith, had not removed his portable forge to the hold again, after
concluding his contributory work for Ahab's leg, but still retained
it on deck, fast lashed to ringbolts by the foremast; being now almost
incessantly invoked by the headsmen, and harpooneers, and bowsmen to do
some little job for them; altering, or repairing, or new shaping their
various weapons and boat furniture. Often he would be surrounded by an
eager circle, all waiting to be served; holding boat-spades, pike-heads,
harpoons, and lances, and jealously watching his every sooty movement,
as he toiled. Nevertheless, this old man's was a patient hammer wielded
by a patient arm. No murmur, no impatience, no petulance did come from
him. Silent, slow, and solemn; bowing over still further his chronically
broken back, he toiled away, as if toil were life itself, and the
heavy beating of his hammer the heavy beating of his heart. And so it
was.--Most miserable!

A peculiar walk in this old man, a certain slight but painful appearing
yawing in his gait, had at an early period of the voyage excited the
curiosity of the mariners. And to the importunity of their persisted
questionings he had finally given in; and so it came to pass that every
one now knew the shameful story of his wretched fate.

Belated, and not innocently, one bitter winter's midnight, on the road
running between two country towns, the blacksmith half-stupidly felt
the deadly numbness stealing over him, and sought refuge in a leaning,
dilapidated barn. The issue was, the loss of the extremities of both
feet. Out of this revelation, part by part, at last came out the four
acts of the gladness, and the one long, and as yet uncatastrophied fifth
act of the grief of his life's drama.

He was an old man, who, at the age of nearly sixty, had postponedly
encountered that thing in sorrow's technicals called ruin. He had been
an artisan of famed excellence, and with plenty to do; owned a house
and garden; embraced a youthful, daughter-like, loving wife, and three
blithe, ruddy children; every Sunday went to a cheerful-looking church,
planted in a grove. But one night, under cover of darkness, and further
concealed in a most cunning disguisement, a desperate burglar slid into
his happy home, and robbed them all of everything. And darker yet to
tell, the blacksmith himself did ignorantly conduct this burglar into
his family's heart. It was the Bottle Conjuror! Upon the opening of that
fatal cork, forth flew the fiend, and shrivelled up his home. Now, for
prudent, most wise, and economic reasons, the blacksmith's shop was in
the basement of his dwelling, but with a separate entrance to it; so
that always had the young and loving healthy wife listened with no
unhappy nervousness, but with vigorous pleasure, to the stout ringing of
her young-armed old husband's hammer; whose reverberations, muffled by
passing through the floors and walls, came up to her, not unsweetly,
in her nursery; and so, to stout Labor's iron lullaby, the blacksmith's
infants were rocked to slumber.

Oh, woe on woe! Oh, Death, why canst thou not sometimes be timely? Hadst
thou taken this old blacksmith to thyself ere his full ruin came upon
him, then had the young widow had a delicious grief, and her orphans a
truly venerable, legendary sire to dream of in their after years; and
all of them a care-killing competency. But Death plucked down some
virtuous elder brother, on whose whistling daily toil solely hung the
responsibilities of some other family, and left the worse than useless
old man standing, till the hideous rot of life should make him easier to
harvest.

Why tell the whole? The blows of the basement hammer every day grew more
and more between; and each blow every day grew fainter than the last;
the wife sat frozen at the window, with tearless eyes, glitteringly
gazing into the weeping faces of her children; the bellows fell; the
forge choked up with cinders; the house was sold; the mother dived
down into the long church-yard grass; her children twice followed her
thither; and the houseless, familyless old man staggered off a vagabond
in crape; his every woe unreverenced; his grey head a scorn to flaxen
curls!

Death seems the only desirable sequel for a career like this; but Death
is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but
the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the
Wild, the Watery, the Unshored; therefore, to the death-longing eyes of
such men, who still have left in them some interior compunctions against
suicide, does the all-contributed and all-receptive ocean alluringly
spread forth his whole plain of unimaginable, taking terrors, and
wonderful, new-life adventures; and from the hearts of infinite
Pacifics, the thousand mermaids sing to them--"Come hither,
broken-hearted; here is another life without the guilt of intermediate
death; here are wonders supernatural, without dying for them. Come
hither! bury thyself in a life which, to your now equally abhorred and
abhorring, landed world, is more oblivious than death. Come hither! put
up THY gravestone, too, within the churchyard, and come hither, till we
marry thee!"

Hearkening to these voices, East and West, by early sunrise, and by fall
of eve, the blacksmith's soul responded, Aye, I come! And so Perth went
a-whaling.



CHAPTER 113. The Forge.


With matted beard, and swathed in a bristling shark-skin apron, about
mid-day, Perth was standing between his forge and anvil, the latter
placed upon an iron-wood log, with one hand holding a pike-head in the
coals, and with the other at his forge's lungs, when Captain Ahab came
along, carrying in his hand a small rusty-looking leathern bag. While
yet a little distance from the forge, moody Ahab paused; till at last,
Perth, withdrawing his iron from the fire, began hammering it upon the
anvil--the red mass sending off the sparks in thick hovering flights,
some of which flew close to Ahab.

"Are these thy Mother Carey's chickens, Perth? they are always flying
in thy wake; birds of good omen, too, but not to all;--look here, they
burn; but thou--thou liv'st among them without a scorch."

"Because I am scorched all over, Captain Ahab," answered Perth, resting
for a moment on his hammer; "I am past scorching; not easily can'st thou
scorch a scar."

"Well, well; no more. Thy shrunk voice sounds too calmly, sanely woeful
to me. In no Paradise myself, I am impatient of all misery in others
that is not mad. Thou should'st go mad, blacksmith; say, why dost thou
not go mad? How can'st thou endure without being mad? Do the heavens yet
hate thee, that thou can'st not go mad?--What wert thou making there?"

"Welding an old pike-head, sir; there were seams and dents in it."

"And can'st thou make it all smooth again, blacksmith, after such hard
usage as it had?"

"I think so, sir."

"And I suppose thou can'st smoothe almost any seams and dents; never
mind how hard the metal, blacksmith?"

"Aye, sir, I think I can; all seams and dents but one."

"Look ye here, then," cried Ahab, passionately advancing, and leaning
with both hands on Perth's shoulders; "look ye here--HERE--can ye
smoothe out a seam like this, blacksmith," sweeping one hand across his
ribbed brow; "if thou could'st, blacksmith, glad enough would I lay
my head upon thy anvil, and feel thy heaviest hammer between my eyes.
Answer! Can'st thou smoothe this seam?"

"Oh! that is the one, sir! Said I not all seams and dents but one?"

"Aye, blacksmith, it is the one; aye, man, it is unsmoothable; for
though thou only see'st it here in my flesh, it has worked down into the
bone of my skull--THAT is all wrinkles! But, away with child's play; no
more gaffs and pikes to-day. Look ye here!" jingling the leathern bag,
as if it were full of gold coins. "I, too, want a harpoon made; one that
a thousand yoke of fiends could not part, Perth; something that will
stick in a whale like his own fin-bone. There's the stuff," flinging
the pouch upon the anvil. "Look ye, blacksmith, these are the gathered
nail-stubbs of the steel shoes of racing horses."

"Horse-shoe stubbs, sir? Why, Captain Ahab, thou hast here, then, the
best and stubbornest stuff we blacksmiths ever work."

"I know it, old man; these stubbs will weld together like glue from the
melted bones of murderers. Quick! forge me the harpoon. And forge me
first, twelve rods for its shank; then wind, and twist, and hammer these
twelve together like the yarns and strands of a tow-line. Quick! I'll
blow the fire."

When at last the twelve rods were made, Ahab tried them, one by one, by
spiralling them, with his own hand, round a long, heavy iron bolt. "A
flaw!" rejecting the last one. "Work that over again, Perth."

This done, Perth was about to begin welding the twelve into one, when
Ahab stayed his hand, and said he would weld his own iron. As, then,
with regular, gasping hems, he hammered on the anvil, Perth passing to
him the glowing rods, one after the other, and the hard pressed forge
shooting up its intense straight flame, the Parsee passed silently, and
bowing over his head towards the fire, seemed invoking some curse or
some blessing on the toil. But, as Ahab looked up, he slid aside.

"What's that bunch of lucifers dodging about there for?" muttered Stubb,
looking on from the forecastle. "That Parsee smells fire like a fusee;
and smells of it himself, like a hot musket's powder-pan."

At last the shank, in one complete rod, received its final heat; and as
Perth, to temper it, plunged it all hissing into the cask of water near
by, the scalding steam shot up into Ahab's bent face.

"Would'st thou brand me, Perth?" wincing for a moment with the pain;
"have I been but forging my own branding-iron, then?"

"Pray God, not that; yet I fear something, Captain Ahab. Is not this
harpoon for the White Whale?"

"For the white fiend! But now for the barbs; thou must make them
thyself, man. Here are my razors--the best of steel; here, and make the
barbs sharp as the needle-sleet of the Icy Sea."

For a moment, the old blacksmith eyed the razors as though he would fain
not use them.

"Take them, man, I have no need for them; for I now neither shave, sup,
nor pray till--but here--to work!"

Fashioned at last into an arrowy shape, and welded by Perth to the
shank, the steel soon pointed the end of the iron; and as the blacksmith
was about giving the barbs their final heat, prior to tempering them, he
cried to Ahab to place the water-cask near.

"No, no--no water for that; I want it of the true death-temper. Ahoy,
there! Tashtego, Queequeg, Daggoo! What say ye, pagans! Will ye give me
as much blood as will cover this barb?" holding it high up. A cluster of
dark nods replied, Yes. Three punctures were made in the heathen flesh,
and the White Whale's barbs were then tempered.

"Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli!"
deliriously howled Ahab, as the malignant iron scorchingly devoured the
baptismal blood.

Now, mustering the spare poles from below, and selecting one of hickory,
with the bark still investing it, Ahab fitted the end to the socket of
the iron. A coil of new tow-line was then unwound, and some fathoms of
it taken to the windlass, and stretched to a great tension. Pressing
his foot upon it, till the rope hummed like a harp-string, then eagerly
bending over it, and seeing no strandings, Ahab exclaimed, "Good! and
now for the seizings."

At one extremity the rope was unstranded, and the separate spread yarns
were all braided and woven round the socket of the harpoon; the pole
was then driven hard up into the socket; from the lower end the rope
was traced half-way along the pole's length, and firmly secured so, with
intertwistings of twine. This done, pole, iron, and rope--like the Three
Fates--remained inseparable, and Ahab moodily stalked away with the
weapon; the sound of his ivory leg, and the sound of the hickory pole,
both hollowly ringing along every plank. But ere he entered his cabin,
light, unnatural, half-bantering, yet most piteous sound was heard. Oh,
Pip! thy wretched laugh, thy idle but unresting eye; all thy strange
mummeries not unmeaningly blended with the black tragedy of the
melancholy ship, and mocked it!



CHAPTER 114. The Gilder.


Penetrating further and further into the heart of the Japanese cruising
ground, the Pequod was soon all astir in the fishery. Often, in mild,
pleasant weather, for twelve, fifteen, eighteen, and twenty hours on the
stretch, they were engaged in the boats, steadily pulling, or sailing,
or paddling after the whales, or for an interlude of sixty or seventy
minutes calmly awaiting their uprising; though with but small success
for their pains.

At such times, under an abated sun; afloat all day upon smooth, slow
heaving swells; seated in his boat, light as a birch canoe; and so
sociably mixing with the soft waves themselves, that like hearth-stone
cats they purr against the gunwale; these are the times of dreamy
quietude, when beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the
ocean's skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and
would not willingly remember, that this velvet paw but conceals a
remorseless fang.

These are the times, when in his whale-boat the rover softly feels a
certain filial, confident, land-like feeling towards the sea; that he
regards it as so much flowery earth; and the distant ship revealing
only the tops of her masts, seems struggling forward, not through high
rolling waves, but through the tall grass of a rolling prairie: as when
the western emigrants' horses only show their erected ears, while their
hidden bodies widely wade through the amazing verdure.

The long-drawn virgin vales; the mild blue hill-sides; as over these
there steals the hush, the hum; you almost swear that play-wearied
children lie sleeping in these solitudes, in some glad May-time, when
the flowers of the woods are plucked. And all this mixes with your most
mystic mood; so that fact and fancy, half-way meeting, interpenetrate,
and form one seamless whole.

Nor did such soothing scenes, however temporary, fail of at least as
temporary an effect on Ahab. But if these secret golden keys did seem
to open in him his own secret golden treasuries, yet did his breath upon
them prove but tarnishing.

Oh, grassy glades! oh, ever vernal endless landscapes in the soul; in
ye,--though long parched by the dead drought of the earthy life,--in ye,
men yet may roll, like young horses in new morning clover; and for some
few fleeting moments, feel the cool dew of the life immortal on them.
Would to God these blessed calms would last. But the mingled, mingling
threads of life are woven by warp and woof: calms crossed by storms, a
storm for every calm. There is no steady unretracing progress in this
life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one
pause:--through infancy's unconscious spell, boyhood's thoughtless
faith, adolescence' doubt (the common doom), then scepticism, then
disbelief, resting at last in manhood's pondering repose of If. But once
gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, and men,
and Ifs eternally. Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no
more? In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will
never weary? Where is the foundling's father hidden? Our souls are like
those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of
our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.

And that same day, too, gazing far down from his boat's side into that
same golden sea, Starbuck lowly murmured:--

"Loveliness unfathomable, as ever lover saw in his young bride's
eye!--Tell me not of thy teeth-tiered sharks, and thy kidnapping
cannibal ways. Let faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I look deep
down and do believe."

And Stubb, fish-like, with sparkling scales, leaped up in that same
golden light:--

"I am Stubb, and Stubb has his history; but here Stubb takes oaths that
he has always been jolly!"



CHAPTER 115. The Pequod Meets The Bachelor.


And jolly enough were the sights and the sounds that came bearing down
before the wind, some few weeks after Ahab's harpoon had been welded.

It was a Nantucket ship, the Bachelor, which had just wedged in her
last cask of oil, and bolted down her bursting hatches; and now, in glad
holiday apparel, was joyously, though somewhat vain-gloriously, sailing
round among the widely-separated ships on the ground, previous to
pointing her prow for home.

The three men at her mast-head wore long streamers of narrow red bunting
at their hats; from the stern, a whale-boat was suspended, bottom down;
and hanging captive from the bowsprit was seen the long lower jaw of the
last whale they had slain. Signals, ensigns, and jacks of all colours
were flying from her rigging, on every side. Sideways lashed in each of
her three basketed tops were two barrels of sperm; above which, in her
top-mast cross-trees, you saw slender breakers of the same precious
fluid; and nailed to her main truck was a brazen lamp.

As was afterwards learned, the Bachelor had met with the most surprising
success; all the more wonderful, for that while cruising in the same
seas numerous other vessels had gone entire months without securing a
single fish. Not only had barrels of beef and bread been given away to
make room for the far more valuable sperm, but additional supplemental
casks had been bartered for, from the ships she had met; and these were
stowed along the deck, and in the captain's and officers' state-rooms.
Even the cabin table itself had been knocked into kindling-wood; and the
cabin mess dined off the broad head of an oil-butt, lashed down to the
floor for a centrepiece. In the forecastle, the sailors had actually
caulked and pitched their chests, and filled them; it was humorously
added, that the cook had clapped a head on his largest boiler, and
filled it; that the steward had plugged his spare coffee-pot and filled
it; that the harpooneers had headed the sockets of their irons and
filled them; that indeed everything was filled with sperm, except the
captain's pantaloons pockets, and those he reserved to thrust his hands
into, in self-complacent testimony of his entire satisfaction.

As this glad ship of good luck bore down upon the moody Pequod, the
barbarian sound of enormous drums came from her forecastle; and drawing
still nearer, a crowd of her men were seen standing round her huge
try-pots, which, covered with the parchment-like POKE or stomach skin of
the black fish, gave forth a loud roar to every stroke of the clenched
hands of the crew. On the quarter-deck, the mates and harpooneers were
dancing with the olive-hued girls who had eloped with them from the
Polynesian Isles; while suspended in an ornamented boat, firmly secured
aloft between the foremast and mainmast, three Long Island negroes, with
glittering fiddle-bows of whale ivory, were presiding over the hilarious
jig. Meanwhile, others of the ship's company were tumultuously busy at
the masonry of the try-works, from which the huge pots had been
removed. You would have almost thought they were pulling down the cursed
Bastille, such wild cries they raised, as the now useless brick and
mortar were being hurled into the sea.

Lord and master over all this scene, the captain stood erect on the
ship's elevated quarter-deck, so that the whole rejoicing drama was
full before him, and seemed merely contrived for his own individual
diversion.

And Ahab, he too was standing on his quarter-deck, shaggy and black,
with a stubborn gloom; and as the two ships crossed each other's
wakes--one all jubilations for things passed, the other all forebodings
as to things to come--their two captains in themselves impersonated the
whole striking contrast of the scene.

"Come aboard, come aboard!" cried the gay Bachelor's commander, lifting
a glass and a bottle in the air.

"Hast seen the White Whale?" gritted Ahab in reply.

"No; only heard of him; but don't believe in him at all," said the other
good-humoredly. "Come aboard!"

"Thou art too damned jolly. Sail on. Hast lost any men?"

"Not enough to speak of--two islanders, that's all;--but come aboard,
old hearty, come along. I'll soon take that black from your brow. Come
along, will ye (merry's the play); a full ship and homeward-bound."

"How wondrous familiar is a fool!" muttered Ahab; then aloud, "Thou art
a full ship and homeward bound, thou sayst; well, then, call me an empty
ship, and outward-bound. So go thy ways, and I will mine. Forward there!
Set all sail, and keep her to the wind!"

And thus, while the one ship went cheerily before the breeze, the other
stubbornly fought against it; and so the two vessels parted; the crew
of the Pequod looking with grave, lingering glances towards the receding
Bachelor; but the Bachelor's men never heeding their gaze for the lively
revelry they were in. And as Ahab, leaning over the taffrail, eyed the
homewardbound craft, he took from his pocket a small vial of sand, and
then looking from the ship to the vial, seemed thereby bringing two
remote associations together, for that vial was filled with Nantucket
soundings.



CHAPTER 116. The Dying Whale.


Not seldom in this life, when, on the right side, fortune's favourites
sail close by us, we, though all adroop before, catch somewhat of the
rushing breeze, and joyfully feel our bagging sails fill out. So seemed
it with the Pequod. For next day after encountering the gay Bachelor,
whales were seen and four were slain; and one of them by Ahab.

It was far down the afternoon; and when all the spearings of the crimson
fight were done: and floating in the lovely sunset sea and sky, sun
and whale both stilly died together; then, such a sweetness and such
plaintiveness, such inwreathing orisons curled up in that rosy air, that
it almost seemed as if far over from the deep green convent valleys of
the Manilla isles, the Spanish land-breeze, wantonly turned sailor, had
gone to sea, freighted with these vesper hymns.

Soothed again, but only soothed to deeper gloom, Ahab, who had sterned
off from the whale, sat intently watching his final wanings from the now
tranquil boat. For that strange spectacle observable in all sperm whales
dying--the turning sunwards of the head, and so expiring--that strange
spectacle, beheld of such a placid evening, somehow to Ahab conveyed a
wondrousness unknown before.

"He turns and turns him to it,--how slowly, but how steadfastly, his
homage-rendering and invoking brow, with his last dying motions. He too
worships fire; most faithful, broad, baronial vassal of the sun!--Oh
that these too-favouring eyes should see these too-favouring sights.
Look! here, far water-locked; beyond all hum of human weal or woe;
in these most candid and impartial seas; where to traditions no rocks
furnish tablets; where for long Chinese ages, the billows have still
rolled on speechless and unspoken to, as stars that shine upon the
Niger's unknown source; here, too, life dies sunwards full of faith; but
see! no sooner dead, than death whirls round the corpse, and it heads
some other way.

"Oh, thou dark Hindoo half of nature, who of drowned bones hast builded
thy separate throne somewhere in the heart of these unverdured seas;
thou art an infidel, thou queen, and too truly speakest to me in the
wide-slaughtering Typhoon, and the hushed burial of its after calm. Nor
has this thy whale sunwards turned his dying head, and then gone round
again, without a lesson to me.

"Oh, trebly hooped and welded hip of power! Oh, high aspiring, rainbowed
jet!--that one strivest, this one jettest all in vain! In vain, oh
whale, dost thou seek intercedings with yon all-quickening sun, that
only calls forth life, but gives it not again. Yet dost thou, darker
half, rock me with a prouder, if a darker faith. All thy unnamable
imminglings float beneath me here; I am buoyed by breaths of once living
things, exhaled as air, but water now.

"Then hail, for ever hail, O sea, in whose eternal tossings the wild
fowl finds his only rest. Born of earth, yet suckled by the sea; though
hill and valley mothered me, ye billows are my foster-brothers!"



CHAPTER 117. The Whale Watch.


The four whales slain that evening had died wide apart; one, far to
windward; one, less distant, to leeward; one ahead; one astern. These
last three were brought alongside ere nightfall; but the windward one
could not be reached till morning; and the boat that had killed it lay
by its side all night; and that boat was Ahab's.

The waif-pole was thrust upright into the dead whale's spout-hole; and
the lantern hanging from its top, cast a troubled flickering glare
upon the black, glossy back, and far out upon the midnight waves, which
gently chafed the whale's broad flank, like soft surf upon a beach.

Ahab and all his boat's crew seemed asleep but the Parsee; who crouching
in the bow, sat watching the sharks, that spectrally played round the
whale, and tapped the light cedar planks with their tails. A sound
like the moaning in squadrons over Asphaltites of unforgiven ghosts of
Gomorrah, ran shuddering through the air.

Started from his slumbers, Ahab, face to face, saw the Parsee; and
hooped round by the gloom of the night they seemed the last men in a
flooded world. "I have dreamed it again," said he.

"Of the hearses? Have I not said, old man, that neither hearse nor
coffin can be thine?"

"And who are hearsed that die on the sea?"

"But I said, old man, that ere thou couldst die on this voyage, two
hearses must verily be seen by thee on the sea; the first not made by
mortal hands; and the visible wood of the last one must be grown in
America."

"Aye, aye! a strange sight that, Parsee:--a hearse and its plumes
floating over the ocean with the waves for the pall-bearers. Ha! Such a
sight we shall not soon see."

"Believe it or not, thou canst not die till it be seen, old man."

"And what was that saying about thyself?"

"Though it come to the last, I shall still go before thee thy pilot."

"And when thou art so gone before--if that ever befall--then ere I can
follow, thou must still appear to me, to pilot me still?--Was it not
so? Well, then, did I believe all ye say, oh my pilot! I have here two
pledges that I shall yet slay Moby Dick and survive it."

"Take another pledge, old man," said the Parsee, as his eyes lighted up
like fire-flies in the gloom--"Hemp only can kill thee."

"The gallows, ye mean.--I am immortal then, on land and on sea," cried
Ahab, with a laugh of derision;--"Immortal on land and on sea!"

Both were silent again, as one man. The grey dawn came on, and the
slumbering crew arose from the boat's bottom, and ere noon the dead
whale was brought to the ship.



CHAPTER 118. The Quadrant.


The season for the Line at length drew near; and every day when Ahab,
coming from his cabin, cast his eyes aloft, the vigilant helmsman would
ostentatiously handle his spokes, and the eager mariners quickly run to
the braces, and would stand there with all their eyes centrally fixed
on the nailed doubloon; impatient for the order to point the ship's
prow for the equator. In good time the order came. It was hard upon high
noon; and Ahab, seated in the bows of his high-hoisted boat, was
about taking his wonted daily observation of the sun to determine his
latitude.

Now, in that Japanese sea, the days in summer are as freshets of
effulgences. That unblinkingly vivid Japanese sun seems the blazing
focus of the glassy ocean's immeasurable burning-glass. The sky looks
lacquered; clouds there are none; the horizon floats; and this nakedness
of unrelieved radiance is as the insufferable splendors of God's throne.
Well that Ahab's quadrant was furnished with coloured glasses, through
which to take sight of that solar fire. So, swinging his seated form
to the roll of the ship, and with his astrological-looking instrument
placed to his eye, he remained in that posture for some moments to
catch the precise instant when the sun should gain its precise meridian.
Meantime while his whole attention was absorbed, the Parsee was kneeling
beneath him on the ship's deck, and with face thrown up like Ahab's,
was eyeing the same sun with him; only the lids of his eyes half hooded
their orbs, and his wild face was subdued to an earthly passionlessness.
At length the desired observation was taken; and with his pencil upon
his ivory leg, Ahab soon calculated what his latitude must be at that
precise instant. Then falling into a moment's revery, he again looked up
towards the sun and murmured to himself: "Thou sea-mark! thou high and
mighty Pilot! thou tellest me truly where I AM--but canst thou cast the
least hint where I SHALL be? Or canst thou tell where some other thing
besides me is this moment living? Where is Moby Dick? This instant thou
must be eyeing him. These eyes of mine look into the very eye that is
even now beholding him; aye, and into the eye that is even now equally
beholding the objects on the unknown, thither side of thee, thou sun!"

Then gazing at his quadrant, and handling, one after the other, its
numerous cabalistical contrivances, he pondered again, and muttered:
"Foolish toy! babies' plaything of haughty Admirals, and Commodores, and
Captains; the world brags of thee, of thy cunning and might; but what
after all canst thou do, but tell the poor, pitiful point, where thou
thyself happenest to be on this wide planet, and the hand that holds
thee: no! not one jot more! Thou canst not tell where one drop of water
or one grain of sand will be to-morrow noon; and yet with thy impotence
thou insultest the sun! Science! Curse thee, thou vain toy; and cursed
be all the things that cast man's eyes aloft to that heaven, whose live
vividness but scorches him, as these old eyes are even now scorched
with thy light, O sun! Level by nature to this earth's horizon are the
glances of man's eyes; not shot from the crown of his head, as if God
had meant him to gaze on his firmament. Curse thee, thou quadrant!"
dashing it to the deck, "no longer will I guide my earthly way by thee;
the level ship's compass, and the level deadreckoning, by log and by
line; THESE shall conduct me, and show me my place on the sea. Aye,"
lighting from the boat to the deck, "thus I trample on thee, thou paltry
thing that feebly pointest on high; thus I split and destroy thee!"

As the frantic old man thus spoke and thus trampled with his live
and dead feet, a sneering triumph that seemed meant for Ahab, and a
fatalistic despair that seemed meant for himself--these passed over
the mute, motionless Parsee's face. Unobserved he rose and glided away;
while, awestruck by the aspect of their commander, the seamen clustered
together on the forecastle, till Ahab, troubledly pacing the deck,
shouted out--"To the braces! Up helm!--square in!"

In an instant the yards swung round; and as the ship half-wheeled upon
her heel, her three firm-seated graceful masts erectly poised upon
her long, ribbed hull, seemed as the three Horatii pirouetting on one
sufficient steed.

Standing between the knight-heads, Starbuck watched the Pequod's
tumultuous way, and Ahab's also, as he went lurching along the deck.

"I have sat before the dense coal fire and watched it all aglow, full of
its tormented flaming life; and I have seen it wane at last, down, down,
to dumbest dust. Old man of oceans! of all this fiery life of thine,
what will at length remain but one little heap of ashes!"

"Aye," cried Stubb, "but sea-coal ashes--mind ye that, Mr.
Starbuck--sea-coal, not your common charcoal. Well, well; I heard Ahab
mutter, 'Here some one thrusts these cards into these old hands of mine;
swears that I must play them, and no others.' And damn me, Ahab, but
thou actest right; live in the game, and die in it!"



CHAPTER 119. The Candles.


Warmest climes but nurse the cruellest fangs: the tiger of Bengal
crouches in spiced groves of ceaseless verdure. Skies the most effulgent
but basket the deadliest thunders: gorgeous Cuba knows tornadoes
that never swept tame northern lands. So, too, it is, that in these
resplendent Japanese seas the mariner encounters the direst of all
storms, the Typhoon. It will sometimes burst from out that cloudless
sky, like an exploding bomb upon a dazed and sleepy town.

Towards evening of that day, the Pequod was torn of her canvas, and
bare-poled was left to fight a Typhoon which had struck her directly
ahead. When darkness came on, sky and sea roared and split with the
thunder, and blazed with the lightning, that showed the disabled masts
fluttering here and there with the rags which the first fury of the
tempest had left for its after sport.

Holding by a shroud, Starbuck was standing on the quarter-deck; at every
flash of the lightning glancing aloft, to see what additional disaster
might have befallen the intricate hamper there; while Stubb and Flask
were directing the men in the higher hoisting and firmer lashing of the
boats. But all their pains seemed naught. Though lifted to the very
top of the cranes, the windward quarter boat (Ahab's) did not escape.
A great rolling sea, dashing high up against the reeling ship's high
teetering side, stove in the boat's bottom at the stern, and left it
again, all dripping through like a sieve.

"Bad work, bad work! Mr. Starbuck," said Stubb, regarding the wreck,
"but the sea will have its way. Stubb, for one, can't fight it. You see,
Mr. Starbuck, a wave has such a great long start before it leaps, all
round the world it runs, and then comes the spring! But as for me, all
the start I have to meet it, is just across the deck here. But never
mind; it's all in fun: so the old song says;"--(SINGS.)

  Oh! jolly is the gale,
  And a joker is the whale,
  A' flourishin' his tail,--
  Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh!

  The scud all a flyin',
  That's his flip only foamin';
  When he stirs in the spicin',--
  Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh!

  Thunder splits the ships,
  But he only smacks his lips,
  A tastin' of this flip,--
  Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hoky-poky lad, is the Ocean, oh!


"Avast Stubb," cried Starbuck, "let the Typhoon sing, and strike his
harp here in our rigging; but if thou art a brave man thou wilt hold thy
peace."

"But I am not a brave man; never said I was a brave man; I am a coward;
and I sing to keep up my spirits. And I tell you what it is, Mr.
Starbuck, there's no way to stop my singing in this world but to cut my
throat. And when that's done, ten to one I sing ye the doxology for a
wind-up."

"Madman! look through my eyes if thou hast none of thine own."

"What! how can you see better of a dark night than anybody else, never
mind how foolish?"

"Here!" cried Starbuck, seizing Stubb by the shoulder, and pointing his
hand towards the weather bow, "markest thou not that the gale comes from
the eastward, the very course Ahab is to run for Moby Dick? the very
course he swung to this day noon? now mark his boat there; where is
that stove? In the stern-sheets, man; where he is wont to stand--his
stand-point is stove, man! Now jump overboard, and sing away, if thou
must!

"I don't half understand ye: what's in the wind?"

"Yes, yes, round the Cape of Good Hope is the shortest way to
Nantucket," soliloquized Starbuck suddenly, heedless of Stubb's
question. "The gale that now hammers at us to stave us, we can turn it
into a fair wind that will drive us towards home. Yonder, to windward,
all is blackness of doom; but to leeward, homeward--I see it lightens up
there; but not with the lightning."

At that moment in one of the intervals of profound darkness, following
the flashes, a voice was heard at his side; and almost at the same
instant a volley of thunder peals rolled overhead.

"Who's there?"

"Old Thunder!" said Ahab, groping his way along the bulwarks to his
pivot-hole; but suddenly finding his path made plain to him by elbowed
lances of fire.

Now, as the lightning rod to a spire on shore is intended to carry off
the perilous fluid into the soil; so the kindred rod which at sea some
ships carry to each mast, is intended to conduct it into the water. But
as this conductor must descend to considerable depth, that its end may
avoid all contact with the hull; and as moreover, if kept constantly
towing there, it would be liable to many mishaps, besides interfering
not a little with some of the rigging, and more or less impeding the
vessel's way in the water; because of all this, the lower parts of a
ship's lightning-rods are not always overboard; but are generally made
in long slender links, so as to be the more readily hauled up into the
chains outside, or thrown down into the sea, as occasion may require.

"The rods! the rods!" cried Starbuck to the crew, suddenly admonished to
vigilance by the vivid lightning that had just been darting flambeaux,
to light Ahab to his post. "Are they overboard? drop them over, fore and
aft. Quick!"

"Avast!" cried Ahab; "let's have fair play here, though we be the weaker
side. Yet I'll contribute to raise rods on the Himmalehs and Andes, that
all the world may be secured; but out on privileges! Let them be, sir."

"Look aloft!" cried Starbuck. "The corpusants! the corpusants!"

All the yard-arms were tipped with a pallid fire; and touched at each
tri-pointed lightning-rod-end with three tapering white flames, each of
the three tall masts was silently burning in that sulphurous air, like
three gigantic wax tapers before an altar.

"Blast the boat! let it go!" cried Stubb at this instant, as a swashing
sea heaved up under his own little craft, so that its gunwale violently
jammed his hand, as he was passing a lashing. "Blast it!"--but
slipping backward on the deck, his uplifted eyes caught the flames; and
immediately shifting his tone he cried--"The corpusants have mercy on us
all!"

To sailors, oaths are household words; they will swear in the trance of
the calm, and in the teeth of the tempest; they will imprecate curses
from the topsail-yard-arms, when most they teeter over to a seething
sea; but in all my voyagings, seldom have I heard a common oath when
God's burning finger has been laid on the ship; when His "Mene, Mene,
Tekel Upharsin" has been woven into the shrouds and the cordage.

While this pallidness was burning aloft, few words were heard from the
enchanted crew; who in one thick cluster stood on the forecastle,
all their eyes gleaming in that pale phosphorescence, like a far away
constellation of stars. Relieved against the ghostly light, the gigantic
jet negro, Daggoo, loomed up to thrice his real stature, and seemed
the black cloud from which the thunder had come. The parted mouth of
Tashtego revealed his shark-white teeth, which strangely gleamed as
if they too had been tipped by corpusants; while lit up by the
preternatural light, Queequeg's tattooing burned like Satanic blue
flames on his body.

The tableau all waned at last with the pallidness aloft; and once more
the Pequod and every soul on her decks were wrapped in a pall. A moment
or two passed, when Starbuck, going forward, pushed against some one. It
was Stubb. "What thinkest thou now, man; I heard thy cry; it was not the
same in the song."

"No, no, it wasn't; I said the corpusants have mercy on us all; and I
hope they will, still. But do they only have mercy on long faces?--have
they no bowels for a laugh? And look ye, Mr. Starbuck--but it's too dark
to look. Hear me, then: I take that mast-head flame we saw for a sign
of good luck; for those masts are rooted in a hold that is going to be
chock a' block with sperm-oil, d'ye see; and so, all that sperm will
work up into the masts, like sap in a tree. Yes, our three masts will
yet be as three spermaceti candles--that's the good promise we saw."

At that moment Starbuck caught sight of Stubb's face slowly beginning
to glimmer into sight. Glancing upwards, he cried: "See! see!" and once
more the high tapering flames were beheld with what seemed redoubled
supernaturalness in their pallor.

"The corpusants have mercy on us all," cried Stubb, again.

At the base of the mainmast, full beneath the doubloon and the flame,
the Parsee was kneeling in Ahab's front, but with his head bowed away
from him; while near by, from the arched and overhanging rigging, where
they had just been engaged securing a spar, a number of the seamen,
arrested by the glare, now cohered together, and hung pendulous, like a
knot of numbed wasps from a drooping, orchard twig. In various enchanted
attitudes, like the standing, or stepping, or running skeletons in
Herculaneum, others remained rooted to the deck; but all their eyes
upcast.

"Aye, aye, men!" cried Ahab. "Look up at it; mark it well; the white
flame but lights the way to the White Whale! Hand me those mainmast
links there; I would fain feel this pulse, and let mine beat against it;
blood against fire! So."

Then turning--the last link held fast in his left hand, he put his foot
upon the Parsee; and with fixed upward eye, and high-flung right arm, he
stood erect before the lofty tri-pointed trinity of flames.

"Oh! thou clear spirit of clear fire, whom on these seas I as Persian
once did worship, till in the sacramental act so burned by thee, that to
this hour I bear the scar; I now know thee, thou clear spirit, and I now
know that thy right worship is defiance. To neither love nor reverence
wilt thou be kind; and e'en for hate thou canst but kill; and all
are killed. No fearless fool now fronts thee. I own thy speechless,
placeless power; but to the last gasp of my earthquake life will
dispute its unconditional, unintegral mastery in me. In the midst of the
personified impersonal, a personality stands here. Though but a point at
best; whencesoe'er I came; wheresoe'er I go; yet while I earthly live,
the queenly personality lives in me, and feels her royal rights. But war
is pain, and hate is woe. Come in thy lowest form of love, and I will
kneel and kiss thee; but at thy highest, come as mere supernal power;
and though thou launchest navies of full-freighted worlds, there's that
in here that still remains indifferent. Oh, thou clear spirit, of thy
fire thou madest me, and like a true child of fire, I breathe it back to
thee."

[SUDDEN, REPEATED FLASHES OF LIGHTNING; THE NINE FLAMES LEAP LENGTHWISE
TO THRICE THEIR PREVIOUS HEIGHT; AHAB, WITH THE REST, CLOSES HIS EYES,
HIS RIGHT HAND PRESSED HARD UPON THEM.]

"I own thy speechless, placeless power; said I not so? Nor was it wrung
from me; nor do I now drop these links. Thou canst blind; but I can then
grope. Thou canst consume; but I can then be ashes. Take the homage of
these poor eyes, and shutter-hands. I would not take it. The lightning
flashes through my skull; mine eye-balls ache and ache; my whole beaten
brain seems as beheaded, and rolling on some stunning ground. Oh, oh!
Yet blindfold, yet will I talk to thee. Light though thou be, thou
leapest out of darkness; but I am darkness leaping out of light, leaping
out of thee! The javelins cease; open eyes; see, or not? There burn the
flames! Oh, thou magnanimous! now I do glory in my genealogy. But thou
art but my fiery father; my sweet mother, I know not. Oh, cruel! what
hast thou done with her? There lies my puzzle; but thine is greater.
Thou knowest not how came ye, hence callest thyself unbegotten;
certainly knowest not thy beginning, hence callest thyself unbegun. I
know that of me, which thou knowest not of thyself, oh, thou omnipotent.
There is some unsuffusing thing beyond thee, thou clear spirit, to whom
all thy eternity is but time, all thy creativeness mechanical. Through
thee, thy flaming self, my scorched eyes do dimly see it. Oh, thou
foundling fire, thou hermit immemorial, thou too hast thy incommunicable
riddle, thy unparticipated grief. Here again with haughty agony, I read
my sire. Leap! leap up, and lick the sky! I leap with thee; I burn with
thee; would fain be welded with thee; defyingly I worship thee!"

"The boat! the boat!" cried Starbuck, "look at thy boat, old man!"

Ahab's harpoon, the one forged at Perth's fire, remained firmly lashed
in its conspicuous crotch, so that it projected beyond his whale-boat's
bow; but the sea that had stove its bottom had caused the loose leather
sheath to drop off; and from the keen steel barb there now came a
levelled flame of pale, forked fire. As the silent harpoon burned there
like a serpent's tongue, Starbuck grasped Ahab by the arm--"God, God
is against thee, old man; forbear! 'tis an ill voyage! ill begun, ill
continued; let me square the yards, while we may, old man, and make a
fair wind of it homewards, to go on a better voyage than this."

Overhearing Starbuck, the panic-stricken crew instantly ran to the
braces--though not a sail was left aloft. For the moment all the aghast
mate's thoughts seemed theirs; they raised a half mutinous cry. But
dashing the rattling lightning links to the deck, and snatching the
burning harpoon, Ahab waved it like a torch among them; swearing to
transfix with it the first sailor that but cast loose a rope's end.
Petrified by his aspect, and still more shrinking from the fiery dart
that he held, the men fell back in dismay, and Ahab again spoke:--

"All your oaths to hunt the White Whale are as binding as mine; and
heart, soul, and body, lungs and life, old Ahab is bound. And that ye
may know to what tune this heart beats; look ye here; thus I blow out
the last fear!" And with one blast of his breath he extinguished the
flame.

As in the hurricane that sweeps the plain, men fly the neighborhood of
some lone, gigantic elm, whose very height and strength but render it so
much the more unsafe, because so much the more a mark for thunderbolts;
so at those last words of Ahab's many of the mariners did run from him
in a terror of dismay.



CHAPTER 120. The Deck Towards the End of the First Night Watch.

AHAB STANDING BY THE HELM. STARBUCK APPROACHING HIM.


"We must send down the main-top-sail yard, sir. The band is working loose
and the lee lift is half-stranded. Shall I strike it, sir?"

"Strike nothing; lash it. If I had sky-sail poles, I'd sway them up
now."

"Sir!--in God's name!--sir?"

"Well."

"The anchors are working, sir. Shall I get them inboard?"

"Strike nothing, and stir nothing, but lash everything. The wind rises,
but it has not got up to my table-lands yet. Quick, and see to it.--By
masts and keels! he takes me for the hunch-backed skipper of some
coasting smack. Send down my main-top-sail yard! Ho, gluepots! Loftiest
trucks were made for wildest winds, and this brain-truck of mine now
sails amid the cloud-scud. Shall I strike that? Oh, none but cowards
send down their brain-trucks in tempest time. What a hooroosh aloft
there! I would e'en take it for sublime, did I not know that the colic
is a noisy malady. Oh, take medicine, take medicine!"



CHAPTER 121. Midnight.--The Forecastle Bulwarks.


STUBB AND FLASK MOUNTED ON THEM, AND PASSING ADDITIONAL LASHINGS OVER
THE ANCHORS THERE HANGING.


"No, Stubb; you may pound that knot there as much as you please, but you
will never pound into me what you were just now saying. And how long
ago is it since you said the very contrary? Didn't you once say that
whatever ship Ahab sails in, that ship should pay something extra on its
insurance policy, just as though it were loaded with powder barrels aft
and boxes of lucifers forward? Stop, now; didn't you say so?"

"Well, suppose I did? What then? I've part changed my flesh since that
time, why not my mind? Besides, supposing we ARE loaded with powder
barrels aft and lucifers forward; how the devil could the lucifers get
afire in this drenching spray here? Why, my little man, you have
pretty red hair, but you couldn't get afire now. Shake yourself; you're
Aquarius, or the water-bearer, Flask; might fill pitchers at your coat
collar. Don't you see, then, that for these extra risks the Marine
Insurance companies have extra guarantees? Here are hydrants, Flask. But
hark, again, and I'll answer ye the other thing. First take your leg off
from the crown of the anchor here, though, so I can pass the rope;
now listen. What's the mighty difference between holding a mast's
lightning-rod in the storm, and standing close by a mast that hasn't
got any lightning-rod at all in a storm? Don't you see, you timber-head,
that no harm can come to the holder of the rod, unless the mast is first
struck? What are you talking about, then? Not one ship in a hundred
carries rods, and Ahab,--aye, man, and all of us,--were in no more
danger then, in my poor opinion, than all the crews in ten thousand
ships now sailing the seas. Why, you King-Post, you, I suppose you would
have every man in the world go about with a small lightning-rod running
up the corner of his hat, like a militia officer's skewered feather,
and trailing behind like his sash. Why don't ye be sensible, Flask? it's
easy to be sensible; why don't ye, then? any man with half an eye can be
sensible."

"I don't know that, Stubb. You sometimes find it rather hard."

"Yes, when a fellow's soaked through, it's hard to be sensible, that's
a fact. And I am about drenched with this spray. Never mind; catch the
turn there, and pass it. Seems to me we are lashing down these anchors
now as if they were never going to be used again. Tying these two
anchors here, Flask, seems like tying a man's hands behind him. And what
big generous hands they are, to be sure. These are your iron fists,
hey? What a hold they have, too! I wonder, Flask, whether the world is
anchored anywhere; if she is, she swings with an uncommon long cable,
though. There, hammer that knot down, and we've done. So; next to
touching land, lighting on deck is the most satisfactory. I say, just
wring out my jacket skirts, will ye? Thank ye. They laugh at long-togs
so, Flask; but seems to me, a Long tailed coat ought always to be worn
in all storms afloat. The tails tapering down that way, serve to carry
off the water, d'ye see. Same with cocked hats; the cocks form gable-end
eave-troughs, Flask. No more monkey-jackets and tarpaulins for me; I
must mount a swallow-tail, and drive down a beaver; so. Halloa! whew!
there goes my tarpaulin overboard; Lord, Lord, that the winds that come
from heaven should be so unmannerly! This is a nasty night, lad."



CHAPTER 122. Midnight Aloft.--Thunder and Lightning.


THE MAIN-TOP-SAIL YARD.--TASHTEGO PASSING NEW LASHINGS AROUND IT.


"Um, um, um. Stop that thunder! Plenty too much thunder up here. What's
the use of thunder? Um, um, um. We don't want thunder; we want rum; give
us a glass of rum. Um, um, um!"



CHAPTER 123. The Musket.


During the most violent shocks of the Typhoon, the man at the Pequod's
jaw-bone tiller had several times been reelingly hurled to the deck by
its spasmodic motions, even though preventer tackles had been attached
to it--for they were slack--because some play to the tiller was
indispensable.

In a severe gale like this, while the ship is but a tossed shuttlecock
to the blast, it is by no means uncommon to see the needles in the
compasses, at intervals, go round and round. It was thus with the
Pequod's; at almost every shock the helmsman had not failed to notice
the whirling velocity with which they revolved upon the cards; it is
a sight that hardly anyone can behold without some sort of unwonted
emotion.

Some hours after midnight, the Typhoon abated so much, that through the
strenuous exertions of Starbuck and Stubb--one engaged forward and the
other aft--the shivered remnants of the jib and fore and main-top-sails
were cut adrift from the spars, and went eddying away to leeward, like
the feathers of an albatross, which sometimes are cast to the winds when
that storm-tossed bird is on the wing.

The three corresponding new sails were now bent and reefed, and a
storm-trysail was set further aft; so that the ship soon went through
the water with some precision again; and the course--for the present,
East-south-east--which he was to steer, if practicable, was once more
given to the helmsman. For during the violence of the gale, he had only
steered according to its vicissitudes. But as he was now bringing the
ship as near her course as possible, watching the compass meanwhile, lo!
a good sign! the wind seemed coming round astern; aye, the foul breeze
became fair!

Instantly the yards were squared, to the lively song of "HO! THE
FAIR WIND! OH-YE-HO, CHEERLY MEN!" the crew singing for joy, that so
promising an event should so soon have falsified the evil portents
preceding it.

In compliance with the standing order of his commander--to report
immediately, and at any one of the twenty-four hours, any decided change
in the affairs of the deck,--Starbuck had no sooner trimmed the yards to
the breeze--however reluctantly and gloomily,--than he mechanically went
below to apprise Captain Ahab of the circumstance.

Ere knocking at his state-room, he involuntarily paused before it
a moment. The cabin lamp--taking long swings this way and that--was
burning fitfully, and casting fitful shadows upon the old man's bolted
door,--a thin one, with fixed blinds inserted, in place of upper panels.
The isolated subterraneousness of the cabin made a certain humming
silence to reign there, though it was hooped round by all the roar of
the elements. The loaded muskets in the rack were shiningly revealed, as
they stood upright against the forward bulkhead. Starbuck was an honest,
upright man; but out of Starbuck's heart, at that instant when he saw
the muskets, there strangely evolved an evil thought; but so blent with
its neutral or good accompaniments that for the instant he hardly knew
it for itself.

"He would have shot me once," he murmured, "yes, there's the very musket
that he pointed at me;--that one with the studded stock; let me touch
it--lift it. Strange, that I, who have handled so many deadly lances,
strange, that I should shake so now. Loaded? I must see. Aye, aye; and
powder in the pan;--that's not good. Best spill it?--wait. I'll cure
myself of this. I'll hold the musket boldly while I think.--I come
to report a fair wind to him. But how fair? Fair for death and
doom,--THAT'S fair for Moby Dick. It's a fair wind that's only fair for
that accursed fish.--The very tube he pointed at me!--the very one;
THIS one--I hold it here; he would have killed me with the very thing I
handle now.--Aye and he would fain kill all his crew. Does he not say
he will not strike his spars to any gale? Has he not dashed his heavenly
quadrant? and in these same perilous seas, gropes he not his way by mere
dead reckoning of the error-abounding log? and in this very Typhoon, did
he not swear that he would have no lightning-rods? But shall this crazed
old man be tamely suffered to drag a whole ship's company down to doom
with him?--Yes, it would make him the wilful murderer of thirty men and
more, if this ship come to any deadly harm; and come to deadly harm, my
soul swears this ship will, if Ahab have his way. If, then, he were this
instant--put aside, that crime would not be his. Ha! is he muttering in
his sleep? Yes, just there,--in there, he's sleeping. Sleeping? aye,
but still alive, and soon awake again. I can't withstand thee, then, old
man. Not reasoning; not remonstrance; not entreaty wilt thou hearken to;
all this thou scornest. Flat obedience to thy own flat commands, this is
all thou breathest. Aye, and say'st the men have vow'd thy vow; say'st
all of us are Ahabs. Great God forbid!--But is there no other way? no
lawful way?--Make him a prisoner to be taken home? What! hope to wrest
this old man's living power from his own living hands? Only a fool
would try it. Say he were pinioned even; knotted all over with ropes
and hawsers; chained down to ring-bolts on this cabin floor; he would
be more hideous than a caged tiger, then. I could not endure the
sight; could not possibly fly his howlings; all comfort, sleep itself,
inestimable reason would leave me on the long intolerable voyage. What,
then, remains? The land is hundreds of leagues away, and locked Japan
the nearest. I stand alone here upon an open sea, with two oceans and
a whole continent between me and law.--Aye, aye, 'tis so.--Is heaven
a murderer when its lightning strikes a would-be murderer in his bed,
tindering sheets and skin together?--And would I be a murderer, then,
if"--and slowly, stealthily, and half sideways looking, he placed the
loaded musket's end against the door.

"On this level, Ahab's hammock swings within; his head this way. A
touch, and Starbuck may survive to hug his wife and child again.--Oh
Mary! Mary!--boy! boy! boy!--But if I wake thee not to death, old man,
who can tell to what unsounded deeps Starbuck's body this day week
may sink, with all the crew! Great God, where art Thou? Shall I? shall
I?--The wind has gone down and shifted, sir; the fore and main topsails
are reefed and set; she heads her course."

"Stern all! Oh Moby Dick, I clutch thy heart at last!"

Such were the sounds that now came hurtling from out the old man's
tormented sleep, as if Starbuck's voice had caused the long dumb dream
to speak.

The yet levelled musket shook like a drunkard's arm against the panel;
Starbuck seemed wrestling with an angel; but turning from the door, he
placed the death-tube in its rack, and left the place.

"He's too sound asleep, Mr. Stubb; go thou down, and wake him, and tell
him. I must see to the deck here. Thou know'st what to say."



CHAPTER 124. The Needle.


Next morning the not-yet-subsided sea rolled in long slow billows of
mighty bulk, and striving in the Pequod's gurgling track, pushed her on
like giants' palms outspread. The strong, unstaggering breeze abounded
so, that sky and air seemed vast outbellying sails; the whole world
boomed before the wind. Muffled in the full morning light, the invisible
sun was only known by the spread intensity of his place; where his
bayonet rays moved on in stacks. Emblazonings, as of crowned Babylonian
kings and queens, reigned over everything. The sea was as a crucible of
molten gold, that bubblingly leaps with light and heat.

Long maintaining an enchanted silence, Ahab stood apart; and every time
the tetering ship loweringly pitched down her bowsprit, he turned to eye
the bright sun's rays produced ahead; and when she profoundly settled by
the stern, he turned behind, and saw the sun's rearward place, and how
the same yellow rays were blending with his undeviating wake.

"Ha, ha, my ship! thou mightest well be taken now for the sea-chariot of
the sun. Ho, ho! all ye nations before my prow, I bring the sun to ye!
Yoke on the further billows; hallo! a tandem, I drive the sea!"

But suddenly reined back by some counter thought, he hurried towards the
helm, huskily demanding how the ship was heading.

"East-sou-east, sir," said the frightened steersman.

"Thou liest!" smiting him with his clenched fist. "Heading East at this
hour in the morning, and the sun astern?"

Upon this every soul was confounded; for the phenomenon just then
observed by Ahab had unaccountably escaped every one else; but its very
blinding palpableness must have been the cause.

Thrusting his head half way into the binnacle, Ahab caught one glimpse
of the compasses; his uplifted arm slowly fell; for a moment he almost
seemed to stagger. Standing behind him Starbuck looked, and lo! the two
compasses pointed East, and the Pequod was as infallibly going West.

But ere the first wild alarm could get out abroad among the crew,
the old man with a rigid laugh exclaimed, "I have it! It has happened
before. Mr. Starbuck, last night's thunder turned our compasses--that's
all. Thou hast before now heard of such a thing, I take it."

"Aye; but never before has it happened to me, sir," said the pale mate,
gloomily.

Here, it must needs be said, that accidents like this have in more than
one case occurred to ships in violent storms. The magnetic energy, as
developed in the mariner's needle, is, as all know, essentially one with
the electricity beheld in heaven; hence it is not to be much marvelled
at, that such things should be. Instances where the lightning has
actually struck the vessel, so as to smite down some of the spars and
rigging, the effect upon the needle has at times been still more fatal;
all its loadstone virtue being annihilated, so that the before magnetic
steel was of no more use than an old wife's knitting needle. But in
either case, the needle never again, of itself, recovers the original
virtue thus marred or lost; and if the binnacle compasses be affected,
the same fate reaches all the others that may be in the ship; even were
the lowermost one inserted into the kelson.

Deliberately standing before the binnacle, and eyeing the transpointed
compasses, the old man, with the sharp of his extended hand, now took
the precise bearing of the sun, and satisfied that the needles were
exactly inverted, shouted out his orders for the ship's course to be
changed accordingly. The yards were hard up; and once more the Pequod
thrust her undaunted bows into the opposing wind, for the supposed fair
one had only been juggling her.

Meanwhile, whatever were his own secret thoughts, Starbuck said nothing,
but quietly he issued all requisite orders; while Stubb and Flask--who
in some small degree seemed then to be sharing his feelings--likewise
unmurmuringly acquiesced. As for the men, though some of them lowly
rumbled, their fear of Ahab was greater than their fear of Fate. But as
ever before, the pagan harpooneers remained almost wholly unimpressed;
or if impressed, it was only with a certain magnetism shot into their
congenial hearts from inflexible Ahab's.

For a space the old man walked the deck in rolling reveries. But
chancing to slip with his ivory heel, he saw the crushed copper
sight-tubes of the quadrant he had the day before dashed to the deck.

"Thou poor, proud heaven-gazer and sun's pilot! yesterday I wrecked
thee, and to-day the compasses would fain have wrecked me. So, so. But
Ahab is lord over the level loadstone yet. Mr. Starbuck--a lance without
a pole; a top-maul, and the smallest of the sail-maker's needles.
Quick!"

Accessory, perhaps, to the impulse dictating the thing he was now about
to do, were certain prudential motives, whose object might have been to
revive the spirits of his crew by a stroke of his subtile skill, in a
matter so wondrous as that of the inverted compasses. Besides, the old
man well knew that to steer by transpointed needles, though clumsily
practicable, was not a thing to be passed over by superstitious sailors,
without some shudderings and evil portents.

"Men," said he, steadily turning upon the crew, as the mate handed
him the things he had demanded, "my men, the thunder turned old Ahab's
needles; but out of this bit of steel Ahab can make one of his own, that
will point as true as any."

Abashed glances of servile wonder were exchanged by the sailors, as this
was said; and with fascinated eyes they awaited whatever magic might
follow. But Starbuck looked away.

With a blow from the top-maul Ahab knocked off the steel head of the
lance, and then handing to the mate the long iron rod remaining, bade
him hold it upright, without its touching the deck. Then, with the maul,
after repeatedly smiting the upper end of this iron rod, he placed the
blunted needle endwise on the top of it, and less strongly hammered
that, several times, the mate still holding the rod as before. Then
going through some small strange motions with it--whether indispensable
to the magnetizing of the steel, or merely intended to augment the awe
of the crew, is uncertain--he called for linen thread; and moving to the
binnacle, slipped out the two reversed needles there, and horizontally
suspended the sail-needle by its middle, over one of the compass-cards.
At first, the steel went round and round, quivering and vibrating at
either end; but at last it settled to its place, when Ahab, who had
been intently watching for this result, stepped frankly back from the
binnacle, and pointing his stretched arm towards it, exclaimed,--"Look
ye, for yourselves, if Ahab be not lord of the level loadstone! The sun
is East, and that compass swears it!"

One after another they peered in, for nothing but their own eyes could
persuade such ignorance as theirs, and one after another they slunk
away.

In his fiery eyes of scorn and triumph, you then saw Ahab in all his
fatal pride.



CHAPTER 125. The Log and Line.


While now the fated Pequod had been so long afloat this voyage, the log
and line had but very seldom been in use. Owing to a confident reliance
upon other means of determining the vessel's place, some merchantmen,
and many whalemen, especially when cruising, wholly neglect to heave the
log; though at the same time, and frequently more for form's sake than
anything else, regularly putting down upon the customary slate the
course steered by the ship, as well as the presumed average rate of
progression every hour. It had been thus with the Pequod. The wooden
reel and angular log attached hung, long untouched, just beneath the
railing of the after bulwarks. Rains and spray had damped it; sun and
wind had warped it; all the elements had combined to rot a thing that
hung so idly. But heedless of all this, his mood seized Ahab, as he
happened to glance upon the reel, not many hours after the magnet scene,
and he remembered how his quadrant was no more, and recalled his frantic
oath about the level log and line. The ship was sailing plungingly;
astern the billows rolled in riots.

"Forward, there! Heave the log!"

Two seamen came. The golden-hued Tahitian and the grizzly Manxman. "Take
the reel, one of ye, I'll heave."

They went towards the extreme stern, on the ship's lee side, where the
deck, with the oblique energy of the wind, was now almost dipping into
the creamy, sidelong-rushing sea.

The Manxman took the reel, and holding it high up, by the projecting
handle-ends of the spindle, round which the spool of line revolved, so
stood with the angular log hanging downwards, till Ahab advanced to him.

Ahab stood before him, and was lightly unwinding some thirty or forty
turns to form a preliminary hand-coil to toss overboard, when the old
Manxman, who was intently eyeing both him and the line, made bold to
speak.

"Sir, I mistrust it; this line looks far gone, long heat and wet have
spoiled it."

"'Twill hold, old gentleman. Long heat and wet, have they spoiled thee?
Thou seem'st to hold. Or, truer perhaps, life holds thee; not thou it."

"I hold the spool, sir. But just as my captain says. With these
grey hairs of mine 'tis not worth while disputing, 'specially with a
superior, who'll ne'er confess."

"What's that? There now's a patched professor in Queen Nature's
granite-founded College; but methinks he's too subservient. Where wert
thou born?"

"In the little rocky Isle of Man, sir."

"Excellent! Thou'st hit the world by that."

"I know not, sir, but I was born there."

"In the Isle of Man, hey? Well, the other way, it's good. Here's a man
from Man; a man born in once independent Man, and now unmanned of Man;
which is sucked in--by what? Up with the reel! The dead, blind wall
butts all inquiring heads at last. Up with it! So."

The log was heaved. The loose coils rapidly straightened out in a long
dragging line astern, and then, instantly, the reel began to whirl. In
turn, jerkingly raised and lowered by the rolling billows, the towing
resistance of the log caused the old reelman to stagger strangely.

"Hold hard!"

Snap! the overstrained line sagged down in one long festoon; the tugging
log was gone.

"I crush the quadrant, the thunder turns the needles, and now the mad
sea parts the log-line. But Ahab can mend all. Haul in here, Tahitian;
reel up, Manxman. And look ye, let the carpenter make another log, and
mend thou the line. See to it."

"There he goes now; to him nothing's happened; but to me, the skewer
seems loosening out of the middle of the world. Haul in, haul in,
Tahitian! These lines run whole, and whirling out: come in broken, and
dragging slow. Ha, Pip? come to help; eh, Pip?"

"Pip? whom call ye Pip? Pip jumped from the whale-boat. Pip's missing.
Let's see now if ye haven't fished him up here, fisherman. It drags
hard; I guess he's holding on. Jerk him, Tahiti! Jerk him off; we haul
in no cowards here. Ho! there's his arm just breaking water. A hatchet!
a hatchet! cut it off--we haul in no cowards here. Captain Ahab! sir,
sir! here's Pip, trying to get on board again."

"Peace, thou crazy loon," cried the Manxman, seizing him by the arm.
"Away from the quarter-deck!"

"The greater idiot ever scolds the lesser," muttered Ahab, advancing.
"Hands off from that holiness! Where sayest thou Pip was, boy?

"Astern there, sir, astern! Lo! lo!"

"And who art thou, boy? I see not my reflection in the vacant pupils of
thy eyes. Oh God! that man should be a thing for immortal souls to sieve
through! Who art thou, boy?"

"Bell-boy, sir; ship's-crier; ding, dong, ding! Pip! Pip! Pip!
One hundred pounds of clay reward for Pip; five feet high--looks
cowardly--quickest known by that! Ding, dong, ding! Who's seen Pip the
coward?"

"There can be no hearts above the snow-line. Oh, ye frozen heavens! look
down here. Ye did beget this luckless child, and have abandoned him,
ye creative libertines. Here, boy; Ahab's cabin shall be Pip's home
henceforth, while Ahab lives. Thou touchest my inmost centre, boy; thou
art tied to me by cords woven of my heart-strings. Come, let's down."

"What's this? here's velvet shark-skin," intently gazing at Ahab's hand,
and feeling it. "Ah, now, had poor Pip but felt so kind a thing as this,
perhaps he had ne'er been lost! This seems to me, sir, as a man-rope;
something that weak souls may hold by. Oh, sir, let old Perth now come
and rivet these two hands together; the black one with the white, for I
will not let this go."

"Oh, boy, nor will I thee, unless I should thereby drag thee to worse
horrors than are here. Come, then, to my cabin. Lo! ye believers in
gods all goodness, and in man all ill, lo you! see the omniscient gods
oblivious of suffering man; and man, though idiotic, and knowing not
what he does, yet full of the sweet things of love and gratitude. Come!
I feel prouder leading thee by thy black hand, than though I grasped an
Emperor's!"

"There go two daft ones now," muttered the old Manxman. "One daft with
strength, the other daft with weakness. But here's the end of the rotten
line--all dripping, too. Mend it, eh? I think we had best have a new
line altogether. I'll see Mr. Stubb about it."



CHAPTER 126. The Life-Buoy.


Steering now south-eastward by Ahab's levelled steel, and her progress
solely determined by Ahab's level log and line; the Pequod held on
her path towards the Equator. Making so long a passage through such
unfrequented waters, descrying no ships, and ere long, sideways impelled
by unvarying trade winds, over waves monotonously mild; all these seemed
the strange calm things preluding some riotous and desperate scene.

At last, when the ship drew near to the outskirts, as it were, of the
Equatorial fishing-ground, and in the deep darkness that goes before the
dawn, was sailing by a cluster of rocky islets; the watch--then headed
by Flask--was startled by a cry so plaintively wild and unearthly--like
half-articulated wailings of the ghosts of all Herod's murdered
Innocents--that one and all, they started from their reveries, and for
the space of some moments stood, or sat, or leaned all transfixedly
listening, like the carved Roman slave, while that wild cry remained
within hearing. The Christian or civilized part of the crew said it was
mermaids, and shuddered; but the pagan harpooneers remained unappalled.
Yet the grey Manxman--the oldest mariner of all--declared that the wild
thrilling sounds that were heard, were the voices of newly drowned men
in the sea.

Below in his hammock, Ahab did not hear of this till grey dawn, when
he came to the deck; it was then recounted to him by Flask, not
unaccompanied with hinted dark meanings. He hollowly laughed, and thus
explained the wonder.

Those rocky islands the ship had passed were the resort of great numbers
of seals, and some young seals that had lost their dams, or some dams
that had lost their cubs, must have risen nigh the ship and kept company
with her, crying and sobbing with their human sort of wail. But this
only the more affected some of them, because most mariners cherish a
very superstitious feeling about seals, arising not only from their
peculiar tones when in distress, but also from the human look of their
round heads and semi-intelligent faces, seen peeringly uprising from
the water alongside. In the sea, under certain circumstances, seals have
more than once been mistaken for men.

But the bodings of the crew were destined to receive a most plausible
confirmation in the fate of one of their number that morning. At
sun-rise this man went from his hammock to his mast-head at the fore;
and whether it was that he was not yet half waked from his sleep (for
sailors sometimes go aloft in a transition state), whether it was thus
with the man, there is now no telling; but, be that as it may, he
had not been long at his perch, when a cry was heard--a cry and a
rushing--and looking up, they saw a falling phantom in the air; and
looking down, a little tossed heap of white bubbles in the blue of the
sea.

The life-buoy--a long slender cask--was dropped from the stern, where it
always hung obedient to a cunning spring; but no hand rose to seize it,
and the sun having long beat upon this cask it had shrunken, so that it
slowly filled, and that parched wood also filled at its every pore; and
the studded iron-bound cask followed the sailor to the bottom, as if to
yield him his pillow, though in sooth but a hard one.

And thus the first man of the Pequod that mounted the mast to look out
for the White Whale, on the White Whale's own peculiar ground; that man
was swallowed up in the deep. But few, perhaps, thought of that at the
time. Indeed, in some sort, they were not grieved at this event, at
least as a portent; for they regarded it, not as a foreshadowing of evil
in the future, but as the fulfilment of an evil already presaged. They
declared that now they knew the reason of those wild shrieks they had
heard the night before. But again the old Manxman said nay.

The lost life-buoy was now to be replaced; Starbuck was directed to see
to it; but as no cask of sufficient lightness could be found, and as
in the feverish eagerness of what seemed the approaching crisis of
the voyage, all hands were impatient of any toil but what was directly
connected with its final end, whatever that might prove to be;
therefore, they were going to leave the ship's stern unprovided with a
buoy, when by certain strange signs and inuendoes Queequeg hinted a hint
concerning his coffin.

"A life-buoy of a coffin!" cried Starbuck, starting.

"Rather queer, that, I should say," said Stubb.

"It will make a good enough one," said Flask, "the carpenter here can
arrange it easily."

"Bring it up; there's nothing else for it," said Starbuck, after a
melancholy pause. "Rig it, carpenter; do not look at me so--the coffin,
I mean. Dost thou hear me? Rig it."

"And shall I nail down the lid, sir?" moving his hand as with a hammer.

"Aye."

"And shall I caulk the seams, sir?" moving his hand as with a
caulking-iron.

"Aye."

"And shall I then pay over the same with pitch, sir?" moving his hand as
with a pitch-pot.

"Away! what possesses thee to this? Make a life-buoy of the coffin, and
no more.--Mr. Stubb, Mr. Flask, come forward with me."

"He goes off in a huff. The whole he can endure; at the parts he baulks.
Now I don't like this. I make a leg for Captain Ahab, and he wears it
like a gentleman; but I make a bandbox for Queequeg, and he won't put
his head into it. Are all my pains to go for nothing with that coffin?
And now I'm ordered to make a life-buoy of it. It's like turning an old
coat; going to bring the flesh on the other side now. I don't like this
cobbling sort of business--I don't like it at all; it's undignified;
it's not my place. Let tinkers' brats do tinkerings; we are their
betters. I like to take in hand none but clean, virgin, fair-and-square
mathematical jobs, something that regularly begins at the beginning, and
is at the middle when midway, and comes to an end at the conclusion; not
a cobbler's job, that's at an end in the middle, and at the beginning at
the end. It's the old woman's tricks to be giving cobbling jobs. Lord!
what an affection all old women have for tinkers. I know an old woman of
sixty-five who ran away with a bald-headed young tinker once. And that's
the reason I never would work for lonely widow old women ashore, when
I kept my job-shop in the Vineyard; they might have taken it into their
lonely old heads to run off with me. But heigh-ho! there are no caps at
sea but snow-caps. Let me see. Nail down the lid; caulk the seams; pay
over the same with pitch; batten them down tight, and hang it with the
snap-spring over the ship's stern. Were ever such things done before
with a coffin? Some superstitious old carpenters, now, would be tied
up in the rigging, ere they would do the job. But I'm made of knotty
Aroostook hemlock; I don't budge. Cruppered with a coffin! Sailing
about with a grave-yard tray! But never mind. We workers in woods make
bridal-bedsteads and card-tables, as well as coffins and hearses. We
work by the month, or by the job, or by the profit; not for us to ask
the why and wherefore of our work, unless it be too confounded cobbling,
and then we stash it if we can. Hem! I'll do the job, now, tenderly.
I'll have me--let's see--how many in the ship's company, all told? But
I've forgotten. Any way, I'll have me thirty separate, Turk's-headed
life-lines, each three feet long hanging all round to the coffin. Then,
if the hull go down, there'll be thirty lively fellows all fighting for
one coffin, a sight not seen very often beneath the sun! Come hammer,
caulking-iron, pitch-pot, and marling-spike! Let's to it."



CHAPTER 127. The Deck.


THE COFFIN LAID UPON TWO LINE-TUBS, BETWEEN THE VICE-BENCH AND THE OPEN
HATCHWAY; THE CARPENTER CAULKING ITS SEAMS; THE STRING OF TWISTED OAKUM
SLOWLY UNWINDING FROM A LARGE ROLL OF IT PLACED IN THE BOSOM OF
HIS FROCK.--AHAB COMES SLOWLY FROM THE CABIN-GANGWAY, AND HEARS PIP
FOLLOWING HIM.


"Back, lad; I will be with ye again presently. He goes! Not this hand
complies with my humor more genially than that boy.--Middle aisle of a
church! What's here?"

"Life-buoy, sir. Mr. Starbuck's orders. Oh, look, sir! Beware the
hatchway!"

"Thank ye, man. Thy coffin lies handy to the vault."

"Sir? The hatchway? oh! So it does, sir, so it does."

"Art not thou the leg-maker? Look, did not this stump come from thy
shop?"

"I believe it did, sir; does the ferrule stand, sir?"

"Well enough. But art thou not also the undertaker?"

"Aye, sir; I patched up this thing here as a coffin for Queequeg; but
they've set me now to turning it into something else."

"Then tell me; art thou not an arrant, all-grasping, intermeddling,
monopolising, heathenish old scamp, to be one day making legs, and the
next day coffins to clap them in, and yet again life-buoys out of those
same coffins? Thou art as unprincipled as the gods, and as much of a
jack-of-all-trades."

"But I do not mean anything, sir. I do as I do."

"The gods again. Hark ye, dost thou not ever sing working about a
coffin? The Titans, they say, hummed snatches when chipping out the
craters for volcanoes; and the grave-digger in the play sings, spade in
hand. Dost thou never?"

"Sing, sir? Do I sing? Oh, I'm indifferent enough, sir, for that; but
the reason why the grave-digger made music must have been because there
was none in his spade, sir. But the caulking mallet is full of it. Hark
to it."

"Aye, and that's because the lid there's a sounding-board; and what in
all things makes the sounding-board is this--there's naught beneath. And
yet, a coffin with a body in it rings pretty much the same, Carpenter.
Hast thou ever helped carry a bier, and heard the coffin knock against
the churchyard gate, going in?

"Faith, sir, I've--"

"Faith? What's that?"

"Why, faith, sir, it's only a sort of exclamation-like--that's all,
sir."

"Um, um; go on."

"I was about to say, sir, that--"

"Art thou a silk-worm? Dost thou spin thy own shroud out of thyself?
Look at thy bosom! Despatch! and get these traps out of sight."

"He goes aft. That was sudden, now; but squalls come sudden in hot
latitudes. I've heard that the Isle of Albemarle, one of the Gallipagos,
is cut by the Equator right in the middle. Seems to me some sort of
Equator cuts yon old man, too, right in his middle. He's always under
the Line--fiery hot, I tell ye! He's looking this way--come, oakum;
quick. Here we go again. This wooden mallet is the cork, and I'm the
professor of musical glasses--tap, tap!"

(AHAB TO HIMSELF.)

"There's a sight! There's a sound! The grey-headed woodpecker tapping
the hollow tree! Blind and dumb might well be envied now. See! that
thing rests on two line-tubs, full of tow-lines. A most malicious wag,
that fellow. Rat-tat! So man's seconds tick! Oh! how immaterial are all
materials! What things real are there, but imponderable thoughts? Here
now's the very dreaded symbol of grim death, by a mere hap, made
the expressive sign of the help and hope of most endangered life.
A life-buoy of a coffin! Does it go further? Can it be that in some
spiritual sense the coffin is, after all, but an immortality-preserver!
I'll think of that. But no. So far gone am I in the dark side of earth,
that its other side, the theoretic bright one, seems but uncertain
twilight to me. Will ye never have done, Carpenter, with that accursed
sound? I go below; let me not see that thing here when I return
again. Now, then, Pip, we'll talk this over; I do suck most wondrous
philosophies from thee! Some unknown conduits from the unknown worlds
must empty into thee!"



CHAPTER 128. The Pequod Meets The Rachel.


Next day, a large ship, the Rachel, was descried, bearing directly down
upon the Pequod, all her spars thickly clustering with men. At the
time the Pequod was making good speed through the water; but as the
broad-winged windward stranger shot nigh to her, the boastful sails all
fell together as blank bladders that are burst, and all life fled from
the smitten hull.

"Bad news; she brings bad news," muttered the old Manxman. But ere her
commander, who, with trumpet to mouth, stood up in his boat; ere he
could hopefully hail, Ahab's voice was heard.

"Hast seen the White Whale?"

"Aye, yesterday. Have ye seen a whale-boat adrift?"

Throttling his joy, Ahab negatively answered this unexpected question;
and would then have fain boarded the stranger, when the stranger captain
himself, having stopped his vessel's way, was seen descending her
side. A few keen pulls, and his boat-hook soon clinched the Pequod's
main-chains, and he sprang to the deck. Immediately he was recognised by
Ahab for a Nantucketer he knew. But no formal salutation was exchanged.

"Where was he?--not killed!--not killed!" cried Ahab, closely advancing.
"How was it?"

It seemed that somewhat late on the afternoon of the day previous, while
three of the stranger's boats were engaged with a shoal of whales, which
had led them some four or five miles from the ship; and while they were
yet in swift chase to windward, the white hump and head of Moby Dick had
suddenly loomed up out of the water, not very far to leeward; whereupon,
the fourth rigged boat--a reserved one--had been instantly lowered in
chase. After a keen sail before the wind, this fourth boat--the swiftest
keeled of all--seemed to have succeeded in fastening--at least, as
well as the man at the mast-head could tell anything about it. In the
distance he saw the diminished dotted boat; and then a swift gleam
of bubbling white water; and after that nothing more; whence it was
concluded that the stricken whale must have indefinitely run away with
his pursuers, as often happens. There was some apprehension, but no
positive alarm, as yet. The recall signals were placed in the rigging;
darkness came on; and forced to pick up her three far to windward
boats--ere going in quest of the fourth one in the precisely opposite
direction--the ship had not only been necessitated to leave that boat to
its fate till near midnight, but, for the time, to increase her distance
from it. But the rest of her crew being at last safe aboard, she crowded
all sail--stunsail on stunsail--after the missing boat; kindling a fire
in her try-pots for a beacon; and every other man aloft on the look-out.
But though when she had thus sailed a sufficient distance to gain the
presumed place of the absent ones when last seen; though she then
paused to lower her spare boats to pull all around her; and not finding
anything, had again dashed on; again paused, and lowered her boats; and
though she had thus continued doing till daylight; yet not the least
glimpse of the missing keel had been seen.

The story told, the stranger Captain immediately went on to reveal his
object in boarding the Pequod. He desired that ship to unite with his
own in the search; by sailing over the sea some four or five miles
apart, on parallel lines, and so sweeping a double horizon, as it were.

"I will wager something now," whispered Stubb to Flask, "that some one
in that missing boat wore off that Captain's best coat; mayhap, his
watch--he's so cursed anxious to get it back. Who ever heard of two
pious whale-ships cruising after one missing whale-boat in the height of
the whaling season? See, Flask, only see how pale he looks--pale in the
very buttons of his eyes--look--it wasn't the coat--it must have been
the--"

"My boy, my own boy is among them. For God's sake--I beg, I
conjure"--here exclaimed the stranger Captain to Ahab, who thus far
had but icily received his petition. "For eight-and-forty hours let me
charter your ship--I will gladly pay for it, and roundly pay for it--if
there be no other way--for eight-and-forty hours only--only that--you
must, oh, you must, and you SHALL do this thing."

"His son!" cried Stubb, "oh, it's his son he's lost! I take back the
coat and watch--what says Ahab? We must save that boy."

"He's drowned with the rest on 'em, last night," said the old Manx
sailor standing behind them; "I heard; all of ye heard their spirits."

Now, as it shortly turned out, what made this incident of the Rachel's
the more melancholy, was the circumstance, that not only was one of the
Captain's sons among the number of the missing boat's crew; but among
the number of the other boat's crews, at the same time, but on the other
hand, separated from the ship during the dark vicissitudes of the chase,
there had been still another son; as that for a time, the wretched
father was plunged to the bottom of the cruellest perplexity; which
was only solved for him by his chief mate's instinctively adopting the
ordinary procedure of a whale-ship in such emergencies, that is, when
placed between jeopardized but divided boats, always to pick up the
majority first. But the captain, for some unknown constitutional reason,
had refrained from mentioning all this, and not till forced to it by
Ahab's iciness did he allude to his one yet missing boy; a little lad,
but twelve years old, whose father with the earnest but unmisgiving
hardihood of a Nantucketer's paternal love, had thus early sought to
initiate him in the perils and wonders of a vocation almost immemorially
the destiny of all his race. Nor does it unfrequently occur, that
Nantucket captains will send a son of such tender age away from them,
for a protracted three or four years' voyage in some other ship than
their own; so that their first knowledge of a whaleman's career shall
be unenervated by any chance display of a father's natural but untimely
partiality, or undue apprehensiveness and concern.

Meantime, now the stranger was still beseeching his poor boon of Ahab;
and Ahab still stood like an anvil, receiving every shock, but without
the least quivering of his own.

"I will not go," said the stranger, "till you say aye to me. Do to me
as you would have me do to you in the like case. For YOU too have a boy,
Captain Ahab--though but a child, and nestling safely at home now--a
child of your old age too--Yes, yes, you relent; I see it--run, run,
men, now, and stand by to square in the yards."

"Avast," cried Ahab--"touch not a rope-yarn"; then in a voice that
prolongingly moulded every word--"Captain Gardiner, I will not do it.
Even now I lose time. Good-bye, good-bye. God bless ye, man, and may I
forgive myself, but I must go. Mr. Starbuck, look at the binnacle watch,
and in three minutes from this present instant warn off all strangers:
then brace forward again, and let the ship sail as before."

Hurriedly turning, with averted face, he descended into his cabin,
leaving the strange captain transfixed at this unconditional and utter
rejection of his so earnest suit. But starting from his enchantment,
Gardiner silently hurried to the side; more fell than stepped into his
boat, and returned to his ship.

Soon the two ships diverged their wakes; and long as the strange vessel
was in view, she was seen to yaw hither and thither at every dark spot,
however small, on the sea. This way and that her yards were swung round;
starboard and larboard, she continued to tack; now she beat against a
head sea; and again it pushed her before it; while all the while, her
masts and yards were thickly clustered with men, as three tall cherry
trees, when the boys are cherrying among the boughs.

But by her still halting course and winding, woeful way, you plainly saw
that this ship that so wept with spray, still remained without comfort.
She was Rachel, weeping for her children, because they were not.



CHAPTER 129. The Cabin.


(AHAB MOVING TO GO ON DECK; PIP CATCHES HIM BY THE HAND TO FOLLOW.)

"Lad, lad, I tell thee thou must not follow Ahab now. The hour is coming
when Ahab would not scare thee from him, yet would not have thee by him.
There is that in thee, poor lad, which I feel too curing to my malady.
Like cures like; and for this hunt, my malady becomes my most desired
health. Do thou abide below here, where they shall serve thee, as if
thou wert the captain. Aye, lad, thou shalt sit here in my own screwed
chair; another screw to it, thou must be."

"No, no, no! ye have not a whole body, sir; do ye but use poor me for
your one lost leg; only tread upon me, sir; I ask no more, so I remain a
part of ye."

"Oh! spite of million villains, this makes me a bigot in the fadeless
fidelity of man!--and a black! and crazy!--but methinks like-cures-like
applies to him too; he grows so sane again."

"They tell me, sir, that Stubb did once desert poor little Pip, whose
drowned bones now show white, for all the blackness of his living skin.
But I will never desert ye, sir, as Stubb did him. Sir, I must go with
ye."

"If thou speakest thus to me much more, Ahab's purpose keels up in him.
I tell thee no; it cannot be."

"Oh good master, master, master!

"Weep so, and I will murder thee! have a care, for Ahab too is mad.
Listen, and thou wilt often hear my ivory foot upon the deck, and still
know that I am there. And now I quit thee. Thy hand!--Met! True art
thou, lad, as the circumference to its centre. So: God for ever bless
thee; and if it come to that,--God for ever save thee, let what will
befall."

(AHAB GOES; PIP STEPS ONE STEP FORWARD.)


"Here he this instant stood; I stand in his air,--but I'm alone. Now
were even poor Pip here I could endure it, but he's missing. Pip! Pip!
Ding, dong, ding! Who's seen Pip? He must be up here; let's try the
door. What? neither lock, nor bolt, nor bar; and yet there's no opening
it. It must be the spell; he told me to stay here: Aye, and told me this
screwed chair was mine. Here, then, I'll seat me, against the transom,
in the ship's full middle, all her keel and her three masts before me.
Here, our old sailors say, in their black seventy-fours great
admirals sometimes sit at table, and lord it over rows of captains and
lieutenants. Ha! what's this? epaulets! epaulets! the epaulets all come
crowding! Pass round the decanters; glad to see ye; fill up, monsieurs!
What an odd feeling, now, when a black boy's host to white men with gold
lace upon their coats!--Monsieurs, have ye seen one Pip?--a little
negro lad, five feet high, hang-dog look, and cowardly! Jumped from a
whale-boat once;--seen him? No! Well then, fill up again, captains, and
let's drink shame upon all cowards! I name no names. Shame upon them!
Put one foot upon the table. Shame upon all cowards.--Hist! above there,
I hear ivory--Oh, master! master! I am indeed down-hearted when you walk
over me. But here I'll stay, though this stern strikes rocks; and they
bulge through; and oysters come to join me."



CHAPTER 130. The Hat.


And now that at the proper time and place, after so long and wide a
preliminary cruise, Ahab,--all other whaling waters swept--seemed to
have chased his foe into an ocean-fold, to slay him the more securely
there; now, that he found himself hard by the very latitude and
longitude where his tormenting wound had been inflicted; now that a
vessel had been spoken which on the very day preceding had actually
encountered Moby Dick;--and now that all his successive meetings with
various ships contrastingly concurred to show the demoniac indifference
with which the white whale tore his hunters, whether sinning or sinned
against; now it was that there lurked a something in the old man's eyes,
which it was hardly sufferable for feeble souls to see. As the unsetting
polar star, which through the livelong, arctic, six months' night
sustains its piercing, steady, central gaze; so Ahab's purpose now
fixedly gleamed down upon the constant midnight of the gloomy crew. It
domineered above them so, that all their bodings, doubts, misgivings,
fears, were fain to hide beneath their souls, and not sprout forth a
single spear or leaf.

In this foreshadowing interval too, all humor, forced or natural,
vanished. Stubb no more strove to raise a smile; Starbuck no more strove
to check one. Alike, joy and sorrow, hope and fear, seemed ground to
finest dust, and powdered, for the time, in the clamped mortar of
Ahab's iron soul. Like machines, they dumbly moved about the deck, ever
conscious that the old man's despot eye was on them.

But did you deeply scan him in his more secret confidential hours; when
he thought no glance but one was on him; then you would have seen that
even as Ahab's eyes so awed the crew's, the inscrutable Parsee's glance
awed his; or somehow, at least, in some wild way, at times affected it.
Such an added, gliding strangeness began to invest the thin Fedallah
now; such ceaseless shudderings shook him; that the men looked dubious
at him; half uncertain, as it seemed, whether indeed he were a mortal
substance, or else a tremulous shadow cast upon the deck by some unseen
being's body. And that shadow was always hovering there. For not by
night, even, had Fedallah ever certainly been known to slumber, or go
below. He would stand still for hours: but never sat or leaned; his wan
but wondrous eyes did plainly say--We two watchmen never rest.

Nor, at any time, by night or day could the mariners now step upon the
deck, unless Ahab was before them; either standing in his pivot-hole, or
exactly pacing the planks between two undeviating limits,--the main-mast
and the mizen; or else they saw him standing in the cabin-scuttle,--his
living foot advanced upon the deck, as if to step; his hat slouched
heavily over his eyes; so that however motionless he stood, however the
days and nights were added on, that he had not swung in his hammock;
yet hidden beneath that slouching hat, they could never tell unerringly
whether, for all this, his eyes were really closed at times; or whether
he was still intently scanning them; no matter, though he stood so in
the scuttle for a whole hour on the stretch, and the unheeded night-damp
gathered in beads of dew upon that stone-carved coat and hat. The
clothes that the night had wet, the next day's sunshine dried upon him;
and so, day after day, and night after night; he went no more beneath
the planks; whatever he wanted from the cabin that thing he sent for.

He ate in the same open air; that is, his two only meals,--breakfast and
dinner: supper he never touched; nor reaped his beard; which darkly grew
all gnarled, as unearthed roots of trees blown over, which still grow
idly on at naked base, though perished in the upper verdure. But though
his whole life was now become one watch on deck; and though the Parsee's
mystic watch was without intermission as his own; yet these two never
seemed to speak--one man to the other--unless at long intervals some
passing unmomentous matter made it necessary. Though such a potent spell
seemed secretly to join the twain; openly, and to the awe-struck crew,
they seemed pole-like asunder. If by day they chanced to speak one word;
by night, dumb men were both, so far as concerned the slightest verbal
interchange. At times, for longest hours, without a single hail, they
stood far parted in the starlight; Ahab in his scuttle, the Parsee by
the mainmast; but still fixedly gazing upon each other; as if in the
Parsee Ahab saw his forethrown shadow, in Ahab the Parsee his abandoned
substance.

And yet, somehow, did Ahab--in his own proper self, as daily, hourly,
and every instant, commandingly revealed to his subordinates,--Ahab
seemed an independent lord; the Parsee but his slave. Still again both
seemed yoked together, and an unseen tyrant driving them; the lean shade
siding the solid rib. For be this Parsee what he may, all rib and keel
was solid Ahab.

At the first faintest glimmering of the dawn, his iron voice was heard
from aft,--"Man the mast-heads!"--and all through the day, till after
sunset and after twilight, the same voice every hour, at the striking of
the helmsman's bell, was heard--"What d'ye see?--sharp! sharp!"

But when three or four days had slided by, after meeting the
children-seeking Rachel; and no spout had yet been seen; the monomaniac
old man seemed distrustful of his crew's fidelity; at least, of nearly
all except the Pagan harpooneers; he seemed to doubt, even, whether
Stubb and Flask might not willingly overlook the sight he sought. But if
these suspicions were really his, he sagaciously refrained from verbally
expressing them, however his actions might seem to hint them.

"I will have the first sight of the whale myself,"--he said. "Aye!
Ahab must have the doubloon! and with his own hands he rigged a nest
of basketed bowlines; and sending a hand aloft, with a single sheaved
block, to secure to the main-mast head, he received the two ends of the
downward-reeved rope; and attaching one to his basket prepared a pin for
the other end, in order to fasten it at the rail. This done, with that
end yet in his hand and standing beside the pin, he looked round upon
his crew, sweeping from one to the other; pausing his glance long upon
Daggoo, Queequeg, Tashtego; but shunning Fedallah; and then settling his
firm relying eye upon the chief mate, said,--"Take the rope, sir--I give
it into thy hands, Starbuck." Then arranging his person in the basket,
he gave the word for them to hoist him to his perch, Starbuck being
the one who secured the rope at last; and afterwards stood near it. And
thus, with one hand clinging round the royal mast, Ahab gazed abroad
upon the sea for miles and miles,--ahead, astern, this side, and
that,--within the wide expanded circle commanded at so great a height.

When in working with his hands at some lofty almost isolated place in
the rigging, which chances to afford no foothold, the sailor at sea is
hoisted up to that spot, and sustained there by the rope; under these
circumstances, its fastened end on deck is always given in strict charge
to some one man who has the special watch of it. Because in such a
wilderness of running rigging, whose various different relations aloft
cannot always be infallibly discerned by what is seen of them at the
deck; and when the deck-ends of these ropes are being every few minutes
cast down from the fastenings, it would be but a natural fatality, if,
unprovided with a constant watchman, the hoisted sailor should by some
carelessness of the crew be cast adrift and fall all swooping to the
sea. So Ahab's proceedings in this matter were not unusual; the only
strange thing about them seemed to be, that Starbuck, almost the one
only man who had ever ventured to oppose him with anything in the
slightest degree approaching to decision--one of those too, whose
faithfulness on the look-out he had seemed to doubt somewhat;--it was
strange, that this was the very man he should select for his watchman;
freely giving his whole life into such an otherwise distrusted person's
hands.

Now, the first time Ahab was perched aloft; ere he had been there ten
minutes; one of those red-billed savage sea-hawks which so often fly
incommodiously close round the manned mast-heads of whalemen in these
latitudes; one of these birds came wheeling and screaming round his head
in a maze of untrackably swift circlings. Then it darted a thousand feet
straight up into the air; then spiralized downwards, and went eddying
again round his head.

But with his gaze fixed upon the dim and distant horizon, Ahab seemed
not to mark this wild bird; nor, indeed, would any one else have marked
it much, it being no uncommon circumstance; only now almost the least
heedful eye seemed to see some sort of cunning meaning in almost every
sight.

"Your hat, your hat, sir!" suddenly cried the Sicilian seaman, who
being posted at the mizen-mast-head, stood directly behind Ahab, though
somewhat lower than his level, and with a deep gulf of air dividing
them.

But already the sable wing was before the old man's eyes; the long
hooked bill at his head: with a scream, the black hawk darted away with
his prize.

An eagle flew thrice round Tarquin's head, removing his cap to replace
it, and thereupon Tanaquil, his wife, declared that Tarquin would
be king of Rome. But only by the replacing of the cap was that omen
accounted good. Ahab's hat was never restored; the wild hawk flew on and
on with it; far in advance of the prow: and at last disappeared; while
from the point of that disappearance, a minute black spot was dimly
discerned, falling from that vast height into the sea.



CHAPTER 131. The Pequod Meets The Delight.


The intense Pequod sailed on; the rolling waves and days went by; the
life-buoy-coffin still lightly swung; and another ship, most miserably
misnamed the Delight, was descried. As she drew nigh, all eyes were
fixed upon her broad beams, called shears, which, in some whaling-ships,
cross the quarter-deck at the height of eight or nine feet; serving to
carry the spare, unrigged, or disabled boats.

Upon the stranger's shears were beheld the shattered, white ribs, and
some few splintered planks, of what had once been a whale-boat; but you
now saw through this wreck, as plainly as you see through the peeled,
half-unhinged, and bleaching skeleton of a horse.

"Hast seen the White Whale?"

"Look!" replied the hollow-cheeked captain from his taffrail; and with
his trumpet he pointed to the wreck.

"Hast killed him?"

"The harpoon is not yet forged that ever will do that," answered the
other, sadly glancing upon a rounded hammock on the deck, whose gathered
sides some noiseless sailors were busy in sewing together.

"Not forged!" and snatching Perth's levelled iron from the crotch, Ahab
held it out, exclaiming--"Look ye, Nantucketer; here in this hand I hold
his death! Tempered in blood, and tempered by lightning are these barbs;
and I swear to temper them triply in that hot place behind the fin,
where the White Whale most feels his accursed life!"

"Then God keep thee, old man--see'st thou that"--pointing to the
hammock--"I bury but one of five stout men, who were alive only
yesterday; but were dead ere night. Only THAT one I bury; the rest were
buried before they died; you sail upon their tomb." Then turning to his
crew--"Are ye ready there? place the plank then on the rail, and
lift the body; so, then--Oh! God"--advancing towards the hammock with
uplifted hands--"may the resurrection and the life--"

"Brace forward! Up helm!" cried Ahab like lightning to his men.

But the suddenly started Pequod was not quick enough to escape the sound
of the splash that the corpse soon made as it struck the sea; not so
quick, indeed, but that some of the flying bubbles might have sprinkled
her hull with their ghostly baptism.

As Ahab now glided from the dejected Delight, the strange life-buoy
hanging at the Pequod's stern came into conspicuous relief.

"Ha! yonder! look yonder, men!" cried a foreboding voice in her wake.
"In vain, oh, ye strangers, ye fly our sad burial; ye but turn us your
taffrail to show us your coffin!"



CHAPTER 132. The Symphony.


It was a clear steel-blue day. The firmaments of air and sea were
hardly separable in that all-pervading azure; only, the pensive air was
transparently pure and soft, with a woman's look, and the robust and
man-like sea heaved with long, strong, lingering swells, as Samson's
chest in his sleep.

Hither, and thither, on high, glided the snow-white wings of small,
unspeckled birds; these were the gentle thoughts of the feminine air;
but to and fro in the deeps, far down in the bottomless blue, rushed
mighty leviathans, sword-fish, and sharks; and these were the strong,
troubled, murderous thinkings of the masculine sea.

But though thus contrasting within, the contrast was only in shades and
shadows without; those two seemed one; it was only the sex, as it were,
that distinguished them.

Aloft, like a royal czar and king, the sun seemed giving this gentle
air to this bold and rolling sea; even as bride to groom. And at the
girdling line of the horizon, a soft and tremulous motion--most seen
here at the Equator--denoted the fond, throbbing trust, the loving
alarms, with which the poor bride gave her bosom away.

Tied up and twisted; gnarled and knotted with wrinkles; haggardly firm
and unyielding; his eyes glowing like coals, that still glow in the
ashes of ruin; untottering Ahab stood forth in the clearness of the
morn; lifting his splintered helmet of a brow to the fair girl's
forehead of heaven.

Oh, immortal infancy, and innocency of the azure! Invisible winged
creatures that frolic all round us! Sweet childhood of air and sky! how
oblivious were ye of old Ahab's close-coiled woe! But so have I seen
little Miriam and Martha, laughing-eyed elves, heedlessly gambol around
their old sire; sporting with the circle of singed locks which grew on
the marge of that burnt-out crater of his brain.

Slowly crossing the deck from the scuttle, Ahab leaned over the side and
watched how his shadow in the water sank and sank to his gaze, the more
and the more that he strove to pierce the profundity. But the lovely
aromas in that enchanted air did at last seem to dispel, for a moment,
the cankerous thing in his soul. That glad, happy air, that winsome
sky, did at last stroke and caress him; the step-mother world, so long
cruel--forbidding--now threw affectionate arms round his stubborn neck,
and did seem to joyously sob over him, as if over one, that however
wilful and erring, she could yet find it in her heart to save and to
bless. From beneath his slouched hat Ahab dropped a tear into the sea;
nor did all the Pacific contain such wealth as that one wee drop.

Starbuck saw the old man; saw him, how he heavily leaned over the side;
and he seemed to hear in his own true heart the measureless sobbing that
stole out of the centre of the serenity around. Careful not to touch
him, or be noticed by him, he yet drew near to him, and stood there.

Ahab turned.

"Starbuck!"

"Sir."

"Oh, Starbuck! it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky. On such
a day--very much such a sweetness as this--I struck my first whale--a
boy-harpooneer of eighteen! Forty--forty--forty years ago!--ago! Forty
years of continual whaling! forty years of privation, and peril, and
storm-time! forty years on the pitiless sea! for forty years has Ahab
forsaken the peaceful land, for forty years to make war on the horrors
of the deep! Aye and yes, Starbuck, out of those forty years I have not
spent three ashore. When I think of this life I have led; the desolation
of solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-town of a Captain's
exclusiveness, which admits but small entrance to any sympathy from the
green country without--oh, weariness! heaviness! Guinea-coast slavery of
solitary command!--when I think of all this; only half-suspected, not so
keenly known to me before--and how for forty years I have fed upon dry
salted fare--fit emblem of the dry nourishment of my soil!--when the
poorest landsman has had fresh fruit to his daily hand, and broken the
world's fresh bread to my mouldy crusts--away, whole oceans away, from
that young girl-wife I wedded past fifty, and sailed for Cape Horn
the next day, leaving but one dent in my marriage pillow--wife?
wife?--rather a widow with her husband alive! Aye, I widowed that poor
girl when I married her, Starbuck; and then, the madness, the frenzy,
the boiling blood and the smoking brow, with which, for a thousand
lowerings old Ahab has furiously, foamingly chased his prey--more a
demon than a man!--aye, aye! what a forty years' fool--fool--old fool,
has old Ahab been! Why this strife of the chase? why weary, and palsy
the arm at the oar, and the iron, and the lance? how the richer or
better is Ahab now? Behold. Oh, Starbuck! is it not hard, that with this
weary load I bear, one poor leg should have been snatched from under
me? Here, brush this old hair aside; it blinds me, that I seem to weep.
Locks so grey did never grow but from out some ashes! But do I look
very old, so very, very old, Starbuck? I feel deadly faint, bowed, and
humped, as though I were Adam, staggering beneath the piled
centuries since Paradise. God! God! God!--crack my heart!--stave my
brain!--mockery! mockery! bitter, biting mockery of grey hairs, have
I lived enough joy to wear ye; and seem and feel thus intolerably old?
Close! stand close to me, Starbuck; let me look into a human eye; it is
better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God. By
the green land; by the bright hearth-stone! this is the magic glass,
man; I see my wife and my child in thine eye. No, no; stay on board, on
board!--lower not when I do; when branded Ahab gives chase to Moby Dick.
That hazard shall not be thine. No, no! not with the far away home I see
in that eye!"

"Oh, my Captain! my Captain! noble soul! grand old heart, after all! why
should any one give chase to that hated fish! Away with me! let us
fly these deadly waters! let us home! Wife and child, too, are
Starbuck's--wife and child of his brotherly, sisterly, play-fellow
youth; even as thine, sir, are the wife and child of thy loving,
longing, paternal old age! Away! let us away!--this instant let me alter
the course! How cheerily, how hilariously, O my Captain, would we bowl
on our way to see old Nantucket again! I think, sir, they have some such
mild blue days, even as this, in Nantucket."

"They have, they have. I have seen them--some summer days in the
morning. About this time--yes, it is his noon nap now--the boy
vivaciously wakes; sits up in bed; and his mother tells him of me, of
cannibal old me; how I am abroad upon the deep, but will yet come back
to dance him again."

"'Tis my Mary, my Mary herself! She promised that my boy, every morning,
should be carried to the hill to catch the first glimpse of his father's
sail! Yes, yes! no more! it is done! we head for Nantucket! Come, my
Captain, study out the course, and let us away! See, see! the boy's face
from the window! the boy's hand on the hill!"

But Ahab's glance was averted; like a blighted fruit tree he shook, and
cast his last, cindered apple to the soil.

"What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what
cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor
commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep
pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly
making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not
so much as dare? Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this
arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is as an errand-boy
in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power;
how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think
thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that
living, and not I. By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in
this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike. And all
the time, lo! that smiling sky, and this unsounded sea! Look! see yon
Albicore! who put it into him to chase and fang that flying-fish? Where
do murderers go, man! Who's to doom, when the judge himself is dragged
to the bar? But it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky; and
the air smells now, as if it blew from a far-away meadow; they have been
making hay somewhere under the slopes of the Andes, Starbuck, and the
mowers are sleeping among the new-mown hay. Sleeping? Aye, toil we how
we may, we all sleep at last on the field. Sleep? Aye, and rust amid
greenness; as last year's scythes flung down, and left in the half-cut
swaths--Starbuck!"

But blanched to a corpse's hue with despair, the Mate had stolen away.

Ahab crossed the deck to gaze over on the other side; but started at
two reflected, fixed eyes in the water there. Fedallah was motionlessly
leaning over the same rail.



CHAPTER 133. The Chase--First Day.


That night, in the mid-watch, when the old man--as his wont at
intervals--stepped forth from the scuttle in which he leaned, and went
to his pivot-hole, he suddenly thrust out his face fiercely, snuffing
up the sea air as a sagacious ship's dog will, in drawing nigh to
some barbarous isle. He declared that a whale must be near. Soon that
peculiar odor, sometimes to a great distance given forth by the
living sperm whale, was palpable to all the watch; nor was any mariner
surprised when, after inspecting the compass, and then the dog-vane, and
then ascertaining the precise bearing of the odor as nearly as possible,
Ahab rapidly ordered the ship's course to be slightly altered, and the
sail to be shortened.

The acute policy dictating these movements was sufficiently vindicated
at daybreak, by the sight of a long sleek on the sea directly and
lengthwise ahead, smooth as oil, and resembling in the pleated watery
wrinkles bordering it, the polished metallic-like marks of some swift
tide-rip, at the mouth of a deep, rapid stream.

"Man the mast-heads! Call all hands!"

Thundering with the butts of three clubbed handspikes on the forecastle
deck, Daggoo roused the sleepers with such judgment claps that they
seemed to exhale from the scuttle, so instantaneously did they appear
with their clothes in their hands.

"What d'ye see?" cried Ahab, flattening his face to the sky.

"Nothing, nothing sir!" was the sound hailing down in reply.

"T'gallant sails!--stunsails! alow and aloft, and on both sides!"

All sail being set, he now cast loose the life-line, reserved for
swaying him to the main royal-mast head; and in a few moments they were
hoisting him thither, when, while but two thirds of the way aloft,
and while peering ahead through the horizontal vacancy between the
main-top-sail and top-gallant-sail, he raised a gull-like cry in the
air. "There she blows!--there she blows! A hump like a snow-hill! It is
Moby Dick!"

Fired by the cry which seemed simultaneously taken up by the three
look-outs, the men on deck rushed to the rigging to behold the famous
whale they had so long been pursuing. Ahab had now gained his final
perch, some feet above the other look-outs, Tashtego standing just
beneath him on the cap of the top-gallant-mast, so that the Indian's
head was almost on a level with Ahab's heel. From this height the whale
was now seen some mile or so ahead, at every roll of the sea revealing
his high sparkling hump, and regularly jetting his silent spout into the
air. To the credulous mariners it seemed the same silent spout they had
so long ago beheld in the moonlit Atlantic and Indian Oceans.

"And did none of ye see it before?" cried Ahab, hailing the perched men
all around him.

"I saw him almost that same instant, sir, that Captain Ahab did, and I
cried out," said Tashtego.

"Not the same instant; not the same--no, the doubloon is mine, Fate
reserved the doubloon for me. I only; none of ye could have raised the
White Whale first. There she blows!--there she blows!--there she blows!
There again!--there again!" he cried, in long-drawn, lingering, methodic
tones, attuned to the gradual prolongings of the whale's visible jets.
"He's going to sound! In stunsails! Down top-gallant-sails! Stand by
three boats. Mr. Starbuck, remember, stay on board, and keep the ship.
Helm there! Luff, luff a point! So; steady, man, steady! There go
flukes! No, no; only black water! All ready the boats there? Stand by,
stand by! Lower me, Mr. Starbuck; lower, lower,--quick, quicker!" and he
slid through the air to the deck.

"He is heading straight to leeward, sir," cried Stubb, "right away from
us; cannot have seen the ship yet."

"Be dumb, man! Stand by the braces! Hard down the helm!--brace up!
Shiver her!--shiver her!--So; well that! Boats, boats!"

Soon all the boats but Starbuck's were dropped; all the boat-sails
set--all the paddles plying; with rippling swiftness, shooting to
leeward; and Ahab heading the onset. A pale, death-glimmer lit up
Fedallah's sunken eyes; a hideous motion gnawed his mouth.

Like noiseless nautilus shells, their light prows sped through the sea;
but only slowly they neared the foe. As they neared him, the ocean grew
still more smooth; seemed drawing a carpet over its waves; seemed a
noon-meadow, so serenely it spread. At length the breathless hunter came
so nigh his seemingly unsuspecting prey, that his entire dazzling hump
was distinctly visible, sliding along the sea as if an isolated thing,
and continually set in a revolving ring of finest, fleecy, greenish
foam. He saw the vast, involved wrinkles of the slightly projecting head
beyond. Before it, far out on the soft Turkish-rugged waters, went
the glistening white shadow from his broad, milky forehead, a musical
rippling playfully accompanying the shade; and behind, the blue waters
interchangeably flowed over into the moving valley of his steady wake;
and on either hand bright bubbles arose and danced by his side. But
these were broken again by the light toes of hundreds of gay fowl softly
feathering the sea, alternate with their fitful flight; and like to
some flag-staff rising from the painted hull of an argosy, the tall but
shattered pole of a recent lance projected from the white whale's back;
and at intervals one of the cloud of soft-toed fowls hovering, and
to and fro skimming like a canopy over the fish, silently perched and
rocked on this pole, the long tail feathers streaming like pennons.

A gentle joyousness--a mighty mildness of repose in swiftness, invested
the gliding whale. Not the white bull Jupiter swimming away with
ravished Europa clinging to his graceful horns; his lovely, leering
eyes sideways intent upon the maid; with smooth bewitching fleetness,
rippling straight for the nuptial bower in Crete; not Jove, not that
great majesty Supreme! did surpass the glorified White Whale as he so
divinely swam.

On each soft side--coincident with the parted swell, that but once
leaving him, then flowed so wide away--on each bright side, the whale
shed off enticings. No wonder there had been some among the hunters who
namelessly transported and allured by all this serenity, had ventured
to assail it; but had fatally found that quietude but the vesture of
tornadoes. Yet calm, enticing calm, oh, whale! thou glidest on, to all
who for the first time eye thee, no matter how many in that same way
thou may'st have bejuggled and destroyed before.

And thus, through the serene tranquillities of the tropical sea, among
waves whose hand-clappings were suspended by exceeding rapture, Moby
Dick moved on, still withholding from sight the full terrors of his
submerged trunk, entirely hiding the wrenched hideousness of his jaw.
But soon the fore part of him slowly rose from the water; for an instant
his whole marbleized body formed a high arch, like Virginia's Natural
Bridge, and warningly waving his bannered flukes in the air, the
grand god revealed himself, sounded, and went out of sight. Hoveringly
halting, and dipping on the wing, the white sea-fowls longingly lingered
over the agitated pool that he left.

With oars apeak, and paddles down, the sheets of their sails adrift, the
three boats now stilly floated, awaiting Moby Dick's reappearance.

"An hour," said Ahab, standing rooted in his boat's stern; and he gazed
beyond the whale's place, towards the dim blue spaces and wide wooing
vacancies to leeward. It was only an instant; for again his eyes seemed
whirling round in his head as he swept the watery circle. The breeze now
freshened; the sea began to swell.

"The birds!--the birds!" cried Tashtego.

In long Indian file, as when herons take wing, the white birds were
now all flying towards Ahab's boat; and when within a few yards began
fluttering over the water there, wheeling round and round, with joyous,
expectant cries. Their vision was keener than man's; Ahab could discover
no sign in the sea. But suddenly as he peered down and down into its
depths, he profoundly saw a white living spot no bigger than a white
weasel, with wonderful celerity uprising, and magnifying as it rose,
till it turned, and then there were plainly revealed two long crooked
rows of white, glistening teeth, floating up from the undiscoverable
bottom. It was Moby Dick's open mouth and scrolled jaw; his vast,
shadowed bulk still half blending with the blue of the sea. The
glittering mouth yawned beneath the boat like an open-doored marble
tomb; and giving one sidelong sweep with his steering oar, Ahab whirled
the craft aside from this tremendous apparition. Then, calling upon
Fedallah to change places with him, went forward to the bows, and
seizing Perth's harpoon, commanded his crew to grasp their oars and
stand by to stern.

Now, by reason of this timely spinning round the boat upon its axis, its
bow, by anticipation, was made to face the whale's head while yet
under water. But as if perceiving this stratagem, Moby Dick, with that
malicious intelligence ascribed to him, sidelingly transplanted himself,
as it were, in an instant, shooting his pleated head lengthwise beneath
the boat.

Through and through; through every plank and each rib, it thrilled for
an instant, the whale obliquely lying on his back, in the manner of
a biting shark, slowly and feelingly taking its bows full within his
mouth, so that the long, narrow, scrolled lower jaw curled high up into
the open air, and one of the teeth caught in a row-lock. The bluish
pearl-white of the inside of the jaw was within six inches of Ahab's
head, and reached higher than that. In this attitude the White Whale
now shook the slight cedar as a mildly cruel cat her mouse. With
unastonished eyes Fedallah gazed, and crossed his arms; but the
tiger-yellow crew were tumbling over each other's heads to gain the
uttermost stern.

And now, while both elastic gunwales were springing in and out, as the
whale dallied with the doomed craft in this devilish way; and from his
body being submerged beneath the boat, he could not be darted at from
the bows, for the bows were almost inside of him, as it were; and
while the other boats involuntarily paused, as before a quick crisis
impossible to withstand, then it was that monomaniac Ahab, furious with
this tantalizing vicinity of his foe, which placed him all alive and
helpless in the very jaws he hated; frenzied with all this, he seized
the long bone with his naked hands, and wildly strove to wrench it from
its gripe. As now he thus vainly strove, the jaw slipped from him; the
frail gunwales bent in, collapsed, and snapped, as both jaws, like an
enormous shears, sliding further aft, bit the craft completely in twain,
and locked themselves fast again in the sea, midway between the two
floating wrecks. These floated aside, the broken ends drooping, the crew
at the stern-wreck clinging to the gunwales, and striving to hold fast
to the oars to lash them across.

At that preluding moment, ere the boat was yet snapped, Ahab, the first
to perceive the whale's intent, by the crafty upraising of his head, a
movement that loosed his hold for the time; at that moment his hand
had made one final effort to push the boat out of the bite. But only
slipping further into the whale's mouth, and tilting over sideways as it
slipped, the boat had shaken off his hold on the jaw; spilled him out of
it, as he leaned to the push; and so he fell flat-faced upon the sea.

Ripplingly withdrawing from his prey, Moby Dick now lay at a little
distance, vertically thrusting his oblong white head up and down in the
billows; and at the same time slowly revolving his whole spindled body;
so that when his vast wrinkled forehead rose--some twenty or more feet
out of the water--the now rising swells, with all their confluent waves,
dazzlingly broke against it; vindictively tossing their shivered spray
still higher into the air.* So, in a gale, the but half baffled Channel
billows only recoil from the base of the Eddystone, triumphantly to
overleap its summit with their scud.


*This motion is peculiar to the sperm whale. It receives its designation
(pitchpoling) from its being likened to that preliminary up-and-down
poise of the whale-lance, in the exercise called pitchpoling, previously
described. By this motion the whale must best and most comprehensively
view whatever objects may be encircling him.


But soon resuming his horizontal attitude, Moby Dick swam swiftly round
and round the wrecked crew; sideways churning the water in his vengeful
wake, as if lashing himself up to still another and more deadly assault.
The sight of the splintered boat seemed to madden him, as the blood of
grapes and mulberries cast before Antiochus's elephants in the book
of Maccabees. Meanwhile Ahab half smothered in the foam of the whale's
insolent tail, and too much of a cripple to swim,--though he could still
keep afloat, even in the heart of such a whirlpool as that; helpless
Ahab's head was seen, like a tossed bubble which the least chance shock
might burst. From the boat's fragmentary stern, Fedallah incuriously and
mildly eyed him; the clinging crew, at the other drifting end, could not
succor him; more than enough was it for them to look to themselves.
For so revolvingly appalling was the White Whale's aspect, and so
planetarily swift the ever-contracting circles he made, that he seemed
horizontally swooping upon them. And though the other boats, unharmed,
still hovered hard by; still they dared not pull into the eddy to
strike, lest that should be the signal for the instant destruction of
the jeopardized castaways, Ahab and all; nor in that case could they
themselves hope to escape. With straining eyes, then, they remained on
the outer edge of the direful zone, whose centre had now become the old
man's head.

Meantime, from the beginning all this had been descried from the ship's
mast heads; and squaring her yards, she had borne down upon the scene;
and was now so nigh, that Ahab in the water hailed her!--"Sail on
the"--but that moment a breaking sea dashed on him from Moby Dick, and
whelmed him for the time. But struggling out of it again, and chancing
to rise on a towering crest, he shouted,--"Sail on the whale!--Drive him
off!"

The Pequod's prows were pointed; and breaking up the charmed circle, she
effectually parted the white whale from his victim. As he sullenly swam
off, the boats flew to the rescue.

Dragged into Stubb's boat with blood-shot, blinded eyes, the white brine
caking in his wrinkles; the long tension of Ahab's bodily strength did
crack, and helplessly he yielded to his body's doom: for a time, lying
all crushed in the bottom of Stubb's boat, like one trodden under foot
of herds of elephants. Far inland, nameless wails came from him, as
desolate sounds from out ravines.

But this intensity of his physical prostration did but so much the more
abbreviate it. In an instant's compass, great hearts sometimes condense
to one deep pang, the sum total of those shallow pains kindly diffused
through feebler men's whole lives. And so, such hearts, though summary
in each one suffering; still, if the gods decree it, in their
life-time aggregate a whole age of woe, wholly made up of instantaneous
intensities; for even in their pointless centres, those noble natures
contain the entire circumferences of inferior souls.

"The harpoon," said Ahab, half way rising, and draggingly leaning on one
bended arm--"is it safe?"

"Aye, sir, for it was not darted; this is it," said Stubb, showing it.

"Lay it before me;--any missing men?"

"One, two, three, four, five;--there were five oars, sir, and here are
five men."

"That's good.--Help me, man; I wish to stand. So, so, I see him! there!
there! going to leeward still; what a leaping spout!--Hands off from me!
The eternal sap runs up in Ahab's bones again! Set the sail; out oars;
the helm!"

It is often the case that when a boat is stove, its crew, being picked
up by another boat, help to work that second boat; and the chase is thus
continued with what is called double-banked oars. It was thus now. But
the added power of the boat did not equal the added power of the whale,
for he seemed to have treble-banked his every fin; swimming with a
velocity which plainly showed, that if now, under these circumstances,
pushed on, the chase would prove an indefinitely prolonged, if not a
hopeless one; nor could any crew endure for so long a period, such an
unintermitted, intense straining at the oar; a thing barely tolerable
only in some one brief vicissitude. The ship itself, then, as it
sometimes happens, offered the most promising intermediate means of
overtaking the chase. Accordingly, the boats now made for her, and were
soon swayed up to their cranes--the two parts of the wrecked boat having
been previously secured by her--and then hoisting everything to her
side, and stacking her canvas high up, and sideways outstretching it
with stun-sails, like the double-jointed wings of an albatross; the
Pequod bore down in the leeward wake of Moby-Dick. At the well known,
methodic intervals, the whale's glittering spout was regularly announced
from the manned mast-heads; and when he would be reported as just gone
down, Ahab would take the time, and then pacing the deck, binnacle-watch
in hand, so soon as the last second of the allotted hour expired, his
voice was heard.--"Whose is the doubloon now? D'ye see him?" and if the
reply was, No, sir! straightway he commanded them to lift him to his
perch. In this way the day wore on; Ahab, now aloft and motionless;
anon, unrestingly pacing the planks.

As he was thus walking, uttering no sound, except to hail the men aloft,
or to bid them hoist a sail still higher, or to spread one to a still
greater breadth--thus to and fro pacing, beneath his slouched hat, at
every turn he passed his own wrecked boat, which had been dropped upon
the quarter-deck, and lay there reversed; broken bow to shattered stern.
At last he paused before it; and as in an already over-clouded sky fresh
troops of clouds will sometimes sail across, so over the old man's face
there now stole some such added gloom as this.

Stubb saw him pause; and perhaps intending, not vainly, though, to
evince his own unabated fortitude, and thus keep up a valiant place in
his Captain's mind, he advanced, and eyeing the wreck exclaimed--"The
thistle the ass refused; it pricked his mouth too keenly, sir; ha! ha!"

"What soulless thing is this that laughs before a wreck? Man, man! did
I not know thee brave as fearless fire (and as mechanical) I could swear
thou wert a poltroon. Groan nor laugh should be heard before a wreck."

"Aye, sir," said Starbuck drawing near, "'tis a solemn sight; an omen,
and an ill one."

"Omen? omen?--the dictionary! If the gods think to speak outright to
man, they will honourably speak outright; not shake their heads, and
give an old wives' darkling hint.--Begone! Ye two are the opposite poles
of one thing; Starbuck is Stubb reversed, and Stubb is Starbuck; and
ye two are all mankind; and Ahab stands alone among the millions of
the peopled earth, nor gods nor men his neighbors! Cold, cold--I
shiver!--How now? Aloft there! D'ye see him? Sing out for every spout,
though he spout ten times a second!"

The day was nearly done; only the hem of his golden robe was rustling.
Soon, it was almost dark, but the look-out men still remained unset.

"Can't see the spout now, sir;--too dark"--cried a voice from the air.

"How heading when last seen?"

"As before, sir,--straight to leeward."

"Good! he will travel slower now 'tis night. Down royals and top-gallant
stun-sails, Mr. Starbuck. We must not run over him before morning; he's
making a passage now, and may heave-to a while. Helm there! keep her
full before the wind!--Aloft! come down!--Mr. Stubb, send a fresh hand
to the fore-mast head, and see it manned till morning."--Then advancing
towards the doubloon in the main-mast--"Men, this gold is mine, for I
earned it; but I shall let it abide here till the White Whale is dead;
and then, whosoever of ye first raises him, upon the day he shall be
killed, this gold is that man's; and if on that day I shall again raise
him, then, ten times its sum shall be divided among all of ye! Away
now!--the deck is thine, sir!"

And so saying, he placed himself half way within the scuttle, and
slouching his hat, stood there till dawn, except when at intervals
rousing himself to see how the night wore on.



CHAPTER 134. The Chase--Second Day.


At day-break, the three mast-heads were punctually manned afresh.

"D'ye see him?" cried Ahab after allowing a little space for the light
to spread.

"See nothing, sir."

"Turn up all hands and make sail! he travels faster than I thought
for;--the top-gallant sails!--aye, they should have been kept on her all
night. But no matter--'tis but resting for the rush."

Here be it said, that this pertinacious pursuit of one particular whale,
continued through day into night, and through night into day, is a thing
by no means unprecedented in the South sea fishery. For such is the
wonderful skill, prescience of experience, and invincible confidence
acquired by some great natural geniuses among the Nantucket commanders;
that from the simple observation of a whale when last descried, they
will, under certain given circumstances, pretty accurately foretell both
the direction in which he will continue to swim for a time, while out of
sight, as well as his probable rate of progression during that period.
And, in these cases, somewhat as a pilot, when about losing sight of
a coast, whose general trending he well knows, and which he desires
shortly to return to again, but at some further point; like as this
pilot stands by his compass, and takes the precise bearing of the
cape at present visible, in order the more certainly to hit aright
the remote, unseen headland, eventually to be visited: so does the
fisherman, at his compass, with the whale; for after being chased, and
diligently marked, through several hours of daylight, then, when night
obscures the fish, the creature's future wake through the darkness
is almost as established to the sagacious mind of the hunter, as the
pilot's coast is to him. So that to this hunter's wondrous skill, the
proverbial evanescence of a thing writ in water, a wake, is to all
desired purposes well nigh as reliable as the steadfast land. And as the
mighty iron Leviathan of the modern railway is so familiarly known in
its every pace, that, with watches in their hands, men time his rate as
doctors that of a baby's pulse; and lightly say of it, the up train or
the down train will reach such or such a spot, at such or such an hour;
even so, almost, there are occasions when these Nantucketers time that
other Leviathan of the deep, according to the observed humor of his
speed; and say to themselves, so many hours hence this whale will have
gone two hundred miles, will have about reached this or that degree of
latitude or longitude. But to render this acuteness at all successful in
the end, the wind and the sea must be the whaleman's allies; for of what
present avail to the becalmed or windbound mariner is the skill that
assures him he is exactly ninety-three leagues and a quarter from his
port? Inferable from these statements, are many collateral subtile
matters touching the chase of whales.

The ship tore on; leaving such a furrow in the sea as when a
cannon-ball, missent, becomes a plough-share and turns up the level
field.

"By salt and hemp!" cried Stubb, "but this swift motion of the deck
creeps up one's legs and tingles at the heart. This ship and I are two
brave fellows!--Ha, ha! Some one take me up, and launch me, spine-wise,
on the sea,--for by live-oaks! my spine's a keel. Ha, ha! we go the gait
that leaves no dust behind!"

"There she blows--she blows!--she blows!--right ahead!" was now the
mast-head cry.

"Aye, aye!" cried Stubb, "I knew it--ye can't escape--blow on and
split your spout, O whale! the mad fiend himself is after ye! blow your
trump--blister your lungs!--Ahab will dam off your blood, as a miller
shuts his watergate upon the stream!"

And Stubb did but speak out for well nigh all that crew. The frenzies
of the chase had by this time worked them bubblingly up, like old wine
worked anew. Whatever pale fears and forebodings some of them might
have felt before; these were not only now kept out of sight through the
growing awe of Ahab, but they were broken up, and on all sides routed,
as timid prairie hares that scatter before the bounding bison. The hand
of Fate had snatched all their souls; and by the stirring perils of
the previous day; the rack of the past night's suspense; the fixed,
unfearing, blind, reckless way in which their wild craft went plunging
towards its flying mark; by all these things, their hearts were bowled
along. The wind that made great bellies of their sails, and rushed the
vessel on by arms invisible as irresistible; this seemed the symbol of
that unseen agency which so enslaved them to the race.

They were one man, not thirty. For as the one ship that held them all;
though it was put together of all contrasting things--oak, and maple,
and pine wood; iron, and pitch, and hemp--yet all these ran into each
other in the one concrete hull, which shot on its way, both balanced and
directed by the long central keel; even so, all the individualities of
the crew, this man's valor, that man's fear; guilt and guiltiness, all
varieties were welded into oneness, and were all directed to that fatal
goal which Ahab their one lord and keel did point to.

The rigging lived. The mast-heads, like the tops of tall palms, were
outspreadingly tufted with arms and legs. Clinging to a spar with one
hand, some reached forth the other with impatient wavings; others,
shading their eyes from the vivid sunlight, sat far out on the rocking
yards; all the spars in full bearing of mortals, ready and ripe for
their fate. Ah! how they still strove through that infinite blueness to
seek out the thing that might destroy them!

"Why sing ye not out for him, if ye see him?" cried Ahab, when, after
the lapse of some minutes since the first cry, no more had been heard.
"Sway me up, men; ye have been deceived; not Moby Dick casts one odd jet
that way, and then disappears."

It was even so; in their headlong eagerness, the men had mistaken some
other thing for the whale-spout, as the event itself soon proved; for
hardly had Ahab reached his perch; hardly was the rope belayed to its
pin on deck, when he struck the key-note to an orchestra, that made the
air vibrate as with the combined discharges of rifles. The triumphant
halloo of thirty buckskin lungs was heard, as--much nearer to the ship
than the place of the imaginary jet, less than a mile ahead--Moby Dick
bodily burst into view! For not by any calm and indolent spoutings; not
by the peaceable gush of that mystic fountain in his head, did the White
Whale now reveal his vicinity; but by the far more wondrous phenomenon
of breaching. Rising with his utmost velocity from the furthest depths,
the Sperm Whale thus booms his entire bulk into the pure element of
air, and piling up a mountain of dazzling foam, shows his place to the
distance of seven miles and more. In those moments, the torn, enraged
waves he shakes off, seem his mane; in some cases, this breaching is his
act of defiance.

"There she breaches! there she breaches!" was the cry, as in his
immeasurable bravadoes the White Whale tossed himself salmon-like to
Heaven. So suddenly seen in the blue plain of the sea, and relieved
against the still bluer margin of the sky, the spray that he raised, for
the moment, intolerably glittered and glared like a glacier; and
stood there gradually fading and fading away from its first sparkling
intensity, to the dim mistiness of an advancing shower in a vale.

"Aye, breach your last to the sun, Moby Dick!" cried Ahab, "thy hour and
thy harpoon are at hand!--Down! down all of ye, but one man at the fore.
The boats!--stand by!"

Unmindful of the tedious rope-ladders of the shrouds, the men, like
shooting stars, slid to the deck, by the isolated backstays and
halyards; while Ahab, less dartingly, but still rapidly was dropped from
his perch.

"Lower away," he cried, so soon as he had reached his boat--a spare one,
rigged the afternoon previous. "Mr. Starbuck, the ship is thine--keep
away from the boats, but keep near them. Lower, all!"

As if to strike a quick terror into them, by this time being the first
assailant himself, Moby Dick had turned, and was now coming for the
three crews. Ahab's boat was central; and cheering his men, he told them
he would take the whale head-and-head,--that is, pull straight up to his
forehead,--a not uncommon thing; for when within a certain limit, such
a course excludes the coming onset from the whale's sidelong vision.
But ere that close limit was gained, and while yet all three boats were
plain as the ship's three masts to his eye; the White Whale churning
himself into furious speed, almost in an instant as it were, rushing
among the boats with open jaws, and a lashing tail, offered appalling
battle on every side; and heedless of the irons darted at him from every
boat, seemed only intent on annihilating each separate plank of which
those boats were made. But skilfully manoeuvred, incessantly wheeling
like trained chargers in the field; the boats for a while eluded him;
though, at times, but by a plank's breadth; while all the time, Ahab's
unearthly slogan tore every other cry but his to shreds.

But at last in his untraceable evolutions, the White Whale so crossed
and recrossed, and in a thousand ways entangled the slack of the three
lines now fast to him, that they foreshortened, and, of themselves,
warped the devoted boats towards the planted irons in him; though now
for a moment the whale drew aside a little, as if to rally for a more
tremendous charge. Seizing that opportunity, Ahab first paid out more
line: and then was rapidly hauling and jerking in upon it again--hoping
that way to disencumber it of some snarls--when lo!--a sight more savage
than the embattled teeth of sharks!

Caught and twisted--corkscrewed in the mazes of the line, loose harpoons
and lances, with all their bristling barbs and points, came flashing
and dripping up to the chocks in the bows of Ahab's boat. Only one
thing could be done. Seizing the boat-knife, he critically reached
within--through--and then, without--the rays of steel; dragged in
the line beyond, passed it, inboard, to the bowsman, and then, twice
sundering the rope near the chocks--dropped the intercepted fagot of
steel into the sea; and was all fast again. That instant, the White
Whale made a sudden rush among the remaining tangles of the other lines;
by so doing, irresistibly dragged the more involved boats of Stubb and
Flask towards his flukes; dashed them together like two rolling husks on
a surf-beaten beach, and then, diving down into the sea, disappeared in
a boiling maelstrom, in which, for a space, the odorous cedar chips of
the wrecks danced round and round, like the grated nutmeg in a swiftly
stirred bowl of punch.

While the two crews were yet circling in the waters, reaching out after
the revolving line-tubs, oars, and other floating furniture, while
aslope little Flask bobbed up and down like an empty vial, twitching his
legs upwards to escape the dreaded jaws of sharks; and Stubb was lustily
singing out for some one to ladle him up; and while the old man's
line--now parting--admitted of his pulling into the creamy pool to
rescue whom he could;--in that wild simultaneousness of a thousand
concreted perils,--Ahab's yet unstricken boat seemed drawn up towards
Heaven by invisible wires,--as, arrow-like, shooting perpendicularly
from the sea, the White Whale dashed his broad forehead against its
bottom, and sent it, turning over and over, into the air; till it fell
again--gunwale downwards--and Ahab and his men struggled out from under
it, like seals from a sea-side cave.

The first uprising momentum of the whale--modifying its direction as
he struck the surface--involuntarily launched him along it, to a little
distance from the centre of the destruction he had made; and with his
back to it, he now lay for a moment slowly feeling with his flukes from
side to side; and whenever a stray oar, bit of plank, the least chip
or crumb of the boats touched his skin, his tail swiftly drew back, and
came sideways smiting the sea. But soon, as if satisfied that his work
for that time was done, he pushed his pleated forehead through the
ocean, and trailing after him the intertangled lines, continued his
leeward way at a traveller's methodic pace.

As before, the attentive ship having descried the whole fight, again
came bearing down to the rescue, and dropping a boat, picked up the
floating mariners, tubs, oars, and whatever else could be caught at, and
safely landed them on her decks. Some sprained shoulders, wrists, and
ankles; livid contusions; wrenched harpoons and lances; inextricable
intricacies of rope; shattered oars and planks; all these were there;
but no fatal or even serious ill seemed to have befallen any one. As
with Fedallah the day before, so Ahab was now found grimly clinging to
his boat's broken half, which afforded a comparatively easy float; nor
did it so exhaust him as the previous day's mishap.

But when he was helped to the deck, all eyes were fastened upon him; as
instead of standing by himself he still half-hung upon the shoulder of
Starbuck, who had thus far been the foremost to assist him. His ivory
leg had been snapped off, leaving but one short sharp splinter.

"Aye, aye, Starbuck, 'tis sweet to lean sometimes, be the leaner who he
will; and would old Ahab had leaned oftener than he has."

"The ferrule has not stood, sir," said the carpenter, now coming up; "I
put good work into that leg."

"But no bones broken, sir, I hope," said Stubb with true concern.

"Aye! and all splintered to pieces, Stubb!--d'ye see it.--But even with
a broken bone, old Ahab is untouched; and I account no living bone of
mine one jot more me, than this dead one that's lost. Nor white whale,
nor man, nor fiend, can so much as graze old Ahab in his own proper and
inaccessible being. Can any lead touch yonder floor, any mast scrape
yonder roof?--Aloft there! which way?"

"Dead to leeward, sir."

"Up helm, then; pile on the sail again, ship keepers! down the rest of
the spare boats and rig them--Mr. Starbuck away, and muster the boat's
crews."

"Let me first help thee towards the bulwarks, sir."

"Oh, oh, oh! how this splinter gores me now! Accursed fate! that the
unconquerable captain in the soul should have such a craven mate!"

"Sir?"

"My body, man, not thee. Give me something for a cane--there, that
shivered lance will do. Muster the men. Surely I have not seen him yet.
By heaven it cannot be!--missing?--quick! call them all."

The old man's hinted thought was true. Upon mustering the company, the
Parsee was not there.

"The Parsee!" cried Stubb--"he must have been caught in--"

"The black vomit wrench thee!--run all of ye above, alow, cabin,
forecastle--find him--not gone--not gone!"

But quickly they returned to him with the tidings that the Parsee was
nowhere to be found.

"Aye, sir," said Stubb--"caught among the tangles of your line--I
thought I saw him dragging under."

"MY line! MY line? Gone?--gone? What means that little word?--What
death-knell rings in it, that old Ahab shakes as if he were the belfry.
The harpoon, too!--toss over the litter there,--d'ye see it?--the forged
iron, men, the white whale's--no, no, no,--blistered fool! this hand did
dart it!--'tis in the fish!--Aloft there! Keep him nailed--Quick!--all
hands to the rigging of the boats--collect the oars--harpooneers!
the irons, the irons!--hoist the royals higher--a pull on all the
sheets!--helm there! steady, steady for your life! I'll ten times girdle
the unmeasured globe; yea and dive straight through it, but I'll slay
him yet!

"Great God! but for one single instant show thyself," cried Starbuck;
"never, never wilt thou capture him, old man--In Jesus' name no more of
this, that's worse than devil's madness. Two days chased; twice stove
to splinters; thy very leg once more snatched from under thee; thy evil
shadow gone--all good angels mobbing thee with warnings:--

"What more wouldst thou have?--Shall we keep chasing this murderous fish
till he swamps the last man? Shall we be dragged by him to the bottom
of the sea? Shall we be towed by him to the infernal world? Oh,
oh,--Impiety and blasphemy to hunt him more!"

"Starbuck, of late I've felt strangely moved to thee; ever since that
hour we both saw--thou know'st what, in one another's eyes. But in this
matter of the whale, be the front of thy face to me as the palm of this
hand--a lipless, unfeatured blank. Ahab is for ever Ahab, man. This
whole act's immutably decreed. 'Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion
years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates' lieutenant; I act
under orders. Look thou, underling! that thou obeyest mine.--Stand round
me, men. Ye see an old man cut down to the stump; leaning on a shivered
lance; propped up on a lonely foot. 'Tis Ahab--his body's part; but
Ahab's soul's a centipede, that moves upon a hundred legs. I feel
strained, half stranded, as ropes that tow dismasted frigates in a gale;
and I may look so. But ere I break, yell hear me crack; and till ye hear
THAT, know that Ahab's hawser tows his purpose yet. Believe ye, men, in
the things called omens? Then laugh aloud, and cry encore! For ere they
drown, drowning things will twice rise to the surface; then rise again,
to sink for evermore. So with Moby Dick--two days he's floated--tomorrow
will be the third. Aye, men, he'll rise once more,--but only to spout
his last! D'ye feel brave men, brave?"

"As fearless fire," cried Stubb.

"And as mechanical," muttered Ahab. Then as the men went forward, he
muttered on: "The things called omens! And yesterday I talked the same
to Starbuck there, concerning my broken boat. Oh! how valiantly I seek
to drive out of others' hearts what's clinched so fast in mine!--The
Parsee--the Parsee!--gone, gone? and he was to go before:--but still was
to be seen again ere I could perish--How's that?--There's a riddle now
might baffle all the lawyers backed by the ghosts of the whole line
of judges:--like a hawk's beak it pecks my brain. I'LL, I'LL solve it,
though!"

When dusk descended, the whale was still in sight to leeward.

So once more the sail was shortened, and everything passed nearly as
on the previous night; only, the sound of hammers, and the hum of the
grindstone was heard till nearly daylight, as the men toiled by lanterns
in the complete and careful rigging of the spare boats and sharpening
their fresh weapons for the morrow. Meantime, of the broken keel of
Ahab's wrecked craft the carpenter made him another leg; while still as
on the night before, slouched Ahab stood fixed within his scuttle; his
hid, heliotrope glance anticipatingly gone backward on its dial; sat due
eastward for the earliest sun.



CHAPTER 135. The Chase.--Third Day.


The morning of the third day dawned fair and fresh, and once more the
solitary night-man at the fore-mast-head was relieved by crowds of the
daylight look-outs, who dotted every mast and almost every spar.

"D'ye see him?" cried Ahab; but the whale was not yet in sight.

"In his infallible wake, though; but follow that wake, that's all. Helm
there; steady, as thou goest, and hast been going. What a lovely day
again! were it a new-made world, and made for a summer-house to the
angels, and this morning the first of its throwing open to them, a
fairer day could not dawn upon that world. Here's food for thought, had
Ahab time to think; but Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels, feels;
THAT'S tingling enough for mortal man! to think's audacity. God only has
that right and privilege. Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a
calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much
for that. And yet, I've sometimes thought my brain was very calm--frozen
calm, this old skull cracks so, like a glass in which the contents
turned to ice, and shiver it. And still this hair is growing now; this
moment growing, and heat must breed it; but no, it's like that sort
of common grass that will grow anywhere, between the earthy clefts of
Greenland ice or in Vesuvius lava. How the wild winds blow it; they whip
it about me as the torn shreds of split sails lash the tossed ship they
cling to. A vile wind that has no doubt blown ere this through prison
corridors and cells, and wards of hospitals, and ventilated them, and
now comes blowing hither as innocent as fleeces. Out upon it!--it's
tainted. Were I the wind, I'd blow no more on such a wicked, miserable
world. I'd crawl somewhere to a cave, and slink there. And yet, 'tis a
noble and heroic thing, the wind! who ever conquered it? In every fight
it has the last and bitterest blow. Run tilting at it, and you but run
through it. Ha! a coward wind that strikes stark naked men, but will not
stand to receive a single blow. Even Ahab is a braver thing--a nobler
thing than THAT. Would now the wind but had a body; but all the things
that most exasperate and outrage mortal man, all these things are
bodiless, but only bodiless as objects, not as agents. There's a most
special, a most cunning, oh, a most malicious difference! And yet, I
say again, and swear it now, that there's something all glorious and
gracious in the wind. These warm Trade Winds, at least, that in the
clear heavens blow straight on, in strong and steadfast, vigorous
mildness; and veer not from their mark, however the baser currents of
the sea may turn and tack, and mightiest Mississippies of the land swift
and swerve about, uncertain where to go at last. And by the eternal
Poles! these same Trades that so directly blow my good ship on; these
Trades, or something like them--something so unchangeable, and full as
strong, blow my keeled soul along! To it! Aloft there! What d'ye see?"

"Nothing, sir."

"Nothing! and noon at hand! The doubloon goes a-begging! See the sun!
Aye, aye, it must be so. I've oversailed him. How, got the start? Aye,
he's chasing ME now; not I, HIM--that's bad; I might have known it, too.
Fool! the lines--the harpoons he's towing. Aye, aye, I have run him by
last night. About! about! Come down, all of ye, but the regular look
outs! Man the braces!"

Steering as she had done, the wind had been somewhat on the Pequod's
quarter, so that now being pointed in the reverse direction, the braced
ship sailed hard upon the breeze as she rechurned the cream in her own
white wake.

"Against the wind he now steers for the open jaw," murmured Starbuck to
himself, as he coiled the new-hauled main-brace upon the rail. "God keep
us, but already my bones feel damp within me, and from the inside wet my
flesh. I misdoubt me that I disobey my God in obeying him!"

"Stand by to sway me up!" cried Ahab, advancing to the hempen basket.
"We should meet him soon."

"Aye, aye, sir," and straightway Starbuck did Ahab's bidding, and once
more Ahab swung on high.

A whole hour now passed; gold-beaten out to ages. Time itself now held
long breaths with keen suspense. But at last, some three points off the
weather bow, Ahab descried the spout again, and instantly from the three
mast-heads three shrieks went up as if the tongues of fire had voiced
it.

"Forehead to forehead I meet thee, this third time, Moby Dick! On deck
there!--brace sharper up; crowd her into the wind's eye. He's too
far off to lower yet, Mr. Starbuck. The sails shake! Stand over that
helmsman with a top-maul! So, so; he travels fast, and I must down. But
let me have one more good round look aloft here at the sea; there's
time for that. An old, old sight, and yet somehow so young; aye, and
not changed a wink since I first saw it, a boy, from the sand-hills of
Nantucket! The same!--the same!--the same to Noah as to me. There's
a soft shower to leeward. Such lovely leewardings! They must lead
somewhere--to something else than common land, more palmy than the
palms. Leeward! the white whale goes that way; look to windward,
then; the better if the bitterer quarter. But good bye, good bye, old
mast-head! What's this?--green? aye, tiny mosses in these warped cracks.
No such green weather stains on Ahab's head! There's the difference now
between man's old age and matter's. But aye, old mast, we both grow old
together; sound in our hulls, though, are we not, my ship? Aye, minus
a leg, that's all. By heaven this dead wood has the better of my live
flesh every way. I can't compare with it; and I've known some ships made
of dead trees outlast the lives of men made of the most vital stuff of
vital fathers. What's that he said? he should still go before me, my
pilot; and yet to be seen again? But where? Will I have eyes at the
bottom of the sea, supposing I descend those endless stairs? and all
night I've been sailing from him, wherever he did sink to. Aye, aye,
like many more thou told'st direful truth as touching thyself, O Parsee;
but, Ahab, there thy shot fell short. Good-bye, mast-head--keep a good
eye upon the whale, the while I'm gone. We'll talk to-morrow, nay,
to-night, when the white whale lies down there, tied by head and tail."

He gave the word; and still gazing round him, was steadily lowered
through the cloven blue air to the deck.

In due time the boats were lowered; but as standing in his shallop's
stern, Ahab just hovered upon the point of the descent, he waved to the
mate,--who held one of the tackle-ropes on deck--and bade him pause.

"Starbuck!"

"Sir?"

"For the third time my soul's ship starts upon this voyage, Starbuck."

"Aye, sir, thou wilt have it so."

"Some ships sail from their ports, and ever afterwards are missing,
Starbuck!"

"Truth, sir: saddest truth."

"Some men die at ebb tide; some at low water; some at the full of
the flood;--and I feel now like a billow that's all one crested comb,
Starbuck. I am old;--shake hands with me, man."

Their hands met; their eyes fastened; Starbuck's tears the glue.

"Oh, my captain, my captain!--noble heart--go not--go not!--see, it's a
brave man that weeps; how great the agony of the persuasion then!"

"Lower away!"--cried Ahab, tossing the mate's arm from him. "Stand by
the crew!"

In an instant the boat was pulling round close under the stern.

"The sharks! the sharks!" cried a voice from the low cabin-window there;
"O master, my master, come back!"

But Ahab heard nothing; for his own voice was high-lifted then; and the
boat leaped on.

Yet the voice spake true; for scarce had he pushed from the ship, when
numbers of sharks, seemingly rising from out the dark waters beneath
the hull, maliciously snapped at the blades of the oars, every time they
dipped in the water; and in this way accompanied the boat with their
bites. It is a thing not uncommonly happening to the whale-boats in
those swarming seas; the sharks at times apparently following them in
the same prescient way that vultures hover over the banners of marching
regiments in the east. But these were the first sharks that had been
observed by the Pequod since the White Whale had been first descried;
and whether it was that Ahab's crew were all such tiger-yellow
barbarians, and therefore their flesh more musky to the senses of the
sharks--a matter sometimes well known to affect them,--however it was,
they seemed to follow that one boat without molesting the others.

"Heart of wrought steel!" murmured Starbuck gazing over the side, and
following with his eyes the receding boat--"canst thou yet ring boldly
to that sight?--lowering thy keel among ravening sharks, and followed by
them, open-mouthed to the chase; and this the critical third day?--For
when three days flow together in one continuous intense pursuit; be sure
the first is the morning, the second the noon, and the third the evening
and the end of that thing--be that end what it may. Oh! my God! what
is this that shoots through me, and leaves me so deadly calm, yet
expectant,--fixed at the top of a shudder! Future things swim before me,
as in empty outlines and skeletons; all the past is somehow grown dim.
Mary, girl! thou fadest in pale glories behind me; boy! I seem to
see but thy eyes grown wondrous blue. Strangest problems of life seem
clearing; but clouds sweep between--Is my journey's end coming? My legs
feel faint; like his who has footed it all day. Feel thy heart,--beats
it yet? Stir thyself, Starbuck!--stave it off--move, move!
speak aloud!--Mast-head there! See ye my boy's hand on the
hill?--Crazed;--aloft there!--keep thy keenest eye upon the boats:--

"Mark well the whale!--Ho! again!--drive off that hawk! see! he pecks--he
tears the vane"--pointing to the red flag flying at the main-truck--"Ha!
he soars away with it!--Where's the old man now? see'st thou that sight,
oh Ahab!--shudder, shudder!"

The boats had not gone very far, when by a signal from the mast-heads--a
downward pointed arm, Ahab knew that the whale had sounded; but
intending to be near him at the next rising, he held on his way a little
sideways from the vessel; the becharmed crew maintaining the profoundest
silence, as the head-beat waves hammered and hammered against the
opposing bow.

"Drive, drive in your nails, oh ye waves! to their uttermost heads
drive them in! ye but strike a thing without a lid; and no coffin and no
hearse can be mine:--and hemp only can kill me! Ha! ha!"

Suddenly the waters around them slowly swelled in broad circles; then
quickly upheaved, as if sideways sliding from a submerged berg of
ice, swiftly rising to the surface. A low rumbling sound was heard; a
subterraneous hum; and then all held their breaths; as bedraggled with
trailing ropes, and harpoons, and lances, a vast form shot lengthwise,
but obliquely from the sea. Shrouded in a thin drooping veil of mist, it
hovered for a moment in the rainbowed air; and then fell swamping back
into the deep. Crushed thirty feet upwards, the waters flashed for
an instant like heaps of fountains, then brokenly sank in a shower of
flakes, leaving the circling surface creamed like new milk round the
marble trunk of the whale.

"Give way!" cried Ahab to the oarsmen, and the boats darted forward to
the attack; but maddened by yesterday's fresh irons that corroded in
him, Moby Dick seemed combinedly possessed by all the angels that fell
from heaven. The wide tiers of welded tendons overspreading his broad
white forehead, beneath the transparent skin, looked knitted together;
as head on, he came churning his tail among the boats; and once more
flailed them apart; spilling out the irons and lances from the two
mates' boats, and dashing in one side of the upper part of their bows,
but leaving Ahab's almost without a scar.

While Daggoo and Queequeg were stopping the strained planks; and as the
whale swimming out from them, turned, and showed one entire flank as he
shot by them again; at that moment a quick cry went up. Lashed round
and round to the fish's back; pinioned in the turns upon turns in which,
during the past night, the whale had reeled the involutions of the lines
around him, the half torn body of the Parsee was seen; his sable raiment
frayed to shreds; his distended eyes turned full upon old Ahab.

The harpoon dropped from his hand.

"Befooled, befooled!"--drawing in a long lean breath--"Aye, Parsee! I
see thee again.--Aye, and thou goest before; and this, THIS then is the
hearse that thou didst promise. But I hold thee to the last letter of
thy word. Where is the second hearse? Away, mates, to the ship! those
boats are useless now; repair them if ye can in time, and return to
me; if not, Ahab is enough to die--Down, men! the first thing that but
offers to jump from this boat I stand in, that thing I harpoon. Ye are
not other men, but my arms and my legs; and so obey me.--Where's the
whale? gone down again?"

But he looked too nigh the boat; for as if bent upon escaping with the
corpse he bore, and as if the particular place of the last encounter had
been but a stage in his leeward voyage, Moby Dick was now again steadily
swimming forward; and had almost passed the ship,--which thus far had
been sailing in the contrary direction to him, though for the present
her headway had been stopped. He seemed swimming with his utmost
velocity, and now only intent upon pursuing his own straight path in the
sea.

"Oh! Ahab," cried Starbuck, "not too late is it, even now, the third
day, to desist. See! Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that
madly seekest him!"

Setting sail to the rising wind, the lonely boat was swiftly impelled to
leeward, by both oars and canvas. And at last when Ahab was sliding
by the vessel, so near as plainly to distinguish Starbuck's face as he
leaned over the rail, he hailed him to turn the vessel about, and follow
him, not too swiftly, at a judicious interval. Glancing upwards, he
saw Tashtego, Queequeg, and Daggoo, eagerly mounting to the three
mast-heads; while the oarsmen were rocking in the two staved boats
which had but just been hoisted to the side, and were busily at work in
repairing them. One after the other, through the port-holes, as he sped,
he also caught flying glimpses of Stubb and Flask, busying themselves
on deck among bundles of new irons and lances. As he saw all this; as he
heard the hammers in the broken boats; far other hammers seemed driving
a nail into his heart. But he rallied. And now marking that the vane or
flag was gone from the main-mast-head, he shouted to Tashtego, who had
just gained that perch, to descend again for another flag, and a hammer
and nails, and so nail it to the mast.

Whether fagged by the three days' running chase, and the resistance
to his swimming in the knotted hamper he bore; or whether it was some
latent deceitfulness and malice in him: whichever was true, the White
Whale's way now began to abate, as it seemed, from the boat so rapidly
nearing him once more; though indeed the whale's last start had not been
so long a one as before. And still as Ahab glided over the waves the
unpitying sharks accompanied him; and so pertinaciously stuck to the
boat; and so continually bit at the plying oars, that the blades became
jagged and crunched, and left small splinters in the sea, at almost
every dip.

"Heed them not! those teeth but give new rowlocks to your oars. Pull on!
'tis the better rest, the shark's jaw than the yielding water."

"But at every bite, sir, the thin blades grow smaller and smaller!"

"They will last long enough! pull on!--But who can tell"--he
muttered--"whether these sharks swim to feast on the whale or on
Ahab?--But pull on! Aye, all alive, now--we near him. The helm! take the
helm! let me pass,"--and so saying two of the oarsmen helped him forward
to the bows of the still flying boat.

At length as the craft was cast to one side, and ran ranging along
with the White Whale's flank, he seemed strangely oblivious of its
advance--as the whale sometimes will--and Ahab was fairly within the
smoky mountain mist, which, thrown off from the whale's spout, curled
round his great, Monadnock hump; he was even thus close to him; when,
with body arched back, and both arms lengthwise high-lifted to the
poise, he darted his fierce iron, and his far fiercer curse into the
hated whale. As both steel and curse sank to the socket, as if sucked
into a morass, Moby Dick sideways writhed; spasmodically rolled his nigh
flank against the bow, and, without staving a hole in it, so suddenly
canted the boat over, that had it not been for the elevated part of the
gunwale to which he then clung, Ahab would once more have been tossed
into the sea. As it was, three of the oarsmen--who foreknew not the
precise instant of the dart, and were therefore unprepared for its
effects--these were flung out; but so fell, that, in an instant two of
them clutched the gunwale again, and rising to its level on a combing
wave, hurled themselves bodily inboard again; the third man helplessly
dropping astern, but still afloat and swimming.

Almost simultaneously, with a mighty volition of ungraduated,
instantaneous swiftness, the White Whale darted through the weltering
sea. But when Ahab cried out to the steersman to take new turns with
the line, and hold it so; and commanded the crew to turn round on their
seats, and tow the boat up to the mark; the moment the treacherous line
felt that double strain and tug, it snapped in the empty air!

"What breaks in me? Some sinew cracks!--'tis whole again; oars! oars!
Burst in upon him!"

Hearing the tremendous rush of the sea-crashing boat, the whale wheeled
round to present his blank forehead at bay; but in that evolution,
catching sight of the nearing black hull of the ship; seemingly seeing
in it the source of all his persecutions; bethinking it--it may be--a
larger and nobler foe; of a sudden, he bore down upon its advancing
prow, smiting his jaws amid fiery showers of foam.

Ahab staggered; his hand smote his forehead. "I grow blind; hands!
stretch out before me that I may yet grope my way. Is't night?"

"The whale! The ship!" cried the cringing oarsmen.

"Oars! oars! Slope downwards to thy depths, O sea, that ere it be for
ever too late, Ahab may slide this last, last time upon his mark! I see:
the ship! the ship! Dash on, my men! Will ye not save my ship?"

But as the oarsmen violently forced their boat through the
sledge-hammering seas, the before whale-smitten bow-ends of two planks
burst through, and in an instant almost, the temporarily disabled boat
lay nearly level with the waves; its half-wading, splashing crew, trying
hard to stop the gap and bale out the pouring water.

Meantime, for that one beholding instant, Tashtego's mast-head hammer
remained suspended in his hand; and the red flag, half-wrapping him as
with a plaid, then streamed itself straight out from him, as his own
forward-flowing heart; while Starbuck and Stubb, standing upon the
bowsprit beneath, caught sight of the down-coming monster just as soon
as he.

"The whale, the whale! Up helm, up helm! Oh, all ye sweet powers of air,
now hug me close! Let not Starbuck die, if die he must, in a woman's
fainting fit. Up helm, I say--ye fools, the jaw! the jaw! Is this the
end of all my bursting prayers? all my life-long fidelities? Oh, Ahab,
Ahab, lo, thy work. Steady! helmsman, steady. Nay, nay! Up helm again!
He turns to meet us! Oh, his unappeasable brow drives on towards one,
whose duty tells him he cannot depart. My God, stand by me now!"

"Stand not by me, but stand under me, whoever you are that will now help
Stubb; for Stubb, too, sticks here. I grin at thee, thou grinning whale!
Who ever helped Stubb, or kept Stubb awake, but Stubb's own unwinking
eye? And now poor Stubb goes to bed upon a mattrass that is all too
soft; would it were stuffed with brushwood! I grin at thee, thou
grinning whale! Look ye, sun, moon, and stars! I call ye assassins of
as good a fellow as ever spouted up his ghost. For all that, I would yet
ring glasses with ye, would ye but hand the cup! Oh, oh! oh, oh! thou
grinning whale, but there'll be plenty of gulping soon! Why fly ye
not, O Ahab! For me, off shoes and jacket to it; let Stubb die in
his drawers! A most mouldy and over salted death, though;--cherries!
cherries! cherries! Oh, Flask, for one red cherry ere we die!"

"Cherries? I only wish that we were where they grow. Oh, Stubb, I hope
my poor mother's drawn my part-pay ere this; if not, few coppers will
now come to her, for the voyage is up."

From the ship's bows, nearly all the seamen now hung inactive; hammers,
bits of plank, lances, and harpoons, mechanically retained in their
hands, just as they had darted from their various employments; all their
enchanted eyes intent upon the whale, which from side to side strangely
vibrating his predestinating head, sent a broad band of overspreading
semicircular foam before him as he rushed. Retribution, swift vengeance,
eternal malice were in his whole aspect, and spite of all that mortal
man could do, the solid white buttress of his forehead smote the ship's
starboard bow, till men and timbers reeled. Some fell flat upon their
faces. Like dislodged trucks, the heads of the harpooneers aloft shook
on their bull-like necks. Through the breach, they heard the waters
pour, as mountain torrents down a flume.

"The ship! The hearse!--the second hearse!" cried Ahab from the boat;
"its wood could only be American!"

Diving beneath the settling ship, the whale ran quivering along its
keel; but turning under water, swiftly shot to the surface again, far
off the other bow, but within a few yards of Ahab's boat, where, for a
time, he lay quiescent.

"I turn my body from the sun. What ho, Tashtego! let me hear thy hammer.
Oh! ye three unsurrendered spires of mine; thou uncracked keel; and only
god-bullied hull; thou firm deck, and haughty helm, and Pole-pointed
prow,--death-glorious ship! must ye then perish, and without me? Am I
cut off from the last fond pride of meanest shipwrecked captains? Oh,
lonely death on lonely life! Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in
my topmost grief. Ho, ho! from all your furthest bounds, pour ye now in,
ye bold billows of my whole foregone life, and top this one piled comber
of my death! Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering
whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at
thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins
and all hearses to one common pool! and since neither can be mine, let
me then tow to pieces, while still chasing thee, though tied to thee,
thou damned whale! THUS, I give up the spear!"

The harpoon was darted; the stricken whale flew forward; with igniting
velocity the line ran through the grooves;--ran foul. Ahab stooped to
clear it; he did clear it; but the flying turn caught him round the
neck, and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their victim, he was
shot out of the boat, ere the crew knew he was gone. Next instant, the
heavy eye-splice in the rope's final end flew out of the stark-empty
tub, knocked down an oarsman, and smiting the sea, disappeared in its
depths.

For an instant, the tranced boat's crew stood still; then turned. "The
ship? Great God, where is the ship?" Soon they through dim, bewildering
mediums saw her sidelong fading phantom, as in the gaseous Fata Morgana;
only the uppermost masts out of water; while fixed by infatuation, or
fidelity, or fate, to their once lofty perches, the pagan harpooneers
still maintained their sinking lookouts on the sea. And now, concentric
circles seized the lone boat itself, and all its crew, and each floating
oar, and every lance-pole, and spinning, animate and inanimate, all
round and round in one vortex, carried the smallest chip of the Pequod
out of sight.

But as the last whelmings intermixingly poured themselves over the
sunken head of the Indian at the mainmast, leaving a few inches of the
erect spar yet visible, together with long streaming yards of the flag,
which calmly undulated, with ironical coincidings, over the destroying
billows they almost touched;--at that instant, a red arm and a hammer
hovered backwardly uplifted in the open air, in the act of nailing
the flag faster and yet faster to the subsiding spar. A sky-hawk that
tauntingly had followed the main-truck downwards from its natural home
among the stars, pecking at the flag, and incommoding Tashtego there;
this bird now chanced to intercept its broad fluttering wing between the
hammer and the wood; and simultaneously feeling that etherial thrill,
the submerged savage beneath, in his death-gasp, kept his hammer frozen
there; and so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his
imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the
flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink
to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and
helmeted herself with it.

Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white
surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great
shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.




Epilogue

"AND I ONLY AM ESCAPED ALONE TO TELL THEE" Job.

The drama's done. Why then here does any one step forth?--Because one
did survive the wreck.

It so chanced, that after the Parsee's disappearance, I was he whom the
Fates ordained to take the place of Ahab's bowsman, when that bowsman
assumed the vacant post; the same, who, when on the last day the three
men were tossed from out of the rocking boat, was dropped astern. So,
floating on the margin of the ensuing scene, and in full sight of it,
when the halfspent suction of the sunk ship reached me, I was then,
but slowly, drawn towards the closing vortex. When I reached it, it had
subsided to a creamy pool. Round and round, then, and ever contracting
towards the button-like black bubble at the axis of that slowly wheeling
circle, like another Ixion I did revolve. Till, gaining that vital
centre, the black bubble upward burst; and now, liberated by reason of
its cunning spring, and, owing to its great buoyancy, rising with great
force, the coffin life-buoy shot lengthwise from the sea, fell over, and
floated by my side. Buoyed up by that coffin, for almost one whole day
and night, I floated on a soft and dirgelike main. The unharming sharks,
they glided by as if with padlocks on their mouths; the savage sea-hawks
sailed with sheathed beaks. On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer,
and picked me up at last. It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in
her retracing search after her missing children, only found another
orphan.





End of Project Gutenberg's Moby Dick; or The Whale, by Herman Melville

*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MOBY DICK; OR THE WHALE ***

***** This file should be named 2701.txt or 2701.zip *****
This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
        http://www.gutenberg.org/2/7/0/2701/

Produced by Daniel Lazarus and Jonesey

Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
will be renamed.

Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
redistribution.



*** START: FULL LICENSE ***

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK

To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
http://gutenberg.org/license).


Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
electronic works

1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.

1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
works.  See paragraph 1.E below.

1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.

1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
States.

1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:

1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
copied or distributed:

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
1.E.9.

1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.

1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.

1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
Gutenberg-tm License.

1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.

1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.

1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
that

- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."

- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
     License.  You must require such a user to return or
     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
     Project Gutenberg-tm works.

- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
     of receipt of the work.

- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.

1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.

1.F.

1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
your equipment.

1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
DAMAGE.

1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
opportunities to fix the problem.

1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.

1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.

1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.


Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm

Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
people in all walks of life.

Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
assistance they need, are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.


Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation

The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
http://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.

The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
page at http://pglaf.org

For additional contact information:
     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
     Chief Executive and Director
     gbnewby@pglaf.org


Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation

Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
status with the IRS.

The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
particular state visit http://pglaf.org

While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
approach us with offers to donate.

International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.

Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate


Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
works.

Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.


Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.


Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:

     http://www.gutenberg.org

This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
The Project Gutenberg EBook of The King James Bible

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org


Title: The King James Bible

Release Date: March 2, 2011 [EBook #10]
[This King James Bible was orginally posted by Project Gutenberg
in late 1989]

Language: English


*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE KING JAMES BIBLE ***














The Old Testament of the King James Version of the Bible




The First Book of Moses:  Called Genesis


1:1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

1:2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon
the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the
waters.

1:3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

1:4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light
from the darkness.

1:5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night.
And the evening and the morning were the first day.

1:6 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters,
and let it divide the waters from the waters.

1:7 And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were
under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament:
and it was so.

1:8 And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the
morning were the second day.

1:9 And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together
unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.

1:10 And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of
the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.

1:11 And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding
seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is
in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.

1:12 And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after
his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after
his kind: and God saw that it was good.

1:13 And the evening and the morning were the third day.

1:14 And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven
to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for
seasons, and for days, and years: 1:15 And let them be for lights in
the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was
so.

1:16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day,
and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.

1:17 And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light
upon the earth, 1:18 And to rule over the day and over the night, and
to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.

1:19 And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.

1:20 And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving
creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the
open firmament of heaven.

1:21 And God created great whales, and every living creature that
moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind,
and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

1:22 And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill
the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.

1:23 And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.

1:24 And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after
his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his
kind: and it was so.

1:25 And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle
after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after
his kind: and God saw that it was good.

1:26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness:
and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl
of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over
every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

1:27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created
he him; male and female created he them.

1:28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and
multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion
over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every
living thing that moveth upon the earth.

1:29 And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed,
which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which
is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.

1:30 And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air,
and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is
life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.

1:31 And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was
very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.

2:1 Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of
them.

2:2 And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and
he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.

2:3 And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that
in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made.

2:4 These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when
they were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the
heavens, 2:5 And every plant of the field before it was in the earth,
and every herb of the field before it grew: for the LORD God had not
caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the
ground.

2:6 But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole
face of the ground.

2:7 And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and
breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living
soul.

2:8 And the LORD God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he
put the man whom he had formed.

2:9 And out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree that is
pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the
midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

2:10 And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence
it was parted, and became into four heads.

2:11 The name of the first is Pison: that is it which compasseth the
whole land of Havilah, where there is gold; 2:12 And the gold of that
land is good: there is bdellium and the onyx stone.

2:13 And the name of the second river is Gihon: the same is it that
compasseth the whole land of Ethiopia.

2:14 And the name of the third river is Hiddekel: that is it which
goeth toward the east of Assyria. And the fourth river is Euphrates.

2:15 And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of
Eden to dress it and to keep it.

2:16 And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the
garden thou mayest freely eat: 2:17 But of the tree of the knowledge
of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou
eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.

2:18 And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be
alone; I will make him an help meet for him.

2:19 And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the
field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see
what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living
creature, that was the name thereof.

2:20 And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air,
and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found an
help meet for him.

2:21 And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he
slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead
thereof; 2:22 And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made
he a woman, and brought her unto the man.

2:23 And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my
flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.

2:24 Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall
cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.

2:25 And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not
ashamed.

3:1 Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which
the LORD God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said,
Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?  3:2 And the woman said
unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden:
3:3 But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden,
God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest
ye die.

3:4 And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: 3:5
For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall
be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.

3:6 And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that
it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one
wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto
her husband with her; and he did eat.

3:7 And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they
were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves
aprons.

3:8 And they heard the voice of the LORD God walking in the garden in
the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the
presence of the LORD God amongst the trees of the garden.

3:9 And the LORD God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art
thou?  3:10 And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was
afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.

3:11 And he said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten
of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?
3:12 And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she
gave me of the tree, and I did eat.

3:13 And the LORD God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast
done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.

3:14 And the LORD God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done
this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the
field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the
days of thy life: 3:15 And I will put enmity between thee and the
woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head,
and thou shalt bruise his heel.

3:16 Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and
thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy
desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.

3:17 And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice
of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee,
saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake;
in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; 3:18 Thorns
also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the
herb of the field; 3:19 In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread,
till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for
dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.

3:20 And Adam called his wife's name Eve; because she was the mother
of all living.

3:21 Unto Adam also and to his wife did the LORD God make coats of
skins, and clothed them.

3:22 And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to
know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also
of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: 3:23 Therefore the
LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground
from whence he was taken.

3:24 So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden
of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep
the way of the tree of life.

4:1 And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain, and
said, I have gotten a man from the LORD.

4:2 And she again bare his brother Abel. And Abel was a keeper of
sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground.

4:3 And in process of time it came to pass, that Cain brought of the
fruit of the ground an offering unto the LORD.

4:4 And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of
the fat thereof. And the LORD had respect unto Abel and to his
offering: 4:5 But unto Cain and to his offering he had not respect.
And Cain was very wroth, and his countenance fell.

4:6 And the LORD said unto Cain, Why art thou wroth? and why is thy
countenance fallen?  4:7 If thou doest well, shalt thou not be
accepted? and if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto
thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him.

4:8 And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when
they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother,
and slew him.

4:9 And the LORD said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he
said, I know not: Am I my brother's keeper?  4:10 And he said, What
hast thou done? the voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from
the ground.

4:11 And now art thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her
mouth to receive thy brother's blood from thy hand; 4:12 When thou
tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her
strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth.

4:13 And Cain said unto the LORD, My punishment is greater than I can
bear.

4:14 Behold, thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the
earth; and from thy face shall I be hid; and I shall be a fugitive and
a vagabond in the earth; and it shall come to pass, that every one
that findeth me shall slay me.

4:15 And the LORD said unto him, Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain,
vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the LORD set a mark
upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.

4:16 And Cain went out from the presence of the LORD, and dwelt in the
land of Nod, on the east of Eden.

4:17 And Cain knew his wife; and she conceived, and bare Enoch: and he
builded a city, and called the name of the city, after the name of his
son, Enoch.

4:18 And unto Enoch was born Irad: and Irad begat Mehujael: and
Mehujael begat Methusael: and Methusael begat Lamech.

4:19 And Lamech took unto him two wives: the name of the one was Adah,
and the name of the other Zillah.

4:20 And Adah bare Jabal: he was the father of such as dwell in tents,
and of such as have cattle.

4:21 And his brother's name was Jubal: he was the father of all such
as handle the harp and organ.

4:22 And Zillah, she also bare Tubalcain, an instructer of every
artificer in brass and iron: and the sister of Tubalcain was Naamah.

4:23 And Lamech said unto his wives, Adah and Zillah, Hear my voice;
ye wives of Lamech, hearken unto my speech: for I have slain a man to
my wounding, and a young man to my hurt.

4:24 If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy and
sevenfold.

4:25 And Adam knew his wife again; and she bare a son, and called his
name Seth: For God, said she, hath appointed me another seed instead
of Abel, whom Cain slew.

4:26 And to Seth, to him also there was born a son; and he called his
name Enos: then began men to call upon the name of the LORD.

5:1 This is the book of the generations of Adam. In the day that God
created man, in the likeness of God made he him; 5:2 Male and female
created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the
day when they were created.

5:3 And Adam lived an hundred and thirty years, and begat a son in his
own likeness, and after his image; and called his name Seth: 5:4 And
the days of Adam after he had begotten Seth were eight hundred years:
and he begat sons and daughters: 5:5 And all the days that Adam lived
were nine hundred and thirty years: and he died.

5:6 And Seth lived an hundred and five years, and begat Enos: 5:7 And
Seth lived after he begat Enos eight hundred and seven years, and
begat sons and daughters: 5:8 And all the days of Seth were nine
hundred and twelve years: and he died.

5:9 And Enos lived ninety years, and begat Cainan: 5:10 And Enos lived
after he begat Cainan eight hundred and fifteen years, and begat sons
and daughters: 5:11 And all the days of Enos were nine hundred and
five years: and he died.

5:12 And Cainan lived seventy years and begat Mahalaleel: 5:13 And
Cainan lived after he begat Mahalaleel eight hundred and forty years,
and begat sons and daughters: 5:14 And all the days of Cainan were
nine hundred and ten years: and he died.

5:15 And Mahalaleel lived sixty and five years, and begat Jared: 5:16
And Mahalaleel lived after he begat Jared eight hundred and thirty
years, and begat sons and daughters: 5:17 And all the days of
Mahalaleel were eight hundred ninety and five years: and he died.

5:18 And Jared lived an hundred sixty and two years, and he begat
Enoch: 5:19 And Jared lived after he begat Enoch eight hundred years,
and begat sons and daughters: 5:20 And all the days of Jared were nine
hundred sixty and two years: and he died.

5:21 And Enoch lived sixty and five years, and begat Methuselah: 5:22
And Enoch walked with God after he begat Methuselah three hundred
years, and begat sons and daughters: 5:23 And all the days of Enoch
were three hundred sixty and five years: 5:24 And Enoch walked with
God: and he was not; for God took him.

5:25 And Methuselah lived an hundred eighty and seven years, and begat
Lamech.

5:26 And Methuselah lived after he begat Lamech seven hundred eighty
and two years, and begat sons and daughters: 5:27 And all the days of
Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine years: and he died.

5:28 And Lamech lived an hundred eighty and two years, and begat a
son: 5:29 And he called his name Noah, saying, This same shall comfort
us concerning our work and toil of our hands, because of the ground
which the LORD hath cursed.

5:30 And Lamech lived after he begat Noah five hundred ninety and five
years, and begat sons and daughters: 5:31 And all the days of Lamech
were seven hundred seventy and seven years: and he died.

5:32 And Noah was five hundred years old: and Noah begat Shem, Ham,
and Japheth.

6:1 And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the
earth, and daughters were born unto them, 6:2 That the sons of God saw
the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of
all which they chose.

6:3 And the LORD said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for
that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty
years.

6:4 There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that,
when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare
children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of
renown.

6:5 And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and
that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil
continually.

6:6 And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it
grieved him at his heart.

6:7 And the LORD said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the
face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and
the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them.

6:8 But Noah found grace in the eyes of the LORD.

6:9 These are the generations of Noah: Noah was a just man and perfect
in his generations, and Noah walked with God.

6:10 And Noah begat three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth.

6:11 The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled
with violence.

6:12 And God looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for
all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth.

6:13 And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me;
for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I
will destroy them with the earth.

6:14 Make thee an ark of gopher wood; rooms shalt thou make in the
ark, and shalt pitch it within and without with pitch.

6:15 And this is the fashion which thou shalt make it of: The length
of the ark shall be three hundred cubits, the breadth of it fifty
cubits, and the height of it thirty cubits.

6:16 A window shalt thou make to the ark, and in a cubit shalt thou
finish it above; and the door of the ark shalt thou set in the side
thereof; with lower, second, and third stories shalt thou make it.

6:17 And, behold, I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the
earth, to destroy all flesh, wherein is the breath of life, from under
heaven; and every thing that is in the earth shall die.

6:18 But with thee will I establish my covenant; and thou shalt come
into the ark, thou, and thy sons, and thy wife, and thy sons' wives
with thee.

6:19 And of every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort shalt
thou bring into the ark, to keep them alive with thee; they shall be
male and female.

6:20 Of fowls after their kind, and of cattle after their kind, of
every creeping thing of the earth after his kind, two of every sort
shall come unto thee, to keep them alive.

6:21 And take thou unto thee of all food that is eaten, and thou shalt
gather it to thee; and it shall be for food for thee, and for them.

6:22 Thus did Noah; according to all that God commanded him, so did
he.

7:1 And the LORD said unto Noah, Come thou and all thy house into the
ark; for thee have I seen righteous before me in this generation.

7:2 Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens, the male
and his female: and of beasts that are not clean by two, the male and
his female.

7:3 Of fowls also of the air by sevens, the male and the female; to
keep seed alive upon the face of all the earth.

7:4 For yet seven days, and I will cause it to rain upon the earth
forty days and forty nights; and every living substance that I have
made will I destroy from off the face of the earth.

7:5 And Noah did according unto all that the LORD commanded him.

7:6 And Noah was six hundred years old when the flood of waters was
upon the earth.

7:7 And Noah went in, and his sons, and his wife, and his sons' wives
with him, into the ark, because of the waters of the flood.

7:8 Of clean beasts, and of beasts that are not clean, and of fowls,
and of every thing that creepeth upon the earth, 7:9 There went in two
and two unto Noah into the ark, the male and the female, as God had
commanded Noah.

7:10 And it came to pass after seven days, that the waters of the
flood were upon the earth.

7:11 In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month,
the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains
of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.

7:12 And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights.

7:13 In the selfsame day entered Noah, and Shem, and Ham, and Japheth,
the sons of Noah, and Noah's wife, and the three wives of his sons
with them, into the ark; 7:14 They, and every beast after his kind,
and all the cattle after their kind, and every creeping thing that
creepeth upon the earth after his kind, and every fowl after his kind,
every bird of every sort.

7:15 And they went in unto Noah into the ark, two and two of all
flesh, wherein is the breath of life.

7:16 And they that went in, went in male and female of all flesh, as
God had commanded him: and the LORD shut him in.

7:17 And the flood was forty days upon the earth; and the waters
increased, and bare up the ark, and it was lift up above the earth.

7:18 And the waters prevailed, and were increased greatly upon the
earth; and the ark went upon the face of the waters.

7:19 And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the
high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered.

7:20 Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains
were covered.

7:21 And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and
of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth
upon the earth, and every man: 7:22 All in whose nostrils was the
breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died.

7:23 And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face
of the ground, both man, and cattle, and the creeping things, and the
fowl of the heaven; and they were destroyed from the earth: and Noah
only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark.

7:24 And the waters prevailed upon the earth an hundred and fifty
days.

8:1 And God remembered Noah, and every living thing, and all the
cattle that was with him in the ark: and God made a wind to pass over
the earth, and the waters asswaged; 8:2 The fountains also of the deep
and the windows of heaven were stopped, and the rain from heaven was
restrained; 8:3 And the waters returned from off the earth
continually: and after the end of the hundred and fifty days the
waters were abated.

8:4 And the ark rested in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of
the month, upon the mountains of Ararat.

8:5 And the waters decreased continually until the tenth month: in the
tenth month, on the first day of the month, were the tops of the
mountains seen.

8:6 And it came to pass at the end of forty days, that Noah opened the
window of the ark which he had made: 8:7 And he sent forth a raven,
which went forth to and fro, until the waters were dried up from off
the earth.

8:8 Also he sent forth a dove from him, to see if the waters were
abated from off the face of the ground; 8:9 But the dove found no rest
for the sole of her foot, and she returned unto him into the ark, for
the waters were on the face of the whole earth: then he put forth his
hand, and took her, and pulled her in unto him into the ark.

8:10 And he stayed yet other seven days; and again he sent forth the
dove out of the ark; 8:11 And the dove came in to him in the evening;
and, lo, in her mouth was an olive leaf pluckt off: so Noah knew that
the waters were abated from off the earth.

8:12 And he stayed yet other seven days; and sent forth the dove;
which returned not again unto him any more.

8:13 And it came to pass in the six hundredth and first year, in the
first month, the first day of the month, the waters were dried up from
off the earth: and Noah removed the covering of the ark, and looked,
and, behold, the face of the ground was dry.

8:14 And in the second month, on the seven and twentieth day of the
month, was the earth dried.

8:15 And God spake unto Noah, saying, 8:16 Go forth of the ark, thou,
and thy wife, and thy sons, and thy sons' wives with thee.

8:17 Bring forth with thee every living thing that is with thee, of
all flesh, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of every creeping thing
that creepeth upon the earth; that they may breed abundantly in the
earth, and be fruitful, and multiply upon the earth.

8:18 And Noah went forth, and his sons, and his wife, and his sons'
wives with him: 8:19 Every beast, every creeping thing, and every
fowl, and whatsoever creepeth upon the earth, after their kinds, went
forth out of the ark.

8:20 And Noah builded an altar unto the LORD; and took of every clean
beast, and of every clean fowl, and offered burnt offerings on the
altar.

8:21 And the LORD smelled a sweet savour; and the LORD said in his
heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake; for
the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth; neither will I
again smite any more every thing living, as I have done.

8:22 While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and
heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.

9:1 And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said unto them, Be
fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.

9:2 And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast
of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth
upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hand are
they delivered.

9:3 Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the
green herb have I given you all things.

9:4 But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall
ye not eat.

9:5 And surely your blood of your lives will I require; at the hand of
every beast will I require it, and at the hand of man; at the hand of
every man's brother will I require the life of man.

9:6 Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in
the image of God made he man.

9:7 And you, be ye fruitful, and multiply; bring forth abundantly in
the earth, and multiply therein.

9:8 And God spake unto Noah, and to his sons with him, saying, 9:9 And
I, behold, I establish my covenant with you, and with your seed after
you; 9:10 And with every living creature that is with you, of the
fowl, of the cattle, and of every beast of the earth with you; from
all that go out of the ark, to every beast of the earth.

9:11 And I will establish my covenant with you, neither shall all
flesh be cut off any more by the waters of a flood; neither shall
there any more be a flood to destroy the earth.

9:12 And God said, This is the token of the covenant which I make
between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for
perpetual generations: 9:13 I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall
be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth.

9:14 And it shall come to pass, when I bring a cloud over the earth,
that the bow shall be seen in the cloud: 9:15 And I will remember my
covenant, which is between me and you and every living creature of all
flesh; and the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all
flesh.

9:16 And the bow shall be in the cloud; and I will look upon it, that
I may remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living
creature of all flesh that is upon the earth.

9:17 And God said unto Noah, This is the token of the covenant, which
I have established between me and all flesh that is upon the earth.

9:18 And the sons of Noah, that went forth of the ark, were Shem, and
Ham, and Japheth: and Ham is the father of Canaan.

9:19 These are the three sons of Noah: and of them was the whole earth
overspread.

9:20 And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard:
9:21 And he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered
within his tent.

9:22 And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father,
and told his two brethren without.

9:23 And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their
shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their
father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father's
nakedness.

9:24 And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had
done unto him.

9:25 And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be
unto his brethren.

9:26 And he said, Blessed be the LORD God of Shem; and Canaan shall be
his servant.

9:27 God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of
Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.

9:28 And Noah lived after the flood three hundred and fifty years.

9:29 And all the days of Noah were nine hundred and fifty years: and
he died.

10:1 Now these are the generations of the sons of Noah, Shem, Ham, and
Japheth: and unto them were sons born after the flood.

10:2 The sons of Japheth; Gomer, and Magog, and Madai, and Javan, and
Tubal, and Meshech, and Tiras.

10:3 And the sons of Gomer; Ashkenaz, and Riphath, and Togarmah.

10:4 And the sons of Javan; Elishah, and Tarshish, Kittim, and
Dodanim.

10:5 By these were the isles of the Gentiles divided in their lands;
every one after his tongue, after their families, in their nations.

10:6 And the sons of Ham; Cush, and Mizraim, and Phut, and Canaan.

10:7 And the sons of Cush; Seba, and Havilah, and Sabtah, and Raamah,
and Sabtechah: and the sons of Raamah; Sheba, and Dedan.

10:8 And Cush begat Nimrod: he began to be a mighty one in the earth.

10:9 He was a mighty hunter before the LORD: wherefore it is said,
Even as Nimrod the mighty hunter before the LORD.

10:10 And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and
Accad, and Calneh, in the land of Shinar.

10:11 Out of that land went forth Asshur, and builded Nineveh, and the
city Rehoboth, and Calah, 10:12 And Resen between Nineveh and Calah:
the same is a great city.

10:13 And Mizraim begat Ludim, and Anamim, and Lehabim, and Naphtuhim,
10:14 And Pathrusim, and Casluhim, (out of whom came Philistim,) and
Caphtorim.

10:15 And Canaan begat Sidon his first born, and Heth, 10:16 And the
Jebusite, and the Amorite, and the Girgasite, 10:17 And the Hivite,
and the Arkite, and the Sinite, 10:18 And the Arvadite, and the
Zemarite, and the Hamathite: and afterward were the families of the
Canaanites spread abroad.

10:19 And the border of the Canaanites was from Sidon, as thou comest
to Gerar, unto Gaza; as thou goest, unto Sodom, and Gomorrah, and
Admah, and Zeboim, even unto Lasha.

10:20 These are the sons of Ham, after their families, after their
tongues, in their countries, and in their nations.

10:21 Unto Shem also, the father of all the children of Eber, the
brother of Japheth the elder, even to him were children born.

10:22 The children of Shem; Elam, and Asshur, and Arphaxad, and Lud,
and Aram.

10:23 And the children of Aram; Uz, and Hul, and Gether, and Mash.

10:24 And Arphaxad begat Salah; and Salah begat Eber.

10:25 And unto Eber were born two sons: the name of one was Peleg; for
in his days was the earth divided; and his brother's name was Joktan.

10:26 And Joktan begat Almodad, and Sheleph, and Hazarmaveth, and
Jerah, 10:27 And Hadoram, and Uzal, and Diklah, 10:28 And Obal, and
Abimael, and Sheba, 10:29 And Ophir, and Havilah, and Jobab: all these
were the sons of Joktan.

10:30 And their dwelling was from Mesha, as thou goest unto Sephar a
mount of the east.

10:31 These are the sons of Shem, after their families, after their
tongues, in their lands, after their nations.

10:32 These are the families of the sons of Noah, after their
generations, in their nations: and by these were the nations divided
in the earth after the flood.

11:1 And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.

11:2 And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they
found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.

11:3 And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn
them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for
morter.

11:4 And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose
top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be
scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.

11:5 And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the
children of men builded.

11:6 And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all
one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be
restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.

11:7 Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that
they may not understand one another's speech.

11:8 So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of
all the earth: and they left off to build the city.

11:9 Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did
there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the
LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

11:10 These are the generations of Shem: Shem was an hundred years
old, and begat Arphaxad two years after the flood: 11:11 And Shem
lived after he begat Arphaxad five hundred years, and begat sons and
daughters.

11:12 And Arphaxad lived five and thirty years, and begat Salah: 11:13
And Arphaxad lived after he begat Salah four hundred and three years,
and begat sons and daughters.

11:14 And Salah lived thirty years, and begat Eber: 11:15 And Salah
lived after he begat Eber four hundred and three years, and begat sons
and daughters.

11:16 And Eber lived four and thirty years, and begat Peleg: 11:17 And
Eber lived after he begat Peleg four hundred and thirty years, and
begat sons and daughters.

11:18 And Peleg lived thirty years, and begat Reu: 11:19 And Peleg
lived after he begat Reu two hundred and nine years, and begat sons
and daughters.

11:20 And Reu lived two and thirty years, and begat Serug: 11:21 And
Reu lived after he begat Serug two hundred and seven years, and begat
sons and daughters.

11:22 And Serug lived thirty years, and begat Nahor: 11:23 And Serug
lived after he begat Nahor two hundred years, and begat sons and
daughters.

11:24 And Nahor lived nine and twenty years, and begat Terah: 11:25
And Nahor lived after he begat Terah an hundred and nineteen years,
and begat sons and daughters.

11:26 And Terah lived seventy years, and begat Abram, Nahor, and
Haran.

11:27 Now these are the generations of Terah: Terah begat Abram,
Nahor, and Haran; and Haran begat Lot.

11:28 And Haran died before his father Terah in the land of his
nativity, in Ur of the Chaldees.

11:29 And Abram and Nahor took them wives: the name of Abram's wife
was Sarai; and the name of Nahor's wife, Milcah, the daughter of
Haran, the father of Milcah, and the father of Iscah.

11:30 But Sarai was barren; she had no child.

11:31 And Terah took Abram his son, and Lot the son of Haran his son's
son, and Sarai his daughter in law, his son Abram's wife; and they
went forth with them from Ur of the Chaldees, to go into the land of
Canaan; and they came unto Haran, and dwelt there.

11:32 And the days of Terah were two hundred and five years: and Terah
died in Haran.

12:1 Now the LORD had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country,
and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I
will shew thee: 12:2 And I will make of thee a great nation, and I
will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a
blessing: 12:3 And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him
that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be
blessed.

12:4 So Abram departed, as the LORD had spoken unto him; and Lot went
with him: and Abram was seventy and five years old when he departed
out of Haran.

12:5 And Abram took Sarai his wife, and Lot his brother's son, and all
their substance that they had gathered, and the souls that they had
gotten in Haran; and they went forth to go into the land of Canaan;
and into the land of Canaan they came.

12:6 And Abram passed through the land unto the place of Sichem, unto
the plain of Moreh. And the Canaanite was then in the land.

12:7 And the LORD appeared unto Abram, and said, Unto thy seed will I
give this land: and there builded he an altar unto the LORD, who
appeared unto him.

12:8 And he removed from thence unto a mountain on the east of Bethel,
and pitched his tent, having Bethel on the west, and Hai on the east:
and there he builded an altar unto the LORD, and called upon the name
of the LORD.

12:9 And Abram journeyed, going on still toward the south.

12:10 And there was a famine in the land: and Abram went down into
Egypt to sojourn there; for the famine was grievous in the land.

12:11 And it came to pass, when he was come near to enter into Egypt,
that he said unto Sarai his wife, Behold now, I know that thou art a
fair woman to look upon: 12:12 Therefore it shall come to pass, when
the Egyptians shall see thee, that they shall say, This is his wife:
and they will kill me, but they will save thee alive.

12:13 Say, I pray thee, thou art my sister: that it may be well with
me for thy sake; and my soul shall live because of thee.

12:14 And it came to pass, that, when Abram was come into Egypt, the
Egyptians beheld the woman that she was very fair.

12:15 The princes also of Pharaoh saw her, and commended her before
Pharaoh: and the woman was taken into Pharaoh's house.

12:16 And he entreated Abram well for her sake: and he had sheep, and
oxen, and he asses, and menservants, and maidservants, and she asses,
and camels.

12:17 And the LORD plagued Pharaoh and his house with great plagues
because of Sarai Abram's wife.

12:18 And Pharaoh called Abram and said, What is this that thou hast
done unto me? why didst thou not tell me that she was thy wife?  12:19
Why saidst thou, She is my sister? so I might have taken her to me to
wife: now therefore behold thy wife, take her, and go thy way.

12:20 And Pharaoh commanded his men concerning him: and they sent him
away, and his wife, and all that he had.

13:1 And Abram went up out of Egypt, he, and his wife, and all that he
had, and Lot with him, into the south.

13:2 And Abram was very rich in cattle, in silver, and in gold.

13:3 And he went on his journeys from the south even to Bethel, unto
the place where his tent had been at the beginning, between Bethel and
Hai; 13:4 Unto the place of the altar, which he had make there at the
first: and there Abram called on the name of the LORD.

13:5 And Lot also, which went with Abram, had flocks, and herds, and
tents.

13:6 And the land was not able to bear them, that they might dwell
together: for their substance was great, so that they could not dwell
together.

13:7 And there was a strife between the herdmen of Abram's cattle and
the herdmen of Lot's cattle: and the Canaanite and the Perizzite
dwelled then in the land.

13:8 And Abram said unto Lot, Let there be no strife, I pray thee,
between me and thee, and between my herdmen and thy herdmen; for we be
brethren.

13:9 Is not the whole land before thee? separate thyself, I pray thee,
from me: if thou wilt take the left hand, then I will go to the right;
or if thou depart to the right hand, then I will go to the left.

13:10 And Lot lifted up his eyes, and beheld all the plain of Jordan,
that it was well watered every where, before the LORD destroyed Sodom
and Gomorrah, even as the garden of the LORD, like the land of Egypt,
as thou comest unto Zoar.

13:11 Then Lot chose him all the plain of Jordan; and Lot journeyed
east: and they separated themselves the one from the other.

13:12 Abram dwelled in the land of Canaan, and Lot dwelled in the
cities of the plain, and pitched his tent toward Sodom.

13:13 But the men of Sodom were wicked and sinners before the LORD
exceedingly.

13:14 And the LORD said unto Abram, after that Lot was separated from
him, Lift up now thine eyes, and look from the place where thou art
northward, and southward, and eastward, and westward: 13:15 For all
the land which thou seest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed for
ever.

13:16 And I will make thy seed as the dust of the earth: so that if a
man can number the dust of the earth, then shall thy seed also be
numbered.

13:17 Arise, walk through the land in the length of it and in the
breadth of it; for I will give it unto thee.

13:18 Then Abram removed his tent, and came and dwelt in the plain of
Mamre, which is in Hebron, and built there an altar unto the LORD.

14:1 And it came to pass in the days of Amraphel king of Shinar,
Arioch king of Ellasar, Chedorlaomer king of Elam, and Tidal king of
nations; 14:2 That these made war with Bera king of Sodom, and with
Birsha king of Gomorrah, Shinab king of Admah, and Shemeber king of
Zeboiim, and the king of Bela, which is Zoar.

14:3 All these were joined together in the vale of Siddim, which is
the salt sea.

14:4 Twelve years they served Chedorlaomer, and in the thirteenth year
they rebelled.

14:5 And in the fourteenth year came Chedorlaomer, and the kings that
were with him, and smote the Rephaims in Ashteroth Karnaim, and the
Zuzims in Ham, and the Emins in Shaveh Kiriathaim, 14:6 And the
Horites in their mount Seir, unto Elparan, which is by the wilderness.

14:7 And they returned, and came to Enmishpat, which is Kadesh, and
smote all the country of the Amalekites, and also the Amorites, that
dwelt in Hazezontamar.

14:8 And there went out the king of Sodom, and the king of Gomorrah,
and the king of Admah, and the king of Zeboiim, and the king of Bela
(the same is Zoar;) and they joined battle with them in the vale of
Siddim; 14:9 With Chedorlaomer the king of Elam, and with Tidal king
of nations, and Amraphel king of Shinar, and Arioch king of Ellasar;
four kings with five.

14:10 And the vale of Siddim was full of slimepits; and the kings of
Sodom and Gomorrah fled, and fell there; and they that remained fled
to the mountain.

14:11 And they took all the goods of Sodom and Gomorrah, and all their
victuals, and went their way.

14:12 And they took Lot, Abram's brother's son, who dwelt in Sodom,
and his goods, and departed.

14:13 And there came one that had escaped, and told Abram the Hebrew;
for he dwelt in the plain of Mamre the Amorite, brother of Eshcol, and
brother of Aner: and these were confederate with Abram.

14:14 And when Abram heard that his brother was taken captive, he
armed his trained servants, born in his own house, three hundred and
eighteen, and pursued them unto Dan.

14:15 And he divided himself against them, he and his servants, by
night, and smote them, and pursued them unto Hobah, which is on the
left hand of Damascus.

14:16 And he brought back all the goods, and also brought again his
brother Lot, and his goods, and the women also, and the people.

14:17 And the king of Sodom went out to meet him after his return from
the slaughter of Chedorlaomer, and of the kings that were with him, at
the valley of Shaveh, which is the king's dale.

14:18 And Melchizedek king of Salem brought forth bread and wine: and
he was the priest of the most high God.

14:19 And he blessed him, and said, Blessed be Abram of the most high
God, possessor of heaven and earth: 14:20 And blessed be the most high
God, which hath delivered thine enemies into thy hand. And he gave him
tithes of all.

14:21 And the king of Sodom said unto Abram, Give me the persons, and
take the goods to thyself.

14:22 And Abram said to the king of Sodom, I have lift up mine hand
unto the LORD, the most high God, the possessor of heaven and earth,
14:23 That I will not take from a thread even to a shoelatchet, and
that I will not take any thing that is thine, lest thou shouldest say,
I have made Abram rich: 14:24 Save only that which the young men have
eaten, and the portion of the men which went with me, Aner, Eshcol,
and Mamre; let them take their portion.

15:1 After these things the word of the LORD came unto Abram in a
vision, saying, Fear not, Abram: I am thy shield, and thy exceeding
great reward.

15:2 And Abram said, LORD God, what wilt thou give me, seeing I go
childless, and the steward of my house is this Eliezer of Damascus?
15:3 And Abram said, Behold, to me thou hast given no seed: and, lo,
one born in my house is mine heir.

15:4 And, behold, the word of the LORD came unto him, saying, This
shall not be thine heir; but he that shall come forth out of thine own
bowels shall be thine heir.

15:5 And he brought him forth abroad, and said, Look now toward
heaven, and tell the stars, if thou be able to number them: and he
said unto him, So shall thy seed be.

15:6 And he believed in the LORD; and he counted it to him for
righteousness.

15:7 And he said unto him, I am the LORD that brought thee out of Ur
of the Chaldees, to give thee this land to inherit it.

15:8 And he said, LORD God, whereby shall I know that I shall inherit
it?  15:9 And he said unto him, Take me an heifer of three years old,
and a she goat of three years old, and a ram of three years old, and a
turtledove, and a young pigeon.

15:10 And he took unto him all these, and divided them in the midst,
and laid each piece one against another: but the birds divided he not.

15:11 And when the fowls came down upon the carcases, Abram drove them
away.

15:12 And when the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram;
and, lo, an horror of great darkness fell upon him.

15:13 And he said unto Abram, Know of a surety that thy seed shall be
a stranger in a land that is not their's, and shall serve them; and
they shall afflict them four hundred years; 15:14 And also that
nation, whom they shall serve, will I judge: and afterward shall they
come out with great substance.

15:15 And thou shalt go to thy fathers in peace; thou shalt be buried
in a good old age.

15:16 But in the fourth generation they shall come hither again: for
the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full.

15:17 And it came to pass, that, when the sun went down, and it was
dark, behold a smoking furnace, and a burning lamp that passed between
those pieces.

15:18 In the same day the LORD made a covenant with Abram, saying,
Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the
great river, the river Euphrates: 15:19 The Kenites, and the
Kenizzites, and the Kadmonites, 15:20 And the Hittites, and the
Perizzites, and the Rephaims, 15:21 And the Amorites, and the
Canaanites, and the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.

16:1 Now Sarai Abram's wife bare him no children: and she had an
handmaid, an Egyptian, whose name was Hagar.

16:2 And Sarai said unto Abram, Behold now, the LORD hath restrained
me from bearing: I pray thee, go in unto my maid; it may be that I may
obtain children by her. And Abram hearkened to the voice of Sarai.

16:3 And Sarai Abram's wife took Hagar her maid the Egyptian, after
Abram had dwelt ten years in the land of Canaan, and gave her to her
husband Abram to be his wife.

16:4 And he went in unto Hagar, and she conceived: and when she saw
that she had conceived, her mistress was despised in her eyes.

16:5 And Sarai said unto Abram, My wrong be upon thee: I have given my
maid into thy bosom; and when she saw that she had conceived, I was
despised in her eyes: the LORD judge between me and thee.

16:6 But Abram said unto Sarai, Behold, thy maid is in thine hand; do
to her as it pleaseth thee. And when Sarai dealt hardly with her, she
fled from her face.

16:7 And the angel of the LORD found her by a fountain of water in the
wilderness, by the fountain in the way to Shur.

16:8 And he said, Hagar, Sarai's maid, whence camest thou? and whither
wilt thou go? And she said, I flee from the face of my mistress Sarai.

16:9 And the angel of the LORD said unto her, Return to thy mistress,
and submit thyself under her hands.

16:10 And the angel of the LORD said unto her, I will multiply thy
seed exceedingly, that it shall not be numbered for multitude.

16:11 And the angel of the LORD said unto her, Behold, thou art with
child and shalt bear a son, and shalt call his name Ishmael; because
the LORD hath heard thy affliction.

16:12 And he will be a wild man; his hand will be against every man,
and every man's hand against him; and he shall dwell in the presence
of all his brethren.

16:13 And she called the name of the LORD that spake unto her, Thou
God seest me: for she said, Have I also here looked after him that
seeth me?  16:14 Wherefore the well was called Beerlahairoi; behold,
it is between Kadesh and Bered.

16:15 And Hagar bare Abram a son: and Abram called his son's name,
which Hagar bare, Ishmael.

16:16 And Abram was fourscore and six years old, when Hagar bare
Ishmael to Abram.

17:1 And when Abram was ninety years old and nine, the LORD appeared
to Abram, and said unto him, I am the Almighty God; walk before me,
and be thou perfect.

17:2 And I will make my covenant between me and thee, and will
multiply thee exceedingly.

17:3 And Abram fell on his face: and God talked with him, saying, 17:4
As for me, behold, my covenant is with thee, and thou shalt be a
father of many nations.

17:5 Neither shall thy name any more be called Abram, but thy name
shall be Abraham; for a father of many nations have I made thee.

17:6 And I will make thee exceeding fruitful, and I will make nations
of thee, and kings shall come out of thee.

17:7 And I will establish my covenant between me and thee and thy seed
after thee in their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be a
God unto thee, and to thy seed after thee.

17:8 And I will give unto thee, and to thy seed after thee, the land
wherein thou art a stranger, all the land of Canaan, for an
everlasting possession; and I will be their God.

17:9 And God said unto Abraham, Thou shalt keep my covenant therefore,
thou, and thy seed after thee in their generations.

17:10 This is my covenant, which ye shall keep, between me and you and
thy seed after thee; Every man child among you shall be circumcised.

17:11 And ye shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskin; and it shall
be a token of the covenant betwixt me and you.

17:12 And he that is eight days old shall be circumcised among you,
every man child in your generations, he that is born in the house, or
bought with money of any stranger, which is not of thy seed.

17:13 He that is born in thy house, and he that is bought with thy
money, must needs be circumcised: and my covenant shall be in your
flesh for an everlasting covenant.

17:14 And the uncircumcised man child whose flesh of his foreskin is
not circumcised, that soul shall be cut off from his people; he hath
broken my covenant.

17:15 And God said unto Abraham, As for Sarai thy wife, thou shalt not
call her name Sarai, but Sarah shall her name be.

17:16 And I will bless her, and give thee a son also of her: yea, I
will bless her, and she shall be a mother of nations; kings of people
shall be of her.

17:17 Then Abraham fell upon his face, and laughed, and said in his
heart, Shall a child be born unto him that is an hundred years old?
and shall Sarah, that is ninety years old, bear?  17:18 And Abraham
said unto God, O that Ishmael might live before thee!  17:19 And God
said, Sarah thy wife shall bear thee a son indeed; and thou shalt call
his name Isaac: and I will establish my covenant with him for an
everlasting covenant, and with his seed after him.

17:20 And as for Ishmael, I have heard thee: Behold, I have blessed
him, and will make him fruitful, and will multiply him exceedingly;
twelve princes shall he beget, and I will make him a great nation.

17:21 But my covenant will I establish with Isaac, which Sarah shall
bear unto thee at this set time in the next year.

17:22 And he left off talking with him, and God went up from Abraham.

17:23 And Abraham took Ishmael his son, and all that were born in his
house, and all that were bought with his money, every male among the
men of Abraham's house; and circumcised the flesh of their foreskin in
the selfsame day, as God had said unto him.

17:24 And Abraham was ninety years old and nine, when he was
circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin.

17:25 And Ishmael his son was thirteen years old, when he was
circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin.

17:26 In the selfsame day was Abraham circumcised, and Ishmael his
son.

17:27 And all the men of his house, born in the house, and bought with
money of the stranger, were circumcised with him.

18:1 And the LORD appeared unto him in the plains of Mamre: and he sat
in the tent door in the heat of the day; 18:2 And he lift up his eyes
and looked, and, lo, three men stood by him: and when he saw them, he
ran to meet them from the tent door, and bowed himself toward the
ground, 18:3 And said, My LORD, if now I have found favour in thy
sight, pass not away, I pray thee, from thy servant: 18:4 Let a little
water, I pray you, be fetched, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves
under the tree: 18:5 And I will fetch a morsel of bread, and comfort
ye your hearts; after that ye shall pass on: for therefore are ye come
to your servant. And they said, So do, as thou hast said.

18:6 And Abraham hastened into the tent unto Sarah, and said, Make
ready quickly three measures of fine meal, knead it, and make cakes
upon the hearth.

18:7 And Abraham ran unto the herd, and fetcht a calf tender and good,
and gave it unto a young man; and he hasted to dress it.

18:8 And he took butter, and milk, and the calf which he had dressed,
and set it before them; and he stood by them under the tree, and they
did eat.

18:9 And they said unto him, Where is Sarah thy wife? And he said,
Behold, in the tent.

18:10 And he said, I will certainly return unto thee according to the
time of life; and, lo, Sarah thy wife shall have a son. And Sarah
heard it in the tent door, which was behind him.

18:11 Now Abraham and Sarah were old and well stricken in age; and it
ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women.

18:12 Therefore Sarah laughed within herself, saying, After I am waxed
old shall I have pleasure, my lord being old also?  18:13 And the LORD
said unto Abraham, Wherefore did Sarah laugh, saying, Shall I of a
surety bear a child, which am old?  18:14 Is any thing too hard for
the LORD? At the time appointed I will return unto thee, according to
the time of life, and Sarah shall have a son.

18:15 Then Sarah denied, saying, I laughed not; for she was afraid.
And he said, Nay; but thou didst laugh.

18:16 And the men rose up from thence, and looked toward Sodom: and
Abraham went with them to bring them on the way.

18:17 And the LORD said, Shall I hide from Abraham that thing which I
do; 18:18 Seeing that Abraham shall surely become a great and mighty
nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him?
18:19 For I know him, that he will command his children and his
household after him, and they shall keep the way of the LORD, to do
justice and judgment; that the LORD may bring upon Abraham that which
he hath spoken of him.

18:20 And the LORD said, Because the cry of Sodom and Gomorrah is
great, and because their sin is very grievous; 18:21 I will go down
now, and see whether they have done altogether according to the cry of
it, which is come unto me; and if not, I will know.

18:22 And the men turned their faces from thence, and went toward
Sodom: but Abraham stood yet before the LORD.

18:23 And Abraham drew near, and said, Wilt thou also destroy the
righteous with the wicked?  18:24 Peradventure there be fifty
righteous within the city: wilt thou also destroy and not spare the
place for the fifty righteous that are therein?  18:25 That be far
from thee to do after this manner, to slay the righteous with the
wicked: and that the righteous should be as the wicked, that be far
from thee: Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?  18:26 And
the LORD said, If I find in Sodom fifty righteous within the city,
then I will spare all the place for their sakes.

18:27 And Abraham answered and said, Behold now, I have taken upon me
to speak unto the LORD, which am but dust and ashes: 18:28
Peradventure there shall lack five of the fifty righteous: wilt thou
destroy all the city for lack of five? And he said, If I find there
forty and five, I will not destroy it.

18:29 And he spake unto him yet again, and said, Peradventure there
shall be forty found there. And he said, I will not do it for forty's
sake.

18:30 And he said unto him, Oh let not the LORD be angry, and I will
speak: Peradventure there shall thirty be found there. And he said, I
will not do it, if I find thirty there.

18:31 And he said, Behold now, I have taken upon me to speak unto the
LORD: Peradventure there shall be twenty found there. And he said, I
will not destroy it for twenty's sake.

18:32 And he said, Oh let not the LORD be angry, and I will speak yet
but this once: Peradventure ten shall be found there. And he said, I
will not destroy it for ten's sake.

18:33 And the LORD went his way, as soon as he had left communing with
Abraham: and Abraham returned unto his place.

19:1 And there came two angels to Sodom at even; and Lot sat in the
gate of Sodom: and Lot seeing them rose up to meet them; and he bowed
himself with his face toward the ground; 19:2 And he said, Behold now,
my lords, turn in, I pray you, into your servant's house, and tarry
all night, and wash your feet, and ye shall rise up early, and go on
your ways. And they said, Nay; but we will abide in the street all
night.

19:3 And he pressed upon them greatly; and they turned in unto him,
and entered into his house; and he made them a feast, and did bake
unleavened bread, and they did eat.

19:4 But before they lay down, the men of the city, even the men of
Sodom, compassed the house round, both old and young, all the people
from every quarter: 19:5 And they called unto Lot, and said unto him,
Where are the men which came in to thee this night? bring them out
unto us, that we may know them.

19:6 And Lot went out at the door unto them, and shut the door after
him, 19:7 And said, I pray you, brethren, do not so wickedly.

19:8 Behold now, I have two daughters which have not known man; let
me, I pray you, bring them out unto you, and do ye to them as is good
in your eyes: only unto these men do nothing; for therefore came they
under the shadow of my roof.

19:9 And they said, Stand back. And they said again, This one fellow
came in to sojourn, and he will needs be a judge: now will we deal
worse with thee, than with them. And they pressed sore upon the man,
even Lot, and came near to break the door.

19:10 But the men put forth their hand, and pulled Lot into the house
to them, and shut to the door.

19:11 And they smote the men that were at the door of the house with
blindness, both small and great: so that they wearied themselves to
find the door.

19:12 And the men said unto Lot, Hast thou here any besides? son in
law, and thy sons, and thy daughters, and whatsoever thou hast in the
city, bring them out of this place: 19:13 For we will destroy this
place, because the cry of them is waxen great before the face of the
LORD; and the LORD hath sent us to destroy it.

19:14 And Lot went out, and spake unto his sons in law, which married
his daughters, and said, Up, get you out of this place; for the LORD
will destroy this city. But he seemed as one that mocked unto his sons
in law.

19:15 And when the morning arose, then the angels hastened Lot,
saying, Arise, take thy wife, and thy two daughters, which are here;
lest thou be consumed in the iniquity of the city.

19:16 And while he lingered, the men laid hold upon his hand, and upon
the hand of his wife, and upon the hand of his two daughters; the LORD
being merciful unto him: and they brought him forth, and set him
without the city.

19:17 And it came to pass, when they had brought them forth abroad,
that he said, Escape for thy life; look not behind thee, neither stay
thou in all the plain; escape to the mountain, lest thou be consumed.

19:18 And Lot said unto them, Oh, not so, my LORD: 19:19 Behold now,
thy servant hath found grace in thy sight, and thou hast magnified thy
mercy, which thou hast shewed unto me in saving my life; and I cannot
escape to the mountain, lest some evil take me, and I die: 19:20
Behold now, this city is near to flee unto, and it is a little one:
Oh, let me escape thither, (is it not a little one?) and my soul shall
live.

19:21 And he said unto him, See, I have accepted thee concerning this
thing also, that I will not overthrow this city, for the which thou
hast spoken.

19:22 Haste thee, escape thither; for I cannot do anything till thou
be come thither. Therefore the name of the city was called Zoar.

19:23 The sun was risen upon the earth when Lot entered into Zoar.

19:24 Then the LORD rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and
fire from the LORD out of heaven; 19:25 And he overthrew those cities,
and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that
which grew upon the ground.

19:26 But his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a
pillar of salt.

19:27 And Abraham gat up early in the morning to the place where he
stood before the LORD: 19:28 And he looked toward Sodom and Gomorrah,
and toward all the land of the plain, and beheld, and, lo, the smoke
of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace.

19:29 And it came to pass, when God destroyed the cities of the plain,
that God remembered Abraham, and sent Lot out of the midst of the
overthrow, when he overthrew the cities in the which Lot dwelt.

19:30 And Lot went up out of Zoar, and dwelt in the mountain, and his
two daughters with him; for he feared to dwell in Zoar: and he dwelt
in a cave, he and his two daughters.

19:31 And the firstborn said unto the younger, Our father is old, and
there is not a man in the earth to come in unto us after the manner of
all the earth: 19:32 Come, let us make our father drink wine, and we
will lie with him, that we may preserve seed of our father.

19:33 And they made their father drink wine that night: and the
firstborn went in, and lay with her father; and he perceived not when
she lay down, nor when she arose.

19:34 And it came to pass on the morrow, that the firstborn said unto
the younger, Behold, I lay yesternight with my father: let us make him
drink wine this night also; and go thou in, and lie with him, that we
may preserve seed of our father.

19:35 And they made their father drink wine that night also: and the
younger arose, and lay with him; and he perceived not when she lay
down, nor when she arose.

19:36 Thus were both the daughters of Lot with child by their father.

19:37 And the first born bare a son, and called his name Moab: the
same is the father of the Moabites unto this day.

19:38 And the younger, she also bare a son, and called his name
Benammi: the same is the father of the children of Ammon unto this
day.

20:1 And Abraham journeyed from thence toward the south country, and
dwelled between Kadesh and Shur, and sojourned in Gerar.

20:2 And Abraham said of Sarah his wife, She is my sister: and
Abimelech king of Gerar sent, and took Sarah.

20:3 But God came to Abimelech in a dream by night, and said to him,
Behold, thou art but a dead man, for the woman which thou hast taken;
for she is a man's wife.

20:4 But Abimelech had not come near her: and he said, LORD, wilt thou
slay also a righteous nation?  20:5 Said he not unto me, She is my
sister? and she, even she herself said, He is my brother: in the
integrity of my heart and innocency of my hands have I done this.

20:6 And God said unto him in a dream, Yea, I know that thou didst
this in the integrity of thy heart; for I also withheld thee from
sinning against me: therefore suffered I thee not to touch her.

20:7 Now therefore restore the man his wife; for he is a prophet, and
he shall pray for thee, and thou shalt live: and if thou restore her
not, know thou that thou shalt surely die, thou, and all that are
thine.

20:8 Therefore Abimelech rose early in the morning, and called all his
servants, and told all these things in their ears: and the men were
sore afraid.

20:9 Then Abimelech called Abraham, and said unto him, What hast thou
done unto us? and what have I offended thee, that thou hast brought on
me and on my kingdom a great sin? thou hast done deeds unto me that
ought not to be done.

20:10 And Abimelech said unto Abraham, What sawest thou, that thou
hast done this thing?  20:11 And Abraham said, Because I thought,
Surely the fear of God is not in this place; and they will slay me for
my wife's sake.

20:12 And yet indeed she is my sister; she is the daughter of my
father, but not the daughter of my mother; and she became my wife.

20:13 And it came to pass, when God caused me to wander from my
father's house, that I said unto her, This is thy kindness which thou
shalt shew unto me; at every place whither we shall come, say of me,
He is my brother.

20:14 And Abimelech took sheep, and oxen, and menservants, and
womenservants, and gave them unto Abraham, and restored him Sarah his
wife.

20:15 And Abimelech said, Behold, my land is before thee: dwell where
it pleaseth thee.

20:16 And unto Sarah he said, Behold, I have given thy brother a
thousand pieces of silver: behold, he is to thee a covering of the
eyes, unto all that are with thee, and with all other: thus she was
reproved.

20:17 So Abraham prayed unto God: and God healed Abimelech, and his
wife, and his maidservants; and they bare children.

20:18 For the LORD had fast closed up all the wombs of the house of
Abimelech, because of Sarah Abraham's wife.

21:1 And the LORD visited Sarah as he had said, and the LORD did unto
Sarah as he had spoken.

21:2 For Sarah conceived, and bare Abraham a son in his old age, at
the set time of which God had spoken to him.

21:3 And Abraham called the name of his son that was born unto him,
whom Sarah bare to him, Isaac.

21:4 And Abraham circumcised his son Isaac being eight days old, as
God had commanded him.

21:5 And Abraham was an hundred years old, when his son Isaac was born
unto him.

21:6 And Sarah said, God hath made me to laugh, so that all that hear
will laugh with me.

21:7 And she said, Who would have said unto Abraham, that Sarah should
have given children suck? for I have born him a son in his old age.

21:8 And the child grew, and was weaned: and Abraham made a great
feast the same day that Isaac was weaned.

21:9 And Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian, which she had born
unto Abraham, mocking.

21:10 Wherefore she said unto Abraham, Cast out this bondwoman and her
son: for the son of this bondwoman shall not be heir with my son, even
with Isaac.

21:11 And the thing was very grievous in Abraham's sight because of
his son.

21:12 And God said unto Abraham, Let it not be grievous in thy sight
because of the lad, and because of thy bondwoman; in all that Sarah
hath said unto thee, hearken unto her voice; for in Isaac shall thy
seed be called.

21:13 And also of the son of the bondwoman will I make a nation,
because he is thy seed.

21:14 And Abraham rose up early in the morning, and took bread, and a
bottle of water, and gave it unto Hagar, putting it on her shoulder,
and the child, and sent her away: and she departed, and wandered in
the wilderness of Beersheba.

21:15 And the water was spent in the bottle, and she cast the child
under one of the shrubs.

21:16 And she went, and sat her down over against him a good way off,
as it were a bow shot: for she said, Let me not see the death of the
child. And she sat over against him, and lift up her voice, and wept.

21:17 And God heard the voice of the lad; and the angel of God called
to Hagar out of heaven, and said unto her, What aileth thee, Hagar?
fear not; for God hath heard the voice of the lad where he is.

21:18 Arise, lift up the lad, and hold him in thine hand; for I will
make him a great nation.

21:19 And God opened her eyes, and she saw a well of water; and she
went, and filled the bottle with water, and gave the lad drink.

21:20 And God was with the lad; and he grew, and dwelt in the
wilderness, and became an archer.

21:21 And he dwelt in the wilderness of Paran: and his mother took him
a wife out of the land of Egypt.

21:22 And it came to pass at that time, that Abimelech and Phichol the
chief captain of his host spake unto Abraham, saying, God is with thee
in all that thou doest: 21:23 Now therefore swear unto me here by God
that thou wilt not deal falsely with me, nor with my son, nor with my
son's son: but according to the kindness that I have done unto thee,
thou shalt do unto me, and to the land wherein thou hast sojourned.

21:24 And Abraham said, I will swear.

21:25 And Abraham reproved Abimelech because of a well of water, which
Abimelech's servants had violently taken away.

21:26 And Abimelech said, I wot not who hath done this thing; neither
didst thou tell me, neither yet heard I of it, but to day.

21:27 And Abraham took sheep and oxen, and gave them unto Abimelech;
and both of them made a covenant.

21:28 And Abraham set seven ewe lambs of the flock by themselves.

21:29 And Abimelech said unto Abraham, What mean these seven ewe lambs
which thou hast set by themselves?  21:30 And he said, For these seven
ewe lambs shalt thou take of my hand, that they may be a witness unto
me, that I have digged this well.

21:31 Wherefore he called that place Beersheba; because there they
sware both of them.

21:32 Thus they made a covenant at Beersheba: then Abimelech rose up,
and Phichol the chief captain of his host, and they returned into the
land of the Philistines.

21:33 And Abraham planted a grove in Beersheba, and called there on
the name of the LORD, the everlasting God.

21:34 And Abraham sojourned in the Philistines' land many days.

22:1 And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt
Abraham, and said unto him, Abraham: and he said, Behold, here I am.

22:2 And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou
lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for
a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.

22:3 And Abraham rose up early in the morning, and saddled his ass,
and took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son, and clave
the wood for the burnt offering, and rose up, and went unto the place
of which God had told him.

22:4 Then on the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes, and saw the
place afar off.

22:5 And Abraham said unto his young men, Abide ye here with the ass;
and I and the lad will go yonder and worship, and come again to you.

22:6 And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering, and laid it upon
Isaac his son; and he took the fire in his hand, and a knife; and they
went both of them together.

22:7 And Isaac spake unto Abraham his father, and said, My father: and
he said, Here am I, my son. And he said, Behold the fire and the wood:
but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?  22:8 And Abraham said, My
son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering: so they
went both of them together.

22:9 And they came to the place which God had told him of; and Abraham
built an altar there, and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his
son, and laid him on the altar upon the wood.

22:10 And Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to slay
his son.

22:11 And the angel of the LORD called unto him out of heaven, and
said, Abraham, Abraham: and he said, Here am I.

22:12 And he said, Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou
any thing unto him: for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou
hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me.

22:13 And Abraham lifted up his eyes, and looked, and behold behind
him a ram caught in a thicket by his horns: and Abraham went and took
the ram, and offered him up for a burnt offering in the stead of his
son.

22:14 And Abraham called the name of that place Jehovahjireh: as it is
said to this day, In the mount of the LORD it shall be seen.

22:15 And the angel of the LORD called unto Abraham out of heaven the
second time, 22:16 And said, By myself have I sworn, saith the LORD,
for because thou hast done this thing, and hast not withheld thy son,
thine only son: 22:17 That in blessing I will bless thee, and in
multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and
as the sand which is upon the sea shore; and thy seed shall possess
the gate of his enemies; 22:18 And in thy seed shall all the nations
of the earth be blessed; because thou hast obeyed my voice.

22:19 So Abraham returned unto his young men, and they rose up and
went together to Beersheba; and Abraham dwelt at Beersheba.

22:20 And it came to pass after these things, that it was told
Abraham, saying, Behold, Milcah, she hath also born children unto thy
brother Nahor; 22:21 Huz his firstborn, and Buz his brother, and
Kemuel the father of Aram, 22:22 And Chesed, and Hazo, and Pildash,
and Jidlaph, and Bethuel.

22:23 And Bethuel begat Rebekah: these eight Milcah did bear to Nahor,
Abraham's brother.

22:24 And his concubine, whose name was Reumah, she bare also Tebah,
and Gaham, and Thahash, and Maachah.

23:1 And Sarah was an hundred and seven and twenty years old: these
were the years of the life of Sarah.

23:2 And Sarah died in Kirjatharba; the same is Hebron in the land of
Canaan: and Abraham came to mourn for Sarah, and to weep for her.

23:3 And Abraham stood up from before his dead, and spake unto the
sons of Heth, saying, 23:4 I am a stranger and a sojourner with you:
give me a possession of a buryingplace with you, that I may bury my
dead out of my sight.

23:5 And the children of Heth answered Abraham, saying unto him, 23:6
Hear us, my lord: thou art a mighty prince among us: in the choice of
our sepulchres bury thy dead; none of us shall withhold from thee his
sepulchre, but that thou mayest bury thy dead.

23:7 And Abraham stood up, and bowed himself to the people of the
land, even to the children of Heth.

23:8 And he communed with them, saying, If it be your mind that I
should bury my dead out of my sight; hear me, and intreat for me to
Ephron the son of Zohar, 23:9 That he may give me the cave of
Machpelah, which he hath, which is in the end of his field; for as
much money as it is worth he shall give it me for a possession of a
buryingplace amongst you.

23:10 And Ephron dwelt among the children of Heth: and Ephron the
Hittite answered Abraham in the audience of the children of Heth, even
of all that went in at the gate of his city, saying, 23:11 Nay, my
lord, hear me: the field give I thee, and the cave that is therein, I
give it thee; in the presence of the sons of my people give I it thee:
bury thy dead.

23:12 And Abraham bowed down himself before the people of the land.

23:13 And he spake unto Ephron in the audience of the people of the
land, saying, But if thou wilt give it, I pray thee, hear me: I will
give thee money for the field; take it of me, and I will bury my dead
there.

23:14 And Ephron answered Abraham, saying unto him, 23:15 My lord,
hearken unto me: the land is worth four hundred shekels of silver;
what is that betwixt me and thee? bury therefore thy dead.

23:16 And Abraham hearkened unto Ephron; and Abraham weighed to Ephron
the silver, which he had named in the audience of the sons of Heth,
four hundred shekels of silver, current money with the merchant.

23:17 And the field of Ephron which was in Machpelah, which was before
Mamre, the field, and the cave which was therein, and all the trees
that were in the field, that were in all the borders round about, were
made sure 23:18 Unto Abraham for a possession in the presence of the
children of Heth, before all that went in at the gate of his city.

23:19 And after this, Abraham buried Sarah his wife in the cave of the
field of Machpelah before Mamre: the same is Hebron in the land of
Canaan.

23:20 And the field, and the cave that is therein, were made sure unto
Abraham for a possession of a buryingplace by the sons of Heth.

24:1 And Abraham was old, and well stricken in age: and the LORD had
blessed Abraham in all things.

24:2 And Abraham said unto his eldest servant of his house, that ruled
over all that he had, Put, I pray thee, thy hand under my thigh: 24:3
And I will make thee swear by the LORD, the God of heaven, and the God
of the earth, that thou shalt not take a wife unto my son of the
daughters of the Canaanites, among whom I dwell: 24:4 But thou shalt
go unto my country, and to my kindred, and take a wife unto my son
Isaac.

24:5 And the servant said unto him, Peradventure the woman will not be
willing to follow me unto this land: must I needs bring thy son again
unto the land from whence thou camest?  24:6 And Abraham said unto
him, Beware thou that thou bring not my son thither again.

24:7 The LORD God of heaven, which took me from my father's house, and
from the land of my kindred, and which spake unto me, and that sware
unto me, saying, Unto thy seed will I give this land; he shall send
his angel before thee, and thou shalt take a wife unto my son from
thence.

24:8 And if the woman will not be willing to follow thee, then thou
shalt be clear from this my oath: only bring not my son thither again.

24:9 And the servant put his hand under the thigh of Abraham his
master, and sware to him concerning that matter.

24:10 And the servant took ten camels of the camels of his master, and
departed; for all the goods of his master were in his hand: and he
arose, and went to Mesopotamia, unto the city of Nahor.

24:11 And he made his camels to kneel down without the city by a well
of water at the time of the evening, even the time that women go out
to draw water.

24:12 And he said O LORD God of my master Abraham, I pray thee, send
me good speed this day, and shew kindness unto my master Abraham.

24:13 Behold, I stand here by the well of water; and the daughters of
the men of the city come out to draw water: 24:14 And let it come to
pass, that the damsel to whom I shall say, Let down thy pitcher, I
pray thee, that I may drink; and she shall say, Drink, and I will give
thy camels drink also: let the same be she that thou hast appointed
for thy servant Isaac; and thereby shall I know that thou hast shewed
kindness unto my master.

24:15 And it came to pass, before he had done speaking, that, behold,
Rebekah came out, who was born to Bethuel, son of Milcah, the wife of
Nahor, Abraham's brother, with her pitcher upon her shoulder.

24:16 And the damsel was very fair to look upon, a virgin, neither had
any man known her: and she went down to the well, and filled her
pitcher, and came up.

24:17 And the servant ran to meet her, and said, Let me, I pray thee,
drink a little water of thy pitcher.

24:18 And she said, Drink, my lord: and she hasted, and let down her
pitcher upon her hand, and gave him drink.

24:19 And when she had done giving him drink, she said, I will draw
water for thy camels also, until they have done drinking.

24:20 And she hasted, and emptied her pitcher into the trough, and ran
again unto the well to draw water, and drew for all his camels.

24:21 And the man wondering at her held his peace, to wit whether the
LORD had made his journey prosperous or not.

24:22 And it came to pass, as the camels had done drinking, that the
man took a golden earring of half a shekel weight, and two bracelets
for her hands of ten shekels weight of gold; 24:23 And said, Whose
daughter art thou? tell me, I pray thee: is there room in thy father's
house for us to lodge in?  24:24 And she said unto him, I am the
daughter of Bethuel the son of Milcah, which she bare unto Nahor.

24:25 She said moreover unto him, We have both straw and provender
enough, and room to lodge in.

24:26 And the man bowed down his head, and worshipped the LORD.

24:27 And he said, Blessed be the LORD God of my master Abraham, who
hath not left destitute my master of his mercy and his truth: I being
in the way, the LORD led me to the house of my master's brethren.

24:28 And the damsel ran, and told them of her mother's house these
things.

24:29 And Rebekah had a brother, and his name was Laban: and Laban ran
out unto the man, unto the well.

24:30 And it came to pass, when he saw the earring and bracelets upon
his sister's hands, and when he heard the words of Rebekah his sister,
saying, Thus spake the man unto me; that he came unto the man; and,
behold, he stood by the camels at the well.

24:31 And he said, Come in, thou blessed of the LORD; wherefore
standest thou without? for I have prepared the house, and room for the
camels.

24:32 And the man came into the house: and he ungirded his camels, and
gave straw and provender for the camels, and water to wash his feet,
and the men's feet that were with him.

24:33 And there was set meat before him to eat: but he said, I will
not eat, until I have told mine errand. And he said, Speak on.

24:34 And he said, I am Abraham's servant.

24:35 And the LORD hath blessed my master greatly; and he is become
great: and he hath given him flocks, and herds, and silver, and gold,
and menservants, and maidservants, and camels, and asses.

24:36 And Sarah my master's wife bare a son to my master when she was
old: and unto him hath he given all that he hath.

24:37 And my master made me swear, saying, Thou shalt not take a wife
to my son of the daughters of the Canaanites, in whose land I dwell:
24:38 But thou shalt go unto my father's house, and to my kindred, and
take a wife unto my son.

24:39 And I said unto my master, Peradventure the woman will not
follow me.

24:40 And he said unto me, The LORD, before whom I walk, will send his
angel with thee, and prosper thy way; and thou shalt take a wife for
my son of my kindred, and of my father's house: 24:41 Then shalt thou
be clear from this my oath, when thou comest to my kindred; and if
they give not thee one, thou shalt be clear from my oath.

24:42 And I came this day unto the well, and said, O LORD God of my
master Abraham, if now thou do prosper my way which I go: 24:43
Behold, I stand by the well of water; and it shall come to pass, that
when the virgin cometh forth to draw water, and I say to her, Give me,
I pray thee, a little water of thy pitcher to drink; 24:44 And she say
to me, Both drink thou, and I will also draw for thy camels: let the
same be the woman whom the LORD hath appointed out for my master's
son.

24:45 And before I had done speaking in mine heart, behold, Rebekah
came forth with her pitcher on her shoulder; and she went down unto
the well, and drew water: and I said unto her, Let me drink, I pray
thee.

24:46 And she made haste, and let down her pitcher from her shoulder,
and said, Drink, and I will give thy camels drink also: so I drank,
and she made the camels drink also.

24:47 And I asked her, and said, Whose daughter art thou? And she
said, the daughter of Bethuel, Nahor's son, whom Milcah bare unto him:
and I put the earring upon her face, and the bracelets upon her hands.

24:48 And I bowed down my head, and worshipped the LORD, and blessed
the LORD God of my master Abraham, which had led me in the right way
to take my master's brother's daughter unto his son.

24:49 And now if ye will deal kindly and truly with my master, tell
me: and if not, tell me; that I may turn to the right hand, or to the
left.

24:50 Then Laban and Bethuel answered and said, The thing proceedeth
from the LORD: we cannot speak unto thee bad or good.

24:51 Behold, Rebekah is before thee, take her, and go, and let her be
thy master's son's wife, as the LORD hath spoken.

24:52 And it came to pass, that, when Abraham's servant heard their
words, he worshipped the LORD, bowing himself to the earth.

24:53 And the servant brought forth jewels of silver, and jewels of
gold, and raiment, and gave them to Rebekah: he gave also to her
brother and to her mother precious things.

24:54 And they did eat and drink, he and the men that were with him,
and tarried all night; and they rose up in the morning, and he said,
Send me away unto my master.

24:55 And her brother and her mother said, Let the damsel abide with
us a few days, at the least ten; after that she shall go.

24:56 And he said unto them, Hinder me not, seeing the LORD hath
prospered my way; send me away that I may go to my master.

24:57 And they said, We will call the damsel, and enquire at her
mouth.

24:58 And they called Rebekah, and said unto her, Wilt thou go with
this man? And she said, I will go.

24:59 And they sent away Rebekah their sister, and her nurse, and
Abraham's servant, and his men.

24:60 And they blessed Rebekah, and said unto her, Thou art our
sister, be thou the mother of thousands of millions, and let thy seed
possess the gate of those which hate them.

24:61 And Rebekah arose, and her damsels, and they rode upon the
camels, and followed the man: and the servant took Rebekah, and went
his way.

24:62 And Isaac came from the way of the well Lahairoi; for he dwelt
in the south country.

24:63 And Isaac went out to meditate in the field at the eventide: and
he lifted up his eyes, and saw, and, behold, the camels were coming.

24:64 And Rebekah lifted up her eyes, and when she saw Isaac, she
lighted off the camel.

24:65 For she had said unto the servant, What man is this that walketh
in the field to meet us? And the servant had said, It is my master:
therefore she took a vail, and covered herself.

24:66 And the servant told Isaac all things that he had done.

24:67 And Isaac brought her into his mother Sarah's tent, and took
Rebekah, and she became his wife; and he loved her: and Isaac was
comforted after his mother's death.

25:1 Then again Abraham took a wife, and her name was Keturah.

25:2 And she bare him Zimran, and Jokshan, and Medan, and Midian, and
Ishbak, and Shuah.

25:3 And Jokshan begat Sheba, and Dedan. And the sons of Dedan were
Asshurim, and Letushim, and Leummim.

25:4 And the sons of Midian; Ephah, and Epher, and Hanoch, and Abidah,
and Eldaah. All these were the children of Keturah.

25:5 And Abraham gave all that he had unto Isaac.

25:6 But unto the sons of the concubines, which Abraham had, Abraham
gave gifts, and sent them away from Isaac his son, while he yet lived,
eastward, unto the east country.

25:7 And these are the days of the years of Abraham's life which he
lived, an hundred threescore and fifteen years.

25:8 Then Abraham gave up the ghost, and died in a good old age, an
old man, and full of years; and was gathered to his people.

25:9 And his sons Isaac and Ishmael buried him in the cave of
Machpelah, in the field of Ephron the son of Zohar the Hittite, which
is before Mamre; 25:10 The field which Abraham purchased of the sons
of Heth: there was Abraham buried, and Sarah his wife.

25:11 And it came to pass after the death of Abraham, that God blessed
his son Isaac; and Isaac dwelt by the well Lahairoi.

25:12 Now these are the generations of Ishmael, Abraham's son, whom
Hagar the Egyptian, Sarah's handmaid, bare unto Abraham: 25:13 And
these are the names of the sons of Ishmael, by their names, according
to their generations: the firstborn of Ishmael, Nebajoth; and Kedar,
and Adbeel, and Mibsam, 25:14 And Mishma, and Dumah, and Massa, 25:15
Hadar, and Tema, Jetur, Naphish, and Kedemah: 25:16 These are the sons
of Ishmael, and these are their names, by their towns, and by their
castles; twelve princes according to their nations.

25:17 And these are the years of the life of Ishmael, an hundred and
thirty and seven years: and he gave up the ghost and died; and was
gathered unto his people.

25:18 And they dwelt from Havilah unto Shur, that is before Egypt, as
thou goest toward Assyria: and he died in the presence of all his
brethren.

25:19 And these are the generations of Isaac, Abraham's son: Abraham
begat Isaac: 25:20 And Isaac was forty years old when he took Rebekah
to wife, the daughter of Bethuel the Syrian of Padanaram, the sister
to Laban the Syrian.

25:21 And Isaac intreated the LORD for his wife, because she was
barren: and the LORD was intreated of him, and Rebekah his wife
conceived.

25:22 And the children struggled together within her; and she said, If
it be so, why am I thus? And she went to enquire of the LORD.

25:23 And the LORD said unto her, Two nations are in thy womb, and two
manner of people shall be separated from thy bowels; and the one
people shall be stronger than the other people; and the elder shall
serve the younger.

25:24 And when her days to be delivered were fulfilled, behold, there
were twins in her womb.

25:25 And the first came out red, all over like an hairy garment; and
they called his name Esau.

25:26 And after that came his brother out, and his hand took hold on
Esau's heel; and his name was called Jacob: and Isaac was threescore
years old when she bare them.

25:27 And the boys grew: and Esau was a cunning hunter, a man of the
field; and Jacob was a plain man, dwelling in tents.

25:28 And Isaac loved Esau, because he did eat of his venison: but
Rebekah loved Jacob.

25:29 And Jacob sod pottage: and Esau came from the field, and he was
faint: 25:30 And Esau said to Jacob, Feed me, I pray thee, with that
same red pottage; for I am faint: therefore was his name called Edom.

25:31 And Jacob said, Sell me this day thy birthright.

25:32 And Esau said, Behold, I am at the point to die: and what profit
shall this birthright do to me?  25:33 And Jacob said, Swear to me
this day; and he sware unto him: and he sold his birthright unto
Jacob.

25:34 Then Jacob gave Esau bread and pottage of lentiles; and he did
eat and drink, and rose up, and went his way: thus Esau despised his
birthright.

26:1 And there was a famine in the land, beside the first famine that
was in the days of Abraham. And Isaac went unto Abimelech king of the
Philistines unto Gerar.

26:2 And the LORD appeared unto him, and said, Go not down into Egypt;
dwell in the land which I shall tell thee of: 26:3 Sojourn in this
land, and I will be with thee, and will bless thee; for unto thee, and
unto thy seed, I will give all these countries, and I will perform the
oath which I sware unto Abraham thy father; 26:4 And I will make thy
seed to multiply as the stars of heaven, and will give unto thy seed
all these countries; and in thy seed shall all the nations of the
earth be blessed; 26:5 Because that Abraham obeyed my voice, and kept
my charge, my commandments, my statutes, and my laws.

26:6 And Isaac dwelt in Gerar: 26:7 And the men of the place asked him
of his wife; and he said, She is my sister: for he feared to say, She
is my wife; lest, said he, the men of the place should kill me for
Rebekah; because she was fair to look upon.

26:8 And it came to pass, when he had been there a long time, that
Abimelech king of the Philistines looked out at a window, and saw,
and, behold, Isaac was sporting with Rebekah his wife.

26:9 And Abimelech called Isaac, and said, Behold, of a surety she is
thy wife; and how saidst thou, She is my sister? And Isaac said unto
him, Because I said, Lest I die for her.

26:10 And Abimelech said, What is this thou hast done unto us? one of
the people might lightly have lien with thy wife, and thou shouldest
have brought guiltiness upon us.

26:11 And Abimelech charged all his people, saying, He that toucheth
this man or his wife shall surely be put to death.

26:12 Then Isaac sowed in that land, and received in the same year an
hundredfold: and the LORD blessed him.

26:13 And the man waxed great, and went forward, and grew until he
became very great: 26:14 For he had possession of flocks, and
possession of herds, and great store of servants: and the Philistines
envied him.

26:15 For all the wells which his father's servants had digged in the
days of Abraham his father, the Philistines had stopped them, and
filled them with earth.

26:16 And Abimelech said unto Isaac, Go from us; for thou art much
mightier than we.

26:17 And Isaac departed thence, and pitched his tent in the valley of
Gerar, and dwelt there.

26:18 And Isaac digged again the wells of water, which they had digged
in the days of Abraham his father; for the Philistines had stopped
them after the death of Abraham: and he called their names after the
names by which his father had called them.

26:19 And Isaac's servants digged in the valley, and found there a
well of springing water.

26:20 And the herdmen of Gerar did strive with Isaac's herdmen,
saying, The water is ours: and he called the name of the well Esek;
because they strove with him.

26:21 And they digged another well, and strove for that also: and he
called the name of it Sitnah.

26:22 And he removed from thence, and digged another well; and for
that they strove not: and he called the name of it Rehoboth; and he
said, For now the LORD hath made room for us, and we shall be fruitful
in the land.

26:23 And he went up from thence to Beersheba.

26:24 And the LORD appeared unto him the same night, and said, I am
the God of Abraham thy father: fear not, for I am with thee, and will
bless thee, and multiply thy seed for my servant Abraham's sake.

26:25 And he builded an altar there, and called upon the name of the
LORD, and pitched his tent there: and there Isaac's servants digged a
well.

26:26 Then Abimelech went to him from Gerar, and Ahuzzath one of his
friends, and Phichol the chief captain of his army.

26:27 And Isaac said unto them, Wherefore come ye to me, seeing ye
hate me, and have sent me away from you?  26:28 And they said, We saw
certainly that the LORD was with thee: and we said, Let there be now
an oath betwixt us, even betwixt us and thee, and let us make a
covenant with thee; 26:29 That thou wilt do us no hurt, as we have not
touched thee, and as we have done unto thee nothing but good, and have
sent thee away in peace: thou art now the blessed of the LORD.

26:30 And he made them a feast, and they did eat and drink.

26:31 And they rose up betimes in the morning, and sware one to
another: and Isaac sent them away, and they departed from him in
peace.

26:32 And it came to pass the same day, that Isaac's servants came,
and told him concerning the well which they had digged, and said unto
him, We have found water.

26:33 And he called it Shebah: therefore the name of the city is
Beersheba unto this day.

26:34 And Esau was forty years old when he took to wife Judith the
daughter of Beeri the Hittite, and Bashemath the daughter of Elon the
Hittite: 26:35 Which were a grief of mind unto Isaac and to Rebekah.

27:1 And it came to pass, that when Isaac was old, and his eyes were
dim, so that he could not see, he called Esau his eldest son, and said
unto him, My son: and he said unto him, Behold, here am I.

27:2 And he said, Behold now, I am old, I know not the day of my
death: 27:3 Now therefore take, I pray thee, thy weapons, thy quiver
and thy bow, and go out to the field, and take me some venison; 27:4
And make me savoury meat, such as I love, and bring it to me, that I
may eat; that my soul may bless thee before I die.

27:5 And Rebekah heard when Isaac spake to Esau his son. And Esau went
to the field to hunt for venison, and to bring it.

27:6 And Rebekah spake unto Jacob her son, saying, Behold, I heard thy
father speak unto Esau thy brother, saying, 27:7 Bring me venison, and
make me savoury meat, that I may eat, and bless thee before the LORD
before my death.

27:8 Now therefore, my son, obey my voice according to that which I
command thee.

27:9 Go now to the flock, and fetch me from thence two good kids of
the goats; and I will make them savoury meat for thy father, such as
he loveth: 27:10 And thou shalt bring it to thy father, that he may
eat, and that he may bless thee before his death.

27:11 And Jacob said to Rebekah his mother, Behold, Esau my brother is
a hairy man, and I am a smooth man: 27:12 My father peradventure will
feel me, and I shall seem to him as a deceiver; and I shall bring a
curse upon me, and not a blessing.

27:13 And his mother said unto him, Upon me be thy curse, my son: only
obey my voice, and go fetch me them.

27:14 And he went, and fetched, and brought them to his mother: and
his mother made savoury meat, such as his father loved.

27:15 And Rebekah took goodly raiment of her eldest son Esau, which
were with her in the house, and put them upon Jacob her younger son:
27:16 And she put the skins of the kids of the goats upon his hands,
and upon the smooth of his neck: 27:17 And she gave the savoury meat
and the bread, which she had prepared, into the hand of her son Jacob.

27:18 And he came unto his father, and said, My father: and he said,
Here am I; who art thou, my son?  27:19 And Jacob said unto his
father, I am Esau thy first born; I have done according as thou badest
me: arise, I pray thee, sit and eat of my venison, that thy soul may
bless me.

27:20 And Isaac said unto his son, How is it that thou hast found it
so quickly, my son? And he said, Because the LORD thy God brought it
to me.

27:21 And Isaac said unto Jacob, Come near, I pray thee, that I may
feel thee, my son, whether thou be my very son Esau or not.

27:22 And Jacob went near unto Isaac his father; and he felt him, and
said, The voice is Jacob's voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau.

27:23 And he discerned him not, because his hands were hairy, as his
brother Esau's hands: so he blessed him.

27:24 And he said, Art thou my very son Esau? And he said, I am.

27:25 And he said, Bring it near to me, and I will eat of my son's
venison, that my soul may bless thee. And he brought it near to him,
and he did eat: and he brought him wine and he drank.

27:26 And his father Isaac said unto him, Come near now, and kiss me,
my son.

27:27 And he came near, and kissed him: and he smelled the smell of
his raiment, and blessed him, and said, See, the smell of my son is as
the smell of a field which the LORD hath blessed: 27:28 Therefore God
give thee of the dew of heaven, and the fatness of the earth, and
plenty of corn and wine: 27:29 Let people serve thee, and nations bow
down to thee: be lord over thy brethren, and let thy mother's sons bow
down to thee: cursed be every one that curseth thee, and blessed be he
that blesseth thee.

27:30 And it came to pass, as soon as Isaac had made an end of
blessing Jacob, and Jacob was yet scarce gone out from the presence of
Isaac his father, that Esau his brother came in from his hunting.

27:31 And he also had made savoury meat, and brought it unto his
father, and said unto his father, Let my father arise, and eat of his
son's venison, that thy soul may bless me.

27:32 And Isaac his father said unto him, Who art thou? And he said, I
am thy son, thy firstborn Esau.

27:33 And Isaac trembled very exceedingly, and said, Who? where is he
that hath taken venison, and brought it me, and I have eaten of all
before thou camest, and have blessed him? yea, and he shall be
blessed.

27:34 And when Esau heard the words of his father, he cried with a
great and exceeding bitter cry, and said unto his father, Bless me,
even me also, O my father.

27:35 And he said, Thy brother came with subtilty, and hath taken away
thy blessing.

27:36 And he said, Is not he rightly named Jacob? for he hath
supplanted me these two times: he took away my birthright; and,
behold, now he hath taken away my blessing. And he said, Hast thou not
reserved a blessing for me?  27:37 And Isaac answered and said unto
Esau, Behold, I have made him thy lord, and all his brethren have I
given to him for servants; and with corn and wine have I sustained
him: and what shall I do now unto thee, my son?  27:38 And Esau said
unto his father, Hast thou but one blessing, my father? bless me, even
me also, O my father. And Esau lifted up his voice, and wept.

27:39 And Isaac his father answered and said unto him, Behold, thy
dwelling shall be the fatness of the earth, and of the dew of heaven
from above; 27:40 And by thy sword shalt thou live, and shalt serve
thy brother; and it shall come to pass when thou shalt have the
dominion, that thou shalt break his yoke from off thy neck.

27:41 And Esau hated Jacob because of the blessing wherewith his
father blessed him: and Esau said in his heart, The days of mourning
for my father are at hand; then will I slay my brother Jacob.

27:42 And these words of Esau her elder son were told to Rebekah: and
she sent and called Jacob her younger son, and said unto him, Behold,
thy brother Esau, as touching thee, doth comfort himself, purposing to
kill thee.

27:43 Now therefore, my son, obey my voice; arise, flee thou to Laban
my brother to Haran; 27:44 And tarry with him a few days, until thy
brother's fury turn away; 27:45 Until thy brother's anger turn away
from thee, and he forget that which thou hast done to him: then I will
send, and fetch thee from thence: why should I be deprived also of you
both in one day?  27:46 And Rebekah said to Isaac, I am weary of my
life because of the daughters of Heth: if Jacob take a wife of the
daughters of Heth, such as these which are of the daughters of the
land, what good shall my life do me?  28:1 And Isaac called Jacob, and
blessed him, and charged him, and said unto him, Thou shalt not take a
wife of the daughters of Canaan.

28:2 Arise, go to Padanaram, to the house of Bethuel thy mother's
father; and take thee a wife from thence of the daughers of Laban thy
mother's brother.

28:3 And God Almighty bless thee, and make thee fruitful, and multiply
thee, that thou mayest be a multitude of people; 28:4 And give thee
the blessing of Abraham, to thee, and to thy seed with thee; that thou
mayest inherit the land wherein thou art a stranger, which God gave
unto Abraham.

28:5 And Isaac sent away Jacob: and he went to Padanaram unto Laban,
son of Bethuel the Syrian, the brother of Rebekah, Jacob's and Esau's
mother.

28:6 When Esau saw that Isaac had blessed Jacob, and sent him away to
Padanaram, to take him a wife from thence; and that as he blessed him
he gave him a charge, saying, Thou shalt not take a wife of the
daughers of Canaan; 28:7 And that Jacob obeyed his father and his
mother, and was gone to Padanaram; 28:8 And Esau seeing that the
daughters of Canaan pleased not Isaac his father; 28:9 Then went Esau
unto Ishmael, and took unto the wives which he had Mahalath the
daughter of Ishmael Abraham's son, the sister of Nebajoth, to be his
wife.

28:10 And Jacob went out from Beersheba, and went toward Haran.

28:11 And he lighted upon a certain place, and tarried there all
night, because the sun was set; and he took of the stones of that
place, and put them for his pillows, and lay down in that place to
sleep.

28:12 And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the
top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending
and descending on it.

28:13 And, behold, the LORD stood above it, and said, I am the LORD
God of Abraham thy father, and the God of Isaac: the land whereon thou
liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed; 28:14 And thy seed
shall be as the dust of the earth, and thou shalt spread abroad to the
west, and to the east, and to the north, and to the south: and in thee
and in thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed.

28:15 And, behold, I am with thee, and will keep thee in all places
whither thou goest, and will bring thee again into this land; for I
will not leave thee, until I have done that which I have spoken to
thee of.

28:16 And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said, Surely the LORD
is in this place; and I knew it not.

28:17 And he was afraid, and said, How dreadful is this place! this is
none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.

28:18 And Jacob rose up early in the morning, and took the stone that
he had put for his pillows, and set it up for a pillar, and poured oil
upon the top of it.

28:19 And he called the name of that place Bethel: but the name of
that city was called Luz at the first.

28:20 And Jacob vowed a vow, saying, If God will be with me, and will
keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat, and
raiment to put on, 28:21 So that I come again to my father's house in
peace; then shall the LORD be my God: 28:22 And this stone, which I
have set for a pillar, shall be God's house: and of all that thou
shalt give me I will surely give the tenth unto thee.

29:1 Then Jacob went on his journey, and came into the land of the
people of the east.

29:2 And he looked, and behold a well in the field, and, lo, there
were three flocks of sheep lying by it; for out of that well they
watered the flocks: and a great stone was upon the well's mouth.

29:3 And thither were all the flocks gathered: and they rolled the
stone from the well's mouth, and watered the sheep, and put the stone
again upon the well's mouth in his place.

29:4 And Jacob said unto them, My brethren, whence be ye? And they
said, Of Haran are we.

29:5 And he said unto them, Know ye Laban the son of Nahor? And they
said, We know him.

29:6 And he said unto them, Is he well? And they said, He is well:
and, behold, Rachel his daughter cometh with the sheep.

29:7 And he said, Lo, it is yet high day, neither is it time that the
cattle should be gathered together: water ye the sheep, and go and
feed them.

29:8 And they said, We cannot, until all the flocks be gathered
together, and till they roll the stone from the well's mouth; then we
water the sheep.

29:9 And while he yet spake with them, Rachel came with her father's
sheep; for she kept them.

29:10 And it came to pass, when Jacob saw Rachel the daughter of Laban
his mother's brother, and the sheep of Laban his mother's brother,
that Jacob went near, and rolled the stone from the well's mouth, and
watered the flock of Laban his mother's brother.

29:11 And Jacob kissed Rachel, and lifted up his voice, and wept.

29:12 And Jacob told Rachel that he was her father's brother, and that
he was Rebekah's son: and she ran and told her father.

29:13 And it came to pass, when Laban heard the tidings of Jacob his
sister's son, that he ran to meet him, and embraced him, and kissed
him, and brought him to his house. And he told Laban all these things.

29:14 And Laban said to him, Surely thou art my bone and my flesh. And
he abode with him the space of a month.

29:15 And Laban said unto Jacob, Because thou art my brother,
shouldest thou therefore serve me for nought? tell me, what shall thy
wages be?  29:16 And Laban had two daughters: the name of the elder
was Leah, and the name of the younger was Rachel.

29:17 Leah was tender eyed; but Rachel was beautiful and well
favoured.

29:18 And Jacob loved Rachel; and said, I will serve thee seven years
for Rachel thy younger daughter.

29:19 And Laban said, It is better that I give her to thee, than that
I should give her to another man: abide with me.

29:20 And Jacob served seven years for Rachel; and they seemed unto
him but a few days, for the love he had to her.

29:21 And Jacob said unto Laban, Give me my wife, for my days are
fulfilled, that I may go in unto her.

29:22 And Laban gathered together all the men of the place, and made a
feast.

29:23 And it came to pass in the evening, that he took Leah his
daughter, and brought her to him; and he went in unto her.

29:24 And Laban gave unto his daughter Leah Zilpah his maid for an
handmaid.

29:25 And it came to pass, that in the morning, behold, it was Leah:
and he said to Laban, What is this thou hast done unto me? did not I
serve with thee for Rachel? wherefore then hast thou beguiled me?
29:26 And Laban said, It must not be so done in our country, to give
the younger before the firstborn.

29:27 Fulfil her week, and we will give thee this also for the service
which thou shalt serve with me yet seven other years.

29:28 And Jacob did so, and fulfilled her week: and he gave him Rachel
his daughter to wife also.

29:29 And Laban gave to Rachel his daughter Bilhah his handmaid to be
her maid.

29:30 And he went in also unto Rachel, and he loved also Rachel more
than Leah, and served with him yet seven other years.

29:31 And when the LORD saw that Leah was hated, he opened her womb:
but Rachel was barren.

29:32 And Leah conceived, and bare a son, and she called his name
Reuben: for she said, Surely the LORD hath looked upon my affliction;
now therefore my husband will love me.

29:33 And she conceived again, and bare a son; and said, Because the
LORD hath heard I was hated, he hath therefore given me this son also:
and she called his name Simeon.

29:34 And she conceived again, and bare a son; and said, Now this time
will my husband be joined unto me, because I have born him three sons:
therefore was his name called Levi.

29:35 And she conceived again, and bare a son: and she said, Now will
I praise the LORD: therefore she called his name Judah; and left
bearing.

30:1 And when Rachel saw that she bare Jacob no children, Rachel
envied her sister; and said unto Jacob, Give me children, or else I
die.

30:2 And Jacob's anger was kindled against Rachel: and he said, Am I
in God's stead, who hath withheld from thee the fruit of the womb?
30:3 And she said, Behold my maid Bilhah, go in unto her; and she
shall bear upon my knees, that I may also have children by her.

30:4 And she gave him Bilhah her handmaid to wife: and Jacob went in
unto her.

30:5 And Bilhah conceived, and bare Jacob a son.

30:6 And Rachel said, God hath judged me, and hath also heard my
voice, and hath given me a son: therefore called she his name Dan.

30:7 And Bilhah Rachel's maid conceived again, and bare Jacob a second
son.

30:8 And Rachel said, With great wrestlings have I wrestled with my
sister, and I have prevailed: and she called his name Naphtali.

30:9 When Leah saw that she had left bearing, she took Zilpah her
maid, and gave her Jacob to wife.

30:10 And Zilpah Leah's maid bare Jacob a son.

30:11 And Leah said, A troop cometh: and she called his name Gad.

30:12 And Zilpah Leah's maid bare Jacob a second son.

30:13 And Leah said, Happy am I, for the daughters will call me
blessed: and she called his name Asher.

30:14 And Reuben went in the days of wheat harvest, and found
mandrakes in the field, and brought them unto his mother Leah. Then
Rachel said to Leah, Give me, I pray thee, of thy son's mandrakes.

30:15 And she said unto her, Is it a small matter that thou hast taken
my husband? and wouldest thou take away my son's mandrakes also? And
Rachel said, Therefore he shall lie with thee to night for thy son's
mandrakes.

30:16 And Jacob came out of the field in the evening, and Leah went
out to meet him, and said, Thou must come in unto me; for surely I
have hired thee with my son's mandrakes. And he lay with her that
night.

30:17 And God hearkened unto Leah, and she conceived, and bare Jacob
the fifth son.

30:18 And Leah said, God hath given me my hire, because I have given
my maiden to my husband: and she called his name Issachar.

30:19 And Leah conceived again, and bare Jacob the sixth son.

30:20 And Leah said, God hath endued me with a good dowry; now will my
husband dwell with me, because I have born him six sons: and she
called his name Zebulun.

30:21 And afterwards she bare a daughter, and called her name Dinah.

30:22 And God remembered Rachel, and God hearkened to her, and opened
her womb.

30:23 And she conceived, and bare a son; and said, God hath taken away
my reproach: 30:24 And she called his name Joseph; and said, The LORD
shall add to me another son.

30:25 And it came to pass, when Rachel had born Joseph, that Jacob
said unto Laban, Send me away, that I may go unto mine own place, and
to my country.

30:26 Give me my wives and my children, for whom I have served thee,
and let me go: for thou knowest my service which I have done thee.

30:27 And Laban said unto him, I pray thee, if I have found favour in
thine eyes, tarry: for I have learned by experience that the LORD hath
blessed me for thy sake.

30:28 And he said, Appoint me thy wages, and I will give it.

30:29 And he said unto him, Thou knowest how I have served thee, and
how thy cattle was with me.

30:30 For it was little which thou hadst before I came, and it is now
increased unto a multitude; and the LORD hath blessed thee since my
coming: and now when shall I provide for mine own house also?  30:31
And he said, What shall I give thee? And Jacob said, Thou shalt not
give me any thing: if thou wilt do this thing for me, I will again
feed and keep thy flock.

30:32 I will pass through all thy flock to day, removing from thence
all the speckled and spotted cattle, and all the brown cattle among
the sheep, and the spotted and speckled among the goats: and of such
shall be my hire.

30:33 So shall my righteousness answer for me in time to come, when it
shall come for my hire before thy face: every one that is not speckled
and spotted among the goats, and brown among the sheep, that shall be
counted stolen with me.

30:34 And Laban said, Behold, I would it might be according to thy
word.

30:35 And he removed that day the he goats that were ringstraked and
spotted, and all the she goats that were speckled and spotted, and
every one that had some white in it, and all the brown among the
sheep, and gave them into the hand of his sons.

30:36 And he set three days' journey betwixt himself and Jacob: and
Jacob fed the rest of Laban's flocks.

30:37 And Jacob took him rods of green poplar, and of the hazel and
chesnut tree; and pilled white strakes in them, and made the white
appear which was in the rods.

30:38 And he set the rods which he had pilled before the flocks in the
gutters in the watering troughs when the flocks came to drink, that
they should conceive when they came to drink.

30:39 And the flocks conceived before the rods, and brought forth
cattle ringstraked, speckled, and spotted.

30:40 And Jacob did separate the lambs, and set the faces of the
flocks toward the ringstraked, and all the brown in the flock of
Laban; and he put his own flocks by themselves, and put them not unto
Laban's cattle.

30:41 And it came to pass, whensoever the stronger cattle did
conceive, that Jacob laid the rods before the eyes of the cattle in
the gutters, that they might conceive among the rods.

30:42 But when the cattle were feeble, he put them not in: so the
feebler were Laban's, and the stronger Jacob's.

30:43 And the man increased exceedingly, and had much cattle, and
maidservants, and menservants, and camels, and asses.

31:1 And he heard the words of Laban's sons, saying, Jacob hath taken
away all that was our father's; and of that which was our father's
hath he gotten all this glory.

31:2 And Jacob beheld the countenance of Laban, and, behold, it was
not toward him as before.

31:3 And the LORD said unto Jacob, Return unto the land of thy
fathers, and to thy kindred; and I will be with thee.

31:4 And Jacob sent and called Rachel and Leah to the field unto his
flock, 31:5 And said unto them, I see your father's countenance, that
it is not toward me as before; but the God of my father hath been with
me.

31:6 And ye know that with all my power I have served your father.

31:7 And your father hath deceived me, and changed my wages ten times;
but God suffered him not to hurt me.

31:8 If he said thus, The speckled shall be thy wages; then all the
cattle bare speckled: and if he said thus, The ringstraked shall be
thy hire; then bare all the cattle ringstraked.

31:9 Thus God hath taken away the cattle of your father, and given
them to me.

31:10 And it came to pass at the time that the cattle conceived, that
I lifted up mine eyes, and saw in a dream, and, behold, the rams which
leaped upon the cattle were ringstraked, speckled, and grisled.

31:11 And the angel of God spake unto me in a dream, saying, Jacob:
And I said, Here am I.

31:12 And he said, Lift up now thine eyes, and see, all the rams which
leap upon the cattle are ringstraked, speckled, and grisled: for I
have seen all that Laban doeth unto thee.

31:13 I am the God of Bethel, where thou anointedst the pillar, and
where thou vowedst a vow unto me: now arise, get thee out from this
land, and return unto the land of thy kindred.

31:14 And Rachel and Leah answered and said unto him, Is there yet any
portion or inheritance for us in our father's house?  31:15 Are we not
counted of him strangers? for he hath sold us, and hath quite devoured
also our money.

31:16 For all the riches which God hath taken from our father, that is
ours, and our children's: now then, whatsoever God hath said unto
thee, do.

31:17 Then Jacob rose up, and set his sons and his wives upon camels;
31:18 And he carried away all his cattle, and all his goods which he
had gotten, the cattle of his getting, which he had gotten in
Padanaram, for to go to Isaac his father in the land of Canaan.

31:19 And Laban went to shear his sheep: and Rachel had stolen the
images that were her father's.

31:20 And Jacob stole away unawares to Laban the Syrian, in that he
told him not that he fled.

31:21 So he fled with all that he had; and he rose up, and passed over
the river, and set his face toward the mount Gilead.

31:22 And it was told Laban on the third day that Jacob was fled.

31:23 And he took his brethren with him, and pursued after him seven
days' journey; and they overtook him in the mount Gilead.

31:24 And God came to Laban the Syrian in a dream by night, and said
unto him, Take heed that thou speak not to Jacob either good or bad.

31:25 Then Laban overtook Jacob. Now Jacob had pitched his tent in the
mount: and Laban with his brethren pitched in the mount of Gilead.

31:26 And Laban said to Jacob, What hast thou done, that thou hast
stolen away unawares to me, and carried away my daughters, as captives
taken with the sword?  31:27 Wherefore didst thou flee away secretly,
and steal away from me; and didst not tell me, that I might have sent
thee away with mirth, and with songs, with tabret, and with harp?
31:28 And hast not suffered me to kiss my sons and my daughters? thou
hast now done foolishly in so doing.

31:29 It is in the power of my hand to do you hurt: but the God of
your father spake unto me yesternight, saying, Take thou heed that
thou speak not to Jacob either good or bad.

31:30 And now, though thou wouldest needs be gone, because thou sore
longedst after thy father's house, yet wherefore hast thou stolen my
gods?  31:31 And Jacob answered and said to Laban, Because I was
afraid: for I said, Peradventure thou wouldest take by force thy
daughters from me.

31:32 With whomsoever thou findest thy gods, let him not live: before
our brethren discern thou what is thine with me, and take it to thee.
For Jacob knew not that Rachel had stolen them.

31:33 And Laban went into Jacob's tent, and into Leah's tent, and into
the two maidservants' tents; but he found them not. Then went he out
of Leah's tent, and entered into Rachel's tent.

31:34 Now Rachel had taken the images, and put them in the camel's
furniture, and sat upon them. And Laban searched all the tent, but
found them not.

31:35 And she said to her father, Let it not displease my lord that I
cannot rise up before thee; for the custom of women is upon me. And he
searched but found not the images.

31:36 And Jacob was wroth, and chode with Laban: and Jacob answered
and said to Laban, What is my trespass? what is my sin, that thou hast
so hotly pursued after me?  31:37 Whereas thou hast searched all my
stuff, what hast thou found of all thy household stuff? set it here
before my brethren and thy brethren, that they may judge betwixt us
both.

31:38 This twenty years have I been with thee; thy ewes and thy she
goats have not cast their young, and the rams of thy flock have I not
eaten.

31:39 That which was torn of beasts I brought not unto thee; I bare
the loss of it; of my hand didst thou require it, whether stolen by
day, or stolen by night.

31:40 Thus I was; in the day the drought consumed me, and the frost by
night; and my sleep departed from mine eyes.

31:41 Thus have I been twenty years in thy house; I served thee
fourteen years for thy two daughters, and six years for thy cattle:
and thou hast changed my wages ten times.

31:42 Except the God of my father, the God of Abraham, and the fear of
Isaac, had been with me, surely thou hadst sent me away now empty. God
hath seen mine affliction and the labour of my hands, and rebuked thee
yesternight.

31:43 And Laban answered and said unto Jacob, These daughters are my
daughters, and these children are my children, and these cattle are my
cattle, and all that thou seest is mine: and what can I do this day
unto these my daughters, or unto their children which they have born?
31:44 Now therefore come thou, let us make a covenant, I and thou; and
let it be for a witness between me and thee.

31:45 And Jacob took a stone, and set it up for a pillar.

31:46 And Jacob said unto his brethren, Gather stones; and they took
stones, and made an heap: and they did eat there upon the heap.

31:47 And Laban called it Jegarsahadutha: but Jacob called it Galeed.

31:48 And Laban said, This heap is a witness between me and thee this
day.

Therefore was the name of it called Galeed; 31:49 And Mizpah; for he
said, The LORD watch between me and thee, when we are absent one from
another.

31:50 If thou shalt afflict my daughters, or if thou shalt take other
wives beside my daughters, no man is with us; see, God is witness
betwixt me and thee.

31:51 And Laban said to Jacob, Behold this heap, and behold this
pillar, which I have cast betwixt me and thee: 31:52 This heap be
witness, and this pillar be witness, that I will not pass over this
heap to thee, and that thou shalt not pass over this heap and this
pillar unto me, for harm.

31:53 The God of Abraham, and the God of Nahor, the God of their
father, judge betwixt us. And Jacob sware by the fear of his father
Isaac.

31:54 Then Jacob offered sacrifice upon the mount, and called his
brethren to eat bread: and they did eat bread, and tarried all night
in the mount.

31:55 And early in the morning Laban rose up, and kissed his sons and
his daughters, and blessed them: and Laban departed, and returned unto
his place.

32:1 And Jacob went on his way, and the angels of God met him.

32:2 And when Jacob saw them, he said, This is God's host: and he
called the name of that place Mahanaim.

32:3 And Jacob sent messengers before him to Esau his brother unto the
land of Seir, the country of Edom.

32:4 And he commanded them, saying, Thus shall ye speak unto my lord
Esau; Thy servant Jacob saith thus, I have sojourned with Laban, and
stayed there until now: 32:5 And I have oxen, and asses, flocks, and
menservants, and womenservants: and I have sent to tell my lord, that
I may find grace in thy sight.

32:6 And the messengers returned to Jacob, saying, We came to thy
brother Esau, and also he cometh to meet thee, and four hundred men
with him.

32:7 Then Jacob was greatly afraid and distressed: and he divided the
people that was with him, and the flocks, and herds, and the camels,
into two bands; 32:8 And said, If Esau come to the one company, and
smite it, then the other company which is left shall escape.

32:9 And Jacob said, O God of my father Abraham, and God of my father
Isaac, the LORD which saidst unto me, Return unto thy country, and to
thy kindred, and I will deal well with thee: 32:10 I am not worthy of
the least of all the mercies, and of all the truth, which thou hast
shewed unto thy servant; for with my staff I passed over this Jordan;
and now I am become two bands.

32:11 Deliver me, I pray thee, from the hand of my brother, from the
hand of Esau: for I fear him, lest he will come and smite me, and the
mother with the children.

32:12 And thou saidst, I will surely do thee good, and make thy seed
as the sand of the sea, which cannot be numbered for multitude.

32:13 And he lodged there that same night; and took of that which came
to his hand a present for Esau his brother; 32:14 Two hundred she
goats, and twenty he goats, two hundred ewes, and twenty rams, 32:15
Thirty milch camels with their colts, forty kine, and ten bulls,
twenty she asses, and ten foals.

32:16 And he delivered them into the hand of his servants, every drove
by themselves; and said unto his servants, Pass over before me, and
put a space betwixt drove and drove.

32:17 And he commanded the foremost, saying, When Esau my brother
meeteth thee, and asketh thee, saying, Whose art thou? and whither
goest thou? and whose are these before thee?  32:18 Then thou shalt
say, They be thy servant Jacob's; it is a present sent unto my lord
Esau: and, behold, also he is behind us.

32:19 And so commanded he the second, and the third, and all that
followed the droves, saying, On this manner shall ye speak unto Esau,
when ye find him.

32:20 And say ye moreover, Behold, thy servant Jacob is behind us. For
he said, I will appease him with the present that goeth before me, and
afterward I will see his face; peradventure he will accept of me.

32:21 So went the present over before him: and himself lodged that
night in the company.

32:22 And he rose up that night, and took his two wives, and his two
womenservants, and his eleven sons, and passed over the ford Jabbok.

32:23 And he took them, and sent them over the brook, and sent over
that he had.

32:24 And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him
until the breaking of the day.

32:25 And when he saw that he prevailed not against him, he touched
the hollow of his thigh; and the hollow of Jacob's thigh was out of
joint, as he wrestled with him.

32:26 And he said, Let me go, for the day breaketh. And he said, I
will not let thee go, except thou bless me.

32:27 And he said unto him, What is thy name? And he said, Jacob.

32:28 And he said, Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel:
for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast
prevailed.

32:29 And Jacob asked him, and said, Tell me, I pray thee, thy name.
And he said, Wherefore is it that thou dost ask after my name? And he
blessed him there.

32:30 And Jacob called the name of the place Peniel: for I have seen
God face to face, and my life is preserved.

32:31 And as he passed over Penuel the sun rose upon him, and he
halted upon his thigh.

32:32 Therefore the children of Israel eat not of the sinew which
shrank, which is upon the hollow of the thigh, unto this day: because
he touched the hollow of Jacob's thigh in the sinew that shrank.

33:1 And Jacob lifted up his eyes, and looked, and, behold, Esau came,
and with him four hundred men. And he divided the children unto Leah,
and unto Rachel, and unto the two handmaids.

33:2 And he put the handmaids and their children foremost, and Leah
and her children after, and Rachel and Joseph hindermost.

33:3 And he passed over before them, and bowed himself to the ground
seven times, until he came near to his brother.

33:4 And Esau ran to meet him, and embraced him, and fell on his neck,
and kissed him: and they wept.

33:5 And he lifted up his eyes, and saw the women and the children;
and said, Who are those with thee? And he said, The children which God
hath graciously given thy servant.

33:6 Then the handmaidens came near, they and their children, and they
bowed themselves.

33:7 And Leah also with her children came near, and bowed themselves:
and after came Joseph near and Rachel, and they bowed themselves.

33:8 And he said, What meanest thou by all this drove which I met? And
he said, These are to find grace in the sight of my lord.

33:9 And Esau said, I have enough, my brother; keep that thou hast
unto thyself.

33:10 And Jacob said, Nay, I pray thee, if now I have found grace in
thy sight, then receive my present at my hand: for therefore I have
seen thy face, as though I had seen the face of God, and thou wast
pleased with me.

33:11 Take, I pray thee, my blessing that is brought to thee; because
God hath dealt graciously with me, and because I have enough. And he
urged him, and he took it.

33:12 And he said, Let us take our journey, and let us go, and I will
go before thee.

33:13 And he said unto him, My lord knoweth that the children are
tender, and the flocks and herds with young are with me: and if men
should overdrive them one day, all the flock will die.

33:14 Let my lord, I pray thee, pass over before his servant: and I
will lead on softly, according as the cattle that goeth before me and
the children be able to endure, until I come unto my lord unto Seir.

33:15 And Esau said, Let me now leave with thee some of the folk that
are with me. And he said, What needeth it? let me find grace in the
sight of my lord.

33:16 So Esau returned that day on his way unto Seir.

33:17 And Jacob journeyed to Succoth, and built him an house, and made
booths for his cattle: therefore the name of the place is called
Succoth.

33:18 And Jacob came to Shalem, a city of Shechem, which is in the
land of Canaan, when he came from Padanaram; and pitched his tent
before the city.

33:19 And he bought a parcel of a field, where he had spread his tent,
at the hand of the children of Hamor, Shechem's father, for an hundred
pieces of money.

33:20 And he erected there an altar, and called it EleloheIsrael.

34:1 And Dinah the daughter of Leah, which she bare unto Jacob, went
out to see the daughters of the land.

34:2 And when Shechem the son of Hamor the Hivite, prince of the
country, saw her, he took her, and lay with her, and defiled her.

34:3 And his soul clave unto Dinah the daughter of Jacob, and he loved
the damsel, and spake kindly unto the damsel.

34:4 And Shechem spake unto his father Hamor, saying, Get me this
damsel to wife.

34:5 And Jacob heard that he had defiled Dinah his daughter: now his
sons were with his cattle in the field: and Jacob held his peace until
they were come.

34:6 And Hamor the father of Shechem went out unto Jacob to commune
with him.

34:7 And the sons of Jacob came out of the field when they heard it:
and the men were grieved, and they were very wroth, because he had
wrought folly in Israel in lying with Jacob's daughter: which thing
ought not to be done.

34:8 And Hamor communed with them, saying, The soul of my son Shechem
longeth for your daughter: I pray you give her him to wife.

34:9 And make ye marriages with us, and give your daughters unto us,
and take our daughters unto you.

34:10 And ye shall dwell with us: and the land shall be before you;
dwell and trade ye therein, and get you possessions therein.

34:11 And Shechem said unto her father and unto her brethren, Let me
find grace in your eyes, and what ye shall say unto me I will give.

34:12 Ask me never so much dowry and gift, and I will give according
as ye shall say unto me: but give me the damsel to wife.

34:13 And the sons of Jacob answered Shechem and Hamor his father
deceitfully, and said, because he had defiled Dinah their sister:
34:14 And they said unto them, We cannot do this thing, to give our
sister to one that is uncircumcised; for that were a reproach unto us:
34:15 But in this will we consent unto you: If ye will be as we be,
that every male of you be circumcised; 34:16 Then will we give our
daughters unto you, and we will take your daughters to us, and we will
dwell with you, and we will become one people.

34:17 But if ye will not hearken unto us, to be circumcised; then will
we take our daughter, and we will be gone.

34:18 And their words pleased Hamor, and Shechem Hamor's son.

34:19 And the young man deferred not to do the thing, because he had
delight in Jacob's daughter: and he was more honourable than all the
house of his father.

34:20 And Hamor and Shechem his son came unto the gate of their city,
and communed with the men of their city, saying, 34:21 These men are
peaceable with us; therefore let them dwell in the land, and trade
therein; for the land, behold, it is large enough for them; let us
take their daughters to us for wives, and let us give them our
daughters.

34:22 Only herein will the men consent unto us for to dwell with us,
to be one people, if every male among us be circumcised, as they are
circumcised.

34:23 Shall not their cattle and their substance and every beast of
their's be our's? only let us consent unto them, and they will dwell
with us.

34:24 And unto Hamor and unto Shechem his son hearkened all that went
out of the gate of his city; and every male was circumcised, all that
went out of the gate of his city.

34:25 And it came to pass on the third day, when they were sore, that
two of the sons of Jacob, Simeon and Levi, Dinah's brethren, took each
man his sword, and came upon the city boldly, and slew all the males.

34:26 And they slew Hamor and Shechem his son with the edge of the
sword, and took Dinah out of Shechem's house, and went out.

34:27 The sons of Jacob came upon the slain, and spoiled the city,
because they had defiled their sister.

34:28 They took their sheep, and their oxen, and their asses, and that
which was in the city, and that which was in the field, 34:29 And all
their wealth, and all their little ones, and their wives took they
captive, and spoiled even all that was in the house.

34:30 And Jacob said to Simeon and Levi, Ye have troubled me to make
me to stink among the inhabitants of the land, among the Canaanites
and the Perizzites: and I being few in number, they shall gather
themselves together against me, and slay me; and I shall be destroyed,
I and my house.

34:31 And they said, Should he deal with our sister as with an harlot?
35:1 And God said unto Jacob, Arise, go up to Bethel, and dwell there:
and make there an altar unto God, that appeared unto thee when thou
fleddest from the face of Esau thy brother.

35:2 Then Jacob said unto his household, and to all that were with
him, Put away the strange gods that are among you, and be clean, and
change your garments: 35:3 And let us arise, and go up to Bethel; and
I will make there an altar unto God, who answered me in the day of my
distress, and was with me in the way which I went.

35:4 And they gave unto Jacob all the strange gods which were in their
hand, and all their earrings which were in their ears; and Jacob hid
them under the oak which was by Shechem.

35:5 And they journeyed: and the terror of God was upon the cities
that were round about them, and they did not pursue after the sons of
Jacob.

35:6 So Jacob came to Luz, which is in the land of Canaan, that is,
Bethel, he and all the people that were with him.

35:7 And he built there an altar, and called the place Elbethel:
because there God appeared unto him, when he fled from the face of his
brother.

35:8 But Deborah Rebekah's nurse died, and she was buried beneath
Bethel under an oak: and the name of it was called Allonbachuth.

35:9 And God appeared unto Jacob again, when he came out of Padanaram,
and blessed him.

35:10 And God said unto him, Thy name is Jacob: thy name shall not be
called any more Jacob, but Israel shall be thy name: and he called his
name Israel.

35:11 And God said unto him, I am God Almighty: be fruitful and
multiply; a nation and a company of nations shall be of thee, and
kings shall come out of thy loins; 35:12 And the land which I gave
Abraham and Isaac, to thee I will give it, and to thy seed after thee
will I give the land.

35:13 And God went up from him in the place where he talked with him.

35:14 And Jacob set up a pillar in the place where he talked with him,
even a pillar of stone: and he poured a drink offering thereon, and he
poured oil thereon.

35:15 And Jacob called the name of the place where God spake with him,
Bethel.

35:16 And they journeyed from Bethel; and there was but a little way
to come to Ephrath: and Rachel travailed, and she had hard labour.

35:17 And it came to pass, when she was in hard labour, that the
midwife said unto her, Fear not; thou shalt have this son also.

35:18 And it came to pass, as her soul was in departing, (for she
died) that she called his name Benoni: but his father called him
Benjamin.

35:19 And Rachel died, and was buried in the way to Ephrath, which is
Bethlehem.

35:20 And Jacob set a pillar upon her grave: that is the pillar of
Rachel's grave unto this day.

35:21 And Israel journeyed, and spread his tent beyond the tower of
Edar.

35:22 And it came to pass, when Israel dwelt in that land, that Reuben
went and lay with Bilhah his father's concubine: and Israel heard it.
Now the sons of Jacob were twelve: 35:23 The sons of Leah; Reuben,
Jacob's firstborn, and Simeon, and Levi, and Judah, and Issachar, and
Zebulun: 35:24 The sons of Rachel; Joseph, and Benjamin: 35:25 And the
sons of Bilhah, Rachel's handmaid; Dan, and Naphtali: 35:26 And the
sons of Zilpah, Leah's handmaid: Gad, and Asher: these are the sons of
Jacob, which were born to him in Padanaram.

35:27 And Jacob came unto Isaac his father unto Mamre, unto the city
of Arbah, which is Hebron, where Abraham and Isaac sojourned.

35:28 And the days of Isaac were an hundred and fourscore years.

35:29 And Isaac gave up the ghost, and died, and was gathered unto his
people, being old and full of days: and his sons Esau and Jacob buried
him.

36:1 Now these are the generations of Esau, who is Edom.

36:2 Esau took his wives of the daughters of Canaan; Adah the daughter
of Elon the Hittite, and Aholibamah the daughter of Anah the daughter
of Zibeon the Hivite; 36:3 And Bashemath Ishmael's daughter, sister of
Nebajoth.

36:4 And Adah bare to Esau Eliphaz; and Bashemath bare Reuel; 36:5 And
Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these are the sons of
Esau, which were born unto him in the land of Canaan.

36:6 And Esau took his wives, and his sons, and his daughters, and all
the persons of his house, and his cattle, and all his beasts, and all
his substance, which he had got in the land of Canaan; and went into
the country from the face of his brother Jacob.

36:7 For their riches were more than that they might dwell together;
and the land wherein they were strangers could not bear them because
of their cattle.

36:8 Thus dwelt Esau in mount Seir: Esau is Edom.

36:9 And these are the generations of Esau the father of the Edomites
in mount Seir: 36:10 These are the names of Esau's sons; Eliphaz the
son of Adah the wife of Esau, Reuel the son of Bashemath the wife of
Esau.

36:11 And the sons of Eliphaz were Teman, Omar, Zepho, and Gatam, and
Kenaz.

36:12 And Timna was concubine to Eliphaz Esau's son; and she bare to
Eliphaz Amalek: these were the sons of Adah Esau's wife.

36:13 And these are the sons of Reuel; Nahath, and Zerah, Shammah, and
Mizzah: these were the sons of Bashemath Esau's wife.

36:14 And these were the sons of Aholibamah, the daughter of Anah the
daughter of Zibeon, Esau's wife: and she bare to Esau Jeush, and
Jaalam, and Korah.

36:15 These were dukes of the sons of Esau: the sons of Eliphaz the
firstborn son of Esau; duke Teman, duke Omar, duke Zepho, duke Kenaz,
36:16 Duke Korah, duke Gatam, and duke Amalek: these are the dukes
that came of Eliphaz in the land of Edom; these were the sons of Adah.

36:17 And these are the sons of Reuel Esau's son; duke Nahath, duke
Zerah, duke Shammah, duke Mizzah: these are the dukes that came of
Reuel in the land of Edom; these are the sons of Bashemath Esau's
wife.

36:18 And these are the sons of Aholibamah Esau's wife; duke Jeush,
duke Jaalam, duke Korah: these were the dukes that came of Aholibamah
the daughter of Anah, Esau's wife.

36:19 These are the sons of Esau, who is Edom, and these are their
dukes.

36:20 These are the sons of Seir the Horite, who inhabited the land;
Lotan, and Shobal, and Zibeon, and Anah, 36:21 And Dishon, and Ezer,
and Dishan: these are the dukes of the Horites, the children of Seir
in the land of Edom.

36:22 And the children of Lotan were Hori and Hemam; and Lotan's
sister was Timna.

36:23 And the children of Shobal were these; Alvan, and Manahath, and
Ebal, Shepho, and Onam.

36:24 And these are the children of Zibeon; both Ajah, and Anah: this
was that Anah that found the mules in the wilderness, as he fed the
asses of Zibeon his father.

36:25 And the children of Anah were these; Dishon, and Aholibamah the
daughter of Anah.

36:26 And these are the children of Dishon; Hemdan, and Eshban, and
Ithran, and Cheran.

36:27 The children of Ezer are these; Bilhan, and Zaavan, and Akan.

36:28 The children of Dishan are these; Uz, and Aran.

36:29 These are the dukes that came of the Horites; duke Lotan, duke
Shobal, duke Zibeon, duke Anah, 36:30 Duke Dishon, duke Ezer, duke
Dishan: these are the dukes that came of Hori, among their dukes in
the land of Seir.

36:31 And these are the kings that reigned in the land of Edom, before
there reigned any king over the children of Israel.

36:32 And Bela the son of Beor reigned in Edom: and the name of his
city was Dinhabah.

36:33 And Bela died, and Jobab the son of Zerah of Bozrah reigned in
his stead.

36:34 And Jobab died, and Husham of the land of Temani reigned in his
stead.

36:35 And Husham died, and Hadad the son of Bedad, who smote Midian in
the field of Moab, reigned in his stead: and the name of his city was
Avith.

36:36 And Hadad died, and Samlah of Masrekah reigned in his stead.

36:37 And Samlah died, and Saul of Rehoboth by the river reigned in
his stead.

36:38 And Saul died, and Baalhanan the son of Achbor reigned in his
stead.

36:39 And Baalhanan the son of Achbor died, and Hadar reigned in his
stead: and the name of his city was Pau; and his wife's name was
Mehetabel, the daughter of Matred, the daughter of Mezahab.

36:40 And these are the names of the dukes that came of Esau,
according to their families, after their places, by their names; duke
Timnah, duke Alvah, duke Jetheth, 36:41 Duke Aholibamah, duke Elah,
duke Pinon, 36:42 Duke Kenaz, duke Teman, duke Mibzar, 36:43 Duke
Magdiel, duke Iram: these be the dukes of Edom, according to their
habitations in the land of their possession: he is Esau the father of
the Edomites.

37:1 And Jacob dwelt in the land wherein his father was a stranger, in
the land of Canaan.

37:2 These are the generations of Jacob. Joseph, being seventeen years
old, was feeding the flock with his brethren; and the lad was with the
sons of Bilhah, and with the sons of Zilpah, his father's wives: and
Joseph brought unto his father their evil report.

37:3 Now Israel loved Joseph more than all his children, because he
was the son of his old age: and he made him a coat of many colours.

37:4 And when his brethren saw that their father loved him more than
all his brethren, they hated him, and could not speak peaceably unto
him.

37:5 And Joseph dreamed a dream, and he told it his brethren: and they
hated him yet the more.

37:6 And he said unto them, Hear, I pray you, this dream which I have
dreamed: 37:7 For, behold, we were binding sheaves in the field, and,
lo, my sheaf arose, and also stood upright; and, behold, your sheaves
stood round about, and made obeisance to my sheaf.

37:8 And his brethren said to him, Shalt thou indeed reign over us? or
shalt thou indeed have dominion over us? And they hated him yet the
more for his dreams, and for his words.

37:9 And he dreamed yet another dream, and told it his brethren, and
said, Behold, I have dreamed a dream more; and, behold, the sun and
the moon and the eleven stars made obeisance to me.

37:10 And he told it to his father, and to his brethren: and his
father rebuked him, and said unto him, What is this dream that thou
hast dreamed?  Shall I and thy mother and thy brethren indeed come to
bow down ourselves to thee to the earth?  37:11 And his brethren
envied him; but his father observed the saying.

37:12 And his brethren went to feed their father's flock in Shechem.

37:13 And Israel said unto Joseph, Do not thy brethren feed the flock
in Shechem? come, and I will send thee unto them. And he said to him,
Here am I.

37:14 And he said to him, Go, I pray thee, see whether it be well with
thy brethren, and well with the flocks; and bring me word again. So he
sent him out of the vale of Hebron, and he came to Shechem.

37:15 And a certain man found him, and, behold, he was wandering in
the field: and the man asked him, saying, What seekest thou?  37:16
And he said, I seek my brethren: tell me, I pray thee, where they feed
their flocks.

37:17 And the man said, They are departed hence; for I heard them say,
Let us go to Dothan. And Joseph went after his brethren, and found
them in Dothan.

37:18 And when they saw him afar off, even before he came near unto
them, they conspired against him to slay him.

37:19 And they said one to another, Behold, this dreamer cometh.

37:20 Come now therefore, and let us slay him, and cast him into some
pit, and we will say, Some evil beast hath devoured him: and we shall
see what will become of his dreams.

37:21 And Reuben heard it, and he delivered him out of their hands;
and said, Let us not kill him.

37:22 And Reuben said unto them, Shed no blood, but cast him into this
pit that is in the wilderness, and lay no hand upon him; that he might
rid him out of their hands, to deliver him to his father again.

37:23 And it came to pass, when Joseph was come unto his brethren,
that they stript Joseph out of his coat, his coat of many colours that
was on him; 37:24 And they took him, and cast him into a pit: and the
pit was empty, there was no water in it.

37:25 And they sat down to eat bread: and they lifted up their eyes
and looked, and, behold, a company of Ishmeelites came from Gilead
with their camels bearing spicery and balm and myrrh, going to carry
it down to Egypt.

37:26 And Judah said unto his brethren, What profit is it if we slay
our brother, and conceal his blood?  37:27 Come, and let us sell him
to the Ishmeelites, and let not our hand be upon him; for he is our
brother and our flesh. And his brethren were content.

37:28 Then there passed by Midianites merchantmen; and they drew and
lifted up Joseph out of the pit, and sold Joseph to the Ishmeelites
for twenty pieces of silver: and they brought Joseph into Egypt.

37:29 And Reuben returned unto the pit; and, behold, Joseph was not in
the pit; and he rent his clothes.

37:30 And he returned unto his brethren, and said, The child is not;
and I, whither shall I go?  37:31 And they took Joseph's coat, and
killed a kid of the goats, and dipped the coat in the blood; 37:32 And
they sent the coat of many colours, and they brought it to their
father; and said, This have we found: know now whether it be thy son's
coat or no.

37:33 And he knew it, and said, It is my son's coat; an evil beast
hath devoured him; Joseph is without doubt rent in pieces.

37:34 And Jacob rent his clothes, and put sackcloth upon his loins,
and mourned for his son many days.

37:35 And all his sons and all his daughters rose up to comfort him;
but he refused to be comforted; and he said, For I will go down into
the grave unto my son mourning. Thus his father wept for him.

37:36 And the Midianites sold him into Egypt unto Potiphar, an officer
of Pharaoh's, and captain of the guard.

38:1 And it came to pass at that time, that Judah went down from his
brethren, and turned in to a certain Adullamite, whose name was Hirah.

38:2 And Judah saw there a daughter of a certain Canaanite, whose name
was Shuah; and he took her, and went in unto her.

38:3 And she conceived, and bare a son; and he called his name Er.

38:4 And she conceived again, and bare a son; and she called his name
Onan.

38:5 And she yet again conceived, and bare a son; and called his name
Shelah: and he was at Chezib, when she bare him.

38:6 And Judah took a wife for Er his firstborn, whose name was Tamar.

38:7 And Er, Judah's firstborn, was wicked in the sight of the LORD;
and the LORD slew him.

38:8 And Judah said unto Onan, Go in unto thy brother's wife, and
marry her, and raise up seed to thy brother.

38:9 And Onan knew that the seed should not be his; and it came to
pass, when he went in unto his brother's wife, that he spilled it on
the ground, lest that he should give seed to his brother.

38:10 And the thing which he did displeased the LORD: wherefore he
slew him also.

38:11 Then said Judah to Tamar his daughter in law, Remain a widow at
thy father's house, till Shelah my son be grown: for he said, Lest
peradventure he die also, as his brethren did. And Tamar went and
dwelt in her father's house.

38:12 And in process of time the daughter of Shuah Judah's wife died;
and Judah was comforted, and went up unto his sheepshearers to
Timnath, he and his friend Hirah the Adullamite.

38:13 And it was told Tamar, saying, Behold thy father in law goeth up
to Timnath to shear his sheep.

38:14 And she put her widow's garments off from her, and covered her
with a vail, and wrapped herself, and sat in an open place, which is
by the way to Timnath; for she saw that Shelah was grown, and she was
not given unto him to wife.

38:15 When Judah saw her, he thought her to be an harlot; because she
had covered her face.

38:16 And he turned unto her by the way, and said, Go to, I pray thee,
let me come in unto thee; (for he knew not that she was his daughter
in law.) And she said, What wilt thou give me, that thou mayest come
in unto me?  38:17 And he said, I will send thee a kid from the flock.
And she said, Wilt thou give me a pledge, till thou send it?  38:18
And he said, What pledge shall I give thee? And she said, Thy signet,
and thy bracelets, and thy staff that is in thine hand. And he gave it
her, and came in unto her, and she conceived by him.

38:19 And she arose, and went away, and laid by her vail from her, and
put on the garments of her widowhood.

38:20 And Judah sent the kid by the hand of his friend the Adullamite,
to receive his pledge from the woman's hand: but he found her not.

38:21 Then he asked the men of that place, saying, Where is the
harlot, that was openly by the way side? And they said, There was no
harlot in this place.

38:22 And he returned to Judah, and said, I cannot find her; and also
the men of the place said, that there was no harlot in this place.

38:23 And Judah said, Let her take it to her, lest we be shamed:
behold, I sent this kid, and thou hast not found her.

38:24 And it came to pass about three months after, that it was told
Judah, saying, Tamar thy daughter in law hath played the harlot; and
also, behold, she is with child by whoredom. And Judah said, Bring her
forth, and let her be burnt.

38:25 When she was brought forth, she sent to her father in law,
saying, By the man, whose these are, am I with child: and she said,
Discern, I pray thee, whose are these, the signet, and bracelets, and
staff.

38:26 And Judah acknowledged them, and said, She hath been more
righteous than I; because that I gave her not to Shelah my son. And he
knew her again no more.

38:27 And it came to pass in the time of her travail, that, behold,
twins were in her womb.

38:28 And it came to pass, when she travailed, that the one put out
his hand: and the midwife took and bound upon his hand a scarlet
thread, saying, This came out first.

38:29 And it came to pass, as he drew back his hand, that, behold, his
brother came out: and she said, How hast thou broken forth? this
breach be upon thee: therefore his name was called Pharez.

38:30 And afterward came out his brother, that had the scarlet thread
upon his hand: and his name was called Zarah.

39:1 And Joseph was brought down to Egypt; and Potiphar, an officer of
Pharaoh, captain of the guard, an Egyptian, bought him of the hands of
the Ishmeelites, which had brought him down thither.

39:2 And the LORD was with Joseph, and he was a prosperous man; and he
was in the house of his master the Egyptian.

39:3 And his master saw that the LORD was with him, and that the LORD
made all that he did to prosper in his hand.

39:4 And Joseph found grace in his sight, and he served him: and he
made him overseer over his house, and all that he had he put into his
hand.

39:5 And it came to pass from the time that he had made him overseer
in his house, and over all that he had, that the LORD blessed the
Egyptian's house for Joseph's sake; and the blessing of the LORD was
upon all that he had in the house, and in the field.

39:6 And he left all that he had in Joseph's hand; and he knew not
ought he had, save the bread which he did eat. And Joseph was a goodly
person, and well favoured.

39:7 And it came to pass after these things, that his master's wife
cast her eyes upon Joseph; and she said, Lie with me.

39:8 But he refused, and said unto his master's wife, Behold, my
master wotteth not what is with me in the house, and he hath committed
all that he hath to my hand; 39:9 There is none greater in this house
than I; neither hath he kept back any thing from me but thee, because
thou art his wife: how then can I do this great wickedness, and sin
against God?  39:10 And it came to pass, as she spake to Joseph day by
day, that he hearkened not unto her, to lie by her, or to be with her.

39:11 And it came to pass about this time, that Joseph went into the
house to do his business; and there was none of the men of the house
there within.

39:12 And she caught him by his garment, saying, Lie with me: and he
left his garment in her hand, and fled, and got him out.

39:13 And it came to pass, when she saw that he had left his garment
in her hand, and was fled forth, 39:14 That she called unto the men of
her house, and spake unto them, saying, See, he hath brought in an
Hebrew unto us to mock us; he came in unto me to lie with me, and I
cried with a loud voice: 39:15 And it came to pass, when he heard that
I lifted up my voice and cried, that he left his garment with me, and
fled, and got him out.

39:16 And she laid up his garment by her, until his lord came home.

39:17 And she spake unto him according to these words, saying, The
Hebrew servant, which thou hast brought unto us, came in unto me to
mock me: 39:18 And it came to pass, as I lifted up my voice and cried,
that he left his garment with me, and fled out.

39:19 And it came to pass, when his master heard the words of his
wife, which she spake unto him, saying, After this manner did thy
servant to me; that his wrath was kindled.

39:20 And Joseph's master took him, and put him into the prison, a
place where the king's prisoners were bound: and he was there in the
prison.

39:21 But the LORD was with Joseph, and shewed him mercy, and gave him
favour in the sight of the keeper of the prison.

39:22 And the keeper of the prison committed to Joseph's hand all the
prisoners that were in the prison; and whatsoever they did there, he
was the doer of it.

39:23 The keeper of the prison looked not to any thing that was under
his hand; because the LORD was with him, and that which he did, the
LORD made it to prosper.

40:1 And it came to pass after these things, that the butler of the
king of Egypt and his baker had offended their lord the king of Egypt.

40:2 And Pharaoh was wroth against two of his officers, against the
chief of the butlers, and against the chief of the bakers.

40:3 And he put them in ward in the house of the captain of the guard,
into the prison, the place where Joseph was bound.

40:4 And the captain of the guard charged Joseph with them, and he
served them: and they continued a season in ward.

40:5 And they dreamed a dream both of them, each man his dream in one
night, each man according to the interpretation of his dream, the
butler and the baker of the king of Egypt, which were bound in the
prison.

40:6 And Joseph came in unto them in the morning, and looked upon
them, and, behold, they were sad.

40:7 And he asked Pharaoh's officers that were with him in the ward of
his lord's house, saying, Wherefore look ye so sadly to day?  40:8 And
they said unto him, We have dreamed a dream, and there is no
interpreter of it. And Joseph said unto them, Do not interpretations
belong to God? tell me them, I pray you.

40:9 And the chief butler told his dream to Joseph, and said to him,
In my dream, behold, a vine was before me; 40:10 And in the vine were
three branches: and it was as though it budded, and her blossoms shot
forth; and the clusters thereof brought forth ripe grapes: 40:11 And
Pharaoh's cup was in my hand: and I took the grapes, and pressed them
into Pharaoh's cup, and I gave the cup into Pharaoh's hand.

40:12 And Joseph said unto him, This is the interpretation of it: The
three branches are three days: 40:13 Yet within three days shall
Pharaoh lift up thine head, and restore thee unto thy place: and thou
shalt deliver Pharaoh's cup into his hand, after the former manner
when thou wast his butler.

40:14 But think on me when it shall be well with thee, and shew
kindness, I pray thee, unto me, and make mention of me unto Pharaoh,
and bring me out of this house: 40:15 For indeed I was stolen away out
of the land of the Hebrews: and here also have I done nothing that
they should put me into the dungeon.

40:16 When the chief baker saw that the interpretation was good, he
said unto Joseph, I also was in my dream, and, behold, I had three
white baskets on my head: 40:17 And in the uppermost basket there was
of all manner of bakemeats for Pharaoh; and the birds did eat them out
of the basket upon my head.

40:18 And Joseph answered and said, This is the interpretation
thereof: The three baskets are three days: 40:19 Yet within three days
shall Pharaoh lift up thy head from off thee, and shall hang thee on a
tree; and the birds shall eat thy flesh from off thee.

40:20 And it came to pass the third day, which was Pharaoh's birthday,
that he made a feast unto all his servants: and he lifted up the head
of the chief butler and of the chief baker among his servants.

40:21 And he restored the chief butler unto his butlership again; and
he gave the cup into Pharaoh's hand: 40:22 But he hanged the chief
baker: as Joseph had interpreted to them.

40:23 Yet did not the chief butler remember Joseph, but forgat him.

41:1 And it came to pass at the end of two full years, that Pharaoh
dreamed: and, behold, he stood by the river.

41:2 And, behold, there came up out of the river seven well favoured
kine and fatfleshed; and they fed in a meadow.

41:3 And, behold, seven other kine came up after them out of the
river, ill favoured and leanfleshed; and stood by the other kine upon
the brink of the river.

41:4 And the ill favoured and leanfleshed kine did eat up the seven
well favoured and fat kine. So Pharaoh awoke.

41:5 And he slept and dreamed the second time: and, behold, seven ears
of corn came up upon one stalk, rank and good.

41:6 And, behold, seven thin ears and blasted with the east wind
sprung up after them.

41:7 And the seven thin ears devoured the seven rank and full ears.
And Pharaoh awoke, and, behold, it was a dream.

41:8 And it came to pass in the morning that his spirit was troubled;
and he sent and called for all the magicians of Egypt, and all the
wise men thereof: and Pharaoh told them his dream; but there was none
that could interpret them unto Pharaoh.

41:9 Then spake the chief butler unto Pharaoh, saying, I do remember
my faults this day: 41:10 Pharaoh was wroth with his servants, and put
me in ward in the captain of the guard's house, both me and the chief
baker: 41:11 And we dreamed a dream in one night, I and he; we dreamed
each man according to the interpretation of his dream.

41:12 And there was there with us a young man, an Hebrew, servant to
the captain of the guard; and we told him, and he interpreted to us
our dreams; to each man according to his dream he did interpret.

41:13 And it came to pass, as he interpreted to us, so it was; me he
restored unto mine office, and him he hanged.

41:14 Then Pharaoh sent and called Joseph, and they brought him
hastily out of the dungeon: and he shaved himself, and changed his
raiment, and came in unto Pharaoh.

41:15 And Pharaoh said unto Joseph, I have dreamed a dream, and there
is none that can interpret it: and I have heard say of thee, that thou
canst understand a dream to interpret it.

41:16 And Joseph answered Pharaoh, saying, It is not in me: God shall
give Pharaoh an answer of peace.

41:17 And Pharaoh said unto Joseph, In my dream, behold, I stood upon
the bank of the river: 41:18 And, behold, there came up out of the
river seven kine, fatfleshed and well favoured; and they fed in a
meadow: 41:19 And, behold, seven other kine came up after them, poor
and very ill favoured and leanfleshed, such as I never saw in all the
land of Egypt for badness: 41:20 And the lean and the ill favoured
kine did eat up the first seven fat kine: 41:21 And when they had
eaten them up, it could not be known that they had eaten them; but
they were still ill favoured, as at the beginning. So I awoke.

41:22 And I saw in my dream, and, behold, seven ears came up in one
stalk, full and good: 41:23 And, behold, seven ears, withered, thin,
and blasted with the east wind, sprung up after them: 41:24 And the
thin ears devoured the seven good ears: and I told this unto the
magicians; but there was none that could declare it to me.

41:25 And Joseph said unto Pharaoh, The dream of Pharaoh is one: God
hath shewed Pharaoh what he is about to do.

41:26 The seven good kine are seven years; and the seven good ears are
seven years: the dream is one.

41:27 And the seven thin and ill favoured kine that came up after them
are seven years; and the seven empty ears blasted with the east wind
shall be seven years of famine.

41:28 This is the thing which I have spoken unto Pharaoh: What God is
about to do he sheweth unto Pharaoh.

41:29 Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all
the land of Egypt: 41:30 And there shall arise after them seven years
of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt;
and the famine shall consume the land; 41:31 And the plenty shall not
be known in the land by reason of that famine following; for it shall
be very grievous.

41:32 And for that the dream was doubled unto Pharaoh twice; it is
because the thing is established by God, and God will shortly bring it
to pass.

41:33 Now therefore let Pharaoh look out a man discreet and wise, and
set him over the land of Egypt.

41:34 Let Pharaoh do this, and let him appoint officers over the land,
and take up the fifth part of the land of Egypt in the seven plenteous
years.

41:35 And let them gather all the food of those good years that come,
and lay up corn under the hand of Pharaoh, and let them keep food in
the cities.

41:36 And that food shall be for store to the land against the seven
years of famine, which shall be in the land of Egypt; that the land
perish not through the famine.

41:37 And the thing was good in the eyes of Pharaoh, and in the eyes
of all his servants.

41:38 And Pharaoh said unto his servants, Can we find such a one as
this is, a man in whom the Spirit of God is?  41:39 And Pharaoh said
unto Joseph, Forasmuch as God hath shewed thee all this, there is none
so discreet and wise as thou art: 41:40 Thou shalt be over my house,
and according unto thy word shall all my people be ruled: only in the
throne will I be greater than thou.

41:41 And Pharaoh said unto Joseph, See, I have set thee over all the
land of Egypt.

41:42 And Pharaoh took off his ring from his hand, and put it upon
Joseph's hand, and arrayed him in vestures of fine linen, and put a
gold chain about his neck; 41:43 And he made him to ride in the second
chariot which he had; and they cried before him, Bow the knee: and he
made him ruler over all the land of Egypt.

41:44 And Pharaoh said unto Joseph, I am Pharaoh, and without thee
shall no man lift up his hand or foot in all the land of Egypt.

41:45 And Pharaoh called Joseph's name Zaphnathpaaneah; and he gave
him to wife Asenath the daughter of Potipherah priest of On. And
Joseph went out over all the land of Egypt.

41:46 And Joseph was thirty years old when he stood before Pharaoh
king of Egypt. And Joseph went out from the presence of Pharaoh, and
went throughout all the land of Egypt.

41:47 And in the seven plenteous years the earth brought forth by
handfuls.

41:48 And he gathered up all the food of the seven years, which were
in the land of Egypt, and laid up the food in the cities: the food of
the field, which was round about every city, laid he up in the same.

41:49 And Joseph gathered corn as the sand of the sea, very much,
until he left numbering; for it was without number.

41:50 And unto Joseph were born two sons before the years of famine
came, which Asenath the daughter of Potipherah priest of On bare unto
him.

41:51 And Joseph called the name of the firstborn Manasseh: For God,
said he, hath made me forget all my toil, and all my father's house.

41:52 And the name of the second called he Ephraim: For God hath
caused me to be fruitful in the land of my affliction.

41:53 And the seven years of plenteousness, that was in the land of
Egypt, were ended.

41:54 And the seven years of dearth began to come, according as Joseph
had said: and the dearth was in all lands; but in all the land of
Egypt there was bread.

41:55 And when all the land of Egypt was famished, the people cried to
Pharaoh for bread: and Pharaoh said unto all the Egyptians, Go unto
Joseph; what he saith to you, do.

41:56 And the famine was over all the face of the earth: and Joseph
opened all the storehouses, and sold unto the Egyptians; and the
famine waxed sore in the land of Egypt.

41:57 And all countries came into Egypt to Joseph for to buy corn;
because that the famine was so sore in all lands.

42:1 Now when Jacob saw that there was corn in Egypt, Jacob said unto
his sons, Why do ye look one upon another?  42:2 And he said, Behold,
I have heard that there is corn in Egypt: get you down thither, and
buy for us from thence; that we may live, and not die.

42:3 And Joseph's ten brethren went down to buy corn in Egypt.

42:4 But Benjamin, Joseph's brother, Jacob sent not with his brethren;
for he said, Lest peradventure mischief befall him.

42:5 And the sons of Israel came to buy corn among those that came:
for the famine was in the land of Canaan.

42:6 And Joseph was the governor over the land, and he it was that
sold to all the people of the land: and Joseph's brethren came, and
bowed down themselves before him with their faces to the earth.

42:7 And Joseph saw his brethren, and he knew them, but made himself
strange unto them, and spake roughly unto them; and he said unto them,
Whence come ye? And they said, From the land of Canaan to buy food.

42:8 And Joseph knew his brethren, but they knew not him.

42:9 And Joseph remembered the dreams which he dreamed of them, and
said unto them, Ye are spies; to see the nakedness of the land ye are
come.

42:10 And they said unto him, Nay, my lord, but to buy food are thy
servants come.

42:11 We are all one man's sons; we are true men, thy servants are no
spies.

42:12 And he said unto them, Nay, but to see the nakedness of the land
ye are come.

42:13 And they said, Thy servants are twelve brethren, the sons of one
man in the land of Canaan; and, behold, the youngest is this day with
our father, and one is not.

42:14 And Joseph said unto them, That is it that I spake unto you,
saying, Ye are spies: 42:15 Hereby ye shall be proved: By the life of
Pharaoh ye shall not go forth hence, except your youngest brother come
hither.

42:16 Send one of you, and let him fetch your brother, and ye shall be
kept in prison, that your words may be proved, whether there be any
truth in you: or else by the life of Pharaoh surely ye are spies.

42:17 And he put them all together into ward three days.

42:18 And Joseph said unto them the third day, This do, and live; for
I fear God: 42:19 If ye be true men, let one of your brethren be bound
in the house of your prison: go ye, carry corn for the famine of your
houses: 42:20 But bring your youngest brother unto me; so shall your
words be verified, and ye shall not die. And they did so.

42:21 And they said one to another, We are verily guilty concerning
our brother, in that we saw the anguish of his soul, when he besought
us, and we would not hear; therefore is this distress come upon us.

42:22 And Reuben answered them, saying, Spake I not unto you, saying,
Do not sin against the child; and ye would not hear? therefore,
behold, also his blood is required.

42:23 And they knew not that Joseph understood them; for he spake unto
them by an interpreter.

42:24 And he turned himself about from them, and wept; and returned to
them again, and communed with them, and took from them Simeon, and
bound him before their eyes.

42:25 Then Joseph commanded to fill their sacks with corn, and to
restore every man's money into his sack, and to give them provision
for the way: and thus did he unto them.

42:26 And they laded their asses with the corn, and departed thence.

42:27 And as one of them opened his sack to give his ass provender in
the inn, he espied his money; for, behold, it was in his sack's mouth.

42:28 And he said unto his brethren, My money is restored; and, lo, it
is even in my sack: and their heart failed them, and they were afraid,
saying one to another, What is this that God hath done unto us?  42:29
And they came unto Jacob their father unto the land of Canaan, and
told him all that befell unto them; saying, 42:30 The man, who is the
lord of the land, spake roughly to us, and took us for spies of the
country.

42:31 And we said unto him, We are true men; we are no spies: 42:32 We
be twelve brethren, sons of our father; one is not, and the youngest
is this day with our father in the land of Canaan.

42:33 And the man, the lord of the country, said unto us, Hereby shall
I know that ye are true men; leave one of your brethren here with me,
and take food for the famine of your households, and be gone: 42:34
And bring your youngest brother unto me: then shall I know that ye are
no spies, but that ye are true men: so will I deliver you your
brother, and ye shall traffick in the land.

42:35 And it came to pass as they emptied their sacks, that, behold,
every man's bundle of money was in his sack: and when both they and
their father saw the bundles of money, they were afraid.

42:36 And Jacob their father said unto them, Me have ye bereaved of my
children: Joseph is not, and Simeon is not, and ye will take Benjamin
away: all these things are against me.

42:37 And Reuben spake unto his father, saying, Slay my two sons, if I
bring him not to thee: deliver him into my hand, and I will bring him
to thee again.

42:38 And he said, My son shall not go down with you; for his brother
is dead, and he is left alone: if mischief befall him by the way in
the which ye go, then shall ye bring down my gray hairs with sorrow to
the grave.

43:1 And the famine was sore in the land.

43:2 And it came to pass, when they had eaten up the corn which they
had brought out of Egypt, their father said unto them, Go again, buy
us a little food.

43:3 And Judah spake unto him, saying, The man did solemnly protest
unto us, saying, Ye shall not see my face, except your brother be with
you.

43:4 If thou wilt send our brother with us, we will go down and buy
thee food: 43:5 But if thou wilt not send him, we will not go down:
for the man said unto us, Ye shall not see my face, except your
brother be with you.

43:6 And Israel said, Wherefore dealt ye so ill with me, as to tell
the man whether ye had yet a brother?  43:7 And they said, The man
asked us straitly of our state, and of our kindred, saying, Is your
father yet alive? have ye another brother? and we told him according
to the tenor of these words: could we certainly know that he would
say, Bring your brother down?  43:8 And Judah said unto Israel his
father, Send the lad with me, and we will arise and go; that we may
live, and not die, both we, and thou, and also our little ones.

43:9 I will be surety for him; of my hand shalt thou require him: if I
bring him not unto thee, and set him before thee, then let me bear the
blame for ever: 43:10 For except we had lingered, surely now we had
returned this second time.

43:11 And their father Israel said unto them, If it must be so now, do
this; take of the best fruits in the land in your vessels, and carry
down the man a present, a little balm, and a little honey, spices, and
myrrh, nuts, and almonds: 43:12 And take double money in your hand;
and the money that was brought again in the mouth of your sacks, carry
it again in your hand; peradventure it was an oversight: 43:13 Take
also your brother, and arise, go again unto the man: 43:14 And God
Almighty give you mercy before the man, that he may send away your
other brother, and Benjamin. If I be bereaved of my children, I am
bereaved.

43:15 And the men took that present, and they took double money in
their hand and Benjamin; and rose up, and went down to Egypt, and
stood before Joseph.

43:16 And when Joseph saw Benjamin with them, he said to the ruler of
his house, Bring these men home, and slay, and make ready; for these
men shall dine with me at noon.

43:17 And the man did as Joseph bade; and the man brought the men into
Joseph's house.

43:18 And the men were afraid, because they were brought into Joseph's
house; and they said, Because of the money that was returned in our
sacks at the first time are we brought in; that he may seek occasion
against us, and fall upon us, and take us for bondmen, and our asses.

43:19 And they came near to the steward of Joseph's house, and they
communed with him at the door of the house, 43:20 And said, O sir, we
came indeed down at the first time to buy food: 43:21 And it came to
pass, when we came to the inn, that we opened our sacks, and, behold,
every man's money was in the mouth of his sack, our money in full
weight: and we have brought it again in our hand.

43:22 And other money have we brought down in our hands to buy food:
we cannot tell who put our money in our sacks.

43:23 And he said, Peace be to you, fear not: your God, and the God of
your father, hath given you treasure in your sacks: I had your money.
And he brought Simeon out unto them.

43:24 And the man brought the men into Joseph's house, and gave them
water, and they washed their feet; and he gave their asses provender.

43:25 And they made ready the present against Joseph came at noon: for
they heard that they should eat bread there.

43:26 And when Joseph came home, they brought him the present which
was in their hand into the house, and bowed themselves to him to the
earth.

43:27 And he asked them of their welfare, and said, Is your father
well, the old man of whom ye spake? Is he yet alive?  43:28 And they
answered, Thy servant our father is in good health, he is yet alive.
And they bowed down their heads, and made obeisance.

43:29 And he lifted up his eyes, and saw his brother Benjamin, his
mother's son, and said, Is this your younger brother, of whom ye spake
unto me? And he said, God be gracious unto thee, my son.

43:30 And Joseph made haste; for his bowels did yearn upon his
brother: and he sought where to weep; and he entered into his chamber,
and wept there.

43:31 And he washed his face, and went out, and refrained himself, and
said, Set on bread.

43:32 And they set on for him by himself, and for them by themselves,
and for the Egyptians, which did eat with him, by themselves: because
the Egyptians might not eat bread with the Hebrews; for that is an
abomination unto the Egyptians.

43:33 And they sat before him, the firstborn according to his
birthright, and the youngest according to his youth: and the men
marvelled one at another.

43:34 And he took and sent messes unto them from before him: but
Benjamin's mess was five times so much as any of their's. And they
drank, and were merry with him.

44:1 And he commanded the steward of his house, saying, Fill the men's
sacks with food, as much as they can carry, and put every man's money
in his sack's mouth.

44:2 And put my cup, the silver cup, in the sack's mouth of the
youngest, and his corn money. And he did according to the word that
Joseph had spoken.

44:3 As soon as the morning was light, the men were sent away, they
and their asses.

44:4 And when they were gone out of the city, and not yet far off,
Joseph said unto his steward, Up, follow after the men; and when thou
dost overtake them, say unto them, Wherefore have ye rewarded evil for
good?  44:5 Is not this it in which my lord drinketh, and whereby
indeed he divineth? ye have done evil in so doing.

44:6 And he overtook them, and he spake unto them these same words.

44:7 And they said unto him, Wherefore saith my lord these words? God
forbid that thy servants should do according to this thing: 44:8
Behold, the money, which we found in our sacks' mouths, we brought
again unto thee out of the land of Canaan: how then should we steal
out of thy lord's house silver or gold?  44:9 With whomsoever of thy
servants it be found, both let him die, and we also will be my lord's
bondmen.

44:10 And he said, Now also let it be according unto your words: he
with whom it is found shall be my servant; and ye shall be blameless.

44:11 Then they speedily took down every man his sack to the ground,
and opened every man his sack.

44:12 And he searched, and began at the eldest, and left at the
youngest: and the cup was found in Benjamin's sack.

44:13 Then they rent their clothes, and laded every man his ass, and
returned to the city.

44:14 And Judah and his brethren came to Joseph's house; for he was
yet there: and they fell before him on the ground.

44:15 And Joseph said unto them, What deed is this that ye have done?
wot ye not that such a man as I can certainly divine?  44:16 And Judah
said, What shall we say unto my lord? what shall we speak?  or how
shall we clear ourselves? God hath found out the iniquity of thy
servants: behold, we are my lord's servants, both we, and he also with
whom the cup is found.

44:17 And he said, God forbid that I should do so: but the man in
whose hand the cup is found, he shall be my servant; and as for you,
get you up in peace unto your father.

44:18 Then Judah came near unto him, and said, Oh my lord, let thy
servant, I pray thee, speak a word in my lord's ears, and let not
thine anger burn against thy servant: for thou art even as Pharaoh.

44:19 My lord asked his servants, saying, Have ye a father, or a
brother?  44:20 And we said unto my lord, We have a father, an old
man, and a child of his old age, a little one; and his brother is
dead, and he alone is left of his mother, and his father loveth him.

44:21 And thou saidst unto thy servants, Bring him down unto me, that
I may set mine eyes upon him.

44:22 And we said unto my lord, The lad cannot leave his father: for
if he should leave his father, his father would die.

44:23 And thou saidst unto thy servants, Except your youngest brother
come down with you, ye shall see my face no more.

44:24 And it came to pass when we came up unto thy servant my father,
we told him the words of my lord.

44:25 And our father said, Go again, and buy us a little food.

44:26 And we said, We cannot go down: if our youngest brother be with
us, then will we go down: for we may not see the man's face, except
our youngest brother be with us.

44:27 And thy servant my father said unto us, Ye know that my wife
bare me two sons: 44:28 And the one went out from me, and I said,
Surely he is torn in pieces; and I saw him not since: 44:29 And if ye
take this also from me, and mischief befall him, ye shall bring down
my gray hairs with sorrow to the grave.

44:30 Now therefore when I come to thy servant my father, and the lad
be not with us; seeing that his life is bound up in the lad's life;
44:31 It shall come to pass, when he seeth that the lad is not with
us, that he will die: and thy servants shall bring down the gray hairs
of thy servant our father with sorrow to the grave.

44:32 For thy servant became surety for the lad unto my father,
saying, If I bring him not unto thee, then I shall bear the blame to
my father for ever.

44:33 Now therefore, I pray thee, let thy servant abide instead of the
lad a bondman to my lord; and let the lad go up with his brethren.

44:34 For how shall I go up to my father, and the lad be not with me?
lest peradventure I see the evil that shall come on my father.

45:1 Then Joseph could not refrain himself before all them that stood
by him; and he cried, Cause every man to go out from me. And there
stood no man with him, while Joseph made himself known unto his
brethren.

45:2 And he wept aloud: and the Egyptians and the house of Pharaoh
heard.

45:3 And Joseph said unto his brethren, I am Joseph; doth my father
yet live? And his brethren could not answer him; for they were
troubled at his presence.

45:4 And Joseph said unto his brethren, Come near to me, I pray you.
And they came near. And he said, I am Joseph your brother, whom ye
sold into Egypt.

45:5 Now therefore be not grieved, nor angry with yourselves, that ye
sold me hither: for God did send me before you to preserve life.

45:6 For these two years hath the famine been in the land: and yet
there are five years, in the which there shall neither be earing nor
harvest.

45:7 And God sent me before you to preserve you a posterity in the
earth, and to save your lives by a great deliverance.

45:8 So now it was not you that sent me hither, but God: and he hath
made me a father to Pharaoh, and lord of all his house, and a ruler
throughout all the land of Egypt.

45:9 Haste ye, and go up to my father, and say unto him, Thus saith
thy son Joseph, God hath made me lord of all Egypt: come down unto me,
tarry not: 45:10 And thou shalt dwell in the land of Goshen, and thou
shalt be near unto me, thou, and thy children, and thy children's
children, and thy flocks, and thy herds, and all that thou hast: 45:11
And there will I nourish thee; for yet there are five years of famine;
lest thou, and thy household, and all that thou hast, come to poverty.

45:12 And, behold, your eyes see, and the eyes of my brother Benjamin,
that it is my mouth that speaketh unto you.

45:13 And ye shall tell my father of all my glory in Egypt, and of all
that ye have seen; and ye shall haste and bring down my father hither.

45:14 And he fell upon his brother Benjamin's neck, and wept; and
Benjamin wept upon his neck.

45:15 Moreover he kissed all his brethren, and wept upon them: and
after that his brethren talked with him.

45:16 And the fame thereof was heard in Pharaoh's house, saying,
Joseph's brethren are come: and it pleased Pharaoh well, and his
servants.

45:17 And Pharaoh said unto Joseph, Say unto thy brethren, This do ye;
lade your beasts, and go, get you unto the land of Canaan; 45:18 And
take your father and your households, and come unto me: and I will
give you the good of the land of Egypt, and ye shall eat the fat of
the land.

45:19 Now thou art commanded, this do ye; take you wagons out of the
land of Egypt for your little ones, and for your wives, and bring your
father, and come.

45:20 Also regard not your stuff; for the good of all the land of
Egypt is your's.

45:21 And the children of Israel did so: and Joseph gave them wagons,
according to the commandment of Pharaoh, and gave them provision for
the way.

45:22 To all of them he gave each man changes of raiment; but to
Benjamin he gave three hundred pieces of silver, and five changes of
raiment.

45:23 And to his father he sent after this manner; ten asses laden
with the good things of Egypt, and ten she asses laden with corn and
bread and meat for his father by the way.

45:24 So he sent his brethren away, and they departed: and he said
unto them, See that ye fall not out by the way.

45:25 And they went up out of Egypt, and came into the land of Canaan
unto Jacob their father, 45:26 And told him, saying, Joseph is yet
alive, and he is governor over all the land of Egypt. And Jacob's
heart fainted, for he believed them not.

45:27 And they told him all the words of Joseph, which he had said
unto them: and when he saw the wagons which Joseph had sent to carry
him, the spirit of Jacob their father revived: 45:28 And Israel said,
It is enough; Joseph my son is yet alive: I will go and see him before
I die.

46:1 And Israel took his journey with all that he had, and came to
Beersheba, and offered sacrifices unto the God of his father Isaac.

46:2 And God spake unto Israel in the visions of the night, and said,
Jacob, Jacob. And he said, Here am I.

46:3 And he said, I am God, the God of thy father: fear not to go down
into Egypt; for I will there make of thee a great nation: 46:4 I will
go down with thee into Egypt; and I will also surely bring thee up
again: and Joseph shall put his hand upon thine eyes.

46:5 And Jacob rose up from Beersheba: and the sons of Israel carried
Jacob their father, and their little ones, and their wives, in the
wagons which Pharaoh had sent to carry him.

46:6 And they took their cattle, and their goods, which they had
gotten in the land of Canaan, and came into Egypt, Jacob, and all his
seed with him: 46:7 His sons, and his sons' sons with him, his
daughters, and his sons' daughters, and all his seed brought he with
him into Egypt.

46:8 And these are the names of the children of Israel, which came
into Egypt, Jacob and his sons: Reuben, Jacob's firstborn.

46:9 And the sons of Reuben; Hanoch, and Phallu, and Hezron, and
Carmi.

46:10 And the sons of Simeon; Jemuel, and Jamin, and Ohad, and Jachin,
and Zohar, and Shaul the son of a Canaanitish woman.

46:11 And the sons of Levi; Gershon, Kohath, and Merari.

46:12 And the sons of Judah; Er, and Onan, and Shelah, and Pharez, and
Zarah: but Er and Onan died in the land of Canaan. And the sons of
Pharez were Hezron and Hamul.

46:13 And the sons of Issachar; Tola, and Phuvah, and Job, and
Shimron.

46:14 And the sons of Zebulun; Sered, and Elon, and Jahleel.

46:15 These be the sons of Leah, which she bare unto Jacob in
Padanaram, with his daughter Dinah: all the souls of his sons and his
daughters were thirty and three.

46:16 And the sons of Gad; Ziphion, and Haggi, Shuni, and Ezbon, Eri,
and Arodi, and Areli.

46:17 And the sons of Asher; Jimnah, and Ishuah, and Isui, and Beriah,
and Serah their sister: and the sons of Beriah; Heber, and Malchiel.

46:18 These are the sons of Zilpah, whom Laban gave to Leah his
daughter, and these she bare unto Jacob, even sixteen souls.

46:19 The sons of Rachel Jacob's wife; Joseph, and Benjamin.

46:20 And unto Joseph in the land of Egypt were born Manasseh and
Ephraim, which Asenath the daughter of Potipherah priest of On bare
unto him.

46:21 And the sons of Benjamin were Belah, and Becher, and Ashbel,
Gera, and Naaman, Ehi, and Rosh, Muppim, and Huppim, and Ard.

46:22 These are the sons of Rachel, which were born to Jacob: all the
souls were fourteen.

46:23 And the sons of Dan; Hushim.

46:24 And the sons of Naphtali; Jahzeel, and Guni, and Jezer, and
Shillem.

46:25 These are the sons of Bilhah, which Laban gave unto Rachel his
daughter, and she bare these unto Jacob: all the souls were seven.

46:26 All the souls that came with Jacob into Egypt, which came out of
his loins, besides Jacob's sons' wives, all the souls were threescore
and six; 46:27 And the sons of Joseph, which were born him in Egypt,
were two souls: all the souls of the house of Jacob, which came into
Egypt, were threescore and ten.

46:28 And he sent Judah before him unto Joseph, to direct his face
unto Goshen; and they came into the land of Goshen.

46:29 And Joseph made ready his chariot, and went up to meet Israel
his father, to Goshen, and presented himself unto him; and he fell on
his neck, and wept on his neck a good while.

46:30 And Israel said unto Joseph, Now let me die, since I have seen
thy face, because thou art yet alive.

46:31 And Joseph said unto his brethren, and unto his father's house,
I will go up, and shew Pharaoh, and say unto him, My brethren, and my
father's house, which were in the land of Canaan, are come unto me;
46:32 And the men are shepherds, for their trade hath been to feed
cattle; and they have brought their flocks, and their herds, and all
that they have.

46:33 And it shall come to pass, when Pharaoh shall call you, and
shall say, What is your occupation?  46:34 That ye shall say, Thy
servants' trade hath been about cattle from our youth even until now,
both we, and also our fathers: that ye may dwell in the land of
Goshen; for every shepherd is an abomination unto the Egyptians.

47:1 Then Joseph came and told Pharaoh, and said, My father and my
brethren, and their flocks, and their herds, and all that they have,
are come out of the land of Canaan; and, behold, they are in the land
of Goshen.

47:2 And he took some of his brethren, even five men, and presented
them unto Pharaoh.

47:3 And Pharaoh said unto his brethren, What is your occupation? And
they said unto Pharaoh, Thy servants are shepherds, both we, and also
our fathers.

47:4 They said morever unto Pharaoh, For to sojourn in the land are we
come; for thy servants have no pasture for their flocks; for the
famine is sore in the land of Canaan: now therefore, we pray thee, let
thy servants dwell in the land of Goshen.

47:5 And Pharaoh spake unto Joseph, saying, Thy father and thy
brethren are come unto thee: 47:6 The land of Egypt is before thee; in
the best of the land make thy father and brethren to dwell; in the
land of Goshen let them dwell: and if thou knowest any men of activity
among them, then make them rulers over my cattle.

47:7 And Joseph brought in Jacob his father, and set him before
Pharaoh: and Jacob blessed Pharaoh.

47:8 And Pharaoh said unto Jacob, How old art thou?  47:9 And Jacob
said unto Pharaoh, The days of the years of my pilgrimage are an
hundred and thirty years: few and evil have the days of the years of
my life been, and have not attained unto the days of the years of the
life of my fathers in the days of their pilgrimage.

47:10 And Jacob blessed Pharaoh, and went out from before Pharaoh.

47:11 And Joseph placed his father and his brethren, and gave them a
possession in the land of Egypt, in the best of the land, in the land
of Rameses, as Pharaoh had commanded.

47:12 And Joseph nourished his father, and his brethren, and all his
father's household, with bread, according to their families.

47:13 And there was no bread in all the land; for the famine was very
sore, so that the land of Egypt and all the land of Canaan fainted by
reason of the famine.

47:14 And Joseph gathered up all the money that was found in the land
of Egypt, and in the land of Canaan, for the corn which they bought:
and Joseph brought the money into Pharaoh's house.

47:15 And when money failed in the land of Egypt, and in the land of
Canaan, all the Egyptians came unto Joseph, and said, Give us bread:
for why should we die in thy presence? for the money faileth.

47:16 And Joseph said, Give your cattle; and I will give you for your
cattle, if money fail.

47:17 And they brought their cattle unto Joseph: and Joseph gave them
bread in exchange for horses, and for the flocks, and for the cattle
of the herds, and for the asses: and he fed them with bread for all
their cattle for that year.

47:18 When that year was ended, they came unto him the second year,
and said unto him, We will not hide it from my lord, how that our
money is spent; my lord also hath our herds of cattle; there is not
ought left in the sight of my lord, but our bodies, and our lands:
47:19 Wherefore shall we die before thine eyes, both we and our land?
buy us and our land for bread, and we and our land will be servants
unto Pharaoh: and give us seed, that we may live, and not die, that
the land be not desolate.

47:20 And Joseph bought all the land of Egypt for Pharaoh; for the
Egyptians sold every man his field, because the famine prevailed over
them: so the land became Pharaoh's.

47:21 And as for the people, he removed them to cities from one end of
the borders of Egypt even to the other end thereof.

47:22 Only the land of the priests bought he not; for the priests had
a portion assigned them of Pharaoh, and did eat their portion which
Pharaoh gave them: wherefore they sold not their lands.

47:23 Then Joseph said unto the people, Behold, I have bought you this
day and your land for Pharaoh: lo, here is seed for you, and ye shall
sow the land.

47:24 And it shall come to pass in the increase, that ye shall give
the fifth part unto Pharaoh, and four parts shall be your own, for
seed of the field, and for your food, and for them of your households,
and for food for your little ones.

47:25 And they said, Thou hast saved our lives: let us find grace in
the sight of my lord, and we will be Pharaoh's servants.

47:26 And Joseph made it a law over the land of Egypt unto this day,
that Pharaoh should have the fifth part, except the land of the
priests only, which became not Pharaoh's.

47:27 And Israel dwelt in the land of Egypt, in the country of Goshen;
and they had possessions therein, and grew, and multiplied
exceedingly.

47:28 And Jacob lived in the land of Egypt seventeen years: so the
whole age of Jacob was an hundred forty and seven years.

47:29 And the time drew nigh that Israel must die: and he called his
son Joseph, and said unto him, If now I have found grace in thy sight,
put, I pray thee, thy hand under my thigh, and deal kindly and truly
with me; bury me not, I pray thee, in Egypt: 47:30 But I will lie with
my fathers, and thou shalt carry me out of Egypt, and bury me in their
buryingplace. And he said, I will do as thou hast said.

47:31 And he said, Swear unto me. And he sware unto him. And Israel
bowed himself upon the bed's head.

48:1 And it came to pass after these things, that one told Joseph,
Behold, thy father is sick: and he took with him his two sons,
Manasseh and Ephraim.

48:2 And one told Jacob, and said, Behold, thy son Joseph cometh unto
thee: and Israel strengthened himself, and sat upon the bed.

48:3 And Jacob said unto Joseph, God Almighty appeared unto me at Luz
in the land of Canaan, and blessed me, 48:4 And said unto me, Behold,
I will make thee fruitful, and multiply thee, and I will make of thee
a multitude of people; and will give this land to thy seed after thee
for an everlasting possession.

48:5 And now thy two sons, Ephraim and Manasseh, which were born unto
thee in the land of Egypt before I came unto thee into Egypt, are
mine; as Reuben and Simeon, they shall be mine.

48:6 And thy issue, which thou begettest after them, shall be thine,
and shall be called after the name of their brethren in their
inheritance.

48:7 And as for me, when I came from Padan, Rachel died by me in the
land of Canaan in the way, when yet there was but a little way to come
unto Ephrath: and I buried her there in the way of Ephrath; the same
is Bethlehem.

48:8 And Israel beheld Joseph's sons, and said, Who are these?  48:9
And Joseph said unto his father, They are my sons, whom God hath given
me in this place. And he said, Bring them, I pray thee, unto me, and I
will bless them.

48:10 Now the eyes of Israel were dim for age, so that he could not
see.

And he brought them near unto him; and he kissed them, and embraced
them.

48:11 And Israel said unto Joseph, I had not thought to see thy face:
and, lo, God hath shewed me also thy seed.

48:12 And Joseph brought them out from between his knees, and he bowed
himself with his face to the earth.

48:13 And Joseph took them both, Ephraim in his right hand toward
Israel's left hand, and Manasseh in his left hand toward Israel's
right hand, and brought them near unto him.

48:14 And Israel stretched out his right hand, and laid it upon
Ephraim's head, who was the younger, and his left hand upon Manasseh's
head, guiding his hands wittingly; for Manasseh was the firstborn.

48:15 And he blessed Joseph, and said, God, before whom my fathers
Abraham and Isaac did walk, the God which fed me all my life long unto
this day, 48:16 The Angel which redeemed me from all evil, bless the
lads; and let my name be named on them, and the name of my fathers
Abraham and Isaac; and let them grow into a multitude in the midst of
the earth.

48:17 And when Joseph saw that his father laid his right hand upon the
head of Ephraim, it displeased him: and he held up his father's hand,
to remove it from Ephraim's head unto Manasseh's head.

48:18 And Joseph said unto his father, Not so, my father: for this is
the firstborn; put thy right hand upon his head.

48:19 And his father refused, and said, I know it, my son, I know it:
he also shall become a people, and he also shall be great: but truly
his younger brother shall be greater than he, and his seed shall
become a multitude of nations.

48:20 And he blessed them that day, saying, In thee shall Israel
bless, saying, God make thee as Ephraim and as Manasseh: and he set
Ephraim before Manasseh.

48:21 And Israel said unto Joseph, Behold, I die: but God shall be
with you, and bring you again unto the land of your fathers.

48:22 Moreover I have given to thee one portion above thy brethren,
which I took out of the hand of the Amorite with my sword and with my
bow.

49:1 And Jacob called unto his sons, and said, Gather yourselves
together, that I may tell you that which shall befall you in the last
days.

49:2 Gather yourselves together, and hear, ye sons of Jacob; and
hearken unto Israel your father.

49:3 Reuben, thou art my firstborn, my might, and the beginning of my
strength, the excellency of dignity, and the excellency of power: 49:4
Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel; because thou wentest up to
thy father's bed; then defiledst thou it: he went up to my couch.

49:5 Simeon and Levi are brethren; instruments of cruelty are in their
habitations.

49:6 O my soul, come not thou into their secret; unto their assembly,
mine honour, be not thou united: for in their anger they slew a man,
and in their selfwill they digged down a wall.

49:7 Cursed be their anger, for it was fierce; and their wrath, for it
was cruel: I will divide them in Jacob, and scatter them in Israel.

49:8 Judah, thou art he whom thy brethren shall praise: thy hand shall
be in the neck of thine enemies; thy father's children shall bow down
before thee.

49:9 Judah is a lion's whelp: from the prey, my son, thou art gone up:
he stooped down, he couched as a lion, and as an old lion; who shall
rouse him up?  49:10 The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a
lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come; and unto him shall
the gathering of the people be.

49:11 Binding his foal unto the vine, and his ass's colt unto the
choice vine; he washed his garments in wine, and his clothes in the
blood of grapes: 49:12 His eyes shall be red with wine, and his teeth
white with milk.

49:13 Zebulun shall dwell at the haven of the sea; and he shall be for
an haven of ships; and his border shall be unto Zidon.

49:14 Issachar is a strong ass couching down between two burdens:
49:15 And he saw that rest was good, and the land that it was
pleasant; and bowed his shoulder to bear, and became a servant unto
tribute.

49:16 Dan shall judge his people, as one of the tribes of Israel.

49:17 Dan shall be a serpent by the way, an adder in the path, that
biteth the horse heels, so that his rider shall fall backward.

49:18 I have waited for thy salvation, O LORD.

49:19 Gad, a troop shall overcome him: but he shall overcome at the
last.

49:20 Out of Asher his bread shall be fat, and he shall yield royal
dainties.

49:21 Naphtali is a hind let loose: he giveth goodly words.

49:22 Joseph is a fruitful bough, even a fruitful bough by a well;
whose branches run over the wall: 49:23 The archers have sorely
grieved him, and shot at him, and hated him: 49:24 But his bow abode
in strength, and the arms of his hands were made strong by the hands
of the mighty God of Jacob; (from thence is the shepherd, the stone of
Israel:) 49:25 Even by the God of thy father, who shall help thee; and
by the Almighty, who shall bless thee with blessings of heaven above,
blessings of the deep that lieth under, blessings of the breasts, and
of the womb: 49:26 The blessings of thy father have prevailed above
the blessings of my progenitors unto the utmost bound of the
everlasting hills: they shall be on the head of Joseph, and on the
crown of the head of him that was separate from his brethren.

49:27 Benjamin shall ravin as a wolf: in the morning he shall devour
the prey, and at night he shall divide the spoil.

49:28 All these are the twelve tribes of Israel: and this is it that
their father spake unto them, and blessed them; every one according to
his blessing he blessed them.

49:29 And he charged them, and said unto them, I am to be gathered
unto my people: bury me with my fathers in the cave that is in the
field of Ephron the Hittite, 49:30 In the cave that is in the field of
Machpelah, which is before Mamre, in the land of Canaan, which Abraham
bought with the field of Ephron the Hittite for a possession of a
buryingplace.

49:31 There they buried Abraham and Sarah his wife; there they buried
Isaac and Rebekah his wife; and there I buried Leah.

49:32 The purchase of the field and of the cave that is therein was
from the children of Heth.

49:33 And when Jacob had made an end of commanding his sons, he
gathered up his feet into the bed, and yielded up the ghost, and was
gathered unto his people.

50:1 And Joseph fell upon his father's face, and wept upon him, and
kissed him.

50:2 And Joseph commanded his servants the physicians to embalm his
father: and the physicians embalmed Israel.

50:3 And forty days were fulfilled for him; for so are fulfilled the
days of those which are embalmed: and the Egyptians mourned for him
threescore and ten days.

50:4 And when the days of his mourning were past, Joseph spake unto
the house of Pharaoh, saying, If now I have found grace in your eyes,
speak, I pray you, in the ears of Pharaoh, saying, 50:5 My father made
me swear, saying, Lo, I die: in my grave which I have digged for me in
the land of Canaan, there shalt thou bury me. Now therefore let me go
up, I pray thee, and bury my father, and I will come again.

50:6 And Pharaoh said, Go up, and bury thy father, according as he
made thee swear.

50:7 And Joseph went up to bury his father: and with him went up all
the servants of Pharaoh, the elders of his house, and all the elders
of the land of Egypt, 50:8 And all the house of Joseph, and his
brethren, and his father's house: only their little ones, and their
flocks, and their herds, they left in the land of Goshen.

50:9 And there went up with him both chariots and horsemen: and it was
a very great company.

50:10 And they came to the threshingfloor of Atad, which is beyond
Jordan, and there they mourned with a great and very sore lamentation:
and he made a mourning for his father seven days.

50:11 And when the inhabitants of the land, the Canaanites, saw the
mourning in the floor of Atad, they said, This is a grievous mourning
to the Egyptians: wherefore the name of it was called Abelmizraim,
which is beyond Jordan.

50:12 And his sons did unto him according as he commanded them: 50:13
For his sons carried him into the land of Canaan, and buried him in
the cave of the field of Machpelah, which Abraham bought with the
field for a possession of a buryingplace of Ephron the Hittite, before
Mamre.

50:14 And Joseph returned into Egypt, he, and his brethren, and all
that went up with him to bury his father, after he had buried his
father.

50:15 And when Joseph's brethren saw that their father was dead, they
said, Joseph will peradventure hate us, and will certainly requite us
all the evil which we did unto him.

50:16 And they sent a messenger unto Joseph, saying, Thy father did
command before he died, saying, 50:17 So shall ye say unto Joseph,
Forgive, I pray thee now, the trespass of thy brethren, and their sin;
for they did unto thee evil: and now, we pray thee, forgive the
trespass of the servants of the God of thy father. And Joseph wept
when they spake unto him.

50:18 And his brethren also went and fell down before his face; and
they said, Behold, we be thy servants.

50:19 And Joseph said unto them, Fear not: for am I in the place of
God?  50:20 But as for you, ye thought evil against me; but God meant
it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people
alive.

50:21 Now therefore fear ye not: I will nourish you, and your little
ones.

And he comforted them, and spake kindly unto them.

50:22 And Joseph dwelt in Egypt, he, and his father's house: and
Joseph lived an hundred and ten years.

50:23 And Joseph saw Ephraim's children of the third generation: the
children also of Machir the son of Manasseh were brought up upon
Joseph's knees.

50:24 And Joseph said unto his brethren, I die: and God will surely
visit you, and bring you out of this land unto the land which he sware
to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.

50:25 And Joseph took an oath of the children of Israel, saying, God
will surely visit you, and ye shall carry up my bones from hence.

50:26 So Joseph died, being an hundred and ten years old: and they
embalmed him, and he was put in a coffin in Egypt.




The Second Book of Moses:  Called Exodus


1:1 Now these are the names of the children of Israel, which came
into Egypt; every man and his household came with Jacob.

1:2 Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah, 1:3 Issachar, Zebulun, and
Benjamin, 1:4 Dan, and Naphtali, Gad, and Asher.

1:5 And all the souls that came out of the loins of Jacob were seventy
souls: for Joseph was in Egypt already.

1:6 And Joseph died, and all his brethren, and all that generation.

1:7 And the children of Israel were fruitful, and increased
abundantly, and multiplied, and waxed exceeding mighty; and the land
was filled with them.

1:8 Now there arose up a new king over Egypt, which knew not Joseph.

1:9 And he said unto his people, Behold, the people of the children of
Israel are more and mightier than we: 1:10 Come on, let us deal wisely
with them; lest they multiply, and it come to pass, that, when there
falleth out any war, they join also unto our enemies, and fight
against us, and so get them up out of the land.

1:11 Therefore they did set over them taskmasters to afflict them with
their burdens. And they built for Pharaoh treasure cities, Pithom and
Raamses.

1:12 But the more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied and
grew.

And they were grieved because of the children of Israel.

1:13 And the Egyptians made the children of Israel to serve with
rigour: 1:14 And they made their lives bitter with hard bondage, in
morter, and in brick, and in all manner of service in the field: all
their service, wherein they made them serve, was with rigour.

1:15 And the king of Egypt spake to the Hebrew midwives, of which the
name of the one was Shiphrah, and the name of the other Puah: 1:16 And
he said, When ye do the office of a midwife to the Hebrew women, and
see them upon the stools; if it be a son, then ye shall kill him: but
if it be a daughter, then she shall live.

1:17 But the midwives feared God, and did not as the king of Egypt
commanded them, but saved the men children alive.

1:18 And the king of Egypt called for the midwives, and said unto
them, Why have ye done this thing, and have saved the men children
alive?  1:19 And the midwives said unto Pharaoh, Because the Hebrew
women are not as the Egyptian women; for they are lively, and are
delivered ere the midwives come in unto them.

1:20 Therefore God dealt well with the midwives: and the people
multiplied, and waxed very mighty.

1:21 And it came to pass, because the midwives feared God, that he
made them houses.

1:22 And Pharaoh charged all his people, saying, Every son that is
born ye shall cast into the river, and every daughter ye shall save
alive.

2:1 And there went a man of the house of Levi, and took to wife a
daughter of Levi.

2:2 And the woman conceived, and bare a son: and when she saw him that
he was a goodly child, she hid him three months.

2:3 And when she could not longer hide him, she took for him an ark of
bulrushes, and daubed it with slime and with pitch, and put the child
therein; and she laid it in the flags by the river's brink.

2:4 And his sister stood afar off, to wit what would be done to him.

2:5 And the daughter of Pharaoh came down to wash herself at the
river; and her maidens walked along by the river's side; and when she
saw the ark among the flags, she sent her maid to fetch it.

2:6 And when she had opened it, she saw the child: and, behold, the
babe wept. And she had compassion on him, and said, This is one of the
Hebrews' children.

2:7 Then said his sister to Pharaoh's daughter, Shall I go and call to
thee a nurse of the Hebrew women, that she may nurse the child for
thee?  2:8 And Pharaoh's daughter said to her, Go. And the maid went
and called the child's mother.

2:9 And Pharaoh's daughter said unto her, Take this child away, and
nurse it for me, and I will give thee thy wages. And the women took
the child, and nursed it.

2:10 And the child grew, and she brought him unto Pharaoh's daughter,
and he became her son. And she called his name Moses: and she said,
Because I drew him out of the water.

2:11 And it came to pass in those days, when Moses was grown, that he
went out unto his brethren, and looked on their burdens: and he spied
an Egyptian smiting an Hebrew, one of his brethren.

2:12 And he looked this way and that way, and when he saw that there
was no man, he slew the Egyptian, and hid him in the sand.

2:13 And when he went out the second day, behold, two men of the
Hebrews strove together: and he said to him that did the wrong,
Wherefore smitest thou thy fellow?  2:14 And he said, Who made thee a
prince and a judge over us? intendest thou to kill me, as thou
killedst the Egyptian? And Moses feared, and said, Surely this thing
is known.

2:15 Now when Pharaoh heard this thing, he sought to slay Moses. But
Moses fled from the face of Pharaoh, and dwelt in the land of Midian:
and he sat down by a well.

2:16 Now the priest of Midian had seven daughters: and they came and
drew water, and filled the troughs to water their father's flock.

2:17 And the shepherds came and drove them away: but Moses stood up
and helped them, and watered their flock.

2:18 And when they came to Reuel their father, he said, How is it that
ye are come so soon to day?  2:19 And they said, An Egyptian delivered
us out of the hand of the shepherds, and also drew water enough for
us, and watered the flock.

2:20 And he said unto his daughters, And where is he? why is it that
ye have left the man? call him, that he may eat bread.

2:21 And Moses was content to dwell with the man: and he gave Moses
Zipporah his daughter.

2:22 And she bare him a son, and he called his name Gershom: for he
said, I have been a stranger in a strange land.

2:23 And it came to pass in process of time, that the king of Egypt
died: and the children of Israel sighed by reason of the bondage, and
they cried, and their cry came up unto God by reason of the bondage.

2:24 And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant
with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob.

2:25 And God looked upon the children of Israel, and God had respect
unto them.

3:1 Now Moses kept the flock of Jethro his father in law, the priest
of Midian: and he led the flock to the backside of the desert, and
came to the mountain of God, even to Horeb.

3:2 And the angel of the LORD appeared unto him in a flame of fire out
of the midst of a bush: and he looked, and, behold, the bush burned
with fire, and the bush was not consumed.

3:3 And Moses said, I will now turn aside, and see this great sight,
why the bush is not burnt.

3:4 And when the LORD saw that he turned aside to see, God called unto
him out of the midst of the bush, and said, Moses, Moses. And he said,
Here am I.

3:5 And he said, Draw not nigh hither: put off thy shoes from off thy
feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.

3:6 Moreover he said, I am the God of thy father, the God of Abraham,
the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. And Moses hid his face; for he
was afraid to look upon God.

3:7 And the LORD said, I have surely seen the affliction of my people
which are in Egypt, and have heard their cry by reason of their
taskmasters; for I know their sorrows; 3:8 And I am come down to
deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up
out of that land unto a good land and a large, unto a land flowing
with milk and honey; unto the place of the Canaanites, and the
Hittites, and the Amorites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and
the Jebusites.

3:9 Now therefore, behold, the cry of the children of Israel is come
unto me: and I have also seen the oppression wherewith the Egyptians
oppress them.

3:10 Come now therefore, and I will send thee unto Pharaoh, that thou
mayest bring forth my people the children of Israel out of Egypt.

3:11 And Moses said unto God, Who am I, that I should go unto Pharaoh,
and that I should bring forth the children of Israel out of Egypt?
3:12 And he said, Certainly I will be with thee; and this shall be a
token unto thee, that I have sent thee: When thou hast brought forth
the people out of Egypt, ye shall serve God upon this mountain.

3:13 And Moses said unto God, Behold, when I come unto the children of
Israel, and shall say unto them, The God of your fathers hath sent me
unto you; and they shall say to me, What is his name? what shall I say
unto them?  3:14 And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said,
Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me
unto you.

3:15 And God said moreover unto Moses, Thus shalt thou say unto the
children of Israel, the LORD God of your fathers, the God of Abraham,
the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, hath sent me unto you: this is
my name for ever, and this is my memorial unto all generations.

3:16 Go, and gather the elders of Israel together, and say unto them,
The LORD God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of
Jacob, appeared unto me, saying, I have surely visited you, and seen
that which is done to you in Egypt: 3:17 And I have said, I will bring
you up out of the affliction of Egypt unto the land of the Canaanites,
and the Hittites, and the Amorites, and the Perizzites, and the
Hivites, and the Jebusites, unto a land flowing with milk and honey.

3:18 And they shall hearken to thy voice: and thou shalt come, thou
and the elders of Israel, unto the king of Egypt, and ye shall say
unto him, The LORD God of the Hebrews hath met with us: and now let us
go, we beseech thee, three days' journey into the wilderness, that we
may sacrifice to the LORD our God.

3:19 And I am sure that the king of Egypt will not let you go, no, not
by a mighty hand.

3:20 And I will stretch out my hand, and smite Egypt with all my
wonders which I will do in the midst thereof: and after that he will
let you go.

3:21 And I will give this people favour in the sight of the Egyptians:
and it shall come to pass, that, when ye go, ye shall not go empty.

3:22 But every woman shall borrow of her neighbour, and of her that
sojourneth in her house, jewels of silver, and jewels of gold, and
raiment: and ye shall put them upon your sons, and upon your
daughters; and ye shall spoil the Egyptians.

4:1 And Moses answered and said, But, behold, they will not believe
me, nor hearken unto my voice: for they will say, The LORD hath not
appeared unto thee.

4:2 And the LORD said unto him, What is that in thine hand? And he
said, A rod.

4:3 And he said, Cast it on the ground. And he cast it on the ground,
and it became a serpent; and Moses fled from before it.

4:4 And the LORD said unto Moses, Put forth thine hand, and take it by
the tail. And he put forth his hand, and caught it, and it became a
rod in his hand: 4:5 That they may believe that the LORD God of their
fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob,
hath appeared unto thee.

4:6 And the LORD said furthermore unto him, Put now thine hand into
thy bosom. And he put his hand into his bosom: and when he took it
out, behold, his hand was leprous as snow.

4:7 And he said, Put thine hand into thy bosom again. And he put his
hand into his bosom again; and plucked it out of his bosom, and,
behold, it was turned again as his other flesh.

4:8 And it shall come to pass, if they will not believe thee, neither
hearken to the voice of the first sign, that they will believe the
voice of the latter sign.

4:9 And it shall come to pass, if they will not believe also these two
signs, neither hearken unto thy voice, that thou shalt take of the
water of the river, and pour it upon the dry land: and the water which
thou takest out of the river shall become blood upon the dry land.

4:10 And Moses said unto the LORD, O my LORD, I am not eloquent,
neither heretofore, nor since thou hast spoken unto thy servant: but I
am slow of speech, and of a slow tongue.

4:11 And the LORD said unto him, Who hath made man's mouth? or who
maketh the dumb, or deaf, or the seeing, or the blind? have not I the
LORD?  4:12 Now therefore go, and I will be with thy mouth, and teach
thee what thou shalt say.

4:13 And he said, O my LORD, send, I pray thee, by the hand of him
whom thou wilt send.

4:14 And the anger of the LORD was kindled against Moses, and he said,
Is not Aaron the Levite thy brother? I know that he can speak well.
And also, behold, he cometh forth to meet thee: and when he seeth
thee, he will be glad in his heart.

4:15 And thou shalt speak unto him, and put words in his mouth: and I
will be with thy mouth, and with his mouth, and will teach you what ye
shall do.

4:16 And he shall be thy spokesman unto the people: and he shall be,
even he shall be to thee instead of a mouth, and thou shalt be to him
instead of God.

4:17 And thou shalt take this rod in thine hand, wherewith thou shalt
do signs.

4:18 And Moses went and returned to Jethro his father in law, and said
unto him, Let me go, I pray thee, and return unto my brethren which
are in Egypt, and see whether they be yet alive. And Jethro said to
Moses, Go in peace.

4:19 And the LORD said unto Moses in Midian, Go, return into Egypt:
for all the men are dead which sought thy life.

4:20 And Moses took his wife and his sons, and set them upon an ass,
and he returned to the land of Egypt: and Moses took the rod of God in
his hand.

4:21 And the LORD said unto Moses, When thou goest to return into
Egypt, see that thou do all those wonders before Pharaoh, which I have
put in thine hand: but I will harden his heart, that he shall not let
the people go.

4:22 And thou shalt say unto Pharaoh, Thus saith the LORD, Israel is
my son, even my firstborn: 4:23 And I say unto thee, Let my son go,
that he may serve me: and if thou refuse to let him go, behold, I will
slay thy son, even thy firstborn.

4:24 And it came to pass by the way in the inn, that the LORD met him,
and sought to kill him.

4:25 Then Zipporah took a sharp stone, and cut off the foreskin of her
son, and cast it at his feet, and said, Surely a bloody husband art
thou to me.

4:26 So he let him go: then she said, A bloody husband thou art,
because of the circumcision.

4:27 And the LORD said to Aaron, Go into the wilderness to meet Moses.
And he went, and met him in the mount of God, and kissed him.

4:28 And Moses told Aaron all the words of the LORD who had sent him,
and all the signs which he had commanded him.

4:29 And Moses and Aaron went and gathered together all the elders of
the children of Israel: 4:30 And Aaron spake all the words which the
LORD had spoken unto Moses, and did the signs in the sight of the
people.

4:31 And the people believed: and when they heard that the LORD had
visited the children of Israel, and that he had looked upon their
affliction, then they bowed their heads and worshipped.

5:1 And afterward Moses and Aaron went in, and told Pharaoh, Thus
saith the LORD God of Israel, Let my people go, that they may hold a
feast unto me in the wilderness.

5:2 And Pharaoh said, Who is the LORD, that I should obey his voice to
let Israel go? I know not the LORD, neither will I let Israel go.

5:3 And they said, The God of the Hebrews hath met with us: let us go,
we pray thee, three days' journey into the desert, and sacrifice unto
the LORD our God; lest he fall upon us with pestilence, or with the
sword.

5:4 And the king of Egypt said unto them, Wherefore do ye, Moses and
Aaron, let the people from their works? get you unto your burdens.

5:5 And Pharaoh said, Behold, the people of the land now are many, and
ye make them rest from their burdens.

5:6 And Pharaoh commanded the same day the taskmasters of the people,
and their officers, saying, 5:7 Ye shall no more give the people straw
to make brick, as heretofore: let them go and gather straw for
themselves.

5:8 And the tale of the bricks, which they did make heretofore, ye
shall lay upon them; ye shall not diminish ought thereof: for they be
idle; therefore they cry, saying, Let us go and sacrifice to our God.

5:9 Let there more work be laid upon the men, that they may labour
therein; and let them not regard vain words.

5:10 And the taskmasters of the people went out, and their officers,
and they spake to the people, saying, Thus saith Pharaoh, I will not
give you straw.

5:11 Go ye, get you straw where ye can find it: yet not ought of your
work shall be diminished.

5:12 So the people were scattered abroad throughout all the land of
Egypt to gather stubble instead of straw.

5:13 And the taskmasters hasted them, saying, Fulfil your works, your
daily tasks, as when there was straw.

5:14 And the officers of the children of Israel, which Pharaoh's
taskmasters had set over them, were beaten, and demanded, Wherefore
have ye not fulfilled your task in making brick both yesterday and to
day, as heretofore?  5:15 Then the officers of the children of Israel
came and cried unto Pharaoh, saying, Wherefore dealest thou thus with
thy servants?  5:16 There is no straw given unto thy servants, and
they say to us, Make brick: and, behold, thy servants are beaten; but
the fault is in thine own people.

5:17 But he said, Ye are idle, ye are idle: therefore ye say, Let us
go and do sacrifice to the LORD.

5:18 Go therefore now, and work; for there shall no straw be given
you, yet shall ye deliver the tale of bricks.

5:19 And the officers of the children of Israel did see that they were
in evil case, after it was said, Ye shall not minish ought from your
bricks of your daily task.

5:20 And they met Moses and Aaron, who stood in the way, as they came
forth from Pharaoh: 5:21 And they said unto them, The LORD look upon
you, and judge; because ye have made our savour to be abhorred in the
eyes of Pharaoh, and in the eyes of his servants, to put a sword in
their hand to slay us.

5:22 And Moses returned unto the LORD, and said, LORD, wherefore hast
thou so evil entreated this people? why is it that thou hast sent me?
5:23 For since I came to Pharaoh to speak in thy name, he hath done
evil to this people; neither hast thou delivered thy people at all.

6:1 Then the LORD said unto Moses, Now shalt thou see what I will do
to Pharaoh: for with a strong hand shall he let them go, and with a
strong hand shall he drive them out of his land.

6:2 And God spake unto Moses, and said unto him, I am the LORD: 6:3
And I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, by the name
of God Almighty, but by my name JEHOVAH was I not known to them.

6:4 And I have also established my covenant with them, to give them
the land of Canaan, the land of their pilgrimage, wherein they were
strangers.

6:5 And I have also heard the groaning of the children of Israel, whom
the Egyptians keep in bondage; and I have remembered my covenant.

6:6 Wherefore say unto the children of Israel, I am the LORD, and I
will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians, and I will
rid you out of their bondage, and I will redeem you with a stretched
out arm, and with great judgments: 6:7 And I will take you to me for a
people, and I will be to you a God: and ye shall know that I am the
LORD your God, which bringeth you out from under the burdens of the
Egyptians.

6:8 And I will bring you in unto the land, concerning the which I did
swear to give it to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob; and I will give
it you for an heritage: I am the LORD.

6:9 And Moses spake so unto the children of Israel: but they hearkened
not unto Moses for anguish of spirit, and for cruel bondage.

6:10 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 6:11 Go in, speak unto
Pharaoh king of Egypt, that he let the children of Israel go out of
his land.

6:12 And Moses spake before the LORD, saying, Behold, the children of
Israel have not hearkened unto me; how then shall Pharaoh hear me, who
am of uncircumcised lips?  6:13 And the LORD spake unto Moses and unto
Aaron, and gave them a charge unto the children of Israel, and unto
Pharaoh king of Egypt, to bring the children of Israel out of the land
of Egypt.

6:14 These be the heads of their fathers' houses: The sons of Reuben
the firstborn of Israel; Hanoch, and Pallu, Hezron, and Carmi: these
be the families of Reuben.

6:15 And the sons of Simeon; Jemuel, and Jamin, and Ohad, and Jachin,
and Zohar, and Shaul the son of a Canaanitish woman: these are the
families of Simeon.

6:16 And these are the names of the sons of Levi according to their
generations; Gershon, and Kohath, and Merari: and the years of the
life of Levi were an hundred thirty and seven years.

6:17 The sons of Gershon; Libni, and Shimi, according to their
families.

6:18 And the sons of Kohath; Amram, and Izhar, and Hebron, and Uzziel:
and the years of the life of Kohath were an hundred thirty and three
years.

6:19 And the sons of Merari; Mahali and Mushi: these are the families
of Levi according to their generations.

6:20 And Amram took him Jochebed his father's sister to wife; and she
bare him Aaron and Moses: and the years of the life of Amram were an
hundred and thirty and seven years.

6:21 And the sons of Izhar; Korah, and Nepheg, and Zichri.

6:22 And the sons of Uzziel; Mishael, and Elzaphan, and Zithri.

6:23 And Aaron took him Elisheba, daughter of Amminadab, sister of
Naashon, to wife; and she bare him Nadab, and Abihu, Eleazar, and
Ithamar.

6:24 And the sons of Korah; Assir, and Elkanah, and Abiasaph: these
are the families of the Korhites.

6:25 And Eleazar Aaron's son took him one of the daughters of Putiel
to wife; and she bare him Phinehas: these are the heads of the fathers
of the Levites according to their families.

6:26 These are that Aaron and Moses, to whom the LORD said, Bring out
the children of Israel from the land of Egypt according to their
armies.

6:27 These are they which spake to Pharaoh king of Egypt, to bring out
the children of Israel from Egypt: these are that Moses and Aaron.

6:28 And it came to pass on the day when the LORD spake unto Moses in
the land of Egypt, 6:29 That the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, I am
the LORD: speak thou unto Pharaoh king of Egypt all that I say unto
thee.

6:30 And Moses said before the LORD, Behold, I am of uncircumcised
lips, and how shall Pharaoh hearken unto me?  7:1 And the LORD said
unto Moses, See, I have made thee a god to Pharaoh: and Aaron thy
brother shall be thy prophet.

7:2 Thou shalt speak all that I command thee: and Aaron thy brother
shall speak unto Pharaoh, that he send the children of Israel out of
his land.

7:3 And I will harden Pharaoh's heart, and multiply my signs and my
wonders in the land of Egypt.

7:4 But Pharaoh shall not hearken unto you, that I may lay my hand
upon Egypt, and bring forth mine armies, and my people the children of
Israel, out of the land of Egypt by great judgments.

7:5 And the Egyptians shall know that I am the LORD, when I stretch
forth mine hand upon Egypt, and bring out the children of Israel from
among them.

7:6 And Moses and Aaron did as the LORD commanded them, so did they.

7:7 And Moses was fourscore years old, and Aaron fourscore and three
years old, when they spake unto Pharaoh.

7:8 And the LORD spake unto Moses and unto Aaron, saying, 7:9 When
Pharaoh shall speak unto you, saying, Shew a miracle for you: then
thou shalt say unto Aaron, Take thy rod, and cast it before Pharaoh,
and it shall become a serpent.

7:10 And Moses and Aaron went in unto Pharaoh, and they did so as the
LORD had commanded: and Aaron cast down his rod before Pharaoh, and
before his servants, and it became a serpent.

7:11 Then Pharaoh also called the wise men and the sorcerers: now the
magicians of Egypt, they also did in like manner with their
enchantments.

7:12 For they cast down every man his rod, and they became serpents:
but Aaron's rod swallowed up their rods.

7:13 And he hardened Pharaoh's heart, that he hearkened not unto them;
as the LORD had said.

7:14 And the LORD said unto Moses, Pharaoh's heart is hardened, he
refuseth to let the people go.

7:15 Get thee unto Pharaoh in the morning; lo, he goeth out unto the
water; and thou shalt stand by the river's brink against he come; and
the rod which was turned to a serpent shalt thou take in thine hand.

7:16 And thou shalt say unto him, The LORD God of the Hebrews hath
sent me unto thee, saying, Let my people go, that they may serve me in
the wilderness: and, behold, hitherto thou wouldest not hear.

7:17 Thus saith the LORD, In this thou shalt know that I am the LORD:
behold, I will smite with the rod that is in mine hand upon the waters
which are in the river, and they shall be turned to blood.

7:18 And the fish that is in the river shall die, and the river shall
stink; and the Egyptians shall lothe to drink of the water of the
river.

7:19 And the LORD spake unto Moses, Say unto Aaron, Take thy rod, and
stretch out thine hand upon the waters of Egypt, upon their streams,
upon their rivers, and upon their ponds, and upon all their pools of
water, that they may become blood; and that there may be blood
throughout all the land of Egypt, both in vessels of wood, and in
vessels of stone.

7:20 And Moses and Aaron did so, as the LORD commanded; and he lifted
up the rod, and smote the waters that were in the river, in the sight
of Pharaoh, and in the sight of his servants; and all the waters that
were in the river were turned to blood.

7:21 And the fish that was in the river died; and the river stank, and
the Egyptians could not drink of the water of the river; and there was
blood throughout all the land of Egypt.

7:22 And the magicians of Egypt did so with their enchantments: and
Pharaoh's heart was hardened, neither did he hearken unto them; as the
LORD had said.

7:23 And Pharaoh turned and went into his house, neither did he set
his heart to this also.

7:24 And all the Egyptians digged round about the river for water to
drink; for they could not drink of the water of the river.

7:25 And seven days were fulfilled, after that the LORD had smitten
the river.

8:1 And the LORD spake unto Moses, Go unto Pharaoh, and say unto him,
Thus saith the LORD, Let my people go, that they may serve me.

8:2 And if thou refuse to let them go, behold, I will smite all thy
borders with frogs: 8:3 And the river shall bring forth frogs
abundantly, which shall go up and come into thine house, and into thy
bedchamber, and upon thy bed, and into the house of thy servants, and
upon thy people, and into thine ovens, and into thy kneadingtroughs:
8:4 And the frogs shall come up both on thee, and upon thy people, and
upon all thy servants.

8:5 And the LORD spake unto Moses, Say unto Aaron, Stretch forth thine
hand with thy rod over the streams, over the rivers, and over the
ponds, and cause frogs to come up upon the land of Egypt.

8:6 And Aaron stretched out his hand over the waters of Egypt; and the
frogs came up, and covered the land of Egypt.

8:7 And the magicians did so with their enchantments, and brought up
frogs upon the land of Egypt.

8:8 Then Pharaoh called for Moses and Aaron, and said, Intreat the
LORD, that he may take away the frogs from me, and from my people; and
I will let the people go, that they may do sacrifice unto the LORD.

8:9 And Moses said unto Pharaoh, Glory over me: when shall I intreat
for thee, and for thy servants, and for thy people, to destroy the
frogs from thee and thy houses, that they may remain in the river
only?  8:10 And he said, To morrow. And he said, Be it according to
thy word: that thou mayest know that there is none like unto the LORD
our God.

8:11 And the frogs shall depart from thee, and from thy houses, and
from thy servants, and from thy people; they shall remain in the river
only.

8:12 And Moses and Aaron went out from Pharaoh: and Moses cried unto
the LORD because of the frogs which he had brought against Pharaoh.

8:13 And the LORD did according to the word of Moses; and the frogs
died out of the houses, out of the villages, and out of the fields.

8:14 And they gathered them together upon heaps: and the land stank.

8:15 But when Pharaoh saw that there was respite, he hardened his
heart, and hearkened not unto them; as the LORD had said.

8:16 And the LORD said unto Moses, Say unto Aaron, Stretch out thy
rod, and smite the dust of the land, that it may become lice
throughout all the land of Egypt.

8:17 And they did so; for Aaron stretched out his hand with his rod,
and smote the dust of the earth, and it became lice in man, and in
beast; all the dust of the land became lice throughout all the land of
Egypt.

8:18 And the magicians did so with their enchantments to bring forth
lice, but they could not: so there were lice upon man, and upon beast.

8:19 Then the magicians said unto Pharaoh, This is the finger of God:
and Pharaoh's heart was hardened, and he hearkened not unto them; as
the LORD had said.

8:20 And the LORD said unto Moses, Rise up early in the morning, and
stand before Pharaoh; lo, he cometh forth to the water; and say unto
him, Thus saith the LORD, Let my people go, that they may serve me.

8:21 Else, if thou wilt not let my people go, behold, I will send
swarms of flies upon thee, and upon thy servants, and upon thy people,
and into thy houses: and the houses of the Egyptians shall be full of
swarms of flies, and also the ground whereon they are.

8:22 And I will sever in that day the land of Goshen, in which my
people dwell, that no swarms of flies shall be there; to the end thou
mayest know that I am the LORD in the midst of the earth.

8:23 And I will put a division between my people and thy people: to
morrow shall this sign be.

8:24 And the LORD did so; and there came a grievous swarm of flies
into the house of Pharaoh, and into his servants' houses, and into all
the land of Egypt: the land was corrupted by reason of the swarm of
flies.

8:25 And Pharaoh called for Moses and for Aaron, and said, Go ye,
sacrifice to your God in the land.

8:26 And Moses said, It is not meet so to do; for we shall sacrifice
the abomination of the Egyptians to the LORD our God: lo, shall we
sacrifice the abomination of the Egyptians before their eyes, and will
they not stone us?  8:27 We will go three days' journey into the
wilderness, and sacrifice to the LORD our God, as he shall command us.

8:28 And Pharaoh said, I will let you go, that ye may sacrifice to the
LORD your God in the wilderness; only ye shall not go very far away:
intreat for me.

8:29 And Moses said, Behold, I go out from thee, and I will intreat
the LORD that the swarms of flies may depart from Pharaoh, from his
servants, and from his people, to morrow: but let not Pharaoh deal
deceitfully any more in not letting the people go to sacrifice to the
LORD.

8:30 And Moses went out from Pharaoh, and intreated the LORD.

8:31 And the LORD did according to the word of Moses; and he removed
the swarms of flies from Pharaoh, from his servants, and from his
people; there remained not one.

8:32 And Pharaoh hardened his heart at this time also, neither would
he let the people go.

9:1 Then the LORD said unto Moses, Go in unto Pharaoh, and tell him,
Thus saith the LORD God of the Hebrews, Let my people go, that they
may serve me.

9:2 For if thou refuse to let them go, and wilt hold them still, 9:3
Behold, the hand of the LORD is upon thy cattle which is in the field,
upon the horses, upon the asses, upon the camels, upon the oxen, and
upon the sheep: there shall be a very grievous murrain.

9:4 And the LORD shall sever between the cattle of Israel and the
cattle of Egypt: and there shall nothing die of all that is the
children's of Israel.

9:5 And the LORD appointed a set time, saying, To morrow the LORD
shall do this thing in the land.

9:6 And the LORD did that thing on the morrow, and all the cattle of
Egypt died: but of the cattle of the children of Israel died not one.

9:7 And Pharaoh sent, and, behold, there was not one of the cattle of
the Israelites dead. And the heart of Pharaoh was hardened, and he did
not let the people go.

9:8 And the LORD said unto Moses and unto Aaron, Take to you handfuls
of ashes of the furnace, and let Moses sprinkle it toward the heaven
in the sight of Pharaoh.

9:9 And it shall become small dust in all the land of Egypt, and shall
be a boil breaking forth with blains upon man, and upon beast,
throughout all the land of Egypt.

9:10 And they took ashes of the furnace, and stood before Pharaoh; and
Moses sprinkled it up toward heaven; and it became a boil breaking
forth with blains upon man, and upon beast.

9:11 And the magicians could not stand before Moses because of the
boils; for the boil was upon the magicians, and upon all the
Egyptians.

9:12 And the LORD hardened the heart of Pharaoh, and he hearkened not
unto them; as the LORD had spoken unto Moses.

9:13 And the LORD said unto Moses, Rise up early in the morning, and
stand before Pharaoh, and say unto him, Thus saith the LORD God of the
Hebrews, Let my people go, that they may serve me.

9:14 For I will at this time send all my plagues upon thine heart, and
upon thy servants, and upon thy people; that thou mayest know that
there is none like me in all the earth.

9:15 For now I will stretch out my hand, that I may smite thee and thy
people with pestilence; and thou shalt be cut off from the earth.

9:16 And in very deed for this cause have I raised thee up, for to
shew in thee my power; and that my name may be declared throughout all
the earth.

9:17 As yet exaltest thou thyself against my people, that thou wilt
not let them go?  9:18 Behold, to morrow about this time I will cause
it to rain a very grievous hail, such as hath not been in Egypt since
the foundation thereof even until now.

9:19 Send therefore now, and gather thy cattle, and all that thou hast
in the field; for upon every man and beast which shall be found in the
field, and shall not be brought home, the hail shall come down upon
them, and they shall die.

9:20 He that feared the word of the LORD among the servants of Pharaoh
made his servants and his cattle flee into the houses: 9:21 And he
that regarded not the word of the LORD left his servants and his
cattle in the field.

9:22 And the LORD said unto Moses, Stretch forth thine hand toward
heaven, that there may be hail in all the land of Egypt, upon man, and
upon beast, and upon every herb of the field, throughout the land of
Egypt.

9:23 And Moses stretched forth his rod toward heaven: and the LORD
sent thunder and hail, and the fire ran along upon the ground; and the
LORD rained hail upon the land of Egypt.

9:24 So there was hail, and fire mingled with the hail, very grievous,
such as there was none like it in all the land of Egypt since it
became a nation.

9:25 And the hail smote throughout all the land of Egypt all that was
in the field, both man and beast; and the hail smote every herb of the
field, and brake every tree of the field.

9:26 Only in the land of Goshen, where the children of Israel were,
was there no hail.

9:27 And Pharaoh sent, and called for Moses and Aaron, and said unto
them, I have sinned this time: the LORD is righteous, and I and my
people are wicked.

9:28 Intreat the LORD (for it is enough) that there be no more mighty
thunderings and hail; and I will let you go, and ye shall stay no
longer.

9:29 And Moses said unto him, As soon as I am gone out of the city, I
will spread abroad my hands unto the LORD; and the thunder shall
cease, neither shall there be any more hail; that thou mayest know how
that the earth is the LORD's.

9:30 But as for thee and thy servants, I know that ye will not yet
fear the LORD God.

9:31 And the flax and the barley was smitten: for the barley was in
the ear, and the flax was bolled.

9:32 But the wheat and the rie were not smitten: for they were not
grown up.

9:33 And Moses went out of the city from Pharaoh, and spread abroad
his hands unto the LORD: and the thunders and hail ceased, and the
rain was not poured upon the earth.

9:34 And when Pharaoh saw that the rain and the hail and the thunders
were ceased, he sinned yet more, and hardened his heart, he and his
servants.

9:35 And the heart of Pharaoh was hardened, neither would he let the
children of Israel go; as the LORD had spoken by Moses.

10:1 And the LORD said unto Moses, Go in unto Pharaoh: for I have
hardened his heart, and the heart of his servants, that I might shew
these my signs before him: 10:2 And that thou mayest tell in the ears
of thy son, and of thy son's son, what things I have wrought in Egypt,
and my signs which I have done among them; that ye may know how that I
am the LORD.

10:3 And Moses and Aaron came in unto Pharaoh, and said unto him, Thus
saith the LORD God of the Hebrews, How long wilt thou refuse to humble
thyself before me? let my people go, that they may serve me.

10:4 Else, if thou refuse to let my people go, behold, to morrow will
I bring the locusts into thy coast: 10:5 And they shall cover the face
of the earth, that one cannot be able to see the earth: and they shall
eat the residue of that which is escaped, which remaineth unto you
from the hail, and shall eat every tree which groweth for you out of
the field: 10:6 And they shall fill thy houses, and the houses of all
thy servants, and the houses of all the Egyptians; which neither thy
fathers, nor thy fathers' fathers have seen, since the day that they
were upon the earth unto this day. And he turned himself, and went out
from Pharaoh.

10:7 And Pharaoh's servants said unto him, How long shall this man be
a snare unto us? let the men go, that they may serve the LORD their
God: knowest thou not yet that Egypt is destroyed?  10:8 And Moses and
Aaron were brought again unto Pharaoh: and he said unto them, Go,
serve the LORD your God: but who are they that shall go?  10:9 And
Moses said, We will go with our young and with our old, with our sons
and with our daughters, with our flocks and with our herds will we go;
for we must hold a feast unto the LORD.

10:10 And he said unto them, Let the LORD be so with you, as I will
let you go, and your little ones: look to it; for evil is before you.

10:11 Not so: go now ye that are men, and serve the LORD; for that ye
did desire. And they were driven out from Pharaoh's presence.

10:12 And the LORD said unto Moses, Stretch out thine hand over the
land of Egypt for the locusts, that they may come up upon the land of
Egypt, and eat every herb of the land, even all that the hail hath
left.

10:13 And Moses stretched forth his rod over the land of Egypt, and
the LORD brought an east wind upon the land all that day, and all that
night; and when it was morning, the east wind brought the locusts.

10:14 And the locust went up over all the land of Egypt, and rested in
all the coasts of Egypt: very grievous were they; before them there
were no such locusts as they, neither after them shall be such.

10:15 For they covered the face of the whole earth, so that the land
was darkened; and they did eat every herb of the land, and all the
fruit of the trees which the hail had left: and there remained not any
green thing in the trees, or in the herbs of the field, through all
the land of Egypt.

10:16 Then Pharaoh called for Moses and Aaron in haste; and he said, I
have sinned against the LORD your God, and against you.

10:17 Now therefore forgive, I pray thee, my sin only this once, and
intreat the LORD your God, that he may take away from me this death
only.

10:18 And he went out from Pharaoh, and intreated the LORD.

10:19 And the LORD turned a mighty strong west wind, which took away
the locusts, and cast them into the Red sea; there remained not one
locust in all the coasts of Egypt.

10:20 But the LORD hardened Pharaoh's heart, so that he would not let
the children of Israel go.

10:21 And the LORD said unto Moses, Stretch out thine hand toward
heaven, that there may be darkness over the land of Egypt, even
darkness which may be felt.

10:22 And Moses stretched forth his hand toward heaven; and there was
a thick darkness in all the land of Egypt three days: 10:23 They saw
not one another, neither rose any from his place for three days: but
all the children of Israel had light in their dwellings.

10:24 And Pharaoh called unto Moses, and said, Go ye, serve the LORD;
only let your flocks and your herds be stayed: let your little ones
also go with you.

10:25 And Moses said, Thou must give us also sacrifices and burnt
offerings, that we may sacrifice unto the LORD our God.

10:26 Our cattle also shall go with us; there shall not an hoof be
left behind; for thereof must we take to serve the LORD our God; and
we know not with what we must serve the LORD, until we come thither.

10:27 But the LORD hardened Pharaoh's heart, and he would not let them
go.

10:28 And Pharaoh said unto him, Get thee from me, take heed to
thyself, see my face no more; for in that day thou seest my face thou
shalt die.

10:29 And Moses said, Thou hast spoken well, I will see thy face again
no more.

11:1 And the LORD said unto Moses, Yet will I bring one plague more
upon Pharaoh, and upon Egypt; afterwards he will let you go hence:
when he shall let you go, he shall surely thrust you out hence
altogether.

11:2 Speak now in the ears of the people, and let every man borrow of
his neighbour, and every woman of her neighbour, jewels of silver and
jewels of gold.

11:3 And the LORD gave the people favour in the sight of the
Egyptians.

Moreover the man Moses was very great in the land of Egypt, in the
sight of Pharaoh's servants, and in the sight of the people.

11:4 And Moses said, Thus saith the LORD, About midnight will I go out
into the midst of Egypt: 11:5 And all the firstborn in the land of
Egypt shall die, from the first born of Pharaoh that sitteth upon his
throne, even unto the firstborn of the maidservant that is behind the
mill; and all the firstborn of beasts.

11:6 And there shall be a great cry throughout all the land of Egypt,
such as there was none like it, nor shall be like it any more.

11:7 But against any of the children of Israel shall not a dog move
his tongue, against man or beast: that ye may know how that the LORD
doth put a difference between the Egyptians and Israel.

11:8 And all these thy servants shall come down unto me, and bow down
themselves unto me, saying, Get thee out, and all the people that
follow thee: and after that I will go out. And he went out from
Pharaoh in a great anger.

11:9 And the LORD said unto Moses, Pharaoh shall not hearken unto you;
that my wonders may be multiplied in the land of Egypt.

11:10 And Moses and Aaron did all these wonders before Pharaoh: and
the LORD hardened Pharaoh's heart, so that he would not let the
children of Israel go out of his land.

12:1 And the LORD spake unto Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt
saying, 12:2 This month shall be unto you the beginning of months: it
shall be the first month of the year to you.

12:3 Speak ye unto all the congregation of Israel, saying, In the
tenth day of this month they shall take to them every man a lamb,
according to the house of their fathers, a lamb for an house: 12:4 And
if the household be too little for the lamb, let him and his neighbour
next unto his house take it according to the number of the souls;
every man according to his eating shall make your count for the lamb.

12:5 Your lamb shall be without blemish, a male of the first year: ye
shall take it out from the sheep, or from the goats: 12:6 And ye shall
keep it up until the fourteenth day of the same month: and the whole
assembly of the congregation of Israel shall kill it in the evening.

12:7 And they shall take of the blood, and strike it on the two side
posts and on the upper door post of the houses, wherein they shall eat
it.

12:8 And they shall eat the flesh in that night, roast with fire, and
unleavened bread; and with bitter herbs they shall eat it.

12:9 Eat not of it raw, nor sodden at all with water, but roast with
fire; his head with his legs, and with the purtenance thereof.

12:10 And ye shall let nothing of it remain until the morning; and
that which remaineth of it until the morning ye shall burn with fire.

12:11 And thus shall ye eat it; with your loins girded, your shoes on
your feet, and your staff in your hand; and ye shall eat it in haste:
it is the LORD's passover.

12:12 For I will pass through the land of Egypt this night, and will
smite all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast; and
against all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgment: I am the LORD.

12:13 And the blood shall be to you for a token upon the houses where
ye are: and when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and the plague
shall not be upon you to destroy you, when I smite the land of Egypt.

12:14 And this day shall be unto you for a memorial; and ye shall keep
it a feast to the LORD throughout your generations; ye shall keep it a
feast by an ordinance for ever.

12:15 Seven days shall ye eat unleavened bread; even the first day ye
shall put away leaven out of your houses: for whosoever eateth
leavened bread from the first day until the seventh day, that soul
shall be cut off from Israel.

12:16 And in the first day there shall be an holy convocation, and in
the seventh day there shall be an holy convocation to you; no manner
of work shall be done in them, save that which every man must eat,
that only may be done of you.

12:17 And ye shall observe the feast of unleavened bread; for in this
selfsame day have I brought your armies out of the land of Egypt:
therefore shall ye observe this day in your generations by an
ordinance for ever.

12:18 In the first month, on the fourteenth day of the month at even,
ye shall eat unleavened bread, until the one and twentieth day of the
month at even.

12:19 Seven days shall there be no leaven found in your houses: for
whosoever eateth that which is leavened, even that soul shall be cut
off from the congregation of Israel, whether he be a stranger, or born
in the land.

12:20 Ye shall eat nothing leavened; in all your habitations shall ye
eat unleavened bread.

12:21 Then Moses called for all the elders of Israel, and said unto
them, Draw out and take you a lamb according to your families, and
kill the passover.

12:22 And ye shall take a bunch of hyssop, and dip it in the blood
that is in the bason, and strike the lintel and the two side posts
with the blood that is in the bason; and none of you shall go out at
the door of his house until the morning.

12:23 For the LORD will pass through to smite the Egyptians; and when
he seeth the blood upon the lintel, and on the two side posts, the
LORD will pass over the door, and will not suffer the destroyer to
come in unto your houses to smite you.

12:24 And ye shall observe this thing for an ordinance to thee and to
thy sons for ever.

12:25 And it shall come to pass, when ye be come to the land which the
LORD will give you, according as he hath promised, that ye shall keep
this service.

12:26 And it shall come to pass, when your children shall say unto
you, What mean ye by this service?  12:27 That ye shall say, It is the
sacrifice of the LORD's passover, who passed over the houses of the
children of Israel in Egypt, when he smote the Egyptians, and
delivered our houses. And the people bowed the head and worshipped.

12:28 And the children of Israel went away, and did as the LORD had
commanded Moses and Aaron, so did they.

12:29 And it came to pass, that at midnight the LORD smote all the
firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh that sat
on his throne unto the firstborn of the captive that was in the
dungeon; and all the firstborn of cattle.

12:30 And Pharaoh rose up in the night, he, and all his servants, and
all the Egyptians; and there was a great cry in Egypt; for there was
not a house where there was not one dead.

12:31 And he called for Moses and Aaron by night, and said, Rise up,
and get you forth from among my people, both ye and the children of
Israel; and go, serve the LORD, as ye have said.

12:32 Also take your flocks and your herds, as ye have said, and be
gone; and bless me also.

12:33 And the Egyptians were urgent upon the people, that they might
send them out of the land in haste; for they said, We be all dead men.

12:34 And the people took their dough before it was leavened, their
kneadingtroughs being bound up in their clothes upon their shoulders.

12:35 And the children of Israel did according to the word of Moses;
and they borrowed of the Egyptians jewels of silver, and jewels of
gold, and raiment: 12:36 And the LORD gave the people favour in the
sight of the Egyptians, so that they lent unto them such things as
they required. And they spoiled the Egyptians.

12:37 And the children of Israel journeyed from Rameses to Succoth,
about six hundred thousand on foot that were men, beside children.

12:38 And a mixed multitude went up also with them; and flocks, and
herds, even very much cattle.

12:39 And they baked unleavened cakes of the dough which they brought
forth out of Egypt, for it was not leavened; because they were thrust
out of Egypt, and could not tarry, neither had they prepared for
themselves any victual.

12:40 Now the sojourning of the children of Israel, who dwelt in
Egypt, was four hundred and thirty years.

12:41 And it came to pass at the end of the four hundred and thirty
years, even the selfsame day it came to pass, that all the hosts of
the LORD went out from the land of Egypt.

12:42 It is a night to be much observed unto the LORD for bringing
them out from the land of Egypt: this is that night of the LORD to be
observed of all the children of Israel in their generations.

12:43 And the LORD said unto Moses and Aaron, This is the ordinance of
the passover: There shall no stranger eat thereof: 12:44 But every
man's servant that is bought for money, when thou hast circumcised
him, then shall he eat thereof.

12:45 A foreigner and an hired servant shall not eat thereof.

12:46 In one house shall it be eaten; thou shalt not carry forth ought
of the flesh abroad out of the house; neither shall ye break a bone
thereof.

12:47 All the congregation of Israel shall keep it.

12:48 And when a stranger shall sojourn with thee, and will keep the
passover to the LORD, let all his males be circumcised, and then let
him come near and keep it; and he shall be as one that is born in the
land: for no uncircumcised person shall eat thereof.

12:49 One law shall be to him that is homeborn, and unto the stranger
that sojourneth among you.

12:50 Thus did all the children of Israel; as the LORD commanded Moses
and Aaron, so did they.

12:51 And it came to pass the selfsame day, that the LORD did bring
the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt by their armies.

13:1 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 13:2 Sanctify unto me all
the firstborn, whatsoever openeth the womb among the children of
Israel, both of man and of beast: it is mine.

13:3 And Moses said unto the people, Remember this day, in which ye
came out from Egypt, out of the house of bondage; for by strength of
hand the LORD brought you out from this place: there shall no leavened
bread be eaten.

13:4 This day came ye out in the month Abib.

13:5 And it shall be when the LORD shall bring thee into the land of
the Canaanites, and the Hittites, and the Amorites, and the Hivites,
and the Jebusites, which he sware unto thy fathers to give thee, a
land flowing with milk and honey, that thou shalt keep this service in
this month.

13:6 Seven days thou shalt eat unleavened bread, and in the seventh
day shall be a feast to the LORD.

13:7 Unleavened bread shall be eaten seven days; and there shall no
leavened bread be seen with thee, neither shall there be leaven seen
with thee in all thy quarters.

13:8 And thou shalt shew thy son in that day, saying, This is done
because of that which the LORD did unto me when I came forth out of
Egypt.

13:9 And it shall be for a sign unto thee upon thine hand, and for a
memorial between thine eyes, that the LORD's law may be in thy mouth:
for with a strong hand hath the LORD brought thee out of Egypt.

13:10 Thou shalt therefore keep this ordinance in his season from year
to year.

13:11 And it shall be when the LORD shall bring thee into the land of
the Canaanites, as he sware unto thee and to thy fathers, and shall
give it thee, 13:12 That thou shalt set apart unto the LORD all that
openeth the matrix, and every firstling that cometh of a beast which
thou hast; the males shall be the LORD's.

13:13 And every firstling of an ass thou shalt redeem with a lamb; and
if thou wilt not redeem it, then thou shalt break his neck: and all
the firstborn of man among thy children shalt thou redeem.

13:14 And it shall be when thy son asketh thee in time to come,
saying, What is this? that thou shalt say unto him, By strength of
hand the LORD brought us out from Egypt, from the house of bondage:
13:15 And it came to pass, when Pharaoh would hardly let us go, that
the LORD slew all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both the
firstborn of man, and the firstborn of beast: therefore I sacrifice to
the LORD all that openeth the matrix, being males; but all the
firstborn of my children I redeem.

13:16 And it shall be for a token upon thine hand, and for frontlets
between thine eyes: for by strength of hand the LORD brought us forth
out of Egypt.

13:17 And it came to pass, when Pharaoh had let the people go, that
God led them not through the way of the land of the Philistines,
although that was near; for God said, Lest peradventure the people
repent when they see war, and they return to Egypt: 13:18 But God led
the people about, through the way of the wilderness of the Red sea:
and the children of Israel went up harnessed out of the land of Egypt.

13:19 And Moses took the bones of Joseph with him: for he had straitly
sworn the children of Israel, saying, God will surely visit you; and
ye shall carry up my bones away hence with you.

13:20 And they took their journey from Succoth, and encamped in Etham,
in the edge of the wilderness.

13:21 And the LORD went before them by day in a pillar of a cloud, to
lead them the way; and by night in a pillar of fire, to give them
light; to go by day and night: 13:22 He took not away the pillar of
the cloud by day, nor the pillar of fire by night, from before the
people.

14:1 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 14:2 Speak unto the
children of Israel, that they turn and encamp before Pihahiroth,
between Migdol and the sea, over against Baalzephon: before it shall
ye encamp by the sea.

14:3 For Pharaoh will say of the children of Israel, They are
entangled in the land, the wilderness hath shut them in.

14:4 And I will harden Pharaoh's heart, that he shall follow after
them; and I will be honoured upon Pharaoh, and upon all his host; that
the Egyptians may know that I am the LORD. And they did so.

14:5 And it was told the king of Egypt that the people fled: and the
heart of Pharaoh and of his servants was turned against the people,
and they said, Why have we done this, that we have let Israel go from
serving us?  14:6 And he made ready his chariot, and took his people
with him: 14:7 And he took six hundred chosen chariots, and all the
chariots of Egypt, and captains over every one of them.

14:8 And the LORD hardened the heart of Pharaoh king of Egypt, and he
pursued after the children of Israel: and the children of Israel went
out with an high hand.

14:9 But the Egyptians pursued after them, all the horses and chariots
of Pharaoh, and his horsemen, and his army, and overtook them
encamping by the sea, beside Pihahiroth, before Baalzephon.

14:10 And when Pharaoh drew nigh, the children of Israel lifted up
their eyes, and, behold, the Egyptians marched after them; and they
were sore afraid: and the children of Israel cried out unto the LORD.

14:11 And they said unto Moses, Because there were no graves in Egypt,
hast thou taken us away to die in the wilderness? wherefore hast thou
dealt thus with us, to carry us forth out of Egypt?  14:12 Is not this
the word that we did tell thee in Egypt, saying, Let us alone, that we
may serve the Egyptians? For it had been better for us to serve the
Egyptians, than that we should die in the wilderness.

14:13 And Moses said unto the people, Fear ye not, stand still, and
see the salvation of the LORD, which he will shew to you to day: for
the Egyptians whom ye have seen to day, ye shall see them again no
more for ever.

14:14 The LORD shall fight for you, and ye shall hold your peace.

14:15 And the LORD said unto Moses, Wherefore criest thou unto me?
speak unto the children of Israel, that they go forward: 14:16 But
lift thou up thy rod, and stretch out thine hand over the sea, and
divide it: and the children of Israel shall go on dry ground through
the midst of the sea.

14:17 And I, behold, I will harden the hearts of the Egyptians, and
they shall follow them: and I will get me honour upon Pharaoh, and
upon all his host, upon his chariots, and upon his horsemen.

14:18 And the Egyptians shall know that I am the LORD, when I have
gotten me honour upon Pharaoh, upon his chariots, and upon his
horsemen.

14:19 And the angel of God, which went before the camp of Israel,
removed and went behind them; and the pillar of the cloud went from
before their face, and stood behind them: 14:20 And it came between
the camp of the Egyptians and the camp of Israel; and it was a cloud
and darkness to them, but it gave light by night to these: so that the
one came not near the other all the night.

14:21 And Moses stretched out his hand over the sea; and the LORD
caused the sea to go back by a strong east wind all that night, and
made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided.

14:22 And the children of Israel went into the midst of the sea upon
the dry ground: and the waters were a wall unto them on their right
hand, and on their left.

14:23 And the Egyptians pursued, and went in after them to the midst
of the sea, even all Pharaoh's horses, his chariots, and his horsemen.

14:24 And it came to pass, that in the morning watch the LORD looked
unto the host of the Egyptians through the pillar of fire and of the
cloud, and troubled the host of the Egyptians, 14:25 And took off
their chariot wheels, that they drave them heavily: so that the
Egyptians said, Let us flee from the face of Israel; for the LORD
fighteth for them against the Egyptians.

14:26 And the LORD said unto Moses, Stretch out thine hand over the
sea, that the waters may come again upon the Egyptians, upon their
chariots, and upon their horsemen.

14:27 And Moses stretched forth his hand over the sea, and the sea
returned to his strength when the morning appeared; and the Egyptians
fled against it; and the LORD overthrew the Egyptians in the midst of
the sea.

14:28 And the waters returned, and covered the chariots, and the
horsemen, and all the host of Pharaoh that came into the sea after
them; there remained not so much as one of them.

14:29 But the children of Israel walked upon dry land in the midst of
the sea; and the waters were a wall unto them on their right hand, and
on their left.

14:30 Thus the LORD saved Israel that day out of the hand of the
Egyptians; and Israel saw the Egyptians dead upon the sea shore.

14:31 And Israel saw that great work which the LORD did upon the
Egyptians: and the people feared the LORD, and believed the LORD, and
his servant Moses.

15:1 Then sang Moses and the children of Israel this song unto the
LORD, and spake, saying, I will sing unto the LORD, for he hath
triumphed gloriously: the horse and his rider hath he thrown into the
sea.

15:2 The LORD is my strength and song, and he is become my salvation:
he is my God, and I will prepare him an habitation; my father's God,
and I will exalt him.

15:3 The LORD is a man of war: the LORD is his name.

15:4 Pharaoh's chariots and his host hath he cast into the sea: his
chosen captains also are drowned in the Red sea.

15:5 The depths have covered them: they sank into the bottom as a
stone.

15:6 Thy right hand, O LORD, is become glorious in power: thy right
hand, O LORD, hath dashed in pieces the enemy.

15:7 And in the greatness of thine excellency thou hast overthrown
them that rose up against thee: thou sentest forth thy wrath, which
consumed them as stubble.

15:8 And with the blast of thy nostrils the waters were gathered
together, the floods stood upright as an heap, and the depths were
congealed in the heart of the sea.

15:9 The enemy said, I will pursue, I will overtake, I will divide the
spoil; my lust shall be satisfied upon them; I will draw my sword, my
hand shall destroy them.

15:10 Thou didst blow with thy wind, the sea covered them: they sank
as lead in the mighty waters.

15:11 Who is like unto thee, O LORD, among the gods? who is like thee,
glorious in holiness, fearful in praises, doing wonders?  15:12 Thou
stretchedst out thy right hand, the earth swallowed them.

15:13 Thou in thy mercy hast led forth the people which thou hast
redeemed: thou hast guided them in thy strength unto thy holy
habitation.

15:14 The people shall hear, and be afraid: sorrow shall take hold on
the inhabitants of Palestina.

15:15 Then the dukes of Edom shall be amazed; the mighty men of Moab,
trembling shall take hold upon them; all the inhabitants of Canaan
shall melt away.

15:16 Fear and dread shall fall upon them; by the greatness of thine
arm they shall be as still as a stone; till thy people pass over, O
LORD, till the people pass over, which thou hast purchased.

15:17 Thou shalt bring them in, and plant them in the mountain of
thine inheritance, in the place, O LORD, which thou hast made for thee
to dwell in, in the Sanctuary, O LORD, which thy hands have
established.

15:18 The LORD shall reign for ever and ever.

15:19 For the horse of Pharaoh went in with his chariots and with his
horsemen into the sea, and the LORD brought again the waters of the
sea upon them; but the children of Israel went on dry land in the
midst of the sea.

15:20 And Miriam the prophetess, the sister of Aaron, took a timbrel
in her hand; and all the women went out after her with timbrels and
with dances.

15:21 And Miriam answered them, Sing ye to the LORD, for he hath
triumphed gloriously; the horse and his rider hath he thrown into the
sea.

15:22 So Moses brought Israel from the Red sea, and they went out into
the wilderness of Shur; and they went three days in the wilderness,
and found no water.

15:23 And when they came to Marah, they could not drink of the waters
of Marah, for they were bitter: therefore the name of it was called
Marah.

15:24 And the people murmured against Moses, saying, What shall we
drink?  15:25 And he cried unto the LORD; and the LORD shewed him a
tree, which when he had cast into the waters, the waters were made
sweet: there he made for them a statute and an ordinance, and there he
proved them, 15:26 And said, If thou wilt diligently hearken to the
voice of the LORD thy God, and wilt do that which is right in his
sight, and wilt give ear to his commandments, and keep all his
statutes, I will put none of these diseases upon thee, which I have
brought upon the Egyptians: for I am the LORD that healeth thee.

15:27 And they came to Elim, where were twelve wells of water, and
threescore and ten palm trees: and they encamped there by the waters.

16:1 And they took their journey from Elim, and all the congregation
of the children of Israel came unto the wilderness of Sin, which is
between Elim and Sinai, on the fifteenth day of the second month after
their departing out of the land of Egypt.

16:2 And the whole congregation of the children of Israel murmured
against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness: 16:3 And the children of
Israel said unto them, Would to God we had died by the hand of the
LORD in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the flesh pots, and when we
did eat bread to the full; for ye have brought us forth into this
wilderness, to kill this whole assembly with hunger.

16:4 Then said the LORD unto Moses, Behold, I will rain bread from
heaven for you; and the people shall go out and gather a certain rate
every day, that I may prove them, whether they will walk in my law, or
no.

16:5 And it shall come to pass, that on the sixth day they shall
prepare that which they bring in; and it shall be twice as much as
they gather daily.

16:6 And Moses and Aaron said unto all the children of Israel, At
even, then ye shall know that the LORD hath brought you out from the
land of Egypt: 16:7 And in the morning, then ye shall see the glory of
the LORD; for that he heareth your murmurings against the LORD: and
what are we, that ye murmur against us?  16:8 And Moses said, This
shall be, when the LORD shall give you in the evening flesh to eat,
and in the morning bread to the full; for that the LORD heareth your
murmurings which ye murmur against him: and what are we? your
murmurings are not against us, but against the LORD.

16:9 And Moses spake unto Aaron, Say unto all the congregation of the
children of Israel, Come near before the LORD: for he hath heard your
murmurings.

16:10 And it came to pass, as Aaron spake unto the whole congregation
of the children of Israel, that they looked toward the wilderness,
and, behold, the glory of the LORD appeared in the cloud.

16:11 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 16:12 I have heard the
murmurings of the children of Israel: speak unto them, saying, At even
ye shall eat flesh, and in the morning ye shall be filled with bread;
and ye shall know that I am the LORD your God.

16:13 And it came to pass, that at even the quails came up, and
covered the camp: and in the morning the dew lay round about the host.

16:14 And when the dew that lay was gone up, behold, upon the face of
the wilderness there lay a small round thing, as small as the hoar
frost on the ground.

16:15 And when the children of Israel saw it, they said one to
another, It is manna: for they wist not what it was. And Moses said
unto them, This is the bread which the LORD hath given you to eat.

16:16 This is the thing which the LORD hath commanded, Gather of it
every man according to his eating, an omer for every man, according to
the number of your persons; take ye every man for them which are in
his tents.

16:17 And the children of Israel did so, and gathered, some more, some
less.

16:18 And when they did mete it with an omer, he that gathered much
had nothing over, and he that gathered little had no lack; they
gathered every man according to his eating.

16:19 And Moses said, Let no man leave of it till the morning.

16:20 Notwithstanding they hearkened not unto Moses; but some of them
left of it until the morning, and it bred worms, and stank: and Moses
was wroth with them.

16:21 And they gathered it every morning, every man according to his
eating: and when the sun waxed hot, it melted.

16:22 And it came to pass, that on the sixth day they gathered twice
as much bread, two omers for one man: and all the rulers of the
congregation came and told Moses.

16:23 And he said unto them, This is that which the LORD hath said, To
morrow is the rest of the holy sabbath unto the LORD: bake that which
ye will bake to day, and seethe that ye will seethe; and that which
remaineth over lay up for you to be kept until the morning.

16:24 And they laid it up till the morning, as Moses bade: and it did
not stink, neither was there any worm therein.

16:25 And Moses said, Eat that to day; for to day is a sabbath unto
the LORD: to day ye shall not find it in the field.

16:26 Six days ye shall gather it; but on the seventh day, which is
the sabbath, in it there shall be none.

16:27 And it came to pass, that there went out some of the people on
the seventh day for to gather, and they found none.

16:28 And the LORD said unto Moses, How long refuse ye to keep my
commandments and my laws?  16:29 See, for that the LORD hath given you
the sabbath, therefore he giveth you on the sixth day the bread of two
days; abide ye every man in his place, let no man go out of his place
on the seventh day.

16:30 So the people rested on the seventh day.

16:31 And the house of Israel called the name thereof Manna: and it
was like coriander seed, white; and the taste of it was like wafers
made with honey.

16:32 And Moses said, This is the thing which the LORD commandeth,
Fill an omer of it to be kept for your generations; that they may see
the bread wherewith I have fed you in the wilderness, when I brought
you forth from the land of Egypt.

16:33 And Moses said unto Aaron, Take a pot, and put an omer full of
manna therein, and lay it up before the LORD, to be kept for your
generations.

16:34 As the LORD commanded Moses, so Aaron laid it up before the
Testimony, to be kept.

16:35 And the children of Israel did eat manna forty years, until they
came to a land inhabited; they did eat manna, until they came unto the
borders of the land of Canaan.

16:36 Now an omer is the tenth part of an ephah.

17:1 And all the congregation of the children of Israel journeyed from
the wilderness of Sin, after their journeys, according to the
commandment of the LORD, and pitched in Rephidim: and there was no
water for the people to drink.

17:2 Wherefore the people did chide with Moses, and said, Give us
water that we may drink. And Moses said unto them, Why chide ye with
me? wherefore do ye tempt the LORD?  17:3 And the people thirsted
there for water; and the people murmured against Moses, and said,
Wherefore is this that thou hast brought us up out of Egypt, to kill
us and our children and our cattle with thirst?  17:4 And Moses cried
unto the LORD, saying, What shall I do unto this people? they be
almost ready to stone me.

17:5 And the LORD said unto Moses, Go on before the people, and take
with thee of the elders of Israel; and thy rod, wherewith thou smotest
the river, take in thine hand, and go.

17:6 Behold, I will stand before thee there upon the rock in Horeb;
and thou shalt smite the rock, and there shall come water out of it,
that the people may drink. And Moses did so in the sight of the elders
of Israel.

17:7 And he called the name of the place Massah, and Meribah, because
of the chiding of the children of Israel, and because they tempted the
LORD, saying, Is the LORD among us, or not?  17:8 Then came Amalek,
and fought with Israel in Rephidim.

17:9 And Moses said unto Joshua, Choose us out men, and go out, fight
with Amalek: to morrow I will stand on the top of the hill with the
rod of God in mine hand.

17:10 So Joshua did as Moses had said to him, and fought with Amalek:
and Moses, Aaron, and Hur went up to the top of the hill.

17:11 And it came to pass, when Moses held up his hand, that Israel
prevailed: and when he let down his hand, Amalek prevailed.

17:12 But Moses hands were heavy; and they took a stone, and put it
under him, and he sat thereon; and Aaron and Hur stayed up his hands,
the one on the one side, and the other on the other side; and his
hands were steady until the going down of the sun.

17:13 And Joshua discomfited Amalek and his people with the edge of
the sword.

17:14 And the LORD said unto Moses, Write this for a memorial in a
book, and rehearse it in the ears of Joshua: for I will utterly put
out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven.

17:15 And Moses built an altar, and called the name of it
Jehovahnissi: 17:16 For he said, Because the LORD hath sworn that the
LORD will have war with Amalek from generation to generation.

18:1 When Jethro, the priest of Midian, Moses' father in law, heard of
all that God had done for Moses, and for Israel his people, and that
the LORD had brought Israel out of Egypt; 18:2 Then Jethro, Moses'
father in law, took Zipporah, Moses' wife, after he had sent her back,
18:3 And her two sons; of which the name of the one was Gershom; for
he said, I have been an alien in a strange land: 18:4 And the name of
the other was Eliezer; for the God of my father, said he, was mine
help, and delivered me from the sword of Pharaoh: 18:5 And Jethro,
Moses' father in law, came with his sons and his wife unto Moses into
the wilderness, where he encamped at the mount of God: 18:6 And he
said unto Moses, I thy father in law Jethro am come unto thee, and thy
wife, and her two sons with her.

18:7 And Moses went out to meet his father in law, and did obeisance,
and kissed him; and they asked each other of their welfare; and they
came into the tent.

18:8 And Moses told his father in law all that the LORD had done unto
Pharaoh and to the Egyptians for Israel's sake, and all the travail
that had come upon them by the way, and how the LORD delivered them.

18:9 And Jethro rejoiced for all the goodness which the LORD had done
to Israel, whom he had delivered out of the hand of the Egyptians.

18:10 And Jethro said, Blessed be the LORD, who hath delivered you out
of the hand of the Egyptians, and out of the hand of Pharaoh, who hath
delivered the people from under the hand of the Egyptians.

18:11 Now I know that the LORD is greater than all gods: for in the
thing wherein they dealt proudly he was above them.

18:12 And Jethro, Moses' father in law, took a burnt offering and
sacrifices for God: and Aaron came, and all the elders of Israel, to
eat bread with Moses' father in law before God.

18:13 And it came to pass on the morrow, that Moses sat to judge the
people: and the people stood by Moses from the morning unto the
evening.

18:14 And when Moses' father in law saw all that he did to the people,
he said, What is this thing that thou doest to the people? why sittest
thou thyself alone, and all the people stand by thee from morning unto
even?  18:15 And Moses said unto his father in law, Because the people
come unto me to enquire of God: 18:16 When they have a matter, they
come unto me; and I judge between one and another, and I do make them
know the statutes of God, and his laws.

18:17 And Moses' father in law said unto him, The thing that thou
doest is not good.

18:18 Thou wilt surely wear away, both thou, and this people that is
with thee: for this thing is too heavy for thee; thou art not able to
perform it thyself alone.

18:19 Hearken now unto my voice, I will give thee counsel, and God
shall be with thee: Be thou for the people to God-ward, that thou
mayest bring the causes unto God: 18:20 And thou shalt teach them
ordinances and laws, and shalt shew them the way wherein they must
walk, and the work that they must do.

18:21 Moreover thou shalt provide out of all the people able men, such
as fear God, men of truth, hating covetousness; and place such over
them, to be rulers of thousands, and rulers of hundreds, rulers of
fifties, and rulers of tens: 18:22 And let them judge the people at
all seasons: and it shall be, that every great matter they shall bring
unto thee, but every small matter they shall judge: so shall it be
easier for thyself, and they shall bear the burden with thee.

18:23 If thou shalt do this thing, and God command thee so, then thou
shalt be able to endure, and all this people shall also go to their
place in peace.

18:24 So Moses hearkened to the voice of his father in law, and did
all that he had said.

18:25 And Moses chose able men out of all Israel, and made them heads
over the people, rulers of thousands, rulers of hundreds, rulers of
fifties, and rulers of tens.

18:26 And they judged the people at all seasons: the hard causes they
brought unto Moses, but every small matter they judged themselves.

18:27 And Moses let his father in law depart; and he went his way into
his own land.

19:1 In the third month, when the children of Israel were gone forth
out of the land of Egypt, the same day came they into the wilderness
of Sinai.

19:2 For they were departed from Rephidim, and were come to the desert
of Sinai, and had pitched in the wilderness; and there Israel camped
before the mount.

19:3 And Moses went up unto God, and the LORD called unto him out of
the mountain, saying, Thus shalt thou say to the house of Jacob, and
tell the children of Israel; 19:4 Ye have seen what I did unto the
Egyptians, and how I bare you on eagles' wings, and brought you unto
myself.

19:5 Now therefore, if ye will obey my voice indeed, and keep my
covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me above all
people: for all the earth is mine: 19:6 And ye shall be unto me a
kingdom of priests, and an holy nation.

These are the words which thou shalt speak unto the children of
Israel.

19:7 And Moses came and called for the elders of the people, and laid
before their faces all these words which the LORD commanded him.

19:8 And all the people answered together, and said, All that the LORD
hath spoken we will do. And Moses returned the words of the people
unto the LORD.

19:9 And the LORD said unto Moses, Lo, I come unto thee in a thick
cloud, that the people may hear when I speak with thee, and believe
thee for ever.

And Moses told the words of the people unto the LORD.

19:10 And the LORD said unto Moses, Go unto the people, and sanctify
them to day and to morrow, and let them wash their clothes, 19:11 And
be ready against the third day: for the third day the LORD will come
down in the sight of all the people upon mount Sinai.

19:12 And thou shalt set bounds unto the people round about, saying,
Take heed to yourselves, that ye go not up into the mount, or touch
the border of it: whosoever toucheth the mount shall be surely put to
death: 19:13 There shall not an hand touch it, but he shall surely be
stoned, or shot through; whether it be beast or man, it shall not
live: when the trumpet soundeth long, they shall come up to the mount.

19:14 And Moses went down from the mount unto the people, and
sanctified the people; and they washed their clothes.

19:15 And he said unto the people, Be ready against the third day:
come not at your wives.

19:16 And it came to pass on the third day in the morning, that there
were thunders and lightnings, and a thick cloud upon the mount, and
the voice of the trumpet exceeding loud; so that all the people that
was in the camp trembled.

19:17 And Moses brought forth the people out of the camp to meet with
God; and they stood at the nether part of the mount.

19:18 And mount Sinai was altogether on a smoke, because the LORD
descended upon it in fire: and the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke
of a furnace, and the whole mount quaked greatly.

19:19 And when the voice of the trumpet sounded long, and waxed louder
and louder, Moses spake, and God answered him by a voice.

19:20 And the LORD came down upon mount Sinai, on the top of the
mount: and the LORD called Moses up to the top of the mount; and Moses
went up.

19:21 And the LORD said unto Moses, Go down, charge the people, lest
they break through unto the LORD to gaze, and many of them perish.

19:22 And let the priests also, which come near to the LORD, sanctify
themselves, lest the LORD break forth upon them.

19:23 And Moses said unto the LORD, The people cannot come up to mount
Sinai: for thou chargedst us, saying, Set bounds about the mount, and
sanctify it.

19:24 And the LORD said unto him, Away, get thee down, and thou shalt
come up, thou, and Aaron with thee: but let not the priests and the
people break through to come up unto the LORD, lest he break forth
upon them.

19:25 So Moses went down unto the people, and spake unto them.

20:1 And God spake all these words, saying, 20:2 I am the LORD thy
God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the
house of bondage.

20:3 Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

20:4 Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness
of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath,
or that is in the water under the earth.

20:5 Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I
the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the
fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them
that hate me; 20:6 And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love
me, and keep my commandments.

20:7 Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain; for the
LORD will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.

20:8 Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.

20:9 Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: 20:10 But the
seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not
do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor
thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy
gates: 20:11 For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea,
and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the
LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.

20:12 Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon
the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.

20:13 Thou shalt not kill.

20:14 Thou shalt not commit adultery.

20:15 Thou shalt not steal.

20:16 Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.

20:17 Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, thou shalt not covet
thy neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his
ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour's.

20:18 And all the people saw the thunderings, and the lightnings, and
the noise of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking: and when the
people saw it, they removed, and stood afar off.

20:19 And they said unto Moses, Speak thou with us, and we will hear:
but let not God speak with us, lest we die.

20:20 And Moses said unto the people, Fear not: for God is come to
prove you, and that his fear may be before your faces, that ye sin
not.

20:21 And the people stood afar off, and Moses drew near unto the
thick darkness where God was.

20:22 And the LORD said unto Moses, Thus thou shalt say unto the
children of Israel, Ye have seen that I have talked with you from
heaven.

20:23 Ye shall not make with me gods of silver, neither shall ye make
unto you gods of gold.

20:24 An altar of earth thou shalt make unto me, and shalt sacrifice
thereon thy burnt offerings, and thy peace offerings, thy sheep, and
thine oxen: in all places where I record my name I will come unto
thee, and I will bless thee.

20:25 And if thou wilt make me an altar of stone, thou shalt not build
it of hewn stone: for if thou lift up thy tool upon it, thou hast
polluted it.

20:26 Neither shalt thou go up by steps unto mine altar, that thy
nakedness be not discovered thereon.

21:1 Now these are the judgments which thou shalt set before them.

21:2 If thou buy an Hebrew servant, six years he shall serve: and in
the seventh he shall go out free for nothing.

21:3 If he came in by himself, he shall go out by himself: if he were
married, then his wife shall go out with him.

21:4 If his master have given him a wife, and she have born him sons
or daughters; the wife and her children shall be her master's, and he
shall go out by himself.

21:5 And if the servant shall plainly say, I love my master, my wife,
and my children; I will not go out free: 21:6 Then his master shall
bring him unto the judges; he shall also bring him to the door, or
unto the door post; and his master shall bore his ear through with an
aul; and he shall serve him for ever.

21:7 And if a man sell his daughter to be a maidservant, she shall not
go out as the menservants do.

21:8 If she please not her master, who hath betrothed her to himself,
then shall he let her be redeemed: to sell her unto a strange nation
he shall have no power, seeing he hath dealt deceitfully with her.

21:9 And if he have betrothed her unto his son, he shall deal with her
after the manner of daughters.

21:10 If he take him another wife; her food, her raiment, and her duty
of marriage, shall he not diminish.

21:11 And if he do not these three unto her, then shall she go out
free without money.

21:12 He that smiteth a man, so that he die, shall be surely put to
death.

21:13 And if a man lie not in wait, but God deliver him into his hand;
then I will appoint thee a place whither he shall flee.

21:14 But if a man come presumptuously upon his neighbour, to slay him
with guile; thou shalt take him from mine altar, that he may die.

21:15 And he that smiteth his father, or his mother, shall be surely
put to death.

21:16 And he that stealeth a man, and selleth him, or if he be found
in his hand, he shall surely be put to death.

21:17 And he that curseth his father, or his mother, shall surely be
put to death.

21:18 And if men strive together, and one smite another with a stone,
or with his fist, and he die not, but keepeth his bed: 21:19 If he
rise again, and walk abroad upon his staff, then shall he that smote
him be quit: only he shall pay for the loss of his time, and shall
cause him to be thoroughly healed.

21:20 And if a man smite his servant, or his maid, with a rod, and he
die under his hand; he shall be surely punished.

21:21 Notwithstanding, if he continue a day or two, he shall not be
punished: for he is his money.

21:22 If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit
depart from her, and yet no mischief follow: he shall be surely
punished, according as the woman's husband will lay upon him; and he
shall pay as the judges determine.

21:23 And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life,
21:24 Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot,
21:25 Burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.

21:26 And if a man smite the eye of his servant, or the eye of his
maid, that it perish; he shall let him go free for his eye's sake.

21:27 And if he smite out his manservant's tooth, or his maidservant's
tooth; he shall let him go free for his tooth's sake.

21:28 If an ox gore a man or a woman, that they die: then the ox shall
be surely stoned, and his flesh shall not be eaten; but the owner of
the ox shall be quit.

21:29 But if the ox were wont to push with his horn in time past, and
it hath been testified to his owner, and he hath not kept him in, but
that he hath killed a man or a woman; the ox shall be stoned, and his
owner also shall be put to death.

21:30 If there be laid on him a sum of money, then he shall give for
the ransom of his life whatsoever is laid upon him.

21:31 Whether he have gored a son, or have gored a daughter, according
to this judgment shall it be done unto him.

21:32 If the ox shall push a manservant or a maidservant; he shall
give unto their master thirty shekels of silver, and the ox shall be
stoned.

21:33 And if a man shall open a pit, or if a man shall dig a pit, and
not cover it, and an ox or an ass fall therein; 21:34 The owner of the
pit shall make it good, and give money unto the owner of them; and the
dead beast shall be his.

21:35 And if one man's ox hurt another's, that he die; then they shall
sell the live ox, and divide the money of it; and the dead ox also
they shall divide.

21:36 Or if it be known that the ox hath used to push in time past,
and his owner hath not kept him in; he shall surely pay ox for ox; and
the dead shall be his own.

22:1 If a man shall steal an ox, or a sheep, and kill it, or sell it;
he shall restore five oxen for an ox, and four sheep for a sheep.

22:2 If a thief be found breaking up, and be smitten that he die,
there shall no blood be shed for him.

22:3 If the sun be risen upon him, there shall be blood shed for him;
for he should make full restitution; if he have nothing, then he shall
be sold for his theft.

22:4 If the theft be certainly found in his hand alive, whether it be
ox, or ass, or sheep; he shall restore double.

22:5 If a man shall cause a field or vineyard to be eaten, and shall
put in his beast, and shall feed in another man's field; of the best
of his own field, and of the best of his own vineyard, shall he make
restitution.

22:6 If fire break out, and catch in thorns, so that the stacks of
corn, or the standing corn, or the field, be consumed therewith; he
that kindled the fire shall surely make restitution.

22:7 If a man shall deliver unto his neighbour money or stuff to keep,
and it be stolen out of the man's house; if the thief be found, let
him pay double.

22:8 If the thief be not found, then the master of the house shall be
brought unto the judges, to see whether he have put his hand unto his
neighbour's goods.

22:9 For all manner of trespass, whether it be for ox, for ass, for
sheep, for raiment, or for any manner of lost thing which another
challengeth to be his, the cause of both parties shall come before the
judges; and whom the judges shall condemn, he shall pay double unto
his neighbour.

22:10 If a man deliver unto his neighbour an ass, or an ox, or a
sheep, or any beast, to keep; and it die, or be hurt, or driven away,
no man seeing it: 22:11 Then shall an oath of the LORD be between them
both, that he hath not put his hand unto his neighbour's goods; and
the owner of it shall accept thereof, and he shall not make it good.

22:12 And if it be stolen from him, he shall make restitution unto the
owner thereof.

22:13 If it be torn in pieces, then let him bring it for witness, and
he shall not make good that which was torn.

22:14 And if a man borrow ought of his neighbour, and it be hurt, or
die, the owner thereof being not with it, he shall surely make it
good.

22:15 But if the owner thereof be with it, he shall not make it good:
if it be an hired thing, it came for his hire.

22:16 And if a man entice a maid that is not betrothed, and lie with
her, he shall surely endow her to be his wife.

22:17 If her father utterly refuse to give her unto him, he shall pay
money according to the dowry of virgins.

22:18 Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.

22:19 Whosoever lieth with a beast shall surely be put to death.

22:20 He that sacrificeth unto any god, save unto the LORD only, he
shall be utterly destroyed.

22:21 Thou shalt neither vex a stranger, nor oppress him: for ye were
strangers in the land of Egypt.

22:22 Ye shall not afflict any widow, or fatherless child.

22:23 If thou afflict them in any wise, and they cry at all unto me, I
will surely hear their cry; 22:24 And my wrath shall wax hot, and I
will kill you with the sword; and your wives shall be widows, and your
children fatherless.

22:25 If thou lend money to any of my people that is poor by thee,
thou shalt not be to him as an usurer, neither shalt thou lay upon him
usury.

22:26 If thou at all take thy neighbour's raiment to pledge, thou
shalt deliver it unto him by that the sun goeth down: 22:27 For that
is his covering only, it is his raiment for his skin: wherein shall he
sleep? and it shall come to pass, when he crieth unto me, that I will
hear; for I am gracious.

22:28 Thou shalt not revile the gods, nor curse the ruler of thy
people.

22:29 Thou shalt not delay to offer the first of thy ripe fruits, and
of thy liquors: the firstborn of thy sons shalt thou give unto me.

22:30 Likewise shalt thou do with thine oxen, and with thy sheep:
seven days it shall be with his dam; on the eighth day thou shalt give
it me.

22:31 And ye shall be holy men unto me: neither shall ye eat any flesh
that is torn of beasts in the field; ye shall cast it to the dogs.

23:1 Thou shalt not raise a false report: put not thine hand with the
wicked to be an unrighteous witness.

23:2 Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil; neither shalt thou
speak in a cause to decline after many to wrest judgment: 23:3 Neither
shalt thou countenance a poor man in his cause.

23:4 If thou meet thine enemy's ox or his ass going astray, thou shalt
surely bring it back to him again.

23:5 If thou see the ass of him that hateth thee lying under his
burden, and wouldest forbear to help him, thou shalt surely help with
him.

23:6 Thou shalt not wrest the judgment of thy poor in his cause.

23:7 Keep thee far from a false matter; and the innocent and righteous
slay thou not: for I will not justify the wicked.

23:8 And thou shalt take no gift: for the gift blindeth the wise, and
perverteth the words of the righteous.

23:9 Also thou shalt not oppress a stranger: for ye know the heart of
a stranger, seeing ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.

23:10 And six years thou shalt sow thy land, and shalt gather in the
fruits thereof: 23:11 But the seventh year thou shalt let it rest and
lie still; that the poor of thy people may eat: and what they leave
the beasts of the field shall eat. In like manner thou shalt deal with
thy vineyard, and with thy oliveyard.

23:12 Six days thou shalt do thy work, and on the seventh day thou
shalt rest: that thine ox and thine ass may rest, and the son of thy
handmaid, and the stranger, may be refreshed.

23:13 And in all things that I have said unto you be circumspect: and
make no mention of the name of other gods, neither let it be heard out
of thy mouth.

23:14 Three times thou shalt keep a feast unto me in the year.

23:15 Thou shalt keep the feast of unleavened bread: (thou shalt eat
unleavened bread seven days, as I commanded thee, in the time
appointed of the month Abib; for in it thou camest out from Egypt: and
none shall appear before me empty:) 23:16 And the feast of harvest,
the firstfruits of thy labours, which thou hast sown in the field: and
the feast of ingathering, which is in the end of the year, when thou
hast gathered in thy labours out of the field.

23:17 Three items in the year all thy males shall appear before the
LORD God.

23:18 Thou shalt not offer the blood of my sacrifice with leavened
bread; neither shall the fat of my sacrifice remain until the morning.

23:19 The first of the firstfruits of thy land thou shalt bring into
the house of the LORD thy God. Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his
mother's milk.

23:20 Behold, I send an Angel before thee, to keep thee in the way,
and to bring thee into the place which I have prepared.

23:21 Beware of him, and obey his voice, provoke him not; for he will
not pardon your transgressions: for my name is in him.

23:22 But if thou shalt indeed obey his voice, and do all that I
speak; then I will be an enemy unto thine enemies, and an adversary
unto thine adversaries.

23:23 For mine Angel shall go before thee, and bring thee in unto the
Amorites, and the Hittites, and the Perizzites, and the Canaanites,
the Hivites, and the Jebusites: and I will cut them off.

23:24 Thou shalt not bow down to their gods, nor serve them, nor do
after their works: but thou shalt utterly overthrow them, and quite
break down their images.

23:25 And ye shall serve the LORD your God, and he shall bless thy
bread, and thy water; and I will take sickness away from the midst of
thee.

23:26 There shall nothing cast their young, nor be barren, in thy
land: the number of thy days I will fulfil.

23:27 I will send my fear before thee, and will destroy all the people
to whom thou shalt come, and I will make all thine enemies turn their
backs unto thee.

23:28 And I will send hornets before thee, which shall drive out the
Hivite, the Canaanite, and the Hittite, from before thee.

23:29 I will not drive them out from before thee in one year; lest the
land become desolate, and the beast of the field multiply against
thee.

23:30 By little and little I will drive them out from before thee,
until thou be increased, and inherit the land.

23:31 And I will set thy bounds from the Red sea even unto the sea of
the Philistines, and from the desert unto the river: for I will
deliver the inhabitants of the land into your hand; and thou shalt
drive them out before thee.

23:32 Thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor with their gods.

23:33 They shall not dwell in thy land, lest they make thee sin
against me: for if thou serve their gods, it will surely be a snare
unto thee.

24:1 And he said unto Moses, Come up unto the LORD, thou, and Aaron,
Nadab, and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel; and worship ye
afar off.

24:2 And Moses alone shall come near the LORD: but they shall not come
nigh; neither shall the people go up with him.

24:3 And Moses came and told the people all the words of the LORD, and
all the judgments: and all the people answered with one voice, and
said, All the words which the LORD hath said will we do.

24:4 And Moses wrote all the words of the LORD, and rose up early in
the morning, and builded an altar under the hill, and twelve pillars,
according to the twelve tribes of Israel.

24:5 And he sent young men of the children of Israel, which offered
burnt offerings, and sacrificed peace offerings of oxen unto the LORD.

24:6 And Moses took half of the blood, and put it in basons; and half
of the blood he sprinkled on the altar.

24:7 And he took the book of the covenant, and read in the audience of
the people: and they said, All that the LORD hath said will we do, and
be obedient.

24:8 And Moses took the blood, and sprinkled it on the people, and
said, Behold the blood of the covenant, which the LORD hath made with
you concerning all these words.

24:9 Then went up Moses, and Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu, and seventy of
the elders of Israel: 24:10 And they saw the God of Israel: and there
was under his feet as it were a paved work of a sapphire stone, and as
it were the body of heaven in his clearness.

24:11 And upon the nobles of the children of Israel he laid not his
hand: also they saw God, and did eat and drink.

24:12 And the LORD said unto Moses, Come up to me into the mount, and
be there: and I will give thee tables of stone, and a law, and
commandments which I have written; that thou mayest teach them.

24:13 And Moses rose up, and his minister Joshua: and Moses went up
into the mount of God.

24:14 And he said unto the elders, Tarry ye here for us, until we come
again unto you: and, behold, Aaron and Hur are with you: if any man
have any matters to do, let him come unto them.

24:15 And Moses went up into the mount, and a cloud covered the mount.

24:16 And the glory of the LORD abode upon mount Sinai, and the cloud
covered it six days: and the seventh day he called unto Moses out of
the midst of the cloud.

24:17 And the sight of the glory of the LORD was like devouring fire
on the top of the mount in the eyes of the children of Israel.

24:18 And Moses went into the midst of the cloud, and gat him up into
the mount: and Moses was in the mount forty days and forty nights.

25:1 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 25:2 Speak unto the
children of Israel, that they bring me an offering: of every man that
giveth it willingly with his heart ye shall take my offering.

25:3 And this is the offering which ye shall take of them; gold, and
silver, and brass, 25:4 And blue, and purple, and scarlet, and fine
linen, and goats' hair, 25:5 And rams' skins dyed red, and badgers'
skins, and shittim wood, 25:6 Oil for the light, spices for anointing
oil, and for sweet incense, 25:7 Onyx stones, and stones to be set in
the ephod, and in the breastplate.

25:8 And let them make me a sanctuary; that I may dwell among them.

25:9 According to all that I shew thee, after the pattern of the
tabernacle, and the pattern of all the instruments thereof, even so
shall ye make it.

25:10 And they shall make an ark of shittim wood: two cubits and a
half shall be the length thereof, and a cubit and a half the breadth
thereof, and a cubit and a half the height thereof.

25:11 And thou shalt overlay it with pure gold, within and without
shalt thou overlay it, and shalt make upon it a crown of gold round
about.

25:12 And thou shalt cast four rings of gold for it, and put them in
the four corners thereof; and two rings shall be in the one side of
it, and two rings in the other side of it.

25:13 And thou shalt make staves of shittim wood, and overlay them
with gold.

25:14 And thou shalt put the staves into the rings by the sides of the
ark, that the ark may be borne with them.

25:15 The staves shall be in the rings of the ark: they shall not be
taken from it.

25:16 And thou shalt put into the ark the testimony which I shall give
thee.

25:17 And thou shalt make a mercy seat of pure gold: two cubits and a
half shall be the length thereof, and a cubit and a half the breadth
thereof.

25:18 And thou shalt make two cherubims of gold, of beaten work shalt
thou make them, in the two ends of the mercy seat.

25:19 And make one cherub on the one end, and the other cherub on the
other end: even of the mercy seat shall ye make the cherubims on the
two ends thereof.

25:20 And the cherubims shall stretch forth their wings on high,
covering the mercy seat with their wings, and their faces shall look
one to another; toward the mercy seat shall the faces of the cherubims
be.

25:21 And thou shalt put the mercy seat above upon the ark; and in the
ark thou shalt put the testimony that I shall give thee.

25:22 And there I will meet with thee, and I will commune with thee
from above the mercy seat, from between the two cherubims which are
upon the ark of the testimony, of all things which I will give thee in
commandment unto the children of Israel.

25:23 Thou shalt also make a table of shittim wood: two cubits shall
be the length thereof, and a cubit the breadth thereof, and a cubit
and a half the height thereof.

25:24 And thou shalt overlay it with pure gold, and make thereto a
crown of gold round about.

25:25 And thou shalt make unto it a border of an hand breadth round
about, and thou shalt make a golden crown to the border thereof round
about.

25:26 And thou shalt make for it four rings of gold, and put the rings
in the four corners that are on the four feet thereof.

25:27 Over against the border shall the rings be for places of the
staves to bear the table.

25:28 And thou shalt make the staves of shittim wood, and overlay them
with gold, that the table may be borne with them.

25:29 And thou shalt make the dishes thereof, and spoons thereof, and
covers thereof, and bowls thereof, to cover withal: of pure gold shalt
thou make them.

25:30 And thou shalt set upon the table shewbread before me alway.

25:31 And thou shalt make a candlestick of pure gold: of beaten work
shall the candlestick be made: his shaft, and his branches, his bowls,
his knops, and his flowers, shall be of the same.

25:32 And six branches shall come out of the sides of it; three
branches of the candlestick out of the one side, and three branches of
the candlestick out of the other side: 25:33 Three bowls made like
unto almonds, with a knop and a flower in one branch; and three bowls
made like almonds in the other branch, with a knop and a flower: so in
the six branches that come out of the candlestick.

25:34 And in the candlesticks shall be four bowls made like unto
almonds, with their knops and their flowers.

25:35 And there shall be a knop under two branches of the same, and a
knop under two branches of the same, and a knop under two branches of
the same, according to the six branches that proceed out of the
candlestick.

25:36 Their knops and their branches shall be of the same: all it
shall be one beaten work of pure gold.

25:37 And thou shalt make the seven lamps thereof: and they shall
light the lamps thereof, that they may give light over against it.

25:38 And the tongs thereof, and the snuffdishes thereof, shall be of
pure gold.

25:39 Of a talent of pure gold shall he make it, with all these
vessels.

25:40 And look that thou make them after their pattern, which was
shewed thee in the mount.

26:1 Moreover thou shalt make the tabernacle with ten curtains of fine
twined linen, and blue, and purple, and scarlet: with cherubims of
cunning work shalt thou make them.

26:2 The length of one curtain shall be eight and twenty cubits, and
the breadth of one curtain four cubits: and every one of the curtains
shall have one measure.

26:3 The five curtains shall be coupled together one to another; and
other five curtains shall be coupled one to another.

26:4 And thou shalt make loops of blue upon the edge of the one
curtain from the selvedge in the coupling; and likewise shalt thou
make in the uttermost edge of another curtain, in the coupling of the
second.

26:5 Fifty loops shalt thou make in the one curtain, and fifty loops
shalt thou make in the edge of the curtain that is in the coupling of
the second; that the loops may take hold one of another.

26:6 And thou shalt make fifty taches of gold, and couple the curtains
together with the taches: and it shall be one tabernacle.

26:7 And thou shalt make curtains of goats' hair to be a covering upon
the tabernacle: eleven curtains shalt thou make.

26:8 The length of one curtain shall be thirty cubits, and the breadth
of one curtain four cubits: and the eleven curtains shall be all of
one measure.

26:9 And thou shalt couple five curtains by themselves, and six
curtains by themselves, and shalt double the sixth curtain in the
forefront of the tabernacle.

26:10 And thou shalt make fifty loops on the edge of the one curtain
that is outmost in the coupling, and fifty loops in the edge of the
curtain which coupleth the second.

26:11 And thou shalt make fifty taches of brass, and put the taches
into the loops, and couple the tent together, that it may be one.

26:12 And the remnant that remaineth of the curtains of the tent, the
half curtain that remaineth, shall hang over the backside of the
tabernacle.

26:13 And a cubit on the one side, and a cubit on the other side of
that which remaineth in the length of the curtains of the tent, it
shall hang over the sides of the tabernacle on this side and on that
side, to cover it.

26:14 And thou shalt make a covering for the tent of rams' skins dyed
red, and a covering above of badgers' skins.

26:15 And thou shalt make boards for the tabernacle of shittim wood
standing up.

26:16 Ten cubits shall be the length of a board, and a cubit and a
half shall be the breadth of one board.

26:17 Two tenons shall there be in one board, set in order one against
another: thus shalt thou make for all the boards of the tabernacle.

26:18 And thou shalt make the boards for the tabernacle, twenty boards
on the south side southward.

26:19 And thou shalt make forty sockets of silver under the twenty
boards; two sockets under one board for his two tenons, and two
sockets under another board for his two tenons.

26:20 And for the second side of the tabernacle on the north side
there shall be twenty boards: 26:21 And their forty sockets of silver;
two sockets under one board, and two sockets under another board.

26:22 And for the sides of the tabernacle westward thou shalt make six
boards.

26:23 And two boards shalt thou make for the corners of the tabernacle
in the two sides.

26:24 And they shall be coupled together beneath, and they shall be
coupled together above the head of it unto one ring: thus shall it be
for them both; they shall be for the two corners.

26:25 And they shall be eight boards, and their sockets of silver,
sixteen sockets; two sockets under one board, and two sockets under
another board.

26:26 And thou shalt make bars of shittim wood; five for the boards of
the one side of the tabernacle, 26:27 And five bars for the boards of
the other side of the tabernacle, and five bars for the boards of the
side of the tabernacle, for the two sides westward.

26:28 And the middle bar in the midst of the boards shall reach from
end to end.

26:29 And thou shalt overlay the boards with gold, and make their
rings of gold for places for the bars: and thou shalt overlay the bars
with gold.

26:30 And thou shalt rear up the tabernacle according to the fashion
thereof which was shewed thee in the mount.

26:31 And thou shalt make a vail of blue, and purple, and scarlet, and
fine twined linen of cunning work: with cherubims shall it be made:
26:32 And thou shalt hang it upon four pillars of shittim wood
overlaid with gold: their hooks shall be of gold, upon the four
sockets of silver.

26:33 And thou shalt hang up the vail under the taches, that thou
mayest bring in thither within the vail the ark of the testimony: and
the vail shall divide unto you between the holy place and the most
holy.

26:34 And thou shalt put the mercy seat upon the ark of the testimony
in the most holy place.

26:35 And thou shalt set the table without the vail, and the
candlestick over against the table on the side of the tabernacle
toward the south: and thou shalt put the table on the north side.

26:36 And thou shalt make an hanging for the door of the tent, of
blue, and purple, and scarlet, and fine twined linen, wrought with
needlework.

26:37 And thou shalt make for the hanging five pillars of shittim
wood, and overlay them with gold, and their hooks shall be of gold:
and thou shalt cast five sockets of brass for them.

27:1 And thou shalt make an altar of shittim wood, five cubits long,
and five cubits broad; the altar shall be foursquare: and the height
thereof shall be three cubits.

27:2 And thou shalt make the horns of it upon the four corners
thereof: his horns shall be of the same: and thou shalt overlay it
with brass.

27:3 And thou shalt make his pans to receive his ashes, and his
shovels, and his basons, and his fleshhooks, and his firepans: all the
vessels thereof thou shalt make of brass.

27:4 And thou shalt make for it a grate of network of brass; and upon
the net shalt thou make four brasen rings in the four corners thereof.

27:5 And thou shalt put it under the compass of the altar beneath,
that the net may be even to the midst of the altar.

27:6 And thou shalt make staves for the altar, staves of shittim wood,
and overlay them with brass.

27:7 And the staves shall be put into the rings, and the staves shall
be upon the two sides of the altar, to bear it.

27:8 Hollow with boards shalt thou make it: as it was shewed thee in
the mount, so shall they make it.

27:9 And thou shalt make the court of the tabernacle: for the south
side southward there shall be hangings for the court of fine twined
linen of an hundred cubits long for one side: 27:10 And the twenty
pillars thereof and their twenty sockets shall be of brass; the hooks
of the pillars and their fillets shall be of silver.

27:11 And likewise for the north side in length there shall be
hangings of an hundred cubits long, and his twenty pillars and their
twenty sockets of brass; the hooks of the pillars and their fillets of
silver.

27:12 And for the breadth of the court on the west side shall be
hangings of fifty cubits: their pillars ten, and their sockets ten.

27:13 And the breadth of the court on the east side eastward shall be
fifty cubits.

27:14 The hangings of one side of the gate shall be fifteen cubits:
their pillars three, and their sockets three.

27:15 And on the other side shall be hangings fifteen cubits: their
pillars three, and their sockets three.

27:16 And for the gate of the court shall be an hanging of twenty
cubits, of blue, and purple, and scarlet, and fine twined linen,
wrought with needlework: and their pillars shall be four, and their
sockets four.

27:17 All the pillars round about the court shall be filleted with
silver; their hooks shall be of silver, and their sockets of brass.

27:18 The length of the court shall be an hundred cubits, and the
breadth fifty every where, and the height five cubits of fine twined
linen, and their sockets of brass.

27:19 All the vessels of the tabernacle in all the service thereof,
and all the pins thereof, and all the pins of the court, shall be of
brass.

27:20 And thou shalt command the children of Israel, that they bring
thee pure oil olive beaten for the light, to cause the lamp to burn
always.

27:21 In the tabernacle of the congregation without the vail, which is
before the testimony, Aaron and his sons shall order it from evening
to morning before the LORD: it shall be a statute for ever unto their
generations on the behalf of the children of Israel.

28:1 And take thou unto thee Aaron thy brother, and his sons with him,
from among the children of Israel, that he may minister unto me in the
priest's office, even Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, Eleazar and Ithamar,
Aaron's sons.

28:2 And thou shalt make holy garments for Aaron thy brother for glory
and for beauty.

28:3 And thou shalt speak unto all that are wise hearted, whom I have
filled with the spirit of wisdom, that they may make Aaron's garments
to consecrate him, that he may minister unto me in the priest's
office.

28:4 And these are the garments which they shall make; a breastplate,
and an ephod, and a robe, and a broidered coat, a mitre, and a girdle:
and they shall make holy garments for Aaron thy brother, and his sons,
that he may minister unto me in the priest's office.

28:5 And they shall take gold, and blue, and purple, and scarlet, and
fine linen.

28:6 And they shall make the ephod of gold, of blue, and of purple, of
scarlet, and fine twined linen, with cunning work.

28:7 It shall have the two shoulderpieces thereof joined at the two
edges thereof; and so it shall be joined together.

28:8 And the curious girdle of the ephod, which is upon it, shall be
of the same, according to the work thereof; even of gold, of blue, and
purple, and scarlet, and fine twined linen.

28:9 And thou shalt take two onyx stones, and grave on them the names
of the children of Israel: 28:10 Six of their names on one stone, and
the other six names of the rest on the other stone, according to their
birth.

28:11 With the work of an engraver in stone, like the engravings of a
signet, shalt thou engrave the two stones with the names of the
children of Israel: thou shalt make them to be set in ouches of gold.

28:12 And thou shalt put the two stones upon the shoulders of the
ephod for stones of memorial unto the children of Israel: and Aaron
shall bear their names before the LORD upon his two shoulders for a
memorial.

28:13 And thou shalt make ouches of gold; 28:14 And two chains of pure
gold at the ends; of wreathen work shalt thou make them, and fasten
the wreathen chains to the ouches.

28:15 And thou shalt make the breastplate of judgment with cunning
work; after the work of the ephod thou shalt make it; of gold, of
blue, and of purple, and of scarlet, and of fine twined linen, shalt
thou make it.

28:16 Foursquare it shall be being doubled; a span shall be the length
thereof, and a span shall be the breadth thereof.

28:17 And thou shalt set in it settings of stones, even four rows of
stones: the first row shall be a sardius, a topaz, and a carbuncle:
this shall be the first row.

28:18 And the second row shall be an emerald, a sapphire, and a
diamond.

28:19 And the third row a ligure, an agate, and an amethyst.

28:20 And the fourth row a beryl, and an onyx, and a jasper: they
shall be set in gold in their inclosings.

28:21 And the stones shall be with the names of the children of
Israel, twelve, according to their names, like the engravings of a
signet; every one with his name shall they be according to the twelve
tribes.

28:22 And thou shalt make upon the breastplate chains at the ends of
wreathen work of pure gold.

28:23 And thou shalt make upon the breastplate two rings of gold, and
shalt put the two rings on the two ends of the breastplate.

28:24 And thou shalt put the two wreathen chains of gold in the two
rings which are on the ends of the breastplate.

28:25 And the other two ends of the two wreathen chains thou shalt
fasten in the two ouches, and put them on the shoulderpieces of the
ephod before it.

28:26 And thou shalt make two rings of gold, and thou shalt put them
upon the two ends of the breastplate in the border thereof, which is
in the side of the ephod inward.

28:27 And two other rings of gold thou shalt make, and shalt put them
on the two sides of the ephod underneath, toward the forepart thereof,
over against the other coupling thereof, above the curious girdle of
the ephod.

28:28 And they shall bind the breastplate by the rings thereof unto
the rings of the ephod with a lace of blue, that it may be above the
curious girdle of the ephod, and that the breastplate be not loosed
from the ephod.

28:29 And Aaron shall bear the names of the children of Israel in the
breastplate of judgment upon his heart, when he goeth in unto the holy
place, for a memorial before the LORD continually.

28:30 And thou shalt put in the breastplate of judgment the Urim and
the Thummim; and they shall be upon Aaron's heart, when he goeth in
before the LORD: and Aaron shall bear the judgment of the children of
Israel upon his heart before the LORD continually.

28:31 And thou shalt make the robe of the ephod all of blue.

28:32 And there shall be an hole in the top of it, in the midst
thereof: it shall have a binding of woven work round about the hole of
it, as it were the hole of an habergeon, that it be not rent.

28:33 And beneath upon the hem of it thou shalt make pomegranates of
blue, and of purple, and of scarlet, round about the hem thereof; and
bells of gold between them round about: 28:34 A golden bell and a
pomegranate, a golden bell and a pomegranate, upon the hem of the robe
round about.

28:35 And it shall be upon Aaron to minister: and his sound shall be
heard when he goeth in unto the holy place before the LORD, and when
he cometh out, that he die not.

28:36 And thou shalt make a plate of pure gold, and grave upon it,
like the engravings of a signet, HOLINESS TO THE LORD.

28:37 And thou shalt put it on a blue lace, that it may be upon the
mitre; upon the forefront of the mitre it shall be.

28:38 And it shall be upon Aaron's forehead, that Aaron may bear the
iniquity of the holy things, which the children of Israel shall hallow
in all their holy gifts; and it shall be always upon his forehead,
that they may be accepted before the LORD.

28:39 And thou shalt embroider the coat of fine linen, and thou shalt
make the mitre of fine linen, and thou shalt make the girdle of
needlework.

28:40 And for Aaron's sons thou shalt make coats, and thou shalt make
for them girdles, and bonnets shalt thou make for them, for glory and
for beauty.

28:41 And thou shalt put them upon Aaron thy brother, and his sons
with him; and shalt anoint them, and consecrate them, and sanctify
them, that they may minister unto me in the priest's office.

28:42 And thou shalt make them linen breeches to cover their
nakedness; from the loins even unto the thighs they shall reach: 28:43
And they shall be upon Aaron, and upon his sons, when they come in
unto the tabernacle of the congregation, or when they come near unto
the altar to minister in the holy place; that they bear not iniquity,
and die: it shall be a statute for ever unto him and his seed after
him.

29:1 And this is the thing that thou shalt do unto them to hallow
them, to minister unto me in the priest's office: Take one young
bullock, and two rams without blemish, 29:2 And unleavened bread, and
cakes unleavened tempered with oil, and wafers unleavened anointed
with oil: of wheaten flour shalt thou make them.

29:3 And thou shalt put them into one basket, and bring them in the
basket, with the bullock and the two rams.

29:4 And Aaron and his sons thou shalt bring unto the door of the
tabernacle of the congregation, and shalt wash them with water.

29:5 And thou shalt take the garments, and put upon Aaron the coat,
and the robe of the ephod, and the ephod, and the breastplate, and
gird him with the curious girdle of the ephod: 29:6 And thou shalt put
the mitre upon his head, and put the holy crown upon the mitre.

29:7 Then shalt thou take the anointing oil, and pour it upon his
head, and anoint him.

29:8 And thou shalt bring his sons, and put coats upon them.

29:9 And thou shalt gird them with girdles, Aaron and his sons, and
put the bonnets on them: and the priest's office shall be theirs for a
perpetual statute: and thou shalt consecrate Aaron and his sons.

29:10 And thou shalt cause a bullock to be brought before the
tabernacle of the congregation: and Aaron and his sons shall put their
hands upon the head of the bullock.

29:11 And thou shalt kill the bullock before the LORD, by the door of
the tabernacle of the congregation.

29:12 And thou shalt take of the blood of the bullock, and put it upon
the horns of the altar with thy finger, and pour all the blood beside
the bottom of the altar.

29:13 And thou shalt take all the fat that covereth the inwards, and
the caul that is above the liver, and the two kidneys, and the fat
that is upon them, and burn them upon the altar.

29:14 But the flesh of the bullock, and his skin, and his dung, shalt
thou burn with fire without the camp: it is a sin offering.

29:15 Thou shalt also take one ram; and Aaron and his sons shall put
their hands upon the head of the ram.

29:16 And thou shalt slay the ram, and thou shalt take his blood, and
sprinkle it round about upon the altar.

29:17 And thou shalt cut the ram in pieces, and wash the inwards of
him, and his legs, and put them unto his pieces, and unto his head.

29:18 And thou shalt burn the whole ram upon the altar: it is a burnt
offering unto the LORD: it is a sweet savour, an offering made by fire
unto the LORD.

29:19 And thou shalt take the other ram; and Aaron and his sons shall
put their hands upon the head of the ram.

29:20 Then shalt thou kill the ram, and take of his blood, and put it
upon the tip of the right ear of Aaron, and upon the tip of the right
ear of his sons, and upon the thumb of their right hand, and upon the
great toe of their right foot, and sprinkle the blood upon the altar
round about.

29:21 And thou shalt take of the blood that is upon the altar, and of
the anointing oil, and sprinkle it upon Aaron, and upon his garments,
and upon his sons, and upon the garments of his sons with him: and he
shall be hallowed, and his garments, and his sons, and his sons'
garments with him.

29:22 Also thou shalt take of the ram the fat and the rump, and the
fat that covereth the inwards, and the caul above the liver, and the
two kidneys, and the fat that is upon them, and the right shoulder;
for it is a ram of consecration: 29:23 And one loaf of bread, and one
cake of oiled bread, and one wafer out of the basket of the unleavened
bread that is before the LORD: 29:24 And thou shalt put all in the
hands of Aaron, and in the hands of his sons; and shalt wave them for
a wave offering before the LORD.

29:25 And thou shalt receive them of their hands, and burn them upon
the altar for a burnt offering, for a sweet savour before the LORD: it
is an offering made by fire unto the LORD.

29:26 And thou shalt take the breast of the ram of Aaron's
consecration, and wave it for a wave offering before the LORD: and it
shall be thy part.

29:27 And thou shalt sanctify the breast of the wave offering, and the
shoulder of the heave offering, which is waved, and which is heaved
up, of the ram of the consecration, even of that which is for Aaron,
and of that which is for his sons: 29:28 And it shall be Aaron's and
his sons' by a statute for ever from the children of Israel: for it is
an heave offering: and it shall be an heave offering from the children
of Israel of the sacrifice of their peace offerings, even their heave
offering unto the LORD.

29:29 And the holy garments of Aaron shall be his sons' after him, to
be anointed therein, and to be consecrated in them.

29:30 And that son that is priest in his stead shall put them on seven
days, when he cometh into the tabernacle of the congregation to
minister in the holy place.

29:31 And thou shalt take the ram of the consecration, and seethe his
flesh in the holy place.

29:32 And Aaron and his sons shall eat the flesh of the ram, and the
bread that is in the basket by the door of the tabernacle of the
congregation.

29:33 And they shall eat those things wherewith the atonement was
made, to consecrate and to sanctify them: but a stranger shall not eat
thereof, because they are holy.

29:34 And if ought of the flesh of the consecrations, or of the bread,
remain unto the morning, then thou shalt burn the remainder with fire:
it shall not be eaten, because it is holy.

29:35 And thus shalt thou do unto Aaron, and to his sons, according to
all things which I have commanded thee: seven days shalt thou
consecrate them.

29:36 And thou shalt offer every day a bullock for a sin offering for
atonement: and thou shalt cleanse the altar, when thou hast made an
atonement for it, and thou shalt anoint it, to sanctify it.

29:37 Seven days thou shalt make an atonement for the altar, and
sanctify it; and it shall be an altar most holy: whatsoever toucheth
the altar shall be holy.

29:38 Now this is that which thou shalt offer upon the altar; two
lambs of the first year day by day continually.

29:39 The one lamb thou shalt offer in the morning; and the other lamb
thou shalt offer at even: 29:40 And with the one lamb a tenth deal of
flour mingled with the fourth part of an hin of beaten oil; and the
fourth part of an hin of wine for a drink offering.

29:41 And the other lamb thou shalt offer at even, and shalt do
thereto according to the meat offering of the morning, and according
to the drink offering thereof, for a sweet savour, an offering made by
fire unto the LORD.

29:42 This shall be a continual burnt offering throughout your
generations at the door of the tabernacle of the congregation before
the LORD: where I will meet you, to speak there unto thee.

29:43 And there I will meet with the children of Israel, and the
tabernacle shall be sanctified by my glory.

29:44 And I will sanctify the tabernacle of the congregation, and the
altar: I will sanctify also both Aaron and his sons, to minister to me
in the priest's office.

29:45 And I will dwell among the children of Israel, and will be their
God.

29:46 And they shall know that I am the LORD their God, that brought
them forth out of the land of Egypt, that I may dwell among them: I am
the LORD their God.

30:1 And thou shalt make an altar to burn incense upon: of shittim
wood shalt thou make it.

30:2 A cubit shall be the length thereof, and a cubit the breadth
thereof; foursquare shall it be: and two cubits shall be the height
thereof: the horns thereof shall be of the same.

30:3 And thou shalt overlay it with pure gold, the top thereof, and
the sides thereof round about, and the horns thereof; and thou shalt
make unto it a crown of gold round about.

30:4 And two golden rings shalt thou make to it under the crown of it,
by the two corners thereof, upon the two sides of it shalt thou make
it; and they shall be for places for the staves to bear it withal.

30:5 And thou shalt make the staves of shittim wood, and overlay them
with gold.

30:6 And thou shalt put it before the vail that is by the ark of the
testimony, before the mercy seat that is over the testimony, where I
will meet with thee.

30:7 And Aaron shall burn thereon sweet incense every morning: when he
dresseth the lamps, he shall burn incense upon it.

30:8 And when Aaron lighteth the lamps at even, he shall burn incense
upon it, a perpetual incense before the LORD throughout your
generations.

30:9 Ye shall offer no strange incense thereon, nor burnt sacrifice,
nor meat offering; neither shall ye pour drink offering thereon.

30:10 And Aaron shall make an atonement upon the horns of it once in a
year with the blood of the sin offering of atonements: once in the
year shall he make atonement upon it throughout your generations: it
is most holy unto the LORD.

30:11 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 30:12 When thou takest
the sum of the children of Israel after their number, then shall they
give every man a ransom for his soul unto the LORD, when thou
numberest them; that there be no plague among them, when thou
numberest them.

30:13 This they shall give, every one that passeth among them that are
numbered, half a shekel after the shekel of the sanctuary: (a shekel
is twenty gerahs:) an half shekel shall be the offering of the LORD.

30:14 Every one that passeth among them that are numbered, from twenty
years old and above, shall give an offering unto the LORD.

30:15 The rich shall not give more, and the poor shall not give less
than half a shekel, when they give an offering unto the LORD, to make
an atonement for your souls.

30:16 And thou shalt take the atonement money of the children of
Israel, and shalt appoint it for the service of the tabernacle of the
congregation; that it may be a memorial unto the children of Israel
before the LORD, to make an atonement for your souls.

30:17 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 30:18 Thou shalt also
make a laver of brass, and his foot also of brass, to wash withal: and
thou shalt put it between the tabernacle of the congregation and the
altar, and thou shalt put water therein.

30:19 For Aaron and his sons shall wash their hands and their feet
thereat: 30:20 When they go into the tabernacle of the congregation,
they shall wash with water, that they die not; or when they come near
to the altar to minister, to burn offering made by fire unto the LORD:
30:21 So they shall wash their hands and their feet, that they die
not: and it shall be a statute for ever to them, even to him and to
his seed throughout their generations.

30:22 Moreover the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 30:23 Take thou also
unto thee principal spices, of pure myrrh five hundred shekels, and of
sweet cinnamon half so much, even two hundred and fifty shekels, and
of sweet calamus two hundred and fifty shekels, 30:24 And of cassia
five hundred shekels, after the shekel of the sanctuary, and of oil
olive an hin: 30:25 And thou shalt make it an oil of holy ointment, an
ointment compound after the art of the apothecary: it shall be an holy
anointing oil.

30:26 And thou shalt anoint the tabernacle of the congregation
therewith, and the ark of the testimony, 30:27 And the table and all
his vessels, and the candlestick and his vessels, and the altar of
incense, 30:28 And the altar of burnt offering with all his vessels,
and the laver and his foot.

30:29 And thou shalt sanctify them, that they may be most holy:
whatsoever toucheth them shall be holy.

30:30 And thou shalt anoint Aaron and his sons, and consecrate them,
that they may minister unto me in the priest's office.

30:31 And thou shalt speak unto the children of Israel, saying, This
shall be an holy anointing oil unto me throughout your generations.

30:32 Upon man's flesh shall it not be poured, neither shall ye make
any other like it, after the composition of it: it is holy, and it
shall be holy unto you.

30:33 Whosoever compoundeth any like it, or whosoever putteth any of
it upon a stranger, shall even be cut off from his people.

30:34 And the LORD said unto Moses, Take unto thee sweet spices,
stacte, and onycha, and galbanum; these sweet spices with pure
frankincense: of each shall there be a like weight: 30:35 And thou
shalt make it a perfume, a confection after the art of the apothecary,
tempered together, pure and holy: 30:36 And thou shalt beat some of it
very small, and put of it before the testimony in the tabernacle of
the congregation, where I will meet with thee: it shall be unto you
most holy.

30:37 And as for the perfume which thou shalt make, ye shall not make
to yourselves according to the composition thereof: it shall be unto
thee holy for the LORD.

30:38 Whosoever shall make like unto that, to smell thereto, shall
even be cut off from his people.

31:1 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 31:2 See, I have called by
name Bezaleel the son of Uri, the son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah:
31:3 And I have filled him with the spirit of God, in wisdom, and in
understanding, and in knowledge, and in all manner of workmanship,
31:4 To devise cunning works, to work in gold, and in silver, and in
brass, 31:5 And in cutting of stones, to set them, and in carving of
timber, to work in all manner of workmanship.

31:6 And I, behold, I have given with him Aholiab, the son of
Ahisamach, of the tribe of Dan: and in the hearts of all that are wise
hearted I have put wisdom, that they may make all that I have
commanded thee; 31:7 The tabernacle of the congregation, and the ark
of the testimony, and the mercy seat that is thereupon, and all the
furniture of the tabernacle, 31:8 And the table and his furniture, and
the pure candlestick with all his furniture, and the altar of incense,
31:9 And the altar of burnt offering with all his furniture, and the
laver and his foot, 31:10 And the cloths of service, and the holy
garments for Aaron the priest, and the garments of his sons, to
minister in the priest's office, 31:11 And the anointing oil, and
sweet incense for the holy place: according to all that I have
commanded thee shall they do.

31:12 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 31:13 Speak thou also
unto the children of Israel, saying, Verily my sabbaths ye shall keep:
for it is a sign between me and you throughout your generations; that
ye may know that I am the LORD that doth sanctify you.

31:14 Ye shall keep the sabbath therefore; for it is holy unto you:
every one that defileth it shall surely be put to death: for whosoever
doeth any work therein, that soul shall be cut off from among his
people.

31:15 Six days may work be done; but in the seventh is the sabbath of
rest, holy to the LORD: whosoever doeth any work in the sabbath day,
he shall surely be put to death.

31:16 Wherefore the children of Israel shall keep the sabbath, to
observe the sabbath throughout their generations, for a perpetual
covenant.

31:17 It is a sign between me and the children of Israel for ever: for
in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day he
rested, and was refreshed.

31:18 And he gave unto Moses, when he had made an end of communing
with him upon mount Sinai, two tables of testimony, tables of stone,
written with the finger of God.

32:1 And when the people saw that Moses delayed to come down out of
the mount, the people gathered themselves together unto Aaron, and
said unto him, Up, make us gods, which shall go before us; for as for
this Moses, the man that brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we
wot not what is become of him.

32:2 And Aaron said unto them, Break off the golden earrings, which
are in the ears of your wives, of your sons, and of your daughters,
and bring them unto me.

32:3 And all the people brake off the golden earrings which were in
their ears, and brought them unto Aaron.

32:4 And he received them at their hand, and fashioned it with a
graving tool, after he had made it a molten calf: and they said, These
be thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt.

32:5 And when Aaron saw it, he built an altar before it; and Aaron
made proclamation, and said, To morrow is a feast to the LORD.

32:6 And they rose up early on the morrow, and offered burnt
offerings, and brought peace offerings; and the people sat down to eat
and to drink, and rose up to play.

32:7 And the LORD said unto Moses, Go, get thee down; for thy people,
which thou broughtest out of the land of Egypt, have corrupted
themselves: 32:8 They have turned aside quickly out of the way which I
commanded them: they have made them a molten calf, and have worshipped
it, and have sacrificed thereunto, and said, These be thy gods, O
Israel, which have brought thee up out of the land of Egypt.

32:9 And the LORD said unto Moses, I have seen this people, and,
behold, it is a stiffnecked people: 32:10 Now therefore let me alone,
that my wrath may wax hot against them, and that I may consume them:
and I will make of thee a great nation.

32:11 And Moses besought the LORD his God, and said, LORD, why doth
thy wrath wax hot against thy people, which thou hast brought forth
out of the land of Egypt with great power, and with a mighty hand?
32:12 Wherefore should the Egyptians speak, and say, For mischief did
he bring them out, to slay them in the mountains, and to consume them
from the face of the earth? Turn from thy fierce wrath, and repent of
this evil against thy people.

32:13 Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, thy servants, to whom thou
swarest by thine own self, and saidst unto them, I will multiply your
seed as the stars of heaven, and all this land that I have spoken of
will I give unto your seed, and they shall inherit it for ever.

32:14 And the LORD repented of the evil which he thought to do unto
his people.

32:15 And Moses turned, and went down from the mount, and the two
tables of the testimony were in his hand: the tables were written on
both their sides; on the one side and on the other were they written.

32:16 And the tables were the work of God, and the writing was the
writing of God, graven upon the tables.

32:17 And when Joshua heard the noise of the people as they shouted,
he said unto Moses, There is a noise of war in the camp.

32:18 And he said, It is not the voice of them that shout for mastery,
neither is it the voice of them that cry for being overcome: but the
noise of them that sing do I hear.

32:19 And it came to pass, as soon as he came nigh unto the camp, that
he saw the calf, and the dancing: and Moses' anger waxed hot, and he
cast the tables out of his hands, and brake them beneath the mount.

32:20 And he took the calf which they had made, and burnt it in the
fire, and ground it to powder, and strawed it upon the water, and made
the children of Israel drink of it.

32:21 And Moses said unto Aaron, What did this people unto thee, that
thou hast brought so great a sin upon them?  32:22 And Aaron said, Let
not the anger of my lord wax hot: thou knowest the people, that they
are set on mischief.

32:23 For they said unto me, Make us gods, which shall go before us:
for as for this Moses, the man that brought us up out of the land of
Egypt, we wot not what is become of him.

32:24 And I said unto them, Whosoever hath any gold, let them break it
off. So they gave it me: then I cast it into the fire, and there came
out this calf.

32:25 And when Moses saw that the people were naked; (for Aaron had
made them naked unto their shame among their enemies:) 32:26 Then
Moses stood in the gate of the camp, and said, Who is on the LORD's
side? let him come unto me. And all the sons of Levi gathered
themselves together unto him.

32:27 And he said unto them, Thus saith the LORD God of Israel, Put
every man his sword by his side, and go in and out from gate to gate
throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man his
companion, and every man his neighbour.

32:28 And the children of Levi did according to the word of Moses: and
there fell of the people that day about three thousand men.

32:29 For Moses had said, Consecrate yourselves today to the LORD,
even every man upon his son, and upon his brother; that he may bestow
upon you a blessing this day.

32:30 And it came to pass on the morrow, that Moses said unto the
people, Ye have sinned a great sin: and now I will go up unto the
LORD; peradventure I shall make an atonement for your sin.

32:31 And Moses returned unto the LORD, and said, Oh, this people have
sinned a great sin, and have made them gods of gold.

32:32 Yet now, if thou wilt forgive their sin--; and if not, blot me,
I pray thee, out of thy book which thou hast written.

32:33 And the LORD said unto Moses, Whosoever hath sinned against me,
him will I blot out of my book.

32:34 Therefore now go, lead the people unto the place of which I have
spoken unto thee: behold, mine Angel shall go before thee:
nevertheless in the day when I visit I will visit their sin upon them.

32:35 And the LORD plagued the people, because they made the calf,
which Aaron made.

33:1 And the LORD said unto Moses, Depart, and go up hence, thou and
the people which thou hast brought up out of the land of Egypt, unto
the land which I sware unto Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, saying,
Unto thy seed will I give it: 33:2 And I will send an angel before
thee; and I will drive out the Canaanite, the Amorite, and the
Hittite, and the Perizzite, the Hivite, and the Jebusite: 33:3 Unto a
land flowing with milk and honey: for I will not go up in the midst of
thee; for thou art a stiffnecked people: lest I consume thee in the
way.

33:4 And when the people heard these evil tidings, they mourned: and
no man did put on him his ornaments.

33:5 For the LORD had said unto Moses, Say unto the children of
Israel, Ye are a stiffnecked people: I will come up into the midst of
thee in a moment, and consume thee: therefore now put off thy
ornaments from thee, that I may know what to do unto thee.

33:6 And the children of Israel stripped themselves of their ornaments
by the mount Horeb.

33:7 And Moses took the tabernacle, and pitched it without the camp,
afar off from the camp, and called it the Tabernacle of the
congregation. And it came to pass, that every one which sought the
LORD went out unto the tabernacle of the congregation, which was
without the camp.

33:8 And it came to pass, when Moses went out unto the tabernacle,
that all the people rose up, and stood every man at his tent door, and
looked after Moses, until he was gone into the tabernacle.

33:9 And it came to pass, as Moses entered into the tabernacle, the
cloudy pillar descended, and stood at the door of the tabernacle, and
the Lord talked with Moses.

33:10 And all the people saw the cloudy pillar stand at the tabernacle
door: and all the people rose up and worshipped, every man in his tent
door.

33:11 And the LORD spake unto Moses face to face, as a man speaketh
unto his friend. And he turned again into the camp: but his servant
Joshua, the son of Nun, a young man, departed not out of the
tabernacle.

33:12 And Moses said unto the LORD, See, thou sayest unto me, Bring up
this people: and thou hast not let me know whom thou wilt send with
me. Yet thou hast said, I know thee by name, and thou hast also found
grace in my sight.

33:13 Now therefore, I pray thee, if I have found grace in thy sight,
shew me now thy way, that I may know thee, that I may find grace in
thy sight: and consider that this nation is thy people.

33:14 And he said, My presence shall go with thee, and I will give
thee rest.

33:15 And he said unto him, If thy presence go not with me, carry us
not up hence.

33:16 For wherein shall it be known here that I and thy people have
found grace in thy sight? is it not in that thou goest with us? so
shall we be separated, I and thy people, from all the people that are
upon the face of the earth.

33:17 And the LORD said unto Moses, I will do this thing also that
thou hast spoken: for thou hast found grace in my sight, and I know
thee by name.

33:18 And he said, I beseech thee, shew me thy glory.

33:19 And he said, I will make all my goodness pass before thee, and I
will proclaim the name of the LORD before thee; and will be gracious
to whom I will be gracious, and will shew mercy on whom I will shew
mercy.

33:20 And he said, Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man
see me, and live.

33:21 And the LORD said, Behold, there is a place by me, and thou
shalt stand upon a rock: 33:22 And it shall come to pass, while my
glory passeth by, that I will put thee in a clift of the rock, and
will cover thee with my hand while I pass by: 33:23 And I will take
away mine hand, and thou shalt see my back parts: but my face shall
not be seen.

34:1 And the LORD said unto Moses, Hew thee two tables of stone like
unto the first: and I will write upon these tables the words that were
in the first tables, which thou brakest.

34:2 And be ready in the morning, and come up in the morning unto
mount Sinai, and present thyself there to me in the top of the mount.

34:3 And no man shall come up with thee, neither let any man be seen
throughout all the mount; neither let the flocks nor herds feed before
that mount.

34:4 And he hewed two tables of stone like unto the first; and Moses
rose up early in the morning, and went up unto mount Sinai, as the
LORD had commanded him, and took in his hand the two tables of stone.

34:5 And the LORD descended in the cloud, and stood with him there,
and proclaimed the name of the LORD.

34:6 And the LORD passed by before him, and proclaimed, The LORD, The
LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in
goodness and truth, 34:7 Keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving
iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear
the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children,
and upon the children's children, unto the third and to the fourth
generation.

34:8 And Moses made haste, and bowed his head toward the earth, and
worshipped.

34:9 And he said, If now I have found grace in thy sight, O LORD, let
my LORD, I pray thee, go among us; for it is a stiffnecked people; and
pardon our iniquity and our sin, and take us for thine inheritance.

34:10 And he said, Behold, I make a covenant: before all thy people I
will do marvels, such as have not been done in all the earth, nor in
any nation: and all the people among which thou art shall see the work
of the LORD: for it is a terrible thing that I will do with thee.

34:11 Observe thou that which I command thee this day: behold, I drive
out before thee the Amorite, and the Canaanite, and the Hittite, and
the Perizzite, and the Hivite, and the Jebusite.

34:12 Take heed to thyself, lest thou make a covenant with the
inhabitants of the land whither thou goest, lest it be for a snare in
the midst of thee: 34:13 But ye shall destroy their altars, break
their images, and cut down their groves: 34:14 For thou shalt worship
no other god: for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God:
34:15 Lest thou make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land, and
they go a whoring after their gods, and do sacrifice unto their gods,
and one call thee, and thou eat of his sacrifice; 34:16 And thou take
of their daughters unto thy sons, and their daughters go a whoring
after their gods, and make thy sons go a whoring after their gods.

34:17 Thou shalt make thee no molten gods.

34:18 The feast of unleavened bread shalt thou keep. Seven days thou
shalt eat unleavened bread, as I commanded thee, in the time of the
month Abib: for in the month Abib thou camest out from Egypt.

34:19 All that openeth the matrix is mine; and every firstling among
thy cattle, whether ox or sheep, that is male.

34:20 But the firstling of an ass thou shalt redeem with a lamb: and
if thou redeem him not, then shalt thou break his neck. All the
firstborn of thy sons thou shalt redeem. And none shall appear before
me empty.

34:21 Six days thou shalt work, but on the seventh day thou shalt
rest: in earing time and in harvest thou shalt rest.

34:22 And thou shalt observe the feast of weeks, of the firstfruits of
wheat harvest, and the feast of ingathering at the year's end.

34:23 Thrice in the year shall all your menchildren appear before the
LORD God, the God of Israel.

34:24 For I will cast out the nations before thee, and enlarge thy
borders: neither shall any man desire thy land, when thou shalt go up
to appear before the LORD thy God thrice in the year.

34:25 Thou shalt not offer the blood of my sacrifice with leaven;
neither shall the sacrifice of the feast of the passover be left unto
the morning.

34:26 The first of the firstfruits of thy land thou shalt bring unto
the house of the LORD thy God. Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his
mother's milk.

34:27 And the LORD said unto Moses, Write thou these words: for after
the tenor of these words I have made a covenant with thee and with
Israel.

34:28 And he was there with the LORD forty days and forty nights; he
did neither eat bread, nor drink water. And he wrote upon the tables
the words of the covenant, the ten commandments.

34:29 And it came to pass, when Moses came down from mount Sinai with
the two tables of testimony in Moses' hand, when he came down from the
mount, that Moses wist not that the skin of his face shone while he
talked with him.

34:30 And when Aaron and all the children of Israel saw Moses, behold,
the skin of his face shone; and they were afraid to come nigh him.

34:31 And Moses called unto them; and Aaron and all the rulers of the
congregation returned unto him: and Moses talked with them.

34:32 And afterward all the children of Israel came nigh: and he gave
them in commandment all that the LORD had spoken with him in mount
Sinai.

34:33 And till Moses had done speaking with them, he put a vail on his
face.

34:34 But when Moses went in before the LORD to speak with him, he
took the vail off, until he came out. And he came out, and spake unto
the children of Israel that which he was commanded.

34:35 And the children of Israel saw the face of Moses, that the skin
of Moses' face shone: and Moses put the vail upon his face again,
until he went in to speak with him.

35:1 And Moses gathered all the congregation of the children of Israel
together, and said unto them, These are the words which the LORD hath
commanded, that ye should do them.

35:2 Six days shall work be done, but on the seventh day there shall
be to you an holy day, a sabbath of rest to the LORD: whosoever doeth
work therein shall be put to death.

35:3 Ye shall kindle no fire throughout your habitations upon the
sabbath day.

35:4 And Moses spake unto all the congregation of the children of
Israel, saying, This is the thing which the LORD commanded, saying,
35:5 Take ye from among you an offering unto the LORD: whosoever is of
a willing heart, let him bring it, an offering of the LORD; gold, and
silver, and brass, 35:6 And blue, and purple, and scarlet, and fine
linen, and goats' hair, 35:7 And rams' skins dyed red, and badgers'
skins, and shittim wood, 35:8 And oil for the light, and spices for
anointing oil, and for the sweet incense, 35:9 And onyx stones, and
stones to be set for the ephod, and for the breastplate.

35:10 And every wise hearted among you shall come, and make all that
the LORD hath commanded; 35:11 The tabernacle, his tent, and his
covering, his taches, and his boards, his bars, his pillars, and his
sockets, 35:12 The ark, and the staves thereof, with the mercy seat,
and the vail of the covering, 35:13 The table, and his staves, and all
his vessels, and the shewbread, 35:14 The candlestick also for the
light, and his furniture, and his lamps, with the oil for the light,
35:15 And the incense altar, and his staves, and the anointing oil,
and the sweet incense, and the hanging for the door at the entering in
of the tabernacle, 35:16 The altar of burnt offering, with his brasen
grate, his staves, and all his vessels, the laver and his foot, 35:17
The hangings of the court, his pillars, and their sockets, and the
hanging for the door of the court, 35:18 The pins of the tabernacle,
and the pins of the court, and their cords, 35:19 The cloths of
service, to do service in the holy place, the holy garments for Aaron
the priest, and the garments of his sons, to minister in the priest's
office.

35:20 And all the congregation of the children of Israel departed from
the presence of Moses.

35:21 And they came, every one whose heart stirred him up, and every
one whom his spirit made willing, and they brought the LORD's offering
to the work of the tabernacle of the congregation, and for all his
service, and for the holy garments.

35:22 And they came, both men and women, as many as were willing
hearted, and brought bracelets, and earrings, and rings, and tablets,
all jewels of gold: and every man that offered offered an offering of
gold unto the LORD.

35:23 And every man, with whom was found blue, and purple, and
scarlet, and fine linen, and goats' hair, and red skins of rams, and
badgers' skins, brought them.

35:24 Every one that did offer an offering of silver and brass brought
the LORD's offering: and every man, with whom was found shittim wood
for any work of the service, brought it.

35:25 And all the women that were wise hearted did spin with their
hands, and brought that which they had spun, both of blue, and of
purple, and of scarlet, and of fine linen.

35:26 And all the women whose heart stirred them up in wisdom spun
goats' hair.

35:27 And the rulers brought onyx stones, and stones to be set, for
the ephod, and for the breastplate; 35:28 And spice, and oil for the
light, and for the anointing oil, and for the sweet incense.

35:29 The children of Israel brought a willing offering unto the LORD,
every man and woman, whose heart made them willing to bring for all
manner of work, which the LORD had commanded to be made by the hand of
Moses.

35:30 And Moses said unto the children of Israel, See, the LORD hath
called by name Bezaleel the son of Uri, the son of Hur, of the tribe
of Judah; 35:31 And he hath filled him with the spirit of God, in
wisdom, in understanding, and in knowledge, and in all manner of
workmanship; 35:32 And to devise curious works, to work in gold, and
in silver, and in brass, 35:33 And in the cutting of stones, to set
them, and in carving of wood, to make any manner of cunning work.

35:34 And he hath put in his heart that he may teach, both he, and
Aholiab, the son of Ahisamach, of the tribe of Dan.

35:35 Them hath he filled with wisdom of heart, to work all manner of
work, of the engraver, and of the cunning workman, and of the
embroiderer, in blue, and in purple, in scarlet, and in fine linen,
and of the weaver, even of them that do any work, and of those that
devise cunning work.

36:1 Then wrought Bezaleel and Aholiab, and every wise hearted man, in
whom the LORD put wisdom and understanding to know how to work all
manner of work for the service of the sanctuary, according to all that
the LORD had commanded.

36:2 And Moses called Bezaleel and Aholiab, and every wise hearted
man, in whose heart the LORD had put wisdom, even every one whose
heart stirred him up to come unto the work to do it: 36:3 And they
received of Moses all the offering, which the children of Israel had
brought for the work of the service of the sanctuary, to make it
withal. And they brought yet unto him free offerings every morning.

36:4 And all the wise men, that wrought all the work of the sanctuary,
came every man from his work which they made; 36:5 And they spake unto
Moses, saying, The people bring much more than enough for the service
of the work, which the LORD commanded to make.

36:6 And Moses gave commandment, and they caused it to be proclaimed
throughout the camp, saying, Let neither man nor woman make any more
work for the offering of the sanctuary. So the people were restrained
from bringing.

36:7 For the stuff they had was sufficient for all the work to make
it, and too much.

36:8 And every wise hearted man among them that wrought the work of
the tabernacle made ten curtains of fine twined linen, and blue, and
purple, and scarlet: with cherubims of cunning work made he them.

36:9 The length of one curtain was twenty and eight cubits, and the
breadth of one curtain four cubits: the curtains were all of one size.

36:10 And he coupled the five curtains one unto another: and the other
five curtains he coupled one unto another.

36:11 And he made loops of blue on the edge of one curtain from the
selvedge in the coupling: likewise he made in the uttermost side of
another curtain, in the coupling of the second.

36:12 Fifty loops made he in one curtain, and fifty loops made he in
the edge of the curtain which was in the coupling of the second: the
loops held one curtain to another.

36:13 And he made fifty taches of gold, and coupled the curtains one
unto another with the taches: so it became one tabernacle.

36:14 And he made curtains of goats' hair for the tent over the
tabernacle: eleven curtains he made them.

36:15 The length of one curtain was thirty cubits, and four cubits was
the breadth of one curtain: the eleven curtains were of one size.

36:16 And he coupled five curtains by themselves, and six curtains by
themselves.

36:17 And he made fifty loops upon the uttermost edge of the curtain
in the coupling, and fifty loops made he upon the edge of the curtain
which coupleth the second.

36:18 And he made fifty taches of brass to couple the tent together,
that it might be one.

36:19 And he made a covering for the tent of rams' skins dyed red, and
a covering of badgers' skins above that.

36:20 And he made boards for the tabernacle of shittim wood, standing
up.

36:21 The length of a board was ten cubits, and the breadth of a board
one cubit and a half.

36:22 One board had two tenons, equally distant one from another: thus
did he make for all the boards of the tabernacle.

36:23 And he made boards for the tabernacle; twenty boards for the
south side southward: 36:24 And forty sockets of silver he made under
the twenty boards; two sockets under one board for his two tenons, and
two sockets under another board for his two tenons.

36:25 And for the other side of the tabernacle, which is toward the
north corner, he made twenty boards, 36:26 And their forty sockets of
silver; two sockets under one board, and two sockets under another
board.

36:27 And for the sides of the tabernacle westward he made six boards.

36:28 And two boards made he for the corners of the tabernacle in the
two sides.

36:29 And they were coupled beneath, and coupled together at the head
thereof, to one ring: thus he did to both of them in both the corners.

36:30 And there were eight boards; and their sockets were sixteen
sockets of silver, under every board two sockets.

36:31 And he made bars of shittim wood; five for the boards of the one
side of the tabernacle, 36:32 And five bars for the boards of the
other side of the tabernacle, and five bars for the boards of the
tabernacle for the sides westward.

36:33 And he made the middle bar to shoot through the boards from the
one end to the other.

36:34 And he overlaid the boards with gold, and made their rings of
gold to be places for the bars, and overlaid the bars with gold.

36:35 And he made a vail of blue, and purple, and scarlet, and fine
twined linen: with cherubims made he it of cunning work.

36:36 And he made thereunto four pillars of shittim wood, and overlaid
them with gold: their hooks were of gold; and he cast for them four
sockets of silver.

36:37 And he made an hanging for the tabernacle door of blue, and
purple, and scarlet, and fine twined linen, of needlework; 36:38 And
the five pillars of it with their hooks: and he overlaid their
chapiters and their fillets with gold: but their five sockets were of
brass.

37:1 And Bezaleel made the ark of shittim wood: two cubits and a half
was the length of it, and a cubit and a half the breadth of it, and a
cubit and a half the height of it: 37:2 And he overlaid it with pure
gold within and without, and made a crown of gold to it round about.

37:3 And he cast for it four rings of gold, to be set by the four
corners of it; even two rings upon the one side of it, and two rings
upon the other side of it.

37:4 And he made staves of shittim wood, and overlaid them with gold.

37:5 And he put the staves into the rings by the sides of the ark, to
bear the ark.

37:6 And he made the mercy seat of pure gold: two cubits and a half
was the length thereof, and one cubit and a half the breadth thereof.

37:7 And he made two cherubims of gold, beaten out of one piece made
he them, on the two ends of the mercy seat; 37:8 One cherub on the end
on this side, and another cherub on the other end on that side: out of
the mercy seat made he the cherubims on the two ends thereof.

37:9 And the cherubims spread out their wings on high, and covered
with their wings over the mercy seat, with their faces one to another;
even to the mercy seatward were the faces of the cherubims.

37:10 And he made the table of shittim wood: two cubits was the length
thereof, and a cubit the breadth thereof, and a cubit and a half the
height thereof: 37:11 And he overlaid it with pure gold, and made
thereunto a crown of gold round about.

37:12 Also he made thereunto a border of an handbreadth round about;
and made a crown of gold for the border thereof round about.

37:13 And he cast for it four rings of gold, and put the rings upon
the four corners that were in the four feet thereof.

37:14 Over against the border were the rings, the places for the
staves to bear the table.

37:15 And he made the staves of shittim wood, and overlaid them with
gold, to bear the table.

37:16 And he made the vessels which were upon the table, his dishes,
and his spoons, and his bowls, and his covers to cover withal, of pure
gold.

37:17 And he made the candlestick of pure gold: of beaten work made he
the candlestick; his shaft, and his branch, his bowls, his knops, and
his flowers, were of the same: 37:18 And six branches going out of the
sides thereof; three branches of the candlestick out of the one side
thereof, and three branches of the candlestick out of the other side
thereof: 37:19 Three bowls made after the fashion of almonds in one
branch, a knop and a flower; and three bowls made like almonds in
another branch, a knop and a flower: so throughout the six branches
going out of the candlestick.

37:20 And in the candlestick were four bowls made like almonds, his
knops, and his flowers: 37:21 And a knop under two branches of the
same, and a knop under two branches of the same, and a knop under two
branches of the same, according to the six branches going out of it.

37:22 Their knops and their branches were of the same: all of it was
one beaten work of pure gold.

37:23 And he made his seven lamps, and his snuffers, and his
snuffdishes, of pure gold.

37:24 Of a talent of pure gold made he it, and all the vessels
thereof.

37:25 And he made the incense altar of shittim wood: the length of it
was a cubit, and the breadth of it a cubit; it was foursquare; and two
cubits was the height of it; the horns thereof were of the same.

37:26 And he overlaid it with pure gold, both the top of it, and the
sides thereof round about, and the horns of it: also he made unto it a
crown of gold round about.

37:27 And he made two rings of gold for it under the crown thereof, by
the two corners of it, upon the two sides thereof, to be places for
the staves to bear it withal.

37:28 And he made the staves of shittim wood, and overlaid them with
gold.

37:29 And he made the holy anointing oil, and the pure incense of
sweet spices, according to the work of the apothecary.

38:1 And he made the altar of burnt offering of shittim wood: five
cubits was the length thereof, and five cubits the breadth thereof; it
was foursquare; and three cubits the height thereof.

38:2 And he made the horns thereof on the four corners of it; the
horns thereof were of the same: and he overlaid it with brass.

38:3 And he made all the vessels of the altar, the pots, and the
shovels, and the basons, and the fleshhooks, and the firepans: all the
vessels thereof made he of brass.

38:4 And he made for the altar a brasen grate of network under the
compass thereof beneath unto the midst of it.

38:5 And he cast four rings for the four ends of the grate of brass,
to be places for the staves.

38:6 And he made the staves of shittim wood, and overlaid them with
brass.

38:7 And he put the staves into the rings on the sides of the altar,
to bear it withal; he made the altar hollow with boards.

38:8 And he made the laver of brass, and the foot of it of brass, of
the lookingglasses of the women assembling, which assembled at the
door of the tabernacle of the congregation.

38:9 And he made the court: on the south side southward the hangings
of the court were of fine twined linen, an hundred cubits: 38:10 Their
pillars were twenty, and their brasen sockets twenty; the hooks of the
pillars and their fillets were of silver.

38:11 And for the north side the hangings were an hundred cubits,
their pillars were twenty, and their sockets of brass twenty; the
hooks of the pillars and their fillets of silver.

38:12 And for the west side were hangings of fifty cubits, their
pillars ten, and their sockets ten; the hooks of the pillars and their
fillets of silver.

38:13 And for the east side eastward fifty cubits.

38:14 The hangings of the one side of the gate were fifteen cubits;
their pillars three, and their sockets three.

38:15 And for the other side of the court gate, on this hand and that
hand, were hangings of fifteen cubits; their pillars three, and their
sockets three.

38:16 All the hangings of the court round about were of fine twined
linen.

38:17 And the sockets for the pillars were of brass; the hooks of the
pillars and their fillets of silver; and the overlaying of their
chapiters of silver; and all the pillars of the court were filleted
with silver.

38:18 And the hanging for the gate of the court was needlework, of
blue, and purple, and scarlet, and fine twined linen: and twenty
cubits was the length, and the height in the breadth was five cubits,
answerable to the hangings of the court.

38:19 And their pillars were four, and their sockets of brass four;
their hooks of silver, and the overlaying of their chapiters and their
fillets of silver.

38:20 And all the pins of the tabernacle, and of the court round
about, were of brass.

38:21 This is the sum of the tabernacle, even of the tabernacle of
testimony, as it was counted, according to the commandment of Moses,
for the service of the Levites, by the hand of Ithamar, son to Aaron
the priest.

38:22 And Bezaleel the son Uri, the son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah,
made all that the LORD commanded Moses.

38:23 And with him was Aholiab, son of Ahisamach, of the tribe of Dan,
an engraver, and a cunning workman, and an embroiderer in blue, and in
purple, and in scarlet, and fine linen.

38:24 All the gold that was occupied for the work in all the work of
the holy place, even the gold of the offering, was twenty and nine
talents, and seven hundred and thirty shekels, after the shekel of the
sanctuary.

38:25 And the silver of them that were numbered of the congregation
was an hundred talents, and a thousand seven hundred and threescore
and fifteen shekels, after the shekel of the sanctuary: 38:26 A bekah
for every man, that is, half a shekel, after the shekel of the
sanctuary, for every one that went to be numbered, from twenty years
old and upward, for six hundred thousand and three thousand and five
hundred and fifty men.

38:27 And of the hundred talents of silver were cast the sockets of
the sanctuary, and the sockets of the vail; an hundred sockets of the
hundred talents, a talent for a socket.

38:28 And of the thousand seven hundred seventy and five shekels he
made hooks for the pillars, and overlaid their chapiters, and filleted
them.

38:29 And the brass of the offering was seventy talents, and two
thousand and four hundred shekels.

38:30 And therewith he made the sockets to the door of the tabernacle
of the congregation, and the brasen altar, and the brasen grate for
it, and all the vessels of the altar, 38:31 And the sockets of the
court round about, and the sockets of the court gate, and all the pins
of the tabernacle, and all the pins of the court round about.

39:1 And of the blue, and purple, and scarlet, they made cloths of
service, to do service in the holy place, and made the holy garments
for Aaron; as the LORD commanded Moses.

39:2 And he made the ephod of gold, blue, and purple, and scarlet, and
fine twined linen.

39:3 And they did beat the gold into thin plates, and cut it into
wires, to work it in the blue, and in the purple, and in the scarlet,
and in the fine linen, with cunning work.

39:4 They made shoulderpieces for it, to couple it together: by the
two edges was it coupled together.

39:5 And the curious girdle of his ephod, that was upon it, was of the
same, according to the work thereof; of gold, blue, and purple, and
scarlet, and fine twined linen; as the LORD commanded Moses.

39:6 And they wrought onyx stones inclosed in ouches of gold, graven,
as signets are graven, with the names of the children of Israel.

39:7 And he put them on the shoulders of the ephod, that they should
be stones for a memorial to the children of Israel; as the LORD
commanded Moses.

39:8 And he made the breastplate of cunning work, like the work of the
ephod; of gold, blue, and purple, and scarlet, and fine twined linen.

39:9 It was foursquare; they made the breastplate double: a span was
the length thereof, and a span the breadth thereof, being doubled.

39:10 And they set in it four rows of stones: the first row was a
sardius, a topaz, and a carbuncle: this was the first row.

39:11 And the second row, an emerald, a sapphire, and a diamond.

39:12 And the third row, a ligure, an agate, and an amethyst.

39:13 And the fourth row, a beryl, an onyx, and a jasper: they were
inclosed in ouches of gold in their inclosings.

39:14 And the stones were according to the names of the children of
Israel, twelve, according to their names, like the engravings of a
signet, every one with his name, according to the twelve tribes.

39:15 And they made upon the breastplate chains at the ends, of
wreathen work of pure gold.

39:16 And they made two ouches of gold, and two gold rings; and put
the two rings in the two ends of the breastplate.

39:17 And they put the two wreathen chains of gold in the two rings on
the ends of the breastplate.

39:18 And the two ends of the two wreathen chains they fastened in the
two ouches, and put them on the shoulderpieces of the ephod, before
it.

39:19 And they made two rings of gold, and put them on the two ends of
the breastplate, upon the border of it, which was on the side of the
ephod inward.

39:20 And they made two other golden rings, and put them on the two
sides of the ephod underneath, toward the forepart of it, over against
the other coupling thereof, above the curious girdle of the ephod.

39:21 And they did bind the breastplate by his rings unto the rings of
the ephod with a lace of blue, that it might be above the curious
girdle of the ephod, and that the breastplate might not be loosed from
the ephod; as the LORD commanded Moses.

39:22 And he made the robe of the ephod of woven work, all of blue.

39:23 And there was an hole in the midst of the robe, as the hole of
an habergeon, with a band round about the hole, that it should not
rend.

39:24 And they made upon the hems of the robe pomegranates of blue,
and purple, and scarlet, and twined linen.

39:25 And they made bells of pure gold, and put the bells between the
pomegranates upon the hem of the robe, round about between the
pomegranates; 39:26 A bell and a pomegranate, a bell and a
pomegranate, round about the hem of the robe to minister in; as the
LORD commanded Moses.

39:27 And they made coats of fine linen of woven work for Aaron, and
for his sons, 39:28 And a mitre of fine linen, and goodly bonnets of
fine linen, and linen breeches of fine twined linen, 39:29 And a
girdle of fine twined linen, and blue, and purple, and scarlet, of
needlework; as the LORD commanded Moses.

39:30 And they made the plate of the holy crown of pure gold, and
wrote upon it a writing, like to the engravings of a signet, HOLINESS
TO THE LORD.

39:31 And they tied unto it a lace of blue, to fasten it on high upon
the mitre; as the LORD commanded Moses.

39:32 Thus was all the work of the tabernacle of the tent of the
congregation finished: and the children of Israel did according to all
that the LORD commanded Moses, so did they.

39:33 And they brought the tabernacle unto Moses, the tent, and all
his furniture, his taches, his boards, his bars, and his pillars, and
his sockets, 39:34 And the covering of rams' skins dyed red, and the
covering of badgers' skins, and the vail of the covering, 39:35 The
ark of the testimony, and the staves thereof, and the mercy seat,
39:36 The table, and all the vessels thereof, and the shewbread, 39:37
The pure candlestick, with the lamps thereof, even with the lamps to
be set in order, and all the vessels thereof, and the oil for light,
39:38 And the golden altar, and the anointing oil, and the sweet
incense, and the hanging for the tabernacle door, 39:39 The brasen
altar, and his grate of brass, his staves, and all his vessels, the
laver and his foot, 39:40 The hangings of the court, his pillars, and
his sockets, and the hanging for the court gate, his cords, and his
pins, and all the vessels of the service of the tabernacle, for the
tent of the congregation, 39:41 The cloths of service to do service in
the holy place, and the holy garments for Aaron the priest, and his
sons' garments, to minister in the priest's office.

39:42 According to all that the LORD commanded Moses, so the children
of Israel made all the work.

39:43 And Moses did look upon all the work, and, behold, they had done
it as the LORD had commanded, even so had they done it: and Moses
blessed them.

40:1 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 40:2 On the first day of
the first month shalt thou set up the tabernacle of the tent of the
congregation.

40:3 And thou shalt put therein the ark of the testimony, and cover
the ark with the vail.

40:4 And thou shalt bring in the table, and set in order the things
that are to be set in order upon it; and thou shalt bring in the
candlestick, and light the lamps thereof.

40:5 And thou shalt set the altar of gold for the incense before the
ark of the testimony, and put the hanging of the door to the
tabernacle.

40:6 And thou shalt set the altar of the burnt offering before the
door of the tabernacle of the tent of the congregation.

40:7 And thou shalt set the laver between the tent of the congregation
and the altar, and shalt put water therein.

40:8 And thou shalt set up the court round about, and hang up the
hanging at the court gate.

40:9 And thou shalt take the anointing oil, and anoint the tabernacle,
and all that is therein, and shalt hallow it, and all the vessels
thereof: and it shall be holy.

40:10 And thou shalt anoint the altar of the burnt offering, and all
his vessels, and sanctify the altar: and it shall be an altar most
holy.

40:11 And thou shalt anoint the laver and his foot, and sanctify it.

40:12 And thou shalt bring Aaron and his sons unto the door of the
tabernacle of the congregation, and wash them with water.

40:13 And thou shalt put upon Aaron the holy garments, and anoint him,
and sanctify him; that he may minister unto me in the priest's office.

40:14 And thou shalt bring his sons, and clothe them with coats: 40:15
And thou shalt anoint them, as thou didst anoint their father, that
they may minister unto me in the priest's office: for their anointing
shall surely be an everlasting priesthood throughout their
generations.

40:16 Thus did Moses: according to all that the LORD commanded him, so
did he.

40:17 And it came to pass in the first month in the second year, on
the first day of the month, that the tabernacle was reared up.

40:18 And Moses reared up the tabernacle, and fastened his sockets,
and set up the boards thereof, and put in the bars thereof, and reared
up his pillars.

40:19 And he spread abroad the tent over the tabernacle, and put the
covering of the tent above upon it; as the LORD commanded Moses.

40:20 And he took and put the testimony into the ark, and set the
staves on the ark, and put the mercy seat above upon the ark: 40:21
And he brought the ark into the tabernacle, and set up the vail of the
covering, and covered the ark of the testimony; as the LORD commanded
Moses.

40:22 And he put the table in the tent of the congregation, upon the
side of the tabernacle northward, without the vail.

40:23 And he set the bread in order upon it before the LORD; as the
LORD had commanded Moses.

40:24 And he put the candlestick in the tent of the congregation, over
against the table, on the side of the tabernacle southward.

40:25 And he lighted the lamps before the LORD; as the LORD commanded
Moses.

40:26 And he put the golden altar in the tent of the congregation
before the vail: 40:27 And he burnt sweet incense thereon; as the LORD
commanded Moses.

40:28 And he set up the hanging at the door of the tabernacle.

40:29 And he put the altar of burnt offering by the door of the
tabernacle of the tent of the congregation, and offered upon it the
burnt offering and the meat offering; as the LORD commanded Moses.

40:30 And he set the laver between the tent of the congregation and
the altar, and put water there, to wash withal.

40:31 And Moses and Aaron and his sons washed their hands and their
feet thereat: 40:32 When they went into the tent of the congregation,
and when they came near unto the altar, they washed; as the LORD
commanded Moses.

40:33 And he reared up the court round about the tabernacle and the
altar, and set up the hanging of the court gate. So Moses finished the
work.

40:34 Then a cloud covered the tent of the congregation, and the glory
of the LORD filled the tabernacle.

40:35 And Moses was not able to enter into the tent of the
congregation, because the cloud abode thereon, and the glory of the
LORD filled the tabernacle.

40:36 And when the cloud was taken up from over the tabernacle, the
children of Israel went onward in all their journeys: 40:37 But if the
cloud were not taken up, then they journeyed not till the day that it
was taken up.

40:38 For the cloud of the LORD was upon the tabernacle by day, and
fire was on it by night, in the sight of all the house of Israel,
throughout all their journeys.




The Third Book of Moses:  Called Leviticus


1:1 And the LORD called unto Moses, and spake unto him out of the
tabernacle of the congregation, saying, 1:2 Speak unto the children of
Israel, and say unto them, If any man of you bring an offering unto
the LORD, ye shall bring your offering of the cattle, even of the
herd, and of the flock.

1:3 If his offering be a burnt sacrifice of the herd, let him offer a
male without blemish: he shall offer it of his own voluntary will at
the door of the tabernacle of the congregation before the LORD.

1:4 And he shall put his hand upon the head of the burnt offering; and
it shall be accepted for him to make atonement for him.

1:5 And he shall kill the bullock before the LORD: and the priests,
Aaron's sons, shall bring the blood, and sprinkle the blood round
about upon the altar that is by the door of the tabernacle of the
congregation.

1:6 And he shall flay the burnt offering, and cut it into his pieces.

1:7 And the sons of Aaron the priest shall put fire upon the altar,
and lay the wood in order upon the fire: 1:8 And the priests, Aaron's
sons, shall lay the parts, the head, and the fat, in order upon the
wood that is on the fire which is upon the altar: 1:9 But his inwards
and his legs shall he wash in water: and the priest shall burn all on
the altar, to be a burnt sacrifice, an offering made by fire, of a
sweet savour unto the LORD.

1:10 And if his offering be of the flocks, namely, of the sheep, or of
the goats, for a burnt sacrifice; he shall bring it a male without
blemish.

1:11 And he shall kill it on the side of the altar northward before
the LORD: and the priests, Aaron's sons, shall sprinkle his blood
round about upon the altar.

1:12 And he shall cut it into his pieces, with his head and his fat:
and the priest shall lay them in order on the wood that is on the fire
which is upon the altar: 1:13 But he shall wash the inwards and the
legs with water: and the priest shall bring it all, and burn it upon
the altar: it is a burnt sacrifice, an offering made by fire, of a
sweet savour unto the LORD.

1:14 And if the burnt sacrifice for his offering to the LORD be of
fowls, then he shall bring his offering of turtledoves, or of young
pigeons.

1:15 And the priest shall bring it unto the altar, and wring off his
head, and burn it on the altar; and the blood thereof shall be wrung
out at the side of the altar: 1:16 And he shall pluck away his crop
with his feathers, and cast it beside the altar on the east part, by
the place of the ashes: 1:17 And he shall cleave it with the wings
thereof, but shall not divide it asunder: and the priest shall burn it
upon the altar, upon the wood that is upon the fire: it is a burnt
sacrifice, an offering made by fire, of a sweet savour unto the LORD.

2:1 And when any will offer a meat offering unto the LORD, his
offering shall be of fine flour; and he shall pour oil upon it, and
put frankincense thereon: 2:2 And he shall bring it to Aaron's sons
the priests: and he shall take thereout his handful of the flour
thereof, and of the oil thereof, with all the frankincense thereof;
and the priest shall burn the memorial of it upon the altar, to be an
offering made by fire, of a sweet savour unto the LORD: 2:3 And the
remnant of the meat offering shall be Aaron's and his sons': it is a
thing most holy of the offerings of the LORD made by fire.

2:4 And if thou bring an oblation of a meat offering baken in the
oven, it shall be unleavened cakes of fine flour mingled with oil, or
unleavened wafers anointed with oil.

2:5 And if thy oblation be a meat offering baken in a pan, it shall be
of fine flour unleavened, mingled with oil.

2:6 Thou shalt part it in pieces, and pour oil thereon: it is a meat
offering.

2:7 And if thy oblation be a meat offering baken in the fryingpan, it
shall be made of fine flour with oil.

2:8 And thou shalt bring the meat offering that is made of these
things unto the LORD: and when it is presented unto the priest, he
shall bring it unto the altar.

2:9 And the priest shall take from the meat offering a memorial
thereof, and shall burn it upon the altar: it is an offering made by
fire, of a sweet savour unto the LORD.

2:10 And that which is left of the meat offering shall be Aaron's and
his sons': it is a thing most holy of the offerings of the LORD made
by fire.

2:11 No meat offering, which ye shall bring unto the LORD, shall be
made with leaven: for ye shall burn no leaven, nor any honey, in any
offering of the LORD made by fire.

2:12 As for the oblation of the firstfruits, ye shall offer them unto
the LORD: but they shall not be burnt on the altar for a sweet savour.

2:13 And every oblation of thy meat offering shalt thou season with
salt; neither shalt thou suffer the salt of the covenant of thy God to
be lacking from thy meat offering: with all thine offerings thou shalt
offer salt.

2:14 And if thou offer a meat offering of thy firstfruits unto the
LORD, thou shalt offer for the meat offering of thy firstfruits green
ears of corn dried by the fire, even corn beaten out of full ears.

2:15 And thou shalt put oil upon it, and lay frankincense thereon: it
is a meat offering.

2:16 And the priest shall burn the memorial of it, part of the beaten
corn thereof, and part of the oil thereof, with all the frankincense
thereof: it is an offering made by fire unto the LORD.

3:1 And if his oblation be a sacrifice of peace offering, if he offer
it of the herd; whether it be a male or female, he shall offer it
without blemish before the LORD.

3:2 And he shall lay his hand upon the head of his offering, and kill
it at the door of the tabernacle of the congregation: and Aaron's sons
the priests shall sprinkle the blood upon the altar round about.

3:3 And he shall offer of the sacrifice of the peace offering an
offering made by fire unto the LORD; the fat that covereth the
inwards, and all the fat that is upon the inwards, 3:4 And the two
kidneys, and the fat that is on them, which is by the flanks, and the
caul above the liver, with the kidneys, it shall he take away.

3:5 And Aaron's sons shall burn it on the altar upon the burnt
sacrifice, which is upon the wood that is on the fire: it is an
offering made by fire, of a sweet savour unto the LORD.

3:6 And if his offering for a sacrifice of peace offering unto the
LORD be of the flock; male or female, he shall offer it without
blemish.

3:7 If he offer a lamb for his offering, then shall he offer it before
the LORD.

3:8 And he shall lay his hand upon the head of his offering, and kill
it before the tabernacle of the congregation: and Aaron's sons shall
sprinkle the blood thereof round about upon the altar.

3:9 And he shall offer of the sacrifice of the peace offering an
offering made by fire unto the LORD; the fat thereof, and the whole
rump, it shall he take off hard by the backbone; and the fat that
covereth the inwards, and all the fat that is upon the inwards, 3:10
And the two kidneys, and the fat that is upon them, which is by the
flanks, and the caul above the liver, with the kidneys, it shall he
take away.

3:11 And the priest shall burn it upon the altar: it is the food of
the offering made by fire unto the LORD.

3:12 And if his offering be a goat, then he shall offer it before the
LORD.

3:13 And he shall lay his hand upon the head of it, and kill it before
the tabernacle of the congregation: and the sons of Aaron shall
sprinkle the blood thereof upon the altar round about.

3:14 And he shall offer thereof his offering, even an offering made by
fire unto the LORD; the fat that covereth the inwards, and all the fat
that is upon the inwards, 3:15 And the two kidneys, and the fat that
is upon them, which is by the flanks, and the caul above the liver,
with the kidneys, it shall he take away.

3:16 And the priest shall burn them upon the altar: it is the food of
the offering made by fire for a sweet savour: all the fat is the
LORD's.

3:17 It shall be a perpetual statute for your generations throughout
all your dwellings, that ye eat neither fat nor blood.

4:1 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 4:2 Speak unto the children
of Israel, saying, If a soul shall sin through ignorance against any
of the commandments of the LORD concerning things which ought not to
be done, and shall do against any of them: 4:3 If the priest that is
anointed do sin according to the sin of the people; then let him bring
for his sin, which he hath sinned, a young bullock without blemish
unto the LORD for a sin offering.

4:4 And he shall bring the bullock unto the door of the tabernacle of
the congregation before the LORD; and shall lay his hand upon the
bullock's head, and kill the bullock before the LORD.

4:5 And the priest that is anointed shall take of the bullock's blood,
and bring it to the tabernacle of the congregation: 4:6 And the priest
shall dip his finger in the blood, and sprinkle of the blood seven
times before the LORD, before the vail of the sanctuary.

4:7 And the priest shall put some of the blood upon the horns of the
altar of sweet incense before the LORD, which is in the tabernacle of
the congregation; and shall pour all the blood of the bullock at the
bottom of the altar of the burnt offering, which is at the door of the
tabernacle of the congregation.

4:8 And he shall take off from it all the fat of the bullock for the
sin offering; the fat that covereth the inwards, and all the fat that
is upon the inwards, 4:9 And the two kidneys, and the fat that is upon
them, which is by the flanks, and the caul above the liver, with the
kidneys, it shall he take away, 4:10 As it was taken off from the
bullock of the sacrifice of peace offerings: and the priest shall burn
them upon the altar of the burnt offering.

4:11 And the skin of the bullock, and all his flesh, with his head,
and with his legs, and his inwards, and his dung, 4:12 Even the whole
bullock shall he carry forth without the camp unto a clean place,
where the ashes are poured out, and burn him on the wood with fire:
where the ashes are poured out shall he be burnt.

4:13 And if the whole congregation of Israel sin through ignorance,
and the thing be hid from the eyes of the assembly, and they have done
somewhat against any of the commandments of the LORD concerning things
which should not be done, and are guilty; 4:14 When the sin, which
they have sinned against it, is known, then the congregation shall
offer a young bullock for the sin, and bring him before the tabernacle
of the congregation.

4:15 And the elders of the congregation shall lay their hands upon the
head of the bullock before the LORD: and the bullock shall be killed
before the LORD.

4:16 And the priest that is anointed shall bring of the bullock's
blood to the tabernacle of the congregation: 4:17 And the priest shall
dip his finger in some of the blood, and sprinkle it seven times
before the LORD, even before the vail.

4:18 And he shall put some of the blood upon the horns of the altar
which is before the LORD, that is in the tabernacle of the
congregation, and shall pour out all the blood at the bottom of the
altar of the burnt offering, which is at the door of the tabernacle of
the congregation.

4:19 And he shall take all his fat from him, and burn it upon the
altar.

4:20 And he shall do with the bullock as he did with the bullock for a
sin offering, so shall he do with this: and the priest shall make an
atonement for them, and it shall be forgiven them.

4:21 And he shall carry forth the bullock without the camp, and burn
him as he burned the first bullock: it is a sin offering for the
congregation.

4:22 When a ruler hath sinned, and done somewhat through ignorance
against any of the commandments of the LORD his God concerning things
which should not be done, and is guilty; 4:23 Or if his sin, wherein
he hath sinned, come to his knowledge; he shall bring his offering, a
kid of the goats, a male without blemish: 4:24 And he shall lay his
hand upon the head of the goat, and kill it in the place where they
kill the burnt offering before the LORD: it is a sin offering.

4:25 And the priest shall take of the blood of the sin offering with
his finger, and put it upon the horns of the altar of burnt offering,
and shall pour out his blood at the bottom of the altar of burnt
offering.

4:26 And he shall burn all his fat upon the altar, as the fat of the
sacrifice of peace offerings: and the priest shall make an atonement
for him as concerning his sin, and it shall be forgiven him.

4:27 And if any one of the common people sin through ignorance, while
he doeth somewhat against any of the commandments of the LORD
concerning things which ought not to be done, and be guilty; 4:28 Or
if his sin, which he hath sinned, come to his knowledge: then he shall
bring his offering, a kid of the goats, a female without blemish, for
his sin which he hath sinned.

4:29 And he shall lay his hand upon the head of the sin offering, and
slay the sin offering in the place of the burnt offering.

4:30 And the priest shall take of the blood thereof with his finger,
and put it upon the horns of the altar of burnt offering, and shall
pour out all the blood thereof at the bottom of the altar.

4:31 And he shall take away all the fat thereof, as the fat is taken
away from off the sacrifice of peace offerings; and the priest shall
burn it upon the altar for a sweet savour unto the LORD; and the
priest shall make an atonement for him, and it shall be forgiven him.

4:32 And if he bring a lamb for a sin offering, he shall bring it a
female without blemish.

4:33 And he shall lay his hand upon the head of the sin offering, and
slay it for a sin offering in the place where they kill the burnt
offering.

4:34 And the priest shall take of the blood of the sin offering with
his finger, and put it upon the horns of the altar of burnt offering,
and shall pour out all the blood thereof at the bottom of the altar:
4:35 And he shall take away all the fat thereof, as the fat of the
lamb is taken away from the sacrifice of the peace offerings; and the
priest shall burn them upon the altar, according to the offerings made
by fire unto the LORD: and the priest shall make an atonement for his
sin that he hath committed, and it shall be forgiven him.

5:1 And if a soul sin, and hear the voice of swearing, and is a
witness, whether he hath seen or known of it; if he do not utter it,
then he shall bear his iniquity.

5:2 Or if a soul touch any unclean thing, whether it be a carcase of
an unclean beast, or a carcase of unclean cattle, or the carcase of
unclean creeping things, and if it be hidden from him; he also shall
be unclean, and guilty.

5:3 Or if he touch the uncleanness of man, whatsoever uncleanness it
be that a man shall be defiled withal, and it be hid from him; when he
knoweth of it, then he shall be guilty.

5:4 Or if a soul swear, pronouncing with his lips to do evil, or to do
good, whatsoever it be that a man shall pronounce with an oath, and it
be hid from him; when he knoweth of it, then he shall be guilty in one
of these.

5:5 And it shall be, when he shall be guilty in one of these things,
that he shall confess that he hath sinned in that thing: 5:6 And he
shall bring his trespass offering unto the LORD for his sin which he
hath sinned, a female from the flock, a lamb or a kid of the goats,
for a sin offering; and the priest shall make an atonement for him
concerning his sin.

5:7 And if he be not able to bring a lamb, then he shall bring for his
trespass, which he hath committed, two turtledoves, or two young
pigeons, unto the LORD; one for a sin offering, and the other for a
burnt offering.

5:8 And he shall bring them unto the priest, who shall offer that
which is for the sin offering first, and wring off his head from his
neck, but shall not divide it asunder: 5:9 And he shall sprinkle of
the blood of the sin offering upon the side of the altar; and the rest
of the blood shall be wrung out at the bottom of the altar: it is a
sin offering.

5:10 And he shall offer the second for a burnt offering, according to
the manner: and the priest shall make an atonement for him for his sin
which he hath sinned, and it shall be forgiven him.

5:11 But if he be not able to bring two turtledoves, or two young
pigeons, then he that sinned shall bring for his offering the tenth
part of an ephah of fine flour for a sin offering; he shall put no oil
upon it, neither shall he put any frankincense thereon: for it is a
sin offering.

5:12 Then shall he bring it to the priest, and the priest shall take
his handful of it, even a memorial thereof, and burn it on the altar,
according to the offerings made by fire unto the LORD: it is a sin
offering.

5:13 And the priest shall make an atonement for him as touching his
sin that he hath sinned in one of these, and it shall be forgiven him:
and the remnant shall be the priest's, as a meat offering.

5:14 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 5:15 If a soul commit a
trespass, and sin through ignorance, in the holy things of the LORD;
then he shall bring for his trespass unto the LORD a ram without
blemish out of the flocks, with thy estimation by shekels of silver,
after the shekel of the sanctuary, for a trespass offering.

5:16 And he shall make amends for the harm that he hath done in the
holy thing, and shall add the fifth part thereto, and give it unto the
priest: and the priest shall make an atonement for him with the ram of
the trespass offering, and it shall be forgiven him.

5:17 And if a soul sin, and commit any of these things which are
forbidden to be done by the commandments of the LORD; though he wist
it not, yet is he guilty, and shall bear his iniquity.

5:18 And he shall bring a ram without blemish out of the flock, with
thy estimation, for a trespass offering, unto the priest: and the
priest shall make an atonement for him concerning his ignorance
wherein he erred and wist it not, and it shall be forgiven him.

5:19 It is a trespass offering: he hath certainly trespassed against
the LORD.

6:1 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 6:2 If a soul sin, and
commit a trespass against the LORD, and lie unto his neighbour in that
which was delivered him to keep, or in fellowship, or in a thing taken
away by violence, or hath deceived his neighbour; 6:3 Or have found
that which was lost, and lieth concerning it, and sweareth falsely; in
any of all these that a man doeth, sinning therein: 6:4 Then it shall
be, because he hath sinned, and is guilty, that he shall restore that
which he took violently away, or the thing which he hath deceitfully
gotten, or that which was delivered him to keep, or the lost thing
which he found, 6:5 Or all that about which he hath sworn falsely; he
shall even restore it in the principal, and shall add the fifth part
more thereto, and give it unto him to whom it appertaineth, in the day
of his trespass offering.

6:6 And he shall bring his trespass offering unto the LORD, a ram
without blemish out of the flock, with thy estimation, for a trespass
offering, unto the priest: 6:7 And the priest shall make an atonement
for him before the LORD: and it shall be forgiven him for any thing of
all that he hath done in trespassing therein.

6:8 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 6:9 Command Aaron and his
sons, saying, This is the law of the burnt offering: It is the burnt
offering, because of the burning upon the altar all night unto the
morning, and the fire of the altar shall be burning in it.

6:10 And the priest shall put on his linen garment, and his linen
breeches shall he put upon his flesh, and take up the ashes which the
fire hath consumed with the burnt offering on the altar, and he shall
put them beside the altar.

6:11 And he shall put off his garments, and put on other garments, and
carry forth the ashes without the camp unto a clean place.

6:12 And the fire upon the altar shall be burning in it; it shall not
be put out: and the priest shall burn wood on it every morning, and
lay the burnt offering in order upon it; and he shall burn thereon the
fat of the peace offerings.

6:13 The fire shall ever be burning upon the altar; it shall never go
out.

6:14 And this is the law of the meat offering: the sons of Aaron shall
offer it before the LORD, before the altar.

6:15 And he shall take of it his handful, of the flour of the meat
offering, and of the oil thereof, and all the frankincense which is
upon the meat offering, and shall burn it upon the altar for a sweet
savour, even the memorial of it, unto the LORD.

6:16 And the remainder thereof shall Aaron and his sons eat: with
unleavened bread shall it be eaten in the holy place; in the court of
the tabernacle of the congregation they shall eat it.

6:17 It shall not be baken with leaven. I have given it unto them for
their portion of my offerings made by fire; it is most holy, as is the
sin offering, and as the trespass offering.

6:18 All the males among the children of Aaron shall eat of it. It
shall be a statute for ever in your generations concerning the
offerings of the LORD made by fire: every one that toucheth them shall
be holy.

6:19 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 6:20 This is the offering
of Aaron and of his sons, which they shall offer unto the LORD in the
day when he is anointed; the tenth part of an ephah of fine flour for
a meat offering perpetual, half of it in the morning, and half thereof
at night.

6:21 In a pan it shall be made with oil; and when it is baken, thou
shalt bring it in: and the baken pieces of the meat offering shalt
thou offer for a sweet savour unto the LORD.

6:22 And the priest of his sons that is anointed in his stead shall
offer it: it is a statute for ever unto the LORD; it shall be wholly
burnt.

6:23 For every meat offering for the priest shall be wholly burnt: it
shall not be eaten.

6:24 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 6:25 Speak unto Aaron and
to his sons, saying, This is the law of the sin offering: In the place
where the burnt offering is killed shall the sin offering be killed
before the LORD: it is most holy.

6:26 The priest that offereth it for sin shall eat it: in the holy
place shall it be eaten, in the court of the tabernacle of the
congregation.

6:27 Whatsoever shall touch the flesh thereof shall be holy: and when
there is sprinkled of the blood thereof upon any garment, thou shalt
wash that whereon it was sprinkled in the holy place.

6:28 But the earthen vessel wherein it is sodden shall be broken: and
if it be sodden in a brasen pot, it shall be both scoured, and rinsed
in water.

6:29 All the males among the priests shall eat thereof: it is most
holy.

6:30 And no sin offering, whereof any of the blood is brought into the
tabernacle of the congregation to reconcile withal in the holy place,
shall be eaten: it shall be burnt in the fire.

7:1 Likewise this is the law of the trespass offering: it is most
holy.

7:2 In the place where they kill the burnt offering shall they kill
the trespass offering: and the blood thereof shall he sprinkle round
about upon the altar.

7:3 And he shall offer of it all the fat thereof; the rump, and the
fat that covereth the inwards, 7:4 And the two kidneys, and the fat
that is on them, which is by the flanks, and the caul that is above
the liver, with the kidneys, it shall he take away: 7:5 And the priest
shall burn them upon the altar for an offering made by fire unto the
LORD: it is a trespass offering.

7:6 Every male among the priests shall eat thereof: it shall be eaten
in the holy place: it is most holy.

7:7 As the sin offering is, so is the trespass offering: there is one
law for them: the priest that maketh atonement therewith shall have
it.

7:8 And the priest that offereth any man's burnt offering, even the
priest shall have to himself the skin of the burnt offering which he
hath offered.

7:9 And all the meat offering that is baken in the oven, and all that
is dressed in the fryingpan, and in the pan, shall be the priest's
that offereth it.

7:10 And every meat offering, mingled with oil, and dry, shall all the
sons of Aaron have, one as much as another.

7:11 And this is the law of the sacrifice of peace offerings, which he
shall offer unto the LORD.

7:12 If he offer it for a thanksgiving, then he shall offer with the
sacrifice of thanksgiving unleavened cakes mingled with oil, and
unleavened wafers anointed with oil, and cakes mingled with oil, of
fine flour, fried.

7:13 Besides the cakes, he shall offer for his offering leavened bread
with the sacrifice of thanksgiving of his peace offerings.

7:14 And of it he shall offer one out of the whole oblation for an
heave offering unto the LORD, and it shall be the priest's that
sprinkleth the blood of the peace offerings.

7:15 And the flesh of the sacrifice of his peace offerings for
thanksgiving shall be eaten the same day that it is offered; he shall
not leave any of it until the morning.

7:16 But if the sacrifice of his offering be a vow, or a voluntary
offering, it shall be eaten the same day that he offereth his
sacrifice: and on the morrow also the remainder of it shall be eaten:
7:17 But the remainder of the flesh of the sacrifice on the third day
shall be burnt with fire.

7:18 And if any of the flesh of the sacrifice of his peace offerings
be eaten at all on the third day, it shall not be accepted, neither
shall it be imputed unto him that offereth it: it shall be an
abomination, and the soul that eateth of it shall bear his iniquity.

7:19 And the flesh that toucheth any unclean thing shall not be eaten;
it shall be burnt with fire: and as for the flesh, all that be clean
shall eat thereof.

7:20 But the soul that eateth of the flesh of the sacrifice of peace
offerings, that pertain unto the LORD, having his uncleanness upon
him, even that soul shall be cut off from his people.

7:21 Moreover the soul that shall touch any unclean thing, as the
uncleanness of man, or any unclean beast, or any abominable unclean
thing, and eat of the flesh of the sacrifice of peace offerings, which
pertain unto the LORD, even that soul shall be cut off from his
people.

7:22 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 7:23 Speak unto the
children of Israel, saying, Ye shall eat no manner of fat, of ox, or
of sheep, or of goat.

7:24 And the fat of the beast that dieth of itself, and the fat of
that which is torn with beasts, may be used in any other use: but ye
shall in no wise eat of it.

7:25 For whosoever eateth the fat of the beast, of which men offer an
offering made by fire unto the LORD, even the soul that eateth it
shall be cut off from his people.

7:26 Moreover ye shall eat no manner of blood, whether it be of fowl
or of beast, in any of your dwellings.

7:27 Whatsoever soul it be that eateth any manner of blood, even that
soul shall be cut off from his people.

7:28 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 7:29 Speak unto the
children of Israel, saying, He that offereth the sacrifice of his
peace offerings unto the LORD shall bring his oblation unto the LORD
of the sacrifice of his peace offerings.

7:30 His own hands shall bring the offerings of the LORD made by fire,
the fat with the breast, it shall he bring, that the breast may be
waved for a wave offering before the LORD.

7:31 And the priest shall burn the fat upon the altar: but the breast
shall be Aaron's and his sons'.

7:32 And the right shoulder shall ye give unto the priest for an heave
offering of the sacrifices of your peace offerings.

7:33 He among the sons of Aaron, that offereth the blood of the peace
offerings, and the fat, shall have the right shoulder for his part.

7:34 For the wave breast and the heave shoulder have I taken of the
children of Israel from off the sacrifices of their peace offerings,
and have given them unto Aaron the priest and unto his sons by a
statute for ever from among the children of Israel.

7:35 This is the portion of the anointing of Aaron, and of the
anointing of his sons, out of the offerings of the LORD made by fire,
in the day when he presented them to minister unto the LORD in the
priest's office; 7:36 Which the LORD commanded to be given them of the
children of Israel, in the day that he anointed them, by a statute for
ever throughout their generations.

7:37 This is the law of the burnt offering, of the meat offering, and
of the sin offering, and of the trespass offering, and of the
consecrations, and of the sacrifice of the peace offerings; 7:38 Which
the LORD commanded Moses in mount Sinai, in the day that he commanded
the children of Israel to offer their oblations unto the LORD, in the
wilderness of Sinai.

8:1 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 8:2 Take Aaron and his sons
with him, and the garments, and the anointing oil, and a bullock for
the sin offering, and two rams, and a basket of unleavened bread; 8:3
And gather thou all the congregation together unto the door of the
tabernacle of the congregation.

8:4 And Moses did as the LORD commanded him; and the assembly was
gathered together unto the door of the tabernacle of the congregation.

8:5 And Moses said unto the congregation, This is the thing which the
LORD commanded to be done.

8:6 And Moses brought Aaron and his sons, and washed them with water.

8:7 And he put upon him the coat, and girded him with the girdle, and
clothed him with the robe, and put the ephod upon him, and he girded
him with the curious girdle of the ephod, and bound it unto him
therewith.

8:8 And he put the breastplate upon him: also he put in the
breastplate the Urim and the Thummim.

8:9 And he put the mitre upon his head; also upon the mitre, even upon
his forefront, did he put the golden plate, the holy crown; as the
LORD commanded Moses.

8:10 And Moses took the anointing oil, and anointed the tabernacle and
all that was therein, and sanctified them.

8:11 And he sprinkled thereof upon the altar seven times, and anointed
the altar and all his vessels, both the laver and his foot, to
sanctify them.

8:12 And he poured of the anointing oil upon Aaron's head, and
anointed him, to sanctify him.

8:13 And Moses brought Aaron's sons, and put coats upon them, and
girded them with girdles, and put bonnets upon them; as the LORD
commanded Moses.

8:14 And he brought the bullock for the sin offering: and Aaron and
his sons laid their hands upon the head of the bullock for the sin
offering.

8:15 And he slew it; and Moses took the blood, and put it upon the
horns of the altar round about with his finger, and purified the
altar, and poured the blood at the bottom of the altar, and sanctified
it, to make reconciliation upon it.

8:16 And he took all the fat that was upon the inwards, and the caul
above the liver, and the two kidneys, and their fat, and Moses burned
it upon the altar.

8:17 But the bullock, and his hide, his flesh, and his dung, he burnt
with fire without the camp; as the LORD commanded Moses.

8:18 And he brought the ram for the burnt offering: and Aaron and his
sons laid their hands upon the head of the ram.

8:19 And he killed it; and Moses sprinkled the blood upon the altar
round about.

8:20 And he cut the ram into pieces; and Moses burnt the head, and the
pieces, and the fat.

8:21 And he washed the inwards and the legs in water; and Moses burnt
the whole ram upon the altar: it was a burnt sacrifice for a sweet
savour, and an offering made by fire unto the LORD; as the LORD
commanded Moses.

8:22 And he brought the other ram, the ram of consecration: and Aaron
and his sons laid their hands upon the head of the ram.

8:23 And he slew it; and Moses took of the blood of it, and put it
upon the tip of Aaron's right ear, and upon the thumb of his right
hand, and upon the great toe of his right foot.

8:24 And he brought Aaron's sons, and Moses put of the blood upon the
tip of their right ear, and upon the thumbs of their right hands, and
upon the great toes of their right feet: and Moses sprinkled the blood
upon the altar round about.

8:25 And he took the fat, and the rump, and all the fat that was upon
the inwards, and the caul above the liver, and the two kidneys, and
their fat, and the right shoulder: 8:26 And out of the basket of
unleavened bread, that was before the LORD, he took one unleavened
cake, and a cake of oiled bread, and one wafer, and put them on the
fat, and upon the right shoulder: 8:27 And he put all upon Aaron's
hands, and upon his sons' hands, and waved them for a wave offering
before the LORD.

8:28 And Moses took them from off their hands, and burnt them on the
altar upon the burnt offering: they were consecrations for a sweet
savour: it is an offering made by fire unto the LORD.

8:29 And Moses took the breast, and waved it for a wave offering
before the LORD: for of the ram of consecration it was Moses' part; as
the LORD commanded Moses.

8:30 And Moses took of the anointing oil, and of the blood which was
upon the altar, and sprinkled it upon Aaron, and upon his garments,
and upon his sons, and upon his sons' garments with him; and
sanctified Aaron, and his garments, and his sons, and his sons'
garments with him.

8:31 And Moses said unto Aaron and to his sons, Boil the flesh at the
door of the tabernacle of the congregation: and there eat it with the
bread that is in the basket of consecrations, as I commanded, saying,
Aaron and his sons shall eat it.

8:32 And that which remaineth of the flesh and of the bread shall ye
burn with fire.

8:33 And ye shall not go out of the door of the tabernacle of the
congregation in seven days, until the days of your consecration be at
an end: for seven days shall he consecrate you.

8:34 As he hath done this day, so the LORD hath commanded to do, to
make an atonement for you.

8:35 Therefore shall ye abide at the door of the tabernacle of the
congregation day and night seven days, and keep the charge of the
LORD, that ye die not: for so I am commanded.

8:36 So Aaron and his sons did all things which the LORD commanded by
the hand of Moses.

9:1 And it came to pass on the eighth day, that Moses called Aaron and
his sons, and the elders of Israel; 9:2 And he said unto Aaron, Take
thee a young calf for a sin offering, and a ram for a burnt offering,
without blemish, and offer them before the LORD.

9:3 And unto the children of Israel thou shalt speak, saying, Take ye
a kid of the goats for a sin offering; and a calf and a lamb, both of
the first year, without blemish, for a burnt offering; 9:4 Also a
bullock and a ram for peace offerings, to sacrifice before the LORD;
and a meat offering mingled with oil: for to day the LORD will appear
unto you.

9:5 And they brought that which Moses commanded before the tabernacle
of the congregation: and all the congregation drew near and stood
before the LORD.

9:6 And Moses said, This is the thing which the LORD commanded that ye
should do: and the glory of the LORD shall appear unto you.

9:7 And Moses said unto Aaron, Go unto the altar, and offer thy sin
offering, and thy burnt offering, and make an atonement for thyself,
and for the people: and offer the offering of the people, and make an
atonement for them; as the LORD commanded.

9:8 Aaron therefore went unto the altar, and slew the calf of the sin
offering, which was for himself.

9:9 And the sons of Aaron brought the blood unto him: and he dipped
his finger in the blood, and put it upon the horns of the altar, and
poured out the blood at the bottom of the altar: 9:10 But the fat, and
the kidneys, and the caul above the liver of the sin offering, he
burnt upon the altar; as the LORD commanded Moses.

9:11 And the flesh and the hide he burnt with fire without the camp.

9:12 And he slew the burnt offering; and Aaron's sons presented unto
him the blood, which he sprinkled round about upon the altar.

9:13 And they presented the burnt offering unto him, with the pieces
thereof, and the head: and he burnt them upon the altar.

9:14 And he did wash the inwards and the legs, and burnt them upon the
burnt offering on the altar.

9:15 And he brought the people's offering, and took the goat, which
was the sin offering for the people, and slew it, and offered it for
sin, as the first.

9:16 And he brought the burnt offering, and offered it according to
the manner.

9:17 And he brought the meat offering, and took an handful thereof,
and burnt it upon the altar, beside the burnt sacrifice of the
morning.

9:18 He slew also the bullock and the ram for a sacrifice of peace
offerings, which was for the people: and Aaron's sons presented unto
him the blood, which he sprinkled upon the altar round about, 9:19 And
the fat of the bullock and of the ram, the rump, and that which
covereth the inwards, and the kidneys, and the caul above the liver:
9:20 And they put the fat upon the breasts, and he burnt the fat upon
the altar: 9:21 And the breasts and the right shoulder Aaron waved for
a wave offering before the LORD; as Moses commanded.

9:22 And Aaron lifted up his hand toward the people, and blessed them,
and came down from offering of the sin offering, and the burnt
offering, and peace offerings.

9:23 And Moses and Aaron went into the tabernacle of the congregation,
and came out, and blessed the people: and the glory of the LORD
appeared unto all the people.

9:24 And there came a fire out from before the LORD, and consumed upon
the altar the burnt offering and the fat: which when all the people
saw, they shouted, and fell on their faces.

10:1 And Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, took either of them his
censer, and put fire therein, and put incense thereon, and offered
strange fire before the LORD, which he commanded them not.

10:2 And there went out fire from the LORD, and devoured them, and
they died before the LORD.

10:3 Then Moses said unto Aaron, This is it that the LORD spake,
saying, I will be sanctified in them that come nigh me, and before all
the people I will be glorified. And Aaron held his peace.

10:4 And Moses called Mishael and Elzaphan, the sons of Uzziel the
uncle of Aaron, and said unto them, Come near, carry your brethren
from before the sanctuary out of the camp.

10:5 So they went near, and carried them in their coats out of the
camp; as Moses had said.

10:6 And Moses said unto Aaron, and unto Eleazar and unto Ithamar, his
sons, Uncover not your heads, neither rend your clothes; lest ye die,
and lest wrath come upon all the people: but let your brethren, the
whole house of Israel, bewail the burning which the LORD hath kindled.

10:7 And ye shall not go out from the door of the tabernacle of the
congregation, lest ye die: for the anointing oil of the LORD is upon
you. And they did according to the word of Moses.

10:8 And the LORD spake unto Aaron, saying, 10:9 Do not drink wine nor
strong drink, thou, nor thy sons with thee, when ye go into the
tabernacle of the congregation, lest ye die: it shall be a statute for
ever throughout your generations: 10:10 And that ye may put difference
between holy and unholy, and between unclean and clean; 10:11 And that
ye may teach the children of Israel all the statutes which the LORD
hath spoken unto them by the hand of Moses.

10:12 And Moses spake unto Aaron, and unto Eleazar and unto Ithamar,
his sons that were left, Take the meat offering that remaineth of the
offerings of the LORD made by fire, and eat it without leaven beside
the altar: for it is most holy: 10:13 And ye shall eat it in the holy
place, because it is thy due, and thy sons' due, of the sacrifices of
the LORD made by fire: for so I am commanded.

10:14 And the wave breast and heave shoulder shall ye eat in a clean
place; thou, and thy sons, and thy daughters with thee: for they be
thy due, and thy sons' due, which are given out of the sacrifices of
peace offerings of the children of Israel.

10:15 The heave shoulder and the wave breast shall they bring with the
offerings made by fire of the fat, to wave it for a wave offering
before the LORD; and it shall be thine, and thy sons' with thee, by a
statute for ever; as the LORD hath commanded.

10:16 And Moses diligently sought the goat of the sin offering, and,
behold, it was burnt: and he was angry with Eleazar and Ithamar, the
sons of Aaron which were left alive, saying, 10:17 Wherefore have ye
not eaten the sin offering in the holy place, seeing it is most holy,
and God hath given it you to bear the iniquity of the congregation, to
make atonement for them before the LORD?  10:18 Behold, the blood of
it was not brought in within the holy place: ye should indeed have
eaten it in the holy place, as I commanded.

10:19 And Aaron said unto Moses, Behold, this day have they offered
their sin offering and their burnt offering before the LORD; and such
things have befallen me: and if I had eaten the sin offering to day,
should it have been accepted in the sight of the LORD?  10:20 And when
Moses heard that, he was content.

11:1 And the LORD spake unto Moses and to Aaron, saying unto them,
11:2 Speak unto the children of Israel, saying, These are the beasts
which ye shall eat among all the beasts that are on the earth.

11:3 Whatsoever parteth the hoof, and is clovenfooted, and cheweth the
cud, among the beasts, that shall ye eat.

11:4 Nevertheless these shall ye not eat of them that chew the cud, or
of them that divide the hoof: as the camel, because he cheweth the
cud, but divideth not the hoof; he is unclean unto you.

11:5 And the coney, because he cheweth the cud, but divideth not the
hoof; he is unclean unto you.

11:6 And the hare, because he cheweth the cud, but divideth not the
hoof; he is unclean unto you.

11:7 And the swine, though he divide the hoof, and be clovenfooted,
yet he cheweth not the cud; he is unclean to you.

11:8 Of their flesh shall ye not eat, and their carcase shall ye not
touch; they are unclean to you.

11:9 These shall ye eat of all that are in the waters: whatsoever hath
fins and scales in the waters, in the seas, and in the rivers, them
shall ye eat.

11:10 And all that have not fins and scales in the seas, and in the
rivers, of all that move in the waters, and of any living thing which
is in the waters, they shall be an abomination unto you: 11:11 They
shall be even an abomination unto you; ye shall not eat of their
flesh, but ye shall have their carcases in abomination.

11:12 Whatsoever hath no fins nor scales in the waters, that shall be
an abomination unto you.

11:13 And these are they which ye shall have in abomination among the
fowls; they shall not be eaten, they are an abomination: the eagle,
and the ossifrage, and the ospray, 11:14 And the vulture, and the kite
after his kind; 11:15 Every raven after his kind; 11:16 And the owl,
and the night hawk, and the cuckow, and the hawk after his kind, 11:17
And the little owl, and the cormorant, and the great owl, 11:18 And
the swan, and the pelican, and the gier eagle, 11:19 And the stork,
the heron after her kind, and the lapwing, and the bat.

11:20 All fowls that creep, going upon all four, shall be an
abomination unto you.

11:21 Yet these may ye eat of every flying creeping thing that goeth
upon all four, which have legs above their feet, to leap withal upon
the earth; 11:22 Even these of them ye may eat; the locust after his
kind, and the bald locust after his kind, and the beetle after his
kind, and the grasshopper after his kind.

11:23 But all other flying creeping things, which have four feet,
shall be an abomination unto you.

11:24 And for these ye shall be unclean: whosoever toucheth the
carcase of them shall be unclean until the even.

11:25 And whosoever beareth ought of the carcase of them shall wash
his clothes, and be unclean until the even.

11:26 The carcases of every beast which divideth the hoof, and is not
clovenfooted, nor cheweth the cud, are unclean unto you: every one
that toucheth them shall be unclean.

11:27 And whatsoever goeth upon his paws, among all manner of beasts
that go on all four, those are unclean unto you: whoso toucheth their
carcase shall be unclean until the even.

11:28 And he that beareth the carcase of them shall wash his clothes,
and be unclean until the even: they are unclean unto you.

11:29 These also shall be unclean unto you among the creeping things
that creep upon the earth; the weasel, and the mouse, and the tortoise
after his kind, 11:30 And the ferret, and the chameleon, and the
lizard, and the snail, and the mole.

11:31 These are unclean to you among all that creep: whosoever doth
touch them, when they be dead, shall be unclean until the even.

11:32 And upon whatsoever any of them, when they are dead, doth fall,
it shall be unclean; whether it be any vessel of wood, or raiment, or
skin, or sack, whatsoever vessel it be, wherein any work is done, it
must be put into water, and it shall be unclean until the even; so it
shall be cleansed.

11:33 And every earthen vessel, whereinto any of them falleth,
whatsoever is in it shall be unclean; and ye shall break it.

11:34 Of all meat which may be eaten, that on which such water cometh
shall be unclean: and all drink that may be drunk in every such vessel
shall be unclean.

11:35 And every thing whereupon any part of their carcase falleth
shall be unclean; whether it be oven, or ranges for pots, they shall
be broken down: for they are unclean and shall be unclean unto you.

11:36 Nevertheless a fountain or pit, wherein there is plenty of
water, shall be clean: but that which toucheth their carcase shall be
unclean.

11:37 And if any part of their carcase fall upon any sowing seed which
is to be sown, it shall be clean.

11:38 But if any water be put upon the seed, and any part of their
carcase fall thereon, it shall be unclean unto you.

11:39 And if any beast, of which ye may eat, die; he that toucheth the
carcase thereof shall be unclean until the even.

11:40 And he that eateth of the carcase of it shall wash his clothes,
and be unclean until the even: he also that beareth the carcase of it
shall wash his clothes, and be unclean until the even.

11:41 And every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth shall be
an abomination; it shall not be eaten.

11:42 Whatsoever goeth upon the belly, and whatsoever goeth upon all
four, or whatsoever hath more feet among all creeping things that
creep upon the earth, them ye shall not eat; for they are an
abomination.

11:43 Ye shall not make yourselves abominable with any creeping thing
that creepeth, neither shall ye make yourselves unclean with them,
that ye should be defiled thereby.

11:44 For I am the LORD your God: ye shall therefore sanctify
yourselves, and ye shall be holy; for I am holy: neither shall ye
defile yourselves with any manner of creeping thing that creepeth upon
the earth.

11:45 For I am the LORD that bringeth you up out of the land of Egypt,
to be your God: ye shall therefore be holy, for I am holy.

11:46 This is the law of the beasts, and of the fowl, and of every
living creature that moveth in the waters, and of every creature that
creepeth upon the earth: 11:47 To make a difference between the
unclean and the clean, and between the beast that may be eaten and the
beast that may not be eaten.

12:1 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 12:2 Speak unto the
children of Israel, saying, If a woman have conceived seed, and born a
man child: then she shall be unclean seven days; according to the days
of the separation for her infirmity shall she be unclean.

12:3 And in the eighth day the flesh of his foreskin shall be
circumcised.

12:4 And she shall then continue in the blood of her purifying three
and thirty days; she shall touch no hallowed thing, nor come into the
sanctuary, until the days of her purifying be fulfilled.

12:5 But if she bear a maid child, then she shall be unclean two
weeks, as in her separation: and she shall continue in the blood of
her purifying threescore and six days.

12:6 And when the days of her purifying are fulfilled, for a son, or
for a daughter, she shall bring a lamb of the first year for a burnt
offering, and a young pigeon, or a turtledove, for a sin offering,
unto the door of the tabernacle of the congregation, unto the priest:
12:7 Who shall offer it before the LORD, and make an atonement for
her; and she shall be cleansed from the issue of her blood. This is
the law for her that hath born a male or a female.

12:8 And if she be not able to bring a lamb, then she shall bring two
turtles, or two young pigeons; the one for the burnt offering, and the
other for a sin offering: and the priest shall make an atonement for
her, and she shall be clean.

13:1 And the LORD spake unto Moses and Aaron, saying, 13:2 When a man
shall have in the skin of his flesh a rising, a scab, or bright spot,
and it be in the skin of his flesh like the plague of leprosy; then he
shall be brought unto Aaron the priest, or unto one of his sons the
priests: 13:3 And the priest shall look on the plague in the skin of
the flesh: and when the hair in the plague is turned white, and the
plague in sight be deeper than the skin of his flesh, it is a plague
of leprosy: and the priest shall look on him, and pronounce him
unclean.

13:4 If the bright spot be white in the skin of his flesh, and in
sight be not deeper than the skin, and the hair thereof be not turned
white; then the priest shall shut up him that hath the plague seven
days: 13:5 And the priest shall look on him the seventh day: and,
behold, if the plague in his sight be at a stay, and the plague spread
not in the skin; then the priest shall shut him up seven days more:
13:6 And the priest shall look on him again the seventh day: and,
behold, if the plague be somewhat dark, and the plague spread not in
the skin, the priest shall pronounce him clean: it is but a scab: and
he shall wash his clothes, and be clean.

13:7 But if the scab spread much abroad in the skin, after that he
hath been seen of the priest for his cleansing, he shall be seen of
the priest again.

13:8 And if the priest see that, behold, the scab spreadeth in the
skin, then the priest shall pronounce him unclean: it is a leprosy.

13:9 When the plague of leprosy is in a man, then he shall be brought
unto the priest; 13:10 And the priest shall see him: and, behold, if
the rising be white in the skin, and it have turned the hair white,
and there be quick raw flesh in the rising; 13:11 It is an old leprosy
in the skin of his flesh, and the priest shall pronounce him unclean,
and shall not shut him up: for he is unclean.

13:12 And if a leprosy break out abroad in the skin, and the leprosy
cover all the skin of him that hath the plague from his head even to
his foot, wheresoever the priest looketh; 13:13 Then the priest shall
consider: and, behold, if the leprosy have covered all his flesh, he
shall pronounce him clean that hath the plague: it is all turned
white: he is clean.

13:14 But when raw flesh appeareth in him, he shall be unclean.

13:15 And the priest shall see the raw flesh, and pronounce him to be
unclean: for the raw flesh is unclean: it is a leprosy.

13:16 Or if the raw flesh turn again, and be changed unto white, he
shall come unto the priest; 13:17 And the priest shall see him: and,
behold, if the plague be turned into white; then the priest shall
pronounce him clean that hath the plague: he is clean.

13:18 The flesh also, in which, even in the skin thereof, was a boil,
and is healed, 13:19 And in the place of the boil there be a white
rising, or a bright spot, white, and somewhat reddish, and it be
shewed to the priest; 13:20 And if, when the priest seeth it, behold,
it be in sight lower than the skin, and the hair thereof be turned
white; the priest shall pronounce him unclean: it is a plague of
leprosy broken out of the boil.

13:21 But if the priest look on it, and, behold, there be no white
hairs therein, and if it be not lower than the skin, but be somewhat
dark; then the priest shall shut him up seven days: 13:22 And if it
spread much abroad in the skin, then the priest shall pronounce him
unclean: it is a plague.

13:23 But if the bright spot stay in his place, and spread not, it is
a burning boil; and the priest shall pronounce him clean.

13:24 Or if there be any flesh, in the skin whereof there is a hot
burning, and the quick flesh that burneth have a white bright spot,
somewhat reddish, or white; 13:25 Then the priest shall look upon it:
and, behold, if the hair in the bright spot be turned white, and it be
in sight deeper than the skin; it is a leprosy broken out of the
burning: wherefore the priest shall pronounce him unclean: it is the
plague of leprosy.

13:26 But if the priest look on it, and, behold, there be no white
hair in the bright spot, and it be no lower than the other skin, but
be somewhat dark; then the priest shall shut him up seven days: 13:27
And the priest shall look upon him the seventh day: and if it be
spread much abroad in the skin, then the priest shall pronounce him
unclean: it is the plague of leprosy.

13:28 And if the bright spot stay in his place, and spread not in the
skin, but it be somewhat dark; it is a rising of the burning, and the
priest shall pronounce him clean: for it is an inflammation of the
burning.

13:29 If a man or woman have a plague upon the head or the beard;
13:30 Then the priest shall see the plague: and, behold, if it be in
sight deeper than the skin; and there be in it a yellow thin hair;
then the priest shall pronounce him unclean: it is a dry scall, even a
leprosy upon the head or beard.

13:31 And if the priest look on the plague of the scall, and, behold,
it be not in sight deeper than the skin, and that there is no black
hair in it; then the priest shall shut up him that hath the plague of
the scall seven days: 13:32 And in the seventh day the priest shall
look on the plague: and, behold, if the scall spread not, and there be
in it no yellow hair, and the scall be not in sight deeper than the
skin; 13:33 He shall be shaven, but the scall shall he not shave; and
the priest shall shut up him that hath the scall seven days more:
13:34 And in the seventh day the priest shall look on the scall: and,
behold, if the scall be not spread in the skin, nor be in sight deeper
than the skin; then the priest shall pronounce him clean: and he shall
wash his clothes, and be clean.

13:35 But if the scall spread much in the skin after his cleansing;
13:36 Then the priest shall look on him: and, behold, if the scall be
spread in the skin, the priest shall not seek for yellow hair; he is
unclean.

13:37 But if the scall be in his sight at a stay, and that there is
black hair grown up therein; the scall is healed, he is clean: and the
priest shall pronounce him clean.

13:38 If a man also or a woman have in the skin of their flesh bright
spots, even white bright spots; 13:39 Then the priest shall look: and,
behold, if the bright spots in the skin of their flesh be darkish
white; it is a freckled spot that groweth in the skin; he is clean.

13:40 And the man whose hair is fallen off his head, he is bald; yet
is he clean.

13:41 And he that hath his hair fallen off from the part of his head
toward his face, he is forehead bald: yet is he clean.

13:42 And if there be in the bald head, or bald forehead, a white
reddish sore; it is a leprosy sprung up in his bald head, or his bald
forehead.

13:43 Then the priest shall look upon it: and, behold, if the rising
of the sore be white reddish in his bald head, or in his bald
forehead, as the leprosy appeareth in the skin of the flesh; 13:44 He
is a leprous man, he is unclean: the priest shall pronounce him
utterly unclean; his plague is in his head.

13:45 And the leper in whom the plague is, his clothes shall be rent,
and his head bare, and he shall put a covering upon his upper lip, and
shall cry, Unclean, unclean.

13:46 All the days wherein the plague shall be in him he shall be
defiled; he is unclean: he shall dwell alone; without the camp shall
his habitation be.

13:47 The garment also that the plague of leprosy is in, whether it be
a woollen garment, or a linen garment; 13:48 Whether it be in the
warp, or woof; of linen, or of woollen; whether in a skin, or in any
thing made of skin; 13:49 And if the plague be greenish or reddish in
the garment, or in the skin, either in the warp, or in the woof, or in
any thing of skin; it is a plague of leprosy, and shall be shewed unto
the priest: 13:50 And the priest shall look upon the plague, and shut
up it that hath the plague seven days: 13:51 And he shall look on the
plague on the seventh day: if the plague be spread in the garment,
either in the warp, or in the woof, or in a skin, or in any work that
is made of skin; the plague is a fretting leprosy; it is unclean.

13:52 He shall therefore burn that garment, whether warp or woof, in
woollen or in linen, or any thing of skin, wherein the plague is: for
it is a fretting leprosy; it shall be burnt in the fire.

13:53 And if the priest shall look, and, behold, the plague be not
spread in the garment, either in the warp, or in the woof, or in any
thing of skin; 13:54 Then the priest shall command that they wash the
thing wherein the plague is, and he shall shut it up seven days more:
13:55 And the priest shall look on the plague, after that it is
washed: and, behold, if the plague have not changed his colour, and
the plague be not spread; it is unclean; thou shalt burn it in the
fire; it is fret inward, whether it be bare within or without.

13:56 And if the priest look, and, behold, the plague be somewhat dark
after the washing of it; then he shall rend it out of the garment, or
out of the skin, or out of the warp, or out of the woof: 13:57 And if
it appear still in the garment, either in the warp, or in the woof, or
in any thing of skin; it is a spreading plague: thou shalt burn that
wherein the plague is with fire.

13:58 And the garment, either warp, or woof, or whatsoever thing of
skin it be, which thou shalt wash, if the plague be departed from
them, then it shall be washed the second time, and shall be clean.

13:59 This is the law of the plague of leprosy in a garment of woollen
or linen, either in the warp, or woof, or any thing of skins, to
pronounce it clean, or to pronounce it unclean.

14:1 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 14:2 This shall be the law
of the leper in the day of his cleansing: He shall be brought unto the
priest: 14:3 And the priest shall go forth out of the camp; and the
priest shall look, and, behold, if the plague of leprosy be healed in
the leper; 14:4 Then shall the priest command to take for him that is
to be cleansed two birds alive and clean, and cedar wood, and scarlet,
and hyssop: 14:5 And the priest shall command that one of the birds be
killed in an earthen vessel over running water: 14:6 As for the living
bird, he shall take it, and the cedar wood, and the scarlet, and the
hyssop, and shall dip them and the living bird in the blood of the
bird that was killed over the running water: 14:7 And he shall
sprinkle upon him that is to be cleansed from the leprosy seven times,
and shall pronounce him clean, and shall let the living bird loose
into the open field.

14:8 And he that is to be cleansed shall wash his clothes, and shave
off all his hair, and wash himself in water, that he may be clean: and
after that he shall come into the camp, and shall tarry abroad out of
his tent seven days.

14:9 But it shall be on the seventh day, that he shall shave all his
hair off his head and his beard and his eyebrows, even all his hair he
shall shave off: and he shall wash his clothes, also he shall wash his
flesh in water, and he shall be clean.

14:10 And on the eighth day he shall take two he lambs without
blemish, and one ewe lamb of the first year without blemish, and three
tenth deals of fine flour for a meat offering, mingled with oil, and
one log of oil.

14:11 And the priest that maketh him clean shall present the man that
is to be made clean, and those things, before the LORD, at the door of
the tabernacle of the congregation: 14:12 And the priest shall take
one he lamb, and offer him for a trespass offering, and the log of
oil, and wave them for a wave offering before the LORD: 14:13 And he
shall slay the lamb in the place where he shall kill the sin offering
and the burnt offering, in the holy place: for as the sin offering is
the priest's, so is the trespass offering: it is most holy: 14:14 And
the priest shall take some of the blood of the trespass offering, and
the priest shall put it upon the tip of the right ear of him that is
to be cleansed, and upon the thumb of his right hand, and upon the
great toe of his right foot: 14:15 And the priest shall take some of
the log of oil, and pour it into the palm of his own left hand: 14:16
And the priest shall dip his right finger in the oil that is in his
left hand, and shall sprinkle of the oil with his finger seven times
before the LORD: 14:17 And of the rest of the oil that is in his hand
shall the priest put upon the tip of the right ear of him that is to
be cleansed, and upon the thumb of his right hand, and upon the great
toe of his right foot, upon the blood of the trespass offering: 14:18
And the remnant of the oil that is in the priest's hand he shall pour
upon the head of him that is to be cleansed: and the priest shall make
an atonement for him before the LORD.

14:19 And the priest shall offer the sin offering, and make an
atonement for him that is to be cleansed from his uncleanness; and
afterward he shall kill the burnt offering: 14:20 And the priest shall
offer the burnt offering and the meat offering upon the altar: and the
priest shall make an atonement for him, and he shall be clean.

14:21 And if he be poor, and cannot get so much; then he shall take
one lamb for a trespass offering to be waved, to make an atonement for
him, and one tenth deal of fine flour mingled with oil for a meat
offering, and a log of oil; 14:22 And two turtledoves, or two young
pigeons, such as he is able to get; and the one shall be a sin
offering, and the other a burnt offering.

14:23 And he shall bring them on the eighth day for his cleansing unto
the priest, unto the door of the tabernacle of the congregation,
before the LORD.

14:24 And the priest shall take the lamb of the trespass offering, and
the log of oil, and the priest shall wave them for a wave offering
before the LORD: 14:25 And he shall kill the lamb of the trespass
offering, and the priest shall take some of the blood of the trespass
offering, and put it upon the tip of the right ear of him that is to
be cleansed, and upon the thumb of his right hand, and upon the great
toe of his right foot: 14:26 And the priest shall pour of the oil into
the palm of his own left hand: 14:27 And the priest shall sprinkle
with his right finger some of the oil that is in his left hand seven
times before the LORD: 14:28 And the priest shall put of the oil that
is in his hand upon the tip of the right ear of him that is to be
cleansed, and upon the thumb of his right hand, and upon the great toe
of his right foot, upon the place of the blood of the trespass
offering: 14:29 And the rest of the oil that is in the priest's hand
he shall put upon the head of him that is to be cleansed, to make an
atonement for him before the LORD.

14:30 And he shall offer the one of the turtledoves, or of the young
pigeons, such as he can get; 14:31 Even such as he is able to get, the
one for a sin offering, and the other for a burnt offering, with the
meat offering: and the priest shall make an atonement for him that is
to be cleansed before the LORD.

14:32 This is the law of him in whom is the plague of leprosy, whose
hand is not able to get that which pertaineth to his cleansing.

14:33 And the LORD spake unto Moses and unto Aaron, saying, 14:34 When
ye be come into the land of Canaan, which I give to you for a
possession, and I put the plague of leprosy in a house of the land of
your possession; 14:35 And he that owneth the house shall come and
tell the priest, saying, It seemeth to me there is as it were a plague
in the house: 14:36 Then the priest shall command that they empty the
house, before the priest go into it to see the plague, that all that
is in the house be not made unclean: and afterward the priest shall go
in to see the house: 14:37 And he shall look on the plague, and,
behold, if the plague be in the walls of the house with hollow
strakes, greenish or reddish, which in sight are lower than the wall;
14:38 Then the priest shall go out of the house to the door of the
house, and shut up the house seven days: 14:39 And the priest shall
come again the seventh day, and shall look: and, behold, if the plague
be spread in the walls of the house; 14:40 Then the priest shall
command that they take away the stones in which the plague is, and
they shall cast them into an unclean place without the city: 14:41 And
he shall cause the house to be scraped within round about, and they
shall pour out the dust that they scrape off without the city into an
unclean place: 14:42 And they shall take other stones, and put them in
the place of those stones; and he shall take other morter, and shall
plaister the house.

14:43 And if the plague come again, and break out in the house, after
that he hath taken away the stones, and after he hath scraped the
house, and after it is plaistered; 14:44 Then the priest shall come
and look, and, behold, if the plague be spread in the house, it is a
fretting leprosy in the house; it is unclean.

14:45 And he shall break down the house, the stones of it, and the
timber thereof, and all the morter of the house; and he shall carry
them forth out of the city into an unclean place.

14:46 Moreover he that goeth into the house all the while that it is
shut up shall be unclean until the even.

14:47 And he that lieth in the house shall wash his clothes; and he
that eateth in the house shall wash his clothes.

14:48 And if the priest shall come in, and look upon it, and, behold,
the plague hath not spread in the house, after the house was
plaistered: then the priest shall pronounce the house clean, because
the plague is healed.

14:49 And he shall take to cleanse the house two birds, and cedar
wood, and scarlet, and hyssop: 14:50 And he shall kill the one of the
birds in an earthen vessel over running water: 14:51 And he shall take
the cedar wood, and the hyssop, and the scarlet, and the living bird,
and dip them in the blood of the slain bird, and in the running water,
and sprinkle the house seven times: 14:52 And he shall cleanse the
house with the blood of the bird, and with the running water, and with
the living bird, and with the cedar wood, and with the hyssop, and
with the scarlet: 14:53 But he shall let go the living bird out of the
city into the open fields, and make an atonement for the house: and it
shall be clean.

14:54 This is the law for all manner of plague of leprosy, and scall,
14:55 And for the leprosy of a garment, and of a house, 14:56 And for
a rising, and for a scab, and for a bright spot: 14:57 To teach when
it is unclean, and when it is clean: this is the law of leprosy.

15:1 And the LORD spake unto Moses and to Aaron, saying, 15:2 Speak
unto the children of Israel, and say unto them, When any man hath a
running issue out of his flesh, because of his issue he is unclean.

15:3 And this shall be his uncleanness in his issue: whether his flesh
run with his issue, or his flesh be stopped from his issue, it is his
uncleanness.

15:4 Every bed, whereon he lieth that hath the issue, is unclean: and
every thing, whereon he sitteth, shall be unclean.

15:5 And whosoever toucheth his bed shall wash his clothes, and bathe
himself in water, and be unclean until the even.

15:6 And he that sitteth on any thing whereon he sat that hath the
issue shall wash his clothes, and bathe himself in water, and be
unclean until the even.

15:7 And he that toucheth the flesh of him that hath the issue shall
wash his clothes, and bathe himself in water, and be unclean until the
even.

15:8 And if he that hath the issue spit upon him that is clean; then
he shall wash his clothes, and bathe himself in water, and be unclean
until the even.

15:9 And what saddle soever he rideth upon that hath the issue shall
be unclean.

15:10 And whosoever toucheth any thing that was under him shall be
unclean until the even: and he that beareth any of those things shall
wash his clothes, and bathe himself in water, and be unclean until the
even.

15:11 And whomsoever he toucheth that hath the issue, and hath not
rinsed his hands in water, he shall wash his clothes, and bathe
himself in water, and be unclean until the even.

15:12 And the vessel of earth, that he toucheth which hath the issue,
shall be broken: and every vessel of wood shall be rinsed in water.

15:13 And when he that hath an issue is cleansed of his issue; then he
shall number to himself seven days for his cleansing, and wash his
clothes, and bathe his flesh in running water, and shall be clean.

15:14 And on the eighth day he shall take to him two turtledoves, or
two young pigeons, and come before the LORD unto the door of the
tabernacle of the congregation, and give them unto the priest: 15:15
And the priest shall offer them, the one for a sin offering, and the
other for a burnt offering; and the priest shall make an atonement for
him before the LORD for his issue.

15:16 And if any man's seed of copulation go out from him, then he
shall wash all his flesh in water, and be unclean until the even.

15:17 And every garment, and every skin, whereon is the seed of
copulation, shall be washed with water, and be unclean until the even.

15:18 The woman also with whom man shall lie with seed of copulation,
they shall both bathe themselves in water, and be unclean until the
even.

15:19 And if a woman have an issue, and her issue in her flesh be
blood, she shall be put apart seven days: and whosoever toucheth her
shall be unclean until the even.

15:20 And every thing that she lieth upon in her separation shall be
unclean: every thing also that she sitteth upon shall be unclean.

15:21 And whosoever toucheth her bed shall wash his clothes, and bathe
himself in water, and be unclean until the even.

15:22 And whosoever toucheth any thing that she sat upon shall wash
his clothes, and bathe himself in water, and be unclean until the
even.

15:23 And if it be on her bed, or on any thing whereon she sitteth,
when he toucheth it, he shall be unclean until the even.

15:24 And if any man lie with her at all, and her flowers be upon him,
he shall be unclean seven days; and all the bed whereon he lieth shall
be unclean.

15:25 And if a woman have an issue of her blood many days out of the
time of her separation, or if it run beyond the time of her
separation; all the days of the issue of her uncleanness shall be as
the days of her separation: she shall be unclean.

15:26 Every bed whereon she lieth all the days of her issue shall be
unto her as the bed of her separation: and whatsoever she sitteth upon
shall be unclean, as the uncleanness of her separation.

15:27 And whosoever toucheth those things shall be unclean, and shall
wash his clothes, and bathe himself in water, and be unclean until the
even.

15:28 But if she be cleansed of her issue, then she shall number to
herself seven days, and after that she shall be clean.

15:29 And on the eighth day she shall take unto her two turtles, or
two young pigeons, and bring them unto the priest, to the door of the
tabernacle of the congregation.

15:30 And the priest shall offer the one for a sin offering, and the
other for a burnt offering; and the priest shall make an atonement for
her before the LORD for the issue of her uncleanness.

15:31 Thus shall ye separate the children of Israel from their
uncleanness; that they die not in their uncleanness, when they defile
my tabernacle that is among them.

15:32 This is the law of him that hath an issue, and of him whose seed
goeth from him, and is defiled therewith; 15:33 And of her that is
sick of her flowers, and of him that hath an issue, of the man, and of
the woman, and of him that lieth with her that is unclean.

16:1 And the LORD spake unto Moses after the death of the two sons of
Aaron, when they offered before the LORD, and died; 16:2 And the LORD
said unto Moses, Speak unto Aaron thy brother, that he come not at all
times into the holy place within the vail before the mercy seat, which
is upon the ark; that he die not: for I will appear in the cloud upon
the mercy seat.

16:3 Thus shall Aaron come into the holy place: with a young bullock
for a sin offering, and a ram for a burnt offering.

16:4 He shall put on the holy linen coat, and he shall have the linen
breeches upon his flesh, and shall be girded with a linen girdle, and
with the linen mitre shall he be attired: these are holy garments;
therefore shall he wash his flesh in water, and so put them on.

16:5 And he shall take of the congregation of the children of Israel
two kids of the goats for a sin offering, and one ram for a burnt
offering.

16:6 And Aaron shall offer his bullock of the sin offering, which is
for himself, and make an atonement for himself, and for his house.

16:7 And he shall take the two goats, and present them before the LORD
at the door of the tabernacle of the congregation.

16:8 And Aaron shall cast lots upon the two goats; one lot for the
LORD, and the other lot for the scapegoat.

16:9 And Aaron shall bring the goat upon which the LORD's lot fell,
and offer him for a sin offering.

16:10 But the goat, on which the lot fell to be the scapegoat, shall
be presented alive before the LORD, to make an atonement with him, and
to let him go for a scapegoat into the wilderness.

16:11 And Aaron shall bring the bullock of the sin offering, which is
for himself, and shall make an atonement for himself, and for his
house, and shall kill the bullock of the sin offering which is for
himself: 16:12 And he shall take a censer full of burning coals of
fire from off the altar before the LORD, and his hands full of sweet
incense beaten small, and bring it within the vail: 16:13 And he shall
put the incense upon the fire before the LORD, that the cloud of the
incense may cover the mercy seat that is upon the testimony, that he
die not: 16:14 And he shall take of the blood of the bullock, and
sprinkle it with his finger upon the mercy seat eastward; and before
the mercy seat shall he sprinkle of the blood with his finger seven
times.

16:15 Then shall he kill the goat of the sin offering, that is for the
people, and bring his blood within the vail, and do with that blood as
he did with the blood of the bullock, and sprinkle it upon the mercy
seat, and before the mercy seat: 16:16 And he shall make an atonement
for the holy place, because of the uncleanness of the children of
Israel, and because of their transgressions in all their sins: and so
shall he do for the tabernacle of the congregation, that remaineth
among them in the midst of their uncleanness.

16:17 And there shall be no man in the tabernacle of the congregation
when he goeth in to make an atonement in the holy place, until he come
out, and have made an atonement for himself, and for his household,
and for all the congregation of Israel.

16:18 And he shall go out unto the altar that is before the LORD, and
make an atonement for it; and shall take of the blood of the bullock,
and of the blood of the goat, and put it upon the horns of the altar
round about.

16:19 And he shall sprinkle of the blood upon it with his finger seven
times, and cleanse it, and hallow it from the uncleanness of the
children of Israel.

16:20 And when he hath made an end of reconciling the holy place, and
the tabernacle of the congregation, and the altar, he shall bring the
live goat: 16:21 And Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of
the live goat, and confess over him all the iniquities of the children
of Israel, and all their transgressions in all their sins, putting
them upon the head of the goat, and shall send him away by the hand of
a fit man into the wilderness: 16:22 And the goat shall bear upon him
all their iniquities unto a land not inhabited: and he shall let go
the goat in the wilderness.

16:23 And Aaron shall come into the tabernacle of the congregation,
and shall put off the linen garments, which he put on when he went
into the holy place, and shall leave them there: 16:24 And he shall
wash his flesh with water in the holy place, and put on his garments,
and come forth, and offer his burnt offering, and the burnt offering
of the people, and make an atonement for himself, and for the people.

16:25 And the fat of the sin offering shall he burn upon the altar.

16:26 And he that let go the goat for the scapegoat shall wash his
clothes, and bathe his flesh in water, and afterward come into the
camp.

16:27 And the bullock for the sin offering, and the goat for the sin
offering, whose blood was brought in to make atonement in the holy
place, shall one carry forth without the camp; and they shall burn in
the fire their skins, and their flesh, and their dung.

16:28 And he that burneth them shall wash his clothes, and bathe his
flesh in water, and afterward he shall come into the camp.

16:29 And this shall be a statute for ever unto you: that in the
seventh month, on the tenth day of the month, ye shall afflict your
souls, and do no work at all, whether it be one of your own country,
or a stranger that sojourneth among you: 16:30 For on that day shall
the priest make an atonement for you, to cleanse you, that ye may be
clean from all your sins before the LORD.

16:31 It shall be a sabbath of rest unto you, and ye shall afflict
your souls, by a statute for ever.

16:32 And the priest, whom he shall anoint, and whom he shall
consecrate to minister in the priest's office in his father's stead,
shall make the atonement, and shall put on the linen clothes, even the
holy garments: 16:33 And he shall make an atonement for the holy
sanctuary, and he shall make an atonement for the tabernacle of the
congregation, and for the altar, and he shall make an atonement for
the priests, and for all the people of the congregation.

16:34 And this shall be an everlasting statute unto you, to make an
atonement for the children of Israel for all their sins once a year.
And he did as the LORD commanded Moses.

17:1 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 17:2 Speak unto Aaron, and
unto his sons, and unto all the children of Israel, and say unto them;
This is the thing which the LORD hath commanded, saying, 17:3 What man
soever there be of the house of Israel, that killeth an ox, or lamb,
or goat, in the camp, or that killeth it out of the camp, 17:4 And
bringeth it not unto the door of the tabernacle of the congregation,
to offer an offering unto the LORD before the tabernacle of the LORD;
blood shall be imputed unto that man; he hath shed blood; and that man
shall be cut off from among his people: 17:5 To the end that the
children of Israel may bring their sacrifices, which they offer in the
open field, even that they may bring them unto the LORD, unto the door
of the tabernacle of the congregation, unto the priest, and offer them
for peace offerings unto the LORD.

17:6 And the priest shall sprinkle the blood upon the altar of the
LORD at the door of the tabernacle of the congregation, and burn the
fat for a sweet savour unto the LORD.

17:7 And they shall no more offer their sacrifices unto devils, after
whom they have gone a whoring. This shall be a statute for ever unto
them throughout their generations.

17:8 And thou shalt say unto them, Whatsoever man there be of the
house of Israel, or of the strangers which sojourn among you, that
offereth a burnt offering or sacrifice, 17:9 And bringeth it not unto
the door of the tabernacle of the congregation, to offer it unto the
LORD; even that man shall be cut off from among his people.

17:10 And whatsoever man there be of the house of Israel, or of the
strangers that sojourn among you, that eateth any manner of blood; I
will even set my face against that soul that eateth blood, and will
cut him off from among his people.

17:11 For the life of the flesh is in the blood: and I have given it
to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls: for it is
the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul.

17:12 Therefore I said unto the children of Israel, No soul of you
shall eat blood, neither shall any stranger that sojourneth among you
eat blood.

17:13 And whatsoever man there be of the children of Israel, or of the
strangers that sojourn among you, which hunteth and catcheth any beast
or fowl that may be eaten; he shall even pour out the blood thereof,
and cover it with dust.

17:14 For it is the life of all flesh; the blood of it is for the life
thereof: therefore I said unto the children of Israel, Ye shall eat
the blood of no manner of flesh: for the life of all flesh is the
blood thereof: whosoever eateth it shall be cut off.

17:15 And every soul that eateth that which died of itself, or that
which was torn with beasts, whether it be one of your own country, or
a stranger, he shall both wash his clothes, and bathe himself in
water, and be unclean until the even: then shall he be clean.

17:16 But if he wash them not, nor bathe his flesh; then he shall bear
his iniquity.

18:1 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 18:2 Speak unto the
children of Israel, and say unto them, I am the LORD your God.

18:3 After the doings of the land of Egypt, wherein ye dwelt, shall ye
not do: and after the doings of the land of Canaan, whither I bring
you, shall ye not do: neither shall ye walk in their ordinances.

18:4 Ye shall do my judgments, and keep mine ordinances, to walk
therein: I am the LORD your God.

18:5 Ye shall therefore keep my statutes, and my judgments: which if a
man do, he shall live in them: I am the LORD.

18:6 None of you shall approach to any that is near of kin to him, to
uncover their nakedness: I am the LORD.

18:7 The nakedness of thy father, or the nakedness of thy mother,
shalt thou not uncover: she is thy mother; thou shalt not uncover her
nakedness.

18:8 The nakedness of thy father's wife shalt thou not uncover: it is
thy father's nakedness.

18:9 The nakedness of thy sister, the daughter of thy father, or
daughter of thy mother, whether she be born at home, or born abroad,
even their nakedness thou shalt not uncover.

18:10 The nakedness of thy son's daughter, or of thy daughter's
daughter, even their nakedness thou shalt not uncover: for theirs is
thine own nakedness.

18:11 The nakedness of thy father's wife's daughter, begotten of thy
father, she is thy sister, thou shalt not uncover her nakedness.

18:12 Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy father's sister: she
is thy father's near kinswoman.

18:13 Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy mother's sister: for
she is thy mother's near kinswoman.

18:14 Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy father's brother,
thou shalt not approach to his wife: she is thine aunt.

18:15 Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy daughter in law: she
is thy son's wife; thou shalt not uncover her nakedness.

18:16 Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy brother's wife: it
is thy brother's nakedness.

18:17 Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of a woman and her
daughter, neither shalt thou take her son's daughter, or her
daughter's daughter, to uncover her nakedness; for they are her near
kinswomen: it is wickedness.

18:18 Neither shalt thou take a wife to her sister, to vex her, to
uncover her nakedness, beside the other in her life time.

18:19 Also thou shalt not approach unto a woman to uncover her
nakedness, as long as she is put apart for her uncleanness.

18:20 Moreover thou shalt not lie carnally with thy neighbour's wife,
to defile thyself with her.

18:21 And thou shalt not let any of thy seed pass through the fire to
Molech, neither shalt thou profane the name of thy God: I am the LORD.

18:22 Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is
abomination.

18:23 Neither shalt thou lie with any beast to defile thyself
therewith: neither shall any woman stand before a beast to lie down
thereto: it is confusion.

18:24 Defile not ye yourselves in any of these things: for in all
these the nations are defiled which I cast out before you: 18:25 And
the land is defiled: therefore I do visit the iniquity thereof upon
it, and the land itself vomiteth out her inhabitants.

18:26 Ye shall therefore keep my statutes and my judgments, and shall
not commit any of these abominations; neither any of your own nation,
nor any stranger that sojourneth among you: 18:27 (For all these
abominations have the men of the land done, which were before you, and
the land is defiled;) 18:28 That the land spue not you out also, when
ye defile it, as it spued out the nations that were before you.

18:29 For whosoever shall commit any of these abominations, even the
souls that commit them shall be cut off from among their people.

18:30 Therefore shall ye keep mine ordinance, that ye commit not any
one of these abominable customs, which were committed before you, and
that ye defile not yourselves therein: I am the LORD your God.

19:1 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 19:2 Speak unto all the
congregation of the children of Israel, and say unto them, Ye shall be
holy: for I the LORD your God am holy.

19:3 Ye shall fear every man his mother, and his father, and keep my
sabbaths: I am the LORD your God.

19:4 Turn ye not unto idols, nor make to yourselves molten gods: I am
the LORD your God.

19:5 And if ye offer a sacrifice of peace offerings unto the LORD, ye
shall offer it at your own will.

19:6 It shall be eaten the same day ye offer it, and on the morrow:
and if ought remain until the third day, it shall be burnt in the
fire.

19:7 And if it be eaten at all on the third day, it is abominable; it
shall not be accepted.

19:8 Therefore every one that eateth it shall bear his iniquity,
because he hath profaned the hallowed thing of the LORD: and that soul
shall be cut off from among his people.

19:9 And when ye reap the harvest of your land, thou shalt not wholly
reap the corners of thy field, neither shalt thou gather the gleanings
of thy harvest.

19:10 And thou shalt not glean thy vineyard, neither shalt thou gather
every grape of thy vineyard; thou shalt leave them for the poor and
stranger: I am the LORD your God.

19:11 Ye shall not steal, neither deal falsely, neither lie one to
another.

19:12 And ye shall not swear by my name falsely, neither shalt thou
profane the name of thy God: I am the LORD.

19:13 Thou shalt not defraud thy neighbour, neither rob him: the wages
of him that is hired shall not abide with thee all night until the
morning.

19:14 Thou shalt not curse the deaf, nor put a stumblingblock before
the blind, but shalt fear thy God: I am the LORD.

19:15 Ye shall do no unrighteousness in judgment: thou shalt not
respect the person of the poor, nor honor the person of the mighty:
but in righteousness shalt thou judge thy neighbour.

19:16 Thou shalt not go up and down as a talebearer among thy people:
neither shalt thou stand against the blood of thy neighbour; I am the
LORD.

19:17 Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thine heart: thou shalt in
any wise rebuke thy neighbour, and not suffer sin upon him.

19:18 Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children
of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself: I am the
LORD.

19:19 Ye shall keep my statutes. Thou shalt not let thy cattle gender
with a diverse kind: thou shalt not sow thy field with mingled seed:
neither shall a garment mingled of linen and woollen come upon thee.

19:20 And whosoever lieth carnally with a woman, that is a bondmaid,
betrothed to an husband, and not at all redeemed, nor freedom given
her; she shall be scourged; they shall not be put to death, because
she was not free.

19:21 And he shall bring his trespass offering unto the LORD, unto the
door of the tabernacle of the congregation, even a ram for a trespass
offering.

19:22 And the priest shall make an atonement for him with the ram of
the trespass offering before the LORD for his sin which he hath done:
and the sin which he hath done shall be forgiven him.

19:23 And when ye shall come into the land, and shall have planted all
manner of trees for food, then ye shall count the fruit thereof as
uncircumcised: three years shall it be as uncircumcised unto you: it
shall not be eaten of.

19:24 But in the fourth year all the fruit thereof shall be holy to
praise the LORD withal.

19:25 And in the fifth year shall ye eat of the fruit thereof, that it
may yield unto you the increase thereof: I am the LORD your God.

19:26 Ye shall not eat any thing with the blood: neither shall ye use
enchantment, nor observe times.

19:27 Ye shall not round the corners of your heads, neither shalt thou
mar the corners of thy beard.

19:28 Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor
print any marks upon you: I am the LORD.

19:29 Do not prostitute thy daughter, to cause her to be a whore; lest
the land fall to whoredom, and the land become full of wickedness.

19:30 Ye shall keep my sabbaths, and reverence my sanctuary: I am the
LORD.

19:31 Regard not them that have familiar spirits, neither seek after
wizards, to be defiled by them: I am the LORD your God.

19:32 Thou shalt rise up before the hoary head, and honour the face of
the old man, and fear thy God: I am the LORD.

19:33 And if a stranger sojourn with thee in your land, ye shall not
vex him.

19:34 But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one
born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were
strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God.

19:35 Ye shall do no unrighteousness in judgment, in meteyard, in
weight, or in measure.

19:36 Just balances, just weights, a just ephah, and a just hin, shall
ye have: I am the LORD your God, which brought you out of the land of
Egypt.

19:37 Therefore shall ye observe all my statutes, and all my
judgments, and do them: I am the LORD.

20:1 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 20:2 Again, thou shalt say
to the children of Israel, Whosoever he be of the children of Israel,
or of the strangers that sojourn in Israel, that giveth any of his
seed unto Molech; he shall surely be put to death: the people of the
land shall stone him with stones.

20:3 And I will set my face against that man, and will cut him off
from among his people; because he hath given of his seed unto Molech,
to defile my sanctuary, and to profane my holy name.

20:4 And if the people of the land do any ways hide their eyes from
the man, when he giveth of his seed unto Molech, and kill him not:
20:5 Then I will set my face against that man, and against his family,
and will cut him off, and all that go a whoring after him, to commit
whoredom with Molech, from among their people.

20:6 And the soul that turneth after such as have familiar spirits,
and after wizards, to go a whoring after them, I will even set my face
against that soul, and will cut him off from among his people.

20:7 Sanctify yourselves therefore, and be ye holy: for I am the LORD
your God.

20:8 And ye shall keep my statutes, and do them: I am the LORD which
sanctify you.

20:9 For every one that curseth his father or his mother shall be
surely put to death: he hath cursed his father or his mother; his
blood shall be upon him.

20:10 And the man that committeth adultery with another man's wife,
even he that committeth adultery with his neighbour's wife, the
adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death.

20:11 And the man that lieth with his father's wife hath uncovered his
father's nakedness: both of them shall surely be put to death; their
blood shall be upon them.

20:12 And if a man lie with his daughter in law, both of them shall
surely be put to death: they have wrought confusion; their blood shall
be upon them.

20:13 If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both
of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to
death; their blood shall be upon them.

20:14 And if a man take a wife and her mother, it is wickedness: they
shall be burnt with fire, both he and they; that there be no
wickedness among you.

20:15 And if a man lie with a beast, he shall surely be put to death:
and ye shall slay the beast.

20:16 And if a woman approach unto any beast, and lie down thereto,
thou shalt kill the woman, and the beast: they shall surely be put to
death; their blood shall be upon them.

20:17 And if a man shall take his sister, his father's daughter, or
his mother's daughter, and see her nakedness, and she see his
nakedness; it is a wicked thing; and they shall be cut off in the
sight of their people: he hath uncovered his sister's nakedness; he
shall bear his iniquity.

20:18 And if a man shall lie with a woman having her sickness, and
shall uncover her nakedness; he hath discovered her fountain, and she
hath uncovered the fountain of her blood: and both of them shall be
cut off from among their people.

20:19 And thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy mother's sister,
nor of thy father's sister: for he uncovereth his near kin: they shall
bear their iniquity.

20:20 And if a man shall lie with his uncle's wife, he hath uncovered
his uncle's nakedness: they shall bear their sin; they shall die
childless.

20:21 And if a man shall take his brother's wife, it is an unclean
thing: he hath uncovered his brother's nakedness; they shall be
childless.

20:22 Ye shall therefore keep all my statutes, and all my judgments,
and do them: that the land, whither I bring you to dwell therein, spue
you not out.

20:23 And ye shall not walk in the manners of the nation, which I cast
out before you: for they committed all these things, and therefore I
abhorred them.

20:24 But I have said unto you, Ye shall inherit their land, and I
will give it unto you to possess it, a land that floweth with milk and
honey: I am the LORD your God, which have separated you from other
people.

20:25 Ye shall therefore put difference between clean beasts and
unclean, and between unclean fowls and clean: and ye shall not make
your souls abominable by beast, or by fowl, or by any manner of living
thing that creepeth on the ground, which I have separated from you as
unclean.

20:26 And ye shall be holy unto me: for I the LORD am holy, and have
severed you from other people, that ye should be mine.

20:27 A man also or woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a
wizard, shall surely be put to death: they shall stone them with
stones: their blood shall be upon them.

21:1 And the LORD said unto Moses, Speak unto the priests the sons of
Aaron, and say unto them, There shall none be defiled for the dead
among his people: 21:2 But for his kin, that is near unto him, that
is, for his mother, and for his father, and for his son, and for his
daughter, and for his brother.

21:3 And for his sister a virgin, that is nigh unto him, which hath
had no husband; for her may he be defiled.

21:4 But he shall not defile himself, being a chief man among his
people, to profane himself.

21:5 They shall not make baldness upon their head, neither shall they
shave off the corner of their beard, nor make any cuttings in their
flesh.

21:6 They shall be holy unto their God, and not profane the name of
their God: for the offerings of the LORD made by fire, and the bread
of their God, they do offer: therefore they shall be holy.

21:7 They shall not take a wife that is a whore, or profane; neither
shall they take a woman put away from her husband: for he is holy unto
his God.

21:8 Thou shalt sanctify him therefore; for he offereth the bread of
thy God: he shall be holy unto thee: for I the LORD, which sanctify
you, am holy.

21:9 And the daughter of any priest, if she profane herself by playing
the whore, she profaneth her father: she shall be burnt with fire.

21:10 And he that is the high priest among his brethren, upon whose
head the anointing oil was poured, and that is consecrated to put on
the garments, shall not uncover his head, nor rend his clothes; 21:11
Neither shall he go in to any dead body, nor defile himself for his
father, or for his mother; 21:12 Neither shall he go out of the
sanctuary, nor profane the sanctuary of his God; for the crown of the
anointing oil of his God is upon him: I am the LORD.

21:13 And he shall take a wife in her virginity.

21:14 A widow, or a divorced woman, or profane, or an harlot, these
shall he not take: but he shall take a virgin of his own people to
wife.

21:15 Neither shall he profane his seed among his people: for I the
LORD do sanctify him.

21:16 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 21:17 Speak unto Aaron,
saying, Whosoever he be of thy seed in their generations that hath any
blemish, let him not approach to offer the bread of his God.

21:18 For whatsoever man he be that hath a blemish, he shall not
approach: a blind man, or a lame, or he that hath a flat nose, or any
thing superfluous, 21:19 Or a man that is brokenfooted, or
brokenhanded, 21:20 Or crookbackt, or a dwarf, or that hath a blemish
in his eye, or be scurvy, or scabbed, or hath his stones broken; 21:21
No man that hath a blemish of the seed of Aaron the priest shall come
nigh to offer the offerings of the LORD made by fire: he hath a
blemish; he shall not come nigh to offer the bread of his God.

21:22 He shall eat the bread of his God, both of the most holy, and of
the holy.

21:23 Only he shall not go in unto the vail, nor come nigh unto the
altar, because he hath a blemish; that he profane not my sanctuaries:
for I the LORD do sanctify them.

21:24 And Moses told it unto Aaron, and to his sons, and unto all the
children of Israel.

22:1 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 22:2 Speak unto Aaron and
to his sons, that they separate themselves from the holy things of the
children of Israel, and that they profane not my holy name in those
things which they hallow unto me: I am the LORD.

22:3 Say unto them, Whosoever he be of all your seed among your
generations, that goeth unto the holy things, which the children of
Israel hallow unto the LORD, having his uncleanness upon him, that
soul shall be cut off from my presence: I am the LORD.

22:4 What man soever of the seed of Aaron is a leper, or hath a
running issue; he shall not eat of the holy things, until he be clean.
And whoso toucheth any thing that is unclean by the dead, or a man
whose seed goeth from him; 22:5 Or whosoever toucheth any creeping
thing, whereby he may be made unclean, or a man of whom he may take
uncleanness, whatsoever uncleanness he hath; 22:6 The soul which hath
touched any such shall be unclean until even, and shall not eat of the
holy things, unless he wash his flesh with water.

22:7 And when the sun is down, he shall be clean, and shall afterward
eat of the holy things; because it is his food.

22:8 That which dieth of itself, or is torn with beasts, he shall not
eat to defile himself therewith; I am the LORD.

22:9 They shall therefore keep mine ordinance, lest they bear sin for
it, and die therefore, if they profane it: I the LORD do sanctify
them.

22:10 There shall no stranger eat of the holy thing: a sojourner of
the priest, or an hired servant, shall not eat of the holy thing.

22:11 But if the priest buy any soul with his money, he shall eat of
it, and he that is born in his house: they shall eat of his meat.

22:12 If the priest's daughter also be married unto a stranger, she
may not eat of an offering of the holy things.

22:13 But if the priest's daughter be a widow, or divorced, and have
no child, and is returned unto her father's house, as in her youth,
she shall eat of her father's meat: but there shall be no stranger eat
thereof.

22:14 And if a man eat of the holy thing unwittingly, then he shall
put the fifth part thereof unto it, and shall give it unto the priest
with the holy thing.

22:15 And they shall not profane the holy things of the children of
Israel, which they offer unto the LORD; 22:16 Or suffer them to bear
the iniquity of trespass, when they eat their holy things: for I the
LORD do sanctify them.

22:17 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 22:18 Speak unto Aaron,
and to his sons, and unto all the children of Israel, and say unto
them, Whatsoever he be of the house of Israel, or of the strangers in
Israel, that will offer his oblation for all his vows, and for all his
freewill offerings, which they will offer unto the LORD for a burnt
offering; 22:19 Ye shall offer at your own will a male without
blemish, of the beeves, of the sheep, or of the goats.

22:20 But whatsoever hath a blemish, that shall ye not offer: for it
shall not be acceptable for you.

22:21 And whosoever offereth a sacrifice of peace offerings unto the
LORD to accomplish his vow, or a freewill offering in beeves or sheep,
it shall be perfect to be accepted; there shall be no blemish therein.

22:22 Blind, or broken, or maimed, or having a wen, or scurvy, or
scabbed, ye shall not offer these unto the LORD, nor make an offering
by fire of them upon the altar unto the LORD.

22:23 Either a bullock or a lamb that hath any thing superfluous or
lacking in his parts, that mayest thou offer for a freewill offering;
but for a vow it shall not be accepted.

22:24 Ye shall not offer unto the LORD that which is bruised, or
crushed, or broken, or cut; neither shall ye make any offering thereof
in your land.

22:25 Neither from a stranger's hand shall ye offer the bread of your
God of any of these; because their corruption is in them, and
blemishes be in them: they shall not be accepted for you.

22:26 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 22:27 When a bullock, or
a sheep, or a goat, is brought forth, then it shall be seven days
under the dam; and from the eighth day and thenceforth it shall be
accepted for an offering made by fire unto the LORD.

22:28 And whether it be cow, or ewe, ye shall not kill it and her
young both in one day.

22:29 And when ye will offer a sacrifice of thanksgiving unto the
LORD, offer it at your own will.

22:30 On the same day it shall be eaten up; ye shall leave none of it
until the morrow: I am the LORD.

22:31 Therefore shall ye keep my commandments, and do them: I am the
LORD.

22:32 Neither shall ye profane my holy name; but I will be hallowed
among the children of Israel: I am the LORD which hallow you, 22:33
That brought you out of the land of Egypt, to be your God: I am the
LORD.

23:1 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 23:2 Speak unto the
children of Israel, and say unto them, Concerning the feasts of the
LORD, which ye shall proclaim to be holy convocations, even these are
my feasts.

23:3 Six days shall work be done: but the seventh day is the sabbath
of rest, an holy convocation; ye shall do no work therein: it is the
sabbath of the LORD in all your dwellings.

23:4 These are the feasts of the LORD, even holy convocations, which
ye shall proclaim in their seasons.

23:5 In the fourteenth day of the first month at even is the LORD's
passover.

23:6 And on the fifteenth day of the same month is the feast of
unleavened bread unto the LORD: seven days ye must eat unleavened
bread.

23:7 In the first day ye shall have an holy convocation: ye shall do
no servile work therein.

23:8 But ye shall offer an offering made by fire unto the LORD seven
days: in the seventh day is an holy convocation: ye shall do no
servile work therein.

23:9 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 23:10 Speak unto the
children of Israel, and say unto them, When ye be come into the land
which I give unto you, and shall reap the harvest thereof, then ye
shall bring a sheaf of the firstfruits of your harvest unto the
priest: 23:11 And he shall wave the sheaf before the LORD, to be
accepted for you: on the morrow after the sabbath the priest shall
wave it.

23:12 And ye shall offer that day when ye wave the sheaf an he lamb
without blemish of the first year for a burnt offering unto the LORD.

23:13 And the meat offering thereof shall be two tenth deals of fine
flour mingled with oil, an offering made by fire unto the LORD for a
sweet savour: and the drink offering thereof shall be of wine, the
fourth part of an hin.

23:14 And ye shall eat neither bread, nor parched corn, nor green
ears, until the selfsame day that ye have brought an offering unto
your God: it shall be a statute for ever throughout your generations
in all your dwellings.

23:15 And ye shall count unto you from the morrow after the sabbath,
from the day that ye brought the sheaf of the wave offering; seven
sabbaths shall be complete: 23:16 Even unto the morrow after the
seventh sabbath shall ye number fifty days; and ye shall offer a new
meat offering unto the LORD.

23:17 Ye shall bring out of your habitations two wave loaves of two
tenth deals; they shall be of fine flour; they shall be baken with
leaven; they are the firstfruits unto the LORD.

23:18 And ye shall offer with the bread seven lambs without blemish of
the first year, and one young bullock, and two rams: they shall be for
a burnt offering unto the LORD, with their meat offering, and their
drink offerings, even an offering made by fire, of sweet savour unto
the LORD.

23:19 Then ye shall sacrifice one kid of the goats for a sin offering,
and two lambs of the first year for a sacrifice of peace offerings.

23:20 And the priest shall wave them with the bread of the firstfruits
for a wave offering before the LORD, with the two lambs: they shall be
holy to the LORD for the priest.

23:21 And ye shall proclaim on the selfsame day, that it may be an
holy convocation unto you: ye shall do no servile work therein: it
shall be a statute for ever in all your dwellings throughout your
generations.

23:22 And when ye reap the harvest of your land, thou shalt not make
clean riddance of the corners of thy field when thou reapest, neither
shalt thou gather any gleaning of thy harvest: thou shalt leave them
unto the poor, and to the stranger: I am the LORD your God.

23:23 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 23:24 Speak unto the
children of Israel, saying, In the seventh month, in the first day of
the month, shall ye have a sabbath, a memorial of blowing of trumpets,
an holy convocation.

23:25 Ye shall do no servile work therein: but ye shall offer an
offering made by fire unto the LORD.

23:26 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 23:27 Also on the tenth
day of this seventh month there shall be a day of atonement: it shall
be an holy convocation unto you; and ye shall afflict your souls, and
offer an offering made by fire unto the LORD.

23:28 And ye shall do no work in that same day: for it is a day of
atonement, to make an atonement for you before the LORD your God.

23:29 For whatsoever soul it be that shall not be afflicted in that
same day, he shall be cut off from among his people.

23:30 And whatsoever soul it be that doeth any work in that same day,
the same soul will I destroy from among his people.

23:31 Ye shall do no manner of work: it shall be a statute for ever
throughout your generations in all your dwellings.

23:32 It shall be unto you a sabbath of rest, and ye shall afflict
your souls: in the ninth day of the month at even, from even unto
even, shall ye celebrate your sabbath.

23:33 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 23:34 Speak unto the
children of Israel, saying, The fifteenth day of this seventh month
shall be the feast of tabernacles for seven days unto the LORD.

23:35 On the first day shall be an holy convocation: ye shall do no
servile work therein.

23:36 Seven days ye shall offer an offering made by fire unto the
LORD: on the eighth day shall be an holy convocation unto you; and ye
shall offer an offering made by fire unto the LORD: it is a solemn
assembly; and ye shall do no servile work therein.

23:37 These are the feasts of the LORD, which ye shall proclaim to be
holy convocations, to offer an offering made by fire unto the LORD, a
burnt offering, and a meat offering, a sacrifice, and drink offerings,
every thing upon his day: 23:38 Beside the sabbaths of the LORD, and
beside your gifts, and beside all your vows, and beside all your
freewill offerings, which ye give unto the LORD.

23:39 Also in the fifteenth day of the seventh month, when ye have
gathered in the fruit of the land, ye shall keep a feast unto the LORD
seven days: on the first day shall be a sabbath, and on the eighth day
shall be a sabbath.

23:40 And ye shall take you on the first day the boughs of goodly
trees, branches of palm trees, and the boughs of thick trees, and
willows of the brook; and ye shall rejoice before the LORD your God
seven days.

23:41 And ye shall keep it a feast unto the LORD seven days in the
year.

It shall be a statute for ever in your generations: ye shall celebrate
it in the seventh month.

23:42 Ye shall dwell in booths seven days; all that are Israelites
born shall dwell in booths: 23:43 That your generations may know that
I made the children of Israel to dwell in booths, when I brought them
out of the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God.

23:44 And Moses declared unto the children of Israel the feasts of the
LORD.

24:1 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 24:2 Command the children
of Israel, that they bring unto thee pure oil olive beaten for the
light, to cause the lamps to burn continually.

24:3 Without the vail of the testimony, in the tabernacle of the
congregation, shall Aaron order it from the evening unto the morning
before the LORD continually: it shall be a statute for ever in your
generations.

24:4 He shall order the lamps upon the pure candlestick before the
LORD continually.

24:5 And thou shalt take fine flour, and bake twelve cakes thereof:
two tenth deals shall be in one cake.

24:6 And thou shalt set them in two rows, six on a row, upon the pure
table before the LORD.

24:7 And thou shalt put pure frankincense upon each row, that it may
be on the bread for a memorial, even an offering made by fire unto the
LORD.

24:8 Every sabbath he shall set it in order before the LORD
continually, being taken from the children of Israel by an everlasting
covenant.

24:9 And it shall be Aaron's and his sons'; and they shall eat it in
the holy place: for it is most holy unto him of the offerings of the
LORD made by fire by a perpetual statute.

24:10 And the son of an Israelitish woman, whose father was an
Egyptian, went out among the children of Israel: and this son of the
Israelitish woman and a man of Israel strove together in the camp;
24:11 And the Israelitish woman's son blasphemed the name of the Lord,
and cursed. And they brought him unto Moses: (and his mother's name
was Shelomith, the daughter of Dibri, of the tribe of Dan:) 24:12 And
they put him in ward, that the mind of the LORD might be shewed them.

24:13 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 24:14 Bring forth him
that hath cursed without the camp; and let all that heard him lay
their hands upon his head, and let all the congregation stone him.

24:15 And thou shalt speak unto the children of Israel, saying,
Whosoever curseth his God shall bear his sin.

24:16 And he that blasphemeth the name of the LORD, he shall surely be
put to death, and all the congregation shall certainly stone him: as
well the stranger, as he that is born in the land, when he blasphemeth
the name of the Lord, shall be put to death.

24:17 And he that killeth any man shall surely be put to death.

24:18 And he that killeth a beast shall make it good; beast for beast.

24:19 And if a man cause a blemish in his neighbour; as he hath done,
so shall it be done to him; 24:20 Breach for breach, eye for eye,
tooth for tooth: as he hath caused a blemish in a man, so shall it be
done to him again.

24:21 And he that killeth a beast, he shall restore it: and he that
killeth a man, he shall be put to death.

24:22 Ye shall have one manner of law, as well for the stranger, as
for one of your own country: for I am the LORD your God.

24:23 And Moses spake to the children of Israel, that they should
bring forth him that had cursed out of the camp, and stone him with
stones. And the children of Israel did as the LORD commanded Moses.

25:1 And the LORD spake unto Moses in mount Sinai, saying, 25:2 Speak
unto the children of Israel, and say unto them, When ye come into the
land which I give you, then shall the land keep a sabbath unto the
LORD.

25:3 Six years thou shalt sow thy field, and six years thou shalt
prune thy vineyard, and gather in the fruit thereof; 25:4 But in the
seventh year shall be a sabbath of rest unto the land, a sabbath for
the LORD: thou shalt neither sow thy field, nor prune thy vineyard.

25:5 That which groweth of its own accord of thy harvest thou shalt
not reap, neither gather the grapes of thy vine undressed: for it is a
year of rest unto the land.

25:6 And the sabbath of the land shall be meat for you; for thee, and
for thy servant, and for thy maid, and for thy hired servant, and for
thy stranger that sojourneth with thee.

25:7 And for thy cattle, and for the beast that are in thy land, shall
all the increase thereof be meat.

25:8 And thou shalt number seven sabbaths of years unto thee, seven
times seven years; and the space of the seven sabbaths of years shall
be unto thee forty and nine years.

25:9 Then shalt thou cause the trumpet of the jubile to sound on the
tenth day of the seventh month, in the day of atonement shall ye make
the trumpet sound throughout all your land.

25:10 And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty
throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be
a jubile unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his possession,
and ye shall return every man unto his family.

25:11 A jubile shall that fiftieth year be unto you: ye shall not sow,
neither reap that which groweth of itself in it, nor gather the grapes
in it of thy vine undressed.

25:12 For it is the jubile; it shall be holy unto you: ye shall eat
the increase thereof out of the field.

25:13 In the year of this jubile ye shall return every man unto his
possession.

25:14 And if thou sell ought unto thy neighbour, or buyest ought of
thy neighbour's hand, ye shall not oppress one another: 25:15
According to the number of years after the jubile thou shalt buy of
thy neighbour, and according unto the number of years of the fruits he
shall sell unto thee: 25:16 According to the multitude of years thou
shalt increase the price thereof, and according to the fewness of
years thou shalt diminish the price of it: for according to the number
of the years of the fruits doth he sell unto thee.

25:17 Ye shall not therefore oppress one another; but thou shalt fear
thy God:for I am the LORD your God.

25:18 Wherefore ye shall do my statutes, and keep my judgments, and do
them; and ye shall dwell in the land in safety.

25:19 And the land shall yield her fruit, and ye shall eat your fill,
and dwell therein in safety.

25:20 And if ye shall say, What shall we eat the seventh year? behold,
we shall not sow, nor gather in our increase: 25:21 Then I will
command my blessing upon you in the sixth year, and it shall bring
forth fruit for three years.

25:22 And ye shall sow the eighth year, and eat yet of old fruit until
the ninth year; until her fruits come in ye shall eat of the old
store.

25:23 The land shall not be sold for ever: for the land is mine, for
ye are strangers and sojourners with me.

25:24 And in all the land of your possession ye shall grant a
redemption for the land.

25:25 If thy brother be waxen poor, and hath sold away some of his
possession, and if any of his kin come to redeem it, then shall he
redeem that which his brother sold.

25:26 And if the man have none to redeem it, and himself be able to
redeem it; 25:27 Then let him count the years of the sale thereof, and
restore the overplus unto the man to whom he sold it; that he may
return unto his possession.

25:28 But if he be not able to restore it to him, then that which is
sold shall remain in the hand of him that hath bought it until the
year of jubile: and in the jubile it shall go out, and he shall return
unto his possession.

25:29 And if a man sell a dwelling house in a walled city, then he may
redeem it within a whole year after it is sold; within a full year may
he redeem it.

25:30 And if it be not redeemed within the space of a full year, then
the house that is in the walled city shall be established for ever to
him that bought it throughout his generations: it shall not go out in
the jubile.

25:31 But the houses of the villages which have no wall round about
them shall be counted as the fields of the country: they may be
redeemed, and they shall go out in the jubile.

25:32 Notwithstanding the cities of the Levites, and the houses of the
cities of their possession, may the Levites redeem at any time.

25:33 And if a man purchase of the Levites, then the house that was
sold, and the city of his possession, shall go out in the year of
jubile: for the houses of the cities of the Levites are their
possession among the children of Israel.

25:34 But the field of the suburbs of their cities may not be sold;
for it is their perpetual possession.

25:35 And if thy brother be waxen poor, and fallen in decay with thee;
then thou shalt relieve him: yea, though he be a stranger, or a
sojourner; that he may live with thee.

25:36 Take thou no usury of him, or increase: but fear thy God; that
thy brother may live with thee.

25:37 Thou shalt not give him thy money upon usury, nor lend him thy
victuals for increase.

25:38 I am the LORD your God, which brought you forth out of the land
of Egypt, to give you the land of Canaan, and to be your God.

25:39 And if thy brother that dwelleth by thee be waxen poor, and be
sold unto thee; thou shalt not compel him to serve as a bondservant:
25:40 But as an hired servant, and as a sojourner, he shall be with
thee, and shall serve thee unto the year of jubile.

25:41 And then shall he depart from thee, both he and his children
with him, and shall return unto his own family, and unto the
possession of his fathers shall he return.

25:42 For they are my servants, which I brought forth out of the land
of Egypt: they shall not be sold as bondmen.

25:43 Thou shalt not rule over him with rigour; but shalt fear thy
God.

25:44 Both thy bondmen, and thy bondmaids, which thou shalt have,
shall be of the heathen that are round about you; of them shall ye buy
bondmen and bondmaids.

25:45 Moreover of the children of the strangers that do sojourn among
you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with you,
which they begat in your land: and they shall be your possession.

25:46 And ye shall take them as an inheritance for your children after
you, to inherit them for a possession; they shall be your bondmen for
ever: but over your brethren the children of Israel, ye shall not rule
one over another with rigour.

25:47 And if a sojourner or stranger wax rich by thee, and thy brother
that dwelleth by him wax poor, and sell himself unto the stranger or
sojourner by thee, or to the stock of the stranger's family: 25:48
After that he is sold he may be redeemed again; one of his brethren
may redeem him: 25:49 Either his uncle, or his uncle's son, may redeem
him, or any that is nigh of kin unto him of his family may redeem him;
or if he be able, he may redeem himself.

25:50 And he shall reckon with him that bought him from the year that
he was sold to him unto the year of jubile: and the price of his sale
shall be according unto the number of years, according to the time of
an hired servant shall it be with him.

25:51 If there be yet many years behind, according unto them he shall
give again the price of his redemption out of the money that he was
bought for.

25:52 And if there remain but few years unto the year of jubile, then
he shall count with him, and according unto his years shall he give
him again the price of his redemption.

25:53 And as a yearly hired servant shall he be with him: and the
other shall not rule with rigour over him in thy sight.

25:54 And if he be not redeemed in these years, then he shall go out
in the year of jubile, both he, and his children with him.

25:55 For unto me the children of Israel are servants; they are my
servants whom I brought forth out of the land of Egypt: I am the LORD
your God.

26:1 Ye shall make you no idols nor graven image, neither rear you up
a standing image, neither shall ye set up any image of stone in your
land, to bow down unto it: for I am the LORD your God.

26:2 Ye shall keep my sabbaths, and reverence my sanctuary: I am the
LORD.

26:3 If ye walk in my statutes, and keep my commandments, and do them;
26:4 Then I will give you rain in due season, and the land shall yield
her increase, and the trees of the field shall yield their fruit.

26:5 And your threshing shall reach unto the vintage, and the vintage
shall reach unto the sowing time: and ye shall eat your bread to the
full, and dwell in your land safely.

26:6 And I will give peace in the land, and ye shall lie down, and
none shall make you afraid: and I will rid evil beasts out of the
land, neither shall the sword go through your land.

26:7 And ye shall chase your enemies, and they shall fall before you
by the sword.

26:8 And five of you shall chase an hundred, and an hundred of you
shall put ten thousand to flight: and your enemies shall fall before
you by the sword.

26:9 For I will have respect unto you, and make you fruitful, and
multiply you, and establish my covenant with you.

26:10 And ye shall eat old store, and bring forth the old because of
the new.

26:11 And I set my tabernacle among you: and my soul shall not abhor
you.

26:12 And I will walk among you, and will be your God, and ye shall be
my people.

26:13 I am the LORD your God, which brought you forth out of the land
of Egypt, that ye should not be their bondmen; and I have broken the
bands of your yoke, and made you go upright.

26:14 But if ye will not hearken unto me, and will not do all these
commandments; 26:15 And if ye shall despise my statutes, or if your
soul abhor my judgments, so that ye will not do all my commandments,
but that ye break my covenant: 26:16 I also will do this unto you; I
will even appoint over you terror, consumption, and the burning ague,
that shall consume the eyes, and cause sorrow of heart: and ye shall
sow your seed in vain, for your enemies shall eat it.

26:17 And I will set my face against you, and ye shall be slain before
your enemies: they that hate you shall reign over you; and ye shall
flee when none pursueth you.

26:18 And if ye will not yet for all this hearken unto me, then I will
punish you seven times more for your sins.

26:19 And I will break the pride of your power; and I will make your
heaven as iron, and your earth as brass: 26:20 And your strength shall
be spent in vain: for your land shall not yield her increase, neither
shall the trees of the land yield their fruits.

26:21 And if ye walk contrary unto me, and will not hearken unto me; I
will bring seven times more plagues upon you according to your sins.

26:22 I will also send wild beasts among you, which shall rob you of
your children, and destroy your cattle, and make you few in number;
and your high ways shall be desolate.

26:23 And if ye will not be reformed by me by these things, but will
walk contrary unto me; 26:24 Then will I also walk contrary unto you,
and will punish you yet seven times for your sins.

26:25 And I will bring a sword upon you, that shall avenge the quarrel
of my covenant: and when ye are gathered together within your cities,
I will send the pestilence among you; and ye shall be delivered into
the hand of the enemy.

26:26 And when I have broken the staff of your bread, ten women shall
bake your bread in one oven, and they shall deliver you your bread
again by weight: and ye shall eat, and not be satisfied.

26:27 And if ye will not for all this hearken unto me, but walk
contrary unto me; 26:28 Then I will walk contrary unto you also in
fury; and I, even I, will chastise you seven times for your sins.

26:29 And ye shall eat the flesh of your sons, and the flesh of your
daughters shall ye eat.

26:30 And I will destroy your high places, and cut down your images,
and cast your carcases upon the carcases of your idols, and my soul
shall abhor you.

26:31 And I will make your cities waste, and bring your sanctuaries
unto desolation, and I will not smell the savour of your sweet odours.

26:32 And I will bring the land into desolation: and your enemies
which dwell therein shall be astonished at it.

26:33 And I will scatter you among the heathen, and will draw out a
sword after you: and your land shall be desolate, and your cities
waste.

26:34 Then shall the land enjoy her sabbaths, as long as it lieth
desolate, and ye be in your enemies' land; even then shall the land
rest, and enjoy her sabbaths.

26:35 As long as it lieth desolate it shall rest; because it did not
rest in your sabbaths, when ye dwelt upon it.

26:36 And upon them that are left alive of you I will send a faintness
into their hearts in the lands of their enemies; and the sound of a
shaken leaf shall chase them; and they shall flee, as fleeing from a
sword; and they shall fall when none pursueth.

26:37 And they shall fall one upon another, as it were before a sword,
when none pursueth: and ye shall have no power to stand before your
enemies.

26:38 And ye shall perish among the heathen, and the land of your
enemies shall eat you up.

26:39 And they that are left of you shall pine away in their iniquity
in your enemies' lands; and also in the iniquities of their fathers
shall they pine away with them.

26:40 If they shall confess their iniquity, and the iniquity of their
fathers, with their trespass which they trespassed against me, and
that also they have walked contrary unto me; 26:41 And that I also
have walked contrary unto them, and have brought them into the land of
their enemies; if then their uncircumcised hearts be humbled, and they
then accept of the punishment of their iniquity: 26:42 Then will I
remember my covenant with Jacob, and also my covenant with Isaac, and
also my covenant with Abraham will I remember; and I will remember the
land.

26:43 The land also shall be left of them, and shall enjoy her
sabbaths, while she lieth desolate without them: and they shall accept
of the punishment of their iniquity: because, even because they
despised my judgments, and because their soul abhorred my statutes.

26:44 And yet for all that, when they be in the land of their enemies,
I will not cast them away, neither will I abhor them, to destroy them
utterly, and to break my covenant with them: for I am the LORD their
God.

26:45 But I will for their sakes remember the covenant of their
ancestors, whom I brought forth out of the land of Egypt in the sight
of the heathen, that I might be their God: I am the LORD.

26:46 These are the statutes and judgments and laws, which the LORD
made between him and the children of Israel in mount Sinai by the hand
of Moses.

27:1 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 27:2 Speak unto the
children of Israel, and say unto them, When a man shall make a
singular vow, the persons shall be for the LORD by thy estimation.

27:3 And thy estimation shall be of the male from twenty years old
even unto sixty years old, even thy estimation shall be fifty shekels
of silver, after the shekel of the sanctuary.

27:4 And if it be a female, then thy estimation shall be thirty
shekels.

27:5 And if it be from five years old even unto twenty years old, then
thy estimation shall be of the male twenty shekels, and for the female
ten shekels.

27:6 And if it be from a month old even unto five years old, then thy
estimation shall be of the male five shekels of silver, and for the
female thy estimation shall be three shekels of silver.

27:7 And if it be from sixty years old and above; if it be a male,
then thy estimation shall be fifteen shekels, and for the female ten
shekels.

27:8 But if he be poorer than thy estimation, then he shall present
himself before the priest, and the priest shall value him; according
to his ability that vowed shall the priest value him.

27:9 And if it be a beast, whereof men bring an offering unto the
LORD, all that any man giveth of such unto the LORD shall be holy.

27:10 He shall not alter it, nor change it, a good for a bad, or a bad
for a good: and if he shall at all change beast for beast, then it and
the exchange thereof shall be holy.

27:11 And if it be any unclean beast, of which they do not offer a
sacrifice unto the LORD, then he shall present the beast before the
priest: 27:12 And the priest shall value it, whether it be good or
bad: as thou valuest it, who art the priest, so shall it be.

27:13 But if he will at all redeem it, then he shall add a fifth part
thereof unto thy estimation.

27:14 And when a man shall sanctify his house to be holy unto the
LORD, then the priest shall estimate it, whether it be good or bad: as
the priest shall estimate it, so shall it stand.

27:15 And if he that sanctified it will redeem his house, then he
shall add the fifth part of the money of thy estimation unto it, and
it shall be his.

27:16 And if a man shall sanctify unto the LORD some part of a field
of his possession, then thy estimation shall be according to the seed
thereof: an homer of barley seed shall be valued at fifty shekels of
silver.

27:17 If he sanctify his field from the year of jubile, according to
thy estimation it shall stand.

27:18 But if he sanctify his field after the jubile, then the priest
shall reckon unto him the money according to the years that remain,
even unto the year of the jubile, and it shall be abated from thy
estimation.

27:19 And if he that sanctified the field will in any wise redeem it,
then he shall add the fifth part of the money of thy estimation unto
it, and it shall be assured to him.

27:20 And if he will not redeem the field, or if he have sold the
field to another man, it shall not be redeemed any more.

27:21 But the field, when it goeth out in the jubile, shall be holy
unto the LORD, as a field devoted; the possession thereof shall be the
priest's.

27:22 And if a man sanctify unto the LORD a field which he hath
bought, which is not of the fields of his possession; 27:23 Then the
priest shall reckon unto him the worth of thy estimation, even unto
the year of the jubile: and he shall give thine estimation in that
day, as a holy thing unto the LORD.

27:24 In the year of the jubile the field shall return unto him of
whom it was bought, even to him to whom the possession of the land did
belong.

27:25 And all thy estimations shall be according to the shekel of the
sanctuary: twenty gerahs shall be the shekel.

27:26 Only the firstling of the beasts, which should be the LORD's
firstling, no man shall sanctify it; whether it be ox, or sheep: it is
the LORD's.

27:27 And if it be of an unclean beast, then he shall redeem it
according to thine estimation, and shall add a fifth part of it
thereto: or if it be not redeemed, then it shall be sold according to
thy estimation.

27:28 Notwithstanding no devoted thing, that a man shall devote unto
the LORD of all that he hath, both of man and beast, and of the field
of his possession, shall be sold or redeemed: every devoted thing is
most holy unto the LORD.

27:29 None devoted, which shall be devoted of men, shall be redeemed;
but shall surely be put to death.

27:30 And all the tithe of the land, whether of the seed of the land,
or of the fruit of the tree, is the LORD's: it is holy unto the LORD.

27:31 And if a man will at all redeem ought of his tithes, he shall
add thereto the fifth part thereof.

27:32 And concerning the tithe of the herd, or of the flock, even of
whatsoever passeth under the rod, the tenth shall be holy unto the
LORD.

27:33 He shall not search whether it be good or bad, neither shall he
change it: and if he change it at all, then both it and the change
thereof shall be holy; it shall not be redeemed.

27:34 These are the commandments, which the LORD commanded Moses for
the children of Israel in mount Sinai.




The Fourth Book of Moses:  Called Numbers


1:1 And the LORD spake unto Moses in the wilderness of Sinai, in the
tabernacle of the congregation, on the first day of the second month,
in the second year after they were come out of the land of Egypt,
saying, 1:2 Take ye the sum of all the congregation of the children of
Israel, after their families, by the house of their fathers, with the
number of their names, every male by their polls; 1:3 From twenty
years old and upward, all that are able to go forth to war in Israel:
thou and Aaron shall number them by their armies.

1:4 And with you there shall be a man of every tribe; every one head
of the house of his fathers.

1:5 And these are the names of the men that shall stand with you: of
the tribe of Reuben; Elizur the son of Shedeur.

1:6 Of Simeon; Shelumiel the son of Zurishaddai.

1:7 Of Judah; Nahshon the son of Amminadab.

1:8 Of Issachar; Nethaneel the son of Zuar.

1:9 Of Zebulun; Eliab the son of Helon.

1:10 Of the children of Joseph: of Ephraim; Elishama the son of
Ammihud: of Manasseh; Gamaliel the son of Pedahzur.

1:11 Of Benjamin; Abidan the son of Gideoni.

1:12 Of Dan; Ahiezer the son of Ammishaddai.

1:13 Of Asher; Pagiel the son of Ocran.

1:14 Of Gad; Eliasaph the son of Deuel.

1:15 Of Naphtali; Ahira the son of Enan.

1:16 These were the renowned of the congregation, princes of the
tribes of their fathers, heads of thousands in Israel.

1:17 And Moses and Aaron took these men which are expressed by their
names: 1:18 And they assembled all the congregation together on the
first day of the second month, and they declared their pedigrees after
their families, by the house of their fathers, according to the number
of the names, from twenty years old and upward, by their polls.

1:19 As the LORD commanded Moses, so he numbered them in the
wilderness of Sinai.

1:20 And the children of Reuben, Israel's eldest son, by their
generations, after their families, by the house of their fathers,
according to the number of the names, by their polls, every male from
twenty years old and upward, all that were able to go forth to war;
1:21 Those that were numbered of them, even of the tribe of Reuben,
were forty and six thousand and five hundred.

1:22 Of the children of Simeon, by their generations, after their
families, by the house of their fathers, those that were numbered of
them, according to the number of the names, by their polls, every male
from twenty years old and upward, all that were able to go forth to
war; 1:23 Those that were numbered of them, even of the tribe of
Simeon, were fifty and nine thousand and three hundred.

1:24 Of the children of Gad, by their generations, after their
families, by the house of their fathers, according to the number of
the names, from twenty years old and upward, all that were able to go
forth to war; 1:25 Those that were numbered of them, even of the tribe
of Gad, were forty and five thousand six hundred and fifty.

1:26 Of the children of Judah, by their generations, after their
families, by the house of their fathers, according to the number of
the names, from twenty years old and upward, all that were able to go
forth to war; 1:27 Those that were numbered of them, even of the tribe
of Judah, were threescore and fourteen thousand and six hundred.

1:28 Of the children of Issachar, by their generations, after their
families, by the house of their fathers, according to the number of
the names, from twenty years old and upward, all that were able to go
forth to war; 1:29 Those that were numbered of them, even of the tribe
of Issachar, were fifty and four thousand and four hundred.

1:30 Of the children of Zebulun, by their generations, after their
families, by the house of their fathers, according to the number of
the names, from twenty years old and upward, all that were able to go
forth to war; 1:31 Those that were numbered of them, even of the tribe
of Zebulun, were fifty and seven thousand and four hundred.

1:32 Of the children of Joseph, namely, of the children of Ephraim, by
their generations, after their families, by the house of their
fathers, according to the number of the names, from twenty years old
and upward, all that were able to go forth to war; 1:33 Those that
were numbered of them, even of the tribe of Ephraim, were forty
thousand and five hundred.

1:34 Of the children of Manasseh, by their generations, after their
families, by the house of their fathers, according to the number of
the names, from twenty years old and upward, all that were able to go
forth to war; 1:35 Those that were numbered of them, even of the tribe
of Manasseh, were thirty and two thousand and two hundred.

1:36 Of the children of Benjamin, by their generations, after their
families, by the house of their fathers, according to the number of
the names, from twenty years old and upward, all that were able to go
forth to war; 1:37 Those that were numbered of them, even of the tribe
of Benjamin, were thirty and five thousand and four hundred.

1:38 Of the children of Dan, by their generations, after their
families, by the house of their fathers, according to the number of
the names, from twenty years old and upward, all that were able to go
forth to war; 1:39 Those that were numbered of them, even of the tribe
of Dan, were threescore and two thousand and seven hundred.

1:40 Of the children of Asher, by their generations, after their
families, by the house of their fathers, according to the number of
the names, from twenty years old and upward, all that were able to go
forth to war; 1:41 Those that were numbered of them, even of the tribe
of Asher, were forty and one thousand and five hundred.

1:42 Of the children of Naphtali, throughout their generations, after
their families, by the house of their fathers, according to the number
of the names, from twenty years old and upward, all that were able to
go forth to war; 1:43 Those that were numbered of them, even of the
tribe of Naphtali, were fifty and three thousand and four hundred.

1:44 These are those that were numbered, which Moses and Aaron
numbered, and the princes of Israel, being twelve men: each one was
for the house of his fathers.

1:45 So were all those that were numbered of the children of Israel,
by the house of their fathers, from twenty years old and upward, all
that were able to go forth to war in Israel; 1:46 Even all they that
were numbered were six hundred thousand and three thousand and five
hundred and fifty.

1:47 But the Levites after the tribe of their fathers were not
numbered among them.

1:48 For the LORD had spoken unto Moses, saying, 1:49 Only thou shalt
not number the tribe of Levi, neither take the sum of them among the
children of Israel: 1:50 But thou shalt appoint the Levites over the
tabernacle of testimony, and over all the vessels thereof, and over
all things that belong to it: they shall bear the tabernacle, and all
the vessels thereof; and they shall minister unto it, and shall encamp
round about the tabernacle.

1:51 And when the tabernacle setteth forward, the Levites shall take
it down: and when the tabernacle is to be pitched, the Levites shall
set it up: and the stranger that cometh nigh shall be put to death.

1:52 And the children of Israel shall pitch their tents, every man by
his own camp, and every man by his own standard, throughout their
hosts.

1:53 But the Levites shall pitch round about the tabernacle of
testimony, that there be no wrath upon the congregation of the
children of Israel: and the Levites shall keep the charge of the
tabernacle of testimony.

1:54 And the children of Israel did according to all that the LORD
commanded Moses, so did they.

2:1 And the LORD spake unto Moses and unto Aaron, saying, 2:2 Every
man of the children of Israel shall pitch by his own standard, with
the ensign of their father's house: far off about the tabernacle of
the congregation shall they pitch.

2:3 And on the east side toward the rising of the sun shall they of
the standard of the camp of Judah pitch throughout their armies: and
Nahshon the son of Amminadab shall be captain of the children of
Judah.

2:4 And his host, and those that were numbered of them, were
threescore and fourteen thousand and six hundred.

2:5 And those that do pitch next unto him shall be the tribe of
Issachar: and Nethaneel the son of Zuar shall be captain of the
children of Issachar.

2:6 And his host, and those that were numbered thereof, were fifty and
four thousand and four hundred.

2:7 Then the tribe of Zebulun: and Eliab the son of Helon shall be
captain of the children of Zebulun.

2:8 And his host, and those that were numbered thereof, were fifty and
seven thousand and four hundred.

2:9 All that were numbered in the camp of Judah were an hundred
thousand and fourscore thousand and six thousand and four hundred,
throughout their armies. These shall first set forth.

2:10 On the south side shall be the standard of the camp of Reuben
according to their armies: and the captain of the children of Reuben
shall be Elizur the son of Shedeur.

2:11 And his host, and those that were numbered thereof, were forty
and six thousand and five hundred.

2:12 And those which pitch by him shall be the tribe of Simeon: and
the captain of the children of Simeon shall be Shelumiel the son of
Zurishaddai.

2:13 And his host, and those that were numbered of them, were fifty
and nine thousand and three hundred.

2:14 Then the tribe of Gad: and the captain of the sons of Gad shall
be Eliasaph the son of Reuel.

2:15 And his host, and those that were numbered of them, were forty
and five thousand and six hundred and fifty.

2:16 All that were numbered in the camp of Reuben were an hundred
thousand and fifty and one thousand and four hundred and fifty,
throughout their armies. And they shall set forth in the second rank.

2:17 Then the tabernacle of the congregation shall set forward with
the camp of the Levites in the midst of the camp: as they encamp, so
shall they set forward, every man in his place by their standards.

2:18 On the west side shall be the standard of the camp of Ephraim
according to their armies: and the captain of the sons of Ephraim
shall be Elishama the son of Ammihud.

2:19 And his host, and those that were numbered of them, were forty
thousand and five hundred.

2:20 And by him shall be the tribe of Manasseh: and the captain of the
children of Manasseh shall be Gamaliel the son of Pedahzur.

2:21 And his host, and those that were numbered of them, were thirty
and two thousand and two hundred.

2:22 Then the tribe of Benjamin: and the captain of the sons of
Benjamin shall be Abidan the son of Gideoni.

2:23 And his host, and those that were numbered of them, were thirty
and five thousand and four hundred.

2:24 All that were numbered of the camp of Ephraim were an hundred
thousand and eight thousand and an hundred, throughout their armies.
And they shall go forward in the third rank.

2:25 The standard of the camp of Dan shall be on the north side by
their armies: and the captain of the children of Dan shall be Ahiezer
the son of Ammishaddai.

2:26 And his host, and those that were numbered of them, were
threescore and two thousand and seven hundred.

2:27 And those that encamp by him shall be the tribe of Asher: and the
captain of the children of Asher shall be Pagiel the son of Ocran.

2:28 And his host, and those that were numbered of them, were forty
and one thousand and five hundred.

2:29 Then the tribe of Naphtali: and the captain of the children of
Naphtali shall be Ahira the son of Enan.

2:30 And his host, and those that were numbered of them, were fifty
and three thousand and four hundred.

2:31 All they that were numbered in the camp of Dan were an hundred
thousand and fifty and seven thousand and six hundred. They shall go
hindmost with their standards.

2:32 These are those which were numbered of the children of Israel by
the house of their fathers: all those that were numbered of the camps
throughout their hosts were six hundred thousand and three thousand
and five hundred and fifty.

2:33 But the Levites were not numbered among the children of Israel;
as the LORD commanded Moses.

2:34 And the children of Israel did according to all that the LORD
commanded Moses: so they pitched by their standards, and so they set
forward, every one after their families, according to the house of
their fathers.

3:1 These also are the generations of Aaron and Moses in the day that
the LORD spake with Moses in mount Sinai.

3:2 And these are the names of the sons of Aaron; Nadab the firstborn,
and Abihu, Eleazar, and Ithamar.

3:3 These are the names of the sons of Aaron, the priests which were
anointed, whom he consecrated to minister in the priest's office.

3:4 And Nadab and Abihu died before the LORD, when they offered
strange fire before the LORD, in the wilderness of Sinai, and they had
no children: and Eleazar and Ithamar ministered in the priest's office
in the sight of Aaron their father.

3:5 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 3:6 Bring the tribe of Levi
near, and present them before Aaron the priest, that they may minister
unto him.

3:7 And they shall keep his charge, and the charge of the whole
congregation before the tabernacle of the congregation, to do the
service of the tabernacle.

3:8 And they shall keep all the instruments of the tabernacle of the
congregation, and the charge of the children of Israel, to do the
service of the tabernacle.

3:9 And thou shalt give the Levites unto Aaron and to his sons: they
are wholly given unto him out of the children of Israel.

3:10 And thou shalt appoint Aaron and his sons, and they shall wait on
their priest's office: and the stranger that cometh nigh shall be put
to death.

3:11 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 3:12 And I, behold, I have
taken the Levites from among the children of Israel instead of all the
firstborn that openeth the matrix among the children of Israel:
therefore the Levites shall be mine; 3:13 Because all the firstborn
are mine; for on the day that I smote all the firstborn in the land of
Egypt I hallowed unto me all the firstborn in Israel, both man and
beast: mine shall they be: I am the LORD.

3:14 And the LORD spake unto Moses in the wilderness of Sinai, saying,
3:15 Number the children of Levi after the house of their fathers, by
their families: every male from a month old and upward shalt thou
number them.

3:16 And Moses numbered them according to the word of the LORD, as he
was commanded.

3:17 And these were the sons of Levi by their names; Gershon, and
Kohath, and Merari.

3:18 And these are the names of the sons of Gershon by their families;
Libni, and Shimei.

3:19 And the sons of Kohath by their families; Amram, and Izehar,
Hebron, and Uzziel.

3:20 And the sons of Merari by their families; Mahli, and Mushi. These
are the families of the Levites according to the house of their
fathers.

3:21 Of Gershon was the family of the Libnites, and the family of the
Shimites: these are the families of the Gershonites.

3:22 Those that were numbered of them, according to the number of all
the males, from a month old and upward, even those that were numbered
of them were seven thousand and five hundred.

3:23 The families of the Gershonites shall pitch behind the tabernacle
westward.

3:24 And the chief of the house of the father of the Gershonites shall
be Eliasaph the son of Lael.

3:25 And the charge of the sons of Gershon in the tabernacle of the
congregation shall be the tabernacle, and the tent, the covering
thereof, and the hanging for the door of the tabernacle of the
congregation, 3:26 And the hangings of the court, and the curtain for
the door of the court, which is by the tabernacle, and by the altar
round about, and the cords of it for all the service thereof.

3:27 And of Kohath was the family of the Amramites, and the family of
the Izeharites, and the family of the Hebronites, and the family of
the Uzzielites: these are the families of the Kohathites.

3:28 In the number of all the males, from a month old and upward, were
eight thousand and six hundred, keeping the charge of the sanctuary.

3:29 The families of the sons of Kohath shall pitch on the side of the
tabernacle southward.

3:30 And the chief of the house of the father of the families of the
Kohathites shall be Elizaphan the son of Uzziel.

3:31 And their charge shall be the ark, and the table, and the
candlestick, and the altars, and the vessels of the sanctuary
wherewith they minister, and the hanging, and all the service thereof.

3:32 And Eleazar the son of Aaron the priest shall be chief over the
chief of the Levites, and have the oversight of them that keep the
charge of the sanctuary.

3:33 Of Merari was the family of the Mahlites, and the family of the
Mushites: these are the families of Merari.

3:34 And those that were numbered of them, according to the number of
all the males, from a month old and upward, were six thousand and two
hundred.

3:35 And the chief of the house of the father of the families of
Merari was Zuriel the son of Abihail: these shall pitch on the side of
the tabernacle northward.

3:36 And under the custody and charge of the sons of Merari shall be
the boards of the tabernacle, and the bars thereof, and the pillars
thereof, and the sockets thereof, and all the vessels thereof, and all
that serveth thereto, 3:37 And the pillars of the court round about,
and their sockets, and their pins, and their cords.

3:38 But those that encamp before the tabernacle toward the east, even
before the tabernacle of the congregation eastward, shall be Moses,
and Aaron and his sons, keeping the charge of the sanctuary for the
charge of the children of Israel; and the stranger that cometh nigh
shall be put to death.

3:39 All that were numbered of the Levites, which Moses and Aaron
numbered at the commandment of the LORD, throughout their families,
all the males from a month old and upward, were twenty and two
thousand.

3:40 And the LORD said unto Moses, Number all the firstborn of the
males of the children of Israel from a month old and upward, and take
the number of their names.

3:41 And thou shalt take the Levites for me (I am the LORD) instead of
all the firstborn among the children of Israel; and the cattle of the
Levites instead of all the firstlings among the cattle of the children
of Israel.

3:42 And Moses numbered, as the LORD commanded him, all the firstborn
among the children of Israel.

3:43 And all the firstborn males by the number of names, from a month
old and upward, of those that were numbered of them, were twenty and
two thousand two hundred and threescore and thirteen.

3:44 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 3:45 Take the Levites
instead of all the firstborn among the children of Israel, and the
cattle of the Levites instead of their cattle; and the Levites shall
be mine: I am the LORD.

3:46 And for those that are to be redeemed of the two hundred and
threescore and thirteen of the firstborn of the children of Israel,
which are more than the Levites; 3:47 Thou shalt even take five
shekels apiece by the poll, after the shekel of the sanctuary shalt
thou take them: (the shekel is twenty gerahs:) 3:48 And thou shalt
give the money, wherewith the odd number of them is to be redeemed,
unto Aaron and to his sons.

3:49 And Moses took the redemption money of them that were over and
above them that were redeemed by the Levites: 3:50 Of the firstborn of
the children of Israel took he the money; a thousand three hundred and
threescore and five shekels, after the shekel of the sanctuary: 3:51
And Moses gave the money of them that were redeemed unto Aaron and to
his sons, according to the word of the LORD, as the LORD commanded
Moses.

4:1 And the LORD spake unto Moses and unto Aaron, saying, 4:2 Take the
sum of the sons of Kohath from among the sons of Levi, after their
families, by the house of their fathers, 4:3 From thirty years old and
upward even until fifty years old, all that enter into the host, to do
the work in the tabernacle of the congregation.

4:4 This shall be the service of the sons of Kohath in the tabernacle
of the congregation, about the most holy things: 4:5 And when the camp
setteth forward, Aaron shall come, and his sons, and they shall take
down the covering vail, and cover the ark of testimony with it: 4:6
And shall put thereon the covering of badgers' skins, and shall spread
over it a cloth wholly of blue, and shall put in the staves thereof.

4:7 And upon the table of shewbread they shall spread a cloth of blue,
and put thereon the dishes, and the spoons, and the bowls, and covers
to cover withal: and the continual bread shall be thereon: 4:8 And
they shall spread upon them a cloth of scarlet, and cover the same
with a covering of badgers' skins, and shall put in the staves
thereof.

4:9 And they shall take a cloth of blue, and cover the candlestick of
the light, and his lamps, and his tongs, and his snuffdishes, and all
the oil vessels thereof, wherewith they minister unto it: 4:10 And
they shall put it and all the vessels thereof within a covering of
badgers' skins, and shall put it upon a bar.

4:11 And upon the golden altar they shall spread a cloth of blue, and
cover it with a covering of badgers' skins, and shall put to the
staves thereof: 4:12 And they shall take all the instruments of
ministry, wherewith they minister in the sanctuary, and put them in a
cloth of blue, and cover them with a covering of badgers' skins, and
shall put them on a bar: 4:13 And they shall take away the ashes from
the altar, and spread a purple cloth thereon: 4:14 And they shall put
upon it all the vessels thereof, wherewith they minister about it,
even the censers, the fleshhooks, and the shovels, and the basons, all
the vessels of the altar; and they shall spread upon it a covering of
badgers' skins, and put to the staves of it.

4:15 And when Aaron and his sons have made an end of covering the
sanctuary, and all the vessels of the sanctuary, as the camp is to set
forward; after that, the sons of Kohath shall come to bear it: but
they shall not touch any holy thing, lest they die. These things are
the burden of the sons of Kohath in the tabernacle of the
congregation.

4:16 And to the office of Eleazar the son of Aaron the priest
pertaineth the oil for the light, and the sweet incense, and the daily
meat offering, and the anointing oil, and the oversight of all the
tabernacle, and of all that therein is, in the sanctuary, and in the
vessels thereof.

4:17 And the LORD spake unto Moses and unto Aaron saying, 4:18 Cut ye
not off the tribe of the families of the Kohathites from among the
Levites: 4:19 But thus do unto them, that they may live, and not die,
when they approach unto the most holy things: Aaron and his sons shall
go in, and appoint them every one to his service and to his burden:
4:20 But they shall not go in to see when the holy things are covered,
lest they die.

4:21 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 4:22 Take also the sum of
the sons of Gershon, throughout the houses of their fathers, by their
families; 4:23 From thirty years old and upward until fifty years old
shalt thou number them; all that enter in to perform the service, to
do the work in the tabernacle of the congregation.

4:24 This is the service of the families of the Gershonites, to serve,
and for burdens: 4:25 And they shall bear the curtains of the
tabernacle, and the tabernacle of the congregation, his covering, and
the covering of the badgers' skins that is above upon it, and the
hanging for the door of the tabernacle of the congregation, 4:26 And
the hangings of the court, and the hanging for the door of the gate of
the court, which is by the tabernacle and by the altar round about,
and their cords, and all the instruments of their service, and all
that is made for them: so shall they serve.

4:27 At the appointment of Aaron and his sons shall be all the service
of the sons of the Gershonites, in all their burdens, and in all their
service: and ye shall appoint unto them in charge all their burdens.

4:28 This is the service of the families of the sons of Gershon in the
tabernacle of the congregation: and their charge shall be under the
hand of Ithamar the son of Aaron the priest.

4:29 As for the sons of Merari, thou shalt number them after their
families, by the house of their fathers; 4:30 From thirty years old
and upward even unto fifty years old shalt thou number them, every one
that entereth into the service, to do the work of the tabernacle of
the congregation.

4:31 And this is the charge of their burden, according to all their
service in the tabernacle of the congregation; the boards of the
tabernacle, and the bars thereof, and the pillars thereof, and sockets
thereof, 4:32 And the pillars of the court round about, and their
sockets, and their pins, and their cords, with all their instruments,
and with all their service: and by name ye shall reckon the
instruments of the charge of their burden.

4:33 This is the service of the families of the sons of Merari,
according to all their service, in the tabernacle of the congregation,
under the hand of Ithamar the son of Aaron the priest.

4:34 And Moses and Aaron and the chief of the congregation numbered
the sons of the Kohathites after their families, and after the house
of their fathers, 4:35 From thirty years old and upward even unto
fifty years old, every one that entereth into the service, for the
work in the tabernacle of the congregation: 4:36 And those that were
numbered of them by their families were two thousand seven hundred and
fifty.

4:37 These were they that were numbered of the families of the
Kohathites, all that might do service in the tabernacle of the
congregation, which Moses and Aaron did number according to the
commandment of the LORD by the hand of Moses.

4:38 And those that were numbered of the sons of Gershon, throughout
their families, and by the house of their fathers, 4:39 From thirty
years old and upward even unto fifty years old, every one that
entereth into the service, for the work in the tabernacle of the
congregation, 4:40 Even those that were numbered of them, throughout
their families, by the house of their fathers, were two thousand and
six hundred and thirty.

4:41 These are they that were numbered of the families of the sons of
Gershon, of all that might do service in the tabernacle of the
congregation, whom Moses and Aaron did number according to the
commandment of the LORD.

4:42 And those that were numbered of the families of the sons of
Merari, throughout their families, by the house of their fathers, 4:43
From thirty years old and upward even unto fifty years old, every one
that entereth into the service, for the work in the tabernacle of the
congregation, 4:44 Even those that were numbered of them after their
families, were three thousand and two hundred.

4:45 These be those that were numbered of the families of the sons of
Merari, whom Moses and Aaron numbered according to the word of the
LORD by the hand of Moses.

4:46 All those that were numbered of the Levites, whom Moses and Aaron
and the chief of Israel numbered, after their families, and after the
house of their fathers, 4:47 From thirty years old and upward even
unto fifty years old, every one that came to do the service of the
ministry, and the service of the burden in the tabernacle of the
congregation.

4:48 Even those that were numbered of them, were eight thousand and
five hundred and fourscore, 4:49 According to the commandment of the
LORD they were numbered by the hand of Moses, every one according to
his service, and according to his burden: thus were they numbered of
him, as the LORD commanded Moses.

5:1 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 5:2 Command the children of
Israel, that they put out of the camp every leper, and every one that
hath an issue, and whosoever is defiled by the dead: 5:3 Both male and
female shall ye put out, without the camp shall ye put them; that they
defile not their camps, in the midst whereof I dwell.

5:4 And the children of Israel did so, and put them out without the
camp: as the LORD spake unto Moses, so did the children of Israel.

5:5 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 5:6 Speak unto the children
of Israel, When a man or woman shall commit any sin that men commit,
to do a trespass against the LORD, and that person be guilty; 5:7 Then
they shall confess their sin which they have done: and he shall
recompense his trespass with the principal thereof, and add unto it
the fifth part thereof, and give it unto him against whom he hath
trespassed.

5:8 But if the man have no kinsman to recompense the trespass unto,
let the trespass be recompensed unto the LORD, even to the priest;
beside the ram of the atonement, whereby an atonement shall be made
for him.

5:9 And every offering of all the holy things of the children of
Israel, which they bring unto the priest, shall be his.

5:10 And every man's hallowed things shall be his: whatsoever any man
giveth the priest, it shall be his.

5:11 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 5:12 Speak unto the
children of Israel, and say unto them, If any man's wife go aside, and
commit a trespass against him, 5:13 And a man lie with her carnally,
and it be hid from the eyes of her husband, and be kept close, and she
be defiled, and there be no witness against her, neither she be taken
with the manner; 5:14 And the spirit of jealousy come upon him, and he
be jealous of his wife, and she be defiled: or if the spirit of
jealousy come upon him, and he be jealous of his wife, and she be not
defiled: 5:15 Then shall the man bring his wife unto the priest, and
he shall bring her offering for her, the tenth part of an ephah of
barley meal; he shall pour no oil upon it, nor put frankincense
thereon; for it is an offering of jealousy, an offering of memorial,
bringing iniquity to remembrance.

5:16 And the priest shall bring her near, and set her before the LORD:
5:17 And the priest shall take holy water in an earthen vessel; and of
the dust that is in the floor of the tabernacle the priest shall take,
and put it into the water: 5:18 And the priest shall set the woman
before the LORD, and uncover the woman's head, and put the offering of
memorial in her hands, which is the jealousy offering: and the priest
shall have in his hand the bitter water that causeth the curse: 5:19
And the priest shall charge her by an oath, and say unto the woman, If
no man have lain with thee, and if thou hast not gone aside to
uncleanness with another instead of thy husband, be thou free from
this bitter water that causeth the curse: 5:20 But if thou hast gone
aside to another instead of thy husband, and if thou be defiled, and
some man have lain with thee beside thine husband: 5:21 Then the
priest shall charge the woman with an oath of cursing, and the priest
shall say unto the woman, The LORD make thee a curse and an oath among
thy people, when the LORD doth make thy thigh to rot, and thy belly to
swell; 5:22 And this water that causeth the curse shall go into thy
bowels, to make thy belly to swell, and thy thigh to rot: And the
woman shall say, Amen, amen.

5:23 And the priest shall write these curses in a book, and he shall
blot them out with the bitter water: 5:24 And he shall cause the woman
to drink the bitter water that causeth the curse: and the water that
causeth the curse shall enter into her, and become bitter.

5:25 Then the priest shall take the jealousy offering out of the
woman's hand, and shall wave the offering before the LORD, and offer
it upon the altar: 5:26 And the priest shall take an handful of the
offering, even the memorial thereof, and burn it upon the altar, and
afterward shall cause the woman to drink the water.

5:27 And when he hath made her to drink the water, then it shall come
to pass, that, if she be defiled, and have done trespass against her
husband, that the water that causeth the curse shall enter into her,
and become bitter, and her belly shall swell, and her thigh shall rot:
and the woman shall be a curse among her people.

5:28 And if the woman be not defiled, but be clean; then she shall be
free, and shall conceive seed.

5:29 This is the law of jealousies, when a wife goeth aside to another
instead of her husband, and is defiled; 5:30 Or when the spirit of
jealousy cometh upon him, and he be jealous over his wife, and shall
set the woman before the LORD, and the priest shall execute upon her
all this law.

5:31 Then shall the man be guiltless from iniquity, and this woman
shall bear her iniquity.

6:1 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 6:2 Speak unto the children
of Israel, and say unto them, When either man or woman shall separate
themselves to vow a vow of a Nazarite, to separate themselves unto the
LORD: 6:3 He shall separate himself from wine and strong drink, and
shall drink no vinegar of wine, or vinegar of strong drink, neither
shall he drink any liquor of grapes, nor eat moist grapes, or dried.

6:4 All the days of his separation shall he eat nothing that is made
of the vine tree, from the kernels even to the husk.

6:5 All the days of the vow of his separation there shall no razor
come upon his head: until the days be fulfilled, in the which he
separateth himself unto the LORD, he shall be holy, and shall let the
locks of the hair of his head grow.

6:6 All the days that he separateth himself unto the LORD he shall
come at no dead body.

6:7 He shall not make himself unclean for his father, or for his
mother, for his brother, or for his sister, when they die: because the
consecration of his God is upon his head.

6:8 All the days of his separation he is holy unto the LORD.

6:9 And if any man die very suddenly by him, and he hath defiled the
head of his consecration; then he shall shave his head in the day of
his cleansing, on the seventh day shall he shave it.

6:10 And on the eighth day he shall bring two turtles, or two young
pigeons, to the priest, to the door of the tabernacle of the
congregation: 6:11 And the priest shall offer the one for a sin
offering, and the other for a burnt offering, and make an atonement
for him, for that he sinned by the dead, and shall hallow his head
that same day.

6:12 And he shall consecrate unto the LORD the days of his separation,
and shall bring a lamb of the first year for a trespass offering: but
the days that were before shall be lost, because his separation was
defiled.

6:13 And this is the law of the Nazarite, when the days of his
separation are fulfilled: he shall be brought unto the door of the
tabernacle of the congregation: 6:14 And he shall offer his offering
unto the LORD, one he lamb of the first year without blemish for a
burnt offering, and one ewe lamb of the first year without blemish for
a sin offering, and one ram without blemish for peace offerings, 6:15
And a basket of unleavened bread, cakes of fine flour mingled with
oil, and wafers of unleavened bread anointed with oil, and their meat
offering, and their drink offerings.

6:16 And the priest shall bring them before the LORD, and shall offer
his sin offering, and his burnt offering: 6:17 And he shall offer the
ram for a sacrifice of peace offerings unto the LORD, with the basket
of unleavened bread: the priest shall offer also his meat offering,
and his drink offering.

6:18 And the Nazarite shall shave the head of his separation at the
door of the tabernacle of the congregation, and shall take the hair of
the head of his separation, and put it in the fire which is under the
sacrifice of the peace offerings.

6:19 And the priest shall take the sodden shoulder of the ram, and one
unleavened cake out of the basket, and one unleavened wafer, and shall
put them upon the hands of the Nazarite, after the hair of his
separation is shaven: 6:20 And the priest shall wave them for a wave
offering before the LORD: this is holy for the priest, with the wave
breast and heave shoulder: and after that the Nazarite may drink wine.

6:21 This is the law of the Nazarite who hath vowed, and of his
offering unto the LORD for his separation, beside that that his hand
shall get: according to the vow which he vowed, so he must do after
the law of his separation.

6:22 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 6:23 Speak unto Aaron and
unto his sons, saying, On this wise ye shall bless the children of
Israel, saying unto them, 6:24 The LORD bless thee, and keep thee:
6:25 The LORD make his face shine upon thee, and be gracious unto
thee: 6:26 The LORD lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee
peace.

6:27 And they shall put my name upon the children of Israel, and I
will bless them.

7:1 And it came to pass on the day that Moses had fully set up the
tabernacle, and had anointed it, and sanctified it, and all the
instruments thereof, both the altar and all the vessels thereof, and
had anointed them, and sanctified them; 7:2 That the princes of
Israel, heads of the house of their fathers, who were the princes of
the tribes, and were over them that were numbered, offered: 7:3 And
they brought their offering before the LORD, six covered wagons, and
twelve oxen; a wagon for two of the princes, and for each one an ox:
and they brought them before the tabernacle.

7:4 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 7:5 Take it of them, that
they may be to do the service of the tabernacle of the congregation;
and thou shalt give them unto the Levites, to every man according to
his service.

7:6 And Moses took the wagons and the oxen, and gave them unto the
Levites.

7:7 Two wagons and four oxen he gave unto the sons of Gershon,
according to their service: 7:8 And four wagons and eight oxen he gave
unto the sons of Merari, according unto their service, under the hand
of Ithamar the son of Aaron the priest.

7:9 But unto the sons of Kohath he gave none: because the service of
the sanctuary belonging unto them was that they should bear upon their
shoulders.

7:10 And the princes offered for dedicating of the altar in the day
that it was anointed, even the princes offered their offering before
the altar.

7:11 And the LORD said unto Moses, They shall offer their offering,
each prince on his day, for the dedicating of the altar.

7:12 And he that offered his offering the first day was Nahshon the
son of Amminadab, of the tribe of Judah: 7:13 And his offering was one
silver charger, the weight thereof was an hundred and thirty shekels,
one silver bowl of seventy shekels, after the shekel of the sanctuary;
both of them were full of fine flour mingled with oil for a meat
offering: 7:14 One spoon of ten shekels of gold, full of incense: 7:15
One young bullock, one ram, one lamb of the first year, for a burnt
offering: 7:16 One kid of the goats for a sin offering: 7:17 And for a
sacrifice of peace offerings, two oxen, five rams, five he goats, five
lambs of the first year: this was the offering of Nahshon the son of
Amminadab.

7:18 On the second day Nethaneel the son of Zuar, prince of Issachar,
did offer: 7:19 He offered for his offering one silver charger, the
weight whereof was an hundred and thirty shekels, one silver bowl of
seventy shekels, after the shekel of the sanctuary; both of them full
of fine flour mingled with oil for a meat offering: 7:20 One spoon of
gold of ten shekels, full of incense: 7:21 One young bullock, one ram,
one lamb of the first year, for a burnt offering: 7:22 One kid of the
goats for a sin offering: 7:23 And for a sacrifice of peace offerings,
two oxen, five rams, five he goats, five lambs of the first year: this
was the offering of Nethaneel the son of Zuar.

7:24 On the third day Eliab the son of Helon, prince of the children
of Zebulun, did offer: 7:25 His offering was one silver charger, the
weight whereof was an hundred and thirty shekels, one silver bowl of
seventy shekels, after the shekel of the sanctuary; both of them full
of fine flour mingled with oil for a meat offering: 7:26 One golden
spoon of ten shekels, full of incense: 7:27 One young bullock, one
ram, one lamb of the first year, for a burnt offering: 7:28 One kid of
the goats for a sin offering: 7:29 And for a sacrifice of peace
offerings, two oxen, five rams, five he goats, five lambs of the first
year: this was the offering of Eliab the son of Helon.

7:30 On the fourth day Elizur the son of Shedeur, prince of the
children of Reuben, did offer: 7:31 His offering was one silver
charger of the weight of an hundred and thirty shekels, one silver
bowl of seventy shekels, after the shekel of the sanctuary; both of
them full of fine flour mingled with oil for a meat offering: 7:32 One
golden spoon of ten shekels, full of incense: 7:33 One young bullock,
one ram, one lamb of the first year, for a burnt offering: 7:34 One
kid of the goats for a sin offering: 7:35 And for a sacrifice of peace
offerings, two oxen, five rams, five he goats, five lambs of the first
year: this was the offering of Elizur the son of Shedeur.

7:36 On the fifth day Shelumiel the son of Zurishaddai, prince of the
children of Simeon, did offer: 7:37 His offering was one silver
charger, the weight whereof was an hundred and thirty shekels, one
silver bowl of seventy shekels, after the shekel of the sanctuary;
both of them full of fine flour mingled with oil for a meat offering:
7:38 One golden spoon of ten shekels, full of incense: 7:39 One young
bullock, one ram, one lamb of the first year, for a burnt offering:
7:40 One kid of the goats for a sin offering: 7:41 And for a sacrifice
of peace offerings, two oxen, five rams, five he goats, five lambs of
the first year: this was the offering of Shelumiel the son of
Zurishaddai.

7:42 On the sixth day Eliasaph the son of Deuel, prince of the
children of Gad, offered: 7:43 His offering was one silver charger of
the weight of an hundred and thirty shekels, a silver bowl of seventy
shekels, after the shekel of the sanctuary; both of them full of fine
flour mingled with oil for a meat offering: 7:44 One golden spoon of
ten shekels, full of incense: 7:45 One young bullock, one ram, one
lamb of the first year, for a burnt offering: 7:46 One kid of the
goats for a sin offering: 7:47 And for a sacrifice of peace offerings,
two oxen, five rams, five he goats, five lambs of the first year: this
was the offering of Eliasaph the son of Deuel.

7:48 On the seventh day Elishama the son of Ammihud, prince of the
children of Ephraim, offered: 7:49 His offering was one silver
charger, the weight whereof was an hundred and thirty shekels, one
silver bowl of seventy shekels, after the shekel of the sanctuary;
both of them full of fine flour mingled with oil for a meat offering:
7:50 One golden spoon of ten shekels, full of incense: 7:51 One young
bullock, one ram, one lamb of the first year, for a burnt offering:
7:52 One kid of the goats for a sin offering: 7:53 And for a sacrifice
of peace offerings, two oxen, five rams, five he goats, five lambs of
the first year: this was the offering of Elishama the son of Ammihud.

7:54 On the eighth day offered Gamaliel the son of Pedahzur, prince of
the children of Manasseh: 7:55 His offering was one silver charger of
the weight of an hundred and thirty shekels, one silver bowl of
seventy shekels, after the shekel of the sanctuary; both of them full
of fine flour mingled with oil for a meat offering: 7:56 One golden
spoon of ten shekels, full of incense: 7:57 One young bullock, one
ram, one lamb of the first year, for a burnt offering: 7:58 One kid of
the goats for a sin offering: 7:59 And for a sacrifice of peace
offerings, two oxen, five rams, five he goats, five lambs of the first
year: this was the offering of Gamaliel the son of Pedahzur.

7:60 On the ninth day Abidan the son of Gideoni, prince of the
children of Benjamin, offered: 7:61 His offering was one silver
charger, the weight whereof was an hundred and thirty shekels, one
silver bowl of seventy shekels, after the shekel of the sanctuary;
both of them full of fine flour mingled with oil for a meat offering:
7:62 One golden spoon of ten shekels, full of incense: 7:63 One young
bullock, one ram, one lamb of the first year, for a burnt offering:
7:64 One kid of the goats for a sin offering: 7:65 And for a sacrifice
of peace offerings, two oxen, five rams, five he goats, five lambs of
the first year: this was the offering of Abidan the son of Gideoni.

7:66 On the tenth day Ahiezer the son of Ammishaddai, prince of the
children of Dan, offered: 7:67 His offering was one silver charger,
the weight whereof was an hundred and thirty shekels, one silver bowl
of seventy shekels, after the shekel of the sanctuary; both of them
full of fine flour mingled with oil for a meat offering: 7:68 One
golden spoon of ten shekels, full of incense: 7:69 One young bullock,
one ram, one lamb of the first year, for a burnt offering: 7:70 One
kid of the goats for a sin offering: 7:71 And for a sacrifice of peace
offerings, two oxen, five rams, five he goats, five lambs of the first
year: this was the offering of Ahiezer the son of Ammishaddai.

7:72 On the eleventh day Pagiel the son of Ocran, prince of the
children of Asher, offered: 7:73 His offering was one silver charger,
the weight whereof was an hundred and thirty shekels, one silver bowl
of seventy shekels, after the shekel of the sanctuary; both of them
full of fine flour mingled with oil for a meat offering: 7:74 One
golden spoon of ten shekels, full of incense: 7:75 One young bullock,
one ram, one lamb of the first year, for a burnt offering: 7:76 One
kid of the goats for a sin offering: 7:77 And for a sacrifice of peace
offerings, two oxen, five rams, five he goats, five lambs of the first
year: this was the offering of Pagiel the son of Ocran.

7:78 On the twelfth day Ahira the son of Enan, prince of the children
of Naphtali, offered: 7:79 His offering was one silver charger, the
weight whereof was an hundred and thirty shekels, one silver bowl of
seventy shekels, after the shekel of the sanctuary; both of them full
of fine flour mingled with oil for a meat offering: 7:80 One golden
spoon of ten shekels, full of incense: 7:81 One young bullock, one
ram, one lamb of the first year, for a burnt offering: 7:82 One kid of
the goats for a sin offering: 7:83 And for a sacrifice of peace
offerings, two oxen, five rams, five he goats, five lambs of the first
year: this was the offering of Ahira the son of Enan.

7:84 This was the dedication of the altar, in the day when it was
anointed, by the princes of Israel: twelve chargers of silver, twelve
silver bowls, twelve spoons of gold: 7:85 Each charger of silver
weighing an hundred and thirty shekels, each bowl seventy: all the
silver vessels weighed two thousand and four hundred shekels, after
the shekel of the sanctuary: 7:86 The golden spoons were twelve, full
of incense, weighing ten shekels apiece, after the shekel of the
sanctuary: all the gold of the spoons was an hundred and twenty
shekels.

7:87 All the oxen for the burnt offering were twelve bullocks, the
rams twelve, the lambs of the first year twelve, with their meat
offering: and the kids of the goats for sin offering twelve.

7:88 And all the oxen for the sacrifice of the peace offerings were
twenty and four bullocks, the rams sixty, the he goats sixty, the
lambs of the first year sixty. This was the dedication of the altar,
after that it was anointed.

7:89 And when Moses was gone into the tabernacle of the congregation
to speak with him, then he heard the voice of one speaking unto him
from off the mercy seat that was upon the ark of testimony, from
between the two cherubims: and he spake unto him.

8:1 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 8:2 Speak unto Aaron and
say unto him, When thou lightest the lamps, the seven lamps shall give
light over against the candlestick.

8:3 And Aaron did so; he lighted the lamps thereof over against the
candlestick, as the LORD commanded Moses.

8:4 And this work of the candlestick was of beaten gold, unto the
shaft thereof, unto the flowers thereof, was beaten work: according
unto the pattern which the LORD had shewed Moses, so he made the
candlestick.

8:5 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 8:6 Take the Levites from
among the children of Israel, and cleanse them.

8:7 And thus shalt thou do unto them, to cleanse them: Sprinkle water
of purifying upon them, and let them shave all their flesh, and let
them wash their clothes, and so make themselves clean.

8:8 Then let them take a young bullock with his meat offering, even
fine flour mingled with oil, and another young bullock shalt thou take
for a sin offering.

8:9 And thou shalt bring the Levites before the tabernacle of the
congregation: and thou shalt gather the whole assembly of the children
of Israel together: 8:10 And thou shalt bring the Levites before the
LORD: and the children of Israel shall put their hands upon the
Levites: 8:11 And Aaron shall offer the Levites before the LORD for an
offering of the children of Israel, that they may execute the service
of the LORD.

8:12 And the Levites shall lay their hands upon the heads of the
bullocks: and thou shalt offer the one for a sin offering, and the
other for a burnt offering, unto the LORD, to make an atonement for
the Levites.

8:13 And thou shalt set the Levites before Aaron, and before his sons,
and offer them for an offering unto the LORD.

8:14 Thus shalt thou separate the Levites from among the children of
Israel: and the Levites shall be mine.

8:15 And after that shall the Levites go in to do the service of the
tabernacle of the congregation: and thou shalt cleanse them, and offer
them for an offering.

8:16 For they are wholly given unto me from among the children of
Israel; instead of such as open every womb, even instead of the
firstborn of all the children of Israel, have I taken them unto me.

8:17 For all the firstborn of the children of Israel are mine, both
man and beast: on the day that I smote every firstborn in the land of
Egypt I sanctified them for myself.

8:18 And I have taken the Levites for all the firstborn of the
children of Israel.

8:19 And I have given the Levites as a gift to Aaron and to his sons
from among the children of Israel, to do the service of the children
of Israel in the tabernacle of the congregation, and to make an
atonement for the children of Israel: that there be no plague among
the children of Israel, when the children of Israel come nigh unto the
sanctuary.

8:20 And Moses, and Aaron, and all the congregation of the children of
Israel, did to the Levites according unto all that the LORD commanded
Moses concerning the Levites, so did the children of Israel unto them.

8:21 And the Levites were purified, and they washed their clothes; and
Aaron offered them as an offering before the LORD; and Aaron made an
atonement for them to cleanse them.

8:22 And after that went the Levites in to do their service in the
tabernacle of the congregation before Aaron, and before his sons: as
the LORD had commanded Moses concerning the Levites, so did they unto
them.

8:23 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 8:24 This is it that
belongeth unto the Levites: from twenty and five years old and upward
they shall go in to wait upon the service of the tabernacle of the
congregation: 8:25 And from the age of fifty years they shall cease
waiting upon the service thereof, and shall serve no more: 8:26 But
shall minister with their brethren in the tabernacle of the
congregation, to keep the charge, and shall do no service. Thus shalt
thou do unto the Levites touching their charge.

9:1 And the LORD spake unto Moses in the wilderness of Sinai, in the
first month of the second year after they were come out of the land of
Egypt, saying, 9:2 Let the children of Israel also keep the passover
at his appointed season.

9:3 In the fourteenth day of this month, at even, ye shall keep it in
his appointed season: according to all the rites of it, and according
to all the ceremonies thereof, shall ye keep it.

9:4 And Moses spake unto the children of Israel, that they should keep
the passover.

9:5 And they kept the passover on the fourteenth day of the first
month at even in the wilderness of Sinai: according to all that the
LORD commanded Moses, so did the children of Israel.

9:6 And there were certain men, who were defiled by the dead body of a
man, that they could not keep the passover on that day: and they came
before Moses and before Aaron on that day: 9:7 And those men said unto
him, We are defiled by the dead body of a man: wherefore are we kept
back, that we may not offer an offering of the LORD in his appointed
season among the children of Israel?  9:8 And Moses said unto them,
Stand still, and I will hear what the LORD will command concerning
you.

9:9 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 9:10 Speak unto the
children of Israel, saying, If any man of you or of your posterity
shall be unclean by reason of a dead body, or be in a journey afar
off, yet he shall keep the passover unto the LORD.

9:11 The fourteenth day of the second month at even they shall keep
it, and eat it with unleavened bread and bitter herbs.

9:12 They shall leave none of it unto the morning, nor break any bone
of it: according to all the ordinances of the passover they shall keep
it.

9:13 But the man that is clean, and is not in a journey, and
forbeareth to keep the passover, even the same soul shall be cut off
from among his people: because he brought not the offering of the LORD
in his appointed season, that man shall bear his sin.

9:14 And if a stranger shall sojourn among you, and will keep the
passover unto the LORD; according to the ordinance of the passover,
and according to the manner thereof, so shall he do: ye shall have one
ordinance, both for the stranger, and for him that was born in the
land.

9:15 And on the day that the tabernacle was reared up the cloud
covered the tabernacle, namely, the tent of the testimony: and at even
there was upon the tabernacle as it were the appearance of fire, until
the morning.

9:16 So it was alway: the cloud covered it by day, and the appearance
of fire by night.

9:17 And when the cloud was taken up from the tabernacle, then after
that the children of Israel journeyed: and in the place where the
cloud abode, there the children of Israel pitched their tents.

9:18 At the commandment of the LORD the children of Israel journeyed,
and at the commandment of the LORD they pitched: as long as the cloud
abode upon the tabernacle they rested in their tents.

9:19 And when the cloud tarried long upon the tabernacle many days,
then the children of Israel kept the charge of the LORD, and journeyed
not.

9:20 And so it was, when the cloud was a few days upon the tabernacle;
according to the commandment of the LORD they abode in their tents,
and according to the commandment of the LORD they journeyed.

9:21 And so it was, when the cloud abode from even unto the morning,
and that the cloud was taken up in the morning, then they journeyed:
whether it was by day or by night that the cloud was taken up, they
journeyed.

9:22 Or whether it were two days, or a month, or a year, that the
cloud tarried upon the tabernacle, remaining thereon, the children of
Israel abode in their tents, and journeyed not: but when it was taken
up, they journeyed.

9:23 At the commandment of the LORD they rested in the tents, and at
the commandment of the LORD they journeyed: they kept the charge of
the LORD, at the commandment of the LORD by the hand of Moses.

10:1 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 10:2 Make thee two
trumpets of silver; of a whole piece shalt thou make them: that thou
mayest use them for the calling of the assembly, and for the
journeying of the camps.

10:3 And when they shall blow with them, all the assembly shall
assemble themselves to thee at the door of the tabernacle of the
congregation.

10:4 And if they blow but with one trumpet, then the princes, which
are heads of the thousands of Israel, shall gather themselves unto
thee.

10:5 When ye blow an alarm, then the camps that lie on the east parts
shall go forward.

10:6 When ye blow an alarm the second time, then the camps that lie on
the south side shall take their journey: they shall blow an alarm for
their journeys.

10:7 But when the congregation is to be gathered together, ye shall
blow, but ye shall not sound an alarm.

10:8 And the sons of Aaron, the priests, shall blow with the trumpets;
and they shall be to you for an ordinance for ever throughout your
generations.

10:9 And if ye go to war in your land against the enemy that
oppresseth you, then ye shall blow an alarm with the trumpets; and ye
shall be remembered before the LORD your God, and ye shall be saved
from your enemies.

10:10 Also in the day of your gladness, and in your solemn days, and
in the beginnings of your months, ye shall blow with the trumpets over
your burnt offerings, and over the sacrifices of your peace offerings;
that they may be to you for a memorial before your God: I am the LORD
your God.

10:11 And it came to pass on the twentieth day of the second month, in
the second year, that the cloud was taken up from off the tabernacle
of the testimony.

10:12 And the children of Israel took their journeys out of the
wilderness of Sinai; and the cloud rested in the wilderness of Paran.

10:13 And they first took their journey according to the commandment
of the LORD by the hand of Moses.

10:14 In the first place went the standard of the camp of the children
of Judah according to their armies: and over his host was Nahshon the
son of Amminadab.

10:15 And over the host of the tribe of the children of Issachar was
Nethaneel the son of Zuar.

10:16 And over the host of the tribe of the children of Zebulun was
Eliab the son of Helon.

10:17 And the tabernacle was taken down; and the sons of Gershon and
the sons of Merari set forward, bearing the tabernacle.

10:18 And the standard of the camp of Reuben set forward according to
their armies: and over his host was Elizur the son of Shedeur.

10:19 And over the host of the tribe of the children of Simeon was
Shelumiel the son of Zurishaddai.

10:20 And over the host of the tribe of the children of Gad was
Eliasaph the son of Deuel.

10:21 And the Kohathites set forward, bearing the sanctuary: and the
other did set up the tabernacle against they came.

10:22 And the standard of the camp of the children of Ephraim set
forward according to their armies: and over his host was Elishama the
son of Ammihud.

10:23 And over the host of the tribe of the children of Manasseh was
Gamaliel the son of Pedahzur.

10:24 And over the host of the tribe of the children of Benjamin was
Abidan the son of Gideoni.

10:25 And the standard of the camp of the children of Dan set forward,
which was the rereward of all the camps throughout their hosts: and
over his host was Ahiezer the son of Ammishaddai.

10:26 And over the host of the tribe of the children of Asher was
Pagiel the son of Ocran.

10:27 And over the host of the tribe of the children of Naphtali was
Ahira the son of Enan.

10:28 Thus were the journeyings of the children of Israel according to
their armies, when they set forward.

10:29 And Moses said unto Hobab, the son of Raguel the Midianite,
Moses' father in law, We are journeying unto the place of which the
LORD said, I will give it you: come thou with us, and we will do thee
good: for the LORD hath spoken good concerning Israel.

10:30 And he said unto him, I will not go; but I will depart to mine
own land, and to my kindred.

10:31 And he said, Leave us not, I pray thee; forasmuch as thou
knowest how we are to encamp in the wilderness, and thou mayest be to
us instead of eyes.

10:32 And it shall be, if thou go with us, yea, it shall be, that what
goodness the LORD shall do unto us, the same will we do unto thee.

10:33 And they departed from the mount of the LORD three days'
journey: and the ark of the covenant of the LORD went before them in
the three days' journey, to search out a resting place for them.

10:34 And the cloud of the LORD was upon them by day, when they went
out of the camp.

10:35 And it came to pass, when the ark set forward, that Moses said,
Rise up, LORD, and let thine enemies be scattered; and let them that
hate thee flee before thee.

10:36 And when it rested, he said, Return, O LORD, unto the many
thousands of Israel.

11:1 And when the people complained, it displeased the LORD: and the
LORD heard it; and his anger was kindled; and the fire of the LORD
burnt among them, and consumed them that were in the uttermost parts
of the camp.

11:2 And the people cried unto Moses; and when Moses prayed unto the
LORD, the fire was quenched.

11:3 And he called the name of the place Taberah: because the fire of
the LORD burnt among them.

11:4 And the mixt multitude that was among them fell a lusting: and
the children of Israel also wept again, and said, Who shall give us
flesh to eat?  11:5 We remember the fish, which we did eat in Egypt
freely; the cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions,
and the garlick: 11:6 But now our soul is dried away: there is nothing
at all, beside this manna, before our eyes.

11:7 And the manna was as coriander seed, and the colour thereof as
the colour of bdellium.

11:8 And the people went about, and gathered it, and ground it in
mills, or beat it in a mortar, and baked it in pans, and made cakes of
it: and the taste of it was as the taste of fresh oil.

11:9 And when the dew fell upon the camp in the night, the manna fell
upon it.

11:10 Then Moses heard the people weep throughout their families,
every man in the door of his tent: and the anger of the LORD was
kindled greatly; Moses also was displeased.

11:11 And Moses said unto the LORD, Wherefore hast thou afflicted thy
servant? and wherefore have I not found favour in thy sight, that thou
layest the burden of all this people upon me?  11:12 Have I conceived
all this people? have I begotten them, that thou shouldest say unto
me, Carry them in thy bosom, as a nursing father beareth the sucking
child, unto the land which thou swarest unto their fathers?  11:13
Whence should I have flesh to give unto all this people? for they weep
unto me, saying, Give us flesh, that we may eat.

11:14 I am not able to bear all this people alone, because it is too
heavy for me.

11:15 And if thou deal thus with me, kill me, I pray thee, out of
hand, if I have found favour in thy sight; and let me not see my
wretchedness.

11:16 And the LORD said unto Moses, Gather unto me seventy men of the
elders of Israel, whom thou knowest to be the elders of the people,
and officers over them; and bring them unto the tabernacle of the
congregation, that they may stand there with thee.

11:17 And I will come down and talk with thee there: and I will take
of the spirit which is upon thee, and will put it upon them; and they
shall bear the burden of the people with thee, that thou bear it not
thyself alone.

11:18 And say thou unto the people, Sanctify yourselves against to
morrow, and ye shall eat flesh: for ye have wept in the ears of the
LORD, saying, Who shall give us flesh to eat? for it was well with us
in Egypt: therefore the LORD will give you flesh, and ye shall eat.

11:19 Ye shall not eat one day, nor two days, nor five days, neither
ten days, nor twenty days; 11:20 But even a whole month, until it come
out at your nostrils, and it be loathsome unto you: because that ye
have despised the LORD which is among you, and have wept before him,
saying, Why came we forth out of Egypt?  11:21 And Moses said, The
people, among whom I am, are six hundred thousand footmen; and thou
hast said, I will give them flesh, that they may eat a whole month.

11:22 Shall the flocks and the herds be slain for them, to suffice
them?  or shall all the fish of the sea be gathered together for them,
to suffice them?  11:23 And the LORD said unto Moses, Is the LORD's
hand waxed short? thou shalt see now whether my word shall come to
pass unto thee or not.

11:24 And Moses went out, and told the people the words of the LORD,
and gathered the seventy men of the elders of the people, and set them
round about the tabernacle.

11:25 And the LORD came down in a cloud, and spake unto him, and took
of the spirit that was upon him, and gave it unto the seventy elders:
and it came to pass, that, when the spirit rested upon them, they
prophesied, and did not cease.

11:26 But there remained two of the men in the camp, the name of the
one was Eldad, and the name of the other Medad: and the spirit rested
upon them; and they were of them that were written, but went not out
unto the tabernacle: and they prophesied in the camp.

11:27 And there ran a young man, and told Moses, and said, Eldad and
Medad do prophesy in the camp.

11:28 And Joshua the son of Nun, the servant of Moses, one of his
young men, answered and said, My lord Moses, forbid them.

11:29 And Moses said unto him, Enviest thou for my sake? would God
that all the LORD's people were prophets, and that the LORD would put
his spirit upon them!  11:30 And Moses gat him into the camp, he and
the elders of Israel.

11:31 And there went forth a wind from the LORD, and brought quails
from the sea, and let them fall by the camp, as it were a day's
journey on this side, and as it were a day's journey on the other
side, round about the camp, and as it were two cubits high upon the
face of the earth.

11:32 And the people stood up all that day, and all that night, and
all the next day, and they gathered the quails: he that gathered least
gathered ten homers: and they spread them all abroad for themselves
round about the camp.

11:33 And while the flesh was yet between their teeth, ere it was
chewed, the wrath of the LORD was kindled against the people, and the
LORD smote the people with a very great plague.

11:34 And he called the name of that place Kibrothhattaavah: because
there they buried the people that lusted.

11:35 And the people journeyed from Kibrothhattaavah unto Hazeroth;
and abode at Hazeroth.

12:1 And Miriam and Aaron spake against Moses because of the Ethiopian
woman whom he had married: for he had married an Ethiopian woman.

12:2 And they said, Hath the LORD indeed spoken only by Moses? hath he
not spoken also by us? And the LORD heard it.

12:3 (Now the man Moses was very meek, above all the men which were
upon the face of the earth.)  12:4 And the LORD spake suddenly unto
Moses, and unto Aaron, and unto Miriam, Come out ye three unto the
tabernacle of the congregation. And they three came out.

12:5 And the LORD came down in the pillar of the cloud, and stood in
the door of the tabernacle, and called Aaron and Miriam: and they both
came forth.

12:6 And he said, Hear now my words: If there be a prophet among you,
I the LORD will make myself known unto him in a vision, and will speak
unto him in a dream.

12:7 My servant Moses is not so, who is faithful in all mine house.

12:8 With him will I speak mouth to mouth, even apparently, and not in
dark speeches; and the similitude of the LORD shall he behold:
wherefore then were ye not afraid to speak against my servant Moses?
12:9 And the anger of the LORD was kindled against them; and he
departed.

12:10 And the cloud departed from off the tabernacle; and, behold,
Miriam became leprous, white as snow: and Aaron looked upon Miriam,
and, behold, she was leprous.

12:11 And Aaron said unto Moses, Alas, my lord, I beseech thee, lay
not the sin upon us, wherein we have done foolishly, and wherein we
have sinned.

12:12 Let her not be as one dead, of whom the flesh is half consumed
when he cometh out of his mother's womb.

12:13 And Moses cried unto the LORD, saying, Heal her now, O God, I
beseech thee.

12:14 And the LORD said unto Moses, If her father had but spit in her
face, should she not be ashamed seven days? let her be shut out from
the camp seven days, and after that let her be received in again.

12:15 And Miriam was shut out from the camp seven days: and the people
journeyed not till Miriam was brought in again.

12:16 And afterward the people removed from Hazeroth, and pitched in
the wilderness of Paran.

13:1 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 13:2 Send thou men, that
they may search the land of Canaan, which I give unto the children of
Israel: of every tribe of their fathers shall ye send a man, every one
a ruler among them.

13:3 And Moses by the commandment of the LORD sent them from the
wilderness of Paran: all those men were heads of the children of
Israel.

13:4 And these were their names: of the tribe of Reuben, Shammua the
son of Zaccur.

13:5 Of the tribe of Simeon, Shaphat the son of Hori.

13:6 Of the tribe of Judah, Caleb the son of Jephunneh.

13:7 Of the tribe of Issachar, Igal the son of Joseph.

13:8 Of the tribe of Ephraim, Oshea the son of Nun.

13:9 Of the tribe of Benjamin, Palti the son of Raphu.

13:10 Of the tribe of Zebulun, Gaddiel the son of Sodi.

13:11 Of the tribe of Joseph, namely, of the tribe of Manasseh, Gaddi
the son of Susi.

13:12 Of the tribe of Dan, Ammiel the son of Gemalli.

13:13 Of the tribe of Asher, Sethur the son of Michael.

13:14 Of the tribe of Naphtali, Nahbi the son of Vophsi.

13:15 Of the tribe of Gad, Geuel the son of Machi.

13:16 These are the names of the men which Moses sent to spy out the
land.

And Moses called Oshea the son of Nun Jehoshua.

13:17 And Moses sent them to spy out the land of Canaan, and said unto
them, Get you up this way southward, and go up into the mountain:
13:18 And see the land, what it is, and the people that dwelleth
therein, whether they be strong or weak, few or many; 13:19 And what
the land is that they dwell in, whether it be good or bad; and what
cities they be that they dwell in, whether in tents, or in strong
holds; 13:20 And what the land is, whether it be fat or lean, whether
there be wood therein, or not. And be ye of good courage, and bring of
the fruit of the land. Now the time was the time of the firstripe
grapes.

13:21 So they went up, and searched the land from the wilderness of
Zin unto Rehob, as men come to Hamath.

13:22 And they ascended by the south, and came unto Hebron; where
Ahiman, Sheshai, and Talmai, the children of Anak, were. (Now Hebron
was built seven years before Zoan in Egypt.)  13:23 And they came unto
the brook of Eshcol, and cut down from thence a branch with one
cluster of grapes, and they bare it between two upon a staff; and they
brought of the pomegranates, and of the figs.

13:24 The place was called the brook Eshcol, because of the cluster of
grapes which the children of Israel cut down from thence.

13:25 And they returned from searching of the land after forty days.

13:26 And they went and came to Moses, and to Aaron, and to all the
congregation of the children of Israel, unto the wilderness of Paran,
to Kadesh; and brought back word unto them, and unto all the
congregation, and shewed them the fruit of the land.

13:27 And they told him, and said, We came unto the land whither thou
sentest us, and surely it floweth with milk and honey; and this is the
fruit of it.

13:28 Nevertheless the people be strong that dwell in the land, and
the cities are walled, and very great: and moreover we saw the
children of Anak there.

13:29 The Amalekites dwell in the land of the south: and the Hittites,
and the Jebusites, and the Amorites, dwell in the mountains: and the
Canaanites dwell by the sea, and by the coast of Jordan.

13:30 And Caleb stilled the people before Moses, and said, Let us go
up at once, and possess it; for we are well able to overcome it.

13:31 But the men that went up with him said, We be not able to go up
against the people; for they are stronger than we.

13:32 And they brought up an evil report of the land which they had
searched unto the children of Israel, saying, The land, through which
we have gone to search it, is a land that eateth up the inhabitants
thereof; and all the people that we saw in it are men of a great
stature.

13:33 And there we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, which come of the
giants: and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were
in their sight.

14:1 And all the congregation lifted up their voice, and cried; and
the people wept that night.

14:2 And all the children of Israel murmured against Moses and against
Aaron: and the whole congregation said unto them, Would God that we
had died in the land of Egypt! or would God we had died in this
wilderness!  14:3 And wherefore hath the LORD brought us unto this
land, to fall by the sword, that our wives and our children should be
a prey? were it not better for us to return into Egypt?  14:4 And they
said one to another, Let us make a captain, and let us return into
Egypt.

14:5 Then Moses and Aaron fell on their faces before all the assembly
of the congregation of the children of Israel.

14:6 And Joshua the son of Nun, and Caleb the son of Jephunneh, which
were of them that searched the land, rent their clothes: 14:7 And they
spake unto all the company of the children of Israel, saying, The
land, which we passed through to search it, is an exceeding good land.

14:8 If the LORD delight in us, then he will bring us into this land,
and give it us; a land which floweth with milk and honey.

14:9 Only rebel not ye against the LORD, neither fear ye the people of
the land; for they are bread for us: their defence is departed from
them, and the LORD is with us: fear them not.

14:10 But all the congregation bade stone them with stones. And the
glory of the LORD appeared in the tabernacle of the congregation
before all the children of Israel.

14:11 And the LORD said unto Moses, How long will this people provoke
me?  and how long will it be ere they believe me, for all the signs
which I have shewed among them?  14:12 I will smite them with the
pestilence, and disinherit them, and will make of thee a greater
nation and mightier than they.

14:13 And Moses said unto the LORD, Then the Egyptians shall hear it,
(for thou broughtest up this people in thy might from among them;)
14:14 And they will tell it to the inhabitants of this land: for they
have heard that thou LORD art among this people, that thou LORD art
seen face to face, and that thy cloud standeth over them, and that
thou goest before them, by day time in a pillar of a cloud, and in a
pillar of fire by night.

14:15 Now if thou shalt kill all this people as one man, then the
nations which have heard the fame of thee will speak, saying, 14:16
Because the LORD was not able to bring this people into the land which
he sware unto them, therefore he hath slain them in the wilderness.

14:17 And now, I beseech thee, let the power of my LORD be great,
according as thou hast spoken, saying, 14:18 The LORD is
longsuffering, and of great mercy, forgiving iniquity and
transgression, and by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the
iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth
generation.

14:19 Pardon, I beseech thee, the iniquity of this people according
unto the greatness of thy mercy, and as thou hast forgiven this
people, from Egypt even until now.

14:20 And the LORD said, I have pardoned according to thy word: 14:21
But as truly as I live, all the earth shall be filled with the glory
of the LORD.

14:22 Because all those men which have seen my glory, and my miracles,
which I did in Egypt and in the wilderness, and have tempted me now
these ten times, and have not hearkened to my voice; 14:23 Surely they
shall not see the land which I sware unto their fathers, neither shall
any of them that provoked me see it: 14:24 But my servant Caleb,
because he had another spirit with him, and hath followed me fully,
him will I bring into the land whereinto he went; and his seed shall
possess it.

14:25 (Now the Amalekites and the Canaanites dwelt in the valley.)
Tomorrow turn you, and get you into the wilderness by the way of the
Red sea.

14:26 And the LORD spake unto Moses and unto Aaron, saying, 14:27 How
long shall I bear with this evil congregation, which murmur against
me? I have heard the murmurings of the children of Israel, which they
murmur against me.

14:28 Say unto them, As truly as I live, saith the LORD, as ye have
spoken in mine ears, so will I do to you: 14:29 Your carcases shall
fall in this wilderness; and all that were numbered of you, according
to your whole number, from twenty years old and upward which have
murmured against me.

14:30 Doubtless ye shall not come into the land, concerning which I
sware to make you dwell therein, save Caleb the son of Jephunneh, and
Joshua the son of Nun.

14:31 But your little ones, which ye said should be a prey, them will
I bring in, and they shall know the land which ye have despised.

14:32 But as for you, your carcases, they shall fall in this
wilderness.

14:33 And your children shall wander in the wilderness forty years,
and bear your whoredoms, until your carcases be wasted in the
wilderness.

14:34 After the number of the days in which ye searched the land, even
forty days, each day for a year, shall ye bear your iniquities, even
forty years, and ye shall know my breach of promise.

14:35 I the LORD have said, I will surely do it unto all this evil
congregation, that are gathered together against me: in this
wilderness they shall be consumed, and there they shall die.

14:36 And the men, which Moses sent to search the land, who returned,
and made all the congregation to murmur against him, by bringing up a
slander upon the land, 14:37 Even those men that did bring up the evil
report upon the land, died by the plague before the LORD.

14:38 But Joshua the son of Nun, and Caleb the son of Jephunneh, which
were of the men that went to search the land, lived still.

14:39 And Moses told these sayings unto all the children of Israel:
and the people mourned greatly.

14:40 And they rose up early in the morning, and gat them up into the
top of the mountain, saying, Lo, we be here, and will go up unto the
place which the LORD hath promised: for we have sinned.

14:41 And Moses said, Wherefore now do ye transgress the commandment
of the LORD? but it shall not prosper.

14:42 Go not up, for the LORD is not among you; that ye be not smitten
before your enemies.

14:43 For the Amalekites and the Canaanites are there before you, and
ye shall fall by the sword: because ye are turned away from the LORD,
therefore the LORD will not be with you.

14:44 But they presumed to go up unto the hill top: nevertheless the
ark of the covenant of the LORD, and Moses, departed not out of the
camp.

14:45 Then the Amalekites came down, and the Canaanites which dwelt in
that hill, and smote them, and discomfited them, even unto Hormah.

15:1 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 15:2 Speak unto the
children of Israel, and say unto them, When ye be come into the land
of your habitations, which I give unto you, 15:3 And will make an
offering by fire unto the LORD, a burnt offering, or a sacrifice in
performing a vow, or in a freewill offering, or in your solemn feasts,
to make a sweet savour unto the LORD, of the herd or of the flock:
15:4 Then shall he that offereth his offering unto the LORD bring a
meat offering of a tenth deal of flour mingled with the fourth part of
an hin of oil.

15:5 And the fourth part of an hin of wine for a drink offering shalt
thou prepare with the burnt offering or sacrifice, for one lamb.

15:6 Or for a ram, thou shalt prepare for a meat offering two tenth
deals of flour mingled with the third part of an hin of oil.

15:7 And for a drink offering thou shalt offer the third part of an
hin of wine, for a sweet savour unto the LORD.

15:8 And when thou preparest a bullock for a burnt offering, or for a
sacrifice in performing a vow, or peace offerings unto the LORD: 15:9
Then shall he bring with a bullock a meat offering of three tenth
deals of flour mingled with half an hin of oil.

15:10 And thou shalt bring for a drink offering half an hin of wine,
for an offering made by fire, of a sweet savour unto the LORD.

15:11 Thus shall it be done for one bullock, or for one ram, or for a
lamb, or a kid.

15:12 According to the number that ye shall prepare, so shall ye do to
every one according to their number.

15:13 All that are born of the country shall do these things after
this manner, in offering an offering made by fire, of a sweet savour
unto the LORD.

15:14 And if a stranger sojourn with you, or whosoever be among you in
your generations, and will offer an offering made by fire, of a sweet
savour unto the LORD; as ye do, so he shall do.

15:15 One ordinance shall be both for you of the congregation, and
also for the stranger that sojourneth with you, an ordinance for ever
in your generations: as ye are, so shall the stranger be before the
LORD.

15:16 One law and one manner shall be for you, and for the stranger
that sojourneth with you.

15:17 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 15:18 Speak unto the
children of Israel, and say unto them, When ye come into the land
whither I bring you, 15:19 Then it shall be, that, when ye eat of the
bread of the land, ye shall offer up an heave offering unto the LORD.

15:20 Ye shall offer up a cake of the first of your dough for an heave
offering: as ye do the heave offering of the threshingfloor, so shall
ye heave it.

15:21 Of the first of your dough ye shall give unto the LORD an heave
offering in your generations.

15:22 And if ye have erred, and not observed all these commandments,
which the LORD hath spoken unto Moses, 15:23 Even all that the LORD
hath commanded you by the hand of Moses, from the day that the LORD
commanded Moses, and henceforward among your generations; 15:24 Then
it shall be, if ought be committed by ignorance without the knowledge
of the congregation, that all the congregation shall offer one young
bullock for a burnt offering, for a sweet savour unto the LORD, with
his meat offering, and his drink offering, according to the manner,
and one kid of the goats for a sin offering.

15:25 And the priest shall make an atonement for all the congregation
of the children of Israel, and it shall be forgiven them; for it is
ignorance: and they shall bring their offering, a sacrifice made by
fire unto the LORD, and their sin offering before the LORD, for their
ignorance: 15:26 And it shall be forgiven all the congregation of the
children of Israel, and the stranger that sojourneth among them;
seeing all the people were in ignorance.

15:27 And if any soul sin through ignorance, then he shall bring a she
goat of the first year for a sin offering.

15:28 And the priest shall make an atonement for the soul that sinneth
ignorantly, when he sinneth by ignorance before the LORD, to make an
atonement for him; and it shall be forgiven him.

15:29 Ye shall have one law for him that sinneth through ignorance,
both for him that is born among the children of Israel, and for the
stranger that sojourneth among them.

15:30 But the soul that doeth ought presumptuously, whether he be born
in the land, or a stranger, the same reproacheth the LORD; and that
soul shall be cut off from among his people.

15:31 Because he hath despised the word of the LORD, and hath broken
his commandment, that soul shall utterly be cut off; his iniquity
shall be upon him.

15:32 And while the children of Israel were in the wilderness, they
found a man that gathered sticks upon the sabbath day.

15:33 And they that found him gathering sticks brought him unto Moses
and Aaron, and unto all the congregation.

15:34 And they put him in ward, because it was not declared what
should be done to him.

15:35 And the LORD said unto Moses, The man shall be surely put to
death: all the congregation shall stone him with stones without the
camp.

15:36 And all the congregation brought him without the camp, and
stoned him with stones, and he died; as the LORD commanded Moses.

15:37 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 15:38 Speak unto the
children of Israel, and bid them that they make them fringes in the
borders of their garments throughout their generations, and that they
put upon the fringe of the borders a ribband of blue: 15:39 And it
shall be unto you for a fringe, that ye may look upon it, and remember
all the commandments of the LORD, and do them; and that ye seek not
after your own heart and your own eyes, after which ye use to go a
whoring: 15:40 That ye may remember, and do all my commandments, and
be holy unto your God.

15:41 I am the LORD your God, which brought you out of the land of
Egypt, to be your God: I am the LORD your God.

16:1 Now Korah, the son of Izhar, the son of Kohath, the son of Levi,
and Dathan and Abiram, the sons of Eliab, and On, the son of Peleth,
sons of Reuben, took men: 16:2 And they rose up before Moses, with
certain of the children of Israel, two hundred and fifty princes of
the assembly, famous in the congregation, men of renown: 16:3 And they
gathered themselves together against Moses and against Aaron, and said
unto them, Ye take too much upon you, seeing all the congregation are
holy, every one of them, and the LORD is among them: wherefore then
lift ye up yourselves above the congregation of the LORD?  16:4 And
when Moses heard it, he fell upon his face: 16:5 And he spake unto
Korah and unto all his company, saying, Even to morrow the LORD will
shew who are his, and who is holy; and will cause him to come near
unto him: even him whom he hath chosen will he cause to come near unto
him.

16:6 This do; Take you censers, Korah, and all his company; 16:7 And
put fire therein, and put incense in them before the LORD to morrow:
and it shall be that the man whom the LORD doth choose, he shall be
holy: ye take too much upon you, ye sons of Levi.

16:8 And Moses said unto Korah, Hear, I pray you, ye sons of Levi:
16:9 Seemeth it but a small thing unto you, that the God of Israel
hath separated you from the congregation of Israel, to bring you near
to himself to do the service of the tabernacle of the LORD, and to
stand before the congregation to minister unto them?  16:10 And he
hath brought thee near to him, and all thy brethren the sons of Levi
with thee: and seek ye the priesthood also?  16:11 For which cause
both thou and all thy company are gathered together against the LORD:
and what is Aaron, that ye murmur against him?  16:12 And Moses sent
to call Dathan and Abiram, the sons of Eliab: which said, We will not
come up: 16:13 Is it a small thing that thou hast brought us up out of
a land that floweth with milk and honey, to kill us in the wilderness,
except thou make thyself altogether a prince over us?  16:14 Moreover
thou hast not brought us into a land that floweth with milk and honey,
or given us inheritance of fields and vineyards: wilt thou put out the
eyes of these men? we will not come up.

16:15 And Moses was very wroth, and said unto the LORD, Respect not
thou their offering: I have not taken one ass from them, neither have
I hurt one of them.

16:16 And Moses said unto Korah, Be thou and all thy company before
the LORD, thou, and they, and Aaron, to morrow: 16:17 And take every
man his censer, and put incense in them, and bring ye before the LORD
every man his censer, two hundred and fifty censers; thou also, and
Aaron, each of you his censer.

16:18 And they took every man his censer, and put fire in them, and
laid incense thereon, and stood in the door of the tabernacle of the
congregation with Moses and Aaron.

16:19 And Korah gathered all the congregation against them unto the
door of the tabernacle of the congregation: and the glory of the LORD
appeared unto all the congregation.

16:20 And the LORD spake unto Moses and unto Aaron, saying, 16:21
Separate yourselves from among this congregation, that I may consume
them in a moment.

16:22 And they fell upon their faces, and said, O God, the God of the
spirits of all flesh, shall one man sin, and wilt thou be wroth with
all the congregation?  16:23 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying,
16:24 Speak unto the congregation, saying, Get you up from about the
tabernacle of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram.

16:25 And Moses rose up and went unto Dathan and Abiram; and the
elders of Israel followed him.

16:26 And he spake unto the congregation, saying, Depart, I pray you,
from the tents of these wicked men, and touch nothing of their's, lest
ye be consumed in all their sins.

16:27 So they gat up from the tabernacle of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram,
on every side: and Dathan and Abiram came out, and stood in the door
of their tents, and their wives, and their sons, and their little
children.

16:28 And Moses said, Hereby ye shall know that the LORD hath sent me
to do all these works; for I have not done them of mine own mind.

16:29 If these men die the common death of all men, or if they be
visited after the visitation of all men; then the LORD hath not sent
me.

16:30 But if the LORD make a new thing, and the earth open her mouth,
and swallow them up, with all that appertain unto them, and they go
down quick into the pit; then ye shall understand that these men have
provoked the LORD.

16:31 And it came to pass, as he had made an end of speaking all these
words, that the ground clave asunder that was under them: 16:32 And
the earth opened her mouth, and swallowed them up, and their houses,
and all the men that appertained unto Korah, and all their goods.

16:33 They, and all that appertained to them, went down alive into the
pit, and the earth closed upon them: and they perished from among the
congregation.

16:34 And all Israel that were round about them fled at the cry of
them: for they said, Lest the earth swallow us up also.

16:35 And there came out a fire from the LORD, and consumed the two
hundred and fifty men that offered incense.

16:36 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 16:37 Speak unto Eleazar
the son of Aaron the priest, that he take up the censers out of the
burning, and scatter thou the fire yonder; for they are hallowed.

16:38 The censers of these sinners against their own souls, let them
make them broad plates for a covering of the altar: for they offered
them before the LORD, therefore they are hallowed: and they shall be a
sign unto the children of Israel.

16:39 And Eleazar the priest took the brasen censers, wherewith they
that were burnt had offered; and they were made broad plates for a
covering of the altar: 16:40 To be a memorial unto the children of
Israel, that no stranger, which is not of the seed of Aaron, come near
to offer incense before the LORD; that he be not as Korah, and as his
company: as the LORD said to him by the hand of Moses.

16:41 But on the morrow all the congregation of the children of Israel
murmured against Moses and against Aaron, saying, Ye have killed the
people of the LORD.

16:42 And it came to pass, when the congregation was gathered against
Moses and against Aaron, that they looked toward the tabernacle of the
congregation: and, behold, the cloud covered it, and the glory of the
LORD appeared.

16:43 And Moses and Aaron came before the tabernacle of the
congregation.

16:44 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 16:45 Get you up from
among this congregation, that I may consume them as in a moment. And
they fell upon their faces.

16:46 And Moses said unto Aaron, Take a censer, and put fire therein
from off the altar, and put on incense, and go quickly unto the
congregation, and make an atonement for them: for there is wrath gone
out from the LORD; the plague is begun.

16:47 And Aaron took as Moses commanded, and ran into the midst of the
congregation; and, behold, the plague was begun among the people: and
he put on incense, and made an atonement for the people.

16:48 And he stood between the dead and the living; and the plague was
stayed.

16:49 Now they that died in the plague were fourteen thousand and
seven hundred, beside them that died about the matter of Korah.

16:50 And Aaron returned unto Moses unto the door of the tabernacle of
the congregation: and the plague was stayed.

17:1 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 17:2 Speak unto the
children of Israel, and take of every one of them a rod according to
the house of their fathers, of all their princes according to the
house of their fathers twelve rods: write thou every man's name upon
his rod.

17:3 And thou shalt write Aaron's name upon the rod of Levi: for one
rod shall be for the head of the house of their fathers.

17:4 And thou shalt lay them up in the tabernacle of the congregation
before the testimony, where I will meet with you.

17:5 And it shall come to pass, that the man's rod, whom I shall
choose, shall blossom: and I will make to cease from me the murmurings
of the children of Israel, whereby they murmur against you.

17:6 And Moses spake unto the children of Israel, and every one of
their princes gave him a rod apiece, for each prince one, according to
their fathers' houses, even twelve rods: and the rod of Aaron was
among their rods.

17:7 And Moses laid up the rods before the LORD in the tabernacle of
witness.

17:8 And it came to pass, that on the morrow Moses went into the
tabernacle of witness; and, behold, the rod of Aaron for the house of
Levi was budded, and brought forth buds, and bloomed blossoms, and
yielded almonds.

17:9 And Moses brought out all the rods from before the LORD unto all
the children of Israel: and they looked, and took every man his rod.

17:10 And the LORD said unto Moses, Bring Aaron's rod again before the
testimony, to be kept for a token against the rebels; and thou shalt
quite take away their murmurings from me, that they die not.

17:11 And Moses did so: as the LORD commanded him, so did he.

17:12 And the children of Israel spake unto Moses, saying, Behold, we
die, we perish, we all perish.

17:13 Whosoever cometh any thing near unto the tabernacle of the LORD
shall die: shall we be consumed with dying?  18:1 And the LORD said
unto Aaron, Thou and thy sons and thy father's house with thee shall
bear the iniquity of the sanctuary: and thou and thy sons with thee
shall bear the iniquity of your priesthood.

18:2 And thy brethren also of the tribe of Levi, the tribe of thy
father, bring thou with thee, that they may be joined unto thee, and
minister unto thee: but thou and thy sons with thee shall minister
before the tabernacle of witness.

18:3 And they shall keep thy charge, and the charge of all the
tabernacle: only they shall not come nigh the vessels of the sanctuary
and the altar, that neither they, nor ye also, die.

18:4 And they shall be joined unto thee, and keep the charge of the
tabernacle of the congregation, for all the service of the tabernacle:
and a stranger shall not come nigh unto you.

18:5 And ye shall keep the charge of the sanctuary, and the charge of
the altar: that there be no wrath any more upon the children of
Israel.

18:6 And I, behold, I have taken your brethren the Levites from among
the children of Israel: to you they are given as a gift for the LORD,
to do the service of the tabernacle of the congregation.

18:7 Therefore thou and thy sons with thee shall keep your priest's
office for everything of the altar, and within the vail; and ye shall
serve: I have given your priest's office unto you as a service of
gift: and the stranger that cometh nigh shall be put to death.

18:8 And the LORD spake unto Aaron, Behold, I also have given thee the
charge of mine heave offerings of all the hallowed things of the
children of Israel; unto thee have I given them by reason of the
anointing, and to thy sons, by an ordinance for ever.

18:9 This shall be thine of the most holy things, reserved from the
fire: every oblation of theirs, every meat offering of theirs, and
every sin offering of theirs, and every trespass offering of theirs
which they shall render unto me, shall be most holy for thee and for
thy sons.

18:10 In the most holy place shalt thou eat it; every male shall eat
it: it shall be holy unto thee.

18:11 And this is thine; the heave offering of their gift, with all
the wave offerings of the children of Israel: I have given them unto
thee, and to thy sons and to thy daughters with thee, by a statute for
ever: every one that is clean in thy house shall eat of it.

18:12 All the best of the oil, and all the best of the wine, and of
the wheat, the firstfruits of them which they shall offer unto the
LORD, them have I given thee.

18:13 And whatsoever is first ripe in the land, which they shall bring
unto the LORD, shall be thine; every one that is clean in thine house
shall eat of it.

18:14 Every thing devoted in Israel shall be thine.

18:15 Every thing that openeth the matrix in all flesh, which they
bring unto the LORD, whether it be of men or beasts, shall be thine:
nevertheless the firstborn of man shalt thou surely redeem, and the
firstling of unclean beasts shalt thou redeem.

18:16 And those that are to be redeemed from a month old shalt thou
redeem, according to thine estimation, for the money of five shekels,
after the shekel of the sanctuary, which is twenty gerahs.

18:17 But the firstling of a cow, or the firstling of a sheep, or the
firstling of a goat, thou shalt not redeem; they are holy: thou shalt
sprinkle their blood upon the altar, and shalt burn their fat for an
offering made by fire, for a sweet savour unto the LORD.

18:18 And the flesh of them shall be thine, as the wave breast and as
the right shoulder are thine.

18:19 All the heave offerings of the holy things, which the children
of Israel offer unto the LORD, have I given thee, and thy sons and thy
daughters with thee, by a statute for ever: it is a covenant of salt
for ever before the LORD unto thee and to thy seed with thee.

18:20 And the LORD spake unto Aaron, Thou shalt have no inheritance in
their land, neither shalt thou have any part among them: I am thy part
and thine inheritance among the children of Israel.

18:21 And, behold, I have given the children of Levi all the tenth in
Israel for an inheritance, for their service which they serve, even
the service of the tabernacle of the congregation.

18:22 Neither must the children of Israel henceforth come nigh the
tabernacle of the congregation, lest they bear sin, and die.

18:23 But the Levites shall do the service of the tabernacle of the
congregation, and they shall bear their iniquity: it shall be a
statute for ever throughout your generations, that among the children
of Israel they have no inheritance.

18:24 But the tithes of the children of Israel, which they offer as an
heave offering unto the LORD, I have given to the Levites to inherit:
therefore I have said unto them, Among the children of Israel they
shall have no inheritance.

18:25 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 18:26 Thus speak unto the
Levites, and say unto them, When ye take of the children of Israel the
tithes which I have given you from them for your inheritance, then ye
shall offer up an heave offering of it for the LORD, even a tenth part
of the tithe.

18:27 And this your heave offering shall be reckoned unto you, as
though it were the corn of the threshingfloor, and as the fulness of
the winepress.

18:28 Thus ye also shall offer an heave offering unto the LORD of all
your tithes, which ye receive of the children of Israel; and ye shall
give thereof the LORD's heave offering to Aaron the priest.

18:29 Out of all your gifts ye shall offer every heave offering of the
LORD, of all the best thereof, even the hallowed part thereof out of
it.

18:30 Therefore thou shalt say unto them, When ye have heaved the best
thereof from it, then it shall be counted unto the Levites as the
increase of the threshingfloor, and as the increase of the winepress.

18:31 And ye shall eat it in every place, ye and your households: for
it is your reward for your service in the tabernacle of the
congregation.

18:32 And ye shall bear no sin by reason of it, when ye have heaved
from it the best of it: neither shall ye pollute the holy things of
the children of Israel, lest ye die.

19:1 And the LORD spake unto Moses and unto Aaron, saying, 19:2 This
is the ordinance of the law which the LORD hath commanded, saying,
Speak unto the children of Israel, that they bring thee a red heifer
without spot, wherein is no blemish, and upon which never came yoke:
19:3 And ye shall give her unto Eleazar the priest, that he may bring
her forth without the camp, and one shall slay her before his face:
19:4 And Eleazar the priest shall take of her blood with his finger,
and sprinkle of her blood directly before the tabernacle of the
congregation seven times: 19:5 And one shall burn the heifer in his
sight; her skin, and her flesh, and her blood, with her dung, shall he
burn: 19:6 And the priest shall take cedar wood, and hyssop, and
scarlet, and cast it into the midst of the burning of the heifer.

19:7 Then the priest shall wash his clothes, and he shall bathe his
flesh in water, and afterward he shall come into the camp, and the
priest shall be unclean until the even.

19:8 And he that burneth her shall wash his clothes in water, and
bathe his flesh in water, and shall be unclean until the even.

19:9 And a man that is clean shall gather up the ashes of the heifer,
and lay them up without the camp in a clean place, and it shall be
kept for the congregation of the children of Israel for a water of
separation: it is a purification for sin.

19:10 And he that gathereth the ashes of the heifer shall wash his
clothes, and be unclean until the even: and it shall be unto the
children of Israel, and unto the stranger that sojourneth among them,
for a statute for ever.

19:11 He that toucheth the dead body of any man shall be unclean seven
days.

19:12 He shall purify himself with it on the third day, and on the
seventh day he shall be clean: but if he purify not himself the third
day, then the seventh day he shall not be clean.

19:13 Whosoever toucheth the dead body of any man that is dead, and
purifieth not himself, defileth the tabernacle of the LORD; and that
soul shall be cut off from Israel: because the water of separation was
not sprinkled upon him, he shall be unclean; his uncleanness is yet
upon him.

19:14 This is the law, when a man dieth in a tent: all that come into
the tent, and all that is in the tent, shall be unclean seven days.

19:15 And every open vessel, which hath no covering bound upon it, is
unclean.

19:16 And whosoever toucheth one that is slain with a sword in the
open fields, or a dead body, or a bone of a man, or a grave, shall be
unclean seven days.

19:17 And for an unclean person they shall take of the ashes of the
burnt heifer of purification for sin, and running water shall be put
thereto in a vessel: 19:18 And a clean person shall take hyssop, and
dip it in the water, and sprinkle it upon the tent, and upon all the
vessels, and upon the persons that were there, and upon him that
touched a bone, or one slain, or one dead, or a grave: 19:19 And the
clean person shall sprinkle upon the unclean on the third day, and on
the seventh day: and on the seventh day he shall purify himself, and
wash his clothes, and bathe himself in water, and shall be clean at
even.

19:20 But the man that shall be unclean, and shall not purify himself,
that soul shall be cut off from among the congregation, because he
hath defiled the sanctuary of the LORD: the water of separation hath
not been sprinkled upon him; he is unclean.

19:21 And it shall be a perpetual statute unto them, that he that
sprinkleth the water of separation shall wash his clothes; and he that
toucheth the water of separation shall be unclean until even.

19:22 And whatsoever the unclean person toucheth shall be unclean; and
the soul that toucheth it shall be unclean until even.

20:1 Then came the children of Israel, even the whole congregation,
into the desert of Zin in the first month: and the people abode in
Kadesh; and Miriam died there, and was buried there.

20:2 And there was no water for the congregation: and they gathered
themselves together against Moses and against Aaron.

20:3 And the people chode with Moses, and spake, saying, Would God
that we had died when our brethren died before the LORD!  20:4 And why
have ye brought up the congregation of the LORD into this wilderness,
that we and our cattle should die there?  20:5 And wherefore have ye
made us to come up out of Egypt, to bring us in unto this evil place?
it is no place of seed, or of figs, or of vines, or of pomegranates;
neither is there any water to drink.

20:6 And Moses and Aaron went from the presence of the assembly unto
the door of the tabernacle of the congregation, and they fell upon
their faces: and the glory of the LORD appeared unto them.

20:7 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 20:8 Take the rod, and
gather thou the assembly together, thou, and Aaron thy brother, and
speak ye unto the rock before their eyes; and it shall give forth his
water, and thou shalt bring forth to them water out of the rock: so
thou shalt give the congregation and their beasts drink.

20:9 And Moses took the rod from before the LORD, as he commanded him.

20:10 And Moses and Aaron gathered the congregation together before
the rock, and he said unto them, Hear now, ye rebels; must we fetch
you water out of this rock?  20:11 And Moses lifted up his hand, and
with his rod he smote the rock twice: and the water came out
abundantly, and the congregation drank, and their beasts also.

20:12 And the LORD spake unto Moses and Aaron, Because ye believed me
not, to sanctify me in the eyes of the children of Israel, therefore
ye shall not bring this congregation into the land which I have given
them.

20:13 This is the water of Meribah; because the children of Israel
strove with the LORD, and he was sanctified in them.

20:14 And Moses sent messengers from Kadesh unto the king of Edom,
Thus saith thy brother Israel, Thou knowest all the travail that hath
befallen us: 20:15 How our fathers went down into Egypt, and we have
dwelt in Egypt a long time; and the Egyptians vexed us, and our
fathers: 20:16 And when we cried unto the LORD, he heard our voice,
and sent an angel, and hath brought us forth out of Egypt: and,
behold, we are in Kadesh, a city in the uttermost of thy border: 20:17
Let us pass, I pray thee, through thy country: we will not pass
through the fields, or through the vineyards, neither will we drink of
the water of the wells: we will go by the king's high way, we will not
turn to the right hand nor to the left, until we have passed thy
borders.

20:18 And Edom said unto him, Thou shalt not pass by me, lest I come
out against thee with the sword.

20:19 And the children of Israel said unto him, We will go by the high
way: and if I and my cattle drink of thy water, then I will pay for
it: I will only, without doing anything else, go through on my feet.

20:20 And he said, Thou shalt not go through. And Edom came out
against him with much people, and with a strong hand.

20:21 Thus Edom refused to give Israel passage through his border:
wherefore Israel turned away from him.

20:22 And the children of Israel, even the whole congregation,
journeyed from Kadesh, and came unto mount Hor.

20:23 And the LORD spake unto Moses and Aaron in mount Hor, by the
coast of the land of Edom, saying, 20:24 Aaron shall be gathered unto
his people: for he shall not enter into the land which I have given
unto the children of Israel, because ye rebelled against my word at
the water of Meribah.

20:25 Take Aaron and Eleazar his son, and bring them up unto mount
Hor: 20:26 And strip Aaron of his garments, and put them upon Eleazar
his son: and Aaron shall be gathered unto his people, and shall die
there.

20:27 And Moses did as the LORD commanded: and they went up into mount
Hor in the sight of all the congregation.

20:28 And Moses stripped Aaron of his garments, and put them upon
Eleazar his son; and Aaron died there in the top of the mount: and
Moses and Eleazar came down from the mount.

20:29 And when all the congregation saw that Aaron was dead, they
mourned for Aaron thirty days, even all the house of Israel.

21:1 And when king Arad the Canaanite, which dwelt in the south, heard
tell that Israel came by the way of the spies; then he fought against
Israel, and took some of them prisoners.

21:2 And Israel vowed a vow unto the LORD, and said, If thou wilt
indeed deliver this people into my hand, then I will utterly destroy
their cities.

21:3 And the LORD hearkened to the voice of Israel, and delivered up
the Canaanites; and they utterly destroyed them and their cities: and
he called the name of the place Hormah.

21:4 And they journeyed from mount Hor by the way of the Red sea, to
compass the land of Edom: and the soul of the people was much
discouraged because of the way.

21:5 And the people spake against God, and against Moses, Wherefore
have ye brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? for there
is no bread, neither is there any water; and our soul loatheth this
light bread.

21:6 And the LORD sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit
the people; and much people of Israel died.

21:7 Therefore the people came to Moses, and said, We have sinned, for
we have spoken against the LORD, and against thee; pray unto the LORD,
that he take away the serpents from us. And Moses prayed for the
people.

21:8 And the LORD said unto Moses, Make thee a fiery serpent, and set
it upon a pole: and it shall come to pass, that every one that is
bitten, when he looketh upon it, shall live.

21:9 And Moses made a serpent of brass, and put it upon a pole, and it
came to pass, that if a serpent had bitten any man, when he beheld the
serpent of brass, he lived.

21:10 And the children of Israel set forward, and pitched in Oboth.

21:11 And they journeyed from Oboth, and pitched at Ijeabarim, in the
wilderness which is before Moab, toward the sunrising.

21:12 From thence they removed, and pitched in the valley of Zared.

21:13 From thence they removed, and pitched on the other side of
Arnon, which is in the wilderness that cometh out of the coasts of the
Amorites: for Arnon is the border of Moab, between Moab and the
Amorites.

21:14 Wherefore it is said in the book of the wars of the LORD, What
he did in the Red sea, and in the brooks of Arnon, 21:15 And at the
stream of the brooks that goeth down to the dwelling of Ar, and lieth
upon the border of Moab.

21:16 And from thence they went to Beer: that is the well whereof the
LORD spake unto Moses, Gather the people together, and I will give
them water.

21:17 Then Israel sang this song, Spring up, O well; sing ye unto it:
21:18 The princes digged the well, the nobles of the people digged it,
by the direction of the lawgiver, with their staves. And from the
wilderness they went to Mattanah: 21:19 And from Mattanah to Nahaliel:
and from Nahaliel to Bamoth: 21:20 And from Bamoth in the valley, that
is in the country of Moab, to the top of Pisgah, which looketh toward
Jeshimon.

21:21 And Israel sent messengers unto Sihon king of the Amorites,
saying, 21:22 Let me pass through thy land: we will not turn into the
fields, or into the vineyards; we will not drink of the waters of the
well: but we will go along by the king's high way, until we be past
thy borders.

21:23 And Sihon would not suffer Israel to pass through his border:
but Sihon gathered all his people together, and went out against
Israel into the wilderness: and he came to Jahaz, and fought against
Israel.

21:24 And Israel smote him with the edge of the sword, and possessed
his land from Arnon unto Jabbok, even unto the children of Ammon: for
the border of the children of Ammon was strong.

21:25 And Israel took all these cities: and Israel dwelt in all the
cities of the Amorites, in Heshbon, and in all the villages thereof.

21:26 For Heshbon was the city of Sihon the king of the Amorites, who
had fought against the former king of Moab, and taken all his land out
of his hand, even unto Arnon.

21:27 Wherefore they that speak in proverbs say, Come into Heshbon,
let the city of Sihon be built and prepared: 21:28 For there is a fire
gone out of Heshbon, a flame from the city of Sihon: it hath consumed
Ar of Moab, and the lords of the high places of Arnon.

21:29 Woe to thee, Moab! thou art undone, O people of Chemosh: he hath
given his sons that escaped, and his daughters, into captivity unto
Sihon king of the Amorites.

21:30 We have shot at them; Heshbon is perished even unto Dibon, and
we have laid them waste even unto Nophah, which reacheth unto Medeba.

21:31 Thus Israel dwelt in the land of the Amorites.

21:32 And Moses sent to spy out Jaazer, and they took the villages
thereof, and drove out the Amorites that were there.

21:33 And they turned and went up by the way of Bashan: and Og the
king of Bashan went out against them, he, and all his people, to the
battle at Edrei.

21:34 And the LORD said unto Moses, Fear him not: for I have delivered
him into thy hand, and all his people, and his land; and thou shalt do
to him as thou didst unto Sihon king of the Amorites, which dwelt at
Heshbon.

21:35 So they smote him, and his sons, and all his people, until there
was none left him alive: and they possessed his land.

22:1 And the children of Israel set forward, and pitched in the plains
of Moab on this side Jordan by Jericho.

22:2 And Balak the son of Zippor saw all that Israel had done to the
Amorites.

22:3 And Moab was sore afraid of the people, because they were many:
and Moab was distressed because of the children of Israel.

22:4 And Moab said unto the elders of Midian, Now shall this company
lick up all that are round about us, as the ox licketh up the grass of
the field.

And Balak the son of Zippor was king of the Moabites at that time.

22:5 He sent messengers therefore unto Balaam the son of Beor to
Pethor, which is by the river of the land of the children of his
people, to call him, saying, Behold, there is a people come out from
Egypt: behold, they cover the face of the earth, and they abide over
against me: 22:6 Come now therefore, I pray thee, curse me this
people; for they are too mighty for me: peradventure I shall prevail,
that we may smite them, and that I may drive them out of the land: for
I wot that he whom thou blessest is blessed, and he whom thou cursest
is cursed.

22:7 And the elders of Moab and the elders of Midian departed with the
rewards of divination in their hand; and they came unto Balaam, and
spake unto him the words of Balak.

22:8 And he said unto them, Lodge here this night, and I will bring
you word again, as the LORD shall speak unto me: and the princes of
Moab abode with Balaam.

22:9 And God came unto Balaam, and said, What men are these with thee?
22:10 And Balaam said unto God, Balak the son of Zippor, king of Moab,
hath sent unto me, saying, 22:11 Behold, there is a people come out of
Egypt, which covereth the face of the earth: come now, curse me them;
peradventure I shall be able to overcome them, and drive them out.

22:12 And God said unto Balaam, Thou shalt not go with them; thou
shalt not curse the people: for they are blessed.

22:13 And Balaam rose up in the morning, and said unto the princes of
Balak, Get you into your land: for the LORD refuseth to give me leave
to go with you.

22:14 And the princes of Moab rose up, and they went unto Balak, and
said, Balaam refuseth to come with us.

22:15 And Balak sent yet again princes, more, and more honourable than
they.

22:16 And they came to Balaam, and said to him, Thus saith Balak the
son of Zippor, Let nothing, I pray thee, hinder thee from coming unto
me: 22:17 For I will promote thee unto very great honour, and I will
do whatsoever thou sayest unto me: come therefore, I pray thee, curse
me this people.

22:18 And Balaam answered and said unto the servants of Balak, If
Balak would give me his house full of silver and gold, I cannot go
beyond the word of the LORD my God, to do less or more.

22:19 Now therefore, I pray you, tarry ye also here this night, that I
may know what the LORD will say unto me more.

22:20 And God came unto Balaam at night, and said unto him, If the men
come to call thee, rise up, and go with them; but yet the word which I
shall say unto thee, that shalt thou do.

22:21 And Balaam rose up in the morning, and saddled his ass, and went
with the princes of Moab.

22:22 And God's anger was kindled because he went: and the angel of
the LORD stood in the way for an adversary against him. Now he was
riding upon his ass, and his two servants were with him.

22:23 And the ass saw the angel of the LORD standing in the way, and
his sword drawn in his hand: and the ass turned aside out of the way,
and went into the field: and Balaam smote the ass, to turn her into
the way.

22:24 But the angel of the LORD stood in a path of the vineyards, a
wall being on this side, and a wall on that side.

22:25 And when the ass saw the angel of the LORD, she thrust herself
unto the wall, and crushed Balaam's foot against the wall: and he
smote her again.

22:26 And the angel of the LORD went further, and stood in a narrow
place, where was no way to turn either to the right hand or to the
left.

22:27 And when the ass saw the angel of the LORD, she fell down under
Balaam: and Balaam's anger was kindled, and he smote the ass with a
staff.

22:28 And the LORD opened the mouth of the ass, and she said unto
Balaam, What have I done unto thee, that thou hast smitten me these
three times?  22:29 And Balaam said unto the ass, Because thou hast
mocked me: I would there were a sword in mine hand, for now would I
kill thee.

22:30 And the ass said unto Balaam, Am not I thine ass, upon which
thou hast ridden ever since I was thine unto this day? was I ever wont
to do so unto thee? And he said, Nay.

22:31 Then the LORD opened the eyes of Balaam, and he saw the angel of
the LORD standing in the way, and his sword drawn in his hand: and he
bowed down his head, and fell flat on his face.

22:32 And the angel of the LORD said unto him, Wherefore hast thou
smitten thine ass these three times? behold, I went out to withstand
thee, because thy way is perverse before me: 22:33 And the ass saw me,
and turned from me these three times: unless she had turned from me,
surely now also I had slain thee, and saved her alive.

22:34 And Balaam said unto the angel of the LORD, I have sinned; for I
knew not that thou stoodest in the way against me: now therefore, if
it displease thee, I will get me back again.

22:35 And the angel of the LORD said unto Balaam, Go with the men: but
only the word that I shall speak unto thee, that thou shalt speak. So
Balaam went with the princes of Balak.

22:36 And when Balak heard that Balaam was come, he went out to meet
him unto a city of Moab, which is in the border of Arnon, which is in
the utmost coast.

22:37 And Balak said unto Balaam, Did I not earnestly send unto thee
to call thee? wherefore camest thou not unto me? am I not able indeed
to promote thee to honour?  22:38 And Balaam said unto Balak, Lo, I am
come unto thee: have I now any power at all to say any thing? the word
that God putteth in my mouth, that shall I speak.

22:39 And Balaam went with Balak, and they came unto Kirjathhuzoth.

22:40 And Balak offered oxen and sheep, and sent to Balaam, and to the
princes that were with him.

22:41 And it came to pass on the morrow, that Balak took Balaam, and
brought him up into the high places of Baal, that thence he might see
the utmost part of the people.

23:1 And Balaam said unto Balak, Build me here seven altars, and
prepare me here seven oxen and seven rams.

23:2 And Balak did as Balaam had spoken; and Balak and Balaam offered
on every altar a bullock and a ram.

23:3 And Balaam said unto Balak, Stand by thy burnt offering, and I
will go: peradventure the LORD will come to meet me: and whatsoever he
sheweth me I will tell thee. And he went to an high place.

23:4 And God met Balaam: and he said unto him, I have prepared seven
altars, and I have offered upon every altar a bullock and a ram.

23:5 And the LORD put a word in Balaam's mouth, and said, Return unto
Balak, and thus thou shalt speak.

23:6 And he returned unto him, and, lo, he stood by his burnt
sacrifice, he, and all the princes of Moab.

23:7 And he took up his parable, and said, Balak the king of Moab hath
brought me from Aram, out of the mountains of the east, saying, Come,
curse me Jacob, and come, defy Israel.

23:8 How shall I curse, whom God hath not cursed? or how shall I defy,
whom the LORD hath not defied?  23:9 For from the top of the rocks I
see him, and from the hills I behold him: lo, the people shall dwell
alone, and shall not be reckoned among the nations.

23:10 Who can count the dust of Jacob, and the number of the fourth
part of Israel? Let me die the death of the righteous, and let my last
end be like his!  23:11 And Balak said unto Balaam, What hast thou
done unto me? I took thee to curse mine enemies, and, behold, thou
hast blessed them altogether.

23:12 And he answered and said, Must I not take heed to speak that
which the LORD hath put in my mouth?  23:13 And Balak said unto him,
Come, I pray thee, with me unto another place, from whence thou mayest
see them: thou shalt see but the utmost part of them, and shalt not
see them all: and curse me them from thence.

23:14 And he brought him into the field of Zophim, to the top of
Pisgah, and built seven altars, and offered a bullock and a ram on
every altar.

23:15 And he said unto Balak, Stand here by thy burnt offering, while
I meet the LORD yonder.

23:16 And the LORD met Balaam, and put a word in his mouth, and said,
Go again unto Balak, and say thus.

23:17 And when he came to him, behold, he stood by his burnt offering,
and the princes of Moab with him. And Balak said unto him, What hath
the LORD spoken?  23:18 And he took up his parable, and said, Rise up,
Balak, and hear; hearken unto me, thou son of Zippor: 23:19 God is not
a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should
repent: hath he said, and shall he not do it? or hath he spoken, and
shall he not make it good?  23:20 Behold, I have received commandment
to bless: and he hath blessed; and I cannot reverse it.

23:21 He hath not beheld iniquity in Jacob, neither hath he seen
perverseness in Israel: the LORD his God is with him, and the shout of
a king is among them.

23:22 God brought them out of Egypt; he hath as it were the strength
of an unicorn.

23:23 Surely there is no enchantment against Jacob, neither is there
any divination against Israel: according to this time it shall be said
of Jacob and of Israel, What hath God wrought!  23:24 Behold, the
people shall rise up as a great lion, and lift up himself as a young
lion: he shall not lie down until he eat of the prey, and drink the
blood of the slain.

23:25 And Balak said unto Balaam, Neither curse them at all, nor bless
them at all.

23:26 But Balaam answered and said unto Balak, Told not I thee,
saying, All that the LORD speaketh, that I must do?  23:27 And Balak
said unto Balaam, Come, I pray thee, I will bring thee unto another
place; peradventure it will please God that thou mayest curse me them
from thence.

23:28 And Balak brought Balaam unto the top of Peor, that looketh
toward Jeshimon.

23:29 And Balaam said unto Balak, Build me here seven altars, and
prepare me here seven bullocks and seven rams.

23:30 And Balak did as Balaam had said, and offered a bullock and a
ram on every altar.

24:1 And when Balaam saw that it pleased the LORD to bless Israel, he
went not, as at other times, to seek for enchantments, but he set his
face toward the wilderness.

24:2 And Balaam lifted up his eyes, and he saw Israel abiding in his
tents according to their tribes; and the spirit of God came upon him.

24:3 And he took up his parable, and said, Balaam the son of Beor hath
said, and the man whose eyes are open hath said: 24:4 He hath said,
which heard the words of God, which saw the vision of the Almighty,
falling into a trance, but having his eyes open: 24:5 How goodly are
thy tents, O Jacob, and thy tabernacles, O Israel!  24:6 As the
valleys are they spread forth, as gardens by the river's side, as the
trees of lign aloes which the LORD hath planted, and as cedar trees
beside the waters.

24:7 He shall pour the water out of his buckets, and his seed shall be
in many waters, and his king shall be higher than Agag, and his
kingdom shall be exalted.

24:8 God brought him forth out of Egypt; he hath as it were the
strength of an unicorn: he shall eat up the nations his enemies, and
shall break their bones, and pierce them through with his arrows.

24:9 He couched, he lay down as a lion, and as a great lion: who shall
stir him up? Blessed is he that blesseth thee, and cursed is he that
curseth thee.

24:10 And Balak's anger was kindled against Balaam, and he smote his
hands together: and Balak said unto Balaam, I called thee to curse
mine enemies, and, behold, thou hast altogether blessed them these
three times.

24:11 Therefore now flee thou to thy place: I thought to promote thee
unto great honour; but, lo, the LORD hath kept thee back from honour.

24:12 And Balaam said unto Balak, Spake I not also to thy messengers
which thou sentest unto me, saying, 24:13 If Balak would give me his
house full of silver and gold, I cannot go beyond the commandment of
the LORD, to do either good or bad of mine own mind; but what the LORD
saith, that will I speak?  24:14 And now, behold, I go unto my people:
come therefore, and I will advertise thee what this people shall do to
thy people in the latter days.

24:15 And he took up his parable, and said, Balaam the son of Beor
hath said, and the man whose eyes are open hath said: 24:16 He hath
said, which heard the words of God, and knew the knowledge of the most
High, which saw the vision of the Almighty, falling into a trance, but
having his eyes open: 24:17 I shall see him, but not now: I shall
behold him, but not nigh: there shall come a Star out of Jacob, and a
Sceptre shall rise out of Israel, and shall smite the corners of Moab,
and destroy all the children of Sheth.

24:18 And Edom shall be a possession, Seir also shall be a possession
for his enemies; and Israel shall do valiantly.

24:19 Out of Jacob shall come he that shall have dominion, and shall
destroy him that remaineth of the city.

24:20 And when he looked on Amalek, he took up his parable, and said,
Amalek was the first of the nations; but his latter end shall be that
he perish for ever.

24:21 And he looked on the Kenites, and took up his parable, and said,
Strong is thy dwellingplace, and thou puttest thy nest in a rock.

24:22 Nevertheless the Kenite shall be wasted, until Asshur shall
carry thee away captive.

24:23 And he took up his parable, and said, Alas, who shall live when
God doeth this!  24:24 And ships shall come from the coast of Chittim,
and shall afflict Asshur, and shall afflict Eber, and he also shall
perish for ever.

24:25 And Balaam rose up, and went and returned to his place: and
Balak also went his way.

25:1 And Israel abode in Shittim, and the people began to commit
whoredom with the daughters of Moab.

25:2 And they called the people unto the sacrifices of their gods: and
the people did eat, and bowed down to their gods.

25:3 And Israel joined himself unto Baalpeor: and the anger of the
LORD was kindled against Israel.

25:4 And the LORD said unto Moses, Take all the heads of the people,
and hang them up before the LORD against the sun, that the fierce
anger of the LORD may be turned away from Israel.

25:5 And Moses said unto the judges of Israel, Slay ye every one his
men that were joined unto Baalpeor.

25:6 And, behold, one of the children of Israel came and brought unto
his brethren a Midianitish woman in the sight of Moses, and in the
sight of all the congregation of the children of Israel, who were
weeping before the door of the tabernacle of the congregation.

25:7 And when Phinehas, the son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron the
priest, saw it, he rose up from among the congregation, and took a
javelin in his hand; 25:8 And he went after the man of Israel into the
tent, and thrust both of them through, the man of Israel, and the
woman through her belly. So the plague was stayed from the children of
Israel.

25:9 And those that died in the plague were twenty and four thousand.

25:10 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 25:11 Phinehas, the son
of Eleazar, the son of Aaron the priest, hath turned my wrath away
from the children of Israel, while he was zealous for my sake among
them, that I consumed not the children of Israel in my jealousy.

25:12 Wherefore say, Behold, I give unto him my covenant of peace:
25:13 And he shall have it, and his seed after him, even the covenant
of an everlasting priesthood; because he was zealous for his God, and
made an atonement for the children of Israel.

25:14 Now the name of the Israelite that was slain, even that was
slain with the Midianitish woman, was Zimri, the son of Salu, a prince
of a chief house among the Simeonites.

25:15 And the name of the Midianitish woman that was slain was Cozbi,
the daughter of Zur; he was head over a people, and of a chief house
in Midian.

25:16 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 25:17 Vex the Midianites,
and smite them: 25:18 For they vex you with their wiles, wherewith
they have beguiled you in the matter of Peor, and in the matter of
Cozbi, the daughter of a prince of Midian, their sister, which was
slain in the day of the plague for Peor's sake.

26:1 And it came to pass after the plague, that the LORD spake unto
Moses and unto Eleazar the son of Aaron the priest, saying, 26:2 Take
the sum of all the congregation of the children of Israel, from twenty
years old and upward, throughout their fathers' house, all that are
able to go to war in Israel.

26:3 And Moses and Eleazar the priest spake with them in the plains of
Moab by Jordan near Jericho, saying, 26:4 Take the sum of the people,
from twenty years old and upward; as the LORD commanded Moses and the
children of Israel, which went forth out of the land of Egypt.

26:5 Reuben, the eldest son of Israel: the children of Reuben; Hanoch,
of whom cometh the family of the Hanochites: of Pallu, the family of
the Palluites: 26:6 Of Hezron, the family of the Hezronites: of Carmi,
the family of the Carmites.

26:7 These are the families of the Reubenites: and they that were
numbered of them were forty and three thousand and seven hundred and
thirty.

26:8 And the sons of Pallu; Eliab.

26:9 And the sons of Eliab; Nemuel, and Dathan, and Abiram. This is
that Dathan and Abiram, which were famous in the congregation, who
strove against Moses and against Aaron in the company of Korah, when
they strove against the LORD: 26:10 And the earth opened her mouth,
and swallowed them up together with Korah, when that company died,
what time the fire devoured two hundred and fifty men: and they became
a sign.

26:11 Notwithstanding the children of Korah died not.

26:12 The sons of Simeon after their families: of Nemuel, the family
of the Nemuelites: of Jamin, the family of the Jaminites: of Jachin,
the family of the Jachinites: 26:13 Of Zerah, the family of the
Zarhites: of Shaul, the family of the Shaulites.

26:14 These are the families of the Simeonites, twenty and two
thousand and two hundred.

26:15 The children of Gad after their families: of Zephon, the family
of the Zephonites: of Haggi, the family of the Haggites: of Shuni, the
family of the Shunites: 26:16 Of Ozni, the family of the Oznites: of
Eri, the family of the Erites: 26:17 Of Arod, the family of the
Arodites: of Areli, the family of the Arelites.

26:18 These are the families of the children of Gad according to those
that were numbered of them, forty thousand and five hundred.

26:19 The sons of Judah were Er and Onan: and Er and Onan died in the
land of Canaan.

26:20 And the sons of Judah after their families were; of Shelah, the
family of the Shelanites: of Pharez, the family of the Pharzites: of
Zerah, the family of the Zarhites.

26:21 And the sons of Pharez were; of Hezron, the family of the
Hezronites: of Hamul, the family of the Hamulites.

26:22 These are the families of Judah according to those that were
numbered of them, threescore and sixteen thousand and five hundred.

26:23 Of the sons of Issachar after their families: of Tola, the
family of the Tolaites: of Pua, the family of the Punites: 26:24 Of
Jashub, the family of the Jashubites: of Shimron, the family of the
Shimronites.

26:25 These are the families of Issachar according to those that were
numbered of them, threescore and four thousand and three hundred.

26:26 Of the sons of Zebulun after their families: of Sered, the
family of the Sardites: of Elon, the family of the Elonites: of
Jahleel, the family of the Jahleelites.

26:27 These are the families of the Zebulunites according to those
that were numbered of them, threescore thousand and five hundred.

26:28 The sons of Joseph after their families were Manasseh and
Ephraim.

26:29 Of the sons of Manasseh: of Machir, the family of the
Machirites: and Machir begat Gilead: of Gilead come the family of the
Gileadites.

26:30 These are the sons of Gilead: of Jeezer, the family of the
Jeezerites: of Helek, the family of the Helekites: 26:31 And of
Asriel, the family of the Asrielites: and of Shechem, the family of
the Shechemites: 26:32 And of Shemida, the family of the Shemidaites:
and of Hepher, the family of the Hepherites.

26:33 And Zelophehad the son of Hepher had no sons, but daughters: and
the names of the daughters of Zelophehad were Mahlah, and Noah,
Hoglah, Milcah, and Tirzah.

26:34 These are the families of Manasseh, and those that were numbered
of them, fifty and two thousand and seven hundred.

26:35 These are the sons of Ephraim after their families: of
Shuthelah, the family of the Shuthalhites: of Becher, the family of
the Bachrites: of Tahan, the family of the Tahanites.

26:36 And these are the sons of Shuthelah: of Eran, the family of the
Eranites.

26:37 These are the families of the sons of Ephraim according to those
that were numbered of them, thirty and two thousand and five hundred.
These are the sons of Joseph after their families.

26:38 The sons of Benjamin after their families: of Bela, the family
of the Belaites: of Ashbel, the family of the Ashbelites: of Ahiram,
the family of the Ahiramites: 26:39 Of Shupham, the family of the
Shuphamites: of Hupham, the family of the Huphamites.

26:40 And the sons of Bela were Ard and Naaman: of Ard, the family of
the Ardites: and of Naaman, the family of the Naamites.

26:41 These are the sons of Benjamin after their families: and they
that were numbered of them were forty and five thousand and six
hundred.

26:42 These are the sons of Dan after their families: of Shuham, the
family of the Shuhamites. These are the families of Dan after their
families.

26:43 All the families of the Shuhamites, according to those that were
numbered of them, were threescore and four thousand and four hundred.

26:44 Of the children of Asher after their families: of Jimna, the
family of the Jimnites: of Jesui, the family of the Jesuites: of
Beriah, the family of the Beriites.

26:45 Of the sons of Beriah: of Heber, the family of the Heberites: of
Malchiel, the family of the Malchielites.

26:46 And the name of the daughter of Asher was Sarah.

26:47 These are the families of the sons of Asher according to those
that were numbered of them; who were fifty and three thousand and four
hundred.

26:48 Of the sons of Naphtali after their families: of Jahzeel, the
family of the Jahzeelites: of Guni, the family of the Gunites: 26:49
Of Jezer, the family of the Jezerites: of Shillem, the family of the
Shillemites.

26:50 These are the families of Naphtali according to their families:
and they that were numbered of them were forty and five thousand and
four hundred.

26:51 These were the numbered of the children of Israel, six hundred
thousand and a thousand seven hundred and thirty.

26:52 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 26:53 Unto these the land
shall be divided for an inheritance according to the number of names.

26:54 To many thou shalt give the more inheritance, and to few thou
shalt give the less inheritance: to every one shall his inheritance be
given according to those that were numbered of him.

26:55 Notwithstanding the land shall be divided by lot: according to
the names of the tribes of their fathers they shall inherit.

26:56 According to the lot shall the possession thereof be divided
between many and few.

26:57 And these are they that were numbered of the Levites after their
families: of Gershon, the family of the Gershonites: of Kohath, the
family of the Kohathites: of Merari, the family of the Merarites.

26:58 These are the families of the Levites: the family of the
Libnites, the family of the Hebronites, the family of the Mahlites,
the family of the Mushites, the family of the Korathites. And Kohath
begat Amram.

26:59 And the name of Amram's wife was Jochebed, the daughter of Levi,
whom her mother bare to Levi in Egypt: and she bare unto Amram Aaron
and Moses, and Miriam their sister.

26:60 And unto Aaron was born Nadab, and Abihu, Eleazar, and Ithamar.

26:61 And Nadab and Abihu died, when they offered strange fire before
the LORD.

26:62 And those that were numbered of them were twenty and three
thousand, all males from a month old and upward: for they were not
numbered among the children of Israel, because there was no
inheritance given them among the children of Israel.

26:63 These are they that were numbered by Moses and Eleazar the
priest, who numbered the children of Israel in the plains of Moab by
Jordan near Jericho.

26:64 But among these there was not a man of them whom Moses and Aaron
the priest numbered, when they numbered the children of Israel in the
wilderness of Sinai.

26:65 For the LORD had said of them, They shall surely die in the
wilderness. And there was not left a man of them, save Caleb the son
of Jephunneh, and Joshua the son of Nun.

27:1 Then came the daughters of Zelophehad, the son of Hepher, the son
of Gilead, the son of Machir, the son of Manasseh, of the families of
Manasseh the son of Joseph: and these are the names of his daughters;
Mahlah, Noah, and Hoglah, and Milcah, and Tirzah.

27:2 And they stood before Moses, and before Eleazar the priest, and
before the princes and all the congregation, by the door of the
tabernacle of the congregation, saying, 27:3 Our father died in the
wilderness, and he was not in the company of them that gathered
themselves together against the LORD in the company of Korah; but died
in his own sin, and had no sons.

27:4 Why should the name of our father be done away from among his
family, because he hath no son? Give unto us therefore a possession
among the brethren of our father.

27:5 And Moses brought their cause before the LORD.

27:6 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 27:7 The daughters of
Zelophehad speak right: thou shalt surely give them a possession of an
inheritance among their father's brethren; and thou shalt cause the
inheritance of their father to pass unto them.

27:8 And thou shalt speak unto the children of Israel, saying, If a
man die, and have no son, then ye shall cause his inheritance to pass
unto his daughter.

27:9 And if he have no daughter, then ye shall give his inheritance
unto his brethren.

27:10 And if he have no brethren, then ye shall give his inheritance
unto his father's brethren.

27:11 And if his father have no brethren, then ye shall give his
inheritance unto his kinsman that is next to him of his family, and he
shall possess it: and it shall be unto the children of Israel a
statute of judgment, as the LORD commanded Moses.

27:12 And the LORD said unto Moses, Get thee up into this mount
Abarim, and see the land which I have given unto the children of
Israel.

27:13 And when thou hast seen it, thou also shalt be gathered unto thy
people, as Aaron thy brother was gathered.

27:14 For ye rebelled against my commandment in the desert of Zin, in
the strife of the congregation, to sanctify me at the water before
their eyes: that is the water of Meribah in Kadesh in the wilderness
of Zin.

27:15 And Moses spake unto the LORD, saying, 27:16 Let the LORD, the
God of the spirits of all flesh, set a man over the congregation,
27:17 Which may go out before them, and which may go in before them,
and which may lead them out, and which may bring them in; that the
congregation of the LORD be not as sheep which have no shepherd.

27:18 And the LORD said unto Moses, Take thee Joshua the son of Nun, a
man in whom is the spirit, and lay thine hand upon him; 27:19 And set
him before Eleazar the priest, and before all the congregation; and
give him a charge in their sight.

27:20 And thou shalt put some of thine honour upon him, that all the
congregation of the children of Israel may be obedient.

27:21 And he shall stand before Eleazar the priest, who shall ask
counsel for him after the judgment of Urim before the LORD: at his
word shall they go out, and at his word they shall come in, both he,
and all the children of Israel with him, even all the congregation.

27:22 And Moses did as the LORD commanded him: and he took Joshua, and
set him before Eleazar the priest, and before all the congregation:
27:23 And he laid his hands upon him, and gave him a charge, as the
LORD commanded by the hand of Moses.

28:1 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 28:2 Command the children
of Israel, and say unto them, My offering, and my bread for my
sacrifices made by fire, for a sweet savour unto me, shall ye observe
to offer unto me in their due season.

28:3 And thou shalt say unto them, This is the offering made by fire
which ye shall offer unto the LORD; two lambs of the first year
without spot day by day, for a continual burnt offering.

28:4 The one lamb shalt thou offer in the morning, and the other lamb
shalt thou offer at even; 28:5 And a tenth part of an ephah of flour
for a meat offering, mingled with the fourth part of an hin of beaten
oil.

28:6 It is a continual burnt offering, which was ordained in mount
Sinai for a sweet savour, a sacrifice made by fire unto the LORD.

28:7 And the drink offering thereof shall be the fourth part of an hin
for the one lamb: in the holy place shalt thou cause the strong wine
to be poured unto the LORD for a drink offering.

28:8 And the other lamb shalt thou offer at even: as the meat offering
of the morning, and as the drink offering thereof, thou shalt offer
it, a sacrifice made by fire, of a sweet savour unto the LORD.

28:9 And on the sabbath day two lambs of the first year without spot,
and two tenth deals of flour for a meat offering, mingled with oil,
and the drink offering thereof: 28:10 This is the burnt offering of
every sabbath, beside the continual burnt offering, and his drink
offering.

28:11 And in the beginnings of your months ye shall offer a burnt
offering unto the LORD; two young bullocks, and one ram, seven lambs
of the first year without spot; 28:12 And three tenth deals of flour
for a meat offering, mingled with oil, for one bullock; and two tenth
deals of flour for a meat offering, mingled with oil, for one ram;
28:13 And a several tenth deal of flour mingled with oil for a meat
offering unto one lamb; for a burnt offering of a sweet savour, a
sacrifice made by fire unto the LORD.

28:14 And their drink offerings shall be half an hin of wine unto a
bullock, and the third part of an hin unto a ram, and a fourth part of
an hin unto a lamb: this is the burnt offering of every month
throughout the months of the year.

28:15 And one kid of the goats for a sin offering unto the LORD shall
be offered, beside the continual burnt offering, and his drink
offering.

28:16 And in the fourteenth day of the first month is the passover of
the LORD.

28:17 And in the fifteenth day of this month is the feast: seven days
shall unleavened bread be eaten.

28:18 In the first day shall be an holy convocation; ye shall do no
manner of servile work therein: 28:19 But ye shall offer a sacrifice
made by fire for a burnt offering unto the LORD; two young bullocks,
and one ram, and seven lambs of the first year: they shall be unto you
without blemish: 28:20 And their meat offering shall be of flour
mingled with oil: three tenth deals shall ye offer for a bullock, and
two tenth deals for a ram; 28:21 A several tenth deal shalt thou offer
for every lamb, throughout the seven lambs: 28:22 And one goat for a
sin offering, to make an atonement for you.

28:23 Ye shall offer these beside the burnt offering in the morning,
which is for a continual burnt offering.

28:24 After this manner ye shall offer daily, throughout the seven
days, the meat of the sacrifice made by fire, of a sweet savour unto
the LORD: it shall be offered beside the continual burnt offering, and
his drink offering.

28:25 And on the seventh day ye shall have an holy convocation; ye
shall do no servile work.

28:26 Also in the day of the firstfruits, when ye bring a new meat
offering unto the LORD, after your weeks be out, ye shall have an holy
convocation; ye shall do no servile work: 28:27 But ye shall offer the
burnt offering for a sweet savour unto the LORD; two young bullocks,
one ram, seven lambs of the first year; 28:28 And their meat offering
of flour mingled with oil, three tenth deals unto one bullock, two
tenth deals unto one ram, 28:29 A several tenth deal unto one lamb,
throughout the seven lambs; 28:30 And one kid of the goats, to make an
atonement for you.

28:31 Ye shall offer them beside the continual burnt offering, and his
meat offering, (they shall be unto you without blemish) and their
drink offerings.

29:1 And in the seventh month, on the first day of the month, ye shall
have an holy convocation; ye shall do no servile work: it is a day of
blowing the trumpets unto you.

29:2 And ye shall offer a burnt offering for a sweet savour unto the
LORD; one young bullock, one ram, and seven lambs of the first year
without blemish: 29:3 And their meat offering shall be of flour
mingled with oil, three tenth deals for a bullock, and two tenth deals
for a ram, 29:4 And one tenth deal for one lamb, throughout the seven
lambs: 29:5 And one kid of the goats for a sin offering, to make an
atonement for you: 29:6 Beside the burnt offering of the month, and
his meat offering, and the daily burnt offering, and his meat
offering, and their drink offerings, according unto their manner, for
a sweet savour, a sacrifice made by fire unto the LORD.

29:7 And ye shall have on the tenth day of this seventh month an holy
convocation; and ye shall afflict your souls: ye shall not do any work
therein: 29:8 But ye shall offer a burnt offering unto the LORD for a
sweet savour; one young bullock, one ram, and seven lambs of the first
year; they shall be unto you without blemish: 29:9 And their meat
offering shall be of flour mingled with oil, three tenth deals to a
bullock, and two tenth deals to one ram, 29:10 A several tenth deal
for one lamb, throughout the seven lambs: 29:11 One kid of the goats
for a sin offering; beside the sin offering of atonement, and the
continual burnt offering, and the meat offering of it, and their drink
offerings.

29:12 And on the fifteenth day of the seventh month ye shall have an
holy convocation; ye shall do no servile work, and ye shall keep a
feast unto the LORD seven days: 29:13 And ye shall offer a burnt
offering, a sacrifice made by fire, of a sweet savour unto the LORD;
thirteen young bullocks, two rams, and fourteen lambs of the first
year; they shall be without blemish: 29:14 And their meat offering
shall be of flour mingled with oil, three tenth deals unto every
bullock of the thirteen bullocks, two tenth deals to each ram of the
two rams, 29:15 And a several tenth deal to each lamb of the fourteen
lambs: 29:16 And one kid of the goats for a sin offering; beside the
continual burnt offering, his meat offering, and his drink offering.

29:17 And on the second day ye shall offer twelve young bullocks, two
rams, fourteen lambs of the first year without spot: 29:18 And their
meat offering and their drink offerings for the bullocks, for the
rams, and for the lambs, shall be according to their number, after the
manner: 29:19 And one kid of the goats for a sin offering; beside the
continual burnt offering, and the meat offering thereof, and their
drink offerings.

29:20 And on the third day eleven bullocks, two rams, fourteen lambs
of the first year without blemish; 29:21 And their meat offering and
their drink offerings for the bullocks, for the rams, and for the
lambs, shall be according to their number, after the manner: 29:22 And
one goat for a sin offering; beside the continual burnt offering, and
his meat offering, and his drink offering.

29:23 And on the fourth day ten bullocks, two rams, and fourteen lambs
of the first year without blemish: 29:24 Their meat offering and their
drink offerings for the bullocks, for the rams, and for the lambs,
shall be according to their number, after the manner: 29:25 And one
kid of the goats for a sin offering; beside the continual burnt
offering, his meat offering, and his drink offering.

29:26 And on the fifth day nine bullocks, two rams, and fourteen lambs
of the first year without spot: 29:27 And their meat offering and
their drink offerings for the bullocks, for the rams, and for the
lambs, shall be according to their number, after the manner: 29:28 And
one goat for a sin offering; beside the continual burnt offering, and
his meat offering, and his drink offering.

29:29 And on the sixth day eight bullocks, two rams, and fourteen
lambs of the first year without blemish: 29:30 And their meat offering
and their drink offerings for the bullocks, for the rams, and for the
lambs, shall be according to their number, after the manner: 29:31 And
one goat for a sin offering; beside the continual burnt offering, his
meat offering, and his drink offering.

29:32 And on the seventh day seven bullocks, two rams, and fourteen
lambs of the first year without blemish: 29:33 And their meat offering
and their drink offerings for the bullocks, for the rams, and for the
lambs, shall be according to their number, after the manner: 29:34 And
one goat for a sin offering; beside the continual burnt offering, his
meat offering, and his drink offering.

29:35 On the eighth day ye shall have a solemn assembly: ye shall do
no servile work therein: 29:36 But ye shall offer a burnt offering, a
sacrifice made by fire, of a sweet savour unto the LORD: one bullock,
one ram, seven lambs of the first year without blemish: 29:37 Their
meat offering and their drink offerings for the bullock, for the ram,
and for the lambs, shall be according to their number, after the
manner: 29:38 And one goat for a sin offering; beside the continual
burnt offering, and his meat offering, and his drink offering.

29:39 These things ye shall do unto the LORD in your set feasts,
beside your vows, and your freewill offerings, for your burnt
offerings, and for your meat offerings, and for your drink offerings,
and for your peace offerings.

29:40 And Moses told the children of Israel according to all that the
LORD commanded Moses.

30:1 And Moses spake unto the heads of the tribes concerning the
children of Israel, saying, This is the thing which the LORD hath
commanded.

30:2 If a man vow a vow unto the LORD, or swear an oath to bind his
soul with a bond; he shall not break his word, he shall do according
to all that proceedeth out of his mouth.

30:3 If a woman also vow a vow unto the LORD, and bind herself by a
bond, being in her father's house in her youth; 30:4 And her father
hear her vow, and her bond wherewith she hath bound her soul, and her
father shall hold his peace at her; then all her vows shall stand, and
every bond wherewith she hath bound her soul shall stand.

30:5 But if her father disallow her in the day that he heareth; not
any of her vows, or of her bonds wherewith she hath bound her soul,
shall stand: and the LORD shall forgive her, because her father
disallowed her.

30:6 And if she had at all an husband, when she vowed, or uttered
ought out of her lips, wherewith she bound her soul; 30:7 And her
husband heard it, and held his peace at her in the day that he heard
it: then her vows shall stand, and her bonds wherewith she bound her
soul shall stand.

30:8 But if her husband disallowed her on the day that he heard it;
then he shall make her vow which she vowed, and that which she uttered
with her lips, wherewith she bound her soul, of none effect: and the
LORD shall forgive her.

30:9 But every vow of a widow, and of her that is divorced, wherewith
they have bound their souls, shall stand against her.

30:10 And if she vowed in her husband's house, or bound her soul by a
bond with an oath; 30:11 And her husband heard it, and held his peace
at her, and disallowed her not: then all her vows shall stand, and
every bond wherewith she bound her soul shall stand.

30:12 But if her husband hath utterly made them void on the day he
heard them; then whatsoever proceeded out of her lips concerning her
vows, or concerning the bond of her soul, shall not stand: her husband
hath made them void; and the LORD shall forgive her.

30:13 Every vow, and every binding oath to afflict the soul, her
husband may establish it, or her husband may make it void.

30:14 But if her husband altogether hold his peace at her from day to
day; then he establisheth all her vows, or all her bonds, which are
upon her: he confirmeth them, because he held his peace at her in the
day that he heard them.

30:15 But if he shall any ways make them void after that he hath heard
them; then he shall bear her iniquity.

30:16 These are the statutes, which the LORD commanded Moses, between
a man and his wife, between the father and his daughter, being yet in
her youth in her father's house.

31:1 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 31:2 Avenge the children
of Israel of the Midianites: afterward shalt thou be gathered unto thy
people.

31:3 And Moses spake unto the people, saying, Arm some of yourselves
unto the war, and let them go against the Midianites, and avenge the
LORD of Midian.

31:4 Of every tribe a thousand, throughout all the tribes of Israel,
shall ye send to the war.

31:5 So there were delivered out of the thousands of Israel, a
thousand of every tribe, twelve thousand armed for war.

31:6 And Moses sent them to the war, a thousand of every tribe, them
and Phinehas the son of Eleazar the priest, to the war, with the holy
instruments, and the trumpets to blow in his hand.

31:7 And they warred against the Midianites, as the LORD commanded
Moses; and they slew all the males.

31:8 And they slew the kings of Midian, beside the rest of them that
were slain; namely, Evi, and Rekem, and Zur, and Hur, and Reba, five
kings of Midian: Balaam also the son of Beor they slew with the sword.

31:9 And the children of Israel took all the women of Midian captives,
and their little ones, and took the spoil of all their cattle, and all
their flocks, and all their goods.

31:10 And they burnt all their cities wherein they dwelt, and all
their goodly castles, with fire.

31:11 And they took all the spoil, and all the prey, both of men and
of beasts.

31:12 And they brought the captives, and the prey, and the spoil, unto
Moses, and Eleazar the priest, and unto the congregation of the
children of Israel, unto the camp at the plains of Moab, which are by
Jordan near Jericho.

31:13 And Moses, and Eleazar the priest, and all the princes of the
congregation, went forth to meet them without the camp.

31:14 And Moses was wroth with the officers of the host, with the
captains over thousands, and captains over hundreds, which came from
the battle.

31:15 And Moses said unto them, Have ye saved all the women alive?
31:16 Behold, these caused the children of Israel, through the counsel
of Balaam, to commit trespass against the LORD in the matter of Peor,
and there was a plague among the congregation of the LORD.

31:17 Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill
every woman that hath known man by lying with him.

31:18 But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying
with him, keep alive for yourselves.

31:19 And do ye abide without the camp seven days: whosoever hath
killed any person, and whosoever hath touched any slain, purify both
yourselves and your captives on the third day, and on the seventh day.

31:20 And purify all your raiment, and all that is made of skins, and
all work of goats' hair, and all things made of wood.

31:21 And Eleazar the priest said unto the men of war which went to
the battle, This is the ordinance of the law which the LORD commanded
Moses; 31:22 Only the gold, and the silver, the brass, the iron, the
tin, and the lead, 31:23 Every thing that may abide the fire, ye shall
make it go through the fire, and it shall be clean: nevertheless it
shall be purified with the water of separation: and all that abideth
not the fire ye shall make go through the water.

31:24 And ye shall wash your clothes on the seventh day, and ye shall
be clean, and afterward ye shall come into the camp.

31:25 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 31:26 Take the sum of the
prey that was taken, both of man and of beast, thou, and Eleazar the
priest, and the chief fathers of the congregation: 31:27 And divide
the prey into two parts; between them that took the war upon them, who
went out to battle, and between all the congregation: 31:28 And levy a
tribute unto the Lord of the men of war which went out to battle: one
soul of five hundred, both of the persons, and of the beeves, and of
the asses, and of the sheep: 31:29 Take it of their half, and give it
unto Eleazar the priest, for an heave offering of the LORD.

31:30 And of the children of Israel's half, thou shalt take one
portion of fifty, of the persons, of the beeves, of the asses, and of
the flocks, of all manner of beasts, and give them unto the Levites,
which keep the charge of the tabernacle of the LORD.

31:31 And Moses and Eleazar the priest did as the LORD commanded
Moses.

31:32 And the booty, being the rest of the prey which the men of war
had caught, was six hundred thousand and seventy thousand and five
thousand sheep, 31:33 And threescore and twelve thousand beeves, 31:34
And threescore and one thousand asses, 31:35 And thirty and two
thousand persons in all, of women that had not known man by lying with
him.

31:36 And the half, which was the portion of them that went out to
war, was in number three hundred thousand and seven and thirty
thousand and five hundred sheep: 31:37 And the LORD's tribute of the
sheep was six hundred and threescore and fifteen.

31:38 And the beeves were thirty and six thousand; of which the LORD's
tribute was threescore and twelve.

31:39 And the asses were thirty thousand and five hundred; of which
the LORD's tribute was threescore and one.

31:40 And the persons were sixteen thousand; of which the LORD's
tribute was thirty and two persons.

31:41 And Moses gave the tribute, which was the LORD's heave offering,
unto Eleazar the priest, as the LORD commanded Moses.

31:42 And of the children of Israel's half, which Moses divided from
the men that warred, 31:43 (Now the half that pertained unto the
congregation was three hundred thousand and thirty thousand and seven
thousand and five hundred sheep, 31:44 And thirty and six thousand
beeves, 31:45 And thirty thousand asses and five hundred, 31:46 And
sixteen thousand persons;) 31:47 Even of the children of Israel's
half, Moses took one portion of fifty, both of man and of beast, and
gave them unto the Levites, which kept the charge of the tabernacle of
the LORD; as the LORD commanded Moses.

31:48 And the officers which were over thousands of the host, the
captains of thousands, and captains of hundreds, came near unto Moses:
31:49 And they said unto Moses, Thy servants have taken the sum of the
men of war which are under our charge, and there lacketh not one man
of us.

31:50 We have therefore brought an oblation for the LORD, what every
man hath gotten, of jewels of gold, chains, and bracelets, rings,
earrings, and tablets, to make an atonement for our souls before the
LORD.

31:51 And Moses and Eleazar the priest took the gold of them, even all
wrought jewels.

31:52 And all the gold of the offering that they offered up to the
LORD, of the captains of thousands, and of the captains of hundreds,
was sixteen thousand seven hundred and fifty shekels.

31:53 (For the men of war had taken spoil, every man for himself.)
31:54 And Moses and Eleazar the priest took the gold of the captains
of thousands and of hundreds, and brought it into the tabernacle of
the congregation, for a memorial for the children of Israel before the
LORD.

32:1 Now the children of Reuben and the children of Gad had a very
great multitude of cattle: and when they saw the land of Jazer, and
the land of Gilead, that, behold, the place was a place for cattle;
32:2 The children of Gad and the children of Reuben came and spake
unto Moses, and to Eleazar the priest, and unto the princes of the
congregation, saying, 32:3 Ataroth, and Dibon, and Jazer, and Nimrah,
and Heshbon, and Elealeh, and Shebam, and Nebo, and Beon, 32:4 Even
the country which the LORD smote before the congregation of Israel, is
a land for cattle, and thy servants have cattle: 32:5 Wherefore, said
they, if we have found grace in thy sight, let this land be given unto
thy servants for a possession, and bring us not over Jordan.

32:6 And Moses said unto the children of Gad and to the children of
Reuben, Shall your brethren go to war, and shall ye sit here?  32:7
And wherefore discourage ye the heart of the children of Israel from
going over into the land which the LORD hath given them?  32:8 Thus
did your fathers, when I sent them from Kadeshbarnea to see the land.

32:9 For when they went up unto the valley of Eshcol, and saw the
land, they discouraged the heart of the children of Israel, that they
should not go into the land which the LORD had given them.

32:10 And the LORD's anger was kindled the same time, and he sware,
saying, 32:11 Surely none of the men that came up out of Egypt, from
twenty years old and upward, shall see the land which I sware unto
Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob; because they have not wholly
followed me: 32:12 Save Caleb the son of Jephunneh the Kenezite, and
Joshua the son of Nun: for they have wholly followed the LORD.

32:13 And the LORD's anger was kindled against Israel, and he made
them wander in the wilderness forty years, until all the generation,
that had done evil in the sight of the LORD, was consumed.

32:14 And, behold, ye are risen up in your fathers' stead, an increase
of sinful men, to augment yet the fierce anger of the LORD toward
Israel.

32:15 For if ye turn away from after him, he will yet again leave them
in the wilderness; and ye shall destroy all this people.

32:16 And they came near unto him, and said, We will build sheepfolds
here for our cattle, and cities for our little ones: 32:17 But we
ourselves will go ready armed before the children of Israel, until we
have brought them unto their place: and our little ones shall dwell in
the fenced cities because of the inhabitants of the land.

32:18 We will not return unto our houses, until the children of Israel
have inherited every man his inheritance.

32:19 For we will not inherit with them on yonder side Jordan, or
forward; because our inheritance is fallen to us on this side Jordan
eastward.

32:20 And Moses said unto them, If ye will do this thing, if ye will
go armed before the LORD to war, 32:21 And will go all of you armed
over Jordan before the LORD, until he hath driven out his enemies from
before him, 32:22 And the land be subdued before the LORD: then
afterward ye shall return, and be guiltless before the LORD, and
before Israel; and this land shall be your possession before the LORD.

32:23 But if ye will not do so, behold, ye have sinned against the
LORD: and be sure your sin will find you out.

32:24 Build you cities for your little ones, and folds for your sheep;
and do that which hath proceeded out of your mouth.

32:25 And the children of Gad and the children of Reuben spake unto
Moses, saying, Thy servants will do as my lord commandeth.

32:26 Our little ones, our wives, our flocks, and all our cattle,
shall be there in the cities of Gilead: 32:27 But thy servants will
pass over, every man armed for war, before the LORD to battle, as my
lord saith.

32:28 So concerning them Moses commanded Eleazar the priest, and
Joshua the son of Nun, and the chief fathers of the tribes of the
children of Israel: 32:29 And Moses said unto them, If the children of
Gad and the children of Reuben will pass with you over Jordan, every
man armed to battle, before the LORD, and the land shall be subdued
before you; then ye shall give them the land of Gilead for a
possession: 32:30 But if they will not pass over with you armed, they
shall have possessions among you in the land of Canaan.

32:31 And the children of Gad and the children of Reuben answered,
saying, As the LORD hath said unto thy servants, so will we do.

32:32 We will pass over armed before the LORD into the land of Canaan,
that the possession of our inheritance on this side Jordan may be
ours.

32:33 And Moses gave unto them, even to the children of Gad, and to
the children of Reuben, and unto half the tribe of Manasseh the son of
Joseph, the kingdom of Sihon king of the Amorites, and the kingdom of
Og king of Bashan, the land, with the cities thereof in the coasts,
even the cities of the country round about.

32:34 And the children of Gad built Dibon, and Ataroth, and Aroer,
32:35 And Atroth, Shophan, and Jaazer, and Jogbehah, 32:36 And
Bethnimrah, and Bethharan, fenced cities: and folds for sheep.

32:37 And the children of Reuben built Heshbon, and Elealeh, and
Kirjathaim, 32:38 And Nebo, and Baalmeon, (their names being changed,)
and Shibmah: and gave other names unto the cities which they builded.

32:39 And the children of Machir the son of Manasseh went to Gilead,
and took it, and dispossessed the Amorite which was in it.

32:40 And Moses gave Gilead unto Machir the son of Manasseh; and he
dwelt therein.

32:41 And Jair the son of Manasseh went and took the small towns
thereof, and called them Havothjair.

32:42 And Nobah went and took Kenath, and the villages thereof, and
called it Nobah, after his own name.

33:1 These are the journeys of the children of Israel, which went
forth out of the land of Egypt with their armies under the hand of
Moses and Aaron.

33:2 And Moses wrote their goings out according to their journeys by
the commandment of the LORD: and these are their journeys according to
their goings out.

33:3 And they departed from Rameses in the first month, on the
fifteenth day of the first month; on the morrow after the passover the
children of Israel went out with an high hand in the sight of all the
Egyptians.

33:4 For the Egyptians buried all their firstborn, which the LORD had
smitten among them: upon their gods also the LORD executed judgments.

33:5 And the children of Israel removed from Rameses, and pitched in
Succoth.

33:6 And they departed from Succoth, and pitched in Etham, which is in
the edge of the wilderness.

33:7 And they removed from Etham, and turned again unto Pihahiroth,
which is before Baalzephon: and they pitched before Migdol.

33:8 And they departed from before Pihahiroth, and passed through the
midst of the sea into the wilderness, and went three days' journey in
the wilderness of Etham, and pitched in Marah.

33:9 And they removed from Marah, and came unto Elim: and in Elim were
twelve fountains of water, and threescore and ten palm trees; and they
pitched there.

33:10 And they removed from Elim, and encamped by the Red sea.

33:11 And they removed from the Red sea, and encamped in the
wilderness of Sin.

33:12 And they took their journey out of the wilderness of Sin, and
encamped in Dophkah.

33:13 And they departed from Dophkah, and encamped in Alush.

33:14 And they removed from Alush, and encamped at Rephidim, where was
no water for the people to drink.

33:15 And they departed from Rephidim, and pitched in the wilderness
of Sinai.

33:16 And they removed from the desert of Sinai, and pitched at
Kibrothhattaavah.

33:17 And they departed from Kibrothhattaavah, and encamped at
Hazeroth.

33:18 And they departed from Hazeroth, and pitched in Rithmah.

33:19 And they departed from Rithmah, and pitched at Rimmonparez.

33:20 And they departed from Rimmonparez, and pitched in Libnah.

33:21 And they removed from Libnah, and pitched at Rissah.

33:22 And they journeyed from Rissah, and pitched in Kehelathah.

33:23 And they went from Kehelathah, and pitched in mount Shapher.

33:24 And they removed from mount Shapher, and encamped in Haradah.

33:25 And they removed from Haradah, and pitched in Makheloth.

33:26 And they removed from Makheloth, and encamped at Tahath.

33:27 And they departed from Tahath, and pitched at Tarah.

33:28 And they removed from Tarah, and pitched in Mithcah.

33:29 And they went from Mithcah, and pitched in Hashmonah.

33:30 And they departed from Hashmonah, and encamped at Moseroth.

33:31 And they departed from Moseroth, and pitched in Benejaakan.

33:32 And they removed from Benejaakan, and encamped at Horhagidgad.

33:33 And they went from Horhagidgad, and pitched in Jotbathah.

33:34 And they removed from Jotbathah, and encamped at Ebronah.

33:35 And they departed from Ebronah, and encamped at Eziongaber.

33:36 And they removed from Eziongaber, and pitched in the wilderness
of Zin, which is Kadesh.

33:37 And they removed from Kadesh, and pitched in mount Hor, in the
edge of the land of Edom.

33:38 And Aaron the priest went up into mount Hor at the commandment
of the LORD, and died there, in the fortieth year after the children
of Israel were come out of the land of Egypt, in the first day of the
fifth month.

33:39 And Aaron was an hundred and twenty and three years old when he
died in mount Hor.

33:40 And king Arad the Canaanite, which dwelt in the south in the
land of Canaan, heard of the coming of the children of Israel.

33:41 And they departed from mount Hor, and pitched in Zalmonah.

33:42 And they departed from Zalmonah, and pitched in Punon.

33:43 And they departed from Punon, and pitched in Oboth.

33:44 And they departed from Oboth, and pitched in Ijeabarim, in the
border of Moab.

33:45 And they departed from Iim, and pitched in Dibongad.

33:46 And they removed from Dibongad, and encamped in Almondiblathaim.

33:47 And they removed from Almondiblathaim, and pitched in the
mountains of Abarim, before Nebo.

33:48 And they departed from the mountains of Abarim, and pitched in
the plains of Moab by Jordan near Jericho.

33:49 And they pitched by Jordan, from Bethjesimoth even unto
Abelshittim in the plains of Moab.

33:50 And the LORD spake unto Moses in the plains of Moab by Jordan
near Jericho, saying, 33:51 Speak unto the children of Israel, and say
unto them, When ye are passed over Jordan into the land of Canaan;
33:52 Then ye shall drive out all the inhabitants of the land from
before you, and destroy all their pictures, and destroy all their
molten images, and quite pluck down all their high places: 33:53 And
ye shall dispossess the inhabitants of the land, and dwell therein:
for I have given you the land to possess it.

33:54 And ye shall divide the land by lot for an inheritance among
your families: and to the more ye shall give the more inheritance, and
to the fewer ye shall give the less inheritance: every man's
inheritance shall be in the place where his lot falleth; according to
the tribes of your fathers ye shall inherit.

33:55 But if ye will not drive out the inhabitants of the land from
before you; then it shall come to pass, that those which ye let remain
of them shall be pricks in your eyes, and thorns in your sides, and
shall vex you in the land wherein ye dwell.

33:56 Moreover it shall come to pass, that I shall do unto you, as I
thought to do unto them.

34:1 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 34:2 Command the children
of Israel, and say unto them, When ye come into the land of Canaan;
(this is the land that shall fall unto you for an inheritance, even
the land of Canaan with the coasts thereof:) 34:3 Then your south
quarter shall be from the wilderness of Zin along by the coast of
Edom, and your south border shall be the outmost coast of the salt sea
eastward: 34:4 And your border shall turn from the south to the ascent
of Akrabbim, and pass on to Zin: and the going forth thereof shall be
from the south to Kadeshbarnea, and shall go on to Hazaraddar, and
pass on to Azmon: 34:5 And the border shall fetch a compass from Azmon
unto the river of Egypt, and the goings out of it shall be at the sea.

34:6 And as for the western border, ye shall even have the great sea
for a border: this shall be your west border.

34:7 And this shall be your north border: from the great sea ye shall
point out for you mount Hor: 34:8 From mount Hor ye shall point out
your border unto the entrance of Hamath; and the goings forth of the
border shall be to Zedad: 34:9 And the border shall go on to Ziphron,
and the goings out of it shall be at Hazarenan: this shall be your
north border.

34:10 And ye shall point out your east border from Hazarenan to
Shepham: 34:11 And the coast shall go down from Shepham to Riblah, on
the east side of Ain; and the border shall descend, and shall reach
unto the side of the sea of Chinnereth eastward: 34:12 And the border
shall go down to Jordan, and the goings out of it shall be at the salt
sea: this shall be your land with the coasts thereof round about.

34:13 And Moses commanded the children of Israel, saying, This is the
land which ye shall inherit by lot, which the LORD commanded to give
unto the nine tribes, and to the half tribe: 34:14 For the tribe of
the children of Reuben according to the house of their fathers, and
the tribe of the children of Gad according to the house of their
fathers, have received their inheritance; and half the tribe of
Manasseh have received their inheritance: 34:15 The two tribes and the
half tribe have received their inheritance on this side Jordan near
Jericho eastward, toward the sunrising.

34:16 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 34:17 These are the names
of the men which shall divide the land unto you: Eleazar the priest,
and Joshua the son of Nun.

34:18 And ye shall take one prince of every tribe, to divide the land
by inheritance.

34:19 And the names of the men are these: Of the tribe of Judah, Caleb
the son of Jephunneh.

34:20 And of the tribe of the children of Simeon, Shemuel the son of
Ammihud.

34:21 Of the tribe of Benjamin, Elidad the son of Chislon.

34:22 And the prince of the tribe of the children of Dan, Bukki the
son of Jogli.

34:23 The prince of the children of Joseph, for the tribe of the
children of Manasseh, Hanniel the son of Ephod.

34:24 And the prince of the tribe of the children of Ephraim, Kemuel
the son of Shiphtan.

34:25 And the prince of the tribe of the children of Zebulun,
Elizaphan the son of Parnach.

34:26 And the prince of the tribe of the children of Issachar, Paltiel
the son of Azzan.

34:27 And the prince of the tribe of the children of Asher, Ahihud the
son of Shelomi.

34:28 And the prince of the tribe of the children of Naphtali, Pedahel
the son of Ammihud.

34:29 These are they whom the LORD commanded to divide the inheritance
unto the children of Israel in the land of Canaan.

35:1 And the LORD spake unto Moses in the plains of Moab by Jordan
near Jericho, saying, 35:2 Command the children of Israel, that they
give unto the Levites of the inheritance of their possession cities to
dwell in; and ye shall give also unto the Levites suburbs for the
cities round about them.

35:3 And the cities shall they have to dwell in; and the suburbs of
them shall be for their cattle, and for their goods, and for all their
beasts.

35:4 And the suburbs of the cities, which ye shall give unto the
Levites, shall reach from the wall of the city and outward a thousand
cubits round about.

35:5 And ye shall measure from without the city on the east side two
thousand cubits, and on the south side two thousand cubits, and on the
west side two thousand cubits, and on the north side two thousand
cubits; and the city shall be in the midst: this shall be to them the
suburbs of the cities.

35:6 And among the cities which ye shall give unto the Levites there
shall be six cities for refuge, which ye shall appoint for the
manslayer, that he may flee thither: and to them ye shall add forty
and two cities.

35:7 So all the cities which ye shall give to the Levites shall be
forty and eight cities: them shall ye give with their suburbs.

35:8 And the cities which ye shall give shall be of the possession of
the children of Israel: from them that have many ye shall give many;
but from them that have few ye shall give few: every one shall give of
his cities unto the Levites according to his inheritance which he
inheriteth.

35:9 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, 35:10 Speak unto the
children of Israel, and say unto them, When ye be come over Jordan
into the land of Canaan; 35:11 Then ye shall appoint you cities to be
cities of refuge for you; that the slayer may flee thither, which
killeth any person at unawares.

35:12 And they shall be unto you cities for refuge from the avenger;
that the manslayer die not, until he stand before the congregation in
judgment.

35:13 And of these cities which ye shall give six cities shall ye have
for refuge.

35:14 Ye shall give three cities on this side Jordan, and three cities
shall ye give in the land of Canaan, which shall be cities of refuge.

35:15 These six cities shall be a refuge, both for the children of
Israel, and for the stranger, and for the sojourner among them: that
every one that killeth any person unawares may flee thither.

35:16 And if he smite him with an instrument of iron, so that he die,
he is a murderer: the murderer shall surely be put to death.

35:17 And if he smite him with throwing a stone, wherewith he may die,
and he die, he is a murderer: the murderer shall surely be put to
death.

35:18 Or if he smite him with an hand weapon of wood, wherewith he may
die, and he die, he is a murderer: the murderer shall surely be put to
death.

35:19 The revenger of blood himself shall slay the murderer: when he
meeteth him, he shall slay him.

35:20 But if he thrust him of hatred, or hurl at him by laying of
wait, that he die; 35:21 Or in enmity smite him with his hand, that he
die: he that smote him shall surely be put to death; for he is a
murderer: the revenger of blood shall slay the murderer, when he
meeteth him.

35:22 But if he thrust him suddenly without enmity, or have cast upon
him any thing without laying of wait, 35:23 Or with any stone,
wherewith a man may die, seeing him not, and cast it upon him, that he
die, and was not his enemy, neither sought his harm: 35:24 Then the
congregation shall judge between the slayer and the revenger of blood
according to these judgments: 35:25 And the congregation shall deliver
the slayer out of the hand of the revenger of blood, and the
congregation shall restore him to the city of his refuge, whither he
was fled: and he shall abide in it unto the death of the high priest,
which was anointed with the holy oil.

35:26 But if the slayer shall at any time come without the border of
the city of his refuge, whither he was fled; 35:27 And the revenger of
blood find him without the borders of the city of his refuge, and the
revenger of blood kill the slayer; he shall not be guilty of blood:
35:28 Because he should have remained in the city of his refuge until
the death of the high priest: but after the death of the high priest
the slayer shall return into the land of his possession.

35:29 So these things shall be for a statute of judgment unto you
throughout your generations in all your dwellings.

35:30 Whoso killeth any person, the murderer shall be put to death by
the mouth of witnesses: but one witness shall not testify against any
person to cause him to die.

35:31 Moreover ye shall take no satisfaction for the life of a
murderer, which is guilty of death: but he shall be surely put to
death.

35:32 And ye shall take no satisfaction for him that is fled to the
city of his refuge, that he should come again to dwell in the land,
until the death of the priest.

35:33 So ye shall not pollute the land wherein ye are: for blood it
defileth the land: and the land cannot be cleansed of the blood that
is shed therein, but by the blood of him that shed it.

35:34 Defile not therefore the land which ye shall inhabit, wherein I
dwell: for I the LORD dwell among the children of Israel.

36:1 And the chief fathers of the families of the children of Gilead,
the son of Machir, the son of Manasseh, of the families of the sons of
Joseph, came near, and spake before Moses, and before the princes, the
chief fathers of the children of Israel: 36:2 And they said, The LORD
commanded my lord to give the land for an inheritance by lot to the
children of Israel: and my lord was commanded by the LORD to give the
inheritance of Zelophehad our brother unto his daughters.

36:3 And if they be married to any of the sons of the other tribes of
the children of Israel, then shall their inheritance be taken from the
inheritance of our fathers, and shall be put to the inheritance of the
tribe whereunto they are received: so shall it be taken from the lot
of our inheritance.

36:4 And when the jubile of the children of Israel shall be, then
shall their inheritance be put unto the inheritance of the tribe
whereunto they are received: so shall their inheritance be taken away
from the inheritance of the tribe of our fathers.

36:5 And Moses commanded the children of Israel according to the word
of the LORD, saying, The tribe of the sons of Joseph hath said well.

36:6 This is the thing which the LORD doth command concerning the
daughters of Zelophehad, saying, Let them marry to whom they think
best; only to the family of the tribe of their father shall they
marry.

36:7 So shall not the inheritance of the children of Israel remove
from tribe to tribe: for every one of the children of Israel shall
keep himself to the inheritance of the tribe of his fathers.

36:8 And every daughter, that possesseth an inheritance in any tribe
of the children of Israel, shall be wife unto one of the family of the
tribe of her father, that the children of Israel may enjoy every man
the inheritance of his fathers.

36:9 Neither shall the inheritance remove from one tribe to another
tribe; but every one of the tribes of the children of Israel shall
keep himself to his own inheritance.

36:10 Even as the LORD commanded Moses, so did the daughters of
Zelophehad: 36:11 For Mahlah, Tirzah, and Hoglah, and Milcah, and
Noah, the daughters of Zelophehad, were married unto their father's
brothers' sons: 36:12 And they were married into the families of the
sons of Manasseh the son of Joseph, and their inheritance remained in
the tribe of the family of their father.

36:13 These are the commandments and the judgments, which the LORD
commanded by the hand of Moses unto the children of Israel in the
plains of Moab by Jordan near Jericho.




The Fifth Book of Moses:  Called Deuteronomy


1:1 These be the words which Moses spake unto all Israel on this side
Jordan in the wilderness, in the plain over against the Red sea,
between Paran, and Tophel, and Laban, and Hazeroth, and Dizahab.

1:2 (There are eleven days' journey from Horeb by the way of mount
Seir unto Kadeshbarnea.)  1:3 And it came to pass in the fortieth
year, in the eleventh month, on the first day of the month, that Moses
spake unto the children of Israel, according unto all that the LORD
had given him in commandment unto them; 1:4 After he had slain Sihon
the king of the Amorites, which dwelt in Heshbon, and Og the king of
Bashan, which dwelt at Astaroth in Edrei: 1:5 On this side Jordan, in
the land of Moab, began Moses to declare this law, saying, 1:6 The
LORD our God spake unto us in Horeb, saying, Ye have dwelt long enough
in this mount: 1:7 Turn you, and take your journey, and go to the
mount of the Amorites, and unto all the places nigh thereunto, in the
plain, in the hills, and in the vale, and in the south, and by the sea
side, to the land of the Canaanites, and unto Lebanon, unto the great
river, the river Euphrates.

1:8 Behold, I have set the land before you: go in and possess the land
which the LORD sware unto your fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to
give unto them and to their seed after them.

1:9 And I spake unto you at that time, saying, I am not able to bear
you myself alone: 1:10 The LORD your God hath multiplied you, and,
behold, ye are this day as the stars of heaven for multitude.

1:11 (The LORD God of your fathers make you a thousand times so many
more as ye are, and bless you, as he hath promised you!)  1:12 How can
I myself alone bear your cumbrance, and your burden, and your strife?
1:13 Take you wise men, and understanding, and known among your
tribes, and I will make them rulers over you.

1:14 And ye answered me, and said, The thing which thou hast spoken is
good for us to do.

1:15 So I took the chief of your tribes, wise men, and known, and made
them heads over you, captains over thousands, and captains over
hundreds, and captains over fifties, and captains over tens, and
officers among your tribes.

1:16 And I charged your judges at that time, saying, Hear the causes
between your brethren, and judge righteously between every man and his
brother, and the stranger that is with him.

1:17 Ye shall not respect persons in judgment; but ye shall hear the
small as well as the great; ye shall not be afraid of the face of man;
for the judgment is God's: and the cause that is too hard for you,
bring it unto me, and I will hear it.

1:18 And I commanded you at that time all the things which ye should
do.

1:19 And when we departed from Horeb, we went through all that great
and terrible wilderness, which ye saw by the way of the mountain of
the Amorites, as the LORD our God commanded us; and we came to
Kadeshbarnea.

1:20 And I said unto you, Ye are come unto the mountain of the
Amorites, which the LORD our God doth give unto us.

1:21 Behold, the LORD thy God hath set the land before thee: go up and
possess it, as the LORD God of thy fathers hath said unto thee; fear
not, neither be discouraged.

1:22 And ye came near unto me every one of you, and said, We will send
men before us, and they shall search us out the land, and bring us
word again by what way we must go up, and into what cities we shall
come.

1:23 And the saying pleased me well: and I took twelve men of you, one
of a tribe: 1:24 And they turned and went up into the mountain, and
came unto the valley of Eshcol, and searched it out.

1:25 And they took of the fruit of the land in their hands, and
brought it down unto us, and brought us word again, and said, It is a
good land which the LORD our God doth give us.

1:26 Notwithstanding ye would not go up, but rebelled against the
commandment of the LORD your God: 1:27 And ye murmured in your tents,
and said, Because the LORD hated us, he hath brought us forth out of
the land of Egypt, to deliver us into the hand of the Amorites, to
destroy us.

1:28 Whither shall we go up? our brethren have discouraged our heart,
saying, The people is greater and taller than we; the cities are great
and walled up to heaven; and moreover we have seen the sons of the
Anakims there.

1:29 Then I said unto you, Dread not, neither be afraid of them.

1:30 The LORD your God which goeth before you, he shall fight for you,
according to all that he did for you in Egypt before your eyes; 1:31
And in the wilderness, where thou hast seen how that the LORD thy God
bare thee, as a man doth bear his son, in all the way that ye went,
until ye came into this place.

1:32 Yet in this thing ye did not believe the LORD your God, 1:33 Who
went in the way before you, to search you out a place to pitch your
tents in, in fire by night, to shew you by what way ye should go, and
in a cloud by day.

1:34 And the LORD heard the voice of your words, and was wroth, and
sware, saying, 1:35 Surely there shall not one of these men of this
evil generation see that good land, which I sware to give unto your
fathers.

1:36 Save Caleb the son of Jephunneh; he shall see it, and to him will
I give the land that he hath trodden upon, and to his children,
because he hath wholly followed the LORD.

1:37 Also the LORD was angry with me for your sakes, saying, Thou also
shalt not go in thither.

1:38 But Joshua the son of Nun, which standeth before thee, he shall
go in thither: encourage him: for he shall cause Israel to inherit it.

1:39 Moreover your little ones, which ye said should be a prey, and
your children, which in that day had no knowledge between good and
evil, they shall go in thither, and unto them will I give it, and they
shall possess it.

1:40 But as for you, turn you, and take your journey into the
wilderness by the way of the Red sea.

1:41 Then ye answered and said unto me, We have sinned against the
LORD, we will go up and fight, according to all that the LORD our God
commanded us.

And when ye had girded on every man his weapons of war, ye were ready
to go up into the hill.

1:42 And the LORD said unto me, Say unto them. Go not up, neither
fight; for I am not among you; lest ye be smitten before your enemies.

1:43 So I spake unto you; and ye would not hear, but rebelled against
the commandment of the LORD, and went presumptuously up into the hill.

1:44 And the Amorites, which dwelt in that mountain, came out against
you, and chased you, as bees do, and destroyed you in Seir, even unto
Hormah.

1:45 And ye returned and wept before the LORD; but the LORD would not
hearken to your voice, nor give ear unto you.

1:46 So ye abode in Kadesh many days, according unto the days that ye
abode there.

2:1 Then we turned, and took our journey into the wilderness by the
way of the Red sea, as the LORD spake unto me: and we compassed mount
Seir many days.

2:2 And the LORD spake unto me, saying, 2:3 Ye have compassed this
mountain long enough: turn you northward.

2:4 And command thou the people, saying, Ye are to pass through the
coast of your brethren the children of Esau, which dwell in Seir; and
they shall be afraid of you: take ye good heed unto yourselves
therefore: 2:5 Meddle not with them; for I will not give you of their
land, no, not so much as a foot breadth; because I have given mount
Seir unto Esau for a possession.

2:6 Ye shall buy meat of them for money, that ye may eat; and ye shall
also buy water of them for money, that ye may drink.

2:7 For the LORD thy God hath blessed thee in all the works of thy
hand: he knoweth thy walking through this great wilderness: these
forty years the LORD thy God hath been with thee; thou hast lacked
nothing.

2:8 And when we passed by from our brethren the children of Esau,
which dwelt in Seir, through the way of the plain from Elath, and from
Eziongaber, we turned and passed by the way of the wilderness of Moab.

2:9 And the LORD said unto me, Distress not the Moabites, neither
contend with them in battle: for I will not give thee of their land
for a possession; because I have given Ar unto the children of Lot for
a possession.

2:10 The Emims dwelt therein in times past, a people great, and many,
and tall, as the Anakims; 2:11 Which also were accounted giants, as
the Anakims; but the Moabites called them Emims.

2:12 The Horims also dwelt in Seir beforetime; but the children of
Esau succeeded them, when they had destroyed them from before them,
and dwelt in their stead; as Israel did unto the land of his
possession, which the LORD gave unto them.

2:13 Now rise up, said I, and get you over the brook Zered. And we
went over the brook Zered.

2:14 And the space in which we came from Kadeshbarnea, until we were
come over the brook Zered, was thirty and eight years; until all the
generation of the men of war were wasted out from among the host, as
the LORD sware unto them.

2:15 For indeed the hand of the LORD was against them, to destroy them
from among the host, until they were consumed.

2:16 So it came to pass, when all the men of war were consumed and
dead from among the people, 2:17 That the LORD spake unto me, saying,
2:18 Thou art to pass over through Ar, the coast of Moab, this day:
2:19 And when thou comest nigh over against the children of Ammon,
distress them not, nor meddle with them: for I will not give thee of
the land of the children of Ammon any possession; because I have given
it unto the children of Lot for a possession.

2:20 (That also was accounted a land of giants: giants dwelt therein
in old time; and the Ammonites call them Zamzummims; 2:21 A people
great, and many, and tall, as the Anakims; but the LORD destroyed them
before them; and they succeeded them, and dwelt in their stead: 2:22
As he did to the children of Esau, which dwelt in Seir, when he
destroyed the Horims from before them; and they succeeded them, and
dwelt in their stead even unto this day: 2:23 And the Avims which
dwelt in Hazerim, even unto Azzah, the Caphtorims, which came forth
out of Caphtor, destroyed them, and dwelt in their stead.)  2:24 Rise
ye up, take your journey, and pass over the river Arnon: behold, I
have given into thine hand Sihon the Amorite, king of Heshbon, and his
land: begin to possess it, and contend with him in battle.

2:25 This day will I begin to put the dread of thee and the fear of
thee upon the nations that are under the whole heaven, who shall hear
report of thee, and shall tremble, and be in anguish because of thee.

2:26 And I sent messengers out of the wilderness of Kedemoth unto
Sihon king of Heshbon with words of peace, saying, 2:27 Let me pass
through thy land: I will go along by the high way, I will neither turn
unto the right hand nor to the left.

2:28 Thou shalt sell me meat for money, that I may eat; and give me
water for money, that I may drink: only I will pass through on my
feet; 2:29 (As the children of Esau which dwell in Seir, and the
Moabites which dwell in Ar, did unto me;) until I shall pass over
Jordan into the land which the LORD our God giveth us.

2:30 But Sihon king of Heshbon would not let us pass by him: for the
LORD thy God hardened his spirit, and made his heart obstinate, that
he might deliver him into thy hand, as appeareth this day.

2:31 And the LORD said unto me, Behold, I have begun to give Sihon and
his land before thee: begin to possess, that thou mayest inherit his
land.

2:32 Then Sihon came out against us, he and all his people, to fight
at Jahaz.

2:33 And the LORD our God delivered him before us; and we smote him,
and his sons, and all his people.

2:34 And we took all his cities at that time, and utterly destroyed
the men, and the women, and the little ones, of every city, we left
none to remain: 2:35 Only the cattle we took for a prey unto
ourselves, and the spoil of the cities which we took.

2:36 From Aroer, which is by the brink of the river of Arnon, and from
the city that is by the river, even unto Gilead, there was not one
city too strong for us: the LORD our God delivered all unto us: 2:37
Only unto the land of the children of Ammon thou camest not, nor unto
any place of the river Jabbok, nor unto the cities in the mountains,
nor unto whatsoever the LORD our God forbad us.

3:1 Then we turned, and went up the way to Bashan: and Og the king of
Bashan came out against us, he and all his people, to battle at Edrei.

3:2 And the LORD said unto me, Fear him not: for I will deliver him,
and all his people, and his land, into thy hand; and thou shalt do
unto him as thou didst unto Sihon king of the Amorites, which dwelt at
Heshbon.

3:3 So the LORD our God delivered into our hands Og also, the king of
Bashan, and all his people: and we smote him until none was left to
him remaining.

3:4 And we took all his cities at that time, there was not a city
which we took not from them, threescore cities, all the region of
Argob, the kingdom of Og in Bashan.

3:5 All these cities were fenced with high walls, gates, and bars;
beside unwalled towns a great many.

3:6 And we utterly destroyed them, as we did unto Sihon king of
Heshbon, utterly destroying the men, women, and children, of every
city.

3:7 But all the cattle, and the spoil of the cities, we took for a
prey to ourselves.

3:8 And we took at that time out of the hand of the two kings of the
Amorites the land that was on this side Jordan, from the river of
Arnon unto mount Hermon; 3:9 (Which Hermon the Sidonians call Sirion;
and the Amorites call it Shenir;) 3:10 All the cities of the plain,
and all Gilead, and all Bashan, unto Salchah and Edrei, cities of the
kingdom of Og in Bashan.

3:11 For only Og king of Bashan remained of the remnant of giants;
behold his bedstead was a bedstead of iron; is it not in Rabbath of
the children of Ammon? nine cubits was the length thereof, and four
cubits the breadth of it, after the cubit of a man.

3:12 And this land, which we possessed at that time, from Aroer, which
is by the river Arnon, and half mount Gilead, and the cities thereof,
gave I unto the Reubenites and to the Gadites.

3:13 And the rest of Gilead, and all Bashan, being the kingdom of Og,
gave I unto the half tribe of Manasseh; all the region of Argob, with
all Bashan, which was called the land of giants.

3:14 Jair the son of Manasseh took all the country of Argob unto the
coasts of Geshuri and Maachathi; and called them after his own name,
Bashanhavothjair, unto this day.

3:15 And I gave Gilead unto Machir.

3:16 And unto the Reubenites and unto the Gadites I gave from Gilead
even unto the river Arnon half the valley, and the border even unto
the river Jabbok, which is the border of the children of Ammon; 3:17
The plain also, and Jordan, and the coast thereof, from Chinnereth
even unto the sea of the plain, even the salt sea, under Ashdothpisgah
eastward.

3:18 And I commanded you at that time, saying, The LORD your God hath
given you this land to possess it: ye shall pass over armed before
your brethren the children of Israel, all that are meet for the war.

3:19 But your wives, and your little ones, and your cattle, (for I
know that ye have much cattle,) shall abide in your cities which I
have given you; 3:20 Until the LORD have given rest unto your
brethren, as well as unto you, and until they also possess the land
which the LORD your God hath given them beyond Jordan: and then shall
ye return every man unto his possession, which I have given you.

3:21 And I commanded Joshua at that time, saying, Thine eyes have seen
all that the LORD your God hath done unto these two kings: so shall
the LORD do unto all the kingdoms whither thou passest.

3:22 Ye shall not fear them: for the LORD your God he shall fight for
you.

3:23 And I besought the LORD at that time, saying, 3:24 O Lord GOD,
thou hast begun to shew thy servant thy greatness, and thy mighty
hand: for what God is there in heaven or in earth, that can do
according to thy works, and according to thy might?  3:25 I pray thee,
let me go over, and see the good land that is beyond Jordan, that
goodly mountain, and Lebanon.

3:26 But the LORD was wroth with me for your sakes, and would not hear
me: and the LORD said unto me, Let it suffice thee; speak no more unto
me of this matter.

3:27 Get thee up into the top of Pisgah, and lift up thine eyes
westward, and northward, and southward, and eastward, and behold it
with thine eyes: for thou shalt not go over this Jordan.

3:28 But charge Joshua, and encourage him, and strengthen him: for he
shall go over before this people, and he shall cause them to inherit
the land which thou shalt see.

3:29 So we abode in the valley over against Bethpeor.

4:1 Now therefore hearken, O Israel, unto the statutes and unto the
judgments, which I teach you, for to do them, that ye may live, and go
in and possess the land which the LORD God of your fathers giveth you.

4:2 Ye shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall
ye diminish ought from it, that ye may keep the commandments of the
LORD your God which I command you.

4:3 Your eyes have seen what the LORD did because of Baalpeor: for all
the men that followed Baalpeor, the LORD thy God hath destroyed them
from among you.

4:4 But ye that did cleave unto the LORD your God are alive every one
of you this day.

4:5 Behold, I have taught you statutes and judgments, even as the LORD
my God commanded me, that ye should do so in the land whither ye go to
possess it.

4:6 Keep therefore and do them; for this is your wisdom and your
understanding in the sight of the nations, which shall hear all these
statutes, and say, Surely this great nation is a wise and
understanding people.

4:7 For what nation is there so great, who hath God so nigh unto them,
as the LORD our God is in all things that we call upon him for?  4:8
And what nation is there so great, that hath statutes and judgments so
righteous as all this law, which I set before you this day?  4:9 Only
take heed to thyself, and keep thy soul diligently, lest thou forget
the things which thine eyes have seen, and lest they depart from thy
heart all the days of thy life: but teach them thy sons, and thy sons'
sons; 4:10 Specially the day that thou stoodest before the LORD thy
God in Horeb, when the LORD said unto me, Gather me the people
together, and I will make them hear my words, that they may learn to
fear me all the days that they shall live upon the earth, and that
they may teach their children.

4:11 And ye came near and stood under the mountain; and the mountain
burned with fire unto the midst of heaven, with darkness, clouds, and
thick darkness.

4:12 And the LORD spake unto you out of the midst of the fire: ye
heard the voice of the words, but saw no similitude; only ye heard a
voice.

4:13 And he declared unto you his covenant, which he commanded you to
perform, even ten commandments; and he wrote them upon two tables of
stone.

4:14 And the LORD commanded me at that time to teach you statutes and
judgments, that ye might do them in the land whither ye go over to
possess it.

4:15 Take ye therefore good heed unto yourselves; for ye saw no manner
of similitude on the day that the LORD spake unto you in Horeb out of
the midst of the fire: 4:16 Lest ye corrupt yourselves, and make you a
graven image, the similitude of any figure, the likeness of male or
female, 4:17 The likeness of any beast that is on the earth, the
likeness of any winged fowl that flieth in the air, 4:18 The likeness
of any thing that creepeth on the ground, the likeness of any fish
that is in the waters beneath the earth: 4:19 And lest thou lift up
thine eyes unto heaven, and when thou seest the sun, and the moon, and
the stars, even all the host of heaven, shouldest be driven to worship
them, and serve them, which the LORD thy God hath divided unto all
nations under the whole heaven.

4:20 But the LORD hath taken you, and brought you forth out of the
iron furnace, even out of Egypt, to be unto him a people of
inheritance, as ye are this day.

4:21 Furthermore the LORD was angry with me for your sakes, and sware
that I should not go over Jordan, and that I should not go in unto
that good land, which the LORD thy God giveth thee for an inheritance:
4:22 But I must die in this land, I must not go over Jordan: but ye
shall go over, and possess that good land.

4:23 Take heed unto yourselves, lest ye forget the covenant of the
LORD your God, which he made with you, and make you a graven image, or
the likeness of any thing, which the LORD thy God hath forbidden thee.

4:24 For the LORD thy God is a consuming fire, even a jealous God.

4:25 When thou shalt beget children, and children's children, and ye
shall have remained long in the land, and shall corrupt yourselves,
and make a graven image, or the likeness of any thing, and shall do
evil in the sight of the LORD thy God, to provoke him to anger: 4:26 I
call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that ye shall
soon utterly perish from off the land whereunto ye go over Jordan to
possess it; ye shall not prolong your days upon it, but shall utterly
be destroyed.

4:27 And the LORD shall scatter you among the nations, and ye shall be
left few in number among the heathen, whither the LORD shall lead you.

4:28 And there ye shall serve gods, the work of men's hands, wood and
stone, which neither see, nor hear, nor eat, nor smell.

4:29 But if from thence thou shalt seek the LORD thy God, thou shalt
find him, if thou seek him with all thy heart and with all thy soul.

4:30 When thou art in tribulation, and all these things are come upon
thee, even in the latter days, if thou turn to the LORD thy God, and
shalt be obedient unto his voice; 4:31 (For the LORD thy God is a
merciful God;) he will not forsake thee, neither destroy thee, nor
forget the covenant of thy fathers which he sware unto them.

4:32 For ask now of the days that are past, which were before thee,
since the day that God created man upon the earth, and ask from the
one side of heaven unto the other, whether there hath been any such
thing as this great thing is, or hath been heard like it?  4:33 Did
ever people hear the voice of God speaking out of the midst of the
fire, as thou hast heard, and live?  4:34 Or hath God assayed to go
and take him a nation from the midst of another nation, by
temptations, by signs, and by wonders, and by war, and by a mighty
hand, and by a stretched out arm, and by great terrors, according to
all that the LORD your God did for you in Egypt before your eyes?
4:35 Unto thee it was shewed, that thou mightest know that the LORD he
is God; there is none else beside him.

4:36 Out of heaven he made thee to hear his voice, that he might
instruct thee: and upon earth he shewed thee his great fire; and thou
heardest his words out of the midst of the fire.

4:37 And because he loved thy fathers, therefore he chose their seed
after them, and brought thee out in his sight with his mighty power
out of Egypt; 4:38 To drive out nations from before thee greater and
mightier than thou art, to bring thee in, to give thee their land for
an inheritance, as it is this day.

4:39 Know therefore this day, and consider it in thine heart, that the
LORD he is God in heaven above, and upon the earth beneath: there is
none else.

4:40 Thou shalt keep therefore his statutes, and his commandments,
which I command thee this day, that it may go well with thee, and with
thy children after thee, and that thou mayest prolong thy days upon
the earth, which the LORD thy God giveth thee, for ever.

4:41 Then Moses severed three cities on this side Jordan toward the
sunrising; 4:42 That the slayer might flee thither, which should kill
his neighbour unawares, and hated him not in times past; and that
fleeing unto one of these cities he might live: 4:43 Namely, Bezer in
the wilderness, in the plain country, of the Reubenites; and Ramoth in
Gilead, of the Gadites; and Golan in Bashan, of the Manassites.

4:44 And this is the law which Moses set before the children of
Israel: 4:45 These are the testimonies, and the statutes, and the
judgments, which Moses spake unto the children of Israel, after they
came forth out of Egypt.

4:46 On this side Jordan, in the valley over against Bethpeor, in the
land of Sihon king of the Amorites, who dwelt at Heshbon, whom Moses
and the children of Israel smote, after they were come forth out of
Egypt: 4:47 And they possessed his land, and the land of Og king of
Bashan, two kings of the Amorites, which were on this side Jordan
toward the sunrising; 4:48 From Aroer, which is by the bank of the
river Arnon, even unto mount Sion, which is Hermon, 4:49 And all the
plain on this side Jordan eastward, even unto the sea of the plain,
under the springs of Pisgah.

5:1 And Moses called all Israel, and said unto them, Hear, O Israel,
the statutes and judgments which I speak in your ears this day, that
ye may learn them, and keep, and do them.

5:2 The LORD our God made a covenant with us in Horeb.

5:3 The LORD made not this covenant with our fathers, but with us,
even us, who are all of us here alive this day.

5:4 The LORD talked with you face to face in the mount out of the
midst of the fire, 5:5 (I stood between the LORD and you at that time,
to shew you the word of the LORD: for ye were afraid by reason of the
fire, and went not up into the mount;) saying, 5:6 I am the LORD thy
God, which brought thee out of the land of Egypt, from the house of
bondage.

5:7 Thou shalt have none other gods before me.

5:8 Thou shalt not make thee any graven image, or any likeness of any
thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or
that is in the waters beneath the earth: 5:9 Thou shalt not bow down
thyself unto them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous
God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the
third and fourth generation of them that hate me, 5:10 And shewing
mercy unto thousands of them that love me and keep my commandments.

5:11 Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain: for the
LORD will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.

5:12 Keep the sabbath day to sanctify it, as the LORD thy God hath
commanded thee.

5:13 Six days thou shalt labour, and do all thy work: 5:14 But the
seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not
do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, nor thy manservant,
nor thy maidservant, nor thine ox, nor thine ass, nor any of thy
cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates; that thy manservant
and thy maidservant may rest as well as thou.

5:15 And remember that thou wast a servant in the land of Egypt, and
that the LORD thy God brought thee out thence through a mighty hand
and by a stretched out arm: therefore the LORD thy God commanded thee
to keep the sabbath day.

5:16 Honour thy father and thy mother, as the LORD thy God hath
commanded thee; that thy days may be prolonged, and that it may go
well with thee, in the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.

5:17 Thou shalt not kill.

5:18 Neither shalt thou commit adultery.

5:19 Neither shalt thou steal.

5:20 Neither shalt thou bear false witness against thy neighbour.

5:21 Neither shalt thou desire thy neighbour's wife, neither shalt
thou covet thy neighbour's house, his field, or his manservant, or his
maidservant, his ox, or his ass, or any thing that is thy neighbour's.

5:22 These words the LORD spake unto all your assembly in the mount
out of the midst of the fire, of the cloud, and of the thick darkness,
with a great voice: and he added no more. And he wrote them in two
tables of stone, and delivered them unto me.

5:23 And it came to pass, when ye heard the voice out of the midst of
the darkness, (for the mountain did burn with fire,) that ye came near
unto me, even all the heads of your tribes, and your elders; 5:24 And
ye said, Behold, the LORD our God hath shewed us his glory and his
greatness, and we have heard his voice out of the midst of the fire:
we have seen this day that God doth talk with man, and he liveth.

5:25 Now therefore why should we die? for this great fire will consume
us: if we hear the voice of the LORD our God any more, then we shall
die.

5:26 For who is there of all flesh, that hath heard the voice of the
living God speaking out of the midst of the fire, as we have, and
lived?  5:27 Go thou near, and hear all that the LORD our God shall
say: and speak thou unto us all that the LORD our God shall speak unto
thee; and we will hear it, and do it.

5:28 And the LORD heard the voice of your words, when ye spake unto
me; and the LORD said unto me, I have heard the voice of the words of
this people, which they have spoken unto thee: they have well said all
that they have spoken.

5:29 O that there were such an heart in them, that they would fear me,
and keep all my commandments always, that it might be well with them,
and with their children for ever!  5:30 Go say to them, Get you into
your tents again.

5:31 But as for thee, stand thou here by me, and I will speak unto
thee all the commandments, and the statutes, and the judgments, which
thou shalt teach them, that they may do them in the land which I give
them to possess it.

5:32 Ye shall observe to do therefore as the LORD your God hath
commanded you: ye shall not turn aside to the right hand or to the
left.

5:33 Ye shall walk in all the ways which the LORD your God hath
commanded you, that ye may live, and that it may be well with you, and
that ye may prolong your days in the land which ye shall possess.

6:1 Now these are the commandments, the statutes, and the judgments,
which the LORD your God commanded to teach you, that ye might do them
in the land whither ye go to possess it: 6:2 That thou mightest fear
the LORD thy God, to keep all his statutes and his commandments, which
I command thee, thou, and thy son, and thy son's son, all the days of
thy life; and that thy days may be prolonged.

6:3 Hear therefore, O Israel, and observe to do it; that it may be
well with thee, and that ye may increase mightily, as the LORD God of
thy fathers hath promised thee, in the land that floweth with milk and
honey.

6:4 Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD: 6:5 And thou shalt
love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and
with all thy might.

6:6 And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine
heart: 6:7 And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and
shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou
walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.

6:8 And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thine hand, and they
shall be as frontlets between thine eyes.

6:9 And thou shalt write them upon the posts of thy house, and on thy
gates.

6:10 And it shall be, when the LORD thy God shall have brought thee
into the land which he sware unto thy fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac,
and to Jacob, to give thee great and goodly cities, which thou
buildedst not, 6:11 And houses full of all good things, which thou
filledst not, and wells digged, which thou diggedst not, vineyards and
olive trees, which thou plantedst not; when thou shalt have eaten and
be full; 6:12 Then beware lest thou forget the LORD, which brought
thee forth out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage.

6:13 Thou shalt fear the LORD thy God, and serve him, and shalt swear
by his name.

6:14 Ye shall not go after other gods, of the gods of the people which
are round about you; 6:15 (For the LORD thy God is a jealous God among
you) lest the anger of the LORD thy God be kindled against thee, and
destroy thee from off the face of the earth.

6:16 Ye shall not tempt the LORD your God, as ye tempted him in
Massah.

6:17 Ye shall diligently keep the commandments of the LORD your God,
and his testimonies, and his statutes, which he hath commanded thee.

6:18 And thou shalt do that which is right and good in the sight of
the LORD: that it may be well with thee, and that thou mayest go in
and possess the good land which the LORD sware unto thy fathers.

6:19 To cast out all thine enemies from before thee, as the LORD hath
spoken.

6:20 And when thy son asketh thee in time to come, saying, What mean
the testimonies, and the statutes, and the judgments, which the LORD
our God hath commanded you?  6:21 Then thou shalt say unto thy son, We
were Pharaoh's bondmen in Egypt; and the LORD brought us out of Egypt
with a mighty hand: 6:22 And the LORD shewed signs and wonders, great
and sore, upon Egypt, upon Pharaoh, and upon all his household, before
our eyes: 6:23 And he brought us out from thence, that he might bring
us in, to give us the land which he sware unto our fathers.

6:24 And the LORD commanded us to do all these statutes, to fear the
LORD our God, for our good always, that he might preserve us alive, as
it is at this day.

6:25 And it shall be our righteousness, if we observe to do all these
commandments before the LORD our God, as he hath commanded us.

7:1 When the LORD thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou
goest to possess it, and hath cast out many nations before thee, the
Hittites, and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites,
and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations
greater and mightier than thou; 7:2 And when the LORD thy God shall
deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy
them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them:
7:3 Neither shalt thou make marriages with them; thy daughter thou
shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy
son.

7:4 For they will turn away thy son from following me, that they may
serve other gods: so will the anger of the LORD be kindled against
you, and destroy thee suddenly.

7:5 But thus shall ye deal with them; ye shall destroy their altars,
and break down their images, and cut down their groves, and burn their
graven images with fire.

7:6 For thou art an holy people unto the LORD thy God: the LORD thy
God hath chosen thee to be a special people unto himself, above all
people that are upon the face of the earth.

7:7 The LORD did not set his love upon you, nor choose you, because ye
were more in number than any people; for ye were the fewest of all
people: 7:8 But because the LORD loved you, and because he would keep
the oath which he had sworn unto your fathers, hath the LORD brought
you out with a mighty hand, and redeemed you out of the house of
bondmen, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt.

7:9 Know therefore that the LORD thy God, he is God, the faithful God,
which keepeth covenant and mercy with them that love him and keep his
commandments to a thousand generations; 7:10 And repayeth them that
hate him to their face, to destroy them: he will not be slack to him
that hateth him, he will repay him to his face.

7:11 Thou shalt therefore keep the commandments, and the statutes, and
the judgments, which I command thee this day, to do them.

7:12 Wherefore it shall come to pass, if ye hearken to these
judgments, and keep, and do them, that the LORD thy God shall keep
unto thee the covenant and the mercy which he sware unto thy fathers:
7:13 And he will love thee, and bless thee, and multiply thee: he will
also bless the fruit of thy womb, and the fruit of thy land, thy corn,
and thy wine, and thine oil, the increase of thy kine, and the flocks
of thy sheep, in the land which he sware unto thy fathers to give
thee.

7:14 Thou shalt be blessed above all people: there shall not be male
or female barren among you, or among your cattle.

7:15 And the LORD will take away from thee all sickness, and will put
none of the evil diseases of Egypt, which thou knowest, upon thee; but
will lay them upon all them that hate thee.

7:16 And thou shalt consume all the people which the LORD thy God
shall deliver thee; thine eye shall have no pity upon them: neither
shalt thou serve their gods; for that will be a snare unto thee.

7:17 If thou shalt say in thine heart, These nations are more than I;
how can I dispossess them?  7:18 Thou shalt not be afraid of them: but
shalt well remember what the LORD thy God did unto Pharaoh, and unto
all Egypt; 7:19 The great temptations which thine eyes saw, and the
signs, and the wonders, and the mighty hand, and the stretched out
arm, whereby the LORD thy God brought thee out: so shall the LORD thy
God do unto all the people of whom thou art afraid.

7:20 Moreover the LORD thy God will send the hornet among them, until
they that are left, and hide themselves from thee, be destroyed.

7:21 Thou shalt not be affrighted at them: for the LORD thy God is
among you, a mighty God and terrible.

7:22 And the LORD thy God will put out those nations before thee by
little and little: thou mayest not consume them at once, lest the
beasts of the field increase upon thee.

7:23 But the LORD thy God shall deliver them unto thee, and shall
destroy them with a mighty destruction, until they be destroyed.

7:24 And he shall deliver their kings into thine hand, and thou shalt
destroy their name from under heaven: there shall no man be able to
stand before thee, until thou have destroyed them.

7:25 The graven images of their gods shall ye burn with fire: thou
shalt not desire the silver or gold that is on them, nor take it unto
thee, lest thou be snared therin: for it is an abomination to the LORD
thy God.

7:26 Neither shalt thou bring an abomination into thine house, lest
thou be a cursed thing like it: but thou shalt utterly detest it, and
thou shalt utterly abhor it; for it is a cursed thing.

8:1 All the commandments which I command thee this day shall ye
observe to do, that ye may live, and multiply, and go in and possess
the land which the LORD sware unto your fathers.

8:2 And thou shalt remember all the way which the LORD thy God led
thee these forty years in the wilderness, to humble thee, and to prove
thee, to know what was in thine heart, whether thou wouldest keep his
commandments, or no.

8:3 And he humbled thee, and suffered thee to hunger, and fed thee
with manna, which thou knewest not, neither did thy fathers know; that
he might make thee know that man doth not live by bread only, but by
every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the LORD doth man live.

8:4 Thy raiment waxed not old upon thee, neither did thy foot swell,
these forty years.

8:5 Thou shalt also consider in thine heart, that, as a man chasteneth
his son, so the LORD thy God chasteneth thee.

8:6 Therefore thou shalt keep the commandments of the LORD thy God, to
walk in his ways, and to fear him.

8:7 For the LORD thy God bringeth thee into a good land, a land of
brooks of water, of fountains and depths that spring out of valleys
and hills; 8:8 A land of wheat, and barley, and vines, and fig trees,
and pomegranates; a land of oil olive, and honey; 8:9 A land wherein
thou shalt eat bread without scarceness, thou shalt not lack any thing
in it; a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills thou
mayest dig brass.

8:10 When thou hast eaten and art full, then thou shalt bless the LORD
thy God for the good land which he hath given thee.

8:11 Beware that thou forget not the LORD thy God, in not keeping his
commandments, and his judgments, and his statutes, which I command
thee this day: 8:12 Lest when thou hast eaten and art full, and hast
built goodly houses, and dwelt therein; 8:13 And when thy herds and
thy flocks multiply, and thy silver and thy gold is multiplied, and
all that thou hast is multiplied; 8:14 Then thine heart be lifted up,
and thou forget the LORD thy God, which brought thee forth out of the
land of Egypt, from the house of bondage; 8:15 Who led thee through
that great and terrible wilderness, wherein were fiery serpents, and
scorpions, and drought, where there was no water; who brought thee
forth water out of the rock of flint; 8:16 Who fed thee in the
wilderness with manna, which thy fathers knew not, that he might
humble thee, and that he might prove thee, to do thee good at thy
latter end; 8:17 And thou say in thine heart, My power and the might
of mine hand hath gotten me this wealth.

8:18 But thou shalt remember the LORD thy God: for it is he that
giveth thee power to get wealth, that he may establish his covenant
which he sware unto thy fathers, as it is this day.

8:19 And it shall be, if thou do at all forget the LORD thy God, and
walk after other gods, and serve them, and worship them, I testify
against you this day that ye shall surely perish.

8:20 As the nations which the LORD destroyeth before your face, so
shall ye perish; because ye would not be obedient unto the voice of
the LORD your God.

9:1 Hear, O Israel: Thou art to pass over Jordan this day, to go in to
possess nations greater and mightier than thyself, cities great and
fenced up to heaven, 9:2 A people great and tall, the children of the
Anakims, whom thou knowest, and of whom thou hast heard say, Who can
stand before the children of Anak!  9:3 Understand therefore this day,
that the LORD thy God is he which goeth over before thee; as a
consuming fire he shall destroy them, and he shall bring them down
before thy face: so shalt thou drive them out, and destroy them
quickly, as the LORD hath said unto thee.

9:4 Speak not thou in thine heart, after that the LORD thy God hath
cast them out from before thee, saying, For my righteousness the LORD
hath brought me in to possess this land: but for the wickedness of
these nations the LORD doth drive them out from before thee.

9:5 Not for thy righteousness, or for the uprightness of thine heart,
dost thou go to possess their land: but for the wickedness of these
nations the LORD thy God doth drive them out from before thee, and
that he may perform the word which the LORD sware unto thy fathers,
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

9:6 Understand therefore, that the LORD thy God giveth thee not this
good land to possess it for thy righteousness; for thou art a
stiffnecked people.

9:7 Remember, and forget not, how thou provokedst the LORD thy God to
wrath in the wilderness: from the day that thou didst depart out of
the land of Egypt, until ye came unto this place, ye have been
rebellious against the LORD.

9:8 Also in Horeb ye provoked the LORD to wrath, so that the LORD was
angry with you to have destroyed you.

9:9 When I was gone up into the mount to receive the tables of stone,
even the tables of the covenant which the LORD made with you, then I
abode in the mount forty days and forty nights, I neither did eat
bread nor drink water: 9:10 And the LORD delivered unto me two tables
of stone written with the finger of God; and on them was written
according to all the words, which the LORD spake with you in the mount
out of the midst of the fire in the day of the assembly.

9:11 And it came to pass at the end of forty days and forty nights,
that the LORD gave me the two tables of stone, even the tables of the
covenant.

9:12 And the LORD said unto me, Arise, get thee down quickly from
hence; for thy people which thou hast brought forth out of Egypt have
corrupted themselves; they are quickly turned aside out of the way
which I commanded them; they have made them a molten image.

9:13 Furthermore the LORD spake unto me, saying, I have seen this
people, and, behold, it is a stiffnecked people: 9:14 Let me alone,
that I may destroy them, and blot out their name from under heaven:
and I will make of thee a nation mightier and greater than they.

9:15 So I turned and came down from the mount, and the mount burned
with fire: and the two tables of the covenant were in my two hands.

9:16 And I looked, and, behold, ye had sinned against the LORD your
God, and had made you a molten calf: ye had turned aside quickly out
of the way which the LORD had commanded you.

9:17 And I took the two tables, and cast them out of my two hands, and
brake them before your eyes.

9:18 And I fell down before the LORD, as at the first, forty days and
forty nights: I did neither eat bread, nor drink water, because of all
your sins which ye sinned, in doing wickedly in the sight of the LORD,
to provoke him to anger.

9:19 For I was afraid of the anger and hot displeasure, wherewith the
LORD was wroth against you to destroy you. But the LORD hearkened unto
me at that time also.

9:20 And the LORD was very angry with Aaron to have destroyed him: and
I prayed for Aaron also the same time.

9:21 And I took your sin, the calf which ye had made, and burnt it
with fire, and stamped it, and ground it very small, even until it was
as small as dust: and I cast the dust thereof into the brook that
descended out of the mount.

9:22 And at Taberah, and at Massah, and at Kibrothhattaavah, ye
provoked the LORD to wrath.

9:23 Likewise when the LORD sent you from Kadeshbarnea, saying, Go up
and possess the land which I have given you; then ye rebelled against
the commandment of the LORD your God, and ye believed him not, nor
hearkened to his voice.

9:24 Ye have been rebellious against the LORD from the day that I knew
you.

9:25 Thus I fell down before the LORD forty days and forty nights, as
I fell down at the first; because the LORD had said he would destroy
you.

9:26 I prayed therefore unto the LORD, and said, O Lord GOD, destroy
not thy people and thine inheritance, which thou hast redeemed through
thy greatness, which thou hast brought forth out of Egypt with a
mighty hand.

9:27 Remember thy servants, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; look not unto
the stubbornness of this people, nor to their wickedness, nor to their
sin: 9:28 Lest the land whence thou broughtest us out say, Because the
LORD was not able to bring them into the land which he promised them,
and because he hated them, he hath brought them out to slay them in
the wilderness.

9:29 Yet they are thy people and thine inheritance, which thou
broughtest out by thy mighty power and by thy stretched out arm.

10:1 At that time the LORD said unto me, Hew thee two tables of stone
like unto the first, and come up unto me into the mount, and make thee
an ark of wood.

10:2 And I will write on the tables the words that were in the first
tables which thou brakest, and thou shalt put them in the ark.

10:3 And I made an ark of shittim wood, and hewed two tables of stone
like unto the first, and went up into the mount, having the two tables
in mine hand.

10:4 And he wrote on the tables, according to the first writing, the
ten commandments, which the LORD spake unto you in the mount out of
the midst of the fire in the day of the assembly: and the LORD gave
them unto me.

10:5 And I turned myself and came down from the mount, and put the
tables in the ark which I had made; and there they be, as the LORD
commanded me.

10:6 And the children of Israel took their journey from Beeroth of the
children of Jaakan to Mosera: there Aaron died, and there he was
buried; and Eleazar his son ministered in the priest's office in his
stead.

10:7 From thence they journeyed unto Gudgodah; and from Gudgodah to
Jotbath, a land of rivers of waters.

10:8 At that time the LORD separated the tribe of Levi, to bear the
ark of the covenant of the LORD, to stand before the LORD to minister
unto him, and to bless in his name, unto this day.

10:9 Wherefore Levi hath no part nor inheritance with his brethren;
the LORD is his inheritance, according as the LORD thy God promised
him.

10:10 And I stayed in the mount, according to the first time, forty
days and forty nights; and the LORD hearkened unto me at that time
also, and the LORD would not destroy thee.

10:11 And the LORD said unto me, Arise, take thy journey before the
people, that they may go in and possess the land, which I sware unto
their fathers to give unto them.

10:12 And now, Israel, what doth the LORD thy God require of thee, but
to fear the LORD thy God, to walk in all his ways, and to love him,
and to serve the LORD thy God with all thy heart and with all thy
soul, 10:13 To keep the commandments of the LORD, and his statutes,
which I command thee this day for thy good?  10:14 Behold, the heaven
and the heaven of heavens is the LORD's thy God, the earth also, with
all that therein is.

10:15 Only the LORD had a delight in thy fathers to love them, and he
chose their seed after them, even you above all people, as it is this
day.

10:16 Circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart, and be no more
stiffnecked.

10:17 For the LORD your God is God of gods, and Lord of lords, a great
God, a mighty, and a terrible, which regardeth not persons, nor taketh
reward: 10:18 He doth execute the judgment of the fatherless and
widow, and loveth the stranger, in giving him food and raiment.

10:19 Love ye therefore the stranger: for ye were strangers in the
land of Egypt.

10:20 Thou shalt fear the LORD thy God; him shalt thou serve, and to
him shalt thou cleave, and swear by his name.

10:21 He is thy praise, and he is thy God, that hath done for thee
these great and terrible things, which thine eyes have seen.

10:22 Thy fathers went down into Egypt with threescore and ten
persons; and now the LORD thy God hath made thee as the stars of
heaven for multitude.

11:1 Therefore thou shalt love the LORD thy God, and keep his charge,
and his statutes, and his judgments, and his commandments, alway.

11:2 And know ye this day: for I speak not with your children which
have not known, and which have not seen the chastisement of the LORD
your God, his greatness, his mighty hand, and his stretched out arm,
11:3 And his miracles, and his acts, which he did in the midst of
Egypt unto Pharaoh the king of Egypt, and unto all his land; 11:4 And
what he did unto the army of Egypt, unto their horses, and to their
chariots; how he made the water of the Red sea to overflow them as
they pursued after you, and how the LORD hath destroyed them unto this
day; 11:5 And what he did unto you in the wilderness, until ye came
into this place; 11:6 And what he did unto Dathan and Abiram, the sons
of Eliab, the son of Reuben: how the earth opened her mouth, and
swallowed them up, and their households, and their tents, and all the
substance that was in their possession, in the midst of all Israel:
11:7 But your eyes have seen all the great acts of the LORD which he
did.

11:8 Therefore shall ye keep all the commandments which I command you
this day, that ye may be strong, and go in and possess the land,
whither ye go to possess it; 11:9 And that ye may prolong your days in
the land, which the LORD sware unto your fathers to give unto them and
to their seed, a land that floweth with milk and honey.

11:10 For the land, whither thou goest in to possess it, is not as the
land of Egypt, from whence ye came out, where thou sowedst thy seed,
and wateredst it with thy foot, as a garden of herbs: 11:11 But the
land, whither ye go to possess it, is a land of hills and valleys, and
drinketh water of the rain of heaven: 11:12 A land which the LORD thy
God careth for: the eyes of the LORD thy God are always upon it, from
the beginning of the year even unto the end of the year.

11:13 And it shall come to pass, if ye shall hearken diligently unto
my commandments which I command you this day, to love the LORD your
God, and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul,
11:14 That I will give you the rain of your land in his due season,
the first rain and the latter rain, that thou mayest gather in thy
corn, and thy wine, and thine oil.

11:15 And I will send grass in thy fields for thy cattle, that thou
mayest eat and be full.

11:16 Take heed to yourselves, that your heart be not deceived, and ye
turn aside, and serve other gods, and worship them; 11:17 And then the
LORD's wrath be kindled against you, and he shut up the heaven, that
there be no rain, and that the land yield not her fruit; and lest ye
perish quickly from off the good land which the LORD giveth you.

11:18 Therefore shall ye lay up these my words in your heart and in
your soul, and bind them for a sign upon your hand, that they may be
as frontlets between your eyes.

11:19 And ye shall teach them your children, speaking of them when
thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, when
thou liest down, and when thou risest up.

11:20 And thou shalt write them upon the door posts of thine house,
and upon thy gates: 11:21 That your days may be multiplied, and the
days of your children, in the land which the LORD sware unto your
fathers to give them, as the days of heaven upon the earth.

11:22 For if ye shall diligently keep all these commandments which I
command you, to do them, to love the LORD your God, to walk in all his
ways, and to cleave unto him; 11:23 Then will the LORD drive out all
these nations from before you, and ye shall possess greater nations
and mightier than yourselves.

11:24 Every place whereon the soles of your feet shall tread shall be
yours: from the wilderness and Lebanon, from the river, the river
Euphrates, even unto the uttermost sea shall your coast be.

11:25 There shall no man be able to stand before you: for the LORD
your God shall lay the fear of you and the dread of you upon all the
land that ye shall tread upon, as he hath said unto you.

11:26 Behold, I set before you this day a blessing and a curse; 11:27
A blessing, if ye obey the commandments of the LORD your God, which I
command you this day: 11:28 And a curse, if ye will not obey the
commandments of the LORD your God, but turn aside out of the way which
I command you this day, to go after other gods, which ye have not
known.

11:29 And it shall come to pass, when the LORD thy God hath brought
thee in unto the land whither thou goest to possess it, that thou
shalt put the blessing upon mount Gerizim, and the curse upon mount
Ebal.

11:30 Are they not on the other side Jordan, by the way where the sun
goeth down, in the land of the Canaanites, which dwell in the
champaign over against Gilgal, beside the plains of Moreh?  11:31 For
ye shall pass over Jordan to go in to possess the land which the LORD
your God giveth you, and ye shall possess it, and dwell therein.

11:32 And ye shall observe to do all the statutes and judgments which
I set before you this day.

12:1 These are the statutes and judgments, which ye shall observe to
do in the land, which the LORD God of thy fathers giveth thee to
possess it, all the days that ye live upon the earth.

12:2 Ye shall utterly destroy all the places, wherein the nations
which ye shall possess served their gods, upon the high mountains, and
upon the hills, and under every green tree: 12:3 And ye shall
overthrow their altars, and break their pillars, and burn their groves
with fire; and ye shall hew down the graven images of their gods, and
destroy the names of them out of that place.

12:4 Ye shall not do so unto the LORD your God.

12:5 But unto the place which the LORD your God shall choose out of
all your tribes to put his name there, even unto his habitation shall
ye seek, and thither thou shalt come: 12:6 And thither ye shall bring
your burnt offerings, and your sacrifices, and your tithes, and heave
offerings of your hand, and your vows, and your freewill offerings,
and the firstlings of your herds and of your flocks: 12:7 And there ye
shall eat before the LORD your God, and ye shall rejoice in all that
ye put your hand unto, ye and your households, wherein the LORD thy
God hath blessed thee.

12:8 Ye shall not do after all the things that we do here this day,
every man whatsoever is right in his own eyes.

12:9 For ye are not as yet come to the rest and to the inheritance,
which the LORD your God giveth you.

12:10 But when ye go over Jordan, and dwell in the land which the LORD
your God giveth you to inherit, and when he giveth you rest from all
your enemies round about, so that ye dwell in safety; 12:11 Then there
shall be a place which the LORD your God shall choose to cause his
name to dwell there; thither shall ye bring all that I command you;
your burnt offerings, and your sacrifices, your tithes, and the heave
offering of your hand, and all your choice vows which ye vow unto the
LORD: 12:12 And ye shall rejoice before the LORD your God, ye, and
your sons, and your daughters, and your menservants, and your
maidservants, and the Levite that is within your gates; forasmuch as
he hath no part nor inheritance with you.

12:13 Take heed to thyself that thou offer not thy burnt offerings in
every place that thou seest: 12:14 But in the place which the LORD
shall choose in one of thy tribes, there thou shalt offer thy burnt
offerings, and there thou shalt do all that I command thee.

12:15 Notwithstanding thou mayest kill and eat flesh in all thy gates,
whatsoever thy soul lusteth after, according to the blessing of the
LORD thy God which he hath given thee: the unclean and the clean may
eat thereof, as of the roebuck, and as of the hart.

12:16 Only ye shall not eat the blood; ye shall pour it upon the earth
as water.

12:17 Thou mayest not eat within thy gates the tithe of thy corn, or
of thy wine, or of thy oil, or the firstlings of thy herds or of thy
flock, nor any of thy vows which thou vowest, nor thy freewill
offerings, or heave offering of thine hand: 12:18 But thou must eat
them before the LORD thy God in the place which the LORD thy God shall
choose, thou, and thy son, and thy daughter, and thy manservant, and
thy maidservant, and the Levite that is within thy gates: and thou
shalt rejoice before the LORD thy God in all that thou puttest thine
hands unto.

12:19 Take heed to thyself that thou forsake not the Levite as long as
thou livest upon the earth.

12:20 When the LORD thy God shall enlarge thy border, as he hath
promised thee, and thou shalt say, I will eat flesh, because thy soul
longeth to eat flesh; thou mayest eat flesh, whatsoever thy soul
lusteth after.

12:21 If the place which the LORD thy God hath chosen to put his name
there be too far from thee, then thou shalt kill of thy herd and of
thy flock, which the LORD hath given thee, as I have commanded thee,
and thou shalt eat in thy gates whatsoever thy soul lusteth after.

12:22 Even as the roebuck and the hart is eaten, so thou shalt eat
them: the unclean and the clean shall eat of them alike.

12:23 Only be sure that thou eat not the blood: for the blood is the
life; and thou mayest not eat the life with the flesh.

12:24 Thou shalt not eat it; thou shalt pour it upon the earth as
water.

12:25 Thou shalt not eat it; that it may go well with thee, and with
thy children after thee, when thou shalt do that which is right in the
sight of the LORD.

12:26 Only thy holy things which thou hast, and thy vows, thou shalt
take, and go unto the place which the LORD shall choose: 12:27 And
thou shalt offer thy burnt offerings, the flesh and the blood, upon
the altar of the LORD thy God: and the blood of thy sacrifices shall
be poured out upon the altar of the LORD thy God, and thou shalt eat
the flesh.

12:28 Observe and hear all these words which I command thee, that it
may go well with thee, and with thy children after thee for ever, when
thou doest that which is good and right in the sight of the LORD thy
God.

12:29 When the LORD thy God shall cut off the nations from before
thee, whither thou goest to possess them, and thou succeedest them,
and dwellest in their land; 12:30 Take heed to thyself that thou be
not snared by following them, after that they be destroyed from before
thee; and that thou enquire not after their gods, saying, How did
these nations serve their gods? even so will I do likewise.

12:31 Thou shalt not do so unto the LORD thy God: for every
abomination to the LORD, which he hateth, have they done unto their
gods; for even their sons and their daughters they have burnt in the
fire to their gods.

12:32 What thing soever I command you, observe to do it: thou shalt
not add thereto, nor diminish from it.

13:1 If there arise among you a prophet, or a dreamer of dreams, and
giveth thee a sign or a wonder, 13:2 And the sign or the wonder come
to pass, whereof he spake unto thee, saying, Let us go after other
gods, which thou hast not known, and let us serve them; 13:3 Thou
shalt not hearken unto the words of that prophet, or that dreamer of
dreams: for the LORD your God proveth you, to know whether ye love the
LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul.

13:4 Ye shall walk after the LORD your God, and fear him, and keep his
commandments, and obey his voice, and ye shall serve him, and cleave
unto him.

13:5 And that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams, shall be put to
death; because he hath spoken to turn you away from the LORD your God,
which brought you out of the land of Egypt, and redeemed you out of
the house of bondage, to thrust thee out of the way which the LORD thy
God commanded thee to walk in. So shalt thou put the evil away from
the midst of thee.

13:6 If thy brother, the son of thy mother, or thy son, or thy
daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend, which is as thine
own soul, entice thee secretly, saying, Let us go and serve other
gods, which thou hast not known, thou, nor thy fathers; 13:7 Namely,
of the gods of the people which are round about you, nigh unto thee,
or far off from thee, from the one end of the earth even unto the
other end of the earth; 13:8 Thou shalt not consent unto him, nor
hearken unto him; neither shall thine eye pity him, neither shalt thou
spare, neither shalt thou conceal him: 13:9 But thou shalt surely kill
him; thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death, and
afterwards the hand of all the people.

13:10 And thou shalt stone him with stones, that he die; because he
hath sought to thrust thee away from the LORD thy God, which brought
thee out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage.

13:11 And all Israel shall hear, and fear, and shall do no more any
such wickedness as this is among you.

13:12 If thou shalt hear say in one of thy cities, which the LORD thy
God hath given thee to dwell there, saying, 13:13 Certain men, the
children of Belial, are gone out from among you, and have withdrawn
the inhabitants of their city, saying, Let us go and serve other gods,
which ye have not known; 13:14 Then shalt thou enquire, and make
search, and ask diligently; and, behold, if it be truth, and the thing
certain, that such abomination is wrought among you; 13:15 Thou shalt
surely smite the inhabitants of that city with the edge of the sword,
destroying it utterly, and all that is therein, and the cattle
thereof, with the edge of the sword.

13:16 And thou shalt gather all the spoil of it into the midst of the
street thereof, and shalt burn with fire the city, and all the spoil
thereof every whit, for the LORD thy God: and it shall be an heap for
ever; it shall not be built again.

13:17 And there shall cleave nought of the cursed thing to thine hand:
that the LORD may turn from the fierceness of his anger, and shew thee
mercy, and have compassion upon thee, and multiply thee, as he hath
sworn unto thy fathers; 13:18 When thou shalt hearken to the voice of
the LORD thy God, to keep all his commandments which I command thee
this day, to do that which is right in the eyes of the LORD thy God.

14:1 Ye are the children of the LORD your God: ye shall not cut
yourselves, nor make any baldness between your eyes for the dead.

14:2 For thou art an holy people unto the LORD thy God, and the LORD
hath chosen thee to be a peculiar people unto himself, above all the
nations that are upon the earth.

14:3 Thou shalt not eat any abominable thing.

14:4 These are the beasts which ye shall eat: the ox, the sheep, and
the goat, 14:5 The hart, and the roebuck, and the fallow deer, and the
wild goat, and the pygarg, and the wild ox, and the chamois.

14:6 And every beast that parteth the hoof, and cleaveth the cleft
into two claws, and cheweth the cud among the beasts, that ye shall
eat.

14:7 Nevertheless these ye shall not eat of them that chew the cud, or
of them that divide the cloven hoof; as the camel, and the hare, and
the coney: for they chew the cud, but divide not the hoof; therefore
they are unclean unto you.

14:8 And the swine, because it divideth the hoof, yet cheweth not the
cud, it is unclean unto you: ye shall not eat of their flesh, nor
touch their dead carcase.

14:9 These ye shall eat of all that are in the waters: all that have
fins and scales shall ye eat: 14:10 And whatsoever hath not fins and
scales ye may not eat; it is unclean unto you.

14:11 Of all clean birds ye shall eat.

14:12 But these are they of which ye shall not eat: the eagle, and the
ossifrage, and the ospray, 14:13 And the glede, and the kite, and the
vulture after his kind, 14:14 And every raven after his kind, 14:15
And the owl, and the night hawk, and the cuckow, and the hawk after
his kind, 14:16 The little owl, and the great owl, and the swan, 14:17
And the pelican, and the gier eagle, and the cormorant, 14:18 And the
stork, and the heron after her kind, and the lapwing, and the bat.

14:19 And every creeping thing that flieth is unclean unto you: they
shall not be eaten.

14:20 But of all clean fowls ye may eat.

14:21 Ye shall not eat of anything that dieth of itself: thou shalt
give it unto the stranger that is in thy gates, that he may eat it; or
thou mayest sell it unto an alien: for thou art an holy people unto
the LORD thy God.

Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother's milk.

14:22 Thou shalt truly tithe all the increase of thy seed, that the
field bringeth forth year by year.

14:23 And thou shalt eat before the LORD thy God, in the place which
he shall choose to place his name there, the tithe of thy corn, of thy
wine, and of thine oil, and the firstlings of thy herds and of thy
flocks; that thou mayest learn to fear the LORD thy God always.

14:24 And if the way be too long for thee, so that thou art not able
to carry it; or if the place be too far from thee, which the LORD thy
God shall choose to set his name there, when the LORD thy God hath
blessed thee: 14:25 Then shalt thou turn it into money, and bind up
the money in thine hand, and shalt go unto the place which the LORD
thy God shall choose: 14:26 And thou shalt bestow that money for
whatsoever thy soul lusteth after, for oxen, or for sheep, or for
wine, or for strong drink, or for whatsoever thy soul desireth: and
thou shalt eat there before the LORD thy God, and thou shalt rejoice,
thou, and thine household, 14:27 And the Levite that is within thy
gates; thou shalt not forsake him; for he hath no part nor inheritance
with thee.

14:28 At the end of three years thou shalt bring forth all the tithe
of thine increase the same year, and shalt lay it up within thy gates:
14:29 And the Levite, (because he hath no part nor inheritance with
thee,) and the stranger, and the fatherless, and the widow, which are
within thy gates, shall come, and shall eat and be satisfied; that the
LORD thy God may bless thee in all the work of thine hand which thou
doest.

15:1 At the end of every seven years thou shalt make a release.

15:2 And this is the manner of the release: Every creditor that
lendeth ought unto his neighbour shall release it; he shall not exact
it of his neighbour, or of his brother; because it is called the
LORD's release.

15:3 Of a foreigner thou mayest exact it again: but that which is
thine with thy brother thine hand shall release; 15:4 Save when there
shall be no poor among you; for the LORD shall greatly bless thee in
the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee for an inheritance to
possess it: 15:5 Only if thou carefully hearken unto the voice of the
LORD thy God, to observe to do all these commandments which I command
thee this day.

15:6 For the LORD thy God blesseth thee, as he promised thee: and thou
shalt lend unto many nations, but thou shalt not borrow; and thou
shalt reign over many nations, but they shall not reign over thee.

15:7 If there be among you a poor man of one of thy brethren within
any of thy gates in thy land which the LORD thy God giveth thee, thou
shalt not harden thine heart, nor shut thine hand from thy poor
brother: 15:8 But thou shalt open thine hand wide unto him, and shalt
surely lend him sufficient for his need, in that which he wanteth.

15:9 Beware that there be not a thought in thy wicked heart, saying,
The seventh year, the year of release, is at hand; and thine eye be
evil against thy poor brother, and thou givest him nought; and he cry
unto the LORD against thee, and it be sin unto thee.

15:10 Thou shalt surely give him, and thine heart shall not be grieved
when thou givest unto him: because that for this thing the LORD thy
God shall bless thee in all thy works, and in all that thou puttest
thine hand unto.

15:11 For the poor shall never cease out of the land: therefore I
command thee, saying, Thou shalt open thine hand wide unto thy
brother, to thy poor, and to thy needy, in thy land.

15:12 And if thy brother, an Hebrew man, or an Hebrew woman, be sold
unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou
shalt let him go free from thee.

15:13 And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let
him go away empty: 15:14 Thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy
flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that
wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him.

15:15 And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of
Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee
this thing to day.

15:16 And it shall be, if he say unto thee, I will not go away from
thee; because he loveth thee and thine house, because he is well with
thee; 15:17 Then thou shalt take an aul, and thrust it through his ear
unto the door, and he shall be thy servant for ever. And also unto thy
maidservant thou shalt do likewise.

15:18 It shall not seem hard unto thee, when thou sendest him away
free from thee; for he hath been worth a double hired servant to thee,
in serving thee six years: and the LORD thy God shall bless thee in
all that thou doest.

15:19 All the firstling males that come of thy herd and of thy flock
thou shalt sanctify unto the LORD thy God: thou shalt do no work with
the firstling of thy bullock, nor shear the firstling of thy sheep.

15:20 Thou shalt eat it before the LORD thy God year by year in the
place which the LORD shall choose, thou and thy household.

15:21 And if there be any blemish therein, as if it be lame, or blind,
or have any ill blemish, thou shalt not sacrifice it unto the LORD thy
God.

15:22 Thou shalt eat it within thy gates: the unclean and the clean
person shall eat it alike, as the roebuck, and as the hart.

15:23 Only thou shalt not eat the blood thereof; thou shalt pour it
upon the ground as water.

16:1 Observe the month of Abib, and keep the passover unto the LORD
thy God: for in the month of Abib the LORD thy God brought thee forth
out of Egypt by night.

16:2 Thou shalt therefore sacrifice the passover unto the LORD thy
God, of the flock and the herd, in the place which the LORD shall
choose to place his name there.

16:3 Thou shalt eat no leavened bread with it; seven days shalt thou
eat unleavened bread therewith, even the bread of affliction; for thou
camest forth out of the land of Egypt in haste: that thou mayest
remember the day when thou camest forth out of the land of Egypt all
the days of thy life.

16:4 And there shall be no leavened bread seen with thee in all thy
coast seven days; neither shall there any thing of the flesh, which
thou sacrificedst the first day at even, remain all night until the
morning.

16:5 Thou mayest not sacrifice the passover within any of thy gates,
which the LORD thy God giveth thee: 16:6 But at the place which the
LORD thy God shall choose to place his name in, there thou shalt
sacrifice the passover at even, at the going down of the sun, at the
season that thou camest forth out of Egypt.

16:7 And thou shalt roast and eat it in the place which the LORD thy
God shall choose: and thou shalt turn in the morning, and go unto thy
tents.

16:8 Six days thou shalt eat unleavened bread: and on the seventh day
shall be a solemn assembly to the LORD thy God: thou shalt do no work
therein.

16:9 Seven weeks shalt thou number unto thee: begin to number the
seven weeks from such time as thou beginnest to put the sickle to the
corn.

16:10 And thou shalt keep the feast of weeks unto the LORD thy God
with a tribute of a freewill offering of thine hand, which thou shalt
give unto the LORD thy God, according as the LORD thy God hath blessed
thee: 16:11 And thou shalt rejoice before the LORD thy God, thou, and
thy son, and thy daughter, and thy manservant, and thy maidservant,
and the Levite that is within thy gates, and the stranger, and the
fatherless, and the widow, that are among you, in the place which the
LORD thy God hath chosen to place his name there.

16:12 And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in Egypt: and
thou shalt observe and do these statutes.

16:13 Thou shalt observe the feast of tabernacles seven days, after
that thou hast gathered in thy corn and thy wine: 16:14 And thou shalt
rejoice in thy feast, thou, and thy son, and thy daughter, and thy
manservant, and thy maidservant, and the Levite, the stranger, and the
fatherless, and the widow, that are within thy gates.

16:15 Seven days shalt thou keep a solemn feast unto the LORD thy God
in the place which the LORD shall choose: because the LORD thy God
shall bless thee in all thine increase, and in all the works of thine
hands, therefore thou shalt surely rejoice.

16:16 Three times in a year shall all thy males appear before the LORD
thy God in the place which he shall choose; in the feast of unleavened
bread, and in the feast of weeks, and in the feast of tabernacles: and
they shall not appear before the LORD empty: 16:17 Every man shall
give as he is able, according to the blessing of the LORD thy God
which he hath given thee.

16:18 Judges and officers shalt thou make thee in all thy gates, which
the LORD thy God giveth thee, throughout thy tribes: and they shall
judge the people with just judgment.

16:19 Thou shalt not wrest judgment; thou shalt not respect persons,
neither take a gift: for a gift doth blind the eyes of the wise, and
pervert the words of the righteous.

16:20 That which is altogether just shalt thou follow, that thou
mayest live, and inherit the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.

16:21 Thou shalt not plant thee a grove of any trees near unto the
altar of the LORD thy God, which thou shalt make thee.

16:22 Neither shalt thou set thee up any image; which the LORD thy God
hateth.

17:1 Thou shalt not sacrifice unto the LORD thy God any bullock, or
sheep, wherein is blemish, or any evilfavouredness: for that is an
abomination unto the LORD thy God.

17:2 If there be found among you, within any of thy gates which the
LORD thy God giveth thee, man or woman, that hath wrought wickedness
in the sight of the LORD thy God, in transgressing his covenant, 17:3
And hath gone and served other gods, and worshipped them, either the
sun, or moon, or any of the host of heaven, which I have not
commanded; 17:4 And it be told thee, and thou hast heard of it, and
enquired diligently, and, behold, it be true, and the thing certain,
that such abomination is wrought in Israel: 17:5 Then shalt thou bring
forth that man or that woman, which have committed that wicked thing,
unto thy gates, even that man or that woman, and shalt stone them with
stones, till they die.

17:6 At the mouth of two witnesses, or three witnesses, shall he that
is worthy of death be put to death; but at the mouth of one witness he
shall not be put to death.

17:7 The hands of the witnesses shall be first upon him to put him to
death, and afterward the hands of all the people. So thou shalt put
the evil away from among you.

17:8 If there arise a matter too hard for thee in judgment, between
blood and blood, between plea and plea, and between stroke and stroke,
being matters of controversy within thy gates: then shalt thou arise,
and get thee up into the place which the LORD thy God shall choose;
17:9 And thou shalt come unto the priests the Levites, and unto the
judge that shall be in those days, and enquire; and they shall shew
thee the sentence of judgment: 17:10 And thou shalt do according to
the sentence, which they of that place which the LORD shall choose
shall shew thee; and thou shalt observe to do according to all that
they inform thee: 17:11 According to the sentence of the law which
they shall teach thee, and according to the judgment which they shall
tell thee, thou shalt do: thou shalt not decline from the sentence
which they shall shew thee, to the right hand, nor to the left.

17:12 And the man that will do presumptuously, and will not hearken
unto the priest that standeth to minister there before the LORD thy
God, or unto the judge, even that man shall die: and thou shalt put
away the evil from Israel.

17:13 And all the people shall hear, and fear, and do no more
presumptuously.

17:14 When thou art come unto the land which the LORD thy God giveth
thee, and shalt possess it, and shalt dwell therein, and shalt say, I
will set a king over me, like as all the nations that are about me;
17:15 Thou shalt in any wise set him king over thee, whom the LORD thy
God shall choose: one from among thy brethren shalt thou set king over
thee: thou mayest not set a stranger over thee, which is not thy
brother.

17:16 But he shall not multiply horses to himself, nor cause the
people to return to Egypt, to the end that he should multiply horses:
forasmuch as the LORD hath said unto you, Ye shall henceforth return
no more that way.

17:17 Neither shall he multiply wives to himself, that his heart turn
not away: neither shall he greatly multiply to himself silver and
gold.

17:18 And it shall be, when he sitteth upon the throne of his kingdom,
that he shall write him a copy of this law in a book out of that which
is before the priests the Levites: 17:19 And it shall be with him, and
he shall read therein all the days of his life: that he may learn to
fear the LORD his God, to keep all the words of this law and these
statutes, to do them: 17:20 That his heart be not lifted up above his
brethren, and that he turn not aside from the commandment, to the
right hand, or to the left: to the end that he may prolong his days in
his kingdom, he, and his children, in the midst of Israel.

18:1 The priests the Levites, and all the tribe of Levi, shall have no
part nor inheritance with Israel: they shall eat the offerings of the
LORD made by fire, and his inheritance.

18:2 Therefore shall they have no inheritance among their brethren:
the LORD is their inheritance, as he hath said unto them.

18:3 And this shall be the priest's due from the people, from them
that offer a sacrifice, whether it be ox or sheep; and they shall give
unto the priest the shoulder, and the two cheeks, and the maw.

18:4 The firstfruit also of thy corn, of thy wine, and of thine oil,
and the first of the fleece of thy sheep, shalt thou give him.

18:5 For the LORD thy God hath chosen him out of all thy tribes, to
stand to minister in the name of the LORD, him and his sons for ever.

18:6 And if a Levite come from any of thy gates out of all Israel,
where he sojourned, and come with all the desire of his mind unto the
place which the LORD shall choose; 18:7 Then he shall minister in the
name of the LORD his God, as all his brethren the Levites do, which
stand there before the LORD.

18:8 They shall have like portions to eat, beside that which cometh of
the sale of his patrimony.

18:9 When thou art come into the land which the LORD thy God giveth
thee, thou shalt not learn to do after the abominations of those
nations.

18:10 There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son
or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or
an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch.

18:11 Or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard,
or a necromancer.

18:12 For all that do these things are an abomination unto the LORD:
and because of these abominations the LORD thy God doth drive them out
from before thee.

18:13 Thou shalt be perfect with the LORD thy God.

18:14 For these nations, which thou shalt possess, hearkened unto
observers of times, and unto diviners: but as for thee, the LORD thy
God hath not suffered thee so to do.

18:15 The LORD thy God will raise up unto thee a Prophet from the
midst of thee, of thy brethren, like unto me; unto him ye shall
hearken; 18:16 According to all that thou desiredst of the LORD thy
God in Horeb in the day of the assembly, saying, Let me not hear again
the voice of the LORD my God, neither let me see this great fire any
more, that I die not.

18:17 And the LORD said unto me, They have well spoken that which they
have spoken.

18:18 I will raise them up a Prophet from among their brethren, like
unto thee, and will put my words in his mouth; and he shall speak unto
them all that I shall command him.

18:19 And it shall come to pass, that whosoever will not hearken unto
my words which he shall speak in my name, I will require it of him.

18:20 But the prophet, which shall presume to speak a word in my name,
which I have not commanded him to speak, or that shall speak in the
name of other gods, even that prophet shall die.

18:21 And if thou say in thine heart, How shall we know the word which
the LORD hath not spoken?  18:22 When a prophet speaketh in the name
of the LORD, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the
thing which the LORD hath not spoken, but the prophet hath spoken it
presumptuously: thou shalt not be afraid of him.

19:1 When the LORD thy God hath cut off the nations, whose land the
LORD thy God giveth thee, and thou succeedest them, and dwellest in
their cities, and in their houses; 19:2 Thou shalt separate three
cities for thee in the midst of thy land, which the LORD thy God
giveth thee to possess it.

19:3 Thou shalt prepare thee a way, and divide the coasts of thy land,
which the LORD thy God giveth thee to inherit, into three parts, that
every slayer may flee thither.

19:4 And this is the case of the slayer, which shall flee thither,
that he may live: Whoso killeth his neighbour ignorantly, whom he
hated not in time past; 19:5 As when a man goeth into the wood with
his neighbour to hew wood, and his hand fetcheth a stroke with the axe
to cut down the tree, and the head slippeth from the helve, and
lighteth upon his neighbour, that he die; he shall flee unto one of
those cities, and live: 19:6 Lest the avenger of the blood pursue the
slayer, while his heart is hot, and overtake him, because the way is
long, and slay him; whereas he was not worthy of death, inasmuch as he
hated him not in time past.

19:7 Wherefore I command thee, saying, Thou shalt separate three
cities for thee.

19:8 And if the LORD thy God enlarge thy coast, as he hath sworn unto
thy fathers, and give thee all the land which he promised to give unto
thy fathers; 19:9 If thou shalt keep all these commandments to do
them, which I command thee this day, to love the LORD thy God, and to
walk ever in his ways; then shalt thou add three cities more for thee,
beside these three: 19:10 That innocent blood be not shed in thy land,
which the LORD thy God giveth thee for an inheritance, and so blood be
upon thee.

19:11 But if any man hate his neighbour, and lie in wait for him, and
rise up against him, and smite him mortally that he die, and fleeth
into one of these cities: 19:12 Then the elders of his city shall send
and fetch him thence, and deliver him into the hand of the avenger of
blood, that he may die.

19:13 Thine eye shall not pity him, but thou shalt put away the guilt
of innocent blood from Israel, that it may go well with thee.

19:14 Thou shalt not remove thy neighbour's landmark, which they of
old time have set in thine inheritance, which thou shalt inherit in
the land that the LORD thy God giveth thee to possess it.

19:15 One witness shall not rise up against a man for any iniquity, or
for any sin, in any sin that he sinneth: at the mouth of two
witnesses, or at the mouth of three witnesses, shall the matter be
established.

19:16 If a false witness rise up against any man to testify against
him that which is wrong; 19:17 Then both the men, between whom the
controversy is, shall stand before the LORD, before the priests and
the judges, which shall be in those days; 19:18 And the judges shall
make diligent inquisition: and, behold, if the witness be a false
witness, and hath testified falsely against his brother; 19:19 Then
shall ye do unto him, as he had thought to have done unto his brother:
so shalt thou put the evil away from among you.

19:20 And those which remain shall hear, and fear, and shall
henceforth commit no more any such evil among you.

19:21 And thine eye shall not pity; but life shall go for life, eye
for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.

20:1 When thou goest out to battle against thine enemies, and seest
horses, and chariots, and a people more than thou, be not afraid of
them: for the LORD thy God is with thee, which brought thee up out of
the land of Egypt.

20:2 And it shall be, when ye are come nigh unto the battle, that the
priest shall approach and speak unto the people, 20:3 And shall say
unto them, Hear, O Israel, ye approach this day unto battle against
your enemies: let not your hearts faint, fear not, and do not tremble,
neither be ye terrified because of them; 20:4 For the LORD your God is
he that goeth with you, to fight for you against your enemies, to save
you.

20:5 And the officers shall speak unto the people, saying, What man is
there that hath built a new house, and hath not dedicated it? let him
go and return to his house, lest he die in the battle, and another man
dedicate it.

20:6 And what man is he that hath planted a vineyard, and hath not yet
eaten of it? let him also go and return unto his house, lest he die in
the battle, and another man eat of it.

20:7 And what man is there that hath betrothed a wife, and hath not
taken her? let him go and return unto his house, lest he die in the
battle, and another man take her.

20:8 And the officers shall speak further unto the people, and they
shall say, What man is there that is fearful and fainthearted? let him
go and return unto his house, lest his brethren's heart faint as well
as his heart.

20:9 And it shall be, when the officers have made an end of speaking
unto the people that they shall make captains of the armies to lead
the people.

20:10 When thou comest nigh unto a city to fight against it, then
proclaim peace unto it.

20:11 And it shall be, if it make thee answer of peace, and open unto
thee, then it shall be, that all the people that is found therein
shall be tributaries unto thee, and they shall serve thee.

20:12 And if it will make no peace with thee, but will make war
against thee, then thou shalt besiege it: 20:13 And when the LORD thy
God hath delivered it into thine hands, thou shalt smite every male
thereof with the edge of the sword: 20:14 But the women, and the
little ones, and the cattle, and all that is in the city, even all the
spoil thereof, shalt thou take unto thyself; and thou shalt eat the
spoil of thine enemies, which the LORD thy God hath given thee.

20:15 Thus shalt thou do unto all the cities which are very far off
from thee, which are not of the cities of these nations.

20:16 But of the cities of these people, which the LORD thy God doth
give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that
breatheth: 20:17 But thou shalt utterly destroy them; namely, the
Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the
Hivites, and the Jebusites; as the LORD thy God hath commanded thee:
20:18 That they teach you not to do after all their abominations,
which they have done unto their gods; so should ye sin against the
LORD your God.

20:19 When thou shalt besiege a city a long time, in making war
against it to take it, thou shalt not destroy the trees thereof by
forcing an axe against them: for thou mayest eat of them, and thou
shalt not cut them down (for the tree of the field is man's life) to
employ them in the siege: 20:20 Only the trees which thou knowest that
they be not trees for meat, thou shalt destroy and cut them down; and
thou shalt build bulwarks against the city that maketh war with thee,
until it be subdued.

21:1 If one be found slain in the land which the LORD thy God giveth
thee to possess it, lying in the field, and it be not known who hath
slain him: 21:2 Then thy elders and thy judges shall come forth, and
they shall measure unto the cities which are round about him that is
slain: 21:3 And it shall be, that the city which is next unto the
slain man, even the elders of that city shall take an heifer, which
hath not been wrought with, and which hath not drawn in the yoke; 21:4
And the elders of that city shall bring down the heifer unto a rough
valley, which is neither eared nor sown, and shall strike off the
heifer's neck there in the valley: 21:5 And the priests the sons of
Levi shall come near; for them the LORD thy God hath chosen to
minister unto him, and to bless in the name of the LORD; and by their
word shall every controversy and every stroke be tried: 21:6 And all
the elders of that city, that are next unto the slain man, shall wash
their hands over the heifer that is beheaded in the valley: 21:7 And
they shall answer and say, Our hands have not shed this blood, neither
have our eyes seen it.

21:8 Be merciful, O LORD, unto thy people Israel, whom thou hast
redeemed, and lay not innocent blood unto thy people of Israel's
charge. And the blood shall be forgiven them.

21:9 So shalt thou put away the guilt of innocent blood from among
you, when thou shalt do that which is right in the sight of the LORD.

21:10 When thou goest forth to war against thine enemies, and the LORD
thy God hath delivered them into thine hands, and thou hast taken them
captive, 21:11 And seest among the captives a beautiful woman, and
hast a desire unto her, that thou wouldest have her to thy wife; 21:12
Then thou shalt bring her home to thine house, and she shall shave her
head, and pare her nails; 21:13 And she shall put the raiment of her
captivity from off her, and shall remain in thine house, and bewail
her father and her mother a full month: and after that thou shalt go
in unto her, and be her husband, and she shall be thy wife.

21:14 And it shall be, if thou have no delight in her, then thou shalt
let her go whither she will; but thou shalt not sell her at all for
money, thou shalt not make merchandise of her, because thou hast
humbled her.

21:15 If a man have two wives, one beloved, and another hated, and
they have born him children, both the beloved and the hated; and if
the firstborn son be hers that was hated: 21:16 Then it shall be, when
he maketh his sons to inherit that which he hath, that he may not make
the son of the beloved firstborn before the son of the hated, which is
indeed the firstborn: 21:17 But he shall acknowledge the son of the
hated for the firstborn, by giving him a double portion of all that he
hath: for he is the beginning of his strength; the right of the
firstborn is his.

21:18 If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey
the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother, and that, when
they have chastened him, will not hearken unto them: 21:19 Then shall
his father and his mother lay hold on him, and bring him out unto the
elders of his city, and unto the gate of his place; 21:20 And they
shall say unto the elders of his city, This our son is stubborn and
rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton, and a
drunkard.

21:21 And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he
die: so shalt thou put evil away from among you; and all Israel shall
hear, and fear.

21:22 And if a man have committed a sin worthy of death, and he be to
be put to death, and thou hang him on a tree: 21:23 His body shall not
remain all night upon the tree, but thou shalt in any wise bury him
that day; (for he that is hanged is accursed of God;) that thy land be
not defiled, which the LORD thy God giveth thee for an inheritance.

22:1 Thou shalt not see thy brother's ox or his sheep go astray, and
hide thyself from them: thou shalt in any case bring them again unto
thy brother.

22:2 And if thy brother be not nigh unto thee, or if thou know him
not, then thou shalt bring it unto thine own house, and it shall be
with thee until thy brother seek after it, and thou shalt restore it
to him again.

22:3 In like manner shalt thou do with his ass; and so shalt thou do
with his raiment; and with all lost thing of thy brother's, which he
hath lost, and thou hast found, shalt thou do likewise: thou mayest
not hide thyself.

22:4 Thou shalt not see thy brother's ass or his ox fall down by the
way, and hide thyself from them: thou shalt surely help him to lift
them up again.

22:5 The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man,
neither shall a man put on a woman's garment: for all that do so are
abomination unto the LORD thy God.

22:6 If a bird's nest chance to be before thee in the way in any tree,
or on the ground, whether they be young ones, or eggs, and the dam
sitting upon the young, or upon the eggs, thou shalt not take the dam
with the young: 22:7 But thou shalt in any wise let the dam go, and
take the young to thee; that it may be well with thee, and that thou
mayest prolong thy days.

22:8 When thou buildest a new house, then thou shalt make a battlement
for thy roof, that thou bring not blood upon thine house, if any man
fall from thence.

22:9 Thou shalt not sow thy vineyard with divers seeds: lest the fruit
of thy seed which thou hast sown, and the fruit of thy vineyard, be
defiled.

22:10 Thou shalt not plow with an ox and an ass together.

22:11 Thou shalt not wear a garment of divers sorts, as of woollen and
linen together.

22:12 Thou shalt make thee fringes upon the four quarters of thy
vesture, wherewith thou coverest thyself.

22:13 If any man take a wife, and go in unto her, and hate her, 22:14
And give occasions of speech against her, and bring up an evil name
upon her, and say, I took this woman, and when I came to her, I found
her not a maid: 22:15 Then shall the father of the damsel, and her
mother, take and bring forth the tokens of the damsel's virginity unto
the elders of the city in the gate: 22:16 And the damsel's father
shall say unto the elders, I gave my daughter unto this man to wife,
and he hateth her; 22:17 And, lo, he hath given occasions of speech
against her, saying, I found not thy daughter a maid; and yet these
are the tokens of my daughter's virginity. And they shall spread the
cloth before the elders of the city.

22:18 And the elders of that city shall take that man and chastise
him; 22:19 And they shall amerce him in an hundred shekels of silver,
and give them unto the father of the damsel, because he hath brought
up an evil name upon a virgin of Israel: and she shall be his wife; he
may not put her away all his days.

22:20 But if this thing be true, and the tokens of virginity be not
found for the damsel: 22:21 Then they shall bring out the damsel to
the door of her father's house, and the men of her city shall stone
her with stones that she die: because she hath wrought folly in
Israel, to play the whore in her father's house: so shalt thou put
evil away from among you.

22:22 If a man be found lying with a woman married to an husband, then
they shall both of them die, both the man that lay with the woman, and
the woman: so shalt thou put away evil from Israel.

22:23 If a damsel that is a virgin be betrothed unto an husband, and a
man find her in the city, and lie with her; 22:24 Then ye shall bring
them both out unto the gate of that city, and ye shall stone them with
stones that they die; the damsel, because she cried not, being in the
city; and the man, because he hath humbled his neighbour's wife: so
thou shalt put away evil from among you.

22:25 But if a man find a betrothed damsel in the field, and the man
force her, and lie with her: then the man only that lay with her shall
die.

22:26 But unto the damsel thou shalt do nothing; there is in the
damsel no sin worthy of death: for as when a man riseth against his
neighbour, and slayeth him, even so is this matter: 22:27 For he found
her in the field, and the betrothed damsel cried, and there was none
to save her.

22:28 If a man find a damsel that is a virgin, which is not betrothed,
and lay hold on her, and lie with her, and they be found; 22:29 Then
the man that lay with her shall give unto the damsel's father fifty
shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife; because he hath humbled
her, he may not put her away all his days.

22:30 A man shall not take his father's wife, nor discover his
father's skirt.

23:1 He that is wounded in the stones, or hath his privy member cut
off, shall not enter into the congregation of the LORD.

23:2 A bastard shall not enter into the congregation of the LORD; even
to his tenth generation shall he not enter into the congregation of
the LORD.

23:3 An Ammonite or Moabite shall not enter into the congregation of
the LORD; even to their tenth generation shall they not enter into the
congregation of the LORD for ever: 23:4 Because they met you not with
bread and with water in the way, when ye came forth out of Egypt; and
because they hired against thee Balaam the son of Beor of Pethor of
Mesopotamia, to curse thee.

23:5 Nevertheless the LORD thy God would not hearken unto Balaam; but
the LORD thy God turned the curse into a blessing unto thee, because
the LORD thy God loved thee.

23:6 Thou shalt not seek their peace nor their prosperity all thy days
for ever.

23:7 Thou shalt not abhor an Edomite; for he is thy brother: thou
shalt not abhor an Egyptian; because thou wast a stranger in his land.

23:8 The children that are begotten of them shall enter into the
congregation of the LORD in their third generation.

23:9 When the host goeth forth against thine enemies, then keep thee
from every wicked thing.

23:10 If there be among you any man, that is not clean by reason of
uncleanness that chanceth him by night, then shall he go abroad out of
the camp, he shall not come within the camp: 23:11 But it shall be,
when evening cometh on, he shall wash himself with water: and when the
sun is down, he shall come into the camp again.

23:12 Thou shalt have a place also without the camp, whither thou
shalt go forth abroad: 23:13 And thou shalt have a paddle upon thy
weapon; and it shall be, when thou wilt ease thyself abroad, thou
shalt dig therewith, and shalt turn back and cover that which cometh
from thee: 23:14 For the LORD thy God walketh in the midst of thy
camp, to deliver thee, and to give up thine enemies before thee;
therefore shall thy camp be holy: that he see no unclean thing in
thee, and turn away from thee.

23:15 Thou shalt not deliver unto his master the servant which is
escaped from his master unto thee: 23:16 He shall dwell with thee,
even among you, in that place which he shall choose in one of thy
gates, where it liketh him best: thou shalt not oppress him.

23:17 There shall be no whore of the daughters of Israel, nor a
sodomite of the sons of Israel.

23:18 Thou shalt not bring the hire of a whore, or the price of a dog,
into the house of the LORD thy God for any vow: for even both these
are abomination unto the LORD thy God.

23:19 Thou shalt not lend upon usury to thy brother; usury of money,
usury of victuals, usury of any thing that is lent upon usury: 23:20
Unto a stranger thou mayest lend upon usury; but unto thy brother thou
shalt not lend upon usury: that the LORD thy God may bless thee in all
that thou settest thine hand to in the land whither thou goest to
possess it.

23:21 When thou shalt vow a vow unto the LORD thy God, thou shalt not
slack to pay it: for the LORD thy God will surely require it of thee;
and it would be sin in thee.

23:22 But if thou shalt forbear to vow, it shall be no sin in thee.

23:23 That which is gone out of thy lips thou shalt keep and perform;
even a freewill offering, according as thou hast vowed unto the LORD
thy God, which thou hast promised with thy mouth.

23:24 When thou comest into thy neighbour's vineyard, then thou mayest
eat grapes thy fill at thine own pleasure; but thou shalt not put any
in thy vessel.

23:25 When thou comest into the standing corn of thy neighbour, then
thou mayest pluck the ears with thine hand; but thou shalt not move a
sickle unto thy neighbour's standing corn.

24:1 When a man hath taken a wife, and married her, and it come to
pass that she find no favour in his eyes, because he hath found some
uncleanness in her: then let him write her a bill of divorcement, and
give it in her hand, and send her out of his house.

24:2 And when she is departed out of his house, she may go and be
another man's wife.

24:3 And if the latter husband hate her, and write her a bill of
divorcement, and giveth it in her hand, and sendeth her out of his
house; or if the latter husband die, which took her to be his wife;
24:4 Her former husband, which sent her away, may not take her again
to be his wife, after that she is defiled; for that is abomination
before the LORD: and thou shalt not cause the land to sin, which the
LORD thy God giveth thee for an inheritance.

24:5 When a man hath taken a new wife, he shall not go out to war,
neither shall he be charged with any business: but he shall be free at
home one year, and shall cheer up his wife which he hath taken.

24:6 No man shall take the nether or the upper millstone to pledge:
for he taketh a man's life to pledge.

24:7 If a man be found stealing any of his brethren of the children of
Israel, and maketh merchandise of him, or selleth him; then that thief
shall die; and thou shalt put evil away from among you.

24:8 Take heed in the plague of leprosy, that thou observe diligently,
and do according to all that the priests the Levites shall teach you:
as I commanded them, so ye shall observe to do.

24:9 Remember what the LORD thy God did unto Miriam by the way, after
that ye were come forth out of Egypt.

24:10 When thou dost lend thy brother any thing, thou shalt not go
into his house to fetch his pledge.

24:11 Thou shalt stand abroad, and the man to whom thou dost lend
shall bring out the pledge abroad unto thee.

24:12 And if the man be poor, thou shalt not sleep with his pledge:
24:13 In any case thou shalt deliver him the pledge again when the sun
goeth down, that he may sleep in his own raiment, and bless thee: and
it shall be righteousness unto thee before the LORD thy God.

24:14 Thou shalt not oppress an hired servant that is poor and needy,
whether he be of thy brethren, or of thy strangers that are in thy
land within thy gates: 24:15 At his day thou shalt give him his hire,
neither shall the sun go down upon it; for he is poor, and setteth his
heart upon it: lest he cry against thee unto the LORD, and it be sin
unto thee.

24:16 The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither
shall the children be put to death for the fathers: every man shall be
put to death for his own sin.

24:17 Thou shalt not pervert the judgment of the stranger, nor of the
fatherless; nor take a widow's raiment to pledge: 24:18 But thou shalt
remember that thou wast a bondman in Egypt, and the LORD thy God
redeemed thee thence: therefore I command thee to do this thing.

24:19 When thou cuttest down thine harvest in thy field, and hast
forgot a sheaf in the field, thou shalt not go again to fetch it: it
shall be for the stranger, for the fatherless, and for the widow: that
the LORD thy God may bless thee in all the work of thine hands.

24:20 When thou beatest thine olive tree, thou shalt not go over the
boughs again: it shall be for the stranger, for the fatherless, and
for the widow.

24:21 When thou gatherest the grapes of thy vineyard, thou shalt not
glean it afterward: it shall be for the stranger, for the fatherless,
and for the widow.

24:22 And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of
Egypt: therefore I command thee to do this thing.

25:1 If there be a controversy between men, and they come unto
judgment, that the judges may judge them; then they shall justify the
righteous, and condemn the wicked.

25:2 And it shall be, if the wicked man be worthy to be beaten, that
the judge shall cause him to lie down, and to be beaten before his
face, according to his fault, by a certain number.

25:3 Forty stripes he may give him, and not exceed: lest, if he should
exceed, and beat him above these with many stripes, then thy brother
should seem vile unto thee.

25:4 Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treadeth out the corn.

25:5 If brethren dwell together, and one of them die, and have no
child, the wife of the dead shall not marry without unto a stranger:
her husband's brother shall go in unto her, and take her to him to
wife, and perform the duty of an husband's brother unto her.

25:6 And it shall be, that the firstborn which she beareth shall
succeed in the name of his brother which is dead, that his name be not
put out of Israel.

25:7 And if the man like not to take his brother's wife, then let his
brother's wife go up to the gate unto the elders, and say, My
husband's brother refuseth to raise up unto his brother a name in
Israel, he will not perform the duty of my husband's brother.

25:8 Then the elders of his city shall call him, and speak unto him:
and if he stand to it, and say, I like not to take her; 25:9 Then
shall his brother's wife come unto him in the presence of the elders,
and loose his shoe from off his foot, and spit in his face, and shall
answer and say, So shall it be done unto that man that will not build
up his brother's house.

25:10 And his name shall be called in Israel, The house of him that
hath his shoe loosed.

25:11 When men strive together one with another, and the wife of the
one draweth near for to deliver her husband out of the hand of him
that smiteth him, and putteth forth her hand, and taketh him by the
secrets: 25:12 Then thou shalt cut off her hand, thine eye shall not
pity her.

25:13 Thou shalt not have in thy bag divers weights, a great and a
small.

25:14 Thou shalt not have in thine house divers measures, a great and
a small.

25:15 But thou shalt have a perfect and just weight, a perfect and
just measure shalt thou have: that thy days may be lengthened in the
land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.

25:16 For all that do such things, and all that do unrighteously, are
an abomination unto the LORD thy God.

25:17 Remember what Amalek did unto thee by the way, when ye were come
forth out of Egypt; 25:18 How he met thee by the way, and smote the
hindmost of thee, even all that were feeble behind thee, when thou
wast faint and weary; and he feared not God.

25:19 Therefore it shall be, when the LORD thy God hath given thee
rest from all thine enemies round about, in the land which the LORD
thy God giveth thee for an inheritance to possess it, that thou shalt
blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven; thou shalt not
forget it.

26:1 And it shall be, when thou art come in unto the land which the
LORD thy God giveth thee for an inheritance, and possessest it, and
dwellest therein; 26:2 That thou shalt take of the first of all the
fruit of the earth, which thou shalt bring of thy land that the LORD
thy God giveth thee, and shalt put it in a basket, and shalt go unto
the place which the LORD thy God shall choose to place his name there.

26:3 And thou shalt go unto the priest that shall be in those days,
and say unto him, I profess this day unto the LORD thy God, that I am
come unto the country which the LORD sware unto our fathers for to
give us.

26:4 And the priest shall take the basket out of thine hand, and set
it down before the altar of the LORD thy God.

26:5 And thou shalt speak and say before the LORD thy God, A Syrian
ready to perish was my father, and he went down into Egypt, and
sojourned there with a few, and became there a nation, great, mighty,
and populous: 26:6 And the Egyptians evil entreated us, and afflicted
us, and laid upon us hard bondage: 26:7 And when we cried unto the
LORD God of our fathers, the LORD heard our voice, and looked on our
affliction, and our labour, and our oppression: 26:8 And the LORD
brought us forth out of Egypt with a mighty hand, and with an
outstretched arm, and with great terribleness, and with signs, and
with wonders: 26:9 And he hath brought us into this place, and hath
given us this land, even a land that floweth with milk and honey.

26:10 And now, behold, I have brought the firstfruits of the land,
which thou, O LORD, hast given me. And thou shalt set it before the
LORD thy God, and worship before the LORD thy God: 26:11 And thou
shalt rejoice in every good thing which the LORD thy God hath given
unto thee, and unto thine house, thou, and the Levite, and the
stranger that is among you.

26:12 When thou hast made an end of tithing all the tithes of thine
increase the third year, which is the year of tithing, and hast given
it unto the Levite, the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow, that
they may eat within thy gates, and be filled; 26:13 Then thou shalt
say before the LORD thy God, I have brought away the hallowed things
out of mine house, and also have given them unto the Levite, and unto
the stranger, to the fatherless, and to the widow, according to all
thy commandments which thou hast commanded me: I have not transgressed
thy commandments, neither have I forgotten them.

26:14 I have not eaten thereof in my mourning, neither have I taken
away ought thereof for any unclean use, nor given ought thereof for
the dead: but I have hearkened to the voice of the LORD my God, and
have done according to all that thou hast commanded me.

26:15 Look down from thy holy habitation, from heaven, and bless thy
people Israel, and the land which thou hast given us, as thou swarest
unto our fathers, a land that floweth with milk and honey.

26:16 This day the LORD thy God hath commanded thee to do these
statutes and judgments: thou shalt therefore keep and do them with all
thine heart, and with all thy soul.

26:17 Thou hast avouched the LORD this day to be thy God, and to walk
in his ways, and to keep his statutes, and his commandments, and his
judgments, and to hearken unto his voice: 26:18 And the LORD hath
avouched thee this day to be his peculiar people, as he hath promised
thee, and that thou shouldest keep all his commandments; 26:19 And to
make thee high above all nations which he hath made, in praise, and in
name, and in honour; and that thou mayest be an holy people unto the
LORD thy God, as he hath spoken.

27:1 And Moses with the elders of Israel commanded the people, saying,
Keep all the commandments which I command you this day.

27:2 And it shall be on the day when ye shall pass over Jordan unto
the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee, that thou shalt set thee
up great stones, and plaister them with plaister: 27:3 And thou shalt
write upon them all the words of this law, when thou art passed over,
that thou mayest go in unto the land which the LORD thy God giveth
thee, a land that floweth with milk and honey; as the LORD God of thy
fathers hath promised thee.

27:4 Therefore it shall be when ye be gone over Jordan, that ye shall
set up these stones, which I command you this day, in mount Ebal, and
thou shalt plaister them with plaister.

27:5 And there shalt thou build an altar unto the LORD thy God, an
altar of stones: thou shalt not lift up any iron tool upon them.

27:6 Thou shalt build the altar of the LORD thy God of whole stones:
and thou shalt offer burnt offerings thereon unto the LORD thy God:
27:7 And thou shalt offer peace offerings, and shalt eat there, and
rejoice before the LORD thy God.

27:8 And thou shalt write upon the stones all the words of this law
very plainly.

27:9 And Moses and the priests the Levites spake unto all Israel,
saying, Take heed, and hearken, O Israel; this day thou art become the
people of the LORD thy God.

27:10 Thou shalt therefore obey the voice of the LORD thy God, and do
his commandments and his statutes, which I command thee this day.

27:11 And Moses charged the people the same day, saying, 27:12 These
shall stand upon mount Gerizim to bless the people, when ye are come
over Jordan; Simeon, and Levi, and Judah, and Issachar, and Joseph,
and Benjamin: 27:13 And these shall stand upon mount Ebal to curse;
Reuben, Gad, and Asher, and Zebulun, Dan, and Naphtali.

27:14 And the Levites shall speak, and say unto all the men of Israel
with a loud voice, 27:15 Cursed be the man that maketh any graven or
molten image, an abomination unto the LORD, the work of the hands of
the craftsman, and putteth it in a secret place. And all the people
shall answer and say, Amen.

27:16 Cursed be he that setteth light by his father or his mother. And
all the people shall say, Amen.

27:17 Cursed be he that removeth his neighbour's landmark. And all the
people shall say, Amen.

27:18 Cursed be he that maketh the blind to wander out of the way. And
all the people shall say, Amen.

27:19 Cursed be he that perverteth the judgment of the stranger,
fatherless, and widow. And all the people shall say, Amen.

27:20 Cursed be he that lieth with his father's wife; because he
uncovereth his father's skirt. And all the people shall say, Amen.

27:21 Cursed be he that lieth with any manner of beast. And all the
people shall say, Amen.

27:22 Cursed be he that lieth with his sister, the daughter of his
father, or the daughter of his mother. And all the people shall say,
Amen.

27:23 Cursed be he that lieth with his mother in law. And all the
people shall say, Amen.

27:24 Cursed be he that smiteth his neighbour secretly. And all the
people shall say, Amen.

27:25 Cursed be he that taketh reward to slay an innocent person. And
all the people shall say, Amen.

27:26 Cursed be he that confirmeth not all the words of this law to do
them. And all the people shall say, Amen.

28:1 And it shall come to pass, if thou shalt hearken diligently unto
the voice of the LORD thy God, to observe and to do all his
commandments which I command thee this day, that the LORD thy God will
set thee on high above all nations of the earth: 28:2 And all these
blessings shall come on thee, and overtake thee, if thou shalt hearken
unto the voice of the LORD thy God.

28:3 Blessed shalt thou be in the city, and blessed shalt thou be in
the field.

28:4 Blessed shall be the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy
ground, and the fruit of thy cattle, the increase of thy kine, and the
flocks of thy sheep.

28:5 Blessed shall be thy basket and thy store.

28:6 Blessed shalt thou be when thou comest in, and blessed shalt thou
be when thou goest out.

28:7 The LORD shall cause thine enemies that rise up against thee to
be smitten before thy face: they shall come out against thee one way,
and flee before thee seven ways.

28:8 The LORD shall command the blessing upon thee in thy storehouses,
and in all that thou settest thine hand unto; and he shall bless thee
in the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.

28:9 The LORD shall establish thee an holy people unto himself, as he
hath sworn unto thee, if thou shalt keep the commandments of the LORD
thy God, and walk in his ways.

28:10 And all people of the earth shall see that thou art called by
the name of the LORD; and they shall be afraid of thee.

28:11 And the LORD shall make thee plenteous in goods, in the fruit of
thy body, and in the fruit of thy cattle, and in the fruit of thy
ground, in the land which the LORD sware unto thy fathers to give
thee.

28:12 The LORD shall open unto thee his good treasure, the heaven to
give the rain unto thy land in his season, and to bless all the work
of thine hand: and thou shalt lend unto many nations, and thou shalt
not borrow.

28:13 And the LORD shall make thee the head, and not the tail; and
thou shalt be above only, and thou shalt not be beneath; if that thou
hearken unto the commandments of the LORD thy God, which I command
thee this day, to observe and to do them: 28:14 And thou shalt not go
aside from any of the words which I command thee this day, to the
right hand, or to the left, to go after other gods to serve them.

28:15 But it shall come to pass, if thou wilt not hearken unto the
voice of the LORD thy God, to observe to do all his commandments and
his statutes which I command thee this day; that all these curses
shall come upon thee, and overtake thee: 28:16 Cursed shalt thou be in
the city, and cursed shalt thou be in the field.

28:17 Cursed shall be thy basket and thy store.

28:18 Cursed shall be the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy
land, the increase of thy kine, and the flocks of thy sheep.

28:19 Cursed shalt thou be when thou comest in, and cursed shalt thou
be when thou goest out.

28:20 The LORD shall send upon thee cursing, vexation, and rebuke, in
all that thou settest thine hand unto for to do, until thou be
destroyed, and until thou perish quickly; because of the wickedness of
thy doings, whereby thou hast forsaken me.

28:21 The LORD shall make the pestilence cleave unto thee, until he
have consumed thee from off the land, whither thou goest to possess
it.

28:22 The LORD shall smite thee with a consumption, and with a fever,
and with an inflammation, and with an extreme burning, and with the
sword, and with blasting, and with mildew; and they shall pursue thee
until thou perish.

28:23 And thy heaven that is over thy head shall be brass, and the
earth that is under thee shall be iron.

28:24 The LORD shall make the rain of thy land powder and dust: from
heaven shall it come down upon thee, until thou be destroyed.

28:25 The LORD shall cause thee to be smitten before thine enemies:
thou shalt go out one way against them, and flee seven ways before
them: and shalt be removed into all the kingdoms of the earth.

28:26 And thy carcase shall be meat unto all fowls of the air, and
unto the beasts of the earth, and no man shall fray them away.

28:27 The LORD will smite thee with the botch of Egypt, and with the
emerods, and with the scab, and with the itch, whereof thou canst not
be healed.

28:28 The LORD shall smite thee with madness, and blindness, and
astonishment of heart: 28:29 And thou shalt grope at noonday, as the
blind gropeth in darkness, and thou shalt not prosper in thy ways: and
thou shalt be only oppressed and spoiled evermore, and no man shall
save thee.

28:30 Thou shalt betroth a wife, and another man shall lie with her:
thou shalt build an house, and thou shalt not dwell therein: thou
shalt plant a vineyard, and shalt not gather the grapes thereof.

28:31 Thine ox shall be slain before thine eyes, and thou shalt not
eat thereof: thine ass shall be violently taken away from before thy
face, and shall not be restored to thee: thy sheep shall be given unto
thine enemies, and thou shalt have none to rescue them.

28:32 Thy sons and thy daughters shall be given unto another people,
and thine eyes shall look, and fail with longing for them all the day
long; and there shall be no might in thine hand.

28:33 The fruit of thy land, and all thy labours, shall a nation which
thou knowest not eat up; and thou shalt be only oppressed and crushed
alway: 28:34 So that thou shalt be mad for the sight of thine eyes
which thou shalt see.

28:35 The LORD shall smite thee in the knees, and in the legs, with a
sore botch that cannot be healed, from the sole of thy foot unto the
top of thy head.

28:36 The LORD shall bring thee, and thy king which thou shalt set
over thee, unto a nation which neither thou nor thy fathers have
known; and there shalt thou serve other gods, wood and stone.

28:37 And thou shalt become an astonishment, a proverb, and a byword,
among all nations whither the LORD shall lead thee.

28:38 Thou shalt carry much seed out into the field, and shalt gather
but little in; for the locust shall consume it.

28:39 Thou shalt plant vineyards, and dress them, but shalt neither
drink of the wine, nor gather the grapes; for the worms shall eat
them.

28:40 Thou shalt have olive trees throughout all thy coasts, but thou
shalt not anoint thyself with the oil; for thine olive shall cast his
fruit.

28:41 Thou shalt beget sons and daughters, but thou shalt not enjoy
them; for they shall go into captivity.

28:42 All thy trees and fruit of thy land shall the locust consume.

28:43 The stranger that is within thee shall get up above thee very
high; and thou shalt come down very low.

28:44 He shall lend to thee, and thou shalt not lend to him: he shall
be the head, and thou shalt be the tail.

28:45 Moreover all these curses shall come upon thee, and shall pursue
thee, and overtake thee, till thou be destroyed; because thou
hearkenedst not unto the voice of the LORD thy God, to keep his
commandments and his statutes which he commanded thee: 28:46 And they
shall be upon thee for a sign and for a wonder, and upon thy seed for
ever.

28:47 Because thou servedst not the LORD thy God with joyfulness, and
with gladness of heart, for the abundance of all things; 28:48
Therefore shalt thou serve thine enemies which the LORD shall send
against thee, in hunger, and in thirst, and in nakedness, and in want
of all things: and he shall put a yoke of iron upon thy neck, until he
have destroyed thee.

28:49 The LORD shall bring a nation against thee from far, from the
end of the earth, as swift as the eagle flieth; a nation whose tongue
thou shalt not understand; 28:50 A nation of fierce countenance, which
shall not regard the person of the old, nor shew favour to the young:
28:51 And he shall eat the fruit of thy cattle, and the fruit of thy
land, until thou be destroyed: which also shall not leave thee either
corn, wine, or oil, or the increase of thy kine, or flocks of thy
sheep, until he have destroyed thee.

28:52 And he shall besiege thee in all thy gates, until thy high and
fenced walls come down, wherein thou trustedst, throughout all thy
land: and he shall besiege thee in all thy gates throughout all thy
land, which the LORD thy God hath given thee.

28:53 And thou shalt eat the fruit of thine own body, the flesh of thy
sons and of thy daughters, which the LORD thy God hath given thee, in
the siege, and in the straitness, wherewith thine enemies shall
distress thee: 28:54 So that the man that is tender among you, and
very delicate, his eye shall be evil toward his brother, and toward
the wife of his bosom, and toward the remnant of his children which he
shall leave: 28:55 So that he will not give to any of them of the
flesh of his children whom he shall eat: because he hath nothing left
him in the siege, and in the straitness, wherewith thine enemies shall
distress thee in all thy gates.

28:56 The tender and delicate woman among you, which would not
adventure to set the sole of her foot upon the ground for delicateness
and tenderness, her eye shall be evil toward the husband of her bosom,
and toward her son, and toward her daughter, 28:57 And toward her
young one that cometh out from between her feet, and toward her
children which she shall bear: for she shall eat them for want of all
things secretly in the siege and straitness, wherewith thine enemy
shall distress thee in thy gates.

28:58 If thou wilt not observe to do all the words of this law that
are written in this book, that thou mayest fear this glorious and
fearful name, THE LORD THY GOD; 28:59 Then the LORD will make thy
plagues wonderful, and the plagues of thy seed, even great plagues,
and of long continuance, and sore sicknesses, and of long continuance.

28:60 Moreover he will bring upon thee all the diseases of Egypt,
which thou wast afraid of; and they shall cleave unto thee.

28:61 Also every sickness, and every plague, which is not written in
the book of this law, them will the LORD bring upon thee, until thou
be destroyed.

28:62 And ye shall be left few in number, whereas ye were as the stars
of heaven for multitude; because thou wouldest not obey the voice of
the LORD thy God.

28:63 And it shall come to pass, that as the LORD rejoiced over you to
do you good, and to multiply you; so the LORD will rejoice over you to
destroy you, and to bring you to nought; and ye shall be plucked from
off the land whither thou goest to possess it.

28:64 And the LORD shall scatter thee among all people, from the one
end of the earth even unto the other; and there thou shalt serve other
gods, which neither thou nor thy fathers have known, even wood and
stone.

28:65 And among these nations shalt thou find no ease, neither shall
the sole of thy foot have rest: but the LORD shall give thee there a
trembling heart, and failing of eyes, and sorrow of mind: 28:66 And
thy life shall hang in doubt before thee; and thou shalt fear day and
night, and shalt have none assurance of thy life: 28:67 In the morning
thou shalt say, Would God it were even! and at even thou shalt say,
Would God it were morning! for the fear of thine heart wherewith thou
shalt fear, and for the sight of thine eyes which thou shalt see.

28:68 And the LORD shall bring thee into Egypt again with ships, by
the way whereof I spake unto thee, Thou shalt see it no more again:
and there ye shall be sold unto your enemies for bondmen and
bondwomen, and no man shall buy you.

29:1 These are the words of the covenant, which the LORD commanded
Moses to make with the children of Israel in the land of Moab, beside
the covenant which he made with them in Horeb.

29:2 And Moses called unto all Israel, and said unto them, Ye have
seen all that the LORD did before your eyes in the land of Egypt unto
Pharaoh, and unto all his servants, and unto all his land; 29:3 The
great temptations which thine eyes have seen, the signs, and those
great miracles: 29:4 Yet the LORD hath not given you an heart to
perceive, and eyes to see, and ears to hear, unto this day.

29:5 And I have led you forty years in the wilderness: your clothes
are not waxen old upon you, and thy shoe is not waxen old upon thy
foot.

29:6 Ye have not eaten bread, neither have ye drunk wine or strong
drink: that ye might know that I am the LORD your God.

29:7 And when ye came unto this place, Sihon the king of Heshbon, and
Og the king of Bashan, came out against us unto battle, and we smote
them: 29:8 And we took their land, and gave it for an inheritance unto
the Reubenites, and to the Gadites, and to the half tribe of Manasseh.

29:9 Keep therefore the words of this covenant, and do them, that ye
may prosper in all that ye do.

29:10 Ye stand this day all of you before the LORD your God; your
captains of your tribes, your elders, and your officers, with all the
men of Israel, 29:11 Your little ones, your wives, and thy stranger
that is in thy camp, from the hewer of thy wood unto the drawer of thy
water: 29:12 That thou shouldest enter into covenant with the LORD thy
God, and into his oath, which the LORD thy God maketh with thee this
day: 29:13 That he may establish thee to day for a people unto
himself, and that he may be unto thee a God, as he hath said unto
thee, and as he hath sworn unto thy fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and
to Jacob.

29:14 Neither with you only do I make this covenant and this oath;
29:15 But with him that standeth here with us this day before the LORD
our God, and also with him that is not here with us this day: 29:16
(For ye know how we have dwelt in the land of Egypt; and how we came
through the nations which ye passed by; 29:17 And ye have seen their
abominations, and their idols, wood and stone, silver and gold, which
were among them:) 29:18 Lest there should be among you man, or woman,
or family, or tribe, whose heart turneth away this day from the LORD
our God, to go and serve the gods of these nations; lest there should
be among you a root that beareth gall and wormwood; 29:19 And it come
to pass, when he heareth the words of this curse, that he bless
himself in his heart, saying, I shall have peace, though I walk in the
imagination of mine heart, to add drunkenness to thirst: 29:20 The
LORD will not spare him, but then the anger of the LORD and his
jealousy shall smoke against that man, and all the curses that are
written in this book shall lie upon him, and the LORD shall blot out
his name from under heaven.

29:21 And the LORD shall separate him unto evil out of all the tribes
of Israel, according to all the curses of the covenant that are
written in this book of the law: 29:22 So that the generation to come
of your children that shall rise up after you, and the stranger that
shall come from a far land, shall say, when they see the plagues of
that land, and the sicknesses which the LORD hath laid upon it; 29:23
And that the whole land thereof is brimstone, and salt, and burning,
that it is not sown, nor beareth, nor any grass groweth therein, like
the overthrow of Sodom, and Gomorrah, Admah, and Zeboim, which the
LORD overthrew in his anger, and in his wrath: 29:24 Even all nations
shall say, Wherefore hath the LORD done thus unto this land? what
meaneth the heat of this great anger?  29:25 Then men shall say,
Because they have forsaken the covenant of the LORD God of their
fathers, which he made with them when he brought them forth out of the
land of Egypt: 29:26 For they went and served other gods, and
worshipped them, gods whom they knew not, and whom he had not given
unto them: 29:27 And the anger of the LORD was kindled against this
land, to bring upon it all the curses that are written in this book:
29:28 And the LORD rooted them out of their land in anger, and in
wrath, and in great indignation, and cast them into another land, as
it is this day.

29:29 The secret things belong unto the LORD our God: but those things
which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever, that
we may do all the words of this law.

30:1 And it shall come to pass, when all these things are come upon
thee, the blessing and the curse, which I have set before thee, and
thou shalt call them to mind among all the nations, whither the LORD
thy God hath driven thee, 30:2 And shalt return unto the LORD thy God,
and shalt obey his voice according to all that I command thee this
day, thou and thy children, with all thine heart, and with all thy
soul; 30:3 That then the LORD thy God will turn thy captivity, and
have compassion upon thee, and will return and gather thee from all
the nations, whither the LORD thy God hath scattered thee.

30:4 If any of thine be driven out unto the outmost parts of heaven,
from thence will the LORD thy God gather thee, and from thence will he
fetch thee: 30:5 And the LORD thy God will bring thee into the land
which thy fathers possessed, and thou shalt possess it; and he will do
thee good, and multiply thee above thy fathers.

30:6 And the LORD thy God will circumcise thine heart, and the heart
of thy seed, to love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with
all thy soul, that thou mayest live.

30:7 And the LORD thy God will put all these curses upon thine
enemies, and on them that hate thee, which persecuted thee.

30:8 And thou shalt return and obey the voice of the LORD, and do all
his commandments which I command thee this day.

30:9 And the LORD thy God will make thee plenteous in every work of
thine hand, in the fruit of thy body, and in the fruit of thy cattle,
and in the fruit of thy land, for good: for the LORD will again
rejoice over thee for good, as he rejoiced over thy fathers: 30:10 If
thou shalt hearken unto the voice of the LORD thy God, to keep his
commandments and his statutes which are written in this book of the
law, and if thou turn unto the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and
with all thy soul.

30:11 For this commandment which I command thee this day, it is not
hidden from thee, neither is it far off.

30:12 It is not in heaven, that thou shouldest say, Who shall go up
for us to heaven, and bring it unto us, that we may hear it, and do
it?  30:13 Neither is it beyond the sea, that thou shouldest say, Who
shall go over the sea for us, and bring it unto us, that we may hear
it, and do it?  30:14 But the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy
mouth, and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it.

30:15 See, I have set before thee this day life and good, and death
and evil; 30:16 In that I command thee this day to love the LORD thy
God, to walk in his ways, and to keep his commandments and his
statutes and his judgments, that thou mayest live and multiply: and
the LORD thy God shall bless thee in the land whither thou goest to
possess it.

30:17 But if thine heart turn away, so that thou wilt not hear, but
shalt be drawn away, and worship other gods, and serve them; 30:18 I
denounce unto you this day, that ye shall surely perish, and that ye
shall not prolong your days upon the land, whither thou passest over
Jordan to go to possess it.

30:19 I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I
have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore
choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live: 30:20 That thou
mayest love the LORD thy God, and that thou mayest obey his voice, and
that thou mayest cleave unto him: for he is thy life, and the length
of thy days: that thou mayest dwell in the land which the LORD sware
unto thy fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give them.

31:1 And Moses went and spake these words unto all Israel.

31:2 And he said unto them, I am an hundred and twenty years old this
day; I can no more go out and come in: also the LORD hath said unto
me, Thou shalt not go over this Jordan.

31:3 The LORD thy God, he will go over before thee, and he will
destroy these nations from before thee, and thou shalt possess them:
and Joshua, he shall go over before thee, as the LORD hath said.

31:4 And the LORD shall do unto them as he did to Sihon and to Og,
kings of the Amorites, and unto the land of them, whom he destroyed.

31:5 And the LORD shall give them up before your face, that ye may do
unto them according unto all the commandments which I have commanded
you.

31:6 Be strong and of a good courage, fear not, nor be afraid of them:
for the LORD thy God, he it is that doth go with thee; he will not
fail thee, nor forsake thee.

31:7 And Moses called unto Joshua, and said unto him in the sight of
all Israel, Be strong and of a good courage: for thou must go with
this people unto the land which the LORD hath sworn unto their fathers
to give them; and thou shalt cause them to inherit it.

31:8 And the LORD, he it is that doth go before thee; he will be with
thee, he will not fail thee, neither forsake thee: fear not, neither
be dismayed.

31:9 And Moses wrote this law, and delivered it unto the priests the
sons of Levi, which bare the ark of the covenant of the LORD, and unto
all the elders of Israel.

31:10 And Moses commanded them, saying, At the end of every seven
years, in the solemnity of the year of release, in the feast of
tabernacles, 31:11 When all Israel is come to appear before the LORD
thy God in the place which he shall choose, thou shalt read this law
before all Israel in their hearing.

31:12 Gather the people together, men and women, and children, and thy
stranger that is within thy gates, that they may hear, and that they
may learn, and fear the LORD your God, and observe to do all the words
of this law: 31:13 And that their children, which have not known any
thing, may hear, and learn to fear the LORD your God, as long as ye
live in the land whither ye go over Jordan to possess it.

31:14 And the LORD said unto Moses, Behold, thy days approach that
thou must die: call Joshua, and present yourselves in the tabernacle
of the congregation, that I may give him a charge. And Moses and
Joshua went, and presented themselves in the tabernacle of the
congregation.

31:15 And the LORD appeared in the tabernacle in a pillar of a cloud:
and the pillar of the cloud stood over the door of the tabernacle.

31:16 And the LORD said unto Moses, Behold, thou shalt sleep with thy
fathers; and this people will rise up, and go a whoring after the gods
of the strangers of the land, whither they go to be among them, and
will forsake me, and break my covenant which I have made with them.

31:17 Then my anger shall be kindled against them in that day, and I
will forsake them, and I will hide my face from them, and they shall
be devoured, and many evils and troubles shall befall them; so that
they will say in that day, Are not these evils come upon us, because
our God is not among us?  31:18 And I will surely hide my face in that
day for all the evils which they shall have wrought, in that they are
turned unto other gods.

31:19 Now therefore write ye this song for you, and teach it the
children of Israel: put it in their mouths, that this song may be a
witness for me against the children of Israel.

31:20 For when I shall have brought them into the land which I sware
unto their fathers, that floweth with milk and honey; and they shall
have eaten and filled themselves, and waxen fat; then will they turn
unto other gods, and serve them, and provoke me, and break my
covenant.

31:21 And it shall come to pass, when many evils and troubles are
befallen them, that this song shall testify against them as a witness;
for it shall not be forgotten out of the mouths of their seed: for I
know their imagination which they go about, even now, before I have
brought them into the land which I sware.

31:22 Moses therefore wrote this song the same day, and taught it the
children of Israel.

31:23 And he gave Joshua the son of Nun a charge, and said, Be strong
and of a good courage: for thou shalt bring the children of Israel
into the land which I sware unto them: and I will be with thee.

31:24 And it came to pass, when Moses had made an end of writing the
words of this law in a book, until they were finished, 31:25 That
Moses commanded the Levites, which bare the ark of the covenant of the
LORD, saying, 31:26 Take this book of the law, and put it in the side
of the ark of the covenant of the LORD your God, that it may be there
for a witness against thee.

31:27 For I know thy rebellion, and thy stiff neck: behold, while I am
yet alive with you this day, ye have been rebellious against the LORD;
and how much more after my death?  31:28 Gather unto me all the elders
of your tribes, and your officers, that I may speak these words in
their ears, and call heaven and earth to record against them.

31:29 For I know that after my death ye will utterly corrupt
yourselves, and turn aside from the way which I have commanded you;
and evil will befall you in the latter days; because ye will do evil
in the sight of the LORD, to provoke him to anger through the work of
your hands.

31:30 And Moses spake in the ears of all the congregation of Israel
the words of this song, until they were ended.

32:1 Give ear, O ye heavens, and I will speak; and hear, O earth, the
words of my mouth.

32:2 My doctrine shall drop as the rain, my speech shall distil as the
dew, as the small rain upon the tender herb, and as the showers upon
the grass: 32:3 Because I will publish the name of the LORD: ascribe
ye greatness unto our God.

32:4 He is the Rock, his work is perfect: for all his ways are
judgment: a God of truth and without iniquity, just and right is he.

32:5 They have corrupted themselves, their spot is not the spot of his
children: they are a perverse and crooked generation.

32:6 Do ye thus requite the LORD, O foolish people and unwise? is not
he thy father that hath bought thee? hath he not made thee, and
established thee?  32:7 Remember the days of old, consider the years
of many generations: ask thy father, and he will shew thee; thy
elders, and they will tell thee.

32:8 When the Most High divided to the nations their inheritance, when
he separated the sons of Adam, he set the bounds of the people
according to the number of the children of Israel.

32:9 For the LORD's portion is his people; Jacob is the lot of his
inheritance.

32:10 He found him in a desert land, and in the waste howling
wilderness; he led him about, he instructed him, he kept him as the
apple of his eye.

32:11 As an eagle stirreth up her nest, fluttereth over her young,
spreadeth abroad her wings, taketh them, beareth them on her wings:
32:12 So the LORD alone did lead him, and there was no strange god
with him.

32:13 He made him ride on the high places of the earth, that he might
eat the increase of the fields; and he made him to suck honey out of
the rock, and oil out of the flinty rock; 32:14 Butter of kine, and
milk of sheep, with fat of lambs, and rams of the breed of Bashan, and
goats, with the fat of kidneys of wheat; and thou didst drink the pure
blood of the grape.

32:15 But Jeshurun waxed fat, and kicked: thou art waxen fat, thou art
grown thick, thou art covered with fatness; then he forsook God which
made him, and lightly esteemed the Rock of his salvation.

32:16 They provoked him to jealousy with strange gods, with
abominations provoked they him to anger.

32:17 They sacrificed unto devils, not to God; to gods whom they knew
not, to new gods that came newly up, whom your fathers feared not.

32:18 Of the Rock that begat thee thou art unmindful, and hast
forgotten God that formed thee.

32:19 And when the LORD saw it, he abhorred them, because of the
provoking of his sons, and of his daughters.

32:20 And he said, I will hide my face from them, I will see what
their end shall be: for they are a very froward generation, children
in whom is no faith.

32:21 They have moved me to jealousy with that which is not God; they
have provoked me to anger with their vanities: and I will move them to
jealousy with those which are not a people; I will provoke them to
anger with a foolish nation.

32:22 For a fire is kindled in mine anger, and shall burn unto the
lowest hell, and shall consume the earth with her increase, and set on
fire the foundations of the mountains.

32:23 I will heap mischiefs upon them; I will spend mine arrows upon
them.

32:24 They shall be burnt with hunger, and devoured with burning heat,
and with bitter destruction: I will also send the teeth of beasts upon
them, with the poison of serpents of the dust.

32:25 The sword without, and terror within, shall destroy both the
young man and the virgin, the suckling also with the man of gray
hairs.

32:26 I said, I would scatter them into corners, I would make the
remembrance of them to cease from among men: 32:27 Were it not that I
feared the wrath of the enemy, lest their adversaries should behave
themselves strangely, and lest they should say, Our hand is high, and
the LORD hath not done all this.

32:28 For they are a nation void of counsel, neither is there any
understanding in them.

32:29 O that they were wise, that they understood this, that they
would consider their latter end!  32:30 How should one chase a
thousand, and two put ten thousand to flight, except their Rock had
sold them, and the LORD had shut them up?  32:31 For their rock is not
as our Rock, even our enemies themselves being judges.

32:32 For their vine is of the vine of Sodom, and of the fields of
Gomorrah: their grapes are grapes of gall, their clusters are bitter:
32:33 Their wine is the poison of dragons, and the cruel venom of
asps.

32:34 Is not this laid up in store with me, and sealed up among my
treasures?  32:35 To me belongeth vengeance and recompence; their foot
shall slide in due time: for the day of their calamity is at hand, and
the things that shall come upon them make haste.

32:36 For the LORD shall judge his people, and repent himself for his
servants, when he seeth that their power is gone, and there is none
shut up, or left.

32:37 And he shall say, Where are their gods, their rock in whom they
trusted, 32:38 Which did eat the fat of their sacrifices, and drank
the wine of their drink offerings? let them rise up and help you, and
be your protection.

32:39 See now that I, even I, am he, and there is no god with me: I
kill, and I make alive; I wound, and I heal: neither is there any that
can deliver out of my hand.

32:40 For I lift up my hand to heaven, and say, I live for ever.

32:41 If I whet my glittering sword, and mine hand take hold on
judgment; I will render vengeance to mine enemies, and will reward
them that hate me.

32:42 I will make mine arrows drunk with blood, and my sword shall
devour flesh; and that with the blood of the slain and of the
captives, from the beginning of revenges upon the enemy.

32:43 Rejoice, O ye nations, with his people: for he will avenge the
blood of his servants, and will render vengeance to his adversaries,
and will be merciful unto his land, and to his people.

32:44 And Moses came and spake all the words of this song in the ears
of the people, he, and Hoshea the son of Nun.

32:45 And Moses made an end of speaking all these words to all Israel:
32:46 And he said unto them, Set your hearts unto all the words which
I testify among you this day, which ye shall command your children to
observe to do, all the words of this law.

32:47 For it is not a vain thing for you; because it is your life: and
through this thing ye shall prolong your days in the land, whither ye
go over Jordan to possess it.

32:48 And the LORD spake unto Moses that selfsame day, saying, 32:49
Get thee up into this mountain Abarim, unto mount Nebo, which is in
the land of Moab, that is over against Jericho; and behold the land of
Canaan, which I give unto the children of Israel for a possession:
32:50 And die in the mount whither thou goest up, and be gathered unto
thy people; as Aaron thy brother died in mount Hor, and was gathered
unto his people: 32:51 Because ye trespassed against me among the
children of Israel at the waters of MeribahKadesh, in the wilderness
of Zin; because ye sanctified me not in the midst of the children of
Israel.

32:52 Yet thou shalt see the land before thee; but thou shalt not go
thither unto the land which I give the children of Israel.

33:1 And this is the blessing, wherewith Moses the man of God blessed
the children of Israel before his death.

33:2 And he said, The LORD came from Sinai, and rose up from Seir unto
them; he shined forth from mount Paran, and he came with ten thousands
of saints: from his right hand went a fiery law for them.

33:3 Yea, he loved the people; all his saints are in thy hand: and
they sat down at thy feet; every one shall receive of thy words.

33:4 Moses commanded us a law, even the inheritance of the
congregation of Jacob.

33:5 And he was king in Jeshurun, when the heads of the people and the
tribes of Israel were gathered together.

33:6 Let Reuben live, and not die; and let not his men be few.

33:7 And this is the blessing of Judah: and he said, Hear, LORD, the
voice of Judah, and bring him unto his people: let his hands be
sufficient for him; and be thou an help to him from his enemies.

33:8 And of Levi he said, Let thy Thummim and thy Urim be with thy
holy one, whom thou didst prove at Massah, and with whom thou didst
strive at the waters of Meribah; 33:9 Who said unto his father and to
his mother, I have not seen him; neither did he acknowledge his
brethren, nor knew his own children: for they have observed thy word,
and kept thy covenant.

33:10 They shall teach Jacob thy judgments, and Israel thy law: they
shall put incense before thee, and whole burnt sacrifice upon thine
altar.

33:11 Bless, LORD, his substance, and accept the work of his hands;
smite through the loins of them that rise against him, and of them
that hate him, that they rise not again.

33:12 And of Benjamin he said, The beloved of the LORD shall dwell in
safety by him; and the Lord shall cover him all the day long, and he
shall dwell between his shoulders.

33:13 And of Joseph he said, Blessed of the LORD be his land, for the
precious things of heaven, for the dew, and for the deep that coucheth
beneath, 33:14 And for the precious fruits brought forth by the sun,
and for the precious things put forth by the moon, 33:15 And for the
chief things of the ancient mountains, and for the precious things of
the lasting hills, 33:16 And for the precious things of the earth and
fulness thereof, and for the good will of him that dwelt in the bush:
let the blessing come upon the head of Joseph, and upon the top of the
head of him that was separated from his brethren.

33:17 His glory is like the firstling of his bullock, and his horns
are like the horns of unicorns: with them he shall push the people
together to the ends of the earth: and they are the ten thousands of
Ephraim, and they are the thousands of Manasseh.

33:18 And of Zebulun he said, Rejoice, Zebulun, in thy going out; and,
Issachar, in thy tents.

33:19 They shall call the people unto the mountain; there they shall
offer sacrifices of righteousness: for they shall suck of the
abundance of the seas, and of treasures hid in the sand.

33:20 And of Gad he said, Blessed be he that enlargeth Gad: he
dwelleth as a lion, and teareth the arm with the crown of the head.

33:21 And he provided the first part for himself, because there, in a
portion of the lawgiver, was he seated; and he came with the heads of
the people, he executed the justice of the LORD, and his judgments
with Israel.

33:22 And of Dan he said, Dan is a lion's whelp: he shall leap from
Bashan.

33:23 And of Naphtali he said, O Naphtali, satisfied with favour, and
full with the blessing of the LORD: possess thou the west and the
south.

33:24 And of Asher he said, Let Asher be blessed with children; let
him be acceptable to his brethren, and let him dip his foot in oil.

33:25 Thy shoes shall be iron and brass; and as thy days, so shall thy
strength be.

33:26 There is none like unto the God of Jeshurun, who rideth upon the
heaven in thy help, and in his excellency on the sky.

33:27 The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the
everlasting arms: and he shall thrust out the enemy from before thee;
and shall say, Destroy them.

33:28 Israel then shall dwell in safety alone: the fountain of Jacob
shall be upon a land of corn and wine; also his heavens shall drop
down dew.

33:29 Happy art thou, O Israel: who is like unto thee, O people saved
by the LORD, the shield of thy help, and who is the sword of thy
excellency! and thine enemies shall be found liars unto thee; and thou
shalt tread upon their high places.

34:1 And Moses went up from the plains of Moab unto the mountain of
Nebo, to the top of Pisgah, that is over against Jericho. And the LORD
shewed him all the land of Gilead, unto Dan, 34:2 And all Naphtali,
and the land of Ephraim, and Manasseh, and all the land of Judah, unto
the utmost sea, 34:3 And the south, and the plain of the valley of
Jericho, the city of palm trees, unto Zoar.

34:4 And the LORD said unto him, This is the land which I sware unto
Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, saying, I will give it unto thy
seed: I have caused thee to see it with thine eyes, but thou shalt not
go over thither.

34:5 So Moses the servant of the LORD died there in the land of Moab,
according to the word of the LORD.

34:6 And he buried him in a valley in the land of Moab, over against
Bethpeor: but no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day.

34:7 And Moses was an hundred and twenty years old when he died: his
eye was not dim, nor his natural force abated.

34:8 And the children of Israel wept for Moses in the plains of Moab
thirty days: so the days of weeping and mourning for Moses were ended.

34:9 And Joshua the son of Nun was full of the spirit of wisdom; for
Moses had laid his hands upon him: and the children of Israel
hearkened unto him, and did as the LORD commanded Moses.

34:10 And there arose not a prophet since in Israel like unto Moses,
whom the LORD knew face to face, 34:11 In all the signs and the
wonders, which the LORD sent him to do in the land of Egypt to
Pharaoh, and to all his servants, and to all his land, 34:12 And in
all that mighty hand, and in all the great terror which Moses shewed
in the sight of all Israel.




The Book of Joshua


1:1 Now after the death of Moses the servant of the LORD it came to
pass, that the LORD spake unto Joshua the son of Nun, Moses' minister,
saying, 1:2 Moses my servant is dead; now therefore arise, go over
this Jordan, thou, and all this people, unto the land which I do give
to them, even to the children of Israel.

1:3 Every place that the sole of your foot shall tread upon, that have
I given unto you, as I said unto Moses.

1:4 From the wilderness and this Lebanon even unto the great river,
the river Euphrates, all the land of the Hittites, and unto the great
sea toward the going down of the sun, shall be your coast.

1:5 There shall not any man be able to stand before thee all the days
of thy life: as I was with Moses, so I will be with thee: I will not
fail thee, nor forsake thee.

1:6 Be strong and of a good courage: for unto this people shalt thou
divide for an inheritance the land, which I sware unto their fathers
to give them.

1:7 Only be thou strong and very courageous, that thou mayest observe
to do according to all the law, which Moses my servant commanded thee:
turn not from it to the right hand or to the left, that thou mayest
prosper withersoever thou goest.

1:8 This book of the law shall not depart out of thy mouth; but thou
shalt meditate therein day and night, that thou mayest observe to do
according to all that is written therein: for then thou shalt make thy
way prosperous, and then thou shalt have good success.

1:9 Have not I commanded thee? Be strong and of a good courage; be not
afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the LORD thy God is with thee
whithersoever thou goest.

1:10 Then Joshua commanded the officers of the people, saying, 1:11
Pass through the host, and command the people, saying, Prepare you
victuals; for within three days ye shall pass over this Jordan, to go
in to possess the land, which the LORD your God giveth you to possess
it.

1:12 And to the Reubenites, and to the Gadites, and to half the tribe
of Manasseh, spake Joshua, saying, 1:13 Remember the word which Moses
the servant of the LORD commanded you, saying, The LORD your God hath
given you rest, and hath given you this land.

1:14 Your wives, your little ones, and your cattle, shall remain in
the land which Moses gave you on this side Jordan; but ye shall pass
before your brethren armed, all the mighty men of valour, and help
them; 1:15 Until the LORD have given your brethren rest, as he hath
given you, and they also have possessed the land which the LORD your
God giveth them: then ye shall return unto the land of your
possession, and enjoy it, which Moses the LORD's servant gave you on
this side Jordan toward the sunrising.

1:16 And they answered Joshua, saying, All that thou commandest us we
will do, and whithersoever thou sendest us, we will go.

1:17 According as we hearkened unto Moses in all things, so will we
hearken unto thee: only the LORD thy God be with thee, as he was with
Moses.

1:18 Whosoever he be that doth rebel against thy commandment, and will
not hearken unto thy words in all that thou commandest him, he shall
be put to death: only be strong and of a good courage.

2:1 And Joshua the son of Nun sent out of Shittim two men to spy
secretly, saying, Go view the land, even Jericho. And they went, and
came into an harlot's house, named Rahab, and lodged there.

2:2 And it was told the king of Jericho, saying, Behold, there came
men in hither to night of the children of Israel to search out the
country.

2:3 And the king of Jericho sent unto Rahab, saying, Bring forth the
men that are come to thee, which are entered into thine house: for
they be come to search out all the country.

2:4 And the woman took the two men, and hid them, and said thus, There
came men unto me, but I wist not whence they were: 2:5 And it came to
pass about the time of shutting of the gate, when it was dark, that
the men went out: whither the men went I wot not: pursue after them
quickly; for ye shall overtake them.

2:6 But she had brought them up to the roof of the house, and hid them
with the stalks of flax, which she had laid in order upon the roof.

2:7 And the men pursued after them the way to Jordan unto the fords:
and as soon as they which pursued after them were gone out, they shut
the gate.

2:8 And before they were laid down, she came up unto them upon the
roof; 2:9 And she said unto the men, I know that the LORD hath given
you the land, and that your terror is fallen upon us, and that all the
inhabitants of the land faint because of you.

2:10 For we have heard how the LORD dried up the water of the Red sea
for you, when ye came out of Egypt; and what ye did unto the two kings
of the Amorites, that were on the other side Jordan, Sihon and Og,
whom ye utterly destroyed.

2:11 And as soon as we had heard these things, our hearts did melt,
neither did there remain any more courage in any man, because of you:
for the LORD your God, he is God in heaven above, and in earth
beneath.

2:12 Now therefore, I pray you, swear unto me by the LORD, since I
have shewed you kindness, that ye will also shew kindness unto my
father's house, and give me a true token: 2:13 And that ye will save
alive my father, and my mother, and my brethren, and my sisters, and
all that they have, and deliver our lives from death.

2:14 And the men answered her, Our life for yours, if ye utter not
this our business. And it shall be, when the LORD hath given us the
land, that we will deal kindly and truly with thee.

2:15 Then she let them down by a cord through the window: for her
house was upon the town wall, and she dwelt upon the wall.

2:16 And she said unto them, Get you to the mountain, lest the
pursuers meet you; and hide yourselves there three days, until the
pursuers be returned: and afterward may ye go your way.

2:17 And the men said unto her, We will be blameless of this thine
oath which thou hast made us swear.

2:18 Behold, when we come into the land, thou shalt bind this line of
scarlet thread in the window which thou didst let us down by: and thou
shalt bring thy father, and thy mother, and thy brethren, and all thy
father's household, home unto thee.

2:19 And it shall be, that whosoever shall go out of the doors of thy
house into the street, his blood shall be upon his head, and we will
be guiltless: and whosoever shall be with thee in the house, his blood
shall be on our head, if any hand be upon him.

2:20 And if thou utter this our business, then we will be quit of
thine oath which thou hast made us to swear.

2:21 And she said, According unto your words, so be it. And she sent
them away, and they departed: and she bound the scarlet line in the
window.

2:22 And they went, and came unto the mountain, and abode there three
days, until the pursuers were returned: and the pursuers sought them
throughout all the way, but found them not.

2:23 So the two men returned, and descended from the mountain, and
passed over, and came to Joshua the son of Nun, and told him all
things that befell them: 2:24 And they said unto Joshua, Truly the
LORD hath delivered into our hands all the land; for even all the
inhabitants of the country do faint because of us.

3:1 And Joshua rose early in the morning; and they removed from
Shittim, and came to Jordan, he and all the children of Israel, and
lodged there before they passed over.

3:2 And it came to pass after three days, that the officers went
through the host; 3:3 And they commanded the people, saying, When ye
see the ark of the covenant of the LORD your God, and the priests the
Levites bearing it, then ye shall remove from your place, and go after
it.

3:4 Yet there shall be a space between you and it, about two thousand
cubits by measure: come not near unto it, that ye may know the way by
which ye must go: for ye have not passed this way heretofore.

3:5 And Joshua said unto the people, Sanctify yourselves: for to
morrow the LORD will do wonders among you.

3:6 And Joshua spake unto the priests, saying, Take up the ark of the
covenant, and pass over before the people. And they took up the ark of
the covenant, and went before the people.

3:7 And the LORD said unto Joshua, This day will I begin to magnify
thee in the sight of all Israel, that they may know that, as I was
with Moses, so I will be with thee.

3:8 And thou shalt command the priests that bear the ark of the
covenant, saying, When ye are come to the brink of the water of
Jordan, ye shall stand still in Jordan.

3:9 And Joshua said unto the children of Israel, Come hither, and hear
the words of the LORD your God.

3:10 And Joshua said, Hereby ye shall know that the living God is
among you, and that he will without fail drive out from before you the
Canaanites, and the Hittites, and the Hivites, and the Perizzites, and
the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Jebusites.

3:11 Behold, the ark of the covenant of the LORD of all the earth
passeth over before you into Jordan.

3:12 Now therefore take you twelve men out of the tribes of Israel,
out of every tribe a man.

3:13 And it shall come to pass, as soon as the soles of the feet of
the priests that bear the ark of the LORD, the LORD of all the earth,
shall rest in the waters of Jordan, that the waters of Jordan shall be
cut off from the waters that come down from above; and they shall
stand upon an heap.

3:14 And it came to pass, when the people removed from their tents, to
pass over Jordan, and the priests bearing the ark of the covenant
before the people; 3:15 And as they that bare the ark were come unto
Jordan, and the feet of the priests that bare the ark were dipped in
the brim of the water, (for Jordan overfloweth all his banks all the
time of harvest,) 3:16 That the waters which came down from above
stood and rose up upon an heap very far from the city Adam, that is
beside Zaretan: and those that came down toward the sea of the plain,
even the salt sea, failed, and were cut off: and the people passed
over right against Jericho.

3:17 And the priests that bare the ark of the covenant of the LORD
stood firm on dry ground in the midst of Jordan, and all the
Israelites passed over on dry ground, until all the people were passed
clean over Jordan.

4:1 And it came to pass, when all the people were clean passed over
Jordan, that the LORD spake unto Joshua, saying, 4:2 Take you twelve
men out of the people, out of every tribe a man, 4:3 And command ye
them, saying, Take you hence out of the midst of Jordan, out of the
place where the priests' feet stood firm, twelve stones, and ye shall
carry them over with you, and leave them in the lodging place, where
ye shall lodge this night.

4:4 Then Joshua called the twelve men, whom he had prepared of the
children of Israel, out of every tribe a man: 4:5 And Joshua said unto
them, Pass over before the ark of the LORD your God into the midst of
Jordan, and take you up every man of you a stone upon his shoulder,
according unto the number of the tribes of the children of Israel: 4:6
That this may be a sign among you, that when your children ask their
fathers in time to come, saying, What mean ye by these stones?  4:7
Then ye shall answer them, That the waters of Jordan were cut off
before the ark of the covenant of the LORD; when it passed over
Jordan, the waters of Jordan were cut off: and these stones shall be
for a memorial unto the children of Israel for ever.

4:8 And the children of Israel did so as Joshua commanded, and took up
twelve stones out of the midst of Jordan, as the LORD spake unto
Joshua, according to the number of the tribes of the children of
Israel, and carried them over with them unto the place where they
lodged, and laid them down there.

4:9 And Joshua set up twelve stones in the midst of Jordan, in the
place where the feet of the priests which bare the ark of the covenant
stood: and they are there unto this day.

4:10 For the priests which bare the ark stood in the midst of Jordan,
until everything was finished that the LORD commanded Joshua to speak
unto the people, according to all that Moses commanded Joshua: and the
people hasted and passed over.

4:11 And it came to pass, when all the people were clean passed over,
that the ark of the LORD passed over, and the priests, in the presence
of the people.

4:12 And the children of Reuben, and the children of Gad, and half the
tribe of Manasseh, passed over armed before the children of Israel, as
Moses spake unto them: 4:13 About forty thousand prepared for war
passed over before the LORD unto battle, to the plains of Jericho.

4:14 On that day the LORD magnified Joshua in the sight of all Israel;
and they feared him, as they feared Moses, all the days of his life.

4:15 And the LORD spake unto Joshua, saying, 4:16 Command the priests
that bear the ark of the testimony, that they come up out of Jordan.

4:17 Joshua therefore commanded the priests, saying, Come ye up out of
Jordan.

4:18 And it came to pass, when the priests that bare the ark of the
covenant of the LORD were come up out of the midst of Jordan, and the
soles of the priests' feet were lifted up unto the dry land, that the
waters of Jordan returned unto their place, and flowed over all his
banks, as they did before.

4:19 And the people came up out of Jordan on the tenth day of the
first month, and encamped in Gilgal, in the east border of Jericho.

4:20 And those twelve stones, which they took out of Jordan, did
Joshua pitch in Gilgal.

4:21 And he spake unto the children of Israel, saying, When your
children shall ask their fathers in time to come, saying, What mean
these stones?  4:22 Then ye shall let your children know, saying,
Israel came over this Jordan on dry land.

4:23 For the LORD your God dried up the waters of Jordan from before
you, until ye were passed over, as the LORD your God did to the Red
sea, which he dried up from before us, until we were gone over: 4:24
That all the people of the earth might know the hand of the LORD, that
it is mighty: that ye might fear the LORD your God for ever.

5:1 And it came to pass, when all the kings of the Amorites, which
were on the side of Jordan westward, and all the kings of the
Canaanites, which were by the sea, heard that the LORD had dried up
the waters of Jordan from before the children of Israel, until we were
passed over, that their heart melted, neither was there spirit in them
any more, because of the children of Israel.

5:2 At that time the LORD said unto Joshua, Make thee sharp knives,
and circumcise again the children of Israel the second time.

5:3 And Joshua made him sharp knives, and circumcised the children of
Israel at the hill of the foreskins.

5:4 And this is the cause why Joshua did circumcise: All the people
that came out of Egypt, that were males, even all the men of war, died
in the wilderness by the way, after they came out of Egypt.

5:5 Now all the people that came out were circumcised: but all the
people that were born in the wilderness by the way as they came forth
out of Egypt, them they had not circumcised.

5:6 For the children of Israel walked forty years in the wilderness,
till all the people that were men of war, which came out of Egypt,
were consumed, because they obeyed not the voice of the LORD: unto
whom the LORD sware that he would not shew them the land, which the
LORD sware unto their fathers that he would give us, a land that
floweth with milk and honey.

5:7 And their children, whom he raised up in their stead, them Joshua
circumcised: for they were uncircumcised, because they had not
circumcised them by the way.

5:8 And it came to pass, when they had done circumcising all the
people, that they abode in their places in the camp, till they were
whole.

5:9 And the LORD said unto Joshua, This day have I rolled away the
reproach of Egypt from off you. Wherefore the name of the place is
called Gilgal unto this day.

5:10 And the children of Israel encamped in Gilgal, and kept the
passover on the fourteenth day of the month at even in the plains of
Jericho.

5:11 And they did eat of the old corn of the land on the morrow after
the passover, unleavened cakes, and parched corn in the selfsame day.

5:12 And the manna ceased on the morrow after they had eaten of the
old corn of the land; neither had the children of Israel manna any
more; but they did eat of the fruit of the land of Canaan that year.

5:13 And it came to pass, when Joshua was by Jericho, that he lifted
up his eyes and looked, and, behold, there stood a man over against
him with his sword drawn in his hand: and Joshua went unto him, and
said unto him, Art thou for us, or for our adversaries?  5:14 And he
said, Nay; but as captain of the host of the LORD am I now come. And
Joshua fell on his face to the earth, and did worship, and said unto
him, What saith my Lord unto his servant?  5:15 And the captain of the
LORD's host said unto Joshua, Loose thy shoe from off thy foot; for
the place whereon thou standest is holy. And Joshua did so.

6:1 Now Jericho was straitly shut up because of the children of
Israel: none went out, and none came in.

6:2 And the LORD said unto Joshua, See, I have given into thine hand
Jericho, and the king thereof, and the mighty men of valour.

6:3 And ye shall compass the city, all ye men of war, and go round
about the city once. Thus shalt thou do six days.

6:4 And seven priests shall bear before the ark seven trumpets of
rams' horns: and the seventh day ye shall compass the city seven
times, and the priests shall blow with the trumpets.

6:5 And it shall come to pass, that when they make a long blast with
the ram's horn, and when ye hear the sound of the trumpet, all the
people shall shout with a great shout; and the wall of the city shall
fall down flat, and the people shall ascend up every man straight
before him.

6:6 And Joshua the son of Nun called the priests, and said unto them,
Take up the ark of the covenant, and let seven priests bear seven
trumpets of rams' horns before the ark of the LORD.

6:7 And he said unto the people, Pass on, and compass the city, and
let him that is armed pass on before the ark of the LORD.

6:8 And it came to pass, when Joshua had spoken unto the people, that
the seven priests bearing the seven trumpets of rams' horns passed on
before the LORD, and blew with the trumpets: and the ark of the
covenant of the LORD followed them.

6:9 And the armed men went before the priests that blew with the
trumpets, and the rereward came after the ark, the priests going on,
and blowing with the trumpets.

6:10 And Joshua had commanded the people, saying, Ye shall not shout,
nor make any noise with your voice, neither shall any word proceed out
of your mouth, until the day I bid you shout; then shall ye shout.

6:11 So the ark of the LORD compassed the city, going about it once:
and they came into the camp, and lodged in the camp.

6:12 And Joshua rose early in the morning, and the priests took up the
ark of the LORD.

6:13 And seven priests bearing seven trumpets of rams' horns before
the ark of the LORD went on continually, and blew with the trumpets:
and the armed men went before them; but the rereward came after the
ark of the LORD, the priests going on, and blowing with the trumpets.

6:14 And the second day they compassed the city once, and returned
into the camp: so they did six days.

6:15 And it came to pass on the seventh day, that they rose early
about the dawning of the day, and compassed the city after the same
manner seven times: only on that day they compassed the city seven
times.

6:16 And it came to pass at the seventh time, when the priests blew
with the trumpets, Joshua said unto the people, Shout; for the LORD
hath given you the city.

6:17 And the city shall be accursed, even it, and all that are
therein, to the LORD: only Rahab the harlot shall live, she and all
that are with her in the house, because she hid the messengers that we
sent.

6:18 And ye, in any wise keep yourselves from the accursed thing, lest
ye make yourselves accursed, when ye take of the accursed thing, and
make the camp of Israel a curse, and trouble it.

6:19 But all the silver, and gold, and vessels of brass and iron, are
consecrated unto the LORD: they shall come into the treasury of the
LORD.

6:20 So the people shouted when the priests blew with the trumpets:
and it came to pass, when the people heard the sound of the trumpet,
and the people shouted with a great shout, that the wall fell down
flat, so that the people went up into the city, every man straight
before him, and they took the city.

6:21 And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and
woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the
sword.

6:22 But Joshua had said unto the two men that had spied out the
country, Go into the harlot's house, and bring out thence the woman,
and all that she hath, as ye sware unto her.

6:23 And the young men that were spies went in, and brought out Rahab,
and her father, and her mother, and her brethren, and all that she
had; and they brought out all her kindred, and left them without the
camp of Israel.

6:24 And they burnt the city with fire, and all that was therein: only
the silver, and the gold, and the vessels of brass and of iron, they
put into the treasury of the house of the LORD.

6:25 And Joshua saved Rahab the harlot alive, and her father's
household, and all that she had; and she dwelleth in Israel even unto
this day; because she hid the messengers, which Joshua sent to spy out
Jericho.

6:26 And Joshua adjured them at that time, saying, Cursed be the man
before the LORD, that riseth up and buildeth this city Jericho: he
shall lay the foundation thereof in his firstborn, and in his youngest
son shall he set up the gates of it.

6:27 So the LORD was with Joshua; and his fame was noised throughout
all the country.

7:1 But the children of Israel committed a trespass in the accursed
thing: for Achan, the son of Carmi, the son of Zabdi, the son of
Zerah, of the tribe of Judah, took of the accursed thing: and the
anger of the LORD was kindled against the children of Israel.

7:2 And Joshua sent men from Jericho to Ai, which is beside Bethaven,
on the east of Bethel, and spake unto them, saying, Go up and view the
country.

And the men went up and viewed Ai.

7:3 And they returned to Joshua, and said unto him, Let not all the
people go up; but let about two or three thousand men go up and smite
Ai; and make not all the people to labour thither; for they are but
few.

7:4 So there went up thither of the people about three thousand men:
and they fled before the men of Ai.

7:5 And the men of Ai smote of them about thirty and six men: for they
chased them from before the gate even unto Shebarim, and smote them in
the going down: wherefore the hearts of the people melted, and became
as water.

7:6 And Joshua rent his clothes, and fell to the earth upon his face
before the ark of the LORD until the eventide, he and the elders of
Israel, and put dust upon their heads.

7:7 And Joshua said, Alas, O LORD God, wherefore hast thou at all
brought this people over Jordan, to deliver us into the hand of the
Amorites, to destroy us? would to God we had been content, and dwelt
on the other side Jordan!  7:8 O LORD, what shall I say, when Israel
turneth their backs before their enemies!  7:9 For the Canaanites and
all the inhabitants of the land shall hear of it, and shall environ us
round, and cut off our name from the earth: and what wilt thou do unto
thy great name?  7:10 And the LORD said unto Joshua, Get thee up;
wherefore liest thou thus upon thy face?  7:11 Israel hath sinned, and
they have also transgressed my covenant which I commanded them: for
they have even taken of the accursed thing, and have also stolen, and
dissembled also, and they have put it even among their own stuff.

7:12 Therefore the children of Israel could not stand before their
enemies, but turned their backs before their enemies, because they
were accursed: neither will I be with you any more, except ye destroy
the accursed from among you.

7:13 Up, sanctify the people, and say, Sanctify yourselves against to
morrow: for thus saith the LORD God of Israel, There is an accursed
thing in the midst of thee, O Israel: thou canst not stand before
thine enemies, until ye take away the accursed thing from among you.

7:14 In the morning therefore ye shall be brought according to your
tribes: and it shall be, that the tribe which the LORD taketh shall
come according to the families thereof; and the family which the LORD
shall take shall come by households; and the household which the LORD
shall take shall come man by man.

7:15 And it shall be, that he that is taken with the accursed thing
shall be burnt with fire, he and all that he hath: because he hath
transgressed the covenant of the LORD, and because he hath wrought
folly in Israel.

7:16 So Joshua rose up early in the morning, and brought Israel by
their tribes; and the tribe of Judah was taken: 7:17 And he brought
the family of Judah; and he took the family of the Zarhites: and he
brought the family of the Zarhites man by man; and Zabdi was taken:
7:18 And he brought his household man by man; and Achan, the son of
Carmi, the son of Zabdi, the son of Zerah, of the tribe of Judah, was
taken.

7:19 And Joshua said unto Achan, My son, give, I pray thee, glory to
the LORD God of Israel, and make confession unto him; and tell me now
what thou hast done; hide it not from me.

7:20 And Achan answered Joshua, and said, Indeed I have sinned against
the LORD God of Israel, and thus and thus have I done: 7:21 When I saw
among the spoils a goodly Babylonish garment, and two hundred shekels
of silver, and a wedge of gold of fifty shekels weight, then I coveted
them, and took them; and, behold, they are hid in the earth in the
midst of my tent, and the silver under it.

7:22 So Joshua sent messengers, and they ran unto the tent; and,
behold, it was hid in his tent, and the silver under it.

7:23 And they took them out of the midst of the tent, and brought them
unto Joshua, and unto all the children of Israel, and laid them out
before the LORD.

7:24 And Joshua, and all Israel with him, took Achan the son of Zerah,
and the silver, and the garment, and the wedge of gold, and his sons,
and his daughters, and his oxen, and his asses, and his sheep, and his
tent, and all that he had: and they brought them unto the valley of
Achor.

7:25 And Joshua said, Why hast thou troubled us? the LORD shall
trouble thee this day. And all Israel stoned him with stones, and
burned them with fire, after they had stoned them with stones.

7:26 And they raised over him a great heap of stones unto this day. So
the LORD turned from the fierceness of his anger. Wherefore the name
of that place was called, The valley of Achor, unto this day.

8:1 And the LORD said unto Joshua, Fear not, neither be thou dismayed:
take all the people of war with thee, and arise, go up to Ai: see, I
have given into thy hand the king of Ai, and his people, and his city,
and his land: 8:2 And thou shalt do to Ai and her king as thou didst
unto Jericho and her king: only the spoil thereof, and the cattle
thereof, shall ye take for a prey unto yourselves: lay thee an ambush
for the city behind it.

8:3 So Joshua arose, and all the people of war, to go up against Ai:
and Joshua chose out thirty thousand mighty men of valour, and sent
them away by night.

8:4 And he commanded them, saying, Behold, ye shall lie in wait
against the city, even behind the city: go not very far from the city,
but be ye all ready: 8:5 And I, and all the people that are with me,
will approach unto the city: and it shall come to pass, when they come
out against us, as at the first, that we will flee before them, 8:6
(For they will come out after us) till we have drawn them from the
city; for they will say, They flee before us, as at the first:
therefore we will flee before them.

8:7 Then ye shall rise up from the ambush, and seize upon the city:
for the LORD your God will deliver it into your hand.

8:8 And it shall be, when ye have taken the city, that ye shall set
the city on fire: according to the commandment of the LORD shall ye
do. See, I have commanded you.

8:9 Joshua therefore sent them forth: and they went to lie in ambush,
and abode between Bethel and Ai, on the west side of Ai: but Joshua
lodged that night among the people.

8:10 And Joshua rose up early in the morning, and numbered the people,
and went up, he and the elders of Israel, before the people to Ai.

8:11 And all the people, even the people of war that were with him,
went up, and drew nigh, and came before the city, and pitched on the
north side of Ai: now there was a valley between them and Ai.

8:12 And he took about five thousand men, and set them to lie in
ambush between Bethel and Ai, on the west side of the city.

8:13 And when they had set the people, even all the host that was on
the north of the city, and their liers in wait on the west of the
city, Joshua went that night into the midst of the valley.

8:14 And it came to pass, when the king of Ai saw it, that they hasted
and rose up early, and the men of the city went out against Israel to
battle, he and all his people, at a time appointed, before the plain;
but he wist not that there were liers in ambush against him behind the
city.

8:15 And Joshua and all Israel made as if they were beaten before
them, and fled by the way of the wilderness.

8:16 And all the people that were in Ai were called together to pursue
after them: and they pursued after Joshua, and were drawn away from
the city.

8:17 And there was not a man left in Ai or Bethel, that went not out
after Israel: and they left the city open, and pursued after Israel.

8:18 And the LORD said unto Joshua, Stretch out the spear that is in
thy hand toward Ai; for I will give it into thine hand. And Joshua
stretched out the spear that he had in his hand toward the city.

8:19 And the ambush arose quickly out of their place, and they ran as
soon as he had stretched out his hand: and they entered into the city,
and took it, and hasted and set the city on fire.

8:20 And when the men of Ai looked behind them, they saw, and, behold,
the smoke of the city ascended up to heaven, and they had no power to
flee this way or that way: and the people that fled to the wilderness
turned back upon the pursuers.

8:21 And when Joshua and all Israel saw that the ambush had taken the
city, and that the smoke of the city ascended, then they turned again,
and slew the men of Ai.

8:22 And the other issued out of the city against them; so they were
in the midst of Israel, some on this side, and some on that side: and
they smote them, so that they let none of them remain or escape.

8:23 And the king of Ai they took alive, and brought him to Joshua.

8:24 And it came to pass, when Israel had made an end of slaying all
the inhabitants of Ai in the field, in the wilderness wherein they
chased them, and when they were all fallen on the edge of the sword,
until they were consumed, that all the Israelites returned unto Ai,
and smote it with the edge of the sword.

8:25 And so it was, that all that fell that day, both of men and
women, were twelve thousand, even all the men of Ai.

8:26 For Joshua drew not his hand back, wherewith he stretched out the
spear, until he had utterly destroyed all the inhabitants of Ai.

8:27 Only the cattle and the spoil of that city Israel took for a prey
unto themselves, according unto the word of the LORD which he
commanded Joshua.

8:28 And Joshua burnt Ai, and made it an heap for ever, even a
desolation unto this day.

8:29 And the king of Ai he hanged on a tree until eventide: and as
soon as the sun was down, Joshua commanded that they should take his
carcase down from the tree, and cast it at the entering of the gate of
the city, and raise thereon a great heap of stones, that remaineth
unto this day.

8:30 Then Joshua built an altar unto the LORD God of Israel in mount
Ebal, 8:31 As Moses the servant of the LORD commanded the children of
Israel, as it is written in the book of the law of Moses, an altar of
whole stones, over which no man hath lift up any iron: and they
offered thereon burnt offerings unto the LORD, and sacrificed peace
offerings.

8:32 And he wrote there upon the stones a copy of the law of Moses,
which he wrote in the presence of the children of Israel.

8:33 And all Israel, and their elders, and officers, and their judges,
stood on this side the ark and on that side before the priests the
Levites, which bare the ark of the covenant of the LORD, as well the
stranger, as he that was born among them; half of them over against
mount Gerizim, and half of them over against mount Ebal; as Moses the
servant of the LORD had commanded before, that they should bless the
people of Israel.

8:34 And afterward he read all the words of the law, the blessings and
cursings, according to all that is written in the book of the law.

8:35 There was not a word of all that Moses commanded, which Joshua
read not before all the congregation of Israel, with the women, and
the little ones, and the strangers that were conversant among them.

9:1 And it came to pass, when all the kings which were on this side
Jordan, in the hills, and in the valleys, and in all the coasts of the
great sea over against Lebanon, the Hittite, and the Amorite, the
Canaanite, the Perizzite, the Hivite, and the Jebusite, heard thereof;
9:2 That they gathered themselves together, to fight with Joshua and
with Israel, with one accord.

9:3 And when the inhabitants of Gibeon heard what Joshua had done unto
Jericho and to Ai, 9:4 They did work wilily, and went and made as if
they had been ambassadors, and took old sacks upon their asses, and
wine bottles, old, and rent, and bound up; 9:5 And old shoes and
clouted upon their feet, and old garments upon them; and all the bread
of their provision was dry and mouldy.

9:6 And they went to Joshua unto the camp at Gilgal, and said unto
him, and to the men of Israel, We be come from a far country: now
therefore make ye a league with us.

9:7 And the men of Israel said unto the Hivites, Peradventure ye dwell
among us; and how shall we make a league with you?  9:8 And they said
unto Joshua, We are thy servants. And Joshua said unto them, Who are
ye? and from whence come ye?  9:9 And they said unto him, From a very
far country thy servants are come because of the name of the LORD thy
God: for we have heard the fame of him, and all that he did in Egypt,
9:10 And all that he did to the two kings of the Amorites, that were
beyond Jordan, to Sihon king of Heshbon, and to Og king of Bashan,
which was at Ashtaroth.

9:11 Wherefore our elders and all the inhabitants of our country spake
to us, saying, Take victuals with you for the journey, and go to meet
them, and say unto them, We are your servants: therefore now make ye a
league with us.

9:12 This our bread we took hot for our provision out of our houses on
the day we came forth to go unto you; but now, behold, it is dry, and
it is mouldy: 9:13 And these bottles of wine, which we filled, were
new; and, behold, they be rent: and these our garments and our shoes
are become old by reason of the very long journey.

9:14 And the men took of their victuals, and asked not counsel at the
mouth of the LORD.

9:15 And Joshua made peace with them, and made a league with them, to
let them live: and the princes of the congregation sware unto them.

9:16 And it came to pass at the end of three days after they had made
a league with them, that they heard that they were their neighbours,
and that they dwelt among them.

9:17 And the children of Israel journeyed, and came unto their cities
on the third day. Now their cities were Gibeon, and Chephirah, and
Beeroth, and Kirjathjearim.

9:18 And the children of Israel smote them not, because the princes of
the congregation had sworn unto them by the LORD God of Israel. And
all the congregation murmured against the princes.

9:19 But all the princes said unto all the congregation, We have sworn
unto them by the LORD God of Israel: now therefore we may not touch
them.

9:20 This we will do to them; we will even let them live, lest wrath
be upon us, because of the oath which we sware unto them.

9:21 And the princes said unto them, Let them live; but let them be
hewers of wood and drawers of water unto all the congregation; as the
princes had promised them.

9:22 And Joshua called for them, and he spake unto them, saying,
Wherefore have ye beguiled us, saying, We are very far from you; when
ye dwell among us?  9:23 Now therefore ye are cursed, and there shall
none of you be freed from being bondmen, and hewers of wood and
drawers of water for the house of my God.

9:24 And they answered Joshua, and said, Because it was certainly told
thy servants, how that the LORD thy God commanded his servant Moses to
give you all the land, and to destroy all the inhabitants of the land
from before you, therefore we were sore afraid of our lives because of
you, and have done this thing.

9:25 And now, behold, we are in thine hand: as it seemeth good and
right unto thee to do unto us, do.

9:26 And so did he unto them, and delivered them out of the hand of
the children of Israel, that they slew them not.

9:27 And Joshua made them that day hewers of wood and drawers of water
for the congregation, and for the altar of the LORD, even unto this
day, in the place which he should choose.

10:1 Now it came to pass, when Adonizedec king of Jerusalem had heard
how Joshua had taken Ai, and had utterly destroyed it; as he had done
to Jericho and her king, so he had done to Ai and her king; and how
the inhabitants of Gibeon had made peace with Israel, and were among
them; 10:2 That they feared greatly, because Gibeon was a great city,
as one of the royal cities, and because it was greater than Ai, and
all the men thereof were mighty.

10:3 Wherefore Adonizedec king of Jerusalem, sent unto Hoham king of
Hebron, and unto Piram king of Jarmuth, and unto Japhia king of
Lachish, and unto Debir king of Eglon, saying, 10:4 Come up unto me,
and help me, that we may smite Gibeon: for it hath made peace with
Joshua and with the children of Israel.

10:5 Therefore the five kings of the Amorites, the king of Jerusalem,
the king of Hebron, the king of Jarmuth, the king of Lachish, the king
of Eglon, gathered themselves together, and went up, they and all
their hosts, and encamped before Gibeon, and made war against it.

10:6 And the men of Gibeon sent unto Joshua to the camp to Gilgal,
saying, Slack not thy hand from thy servants; come up to us quickly,
and save us, and help us: for all the kings of the Amorites that dwell
in the mountains are gathered together against us.

10:7 So Joshua ascended from Gilgal, he, and all the people of war
with him, and all the mighty men of valour.

10:8 And the LORD said unto Joshua, Fear them not: for I have
delivered them into thine hand; there shall not a man of them stand
before thee.

10:9 Joshua therefore came unto them suddenly, and went up from Gilgal
all night.

10:10 And the LORD discomfited them before Israel, and slew them with
a great slaughter at Gibeon, and chased them along the way that goeth
up to Bethhoron, and smote them to Azekah, and unto Makkedah.

10:11 And it came to pass, as they fled from before Israel, and were
in the going down to Bethhoron, that the LORD cast down great stones
from heaven upon them unto Azekah, and they died: they were more which
died with hailstones than they whom the children of Israel slew with
the sword.

10:12 Then spake Joshua to the LORD in the day when the LORD delivered
up the Amorites before the children of Israel, and he said in the
sight of Israel, Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in
the valley of Ajalon.

10:13 And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people
had avenged themselves upon their enemies. Is not this written in the
book of Jasher? So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and
hasted not to go down about a whole day.

10:14 And there was no day like that before it or after it, that the
LORD hearkened unto the voice of a man: for the LORD fought for
Israel.

10:15 And Joshua returned, and all Israel with him, unto the camp to
Gilgal.

10:16 But these five kings fled, and hid themselves in a cave at
Makkedah.

10:17 And it was told Joshua, saying, The five kings are found hid in
a cave at Makkedah.

10:18 And Joshua said, Roll great stones upon the mouth of the cave,
and set men by it for to keep them: 10:19 And stay ye not, but pursue
after your enemies, and smite the hindmost of them; suffer them not to
enter into their cities: for the LORD your God hath delivered them
into your hand.

10:20 And it came to pass, when Joshua and the children of Israel had
made an end of slaying them with a very great slaughter, till they
were consumed, that the rest which remained of them entered into
fenced cities.

10:21 And all the people returned to the camp to Joshua at Makkedah in
peace: none moved his tongue against any of the children of Israel.

10:22 Then said Joshua, Open the mouth of the cave, and bring out
those five kings unto me out of the cave.

10:23 And they did so, and brought forth those five kings unto him out
of the cave, the king of Jerusalem, the king of Hebron, the king of
Jarmuth, the king of Lachish, and the king of Eglon.

10:24 And it came to pass, when they brought out those kings unto
Joshua, that Joshua called for all the men of Israel, and said unto
the captains of the men of war which went with him, Come near, put
your feet upon the necks of these kings. And they came near, and put
their feet upon the necks of them.

10:25 And Joshua said unto them, Fear not, nor be dismayed, be strong
and of good courage: for thus shall the LORD do to all your enemies
against whom ye fight.

10:26 And afterward Joshua smote them, and slew them, and hanged them
on five trees: and they were hanging upon the trees until the evening.

10:27 And it came to pass at the time of the going down of the sun,
that Joshua commanded, and they took them down off the trees, and cast
them into the cave wherein they had been hid, and laid great stones in
the cave's mouth, which remain until this very day.

10:28 And that day Joshua took Makkedah, and smote it with the edge of
the sword, and the king thereof he utterly destroyed, them, and all
the souls that were therein; he let none remain: and he did to the
king of Makkedah as he did unto the king of Jericho.

10:29 Then Joshua passed from Makkedah, and all Israel with him, unto
Libnah, and fought against Libnah: 10:30 And the LORD delivered it
also, and the king thereof, into the hand of Israel; and he smote it
with the edge of the sword, and all the souls that were therein; he
let none remain in it; but did unto the king thereof as he did unto
the king of Jericho.

10:31 And Joshua passed from Libnah, and all Israel with him, unto
Lachish, and encamped against it, and fought against it: 10:32 And the
LORD delivered Lachish into the hand of Israel, which took it on the
second day, and smote it with the edge of the sword, and all the souls
that were therein, according to all that he had done to Libnah.

10:33 Then Horam king of Gezer came up to help Lachish; and Joshua
smote him and his people, until he had left him none remaining.

10:34 And from Lachish Joshua passed unto Eglon, and all Israel with
him; and they encamped against it, and fought against it: 10:35 And
they took it on that day, and smote it with the edge of the sword, and
all the souls that were therein he utterly destroyed that day,
according to all that he had done to Lachish.

10:36 And Joshua went up from Eglon, and all Israel with him, unto
Hebron; and they fought against it: 10:37 And they took it, and smote
it with the edge of the sword, and the king thereof, and all the
cities thereof, and all the souls that were therein; he left none
remaining, according to all that he had done to Eglon; but destroyed
it utterly, and all the souls that were therein.

10:38 And Joshua returned, and all Israel with him, to Debir; and
fought against it: 10:39 And he took it, and the king thereof, and all
the cities thereof; and they smote them with the edge of the sword,
and utterly destroyed all the souls that were therein; he left none
remaining: as he had done to Hebron, so he did to Debir, and to the
king thereof; as he had done also to Libnah, and to her king.

10:40 So Joshua smote all the country of the hills, and of the south,
and of the vale, and of the springs, and all their kings: he left none
remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the LORD God of
Israel commanded.

10:41 And Joshua smote them from Kadeshbarnea even unto Gaza, and all
the country of Goshen, even unto Gibeon.

10:42 And all these kings and their land did Joshua take at one time,
because the LORD God of Israel fought for Israel.

10:43 And Joshua returned, and all Israel with him, unto the camp to
Gilgal.

11:1 And it came to pass, when Jabin king of Hazor had heard those
things, that he sent to Jobab king of Madon, and to the king of
Shimron, and to the king of Achshaph, 11:2 And to the kings that were
on the north of the mountains, and of the plains south of Chinneroth,
and in the valley, and in the borders of Dor on the west, 11:3 And to
the Canaanite on the east and on the west, and to the Amorite, and the
Hittite, and the Perizzite, and the Jebusite in the mountains, and to
the Hivite under Hermon in the land of Mizpeh.

11:4 And they went out, they and all their hosts with them, much
people, even as the sand that is upon the sea shore in multitude, with
horses and chariots very many.

11:5 And when all these kings were met together, they came and pitched
together at the waters of Merom, to fight against Israel.

11:6 And the LORD said unto Joshua, Be not afraid because of them: for
to morrow about this time will I deliver them up all slain before
Israel: thou shalt hough their horses, and burn their chariots with
fire.

11:7 So Joshua came, and all the people of war with him, against them
by the waters of Merom suddenly; and they fell upon them.

11:8 And the LORD delivered them into the hand of Israel, who smote
them, and chased them unto great Zidon, and unto Misrephothmaim, and
unto the valley of Mizpeh eastward; and they smote them, until they
left them none remaining.

11:9 And Joshua did unto them as the LORD bade him: he houghed their
horses, and burnt their chariots with fire.

11:10 And Joshua at that time turned back, and took Hazor, and smote
the king thereof with the sword: for Hazor beforetime was the head of
all those kingdoms.

11:11 And they smote all the souls that were therein with the edge of
the sword, utterly destroying them: there was not any left to breathe:
and he burnt Hazor with fire.

11:12 And all the cities of those kings, and all the kings of them,
did Joshua take, and smote them with the edge of the sword, and he
utterly destroyed them, as Moses the servant of the LORD commanded.

11:13 But as for the cities that stood still in their strength, Israel
burned none of them, save Hazor only; that did Joshua burn.

11:14 And all the spoil of these cities, and the cattle, the children
of Israel took for a prey unto themselves; but every man they smote
with the edge of the sword, until they had destroyed them, neither
left they any to breathe.

11:15 As the LORD commanded Moses his servant, so did Moses command
Joshua, and so did Joshua; he left nothing undone of all that the LORD
commanded Moses.

11:16 So Joshua took all that land, the hills, and all the south
country, and all the land of Goshen, and the valley, and the plain,
and the mountain of Israel, and the valley of the same; 11:17 Even
from the mount Halak, that goeth up to Seir, even unto Baalgad in the
valley of Lebanon under mount Hermon: and all their kings he took, and
smote them, and slew them.

11:18 Joshua made war a long time with all those kings.

11:19 There was not a city that made peace with the children of
Israel, save the Hivites the inhabitants of Gibeon: all other they
took in battle.

11:20 For it was of the LORD to harden their hearts, that they should
come against Israel in battle, that he might destroy them utterly, and
that they might have no favour, but that he might destroy them, as the
LORD commanded Moses.

11:21 And at that time came Joshua, and cut off the Anakims from the
mountains, from Hebron, from Debir, from Anab, and from all the
mountains of Judah, and from all the mountains of Israel: Joshua
destroyed them utterly with their cities.

11:22 There was none of the Anakims left in the land of the children
of Israel: only in Gaza, in Gath, and in Ashdod, there remained.

11:23 So Joshua took the whole land, according to all that the LORD
said unto Moses; and Joshua gave it for an inheritance unto Israel
according to their divisions by their tribes. And the land rested from
war.

12:1 Now these are the kings of the land, which the children of Israel
smote, and possessed their land on the other side Jordan toward the
rising of the sun, from the river Arnon unto mount Hermon, and all the
plain on the east: 12:2 Sihon king of the Amorites, who dwelt in
Heshbon, and ruled from Aroer, which is upon the bank of the river
Arnon, and from the middle of the river, and from half Gilead, even
unto the river Jabbok, which is the border of the children of Ammon;
12:3 And from the plain to the sea of Chinneroth on the east, and unto
the sea of the plain, even the salt sea on the east, the way to
Bethjeshimoth; and from the south, under Ashdothpisgah: 12:4 And the
coast of Og king of Bashan, which was of the remnant of the giants,
that dwelt at Ashtaroth and at Edrei, 12:5 And reigned in mount
Hermon, and in Salcah, and in all Bashan, unto the border of the
Geshurites and the Maachathites, and half Gilead, the border of Sihon
king of Heshbon.

12:6 Them did Moses the servant of the LORD and the children of Israel
smite: and Moses the servant of the LORD gave it for a possession unto
the Reubenites, and the Gadites, and the half tribe of Manasseh.

12:7 And these are the kings of the country which Joshua and the
children of Israel smote on this side Jordan on the west, from Baalgad
in the valley of Lebanon even unto the mount Halak, that goeth up to
Seir; which Joshua gave unto the tribes of Israel for a possession
according to their divisions; 12:8 In the mountains, and in the
valleys, and in the plains, and in the springs, and in the wilderness,
and in the south country; the Hittites, the Amorites, and the
Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites: 12:9 The
king of Jericho, one; the king of Ai, which is beside Bethel, one;
12:10 The king of Jerusalem, one; the king of Hebron, one; 12:11 The
king of Jarmuth, one; the king of Lachish, one; 12:12 The king of
Eglon, one; the king of Gezer, one; 12:13 The king of Debir, one; the
king of Geder, one; 12:14 The king of Hormah, one; the king of Arad,
one; 12:15 The king of Libnah, one; the king of Adullam, one; 12:16
The king of Makkedah, one; the king of Bethel, one; 12:17 The king of
Tappuah, one; the king of Hepher, one; 12:18 The king of Aphek, one;
the king of Lasharon, one; 12:19 The king of Madon, one; the king of
Hazor, one; 12:20 The king of Shimronmeron, one; the king of Achshaph,
one; 12:21 The king of Taanach, one; the king of Megiddo, one; 12:22
The king of Kedesh, one; the king of Jokneam of Carmel, one; 12:23 The
king of Dor in the coast of Dor, one; the king of the nations of
Gilgal, one; 12:24 The king of Tirzah, one: all the kings thirty and
one.

13:1 Now Joshua was old and stricken in years; and the LORD said unto
him, Thou art old and stricken in years, and there remaineth yet very
much land to be possessed.

13:2 This is the land that yet remaineth: all the borders of the
Philistines, and all Geshuri, 13:3 From Sihor, which is before Egypt,
even unto the borders of Ekron northward, which is counted to the
Canaanite: five lords of the Philistines; the Gazathites, and the
Ashdothites, the Eshkalonites, the Gittites, and the Ekronites; also
the Avites: 13:4 From the south, all the land of the Canaanites, and
Mearah that is beside the Sidonians unto Aphek, to the borders of the
Amorites: 13:5 And the land of the Giblites, and all Lebanon, toward
the sunrising, from Baalgad under mount Hermon unto the entering into
Hamath.

13:6 All the inhabitants of the hill country from Lebanon unto
Misrephothmaim, and all the Sidonians, them will I drive out from
before the children of Israel: only divide thou it by lot unto the
Israelites for an inheritance, as I have commanded thee.

13:7 Now therefore divide this land for an inheritance unto the nine
tribes, and the half tribe of Manasseh, 13:8 With whom the Reubenites
and the Gadites have received their inheritance, which Moses gave
them, beyond Jordan eastward, even as Moses the servant of the LORD
gave them; 13:9 From Aroer, that is upon the bank of the river Arnon,
and the city that is in the midst of the river, and all the plain of
Medeba unto Dibon; 13:10 And all the cities of Sihon king of the
Amorites, which reigned in Heshbon, unto the border of the children of
Ammon; 13:11 And Gilead, and the border of the Geshurites and
Maachathites, and all mount Hermon, and all Bashan unto Salcah; 13:12
All the kingdom of Og in Bashan, which reigned in Ashtaroth and in
Edrei, who remained of the remnant of the giants: for these did Moses
smite, and cast them out.

13:13 Nevertheless the children of Israel expelled not the Geshurites,
nor the Maachathites: but the Geshurites and the Maachathites dwell
among the Israelites until this day.

13:14 Only unto the tribes of Levi he gave none inheritance; the
sacrifices of the LORD God of Israel made by fire are their
inheritance, as he said unto them.

13:15 And Moses gave unto the tribe of the children of Reuben
inheritance according to their families.

13:16 And their coast was from Aroer, that is on the bank of the river
Arnon, and the city that is in the midst of the river, and all the
plain by Medeba; 13:17 Heshbon, and all her cities that are in the
plain; Dibon, and Bamothbaal, and Bethbaalmeon, 13:18 And Jahaza, and
Kedemoth, and Mephaath, 13:19 And Kirjathaim, and Sibmah, and
Zarethshahar in the mount of the valley, 13:20 And Bethpeor, and
Ashdothpisgah, and Bethjeshimoth, 13:21 And all the cities of the
plain, and all the kingdom of Sihon king of the Amorites, which
reigned in Heshbon, whom Moses smote with the princes of Midian, Evi,
and Rekem, and Zur, and Hur, and Reba, which were dukes of Sihon,
dwelling in the country.

13:22 Balaam also the son of Beor, the soothsayer, did the children of
Israel slay with the sword among them that were slain by them.

13:23 And the border of the children of Reuben was Jordan, and the
border thereof. This was the inheritance of the children of Reuben
after their families, the cities and the villages thereof.

13:24 And Moses gave inheritance unto the tribe of Gad, even unto the
children of Gad according to their families.

13:25 And their coast was Jazer, and all the cities of Gilead, and
half the land of the children of Ammon, unto Aroer that is before
Rabbah; 13:26 And from Heshbon unto Ramathmizpeh, and Betonim; and
from Mahanaim unto the border of Debir; 13:27 And in the valley,
Betharam, and Bethnimrah, and Succoth, and Zaphon, the rest of the
kingdom of Sihon king of Heshbon, Jordan and his border, even unto the
edge of the sea of Chinnereth on the other side Jordan eastward.

13:28 This is the inheritance of the children of Gad after their
families, the cities, and their villages.

13:29 And Moses gave inheritance unto the half tribe of Manasseh: and
this was the possession of the half tribe of the children of Manasseh
by their families.

13:30 And their coast was from Mahanaim, all Bashan, all the kingdom
of Og king of Bashan, and all the towns of Jair, which are in Bashan,
threescore cities: 13:31 And half Gilead, and Ashtaroth, and Edrei,
cities of the kingdom of Og in Bashan, were pertaining unto the
children of Machir the son of Manasseh, even to the one half of the
children of Machir by their families.

13:32 These are the countries which Moses did distribute for
inheritance in the plains of Moab, on the other side Jordan, by
Jericho, eastward.

13:33 But unto the tribe of Levi Moses gave not any inheritance: the
LORD God of Israel was their inheritance, as he said unto them.

14:1 And these are the countries which the children of Israel
inherited in the land of Canaan, which Eleazar the priest, and Joshua
the son of Nun, and the heads of the fathers of the tribes of the
children of Israel, distributed for inheritance to them.

14:2 By lot was their inheritance, as the LORD commanded by the hand
of Moses, for the nine tribes, and for the half tribe.

14:3 For Moses had given the inheritance of two tribes and an half
tribe on the other side Jordan: but unto the Levites he gave none
inheritance among them.

14:4 For the children of Joseph were two tribes, Manasseh and Ephraim:
therefore they gave no part unto the Levites in the land, save cities
to dwell in, with their suburbs for their cattle and for their
substance.

14:5 As the LORD commanded Moses, so the children of Israel did, and
they divided the land.

14:6 Then the children of Judah came unto Joshua in Gilgal: and Caleb
the son of Jephunneh the Kenezite said unto him, Thou knowest the
thing that the LORD said unto Moses the man of God concerning me and
thee in Kadeshbarnea.

14:7 Forty years old was I when Moses the servant of the LORD sent me
from Kadeshbarnea to espy out the land; and I brought him word again
as it was in mine heart.

14:8 Nevertheless my brethren that went up with me made the heart of
the people melt: but I wholly followed the LORD my God.

14:9 And Moses sware on that day, saying, Surely the land whereon thy
feet have trodden shall be thine inheritance, and thy children's for
ever, because thou hast wholly followed the LORD my God.

14:10 And now, behold, the LORD hath kept me alive, as he said, these
forty and five years, even since the LORD spake this word unto Moses,
while the children of Israel wandered in the wilderness: and now, lo,
I am this day fourscore and five years old.

14:11 As yet I am as strong this day as I was in the day that Moses
sent me: as my strength was then, even so is my strength now, for war,
both to go out, and to come in.

14:12 Now therefore give me this mountain, whereof the LORD spake in
that day; for thou heardest in that day how the Anakims were there,
and that the cities were great and fenced: if so be the LORD will be
with me, then I shall be able to drive them out, as the LORD said.

14:13 And Joshua blessed him, and gave unto Caleb the son of Jephunneh
Hebron for an inheritance.

14:14 Hebron therefore became the inheritance of Caleb the son of
Jephunneh the Kenezite unto this day, because that he wholly followed
the LORD God of Israel.

14:15 And the name of Hebron before was Kirjatharba; which Arba was a
great man among the Anakims. And the land had rest from war.

15:1 This then was the lot of the tribe of the children of Judah by
their families; even to the border of Edom the wilderness of Zin
southward was the uttermost part of the south coast.

15:2 And their south border was from the shore of the salt sea, from
the bay that looketh southward: 15:3 And it went out to the south side
to Maalehacrabbim, and passed along to Zin, and ascended up on the
south side unto Kadeshbarnea, and passed along to Hezron, and went up
to Adar, and fetched a compass to Karkaa: 15:4 From thence it passed
toward Azmon, and went out unto the river of Egypt; and the goings out
of that coast were at the sea: this shall be your south coast.

15:5 And the east border was the salt sea, even unto the end of
Jordan.

And their border in the north quarter was from the bay of the sea at
the uttermost part of Jordan: 15:6 And the border went up to
Bethhogla, and passed along by the north of Betharabah; and the border
went up to the stone of Bohan the son of Reuben: 15:7 And the border
went up toward Debir from the valley of Achor, and so northward,
looking toward Gilgal, that is before the going up to Adummim, which
is on the south side of the river: and the border passed toward the
waters of Enshemesh, and the goings out thereof were at Enrogel: 15:8
And the border went up by the valley of the son of Hinnom unto the
south side of the Jebusite; the same is Jerusalem: and the border went
up to the top of the mountain that lieth before the valley of Hinnom
westward, which is at the end of the valley of the giants northward:
15:9 And the border was drawn from the top of the hill unto the
fountain of the water of Nephtoah, and went out to the cities of mount
Ephron; and the border was drawn to Baalah, which is Kirjathjearim:
15:10 And the border compassed from Baalah westward unto mount Seir,
and passed along unto the side of mount Jearim, which is Chesalon, on
the north side, and went down to Bethshemesh, and passed on to Timnah:
15:11 And the border went out unto the side of Ekron northward: and
the border was drawn to Shicron, and passed along to mount Baalah, and
went out unto Jabneel; and the goings out of the border were at the
sea.

15:12 And the west border was to the great sea, and the coast thereof.

This is the coast of the children of Judah round about according to
their families.

15:13 And unto Caleb the son of Jephunneh he gave a part among the
children of Judah, according to the commandment of the LORD to Joshua,
even the city of Arba the father of Anak, which city is Hebron.

15:14 And Caleb drove thence the three sons of Anak, Sheshai, and
Ahiman, and Talmai, the children of Anak.

15:15 And he went up thence to the inhabitants of Debir: and the name
of Debir before was Kirjathsepher.

15:16 And Caleb said, He that smiteth Kirjathsepher, and taketh it, to
him will I give Achsah my daughter to wife.

15:17 And Othniel the son of Kenaz, the brother of Caleb, took it: and
he gave him Achsah his daughter to wife.

15:18 And it came to pass, as she came unto him, that she moved him to
ask of her father a field: and she lighted off her ass; and Caleb said
unto her, What wouldest thou?  15:19 Who answered, Give me a blessing;
for thou hast given me a south land; give me also springs of water.
And he gave her the upper springs, and the nether springs.

15:20 This is the inheritance of the tribe of the children of Judah
according to their families.

15:21 And the uttermost cities of the tribe of the children of Judah
toward the coast of Edom southward were Kabzeel, and Eder, and Jagur,
15:22 And Kinah, and Dimonah, and Adadah, 15:23 And Kedesh, and Hazor,
and Ithnan, 15:24 Ziph, and Telem, and Bealoth, 15:25 And Hazor,
Hadattah, and Kerioth, and Hezron, which is Hazor, 15:26 Amam, and
Shema, and Moladah, 15:27 And Hazargaddah, and Heshmon, and Bethpalet,
15:28 And Hazarshual, and Beersheba, and Bizjothjah, 15:29 Baalah, and
Iim, and Azem, 15:30 And Eltolad, and Chesil, and Hormah, 15:31 And
Ziklag, and Madmannah, and Sansannah, 15:32 And Lebaoth, and Shilhim,
and Ain, and Rimmon: all the cities are twenty and nine, with their
villages: 15:33 And in the valley, Eshtaol, and Zoreah, and Ashnah,
15:34 And Zanoah, and Engannim, Tappuah, and Enam, 15:35 Jarmuth, and
Adullam, Socoh, and Azekah, 15:36 And Sharaim, and Adithaim, and
Gederah, and Gederothaim; fourteen cities with their villages: 15:37
Zenan, and Hadashah, and Migdalgad, 15:38 And Dilean, and Mizpeh, and
Joktheel, 15:39 Lachish, and Bozkath, and Eglon, 15:40 And Cabbon, and
Lahmam, and Kithlish, 15:41 And Gederoth, Bethdagon, and Naamah, and
Makkedah; sixteen cities with their villages: 15:42 Libnah, and Ether,
and Ashan, 15:43 And Jiphtah, and Ashnah, and Nezib, 15:44 And Keilah,
and Achzib, and Mareshah; nine cities with their villages: 15:45
Ekron, with her towns and her villages: 15:46 From Ekron even unto the
sea, all that lay near Ashdod, with their villages: 15:47 Ashdod with
her towns and her villages, Gaza with her towns and her villages, unto
the river of Egypt, and the great sea, and the border thereof: 15:48
And in the mountains, Shamir, and Jattir, and Socoh, 15:49 And Dannah,
and Kirjathsannah, which is Debir, 15:50 And Anab, and Eshtemoh, and
Anim, 15:51 And Goshen, and Holon, and Giloh; eleven cities with their
villages: 15:52 Arab, and Dumah, and Eshean, 15:53 And Janum, and
Bethtappuah, and Aphekah, 15:54 And Humtah, and Kirjatharba, which is
Hebron, and Zior; nine cities with their villages: 15:55 Maon, Carmel,
and Ziph, and Juttah, 15:56 And Jezreel, and Jokdeam, and Zanoah,
15:57 Cain, Gibeah, and Timnah; ten cities with their villages: 15:58
Halhul, Bethzur, and Gedor, 15:59 And Maarath, and Bethanoth, and
Eltekon; six cities with their villages: 15:60 Kirjathbaal, which is
Kirjathjearim, and Rabbah; two cities with their villages: 15:61 In
the wilderness, Betharabah, Middin, and Secacah, 15:62 And Nibshan,
and the city of Salt, and Engedi; six cities with their villages.

15:63 As for the Jebusites the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the children
of Judah could not drive them out; but the Jebusites dwell with the
children of Judah at Jerusalem unto this day.

16:1 And the lot of the children of Joseph fell from Jordan by
Jericho, unto the water of Jericho on the east, to the wilderness that
goeth up from Jericho throughout mount Bethel, 16:2 And goeth out from
Bethel to Luz, and passeth along unto the borders of Archi to Ataroth,
16:3 And goeth down westward to the coast of Japhleti, unto the coast
of Bethhoron the nether, and to Gezer; and the goings out thereof are
at the sea.

16:4 So the children of Joseph, Manasseh and Ephraim, took their
inheritance.

16:5 And the border of the children of Ephraim according to their
families was thus: even the border of their inheritance on the east
side was Atarothaddar, unto Bethhoron the upper; 16:6 And the border
went out toward the sea to Michmethah on the north side; and the
border went about eastward unto Taanathshiloh, and passed by it on the
east to Janohah; 16:7 And it went down from Janohah to Ataroth, and to
Naarath, and came to Jericho, and went out at Jordan.

16:8 The border went out from Tappuah westward unto the river Kanah;
and the goings out thereof were at the sea. This is the inheritance of
the tribe of the children of Ephraim by their families.

16:9 And the separate cities for the children of Ephraim were among
the inheritance of the children of Manasseh, all the cities with their
villages.

16:10 And they drave not out the Canaanites that dwelt in Gezer: but
the Canaanites dwell among the Ephraimites unto this day, and serve
under tribute.

17:1 There was also a lot for the tribe of Manasseh; for he was the
firstborn of Joseph; to wit, for Machir the firstborn of Manasseh, the
father of Gilead: because he was a man of war, therefore he had Gilead
and Bashan.

17:2 There was also a lot for the rest of the children of Manasseh by
their families; for the children of Abiezer, and for the children of
Helek, and for the children of Asriel, and for the children of
Shechem, and for the children of Hepher, and for the children of
Shemida: these were the male children of Manasseh the son of Joseph by
their families.

17:3 But Zelophehad, the son of Hepher, the son of Gilead, the son of
Machir, the son of Manasseh, had no sons, but daughters: and these are
the names of his daughters, Mahlah, and Noah, Hoglah, Milcah, and
Tirzah.

17:4 And they came near before Eleazar the priest, and before Joshua
the son of Nun, and before the princes, saying, The LORD commanded
Moses to give us an inheritance among our brethren. Therefore
according to the commandment of the LORD he gave them an inheritance
among the brethren of their father.

17:5 And there fell ten portions to Manasseh, beside the land of
Gilead and Bashan, which were on the other side Jordan; 17:6 Because
the daughters of Manasseh had an inheritance among his sons: and the
rest of Manasseh's sons had the land of Gilead.

17:7 And the coast of Manasseh was from Asher to Michmethah, that
lieth before Shechem; and the border went along on the right hand unto
the inhabitants of Entappuah.

17:8 Now Manasseh had the land of Tappuah: but Tappuah on the border
of Manasseh belonged to the children of Ephraim; 17:9 And the coast
descended unto the river Kanah, southward of the river: these cities
of Ephraim are among the cities of Manasseh: the coast of Manasseh
also was on the north side of the river, and the outgoings of it were
at the sea: 17:10 Southward it was Ephraim's, and northward it was
Manasseh's, and the sea is his border; and they met together in Asher
on the north, and in Issachar on the east.

17:11 And Manasseh had in Issachar and in Asher Bethshean and her
towns, and Ibleam and her towns, and the inhabitants of Dor and her
towns, and the inhabitants of Endor and her towns, and the inhabitants
of Taanach and her towns, and the inhabitants of Megiddo and her
towns, even three countries.

17:12 Yet the children of Manasseh could not drive out the inhabitants
of those cities; but the Canaanites would dwell in that land.

17:13 Yet it came to pass, when the children of Israel were waxen
strong, that they put the Canaanites to tribute, but did not utterly
drive them out.

17:14 And the children of Joseph spake unto Joshua, saying, Why hast
thou given me but one lot and one portion to inherit, seeing I am a
great people, forasmuch as the LORD hath blessed me hitherto?  17:15
And Joshua answered them, If thou be a great people, then get thee up
to the wood country, and cut down for thyself there in the land of the
Perizzites and of the giants, if mount Ephraim be too narrow for thee.

17:16 And the children of Joseph said, The hill is not enough for us:
and all the Canaanites that dwell in the land of the valley have
chariots of iron, both they who are of Bethshean and her towns, and
they who are of the valley of Jezreel.

17:17 And Joshua spake unto the house of Joseph, even to Ephraim and
to Manasseh, saying, Thou art a great people, and hast great power:
thou shalt not have one lot only: 17:18 But the mountain shall be
thine; for it is a wood, and thou shalt cut it down: and the outgoings
of it shall be thine: for thou shalt drive out the Canaanites, though
they have iron chariots, and though they be strong.

18:1 And the whole congregation of the children of Israel assembled
together at Shiloh, and set up the tabernacle of the congregation
there. And the land was subdued before them.

18:2 And there remained among the children of Israel seven tribes,
which had not yet received their inheritance.

18:3 And Joshua said unto the children of Israel, How long are ye
slack to go to possess the land, which the LORD God of your fathers
hath given you?  18:4 Give out from among you three men for each
tribe: and I will send them, and they shall rise, and go through the
land, and describe it according to the inheritance of them; and they
shall come again to me.

18:5 And they shall divide it into seven parts: Judah shall abide in
their coast on the south, and the house of Joseph shall abide in their
coasts on the north.

18:6 Ye shall therefore describe the land into seven parts, and bring
the description hither to me, that I may cast lots for you here before
the LORD our God.

18:7 But the Levites have no part among you; for the priesthood of the
LORD is their inheritance: and Gad, and Reuben, and half the tribe of
Manasseh, have received their inheritance beyond Jordan on the east,
which Moses the servant of the LORD gave them.

18:8 And the men arose, and went away: and Joshua charged them that
went to describe the land, saying, Go and walk through the land, and
describe it, and come again to me, that I may here cast lots for you
before the LORD in Shiloh.

18:9 And the men went and passed through the land, and described it by
cities into seven parts in a book, and came again to Joshua to the
host at Shiloh.

18:10 And Joshua cast lots for them in Shiloh before the LORD: and
there Joshua divided the land unto the children of Israel according to
their divisions.

18:11 And the lot of the tribe of the children of Benjamin came up
according to their families: and the coast of their lot came forth
between the children of Judah and the children of Joseph.

18:12 And their border on the north side was from Jordan; and the
border went up to the side of Jericho on the north side, and went up
through the mountains westward; and the goings out thereof were at the
wilderness of Bethaven.

18:13 And the border went over from thence toward Luz, to the side of
Luz, which is Bethel, southward; and the border descended to
Atarothadar, near the hill that lieth on the south side of the nether
Bethhoron.

18:14 And the border was drawn thence, and compassed the corner of the
sea southward, from the hill that lieth before Bethhoron southward;
and the goings out thereof were at Kirjathbaal, which is
Kirjathjearim, a city of the children of Judah: this was the west
quarter.

18:15 And the south quarter was from the end of Kirjathjearim, and the
border went out on the west, and went out to the well of waters of
Nephtoah: 18:16 And the border came down to the end of the mountain
that lieth before the valley of the son of Hinnom, and which is in the
valley of the giants on the north, and descended to the valley of
Hinnom, to the side of Jebusi on the south, and descended to Enrogel,
18:17 And was drawn from the north, and went forth to Enshemesh, and
went forth toward Geliloth, which is over against the going up of
Adummim, and descended to the stone of Bohan the son of Reuben, 18:18
And passed along toward the side over against Arabah northward, and
went down unto Arabah: 18:19 And the border passed along to the side
of Bethhoglah northward: and the outgoings of the border were at the
north bay of the salt sea at the south end of Jordan: this was the
south coast.

18:20 And Jordan was the border of it on the east side. This was the
inheritance of the children of Benjamin, by the coasts thereof round
about, according to their families.

18:21 Now the cities of the tribe of the children of Benjamin
according to their families were Jericho, and Bethhoglah, and the
valley of Keziz, 18:22 And Betharabah, and Zemaraim, and Bethel, 18:23
And Avim, and Pharah, and Ophrah, 18:24 And Chepharhaammonai, and
Ophni, and Gaba; twelve cities with their villages: 18:25 Gibeon, and
Ramah, and Beeroth, 18:26 And Mizpeh, and Chephirah, and Mozah, 18:27
And Rekem, and Irpeel, and Taralah, 18:28 And Zelah, Eleph, and
Jebusi, which is Jerusalem, Gibeath, and Kirjath; fourteen cities with
their villages. This is the inheritance of the children of Benjamin
according to their families.

19:1 And the second lot came forth to Simeon, even for the tribe of
the children of Simeon according to their families: and their
inheritance was within the inheritance of the children of Judah.

19:2 And they had in their inheritance Beersheba, and Sheba, and
Moladah, 19:3 And Hazarshual, and Balah, and Azem, 19:4 And Eltolad,
and Bethul, and Hormah, 19:5 And Ziklag, and Bethmarcaboth, and
Hazarsusah, 19:6 And Bethlebaoth, and Sharuhen; thirteen cities and
their villages: 19:7 Ain, Remmon, and Ether, and Ashan; four cities
and their villages: 19:8 And all the villages that were round about
these cities to Baalathbeer, Ramath of the south. This is the
inheritance of the tribe of the children of Simeon according to their
families.

19:9 Out of the portion of the children of Judah was the inheritance
of the children of Simeon: for the part of the children of Judah was
too much for them: therefore the children of Simeon had their
inheritance within the inheritance of them.

19:10 And the third lot came up for the children of Zebulun according
to their families: and the border of their inheritance was unto Sarid:
19:11 And their border went up toward the sea, and Maralah, and
reached to Dabbasheth, and reached to the river that is before
Jokneam; 19:12 And turned from Sarid eastward toward the sunrising
unto the border of Chislothtabor, and then goeth out to Daberath, and
goeth up to Japhia, 19:13 And from thence passeth on along on the east
to Gittahhepher, to Ittahkazin, and goeth out to Remmonmethoar to
Neah; 19:14 And the border compasseth it on the north side to
Hannathon: and the outgoings thereof are in the valley of Jiphthahel:
19:15 And Kattath, and Nahallal, and Shimron, and Idalah, and
Bethlehem: twelve cities with their villages.

19:16 This is the inheritance of the children of Zebulun according to
their families, these cities with their villages.

19:17 And the fourth lot came out to Issachar, for the children of
Issachar according to their families.

19:18 And their border was toward Jezreel, and Chesulloth, and Shunem,
19:19 And Haphraim, and Shihon, and Anaharath, 19:20 And Rabbith, and
Kishion, and Abez, 19:21 And Remeth, and Engannim, and Enhaddah, and
Bethpazzez; 19:22 And the coast reacheth to Tabor, and Shahazimah, and
Bethshemesh; and the outgoings of their border were at Jordan: sixteen
cities with their villages.

19:23 This is the inheritance of the tribe of the children of Issachar
according to their families, the cities and their villages.

19:24 And the fifth lot came out for the tribe of the children of
Asher according to their families.

19:25 And their border was Helkath, and Hali, and Beten, and Achshaph,
19:26 And Alammelech, and Amad, and Misheal; and reacheth to Carmel
westward, and to Shihorlibnath; 19:27 And turneth toward the sunrising
to Bethdagon, and reacheth to Zebulun, and to the valley of Jiphthahel
toward the north side of Bethemek, and Neiel, and goeth out to Cabul
on the left hand, 19:28 And Hebron, and Rehob, and Hammon, and Kanah,
even unto great Zidon; 19:29 And then the coast turneth to Ramah, and
to the strong city Tyre; and the coast turneth to Hosah; and the
outgoings thereof are at the sea from the coast to Achzib: 19:30 Ummah
also, and Aphek, and Rehob: twenty and two cities with their villages.

19:31 This is the inheritance of the tribe of the children of Asher
according to their families, these cities with their villages.

19:32 The sixth lot came out to the children of Naphtali, even for the
children of Naphtali according to their families.

19:33 And their coast was from Heleph, from Allon to Zaanannim, and
Adami, Nekeb, and Jabneel, unto Lakum; and the outgoings thereof were
at Jordan: 19:34 And then the coast turneth westward to Aznothtabor,
and goeth out from thence to Hukkok, and reacheth to Zebulun on the
south side, and reacheth to Asher on the west side, and to Judah upon
Jordan toward the sunrising.

19:35 And the fenced cities are Ziddim, Zer, and Hammath, Rakkath, and
Chinnereth, 19:36 And Adamah, and Ramah, and Hazor, 19:37 And Kedesh,
and Edrei, and Enhazor, 19:38 And Iron, and Migdalel, Horem, and
Bethanath, and Bethshemesh; nineteen cities with their villages.

19:39 This is the inheritance of the tribe of the children of Naphtali
according to their families, the cities and their villages.

19:40 And the seventh lot came out for the tribe of the children of
Dan according to their families.

19:41 And the coast of their inheritance was Zorah, and Eshtaol, and
Irshemesh, 19:42 And Shaalabbin, and Ajalon, and Jethlah, 19:43 And
Elon, and Thimnathah, and Ekron, 19:44 And Eltekeh, and Gibbethon, and
Baalath, 19:45 And Jehud, and Beneberak, and Gathrimmon, 19:46 And
Mejarkon, and Rakkon, with the border before Japho.

19:47 And the coast of the children of Dan went out too little for
them: therefore the children of Dan went up to fight against Leshem,
and took it, and smote it with the edge of the sword, and possessed
it, and dwelt therein, and called Leshem, Dan, after the name of Dan
their father.

19:48 This is the inheritance of the tribe of the children of Dan
according to their families, these cities with their villages.

19:49 When they had made an end of dividing the land for inheritance
by their coasts, the children of Israel gave an inheritance to Joshua
the son of Nun among them: 19:50 According to the word of the LORD
they gave him the city which he asked, even Timnathserah in mount
Ephraim: and he built the city, and dwelt therein.

19:51 These are the inheritances, which Eleazar the priest, and Joshua
the son of Nun, and the heads of the fathers of the tribes of the
children of Israel, divided for an inheritance by lot in Shiloh before
the LORD, at the door of the tabernacle of the congregation. So they
made an end of dividing the country.

20:1 The LORD also spake unto Joshua, saying, 20:2 Speak to the
children of Israel, saying, Appoint out for you cities of refuge,
whereof I spake unto you by the hand of Moses: 20:3 That the slayer
that killeth any person unawares and unwittingly may flee thither: and
they shall be your refuge from the avenger of blood.

20:4 And when he that doth flee unto one of those cities shall stand
at the entering of the gate of the city, and shall declare his cause
in the ears of the elders of that city, they shall take him into the
city unto them, and give him a place, that he may dwell among them.

20:5 And if the avenger of blood pursue after him, then they shall not
deliver the slayer up into his hand; because he smote his neighbour
unwittingly, and hated him not beforetime.

20:6 And he shall dwell in that city, until he stand before the
congregation for judgment, and until the death of the high priest that
shall be in those days: then shall the slayer return, and come unto
his own city, and unto his own house, unto the city from whence he
fled.

20:7 And they appointed Kedesh in Galilee in mount Naphtali, and
Shechem in mount Ephraim, and Kirjatharba, which is Hebron, in the
mountain of Judah.

20:8 And on the other side Jordan by Jericho eastward, they assigned
Bezer in the wilderness upon the plain out of the tribe of Reuben, and
Ramoth in Gilead out of the tribe of Gad, and Golan in Bashan out of
the tribe of Manasseh.

20:9 These were the cities appointed for all the children of Israel,
and for the stranger that sojourneth among them, that whosoever
killeth any person at unawares might flee thither, and not die by the
hand of the avenger of blood, until he stood before the congregation.

21:1 Then came near the heads of the fathers of the Levites unto
Eleazar the priest, and unto Joshua the son of Nun, and unto the heads
of the fathers of the tribes of the children of Israel; 21:2 And they
spake unto them at Shiloh in the land of Canaan, saying, The LORD
commanded by the hand of Moses to give us cities to dwell in, with the
suburbs thereof for our cattle.

21:3 And the children of Israel gave unto the Levites out of their
inheritance, at the commandment of the LORD, these cities and their
suburbs.

21:4 And the lot came out for the families of the Kohathites: and the
children of Aaron the priest, which were of the Levites, had by lot
out of the tribe of Judah, and out of the tribe of Simeon, and out of
the tribe of Benjamin, thirteen cities.

21:5 And the rest of the children of Kohath had by lot out of the
families of the tribe of Ephraim, and out of the tribe of Dan, and out
of the half tribe of Manasseh, ten cities.

21:6 And the children of Gershon had by lot out of the families of the
tribe of Issachar, and out of the tribe of Asher, and out of the tribe
of Naphtali, and out of the half tribe of Manasseh in Bashan, thirteen
cities.

21:7 The children of Merari by their families had out of the tribe of
Reuben, and out of the tribe of Gad, and out of the tribe of Zebulun,
twelve cities.

21:8 And the children of Israel gave by lot unto the Levites these
cities with their suburbs, as the LORD commanded by the hand of Moses.

21:9 And they gave out of the tribe of the children of Judah, and out
of the tribe of the children of Simeon, these cities which are here
mentioned by name.

21:10 Which the children of Aaron, being of the families of the
Kohathites, who were of the children of Levi, had: for theirs was the
first lot.

21:11 And they gave them the city of Arba the father of Anak, which
city is Hebron, in the hill country of Judah, with the suburbs thereof
round about it.

21:12 But the fields of the city, and the villages thereof, gave they
to Caleb the son of Jephunneh for his possession.

21:13 Thus they gave to the children of Aaron the priest Hebron with
her suburbs, to be a city of refuge for the slayer; and Libnah with
her suburbs, 21:14 And Jattir with her suburbs, and Eshtemoa with her
suburbs, 21:15 And Holon with her suburbs, and Debir with her suburbs,
21:16 And Ain with her suburbs, and Juttah with her suburbs, and
Bethshemesh with her suburbs; nine cities out of those two tribes.

21:17 And out of the tribe of Benjamin, Gibeon with her suburbs, Geba
with her suburbs, 21:18 Anathoth with her suburbs, and Almon with her
suburbs; four cities.

21:19 All the cities of the children of Aaron, the priests, were
thirteen cities with their suburbs.

21:20 And the families of the children of Kohath, the Levites which
remained of the children of Kohath, even they had the cities of their
lot out of the tribe of Ephraim.

21:21 For they gave them Shechem with her suburbs in mount Ephraim, to
be a city of refuge for the slayer; and Gezer with her suburbs, 21:22
And Kibzaim with her suburbs, and Bethhoron with her suburbs; four
cities.

21:23 And out of the tribe of Dan, Eltekeh with her suburbs, Gibbethon
with her suburbs, 21:24 Aijalon with her suburbs, Gathrimmon with her
suburbs; four cities.

21:25 And out of the half tribe of Manasseh, Tanach with her suburbs,
and Gathrimmon with her suburbs; two cities.

21:26 All the cities were ten with their suburbs for the families of
the children of Kohath that remained.

21:27 And unto the children of Gershon, of the families of the
Levites, out of the other half tribe of Manasseh they gave Golan in
Bashan with her suburbs, to be a city of refuge for the slayer; and
Beeshterah with her suburbs; two cities.

21:28 And out of the tribe of Issachar, Kishon with her suburbs,
Dabareh with her suburbs, 21:29 Jarmuth with her suburbs, Engannim
with her suburbs; four cities.

21:30 And out of the tribe of Asher, Mishal with her suburbs, Abdon
with her suburbs, 21:31 Helkath with her suburbs, and Rehob with her
suburbs; four cities.

21:32 And out of the tribe of Naphtali, Kedesh in Galilee with her
suburbs, to be a city of refuge for the slayer; and Hammothdor with
her suburbs, and Kartan with her suburbs; three cities.

21:33 All the cities of the Gershonites according to their families
were thirteen cities with their suburbs.

21:34 And unto the families of the children of Merari, the rest of the
Levites, out of the tribe of Zebulun, Jokneam with her suburbs, and
Kartah with her suburbs, 21:35 Dimnah with her suburbs, Nahalal with
her suburbs; four cities.

21:36 And out of the tribe of Reuben, Bezer with her suburbs, and
Jahazah with her suburbs, 21:37 Kedemoth with her suburbs, and
Mephaath with her suburbs; four cities.

21:38 And out of the tribe of Gad, Ramoth in Gilead with her suburbs,
to be a city of refuge for the slayer; and Mahanaim with her suburbs,
21:39 Heshbon with her suburbs, Jazer with her suburbs; four cities in
all.

21:40 So all the cities for the children of Merari by their families,
which were remaining of the families of the Levites, were by their lot
twelve cities.

21:41 All the cities of the Levites within the possession of the
children of Israel were forty and eight cities with their suburbs.

21:42 These cities were every one with their suburbs round about them:
thus were all these cities.

21:43 And the LORD gave unto Israel all the land which he sware to
give unto their fathers; and they possessed it, and dwelt therein.

21:44 And the LORD gave them rest round about, according to all that
he sware unto their fathers: and there stood not a man of all their
enemies before them; the LORD delivered all their enemies into their
hand.

21:45 There failed not ought of any good thing which the LORD had
spoken unto the house of Israel; all came to pass.

22:1 Then Joshua called the Reubenites, and the Gadites, and the half
tribe of Manasseh, 22:2 And said unto them, Ye have kept all that
Moses the servant of the LORD commanded you, and have obeyed my voice
in all that I commanded you: 22:3 Ye have not left your brethren these
many days unto this day, but have kept the charge of the commandment
of the LORD your God.

22:4 And now the LORD your God hath given rest unto your brethren, as
he promised them: therefore now return ye, and get you unto your
tents, and unto the land of your possession, which Moses the servant
of the LORD gave you on the other side Jordan.

22:5 But take diligent heed to do the commandment and the law, which
Moses the servant of the LORD charged you, to love the LORD your God,
and to walk in all his ways, and to keep his commandments, and to
cleave unto him, and to serve him with all your heart and with all
your soul.

22:6 So Joshua blessed them, and sent them away: and they went unto
their tents.

22:7 Now to the one half of the tribe of Manasseh Moses had given
possession in Bashan: but unto the other half thereof gave Joshua
among their brethren on this side Jordan westward. And when Joshua
sent them away also unto their tents, then he blessed them, 22:8 And
he spake unto them, saying, Return with much riches unto your tents,
and with very much cattle, with silver, and with gold, and with brass,
and with iron, and with very much raiment: divide the spoil of your
enemies with your brethren.

22:9 And the children of Reuben and the children of Gad and the half
tribe of Manasseh returned, and departed from the children of Israel
out of Shiloh, which is in the land of Canaan, to go unto the country
of Gilead, to the land of their possession, whereof they were
possessed, according to the word of the LORD by the hand of Moses.

22:10 And when they came unto the borders of Jordan, that are in the
land of Canaan, the children of Reuben and the children of Gad and the
half tribe of Manasseh built there an altar by Jordan, a great altar
to see to.

22:11 And the children of Israel heard say, Behold, the children of
Reuben and the children of Gad and the half tribe of Manasseh have
built an altar over against the land of Canaan, in the borders of
Jordan, at the passage of the children of Israel.

22:12 And when the children of Israel heard of it, the whole
congregation of the children of Israel gathered themselves together at
Shiloh, to go up to war against them.

22:13 And the children of Israel sent unto the children of Reuben, and
to the children of Gad, and to the half tribe of Manasseh, into the
land of Gilead, Phinehas the son of Eleazar the priest, 22:14 And with
him ten princes, of each chief house a prince throughout all the
tribes of Israel; and each one was an head of the house of their
fathers among the thousands of Israel.

22:15 And they came unto the children of Reuben, and to the children
of Gad, and to the half tribe of Manasseh, unto the land of Gilead,
and they spake with them, saying, 22:16 Thus saith the whole
congregation of the LORD, What trespass is this that ye have committed
against the God of Israel, to turn away this day from following the
LORD, in that ye have builded you an altar, that ye might rebel this
day against the LORD?  22:17 Is the iniquity of Peor too little for
us, from which we are not cleansed until this day, although there was
a plague in the congregation of the LORD, 22:18 But that ye must turn
away this day from following the LORD? and it will be, seeing ye rebel
to day against the LORD, that to morrow he will be wroth with the
whole congregation of Israel.

22:19 Notwithstanding, if the land of your possession be unclean, then
pass ye over unto the land of the possession of the LORD, wherein the
LORD's tabernacle dwelleth, and take possession among us: but rebel
not against the LORD, nor rebel against us, in building you an altar
beside the altar of the LORD our God.

22:20 Did not Achan the son of Zerah commit a trespass in the accursed
thing, and wrath fell on all the congregation of Israel? and that man
perished not alone in his iniquity.

22:21 Then the children of Reuben and the children of Gad and the half
tribe of Manasseh answered, and said unto the heads of the thousands
of Israel, 22:22 The LORD God of gods, the LORD God of gods, he
knoweth, and Israel he shall know; if it be in rebellion, or if in
transgression against the LORD, (save us not this day,) 22:23 That we
have built us an altar to turn from following the LORD, or if to offer
thereon burnt offering or meat offering, or if to offer peace
offerings thereon, let the LORD himself require it; 22:24 And if we
have not rather done it for fear of this thing, saying, In time to
come your children might speak unto our children, saying, What have ye
to do with the LORD God of Israel?  22:25 For the LORD hath made
Jordan a border between us and you, ye children of Reuben and children
of Gad; ye have no part in the LORD: so shall your children make our
children cease from fearing the LORD.

22:26 Therefore we said, Let us now prepare to build us an altar, not
for burnt offering, nor for sacrifice: 22:27 But that it may be a
witness between us, and you, and our generations after us, that we
might do the service of the LORD before him with our burnt offerings,
and with our sacrifices, and with our peace offerings; that your
children may not say to our children in time to come, Ye have no part
in the LORD.

22:28 Therefore said we, that it shall be, when they should so say to
us or to our generations in time to come, that we may say again,
Behold the pattern of the altar of the LORD, which our fathers made,
not for burnt offerings, nor for sacrifices; but it is a witness
between us and you.

22:29 God forbid that we should rebel against the LORD, and turn this
day from following the LORD, to build an altar for burnt offerings,
for meat offerings, or for sacrifices, beside the altar of the LORD
our God that is before his tabernacle.

22:30 And when Phinehas the priest, and the princes of the
congregation and heads of the thousands of Israel which were with him,
heard the words that the children of Reuben and the children of Gad
and the children of Manasseh spake, it pleased them.

22:31 And Phinehas the son of Eleazar the priest said unto the
children of Reuben, and to the children of Gad, and to the children of
Manasseh, This day we perceive that the LORD is among us, because ye
have not committed this trespass against the LORD: now ye have
delivered the children of Israel out of the hand of the LORD.

22:32 And Phinehas the son of Eleazar the priest, and the princes,
returned from the children of Reuben, and from the children of Gad,
out of the land of Gilead, unto the land of Canaan, to the children of
Israel, and brought them word again.

22:33 And the thing pleased the children of Israel; and the children
of Israel blessed God, and did not intend to go up against them in
battle, to destroy the land wherein the children of Reuben and Gad
dwelt.

22:34 And the children of Reuben and the children of Gad called the
altar Ed: for it shall be a witness between us that the LORD is God.

23:1 And it came to pass a long time after that the LORD had given
rest unto Israel from all their enemies round about, that Joshua waxed
old and stricken in age.

23:2 And Joshua called for all Israel, and for their elders, and for
their heads, and for their judges, and for their officers, and said
unto them, I am old and stricken in age: 23:3 And ye have seen all
that the LORD your God hath done unto all these nations because of
you; for the LORD your God is he that hath fought for you.

23:4 Behold, I have divided unto you by lot these nations that remain,
to be an inheritance for your tribes, from Jordan, with all the
nations that I have cut off, even unto the great sea westward.

23:5 And the LORD your God, he shall expel them from before you, and
drive them from out of your sight; and ye shall possess their land, as
the LORD your God hath promised unto you.

23:6 Be ye therefore very courageous to keep and to do all that is
written in the book of the law of Moses, that ye turn not aside
therefrom to the right hand or to the left; 23:7 That ye come not
among these nations, these that remain among you; neither make mention
of the name of their gods, nor cause to swear by them, neither serve
them, nor bow yourselves unto them: 23:8 But cleave unto the LORD your
God, as ye have done unto this day.

23:9 For the LORD hath driven out from before you great nations and
strong: but as for you, no man hath been able to stand before you unto
this day.

23:10 One man of you shall chase a thousand: for the LORD your God, he
it is that fighteth for you, as he hath promised you.

23:11 Take good heed therefore unto yourselves, that ye love the LORD
your God.

23:12 Else if ye do in any wise go back, and cleave unto the remnant
of these nations, even these that remain among you, and shall make
marriages with them, and go in unto them, and they to you: 23:13 Know
for a certainty that the LORD your God will no more drive out any of
these nations from before you; but they shall be snares and traps unto
you, and scourges in your sides, and thorns in your eyes, until ye
perish from off this good land which the LORD your God hath given you.

23:14 And, behold, this day I am going the way of all the earth: and
ye know in all your hearts and in all your souls, that not one thing
hath failed of all the good things which the LORD your God spake
concerning you; all are come to pass unto you, and not one thing hath
failed thereof.

23:15 Therefore it shall come to pass, that as all good things are
come upon you, which the LORD your God promised you; so shall the LORD
bring upon you all evil things, until he have destroyed you from off
this good land which the LORD your God hath given you.

23:16 When ye have transgressed the covenant of the LORD your God,
which he commanded you, and have gone and served other gods, and bowed
yourselves to them; then shall the anger of the LORD be kindled
against you, and ye shall perish quickly from off the good land which
he hath given unto you.

24:1 And Joshua gathered all the tribes of Israel to Shechem, and
called for the elders of Israel, and for their heads, and for their
judges, and for their officers; and they presented themselves before
God.

24:2 And Joshua said unto all the people, Thus saith the LORD God of
Israel, Your fathers dwelt on the other side of the flood in old time,
even Terah, the father of Abraham, and the father of Nachor: and they
served other gods.

24:3 And I took your father Abraham from the other side of the flood,
and led him throughout all the land of Canaan, and multiplied his
seed, and gave him Isaac.

24:4 And I gave unto Isaac Jacob and Esau: and I gave unto Esau mount
Seir, to possess it; but Jacob and his children went down into Egypt.

24:5 I sent Moses also and Aaron, and I plagued Egypt, according to
that which I did among them: and afterward I brought you out.

24:6 And I brought your fathers out of Egypt: and ye came unto the
sea; and the Egyptians pursued after your fathers with chariots and
horsemen unto the Red sea.

24:7 And when they cried unto the LORD, he put darkness between you
and the Egyptians, and brought the sea upon them, and covered them;
and your eyes have seen what I have done in Egypt: and ye dwelt in the
wilderness a long season.

24:8 And I brought you into the land of the Amorites, which dwelt on
the other side Jordan; and they fought with you: and I gave them into
your hand, that ye might possess their land; and I destroyed them from
before you.

24:9 Then Balak the son of Zippor, king of Moab, arose and warred
against Israel, and sent and called Balaam the son of Beor to curse
you: 24:10 But I would not hearken unto Balaam; therefore he blessed
you still: so I delivered you out of his hand.

24:11 And you went over Jordan, and came unto Jericho: and the men of
Jericho fought against you, the Amorites, and the Perizzites, and the
Canaanites, and the Hittites, and the Girgashites, the Hivites, and
the Jebusites; and I delivered them into your hand.

24:12 And I sent the hornet before you, which drave them out from
before you, even the two kings of the Amorites; but not with thy
sword, nor with thy bow.

24:13 And I have given you a land for which ye did not labour, and
cities which ye built not, and ye dwell in them; of the vineyards and
oliveyards which ye planted not do ye eat.

24:14 Now therefore fear the LORD, and serve him in sincerity and in
truth: and put away the gods which your fathers served on the other
side of the flood, and in Egypt; and serve ye the LORD.

24:15 And if it seem evil unto you to serve the LORD, choose you this
day whom ye will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served
that were on the other side of the flood, or the gods of the Amorites,
in whose land ye dwell: but as for me and my house, we will serve the
LORD.

24:16 And the people answered and said, God forbid that we should
forsake the LORD, to serve other gods; 24:17 For the LORD our God, he
it is that brought us up and our fathers out of the land of Egypt,
from the house of bondage, and which did those great signs in our
sight, and preserved us in all the way wherein we went, and among all
the people through whom we passed: 24:18 And the LORD drave out from
before us all the people, even the Amorites which dwelt in the land:
therefore will we also serve the LORD; for he is our God.

24:19 And Joshua said unto the people, Ye cannot serve the LORD: for
he is an holy God; he is a jealous God; he will not forgive your
transgressions nor your sins.

24:20 If ye forsake the LORD, and serve strange gods, then he will
turn and do you hurt, and consume you, after that he hath done you
good.

24:21 And the people said unto Joshua, Nay; but we will serve the
LORD.

24:22 And Joshua said unto the people, Ye are witnesses against
yourselves that ye have chosen you the LORD, to serve him. And they
said, We are witnesses.

24:23 Now therefore put away, said he, the strange gods which are
among you, and incline your heart unto the LORD God of Israel.

24:24 And the people said unto Joshua, The LORD our God will we serve,
and his voice will we obey.

24:25 So Joshua made a covenant with the people that day, and set them
a statute and an ordinance in Shechem.

24:26 And Joshua wrote these words in the book of the law of God, and
took a great stone, and set it up there under an oak, that was by the
sanctuary of the LORD.

24:27 And Joshua said unto all the people, Behold, this stone shall be
a witness unto us; for it hath heard all the words of the LORD which
he spake unto us: it shall be therefore a witness unto you, lest ye
deny your God.

24:28 So Joshua let the people depart, every man unto his inheritance.

24:29 And it came to pass after these things, that Joshua the son of
Nun, the servant of the LORD, died, being an hundred and ten years
old.

24:30 And they buried him in the border of his inheritance in
Timnathserah, which is in mount Ephraim, on the north side of the hill
of Gaash.

24:31 And Israel served the LORD all the days of Joshua, and all the
days of the elders that overlived Joshua, and which had known all the
works of the LORD, that he had done for Israel.

24:32 And the bones of Joseph, which the children of Israel brought up
out of Egypt, buried they in Shechem, in a parcel of ground which
Jacob bought of the sons of Hamor the father of Shechem for an hundred
pieces of silver: and it became the inheritance of the children of
Joseph.

24:33 And Eleazar the son of Aaron died; and they buried him in a hill
that pertained to Phinehas his son, which was given him in mount
Ephraim.




The Book of Judges


1:1 Now after the death of Joshua it came to pass, that the children
of Israel asked the LORD, saying, Who shall go up for us against the
Canaanites first, to fight against them?  1:2 And the LORD said, Judah
shall go up: behold, I have delivered the land into his hand.

1:3 And Judah said unto Simeon his brother, Come up with me into my
lot, that we may fight against the Canaanites; and I likewise will go
with thee into thy lot. So Simeon went with him.

1:4 And Judah went up; and the LORD delivered the Canaanites and the
Perizzites into their hand: and they slew of them in Bezek ten
thousand men.

1:5 And they found Adonibezek in Bezek: and they fought against him,
and they slew the Canaanites and the Perizzites.

1:6 But Adonibezek fled; and they pursued after him, and caught him,
and cut off his thumbs and his great toes.

1:7 And Adonibezek said, Threescore and ten kings, having their thumbs
and their great toes cut off, gathered their meat under my table: as I
have done, so God hath requited me. And they brought him to Jerusalem,
and there he died.

1:8 Now the children of Judah had fought against Jerusalem, and had
taken it, and smitten it with the edge of the sword, and set the city
on fire.

1:9 And afterward the children of Judah went down to fight against the
Canaanites, that dwelt in the mountain, and in the south, and in the
valley.

1:10 And Judah went against the Canaanites that dwelt in Hebron: (now
the name of Hebron before was Kirjatharba:) and they slew Sheshai, and
Ahiman, and Talmai.

1:11 And from thence he went against the inhabitants of Debir: and the
name of Debir before was Kirjathsepher: 1:12 And Caleb said, He that
smiteth Kirjathsepher, and taketh it, to him will I give Achsah my
daughter to wife.

1:13 And Othniel the son of Kenaz, Caleb's younger brother, took it:
and he gave him Achsah his daughter to wife.

1:14 And it came to pass, when she came to him, that she moved him to
ask of her father a field: and she lighted from off her ass; and Caleb
said unto her, What wilt thou?  1:15 And she said unto him, Give me a
blessing: for thou hast given me a south land; give me also springs of
water. And Caleb gave her the upper springs and the nether springs.

1:16 And the children of the Kenite, Moses' father in law, went up out
of the city of palm trees with the children of Judah into the
wilderness of Judah, which lieth in the south of Arad; and they went
and dwelt among the people.

1:17 And Judah went with Simeon his brother, and they slew the
Canaanites that inhabited Zephath, and utterly destroyed it. And the
name of the city was called Hormah.

1:18 Also Judah took Gaza with the coast thereof, and Askelon with the
coast thereof, and Ekron with the coast thereof.

1:19 And the LORD was with Judah; and he drave out the inhabitants of
the mountain; but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley,
because they had chariots of iron.

1:20 And they gave Hebron unto Caleb, as Moses said: and he expelled
thence the three sons of Anak.

1:21 And the children of Benjamin did not drive out the Jebusites that
inhabited Jerusalem; but the Jebusites dwell with the children of
Benjamin in Jerusalem unto this day.

1:22 And the house of Joseph, they also went up against Bethel: and
the LORD was with them.

1:23 And the house of Joseph sent to descry Bethel. (Now the name of
the city before was Luz.)  1:24 And the spies saw a man come forth out
of the city, and they said unto him, Shew us, we pray thee, the
entrance into the city, and we will shew thee mercy.

1:25 And when he shewed them the entrance into the city, they smote
the city with the edge of the sword; but they let go the man and all
his family.

1:26 And the man went into the land of the Hittites, and built a city,
and called the name thereof Luz: which is the name thereof unto this
day.

1:27 Neither did Manasseh drive out the inhabitants of Bethshean and
her towns, nor Taanach and her towns, nor the inhabitants of Dor and
her towns, nor the inhabitants of Ibleam and her towns, nor the
inhabitants of Megiddo and her towns: but the Canaanites would dwell
in that land.

1:28 And it came to pass, when Israel was strong, that they put the
Canaanites to tribute, and did not utterly drive them out.

1:29 Neither did Ephraim drive out the Canaanites that dwelt in Gezer;
but the Canaanites dwelt in Gezer among them.

1:30 Neither did Zebulun drive out the inhabitants of Kitron, nor the
inhabitants of Nahalol; but the Canaanites dwelt among them, and
became tributaries.

1:31 Neither did Asher drive out the inhabitants of Accho, nor the
inhabitants of Zidon, nor of Ahlab, nor of Achzib, nor of Helbah, nor
of Aphik, nor of Rehob: 1:32 But the Asherites dwelt among the
Canaanites, the inhabitants of the land: for they did not drive them
out.

1:33 Neither did Naphtali drive out the inhabitants of Bethshemesh,
nor the inhabitants of Bethanath; but he dwelt among the Canaanites,
the inhabitants of the land: nevertheless the inhabitants of
Bethshemesh and of Bethanath became tributaries unto them.

1:34 And the Amorites forced the children of Dan into the mountain:
for they would not suffer them to come down to the valley: 1:35 But
the Amorites would dwell in mount Heres in Aijalon, and in Shaalbim:
yet the hand of the house of Joseph prevailed, so that they became
tributaries.

1:36 And the coast of the Amorites was from the going up to Akrabbim,
from the rock, and upward.

2:1 And an angel of the LORD came up from Gilgal to Bochim, and said,
I made you to go up out of Egypt, and have brought you unto the land
which I sware unto your fathers; and I said, I will never break my
covenant with you.

2:2 And ye shall make no league with the inhabitants of this land; ye
shall throw down their altars: but ye have not obeyed my voice: why
have ye done this?  2:3 Wherefore I also said, I will not drive them
out from before you; but they shall be as thorns in your sides, and
their gods shall be a snare unto you.

2:4 And it came to pass, when the angel of the LORD spake these words
unto all the children of Israel, that the people lifted up their
voice, and wept.

2:5 And they called the name of that place Bochim: and they sacrificed
there unto the LORD.

2:6 And when Joshua had let the people go, the children of Israel went
every man unto his inheritance to possess the land.

2:7 And the people served the LORD all the days of Joshua, and all the
days of the elders that outlived Joshua, who had seen all the great
works of the LORD, that he did for Israel.

2:8 And Joshua the son of Nun, the servant of the LORD, died, being an
hundred and ten years old.

2:9 And they buried him in the border of his inheritance in
Timnathheres, in the mount of Ephraim, on the north side of the hill
Gaash.

2:10 And also all that generation were gathered unto their fathers:
and there arose another generation after them, which knew not the
LORD, nor yet the works which he had done for Israel.

2:11 And the children of Israel did evil in the sight of the LORD, and
served Baalim: 2:12 And they forsook the LORD God of their fathers,
which brought them out of the land of Egypt, and followed other gods,
of the gods of the people that were round about them, and bowed
themselves unto them, and provoked the LORD to anger.

2:13 And they forsook the LORD, and served Baal and Ashtaroth.

2:14 And the anger of the LORD was hot against Israel, and he
delivered them into the hands of spoilers that spoiled them, and he
sold them into the hands of their enemies round about, so that they
could not any longer stand before their enemies.

2:15 Whithersoever they went out, the hand of the LORD was against
them for evil, as the LORD had said, and as the LORD had sworn unto
them: and they were greatly distressed.

2:16 Nevertheless the LORD raised up judges, which delivered them out
of the hand of those that spoiled them.

2:17 And yet they would not hearken unto their judges, but they went a
whoring after other gods, and bowed themselves unto them: they turned
quickly out of the way which their fathers walked in, obeying the
commandments of the LORD; but they did not so.

2:18 And when the LORD raised them up judges, then the LORD was with
the judge, and delivered them out of the hand of their enemies all the
days of the judge: for it repented the LORD because of their groanings
by reason of them that oppressed them and vexed them.

2:19 And it came to pass, when the judge was dead, that they returned,
and corrupted themselves more than their fathers, in following other
gods to serve them, and to bow down unto them; they ceased not from
their own doings, nor from their stubborn way.

2:20 And the anger of the LORD was hot against Israel; and he said,
Because that this people hath transgressed my covenant which I
commanded their fathers, and have not hearkened unto my voice; 2:21 I
also will not henceforth drive out any from before them of the nations
which Joshua left when he died: 2:22 That through them I may prove
Israel, whether they will keep the way of the LORD to walk therein, as
their fathers did keep it, or not.

2:23 Therefore the LORD left those nations, without driving them out
hastily; neither delivered he them into the hand of Joshua.

3:1 Now these are the nations which the LORD left, to prove Israel by
them, even as many of Israel as had not known all the wars of Canaan;
3:2 Only that the generations of the children of Israel might know, to
teach them war, at the least such as before knew nothing thereof; 3:3
Namely, five lords of the Philistines, and all the Canaanites, and the
Sidonians, and the Hivites that dwelt in mount Lebanon, from mount
Baalhermon unto the entering in of Hamath.

3:4 And they were to prove Israel by them, to know whether they would
hearken unto the commandments of the LORD, which he commanded their
fathers by the hand of Moses.

3:5 And the children of Israel dwelt among the Canaanites, Hittites,
and Amorites, and Perizzites, and Hivites, and Jebusites: 3:6 And they
took their daughters to be their wives, and gave their daughters to
their sons, and served their gods.

3:7 And the children of Israel did evil in the sight of the LORD, and
forgat the LORD their God, and served Baalim and the groves.

3:8 Therefore the anger of the LORD was hot against Israel, and he
sold them into the hand of Chushanrishathaim king of Mesopotamia: and
the children of Israel served Chushanrishathaim eight years.

3:9 And when the children of Israel cried unto the LORD, the LORD
raised up a deliverer to the children of Israel, who delivered them,
even Othniel the son of Kenaz, Caleb's younger brother.

3:10 And the Spirit of the LORD came upon him, and he judged Israel,
and went out to war: and the LORD delivered Chushanrishathaim king of
Mesopotamia into his hand; and his hand prevailed against
Chushanrishathaim.

3:11 And the land had rest forty years. And Othniel the son of Kenaz
died.

3:12 And the children of Israel did evil again in the sight of the
LORD: and the LORD strengthened Eglon the king of Moab against Israel,
because they had done evil in the sight of the LORD.

3:13 And he gathered unto him the children of Ammon and Amalek, and
went and smote Israel, and possessed the city of palm trees.

3:14 So the children of Israel served Eglon the king of Moab eighteen
years.

3:15 But when the children of Israel cried unto the LORD, the LORD
raised them up a deliverer, Ehud the son of Gera, a Benjamite, a man
lefthanded: and by him the children of Israel sent a present unto
Eglon the king of Moab.

3:16 But Ehud made him a dagger which had two edges, of a cubit
length; and he did gird it under his raiment upon his right thigh.

3:17 And he brought the present unto Eglon king of Moab: and Eglon was
a very fat man.

3:18 And when he had made an end to offer the present, he sent away
the people that bare the present.

3:19 But he himself turned again from the quarries that were by
Gilgal, and said, I have a secret errand unto thee, O king: who said,
Keep silence. And all that stood by him went out from him.

3:20 And Ehud came unto him; and he was sitting in a summer parlour,
which he had for himself alone. And Ehud said, I have a message from
God unto thee.

And he arose out of his seat.

3:21 And Ehud put forth his left hand, and took the dagger from his
right thigh, and thrust it into his belly: 3:22 And the haft also went
in after the blade; and the fat closed upon the blade, so that he
could not draw the dagger out of his belly; and the dirt came out.

3:23 Then Ehud went forth through the porch, and shut the doors of the
parlour upon him, and locked them.

3:24 When he was gone out, his servants came; and when they saw that,
behold, the doors of the parlour were locked, they said, Surely he
covereth his feet in his summer chamber.

3:25 And they tarried till they were ashamed: and, behold, he opened
not the doors of the parlour; therefore they took a key, and opened
them: and, behold, their lord was fallen down dead on the earth.

3:26 And Ehud escaped while they tarried, and passed beyond the
quarries, and escaped unto Seirath.

3:27 And it came to pass, when he was come, that he blew a trumpet in
the mountain of Ephraim, and the children of Israel went down with him
from the mount, and he before them.

3:28 And he said unto them, Follow after me: for the LORD hath
delivered your enemies the Moabites into your hand. And they went down
after him, and took the fords of Jordan toward Moab, and suffered not
a man to pass over.

3:29 And they slew of Moab at that time about ten thousand men, all
lusty, and all men of valour; and there escaped not a man.

3:30 So Moab was subdued that day under the hand of Israel. And the
land had rest fourscore years.

3:31 And after him was Shamgar the son of Anath, which slew of the
Philistines six hundred men with an ox goad: and he also delivered
Israel.

4:1 And the children of Israel again did evil in the sight of the
LORD, when Ehud was dead.

4:2 And the LORD sold them into the hand of Jabin king of Canaan, that
reigned in Hazor; the captain of whose host was Sisera, which dwelt in
Harosheth of the Gentiles.

4:3 And the children of Israel cried unto the LORD: for he had nine
hundred chariots of iron; and twenty years he mightily oppressed the
children of Israel.

4:4 And Deborah, a prophetess, the wife of Lapidoth, she judged Israel
at that time.

4:5 And she dwelt under the palm tree of Deborah between Ramah and
Bethel in mount Ephraim: and the children of Israel came up to her for
judgment.

4:6 And she sent and called Barak the son of Abinoam out of
Kedeshnaphtali, and said unto him, Hath not the LORD God of Israel
commanded, saying, Go and draw toward mount Tabor, and take with thee
ten thousand men of the children of Naphtali and of the children of
Zebulun?  4:7 And I will draw unto thee to the river Kishon Sisera,
the captain of Jabin's army, with his chariots and his multitude; and
I will deliver him into thine hand.

4:8 And Barak said unto her, If thou wilt go with me, then I will go:
but if thou wilt not go with me, then I will not go.

4:9 And she said, I will surely go with thee: notwithstanding the
journey that thou takest shall not be for thine honour; for the LORD
shall sell Sisera into the hand of a woman. And Deborah arose, and
went with Barak to Kedesh.

4:10 And Barak called Zebulun and Naphtali to Kedesh; and he went up
with ten thousand men at his feet: and Deborah went up with him.

4:11 Now Heber the Kenite, which was of the children of Hobab the
father in law of Moses, had severed himself from the Kenites, and
pitched his tent unto the plain of Zaanaim, which is by Kedesh.

4:12 And they shewed Sisera that Barak the son of Abinoam was gone up
to mount Tabor.

4:13 And Sisera gathered together all his chariots, even nine hundred
chariots of iron, and all the people that were with him, from
Harosheth of the Gentiles unto the river of Kishon.

4:14 And Deborah said unto Barak, Up; for this is the day in which the
LORD hath delivered Sisera into thine hand: is not the LORD gone out
before thee? So Barak went down from mount Tabor, and ten thousand men
after him.

4:15 And the LORD discomfited Sisera, and all his chariots, and all
his host, with the edge of the sword before Barak; so that Sisera
lighted down off his chariot, and fled away on his feet.

4:16 But Barak pursued after the chariots, and after the host, unto
Harosheth of the Gentiles: and all the host of Sisera fell upon the
edge of the sword; and there was not a man left.

4:17 Howbeit Sisera fled away on his feet to the tent of Jael the wife
of Heber the Kenite: for there was peace between Jabin the king of
Hazor and the house of Heber the Kenite.

4:18 And Jael went out to meet Sisera, and said unto him, Turn in, my
lord, turn in to me; fear not. And when he had turned in unto her into
the tent, she covered him with a mantle.

4:19 And he said unto her, Give me, I pray thee, a little water to
drink; for I am thirsty. And she opened a bottle of milk, and gave him
drink, and covered him.

4:20 Again he said unto her, Stand in the door of the tent, and it
shall be, when any man doth come and enquire of thee, and say, Is
there any man here? that thou shalt say, No.

4:21 Then Jael Heber's wife took a nail of the tent, and took an
hammer in her hand, and went softly unto him, and smote the nail into
his temples, and fastened it into the ground: for he was fast asleep
and weary. So he died.

4:22 And, behold, as Barak pursued Sisera, Jael came out to meet him,
and said unto him, Come, and I will shew thee the man whom thou
seekest. And when he came into her tent, behold, Sisera lay dead, and
the nail was in his temples.

4:23 So God subdued on that day Jabin the king of Canaan before the
children of Israel.

4:24 And the hand of the children of Israel prospered, and prevailed
against Jabin the king of Canaan, until they had destroyed Jabin king
of Canaan.

5:1 Then sang Deborah and Barak the son of Abinoam on that day,
saying, 5:2 Praise ye the LORD for the avenging of Israel, when the
people willingly offered themselves.

5:3 Hear, O ye kings; give ear, O ye princes; I, even I, will sing
unto the LORD; I will sing praise to the LORD God of Israel.

5:4 LORD, when thou wentest out of Seir, when thou marchedst out of
the field of Edom, the earth trembled, and the heavens dropped, the
clouds also dropped water.

5:5 The mountains melted from before the LORD, even that Sinai from
before the LORD God of Israel.

5:6 In the days of Shamgar the son of Anath, in the days of Jael, the
highways were unoccupied, and the travellers walked through byways.

5:7 The inhabitants of the villages ceased, they ceased in Israel,
until that I Deborah arose, that I arose a mother in Israel.

5:8 They chose new gods; then was war in the gates: was there a shield
or spear seen among forty thousand in Israel?  5:9 My heart is toward
the governors of Israel, that offered themselves willingly among the
people. Bless ye the LORD.

5:10 Speak, ye that ride on white asses, ye that sit in judgment, and
walk by the way.

5:11 They that are delivered from the noise of archers in the places
of drawing water, there shall they rehearse the righteous acts of the
LORD, even the righteous acts toward the inhabitants of his villages
in Israel: then shall the people of the LORD go down to the gates.

5:12 Awake, awake, Deborah: awake, awake, utter a song: arise, Barak,
and lead thy captivity captive, thou son of Abinoam.

5:13 Then he made him that remaineth have dominion over the nobles
among the people: the LORD made me have dominion over the mighty.

5:14 Out of Ephraim was there a root of them against Amalek; after
thee, Benjamin, among thy people; out of Machir came down governors,
and out of Zebulun they that handle the pen of the writer.

5:15 And the princes of Issachar were with Deborah; even Issachar, and
also Barak: he was sent on foot into the valley. For the divisions of
Reuben there were great thoughts of heart.

5:16 Why abodest thou among the sheepfolds, to hear the bleatings of
the flocks? For the divisions of Reuben there were great searchings of
heart.

5:17 Gilead abode beyond Jordan: and why did Dan remain in ships?
Asher continued on the sea shore, and abode in his breaches.

5:18 Zebulun and Naphtali were a people that jeoparded their lives
unto the death in the high places of the field.

5:19 The kings came and fought, then fought the kings of Canaan in
Taanach by the waters of Megiddo; they took no gain of money.

5:20 They fought from heaven; the stars in their courses fought
against Sisera.

5:21 The river of Kishon swept them away, that ancient river, the
river Kishon. O my soul, thou hast trodden down strength.

5:22 Then were the horsehoofs broken by the means of the pransings,
the pransings of their mighty ones.

5:23 Curse ye Meroz, said the angel of the LORD, curse ye bitterly the
inhabitants thereof; because they came not to the help of the LORD, to
the help of the LORD against the mighty.

5:24 Blessed above women shall Jael the wife of Heber the Kenite be,
blessed shall she be above women in the tent.

5:25 He asked water, and she gave him milk; she brought forth butter
in a lordly dish.

5:26 She put her hand to the nail, and her right hand to the workmen's
hammer; and with the hammer she smote Sisera, she smote off his head,
when she had pierced and stricken through his temples.

5:27 At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down: at her feet he bowed,
he fell: where he bowed, there he fell down dead.

5:28 The mother of Sisera looked out at a window, and cried through
the lattice, Why is his chariot so long in coming? why tarry the
wheels of his chariots?  5:29 Her wise ladies answered her, yea, she
returned answer to herself, 5:30 Have they not sped? have they not
divided the prey; to every man a damsel or two; to Sisera a prey of
divers colours, a prey of divers colours of needlework, of divers
colours of needlework on both sides, meet for the necks of them that
take the spoil?  5:31 So let all thine enemies perish, O LORD: but let
them that love him be as the sun when he goeth forth in his might. And
the land had rest forty years.

6:1 And the children of Israel did evil in the sight of the LORD: and
the LORD delivered them into the hand of Midian seven years.

6:2 And the hand of Midian prevailed against Israel: and because of
the Midianites the children of Israel made them the dens which are in
the mountains, and caves, and strong holds.

6:3 And so it was, when Israel had sown, that the Midianites came up,
and the Amalekites, and the children of the east, even they came up
against them; 6:4 And they encamped against them, and destroyed the
increase of the earth, till thou come unto Gaza, and left no
sustenance for Israel, neither sheep, nor ox, nor ass.

6:5 For they came up with their cattle and their tents, and they came
as grasshoppers for multitude; for both they and their camels were
without number: and they entered into the land to destroy it.

6:6 And Israel was greatly impoverished because of the Midianites; and
the children of Israel cried unto the LORD.

6:7 And it came to pass, when the children of Israel cried unto the
LORD because of the Midianites, 6:8 That the LORD sent a prophet unto
the children of Israel, which said unto them, Thus saith the LORD God
of Israel, I brought you up from Egypt, and brought you forth out of
the house of bondage; 6:9 And I delivered you out of the hand of the
Egyptians, and out of the hand of all that oppressed you, and drave
them out from before you, and gave you their land; 6:10 And I said
unto you, I am the LORD your God; fear not the gods of the Amorites,
in whose land ye dwell: but ye have not obeyed my voice.

6:11 And there came an angel of the LORD, and sat under an oak which
was in Ophrah, that pertained unto Joash the Abiezrite: and his son
Gideon threshed wheat by the winepress, to hide it from the
Midianites.

6:12 And the angel of the LORD appeared unto him, and said unto him,
The LORD is with thee, thou mighty man of valour.

6:13 And Gideon said unto him, Oh my Lord, if the LORD be with us, why
then is all this befallen us? and where be all his miracles which our
fathers told us of, saying, Did not the LORD bring us up from Egypt?
but now the LORD hath forsaken us, and delivered us into the hands of
the Midianites.

6:14 And the LORD looked upon him, and said, Go in this thy might, and
thou shalt save Israel from the hand of the Midianites: have not I
sent thee?  6:15 And he said unto him, Oh my Lord, wherewith shall I
save Israel?  behold, my family is poor in Manasseh, and I am the
least in my father's house.

6:16 And the LORD said unto him, Surely I will be with thee, and thou
shalt smite the Midianites as one man.

6:17 And he said unto him, If now I have found grace in thy sight,
then shew me a sign that thou talkest with me.

6:18 Depart not hence, I pray thee, until I come unto thee, and bring
forth my present, and set it before thee. And he said, I will tarry
until thou come again.

6:19 And Gideon went in, and made ready a kid, and unleavened cakes of
an ephah of flour: the flesh he put in a basket, and he put the broth
in a pot, and brought it out unto him under the oak, and presented it.

6:20 And the angel of God said unto him, Take the flesh and the
unleavened cakes, and lay them upon this rock, and pour out the broth.
And he did so.

6:21 Then the angel of the LORD put forth the end of the staff that
was in his hand, and touched the flesh and the unleavened cakes; and
there rose up fire out of the rock, and consumed the flesh and the
unleavened cakes. Then the angel of the LORD departed out of his
sight.

6:22 And when Gideon perceived that he was an angel of the LORD,
Gideon said, Alas, O LORD God! for because I have seen an angel of the
LORD face to face.

6:23 And the LORD said unto him, Peace be unto thee; fear not: thou
shalt not die.

6:24 Then Gideon built an altar there unto the LORD, and called it
Jehovahshalom: unto this day it is yet in Ophrah of the Abiezrites.

6:25 And it came to pass the same night, that the LORD said unto him,
Take thy father's young bullock, even the second bullock of seven
years old, and throw down the altar of Baal that thy father hath, and
cut down the grove that is by it: 6:26 And build an altar unto the
LORD thy God upon the top of this rock, in the ordered place, and take
the second bullock, and offer a burnt sacrifice with the wood of the
grove which thou shalt cut down.

6:27 Then Gideon took ten men of his servants, and did as the LORD had
said unto him: and so it was, because he feared his father's
household, and the men of the city, that he could not do it by day,
that he did it by night.

6:28 And when the men of the city arose early in the morning, behold,
the altar of Baal was cast down, and the grove was cut down that was
by it, and the second bullock was offered upon the altar that was
built.

6:29 And they said one to another, Who hath done this thing? And when
they enquired and asked, they said, Gideon the son of Joash hath done
this thing.

6:30 Then the men of the city said unto Joash, Bring out thy son, that
he may die: because he hath cast down the altar of Baal, and because
he hath cut down the grove that was by it.

6:31 And Joash said unto all that stood against him, Will ye plead for
Baal? will ye save him? he that will plead for him, let him be put to
death whilst it is yet morning: if he be a god, let him plead for
himself, because one hath cast down his altar.

6:32 Therefore on that day he called him Jerubbaal, saying, Let Baal
plead against him, because he hath thrown down his altar.

6:33 Then all the Midianites and the Amalekites and the children of
the east were gathered together, and went over, and pitched in the
valley of Jezreel.

6:34 But the Spirit of the LORD came upon Gideon, and he blew a
trumpet; and Abiezer was gathered after him.

6:35 And he sent messengers throughout all Manasseh; who also was
gathered after him: and he sent messengers unto Asher, and unto
Zebulun, and unto Naphtali; and they came up to meet them.

6:36 And Gideon said unto God, If thou wilt save Israel by mine hand,
as thou hast said, 6:37 Behold, I will put a fleece of wool in the
floor; and if the dew be on the fleece only, and it be dry upon all
the earth beside, then shall I know that thou wilt save Israel by mine
hand, as thou hast said.

6:38 And it was so: for he rose up early on the morrow, and thrust the
fleece together, and wringed the dew out of the fleece, a bowl full of
water.

6:39 And Gideon said unto God, Let not thine anger be hot against me,
and I will speak but this once: let me prove, I pray thee, but this
once with the fleece; let it now be dry only upon the fleece, and upon
all the ground let there be dew.

6:40 And God did so that night: for it was dry upon the fleece only,
and there was dew on all the ground.

7:1 Then Jerubbaal, who is Gideon, and all the people that were with
him, rose up early, and pitched beside the well of Harod: so that the
host of the Midianites were on the north side of them, by the hill of
Moreh, in the valley.

7:2 And the LORD said unto Gideon, The people that are with thee are
too many for me to give the Midianites into their hands, lest Israel
vaunt themselves against me, saying, Mine own hand hath saved me.

7:3 Now therefore go to, proclaim in the ears of the people, saying,
Whosoever is fearful and afraid, let him return and depart early from
mount Gilead. And there returned of the people twenty and two
thousand; and there remained ten thousand.

7:4 And the LORD said unto Gideon, The people are yet too many; bring
them down unto the water, and I will try them for thee there: and it
shall be, that of whom I say unto thee, This shall go with thee, the
same shall go with thee; and of whomsoever I say unto thee, This shall
not go with thee, the same shall not go.

7:5 So he brought down the people unto the water: and the LORD said
unto Gideon, Every one that lappeth of the water with his tongue, as a
dog lappeth, him shalt thou set by himself; likewise every one that
boweth down upon his knees to drink.

7:6 And the number of them that lapped, putting their hand to their
mouth, were three hundred men: but all the rest of the people bowed
down upon their knees to drink water.

7:7 And the LORD said unto Gideon, By the three hundred men that
lapped will I save you, and deliver the Midianites into thine hand:
and let all the other people go every man unto his place.

7:8 So the people took victuals in their hand, and their trumpets: and
he sent all the rest of Israel every man unto his tent, and retained
those three hundred men: and the host of Midian was beneath him in the
valley.

7:9 And it came to pass the same night, that the LORD said unto him,
Arise, get thee down unto the host; for I have delivered it into thine
hand.

7:10 But if thou fear to go down, go thou with Phurah thy servant down
to the host: 7:11 And thou shalt hear what they say; and afterward
shall thine hands be strengthened to go down unto the host. Then went
he down with Phurah his servant unto the outside of the armed men that
were in the host.

7:12 And the Midianites and the Amalekites and all the children of the
east lay along in the valley like grasshoppers for multitude; and
their camels were without number, as the sand by the sea side for
multitude.

7:13 And when Gideon was come, behold, there was a man that told a
dream unto his fellow, and said, Behold, I dreamed a dream, and, lo, a
cake of barley bread tumbled into the host of Midian, and came unto a
tent, and smote it that it fell, and overturned it, that the tent lay
along.

7:14 And his fellow answered and said, This is nothing else save the
sword of Gideon the son of Joash, a man of Israel: for into his hand
hath God delivered Midian, and all the host.

7:15 And it was so, when Gideon heard the telling of the dream, and
the interpretation thereof, that he worshipped, and returned into the
host of Israel, and said, Arise; for the LORD hath delivered into your
hand the host of Midian.

7:16 And he divided the three hundred men into three companies, and he
put a trumpet in every man's hand, with empty pitchers, and lamps
within the pitchers.

7:17 And he said unto them, Look on me, and do likewise: and, behold,
when I come to the outside of the camp, it shall be that, as I do, so
shall ye do.

7:18 When I blow with a trumpet, I and all that are with me, then blow
ye the trumpets also on every side of all the camp, and say, The sword
of the LORD, and of Gideon.

7:19 So Gideon, and the hundred men that were with him, came unto the
outside of the camp in the beginning of the middle watch; and they had
but newly set the watch: and they blew the trumpets, and brake the
pitchers that were in their hands.

7:20 And the three companies blew the trumpets, and brake the
pitchers, and held the lamps in their left hands, and the trumpets in
their right hands to blow withal: and they cried, The sword of the
LORD, and of Gideon.

7:21 And they stood every man in his place round about the camp; and
all the host ran, and cried, and fled.

7:22 And the three hundred blew the trumpets, and the LORD set every
man's sword against his fellow, even throughout all the host: and the
host fled to Bethshittah in Zererath, and to the border of
Abelmeholah, unto Tabbath.

7:23 And the men of Israel gathered themselves together out of
Naphtali, and out of Asher, and out of all Manasseh, and pursued after
the Midianites.

7:24 And Gideon sent messengers throughout all mount Ephraim, saying,
come down against the Midianites, and take before them the waters unto
Bethbarah and Jordan. Then all the men of Ephraim gathered themselves
together, and took the waters unto Bethbarah and Jordan.

7:25 And they took two princes of the Midianites, Oreb and Zeeb; and
they slew Oreb upon the rock Oreb, and Zeeb they slew at the winepress
of Zeeb, and pursued Midian, and brought the heads of Oreb and Zeeb to
Gideon on the other side Jordan.

8:1 And the men of Ephraim said unto him, Why hast thou served us
thus, that thou calledst us not, when thou wentest to fight with the
Midianites?  And they did chide with him sharply.

8:2 And he said unto them, What have I done now in comparison of you?
Is not the gleaning of the grapes of Ephraim better than the vintage
of Abiezer?  8:3 God hath delivered into your hands the princes of
Midian, Oreb and Zeeb: and what was I able to do in comparison of you?
Then their anger was abated toward him, when he had said that.

8:4 And Gideon came to Jordan, and passed over, he, and the three
hundred men that were with him, faint, yet pursuing them.

8:5 And he said unto the men of Succoth, Give, I pray you, loaves of
bread unto the people that follow me; for they be faint, and I am
pursuing after Zebah and Zalmunna, kings of Midian.

8:6 And the princes of Succoth said, Are the hands of Zebah and
Zalmunna now in thine hand, that we should give bread unto thine army?
8:7 And Gideon said, Therefore when the LORD hath delivered Zebah and
Zalmunna into mine hand, then I will tear your flesh with the thorns
of the wilderness and with briers.

8:8 And he went up thence to Penuel, and spake unto them likewise: and
the men of Penuel answered him as the men of Succoth had answered him.

8:9 And he spake also unto the men of Penuel, saying, When I come
again in peace, I will break down this tower.

8:10 Now Zebah and Zalmunna were in Karkor, and their hosts with them,
about fifteen thousand men, all that were left of all the hosts of the
children of the east: for there fell an hundred and twenty thousand
men that drew sword.

8:11 And Gideon went up by the way of them that dwelt in tents on the
east of Nobah and Jogbehah, and smote the host; for the host was
secure.

8:12 And when Zebah and Zalmunna fled, he pursued after them, and took
the two kings of Midian, Zebah and Zalmunna, and discomfited all the
host.

8:13 And Gideon the son of Joash returned from battle before the sun
was up, 8:14 And caught a young man of the men of Succoth, and
enquired of him: and he described unto him the princes of Succoth, and
the elders thereof, even threescore and seventeen men.

8:15 And he came unto the men of Succoth, and said, Behold Zebah and
Zalmunna, with whom ye did upbraid me, saying, Are the hands of Zebah
and Zalmunna now in thine hand, that we should give bread unto thy men
that are weary?  8:16 And he took the elders of the city, and thorns
of the wilderness and briers, and with them he taught the men of
Succoth.

8:17 And he beat down the tower of Penuel, and slew the men of the
city.

8:18 Then said he unto Zebah and Zalmunna, What manner of men were
they whom ye slew at Tabor? And they answered, As thou art, so were
they; each one resembled the children of a king.

8:19 And he said, They were my brethren, even the sons of my mother:
as the LORD liveth, if ye had saved them alive, I would not slay you.

8:20 And he said unto Jether his firstborn, Up, and slay them. But the
youth drew not his sword: for he feared, because he was yet a youth.

8:21 Then Zebah and Zalmunna said, Rise thou, and fall upon us: for as
the man is, so is his strength. And Gideon arose, and slew Zebah and
Zalmunna, and took away the ornaments that were on their camels'
necks.

8:22 Then the men of Israel said unto Gideon, Rule thou over us, both
thou, and thy son, and thy son's son also: for thou hast delivered us
from the hand of Midian.

8:23 And Gideon said unto them, I will not rule over you, neither
shall my son rule over you: the LORD shall rule over you.

8:24 And Gideon said unto them, I would desire a request of you, that
ye would give me every man the earrings of his prey. (For they had
golden earrings, because they were Ishmaelites.)  8:25 And they
answered, We will willingly give them. And they spread a garment, and
did cast therein every man the earrings of his prey.

8:26 And the weight of the golden earrings that he requested was a
thousand and seven hundred shekels of gold; beside ornaments, and
collars, and purple raiment that was on the kings of Midian, and
beside the chains that were about their camels' necks.

8:27 And Gideon made an ephod thereof, and put it in his city, even in
Ophrah: and all Israel went thither a whoring after it: which thing
became a snare unto Gideon, and to his house.

8:28 Thus was Midian subdued before the children of Israel, so that
they lifted up their heads no more. And the country was in quietness
forty years in the days of Gideon.

8:29 And Jerubbaal the son of Joash went and dwelt in his own house.

8:30 And Gideon had threescore and ten sons of his body begotten: for
he had many wives.

8:31 And his concubine that was in Shechem, she also bare him a son,
whose name he called Abimelech.

8:32 And Gideon the son of Joash died in a good old age, and was
buried in the sepulchre of Joash his father, in Ophrah of the
Abiezrites.

8:33 And it came to pass, as soon as Gideon was dead, that the
children of Israel turned again, and went a whoring after Baalim, and
made Baalberith their god.

8:34 And the children of Israel remembered not the LORD their God, who
had delivered them out of the hands of all their enemies on every
side: 8:35 Neither shewed they kindness to the house of Jerubbaal,
namely, Gideon, according to all the goodness which he had shewed unto
Israel.

9:1 And Abimelech the son of Jerubbaal went to Shechem unto his
mother's brethren, and communed with them, and with all the family of
the house of his mother's father, saying, 9:2 Speak, I pray you, in
the ears of all the men of Shechem, Whether is better for you, either
that all the sons of Jerubbaal, which are threescore and ten persons,
reign over you, or that one reign over you? remember also that I am
your bone and your flesh.

9:3 And his mother's brethren spake of him in the ears of all the men
of Shechem all these words: and their hearts inclined to follow
Abimelech; for they said, He is our brother.

9:4 And they gave him threescore and ten pieces of silver out of the
house of Baalberith, wherewith Abimelech hired vain and light persons,
which followed him.

9:5 And he went unto his father's house at Ophrah, and slew his
brethren the sons of Jerubbaal, being threescore and ten persons, upon
one stone: notwithstanding yet Jotham the youngest son of Jerubbaal
was left; for he hid himself.

9:6 And all the men of Shechem gathered together, and all the house of
Millo, and went, and made Abimelech king, by the plain of the pillar
that was in Shechem.

9:7 And when they told it to Jotham, he went and stood in the top of
mount Gerizim, and lifted up his voice, and cried, and said unto them,
Hearken unto me, ye men of Shechem, that God may hearken unto you.

9:8 The trees went forth on a time to anoint a king over them; and
they said unto the olive tree, Reign thou over us.

9:9 But the olive tree said unto them, Should I leave my fatness,
wherewith by me they honour God and man, and go to be promoted over
the trees?  9:10 And the trees said to the fig tree, Come thou, and
reign over us.

9:11 But the fig tree said unto them, Should I forsake my sweetness,
and my good fruit, and go to be promoted over the trees?  9:12 Then
said the trees unto the vine, Come thou, and reign over us.

9:13 And the vine said unto them, Should I leave my wine, which
cheereth God and man, and go to be promoted over the trees?  9:14 Then
said all the trees unto the bramble, Come thou, and reign over us.

9:15 And the bramble said unto the trees, If in truth ye anoint me
king over you, then come and put your trust in my shadow: and if not,
let fire come out of the bramble, and devour the cedars of Lebanon.

9:16 Now therefore, if ye have done truly and sincerely, in that ye
have made Abimelech king, and if ye have dealt well with Jerubbaal and
his house, and have done unto him according to the deserving of his
hands; 9:17 (For my father fought for you, and adventured his life
far, and delivered you out of the hand of Midian: 9:18 And ye are
risen up against my father's house this day, and have slain his sons,
threescore and ten persons, upon one stone, and have made Abimelech,
the son of his maidservant, king over the men of Shechem, because he
is your brother;) 9:19 If ye then have dealt truly and sincerely with
Jerubbaal and with his house this day, then rejoice ye in Abimelech,
and let him also rejoice in you: 9:20 But if not, let fire come out
from Abimelech, and devour the men of Shechem, and the house of Millo;
and let fire come out from the men of Shechem, and from the house of
Millo, and devour Abimelech.

9:21 And Jotham ran away, and fled, and went to Beer, and dwelt there,
for fear of Abimelech his brother.

9:22 When Abimelech had reigned three years over Israel, 9:23 Then God
sent an evil spirit between Abimelech and the men of Shechem; and the
men of Shechem dealt treacherously with Abimelech: 9:24 That the
cruelty done to the threescore and ten sons of Jerubbaal might come,
and their blood be laid upon Abimelech their brother, which slew them;
and upon the men of Shechem, which aided him in the killing of his
brethren.

9:25 And the men of Shechem set liers in wait for him in the top of
the mountains, and they robbed all that came along that way by them:
and it was told Abimelech.

9:26 And Gaal the son of Ebed came with his brethren, and went over to
Shechem: and the men of Shechem put their confidence in him.

9:27 And they went out into the fields, and gathered their vineyards,
and trode the grapes, and made merry, and went into the house of their
god, and did eat and drink, and cursed Abimelech.

9:28 And Gaal the son of Ebed said, Who is Abimelech, and who is
Shechem, that we should serve him? is not he the son of Jerubbaal? and
Zebul his officer? serve the men of Hamor the father of Shechem: for
why should we serve him?  9:29 And would to God this people were under
my hand! then would I remove Abimelech. And he said to Abimelech,
Increase thine army, and come out.

9:30 And when Zebul the ruler of the city heard the words of Gaal the
son of Ebed, his anger was kindled.

9:31 And he sent messengers unto Abimelech privily, saying, Behold,
Gaal the son of Ebed and his brethren be come to Shechem; and, behold,
they fortify the city against thee.

9:32 Now therefore up by night, thou and the people that is with thee,
and lie in wait in the field: 9:33 And it shall be, that in the
morning, as soon as the sun is up, thou shalt rise early, and set upon
the city: and, behold, when he and the people that is with him come
out against thee, then mayest thou do to them as thou shalt find
occasion.

9:34 And Abimelech rose up, and all the people that were with him, by
night, and they laid wait against Shechem in four companies.

9:35 And Gaal the son of Ebed went out, and stood in the entering of
the gate of the city: and Abimelech rose up, and the people that were
with him, from lying in wait.

9:36 And when Gaal saw the people, he said to Zebul, Behold, there
come people down from the top of the mountains. And Zebul said unto
him, Thou seest the shadow of the mountains as if they were men.

9:37 And Gaal spake again, and said, See there come people down by the
middle of the land, and another company come along by the plain of
Meonenim.

9:38 Then said Zebul unto him, Where is now thy mouth, wherewith thou
saidst, Who is Abimelech, that we should serve him? is not this the
people that thou hast despised? go out, I pray now, and fight with
them.

9:39 And Gaal went out before the men of Shechem, and fought with
Abimelech.

9:40 And Abimelech chased him, and he fled before him, and many were
overthrown and wounded, even unto the entering of the gate.

9:41 And Abimelech dwelt at Arumah: and Zebul thrust out Gaal and his
brethren, that they should not dwell in Shechem.

9:42 And it came to pass on the morrow, that the people went out into
the field; and they told Abimelech.

9:43 And he took the people, and divided them into three companies,
and laid wait in the field, and looked, and, behold, the people were
come forth out of the city; and he rose up against them, and smote
them.

9:44 And Abimelech, and the company that was with him, rushed forward,
and stood in the entering of the gate of the city: and the two other
companies ran upon all the people that were in the fields, and slew
them.

9:45 And Abimelech fought against the city all that day; and he took
the city, and slew the people that was therein, and beat down the
city, and sowed it with salt.

9:46 And when all the men of the tower of Shechem heard that, they
entered into an hold of the house of the god Berith.

9:47 And it was told Abimelech, that all the men of the tower of
Shechem were gathered together.

9:48 And Abimelech gat him up to mount Zalmon, he and all the people
that were with him; and Abimelech took an axe in his hand, and cut
down a bough from the trees, and took it, and laid it on his shoulder,
and said unto the people that were with him, What ye have seen me do,
make haste, and do as I have done.

9:49 And all the people likewise cut down every man his bough, and
followed Abimelech, and put them to the hold, and set the hold on fire
upon them; so that all the men of the tower of Shechem died also,
about a thousand men and women.

9:50 Then went Abimelech to Thebez, and encamped against Thebez, and
took it.

9:51 But there was a strong tower within the city, and thither fled
all the men and women, and all they of the city, and shut it to them,
and gat them up to the top of the tower.

9:52 And Abimelech came unto the tower, and fought against it, and
went hard unto the door of the tower to burn it with fire.

9:53 And a certain woman cast a piece of a millstone upon Abimelech's
head, and all to brake his skull.

9:54 Then he called hastily unto the young man his armourbearer, and
said unto him, Draw thy sword, and slay me, that men say not of me, A
women slew him. And his young man thrust him through, and he died.

9:55 And when the men of Israel saw that Abimelech was dead, they
departed every man unto his place.

9:56 Thus God rendered the wickedness of Abimelech, which he did unto
his father, in slaying his seventy brethren: 9:57 And all the evil of
the men of Shechem did God render upon their heads: and upon them came
the curse of Jotham the son of Jerubbaal.

10:1 And after Abimelech there arose to defend Israel Tola the son of
Puah, the son of Dodo, a man of Issachar; and he dwelt in Shamir in
mount Ephraim.

10:2 And he judged Israel twenty and three years, and died, and was
buried in Shamir.

10:3 And after him arose Jair, a Gileadite, and judged Israel twenty
and two years.

10:4 And he had thirty sons that rode on thirty ass colts, and they
had thirty cities, which are called Havothjair unto this day, which
are in the land of Gilead.

10:5 And Jair died, and was buried in Camon.

10:6 And the children of Israel did evil again in the sight of the
LORD, and served Baalim, and Ashtaroth, and the gods of Syria, and the
gods of Zidon, and the gods of Moab, and the gods of the children of
Ammon, and the gods of the Philistines, and forsook the LORD, and
served not him.

10:7 And the anger of the LORD was hot against Israel, and he sold
them into the hands of the Philistines, and into the hands of the
children of Ammon.

10:8 And that year they vexed and oppressed the children of Israel:
eighteen years, all the children of Israel that were on the other side
Jordan in the land of the Amorites, which is in Gilead.

10:9 Moreover the children of Ammon passed over Jordan to fight also
against Judah, and against Benjamin, and against the house of Ephraim;
so that Israel was sore distressed.

10:10 And the children of Israel cried unto the LORD, saying, We have
sinned against thee, both because we have forsaken our God, and also
served Baalim.

10:11 And the LORD said unto the children of Israel, Did not I deliver
you from the Egyptians, and from the Amorites, from the children of
Ammon, and from the Philistines?  10:12 The Zidonians also, and the
Amalekites, and the Maonites, did oppress you; and ye cried to me, and
I delivered you out of their hand.

10:13 Yet ye have forsaken me, and served other gods: wherefore I will
deliver you no more.

10:14 Go and cry unto the gods which ye have chosen; let them deliver
you in the time of your tribulation.

10:15 And the children of Israel said unto the LORD, We have sinned:
do thou unto us whatsoever seemeth good unto thee; deliver us only, we
pray thee, this day.

10:16 And they put away the strange gods from among them, and served
the LORD: and his soul was grieved for the misery of Israel.

10:17 Then the children of Ammon were gathered together, and encamped
in Gilead. And the children of Israel assembled themselves together,
and encamped in Mizpeh.

10:18 And the people and princes of Gilead said one to another, What
man is he that will begin to fight against the children of Ammon? he
shall be head over all the inhabitants of Gilead.

11:1 Now Jephthah the Gileadite was a mighty man of valour, and he was
the son of an harlot: and Gilead begat Jephthah.

11:2 And Gilead's wife bare him sons; and his wife's sons grew up, and
they thrust out Jephthah, and said unto him, Thou shalt not inherit in
our father's house; for thou art the son of a strange woman.

11:3 Then Jephthah fled from his brethren, and dwelt in the land of
Tob: and there were gathered vain men to Jephthah, and went out with
him.

11:4 And it came to pass in process of time, that the children of
Ammon made war against Israel.

11:5 And it was so, that when the children of Ammon made war against
Israel, the elders of Gilead went to fetch Jephthah out of the land of
Tob: 11:6 And they said unto Jephthah, Come, and be our captain, that
we may fight with the children of Ammon.

11:7 And Jephthah said unto the elders of Gilead, Did not ye hate me,
and expel me out of my father's house? and why are ye come unto me now
when ye are in distress?  11:8 And the elders of Gilead said unto
Jephthah, Therefore we turn again to thee now, that thou mayest go
with us, and fight against the children of Ammon, and be our head over
all the inhabitants of Gilead.

11:9 And Jephthah said unto the elders of Gilead, If ye bring me home
again to fight against the children of Ammon, and the LORD deliver
them before me, shall I be your head?  11:10 And the elders of Gilead
said unto Jephthah, The LORD be witness between us, if we do not so
according to thy words.

11:11 Then Jephthah went with the elders of Gilead, and the people
made him head and captain over them: and Jephthah uttered all his
words before the LORD in Mizpeh.

11:12 And Jephthah sent messengers unto the king of the children of
Ammon, saying, What hast thou to do with me, that thou art come
against me to fight in my land?  11:13 And the king of the children of
Ammon answered unto the messengers of Jephthah, Because Israel took
away my land, when they came up out of Egypt, from Arnon even unto
Jabbok, and unto Jordan: now therefore restore those lands again
peaceably.

11:14 And Jephthah sent messengers again unto the king of the children
of Ammon: 11:15 And said unto him, Thus saith Jephthah, Israel took
not away the land of Moab, nor the land of the children of Ammon:
11:16 But when Israel came up from Egypt, and walked through the
wilderness unto the Red sea, and came to Kadesh; 11:17 Then Israel
sent messengers unto the king of Edom, saying, Let me, I pray thee,
pass through thy land: but the king of Edom would not hearken thereto.
And in like manner they sent unto the king of Moab: but he would not
consent: and Israel abode in Kadesh.

11:18 Then they went along through the wilderness, and compassed the
land of Edom, and the land of Moab, and came by the east side of the
land of Moab, and pitched on the other side of Arnon, but came not
within the border of Moab: for Arnon was the border of Moab.

11:19 And Israel sent messengers unto Sihon king of the Amorites, the
king of Heshbon; and Israel said unto him, Let us pass, we pray thee,
through thy land into my place.

11:20 But Sihon trusted not Israel to pass through his coast: but
Sihon gathered all his people together, and pitched in Jahaz, and
fought against Israel.

11:21 And the LORD God of Israel delivered Sihon and all his people
into the hand of Israel, and they smote them: so Israel possessed all
the land of the Amorites, the inhabitants of that country.

11:22 And they possessed all the coasts of the Amorites, from Arnon
even unto Jabbok, and from the wilderness even unto Jordan.

11:23 So now the LORD God of Israel hath dispossessed the Amorites
from before his people Israel, and shouldest thou possess it?  11:24
Wilt not thou possess that which Chemosh thy god giveth thee to
possess? So whomsoever the LORD our God shall drive out from before
us, them will we possess.

11:25 And now art thou any thing better than Balak the son of Zippor,
king of Moab? did he ever strive against Israel, or did he ever fight
against them, 11:26 While Israel dwelt in Heshbon and her towns, and
in Aroer and her towns, and in all the cities that be along by the
coasts of Arnon, three hundred years? why therefore did ye not recover
them within that time?  11:27 Wherefore I have not sinned against
thee, but thou doest me wrong to war against me: the LORD the Judge be
judge this day between the children of Israel and the children of
Ammon.

11:28 Howbeit the king of the children of Ammon hearkened not unto the
words of Jephthah which he sent him.

11:29 Then the Spirit of the LORD came upon Jephthah, and he passed
over Gilead, and Manasseh, and passed over Mizpeh of Gilead, and from
Mizpeh of Gilead he passed over unto the children of Ammon.

11:30 And Jephthah vowed a vow unto the LORD, and said, If thou shalt
without fail deliver the children of Ammon into mine hands, 11:31 Then
it shall be, that whatsoever cometh forth of the doors of my house to
meet me, when I return in peace from the children of Ammon, shall
surely be the LORD's, and I will offer it up for a burnt offering.

11:32 So Jephthah passed over unto the children of Ammon to fight
against them; and the LORD delivered them into his hands.

11:33 And he smote them from Aroer, even till thou come to Minnith,
even twenty cities, and unto the plain of the vineyards, with a very
great slaughter. Thus the children of Ammon were subdued before the
children of Israel.

11:34 And Jephthah came to Mizpeh unto his house, and, behold, his
daughter came out to meet him with timbrels and with dances: and she
was his only child; beside her he had neither son nor daughter.

11:35 And it came to pass, when he saw her, that he rent his clothes,
and said, Alas, my daughter! thou hast brought me very low, and thou
art one of them that trouble me: for I have opened my mouth unto the
LORD, and I cannot go back.

11:36 And she said unto him, My father, if thou hast opened thy mouth
unto the LORD, do to me according to that which hath proceeded out of
thy mouth; forasmuch as the LORD hath taken vengeance for thee of
thine enemies, even of the children of Ammon.

11:37 And she said unto her father, Let this thing be done for me: let
me alone two months, that I may go up and down upon the mountains, and
bewail my virginity, I and my fellows.

11:38 And he said, Go. And he sent her away for two months: and she
went with her companions, and bewailed her virginity upon the
mountains.

11:39 And it came to pass at the end of two months, that she returned
unto her father, who did with her according to his vow which he had
vowed: and she knew no man. And it was a custom in Israel, 11:40 That
the daughters of Israel went yearly to lament the daughter of Jephthah
the Gileadite four days in a year.

12:1 And the men of Ephraim gathered themselves together, and went
northward, and said unto Jephthah, Wherefore passedst thou over to
fight against the children of Ammon, and didst not call us to go with
thee? we will burn thine house upon thee with fire.

12:2 And Jephthah said unto them, I and my people were at great strife
with the children of Ammon; and when I called you, ye delivered me not
out of their hands.

12:3 And when I saw that ye delivered me not, I put my life in my
hands, and passed over against the children of Ammon, and the LORD
delivered them into my hand: wherefore then are ye come up unto me
this day, to fight against me?  12:4 Then Jephthah gathered together
all the men of Gilead, and fought with Ephraim: and the men of Gilead
smote Ephraim, because they said, Ye Gileadites are fugitives of
Ephraim among the Ephraimites, and among the Manassites.

12:5 And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the
Ephraimites: and it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were
escaped said, Let me go over; that the men of Gilead said unto him,
Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay; 12:6 Then said they unto him,
Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to
pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages
of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and
two thousand.

12:7 And Jephthah judged Israel six years. Then died Jephthah the
Gileadite, and was buried in one of the cities of Gilead.

12:8 And after him Ibzan of Bethlehem judged Israel.

12:9 And he had thirty sons, and thirty daughters, whom he sent
abroad, and took in thirty daughters from abroad for his sons. And he
judged Israel seven years.

12:10 Then died Ibzan, and was buried at Bethlehem.

12:11 And after him Elon, a Zebulonite, judged Israel; and he judged
Israel ten years.

12:12 And Elon the Zebulonite died, and was buried in Aijalon in the
country of Zebulun.

12:13 And after him Abdon the son of Hillel, a Pirathonite, judged
Israel.

12:14 And he had forty sons and thirty nephews, that rode on
threescore and ten ass colts: and he judged Israel eight years.

12:15 And Abdon the son of Hillel the Pirathonite died, and was buried
in Pirathon in the land of Ephraim, in the mount of the Amalekites.

13:1 And the children of Israel did evil again in the sight of the
LORD; and the LORD delivered them into the hand of the Philistines
forty years.

13:2 And there was a certain man of Zorah, of the family of the
Danites, whose name was Manoah; and his wife was barren, and bare not.

13:3 And the angel of the LORD appeared unto the woman, and said unto
her, Behold now, thou art barren, and bearest not: but thou shalt
conceive, and bear a son.

13:4 Now therefore beware, I pray thee, and drink not wine nor strong
drink, and eat not any unclean thing: 13:5 For, lo, thou shalt
conceive, and bear a son; and no razor shall come on his head: for the
child shall be a Nazarite unto God from the womb: and he shall begin
to deliver Israel out of the hand of the Philistines.

13:6 Then the woman came and told her husband, saying, A man of God
came unto me, and his countenance was like the countenance of an angel
of God, very terrible: but I asked him not whence he was, neither told
he me his name: 13:7 But he said unto me, Behold, thou shalt conceive,
and bear a son; and now drink no wine nor strong drink, neither eat
any unclean thing: for the child shall be a Nazarite to God from the
womb to the day of his death.

13:8 Then Manoah intreated the LORD, and said, O my Lord, let the man
of God which thou didst send come again unto us, and teach us what we
shall do unto the child that shall be born.

13:9 And God hearkened to the voice of Manoah; and the angel of God
came again unto the woman as she sat in the field: but Manoah her
husband was not with her.

13:10 And the woman made haste, and ran, and shewed her husband, and
said unto him, Behold, the man hath appeared unto me, that came unto
me the other day.

13:11 And Manoah arose, and went after his wife, and came to the man,
and said unto him, Art thou the man that spakest unto the woman? And
he said, I am.

13:12 And Manoah said, Now let thy words come to pass. How shall we
order the child, and how shall we do unto him?  13:13 And the angel of
the LORD said unto Manoah, Of all that I said unto the woman let her
beware.

13:14 She may not eat of any thing that cometh of the vine, neither
let her drink wine or strong drink, nor eat any unclean thing: all
that I commanded her let her observe.

13:15 And Manoah said unto the angel of the LORD, I pray thee, let us
detain thee, until we shall have made ready a kid for thee.

13:16 And the angel of the LORD said unto Manoah, Though thou detain
me, I will not eat of thy bread: and if thou wilt offer a burnt
offering, thou must offer it unto the LORD. For Manoah knew not that
he was an angel of the LORD.

13:17 And Manoah said unto the angel of the LORD, What is thy name,
that when thy sayings come to pass we may do thee honour?  13:18 And
the angel of the LORD said unto him, Why askest thou thus after my
name, seeing it is secret?  13:19 So Manoah took a kid with a meat
offering, and offered it upon a rock unto the LORD: and the angel did
wonderously; and Manoah and his wife looked on.

13:20 For it came to pass, when the flame went up toward heaven from
off the altar, that the angel of the LORD ascended in the flame of the
altar. And Manoah and his wife looked on it, and fell on their faces
to the ground.

13:21 But the angel of the LORD did no more appear to Manoah and to
his wife. Then Manoah knew that he was an angel of the LORD.

13:22 And Manoah said unto his wife, We shall surely die, because we
have seen God.

13:23 But his wife said unto him, If the LORD were pleased to kill us,
he would not have received a burnt offering and a meat offering at our
hands, neither would he have shewed us all these things, nor would as
at this time have told us such things as these.

13:24 And the woman bare a son, and called his name Samson: and the
child grew, and the LORD blessed him.

13:25 And the Spirit of the LORD began to move him at times in the
camp of Dan between Zorah and Eshtaol.

14:1 And Samson went down to Timnath, and saw a woman in Timnath of
the daughters of the Philistines.

14:2 And he came up, and told his father and his mother, and said, I
have seen a woman in Timnath of the daughters of the Philistines: now
therefore get her for me to wife.

14:3 Then his father and his mother said unto him, Is there never a
woman among the daughters of thy brethren, or among all my people,
that thou goest to take a wife of the uncircumcised Philistines? And
Samson said unto his father, Get her for me; for she pleaseth me well.

14:4 But his father and his mother knew not that it was of the LORD,
that he sought an occasion against the Philistines: for at that time
the Philistines had dominion over Israel.

14:5 Then went Samson down, and his father and his mother, to Timnath,
and came to the vineyards of Timnath: and, behold, a young lion roared
against him.

14:6 And the Spirit of the LORD came mightily upon him, and he rent
him as he would have rent a kid, and he had nothing in his hand: but
he told not his father or his mother what he had done.

14:7 And he went down, and talked with the woman; and she pleased
Samson well.

14:8 And after a time he returned to take her, and he turned aside to
see the carcase of the lion: and, behold, there was a swarm of bees
and honey in the carcase of the lion.

14:9 And he took thereof in his hands, and went on eating, and came to
his father and mother, and he gave them, and they did eat: but he told
not them that he had taken the honey out of the carcase of the lion.

14:10 So his father went down unto the woman: and Samson made there a
feast; for so used the young men to do.

14:11 And it came to pass, when they saw him, that they brought thirty
companions to be with him.

14:12 And Samson said unto them, I will now put forth a riddle unto
you: if ye can certainly declare it me within the seven days of the
feast, and find it out, then I will give you thirty sheets and thirty
change of garments: 14:13 But if ye cannot declare it me, then shall
ye give me thirty sheets and thirty change of garments. And they said
unto him, Put forth thy riddle, that we may hear it.

14:14 And he said unto them, Out of the eater came forth meat, and out
of the strong came forth sweetness. And they could not in three days
expound the riddle.

14:15 And it came to pass on the seventh day, that they said unto
Samson's wife, Entice thy husband, that he may declare unto us the
riddle, lest we burn thee and thy father's house with fire: have ye
called us to take that we have? is it not so?  14:16 And Samson's wife
wept before him, and said, Thou dost but hate me, and lovest me not:
thou hast put forth a riddle unto the children of my people, and hast
not told it me. And he said unto her, Behold, I have not told it my
father nor my mother, and shall I tell it thee?  14:17 And she wept
before him the seven days, while their feast lasted: and it came to
pass on the seventh day, that he told her, because she lay sore upon
him: and she told the riddle to the children of her people.

14:18 And the men of the city said unto him on the seventh day before
the sun went down, What is sweeter than honey? And what is stronger
than a lion?  and he said unto them, If ye had not plowed with my
heifer, ye had not found out my riddle.

14:19 And the Spirit of the LORD came upon him, and he went down to
Ashkelon, and slew thirty men of them, and took their spoil, and gave
change of garments unto them which expounded the riddle. And his anger
was kindled, and he went up to his father's house.

14:20 But Samson's wife was given to his companion, whom he had used
as his friend.

15:1 But it came to pass within a while after, in the time of wheat
harvest, that Samson visited his wife with a kid; and he said, I will
go in to my wife into the chamber. But her father would not suffer him
to go in.

15:2 And her father said, I verily thought that thou hadst utterly
hated her; therefore I gave her to thy companion: is not her younger
sister fairer than she? take her, I pray thee, instead of her.

15:3 And Samson said concerning them, Now shall I be more blameless
than the Philistines, though I do them a displeasure.

15:4 And Samson went and caught three hundred foxes, and took
firebrands, and turned tail to tail, and put a firebrand in the midst
between two tails.

15:5 And when he had set the brands on fire, he let them go into the
standing corn of the Philistines, and burnt up both the shocks, and
also the standing corn, with the vineyards and olives.

15:6 Then the Philistines said, Who hath done this? And they answered,
Samson, the son in law of the Timnite, because he had taken his wife,
and given her to his companion. And the Philistines came up, and burnt
her and her father with fire.

15:7 And Samson said unto them, Though ye have done this, yet will I
be avenged of you, and after that I will cease.

15:8 And he smote them hip and thigh with a great slaughter: and he
went down and dwelt in the top of the rock Etam.

15:9 Then the Philistines went up, and pitched in Judah, and spread
themselves in Lehi.

15:10 And the men of Judah said, Why are ye come up against us? And
they answered, To bind Samson are we come up, to do to him as he hath
done to us.

15:11 Then three thousand men of Judah went to the top of the rock
Etam, and said to Samson, Knowest thou not that the Philistines are
rulers over us? what is this that thou hast done unto us? And he said
unto them, As they did unto me, so have I done unto them.

15:12 And they said unto him, We are come down to bind thee, that we
may deliver thee into the hand of the Philistines. And Samson said
unto them, Swear unto me, that ye will not fall upon me yourselves.

15:13 And they spake unto him, saying, No; but we will bind thee fast,
and deliver thee into their hand: but surely we will not kill thee.
And they bound him with two new cords, and brought him up from the
rock.

15:14 And when he came unto Lehi, the Philistines shouted against him:
and the Spirit of the LORD came mightily upon him, and the cords that
were upon his arms became as flax that was burnt with fire, and his
bands loosed from off his hands.

15:15 And he found a new jawbone of an ass, and put forth his hand,
and took it, and slew a thousand men therewith.

15:16 And Samson said, With the jawbone of an ass, heaps upon heaps,
with the jaw of an ass have I slain a thousand men.

15:17 And it came to pass, when he had made an end of speaking, that
he cast away the jawbone out of his hand, and called that place
Ramathlehi.

15:18 And he was sore athirst, and called on the LORD, and said, Thou
hast given this great deliverance into the hand of thy servant: and
now shall I die for thirst, and fall into the hand of the
uncircumcised?  15:19 But God clave an hollow place that was in the
jaw, and there came water thereout; and when he had drunk, his spirit
came again, and he revived: wherefore he called the name thereof
Enhakkore, which is in Lehi unto this day.

15:20 And he judged Israel in the days of the Philistines twenty
years.

16:1 Then went Samson to Gaza, and saw there an harlot, and went in
unto her.

16:2 And it was told the Gazites, saying, Samson is come hither. And
they compassed him in, and laid wait for him all night in the gate of
the city, and were quiet all the night, saying, In the morning, when
it is day, we shall kill him.

16:3 And Samson lay till midnight, and arose at midnight, and took the
doors of the gate of the city, and the two posts, and went away with
them, bar and all, and put them upon his shoulders, and carried them
up to the top of an hill that is before Hebron.

16:4 And it came to pass afterward, that he loved a woman in the
valley of Sorek, whose name was Delilah.

16:5 And the lords of the Philistines came up unto her, and said unto
her, Entice him, and see wherein his great strength lieth, and by what
means we may prevail against him, that we may bind him to afflict him;
and we will give thee every one of us eleven hundred pieces of silver.

16:6 And Delilah said to Samson, Tell me, I pray thee, wherein thy
great strength lieth, and wherewith thou mightest be bound to afflict
thee.

16:7 And Samson said unto her, If they bind me with seven green withs
that were never dried, then shall I be weak, and be as another man.

16:8 Then the lords of the Philistines brought up to her seven green
withs which had not been dried, and she bound him with them.

16:9 Now there were men lying in wait, abiding with her in the
chamber.

And she said unto him, The Philistines be upon thee, Samson. And he
brake the withs, as a thread of tow is broken when it toucheth the
fire. So his strength was not known.

16:10 And Delilah said unto Samson, Behold, thou hast mocked me, and
told me lies: now tell me, I pray thee, wherewith thou mightest be
bound.

16:11 And he said unto her, If they bind me fast with new ropes that
never were occupied, then shall I be weak, and be as another man.

16:12 Delilah therefore took new ropes, and bound him therewith, and
said unto him, The Philistines be upon thee, Samson. And there were
liers in wait abiding in the chamber. And he brake them from off his
arms like a thread.

16:13 And Delilah said unto Samson, Hitherto thou hast mocked me, and
told me lies: tell me wherewith thou mightest be bound. And he said
unto her, If thou weavest the seven locks of my head with the web.

16:14 And she fastened it with the pin, and said unto him, The
Philistines be upon thee, Samson. And he awaked out of his sleep, and
went away with the pin of the beam, and with the web.

16:15 And she said unto him, How canst thou say, I love thee, when
thine heart is not with me? thou hast mocked me these three times, and
hast not told me wherein thy great strength lieth.

16:16 And it came to pass, when she pressed him daily with her words,
and urged him, so that his soul was vexed unto death; 16:17 That he
told her all his heart, and said unto her, There hath not come a razor
upon mine head; for I have been a Nazarite unto God from my mother's
womb: if I be shaven, then my strength will go from me, and I shall
become weak, and be like any other man.

16:18 And when Delilah saw that he had told her all his heart, she
sent and called for the lords of the Philistines, saying, Come up this
once, for he hath shewed me all his heart. Then the lords of the
Philistines came up unto her, and brought money in their hand.

16:19 And she made him sleep upon her knees; and she called for a man,
and she caused him to shave off the seven locks of his head; and she
began to afflict him, and his strength went from him.

16:20 And she said, The Philistines be upon thee, Samson. And he awoke
out of his sleep, and said, I will go out as at other times before,
and shake myself. And he wist not that the LORD was departed from him.

16:21 But the Philistines took him, and put out his eyes, and brought
him down to Gaza, and bound him with fetters of brass; and he did
grind in the prison house.

16:22 Howbeit the hair of his head began to grow again after he was
shaven.

16:23 Then the lords of the Philistines gathered them together for to
offer a great sacrifice unto Dagon their god, and to rejoice: for they
said, Our god hath delivered Samson our enemy into our hand.

16:24 And when the people saw him, they praised their god: for they
said, Our god hath delivered into our hands our enemy, and the
destroyer of our country, which slew many of us.

16:25 And it came to pass, when their hearts were merry, that they
said, Call for Samson, that he may make us sport. And they called for
Samson out of the prison house; and he made them sport: and they set
him between the pillars.

16:26 And Samson said unto the lad that held him by the hand, Suffer
me that I may feel the pillars whereupon the house standeth, that I
may lean upon them.

16:27 Now the house was full of men and women; and all the lords of
the Philistines were there; and there were upon the roof about three
thousand men and women, that beheld while Samson made sport.

16:28 And Samson called unto the LORD, and said, O Lord God, remember
me, I pray thee, and strengthen me, I pray thee, only this once, O
God, that I may be at once avenged of the Philistines for my two eyes.

16:29 And Samson took hold of the two middle pillars upon which the
house stood, and on which it was borne up, of the one with his right
hand, and of the other with his left.

16:30 And Samson said, Let me die with the Philistines. And he bowed
himself with all his might; and the house fell upon the lords, and
upon all the people that were therein. So the dead which he slew at
his death were more than they which he slew in his life.

16:31 Then his brethren and all the house of his father came down, and
took him, and brought him up, and buried him between Zorah and Eshtaol
in the buryingplace of Manoah his father. And he judged Israel twenty
years.

17:1 And there was a man of mount Ephraim, whose name was Micah.

17:2 And he said unto his mother, The eleven hundred shekels of silver
that were taken from thee, about which thou cursedst, and spakest of
also in mine ears, behold, the silver is with me; I took it. And his
mother said, Blessed be thou of the LORD, my son.

17:3 And when he had restored the eleven hundred shekels of silver to
his mother, his mother said, I had wholly dedicated the silver unto
the LORD from my hand for my son, to make a graven image and a molten
image: now therefore I will restore it unto thee.

17:4 Yet he restored the money unto his mother; and his mother took
two hundred shekels of silver, and gave them to the founder, who made
thereof a graven image and a molten image: and they were in the house
of Micah.

17:5 And the man Micah had an house of gods, and made an ephod, and
teraphim, and consecrated one of his sons, who became his priest.

17:6 In those days there was no king in Israel, but every man did that
which was right in his own eyes.

17:7 And there was a young man out of Bethlehemjudah of the family of
Judah, who was a Levite, and he sojourned there.

17:8 And the man departed out of the city from Bethlehemjudah to
sojourn where he could find a place: and he came to mount Ephraim to
the house of Micah, as he journeyed.

17:9 And Micah said unto him, Whence comest thou? And he said unto
him, I am a Levite of Bethlehemjudah, and I go to sojourn where I may
find a place.

17:10 And Micah said unto him, Dwell with me, and be unto me a father
and a priest, and I will give thee ten shekels of silver by the year,
and a suit of apparel, and thy victuals. So the Levite went in.

17:11 And the Levite was content to dwell with the man; and the young
man was unto him as one of his sons.

17:12 And Micah consecrated the Levite; and the young man became his
priest, and was in the house of Micah.

17:13 Then said Micah, Now know I that the LORD will do me good,
seeing I have a Levite to my priest.

18:1 In those days there was no king in Israel: and in those days the
tribe of the Danites sought them an inheritance to dwell in; for unto
that day all their inheritance had not fallen unto them among the
tribes of Israel.

18:2 And the children of Dan sent of their family five men from their
coasts, men of valour, from Zorah, and from Eshtaol, to spy out the
land, and to search it; and they said unto them, Go, search the land:
who when they came to mount Ephraim, to the house of Micah, they
lodged there.

18:3 When they were by the house of Micah, they knew the voice of the
young man the Levite: and they turned in thither, and said unto him,
Who brought thee hither? and what makest thou in this place? and what
hast thou here?  18:4 And he said unto them, Thus and thus dealeth
Micah with me, and hath hired me, and I am his priest.

18:5 And they said unto him, Ask counsel, we pray thee, of God, that
we may know whether our way which we go shall be prosperous.

18:6 And the priest said unto them, Go in peace: before the LORD is
your way wherein ye go.

18:7 Then the five men departed, and came to Laish, and saw the people
that were therein, how they dwelt careless, after the manner of the
Zidonians, quiet and secure; and there was no magistrate in the land,
that might put them to shame in any thing; and they were far from the
Zidonians, and had no business with any man.

18:8 And they came unto their brethren to Zorah and Eshtaol: and their
brethren said unto them, What say ye?  18:9 And they said, Arise, that
we may go up against them: for we have seen the land, and, behold, it
is very good: and are ye still? be not slothful to go, and to enter to
possess the land.

18:10 When ye go, ye shall come unto a people secure, and to a large
land: for God hath given it into your hands; a place where there is no
want of any thing that is in the earth.

18:11 And there went from thence of the family of the Danites, out of
Zorah and out of Eshtaol, six hundred men appointed with weapons of
war.

18:12 And they went up, and pitched in Kirjathjearim, in Judah:
wherefore they called that place Mahanehdan unto this day: behold, it
is behind Kirjathjearim.

18:13 And they passed thence unto mount Ephraim, and came unto the
house of Micah.

18:14 Then answered the five men that went to spy out the country of
Laish, and said unto their brethren, Do ye know that there is in these
houses an ephod, and teraphim, and a graven image, and a molten image?
now therefore consider what ye have to do.

18:15 And they turned thitherward, and came to the house of the young
man the Levite, even unto the house of Micah, and saluted him.

18:16 And the six hundred men appointed with their weapons of war,
which were of the children of Dan, stood by the entering of the gate.

18:17 And the five men that went to spy out the land went up, and came
in thither, and took the graven image, and the ephod, and the
teraphim, and the molten image: and the priest stood in the entering
of the gate with the six hundred men that were appointed with weapons
of war.

18:18 And these went into Micah's house, and fetched the carved image,
the ephod, and the teraphim, and the molten image. Then said the
priest unto them, What do ye?  18:19 And they said unto him, Hold thy
peace, lay thine hand upon thy mouth, and go with us, and be to us a
father and a priest: is it better for thee to be a priest unto the
house of one man, or that thou be a priest unto a tribe and a family
in Israel?  18:20 And the priest's heart was glad, and he took the
ephod, and the teraphim, and the graven image, and went in the midst
of the people.

18:21 So they turned and departed, and put the little ones and the
cattle and the carriage before them.

18:22 And when they were a good way from the house of Micah, the men
that were in the houses near to Micah's house were gathered together,
and overtook the children of Dan.

18:23 And they cried unto the children of Dan. And they turned their
faces, and said unto Micah, What aileth thee, that thou comest with
such a company?  18:24 And he said, Ye have taken away my gods which I
made, and the priest, and ye are gone away: and what have I more? and
what is this that ye say unto me, What aileth thee?  18:25 And the
children of Dan said unto him, Let not thy voice be heard among us,
lest angry fellows run upon thee, and thou lose thy life, with the
lives of thy household.

18:26 And the children of Dan went their way: and when Micah saw that
they were too strong for him, he turned and went back unto his house.

18:27 And they took the things which Micah had made, and the priest
which he had, and came unto Laish, unto a people that were at quiet
and secure: and they smote them with the edge of the sword, and burnt
the city with fire.

18:28 And there was no deliverer, because it was far from Zidon, and
they had no business with any man; and it was in the valley that lieth
by Bethrehob. And they built a city, and dwelt therein.

18:29 And they called the name of the city Dan, after the name of Dan
their father, who was born unto Israel: howbeit the name of the city
was Laish at the first.

18:30 And the children of Dan set up the graven image: and Jonathan,
the son of Gershom, the son of Manasseh, he and his sons were priests
to the tribe of Dan until the day of the captivity of the land.

18:31 And they set them up Micah's graven image, which he made, all
the time that the house of God was in Shiloh.

19:1 And it came to pass in those days, when there was no king in
Israel, that there was a certain Levite sojourning on the side of
mount Ephraim, who took to him a concubine out of Bethlehemjudah.

19:2 And his concubine played the whore against him, and went away
from him unto her father's house to Bethlehemjudah, and was there four
whole months.

19:3 And her husband arose, and went after her, to speak friendly unto
her, and to bring her again, having his servant with him, and a couple
of asses: and she brought him into her father's house: and when the
father of the damsel saw him, he rejoiced to meet him.

19:4 And his father in law, the damsel's father, retained him; and he
abode with him three days: so they did eat and drink, and lodged
there.

19:5 And it came to pass on the fourth day, when they arose early in
the morning, that he rose up to depart: and the damsel's father said
unto his son in law, Comfort thine heart with a morsel of bread, and
afterward go your way.

19:6 And they sat down, and did eat and drink both of them together:
for the damsel's father had said unto the man, Be content, I pray
thee, and tarry all night, and let thine heart be merry.

19:7 And when the man rose up to depart, his father in law urged him:
therefore he lodged there again.

19:8 And he arose early in the morning on the fifth day to depart; and
the damsel's father said, Comfort thine heart, I pray thee. And they
tarried until afternoon, and they did eat both of them.

19:9 And when the man rose up to depart, he, and his concubine, and
his servant, his father in law, the damsel's father, said unto him,
Behold, now the day draweth toward evening, I pray you tarry all
night: behold, the day groweth to an end, lodge here, that thine heart
may be merry; and to morrow get you early on your way, that thou
mayest go home.

19:10 But the man would not tarry that night, but he rose up and
departed, and came over against Jebus, which is Jerusalem; and there
were with him two asses saddled, his concubine also was with him.

19:11 And when they were by Jebus, the day was far spent; and the
servant said unto his master, Come, I pray thee, and let us turn in
into this city of the Jebusites, and lodge in it.

19:12 And his master said unto him, We will not turn aside hither into
the city of a stranger, that is not of the children of Israel; we will
pass over to Gibeah.

19:13 And he said unto his servant, Come, and let us draw near to one
of these places to lodge all night, in Gibeah, or in Ramah.

19:14 And they passed on and went their way; and the sun went down
upon them when they were by Gibeah, which belongeth to Benjamin.

19:15 And they turned aside thither, to go in and to lodge in Gibeah:
and when he went in, he sat him down in a street of the city: for
there was no man that took them into his house to lodging.

19:16 And, behold, there came an old man from his work out of the
field at even, which was also of mount Ephraim; and he sojourned in
Gibeah: but the men of the place were Benjamites.

19:17 And when he had lifted up his eyes, he saw a wayfaring man in
the street of the city: and the old man said, Whither goest thou? and
whence comest thou?  19:18 And he said unto him, We are passing from
Bethlehemjudah toward the side of mount Ephraim; from thence am I: and
I went to Bethlehemjudah, but I am now going to the house of the LORD;
and there is no man that receiveth me to house.

19:19 Yet there is both straw and provender for our asses; and there
is bread and wine also for me, and for thy handmaid, and for the young
man which is with thy servants: there is no want of any thing.

19:20 And the old man said, Peace be with thee; howsoever let all thy
wants lie upon me; only lodge not in the street.

19:21 So he brought him into his house, and gave provender unto the
asses: and they washed their feet, and did eat and drink.

19:22 Now as they were making their hearts merry, behold, the men of
the city, certain sons of Belial, beset the house round about, and
beat at the door, and spake to the master of the house, the old man,
saying, Bring forth the man that came into thine house, that we may
know him.

19:23 And the man, the master of the house, went out unto them, and
said unto them, Nay, my brethren, nay, I pray you, do not so wickedly;
seeing that this man is come into mine house, do not this folly.

19:24 Behold, here is my daughter a maiden, and his concubine; them I
will bring out now, and humble ye them, and do with them what seemeth
good unto you: but unto this man do not so vile a thing.

19:25 But the men would not hearken to him: so the man took his
concubine, and brought her forth unto them; and they knew her, and
abused her all the night until the morning: and when the day began to
spring, they let her go.

19:26 Then came the woman in the dawning of the day, and fell down at
the door of the man's house where her lord was, till it was light.

19:27 And her lord rose up in the morning, and opened the doors of the
house, and went out to go his way: and, behold, the woman his
concubine was fallen down at the door of the house, and her hands were
upon the threshold.

19:28 And he said unto her, Up, and let us be going. But none
answered.

Then the man took her up upon an ass, and the man rose up, and gat him
unto his place.

19:29 And when he was come into his house, he took a knife, and laid
hold on his concubine, and divided her, together with her bones, into
twelve pieces, and sent her into all the coasts of Israel.

19:30 And it was so, that all that saw it said, There was no such deed
done nor seen from the day that the children of Israel came up out of
the land of Egypt unto this day: consider of it, take advice, and
speak your minds.

20:1 Then all the children of Israel went out, and the congregation
was gathered together as one man, from Dan even to Beersheba, with the
land of Gilead, unto the LORD in Mizpeh.

20:2 And the chief of all the people, even of all the tribes of
Israel, presented themselves in the assembly of the people of God,
four hundred thousand footmen that drew sword.

20:3 (Now the children of Benjamin heard that the children of Israel
were gone up to Mizpeh.) Then said the children of Israel, Tell us,
how was this wickedness?  20:4 And the Levite, the husband of the
woman that was slain, answered and said, I came into Gibeah that
belongeth to Benjamin, I and my concubine, to lodge.

20:5 And the men of Gibeah rose against me, and beset the house round
about upon me by night, and thought to have slain me: and my concubine
have they forced, that she is dead.

20:6 And I took my concubine, and cut her in pieces, and sent her
throughout all the country of the inheritance of Israel: for they have
committed lewdness and folly in Israel.

20:7 Behold, ye are all children of Israel; give here your advice and
counsel.

20:8 And all the people arose as one man, saying, We will not any of
us go to his tent, neither will we any of us turn into his house.

20:9 But now this shall be the thing which we will do to Gibeah; we
will go up by lot against it; 20:10 And we will take ten men of an
hundred throughout all the tribes of Israel, and an hundred of a
thousand, and a thousand out of ten thousand, to fetch victual for the
people, that they may do, when they come to Gibeah of Benjamin,
according to all the folly that they have wrought in Israel.

20:11 So all the men of Israel were gathered against the city, knit
together as one man.

20:12 And the tribes of Israel sent men through all the tribe of
Benjamin, saying, What wickedness is this that is done among you?
20:13 Now therefore deliver us the men, the children of Belial, which
are in Gibeah, that we may put them to death, and put away evil from
Israel. But the children of Benjamin would not hearken to the voice of
their brethren the children of Israel.

20:14 But the children of Benjamin gathered themselves together out of
the cities unto Gibeah, to go out to battle against the children of
Israel.

20:15 And the children of Benjamin were numbered at that time out of
the cities twenty and six thousand men that drew sword, beside the
inhabitants of Gibeah, which were numbered seven hundred chosen men.

20:16 Among all this people there were seven hundred chosen men
lefthanded; every one could sling stones at an hair breadth, and not
miss.

20:17 And the men of Israel, beside Benjamin, were numbered four
hundred thousand men that drew sword: all these were men of war.

20:18 And the children of Israel arose, and went up to the house of
God, and asked counsel of God, and said, Which of us shall go up first
to the battle against the children of Benjamin? And the LORD said,
Judah shall go up first.

20:19 And the children of Israel rose up in the morning, and encamped
against Gibeah.

20:20 And the men of Israel went out to battle against Benjamin; and
the men of Israel put themselves in array to fight against them at
Gibeah.

20:21 And the children of Benjamin came forth out of Gibeah, and
destroyed down to the ground of the Israelites that day twenty and two
thousand men.

20:22 And the people the men of Israel encouraged themselves, and set
their battle again in array in the place where they put themselves in
array the first day.

20:23 (And the children of Israel went up and wept before the LORD
until even, and asked counsel of the LORD, saying, Shall I go up again
to battle against the children of Benjamin my brother? And the LORD
said, Go up against him.)  20:24 And the children of Israel came near
against the children of Benjamin the second day.

20:25 And Benjamin went forth against them out of Gibeah the second
day, and destroyed down to the ground of the children of Israel again
eighteen thousand men; all these drew the sword.

20:26 Then all the children of Israel, and all the people, went up,
and came unto the house of God, and wept, and sat there before the
LORD, and fasted that day until even, and offered burnt offerings and
peace offerings before the LORD.

20:27 And the children of Israel enquired of the LORD, (for the ark of
the covenant of God was there in those days, 20:28 And Phinehas, the
son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron, stood before it in those days,)
saying, Shall I yet again go out to battle against the children of
Benjamin my brother, or shall I cease? And the LORD said, Go up; for
to morrow I will deliver them into thine hand.

20:29 And Israel set liers in wait round about Gibeah.

20:30 And the children of Israel went up against the children of
Benjamin on the third day, and put themselves in array against Gibeah,
as at other times.

20:31 And the children of Benjamin went out against the people, and
were drawn away from the city; and they began to smite of the people,
and kill, as at other times, in the highways, of which one goeth up to
the house of God, and the other to Gibeah in the field, about thirty
men of Israel.

20:32 And the children of Benjamin said, They are smitten down before
us, as at the first. But the children of Israel said, Let us flee, and
draw them from the city unto the highways.

20:33 And all the men of Israel rose up out of their place, and put
themselves in array at Baaltamar: and the liers in wait of Israel came
forth out of their places, even out of the meadows of Gibeah.

20:34 And there came against Gibeah ten thousand chosen men out of all
Israel, and the battle was sore: but they knew not that evil was near
them.

20:35 And the LORD smote Benjamin before Israel: and the children of
Israel destroyed of the Benjamites that day twenty and five thousand
and an hundred men: all these drew the sword.

20:36 So the children of Benjamin saw that they were smitten: for the
men of Israel gave place to the Benjamites, because they trusted unto
the liers in wait which they had set beside Gibeah.

20:37 And the liers in wait hasted, and rushed upon Gibeah; and the
liers in wait drew themselves along, and smote all the city with the
edge of the sword.

20:38 Now there was an appointed sign between the men of Israel and
the liers in wait, that they should make a great flame with smoke rise
up out of the city.

20:39 And when the men of Israel retired in the battle, Benjamin began
to smite and kill of the men of Israel about thirty persons: for they
said, Surely they are smitten down before us, as in the first battle.

20:40 But when the flame began to arise up out of the city with a
pillar of smoke, the Benjamites looked behind them, and, behold, the
flame of the city ascended up to heaven.

20:41 And when the men of Israel turned again, the men of Benjamin
were amazed: for they saw that evil was come upon them.

20:42 Therefore they turned their backs before the men of Israel unto
the way of the wilderness; but the battle overtook them; and them
which came out of the cities they destroyed in the midst of them.

20:43 Thus they inclosed the Benjamites round about, and chased them,
and trode them down with ease over against Gibeah toward the
sunrising.

20:44 And there fell of Benjamin eighteen thousand men; all these were
men of valour.

20:45 And they turned and fled toward the wilderness unto the rock of
Rimmon: and they gleaned of them in the highways five thousand men;
and pursued hard after them unto Gidom, and slew two thousand men of
them.

20:46 So that all which fell that day of Benjamin were twenty and five
thousand men that drew the sword; all these were men of valour.

20:47 But six hundred men turned and fled to the wilderness unto the
rock Rimmon, and abode in the rock Rimmon four months.

20:48 And the men of Israel turned again upon the children of
Benjamin, and smote them with the edge of the sword, as well the men
of every city, as the beast, and all that came to hand: also they set
on fire all the cities that they came to.

21:1 Now the men of Israel had sworn in Mizpeh, saying, There shall
not any of us give his daughter unto Benjamin to wife.

21:2 And the people came to the house of God, and abode there till
even before God, and lifted up their voices, and wept sore; 21:3 And
said, O LORD God of Israel, why is this come to pass in Israel, that
there should be to day one tribe lacking in Israel?  21:4 And it came
to pass on the morrow, that the people rose early, and built there an
altar, and offered burnt offerings and peace offerings.

21:5 And the children of Israel said, Who is there among all the
tribes of Israel that came not up with the congregation unto the LORD?
For they had made a great oath concerning him that came not up to the
LORD to Mizpeh, saying, He shall surely be put to death.

21:6 And the children of Israel repented them for Benjamin their
brother, and said, There is one tribe cut off from Israel this day.

21:7 How shall we do for wives for them that remain, seeing we have
sworn by the LORD that we will not give them of our daughters to
wives?  21:8 And they said, What one is there of the tribes of Israel
that came not up to Mizpeh to the LORD? And, behold, there came none
to the camp from Jabeshgilead to the assembly.

21:9 For the people were numbered, and, behold, there were none of the
inhabitants of Jabeshgilead there.

21:10 And the congregation sent thither twelve thousand men of the
valiantest, and commanded them, saying, Go and smite the inhabitants
of Jabeshgilead with the edge of the sword, with the women and the
children.

21:11 And this is the thing that ye shall do, Ye shall utterly destroy
every male, and every woman that hath lain by man.

21:12 And they found among the inhabitants of Jabeshgilead four
hundred young virgins, that had known no man by lying with any male:
and they brought them unto the camp to Shiloh, which is in the land of
Canaan.

21:13 And the whole congregation sent some to speak to the children of
Benjamin that were in the rock Rimmon, and to call peaceably unto
them.

21:14 And Benjamin came again at that time; and they gave them wives
which they had saved alive of the women of Jabeshgilead: and yet so
they sufficed them not.

21:15 And the people repented them for Benjamin, because that the LORD
had made a breach in the tribes of Israel.

21:16 Then the elders of the congregation said, How shall we do for
wives for them that remain, seeing the women are destroyed out of
Benjamin?  21:17 And they said, There must be an inheritance for them
that be escaped of Benjamin, that a tribe be not destroyed out of
Israel.

21:18 Howbeit we may not give them wives of our daughters: for the
children of Israel have sworn, saying, Cursed be he that giveth a wife
to Benjamin.

21:19 Then they said, Behold, there is a feast of the LORD in Shiloh
yearly in a place which is on the north side of Bethel, on the east
side of the highway that goeth up from Bethel to Shechem, and on the
south of Lebonah.

21:20 Therefore they commanded the children of Benjamin, saying, Go
and lie in wait in the vineyards; 21:21 And see, and, behold, if the
daughters of Shiloh come out to dance in dances, then come ye out of
the vineyards, and catch you every man his wife of the daughters of
Shiloh, and go to the land of Benjamin.

21:22 And it shall be, when their fathers or their brethren come unto
us to complain, that we will say unto them, Be favourable unto them
for our sakes: because we reserved not to each man his wife in the
war: for ye did not give unto them at this time, that ye should be
guilty.

21:23 And the children of Benjamin did so, and took them wives,
according to their number, of them that danced, whom they caught: and
they went and returned unto their inheritance, and repaired the
cities, and dwelt in them.

21:24 And the children of Israel departed thence at that time, every
man to his tribe and to his family, and they went out from thence
every man to his inheritance.

21:25 In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that
which was right in his own eyes.




The Book of Ruth


1:1 Now it came to pass in the days when the judges ruled, that there
was a famine in the land. And a certain man of Bethlehemjudah went to
sojourn in the country of Moab, he, and his wife, and his two sons.

1:2 And the name of the man was Elimelech, and the name of his wife
Naomi, and the name of his two sons Mahlon and Chilion, Ephrathites of
Bethlehemjudah. And they came into the country of Moab, and continued
there.

1:3 And Elimelech Naomi's husband died; and she was left, and her two
sons.

1:4 And they took them wives of the women of Moab; the name of the one
was Orpah, and the name of the other Ruth: and they dwelled there
about ten years.

1:5 And Mahlon and Chilion died also both of them; and the woman was
left of her two sons and her husband.

1:6 Then she arose with her daughters in law, that she might return
from the country of Moab: for she had heard in the country of Moab how
that the LORD had visited his people in giving them bread.

1:7 Wherefore she went forth out of the place where she was, and her
two daughters in law with her; and they went on the way to return unto
the land of Judah.

1:8 And Naomi said unto her two daughters in law, Go, return each to
her mother's house: the LORD deal kindly with you, as ye have dealt
with the dead, and with me.

1:9 The LORD grant you that ye may find rest, each of you in the house
of her husband. Then she kissed them; and they lifted up their voice,
and wept.

1:10 And they said unto her, Surely we will return with thee unto thy
people.

1:11 And Naomi said, Turn again, my daughters: why will ye go with me?
are there yet any more sons in my womb, that they may be your
husbands?  1:12 Turn again, my daughters, go your way; for I am too
old to have an husband. If I should say, I have hope, if I should have
an husband also to night, and should also bear sons; 1:13 Would ye
tarry for them till they were grown? would ye stay for them from
having husbands? nay, my daughters; for it grieveth me much for your
sakes that the hand of the LORD is gone out against me.

1:14 And they lifted up their voice, and wept again: and Orpah kissed
her mother in law; but Ruth clave unto her.

1:15 And she said, Behold, thy sister in law is gone back unto her
people, and unto her gods: return thou after thy sister in law.

1:16 And Ruth said, Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from
following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where
thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God
my God: 1:17 Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried:
the LORD do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and
me.

1:18 When she saw that she was stedfastly minded to go with her, then
she left speaking unto her.

1:19 So they two went until they came to Bethlehem. And it came to
pass, when they were come to Bethlehem, that all the city was moved
about them, and they said, Is this Naomi?  1:20 And she said unto
them, Call me not Naomi, call me Mara: for the Almighty hath dealt
very bitterly with me.

1:21 I went out full and the LORD hath brought me home again empty:
why then call ye me Naomi, seeing the LORD hath testified against me,
and the Almighty hath afflicted me?  1:22 So Naomi returned, and Ruth
the Moabitess, her daughter in law, with her, which returned out of
the country of Moab: and they came to Bethlehem in the beginning of
barley harvest.

2:1 And Naomi had a kinsman of her husband's, a mighty man of wealth,
of the family of Elimelech; and his name was Boaz.

2:2 And Ruth the Moabitess said unto Naomi, Let me now go to the
field, and glean ears of corn after him in whose sight I shall find
grace.

And she said unto her, Go, my daughter.

2:3 And she went, and came, and gleaned in the field after the
reapers: and her hap was to light on a part of the field belonging
unto Boaz, who was of the kindred of Elimelech.

2:4 And, behold, Boaz came from Bethlehem, and said unto the reapers,
The LORD be with you. And they answered him, The LORD bless thee.

2:5 Then said Boaz unto his servant that was set over the reapers,
Whose damsel is this?  2:6 And the servant that was set over the
reapers answered and said, It is the Moabitish damsel that came back
with Naomi out of the country of Moab: 2:7 And she said, I pray you,
let me glean and gather after the reapers among the sheaves: so she
came, and hath continued even from the morning until now, that she
tarried a little in the house.

2:8 Then said Boaz unto Ruth, Hearest thou not, my daughter? Go not to
glean in another field, neither go from hence, but abide here fast by
my maidens: 2:9 Let thine eyes be on the field that they do reap, and
go thou after them: have I not charged the young men that they shall
not touch thee? and when thou art athirst, go unto the vessels, and
drink of that which the young men have drawn.

2:10 Then she fell on her face, and bowed herself to the ground, and
said unto him, Why have I found grace in thine eyes, that thou
shouldest take knowledge of me, seeing I am a stranger?  2:11 And Boaz
answered and said unto her, It hath fully been shewed me, all that
thou hast done unto thy mother in law since the death of thine
husband: and how thou hast left thy father and thy mother, and the
land of thy nativity, and art come unto a people which thou knewest
not heretofore.

2:12 The LORD recompense thy work, and a full reward be given thee of
the LORD God of Israel, under whose wings thou art come to trust.

2:13 Then she said, Let me find favour in thy sight, my lord; for that
thou hast comforted me, and for that thou hast spoken friendly unto
thine handmaid, though I be not like unto one of thine handmaidens.

2:14 And Boaz said unto her, At mealtime come thou hither, and eat of
the bread, and dip thy morsel in the vinegar. And she sat beside the
reapers: and he reached her parched corn, and she did eat, and was
sufficed, and left.

2:15 And when she was risen up to glean, Boaz commanded his young men,
saying, Let her glean even among the sheaves, and reproach her not:
2:16 And let fall also some of the handfuls of purpose for her, and
leave them, that she may glean them, and rebuke her not.

2:17 So she gleaned in the field until even, and beat out that she had
gleaned: and it was about an ephah of barley.

2:18 And she took it up, and went into the city: and her mother in law
saw what she had gleaned: and she brought forth, and gave to her that
she had reserved after she was sufficed.

2:19 And her mother in law said unto her, Where hast thou gleaned to
day?  and where wroughtest thou? blessed be he that did take knowledge
of thee. And she shewed her mother in law with whom she had wrought,
and said, The man's name with whom I wrought to day is Boaz.

2:20 And Naomi said unto her daughter in law, Blessed be he of the
LORD, who hath not left off his kindness to the living and to the
dead. And Naomi said unto her, The man is near of kin unto us, one of
our next kinsmen.

2:21 And Ruth the Moabitess said, He said unto me also, Thou shalt
keep fast by my young men, until they have ended all my harvest.

2:22 And Naomi said unto Ruth her daughter in law, It is good, my
daughter, that thou go out with his maidens, that they meet thee not
in any other field.

2:23 So she kept fast by the maidens of Boaz to glean unto the end of
barley harvest and of wheat harvest; and dwelt with her mother in law.

3:1 Then Naomi her mother in law said unto her, My daughter, shall I
not seek rest for thee, that it may be well with thee?  3:2 And now is
not Boaz of our kindred, with whose maidens thou wast?  Behold, he
winnoweth barley to night in the threshingfloor.

3:3 Wash thyself therefore, and anoint thee, and put thy raiment upon
thee, and get thee down to the floor: but make not thyself known unto
the man, until he shall have done eating and drinking.

3:4 And it shall be, when he lieth down, that thou shalt mark the
place where he shall lie, and thou shalt go in, and uncover his feet,
and lay thee down; and he will tell thee what thou shalt do.

3:5 And she said unto her, All that thou sayest unto me I will do.

3:6 And she went down unto the floor, and did according to all that
her mother in law bade her.

3:7 And when Boaz had eaten and drunk, and his heart was merry, he
went to lie down at the end of the heap of corn: and she came softly,
and uncovered his feet, and laid her down.

3:8 And it came to pass at midnight, that the man was afraid, and
turned himself: and, behold, a woman lay at his feet.

3:9 And he said, Who art thou? And she answered, I am Ruth thine
handmaid: spread therefore thy skirt over thine handmaid; for thou art
a near kinsman.

3:10 And he said, Blessed be thou of the LORD, my daughter: for thou
hast shewed more kindness in the latter end than at the beginning,
inasmuch as thou followedst not young men, whether poor or rich.

3:11 And now, my daughter, fear not; I will do to thee all that thou
requirest: for all the city of my people doth know that thou art a
virtuous woman.

3:12 And now it is true that I am thy near kinsman: howbeit there is a
kinsman nearer than I.

3:13 Tarry this night, and it shall be in the morning, that if he will
perform unto thee the part of a kinsman, well; let him do the
kinsman's part: but if he will not do the part of a kinsman to thee,
then will I do the part of a kinsman to thee, as the LORD liveth: lie
down until the morning.

3:14 And she lay at his feet until the morning: and she rose up before
one could know another. And he said, Let it not be known that a woman
came into the floor.

3:15 Also he said, Bring the vail that thou hast upon thee, and hold
it.

And when she held it, he measured six measures of barley, and laid it
on her: and she went into the city.

3:16 And when she came to her mother in law, she said, Who art thou,
my daughter? And she told her all that the man had done to her.

3:17 And she said, These six measures of barley gave he me; for he
said to me, Go not empty unto thy mother in law.

3:18 Then said she, Sit still, my daughter, until thou know how the
matter will fall: for the man will not be in rest, until he have
finished the thing this day.

4:1 Then went Boaz up to the gate, and sat him down there: and,
behold, the kinsman of whom Boaz spake came by; unto whom he said, Ho,
such a one! turn aside, sit down here. And he turned aside, and sat
down.

4:2 And he took ten men of the elders of the city, and said, Sit ye
down here. And they sat down.

4:3 And he said unto the kinsman, Naomi, that is come again out of the
country of Moab, selleth a parcel of land, which was our brother
Elimelech's: 4:4 And I thought to advertise thee, saying, Buy it
before the inhabitants, and before the elders of my people. If thou
wilt redeem it, redeem it: but if thou wilt not redeem it, then tell
me, that I may know: for there is none to redeem it beside thee; and I
am after thee. And he said, I will redeem it.

4:5 Then said Boaz, What day thou buyest the field of the hand of
Naomi, thou must buy it also of Ruth the Moabitess, the wife of the
dead, to raise up the name of the dead upon his inheritance.

4:6 And the kinsman said, I cannot redeem it for myself, lest I mar
mine own inheritance: redeem thou my right to thyself; for I cannot
redeem it.

4:7 Now this was the manner in former time in Israel concerning
redeeming and concerning changing, for to confirm all things; a man
plucked off his shoe, and gave it to his neighbour: and this was a
testimony in Israel.

4:8 Therefore the kinsman said unto Boaz, Buy it for thee. So he drew
off his shoe.

4:9 And Boaz said unto the elders, and unto all the people, Ye are
witnesses this day, that I have bought all that was Elimelech's, and
all that was Chilion's and Mahlon's, of the hand of Naomi.

4:10 Moreover Ruth the Moabitess, the wife of Mahlon, have I purchased
to be my wife, to raise up the name of the dead upon his inheritance,
that the name of the dead be not cut off from among his brethren, and
from the gate of his place: ye are witnesses this day.

4:11 And all the people that were in the gate, and the elders, said,
We are witnesses. The LORD make the woman that is come into thine
house like Rachel and like Leah, which two did build the house of
Israel: and do thou worthily in Ephratah, and be famous in Bethlehem:
4:12 And let thy house be like the house of Pharez, whom Tamar bare
unto Judah, of the seed which the LORD shall give thee of this young
woman.

4:13 So Boaz took Ruth, and she was his wife: and when he went in unto
her, the LORD gave her conception, and she bare a son.

4:14 And the women said unto Naomi, Blessed be the LORD, which hath
not left thee this day without a kinsman, that his name may be famous
in Israel.

4:15 And he shall be unto thee a restorer of thy life, and a nourisher
of thine old age: for thy daughter in law, which loveth thee, which is
better to thee than seven sons, hath born him.

4:16 And Naomi took the child, and laid it in her bosom, and became
nurse unto it.

4:17 And the women her neighbours gave it a name, saying, There is a
son born to Naomi; and they called his name Obed: he is the father of
Jesse, the father of David.

4:18 Now these are the generations of Pharez: Pharez begat Hezron,
4:19 And Hezron begat Ram, and Ram begat Amminadab, 4:20 And Amminadab
begat Nahshon, and Nahshon begat Salmon, 4:21 And Salmon begat Boaz,
and Boaz begat Obed, 4:22 And Obed begat Jesse, and Jesse begat David.




The First Book of Samuel

Otherwise Called:

The First Book of the Kings


1:1 Now there was a certain man of Ramathaimzophim, of mount Ephraim,
and his name was Elkanah, the son of Jeroham, the son of Elihu, the
son of Tohu, the son of Zuph, an Ephrathite: 1:2 And he had two wives;
the name of the one was Hannah, and the name of the other Peninnah:
and Peninnah had children, but Hannah had no children.

1:3 And this man went up out of his city yearly to worship and to
sacrifice unto the LORD of hosts in Shiloh. And the two sons of Eli,
Hophni and Phinehas, the priests of the LORD, were there.

1:4 And when the time was that Elkanah offered, he gave to Peninnah
his wife, and to all her sons and her daughters, portions: 1:5 But
unto Hannah he gave a worthy portion; for he loved Hannah: but the
LORD had shut up her womb.

1:6 And her adversary also provoked her sore, for to make her fret,
because the LORD had shut up her womb.

1:7 And as he did so year by year, when she went up to the house of
the LORD, so she provoked her; therefore she wept, and did not eat.

1:8 Then said Elkanah her husband to her, Hannah, why weepest thou?
and why eatest thou not? and why is thy heart grieved? am not I better
to thee than ten sons?  1:9 So Hannah rose up after they had eaten in
Shiloh, and after they had drunk. Now Eli the priest sat upon a seat
by a post of the temple of the LORD.

1:10 And she was in bitterness of soul, and prayed unto the LORD, and
wept sore.

1:11 And she vowed a vow, and said, O LORD of hosts, if thou wilt
indeed look on the affliction of thine handmaid, and remember me, and
not forget thine handmaid, but wilt give unto thine handmaid a man
child, then I will give him unto the LORD all the days of his life,
and there shall no razor come upon his head.

1:12 And it came to pass, as she continued praying before the LORD,
that Eli marked her mouth.

1:13 Now Hannah, she spake in her heart; only her lips moved, but her
voice was not heard: therefore Eli thought she had been drunken.

1:14 And Eli said unto her, How long wilt thou be drunken? put away
thy wine from thee.

1:15 And Hannah answered and said, No, my lord, I am a woman of a
sorrowful spirit: I have drunk neither wine nor strong drink, but have
poured out my soul before the LORD.

1:16 Count not thine handmaid for a daughter of Belial: for out of the
abundance of my complaint and grief have I spoken hitherto.

1:17 Then Eli answered and said, Go in peace: and the God of Israel
grant thee thy petition that thou hast asked of him.

1:18 And she said, Let thine handmaid find grace in thy sight. So the
woman went her way, and did eat, and her countenance was no more sad.

1:19 And they rose up in the morning early, and worshipped before the
LORD, and returned, and came to their house to Ramah: and Elkanah knew
Hannah his wife; and the LORD remembered her.

1:20 Wherefore it came to pass, when the time was come about after
Hannah had conceived, that she bare a son, and called his name Samuel,
saying, Because I have asked him of the LORD.

1:21 And the man Elkanah, and all his house, went up to offer unto the
LORD the yearly sacrifice, and his vow.

1:22 But Hannah went not up; for she said unto her husband, I will not
go up until the child be weaned, and then I will bring him, that he
may appear before the LORD, and there abide for ever.

1:23 And Elkanah her husband said unto her, Do what seemeth thee good;
tarry until thou have weaned him; only the LORD establish his word. So
the woman abode, and gave her son suck until she weaned him.

1:24 And when she had weaned him, she took him up with her, with three
bullocks, and one ephah of flour, and a bottle of wine, and brought
him unto the house of the LORD in Shiloh: and the child was young.

1:25 And they slew a bullock, and brought the child to Eli.

1:26 And she said, Oh my lord, as thy soul liveth, my lord, I am the
woman that stood by thee here, praying unto the LORD.

1:27 For this child I prayed; and the LORD hath given me my petition
which I asked of him: 1:28 Therefore also I have lent him to the LORD;
as long as he liveth he shall be lent to the LORD. And he worshipped
the LORD there.

2:1 And Hannah prayed, and said, My heart rejoiceth in the LORD, mine
horn is exalted in the LORD: my mouth is enlarged over mine enemies;
because I rejoice in thy salvation.

2:2 There is none holy as the LORD: for there is none beside thee:
neither is there any rock like our God.

2:3 Talk no more so exceeding proudly; let not arrogancy come out of
your mouth: for the LORD is a God of knowledge, and by him actions are
weighed.

2:4 The bows of the mighty men are broken, and they that stumbled are
girded with strength.

2:5 They that were full have hired out themselves for bread; and they
that were hungry ceased: so that the barren hath born seven; and she
that hath many children is waxed feeble.

2:6 The LORD killeth, and maketh alive: he bringeth down to the grave,
and bringeth up.

2:7 The LORD maketh poor, and maketh rich: he bringeth low, and
lifteth up.

2:8 He raiseth up the poor out of the dust, and lifteth up the beggar
from the dunghill, to set them among princes, and to make them inherit
the throne of glory: for the pillars of the earth are the LORD's, and
he hath set the world upon them.

2:9 He will keep the feet of his saints, and the wicked shall be
silent in darkness; for by strength shall no man prevail.

2:10 The adversaries of the LORD shall be broken to pieces; out of
heaven shall he thunder upon them: the LORD shall judge the ends of
the earth; and he shall give strength unto his king, and exalt the
horn of his anointed.

2:11 And Elkanah went to Ramah to his house. And the child did
minister unto the LORD before Eli the priest.

2:12 Now the sons of Eli were sons of Belial; they knew not the LORD.

2:13 And the priest's custom with the people was, that, when any man
offered sacrifice, the priest's servant came, while the flesh was in
seething, with a fleshhook of three teeth in his hand; 2:14 And he
struck it into the pan, or kettle, or caldron, or pot; all that the
fleshhook brought up the priest took for himself. So they did in
Shiloh unto all the Israelites that came thither.

2:15 Also before they burnt the fat, the priest's servant came, and
said to the man that sacrificed, Give flesh to roast for the priest;
for he will not have sodden flesh of thee, but raw.

2:16 And if any man said unto him, Let them not fail to burn the fat
presently, and then take as much as thy soul desireth; then he would
answer him, Nay; but thou shalt give it me now: and if not, I will
take it by force.

2:17 Wherefore the sin of the young men was very great before the
LORD: for men abhorred the offering of the LORD.

2:18 But Samuel ministered before the LORD, being a child, girded with
a linen ephod.

2:19 Moreover his mother made him a little coat, and brought it to him
from year to year, when she came up with her husband to offer the
yearly sacrifice.

2:20 And Eli blessed Elkanah and his wife, and said, The LORD give
thee seed of this woman for the loan which is lent to the LORD. And
they went unto their own home.

2:21 And the LORD visited Hannah, so that she conceived, and bare
three sons and two daughters. And the child Samuel grew before the
LORD.

2:22 Now Eli was very old, and heard all that his sons did unto all
Israel; and how they lay with the women that assembled at the door of
the tabernacle of the congregation.

2:23 And he said unto them, Why do ye such things? for I hear of your
evil dealings by all this people.

2:24 Nay, my sons; for it is no good report that I hear: ye make the
LORD's people to transgress.

2:25 If one man sin against another, the judge shall judge him: but if
a man sin against the LORD, who shall intreat for him? Notwithstanding
they hearkened not unto the voice of their father, because the LORD
would slay them.

2:26 And the child Samuel grew on, and was in favour both with the
LORD, and also with men.

2:27 And there came a man of God unto Eli, and said unto him, Thus
saith the LORD, Did I plainly appear unto the house of thy father,
when they were in Egypt in Pharaoh's house?  2:28 And did I choose him
out of all the tribes of Israel to be my priest, to offer upon mine
altar, to burn incense, to wear an ephod before me? and did I give
unto the house of thy father all the offerings made by fire of the
children of Israel?  2:29 Wherefore kick ye at my sacrifice and at
mine offering, which I have commanded in my habitation; and honourest
thy sons above me, to make yourselves fat with the chiefest of all the
offerings of Israel my people?  2:30 Wherefore the LORD God of Israel
saith, I said indeed that thy house, and the house of thy father,
should walk before me for ever: but now the LORD saith, Be it far from
me; for them that honour me I will honour, and they that despise me
shall be lightly esteemed.

2:31 Behold, the days come, that I will cut off thine arm, and the arm
of thy father's house, that there shall not be an old man in thine
house.

2:32 And thou shalt see an enemy in my habitation, in all the wealth
which God shall give Israel: and there shall not be an old man in
thine house for ever.

2:33 And the man of thine, whom I shall not cut off from mine altar,
shall be to consume thine eyes, and to grieve thine heart: and all the
increase of thine house shall die in the flower of their age.

2:34 And this shall be a sign unto thee, that shall come upon thy two
sons, on Hophni and Phinehas; in one day they shall die both of them.

2:35 And I will raise me up a faithful priest, that shall do according
to that which is in mine heart and in my mind: and I will build him a
sure house; and he shall walk before mine anointed for ever.

2:36 And it shall come to pass, that every one that is left in thine
house shall come and crouch to him for a piece of silver and a morsel
of bread, and shall say, Put me, I pray thee, into one of the priests'
offices, that I may eat a piece of bread.

3:1 And the child Samuel ministered unto the LORD before Eli. And the
word of the LORD was precious in those days; there was no open vision.

3:2 And it came to pass at that time, when Eli was laid down in his
place, and his eyes began to wax dim, that he could not see; 3:3 And
ere the lamp of God went out in the temple of the LORD, where the ark
of God was, and Samuel was laid down to sleep; 3:4 That the LORD
called Samuel: and he answered, Here am I.

3:5 And he ran unto Eli, and said, Here am I; for thou calledst me.
And he said, I called not; lie down again. And he went and lay down.

3:6 And the LORD called yet again, Samuel. And Samuel arose and went
to Eli, and said, Here am I; for thou didst call me. And he answered,
I called not, my son; lie down again.

3:7 Now Samuel did not yet know the LORD, neither was the word of the
LORD yet revealed unto him.

3:8 And the LORD called Samuel again the third time. And he arose and
went to Eli, and said, Here am I; for thou didst call me. And Eli
perceived that the LORD had called the child.

3:9 Therefore Eli said unto Samuel, Go, lie down: and it shall be, if
he call thee, that thou shalt say, Speak, LORD; for thy servant
heareth. So Samuel went and lay down in his place.

3:10 And the LORD came, and stood, and called as at other times,
Samuel, Samuel. Then Samuel answered, Speak; for thy servant heareth.

3:11 And the LORD said to Samuel, Behold, I will do a thing in Israel,
at which both the ears of every one that heareth it shall tingle.

3:12 In that day I will perform against Eli all things which I have
spoken concerning his house: when I begin, I will also make an end.

3:13 For I have told him that I will judge his house for ever for the
iniquity which he knoweth; because his sons made themselves vile, and
he restrained them not.

3:14 And therefore I have sworn unto the house of Eli, that the
iniquity of Eli's house shall not be purged with sacrifice nor
offering for ever.

3:15 And Samuel lay until the morning, and opened the doors of the
house of the LORD. And Samuel feared to shew Eli the vision.

3:16 Then Eli called Samuel, and said, Samuel, my son. And he
answered, Here am I.

3:17 And he said, What is the thing that the LORD hath said unto thee?
I pray thee hide it not from me: God do so to thee, and more also, if
thou hide any thing from me of all the things that he said unto thee.

3:18 And Samuel told him every whit, and hid nothing from him. And he
said, It is the LORD: let him do what seemeth him good.

3:19 And Samuel grew, and the LORD was with him, and did let none of
his words fall to the ground.

3:20 And all Israel from Dan even to Beersheba knew that Samuel was
established to be a prophet of the LORD.

3:21 And the LORD appeared again in Shiloh: for the LORD revealed
himself to Samuel in Shiloh by the word of the LORD.

4:1 And the word of Samuel came to all Israel. Now Israel went out
against the Philistines to battle, and pitched beside Ebenezer: and
the Philistines pitched in Aphek.

4:2 And the Philistines put themselves in array against Israel: and
when they joined battle, Israel was smitten before the Philistines:
and they slew of the army in the field about four thousand men.

4:3 And when the people were come into the camp, the elders of Israel
said, Wherefore hath the LORD smitten us to day before the
Philistines? Let us fetch the ark of the covenant of the LORD out of
Shiloh unto us, that, when it cometh among us, it may save us out of
the hand of our enemies.

4:4 So the people sent to Shiloh, that they might bring from thence
the ark of the covenant of the LORD of hosts, which dwelleth between
the cherubims: and the two sons of Eli, Hophni and Phinehas, were
there with the ark of the covenant of God.

4:5 And when the ark of the covenant of the LORD came into the camp,
all Israel shouted with a great shout, so that the earth rang again.

4:6 And when the Philistines heard the noise of the shout, they said,
What meaneth the noise of this great shout in the camp of the Hebrews?
And they understood that the ark of the LORD was come into the camp.

4:7 And the Philistines were afraid, for they said, God is come into
the camp. And they said, Woe unto us! for there hath not been such a
thing heretofore.

4:8 Woe unto us! who shall deliver us out of the hand of these mighty
Gods? these are the Gods that smote the Egyptians with all the plagues
in the wilderness.

4:9 Be strong and quit yourselves like men, O ye Philistines, that ye
be not servants unto the Hebrews, as they have been to you: quit
yourselves like men, and fight.

4:10 And the Philistines fought, and Israel was smitten, and they fled
every man into his tent: and there was a very great slaughter; for
there fell of Israel thirty thousand footmen.

4:11 And the ark of God was taken; and the two sons of Eli, Hophni and
Phinehas, were slain.

4:12 And there ran a man of Benjamin out of the army, and came to
Shiloh the same day with his clothes rent, and with earth upon his
head.

4:13 And when he came, lo, Eli sat upon a seat by the wayside
watching: for his heart trembled for the ark of God. And when the man
came into the city, and told it, all the city cried out.

4:14 And when Eli heard the noise of the crying, he said, What meaneth
the noise of this tumult? And the man came in hastily, and told Eli.

4:15 Now Eli was ninety and eight years old; and his eyes were dim,
that he could not see.

4:16 And the man said unto Eli, I am he that came out of the army, and
I fled to day out of the army. And he said, What is there done, my
son?  4:17 And the messenger answered and said, Israel is fled before
the Philistines, and there hath been also a great slaughter among the
people, and thy two sons also, Hophni and Phinehas, are dead, and the
ark of God is taken.

4:18 And it came to pass, when he made mention of the ark of God, that
he fell from off the seat backward by the side of the gate, and his
neck brake, and he died: for he was an old man, and heavy. And he had
judged Israel forty years.

4:19 And his daughter in law, Phinehas' wife, was with child, near to
be delivered: and when she heard the tidings that the ark of God was
taken, and that her father in law and her husband were dead, she bowed
herself and travailed; for her pains came upon her.

4:20 And about the time of her death the women that stood by her said
unto her, Fear not; for thou hast born a son. But she answered not,
neither did she regard it.

4:21 And she named the child Ichabod, saying, The glory is departed
from Israel: because the ark of God was taken, and because of her
father in law and her husband.

4:22 And she said, The glory is departed from Israel: for the ark of
God is taken.

5:1 And the Philistines took the ark of God, and brought it from
Ebenezer unto Ashdod.

5:2 When the Philistines took the ark of God, they brought it into the
house of Dagon, and set it by Dagon.

5:3 And when they of Ashdod arose early on the morrow, behold, Dagon
was fallen upon his face to the earth before the ark of the LORD. And
they took Dagon, and set him in his place again.

5:4 And when they arose early on the morrow morning, behold, Dagon was
fallen upon his face to the ground before the ark of the LORD; and the
head of Dagon and both the palms of his hands were cut off upon the
threshold; only the stump of Dagon was left to him.

5:5 Therefore neither the priests of Dagon, nor any that come into
Dagon's house, tread on the threshold of Dagon in Ashdod unto this
day.

5:6 But the hand of the LORD was heavy upon them of Ashdod, and he
destroyed them, and smote them with emerods, even Ashdod and the
coasts thereof.

5:7 And when the men of Ashdod saw that it was so, they said, The ark
of the God of Israel shall not abide with us: for his hand is sore
upon us, and upon Dagon our god.

5:8 They sent therefore and gathered all the lords of the Philistines
unto them, and said, What shall we do with the ark of the God of
Israel? And they answered, Let the ark of the God of Israel be carried
about unto Gath. And they carried the ark of the God of Israel about
thither.

5:9 And it was so, that, after they had carried it about, the hand of
the LORD was against the city with a very great destruction: and he
smote the men of the city, both small and great, and they had emerods
in their secret parts.

5:10 Therefore they sent the ark of God to Ekron. And it came to pass,
as the ark of God came to Ekron, that the Ekronites cried out, saying,
They have brought about the ark of the God of Israel to us, to slay us
and our people.

5:11 So they sent and gathered together all the lords of the
Philistines, and said, Send away the ark of the God of Israel, and let
it go again to his own place, that it slay us not, and our people: for
there was a deadly destruction throughout all the city; the hand of
God was very heavy there.

5:12 And the men that died not were smitten with the emerods: and the
cry of the city went up to heaven.

6:1 And the ark of the LORD was in the country of the Philistines
seven months.

6:2 And the Philistines called for the priests and the diviners,
saying, What shall we do to the ark of the LORD? tell us wherewith we
shall send it to his place.

6:3 And they said, If ye send away the ark of the God of Israel, send
it not empty; but in any wise return him a trespass offering: then ye
shall be healed, and it shall be known to you why his hand is not
removed from you.

6:4 Then said they, What shall be the trespass offering which we shall
return to him? They answered, Five golden emerods, and five golden
mice, according to the number of the lords of the Philistines: for one
plague was on you all, and on your lords.

6:5 Wherefore ye shall make images of your emerods, and images of your
mice that mar the land; and ye shall give glory unto the God of
Israel: peradventure he will lighten his hand from off you, and from
off your gods, and from off your land.

6:6 Wherefore then do ye harden your hearts, as the Egyptians and
Pharaoh hardened their hearts? when he had wrought wonderfully among
them, did they not let the people go, and they departed?  6:7 Now
therefore make a new cart, and take two milch kine, on which there
hath come no yoke, and tie the kine to the cart, and bring their
calves home from them: 6:8 And take the ark of the LORD, and lay it
upon the cart; and put the jewels of gold, which ye return him for a
trespass offering, in a coffer by the side thereof; and send it away,
that it may go.

6:9 And see, if it goeth up by the way of his own coast to
Bethshemesh, then he hath done us this great evil: but if not, then we
shall know that it is not his hand that smote us: it was a chance that
happened to us.

6:10 And the men did so; and took two milch kine, and tied them to the
cart, and shut up their calves at home: 6:11 And they laid the ark of
the LORD upon the cart, and the coffer with the mice of gold and the
images of their emerods.

6:12 And the kine took the straight way to the way of Bethshemesh, and
went along the highway, lowing as they went, and turned not aside to
the right hand or to the left; and the lords of the Philistines went
after them unto the border of Bethshemesh.

6:13 And they of Bethshemesh were reaping their wheat harvest in the
valley: and they lifted up their eyes, and saw the ark, and rejoiced
to see it.

6:14 And the cart came into the field of Joshua, a Bethshemite, and
stood there, where there was a great stone: and they clave the wood of
the cart, and offered the kine a burnt offering unto the LORD.

6:15 And the Levites took down the ark of the LORD, and the coffer
that was with it, wherein the jewels of gold were, and put them on the
great stone: and the men of Bethshemesh offered burnt offerings and
sacrificed sacrifices the same day unto the LORD.

6:16 And when the five lords of the Philistines had seen it, they
returned to Ekron the same day.

6:17 And these are the golden emerods which the Philistines returned
for a trespass offering unto the LORD; for Ashdod one, for Gaza one,
for Askelon one, for Gath one, for Ekron one; 6:18 And the golden
mice, according to the number of all the cities of the Philistines
belonging to the five lords, both of fenced cities, and of country
villages, even unto the great stone of Abel, whereon they set down the
ark of the LORD: which stone remaineth unto this day in the field of
Joshua, the Bethshemite.

6:19 And he smote the men of Bethshemesh, because they had looked into
the ark of the LORD, even he smote of the people fifty thousand and
threescore and ten men: and the people lamented, because the LORD had
smitten many of the people with a great slaughter.

6:20 And the men of Bethshemesh said, Who is able to stand before this
holy LORD God? and to whom shall he go up from us?  6:21 And they sent
messengers to the inhabitants of Kirjathjearim, saying, The
Philistines have brought again the ark of the LORD; come ye down, and
fetch it up to you.

7:1 And the men of Kirjathjearim came, and fetched up the ark of the
LORD, and brought it into the house of Abinadab in the hill, and
sanctified Eleazar his son to keep the ark of the LORD.

7:2 And it came to pass, while the ark abode in Kirjathjearim, that
the time was long; for it was twenty years: and all the house of
Israel lamented after the LORD.

7:3 And Samuel spake unto all the house of Israel, saying, If ye do
return unto the LORD with all your hearts, then put away the strange
gods and Ashtaroth from among you, and prepare your hearts unto the
LORD, and serve him only: and he will deliver you out of the hand of
the Philistines.

7:4 Then the children of Israel did put away Baalim and Ashtaroth, and
served the LORD only.

7:5 And Samuel said, Gather all Israel to Mizpeh, and I will pray for
you unto the LORD.

7:6 And they gathered together to Mizpeh, and drew water, and poured
it out before the LORD, and fasted on that day, and said there, We
have sinned against the LORD. And Samuel judged the children of Israel
in Mizpeh.

7:7 And when the Philistines heard that the children of Israel were
gathered together to Mizpeh, the lords of the Philistines went up
against Israel. And when the children of Israel heard it, they were
afraid of the Philistines.

7:8 And the children of Israel said to Samuel, Cease not to cry unto
the LORD our God for us, that he will save us out of the hand of the
Philistines.

7:9 And Samuel took a sucking lamb, and offered it for a burnt
offering wholly unto the LORD: and Samuel cried unto the LORD for
Israel; and the LORD heard him.

7:10 And as Samuel was offering up the burnt offering, the Philistines
drew near to battle against Israel: but the LORD thundered with a
great thunder on that day upon the Philistines, and discomfited them;
and they were smitten before Israel.

7:11 And the men of Israel went out of Mizpeh, and pursued the
Philistines, and smote them, until they came under Bethcar.

7:12 Then Samuel took a stone, and set it between Mizpeh and Shen, and
called the name of it Ebenezer, saying, Hitherto hath the LORD helped
us.

7:13 So the Philistines were subdued, and they came no more into the
coast of Israel: and the hand of the LORD was against the Philistines
all the days of Samuel.

7:14 And the cities which the Philistines had taken from Israel were
restored to Israel, from Ekron even unto Gath; and the coasts thereof
did Israel deliver out of the hands of the Philistines. And there was
peace between Israel and the Amorites.

7:15 And Samuel judged Israel all the days of his life.

7:16 And he went from year to year in circuit to Bethel, and Gilgal,
and Mizpeh, and judged Israel in all those places.

7:17 And his return was to Ramah; for there was his house; and there
he judged Israel; and there he built an altar unto the LORD.

8:1 And it came to pass, when Samuel was old, that he made his sons
judges over Israel.

8:2 Now the name of his firstborn was Joel; and the name of his
second, Abiah: they were judges in Beersheba.

8:3 And his sons walked not in his ways, but turned aside after lucre,
and took bribes, and perverted judgment.

8:4 Then all the elders of Israel gathered themselves together, and
came to Samuel unto Ramah, 8:5 And said unto him, Behold, thou art
old, and thy sons walk not in thy ways: now make us a king to judge us
like all the nations.

8:6 But the thing displeased Samuel, when they said, Give us a king to
judge us. And Samuel prayed unto the LORD.

8:7 And the LORD said unto Samuel, Hearken unto the voice of the
people in all that they say unto thee: for they have not rejected
thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them.

8:8 According to all the works which they have done since the day that
I brought them up out of Egypt even unto this day, wherewith they have
forsaken me, and served other gods, so do they also unto thee.

8:9 Now therefore hearken unto their voice: howbeit yet protest
solemnly unto them, and shew them the manner of the king that shall
reign over them.

8:10 And Samuel told all the words of the LORD unto the people that
asked of him a king.

8:11 And he said, This will be the manner of the king that shall reign
over you: He will take your sons, and appoint them for himself, for
his chariots, and to be his horsemen; and some shall run before his
chariots.

8:12 And he will appoint him captains over thousands, and captains
over fifties; and will set them to ear his ground, and to reap his
harvest, and to make his instruments of war, and instruments of his
chariots.

8:13 And he will take your daughters to be confectionaries, and to be
cooks, and to be bakers.

8:14 And he will take your fields, and your vineyards, and your
oliveyards, even the best of them, and give them to his servants.

8:15 And he will take the tenth of your seed, and of your vineyards,
and give to his officers, and to his servants.

8:16 And he will take your menservants, and your maidservants, and
your goodliest young men, and your asses, and put them to his work.

8:17 He will take the tenth of your sheep: and ye shall be his
servants.

8:18 And ye shall cry out in that day because of your king which ye
shall have chosen you; and the LORD will not hear you in that day.

8:19 Nevertheless the people refused to obey the voice of Samuel; and
they said, Nay; but we will have a king over us; 8:20 That we also may
be like all the nations; and that our king may judge us, and go out
before us, and fight our battles.

8:21 And Samuel heard all the words of the people, and he rehearsed
them in the ears of the LORD.

8:22 And the LORD said to Samuel, Hearken unto their voice, and make
them a king. And Samuel said unto the men of Israel, Go ye every man
unto his city.

9:1 Now there was a man of Benjamin, whose name was Kish, the son of
Abiel, the son of Zeror, the son of Bechorath, the son of Aphiah, a
Benjamite, a mighty man of power.

9:2 And he had a son, whose name was Saul, a choice young man, and a
goodly: and there was not among the children of Israel a goodlier
person than he: from his shoulders and upward he was higher than any
of the people.

9:3 And the asses of Kish Saul's father were lost. And Kish said to
Saul his son, Take now one of the servants with thee, and arise, go
seek the asses.

9:4 And he passed through mount Ephraim, and passed through the land
of Shalisha, but they found them not: then they passed through the
land of Shalim, and there they were not: and he passed through the
land of the Benjamites, but they found them not.

9:5 And when they were come to the land of Zuph, Saul said to his
servant that was with him, Come, and let us return; lest my father
leave caring for the asses, and take thought for us.

9:6 And he said unto him, Behold now, there is in this city a man of
God, and he is an honourable man; all that he saith cometh surely to
pass: now let us go thither; peradventure he can shew us our way that
we should go.

9:7 Then said Saul to his servant, But, behold, if we go, what shall
we bring the man? for the bread is spent in our vessels, and there is
not a present to bring to the man of God: what have we?  9:8 And the
servant answered Saul again, and said, Behold, I have here at hand the
fourth part of a shekel of silver: that will I give to the man of God,
to tell us our way.

9:9 (Beforetime in Israel, when a man went to enquire of God, thus he
spake, Come, and let us go to the seer: for he that is now called a
Prophet was beforetime called a Seer.)  9:10 Then said Saul to his
servant, Well said; come, let us go. So they went unto the city where
the man of God was.

9:11 And as they went up the hill to the city, they found young
maidens going out to draw water, and said unto them, Is the seer here?
9:12 And they answered them, and said, He is; behold, he is before
you: make haste now, for he came to day to the city; for there is a
sacrifice of the people to day in the high place: 9:13 As soon as ye
be come into the city, ye shall straightway find him, before he go up
to the high place to eat: for the people will not eat until he come,
because he doth bless the sacrifice; and afterwards they eat that be
bidden. Now therefore get you up; for about this time ye shall find
him.

9:14 And they went up into the city: and when they were come into the
city, behold, Samuel came out against them, for to go up to the high
place.

9:15 Now the LORD had told Samuel in his ear a day before Saul came,
saying, 9:16 To morrow about this time I will send thee a man out of
the land of Benjamin, and thou shalt anoint him to be captain over my
people Israel, that he may save my people out of the hand of the
Philistines: for I have looked upon my people, because their cry is
come unto me.

9:17 And when Samuel saw Saul, the LORD said unto him, Behold the man
whom I spake to thee of! this same shall reign over my people.

9:18 Then Saul drew near to Samuel in the gate, and said, Tell me, I
pray thee, where the seer's house is.

9:19 And Samuel answered Saul, and said, I am the seer: go up before
me unto the high place; for ye shall eat with me to day, and to morrow
I will let thee go, and will tell thee all that is in thine heart.

9:20 And as for thine asses that were lost three days ago, set not thy
mind on them; for they are found. And on whom is all the desire of
Israel? Is it not on thee, and on all thy father's house?  9:21 And
Saul answered and said, Am not I a Benjamite, of the smallest of the
tribes of Israel? and my family the least of all the families of the
tribe of Benjamin? wherefore then speakest thou so to me?  9:22 And
Samuel took Saul and his servant, and brought them into the parlour,
and made them sit in the chiefest place among them that were bidden,
which were about thirty persons.

9:23 And Samuel said unto the cook, Bring the portion which I gave
thee, of which I said unto thee, Set it by thee.

9:24 And the cook took up the shoulder, and that which was upon it,
and set it before Saul. And Samuel said, Behold that which is left!
set it before thee, and eat: for unto this time hath it been kept for
thee since I said, I have invited the people. So Saul did eat with
Samuel that day.

9:25 And when they were come down from the high place into the city,
Samuel communed with Saul upon the top of the house.

9:26 And they arose early: and it came to pass about the spring of the
day, that Samuel called Saul to the top of the house, saying, Up, that
I may send thee away. And Saul arose, and they went out both of them,
he and Samuel, abroad.

9:27 And as they were going down to the end of the city, Samuel said
to Saul, Bid the servant pass on before us, (and he passed on), but
stand thou still a while, that I may shew thee the word of God.

10:1 Then Samuel took a vial of oil, and poured it upon his head, and
kissed him, and said, Is it not because the LORD hath anointed thee to
be captain over his inheritance?  10:2 When thou art departed from me
to day, then thou shalt find two men by Rachel's sepulchre in the
border of Benjamin at Zelzah; and they will say unto thee, The asses
which thou wentest to seek are found: and, lo, thy father hath left
the care of the asses, and sorroweth for you, saying, What shall I do
for my son?  10:3 Then shalt thou go on forward from thence, and thou
shalt come to the plain of Tabor, and there shall meet thee three men
going up to God to Bethel, one carrying three kids, and another
carrying three loaves of bread, and another carrying a bottle of wine:
10:4 And they will salute thee, and give thee two loaves of bread;
which thou shalt receive of their hands.

10:5 After that thou shalt come to the hill of God, where is the
garrison of the Philistines: and it shall come to pass, when thou art
come thither to the city, that thou shalt meet a company of prophets
coming down from the high place with a psaltery, and a tabret, and a
pipe, and a harp, before them; and they shall prophesy: 10:6 And the
Spirit of the LORD will come upon thee, and thou shalt prophesy with
them, and shalt be turned into another man.

10:7 And let it be, when these signs are come unto thee, that thou do
as occasion serve thee; for God is with thee.

10:8 And thou shalt go down before me to Gilgal; and, behold, I will
come down unto thee, to offer burnt offerings, and to sacrifice
sacrifices of peace offerings: seven days shalt thou tarry, till I
come to thee, and shew thee what thou shalt do.

10:9 And it was so, that when he had turned his back to go from
Samuel, God gave him another heart: and all those signs came to pass
that day.

10:10 And when they came thither to the hill, behold, a company of
prophets met him; and the Spirit of God came upon him, and he
prophesied among them.

10:11 And it came to pass, when all that knew him beforetime saw that,
behold, he prophesied among the prophets, then the people said one to
another, What is this that is come unto the son of Kish? Is Saul also
among the prophets?  10:12 And one of the same place answered and
said, But who is their father? Therefore it became a proverb, Is Saul
also among the prophets?  10:13 And when he had made an end of
prophesying, he came to the high place.

10:14 And Saul's uncle said unto him and to his servant, Whither went
ye?  And he said, To seek the asses: and when we saw that they were no
where, we came to Samuel.

10:15 And Saul's uncle said, Tell me, I pray thee, what Samuel said
unto you.

10:16 And Saul said unto his uncle, He told us plainly that the asses
were found. But of the matter of the kingdom, whereof Samuel spake, he
told him not.

10:17 And Samuel called the people together unto the LORD to Mizpeh;
10:18 And said unto the children of Israel, Thus saith the LORD God of
Israel, I brought up Israel out of Egypt, and delivered you out of the
hand of the Egyptians, and out of the hand of all kingdoms, and of
them that oppressed you: 10:19 And ye have this day rejected your God,
who himself saved you out of all your adversities and your
tribulations; and ye have said unto him, Nay, but set a king over us.
Now therefore present yourselves before the LORD by your tribes, and
by your thousands.

10:20 And when Samuel had caused all the tribes of Israel to come
near, the tribe of Benjamin was taken.

10:21 When he had caused the tribe of Benjamin to come near by their
families, the family of Matri was taken, and Saul the son of Kish was
taken: and when they sought him, he could not be found.

10:22 Therefore they enquired of the LORD further, if the man should
yet come thither. And the LORD answered, Behold he hath hid himself
among the stuff.

10:23 And they ran and fetched him thence: and when he stood among the
people, he was higher than any of the people from his shoulders and
upward.

10:24 And Samuel said to all the people, See ye him whom the LORD hath
chosen, that there is none like him among all the people? And all the
people shouted, and said, God save the king.

10:25 Then Samuel told the people the manner of the kingdom, and wrote
it in a book, and laid it up before the LORD. And Samuel sent all the
people away, every man to his house.

10:26 And Saul also went home to Gibeah; and there went with him a
band of men, whose hearts God had touched.

10:27 But the children of Belial said, How shall this man save us? And
they despised him, and brought no presents. But he held his peace.

11:1 Then Nahash the Ammonite came up, and encamped against
Jabeshgilead: and all the men of Jabesh said unto Nahash, Make a
covenant with us, and we will serve thee.

11:2 And Nahash the Ammonite answered them, On this condition will I
make a covenant with you, that I may thrust out all your right eyes,
and lay it for a reproach upon all Israel.

11:3 And the elders of Jabesh said unto him, Give us seven days'
respite, that we may send messengers unto all the coasts of Israel:
and then, if there be no man to save us, we will come out to thee.

11:4 Then came the messengers to Gibeah of Saul, and told the tidings
in the ears of the people: and all the people lifted up their voices,
and wept.

11:5 And, behold, Saul came after the herd out of the field; and Saul
said, What aileth the people that they weep? And they told him the
tidings of the men of Jabesh.

11:6 And the Spirit of God came upon Saul when he heard those tidings,
and his anger was kindled greatly.

11:7 And he took a yoke of oxen, and hewed them in pieces, and sent
them throughout all the coasts of Israel by the hands of messengers,
saying, Whosoever cometh not forth after Saul and after Samuel, so
shall it be done unto his oxen. And the fear of the LORD fell on the
people, and they came out with one consent.

11:8 And when he numbered them in Bezek, the children of Israel were
three hundred thousand, and the men of Judah thirty thousand.

11:9 And they said unto the messengers that came, Thus shall ye say
unto the men of Jabeshgilead, To morrow, by that time the sun be hot,
ye shall have help. And the messengers came and shewed it to the men
of Jabesh; and they were glad.

11:10 Therefore the men of Jabesh said, To morrow we will come out
unto you, and ye shall do with us all that seemeth good unto you.

11:11 And it was so on the morrow, that Saul put the people in three
companies; and they came into the midst of the host in the morning
watch, and slew the Ammonites until the heat of the day: and it came
to pass, that they which remained were scattered, so that two of them
were not left together.

11:12 And the people said unto Samuel, Who is he that said, Shall Saul
reign over us? bring the men, that we may put them to death.

11:13 And Saul said, There shall not a man be put to death this day:
for to day the LORD hath wrought salvation in Israel.

11:14 Then said Samuel to the people, Come, and let us go to Gilgal,
and renew the kingdom there.

11:15 And all the people went to Gilgal; and there they made Saul king
before the LORD in Gilgal; and there they sacrificed sacrifices of
peace offerings before the LORD; and there Saul and all the men of
Israel rejoiced greatly.

12:1 And Samuel said unto all Israel, Behold, I have hearkened unto
your voice in all that ye said unto me, and have made a king over you.

12:2 And now, behold, the king walketh before you: and I am old and
grayheaded; and, behold, my sons are with you: and I have walked
before you from my childhood unto this day.

12:3 Behold, here I am: witness against me before the LORD, and before
his anointed: whose ox have I taken? or whose ass have I taken? or
whom have I defrauded? whom have I oppressed? or of whose hand have I
received any bribe to blind mine eyes therewith? and I will restore it
you.

12:4 And they said, Thou hast not defrauded us, nor oppressed us,
neither hast thou taken ought of any man's hand.

12:5 And he said unto them, The LORD is witness against you, and his
anointed is witness this day, that ye have not found ought in my hand.
And they answered, He is witness.

12:6 And Samuel said unto the people, It is the LORD that advanced
Moses and Aaron, and that brought your fathers up out of the land of
Egypt.

12:7 Now therefore stand still, that I may reason with you before the
LORD of all the righteous acts of the LORD, which he did to you and to
your fathers.

12:8 When Jacob was come into Egypt, and your fathers cried unto the
LORD, then the LORD sent Moses and Aaron, which brought forth your
fathers out of Egypt, and made them dwell in this place.

12:9 And when they forgat the LORD their God, he sold them into the
hand of Sisera, captain of the host of Hazor, and into the hand of the
Philistines, and into the hand of the king of Moab, and they fought
against them.

12:10 And they cried unto the LORD, and said, We have sinned, because
we have forsaken the LORD, and have served Baalim and Ashtaroth: but
now deliver us out of the hand of our enemies, and we will serve thee.

12:11 And the LORD sent Jerubbaal, and Bedan, and Jephthah, and
Samuel, and delivered you out of the hand of your enemies on every
side, and ye dwelled safe.

12:12 And when ye saw that Nahash the king of the children of Ammon
came against you, ye said unto me, Nay; but a king shall reign over
us: when the LORD your God was your king.

12:13 Now therefore behold the king whom ye have chosen, and whom ye
have desired! and, behold, the LORD hath set a king over you.

12:14 If ye will fear the LORD, and serve him, and obey his voice, and
not rebel against the commandment of the LORD, then shall both ye and
also the king that reigneth over you continue following the LORD your
God: 12:15 But if ye will not obey the voice of the LORD, but rebel
against the commandment of the LORD, then shall the hand of the LORD
be against you, as it was against your fathers.

12:16 Now therefore stand and see this great thing, which the LORD
will do before your eyes.

12:17 Is it not wheat harvest to day? I will call unto the LORD, and
he shall send thunder and rain; that ye may perceive and see that your
wickedness is great, which ye have done in the sight of the LORD, in
asking you a king.

12:18 So Samuel called unto the LORD; and the LORD sent thunder and
rain that day: and all the people greatly feared the LORD and Samuel.

12:19 And all the people said unto Samuel, Pray for thy servants unto
the LORD thy God, that we die not: for we have added unto all our sins
this evil, to ask us a king.

12:20 And Samuel said unto the people, Fear not: ye have done all this
wickedness: yet turn not aside from following the LORD, but serve the
LORD with all your heart; 12:21 And turn ye not aside: for then should
ye go after vain things, which cannot profit nor deliver; for they are
vain.

12:22 For the LORD will not forsake his people for his great name's
sake: because it hath pleased the LORD to make you his people.

12:23 Moreover as for me, God forbid that I should sin against the
LORD in ceasing to pray for you: but I will teach you the good and the
right way: 12:24 Only fear the LORD, and serve him in truth with all
your heart: for consider how great things he hath done for you.

12:25 But if ye shall still do wickedly, ye shall be consumed, both ye
and your king.

13:1 Saul reigned one year; and when he had reigned two years over
Israel, 13:2 Saul chose him three thousand men of Israel; whereof two
thousand were with Saul in Michmash and in mount Bethel, and a
thousand were with Jonathan in Gibeah of Benjamin: and the rest of the
people he sent every man to his tent.

13:3 And Jonathan smote the garrison of the Philistines that was in
Geba, and the Philistines heard of it. And Saul blew the trumpet
throughout all the land, saying, Let the Hebrews hear.

13:4 And all Israel heard say that Saul had smitten a garrison of the
Philistines, and that Israel also was had in abomination with the
Philistines. And the people were called together after Saul to Gilgal.

13:5 And the Philistines gathered themselves together to fight with
Israel, thirty thousand chariots, and six thousand horsemen, and
people as the sand which is on the sea shore in multitude: and they
came up, and pitched in Michmash, eastward from Bethaven.

13:6 When the men of Israel saw that they were in a strait, (for the
people were distressed,) then the people did hide themselves in caves,
and in thickets, and in rocks, and in high places, and in pits.

13:7 And some of the Hebrews went over Jordan to the land of Gad and
Gilead. As for Saul, he was yet in Gilgal, and all the people followed
him trembling.

13:8 And he tarried seven days, according to the set time that Samuel
had appointed: but Samuel came not to Gilgal; and the people were
scattered from him.

13:9 And Saul said, Bring hither a burnt offering to me, and peace
offerings. And he offered the burnt offering.

13:10 And it came to pass, that as soon as he had made an end of
offering the burnt offering, behold, Samuel came; and Saul went out to
meet him, that he might salute him.

13:11 And Samuel said, What hast thou done? And Saul said, Because I
saw that the people were scattered from me, and that thou camest not
within the days appointed, and that the Philistines gathered
themselves together at Michmash; 13:12 Therefore said I, The
Philistines will come down now upon me to Gilgal, and I have not made
supplication unto the LORD: I forced myself therefore, and offered a
burnt offering.

13:13 And Samuel said to Saul, Thou hast done foolishly: thou hast not
kept the commandment of the LORD thy God, which he commanded thee: for
now would the LORD have established thy kingdom upon Israel for ever.

13:14 But now thy kingdom shall not continue: the LORD hath sought him
a man after his own heart, and the LORD hath commanded him to be
captain over his people, because thou hast not kept that which the
LORD commanded thee.

13:15 And Samuel arose, and gat him up from Gilgal unto Gibeah of
Benjamin. And Saul numbered the people that were present with him,
about six hundred men.

13:16 And Saul, and Jonathan his son, and the people that were present
with them, abode in Gibeah of Benjamin: but the Philistines encamped
in Michmash.

13:17 And the spoilers came out of the camp of the Philistines in
three companies: one company turned unto the way that leadeth to
Ophrah, unto the land of Shual: 13:18 And another company turned the
way to Bethhoron: and another company turned to the way of the border
that looketh to the valley of Zeboim toward the wilderness.

13:19 Now there was no smith found throughout all the land of Israel:
for the Philistines said, Lest the Hebrews make them swords or spears:
13:20 But all the Israelites went down to the Philistines, to sharpen
every man his share, and his coulter, and his axe, and his mattock.

13:21 Yet they had a file for the mattocks, and for the coulters, and
for the forks, and for the axes, and to sharpen the goads.

13:22 So it came to pass in the day of battle, that there was neither
sword nor spear found in the hand of any of the people that were with
Saul and Jonathan: but with Saul and with Jonathan his son was there
found.

13:23 And the garrison of the Philistines went out to the passage of
Michmash.

14:1 Now it came to pass upon a day, that Jonathan the son of Saul
said unto the young man that bare his armour, Come, and let us go over
to the Philistines' garrison, that is on the other side. But he told
not his father.

14:2 And Saul tarried in the uttermost part of Gibeah under a
pomegranate tree which is in Migron: and the people that were with him
were about six hundred men; 14:3 And Ahiah, the son of Ahitub,
Ichabod's brother, the son of Phinehas, the son of Eli, the LORD's
priest in Shiloh, wearing an ephod. And the people knew not that
Jonathan was gone.

14:4 And between the passages, by which Jonathan sought to go over
unto the Philistines' garrison, there was a sharp rock on the one
side, and a sharp rock on the other side: and the name of the one was
Bozez, and the name of the other Seneh.

14:5 The forefront of the one was situate northward over against
Michmash, and the other southward over against Gibeah.

14:6 And Jonathan said to the young man that bare his armour, Come,
and let us go over unto the garrison of these uncircumcised: it may be
that the LORD will work for us: for there is no restraint to the LORD
to save by many or by few.

14:7 And his armourbearer said unto him, Do all that is in thine
heart: turn thee; behold, I am with thee according to thy heart.

14:8 Then said Jonathan, Behold, we will pass over unto these men, and
we will discover ourselves unto them.

14:9 If they say thus unto us, Tarry until we come to you; then we
will stand still in our place, and will not go up unto them.

14:10 But if they say thus, Come up unto us; then we will go up: for
the LORD hath delivered them into our hand: and this shall be a sign
unto us.

14:11 And both of them discovered themselves unto the garrison of the
Philistines: and the Philistines said, Behold, the Hebrews come forth
out of the holes where they had hid themselves.

14:12 And the men of the garrison answered Jonathan and his
armourbearer, and said, Come up to us, and we will shew you a thing.
And Jonathan said unto his armourbearer, Come up after me: for the
LORD hath delivered them into the hand of Israel.

14:13 And Jonathan climbed up upon his hands and upon his feet, and
his armourbearer after him: and they fell before Jonathan; and his
armourbearer slew after him.

14:14 And that first slaughter, which Jonathan and his armourbearer
made, was about twenty men, within as it were an half acre of land,
which a yoke of oxen might plow.

14:15 And there was trembling in the host, in the field, and among all
the people: the garrison, and the spoilers, they also trembled, and
the earth quaked: so it was a very great trembling.

14:16 And the watchmen of Saul in Gibeah of Benjamin looked; and,
behold, the multitude melted away, and they went on beating down one
another.

14:17 Then said Saul unto the people that were with him, Number now,
and see who is gone from us. And when they had numbered, behold,
Jonathan and his armourbearer were not there.

14:18 And Saul said unto Ahiah, Bring hither the ark of God. For the
ark of God was at that time with the children of Israel.

14:19 And it came to pass, while Saul talked unto the priest, that the
noise that was in the host of the Philistines went on and increased:
and Saul said unto the priest, Withdraw thine hand.

14:20 And Saul and all the people that were with him assembled
themselves, and they came to the battle: and, behold, every man's
sword was against his fellow, and there was a very great discomfiture.

14:21 Moreover the Hebrews that were with the Philistines before that
time, which went up with them into the camp from the country round
about, even they also turned to be with the Israelites that were with
Saul and Jonathan.

14:22 Likewise all the men of Israel which had hid themselves in mount
Ephraim, when they heard that the Philistines fled, even they also
followed hard after them in the battle.

14:23 So the LORD saved Israel that day: and the battle passed over
unto Bethaven.

14:24 And the men of Israel were distressed that day: for Saul had
adjured the people, saying, Cursed be the man that eateth any food
until evening, that I may be avenged on mine enemies. So none of the
people tasted any food.

14:25 And all they of the land came to a wood; and there was honey
upon the ground.

14:26 And when the people were come into the wood, behold, the honey
dropped; but no man put his hand to his mouth: for the people feared
the oath.

14:27 But Jonathan heard not when his father charged the people with
the oath: wherefore he put forth the end of the rod that was in his
hand, and dipped it in an honeycomb, and put his hand to his mouth;
and his eyes were enlightened.

14:28 Then answered one of the people, and said, Thy father straitly
charged the people with an oath, saying, Cursed be the man that eateth
any food this day. And the people were faint.

14:29 Then said Jonathan, My father hath troubled the land: see, I
pray you, how mine eyes have been enlightened, because I tasted a
little of this honey.

14:30 How much more, if haply the people had eaten freely to day of
the spoil of their enemies which they found? for had there not been
now a much greater slaughter among the Philistines?  14:31 And they
smote the Philistines that day from Michmash to Aijalon: and the
people were very faint.

14:32 And the people flew upon the spoil, and took sheep, and oxen,
and calves, and slew them on the ground: and the people did eat them
with the blood.

14:33 Then they told Saul, saying, Behold, the people sin against the
LORD, in that they eat with the blood. And he said, Ye have
transgressed: roll a great stone unto me this day.

14:34 And Saul said, Disperse yourselves among the people, and say
unto them, Bring me hither every man his ox, and every man his sheep,
and slay them here, and eat; and sin not against the LORD in eating
with the blood.

And all the people brought every man his ox with him that night, and
slew them there.

14:35 And Saul built an altar unto the LORD: the same was the first
altar that he built unto the LORD.

14:36 And Saul said, Let us go down after the Philistines by night,
and spoil them until the morning light, and let us not leave a man of
them. And they said, Do whatsoever seemeth good unto thee. Then said
the priest, Let us draw near hither unto God.

14:37 And Saul asked counsel of God, Shall I go down after the
Philistines? wilt thou deliver them into the hand of Israel? But he
answered him not that day.

14:38 And Saul said, Draw ye near hither, all the chief of the people:
and know and see wherein this sin hath been this day.

14:39 For, as the LORD liveth, which saveth Israel, though it be in
Jonathan my son, he shall surely die. But there was not a man among
all the people that answered him.

14:40 Then said he unto all Israel, Be ye on one side, and I and
Jonathan my son will be on the other side. And the people said unto
Saul, Do what seemeth good unto thee.

14:41 Therefore Saul said unto the LORD God of Israel, Give a perfect
lot.

And Saul and Jonathan were taken: but the people escaped.

14:42 And Saul said, Cast lots between me and Jonathan my son. And
Jonathan was taken.

14:43 Then Saul said to Jonathan, Tell me what thou hast done. And
Jonathan told him, and said, I did but taste a little honey with the
end of the rod that was in mine hand, and, lo, I must die.

14:44 And Saul answered, God do so and more also: for thou shalt
surely die, Jonathan.

14:45 And the people said unto Saul, Shall Jonathan die, who hath
wrought this great salvation in Israel? God forbid: as the LORD
liveth, there shall not one hair of his head fall to the ground; for
he hath wrought with God this day. So the people rescued Jonathan,
that he died not.

14:46 Then Saul went up from following the Philistines: and the
Philistines went to their own place.

14:47 So Saul took the kingdom over Israel, and fought against all his
enemies on every side, against Moab, and against the children of
Ammon, and against Edom, and against the kings of Zobah, and against
the Philistines: and whithersoever he turned himself, he vexed them.

14:48 And he gathered an host, and smote the Amalekites, and delivered
Israel out of the hands of them that spoiled them.

14:49 Now the sons of Saul were Jonathan, and Ishui, and Melchishua:
and the names of his two daughters were these; the name of the
firstborn Merab, and the name of the younger Michal: 14:50 And the
name of Saul's wife was Ahinoam, the daughter of Ahimaaz: and the name
of the captain of his host was Abner, the son of Ner, Saul's uncle.

14:51 And Kish was the father of Saul; and Ner the father of Abner was
the son of Abiel.

14:52 And there was sore war against the Philistines all the days of
Saul: and when Saul saw any strong man, or any valiant man, he took
him unto him.

15:1 Samuel also said unto Saul, The LORD sent me to anoint thee to be
king over his people, over Israel: now therefore hearken thou unto the
voice of the words of the LORD.

15:2 Thus saith the LORD of hosts, I remember that which Amalek did to
Israel, how he laid wait for him in the way, when he came up from
Egypt.

15:3 Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have,
and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling,
ox and sheep, camel and ass.

15:4 And Saul gathered the people together, and numbered them in
Telaim, two hundred thousand footmen, and ten thousand men of Judah.

15:5 And Saul came to a city of Amalek, and laid wait in the valley.

15:6 And Saul said unto the Kenites, Go, depart, get you down from
among the Amalekites, lest I destroy you with them: for ye shewed
kindness to all the children of Israel, when they came up out of
Egypt. So the Kenites departed from among the Amalekites.

15:7 And Saul smote the Amalekites from Havilah until thou comest to
Shur, that is over against Egypt.

15:8 And he took Agag the king of the Amalekites alive, and utterly
destroyed all the people with the edge of the sword.

15:9 But Saul and the people spared Agag, and the best of the sheep,
and of the oxen, and of the fatlings, and the lambs, and all that was
good, and would not utterly destroy them: but every thing that was
vile and refuse, that they destroyed utterly.

15:10 Then came the word of the LORD unto Samuel, saying, 15:11 It
repenteth me that I have set up Saul to be king: for he is turned back
from following me, and hath not performed my commandments. And it
grieved Samuel; and he cried unto the LORD all night.

15:12 And when Samuel rose early to meet Saul in the morning, it was
told Samuel, saying, Saul came to Carmel, and, behold, he set him up a
place, and is gone about, and passed on, and gone down to Gilgal.

15:13 And Samuel came to Saul: and Saul said unto him, Blessed be thou
of the LORD: I have performed the commandment of the LORD.

15:14 And Samuel said, What meaneth then this bleating of the sheep in
mine ears, and the lowing of the oxen which I hear?  15:15 And Saul
said, They have brought them from the Amalekites: for the people
spared the best of the sheep and of the oxen, to sacrifice unto the
LORD thy God; and the rest we have utterly destroyed.

15:16 Then Samuel said unto Saul, Stay, and I will tell thee what the
LORD hath said to me this night. And he said unto him, Say on.

15:17 And Samuel said, When thou wast little in thine own sight, wast
thou not made the head of the tribes of Israel, and the LORD anointed
thee king over Israel?  15:18 And the LORD sent thee on a journey, and
said, Go and utterly destroy the sinners the Amalekites, and fight
against them until they be consumed.

15:19 Wherefore then didst thou not obey the voice of the LORD, but
didst fly upon the spoil, and didst evil in the sight of the LORD?
15:20 And Saul said unto Samuel, Yea, I have obeyed the voice of the
LORD, and have gone the way which the LORD sent me, and have brought
Agag the king of Amalek, and have utterly destroyed the Amalekites.

15:21 But the people took of the spoil, sheep and oxen, the chief of
the things which should have been utterly destroyed, to sacrifice unto
the LORD thy God in Gilgal.

15:22 And Samuel said, Hath the LORD as great delight in burnt
offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the LORD? Behold,
to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams.

15:23 For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is
as iniquity and idolatry. Because thou hast rejected the word of the
LORD, he hath also rejected thee from being king.

15:24 And Saul said unto Samuel, I have sinned: for I have
transgressed the commandment of the LORD, and thy words: because I
feared the people, and obeyed their voice.

15:25 Now therefore, I pray thee, pardon my sin, and turn again with
me, that I may worship the LORD.

15:26 And Samuel said unto Saul, I will not return with thee: for thou
hast rejected the word of the LORD, and the LORD hath rejected thee
from being king over Israel.

15:27 And as Samuel turned about to go away, he laid hold upon the
skirt of his mantle, and it rent.

15:28 And Samuel said unto him, The LORD hath rent the kingdom of
Israel from thee this day, and hath given it to a neighbour of thine,
that is better than thou.

15:29 And also the Strength of Israel will not lie nor repent: for he
is not a man, that he should repent.

15:30 Then he said, I have sinned: yet honour me now, I pray thee,
before the elders of my people, and before Israel, and turn again with
me, that I may worship the LORD thy God.

15:31 So Samuel turned again after Saul; and Saul worshipped the LORD.

15:32 Then said Samuel, Bring ye hither to me Agag the king of the
Amalekites. And Agag came unto him delicately. And Agag said, Surely
the bitterness of death is past.

15:33 And Samuel said, As the sword hath made women childless, so
shall thy mother be childless among women. And Samuel hewed Agag in
pieces before the LORD in Gilgal.

15:34 Then Samuel went to Ramah; and Saul went up to his house to
Gibeah of Saul.

15:35 And Samuel came no more to see Saul until the day of his death:
nevertheless Samuel mourned for Saul: and the LORD repented that he
had made Saul king over Israel.

16:1 And the LORD said unto Samuel, How long wilt thou mourn for Saul,
seeing I have rejected him from reigning over Israel? fill thine horn
with oil, and go, I will send thee to Jesse the Bethlehemite: for I
have provided me a king among his sons.

16:2 And Samuel said, How can I go? if Saul hear it, he will kill me.
And the LORD said, Take an heifer with thee, and say, I am come to
sacrifice to the LORD.

16:3 And call Jesse to the sacrifice, and I will shew thee what thou
shalt do: and thou shalt anoint unto me him whom I name unto thee.

16:4 And Samuel did that which the LORD spake, and came to Bethlehem.
And the elders of the town trembled at his coming, and said, Comest
thou peaceably?  16:5 And he said, Peaceably: I am come to sacrifice
unto the LORD: sanctify yourselves, and come with me to the sacrifice.
And he sanctified Jesse and his sons, and called them to the
sacrifice.

16:6 And it came to pass, when they were come, that he looked on
Eliab, and said, Surely the LORD's anointed is before him.

16:7 But the LORD said unto Samuel, Look not on his countenance, or on
the height of his stature; because I have refused him: for the LORD
seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but
the LORD looketh on the heart.

16:8 Then Jesse called Abinadab, and made him pass before Samuel. And
he said, Neither hath the LORD chosen this.

16:9 Then Jesse made Shammah to pass by. And he said, Neither hath the
LORD chosen this.

16:10 Again, Jesse made seven of his sons to pass before Samuel. And
Samuel said unto Jesse, The LORD hath not chosen these.

16:11 And Samuel said unto Jesse, Are here all thy children? And he
said, There remaineth yet the youngest, and, behold, he keepeth the
sheep. And Samuel said unto Jesse, Send and fetch him: for we will not
sit down till he come hither.

16:12 And he sent, and brought him in. Now he was ruddy, and withal of
a beautiful countenance, and goodly to look to. And the LORD said,
Arise, anoint him: for this is he.

16:13 Then Samuel took the horn of oil, and anointed him in the midst
of his brethren: and the Spirit of the LORD came upon David from that
day forward. So Samuel rose up, and went to Ramah.

16:14 But the Spirit of the LORD departed from Saul, and an evil
spirit from the LORD troubled him.

16:15 And Saul's servants said unto him, Behold now, an evil spirit
from God troubleth thee.

16:16 Let our lord now command thy servants, which are before thee, to
seek out a man, who is a cunning player on an harp: and it shall come
to pass, when the evil spirit from God is upon thee, that he shall
play with his hand, and thou shalt be well.

16:17 And Saul said unto his servants, Provide me now a man that can
play well, and bring him to me.

16:18 Then answered one of the servants, and said, Behold, I have seen
a son of Jesse the Bethlehemite, that is cunning in playing, and a
mighty valiant man, and a man of war, and prudent in matters, and a
comely person, and the LORD is with him.

16:19 Wherefore Saul sent messengers unto Jesse, and said, Send me
David thy son, which is with the sheep.

16:20 And Jesse took an ass laden with bread, and a bottle of wine,
and a kid, and sent them by David his son unto Saul.

16:21 And David came to Saul, and stood before him: and he loved him
greatly; and he became his armourbearer.

16:22 And Saul sent to Jesse, saying, Let David, I pray thee, stand
before me; for he hath found favour in my sight.

16:23 And it came to pass, when the evil spirit from God was upon
Saul, that David took an harp, and played with his hand: so Saul was
refreshed, and was well, and the evil spirit departed from him.

17:1 Now the Philistines gathered together their armies to battle, and
were gathered together at Shochoh, which belongeth to Judah, and
pitched between Shochoh and Azekah, in Ephesdammim.

17:2 And Saul and the men of Israel were gathered together, and
pitched by the valley of Elah, and set the battle in array against the
Philistines.

17:3 And the Philistines stood on a mountain on the one side, and
Israel stood on a mountain on the other side: and there was a valley
between them.

17:4 And there went out a champion out of the camp of the Philistines,
named Goliath, of Gath, whose height was six cubits and a span.

17:5 And he had an helmet of brass upon his head, and he was armed
with a coat of mail; and the weight of the coat was five thousand
shekels of brass.

17:6 And he had greaves of brass upon his legs, and a target of brass
between his shoulders.

17:7 And the staff of his spear was like a weaver's beam; and his
spear's head weighed six hundred shekels of iron: and one bearing a
shield went before him.

17:8 And he stood and cried unto the armies of Israel, and said unto
them, Why are ye come out to set your battle in array? am not I a
Philistine, and ye servants to Saul? choose you a man for you, and let
him come down to me.

17:9 If he be able to fight with me, and to kill me, then will we be
your servants: but if I prevail against him, and kill him, then shall
ye be our servants, and serve us.

17:10 And the Philistine said, I defy the armies of Israel this day;
give me a man, that we may fight together.

17:11 When Saul and all Israel heard those words of the Philistine,
they were dismayed, and greatly afraid.

17:12 Now David was the son of that Ephrathite of Bethlehemjudah,
whose name was Jesse; and he had eight sons: and the man went among
men for an old man in the days of Saul.

17:13 And the three eldest sons of Jesse went and followed Saul to the
battle: and the names of his three sons that went to the battle were
Eliab the firstborn, and next unto him Abinadab, and the third
Shammah.

17:14 And David was the youngest: and the three eldest followed Saul.

17:15 But David went and returned from Saul to feed his father's sheep
at Bethlehem.

17:16 And the Philistine drew near morning and evening, and presented
himself forty days.

17:17 And Jesse said unto David his son, Take now for thy brethren an
ephah of this parched corn, and these ten loaves, and run to the camp
of thy brethren; 17:18 And carry these ten cheeses unto the captain of
their thousand, and look how thy brethren fare, and take their pledge.

17:19 Now Saul, and they, and all the men of Israel, were in the
valley of Elah, fighting with the Philistines.

17:20 And David rose up early in the morning, and left the sheep with
a keeper, and took, and went, as Jesse had commanded him; and he came
to the trench, as the host was going forth to the fight, and shouted
for the battle.

17:21 For Israel and the Philistines had put the battle in array, army
against army.

17:22 And David left his carriage in the hand of the keeper of the
carriage, and ran into the army, and came and saluted his brethren.

17:23 And as he talked with them, behold, there came up the champion,
the Philistine of Gath, Goliath by name, out of the armies of the
Philistines, and spake according to the same words: and David heard
them.

17:24 And all the men of Israel, when they saw the man, fled from him,
and were sore afraid.

17:25 And the men of Israel said, Have ye seen this man that is come
up?  surely to defy Israel is he come up: and it shall be, that the
man who killeth him, the king will enrich him with great riches, and
will give him his daughter, and make his father's house free in
Israel.

17:26 And David spake to the men that stood by him, saying, What shall
be done to the man that killeth this Philistine, and taketh away the
reproach from Israel? for who is this uncircumcised Philistine, that
he should defy the armies of the living God?  17:27 And the people
answered him after this manner, saying, So shall it be done to the man
that killeth him.

17:28 And Eliab his eldest brother heard when he spake unto the men;
and Eliab's anger was kindled against David, and he said, Why camest
thou down hither? and with whom hast thou left those few sheep in the
wilderness? I know thy pride, and the naughtiness of thine heart; for
thou art come down that thou mightest see the battle.

17:29 And David said, What have I now done? Is there not a cause?
17:30 And he turned from him toward another, and spake after the same
manner: and the people answered him again after the former manner.

17:31 And when the words were heard which David spake, they rehearsed
them before Saul: and he sent for him.

17:32 And David said to Saul, Let no man's heart fail because of him;
thy servant will go and fight with this Philistine.

17:33 And Saul said to David, Thou art not able to go against this
Philistine to fight with him: for thou art but a youth, and he a man
of war from his youth.

17:34 And David said unto Saul, Thy servant kept his father's sheep,
and there came a lion, and a bear, and took a lamb out of the flock:
17:35 And I went out after him, and smote him, and delivered it out of
his mouth: and when he arose against me, I caught him by his beard,
and smote him, and slew him.

17:36 Thy servant slew both the lion and the bear: and this
uncircumcised Philistine shall be as one of them, seeing he hath
defied the armies of the living God.

17:37 David said moreover, The LORD that delivered me out of the paw
of the lion, and out of the paw of the bear, he will deliver me out of
the hand of this Philistine. And Saul said unto David, Go, and the
LORD be with thee.

17:38 And Saul armed David with his armour, and he put an helmet of
brass upon his head; also he armed him with a coat of mail.

17:39 And David girded his sword upon his armour, and he assayed to
go; for he had not proved it. And David said unto Saul, I cannot go
with these; for I have not proved them. And David put them off him.

17:40 And he took his staff in his hand, and chose him five smooth
stones out of the brook, and put them in a shepherd's bag which he
had, even in a scrip; and his sling was in his hand: and he drew near
to the Philistine.

17:41 And the Philistine came on and drew near unto David; and the man
that bare the shield went before him.

17:42 And when the Philistine looked about, and saw David, he
disdained him: for he was but a youth, and ruddy, and of a fair
countenance.

17:43 And the Philistine said unto David, Am I a dog, that thou comest
to me with staves? And the Philistine cursed David by his gods.

17:44 And the Philistine said to David, Come to me, and I will give
thy flesh unto the fowls of the air, and to the beasts of the field.

17:45 Then said David to the Philistine, Thou comest to me with a
sword, and with a spear, and with a shield: but I come to thee in the
name of the LORD of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom thou
hast defied.

17:46 This day will the LORD deliver thee into mine hand; and I will
smite thee, and take thine head from thee; and I will give the
carcases of the host of the Philistines this day unto the fowls of the
air, and to the wild beasts of the earth; that all the earth may know
that there is a God in Israel.

17:47 And all this assembly shall know that the LORD saveth not with
sword and spear: for the battle is the LORD's, and he will give you
into our hands.

17:48 And it came to pass, when the Philistine arose, and came, and
drew nigh to meet David, that David hastened, and ran toward the army
to meet the Philistine.

17:49 And David put his hand in his bag, and took thence a stone, and
slang it, and smote the Philistine in his forehead, that the stone
sunk into his forehead; and he fell upon his face to the earth.

17:50 So David prevailed over the Philistine with a sling and with a
stone, and smote the Philistine, and slew him; but there was no sword
in the hand of David.

17:51 Therefore David ran, and stood upon the Philistine, and took his
sword, and drew it out of the sheath thereof, and slew him, and cut
off his head therewith. And when the Philistines saw their champion
was dead, they fled.

17:52 And the men of Israel and of Judah arose, and shouted, and
pursued the Philistines, until thou come to the valley, and to the
gates of Ekron.

And the wounded of the Philistines fell down by the way to Shaaraim,
even unto Gath, and unto Ekron.

17:53 And the children of Israel returned from chasing after the
Philistines, and they spoiled their tents.

17:54 And David took the head of the Philistine, and brought it to
Jerusalem; but he put his armour in his tent.

17:55 And when Saul saw David go forth against the Philistine, he said
unto Abner, the captain of the host, Abner, whose son is this youth?
And Abner said, As thy soul liveth, O king, I cannot tell.

17:56 And the king said, Enquire thou whose son the stripling is.

17:57 And as David returned from the slaughter of the Philistine,
Abner took him, and brought him before Saul with the head of the
Philistine in his hand.

17:58 And Saul said to him, Whose son art thou, thou young man? And
David answered, I am the son of thy servant Jesse the Bethlehemite.

18:1 And it came to pass, when he had made an end of speaking unto
Saul, that the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and
Jonathan loved him as his own soul.

18:2 And Saul took him that day, and would let him go no more home to
his father's house.

18:3 Then Jonathan and David made a covenant, because he loved him as
his own soul.

18:4 And Jonathan stripped himself of the robe that was upon him, and
gave it to David, and his garments, even to his sword, and to his bow,
and to his girdle.

18:5 And David went out whithersoever Saul sent him, and behaved
himself wisely: and Saul set him over the men of war, and he was
accepted in the sight of all the people, and also in the sight of
Saul's servants.

18:6 And it came to pass as they came, when David was returned from
the slaughter of the Philistine, that the women came out of all cities
of Israel, singing and dancing, to meet king Saul, with tabrets, with
joy, and with instruments of musick.

18:7 And the women answered one another as they played, and said, Saul
hath slain his thousands, and David his ten thousands.

18:8 And Saul was very wroth, and the saying displeased him; and he
said, They have ascribed unto David ten thousands, and to me they have
ascribed but thousands: and what can he have more but the kingdom?
18:9 And Saul eyed David from that day and forward.

18:10 And it came to pass on the morrow, that the evil spirit from God
came upon Saul, and he prophesied in the midst of the house: and David
played with his hand, as at other times: and there was a javelin in
Saul's hand.

18:11 And Saul cast the javelin; for he said, I will smite David even
to the wall with it. And David avoided out of his presence twice.

18:12 And Saul was afraid of David, because the LORD was with him, and
was departed from Saul.

18:13 Therefore Saul removed him from him, and made him his captain
over a thousand; and he went out and came in before the people.

18:14 And David behaved himself wisely in all his ways; and the LORD
was with him.

18:15 Wherefore when Saul saw that he behaved himself very wisely, he
was afraid of him.

18:16 But all Israel and Judah loved David, because he went out and
came in before them.

18:17 And Saul said to David, Behold my elder daughter Merab, her will
I give thee to wife: only be thou valiant for me, and fight the LORD's
battles.

For Saul said, Let not mine hand be upon him, but let the hand of the
Philistines be upon him.

18:18 And David said unto Saul, Who am I? and what is my life, or my
father's family in Israel, that I should be son in law to the king?
18:19 But it came to pass at the time when Merab Saul's daughter
should have been given to David, that she was given unto Adriel the
Meholathite to wife.

18:20 And Michal Saul's daughter loved David: and they told Saul, and
the thing pleased him.

18:21 And Saul said, I will give him her, that she may be a snare to
him, and that the hand of the Philistines may be against him.
Wherefore Saul said to David, Thou shalt this day be my son in law in
the one of the twain.

18:22 And Saul commanded his servants, saying, Commune with David
secretly, and say, Behold, the king hath delight in thee, and all his
servants love thee: now therefore be the king's son in law.

18:23 And Saul's servants spake those words in the ears of David. And
David said, Seemeth it to you a light thing to be a king's son in law,
seeing that I am a poor man, and lightly esteemed?  18:24 And the
servants of Saul told him, saying, On this manner spake David.

18:25 And Saul said, Thus shall ye say to David, The king desireth not
any dowry, but an hundred foreskins of the Philistines, to be avenged
of the king's enemies. But Saul thought to make David fall by the hand
of the Philistines.

18:26 And when his servants told David these words, it pleased David
well to be the king's son in law: and the days were not expired.

18:27 Wherefore David arose and went, he and his men, and slew of the
Philistines two hundred men; and David brought their foreskins, and
they gave them in full tale to the king, that he might be the king's
son in law. And Saul gave him Michal his daughter to wife.

18:28 And Saul saw and knew that the LORD was with David, and that
Michal Saul's daughter loved him.

18:29 And Saul was yet the more afraid of David; and Saul became
David's enemy continually.

18:30 Then the princes of the Philistines went forth: and it came to
pass, after they went forth, that David behaved himself more wisely
than all the servants of Saul; so that his name was much set by.

19:1 And Saul spake to Jonathan his son, and to all his servants, that
they should kill David.

19:2 But Jonathan Saul's son delighted much in David: and Jonathan
told David, saying, Saul my father seeketh to kill thee: now
therefore, I pray thee, take heed to thyself until the morning, and
abide in a secret place, and hide thyself: 19:3 And I will go out and
stand beside my father in the field where thou art, and I will commune
with my father of thee; and what I see, that I will tell thee.

19:4 And Jonathan spake good of David unto Saul his father, and said
unto him, Let not the king sin against his servant, against David;
because he hath not sinned against thee, and because his works have
been to thee-ward very good: 19:5 For he did put his life in his hand,
and slew the Philistine, and the LORD wrought a great salvation for
all Israel: thou sawest it, and didst rejoice: wherefore then wilt
thou sin against innocent blood, to slay David without a cause?  19:6
And Saul hearkened unto the voice of Jonathan: and Saul sware, As the
LORD liveth, he shall not be slain.

19:7 And Jonathan called David, and Jonathan shewed him all those
things.

And Jonathan brought David to Saul, and he was in his presence, as in
times past.

19:8 And there was war again: and David went out, and fought with the
Philistines, and slew them with a great slaughter; and they fled from
him.

19:9 And the evil spirit from the LORD was upon Saul, as he sat in his
house with his javelin in his hand: and David played with his hand.

19:10 And Saul sought to smite David even to the wall with the
javelin: but he slipped away out of Saul's presence, and he smote the
javelin into the wall: and David fled, and escaped that night.

19:11 Saul also sent messengers unto David's house, to watch him, and
to slay him in the morning: and Michal David's wife told him, saying,
If thou save not thy life to night, to morrow thou shalt be slain.

19:12 So Michal let David down through a window: and he went, and
fled, and escaped.

19:13 And Michal took an image, and laid it in the bed, and put a
pillow of goats' hair for his bolster, and covered it with a cloth.

19:14 And when Saul sent messengers to take David, she said, He is
sick.

19:15 And Saul sent the messengers again to see David, saying, Bring
him up to me in the bed, that I may slay him.

19:16 And when the messengers were come in, behold, there was an image
in the bed, with a pillow of goats' hair for his bolster.

19:17 And Saul said unto Michal, Why hast thou deceived me so, and
sent away mine enemy, that he is escaped? And Michal answered Saul, He
said unto me, Let me go; why should I kill thee?  19:18 So David fled,
and escaped, and came to Samuel to Ramah, and told him all that Saul
had done to him. And he and Samuel went and dwelt in Naioth.

19:19 And it was told Saul, saying, Behold, David is at Naioth in
Ramah.

19:20 And Saul sent messengers to take David: and when they saw the
company of the prophets prophesying, and Samuel standing as appointed
over them, the Spirit of God was upon the messengers of Saul, and they
also prophesied.

19:21 And when it was told Saul, he sent other messengers, and they
prophesied likewise. And Saul sent messengers again the third time,
and they prophesied also.

19:22 Then went he also to Ramah, and came to a great well that is in
Sechu: and he asked and said, Where are Samuel and David? And one
said, Behold, they be at Naioth in Ramah.

19:23 And he went thither to Naioth in Ramah: and the Spirit of God
was upon him also, and he went on, and prophesied, until he came to
Naioth in Ramah.

19:24 And he stripped off his clothes also, and prophesied before
Samuel in like manner, and lay down naked all that day and all that
night. Wherefore they say, Is Saul also among the prophets?  20:1 And
David fled from Naioth in Ramah, and came and said before Jonathan,
What have I done? what is mine iniquity? and what is my sin before thy
father, that he seeketh my life?  20:2 And he said unto him, God
forbid; thou shalt not die: behold, my father will do nothing either
great or small, but that he will shew it me: and why should my father
hide this thing from me? it is not so.

20:3 And David sware moreover, and said, Thy father certainly knoweth
that I have found grace in thine eyes; and he saith, Let not Jonathan
know this, lest he be grieved: but truly as the LORD liveth, and as
thy soul liveth, there is but a step between me and death.

20:4 Then said Jonathan unto David, Whatsoever thy soul desireth, I
will even do it for thee.

20:5 And David said unto Jonathan, Behold, to morrow is the new moon,
and I should not fail to sit with the king at meat: but let me go,
that I may hide myself in the field unto the third day at even.

20:6 If thy father at all miss me, then say, David earnestly asked
leave of me that he might run to Bethlehem his city: for there is a
yearly sacrifice there for all the family.

20:7 If he say thus, It is well; thy servant shall have peace: but if
he be very wroth, then be sure that evil is determined by him.

20:8 Therefore thou shalt deal kindly with thy servant; for thou hast
brought thy servant into a covenant of the LORD with thee:
notwithstanding, if there be in me iniquity, slay me thyself; for why
shouldest thou bring me to thy father?  20:9 And Jonathan said, Far be
it from thee: for if I knew certainly that evil were determined by my
father to come upon thee, then would not I tell it thee?  20:10 Then
said David to Jonathan, Who shall tell me? or what if thy father
answer thee roughly?  20:11 And Jonathan said unto David, Come, and
let us go out into the field. And they went out both of them into the
field.

20:12 And Jonathan said unto David, O LORD God of Israel, when I have
sounded my father about to morrow any time, or the third day, and,
behold, if there be good toward David, and I then send not unto thee,
and shew it thee; 20:13 The LORD do so and much more to Jonathan: but
if it please my father to do thee evil, then I will shew it thee, and
send thee away, that thou mayest go in peace: and the LORD be with
thee, as he hath been with my father.

20:14 And thou shalt not only while yet I live shew me the kindness of
the LORD, that I die not: 20:15 But also thou shalt not cut off thy
kindness from my house for ever: no, not when the LORD hath cut off
the enemies of David every one from the face of the earth.

20:16 So Jonathan made a covenant with the house of David, saying, Let
the LORD even require it at the hand of David's enemies.

20:17 And Jonathan caused David to swear again, because he loved him:
for he loved him as he loved his own soul.

20:18 Then Jonathan said to David, To morrow is the new moon: and thou
shalt be missed, because thy seat will be empty.

20:19 And when thou hast stayed three days, then thou shalt go down
quickly, and come to the place where thou didst hide thyself when the
business was in hand, and shalt remain by the stone Ezel.

20:20 And I will shoot three arrows on the side thereof, as though I
shot at a mark.

20:21 And, behold, I will send a lad, saying, Go, find out the arrows.
If I expressly say unto the lad, Behold, the arrows are on this side
of thee, take them; then come thou: for there is peace to thee, and no
hurt; as the LORD liveth.

20:22 But if I say thus unto the young man, Behold, the arrows are
beyond thee; go thy way: for the LORD hath sent thee away.

20:23 And as touching the matter which thou and I have spoken of,
behold, the LORD be between thee and me for ever.

20:24 So David hid himself in the field: and when the new moon was
come, the king sat him down to eat meat.

20:25 And the king sat upon his seat, as at other times, even upon a
seat by the wall: and Jonathan arose, and Abner sat by Saul's side,
and David's place was empty.

20:26 Nevertheless Saul spake not any thing that day: for he thought,
Something hath befallen him, he is not clean; surely he is not clean.

20:27 And it came to pass on the morrow, which was the second day of
the month, that David's place was empty: and Saul said unto Jonathan
his son, Wherefore cometh not the son of Jesse to meat, neither
yesterday, nor to day?  20:28 And Jonathan answered Saul, David
earnestly asked leave of me to go to Bethlehem: 20:29 And he said, Let
me go, I pray thee; for our family hath a sacrifice in the city; and
my brother, he hath commanded me to be there: and now, if I have found
favour in thine eyes, let me get away, I pray thee, and see my
brethren. Therefore he cometh not unto the king's table.

20:30 Then Saul's anger was kindled against Jonathan, and he said unto
him, Thou son of the perverse rebellious woman, do not I know that
thou hast chosen the son of Jesse to thine own confusion, and unto the
confusion of thy mother's nakedness?  20:31 For as long as the son of
Jesse liveth upon the ground, thou shalt not be established, nor thy
kingdom. Wherefore now send and fetch him unto me, for he shall surely
die.

20:32 And Jonathan answered Saul his father, and said unto him,
Wherefore shall he be slain? what hath he done?  20:33 And Saul cast a
javelin at him to smite him: whereby Jonathan knew that it was
determined of his father to slay David.

20:34 So Jonathan arose from the table in fierce anger, and did eat no
meat the second day of the month: for he was grieved for David,
because his father had done him shame.

20:35 And it came to pass in the morning, that Jonathan went out into
the field at the time appointed with David, and a little lad with him.

20:36 And he said unto his lad, Run, find out now the arrows which I
shoot. And as the lad ran, he shot an arrow beyond him.

20:37 And when the lad was come to the place of the arrow which
Jonathan had shot, Jonathan cried after the lad, and said, Is not the
arrow beyond thee?  20:38 And Jonathan cried after the lad, Make
speed, haste, stay not. And Jonathan's lad gathered up the arrows, and
came to his master.

20:39 But the lad knew not any thing: only Jonathan and David knew the
matter.

20:40 And Jonathan gave his artillery unto his lad, and said unto him,
Go, carry them to the city.

20:41 And as soon as the lad was gone, David arose out of a place
toward the south, and fell on his face to the ground, and bowed
himself three times: and they kissed one another, and wept one with
another, until David exceeded.

20:42 And Jonathan said to David, Go in peace, forasmuch as we have
sworn both of us in the name of the LORD, saying, The LORD be between
me and thee, and between my seed and thy seed for ever. And he arose
and departed: and Jonathan went into the city.

21:1 Then came David to Nob to Ahimelech the priest: and Ahimelech was
afraid at the meeting of David, and said unto him, Why art thou alone,
and no man with thee?  21:2 And David said unto Ahimelech the priest,
The king hath commanded me a business, and hath said unto me, Let no
man know any thing of the business whereabout I send thee, and what I
have commanded thee: and I have appointed my servants to such and such
a place.

21:3 Now therefore what is under thine hand? give me five loaves of
bread in mine hand, or what there is present.

21:4 And the priest answered David, and said, There is no common bread
under mine hand, but there is hallowed bread; if the young men have
kept themselves at least from women.

21:5 And David answered the priest, and said unto him, Of a truth
women have been kept from us about these three days, since I came out,
and the vessels of the young men are holy, and the bread is in a
manner common, yea, though it were sanctified this day in the vessel.

21:6 So the priest gave him hallowed bread: for there was no bread
there but the shewbread, that was taken from before the LORD, to put
hot bread in the day when it was taken away.

21:7 Now a certain man of the servants of Saul was there that day,
detained before the LORD; and his name was Doeg, an Edomite, the
chiefest of the herdmen that belonged to Saul.

21:8 And David said unto Ahimelech, And is there not here under thine
hand spear or sword? for I have neither brought my sword nor my
weapons with me, because the king's business required haste.

21:9 And the priest said, The sword of Goliath the Philistine, whom
thou slewest in the valley of Elah, behold, it is here wrapped in a
cloth behind the ephod: if thou wilt take that, take it: for there is
no other save that here. And David said, There is none like that; give
it me.

21:10 And David arose and fled that day for fear of Saul, and went to
Achish the king of Gath.

21:11 And the servants of Achish said unto him, Is not this David the
king of the land? did they not sing one to another of him in dances,
saying, Saul hath slain his thousands, and David his ten thousands?
21:12 And David laid up these words in his heart, and was sore afraid
of Achish the king of Gath.

21:13 And he changed his behaviour before them, and feigned himself
mad in their hands, and scrabbled on the doors of the gate, and let
his spittle fall down upon his beard.

21:14 Then said Achish unto his servants, Lo, ye see the man is mad:
wherefore then have ye brought him to me?  21:15 Have I need of mad
men, that ye have brought this fellow to play the mad man in my
presence? shall this fellow come into my house?  22:1 David therefore
departed thence, and escaped to the cave Adullam: and when his
brethren and all his father's house heard it, they went down thither
to him.

22:2 And every one that was in distress, and every one that was in
debt, and every one that was discontented, gathered themselves unto
him; and he became a captain over them: and there were with him about
four hundred men.

22:3 And David went thence to Mizpeh of Moab: and he said unto the
king of Moab, Let my father and my mother, I pray thee, come forth,
and be with you, till I know what God will do for me.

22:4 And he brought them before the king of Moab: and they dwelt with
him all the while that David was in the hold.

22:5 And the prophet Gad said unto David, Abide not in the hold;
depart, and get thee into the land of Judah. Then David departed, and
came into the forest of Hareth.

22:6 When Saul heard that David was discovered, and the men that were
with him, (now Saul abode in Gibeah under a tree in Ramah, having his
spear in his hand, and all his servants were standing about him;) 22:7
Then Saul said unto his servants that stood about him, Hear now, ye
Benjamites; will the son of Jesse give every one of you fields and
vineyards, and make you all captains of thousands, and captains of
hundreds; 22:8 That all of you have conspired against me, and there is
none that sheweth me that my son hath made a league with the son of
Jesse, and there is none of you that is sorry for me, or sheweth unto
me that my son hath stirred up my servant against me, to lie in wait,
as at this day?  22:9 Then answered Doeg the Edomite, which was set
over the servants of Saul, and said, I saw the son of Jesse coming to
Nob, to Ahimelech the son of Ahitub.

22:10 And he enquired of the LORD for him, and gave him victuals, and
gave him the sword of Goliath the Philistine.

22:11 Then the king sent to call Ahimelech the priest, the son of
Ahitub, and all his father's house, the priests that were in Nob: and
they came all of them to the king.

22:12 And Saul said, Hear now, thou son of Ahitub. And he answered,
Here I am, my lord.

22:13 And Saul said unto him, Why have ye conspired against me, thou
and the son of Jesse, in that thou hast given him bread, and a sword,
and hast enquired of God for him, that he should rise against me, to
lie in wait, as at this day?  22:14 Then Ahimelech answered the king,
and said, And who is so faithful among all thy servants as David,
which is the king's son in law, and goeth at thy bidding, and is
honourable in thine house?  22:15 Did I then begin to enquire of God
for him? be it far from me: let not the king impute any thing unto his
servant, nor to all the house of my father: for thy servant knew
nothing of all this, less or more.

22:16 And the king said, Thou shalt surely die, Ahimelech, thou, and
all thy father's house.

22:17 And the king said unto the footmen that stood about him, Turn,
and slay the priests of the LORD: because their hand also is with
David, and because they knew when he fled, and did not shew it to me.
But the servants of the king would not put forth their hand to fall
upon the priests of the LORD.

22:18 And the king said to Doeg, Turn thou, and fall upon the priests.
And Doeg the Edomite turned, and he fell upon the priests, and slew on
that day fourscore and five persons that did wear a linen ephod.

22:19 And Nob, the city of the priests, smote he with the edge of the
sword, both men and women, children and sucklings, and oxen, and
asses, and sheep, with the edge of the sword.

22:20 And one of the sons of Ahimelech the son of Ahitub, named
Abiathar, escaped, and fled after David.

22:21 And Abiathar shewed David that Saul had slain the LORD's
priests.

22:22 And David said unto Abiathar, I knew it that day, when Doeg the
Edomite was there, that he would surely tell Saul: I have occasioned
the death of all the persons of thy father's house.

22:23 Abide thou with me, fear not: for he that seeketh my life
seeketh thy life: but with me thou shalt be in safeguard.

23:1 Then they told David, saying, Behold, the Philistines fight
against Keilah, and they rob the threshingfloors.

23:2 Therefore David enquired of the LORD, saying, Shall I go and
smite these Philistines? And the LORD said unto David, Go, and smite
the Philistines, and save Keilah.

23:3 And David's men said unto him, Behold, we be afraid here in
Judah: how much more then if we come to Keilah against the armies of
the Philistines?  23:4 Then David enquired of the LORD yet again. And
the LORD answered him and said, Arise, go down to Keilah; for I will
deliver the Philistines into thine hand.

23:5 So David and his men went to Keilah, and fought with the
Philistines, and brought away their cattle, and smote them with a
great slaughter. So David saved the inhabitants of Keilah.

23:6 And it came to pass, when Abiathar the son of Ahimelech fled to
David to Keilah, that he came down with an ephod in his hand.

23:7 And it was told Saul that David was come to Keilah. And Saul
said, God hath delivered him into mine hand; for he is shut in, by
entering into a town that hath gates and bars.

23:8 And Saul called all the people together to war, to go down to
Keilah, to besiege David and his men.

23:9 And David knew that Saul secretly practised mischief against him;
and he said to Abiathar the priest, Bring hither the ephod.

23:10 Then said David, O LORD God of Israel, thy servant hath
certainly heard that Saul seeketh to come to Keilah, to destroy the
city for my sake.

23:11 Will the men of Keilah deliver me up into his hand? will Saul
come down, as thy servant hath heard? O LORD God of Israel, I beseech
thee, tell thy servant. And the LORD said, He will come down.

23:12 Then said David, Will the men of Keilah deliver me and my men
into the hand of Saul? And the LORD said, They will deliver thee up.

23:13 Then David and his men, which were about six hundred, arose and
departed out of Keilah, and went whithersoever they could go. And it
was told Saul that David was escaped from Keilah; and he forbare to go
forth.

23:14 And David abode in the wilderness in strong holds, and remained
in a mountain in the wilderness of Ziph. And Saul sought him every
day, but God delivered him not into his hand.

23:15 And David saw that Saul was come out to seek his life: and David
was in the wilderness of Ziph in a wood.

23:16 And Jonathan Saul's son arose, and went to David into the wood,
and strengthened his hand in God.

23:17 And he said unto him, Fear not: for the hand of Saul my father
shall not find thee; and thou shalt be king over Israel, and I shall
be next unto thee; and that also Saul my father knoweth.

23:18 And they two made a covenant before the LORD: and David abode in
the wood, and Jonathan went to his house.

23:19 Then came up the Ziphites to Saul to Gibeah, saying, Doth not
David hide himself with us in strong holds in the wood, in the hill of
Hachilah, which is on the south of Jeshimon?  23:20 Now therefore, O
king, come down according to all the desire of thy soul to come down;
and our part shall be to deliver him into the king's hand.

23:21 And Saul said, Blessed be ye of the LORD; for ye have compassion
on me.

23:22 Go, I pray you, prepare yet, and know and see his place where
his haunt is, and who hath seen him there: for it is told me that he
dealeth very subtilly.

23:23 See therefore, and take knowledge of all the lurking places
where he hideth himself, and come ye again to me with the certainty,
and I will go with you: and it shall come to pass, if he be in the
land, that I will search him out throughout all the thousands of
Judah.

23:24 And they arose, and went to Ziph before Saul: but David and his
men were in the wilderness of Maon, in the plain on the south of
Jeshimon.

23:25 Saul also and his men went to seek him. And they told David;
wherefore he came down into a rock, and abode in the wilderness of
Maon. And when Saul heard that, he pursued after David in the
wilderness of Maon.

23:26 And Saul went on this side of the mountain, and David and his
men on that side of the mountain: and David made haste to get away for
fear of Saul; for Saul and his men compassed David and his men round
about to take them.

23:27 But there came a messenger unto Saul, saying, Haste thee, and
come; for the Philistines have invaded the land.

23:28 Wherefore Saul returned from pursuing after David, and went
against the Philistines: therefore they called that place
Selahammahlekoth.

23:29 And David went up from thence, and dwelt in strong holds at
Engedi.

24:1 And it came to pass, when Saul was returned from following the
Philistines, that it was told him, saying, Behold, David is in the
wilderness of Engedi.

24:2 Then Saul took three thousand chosen men out of all Israel, and
went to seek David and his men upon the rocks of the wild goats.

24:3 And he came to the sheepcotes by the way, where was a cave; and
Saul went in to cover his feet: and David and his men remained in the
sides of the cave.

24:4 And the men of David said unto him, Behold the day of which the
LORD said unto thee, Behold, I will deliver thine enemy into thine
hand, that thou mayest do to him as it shall seem good unto thee. Then
David arose, and cut off the skirt of Saul's robe privily.

24:5 And it came to pass afterward, that David's heart smote him,
because he had cut off Saul's skirt.

24:6 And he said unto his men, The LORD forbid that I should do this
thing unto my master, the LORD's anointed, to stretch forth mine hand
against him, seeing he is the anointed of the LORD.

24:7 So David stayed his servants with these words, and suffered them
not to rise against Saul. But Saul rose up out of the cave, and went
on his way.

24:8 David also arose afterward, and went out of the cave, and cried
after Saul, saying, My lord the king. And when Saul looked behind him,
David stooped with his face to the earth, and bowed himself.

24:9 And David said to Saul, Wherefore hearest thou men's words,
saying, Behold, David seeketh thy hurt?  24:10 Behold, this day thine
eyes have seen how that the LORD had delivered thee to day into mine
hand in the cave: and some bade me kill thee: but mine eye spared
thee; and I said, I will not put forth mine hand against my lord; for
he is the LORD's anointed.

24:11 Moreover, my father, see, yea, see the skirt of thy robe in my
hand: for in that I cut off the skirt of thy robe, and killed thee
not, know thou and see that there is neither evil nor transgression in
mine hand, and I have not sinned against thee; yet thou huntest my
soul to take it.

24:12 The LORD judge between me and thee, and the LORD avenge me of
thee: but mine hand shall not be upon thee.

24:13 As saith the proverb of the ancients, Wickedness proceedeth from
the wicked: but mine hand shall not be upon thee.

24:14 After whom is the king of Israel come out? after whom dost thou
pursue? after a dead dog, after a flea.

24:15 The LORD therefore be judge, and judge between me and thee, and
see, and plead my cause, and deliver me out of thine hand.

24:16 And it came to pass, when David had made an end of speaking
these words unto Saul, that Saul said, Is this thy voice, my son
David? And Saul lifted up his voice, and wept.

24:17 And he said to David, Thou art more righteous than I: for thou
hast rewarded me good, whereas I have rewarded thee evil.

24:18 And thou hast shewed this day how that thou hast dealt well with
me: forasmuch as when the LORD had delivered me into thine hand, thou
killedst me not.

24:19 For if a man find his enemy, will he let him go well away?
wherefore the LORD reward thee good for that thou hast done unto me
this day.

24:20 And now, behold, I know well that thou shalt surely be king, and
that the kingdom of Israel shall be established in thine hand.

24:21 Swear now therefore unto me by the LORD, that thou wilt not cut
off my seed after me, and that thou wilt not destroy my name out of my
father's house.

24:22 And David sware unto Saul. And Saul went home; but David and his
men gat them up unto the hold.

25:1 And Samuel died; and all the Israelites were gathered together,
and lamented him, and buried him in his house at Ramah. And David
arose, and went down to the wilderness of Paran.

25:2 And there was a man in Maon, whose possessions were in Carmel;
and the man was very great, and he had three thousand sheep, and a
thousand goats: and he was shearing his sheep in Carmel.

25:3 Now the name of the man was Nabal; and the name of his wife
Abigail: and she was a woman of good understanding, and of a beautiful
countenance: but the man was churlish and evil in his doings; and he
was of the house of Caleb.

25:4 And David heard in the wilderness that Nabal did shear his sheep.

25:5 And David sent out ten young men, and David said unto the young
men, Get you up to Carmel, and go to Nabal, and greet him in my name:
25:6 And thus shall ye say to him that liveth in prosperity, Peace be
both to thee, and peace be to thine house, and peace be unto all that
thou hast.

25:7 And now I have heard that thou hast shearers: now thy shepherds
which were with us, we hurt them not, neither was there ought missing
unto them, all the while they were in Carmel.

25:8 Ask thy young men, and they will shew thee. Wherefore let the
young men find favour in thine eyes: for we come in a good day: give,
I pray thee, whatsoever cometh to thine hand unto thy servants, and to
thy son David.

25:9 And when David's young men came, they spake to Nabal according to
all those words in the name of David, and ceased.

25:10 And Nabal answered David's servants, and said, Who is David? and
who is the son of Jesse? there be many servants now a days that break
away every man from his master.

25:11 Shall I then take my bread, and my water, and my flesh that I
have killed for my shearers, and give it unto men, whom I know not
whence they be?  25:12 So David's young men turned their way, and went
again, and came and told him all those sayings.

25:13 And David said unto his men, Gird ye on every man his sword. And
they girded on every man his sword; and David also girded on his
sword: and there went up after David about four hundred men; and two
hundred abode by the stuff.

25:14 But one of the young men told Abigail, Nabal's wife, saying,
Behold, David sent messengers out of the wilderness to salute our
master; and he railed on them.

25:15 But the men were very good unto us, and we were not hurt,
neither missed we any thing, as long as we were conversant with them,
when we were in the fields: 25:16 They were a wall unto us both by
night and day, all the while we were with them keeping the sheep.

25:17 Now therefore know and consider what thou wilt do; for evil is
determined against our master, and against all his household: for he
is such a son of Belial, that a man cannot speak to him.

25:18 Then Abigail made haste, and took two hundred loaves, and two
bottles of wine, and five sheep ready dressed, and five measures of
parched corn, and an hundred clusters of raisins, and two hundred
cakes of figs, and laid them on asses.

25:19 And she said unto her servants, Go on before me; behold, I come
after you. But she told not her husband Nabal.

25:20 And it was so, as she rode on the ass, that she came down by the
covert on the hill, and, behold, David and his men came down against
her; and she met them.

25:21 Now David had said, Surely in vain have I kept all that this
fellow hath in the wilderness, so that nothing was missed of all that
pertained unto him: and he hath requited me evil for good.

25:22 So and more also do God unto the enemies of David, if I leave of
all that pertain to him by the morning light any that pisseth against
the wall.

25:23 And when Abigail saw David, she hasted, and lighted off the ass,
and fell before David on her face, and bowed herself to the ground,
25:24 And fell at his feet, and said, Upon me, my lord, upon me let
this iniquity be: and let thine handmaid, I pray thee, speak in thine
audience, and hear the words of thine handmaid.

25:25 Let not my lord, I pray thee, regard this man of Belial, even
Nabal: for as his name is, so is he; Nabal is his name, and folly is
with him: but I thine handmaid saw not the young men of my lord, whom
thou didst send.

25:26 Now therefore, my lord, as the LORD liveth, and as thy soul
liveth, seeing the LORD hath withholden thee from coming to shed
blood, and from avenging thyself with thine own hand, now let thine
enemies, and they that seek evil to my lord, be as Nabal.

25:27 And now this blessing which thine handmaid hath brought unto my
lord, let it even be given unto the young men that follow my lord.

25:28 I pray thee, forgive the trespass of thine handmaid: for the
LORD will certainly make my lord a sure house; because my lord
fighteth the battles of the LORD, and evil hath not been found in thee
all thy days.

25:29 Yet a man is risen to pursue thee, and to seek thy soul: but the
soul of my lord shall be bound in the bundle of life with the LORD thy
God; and the souls of thine enemies, them shall he sling out, as out
of the middle of a sling.

25:30 And it shall come to pass, when the LORD shall have done to my
lord according to all the good that he hath spoken concerning thee,
and shall have appointed thee ruler over Israel; 25:31 That this shall
be no grief unto thee, nor offence of heart unto my lord, either that
thou hast shed blood causeless, or that my lord hath avenged himself:
but when the LORD shall have dealt well with my lord, then remember
thine handmaid.

25:32 And David said to Abigail, Blessed be the LORD God of Israel,
which sent thee this day to meet me: 25:33 And blessed be thy advice,
and blessed be thou, which hast kept me this day from coming to shed
blood, and from avenging myself with mine own hand.

25:34 For in very deed, as the LORD God of Israel liveth, which hath
kept me back from hurting thee, except thou hadst hasted and come to
meet me, surely there had not been left unto Nabal by the morning
light any that pisseth against the wall.

25:35 So David received of her hand that which she had brought him,
and said unto her, Go up in peace to thine house; see, I have
hearkened to thy voice, and have accepted thy person.

25:36 And Abigail came to Nabal; and, behold, he held a feast in his
house, like the feast of a king; and Nabal's heart was merry within
him, for he was very drunken: wherefore she told him nothing, less or
more, until the morning light.

25:37 But it came to pass in the morning, when the wine was gone out
of Nabal, and his wife had told him these things, that his heart died
within him, and he became as a stone.

25:38 And it came to pass about ten days after, that the LORD smote
Nabal, that he died.

25:39 And when David heard that Nabal was dead, he said, Blessed be
the LORD, that hath pleaded the cause of my reproach from the hand of
Nabal, and hath kept his servant from evil: for the LORD hath returned
the wickedness of Nabal upon his own head. And David sent and communed
with Abigail, to take her to him to wife.

25:40 And when the servants of David were come to Abigail to Carmel,
they spake unto her, saying, David sent us unto thee, to take thee to
him to wife.

25:41 And she arose, and bowed herself on her face to the earth, and
said, Behold, let thine handmaid be a servant to wash the feet of the
servants of my lord.

25:42 And Abigail hasted, and arose and rode upon an ass, with five
damsels of hers that went after her; and she went after the messengers
of David, and became his wife.

25:43 David also took Ahinoam of Jezreel; and they were also both of
them his wives.

25:44 But Saul had given Michal his daughter, David's wife, to Phalti
the son of Laish, which was of Gallim.

26:1 And the Ziphites came unto Saul to Gibeah, saying, Doth not David
hide himself in the hill of Hachilah, which is before Jeshimon?  26:2
Then Saul arose, and went down to the wilderness of Ziph, having three
thousand chosen men of Israel with him, to seek David in the
wilderness of Ziph.

26:3 And Saul pitched in the hill of Hachilah, which is before
Jeshimon, by the way. But David abode in the wilderness, and he saw
that Saul came after him into the wilderness.

26:4 David therefore sent out spies, and understood that Saul was come
in very deed.

26:5 And David arose, and came to the place where Saul had pitched:
and David beheld the place where Saul lay, and Abner the son of Ner,
the captain of his host: and Saul lay in the trench, and the people
pitched round about him.

26:6 Then answered David and said to Ahimelech the Hittite, and to
Abishai the son of Zeruiah, brother to Joab, saying, Who will go down
with me to Saul to the camp? And Abishai said, I will go down with
thee.

26:7 So David and Abishai came to the people by night: and, behold,
Saul lay sleeping within the trench, and his spear stuck in the ground
at his bolster: but Abner and the people lay round about him.

26:8 Then said Abishai to David, God hath delivered thine enemy into
thine hand this day: now therefore let me smite him, I pray thee, with
the spear even to the earth at once, and I will not smite him the
second time.

26:9 And David said to Abishai, Destroy him not: for who can stretch
forth his hand against the LORD's anointed, and be guiltless?  26:10
David said furthermore, As the LORD liveth, the LORD shall smite him;
or his day shall come to die; or he shall descend into battle, and
perish.

26:11 The LORD forbid that I should stretch forth mine hand against
the LORD's anointed: but, I pray thee, take thou now the spear that is
at his bolster, and the cruse of water, and let us go.

26:12 So David took the spear and the cruse of water from Saul's
bolster; and they gat them away, and no man saw it, nor knew it,
neither awaked: for they were all asleep; because a deep sleep from
the LORD was fallen upon them.

26:13 Then David went over to the other side, and stood on the top of
an hill afar off; a great space being between them: 26:14 And David
cried to the people, and to Abner the son of Ner, saying, Answerest
thou not, Abner? Then Abner answered and said, Who art thou that
criest to the king?  26:15 And David said to Abner, Art not thou a
valiant man? and who is like to thee in Israel? wherefore then hast
thou not kept thy lord the king? for there came one of the people in
to destroy the king thy lord.

26:16 This thing is not good that thou hast done. As the LORD liveth,
ye are worthy to die, because ye have not kept your master, the LORD's
anointed.

And now see where the king's spear is, and the cruse of water that was
at his bolster.

26:17 And Saul knew David's voice, and said, Is this thy voice, my son
David? And David said, It is my voice, my lord, O king.

26:18 And he said, Wherefore doth my lord thus pursue after his
servant?  for what have I done? or what evil is in mine hand?  26:19
Now therefore, I pray thee, let my lord the king hear the words of his
servant. If the LORD have stirred thee up against me, let him accept
an offering: but if they be the children of men, cursed be they before
the LORD; for they have driven me out this day from abiding in the
inheritance of the LORD, saying, Go, serve other gods.

26:20 Now therefore, let not my blood fall to the earth before the
face of the LORD: for the king of Israel is come out to seek a flea,
as when one doth hunt a partridge in the mountains.

26:21 Then said Saul, I have sinned: return, my son David: for I will
no more do thee harm, because my soul was precious in thine eyes this
day: behold, I have played the fool, and have erred exceedingly.

26:22 And David answered and said, Behold the king's spear! and let
one of the young men come over and fetch it.

26:23 The LORD render to every man his righteousness and his
faithfulness; for the LORD delivered thee into my hand to day, but I
would not stretch forth mine hand against the LORD's anointed.

26:24 And, behold, as thy life was much set by this day in mine eyes,
so let my life be much set by in the eyes of the LORD, and let him
deliver me out of all tribulation.

26:25 Then Saul said to David, Blessed be thou, my son David: thou
shalt both do great things, and also shalt still prevail. So David
went on his way, and Saul returned to his place.

27:1 And David said in his heart, I shall now perish one day by the
hand of Saul: there is nothing better for me than that I should
speedily escape into the land of the Philistines; and Saul shall
despair of me, to seek me any more in any coast of Israel: so shall I
escape out of his hand.

27:2 And David arose, and he passed over with the six hundred men that
were with him unto Achish, the son of Maoch, king of Gath.

27:3 And David dwelt with Achish at Gath, he and his men, every man
with his household, even David with his two wives, Ahinoam the
Jezreelitess, and Abigail the Carmelitess, Nabal's wife.

27:4 And it was told Saul that David was fled to Gath: and he sought
no more again for him.

27:5 And David said unto Achish, If I have now found grace in thine
eyes, let them give me a place in some town in the country, that I may
dwell there: for why should thy servant dwell in the royal city with
thee?  27:6 Then Achish gave him Ziklag that day: wherefore Ziklag
pertaineth unto the kings of Judah unto this day.

27:7 And the time that David dwelt in the country of the Philistines
was a full year and four months.

27:8 And David and his men went up, and invaded the Geshurites, and
the Gezrites, and the Amalekites: for those nations were of old the
inhabitants of the land, as thou goest to Shur, even unto the land of
Egypt.

27:9 And David smote the land, and left neither man nor woman alive,
and took away the sheep, and the oxen, and the asses, and the camels,
and the apparel, and returned, and came to Achish.

27:10 And Achish said, Whither have ye made a road to day? And David
said, Against the south of Judah, and against the south of the
Jerahmeelites, and against the south of the Kenites.

27:11 And David saved neither man nor woman alive, to bring tidings to
Gath, saying, Lest they should tell on us, saying, So did David, and
so will be his manner all the while he dwelleth in the country of the
Philistines.

27:12 And Achish believed David, saying, He hath made his people
Israel utterly to abhor him; therefore he shall be my servant for
ever.

28:1 And it came to pass in those days, that the Philistines gathered
their armies together for warfare, to fight with Israel. And Achish
said unto David, Know thou assuredly, that thou shalt go out with me
to battle, thou and thy men.

28:2 And David said to Achish, Surely thou shalt know what thy servant
can do. And Achish said to David, Therefore will I make thee keeper of
mine head for ever.

28:3 Now Samuel was dead, and all Israel had lamented him, and buried
him in Ramah, even in his own city. And Saul had put away those that
had familiar spirits, and the wizards, out of the land.

28:4 And the Philistines gathered themselves together, and came and
pitched in Shunem: and Saul gathered all Israel together, and they
pitched in Gilboa.

28:5 And when Saul saw the host of the Philistines, he was afraid, and
his heart greatly trembled.

28:6 And when Saul enquired of the LORD, the LORD answered him not,
neither by dreams, nor by Urim, nor by prophets.

28:7 Then said Saul unto his servants, Seek me a woman that hath a
familiar spirit, that I may go to her, and enquire of her. And his
servants said to him, Behold, there is a woman that hath a familiar
spirit at Endor.

28:8 And Saul disguised himself, and put on other raiment, and he
went, and two men with him, and they came to the woman by night: and
he said, I pray thee, divine unto me by the familiar spirit, and bring
me him up, whom I shall name unto thee.

28:9 And the woman said unto him, Behold, thou knowest what Saul hath
done, how he hath cut off those that have familiar spirits, and the
wizards, out of the land: wherefore then layest thou a snare for my
life, to cause me to die?  28:10 And Saul sware to her by the LORD,
saying, As the LORD liveth, there shall no punishment happen to thee
for this thing.

28:11 Then said the woman, Whom shall I bring up unto thee? And he
said, Bring me up Samuel.

28:12 And when the woman saw Samuel, she cried with a loud voice: and
the woman spake to Saul, saying, Why hast thou deceived me? for thou
art Saul.

28:13 And the king said unto her, Be not afraid: for what sawest thou?
And the woman said unto Saul, I saw gods ascending out of the earth.

28:14 And he said unto her, What form is he of? And she said, An old
man cometh up; and he is covered with a mantle. And Saul perceived
that it was Samuel, and he stooped with his face to the ground, and
bowed himself.

28:15 And Samuel said to Saul, Why hast thou disquieted me, to bring
me up? And Saul answered, I am sore distressed; for the Philistines
make war against me, and God is departed from me, and answereth me no
more, neither by prophets, nor by dreams: therefore I have called
thee, that thou mayest make known unto me what I shall do.

28:16 Then said Samuel, Wherefore then dost thou ask of me, seeing the
LORD is departed from thee, and is become thine enemy?  28:17 And the
LORD hath done to him, as he spake by me: for the LORD hath rent the
kingdom out of thine hand, and given it to thy neighbour, even to
David: 28:18 Because thou obeyedst not the voice of the LORD, nor
executedst his fierce wrath upon Amalek, therefore hath the LORD done
this thing unto thee this day.

28:19 Moreover the LORD will also deliver Israel with thee into the
hand of the Philistines: and to morrow shalt thou and thy sons be with
me: the LORD also shall deliver the host of Israel into the hand of
the Philistines.

28:20 Then Saul fell straightway all along on the earth, and was sore
afraid, because of the words of Samuel: and there was no strength in
him; for he had eaten no bread all the day, nor all the night.

28:21 And the woman came unto Saul, and saw that he was sore troubled,
and said unto him, Behold, thine handmaid hath obeyed thy voice, and I
have put my life in my hand, and have hearkened unto thy words which
thou spakest unto me.

28:22 Now therefore, I pray thee, hearken thou also unto the voice of
thine handmaid, and let me set a morsel of bread before thee; and eat,
that thou mayest have strength, when thou goest on thy way.

28:23 But he refused, and said, I will not eat. But his servants,
together with the woman, compelled him; and he hearkened unto their
voice. So he arose from the earth, and sat upon the bed.

28:24 And the woman had a fat calf in the house; and she hasted, and
killed it, and took flour, and kneaded it, and did bake unleavened
bread thereof: 28:25 And she brought it before Saul, and before his
servants; and they did eat. Then they rose up, and went away that
night.

29:1 Now the Philistines gathered together all their armies to Aphek:
and the Israelites pitched by a fountain which is in Jezreel.

29:2 And the lords of the Philistines passed on by hundreds, and by
thousands: but David and his men passed on in the rereward with
Achish.

29:3 Then said the princes of the Philistines, What do these Hebrews
here?  And Achish said unto the princes of the Philistines, Is not
this David, the servant of Saul the king of Israel, which hath been
with me these days, or these years, and I have found no fault in him
since he fell unto me unto this day?  29:4 And the princes of the
Philistines were wroth with him; and the princes of the Philistines
said unto him, Make this fellow return, that he may go again to his
place which thou hast appointed him, and let him not go down with us
to battle, lest in the battle he be an adversary to us: for wherewith
should he reconcile himself unto his master? should it not be with the
heads of these men?  29:5 Is not this David, of whom they sang one to
another in dances, saying, Saul slew his thousands, and David his ten
thousands?  29:6 Then Achish called David, and said unto him, Surely,
as the LORD liveth, thou hast been upright, and thy going out and thy
coming in with me in the host is good in my sight: for I have not
found evil in thee since the day of thy coming unto me unto this day:
nevertheless the lords favour thee not.

29:7 Wherefore now return, and go in peace, that thou displease not
the lords of the Philistines.

29:8 And David said unto Achish, But what have I done? and what hast
thou found in thy servant so long as I have been with thee unto this
day, that I may not go fight against the enemies of my lord the king?
29:9 And Achish answered and said to David, I know that thou art good
in my sight, as an angel of God: notwithstanding the princes of the
Philistines have said, He shall not go up with us to the battle.

29:10 Wherefore now rise up early in the morning with thy master's
servants that are come with thee: and as soon as ye be up early in the
morning, and have light, depart.

29:11 So David and his men rose up early to depart in the morning, to
return into the land of the Philistines. And the Philistines went up
to Jezreel.

30:1 And it came to pass, when David and his men were come to Ziklag
on the third day, that the Amalekites had invaded the south, and
Ziklag, and smitten Ziklag, and burned it with fire; 30:2 And had
taken the women captives, that were therein: they slew not any, either
great or small, but carried them away, and went on their way.

30:3 So David and his men came to the city, and, behold, it was burned
with fire; and their wives, and their sons, and their daughters, were
taken captives.

30:4 Then David and the people that were with him lifted up their
voice and wept, until they had no more power to weep.

30:5 And David's two wives were taken captives, Ahinoam the
Jezreelitess, and Abigail the wife of Nabal the Carmelite.

30:6 And David was greatly distressed; for the people spake of stoning
him, because the soul of all the people was grieved, every man for his
sons and for his daughters: but David encouraged himself in the LORD
his God.

30:7 And David said to Abiathar the priest, Ahimelech's son, I pray
thee, bring me hither the ephod. And Abiathar brought thither the
ephod to David.

30:8 And David enquired at the LORD, saying, Shall I pursue after this
troop? shall I overtake them? And he answered him, Pursue: for thou
shalt surely overtake them, and without fail recover all.

30:9 So David went, he and the six hundred men that were with him, and
came to the brook Besor, where those that were left behind stayed.

30:10 But David pursued, he and four hundred men: for two hundred
abode behind, which were so faint that they could not go over the
brook Besor.

30:11 And they found an Egyptian in the field, and brought him to
David, and gave him bread, and he did eat; and they made him drink
water; 30:12 And they gave him a piece of a cake of figs, and two
clusters of raisins: and when he had eaten, his spirit came again to
him: for he had eaten no bread, nor drunk any water, three days and
three nights.

30:13 And David said unto him, To whom belongest thou? and whence art
thou? And he said, I am a young man of Egypt, servant to an Amalekite;
and my master left me, because three days agone I fell sick.

30:14 We made an invasion upon the south of the Cherethites, and upon
the coast which belongeth to Judah, and upon the south of Caleb; and
we burned Ziklag with fire.

30:15 And David said to him, Canst thou bring me down to this company?
And he said, Swear unto me by God, that thou wilt neither kill me, nor
deliver me into the hands of my master, and I will bring thee down to
this company.

30:16 And when he had brought him down, behold, they were spread
abroad upon all the earth, eating and drinking, and dancing, because
of all the great spoil that they had taken out of the land of the
Philistines, and out of the land of Judah.

30:17 And David smote them from the twilight even unto the evening of
the next day: and there escaped not a man of them, save four hundred
young men, which rode upon camels, and fled.

30:18 And David recovered all that the Amalekites had carried away:
and David rescued his two wives.

30:19 And there was nothing lacking to them, neither small nor great,
neither sons nor daughters, neither spoil, nor any thing that they had
taken to them: David recovered all.

30:20 And David took all the flocks and the herds, which they drave
before those other cattle, and said, This is David's spoil.

30:21 And David came to the two hundred men, which were so faint that
they could not follow David, whom they had made also to abide at the
brook Besor: and they went forth to meet David, and to meet the people
that were with him: and when David came near to the people, he saluted
them.

30:22 Then answered all the wicked men and men of Belial, of those
that went with David, and said, Because they went not with us, we will
not give them ought of the spoil that we have recovered, save to every
man his wife and his children, that they may lead them away, and
depart.

30:23 Then said David, Ye shall not do so, my brethren, with that
which the LORD hath given us, who hath preserved us, and delivered the
company that came against us into our hand.

30:24 For who will hearken unto you in this matter? but as his part is
that goeth down to the battle, so shall his part be that tarrieth by
the stuff: they shall part alike.

30:25 And it was so from that day forward, that he made it a statute
and an ordinance for Israel unto this day.

30:26 And when David came to Ziklag, he sent of the spoil unto the
elders of Judah, even to his friends, saying, Behold a present for you
of the spoil of the enemies of the LORD; 30:27 To them which were in
Bethel, and to them which were in south Ramoth, and to them which were
in Jattir, 30:28 And to them which were in Aroer, and to them which
were in Siphmoth, and to them which were in Eshtemoa, 30:29 And to
them which were in Rachal, and to them which were in the cities of the
Jerahmeelites, and to them which were in the cities of the Kenites,
30:30 And to them which were in Hormah, and to them which were in
Chorashan, and to them which were in Athach, 30:31 And to them which
were in Hebron, and to all the places where David himself and his men
were wont to haunt.

31:1 Now the Philistines fought against Israel: and the men of Israel
fled from before the Philistines, and fell down slain in mount Gilboa.

31:2 And the Philistines followed hard upon Saul and upon his sons;
and the Philistines slew Jonathan, and Abinadab, and Melchishua,
Saul's sons.

31:3 And the battle went sore against Saul, and the archers hit him;
and he was sore wounded of the archers.

31:4 Then said Saul unto his armourbearer, Draw thy sword, and thrust
me through therewith; lest these uncircumcised come and thrust me
through, and abuse me. But his armourbearer would not; for he was sore
afraid. Therefore Saul took a sword, and fell upon it.

31:5 And when his armourbearer saw that Saul was dead, he fell
likewise upon his sword, and died with him.

31:6 So Saul died, and his three sons, and his armourbearer, and all
his men, that same day together.

31:7 And when the men of Israel that were on the other side of the
valley, and they that were on the other side Jordan, saw that the men
of Israel fled, and that Saul and his sons were dead, they forsook the
cities, and fled; and the Philistines came and dwelt in them.

31:8 And it came to pass on the morrow, when the Philistines came to
strip the slain, that they found Saul and his three sons fallen in
mount Gilboa.

31:9 And they cut off his head, and stripped off his armour, and sent
into the land of the Philistines round about, to publish it in the
house of their idols, and among the people.

31:10 And they put his armour in the house of Ashtaroth: and they
fastened his body to the wall of Bethshan.

31:11 And when the inhabitants of Jabeshgilead heard of that which the
Philistines had done to Saul; 31:12 All the valiant men arose, and
went all night, and took the body of Saul and the bodies of his sons
from the wall of Bethshan, and came to Jabesh, and burnt them there.

31:13 And they took their bones, and buried them under a tree at
Jabesh, and fasted seven days.




The Second Book of Samuel

Otherwise Called:

The Second Book of the Kings


1:1 Now it came to pass after the death of Saul, when David was
returned from the slaughter of the Amalekites, and David had abode two
days in Ziklag; 1:2 It came even to pass on the third day, that,
behold, a man came out of the camp from Saul with his clothes rent,
and earth upon his head: and so it was, when he came to David, that he
fell to the earth, and did obeisance.

1:3 And David said unto him, From whence comest thou? And he said unto
him, Out of the camp of Israel am I escaped.

1:4 And David said unto him, How went the matter? I pray thee, tell
me.

And he answered, That the people are fled from the battle, and many of
the people also are fallen and dead; and Saul and Jonathan his son are
dead also.

1:5 And David said unto the young man that told him, How knowest thou
that Saul and Jonathan his son be dead?  1:6 And the young man that
told him said, As I happened by chance upon mount Gilboa, behold, Saul
leaned upon his spear; and, lo, the chariots and horsemen followed
hard after him.

1:7 And when he looked behind him, he saw me, and called unto me. And
I answered, Here am I.

1:8 And he said unto me, Who art thou? And I answered him, I am an
Amalekite.

1:9 He said unto me again, Stand, I pray thee, upon me, and slay me:
for anguish is come upon me, because my life is yet whole in me.

1:10 So I stood upon him, and slew him, because I was sure that he
could not live after that he was fallen: and I took the crown that was
upon his head, and the bracelet that was on his arm, and have brought
them hither unto my lord.

1:11 Then David took hold on his clothes, and rent them; and likewise
all the men that were with him: 1:12 And they mourned, and wept, and
fasted until even, for Saul, and for Jonathan his son, and for the
people of the LORD, and for the house of Israel; because they were
fallen by the sword.

1:13 And David said unto the young man that told him, Whence art thou?
And he answered, I am the son of a stranger, an Amalekite.

1:14 And David said unto him, How wast thou not afraid to stretch
forth thine hand to destroy the LORD's anointed?  1:15 And David
called one of the young men, and said, Go near, and fall upon him. And
he smote him that he died.

1:16 And David said unto him, Thy blood be upon thy head; for thy
mouth hath testified against thee, saying, I have slain the LORD's
anointed.

1:17 And David lamented with this lamentation over Saul and over
Jonathan his son: 1:18 (Also he bade them teach the children of Judah
the use of the bow: behold, it is written in the book of Jasher.)
1:19 The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places: how are the
mighty fallen!  1:20 Tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the
streets of Askelon; lest the daughters of the Philistines rejoice,
lest the daughters of the uncircumcised triumph.

1:21 Ye mountains of Gilboa, let there be no dew, neither let there be
rain, upon you, nor fields of offerings: for there the shield of the
mighty is vilely cast away, the shield of Saul, as though he had not
been anointed with oil.

1:22 From the blood of the slain, from the fat of the mighty, the bow
of Jonathan turned not back, and the sword of Saul returned not empty.

1:23 Saul and Jonathan were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in
their death they were not divided: they were swifter than eagles, they
were stronger than lions.

1:24 Ye daughters of Israel, weep over Saul, who clothed you in
scarlet, with other delights, who put on ornaments of gold upon your
apparel.

1:25 How are the mighty fallen in the midst of the battle! O Jonathan,
thou wast slain in thine high places.

1:26 I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: very pleasant hast
thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of
women.

1:27 How are the mighty fallen, and the weapons of war perished!  2:1
And it came to pass after this, that David enquired of the LORD,
saying, Shall I go up into any of the cities of Judah? And the LORD
said unto him, Go up. And David said, Whither shall I go up? And he
said, Unto Hebron.

2:2 So David went up thither, and his two wives also, Ahinoam the
Jezreelitess, and Abigail Nabal's wife the Carmelite.

2:3 And his men that were with him did David bring up, every man with
his household: and they dwelt in the cities of Hebron.

2:4 And the men of Judah came, and there they anointed David king over
the house of Judah. And they told David, saying, That the men of
Jabeshgilead were they that buried Saul.

2:5 And David sent messengers unto the men of Jabeshgilead, and said
unto them, Blessed be ye of the LORD, that ye have shewed this
kindness unto your lord, even unto Saul, and have buried him.

2:6 And now the LORD shew kindness and truth unto you: and I also will
requite you this kindness, because ye have done this thing.

2:7 Therefore now let your hands be strengthened, and be ye valiant:
for your master Saul is dead, and also the house of Judah have
anointed me king over them.

2:8 But Abner the son of Ner, captain of Saul's host, took Ishbosheth
the son of Saul, and brought him over to Mahanaim; 2:9 And made him
king over Gilead, and over the Ashurites, and over Jezreel, and over
Ephraim, and over Benjamin, and over all Israel.

2:10 Ishbosheth Saul's son was forty years old when he began to reign
over Israel, and reigned two years. But the house of Judah followed
David.

2:11 And the time that David was king in Hebron over the house of
Judah was seven years and six months.

2:12 And Abner the son of Ner, and the servants of Ishbosheth the son
of Saul, went out from Mahanaim to Gibeon.

2:13 And Joab the son of Zeruiah, and the servants of David, went out,
and met together by the pool of Gibeon: and they sat down, the one on
the one side of the pool, and the other on the other side of the pool.

2:14 And Abner said to Joab, Let the young men now arise, and play
before us. And Joab said, Let them arise.

2:15 Then there arose and went over by number twelve of Benjamin,
which pertained to Ishbosheth the son of Saul, and twelve of the
servants of David.

2:16 And they caught every one his fellow by the head, and thrust his
sword in his fellow's side; so they fell down together: wherefore that
place was called Helkathhazzurim, which is in Gibeon.

2:17 And there was a very sore battle that day; and Abner was beaten,
and the men of Israel, before the servants of David.

2:18 And there were three sons of Zeruiah there, Joab, and Abishai,
and Asahel: and Asahel was as light of foot as a wild roe.

2:19 And Asahel pursued after Abner; and in going he turned not to the
right hand nor to the left from following Abner.

2:20 Then Abner looked behind him, and said, Art thou Asahel? And he
answered, I am.

2:21 And Abner said to him, Turn thee aside to thy right hand or to
thy left, and lay thee hold on one of the young men, and take thee his
armour.

But Asahel would not turn aside from following of him.

2:22 And Abner said again to Asahel, Turn thee aside from following
me: wherefore should I smite thee to the ground? how then should I
hold up my face to Joab thy brother?  2:23 Howbeit he refused to turn
aside: wherefore Abner with the hinder end of the spear smote him
under the fifth rib, that the spear came out behind him; and he fell
down there, and died in the same place: and it came to pass, that as
many as came to the place where Asahel fell down and died stood still.

2:24 Joab also and Abishai pursued after Abner: and the sun went down
when they were come to the hill of Ammah, that lieth before Giah by
the way of the wilderness of Gibeon.

2:25 And the children of Benjamin gathered themselves together after
Abner, and became one troop, and stood on the top of an hill.

2:26 Then Abner called to Joab, and said, Shall the sword devour for
ever?  knowest thou not that it will be bitterness in the latter end?
how long shall it be then, ere thou bid the people return from
following their brethren?  2:27 And Joab said, As God liveth, unless
thou hadst spoken, surely then in the morning the people had gone up
every one from following his brother.

2:28 So Joab blew a trumpet, and all the people stood still, and
pursued after Israel no more, neither fought they any more.

2:29 And Abner and his men walked all that night through the plain,
and passed over Jordan, and went through all Bithron, and they came to
Mahanaim.

2:30 And Joab returned from following Abner: and when he had gathered
all the people together, there lacked of David's servants nineteen men
and Asahel.

2:31 But the servants of David had smitten of Benjamin, and of Abner's
men, so that three hundred and threescore men died.

2:32 And they took up Asahel, and buried him in the sepulchre of his
father, which was in Bethlehem. And Joab and his men went all night,
and they came to Hebron at break of day.

3:1 Now there was long war between the house of Saul and the house of
David: but David waxed stronger and stronger, and the house of Saul
waxed weaker and weaker.

3:2 And unto David were sons born in Hebron: and his firstborn was
Amnon, of Ahinoam the Jezreelitess; 3:3 And his second, Chileab, of
Abigail the wife of Nabal the Carmelite; and the third, Absalom the
son of Maacah the daughter of Talmai king of Geshur; 3:4 And the
fourth, Adonijah the son of Haggith; and the fifth, Shephatiah the son
of Abital; 3:5 And the sixth, Ithream, by Eglah David's wife. These
were born to David in Hebron.

3:6 And it came to pass, while there was war between the house of Saul
and the house of David, that Abner made himself strong for the house
of Saul.

3:7 And Saul had a concubine, whose name was Rizpah, the daughter of
Aiah: and Ishbosheth said to Abner, Wherefore hast thou gone in unto
my father's concubine?  3:8 Then was Abner very wroth for the words of
Ishbosheth, and said, Am I a dog's head, which against Judah do shew
kindness this day unto the house of Saul thy father, to his brethren,
and to his friends, and have not delivered thee into the hand of
David, that thou chargest me to day with a fault concerning this
woman?  3:9 So do God to Abner, and more also, except, as the LORD
hath sworn to David, even so I do to him; 3:10 To translate the
kingdom from the house of Saul, and to set up the throne of David over
Israel and over Judah, from Dan even to Beersheba.

3:11 And he could not answer Abner a word again, because he feared
him.

3:12 And Abner sent messengers to David on his behalf, saying, Whose
is the land? saying also, Make thy league with me, and, behold, my
hand shall be with thee, to bring about all Israel unto thee.

3:13 And he said, Well; I will make a league with thee: but one thing
I require of thee, that is, Thou shalt not see my face, except thou
first bring Michal Saul's daughter, when thou comest to see my face.

3:14 And David sent messengers to Ishbosheth Saul's son, saying,
Deliver me my wife Michal, which I espoused to me for an hundred
foreskins of the Philistines.

3:15 And Ishbosheth sent, and took her from her husband, even from
Phaltiel the son of Laish.

3:16 And her husband went with her along weeping behind her to
Bahurim.

Then said Abner unto him, Go, return. And he returned.

3:17 And Abner had communication with the elders of Israel, saying, Ye
sought for David in times past to be king over you: 3:18 Now then do
it: for the LORD hath spoken of David, saying, By the hand of my
servant David I will save my people Israel out of the hand of the
Philistines, and out of the hand of all their enemies.

3:19 And Abner also spake in the ears of Benjamin: and Abner went also
to speak in the ears of David in Hebron all that seemed good to
Israel, and that seemed good to the whole house of Benjamin.

3:20 So Abner came to David to Hebron, and twenty men with him. And
David made Abner and the men that were with him a feast.

3:21 And Abner said unto David, I will arise and go, and will gather
all Israel unto my lord the king, that they may make a league with
thee, and that thou mayest reign over all that thine heart desireth.
And David sent Abner away; and he went in peace.

3:22 And, behold, the servants of David and Joab came from pursuing a
troop, and brought in a great spoil with them: but Abner was not with
David in Hebron; for he had sent him away, and he was gone in peace.

3:23 When Joab and all the host that was with him were come, they told
Joab, saying, Abner the son of Ner came to the king, and he hath sent
him away, and he is gone in peace.

3:24 Then Joab came to the king, and said, What hast thou done?
behold, Abner came unto thee; why is it that thou hast sent him away,
and he is quite gone?  3:25 Thou knowest Abner the son of Ner, that he
came to deceive thee, and to know thy going out and thy coming in, and
to know all that thou doest.

3:26 And when Joab was come out from David, he sent messengers after
Abner, which brought him again from the well of Sirah: but David knew
it not.

3:27 And when Abner was returned to Hebron, Joab took him aside in the
gate to speak with him quietly, and smote him there under the fifth
rib, that he died, for the blood of Asahel his brother.

3:28 And afterward when David heard it, he said, I and my kingdom are
guiltless before the LORD for ever from the blood of Abner the son of
Ner: 3:29 Let it rest on the head of Joab, and on all his father's
house; and let there not fail from the house of Joab one that hath an
issue, or that is a leper, or that leaneth on a staff, or that falleth
on the sword, or that lacketh bread.

3:30 So Joab, and Abishai his brother slew Abner, because he had slain
their brother Asahel at Gibeon in the battle.

3:31 And David said to Joab, and to all the people that were with him,
Rend your clothes, and gird you with sackcloth, and mourn before
Abner. And king David himself followed the bier.

3:32 And they buried Abner in Hebron: and the king lifted up his
voice, and wept at the grave of Abner; and all the people wept.

3:33 And the king lamented over Abner, and said, Died Abner as a fool
dieth?  3:34 Thy hands were not bound, nor thy feet put into fetters:
as a man falleth before wicked men, so fellest thou. And all the
people wept again over him.

3:35 And when all the people came to cause David to eat meat while it
was yet day, David sware, saying, So do God to me, and more also, if I
taste bread, or ought else, till the sun be down.

3:36 And all the people took notice of it, and it pleased them: as
whatsoever the king did pleased all the people.

3:37 For all the people and all Israel understood that day that it was
not of the king to slay Abner the son of Ner.

3:38 And the king said unto his servants, Know ye not that there is a
prince and a great man fallen this day in Israel?  3:39 And I am this
day weak, though anointed king; and these men the sons of Zeruiah be
too hard for me: the LORD shall reward the doer of evil according to
his wickedness.

4:1 And when Saul's son heard that Abner was dead in Hebron, his hands
were feeble, and all the Israelites were troubled.

4:2 And Saul's son had two men that were captains of bands: the name
of the one was Baanah, and the name of the other Rechab, the sons of
Rimmon a Beerothite, of the children of Benjamin: (for Beeroth also
was reckoned to Benjamin.

4:3 And the Beerothites fled to Gittaim, and were sojourners there
until this day.)  4:4 And Jonathan, Saul's son, had a son that was
lame of his feet. He was five years old when the tidings came of Saul
and Jonathan out of Jezreel, and his nurse took him up, and fled: and
it came to pass, as she made haste to flee, that he fell, and became
lame. And his name was Mephibosheth.

4:5 And the sons of Rimmon the Beerothite, Rechab and Baanah, went,
and came about the heat of the day to the house of Ishbosheth, who lay
on a bed at noon.

4:6 And they came thither into the midst of the house, as though they
would have fetched wheat; and they smote him under the fifth rib: and
Rechab and Baanah his brother escaped.

4:7 For when they came into the house, he lay on his bed in his
bedchamber, and they smote him, and slew him, and beheaded him, and
took his head, and gat them away through the plain all night.

4:8 And they brought the head of Ishbosheth unto David to Hebron, and
said to the king, Behold the head of Ishbosheth the son of Saul thine
enemy, which sought thy life; and the LORD hath avenged my lord the
king this day of Saul, and of his seed.

4:9 And David answered Rechab and Baanah his brother, the sons of
Rimmon the Beerothite, and said unto them, As the LORD liveth, who
hath redeemed my soul out of all adversity, 4:10 When one told me,
saying, Behold, Saul is dead, thinking to have brought good tidings, I
took hold of him, and slew him in Ziklag, who thought that I would
have given him a reward for his tidings: 4:11 How much more, when
wicked men have slain a righteous person in his own house upon his
bed? shall I not therefore now require his blood of your hand, and
take you away from the earth?  4:12 And David commanded his young men,
and they slew them, and cut off their hands and their feet, and hanged
them up over the pool in Hebron. But they took the head of Ishbosheth,
and buried it in the sepulchre of Abner in Hebron.

5:1 Then came all the tribes of Israel to David unto Hebron, and
spake, saying, Behold, we are thy bone and thy flesh.

5:2 Also in time past, when Saul was king over us, thou wast he that
leddest out and broughtest in Israel: and the LORD said to thee, Thou
shalt feed my people Israel, and thou shalt be a captain over Israel.

5:3 So all the elders of Israel came to the king to Hebron; and king
David made a league with them in Hebron before the LORD: and they
anointed David king over Israel.

5:4 David was thirty years old when he began to reign, and he reigned
forty years.

5:5 In Hebron he reigned over Judah seven years and six months: and in
Jerusalem he reigned thirty and three years over all Israel and Judah.

5:6 And the king and his men went to Jerusalem unto the Jebusites, the
inhabitants of the land: which spake unto David, saying, Except thou
take away the blind and the lame, thou shalt not come in hither:
thinking, David cannot come in hither.

5:7 Nevertheless David took the strong hold of Zion: the same is the
city of David.

5:8 And David said on that day, Whosoever getteth up to the gutter,
and smiteth the Jebusites, and the lame and the blind that are hated
of David's soul, he shall be chief and captain. Wherefore they said,
The blind and the lame shall not come into the house.

5:9 So David dwelt in the fort, and called it the city of David. And
David built round about from Millo and inward.

5:10 And David went on, and grew great, and the LORD God of hosts was
with him.

5:11 And Hiram king of Tyre sent messengers to David, and cedar trees,
and carpenters, and masons: and they built David an house.

5:12 And David perceived that the LORD had established him king over
Israel, and that he had exalted his kingdom for his people Israel's
sake.

5:13 And David took him more concubines and wives out of Jerusalem,
after he was come from Hebron: and there were yet sons and daughters
born to David.

5:14 And these be the names of those that were born unto him in
Jerusalem; Shammuah, and Shobab, and Nathan, and Solomon, 5:15 Ibhar
also, and Elishua, and Nepheg, and Japhia, 5:16 And Elishama, and
Eliada, and Eliphalet.

5:17 But when the Philistines heard that they had anointed David king
over Israel, all the Philistines came up to seek David; and David
heard of it, and went down to the hold.

5:18 The Philistines also came and spread themselves in the valley of
Rephaim.

5:19 And David enquired of the LORD, saying, Shall I go up to the
Philistines? wilt thou deliver them into mine hand? And the LORD said
unto David, Go up: for I will doubtless deliver the Philistines into
thine hand.

5:20 And David came to Baalperazim, and David smote them there, and
said, The LORD hath broken forth upon mine enemies before me, as the
breach of waters. Therefore he called the name of that place
Baalperazim.

5:21 And there they left their images, and David and his men burned
them.

5:22 And the Philistines came up yet again, and spread themselves in
the valley of Rephaim.

5:23 And when David enquired of the LORD, he said, Thou shalt not go
up; but fetch a compass behind them, and come upon them over against
the mulberry trees.

5:24 And let it be, when thou hearest the sound of a going in the tops
of the mulberry trees, that then thou shalt bestir thyself: for then
shall the LORD go out before thee, to smite the host of the
Philistines.

5:25 And David did so, as the LORD had commanded him; and smote the
Philistines from Geba until thou come to Gazer.

6:1 Again, David gathered together all the chosen men of Israel,
thirty thousand.

6:2 And David arose, and went with all the people that were with him
from Baale of Judah, to bring up from thence the ark of God, whose
name is called by the name of the LORD of hosts that dwelleth between
the cherubims.

6:3 And they set the ark of God upon a new cart, and brought it out of
the house of Abinadab that was in Gibeah: and Uzzah and Ahio, the sons
of Abinadab, drave the new cart.

6:4 And they brought it out of the house of Abinadab which was at
Gibeah, accompanying the ark of God: and Ahio went before the ark.

6:5 And David and all the house of Israel played before the LORD on
all manner of instruments made of fir wood, even on harps, and on
psalteries, and on timbrels, and on cornets, and on cymbals.

6:6 And when they came to Nachon's threshingfloor, Uzzah put forth his
hand to the ark of God, and took hold of it; for the oxen shook it.

6:7 And the anger of the LORD was kindled against Uzzah; and God smote
him there for his error; and there he died by the ark of God.

6:8 And David was displeased, because the LORD had made a breach upon
Uzzah: and he called the name of the place Perezuzzah to this day.

6:9 And David was afraid of the LORD that day, and said, How shall the
ark of the LORD come to me?  6:10 So David would not remove the ark of
the LORD unto him into the city of David: but David carried it aside
into the house of Obededom the Gittite.

6:11 And the ark of the LORD continued in the house of Obededom the
Gittite three months: and the LORD blessed Obededom, and all his
household.

6:12 And it was told king David, saying, The LORD hath blessed the
house of Obededom, and all that pertaineth unto him, because of the
ark of God. So David went and brought up the ark of God from the house
of Obededom into the city of David with gladness.

6:13 And it was so, that when they that bare the ark of the LORD had
gone six paces, he sacrificed oxen and fatlings.

6:14 And David danced before the LORD with all his might; and David
was girded with a linen ephod.

6:15 So David and all the house of Israel brought up the ark of the
LORD with shouting, and with the sound of the trumpet.

6:16 And as the ark of the LORD came into the city of David, Michal
Saul's daughter looked through a window, and saw king David leaping
and dancing before the LORD; and she despised him in her heart.

6:17 And they brought in the ark of the LORD, and set it in his place,
in the midst of the tabernacle that David had pitched for it: and
David offered burnt offerings and peace offerings before the LORD.

6:18 And as soon as David had made an end of offering burnt offerings
and peace offerings, he blessed the people in the name of the LORD of
hosts.

6:19 And he dealt among all the people, even among the whole multitude
of Israel, as well to the women as men, to every one a cake of bread,
and a good piece of flesh, and a flagon of wine. So all the people
departed every one to his house.

6:20 Then David returned to bless his household. And Michal the
daughter of Saul came out to meet David, and said, How glorious was
the king of Israel to day, who uncovered himself to day in the eyes of
the handmaids of his servants, as one of the vain fellows shamelessly
uncovereth himself!  6:21 And David said unto Michal, It was before
the LORD, which chose me before thy father, and before all his house,
to appoint me ruler over the people of the LORD, over Israel:
therefore will I play before the LORD.

6:22 And I will yet be more vile than thus, and will be base in mine
own sight: and of the maidservants which thou hast spoken of, of them
shall I be had in honour.

6:23 Therefore Michal the daughter of Saul had no child unto the day
of her death.

7:1 And it came to pass, when the king sat in his house, and the LORD
had given him rest round about from all his enemies; 7:2 That the king
said unto Nathan the prophet, See now, I dwell in an house of cedar,
but the ark of God dwelleth within curtains.

7:3 And Nathan said to the king, Go, do all that is in thine heart;
for the LORD is with thee.

7:4 And it came to pass that night, that the word of the LORD came
unto Nathan, saying, 7:5 Go and tell my servant David, Thus saith the
LORD, Shalt thou build me an house for me to dwell in?  7:6 Whereas I
have not dwelt in any house since the time that I brought up the
children of Israel out of Egypt, even to this day, but have walked in
a tent and in a tabernacle.

7:7 In all the places wherein I have walked with all the children of
Israel spake I a word with any of the tribes of Israel, whom I
commanded to feed my people Israel, saying, Why build ye not me an
house of cedar?  7:8 Now therefore so shalt thou say unto my servant
David, Thus saith the LORD of hosts, I took thee from the sheepcote,
from following the sheep, to be ruler over my people, over Israel: 7:9
And I was with thee whithersoever thou wentest, and have cut off all
thine enemies out of thy sight, and have made thee a great name, like
unto the name of the great men that are in the earth.

7:10 Moreover I will appoint a place for my people Israel, and will
plant them, that they may dwell in a place of their own, and move no
more; neither shall the children of wickedness afflict them any more,
as beforetime, 7:11 And as since the time that I commanded judges to
be over my people Israel, and have caused thee to rest from all thine
enemies. Also the LORD telleth thee that he will make thee an house.

7:12 And when thy days be fulfilled, and thou shalt sleep with thy
fathers, I will set up thy seed after thee, which shall proceed out of
thy bowels, and I will establish his kingdom.

7:13 He shall build an house for my name, and I will stablish the
throne of his kingdom for ever.

7:14 I will be his father, and he shall be my son. If he commit
iniquity, I will chasten him with the rod of men, and with the stripes
of the children of men: 7:15 But my mercy shall not depart away from
him, as I took it from Saul, whom I put away before thee.

7:16 And thine house and thy kingdom shall be established for ever
before thee: thy throne shall be established for ever.

7:17 According to all these words, and according to all this vision,
so did Nathan speak unto David.

7:18 Then went king David in, and sat before the LORD, and he said,
Who am I, O Lord GOD? and what is my house, that thou hast brought me
hitherto?  7:19 And this was yet a small thing in thy sight, O Lord
GOD; but thou hast spoken also of thy servant's house for a great
while to come. And is this the manner of man, O Lord GOD?  7:20 And
what can David say more unto thee? for thou, Lord GOD, knowest thy
servant.

7:21 For thy word's sake, and according to thine own heart, hast thou
done all these great things, to make thy servant know them.

7:22 Wherefore thou art great, O LORD God: for there is none like
thee, neither is there any God beside thee, according to all that we
have heard with our ears.

7:23 And what one nation in the earth is like thy people, even like
Israel, whom God went to redeem for a people to himself, and to make
him a name, and to do for you great things and terrible, for thy land,
before thy people, which thou redeemedst to thee from Egypt, from the
nations and their gods?  7:24 For thou hast confirmed to thyself thy
people Israel to be a people unto thee for ever: and thou, LORD, art
become their God.

7:25 And now, O LORD God, the word that thou hast spoken concerning
thy servant, and concerning his house, establish it for ever, and do
as thou hast said.

7:26 And let thy name be magnified for ever, saying, The LORD of hosts
is the God over Israel: and let the house of thy servant David be
established before thee.

7:27 For thou, O LORD of hosts, God of Israel, hast revealed to thy
servant, saying, I will build thee an house: therefore hath thy
servant found in his heart to pray this prayer unto thee.

7:28 And now, O Lord GOD, thou art that God, and thy words be true,
and thou hast promised this goodness unto thy servant: 7:29 Therefore
now let it please thee to bless the house of thy servant, that it may
continue for ever before thee: for thou, O Lord GOD, hast spoken it:
and with thy blessing let the house of thy servant be blessed for
ever.

8:1 And after this it came to pass that David smote the Philistines,
and subdued them: and David took Methegammah out of the hand of the
Philistines.

8:2 And he smote Moab, and measured them with a line, casting them
down to the ground; even with two lines measured he to put to death,
and with one full line to keep alive. And so the Moabites became
David's servants, and brought gifts.

8:3 David smote also Hadadezer, the son of Rehob, king of Zobah, as he
went to recover his border at the river Euphrates.

8:4 And David took from him a thousand chariots, and seven hundred
horsemen, and twenty thousand footmen: and David houghed all the
chariot horses, but reserved of them for an hundred chariots.

8:5 And when the Syrians of Damascus came to succour Hadadezer king of
Zobah, David slew of the Syrians two and twenty thousand men.

8:6 Then David put garrisons in Syria of Damascus: and the Syrians
became servants to David, and brought gifts. And the LORD preserved
David whithersoever he went.

8:7 And David took the shields of gold that were on the servants of
Hadadezer, and brought them to Jerusalem.

8:8 And from Betah, and from Berothai, cities of Hadadezer, king David
took exceeding much brass.

8:9 When Toi king of Hamath heard that David had smitten all the host
of Hadadezer, 8:10 Then Toi sent Joram his son unto king David, to
salute him, and to bless him, because he had fought against Hadadezer,
and smitten him: for Hadadezer had wars with Toi. And Joram brought
with him vessels of silver, and vessels of gold, and vessels of brass:
8:11 Which also king David did dedicate unto the LORD, with the silver
and gold that he had dedicated of all nations which he subdued; 8:12
Of Syria, and of Moab, and of the children of Ammon, and of the
Philistines, and of Amalek, and of the spoil of Hadadezer, son of
Rehob, king of Zobah.

8:13 And David gat him a name when he returned from smiting of the
Syrians in the valley of salt, being eighteen thousand men.

8:14 And he put garrisons in Edom; throughout all Edom put he
garrisons, and all they of Edom became David's servants. And the LORD
preserved David whithersoever he went.

8:15 And David reigned over all Israel; and David executed judgment
and justice unto all his people.

8:16 And Joab the son of Zeruiah was over the host; and Jehoshaphat
the son of Ahilud was recorder; 8:17 And Zadok the son of Ahitub, and
Ahimelech the son of Abiathar, were the priests; and Seraiah was the
scribe; 8:18 And Benaiah the son of Jehoiada was over both the
Cherethites and the Pelethites; and David's sons were chief rulers.

9:1 And David said, Is there yet any that is left of the house of
Saul, that I may shew him kindness for Jonathan's sake?  9:2 And there
was of the house of Saul a servant whose name was Ziba. And when they
had called him unto David, the king said unto him, Art thou Ziba?  And
he said, Thy servant is he.

9:3 And the king said, Is there not yet any of the house of Saul, that
I may shew the kindness of God unto him? And Ziba said unto the king,
Jonathan hath yet a son, which is lame on his feet.

9:4 And the king said unto him, Where is he? And Ziba said unto the
king, Behold, he is in the house of Machir, the son of Ammiel, in
Lodebar.

9:5 Then king David sent, and fetched him out of the house of Machir,
the son of Ammiel, from Lodebar.

9:6 Now when Mephibosheth, the son of Jonathan, the son of Saul, was
come unto David, he fell on his face, and did reverence. And David
said, Mephibosheth. And he answered, Behold thy servant!  9:7 And
David said unto him, Fear not: for I will surely shew thee kindness
for Jonathan thy father's sake, and will restore thee all the land of
Saul thy father; and thou shalt eat bread at my table continually.

9:8 And he bowed himself, and said, What is thy servant, that thou
shouldest look upon such a dead dog as I am?  9:9 Then the king called
to Ziba, Saul's servant, and said unto him, I have given unto thy
master's son all that pertained to Saul and to all his house.

9:10 Thou therefore, and thy sons, and thy servants, shall till the
land for him, and thou shalt bring in the fruits, that thy master's
son may have food to eat: but Mephibosheth thy master's son shall eat
bread alway at my table. Now Ziba had fifteen sons and twenty
servants.

9:11 Then said Ziba unto the king, According to all that my lord the
king hath commanded his servant, so shall thy servant do. As for
Mephibosheth, said the king, he shall eat at my table, as one of the
king's sons.

9:12 And Mephibosheth had a young son, whose name was Micha. And all
that dwelt in the house of Ziba were servants unto Mephibosheth.

9:13 So Mephibosheth dwelt in Jerusalem: for he did eat continually at
the king's table; and was lame on both his feet.

10:1 And it came to pass after this, that the king of the children of
Ammon died, and Hanun his son reigned in his stead.

10:2 Then said David, I will shew kindness unto Hanun the son of
Nahash, as his father shewed kindness unto me. And David sent to
comfort him by the hand of his servants for his father. And David's
servants came into the land of the children of Ammon.

10:3 And the princes of the children of Ammon said unto Hanun their
lord, Thinkest thou that David doth honour thy father, that he hath
sent comforters unto thee? hath not David rather sent his servants
unto thee, to search the city, and to spy it out, and to overthrow it?
10:4 Wherefore Hanun took David's servants, and shaved off the one
half of their beards, and cut off their garments in the middle, even
to their buttocks, and sent them away.

10:5 When they told it unto David, he sent to meet them, because the
men were greatly ashamed: and the king said, Tarry at Jericho until
your beards be grown, and then return.

10:6 And when the children of Ammon saw that they stank before David,
the children of Ammon sent and hired the Syrians of Bethrehob and the
Syrians of Zoba, twenty thousand footmen, and of king Maacah a
thousand men, and of Ishtob twelve thousand men.

10:7 And when David heard of it, he sent Joab, and all the host of the
mighty men.

10:8 And the children of Ammon came out, and put the battle in array
at the entering in of the gate: and the Syrians of Zoba, and of Rehob,
and Ishtob, and Maacah, were by themselves in the field.

10:9 When Joab saw that the front of the battle was against him before
and behind, he chose of all the choice men of Israel, and put them in
array against the Syrians: 10:10 And the rest of the people he
delivered into the hand of Abishai his brother, that he might put them
in array against the children of Ammon.

10:11 And he said, If the Syrians be too strong for me, then thou
shalt help me: but if the children of Ammon be too strong for thee,
then I will come and help thee.

10:12 Be of good courage, and let us play the men for our people, and
for the cities of our God: and the LORD do that which seemeth him
good.

10:13 And Joab drew nigh, and the people that were with him, unto the
battle against the Syrians: and they fled before him.

10:14 And when the children of Ammon saw that the Syrians were fled,
then fled they also before Abishai, and entered into the city. So Joab
returned from the children of Ammon, and came to Jerusalem.

10:15 And when the Syrians saw that they were smitten before Israel,
they gathered themselves together.

10:16 And Hadarezer sent, and brought out the Syrians that were beyond
the river: and they came to Helam; and Shobach the captain of the host
of Hadarezer went before them.

10:17 And when it was told David, he gathered all Israel together, and
passed over Jordan, and came to Helam. And the Syrians set themselves
in array against David, and fought with him.

10:18 And the Syrians fled before Israel; and David slew the men of
seven hundred chariots of the Syrians, and forty thousand horsemen,
and smote Shobach the captain of their host, who died there.

10:19 And when all the kings that were servants to Hadarezer saw that
they were smitten before Israel, they made peace with Israel, and
served them. So the Syrians feared to help the children of Ammon any
more.

11:1 And it came to pass, after the year was expired, at the time when
kings go forth to battle, that David sent Joab, and his servants with
him, and all Israel; and they destroyed the children of Ammon, and
besieged Rabbah. But David tarried still at Jerusalem.

11:2 And it came to pass in an eveningtide, that David arose from off
his bed, and walked upon the roof of the king's house: and from the
roof he saw a woman washing herself; and the woman was very beautiful
to look upon.

11:3 And David sent and enquired after the woman. And one said, Is not
this Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite?
11:4 And David sent messengers, and took her; and she came in unto
him, and he lay with her; for she was purified from her uncleanness:
and she returned unto her house.

11:5 And the woman conceived, and sent and told David, and said, I am
with child.

11:6 And David sent to Joab, saying, Send me Uriah the Hittite. And
Joab sent Uriah to David.

11:7 And when Uriah was come unto him, David demanded of him how Joab
did, and how the people did, and how the war prospered.

11:8 And David said to Uriah, Go down to thy house, and wash thy feet.
And Uriah departed out of the king's house, and there followed him a
mess of meat from the king.

11:9 But Uriah slept at the door of the king's house with all the
servants of his lord, and went not down to his house.

11:10 And when they had told David, saying, Uriah went not down unto
his house, David said unto Uriah, Camest thou not from thy journey?
why then didst thou not go down unto thine house?  11:11 And Uriah
said unto David, The ark, and Israel, and Judah, abide in tents; and
my lord Joab, and the servants of my lord, are encamped in the open
fields; shall I then go into mine house, to eat and to drink, and to
lie with my wife? as thou livest, and as thy soul liveth, I will not
do this thing.

11:12 And David said to Uriah, Tarry here to day also, and to morrow I
will let thee depart. So Uriah abode in Jerusalem that day, and the
morrow.

11:13 And when David had called him, he did eat and drink before him;
and he made him drunk: and at even he went out to lie on his bed with
the servants of his lord, but went not down to his house.

11:14 And it came to pass in the morning, that David wrote a letter to
Joab, and sent it by the hand of Uriah.

11:15 And he wrote in the letter, saying, Set ye Uriah in the
forefront of the hottest battle, and retire ye from him, that he may
be smitten, and die.

11:16 And it came to pass, when Joab observed the city, that he
assigned Uriah unto a place where he knew that valiant men were.

11:17 And the men of the city went out, and fought with Joab: and
there fell some of the people of the servants of David; and Uriah the
Hittite died also.

11:18 Then Joab sent and told David all the things concerning the war;
11:19 And charged the messenger, saying, When thou hast made an end of
telling the matters of the war unto the king, 11:20 And if so be that
the king's wrath arise, and he say unto thee, Wherefore approached ye
so nigh unto the city when ye did fight? knew ye not that they would
shoot from the wall?  11:21 Who smote Abimelech the son of
Jerubbesheth? did not a woman cast a piece of a millstone upon him
from the wall, that he died in Thebez? why went ye nigh the wall? then
say thou, Thy servant Uriah the Hittite is dead also.

11:22 So the messenger went, and came and shewed David all that Joab
had sent him for.

11:23 And the messenger said unto David, Surely the men prevailed
against us, and came out unto us into the field, and we were upon them
even unto the entering of the gate.

11:24 And the shooters shot from off the wall upon thy servants; and
some of the king's servants be dead, and thy servant Uriah the Hittite
is dead also.

11:25 Then David said unto the messenger, Thus shalt thou say unto
Joab, Let not this thing displease thee, for the sword devoureth one
as well as another: make thy battle more strong against the city, and
overthrow it: and encourage thou him.

11:26 And when the wife of Uriah heard that Uriah her husband was
dead, she mourned for her husband.

11:27 And when the mourning was past, David sent and fetched her to
his house, and she became his wife, and bare him a son. But the thing
that David had done displeased the LORD.

12:1 And the LORD sent Nathan unto David. And he came unto him, and
said unto him, There were two men in one city; the one rich, and the
other poor.

12:2 The rich man had exceeding many flocks and herds: 12:3 But the
poor man had nothing, save one little ewe lamb, which he had bought
and nourished up: and it grew up together with him, and with his
children; it did eat of his own meat, and drank of his own cup, and
lay in his bosom, and was unto him as a daughter.

12:4 And there came a traveller unto the rich man, and he spared to
take of his own flock and of his own herd, to dress for the wayfaring
man that was come unto him; but took the poor man's lamb, and dressed
it for the man that was come to him.

12:5 And David's anger was greatly kindled against the man; and he
said to Nathan, As the LORD liveth, the man that hath done this thing
shall surely die: 12:6 And he shall restore the lamb fourfold, because
he did this thing, and because he had no pity.

12:7 And Nathan said to David, Thou art the man. Thus saith the LORD
God of Israel, I anointed thee king over Israel, and I delivered thee
out of the hand of Saul; 12:8 And I gave thee thy master's house, and
thy master's wives into thy bosom, and gave thee the house of Israel
and of Judah; and if that had been too little, I would moreover have
given unto thee such and such things.

12:9 Wherefore hast thou despised the commandment of the LORD, to do
evil in his sight? thou hast killed Uriah the Hittite with the sword,
and hast taken his wife to be thy wife, and hast slain him with the
sword of the children of Ammon.

12:10 Now therefore the sword shall never depart from thine house;
because thou hast despised me, and hast taken the wife of Uriah the
Hittite to be thy wife.

12:11 Thus saith the LORD, Behold, I will raise up evil against thee
out of thine own house, and I will take thy wives before thine eyes,
and give them unto thy neighbour, and he shall lie with thy wives in
the sight of this sun.

12:12 For thou didst it secretly: but I will do this thing before all
Israel, and before the sun.

12:13 And David said unto Nathan, I have sinned against the LORD. And
Nathan said unto David, The LORD also hath put away thy sin; thou
shalt not die.

12:14 Howbeit, because by this deed thou hast given great occasion to
the enemies of the LORD to blaspheme, the child also that is born unto
thee shall surely die.

12:15 And Nathan departed unto his house. And the LORD struck the
child that Uriah's wife bare unto David, and it was very sick.

12:16 David therefore besought God for the child; and David fasted,
and went in, and lay all night upon the earth.

12:17 And the elders of his house arose, and went to him, to raise him
up from the earth: but he would not, neither did he eat bread with
them.

12:18 And it came to pass on the seventh day, that the child died. And
the servants of David feared to tell him that the child was dead: for
they said, Behold, while the child was yet alive, we spake unto him,
and he would not hearken unto our voice: how will he then vex himself,
if we tell him that the child is dead?  12:19 But when David saw that
his servants whispered, David perceived that the child was dead:
therefore David said unto his servants, Is the child dead? And they
said, He is dead.

12:20 Then David arose from the earth, and washed, and anointed
himself, and changed his apparel, and came into the house of the LORD,
and worshipped: then he came to his own house; and when he required,
they set bread before him, and he did eat.

12:21 Then said his servants unto him, What thing is this that thou
hast done? thou didst fast and weep for the child, while it was alive;
but when the child was dead, thou didst rise and eat bread.

12:22 And he said, While the child was yet alive, I fasted and wept:
for I said, Who can tell whether GOD will be gracious to me, that the
child may live?  12:23 But now he is dead, wherefore should I fast?
can I bring him back again? I shall go to him, but he shall not return
to me.

12:24 And David comforted Bathsheba his wife, and went in unto her,
and lay with her: and she bare a son, and he called his name Solomon:
and the LORD loved him.

12:25 And he sent by the hand of Nathan the prophet; and he called his
name Jedidiah, because of the LORD.

12:26 And Joab fought against Rabbah of the children of Ammon, and
took the royal city.

12:27 And Joab sent messengers to David, and said, I have fought
against Rabbah, and have taken the city of waters.

12:28 Now therefore gather the rest of the people together, and encamp
against the city, and take it: lest I take the city, and it be called
after my name.

12:29 And David gathered all the people together, and went to Rabbah,
and fought against it, and took it.

12:30 And he took their king's crown from off his head, the weight
whereof was a talent of gold with the precious stones: and it was set
on David's head. And he brought forth the spoil of the city in great
abundance.

12:31 And he brought forth the people that were therein, and put them
under saws, and under harrows of iron, and under axes of iron, and
made them pass through the brick-kiln: and thus did he unto all the
cities of the children of Ammon. So David and all the people returned
unto Jerusalem.

13:1 And it came to pass after this, that Absalom the son of David had
a fair sister, whose name was Tamar; and Amnon the son of David loved
her.

13:2 And Amnon was so vexed, that he fell sick for his sister Tamar;
for she was a virgin; and Amnon thought it hard for him to do anything
to her.

13:3 But Amnon had a friend, whose name was Jonadab, the son of
Shimeah David's brother: and Jonadab was a very subtil man.

13:4 And he said unto him, Why art thou, being the king's son, lean
from day to day? wilt thou not tell me? And Amnon said unto him, I
love Tamar, my brother Absalom's sister.

13:5 And Jonadab said unto him, Lay thee down on thy bed, and make
thyself sick: and when thy father cometh to see thee, say unto him, I
pray thee, let my sister Tamar come, and give me meat, and dress the
meat in my sight, that I may see it, and eat it at her hand.

13:6 So Amnon lay down, and made himself sick: and when the king was
come to see him, Amnon said unto the king, I pray thee, let Tamar my
sister come, and make me a couple of cakes in my sight, that I may eat
at her hand.

13:7 Then David sent home to Tamar, saying, Go now to thy brother
Amnon's house, and dress him meat.

13:8 So Tamar went to her brother Amnon's house; and he was laid down.
And she took flour, and kneaded it, and made cakes in his sight, and
did bake the cakes.

13:9 And she took a pan, and poured them out before him; but he
refused to eat. And Amnon said, Have out all men from me. And they
went out every man from him.

13:10 And Amnon said unto Tamar, Bring the meat into the chamber, that
I may eat of thine hand. And Tamar took the cakes which she had made,
and brought them into the chamber to Amnon her brother.

13:11 And when she had brought them unto him to eat, he took hold of
her, and said unto her, Come lie with me, my sister.

13:12 And she answered him, Nay, my brother, do not force me; for no
such thing ought to be done in Israel: do not thou this folly.

13:13 And I, whither shall I cause my shame to go? and as for thee,
thou shalt be as one of the fools in Israel. Now therefore, I pray
thee, speak unto the king; for he will not withhold me from thee.

13:14 Howbeit he would not hearken unto her voice: but, being stronger
than she, forced her, and lay with her.

13:15 Then Amnon hated her exceedingly; so that the hatred wherewith
he hated her was greater than the love wherewith he had loved her. And
Amnon said unto her, Arise, be gone.

13:16 And she said unto him, There is no cause: this evil in sending
me away is greater than the other that thou didst unto me. But he
would not hearken unto her.

13:17 Then he called his servant that ministered unto him, and said,
Put now this woman out from me, and bolt the door after her.

13:18 And she had a garment of divers colours upon her: for with such
robes were the king's daughters that were virgins apparelled. Then his
servant brought her out, and bolted the door after her.

13:19 And Tamar put ashes on her head, and rent her garment of divers
colours that was on her, and laid her hand on her head, and went on
crying.

13:20 And Absalom her brother said unto her, Hath Amnon thy brother
been with thee? but hold now thy peace, my sister: he is thy brother;
regard not this thing. So Tamar remained desolate in her brother
Absalom's house.

13:21 But when king David heard of all these things, he was very
wroth.

13:22 And Absalom spake unto his brother Amnon neither good nor bad:
for Absalom hated Amnon, because he had forced his sister Tamar.

13:23 And it came to pass after two full years, that Absalom had
sheepshearers in Baalhazor, which is beside Ephraim: and Absalom
invited all the king's sons.

13:24 And Absalom came to the king, and said, Behold now, thy servant
hath sheepshearers; let the king, I beseech thee, and his servants go
with thy servant.

13:25 And the king said to Absalom, Nay, my son, let us not all now
go, lest we be chargeable unto thee. And he pressed him: howbeit he
would not go, but blessed him.

13:26 Then said Absalom, If not, I pray thee, let my brother Amnon go
with us. And the king said unto him, Why should he go with thee?
13:27 But Absalom pressed him, that he let Amnon and all the king's
sons go with him.

13:28 Now Absalom had commanded his servants, saying, Mark ye now when
Amnon's heart is merry with wine, and when I say unto you, Smite
Amnon; then kill him, fear not: have not I commanded you? be
courageous, and be valiant.

13:29 And the servants of Absalom did unto Amnon as Absalom had
commanded.

Then all the king's sons arose, and every man gat him up upon his
mule, and fled.

13:30 And it came to pass, while they were in the way, that tidings
came to David, saying, Absalom hath slain all the king's sons, and
there is not one of them left.

13:31 Then the king arose, and tare his garments, and lay on the
earth; and all his servants stood by with their clothes rent.

13:32 And Jonadab, the son of Shimeah David's brother, answered and
said, Let not my lord suppose that they have slain all the young men
the king's sons; for Amnon only is dead: for by the appointment of
Absalom this hath been determined from the day that he forced his
sister Tamar.

13:33 Now therefore let not my lord the king take the thing to his
heart, to think that all the king's sons are dead: for Amnon only is
dead.

13:34 But Absalom fled. And the young man that kept the watch lifted
up his eyes, and looked, and, behold, there came much people by the
way of the hill side behind him.

13:35 And Jonadab said unto the king, Behold, the king's sons come: as
thy servant said, so it is.

13:36 And it came to pass, as soon as he had made an end of speaking,
that, behold, the king's sons came, and lifted up their voice and
wept: and the king also and all his servants wept very sore.

13:37 But Absalom fled, and went to Talmai, the son of Ammihud, king
of Geshur. And David mourned for his son every day.

13:38 So Absalom fled, and went to Geshur, and was there three years.

13:39 And the soul of king David longed to go forth unto Absalom: for
he was comforted concerning Amnon, seeing he was dead.

14:1 Now Joab the son of Zeruiah perceived that the king's heart was
toward Absalom.

14:2 And Joab sent to Tekoah, and fetched thence a wise woman, and
said unto her, I pray thee, feign thyself to be a mourner, and put on
now mourning apparel, and anoint not thyself with oil, but be as a
woman that had a long time mourned for the dead: 14:3 And come to the
king, and speak on this manner unto him. So Joab put the words in her
mouth.

14:4 And when the woman of Tekoah spake to the king, she fell on her
face to the ground, and did obeisance, and said, Help, O king.

14:5 And the king said unto her, What aileth thee? And she answered, I
am indeed a widow woman, and mine husband is dead.

14:6 And thy handmaid had two sons, and they two strove together in
the field, and there was none to part them, but the one smote the
other, and slew him.

14:7 And, behold, the whole family is risen against thine handmaid,
and they said, Deliver him that smote his brother, that we may kill
him, for the life of his brother whom he slew; and we will destroy the
heir also: and so they shall quench my coal which is left, and shall
not leave to my husband neither name nor remainder upon the earth.

14:8 And the king said unto the woman, Go to thine house, and I will
give charge concerning thee.

14:9 And the woman of Tekoah said unto the king, My lord, O king, the
iniquity be on me, and on my father's house: and the king and his
throne be guiltless.

14:10 And the king said, Whoever saith ought unto thee, bring him to
me, and he shall not touch thee any more.

14:11 Then said she, I pray thee, let the king remember the LORD thy
God, that thou wouldest not suffer the revengers of blood to destroy
any more, lest they destroy my son. And he said, As the LORD liveth,
there shall not one hair of thy son fall to the earth.

14:12 Then the woman said, Let thine handmaid, I pray thee, speak one
word unto my lord the king. And he said, Say on.

14:13 And the woman said, Wherefore then hast thou thought such a
thing against the people of God? for the king doth speak this thing as
one which is faulty, in that the king doth not fetch home again his
banished.

14:14 For we must needs die, and are as water spilt on the ground,
which cannot be gathered up again; neither doth God respect any
person: yet doth he devise means, that his banished be not expelled
from him.

14:15 Now therefore that I am come to speak of this thing unto my lord
the king, it is because the people have made me afraid: and thy
handmaid said, I will now speak unto the king; it may be that the king
will perform the request of his handmaid.

14:16 For the king will hear, to deliver his handmaid out of the hand
of the man that would destroy me and my son together out of the
inheritance of God.

14:17 Then thine handmaid said, The word of my lord the king shall now
be comfortable: for as an angel of God, so is my lord the king to
discern good and bad: therefore the LORD thy God will be with thee.

14:18 Then the king answered and said unto the woman, Hide not from
me, I pray thee, the thing that I shall ask thee. And the woman said,
Let my lord the king now speak.

14:19 And the king said, Is not the hand of Joab with thee in all
this?  And the woman answered and said, As thy soul liveth, my lord
the king, none can turn to the right hand or to the left from ought
that my lord the king hath spoken: for thy servant Joab, he bade me,
and he put all these words in the mouth of thine handmaid: 14:20 To
fetch about this form of speech hath thy servant Joab done this thing:
and my lord is wise, according to the wisdom of an angel of God, to
know all things that are in the earth.

14:21 And the king said unto Joab, Behold now, I have done this thing:
go therefore, bring the young man Absalom again.

14:22 And Joab fell to the ground on his face, and bowed himself, and
thanked the king: and Joab said, To day thy servant knoweth that I
have found grace in thy sight, my lord, O king, in that the king hath
fulfilled the request of his servant.

14:23 So Joab arose and went to Geshur, and brought Absalom to
Jerusalem.

14:24 And the king said, Let him turn to his own house, and let him
not see my face. So Absalom returned to his own house, and saw not the
king's face.

14:25 But in all Israel there was none to be so much praised as
Absalom for his beauty: from the sole of his foot even to the crown of
his head there was no blemish in him.

14:26 And when he polled his head, (for it was at every year's end
that he polled it: because the hair was heavy on him, therefore he
polled it:) he weighed the hair of his head at two hundred shekels
after the king's weight.

14:27 And unto Absalom there were born three sons, and one daughter,
whose name was Tamar: she was a woman of a fair countenance.

14:28 So Absalom dwelt two full years in Jerusalem, and saw not the
king's face.

14:29 Therefore Absalom sent for Joab, to have sent him to the king;
but he would not come to him: and when he sent again the second time,
he would not come.

14:30 Therefore he said unto his servants, See, Joab's field is near
mine, and he hath barley there; go and set it on fire. And Absalom's
servants set the field on fire.

14:31 Then Joab arose, and came to Absalom unto his house, and said
unto him, Wherefore have thy servants set my field on fire?  14:32 And
Absalom answered Joab, Behold, I sent unto thee, saying, Come hither,
that I may send thee to the king, to say, Wherefore am I come from
Geshur? it had been good for me to have been there still: now
therefore let me see the king's face; and if there be any iniquity in
me, let him kill me.

14:33 So Joab came to the king, and told him: and when he had called
for Absalom, he came to the king, and bowed himself on his face to the
ground before the king: and the king kissed Absalom.

15:1 And it came to pass after this, that Absalom prepared him
chariots and horses, and fifty men to run before him.

15:2 And Absalom rose up early, and stood beside the way of the gate:
and it was so, that when any man that had a controversy came to the
king for judgment, then Absalom called unto him, and said, Of what
city art thou? And he said, Thy servant is of one of the tribes of
Israel.

15:3 And Absalom said unto him, See, thy matters are good and right;
but there is no man deputed of the king to hear thee.

15:4 Absalom said moreover, Oh that I were made judge in the land,
that every man which hath any suit or cause might come unto me, and I
would do him justice!  15:5 And it was so, that when any man came nigh
to him to do him obeisance, he put forth his hand, and took him, and
kissed him.

15:6 And on this manner did Absalom to all Israel that came to the
king for judgment: so Absalom stole the hearts of the men of Israel.

15:7 And it came to pass after forty years, that Absalom said unto the
king, I pray thee, let me go and pay my vow, which I have vowed unto
the LORD, in Hebron.

15:8 For thy servant vowed a vow while I abode at Geshur in Syria,
saying, If the LORD shall bring me again indeed to Jerusalem, then I
will serve the LORD.

15:9 And the king said unto him, Go in peace. So he arose, and went to
Hebron.

15:10 But Absalom sent spies throughout all the tribes of Israel,
saying, As soon as ye hear the sound of the trumpet, then ye shall
say, Absalom reigneth in Hebron.

15:11 And with Absalom went two hundred men out of Jerusalem, that
were called; and they went in their simplicity, and they knew not any
thing.

15:12 And Absalom sent for Ahithophel the Gilonite, David's
counsellor, from his city, even from Giloh, while he offered
sacrifices. And the conspiracy was strong; for the people increased
continually with Absalom.

15:13 And there came a messenger to David, saying, The hearts of the
men of Israel are after Absalom.

15:14 And David said unto all his servants that were with him at
Jerusalem, Arise, and let us flee; for we shall not else escape from
Absalom: make speed to depart, lest he overtake us suddenly, and bring
evil upon us, and smite the city with the edge of the sword.

15:15 And the king's servants said unto the king, Behold, thy servants
are ready to do whatsoever my lord the king shall appoint.

15:16 And the king went forth, and all his household after him. And
the king left ten women, which were concubines, to keep the house.

15:17 And the king went forth, and all the people after him, and
tarried in a place that was far off.

15:18 And all his servants passed on beside him; and all the
Cherethites, and all the Pelethites, and all the Gittites, six hundred
men which came after him from Gath, passed on before the king.

15:19 Then said the king to Ittai the Gittite, Wherefore goest thou
also with us? return to thy place, and abide with the king: for thou
art a stranger, and also an exile.

15:20 Whereas thou camest but yesterday, should I this day make thee
go up and down with us? seeing I go whither I may, return thou, and
take back thy brethren: mercy and truth be with thee.

15:21 And Ittai answered the king, and said, As the LORD liveth, and
as my lord the king liveth, surely in what place my lord the king
shall be, whether in death or life, even there also will thy servant
be.

15:22 And David said to Ittai, Go and pass over. And Ittai the Gittite
passed over, and all his men, and all the little ones that were with
him.

15:23 And all the country wept with a loud voice, and all the people
passed over: the king also himself passed over the brook Kidron, and
all the people passed over, toward the way of the wilderness.

15:24 And lo Zadok also, and all the Levites were with him, bearing
the ark of the covenant of God: and they set down the ark of God; and
Abiathar went up, until all the people had done passing out of the
city.

15:25 And the king said unto Zadok, Carry back the ark of God into the
city: if I shall find favour in the eyes of the LORD, he will bring me
again, and shew me both it, and his habitation: 15:26 But if he thus
say, I have no delight in thee; behold, here am I, let him do to me as
seemeth good unto him.

15:27 The king said also unto Zadok the priest, Art not thou a seer?
return into the city in peace, and your two sons with you, Ahimaaz thy
son, and Jonathan the son of Abiathar.

15:28 See, I will tarry in the plain of the wilderness, until there
come word from you to certify me.

15:29 Zadok therefore and Abiathar carried the ark of God again to
Jerusalem: and they tarried there.

15:30 And David went up by the ascent of mount Olivet, and wept as he
went up, and had his head covered, and he went barefoot: and all the
people that was with him covered every man his head, and they went up,
weeping as they went up.

15:31 And one told David, saying, Ahithophel is among the conspirators
with Absalom. And David said, O LORD, I pray thee, turn the counsel of
Ahithophel into foolishness.

15:32 And it came to pass, that when David was come to the top of the
mount, where he worshipped God, behold, Hushai the Archite came to
meet him with his coat rent, and earth upon his head: 15:33 Unto whom
David said, If thou passest on with me, then thou shalt be a burden
unto me: 15:34 But if thou return to the city, and say unto Absalom, I
will be thy servant, O king; as I have been thy father's servant
hitherto, so will I now also be thy servant: then mayest thou for me
defeat the counsel of Ahithophel.

15:35 And hast thou not there with thee Zadok and Abiathar the
priests?  therefore it shall be, that what thing soever thou shalt
hear out of the king's house, thou shalt tell it to Zadok and Abiathar
the priests.

15:36 Behold, they have there with them their two sons, Ahimaaz
Zadok's son, and Jonathan Abiathar's son; and by them ye shall send
unto me every thing that ye can hear.

15:37 So Hushai David's friend came into the city, and Absalom came
into Jerusalem.

16:1 And when David was a little past the top of the hill, behold,
Ziba the servant of Mephibosheth met him, with a couple of asses
saddled, and upon them two hundred loaves of bread, and an hundred
bunches of raisins, and an hundred of summer fruits, and a bottle of
wine.

16:2 And the king said unto Ziba, What meanest thou by these? And Ziba
said, The asses be for the king's household to ride on; and the bread
and summer fruit for the young men to eat; and the wine, that such as
be faint in the wilderness may drink.

16:3 And the king said, And where is thy master's son? And Ziba said
unto the king, Behold, he abideth at Jerusalem: for he said, To day
shall the house of Israel restore me the kingdom of my father.

16:4 Then said the king to Ziba, Behold, thine are all that pertained
unto Mephibosheth. And Ziba said, I humbly beseech thee that I may
find grace in thy sight, my lord, O king.

16:5 And when king David came to Bahurim, behold, thence came out a
man of the family of the house of Saul, whose name was Shimei, the son
of Gera: he came forth, and cursed still as he came.

16:6 And he cast stones at David, and at all the servants of king
David: and all the people and all the mighty men were on his right
hand and on his left.

16:7 And thus said Shimei when he cursed, Come out, come out, thou
bloody man, and thou man of Belial: 16:8 The LORD hath returned upon
thee all the blood of the house of Saul, in whose stead thou hast
reigned; and the LORD hath delivered the kingdom into the hand of
Absalom thy son: and, behold, thou art taken in thy mischief, because
thou art a bloody man.

16:9 Then said Abishai the son of Zeruiah unto the king, Why should
this dead dog curse my lord the king? let me go over, I pray thee, and
take off his head.

16:10 And the king said, What have I to do with you, ye sons of
Zeruiah?  so let him curse, because the LORD hath said unto him, Curse
David. Who shall then say, Wherefore hast thou done so?  16:11 And
David said to Abishai, and to all his servants, Behold, my son, which
came forth of my bowels, seeketh my life: how much more now may this
Benjamite do it? let him alone, and let him curse; for the LORD hath
bidden him.

16:12 It may be that the LORD will look on mine affliction, and that
the LORD will requite me good for his cursing this day.

16:13 And as David and his men went by the way, Shimei went along on
the hill's side over against him, and cursed as he went, and threw
stones at him, and cast dust.

16:14 And the king, and all the people that were with him, came weary,
and refreshed themselves there.

16:15 And Absalom, and all the people the men of Israel, came to
Jerusalem, and Ahithophel with him.

16:16 And it came to pass, when Hushai the Archite, David's friend,
was come unto Absalom, that Hushai said unto Absalom, God save the
king, God save the king.

16:17 And Absalom said to Hushai, Is this thy kindness to thy friend?
why wentest thou not with thy friend?  16:18 And Hushai said unto
Absalom, Nay; but whom the LORD, and this people, and all the men of
Israel, choose, his will I be, and with him will I abide.

16:19 And again, whom should I serve? should I not serve in the
presence of his son? as I have served in thy father's presence, so
will I be in thy presence.

16:20 Then said Absalom to Ahithophel, Give counsel among you what we
shall do.

16:21 And Ahithophel said unto Absalom, Go in unto thy father's
concubines, which he hath left to keep the house; and all Israel shall
hear that thou art abhorred of thy father: then shall the hands of all
that are with thee be strong.

16:22 So they spread Absalom a tent upon the top of the house; and
Absalom went in unto his father's concubines in the sight of all
Israel.

16:23 And the counsel of Ahithophel, which he counselled in those
days, was as if a man had enquired at the oracle of God: so was all
the counsel of Ahithophel both with David and with Absalom.

17:1 Moreover Ahithophel said unto Absalom, Let me now choose out
twelve thousand men, and I will arise and pursue after David this
night: 17:2 And I will come upon him while he is weary and weak
handed, and will make him afraid: and all the people that are with him
shall flee; and I will smite the king only: 17:3 And I will bring back
all the people unto thee: the man whom thou seekest is as if all
returned: so all the people shall be in peace.

17:4 And the saying pleased Absalom well, and all the elders of
Israel.

17:5 Then said Absalom, Call now Hushai the Archite also, and let us
hear likewise what he saith.

17:6 And when Hushai was come to Absalom, Absalom spake unto him,
saying, Ahithophel hath spoken after this manner: shall we do after
his saying? if not; speak thou.

17:7 And Hushai said unto Absalom, The counsel that Ahithophel hath
given is not good at this time.

17:8 For, said Hushai, thou knowest thy father and his men, that they
be mighty men, and they be chafed in their minds, as a bear robbed of
her whelps in the field: and thy father is a man of war, and will not
lodge with the people.

17:9 Behold, he is hid now in some pit, or in some other place: and it
will come to pass, when some of them be overthrown at the first, that
whosoever heareth it will say, There is a slaughter among the people
that follow Absalom.

17:10 And he also that is valiant, whose heart is as the heart of a
lion, shall utterly melt: for all Israel knoweth that thy father is a
mighty man, and they which be with him are valiant men.

17:11 Therefore I counsel that all Israel be generally gathered unto
thee, from Dan even to Beersheba, as the sand that is by the sea for
multitude; and that thou go to battle in thine own person.

17:12 So shall we come upon him in some place where he shall be found,
and we will light upon him as the dew falleth on the ground: and of
him and of all the men that are with him there shall not be left so
much as one.

17:13 Moreover, if he be gotten into a city, then shall all Israel
bring ropes to that city, and we will draw it into the river, until
there be not one small stone found there.

17:14 And Absalom and all the men of Israel said, The counsel of
Hushai the Archite is better than the counsel of Ahithophel. For the
LORD had appointed to defeat the good counsel of Ahithophel, to the
intent that the LORD might bring evil upon Absalom.

17:15 Then said Hushai unto Zadok and to Abiathar the priests, Thus
and thus did Ahithophel counsel Absalom and the elders of Israel; and
thus and thus have I counselled.

17:16 Now therefore send quickly, and tell David, saying, Lodge not
this night in the plains of the wilderness, but speedily pass over;
lest the king be swallowed up, and all the people that are with him.

17:17 Now Jonathan and Ahimaaz stayed by Enrogel; for they might not
be seen to come into the city: and a wench went and told them; and
they went and told king David.

17:18 Nevertheless a lad saw them, and told Absalom: but they went
both of them away quickly, and came to a man's house in Bahurim, which
had a well in his court; whither they went down.

17:19 And the woman took and spread a covering over the well's mouth,
and spread ground corn thereon; and the thing was not known.

17:20 And when Absalom's servants came to the woman to the house, they
said, Where is Ahimaaz and Jonathan? And the woman said unto them,
They be gone over the brook of water. And when they had sought and
could not find them, they returned to Jerusalem.

17:21 And it came to pass, after they were departed, that they came up
out of the well, and went and told king David, and said unto David,
Arise, and pass quickly over the water: for thus hath Ahithophel
counselled against you.

17:22 Then David arose, and all the people that were with him, and
they passed over Jordan: by the morning light there lacked not one of
them that was not gone over Jordan.

17:23 And when Ahithophel saw that his counsel was not followed, he
saddled his ass, and arose, and gat him home to his house, to his
city, and put his household in order, and hanged himself, and died,
and was buried in the sepulchre of his father.

17:24 Then David came to Mahanaim. And Absalom passed over Jordan, he
and all the men of Israel with him.

17:25 And Absalom made Amasa captain of the host instead of Joab:
which Amasa was a man's son, whose name was Ithra an Israelite, that
went in to Abigail the daughter of Nahash, sister to Zeruiah Joab's
mother.

17:26 So Israel and Absalom pitched in the land of Gilead.

17:27 And it came to pass, when David was come to Mahanaim, that Shobi
the son of Nahash of Rabbah of the children of Ammon, and Machir the
son of Ammiel of Lodebar, and Barzillai the Gileadite of Rogelim,
17:28 Brought beds, and basons, and earthen vessels, and wheat, and
barley, and flour, and parched corn, and beans, and lentiles, and
parched pulse, 17:29 And honey, and butter, and sheep, and cheese of
kine, for David, and for the people that were with him, to eat: for
they said, The people is hungry, and weary, and thirsty, in the
wilderness.

18:1 And David numbered the people that were with him, and set
captains of thousands, and captains of hundreds over them.

18:2 And David sent forth a third part of the people under the hand of
Joab, and a third part under the hand of Abishai the son of Zeruiah,
Joab's brother, and a third part under the hand of Ittai the Gittite.
And the king said unto the people, I will surely go forth with you
myself also.

18:3 But the people answered, Thou shalt not go forth: for if we flee
away, they will not care for us; neither if half of us die, will they
care for us: but now thou art worth ten thousand of us: therefore now
it is better that thou succour us out of the city.

18:4 And the king said unto them, What seemeth you best I will do. And
the king stood by the gate side, and all the people came out by
hundreds and by thousands.

18:5 And the king commanded Joab and Abishai and Ittai, saying, Deal
gently for my sake with the young man, even with Absalom. And all the
people heard when the king gave all the captains charge concerning
Absalom.

18:6 So the people went out into the field against Israel: and the
battle was in the wood of Ephraim; 18:7 Where the people of Israel
were slain before the servants of David, and there was there a great
slaughter that day of twenty thousand men.

18:8 For the battle was there scattered over the face of all the
country: and the wood devoured more people that day than the sword
devoured.

18:9 And Absalom met the servants of David. And Absalom rode upon a
mule, and the mule went under the thick boughs of a great oak, and his
head caught hold of the oak, and he was taken up between the heaven
and the earth; and the mule that was under him went away.

18:10 And a certain man saw it, and told Joab, and said, Behold, I saw
Absalom hanged in an oak.

18:11 And Joab said unto the man that told him, And, behold, thou
sawest him, and why didst thou not smite him there to the ground? and
I would have given thee ten shekels of silver, and a girdle.

18:12 And the man said unto Joab, Though I should receive a thousand
shekels of silver in mine hand, yet would I not put forth mine hand
against the king's son: for in our hearing the king charged thee and
Abishai and Ittai, saying, Beware that none touch the young man
Absalom.

18:13 Otherwise I should have wrought falsehood against mine own life:
for there is no matter hid from the king, and thou thyself wouldest
have set thyself against me.

18:14 Then said Joab, I may not tarry thus with thee. And he took
three darts in his hand, and thrust them through the heart of Absalom,
while he was yet alive in the midst of the oak.

18:15 And ten young men that bare Joab's armour compassed about and
smote Absalom, and slew him.

18:16 And Joab blew the trumpet, and the people returned from pursuing
after Israel: for Joab held back the people.

18:17 And they took Absalom, and cast him into a great pit in the
wood, and laid a very great heap of stones upon him: and all Israel
fled every one to his tent.

18:18 Now Absalom in his lifetime had taken and reared up for himself
a pillar, which is in the king's dale: for he said, I have no son to
keep my name in remembrance: and he called the pillar after his own
name: and it is called unto this day, Absalom's place.

18:19 Then said Ahimaaz the son of Zadok, Let me now run, and bear the
king tidings, how that the LORD hath avenged him of his enemies.

18:20 And Joab said unto him, Thou shalt not bear tidings this day,
but thou shalt bear tidings another day: but this day thou shalt bear
no tidings, because the king's son is dead.

18:21 Then said Joab to Cushi, Go tell the king what thou hast seen.
And Cushi bowed himself unto Joab, and ran.

18:22 Then said Ahimaaz the son of Zadok yet again to Joab, But
howsoever, let me, I pray thee, also run after Cushi. And Joab said,
Wherefore wilt thou run, my son, seeing that thou hast no tidings
ready?  18:23 But howsoever, said he, let me run. And he said unto
him, Run. Then Ahimaaz ran by the way of the plain, and overran Cushi.

18:24 And David sat between the two gates: and the watchman went up to
the roof over the gate unto the wall, and lifted up his eyes, and
looked, and behold a man running alone.

18:25 And the watchman cried, and told the king. And the king said, If
he be alone, there is tidings in his mouth. And he came apace, and
drew near.

18:26 And the watchman saw another man running: and the watchman
called unto the porter, and said, Behold another man running alone.
And the king said, He also bringeth tidings.

18:27 And the watchman said, Me thinketh the running of the foremost
is like the running of Ahimaaz the son of Zadok. And the king said, He
is a good man, and cometh with good tidings.

18:28 And Ahimaaz called, and said unto the king, All is well. And he
fell down to the earth upon his face before the king, and said,
Blessed be the LORD thy God, which hath delivered up the men that
lifted up their hand against my lord the king.

18:29 And the king said, Is the young man Absalom safe? And Ahimaaz
answered, When Joab sent the king's servant, and me thy servant, I saw
a great tumult, but I knew not what it was.

18:30 And the king said unto him, Turn aside, and stand here. And he
turned aside, and stood still.

18:31 And, behold, Cushi came; and Cushi said, Tidings, my lord the
king: for the LORD hath avenged thee this day of all them that rose up
against thee.

18:32 And the king said unto Cushi, Is the young man Absalom safe? And
Cushi answered, The enemies of my lord the king, and all that rise
against thee to do thee hurt, be as that young man is.

18:33 And the king was much moved, and went up to the chamber over the
gate, and wept: and as he went, thus he said, O my son Absalom, my
son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son,
my son!  19:1 And it was told Joab, Behold, the king weepeth and
mourneth for Absalom.

19:2 And the victory that day was turned into mourning unto all the
people: for the people heard say that day how the king was grieved for
his son.

19:3 And the people gat them by stealth that day into the city, as
people being ashamed steal away when they flee in battle.

19:4 But the king covered his face, and the king cried with a loud
voice, O my son Absalom, O Absalom, my son, my son!  19:5 And Joab
came into the house to the king, and said, Thou hast shamed this day
the faces of all thy servants, which this day have saved thy life, and
the lives of thy sons and of thy daughters, and the lives of thy
wives, and the lives of thy concubines; 19:6 In that thou lovest thine
enemies, and hatest thy friends. For thou hast declared this day, that
thou regardest neither princes nor servants: for this day I perceive,
that if Absalom had lived, and all we had died this day, then it had
pleased thee well.

19:7 Now therefore arise, go forth, and speak comfortably unto thy
servants: for I swear by the LORD, if thou go not forth, there will
not tarry one with thee this night: and that will be worse unto thee
than all the evil that befell thee from thy youth until now.

19:8 Then the king arose, and sat in the gate. And they told unto all
the people, saying, Behold, the king doth sit in the gate. And all the
people came before the king: for Israel had fled every man to his
tent.

19:9 And all the people were at strife throughout all the tribes of
Israel, saying, The king saved us out of the hand of our enemies, and
he delivered us out of the hand of the Philistines; and now he is fled
out of the land for Absalom.

19:10 And Absalom, whom we anointed over us, is dead in battle. Now
therefore why speak ye not a word of bringing the king back?  19:11
And king David sent to Zadok and to Abiathar the priests, saying,
Speak unto the elders of Judah, saying, Why are ye the last to bring
the king back to his house? seeing the speech of all Israel is come to
the king, even to his house.

19:12 Ye are my brethren, ye are my bones and my flesh: wherefore then
are ye the last to bring back the king?  19:13 And say ye to Amasa,
Art thou not of my bone, and of my flesh? God do so to me, and more
also, if thou be not captain of the host before me continually in the
room of Joab.

19:14 And he bowed the heart of all the men of Judah, even as the
heart of one man; so that they sent this word unto the king, Return
thou, and all thy servants.

19:15 So the king returned, and came to Jordan. And Judah came to
Gilgal, to go to meet the king, to conduct the king over Jordan.

19:16 And Shimei the son of Gera, a Benjamite, which was of Bahurim,
hasted and came down with the men of Judah to meet king David.

19:17 And there were a thousand men of Benjamin with him, and Ziba the
servant of the house of Saul, and his fifteen sons and his twenty
servants with him; and they went over Jordan before the king.

19:18 And there went over a ferry boat to carry over the king's
household, and to do what he thought good. And Shimei the son of Gera
fell down before the king, as he was come over Jordan; 19:19 And said
unto the king, Let not my lord impute iniquity unto me, neither do
thou remember that which thy servant did perversely the day that my
lord the king went out of Jerusalem, that the king should take it to
his heart.

19:20 For thy servant doth know that I have sinned: therefore, behold,
I am come the first this day of all the house of Joseph to go down to
meet my lord the king.

19:21 But Abishai the son of Zeruiah answered and said, Shall not
Shimei be put to death for this, because he cursed the LORD's
anointed?  19:22 And David said, What have I to do with you, ye sons
of Zeruiah, that ye should this day be adversaries unto me? shall
there any man be put to death this day in Israel? for do not I know
that I am this day king over Israel?  19:23 Therefore the king said
unto Shimei, Thou shalt not die. And the king sware unto him.

19:24 And Mephibosheth the son of Saul came down to meet the king, and
had neither dressed his feet, nor trimmed his beard, nor washed his
clothes, from the day the king departed until the day he came again in
peace.

19:25 And it came to pass, when he was come to Jerusalem to meet the
king, that the king said unto him, Wherefore wentest not thou with me,
Mephibosheth?  19:26 And he answered, My lord, O king, my servant
deceived me: for thy servant said, I will saddle me an ass, that I may
ride thereon, and go to the king; because thy servant is lame.

19:27 And he hath slandered thy servant unto my lord the king; but my
lord the king is as an angel of God: do therefore what is good in
thine eyes.

19:28 For all of my father's house were but dead men before my lord
the king: yet didst thou set thy servant among them that did eat at
thine own table. What right therefore have I yet to cry any more unto
the king?  19:29 And the king said unto him, Why speakest thou any
more of thy matters? I have said, Thou and Ziba divide the land.

19:30 And Mephibosheth said unto the king, Yea, let him take all,
forasmuch as my lord the king is come again in peace unto his own
house.

19:31 And Barzillai the Gileadite came down from Rogelim, and went
over Jordan with the king, to conduct him over Jordan.

19:32 Now Barzillai was a very aged man, even fourscore years old: and
he had provided the king of sustenance while he lay at Mahanaim; for
he was a very great man.

19:33 And the king said unto Barzillai, Come thou over with me, and I
will feed thee with me in Jerusalem.

19:34 And Barzillai said unto the king, How long have I to live, that
I should go up with the king unto Jerusalem?  19:35 I am this day
fourscore years old: and can I discern between good and evil? can thy
servant taste what I eat or what I drink? can I hear any more the
voice of singing men and singing women? wherefore then should thy
servant be yet a burden unto my lord the king?  19:36 Thy servant will
go a little way over Jordan with the king: and why should the king
recompense it me with such a reward?  19:37 Let thy servant, I pray
thee, turn back again, that I may die in mine own city, and be buried
by the grave of my father and of my mother. But behold thy servant
Chimham; let him go over with my lord the king; and do to him what
shall seem good unto thee.

19:38 And the king answered, Chimham shall go over with me, and I will
do to him that which shall seem good unto thee: and whatsoever thou
shalt require of me, that will I do for thee.

19:39 And all the people went over Jordan. And when the king was come
over, the king kissed Barzillai, and blessed him; and he returned unto
his own place.

19:40 Then the king went on to Gilgal, and Chimham went on with him:
and all the people of Judah conducted the king, and also half the
people of Israel.

19:41 And, behold, all the men of Israel came to the king, and said
unto the king, Why have our brethren the men of Judah stolen thee
away, and have brought the king, and his household, and all David's
men with him, over Jordan?  19:42 And all the men of Judah answered
the men of Israel, Because the king is near of kin to us: wherefore
then be ye angry for this matter? have we eaten at all of the king's
cost? or hath he given us any gift?  19:43 And the men of Israel
answered the men of Judah, and said, We have ten parts in the king,
and we have also more right in David than ye: why then did ye despise
us, that our advice should not be first had in bringing back our king?
And the words of the men of Judah were fiercer than the words of the
men of Israel.

20:1 And there happened to be there a man of Belial, whose name was
Sheba, the son of Bichri, a Benjamite: and he blew a trumpet, and
said, We have no part in David, neither have we inheritance in the son
of Jesse: every man to his tents, O Israel.

20:2 So every man of Israel went up from after David, and followed
Sheba the son of Bichri: but the men of Judah clave unto their king,
from Jordan even to Jerusalem.

20:3 And David came to his house at Jerusalem; and the king took the
ten women his concubines, whom he had left to keep the house, and put
them in ward, and fed them, but went not in unto them. So they were
shut up unto the day of their death, living in widowhood.

20:4 Then said the king to Amasa, Assemble me the men of Judah within
three days, and be thou here present.

20:5 So Amasa went to assemble the men of Judah: but he tarried longer
than the set time which he had appointed him.

20:6 And David said to Abishai, Now shall Sheba the son of Bichri do
us more harm than did Absalom: take thou thy lord's servants, and
pursue after him, lest he get him fenced cities, and escape us.

20:7 And there went out after him Joab's men, and the Cherethites, and
the Pelethites, and all the mighty men: and they went out of
Jerusalem, to pursue after Sheba the son of Bichri.

20:8 When they were at the great stone which is in Gibeon, Amasa went
before them. And Joab's garment that he had put on was girded unto
him, and upon it a girdle with a sword fastened upon his loins in the
sheath thereof; and as he went forth it fell out.

20:9 And Joab said to Amasa, Art thou in health, my brother? And Joab
took Amasa by the beard with the right hand to kiss him.

20:10 But Amasa took no heed to the sword that was in Joab's hand: so
he smote him therewith in the fifth rib, and shed out his bowels to
the ground, and struck him not again; and he died. So Joab and Abishai
his brother pursued after Sheba the son of Bichri.

20:11 And one of Joab's men stood by him, and said, He that favoureth
Joab, and he that is for David, let him go after Joab.

20:12 And Amasa wallowed in blood in the midst of the highway. And
when the man saw that all the people stood still, he removed Amasa out
of the highway into the field, and cast a cloth upon him, when he saw
that every one that came by him stood still.

20:13 When he was removed out of the highway, all the people went on
after Joab, to pursue after Sheba the son of Bichri.

20:14 And he went through all the tribes of Israel unto Abel, and to
Bethmaachah, and all the Berites: and they were gathered together, and
went also after him.

20:15 And they came and besieged him in Abel of Bethmaachah, and they
cast up a bank against the city, and it stood in the trench: and all
the people that were with Joab battered the wall, to throw it down.

20:16 Then cried a wise woman out of the city, Hear, hear; say, I pray
you, unto Joab, Come near hither, that I may speak with thee.

20:17 And when he was come near unto her, the woman said, Art thou
Joab?  And he answered, I am he. Then she said unto him, Hear the
words of thine handmaid. And he answered, I do hear.

20:18 Then she spake, saying, They were wont to speak in old time,
saying, They shall surely ask counsel at Abel: and so they ended the
matter.

20:19 I am one of them that are peaceable and faithful in Israel: thou
seekest to destroy a city and a mother in Israel: why wilt thou
swallow up the inheritance of the LORD?  20:20 And Joab answered and
said, Far be it, far be it from me, that I should swallow up or
destroy.

20:21 The matter is not so: but a man of mount Ephraim, Sheba the son
of Bichri by name, hath lifted up his hand against the king, even
against David: deliver him only, and I will depart from the city. And
the woman said unto Joab, Behold, his head shall be thrown to thee
over the wall.

20:22 Then the woman went unto all the people in her wisdom. And they
cut off the head of Sheba the son of Bichri, and cast it out to Joab.
And he blew a trumpet, and they retired from the city, every man to
his tent. And Joab returned to Jerusalem unto the king.

20:23 Now Joab was over all the host of Israel: and Benaiah the son of
Jehoiada was over the Cherethites and over the Pelethites: 20:24 And
Adoram was over the tribute: and Jehoshaphat the son of Ahilud was
recorder: 20:25 And Sheva was scribe: and Zadok and Abiathar were the
priests: 20:26 And Ira also the Jairite was a chief ruler about David.

21:1 Then there was a famine in the days of David three years, year
after year; and David enquired of the LORD. And the LORD answered, It
is for Saul, and for his bloody house, because he slew the Gibeonites.

21:2 And the king called the Gibeonites, and said unto them; (now the
Gibeonites were not of the children of Israel, but of the remnant of
the Amorites; and the children of Israel had sworn unto them: and Saul
sought to slay them in his zeal to the children of Israel and Judah.)
21:3 Wherefore David said unto the Gibeonites, What shall I do for
you?  and wherewith shall I make the atonement, that ye may bless the
inheritance of the LORD?  21:4 And the Gibeonites said unto him, We
will have no silver nor gold of Saul, nor of his house; neither for us
shalt thou kill any man in Israel. And he said, What ye shall say,
that will I do for you.

21:5 And they answered the king, The man that consumed us, and that
devised against us that we should be destroyed from remaining in any
of the coasts of Israel, 21:6 Let seven men of his sons be delivered
unto us, and we will hang them up unto the LORD in Gibeah of Saul,
whom the LORD did choose. And the king said, I will give them.

21:7 But the king spared Mephibosheth, the son of Jonathan the son of
Saul, because of the LORD's oath that was between them, between David
and Jonathan the son of Saul.

21:8 But the king took the two sons of Rizpah the daughter of Aiah,
whom she bare unto Saul, Armoni and Mephibosheth; and the five sons of
Michal the daughter of Saul, whom she brought up for Adriel the son of
Barzillai the Meholathite: 21:9 And he delivered them into the hands
of the Gibeonites, and they hanged them in the hill before the LORD:
and they fell all seven together, and were put to death in the days of
harvest, in the first days, in the beginning of barley harvest.

21:10 And Rizpah the daughter of Aiah took sackcloth, and spread it
for her upon the rock, from the beginning of harvest until water
dropped upon them out of heaven, and suffered neither the birds of the
air to rest on them by day, nor the beasts of the field by night.

21:11 And it was told David what Rizpah the daughter of Aiah, the
concubine of Saul, had done.

21:12 And David went and took the bones of Saul and the bones of
Jonathan his son from the men of Jabeshgilead, which had stolen them
from the street of Bethshan, where the Philistines had hanged them,
when the Philistines had slain Saul in Gilboa: 21:13 And he brought up
from thence the bones of Saul and the bones of Jonathan his son; and
they gathered the bones of them that were hanged.

21:14 And the bones of Saul and Jonathan his son buried they in the
country of Benjamin in Zelah, in the sepulchre of Kish his father: and
they performed all that the king commanded. And after that God was
intreated for the land.

21:15 Moreover the Philistines had yet war again with Israel; and
David went down, and his servants with him, and fought against the
Philistines: and David waxed faint.

21:16 And Ishbibenob, which was of the sons of the giant, the weight
of whose spear weighed three hundred shekels of brass in weight, he
being girded with a new sword, thought to have slain David.

21:17 But Abishai the son of Zeruiah succoured him, and smote the
Philistine, and killed him. Then the men of David sware unto him,
saying, Thou shalt go no more out with us to battle, that thou quench
not the light of Israel.

21:18 And it came to pass after this, that there was again a battle
with the Philistines at Gob: then Sibbechai the Hushathite slew Saph,
which was of the sons of the giant.

21:19 And there was again a battle in Gob with the Philistines, where
Elhanan the son of Jaareoregim, a Bethlehemite, slew the brother of
Goliath the Gittite, the staff of whose spear was like a weaver's
beam.

21:20 And there was yet a battle in Gath, where was a man of great
stature, that had on every hand six fingers, and on every foot six
toes, four and twenty in number; and he also was born to the giant.

21:21 And when he defied Israel, Jonathan the son of Shimeah the
brother of David slew him.

21:22 These four were born to the giant in Gath, and fell by the hand
of David, and by the hand of his servants.

22:1 And David spake unto the LORD the words of this song in the day
that the LORD had delivered him out of the hand of all his enemies,
and out of the hand of Saul: 22:2 And he said, The LORD is my rock,
and my fortress, and my deliverer; 22:3 The God of my rock; in him
will I trust: he is my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my high
tower, and my refuge, my saviour; thou savest me from violence.

22:4 I will call on the LORD, who is worthy to be praised: so shall I
be saved from mine enemies.

22:5 When the waves of death compassed me, the floods of ungodly men
made me afraid; 22:6 The sorrows of hell compassed me about; the
snares of death prevented me; 22:7 In my distress I called upon the
LORD, and cried to my God: and he did hear my voice out of his temple,
and my cry did enter into his ears.

22:8 Then the earth shook and trembled; the foundations of heaven
moved and shook, because he was wroth.

22:9 There went up a smoke out of his nostrils, and fire out of his
mouth devoured: coals were kindled by it.

22:10 He bowed the heavens also, and came down; and darkness was under
his feet.

22:11 And he rode upon a cherub, and did fly: and he was seen upon the
wings of the wind.

22:12 And he made darkness pavilions round about him, dark waters, and
thick clouds of the skies.

22:13 Through the brightness before him were coals of fire kindled.

22:14 The LORD thundered from heaven, and the most High uttered his
voice.

22:15 And he sent out arrows, and scattered them; lightning, and
discomfited them.

22:16 And the channels of the sea appeared, the foundations of the
world were discovered, at the rebuking of the LORD, at the blast of
the breath of his nostrils.

22:17 He sent from above, he took me; he drew me out of many waters;
22:18 He delivered me from my strong enemy, and from them that hated
me: for they were too strong for me.

22:19 They prevented me in the day of my calamity: but the LORD was my
stay.

22:20 He brought me forth also into a large place: he delivered me,
because he delighted in me.

22:21 The LORD rewarded me according to my righteousness: according to
the cleanness of my hands hath he recompensed me.

22:22 For I have kept the ways of the LORD, and have not wickedly
departed from my God.

22:23 For all his judgments were before me: and as for his statutes, I
did not depart from them.

22:24 I was also upright before him, and have kept myself from mine
iniquity.

22:25 Therefore the LORD hath recompensed me according to my
righteousness; according to my cleanness in his eye sight.

22:26 With the merciful thou wilt shew thyself merciful, and with the
upright man thou wilt shew thyself upright.

22:27 With the pure thou wilt shew thyself pure; and with the froward
thou wilt shew thyself unsavoury.

22:28 And the afflicted people thou wilt save: but thine eyes are upon
the haughty, that thou mayest bring them down.

22:29 For thou art my lamp, O LORD: and the LORD will lighten my
darkness.

22:30 For by thee I have run through a troop: by my God have I leaped
over a wall.

22:31 As for God, his way is perfect; the word of the LORD is tried:
he is a buckler to all them that trust in him.

22:32 For who is God, save the LORD? and who is a rock, save our God?
22:33 God is my strength and power: and he maketh my way perfect.

22:34 He maketh my feet like hinds' feet: and setteth me upon my high
places.

22:35 He teacheth my hands to war; so that a bow of steel is broken by
mine arms.

22:36 Thou hast also given me the shield of thy salvation: and thy
gentleness hath made me great.

22:37 Thou hast enlarged my steps under me; so that my feet did not
slip.

22:38 I have pursued mine enemies, and destroyed them; and turned not
again until I had consumed them.

22:39 And I have consumed them, and wounded them, that they could not
arise: yea, they are fallen under my feet.

22:40 For thou hast girded me with strength to battle: them that rose
up against me hast thou subdued under me.

22:41 Thou hast also given me the necks of mine enemies, that I might
destroy them that hate me.

22:42 They looked, but there was none to save; even unto the LORD, but
he answered them not.

22:43 Then did I beat them as small as the dust of the earth, I did
stamp them as the mire of the street, and did spread them abroad.

22:44 Thou also hast delivered me from the strivings of my people,
thou hast kept me to be head of the heathen: a people which I knew not
shall serve me.

22:45 Strangers shall submit themselves unto me: as soon as they hear,
they shall be obedient unto me.

22:46 Strangers shall fade away, and they shall be afraid out of their
close places.

22:47 The LORD liveth; and blessed be my rock; and exalted be the God
of the rock of my salvation.

22:48 It is God that avengeth me, and that bringeth down the people
under me.

22:49 And that bringeth me forth from mine enemies: thou also hast
lifted me up on high above them that rose up against me: thou hast
delivered me from the violent man.

22:50 Therefore I will give thanks unto thee, O LORD, among the
heathen, and I will sing praises unto thy name.

22:51 He is the tower of salvation for his king: and sheweth mercy to
his anointed, unto David, and to his seed for evermore.

23:1 Now these be the last words of David. David the son of Jesse
said, and the man who was raised up on high, the anointed of the God
of Jacob, and the sweet psalmist of Israel, said, 23:2 The Spirit of
the LORD spake by me, and his word was in my tongue.

23:3 The God of Israel said, the Rock of Israel spake to me, He that
ruleth over men must be just, ruling in the fear of God.

23:4 And he shall be as the light of the morning, when the sun riseth,
even a morning without clouds; as the tender grass springing out of
the earth by clear shining after rain.

23:5 Although my house be not so with God; yet he hath made with me an
everlasting covenant, ordered in all things, and sure: for this is all
my salvation, and all my desire, although he make it not to grow.

23:6 But the sons of Belial shall be all of them as thorns thrust
away, because they cannot be taken with hands: 23:7 But the man that
shall touch them must be fenced with iron and the staff of a spear;
and they shall be utterly burned with fire in the same place.

23:8 These be the names of the mighty men whom David had: The
Tachmonite that sat in the seat, chief among the captains; the same
was Adino the Eznite: he lift up his spear against eight hundred, whom
he slew at one time.

23:9 And after him was Eleazar the son of Dodo the Ahohite, one of the
three mighty men with David, when they defied the Philistines that
were there gathered together to battle, and the men of Israel were
gone away: 23:10 He arose, and smote the Philistines until his hand
was weary, and his hand clave unto the sword: and the LORD wrought a
great victory that day; and the people returned after him only to
spoil.

23:11 And after him was Shammah the son of Agee the Hararite. And the
Philistines were gathered together into a troop, where was a piece of
ground full of lentiles: and the people fled from the Philistines.

23:12 But he stood in the midst of the ground, and defended it, and
slew the Philistines: and the LORD wrought a great victory.

23:13 And three of the thirty chief went down, and came to David in
the harvest time unto the cave of Adullam: and the troop of the
Philistines pitched in the valley of Rephaim.

23:14 And David was then in an hold, and the garrison of the
Philistines was then in Bethlehem.

23:15 And David longed, and said, Oh that one would give me drink of
the water of the well of Bethlehem, which is by the gate!  23:16 And
the three mighty men brake through the host of the Philistines, and
drew water out of the well of Bethlehem, that was by the gate, and
took it, and brought it to David: nevertheless he would not drink
thereof, but poured it out unto the LORD.

23:17 And he said, Be it far from me, O LORD, that I should do this:
is not this the blood of the men that went in jeopardy of their lives?
therefore he would not drink it. These things did these three mighty
men.

23:18 And Abishai, the brother of Joab, the son of Zeruiah, was chief
among three. And he lifted up his spear against three hundred, and
slew them, and had the name among three.

23:19 Was he not most honourable of three? therefore he was their
captain: howbeit he attained not unto the first three.

23:20 And Benaiah the son of Jehoiada, the son of a valiant man, of
Kabzeel, who had done many acts, he slew two lionlike men of Moab: he
went down also and slew a lion in the midst of a pit in time of snow:
23:21 And he slew an Egyptian, a goodly man: and the Egyptian had a
spear in his hand; but he went down to him with a staff, and plucked
the spear out of the Egyptian's hand, and slew him with his own spear.

23:22 These things did Benaiah the son of Jehoiada, and had the name
among three mighty men.

23:23 He was more honourable than the thirty, but he attained not to
the first three. And David set him over his guard.

23:24 Asahel the brother of Joab was one of the thirty; Elhanan the
son of Dodo of Bethlehem, 23:25 Shammah the Harodite, Elika the
Harodite, 23:26 Helez the Paltite, Ira the son of Ikkesh the Tekoite,
23:27 Abiezer the Anethothite, Mebunnai the Hushathite, 23:28 Zalmon
the Ahohite, Maharai the Netophathite, 23:29 Heleb the son of Baanah,
a Netophathite, Ittai the son of Ribai out of Gibeah of the children
of Benjamin, 23:30 Benaiah the Pirathonite, Hiddai of the brooks of
Gaash, 23:31 Abialbon the Arbathite, Azmaveth the Barhumite, 23:32
Eliahba the Shaalbonite, of the sons of Jashen, Jonathan, 23:33
Shammah the Hararite, Ahiam the son of Sharar the Hararite, 23:34
Eliphelet the son of Ahasbai, the son of the Maachathite, Eliam the
son of Ahithophel the Gilonite, 23:35 Hezrai the Carmelite, Paarai the
Arbite, 23:36 Igal the son of Nathan of Zobah, Bani the Gadite, 23:37
Zelek the Ammonite, Nahari the Beerothite, armourbearer to Joab the
son of Zeruiah, 23:38 Ira an Ithrite, Gareb an Ithrite, 23:39 Uriah
the Hittite: thirty and seven in all.

24:1 And again the anger of the LORD was kindled against Israel, and
he moved David against them to say, Go, number Israel and Judah.

24:2 For the king said to Joab the captain of the host, which was with
him, Go now through all the tribes of Israel, from Dan even to
Beersheba, and number ye the people, that I may know the number of the
people.

24:3 And Joab said unto the king, Now the LORD thy God add unto the
people, how many soever they be, an hundredfold, and that the eyes of
my lord the king may see it: but why doth my lord the king delight in
this thing?  24:4 Notwithstanding the king's word prevailed against
Joab, and against the captains of the host. And Joab and the captains
of the host went out from the presence of the king, to number the
people of Israel.

24:5 And they passed over Jordan, and pitched in Aroer, on the right
side of the city that lieth in the midst of the river of Gad, and
toward Jazer: 24:6 Then they came to Gilead, and to the land of
Tahtimhodshi; and they came to Danjaan, and about to Zidon, 24:7 And
came to the strong hold of Tyre, and to all the cities of the Hivites,
and of the Canaanites: and they went out to the south of Judah, even
to Beersheba.

24:8 So when they had gone through all the land, they came to
Jerusalem at the end of nine months and twenty days.

24:9 And Joab gave up the sum of the number of the people unto the
king: and there were in Israel eight hundred thousand valiant men that
drew the sword; and the men of Judah were five hundred thousand men.

24:10 And David's heart smote him after that he had numbered the
people.

And David said unto the LORD, I have sinned greatly in that I have
done: and now, I beseech thee, O LORD, take away the iniquity of thy
servant; for I have done very foolishly.

24:11 For when David was up in the morning, the word of the LORD came
unto the prophet Gad, David's seer, saying, 24:12 Go and say unto
David, Thus saith the LORD, I offer thee three things; choose thee one
of them, that I may do it unto thee.

24:13 So Gad came to David, and told him, and said unto him, Shall
seven years of famine come unto thee in thy land? or wilt thou flee
three months before thine enemies, while they pursue thee? or that
there be three days' pestilence in thy land? now advise, and see what
answer I shall return to him that sent me.

24:14 And David said unto Gad, I am in a great strait: let us fall now
into the hand of the LORD; for his mercies are great: and let me not
fall into the hand of man.

24:15 So the LORD sent a pestilence upon Israel from the morning even
to the time appointed: and there died of the people from Dan even to
Beersheba seventy thousand men.

24:16 And when the angel stretched out his hand upon Jerusalem to
destroy it, the LORD repented him of the evil, and said to the angel
that destroyed the people, It is enough: stay now thine hand. And the
angel of the LORD was by the threshingplace of Araunah the Jebusite.

24:17 And David spake unto the LORD when he saw the angel that smote
the people, and said, Lo, I have sinned, and I have done wickedly: but
these sheep, what have they done? let thine hand, I pray thee, be
against me, and against my father's house.

24:18 And Gad came that day to David, and said unto him, Go up, rear
an altar unto the LORD in the threshingfloor of Araunah the Jebusite.

24:19 And David, according to the saying of Gad, went up as the LORD
commanded.

24:20 And Araunah looked, and saw the king and his servants coming on
toward him: and Araunah went out, and bowed himself before the king on
his face upon the ground.

24:21 And Araunah said, Wherefore is my lord the king come to his
servant?  And David said, To buy the threshingfloor of thee, to build
an altar unto the LORD, that the plague may be stayed from the people.

24:22 And Araunah said unto David, Let my lord the king take and offer
up what seemeth good unto him: behold, here be oxen for burnt
sacrifice, and threshing instruments and other instruments of the oxen
for wood.

24:23 All these things did Araunah, as a king, give unto the king. And
Araunah said unto the king, The LORD thy God accept thee.

24:24 And the king said unto Araunah, Nay; but I will surely buy it of
thee at a price: neither will I offer burnt offerings unto the LORD my
God of that which doth cost me nothing. So David bought the
threshingfloor and the oxen for fifty shekels of silver.

24:25 And David built there an altar unto the LORD, and offered burnt
offerings and peace offerings. So the LORD was intreated for the land,
and the plague was stayed from Israel.




The First Book of the Kings

Commonly Called:

The Third Book of the Kings


1:1 Now king David was old and stricken in years; and they covered
him with clothes, but he gat no heat.

1:2 Wherefore his servants said unto him, Let there be sought for my
lord the king a young virgin: and let her stand before the king, and
let her cherish him, and let her lie in thy bosom, that my lord the
king may get heat.

1:3 So they sought for a fair damsel throughout all the coasts of
Israel, and found Abishag a Shunammite, and brought her to the king.

1:4 And the damsel was very fair, and cherished the king, and
ministered to him: but the king knew her not.

1:5 Then Adonijah the son of Haggith exalted himself, saying, I will
be king: and he prepared him chariots and horsemen, and fifty men to
run before him.

1:6 And his father had not displeased him at any time in saying, Why
hast thou done so? and he also was a very goodly man; and his mother
bare him after Absalom.

1:7 And he conferred with Joab the son of Zeruiah, and with Abiathar
the priest: and they following Adonijah helped him.

1:8 But Zadok the priest, and Benaiah the son of Jehoiada, and Nathan
the prophet, and Shimei, and Rei, and the mighty men which belonged to
David, were not with Adonijah.

1:9 And Adonijah slew sheep and oxen and fat cattle by the stone of
Zoheleth, which is by Enrogel, and called all his brethren the king's
sons, and all the men of Judah the king's servants: 1:10 But Nathan
the prophet, and Benaiah, and the mighty men, and Solomon his brother,
he called not.

1:11 Wherefore Nathan spake unto Bathsheba the mother of Solomon,
saying, Hast thou not heard that Adonijah the son of Haggith doth
reign, and David our lord knoweth it not?  1:12 Now therefore come,
let me, I pray thee, give thee counsel, that thou mayest save thine
own life, and the life of thy son Solomon.

1:13 Go and get thee in unto king David, and say unto him, Didst not
thou, my lord, O king, swear unto thine handmaid, saying, Assuredly
Solomon thy son shall reign after me, and he shall sit upon my throne?
why then doth Adonijah reign?  1:14 Behold, while thou yet talkest
there with the king, I also will come in after thee, and confirm thy
words.

1:15 And Bathsheba went in unto the king into the chamber: and the
king was very old; and Abishag the Shunammite ministered unto the
king.

1:16 And Bathsheba bowed, and did obeisance unto the king. And the
king said, What wouldest thou?  1:17 And she said unto him, My lord,
thou swarest by the LORD thy God unto thine handmaid, saying,
Assuredly Solomon thy son shall reign after me, and he shall sit upon
my throne.

1:18 And now, behold, Adonijah reigneth; and now, my lord the king,
thou knowest it not: 1:19 And he hath slain oxen and fat cattle and
sheep in abundance, and hath called all the sons of the king, and
Abiathar the priest, and Joab the captain of the host: but Solomon thy
servant hath he not called.

1:20 And thou, my lord, O king, the eyes of all Israel are upon thee,
that thou shouldest tell them who shall sit on the throne of my lord
the king after him.

1:21 Otherwise it shall come to pass, when my lord the king shall
sleep with his fathers, that I and my son Solomon shall be counted
offenders.

1:22 And, lo, while she yet talked with the king, Nathan the prophet
also came in.

1:23 And they told the king, saying, Behold Nathan the prophet. And
when he was come in before the king, he bowed himself before the king
with his face to the ground.

1:24 And Nathan said, My lord, O king, hast thou said, Adonijah shall
reign after me, and he shall sit upon my throne?  1:25 For he is gone
down this day, and hath slain oxen and fat cattle and sheep in
abundance, and hath called all the king's sons, and the captains of
the host, and Abiathar the priest; and, behold, they eat and drink
before him, and say, God save king Adonijah.

1:26 But me, even me thy servant, and Zadok the priest, and Benaiah
the son of Jehoiada, and thy servant Solomon, hath he not called.

1:27 Is this thing done by my lord the king, and thou hast not shewed
it unto thy servant, who should sit on the throne of my lord the king
after him?  1:28 Then king David answered and said, Call me Bathsheba.
And she came into the king's presence, and stood before the king.

1:29 And the king sware, and said, As the LORD liveth, that hath
redeemed my soul out of all distress, 1:30 Even as I sware unto thee
by the LORD God of Israel, saying, Assuredly Solomon thy son shall
reign after me, and he shall sit upon my throne in my stead; even so
will I certainly do this day.

1:31 Then Bathsheba bowed with her face to the earth, and did
reverence to the king, and said, Let my lord king David live for ever.

1:32 And king David said, Call me Zadok the priest, and Nathan the
prophet, and Benaiah the son of Jehoiada. And they came before the
king.

1:33 The king also said unto them, Take with you the servants of your
lord, and cause Solomon my son to ride upon mine own mule, and bring
him down to Gihon: 1:34 And let Zadok the priest and Nathan the
prophet anoint him there king over Israel: and blow ye with the
trumpet, and say, God save king Solomon.

1:35 Then ye shall come up after him, that he may come and sit upon my
throne; for he shall be king in my stead: and I have appointed him to
be ruler over Israel and over Judah.

1:36 And Benaiah the son of Jehoiada answered the king, and said,
Amen: the LORD God of my lord the king say so too.

1:37 As the LORD hath been with my lord the king, even so be he with
Solomon, and make his throne greater than the throne of my lord king
David.

1:38 So Zadok the priest, and Nathan the prophet, and Benaiah the son
of Jehoiada, and the Cherethites, and the Pelethites, went down, and
caused Solomon to ride upon king David's mule, and brought him to
Gihon.

1:39 And Zadok the priest took an horn of oil out of the tabernacle,
and anointed Solomon. And they blew the trumpet; and all the people
said, God save king Solomon.

1:40 And all the people came up after him, and the people piped with
pipes, and rejoiced with great joy, so that the earth rent with the
sound of them.

1:41 And Adonijah and all the guests that were with him heard it as
they had made an end of eating. And when Joab heard the sound of the
trumpet, he said, Wherefore is this noise of the city being in an
uproar?  1:42 And while he yet spake, behold, Jonathan the son of
Abiathar the priest came; and Adonijah said unto him, Come in; for
thou art a valiant man, and bringest good tidings.

1:43 And Jonathan answered and said to Adonijah, Verily our lord king
David hath made Solomon king.

1:44 And the king hath sent with him Zadok the priest, and Nathan the
prophet, and Benaiah the son of Jehoiada, and the Cherethites, and the
Pelethites, and they have caused him to ride upon the king's mule:
1:45 And Zadok the priest and Nathan the prophet have anointed him
king in Gihon: and they are come up from thence rejoicing, so that the
city rang again. This is the noise that ye have heard.

1:46 And also Solomon sitteth on the throne of the kingdom.

1:47 And moreover the king's servants came to bless our lord king
David, saying, God make the name of Solomon better than thy name, and
make his throne greater than thy throne. And the king bowed himself
upon the bed.

1:48 And also thus said the king, Blessed be the LORD God of Israel,
which hath given one to sit on my throne this day, mine eyes even
seeing it.

1:49 And all the guests that were with Adonijah were afraid, and rose
up, and went every man his way.

1:50 And Adonijah feared because of Solomon, and arose, and went, and
caught hold on the horns of the altar.

1:51 And it was told Solomon, saying, Behold, Adonijah feareth king
Solomon: for, lo, he hath caught hold on the horns of the altar,
saying, Let king Solomon swear unto me today that he will not slay his
servant with the sword.

1:52 And Solomon said, If he will shew himself a worthy man, there
shall not an hair of him fall to the earth: but if wickedness shall be
found in him, he shall die.

1:53 So king Solomon sent, and they brought him down from the altar.
And he came and bowed himself to king Solomon: and Solomon said unto
him, Go to thine house.

2:1 Now the days of David drew nigh that he should die; and he charged
Solomon his son, saying, 2:2 I go the way of all the earth: be thou
strong therefore, and shew thyself a man; 2:3 And keep the charge of
the LORD thy God, to walk in his ways, to keep his statutes, and his
commandments, and his judgments, and his testimonies, as it is written
in the law of Moses, that thou mayest prosper in all that thou doest,
and whithersoever thou turnest thyself: 2:4 That the LORD may continue
his word which he spake concerning me, saying, If thy children take
heed to their way, to walk before me in truth with all their heart and
with all their soul, there shall not fail thee (said he) a man on the
throne of Israel.

2:5 Moreover thou knowest also what Joab the son of Zeruiah did to me,
and what he did to the two captains of the hosts of Israel, unto Abner
the son of Ner, and unto Amasa the son of Jether, whom he slew, and
shed the blood of war in peace, and put the blood of war upon his
girdle that was about his loins, and in his shoes that were on his
feet.

2:6 Do therefore according to thy wisdom, and let not his hoar head go
down to the grave in peace.

2:7 But shew kindness unto the sons of Barzillai the Gileadite, and
let them be of those that eat at thy table: for so they came to me
when I fled because of Absalom thy brother.

2:8 And, behold, thou hast with thee Shimei the son of Gera, a
Benjamite of Bahurim, which cursed me with a grievous curse in the day
when I went to Mahanaim: but he came down to meet me at Jordan, and I
sware to him by the LORD, saying, I will not put thee to death with
the sword.

2:9 Now therefore hold him not guiltless: for thou art a wise man, and
knowest what thou oughtest to do unto him; but his hoar head bring
thou down to the grave with blood.

2:10 So David slept with his fathers, and was buried in the city of
David.

2:11 And the days that David reigned over Israel were forty years:
seven years reigned he in Hebron, and thirty and three years reigned
he in Jerusalem.

2:12 Then sat Solomon upon the throne of David his father; and his
kingdom was established greatly.

2:13 And Adonijah the son of Haggith came to Bathsheba the mother of
Solomon. And she said, Comest thou peaceably? And he said, Peaceably.

2:14 He said moreover, I have somewhat to say unto thee. And she said,
Say on.

2:15 And he said, Thou knowest that the kingdom was mine, and that all
Israel set their faces on me, that I should reign: howbeit the kingdom
is turned about, and is become my brother's: for it was his from the
LORD.

2:16 And now I ask one petition of thee, deny me not. And she said
unto him, Say on.

2:17 And he said, Speak, I pray thee, unto Solomon the king, (for he
will not say thee nay,) that he give me Abishag the Shunammite to
wife.

2:18 And Bathsheba said, Well; I will speak for thee unto the king.

2:19 Bathsheba therefore went unto king Solomon, to speak unto him for
Adonijah. And the king rose up to meet her, and bowed himself unto
her, and sat down on his throne, and caused a seat to be set for the
king's mother; and she sat on his right hand.

2:20 Then she said, I desire one small petition of thee; I pray thee,
say me not nay. And the king said unto her, Ask on, my mother: for I
will not say thee nay.

2:21 And she said, Let Abishag the Shunammite be given to Adonijah thy
brother to wife.

2:22 And king Solomon answered and said unto his mother, And why dost
thou ask Abishag the Shunammite for Adonijah? ask for him the kingdom
also; for he is mine elder brother; even for him, and for Abiathar the
priest, and for Joab the son of Zeruiah.

2:23 Then king Solomon sware by the LORD, saying, God do so to me, and
more also, if Adonijah have not spoken this word against his own life.

2:24 Now therefore, as the LORD liveth, which hath established me, and
set me on the throne of David my father, and who hath made me an
house, as he promised, Adonijah shall be put to death this day.

2:25 And king Solomon sent by the hand of Benaiah the son of Jehoiada;
and he fell upon him that he died.

2:26 And unto Abiathar the priest said the king, Get thee to Anathoth,
unto thine own fields; for thou art worthy of death: but I will not at
this time put thee to death, because thou barest the ark of the LORD
God before David my father, and because thou hast been afflicted in
all wherein my father was afflicted.

2:27 So Solomon thrust out Abiathar from being priest unto the LORD;
that he might fulfil the word of the LORD, which he spake concerning
the house of Eli in Shiloh.

2:28 Then tidings came to Joab: for Joab had turned after Adonijah,
though he turned not after Absalom. And Joab fled unto the tabernacle
of the LORD, and caught hold on the horns of the altar.

2:29 And it was told king Solomon that Joab was fled unto the
tabernacle of the LORD; and, behold, he is by the altar. Then Solomon
sent Benaiah the son of Jehoiada, saying, Go, fall upon him.

2:30 And Benaiah came to the tabernacle of the LORD, and said unto
him, Thus saith the king, Come forth. And he said, Nay; but I will die
here. And Benaiah brought the king word again, saying, Thus said Joab,
and thus he answered me.

2:31 And the king said unto him, Do as he hath said, and fall upon
him, and bury him; that thou mayest take away the innocent blood,
which Joab shed, from me, and from the house of my father.

2:32 And the LORD shall return his blood upon his own head, who fell
upon two men more righteous and better than he, and slew them with the
sword, my father David not knowing thereof, to wit, Abner the son of
Ner, captain of the host of Israel, and Amasa the son of Jether,
captain of the host of Judah.

2:33 Their blood shall therefore return upon the head of Joab, and
upon the head of his seed for ever: but upon David, and upon his seed,
and upon his house, and upon his throne, shall there be peace for ever
from the LORD.

2:34 So Benaiah the son of Jehoiada went up, and fell upon him, and
slew him: and he was buried in his own house in the wilderness.

2:35 And the king put Benaiah the son of Jehoiada in his room over the
host: and Zadok the priest did the king put in the room of Abiathar.

2:36 And the king sent and called for Shimei, and said unto him, Build
thee an house in Jerusalem, and dwell there, and go not forth thence
any whither.

2:37 For it shall be, that on the day thou goest out, and passest over
the brook Kidron, thou shalt know for certain that thou shalt surely
die: thy blood shall be upon thine own head.

2:38 And Shimei said unto the king, The saying is good: as my lord the
king hath said, so will thy servant do. And Shimei dwelt in Jerusalem
many days.

2:39 And it came to pass at the end of three years, that two of the
servants of Shimei ran away unto Achish son of Maachah king of Gath.
And they told Shimei, saying, Behold, thy servants be in Gath.

2:40 And Shimei arose, and saddled his ass, and went to Gath to Achish
to seek his servants: and Shimei went, and brought his servants from
Gath.

2:41 And it was told Solomon that Shimei had gone from Jerusalem to
Gath, and was come again.

2:42 And the king sent and called for Shimei, and said unto him, Did I
not make thee to swear by the LORD, and protested unto thee, saying,
Know for a certain, on the day thou goest out, and walkest abroad any
whither, that thou shalt surely die? and thou saidst unto me, The word
that I have heard is good.

2:43 Why then hast thou not kept the oath of the LORD, and the
commandment that I have charged thee with?  2:44 The king said
moreover to Shimei, Thou knowest all the wickedness which thine heart
is privy to, that thou didst to David my father: therefore the LORD
shall return thy wickedness upon thine own head; 2:45 And king Solomon
shall be blessed, and the throne of David shall be established before
the LORD for ever.

2:46 So the king commanded Benaiah the son of Jehoiada; which went
out, and fell upon him, that he died. And the kingdom was established
in the hand of Solomon.

3:1 And Solomon made affinity with Pharaoh king of Egypt, and took
Pharaoh's daughter, and brought her into the city of David, until he
had made an end of building his own house, and the house of the LORD,
and the wall of Jerusalem round about.

3:2 Only the people sacrificed in high places, because there was no
house built unto the name of the LORD, until those days.

3:3 And Solomon loved the LORD, walking in the statutes of David his
father: only he sacrificed and burnt incense in high places.

3:4 And the king went to Gibeon to sacrifice there; for that was the
great high place: a thousand burnt offerings did Solomon offer upon
that altar.

3:5 In Gibeon the LORD appeared to Solomon in a dream by night: and
God said, Ask what I shall give thee.

3:6 And Solomon said, Thou hast shewed unto thy servant David my
father great mercy, according as he walked before thee in truth, and
in righteousness, and in uprightness of heart with thee; and thou hast
kept for him this great kindness, that thou hast given him a son to
sit on his throne, as it is this day.

3:7 And now, O LORD my God, thou hast made thy servant king instead of
David my father: and I am but a little child: I know not how to go out
or come in.

3:8 And thy servant is in the midst of thy people which thou hast
chosen, a great people, that cannot be numbered nor counted for
multitude.

3:9 Give therefore thy servant an understanding heart to judge thy
people, that I may discern between good and bad: for who is able to
judge this thy so great a people?  3:10 And the speech pleased the
LORD, that Solomon had asked this thing.

3:11 And God said unto him, Because thou hast asked this thing, and
hast not asked for thyself long life; neither hast asked riches for
thyself, nor hast asked the life of thine enemies; but hast asked for
thyself understanding to discern judgment; 3:12 Behold, I have done
according to thy words: lo, I have given thee a wise and an
understanding heart; so that there was none like thee before thee,
neither after thee shall any arise like unto thee.

3:13 And I have also given thee that which thou hast not asked, both
riches, and honour: so that there shall not be any among the kings
like unto thee all thy days.

3:14 And if thou wilt walk in my ways, to keep my statutes and my
commandments, as thy father David did walk, then I will lengthen thy
days.

3:15 And Solomon awoke; and, behold, it was a dream. And he came to
Jerusalem, and stood before the ark of the covenant of the LORD, and
offered up burnt offerings, and offered peace offerings, and made a
feast to all his servants.

3:16 Then came there two women, that were harlots, unto the king, and
stood before him.

3:17 And the one woman said, O my lord, I and this woman dwell in one
house; and I was delivered of a child with her in the house.

3:18 And it came to pass the third day after that I was delivered,
that this woman was delivered also: and we were together; there was no
stranger with us in the house, save we two in the house.

3:19 And this woman's child died in the night; because she overlaid
it.

3:20 And she arose at midnight, and took my son from beside me, while
thine handmaid slept, and laid it in her bosom, and laid her dead
child in my bosom.

3:21 And when I rose in the morning to give my child suck, behold, it
was dead: but when I had considered it in the morning, behold, it was
not my son, which I did bear.

3:22 And the other woman said, Nay; but the living is my son, and the
dead is thy son. And this said, No; but the dead is thy son, and the
living is my son. Thus they spake before the king.

3:23 Then said the king, The one saith, This is my son that liveth,
and thy son is the dead: and the other saith, Nay; but thy son is the
dead, and my son is the living.

3:24 And the king said, Bring me a sword. And they brought a sword
before the king.

3:25 And the king said, Divide the living child in two, and give half
to the one, and half to the other.

3:26 Then spake the woman whose the living child was unto the king,
for her bowels yearned upon her son, and she said, O my lord, give her
the living child, and in no wise slay it. But the other said, Let it
be neither mine nor thine, but divide it.

3:27 Then the king answered and said, Give her the living child, and
in no wise slay it: she is the mother thereof.

3:28 And all Israel heard of the judgment which the king had judged;
and they feared the king: for they saw that the wisdom of God was in
him, to do judgment.

4:1 So king Solomon was king over all Israel.

4:2 And these were the princes which he had; Azariah the son of Zadok
the priest, 4:3 Elihoreph and Ahiah, the sons of Shisha, scribes;
Jehoshaphat the son of Ahilud, the recorder.

4:4 And Benaiah the son of Jehoiada was over the host: and Zadok and
Abiathar were the priests: 4:5 And Azariah the son of Nathan was over
the officers: and Zabud the son of Nathan was principal officer, and
the king's friend: 4:6 And Ahishar was over the household: and
Adoniram the son of Abda was over the tribute.

4:7 And Solomon had twelve officers over all Israel, which provided
victuals for the king and his household: each man his month in a year
made provision.

4:8 And these are their names: The son of Hur, in mount Ephraim: 4:9
The son of Dekar, in Makaz, and in Shaalbim, and Bethshemesh, and
Elonbethhanan: 4:10 The son of Hesed, in Aruboth; to him pertained
Sochoh, and all the land of Hepher: 4:11 The son of Abinadab, in all
the region of Dor; which had Taphath the daughter of Solomon to wife:
4:12 Baana the son of Ahilud; to him pertained Taanach and Megiddo,
and all Bethshean, which is by Zartanah beneath Jezreel, from
Bethshean to Abelmeholah, even unto the place that is beyond Jokneam:
4:13 The son of Geber, in Ramothgilead; to him pertained the towns of
Jair the son of Manasseh, which are in Gilead; to him also pertained
the region of Argob, which is in Bashan, threescore great cities with
walls and brasen bars: 4:14 Ahinadab the son of Iddo had Mahanaim:
4:15 Ahimaaz was in Naphtali; he also took Basmath the daughter of
Solomon to wife: 4:16 Baanah the son of Hushai was in Asher and in
Aloth: 4:17 Jehoshaphat the son of Paruah, in Issachar: 4:18 Shimei
the son of Elah, in Benjamin: 4:19 Geber the son of Uri was in the
country of Gilead, in the country of Sihon king of the Amorites, and
of Og king of Bashan; and he was the only officer which was in the
land.

4:20 Judah and Israel were many, as the sand which is by the sea in
multitude, eating and drinking, and making merry.

4:21 And Solomon reigned over all kingdoms from the river unto the
land of the Philistines, and unto the border of Egypt: they brought
presents, and served Solomon all the days of his life.

4:22 And Solomon's provision for one day was thirty measures of fine
flour, and threescore measures of meal, 4:23 Ten fat oxen, and twenty
oxen out of the pastures, and an hundred sheep, beside harts, and
roebucks, and fallowdeer, and fatted fowl.

4:24 For he had dominion over all the region on this side the river,
from Tiphsah even to Azzah, over all the kings on this side the river:
and he had peace on all sides round about him.

4:25 And Judah and Israel dwelt safely, every man under his vine and
under his fig tree, from Dan even to Beersheba, all the days of
Solomon.

4:26 And Solomon had forty thousand stalls of horses for his chariots,
and twelve thousand horsemen.

4:27 And those officers provided victual for king Solomon, and for all
that came unto king Solomon's table, every man in his month: they
lacked nothing.

4:28 Barley also and straw for the horses and dromedaries brought they
unto the place where the officers were, every man according to his
charge.

4:29 And God gave Solomon wisdom and understanding exceeding much, and
largeness of heart, even as the sand that is on the sea shore.

4:30 And Solomon's wisdom excelled the wisdom of all the children of
the east country, and all the wisdom of Egypt.

4:31 For he was wiser than all men; than Ethan the Ezrahite, and
Heman, and Chalcol, and Darda, the sons of Mahol: and his fame was in
all nations round about.

4:32 And he spake three thousand proverbs: and his songs were a
thousand and five.

4:33 And he spake of trees, from the cedar tree that is in Lebanon
even unto the hyssop that springeth out of the wall: he spake also of
beasts, and of fowl, and of creeping things, and of fishes.

4:34 And there came of all people to hear the wisdom of Solomon, from
all kings of the earth, which had heard of his wisdom.

5:1 And Hiram king of Tyre sent his servants unto Solomon; for he had
heard that they had anointed him king in the room of his father: for
Hiram was ever a lover of David.

5:2 And Solomon sent to Hiram, saying, 5:3 Thou knowest how that David
my father could not build an house unto the name of the LORD his God
for the wars which were about him on every side, until the LORD put
them under the soles of his feet.

5:4 But now the LORD my God hath given me rest on every side, so that
there is neither adversary nor evil occurrent.

5:5 And, behold, I purpose to build an house unto the name of the LORD
my God, as the LORD spake unto David my father, saying, Thy son, whom
I will set upon thy throne in thy room, he shall build an house unto
my name.

5:6 Now therefore command thou that they hew me cedar trees out of
Lebanon; and my servants shall be with thy servants: and unto thee
will I give hire for thy servants according to all that thou shalt
appoint: for thou knowest that there is not among us any that can
skill to hew timber like unto the Sidonians.

5:7 And it came to pass, when Hiram heard the words of Solomon, that
he rejoiced greatly, and said, Blessed be the LORD this day, which
hath given unto David a wise son over this great people.

5:8 And Hiram sent to Solomon, saying, I have considered the things
which thou sentest to me for: and I will do all thy desire concerning
timber of cedar, and concerning timber of fir.

5:9 My servants shall bring them down from Lebanon unto the sea: and I
will convey them by sea in floats unto the place that thou shalt
appoint me, and will cause them to be discharged there, and thou shalt
receive them: and thou shalt accomplish my desire, in giving food for
my household.

5:10 So Hiram gave Solomon cedar trees and fir trees according to all
his desire.

5:11 And Solomon gave Hiram twenty thousand measures of wheat for food
to his household, and twenty measures of pure oil: thus gave Solomon
to Hiram year by year.

5:12 And the LORD gave Solomon wisdom, as he promised him: and there
was peace between Hiram and Solomon; and they two made a league
together.

5:13 And king Solomon raised a levy out of all Israel; and the levy
was thirty thousand men.

5:14 And he sent them to Lebanon, ten thousand a month by courses: a
month they were in Lebanon, and two months at home: and Adoniram was
over the levy.

5:15 And Solomon had threescore and ten thousand that bare burdens,
and fourscore thousand hewers in the mountains; 5:16 Beside the chief
of Solomon's officers which were over the work, three thousand and
three hundred, which ruled over the people that wrought in the work.

5:17 And the king commanded, and they brought great stones, costly
stones, and hewed stones, to lay the foundation of the house.

5:18 And Solomon's builders and Hiram's builders did hew them, and the
stonesquarers: so they prepared timber and stones to build the house.

6:1 And it came to pass in the four hundred and eightieth year after
the children of Israel were come out of the land of Egypt, in the
fourth year of Solomon's reign over Israel, in the month Zif, which is
the second month, that he began to build the house of the LORD.

6:2 And the house which king Solomon built for the LORD, the length
thereof was threescore cubits, and the breadth thereof twenty cubits,
and the height thereof thirty cubits.

6:3 And the porch before the temple of the house, twenty cubits was
the length thereof, according to the breadth of the house; and ten
cubits was the breadth thereof before the house.

6:4 And for the house he made windows of narrow lights.

6:5 And against the wall of the house he built chambers round about,
against the walls of the house round about, both of the temple and of
the oracle: and he made chambers round about: 6:6 The nethermost
chamber was five cubits broad, and the middle was six cubits broad,
and the third was seven cubits broad: for without in the wall of the
house he made narrowed rests round about, that the beams should not be
fastened in the walls of the house.

6:7 And the house, when it was in building, was built of stone made
ready before it was brought thither: so that there was neither hammer
nor axe nor any tool of iron heard in the house, while it was in
building.

6:8 The door for the middle chamber was in the right side of the
house: and they went up with winding stairs into the middle chamber,
and out of the middle into the third.

6:9 So he built the house, and finished it; and covered the house with
beams and boards of cedar.

6:10 And then he built chambers against all the house, five cubits
high: and they rested on the house with timber of cedar.

6:11 And the word of the LORD came to Solomon, saying, 6:12 Concerning
this house which thou art in building, if thou wilt walk in my
statutes, and execute my judgments, and keep all my commandments to
walk in them; then will I perform my word with thee, which I spake
unto David thy father: 6:13 And I will dwell among the children of
Israel, and will not forsake my people Israel.

6:14 So Solomon built the house, and finished it.

6:15 And he built the walls of the house within with boards of cedar,
both the floor of the house, and the walls of the ceiling: and he
covered them on the inside with wood, and covered the floor of the
house with planks of fir.

6:16 And he built twenty cubits on the sides of the house, both the
floor and the walls with boards of cedar: he even built them for it
within, even for the oracle, even for the most holy place.

6:17 And the house, that is, the temple before it, was forty cubits
long.

6:18 And the cedar of the house within was carved with knops and open
flowers: all was cedar; there was no stone seen.

6:19 And the oracle he prepared in the house within, to set there the
ark of the covenant of the LORD.

6:20 And the oracle in the forepart was twenty cubits in length, and
twenty cubits in breadth, and twenty cubits in the height thereof: and
he overlaid it with pure gold; and so covered the altar which was of
cedar.

6:21 So Solomon overlaid the house within with pure gold: and he made
a partition by the chains of gold before the oracle; and he overlaid
it with gold.

6:22 And the whole house he overlaid with gold, until he had finished
all the house: also the whole altar that was by the oracle he overlaid
with gold.

6:23 And within the oracle he made two cherubims of olive tree, each
ten cubits high.

6:24 And five cubits was the one wing of the cherub, and five cubits
the other wing of the cherub: from the uttermost part of the one wing
unto the uttermost part of the other were ten cubits.

6:25 And the other cherub was ten cubits: both the cherubims were of
one measure and one size.

6:26 The height of the one cherub was ten cubits, and so was it of the
other cherub.

6:27 And he set the cherubims within the inner house: and they
stretched forth the wings of the cherubims, so that the wing of the
one touched the one wall, and the wing of the other cherub touched the
other wall; and their wings touched one another in the midst of the
house.

6:28 And he overlaid the cherubims with gold.

6:29 And he carved all the walls of the house round about with carved
figures of cherubims and palm trees and open flowers, within and
without.

6:30 And the floors of the house he overlaid with gold, within and
without.

6:31 And for the entering of the oracle he made doors of olive tree:
the lintel and side posts were a fifth part of the wall.

6:32 The two doors also were of olive tree; and he carved upon them
carvings of cherubims and palm trees and open flowers, and overlaid
them with gold, and spread gold upon the cherubims, and upon the palm
trees.

6:33 So also made he for the door of the temple posts of olive tree, a
fourth part of the wall.

6:34 And the two doors were of fir tree: the two leaves of the one
door were folding, and the two leaves of the other door were folding.

6:35 And he carved thereon cherubims and palm trees and open flowers:
and covered them with gold fitted upon the carved work.

6:36 And he built the inner court with three rows of hewed stone, and
a row of cedar beams.

6:37 In the fourth year was the foundation of the house of the LORD
laid, in the month Zif: 6:38 And in the eleventh year, in the month
Bul, which is the eighth month, was the house finished throughout all
the parts thereof, and according to all the fashion of it. So was he
seven years in building it.

7:1 But Solomon was building his own house thirteen years, and he
finished all his house.

7:2 He built also the house of the forest of Lebanon; the length
thereof was an hundred cubits, and the breadth thereof fifty cubits,
and the height thereof thirty cubits, upon four rows of cedar pillars,
with cedar beams upon the pillars.

7:3 And it was covered with cedar above upon the beams, that lay on
forty five pillars, fifteen in a row.

7:4 And there were windows in three rows, and light was against light
in three ranks.

7:5 And all the doors and posts were square, with the windows: and
light was against light in three ranks.

7:6 And he made a porch of pillars; the length thereof was fifty
cubits, and the breadth thereof thirty cubits: and the porch was
before them: and the other pillars and the thick beam were before
them.

7:7 Then he made a porch for the throne where he might judge, even the
porch of judgment: and it was covered with cedar from one side of the
floor to the other.

7:8 And his house where he dwelt had another court within the porch,
which was of the like work. Solomon made also an house for Pharaoh's
daughter, whom he had taken to wife, like unto this porch.

7:9 All these were of costly stones, according to the measures of
hewed stones, sawed with saws, within and without, even from the
foundation unto the coping, and so on the outside toward the great
court.

7:10 And the foundation was of costly stones, even great stones,
stones of ten cubits, and stones of eight cubits.

7:11 And above were costly stones, after the measures of hewed stones,
and cedars.

7:12 And the great court round about was with three rows of hewed
stones, and a row of cedar beams, both for the inner court of the
house of the LORD, and for the porch of the house.

7:13 And king Solomon sent and fetched Hiram out of Tyre.

7:14 He was a widow's son of the tribe of Naphtali, and his father was
a man of Tyre, a worker in brass: and he was filled with wisdom, and
understanding, and cunning to work all works in brass. And he came to
king Solomon, and wrought all his work.

7:15 For he cast two pillars of brass, of eighteen cubits high apiece:
and a line of twelve cubits did compass either of them about.

7:16 And he made two chapiters of molten brass, to set upon the tops
of the pillars: the height of the one chapiter was five cubits, and
the height of the other chapiter was five cubits: 7:17 And nets of
checker work, and wreaths of chain work, for the chapiters which were
upon the top of the pillars; seven for the one chapiter, and seven for
the other chapiter.

7:18 And he made the pillars, and two rows round about upon the one
network, to cover the chapiters that were upon the top, with
pomegranates: and so did he for the other chapiter.

7:19 And the chapiters that were upon the top of the pillars were of
lily work in the porch, four cubits.

7:20 And the chapiters upon the two pillars had pomegranates also
above, over against the belly which was by the network: and the
pomegranates were two hundred in rows round about upon the other
chapiter.

7:21 And he set up the pillars in the porch of the temple: and he set
up the right pillar, and called the name thereof Jachin: and he set up
the left pillar, and called the name thereof Boaz.

7:22 And upon the top of the pillars was lily work: so was the work of
the pillars finished.

7:23 And he made a molten sea, ten cubits from the one brim to the
other: it was round all about, and his height was five cubits: and a
line of thirty cubits did compass it round about.

7:24 And under the brim of it round about there were knops compassing
it, ten in a cubit, compassing the sea round about: the knops were
cast in two rows, when it was cast.

7:25 It stood upon twelve oxen, three looking toward the north, and
three looking toward the west, and three looking toward the south, and
three looking toward the east: and the sea was set above upon them,
and all their hinder parts were inward.

7:26 And it was an hand breadth thick, and the brim thereof was
wrought like the brim of a cup, with flowers of lilies: it contained
two thousand baths.

7:27 And he made ten bases of brass; four cubits was the length of one
base, and four cubits the breadth thereof, and three cubits the height
of it.

7:28 And the work of the bases was on this manner: they had borders,
and the borders were between the ledges: 7:29 And on the borders that
were between the ledges were lions, oxen, and cherubims: and upon the
ledges there was a base above: and beneath the lions and oxen were
certain additions made of thin work.

7:30 And every base had four brasen wheels, and plates of brass: and
the four corners thereof had undersetters: under the laver were
undersetters molten, at the side of every addition.

7:31 And the mouth of it within the chapiter and above was a cubit:
but the mouth thereof was round after the work of the base, a cubit
and an half: and also upon the mouth of it were gravings with their
borders, foursquare, not round.

7:32 And under the borders were four wheels; and the axletrees of the
wheels were joined to the base: and the height of a wheel was a cubit
and half a cubit.

7:33 And the work of the wheels was like the work of a chariot wheel:
their axletrees, and their naves, and their felloes, and their spokes,
were all molten.

7:34 And there were four undersetters to the four corners of one base:
and the undersetters were of the very base itself.

7:35 And in the top of the base was there a round compass of half a
cubit high: and on the top of the base the ledges thereof and the
borders thereof were of the same.

7:36 For on the plates of the ledges thereof, and on the borders
thereof, he graved cherubims, lions, and palm trees, according to the
proportion of every one, and additions round about.

7:37 After this manner he made the ten bases: all of them had one
casting, one measure, and one size.

7:38 Then made he ten lavers of brass: one laver contained forty
baths: and every laver was four cubits: and upon every one of the ten
bases one laver.

7:39 And he put five bases on the right side of the house, and five on
the left side of the house: and he set the sea on the right side of
the house eastward over against the south.

7:40 And Hiram made the lavers, and the shovels, and the basons. So
Hiram made an end of doing all the work that he made king Solomon for
the house of the LORD: 7:41 The two pillars, and the two bowls of the
chapiters that were on the top of the two pillars; and the two
networks, to cover the two bowls of the chapiters which were upon the
top of the pillars; 7:42 And four hundred pomegranates for the two
networks, even two rows of pomegranates for one network, to cover the
two bowls of the chapiters that were upon the pillars; 7:43 And the
ten bases, and ten lavers on the bases; 7:44 And one sea, and twelve
oxen under the sea; 7:45 And the pots, and the shovels, and the
basons: and all these vessels, which Hiram made to king Solomon for
the house of the LORD, were of bright brass.

7:46 In the plain of Jordan did the king cast them, in the clay ground
between Succoth and Zarthan.

7:47 And Solomon left all the vessels unweighed, because they were
exceeding many: neither was the weight of the brass found out.

7:48 And Solomon made all the vessels that pertained unto the house of
the LORD: the altar of gold, and the table of gold, whereupon the
shewbread was, 7:49 And the candlesticks of pure gold, five on the
right side, and five on the left, before the oracle, with the flowers,
and the lamps, and the tongs of gold, 7:50 And the bowls, and the
snuffers, and the basons, and the spoons, and the censers of pure
gold; and the hinges of gold, both for the doors of the inner house,
the most holy place, and for the doors of the house, to wit, of the
temple.

7:51 So was ended all the work that king Solomon made for the house of
the LORD. And Solomon brought in the things which David his father had
dedicated; even the silver, and the gold, and the vessels, did he put
among the treasures of the house of the LORD.

8:1 Then Solomon assembled the elders of Israel, and all the heads of
the tribes, the chief of the fathers of the children of Israel, unto
king Solomon in Jerusalem, that they might bring up the ark of the
covenant of the LORD out of the city of David, which is Zion.

8:2 And all the men of Israel assembled themselves unto king Solomon
at the feast in the month Ethanim, which is the seventh month.

8:3 And all the elders of Israel came, and the priests took up the
ark.

8:4 And they brought up the ark of the LORD, and the tabernacle of the
congregation, and all the holy vessels that were in the tabernacle,
even those did the priests and the Levites bring up.

8:5 And king Solomon, and all the congregation of Israel, that were
assembled unto him, were with him before the ark, sacrificing sheep
and oxen, that could not be told nor numbered for multitude.

8:6 And the priests brought in the ark of the covenant of the LORD
unto his place, into the oracle of the house, to the most holy place,
even under the wings of the cherubims.

8:7 For the cherubims spread forth their two wings over the place of
the ark, and the cherubims covered the ark and the staves thereof
above.

8:8 And they drew out the staves, that the ends of the staves were
seen out in the holy place before the oracle, and they were not seen
without: and there they are unto this day.

8:9 There was nothing in the ark save the two tables of stone, which
Moses put there at Horeb, when the LORD made a covenant with the
children of Israel, when they came out of the land of Egypt.

8:10 And it came to pass, when the priests were come out of the holy
place, that the cloud filled the house of the LORD, 8:11 So that the
priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud: for the
glory of the LORD had filled the house of the LORD.

8:12 Then spake Solomon, The LORD said that he would dwell in the
thick darkness.

8:13 I have surely built thee an house to dwell in, a settled place
for thee to abide in for ever.

8:14 And the king turned his face about, and blessed all the
congregation of Israel: (and all the congregation of Israel stood;)
8:15 And he said, Blessed be the LORD God of Israel, which spake with
his mouth unto David my father, and hath with his hand fulfilled it,
saying, 8:16 Since the day that I brought forth my people Israel out
of Egypt, I chose no city out of all the tribes of Israel to build an
house, that my name might be therein; but I chose David to be over my
people Israel.

8:17 And it was in the heart of David my father to build an house for
the name of the LORD God of Israel.

8:18 And the LORD said unto David my father, Whereas it was in thine
heart to build an house unto my name, thou didst well that it was in
thine heart.

8:19 Nevertheless thou shalt not build the house; but thy son that
shall come forth out of thy loins, he shall build the house unto my
name.

8:20 And the LORD hath performed his word that he spake, and I am
risen up in the room of David my father, and sit on the throne of
Israel, as the LORD promised, and have built an house for the name of
the LORD God of Israel.

8:21 And I have set there a place for the ark, wherein is the covenant
of the LORD, which he made with our fathers, when he brought them out
of the land of Egypt.

8:22 And Solomon stood before the altar of the LORD in the presence of
all the congregation of Israel, and spread forth his hands toward
heaven: 8:23 And he said, LORD God of Israel, there is no God like
thee, in heaven above, or on earth beneath, who keepest covenant and
mercy with thy servants that walk before thee with all their heart:
8:24 Who hast kept with thy servant David my father that thou
promisedst him: thou spakest also with thy mouth, and hast fulfilled
it with thine hand, as it is this day.

8:25 Therefore now, LORD God of Israel, keep with thy servant David my
father that thou promisedst him, saying, There shall not fail thee a
man in my sight to sit on the throne of Israel; so that thy children
take heed to their way, that they walk before me as thou hast walked
before me.

8:26 And now, O God of Israel, let thy word, I pray thee, be verified,
which thou spakest unto thy servant David my father.

8:27 But will God indeed dwell on the earth? behold, the heaven and
heaven of heavens cannot contain thee; how much less this house that I
have builded?  8:28 Yet have thou respect unto the prayer of thy
servant, and to his supplication, O LORD my God, to hearken unto the
cry and to the prayer, which thy servant prayeth before thee to day:
8:29 That thine eyes may be open toward this house night and day, even
toward the place of which thou hast said, My name shall be there: that
thou mayest hearken unto the prayer which thy servant shall make
toward this place.

8:30 And hearken thou to the supplication of thy servant, and of thy
people Israel, when they shall pray toward this place: and hear thou
in heaven thy dwelling place: and when thou hearest, forgive.

8:31 If any man trespass against his neighbour, and an oath be laid
upon him to cause him to swear, and the oath come before thine altar
in this house: 8:32 Then hear thou in heaven, and do, and judge thy
servants, condemning the wicked, to bring his way upon his head; and
justifying the righteous, to give him according to his righteousness.

8:33 When thy people Israel be smitten down before the enemy, because
they have sinned against thee, and shall turn again to thee, and
confess thy name, and pray, and make supplication unto thee in this
house: 8:34 Then hear thou in heaven, and forgive the sin of thy
people Israel, and bring them again unto the land which thou gavest
unto their fathers.

8:35 When heaven is shut up, and there is no rain, because they have
sinned against thee; if they pray toward this place, and confess thy
name, and turn from their sin, when thou afflictest them: 8:36 Then
hear thou in heaven, and forgive the sin of thy servants, and of thy
people Israel, that thou teach them the good way wherein they should
walk, and give rain upon thy land, which thou hast given to thy people
for an inheritance.

8:37 If there be in the land famine, if there be pestilence, blasting,
mildew, locust, or if there be caterpiller; if their enemy besiege
them in the land of their cities; whatsoever plague, whatsoever
sickness there be; 8:38 What prayer and supplication soever be made by
any man, or by all thy people Israel, which shall know every man the
plague of his own heart, and spread forth his hands toward this house:
8:39 Then hear thou in heaven thy dwelling place, and forgive, and do,
and give to every man according to his ways, whose heart thou knowest;
(for thou, even thou only, knowest the hearts of all the children of
men;) 8:40 That they may fear thee all the days that they live in the
land which thou gavest unto our fathers.

8:41 Moreover concerning a stranger, that is not of thy people Israel,
but cometh out of a far country for thy name's sake; 8:42 (For they
shall hear of thy great name, and of thy strong hand, and of thy
stretched out arm;) when he shall come and pray toward this house;
8:43 Hear thou in heaven thy dwelling place, and do according to all
that the stranger calleth to thee for: that all people of the earth
may know thy name, to fear thee, as do thy people Israel; and that
they may know that this house, which I have builded, is called by thy
name.

8:44 If thy people go out to battle against their enemy, whithersoever
thou shalt send them, and shall pray unto the LORD toward the city
which thou hast chosen, and toward the house that I have built for thy
name: 8:45 Then hear thou in heaven their prayer and their
supplication, and maintain their cause.

8:46 If they sin against thee, (for there is no man that sinneth not,)
and thou be angry with them, and deliver them to the enemy, so that
they carry them away captives unto the land of the enemy, far or near;
8:47 Yet if they shall bethink themselves in the land whither they
were carried captives, and repent, and make supplication unto thee in
the land of them that carried them captives, saying, We have sinned,
and have done perversely, we have committed wickedness; 8:48 And so
return unto thee with all their heart, and with all their soul, in the
land of their enemies, which led them away captive, and pray unto thee
toward their land, which thou gavest unto their fathers, the city
which thou hast chosen, and the house which I have built for thy name:
8:49 Then hear thou their prayer and their supplication in heaven thy
dwelling place, and maintain their cause, 8:50 And forgive thy people
that have sinned against thee, and all their transgressions wherein
they have transgressed against thee, and give them compassion before
them who carried them captive, that they may have compassion on them:
8:51 For they be thy people, and thine inheritance, which thou
broughtest forth out of Egypt, from the midst of the furnace of iron:
8:52 That thine eyes may be open unto the supplication of thy servant,
and unto the supplication of thy people Israel, to hearken unto them
in all that they call for unto thee.

8:53 For thou didst separate them from among all the people of the
earth, to be thine inheritance, as thou spakest by the hand of Moses
thy servant, when thou broughtest our fathers out of Egypt, O LORD
God.

8:54 And it was so, that when Solomon had made an end of praying all
this prayer and supplication unto the LORD, he arose from before the
altar of the LORD, from kneeling on his knees with his hands spread up
to heaven.

8:55 And he stood, and blessed all the congregation of Israel with a
loud voice, saying, 8:56 Blessed be the LORD, that hath given rest
unto his people Israel, according to all that he promised: there hath
not failed one word of all his good promise, which he promised by the
hand of Moses his servant.

8:57 The LORD our God be with us, as he was with our fathers: let him
not leave us, nor forsake us: 8:58 That he may incline our hearts unto
him, to walk in all his ways, and to keep his commandments, and his
statutes, and his judgments, which he commanded our fathers.

8:59 And let these my words, wherewith I have made supplication before
the LORD, be nigh unto the LORD our God day and night, that he
maintain the cause of his servant, and the cause of his people Israel
at all times, as the matter shall require: 8:60 That all the people of
the earth may know that the LORD is God, and that there is none else.

8:61 Let your heart therefore be perfect with the LORD our God, to
walk in his statutes, and to keep his commandments, as at this day.

8:62 And the king, and all Israel with him, offered sacrifice before
the LORD.

8:63 And Solomon offered a sacrifice of peace offerings, which he
offered unto the LORD, two and twenty thousand oxen, and an hundred
and twenty thousand sheep. So the king and all the children of Israel
dedicated the house of the LORD.

8:64 The same day did the king hallow the middle of the court that was
before the house of the LORD: for there he offered burnt offerings,
and meat offerings, and the fat of the peace offerings: because the
brasen altar that was before the LORD was too little to receive the
burnt offerings, and meat offerings, and the fat of the peace
offerings.

8:65 And at that time Solomon held a feast, and all Israel with him, a
great congregation, from the entering in of Hamath unto the river of
Egypt, before the LORD our God, seven days and seven days, even
fourteen days.

8:66 On the eighth day he sent the people away: and they blessed the
king, and went unto their tents joyful and glad of heart for all the
goodness that the LORD had done for David his servant, and for Israel
his people.

9:1 And it came to pass, when Solomon had finished the building of the
house of the LORD, and the king's house, and all Solomon's desire
which he was pleased to do, 9:2 That the LORD appeared to Solomon the
second time, as he had appeared unto him at Gibeon.

9:3 And the LORD said unto him, I have heard thy prayer and thy
supplication, that thou hast made before me: I have hallowed this
house, which thou hast built, to put my name there for ever; and mine
eyes and mine heart shall be there perpetually.

9:4 And if thou wilt walk before me, as David thy father walked, in
integrity of heart, and in uprightness, to do according to all that I
have commanded thee, and wilt keep my statutes and my judgments: 9:5
Then I will establish the throne of thy kingdom upon Israel for ever,
as I promised to David thy father, saying, There shall not fail thee a
man upon the throne of Israel.

9:6 But if ye shall at all turn from following me, ye or your
children, and will not keep my commandments and my statutes which I
have set before you, but go and serve other gods, and worship them:
9:7 Then will I cut off Israel out of the land which I have given
them; and this house, which I have hallowed for my name, will I cast
out of my sight; and Israel shall be a proverb and a byword among all
people: 9:8 And at this house, which is high, every one that passeth
by it shall be astonished, and shall hiss; and they shall say, Why
hath the LORD done thus unto this land, and to this house?  9:9 And
they shall answer, Because they forsook the LORD their God, who
brought forth their fathers out of the land of Egypt, and have taken
hold upon other gods, and have worshipped them, and served them:
therefore hath the LORD brought upon them all this evil.

9:10 And it came to pass at the end of twenty years, when Solomon had
built the two houses, the house of the LORD, and the king's house,
9:11 (Now Hiram the king of Tyre had furnished Solomon with cedar
trees and fir trees, and with gold, according to all his desire,) that
then king Solomon gave Hiram twenty cities in the land of Galilee.

9:12 And Hiram came out from Tyre to see the cities which Solomon had
given him; and they pleased him not.

9:13 And he said, What cities are these which thou hast given me, my
brother? And he called them the land of Cabul unto this day.

9:14 And Hiram sent to the king sixscore talents of gold.

9:15 And this is the reason of the levy which king Solomon raised; for
to build the house of the LORD, and his own house, and Millo, and the
wall of Jerusalem, and Hazor, and Megiddo, and Gezer.

9:16 For Pharaoh king of Egypt had gone up, and taken Gezer, and burnt
it with fire, and slain the Canaanites that dwelt in the city, and
given it for a present unto his daughter, Solomon's wife.

9:17 And Solomon built Gezer, and Bethhoron the nether, 9:18 And
Baalath, and Tadmor in the wilderness, in the land, 9:19 And all the
cities of store that Solomon had, and cities for his chariots, and
cities for his horsemen, and that which Solomon desired to build in
Jerusalem, and in Lebanon, and in all the land of his dominion.

9:20 And all the people that were left of the Amorites, Hittites,
Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites, which were not of the children of
Israel, 9:21 Their children that were left after them in the land,
whom the children of Israel also were not able utterly to destroy,
upon those did Solomon levy a tribute of bondservice unto this day.

9:22 But of the children of Israel did Solomon make no bondmen: but
they were men of war, and his servants, and his princes, and his
captains, and rulers of his chariots, and his horsemen.

9:23 These were the chief of the officers that were over Solomon's
work, five hundred and fifty, which bare rule over the people that
wrought in the work.

9:24 But Pharaoh's daughter came up out of the city of David unto her
house which Solomon had built for her: then did he build Millo.

9:25 And three times in a year did Solomon offer burnt offerings and
peace offerings upon the altar which he built unto the LORD, and he
burnt incense upon the altar that was before the LORD. So he finished
the house.

9:26 And king Solomon made a navy of ships in Eziongeber, which is
beside Eloth, on the shore of the Red sea, in the land of Edom.

9:27 And Hiram sent in the navy his servants, shipmen that had
knowledge of the sea, with the servants of Solomon.

9:28 And they came to Ophir, and fetched from thence gold, four
hundred and twenty talents, and brought it to king Solomon.

10:1 And when the queen of Sheba heard of the fame of Solomon
concerning the name of the LORD, she came to prove him with hard
questions.

10:2 And she came to Jerusalem with a very great train, with camels
that bare spices, and very much gold, and precious stones: and when
she was come to Solomon, she communed with him of all that was in her
heart.

10:3 And Solomon told her all her questions: there was not any thing
hid from the king, which he told her not.

10:4 And when the queen of Sheba had seen all Solomon's wisdom, and
the house that he had built, 10:5 And the meat of his table, and the
sitting of his servants, and the attendance of his ministers, and
their apparel, and his cupbearers, and his ascent by which he went up
unto the house of the LORD; there was no more spirit in her.

10:6 And she said to the king, It was a true report that I heard in
mine own land of thy acts and of thy wisdom.

10:7 Howbeit I believed not the words, until I came, and mine eyes had
seen it: and, behold, the half was not told me: thy wisdom and
prosperity exceedeth the fame which I heard.

10:8 Happy are thy men, happy are these thy servants, which stand
continually before thee, and that hear thy wisdom.

10:9 Blessed be the LORD thy God, which delighted in thee, to set thee
on the throne of Israel: because the LORD loved Israel for ever,
therefore made he thee king, to do judgment and justice.

10:10 And she gave the king an hundred and twenty talents of gold, and
of spices very great store, and precious stones: there came no more
such abundance of spices as these which the queen of Sheba gave to
king Solomon.

10:11 And the navy also of Hiram, that brought gold from Ophir,
brought in from Ophir great plenty of almug trees, and precious
stones.

10:12 And the king made of the almug trees pillars for the house of
the LORD, and for the king's house, harps also and psalteries for
singers: there came no such almug trees, nor were seen unto this day.

10:13 And king Solomon gave unto the queen of Sheba all her desire,
whatsoever she asked, beside that which Solomon gave her of his royal
bounty.

So she turned and went to her own country, she and her servants.

10:14 Now the weight of gold that came to Solomon in one year was six
hundred threescore and six talents of gold, 10:15 Beside that he had
of the merchantmen, and of the traffick of the spice merchants, and of
all the kings of Arabia, and of the governors of the country.

10:16 And king Solomon made two hundred targets of beaten gold: six
hundred shekels of gold went to one target.

10:17 And he made three hundred shields of beaten gold; three pound of
gold went to one shield: and the king put them in the house of the
forest of Lebanon.

10:18 Moreover the king made a great throne of ivory, and overlaid it
with the best gold.

10:19 The throne had six steps, and the top of the throne was round
behind: and there were stays on either side on the place of the seat,
and two lions stood beside the stays.

10:20 And twelve lions stood there on the one side and on the other
upon the six steps: there was not the like made in any kingdom.

10:21 And all king Solomon's drinking vessels were of gold, and all
the vessels of the house of the forest of Lebanon were of pure gold;
none were of silver: it was nothing accounted of in the days of
Solomon.

10:22 For the king had at sea a navy of Tharshish with the navy of
Hiram: once in three years came the navy of Tharshish, bringing gold,
and silver, ivory, and apes, and peacocks.

10:23 So king Solomon exceeded all the kings of the earth for riches
and for wisdom.

10:24 And all the earth sought to Solomon, to hear his wisdom, which
God had put in his heart.

10:25 And they brought every man his present, vessels of silver, and
vessels of gold, and garments, and armour, and spices, horses, and
mules, a rate year by year.

10:26 And Solomon gathered together chariots and horsemen: and he had
a thousand and four hundred chariots, and twelve thousand horsemen,
whom he bestowed in the cities for chariots, and with the king at
Jerusalem.

10:27 And the king made silver to be in Jerusalem as stones, and
cedars made he to be as the sycomore trees that are in the vale, for
abundance.

10:28 And Solomon had horses brought out of Egypt, and linen yarn: the
king's merchants received the linen yarn at a price.

10:29 And a chariot came up and went out of Egypt for six hundred
shekels of silver, and an horse for an hundred and fifty: and so for
all the kings of the Hittites, and for the kings of Syria, did they
bring them out by their means.

11:1 But king Solomon loved many strange women, together with the
daughter of Pharaoh, women of the Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites,
Zidonians, and Hittites: 11:2 Of the nations concerning which the LORD
said unto the children of Israel, Ye shall not go in to them, neither
shall they come in unto you: for surely they will turn away your heart
after their gods: Solomon clave unto these in love.

11:3 And he had seven hundred wives, princesses, and three hundred
concubines: and his wives turned away his heart.

11:4 For it came to pass, when Solomon was old, that his wives turned
away his heart after other gods: and his heart was not perfect with
the LORD his God, as was the heart of David his father.

11:5 For Solomon went after Ashtoreth the goddess of the Zidonians,
and after Milcom the abomination of the Ammonites.

11:6 And Solomon did evil in the sight of the LORD, and went not fully
after the LORD, as did David his father.

11:7 Then did Solomon build an high place for Chemosh, the abomination
of Moab, in the hill that is before Jerusalem, and for Molech, the
abomination of the children of Ammon.

11:8 And likewise did he for all his strange wives, which burnt
incense and sacrificed unto their gods.

11:9 And the LORD was angry with Solomon, because his heart was turned
from the LORD God of Israel, which had appeared unto him twice, 11:10
And had commanded him concerning this thing, that he should not go
after other gods: but he kept not that which the LORD commanded.

11:11 Wherefore the LORD said unto Solomon, Forasmuch as this is done
of thee, and thou hast not kept my covenant and my statutes, which I
have commanded thee, I will surely rend the kingdom from thee, and
will give it to thy servant.

11:12 Notwithstanding in thy days I will not do it for David thy
father's sake: but I will rend it out of the hand of thy son.

11:13 Howbeit I will not rend away all the kingdom; but will give one
tribe to thy son for David my servant's sake, and for Jerusalem's sake
which I have chosen.

11:14 And the LORD stirred up an adversary unto Solomon, Hadad the
Edomite: he was of the king's seed in Edom.

11:15 For it came to pass, when David was in Edom, and Joab the
captain of the host was gone up to bury the slain, after he had
smitten every male in Edom; 11:16 (For six months did Joab remain
there with all Israel, until he had cut off every male in Edom:) 11:17
That Hadad fled, he and certain Edomites of his father's servants with
him, to go into Egypt; Hadad being yet a little child.

11:18 And they arose out of Midian, and came to Paran: and they took
men with them out of Paran, and they came to Egypt, unto Pharaoh king
of Egypt; which gave him an house, and appointed him victuals, and
gave him land.

11:19 And Hadad found great favour in the sight of Pharaoh, so that he
gave him to wife the sister of his own wife, the sister of Tahpenes
the queen.

11:20 And the sister of Tahpenes bare him Genubath his son, whom
Tahpenes weaned in Pharaoh's house: and Genubath was in Pharaoh's
household among the sons of Pharaoh.

11:21 And when Hadad heard in Egypt that David slept with his fathers,
and that Joab the captain of the host was dead, Hadad said to Pharaoh,
Let me depart, that I may go to mine own country.

11:22 Then Pharaoh said unto him, But what hast thou lacked with me,
that, behold, thou seekest to go to thine own country? And he
answered, Nothing: howbeit let me go in any wise.

11:23 And God stirred him up another adversary, Rezon the son of
Eliadah, which fled from his lord Hadadezer king of Zobah: 11:24 And
he gathered men unto him, and became captain over a band, when David
slew them of Zobah: and they went to Damascus, and dwelt therein, and
reigned in Damascus.

11:25 And he was an adversary to Israel all the days of Solomon,
beside the mischief that Hadad did: and he abhorred Israel, and
reigned over Syria.

11:26 And Jeroboam the son of Nebat, an Ephrathite of Zereda,
Solomon's servant, whose mother's name was Zeruah, a widow woman, even
he lifted up his hand against the king.

11:27 And this was the cause that he lifted up his hand against the
king: Solomon built Millo, and repaired the breaches of the city of
David his father.

11:28 And the man Jeroboam was a mighty man of valour: and Solomon
seeing the young man that he was industrious, he made him ruler over
all the charge of the house of Joseph.

11:29 And it came to pass at that time when Jeroboam went out of
Jerusalem, that the prophet Ahijah the Shilonite found him in the way;
and he had clad himself with a new garment; and they two were alone in
the field: 11:30 And Ahijah caught the new garment that was on him,
and rent it in twelve pieces: 11:31 And he said to Jeroboam, Take thee
ten pieces: for thus saith the LORD, the God of Israel, Behold, I will
rend the kingdom out of the hand of Solomon, and will give ten tribes
to thee: 11:32 (But he shall have one tribe for my servant David's
sake, and for Jerusalem's sake, the city which I have chosen out of
all the tribes of Israel:) 11:33 Because that they have forsaken me,
and have worshipped Ashtoreth the goddess of the Zidonians, Chemosh
the god of the Moabites, and Milcom the god of the children of Ammon,
and have not walked in my ways, to do that which is right in mine
eyes, and to keep my statutes and my judgments, as did David his
father.

11:34 Howbeit I will not take the whole kingdom out of his hand: but I
will make him prince all the days of his life for David my servant's
sake, whom I chose, because he kept my commandments and my statutes:
11:35 But I will take the kingdom out of his son's hand, and will give
it unto thee, even ten tribes.

11:36 And unto his son will I give one tribe, that David my servant
may have a light alway before me in Jerusalem, the city which I have
chosen me to put my name there.

11:37 And I will take thee, and thou shalt reign according to all that
thy soul desireth, and shalt be king over Israel.

11:38 And it shall be, if thou wilt hearken unto all that I command
thee, and wilt walk in my ways, and do that is right in my sight, to
keep my statutes and my commandments, as David my servant did; that I
will be with thee, and build thee a sure house, as I built for David,
and will give Israel unto thee.

11:39 And I will for this afflict the seed of David, but not for ever.

11:40 Solomon sought therefore to kill Jeroboam. And Jeroboam arose,
and fled into Egypt, unto Shishak king of Egypt, and was in Egypt
until the death of Solomon.

11:41 And the rest of the acts of Solomon, and all that he did, and
his wisdom, are they not written in the book of the acts of Solomon?
11:42 And the time that Solomon reigned in Jerusalem over all Israel
was forty years.

11:43 And Solomon slept with his fathers, and was buried in the city
of David his father: and Rehoboam his son reigned in his stead.

12:1 And Rehoboam went to Shechem: for all Israel were come to Shechem
to make him king.

12:2 And it came to pass, when Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who was yet
in Egypt, heard of it, (for he was fled from the presence of king
Solomon, and Jeroboam dwelt in Egypt;) 12:3 That they sent and called
him. And Jeroboam and all the congregation of Israel came, and spake
unto Rehoboam, saying, 12:4 Thy father made our yoke grievous: now
therefore make thou the grievous service of thy father, and his heavy
yoke which he put upon us, lighter, and we will serve thee.

12:5 And he said unto them, Depart yet for three days, then come again
to me. And the people departed.

12:6 And king Rehoboam consulted with the old men, that stood before
Solomon his father while he yet lived, and said, How do ye advise that
I may answer this people?  12:7 And they spake unto him, saying, If
thou wilt be a servant unto this people this day, and wilt serve them,
and answer them, and speak good words to them, then they will be thy
servants for ever.

12:8 But he forsook the counsel of the old men, which they had given
him, and consulted with the young men that were grown up with him, and
which stood before him: 12:9 And he said unto them, What counsel give
ye that we may answer this people, who have spoken to me, saying, Make
the yoke which thy father did put upon us lighter?  12:10 And the
young men that were grown up with him spake unto him, saying, Thus
shalt thou speak unto this people that spake unto thee, saying, Thy
father made our yoke heavy, but make thou it lighter unto us; thus
shalt thou say unto them, My little finger shall be thicker than my
father's loins.

12:11 And now whereas my father did lade you with a heavy yoke, I will
add to your yoke: my father hath chastised you with whips, but I will
chastise you with scorpions.

12:12 So Jeroboam and all the people came to Rehoboam the third day,
as the king had appointed, saying, Come to me again the third day.

12:13 And the king answered the people roughly, and forsook the old
men's counsel that they gave him; 12:14 And spake to them after the
counsel of the young men, saying, My father made your yoke heavy, and
I will add to your yoke: my father also chastised you with whips, but
I will chastise you with scorpions.

12:15 Wherefore the king hearkened not unto the people; for the cause
was from the LORD, that he might perform his saying, which the LORD
spake by Ahijah the Shilonite unto Jeroboam the son of Nebat.

12:16 So when all Israel saw that the king hearkened not unto them,
the people answered the king, saying, What portion have we in David?
neither have we inheritance in the son of Jesse: to your tents, O
Israel: now see to thine own house, David. So Israel departed unto
their tents.

12:17 But as for the children of Israel which dwelt in the cities of
Judah, Rehoboam reigned over them.

12:18 Then king Rehoboam sent Adoram, who was over the tribute; and
all Israel stoned him with stones, that he died. Therefore king
Rehoboam made speed to get him up to his chariot, to flee to
Jerusalem.

12:19 So Israel rebelled against the house of David unto this day.

12:20 And it came to pass, when all Israel heard that Jeroboam was
come again, that they sent and called him unto the congregation, and
made him king over all Israel: there was none that followed the house
of David, but the tribe of Judah only.

12:21 And when Rehoboam was come to Jerusalem, he assembled all the
house of Judah, with the tribe of Benjamin, an hundred and fourscore
thousand chosen men, which were warriors, to fight against the house
of Israel, to bring the kingdom again to Rehoboam the son of Solomon.

12:22 But the word of God came unto Shemaiah the man of God, saying,
12:23 Speak unto Rehoboam, the son of Solomon, king of Judah, and unto
all the house of Judah and Benjamin, and to the remnant of the people,
saying, 12:24 Thus saith the LORD, Ye shall not go up, nor fight
against your brethren the children of Israel: return every man to his
house; for this thing is from me. They hearkened therefore to the word
of the LORD, and returned to depart, according to the word of the
LORD.

12:25 Then Jeroboam built Shechem in mount Ephraim, and dwelt therein;
and went out from thence, and built Penuel.

12:26 And Jeroboam said in his heart, Now shall the kingdom return to
the house of David: 12:27 If this people go up to do sacrifice in the
house of the LORD at Jerusalem, then shall the heart of this people
turn again unto their lord, even unto Rehoboam king of Judah, and they
shall kill me, and go again to Rehoboam king of Judah.

12:28 Whereupon the king took counsel, and made two calves of gold,
and said unto them, It is too much for you to go up to Jerusalem:
behold thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of
Egypt.

12:29 And he set the one in Bethel, and the other put he in Dan.

12:30 And this thing became a sin: for the people went to worship
before the one, even unto Dan.

12:31 And he made an house of high places, and made priests of the
lowest of the people, which were not of the sons of Levi.

12:32 And Jeroboam ordained a feast in the eighth month, on the
fifteenth day of the month, like unto the feast that is in Judah, and
he offered upon the altar. So did he in Bethel, sacrificing unto the
calves that he had made: and he placed in Bethel the priests of the
high places which he had made.

12:33 So he offered upon the altar which he had made in Bethel the
fifteenth day of the eighth month, even in the month which he had
devised of his own heart; and ordained a feast unto the children of
Israel: and he offered upon the altar, and burnt incense.

13:1 And, behold, there came a man of God out of Judah by the word of
the LORD unto Bethel: and Jeroboam stood by the altar to burn incense.

13:2 And he cried against the altar in the word of the LORD, and said,
O altar, altar, thus saith the LORD; Behold, a child shall be born
unto the house of David, Josiah by name; and upon thee shall he offer
the priests of the high places that burn incense upon thee, and men's
bones shall be burnt upon thee.

13:3 And he gave a sign the same day, saying, This is the sign which
the LORD hath spoken; Behold, the altar shall be rent, and the ashes
that are upon it shall be poured out.

13:4 And it came to pass, when king Jeroboam heard the saying of the
man of God, which had cried against the altar in Bethel, that he put
forth his hand from the altar, saying, Lay hold on him. And his hand,
which he put forth against him, dried up, so that he could not pull it
in again to him.

13:5 The altar also was rent, and the ashes poured out from the altar,
according to the sign which the man of God had given by the word of
the LORD.

13:6 And the king answered and said unto the man of God, Intreat now
the face of the LORD thy God, and pray for me, that my hand may be
restored me again. And the man of God besought the LORD, and the
king's hand was restored him again, and became as it was before.

13:7 And the king said unto the man of God, Come home with me, and
refresh thyself, and I will give thee a reward.

13:8 And the man of God said unto the king, If thou wilt give me half
thine house, I will not go in with thee, neither will I eat bread nor
drink water in this place: 13:9 For so was it charged me by the word
of the LORD, saying, Eat no bread, nor drink water, nor turn again by
the same way that thou camest.

13:10 So he went another way, and returned not by the way that he came
to Bethel.

13:11 Now there dwelt an old prophet in Bethel; and his sons came and
told him all the works that the man of God had done that day in
Bethel: the words which he had spoken unto the king, them they told
also to their father.

13:12 And their father said unto them, What way went he? For his sons
had seen what way the man of God went, which came from Judah.

13:13 And he said unto his sons, Saddle me the ass. So they saddled
him the ass: and he rode thereon, 13:14 And went after the man of God,
and found him sitting under an oak: and he said unto him, Art thou the
man of God that camest from Judah? And he said, I am.

13:15 Then he said unto him, Come home with me, and eat bread.

13:16 And he said, I may not return with thee, nor go in with thee:
neither will I eat bread nor drink water with thee in this place:
13:17 For it was said to me by the word of the LORD, Thou shalt eat no
bread nor drink water there, nor turn again to go by the way that thou
camest.

13:18 He said unto him, I am a prophet also as thou art; and an angel
spake unto me by the word of the LORD, saying, Bring him back with
thee into thine house, that he may eat bread and drink water. But he
lied unto him.

13:19 So he went back with him, and did eat bread in his house, and
drank water.

13:20 And it came to pass, as they sat at the table, that the word of
the LORD came unto the prophet that brought him back: 13:21 And he
cried unto the man of God that came from Judah, saying, Thus saith the
LORD, Forasmuch as thou hast disobeyed the mouth of the LORD, and hast
not kept the commandment which the LORD thy God commanded thee, 13:22
But camest back, and hast eaten bread and drunk water in the place, of
the which the Lord did say to thee, Eat no bread, and drink no water;
thy carcase shall not come unto the sepulchre of thy fathers.

13:23 And it came to pass, after he had eaten bread, and after he had
drunk, that he saddled for him the ass, to wit, for the prophet whom
he had brought back.

13:24 And when he was gone, a lion met him by the way, and slew him:
and his carcase was cast in the way, and the ass stood by it, the lion
also stood by the carcase.

13:25 And, behold, men passed by, and saw the carcase cast in the way,
and the lion standing by the carcase: and they came and told it in the
city where the old prophet dwelt.

13:26 And when the prophet that brought him back from the way heard
thereof, he said, It is the man of God, who was disobedient unto the
word of the LORD: therefore the LORD hath delivered him unto the lion,
which hath torn him, and slain him, according to the word of the LORD,
which he spake unto him.

13:27 And he spake to his sons, saying, Saddle me the ass. And they
saddled him.

13:28 And he went and found his carcase cast in the way, and the ass
and the lion standing by the carcase: the lion had not eaten the
carcase, nor torn the ass.

13:29 And the prophet took up the carcase of the man of God, and laid
it upon the ass, and brought it back: and the old prophet came to the
city, to mourn and to bury him.

13:30 And he laid his carcase in his own grave; and they mourned over
him, saying, Alas, my brother!  13:31 And it came to pass, after he
had buried him, that he spake to his sons, saying, When I am dead,
then bury me in the sepulchre wherein the man of God is buried; lay my
bones beside his bones: 13:32 For the saying which he cried by the
word of the LORD against the altar in Bethel, and against all the
houses of the high places which are in the cities of Samaria, shall
surely come to pass.

13:33 After this thing Jeroboam returned not from his evil way, but
made again of the lowest of the people priests of the high places:
whosoever would, he consecrated him, and he became one of the priests
of the high places.

13:34 And this thing became sin unto the house of Jeroboam, even to
cut it off, and to destroy it from off the face of the earth.

14:1 At that time Abijah the son of Jeroboam fell sick.

14:2 And Jeroboam said to his wife, Arise, I pray thee, and disguise
thyself, that thou be not known to be the wife of Jeroboam; and get
thee to Shiloh: behold, there is Ahijah the prophet, which told me
that I should be king over this people.

14:3 And take with thee ten loaves, and cracknels, and a cruse of
honey, and go to him: he shall tell thee what shall become of the
child.

14:4 And Jeroboam's wife did so, and arose, and went to Shiloh, and
came to the house of Ahijah. But Ahijah could not see; for his eyes
were set by reason of his age.

14:5 And the LORD said unto Ahijah, Behold, the wife of Jeroboam
cometh to ask a thing of thee for her son; for he is sick: thus and
thus shalt thou say unto her: for it shall be, when she cometh in,
that she shall feign herself to be another woman.

14:6 And it was so, when Ahijah heard the sound of her feet, as she
came in at the door, that he said, Come in, thou wife of Jeroboam; why
feignest thou thyself to be another? for I am sent to thee with heavy
tidings.

14:7 Go, tell Jeroboam, Thus saith the LORD God of Israel, Forasmuch
as I exalted thee from among the people, and made thee prince over my
people Israel, 14:8 And rent the kingdom away from the house of David,
and gave it thee: and yet thou hast not been as my servant David, who
kept my commandments, and who followed me with all his heart, to do
that only which was right in mine eyes; 14:9 But hast done evil above
all that were before thee: for thou hast gone and made thee other
gods, and molten images, to provoke me to anger, and hast cast me
behind thy back: 14:10 Therefore, behold, I will bring evil upon the
house of Jeroboam, and will cut off from Jeroboam him that pisseth
against the wall, and him that is shut up and left in Israel, and will
take away the remnant of the house of Jeroboam, as a man taketh away
dung, till it be all gone.

14:11 Him that dieth of Jeroboam in the city shall the dogs eat; and
him that dieth in the field shall the fowls of the air eat: for the
LORD hath spoken it.

14:12 Arise thou therefore, get thee to thine own house: and when thy
feet enter into the city, the child shall die.

14:13 And all Israel shall mourn for him, and bury him: for he only of
Jeroboam shall come to the grave, because in him there is found some
good thing toward the LORD God of Israel in the house of Jeroboam.

14:14 Moreover the LORD shall raise him up a king over Israel, who
shall cut off the house of Jeroboam that day: but what? even now.

14:15 For the LORD shall smite Israel, as a reed is shaken in the
water, and he shall root up Israel out of this good land, which he
gave to their fathers, and shall scatter them beyond the river,
because they have made their groves, provoking the LORD to anger.

14:16 And he shall give Israel up because of the sins of Jeroboam, who
did sin, and who made Israel to sin.

14:17 And Jeroboam's wife arose, and departed, and came to Tirzah: and
when she came to the threshold of the door, the child died; 14:18 And
they buried him; and all Israel mourned for him, according to the word
of the LORD, which he spake by the hand of his servant Ahijah the
prophet.

14:19 And the rest of the acts of Jeroboam, how he warred, and how he
reigned, behold, they are written in the book of the chronicles of the
kings of Israel.

14:20 And the days which Jeroboam reigned were two and twenty years:
and he slept with his fathers, and Nadab his son reigned in his stead.

14:21 And Rehoboam the son of Solomon reigned in Judah. Rehoboam was
forty and one years old when he began to reign, and he reigned
seventeen years in Jerusalem, the city which the LORD did choose out
of all the tribes of Israel, to put his name there. And his mother's
name was Naamah an Ammonitess.

14:22 And Judah did evil in the sight of the LORD, and they provoked
him to jealousy with their sins which they had committed, above all
that their fathers had done.

14:23 For they also built them high places, and images, and groves, on
every high hill, and under every green tree.

14:24 And there were also sodomites in the land: and they did
according to all the abominations of the nations which the LORD cast
out before the children of Israel.

14:25 And it came to pass in the fifth year of king Rehoboam, that
Shishak king of Egypt came up against Jerusalem: 14:26 And he took
away the treasures of the house of the LORD, and the treasures of the
king's house; he even took away all: and he took away all the shields
of gold which Solomon had made.

14:27 And king Rehoboam made in their stead brasen shields, and
committed them unto the hands of the chief of the guard, which kept
the door of the king's house.

14:28 And it was so, when the king went into the house of the LORD,
that the guard bare them, and brought them back into the guard
chamber.

14:29 Now the rest of the acts of Rehoboam, and all that he did, are
they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah?
14:30 And there was war between Rehoboam and Jeroboam all their days.

14:31 And Rehoboam slept with his fathers, and was buried with his
fathers in the city of David. And his mother's name was Naamah an
Ammonitess. And Abijam his son reigned in his stead.

15:1 Now in the eighteenth year of king Jeroboam the son of Nebat
reigned Abijam over Judah.

15:2 Three years reigned he in Jerusalem. and his mother's name was
Maachah, the daughter of Abishalom.

15:3 And he walked in all the sins of his father, which he had done
before him: and his heart was not perfect with the LORD his God, as
the heart of David his father.

15:4 Nevertheless for David's sake did the LORD his God give him a
lamp in Jerusalem, to set up his son after him, and to establish
Jerusalem: 15:5 Because David did that which was right in the eyes of
the LORD, and turned not aside from any thing that he commanded him
all the days of his life, save only in the matter of Uriah the
Hittite.

15:6 And there was war between Rehoboam and Jeroboam all the days of
his life.

15:7 Now the rest of the acts of Abijam, and all that he did, are they
not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah? And
there was war between Abijam and Jeroboam.

15:8 And Abijam slept with his fathers; and they buried him in the
city of David: and Asa his son reigned in his stead.

15:9 And in the twentieth year of Jeroboam king of Israel reigned Asa
over Judah.

15:10 And forty and one years reigned he in Jerusalem. And his
mother's name was Maachah, the daughter of Abishalom.

15:11 And Asa did that which was right in the eyes of the LORD, as did
David his father.

15:12 And he took away the sodomites out of the land, and removed all
the idols that his fathers had made.

15:13 And also Maachah his mother, even her he removed from being
queen, because she had made an idol in a grove; and Asa destroyed her
idol, and burnt it by the brook Kidron.

15:14 But the high places were not removed: nevertheless Asa's heart
was perfect with the LORD all his days.

15:15 And he brought in the things which his father had dedicated, and
the things which himself had dedicated, into the house of the LORD,
silver, and gold, and vessels.

15:16 And there was war between Asa and Baasha king of Israel all
their days.

15:17 And Baasha king of Israel went up against Judah, and built
Ramah, that he might not suffer any to go out or come in to Asa king
of Judah.

15:18 Then Asa took all the silver and the gold that were left in the
treasures of the house of the LORD, and the treasures of the king's
house, and delivered them into the hand of his servants: and king Asa
sent them to Benhadad, the son of Tabrimon, the son of Hezion, king of
Syria, that dwelt at Damascus, saying, 15:19 There is a league between
me and thee, and between my father and thy father: behold, I have sent
unto thee a present of silver and gold; come and break thy league with
Baasha king of Israel, that he may depart from me.

15:20 So Benhadad hearkened unto king Asa, and sent the captains of
the hosts which he had against the cities of Israel, and smote Ijon,
and Dan, and Abelbethmaachah, and all Cinneroth, with all the land of
Naphtali.

15:21 And it came to pass, when Baasha heard thereof, that he left off
building of Ramah, and dwelt in Tirzah.

15:22 Then king Asa made a proclamation throughout all Judah; none was
exempted: and they took away the stones of Ramah, and the timber
thereof, wherewith Baasha had builded; and king Asa built with them
Geba of Benjamin, and Mizpah.

15:23 The rest of all the acts of Asa, and all his might, and all that
he did, and the cities which he built, are they not written in the
book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah? Nevertheless in the time
of his old age he was diseased in his feet.

15:24 And Asa slept with his fathers, and was buried with his fathers
in the city of David his father: and Jehoshaphat his son reigned in
his stead.

15:25 And Nadab the son of Jeroboam began to reign over Israel in the
second year of Asa king of Judah, and reigned over Israel two years.

15:26 And he did evil in the sight of the LORD, and walked in the way
of his father, and in his sin wherewith he made Israel to sin.

15:27 And Baasha the son of Ahijah, of the house of Issachar,
conspired against him; and Baasha smote him at Gibbethon, which
belonged to the Philistines; for Nadab and all Israel laid siege to
Gibbethon.

15:28 Even in the third year of Asa king of Judah did Baasha slay him,
and reigned in his stead.

15:29 And it came to pass, when he reigned, that he smote all the
house of Jeroboam; he left not to Jeroboam any that breathed, until he
had destroyed him, according unto the saying of the LORD, which he
spake by his servant Ahijah the Shilonite: 15:30 Because of the sins
of Jeroboam which he sinned, and which he made Israel sin, by his
provocation wherewith he provoked the LORD God of Israel to anger.

15:31 Now the rest of the acts of Nadab, and all that he did, are they
not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Israel?
15:32 And there was war between Asa and Baasha king of Israel all
their days.

15:33 In the third year of Asa king of Judah began Baasha the son of
Ahijah to reign over all Israel in Tirzah, twenty and four years.

15:34 And he did evil in the sight of the LORD, and walked in the way
of Jeroboam, and in his sin wherewith he made Israel to sin.

16:1 Then the word of the LORD came to Jehu the son of Hanani against
Baasha, saying, 16:2 Forasmuch as I exalted thee out of the dust, and
made thee prince over my people Israel; and thou hast walked in the
way of Jeroboam, and hast made my people Israel to sin, to provoke me
to anger with their sins; 16:3 Behold, I will take away the posterity
of Baasha, and the posterity of his house; and will make thy house
like the house of Jeroboam the son of Nebat.

16:4 Him that dieth of Baasha in the city shall the dogs eat; and him
that dieth of his in the fields shall the fowls of the air eat.

16:5 Now the rest of the acts of Baasha, and what he did, and his
might, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings
of Israel?  16:6 So Baasha slept with his fathers, and was buried in
Tirzah: and Elah his son reigned in his stead.

16:7 And also by the hand of the prophet Jehu the son of Hanani came
the word of the LORD against Baasha, and against his house, even for
all the evil that he did in the sight of the LORD, in provoking him to
anger with the work of his hands, in being like the house of Jeroboam;
and because he killed him.

16:8 In the twenty and sixth year of Asa king of Judah began Elah the
son of Baasha to reign over Israel in Tirzah, two years.

16:9 And his servant Zimri, captain of half his chariots, conspired
against him, as he was in Tirzah, drinking himself drunk in the house
of Arza steward of his house in Tirzah.

16:10 And Zimri went in and smote him, and killed him, in the twenty
and seventh year of Asa king of Judah, and reigned in his stead.

16:11 And it came to pass, when he began to reign, as soon as he sat
on his throne, that he slew all the house of Baasha: he left him not
one that pisseth against a wall, neither of his kinsfolks, nor of his
friends.

16:12 Thus did Zimri destroy all the house of Baasha, according to the
word of the LORD, which he spake against Baasha by Jehu the prophet.

16:13 For all the sins of Baasha, and the sins of Elah his son, by
which they sinned, and by which they made Israel to sin, in provoking
the LORD God of Israel to anger with their vanities.

16:14 Now the rest of the acts of Elah, and all that he did, are they
not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Israel?
16:15 In the twenty and seventh year of Asa king of Judah did Zimri
reign seven days in Tirzah. And the people were encamped against
Gibbethon, which belonged to the Philistines.

16:16 And the people that were encamped heard say, Zimri hath
conspired, and hath also slain the king: wherefore all Israel made
Omri, the captain of the host, king over Israel that day in the camp.

16:17 And Omri went up from Gibbethon, and all Israel with him, and
they besieged Tirzah.

16:18 And it came to pass, when Zimri saw that the city was taken,
that he went into the palace of the king's house, and burnt the king's
house over him with fire, and died.

16:19 For his sins which he sinned in doing evil in the sight of the
LORD, in walking in the way of Jeroboam, and in his sin which he did,
to make Israel to sin.

16:20 Now the rest of the acts of Zimri, and his treason that he
wrought, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the
kings of Israel?  16:21 Then were the people of Israel divided into
two parts: half of the people followed Tibni the son of Ginath, to
make him king; and half followed Omri.

16:22 But the people that followed Omri prevailed against the people
that followed Tibni the son of Ginath: so Tibni died, and Omri
reigned.

16:23 In the thirty and first year of Asa king of Judah began Omri to
reign over Israel, twelve years: six years reigned he in Tirzah.

16:24 And he bought the hill Samaria of Shemer for two talents of
silver, and built on the hill, and called the name of the city which
he built, after the name of Shemer, owner of the hill, Samaria.

16:25 But Omri wrought evil in the eyes of the LORD, and did worse
than all that were before him.

16:26 For he walked in all the way of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, and
in his sin wherewith he made Israel to sin, to provoke the LORD God of
Israel to anger with their vanities.

16:27 Now the rest of the acts of Omri which he did, and his might
that he shewed, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of
the kings of Israel?  16:28 So Omri slept with his fathers, and was
buried in Samaria: and Ahab his son reigned in his stead.

16:29 And in the thirty and eighth year of Asa king of Judah began
Ahab the son of Omri to reign over Israel: and Ahab the son of Omri
reigned over Israel in Samaria twenty and two years.

16:30 And Ahab the son of Omri did evil in the sight of the LORD above
all that were before him.

16:31 And it came to pass, as if it had been a light thing for him to
walk in the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, that he took to wife
Jezebel the daughter of Ethbaal king of the Zidonians, and went and
served Baal, and worshipped him.

16:32 And he reared up an altar for Baal in the house of Baal, which
he had built in Samaria.

16:33 And Ahab made a grove; and Ahab did more to provoke the LORD God
of Israel to anger than all the kings of Israel that were before him.

16:34 In his days did Hiel the Bethelite build Jericho: he laid the
foundation thereof in Abiram his firstborn, and set up the gates
thereof in his youngest son Segub, according to the word of the LORD,
which he spake by Joshua the son of Nun.

17:1 And Elijah the Tishbite, who was of the inhabitants of Gilead,
said unto Ahab, As the LORD God of Israel liveth, before whom I stand,
there shall not be dew nor rain these years, but according to my word.

17:2 And the word of the LORD came unto him, saying, 17:3 Get thee
hence, and turn thee eastward, and hide thyself by the brook Cherith,
that is before Jordan.

17:4 And it shall be, that thou shalt drink of the brook; and I have
commanded the ravens to feed thee there.

17:5 So he went and did according unto the word of the LORD: for he
went and dwelt by the brook Cherith, that is before Jordan.

17:6 And the ravens brought him bread and flesh in the morning, and
bread and flesh in the evening; and he drank of the brook.

17:7 And it came to pass after a while, that the brook dried up,
because there had been no rain in the land.

17:8 And the word of the LORD came unto him, saying, 17:9 Arise, get
thee to Zarephath, which belongeth to Zidon, and dwell there: behold,
I have commanded a widow woman there to sustain thee.

17:10 So he arose and went to Zarephath. And when he came to the gate
of the city, behold, the widow woman was there gathering of sticks:
and he called to her, and said, Fetch me, I pray thee, a little water
in a vessel, that I may drink.

17:11 And as she was going to fetch it, he called to her, and said,
Bring me, I pray thee, a morsel of bread in thine hand.

17:12 And she said, As the LORD thy God liveth, I have not a cake, but
an handful of meal in a barrel, and a little oil in a cruse: and,
behold, I am gathering two sticks, that I may go in and dress it for
me and my son, that we may eat it, and die.

17:13 And Elijah said unto her, Fear not; go and do as thou hast said:
but make me thereof a little cake first, and bring it unto me, and
after make for thee and for thy son.

17:14 For thus saith the LORD God of Israel, The barrel of meal shall
not waste, neither shall the cruse of oil fail, until the day that the
LORD sendeth rain upon the earth.

17:15 And she went and did according to the saying of Elijah: and she,
and he, and her house, did eat many days.

17:16 And the barrel of meal wasted not, neither did the cruse of oil
fail, according to the word of the LORD, which he spake by Elijah.

17:17 And it came to pass after these things, that the son of the
woman, the mistress of the house, fell sick; and his sickness was so
sore, that there was no breath left in him.

17:18 And she said unto Elijah, What have I to do with thee, O thou
man of God? art thou come unto me to call my sin to remembrance, and
to slay my son?  17:19 And he said unto her, Give me thy son. And he
took him out of her bosom, and carried him up into a loft, where he
abode, and laid him upon his own bed.

17:20 And he cried unto the LORD, and said, O LORD my God, hast thou
also brought evil upon the widow with whom I sojourn, by slaying her
son?  17:21 And he stretched himself upon the child three times, and
cried unto the LORD, and said, O LORD my God, I pray thee, let this
child's soul come into him again.

17:22 And the LORD heard the voice of Elijah; and the soul of the
child came into him again, and he revived.

17:23 And Elijah took the child, and brought him down out of the
chamber into the house, and delivered him unto his mother: and Elijah
said, See, thy son liveth.

17:24 And the woman said to Elijah, Now by this I know that thou art a
man of God, and that the word of the LORD in thy mouth is truth.

18:1 And it came to pass after many days, that the word of the LORD
came to Elijah in the third year, saying, Go, shew thyself unto Ahab;
and I will send rain upon the earth.

18:2 And Elijah went to shew himself unto Ahab. And there was a sore
famine in Samaria.

18:3 And Ahab called Obadiah, which was the governor of his house.
(Now Obadiah feared the LORD greatly: 18:4 For it was so, when Jezebel
cut off the prophets of the LORD, that Obadiah took an hundred
prophets, and hid them by fifty in a cave, and fed them with bread and
water.)  18:5 And Ahab said unto Obadiah, Go into the land, unto all
fountains of water, and unto all brooks: peradventure we may find
grass to save the horses and mules alive, that we lose not all the
beasts.

18:6 So they divided the land between them to pass throughout it: Ahab
went one way by himself, and Obadiah went another way by himself.

18:7 And as Obadiah was in the way, behold, Elijah met him: and he
knew him, and fell on his face, and said, Art thou that my lord
Elijah?  18:8 And he answered him, I am: go, tell thy lord, Behold,
Elijah is here.

18:9 And he said, What have I sinned, that thou wouldest deliver thy
servant into the hand of Ahab, to slay me?  18:10 As the LORD thy God
liveth, there is no nation or kingdom, whither my lord hath not sent
to seek thee: and when they said, He is not there; he took an oath of
the kingdom and nation, that they found thee not.

18:11 And now thou sayest, Go, tell thy lord, Behold, Elijah is here.

18:12 And it shall come to pass, as soon as I am gone from thee, that
the Spirit of the LORD shall carry thee whither I know not; and so
when I come and tell Ahab, and he cannot find thee, he shall slay me:
but I thy servant fear the LORD from my youth.

18:13 Was it not told my lord what I did when Jezebel slew the
prophets of the LORD, how I hid an hundred men of the LORD's prophets
by fifty in a cave, and fed them with bread and water?  18:14 And now
thou sayest, Go, tell thy lord, Behold, Elijah is here: and he shall
slay me.

18:15 And Elijah said, As the LORD of hosts liveth, before whom I
stand, I will surely shew myself unto him to day.

18:16 So Obadiah went to meet Ahab, and told him: and Ahab went to
meet Elijah.

18:17 And it came to pass, when Ahab saw Elijah, that Ahab said unto
him, Art thou he that troubleth Israel?  18:18 And he answered, I have
not troubled Israel; but thou, and thy father's house, in that ye have
forsaken the commandments of the LORD, and thou hast followed Baalim.

18:19 Now therefore send, and gather to me all Israel unto mount
Carmel, and the prophets of Baal four hundred and fifty, and the
prophets of the groves four hundred, which eat at Jezebel's table.

18:20 So Ahab sent unto all the children of Israel, and gathered the
prophets together unto mount Carmel.

18:21 And Elijah came unto all the people, and said, How long halt ye
between two opinions? if the LORD be God, follow him: but if Baal,
then follow him. And the people answered him not a word.

18:22 Then said Elijah unto the people, I, even I only, remain a
prophet of the LORD; but Baal's prophets are four hundred and fifty
men.

18:23 Let them therefore give us two bullocks; and let them choose one
bullock for themselves, and cut it in pieces, and lay it on wood, and
put no fire under: and I will dress the other bullock, and lay it on
wood, and put no fire under: 18:24 And call ye on the name of your
gods, and I will call on the name of the LORD: and the God that
answereth by fire, let him be God. And all the people answered and
said, It is well spoken.

18:25 And Elijah said unto the prophets of Baal, Choose you one
bullock for yourselves, and dress it first; for ye are many; and call
on the name of your gods, but put no fire under.

18:26 And they took the bullock which was given them, and they dressed
it, and called on the name of Baal from morning even until noon,
saying, O Baal, hear us. But there was no voice, nor any that
answered. And they leaped upon the altar which was made.

18:27 And it came to pass at noon, that Elijah mocked them, and said,
Cry aloud: for he is a god; either he is talking, or he is pursuing,
or he is in a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth, and must be
awaked.

18:28 And they cried aloud, and cut themselves after their manner with
knives and lancets, till the blood gushed out upon them.

18:29 And it came to pass, when midday was past, and they prophesied
until the time of the offering of the evening sacrifice, that there
was neither voice, nor any to answer, nor any that regarded.

18:30 And Elijah said unto all the people, Come near unto me. And all
the people came near unto him. And he repaired the altar of the LORD
that was broken down.

18:31 And Elijah took twelve stones, according to the number of the
tribes of the sons of Jacob, unto whom the word of the LORD came,
saying, Israel shall be thy name: 18:32 And with the stones he built
an altar in the name of the LORD: and he made a trench about the
altar, as great as would contain two measures of seed.

18:33 And he put the wood in order, and cut the bullock in pieces, and
laid him on the wood, and said, Fill four barrels with water, and pour
it on the burnt sacrifice, and on the wood.

18:34 And he said, Do it the second time. And they did it the second
time.

And he said, Do it the third time. And they did it the third time.

18:35 And the water ran round about the altar; and he filled the
trench also with water.

18:36 And it came to pass at the time of the offering of the evening
sacrifice, that Elijah the prophet came near, and said, LORD God of
Abraham, Isaac, and of Israel, let it be known this day that thou art
God in Israel, and that I am thy servant, and that I have done all
these things at thy word.

18:37 Hear me, O LORD, hear me, that this people may know that thou
art the LORD God, and that thou hast turned their heart back again.

18:38 Then the fire of the LORD fell, and consumed the burnt
sacrifice, and the wood, and the stones, and the dust, and licked up
the water that was in the trench.

18:39 And when all the people saw it, they fell on their faces: and
they said, The LORD, he is the God; the LORD, he is the God.

18:40 And Elijah said unto them, Take the prophets of Baal; let not
one of them escape. And they took them: and Elijah brought them down
to the brook Kishon, and slew them there.

18:41 And Elijah said unto Ahab, Get thee up, eat and drink; for there
is a sound of abundance of rain.

18:42 So Ahab went up to eat and to drink. And Elijah went up to the
top of Carmel; and he cast himself down upon the earth, and put his
face between his knees, 18:43 And said to his servant, Go up now, look
toward the sea. And he went up, and looked, and said, There is
nothing. And he said, Go again seven times.

18:44 And it came to pass at the seventh time, that he said, Behold,
there ariseth a little cloud out of the sea, like a man's hand. And he
said, Go up, say unto Ahab, Prepare thy chariot, and get thee down
that the rain stop thee not.

18:45 And it came to pass in the mean while, that the heaven was black
with clouds and wind, and there was a great rain. And Ahab rode, and
went to Jezreel.

18:46 And the hand of the LORD was on Elijah; and he girded up his
loins, and ran before Ahab to the entrance of Jezreel.

19:1 And Ahab told Jezebel all that Elijah had done, and withal how he
had slain all the prophets with the sword.

19:2 Then Jezebel sent a messenger unto Elijah, saying, So let the
gods do to me, and more also, if I make not thy life as the life of
one of them by to morrow about this time.

19:3 And when he saw that, he arose, and went for his life, and came
to Beersheba, which belongeth to Judah, and left his servant there.

19:4 But he himself went a day's journey into the wilderness, and came
and sat down under a juniper tree: and he requested for himself that
he might die; and said, It is enough; now, O LORD, take away my life;
for I am not better than my fathers.

19:5 And as he lay and slept under a juniper tree, behold, then an
angel touched him, and said unto him, Arise and eat.

19:6 And he looked, and, behold, there was a cake baken on the coals,
and a cruse of water at his head. And he did eat and drink, and laid
him down again.

19:7 And the angel of the LORD came again the second time, and touched
him, and said, Arise and eat; because the journey is too great for
thee.

19:8 And he arose, and did eat and drink, and went in the strength of
that meat forty days and forty nights unto Horeb the mount of God.

19:9 And he came thither unto a cave, and lodged there; and, behold,
the word of the LORD came to him, and he said unto him, What doest
thou here, Elijah?  19:10 And he said, I have been very jealous for
the LORD God of hosts: for the children of Israel have forsaken thy
covenant, thrown down thine altars, and slain thy prophets with the
sword; and I, even I only, am left; and they seek my life, to take it
away.

19:11 And he said, Go forth, and stand upon the mount before the LORD.

And, behold, the LORD passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the
mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the LORD; but the LORD
was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the LORD
was not in the earthquake: 19:12 And after the earthquake a fire; but
the LORD was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.

19:13 And it was so, when Elijah heard it, that he wrapped his face in
his mantle, and went out, and stood in the entering in of the cave.
And, behold, there came a voice unto him, and said, What doest thou
here, Elijah?  19:14 And he said, I have been very jealous for the
LORD God of hosts: because the children of Israel have forsaken thy
covenant, thrown down thine altars, and slain thy prophets with the
sword; and I, even I only, am left; and they seek my life, to take it
away.

19:15 And the LORD said unto him, Go, return on thy way to the
wilderness of Damascus: and when thou comest, anoint Hazael to be king
over Syria: 19:16 And Jehu the son of Nimshi shalt thou anoint to be
king over Israel: and Elisha the son of Shaphat of Abelmeholah shalt
thou anoint to be prophet in thy room.

19:17 And it shall come to pass, that him that escapeth the sword of
Hazael shall Jehu slay: and him that escapeth from the sword of Jehu
shall Elisha slay.

19:18 Yet I have left me seven thousand in Israel, all the knees which
have not bowed unto Baal, and every mouth which hath not kissed him.

19:19 So he departed thence, and found Elisha the son of Shaphat, who
was plowing with twelve yoke of oxen before him, and he with the
twelfth: and Elijah passed by him, and cast his mantle upon him.

19:20 And he left the oxen, and ran after Elijah, and said, Let me, I
pray thee, kiss my father and my mother, and then I will follow thee.
And he said unto him, Go back again: for what have I done to thee?
19:21 And he returned back from him, and took a yoke of oxen, and slew
them, and boiled their flesh with the instruments of the oxen, and
gave unto the people, and they did eat. Then he arose, and went after
Elijah, and ministered unto him.

20:1 And Benhadad the king of Syria gathered all his host together:
and there were thirty and two kings with him, and horses, and
chariots; and he went up and besieged Samaria, and warred against it.

20:2 And he sent messengers to Ahab king of Israel into the city, and
said unto him, Thus saith Benhadad, 20:3 Thy silver and thy gold is
mine; thy wives also and thy children, even the goodliest, are mine.

20:4 And the king of Israel answered and said, My lord, O king,
according to thy saying, I am thine, and all that I have.

20:5 And the messengers came again, and said, Thus speaketh Benhadad,
saying, Although I have sent unto thee, saying, Thou shalt deliver me
thy silver, and thy gold, and thy wives, and thy children; 20:6 Yet I
will send my servants unto thee to morrow about this time, and they
shall search thine house, and the houses of thy servants; and it shall
be, that whatsoever is pleasant in thine eyes, they shall put it in
their hand, and take it away.

20:7 Then the king of Israel called all the elders of the land, and
said, Mark, I pray you, and see how this man seeketh mischief: for he
sent unto me for my wives, and for my children, and for my silver, and
for my gold; and I denied him not.

20:8 And all the elders and all the people said unto him, Hearken not
unto him, nor consent.

20:9 Wherefore he said unto the messengers of Benhadad, Tell my lord
the king, All that thou didst send for to thy servant at the first I
will do: but this thing I may not do. And the messengers departed, and
brought him word again.

20:10 And Benhadad sent unto him, and said, The gods do so unto me,
and more also, if the dust of Samaria shall suffice for handfuls for
all the people that follow me.

20:11 And the king of Israel answered and said, Tell him, Let not him
that girdeth on his harness boast himself as he that putteth it off.

20:12 And it came to pass, when Ben-hadad heard this message, as he
was drinking, he and the kings in the pavilions, that he said unto his
servants, Set yourselves in array. And they set themselves in array
against the city.

20:13 And, behold, there came a prophet unto Ahab king of Israel,
saying, Thus saith the LORD, Hast thou seen all this great multitude?
behold, I will deliver it into thine hand this day; and thou shalt
know that I am the LORD.

20:14 And Ahab said, By whom? And he said, Thus saith the LORD, Even
by the young men of the princes of the provinces. Then he said, Who
shall order the battle? And he answered, Thou.

20:15 Then he numbered the young men of the princes of the provinces,
and they were two hundred and thirty two: and after them he numbered
all the people, even all the children of Israel, being seven thousand.

20:16 And they went out at noon. But Benhadad was drinking himself
drunk in the pavilions, he and the kings, the thirty and two kings
that helped him.

20:17 And the young men of the princes of the provinces went out
first; and Benhadad sent out, and they told him, saying, There are men
come out of Samaria.

20:18 And he said, Whether they be come out for peace, take them
alive; or whether they be come out for war, take them alive.

20:19 So these young men of the princes of the provinces came out of
the city, and the army which followed them.

20:20 And they slew every one his man: and the Syrians fled; and
Israel pursued them: and Benhadad the king of Syria escaped on an
horse with the horsemen.

20:21 And the king of Israel went out, and smote the horses and
chariots, and slew the Syrians with a great slaughter.

20:22 And the prophet came to the king of Israel, and said unto him,
Go, strengthen thyself, and mark, and see what thou doest: for at the
return of the year the king of Syria will come up against thee.

20:23 And the servants of the king of Syria said unto him, Their gods
are gods of the hills; therefore they were stronger than we; but let
us fight against them in the plain, and surely we shall be stronger
than they.

20:24 And do this thing, Take the kings away, every man out of his
place, and put captains in their rooms: 20:25 And number thee an army,
like the army that thou hast lost, horse for horse, and chariot for
chariot: and we will fight against them in the plain, and surely we
shall be stronger than they. And he hearkened unto their voice, and
did so.

20:26 And it came to pass at the return of the year, that Benhadad
numbered the Syrians, and went up to Aphek, to fight against Israel.

20:27 And the children of Israel were numbered, and were all present,
and went against them: and the children of Israel pitched before them
like two little flocks of kids; but the Syrians filled the country.

20:28 And there came a man of God, and spake unto the king of Israel,
and said, Thus saith the LORD, Because the Syrians have said, The LORD
is God of the hills, but he is not God of the valleys, therefore will
I deliver all this great multitude into thine hand, and ye shall know
that I am the LORD.

20:29 And they pitched one over against the other seven days. And so
it was, that in the seventh day the battle was joined: and the
children of Israel slew of the Syrians an hundred thousand footmen in
one day.

20:30 But the rest fled to Aphek, into the city; and there a wall fell
upon twenty and seven thousand of the men that were left. And Benhadad
fled, and came into the city, into an inner chamber.

20:31 And his servants said unto him, Behold now, we have heard that
the kings of the house of Israel are merciful kings: let us, I pray
thee, put sackcloth on our loins, and ropes upon our heads, and go out
to the king of Israel: peradventure he will save thy life.

20:32 So they girded sackcloth on their loins, and put ropes on their
heads, and came to the king of Israel, and said, Thy servant Benhadad
saith, I pray thee, let me live. And he said, Is he yet alive? he is
my brother.

20:33 Now the men did diligently observe whether any thing would come
from him, and did hastily catch it: and they said, Thy brother
Benhadad. Then he said, Go ye, bring him. Then Benhadad came forth to
him; and he caused him to come up into the chariot.

20:34 And Ben-hadad said unto him, The cities, which my father took
from thy father, I will restore; and thou shalt make streets for thee
in Damascus, as my father made in Samaria. Then said Ahab, I will send
thee away with this covenant. So he made a covenant with him, and sent
him away.

20:35 And a certain man of the sons of the prophets said unto his
neighbour in the word of the LORD, Smite me, I pray thee. And the man
refused to smite him.

20:36 Then said he unto him, Because thou hast not obeyed the voice of
the LORD, behold, as soon as thou art departed from me, a lion shall
slay thee.

And as soon as he was departed from him, a lion found him, and slew
him.

20:37 Then he found another man, and said, Smite me, I pray thee. And
the man smote him, so that in smiting he wounded him.

20:38 So the prophet departed, and waited for the king by the way, and
disguised himself with ashes upon his face.

20:39 And as the king passed by, he cried unto the king: and he said,
Thy servant went out into the midst of the battle; and, behold, a man
turned aside, and brought a man unto me, and said, Keep this man: if
by any means he be missing, then shall thy life be for his life, or
else thou shalt pay a talent of silver.

20:40 And as thy servant was busy here and there, he was gone. And the
king of Israel said unto him, So shall thy judgment be; thyself hast
decided it.

20:41 And he hasted, and took the ashes away from his face; and the
king of Israel discerned him that he was of the prophets.

20:42 And he said unto him, Thus saith the LORD, Because thou hast let
go out of thy hand a man whom I appointed to utter destruction,
therefore thy life shall go for his life, and thy people for his
people.

20:43 And the king of Israel went to his house heavy and displeased,
and came to Samaria.

21:1 And it came to pass after these things, that Naboth the
Jezreelite had a vineyard, which was in Jezreel, hard by the palace of
Ahab king of Samaria.

21:2 And Ahab spake unto Naboth, saying, Give me thy vineyard, that I
may have it for a garden of herbs, because it is near unto my house:
and I will give thee for it a better vineyard than it; or, if it seem
good to thee, I will give thee the worth of it in money.

21:3 And Naboth said to Ahab, The LORD forbid it me, that I should
give the inheritance of my fathers unto thee.

21:4 And Ahab came into his house heavy and displeased because of the
word which Naboth the Jezreelite had spoken to him: for he had said, I
will not give thee the inheritance of my fathers. And he laid him down
upon his bed, and turned away his face, and would eat no bread.

21:5 But Jezebel his wife came to him, and said unto him, Why is thy
spirit so sad, that thou eatest no bread?  21:6 And he said unto her,
Because I spake unto Naboth the Jezreelite, and said unto him, Give me
thy vineyard for money; or else, if it please thee, I will give thee
another vineyard for it: and he answered, I will not give thee my
vineyard.

21:7 And Jezebel his wife said unto him, Dost thou now govern the
kingdom of Israel? arise, and eat bread, and let thine heart be merry:
I will give thee the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite.

21:8 So she wrote letters in Ahab's name, and sealed them with his
seal, and sent the letters unto the elders and to the nobles that were
in his city, dwelling with Naboth.

21:9 And she wrote in the letters, saying, Proclaim a fast, and set
Naboth on high among the people: 21:10 And set two men, sons of
Belial, before him, to bear witness against him, saying, Thou didst
blaspheme God and the king. And then carry him out, and stone him,
that he may die.

21:11 And the men of his city, even the elders and the nobles who were
the inhabitants in his city, did as Jezebel had sent unto them, and as
it was written in the letters which she had sent unto them.

21:12 They proclaimed a fast, and set Naboth on high among the people.

21:13 And there came in two men, children of Belial, and sat before
him: and the men of Belial witnessed against him, even against Naboth,
in the presence of the people, saying, Naboth did blaspheme God and
the king. Then they carried him forth out of the city, and stoned him
with stones, that he died.

21:14 Then they sent to Jezebel, saying, Naboth is stoned, and is
dead.

21:15 And it came to pass, when Jezebel heard that Naboth was stoned,
and was dead, that Jezebel said to Ahab, Arise, take possession of the
vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite, which he refused to give thee for
money: for Naboth is not alive, but dead.

21:16 And it came to pass, when Ahab heard that Naboth was dead, that
Ahab rose up to go down to the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite, to
take possession of it.

21:17 And the word of the LORD came to Elijah the Tishbite, saying,
21:18 Arise, go down to meet Ahab king of Israel, which is in Samaria:
behold, he is in the vineyard of Naboth, whither he is gone down to
possess it.

21:19 And thou shalt speak unto him, saying, Thus saith the LORD, Hast
thou killed, and also taken possession? And thou shalt speak unto him,
saying, Thus saith the LORD, In the place where dogs licked the blood
of Naboth shall dogs lick thy blood, even thine.

21:20 And Ahab said to Elijah, Hast thou found me, O mine enemy? And
he answered, I have found thee: because thou hast sold thyself to work
evil in the sight of the LORD.

21:21 Behold, I will bring evil upon thee, and will take away thy
posterity, and will cut off from Ahab him that pisseth against the
wall, and him that is shut up and left in Israel, 21:22 And will make
thine house like the house of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, and like the
house of Baasha the son of Ahijah, for the provocation wherewith thou
hast provoked me to anger, and made Israel to sin.

21:23 And of Jezebel also spake the LORD, saying, The dogs shall eat
Jezebel by the wall of Jezreel.

21:24 Him that dieth of Ahab in the city the dogs shall eat; and him
that dieth in the field shall the fowls of the air eat.

21:25 But there was none like unto Ahab, which did sell himself to
work wickedness in the sight of the LORD, whom Jezebel his wife
stirred up.

21:26 And he did very abominably in following idols, according to all
things as did the Amorites, whom the LORD cast out before the children
of Israel.

21:27 And it came to pass, when Ahab heard those words, that he rent
his clothes, and put sackcloth upon his flesh, and fasted, and lay in
sackcloth, and went softly.

21:28 And the word of the LORD came to Elijah the Tishbite, saying,
21:29 Seest thou how Ahab humbleth himself before me? because he
humbleth himself before me, I will not bring the evil in his days: but
in his son's days will I bring the evil upon his house.

22:1 And they continued three years without war between Syria and
Israel.

22:2 And it came to pass in the third year, that Jehoshaphat the king
of Judah came down to the king of Israel.

22:3 And the king of Israel said unto his servants, Know ye that
Ramoth in Gilead is ours, and we be still, and take it not out of the
hand of the king of Syria?  22:4 And he said unto Jehoshaphat, Wilt
thou go with me to battle to Ramothgilead? And Jehoshaphat said to the
king of Israel, I am as thou art, my people as thy people, my horses
as thy horses.

22:5 And Jehoshaphat said unto the king of Israel, Enquire, I pray
thee, at the word of the LORD to day.

22:6 Then the king of Israel gathered the prophets together, about
four hundred men, and said unto them, Shall I go against Ramothgilead
to battle, or shall I forbear? And they said, Go up; for the LORD
shall deliver it into the hand of the king.

22:7 And Jehoshaphat said, Is there not here a prophet of the LORD
besides, that we might enquire of him?  22:8 And the king of Israel
said unto Jehoshaphat, There is yet one man, Micaiah the son of Imlah,
by whom we may enquire of the LORD: but I hate him; for he doth not
prophesy good concerning me, but evil. And Jehoshaphat said, Let not
the king say so.

22:9 Then the king of Israel called an officer, and said, Hasten
hither Micaiah the son of Imlah.

22:10 And the king of Israel and Jehoshaphat the king of Judah sat
each on his throne, having put on their robes, in a void place in the
entrance of the gate of Samaria; and all the prophets prophesied
before them.

22:11 And Zedekiah the son of Chenaanah made him horns of iron: and he
said, Thus saith the LORD, With these shalt thou push the Syrians,
until thou have consumed them.

22:12 And all the prophets prophesied so, saying, Go up to
Ramothgilead, and prosper: for the LORD shall deliver it into the
king's hand.

22:13 And the messenger that was gone to call Micaiah spake unto him,
saying, Behold now, the words of the prophets declare good unto the
king with one mouth: let thy word, I pray thee, be like the word of
one of them, and speak that which is good.

22:14 And Micaiah said, As the LORD liveth, what the LORD saith unto
me, that will I speak.

22:15 So he came to the king. And the king said unto him, Micaiah,
shall we go against Ramothgilead to battle, or shall we forbear? And
he answered him, Go, and prosper: for the LORD shall deliver it into
the hand of the king.

22:16 And the king said unto him, How many times shall I adjure thee
that thou tell me nothing but that which is true in the name of the
LORD?  22:17 And he said, I saw all Israel scattered upon the hills,
as sheep that have not a shepherd: and the LORD said, These have no
master: let them return every man to his house in peace.

22:18 And the king of Israel said unto Jehoshaphat, Did I not tell
thee that he would prophesy no good concerning me, but evil?  22:19
And he said, Hear thou therefore the word of the LORD: I saw the LORD
sitting on his throne, and all the host of heaven standing by him on
his right hand and on his left.

22:20 And the LORD said, Who shall persuade Ahab, that he may go up
and fall at Ramothgilead? And one said on this manner, and another
said on that manner.

22:21 And there came forth a spirit, and stood before the LORD, and
said, I will persuade him.

22:22 And the LORD said unto him, Wherewith? And he said, I will go
forth, and I will be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets.
And he said, Thou shalt persude him, and prevail also: go forth, and
do so.

22:23 Now therefore, behold, the LORD hath put a lying spirit in the
mouth of all these thy prophets, and the LORD hath spoken evil
concerning thee.

22:24 But Zedekiah the son of Chenaanah went near, and smote Micaiah
on the cheek, and said, Which way went the Spirit of the LORD from me
to speak unto thee?  22:25 And Micaiah said, Behold, thou shalt see in
that day, when thou shalt go into an inner chamber to hide thyself.

22:26 And the king of Israel said, Take Micaiah, and carry him back
unto Amon the governor of the city, and to Joash the king's son; 22:27
And say, Thus saith the king, Put this fellow in the prison, and feed
him with bread of affliction and with water of affliction, until I
come in peace.

22:28 And Micaiah said, If thou return at all in peace, the LORD hath
not spoken by me. And he said, Hearken, O people, every one of you.

22:29 So the king of Israel and Jehoshaphat the king of Judah went up
to Ramothgilead.

22:30 And the king of Israel said unto Jehoshaphat, I will disguise
myself, and enter into the battle; but put thou on thy robes. And the
king of Israel disguised himself, and went into the battle.

22:31 But the king of Syria commanded his thirty and two captains that
had rule over his chariots, saying, Fight neither with small nor
great, save only with the king of Israel.

22:32 And it came to pass, when the captains of the chariots saw
Jehoshaphat, that they said, Surely it is the king of Israel. And they
turned aside to fight against him: and Jehoshaphat cried out.

22:33 And it came to pass, when the captains of the chariots perceived
that it was not the king of Israel, that they turned back from
pursuing him.

22:34 And a certain man drew a bow at a venture, and smote the king of
Israel between the joints of the harness: wherefore he said unto the
driver of his chariot, Turn thine hand, and carry me out of the host;
for I am wounded.

22:35 And the battle increased that day: and the king was stayed up in
his chariot against the Syrians, and died at even: and the blood ran
out of the wound into the midst of the chariot.

22:36 And there went a proclamation throughout the host about the
going down of the sun, saying, Every man to his city, and every man to
his own country.

22:37 So the king died, and was brought to Samaria; and they buried
the king in Samaria.

22:38 And one washed the chariot in the pool of Samaria; and the dogs
licked up his blood; and they washed his armour; according unto the
word of the LORD which he spake.

22:39 Now the rest of the acts of Ahab, and all that he did, and the
ivory house which he made, and all the cities that he built, are they
not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Israel?
22:40 So Ahab slept with his fathers; and Ahaziah his son reigned in
his stead.

22:41 And Jehoshaphat the son of Asa began to reign over Judah in the
fourth year of Ahab king of Israel.

22:42 Jehoshaphat was thirty and five years old when he began to
reign; and he reigned twenty and five years in Jerusalem. And his
mother's name was Azubah the daughter of Shilhi.

22:43 And he walked in all the ways of Asa his father; he turned not
aside from it, doing that which was right in the eyes of the LORD:
nevertheless the high places were not taken away; for the people
offered and burnt incense yet in the high places.

22:44 And Jehoshaphat made peace with the king of Israel.

22:45 Now the rest of the acts of Jehoshaphat, and his might that he
shewed, and how he warred, are they not written in the book of the
chronicles of the kings of Judah?  22:46 And the remnant of the
sodomites, which remained in the days of his father Asa, he took out
of the land.

22:47 There was then no king in Edom: a deputy was king.

22:48 Jehoshaphat made ships of Tharshish to go to Ophir for gold: but
they went not; for the ships were broken at Eziongeber.

22:49 Then said Ahaziah the son of Ahab unto Jehoshaphat, Let my
servants go with thy servants in the ships. But Jehoshaphat would not.

22:50 And Jehoshaphat slept with his fathers, and was buried with his
fathers in the city of David his father: and Jehoram his son reigned
in his stead.

22:51 Ahaziah the son of Ahab began to reign over Israel in Samaria
the seventeenth year of Jehoshaphat king of Judah, and reigned two
years over Israel.

22:52 And he did evil in the sight of the LORD, and walked in the way
of his father, and in the way of his mother, and in the way of
Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin: 22:53 For he served
Baal, and worshipped him, and provoked to anger the LORD God of
Israel, according to all that his father had done.




The Second Book of the Kings

Commonly Called:

The Fourth Book of the Kings


1:1 Then Moab rebelled against Israel after the death of Ahab.

1:2 And Ahaziah fell down through a lattice in his upper chamber that
was in Samaria, and was sick: and he sent messengers, and said unto
them, Go, enquire of Baalzebub the god of Ekron whether I shall
recover of this disease.

1:3 But the angel of the LORD said to Elijah the Tishbite, Arise, go
up to meet the messengers of the king of Samaria, and say unto them,
Is it not because there is not a God in Israel, that ye go to enquire
of Baalzebub the god of Ekron?  1:4 Now therefore thus saith the LORD,
Thou shalt not come down from that bed on which thou art gone up, but
shalt surely die. And Elijah departed.

1:5 And when the messengers turned back unto him, he said unto them,
Why are ye now turned back?  1:6 And they said unto him, There came a
man up to meet us, and said unto us, Go, turn again unto the king that
sent you, and say unto him, Thus saith the LORD, Is it not because
there is not a God in Israel, that thou sendest to enquire of
Baalzebub the god of Ekron? therefore thou shalt not come down from
that bed on which thou art gone up, but shalt surely die.

1:7 And he said unto them, What manner of man was he which came up to
meet you, and told you these words?  1:8 And they answered him, He was
an hairy man, and girt with a girdle of leather about his loins. And
he said, It is Elijah the Tishbite.

1:9 Then the king sent unto him a captain of fifty with his fifty. And
he went up to him: and, behold, he sat on the top of an hill. And he
spake unto him, Thou man of God, the king hath said, Come down.

1:10 And Elijah answered and said to the captain of fifty, If I be a
man of God, then let fire come down from heaven, and consume thee and
thy fifty.

And there came down fire from heaven, and consumed him and his fifty.

1:11 Again also he sent unto him another captain of fifty with his
fifty.

And he answered and said unto him, O man of God, thus hath the king
said, Come down quickly.

1:12 And Elijah answered and said unto them, If I be a man of God, let
fire come down from heaven, and consume thee and thy fifty. And the
fire of God came down from heaven, and consumed him and his fifty.

1:13 And he sent again a captain of the third fifty with his fifty.
And the third captain of fifty went up, and came and fell on his knees
before Elijah, and besought him, and said unto him, O man of God, I
pray thee, let my life, and the life of these fifty thy servants, be
precious in thy sight.

1:14 Behold, there came fire down from heaven, and burnt up the two
captains of the former fifties with their fifties: therefore let my
life now be precious in thy sight.

1:15 And the angel of the LORD said unto Elijah, Go down with him: be
not afraid of him. And he arose, and went down with him unto the king.

1:16 And he said unto him, Thus saith the LORD, Forasmuch as thou hast
sent messengers to enquire of Baalzebub the god of Ekron, is it not
because there is no God in Israel to enquire of his word? therefore
thou shalt not come down off that bed on which thou art gone up, but
shalt surely die.

1:17 So he died according to the word of the LORD which Elijah had
spoken.

And Jehoram reigned in his stead in the second year of Jehoram the son
of Jehoshaphat king of Judah; because he had no son.

1:18 Now the rest of the acts of Ahaziah which he did, are they not
written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Israel?  2:1 And
it came to pass, when the LORD would take up Elijah into heaven by a
whirlwind, that Elijah went with Elisha from Gilgal.

2:2 And Elijah said unto Elisha, Tarry here, I pray thee; for the LORD
hath sent me to Bethel. And Elisha said unto him, As the LORD liveth,
and as thy soul liveth, I will not leave thee. So they went down to
Bethel.

2:3 And the sons of the prophets that were at Bethel came forth to
Elisha, and said unto him, Knowest thou that the LORD will take away
thy master from thy head to day? And he said, Yea, I know it; hold ye
your peace.

2:4 And Elijah said unto him, Elisha, tarry here, I pray thee; for the
LORD hath sent me to Jericho. And he said, As the LORD liveth, and as
thy soul liveth, I will not leave thee. So they came to Jericho.

2:5 And the sons of the prophets that were at Jericho came to Elisha,
and said unto him, Knowest thou that the LORD will take away thy
master from thy head to day? And he answered, Yea, I know it; hold ye
your peace.

2:6 And Elijah said unto him, Tarry, I pray thee, here; for the LORD
hath sent me to Jordan. And he said, As the LORD liveth, and as thy
soul liveth, I will not leave thee. And they two went on.

2:7 And fifty men of the sons of the prophets went, and stood to view
afar off: and they two stood by Jordan.

2:8 And Elijah took his mantle, and wrapped it together, and smote the
waters, and they were divided hither and thither, so that they two
went over on dry ground.

2:9 And it came to pass, when they were gone over, that Elijah said
unto Elisha, Ask what I shall do for thee, before I be taken away from
thee. And Elisha said, I pray thee, let a double portion of thy spirit
be upon me.

2:10 And he said, Thou hast asked a hard thing: nevertheless, if thou
see me when I am taken from thee, it shall be so unto thee; but if
not, it shall not be so.

2:11 And it came to pass, as they still went on, and talked, that,
behold, there appeared a chariot of fire, and horses of fire, and
parted them both asunder; and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into
heaven.

2:12 And Elisha saw it, and he cried, My father, my father, the
chariot of Israel, and the horsemen thereof. And he saw him no more:
and he took hold of his own clothes, and rent them in two pieces.

2:13 He took up also the mantle of Elijah that fell from him, and went
back, and stood by the bank of Jordan; 2:14 And he took the mantle of
Elijah that fell from him, and smote the waters, and said, Where is
the LORD God of Elijah? and when he also had smitten the waters, they
parted hither and thither: and Elisha went over.

2:15 And when the sons of the prophets which were to view at Jericho
saw him, they said, The spirit of Elijah doth rest on Elisha. And they
came to meet him, and bowed themselves to the ground before him.

2:16 And they said unto him, Behold now, there be with thy servants
fifty strong men; let them go, we pray thee, and seek thy master: lest
peradventure the Spirit of the LORD hath taken him up, and cast him
upon some mountain, or into some valley. And he said, Ye shall not
send.

2:17 And when they urged him till he was ashamed, he said, Send. They
sent therefore fifty men; and they sought three days, but found him
not.

2:18 And when they came again to him, (for he tarried at Jericho,) he
said unto them, Did I not say unto you, Go not?  2:19 And the men of
the city said unto Elisha, Behold, I pray thee, the situation of this
city is pleasant, as my lord seeth: but the water is naught, and the
ground barren.

2:20 And he said, Bring me a new cruse, and put salt therein. And they
brought it to him.

2:21 And he went forth unto the spring of the waters, and cast the
salt in there, and said, Thus saith the LORD, I have healed these
waters; there shall not be from thence any more death or barren land.

2:22 So the waters were healed unto this day, according to the saying
of Elisha which he spake.

2:23 And he went up from thence unto Bethel: and as he was going up by
the way, there came forth little children out of the city, and mocked
him, and said unto him, Go up, thou bald head; go up, thou bald head.

2:24 And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the
name of the LORD. And there came forth two she bears out of the wood,
and tare forty and two children of them.

2:25 And he went from thence to mount Carmel, and from thence he
returned to Samaria.

3:1 Now Jehoram the son of Ahab began to reign over Israel in Samaria
the eighteenth year of Jehoshaphat king of Judah, and reigned twelve
years.

3:2 And he wrought evil in the sight of the LORD; but not like his
father, and like his mother: for he put away the image of Baal that
his father had made.

3:3 Nevertheless he cleaved unto the sins of Jeroboam the son of
Nebat, which made Israel to sin; he departed not therefrom.

3:4 And Mesha king of Moab was a sheepmaster, and rendered unto the
king of Israel an hundred thousand lambs, and an hundred thousand
rams, with the wool.

3:5 But it came to pass, when Ahab was dead, that the king of Moab
rebelled against the king of Israel.

3:6 And king Jehoram went out of Samaria the same time, and numbered
all Israel.

3:7 And he went and sent to Jehoshaphat the king of Judah, saying, The
king of Moab hath rebelled against me: wilt thou go with me against
Moab to battle? And he said, I will go up: I am as thou art, my people
as thy people, and my horses as thy horses.

3:8 And he said, Which way shall we go up? And he answered, The way
through the wilderness of Edom.

3:9 So the king of Israel went, and the king of Judah, and the king of
Edom: and they fetched a compass of seven days' journey: and there was
no water for the host, and for the cattle that followed them.

3:10 And the king of Israel said, Alas! that the LORD hath called
these three kings together, to deliver them into the hand of Moab!
3:11 But Jehoshaphat said, Is there not here a prophet of the LORD,
that we may enquire of the LORD by him? And one of the king of
Israel's servants answered and said, Here is Elisha the son of
Shaphat, which poured water on the hands of Elijah.

3:12 And Jehoshaphat said, The word of the LORD is with him. So the
king of Israel and Jehoshaphat and the king of Edom went down to him.

3:13 And Elisha said unto the king of Israel, What have I to do with
thee?  get thee to the prophets of thy father, and to the prophets of
thy mother.

And the king of Israel said unto him, Nay: for the LORD hath called
these three kings together, to deliver them into the hand of Moab.

3:14 And Elisha said, As the LORD of hosts liveth, before whom I
stand, surely, were it not that I regard the presence of Jehoshaphat
the king of Judah, I would not look toward thee, nor see thee.

3:15 But now bring me a minstrel. And it came to pass, when the
minstrel played, that the hand of the LORD came upon him.

3:16 And he said, Thus saith the LORD, Make this valley full of
ditches.

3:17 For thus saith the LORD, Ye shall not see wind, neither shall ye
see rain; yet that valley shall be filled with water, that ye may
drink, both ye, and your cattle, and your beasts.

3:18 And this is but a light thing in the sight of the LORD: he will
deliver the Moabites also into your hand.

3:19 And ye shall smite every fenced city, and every choice city, and
shall fell every good tree, and stop all wells of water, and mar every
good piece of land with stones.

3:20 And it came to pass in the morning, when the meat offering was
offered, that, behold, there came water by the way of Edom, and the
country was filled with water.

3:21 And when all the Moabites heard that the kings were come up to
fight against them, they gathered all that were able to put on armour,
and upward, and stood in the border.

3:22 And they rose up early in the morning, and the sun shone upon the
water, and the Moabites saw the water on the other side as red as
blood: 3:23 And they said, This is blood: the kings are surely slain,
and they have smitten one another: now therefore, Moab, to the spoil.

3:24 And when they came to the camp of Israel, the Israelites rose up
and smote the Moabites, so that they fled before them: but they went
forward smiting the Moabites, even in their country.

3:25 And they beat down the cities, and on every good piece of land
cast every man his stone, and filled it; and they stopped all the
wells of water, and felled all the good trees: only in Kirharaseth
left they the stones thereof; howbeit the slingers went about it, and
smote it.

3:26 And when the king of Moab saw that the battle was too sore for
him, he took with him seven hundred men that drew swords, to break
through even unto the king of Edom: but they could not.

3:27 Then he took his eldest son that should have reigned in his
stead, and offered him for a burnt offering upon the wall. And there
was great indignation against Israel: and they departed from him, and
returned to their own land.

4:1 Now there cried a certain woman of the wives of the sons of the
prophets unto Elisha, saying, Thy servant my husband is dead; and thou
knowest that thy servant did fear the LORD: and the creditor is come
to take unto him my two sons to be bondmen.

4:2 And Elisha said unto her, What shall I do for thee? tell me, what
hast thou in the house? And she said, Thine handmaid hath not any
thing in the house, save a pot of oil.

4:3 Then he said, Go, borrow thee vessels abroad of all thy
neighbours, even empty vessels; borrow not a few.

4:4 And when thou art come in, thou shalt shut the door upon thee and
upon thy sons, and shalt pour out into all those vessels, and thou
shalt set aside that which is full.

4:5 So she went from him, and shut the door upon her and upon her
sons, who brought the vessels to her; and she poured out.

4:6 And it came to pass, when the vessels were full, that she said
unto her son, Bring me yet a vessel. And he said unto her, There is
not a vessel more. And the oil stayed.

4:7 Then she came and told the man of God. And he said, Go, sell the
oil, and pay thy debt, and live thou and thy children of the rest.

4:8 And it fell on a day, that Elisha passed to Shunem, where was a
great woman; and she constrained him to eat bread. And so it was, that
as oft as he passed by, he turned in thither to eat bread.

4:9 And she said unto her husband, Behold now, I perceive that this is
an holy man of God, which passeth by us continually.

4:10 Let us make a little chamber, I pray thee, on the wall; and let
us set for him there a bed, and a table, and a stool, and a
candlestick: and it shall be, when he cometh to us, that he shall turn
in thither.

4:11 And it fell on a day, that he came thither, and he turned into
the chamber, and lay there.

4:12 And he said to Gehazi his servant, Call this Shunammite. And when
he had called her, she stood before him.

4:13 And he said unto him, Say now unto her, Behold, thou hast been
careful for us with all this care; what is to be done for thee?
wouldest thou be spoken for to the king, or to the captain of the
host? And she answered, I dwell among mine own people.

4:14 And he said, What then is to be done for her? And Gehazi
answered, Verily she hath no child, and her husband is old.

4:15 And he said, Call her. And when he had called her, she stood in
the door.

4:16 And he said, About this season, according to the time of life,
thou shalt embrace a son. And she said, Nay, my lord, thou man of God,
do not lie unto thine handmaid.

4:17 And the woman conceived, and bare a son at that season that
Elisha had said unto her, according to the time of life.

4:18 And when the child was grown, it fell on a day, that he went out
to his father to the reapers.

4:19 And he said unto his father, My head, my head. And he said to a
lad, Carry him to his mother.

4:20 And when he had taken him, and brought him to his mother, he sat
on her knees till noon, and then died.

4:21 And she went up, and laid him on the bed of the man of God, and
shut the door upon him, and went out.

4:22 And she called unto her husband, and said, Send me, I pray thee,
one of the young men, and one of the asses, that I may run to the man
of God, and come again.

4:23 And he said, Wherefore wilt thou go to him to day? it is neither
new moon, nor sabbath. And she said, It shall be well.

4:24 Then she saddled an ass, and said to her servant, Drive, and go
forward; slack not thy riding for me, except I bid thee.

4:25 So she went and came unto the man of God to mount Carmel. And it
came to pass, when the man of God saw her afar off, that he said to
Gehazi his servant, Behold, yonder is that Shunammite: 4:26 Run now, I
pray thee, to meet her, and say unto her, Is it well with thee? is it
well with thy husband? is it well with the child? And she answered, It
is well: 4:27 And when she came to the man of God to the hill, she
caught him by the feet: but Gehazi came near to thrust her away. And
the man of God said, Let her alone; for her soul is vexed within her:
and the LORD hath hid it from me, and hath not told me.

4:28 Then she said, Did I desire a son of my lord? did I not say, Do
not deceive me?  4:29 Then he said to Gehazi, Gird up thy loins, and
take my staff in thine hand, and go thy way: if thou meet any man,
salute him not; and if any salute thee, answer him not again: and lay
my staff upon the face of the child.

4:30 And the mother of the child said, As the LORD liveth, and as thy
soul liveth, I will not leave thee. And he arose, and followed her.

4:31 And Gehazi passed on before them, and laid the staff upon the
face of the child; but there was neither voice, nor hearing. Wherefore
he went again to meet him, and told him, saying, The child is not
awaked.

4:32 And when Elisha was come into the house, behold, the child was
dead, and laid upon his bed.

4:33 He went in therefore, and shut the door upon them twain, and
prayed unto the LORD.

4:34 And he went up, and lay upon the child, and put his mouth upon
his mouth, and his eyes upon his eyes, and his hands upon his hands:
and stretched himself upon the child; and the flesh of the child waxed
warm.

4:35 Then he returned, and walked in the house to and fro; and went
up, and stretched himself upon him: and the child sneezed seven times,
and the child opened his eyes.

4:36 And he called Gehazi, and said, Call this Shunammite. So he
called her. And when she was come in unto him, he said, Take up thy
son.

4:37 Then she went in, and fell at his feet, and bowed herself to the
ground, and took up her son, and went out.

4:38 And Elisha came again to Gilgal: and there was a dearth in the
land; and the sons of the prophets were sitting before him: and he
said unto his servant, Set on the great pot, and seethe pottage for
the sons of the prophets.

4:39 And one went out into the field to gather herbs, and found a wild
vine, and gathered thereof wild gourds his lap full, and came and
shred them into the pot of pottage: for they knew them not.

4:40 So they poured out for the men to eat. And it came to pass, as
they were eating of the pottage, that they cried out, and said, O thou
man of God, there is death in the pot. And they could not eat thereof.

4:41 But he said, Then bring meal. And he cast it into the pot; and he
said, Pour out for the people, that they may eat. And there was no
harm in the pot.

4:42 And there came a man from Baalshalisha, and brought the man of
God bread of the firstfruits, twenty loaves of barley, and full ears
of corn in the husk thereof. And he said, Give unto the people, that
they may eat.

4:43 And his servitor said, What, should I set this before an hundred
men?  He said again, Give the people, that they may eat: for thus
saith the LORD, They shall eat, and shall leave thereof.

4:44 So he set it before them, and they did eat, and left thereof,
according to the word of the LORD.

5:1 Now Naaman, captain of the host of the king of Syria, was a great
man with his master, and honourable, because by him the LORD had given
deliverance unto Syria: he was also a mighty man in valour, but he was
a leper.

5:2 And the Syrians had gone out by companies, and had brought away
captive out of the land of Israel a little maid; and she waited on
Naaman's wife.

5:3 And she said unto her mistress, Would God my lord were with the
prophet that is in Samaria! for he would recover him of his leprosy.

5:4 And one went in, and told his lord, saying, Thus and thus said the
maid that is of the land of Israel.

5:5 And the king of Syria said, Go to, go, and I will send a letter
unto the king of Israel. And he departed, and took with him ten
talents of silver, and six thousand pieces of gold, and ten changes of
raiment.

5:6 And he brought the letter to the king of Israel, saying, Now when
this letter is come unto thee, behold, I have therewith sent Naaman my
servant to thee, that thou mayest recover him of his leprosy.

5:7 And it came to pass, when the king of Israel had read the letter,
that he rent his clothes, and said, Am I God, to kill and to make
alive, that this man doth send unto me to recover a man of his
leprosy? wherefore consider, I pray you, and see how he seeketh a
quarrel against me.

5:8 And it was so, when Elisha the man of God had heard that the king
of Israel had rent his clothes, that he sent to the king, saying,
Wherefore hast thou rent thy clothes? let him come now to me, and he
shall know that there is a prophet in Israel.

5:9 So Naaman came with his horses and with his chariot, and stood at
the door of the house of Elisha.

5:10 And Elisha sent a messenger unto him, saying, Go and wash in
Jordan seven times, and thy flesh shall come again to thee, and thou
shalt be clean.

5:11 But Naaman was wroth, and went away, and said, Behold, I thought,
He will surely come out to me, and stand, and call on the name of the
LORD his God, and strike his hand over the place, and recover the
leper.

5:12 Are not Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, better than all
the waters of Israel? may I not wash in them, and be clean? So he
turned and went away in a rage.

5:13 And his servants came near, and spake unto him, and said, My
father, if the prophet had bid thee do some great thing, wouldest thou
not have done it? how much rather then, when he saith to thee, Wash,
and be clean?  5:14 Then went he down, and dipped himself seven times
in Jordan, according to the saying of the man of God: and his flesh
came again like unto the flesh of a little child, and he was clean.

5:15 And he returned to the man of God, he and all his company, and
came, and stood before him: and he said, Behold, now I know that there
is no God in all the earth, but in Israel: now therefore, I pray thee,
take a blessing of thy servant.

5:16 But he said, As the LORD liveth, before whom I stand, I will
receive none. And he urged him to take it; but he refused.

5:17 And Naaman said, Shall there not then, I pray thee, be given to
thy servant two mules' burden of earth? for thy servant will
henceforth offer neither burnt offering nor sacrifice unto other gods,
but unto the LORD.

5:18 In this thing the LORD pardon thy servant, that when my master
goeth into the house of Rimmon to worship there, and he leaneth on my
hand, and I bow myself in the house of Rimmon: when I bow down myself
in the house of Rimmon, the LORD pardon thy servant in this thing.

5:19 And he said unto him, Go in peace. So he departed from him a
little way.

5:20 But Gehazi, the servant of Elisha the man of God, said, Behold,
my master hath spared Naaman this Syrian, in not receiving at his
hands that which he brought: but, as the LORD liveth, I will run after
him, and take somewhat of him.

5:21 So Gehazi followed after Naaman. And when Naaman saw him running
after him, he lighted down from the chariot to meet him, and said, Is
all well?  5:22 And he said, All is well. My master hath sent me,
saying, Behold, even now there be come to me from mount Ephraim two
young men of the sons of the prophets: give them, I pray thee, a
talent of silver, and two changes of garments.

5:23 And Naaman said, Be content, take two talents. And he urged him,
and bound two talents of silver in two bags, with two changes of
garments, and laid them upon two of his servants; and they bare them
before him.

5:24 And when he came to the tower, he took them from their hand, and
bestowed them in the house: and he let the men go, and they departed.

5:25 But he went in, and stood before his master. And Elisha said unto
him, Whence comest thou, Gehazi? And he said, Thy servant went no
whither.

5:26 And he said unto him, Went not mine heart with thee, when the man
turned again from his chariot to meet thee? Is it a time to receive
money, and to receive garments, and oliveyards, and vineyards, and
sheep, and oxen, and menservants, and maidservants?  5:27 The leprosy
therefore of Naaman shall cleave unto thee, and unto thy seed for
ever. And he went out from his presence a leper as white as snow.

6:1 And the sons of the prophets said unto Elisha, Behold now, the
place where we dwell with thee is too strait for us.

6:2 Let us go, we pray thee, unto Jordan, and take thence every man a
beam, and let us make us a place there, where we may dwell. And he
answered, Go ye.

6:3 And one said, Be content, I pray thee, and go with thy servants.
And he answered, I will go.

6:4 So he went with them. And when they came to Jordan, they cut down
wood.

6:5 But as one was felling a beam, the axe head fell into the water:
and he cried, and said, Alas, master! for it was borrowed.

6:6 And the man of God said, Where fell it? And he shewed him the
place.

And he cut down a stick, and cast it in thither; and the iron did
swim.

6:7 Therefore said he, Take it up to thee. And he put out his hand,
and took it.

6:8 Then the king of Syria warred against Israel, and took counsel
with his servants, saying, In such and such a place shall be my camp.

6:9 And the man of God sent unto the king of Israel, saying, Beware
that thou pass not such a place; for thither the Syrians are come
down.

6:10 And the king of Israel sent to the place which the man of God
told him and warned him of, and saved himself there, not once nor
twice.

6:11 Therefore the heart of the king of Syria was sore troubled for
this thing; and he called his servants, and said unto them, Will ye
not shew me which of us is for the king of Israel?  6:12 And one of
his servants said, None, my lord, O king: but Elisha, the prophet that
is in Israel, telleth the king of Israel the words that thou speakest
in thy bedchamber.

6:13 And he said, Go and spy where he is, that I may send and fetch
him.

And it was told him, saying, Behold, he is in Dothan.

6:14 Therefore sent he thither horses, and chariots, and a great host:
and they came by night, and compassed the city about.

6:15 And when the servant of the man of God was risen early, and gone
forth, behold, an host compassed the city both with horses and
chariots. And his servant said unto him, Alas, my master! how shall we
do?  6:16 And he answered, Fear not: for they that be with us are more
than they that be with them.

6:17 And Elisha prayed, and said, LORD, I pray thee, open his eyes,
that he may see. And the LORD opened the eyes of the young man; and he
saw: and, behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire
round about Elisha.

6:18 And when they came down to him, Elisha prayed unto the LORD, and
said, Smite this people, I pray thee, with blindness. And he smote
them with blindness according to the word of Elisha.

6:19 And Elisha said unto them, This is not the way, neither is this
the city: follow me, and I will bring you to the man whom ye seek. But
he led them to Samaria.

6:20 And it came to pass, when they were come into Samaria, that
Elisha said, LORD, open the eyes of these men, that they may see. And
the LORD opened their eyes, and they saw; and, behold, they were in
the midst of Samaria.

6:21 And the king of Israel said unto Elisha, when he saw them, My
father, shall I smite them? shall I smite them?  6:22 And he answered,
Thou shalt not smite them: wouldest thou smite those whom thou hast
taken captive with thy sword and with thy bow? set bread and water
before them, that they may eat and drink, and go to their master.

6:23 And he prepared great provision for them: and when they had eaten
and drunk, he sent them away, and they went to their master. So the
bands of Syria came no more into the land of Israel.

6:24 And it came to pass after this, that Benhadad king of Syria
gathered all his host, and went up, and besieged Samaria.

6:25 And there was a great famine in Samaria: and, behold, they
besieged it, until an ass's head was sold for fourscore pieces of
silver, and the fourth part of a cab of dove's dung for five pieces of
silver.

6:26 And as the king of Israel was passing by upon the wall, there
cried a woman unto him, saying, Help, my lord, O king.

6:27 And he said, If the LORD do not help thee, whence shall I help
thee?  out of the barnfloor, or out of the winepress?  6:28 And the
king said unto her, What aileth thee? And she answered, This woman
said unto me, Give thy son, that we may eat him to day, and we will
eat my son to morrow.

6:29 So we boiled my son, and did eat him: and I said unto her on the
next day, Give thy son, that we may eat him: and she hath hid her son.

6:30 And it came to pass, when the king heard the words of the woman,
that he rent his clothes; and he passed by upon the wall, and the
people looked, and, behold, he had sackcloth within upon his flesh.

6:31 Then he said, God do so and more also to me, if the head of
Elisha the son of Shaphat shall stand on him this day.

6:32 But Elisha sat in his house, and the elders sat with him; and the
king sent a man from before him: but ere the messenger came to him, he
said to the elders, See ye how this son of a murderer hath sent to
take away mine head? look, when the messenger cometh, shut the door,
and hold him fast at the door: is not the sound of his master's feet
behind him?  6:33 And while he yet talked with them, behold, the
messenger came down unto him: and he said, Behold, this evil is of the
LORD; what should I wait for the LORD any longer?  7:1 Then Elisha
said, Hear ye the word of the LORD; Thus saith the LORD, To morrow
about this time shall a measure of fine flour be sold for a shekel,
and two measures of barley for a shekel, in the gate of Samaria.

7:2 Then a lord on whose hand the king leaned answered the man of God,
and said, Behold, if the LORD would make windows in heaven, might this
thing be?  And he said, Behold, thou shalt see it with thine eyes, but
shalt not eat thereof.

7:3 And there were four leprous men at the entering in of the gate:
and they said one to another, Why sit we here until we die?  7:4 If we
say, We will enter into the city, then the famine is in the city, and
we shall die there: and if we sit still here, we die also. Now
therefore come, and let us fall unto the host of the Syrians: if they
save us alive, we shall live; and if they kill us, we shall but die.

7:5 And they rose up in the twilight, to go unto the camp of the
Syrians: and when they were come to the uttermost part of the camp of
Syria, behold, there was no man there.

7:6 For the LORD had made the host of the Syrians to hear a noise of
chariots, and a noise of horses, even the noise of a great host: and
they said one to another, Lo, the king of Israel hath hired against us
the kings of the Hittites, and the kings of the Egyptians, to come
upon us.

7:7 Wherefore they arose and fled in the twilight, and left their
tents, and their horses, and their asses, even the camp as it was, and
fled for their life.

7:8 And when these lepers came to the uttermost part of the camp, they
went into one tent, and did eat and drink, and carried thence silver,
and gold, and raiment, and went and hid it; and came again, and
entered into another tent, and carried thence also, and went and hid
it.

7:9 Then they said one to another, We do not well: this day is a day
of good tidings, and we hold our peace: if we tarry till the morning
light, some mischief will come upon us: now therefore come, that we
may go and tell the king's household.

7:10 So they came and called unto the porter of the city: and they
told them, saying, We came to the camp of the Syrians, and, behold,
there was no man there, neither voice of man, but horses tied, and
asses tied, and the tents as they were.

7:11 And he called the porters; and they told it to the king's house
within.

7:12 And the king arose in the night, and said unto his servants, I
will now shew you what the Syrians have done to us. They know that we
be hungry; therefore are they gone out of the camp to hide themselves
in the field, saying, When they come out of the city, we shall catch
them alive, and get into the city.

7:13 And one of his servants answered and said, Let some take, I pray
thee, five of the horses that remain, which are left in the city,
(behold, they are as all the multitude of Israel that are left in it:
behold, I say, they are even as all the multitude of the Israelites
that are consumed:) and let us send and see.

7:14 They took therefore two chariot horses; and the king sent after
the host of the Syrians, saying, Go and see.

7:15 And they went after them unto Jordan: and, lo, all the way was
full of garments and vessels, which the Syrians had cast away in their
haste. And the messengers returned, and told the king.

7:16 And the people went out, and spoiled the tents of the Syrians. So
a measure of fine flour was sold for a shekel, and two measures of
barley for a shekel, according to the word of the LORD.

7:17 And the king appointed the lord on whose hand he leaned to have
the charge of the gate: and the people trode upon him in the gate, and
he died, as the man of God had said, who spake when the king came down
to him.

7:18 And it came to pass as the man of God had spoken to the king,
saying, Two measures of barley for a shekel, and a measure of fine
flour for a shekel, shall be to morrow about this time in the gate of
Samaria: 7:19 And that lord answered the man of God, and said, Now,
behold, if the LORD should make windows in heaven, might such a thing
be? And he said, Behold, thou shalt see it with thine eyes, but shalt
not eat thereof.

7:20 And so it fell out unto him: for the people trode upon him in the
gate, and he died.

8:1 Then spake Elisha unto the woman, whose son he had restored to
life, saying, Arise, and go thou and thine household, and sojourn
wheresoever thou canst sojourn: for the LORD hath called for a famine;
and it shall also come upon the land seven years.

8:2 And the woman arose, and did after the saying of the man of God:
and she went with her household, and sojourned in the land of the
Philistines seven years.

8:3 And it came to pass at the seven years' end, that the woman
returned out of the land of the Philistines: and she went forth to cry
unto the king for her house and for her land.

8:4 And the king talked with Gehazi the servant of the man of God,
saying, Tell me, I pray thee, all the great things that Elisha hath
done.

8:5 And it came to pass, as he was telling the king how he had
restored a dead body to life, that, behold, the woman, whose son he
had restored to life, cried to the king for her house and for her
land. And Gehazi said, My lord, O king, this is the woman, and this is
her son, whom Elisha restored to life.

8:6 And when the king asked the woman, she told him. So the king
appointed unto her a certain officer, saying, Restore all that was
hers, and all the fruits of the field since the day that she left the
land, even until now.

8:7 And Elisha came to Damascus; and Benhadad the king of Syria was
sick; and it was told him, saying, The man of God is come hither.

8:8 And the king said unto Hazael, Take a present in thine hand, and
go, meet the man of God, and enquire of the LORD by him, saying, Shall
I recover of this disease?  8:9 So Hazael went to meet him, and took a
present with him, even of every good thing of Damascus, forty camels'
burden, and came and stood before him, and said, Thy son Benhadad king
of Syria hath sent me to thee, saying, Shall I recover of this
disease?  8:10 And Elisha said unto him, Go, say unto him, Thou mayest
certainly recover: howbeit the LORD hath shewed me that he shall
surely die.

8:11 And he settled his countenance stedfastly, until he was ashamed:
and the man of God wept.

8:12 And Hazael said, Why weepeth my lord? And he answered, Because I
know the evil that thou wilt do unto the children of Israel: their
strong holds wilt thou set on fire, and their young men wilt thou slay
with the sword, and wilt dash their children, and rip up their women
with child.

8:13 And Hazael said, But what, is thy servant a dog, that he should
do this great thing? And Elisha answered, The LORD hath shewed me that
thou shalt be king over Syria.

8:14 So he departed from Elisha, and came to his master; who said to
him, What said Elisha to thee? And he answered, He told me that thou
shouldest surely recover.

8:15 And it came to pass on the morrow, that he took a thick cloth,
and dipped it in water, and spread it on his face, so that he died:
and Hazael reigned in his stead.

8:16 And in the fifth year of Joram the son of Ahab king of Israel,
Jehoshaphat being then king of Judah, Jehoram the son of Je hoshaphat
king of Judah began to reign.

8:17 Thirty and two years old was he when he began to reign; and he
reigned eight years in Jerusalem.

8:18 And he walked in the way of the kings of Israel, as did the house
of Ahab: for the daughter of Ahab was his wife: and he did evil in the
sight of the LORD.

8:19 Yet the LORD would not destroy Judah for David his servant's
sake, as he promised him to give him alway a light, and to his
children.

8:20 In his days Edom revolted from under the hand of Judah, and made
a king over themselves.

8:21 So Joram went over to Zair, and all the chariots with him: and he
rose by night, and smote the Edomites which compassed him about, and
the captains of the chariots: and the people fled into their tents.

8:22 Yet Edom revolted from under the hand of Judah unto this day.
Then Libnah revolted at the same time.

8:23 And the rest of the acts of Joram, and all that he did, are they
not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah?  8:24
And Joram slept with his fathers, and was buried with his fathers in
the city of David: and Ahaziah his son reigned in his stead.

8:25 In the twelfth year of Joram the son of Ahab king of Israel did
Ahaziah the son of Jehoram king of Judah begin to reign.

8:26 Two and twenty years old was Ahaziah when he began to reign; and
he reigned one year in Jerusalem. And his mother's name was Athaliah,
the daughter of Omri king of Israel.

8:27 And he walked in the way of the house of Ahab, and did evil in
the sight of the LORD, as did the house of Ahab: for he was the son in
law of the house of Ahab.

8:28 And he went with Joram the son of Ahab to the war against Hazael
king of Syria in Ramothgilead; and the Syrians wounded Joram.

8:29 And king Joram went back to be healed in Jezreel of the wounds
which the Syrians had given him at Ramah, when he fought against
Hazael king of Syria. And Ahaziah the son of Jehoram king of Judah
went down to see Joram the son of Ahab in Jezreel, because he was
sick.

9:1 And Elisha the prophet called one of the children of the prophets,
and said unto him, Gird up thy loins, and take this box of oil in
thine hand, and go to Ramothgilead: 9:2 And when thou comest thither,
look out there Jehu the son of Jehoshaphat the son of Nimshi, and go
in, and make him arise up from among his brethren, and carry him to an
inner chamber; 9:3 Then take the box of oil, and pour it on his head,
and say, Thus saith the LORD, I have anointed thee king over Israel.
Then open the door, and flee, and tarry not.

9:4 So the young man, even the young man the prophet, went to
Ramothgilead.

9:5 And when he came, behold, the captains of the host were sitting;
and he said, I have an errand to thee, O captain. And Jehu said, Unto
which of all us? And he said, To thee, O captain.

9:6 And he arose, and went into the house; and he poured the oil on
his head, and said unto him, Thus saith the LORD God of Israel, I have
anointed thee king over the people of the LORD, even over Israel.

9:7 And thou shalt smite the house of Ahab thy master, that I may
avenge the blood of my servants the prophets, and the blood of all the
servants of the LORD, at the hand of Jezebel.

9:8 For the whole house of Ahab shall perish: and I will cut off from
Ahab him that pisseth against the wall, and him that is shut up and
left in Israel: 9:9 And I will make the house of Ahab like the house
of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, and like the house of Baasha the son of
Ahijah: 9:10 And the dogs shall eat Jezebel in the portion of Jezreel,
and there shall be none to bury her. And he opened the door, and fled.

9:11 Then Jehu came forth to the servants of his lord: and one said
unto him, Is all well? wherefore came this mad fellow to thee? And he
said unto them, Ye know the man, and his communication.

9:12 And they said, It is false; tell us now. And he said, Thus and
thus spake he to me, saying, Thus saith the LORD, I have anointed thee
king over Israel.

9:13 Then they hasted, and took every man his garment, and put it
under him on the top of the stairs, and blew with trumpets, saying,
Jehu is king.

9:14 So Jehu the son of Jehoshaphat the son of Nimshi conspired
against Joram. (Now Joram had kept Ramothgilead, he and all Israel,
because of Hazael king of Syria.

9:15 But king Joram was returned to be healed in Jezreel of the wounds
which the Syrians had given him, when he fought with Hazael king of
Syria.)  And Jehu said, If it be your minds, then let none go forth
nor escape out of the city to go to tell it in Jezreel.

9:16 So Jehu rode in a chariot, and went to Jezreel; for Joram lay
there.

And Ahaziah king of Judah was come down to see Joram.

9:17 And there stood a watchman on the tower in Jezreel, and he spied
the company of Jehu as he came, and said, I see a company. And Joram
said, Take an horseman, and send to meet them, and let him say, Is it
peace?  9:18 So there went one on horseback to meet him, and said,
Thus saith the king, Is it peace? And Jehu said, What hast thou to do
with peace? turn thee behind me. And the watchman told, saying, The
messenger came to them, but he cometh not again.

9:19 Then he sent out a second on horseback, which came to them, and
said, Thus saith the king, Is it peace? And Jehu answered, What hast
thou to do with peace? turn thee behind me.

9:20 And the watchman told, saying, He came even unto them, and cometh
not again: and the driving is like the driving of Jehu the son of
Nimshi; for he driveth furiously.

9:21 And Joram said, Make ready. And his chariot was made ready. And
Joram king of Israel and Ahaziah king of Judah went out, each in his
chariot, and they went out against Jehu, and met him in the portion of
Naboth the Jezreelite.

9:22 And it came to pass, when Joram saw Jehu, that he said, Is it
peace, Jehu? And he answered, What peace, so long as the whoredoms of
thy mother Jezebel and her witchcrafts are so many?  9:23 And Joram
turned his hands, and fled, and said to Ahaziah, There is treachery, O
Ahaziah.

9:24 And Jehu drew a bow with his full strength, and smote Jehoram
between his arms, and the arrow went out at his heart, and he sunk
down in his chariot.

9:25 Then said Jehu to Bidkar his captain, Take up, and cast him in
the portion of the field of Naboth the Jezreelite: for remember how
that, when I and thou rode together after Ahab his father, the LORD
laid this burden upon him; 9:26 Surely I have seen yesterday the blood
of Naboth, and the blood of his sons, saith the LORD; and I will
requite thee in this plat, saith the LORD. Now therefore take and cast
him into the plat of ground, according to the word of the LORD.

9:27 But when Ahaziah the king of Judah saw this, he fled by the way
of the garden house. And Jehu followed after him, and said, Smite him
also in the chariot. And they did so at the going up to Gur, which is
by Ibleam.

And he fled to Megiddo, and died there.

9:28 And his servants carried him in a chariot to Jerusalem, and
buried him in his sepulchre with his fathers in the city of David.

9:29 And in the eleventh year of Joram the son of Ahab began Ahaziah
to reign over Judah.

9:30 And when Jehu was come to Jezreel, Jezebel heard of it; and she
painted her face, and tired her head, and looked out at a window.

9:31 And as Jehu entered in at the gate, she said, Had Zimri peace,
who slew his master?  9:32 And he lifted up his face to the window,
and said, Who is on my side?  who? And there looked out to him two or
three eunuchs.

9:33 And he said, Throw her down. So they threw her down: and some of
her blood was sprinkled on the wall, and on the horses: and he trode
her under foot.

9:34 And when he was come in, he did eat and drink, and said, Go, see
now this cursed woman, and bury her: for she is a king's daughter.

9:35 And they went to bury her: but they found no more of her than the
skull, and the feet, and the palms of her hands.

9:36 Wherefore they came again, and told him. And he said, This is the
word of the LORD, which he spake by his servant Elijah the Tishbite,
saying, In the portion of Jezreel shall dogs eat the flesh of Jezebel:
9:37 And the carcase of Jezebel shall be as dung upon the face of the
field in the portion of Jezreel; so that they shall not say, This is
Jezebel.

10:1 And Ahab had seventy sons in Samaria. And Jehu wrote letters, and
sent to Samaria, unto the rulers of Jezreel, to the elders, and to
them that brought up Ahab's children, saying, 10:2 Now as soon as this
letter cometh to you, seeing your master's sons are with you, and
there are with you chariots and horses, a fenced city also, and
armour; 10:3 Look even out the best and meetest of your master's sons,
and set him on his father's throne, and fight for your master's house.

10:4 But they were exceedingly afraid, and said, Behold, two kings
stood not before him: how then shall we stand?  10:5 And he that was
over the house, and he that was over the city, the elders also, and
the bringers up of the children, sent to Jehu, saying, We are thy
servants, and will do all that thou shalt bid us; we will not make any
king: do thou that which is good in thine eyes.

10:6 Then he wrote a letter the second time to them, saying, If ye be
mine, and if ye will hearken unto my voice, take ye the heads of the
men your master's sons, and come to me to Jezreel by to morrow this
time. Now the king's sons, being seventy persons, were with the great
men of the city, which brought them up.

10:7 And it came to pass, when the letter came to them, that they took
the king's sons, and slew seventy persons, and put their heads in
baskets, and sent him them to Jezreel.

10:8 And there came a messenger, and told him, saying, They have
brought the heads of the king's sons. And he said, Lay ye them in two
heaps at the entering in of the gate until the morning.

10:9 And it came to pass in the morning, that he went out, and stood,
and said to all the people, Ye be righteous: behold, I conspired
against my master, and slew him: but who slew all these?  10:10 Know
now that there shall fall unto the earth nothing of the word of the
LORD, which the LORD spake concerning the house of Ahab: for the LORD
hath done that which he spake by his servant Elijah.

10:11 So Jehu slew all that remained of the house of Ahab in Jezreel,
and all his great men, and his kinsfolks, and his priests, until he
left him none remaining.

10:12 And he arose and departed, and came to Samaria. And as he was at
the shearing house in the way, 10:13 Jehu met with the brethren of
Ahaziah king of Judah, and said, Who are ye? And they answered, We are
the brethren of Ahaziah; and we go down to salute the children of the
king and the children of the queen.

10:14 And he said, Take them alive. And they took them alive, and slew
them at the pit of the shearing house, even two and forty men; neither
left he any of them.

10:15 And when he was departed thence, he lighted on Jehonadab the son
of Rechab coming to meet him: and he saluted him, and said to him, Is
thine heart right, as my heart is with thy heart? And Jehonadab
answered, It is. If it be, give me thine hand. And he gave him his
hand; and he took him up to him into the chariot.

10:16 And he said, Come with me, and see my zeal for the LORD. So they
made him ride in his chariot.

10:17 And when he came to Samaria, he slew all that remained unto Ahab
in Samaria, till he had destroyed him, according to the saying of the
LORD, which he spake to Elijah.

10:18 And Jehu gathered all the people together, and said unto them,
Ahab served Baal a little; but Jehu shall serve him much.

10:19 Now therefore call unto me all the prophets of Baal, all his
servants, and all his priests; let none be wanting: for I have a great
sacrifice to do to Baal; whosoever shall be wanting, he shall not
live. But Jehu did it in subtilty, to the intent that he might destroy
the worshippers of Baal.

10:20 And Jehu said, Proclaim a solemn assembly for Baal. And they
proclaimed it.

10:21 And Jehu sent through all Israel: and all the worshippers of
Baal came, so that there was not a man left that came not. And they
came into the house of Baal; and the house of Baal was full from one
end to another.

10:22 And he said unto him that was over the vestry, Bring forth
vestments for all the worshippers of Baal. And he brought them forth
vestments.

10:23 And Jehu went, and Jehonadab the son of Rechab, into the house
of Baal, and said unto the worshippers of Baal, Search, and look that
there be here with you none of the servants of the LORD, but the
worshippers of Baal only.

10:24 And when they went in to offer sacrifices and burnt offerings,
Jehu appointed fourscore men without, and said, If any of the men whom
I have brought into your hands escape, he that letteth him go, his
life shall be for the life of him.

10:25 And it came to pass, as soon as he had made an end of offering
the burnt offering, that Jehu said to the guard and to the captains,
Go in, and slay them; let none come forth. And they smote them with
the edge of the sword; and the guard and the captains cast them out,
and went to the city of the house of Baal.

10:26 And they brought forth the images out of the house of Baal, and
burned them.

10:27 And they brake down the image of Baal, and brake down the house
of Baal, and made it a draught house unto this day.

10:28 Thus Jehu destroyed Baal out of Israel.

10:29 Howbeit from the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who made
Israel to sin, Jehu departed not from after them, to wit, the golden
calves that were in Bethel, and that were in Dan.

10:30 And the LORD said unto Jehu, Because thou hast done well in
executing that which is right in mine eyes, and hast done unto the
house of Ahab according to all that was in mine heart, thy children of
the fourth generation shall sit on the throne of Israel.

10:31 But Jehu took no heed to walk in the law of the LORD God of
Israel with all his heart: for he departed not from the sins of
Jeroboam, which made Israel to sin.

10:32 In those days the LORD began to cut Israel short: and Hazael
smote them in all the coasts of Israel; 10:33 From Jordan eastward,
all the land of Gilead, the Gadites, and the Reubenites, and the
Manassites, from Aroer, which is by the river Arnon, even Gilead and
Bashan.

10:34 Now the rest of the acts of Jehu, and all that he did, and all
his might, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the
kings of Israel?  10:35 And Jehu slept with his fathers: and they
buried him in Samaria. And Jehoahaz his son reigned in his stead.

10:36 And the time that Jehu reigned over Israel in Samaria was twenty
and eight years.

11:1 And when Athaliah the mother of Ahaziah saw that her son was
dead, she arose and destroyed all the seed royal.

11:2 But Jehosheba, the daughter of king Joram, sister of Ahaziah,
took Joash the son of Ahaziah, and stole him from among the king's
sons which were slain; and they hid him, even him and his nurse, in
the bedchamber from Athaliah, so that he was not slain.

11:3 And he was with her hid in the house of the LORD six years. And
Athaliah did reign over the land.

11:4 And the seventh year Jehoiada sent and fetched the rulers over
hundreds, with the captains and the guard, and brought them to him
into the house of the LORD, and made a covenant with them, and took an
oath of them in the house of the LORD, and shewed them the king's son.

11:5 And he commanded them, saying, This is the thing that ye shall
do; A third part of you that enter in on the sabbath shall even be
keepers of the watch of the king's house; 11:6 And a third part shall
be at the gate of Sur; and a third part at the gate behind the guard:
so shall ye keep the watch of the house, that it be not broken down.

11:7 And two parts of all you that go forth on the sabbath, even they
shall keep the watch of the house of the LORD about the king.

11:8 And ye shall compass the king round about, every man with his
weapons in his hand: and he that cometh within the ranges, let him be
slain: and be ye with the king as he goeth out and as he cometh in.

11:9 And the captains over the hundreds did according to all things
that Jehoiada the priest commanded: and they took every man his men
that were to come in on the sabbath, with them that should go out on
the sabbath, and came to Jehoiada the priest.

11:10 And to the captains over hundreds did the priest give king
David's spears and shields, that were in the temple of the LORD.

11:11 And the guard stood, every man with his weapons in his hand,
round about the king, from the right corner of the temple to the left
corner of the temple, along by the altar and the temple.

11:12 And he brought forth the king's son, and put the crown upon him,
and gave him the testimony; and they made him king, and anointed him;
and they clapped their hands, and said, God save the king.

11:13 And when Athaliah heard the noise of the guard and of the
people, she came to the people into the temple of the LORD.

11:14 And when she looked, behold, the king stood by a pillar, as the
manner was, and the princes and the trumpeters by the king, and all
the people of the land rejoiced, and blew with trumpets: and Athaliah
rent her clothes, and cried, Treason, Treason.

11:15 But Jehoiada the priest commanded the captains of the hundreds,
the officers of the host, and said unto them, Have her forth without
the ranges: and him that followeth her kill with the sword. For the
priest had said, Let her not be slain in the house of the LORD.

11:16 And they laid hands on her; and she went by the way by the which
the horses came into the king's house: and there was she slain.

11:17 And Jehoiada made a covenant between the LORD and the king and
the people, that they should be the LORD's people; between the king
also and the people.

11:18 And all the people of the land went into the house of Baal, and
brake it down; his altars and his images brake they in pieces
thoroughly, and slew Mattan the priest of Baal before the altars. And
the priest appointed officers over the house of the LORD.

11:19 And he took the rulers over hundreds, and the captains, and the
guard, and all the people of the land; and they brought down the king
from the house of the LORD, and came by the way of the gate of the
guard to the king's house. And he sat on the throne of the kings.

11:20 And all the people of the land rejoiced, and the city was in
quiet: and they slew Athaliah with the sword beside the king's house.

11:21 Seven years old was Jehoash when he began to reign.

12:1 In the seventh year of Jehu Jehoash began to reign; and forty
years reigned he in Jerusalem. And his mother's name was Zibiah of
Beersheba.

12:2 And Jehoash did that which was right in the sight of the LORD all
his days wherein Jehoiada the priest instructed him.

12:3 But the high places were not taken away: the people still
sacrificed and burnt incense in the high places.

12:4 And Jehoash said to the priests, All the money of the dedicated
things that is brought into the house of the LORD, even the money of
every one that passeth the account, the money that every man is set
at, and all the money that cometh into any man's heart to bring into
the house of the LORD, 12:5 Let the priests take it to them, every man
of his acquaintance: and let them repair the breaches of the house,
wheresoever any breach shall be found.

12:6 But it was so, that in the three and twentieth year of king
Jehoash the priests had not repaired the breaches of the house.

12:7 Then king Jehoash called for Jehoiada the priest, and the other
priests, and said unto them, Why repair ye not the breaches of the
house? now therefore receive no more money of your acquaintance, but
deliver it for the breaches of the house.

12:8 And the priests consented to receive no more money of the people,
neither to repair the breaches of the house.

12:9 But Jehoiada the priest took a chest, and bored a hole in the lid
of it, and set it beside the altar, on the right side as one cometh
into the house of the LORD: and the priests that kept the door put
therein all the money that was brought into the house of the LORD.

12:10 And it was so, when they saw that there was much money in the
chest, that the king's scribe and the high priest came up, and they
put up in bags, and told the money that was found in the house of the
LORD.

12:11 And they gave the money, being told, into the hands of them that
did the work, that had the oversight of the house of the LORD: and
they laid it out to the carpenters and builders, that wrought upon the
house of the LORD, 12:12 And to masons, and hewers of stone, and to
buy timber and hewed stone to repair the breaches of the house of the
LORD, and for all that was laid out for the house to repair it.

12:13 Howbeit there were not made for the house of the LORD bowls of
silver, snuffers, basons, trumpets, any vessels of gold, or vessels of
silver, of the money that was brought into the house of the LORD:
12:14 But they gave that to the workmen, and repaired therewith the
house of the LORD.

12:15 Moreover they reckoned not with the men, into whose hand they
delivered the money to be bestowed on workmen: for they dealt
faithfully.

12:16 The trespass money and sin money was not brought into the house
of the LORD: it was the priests'.

12:17 Then Hazael king of Syria went up, and fought against Gath, and
took it: and Hazael set his face to go up to Jerusalem.

12:18 And Jehoash king of Judah took all the hallowed things that
Jehoshaphat, and Jehoram, and Ahaziah, his fathers, kings of Judah,
had dedicated, and his own hallowed things, and all the gold that was
found in the treasures of the house of the LORD, and in the king's
house, and sent it to Hazael king of Syria: and he went away from
Jerusalem.

12:19 And the rest of the acts of Joash, and all that he did, are they
not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah?
12:20 And his servants arose, and made a conspiracy, and slew Joash in
the house of Millo, which goeth down to Silla.

12:21 For Jozachar the son of Shimeath, and Jehozabad the son of
Shomer, his servants, smote him, and he died; and they buried him with
his fathers in the city of David: and Amaziah his son reigned in his
stead.

13:1 In the three and twentieth year of Joash the son of Ahaziah king
of Judah Jehoahaz the son of Jehu began to reign over Israel in
Samaria, and reigned seventeen years.

13:2 And he did that which was evil in the sight of the LORD, and
followed the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, which made Israel to
sin; he departed not therefrom.

13:3 And the anger of the LORD was kindled against Israel, and he
delivered them into the hand of Hazael king of Syria, and into the
hand of Benhadad the son of Hazael, all their days.

13:4 And Jehoahaz besought the LORD, and the LORD hearkened unto him:
for he saw the oppression of Israel, because the king of Syria
oppressed them.

13:5 (And the LORD gave Israel a saviour, so that they went out from
under the hand of the Syrians: and the children of Israel dwelt in
their tents, as beforetime.

13:6 Nevertheless they departed not from the sins of the house of
Jeroboam, who made Israel sin, but walked therein: and there remained
the grove also in Samaria.)  13:7 Neither did he leave of the people
to Jehoahaz but fifty horsemen, and ten chariots, and ten thousand
footmen; for the king of Syria had destroyed them, and had made them
like the dust by threshing.

13:8 Now the rest of the acts of Jehoahaz, and all that he did, and
his might, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the
kings of Israel?  13:9 And Jehoahaz slept with his fathers; and they
buried him in Samaria: and Joash his son reigned in his stead.

13:10 In the thirty and seventh year of Joash king of Judah began
Jehoash the son of Jehoahaz to reign over Israel in Samaria, and
reigned sixteen years.

13:11 And he did that which was evil in the sight of the LORD; he
departed not from all the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who made
Israel sin: but he walked therein.

13:12 And the rest of the acts of Joash, and all that he did, and his
might wherewith he fought against Amaziah king of Judah, are they not
written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Israel?  13:13
And Joash slept with his fathers; and Jeroboam sat upon his throne:
and Joash was buried in Samaria with the kings of Israel.

13:14 Now Elisha was fallen sick of his sickness whereof he died. And
Joash the king of Israel came down unto him, and wept over his face,
and said, O my father, my father, the chariot of Israel, and the
horsemen thereof.

13:15 And Elisha said unto him, Take bow and arrows. And he took unto
him bow and arrows.

13:16 And he said to the king of Israel, Put thine hand upon the bow.
And he put his hand upon it: and Elisha put his hands upon the king's
hands.

13:17 And he said, Open the window eastward. And he opened it. Then
Elisha said, Shoot. And he shot. And he said, The arrow of the LORD's
deliverance, and the arrow of deliverance from Syria: for thou shalt
smite the Syrians in Aphek, till thou have consumed them.

13:18 And he said, Take the arrows. And he took them. And he said unto
the king of Israel, Smite upon the ground. And he smote thrice, and
stayed.

13:19 And the man of God was wroth with him, and said, Thou shouldest
have smitten five or six times; then hadst thou smitten Syria till
thou hadst consumed it: whereas now thou shalt smite Syria but thrice.

13:20 And Elisha died, and they buried him. And the bands of the
Moabites invaded the land at the coming in of the year.

13:21 And it came to pass, as they were burying a man, that, behold,
they spied a band of men; and they cast the man into the sepulchre of
Elisha: and when the man was let down, and touched the bones of
Elisha, he revived, and stood up on his feet.

13:22 But Hazael king of Syria oppressed Israel all the days of
Jehoahaz.

13:23 And the LORD was gracious unto them, and had compassion on them,
and had respect unto them, because of his covenant with Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob, and would not destroy them, neither cast he them
from his presence as yet.

13:24 So Hazael king of Syria died; and Benhadad his son reigned in
his stead.

13:25 And Jehoash the son of Jehoahaz took again out of the hand of
Benhadad the son of Hazael the cities, which he had taken out of the
hand of Jehoahaz his father by war. Three times did Joash beat him,
and recovered the cities of Israel.

14:1 In the second year of Joash son of Jehoahaz king of Israel
reigned Amaziah the son of Joash king of Judah.

14:2 He was twenty and five years old when he began to reign, and
reigned twenty and nine years in Jerusalem. And his mother's name was
Jehoaddan of Jerusalem.

14:3 And he did that which was right in the sight of the LORD, yet not
like David his father: he did according to all things as Joash his
father did.

14:4 Howbeit the high places were not taken away: as yet the people
did sacrifice and burnt incense on the high places.

14:5 And it came to pass, as soon as the kingdom was confirmed in his
hand, that he slew his servants which had slain the king his father.

14:6 But the children of the murderers he slew not: according unto
that which is written in the book of the law of Moses, wherein the
LORD commanded, saying, The fathers shall not be put to death for the
children, nor the children be put to death for the fathers; but every
man shall be put to death for his own sin.

14:7 He slew of Edom in the valley of salt ten thousand, and took
Selah by war, and called the name of it Joktheel unto this day.

14:8 Then Amaziah sent messengers to Jehoash, the son of Jehoahaz son
of Jehu, king of Israel, saying, Come, let us look one another in the
face.

14:9 And Jehoash the king of Israel sent to Amaziah king of Judah,
saying, The thistle that was in Lebanon sent to the cedar that was in
Lebanon, saying, Give thy daughter to my son to wife: and there passed
by a wild beast that was in Lebanon, and trode down the thistle.

14:10 Thou hast indeed smitten Edom, and thine heart hath lifted thee
up: glory of this, and tarry at home: for why shouldest thou meddle to
thy hurt, that thou shouldest fall, even thou, and Judah with thee?
14:11 But Amaziah would not hear. Therefore Jehoash king of Israel
went up; and he and Amaziah king of Judah looked one another in the
face at Bethshemesh, which belongeth to Judah.

14:12 And Judah was put to the worse before Israel; and they fled
every man to their tents.

14:13 And Jehoash king of Israel took Amaziah king of Judah, the son
of Jehoash the son of Ahaziah, at Bethshemesh, and came to Jerusalem,
and brake down the wall of Jerusalem from the gate of Ephraim unto the
corner gate, four hundred cubits.

14:14 And he took all the gold and silver, and all the vessels that
were found in the house of the LORD, and in the treasures of the
king's house, and hostages, and returned to Samaria.

14:15 Now the rest of the acts of Jehoash which he did, and his might,
and how he fought with Amaziah king of Judah, are they not written in
the book of the chronicles of the kings of Israel?  14:16 And Jehoash
slept with his fathers, and was buried in Samaria with the kings of
Israel; and Jeroboam his son reigned in his stead.

14:17 And Amaziah the son of Joash king of Judah lived after the death
of Jehoash son of Jehoahaz king of Israel fifteen years.

14:18 And the rest of the acts of Amaziah, are they not written in the
book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah?  14:19 Now they made a
conspiracy against him in Jerusalem: and he fled to Lachish; but they
sent after him to Lachish, and slew him there.

14:20 And they brought him on horses: and he was buried at Jerusalem
with his fathers in the city of David.

14:21 And all the people of Judah took Azariah, which was sixteen
years old, and made him king instead of his father Amaziah.

14:22 He built Elath, and restored it to Judah, after that the king
slept with his fathers.

14:23 In the fifteenth year of Amaziah the son of Joash king of Judah
Jeroboam the son of Joash king of Israel began to reign in Samaria,
and reigned forty and one years.

14:24 And he did that which was evil in the sight of the LORD: he
departed not from all the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who made
Israel to sin.

14:25 He restored the coast of Israel from the entering of Hamath unto
the sea of the plain, according to the word of the LORD God of Israel,
which he spake by the hand of his servant Jonah, the son of Amittai,
the prophet, which was of Gathhepher.

14:26 For the LORD saw the affliction of Israel, that it was very
bitter: for there was not any shut up, nor any left, nor any helper
for Israel.

14:27 And the LORD said not that he would blot out the name of Israel
from under heaven: but he saved them by the hand of Jeroboam the son
of Joash.

14:28 Now the rest of the acts of Jeroboam, and all that he did, and
his might, how he warred, and how he recovered Damascus, and Hamath,
which belonged to Judah, for Israel, are they not written in the book
of the chronicles of the kings of Israel?  14:29 And Jeroboam slept
with his fathers, even with the kings of Israel; and Zachariah his son
reigned in his stead.

15:1 In the twenty and seventh year of Jeroboam king of Israel began
Azariah son of Amaziah king of Judah to reign.

15:2 Sixteen years old was he when he began to reign, and he reigned
two and fifty years in Jerusalem. And his mother's name was Jecholiah
of Jerusalem.

15:3 And he did that which was right in the sight of the LORD,
according to all that his father Amaziah had done; 15:4 Save that the
high places were not removed: the people sacrificed and burnt incense
still on the high places.

15:5 And the LORD smote the king, so that he was a leper unto the day
of his death, and dwelt in a several house. And Jotham the king's son
was over the house, judging the people of the land.

15:6 And the rest of the acts of Azariah, and all that he did, are
they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah?
15:7 So Azariah slept with his fathers; and they buried him with his
fathers in the city of David: and Jotham his son reigned in his stead.

15:8 In the thirty and eighth year of Azariah king of Judah did
Zachariah the son of Jeroboam reign over Israel in Samaria six months.

15:9 And he did that which was evil in the sight of the LORD, as his
fathers had done: he departed not from the sins of Jeroboam the son of
Nebat, who made Israel to sin.

15:10 And Shallum the son of Jabesh conspired against him, and smote
him before the people, and slew him, and reigned in his stead.

15:11 And the rest of the acts of Zachariah, behold, they are written
in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Israel.

15:12 This was the word of the LORD which he spake unto Jehu, saying,
Thy sons shall sit on the throne of Israel unto the fourth generation.
And so it came to pass.

15:13 Shallum the son of Jabesh began to reign in the nine and
thirtieth year of Uzziah king of Judah; and he reigned a full month in
Samaria.

15:14 For Menahem the son of Gadi went up from Tirzah, and came to
Samaria, and smote Shallum the son of Jabesh in Samaria, and slew him,
and reigned in his stead.

15:15 And the rest of the acts of Shallum, and his conspiracy which he
made, behold, they are written in the book of the chronicles of the
kings of Israel.

15:16 Then Menahem smote Tiphsah, and all that were therein, and the
coasts thereof from Tirzah: because they opened not to him, therefore
he smote it; and all the women therein that were with child he ripped
up.

15:17 In the nine and thirtieth year of Azariah king of Judah began
Menahem the son of Gadi to reign over Israel, and reigned ten years in
Samaria.

15:18 And he did that which was evil in the sight of the LORD: he
departed not all his days from the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat,
who made Israel to sin.

15:19 And Pul the king of Assyria came against the land: and Menahem
gave Pul a thousand talents of silver, that his hand might be with him
to confirm the kingdom in his hand.

15:20 And Menahem exacted the money of Israel, even of all the mighty
men of wealth, of each man fifty shekels of silver, to give to the
king of Assyria. So the king of Assyria turned back, and stayed not
there in the land.

15:21 And the rest of the acts of Menahem, and all that he did, are
they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Israel?
15:22 And Menahem slept with his fathers; and Pekahiah his son reigned
in his stead.

15:23 In the fiftieth year of Azariah king of Judah Pekahiah the son
of Menahem began to reign over Israel in Samaria, and reigned two
years.

15:24 And he did that which was evil in the sight of the LORD: he
departed not from the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who made
Israel to sin.

15:25 But Pekah the son of Remaliah, a captain of his, conspired
against him, and smote him in Samaria, in the palace of the king's
house, with Argob and Arieh, and with him fifty men of the Gileadites:
and he killed him, and reigned in his room.

15:26 And the rest of the acts of Pekahiah, and all that he did,
behold, they are written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of
Israel.

15:27 In the two and fiftieth year of Azariah king of Judah Pekah the
son of Remaliah began to reign over Israel in Samaria, and reigned
twenty years.

15:28 And he did that which was evil in the sight of the LORD: he
departed not from the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who made
Israel to sin.

15:29 In the days of Pekah king of Israel came Tiglathpileser king of
Assyria, and took Ijon, and Abelbethmaachah, and Janoah, and Kedesh,
and Hazor, and Gilead, and Galilee, all the land of Naphtali, and
carried them captive to Assyria.

15:30 And Hoshea the son of Elah made a conspiracy against Pekah the
son of Remaliah, and smote him, and slew him, and reigned in his
stead, in the twentieth year of Jotham the son of Uzziah.

15:31 And the rest of the acts of Pekah, and all that he did, behold,
they are written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Israel.

15:32 In the second year of Pekah the son of Remaliah king of Israel
began Jotham the son of Uzziah king of Judah to reign.

15:33 Five and twenty years old was he when he began to reign, and he
reigned sixteen years in Jerusalem. And his mother's name was Jerusha,
the daughter of Zadok.

15:34 And he did that which was right in the sight of the LORD: he did
according to all that his father Uzziah had done.

15:35 Howbeit the high places were not removed: the people sacrificed
and burned incense still in the high places. He built the higher gate
of the house of the LORD.

15:36 Now the rest of the acts of Jotham, and all that he did, are
they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah?
15:37 In those days the LORD began to send against Judah Rezin the
king of Syria, and Pekah the son of Remaliah.

15:38 And Jotham slept with his fathers, and was buried with his
fathers in the city of David his father: and Ahaz his son reigned in
his stead.

16:1 In the seventeenth year of Pekah the son of Remaliah Ahaz the son
of Jotham king of Judah began to reign.

16:2 Twenty years old was Ahaz when he began to reign, and reigned
sixteen years in Jerusalem, and did not that which was right in the
sight of the LORD his God, like David his father.

16:3 But he walked in the way of the kings of Israel, yea, and made
his son to pass through the fire, according to the abominations of the
heathen, whom the LORD cast out from before the children of Israel.

16:4 And he sacrificed and burnt incense in the high places, and on
the hills, and under every green tree.

16:5 Then Rezin king of Syria and Pekah son of Remaliah king of Israel
came up to Jerusalem to war: and they besieged Ahaz, but could not
overcome him.

16:6 At that time Rezin king of Syria recovered Elath to Syria, and
drave the Jews from Elath: and the Syrians came to Elath, and dwelt
there unto this day.

16:7 So Ahaz sent messengers to Tiglathpileser king of Assyria,
saying, I am thy servant and thy son: come up, and save me out of the
hand of the king of Syria, and out of the hand of the king of Israel,
which rise up against me.

16:8 And Ahaz took the silver and gold that was found in the house of
the LORD, and in the treasures of the king's house, and sent it for a
present to the king of Assyria.

16:9 And the king of Assyria hearkened unto him: for the king of
Assyria went up against Damascus, and took it, and carried the people
of it captive to Kir, and slew Rezin.

16:10 And king Ahaz went to Damascus to meet Tiglathpileser king of
Assyria, and saw an altar that was at Damascus: and king Ahaz sent to
Urijah the priest the fashion of the altar, and the pattern of it,
according to all the workmanship thereof.

16:11 And Urijah the priest built an altar according to all that king
Ahaz had sent from Damascus: so Urijah the priest made it against king
Ahaz came from Damascus.

16:12 And when the king was come from Damascus, the king saw the
altar: and the king approached to the altar, and offered thereon.

16:13 And he burnt his burnt offering and his meat offering, and
poured his drink offering, and sprinkled the blood of his peace
offerings, upon the altar.

16:14 And he brought also the brasen altar, which was before the LORD,
from the forefront of the house, from between the altar and the house
of the LORD, and put it on the north side of the altar.

16:15 And king Ahaz commanded Urijah the priest, saying, Upon the
great altar burn the morning burnt offering, and the evening meat
offering, and the king's burnt sacrifice, and his meat offering, with
the burnt offering of all the people of the land, and their meat
offering, and their drink offerings; and sprinkle upon it all the
blood of the burnt offering, and all the blood of the sacrifice: and
the brasen altar shall be for me to enquire by.

16:16 Thus did Urijah the priest, according to all that king Ahaz
commanded.

16:17 And king Ahaz cut off the borders of the bases, and removed the
laver from off them; and took down the sea from off the brasen oxen
that were under it, and put it upon the pavement of stones.

16:18 And the covert for the sabbath that they had built in the house,
and the king's entry without, turned he from the house of the LORD for
the king of Assyria.

16:19 Now the rest of the acts of Ahaz which he did, are they not
written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah?  16:20
And Ahaz slept with his fathers, and was buried with his fathers in
the city of David: and Hezekiah his son reigned in his stead.

17:1 In the twelfth year of Ahaz king of Judah began Hoshea the son of
Elah to reign in Samaria over Israel nine years.

17:2 And he did that which was evil in the sight of the LORD, but not
as the kings of Israel that were before him.

17:3 Against him came up Shalmaneser king of Assyria; and Hoshea
became his servant, and gave him presents.

17:4 And the king of Assyria found conspiracy in Hoshea: for he had
sent messengers to So king of Egypt, and brought no present to the
king of Assyria, as he had done year by year: therefore the king of
Assyria shut him up, and bound him in prison.

17:5 Then the king of Assyria came up throughout all the land, and
went up to Samaria, and besieged it three years.

17:6 In the ninth year of Hoshea the king of Assyria took Samaria, and
carried Israel away into Assyria, and placed them in Halah and in
Habor by the river of Gozan, and in the cities of the Medes.

17:7 For so it was, that the children of Israel had sinned against the
LORD their God, which had brought them up out of the land of Egypt,
from under the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt, and had feared other
gods, 17:8 And walked in the statutes of the heathen, whom the LORD
cast out from before the children of Israel, and of the kings of
Israel, which they had made.

17:9 And the children of Israel did secretly those things that were
not right against the LORD their God, and they built them high places
in all their cities, from the tower of the watchmen to the fenced
city.

17:10 And they set them up images and groves in every high hill, and
under every green tree: 17:11 And there they burnt incense in all the
high places, as did the heathen whom the LORD carried away before
them; and wrought wicked things to provoke the LORD to anger: 17:12
For they served idols, whereof the LORD had said unto them, Ye shall
not do this thing.

17:13 Yet the LORD testified against Israel, and against Judah, by all
the prophets, and by all the seers, saying, Turn ye from your evil
ways, and keep my commandments and my statutes, according to all the
law which I commanded your fathers, and which I sent to you by my
servants the prophets.

17:14 Notwithstanding they would not hear, but hardened their necks,
like to the neck of their fathers, that did not believe in the LORD
their God.

17:15 And they rejected his statutes, and his covenant that he made
with their fathers, and his testimonies which he testified against
them; and they followed vanity, and became vain, and went after the
heathen that were round about them, concerning whom the LORD had
charged them, that they should not do like them.

17:16 And they left all the commandments of the LORD their God, and
made them molten images, even two calves, and made a grove, and
worshipped all the host of heaven, and served Baal.

17:17 And they caused their sons and their daughters to pass through
the fire, and used divination and enchantments, and sold themselves to
do evil in the sight of the LORD, to provoke him to anger.

17:18 Therefore the LORD was very angry with Israel, and removed them
out of his sight: there was none left but the tribe of Judah only.

17:19 Also Judah kept not the commandments of the LORD their God, but
walked in the statutes of Israel which they made.

17:20 And the LORD rejected all the seed of Israel, and afflicted
them, and delivered them into the hand of spoilers, until he had cast
them out of his sight.

17:21 For he rent Israel from the house of David; and they made
Jeroboam the son of Nebat king: and Jeroboam drave Israel from
following the LORD, and made them sin a great sin.

17:22 For the children of Israel walked in all the sins of Jeroboam
which he did; they departed not from them; 17:23 Until the LORD
removed Israel out of his sight, as he had said by all his servants
the prophets. So was Israel carried away out of their own land to
Assyria unto this day.

17:24 And the king of Assyria brought men from Babylon, and from
Cuthah, and from Ava, and from Hamath, and from Sepharvaim, and placed
them in the cities of Samaria instead of the children of Israel: and
they possessed Samaria, and dwelt in the cities thereof.

17:25 And so it was at the beginning of their dwelling there, that
they feared not the LORD: therefore the LORD sent lions among them,
which slew some of them.

17:26 Wherefore they spake to the king of Assyria, saying, The nations
which thou hast removed, and placed in the cities of Samaria, know not
the manner of the God of the land: therefore he hath sent lions among
them, and, behold, they slay them, because they know not the manner of
the God of the land.

17:27 Then the king of Assyria commanded, saying, Carry thither one of
the priests whom ye brought from thence; and let them go and dwell
there, and let him teach them the manner of the God of the land.

17:28 Then one of the priests whom they had carried away from Samaria
came and dwelt in Bethel, and taught them how they should fear the
LORD.

17:29 Howbeit every nation made gods of their own, and put them in the
houses of the high places which the Samaritans had made, every nation
in their cities wherein they dwelt.

17:30 And the men of Babylon made Succothbenoth, and the men of Cuth
made Nergal, and the men of Hamath made Ashima, 17:31 And the Avites
made Nibhaz and Tartak, and the Sepharvites burnt their children in
fire to Adrammelech and Anammelech, the gods of Sepharvaim.

17:32 So they feared the LORD, and made unto themselves of the lowest
of them priests of the high places, which sacrificed for them in the
houses of the high places.

17:33 They feared the LORD, and served their own gods, after the
manner of the nations whom they carried away from thence.

17:34 Unto this day they do after the former manners: they fear not
the LORD, neither do they after their statutes, or after their
ordinances, or after the law and commandment which the LORD commanded
the children of Jacob, whom he named Israel; 17:35 With whom the LORD
had made a covenant, and charged them, saying, Ye shall not fear other
gods, nor bow yourselves to them, nor serve them, nor sacrifice to
them: 17:36 But the LORD, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt
with great power and a stretched out arm, him shall ye fear, and him
shall ye worship, and to him shall ye do sacrifice.

17:37 And the statutes, and the ordinances, and the law, and the
commandment, which he wrote for you, ye shall observe to do for
evermore; and ye shall not fear other gods.

17:38 And the covenant that I have made with you ye shall not forget;
neither shall ye fear other gods.

17:39 But the LORD your God ye shall fear; and he shall deliver you
out of the hand of all your enemies.

17:40 Howbeit they did not hearken, but they did after their former
manner.

17:41 So these nations feared the LORD, and served their graven
images, both their children, and their children's children: as did
their fathers, so do they unto this day.

18:1 Now it came to pass in the third year of Hoshea son of Elah king
of Israel, that Hezekiah the son of Ahaz king of Judah began to reign.

18:2 Twenty and five years old was he when he began to reign; and he
reigned twenty and nine years in Jerusalem. His mother's name also was
Abi, the daughter of Zachariah.

18:3 And he did that which was right in the sight of the LORD,
according to all that David his father did.

18:4 He removed the high places, and brake the images, and cut down
the groves, and brake in pieces the brasen serpent that Moses had
made: for unto those days the children of Israel did burn incense to
it: and he called it Nehushtan.

18:5 He trusted in the LORD God of Israel; so that after him was none
like him among all the kings of Judah, nor any that were before him.

18:6 For he clave to the LORD, and departed not from following him,
but kept his commandments, which the LORD commanded Moses.

18:7 And the LORD was with him; and he prospered whithersoever he went
forth: and he rebelled against the king of Assyria, and served him
not.

18:8 He smote the Philistines, even unto Gaza, and the borders
thereof, from the tower of the watchmen to the fenced city.

18:9 And it came to pass in the fourth year of king Hezekiah, which
was the seventh year of Hoshea son of Elah king of Israel, that
Shalmaneser king of Assyria came up against Samaria, and besieged it.

18:10 And at the end of three years they took it: even in the sixth
year of Hezekiah, that is in the ninth year of Hoshea king of Israel,
Samaria was taken.

18:11 And the king of Assyria did carry away Israel unto Assyria, and
put them in Halah and in Habor by the river of Gozan, and in the
cities of the Medes: 18:12 Because they obeyed not the voice of the
LORD their God, but transgressed his covenant, and all that Moses the
servant of the LORD commanded, and would not hear them, nor do them.

18:13 Now in the fourteenth year of king Hezekiah did Sennacherib king
of Assyria come up against all the fenced cities of Judah, and took
them.

18:14 And Hezekiah king of Judah sent to the king of Assyria to
Lachish, saying, I have offended; return from me: that which thou
puttest on me will I bear. And the king of Assyria appointed unto
Hezekiah king of Judah three hundred talents of silver and thirty
talents of gold.

18:15 And Hezekiah gave him all the silver that was found in the house
of the LORD, and in the treasures of the king's house.

18:16 At that time did Hezekiah cut off the gold from the doors of the
temple of the LORD, and from the pillars which Hezekiah king of Judah
had overlaid, and gave it to the king of Assyria.

18:17 And the king of Assyria sent Tartan and Rabsaris and Rabshakeh
from Lachish to king Hezekiah with a great host against Jerusalem. And
they went up and came to Jerusalem. And when they were come up, they
came and stood by the conduit of the upper pool, which is in the
highway of the fuller's field.

18:18 And when they had called to the king, there came out to them
Eliakim the son of Hilkiah, which was over the household, and Shebna
the scribe, and Joah the son of Asaph the recorder.

18:19 And Rabshakeh said unto them, Speak ye now to Hezekiah, Thus
saith the great king, the king of Assyria, What confidence is this
wherein thou trustest?  18:20 Thou sayest, (but they are but vain
words,) I have counsel and strength for the war. Now on whom dost thou
trust, that thou rebellest against me?  18:21 Now, behold, thou
trustest upon the staff of this bruised reed, even upon Egypt, on
which if a man lean, it will go into his hand, and pierce it: so is
Pharaoh king of Egypt unto all that trust on him.

18:22 But if ye say unto me, We trust in the LORD our God: is not that
he, whose high places and whose altars Hezekiah hath taken away, and
hath said to Judah and Jerusalem, Ye shall worship before this altar
in Jerusalem?  18:23 Now therefore, I pray thee, give pledges to my
lord the king of Assyria, and I will deliver thee two thousand horses,
if thou be able on thy part to set riders upon them.

18:24 How then wilt thou turn away the face of one captain of the
least of my master's servants, and put thy trust on Egypt for chariots
and for horsemen?  18:25 Am I now come up without the LORD against
this place to destroy it?  The LORD said to me, Go up against this
land, and destroy it.

18:26 Then said Eliakim the son of Hilkiah, and Shebna, and Joah, unto
Rabshakeh, Speak, I pray thee, to thy servants in the Syrian language;
for we understand it: and talk not with us in the Jews' language in
the ears of the people that are on the wall.

18:27 But Rabshakeh said unto them, Hath my master sent me to thy
master, and to thee, to speak these words? hath he not sent me to the
men which sit on the wall, that they may eat their own dung, and drink
their own piss with you?  18:28 Then Rabshakeh stood and cried with a
loud voice in the Jews' language, and spake, saying, Hear the word of
the great king, the king of Assyria: 18:29 Thus saith the king, Let
not Hezekiah deceive you: for he shall not be able to deliver you out
of his hand: 18:30 Neither let Hezekiah make you trust in the LORD,
saying, The LORD will surely deliver us, and this city shall not be
delivered into the hand of the king of Assyria.

18:31 Hearken not to Hezekiah: for thus saith the king of Assyria,
Make an agreement with me by a present, and come out to me, and then
eat ye every man of his own vine, and every one of his fig tree, and
drink ye every one the waters of his cistern: 18:32 Until I come and
take you away to a land like your own land, a land of corn and wine, a
land of bread and vineyards, a land of oil olive and of honey, that ye
may live, and not die: and hearken not unto Hezekiah, when he
persuadeth you, saying, The LORD will deliver us.

18:33 Hath any of the gods of the nations delivered at all his land
out of the hand of the king of Assyria?  18:34 Where are the gods of
Hamath, and of Arpad? where are the gods of Sepharvaim, Hena, and
Ivah? have they delivered Samaria out of mine hand?  18:35 Who are
they among all the gods of the countries, that have delivered their
country out of mine hand, that the LORD should deliver Jerusalem out
of mine hand?  18:36 But the people held their peace, and answered him
not a word: for the king's commandment was, saying, Answer him not.

18:37 Then came Eliakim the son of Hilkiah, which was over the
household, and Shebna the scribe, and Joah the son of Asaph the
recorder, to Hezekiah with their clothes rent, and told him the words
of Rabshakeh.

19:1 And it came to pass, when king Hezekiah heard it, that he rent
his clothes, and covered himself with sackcloth, and went into the
house of the LORD.

19:2 And he sent Eliakim, which was over the household, and Shebna the
scribe, and the elders of the priests, covered with sackcloth, to
Isaiah the prophet the son of Amoz.

19:3 And they said unto him, Thus saith Hezekiah, This day is a day of
trouble, and of rebuke, and blasphemy; for the children are come to
the birth, and there is not strength to bring forth.

19:4 It may be the LORD thy God will hear all the words of Rabshakeh,
whom the king of Assyria his master hath sent to reproach the living
God; and will reprove the words which the LORD thy God hath heard:
wherefore lift up thy prayer for the remnant that are left.

19:5 So the servants of king Hezekiah came to Isaiah.

19:6 And Isaiah said unto them, Thus shall ye say to your master, Thus
saith the LORD, Be not afraid of the words which thou hast heard, with
which the servants of the king of Assyria have blasphemed me.

19:7 Behold, I will send a blast upon him, and he shall hear a rumour,
and shall return to his own land; and I will cause him to fall by the
sword in his own land.

19:8 So Rabshakeh returned, and found the king of Assyria warring
against Libnah: for he had heard that he was departed from Lachish.

19:9 And when he heard say of Tirhakah king of Ethiopia, Behold, he is
come out to fight against thee: he sent messengers again unto
Hezekiah, saying, 19:10 Thus shall ye speak to Hezekiah king of Judah,
saying, Let not thy God in whom thou trustest deceive thee, saying,
Jerusalem shall not be delivered into the hand of the king of Assyria.

19:11 Behold, thou hast heard what the kings of Assyria have done to
all lands, by destroying them utterly: and shalt thou be delivered?
19:12 Have the gods of the nations delivered them which my fathers
have destroyed; as Gozan, and Haran, and Rezeph, and the children of
Eden which were in Thelasar?  19:13 Where is the king of Hamath, and
the king of Arpad, and the king of the city of Sepharvaim, of Hena,
and Ivah?  19:14 And Hezekiah received the letter of the hand of the
messengers, and read it: and Hezekiah went up into the house of the
LORD, and spread it before the LORD.

19:15 And Hezekiah prayed before the LORD, and said, O LORD God of
Israel, which dwellest between the cherubims, thou art the God, even
thou alone, of all the kingdoms of the earth; thou hast made heaven
and earth.

19:16 LORD, bow down thine ear, and hear: open, LORD, thine eyes, and
see: and hear the words of Sennacherib, which hath sent him to
reproach the living God.

19:17 Of a truth, LORD, the kings of Assyria have destroyed the
nations and their lands, 19:18 And have cast their gods into the fire:
for they were no gods, but the work of men's hands, wood and stone:
therefore they have destroyed them.

19:19 Now therefore, O LORD our God, I beseech thee, save thou us out
of his hand, that all the kingdoms of the earth may know that thou art
the LORD God, even thou only.

19:20 Then Isaiah the son of Amoz sent to Hezekiah, saying, Thus saith
the LORD God of Israel, That which thou hast prayed to me against
Sennacherib king of Assyria I have heard.

19:21 This is the word that the LORD hath spoken concerning him; The
virgin the daughter of Zion hath despised thee, and laughed thee to
scorn; the daughter of Jerusalem hath shaken her head at thee.

19:22 Whom hast thou reproached and blasphemed? and against whom hast
thou exalted thy voice, and lifted up thine eyes on high? even against
the Holy One of Israel.

19:23 By thy messengers thou hast reproached the LORD, and hast said,
With the multitude of my chariots I am come up to the height of the
mountains, to the sides of Lebanon, and will cut down the tall cedar
trees thereof, and the choice fir trees thereof: and I will enter into
the lodgings of his borders, and into the forest of his Carmel.

19:24 I have digged and drunk strange waters, and with the sole of my
feet have I dried up all the rivers of besieged places.

19:25 Hast thou not heard long ago how I have done it, and of ancient
times that I have formed it? now have I brought it to pass, that thou
shouldest be to lay waste fenced cities into ruinous heaps.

19:26 Therefore their inhabitants were of small power, they were
dismayed and confounded; they were as the grass of the field, and as
the green herb, as the grass on the house tops, and as corn blasted
before it be grown up.

19:27 But I know thy abode, and thy going out, and thy coming in, and
thy rage against me.

19:28 Because thy rage against me and thy tumult is come up into mine
ears, therefore I will put my hook in thy nose, and my bridle in thy
lips, and I will turn thee back by the way by which thou camest.

19:29 And this shall be a sign unto thee, Ye shall eat this year such
things as grow of themselves, and in the second year that which
springeth of the same; and in the third year sow ye, and reap, and
plant vineyards, and eat the fruits thereof.

19:30 And the remnant that is escaped of the house of Judah shall yet
again take root downward, and bear fruit upward.

19:31 For out of Jerusalem shall go forth a remnant, and they that
escape out of mount Zion: the zeal of the LORD of hosts shall do this.

19:32 Therefore thus saith the LORD concerning the king of Assyria, He
shall not come into this city, nor shoot an arrow there, nor come
before it with shield, nor cast a bank against it.

19:33 By the way that he came, by the same shall he return, and shall
not come into this city, saith the LORD.

19:34 For I will defend this city, to save it, for mine own sake, and
for my servant David's sake.

19:35 And it came to pass that night, that the angel of the LORD went
out, and smote in the camp of the Assyrians an hundred fourscore and
five thousand: and when they arose early in the morning, behold, they
were all dead corpses.

19:36 So Sennacherib king of Assyria departed, and went and returned,
and dwelt at Nineveh.

19:37 And it came to pass, as he was worshipping in the house of
Nisroch his god, that Adrammelech and Sharezer his sons smote him with
the sword: and they escaped into the land of Armenia. And Esarhaddon
his son reigned in his stead.

20:1 In those days was Hezekiah sick unto death. And the prophet
Isaiah the son of Amoz came to him, and said unto him, Thus saith the
LORD, Set thine house in order; for thou shalt die, and not live.

20:2 Then he turned his face to the wall, and prayed unto the LORD,
saying, 20:3 I beseech thee, O LORD, remember now how I have walked
before thee in truth and with a perfect heart, and have done that
which is good in thy sight. And Hezekiah wept sore.

20:4 And it came to pass, afore Isaiah was gone out into the middle
court, that the word of the LORD came to him, saying, 20:5 Turn again,
and tell Hezekiah the captain of my people, Thus saith the LORD, the
God of David thy father, I have heard thy prayer, I have seen thy
tears: behold, I will heal thee: on the third day thou shalt go up
unto the house of the LORD.

20:6 And I will add unto thy days fifteen years; and I will deliver
thee and this city out of the hand of the king of Assyria; and I will
defend this city for mine own sake, and for my servant David's sake.

20:7 And Isaiah said, Take a lump of figs. And they took and laid it
on the boil, and he recovered.

20:8 And Hezekiah said unto Isaiah, What shall be the sign that the
LORD will heal me, and that I shall go up into the house of the LORD
the third day?  20:9 And Isaiah said, This sign shalt thou have of the
LORD, that the LORD will do the thing that he hath spoken: shall the
shadow go forward ten degrees, or go back ten degrees?  20:10 And
Hezekiah answered, It is a light thing for the shadow to go down ten
degrees: nay, but let the shadow return backward ten degrees.

20:11 And Isaiah the prophet cried unto the LORD: and he brought the
shadow ten degrees backward, by which it had gone down in the dial of
Ahaz.

20:12 At that time Berodachbaladan, the son of Baladan, king of
Babylon, sent letters and a present unto Hezekiah: for he had heard
that Hezekiah had been sick.

20:13 And Hezekiah hearkened unto them, and shewed them all the house
of his precious things, the silver, and the gold, and the spices, and
the precious ointment, and all the house of his armour, and all that
was found in his treasures: there was nothing in his house, nor in all
his dominion, that Hezekiah shewed them not.

20:14 Then came Isaiah the prophet unto king Hezekiah, and said unto
him, What said these men? and from whence came they unto thee? And
Hezekiah said, They are come from a far country, even from Babylon.

20:15 And he said, What have they seen in thine house? And Hezekiah
answered, All the things that are in mine house have they seen: there
is nothing among my treasures that I have not shewed them.

20:16 And Isaiah said unto Hezekiah, Hear the word of the LORD.

20:17 Behold, the days come, that all that is in thine house, and that
which thy fathers have laid up in store unto this day, shall be
carried into Babylon: nothing shall be left, saith the LORD.

20:18 And of thy sons that shall issue from thee, which thou shalt
beget, shall they take away; and they shall be eunuchs in the palace
of the king of Babylon.

20:19 Then said Hezekiah unto Isaiah, Good is the word of the LORD
which thou hast spoken. And he said, Is it not good, if peace and
truth be in my days?  20:20 And the rest of the acts of Hezekiah, and
all his might, and how he made a pool, and a conduit, and brought
water into the city, are they not written in the book of the
chronicles of the kings of Judah?  20:21 And Hezekiah slept with his
fathers: and Manasseh his son reigned in his stead.

21:1 Manasseh was twelve years old when he began to reign, and reigned
fifty and five years in Jerusalem. And his mother's name was
Hephzibah.

21:2 And he did that which was evil in the sight of the LORD, after
the abominations of the heathen, whom the LORD cast out before the
children of Israel.

21:3 For he built up again the high places which Hezekiah his father
had destroyed; and he reared up altars for Baal, and made a grove, as
did Ahab king of Israel; and worshipped all the host of heaven, and
served them.

21:4 And he built altars in the house of the LORD, of which the LORD
said, In Jerusalem will I put my name.

21:5 And he built altars for all the host of heaven in the two courts
of the house of the LORD.

21:6 And he made his son pass through the fire, and observed times,
and used enchantments, and dealt with familiar spirits and wizards: he
wrought much wickedness in the sight of the LORD, to provoke him to
anger.

21:7 And he set a graven image of the grove that he had made in the
house, of which the LORD said to David, and to Solomon his son, In
this house, and in Jerusalem, which I have chosen out of all tribes of
Israel, will I put my name for ever: 21:8 Neither will I make the feet
of Israel move any more out of the land which I gave their fathers;
only if they will observe to do according to all that I have commanded
them, and according to all the law that my servant Moses commanded
them.

21:9 But they hearkened not: and Manasseh seduced them to do more evil
than did the nations whom the LORD destroyed before the children of
Israel.

21:10 And the LORD spake by his servants the prophets, saying, 21:11
Because Manasseh king of Judah hath done these abominations, and hath
done wickedly above all that the Amorites did, which were before him,
and hath made Judah also to sin with his idols: 21:12 Therefore thus
saith the LORD God of Israel, Behold, I am bringing such evil upon
Jerusalem and Judah, that whosoever heareth of it, both his ears shall
tingle.

21:13 And I will stretch over Jerusalem the line of Samaria, and the
plummet of the house of Ahab: and I will wipe Jerusalem as a man
wipeth a dish, wiping it, and turning it upside down.

21:14 And I will forsake the remnant of mine inheritance, and deliver
them into the hand of their enemies; and they shall become a prey and
a spoil to all their enemies; 21:15 Because they have done that which
was evil in my sight, and have provoked me to anger, since the day
their fathers came forth out of Egypt, even unto this day.

21:16 Moreover Manasseh shed innocent blood very much, till he had
filled Jerusalem from one end to another; beside his sin wherewith he
made Judah to sin, in doing that which was evil in the sight of the
LORD.

21:17 Now the rest of the acts of Manasseh, and all that he did, and
his sin that he sinned, are they not written in the book of the
chronicles of the kings of Judah?  21:18 And Manasseh slept with his
fathers, and was buried in the garden of his own house, in the garden
of Uzza: and Amon his son reigned in his stead.

21:19 Amon was twenty and two years old when he began to reign, and he
reigned two years in Jerusalem. And his mother's name was
Meshullemeth, the daughter of Haruz of Jotbah.

21:20 And he did that which was evil in the sight of the LORD, as his
father Manasseh did.

21:21 And he walked in all the way that his father walked in, and
served the idols that his father served, and worshipped them: 21:22
And he forsook the LORD God of his fathers, and walked not in the way
of the LORD.

21:23 And the servants of Amon conspired against him, and slew the
king in his own house.

21:24 And the people of the land slew all them that had conspired
against king Amon; and the people of the land made Josiah his son king
in his stead.

21:25 Now the rest of the acts of Amon which he did, are they not
written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah?  21:26
And he was buried in his sepulchre in the garden of Uzza: and Josiah
his son reigned in his stead.

22:1 Josiah was eight years old when he began to reign, and he reigned
thirty and one years in Jerusalem. And his mother's name was Jedidah,
the daughter of Adaiah of Boscath.

22:2 And he did that which was right in the sight of the LORD, and
walked in all the way of David his father, and turned not aside to the
right hand or to the left.

22:3 And it came to pass in the eighteenth year of king Josiah, that
the king sent Shaphan the son of Azaliah, the son of Meshullam, the
scribe, to the house of the LORD, saying, 22:4 Go up to Hilkiah the
high priest, that he may sum the silver which is brought into the
house of the LORD, which the keepers of the door have gathered of the
people: 22:5 And let them deliver it into the hand of the doers of the
work, that have the oversight of the house of the LORD: and let them
give it to the doers of the work which is in the house of the LORD, to
repair the breaches of the house, 22:6 Unto carpenters, and builders,
and masons, and to buy timber and hewn stone to repair the house.

22:7 Howbeit there was no reckoning made with them of the money that
was delivered into their hand, because they dealt faithfully.

22:8 And Hilkiah the high priest said unto Shaphan the scribe, I have
found the book of the law in the house of the LORD. And Hilkiah gave
the book to Shaphan, and he read it.

22:9 And Shaphan the scribe came to the king, and brought the king
word again, and said, Thy servants have gathered the money that was
found in the house, and have delivered it into the hand of them that
do the work, that have the oversight of the house of the LORD.

22:10 And Shaphan the scribe shewed the king, saying, Hilkiah the
priest hath delivered me a book. And Shaphan read it before the king.

22:11 And it came to pass, when the king had heard the words of the
book of the law, that he rent his clothes.

22:12 And the king commanded Hilkiah the priest, and Ahikam the son of
Shaphan, and Achbor the son of Michaiah, and Shaphan the scribe, and
Asahiah a servant of the king's, saying, 22:13 Go ye, enquire of the
LORD for me, and for the people, and for all Judah, concerning the
words of this book that is found: for great is the wrath of the LORD
that is kindled against us, because our fathers have not hearkened
unto the words of this book, to do according unto all that which is
written concerning us.

22:14 So Hilkiah the priest, and Ahikam, and Achbor, and Shaphan, and
Asahiah, went unto Huldah the prophetess, the wife of Shallum the son
of Tikvah, the son of Harhas, keeper of the wardrobe; (now she dwelt
in Jerusalem in the college;) and they communed with her.

22:15 And she said unto them, Thus saith the LORD God of Israel, Tell
the man that sent you to me, 22:16 Thus saith the LORD, Behold, I will
bring evil upon this place, and upon the inhabitants thereof, even all
the words of the book which the king of Judah hath read: 22:17 Because
they have forsaken me, and have burned incense unto other gods, that
they might provoke me to anger with all the works of their hands;
therefore my wrath shall be kindled against this place, and shall not
be quenched.

22:18 But to the king of Judah which sent you to enquire of the LORD,
thus shall ye say to him, Thus saith the LORD God of Israel, As
touching the words which thou hast heard; 22:19 Because thine heart
was tender, and thou hast humbled thyself before the LORD, when thou
heardest what I spake against this place, and against the inhabitants
thereof, that they should become a desolation and a curse, and hast
rent thy clothes, and wept before me; I also have heard thee, saith
the LORD.

22:20 Behold therefore, I will gather thee unto thy fathers, and thou
shalt be gathered into thy grave in peace; and thine eyes shall not
see all the evil which I will bring upon this place. And they brought
the king word again.

23:1 And the king sent, and they gathered unto him all the elders of
Judah and of Jerusalem.

23:2 And the king went up into the house of the LORD, and all the men
of Judah and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem with him, and the
priests, and the prophets, and all the people, both small and great:
and he read in their ears all the words of the book of the covenant
which was found in the house of the LORD.

23:3 And the king stood by a pillar, and made a covenant before the
LORD, to walk after the LORD, and to keep his commandments and his
testimonies and his statutes with all their heart and all their soul,
to perform the words of this covenant that were written in this book.
And all the people stood to the covenant.

23:4 And the king commanded Hilkiah the high priest, and the priests
of the second order, and the keepers of the door, to bring forth out
of the temple of the LORD all the vessels that were made for Baal, and
for the grove, and for all the host of heaven: and he burned them
without Jerusalem in the fields of Kidron, and carried the ashes of
them unto Bethel.

23:5 And he put down the idolatrous priests, whom the kings of Judah
had ordained to burn incense in the high places in the cities of
Judah, and in the places round about Jerusalem; them also that burned
incense unto Baal, to the sun, and to the moon, and to the planets,
and to all the host of heaven.

23:6 And he brought out the grove from the house of the LORD, without
Jerusalem, unto the brook Kidron, and burned it at the brook Kidron,
and stamped it small to powder, and cast the powder thereof upon the
graves of the children of the people.

23:7 And he brake down the houses of the sodomites, that were by the
house of the LORD, where the women wove hangings for the grove.

23:8 And he brought all the priests out of the cities of Judah, and
defiled the high places where the priests had burned incense, from
Geba to Beersheba, and brake down the high places of the gates that
were in the entering in of the gate of Joshua the governor of the
city, which were on a man's left hand at the gate of the city.

23:9 Nevertheless the priests of the high places came not up to the
altar of the LORD in Jerusalem, but they did eat of the unleavened
bread among their brethren.

23:10 And he defiled Topheth, which is in the valley of the children
of Hinnom, that no man might make his son or his daughter to pass
through the fire to Molech.

23:11 And he took away the horses that the kings of Judah had given to
the sun, at the entering in of the house of the LORD, by the chamber
of Nathanmelech the chamberlain, which was in the suburbs, and burned
the chariots of the sun with fire.

23:12 And the altars that were on the top of the upper chamber of
Ahaz, which the kings of Judah had made, and the altars which Manasseh
had made in the two courts of the house of the LORD, did the king beat
down, and brake them down from thence, and cast the dust of them into
the brook Kidron.

23:13 And the high places that were before Jerusalem, which were on
the right hand of the mount of corruption, which Solomon the king of
Israel had builded for Ashtoreth the abomination of the Zidonians, and
for Chemosh the abomination of the Moabites, and for Milcom the
abomination of the children of Ammon, did the king defile.

23:14 And he brake in pieces the images, and cut down the groves, and
filled their places with the bones of men.

23:15 Moreover the altar that was at Bethel, and the high place which
Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin, had made, both that
altar and the high place he brake down, and burned the high place, and
stamped it small to powder, and burned the grove.

23:16 And as Josiah turned himself, he spied the sepulchres that were
there in the mount, and sent, and took the bones out of the
sepulchres, and burned them upon the altar, and polluted it, according
to the word of the LORD which the man of God proclaimed, who
proclaimed these words.

23:17 Then he said, What title is that that I see? And the men of the
city told him, It is the sepulchre of the man of God, which came from
Judah, and proclaimed these things that thou hast done against the
altar of Bethel.

23:18 And he said, Let him alone; let no man move his bones. So they
let his bones alone, with the bones of the prophet that came out of
Samaria.

23:19 And all the houses also of the high places that were in the
cities of Samaria, which the kings of Israel had made to provoke the
Lord to anger, Josiah took away, and did to them according to all the
acts that he had done in Bethel.

23:20 And he slew all the priests of the high places that were there
upon the altars, and burned men's bones upon them, and returned to
Jerusalem.

23:21 And the king commanded all the people, saying, Keep the passover
unto the LORD your God, as it is written in the book of this covenant.

23:22 Surely there was not holden such a passover from the days of the
judges that judged Israel, nor in all the days of the kings of Israel,
nor of the kings of Judah; 23:23 But in the eighteenth year of king
Josiah, wherein this passover was holden to the LORD in Jerusalem.

23:24 Moreover the workers with familiar spirits, and the wizards, and
the images, and the idols, and all the abominations that were spied in
the land of Judah and in Jerusalem, did Josiah put away, that he might
perform the words of the law which were written in the book that
Hilkiah the priest found in the house of the LORD.

23:25 And like unto him was there no king before him, that turned to
the LORD with all his heart, and with all his soul, and with all his
might, according to all the law of Moses; neither after him arose
there any like him.

23:26 Notwithstanding the LORD turned not from the fierceness of his
great wrath, wherewith his anger was kindled against Judah, because of
all the provocations that Manasseh had provoked him withal.

23:27 And the LORD said, I will remove Judah also out of my sight, as
I have removed Israel, and will cast off this city Jerusalem which I
have chosen, and the house of which I said, My name shall be there.

23:28 Now the rest of the acts of Josiah, and all that he did, are
they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah?
23:29 In his days Pharaohnechoh king of Egypt went up against the king
of Assyria to the river Euphrates: and king Josiah went against him;
and he slew him at Megiddo, when he had seen him.

23:30 And his servants carried him in a chariot dead from Megiddo, and
brought him to Jerusalem, and buried him in his own sepulchre. And the
people of the land took Jehoahaz the son of Josiah, and anointed him,
and made him king in his father's stead.

23:31 Jehoahaz was twenty and three years old when he began to reign;
and he reigned three months in Jerusalem. And his mother's name was
Hamutal, the daughter of Jeremiah of Libnah.

23:32 And he did that which was evil in the sight of the LORD,
according to all that his fathers had done.

23:33 And Pharaohnechoh put him in bands at Riblah in the land of
Hamath, that he might not reign in Jerusalem; and put the land to a
tribute of an hundred talents of silver, and a talent of gold.

23:34 And Pharaohnechoh made Eliakim the son of Josiah king in the
room of Josiah his father, and turned his name to Jehoiakim, and took
Jehoahaz away: and he came to Egypt, and died there.

23:35 And Jehoiakim gave the silver and the gold to Pharaoh; but he
taxed the land to give the money according to the commandment of
Pharaoh: he exacted the silver and the gold of the people of the land,
of every one according to his taxation, to give it unto Pharaohnechoh.

23:36 Jehoiakim was twenty and five years old when he began to reign;
and he reigned eleven years in Jerusalem. And his mother's name was
Zebudah, the daughter of Pedaiah of Rumah.

23:37 And he did that which was evil in the sight of the LORD,
according to all that his fathers had done.

24:1 In his days Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came up, and Jehoiakim
became his servant three years: then he turned and rebelled against
him.

24:2 And the LORD sent against him bands of the Chaldees, and bands of
the Syrians, and bands of the Moabites, and bands of the children of
Ammon, and sent them against Judah to destroy it, according to the
word of the LORD, which he spake by his servants the prophets.

24:3 Surely at the commandment of the LORD came this upon Judah, to
remove them out of his sight, for the sins of Manasseh, according to
all that he did; 24:4 And also for the innocent blood that he shed:
for he filled Jerusalem with innocent blood; which the LORD would not
pardon.

24:5 Now the rest of the acts of Jehoiakim, and all that he did, are
they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Judah?
24:6 So Jehoiakim slept with his fathers: and Jehoiachin his son
reigned in his stead.

24:7 And the king of Egypt came not again any more out of his land:
for the king of Babylon had taken from the river of Egypt unto the
river Euphrates all that pertained to the king of Egypt.

24:8 Jehoiachin was eighteen years old when he began to reign, and he
reigned in Jerusalem three months. And his mother's name was Nehushta,
the daughter of Elnathan of Jerusalem.

24:9 And he did that which was evil in the sight of the LORD,
according to all that his father had done.

24:10 At that time the servants of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came
up against Jerusalem, and the city was besieged.

24:11 And Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came against the city, and
his servants did besiege it.

24:12 And Jehoiachin the king of Judah went out to the king of
Babylon, he, and his mother, and his servants, and his princes, and
his officers: and the king of Babylon took him in the eighth year of
his reign.

24:13 And he carried out thence all the treasures of the house of the
LORD, and the treasures of the king's house, and cut in pieces all the
vessels of gold which Solomon king of Israel had made in the temple of
the LORD, as the LORD had said.

24:14 And he carried away all Jerusalem, and all the princes, and all
the mighty men of valour, even ten thousand captives, and all the
craftsmen and smiths: none remained, save the poorest sort of the
people of the land.

24:15 And he carried away Jehoiachin to Babylon, and the king's
mother, and the king's wives, and his officers, and the mighty of the
land, those carried he into captivity from Jerusalem to Babylon.

24:16 And all the men of might, even seven thousand, and craftsmen and
smiths a thousand, all that were strong and apt for war, even them the
king of Babylon brought captive to Babylon.

24:17 And the king of Babylon made Mattaniah his father's brother king
in his stead, and changed his name to Zedekiah.

24:18 Zedekiah was twenty and one years old when he began to reign,
and he reigned eleven years in Jerusalem. And his mother's name was
Hamutal, the daughter of Jeremiah of Libnah.

24:19 And he did that which was evil in the sight of the LORD,
according to all that Jehoiakim had done.

24:20 For through the anger of the LORD it came to pass in Jerusalem
and Judah, until he had cast them out from his presence, that Zedekiah
rebelled against the king of Babylon.

25:1 And it came to pass in the ninth year of his reign, in the tenth
month, in the tenth day of the month, that Nebuchadnezzar king of
Babylon came, he, and all his host, against Jerusalem, and pitched
against it; and they built forts against it round about.

25:2 And the city was besieged unto the eleventh year of king
Zedekiah.

25:3 And on the ninth day of the fourth month the famine prevailed in
the city, and there was no bread for the people of the land.

25:4 And the city was broken up, and all the men of war fled by night
by the way of the gate between two walls, which is by the king's
garden: (now the Chaldees were against the city round about:) and the
king went the way toward the plain.

25:5 And the army of the Chaldees pursued after the king, and overtook
him in the plains of Jericho: and all his army were scattered from
him.

25:6 So they took the king, and brought him up to the king of Babylon
to Riblah; and they gave judgment upon him.

25:7 And they slew the sons of Zedekiah before his eyes, and put out
the eyes of Zedekiah, and bound him with fetters of brass, and carried
him to Babylon.

25:8 And in the fifth month, on the seventh day of the month, which is
the nineteenth year of king Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, came
Nebuzaradan, captain of the guard, a servant of the king of Babylon,
unto Jerusalem: 25:9 And he burnt the house of the LORD, and the
king's house, and all the houses of Jerusalem, and every great man's
house burnt he with fire.

25:10 And all the army of the Chaldees, that were with the captain of
the guard, brake down the walls of Jerusalem round about.

25:11 Now the rest of the people that were left in the city, and the
fugitives that fell away to the king of Babylon, with the remnant of
the multitude, did Nebuzaradan the captain of the guard carry away.

25:12 But the captain of the guard left of the door of the poor of the
land to be vinedressers and husbandmen.

25:13 And the pillars of brass that were in the house of the LORD, and
the bases, and the brasen sea that was in the house of the LORD, did
the Chaldees break in pieces, and carried the brass of them to
Babylon.

25:14 And the pots, and the shovels, and the snuffers, and the spoons,
and all the vessels of brass wherewith they ministered, took they
away.

25:15 And the firepans, and the bowls, and such things as were of
gold, in gold, and of silver, in silver, the captain of the guard took
away.

25:16 The two pillars, one sea, and the bases which Solomon had made
for the house of the LORD; the brass of all these vessels was without
weight.

25:17 The height of the one pillar was eighteen cubits, and the
chapiter upon it was brass: and the height of the chapiter three
cubits; and the wreathen work, and pomegranates upon the chapiter
round about, all of brass: and like unto these had the second pillar
with wreathen work.

25:18 And the captain of the guard took Seraiah the chief priest, and
Zephaniah the second priest, and the three keepers of the door: 25:19
And out of the city he took an officer that was set over the men of
war, and five men of them that were in the king's presence, which were
found in the city, and the principal scribe of the host, which
mustered the people of the land, and threescore men of the people of
the land that were found in the city: 25:20 And Nebuzaradan captain of
the guard took these, and brought them to the king of Babylon to
Riblah: 25:21 And the king of Babylon smote them, and slew them at
Riblah in the land of Hamath. So Judah was carried away out of their
land.

25:22 And as for the people that remained in the land of Judah, whom
Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon had left, even over them he made
Gedaliah the son of Ahikam, the son of Shaphan, ruler.

25:23 And when all the captains of the armies, they and their men,
heard that the king of Babylon had made Gedaliah governor, there came
to Gedaliah to Mizpah, even Ishmael the son of Nethaniah, and Johanan
the son of Careah, and Seraiah the son of Tanhumeth the Netophathite,
and Jaazaniah the son of a Maachathite, they and their men.

25:24 And Gedaliah sware to them, and to their men, and said unto
them, Fear not to be the servants of the Chaldees: dwell in the land,
and serve the king of Babylon; and it shall be well with you.

25:25 But it came to pass in the seventh month, that Ishmael the son
of Nethaniah, the son of Elishama, of the seed royal, came, and ten
men with him, and smote Gedaliah, that he died, and the Jews and the
Chaldees that were with him at Mizpah.

25:26 And all the people, both small and great, and the captains of
the armies, arose, and came to Egypt: for they were afraid of the
Chaldees.

25:27 And it came to pass in the seven and thirtieth year of the
captivity of Jehoiachin king of Judah, in the twelfth month, on the
seven and twentieth day of the month, that Evilmerodach king of
Babylon in the year that he began to reign did lift up the head of
Jehoiachin king of Judah out of prison; 25:28 And he spake kindly to
him, and set his throne above the throne of the kings that were with
him in Babylon; 25:29 And changed his prison garments: and he did eat
bread continually before him all the days of his life.

25:30 And his allowance was a continual allowance given him of the
king, a daily rate for every day, all the days of his life.




The First Book of the Chronicles


1:1 Adam, Sheth, Enosh, 1:2 Kenan, Mahalaleel, Jered, 1:3 Henoch,
Methuselah, Lamech, 1:4 Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth.

1:5 The sons of Japheth; Gomer, and Magog, and Madai, and Javan, and
Tubal, and Meshech, and Tiras.

1:6 And the sons of Gomer; Ashchenaz, and Riphath, and Togarmah.

1:7 And the sons of Javan; Elishah, and Tarshish, Kittim, and Dodanim.

1:8 The sons of Ham; Cush, and Mizraim, Put, and Canaan.

1:9 And the sons of Cush; Seba, and Havilah, and Sabta, and Raamah,
and Sabtecha. And the sons of Raamah; Sheba, and Dedan.

1:10 And Cush begat Nimrod: he began to be mighty upon the earth.

1:11 And Mizraim begat Ludim, and Anamim, and Lehabim, and Naphtuhim,
1:12 And Pathrusim, and Casluhim, (of whom came the Philistines,) and
Caphthorim.

1:13 And Canaan begat Zidon his firstborn, and Heth, 1:14 The Jebusite
also, and the Amorite, and the Girgashite, 1:15 And the Hivite, and
the Arkite, and the Sinite, 1:16 And the Arvadite, and the Zemarite,
and the Hamathite.

1:17 The sons of Shem; Elam, and Asshur, and Arphaxad, and Lud, and
Aram, and Uz, and Hul, and Gether, and Meshech.

1:18 And Arphaxad begat Shelah, and Shelah begat Eber.

1:19 And unto Eber were born two sons: the name of the one was Peleg;
because in his days the earth was divided: and his brother's name was
Joktan.

1:20 And Joktan begat Almodad, and Sheleph, and Hazarmaveth, and
Jerah, 1:21 Hadoram also, and Uzal, and Diklah, 1:22 And Ebal, and
Abimael, and Sheba, 1:23 And Ophir, and Havilah, and Jobab. All these
were the sons of Joktan.

1:24 Shem, Arphaxad, Shelah, 1:25 Eber, Peleg, Reu, 1:26 Serug, Nahor,
Terah, 1:27 Abram; the same is Abraham.

1:28 The sons of Abraham; Isaac, and Ishmael.

1:29 These are their generations: The firstborn of Ishmael, Nebaioth;
then Kedar, and Adbeel, and Mibsam, 1:30 Mishma, and Dumah, Massa,
Hadad, and Tema, 1:31 Jetur, Naphish, and Kedemah. These are the sons
of Ishmael.

1:32 Now the sons of Keturah, Abraham's concubine: she bare Zimran,
and Jokshan, and Medan, and Midian, and Ishbak, and Shuah. And the
sons of Jokshan; Sheba, and Dedan.

1:33 And the sons of Midian; Ephah, and Epher, and Henoch, and Abida,
and Eldaah. All these are the sons of Keturah.

1:34 And Abraham begat Isaac. The sons of Isaac; Esau and Israel.

1:35 The sons of Esau; Eliphaz, Reuel, and Jeush, and Jaalam, and
Korah.

1:36 The sons of Eliphaz; Teman, and Omar, Zephi, and Gatam, Kenaz,
and Timna, and Amalek.

1:37 The sons of Reuel; Nahath, Zerah, Shammah, and Mizzah.

1:38 And the sons of Seir; Lotan, and Shobal, and Zibeon, and Anah,
and Dishon, and Ezar, and Dishan.

1:39 And the sons of Lotan; Hori, and Homam: and Timna was Lotan's
sister.

1:40 The sons of Shobal; Alian, and Manahath, and Ebal, Shephi, and
Onam.

and the sons of Zibeon; Aiah, and Anah.

1:41 The sons of Anah; Dishon. And the sons of Dishon; Amram, and
Eshban, and Ithran, and Cheran.

1:42 The sons of Ezer; Bilhan, and Zavan, and Jakan. The sons of
Dishan; Uz, and Aran.

1:43 Now these are the kings that reigned in the land of Edom before
any king reigned over the children of Israel; Bela the son of Beor:
and the name of his city was Dinhabah.

1:44 And when Bela was dead, Jobab the son of Zerah of Bozrah reigned
in his stead.

1:45 And when Jobab was dead, Husham of the land of the Temanites
reigned in his stead.

1:46 And when Husham was dead, Hadad the son of Bedad, which smote
Midian in the field of Moab, reigned in his stead: and the name of his
city was Avith.

1:47 And when Hadad was dead, Samlah of Masrekah reigned in his stead.

1:48 And when Samlah was dead, Shaul of Rehoboth by the river reigned
in his stead.

1:49 And when Shaul was dead, Baalhanan the son of Achbor reigned in
his stead.

1:50 And when Baalhanan was dead, Hadad reigned in his stead: and the
name of his city was Pai; and his wife's name was Mehetabel, the
daughter of Matred, the daughter of Mezahab.

1:51 Hadad died also. And the dukes of Edom were; duke Timnah, duke
Aliah, duke Jetheth, 1:52 Duke Aholibamah, duke Elah, duke Pinon, 1:53
Duke Kenaz, duke Teman, duke Mibzar, 1:54 Duke Magdiel, duke Iram.
These are the dukes of Edom.

2:1 These are the sons of Israel; Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah,
Issachar, and Zebulun, 2:2 Dan, Joseph, and Benjamin, Naphtali, Gad,
and Asher.

2:3 The sons of Judah; Er, and Onan, and Shelah: which three were born
unto him of the daughter of Shua the Canaanitess. And Er, the
firstborn of Judah, was evil in the sight of the LORD; and he slew
him.

2:4 And Tamar his daughter in law bore him Pharez and Zerah. All the
sons of Judah were five.

2:5 The sons of Pharez; Hezron, and Hamul.

2:6 And the sons of Zerah; Zimri, and Ethan, and Heman, and Calcol,
and Dara: five of them in all.

2:7 And the sons of Carmi; Achar, the troubler of Israel, who
transgressed in the thing accursed.

2:8 And the sons of Ethan; Azariah.

2:9 The sons also of Hezron, that were born unto him; Jerahmeel, and
Ram, and Chelubai.

2:10 And Ram begat Amminadab; and Amminadab begat Nahshon, prince of
the children of Judah; 2:11 And Nahshon begat Salma, and Salma begat
Boaz, 2:12 And Boaz begat Obed, and Obed begat Jesse, 2:13 And Jesse
begat his firstborn Eliab, and Abinadab the second, and Shimma the
third, 2:14 Nethaneel the fourth, Raddai the fifth, 2:15 Ozem the
sixth, David the seventh: 2:16 Whose sisters were Zeruiah, and
Abigail. And the sons of Zeruiah; Abishai, and Joab, and Asahel,
three.

2:17 And Abigail bare Amasa: and the father of Amasa was Jether the
Ishmeelite.

2:18 And Caleb the son of Hezron begat children of Azubah his wife,
and of Jerioth: her sons are these; Jesher, and Shobab, and Ardon.

2:19 And when Azubah was dead, Caleb took unto him Ephrath, which bare
him Hur.

2:20 And Hur begat Uri, and Uri begat Bezaleel.

2:21 And afterward Hezron went in to the daughter of Machir the father
of Gilead, whom he married when he was threescore years old; and she
bare him Segub.

2:22 And Segub begat Jair, who had three and twenty cities in the land
of Gilead.

2:23 And he took Geshur, and Aram, with the towns of Jair, from them,
with Kenath, and the towns thereof, even threescore cities. All these
belonged to the sons of Machir the father of Gilead.

2:24 And after that Hezron was dead in Calebephratah, then Abiah
Hezron's wife bare him Ashur the father of Tekoa.

2:25 And the sons of Jerahmeel the firstborn of Hezron were, Ram the
firstborn, and Bunah, and Oren, and Ozem, and Ahijah.

2:26 Jerahmeel had also another wife, whose name was Atarah; she was
the mother of Onam.

2:27 And the sons of Ram the firstborn of Jerahmeel were, Maaz, and
Jamin, and Eker.

2:28 And the sons of Onam were, Shammai, and Jada. And the sons of
Shammai; Nadab and Abishur.

2:29 And the name of the wife of Abishur was Abihail, and she bare him
Ahban, and Molid.

2:30 And the sons of Nadab; Seled, and Appaim: but Seled died without
children.

2:31 And the sons of Appaim; Ishi. And the sons of Ishi; Sheshan. And
the children of Sheshan; Ahlai.

2:32 And the sons of Jada the brother of Shammai; Jether, and
Jonathan: and Jether died without children.

2:33 And the sons of Jonathan; Peleth, and Zaza. These were the sons
of Jerahmeel.

2:34 Now Sheshan had no sons, but daughters. And Sheshan had a
servant, an Egyptian, whose name was Jarha.

2:35 And Sheshan gave his daughter to Jarha his servant to wife; and
she bare him Attai.

2:36 And Attai begat Nathan, and Nathan begat Zabad, 2:37 And Zabad
begat Ephlal, and Ephlal begat Obed, 2:38 And Obed begat Jehu, and
Jehu begat Azariah, 2:39 And Azariah begat Helez, and Helez begat
Eleasah, 2:40 And Eleasah begat Sisamai, and Sisamai begat Shallum,
2:41 And Shallum begat Jekamiah, and Jekamiah begat Elishama.

2:42 Now the sons of Caleb the brother of Jerahmeel were, Mesha his
firstborn, which was the father of Ziph; and the sons of Mareshah the
father of Hebron.

2:43 And the sons of Hebron; Korah, and Tappuah, and Rekem, and Shema.

2:44 And Shema begat Raham, the father of Jorkoam: and Rekem begat
Shammai.

2:45 And the son of Shammai was Maon: and Maon was the father of
Bethzur.

2:46 And Ephah, Caleb's concubine, bare Haran, and Moza, and Gazez:
and Haran begat Gazez.

2:47 And the sons of Jahdai; Regem, and Jotham, and Gesham, and Pelet,
and Ephah, and Shaaph.

2:48 Maachah, Caleb's concubine, bare Sheber, and Tirhanah.

2:49 She bare also Shaaph the father of Madmannah, Sheva the father of
Machbenah, and the father of Gibea: and the daughter of Caleb was
Achsa.

2:50 These were the sons of Caleb the son of Hur, the firstborn of
Ephratah; Shobal the father of Kirjathjearim.

2:51 Salma the father of Bethlehem, Hareph the father of Bethgader.

2:52 And Shobal the father of Kirjathjearim had sons; Haroeh, and half
of the Manahethites.

2:53 And the families of Kirjathjearim; the Ithrites, and the Puhites,
and the Shumathites, and the Mishraites; of them came the Zareathites,
and the Eshtaulites, 2:54 The sons of Salma; Bethlehem, and the
Netophathites, Ataroth, the house of Joab, and half of the
Manahethites, the Zorites.

2:55 And the families of the scribes which dwelt at Jabez; the
Tirathites, the Shimeathites, and Suchathites. These are the Kenites
that came of Hemath, the father of the house of Rechab.

3:1 Now these were the sons of David, which were born unto him in
Hebron; the firstborn Amnon, of Ahinoam the Jezreelitess; the second
Daniel, of Abigail the Carmelitess: 3:2 The third, Absalom the son of
Maachah the daughter of Talmai king of Geshur: the fourth, Adonijah
the son of Haggith: 3:3 The fifth, Shephatiah of Abital: the sixth,
Ithream by Eglah his wife.

3:4 These six were born unto him in Hebron; and there he reigned seven
years and six months: and in Jerusalem he reigned thirty and three
years.

3:5 And these were born unto him in Jerusalem; Shimea, and Shobab, and
Nathan, and Solomon, four, of Bathshua the daughter of Ammiel: 3:6
Ibhar also, and Elishama, and Eliphelet, 3:7 And Nogah, and Nepheg,
and Japhia, 3:8 And Elishama, and Eliada, and Eliphelet, nine.

3:9 These were all the sons of David, beside the sons of the
concubines, and Tamar their sister.

3:10 And Solomon's son was Rehoboam, Abia his son, Asa his son,
Jehoshaphat his son, 3:11 Joram his son, Ahaziah his son, Joash his
son, 3:12 Amaziah his son, Azariah his son, Jotham his son, 3:13 Ahaz
his son, Hezekiah his son, Manasseh his son, 3:14 Amon his son, Josiah
his son.

3:15 And the sons of Josiah were, the firstborn Johanan, the second
Jehoiakim, the third Zedekiah, the fourth Shallum.

3:16 And the sons of Jehoiakim: Jeconiah his son, Zedekiah his son.

3:17 And the sons of Jeconiah; Assir, Salathiel his son, 3:18
Malchiram also, and Pedaiah, and Shenazar, Jecamiah, Hoshama, and
Nedabiah.

3:19 And the sons of Pedaiah were, Zerubbabel, and Shimei: and the
sons of Zerubbabel; Meshullam, and Hananiah, and Shelomith their
sister: 3:20 And Hashubah, and Ohel, and Berechiah, and Hasadiah,
Jushabhesed, five.

3:21 And the sons of Hananiah; Pelatiah, and Jesaiah: the sons of
Rephaiah, the sons of Arnan, the sons of Obadiah, the sons of
Shechaniah.

3:22 And the sons of Shechaniah; Shemaiah: and the sons of Shemaiah;
Hattush, and Igeal, and Bariah, and Neariah, and Shaphat, six.

3:23 And the sons of Neariah; Elioenai, and Hezekiah, and Azrikam,
three.

3:24 And the sons of Elioenai were, Hodaiah, and Eliashib, and
Pelaiah, and Akkub, and Johanan, and Dalaiah, and Anani, seven.

4:1 The sons of Judah; Pharez, Hezron, and Carmi, and Hur, and Shobal.

4:2 And Reaiah the son of Shobal begat Jahath; and Jahath begat
Ahumai, and Lahad. These are the families of the Zorathites.

4:3 And these were of the father of Etam; Jezreel, and Ishma, and
Idbash: and the name of their sister was Hazelelponi: 4:4 And Penuel
the father of Gedor, and Ezer the father of Hushah. These are the sons
of Hur, the firstborn of Ephratah, the father of Bethlehem.

4:5 And Ashur the father of Tekoa had two wives, Helah and Naarah.

4:6 And Naarah bare him Ahuzam, and Hepher, and Temeni, and
Haahashtari.

These were the sons of Naarah.

4:7 And the sons of Helah were, Zereth, and Jezoar, and Ethnan.

4:8 And Coz begat Anub, and Zobebah, and the families of Aharhel the
son of Harum.

4:9 And Jabez was more honourable than his brethren: and his mother
called his name Jabez, saying, Because I bare him with sorrow.

4:10 And Jabez called on the God of Israel, saying, Oh that thou
wouldest bless me indeed, and enlarge my coast, and that thine hand
might be with me, and that thou wouldest keep me from evil, that it
may not grieve me! And God granted him that which he requested.

4:11 And Chelub the brother of Shuah begat Mehir, which was the father
of Eshton.

4:12 And Eshton begat Bethrapha, and Paseah, and Tehinnah the father
of Irnahash. These are the men of Rechah.

4:13 And the sons of Kenaz; Othniel, and Seraiah: and the sons of
Othniel; Hathath.

4:14 And Meonothai begat Ophrah: and Seraiah begat Joab, the father of
the valley of Charashim; for they were craftsmen.

4:15 And the sons of Caleb the son of Jephunneh; Iru, Elah, and Naam:
and the sons of Elah, even Kenaz.

4:16 And the sons of Jehaleleel; Ziph, and Ziphah, Tiria, and Asareel.

4:17 And the sons of Ezra were, Jether, and Mered, and Epher, and
Jalon: and she bare Miriam, and Shammai, and Ishbah the father of
Eshtemoa.

4:18 And his wife Jehudijah bare Jered the father of Gedor, and Heber
the father of Socho, and Jekuthiel the father of Zanoah. And these are
the sons of Bithiah the daughter of Pharaoh, which Mered took.

4:19 And the sons of his wife Hodiah the sister of Naham, the father
of Keilah the Garmite, and Eshtemoa the Maachathite.

4:20 And the sons of Shimon were, Amnon, and Rinnah, Benhanan, and
Tilon.

And the sons of Ishi were, Zoheth, and Benzoheth.

4:21 The sons of Shelah the son of Judah were, Er the father of Lecah,
and Laadah the father of Mareshah, and the families of the house of
them that wrought fine linen, of the house of Ashbea, 4:22 And Jokim,
and the men of Chozeba, and Joash, and Saraph, who had the dominion in
Moab, and Jashubilehem. And these are ancient things.

4:23 These were the potters, and those that dwelt among plants and
hedges: there they dwelt with the king for his work.

4:24 The sons of Simeon were, Nemuel, and Jamin, Jarib, Zerah, and
Shaul: 4:25 Shallum his son, Mibsam his son, Mishma his son.

4:26 And the sons of Mishma; Hamuel his son, Zacchur his son, Shimei
his son.

4:27 And Shimei had sixteen sons and six daughters: but his brethren
had not many children, neither did all their family multiply, like to
the children of Judah.

4:28 And they dwelt at Beersheba, and Moladah, and Hazarshual, 4:29
And at Bilhah, and at Ezem, and at Tolad, 4:30 And at Bethuel, and at
Hormah, and at Ziklag, 4:31 And at Bethmarcaboth, and Hazarsusim, and
at Bethbirei, and at Shaaraim. These were their cities unto the reign
of David.

4:32 And their villages were, Etam, and Ain, Rimmon, and Tochen, and
Ashan, five cities: 4:33 And all their villages that were round about
the same cities, unto Baal. These were their habitations, and their
genealogy.

4:34 And Meshobab, and Jamlech, and Joshah, the son of Amaziah, 4:35
And Joel, and Jehu the son of Josibiah, the son of Seraiah, the son of
Asiel, 4:36 And Elioenai, and Jaakobah, and Jeshohaiah, and Asaiah,
and Adiel, and Jesimiel, and Benaiah, 4:37 And Ziza the son of Shiphi,
the son of Allon, the son of Jedaiah, the son of Shimri, the son of
Shemaiah; 4:38 These mentioned by their names were princes in their
families: and the house of their fathers increased greatly.

4:39 And they went to the entrance of Gedor, even unto the east side
of the valley, to seek pasture for their flocks.

4:40 And they found fat pasture and good, and the land was wide, and
quiet, and peaceable; for they of Ham had dwelt there of old.

4:41 And these written by name came in the days of Hezekiah king of
Judah, and smote their tents, and the habitations that were found
there, and destroyed them utterly unto this day, and dwelt in their
rooms: because there was pasture there for their flocks.

4:42 And some of them, even of the sons of Simeon, five hundred men,
went to mount Seir, having for their captains Pelatiah, and Neariah,
and Rephaiah, and Uzziel, the sons of Ishi.

4:43 And they smote the rest of the Amalekites that were escaped, and
dwelt there unto this day.

5:1 Now the sons of Reuben the firstborn of Israel, (for he was the
firstborn; but forasmuch as he defiled his father's bed, his
birthright was given unto the sons of Joseph the son of Israel: and
the genealogy is not to be reckoned after the birthright.

5:2 For Judah prevailed above his brethren, and of him came the chief
ruler; but the birthright was Joseph's:) 5:3 The sons, I say, of
Reuben the firstborn of Israel were, Hanoch, and Pallu, Hezron, and
Carmi.

5:4 The sons of Joel; Shemaiah his son, Gog his son, Shimei his son,
5:5 Micah his son, Reaia his son, Baal his son, 5:6 Beerah his son,
whom Tilgathpilneser king of Assyria carried away captive: he was
prince of the Reubenites.

5:7 And his brethren by their families, when the genealogy of their
generations was reckoned, were the chief, Jeiel, and Zechariah, 5:8
And Bela the son of Azaz, the son of Shema, the son of Joel, who dwelt
in Aroer, even unto Nebo and Baalmeon: 5:9 And eastward he inhabited
unto the entering in of the wilderness from the river Euphrates:
because their cattle were multiplied in the land of Gilead.

5:10 And in the days of Saul they made war with the Hagarites, who
fell by their hand: and they dwelt in their tents throughout all the
east land of Gilead.

5:11 And the children of Gad dwelt over against them, in the land of
Bashan unto Salcah: 5:12 Joel the chief, and Shapham the next, and
Jaanai, and Shaphat in Bashan.

5:13 And their brethren of the house of their fathers were, Michael,
and Meshullam, and Sheba, and Jorai, and Jachan, and Zia, and Heber,
seven.

5:14 These are the children of Abihail the son of Huri, the son of
Jaroah, the son of Gilead, the son of Michael, the son of Jeshishai,
the son of Jahdo, the son of Buz; 5:15 Ahi the son of Abdiel, the son
of Guni, chief of the house of their fathers.

5:16 And they dwelt in Gilead in Bashan, and in her towns, and in all
the suburbs of Sharon, upon their borders.

5:17 All these were reckoned by genealogies in the days of Jotham king
of Judah, and in the days of Jeroboam king of Israel.

5:18 The sons of Reuben, and the Gadites, and half the tribe of
Manasseh, of valiant men, men able to bear buckler and sword, and to
shoot with bow, and skilful in war, were four and forty thousand seven
hundred and threescore, that went out to the war.

5:19 And they made war with the Hagarites, with Jetur, and Nephish,
and Nodab.

5:20 And they were helped against them, and the Hagarites were
delivered into their hand, and all that were with them: for they cried
to God in the battle, and he was intreated of them; because they put
their trust in him.

5:21 And they took away their cattle; of their camels fifty thousand,
and of sheep two hundred and fifty thousand, and of asses two
thousand, and of men an hundred thousand.

5:22 For there fell down many slain, because the war was of God. And
they dwelt in their steads until the captivity.

5:23 And the children of the half tribe of Manasseh dwelt in the land:
they increased from Bashan unto Baalhermon and Senir, and unto mount
Hermon.

5:24 And these were the heads of the house of their fathers, even
Epher, and Ishi, and Eliel, and Azriel, and Jeremiah, and Hodaviah,
and Jahdiel, mighty men of valour, famous men, and heads of the house
of their fathers.

5:25 And they transgressed against the God of their fathers, and went
a whoring after the gods of the people of the land, whom God destroyed
before them.

5:26 And the God of Israel stirred up the spirit of Pul king of
Assyria, and the spirit of Tilgathpilneser king of Assyria, and he
carried them away, even the Reubenites, and the Gadites, and the half
tribe of Manasseh, and brought them unto Halah, and Habor, and Hara,
and to the river Gozan, unto this day.

6:1 The sons of Levi; Gershon, Kohath, and Merari.

6:2 And the sons of Kohath; Amram, Izhar, and Hebron, and Uzziel.

6:3 And the children of Amram; Aaron, and Moses, and Miriam. The sons
also of Aaron; Nadab, and Abihu, Eleazar, and Ithamar.

6:4 Eleazar begat Phinehas, Phinehas begat Abishua, 6:5 And Abishua
begat Bukki, and Bukki begat Uzzi, 6:6 And Uzzi begat Zerahiah, and
Zerahiah begat Meraioth, 6:7 Meraioth begat Amariah, and Amariah begat
Ahitub, 6:8 And Ahitub begat Zadok, and Zadok begat Ahimaaz, 6:9 And
Ahimaaz begat Azariah, and Azariah begat Johanan, 6:10 And Johanan
begat Azariah, (he it is that executed the priest's office in the
temple that Solomon built in Jerusalem:) 6:11 And Azariah begat
Amariah, and Amariah begat Ahitub, 6:12 And Ahitub begat Zadok, and
Zadok begat Shallum, 6:13 And Shallum begat Hilkiah, and Hilkiah begat
Azariah, 6:14 And Azariah begat Seraiah, and Seraiah begat Jehozadak,
6:15 And Jehozadak went into captivity, when the LORD carried away
Judah and Jerusalem by the hand of Nebuchadnezzar.

6:16 The sons of Levi; Gershom, Kohath, and Merari.

6:17 And these be the names of the sons of Gershom; Libni, and Shimei.

6:18 And the sons of Kohath were, Amram, and Izhar, and Hebron, and
Uzziel.

6:19 The sons of Merari; Mahli, and Mushi. And these are the families
of the Levites according to their fathers.

6:20 Of Gershom; Libni his son, Jahath his son, Zimmah his son, 6:21
Joah his son, Iddo his son, Zerah his son, Jeaterai his son.

6:22 The sons of Kohath; Amminadab his son, Korah his son, Assir his
son, 6:23 Elkanah his son, and Ebiasaph his son, and Assir his son,
6:24 Tahath his son, Uriel his son, Uzziah his son, and Shaul his son.

6:25 And the sons of Elkanah; Amasai, and Ahimoth.

6:26 As for Elkanah: the sons of Elkanah; Zophai his son, and Nahath
his son, 6:27 Eliab his son, Jeroham his son, Elkanah his son.

6:28 And the sons of Samuel; the firstborn Vashni, and Abiah.

6:29 The sons of Merari; Mahli, Libni his son, Shimei his son, Uzza
his son, 6:30 Shimea his son, Haggiah his son, Asaiah his son.

6:31 And these are they whom David set over the service of song in the
house of the LORD, after that the ark had rest.

6:32 And they ministered before the dwelling place of the tabernacle
of the congregation with singing, until Solomon had built the house of
the LORD in Jerusalem: and then they waited on their office according
to their order.

6:33 And these are they that waited with their children. Of the sons
of the Kohathites: Heman a singer, the son of Joel, the son of
Shemuel, 6:34 The son of Elkanah, the son of Jeroham, the son of
Eliel, the son of Toah, 6:35 The son of Zuph, the son of Elkanah, the
son of Mahath, the son of Amasai, 6:36 The son of Elkanah, the son of
Joel, the son of Azariah, the son of Zephaniah, 6:37 The son of
Tahath, the son of Assir, the son of Ebiasaph, the son of Korah, 6:38
The son of Izhar, the son of Kohath, the son of Levi, the son of
Israel.

6:39 And his brother Asaph, who stood on his right hand, even Asaph
the son of Berachiah, the son of Shimea, 6:40 The son of Michael, the
son of Baaseiah, the son of Malchiah, 6:41 The son of Ethni, the son
of Zerah, the son of Adaiah, 6:42 The son of Ethan, the son of Zimmah,
the son of Shimei, 6:43 The son of Jahath, the son of Gershom, the son
of Levi.

6:44 And their brethren the sons of Merari stood on the left hand:
Ethan the son of Kishi, the son of Abdi, the son of Malluch, 6:45 The
son of Hashabiah, the son of Amaziah, the son of Hilkiah, 6:46 The son
of Amzi, the son of Bani, the son of Shamer, 6:47 The son of Mahli,
the son of Mushi, the son of Merari, the son of Levi.

6:48 Their brethren also the Levites were appointed unto all manner of
service of the tabernacle of the house of God.

6:49 But Aaron and his sons offered upon the altar of the burnt
offering, and on the altar of incense, and were appointed for all the
work of the place most holy, and to make an atonement for Israel,
according to all that Moses the servant of God had commanded.

6:50 And these are the sons of Aaron; Eleazar his son, Phinehas his
son, Abishua his son, 6:51 Bukki his son, Uzzi his son, Zerahiah his
son, 6:52 Meraioth his son, Amariah his son, Ahitub his son, 6:53
Zadok his son, Ahimaaz his son.

6:54 Now these are their dwelling places throughout their castles in
their coasts, of the sons of Aaron, of the families of the Kohathites:
for theirs was the lot.

6:55 And they gave them Hebron in the land of Judah, and the suburbs
thereof round about it.

6:56 But the fields of the city, and the villages thereof, they gave
to Caleb the son of Jephunneh.

6:57 And to the sons of Aaron they gave the cities of Judah, namely,
Hebron, the city of refuge, and Libnah with her suburbs, and Jattir,
and Eshtemoa, with their suburbs, 6:58 And Hilen with her suburbs,
Debir with her suburbs, 6:59 And Ashan with her suburbs, and
Bethshemesh with her suburbs: 6:60 And out of the tribe of Benjamin;
Geba with her suburbs, and Alemeth with her suburbs, and Anathoth with
her suburbs. All their cities throughout their families were thirteen
cities.

6:61 And unto the sons of Kohath, which were left of the family of
that tribe, were cities given out of the half tribe, namely, out of
the half tribe of Manasseh, by lot, ten cities.

6:62 And to the sons of Gershom throughout their families out of the
tribe of Issachar, and out of the tribe of Asher, and out of the tribe
of Naphtali, and out of the tribe of Manasseh in Bashan, thirteen
cities.

6:63 Unto the sons of Merari were given by lot, throughout their
families, out of the tribe of Reuben, and out of the tribe of Gad, and
out of the tribe of Zebulun, twelve cities.

6:64 And the children of Israel gave to the Levites these cities with
their suburbs.

6:65 And they gave by lot out of the tribe of the children of Judah,
and out of the tribe of the children of Simeon, and out of the tribe
of the children of Benjamin, these cities, which are called by their
names.

6:66 And the residue of the families of the sons of Kohath had cities
of their coasts out of the tribe of Ephraim.

6:67 And they gave unto them, of the cities of refuge, Shechem in
mount Ephraim with her suburbs; they gave also Gezer with her suburbs,
6:68 And Jokmeam with her suburbs, and Bethhoron with her suburbs,
6:69 And Aijalon with her suburbs, and Gathrimmon with her suburbs:
6:70 And out of the half tribe of Manasseh; Aner with her suburbs, and
Bileam with her suburbs, for the family of the remnant of the sons of
Kohath.

6:71 Unto the sons of Gershom were given out of the family of the half
tribe of Manasseh, Golan in Bashan with her suburbs, and Ashtaroth
with her suburbs: 6:72 And out of the tribe of Issachar; Kedesh with
her suburbs, Daberath with her suburbs, 6:73 And Ramoth with her
suburbs, and Anem with her suburbs: 6:74 And out of the tribe of
Asher; Mashal with her suburbs, and Abdon with her suburbs, 6:75 And
Hukok with her suburbs, and Rehob with her suburbs: 6:76 And out of
the tribe of Naphtali; Kedesh in Galilee with her suburbs, and Hammon
with her suburbs, and Kirjathaim with her suburbs.

6:77 Unto the rest of the children of Merari were given out of the
tribe of Zebulun, Rimmon with her suburbs, Tabor with her suburbs:
6:78 And on the other side Jordan by Jericho, on the east side of
Jordan, were given them out of the tribe of Reuben, Bezer in the
wilderness with her suburbs, and Jahzah with her suburbs, 6:79
Kedemoth also with her suburbs, and Mephaath with her suburbs: 6:80
And out of the tribe of Gad; Ramoth in Gilead with her suburbs, and
Mahanaim with her suburbs, 6:81 And Heshbon with her suburbs, and
Jazer with her suburbs.

7:1 Now the sons of Issachar were, Tola, and Puah, Jashub, and
Shimrom, four.

7:2 And the sons of Tola; Uzzi, and Rephaiah, and Jeriel, and Jahmai,
and Jibsam, and Shemuel, heads of their father's house, to wit, of
Tola: they were valiant men of might in their generations; whose
number was in the days of David two and twenty thousand and six
hundred.

7:3 And the sons of Uzzi; Izrahiah: and the sons of Izrahiah; Michael,
and Obadiah, and Joel, Ishiah, five: all of them chief men.

7:4 And with them, by their generations, after the house of their
fathers, were bands of soldiers for war, six and thirty thousand men:
for they had many wives and sons.

7:5 And their brethren among all the families of Issachar were valiant
men of might, reckoned in all by their genealogies fourscore and seven
thousand.

7:6 The sons of Benjamin; Bela, and Becher, and Jediael, three.

7:7 And the sons of Bela; Ezbon, and Uzzi, and Uzziel, and Jerimoth,
and Iri, five; heads of the house of their fathers, mighty men of
valour; and were reckoned by their genealogies twenty and two thousand
and thirty and four.

7:8 And the sons of Becher; Zemira, and Joash, and Eliezer, and
Elioenai, and Omri, and Jerimoth, and Abiah, and Anathoth, and
Alameth. All these are the sons of Becher.

7:9 And the number of them, after their genealogy by their
generations, heads of the house of their fathers, mighty men of
valour, was twenty thousand and two hundred.

7:10 The sons also of Jediael; Bilhan: and the sons of Bilhan; Jeush,
and Benjamin, and Ehud, and Chenaanah, and Zethan, and Tharshish, and
Ahishahar.

7:11 All these the sons of Jediael, by the heads of their fathers,
mighty men of valour, were seventeen thousand and two hundred
soldiers, fit to go out for war and battle.

7:12 Shuppim also, and Huppim, the children of Ir, and Hushim, the
sons of Aher.

7:13 The sons of Naphtali; Jahziel, and Guni, and Jezer, and Shallum,
the sons of Bilhah.

7:14 The sons of Manasseh; Ashriel, whom she bare: (but his concubine
the Aramitess bare Machir the father of Gilead: 7:15 And Machir took
to wife the sister of Huppim and Shuppim, whose sister's name was
Maachah;) and the name of the second was Zelophehad: and Zelophehad
had daughters.

7:16 And Maachah the wife of Machir bare a son, and she called his
name Peresh; and the name of his brother was Sheresh; and his sons
were Ulam and Rakem.

7:17 And the sons of Ulam; Bedan. These were the sons of Gilead, the
son of Machir, the son of Manasseh.

7:18 And his sister Hammoleketh bare Ishod, and Abiezer, and Mahalah.

7:19 And the sons of Shemidah were, Ahian, and Shechem, and Likhi, and
Aniam.

7:20 And the sons of Ephraim; Shuthelah, and Bered his son, and Tahath
his son, and Eladah his son, and Tahath his son, 7:21 And Zabad his
son, and Shuthelah his son, and Ezer, and Elead, whom the men of Gath
that were born in that land slew, because they came down to take away
their cattle.

7:22 And Ephraim their father mourned many days, and his brethren came
to comfort him.

7:23 And when he went in to his wife, she conceived, and bare a son,
and he called his name Beriah, because it went evil with his house.

7:24 (And his daughter was Sherah, who built Bethhoron the nether, and
the upper, and Uzzensherah.)  7:25 And Rephah was his son, also
Resheph, and Telah his son, and Tahan his son.

7:26 Laadan his son, Ammihud his son, Elishama his son.

7:27 Non his son, Jehoshuah his son.

7:28 And their possessions and habitations were, Bethel and the towns
thereof, and eastward Naaran, and westward Gezer, with the towns
thereof; Shechem also and the towns thereof, unto Gaza and the towns
thereof: 7:29 And by the borders of the children of Manasseh,
Bethshean and her towns, Taanach and her towns, Megiddo and her towns,
Dor and her towns. In these dwelt the children of Joseph the son of
Israel.

7:30 The sons of Asher; Imnah, and Isuah, and Ishuai, and Beriah, and
Serah their sister.

7:31 And the sons of Beriah; Heber, and Malchiel, who is the father of
Birzavith.

7:32 And Heber begat Japhlet, and Shomer, and Hotham, and Shua their
sister.

7:33 And the sons of Japhlet; Pasach, and Bimhal, and Ashvath. These
are the children of Japhlet.

7:34 And the sons of Shamer; Ahi, and Rohgah, Jehubbah, and Aram.

7:35 And the sons of his brother Helem; Zophah, and Imna, and Shelesh,
and Amal.

7:36 The sons of Zophah; Suah, and Harnepher, and Shual, and Beri, and
Imrah, 7:37 Bezer, and Hod, and Shamma, and Shilshah, and Ithran, and
Beera.

7:38 And the sons of Jether; Jephunneh, and Pispah, and Ara.

7:39 And the sons of Ulla; Arah, and Haniel, and Rezia.

7:40 All these were the children of Asher, heads of their father's
house, choice and mighty men of valour, chief of the princes. And the
number throughout the genealogy of them that were apt to the war and
to battle was twenty and six thousand men.

8:1 Now Benjamin begat Bela his firstborn, Ashbel the second, and
Aharah the third, 8:2 Nohah the fourth, and Rapha the fifth.

8:3 And the sons of Bela were, Addar, and Gera, and Abihud, 8:4 And
Abishua, and Naaman, and Ahoah, 8:5 And Gera, and Shephuphan, and
Huram.

8:6 And these are the sons of Ehud: these are the heads of the fathers
of the inhabitants of Geba, and they removed them to Manahath: 8:7 And
Naaman, and Ahiah, and Gera, he removed them, and begat Uzza, and
Ahihud.

8:8 And Shaharaim begat children in the country of Moab, after he had
sent them away; Hushim and Baara were his wives.

8:9 And he begat of Hodesh his wife, Jobab, and Zibia, and Mesha, and
Malcham, 8:10 And Jeuz, and Shachia, and Mirma. These were his sons,
heads of the fathers.

8:11 And of Hushim he begat Abitub, and Elpaal.

8:12 The sons of Elpaal; Eber, and Misham, and Shamed, who built Ono,
and Lod, with the towns thereof: 8:13 Beriah also, and Shema, who were
heads of the fathers of the inhabitants of Aijalon, who drove away the
inhabitants of Gath: 8:14 And Ahio, Shashak, and Jeremoth, 8:15 And
Zebadiah, and Arad, and Ader, 8:16 And Michael, and Ispah, and Joha,
the sons of Beriah; 8:17 And Zebadiah, and Meshullam, and Hezeki, and
Heber, 8:18 Ishmerai also, and Jezliah, and Jobab, the sons of Elpaal;
8:19 And Jakim, and Zichri, and Zabdi, 8:20 And Elienai, and Zilthai,
and Eliel, 8:21 And Adaiah, and Beraiah, and Shimrath, the sons of
Shimhi; 8:22 And Ishpan, and Heber, and Eliel, 8:23 And Abdon, and
Zichri, and Hanan, 8:24 And Hananiah, and Elam, and Antothijah, 8:25
And Iphedeiah, and Penuel, the sons of Shashak; 8:26 And Shamsherai,
and Shehariah, and Athaliah, 8:27 And Jaresiah, and Eliah, and Zichri,
the sons of Jeroham.

8:28 These were heads of the fathers, by their generations, chief men.

These dwelt in Jerusalem.

8:29 And at Gibeon dwelt the father of Gibeon; whose wife's name was
Maachah: 8:30 And his firstborn son Abdon, and Zur, and Kish, and
Baal, and Nadab, 8:31 And Gedor, and Ahio, and Zacher.

8:32 And Mikloth begat Shimeah. And these also dwelt with their
brethren in Jerusalem, over against them.

8:33 And Ner begat Kish, and Kish begat Saul, and Saul begat Jonathan,
and Malchishua, and Abinadab, and Eshbaal.

8:34 And the son of Jonathan was Meribbaal; and Meribbaal begat Micah.

8:35 And the sons of Micah were, Pithon, and Melech, and Tarea, and
Ahaz.

8:36 And Ahaz begat Jehoadah; and Jehoadah begat Alemeth, and
Azmaveth, and Zimri; and Zimri begat Moza, 8:37 And Moza begat Binea:
Rapha was his son, Eleasah his son, Azel his son: 8:38 And Azel had
six sons, whose names are these, Azrikam, Bocheru, and Ishmael, and
Sheariah, and Obadiah, and Hanan. All these were the sons of Azel.

8:39 And the sons of Eshek his brother were, Ulam his firstborn,
Jehush the second, and Eliphelet the third.

8:40 And the sons of Ulam were mighty men of valour, archers, and had
many sons, and sons' sons, an hundred and fifty. All these are of the
sons of Benjamin.

9:1 So all Israel were reckoned by genealogies; and, behold, they were
written in the book of the kings of Israel and Judah, who were carried
away to Babylon for their transgression.

9:2 Now the first inhabitants that dwelt in their possessions in their
cities were, the Israelites, the priests, Levites, and the Nethinims.

9:3 And in Jerusalem dwelt of the children of Judah, and of the
children of Benjamin, and of the children of Ephraim, and Manasseh;
9:4 Uthai the son of Ammihud, the son of Omri, the son of Imri, the
son of Bani, of the children of Pharez the son of Judah.

9:5 And of the Shilonites; Asaiah the firstborn, and his sons.

9:6 And of the sons of Zerah; Jeuel, and their brethren, six hundred
and ninety.

9:7 And of the sons of Benjamin; Sallu the son of Meshullam, the son
of Hodaviah, the son of Hasenuah, 9:8 And Ibneiah the son of Jeroham,
and Elah the son of Uzzi, the son of Michri, and Meshullam the son of
Shephathiah, the son of Reuel, the son of Ibnijah; 9:9 And their
brethren, according to their generations, nine hundred and fifty and
six. All these men were chief of the fathers in the house of their
fathers.

9:10 And of the priests; Jedaiah, and Jehoiarib, and Jachin, 9:11 And
Azariah the son of Hilkiah, the son of Meshullam, the son of Zadok,
the son of Meraioth, the son of Ahitub, the ruler of the house of God;
9:12 And Adaiah the son of Jeroham, the son of Pashur, the son of
Malchijah, and Maasiai the son of Adiel, the son of Jahzerah, the son
of Meshullam, the son of Meshillemith, the son of Immer; 9:13 And
their brethren, heads of the house of their fathers, a thousand and
seven hundred and threescore; very able men for the work of the
service of the house of God.

9:14 And of the Levites; Shemaiah the son of Hasshub, the son of
Azrikam, the son of Hashabiah, of the sons of Merari; 9:15 And
Bakbakkar, Heresh, and Galal, and Mattaniah the son of Micah, the son
of Zichri, the son of Asaph; 9:16 And Obadiah the son of Shemaiah, the
son of Galal, the son of Jeduthun, and Berechiah the son of Asa, the
son of Elkanah, that dwelt in the villages of the Netophathites.

9:17 And the porters were, Shallum, and Akkub, and Talmon, and Ahiman,
and their brethren: Shallum was the chief; 9:18 Who hitherto waited in
the king's gate eastward: they were porters in the companies of the
children of Levi.

9:19 And Shallum the son of Kore, the son of Ebiasaph, the son of
Korah, and his brethren, of the house of his father, the Korahites,
were over the work of the service, keepers of the gates of the
tabernacle: and their fathers, being over the host of the LORD, were
keepers of the entry.

9:20 And Phinehas the son of Eleazar was the ruler over them in time
past, and the LORD was with him.

9:21 And Zechariah the son of Meshelemiah was porter of the door of
the tabernacle of the congregation.

9:22 All these which were chosen to be porters in the gates were two
hundred and twelve. These were reckoned by their genealogy in their
villages, whom David and Samuel the seer did ordain in their set
office.

9:23 So they and their children had the oversight of the gates of the
house of the LORD, namely, the house of the tabernacle, by wards.

9:24 In four quarters were the porters, toward the east, west, north,
and south.

9:25 And their brethren, which were in their villages, were to come
after seven days from time to time with them.

9:26 For these Levites, the four chief porters, were in their set
office, and were over the chambers and treasuries of the house of God.

9:27 And they lodged round about the house of God, because the charge
was upon them, and the opening thereof every morning pertained to
them.

9:28 And certain of them had the charge of the ministering vessels,
that they should bring them in and out by tale.

9:29 Some of them also were appointed to oversee the vessels, and all
the instruments of the sanctuary, and the fine flour, and the wine,
and the oil, and the frankincense, and the spices.

9:30 And some of the sons of the priests made the ointment of the
spices.

9:31 And Mattithiah, one of the Levites, who was the firstborn of
Shallum the Korahite, had the set office over the things that were
made in the pans.

9:32 And other of their brethren, of the sons of the Kohathites, were
over the shewbread, to prepare it every sabbath.

9:33 And these are the singers, chief of the fathers of the Levites,
who remaining in the chambers were free: for they were employed in
that work day and night.

9:34 These chief fathers of the Levites were chief throughout their
generations; these dwelt at Jerusalem.

9:35 And in Gibeon dwelt the father of Gibeon, Jehiel, whose wife's
name was Maachah: 9:36 And his firstborn son Abdon, then Zur, and
Kish, and Baal, and Ner, and Nadab.

9:37 And Gedor, and Ahio, and Zechariah, and Mikloth.

9:38 And Mikloth begat Shimeam. And they also dwelt with their
brethren at Jerusalem, over against their brethren.

9:39 And Ner begat Kish; and Kish begat Saul; and Saul begat Jonathan,
and Malchishua, and Abinadab, and Eshbaal.

9:40 And the son of Jonathan was Meribbaal: and Meribbaal begat Micah.

9:41 And the sons of Micah were, Pithon, and Melech, and Tahrea, and
Ahaz.

9:42 And Ahaz begat Jarah; and Jarah begat Alemeth, and Azmaveth, and
Zimri; and Zimri begat Moza; 9:43 And Moza begat Binea; and Rephaiah
his son, Eleasah his son, Azel his son.

9:44 And Azel had six sons, whose names are these, Azrikam, Bocheru,
and Ishmael, and Sheariah, and Obadiah, and Hanan: these were the sons
of Azel.

10:1 Now the Philistines fought against Israel; and the men of Israel
fled from before the Philistines, and fell down slain in mount Gilboa.

10:2 And the Philistines followed hard after Saul, and after his sons;
and the Philistines slew Jonathan, and Abinadab, and Malchishua, the
sons of Saul.

10:3 And the battle went sore against Saul, and the archers hit him,
and he was wounded of the archers.

10:4 Then said Saul to his armourbearer, Draw thy sword, and thrust me
through therewith; lest these uncircumcised come and abuse me. But his
armourbearer would not; for he was sore afraid. So Saul took a sword,
and fell upon it.

10:5 And when his armourbearer saw that Saul was dead, he fell
likewise on the sword, and died.

10:6 So Saul died, and his three sons, and all his house died
together.

10:7 And when all the men of Israel that were in the valley saw that
they fled, and that Saul and his sons were dead, then they forsook
their cities, and fled: and the Philistines came and dwelt in them.

10:8 And it came to pass on the morrow, when the Philistines came to
strip the slain, that they found Saul and his sons fallen in mount
Gilboa.

10:9 And when they had stripped him, they took his head, and his
armour, and sent into the land of the Philistines round about, to
carry tidings unto their idols, and to the people.

10:10 And they put his armour in the house of their gods, and fastened
his head in the temple of Dagon.

10:11 And when all Jabeshgilead heard all that the Philistines had
done to Saul, 10:12 They arose, all the valiant men, and took away the
body of Saul, and the bodies of his sons, and brought them to Jabesh,
and buried their bones under the oak in Jabesh, and fasted seven days.

10:13 So Saul died for his transgression which he committed against
the LORD, even against the word of the LORD, which he kept not, and
also for asking counsel of one that had a familiar spirit, to enquire
of it; 10:14 And enquired not of the LORD: therefore he slew him, and
turned the kingdom unto David the son of Jesse.

11:1 Then all Israel gathered themselves to David unto Hebron, saying,
Behold, we are thy bone and thy flesh.

11:2 And moreover in time past, even when Saul was king, thou wast he
that leddest out and broughtest in Israel: and the LORD thy God said
unto thee, Thou shalt feed my people Israel, and thou shalt be ruler
over my people Israel.

11:3 Therefore came all the elders of Israel to the king to Hebron;
and David made a covenant with them in Hebron before the LORD; and
they anointed David king over Israel, according to the word of the
LORD by Samuel.

11:4 And David and all Israel went to Jerusalem, which is Jebus; where
the Jebusites were, the inhabitants of the land.

11:5 And the inhabitants of Jebus said to David, Thou shalt not come
hither. Nevertheless David took the castle of Zion, which is the city
of David.

11:6 And David said, Whosoever smiteth the Jebusites first shall be
chief and captain. So Joab the son of Zeruiah went first up, and was
chief.

11:7 And David dwelt in the castle; therefore they called it the city
of David.

11:8 And he built the city round about, even from Millo round about:
and Joab repaired the rest of the city.

11:9 So David waxed greater and greater: for the LORD of hosts was
with him.

11:10 These also are the chief of the mighty men whom David had, who
strengthened themselves with him in his kingdom, and with all Israel,
to make him king, according to the word of the LORD concerning Israel.

11:11 And this is the number of the mighty men whom David had;
Jashobeam, an Hachmonite, the chief of the captains: he lifted up his
spear against three hundred slain by him at one time.

11:12 And after him was Eleazar the son of Dodo, the Ahohite, who was
one of the three mighties.

11:13 He was with David at Pasdammim, and there the Philistines were
gathered together to battle, where was a parcel of ground full of
barley; and the people fled from before the Philistines.

11:14 And they set themselves in the midst of that parcel, and
delivered it, and slew the Philistines; and the LORD saved them by a
great deliverance.

11:15 Now three of the thirty captains went down to the rock to David,
into the cave of Adullam; and the host of the Philistines encamped in
the valley of Rephaim.

11:16 And David was then in the hold, and the Philistines' garrison
was then at Bethlehem.

11:17 And David longed, and said, Oh that one would give me drink of
the water of the well of Bethlehem, that is at the gate!  11:18 And
the three brake through the host of the Philistines, and drew water
out of the well of Bethlehem, that was by the gate, and took it, and
brought it to David: but David would not drink of it, but poured it
out to the LORD.

11:19 And said, My God forbid it me, that I should do this thing:
shall I drink the blood of these men that have put their lives in
jeopardy? for with the jeopardy of their lives they brought it.
Therefore he would not drink it.

These things did these three mightiest.

11:20 And Abishai the brother of Joab, he was chief of the three: for
lifting up his spear against three hundred, he slew them, and had a
name among the three.

11:21 Of the three, he was more honourable than the two; for he was
their captain: howbeit he attained not to the first three.

11:22 Benaiah the son of Jehoiada, the son of a valiant man of
Kabzeel, who had done many acts; he slew two lionlike men of Moab:
also he went down and slew a lion in a pit in a snowy day.

11:23 And he slew an Egyptian, a man of great stature, five cubits
high; and in the Egyptian's hand was a spear like a weaver's beam; and
he went down to him with a staff, and plucked the spear out of the
Egyptian's hand, and slew him with his own spear.

11:24 These things did Benaiah the son of Jehoiada, and had the name
among the three mighties.

11:25 Behold, he was honourable among the thirty, but attained not to
the first three: and David set him over his guard.

11:26 Also the valiant men of the armies were, Asahel the brother of
Joab, Elhanan the son of Dodo of Bethlehem, 11:27 Shammoth the
Harorite, Helez the Pelonite, 11:28 Ira the son of Ikkesh the Tekoite,
Abiezer the Antothite, 11:29 Sibbecai the Hushathite, Ilai the
Ahohite, 11:30 Maharai the Netophathite, Heled the son of Baanah the
Netophathite, 11:31 Ithai the son of Ribai of Gibeah, that pertained
to the children of Benjamin, Benaiah the Pirathonite, 11:32 Hurai of
the brooks of Gaash, Abiel the Arbathite, 11:33 Azmaveth the
Baharumite, Eliahba the Shaalbonite, 11:34 The sons of Hashem the
Gizonite, Jonathan the son of Shage the Hararite, 11:35 Ahiam the son
of Sacar the Hararite, Eliphal the son of Ur, 11:36 Hepher the
Mecherathite, Ahijah the Pelonite, 11:37 Hezro the Carmelite, Naarai
the son of Ezbai, 11:38 Joel the brother of Nathan, Mibhar the son of
Haggeri, 11:39 Zelek the Ammonite, Naharai the Berothite, the
armourbearer of Joab the son of Zeruiah, 11:40 Ira the Ithrite, Gareb
the Ithrite, 11:41 Uriah the Hittite, Zabad the son of Ahlai, 11:42
Adina the son of Shiza the Reubenite, a captain of the Reubenites, and
thirty with him, 11:43 Hanan the son of Maachah, and Joshaphat the
Mithnite, 11:44 Uzzia the Ashterathite, Shama and Jehiel the sons of
Hothan the Aroerite, 11:45 Jediael the son of Shimri, and Joha his
brother, the Tizite, 11:46 Eliel the Mahavite, and Jeribai, and
Joshaviah, the sons of Elnaam, and Ithmah the Moabite, 11:47 Eliel,
and Obed, and Jasiel the Mesobaite.

12:1 Now these are they that came to David to Ziklag, while he yet
kept himself close because of Saul the son of Kish: and they were
among the mighty men, helpers of the war.

12:2 They were armed with bows, and could use both the right hand and
the left in hurling stones and shooting arrows out of a bow, even of
Saul's brethren of Benjamin.

12:3 The chief was Ahiezer, then Joash, the sons of Shemaah the
Gibeathite; and Jeziel, and Pelet, the sons of Azmaveth; and Berachah,
and Jehu the Antothite.

12:4 And Ismaiah the Gibeonite, a mighty man among the thirty, and
over the thirty; and Jeremiah, and Jahaziel, and Johanan, and Josabad
the Gederathite, 12:5 Eluzai, and Jerimoth, and Bealiah, and
Shemariah, and Shephatiah the Haruphite, 12:6 Elkanah, and Jesiah, and
Azareel, and Joezer, and Jashobeam, the Korhites, 12:7 And Joelah, and
Zebadiah, the sons of Jeroham of Gedor.

12:8 And of the Gadites there separated themselves unto David into the
hold to the wilderness men of might, and men of war fit for the
battle, that could handle shield and buckler, whose faces were like
the faces of lions, and were as swift as the roes upon the mountains;
12:9 Ezer the first, Obadiah the second, Eliab the third, 12:10
Mishmannah the fourth, Jeremiah the fifth, 12:11 Attai the sixth,
Eliel the seventh, 12:12 Johanan the eighth, Elzabad the ninth, 12:13
Jeremiah the tenth, Machbanai the eleventh.

12:14 These were of the sons of Gad, captains of the host: one of the
least was over an hundred, and the greatest over a thousand.

12:15 These are they that went over Jordan in the first month, when it
had overflown all his banks; and they put to flight all them of the
valleys, both toward the east, and toward the west.

12:16 And there came of the children of Benjamin and Judah to the hold
unto David.

12:17 And David went out to meet them, and answered and said unto
them, If ye be come peaceably unto me to help me, mine heart shall be
knit unto you: but if ye be come to betray me to mine enemies, seeing
there is no wrong in mine hands, the God of our fathers look thereon,
and rebuke it.

12:18 Then the spirit came upon Amasai, who was chief of the captains,
and he said, Thine are we, David, and on thy side, thou son of Jesse:
peace, peace be unto thee, and peace be to thine helpers; for thy God
helpeth thee.

Then David received them, and made them captains of the band.

12:19 And there fell some of Manasseh to David, when he came with the
Philistines against Saul to battle: but they helped them not: for the
lords of the Philistines upon advisement sent him away, saying, He
will fall to his master Saul to the jeopardy of our heads.

12:20 As he went to Ziklag, there fell to him of Manasseh, Adnah, and
Jozabad, and Jediael, and Michael, and Jozabad, and Elihu, and
Zilthai, captains of the thousands that were of Manasseh.

12:21 And they helped David against the band of the rovers: for they
were all mighty men of valour, and were captains in the host.

12:22 For at that time day by day there came to David to help him,
until it was a great host, like the host of God.

12:23 And these are the numbers of the bands that were ready armed to
the war, and came to David to Hebron, to turn the kingdom of Saul to
him, according to the word of the LORD.

12:24 The children of Judah that bare shield and spear were six
thousand and eight hundred, ready armed to the war.

12:25 Of the children of Simeon, mighty men of valour for the war,
seven thousand and one hundred.

12:26 Of the children of Levi four thousand and six hundred.

12:27 And Jehoiada was the leader of the Aaronites, and with him were
three thousand and seven hundred; 12:28 And Zadok, a young man mighty
of valour, and of his father's house twenty and two captains.

12:29 And of the children of Benjamin, the kindred of Saul, three
thousand: for hitherto the greatest part of them had kept the ward of
the house of Saul.

12:30 And of the children of Ephraim twenty thousand and eight
hundred, mighty men of valour, famous throughout the house of their
fathers.

12:31 And of the half tribe of Manasseh eighteen thousand, which were
expressed by name, to come and make David king.

12:32 And of the children of Issachar, which were men that had
understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do; the heads
of them were two hundred; and all their brethren were at their
commandment.

12:33 Of Zebulun, such as went forth to battle, expert in war, with
all instruments of war, fifty thousand, which could keep rank: they
were not of double heart.

12:34 And of Naphtali a thousand captains, and with them with shield
and spear thirty and seven thousand.

12:35 And of the Danites expert in war twenty and eight thousand and
six hundred.

12:36 And of Asher, such as went forth to battle, expert in war, forty
thousand.

12:37 And on the other side of Jordan, of the Reubenites, and the
Gadites, and of the half tribe of Manasseh, with all manner of
instruments of war for the battle, an hundred and twenty thousand.

12:38 All these men of war, that could keep rank, came with a perfect
heart to Hebron, to make David king over all Israel: and all the rest
also of Israel were of one heart to make David king.

12:39 And there they were with David three days, eating and drinking:
for their brethren had prepared for them.

12:40 Moreover they that were nigh them, even unto Issachar and
Zebulun and Naphtali, brought bread on asses, and on camels, and on
mules, and on oxen, and meat, meal, cakes of figs, and bunches of
raisins, and wine, and oil, and oxen, and sheep abundantly: for there
was joy in Israel.

13:1 And David consulted with the captains of thousands and hundreds,
and with every leader.

13:2 And David said unto all the congregation of Israel, If it seem
good unto you, and that it be of the LORD our God, let us send abroad
unto our brethren every where, that are left in all the land of
Israel, and with them also to the priests and Levites which are in
their cities and suburbs, that they may gather themselves unto us:
13:3 And let us bring again the ark of our God to us: for we enquired
not at it in the days of Saul.

13:4 And all the congregation said that they would do so: for the
thing was right in the eyes of all the people.

13:5 So David gathered all Israel together, from Shihor of Egypt even
unto the entering of Hemath, to bring the ark of God from
Kirjathjearim.

13:6 And David went up, and all Israel, to Baalah, that is, to
Kirjathjearim, which belonged to Judah, to bring up thence the ark of
God the LORD, that dwelleth between the cherubims, whose name is
called on it.

13:7 And they carried the ark of God in a new cart out of the house of
Abinadab: and Uzza and Ahio drave the cart.

13:8 And David and all Israel played before God with all their might,
and with singing, and with harps, and with psalteries, and with
timbrels, and with cymbals, and with trumpets.

13:9 And when they came unto the threshingfloor of Chidon, Uzza put
forth his hand to hold the ark; for the oxen stumbled.

13:10 And the anger of the LORD was kindled against Uzza, and he smote
him, because he put his hand to the ark: and there he died before God.

13:11 And David was displeased, because the LORD had made a breach
upon Uzza: wherefore that place is called Perezuzza to this day.

13:12 And David was afraid of God that day, saying, How shall I bring
the ark of God home to me?  13:13 So David brought not the ark home to
himself to the city of David, but carried it aside into the house of
Obededom the Gittite.

13:14 And the ark of God remained with the family of Obededom in his
house three months. And the LORD blessed the house of Obededom, and
all that he had.

14:1 Now Hiram king of Tyre sent messengers to David, and timber of
cedars, with masons and carpenters, to build him an house.

14:2 And David perceived that the LORD had confirmed him king over
Israel, for his kingdom was lifted up on high, because of his people
Israel.

14:3 And David took more wives at Jerusalem: and David begat more sons
and daughters.

14:4 Now these are the names of his children which he had in
Jerusalem; Shammua, and Shobab, Nathan, and Solomon, 14:5 And Ibhar,
and Elishua, and Elpalet, 14:6 And Nogah, and Nepheg, and Japhia, 14:7
And Elishama, and Beeliada, and Eliphalet.

14:8 And when the Philistines heard that David was anointed king over
all Israel, all the Philistines went up to seek David. And David heard
of it, and went out against them.

14:9 And the Philistines came and spread themselves in the valley of
Rephaim.

14:10 And David enquired of God, saying, Shall I go up against the
Philistines? And wilt thou deliver them into mine hand? And the LORD
said unto him, Go up; for I will deliver them into thine hand.

14:11 So they came up to Baalperazim; and David smote them there. Then
David said, God hath broken in upon mine enemies by mine hand like the
breaking forth of waters: therefore they called the name of that place
Baalperazim.

14:12 And when they had left their gods there, David gave a
commandment, and they were burned with fire.

14:13 And the Philistines yet again spread themselves abroad in the
valley.

14:14 Therefore David enquired again of God; and God said unto him, Go
not up after them; turn away from them, and come upon them over
against the mulberry trees.

14:15 And it shall be, when thou shalt hear a sound of going in the
tops of the mulberry trees, that then thou shalt go out to battle: for
God is gone forth before thee to smite the host of the Philistines.

14:16 David therefore did as God commanded him: and they smote the
host of the Philistines from Gibeon even to Gazer.

14:17 And the fame of David went out into all lands; and the LORD
brought the fear of him upon all nations.

15:1 And David made him houses in the city of David, and prepared a
place for the ark of God, and pitched for it a tent.

15:2 Then David said, None ought to carry the ark of God but the
Levites: for them hath the LORD chosen to carry the ark of God, and to
minister unto him for ever.

15:3 And David gathered all Israel together to Jerusalem, to bring up
the ark of the LORD unto his place, which he had prepared for it.

15:4 And David assembled the children of Aaron, and the Levites: 15:5
Of the sons of Kohath; Uriel the chief, and his brethren an hundred
and twenty: 15:6 Of the sons of Merari; Asaiah the chief, and his
brethren two hundred and twenty: 15:7 Of the sons of Gershom; Joel the
chief and his brethren an hundred and thirty: 15:8 Of the sons of
Elizaphan; Shemaiah the chief, and his brethren two hundred: 15:9 Of
the sons of Hebron; Eliel the chief, and his brethren fourscore: 15:10
Of the sons of Uzziel; Amminadab the chief, and his brethren an
hundred and twelve.

15:11 And David called for Zadok and Abiathar the priests, and for the
Levites, for Uriel, Asaiah, and Joel, Shemaiah, and Eliel, and
Amminadab, 15:12 And said unto them, Ye are the chief of the fathers
of the Levites: sanctify yourselves, both ye and your brethren, that
ye may bring up the ark of the LORD God of Israel unto the place that
I have prepared for it.

15:13 For because ye did it not at the first, the LORD our God made a
breach upon us, for that we sought him not after the due order.

15:14 So the priests and the Levites sanctified themselves to bring up
the ark of the LORD God of Israel.

15:15 And the children of the Levites bare the ark of God upon their
shoulders with the staves thereon, as Moses commanded according to the
word of the LORD.

15:16 And David spake to the chief of the Levites to appoint their
brethren to be the singers with instruments of musick, psalteries and
harps and cymbals, sounding, by lifting up the voice with joy.

15:17 So the Levites appointed Heman the son of Joel; and of his
brethren, Asaph the son of Berechiah; and of the sons of Merari their
brethren, Ethan the son of Kushaiah; 15:18 And with them their
brethren of the second degree, Zechariah, Ben, and Jaaziel, and
Shemiramoth, and Jehiel, and Unni, Eliab, and Benaiah, and Maaseiah,
and Mattithiah, and Elipheleh, and Mikneiah, and Obededom, and Jeiel,
the porters.

15:19 So the singers, Heman, Asaph, and Ethan, were appointed to sound
with cymbals of brass; 15:20 And Zechariah, and Aziel, and
Shemiramoth, and Jehiel, and Unni, and Eliab, and Maaseiah, and
Benaiah, with psalteries on Alamoth; 15:21 And Mattithiah, and
Elipheleh, and Mikneiah, and Obededom, and Jeiel, and Azaziah, with
harps on the Sheminith to excel.

15:22 And Chenaniah, chief of the Levites, was for song: he instructed
about the song, because he was skilful.

15:23 And Berechiah and Elkanah were doorkeepers for the ark.

15:24 And Shebaniah, and Jehoshaphat, and Nethaneel, and Amasai, and
Zechariah, and Benaiah, and Eliezer, the priests, did blow with the
trumpets before the ark of God: and Obededom and Jehiah were
doorkeepers for the ark.

15:25 So David, and the elders of Israel, and the captains over
thousands, went to bring up the ark of the covenant of the LORD out of
the house of Obededom with joy.

15:26 And it came to pass, when God helped the Levites that bare the
ark of the covenant of the LORD, that they offered seven bullocks and
seven rams.

15:27 And David was clothed with a robe of fine linen, and all the
Levites that bare the ark, and the singers, and Chenaniah the master
of the song with the singers: David also had upon him an ephod of
linen.

15:28 Thus all Israel brought up the ark of the covenant of the LORD
with shouting, and with sound of the cornet, and with trumpets, and
with cymbals, making a noise with psalteries and harps.

15:29 And it came to pass, as the ark of the covenant of the LORD came
to the city of David, that Michal, the daughter of Saul looking out at
a window saw king David dancing and playing: and she despised him in
her heart.

16:1 So they brought the ark of God, and set it in the midst of the
tent that David had pitched for it: and they offered burnt sacrifices
and peace offerings before God.

16:2 And when David had made an end of offering the burnt offerings
and the peace offerings, he blessed the people in the name of the
LORD.

16:3 And he dealt to every one of Israel, both man and woman, to every
one a loaf of bread, and a good piece of flesh, and a flagon of wine.

16:4 And he appointed certain of the Levites to minister before the
ark of the LORD, and to record, and to thank and praise the LORD God
of Israel: 16:5 Asaph the chief, and next to him Zechariah, Jeiel, and
Shemiramoth, and Jehiel, and Mattithiah, and Eliab, and Benaiah, and
Obededom: and Jeiel with psalteries and with harps; but Asaph made a
sound with cymbals; 16:6 Benaiah also and Jahaziel the priests with
trumpets continually before the ark of the covenant of God.

16:7 Then on that day David delivered first this psalm to thank the
LORD into the hand of Asaph and his brethren.

16:8 Give thanks unto the LORD, call upon his name, make known his
deeds among the people.

16:9 Sing unto him, sing psalms unto him, talk ye of all his wondrous
works.

16:10 Glory ye in his holy name: let the heart of them rejoice that
seek the LORD.

16:11 Seek the LORD and his strength, seek his face continually.

16:12 Remember his marvellous works that he hath done, his wonders,
and the judgments of his mouth; 16:13 O ye seed of Israel his servant,
ye children of Jacob, his chosen ones.

16:14 He is the LORD our God; his judgments are in all the earth.

16:15 Be ye mindful always of his covenant; the word which he
commanded to a thousand generations; 16:16 Even of the covenant which
he made with Abraham, and of his oath unto Isaac; 16:17 And hath
confirmed the same to Jacob for a law, and to Israel for an
everlasting covenant, 16:18 Saying, Unto thee will I give the land of
Canaan, the lot of your inheritance; 16:19 When ye were but few, even
a few, and strangers in it.

16:20 And when they went from nation to nation, and from one kingdom
to another people; 16:21 He suffered no man to do them wrong: yea, he
reproved kings for their sakes, 16:22 Saying, Touch not mine anointed,
and do my prophets no harm.

16:23 Sing unto the LORD, all the earth; shew forth from day to day
his salvation.

16:24 Declare his glory among the heathen; his marvellous works among
all nations.

16:25 For great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised: he also is to
be feared above all gods.

16:26 For all the gods of the people are idols: but the LORD made the
heavens.

16:27 Glory and honour are in his presence; strength and gladness are
in his place.

16:28 Give unto the LORD, ye kindreds of the people, give unto the
LORD glory and strength.

16:29 Give unto the LORD the glory due unto his name: bring an
offering, and come before him: worship the LORD in the beauty of
holiness.

16:30 Fear before him, all the earth: the world also shall be stable,
that it be not moved.

16:31 Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice: and let men
say among the nations, The LORD reigneth.

16:32 Let the sea roar, and the fulness thereof: let the fields
rejoice, and all that is therein.

16:33 Then shall the trees of the wood sing out at the presence of the
LORD, because he cometh to judge the earth.

16:34 O give thanks unto the LORD; for he is good; for his mercy
endureth for ever.

16:35 And say ye, Save us, O God of our salvation, and gather us
together, and deliver us from the heathen, that we may give thanks to
thy holy name, and glory in thy praise.

16:36 Blessed be the LORD God of Israel for ever and ever. And all the
people said, Amen, and praised the LORD.

16:37 So he left there before the ark of the covenant of the LORD
Asaph and his brethren, to minister before the ark continually, as
every day's work required: 16:38 And Obededom with their brethren,
threescore and eight; Obededom also the son of Jeduthun and Hosah to
be porters: 16:39 And Zadok the priest, and his brethren the priests,
before the tabernacle of the LORD in the high place that was at
Gibeon, 16:40 To offer burnt offerings unto the LORD upon the altar of
the burnt offering continually morning and evening, and to do
according to all that is written in the law of the LORD, which he
commanded Israel; 16:41 And with them Heman and Jeduthun, and the rest
that were chosen, who were expressed by name, to give thanks to the
LORD, because his mercy endureth for ever; 16:42 And with them Heman
and Jeduthun with trumpets and cymbals for those that should make a
sound, and with musical instruments of God. And the sons of Jeduthun
were porters.

16:43 And all the people departed every man to his house: and David
returned to bless his house.

17:1 Now it came to pass, as David sat in his house, that David said
to Nathan the prophet, Lo, I dwell in an house of cedars, but the ark
of the covenant of the LORD remaineth under curtains.

17:2 Then Nathan said unto David, Do all that is in thine heart; for
God is with thee.

17:3 And it came to pass the same night, that the word of God came to
Nathan, saying, 17:4 Go and tell David my servant, Thus saith the
LORD, Thou shalt not build me an house to dwell in: 17:5 For I have
not dwelt in an house since the day that I brought up Israel unto this
day; but have gone from tent to tent, and from one tabernacle to
another.

17:6 Wheresoever I have walked with all Israel, spake I a word to any
of the judges of Israel, whom I commanded to feed my people, saying,
Why have ye not built me an house of cedars?  17:7 Now therefore thus
shalt thou say unto my servant David, Thus saith the LORD of hosts, I
took thee from the sheepcote, even from following the sheep, that thou
shouldest be ruler over my people Israel: 17:8 And I have been with
thee whithersoever thou hast walked, and have cut off all thine
enemies from before thee, and have made thee a name like the name of
the great men that are in the earth.

17:9 Also I will ordain a place for my people Israel, and will plant
them, and they shall dwell in their place, and shall be moved no more;
neither shall the children of wickedness waste them any more, as at
the beginning, 17:10 And since the time that I commanded judges to be
over my people Israel. Moreover I will subdue all thine enemies.
Furthermore I tell thee that the LORD will build thee an house.

17:11 And it shall come to pass, when thy days be expired that thou
must go to be with thy fathers, that I will raise up thy seed after
thee, which shall be of thy sons; and I will establish his kingdom.

17:12 He shall build me an house, and I will stablish his throne for
ever.

17:13 I will be his father, and he shall be my son: and I will not
take my mercy away from him, as I took it from him that was before
thee: 17:14 But I will settle him in mine house and in my kingdom for
ever: and his throne shall be established for evermore.

17:15 According to all these words, and according to all this vision,
so did Nathan speak unto David.

17:16 And David the king came and sat before the LORD, and said, Who
am I, O LORD God, and what is mine house, that thou hast brought me
hitherto?  17:17 And yet this was a small thing in thine eyes, O God;
for thou hast also spoken of thy servant's house for a great while to
come, and hast regarded me according to the estate of a man of high
degree, O LORD God.

17:18 What can David speak more to thee for the honour of thy servant?
for thou knowest thy servant.

17:19 O LORD, for thy servant's sake, and according to thine own
heart, hast thou done all this greatness, in making known all these
great things.

17:20 O LORD, there is none like thee, neither is there any God beside
thee, according to all that we have heard with our ears.

17:21 And what one nation in the earth is like thy people Israel, whom
God went to redeem to be his own people, to make thee a name of
greatness and terribleness, by driving out nations from before thy
people whom thou hast redeemed out of Egypt?  17:22 For thy people
Israel didst thou make thine own people for ever; and thou, LORD,
becamest their God.

17:23 Therefore now, LORD, let the thing that thou hast spoken
concerning thy servant and concerning his house be established for
ever, and do as thou hast said.

17:24 Let it even be established, that thy name may be magnified for
ever, saying, The LORD of hosts is the God of Israel, even a God to
Israel: and let the house of David thy servant be established before
thee.

17:25 For thou, O my God, hast told thy servant that thou wilt build
him an house: therefore thy servant hath found in his heart to pray
before thee.

17:26 And now, LORD, thou art God, and hast promised this goodness
unto thy servant: 17:27 Now therefore let it please thee to bless the
house of thy servant, that it may be before thee for ever: for thou
blessest, O LORD, and it shall be blessed for ever.

18:1 Now after this it came to pass, that David smote the Philistines,
and subdued them, and took Gath and her towns out of the hand of the
Philistines.

18:2 And he smote Moab; and the Moabites became David's servants, and
brought gifts.

18:3 And David smote Hadarezer king of Zobah unto Hamath, as he went
to stablish his dominion by the river Euphrates.

18:4 And David took from him a thousand chariots, and seven thousand
horsemen, and twenty thousand footmen: David also houghed all the
chariot horses, but reserved of them an hundred chariots.

18:5 And when the Syrians of Damascus came to help Hadarezer king of
Zobah, David slew of the Syrians two and twenty thousand men.

18:6 Then David put garrisons in Syriadamascus; and the Syrians became
David's servants, and brought gifts. Thus the LORD preserved David
whithersoever he went.

18:7 And David took the shields of gold that were on the servants of
Hadarezer, and brought them to Jerusalem.

18:8 Likewise from Tibhath, and from Chun, cities of Hadarezer,
brought David very much brass, wherewith Solomon made the brasen sea,
and the pillars, and the vessels of brass.

18:9 Now when Tou king of Hamath heard how David had smitten all the
host of Hadarezer king of Zobah; 18:10 He sent Hadoram his son to king
David, to enquire of his welfare, and to congratulate him, because he
had fought against Hadarezer, and smitten him; (for Hadarezer had war
with Tou;) and with him all manner of vessels of gold and silver and
brass.

18:11 Them also king David dedicated unto the LORD, with the silver
and the gold that he brought from all these nations; from Edom, and
from Moab, and from the children of Ammon, and from the Philistines,
and from Amalek.

18:12 Moreover Abishai the son of Zeruiah slew of the Edomites in the
valley of salt eighteen thousand.

18:13 And he put garrisons in Edom; and all the Edomites became
David's servants. Thus the LORD preserved David whithersoever he went.

18:14 So David reigned over all Israel, and executed judgment and
justice among all his people.

18:15 And Joab the son of Zeruiah was over the host; and Jehoshaphat
the son of Ahilud, recorder.

18:16 And Zadok the son of Ahitub, and Abimelech the son of Abiathar,
were the priests; and Shavsha was scribe; 18:17 And Benaiah the son of
Jehoiada was over the Cherethites and the Pelethites; and the sons of
David were chief about the king.

19:1 Now it came to pass after this, that Nahash the king of the
children of Ammon died, and his son reigned in his stead.

19:2 And David said, I will shew kindness unto Hanun the son of
Nahash, because his father shewed kindness to me. And David sent
messengers to comfort him concerning his father. So the servants of
David came into the land of the children of Ammon to Hanun, to comfort
him.

19:3 But the princes of the children of Ammon said to Hanun, Thinkest
thou that David doth honour thy father, that he hath sent comforters
unto thee?  are not his servants come unto thee for to search, and to
overthrow, and to spy out the land?  19:4 Wherefore Hanun took David's
servants, and shaved them, and cut off their garments in the midst
hard by their buttocks, and sent them away.

19:5 Then there went certain, and told David how the men were served.
And he sent to meet them: for the men were greatly ashamed. And the
king said, Tarry at Jericho until your beards be grown, and then
return.

19:6 And when the children of Ammon saw that they had made themselves
odious to David, Hanun and the children of Ammon sent a thousand
talents of silver to hire them chariots and horsemen out of
Mesopotamia, and out of Syriamaachah, and out of Zobah.

19:7 So they hired thirty and two thousand chariots, and the king of
Maachah and his people; who came and pitched before Medeba. And the
children of Ammon gathered themselves together from their cities, and
came to battle.

19:8 And when David heard of it, he sent Joab, and all the host of the
mighty men.

19:9 And the children of Ammon came out, and put the battle in array
before the gate of the city: and the kings that were come were by
themselves in the field.

19:10 Now when Joab saw that the battle was set against him before and
behind, he chose out of all the choice of Israel, and put them in
array against the Syrians.

19:11 And the rest of the people he delivered unto the hand of Abishai
his brother, and they set themselves in array against the children of
Ammon.

19:12 And he said, If the Syrians be too strong for me, then thou
shalt help me: but if the children of Ammon be too strong for thee,
then I will help thee.

19:13 Be of good courage, and let us behave ourselves valiantly for
our people, and for the cities of our God: and let the LORD do that
which is good in his sight.

19:14 So Joab and the people that were with him drew nigh before the
Syrians unto the battle; and they fled before him.

19:15 And when the children of Ammon saw that the Syrians were fled,
they likewise fled before Abishai his brother, and entered into the
city. Then Joab came to Jerusalem.

19:16 And when the Syrians saw that they were put to the worse before
Israel, they sent messengers, and drew forth the Syrians that were
beyond the river: and Shophach the captain of the host of Hadarezer
went before them.

19:17 And it was told David; and he gathered all Israel, and passed
over Jordan, and came upon them, and set the battle in array against
them. So when David had put the battle in array against the Syrians,
they fought with him.

19:18 But the Syrians fled before Israel; and David slew of the
Syrians seven thousand men which fought in chariots, and forty
thousand footmen, and killed Shophach the captain of the host.

19:19 And when the servants of Hadarezer saw that they were put to the
worse before Israel, they made peace with David, and became his
servants: neither would the Syrians help the children of Ammon any
more.

20:1 And it came to pass, that after the year was expired, at the time
that kings go out to battle, Joab led forth the power of the army, and
wasted the country of the children of Ammon, and came and besieged
Rabbah. But David tarried at Jerusalem. And Joab smote Rabbah, and
destroyed it.

20:2 And David took the crown of their king from off his head, and
found it to weigh a talent of gold, and there were precious stones in
it; and it was set upon David's head: and he brought also exceeding
much spoil out of the city.

20:3 And he brought out the people that were in it, and cut them with
saws, and with harrows of iron, and with axes. Even so dealt David
with all the cities of the children of Ammon. And David and all the
people returned to Jerusalem.

20:4 And it came to pass after this, that there arose war at Gezer
with the Philistines; at which time Sibbechai the Hushathite slew
Sippai, that was of the children of the giant: and they were subdued.

20:5 And there was war again with the Philistines; and Elhanan the son
of Jair slew Lahmi the brother of Goliath the Gittite, whose spear
staff was like a weaver's beam.

20:6 And yet again there was war at Gath, where was a man of great
stature, whose fingers and toes were four and twenty, six on each
hand, and six on each foot and he also was the son of the giant.

20:7 But when he defied Israel, Jonathan the son of Shimea David's
brother slew him.

20:8 These were born unto the giant in Gath; and they fell by the hand
of David, and by the hand of his servants.

21:1 And Satan stood up against Israel, and provoked David to number
Israel.

21:2 And David said to Joab and to the rulers of the people, Go,
number Israel from Beersheba even to Dan; and bring the number of them
to me, that I may know it.

21:3 And Joab answered, The LORD make his people an hundred times so
many more as they be: but, my lord the king, are they not all my
lord's servants?  why then doth my lord require this thing? why will
he be a cause of trespass to Israel?  21:4 Nevertheless the king's
word prevailed against Joab. Wherefore Joab departed, and went
throughout all Israel, and came to Jerusalem.

21:5 And Joab gave the sum of the number of the people unto David. And
all they of Israel were a thousand thousand and an hundred thousand
men that drew sword: and Judah was four hundred threescore and ten
thousand men that drew sword.

21:6 But Levi and Benjamin counted he not among them: for the king's
word was abominable to Joab.

21:7 And God was displeased with this thing; therefore he smote
Israel.

21:8 And David said unto God, I have sinned greatly, because I have
done this thing: but now, I beseech thee, do away the iniquity of thy
servant; for I have done very foolishly.

21:9 And the LORD spake unto Gad, David's seer, saying, 21:10 Go and
tell David, saying, Thus saith the LORD, I offer thee three things:
choose thee one of them, that I may do it unto thee.

21:11 So Gad came to David, and said unto him, Thus saith the LORD,
Choose thee 21:12 Either three years' famine; or three months to be
destroyed before thy foes, while that the sword of thine enemies
overtaketh thee; or else three days the sword of the LORD, even the
pestilence, in the land, and the angel of the LORD destroying
throughout all the coasts of Israel. Now therefore advise thyself what
word I shall bring again to him that sent me.

21:13 And David said unto Gad, I am in a great strait: let me fall now
into the hand of the LORD; for very great are his mercies: but let me
not fall into the hand of man.

21:14 So the LORD sent pestilence upon Israel: and there fell of
Israel seventy thousand men.

21:15 And God sent an angel unto Jerusalem to destroy it: and as he
was destroying, the LORD beheld, and he repented him of the evil, and
said to the angel that destroyed, It is enough, stay now thine hand.
And the angel of the LORD stood by the threshingfloor of Ornan the
Jebusite.

21:16 And David lifted up his eyes, and saw the angel of the LORD
stand between the earth and the heaven, having a drawn sword in his
hand stretched out over Jerusalem. Then David and the elders of
Israel, who were clothed in sackcloth, fell upon their faces.

21:17 And David said unto God, Is it not I that commanded the people
to be numbered? even I it is that have sinned and done evil indeed;
but as for these sheep, what have they done? let thine hand, I pray
thee, O LORD my God, be on me, and on my father's house; but not on
thy people, that they should be plagued.

21:18 Then the angel of the LORD commanded Gad to say to David, that
David should go up, and set up an altar unto the LORD in the
threshingfloor of Ornan the Jebusite.

21:19 And David went up at the saying of Gad, which he spake in the
name of the LORD.

21:20 And Ornan turned back, and saw the angel; and his four sons with
him hid themselves. Now Ornan was threshing wheat.

21:21 And as David came to Ornan, Ornan looked and saw David, and went
out of the threshingfloor, and bowed himself to David with his face to
the ground.

21:22 Then David said to Ornan, Grant me the place of this
threshingfloor, that I may build an altar therein unto the LORD: thou
shalt grant it me for the full price: that the plague may be stayed
from the people.

21:23 And Ornan said unto David, Take it to thee, and let my lord the
king do that which is good in his eyes: lo, I give thee the oxen also
for burnt offerings, and the threshing instruments for wood, and the
wheat for the meat offering; I give it all.

21:24 And king David said to Ornan, Nay; but I will verily buy it for
the full price: for I will not take that which is thine for the LORD,
nor offer burnt offerings without cost.

21:25 So David gave to Ornan for the place six hundred shekels of gold
by weight.

21:26 And David built there an altar unto the LORD, and offered burnt
offerings and peace offerings, and called upon the LORD; and he
answered him from heaven by fire upon the altar of burnt offering.

21:27 And the LORD commanded the angel; and he put up his sword again
into the sheath thereof.

21:28 At that time when David saw that the LORD had answered him in
the threshingfloor of Ornan the Jebusite, then he sacrificed there.

21:29 For the tabernacle of the LORD, which Moses made in the
wilderness, and the altar of the burnt offering, were at that season
in the high place at Gibeon.

21:30 But David could not go before it to enquire of God: for he was
afraid because of the sword of the angel of the LORD.

22:1 Then David said, This is the house of the LORD God, and this is
the altar of the burnt offering for Israel.

22:2 And David commanded to gather together the strangers that were in
the land of Israel; and he set masons to hew wrought stones to build
the house of God.

22:3 And David prepared iron in abundance for the nails for the doors
of the gates, and for the joinings; and brass in abundance without
weight; 22:4 Also cedar trees in abundance: for the Zidonians and they
of Tyre brought much cedar wood to David.

22:5 And David said, Solomon my son is young and tender, and the house
that is to be builded for the LORD must be exceeding magnifical, of
fame and of glory throughout all countries: I will therefore now make
preparation for it. So David prepared abundantly before his death.

22:6 Then he called for Solomon his son, and charged him to build an
house for the LORD God of Israel.

22:7 And David said to Solomon, My son, as for me, it was in my mind
to build an house unto the name of the LORD my God: 22:8 But the word
of the LORD came to me, saying, Thou hast shed blood abundantly, and
hast made great wars: thou shalt not build an house unto my name,
because thou hast shed much blood upon the earth in my sight.

22:9 Behold, a son shall be born to thee, who shall be a man of rest;
and I will give him rest from all his enemies round about: for his
name shall be Solomon, and I will give peace and quietness unto Israel
in his days.

22:10 He shall build an house for my name; and he shall be my son, and
I will be his father; and I will establish the throne of his kingdom
over Israel for ever.

22:11 Now, my son, the LORD be with thee; and prosper thou, and build
the house of the LORD thy God, as he hath said of thee.

22:12 Only the LORD give thee wisdom and understanding, and give thee
charge concerning Israel, that thou mayest keep the law of the LORD
thy God.

22:13 Then shalt thou prosper, if thou takest heed to fulfil the
statutes and judgments which the LORD charged Moses with concerning
Israel: be strong, and of good courage; dread not, nor be dismayed.

22:14 Now, behold, in my trouble I have prepared for the house of the
LORD an hundred thousand talents of gold, and a thousand thousand
talents of silver; and of brass and iron without weight; for it is in
abundance: timber also and stone have I prepared; and thou mayest add
thereto.

22:15 Moreover there are workmen with thee in abundance, hewers and
workers of stone and timber, and all manner of cunning men for every
manner of work.

22:16 Of the gold, the silver, and the brass, and the iron, there is
no number. Arise therefore, and be doing, and the LORD be with thee.

22:17 David also commanded all the princes of Israel to help Solomon
his son, saying, 22:18 Is not the LORD your God with you? and hath he
not given you rest on every side? for he hath given the inhabitants of
the land into mine hand; and the land is subdued before the LORD, and
before his people.

22:19 Now set your heart and your soul to seek the LORD your God;
arise therefore, and build ye the sanctuary of the LORD God, to bring
the ark of the covenant of the LORD, and the holy vessels of God, into
the house that is to be built to the name of the LORD.

23:1 So when David was old and full of days, he made Solomon his son
king over Israel.

23:2 And he gathered together all the princes of Israel, with the
priests and the Levites.

23:3 Now the Levites were numbered from the age of thirty years and
upward: and their number by their polls, man by man, was thirty and
eight thousand.

23:4 Of which, twenty and four thousand were to set forward the work
of the house of the LORD; and six thousand were officers and judges:
23:5 Moreover four thousand were porters; and four thousand praised
the LORD with the instruments which I made, said David, to praise
therewith.

23:6 And David divided them into courses among the sons of Levi,
namely, Gershon, Kohath, and Merari.

23:7 Of the Gershonites were, Laadan, and Shimei.

23:8 The sons of Laadan; the chief was Jehiel, and Zetham, and Joel,
three.

23:9 The sons of Shimei; Shelomith, and Haziel, and Haran, three.
These were the chief of the fathers of Laadan.

23:10 And the sons of Shimei were, Jahath, Zina, and Jeush, and
Beriah.

These four were the sons of Shimei.

23:11 And Jahath was the chief, and Zizah the second: but Jeush and
Beriah had not many sons; therefore they were in one reckoning,
according to their father's house.

23:12 The sons of Kohath; Amram, Izhar, Hebron, and Uzziel, four.

23:13 The sons of Amram; Aaron and Moses: and Aaron was separated,
that he should sanctify the most holy things, he and his sons for
ever, to burn incense before the LORD, to minister unto him, and to
bless in his name for ever.

23:14 Now concerning Moses the man of God, his sons were named of the
tribe of Levi.

23:15 The sons of Moses were, Gershom, and Eliezer.

23:16 Of the sons of Gershom, Shebuel was the chief.

23:17 And the sons of Eliezer were, Rehabiah the chief. And Eliezer
had none other sons; but the sons of Rehabiah were very many.

23:18 Of the sons of Izhar; Shelomith the chief.

23:19 Of the sons of Hebron; Jeriah the first, Amariah the second,
Jahaziel the third, and Jekameam the fourth.

23:20 Of the sons of Uzziel; Micah the first and Jesiah the second.

23:21 The sons of Merari; Mahli, and Mushi. The sons of Mahli;
Eleazar, and Kish.

23:22 And Eleazar died, and had no sons, but daughters: and their
brethren the sons of Kish took them.

23:23 The sons of Mushi; Mahli, and Eder, and Jeremoth, three.

23:24 These were the sons of Levi after the house of their fathers;
even the chief of the fathers, as they were counted by number of names
by their polls, that did the work for the service of the house of the
LORD, from the age of twenty years and upward.

23:25 For David said, The LORD God of Israel hath given rest unto his
people, that they may dwell in Jerusalem for ever: 23:26 And also unto
the Levites; they shall no more carry the tabernacle, nor any vessels
of it for the service thereof.

23:27 For by the last words of David the Levites were numbered from
twenty years old and above: 23:28 Because their office was to wait on
the sons of Aaron for the service of the house of the LORD, in the
courts, and in the chambers, and in the purifying of all holy things,
and the work of the service of the house of God; 23:29 Both for the
shewbread, and for the fine flour for meat offering, and for the
unleavened cakes, and for that which is baked in the pan, and for that
which is fried, and for all manner of measure and size; 23:30 And to
stand every morning to thank and praise the LORD, and likewise at
even: 23:31 And to offer all burnt sacrifices unto the LORD in the
sabbaths, in the new moons, and on the set feasts, by number,
according to the order commanded unto them, continually before the
LORD: 23:32 And that they should keep the charge of the tabernacle of
the congregation, and the charge of the holy place, and the charge of
the sons of Aaron their brethren, in the service of the house of the
LORD.

24:1 Now these are the divisions of the sons of Aaron. The sons of
Aaron; Nadab, and Abihu, Eleazar, and Ithamar.

24:2 But Nadab and Abihu died before their father, and had no
children: therefore Eleazar and Ithamar executed the priest's office.

24:3 And David distributed them, both Zadok of the sons of Eleazar,
and Ahimelech of the sons of Ithamar, according to their offices in
their service.

24:4 And there were more chief men found of the sons of Eleazar than
of the sons of Ithamar, and thus were they divided. Among the sons of
Eleazar there were sixteen chief men of the house of their fathers,
and eight among the sons of Ithamar according to the house of their
fathers.

24:5 Thus were they divided by lot, one sort with another; for the
governors of the sanctuary, and governors of the house of God, were of
the sons of Eleazar, and of the sons of Ithamar.

24:6 And Shemaiah the son of Nethaneel the scribe, one of the Levites,
wrote them before the king, and the princes, and Zadok the priest, and
Ahimelech the son of Abiathar, and before the chief of the fathers of
the priests and Levites: one principal household being taken for
Eleazar, and one taken for Ithamar.

24:7 Now the first lot came forth to Jehoiarib, the second to Jedaiah,
24:8 The third to Harim, the fourth to Seorim, 24:9 The fifth to
Malchijah, the sixth to Mijamin, 24:10 The seventh to Hakkoz, the
eighth to Abijah, 24:11 The ninth to Jeshuah, the tenth to Shecaniah,
24:12 The eleventh to Eliashib, the twelfth to Jakim, 24:13 The
thirteenth to Huppah, the fourteenth to Jeshebeab, 24:14 The fifteenth
to Bilgah, the sixteenth to Immer, 24:15 The seventeenth to Hezir, the
eighteenth to Aphses, 24:16 The nineteenth to Pethahiah, the twentieth
to Jehezekel, 24:17 The one and twentieth to Jachin, the two and
twentieth to Gamul, 24:18 The three and twentieth to Delaiah, the four
and twentieth to Maaziah.

24:19 These were the orderings of them in their service to come into
the house of the LORD, according to their manner, under Aaron their
father, as the LORD God of Israel had commanded him.

24:20 And the rest of the sons of Levi were these: Of the sons of
Amram; Shubael: of the sons of Shubael; Jehdeiah.

24:21 Concerning Rehabiah: of the sons of Rehabiah, the first was
Isshiah.

24:22 Of the Izharites; Shelomoth: of the sons of Shelomoth; Jahath.

24:23 And the sons of Hebron; Jeriah the first, Amariah the second,
Jahaziel the third, Jekameam the fourth.

24:24 Of the sons of Uzziel; Michah: of the sons of Michah; Shamir.

24:25 The brother of Michah was Isshiah: of the sons of Isshiah;
Zechariah.

24:26 The sons of Merari were Mahli and Mushi: the sons of Jaaziah;
Beno.

24:27 The sons of Merari by Jaaziah; Beno, and Shoham, and Zaccur, and
Ibri.

24:28 Of Mahli came Eleazar, who had no sons.

24:29 Concerning Kish: the son of Kish was Jerahmeel.

24:30 The sons also of Mushi; Mahli, and Eder, and Jerimoth. These
were the sons of the Levites after the house of their fathers.

24:31 These likewise cast lots over against their brethren the sons of
Aaron in the presence of David the king, and Zadok, and Ahimelech, and
the chief of the fathers of the priests and Levites, even the
principal fathers over against their younger brethren.

25:1 Moreover David and the captains of the host separated to the
service of the sons of Asaph, and of Heman, and of Jeduthun, who
should prophesy with harps, with psalteries, and with cymbals: and the
number of the workmen according to their service was: 25:2 Of the sons
of Asaph; Zaccur, and Joseph, and Nethaniah, and Asarelah, the sons of
Asaph under the hands of Asaph, which prophesied according to the
order of the king.

25:3 Of Jeduthun: the sons of Jeduthun; Gedaliah, and Zeri, and
Jeshaiah, Hashabiah, and Mattithiah, six, under the hands of their
father Jeduthun, who prophesied with a harp, to give thanks and to
praise the LORD.

25:4 Of Heman: the sons of Heman: Bukkiah, Mattaniah, Uzziel, Shebuel,
and Jerimoth, Hananiah, Hanani, Eliathah, Giddalti, and Romamtiezer,
Joshbekashah, Mallothi, Hothir, and Mahazioth: 25:5 All these were the
sons of Heman the king's seer in the words of God, to lift up the
horn. And God gave to Heman fourteen sons and three daughters.

25:6 All these were under the hands of their father for song in the
house of the LORD, with cymbals, psalteries, and harps, for the
service of the house of God, according to the king's order to Asaph,
Jeduthun, and Heman.

25:7 So the number of them, with their brethren that were instructed
in the songs of the LORD, even all that were cunning, was two hundred
fourscore and eight.

25:8 And they cast lots, ward against ward, as well the small as the
great, the teacher as the scholar.

25:9 Now the first lot came forth for Asaph to Joseph: the second to
Gedaliah, who with his brethren and sons were twelve: 25:10 The third
to Zaccur, he, his sons, and his brethren, were twelve: 25:11 The
fourth to Izri, he, his sons, and his brethren, were twelve: 25:12 The
fifth to Nethaniah, he, his sons, and his brethren, were twelve: 25:13
The sixth to Bukkiah, he, his sons, and his brethren, were twelve:
25:14 The seventh to Jesharelah, he, his sons, and his brethren, were
twelve: 25:15 The eighth to Jeshaiah, he, his sons, and his brethren,
were twelve: 25:16 The ninth to Mattaniah, he, his sons, and his
brethren, were twelve: 25:17 The tenth to Shimei, he, his sons, and
his brethren, were twelve: 25:18 The eleventh to Azareel, he, his
sons, and his brethren, were twelve: 25:19 The twelfth to Hashabiah,
he, his sons, and his brethren, were twelve: 25:20 The thirteenth to
Shubael, he, his sons, and his brethren, were twelve: 25:21 The
fourteenth to Mattithiah, he, his sons, and his brethren, were twelve:
25:22 The fifteenth to Jeremoth, he, his sons, and his brethren, were
twelve: 25:23 The sixteenth to Hananiah, he, his sons, and his
brethren, were twelve: 25:24 The seventeenth to Joshbekashah, he, his
sons, and his brethren, were twelve: 25:25 The eighteenth to Hanani,
he, his sons, and his brethren, were twelve: 25:26 The nineteenth to
Mallothi, he, his sons, and his brethren, were twelve: 25:27 The
twentieth to Eliathah, he, his sons, and his brethren, were twelve:
25:28 The one and twentieth to Hothir, he, his sons, and his brethren,
were twelve: 25:29 The two and twentieth to Giddalti, he, his sons,
and his brethren, were twelve: 25:30 The three and twentieth to
Mahazioth, he, his sons, and his brethren, were twelve: 25:31 The four
and twentieth to Romamtiezer, he, his sons, and his brethren, were
twelve.

26:1 Concerning the divisions of the porters: Of the Korhites was
Meshelemiah the son of Kore, of the sons of Asaph.

26:2 And the sons of Meshelemiah were, Zechariah the firstborn,
Jediael the second, Zebadiah the third, Jathniel the fourth, 26:3 Elam
the fifth, Jehohanan the sixth, Elioenai the seventh.

26:4 Moreover the sons of Obededom were, Shemaiah the firstborn,
Jehozabad the second, Joah the third, and Sacar the fourth, and
Nethaneel the fifth.

26:5 Ammiel the sixth, Issachar the seventh, Peulthai the eighth: for
God blessed him.

26:6 Also unto Shemaiah his son were sons born, that ruled throughout
the house of their father: for they were mighty men of valour.

26:7 The sons of Shemaiah; Othni, and Rephael, and Obed, Elzabad,
whose brethren were strong men, Elihu, and Semachiah.

26:8 All these of the sons of Obededom: they and their sons and their
brethren, able men for strength for the service, were threescore and
two of Obededom.

26:9 And Meshelemiah had sons and brethren, strong men, eighteen.

26:10 Also Hosah, of the children of Merari, had sons; Simri the
chief, (for though he was not the firstborn, yet his father made him
the chief;) 26:11 Hilkiah the second, Tebaliah the third, Zechariah
the fourth: all the sons and brethren of Hosah were thirteen.

26:12 Among these were the divisions of the porters, even among the
chief men, having wards one against another, to minister in the house
of the LORD.

26:13 And they cast lots, as well the small as the great, according to
the house of their fathers, for every gate.

26:14 And the lot eastward fell to Shelemiah. Then for Zechariah his
son, a wise counsellor, they cast lots; and his lot came out
northward.

26:15 To Obededom southward; and to his sons the house of Asuppim.

26:16 To Shuppim and Hosah the lot came forth westward, with the gate
Shallecheth, by the causeway of the going up, ward against ward.

26:17 Eastward were six Levites, northward four a day, southward four
a day, and toward Asuppim two and two.

26:18 At Parbar westward, four at the causeway, and two at Parbar.

26:19 These are the divisions of the porters among the sons of Kore,
and among the sons of Merari.

26:20 And of the Levites, Ahijah was over the treasures of the house
of God, and over the treasures of the dedicated things.

26:21 As concerning the sons of Laadan; the sons of the Gershonite
Laadan, chief fathers, even of Laadan the Gershonite, were Jehieli.

26:22 The sons of Jehieli; Zetham, and Joel his brother, which were
over the treasures of the house of the LORD.

26:23 Of the Amramites, and the Izharites, the Hebronites, and the
Uzzielites: 26:24 And Shebuel the son of Gershom, the son of Moses,
was ruler of the treasures.

26:25 And his brethren by Eliezer; Rehabiah his son, and Jeshaiah his
son, and Joram his son, and Zichri his son, and Shelomith his son.

26:26 Which Shelomith and his brethren were over all the treasures of
the dedicated things, which David the king, and the chief fathers, the
captains over thousands and hundreds, and the captains of the host,
had dedicated.

26:27 Out of the spoils won in battles did they dedicate to maintain
the house of the LORD.

26:28 And all that Samuel the seer, and Saul the son of Kish, and
Abner the son of Ner, and Joab the son of Zeruiah, had dedicated; and
whosoever had dedicated any thing, it was under the hand of Shelomith,
and of his brethren.

26:29 Of the Izharites, Chenaniah and his sons were for the outward
business over Israel, for officers and judges.

26:30 And of the Hebronites, Hashabiah and his brethren, men of
valour, a thousand and seven hundred, were officers among them of
Israel on this side Jordan westward in all the business of the LORD,
and in the service of the king.

26:31 Among the Hebronites was Jerijah the chief, even among the
Hebronites, according to the generations of his fathers. In the
fortieth year of the reign of David they were sought for, and there
were found among them mighty men of valour at Jazer of Gilead.

26:32 And his brethren, men of valour, were two thousand and seven
hundred chief fathers, whom king David made rulers over the
Reubenites, the Gadites, and the half tribe of Manasseh, for every
matter pertaining to God, and affairs of the king.

27:1 Now the children of Israel after their number, to wit, the chief
fathers and captains of thousands and hundreds, and their officers
that served the king in any matter of the courses, which came in and
went out month by month throughout all the months of the year, of
every course were twenty and four thousand.

27:2 Over the first course for the first month was Jashobeam the son
of Zabdiel: and in his course were twenty and four thousand.

27:3 Of the children of Perez was the chief of all the captains of the
host for the first month.

27:4 And over the course of the second month was Dodai an Ahohite, and
of his course was Mikloth also the ruler: in his course likewise were
twenty and four thousand.

27:5 The third captain of the host for the third month was Benaiah the
son of Jehoiada, a chief priest: and in his course were twenty and
four thousand.

27:6 This is that Benaiah, who was mighty among the thirty, and above
the thirty: and in his course was Ammizabad his son.

27:7 The fourth captain for the fourth month was Asahel the brother of
Joab, and Zebadiah his son after him: and in his course were twenty
and four thousand.

27:8 The fifth captain for the fifth month was Shamhuth the Izrahite:
and in his course were twenty and four thousand.

27:9 The sixth captain for the sixth month was Ira the son of Ikkesh
the Tekoite: and in his course were twenty and four thousand.

27:10 The seventh captain for the seventh month was Helez the
Pelonite, of the children of Ephraim: and in his course were twenty
and four thousand.

27:11 The eighth captain for the eighth month was Sibbecai the
Hushathite, of the Zarhites: and in his course were twenty and four
thousand.

27:12 The ninth captain for the ninth month was Abiezer the
Anetothite, of the Benjamites: and in his course were twenty and four
thousand.

27:13 The tenth captain for the tenth month was Maharai the
Netophathite, of the Zarhites: and in his course were twenty and four
thousand.

27:14 The eleventh captain for the eleventh month was Benaiah the
Pirathonite, of the children of Ephraim: and in his course were twenty
and four thousand.

27:15 The twelfth captain for the twelfth month was Heldai the
Netophathite, of Othniel: and in his course were twenty and four
thousand.

27:16 Furthermore over the tribes of Israel: the ruler of the
Reubenites was Eliezer the son of Zichri: of the Simeonites,
Shephatiah the son of Maachah: 27:17 Of the Levites, Hashabiah the son
of Kemuel: of the Aaronites, Zadok: 27:18 Of Judah, Elihu, one of the
brethren of David: of Issachar, Omri the son of Michael: 27:19 Of
Zebulun, Ishmaiah the son of Obadiah: of Naphtali, Jerimoth the son of
Azriel: 27:20 Of the children of Ephraim, Hoshea the son of Azaziah:
of the half tribe of Manasseh, Joel the son of Pedaiah: 27:21 Of the
half tribe of Manasseh in Gilead, Iddo the son of Zechariah: of
Benjamin, Jaasiel the son of Abner: 27:22 Of Dan, Azareel the son of
Jeroham. These were the princes of the tribes of Israel.

27:23 But David took not the number of them from twenty years old and
under: because the LORD had said he would increase Israel like to the
stars of the heavens.

27:24 Joab the son of Zeruiah began to number, but he finished not,
because there fell wrath for it against Israel; neither was the number
put in the account of the chronicles of king David.

27:25 And over the king's treasures was Azmaveth the son of Adiel: and
over the storehouses in the fields, in the cities, and in the
villages, and in the castles, was Jehonathan the son of Uzziah: 27:26
And over them that did the work of the field for tillage of the ground
was Ezri the son of Chelub: 27:27 And over the vineyards was Shimei
the Ramathite: over the increase of the vineyards for the wine cellars
was Zabdi the Shiphmite: 27:28 And over the olive trees and the
sycomore trees that were in the low plains was Baalhanan the Gederite:
and over the cellars of oil was Joash: 27:29 And over the herds that
fed in Sharon was Shitrai the Sharonite: and over the herds that were
in the valleys was Shaphat the son of Adlai: 27:30 Over the camels
also was Obil the Ishmaelite: and over the asses was Jehdeiah the
Meronothite: 27:31 And over the flocks was Jaziz the Hagerite. All
these were the rulers of the substance which was king David's.

27:32 Also Jonathan David's uncle was a counsellor, a wise man, and a
scribe: and Jehiel the son of Hachmoni was with the king's sons: 27:33
And Ahithophel was the king's counsellor: and Hushai the Archite was
the king's companion: 27:34 And after Ahithophel was Jehoiada the son
of Benaiah, and Abiathar: and the general of the king's army was Joab.

28:1 And David assembled all the princes of Israel, the princes of the
tribes, and the captains of the companies that ministered to the king
by course, and the captains over the thousands, and captains over the
hundreds, and the stewards over all the substance and possession of
the king, and of his sons, with the officers, and with the mighty men,
and with all the valiant men, unto Jerusalem.

28:2 Then David the king stood up upon his feet, and said, Hear me, my
brethren, and my people: As for me, I had in mine heart to build an
house of rest for the ark of the covenant of the LORD, and for the
footstool of our God, and had made ready for the building: 28:3 But
God said unto me, Thou shalt not build an house for my name, because
thou hast been a man of war, and hast shed blood.

28:4 Howbeit the LORD God of Israel chose me before all the house of
my father to be king over Israel for ever: for he hath chosen Judah to
be the ruler; and of the house of Judah, the house of my father; and
among the sons of my father he liked me to make me king over all
Israel: 28:5 And of all my sons, (for the LORD hath given me many
sons,) he hath chosen Solomon my son to sit upon the throne of the
kingdom of the LORD over Israel.

28:6 And he said unto me, Solomon thy son, he shall build my house and
my courts: for I have chosen him to be my son, and I will be his
father.

28:7 Moreover I will establish his kingdom for ever, if he be constant
to do my commandments and my judgments, as at this day.

28:8 Now therefore in the sight of all Israel the congregation of the
LORD, and in the audience of our God, keep and seek for all the
commandments of the LORD your God: that ye may possess this good land,
and leave it for an inheritance for your children after you for ever.

28:9 And thou, Solomon my son, know thou the God of thy father, and
serve him with a perfect heart and with a willing mind: for the LORD
searcheth all hearts, and understandeth all the imaginations of the
thoughts: if thou seek him, he will be found of thee; but if thou
forsake him, he will cast thee off for ever.

28:10 Take heed now; for the LORD hath chosen thee to build an house
for the sanctuary: be strong, and do it.

28:11 Then David gave to Solomon his son the pattern of the porch, and
of the houses thereof, and of the treasuries thereof, and of the upper
chambers thereof, and of the inner parlours thereof, and of the place
of the mercy seat, 28:12 And the pattern of all that he had by the
spirit, of the courts of the house of the LORD, and of all the
chambers round about, of the treasuries of the house of God, and of
the treasuries of the dedicated things: 28:13 Also for the courses of
the priests and the Levites, and for all the work of the service of
the house of the LORD, and for all the vessels of service in the house
of the LORD.

28:14 He gave of gold by weight for things of gold, for all
instruments of all manner of service; silver also for all instruments
of silver by weight, for all instruments of every kind of service:
28:15 Even the weight for the candlesticks of gold, and for their
lamps of gold, by weight for every candlestick, and for the lamps
thereof: and for the candlesticks of silver by weight, both for the
candlestick, and also for the lamps thereof, according to the use of
every candlestick.

28:16 And by weight he gave gold for the tables of shewbread, for
every table; and likewise silver for the tables of silver: 28:17 Also
pure gold for the fleshhooks, and the bowls, and the cups: and for the
golden basons he gave gold by weight for every bason; and likewise
silver by weight for every bason of silver: 28:18 And for the altar of
incense refined gold by weight; and gold for the pattern of the
chariot of the cherubims, that spread out their wings, and covered the
ark of the covenant of the LORD.

28:19 All this, said David, the LORD made me understand in writing by
his hand upon me, even all the works of this pattern.

28:20 And David said to Solomon his son, Be strong and of good
courage, and do it: fear not, nor be dismayed: for the LORD God, even
my God, will be with thee; he will not fail thee, nor forsake thee,
until thou hast finished all the work for the service of the house of
the LORD.

28:21 And, behold, the courses of the priests and the Levites, even
they shall be with thee for all the service of the house of God: and
there shall be with thee for all manner of workmanship every willing
skilful man, for any manner of service: also the princes and all the
people will be wholly at thy commandment.

29:1 Furthermore David the king said unto all the congregation,
Solomon my son, whom alone God hath chosen, is yet young and tender,
and the work is great: for the palace is not for man, but for the LORD
God.

29:2 Now I have prepared with all my might for the house of my God the
gold for things to be made of gold, and the silver for things of
silver, and the brass for things of brass, the iron for things of
iron, and wood for things of wood; onyx stones, and stones to be set,
glistering stones, and of divers colours, and all manner of precious
stones, and marble stones in abundance.

29:3 Moreover, because I have set my affection to the house of my God,
I have of mine own proper good, of gold and silver, which I have given
to the house of my God, over and above all that I have prepared for
the holy house.

29:4 Even three thousand talents of gold, of the gold of Ophir, and
seven thousand talents of refined silver, to overlay the walls of the
houses withal: 29:5 The gold for things of gold, and the silver for
things of silver, and for all manner of work to be made by the hands
of artificers. And who then is willing to consecrate his service this
day unto the LORD?  29:6 Then the chief of the fathers and princes of
the tribes of Israel and the captains of thousands and of hundreds,
with the rulers of the king's work, offered willingly, 29:7 And gave
for the service of the house of God of gold five thousand talents and
ten thousand drams, and of silver ten thousand talents, and of brass
eighteen thousand talents, and one hundred thousand talents of iron.

29:8 And they with whom precious stones were found gave them to the
treasure of the house of the LORD, by the hand of Jehiel the
Gershonite.

29:9 Then the people rejoiced, for that they offered willingly,
because with perfect heart they offered willingly to the LORD: and
David the king also rejoiced with great joy.

29:10 Wherefore David blessed the LORD before all the congregation:
and David said, Blessed be thou, LORD God of Israel our father, for
ever and ever.

29:11 Thine, O LORD is the greatness, and the power, and the glory,
and the victory, and the majesty: for all that is in the heaven and in
the earth is thine; thine is the kingdom, O LORD, and thou art exalted
as head above all.

29:12 Both riches and honour come of thee, and thou reignest over all;
and in thine hand is power and might; and in thine hand it is to make
great, and to give strength unto all.

29:13 Now therefore, our God, we thank thee, and praise thy glorious
name.

29:14 But who am I, and what is my people, that we should be able to
offer so willingly after this sort? for all things come of thee, and
of thine own have we given thee.

29:15 For we are strangers before thee, and sojourners, as were all
our fathers: our days on the earth are as a shadow, and there is none
abiding.

29:16 O LORD our God, all this store that we have prepared to build
thee an house for thine holy name cometh of thine hand, and is all
thine own.

29:17 I know also, my God, that thou triest the heart, and hast
pleasure in uprightness. As for me, in the uprightness of mine heart I
have willingly offered all these things: and now have I seen with joy
thy people, which are present here, to offer willingly unto thee.

29:18 O LORD God of Abraham, Isaac, and of Israel, our fathers, keep
this for ever in the imagination of the thoughts of the heart of thy
people, and prepare their heart unto thee: 29:19 And give unto Solomon
my son a perfect heart, to keep thy commandments, thy testimonies, and
thy statutes, and to do all these things, and to build the palace, for
the which I have made provision.

29:20 And David said to all the congregation, Now bless the LORD your
God.

And all the congregation blessed the LORD God of their fathers, and
bowed down their heads, and worshipped the LORD, and the king.

29:21 And they sacrificed sacrifices unto the LORD, and offered burnt
offerings unto the LORD, on the morrow after that day, even a thousand
bullocks, a thousand rams, and a thousand lambs, with their drink
offerings, and sacrifices in abundance for all Israel: 29:22 And did
eat and drink before the LORD on that day with great gladness. And
they made Solomon the son of David king the second time, and anointed
him unto the LORD to be the chief governor, and Zadok to be priest.

29:23 Then Solomon sat on the throne of the LORD as king instead of
David his father, and prospered; and all Israel obeyed him.

29:24 And all the princes, and the mighty men, and all the sons
likewise of king David, submitted themselves unto Solomon the king.

29:25 And the LORD magnified Solomon exceedingly in the sight of all
Israel, and bestowed upon him such royal majesty as had not been on
any king before him in Israel.

29:26 Thus David the son of Jesse reigned over all Israel.

29:27 And the time that he reigned over Israel was forty years; seven
years reigned he in Hebron, and thirty and three years reigned he in
Jerusalem.

29:28 And he died in a good old age, full of days, riches, and honour:
and Solomon his son reigned in his stead.

29:29 Now the acts of David the king, first and last, behold, they are
written in the book of Samuel the seer, and in the book of Nathan the
prophet, and in the book of Gad the seer, 29:30 With all his reign and
his might, and the times that went over him, and over Israel, and over
all the kingdoms of the countries.




The Second Book of the Chronicles


1:1 And Solomon the son of David was strengthened in his kingdom, and
the LORD his God was with him, and magnified him exceedingly.

1:2 Then Solomon spake unto all Israel, to the captains of thousands
and of hundreds, and to the judges, and to every governor in all
Israel, the chief of the fathers.

1:3 So Solomon, and all the congregation with him, went to the high
place that was at Gibeon; for there was the tabernacle of the
congregation of God, which Moses the servant of the LORD had made in
the wilderness.

1:4 But the ark of God had David brought up from Kirjathjearim to the
place which David had prepared for it: for he had pitched a tent for
it at Jerusalem.

1:5 Moreover the brasen altar, that Bezaleel the son of Uri, the son
of Hur, had made, he put before the tabernacle of the LORD: and
Solomon and the congregation sought unto it.

1:6 And Solomon went up thither to the brasen altar before the LORD,
which was at the tabernacle of the congregation, and offered a
thousand burnt offerings upon it.

1:7 In that night did God appear unto Solomon, and said unto him, Ask
what I shall give thee.

1:8 And Solomon said unto God, Thou hast shewed great mercy unto David
my father, and hast made me to reign in his stead.

1:9 Now, O LORD God, let thy promise unto David my father be
established: for thou hast made me king over a people like the dust of
the earth in multitude.

1:10 Give me now wisdom and knowledge, that I may go out and come in
before this people: for who can judge this thy people, that is so
great?  1:11 And God said to Solomon, Because this was in thine heart,
and thou hast not asked riches, wealth, or honour, nor the life of
thine enemies, neither yet hast asked long life; but hast asked wisdom
and knowledge for thyself, that thou mayest judge my people, over whom
I have made thee king: 1:12 Wisdom and knowledge is granted unto thee;
and I will give thee riches, and wealth, and honour, such as none of
the kings have had that have been before thee, neither shall there any
after thee have the like.

1:13 Then Solomon came from his journey to the high place that was at
Gibeon to Jerusalem, from before the tabernacle of the congregation,
and reigned over Israel.

1:14 And Solomon gathered chariots and horsemen: and he had a thousand
and four hundred chariots, and twelve thousand horsemen, which he
placed in the chariot cities, and with the king at Jerusalem.

1:15 And the king made silver and gold at Jerusalem as plenteous as
stones, and cedar trees made he as the sycomore trees that are in the
vale for abundance.

1:16 And Solomon had horses brought out of Egypt, and linen yarn: the
king's merchants received the linen yarn at a price.

1:17 And they fetched up, and brought forth out of Egypt a chariot for
six hundred shekels of silver, and an horse for an hundred and fifty:
and so brought they out horses for all the kings of the Hittites, and
for the kings of Syria, by their means.

2:1 And Solomon determined to build an house for the name of the LORD,
and an house for his kingdom.

2:2 And Solomon told out threescore and ten thousand men to bear
burdens, and fourscore thousand to hew in the mountain, and three
thousand and six hundred to oversee them.

2:3 And Solomon sent to Huram the king of Tyre, saying, As thou didst
deal with David my father, and didst send him cedars to build him an
house to dwell therein, even so deal with me.

2:4 Behold, I build an house to the name of the LORD my God, to
dedicate it to him, and to burn before him sweet incense, and for the
continual shewbread, and for the burnt offerings morning and evening,
on the sabbaths, and on the new moons, and on the solemn feasts of the
LORD our God. This is an ordinance for ever to Israel.

2:5 And the house which I build is great: for great is our God above
all gods.

2:6 But who is able to build him an house, seeing the heaven and
heaven of heavens cannot contain him? who am I then, that I should
build him an house, save only to burn sacrifice before him?  2:7 Send
me now therefore a man cunning to work in gold, and in silver, and in
brass, and in iron, and in purple, and crimson, and blue, and that can
skill to grave with the cunning men that are with me in Judah and in
Jerusalem, whom David my father did provide.

2:8 Send me also cedar trees, fir trees, and algum trees, out of
Lebanon: for I know that thy servants can skill to cut timber in
Lebanon; and, behold, my servants shall be with thy servants, 2:9 Even
to prepare me timber in abundance: for the house which I am about to
build shall be wonderful great.

2:10 And, behold, I will give to thy servants, the hewers that cut
timber, twenty thousand measures of beaten wheat, and twenty thousand
measures of barley, and twenty thousand baths of wine, and twenty
thousand baths of oil.

2:11 Then Huram the king of Tyre answered in writing, which he sent to
Solomon, Because the LORD hath loved his people, he hath made thee
king over them.

2:12 Huram said moreover, Blessed be the LORD God of Israel, that made
heaven and earth, who hath given to David the king a wise son, endued
with prudence and understanding, that might build an house for the
LORD, and an house for his kingdom.

2:13 And now I have sent a cunning man, endued with understanding, of
Huram my father's, 2:14 The son of a woman of the daughters of Dan,
and his father was a man of Tyre, skilful to work in gold, and in
silver, in brass, in iron, in stone, and in timber, in purple, in
blue, and in fine linen, and in crimson; also to grave any manner of
graving, and to find out every device which shall be put to him, with
thy cunning men, and with the cunning men of my lord David thy father.

2:15 Now therefore the wheat, and the barley, the oil, and the wine,
which my lord hath spoken of, let him send unto his servants: 2:16 And
we will cut wood out of Lebanon, as much as thou shalt need: and we
will bring it to thee in floats by sea to Joppa; and thou shalt carry
it up to Jerusalem.

2:17 And Solomon numbered all the strangers that were in the land of
Israel, after the numbering wherewith David his father had numbered
them; and they were found an hundred and fifty thousand and three
thousand and six hundred.

2:18 And he set threescore and ten thousand of them to be bearers of
burdens, and fourscore thousand to be hewers in the mountain, and
three thousand and six hundred overseers to set the people a work.

3:1 Then Solomon began to build the house of the LORD at Jerusalem in
mount Moriah, where the Lord appeared unto David his father, in the
place that David had prepared in the threshingfloor of Ornan the
Jebusite.

3:2 And he began to build in the second day of the second month, in
the fourth year of his reign.

3:3 Now these are the things wherein Solomon was instructed for the
building of the house of God. The length by cubits after the first
measure was threescore cubits, and the breadth twenty cubits.

3:4 And the porch that was in the front of the house, the length of it
was according to the breadth of the house, twenty cubits, and the
height was an hundred and twenty: and he overlaid it within with pure
gold.

3:5 And the greater house he cieled with fir tree, which he overlaid
with fine gold, and set thereon palm trees and chains.

3:6 And he garnished the house with precious stones for beauty: and
the gold was gold of Parvaim.

3:7 He overlaid also the house, the beams, the posts, and the walls
thereof, and the doors thereof, with gold; and graved cherubims on the
walls.

3:8 And he made the most holy house, the length whereof was according
to the breadth of the house, twenty cubits, and the breadth thereof
twenty cubits: and he overlaid it with fine gold, amounting to six
hundred talents.

3:9 And the weight of the nails was fifty shekels of gold. And he
overlaid the upper chambers with gold.

3:10 And in the most holy house he made two cherubims of image work,
and overlaid them with gold.

3:11 And the wings of the cherubims were twenty cubits long: one wing
of the one cherub was five cubits, reaching to the wall of the house:
and the other wing was likewise five cubits, reaching to the wing of
the other cherub.

3:12 And one wing of the other cherub was five cubits, reaching to the
wall of the house: and the other wing was five cubits also, joining to
the wing of the other cherub.

3:13 The wings of these cherubims spread themselves forth twenty
cubits: and they stood on their feet, and their faces were inward.

3:14 And he made the vail of blue, and purple, and crimson, and fine
linen, and wrought cherubims thereon.

3:15 Also he made before the house two pillars of thirty and five
cubits high, and the chapiter that was on the top of each of them was
five cubits.

3:16 And he made chains, as in the oracle, and put them on the heads
of the pillars; and made an hundred pomegranates, and put them on the
chains.

3:17 And he reared up the pillars before the temple, one on the right
hand, and the other on the left; and called the name of that on the
right hand Jachin, and the name of that on the left Boaz.

4:1 Moreover he made an altar of brass, twenty cubits the length
thereof, and twenty cubits the breadth thereof, and ten cubits the
height thereof.

4:2 Also he made a molten sea of ten cubits from brim to brim, round
in compass, and five cubits the height thereof; and a line of thirty
cubits did compass it round about.

4:3 And under it was the similitude of oxen, which did compass it
round about: ten in a cubit, compassing the sea round about. Two rows
of oxen were cast, when it was cast.

4:4 It stood upon twelve oxen, three looking toward the north, and
three looking toward the west, and three looking toward the south, and
three looking toward the east: and the sea was set above upon them,
and all their hinder parts were inward.

4:5 And the thickness of it was an handbreadth, and the brim of it
like the work of the brim of a cup, with flowers of lilies; and it
received and held three thousand baths.

4:6 He made also ten lavers, and put five on the right hand, and five
on the left, to wash in them: such things as they offered for the
burnt offering they washed in them; but the sea was for the priests to
wash in.

4:7 And he made ten candlesticks of gold according to their form, and
set them in the temple, five on the right hand, and five on the left.

4:8 He made also ten tables, and placed them in the temple, five on
the right side, and five on the left. And he made an hundred basons of
gold.

4:9 Furthermore he made the court of the priests, and the great court,
and doors for the court, and overlaid the doors of them with brass.

4:10 And he set the sea on the right side of the east end, over
against the south.

4:11 And Huram made the pots, and the shovels, and the basons. And
Huram finished the work that he was to make for king Solomon for the
house of God; 4:12 To wit, the two pillars, and the pommels, and the
chapiters which were on the top of the two pillars, and the two
wreaths to cover the two pommels of the chapiters which were on the
top of the pillars; 4:13 And four hundred pomegranates on the two
wreaths; two rows of pomegranates on each wreath, to cover the two
pommels of the chapiters which were upon the pillars.

4:14 He made also bases, and lavers made he upon the bases; 4:15 One
sea, and twelve oxen under it.

4:16 The pots also, and the shovels, and the fleshhooks, and all their
instruments, did Huram his father make to king Solomon for the house
of the LORD of bright brass.

4:17 In the plain of Jordan did the king cast them, in the clay ground
between Succoth and Zeredathah.

4:18 Thus Solomon made all these vessels in great abundance: for the
weight of the brass could not be found out.

4:19 And Solomon made all the vessels that were for the house of God,
the golden altar also, and the tables whereon the shewbread was set;
4:20 Moreover the candlesticks with their lamps, that they should burn
after the manner before the oracle, of pure gold; 4:21 And the
flowers, and the lamps, and the tongs, made he of gold, and that
perfect gold; 4:22 And the snuffers, and the basons, and the spoons,
and the censers, of pure gold: and the entry of the house, the inner
doors thereof for the most holy place, and the doors of the house of
the temple, were of gold.

5:1 Thus all the work that Solomon made for the house of the LORD was
finished: and Solomon brought in all the things that David his father
had dedicated; and the silver, and the gold, and all the instruments,
put he among the treasures of the house of God.

5:2 Then Solomon assembled the elders of Israel, and all the heads of
the tribes, the chief of the fathers of the children of Israel, unto
Jerusalem, to bring up the ark of the covenant of the LORD out of the
city of David, which is Zion.

5:3 Wherefore all the men of Israel assembled themselves unto the king
in the feast which was in the seventh month.

5:4 And all the elders of Israel came; and the Levites took up the
ark.

5:5 And they brought up the ark, and the tabernacle of the
congregation, and all the holy vessels that were in the tabernacle,
these did the priests and the Levites bring up.

5:6 Also king Solomon, and all the congregation of Israel that were
assembled unto him before the ark, sacrificed sheep and oxen, which
could not be told nor numbered for multitude.

5:7 And the priests brought in the ark of the covenant of the LORD
unto his place, to the oracle of the house, into the most holy place,
even under the wings of the cherubims: 5:8 For the cherubims spread
forth their wings over the place of the ark, and the cherubims covered
the ark and the staves thereof above.

5:9 And they drew out the staves of the ark, that the ends of the
staves were seen from the ark before the oracle; but they were not
seen without. And there it is unto this day.

5:10 There was nothing in the ark save the two tables which Moses put
therein at Horeb, when the LORD made a covenant with the children of
Israel, when they came out of Egypt.

5:11 And it came to pass, when the priests were come out of the holy
place: (for all the priests that were present were sanctified, and did
not then wait by course: 5:12 Also the Levites which were the singers,
all of them of Asaph, of Heman, of Jeduthun, with their sons and their
brethren, being arrayed in white linen, having cymbals and psalteries
and harps, stood at the east end of the altar, and with them an
hundred and twenty priests sounding with trumpets:) 5:13 It came even
to pass, as the trumpeters and singers were as one, to make one sound
to be heard in praising and thanking the LORD; and when they lifted up
their voice with the trumpets and cymbals and instruments of musick,
and praised the LORD, saying, For he is good; for his mercy endureth
for ever: that then the house was filled with a cloud, even the house
of the LORD; 5:14 So that the priests could not stand to minister by
reason of the cloud: for the glory of the LORD had filled the house of
God.

6:1 Then said Solomon, The LORD hath said that he would dwell in the
thick darkness.

6:2 But I have built an house of habitation for thee, and a place for
thy dwelling for ever.

6:3 And the king turned his face, and blessed the whole congregation
of Israel: and all the congregation of Israel stood.

6:4 And he said, Blessed be the LORD God of Israel, who hath with his
hands fulfilled that which he spake with his mouth to my father David,
saying, 6:5 Since the day that I brought forth my people out of the
land of Egypt I chose no city among all the tribes of Israel to build
an house in, that my name might be there; neither chose I any man to
be a ruler over my people Israel: 6:6 But I have chosen Jerusalem,
that my name might be there; and have chosen David to be over my
people Israel.

6:7 Now it was in the heart of David my father to build an house for
the name of the LORD God of Israel.

6:8 But the LORD said to David my father, Forasmuch as it was in thine
heart to build an house for my name, thou didst well in that it was in
thine heart: 6:9 Notwithstanding thou shalt not build the house; but
thy son which shall come forth out of thy loins, he shall build the
house for my name.

6:10 The LORD therefore hath performed his word that he hath spoken:
for I am risen up in the room of David my father, and am set on the
throne of Israel, as the LORD promised, and have built the house for
the name of the LORD God of Israel.

6:11 And in it have I put the ark, wherein is the covenant of the
LORD, that he made with the children of Israel.

6:12 And he stood before the altar of the LORD in the presence of all
the congregation of Israel, and spread forth his hands: 6:13 For
Solomon had made a brasen scaffold of five cubits long, and five
cubits broad, and three cubits high, and had set it in the midst of
the court: and upon it he stood, and kneeled down upon his knees
before all the congregation of Israel, and spread forth his hands
toward heaven.

6:14 And said, O LORD God of Israel, there is no God like thee in the
heaven, nor in the earth; which keepest covenant, and shewest mercy
unto thy servants, that walk before thee with all their hearts: 6:15
Thou which hast kept with thy servant David my father that which thou
hast promised him; and spakest with thy mouth, and hast fulfilled it
with thine hand, as it is this day.

6:16 Now therefore, O LORD God of Israel, keep with thy servant David
my father that which thou hast promised him, saying, There shall not
fail thee a man in my sight to sit upon the throne of Israel; yet so
that thy children take heed to their way to walk in my law, as thou
hast walked before me.

6:17 Now then, O LORD God of Israel, let thy word be verified, which
thou hast spoken unto thy servant David.

6:18 But will God in very deed dwell with men on the earth? behold,
heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain thee; how much less
this house which I have built!  6:19 Have respect therefore to the
prayer of thy servant, and to his supplication, O LORD my God, to
hearken unto the cry and the prayer which thy servant prayeth before
thee: 6:20 That thine eyes may be open upon this house day and night,
upon the place whereof thou hast said that thou wouldest put thy name
there; to hearken unto the prayer which thy servant prayeth toward
this place.

6:21 Hearken therefore unto the supplications of thy servant, and of
thy people Israel, which they shall make toward this place: hear thou
from thy dwelling place, even from heaven; and when thou hearest,
forgive.

6:22 If a man sin against his neighbour, and an oath be laid upon him
to make him swear, and the oath come before thine altar in this house;
6:23 Then hear thou from heaven, and do, and judge thy servants, by
requiting the wicked, by recompensing his way upon his own head; and
by justifying the righteous, by giving him according to his
righteousness.

6:24 And if thy people Israel be put to the worse before the enemy,
because they have sinned against thee; and shall return and confess
thy name, and pray and make supplication before thee in this house;
6:25 Then hear thou from the heavens, and forgive the sin of thy
people Israel, and bring them again unto the land which thou gavest to
them and to their fathers.

6:26 When the heaven is shut up, and there is no rain, because they
have sinned against thee; yet if they pray toward this place, and
confess thy name, and turn from their sin, when thou dost afflict
them; 6:27 Then hear thou from heaven, and forgive the sin of thy
servants, and of thy people Israel, when thou hast taught them the
good way, wherein they should walk; and send rain upon thy land, which
thou hast given unto thy people for an inheritance.

6:28 If there be dearth in the land, if there be pestilence, if there
be blasting, or mildew, locusts, or caterpillers; if their enemies
besiege them in the cities of their land; whatsoever sore or
whatsoever sickness there be: 6:29 Then what prayer or what
supplication soever shall be made of any man, or of all thy people
Israel, when every one shall know his own sore and his own grief, and
shall spread forth his hands in this house: 6:30 Then hear thou from
heaven thy dwelling place, and forgive, and render unto every man
according unto all his ways, whose heart thou knowest; (for thou only
knowest the hearts of the children of men:) 6:31 That they may fear
thee, to walk in thy ways, so long as they live in the land which thou
gavest unto our fathers.

6:32 Moreover concerning the stranger, which is not of thy people
Israel, but is come from a far country for thy great name's sake, and
thy mighty hand, and thy stretched out arm; if they come and pray in
this house; 6:33 Then hear thou from the heavens, even from thy
dwelling place, and do according to all that the stranger calleth to
thee for; that all people of the earth may know thy name, and fear
thee, as doth thy people Israel, and may know that this house which I
have built is called by thy name.

6:34 If thy people go out to war against their enemies by the way that
thou shalt send them, and they pray unto thee toward this city which
thou hast chosen, and the house which I have built for thy name; 6:35
Then hear thou from the heavens their prayer and their supplication,
and maintain their cause.

6:36 If they sin against thee, (for there is no man which sinneth
not,) and thou be angry with them, and deliver them over before their
enemies, and they carry them away captives unto a land far off or
near; 6:37 Yet if they bethink themselves in the land whither they are
carried captive, and turn and pray unto thee in the land of their
captivity, saying, We have sinned, we have done amiss, and have dealt
wickedly; 6:38 If they return to thee with all their heart and with
all their soul in the land of their captivity, whither they have
carried them captives, and pray toward their land, which thou gavest
unto their fathers, and toward the city which thou hast chosen, and
toward the house which I have built for thy name: 6:39 Then hear thou
from the heavens, even from thy dwelling place, their prayer and their
supplications, and maintain their cause, and forgive thy people which
have sinned against thee.

6:40 Now, my God, let, I beseech thee, thine eyes be open, and let
thine ears be attent unto the prayer that is made in this place.

6:41 Now therefore arise, O LORD God, into thy resting place, thou,
and the ark of thy strength: let thy priests, O LORD God, be clothed
with salvation, and let thy saints rejoice in goodness.

6:42 O LORD God, turn not away the face of thine anointed: remember
the mercies of David thy servant.

7:1 Now when Solomon had made an end of praying, the fire came down
from heaven, and consumed the burnt offering and the sacrifices; and
the glory of the LORD filled the house.

7:2 And the priests could not enter into the house of the LORD,
because the glory of the LORD had filled the LORD's house.

7:3 And when all the children of Israel saw how the fire came down,
and the glory of the LORD upon the house, they bowed themselves with
their faces to the ground upon the pavement, and worshipped, and
praised the LORD, saying, For he is good; for his mercy endureth for
ever.

7:4 Then the king and all the people offered sacrifices before the
LORD.

7:5 And king Solomon offered a sacrifice of twenty and two thousand
oxen, and an hundred and twenty thousand sheep: so the king and all
the people dedicated the house of God.

7:6 And the priests waited on their offices: the Levites also with
instruments of musick of the LORD, which David the king had made to
praise the LORD, because his mercy endureth for ever, when David
praised by their ministry; and the priests sounded trumpets before
them, and all Israel stood.

7:7 Moreover Solomon hallowed the middle of the court that was before
the house of the LORD: for there he offered burnt offerings, and the
fat of the peace offerings, because the brasen altar which Solomon had
made was not able to receive the burnt offerings, and the meat
offerings, and the fat.

7:8 Also at the same time Solomon kept the feast seven days, and all
Israel with him, a very great congregation, from the entering in of
Hamath unto the river of Egypt.

7:9 And in the eighth day they made a solemn assembly: for they kept
the dedication of the altar seven days, and the feast seven days.

7:10 And on the three and twentieth day of the seventh month he sent
the people away into their tents, glad and merry in heart for the
goodness that the LORD had shewed unto David, and to Solomon, and to
Israel his people.

7:11 Thus Solomon finished the house of the LORD, and the king's
house: and all that came into Solomon's heart to make in the house of
the LORD, and in his own house, he prosperously effected.

7:12 And the LORD appeared to Solomon by night, and said unto him, I
have heard thy prayer, and have chosen this place to myself for an
house of sacrifice.

7:13 If I shut up heaven that there be no rain, or if I command the
locusts to devour the land, or if I send pestilence among my people;
7:14 If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble
themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked
ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and
will heal their land.

7:15 Now mine eyes shall be open, and mine ears attent unto the prayer
that is made in this place.

7:16 For now have I chosen and sanctified this house, that my name may
be there for ever: and mine eyes and mine heart shall be there
perpetually.

7:17 And as for thee, if thou wilt walk before me, as David thy father
walked, and do according to all that I have commanded thee, and shalt
observe my statutes and my judgments; 7:18 Then will I stablish the
throne of thy kingdom, according as I have covenanted with David thy
father, saying, There shall not fail thee a man to be ruler in Israel.

7:19 But if ye turn away, and forsake my statutes and my commandments,
which I have set before you, and shall go and serve other gods, and
worship them; 7:20 Then will I pluck them up by the roots out of my
land which I have given them; and this house, which I have sanctified
for my name, will I cast out of my sight, and will make it to be a
proverb and a byword among all nations.

7:21 And this house, which is high, shall be an astonishment to every
one that passeth by it; so that he shall say, Why hath the LORD done
thus unto this land, and unto this house?  7:22 And it shall be
answered, Because they forsook the LORD God of their fathers, which
brought them forth out of the land of Egypt, and laid hold on other
gods, and worshipped them, and served them: therefore hath he brought
all this evil upon them.

8:1 And it came to pass at the end of twenty years, wherein Solomon
had built the house of the LORD, and his own house, 8:2 That the
cities which Huram had restored to Solomon, Solomon built them, and
caused the children of Israel to dwell there.

8:3 And Solomon went to Hamathzobah, and prevailed against it.

8:4 And he built Tadmor in the wilderness, and all the store cities,
which he built in Hamath.

8:5 Also he built Bethhoron the upper, and Bethhoron the nether,
fenced cities, with walls, gates, and bars; 8:6 And Baalath, and all
the store cities that Solomon had, and all the chariot cities, and the
cities of the horsemen, and all that Solomon desired to build in
Jerusalem, and in Lebanon, and throughout all the land of his
dominion.

8:7 As for all the people that were left of the Hittites, and the
Amorites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites,
which were not of Israel, 8:8 But of their children, who were left
after them in the land, whom the children of Israel consumed not, them
did Solomon make to pay tribute until this day.

8:9 But of the children of Israel did Solomon make no servants for his
work; but they were men of war, and chief of his captains, and
captains of his chariots and horsemen.

8:10 And these were the chief of king Solomon's officers, even two
hundred and fifty, that bare rule over the people.

8:11 And Solomon brought up the daughter of Pharaoh out of the city of
David unto the house that he had built for her: for he said, My wife
shall not dwell in the house of David king of Israel, because the
places are holy, whereunto the ark of the LORD hath come.

8:12 Then Solomon offered burnt offerings unto the LORD on the altar
of the LORD, which he had built before the porch, 8:13 Even after a
certain rate every day, offering according to the commandment of
Moses, on the sabbaths, and on the new moons, and on the solemn
feasts, three times in the year, even in the feast of unleavened
bread, and in the feast of weeks, and in the feast of tabernacles.

8:14 And he appointed, according to the order of David his father, the
courses of the priests to their service, and the Levites to their
charges, to praise and minister before the priests, as the duty of
every day required: the porters also by their courses at every gate:
for so had David the man of God commanded.

8:15 And they departed not from the commandment of the king unto the
priests and Levites concerning any matter, or concerning the
treasures.

8:16 Now all the work of Solomon was prepared unto the day of the
foundation of the house of the LORD, and until it was finished. So the
house of the LORD was perfected.

8:17 Then went Solomon to Eziongeber, and to Eloth, at the sea side in
the land of Edom.

8:18 And Huram sent him by the hands of his servants ships, and
servants that had knowledge of the sea; and they went with the
servants of Solomon to Ophir, and took thence four hundred and fifty
talents of gold, and brought them to king Solomon.

9:1 And when the queen of Sheba heard of the fame of Solomon, she came
to prove Solomon with hard questions at Jerusalem, with a very great
company, and camels that bare spices, and gold in abundance, and
precious stones: and when she was come to Solomon, she communed with
him of all that was in her heart.

9:2 And Solomon told her all her questions: and there was nothing hid
from Solomon which he told her not.

9:3 And when the queen of Sheba had seen the wisdom of Solomon, and
the house that he had built, 9:4 And the meat of his table, and the
sitting of his servants, and the attendance of his ministers, and
their apparel; his cupbearers also, and their apparel; and his ascent
by which he went up into the house of the LORD; there was no more
spirit in her.

9:5 And she said to the king, It was a true report which I heard in
mine own land of thine acts, and of thy wisdom: 9:6 Howbeit I believed
not their words, until I came, and mine eyes had seen it: and, behold,
the one half of the greatness of thy wisdom was not told me: for thou
exceedest the fame that I heard.

9:7 Happy are thy men, and happy are these thy servants, which stand
continually before thee, and hear thy wisdom.

9:8 Blessed be the LORD thy God, which delighted in thee to set thee
on his throne, to be king for the LORD thy God: because thy God loved
Israel, to establish them for ever, therefore made he thee king over
them, to do judgment and justice.

9:9 And she gave the king an hundred and twenty talents of gold, and
of spices great abundance, and precious stones: neither was there any
such spice as the queen of Sheba gave king Solomon.

9:10 And the servants also of Huram, and the servants of Solomon,
which brought gold from Ophir, brought algum trees and precious
stones.

9:11 And the king made of the algum trees terraces to the house of the
LORD, and to the king's palace, and harps and psalteries for singers:
and there were none such seen before in the land of Judah.

9:12 And king Solomon gave to the queen of Sheba all her desire,
whatsoever she asked, beside that which she had brought unto the king.
So she turned, and went away to her own land, she and her servants.

9:13 Now the weight of gold that came to Solomon in one year was six
hundred and threescore and six talents of gold; 9:14 Beside that which
chapmen and merchants brought. And all the kings of Arabia and
governors of the country brought gold and silver to Solomon.

9:15 And king Solomon made two hundred targets of beaten gold: six
hundred shekels of beaten gold went to one target.

9:16 And three hundred shields made he of beaten gold: three hundred
shekels of gold went to one shield. And the king put them in the house
of the forest of Lebanon.

9:17 Moreover the king made a great throne of ivory, and overlaid it
with pure gold.

9:18 And there were six steps to the throne, with a footstool of gold,
which were fastened to the throne, and stays on each side of the
sitting place, and two lions standing by the stays: 9:19 And twelve
lions stood there on the one side and on the other upon the six steps.
There was not the like made in any kingdom.

9:20 And all the drinking vessels of king Solomon were of gold, and
all the vessels of the house of the forest of Lebanon were of pure
gold: none were of silver; it was not any thing accounted of in the
days of Solomon.

9:21 For the king's ships went to Tarshish with the servants of Huram:
every three years once came the ships of Tarshish bringing gold, and
silver, ivory, and apes, and peacocks.

9:22 And king Solomon passed all the kings of the earth in riches and
wisdom.

9:23 And all the kings of the earth sought the presence of Solomon, to
hear his wisdom, that God had put in his heart.

9:24 And they brought every man his present, vessels of silver, and
vessels of gold, and raiment, harness, and spices, horses, and mules,
a rate year by year.

9:25 And Solomon had four thousand stalls for horses and chariots, and
twelve thousand horsemen; whom he bestowed in the chariot cities, and
with the king at Jerusalem.

9:26 And he reigned over all the kings from the river even unto the
land of the Philistines, and to the border of Egypt.

9:27 And the king made silver in Jerusalem as stones, and cedar trees
made he as the sycomore trees that are in the low plains in abundance.

9:28 And they brought unto Solomon horses out of Egypt, and out of all
lands.

9:29 Now the rest of the acts of Solomon, first and last, are they not
written in the book of Nathan the prophet, and in the prophecy of
Ahijah the Shilonite, and in the visions of Iddo the seer against
Jeroboam the son of Nebat?  9:30 And Solomon reigned in Jerusalem over
all Israel forty years.

9:31 And Solomon slept with his fathers, and he was buried in the city
of David his father: and Rehoboam his son reigned in his stead.

10:1 And Rehoboam went to Shechem: for to Shechem were all Israel come
to make him king.

10:2 And it came to pass, when Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who was in
Egypt, whither he fled from the presence of Solomon the king, heard
it, that Jeroboam returned out of Egypt.

10:3 And they sent and called him. So Jeroboam and all Israel came and
spake to Rehoboam, saying, 10:4 Thy father made our yoke grievous: now
therefore ease thou somewhat the grievous servitude of thy father, and
his heavy yoke that he put upon us, and we will serve thee.

10:5 And he said unto them, Come again unto me after three days. And
the people departed.

10:6 And king Rehoboam took counsel with the old men that had stood
before Solomon his father while he yet lived, saying, What counsel
give ye me to return answer to this people?  10:7 And they spake unto
him, saying, If thou be kind to this people, and please them, and
speak good words to them, they will be thy servants for ever.

10:8 But he forsook the counsel which the old men gave him, and took
counsel with the young men that were brought up with him, that stood
before him.

10:9 And he said unto them, What advice give ye that we may return
answer to this people, which have spoken to me, saying, Ease somewhat
the yoke that thy father did put upon us?  10:10 And the young men
that were brought up with him spake unto him, saying, Thus shalt thou
answer the people that spake unto thee, saying, Thy father made our
yoke heavy, but make thou it somewhat lighter for us; thus shalt thou
say unto them, My little finger shall be thicker than my father's
loins.

10:11 For whereas my father put a heavy yoke upon you, I will put more
to your yoke: my father chastised you with whips, but I will chastise
you with scorpions.

10:12 So Jeroboam and all the people came to Rehoboam on the third
day, as the king bade, saying, Come again to me on the third day.

10:13 And the king answered them roughly; and king Rehoboam forsook
the counsel of the old men, 10:14 And answered them after the advice
of the young men, saying, My father made your yoke heavy, but I will
add thereto: my father chastised you with whips, but I will chastise
you with scorpions.

10:15 So the king hearkened not unto the people: for the cause was of
God, that the LORD might perform his word, which he spake by the hand
of Ahijah the Shilonite to Jeroboam the son of Nebat.

10:16 And when all Israel saw that the king would not hearken unto
them, the people answered the king, saying, What portion have we in
David?  and we have none inheritance in the son of Jesse: every man to
your tents, O Israel: and now, David, see to thine own house. So all
Israel went to their tents.

10:17 But as for the children of Israel that dwelt in the cities of
Judah, Rehoboam reigned over them.

10:18 Then king Rehoboam sent Hadoram that was over the tribute; and
the children of Israel stoned him with stones, that he died. But king
Rehoboam made speed to get him up to his chariot, to flee to
Jerusalem.

10:19 And Israel rebelled against the house of David unto this day.

11:1 And when Rehoboam was come to Jerusalem, he gathered of the house
of Judah and Benjamin an hundred and fourscore thousand chosen men,
which were warriors, to fight against Israel, that he might bring the
kingdom again to Rehoboam.

11:2 But the word of the LORD came to Shemaiah the man of God, saying,
11:3 Speak unto Rehoboam the son of Solomon, king of Judah, and to all
Israel in Judah and Benjamin, saying, 11:4 Thus saith the LORD, Ye
shall not go up, nor fight against your brethren: return every man to
his house: for this thing is done of me. And they obeyed the words of
the LORD, and returned from going against Jeroboam.

11:5 And Rehoboam dwelt in Jerusalem, and built cities for defence in
Judah.

11:6 He built even Bethlehem, and Etam, and Tekoa, 11:7 And Bethzur,
and Shoco, and Adullam, 11:8 And Gath, and Mareshah, and Ziph, 11:9
And Adoraim, and Lachish, and Azekah, 11:10 And Zorah, and Aijalon,
and Hebron, which are in Judah and in Benjamin fenced cities.

11:11 And he fortified the strong holds, and put captains in them, and
store of victual, and of oil and wine.

11:12 And in every several city he put shields and spears, and made
them exceeding strong, having Judah and Benjamin on his side.

11:13 And the priests and the Levites that were in all Israel resorted
to him out of all their coasts.

11:14 For the Levites left their suburbs and their possession, and
came to Judah and Jerusalem: for Jeroboam and his sons had cast them
off from executing the priest's office unto the LORD: 11:15 And he
ordained him priests for the high places, and for the devils, and for
the calves which he had made.

11:16 And after them out of all the tribes of Israel such as set their
hearts to seek the LORD God of Israel came to Jerusalem, to sacrifice
unto the LORD God of their fathers.

11:17 So they strengthened the kingdom of Judah, and made Rehoboam the
son of Solomon strong, three years: for three years they walked in the
way of David and Solomon.

11:18 And Rehoboam took him Mahalath the daughter of Jerimoth the son
of David to wife, and Abihail the daughter of Eliab the son of Jesse;
11:19 Which bare him children; Jeush, and Shamariah, and Zaham.

11:20 And after her he took Maachah the daughter of Absalom; which
bare him Abijah, and Attai, and Ziza, and Shelomith.

11:21 And Rehoboam loved Maachah the daughter of Absalom above all his
wives and his concubines: (for he took eighteen wives, and threescore
concubines; and begat twenty and eight sons, and threescore
daughters.)  11:22 And Rehoboam made Abijah the son of Maachah the
chief, to be ruler among his brethren: for he thought to make him
king.

11:23 And he dealt wisely, and dispersed of all his children
throughout all the countries of Judah and Benjamin, unto every fenced
city: and he gave them victual in abundance. And he desired many
wives.

12:1 And it came to pass, when Rehoboam had established the kingdom,
and had strengthened himself, he forsook the law of the LORD, and all
Israel with him.

12:2 And it came to pass, that in the fifth year of king Rehoboam
Shishak king of Egypt came up against Jerusalem, because they had
transgressed against the LORD, 12:3 With twelve hundred chariots, and
threescore thousand horsemen: and the people were without number that
came with him out of Egypt; the Lubims, the Sukkiims, and the
Ethiopians.

12:4 And he took the fenced cities which pertained to Judah, and came
to Jerusalem.

12:5 Then came Shemaiah the prophet to Rehoboam, and to the princes of
Judah, that were gathered together to Jerusalem because of Shishak,
and said unto them, Thus saith the LORD, Ye have forsaken me, and
therefore have I also left you in the hand of Shishak.

12:6 Whereupon the princes of Israel and the king humbled themselves;
and they said, The LORD is righteous.

12:7 And when the LORD saw that they humbled themselves, the word of
the LORD came to Shemaiah, saying, They have humbled themselves;
therefore I will not destroy them, but I will grant them some
deliverance; and my wrath shall not be poured out upon Jerusalem by
the hand of Shishak.

12:8 Nevertheless they shall be his servants; that they may know my
service, and the service of the kingdoms of the countries.

12:9 So Shishak king of Egypt came up against Jerusalem, and took away
the treasures of the house of the LORD, and the treasures of the
king's house; he took all: he carried away also the shields of gold
which Solomon had made.

12:10 Instead of which king Rehoboam made shields of brass, and
committed them to the hands of the chief of the guard, that kept the
entrance of the king's house.

12:11 And when the king entered into the house of the LORD, the guard
came and fetched them, and brought them again into the guard chamber.

12:12 And when he humbled himself, the wrath of the LORD turned from
him, that he would not destroy him altogether: and also in Judah
things went well.

12:13 So king Rehoboam strengthened himself in Jerusalem, and reigned:
for Rehoboam was one and forty years old when he began to reign, and
he reigned seventeen years in Jerusalem, the city which the LORD had
chosen out of all the tribes of Israel, to put his name there. And his
mother's name was Naamah an Ammonitess.

12:14 And he did evil, because he prepared not his heart to seek the
LORD.

12:15 Now the acts of Rehoboam, first and last, are they not written
in the book of Shemaiah the prophet, and of Iddo the seer concerning
genealogies? And there were wars between Rehoboam and Jeroboam
continually.

12:16 And Rehoboam slept with his fathers, and was buried in the city
of David: and Abijah his son reigned in his stead.

13:1 Now in the eighteenth year of king Jeroboam began Abijah to reign
over Judah.

13:2 He reigned three years in Jerusalem. His mother's name also was
Michaiah the daughter of Uriel of Gibeah. And there was war between
Abijah and Jeroboam.

13:3 And Abijah set the battle in array with an army of valiant men of
war, even four hundred thousand chosen men: Jeroboam also set the
battle in array against him with eight hundred thousand chosen men,
being mighty men of valour.

13:4 And Abijah stood up upon mount Zemaraim, which is in mount
Ephraim, and said, Hear me, thou Jeroboam, and all Israel; 13:5 Ought
ye not to know that the LORD God of Israel gave the kingdom over
Israel to David for ever, even to him and to his sons by a covenant of
salt?  13:6 Yet Jeroboam the son of Nebat, the servant of Solomon the
son of David, is risen up, and hath rebelled against his lord.

13:7 And there are gathered unto him vain men, the children of Belial,
and have strengthened themselves against Rehoboam the son of Solomon,
when Rehoboam was young and tenderhearted, and could not withstand
them.

13:8 And now ye think to withstand the kingdom of the LORD in the hand
of the sons of David; and ye be a great multitude, and there are with
your golden calves, which Jeroboam made you for gods.

13:9 Have ye not cast out the priests of the LORD, the sons of Aaron,
and the Levites, and have made you priests after the manner of the
nations of other lands? so that whosoever cometh to consecrate himself
with a young bullock and seven rams, the same may be a priest of them
that are no gods.

13:10 But as for us, the LORD is our God, and we have not forsaken
him; and the priests, which minister unto the LORD, are the sons of
Aaron, and the Levites wait upon their business: 13:11 And they burn
unto the LORD every morning and every evening burnt sacrifices and
sweet incense: the shewbread also set they in order upon the pure
table; and the candlestick of gold with the lamps thereof, to burn
every evening: for we keep the charge of the LORD our God; but ye have
forsaken him.

13:12 And, behold, God himself is with us for our captain, and his
priests with sounding trumpets to cry alarm against you. O children of
Israel, fight ye not against the LORD God of your fathers; for ye
shall not prosper.

13:13 But Jeroboam caused an ambushment to come about behind them: so
they were before Judah, and the ambushment was behind them.

13:14 And when Judah looked back, behold, the battle was before and
behind: and they cried unto the LORD, and the priests sounded with the
trumpets.

13:15 Then the men of Judah gave a shout: and as the men of Judah
shouted, it came to pass, that God smote Jeroboam and all Israel
before Abijah and Judah.

13:16 And the children of Israel fled before Judah: and God delivered
them into their hand.

13:17 And Abijah and his people slew them with a great slaughter: so
there fell down slain of Israel five hundred thousand chosen men.

13:18 Thus the children of Israel were brought under at that time, and
the children of Judah prevailed, because they relied upon the LORD God
of their fathers.

13:19 And Abijah pursued after Jeroboam, and took cities from him,
Bethel with the towns thereof, and Jeshanah with the towns thereof,
and Ephraim with the towns thereof.

13:20 Neither did Jeroboam recover strength again in the days of
Abijah: and the LORD struck him, and he died.

13:21 But Abijah waxed mighty, and married fourteen wives, and begat
twenty and two sons, and sixteen daughters.

13:22 And the rest of the acts of Abijah, and his ways, and his
sayings, are written in the story of the prophet Iddo.

14:1 So Abijah slept with his fathers, and they buried him in the city
of David: and Asa his son reigned in his stead. In his days the land
was quiet ten years.

14:2 And Asa did that which was good and right in the eyes of the LORD
his God: 14:3 For he took away the altars of the strange gods, and the
high places, and brake down the images, and cut down the groves: 14:4
And commanded Judah to seek the LORD God of their fathers, and to do
the law and the commandment.

14:5 Also he took away out of all the cities of Judah the high places
and the images: and the kingdom was quiet before him.

14:6 And he built fenced cities in Judah: for the land had rest, and
he had no war in those years; because the LORD had given him rest.

14:7 Therefore he said unto Judah, Let us build these cities, and make
about them walls, and towers, gates, and bars, while the land is yet
before us; because we have sought the LORD our God, we have sought
him, and he hath given us rest on every side. So they built and
prospered.

14:8 And Asa had an army of men that bare targets and spears, out of
Judah three hundred thousand; and out of Benjamin, that bare shields
and drew bows, two hundred and fourscore thousand: all these were
mighty men of valour.

14:9 And there came out against them Zerah the Ethiopian with an host
of a thousand thousand, and three hundred chariots; and came unto
Mareshah.

14:10 Then Asa went out against him, and they set the battle in array
in the valley of Zephathah at Mareshah.

14:11 And Asa cried unto the LORD his God, and said, LORD, it is
nothing with thee to help, whether with many, or with them that have
no power: help us, O LORD our God; for we rest on thee, and in thy
name we go against this multitude. O LORD, thou art our God; let no
man prevail against thee.

14:12 So the LORD smote the Ethiopians before Asa, and before Judah;
and the Ethiopians fled.

14:13 And Asa and the people that were with him pursued them unto
Gerar: and the Ethiopians were overthrown, that they could not recover
themselves; for they were destroyed before the LORD, and before his
host; and they carried away very much spoil.

14:14 And they smote all the cities round about Gerar; for the fear of
the LORD came upon them: and they spoiled all the cities; for there
was exceeding much spoil in them.

14:15 They smote also the tents of cattle, and carried away sheep and
camels in abundance, and returned to Jerusalem.

15:1 And the Spirit of God came upon Azariah the son of Oded: 15:2 And
he went out to meet Asa, and said unto him, Hear ye me, Asa, and all
Judah and Benjamin; The LORD is with you, while ye be with him; and if
ye seek him, he will be found of you; but if ye forsake him, he will
forsake you.

15:3 Now for a long season Israel hath been without the true God, and
without a teaching priest, and without law.

15:4 But when they in their trouble did turn unto the LORD God of
Israel, and sought him, he was found of them.

15:5 And in those times there was no peace to him that went out, nor
to him that came in, but great vexations were upon all the inhabitants
of the countries.

15:6 And nation was destroyed of nation, and city of city: for God did
vex them with all adversity.

15:7 Be ye strong therefore, and let not your hands be weak: for your
work shall be rewarded.

15:8 And when Asa heard these words, and the prophecy of Oded the
prophet, he took courage, and put away the abominable idols out of all
the land of Judah and Benjamin, and out of the cities which he had
taken from mount Ephraim, and renewed the altar of the LORD, that was
before the porch of the LORD.

15:9 And he gathered all Judah and Benjamin, and the strangers with
them out of Ephraim and Manasseh, and out of Simeon: for they fell to
him out of Israel in abundance, when they saw that the LORD his God
was with him.

15:10 So they gathered themselves together at Jerusalem in the third
month, in the fifteenth year of the reign of Asa.

15:11 And they offered unto the LORD the same time, of the spoil which
they had brought, seven hundred oxen and seven thousand sheep.

15:12 And they entered into a covenant to seek the LORD God of their
fathers with all their heart and with all their soul; 15:13 That
whosoever would not seek the LORD God of Israel should be put to
death, whether small or great, whether man or woman.

15:14 And they sware unto the LORD with a loud voice, and with
shouting, and with trumpets, and with cornets.

15:15 And all Judah rejoiced at the oath: for they had sworn with all
their heart, and sought him with their whole desire; and he was found
of them: and the LORD gave them rest round about.

15:16 And also concerning Maachah the mother of Asa the king, he
removed her from being queen, because she had made an idol in a grove:
and Asa cut down her idol, and stamped it, and burnt it at the brook
Kidron.

15:17 But the high places were not taken away out of Israel:
nevertheless the heart of Asa was perfect all his days.

15:18 And he brought into the house of God the things that his father
had dedicated, and that he himself had dedicated, silver, and gold,
and vessels.

15:19 And there was no more war unto the five and thirtieth year of
the reign of Asa.

16:1 In the six and thirtieth year of the reign of Asa Baasha king of
Israel came up against Judah, and built Ramah, to the intent that he
might let none go out or come in to Asa king of Judah.

16:2 Then Asa brought out silver and gold out of the treasures of the
house of the LORD and of the king's house, and sent to Benhadad king
of Syria, that dwelt at Damascus, saying, 16:3 There is a league
between me and thee, as there was between my father and thy father:
behold, I have sent thee silver and gold; go, break thy league with
Baasha king of Israel, that he may depart from me.

16:4 And Benhadad hearkened unto king Asa, and sent the captains of
his armies against the cities of Israel; and they smote Ijon, and Dan,
and Abelmaim, and all the store cities of Naphtali.

16:5 And it came to pass, when Baasha heard it, that he left off
building of Ramah, and let his work cease.

16:6 Then Asa the king took all Judah; and they carried away the
stones of Ramah, and the timber thereof, wherewith Baasha was
building; and he built therewith Geba and Mizpah.

16:7 And at that time Hanani the seer came to Asa king of Judah, and
said unto him, Because thou hast relied on the king of Syria, and not
relied on the LORD thy God, therefore is the host of the king of Syria
escaped out of thine hand.

16:8 Were not the Ethiopians and the Lubims a huge host, with very
many chariots and horsemen? yet, because thou didst rely on the LORD,
he delivered them into thine hand.

16:9 For the eyes of the LORD run to and fro throughout the whole
earth, to shew himself strong in the behalf of them whose heart is
perfect toward him. Herein thou hast done foolishly: therefore from
henceforth thou shalt have wars.

16:10 Then Asa was wroth with the seer, and put him in a prison house;
for he was in a rage with him because of this thing. And Asa oppressed
some of the people the same time.

16:11 And, behold, the acts of Asa, first and last, lo, they are
written in the book of the kings of Judah and Israel.

16:12 And Asa in the thirty and ninth year of his reign was diseased
in his feet, until his disease was exceeding great: yet in his disease
he sought not to the LORD, but to the physicians.

16:13 And Asa slept with his fathers, and died in the one and fortieth
year of his reign.

16:14 And they buried him in his own sepulchres, which he had made for
himself in the city of David, and laid him in the bed which was filled
with sweet odours and divers kinds of spices prepared by the
apothecaries' art: and they made a very great burning for him.

17:1 And Jehoshaphat his son reigned in his stead, and strengthened
himself against Israel.

17:2 And he placed forces in all the fenced cities of Judah, and set
garrisons in the land of Judah, and in the cities of Ephraim, which
Asa his father had taken.

17:3 And the LORD was with Jehoshaphat, because he walked in the first
ways of his father David, and sought not unto Baalim; 17:4 But sought
to the Lord God of his father, and walked in his commandments, and not
after the doings of Israel.

17:5 Therefore the LORD stablished the kingdom in his hand; and all
Judah brought to Jehoshaphat presents; and he had riches and honour in
abundance.

17:6 And his heart was lifted up in the ways of the LORD: moreover he
took away the high places and groves out of Judah.

17:7 Also in the third year of his reign he sent to his princes, even
to Benhail, and to Obadiah, and to Zechariah, and to Nethaneel, and to
Michaiah, to teach in the cities of Judah.

17:8 And with them he sent Levites, even Shemaiah, and Nethaniah, and
Zebadiah, and Asahel, and Shemiramoth, and Jehonathan, and Adonijah,
and Tobijah, and Tobadonijah, Levites; and with them Elishama and
Jehoram, priests.

17:9 And they taught in Judah, and had the book of the law of the LORD
with them, and went about throughout all the cities of Judah, and
taught the people.

17:10 And the fear of the LORD fell upon all the kingdoms of the lands
that were round about Judah, so that they made no war against
Jehoshaphat.

17:11 Also some of the Philistines brought Jehoshaphat presents, and
tribute silver; and the Arabians brought him flocks, seven thousand
and seven hundred rams, and seven thousand and seven hundred he goats.

17:12 And Jehoshaphat waxed great exceedingly; and he built in Judah
castles, and cities of store.

17:13 And he had much business in the cities of Judah: and the men of
war, mighty men of valour, were in Jerusalem.

17:14 And these are the numbers of them according to the house of
their fathers: Of Judah, the captains of thousands; Adnah the chief,
and with him mighty men of valour three hundred thousand.

17:15 And next to him was Jehohanan the captain, and with him two
hundred and fourscore thousand.

17:16 And next him was Amasiah the son of Zichri, who willingly
offered himself unto the LORD; and with him two hundred thousand
mighty men of valour.

17:17 And of Benjamin; Eliada a mighty man of valour, and with him
armed men with bow and shield two hundred thousand.

17:18 And next him was Jehozabad, and with him an hundred and
fourscore thousand ready prepared for the war.

17:19 These waited on the king, beside those whom the king put in the
fenced cities throughout all Judah.

18:1 Now Jehoshaphat had riches and honour in abundance, and joined
affinity with Ahab.

18:2 And after certain years he went down to Ahab to Samaria. And Ahab
killed sheep and oxen for him in abundance, and for the people that he
had with him, and persuaded him to go up with him to Ramothgilead.

18:3 And Ahab king of Israel said unto Jehoshaphat king of Judah, Wilt
thou go with me to Ramothgilead? And he answered him, I am as thou
art, and my people as thy people; and we will be with thee in the war.

18:4 And Jehoshaphat said unto the king of Israel, Enquire, I pray
thee, at the word of the LORD to day.

18:5 Therefore the king of Israel gathered together of prophets four
hundred men, and said unto them, Shall we go to Ramothgilead to
battle, or shall I forbear? And they said, Go up; for God will deliver
it into the king's hand.

18:6 But Jehoshaphat said, Is there not here a prophet of the LORD
besides, that we might enquire of him?  18:7 And the king of Israel
said unto Jehoshaphat, There is yet one man, by whom we may enquire of
the LORD: but I hate him; for he never prophesied good unto me, but
always evil: the same is Micaiah the son of Imla. And Jehoshaphat
said, Let not the king say so.

18:8 And the king of Israel called for one of his officers, and said,
Fetch quickly Micaiah the son of Imla.

18:9 And the king of Israel and Jehoshaphat king of Judah sat either
of them on his throne, clothed in their robes, and they sat in a void
place at the entering in of the gate of Samaria; and all the prophets
prophesied before them.

18:10 And Zedekiah the son of Chenaanah had made him horns of iron,
and said, Thus saith the LORD, With these thou shalt push Syria until
they be consumed.

18:11 And all the prophets prophesied so, saying, Go up to
Ramothgilead, and prosper: for the LORD shall deliver it into the hand
of the king.

18:12 And the messenger that went to call Micaiah spake to him,
saying, Behold, the words of the prophets declare good to the king
with one assent; let thy word therefore, I pray thee, be like one of
their's, and speak thou good.

18:13 And Micaiah said, As the LORD liveth, even what my God saith,
that will I speak.

18:14 And when he was come to the king, the king said unto him,
Micaiah, shall we go to Ramothgilead to battle, or shall I forbear?
And he said, Go ye up, and prosper, and they shall be delivered into
your hand.

18:15 And the king said to him, How many times shall I adjure thee
that thou say nothing but the truth to me in the name of the LORD?
18:16 Then he said, I did see all Israel scattered upon the mountains,
as sheep that have no shepherd: and the LORD said, These have no
master; let them return therefore every man to his house in peace.

18:17 And the king of Israel said to Jehoshaphat, Did I not tell thee
that he would not prophesy good unto me, but evil?  18:18 Again he
said, Therefore hear the word of the LORD; I saw the LORD sitting upon
his throne, and all the host of heaven standing on his right hand and
on his left.

18:19 And the LORD said, Who shall entice Ahab king of Israel, that he
may go up and fall at Ramothgilead? And one spake saying after this
manner, and another saying after that manner.

18:20 Then there came out a spirit, and stood before the LORD, and
said, I will entice him. And the LORD said unto him, Wherewith?  18:21
And he said, I will go out, and be a lying spirit in the mouth of all
his prophets. And the Lord said, Thou shalt entice him, and thou shalt
also prevail: go out, and do even so.

18:22 Now therefore, behold, the LORD hath put a lying spirit in the
mouth of these thy prophets, and the LORD hath spoken evil against
thee.

18:23 Then Zedekiah the son of Chenaanah came near, and smote Micaiah
upon the cheek, and said, Which way went the Spirit of the LORD from
me to speak unto thee?  18:24 And Micaiah said, Behold, thou shalt see
on that day when thou shalt go into an inner chamber to hide thyself.

18:25 Then the king of Israel said, Take ye Micaiah, and carry him
back to Amon the governor of the city, and to Joash the king's son;
18:26 And say, Thus saith the king, Put this fellow in the prison, and
feed him with bread of affliction and with water of affliction, until
I return in peace.

18:27 And Micaiah said, If thou certainly return in peace, then hath
not the LORD spoken by me. And he said, Hearken, all ye people.

18:28 So the king of Israel and Jehoshaphat the king of Judah went up
to Ramothgilead.

18:29 And the king of Israel said unto Jehoshaphat, I will disguise
myself, and I will go to the battle; but put thou on thy robes. So the
king of Israel disguised himself; and they went to the battle.

18:30 Now the king of Syria had commanded the captains of the chariots
that were with him, saying, Fight ye not with small or great, save
only with the king of Israel.

18:31 And it came to pass, when the captains of the chariots saw
Jehoshaphat, that they said, It is the king of Israel. Therefore they
compassed about him to fight: but Jehoshaphat cried out, and the LORD
helped him; and God moved them to depart from him.

18:32 For it came to pass, that, when the captains of the chariots
perceived that it was not the king of Israel, they turned back again
from pursuing him.

18:33 And a certain man drew a bow at a venture, and smote the king of
Israel between the joints of the harness: therefore he said to his
chariot man, Turn thine hand, that thou mayest carry me out of the
host; for I am wounded.

18:34 And the battle increased that day: howbeit the king of Israel
stayed himself up in his chariot against the Syrians until the even:
and about the time of the sun going down he died.

19:1 And Jehoshaphat the king of Judah returned to his house in peace
to Jerusalem.

19:2 And Jehu the son of Hanani the seer went out to meet him, and
said to king Jehoshaphat, Shouldest thou help the ungodly, and love
them that hate the LORD? therefore is wrath upon thee from before the
LORD.

19:3 Nevertheless there are good things found in thee, in that thou
hast taken away the groves out of the land, and hast prepared thine
heart to seek God.

19:4 And Jehoshaphat dwelt at Jerusalem: and he went out again through
the people from Beersheba to mount Ephraim, and brought them back unto
the LORD God of their fathers.

19:5 And he set judges in the land throughout all the fenced cities of
Judah, city by city, 19:6 And said to the judges, Take heed what ye
do: for ye judge not for man, but for the LORD, who is with you in the
judgment.

19:7 Wherefore now let the fear of the LORD be upon you; take heed and
do it: for there is no iniquity with the LORD our God, nor respect of
persons, nor taking of gifts.

19:8 Moreover in Jerusalem did Jehoshaphat set of the Levites, and of
the priests, and of the chief of the fathers of Israel, for the
judgment of the LORD, and for controversies, when they returned to
Jerusalem.

19:9 And he charged them, saying, Thus shall ye do in the fear of the
LORD, faithfully, and with a perfect heart.

19:10 And what cause soever shall come to you of your brethren that
dwell in your cities, between blood and blood, between law and
commandment, statutes and judgments, ye shall even warn them that they
trespass not against the LORD, and so wrath come upon you, and upon
your brethren: this do, and ye shall not trespass.

19:11 And, behold, Amariah the chief priest is over you in all matters
of the LORD; and Zebadiah the son of Ishmael, the ruler of the house
of Judah, for all the king's matters: also the Levites shall be
officers before you. Deal courageously, and the LORD shall be with the
good.

20:1 It came to pass after this also, that the children of Moab, and
the children of Ammon, and with them other beside the Ammonites, came
against Jehoshaphat to battle.

20:2 Then there came some that told Jehoshaphat, saying, There cometh
a great multitude against thee from beyond the sea on this side Syria;
and, behold, they be in Hazazontamar, which is Engedi.

20:3 And Jehoshaphat feared, and set himself to seek the LORD, and
proclaimed a fast throughout all Judah.

20:4 And Judah gathered themselves together, to ask help of the LORD:
even out of all the cities of Judah they came to seek the LORD.

20:5 And Jehoshaphat stood in the congregation of Judah and Jerusalem,
in the house of the LORD, before the new court, 20:6 And said, O LORD
God of our fathers, art not thou God in heaven? and rulest not thou
over all the kingdoms of the heathen? and in thine hand is there not
power and might, so that none is able to withstand thee?  20:7 Art not
thou our God, who didst drive out the inhabitants of this land before
thy people Israel, and gavest it to the seed of Abraham thy friend for
ever?  20:8 And they dwelt therein, and have built thee a sanctuary
therein for thy name, saying, 20:9 If, when evil cometh upon us, as
the sword, judgment, or pestilence, or famine, we stand before this
house, and in thy presence, (for thy name is in this house,) and cry
unto thee in our affliction, then thou wilt hear and help.

20:10 And now, behold, the children of Ammon and Moab and mount Seir,
whom thou wouldest not let Israel invade, when they came out of the
land of Egypt, but they turned from them, and destroyed them not;
20:11 Behold, I say, how they reward us, to come to cast us out of thy
possession, which thou hast given us to inherit.

20:12 O our God, wilt thou not judge them? for we have no might
against this great company that cometh against us; neither know we
what to do: but our eyes are upon thee.

20:13 And all Judah stood before the LORD, with their little ones,
their wives, and their children.

20:14 Then upon Jahaziel the son of Zechariah, the son of Benaiah, the
son of Jeiel, the son of Mattaniah, a Levite of the sons of Asaph,
came the Spirit of the LORD in the midst of the congregation; 20:15
And he said, Hearken ye, all Judah, and ye inhabitants of Jerusalem,
and thou king Jehoshaphat, Thus saith the LORD unto you, Be not afraid
nor dismayed by reason of this great multitude; for the battle is not
yours, but God's.

20:16 To morrow go ye down against them: behold, they come up by the
cliff of Ziz; and ye shall find them at the end of the brook, before
the wilderness of Jeruel.

20:17 Ye shall not need to fight in this battle: set yourselves, stand
ye still, and see the salvation of the LORD with you, O Judah and
Jerusalem: fear not, nor be dismayed; to morrow go out against them:
for the LORD will be with you.

20:18 And Jehoshaphat bowed his head with his face to the ground: and
all Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem fell before the LORD,
worshipping the LORD.

20:19 And the Levites, of the children of the Kohathites, and of the
children of the Korhites, stood up to praise the LORD God of Israel
with a loud voice on high.

20:20 And they rose early in the morning, and went forth into the
wilderness of Tekoa: and as they went forth, Jehoshaphat stood and
said, Hear me, O Judah, and ye inhabitants of Jerusalem; Believe in
the LORD your God, so shall ye be established; believe his prophets,
so shall ye prosper.

20:21 And when he had consulted with the people, he appointed singers
unto the LORD, and that should praise the beauty of holiness, as they
went out before the army, and to say, Praise the LORD; for his mercy
endureth for ever.

20:22 And when they began to sing and to praise, the LORD set
ambushments against the children of Ammon, Moab, and mount Seir, which
were come against Judah; and they were smitten.

20:23 For the children of Ammon and Moab stood up against the
inhabitants of mount Seir, utterly to slay and destroy them: and when
they had made an end of the inhabitants of Seir, every one helped to
destroy another.

20:24 And when Judah came toward the watch tower in the wilderness,
they looked unto the multitude, and, behold, they were dead bodies
fallen to the earth, and none escaped.

20:25 And when Jehoshaphat and his people came to take away the spoil
of them, they found among them in abundance both riches with the dead
bodies, and precious jewels, which they stripped off for themselves,
more than they could carry away: and they were three days in gathering
of the spoil, it was so much.

20:26 And on the fourth day they assembled themselves in the valley of
Berachah; for there they blessed the LORD: therefore the name of the
same place was called, The valley of Berachah, unto this day.

20:27 Then they returned, every man of Judah and Jerusalem, and
Jehoshaphat in the forefront of them, to go again to Jerusalem with
joy; for the LORD had made them to rejoice over their enemies.

20:28 And they came to Jerusalem with psalteries and harps and
trumpets unto the house of the LORD.

20:29 And the fear of God was on all the kingdoms of those countries,
when they had heard that the LORD fought against the enemies of
Israel.

20:30 So the realm of Jehoshaphat was quiet: for his God gave him rest
round about.

20:31 And Jehoshaphat reigned over Judah: he was thirty and five years
old when he began to reign, and he reigned twenty and five years in
Jerusalem.

And his mother's name was Azubah the daughter of Shilhi.

20:32 And he walked in the way of Asa his father, and departed not
from it, doing that which was right in the sight of the LORD.

20:33 Howbeit the high places were not taken away: for as yet the
people had not prepared their hearts unto the God of their fathers.

20:34 Now the rest of the acts of Jehoshaphat, first and last, behold,
they are written in the book of Jehu the son of Hanani, who is
mentioned in the book of the kings of Israel.

20:35 And after this did Jehoshaphat king of Judah join himself with
Ahaziah king of Israel, who did very wickedly: 20:36 And he joined
himself with him to make ships to go to Tarshish: and they made the
ships in Eziongaber.

20:37 Then Eliezer the son of Dodavah of Mareshah prophesied against
Jehoshaphat, saying, Because thou hast joined thyself with Ahaziah,
the LORD hath broken thy works. And the ships were broken, that they
were not able to go to Tarshish.

21:1 Now Jehoshaphat slept with his fathers, and was buried with his
fathers in the city of David. And Jehoram his son reigned in his
stead.

21:2 And he had brethren the sons of Jehoshaphat, Azariah, and Jehiel,
and Zechariah, and Azariah, and Michael, and Shephatiah: all these
were the sons of Jehoshaphat king of Israel.

21:3 And their father gave them great gifts of silver, and of gold,
and of precious things, with fenced cities in Judah: but the kingdom
gave he to Jehoram; because he was the firstborn.

21:4 Now when Jehoram was risen up to the kingdom of his father, he
strengthened himself, and slew all his brethren with the sword, and
divers also of the princes of Israel.

21:5 Jehoram was thirty and two years old when he began to reign, and
he reigned eight years in Jerusalem.

21:6 And he walked in the way of the kings of Israel, like as did the
house of Ahab: for he had the daughter of Ahab to wife: and he wrought
that which was evil in the eyes of the LORD.

21:7 Howbeit the LORD would not destroy the house of David, because of
the covenant that he had made with David, and as he promised to give a
light to him and to his sons for ever.

21:8 In his days the Edomites revolted from under the dominion of
Judah, and made themselves a king.

21:9 Then Jehoram went forth with his princes, and all his chariots
with him: and he rose up by night, and smote the Edomites which
compassed him in, and the captains of the chariots.

21:10 So the Edomites revolted from under the hand of Judah unto this
day.

The same time also did Libnah revolt from under his hand; because he
had forsaken the LORD God of his fathers.

21:11 Moreover he made high places in the mountains of Judah and
caused the inhabitants of Jerusalem to commit fornication, and
compelled Judah thereto.

21:12 And there came a writing to him from Elijah the prophet, saying,
Thus saith the LORD God of David thy father, Because thou hast not
walked in the ways of Jehoshaphat thy father, nor in the ways of Asa
king of Judah, 21:13 But hast walked in the way of the kings of
Israel, and hast made Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem to go a
whoring, like to the whoredoms of the house of Ahab, and also hast
slain thy brethren of thy father's house, which were better than
thyself: 21:14 Behold, with a great plague will the LORD smite thy
people, and thy children, and thy wives, and all thy goods: 21:15 And
thou shalt have great sickness by disease of thy bowels, until thy
bowels fall out by reason of the sickness day by day.

21:16 Moreover the LORD stirred up against Jehoram the spirit of the
Philistines, and of the Arabians, that were near the Ethiopians: 21:17
And they came up into Judah, and brake into it, and carried away all
the substance that was found in the king's house, and his sons also,
and his wives; so that there was never a son left him, save Jehoahaz,
the youngest of his sons.

21:18 And after all this the LORD smote him in his bowels with an
incurable disease.

21:19 And it came to pass, that in process of time, after the end of
two years, his bowels fell out by reason of his sickness: so he died
of sore diseases. And his people made no burning for him, like the
burning of his fathers.

21:20 Thirty and two years old was he when he began to reign, and he
reigned in Jerusalem eight years, and departed without being desired.
Howbeit they buried him in the city of David, but not in the
sepulchres of the kings.

22:1 And the inhabitants of Jerusalem made Ahaziah his youngest son
king in his stead: for the band of men that came with the Arabians to
the camp had slain all the eldest. So Ahaziah the son of Jehoram king
of Judah reigned.

22:2 Forty and two years old was Ahaziah when he began to reign, and
he reigned one year in Jerusalem. His mother's name also was Athaliah
the daughter of Omri.

22:3 He also walked in the ways of the house of Ahab: for his mother
was his counsellor to do wickedly.

22:4 Wherefore he did evil in the sight of the LORD like the house of
Ahab: for they were his counsellors after the death of his father to
his destruction.

22:5 He walked also after their counsel, and went with Jehoram the son
of Ahab king of Israel to war against Hazael king of Syria at
Ramothgilead: and the Syrians smote Joram.

22:6 And he returned to be healed in Jezreel because of the wounds
which were given him at Ramah, when he fought with Hazael king of
Syria. And Azariah the son of Jehoram king of Judah went down to see
Jehoram the son of Ahab at Jezreel, because he was sick.

22:7 And the destruction of Ahaziah was of God by coming to Joram: for
when he was come, he went out with Jehoram against Jehu the son of
Nimshi, whom the LORD had anointed to cut off the house of Ahab.

22:8 And it came to pass, that, when Jehu was executing judgment upon
the house of Ahab, and found the princes of Judah, and the sons of the
brethren of Ahaziah, that ministered to Ahaziah, he slew them.

22:9 And he sought Ahaziah: and they caught him, (for he was hid in
Samaria,) and brought him to Jehu: and when they had slain him, they
buried him: Because, said they, he is the son of Jehoshaphat, who
sought the LORD with all his heart. So the house of Ahaziah had no
power to keep still the kingdom.

22:10 But when Athaliah the mother of Ahaziah saw that her son was
dead, she arose and destroyed all the seed royal of the house of
Judah.

22:11 But Jehoshabeath, the daughter of the king, took Joash the son
of Ahaziah, and stole him from among the king's sons that were slain,
and put him and his nurse in a bedchamber. So Jehoshabeath, the
daughter of king Jehoram, the wife of Jehoiada the priest, (for she
was the sister of Ahaziah,) hid him from Athaliah, so that she slew
him not.

22:12 And he was with them hid in the house of God six years: and
Athaliah reigned over the land.

23:1 And in the seventh year Jehoiada strengthened himself, and took
the captains of hundreds, Azariah the son of Jeroham, and Ishmael the
son of Jehohanan, and Azariah the son of Obed, and Maaseiah the son of
Adaiah, and Elishaphat the son of Zichri, into covenant with him.

23:2 And they went about in Judah, and gathered the Levites out of all
the cities of Judah, and the chief of the fathers of Israel, and they
came to Jerusalem.

23:3 And all the congregation made a covenant with the king in the
house of God. And he said unto them, Behold, the king's son shall
reign, as the LORD hath said of the sons of David.

23:4 This is the thing that ye shall do; A third part of you entering
on the sabbath, of the priests and of the Levites, shall be porters of
the doors; 23:5 And a third part shall be at the king's house; and a
third part at the gate of the foundation: and all the people shall be
in the courts of the house of the LORD.

23:6 But let none come into the house of the LORD, save the priests,
and they that minister of the Levites; they shall go in, for they are
holy: but all the people shall keep the watch of the LORD.

23:7 And the Levites shall compass the king round about, every man
with his weapons in his hand; and whosoever else cometh into the
house, he shall be put to death: but be ye with the king when he
cometh in, and when he goeth out.

23:8 So the Levites and all Judah did according to all things that
Jehoiada the priest had commanded, and took every man his men that
were to come in on the sabbath, with them that were to go out on the
sabbath: for Jehoiada the priest dismissed not the courses.

23:9 Moreover Jehoiada the priest delivered to the captains of
hundreds spears, and bucklers, and shields, that had been king
David's, which were in the house of God.

23:10 And he set all the people, every man having his weapon in his
hand, from the right side of the temple to the left side of the
temple, along by the altar and the temple, by the king round about.

23:11 Then they brought out the king's son, and put upon him the
crown, and gave him the testimony, and made him king. And Jehoiada and
his sons anointed him, and said, God save the king.

23:12 Now when Athaliah heard the noise of the people running and
praising the king, she came to the people into the house of the LORD:
23:13 And she looked, and, behold, the king stood at his pillar at the
entering in, and the princes and the trumpets by the king: and all the
people of the land rejoiced, and sounded with trumpets, also the
singers with instruments of musick, and such as taught to sing praise.
Then Athaliah rent her clothes, and said, Treason, Treason.

23:14 Then Jehoiada the priest brought out the captains of hundreds
that were set over the host, and said unto them, Have her forth of the
ranges: and whoso followeth her, let him be slain with the sword. For
the priest said, Slay her not in the house of the LORD.

23:15 So they laid hands on her; and when she was come to the entering
of the horse gate by the king's house, they slew her there.

23:16 And Jehoiada made a covenant between him, and between all the
people, and between the king, that they should be the LORD's people.

23:17 Then all the people went to the house of Baal, and brake it
down, and brake his altars and his images in pieces, and slew Mattan
the priest of Baal before the altars.

23:18 Also Jehoiada appointed the offices of the house of the LORD by
the hand of the priests the Levites, whom David had distributed in the
house of the LORD, to offer the burnt offerings of the LORD, as it is
written in the law of Moses, with rejoicing and with singing, as it
was ordained by David.

23:19 And he set the porters at the gates of the house of the LORD,
that none which was unclean in any thing should enter in.

23:20 And he took the captains of hundreds, and the nobles, and the
governors of the people, and all the people of the land, and brought
down the king from the house of the LORD: and they came through the
high gate into the king's house, and set the king upon the throne of
the kingdom.

23:21 And all the people of the land rejoiced: and the city was quiet,
after that they had slain Athaliah with the sword.

24:1 Joash was seven years old when he began to reign, and he reigned
forty years in Jerusalem. His mother's name also was Zibiah of
Beersheba.

24:2 And Joash did that which was right in the sight of the LORD all
the days of Jehoiada the priest.

24:3 And Jehoiada took for him two wives; and he begat sons and
daughters.

24:4 And it came to pass after this, that Joash was minded to repair
the house of the LORD.

24:5 And he gathered together the priests and the Levites, and said to
them, Go out unto the cities of Judah, and gather of all Israel money
to repair the house of your God from year to year, and see that ye
hasten the matter. Howbeit the Levites hastened it not.

24:6 And the king called for Jehoiada the chief, and said unto him,
Why hast thou not required of the Levites to bring in out of Judah and
out of Jerusalem the collection, according to the commandment of Moses
the servant of the LORD, and of the congregation of Israel, for the
tabernacle of witness?  24:7 For the sons of Athaliah, that wicked
woman, had broken up the house of God; and also all the dedicated
things of the house of the LORD did they bestow upon Baalim.

24:8 And at the king's commandment they made a chest, and set it
without at the gate of the house of the LORD.

24:9 And they made a proclamation through Judah and Jerusalem, to
bring in to the LORD the collection that Moses the servant of God laid
upon Israel in the wilderness.

24:10 And all the princes and all the people rejoiced, and brought in,
and cast into the chest, until they had made an end.

24:11 Now it came to pass, that at what time the chest was brought
unto the king's office by the hand of the Levites, and when they saw
that there was much money, the king's scribe and the high priest's
officer came and emptied the chest, and took it, and carried it to his
place again. Thus they did day by day, and gathered money in
abundance.

24:12 And the king and Jehoiada gave it to such as did the work of the
service of the house of the LORD, and hired masons and carpenters to
repair the house of the LORD, and also such as wrought iron and brass
to mend the house of the LORD.

24:13 So the workmen wrought, and the work was perfected by them, and
they set the house of God in his state, and strengthened it.

24:14 And when they had finished it, they brought the rest of the
money before the king and Jehoiada, whereof were made vessels for the
house of the LORD, even vessels to minister, and to offer withal, and
spoons, and vessels of gold and silver. And they offered burnt
offerings in the house of the LORD continually all the days of
Jehoiada.

24:15 But Jehoiada waxed old, and was full of days when he died; an
hundred and thirty years old was he when he died.

24:16 And they buried him in the city of David among the kings,
because he had done good in Israel, both toward God, and toward his
house.

24:17 Now after the death of Jehoiada came the princes of Judah, and
made obeisance to the king. Then the king hearkened unto them.

24:18 And they left the house of the LORD God of their fathers, and
served groves and idols: and wrath came upon Judah and Jerusalem for
this their trespass.

24:19 Yet he sent prophets to them, to bring them again unto the LORD;
and they testified against them: but they would not give ear.

24:20 And the Spirit of God came upon Zechariah the son of Jehoiada
the priest, which stood above the people, and said unto them, Thus
saith God, Why transgress ye the commandments of the LORD, that ye
cannot prosper? because ye have forsaken the LORD, he hath also
forsaken you.

24:21 And they conspired against him, and stoned him with stones at
the commandment of the king in the court of the house of the LORD.

24:22 Thus Joash the king remembered not the kindness which Jehoiada
his father had done to him, but slew his son. And when he died, he
said, The LORD look upon it, and require it.

24:23 And it came to pass at the end of the year, that the host of
Syria came up against him: and they came to Judah and Jerusalem, and
destroyed all the princes of the people from among the people, and
sent all the spoil of them unto the king of Damascus.

24:24 For the army of the Syrians came with a small company of men,
and the LORD delivered a very great host into their hand, because they
had forsaken the LORD God of their fathers. So they executed judgment
against Joash.

24:25 And when they were departed from him, (for they left him in
great diseases,) his own servants conspired against him for the blood
of the sons of Jehoiada the priest, and slew him on his bed, and he
died: and they buried him in the city of David, but they buried him
not in the sepulchres of the kings.

24:26 And these are they that conspired against him; Zabad the son of
Shimeath an Ammonitess, and Jehozabad the son of Shimrith a Moabitess.

24:27 Now concerning his sons, and the greatness of the burdens laid
upon him, and the repairing of the house of God, behold, they are
written in the story of the book of the kings. And Amaziah his son
reigned in his stead.

25:1 Amaziah was twenty and five years old when he began to reign, and
he reigned twenty and nine years in Jerusalem. And his mother's name
was Jehoaddan of Jerusalem.

25:2 And he did that which was right in the sight of the LORD, but not
with a perfect heart.

25:3 Now it came to pass, when the kingdom was established to him,
that he slew his servants that had killed the king his father.

25:4 But he slew not their children, but did as it is written in the
law in the book of Moses, where the LORD commanded, saying, The
fathers shall not die for the children, neither shall the children die
for the fathers, but every man shall die for his own sin.

25:5 Moreover Amaziah gathered Judah together, and made them captains
over thousands, and captains over hundreds, according to the houses of
their fathers, throughout all Judah and Benjamin: and he numbered them
from twenty years old and above, and found them three hundred thousand
choice men, able to go forth to war, that could handle spear and
shield.

25:6 He hired also an hundred thousand mighty men of valour out of
Israel for an hundred talents of silver.

25:7 But there came a man of God to him, saying, O king, let not the
army of Israel go with thee; for the LORD is not with Israel, to wit,
with all the children of Ephraim.

25:8 But if thou wilt go, do it; be strong for the battle: God shall
make thee fall before the enemy: for God hath power to help, and to
cast down.

25:9 And Amaziah said to the man of God, But what shall we do for the
hundred talents which I have given to the army of Israel? And the man
of God answered, The LORD is able to give thee much more than this.

25:10 Then Amaziah separated them, to wit, the army that was come to
him out of Ephraim, to go home again: wherefore their anger was
greatly kindled against Judah, and they returned home in great anger.

25:11 And Amaziah strengthened himself, and led forth his people, and
went to the valley of salt, and smote of the children of Seir ten
thousand.

25:12 And other ten thousand left alive did the children of Judah
carry away captive, and brought them unto the top of the rock, and
cast them down from the top of the rock, that they all were broken in
pieces.

25:13 But the soldiers of the army which Amaziah sent back, that they
should not go with him to battle, fell upon the cities of Judah, from
Samaria even unto Bethhoron, and smote three thousand of them, and
took much spoil.

25:14 Now it came to pass, after that Amaziah was come from the
slaughter of the Edomites, that he brought the gods of the children of
Seir, and set them up to be his gods, and bowed down himself before
them, and burned incense unto them.

25:15 Wherefore the anger of the LORD was kindled against Amaziah, and
he sent unto him a prophet, which said unto him, Why hast thou sought
after the gods of the people, which could not deliver their own people
out of thine hand?  25:16 And it came to pass, as he talked with him,
that the king said unto him, Art thou made of the king's counsel?
forbear; why shouldest thou be smitten? Then the prophet forbare, and
said, I know that God hath determined to destroy thee, because thou
hast done this, and hast not hearkened unto my counsel.

25:17 Then Amaziah king of Judah took advice, and sent to Joash, the
son of Jehoahaz, the son of Jehu, king of Israel, saying, Come, let us
see one another in the face.

25:18 And Joash king of Israel sent to Amaziah king of Judah, saying,
The thistle that was in Lebanon sent to the cedar that was in Lebanon,
saying, Give thy daughter to my son to wife: and there passed by a
wild beast that was in Lebanon, and trode down the thistle.

25:19 Thou sayest, Lo, thou hast smitten the Edomites; and thine heart
lifteth thee up to boast: abide now at home; why shouldest thou meddle
to thine hurt, that thou shouldest fall, even thou, and Judah with
thee?  25:20 But Amaziah would not hear; for it came of God, that he
might deliver them into the hand of their enemies, because they sought
after the gods of Edom.

25:21 So Joash the king of Israel went up; and they saw one another in
the face, both he and Amaziah king of Judah, at Bethshemesh, which
belongeth to Judah.

25:22 And Judah was put to the worse before Israel, and they fled
every man to his tent.

25:23 And Joash the king of Israel took Amaziah king of Judah, the son
of Joash, the son of Jehoahaz, at Bethshemesh, and brought him to
Jerusalem, and brake down the wall of Jerusalem from the gate of
Ephraim to the corner gate, four hundred cubits.

25:24 And he took all the gold and the silver, and all the vessels
that were found in the house of God with Obededom, and the treasures
of the king's house, the hostages also, and returned to Samaria.

25:25 And Amaziah the son of Joash king of Judah lived after the death
of Joash son of Jehoahaz king of Israel fifteen years.

25:26 Now the rest of the acts of Amaziah, first and last, behold, are
they not written in the book of the kings of Judah and Israel?  25:27
Now after the time that Amaziah did turn away from following the LORD
they made a conspiracy against him in Jerusalem; and he fled to
Lachish: but they sent to Lachish after him, and slew him there.

25:28 And they brought him upon horses, and buried him with his
fathers in the city of Judah.

26:1 Then all the people of Judah took Uzziah, who was sixteen years
old, and made him king in the room of his father Amaziah.

26:2 He built Eloth, and restored it to Judah, after that the king
slept with his fathers.

26:3 Sixteen years old was Uzziah when he began to reign, and he
reigned fifty and two years in Jerusalem. His mother's name also was
Jecoliah of Jerusalem.

26:4 And he did that which was right in the sight of the LORD,
according to all that his father Amaziah did.

26:5 And he sought God in the days of Zechariah, who had understanding
in the visions of God: and as long as he sought the LORD, God made him
to prosper.

26:6 And he went forth and warred against the Philistines, and brake
down the wall of Gath, and the wall of Jabneh, and the wall of Ashdod,
and built cities about Ashdod, and among the Philistines.

26:7 And God helped him against the Philistines, and against the
Arabians that dwelt in Gurbaal, and the Mehunims.

26:8 And the Ammonites gave gifts to Uzziah: and his name spread
abroad even to the entering in of Egypt; for he strengthened himself
exceedingly.

26:9 Moreover Uzziah built towers in Jerusalem at the corner gate, and
at the valley gate, and at the turning of the wall, and fortified
them.

26:10 Also he built towers in the desert, and digged many wells: for
he had much cattle, both in the low country, and in the plains:
husbandmen also, and vine dressers in the mountains, and in Carmel:
for he loved husbandry.

26:11 Moreover Uzziah had an host of fighting men, that went out to
war by bands, according to the number of their account by the hand of
Jeiel the scribe and Maaseiah the ruler, under the hand of Hananiah,
one of the king's captains.

26:12 The whole number of the chief of the fathers of the mighty men
of valour were two thousand and six hundred.

26:13 And under their hand was an army, three hundred thousand and
seven thousand and five hundred, that made war with mighty power, to
help the king against the enemy.

26:14 And Uzziah prepared for them throughout all the host shields,
and spears, and helmets, and habergeons, and bows, and slings to cast
stones.

26:15 And he made in Jerusalem engines, invented by cunning men, to be
on the towers and upon the bulwarks, to shoot arrows and great stones
withal.

And his name spread far abroad; for he was marvellously helped, till
he was strong.

26:16 But when he was strong, his heart was lifted up to his
destruction: for he transgressed against the LORD his God, and went
into the temple of the LORD to burn incense upon the altar of incense.

26:17 And Azariah the priest went in after him, and with him fourscore
priests of the LORD, that were valiant men: 26:18 And they withstood
Uzziah the king, and said unto him, It appertaineth not unto thee,
Uzziah, to burn incense unto the LORD, but to the priests the sons of
Aaron, that are consecrated to burn incense: go out of the sanctuary;
for thou hast trespassed; neither shall it be for thine honour from
the LORD God.

26:19 Then Uzziah was wroth, and had a censer in his hand to burn
incense: and while he was wroth with the priests, the leprosy even
rose up in his forehead before the priests in the house of the LORD,
from beside the incense altar.

26:20 And Azariah the chief priest, and all the priests, looked upon
him, and, behold, he was leprous in his forehead, and they thrust him
out from thence; yea, himself hasted also to go out, because the LORD
had smitten him.

26:21 And Uzziah the king was a leper unto the day of his death, and
dwelt in a several house, being a leper; for he was cut off from the
house of the LORD: and Jotham his son was over the king's house,
judging the people of the land.

26:22 Now the rest of the acts of Uzziah, first and last, did Isaiah
the prophet, the son of Amoz, write.

26:23 So Uzziah slept with his fathers, and they buried him with his
fathers in the field of the burial which belonged to the kings; for
they said, He is a leper: and Jotham his son reigned in his stead.

27:1 Jotham was twenty and five years old when he began to reign, and
he reigned sixteen years in Jerusalem. His mother's name also was
Jerushah, the daughter of Zadok.

27:2 And he did that which was right in the sight of the LORD,
according to all that his father Uzziah did: howbeit he entered not
into the temple of the LORD. And the people did yet corruptly.

27:3 He built the high gate of the house of the LORD, and on the wall
of Ophel he built much.

27:4 Moreover he built cities in the mountains of Judah, and in the
forests he built castles and towers.

27:5 He fought also with the king of the Ammonites, and prevailed
against them. And the children of Ammon gave him the same year an
hundred talents of silver, and ten thousand measures of wheat, and ten
thousand of barley. So much did the children of Ammon pay unto him,
both the second year, and the third.

27:6 So Jotham became mighty, because he prepared his ways before the
LORD his God.

27:7 Now the rest of the acts of Jotham, and all his wars, and his
ways, lo, they are written in the book of the kings of Israel and
Judah.

27:8 He was five and twenty years old when he began to reign, and
reigned sixteen years in Jerusalem.

27:9 And Jotham slept with his fathers, and they buried him in the
city of David: and Ahaz his son reigned in his stead.

28:1 Ahaz was twenty years old when he began to reign, and he reigned
sixteen years in Jerusalem: but he did not that which was right in the
sight of the LORD, like David his father: 28:2 For he walked in the
ways of the kings of Israel, and made also molten images for Baalim.

28:3 Moreover he burnt incense in the valley of the son of Hinnom, and
burnt his children in the fire, after the abominations of the heathen
whom the LORD had cast out before the children of Israel.

28:4 He sacrificed also and burnt incense in the high places, and on
the hills, and under every green tree.

28:5 Wherefore the LORD his God delivered him into the hand of the
king of Syria; and they smote him, and carried away a great multitude
of them captives, and brought them to Damascus. And he was also
delivered into the hand of the king of Israel, who smote him with a
great slaughter.

28:6 For Pekah the son of Remaliah slew in Judah an hundred and twenty
thousand in one day, which were all valiant men; because they had
forsaken the LORD God of their fathers.

28:7 And Zichri, a mighty man of Ephraim, slew Maaseiah the king's
son, and Azrikam the governor of the house, and Elkanah that was next
to the king.

28:8 And the children of Israel carried away captive of their brethren
two hundred thousand, women, sons, and daughters, and took also away
much spoil from them, and brought the spoil to Samaria.

28:9 But a prophet of the LORD was there, whose name was Oded: and he
went out before the host that came to Samaria, and said unto them,
Behold, because the LORD God of your fathers was wroth with Judah, he
hath delivered them into your hand, and ye have slain them in a rage
that reacheth up unto heaven.

28:10 And now ye purpose to keep under the children of Judah and
Jerusalem for bondmen and bondwomen unto you: but are there not with
you, even with you, sins against the LORD your God?  28:11 Now hear me
therefore, and deliver the captives again, which ye have taken captive
of your brethren: for the fierce wrath of the LORD is upon you.

28:12 Then certain of the heads of the children of Ephraim, Azariah
the son of Johanan, Berechiah the son of Meshillemoth, and Jehizkiah
the son of Shallum, and Amasa the son of Hadlai, stood up against them
that came from the war, 28:13 And said unto them, Ye shall not bring
in the captives hither: for whereas we have offended against the LORD
already, ye intend to add more to our sins and to our trespass: for
our trespass is great, and there is fierce wrath against Israel.

28:14 So the armed men left the captives and the spoil before the
princes and all the congregation.

28:15 And the men which were expressed by name rose up, and took the
captives, and with the spoil clothed all that were naked among them,
and arrayed them, and shod them, and gave them to eat and to drink,
and anointed them, and carried all the feeble of them upon asses, and
brought them to Jericho, the city of palm trees, to their brethren:
then they returned to Samaria.

28:16 At that time did king Ahaz send unto the kings of Assyria to
help him.

28:17 For again the Edomites had come and smitten Judah, and carried
away captives.

28:18 The Philistines also had invaded the cities of the low country,
and of the south of Judah, and had taken Bethshemesh, and Ajalon, and
Gederoth, and Shocho with the villages thereof, and Timnah with the
villages thereof, Gimzo also and the villages thereof: and they dwelt
there.

28:19 For the LORD brought Judah low because of Ahaz king of Israel;
for he made Judah naked, and transgressed sore against the LORD.

28:20 And Tilgathpilneser king of Assyria came unto him, and
distressed him, but strengthened him not.

28:21 For Ahaz took away a portion out of the house of the LORD, and
out of the house of the king, and of the princes, and gave it unto the
king of Assyria: but he helped him not.

28:22 And in the time of his distress did he trespass yet more against
the LORD: this is that king Ahaz.

28:23 For he sacrificed unto the gods of Damascus, which smote him:
and he said, Because the gods of the kings of Syria help them,
therefore will I sacrifice to them, that they may help me. But they
were the ruin of him, and of all Israel.

28:24 And Ahaz gathered together the vessels of the house of God, and
cut in pieces the vessels of the house of God, and shut up the doors
of the house of the LORD, and he made him altars in every corner of
Jerusalem.

28:25 And in every several city of Judah he made high places to burn
incense unto other gods, and provoked to anger the LORD God of his
fathers.

28:26 Now the rest of his acts and of all his ways, first and last,
behold, they are written in the book of the kings of Judah and Israel.

28:27 And Ahaz slept with his fathers, and they buried him in the
city, even in Jerusalem: but they brought him not into the sepulchres
of the kings of Israel: and Hezekiah his son reigned in his stead.

29:1 Hezekiah began to reign when he was five and twenty years old,
and he reigned nine and twenty years in Jerusalem. And his mother's
name was Abijah, the daughter of Zechariah.

29:2 And he did that which was right in the sight of the LORD,
according to all that David his father had done.

29:3 He in the first year of his reign, in the first month, opened the
doors of the house of the LORD, and repaired them.

29:4 And he brought in the priests and the Levites, and gathered them
together into the east street, 29:5 And said unto them, Hear me, ye
Levites, sanctify now yourselves, and sanctify the house of the LORD
God of your fathers, and carry forth the filthiness out of the holy
place.

29:6 For our fathers have trespassed, and done that which was evil in
the eyes of the LORD our God, and have forsaken him, and have turned
away their faces from the habitation of the LORD, and turned their
backs.

29:7 Also they have shut up the doors of the porch, and put out the
lamps, and have not burned incense nor offered burnt offerings in the
holy place unto the God of Israel.

29:8 Wherefore the wrath of the LORD was upon Judah and Jerusalem, and
he hath delivered them to trouble, to astonishment, and to hissing, as
ye see with your eyes.

29:9 For, lo, our fathers have fallen by the sword, and our sons and
our daughters and our wives are in captivity for this.

29:10 Now it is in mine heart to make a covenant with the LORD God of
Israel, that his fierce wrath may turn away from us.

29:11 My sons, be not now negligent: for the LORD hath chosen you to
stand before him, to serve him, and that ye should minister unto him,
and burn incense.

29:12 Then the Levites arose, Mahath the son of Amasai, and Joel the
son of Azariah, of the sons of the Kohathites: and of the sons of
Merari, Kish the son of Abdi, and Azariah the son of Jehalelel: and of
the Gershonites; Joah the son of Zimmah, and Eden the son of Joah:
29:13 And of the sons of Elizaphan; Shimri, and Jeiel: and of the sons
of Asaph; Zechariah, and Mattaniah: 29:14 And of the sons of Heman;
Jehiel, and Shimei: and of the sons of Jeduthun; Shemaiah, and Uzziel.

29:15 And they gathered their brethren, and sanctified themselves, and
came, according to the commandment of the king, by the words of the
LORD, to cleanse the house of the LORD.

29:16 And the priests went into the inner part of the house of the
LORD, to cleanse it, and brought out all the uncleanness that they
found in the temple of the LORD into the court of the house of the
LORD. And the Levites took it, to carry it out abroad into the brook
Kidron.

29:17 Now they began on the first day of the first month to sanctify,
and on the eighth day of the month came they to the porch of the LORD:
so they sanctified the house of the LORD in eight days; and in the
sixteenth day of the first month they made an end.

29:18 Then they went in to Hezekiah the king, and said, We have
cleansed all the house of the LORD, and the altar of burnt offering,
with all the vessels thereof, and the shewbread table, with all the
vessels thereof.

29:19 Moreover all the vessels, which king Ahaz in his reign did cast
away in his transgression, have we prepared and sanctified, and,
behold, they are before the altar of the LORD.

29:20 Then Hezekiah the king rose early, and gathered the rulers of
the city, and went up to the house of the LORD.

29:21 And they brought seven bullocks, and seven rams, and seven
lambs, and seven he goats, for a sin offering for the kingdom, and for
the sanctuary, and for Judah. And he commanded the priests the sons of
Aaron to offer them on the altar of the LORD.

29:22 So they killed the bullocks, and the priests received the blood,
and sprinkled it on the altar: likewise, when they had killed the
rams, they sprinkled the blood upon the altar: they killed also the
lambs, and they sprinkled the blood upon the altar.

29:23 And they brought forth the he goats for the sin offering before
the king and the congregation; and they laid their hands upon them:
29:24 And the priests killed them, and they made reconciliation with
their blood upon the altar, to make an atonement for all Israel: for
the king commanded that the burnt offering and the sin offering should
be made for all Israel.

29:25 And he set the Levites in the house of the LORD with cymbals,
with psalteries, and with harps, according to the commandment of
David, and of Gad the king's seer, and Nathan the prophet: for so was
the commandment of the LORD by his prophets.

29:26 And the Levites stood with the instruments of David, and the
priests with the trumpets.

29:27 And Hezekiah commanded to offer the burnt offering upon the
altar.

And when the burnt offering began, the song of the LORD began also
with the trumpets, and with the instruments ordained by David king of
Israel.

29:28 And all the congregation worshipped, and the singers sang, and
the trumpeters sounded: and all this continued until the burnt
offering was finished.

29:29 And when they had made an end of offering, the king and all that
were present with him bowed themselves, and worshipped.

29:30 Moreover Hezekiah the king and the princes commanded the Levites
to sing praise unto the LORD with the words of David, and of Asaph the
seer. And they sang praises with gladness, and they bowed their heads
and worshipped.

29:31 Then Hezekiah answered and said, Now ye have consecrated
yourselves unto the LORD, come near and bring sacrifices and thank
offerings into the house of the LORD. And the congregation brought in
sacrifices and thank offerings; and as many as were of a free heart
burnt offerings.

29:32 And the number of the burnt offerings, which the congregation
brought, was threescore and ten bullocks, an hundred rams, and two
hundred lambs: all these were for a burnt offering to the LORD.

29:33 And the consecrated things were six hundred oxen and three
thousand sheep.

29:34 But the priests were too few, so that they could not flay all
the burnt offerings: wherefore their brethren the Levites did help
them, till the work was ended, and until the other priests had
sanctified themselves: for the Levites were more upright in heart to
sanctify themselves than the priests.

29:35 And also the burnt offerings were in abundance, with the fat of
the peace offerings, and the drink offerings for every burnt offering.
So the service of the house of the LORD was set in order.

29:36 And Hezekiah rejoiced, and all the people, that God had prepared
the people: for the thing was done suddenly.

30:1 And Hezekiah sent to all Israel and Judah, and wrote letters also
to Ephraim and Manasseh, that they should come to the house of the
LORD at Jerusalem, to keep the passover unto the LORD God of Israel.

30:2 For the king had taken counsel, and his princes, and all the
congregation in Jerusalem, to keep the passover in the second month.

30:3 For they could not keep it at that time, because the priests had
not sanctified themselves sufficiently, neither had the people
gathered themselves together to Jerusalem.

30:4 And the thing pleased the king and all the congregation.

30:5 So they established a decree to make proclamation throughout all
Israel, from Beersheba even to Dan, that they should come to keep the
passover unto the LORD God of Israel at Jerusalem: for they had not
done it of a long time in such sort as it was written.

30:6 So the posts went with the letters from the king and his princes
throughout all Israel and Judah, and according to the commandment of
the king, saying, Ye children of Israel, turn again unto the LORD God
of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, and he will return to the remnant of
you, that are escaped out of the hand of the kings of Assyria.

30:7 And be not ye like your fathers, and like your brethren, which
trespassed against the LORD God of their fathers, who therefore gave
them up to desolation, as ye see.

30:8 Now be ye not stiffnecked, as your fathers were, but yield
yourselves unto the LORD, and enter into his sanctuary, which he hath
sanctified for ever: and serve the LORD your God, that the fierceness
of his wrath may turn away from you.

30:9 For if ye turn again unto the LORD, your brethren and your
children shall find compassion before them that lead them captive, so
that they shall come again into this land: for the LORD your God is
gracious and merciful, and will not turn away his face from you, if ye
return unto him.

30:10 So the posts passed from city to city through the country of
Ephraim and Manasseh even unto Zebulun: but they laughed them to
scorn, and mocked them.

30:11 Nevertheless divers of Asher and Manasseh and of Zebulun humbled
themselves, and came to Jerusalem.

30:12 Also in Judah the hand of God was to give them one heart to do
the commandment of the king and of the princes, by the word of the
LORD.

30:13 And there assembled at Jerusalem much people to keep the feast
of unleavened bread in the second month, a very great congregation.

30:14 And they arose and took away the altars that were in Jerusalem,
and all the altars for incense took they away, and cast them into the
brook Kidron.

30:15 Then they killed the passover on the fourteenth day of the
second month: and the priests and the Levites were ashamed, and
sanctified themselves, and brought in the burnt offerings into the
house of the LORD.

30:16 And they stood in their place after their manner, according to
the law of Moses the man of God: the priests sprinkled the blood,
which they received of the hand of the Levites.

30:17 For there were many in the congregation that were not
sanctified: therefore the Levites had the charge of the killing of the
passovers for every one that was not clean, to sanctify them unto the
LORD.

30:18 For a multitude of the people, even many of Ephraim, and
Manasseh, Issachar, and Zebulun, had not cleansed themselves, yet did
they eat the passover otherwise than it was written. But Hezekiah
prayed for them, saying, The good LORD pardon every one 30:19 That
prepareth his heart to seek God, the LORD God of his fathers, though
he be not cleansed according to the purification of the sanctuary.

30:20 And the LORD hearkened to Hezekiah, and healed the people.

30:21 And the children of Israel that were present at Jerusalem kept
the feast of unleavened bread seven days with great gladness: and the
Levites and the priests praised the LORD day by day, singing with loud
instruments unto the LORD.

30:22 And Hezekiah spake comfortably unto all the Levites that taught
the good knowledge of the LORD: and they did eat throughout the feast
seven days, offering peace offerings, and making confession to the
LORD God of their fathers.

30:23 And the whole assembly took counsel to keep other seven days:
and they kept other seven days with gladness.

30:24 For Hezekiah king of Judah did give to the congregation a
thousand bullocks and seven thousand sheep; and the princes gave to
the congregation a thousand bullocks and ten thousand sheep: and a
great number of priests sanctified themselves.

30:25 And all the congregation of Judah, with the priests and the
Levites, and all the congregation that came out of Israel, and the
strangers that came out of the land of Israel, and that dwelt in
Judah, rejoiced.

30:26 So there was great joy in Jerusalem: for since the time of
Solomon the son of David king of Israel there was not the like in
Jerusalem.

30:27 Then the priests the Levites arose and blessed the people: and
their voice was heard, and their prayer came up to his holy dwelling
place, even unto heaven.

31:1 Now when all this was finished, all Israel that were present went
out to the cities of Judah, and brake the images in pieces, and cut
down the groves, and threw down the high places and the altars out of
all Judah and Benjamin, in Ephraim also and Manasseh, until they had
utterly destroyed them all. Then all the children of Israel returned,
every man to his possession, into their own cities.

31:2 And Hezekiah appointed the courses of the priests and the Levites
after their courses, every man according to his service, the priests
and Levites for burnt offerings and for peace offerings, to minister,
and to give thanks, and to praise in the gates of the tents of the
LORD.

31:3 He appointed also the king's portion of his substance for the
burnt offerings, to wit, for the morning and evening burnt offerings,
and the burnt offerings for the sabbaths, and for the new moons, and
for the set feasts, as it is written in the law of the LORD.

31:4 Moreover he commanded the people that dwelt in Jerusalem to give
the portion of the priests and the Levites, that they might be
encouraged in the law of the LORD.

31:5 And as soon as the commandment came abroad, the children of
Israel brought in abundance the firstfruits of corn, wine, and oil,
and honey, and of all the increase of the field; and the tithe of all
things brought they in abundantly.

31:6 And concerning the children of Israel and Judah, that dwelt in
the cities of Judah, they also brought in the tithe of oxen and sheep,
and the tithe of holy things which were consecrated unto the LORD
their God, and laid them by heaps.

31:7 In the third month they began to lay the foundation of the heaps,
and finished them in the seventh month.

31:8 And when Hezekiah and the princes came and saw the heaps, they
blessed the LORD, and his people Israel.

31:9 Then Hezekiah questioned with the priests and the Levites
concerning the heaps.

31:10 And Azariah the chief priest of the house of Zadok answered him,
and said, Since the people began to bring the offerings into the house
of the LORD, we have had enough to eat, and have left plenty: for the
LORD hath blessed his people; and that which is left is this great
store.

31:11 Then Hezekiah commanded to prepare chambers in the house of the
LORD; and they prepared them, 31:12 And brought in the offerings and
the tithes and the dedicated things faithfully: over which Cononiah
the Levite was ruler, and Shimei his brother was the next.

31:13 And Jehiel, and Azaziah, and Nahath, and Asahel, and Jerimoth,
and Jozabad, and Eliel, and Ismachiah, and Mahath, and Benaiah, were
overseers under the hand of Cononiah and Shimei his brother, at the
commandment of Hezekiah the king, and Azariah the ruler of the house
of God.

31:14 And Kore the son of Imnah the Levite, the porter toward the
east, was over the freewill offerings of God, to distribute the
oblations of the LORD, and the most holy things.

31:15 And next him were Eden, and Miniamin, and Jeshua, and Shemaiah,
Amariah, and Shecaniah, in the cities of the priests, in their set
office, to give to their brethren by courses, as well to the great as
to the small: 31:16 Beside their genealogy of males, from three years
old and upward, even unto every one that entereth into the house of
the LORD, his daily portion for their service in their charges
according to their courses; 31:17 Both to the genealogy of the priests
by the house of their fathers, and the Levites from twenty years old
and upward, in their charges by their courses; 31:18 And to the
genealogy of all their little ones, their wives, and their sons, and
their daughters, through all the congregation: for in their set office
they sanctified themselves in holiness: 31:19 Also of the sons of
Aaron the priests, which were in the fields of the suburbs of their
cities, in every several city, the men that were expressed by name, to
give portions to all the males among the priests, and to all that were
reckoned by genealogies among the Levites.

31:20 And thus did Hezekiah throughout all Judah, and wrought that
which was good and right and truth before the LORD his God.

31:21 And in every work that he began in the service of the house of
God, and in the law, and in the commandments, to seek his God, he did
it with all his heart, and prospered.

32:1 After these things, and the establishment thereof, Sennacherib
king of Assyria came, and entered into Judah, and encamped against the
fenced cities, and thought to win them for himself.

32:2 And when Hezekiah saw that Sennacherib was come, and that he was
purposed to fight against Jerusalem, 32:3 He took counsel with his
princes and his mighty men to stop the waters of the fountains which
were without the city: and they did help him.

32:4 So there was gathered much people together, who stopped all the
fountains, and the brook that ran through the midst of the land,
saying, Why should the kings of Assyria come, and find much water?
32:5 Also he strengthened himself, and built up all the wall that was
broken, and raised it up to the towers, and another wall without, and
repaired Millo in the city of David, and made darts and shields in
abundance.

32:6 And he set captains of war over the people, and gathered them
together to him in the street of the gate of the city, and spake
comfortably to them, saying, 32:7 Be strong and courageous, be not
afraid nor dismayed for the king of Assyria, nor for all the multitude
that is with him: for there be more with us than with him: 32:8 With
him is an arm of flesh; but with us is the LORD our God to help us,
and to fight our battles. And the people rested themselves upon the
words of Hezekiah king of Judah.

32:9 After this did Sennacherib king of Assyria send his servants to
Jerusalem, (but he himself laid siege against Lachish, and all his
power with him,) unto Hezekiah king of Judah, and unto all Judah that
were at Jerusalem, saying, 32:10 Thus saith Sennacherib king of
Assyria, Whereon do ye trust, that ye abide in the siege in Jerusalem?
32:11 Doth not Hezekiah persuade you to give over yourselves to die by
famine and by thirst, saying, The LORD our God shall deliver us out of
the hand of the king of Assyria?  32:12 Hath not the same Hezekiah
taken away his high places and his altars, and commanded Judah and
Jerusalem, saying, Ye shall worship before one altar, and burn incense
upon it?  32:13 Know ye not what I and my fathers have done unto all
the people of other lands? were the gods of the nations of those lands
any ways able to deliver their lands out of mine hand?  32:14 Who was
there among all the gods of those nations that my fathers utterly
destroyed, that could deliver his people out of mine hand, that your
God should be able to deliver you out of mine hand?  32:15 Now
therefore let not Hezekiah deceive you, nor persuade you on this
manner, neither yet believe him: for no god of any nation or kingdom
was able to deliver his people out of mine hand, and out of the hand
of my fathers: how much less shall your God deliver you out of mine
hand?  32:16 And his servants spake yet more against the LORD God, and
against his servant Hezekiah.

32:17 He wrote also letters to rail on the LORD God of Israel, and to
speak against him, saying, As the gods of the nations of other lands
have not delivered their people out of mine hand, so shall not the God
of Hezekiah deliver his people out of mine hand.

32:18 Then they cried with a loud voice in the Jews' speech unto the
people of Jerusalem that were on the wall, to affright them, and to
trouble them; that they might take the city.

32:19 And they spake against the God of Jerusalem, as against the gods
of the people of the earth, which were the work of the hands of man.

32:20 And for this cause Hezekiah the king, and the prophet Isaiah the
son of Amoz, prayed and cried to heaven.

32:21 And the LORD sent an angel, which cut off all the mighty men of
valour, and the leaders and captains in the camp of the king of
Assyria. So he returned with shame of face to his own land. And when
he was come into the house of his god, they that came forth of his own
bowels slew him there with the sword.

32:22 Thus the LORD saved Hezekiah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem
from the hand of Sennacherib the king of Assyria, and from the hand of
all other, and guided them on every side.

32:23 And many brought gifts unto the LORD to Jerusalem, and presents
to Hezekiah king of Judah: so that he was magnified in the sight of
all nations from thenceforth.

32:24 In those days Hezekiah was sick to the death, and prayed unto
the LORD: and he spake unto him, and he gave him a sign.

32:25 But Hezekiah rendered not again according to the benefit done
unto him; for his heart was lifted up: therefore there was wrath upon
him, and upon Judah and Jerusalem.

32:26 Notwithstanding Hezekiah humbled himself for the pride of his
heart, both he and the inhabitants of Jerusalem, so that the wrath of
the LORD came not upon them in the days of Hezekiah.

32:27 And Hezekiah had exceeding much riches and honour: and he made
himself treasuries for silver, and for gold, and for precious stones,
and for spices, and for shields, and for all manner of pleasant
jewels; 32:28 Storehouses also for the increase of corn, and wine, and
oil; and stalls for all manner of beasts, and cotes for flocks.

32:29 Moreover he provided him cities, and possessions of flocks and
herds in abundance: for God had given him substance very much.

32:30 This same Hezekiah also stopped the upper watercourse of Gihon,
and brought it straight down to the west side of the city of David.
And Hezekiah prospered in all his works.

32:31 Howbeit in the business of the ambassadors of the princes of
Babylon, who sent unto him to enquire of the wonder that was done in
the land, God left him, to try him, that he might know all that was in
his heart.

32:32 Now the rest of the acts of Hezekiah, and his goodness, behold,
they are written in the vision of Isaiah the prophet, the son of Amoz,
and in the book of the kings of Judah and Israel.

32:33 And Hezekiah slept with his fathers, and they buried him in the
chiefest of the sepulchres of the sons of David: and all Judah and the
inhabitants of Jerusalem did him honour at his death. And Manasseh his
son reigned in his stead.

33:1 Manasseh was twelve years old when he began to reign, and he
reigned fifty and five years in Jerusalem: 33:2 But did that which was
evil in the sight of the LORD, like unto the abominations of the
heathen, whom the LORD had cast out before the children of Israel.

33:3 For he built again the high places which Hezekiah his father had
broken down, and he reared up altars for Baalim, and made groves, and
worshipped all the host of heaven, and served them.

33:4 Also he built altars in the house of the LORD, whereof the LORD
had said, In Jerusalem shall my name be for ever.

33:5 And he built altars for all the host of heaven in the two courts
of the house of the LORD.

33:6 And he caused his children to pass through the fire in the valley
of the son of Hinnom: also he observed times, and used enchantments,
and used witchcraft, and dealt with a familiar spirit, and with
wizards: he wrought much evil in the sight of the LORD, to provoke him
to anger.

33:7 And he set a carved image, the idol which he had made, in the
house of God, of which God had said to David and to Solomon his son,
In this house, and in Jerusalem, which I have chosen before all the
tribes of Israel, will I put my name for ever: 33:8 Neither will I any
more remove the foot of Israel from out of the land which I have
appointed for your fathers; so that they will take heed to do all that
I have commanded them, according to the whole law and the statutes and
the ordinances by the hand of Moses.

33:9 So Manasseh made Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem to err,
and to do worse than the heathen, whom the LORD had destroyed before
the children of Israel.

33:10 And the LORD spake to Manasseh, and to his people: but they
would not hearken.

33:11 Wherefore the LORD brought upon them the captains of the host of
the king of Assyria, which took Manasseh among the thorns, and bound
him with fetters, and carried him to Babylon.

33:12 And when he was in affliction, he besought the LORD his God, and
humbled himself greatly before the God of his fathers, 33:13 And
prayed unto him: and he was intreated of him, and heard his
supplication, and brought him again to Jerusalem into his kingdom.
Then Manasseh knew that the LORD he was God.

33:14 Now after this he built a wall without the city of David, on the
west side of Gihon, in the valley, even to the entering in at the fish
gate, and compassed about Ophel, and raised it up a very great height,
and put captains of war in all the fenced cities of Judah.

33:15 And he took away the strange gods, and the idol out of the house
of the LORD, and all the altars that he had built in the mount of the
house of the LORD, and in Jerusalem, and cast them out of the city.

33:16 And he repaired the altar of the LORD, and sacrificed thereon
peace offerings and thank offerings, and commanded Judah to serve the
LORD God of Israel.

33:17 Nevertheless the people did sacrifice still in the high places,
yet unto the LORD their God only.

33:18 Now the rest of the acts of Manasseh, and his prayer unto his
God, and the words of the seers that spake to him in the name of the
LORD God of Israel, behold, they are written in the book of the kings
of Israel.

33:19 His prayer also, and how God was intreated of him, and all his
sins, and his trespass, and the places wherein he built high places,
and set up groves and graven images, before he was humbled: behold,
they are written among the sayings of the seers.

33:20 So Manasseh slept with his fathers, and they buried him in his
own house: and Amon his son reigned in his stead.

33:21 Amon was two and twenty years old when he began to reign, and
reigned two years in Jerusalem.

33:22 But he did that which was evil in the sight of the LORD, as did
Manasseh his father: for Amon sacrificed unto all the carved images
which Manasseh his father had made, and served them; 33:23 And humbled
not himself before the LORD, as Manasseh his father had humbled
himself; but Amon trespassed more and more.

33:24 And his servants conspired against him, and slew him in his own
house.

33:25 But the people of the land slew all them that had conspired
against king Amon; and the people of the land made Josiah his son king
in his stead.

34:1 Josiah was eight years old when he began to reign, and he reigned
in Jerusalem one and thirty years.

34:2 And he did that which was right in the sight of the LORD, and
walked in the ways of David his father, and declined neither to the
right hand, nor to the left.

34:3 For in the eighth year of his reign, while he was yet young, he
began to seek after the God of David his father: and in the twelfth
year he began to purge Judah and Jerusalem from the high places, and
the groves, and the carved images, and the molten images.

34:4 And they brake down the altars of Baalim in his presence; and the
images, that were on high above them, he cut down; and the groves, and
the carved images, and the molten images, he brake in pieces, and made
dust of them, and strowed it upon the graves of them that had
sacrificed unto them.

34:5 And he burnt the bones of the priests upon their altars, and
cleansed Judah and Jerusalem.

34:6 And so did he in the cities of Manasseh, and Ephraim, and Simeon,
even unto Naphtali, with their mattocks round about.

34:7 And when he had broken down the altars and the groves, and had
beaten the graven images into powder, and cut down all the idols
throughout all the land of Israel, he returned to Jerusalem.

34:8 Now in the eighteenth year of his reign, when he had purged the
land, and the house, he sent Shaphan the son of Azaliah, and Maaseiah
the governor of the city, and Joah the son of Joahaz the recorder, to
repair the house of the LORD his God.

34:9 And when they came to Hilkiah the high priest, they delivered the
money that was brought into the house of God, which the Levites that
kept the doors had gathered of the hand of Manasseh and Ephraim, and
of all the remnant of Israel, and of all Judah and Benjamin; and they
returned to Jerusalem.

34:10 And they put it in the hand of the workmen that had the
oversight of the house of the LORD, and they gave it to the workmen
that wrought in the house of the LORD, to repair and amend the house:
34:11 Even to the artificers and builders gave they it, to buy hewn
stone, and timber for couplings, and to floor the houses which the
kings of Judah had destroyed.

34:12 And the men did the work faithfully: and the overseers of them
were Jahath and Obadiah, the Levites, of the sons of Merari; and
Zechariah and Meshullam, of the sons of the Kohathites, to set it
forward; and other of the Levites, all that could skill of instruments
of musick.

34:13 Also they were over the bearers of burdens, and were overseers
of all that wrought the work in any manner of service: and of the
Levites there were scribes, and officers, and porters.

34:14 And when they brought out the money that was brought into the
house of the LORD, Hilkiah the priest found a book of the law of the
LORD given by Moses.

34:15 And Hilkiah answered and said to Shaphan the scribe, I have
found the book of the law in the house of the LORD. And Hilkiah
delivered the book to Shaphan.

34:16 And Shaphan carried the book to the king, and brought the king
word back again, saying, All that was committed to thy servants, they
do it.

34:17 And they have gathered together the money that was found in the
house of the LORD, and have delivered it into the hand of the
overseers, and to the hand of the workmen.

34:18 Then Shaphan the scribe told the king, saying, Hilkiah the
priest hath given me a book. And Shaphan read it before the king.

34:19 And it came to pass, when the king had heard the words of the
law, that he rent his clothes.

34:20 And the king commanded Hilkiah, and Ahikam the son of Shaphan,
and Abdon the son of Micah, and Shaphan the scribe, and Asaiah a
servant of the king's, saying, 34:21 Go, enquire of the LORD for me,
and for them that are left in Israel and in Judah, concerning the
words of the book that is found: for great is the wrath of the LORD
that is poured out upon us, because our fathers have not kept the word
of the LORD, to do after all that is written in this book.

34:22 And Hilkiah, and they that the king had appointed, went to
Huldah the prophetess, the wife of Shallum the son of Tikvath, the son
of Hasrah, keeper of the wardrobe; (now she dwelt in Jerusalem in the
college:) and they spake to her to that effect.

34:23 And she answered them, Thus saith the LORD God of Israel, Tell
ye the man that sent you to me, 34:24 Thus saith the LORD, Behold, I
will bring evil upon this place, and upon the inhabitants thereof,
even all the curses that are written in the book which they have read
before the king of Judah: 34:25 Because they have forsaken me, and
have burned incense unto other gods, that they might provoke me to
anger with all the works of their hands; therefore my wrath shall be
poured out upon this place, and shall not be quenched.

34:26 And as for the king of Judah, who sent you to enquire of the
LORD, so shall ye say unto him, Thus saith the LORD God of Israel
concerning the words which thou hast heard; 34:27 Because thine heart
was tender, and thou didst humble thyself before God, when thou
heardest his words against this place, and against the inhabitants
thereof, and humbledst thyself before me, and didst rend thy clothes,
and weep before me; I have even heard thee also, saith the LORD.

34:28 Behold, I will gather thee to thy fathers, and thou shalt be
gathered to thy grave in peace, neither shall thine eyes see all the
evil that I will bring upon this place, and upon the inhabitants of
the same. So they brought the king word again.

34:29 Then the king sent and gathered together all the elders of Judah
and Jerusalem.

34:30 And the king went up into the house of the LORD, and all the men
of Judah, and the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and the priests, and the
Levites, and all the people, great and small: and he read in their
ears all the words of the book of the covenant that was found in the
house of the LORD.

34:31 And the king stood in his place, and made a covenant before the
LORD, to walk after the LORD, and to keep his commandments, and his
testimonies, and his statutes, with all his heart, and with all his
soul, to perform the words of the covenant which are written in this
book.

34:32 And he caused all that were present in Jerusalem and Benjamin to
stand to it. And the inhabitants of Jerusalem did according to the
covenant of God, the God of their fathers.

34:33 And Josiah took away all the abominations out of all the
countries that pertained to the children of Israel, and made all that
were present in Israel to serve, even to serve the LORD their God. And
all his days they departed not from following the LORD, the God of
their fathers.

35:1 Moreover Josiah kept a passover unto the LORD in Jerusalem: and
they killed the passover on the fourteenth day of the first month.

35:2 And he set the priests in their charges, and encouraged them to
the service of the house of the LORD, 35:3 And said unto the Levites
that taught all Israel, which were holy unto the LORD, Put the holy
ark in the house which Solomon the son of David king of Israel did
build; it shall not be a burden upon your shoulders: serve now the
LORD your God, and his people Israel, 35:4 And prepare yourselves by
the houses of your fathers, after your courses, according to the
writing of David king of Israel, and according to the writing of
Solomon his son.

35:5 And stand in the holy place according to the divisions of the
families of the fathers of your brethren the people, and after the
division of the families of the Levites.

35:6 So kill the passover, and sanctify yourselves, and prepare your
brethren, that they may do according to the word of the LORD by the
hand of Moses.

35:7 And Josiah gave to the people, of the flock, lambs and kids, all
for the passover offerings, for all that were present, to the number
of thirty thousand, and three thousand bullocks: these were of the
king's substance.

35:8 And his princes gave willingly unto the people, to the priests,
and to the Levites: Hilkiah and Zechariah and Jehiel, rulers of the
house of God, gave unto the priests for the passover offerings two
thousand and six hundred small cattle and three hundred oxen.

35:9 Conaniah also, and Shemaiah and Nethaneel, his brethren, and
Hashabiah and Jeiel and Jozabad, chief of the Levites, gave unto the
Levites for passover offerings five thousand small cattle, and five
hundred oxen.

35:10 So the service was prepared, and the priests stood in their
place, and the Levites in their courses, according to the king's
commandment.

35:11 And they killed the passover, and the priests sprinkled the
blood from their hands, and the Levites flayed them.

35:12 And they removed the burnt offerings, that they might give
according to the divisions of the families of the people, to offer
unto the LORD, as it is written in the book of Moses. And so did they
with the oxen.

35:13 And they roasted the passover with fire according to the
ordinance: but the other holy offerings sod they in pots, and in
caldrons, and in pans, and divided them speedily among all the people.

35:14 And afterward they made ready for themselves, and for the
priests: because the priests the sons of Aaron were busied in offering
of burnt offerings and the fat until night; therefore the Levites
prepared for themselves, and for the priests the sons of Aaron.

35:15 And the singers the sons of Asaph were in their place, according
to the commandment of David, and Asaph, and Heman, and Jeduthun the
king's seer; and the porters waited at every gate; they might not
depart from their service; for their brethren the Levites prepared for
them.

35:16 So all the service of the LORD was prepared the same day, to
keep the passover, and to offer burnt offerings upon the altar of the
LORD, according to the commandment of king Josiah.

35:17 And the children of Israel that were present kept the passover
at that time, and the feast of unleavened bread seven days.

35:18 And there was no passover like to that kept in Israel from the
days of Samuel the prophet; neither did all the kings of Israel keep
such a passover as Josiah kept, and the priests, and the Levites, and
all Judah and Israel that were present, and the inhabitants of
Jerusalem.

35:19 In the eighteenth year of the reign of Josiah was this passover
kept.

35:20 After all this, when Josiah had prepared the temple, Necho king
of Egypt came up to fight against Charchemish by Euphrates: and Josiah
went out against him.

35:21 But he sent ambassadors to him, saying, What have I to do with
thee, thou king of Judah? I come not against thee this day, but
against the house wherewith I have war: for God commanded me to make
haste: forbear thee from meddling with God, who is with me, that he
destroy thee not.

35:22 Nevertheless Josiah would not turn his face from him, but
disguised himself, that he might fight with him, and hearkened not
unto the words of Necho from the mouth of God, and came to fight in
the valley of Megiddo.

35:23 And the archers shot at king Josiah; and the king said to his
servants, Have me away; for I am sore wounded.

35:24 His servants therefore took him out of that chariot, and put him
in the second chariot that he had; and they brought him to Jerusalem,
and he died, and was buried in one of the sepulchres of his fathers.
And all Judah and Jerusalem mourned for Josiah.

35:25 And Jeremiah lamented for Josiah: and all the singing men and
the singing women spake of Josiah in their lamentations to this day,
and made them an ordinance in Israel: and, behold, they are written in
the lamentations.

35:26 Now the rest of the acts of Josiah, and his goodness, according
to that which was written in the law of the LORD, 35:27 And his deeds,
first and last, behold, they are written in the book of the kings of
Israel and Judah.

36:1 Then the people of the land took Jehoahaz the son of Josiah, and
made him king in his father's stead in Jerusalem.

36:2 Jehoahaz was twenty and three years old when he began to reign,
and he reigned three months in Jerusalem.

36:3 And the king of Egypt put him down at Jerusalem, and condemned
the land in an hundred talents of silver and a talent of gold.

36:4 And the king of Egypt made Eliakim his brother king over Judah
and Jerusalem, and turned his name to Jehoiakim. And Necho took
Jehoahaz his brother, and carried him to Egypt.

36:5 Jehoiakim was twenty and five years old when he began to reign,
and he reigned eleven years in Jerusalem: and he did that which was
evil in the sight of the LORD his God.

36:6 Against him came up Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, and bound him
in fetters, to carry him to Babylon.

36:7 Nebuchadnezzar also carried of the vessels of the house of the
LORD to Babylon, and put them in his temple at Babylon.

36:8 Now the rest of the acts of Jehoiakim, and his abominations which
he did, and that which was found in him, behold, they are written in
the book of the kings of Israel and Judah: and Jehoiachin his son
reigned in his stead.

36:9 Jehoiachin was eight years old when he began to reign, and he
reigned three months and ten days in Jerusalem: and he did that which
was evil in the sight of the LORD.

36:10 And when the year was expired, king Nebuchadnezzar sent, and
brought him to Babylon, with the goodly vessels of the house of the
LORD, and made Zedekiah his brother king over Judah and Jerusalem.

36:11 Zedekiah was one and twenty years old when he began to reign,
and reigned eleven years in Jerusalem.

36:12 And he did that which was evil in the sight of the LORD his God,
and humbled not himself before Jeremiah the prophet speaking from the
mouth of the LORD.

36:13 And he also rebelled against king Nebuchadnezzar, who had made
him swear by God: but he stiffened his neck, and hardened his heart
from turning unto the LORD God of Israel.

36:14 Moreover all the chief of the priests, and the people,
transgressed very much after all the abominations of the heathen; and
polluted the house of the LORD which he had hallowed in Jerusalem.

36:15 And the LORD God of their fathers sent to them by his
messengers, rising up betimes, and sending; because he had compassion
on his people, and on his dwelling place: 36:16 But they mocked the
messengers of God, and despised his words, and misused his prophets,
until the wrath of the LORD arose against his people, till there was
no remedy.

36:17 Therefore he brought upon them the king of the Chaldees, who
slew their young men with the sword in the house of their sanctuary,
and had no compassion upon young man or maiden, old man, or him that
stooped for age: he gave them all into his hand.

36:18 And all the vessels of the house of God, great and small, and
the treasures of the house of the LORD, and the treasures of the king,
and of his princes; all these he brought to Babylon.

36:19 And they burnt the house of God, and brake down the wall of
Jerusalem, and burnt all the palaces thereof with fire, and destroyed
all the goodly vessels thereof.

36:20 And them that had escaped from the sword carried he away to
Babylon; where they were servants to him and his sons until the reign
of the kingdom of Persia: 36:21 To fulfil the word of the LORD by the
mouth of Jeremiah, until the land had enjoyed her sabbaths: for as
long as she lay desolate she kept sabbath, to fulfil threescore and
ten years.

36:22 Now in the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, that the word of
the LORD spoken by the mouth of Jeremiah might be accomplished, the
LORD stirred up the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia, that he made a
proclamation throughout all his kingdom, and put it also in writing,
saying, 36:23 Thus saith Cyrus king of Persia, All the kingdoms of the
earth hath the LORD God of heaven given me; and he hath charged me to
build him an house in Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Who is there among
you of all his people?  The LORD his God be with him, and let him go up.




Ezra


1:1 Now in the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, that the word of
the LORD by the mouth of Jeremiah might be fulfilled, the LORD stirred
up the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia, that he made a proclamation
throughout all his kingdom, and put it also in writing, saying, 1:2
Thus saith Cyrus king of Persia, The LORD God of heaven hath given me
all the kingdoms of the earth; and he hath charged me to build him an
house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah.

1:3 Who is there among you of all his people? his God be with him, and
let him go up to Jerusalem, which is in Judah, and build the house of
the LORD God of Israel, (he is the God,) which is in Jerusalem.

1:4 And whosoever remaineth in any place where he sojourneth, let the
men of his place help him with silver, and with gold, and with goods,
and with beasts, beside the freewill offering for the house of God
that is in Jerusalem.

1:5 Then rose up the chief of the fathers of Judah and Benjamin, and
the priests, and the Levites, with all them whose spirit God had
raised, to go up to build the house of the LORD which is in Jerusalem.

1:6 And all they that were about them strengthened their hands with
vessels of silver, with gold, with goods, and with beasts, and with
precious things, beside all that was willingly offered.

1:7 Also Cyrus the king brought forth the vessels of the house of the
LORD, which Nebuchadnezzar had brought forth out of Jerusalem, and had
put them in the house of his gods; 1:8 Even those did Cyrus king of
Persia bring forth by the hand of Mithredath the treasurer, and
numbered them unto Sheshbazzar, the prince of Judah.

1:9 And this is the number of them: thirty chargers of gold, a
thousand chargers of silver, nine and twenty knives, 1:10 Thirty
basons of gold, silver basons of a second sort four hundred and ten,
and other vessels a thousand.

1:11 All the vessels of gold and of silver were five thousand and four
hundred. All these did Sheshbazzar bring up with them of the captivity
that were brought up from Babylon unto Jerusalem.

2:1 Now these are the children of the province that went up out of the
captivity, of those which had been carried away, whom Nebuchadnezzar
the king of Babylon had carried away unto Babylon, and came again unto
Jerusalem and Judah, every one unto his city; 2:2 Which came with
Zerubbabel: Jeshua, Nehemiah, Seraiah, Reelaiah, Mordecai, Bilshan,
Mizpar, Bigvai, Rehum, Baanah. The number of the men of the people of
Israel: 2:3 The children of Parosh, two thousand an hundred seventy
and two.

2:4 The children of Shephatiah, three hundred seventy and two.

2:5 The children of Arah, seven hundred seventy and five.

2:6 The children of Pahathmoab, of the children of Jeshua and Joab,
two thousand eight hundred and twelve.

2:7 The children of Elam, a thousand two hundred fifty and four.

2:8 The children of Zattu, nine hundred forty and five.

2:9 The children of Zaccai, seven hundred and threescore.

2:10 The children of Bani, six hundred forty and two.

2:11 The children of Bebai, six hundred twenty and three.

2:12 The children of Azgad, a thousand two hundred twenty and two.

2:13 The children of Adonikam, six hundred sixty and six.

2:14 The children of Bigvai, two thousand fifty and six.

2:15 The children of Adin, four hundred fifty and four.

2:16 The children of Ater of Hezekiah, ninety and eight.

2:17 The children of Bezai, three hundred twenty and three.

2:18 The children of Jorah, an hundred and twelve.

2:19 The children of Hashum, two hundred twenty and three.

2:20 The children of Gibbar, ninety and five.

2:21 The children of Bethlehem, an hundred twenty and three.

2:22 The men of Netophah, fifty and six.

2:23 The men of Anathoth, an hundred twenty and eight.

2:24 The children of Azmaveth, forty and two.

2:25 The children of Kirjatharim, Chephirah, and Beeroth, seven
hundred and forty and three.

2:26 The children of Ramah and Gaba, six hundred twenty and one.

2:27 The men of Michmas, an hundred twenty and two.

2:28 The men of Bethel and Ai, two hundred twenty and three.

2:29 The children of Nebo, fifty and two.

2:30 The children of Magbish, an hundred fifty and six.

2:31 The children of the other Elam, a thousand two hundred fifty and
four.

2:32 The children of Harim, three hundred and twenty.

2:33 The children of Lod, Hadid, and Ono, seven hundred twenty and
five.

2:34 The children of Jericho, three hundred forty and five.

2:35 The children of Senaah, three thousand and six hundred and
thirty.

2:36 The priests: the children of Jedaiah, of the house of Jeshua,
nine hundred seventy and three.

2:37 The children of Immer, a thousand fifty and two.

2:38 The children of Pashur, a thousand two hundred forty and seven.

2:39 The children of Harim, a thousand and seventeen.

2:40 The Levites: the children of Jeshua and Kadmiel, of the children
of Hodaviah, seventy and four.

2:41 The singers: the children of Asaph, an hundred twenty and eight.

2:42 The children of the porters: the children of Shallum, the
children of Ater, the children of Talmon, the children of Akkub, the
children of Hatita, the children of Shobai, in all an hundred thirty
and nine.

2:43 The Nethinims: the children of Ziha, the children of Hasupha, the
children of Tabbaoth, 2:44 The children of Keros, the children of
Siaha, the children of Padon, 2:45 The children of Lebanah, the
children of Hagabah, the children of Akkub, 2:46 The children of
Hagab, the children of Shalmai, the children of Hanan, 2:47 The
children of Giddel, the children of Gahar, the children of Reaiah,
2:48 The children of Rezin, the children of Nekoda, the children of
Gazzam, 2:49 The children of Uzza, the children of Paseah, the
children of Besai, 2:50 The children of Asnah, the children of
Mehunim, the children of Nephusim, 2:51 The children of Bakbuk, the
children of Hakupha, the children of Harhur, 2:52 The children of
Bazluth, the children of Mehida, the children of Harsha, 2:53 The
children of Barkos, the children of Sisera, the children of Thamah,
2:54 The children of Neziah, the children of Hatipha.

2:55 The children of Solomon's servants: the children of Sotai, the
children of Sophereth, the children of Peruda, 2:56 The children of
Jaalah, the children of Darkon, the children of Giddel, 2:57 The
children of Shephatiah, the children of Hattil, the children of
Pochereth of Zebaim, the children of Ami.

2:58 All the Nethinims, and the children of Solomon's servants, were
three hundred ninety and two.

2:59 And these were they which went up from Telmelah, Telharsa,
Cherub, Addan, and Immer: but they could not shew their father's
house, and their seed, whether they were of Israel: 2:60 The children
of Delaiah, the children of Tobiah, the children of Nekoda, six
hundred fifty and two.

2:61 And of the children of the priests: the children of Habaiah, the
children of Koz, the children of Barzillai; which took a wife of the
daughters of Barzillai the Gileadite, and was called after their name:
2:62 These sought their register among those that were reckoned by
genealogy, but they were not found: therefore were they, as polluted,
put from the priesthood.

2:63 And the Tirshatha said unto them, that they should not eat of the
most holy things, till there stood up a priest with Urim and with
Thummim.

2:64 The whole congregation together was forty and two thousand three
hundred and threescore, 2:65 Beside their servants and their maids, of
whom there were seven thousand three hundred thirty and seven: and
there were among them two hundred singing men and singing women.

2:66 Their horses were seven hundred thirty and six; their mules, two
hundred forty and five; 2:67 Their camels, four hundred thirty and
five; their asses, six thousand seven hundred and twenty.

2:68 And some of the chief of the fathers, when they came to the house
of the LORD which is at Jerusalem, offered freely for the house of God
to set it up in his place: 2:69 They gave after their ability unto the
treasure of the work threescore and one thousand drams of gold, and
five thousand pound of silver, and one hundred priests' garments.

2:70 So the priests, and the Levites, and some of the people, and the
singers, and the porters, and the Nethinims, dwelt in their cities,
and all Israel in their cities.

3:1 And when the seventh month was come, and the children of Israel
were in the cities, the people gathered themselves together as one man
to Jerusalem.

3:2 Then stood up Jeshua the son of Jozadak, and his brethren the
priests, and Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel, and his brethren, and
builded the altar of the God of Israel, to offer burnt offerings
thereon, as it is written in the law of Moses the man of God.

3:3 And they set the altar upon his bases; for fear was upon them
because of the people of those countries: and they offered burnt
offerings thereon unto the LORD, even burnt offerings morning and
evening.

3:4 They kept also the feast of tabernacles, as it is written, and
offered the daily burnt offerings by number, according to the custom,
as the duty of every day required; 3:5 And afterward offered the
continual burnt offering, both of the new moons, and of all the set
feasts of the LORD that were consecrated, and of every one that
willingly offered a freewill offering unto the LORD.

3:6 From the first day of the seventh month began they to offer burnt
offerings unto the LORD. But the foundation of the temple of the LORD
was not yet laid.

3:7 They gave money also unto the masons, and to the carpenters; and
meat, and drink, and oil, unto them of Zidon, and to them of Tyre, to
bring cedar trees from Lebanon to the sea of Joppa, according to the
grant that they had of Cyrus king of Persia.

3:8 Now in the second year of their coming unto the house of God at
Jerusalem, in the second month, began Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel,
and Jeshua the son of Jozadak, and the remnant of their brethren the
priests and the Levites, and all they that were come out of the
captivity unto Jerusalem; and appointed the Levites, from twenty years
old and upward, to set forward the work of the house of the LORD.

3:9 Then stood Jeshua with his sons and his brethren, Kadmiel and his
sons, the sons of Judah, together, to set forward the workmen in the
house of God: the sons of Henadad, with their sons and their brethren
the Levites.

3:10 And when the builders laid the foundation of the temple of the
LORD, they set the priests in their apparel with trumpets, and the
Levites the sons of Asaph with cymbals, to praise the LORD, after the
ordinance of David king of Israel.

3:11 And they sang together by course in praising and giving thanks
unto the LORD; because he is good, for his mercy endureth for ever
toward Israel.

And all the people shouted with a great shout, when they praised the
LORD, because the foundation of the house of the LORD was laid.

3:12 But many of the priests and Levites and chief of the fathers, who
were ancient men, that had seen the first house, when the foundation
of this house was laid before their eyes, wept with a loud voice; and
many shouted aloud for joy: 3:13 So that the people could not discern
the noise of the shout of joy from the noise of the weeping of the
people: for the people shouted with a loud shout, and the noise was
heard afar off.

4:1 Now when the adversaries of Judah and Benjamin heard that the
children of the captivity builded the temple unto the LORD God of
Israel; 4:2 Then they came to Zerubbabel, and to the chief of the
fathers, and said unto them, Let us build with you: for we seek your
God, as ye do; and we do sacrifice unto him since the days of
Esarhaddon king of Assur, which brought us up hither.

4:3 But Zerubbabel, and Jeshua, and the rest of the chief of the
fathers of Israel, said unto them, Ye have nothing to do with us to
build an house unto our God; but we ourselves together will build unto
the LORD God of Israel, as king Cyrus the king of Persia hath
commanded us.

4:4 Then the people of the land weakened the hands of the people of
Judah, and troubled them in building, 4:5 And hired counsellors
against them, to frustrate their purpose, all the days of Cyrus king
of Persia, even until the reign of Darius king of Persia.

4:6 And in the reign of Ahasuerus, in the beginning of his reign,
wrote they unto him an accusation against the inhabitants of Judah and
Jerusalem.

4:7 And in the days of Artaxerxes wrote Bishlam, Mithredath, Tabeel,
and the rest of their companions, unto Artaxerxes king of Persia; and
the writing of the letter was written in the Syrian tongue, and
interpreted in the Syrian tongue.

4:8 Rehum the chancellor and Shimshai the scribe wrote a letter
against Jerusalem to Artaxerxes the king in this sort: 4:9 Then wrote
Rehum the chancellor, and Shimshai the scribe, and the rest of their
companions; the Dinaites, the Apharsathchites, the Tarpelites, the
Apharsites, the Archevites, the Babylonians, the Susanchites, the
Dehavites, and the Elamites, 4:10 And the rest of the nations whom the
great and noble Asnapper brought over, and set in the cities of
Samaria, and the rest that are on this side the river, and at such a
time.

4:11 This is the copy of the letter that they sent unto him, even unto
Artaxerxes the king; Thy servants the men on this side the river, and
at such a time.

4:12 Be it known unto the king, that the Jews which came up from thee
to us are come unto Jerusalem, building the rebellious and the bad
city, and have set up the walls thereof, and joined the foundations.

4:13 Be it known now unto the king, that, if this city be builded, and
the walls set up again, then will they not pay toll, tribute, and
custom, and so thou shalt endamage the revenue of the kings.

4:14 Now because we have maintenance from the king's palace, and it
was not meet for us to see the king's dishonour, therefore have we
sent and certified the king; 4:15 That search may be made in the book
of the records of thy fathers: so shalt thou find in the book of the
records, and know that this city is a rebellious city, and hurtful
unto kings and provinces, and that they have moved sedition within the
same of old time: for which cause was this city destroyed.

4:16 We certify the king that, if this city be builded again, and the
walls thereof set up, by this means thou shalt have no portion on this
side the river.

4:17 Then sent the king an answer unto Rehum the chancellor, and to
Shimshai the scribe, and to the rest of their companions that dwell in
Samaria, and unto the rest beyond the river, Peace, and at such a
time.

4:18 The letter which ye sent unto us hath been plainly read before
me.

4:19 And I commanded, and search hath been made, and it is found that
this city of old time hath made insurrection against kings, and that
rebellion and sedition have been made therein.

4:20 There have been mighty kings also over Jerusalem, which have
ruled over all countries beyond the river; and toll, tribute, and
custom, was paid unto them.

4:21 Give ye now commandment to cause these men to cease, and that
this city be not builded, until another commandment shall be given
from me.

4:22 Take heed now that ye fail not to do this: why should damage grow
to the hurt of the kings?  4:23 Now when the copy of king Artaxerxes'
letter was read before Rehum, and Shimshai the scribe, and their
companions, they went up in haste to Jerusalem unto the Jews, and made
them to cease by force and power.

4:24 Then ceased the work of the house of God which is at Jerusalem.
So it ceased unto the second year of the reign of Darius king of
Persia.

5:1 Then the prophets, Haggai the prophet, and Zechariah the son of
Iddo, prophesied unto the Jews that were in Judah and Jerusalem in the
name of the God of Israel, even unto them.

5:2 Then rose up Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel, and Jeshua the son
of Jozadak, and began to build the house of God which is at Jerusalem:
and with them were the prophets of God helping them.

5:3 At the same time came to them Tatnai, governor on this side the
river, and Shetharboznai and their companions, and said thus unto
them, Who hath commanded you to build this house, and to make up this
wall?  5:4 Then said we unto them after this manner, What are the
names of the men that make this building?  5:5 But the eye of their
God was upon the elders of the Jews, that they could not cause them to
cease, till the matter came to Darius: and then they returned answer
by letter concerning this matter.

5:6 The copy of the letter that Tatnai, governor on this side the
river, and Shetharboznai and his companions the Apharsachites, which
were on this side the river, sent unto Darius the king: 5:7 They sent
a letter unto him, wherein was written thus; Unto Darius the king, all
peace.

5:8 Be it known unto the king, that we went into the province of
Judea, to the house of the great God, which is builded with great
stones, and timber is laid in the walls, and this work goeth fast on,
and prospereth in their hands.

5:9 Then asked we those elders, and said unto them thus, Who commanded
you to build this house, and to make up these walls?  5:10 We asked
their names also, to certify thee, that we might write the names of
the men that were the chief of them.

5:11 And thus they returned us answer, saying, We are the servants of
the God of heaven and earth, and build the house that was builded
these many years ago, which a great king of Israel builded and set up.

5:12 But after that our fathers had provoked the God of heaven unto
wrath, he gave them into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar the king of
Babylon, the Chaldean, who destroyed this house, and carried the
people away into Babylon.

5:13 But in the first year of Cyrus the king of Babylon the same king
Cyrus made a decree to build this house of God.

5:14 And the vessels also of gold and silver of the house of God,
which Nebuchadnezzar took out of the temple that was in Jerusalem, and
brought them into the temple of Babylon, those did Cyrus the king take
out of the temple of Babylon, and they were delivered unto one, whose
name was Sheshbazzar, whom he had made governor; 5:15 And said unto
him, Take these vessels, go, carry them into the temple that is in
Jerusalem, and let the house of God be builded in his place.

5:16 Then came the same Sheshbazzar, and laid the foundation of the
house of God which is in Jerusalem: and since that time even until now
hath it been in building, and yet it is not finished.

5:17 Now therefore, if it seem good to the king, let there be search
made in the king's treasure house, which is there at Babylon, whether
it be so, that a decree was made of Cyrus the king to build this house
of God at Jerusalem, and let the king send his pleasure to us
concerning this matter.

6:1 Then Darius the king made a decree, and search was made in the
house of the rolls, where the treasures were laid up in Babylon.

6:2 And there was found at Achmetha, in the palace that is in the
province of the Medes, a roll, and therein was a record thus written:
6:3 In the first year of Cyrus the king the same Cyrus the king made a
decree concerning the house of God at Jerusalem, Let the house be
builded, the place where they offered sacrifices, and let the
foundations thereof be strongly laid; the height thereof threescore
cubits, and the breadth thereof threescore cubits; 6:4 With three rows
of great stones, and a row of new timber: and let the expenses be
given out of the king's house: 6:5 And also let the golden and silver
vessels of the house of God, which Nebuchadnezzar took forth out of
the temple which is at Jerusalem, and brought unto Babylon, be
restored, and brought again unto the temple which is at Jerusalem,
every one to his place, and place them in the house of God.

6:6 Now therefore, Tatnai, governor beyond the river, Shetharboznai,
and your companions the Apharsachites, which are beyond the river, be
ye far from thence: 6:7 Let the work of this house of God alone; let
the governor of the Jews and the elders of the Jews build this house
of God in his place.

6:8 Moreover I make a decree what ye shall do to the elders of these
Jews for the building of this house of God: that of the king's goods,
even of the tribute beyond the river, forthwith expenses be given unto
these men, that they be not hindered.

6:9 And that which they have need of, both young bullocks, and rams,
and lambs, for the burnt offerings of the God of heaven, wheat, salt,
wine, and oil, according to the appointment of the priests which are
at Jerusalem, let it be given them day by day without fail: 6:10 That
they may offer sacrifices of sweet savours unto the God of heaven, and
pray for the life of the king, and of his sons.

6:11 Also I have made a decree, that whosoever shall alter this word,
let timber be pulled down from his house, and being set up, let him be
hanged thereon; and let his house be made a dunghill for this.

6:12 And the God that hath caused his name to dwell there destroy all
kings and people, that shall put to their hand to alter and to destroy
this house of God which is at Jerusalem. I Darius have made a decree;
let it be done with speed.

6:13 Then Tatnai, governor on this side the river, Shetharboznai, and
their companions, according to that which Darius the king had sent, so
they did speedily.

6:14 And the elders of the Jews builded, and they prospered through
the prophesying of Haggai the prophet and Zechariah the son of Iddo.
And they builded, and finished it, according to the commandment of the
God of Israel, and according to the commandment of Cyrus, and Darius,
and Artaxerxes king of Persia.

6:15 And this house was finished on the third day of the month Adar,
which was in the sixth year of the reign of Darius the king.

6:16 And the children of Israel, the priests, and the Levites, and the
rest of the children of the captivity, kept the dedication of this
house of God with joy.

6:17 And offered at the dedication of this house of God an hundred
bullocks, two hundred rams, four hundred lambs; and for a sin offering
for all Israel, twelve he goats, according to the number of the tribes
of Israel.

6:18 And they set the priests in their divisions, and the Levites in
their courses, for the service of God, which is at Jerusalem; as it is
written in the book of Moses.

6:19 And the children of the captivity kept the passover upon the
fourteenth day of the first month.

6:20 For the priests and the Levites were purified together, all of
them were pure, and killed the passover for all the children of the
captivity, and for their brethren the priests, and for themselves.

6:21 And the children of Israel, which were come again out of
captivity, and all such as had separated themselves unto them from the
filthiness of the heathen of the land, to seek the LORD God of Israel,
did eat, 6:22 And kept the feast of unleavened bread seven days with
joy: for the LORD had made them joyful, and turned the heart of the
king of Assyria unto them, to strengthen their hands in the work of
the house of God, the God of Israel.

7:1 Now after these things, in the reign of Artaxerxes king of Persia,
Ezra the son of Seraiah, the son of Azariah, the son of Hilkiah, 7:2
The son of Shallum, the son of Zadok, the son of Ahitub, 7:3 The son
of Amariah, the son of Azariah, the son of Meraioth, 7:4 The son of
Zerahiah, the son of Uzzi, the son of Bukki, 7:5 The son of Abishua,
the son of Phinehas, the son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron the chief
priest: 7:6 This Ezra went up from Babylon; and he was a ready scribe
in the law of Moses, which the LORD God of Israel had given: and the
king granted him all his request, according to the hand of the LORD
his God upon him.

7:7 And there went up some of the children of Israel, and of the
priests, and the Levites, and the singers, and the porters, and the
Nethinims, unto Jerusalem, in the seventh year of Artaxerxes the king.

7:8 And he came to Jerusalem in the fifth month, which was in the
seventh year of the king.

7:9 For upon the first day of the first month began he to go up from
Babylon, and on the first day of the fifth month came he to Jerusalem,
according to the good hand of his God upon him.

7:10 For Ezra had prepared his heart to seek the law of the LORD, and
to do it, and to teach in Israel statutes and judgments.

7:11 Now this is the copy of the letter that the king Artaxerxes gave
unto Ezra the priest, the scribe, even a scribe of the words of the
commandments of the LORD, and of his statutes to Israel.

7:12 Artaxerxes, king of kings, unto Ezra the priest, a scribe of the
law of the God of heaven, perfect peace, and at such a time.

7:13 I make a decree, that all they of the people of Israel, and of
his priests and Levites, in my realm, which are minded of their own
freewill to go up to Jerusalem, go with thee.

7:14 Forasmuch as thou art sent of the king, and of his seven
counsellors, to enquire concerning Judah and Jerusalem, according to
the law of thy God which is in thine hand; 7:15 And to carry the
silver and gold, which the king and his counsellors have freely
offered unto the God of Israel, whose habitation is in Jerusalem, 7:16
And all the silver and gold that thou canst find in all the province
of Babylon, with the freewill offering of the people, and of the
priests, offering willingly for the house of their God which is in
Jerusalem: 7:17 That thou mayest buy speedily with this money
bullocks, rams, lambs, with their meat offerings and their drink
offerings, and offer them upon the altar of the house of your God
which is in Jerusalem.

7:18 And whatsoever shall seem good to thee, and to thy brethren, to
do with the rest of the silver and the gold, that do after the will of
your God.

7:19 The vessels also that are given thee for the service of the house
of thy God, those deliver thou before the God of Jerusalem.

7:20 And whatsoever more shall be needful for the house of thy God,
which thou shalt have occasion to bestow, bestow it out of the king's
treasure house.

7:21 And I, even I Artaxerxes the king, do make a decree to all the
treasurers which are beyond the river, that whatsoever Ezra the
priest, the scribe of the law of the God of heaven, shall require of
you, it be done speedily, 7:22 Unto an hundred talents of silver, and
to an hundred measures of wheat, and to an hundred baths of wine, and
to an hundred baths of oil, and salt without prescribing how much.

7:23 Whatsoever is commanded by the God of heaven, let it be
diligently done for the house of the God of heaven: for why should
there be wrath against the realm of the king and his sons?  7:24 Also
we certify you, that touching any of the priests and Levites, singers,
porters, Nethinims, or ministers of this house of God, it shall not be
lawful to impose toll, tribute, or custom, upon them.

7:25 And thou, Ezra, after the wisdom of thy God, that is in thine
hand, set magistrates and judges, which may judge all the people that
are beyond the river, all such as know the laws of thy God; and teach
ye them that know them not.

7:26 And whosoever will not do the law of thy God, and the law of the
king, let judgment be executed speedily upon him, whether it be unto
death, or to banishment, or to confiscation of goods, or to
imprisonment.

7:27 Blessed be the LORD God of our fathers, which hath put such a
thing as this in the king's heart, to beautify the house of the LORD
which is in Jerusalem: 7:28 And hath extended mercy unto me before the
king, and his counsellors, and before all the king's mighty princes.
And I was strengthened as the hand of the LORD my God was upon me, and
I gathered together out of Israel chief men to go up with me.

8:1 These are now the chief of their fathers, and this is the
genealogy of them that went up with me from Babylon, in the reign of
Artaxerxes the king.

8:2 Of the sons of Phinehas; Gershom: of the sons of Ithamar; Daniel:
of the sons of David; Hattush.

8:3 Of the sons of Shechaniah, of the sons of Pharosh; Zechariah: and
with him were reckoned by genealogy of the males an hundred and fifty.

8:4 Of the sons of Pahathmoab; Elihoenai the son of Zerahiah, and with
him two hundred males.

8:5 Of the sons of Shechaniah; the son of Jahaziel, and with him three
hundred males.

8:6 Of the sons also of Adin; Ebed the son of Jonathan, and with him
fifty males.

8:7 And of the sons of Elam; Jeshaiah the son of Athaliah, and with
him seventy males.

8:8 And of the sons of Shephatiah; Zebadiah the son of Michael, and
with him fourscore males.

8:9 Of the sons of Joab; Obadiah the son of Jehiel, and with him two
hundred and eighteen males.

8:10 And of the sons of Shelomith; the son of Josiphiah, and with him
an hundred and threescore males.

8:11 And of the sons of Bebai; Zechariah the son of Bebai, and with
him twenty and eight males.

8:12 And of the sons of Azgad; Johanan the son of Hakkatan, and with
him an hundred and ten males.

8:13 And of the last sons of Adonikam, whose names are these,
Eliphelet, Jeiel, and Shemaiah, and with them threescore males.

8:14 Of the sons also of Bigvai; Uthai, and Zabbud, and with them
seventy males.

8:15 And I gathered them together to the river that runneth to Ahava;
and there abode we in tents three days: and I viewed the people, and
the priests, and found there none of the sons of Levi.

8:16 Then sent I for Eliezer, for Ariel, for Shemaiah, and for
Elnathan, and for Jarib, and for Elnathan, and for Nathan, and for
Zechariah, and for Meshullam, chief men; also for Joiarib, and for
Elnathan, men of understanding.

8:17 And I sent them with commandment unto Iddo the chief at the place
Casiphia, and I told them what they should say unto Iddo, and to his
brethren the Nethinims, at the place Casiphia, that they should bring
unto us ministers for the house of our God.

8:18 And by the good hand of our God upon us they brought us a man of
understanding, of the sons of Mahli, the son of Levi, the son of
Israel; and Sherebiah, with his sons and his brethren, eighteen; 8:19
And Hashabiah, and with him Jeshaiah of the sons of Merari, his
brethren and their sons, twenty; 8:20 Also of the Nethinims, whom
David and the princes had appointed for the service of the Levites,
two hundred and twenty Nethinims: all of them were expressed by name.

8:21 Then I proclaimed a fast there, at the river of Ahava, that we
might afflict ourselves before our God, to seek of him a right way for
us, and for our little ones, and for all our substance.

8:22 For I was ashamed to require of the king a band of soldiers and
horsemen to help us against the enemy in the way: because we had
spoken unto the king, saying, The hand of our God is upon all them for
good that seek him; but his power and his wrath is against all them
that forsake him.

8:23 So we fasted and besought our God for this: and he was intreated
of us.

8:24 Then I separated twelve of the chief of the priests, Sherebiah,
Hashabiah, and ten of their brethren with them, 8:25 And weighed unto
them the silver, and the gold, and the vessels, even the offering of
the house of our God, which the king, and his counsellors, and his
lords, and all Israel there present, had offered: 8:26 I even weighed
unto their hand six hundred and fifty talents of silver, and silver
vessels an hundred talents, and of gold an hundred talents; 8:27 Also
twenty basons of gold, of a thousand drams; and two vessels of fine
copper, precious as gold.

8:28 And I said unto them, Ye are holy unto the LORD; the vessels are
holy also; and the silver and the gold are a freewill offering unto
the LORD God of your fathers.

8:29 Watch ye, and keep them, until ye weigh them before the chief of
the priests and the Levites, and chief of the fathers of Israel, at
Jerusalem, in the chambers of the house of the LORD.

8:30 So took the priests and the Levites the weight of the silver, and
the gold, and the vessels, to bring them to Jerusalem unto the house
of our God.

8:31 Then we departed from the river of Ahava on the twelfth day of
the first month, to go unto Jerusalem: and the hand of our God was
upon us, and he delivered us from the hand of the enemy, and of such
as lay in wait by the way.

8:32 And we came to Jerusalem, and abode there three days.

8:33 Now on the fourth day was the silver and the gold and the vessels
weighed in the house of our God by the hand of Meremoth the son of
Uriah the priest; and with him was Eleazar the son of Phinehas; and
with them was Jozabad the son of Jeshua, and Noadiah the son of
Binnui, Levites; 8:34 By number and by weight of every one: and all
the weight was written at that time.

8:35 Also the children of those that had been carried away, which were
come out of the captivity, offered burnt offerings unto the God of
Israel, twelve bullocks for all Israel, ninety and six rams, seventy
and seven lambs, twelve he goats for a sin offering: all this was a
burnt offering unto the LORD.

8:36 And they delivered the king's commissions unto the king's
lieutenants, and to the governors on this side the river: and they
furthered the people, and the house of God.

9:1 Now when these things were done, the princes came to me, saying,
The people of Israel, and the priests, and the Levites, have not
separated themselves from the people of the lands, doing according to
their abominations, even of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the
Perizzites, the Jebusites, the Ammonites, the Moabites, the Egyptians,
and the Amorites.

9:2 For they have taken of their daughters for themselves, and for
their sons: so that the holy seed have mingled themselves with the
people of those lands: yea, the hand of the princes and rulers hath
been chief in this trespass.

9:3 And when I heard this thing, I rent my garment and my mantle, and
plucked off the hair of my head and of my beard, and sat down
astonied.

9:4 Then were assembled unto me every one that trembled at the words
of the God of Israel, because of the transgression of those that had
been carried away; and I sat astonied until the evening sacrifice.

9:5 And at the evening sacrifice I arose up from my heaviness; and
having rent my garment and my mantle, I fell upon my knees, and spread
out my hands unto the LORD my God, 9:6 And said, O my God, I am
ashamed and blush to lift up my face to thee, my God: for our
iniquities are increased over our head, and our trespass is grown up
unto the heavens.

9:7 Since the days of our fathers have we been in a great trespass
unto this day; and for our iniquities have we, our kings, and our
priests, been delivered into the hand of the kings of the lands, to
the sword, to captivity, and to a spoil, and to confusion of face, as
it is this day.

9:8 And now for a little space grace hath been shewed from the LORD
our God, to leave us a remnant to escape, and to give us a nail in his
holy place, that our God may lighten our eyes, and give us a little
reviving in our bondage.

9:9 For we were bondmen; yet our God hath not forsaken us in our
bondage, but hath extended mercy unto us in the sight of the kings of
Persia, to give us a reviving, to set up the house of our God, and to
repair the desolations thereof, and to give us a wall in Judah and in
Jerusalem.

9:10 And now, O our God, what shall we say after this? for we have
forsaken thy commandments, 9:11 Which thou hast commanded by thy
servants the prophets, saying, The land, unto which ye go to possess
it, is an unclean land with the filthiness of the people of the lands,
with their abominations, which have filled it from one end to another
with their uncleanness.

9:12 Now therefore give not your daughters unto their sons, neither
take their daughters unto your sons, nor seek their peace or their
wealth for ever: that ye may be strong, and eat the good of the land,
and leave it for an inheritance to your children for ever.

9:13 And after all that is come upon us for our evil deeds, and for
our great trespass, seeing that thou our God hast punished us less
than our iniquities deserve, and hast given us such deliverance as
this; 9:14 Should we again break thy commandments, and join in
affinity with the people of these abominations? wouldest not thou be
angry with us till thou hadst consumed us, so that there should be no
remnant nor escaping?  9:15 O LORD God of Israel, thou art righteous:
for we remain yet escaped, as it is this day: behold, we are before
thee in our trespasses: for we cannot stand before thee because of
this.

10:1 Now when Ezra had prayed, and when he had confessed, weeping and
casting himself down before the house of God, there assembled unto him
out of Israel a very great congregation of men and women and children:
for the people wept very sore.

10:2 And Shechaniah the son of Jehiel, one of the sons of Elam,
answered and said unto Ezra, We have trespassed against our God, and
have taken strange wives of the people of the land: yet now there is
hope in Israel concerning this thing.

10:3 Now therefore let us make a covenant with our God to put away all
the wives, and such as are born of them, according to the counsel of
my lord, and of those that tremble at the commandment of our God; and
let it be done according to the law.

10:4 Arise; for this matter belongeth unto thee: we also will be with
thee: be of good courage, and do it.

10:5 Then arose Ezra, and made the chief priests, the Levites, and all
Israel, to swear that they should do according to this word. And they
sware.

10:6 Then Ezra rose up from before the house of God, and went into the
chamber of Johanan the son of Eliashib: and when he came thither, he
did eat no bread, nor drink water: for he mourned because of the
transgression of them that had been carried away.

10:7 And they made proclamation throughout Judah and Jerusalem unto
all the children of the captivity, that they should gather themselves
together unto Jerusalem; 10:8 And that whosoever would not come within
three days, according to the counsel of the princes and the elders,
all his substance should be forfeited, and himself separated from the
congregation of those that had been carried away.

10:9 Then all the men of Judah and Benjamin gathered themselves
together unto Jerusalem within three days. It was the ninth month, on
the twentieth day of the month; and all the people sat in the street
of the house of God, trembling because of this matter, and for the
great rain.

10:10 And Ezra the priest stood up, and said unto them, Ye have
transgressed, and have taken strange wives, to increase the trespass
of Israel.

10:11 Now therefore make confession unto the LORD God of your fathers,
and do his pleasure: and separate yourselves from the people of the
land, and from the strange wives.

10:12 Then all the congregation answered and said with a loud voice,
As thou hast said, so must we do.

10:13 But the people are many, and it is a time of much rain, and we
are not able to stand without, neither is this a work of one day or
two: for we are many that have transgressed in this thing.

10:14 Let now our rulers of all the congregation stand, and let all
them which have taken strange wives in our cities come at appointed
times, and with them the elders of every city, and the judges thereof,
until the fierce wrath of our God for this matter be turned from us.

10:15 Only Jonathan the son of Asahel and Jahaziah the son of Tikvah
were employed about this matter: and Meshullam and Shabbethai the
Levite helped them.

10:16 And the children of the captivity did so. And Ezra the priest,
with certain chief of the fathers, after the house of their fathers,
and all of them by their names, were separated, and sat down in the
first day of the tenth month to examine the matter.

10:17 And they made an end with all the men that had taken strange
wives by the first day of the first month.

10:18 And among the sons of the priests there were found that had
taken strange wives: namely, of the sons of Jeshua the son of Jozadak,
and his brethren; Maaseiah, and Eliezer, and Jarib, and Gedaliah.

10:19 And they gave their hands that they would put away their wives;
and being guilty, they offered a ram of the flock for their trespass.

10:20 And of the sons of Immer; Hanani, and Zebadiah.

10:21 And of the sons of Harim; Maaseiah, and Elijah, and Shemaiah,
and Jehiel, and Uzziah.

10:22 And of the sons of Pashur; Elioenai, Maaseiah, Ishmael,
Nethaneel, Jozabad, and Elasah.

10:23 Also of the Levites; Jozabad, and Shimei, and Kelaiah, (the same
is Kelita,) Pethahiah, Judah, and Eliezer.

10:24 Of the singers also; Eliashib: and of the porters; Shallum, and
Telem, and Uri.

10:25 Moreover of Israel: of the sons of Parosh; Ramiah, and Jeziah,
and Malchiah, and Miamin, and Eleazar, and Malchijah, and Benaiah.

10:26 And of the sons of Elam; Mattaniah, Zechariah, and Jehiel, and
Abdi, and Jeremoth, and Eliah.

10:27 And of the sons of Zattu; Elioenai, Eliashib, Mattaniah, and
Jeremoth, and Zabad, and Aziza.

10:28 Of the sons also of Bebai; Jehohanan, Hananiah, Zabbai, and
Athlai.

10:29 And of the sons of Bani; Meshullam, Malluch, and Adaiah, Jashub,
and Sheal, and Ramoth.

10:30 And of the sons of Pahathmoab; Adna, and Chelal, Benaiah,
Maaseiah, Mattaniah, Bezaleel, and Binnui, and Manasseh.

10:31 And of the sons of Harim; Eliezer, Ishijah, Malchiah, Shemaiah,
Shimeon, 10:32 Benjamin, Malluch, and Shemariah.

10:33 Of the sons of Hashum; Mattenai, Mattathah, Zabad, Eliphelet,
Jeremai, Manasseh, and Shimei.

10:34 Of the sons of Bani; Maadai, Amram, and Uel, 10:35 Benaiah,
Bedeiah, Chelluh, 10:36 Vaniah, Meremoth, Eliashib, 10:37 Mattaniah,
Mattenai, and Jaasau, 10:38 And Bani, and Binnui, Shimei, 10:39 And
Shelemiah, and Nathan, and Adaiah, 10:40 Machnadebai, Shashai, Sharai,
10:41 Azareel, and Shelemiah, Shemariah, 10:42 Shallum, Amariah, and
Joseph.

10:43 Of the sons of Nebo; Jeiel, Mattithiah, Zabad, Zebina, Jadau,
and Joel, Benaiah.

10:44 All these had taken strange wives: and some of them had wives by
whom they had children.




The Book of Nehemiah


1:1 The words of Nehemiah the son of Hachaliah. And it came to pass
in the month Chisleu, in the twentieth year, as I was in Shushan the
palace, 1:2 That Hanani, one of my brethren, came, he and certain men
of Judah; and I asked them concerning the Jews that had escaped, which
were left of the captivity, and concerning Jerusalem.

1:3 And they said unto me, The remnant that are left of the captivity
there in the province are in great affliction and reproach: the wall
of Jerusalem also is broken down, and the gates thereof are burned
with fire.

1:4 And it came to pass, when I heard these words, that I sat down and
wept, and mourned certain days, and fasted, and prayed before the God
of heaven, 1:5 And said, I beseech thee, O LORD God of heaven, the
great and terrible God, that keepeth covenant and mercy for them that
love him and observe his commandments: 1:6 Let thine ear now be
attentive, and thine eyes open, that thou mayest hear the prayer of
thy servant, which I pray before thee now, day and night, for the
children of Israel thy servants, and confess the sins of the children
of Israel, which we have sinned against thee: both I and my father's
house have sinned.

1:7 We have dealt very corruptly against thee, and have not kept the
commandments, nor the statutes, nor the judgments, which thou
commandedst thy servant Moses.

1:8 Remember, I beseech thee, the word that thou commandedst thy
servant Moses, saying, If ye transgress, I will scatter you abroad
among the nations: 1:9 But if ye turn unto me, and keep my
commandments, and do them; though there were of you cast out unto the
uttermost part of the heaven, yet will I gather them from thence, and
will bring them unto the place that I have chosen to set my name
there.

1:10 Now these are thy servants and thy people, whom thou hast
redeemed by thy great power, and by thy strong hand.

1:11 O LORD, I beseech thee, let now thine ear be attentive to the
prayer of thy servant, and to the prayer of thy servants, who desire
to fear thy name: and prosper, I pray thee, thy servant this day, and
grant him mercy in the sight of this man. For I was the king's
cupbearer.

2:1 And it came to pass in the month Nisan, in the twentieth year of
Artaxerxes the king, that wine was before him: and I took up the wine,
and gave it unto the king. Now I had not been beforetime sad in his
presence.

2:2 Wherefore the king said unto me, Why is thy countenance sad,
seeing thou art not sick? this is nothing else but sorrow of heart.
Then I was very sore afraid, 2:3 And said unto the king, Let the king
live for ever: why should not my countenance be sad, when the city,
the place of my fathers' sepulchres, lieth waste, and the gates
thereof are consumed with fire?  2:4 Then the king said unto me, For
what dost thou make request? So I prayed to the God of heaven.

2:5 And I said unto the king, If it please the king, and if thy
servant have found favour in thy sight, that thou wouldest send me
unto Judah, unto the city of my fathers' sepulchres, that I may build
it.

2:6 And the king said unto me, (the queen also sitting by him,) For
how long shall thy journey be? and when wilt thou return? So it
pleased the king to send me; and I set him a time.

2:7 Moreover I said unto the king, If it please the king, let letters
be given me to the governors beyond the river, that they may convey me
over till I come into Judah; 2:8 And a letter unto Asaph the keeper of
the king's forest, that he may give me timber to make beams for the
gates of the palace which appertained to the house, and for the wall
of the city, and for the house that I shall enter into. And the king
granted me, according to the good hand of my God upon me.

2:9 Then I came to the governors beyond the river, and gave them the
king's letters. Now the king had sent captains of the army and
horsemen with me.

2:10 When Sanballat the Horonite, and Tobiah the servant, the
Ammonite, heard of it, it grieved them exceedingly that there was come
a man to seek the welfare of the children of Israel.

2:11 So I came to Jerusalem, and was there three days.

2:12 And I arose in the night, I and some few men with me; neither
told I any man what my God had put in my heart to do at Jerusalem:
neither was there any beast with me, save the beast that I rode upon.

2:13 And I went out by night by the gate of the valley, even before
the dragon well, and to the dung port, and viewed the walls of
Jerusalem, which were broken down, and the gates thereof were consumed
with fire.

2:14 Then I went on to the gate of the fountain, and to the king's
pool: but there was no place for the beast that was under me to pass.

2:15 Then went I up in the night by the brook, and viewed the wall,
and turned back, and entered by the gate of the valley, and so
returned.

2:16 And the rulers knew not whither I went, or what I did; neither
had I as yet told it to the Jews, nor to the priests, nor to the
nobles, nor to the rulers, nor to the rest that did the work.

2:17 Then said I unto them, Ye see the distress that we are in, how
Jerusalem lieth waste, and the gates thereof are burned with fire:
come, and let us build up the wall of Jerusalem, that we be no more a
reproach.

2:18 Then I told them of the hand of my God which was good upon me; as
also the king's words that he had spoken unto me. And they said, Let
us rise up and build. So they strengthened their hands for this good
work.

2:19 But when Sanballat the Horonite, and Tobiah the servant, the
Ammonite, and Geshem the Arabian, heard it, they laughed us to scorn,
and despised us, and said, What is this thing that ye do? will ye
rebel against the king?  2:20 Then answered I them, and said unto
them, The God of heaven, he will prosper us; therefore we his servants
will arise and build: but ye have no portion, nor right, nor memorial,
in Jerusalem.

3:1 Then Eliashib the high priest rose up with his brethren the
priests, and they builded the sheep gate; they sanctified it, and set
up the doors of it; even unto the tower of Meah they sanctified it,
unto the tower of Hananeel.

3:2 And next unto him builded the men of Jericho. And next to them
builded Zaccur the son of Imri.

3:3 But the fish gate did the sons of Hassenaah build, who also laid
the beams thereof, and set up the doors thereof, the locks thereof,
and the bars thereof.

3:4 And next unto them repaired Meremoth the son of Urijah, the son of
Koz. And next unto them repaired Meshullam the son of Berechiah, the
son of Meshezabeel. And next unto them repaired Zadok the son of
Baana.

3:5 And next unto them the Tekoites repaired; but their nobles put not
their necks to the work of their LORD.

3:6 Moreover the old gate repaired Jehoiada the son of Paseah, and
Meshullam the son of Besodeiah; they laid the beams thereof, and set
up the doors thereof, and the locks thereof, and the bars thereof.

3:7 And next unto them repaired Melatiah the Gibeonite, and Jadon the
Meronothite, the men of Gibeon, and of Mizpah, unto the throne of the
governor on this side the river.

3:8 Next unto him repaired Uzziel the son of Harhaiah, of the
goldsmiths.

Next unto him also repaired Hananiah the son of one of the
apothecaries, and they fortified Jerusalem unto the broad wall.

3:9 And next unto them repaired Rephaiah the son of Hur, the ruler of
the half part of Jerusalem.

3:10 And next unto them repaired Jedaiah the son of Harumaph, even
over against his house. And next unto him repaired Hattush the son of
Hashabniah.

3:11 Malchijah the son of Harim, and Hashub the son of Pahathmoab,
repaired the other piece, and the tower of the furnaces.

3:12 And next unto him repaired Shallum the son of Halohesh, the ruler
of the half part of Jerusalem, he and his daughters.

3:13 The valley gate repaired Hanun, and the inhabitants of Zanoah;
they built it, and set up the doors thereof, the locks thereof, and
the bars thereof, and a thousand cubits on the wall unto the dung
gate.

3:14 But the dung gate repaired Malchiah the son of Rechab, the ruler
of part of Bethhaccerem; he built it, and set up the doors thereof,
the locks thereof, and the bars thereof.

3:15 But the gate of the fountain repaired Shallun the son of
Colhozeh, the ruler of part of Mizpah; he built it, and covered it,
and set up the doors thereof, the locks thereof, and the bars thereof,
and the wall of the pool of Siloah by the king's garden, and unto the
stairs that go down from the city of David.

3:16 After him repaired Nehemiah the son of Azbuk, the ruler of the
half part of Bethzur, unto the place over against the sepulchres of
David, and to the pool that was made, and unto the house of the
mighty.

3:17 After him repaired the Levites, Rehum the son of Bani. Next unto
him repaired Hashabiah, the ruler of the half part of Keilah, in his
part.

3:18 After him repaired their brethren, Bavai the son of Henadad, the
ruler of the half part of Keilah.

3:19 And next to him repaired Ezer the son of Jeshua, the ruler of
Mizpah, another piece over against the going up to the armoury at the
turning of the wall.

3:20 After him Baruch the son of Zabbai earnestly repaired the other
piece, from the turning of the wall unto the door of the house of
Eliashib the high priest.

3:21 After him repaired Meremoth the son of Urijah the son of Koz
another piece, from the door of the house of Eliashib even to the end
of the house of Eliashib.

3:22 And after him repaired the priests, the men of the plain.

3:23 After him repaired Benjamin and Hashub over against their house.

After him repaired Azariah the son of Maaseiah the son of Ananiah by
his house.

3:24 After him repaired Binnui the son of Henadad another piece, from
the house of Azariah unto the turning of the wall, even unto the
corner.

3:25 Palal the son of Uzai, over against the turning of the wall, and
the tower which lieth out from the king's high house, that was by the
court of the prison. After him Pedaiah the son of Parosh.

3:26 Moreover the Nethinims dwelt in Ophel, unto the place over
against the water gate toward the east, and the tower that lieth out.

3:27 After them the Tekoites repaired another piece, over against the
great tower that lieth out, even unto the wall of Ophel.

3:28 From above the horse gate repaired the priests, every one over
against his house.

3:29 After them repaired Zadok the son of Immer over against his
house.

After him repaired also Shemaiah the son of Shechaniah, the keeper of
the east gate.

3:30 After him repaired Hananiah the son of Shelemiah, and Hanun the
sixth son of Zalaph, another piece. After him repaired Meshullam the
son of Berechiah over against his chamber.

3:31 After him repaired Malchiah the goldsmith's son unto the place of
the Nethinims, and of the merchants, over against the gate Miphkad,
and to the going up of the corner.

3:32 And between the going up of the corner unto the sheep gate
repaired the goldsmiths and the merchants.

4:1 But it came to pass, that when Sanballat heard that we builded the
wall, he was wroth, and took great indignation, and mocked the Jews.

4:2 And he spake before his brethren and the army of Samaria, and
said, What do these feeble Jews? will they fortify themselves? will
they sacrifice?  will they make an end in a day? will they revive the
stones out of the heaps of the rubbish which are burned?  4:3 Now
Tobiah the Ammonite was by him, and he said, Even that which they
build, if a fox go up, he shall even break down their stone wall.

4:4 Hear, O our God; for we are despised: and turn their reproach upon
their own head, and give them for a prey in the land of captivity: 4:5
And cover not their iniquity, and let not their sin be blotted out
from before thee: for they have provoked thee to anger before the
builders.

4:6 So built we the wall; and all the wall was joined together unto
the half thereof: for the people had a mind to work.

4:7 But it came to pass, that when Sanballat, and Tobiah, and the
Arabians, and the Ammonites, and the Ashdodites, heard that the walls
of Jerusalem were made up, and that the breaches began to be stopped,
then they were very wroth, 4:8 And conspired all of them together to
come and to fight against Jerusalem, and to hinder it.

4:9 Nevertheless we made our prayer unto our God, and set a watch
against them day and night, because of them.

4:10 And Judah said, The strength of the bearers of burdens is
decayed, and there is much rubbish; so that we are not able to build
the wall.

4:11 And our adversaries said, They shall not know, neither see, till
we come in the midst among them, and slay them, and cause the work to
cease.

4:12 And it came to pass, that when the Jews which dwelt by them came,
they said unto us ten times, From all places whence ye shall return
unto us they will be upon you.

4:13 Therefore set I in the lower places behind the wall, and on the
higher places, I even set the people after their families with their
swords, their spears, and their bows.

4:14 And I looked, and rose up, and said unto the nobles, and to the
rulers, and to the rest of the people, Be not ye afraid of them:
remember the LORD, which is great and terrible, and fight for your
brethren, your sons, and your daughters, your wives, and your houses.

4:15 And it came to pass, when our enemies heard that it was known
unto us, and God had brought their counsel to nought, that we returned
all of us to the wall, every one unto his work.

4:16 And it came to pass from that time forth, that the half of my
servants wrought in the work, and the other half of them held both the
spears, the shields, and the bows, and the habergeons; and the rulers
were behind all the house of Judah.

4:17 They which builded on the wall, and they that bare burdens, with
those that laded, every one with one of his hands wrought in the work,
and with the other hand held a weapon.

4:18 For the builders, every one had his sword girded by his side, and
so builded. And he that sounded the trumpet was by me.

4:19 And I said unto the nobles, and to the rulers, and to the rest of
the people, The work is great and large, and we are separated upon the
wall, one far from another.

4:20 In what place therefore ye hear the sound of the trumpet, resort
ye thither unto us: our God shall fight for us.

4:21 So we laboured in the work: and half of them held the spears from
the rising of the morning till the stars appeared.

4:22 Likewise at the same time said I unto the people, Let every one
with his servant lodge within Jerusalem, that in the night they may be
a guard to us, and labour on the day.

4:23 So neither I, nor my brethren, nor my servants, nor the men of
the guard which followed me, none of us put off our clothes, saving
that every one put them off for washing.

5:1 And there was a great cry of the people and of their wives against
their brethren the Jews.

5:2 For there were that said, We, our sons, and our daughters, are
many: therefore we take up corn for them, that we may eat, and live.

5:3 Some also there were that said, We have mortgaged our lands,
vineyards, and houses, that we might buy corn, because of the dearth.

5:4 There were also that said, We have borrowed money for the king's
tribute, and that upon our lands and vineyards.

5:5 Yet now our flesh is as the flesh of our brethren, our children as
their children: and, lo, we bring into bondage our sons and our
daughters to be servants, and some of our daughters are brought unto
bondage already: neither is it in our power to redeem them; for other
men have our lands and vineyards.

5:6 And I was very angry when I heard their cry and these words.

5:7 Then I consulted with myself, and I rebuked the nobles, and the
rulers, and said unto them, Ye exact usury, every one of his brother.
And I set a great assembly against them.

5:8 And I said unto them, We after our ability have redeemed our
brethren the Jews, which were sold unto the heathen; and will ye even
sell your brethren? or shall they be sold unto us? Then held they
their peace, and found nothing to answer.

5:9 Also I said, It is not good that ye do: ought ye not to walk in
the fear of our God because of the reproach of the heathen our
enemies?  5:10 I likewise, and my brethren, and my servants, might
exact of them money and corn: I pray you, let us leave off this usury.

5:11 Restore, I pray you, to them, even this day, their lands, their
vineyards, their oliveyards, and their houses, also the hundredth part
of the money, and of the corn, the wine, and the oil, that ye exact of
them.

5:12 Then said they, We will restore them, and will require nothing of
them; so will we do as thou sayest. Then I called the priests, and
took an oath of them, that they should do according to this promise.

5:13 Also I shook my lap, and said, So God shake out every man from
his house, and from his labour, that performeth not this promise, even
thus be he shaken out, and emptied. And all the congregation said,
Amen, and praised the LORD. And the people did according to this
promise.

5:14 Moreover from the time that I was appointed to be their governor
in the land of Judah, from the twentieth year even unto the two and
thirtieth year of Artaxerxes the king, that is, twelve years, I and my
brethren have not eaten the bread of the governor.

5:15 But the former governors that had been before me were chargeable
unto the people, and had taken of them bread and wine, beside forty
shekels of silver; yea, even their servants bare rule over the people:
but so did not I, because of the fear of God.

5:16 Yea, also I continued in the work of this wall, neither bought we
any land: and all my servants were gathered thither unto the work.

5:17 Moreover there were at my table an hundred and fifty of the Jews
and rulers, beside those that came unto us from among the heathen that
are about us.

5:18 Now that which was prepared for me daily was one ox and six
choice sheep; also fowls were prepared for me, and once in ten days
store of all sorts of wine: yet for all this required not I the bread
of the governor, because the bondage was heavy upon this people.

5:19 Think upon me, my God, for good, according to all that I have
done for this people.

6:1 Now it came to pass when Sanballat, and Tobiah, and Geshem the
Arabian, and the rest of our enemies, heard that I had builded the
wall, and that there was no breach left therein; (though at that time
I had not set up the doors upon the gates;) 6:2 That Sanballat and
Geshem sent unto me, saying, Come, let us meet together in some one of
the villages in the plain of Ono. But they thought to do me mischief.

6:3 And I sent messengers unto them, saying, I am doing a great work,
so that I cannot come down: why should the work cease, whilst I leave
it, and come down to you?  6:4 Yet they sent unto me four times after
this sort; and I answered them after the same manner.

6:5 Then sent Sanballat his servant unto me in like manner the fifth
time with an open letter in his hand; 6:6 Wherein was written, It is
reported among the heathen, and Gashmu saith it, that thou and the
Jews think to rebel: for which cause thou buildest the wall, that thou
mayest be their king, according to these words.

6:7 And thou hast also appointed prophets to preach of thee at
Jerusalem, saying, There is a king in Judah: and now shall it be
reported to the king according to these words. Come now therefore, and
let us take counsel together.

6:8 Then I sent unto him, saying, There are no such things done as
thou sayest, but thou feignest them out of thine own heart.

6:9 For they all made us afraid, saying, Their hands shall be weakened
from the work, that it be not done. Now therefore, O God, strengthen
my hands.

6:10 Afterward I came unto the house of Shemaiah the son of Delaiah
the son of Mehetabeel, who was shut up; and he said, Let us meet
together in the house of God, within the temple, and let us shut the
doors of the temple: for they will come to slay thee; yea, in the
night will they come to slay thee.

6:11 And I said, Should such a man as I flee? and who is there, that,
being as I am, would go into the temple to save his life? I will not
go in.

6:12 And, lo, I perceived that God had not sent him; but that he
pronounced this prophecy against me: for Tobiah and Sanballat had
hired him.

6:13 Therefore was he hired, that I should be afraid, and do so, and
sin, and that they might have matter for an evil report, that they
might reproach me.

6:14 My God, think thou upon Tobiah and Sanballat according to these
their works, and on the prophetess Noadiah, and the rest of the
prophets, that would have put me in fear.

6:15 So the wall was finished in the twenty and fifth day of the month
Elul, in fifty and two days.

6:16 And it came to pass, that when all our enemies heard thereof, and
all the heathen that were about us saw these things, they were much
cast down in their own eyes: for they perceived that this work was
wrought of our God.

6:17 Moreover in those days the nobles of Judah sent many letters unto
Tobiah, and the letters of Tobiah came unto them.

6:18 For there were many in Judah sworn unto him, because he was the
son in law of Shechaniah the son of Arah; and his son Johanan had
taken the daughter of Meshullam the son of Berechiah.

6:19 Also they reported his good deeds before me, and uttered my words
to him. And Tobiah sent letters to put me in fear.

7:1 Now it came to pass, when the wall was built, and I had set up the
doors, and the porters and the singers and the Levites were appointed,
7:2 That I gave my brother Hanani, and Hananiah the ruler of the
palace, charge over Jerusalem: for he was a faithful man, and feared
God above many.

7:3 And I said unto them, Let not the gates of Jerusalem be opened
until the sun be hot; and while they stand by, let them shut the
doors, and bar them: and appoint watches of the inhabitants of
Jerusalem, every one in his watch, and every one to be over against
his house.

7:4 Now the city was large and great: but the people were few therein,
and the houses were not builded.

7:5 And my God put into mine heart to gather together the nobles, and
the rulers, and the people, that they might be reckoned by genealogy.
And I found a register of the genealogy of them which came up at the
first, and found written therein, 7:6 These are the children of the
province, that went up out of the captivity, of those that had been
carried away, whom Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon had carried
away, and came again to Jerusalem and to Judah, every one unto his
city; 7:7 Who came with Zerubbabel, Jeshua, Nehemiah, Azariah,
Raamiah, Nahamani, Mordecai, Bilshan, Mispereth, Bigvai, Nehum,
Baanah. The number, I say, of the men of the people of Israel was
this; 7:8 The children of Parosh, two thousand an hundred seventy and
two.

7:9 The children of Shephatiah, three hundred seventy and two.

7:10 The children of Arah, six hundred fifty and two.

7:11 The children of Pahathmoab, of the children of Jeshua and Joab,
two thousand and eight hundred and eighteen.

7:12 The children of Elam, a thousand two hundred fifty and four.

7:13 The children of Zattu, eight hundred forty and five.

7:14 The children of Zaccai, seven hundred and threescore.

7:15 The children of Binnui, six hundred forty and eight.

7:16 The children of Bebai, six hundred twenty and eight.

7:17 The children of Azgad, two thousand three hundred twenty and two.

7:18 The children of Adonikam, six hundred threescore and seven.

7:19 The children of Bigvai, two thousand threescore and seven.

7:20 The children of Adin, six hundred fifty and five.

7:21 The children of Ater of Hezekiah, ninety and eight.

7:22 The children of Hashum, three hundred twenty and eight.

7:23 The children of Bezai, three hundred twenty and four.

7:24 The children of Hariph, an hundred and twelve.

7:25 The children of Gibeon, ninety and five.

7:26 The men of Bethlehem and Netophah, an hundred fourscore and
eight.

7:27 The men of Anathoth, an hundred twenty and eight.

7:28 The men of Bethazmaveth, forty and two.

7:29 The men of Kirjathjearim, Chephirah, and Beeroth, seven hundred
forty and three.

7:30 The men of Ramah and Gaba, six hundred twenty and one.

7:31 The men of Michmas, an hundred and twenty and two.

7:32 The men of Bethel and Ai, an hundred twenty and three.

7:33 The men of the other Nebo, fifty and two.

7:34 The children of the other Elam, a thousand two hundred fifty and
four.

7:35 The children of Harim, three hundred and twenty.

7:36 The children of Jericho, three hundred forty and five.

7:37 The children of Lod, Hadid, and Ono, seven hundred twenty and
one.

7:38 The children of Senaah, three thousand nine hundred and thirty.

7:39 The priests: the children of Jedaiah, of the house of Jeshua,
nine hundred seventy and three.

7:40 The children of Immer, a thousand fifty and two.

7:41 The children of Pashur, a thousand two hundred forty and seven.

7:42 The children of Harim, a thousand and seventeen.

7:43 The Levites: the children of Jeshua, of Kadmiel, and of the
children of Hodevah, seventy and four.

7:44 The singers: the children of Asaph, an hundred forty and eight.

7:45 The porters: the children of Shallum, the children of Ater, the
children of Talmon, the children of Akkub, the children of Hatita, the
children of Shobai, an hundred thirty and eight.

7:46 The Nethinims: the children of Ziha, the children of Hashupha,
the children of Tabbaoth, 7:47 The children of Keros, the children of
Sia, the children of Padon, 7:48 The children of Lebana, the children
of Hagaba, the children of Shalmai, 7:49 The children of Hanan, the
children of Giddel, the children of Gahar, 7:50 The children of
Reaiah, the children of Rezin, the children of Nekoda, 7:51 The
children of Gazzam, the children of Uzza, the children of Phaseah,
7:52 The children of Besai, the children of Meunim, the children of
Nephishesim, 7:53 The children of Bakbuk, the children of Hakupha, the
children of Harhur, 7:54 The children of Bazlith, the children of
Mehida, the children of Harsha, 7:55 The children of Barkos, the
children of Sisera, the children of Tamah, 7:56 The children of
Neziah, the children of Hatipha.

7:57 The children of Solomon's servants: the children of Sotai, the
children of Sophereth, the children of Perida, 7:58 The children of
Jaala, the children of Darkon, the children of Giddel, 7:59 The
children of Shephatiah, the children of Hattil, the children of
Pochereth of Zebaim, the children of Amon.

7:60 All the Nethinims, and the children of Solomon's servants, were
three hundred ninety and two.

7:61 And these were they which went up also from Telmelah, Telharesha,
Cherub, Addon, and Immer: but they could not shew their father's
house, nor their seed, whether they were of Israel.

7:62 The children of Delaiah, the children of Tobiah, the children of
Nekoda, six hundred forty and two.

7:63 And of the priests: the children of Habaiah, the children of Koz,
the children of Barzillai, which took one of the daughters of
Barzillai the Gileadite to wife, and was called after their name.

7:64 These sought their register among those that were reckoned by
genealogy, but it was not found: therefore were they, as polluted, put
from the priesthood.

7:65 And the Tirshatha said unto them, that they should not eat of the
most holy things, till there stood up a priest with Urim and Thummim.

7:66 The whole congregation together was forty and two thousand three
hundred and threescore, 7:67 Beside their manservants and their
maidservants, of whom there were seven thousand three hundred thirty
and seven: and they had two hundred forty and five singing men and
singing women.

7:68 Their horses, seven hundred thirty and six: their mules, two
hundred forty and five: 7:69 Their camels, four hundred thirty and
five: six thousand seven hundred and twenty asses.

7:70 And some of the chief of the fathers gave unto the work. The
Tirshatha gave to the treasure a thousand drams of gold, fifty basons,
five hundred and thirty priests' garments.

7:71 And some of the chief of the fathers gave to the treasure of the
work twenty thousand drams of gold, and two thousand and two hundred
pound of silver.

7:72 And that which the rest of the people gave was twenty thousand
drams of gold, and two thousand pound of silver, and threescore and
seven priests' garments.

7:73 So the priests, and the Levites, and the porters, and the
singers, and some of the people, and the Nethinims, and all Israel,
dwelt in their cities; and when the seventh month came, the children
of Israel were in their cities.

8:1 And all the people gathered themselves together as one man into
the street that was before the water gate; and they spake unto Ezra
the scribe to bring the book of the law of Moses, which the LORD had
commanded to Israel.

8:2 And Ezra the priest brought the law before the congregation both
of men and women, and all that could hear with understanding, upon the
first day of the seventh month.

8:3 And he read therein before the street that was before the water
gate from the morning until midday, before the men and the women, and
those that could understand; and the ears of all the people were
attentive unto the book of the law.

8:4 And Ezra the scribe stood upon a pulpit of wood, which they had
made for the purpose; and beside him stood Mattithiah, and Shema, and
Anaiah, and Urijah, and Hilkiah, and Maaseiah, on his right hand; and
on his left hand, Pedaiah, and Mishael, and Malchiah, and Hashum, and
Hashbadana, Zechariah, and Meshullam.

8:5 And Ezra opened the book in the sight of all the people; (for he
was above all the people;) and when he opened it, all the people stood
up: 8:6 And Ezra blessed the LORD, the great God. And all the people
answered, Amen, Amen, with lifting up their hands: and they bowed
their heads, and worshipped the LORD with their faces to the ground.

8:7 Also Jeshua, and Bani, and Sherebiah, Jamin, Akkub, Shabbethai,
Hodijah, Maaseiah, Kelita, Azariah, Jozabad, Hanan, Pelaiah, and the
Levites, caused the people to understand the law: and the people stood
in their place.

8:8 So they read in the book in the law of God distinctly, and gave
the sense, and caused them to understand the reading.

8:9 And Nehemiah, which is the Tirshatha, and Ezra the priest the
scribe, and the Levites that taught the people, said unto all the
people, This day is holy unto the LORD your God; mourn not, nor weep.
For all the people wept, when they heard the words of the law.

8:10 Then he said unto them, Go your way, eat the fat, and drink the
sweet, and send portions unto them for whom nothing is prepared: for
this day is holy unto our LORD: neither be ye sorry; for the joy of
the LORD is your strength.

8:11 So the Levites stilled all the people, saying, Hold your peace,
for the day is holy; neither be ye grieved.

8:12 And all the people went their way to eat, and to drink, and to
send portions, and to make great mirth, because they had understood
the words that were declared unto them.

8:13 And on the second day were gathered together the chief of the
fathers of all the people, the priests, and the Levites, unto Ezra the
scribe, even to understand the words of the law.

8:14 And they found written in the law which the LORD had commanded by
Moses, that the children of Israel should dwell in booths in the feast
of the seventh month: 8:15 And that they should publish and proclaim
in all their cities, and in Jerusalem, saying, Go forth unto the
mount, and fetch olive branches, and pine branches, and myrtle
branches, and palm branches, and branches of thick trees, to make
booths, as it is written.

8:16 So the people went forth, and brought them, and made themselves
booths, every one upon the roof of his house, and in their courts, and
in the courts of the house of God, and in the street of the water
gate, and in the street of the gate of Ephraim.

8:17 And all the congregation of them that were come again out of the
captivity made booths, and sat under the booths: for since the days of
Jeshua the son of Nun unto that day had not the children of Israel
done so. And there was very great gladness.

8:18 Also day by day, from the first day unto the last day, he read in
the book of the law of God. And they kept the feast seven days; and on
the eighth day was a solemn assembly, according unto the manner.

9:1 Now in the twenty and fourth day of this month the children of
Israel were assembled with fasting, and with sackclothes, and earth
upon them.

9:2 And the seed of Israel separated themselves from all strangers,
and stood and confessed their sins, and the iniquities of their
fathers.

9:3 And they stood up in their place, and read in the book of the law
of the LORD their God one fourth part of the day; and another fourth
part they confessed, and worshipped the LORD their God.

9:4 Then stood up upon the stairs, of the Levites, Jeshua, and Bani,
Kadmiel, Shebaniah, Bunni, Sherebiah, Bani, and Chenani, and cried
with a loud voice unto the LORD their God.

9:5 Then the Levites, Jeshua, and Kadmiel, Bani, Hashabniah,
Sherebiah, Hodijah, Shebaniah, and Pethahiah, said, Stand up and bless
the LORD your God for ever and ever: and blessed be thy glorious name,
which is exalted above all blessing and praise.

9:6 Thou, even thou, art LORD alone; thou hast made heaven, the heaven
of heavens, with all their host, the earth, and all things that are
therein, the seas, and all that is therein, and thou preservest them
all; and the host of heaven worshippeth thee.

9:7 Thou art the LORD the God, who didst choose Abram, and broughtest
him forth out of Ur of the Chaldees, and gavest him the name of
Abraham; 9:8 And foundest his heart faithful before thee, and madest a
covenant with him to give the land of the Canaanites, the Hittites,
the Amorites, and the Perizzites, and the Jebusites, and the
Girgashites, to give it, I say, to his seed, and hast performed thy
words; for thou art righteous: 9:9 And didst see the affliction of our
fathers in Egypt, and heardest their cry by the Red sea; 9:10 And
shewedst signs and wonders upon Pharaoh, and on all his servants, and
on all the people of his land: for thou knewest that they dealt
proudly against them. So didst thou get thee a name, as it is this
day.

9:11 And thou didst divide the sea before them, so that they went
through the midst of the sea on the dry land; and their persecutors
thou threwest into the deeps, as a stone into the mighty waters.

9:12 Moreover thou leddest them in the day by a cloudy pillar; and in
the night by a pillar of fire, to give them light in the way wherein
they should go.

9:13 Thou camest down also upon mount Sinai, and spakest with them
from heaven, and gavest them right judgments, and true laws, good
statutes and commandments: 9:14 And madest known unto them thy holy
sabbath, and commandedst them precepts, statutes, and laws, by the
hand of Moses thy servant: 9:15 And gavest them bread from heaven for
their hunger, and broughtest forth water for them out of the rock for
their thirst, and promisedst them that they should go in to possess
the land which thou hadst sworn to give them.

9:16 But they and our fathers dealt proudly, and hardened their necks,
and hearkened not to thy commandments, 9:17 And refused to obey,
neither were mindful of thy wonders that thou didst among them; but
hardened their necks, and in their rebellion appointed a captain to
return to their bondage: but thou art a God ready to pardon, gracious
and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and forsookest
them not.

9:18 Yea, when they had made them a molten calf, and said, This is thy
God that brought thee up out of Egypt, and had wrought great
provocations; 9:19 Yet thou in thy manifold mercies forsookest them
not in the wilderness: the pillar of the cloud departed not from them
by day, to lead them in the way; neither the pillar of fire by night,
to shew them light, and the way wherein they should go.

9:20 Thou gavest also thy good spirit to instruct them, and
withheldest not thy manna from their mouth, and gavest them water for
their thirst.

9:21 Yea, forty years didst thou sustain them in the wilderness, so
that they lacked nothing; their clothes waxed not old, and their feet
swelled not.

9:22 Moreover thou gavest them kingdoms and nations, and didst divide
them into corners: so they possessed the land of Sihon, and the land
of the king of Heshbon, and the land of Og king of Bashan.

9:23 Their children also multipliedst thou as the stars of heaven, and
broughtest them into the land, concerning which thou hadst promised to
their fathers, that they should go in to possess it.

9:24 So the children went in and possessed the land, and thou
subduedst before them the inhabitants of the land, the Canaanites, and
gavest them into their hands, with their kings, and the people of the
land, that they might do with them as they would.

9:25 And they took strong cities, and a fat land, and possessed houses
full of all goods, wells digged, vineyards, and oliveyards, and fruit
trees in abundance: so they did eat, and were filled, and became fat,
and delighted themselves in thy great goodness.

9:26 Nevertheless they were disobedient, and rebelled against thee,
and cast thy law behind their backs, and slew thy prophets which
testified against them to turn them to thee, and they wrought great
provocations.

9:27 Therefore thou deliveredst them into the hand of their enemies,
who vexed them: and in the time of their trouble, when they cried unto
thee, thou heardest them from heaven; and according to thy manifold
mercies thou gavest them saviours, who saved them out of the hand of
their enemies.

9:28 But after they had rest, they did evil again before thee:
therefore leftest thou them in the land of their enemies, so that they
had the dominion over them: yet when they returned, and cried unto
thee, thou heardest them from heaven; and many times didst thou
deliver them according to thy mercies; 9:29 And testifiedst against
them, that thou mightest bring them again unto thy law: yet they dealt
proudly, and hearkened not unto thy commandments, but sinned against
thy judgments, (which if a man do, he shall live in them;) and
withdrew the shoulder, and hardened their neck, and would not hear.

9:30 Yet many years didst thou forbear them, and testifiedst against
them by thy spirit in thy prophets: yet would they not give ear:
therefore gavest thou them into the hand of the people of the lands.

9:31 Nevertheless for thy great mercies' sake thou didst not utterly
consume them, nor forsake them; for thou art a gracious and merciful
God.

9:32 Now therefore, our God, the great, the mighty, and the terrible
God, who keepest covenant and mercy, let not all the trouble seem
little before thee, that hath come upon us, on our kings, on our
princes, and on our priests, and on our prophets, and on our fathers,
and on all thy people, since the time of the kings of Assyria unto
this day.

9:33 Howbeit thou art just in all that is brought upon us; for thou
hast done right, but we have done wickedly: 9:34 Neither have our
kings, our princes, our priests, nor our fathers, kept thy law, nor
hearkened unto thy commandments and thy testimonies, wherewith thou
didst testify against them.

9:35 For they have not served thee in their kingdom, and in thy great
goodness that thou gavest them, and in the large and fat land which
thou gavest before them, neither turned they from their wicked works.

9:36 Behold, we are servants this day, and for the land that thou
gavest unto our fathers to eat the fruit thereof and the good thereof,
behold, we are servants in it: 9:37 And it yieldeth much increase unto
the kings whom thou hast set over us because of our sins: also they
have dominion over our bodies, and over our cattle, at their pleasure,
and we are in great distress.

9:38 And because of all this we make a sure covenant, and write it;
and our princes, Levites, and priests, seal unto it.

10:1 Now those that sealed were, Nehemiah, the Tirshatha, the son of
Hachaliah, and Zidkijah, 10:2 Seraiah, Azariah, Jeremiah, 10:3 Pashur,
Amariah, Malchijah, 10:4 Hattush, Shebaniah, Malluch, 10:5 Harim,
Meremoth, Obadiah, 10:6 Daniel, Ginnethon, Baruch, 10:7 Meshullam,
Abijah, Mijamin, 10:8 Maaziah, Bilgai, Shemaiah: these were the
priests.

10:9 And the Levites: both Jeshua the son of Azaniah, Binnui of the
sons of Henadad, Kadmiel; 10:10 And their brethren, Shebaniah,
Hodijah, Kelita, Pelaiah, Hanan, 10:11 Micha, Rehob, Hashabiah, 10:12
Zaccur, Sherebiah, Shebaniah, 10:13 Hodijah, Bani, Beninu.

10:14 The chief of the people; Parosh, Pahathmoab, Elam, Zatthu, Bani,
10:15 Bunni, Azgad, Bebai, 10:16 Adonijah, Bigvai, Adin, 10:17 Ater,
Hizkijah, Azzur, 10:18 Hodijah, Hashum, Bezai, 10:19 Hariph, Anathoth,
Nebai, 10:20 Magpiash, Meshullam, Hezir, 10:21 Meshezabeel, Zadok,
Jaddua, 10:22 Pelatiah, Hanan, Anaiah, 10:23 Hoshea, Hananiah, Hashub,
10:24 Hallohesh, Pileha, Shobek, 10:25 Rehum, Hashabnah, Maaseiah,
10:26 And Ahijah, Hanan, Anan, 10:27 Malluch, Harim, Baanah.

10:28 And the rest of the people, the priests, the Levites, the
porters, the singers, the Nethinims, and all they that had separated
themselves from the people of the lands unto the law of God, their
wives, their sons, and their daughters, every one having knowledge,
and having understanding; 10:29 They clave to their brethren, their
nobles, and entered into a curse, and into an oath, to walk in God's
law, which was given by Moses the servant of God, and to observe and
do all the commandments of the LORD our Lord, and his judgments and
his statutes; 10:30 And that we would not give our daughters unto the
people of the land, not take their daughters for our sons: 10:31 And
if the people of the land bring ware or any victuals on the sabbath
day to sell, that we would not buy it of them on the sabbath, or on
the holy day: and that we would leave the seventh year, and the
exaction of every debt.

10:32 Also we made ordinances for us, to charge ourselves yearly with
the third part of a shekel for the service of the house of our God;
10:33 For the shewbread, and for the continual meat offering, and for
the continual burnt offering, of the sabbaths, of the new moons, for
the set feasts, and for the holy things, and for the sin offerings to
make an atonement for Israel, and for all the work of the house of our
God.

10:34 And we cast the lots among the priests, the Levites, and the
people, for the wood offering, to bring it into the house of our God,
after the houses of our fathers, at times appointed year by year, to
burn upon the altar of the LORD our God, as it is written in the law:
10:35 And to bring the firstfruits of our ground, and the firstfruits
of all fruit of all trees, year by year, unto the house of the LORD:
10:36 Also the firstborn of our sons, and of our cattle, as it is
written in the law, and the firstlings of our herds and of our flocks,
to bring to the house of our God, unto the priests that minister in
the house of our God: 10:37 And that we should bring the firstfruits
of our dough, and our offerings, and the fruit of all manner of trees,
of wine and of oil, unto the priests, to the chambers of the house of
our God; and the tithes of our ground unto the Levites, that the same
Levites might have the tithes in all the cities of our tillage.

10:38 And the priest the son of Aaron shall be with the Levites, when
the Levites take tithes: and the Levites shall bring up the tithe of
the tithes unto the house of our God, to the chambers, into the
treasure house.

10:39 For the children of Israel and the children of Levi shall bring
the offering of the corn, of the new wine, and the oil, unto the
chambers, where are the vessels of the sanctuary, and the priests that
minister, and the porters, and the singers: and we will not forsake
the house of our God.

11:1 And the rulers of the people dwelt at Jerusalem: the rest of the
people also cast lots, to bring one of ten to dwell in Jerusalem the
holy city, and nine parts to dwell in other cities.

11:2 And the people blessed all the men, that willingly offered
themselves to dwell at Jerusalem.

11:3 Now these are the chief of the province that dwelt in Jerusalem:
but in the cities of Judah dwelt every one in his possession in their
cities, to wit, Israel, the priests, and the Levites, and the
Nethinims, and the children of Solomon's servants.

11:4 And at Jerusalem dwelt certain of the children of Judah, and of
the children of Benjamin. Of the children of Judah; Athaiah the son of
Uzziah, the son of Zechariah, the son of Amariah, the son of
Shephatiah, the son of Mahalaleel, of the children of Perez; 11:5 And
Maaseiah the son of Baruch, the son of Colhozeh, the son of Hazaiah,
the son of Adaiah, the son of Joiarib, the son of Zechariah, the son
of Shiloni.

11:6 All the sons of Perez that dwelt at Jerusalem were four hundred
threescore and eight valiant men.

11:7 And these are the sons of Benjamin; Sallu the son of Meshullam,
the son of Joed, the son of Pedaiah, the son of Kolaiah, the son of
Maaseiah, the son of Ithiel, the son of Jesaiah.

11:8 And after him Gabbai, Sallai, nine hundred twenty and eight.

11:9 And Joel the son of Zichri was their overseer: and Judah the son
of Senuah was second over the city.

11:10 Of the priests: Jedaiah the son of Joiarib, Jachin.

11:11 Seraiah the son of Hilkiah, the son of Meshullam, the son of
Zadok, the son of Meraioth, the son of Ahitub, was the ruler of the
house of God.

11:12 And their brethren that did the work of the house were eight
hundred twenty and two: and Adaiah the son of Jeroham, the son of
Pelaliah, the son of Amzi, the son of Zechariah, the son of Pashur,
the son of Malchiah.

11:13 And his brethren, chief of the fathers, two hundred forty and
two: and Amashai the son of Azareel, the son of Ahasai, the son of
Meshillemoth, the son of Immer, 11:14 And their brethren, mighty men
of valour, an hundred twenty and eight: and their overseer was
Zabdiel, the son of one of the great men.

11:15 Also of the Levites: Shemaiah the son of Hashub, the son of
Azrikam, the son of Hashabiah, the son of Bunni; 11:16 And Shabbethai
and Jozabad, of the chief of the Levites, had the oversight of the
outward business of the house of God.

11:17 And Mattaniah the son of Micha, the son of Zabdi, the son of
Asaph, was the principal to begin the thanksgiving in prayer: and
Bakbukiah the second among his brethren, and Abda the son of Shammua,
the son of Galal, the son of Jeduthun.

11:18 All the Levites in the holy city were two hundred fourscore and
four.

11:19 Moreover the porters, Akkub, Talmon, and their brethren that
kept the gates, were an hundred seventy and two.

11:20 And the residue of Israel, of the priests, and the Levites, were
in all the cities of Judah, every one in his inheritance.

11:21 But the Nethinims dwelt in Ophel: and Ziha and Gispa were over
the Nethinims.

11:22 The overseer also of the Levites at Jerusalem was Uzzi the son
of Bani, the son of Hashabiah, the son of Mattaniah, the son of Micha.
Of the sons of Asaph, the singers were over the business of the house
of God.

11:23 For it was the king's commandment concerning them, that a
certain portion should be for the singers, due for every day.

11:24 And Pethahiah the son of Meshezabeel, of the children of Zerah
the son of Judah, was at the king's hand in all matters concerning the
people.

11:25 And for the villages, with their fields, some of the children of
Judah dwelt at Kirjatharba, and in the villages thereof, and at Dibon,
and in the villages thereof, and at Jekabzeel, and in the villages
thereof, 11:26 And at Jeshua, and at Moladah, and at Bethphelet, 11:27
And at Hazarshual, and at Beersheba, and in the villages thereof,
11:28 And at Ziklag, and at Mekonah, and in the villages thereof,
11:29 And at Enrimmon, and at Zareah, and at Jarmuth, 11:30 Zanoah,
Adullam, and in their villages, at Lachish, and the fields thereof, at
Azekah, and in the villages thereof. And they dwelt from Beersheba
unto the valley of Hinnom.

11:31 The children also of Benjamin from Geba dwelt at Michmash, and
Aija, and Bethel, and in their villages.

11:32 And at Anathoth, Nob, Ananiah, 11:33 Hazor, Ramah, Gittaim,
11:34 Hadid, Zeboim, Neballat, 11:35 Lod, and Ono, the valley of
craftsmen.

11:36 And of the Levites were divisions in Judah, and in Benjamin.

12:1 Now these are the priests and the Levites that went up with
Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel, and Jeshua: Seraiah, Jeremiah, Ezra,
12:2 Amariah, Malluch, Hattush, 12:3 Shechaniah, Rehum, Meremoth, 12:4
Iddo, Ginnetho, Abijah, 12:5 Miamin, Maadiah, Bilgah, 12:6 Shemaiah,
and Joiarib, Jedaiah, 12:7 Sallu, Amok, Hilkiah, Jedaiah. These were
the chief of the priests and of their brethren in the days of Jeshua.

12:8 Moreover the Levites: Jeshua, Binnui, Kadmiel, Sherebiah, Judah,
and Mattaniah, which was over the thanksgiving, he and his brethren.

12:9 Also Bakbukiah and Unni, their brethren, were over against them
in the watches.

12:10 And Jeshua begat Joiakim, Joiakim also begat Eliashib, and
Eliashib begat Joiada, 12:11 And Joiada begat Jonathan, and Jonathan
begat Jaddua.

12:12 And in the days of Joiakim were priests, the chief of the
fathers: of Seraiah, Meraiah; of Jeremiah, Hananiah; 12:13 Of Ezra,
Meshullam; of Amariah, Jehohanan; 12:14 Of Melicu, Jonathan; of
Shebaniah, Joseph; 12:15 Of Harim, Adna; of Meraioth, Helkai; 12:16 Of
Iddo, Zechariah; of Ginnethon, Meshullam; 12:17 Of Abijah, Zichri; of
Miniamin, of Moadiah, Piltai: 12:18 Of Bilgah, Shammua; of Shemaiah,
Jehonathan; 12:19 And of Joiarib, Mattenai; of Jedaiah, Uzzi; 12:20 Of
Sallai, Kallai; of Amok, Eber; 12:21 Of Hilkiah, Hashabiah; of
Jedaiah, Nethaneel.

12:22 The Levites in the days of Eliashib, Joiada, and Johanan, and
Jaddua, were recorded chief of the fathers: also the priests, to the
reign of Darius the Persian.

12:23 The sons of Levi, the chief of the fathers, were written in the
book of the chronicles, even until the days of Johanan the son of
Eliashib.

12:24 And the chief of the Levites: Hashabiah, Sherebiah, and Jeshua
the son of Kadmiel, with their brethren over against them, to praise
and to give thanks, according to the commandment of David the man of
God, ward over against ward.

12:25 Mattaniah, and Bakbukiah, Obadiah, Meshullam, Talmon, Akkub,
were porters keeping the ward at the thresholds of the gates.

12:26 These were in the days of Joiakim the son of Jeshua, the son of
Jozadak, and in the days of Nehemiah the governor, and of Ezra the
priest, the scribe.

12:27 And at the dedication of the wall of Jerusalem they sought the
Levites out of all their places, to bring them to Jerusalem, to keep
the dedication with gladness, both with thanksgivings, and with
singing, with cymbals, psalteries, and with harps.

12:28 And the sons of the singers gathered themselves together, both
out of the plain country round about Jerusalem, and from the villages
of Netophathi; 12:29 Also from the house of Gilgal, and out of the
fields of Geba and Azmaveth: for the singers had builded them villages
round about Jerusalem.

12:30 And the priests and the Levites purified themselves, and
purified the people, and the gates, and the wall.

12:31 Then I brought up the princes of Judah upon the wall, and
appointed two great companies of them that gave thanks, whereof one
went on the right hand upon the wall toward the dung gate: 12:32 And
after them went Hoshaiah, and half of the princes of Judah, 12:33 And
Azariah, Ezra, and Meshullam, 12:34 Judah, and Benjamin, and Shemaiah,
and Jeremiah, 12:35 And certain of the priests' sons with trumpets;
namely, Zechariah the son of Jonathan, the son of Shemaiah, the son of
Mattaniah, the son of Michaiah, the son of Zaccur, the son of Asaph:
12:36 And his brethren, Shemaiah, and Azarael, Milalai, Gilalai, Maai,
Nethaneel, and Judah, Hanani, with the musical instruments of David
the man of God, and Ezra the scribe before them.

12:37 And at the fountain gate, which was over against them, they went
up by the stairs of the city of David, at the going up of the wall,
above the house of David, even unto the water gate eastward.

12:38 And the other company of them that gave thanks went over against
them, and I after them, and the half of the people upon the wall, from
beyond the tower of the furnaces even unto the broad wall; 12:39 And
from above the gate of Ephraim, and above the old gate, and above the
fish gate, and the tower of Hananeel, and the tower of Meah, even unto
the sheep gate: and they stood still in the prison gate.

12:40 So stood the two companies of them that gave thanks in the house
of God, and I, and the half of the rulers with me: 12:41 And the
priests; Eliakim, Maaseiah, Miniamin, Michaiah, Elioenai, Zechariah,
and Hananiah, with trumpets; 12:42 And Maaseiah, and Shemaiah, and
Eleazar, and Uzzi, and Jehohanan, and Malchijah, and Elam, and Ezer.
And the singers sang loud, with Jezrahiah their overseer.

12:43 Also that day they offered great sacrifices, and rejoiced: for
God had made them rejoice with great joy: the wives also and the
children rejoiced: so that the joy of Jerusalem was heard even afar
off.

12:44 And at that time were some appointed over the chambers for the
treasures, for the offerings, for the firstfruits, and for the tithes,
to gather into them out of the fields of the cities the portions of
the law for the priests and Levites: for Judah rejoiced for the
priests and for the Levites that waited.

12:45 And both the singers and the porters kept the ward of their God,
and the ward of the purification, according to the commandment of
David, and of Solomon his son.

12:46 For in the days of David and Asaph of old there were chief of
the singers, and songs of praise and thanksgiving unto God.

12:47 And all Israel in the days of Zerubbabel, and in the days of
Nehemiah, gave the portions of the singers and the porters, every day
his portion: and they sanctified holy things unto the Levites; and the
Levites sanctified them unto the children of Aaron.

13:1 On that day they read in the book of Moses in the audience of the
people; and therein was found written, that the Ammonite and the
Moabite should not come into the congregation of God for ever; 13:2
Because they met not the children of Israel with bread and with water,
but hired Balaam against them, that he should curse them: howbeit our
God turned the curse into a blessing.

13:3 Now it came to pass, when they had heard the law, that they
separated from Israel all the mixed multitude.

13:4 And before this, Eliashib the priest, having the oversight of the
chamber of the house of our God, was allied unto Tobiah: 13:5 And he
had prepared for him a great chamber, where aforetime they laid the
meat offerings, the frankincense, and the vessels, and the tithes of
the corn, the new wine, and the oil, which was commanded to be given
to the Levites, and the singers, and the porters; and the offerings of
the priests.

13:6 But in all this time was not I at Jerusalem: for in the two and
thirtieth year of Artaxerxes king of Babylon came I unto the king, and
after certain days obtained I leave of the king: 13:7 And I came to
Jerusalem, and understood of the evil that Eliashib did for Tobiah, in
preparing him a chamber in the courts of the house of God.

13:8 And it grieved me sore: therefore I cast forth all the household
stuff to Tobiah out of the chamber.

13:9 Then I commanded, and they cleansed the chambers: and thither
brought I again the vessels of the house of God, with the meat
offering and the frankincense.

13:10 And I perceived that the portions of the Levites had not been
given them: for the Levites and the singers, that did the work, were
fled every one to his field.

13:11 Then contended I with the rulers, and said, Why is the house of
God forsaken? And I gathered them together, and set them in their
place.

13:12 Then brought all Judah the tithe of the corn and the new wine
and the oil unto the treasuries.

13:13 And I made treasurers over the treasuries, Shelemiah the priest,
and Zadok the scribe, and of the Levites, Pedaiah: and next to them
was Hanan the son of Zaccur, the son of Mattaniah: for they were
counted faithful, and their office was to distribute unto their
brethren.

13:14 Remember me, O my God, concerning this, and wipe not out my good
deeds that I have done for the house of my God, and for the offices
thereof.

13:15 In those days saw I in Judah some treading wine presses on the
sabbath, and bringing in sheaves, and lading asses; as also wine,
grapes, and figs, and all manner of burdens, which they brought into
Jerusalem on the sabbath day: and I testified against them in the day
wherein they sold victuals.

13:16 There dwelt men of Tyre also therein, which brought fish, and
all manner of ware, and sold on the sabbath unto the children of
Judah, and in Jerusalem.

13:17 Then I contended with the nobles of Judah, and said unto them,
What evil thing is this that ye do, and profane the sabbath day?
13:18 Did not your fathers thus, and did not our God bring all this
evil upon us, and upon this city? yet ye bring more wrath upon Israel
by profaning the sabbath.

13:19 And it came to pass, that when the gates of Jerusalem began to
be dark before the sabbath, I commanded that the gates should be shut,
and charged that they should not be opened till after the sabbath: and
some of my servants set I at the gates, that there should no burden be
brought in on the sabbath day.

13:20 So the merchants and sellers of all kind of ware lodged without
Jerusalem once or twice.

13:21 Then I testified against them, and said unto them, Why lodge ye
about the wall? if ye do so again, I will lay hands on you. From that
time forth came they no more on the sabbath.

13:22 And I commanded the Levites that they should cleanse themselves,
and that they should come and keep the gates, to sanctify the sabbath
day.

Remember me, O my God, concerning this also, and spare me according to
the greatness of thy mercy.

13:23 In those days also saw I Jews that had married wives of Ashdod,
of Ammon, and of Moab: 13:24 And their children spake half in the
speech of Ashdod, and could not speak in the Jews' language, but
according to the language of each people.

13:25 And I contended with them, and cursed them, and smote certain of
them, and plucked off their hair, and made them swear by God, saying,
Ye shall not give your daughters unto their sons, nor take their
daughters unto your sons, or for yourselves.

13:26 Did not Solomon king of Israel sin by these things? yet among
many nations was there no king like him, who was beloved of his God,
and God made him king over all Israel: nevertheless even him did
outlandish women cause to sin.

13:27 Shall we then hearken unto you to do all this great evil, to
transgress against our God in marrying strange wives?  13:28 And one
of the sons of Joiada, the son of Eliashib the high priest, was son in
law to Sanballat the Horonite: therefore I chased him from me.

13:29 Remember them, O my God, because they have defiled the
priesthood, and the covenant of the priesthood, and of the Levites.

13:30 Thus cleansed I them from all strangers, and appointed the wards
of the priests and the Levites, every one in his business; 13:31 And
for the wood offering, at times appointed, and for the firstfruits.
Remember me, O my God, for good.




The Book of Esther


1:1 Now it came to pass in the days of Ahasuerus, (this is Ahasuerus
which reigned, from India even unto Ethiopia, over an hundred and
seven and twenty provinces:) 1:2 That in those days, when the king
Ahasuerus sat on the throne of his kingdom, which was in Shushan the
palace, 1:3 In the third year of his reign, he made a feast unto all
his princes and his servants; the power of Persia and Media, the
nobles and princes of the provinces, being before him: 1:4 When he
shewed the riches of his glorious kingdom and the honour of his
excellent majesty many days, even an hundred and fourscore days.

1:5 And when these days were expired, the king made a feast unto all
the people that were present in Shushan the palace, both unto great
and small, seven days, in the court of the garden of the king's
palace; 1:6 Where were white, green, and blue, hangings, fastened with
cords of fine linen and purple to silver rings and pillars of marble:
the beds were of gold and silver, upon a pavement of red, and blue,
and white, and black, marble.

1:7 And they gave them drink in vessels of gold, (the vessels being
diverse one from another,) and royal wine in abundance, according to
the state of the king.

1:8 And the drinking was according to the law; none did compel: for so
the king had appointed to all the officers of his house, that they
should do according to every man's pleasure.

1:9 Also Vashti the queen made a feast for the women in the royal
house which belonged to king Ahasuerus.

1:10 On the seventh day, when the heart of the king was merry with
wine, he commanded Mehuman, Biztha, Harbona, Bigtha, and Abagtha,
Zethar, and Carcas, the seven chamberlains that served in the presence
of Ahasuerus the king, 1:11 To bring Vashti the queen before the king
with the crown royal, to shew the people and the princes her beauty:
for she was fair to look on.

1:12 But the queen Vashti refused to come at the king's commandment by
his chamberlains: therefore was the king very wroth, and his anger
burned in him.

1:13 Then the king said to the wise men, which knew the times, (for so
was the king's manner toward all that knew law and judgment: 1:14 And
the next unto him was Carshena, Shethar, Admatha, Tarshish, Meres,
Marsena, and Memucan, the seven princes of Persia and Media, which saw
the king's face, and which sat the first in the kingdom;) 1:15 What
shall we do unto the queen Vashti according to law, because she hath
not performed the commandment of the king Ahasuerus by the
chamberlains?  1:16 And Memucan answered before the king and the
princes, Vashti the queen hath not done wrong to the king only, but
also to all the princes, and to all the people that are in all the
provinces of the king Ahasuerus.

1:17 For this deed of the queen shall come abroad unto all women, so
that they shall despise their husbands in their eyes, when it shall be
reported, The king Ahasuerus commanded Vashti the queen to be brought
in before him, but she came not.

1:18 Likewise shall the ladies of Persia and Media say this day unto
all the king's princes, which have heard of the deed of the queen.
Thus shall there arise too much contempt and wrath.

1:19 If it please the king, let there go a royal commandment from him,
and let it be written among the laws of the Persians and the Medes,
that it be not altered, That Vashti come no more before king
Ahasuerus; and let the king give her royal estate unto another that is
better than she.

1:20 And when the king's decree which he shall make shall be published
throughout all his empire, (for it is great,) all the wives shall give
to their husbands honour, both to great and small.

1:21 And the saying pleased the king and the princes; and the king did
according to the word of Memucan: 1:22 For he sent letters into all
the king's provinces, into every province according to the writing
thereof, and to every people after their language, that every man
should bear rule in his own house, and that it should be published
according to the language of every people.

2:1 After these things, when the wrath of king Ahasuerus was appeased,
he remembered Vashti, and what she had done, and what was decreed
against her.

2:2 Then said the king's servants that ministered unto him, Let there
be fair young virgins sought for the king: 2:3 And let the king
appoint officers in all the provinces of his kingdom, that they may
gather together all the fair young virgins unto Shushan the palace, to
the house of the women, unto the custody of Hege the king's
chamberlain, keeper of the women; and let their things for
purification be given them: 2:4 And let the maiden which pleaseth the
king be queen instead of Vashti.

And the thing pleased the king; and he did so.

2:5 Now in Shushan the palace there was a certain Jew, whose name was
Mordecai, the son of Jair, the son of Shimei, the son of Kish, a
Benjamite; 2:6 Who had been carried away from Jerusalem with the
captivity which had been carried away with Jeconiah king of Judah,
whom Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon had carried away.

2:7 And he brought up Hadassah, that is, Esther, his uncle's daughter:
for she had neither father nor mother, and the maid was fair and
beautiful; whom Mordecai, when her father and mother were dead, took
for his own daughter.

2:8 So it came to pass, when the king's commandment and his decree was
heard, and when many maidens were gathered together unto Shushan the
palace, to the custody of Hegai, that Esther was brought also unto the
king's house, to the custody of Hegai, keeper of the women.

2:9 And the maiden pleased him, and she obtained kindness of him; and
he speedily gave her her things for purification, with such things as
belonged to her, and seven maidens, which were meet to be given her,
out of the king's house: and he preferred her and her maids unto the
best place of the house of the women.

2:10 Esther had not shewed her people nor her kindred: for Mordecai
had charged her that she should not shew it.

2:11 And Mordecai walked every day before the court of the women's
house, to know how Esther did, and what should become of her.

2:12 Now when every maid's turn was come to go in to king Ahasuerus,
after that she had been twelve months, according to the manner of the
women, (for so were the days of their purifications accomplished, to
wit, six months with oil of myrrh, and six months with sweet odours,
and with other things for the purifying of the women;) 2:13 Then thus
came every maiden unto the king; whatsoever she desired was given her
to go with her out of the house of the women unto the king's house.

2:14 In the evening she went, and on the morrow she returned into the
second house of the women, to the custody of Shaashgaz, the king's
chamberlain, which kept the concubines: she came in unto the king no
more, except the king delighted in her, and that she were called by
name.

2:15 Now when the turn of Esther, the daughter of Abihail the uncle of
Mordecai, who had taken her for his daughter, was come to go in unto
the king, she required nothing but what Hegai the king's chamberlain,
the keeper of the women, appointed. And Esther obtained favour in the
sight of all them that looked upon her.

2:16 So Esther was taken unto king Ahasuerus into his house royal in
the tenth month, which is the month Tebeth, in the seventh year of his
reign.

2:17 And the king loved Esther above all the women, and she obtained
grace and favour in his sight more than all the virgins; so that he
set the royal crown upon her head, and made her queen instead of
Vashti.

2:18 Then the king made a great feast unto all his princes and his
servants, even Esther's feast; and he made a release to the provinces,
and gave gifts, according to the state of the king.

2:19 And when the virgins were gathered together the second time, then
Mordecai sat in the king's gate.

2:20 Esther had not yet shewed her kindred nor her people; as Mordecai
had charged her: for Esther did the commandment of Mordecai, like as
when she was brought up with him.

2:21 In those days, while Mordecai sat in the king's gate, two of the
king's chamberlains, Bigthan and Teresh, of those which kept the door,
were wroth, and sought to lay hands on the king Ahasuerus.

2:22 And the thing was known to Mordecai, who told it unto Esther the
queen; and Esther certified the king thereof in Mordecai's name.

2:23 And when inquisition was made of the matter, it was found out;
therefore they were both hanged on a tree: and it was written in the
book of the chronicles before the king.

3:1 After these things did king Ahasuerus promote Haman the son of
Hammedatha the Agagite, and advanced him, and set his seat above all
the princes that were with him.

3:2 And all the king's servants, that were in the king's gate, bowed,
and reverenced Haman: for the king had so commanded concerning him.
But Mordecai bowed not, nor did him reverence.

3:3 Then the king's servants, which were in the king's gate, said unto
Mordecai, Why transgressest thou the king's commandment?  3:4 Now it
came to pass, when they spake daily unto him, and he hearkened not
unto them, that they told Haman, to see whether Mordecai's matters
would stand: for he had told them that he was a Jew.

3:5 And when Haman saw that Mordecai bowed not, nor did him reverence,
then was Haman full of wrath.

3:6 And he thought scorn to lay hands on Mordecai alone; for they had
shewed him the people of Mordecai: wherefore Haman sought to destroy
all the Jews that were throughout the whole kingdom of Ahasuerus, even
the people of Mordecai.

3:7 In the first month, that is, the month Nisan, in the twelfth year
of king Ahasuerus, they cast Pur, that is, the lot, before Haman from
day to day, and from month to month, to the twelfth month, that is,
the month Adar.

3:8 And Haman said unto king Ahasuerus, There is a certain people
scattered abroad and dispersed among the people in all the provinces
of thy kingdom; and their laws are diverse from all people; neither
keep they the king's laws: therefore it is not for the king's profit
to suffer them.

3:9 If it please the king, let it be written that they may be
destroyed: and I will pay ten thousand talents of silver to the hands
of those that have the charge of the business, to bring it into the
king's treasuries.

3:10 And the king took his ring from his hand, and gave it unto Haman
the son of Hammedatha the Agagite, the Jews' enemy.

3:11 And the king said unto Haman, The silver is given to thee, the
people also, to do with them as it seemeth good to thee.

3:12 Then were the king's scribes called on the thirteenth day of the
first month, and there was written according to all that Haman had
commanded unto the king's lieutenants, and to the governors that were
over every province, and to the rulers of every people of every
province according to the writing thereof, and to every people after
their language; in the name of king Ahasuerus was it written, and
sealed with the king's ring.

3:13 And the letters were sent by posts into all the king's provinces,
to destroy, to kill, and to cause to perish, all Jews, both young and
old, little children and women, in one day, even upon the thirteenth
day of the twelfth month, which is the month Adar, and to take the
spoil of them for a prey.

3:14 The copy of the writing for a commandment to be given in every
province was published unto all people, that they should be ready
against that day.

3:15 The posts went out, being hastened by the king's commandment, and
the decree was given in Shushan the palace. And the king and Haman sat
down to drink; but the city Shushan was perplexed.

4:1 When Mordecai perceived all that was done, Mordecai rent his
clothes, and put on sackcloth with ashes, and went out into the midst
of the city, and cried with a loud and a bitter cry; 4:2 And came even
before the king's gate: for none might enter into the king's gate
clothed with sackcloth.

4:3 And in every province, whithersoever the king's commandment and
his decree came, there was great mourning among the Jews, and fasting,
and weeping, and wailing; and many lay in sackcloth and ashes.

4:4 So Esther's maids and her chamberlains came and told it her. Then
was the queen exceedingly grieved; and she sent raiment to clothe
Mordecai, and to take away his sackcloth from him: but he received it
not.

4:5 Then called Esther for Hatach, one of the king's chamberlains,
whom he had appointed to attend upon her, and gave him a commandment
to Mordecai, to know what it was, and why it was.

4:6 So Hatach went forth to Mordecai unto the street of the city,
which was before the king's gate.

4:7 And Mordecai told him of all that had happened unto him, and of
the sum of the money that Haman had promised to pay to the king's
treasuries for the Jews, to destroy them.

4:8 Also he gave him the copy of the writing of the decree that was
given at Shushan to destroy them, to shew it unto Esther, and to
declare it unto her, and to charge her that she should go in unto the
king, to make supplication unto him, and to make request before him
for her people.

4:9 And Hatach came and told Esther the words of Mordecai.

4:10 Again Esther spake unto Hatach, and gave him commandment unto
Mordecai; 4:11 All the king's servants, and the people of the king's
provinces, do know, that whosoever, whether man or women, shall come
unto the king into the inner court, who is not called, there is one
law of his to put him to death, except such to whom the king shall
hold out the golden sceptre, that he may live: but I have not been
called to come in unto the king these thirty days.

4:12 And they told to Mordecai Esther's words.

4:13 Then Mordecai commanded to answer Esther, Think not with thyself
that thou shalt escape in the king's house, more than all the Jews.

4:14 For if thou altogether holdest thy peace at this time, then shall
there enlargement and deliverance arise to the Jews from another
place; but thou and thy father's house shall be destroyed: and who
knoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a time as this?
4:15 Then Esther bade them return Mordecai this answer, 4:16 Go,
gather together all the Jews that are present in Shushan, and fast ye
for me, and neither eat nor drink three days, night or day: I also and
my maidens will fast likewise; and so will I go in unto the king,
which is not according to the law: and if I perish, I perish.

4:17 So Mordecai went his way, and did according to all that Esther
had commanded him.

5:1 Now it came to pass on the third day, that Esther put on her royal
apparel, and stood in the inner court of the king's house, over
against the king's house: and the king sat upon his royal throne in
the royal house, over against the gate of the house.

5:2 And it was so, when the king saw Esther the queen standing in the
court, that she obtained favour in his sight: and the king held out to
Esther the golden sceptre that was in his hand. So Esther drew near,
and touched the top of the sceptre.

5:3 Then said the king unto her, What wilt thou, queen Esther? and
what is thy request? it shall be even given thee to the half of the
kingdom.

5:4 And Esther answered, If it seem good unto the king, let the king
and Haman come this day unto the banquet that I have prepared for him.

5:5 Then the king said, Cause Haman to make haste, that he may do as
Esther hath said. So the king and Haman came to the banquet that
Esther had prepared.

5:6 And the king said unto Esther at the banquet of wine, What is thy
petition? and it shall be granted thee: and what is thy request? even
to the half of the kingdom it shall be performed.

5:7 Then answered Esther, and said, My petition and my request is; 5:8
If I have found favour in the sight of the king, and if it please the
king to grant my petition, and to perform my request, let the king and
Haman come to the banquet that I shall prepare for them, and I will do
to morrow as the king hath said.

5:9 Then went Haman forth that day joyful and with a glad heart: but
when Haman saw Mordecai in the king's gate, that he stood not up, nor
moved for him, he was full of indignation against Mordecai.

5:10 Nevertheless Haman refrained himself: and when he came home, he
sent and called for his friends, and Zeresh his wife.

5:11 And Haman told them of the glory of his riches, and the multitude
of his children, and all the things wherein the king had promoted him,
and how he had advanced him above the princes and servants of the
king.

5:12 Haman said moreover, Yea, Esther the queen did let no man come in
with the king unto the banquet that she had prepared but myself; and
to morrow am I invited unto her also with the king.

5:13 Yet all this availeth me nothing, so long as I see Mordecai the
Jew sitting at the king's gate.

5:14 Then said Zeresh his wife and all his friends unto him, Let a
gallows be made of fifty cubits high, and to morrow speak thou unto
the king that Mordecai may be hanged thereon: then go thou in merrily
with the king unto the banquet. And the thing pleased Haman; and he
caused the gallows to be made.

6:1 On that night could not the king sleep, and he commanded to bring
the book of records of the chronicles; and they were read before the
king.

6:2 And it was found written, that Mordecai had told of Bigthana and
Teresh, two of the king's chamberlains, the keepers of the door, who
sought to lay hand on the king Ahasuerus.

6:3 And the king said, What honour and dignity hath been done to
Mordecai for this? Then said the king's servants that ministered unto
him, There is nothing done for him.

6:4 And the king said, Who is in the court? Now Haman was come into
the outward court of the king's house, to speak unto the king to hang
Mordecai on the gallows that he had prepared for him.

6:5 And the king's servants said unto him, Behold, Haman standeth in
the court. And the king said, Let him come in.

6:6 So Haman came in. And the king said unto him, What shall be done
unto the man whom the king delighteth to honour? Now Haman thought in
his heart, To whom would the king delight to do honour more than to
myself?  6:7 And Haman answered the king, For the man whom the king
delighteth to honour, 6:8 Let the royal apparel be brought which the
king useth to wear, and the horse that the king rideth upon, and the
crown royal which is set upon his head: 6:9 And let this apparel and
horse be delivered to the hand of one of the king's most noble
princes, that they may array the man withal whom the king delighteth
to honour, and bring him on horseback through the street of the city,
and proclaim before him, Thus shall it be done to the man whom the
king delighteth to honour.

6:10 Then the king said to Haman, Make haste, and take the apparel and
the horse, as thou hast said, and do even so to Mordecai the Jew, that
sitteth at the king's gate: let nothing fail of all that thou hast
spoken.

6:11 Then took Haman the apparel and the horse, and arrayed Mordecai,
and brought him on horseback through the street of the city, and
proclaimed before him, Thus shall it be done unto the man whom the
king delighteth to honour.

6:12 And Mordecai came again to the king's gate. But Haman hasted to
his house mourning, and having his head covered.

6:13 And Haman told Zeresh his wife and all his friends every thing
that had befallen him. Then said his wise men and Zeresh his wife unto
him, If Mordecai be of the seed of the Jews, before whom thou hast
begun to fall, thou shalt not prevail against him, but shalt surely
fall before him.

6:14 And while they were yet talking with him, came the king's
chamberlains, and hasted to bring Haman unto the banquet that Esther
had prepared.

7:1 So the king and Haman came to banquet with Esther the queen.

7:2 And the king said again unto Esther on the second day at the
banquet of wine, What is thy petition, queen Esther? and it shall be
granted thee: and what is thy request? and it shall be performed, even
to the half of the kingdom.

7:3 Then Esther the queen answered and said, If I have found favour in
thy sight, O king, and if it please the king, let my life be given me
at my petition, and my people at my request: 7:4 For we are sold, I
and my people, to be destroyed, to be slain, and to perish. But if we
had been sold for bondmen and bondwomen, I had held my tongue,
although the enemy could not countervail the king's damage.

7:5 Then the king Ahasuerus answered and said unto Esther the queen,
Who is he, and where is he, that durst presume in his heart to do so?
7:6 And Esther said, The adversary and enemy is this wicked Haman.
Then Haman was afraid before the king and the queen.

7:7 And the king arising from the banquet of wine in his wrath went
into the palace garden: and Haman stood up to make request for his
life to Esther the queen; for he saw that there was evil determined
against him by the king.

7:8 Then the king returned out of the palace garden into the place of
the banquet of wine; and Haman was fallen upon the bed whereon Esther
was. Then said the king, Will he force the queen also before me in the
house? As the word went out of king's mouth, they covered Haman's
face.

7:9 And Harbonah, one of the chamberlains, said before the king,
Behold also, the gallows fifty cubits high, which Haman had made for
Mordecai, who spoken good for the king, standeth in the house of
Haman. Then the king said, Hang him thereon.

7:10 So they hanged Haman on the gallows that he had prepared for
Mordecai. Then was the king's wrath pacified.

8:1 On that day did the king Ahasuerus give the house of Haman the
Jews' enemy unto Esther the queen. And Mordecai came before the king;
for Esther had told what he was unto her.

8:2 And the king took off his ring, which he had taken from Haman, and
gave it unto Mordecai. And Esther set Mordecai over the house of
Haman.

8:3 And Esther spake yet again before the king, and fell down at his
feet, and besought him with tears to put away the mischief of Haman
the Agagite, and his device that he had devised against the Jews.

8:4 Then the king held out the golden sceptre toward Esther. So Esther
arose, and stood before the king, 8:5 And said, If it please the king,
and if I have favour in his sight, and the thing seem right before the
king, and I be pleasing in his eyes, let it be written to reverse the
letters devised by Haman the son of Hammedatha the Agagite, which he
wrote to destroy the Jews which are in all the king's provinces: 8:6
For how can I endure to see the evil that shall come unto my people?
or how can I endure to see the destruction of my kindred?  8:7 Then
the king Ahasuerus said unto Esther the queen and to Mordecai the Jew,
Behold, I have given Esther the house of Haman, and him they have
hanged upon the gallows, because he laid his hand upon the Jews.

8:8 Write ye also for the Jews, as it liketh you, in the king's name,
and seal it with the king's ring: for the writing which is written in
the king's name, and sealed with the king's ring, may no man reverse.

8:9 Then were the king's scribes called at that time in the third
month, that is, the month Sivan, on the three and twentieth day
thereof; and it was written according to all that Mordecai commanded
unto the Jews, and to the lieutenants, and the deputies and rulers of
the provinces which are from India unto Ethiopia, an hundred twenty
and seven provinces, unto every province according to the writing
thereof, and unto every people after their language, and to the Jews
according to their writing, and according to their language.

8:10 And he wrote in the king Ahasuerus' name, and sealed it with the
king's ring, and sent letters by posts on horseback, and riders on
mules, camels, and young dromedaries: 8:11 Wherein the king granted
the Jews which were in every city to gather themselves together, and
to stand for their life, to destroy, to slay and to cause to perish,
all the power of the people and province that would assault them, both
little ones and women, and to take the spoil of them for a prey, 8:12
Upon one day in all the provinces of king Ahasuerus, namely, upon the
thirteenth day of the twelfth month, which is the month Adar.

8:13 The copy of the writing for a commandment to be given in every
province was published unto all people, and that the Jews should be
ready against that day to avenge themselves on their enemies.

8:14 So the posts that rode upon mules and camels went out, being
hastened and pressed on by the king's commandment. And the decree was
given at Shushan the palace.

8:15 And Mordecai went out from the presence of the king in royal
apparel of blue and white, and with a great crown of gold, and with a
garment of fine linen and purple: and the city of Shushan rejoiced and
was glad.

8:16 The Jews had light, and gladness, and joy, and honour.

8:17 And in every province, and in every city, whithersoever the
king's commandment and his decree came, the Jews had joy and gladness,
a feast and a good day. And many of the people of the land became
Jews; for the fear of the Jews fell upon them.

9:1 Now in the twelfth month, that is, the month Adar, on the
thirteenth day of the same, when the king's commandment and his decree
drew near to be put in execution, in the day that the enemies of the
Jews hoped to have power over them, (though it was turned to the
contrary, that the Jews had rule over them that hated them;) 9:2 The
Jews gathered themselves together in their cities throughout all the
provinces of the king Ahasuerus, to lay hand on such as sought their
hurt: and no man could withstand them; for the fear of them fell upon
all people.

9:3 And all the rulers of the provinces, and the lieutenants, and the
deputies, and officers of the king, helped the Jews; because the fear
of Mordecai fell upon them.

9:4 For Mordecai was great in the king's house, and his fame went out
throughout all the provinces: for this man Mordecai waxed greater and
greater.

9:5 Thus the Jews smote all their enemies with the stroke of the
sword, and slaughter, and destruction, and did what they would unto
those that hated them.

9:6 And in Shushan the palace the Jews slew and destroyed five hundred
men.

9:7 And Parshandatha, and Dalphon, and Aspatha, 9:8 And Poratha, and
Adalia, and Aridatha, 9:9 And Parmashta, and Arisai, and Aridai, and
Vajezatha, 9:10 The ten sons of Haman the son of Hammedatha, the enemy
of the Jews, slew they; but on the spoil laid they not their hand.

9:11 On that day the number of those that were slain in Shushan the
palace was brought before the king.

9:12 And the king said unto Esther the queen, The Jews have slain and
destroyed five hundred men in Shushan the palace, and the ten sons of
Haman; what have they done in the rest of the king's provinces? now
what is thy petition? and it shall be granted thee: or what is thy
request further? and it shall be done.

9:13 Then said Esther, If it please the king, let it be granted to the
Jews which are in Shushan to do to morrow also according unto this
day's decree, and let Haman's ten sons be hanged upon the gallows.

9:14 And the king commanded it so to be done: and the decree was given
at Shushan; and they hanged Haman's ten sons.

9:15 For the Jews that were in Shushan gathered themselves together on
the fourteenth day also of the month Adar, and slew three hundred men
at Shushan; but on the prey they laid not their hand.

9:16 But the other Jews that were in the king's provinces gathered
themselves together, and stood for their lives, and had rest from
their enemies, and slew of their foes seventy and five thousand, but
they laid not their hands on the prey, 9:17 On the thirteenth day of
the month Adar; and on the fourteenth day of the same rested they, and
made it a day of feasting and gladness.

9:18 But the Jews that were at Shushan assembled together on the
thirteenth day thereof, and on the fourteenth thereof; and on the
fifteenth day of the same they rested, and made it a day of feasting
and gladness.

9:19 Therefore the Jews of the villages, that dwelt in the unwalled
towns, made the fourteenth day of the month Adar a day of gladness and
feasting, and a good day, and of sending portions one to another.

9:20 And Mordecai wrote these things, and sent letters unto all the
Jews that were in all the provinces of the king Ahasuerus, both nigh
and far, 9:21 To stablish this among them, that they should keep the
fourteenth day of the month Adar, and the fifteenth day of the same,
yearly, 9:22 As the days wherein the Jews rested from their enemies,
and the month which was turned unto them from sorrow to joy, and from
mourning into a good day: that they should make them days of feasting
and joy, and of sending portions one to another, and gifts to the
poor.

9:23 And the Jews undertook to do as they had begun, and as Mordecai
had written unto them; 9:24 Because Haman the son of Hammedatha, the
Agagite, the enemy of all the Jews, had devised against the Jews to
destroy them, and had cast Pur, that is, the lot, to consume them, and
to destroy them; 9:25 But when Esther came before the king, he
commanded by letters that his wicked device, which he devised against
the Jews, should return upon his own head, and that he and his sons
should be hanged on the gallows.

9:26 Wherefore they called these days Purim after the name of Pur.

Therefore for all the words of this letter, and of that which they had
seen concerning this matter, and which had come unto them, 9:27 The
Jews ordained, and took upon them, and upon their seed, and upon all
such as joined themselves unto them, so as it should not fail, that
they would keep these two days according to their writing, and
according to their appointed time every year; 9:28 And that these days
should be remembered and kept throughout every generation, every
family, every province, and every city; and that these days of Purim
should not fail from among the Jews, nor the memorial of them perish
from their seed.

9:29 Then Esther the queen, the daughter of Abihail, and Mordecai the
Jew, wrote with all authority, to confirm this second letter of Purim.

9:30 And he sent the letters unto all the Jews, to the hundred twenty
and seven provinces of the kingdom of Ahasuerus, with words of peace
and truth, 9:31 To confirm these days of Purim in their times
appointed, according as Mordecai the Jew and Esther the queen had
enjoined them, and as they had decreed for themselves and for their
seed, the matters of the fastings and their cry.

9:32 And the decree of Esther confirmed these matters of Purim; and it
was written in the book.

10:1 And the king Ahasuerus laid a tribute upon the land, and upon the
isles of the sea.

10:2 And all the acts of his power and of his might, and the
declaration of the greatness of Mordecai, whereunto the king advanced
him, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings
of Media and Persia?  10:3 For Mordecai the Jew was next unto king
Ahasuerus, and great among the Jews, and accepted of the multitude of
his brethren, seeking the wealth of his people, and speaking peace to
all his seed.




The Book of Job


1:1 There was a man in the land of Uz, whose name was Job; and that
man was perfect and upright, and one that feared God, and eschewed evil.

1:2 And there were born unto him seven sons and three daughters.

1:3 His substance also was seven thousand sheep, and three thousand
camels, and five hundred yoke of oxen, and five hundred she asses, and
a very great household; so that this man was the greatest of all the
men of the east.

1:4 And his sons went and feasted in their houses, every one his day;
and sent and called for their three sisters to eat and to drink with
them.

1:5 And it was so, when the days of their feasting were gone about,
that Job sent and sanctified them, and rose up early in the morning,
and offered burnt offerings according to the number of them all: for
Job said, It may be that my sons have sinned, and cursed God in their
hearts. Thus did Job continually.

1:6 Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present
themselves before the LORD, and Satan came also among them.

1:7 And the LORD said unto Satan, Whence comest thou? Then Satan
answered the LORD, and said, From going to and fro in the earth, and
from walking up and down in it.

1:8 And the LORD said unto Satan, Hast thou considered my servant Job,
that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright
man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil?  1:9 Then Satan
answered the LORD, and said, Doth Job fear God for nought?  1:10 Hast
not thou made an hedge about him, and about his house, and about all
that he hath on every side? thou hast blessed the work of his hands,
and his substance is increased in the land.

1:11 But put forth thine hand now, and touch all that he hath, and he
will curse thee to thy face.

1:12 And the LORD said unto Satan, Behold, all that he hath is in thy
power; only upon himself put not forth thine hand. So Satan went forth
from the presence of the LORD.

1:13 And there was a day when his sons and his daughters were eating
and drinking wine in their eldest brother's house: 1:14 And there came
a messenger unto Job, and said, The oxen were plowing, and the asses
feeding beside them: 1:15 And the Sabeans fell upon them, and took
them away; yea, they have slain the servants with the edge of the
sword; and I only am escaped alone to tell thee.

1:16 While he was yet speaking, there came also another, and said, The
fire of God is fallen from heaven, and hath burned up the sheep, and
the servants, and consumed them; and I only am escaped alone to tell
thee.

1:17 While he was yet speaking, there came also another, and said, The
Chaldeans made out three bands, and fell upon the camels, and have
carried them away, yea, and slain the servants with the edge of the
sword; and I only am escaped alone to tell thee.

1:18 While he was yet speaking, there came also another, and said, Thy
sons and thy daughters were eating and drinking wine in their eldest
brother's house: 1:19 And, behold, there came a great wind from the
wilderness, and smote the four corners of the house, and it fell upon
the young men, and they are dead; and I only am escaped alone to tell
thee.

1:20 Then Job arose, and rent his mantle, and shaved his head, and
fell down upon the ground, and worshipped, 1:21 And said, Naked came I
out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither: the LORD
gave, and the LORD hath taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.

1:22 In all this Job sinned not, nor charged God foolishly.

2:1 Again there was a day when the sons of God came to present
themselves before the LORD, and Satan came also among them to present
himself before the LORD.

2:2 And the LORD said unto Satan, From whence comest thou? And Satan
answered the LORD, and said, From going to and fro in the earth, and
from walking up and down in it.

2:3 And the LORD said unto Satan, Hast thou considered my servant Job,
that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright
man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil? and still he holdeth
fast his integrity, although thou movedst me against him, to destroy
him without cause.

2:4 And Satan answered the LORD, and said, Skin for skin, yea, all
that a man hath will he give for his life.

2:5 But put forth thine hand now, and touch his bone and his flesh,
and he will curse thee to thy face.

2:6 And the LORD said unto Satan, Behold, he is in thine hand; but
save his life.

2:7 So went Satan forth from the presence of the LORD, and smote Job
with sore boils from the sole of his foot unto his crown.

2:8 And he took him a potsherd to scrape himself withal; and he sat
down among the ashes.

2:9 Then said his wife unto him, Dost thou still retain thine
integrity?  curse God, and die.

2:10 But he said unto her, Thou speakest as one of the foolish women
speaketh. What? shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we
not receive evil? In all this did not Job sin with his lips.

2:11 Now when Job's three friends heard of all this evil that was come
upon him, they came every one from his own place; Eliphaz the
Temanite, and Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite: for they
had made an appointment together to come to mourn with him and to
comfort him.

2:12 And when they lifted up their eyes afar off, and knew him not,
they lifted up their voice, and wept; and they rent every one his
mantle, and sprinkled dust upon their heads toward heaven.

2:13 So they sat down with him upon the ground seven days and seven
nights, and none spake a word unto him: for they saw that his grief
was very great.

3:1 After this opened Job his mouth, and cursed his day.

3:2 And Job spake, and said, 3:3 Let the day perish wherein I was
born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man child
conceived.

3:4 Let that day be darkness; let not God regard it from above,
neither let the light shine upon it.

3:5 Let darkness and the shadow of death stain it; let a cloud dwell
upon it; let the blackness of the day terrify it.

3:6 As for that night, let darkness seize upon it; let it not be
joined unto the days of the year, let it not come into the number of
the months.

3:7 Lo, let that night be solitary, let no joyful voice come therein.

3:8 Let them curse it that curse the day, who are ready to raise up
their mourning.

3:9 Let the stars of the twilight thereof be dark; let it look for
light, but have none; neither let it see the dawning of the day: 3:10
Because it shut not up the doors of my mother's womb, nor hid sorrow
from mine eyes.

3:11 Why died I not from the womb? why did I not give up the ghost
when I came out of the belly?  3:12 Why did the knees prevent me? or
why the breasts that I should suck?  3:13 For now should I have lain
still and been quiet, I should have slept: then had I been at rest,
3:14 With kings and counsellors of the earth, which build desolate
places for themselves; 3:15 Or with princes that had gold, who filled
their houses with silver: 3:16 Or as an hidden untimely birth I had
not been; as infants which never saw light.

3:17 There the wicked cease from troubling; and there the weary be at
rest.

3:18 There the prisoners rest together; they hear not the voice of the
oppressor.

3:19 The small and great are there; and the servant is free from his
master.

3:20 Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery, and life unto
the bitter in soul; 3:21 Which long for death, but it cometh not; and
dig for it more than for hid treasures; 3:22 Which rejoice
exceedingly, and are glad, when they can find the grave?  3:23 Why is
light given to a man whose way is hid, and whom God hath hedged in?
3:24 For my sighing cometh before I eat, and my roarings are poured
out like the waters.

3:25 For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me, and that
which I was afraid of is come unto me.

3:26 I was not in safety, neither had I rest, neither was I quiet; yet
trouble came.

4:1 Then Eliphaz the Temanite answered and said, 4:2 If we assay to
commune with thee, wilt thou be grieved? but who can withhold himself
from speaking?  4:3 Behold, thou hast instructed many, and thou hast
strengthened the weak hands.

4:4 Thy words have upholden him that was falling, and thou hast
strengthened the feeble knees.

4:5 But now it is come upon thee, and thou faintest; it toucheth thee,
and thou art troubled.

4:6 Is not this thy fear, thy confidence, thy hope, and the
uprightness of thy ways?  4:7 Remember, I pray thee, who ever
perished, being innocent? or where were the righteous cut off?  4:8
Even as I have seen, they that plow iniquity, and sow wickedness, reap
the same.

4:9 By the blast of God they perish, and by the breath of his nostrils
are they consumed.

4:10 The roaring of the lion, and the voice of the fierce lion, and
the teeth of the young lions, are broken.

4:11 The old lion perisheth for lack of prey, and the stout lion's
whelps are scattered abroad.

4:12 Now a thing was secretly brought to me, and mine ear received a
little thereof.

4:13 In thoughts from the visions of the night, when deep sleep
falleth on men, 4:14 Fear came upon me, and trembling, which made all
my bones to shake.

4:15 Then a spirit passed before my face; the hair of my flesh stood
up: 4:16 It stood still, but I could not discern the form thereof: an
image was before mine eyes, there was silence, and I heard a voice,
saying, 4:17 Shall mortal man be more just than God? shall a man be
more pure than his maker?  4:18 Behold, he put no trust in his
servants; and his angels he charged with folly: 4:19 How much less in
them that dwell in houses of clay, whose foundation is in the dust,
which are crushed before the moth?  4:20 They are destroyed from
morning to evening: they perish for ever without any regarding it.

4:21 Doth not their excellency which is in them go away? they die,
even without wisdom.

5:1 Call now, if there be any that will answer thee; and to which of
the saints wilt thou turn?  5:2 For wrath killeth the foolish man, and
envy slayeth the silly one.

5:3 I have seen the foolish taking root: but suddenly I cursed his
habitation.

5:4 His children are far from safety, and they are crushed in the
gate, neither is there any to deliver them.

5:5 Whose harvest the hungry eateth up, and taketh it even out of the
thorns, and the robber swalloweth up their substance.

5:6 Although affliction cometh not forth of the dust, neither doth
trouble spring out of the ground; 5:7 Yet man is born unto trouble, as
the sparks fly upward.

5:8 I would seek unto God, and unto God would I commit my cause: 5:9
Which doeth great things and unsearchable; marvellous things without
number: 5:10 Who giveth rain upon the earth, and sendeth waters upon
the fields: 5:11 To set up on high those that be low; that those which
mourn may be exalted to safety.

5:12 He disappointeth the devices of the crafty, so that their hands
cannot perform their enterprise.

5:13 He taketh the wise in their own craftiness: and the counsel of
the froward is carried headlong.

5:14 They meet with darkness in the day time, and grope in the noonday
as in the night.

5:15 But he saveth the poor from the sword, from their mouth, and from
the hand of the mighty.

5:16 So the poor hath hope, and iniquity stoppeth her mouth.

5:17 Behold, happy is the man whom God correcteth: therefore despise
not thou the chastening of the Almighty: 5:18 For he maketh sore, and
bindeth up: he woundeth, and his hands make whole.

5:19 He shall deliver thee in six troubles: yea, in seven there shall
no evil touch thee.

5:20 In famine he shall redeem thee from death: and in war from the
power of the sword.

5:21 Thou shalt be hid from the scourge of the tongue: neither shalt
thou be afraid of destruction when it cometh.

5:22 At destruction and famine thou shalt laugh: neither shalt thou be
afraid of the beasts of the earth.

5:23 For thou shalt be in league with the stones of the field: and the
beasts of the field shall be at peace with thee.

5:24 And thou shalt know that thy tabernacle shall be in peace; and
thou shalt visit thy habitation, and shalt not sin.

5:25 Thou shalt know also that thy seed shall be great, and thine
offspring as the grass of the earth.

5:26 Thou shalt come to thy grave in a full age, like as a shock of
corn cometh in in his season.

5:27 Lo this, we have searched it, so it is; hear it, and know thou it
for thy good.

6:1 But Job answered and said, 6:2 Oh that my grief were throughly
weighed, and my calamity laid in the balances together!  6:3 For now
it would be heavier than the sand of the sea: therefore my words are
swallowed up.

6:4 For the arrows of the Almighty are within me, the poison whereof
drinketh up my spirit: the terrors of God do set themselves in array
against me.

6:5 Doth the wild ass bray when he hath grass? or loweth the ox over
his fodder?  6:6 Can that which is unsavoury be eaten without salt? or
is there any taste in the white of an egg?  6:7 The things that my
soul refused to touch are as my sorrowful meat.

6:8 Oh that I might have my request; and that God would grant me the
thing that I long for!  6:9 Even that it would please God to destroy
me; that he would let loose his hand, and cut me off!  6:10 Then
should I yet have comfort; yea, I would harden myself in sorrow: let
him not spare; for I have not concealed the words of the Holy One.

6:11 What is my strength, that I should hope? and what is mine end,
that I should prolong my life?  6:12 Is my strength the strength of
stones? or is my flesh of brass?  6:13 Is not my help in me? and is
wisdom driven quite from me?  6:14 To him that is afflicted pity
should be shewed from his friend; but he forsaketh the fear of the
Almighty.

6:15 My brethren have dealt deceitfully as a brook, and as the stream
of brooks they pass away; 6:16 Which are blackish by reason of the
ice, and wherein the snow is hid: 6:17 What time they wax warm, they
vanish: when it is hot, they are consumed out of their place.

6:18 The paths of their way are turned aside; they go to nothing, and
perish.

6:19 The troops of Tema looked, the companies of Sheba waited for
them.

6:20 They were confounded because they had hoped; they came thither,
and were ashamed.

6:21 For now ye are nothing; ye see my casting down, and are afraid.

6:22 Did I say, Bring unto me? or, Give a reward for me of your
substance?  6:23 Or, Deliver me from the enemy's hand? or, Redeem me
from the hand of the mighty?  6:24 Teach me, and I will hold my
tongue: and cause me to understand wherein I have erred.

6:25 How forcible are right words! but what doth your arguing reprove?
6:26 Do ye imagine to reprove words, and the speeches of one that is
desperate, which are as wind?  6:27 Yea, ye overwhelm the fatherless,
and ye dig a pit for your friend.

6:28 Now therefore be content, look upon me; for it is evident unto
you if I lie.

6:29 Return, I pray you, let it not be iniquity; yea, return again, my
righteousness is in it.

6:30 Is there iniquity in my tongue? cannot my taste discern perverse
things?  7:1 Is there not an appointed time to man upon earth? are not
his days also like the days of an hireling?  7:2 As a servant
earnestly desireth the shadow, and as an hireling looketh for the
reward of his work: 7:3 So am I made to possess months of vanity, and
wearisome nights are appointed to me.

7:4 When I lie down, I say, When shall I arise, and the night be gone?
and I am full of tossings to and fro unto the dawning of the day.

7:5 My flesh is clothed with worms and clods of dust; my skin is
broken, and become loathsome.

7:6 My days are swifter than a weaver's shuttle, and are spent without
hope.

7:7 O remember that my life is wind: mine eye shall no more see good.

7:8 The eye of him that hath seen me shall see me no more: thine eyes
are upon me, and I am not.

7:9 As the cloud is consumed and vanisheth away: so he that goeth down
to the grave shall come up no more.

7:10 He shall return no more to his house, neither shall his place
know him any more.

7:11 Therefore I will not refrain my mouth; I will speak in the
anguish of my spirit; I will complain in the bitterness of my soul.

7:12 Am I a sea, or a whale, that thou settest a watch over me?  7:13
When I say, My bed shall comfort me, my couch shall ease my
complaints; 7:14 Then thou scarest me with dreams, and terrifiest me
through visions: 7:15 So that my soul chooseth strangling, and death
rather than my life.

7:16 I loathe it; I would not live alway: let me alone; for my days
are vanity.

7:17 What is man, that thou shouldest magnify him? and that thou
shouldest set thine heart upon him?  7:18 And that thou shouldest
visit him every morning, and try him every moment?  7:19 How long wilt
thou not depart from me, nor let me alone till I swallow down my
spittle?  7:20 I have sinned; what shall I do unto thee, O thou
preserver of men?  why hast thou set me as a mark against thee, so
that I am a burden to myself?  7:21 And why dost thou not pardon my
transgression, and take away my iniquity? for now shall I sleep in the
dust; and thou shalt seek me in the morning, but I shall not be.

8:1 Then answered Bildad the Shuhite, and said, 8:2 How long wilt thou
speak these things? and how long shall the words of thy mouth be like
a strong wind?  8:3 Doth God pervert judgment? or doth the Almighty
pervert justice?  8:4 If thy children have sinned against him, and he
have cast them away for their transgression; 8:5 If thou wouldest seek
unto God betimes, and make thy supplication to the Almighty; 8:6 If
thou wert pure and upright; surely now he would awake for thee, and
make the habitation of thy righteousness prosperous.

8:7 Though thy beginning was small, yet thy latter end should greatly
increase.

8:8 For enquire, I pray thee, of the former age, and prepare thyself
to the search of their fathers: 8:9 (For we are but of yesterday, and
know nothing, because our days upon earth are a shadow:) 8:10 Shall
not they teach thee, and tell thee, and utter words out of their
heart?  8:11 Can the rush grow up without mire? can the flag grow
without water?  8:12 Whilst it is yet in his greenness, and not cut
down, it withereth before any other herb.

8:13 So are the paths of all that forget God; and the hypocrite's hope
shall perish: 8:14 Whose hope shall be cut off, and whose trust shall
be a spider's web.

8:15 He shall lean upon his house, but it shall not stand: he shall
hold it fast, but it shall not endure.

8:16 He is green before the sun, and his branch shooteth forth in his
garden.

8:17 His roots are wrapped about the heap, and seeth the place of
stones.

8:18 If he destroy him from his place, then it shall deny him, saying,
I have not seen thee.

8:19 Behold, this is the joy of his way, and out of the earth shall
others grow.

8:20 Behold, God will not cast away a perfect man, neither will he
help the evil doers: 8:21 Till he fill thy mouth with laughing, and
thy lips with rejoicing.

8:22 They that hate thee shall be clothed with shame; and the dwelling
place of the wicked shall come to nought.

9:1 Then Job answered and said, 9:2 I know it is so of a truth: but
how should man be just with God?  9:3 If he will contend with him, he
cannot answer him one of a thousand.

9:4 He is wise in heart, and mighty in strength: who hath hardened
himself against him, and hath prospered?  9:5 Which removeth the
mountains, and they know not: which overturneth them in his anger.

9:6 Which shaketh the earth out of her place, and the pillars thereof
tremble.

9:7 Which commandeth the sun, and it riseth not; and sealeth up the
stars.

9:8 Which alone spreadeth out the heavens, and treadeth upon the waves
of the sea.

9:9 Which maketh Arcturus, Orion, and Pleiades, and the chambers of
the south.

9:10 Which doeth great things past finding out; yea, and wonders
without number.

9:11 Lo, he goeth by me, and I see him not: he passeth on also, but I
perceive him not.

9:12 Behold, he taketh away, who can hinder him? who will say unto
him, What doest thou?  9:13 If God will not withdraw his anger, the
proud helpers do stoop under him.

9:14 How much less shall I answer him, and choose out my words to
reason with him?  9:15 Whom, though I were righteous, yet would I not
answer, but I would make supplication to my judge.

9:16 If I had called, and he had answered me; yet would I not believe
that he had hearkened unto my voice.

9:17 For he breaketh me with a tempest, and multiplieth my wounds
without cause.

9:18 He will not suffer me to take my breath, but filleth me with
bitterness.

9:19 If I speak of strength, lo, he is strong: and if of judgment, who
shall set me a time to plead?  9:20 If I justify myself, mine own
mouth shall condemn me: if I say, I am perfect, it shall also prove me
perverse.

9:21 Though I were perfect, yet would I not know my soul: I would
despise my life.

9:22 This is one thing, therefore I said it, He destroyeth the perfect
and the wicked.

9:23 If the scourge slay suddenly, he will laugh at the trial of the
innocent.

9:24 The earth is given into the hand of the wicked: he covereth the
faces of the judges thereof; if not, where, and who is he?  9:25 Now
my days are swifter than a post: they flee away, they see no good.

9:26 They are passed away as the swift ships: as the eagle that
hasteth to the prey.

9:27 If I say, I will forget my complaint, I will leave off my
heaviness, and comfort myself: 9:28 I am afraid of all my sorrows, I
know that thou wilt not hold me innocent.

9:29 If I be wicked, why then labour I in vain?  9:30 If I wash myself
with snow water, and make my hands never so clean; 9:31 Yet shalt thou
plunge me in the ditch, and mine own clothes shall abhor me.

9:32 For he is not a man, as I am, that I should answer him, and we
should come together in judgment.

9:33 Neither is there any daysman betwixt us, that might lay his hand
upon us both.

9:34 Let him take his rod away from me, and let not his fear terrify
me: 9:35 Then would I speak, and not fear him; but it is not so with
me.

10:1 My soul is weary of my life; I will leave my complaint upon
myself; I will speak in the bitterness of my soul.

10:2 I will say unto God, Do not condemn me; shew me wherefore thou
contendest with me.

10:3 Is it good unto thee that thou shouldest oppress, that thou
shouldest despise the work of thine hands, and shine upon the counsel
of the wicked?  10:4 Hast thou eyes of flesh? or seest thou as man
seeth?  10:5 Are thy days as the days of man? are thy years as man's
days, 10:6 That thou enquirest after mine iniquity, and searchest
after my sin?  10:7 Thou knowest that I am not wicked; and there is
none that can deliver out of thine hand.

10:8 Thine hands have made me and fashioned me together round about;
yet thou dost destroy me.

10:9 Remember, I beseech thee, that thou hast made me as the clay; and
wilt thou bring me into dust again?  10:10 Hast thou not poured me out
as milk, and curdled me like cheese?  10:11 Thou hast clothed me with
skin and flesh, and hast fenced me with bones and sinews.

10:12 Thou hast granted me life and favour, and thy visitation hath
preserved my spirit.

10:13 And these things hast thou hid in thine heart: I know that this
is with thee.

10:14 If I sin, then thou markest me, and thou wilt not acquit me from
mine iniquity.

10:15 If I be wicked, woe unto me; and if I be righteous, yet will I
not lift up my head. I am full of confusion; therefore see thou mine
affliction; 10:16 For it increaseth. Thou huntest me as a fierce lion:
and again thou shewest thyself marvellous upon me.

10:17 Thou renewest thy witnesses against me, and increasest thine
indignation upon me; changes and war are against me.

10:18 Wherefore then hast thou brought me forth out of the womb? Oh
that I had given up the ghost, and no eye had seen me!  10:19 I should
have been as though I had not been; I should have been carried from
the womb to the grave.

10:20 Are not my days few? cease then, and let me alone, that I may
take comfort a little, 10:21 Before I go whence I shall not return,
even to the land of darkness and the shadow of death; 10:22 A land of
darkness, as darkness itself; and of the shadow of death, without any
order, and where the light is as darkness.

11:1 Then answered Zophar the Naamathite, and said, 11:2 Should not
the multitude of words be answered? and should a man full of talk be
justified?  11:3 Should thy lies make men hold their peace? and when
thou mockest, shall no man make thee ashamed?  11:4 For thou hast
said, My doctrine is pure, and I am clean in thine eyes.

11:5 But oh that God would speak, and open his lips against thee; 11:6
And that he would shew thee the secrets of wisdom, that they are
double to that which is! Know therefore that God exacteth of thee less
than thine iniquity deserveth.

11:7 Canst thou by searching find out God? canst thou find out the
Almighty unto perfection?  11:8 It is as high as heaven; what canst
thou do? deeper than hell; what canst thou know?  11:9 The measure
thereof is longer than the earth, and broader than the sea.

11:10 If he cut off, and shut up, or gather together, then who can
hinder him?  11:11 For he knoweth vain men: he seeth wickedness also;
will he not then consider it?  11:12 For vain men would be wise,
though man be born like a wild ass's colt.

11:13 If thou prepare thine heart, and stretch out thine hands toward
him; 11:14 If iniquity be in thine hand, put it far away, and let not
wickedness dwell in thy tabernacles.

11:15 For then shalt thou lift up thy face without spot; yea, thou
shalt be stedfast, and shalt not fear: 11:16 Because thou shalt forget
thy misery, and remember it as waters that pass away: 11:17 And thine
age shall be clearer than the noonday: thou shalt shine forth, thou
shalt be as the morning.

11:18 And thou shalt be secure, because there is hope; yea, thou shalt
dig about thee, and thou shalt take thy rest in safety.

11:19 Also thou shalt lie down, and none shall make thee afraid; yea,
many shall make suit unto thee.

11:20 But the eyes of the wicked shall fail, and they shall not
escape, and their hope shall be as the giving up of the ghost.

12:1 And Job answered and said, 12:2 No doubt but ye are the people,
and wisdom shall die with you.

12:3 But I have understanding as well as you; I am not inferior to
you: yea, who knoweth not such things as these?  12:4 I am as one
mocked of his neighbour, who calleth upon God, and he answereth him:
the just upright man is laughed to scorn.

12:5 He that is ready to slip with his feet is as a lamp despised in
the thought of him that is at ease.

12:6 The tabernacles of robbers prosper, and they that provoke God are
secure; into whose hand God bringeth abundantly.

12:7 But ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee; and the fowls
of the air, and they shall tell thee: 12:8 Or speak to the earth, and
it shall teach thee: and the fishes of the sea shall declare unto
thee.

12:9 Who knoweth not in all these that the hand of the LORD hath
wrought this?  12:10 In whose hand is the soul of every living thing,
and the breath of all mankind.

12:11 Doth not the ear try words? and the mouth taste his meat?  12:12
With the ancient is wisdom; and in length of days understanding.

12:13 With him is wisdom and strength, he hath counsel and
understanding.

12:14 Behold, he breaketh down, and it cannot be built again: he
shutteth up a man, and there can be no opening.

12:15 Behold, he withholdeth the waters, and they dry up: also he
sendeth them out, and they overturn the earth.

12:16 With him is strength and wisdom: the deceived and the deceiver
are his.

12:17 He leadeth counsellors away spoiled, and maketh the judges
fools.

12:18 He looseth the bond of kings, and girdeth their loins with a
girdle.

12:19 He leadeth princes away spoiled, and overthroweth the mighty.

12:20 He removeth away the speech of the trusty, and taketh away the
understanding of the aged.

12:21 He poureth contempt upon princes, and weakeneth the strength of
the mighty.

12:22 He discovereth deep things out of darkness, and bringeth out to
light the shadow of death.

12:23 He increaseth the nations, and destroyeth them: he enlargeth the
nations, and straiteneth them again.

12:24 He taketh away the heart of the chief of the people of the
earth, and causeth them to wander in a wilderness where there is no
way.

12:25 They grope in the dark without light, and he maketh them to
stagger like a drunken man.

13:1 Lo, mine eye hath seen all this, mine ear hath heard and
understood it.

13:2 What ye know, the same do I know also: I am not inferior unto
you.

13:3 Surely I would speak to the Almighty, and I desire to reason with
God.

13:4 But ye are forgers of lies, ye are all physicians of no value.

13:5 O that ye would altogether hold your peace! and it should be your
wisdom.

13:6 Hear now my reasoning, and hearken to the pleadings of my lips.

13:7 Will ye speak wickedly for God? and talk deceitfully for him?
13:8 Will ye accept his person? will ye contend for God?  13:9 Is it
good that he should search you out? or as one man mocketh another, do
ye so mock him?  13:10 He will surely reprove you, if ye do secretly
accept persons.

13:11 Shall not his excellency make you afraid? and his dread fall
upon you?  13:12 Your remembrances are like unto ashes, your bodies to
bodies of clay.

13:13 Hold your peace, let me alone, that I may speak, and let come on
me what will.

13:14 Wherefore do I take my flesh in my teeth, and put my life in
mine hand?  13:15 Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him: but I
will maintain mine own ways before him.

13:16 He also shall be my salvation: for an hypocrite shall not come
before him.

13:17 Hear diligently my speech, and my declaration with your ears.

13:18 Behold now, I have ordered my cause; I know that I shall be
justified.

13:19 Who is he that will plead with me? for now, if I hold my tongue,
I shall give up the ghost.

13:20 Only do not two things unto me: then will I not hide myself from
thee.

13:21 Withdraw thine hand far from me: and let not thy dread make me
afraid.

13:22 Then call thou, and I will answer: or let me speak, and answer
thou me.

13:23 How many are mine iniquities and sins? make me to know my
transgression and my sin.

13:24 Wherefore hidest thou thy face, and holdest me for thine enemy?
13:25 Wilt thou break a leaf driven to and fro? and wilt thou pursue
the dry stubble?  13:26 For thou writest bitter things against me, and
makest me to possess the iniquities of my youth.

13:27 Thou puttest my feet also in the stocks, and lookest narrowly
unto all my paths; thou settest a print upon the heels of my feet.

13:28 And he, as a rotten thing, consumeth, as a garment that is moth
eaten.

14:1 Man that is born of a woman is of few days and full of trouble.

14:2 He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth also as
a shadow, and continueth not.

14:3 And doth thou open thine eyes upon such an one, and bringest me
into judgment with thee?  14:4 Who can bring a clean thing out of an
unclean? not one.

14:5 Seeing his days are determined, the number of his months are with
thee, thou hast appointed his bounds that he cannot pass; 14:6 Turn
from him, that he may rest, till he shall accomplish, as an hireling,
his day.

14:7 For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will
sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof will not cease.

14:8 Though the root thereof wax old in the earth, and the stock
thereof die in the ground; 14:9 Yet through the scent of water it will
bud, and bring forth boughs like a plant.

14:10 But man dieth, and wasteth away: yea, man giveth up the ghost,
and where is he?  14:11 As the waters fail from the sea, and the flood
decayeth and drieth up: 14:12 So man lieth down, and riseth not: till
the heavens be no more, they shall not awake, nor be raised out of
their sleep.

14:13 O that thou wouldest hide me in the grave, that thou wouldest
keep me secret, until thy wrath be past, that thou wouldest appoint me
a set time, and remember me!  14:14 If a man die, shall he live again?
all the days of my appointed time will I wait, till my change come.

14:15 Thou shalt call, and I will answer thee: thou wilt have a desire
to the work of thine hands.

14:16 For now thou numberest my steps: dost thou not watch over my
sin?  14:17 My transgression is sealed up in a bag, and thou sewest up
mine iniquity.

14:18 And surely the mountains falling cometh to nought, and the rock
is removed out of his place.

14:19 The waters wear the stones: thou washest away the things which
grow out of the dust of the earth; and thou destroyest the hope of
man.

14:20 Thou prevailest for ever against him, and he passeth: thou
changest his countenance, and sendest him away.

14:21 His sons come to honour, and he knoweth it not; and they are
brought low, but he perceiveth it not of them.

14:22 But his flesh upon him shall have pain, and his soul within him
shall mourn.

15:1 Then answered Eliphaz the Temanite, and said, 15:2 Should a wise
man utter vain knowledge, and fill his belly with the east wind?  15:3
Should he reason with unprofitable talk? or with speeches wherewith he
can do no good?  15:4 Yea, thou castest off fear, and restrainest
prayer before God.

15:5 For thy mouth uttereth thine iniquity, and thou choosest the
tongue of the crafty.

15:6 Thine own mouth condemneth thee, and not I: yea, thine own lips
testify against thee.

15:7 Art thou the first man that was born? or wast thou made before
the hills?  15:8 Hast thou heard the secret of God? and dost thou
restrain wisdom to thyself?  15:9 What knowest thou, that we know not?
what understandest thou, which is not in us?  15:10 With us are both
the grayheaded and very aged men, much elder than thy father.

15:11 Are the consolations of God small with thee? is there any secret
thing with thee?  15:12 Why doth thine heart carry thee away? and what
do thy eyes wink at, 15:13 That thou turnest thy spirit against God,
and lettest such words go out of thy mouth?  15:14 What is man, that
he should be clean? and he which is born of a woman, that he should be
righteous?  15:15 Behold, he putteth no trust in his saints; yea, the
heavens are not clean in his sight.

15:16 How much more abominable and filthy is man, which drinketh
iniquity like water?  15:17 I will shew thee, hear me; and that which
I have seen I will declare; 15:18 Which wise men have told from their
fathers, and have not hid it: 15:19 Unto whom alone the earth was
given, and no stranger passed among them.

15:20 The wicked man travaileth with pain all his days, and the number
of years is hidden to the oppressor.

15:21 A dreadful sound is in his ears: in prosperity the destroyer
shall come upon him.

15:22 He believeth not that he shall return out of darkness, and he is
waited for of the sword.

15:23 He wandereth abroad for bread, saying, Where is it? he knoweth
that the day of darkness is ready at his hand.

15:24 Trouble and anguish shall make him afraid; they shall prevail
against him, as a king ready to the battle.

15:25 For he stretcheth out his hand against God, and strengtheneth
himself against the Almighty.

15:26 He runneth upon him, even on his neck, upon the thick bosses of
his bucklers: 15:27 Because he covereth his face with his fatness, and
maketh collops of fat on his flanks.

15:28 And he dwelleth in desolate cities, and in houses which no man
inhabiteth, which are ready to become heaps.

15:29 He shall not be rich, neither shall his substance continue,
neither shall he prolong the perfection thereof upon the earth.

15:30 He shall not depart out of darkness; the flame shall dry up his
branches, and by the breath of his mouth shall he go away.

15:31 Let not him that is deceived trust in vanity: for vanity shall
be his recompence.

15:32 It shall be accomplished before his time, and his branch shall
not be green.

15:33 He shall shake off his unripe grape as the vine, and shall cast
off his flower as the olive.

15:34 For the congregation of hypocrites shall be desolate, and fire
shall consume the tabernacles of bribery.

15:35 They conceive mischief, and bring forth vanity, and their belly
prepareth deceit.

16:1 Then Job answered and said, 16:2 I have heard many such things:
miserable comforters are ye all.

16:3 Shall vain words have an end? or what emboldeneth thee that thou
answerest?  16:4 I also could speak as ye do: if your soul were in my
soul's stead, I could heap up words against you, and shake mine head
at you.

16:5 But I would strengthen you with my mouth, and the moving of my
lips should asswage your grief.

16:6 Though I speak, my grief is not asswaged: and though I forbear,
what am I eased?  16:7 But now he hath made me weary: thou hast made
desolate all my company.

16:8 And thou hast filled me with wrinkles, which is a witness against
me: and my leanness rising up in me beareth witness to my face.

16:9 He teareth me in his wrath, who hateth me: he gnasheth upon me
with his teeth; mine enemy sharpeneth his eyes upon me.

16:10 They have gaped upon me with their mouth; they have smitten me
upon the cheek reproachfully; they have gathered themselves together
against me.

16:11 God hath delivered me to the ungodly, and turned me over into
the hands of the wicked.

16:12 I was at ease, but he hath broken me asunder: he hath also taken
me by my neck, and shaken me to pieces, and set me up for his mark.

16:13 His archers compass me round about, he cleaveth my reins
asunder, and doth not spare; he poureth out my gall upon the ground.

16:14 He breaketh me with breach upon breach, he runneth upon me like
a giant.

16:15 I have sewed sackcloth upon my skin, and defiled my horn in the
dust.

16:16 My face is foul with weeping, and on my eyelids is the shadow of
death; 16:17 Not for any injustice in mine hands: also my prayer is
pure.

16:18 O earth, cover not thou my blood, and let my cry have no place.

16:19 Also now, behold, my witness is in heaven, and my record is on
high.

16:20 My friends scorn me: but mine eye poureth out tears unto God.

16:21 O that one might plead for a man with God, as a man pleadeth for
his neighbour!  16:22 When a few years are come, then I shall go the
way whence I shall not return.

17:1 My breath is corrupt, my days are extinct, the graves are ready
for me.

17:2 Are there not mockers with me? and doth not mine eye continue in
their provocation?  17:3 Lay down now, put me in a surety with thee;
who is he that will strike hands with me?  17:4 For thou hast hid
their heart from understanding: therefore shalt thou not exalt them.

17:5 He that speaketh flattery to his friends, even the eyes of his
children shall fail.

17:6 He hath made me also a byword of the people; and aforetime I was
as a tabret.

17:7 Mine eye also is dim by reason of sorrow, and all my members are
as a shadow.

17:8 Upright men shall be astonied at this, and the innocent shall
stir up himself against the hypocrite.

17:9 The righteous also shall hold on his way, and he that hath clean
hands shall be stronger and stronger.

17:10 But as for you all, do ye return, and come now: for I cannot
find one wise man among you.

17:11 My days are past, my purposes are broken off, even the thoughts
of my heart.

17:12 They change the night into day: the light is short because of
darkness.

17:13 If I wait, the grave is mine house: I have made my bed in the
darkness.

17:14 I have said to corruption, Thou art my father: to the worm, Thou
art my mother, and my sister.

17:15 And where is now my hope? as for my hope, who shall see it?
17:16 They shall go down to the bars of the pit, when our rest
together is in the dust.

18:1 Then answered Bildad the Shuhite, and said, 18:2 How long will it
be ere ye make an end of words? mark, and afterwards we will speak.

18:3 Wherefore are we counted as beasts, and reputed vile in your
sight?  18:4 He teareth himself in his anger: shall the earth be
forsaken for thee? and shall the rock be removed out of his place?
18:5 Yea, the light of the wicked shall be put out, and the spark of
his fire shall not shine.

18:6 The light shall be dark in his tabernacle, and his candle shall
be put out with him.

18:7 The steps of his strength shall be straitened, and his own
counsel shall cast him down.

18:8 For he is cast into a net by his own feet, and he walketh upon a
snare.

18:9 The gin shall take him by the heel, and the robber shall prevail
against him.

18:10 The snare is laid for him in the ground, and a trap for him in
the way.

18:11 Terrors shall make him afraid on every side, and shall drive him
to his feet.

18:12 His strength shall be hungerbitten, and destruction shall be
ready at his side.

18:13 It shall devour the strength of his skin: even the firstborn of
death shall devour his strength.

18:14 His confidence shall be rooted out of his tabernacle, and it
shall bring him to the king of terrors.

18:15 It shall dwell in his tabernacle, because it is none of his:
brimstone shall be scattered upon his habitation.

18:16 His roots shall be dried up beneath, and above shall his branch
be cut off.

18:17 His remembrance shall perish from the earth, and he shall have
no name in the street.

18:18 He shall be driven from light into darkness, and chased out of
the world.

18:19 He shall neither have son nor nephew among his people, nor any
remaining in his dwellings.

18:20 They that come after him shall be astonied at his day, as they
that went before were affrighted.

18:21 Surely such are the dwellings of the wicked, and this is the
place of him that knoweth not God.

19:1 Then Job answered and said, 19:2 How long will ye vex my soul,
and break me in pieces with words?  19:3 These ten times have ye
reproached me: ye are not ashamed that ye make yourselves strange to
me.

19:4 And be it indeed that I have erred, mine error remaineth with
myself.

19:5 If indeed ye will magnify yourselves against me, and plead
against me my reproach: 19:6 Know now that God hath overthrown me, and
hath compassed me with his net.

19:7 Behold, I cry out of wrong, but I am not heard: I cry aloud, but
there is no judgment.

19:8 He hath fenced up my way that I cannot pass, and he hath set
darkness in my paths.

19:9 He hath stripped me of my glory, and taken the crown from my
head.

19:10 He hath destroyed me on every side, and I am gone: and mine hope
hath he removed like a tree.

19:11 He hath also kindled his wrath against me, and he counteth me
unto him as one of his enemies.

19:12 His troops come together, and raise up their way against me, and
encamp round about my tabernacle.

19:13 He hath put my brethren far from me, and mine acquaintance are
verily estranged from me.

19:14 My kinsfolk have failed, and my familiar friends have forgotten
me.

19:15 They that dwell in mine house, and my maids, count me for a
stranger: I am an alien in their sight.

19:16 I called my servant, and he gave me no answer; I intreated him
with my mouth.

19:17 My breath is strange to my wife, though I intreated for the
children's sake of mine own body.

19:18 Yea, young children despised me; I arose, and they spake against
me.

19:19 All my inward friends abhorred me: and they whom I loved are
turned against me.

19:20 My bone cleaveth to my skin and to my flesh, and I am escaped
with the skin of my teeth.

19:21 Have pity upon me, have pity upon me, O ye my friends; for the
hand of God hath touched me.

19:22 Why do ye persecute me as God, and are not satisfied with my
flesh?  19:23 Oh that my words were now written! oh that they were
printed in a book!  19:24 That they were graven with an iron pen and
lead in the rock for ever!  19:25 For I know that my redeemer liveth,
and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: 19:26 And
though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I
see God: 19:27 Whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall
behold, and not another; though my reins be consumed within me.

19:28 But ye should say, Why persecute we him, seeing the root of the
matter is found in me?  19:29 Be ye afraid of the sword: for wrath
bringeth the punishments of the sword, that ye may know there is a
judgment.

20:1 Then answered Zophar the Naamathite, and said, 20:2 Therefore do
my thoughts cause me to answer, and for this I make haste.

20:3 I have heard the check of my reproach, and the spirit of my
understanding causeth me to answer.

20:4 Knowest thou not this of old, since man was placed upon earth,
20:5 That the triumphing of the wicked is short, and the joy of the
hypocrite but for a moment?  20:6 Though his excellency mount up to
the heavens, and his head reach unto the clouds; 20:7 Yet he shall
perish for ever like his own dung: they which have seen him shall say,
Where is he?  20:8 He shall fly away as a dream, and shall not be
found: yea, he shall be chased away as a vision of the night.

20:9 The eye also which saw him shall see him no more; neither shall
his place any more behold him.

20:10 His children shall seek to please the poor, and his hands shall
restore their goods.

20:11 His bones are full of the sin of his youth, which shall lie down
with him in the dust.

20:12 Though wickedness be sweet in his mouth, though he hide it under
his tongue; 20:13 Though he spare it, and forsake it not; but keep it
still within his mouth: 20:14 Yet his meat in his bowels is turned, it
is the gall of asps within him.

20:15 He hath swallowed down riches, and he shall vomit them up again:
God shall cast them out of his belly.

20:16 He shall suck the poison of asps: the viper's tongue shall slay
him.

20:17 He shall not see the rivers, the floods, the brooks of honey and
butter.

20:18 That which he laboured for shall he restore, and shall not
swallow it down: according to his substance shall the restitution be,
and he shall not rejoice therein.

20:19 Because he hath oppressed and hath forsaken the poor; because he
hath violently taken away an house which he builded not; 20:20 Surely
he shall not feel quietness in his belly, he shall not save of that
which he desired.

20:21 There shall none of his meat be left; therefore shall no man
look for his goods.

20:22 In the fulness of his sufficiency he shall be in straits: every
hand of the wicked shall come upon him.

20:23 When he is about to fill his belly, God shall cast the fury of
his wrath upon him, and shall rain it upon him while he is eating.

20:24 He shall flee from the iron weapon, and the bow of steel shall
strike him through.

20:25 It is drawn, and cometh out of the body; yea, the glittering
sword cometh out of his gall: terrors are upon him.

20:26 All darkness shall be hid in his secret places: a fire not blown
shall consume him; it shall go ill with him that is left in his
tabernacle.

20:27 The heaven shall reveal his iniquity; and the earth shall rise
up against him.

20:28 The increase of his house shall depart, and his goods shall flow
away in the day of his wrath.

20:29 This is the portion of a wicked man from God, and the heritage
appointed unto him by God.

21:1 But Job answered and said, 21:2 Hear diligently my speech, and
let this be your consolations.

21:3 Suffer me that I may speak; and after that I have spoken, mock
on.

21:4 As for me, is my complaint to man? and if it were so, why should
not my spirit be troubled?  21:5 Mark me, and be astonished, and lay
your hand upon your mouth.

21:6 Even when I remember I am afraid, and trembling taketh hold on my
flesh.

21:7 Wherefore do the wicked live, become old, yea, are mighty in
power?  21:8 Their seed is established in their sight with them, and
their offspring before their eyes.

21:9 Their houses are safe from fear, neither is the rod of God upon
them.

21:10 Their bull gendereth, and faileth not; their cow calveth, and
casteth not her calf.

21:11 They send forth their little ones like a flock, and their
children dance.

21:12 They take the timbrel and harp, and rejoice at the sound of the
organ.

21:13 They spend their days in wealth, and in a moment go down to the
grave.

21:14 Therefore they say unto God, Depart from us; for we desire not
the knowledge of thy ways.

21:15 What is the Almighty, that we should serve him? and what profit
should we have, if we pray unto him?  21:16 Lo, their good is not in
their hand: the counsel of the wicked is far from me.

21:17 How oft is the candle of the wicked put out! and how oft cometh
their destruction upon them! God distributeth sorrows in his anger.

21:18 They are as stubble before the wind, and as chaff that the storm
carrieth away.

21:19 God layeth up his iniquity for his children: he rewardeth him,
and he shall know it.

21:20 His eyes shall see his destruction, and he shall drink of the
wrath of the Almighty.

21:21 For what pleasure hath he in his house after him, when the
number of his months is cut off in the midst?  21:22 Shall any teach
God knowledge? seeing he judgeth those that are high.

21:23 One dieth in his full strength, being wholly at ease and quiet.

21:24 His breasts are full of milk, and his bones are moistened with
marrow.

21:25 And another dieth in the bitterness of his soul, and never
eateth with pleasure.

21:26 They shall lie down alike in the dust, and the worms shall cover
them.

21:27 Behold, I know your thoughts, and the devices which ye
wrongfully imagine against me.

21:28 For ye say, Where is the house of the prince? and where are the
dwelling places of the wicked?  21:29 Have ye not asked them that go
by the way? and do ye not know their tokens, 21:30 That the wicked is
reserved to the day of destruction? they shall be brought forth to the
day of wrath.

21:31 Who shall declare his way to his face? and who shall repay him
what he hath done?  21:32 Yet shall he be brought to the grave, and
shall remain in the tomb.

21:33 The clods of the valley shall be sweet unto him, and every man
shall draw after him, as there are innumerable before him.

21:34 How then comfort ye me in vain, seeing in your answers there
remaineth falsehood?  22:1 Then Eliphaz the Temanite answered and
said, 22:2 Can a man be profitable unto God, as he that is wise may be
profitable unto himself?  22:3 Is it any pleasure to the Almighty,
that thou art righteous? or is it gain to him, that thou makest thy
ways perfect?  22:4 Will he reprove thee for fear of thee? will he
enter with thee into judgment?  22:5 Is not thy wickedness great? and
thine iniquities infinite?  22:6 For thou hast taken a pledge from thy
brother for nought, and stripped the naked of their clothing.

22:7 Thou hast not given water to the weary to drink, and thou hast
withholden bread from the hungry.

22:8 But as for the mighty man, he had the earth; and the honourable
man dwelt in it.

22:9 Thou hast sent widows away empty, and the arms of the fatherless
have been broken.

22:10 Therefore snares are round about thee, and sudden fear troubleth
thee; 22:11 Or darkness, that thou canst not see; and abundance of
waters cover thee.

22:12 Is not God in the height of heaven? and behold the height of the
stars, how high they are!  22:13 And thou sayest, How doth God know?
can he judge through the dark cloud?  22:14 Thick clouds are a
covering to him, that he seeth not; and he walketh in the circuit of
heaven.

22:15 Hast thou marked the old way which wicked men have trodden?
22:16 Which were cut down out of time, whose foundation was overflown
with a flood: 22:17 Which said unto God, Depart from us: and what can
the Almighty do for them?  22:18 Yet he filled their houses with good
things: but the counsel of the wicked is far from me.

22:19 The righteous see it, and are glad: and the innocent laugh them
to scorn.

22:20 Whereas our substance is not cut down, but the remnant of them
the fire consumeth.

22:21 Acquaint now thyself with him, and be at peace: thereby good
shall come unto thee.

22:22 Receive, I pray thee, the law from his mouth, and lay up his
words in thine heart.

22:23 If thou return to the Almighty, thou shalt be built up, thou
shalt put away iniquity far from thy tabernacles.

22:24 Then shalt thou lay up gold as dust, and the gold of Ophir as
the stones of the brooks.

22:25 Yea, the Almighty shall be thy defence, and thou shalt have
plenty of silver.

22:26 For then shalt thou have thy delight in the Almighty, and shalt
lift up thy face unto God.

22:27 Thou shalt make thy prayer unto him, and he shall hear thee, and
thou shalt pay thy vows.

22:28 Thou shalt also decree a thing, and it shall be established unto
thee: and the light shall shine upon thy ways.

22:29 When men are cast down, then thou shalt say, There is lifting
up; and he shall save the humble person.

22:30 He shall deliver the island of the innocent: and it is delivered
by the pureness of thine hands.

23:1 Then Job answered and said, 23:2 Even to day is my complaint
bitter: my stroke is heavier than my groaning.

23:3 Oh that I knew where I might find him! that I might come even to
his seat!  23:4 I would order my cause before him, and fill my mouth
with arguments.

23:5 I would know the words which he would answer me, and understand
what he would say unto me.

23:6 Will he plead against me with his great power? No; but he would
put strength in me.

23:7 There the righteous might dispute with him; so should I be
delivered for ever from my judge.

23:8 Behold, I go forward, but he is not there; and backward, but I
cannot perceive him: 23:9 On the left hand, where he doth work, but I
cannot behold him: he hideth himself on the right hand, that I cannot
see him: 23:10 But he knoweth the way that I take: when he hath tried
me, I shall come forth as gold.

23:11 My foot hath held his steps, his way have I kept, and not
declined.

23:12 Neither have I gone back from the commandment of his lips; I
have esteemed the words of his mouth more than my necessary food.

23:13 But he is in one mind, and who can turn him? and what his soul
desireth, even that he doeth.

23:14 For he performeth the thing that is appointed for me: and many
such things are with him.

23:15 Therefore am I troubled at his presence: when I consider, I am
afraid of him.

23:16 For God maketh my heart soft, and the Almighty troubleth me:
23:17 Because I was not cut off before the darkness, neither hath he
covered the darkness from my face.

24:1 Why, seeing times are not hidden from the Almighty, do they that
know him not see his days?  24:2 Some remove the landmarks; they
violently take away flocks, and feed thereof.

24:3 They drive away the ass of the fatherless, they take the widow's
ox for a pledge.

24:4 They turn the needy out of the way: the poor of the earth hide
themselves together.

24:5 Behold, as wild asses in the desert, go they forth to their work;
rising betimes for a prey: the wilderness yieldeth food for them and
for their children.

24:6 They reap every one his corn in the field: and they gather the
vintage of the wicked.

24:7 They cause the naked to lodge without clothing, that they have no
covering in the cold.

24:8 They are wet with the showers of the mountains, and embrace the
rock for want of a shelter.

24:9 They pluck the fatherless from the breast, and take a pledge of
the poor.

24:10 They cause him to go naked without clothing, and they take away
the sheaf from the hungry; 24:11 Which make oil within their walls,
and tread their winepresses, and suffer thirst.

24:12 Men groan from out of the city, and the soul of the wounded
crieth out: yet God layeth not folly to them.

24:13 They are of those that rebel against the light; they know not
the ways thereof, nor abide in the paths thereof.

24:14 The murderer rising with the light killeth the poor and needy,
and in the night is as a thief.

24:15 The eye also of the adulterer waiteth for the twilight, saying,
No eye shall see me: and disguiseth his face.

24:16 In the dark they dig through houses, which they had marked for
themselves in the daytime: they know not the light.

24:17 For the morning is to them even as the shadow of death: if one
know them, they are in the terrors of the shadow of death.

24:18 He is swift as the waters; their portion is cursed in the earth:
he beholdeth not the way of the vineyards.

24:19 Drought and heat consume the snow waters: so doth the grave
those which have sinned.

24:20 The womb shall forget him; the worm shall feed sweetly on him;
he shall be no more remembered; and wickedness shall be broken as a
tree.

24:21 He evil entreateth the barren that beareth not: and doeth not
good to the widow.

24:22 He draweth also the mighty with his power: he riseth up, and no
man is sure of life.

24:23 Though it be given him to be in safety, whereon he resteth; yet
his eyes are upon their ways.

24:24 They are exalted for a little while, but are gone and brought
low; they are taken out of the way as all other, and cut off as the
tops of the ears of corn.

24:25 And if it be not so now, who will make me a liar, and make my
speech nothing worth?  25:1 Then answered Bildad the Shuhite, and
said, 25:2 Dominion and fear are with him, he maketh peace in his high
places.

25:3 Is there any number of his armies? and upon whom doth not his
light arise?  25:4 How then can man be justified with God? or how can
he be clean that is born of a woman?  25:5 Behold even to the moon,
and it shineth not; yea, the stars are not pure in his sight.

25:6 How much less man, that is a worm? and the son of man, which is a
worm?  26:1 But Job answered and said, 26:2 How hast thou helped him
that is without power? how savest thou the arm that hath no strength?
26:3 How hast thou counselled him that hath no wisdom? and how hast
thou plentifully declared the thing as it is?  26:4 To whom hast thou
uttered words? and whose spirit came from thee?  26:5 Dead things are
formed from under the waters, and the inhabitants thereof.

26:6 Hell is naked before him, and destruction hath no covering.

26:7 He stretcheth out the north over the empty place, and hangeth the
earth upon nothing.

26:8 He bindeth up the waters in his thick clouds; and the cloud is
not rent under them.

26:9 He holdeth back the face of his throne, and spreadeth his cloud
upon it.

26:10 He hath compassed the waters with bounds, until the day and
night come to an end.

26:11 The pillars of heaven tremble and are astonished at his reproof.

26:12 He divideth the sea with his power, and by his understanding he
smiteth through the proud.

26:13 By his spirit he hath garnished the heavens; his hand hath
formed the crooked serpent.

26:14 Lo, these are parts of his ways: but how little a portion is
heard of him? but the thunder of his power who can understand?  27:1
Moreover Job continued his parable, and said, 27:2 As God liveth, who
hath taken away my judgment; and the Almighty, who hath vexed my soul;
27:3 All the while my breath is in me, and the spirit of God is in my
nostrils; 27:4 My lips shall not speak wickedness, nor my tongue utter
deceit.

27:5 God forbid that I should justify you: till I die I will not
remove mine integrity from me.

27:6 My righteousness I hold fast, and will not let it go: my heart
shall not reproach me so long as I live.

27:7 Let mine enemy be as the wicked, and he that riseth up against me
as the unrighteous.

27:8 For what is the hope of the hypocrite, though he hath gained,
when God taketh away his soul?  27:9 Will God hear his cry when
trouble cometh upon him?  27:10 Will he delight himself in the
Almighty? will he always call upon God?  27:11 I will teach you by the
hand of God: that which is with the Almighty will I not conceal.

27:12 Behold, all ye yourselves have seen it; why then are ye thus
altogether vain?  27:13 This is the portion of a wicked man with God,
and the heritage of oppressors, which they shall receive of the
Almighty.

27:14 If his children be multiplied, it is for the sword: and his
offspring shall not be satisfied with bread.

27:15 Those that remain of him shall be buried in death: and his
widows shall not weep.

27:16 Though he heap up silver as the dust, and prepare raiment as the
clay; 27:17 He may prepare it, but the just shall put it on, and the
innocent shall divide the silver.

27:18 He buildeth his house as a moth, and as a booth that the keeper
maketh.

27:19 The rich man shall lie down, but he shall not be gathered: he
openeth his eyes, and he is not.

27:20 Terrors take hold on him as waters, a tempest stealeth him away
in the night.

27:21 The east wind carrieth him away, and he departeth: and as a
storm hurleth him out of his place.

27:22 For God shall cast upon him, and not spare: he would fain flee
out of his hand.

27:23 Men shall clap their hands at him, and shall hiss him out of his
place.

28:1 Surely there is a vein for the silver, and a place for gold where
they fine it.

28:2 Iron is taken out of the earth, and brass is molten out of the
stone.

28:3 He setteth an end to darkness, and searcheth out all perfection:
the stones of darkness, and the shadow of death.

28:4 The flood breaketh out from the inhabitant; even the waters
forgotten of the foot: they are dried up, they are gone away from men.

28:5 As for the earth, out of it cometh bread: and under it is turned
up as it were fire.

28:6 The stones of it are the place of sapphires: and it hath dust of
gold.

28:7 There is a path which no fowl knoweth, and which the vulture's
eye hath not seen: 28:8 The lion's whelps have not trodden it, nor the
fierce lion passed by it.

28:9 He putteth forth his hand upon the rock; he overturneth the
mountains by the roots.

28:10 He cutteth out rivers among the rocks; and his eye seeth every
precious thing.

28:11 He bindeth the floods from overflowing; and the thing that is
hid bringeth he forth to light.

28:12 But where shall wisdom be found? and where is the place of
understanding?  28:13 Man knoweth not the price thereof; neither is it
found in the land of the living.

28:14 The depth saith, It is not in me: and the sea saith, It is not
with me.

28:15 It cannot be gotten for gold, neither shall silver be weighed
for the price thereof.

28:16 It cannot be valued with the gold of Ophir, with the precious
onyx, or the sapphire.

28:17 The gold and the crystal cannot equal it: and the exchange of it
shall not be for jewels of fine gold.

28:18 No mention shall be made of coral, or of pearls: for the price
of wisdom is above rubies.

28:19 The topaz of Ethiopia shall not equal it, neither shall it be
valued with pure gold.

28:20 Whence then cometh wisdom? and where is the place of
understanding?  28:21 Seeing it is hid from the eyes of all living,
and kept close from the fowls of the air.

28:22 Destruction and death say, We have heard the fame thereof with
our ears.

28:23 God understandeth the way thereof, and he knoweth the place
thereof.

28:24 For he looketh to the ends of the earth, and seeth under the
whole heaven; 28:25 To make the weight for the winds; and he weigheth
the waters by measure.

28:26 When he made a decree for the rain, and a way for the lightning
of the thunder: 28:27 Then did he see it, and declare it; he prepared
it, yea, and searched it out.

28:28 And unto man he said, Behold, the fear of the LORD, that is
wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding.

29:1 Moreover Job continued his parable, and said, 29:2 Oh that I were
as in months past, as in the days when God preserved me; 29:3 When his
candle shined upon my head, and when by his light I walked through
darkness; 29:4 As I was in the days of my youth, when the secret of
God was upon my tabernacle; 29:5 When the Almighty was yet with me,
when my children were about me; 29:6 When I washed my steps with
butter, and the rock poured me out rivers of oil; 29:7 When I went out
to the gate through the city, when I prepared my seat in the street!
29:8 The young men saw me, and hid themselves: and the aged arose, and
stood up.

29:9 The princes refrained talking, and laid their hand on their
mouth.

29:10 The nobles held their peace, and their tongue cleaved to the
roof of their mouth.

29:11 When the ear heard me, then it blessed me; and when the eye saw
me, it gave witness to me: 29:12 Because I delivered the poor that
cried, and the fatherless, and him that had none to help him.

29:13 The blessing of him that was ready to perish came upon me: and I
caused the widow's heart to sing for joy.

29:14 I put on righteousness, and it clothed me: my judgment was as a
robe and a diadem.

29:15 I was eyes to the blind, and feet was I to the lame.

29:16 I was a father to the poor: and the cause which I knew not I
searched out.

29:17 And I brake the jaws of the wicked, and plucked the spoil out of
his teeth.

29:18 Then I said, I shall die in my nest, and I shall multiply my
days as the sand.

29:19 My root was spread out by the waters, and the dew lay all night
upon my branch.

29:20 My glory was fresh in me, and my bow was renewed in my hand.

29:21 Unto me men gave ear, and waited, and kept silence at my
counsel.

29:22 After my words they spake not again; and my speech dropped upon
them.

29:23 And they waited for me as for the rain; and they opened their
mouth wide as for the latter rain.

29:24 If I laughed on them, they believed it not; and the light of my
countenance they cast not down.

29:25 I chose out their way, and sat chief, and dwelt as a king in the
army, as one that comforteth the mourners.

30:1 But now they that are younger than I have me in derision, whose
fathers I would have disdained to have set with the dogs of my flock.

30:2 Yea, whereto might the strength of their hands profit me, in whom
old age was perished?  30:3 For want and famine they were solitary;
fleeing into the wilderness in former time desolate and waste.

30:4 Who cut up mallows by the bushes, and juniper roots for their
meat.

30:5 They were driven forth from among men, (they cried after them as
after a thief;) 30:6 To dwell in the cliffs of the valleys, in caves
of the earth, and in the rocks.

30:7 Among the bushes they brayed; under the nettles they were
gathered together.

30:8 They were children of fools, yea, children of base men: they were
viler than the earth.

30:9 And now am I their song, yea, I am their byword.

30:10 They abhor me, they flee far from me, and spare not to spit in
my face.

30:11 Because he hath loosed my cord, and afflicted me, they have also
let loose the bridle before me.

30:12 Upon my right hand rise the youth; they push away my feet, and
they raise up against me the ways of their destruction.

30:13 They mar my path, they set forward my calamity, they have no
helper.

30:14 They came upon me as a wide breaking in of waters: in the
desolation they rolled themselves upon me.

30:15 Terrors are turned upon me: they pursue my soul as the wind: and
my welfare passeth away as a cloud.

30:16 And now my soul is poured out upon me; the days of affliction
have taken hold upon me.

30:17 My bones are pierced in me in the night season: and my sinews
take no rest.

30:18 By the great force of my disease is my garment changed: it
bindeth me about as the collar of my coat.

30:19 He hath cast me into the mire, and I am become like dust and
ashes.

30:20 I cry unto thee, and thou dost not hear me: I stand up, and thou
regardest me not.

30:21 Thou art become cruel to me: with thy strong hand thou opposest
thyself against me.

30:22 Thou liftest me up to the wind; thou causest me to ride upon it,
and dissolvest my substance.

30:23 For I know that thou wilt bring me to death, and to the house
appointed for all living.

30:24 Howbeit he will not stretch out his hand to the grave, though
they cry in his destruction.

30:25 Did not I weep for him that was in trouble? was not my soul
grieved for the poor?  30:26 When I looked for good, then evil came
unto me: and when I waited for light, there came darkness.

30:27 My bowels boiled, and rested not: the days of affliction
prevented me.

30:28 I went mourning without the sun: I stood up, and I cried in the
congregation.

30:29 I am a brother to dragons, and a companion to owls.

30:30 My skin is black upon me, and my bones are burned with heat.

30:31 My harp also is turned to mourning, and my organ into the voice
of them that weep.

31:1 I made a covenant with mine eyes; why then should I think upon a
maid?  31:2 For what portion of God is there from above? and what
inheritance of the Almighty from on high?  31:3 Is not destruction to
the wicked? and a strange punishment to the workers of iniquity?  31:4
Doth not he see my ways, and count all my steps?  31:5 If I have
walked with vanity, or if my foot hath hasted to deceit; 31:6 Let me
be weighed in an even balance that God may know mine integrity.

31:7 If my step hath turned out of the way, and mine heart walked
after mine eyes, and if any blot hath cleaved to mine hands; 31:8 Then
let me sow, and let another eat; yea, let my offspring be rooted out.

31:9 If mine heart have been deceived by a woman, or if I have laid
wait at my neighbour's door; 31:10 Then let my wife grind unto
another, and let others bow down upon her.

31:11 For this is an heinous crime; yea, it is an iniquity to be
punished by the judges.

31:12 For it is a fire that consumeth to destruction, and would root
out all mine increase.

31:13 If I did despise the cause of my manservant or of my
maidservant, when they contended with me; 31:14 What then shall I do
when God riseth up? and when he visiteth, what shall I answer him?
31:15 Did not he that made me in the womb make him? and did not one
fashion us in the womb?  31:16 If I have withheld the poor from their
desire, or have caused the eyes of the widow to fail; 31:17 Or have
eaten my morsel myself alone, and the fatherless hath not eaten
thereof; 31:18 (For from my youth he was brought up with me, as with a
father, and I have guided her from my mother's womb;) 31:19 If I have
seen any perish for want of clothing, or any poor without covering;
31:20 If his loins have not blessed me, and if he were not warmed with
the fleece of my sheep; 31:21 If I have lifted up my hand against the
fatherless, when I saw my help in the gate: 31:22 Then let mine arm
fall from my shoulder blade, and mine arm be broken from the bone.

31:23 For destruction from God was a terror to me, and by reason of
his highness I could not endure.

31:24 If I have made gold my hope, or have said to the fine gold, Thou
art my confidence; 31:25 If I rejoice because my wealth was great, and
because mine hand had gotten much; 31:26 If I beheld the sun when it
shined, or the moon walking in brightness; 31:27 And my heart hath
been secretly enticed, or my mouth hath kissed my hand: 31:28 This
also were an iniquity to be punished by the judge: for I should have
denied the God that is above.

31:29 If I rejoice at the destruction of him that hated me, or lifted
up myself when evil found him: 31:30 Neither have I suffered my mouth
to sin by wishing a curse to his soul.

31:31 If the men of my tabernacle said not, Oh that we had of his
flesh!  we cannot be satisfied.

31:32 The stranger did not lodge in the street: but I opened my doors
to the traveller.

31:33 If I covered my transgressions as Adam, by hiding mine iniquity
in my bosom: 31:34 Did I fear a great multitude, or did the contempt
of families terrify me, that I kept silence, and went not out of the
door?  31:35 Oh that one would hear me! behold, my desire is, that the
Almighty would answer me, and that mine adversary had written a book.

31:36 Surely I would take it upon my shoulder, and bind it as a crown
to me.

31:37 I would declare unto him the number of my steps; as a prince
would I go near unto him.

31:38 If my land cry against me, or that the furrows likewise thereof
complain; 31:39 If I have eaten the fruits thereof without money, or
have caused the owners thereof to lose their life: 31:40 Let thistles
grow instead of wheat, and cockle instead of barley.

The words of Job are ended.

32:1 So these three men ceased to answer Job, because he was righteous
in his own eyes.

32:2 Then was kindled the wrath of Elihu the son of Barachel the
Buzite, of the kindred of Ram: against Job was his wrath kindled,
because he justified himself rather than God.

32:3 Also against his three friends was his wrath kindled, because
they had found no answer, and yet had condemned Job.

32:4 Now Elihu had waited till Job had spoken, because they were elder
than he.

32:5 When Elihu saw that there was no answer in the mouth of these
three men, then his wrath was kindled.

32:6 And Elihu the son of Barachel the Buzite answered and said, I am
young, and ye are very old; wherefore I was afraid, and durst not shew
you mine opinion.

32:7 I said, Days should speak, and multitude of years should teach
wisdom.

32:8 But there is a spirit in man: and the inspiration of the Almighty
giveth them understanding.

32:9 Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand
judgment.

32:10 Therefore I said, Hearken to me; I also will shew mine opinion.

32:11 Behold, I waited for your words; I gave ear to your reasons,
whilst ye searched out what to say.

32:12 Yea, I attended unto you, and, behold, there was none of you
that convinced Job, or that answered his words: 32:13 Lest ye should
say, We have found out wisdom: God thrusteth him down, not man.

32:14 Now he hath not directed his words against me: neither will I
answer him with your speeches.

32:15 They were amazed, they answered no more: they left off speaking.

32:16 When I had waited, (for they spake not, but stood still, and
answered no more;) 32:17 I said, I will answer also my part, I also
will shew mine opinion.

32:18 For I am full of matter, the spirit within me constraineth me.

32:19 Behold, my belly is as wine which hath no vent; it is ready to
burst like new bottles.

32:20 I will speak, that I may be refreshed: I will open my lips and
answer.

32:21 Let me not, I pray you, accept any man's person, neither let me
give flattering titles unto man.

32:22 For I know not to give flattering titles; in so doing my maker
would soon take me away.

33:1 Wherefore, Job, I pray thee, hear my speeches, and hearken to all
my words.

33:2 Behold, now I have opened my mouth, my tongue hath spoken in my
mouth.

33:3 My words shall be of the uprightness of my heart: and my lips
shall utter knowledge clearly.

33:4 The spirit of God hath made me, and the breath of the Almighty
hath given me life.

33:5 If thou canst answer me, set thy words in order before me, stand
up.

33:6 Behold, I am according to thy wish in God's stead: I also am
formed out of the clay.

33:7 Behold, my terror shall not make thee afraid, neither shall my
hand be heavy upon thee.

33:8 Surely thou hast spoken in mine hearing, and I have heard the
voice of thy words, saying, 33:9 I am clean without transgression, I
am innocent; neither is there iniquity in me.

33:10 Behold, he findeth occasions against me, he counteth me for his
enemy, 33:11 He putteth my feet in the stocks, he marketh all my
paths.

33:12 Behold, in this thou art not just: I will answer thee, that God
is greater than man.

33:13 Why dost thou strive against him? for he giveth not account of
any of his matters.

33:14 For God speaketh once, yea twice, yet man perceiveth it not.

33:15 In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falleth
upon men, in slumberings upon the bed; 33:16 Then he openeth the ears
of men, and sealeth their instruction, 33:17 That he may withdraw man
from his purpose, and hide pride from man.

33:18 He keepeth back his soul from the pit, and his life from
perishing by the sword.

33:19 He is chastened also with pain upon his bed, and the multitude
of his bones with strong pain: 33:20 So that his life abhorreth bread,
and his soul dainty meat.

33:21 His flesh is consumed away, that it cannot be seen; and his
bones that were not seen stick out.

33:22 Yea, his soul draweth near unto the grave, and his life to the
destroyers.

33:23 If there be a messenger with him, an interpreter, one among a
thousand, to shew unto man his uprightness: 33:24 Then he is gracious
unto him, and saith, Deliver him from going down to the pit: I have
found a ransom.

33:25 His flesh shall be fresher than a child's: he shall return to
the days of his youth: 33:26 He shall pray unto God, and he will be
favourable unto him: and he shall see his face with joy: for he will
render unto man his righteousness.

33:27 He looketh upon men, and if any say, I have sinned, and
perverted that which was right, and it profited me not; 33:28 He will
deliver his soul from going into the pit, and his life shall see the
light.

33:29 Lo, all these things worketh God oftentimes with man, 33:30 To
bring back his soul from the pit, to be enlightened with the light of
the living.

33:31 Mark well, O Job, hearken unto me: hold thy peace, and I will
speak.

33:32 If thou hast anything to say, answer me: speak, for I desire to
justify thee.

33:33 If not, hearken unto me: hold thy peace, and I shall teach thee
wisdom.

34:1 Furthermore Elihu answered and said, 34:2 Hear my words, O ye
wise men; and give ear unto me, ye that have knowledge.

34:3 For the ear trieth words, as the mouth tasteth meat.

34:4 Let us choose to us judgment: let us know among ourselves what is
good.

34:5 For Job hath said, I am righteous: and God hath taken away my
judgment.

34:6 Should I lie against my right? my wound is incurable without
transgression.

34:7 What man is like Job, who drinketh up scorning like water?  34:8
Which goeth in company with the workers of iniquity, and walketh with
wicked men.

34:9 For he hath said, It profiteth a man nothing that he should
delight himself with God.

34:10 Therefore hearken unto me ye men of understanding: far be it
from God, that he should do wickedness; and from the Almighty, that he
should commit iniquity.

34:11 For the work of a man shall he render unto him, and cause every
man to find according to his ways.

34:12 Yea, surely God will not do wickedly, neither will the Almighty
pervert judgment.

34:13 Who hath given him a charge over the earth? or who hath disposed
the whole world?  34:14 If he set his heart upon man, if he gather
unto himself his spirit and his breath; 34:15 All flesh shall perish
together, and man shall turn again unto dust.

34:16 If now thou hast understanding, hear this: hearken to the voice
of my words.

34:17 Shall even he that hateth right govern? and wilt thou condemn
him that is most just?  34:18 Is it fit to say to a king, Thou art
wicked? and to princes, Ye are ungodly?  34:19 How much less to him
that accepteth not the persons of princes, nor regardeth the rich more
than the poor? for they all are the work of his hands.

34:20 In a moment shall they die, and the people shall be troubled at
midnight, and pass away: and the mighty shall be taken away without
hand.

34:21 For his eyes are upon the ways of man, and he seeth all his
goings.

34:22 There is no darkness, nor shadow of death, where the workers of
iniquity may hide themselves.

34:23 For he will not lay upon man more than right; that he should
enter into judgment with God.

34:24 He shall break in pieces mighty men without number, and set
others in their stead.

34:25 Therefore he knoweth their works, and he overturneth them in the
night, so that they are destroyed.

34:26 He striketh them as wicked men in the open sight of others;
34:27 Because they turned back from him, and would not consider any of
his ways: 34:28 So that they cause the cry of the poor to come unto
him, and he heareth the cry of the afflicted.

34:29 When he giveth quietness, who then can make trouble? and when he
hideth his face, who then can behold him? whether it be done against a
nation, or against a man only: 34:30 That the hypocrite reign not,
lest the people be ensnared.

34:31 Surely it is meet to be said unto God, I have borne
chastisement, I will not offend any more: 34:32 That which I see not
teach thou me: if I have done iniquity, I will do no more.

34:33 Should it be according to thy mind? he will recompense it,
whether thou refuse, or whether thou choose; and not I: therefore
speak what thou knowest.

34:34 Let men of understanding tell me, and let a wise man hearken
unto me.

34:35 Job hath spoken without knowledge, and his words were without
wisdom.

34:36 My desire is that Job may be tried unto the end because of his
answers for wicked men.

34:37 For he addeth rebellion unto his sin, he clappeth his hands
among us, and multiplieth his words against God.

35:1 Elihu spake moreover, and said, 35:2 Thinkest thou this to be
right, that thou saidst, My righteousness is more than God's?  35:3
For thou saidst, What advantage will it be unto thee? and, What profit
shall I have, if I be cleansed from my sin?  35:4 I will answer thee,
and thy companions with thee.

35:5 Look unto the heavens, and see; and behold the clouds which are
higher than thou.

35:6 If thou sinnest, what doest thou against him? or if thy
transgressions be multiplied, what doest thou unto him?  35:7 If thou
be righteous, what givest thou him? or what receiveth he of thine
hand?  35:8 Thy wickedness may hurt a man as thou art; and thy
righteousness may profit the son of man.

35:9 By reason of the multitude of oppressions they make the oppressed
to cry: they cry out by reason of the arm of the mighty.

35:10 But none saith, Where is God my maker, who giveth songs in the
night; 35:11 Who teacheth us more than the beasts of the earth, and
maketh us wiser than the fowls of heaven?  35:12 There they cry, but
none giveth answer, because of the pride of evil men.

35:13 Surely God will not hear vanity, neither will the Almighty
regard it.

35:14 Although thou sayest thou shalt not see him, yet judgment is
before him; therefore trust thou in him.

35:15 But now, because it is not so, he hath visited in his anger; yet
he knoweth it not in great extremity: 35:16 Therefore doth Job open
his mouth in vain; he multiplieth words without knowledge.

36:1 Elihu also proceeded, and said, 36:2 Suffer me a little, and I
will shew thee that I have yet to speak on God's behalf.

36:3 I will fetch my knowledge from afar, and will ascribe
righteousness to my Maker.

36:4 For truly my words shall not be false: he that is perfect in
knowledge is with thee.

36:5 Behold, God is mighty, and despiseth not any: he is mighty in
strength and wisdom.

36:6 He preserveth not the life of the wicked: but giveth right to the
poor.

36:7 He withdraweth not his eyes from the righteous: but with kings
are they on the throne; yea, he doth establish them for ever, and they
are exalted.

36:8 And if they be bound in fetters, and be holden in cords of
affliction; 36:9 Then he sheweth them their work, and their
transgressions that they have exceeded.

36:10 He openeth also their ear to discipline, and commandeth that
they return from iniquity.

36:11 If they obey and serve him, they shall spend their days in
prosperity, and their years in pleasures.

36:12 But if they obey not, they shall perish by the sword, and they
shall die without knowledge.

36:13 But the hypocrites in heart heap up wrath: they cry not when he
bindeth them.

36:14 They die in youth, and their life is among the unclean.

36:15 He delivereth the poor in his affliction, and openeth their ears
in oppression.

36:16 Even so would he have removed thee out of the strait into a
broad place, where there is no straitness; and that which should be
set on thy table should be full of fatness.

36:17 But thou hast fulfilled the judgment of the wicked: judgment and
justice take hold on thee.

36:18 Because there is wrath, beware lest he take thee away with his
stroke: then a great ransom cannot deliver thee.

36:19 Will he esteem thy riches? no, not gold, nor all the forces of
strength.

36:20 Desire not the night, when people are cut off in their place.

36:21 Take heed, regard not iniquity: for this hast thou chosen rather
than affliction.

36:22 Behold, God exalteth by his power: who teacheth like him?  36:23
Who hath enjoined him his way? or who can say, Thou hast wrought
iniquity?  36:24 Remember that thou magnify his work, which men
behold.

36:25 Every man may see it; man may behold it afar off.

36:26 Behold, God is great, and we know him not, neither can the
number of his years be searched out.

36:27 For he maketh small the drops of water: they pour down rain
according to the vapour thereof: 36:28 Which the clouds do drop and
distil upon man abundantly.

36:29 Also can any understand the spreadings of the clouds, or the
noise of his tabernacle?  36:30 Behold, he spreadeth his light upon
it, and covereth the bottom of the sea.

36:31 For by them judgeth he the people; he giveth meat in abundance.

36:32 With clouds he covereth the light; and commandeth it not to
shine by the cloud that cometh betwixt.

36:33 The noise thereof sheweth concerning it, the cattle also
concerning the vapour.

37:1 At this also my heart trembleth, and is moved out of his place.

37:2 Hear attentively the noise of his voice, and the sound that goeth
out of his mouth.

37:3 He directeth it under the whole heaven, and his lightning unto
the ends of the earth.

37:4 After it a voice roareth: he thundereth with the voice of his
excellency; and he will not stay them when his voice is heard.

37:5 God thundereth marvellously with his voice; great things doeth
he, which we cannot comprehend.

37:6 For he saith to the snow, Be thou on the earth; likewise to the
small rain, and to the great rain of his strength.

37:7 He sealeth up the hand of every man; that all men may know his
work.

37:8 Then the beasts go into dens, and remain in their places.

37:9 Out of the south cometh the whirlwind: and cold out of the north.

37:10 By the breath of God frost is given: and the breadth of the
waters is straitened.

37:11 Also by watering he wearieth the thick cloud: he scattereth his
bright cloud: 37:12 And it is turned round about by his counsels: that
they may do whatsoever he commandeth them upon the face of the world
in the earth.

37:13 He causeth it to come, whether for correction, or for his land,
or for mercy.

37:14 Hearken unto this, O Job: stand still, and consider the wondrous
works of God.

37:15 Dost thou know when God disposed them, and caused the light of
his cloud to shine?  37:16 Dost thou know the balancings of the
clouds, the wondrous works of him which is perfect in knowledge?
37:17 How thy garments are warm, when he quieteth the earth by the
south wind?  37:18 Hast thou with him spread out the sky, which is
strong, and as a molten looking glass?  37:19 Teach us what we shall
say unto him; for we cannot order our speech by reason of darkness.

37:20 Shall it be told him that I speak? if a man speak, surely he
shall be swallowed up.

37:21 And now men see not the bright light which is in the clouds: but
the wind passeth, and cleanseth them.

37:22 Fair weather cometh out of the north: with God is terrible
majesty.

37:23 Touching the Almighty, we cannot find him out: he is excellent
in power, and in judgment, and in plenty of justice: he will not
afflict.

37:24 Men do therefore fear him: he respecteth not any that are wise
of heart.

38:1 Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind, and said, 38:2
Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?  38:3
Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and
answer thou me.

38:4 Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?
declare, if thou hast understanding.

38:5 Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath
stretched the line upon it?  38:6 Whereupon are the foundations
thereof fastened? or who laid the corner stone thereof; 38:7 When the
morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?
38:8 Or who shut up the sea with doors, when it brake forth, as if it
had issued out of the womb?  38:9 When I made the cloud the garment
thereof, and thick darkness a swaddlingband for it, 38:10 And brake up
for it my decreed place, and set bars and doors, 38:11 And said,
Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further: and here shall thy proud
waves be stayed?  38:12 Hast thou commanded the morning since thy
days; and caused the dayspring to know his place; 38:13 That it might
take hold of the ends of the earth, that the wicked might be shaken
out of it?  38:14 It is turned as clay to the seal; and they stand as
a garment.

38:15 And from the wicked their light is withholden, and the high arm
shall be broken.

38:16 Hast thou entered into the springs of the sea? or hast thou
walked in the search of the depth?  38:17 Have the gates of death been
opened unto thee? or hast thou seen the doors of the shadow of death?
38:18 Hast thou perceived the breadth of the earth? declare if thou
knowest it all.

38:19 Where is the way where light dwelleth? and as for darkness,
where is the place thereof, 38:20 That thou shouldest take it to the
bound thereof, and that thou shouldest know the paths to the house
thereof?  38:21 Knowest thou it, because thou wast then born? or
because the number of thy days is great?  38:22 Hast thou entered into
the treasures of the snow? or hast thou seen the treasures of the
hail, 38:23 Which I have reserved against the time of trouble, against
the day of battle and war?  38:24 By what way is the light parted,
which scattereth the east wind upon the earth?  38:25 Who hath divided
a watercourse for the overflowing of waters, or a way for the
lightning of thunder; 38:26 To cause it to rain on the earth, where no
man is; on the wilderness, wherein there is no man; 38:27 To satisfy
the desolate and waste ground; and to cause the bud of the tender herb
to spring forth?  38:28 Hath the rain a father? or who hath begotten
the drops of dew?  38:29 Out of whose womb came the ice? and the hoary
frost of heaven, who hath gendered it?  38:30 The waters are hid as
with a stone, and the face of the deep is frozen.

38:31 Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the
bands of Orion?  38:32 Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in his season?
or canst thou guide Arcturus with his sons?  38:33 Knowest thou the
ordinances of heaven? canst thou set the dominion thereof in the
earth?  38:34 Canst thou lift up thy voice to the clouds, that
abundance of waters may cover thee?  38:35 Canst thou send lightnings,
that they may go and say unto thee, Here we are?  38:36 Who hath put
wisdom in the inward parts? or who hath given understanding to the
heart?  38:37 Who can number the clouds in wisdom? or who can stay the
bottles of heaven, 38:38 When the dust groweth into hardness, and the
clods cleave fast together?  38:39 Wilt thou hunt the prey for the
lion? or fill the appetite of the young lions, 38:40 When they couch
in their dens, and abide in the covert to lie in wait?  38:41 Who
provideth for the raven his food? when his young ones cry unto God,
they wander for lack of meat.

39:1 Knowest thou the time when the wild goats of the rock bring
forth? or canst thou mark when the hinds do calve?  39:2 Canst thou
number the months that they fulfil? or knowest thou the time when they
bring forth?  39:3 They bow themselves, they bring forth their young
ones, they cast out their sorrows.

39:4 Their young ones are in good liking, they grow up with corn; they
go forth, and return not unto them.

39:5 Who hath sent out the wild ass free? or who hath loosed the bands
of the wild ass?  39:6 Whose house I have made the wilderness, and the
barren land his dwellings.

39:7 He scorneth the multitude of the city, neither regardeth he the
crying of the driver.

39:8 The range of the mountains is his pasture, and he searcheth after
every green thing.

39:9 Will the unicorn be willing to serve thee, or abide by thy crib?
39:10 Canst thou bind the unicorn with his band in the furrow? or will
he harrow the valleys after thee?  39:11 Wilt thou trust him, because
his strength is great? or wilt thou leave thy labour to him?  39:12
Wilt thou believe him, that he will bring home thy seed, and gather it
into thy barn?  39:13 Gavest thou the goodly wings unto the peacocks?
or wings and feathers unto the ostrich?  39:14 Which leaveth her eggs
in the earth, and warmeth them in dust, 39:15 And forgetteth that the
foot may crush them, or that the wild beast may break them.

39:16 She is hardened against her young ones, as though they were not
her's: her labour is in vain without fear; 39:17 Because God hath
deprived her of wisdom, neither hath he imparted to her understanding.

39:18 What time she lifteth up herself on high, she scorneth the horse
and his rider.

39:19 Hast thou given the horse strength? hast thou clothed his neck
with thunder?  39:20 Canst thou make him afraid as a grasshopper? the
glory of his nostrils is terrible.

39:21 He paweth in the valley, and rejoiceth in his strength: he goeth
on to meet the armed men.

39:22 He mocketh at fear, and is not affrighted; neither turneth he
back from the sword.

39:23 The quiver rattleth against him, the glittering spear and the
shield.

39:24 He swalloweth the ground with fierceness and rage: neither
believeth he that it is the sound of the trumpet.

39:25 He saith among the trumpets, Ha, ha; and he smelleth the battle
afar off, the thunder of the captains, and the shouting.

39:26 Doth the hawk fly by thy wisdom, and stretch her wings toward
the south?  39:27 Doth the eagle mount up at thy command, and make her
nest on high?  39:28 She dwelleth and abideth on the rock, upon the
crag of the rock, and the strong place.

39:29 From thence she seeketh the prey, and her eyes behold afar off.

39:30 Her young ones also suck up blood: and where the slain are,
there is she.

40:1 Moreover the LORD answered Job, and said, 40:2 Shall he that
contendeth with the Almighty instruct him? he that reproveth God, let
him answer it.

40:3 Then Job answered the LORD, and said, 40:4 Behold, I am vile;
what shall I answer thee? I will lay mine hand upon my mouth.

40:5 Once have I spoken; but I will not answer: yea, twice; but I will
proceed no further.

40:6 Then answered the LORD unto Job out of the whirlwind, and said,
40:7 Gird up thy loins now like a man: I will demand of thee, and
declare thou unto me.

40:8 Wilt thou also disannul my judgment? wilt thou condemn me, that
thou mayest be righteous?  40:9 Hast thou an arm like God? or canst
thou thunder with a voice like him?  40:10 Deck thyself now with
majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty.

40:11 Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is
proud, and abase him.

40:12 Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread
down the wicked in their place.

40:13 Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret.

40:14 Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can
save thee.

40:15 Behold now behemoth, which I made with thee; he eateth grass as
an ox.

40:16 Lo now, his strength is in his loins, and his force is in the
navel of his belly.

40:17 He moveth his tail like a cedar: the sinews of his stones are
wrapped together.

40:18 His bones are as strong pieces of brass; his bones are like bars
of iron.

40:19 He is the chief of the ways of God: he that made him can make
his sword to approach unto him.

40:20 Surely the mountains bring him forth food, where all the beasts
of the field play.

40:21 He lieth under the shady trees, in the covert of the reed, and
fens.

40:22 The shady trees cover him with their shadow; the willows of the
brook compass him about.

40:23 Behold, he drinketh up a river, and hasteth not: he trusteth
that he can draw up Jordan into his mouth.

40:24 He taketh it with his eyes: his nose pierceth through snares.

41:1 Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? or his tongue with a
cord which thou lettest down?  41:2 Canst thou put an hook into his
nose? or bore his jaw through with a thorn?  41:3 Will he make many
supplications unto thee? will he speak soft words unto thee?  41:4
Will he make a covenant with thee? wilt thou take him for a servant
for ever?  41:5 Wilt thou play with him as with a bird? or wilt thou
bind him for thy maidens?  41:6 Shall the companions make a banquet of
him? shall they part him among the merchants?  41:7 Canst thou fill
his skin with barbed irons? or his head with fish spears?  41:8 Lay
thine hand upon him, remember the battle, do no more.

41:9 Behold, the hope of him is in vain: shall not one be cast down
even at the sight of him?  41:10 None is so fierce that dare stir him
up: who then is able to stand before me?  41:11 Who hath prevented me,
that I should repay him? whatsoever is under the whole heaven is mine.

41:12 I will not conceal his parts, nor his power, nor his comely
proportion.

41:13 Who can discover the face of his garment? or who can come to him
with his double bridle?  41:14 Who can open the doors of his face? his
teeth are terrible round about.

41:15 His scales are his pride, shut up together as with a close seal.

41:16 One is so near to another, that no air can come between them.

41:17 They are joined one to another, they stick together, that they
cannot be sundered.

41:18 By his neesings a light doth shine, and his eyes are like the
eyelids of the morning.

41:19 Out of his mouth go burning lamps, and sparks of fire leap out.

41:20 Out of his nostrils goeth smoke, as out of a seething pot or
caldron.

41:21 His breath kindleth coals, and a flame goeth out of his mouth.

41:22 In his neck remaineth strength, and sorrow is turned into joy
before him.

41:23 The flakes of his flesh are joined together: they are firm in
themselves; they cannot be moved.

41:24 His heart is as firm as a stone; yea, as hard as a piece of the
nether millstone.

41:25 When he raiseth up himself, the mighty are afraid: by reason of
breakings they purify themselves.

41:26 The sword of him that layeth at him cannot hold: the spear, the
dart, nor the habergeon.

41:27 He esteemeth iron as straw, and brass as rotten wood.

41:28 The arrow cannot make him flee: slingstones are turned with him
into stubble.

41:29 Darts are counted as stubble: he laugheth at the shaking of a
spear.

41:30 Sharp stones are under him: he spreadeth sharp pointed things
upon the mire.

41:31 He maketh the deep to boil like a pot: he maketh the sea like a
pot of ointment.

41:32 He maketh a path to shine after him; one would think the deep to
be hoary.

41:33 Upon earth there is not his like, who is made without fear.

41:34 He beholdeth all high things: he is a king over all the children
of pride.

42:1 Then Job answered the LORD, and said, 42:2 I know that thou canst
do every thing, and that no thought can be withholden from thee.

42:3 Who is he that hideth counsel without knowledge? therefore have I
uttered that I understood not; things too wonderful for me, which I
knew not.

42:4 Hear, I beseech thee, and I will speak: I will demand of thee,
and declare thou unto me.

42:5 I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye
seeth thee.

42:6 Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes.

42:7 And it was so, that after the LORD had spoken these words unto
Job, the LORD said to Eliphaz the Temanite, My wrath is kindled
against thee, and against thy two friends: for ye have not spoken of
me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath.

42:8 Therefore take unto you now seven bullocks and seven rams, and go
to my servant Job, and offer up for yourselves a burnt offering; and
my servant Job shall pray for you: for him will I accept: lest I deal
with you after your folly, in that ye have not spoken of me the thing
which is right, like my servant Job.

42:9 So Eliphaz the Temanite and Bildad the Shuhite and Zophar the
Naamathite went, and did according as the LORD commanded them: the
LORD also accepted Job.

42:10 And the LORD turned the captivity of Job, when he prayed for his
friends: also the LORD gave Job twice as much as he had before.

42:11 Then came there unto him all his brethren, and all his sisters,
and all they that had been of his acquaintance before, and did eat
bread with him in his house: and they bemoaned him, and comforted him
over all the evil that the LORD had brought upon him: every man also
gave him a piece of money, and every one an earring of gold.

42:12 So the LORD blessed the latter end of Job more than his
beginning: for he had fourteen thousand sheep, and six thousand
camels, and a thousand yoke of oxen, and a thousand she asses.

42:13 He had also seven sons and three daughters.

42:14 And he called the name of the first, Jemima; and the name of the
second, Kezia; and the name of the third, Kerenhappuch.

42:15 And in all the land were no women found so fair as the daughters
of Job: and their father gave them inheritance among their brethren.

42:16 After this lived Job an hundred and forty years, and saw his
sons, and his sons' sons, even four generations.

42:17 So Job died, being old and full of days.




The Book of Psalms


1:1 Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly,
nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the
scornful.

1:2 But his delight is in the law of the LORD; and in his law doth he
meditate day and night.

1:3 And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that
bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not
wither; and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper.

1:4 The ungodly are not so: but are like the chaff which the wind
driveth away.

1:5 Therefore the ungodly shall not stand in the judgment, nor sinners
in the congregation of the righteous.

1:6 For the LORD knoweth the way of the righteous: but the way of the
ungodly shall perish.



2:1 Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?

2:2 The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel
together, against the LORD, and against his anointed, saying,

2:3 Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from
us.

2:4 He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the LORD shall have
them in derision.

2:5 Then shall he speak unto them in his wrath, and vex them in his
sore displeasure.

2:6 Yet have I set my king upon my holy hill of Zion.

2:7 I will declare the decree: the LORD hath said unto me, Thou art my
Son; this day have I begotten thee.

2:8 Ask of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine
inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession.

2:9 Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in
pieces like a potter's vessel.

2:10 Be wise now therefore, O ye kings: be instructed, ye judges of
the earth.

2:11 Serve the LORD with fear, and rejoice with trembling.

2:12 Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and ye perish from the way, when
his wrath is kindled but a little. Blessed are all they that put their
trust in him.



3:1 Lord, how are they increased that trouble me! many are they that
rise up against me.

3:2 Many there be which say of my soul, There is no help for him in
God.

Selah.

3:3 But thou, O LORD, art a shield for me; my glory, and the lifter up
of mine head.

3:4 I cried unto the LORD with my voice, and he heard me out of his
holy hill. Selah.

3:5 I laid me down and slept; I awaked; for the LORD sustained me.

3:6 I will not be afraid of ten thousands of people, that have set
themselves against me round about.

3:7 Arise, O LORD; save me, O my God: for thou hast smitten all mine
enemies upon the cheek bone; thou hast broken the teeth of the
ungodly.

3:8 Salvation belongeth unto the LORD: thy blessing is upon thy
people.

Selah.



4:1 Hear me when I call, O God of my righteousness: thou hast enlarged
me when I was in distress; have mercy upon me, and hear my prayer.

4:2 O ye sons of men, how long will ye turn my glory into shame? how
long will ye love vanity, and seek after leasing? Selah.

4:3 But know that the LORD hath set apart him that is godly for
himself: the LORD will hear when I call unto him.

4:4 Stand in awe, and sin not: commune with your own heart upon your
bed, and be still. Selah.

4:5 Offer the sacrifices of righteousness, and put your trust in the
LORD.

4:6 There be many that say, Who will shew us any good? LORD, lift thou
up the light of thy countenance upon us.

4:7 Thou hast put gladness in my heart, more than in the time that
their corn and their wine increased.

4:8 I will both lay me down in peace, and sleep: for thou, LORD, only
makest me dwell in safety.



5:1 Give ear to my words, O LORD, consider my meditation.

5:2 Hearken unto the voice of my cry, my King, and my God: for unto
thee will I pray.

5:3 My voice shalt thou hear in the morning, O LORD; in the morning
will I direct my prayer unto thee, and will look up.

5:4 For thou art not a God that hath pleasure in wickedness: neither
shall evil dwell with thee.

5:5 The foolish shall not stand in thy sight: thou hatest all workers
of iniquity.

5:6 Thou shalt destroy them that speak leasing: the LORD will abhor
the bloody and deceitful man.

5:7 But as for me, I will come into thy house in the multitude of thy
mercy: and in thy fear will I worship toward thy holy temple.

5:8 Lead me, O LORD, in thy righteousness because of mine enemies;
make thy way straight before my face.

5:9 For there is no faithfulness in their mouth; their inward part is
very wickedness; their throat is an open sepulchre; they flatter with
their tongue.

5:10 Destroy thou them, O God; let them fall by their own counsels;
cast them out in the multitude of their transgressions; for they have
rebelled against thee.

5:11 But let all those that put their trust in thee rejoice: let them
ever shout for joy, because thou defendest them: let them also that
love thy name be joyful in thee.

5:12 For thou, LORD, wilt bless the righteous; with favour wilt thou
compass him as with a shield.



6:1 O LORD, rebuke me not in thine anger, neither chasten me in thy
hot displeasure.

6:2 Have mercy upon me, O LORD; for I am weak: O LORD, heal me; for my
bones are vexed.

6:3 My soul is also sore vexed: but thou, O LORD, how long?

6:4 Return, O LORD, deliver my soul: oh save me for thy mercies' sake.

6:5 For in death there is no remembrance of thee: in the grave who
shall give thee thanks?

6:6 I am weary with my groaning; all the night make I my bed to swim;
I water my couch with my tears.

6:7 Mine eye is consumed because of grief; it waxeth old because of
all mine enemies.

6:8 Depart from me, all ye workers of iniquity; for the LORD hath
heard the voice of my weeping.

6:9 The LORD hath heard my supplication; the LORD will receive my
prayer.

6:10 Let all mine enemies be ashamed and sore vexed: let them return
and be ashamed suddenly.



7:1 O LORD my God, in thee do I put my trust: save me from all them
that persecute me, and deliver me:

7:2 Lest he tear my soul like a lion, rending it in pieces, while
there is none to deliver.

7:3 O LORD my God, If I have done this; if there be iniquity in my
hands;

7:4 If I have rewarded evil unto him that was at peace with me; (yea,
I have delivered him that without cause is mine enemy:)

7:5 Let the enemy persecute my soul, and take it; yea, let him tread
down my life upon the earth, and lay mine honour in the dust. Selah.

7:6 Arise, O LORD, in thine anger, lift up thyself because of the rage
of mine enemies: and awake for me to the judgment that thou hast
commanded.

7:7 So shall the congregation of the people compass thee about: for
their sakes therefore return thou on high.

7:8 The LORD shall judge the people: judge me, O LORD, according to my
righteousness, and according to mine integrity that is in me.

7:9 Oh let the wickedness of the wicked come to an end; but establish
the just: for the righteous God trieth the hearts and reins.

7:10 My defence is of God, which saveth the upright in heart.

7:11 God judgeth the righteous, and God is angry with the wicked every
day.

7:12 If he turn not, he will whet his sword; he hath bent his bow, and
made it ready.

7:13 He hath also prepared for him the instruments of death; he
ordaineth his arrows against the persecutors.

7:14 Behold, he travaileth with iniquity, and hath conceived mischief,
and brought forth falsehood.

7:15 He made a pit, and digged it, and is fallen into the ditch which
he made.

7:16 His mischief shall return upon his own head, and his violent
dealing shall come down upon his own pate.

7:17 I will praise the LORD according to his righteousness: and will
sing praise to the name of the LORD most high.



8:1 O LORD, our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth! who
hast set thy glory above the heavens.

8:2 Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained
strength because of thine enemies, that thou mightest still the enemy
and the avenger.

8:3 When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and
the stars, which thou hast ordained;

8:4 What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man,
that thou visitest him?

8:5 For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast
crowned him with glory and honour.

8:6 Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou
hast put all things under his feet:

8:7 All sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field;

8:8 The fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever
passeth through the paths of the seas.

8:9 O LORD our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth!


9:1 I will praise thee, O LORD, with my whole heart; I will shew forth
all thy marvellous works.

9:2 I will be glad and rejoice in thee: I will sing praise to thy
name, O thou most High.

9:3 When mine enemies are turned back, they shall fall and perish at
thy presence.

9:4 For thou hast maintained my right and my cause; thou satest in the
throne judging right.

9:5 Thou hast rebuked the heathen, thou hast destroyed the wicked,
thou hast put out their name for ever and ever.

9:6 O thou enemy, destructions are come to a perpetual end: and thou
hast destroyed cities; their memorial is perished with them.

9:7 But the LORD shall endure for ever: he hath prepared his throne
for judgment.

9:8 And he shall judge the world in righteousness, he shall minister
judgment to the people in uprightness.

9:9 The LORD also will be a refuge for the oppressed, a refuge in
times of trouble.

9:10 And they that know thy name will put their trust in thee: for
thou, LORD, hast not forsaken them that seek thee.

9:11 Sing praises to the LORD, which dwelleth in Zion: declare among
the people his doings.

9:12 When he maketh inquisition for blood, he remembereth them: he
forgetteth not the cry of the humble.

9:13 Have mercy upon me, O LORD; consider my trouble which I suffer of
them that hate me, thou that liftest me up from the gates of death:

9:14 That I may shew forth all thy praise in the gates of the daughter
of Zion: I will rejoice in thy salvation.

9:15 The heathen are sunk down in the pit that they made: in the net
which they hid is their own foot taken.

9:16 The LORD is known by the judgment which he executeth: the wicked
is snared in the work of his own hands. Higgaion. Selah.

9:17 The wicked shall be turned into hell, and all the nations that
forget God.

9:18 For the needy shall not alway be forgotten: the expectation of
the poor shall not perish for ever.

9:19 Arise, O LORD; let not man prevail: let the heathen be judged in
thy sight.

9:20 Put them in fear, O LORD: that the nations may know themselves to
be but men. Selah.



10:1 Why standest thou afar off, O LORD? why hidest thou thyself in
times of trouble?

10:2 The wicked in his pride doth persecute the poor: let them be
taken in the devices that they have imagined.

10:3 For the wicked boasteth of his heart's desire, and blesseth the
covetous, whom the LORD abhorreth.

10:4 The wicked, through the pride of his countenance, will not seek
after God: God is not in all his thoughts.

10:5 His ways are always grievous; thy judgments are far above out of
his sight: as for all his enemies, he puffeth at them.

10:6 He hath said in his heart, I shall not be moved: for I shall
never be in adversity.

10:7 His mouth is full of cursing and deceit and fraud: under his
tongue is mischief and vanity.

10:8 He sitteth in the lurking places of the villages: in the secret
places doth he murder the innocent: his eyes are privily set against
the poor.

10:9 He lieth in wait secretly as a lion in his den: he lieth in wait
to catch the poor: he doth catch the poor, when he draweth him into
his net.

10:10 He croucheth, and humbleth himself, that the poor may fall by
his strong ones.

10:11 He hath said in his heart, God hath forgotten: he hideth his
face; he will never see it.

10:12 Arise, O LORD; O God, lift up thine hand: forget not the humble.

10:13 Wherefore doth the wicked contemn God? he hath said in his
heart, Thou wilt not require it.

10:14 Thou hast seen it; for thou beholdest mischief and spite, to
requite it with thy hand: the poor committeth himself unto thee; thou
art the helper of the fatherless.

10:15 Break thou the arm of the wicked and the evil man: seek out his
wickedness till thou find none.

10:16 The LORD is King for ever and ever: the heathen are perished out
of his land.

10:17 LORD, thou hast heard the desire of the humble: thou wilt
prepare their heart, thou wilt cause thine ear to hear:

10:18 To judge the fatherless and the oppressed, that the man of the
earth may no more oppress.



11:1 In the LORD put I my trust: how say ye to my soul, Flee as a bird
to your mountain?

11:2 For, lo, the wicked bend their bow, they make ready their arrow
upon the string, that they may privily shoot at the upright in heart.

11:3 If the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?

11:4 The LORD is in his holy temple, the LORD's throne is in heaven:
his eyes behold, his eyelids try, the children of men.

11:5 The LORD trieth the righteous: but the wicked and him that loveth
violence his soul hateth.

11:6 Upon the wicked he shall rain snares, fire and brimstone, and an
horrible tempest: this shall be the portion of their cup.

11:7 For the righteous LORD loveth righteousness; his countenance doth
behold the upright.



12:1 Help, LORD; for the godly man ceaseth; for the faithful fail from
among the children of men.

12:2 They speak vanity every one with his neighbour: with flattering
lips and with a double heart do they speak.

12:3 The LORD shall cut off all flattering lips, and the tongue that
speaketh proud things:

12:4 Who have said, With our tongue will we prevail; our lips are our
own: who is lord over us?

12:5 For the oppression of the poor, for the sighing of the needy, now
will I arise, saith the LORD; I will set him in safety from him that
puffeth at him.

12:6 The words of the LORD are pure words: as silver tried in a
furnace of earth, purified seven times.

12:7 Thou shalt keep them, O LORD, thou shalt preserve them from this
generation for ever.

12:8 The wicked walk on every side, when the vilest men are exalted.



13:1 How long wilt thou forget me, O LORD? for ever? how long wilt
thou hide thy face from me?

13:2 How long shall I take counsel in my soul, having sorrow in my
heart daily? how long shall mine enemy be exalted over me?

13:3 Consider and hear me, O LORD my God: lighten mine eyes, lest I
sleep the sleep of death;

13:4 Lest mine enemy say, I have prevailed against him; and those that
trouble me rejoice when I am moved.

13:5 But I have trusted in thy mercy; my heart shall rejoice in thy
salvation.

13:6 I will sing unto the LORD, because he hath dealt bountifully with
me.



14:1 The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. They are
corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth
good.

14:2 The LORD looked down from heaven upon the children of men, to see
if there were any that did understand, and seek God.

14:3 They are all gone aside, they are all together become filthy:
there is none that doeth good, no, not one.

14:4 Have all the workers of iniquity no knowledge? who eat up my
people as they eat bread, and call not upon the LORD.

14:5 There were they in great fear: for God is in the generation of
the righteous.

14:6 Ye have shamed the counsel of the poor, because the LORD is his
refuge.

14:7 Oh that the salvation of Israel were come out of Zion! when the
LORD bringeth back the captivity of his people, Jacob shall rejoice,
and Israel shall be glad.



15:1 Lord, who shall abide in thy tabernacle? who shall dwell in thy
holy hill?

15:2 He that walketh uprightly, and worketh righteousness, and
speaketh the truth in his heart.

15:3 He that backbiteth not with his tongue, nor doeth evil to his
neighbour, nor taketh up a reproach against his neighbour.

15:4 In whose eyes a vile person is contemned; but he honoureth them
that fear the LORD. He that sweareth to his own hurt, and changeth
not.

15:5 He that putteth not out his money to usury, nor taketh reward
against the innocent. He that doeth these things shall never be moved.



16:1 Preserve me, O God: for in thee do I put my trust.

16:2 O my soul, thou hast said unto the LORD, Thou art my Lord: my
goodness extendeth not to thee;

16:3 But to the saints that are in the earth, and to the excellent, in
whom is all my delight.

16:4 Their sorrows shall be multiplied that hasten after another god:
their drink offerings of blood will I not offer, nor take up their
names into my lips.

16:5 The LORD is the portion of mine inheritance and of my cup: thou
maintainest my lot.

16:6 The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places; yea, I have a
goodly heritage.

16:7 I will bless the LORD, who hath given me counsel: my reins also
instruct me in the night seasons.

16:8 I have set the LORD always before me: because he is at my right
hand, I shall not be moved.

16:9 Therefore my heart is glad, and my glory rejoiceth: my flesh also
shall rest in hope.

16:10 For thou wilt not leave my soul in hell; neither wilt thou
suffer thine Holy One to see corruption.

16:11 Thou wilt shew me the path of life: in thy presence is fulness
of joy; at thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore.



17:1 Hear the right, O LORD, attend unto my cry, give ear unto my
prayer, that goeth not out of feigned lips.

17:2 Let my sentence come forth from thy presence; let thine eyes
behold the things that are equal.

17:3 Thou hast proved mine heart; thou hast visited me in the night;
thou hast tried me, and shalt find nothing; I am purposed that my
mouth shall not transgress.

17:4 Concerning the works of men, by the word of thy lips I have kept
me from the paths of the destroyer.

17:5 Hold up my goings in thy paths, that my footsteps slip not.

17:6 I have called upon thee, for thou wilt hear me, O God: incline
thine ear unto me, and hear my speech.

17:7 Shew thy marvellous lovingkindness, O thou that savest by thy
right hand them which put their trust in thee from those that rise up
against them.

17:8 Keep me as the apple of the eye, hide me under the shadow of thy
wings,

17:9 From the wicked that oppress me, from my deadly enemies, who
compass me about.

17:10 They are inclosed in their own fat: with their mouth they speak
proudly.

17:11 They have now compassed us in our steps: they have set their
eyes bowing down to the earth;

17:12 Like as a lion that is greedy of his prey, and as it were a
young lion lurking in secret places.

17:13 Arise, O LORD, disappoint him, cast him down: deliver my soul
from the wicked, which is thy sword:

17:14 From men which are thy hand, O LORD, from men of the world,
which have their portion in this life, and whose belly thou fillest
with thy hid treasure: they are full of children, and leave the rest
of their substance to their babes.

17:15 As for me, I will behold thy face in righteousness: I shall be
satisfied, when I awake, with thy likeness.



18:1 I will love thee, O LORD, my strength.

18:2 The LORD is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer; my God,
my strength, in whom I will trust; my buckler, and the horn of my
salvation, and my high tower.

18:3 I will call upon the LORD, who is worthy to be praised: so shall
I be saved from mine enemies.

18:4 The sorrows of death compassed me, and the floods of ungodly men
made me afraid.

18:5 The sorrows of hell compassed me about: the snares of death
prevented me.

18:6 In my distress I called upon the LORD, and cried unto my God: he
heard my voice out of his temple, and my cry came before him, even
into his ears.

18:7 Then the earth shook and trembled; the foundations also of the
hills moved and were shaken, because he was wroth.

18:8 There went up a smoke out of his nostrils, and fire out of his
mouth devoured: coals were kindled by it.

18:9 He bowed the heavens also, and came down: and darkness was under
his feet.

18:10 And he rode upon a cherub, and did fly: yea, he did fly upon the
wings of the wind.

18:11 He made darkness his secret place; his pavilion round about him
were dark waters and thick clouds of the skies.

18:12 At the brightness that was before him his thick clouds passed,
hail stones and coals of fire.

18:13 The LORD also thundered in the heavens, and the Highest gave his
voice; hail stones and coals of fire.

18:14 Yea, he sent out his arrows, and scattered them; and he shot out
lightnings, and discomfited them.

18:15 Then the channels of waters were seen, and the foundations of
the world were discovered at thy rebuke, O LORD, at the blast of the
breath of thy nostrils.

18:16 He sent from above, he took me, he drew me out of many waters.

18:17 He delivered me from my strong enemy, and from them which hated
me: for they were too strong for me.

18:18 They prevented me in the day of my calamity: but the LORD was my
stay.

18:19 He brought me forth also into a large place; he delivered me,
because he delighted in me.

18:20 The LORD rewarded me according to my righteousness; according to
the cleanness of my hands hath he recompensed me.

18:21 For I have kept the ways of the LORD, and have not wickedly
departed from my God.

18:22 For all his judgments were before me, and I did not put away his
statutes from me.

18:23 I was also upright before him, and I kept myself from mine
iniquity.

18:24 Therefore hath the LORD recompensed me according to my
righteousness, according to the cleanness of my hands in his eyesight.

18:25 With the merciful thou wilt shew thyself merciful; with an
upright man thou wilt shew thyself upright;

18:26 With the pure thou wilt shew thyself pure; and with the froward
thou wilt shew thyself froward.

18:27 For thou wilt save the afflicted people; but wilt bring down
high looks.

18:28 For thou wilt light my candle: the LORD my God will enlighten my
darkness.

18:29 For by thee I have run through a troop; and by my God have I
leaped over a wall.

18:30 As for God, his way is perfect: the word of the LORD is tried:
he is a buckler to all those that trust in him.

18:31 For who is God save the LORD? or who is a rock save our God?

18:32 It is God that girdeth me with strength, and maketh my way
perfect.

18:33 He maketh my feet like hinds' feet, and setteth me upon my high
places.

18:34 He teacheth my hands to war, so that a bow of steel is broken by
mine arms.

18:35 Thou hast also given me the shield of thy salvation: and thy
right hand hath holden me up, and thy gentleness hath made me great.

18:36 Thou hast enlarged my steps under me, that my feet did not slip.

18:37 I have pursued mine enemies, and overtaken them: neither did I
turn again till they were consumed.

18:38 I have wounded them that they were not able to rise: they are
fallen under my feet.

18:39 For thou hast girded me with strength unto the battle: thou hast
subdued under me those that rose up against me.

18:40 Thou hast also given me the necks of mine enemies; that I might
destroy them that hate me.

18:41 They cried, but there was none to save them: even unto the LORD,
but he answered them not.

18:42 Then did I beat them small as the dust before the wind: I did
cast them out as the dirt in the streets.

18:43 Thou hast delivered me from the strivings of the people; and
thou hast made me the head of the heathen: a people whom I have not
known shall serve me.

18:44 As soon as they hear of me, they shall obey me: the strangers
shall submit themselves unto me.

18:45 The strangers shall fade away, and be afraid out of their close
places.

18:46 The LORD liveth; and blessed be my rock; and let the God of my
salvation be exalted.

18:47 It is God that avengeth me, and subdueth the people under me.

18:48 He delivereth me from mine enemies: yea, thou liftest me up
above those that rise up against me: thou hast delivered me from the
violent man.

18:49 Therefore will I give thanks unto thee, O LORD, among the
heathen, and sing praises unto thy name.

18:50 Great deliverance giveth he to his king; and sheweth mercy to
his anointed, to David, and to his seed for evermore.



19:1 The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth
his handywork.

19:2 Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth
knowledge.

19:3 There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard.

19:4 Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to
the end of the world. In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun,

19:5 Which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and rejoiceth
as a strong man to run a race.

19:6 His going forth is from the end of the heaven, and his circuit
unto the ends of it: and there is nothing hid from the heat thereof.

19:7 The law of the LORD is perfect, converting the soul: the
testimony of the LORD is sure, making wise the simple.

19:8 The statutes of the LORD are right, rejoicing the heart: the
commandment of the LORD is pure, enlightening the eyes.

19:9 The fear of the LORD is clean, enduring for ever: the judgments
of the LORD are true and righteous altogether.

19:10 More to be desired are they than gold, yea, than much fine gold:
sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb.

19:11 Moreover by them is thy servant warned: and in keeping of them
there is great reward.

19:12 Who can understand his errors? cleanse thou me from secret
faults.

19:13 Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins; let them not
have dominion over me: then shall I be upright, and I shall be
innocent from the great transgression.

19:14 Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be
acceptable in thy sight, O LORD, my strength, and my redeemer.



20:1 The LORD hear thee in the day of trouble; the name of the God of
Jacob defend thee;

20:2 Send thee help from the sanctuary, and strengthen thee out of
Zion;

20:3 Remember all thy offerings, and accept thy burnt sacrifice;
Selah.

20:4 Grant thee according to thine own heart, and fulfil all thy
counsel.

20:5 We will rejoice in thy salvation, and in the name of our God we
will set up our banners: the LORD fulfil all thy petitions.

20:6 Now know I that the LORD saveth his anointed; he will hear him
from his holy heaven with the saving strength of his right hand.

20:7 Some trust in chariots, and some in horses: but we will remember
the name of the LORD our God.

20:8 They are brought down and fallen: but we are risen, and stand
upright.

20:9 Save, LORD: let the king hear us when we call.



21:1 The king shall joy in thy strength, O LORD; and in thy salvation
how greatly shall he rejoice!

21:2 Thou hast given him his heart's desire, and hast not withholden
the request of his lips. Selah.

21:3 For thou preventest him with the blessings of goodness: thou
settest a crown of pure gold on his head.

21:4 He asked life of thee, and thou gavest it him, even length of
days for ever and ever.

21:5 His glory is great in thy salvation: honour and majesty hast thou
laid upon him.

21:6 For thou hast made him most blessed for ever: thou hast made him
exceeding glad with thy countenance.

21:7 For the king trusteth in the LORD, and through the mercy of the
most High he shall not be moved.

21:8 Thine hand shall find out all thine enemies: thy right hand shall
find out those that hate thee.

21:9 Thou shalt make them as a fiery oven in the time of thine anger:
the LORD shall swallow them up in his wrath, and the fire shall devour
them.

21:10 Their fruit shalt thou destroy from the earth, and their seed
from among the children of men.

21:11 For they intended evil against thee: they imagined a mischievous
device, which they are not able to perform.

21:12 Therefore shalt thou make them turn their back, when thou shalt
make ready thine arrows upon thy strings against the face of them.

21:13 Be thou exalted, LORD, in thine own strength: so will we sing
and praise thy power.



22:1 My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art thou so far
from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?

22:2 O my God, I cry in the day time, but thou hearest not; and in the
night season, and am not silent.

22:3 But thou art holy, O thou that inhabitest the praises of Israel.

22:4 Our fathers trusted in thee: they trusted, and thou didst deliver
them.

22:5 They cried unto thee, and were delivered: they trusted in thee,
and were not confounded.

22:6 But I am a worm, and no man; a reproach of men, and despised of
the people.

22:7 All they that see me laugh me to scorn: they shoot out the lip,
they shake the head, saying,

22:8 He trusted on the LORD that he would deliver him: let him deliver
him, seeing he delighted in him.

22:9 But thou art he that took me out of the womb: thou didst make me
hope when I was upon my mother's breasts.

22:10 I was cast upon thee from the womb: thou art my God from my
mother's belly.

22:11 Be not far from me; for trouble is near; for there is none to
help.

22:12 Many bulls have compassed me: strong bulls of Bashan have beset
me round.

22:13 They gaped upon me with their mouths, as a ravening and a
roaring lion.

22:14 I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint:
my heart is like wax; it is melted in the midst of my bowels.

22:15 My strength is dried up like a potsherd; and my tongue cleaveth
to my jaws; and thou hast brought me into the dust of death.

22:16 For dogs have compassed me: the assembly of the wicked have
inclosed me: they pierced my hands and my feet.

22:17 I may tell all my bones: they look and stare upon me.

22:18 They part my garments among them, and cast lots upon my vesture.

22:19 But be not thou far from me, O LORD: O my strength, haste thee
to help me.

22:20 Deliver my soul from the sword; my darling from the power of the
dog.

22:21 Save me from the lion's mouth: for thou hast heard me from the
horns of the unicorns.

22:22 I will declare thy name unto my brethren: in the midst of the
congregation will I praise thee.

22:23 Ye that fear the LORD, praise him; all ye the seed of Jacob,
glorify him; and fear him, all ye the seed of Israel.

22:24 For he hath not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the
afflicted; neither hath he hid his face from him; but when he cried
unto him, he heard.

22:25 My praise shall be of thee in the great congregation: I will pay
my vows before them that fear him.

22:26 The meek shall eat and be satisfied: they shall praise the LORD
that seek him: your heart shall live for ever.

22:27 All the ends of the world shall remember and turn unto the LORD:
and all the kindreds of the nations shall worship before thee.

22:28 For the kingdom is the LORD's: and he is the governor among the
nations.

22:29 All they that be fat upon earth shall eat and worship: all they
that go down to the dust shall bow before him: and none can keep alive
his own soul.

22:30 A seed shall serve him; it shall be accounted to the Lord for a
generation.

22:31 They shall come, and shall declare his righteousness unto a
people that shall be born, that he hath done this.



23:1 The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.

23:2 He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside
the still waters.

23:3 He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness
for his name's sake.

23:4 Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I
will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they
comfort me.

23:5 Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies:
thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.

23:6 Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my
life: and I will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever.



24:1 The earth is the LORD's, and the fulness thereof; the world, and
they that dwell therein.

24:2 For he hath founded it upon the seas, and established it upon the
floods.

24:3 Who shall ascend into the hill of the LORD? or who shall stand in
his holy place?

24:4 He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart; who hath not lifted
up his soul unto vanity, nor sworn deceitfully.

24:5 He shall receive the blessing from the LORD, and righteousness
from the God of his salvation.

24:6 This is the generation of them that seek him, that seek thy face,
O Jacob. Selah.

24:7 Lift up your heads, O ye gates; and be ye lift up, ye everlasting
doors; and the King of glory shall come in.

24:8 Who is this King of glory? The LORD strong and mighty, the LORD
mighty in battle.

24:9 Lift up your heads, O ye gates; even lift them up, ye everlasting
doors; and the King of glory shall come in.

24:10 Who is this King of glory? The LORD of hosts, he is the King of
glory. Selah.



25:1 Unto thee, O LORD, do I lift up my soul.

25:2 O my God, I trust in thee: let me not be ashamed, let not mine
enemies triumph over me.

25:3 Yea, let none that wait on thee be ashamed: let them be ashamed
which transgress without cause.

25:4 Shew me thy ways, O LORD; teach me thy paths.

25:5 Lead me in thy truth, and teach me: for thou art the God of my
salvation; on thee do I wait all the day.

25:6 Remember, O LORD, thy tender mercies and thy lovingkindnesses;
for they have been ever of old.

25:7 Remember not the sins of my youth, nor my transgressions:
according to thy mercy remember thou me for thy goodness' sake, O
LORD.

25:8 Good and upright is the LORD: therefore will he teach sinners in
the way.

25:9 The meek will he guide in judgment: and the meek will he teach
his way.

25:10 All the paths of the LORD are mercy and truth unto such as keep
his covenant and his testimonies.

25:11 For thy name's sake, O LORD, pardon mine iniquity; for it is
great.

25:12 What man is he that feareth the LORD? him shall he teach in the
way that he shall choose.

25:13 His soul shall dwell at ease; and his seed shall inherit the
earth.

25:14 The secret of the LORD is with them that fear him; and he will
shew them his covenant.

25:15 Mine eyes are ever toward the LORD; for he shall pluck my feet
out of the net.

25:16 Turn thee unto me, and have mercy upon me; for I am desolate and
afflicted.

25:17 The troubles of my heart are enlarged: O bring thou me out of my
distresses.

25:18 Look upon mine affliction and my pain; and forgive all my sins.

25:19 Consider mine enemies; for they are many; and they hate me with
cruel hatred.

25:20 O keep my soul, and deliver me: let me not be ashamed; for I put
my trust in thee.

25:21 Let integrity and uprightness preserve me; for I wait on thee.

25:22 Redeem Israel, O God, out of all his troubles.



26:1 Judge me, O LORD; for I have walked in mine integrity: I have
trusted also in the LORD; therefore I shall not slide.

26:2 Examine me, O LORD, and prove me; try my reins and my heart.

26:3 For thy lovingkindness is before mine eyes: and I have walked in
thy truth.

26:4 I have not sat with vain persons, neither will I go in with
dissemblers.

26:5 I have hated the congregation of evil doers; and will not sit
with the wicked.

26:6 I will wash mine hands in innocency: so will I compass thine
altar, O LORD:

26:7 That I may publish with the voice of thanksgiving, and tell of
all thy wondrous works.

26:8 LORD, I have loved the habitation of thy house, and the place
where thine honour dwelleth.

26:9 Gather not my soul with sinners, nor my life with bloody men:

26:10 In whose hands is mischief, and their right hand is full of
bribes.

26:11 But as for me, I will walk in mine integrity: redeem me, and be
merciful unto me.

26:12 My foot standeth in an even place: in the congregations will I
bless the LORD.



27:1 The LORD is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? the
LORD is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?

27:2 When the wicked, even mine enemies and my foes, came upon me to
eat up my flesh, they stumbled and fell.

27:3 Though an host should encamp against me, my heart shall not fear:
though war should rise against me, in this will I be confident.

27:4 One thing have I desired of the LORD, that will I seek after;
that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to
behold the beauty of the LORD, and to enquire in his temple.

27:5 For in the time of trouble he shall hide me in his pavilion: in
the secret of his tabernacle shall he hide me; he shall set me up upon
a rock.

27:6 And now shall mine head be lifted up above mine enemies round
about me: therefore will I offer in his tabernacle sacrifices of joy;
I will sing, yea, I will sing praises unto the LORD.

27:7 Hear, O LORD, when I cry with my voice: have mercy also upon me,
and answer me.

27:8 When thou saidst, Seek ye my face; my heart said unto thee, Thy
face, LORD, will I seek.

27:9 Hide not thy face far from me; put not thy servant away in anger:
thou hast been my help; leave me not, neither forsake me, O God of my
salvation.

27:10 When my father and my mother forsake me, then the LORD will take
me up.

27:11 Teach me thy way, O LORD, and lead me in a plain path, because
of mine enemies.

27:12 Deliver me not over unto the will of mine enemies: for false
witnesses are risen up against me, and such as breathe out cruelty.

27:13 I had fainted, unless I had believed to see the goodness of the
LORD in the land of the living.

27:14 Wait on the LORD: be of good courage, and he shall strengthen
thine heart: wait, I say, on the LORD.



28:1 Unto thee will I cry, O LORD my rock; be not silent to me: lest,
if thou be silent to me, I become like them that go down into the pit.

28:2 Hear the voice of my supplications, when I cry unto thee, when I
lift up my hands toward thy holy oracle.

28:3 Draw me not away with the wicked, and with the workers of
iniquity, which speak peace to their neighbours, but mischief is in
their hearts.

28:4 Give them according to their deeds, and according to the
wickedness of their endeavours: give them after the work of their
hands; render to them their desert.

28:5 Because they regard not the works of the LORD, nor the operation
of his hands, he shall destroy them, and not build them up.

28:6 Blessed be the LORD, because he hath heard the voice of my
supplications.

28:7 The LORD is my strength and my shield; my heart trusted in him,
and I am helped: therefore my heart greatly rejoiceth; and with my
song will I praise him.

28:8 The LORD is their strength, and he is the saving strength of his
anointed.

28:9 Save thy people, and bless thine inheritance: feed them also, and
lift them up for ever.



29:1 Give unto the LORD, O ye mighty, give unto the LORD glory and
strength.

29:2 Give unto the LORD the glory due unto his name; worship the LORD
in the beauty of holiness.

29:3 The voice of the LORD is upon the waters: the God of glory
thundereth: the LORD is upon many waters.

29:4 The voice of the LORD is powerful; the voice of the LORD is full
of majesty.

29:5 The voice of the LORD breaketh the cedars; yea, the LORD breaketh
the cedars of Lebanon.

29:6 He maketh them also to skip like a calf; Lebanon and Sirion like
a young unicorn.

29:7 The voice of the LORD divideth the flames of fire.

29:8 The voice of the LORD shaketh the wilderness; the LORD shaketh
the wilderness of Kadesh.

29:9 The voice of the LORD maketh the hinds to calve, and discovereth
the forests: and in his temple doth every one speak of his glory.

29:10 The LORD sitteth upon the flood; yea, the LORD sitteth King for
ever.

29:11 The LORD will give strength unto his people; the LORD will bless
his people with peace.



30:1 I will extol thee, O LORD; for thou hast lifted me up, and hast
not made my foes to rejoice over me.

30:2 O LORD my God, I cried unto thee, and thou hast healed me.

30:3 O LORD, thou hast brought up my soul from the grave: thou hast
kept me alive, that I should not go down to the pit.

30:4 Sing unto the LORD, O ye saints of his, and give thanks at the
remembrance of his holiness.

30:5 For his anger endureth but a moment; in his favour is life:
weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.

30:6 And in my prosperity I said, I shall never be moved.

30:7 LORD, by thy favour thou hast made my mountain to stand strong:
thou didst hide thy face, and I was troubled.

30:8 I cried to thee, O LORD; and unto the LORD I made supplication.

30:9 What profit is there in my blood, when I go down to the pit?
Shall the dust praise thee? shall it declare thy truth?

30:10 Hear, O LORD, and have mercy upon me: LORD, be thou my helper.

30:11 Thou hast turned for me my mourning into dancing: thou hast put
off my sackcloth, and girded me with gladness;

30:12 To the end that my glory may sing praise to thee, and not be
silent.

O LORD my God, I will give thanks unto thee for ever.



31:1 In thee, O LORD, do I put my trust; let me never be ashamed:
deliver me in thy righteousness.

31:2 Bow down thine ear to me; deliver me speedily: be thou my strong
rock, for an house of defence to save me.

31:3 For thou art my rock and my fortress; therefore for thy name's
sake lead me, and guide me.

31:4 Pull me out of the net that they have laid privily for me: for
thou art my strength.

31:5 Into thine hand I commit my spirit: thou hast redeemed me, O LORD
God of truth.

31:6 I have hated them that regard lying vanities: but I trust in the
LORD.

31:7 I will be glad and rejoice in thy mercy: for thou hast considered
my trouble; thou hast known my soul in adversities;

31:8 And hast not shut me up into the hand of the enemy: thou hast set
my feet in a large room.

31:9 Have mercy upon me, O LORD, for I am in trouble: mine eye is
consumed with grief, yea, my soul and my belly.

31:10 For my life is spent with grief, and my years with sighing: my
strength faileth because of mine iniquity, and my bones are consumed.

31:11 I was a reproach among all mine enemies, but especially among my
neighbours, and a fear to mine acquaintance: they that did see me
without fled from me.

31:12 I am forgotten as a dead man out of mind: I am like a broken
vessel.

31:13 For I have heard the slander of many: fear was on every side:
while they took counsel together against me, they devised to take away
my life.

31:14 But I trusted in thee, O LORD: I said, Thou art my God.

31:15 My times are in thy hand: deliver me from the hand of mine
enemies, and from them that persecute me.

31:16 Make thy face to shine upon thy servant: save me for thy
mercies' sake.

31:17 Let me not be ashamed, O LORD; for I have called upon thee: let
the wicked be ashamed, and let them be silent in the grave.

31:18 Let the lying lips be put to silence; which speak grievous
things proudly and contemptuously against the righteous.

31:19 Oh how great is thy goodness, which thou hast laid up for them
that fear thee; which thou hast wrought for them that trust in thee
before the sons of men!

31:20 Thou shalt hide them in the secret of thy presence from the
pride of man: thou shalt keep them secretly in a pavilion from the
strife of tongues.

31:21 Blessed be the LORD: for he hath shewed me his marvellous
kindness in a strong city.

31:22 For I said in my haste, I am cut off from before thine eyes:
nevertheless thou heardest the voice of my supplications when I cried
unto thee.

31:23 O love the LORD, all ye his saints: for the LORD preserveth the
faithful, and plentifully rewardeth the proud doer.

31:24 Be of good courage, and he shall strengthen your heart, all ye
that hope in the LORD.



32:1 Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is
covered.

32:2 Blessed is the man unto whom the LORD imputeth not iniquity, and
in whose spirit there is no guile.

32:3 When I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roaring all
the day long.

32:4 For day and night thy hand was heavy upon me: my moisture is
turned into the drought of summer. Selah.

32:5 I acknowledge my sin unto thee, and mine iniquity have I not hid.
I said, I will confess my transgressions unto the LORD; and thou
forgavest the iniquity of my sin. Selah.

32:6 For this shall every one that is godly pray unto thee in a time
when thou mayest be found: surely in the floods of great waters they
shall not come nigh unto him.

32:7 Thou art my hiding place; thou shalt preserve me from trouble;
thou shalt compass me about with songs of deliverance. Selah.

32:8 I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way which thou shalt
go: I will guide thee with mine eye.

32:9 Be ye not as the horse, or as the mule, which have no
understanding: whose mouth must be held in with bit and bridle, lest
they come near unto thee.

32:10 Many sorrows shall be to the wicked: but he that trusteth in the
LORD, mercy shall compass him about.

32:11 Be glad in the LORD, and rejoice, ye righteous: and shout for
joy, all ye that are upright in heart.



33:1 Rejoice in the LORD, O ye righteous: for praise is comely for the
upright.

33:2 Praise the LORD with harp: sing unto him with the psaltery and an
instrument of ten strings.

33:3 Sing unto him a new song; play skilfully with a loud noise.

33:4 For the word of the LORD is right; and all his works are done in
truth.

33:5 He loveth righteousness and judgment: the earth is full of the
goodness of the LORD.

33:6 By the word of the LORD were the heavens made; and all the host
of them by the breath of his mouth.

33:7 He gathereth the waters of the sea together as an heap: he layeth
up the depth in storehouses.

33:8 Let all the earth fear the LORD: let all the inhabitants of the
world stand in awe of him.

33:9 For he spake, and it was done; he commanded, and it stood fast.

33:10 The LORD bringeth the counsel of the heathen to nought: he
maketh the devices of the people of none effect.

33:11 The counsel of the LORD standeth for ever, the thoughts of his
heart to all generations.

33:12 Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD; and the people whom
he hath chosen for his own inheritance.

33:13 The LORD looketh from heaven; he beholdeth all the sons of men.

33:14 From the place of his habitation he looketh upon all the
inhabitants of the earth.

33:15 He fashioneth their hearts alike; he considereth all their
works.

33:16 There is no king saved by the multitude of an host: a mighty man
is not delivered by much strength.

33:17 An horse is a vain thing for safety: neither shall he deliver
any by his great strength.

33:18 Behold, the eye of the LORD is upon them that fear him, upon
them that hope in his mercy;

33:19 To deliver their soul from death, and to keep them alive in
famine.

33:20 Our soul waiteth for the LORD: he is our help and our shield.

33:21 For our heart shall rejoice in him, because we have trusted in
his holy name.

33:22 Let thy mercy, O LORD, be upon us, according as we hope in thee.



34:1 I will bless the LORD at all times: his praise shall continually
be in my mouth.

34:2 My soul shall make her boast in the LORD: the humble shall hear
thereof, and be glad.

34:3 O magnify the LORD with me, and let us exalt his name together.

34:4 I sought the LORD, and he heard me, and delivered me from all my
fears.

34:5 They looked unto him, and were lightened: and their faces were
not ashamed.

34:6 This poor man cried, and the LORD heard him, and saved him out of
all his troubles.

34:7 The angel of the LORD encampeth round about them that fear him,
and delivereth them.

34:8 O taste and see that the LORD is good: blessed is the man that
trusteth in him.

34:9 O fear the LORD, ye his saints: for there is no want to them that
fear him.

34:10 The young lions do lack, and suffer hunger: but they that seek
the LORD shall not want any good thing.

34:11 Come, ye children, hearken unto me: I will teach you the fear of
the LORD.

34:12 What man is he that desireth life, and loveth many days, that he
may see good?

34:13 Keep thy tongue from evil, and thy lips from speaking guile.

34:14 Depart from evil, and do good; seek peace, and pursue it.

34:15 The eyes of the LORD are upon the righteous, and his ears are
open unto their cry.

34:16 The face of the LORD is against them that do evil, to cut off
the remembrance of them from the earth.

34:17 The righteous cry, and the LORD heareth, and delivereth them out
of all their troubles.

34:18 The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and
saveth such as be of a contrite spirit.

34:19 Many are the afflictions of the righteous: but the LORD
delivereth him out of them all.

34:20 He keepeth all his bones: not one of them is broken.

34:21 Evil shall slay the wicked: and they that hate the righteous
shall be desolate.

34:22 The LORD redeemeth the soul of his servants: and none of them
that trust in him shall be desolate.



35:1 Plead my cause, O LORD, with them that strive with me: fight
against them that fight against me.

35:2 Take hold of shield and buckler, and stand up for mine help.

35:3 Draw out also the spear, and stop the way against them that
persecute me: say unto my soul, I am thy salvation.

35:4 Let them be confounded and put to shame that seek after my soul:
let them be turned back and brought to confusion that devise my hurt.

35:5 Let them be as chaff before the wind: and let the angel of the
LORD chase them.

35:6 Let their way be dark and slippery: and let the angel of the LORD
persecute them.

35:7 For without cause have they hid for me their net in a pit, which
without cause they have digged for my soul.

35:8 Let destruction come upon him at unawares; and let his net that
he hath hid catch himself: into that very destruction let him fall.

35:9 And my soul shall be joyful in the LORD: it shall rejoice in his
salvation.

35:10 All my bones shall say, LORD, who is like unto thee, which
deliverest the poor from him that is too strong for him, yea, the poor
and the needy from him that spoileth him?

35:11 False witnesses did rise up; they laid to my charge things that
I knew not.

35:12 They rewarded me evil for good to the spoiling of my soul.

35:13 But as for me, when they were sick, my clothing was sackcloth: I
humbled my soul with fasting; and my prayer returned into mine own
bosom.

35:14 I behaved myself as though he had been my friend or brother: I
bowed down heavily, as one that mourneth for his mother.

35:15 But in mine adversity they rejoiced, and gathered themselves
together: yea, the abjects gathered themselves together against me,
and I knew it not; they did tear me, and ceased not:

35:16 With hypocritical mockers in feasts, they gnashed upon me with
their teeth.

35:17 Lord, how long wilt thou look on? rescue my soul from their
destructions, my darling from the lions.

35:18 I will give thee thanks in the great congregation: I will praise
thee among much people.

35:19 Let not them that are mine enemies wrongfully rejoice over me:
neither let them wink with the eye that hate me without a cause.

35:20 For they speak not peace: but they devise deceitful matters
against them that are quiet in the land.

35:21 Yea, they opened their mouth wide against me, and said, Aha,
aha, our eye hath seen it.

35:22 This thou hast seen, O LORD: keep not silence: O Lord, be not
far from me.

35:23 Stir up thyself, and awake to my judgment, even unto my cause,
my God and my Lord.

35:24 Judge me, O LORD my God, according to thy righteousness; and let
them not rejoice over me.

35:25 Let them not say in their hearts, Ah, so would we have it: let
them not say, We have swallowed him up.

35:26 Let them be ashamed and brought to confusion together that
rejoice at mine hurt: let them be clothed with shame and dishonour
that magnify themselves against me.

35:27 Let them shout for joy, and be glad, that favour my righteous
cause: yea, let them say continually, Let the LORD be magnified, which
hath pleasure in the prosperity of his servant.

35:28 And my tongue shall speak of thy righteousness and of thy praise
all the day long.



36:1 The transgression of the wicked saith within my heart, that there
is no fear of God before his eyes.

36:2 For he flattereth himself in his own eyes, until his iniquity be
found to be hateful.

36:3 The words of his mouth are iniquity and deceit: he hath left off
to be wise, and to do good.

36:4 He deviseth mischief upon his bed; he setteth himself in a way
that is not good; he abhorreth not evil.

36:5 Thy mercy, O LORD, is in the heavens; and thy faithfulness
reacheth unto the clouds.

36:6 Thy righteousness is like the great mountains; thy judgments are
a great deep: O LORD, thou preservest man and beast.

36:7 How excellent is thy lovingkindness, O God! therefore the
children of men put their trust under the shadow of thy wings.

36:8 They shall be abundantly satisfied with the fatness of thy house;
and thou shalt make them drink of the river of thy pleasures.

36:9 For with thee is the fountain of life: in thy light shall we see
light.

36:10 O continue thy lovingkindness unto them that know thee; and thy
righteousness to the upright in heart.

36:11 Let not the foot of pride come against me, and let not the hand
of the wicked remove me.

36:12 There are the workers of iniquity fallen: they are cast down,
and shall not be able to rise.



37:1 Fret not thyself because of evildoers, neither be thou envious
against the workers of iniquity.

37:2 For they shall soon be cut down like the grass, and wither as the
green herb.

37:3 Trust in the LORD, and do good; so shalt thou dwell in the land,
and verily thou shalt be fed.

37:4 Delight thyself also in the LORD: and he shall give thee the
desires of thine heart.

37:5 Commit thy way unto the LORD; trust also in him; and he shall
bring it to pass.

37:6 And he shall bring forth thy righteousness as the light, and thy
judgment as the noonday.

37:7 Rest in the LORD, and wait patiently for him: fret not thyself
because of him who prospereth in his way, because of the man who
bringeth wicked devices to pass.

37:8 Cease from anger, and forsake wrath: fret not thyself in any wise
to do evil.

37:9 For evildoers shall be cut off: but those that wait upon the
LORD, they shall inherit the earth.

37:10 For yet a little while, and the wicked shall not be: yea, thou
shalt diligently consider his place, and it shall not be.

37:11 But the meek shall inherit the earth; and shall delight
themselves in the abundance of peace.

37:12 The wicked plotteth against the just, and gnasheth upon him with
his teeth.

37:13 The LORD shall laugh at him: for he seeth that his day is
coming.

37:14 The wicked have drawn out the sword, and have bent their bow, to
cast down the poor and needy, and to slay such as be of upright
conversation.

37:15 Their sword shall enter into their own heart, and their bows
shall be broken.

37:16 A little that a righteous man hath is better than the riches of
many wicked.

37:17 For the arms of the wicked shall be broken: but the LORD
upholdeth the righteous.

37:18 The LORD knoweth the days of the upright: and their inheritance
shall be for ever.

37:19 They shall not be ashamed in the evil time: and in the days of
famine they shall be satisfied.

37:20 But the wicked shall perish, and the enemies of the LORD shall
be as the fat of lambs: they shall consume; into smoke shall they
consume away.

37:21 The wicked borroweth, and payeth not again: but the righteous
sheweth mercy, and giveth.

37:22 For such as be blessed of him shall inherit the earth; and they
that be cursed of him shall be cut off.

37:23 The steps of a good man are ordered by the LORD: and he
delighteth in his way.

37:24 Though he fall, he shall not be utterly cast down: for the LORD
upholdeth him with his hand.

37:25 I have been young, and now am old; yet have I not seen the
righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread.

37:26 He is ever merciful, and lendeth; and his seed is blessed.

37:27 Depart from evil, and do good; and dwell for evermore.

37:28 For the LORD loveth judgment, and forsaketh not his saints; they
are preserved for ever: but the seed of the wicked shall be cut off.

37:29 The righteous shall inherit the land, and dwell therein for
ever.

37:30 The mouth of the righteous speaketh wisdom, and his tongue
talketh of judgment.

37:31 The law of his God is in his heart; none of his steps shall
slide.

37:32 The wicked watcheth the righteous, and seeketh to slay him.

37:33 The LORD will not leave him in his hand, nor condemn him when he
is judged.

37:34 Wait on the LORD, and keep his way, and he shall exalt thee to
inherit the land: when the wicked are cut off, thou shalt see it.

37:35 I have seen the wicked in great power, and spreading himself
like a green bay tree.

37:36 Yet he passed away, and, lo, he was not: yea, I sought him, but
he could not be found.

37:37 Mark the perfect man, and behold the upright: for the end of
that man is peace.

37:38 But the transgressors shall be destroyed together: the end of
the wicked shall be cut off.

37:39 But the salvation of the righteous is of the LORD: he is their
strength in the time of trouble.

37:40 And the LORD shall help them, and deliver them: he shall deliver
them from the wicked, and save them, because they trust in him.



38:1 O lord, rebuke me not in thy wrath: neither chasten me in thy hot
displeasure.

38:2 For thine arrows stick fast in me, and thy hand presseth me sore.

38:3 There is no soundness in my flesh because of thine anger; neither
is there any rest in my bones because of my sin.

38:4 For mine iniquities are gone over mine head: as an heavy burden
they are too heavy for me.

38:5 My wounds stink and are corrupt because of my foolishness.

38:6 I am troubled; I am bowed down greatly; I go mourning all the day
long.

38:7 For my loins are filled with a loathsome disease: and there is no
soundness in my flesh.

38:8 I am feeble and sore broken: I have roared by reason of the
disquietness of my heart.

38:9 Lord, all my desire is before thee; and my groaning is not hid
from thee.

38:10 My heart panteth, my strength faileth me: as for the light of
mine eyes, it also is gone from me.

38:11 My lovers and my friends stand aloof from my sore; and my
kinsmen stand afar off.

38:12 They also that seek after my life lay snares for me: and they
that seek my hurt speak mischievous things, and imagine deceits all
the day long.

38:13 But I, as a deaf man, heard not; and I was as a dumb man that
openeth not his mouth.

38:14 Thus I was as a man that heareth not, and in whose mouth are no
reproofs.

38:15 For in thee, O LORD, do I hope: thou wilt hear, O Lord my God.

38:16 For I said, Hear me, lest otherwise they should rejoice over me:
when my foot slippeth, they magnify themselves against me.

38:17 For I am ready to halt, and my sorrow is continually before me.

38:18 For I will declare mine iniquity; I will be sorry for my sin.

38:19 But mine enemies are lively, and they are strong: and they that
hate me wrongfully are multiplied.

38:20 They also that render evil for good are mine adversaries;
because I follow the thing that good is.

38:21 Forsake me not, O LORD: O my God, be not far from me.

38:22 Make haste to help me, O Lord my salvation.



39:1 I said, I will take heed to my ways, that I sin not with my
tongue: I will keep my mouth with a bridle, while the wicked is before
me.

39:2 I was dumb with silence, I held my peace, even from good; and my
sorrow was stirred.

39:3 My heart was hot within me, while I was musing the fire burned:
then spake I with my tongue,

39:4 LORD, make me to know mine end, and the measure of my days, what
it is: that I may know how frail I am.

39:5 Behold, thou hast made my days as an handbreadth; and mine age is
as nothing before thee: verily every man at his best state is
altogether vanity.

Selah.

39:6 Surely every man walketh in a vain shew: surely they are
disquieted in vain: he heapeth up riches, and knoweth not who shall
gather them.

39:7 And now, Lord, what wait I for? my hope is in thee.

39:8 Deliver me from all my transgressions: make me not the reproach
of the foolish.

39:9 I was dumb, I opened not my mouth; because thou didst it.

39:10 Remove thy stroke away from me: I am consumed by the blow of
thine hand.

39:11 When thou with rebukes dost correct man for iniquity, thou
makest his beauty to consume away like a moth: surely every man is
vanity. Selah.

39:12 Hear my prayer, O LORD, and give ear unto my cry; hold not thy
peace at my tears: for I am a stranger with thee, and a sojourner, as
all my fathers were.

39:13 O spare me, that I may recover strength, before I go hence, and
be no more.



40:1 I waited patiently for the LORD; and he inclined unto me, and
heard my cry.

40:2 He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry
clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings.

40:3 And he hath put a new song in my mouth, even praise unto our God:
many shall see it, and fear, and shall trust in the LORD.

40:4 Blessed is that man that maketh the LORD his trust, and
respecteth not the proud, nor such as turn aside to lies.

40:5 Many, O LORD my God, are thy wonderful works which thou hast
done, and thy thoughts which are to us-ward: they cannot be reckoned
up in order unto thee: if I would declare and speak of them, they are
more than can be numbered.

40:6 Sacrifice and offering thou didst not desire; mine ears hast thou
opened: burnt offering and sin offering hast thou not required.

40:7 Then said I, Lo, I come: in the volume of the book it is written
of me,

40:8 I delight to do thy will, O my God: yea, thy law is within my
heart.

40:9 I have preached righteousness in the great congregation: lo, I
have not refrained my lips, O LORD, thou knowest.

40:10 I have not hid thy righteousness within my heart; I have
declared thy faithfulness and thy salvation: I have not concealed thy
lovingkindness and thy truth from the great congregation.

40:11 Withhold not thou thy tender mercies from me, O LORD: let thy
lovingkindness and thy truth continually preserve me.

40:12 For innumerable evils have compassed me about: mine iniquities
have taken hold upon me, so that I am not able to look up; they are
more than the hairs of mine head: therefore my heart faileth me.

40:13 Be pleased, O LORD, to deliver me: O LORD, make haste to help
me.

40:14 Let them be ashamed and confounded together that seek after my
soul to destroy it; let them be driven backward and put to shame that
wish me evil.

40:15 Let them be desolate for a reward of their shame that say unto
me, Aha, aha.

40:16 Let all those that seek thee rejoice and be glad in thee: let
such as love thy salvation say continually, The LORD be magnified.

40:17 But I am poor and needy; yet the Lord thinketh upon me: thou art
my help and my deliverer; make no tarrying, O my God.



41:1 Blessed is he that considereth the poor: the LORD will deliver
him in time of trouble.

41:2 The LORD will preserve him, and keep him alive; and he shall be
blessed upon the earth: and thou wilt not deliver him unto the will of
his enemies.

41:3 The LORD will strengthen him upon the bed of languishing: thou
wilt make all his bed in his sickness.

41:4 I said, LORD, be merciful unto me: heal my soul; for I have
sinned against thee.

41:5 Mine enemies speak evil of me, When shall he die, and his name
perish?

41:6 And if he come to see me, he speaketh vanity: his heart gathereth
iniquity to itself; when he goeth abroad, he telleth it.

41:7 All that hate me whisper together against me: against me do they
devise my hurt.

41:8 An evil disease, say they, cleaveth fast unto him: and now that
he lieth he shall rise up no more.

41:9 Yea, mine own familiar friend, in whom I trusted, which did eat
of my bread, hath lifted up his heel against me.

41:10 But thou, O LORD, be merciful unto me, and raise me up, that I
may requite them.

41:11 By this I know that thou favourest me, because mine enemy doth
not triumph over me.

41:12 And as for me, thou upholdest me in mine integrity, and settest
me before thy face for ever.

41:13 Blessed be the LORD God of Israel from everlasting, and to
everlasting. Amen, and Amen.



42:1 As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul
after thee, O God.

42:2 My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God: when shall I come
and appear before God?

42:3 My tears have been my meat day and night, while they continually
say unto me, Where is thy God?

42:4 When I remember these things, I pour out my soul in me: for I had
gone with the multitude, I went with them to the house of God, with
the voice of joy and praise, with a multitude that kept holyday.

42:5 Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted in
me?  hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise him for the help of his
countenance.

42:6 O my God, my soul is cast down within me: therefore will I
remember thee from the land of Jordan, and of the Hermonites, from the
hill Mizar.

42:7 Deep calleth unto deep at the noise of thy waterspouts: all thy
waves and thy billows are gone over me.

42:8 Yet the LORD will command his lovingkindness in the day time, and
in the night his song shall be with me, and my prayer unto the God of
my life.

42:9 I will say unto God my rock, Why hast thou forgotten me? why go I
mourning because of the oppression of the enemy?

42:10 As with a sword in my bones, mine enemies reproach me; while
they say daily unto me, Where is thy God?

42:11 Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted
within me? hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise him, who is the
health of my countenance, and my God.



43:1 Judge me, O God, and plead my cause against an ungodly nation: O
deliver me from the deceitful and unjust man.

43:2 For thou art the God of my strength: why dost thou cast me off?
why go I mourning because of the oppression of the enemy?

43:3 O send out thy light and thy truth: let them lead me; let them
bring me unto thy holy hill, and to thy tabernacles.

43:4 Then will I go unto the altar of God, unto God my exceeding joy:
yea, upon the harp will I praise thee, O God my God.

43:5 Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted
within me? hope in God: for I shall yet praise him, who is the health
of my countenance, and my God.



44:1 We have heard with our ears, O God, our fathers have told us,
what work thou didst in their days, in the times of old.

44:2 How thou didst drive out the heathen with thy hand, and plantedst
them; how thou didst afflict the people, and cast them out.

44:3 For they got not the land in possession by their own sword,
neither did their own arm save them: but thy right hand, and thine
arm, and the light of thy countenance, because thou hadst a favour
unto them.

44:4 Thou art my King, O God: command deliverances for Jacob.

44:5 Through thee will we push down our enemies: through thy name will
we tread them under that rise up against us.

44:6 For I will not trust in my bow, neither shall my sword save me.

44:7 But thou hast saved us from our enemies, and hast put them to
shame that hated us.

44:8 In God we boast all the day long, and praise thy name for ever.

Selah.

44:9 But thou hast cast off, and put us to shame; and goest not forth
with our armies.

44:10 Thou makest us to turn back from the enemy: and they which hate
us spoil for themselves.

44:11 Thou hast given us like sheep appointed for meat; and hast
scattered us among the heathen.

44:12 Thou sellest thy people for nought, and dost not increase thy
wealth by their price.

44:13 Thou makest us a reproach to our neighbours, a scorn and a
derision to them that are round about us.

44:14 Thou makest us a byword among the heathen, a shaking of the head
among the people.

44:15 My confusion is continually before me, and the shame of my face
hath covered me,

44:16 For the voice of him that reproacheth and blasphemeth; by reason
of the enemy and avenger.

44:17 All this is come upon us; yet have we not forgotten thee,
neither have we dealt falsely in thy covenant.

44:18 Our heart is not turned back, neither have our steps declined
from thy way;

44:19 Though thou hast sore broken us in the place of dragons, and
covered us with the shadow of death.

44:20 If we have forgotten the name of our God, or stretched out our
hands to a strange god;

44:21 Shall not God search this out? for he knoweth the secrets of the
heart.

44:22 Yea, for thy sake are we killed all the day long; we are counted
as sheep for the slaughter.

44:23 Awake, why sleepest thou, O Lord? arise, cast us not off for
ever.

44:24 Wherefore hidest thou thy face, and forgettest our affliction
and our oppression?

44:25 For our soul is bowed down to the dust: our belly cleaveth unto
the earth.

44:26 Arise for our help, and redeem us for thy mercies' sake.



45:1 My heart is inditing a good matter: I speak of the things which I
have made touching the king: my tongue is the pen of a ready writer.

45:2 Thou art fairer than the children of men: grace is poured into
thy lips: therefore God hath blessed thee for ever.

45:3 Gird thy sword upon thy thigh, O most mighty, with thy glory and
thy majesty.

45:4 And in thy majesty ride prosperously because of truth and
meekness and righteousness; and thy right hand shall teach thee
terrible things.

45:5 Thine arrows are sharp in the heart of the king's enemies;
whereby the people fall under thee.

45:6 Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever: the sceptre of thy
kingdom is a right sceptre.

45:7 Thou lovest righteousness, and hatest wickedness: therefore God,
thy God, hath anointed thee with the oil of gladness above thy
fellows.

45:8 All thy garments smell of myrrh, and aloes, and cassia, out of
the ivory palaces, whereby they have made thee glad.

45:9 Kings' daughters were among thy honourable women: upon thy right
hand did stand the queen in gold of Ophir.

45:10 Hearken, O daughter, and consider, and incline thine ear; forget
also thine own people, and thy father's house;

45:11 So shall the king greatly desire thy beauty: for he is thy Lord;
and worship thou him.

45:12 And the daughter of Tyre shall be there with a gift; even the
rich among the people shall intreat thy favour.

45:13 The king's daughter is all glorious within: her clothing is of
wrought gold.

45:14 She shall be brought unto the king in raiment of needlework: the
virgins her companions that follow her shall be brought unto thee.

45:15 With gladness and rejoicing shall they be brought: they shall
enter into the king's palace.

45:16 Instead of thy fathers shall be thy children, whom thou mayest
make princes in all the earth.

45:17 I will make thy name to be remembered in all generations:
therefore shall the people praise thee for ever and ever.



46:1 God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.

46:2 Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and
though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea;

46:3 Though the waters thereof roar and be troubled, though the
mountains shake with the swelling thereof. Selah.

46:4 There is a river, the streams whereof shall make glad the city of
God, the holy place of the tabernacles of the most High.

46:5 God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved: God shall
help her, and that right early.

46:6 The heathen raged, the kingdoms were moved: he uttered his voice,
the earth melted.

46:7 The LORD of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge.
Selah.

46:8 Come, behold the works of the LORD, what desolations he hath made
in the earth.

46:9 He maketh wars to cease unto the end of the earth; he breaketh
the bow, and cutteth the spear in sunder; he burneth the chariot in
the fire.

46:10 Be still, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the
heathen, I will be exalted in the earth.

46:11 The LORD of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge.
Selah.



47:1 O clap your hands, all ye people; shout unto God with the voice
of triumph.

47:2 For the LORD most high is terrible; he is a great King over all
the earth.

47:3 He shall subdue the people under us, and the nations under our
feet.

47:4 He shall choose our inheritance for us, the excellency of Jacob
whom he loved. Selah.

47:5 God is gone up with a shout, the LORD with the sound of a
trumpet.

47:6 Sing praises to God, sing praises: sing praises unto our King,
sing praises.

47:7 For God is the King of all the earth: sing ye praises with
understanding.

47:8 God reigneth over the heathen: God sitteth upon the throne of his
holiness.

47:9 The princes of the people are gathered together, even the people
of the God of Abraham: for the shields of the earth belong unto God:
he is greatly exalted.



48:1 Great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised in the city of our
God, in the mountain of his holiness.

48:2 Beautiful for situation, the joy of the whole earth, is mount
Zion, on the sides of the north, the city of the great King.

48:3 God is known in her palaces for a refuge.

48:4 For, lo, the kings were assembled, they passed by together.

48:5 They saw it, and so they marvelled; they were troubled, and
hasted away.

48:6 Fear took hold upon them there, and pain, as of a woman in
travail.

48:7 Thou breakest the ships of Tarshish with an east wind.

48:8 As we have heard, so have we seen in the city of the LORD of
hosts, in the city of our God: God will establish it for ever. Selah.

48:9 We have thought of thy lovingkindness, O God, in the midst of thy
temple.

48:10 According to thy name, O God, so is thy praise unto the ends of
the earth: thy right hand is full of righteousness.

48:11 Let mount Zion rejoice, let the daughters of Judah be glad,
because of thy judgments.

48:12 Walk about Zion, and go round about her: tell the towers
thereof.

48:13 Mark ye well her bulwarks, consider her palaces; that ye may
tell it to the generation following.

48:14 For this God is our God for ever and ever: he will be our guide
even unto death.



49:1 Hear this, all ye people; give ear, all ye inhabitants of the
world:

49:2 Both low and high, rich and poor, together.

49:3 My mouth shall speak of wisdom; and the meditation of my heart
shall be of understanding.

49:4 I will incline mine ear to a parable: I will open my dark saying
upon the harp.

49:5 Wherefore should I fear in the days of evil, when the iniquity of
my heels shall compass me about?

49:6 They that trust in their wealth, and boast themselves in the
multitude of their riches;

49:7 None of them can by any means redeem his brother, nor give to God
a ransom for him:

49:8 (For the redemption of their soul is precious, and it ceaseth for
ever:)

49:9 That he should still live for ever, and not see corruption.

49:10 For he seeth that wise men die, likewise the fool and the
brutish person perish, and leave their wealth to others.

49:11 Their inward thought is, that their houses shall continue for
ever, and their dwelling places to all generations; they call their
lands after their own names.

49:12 Nevertheless man being in honour abideth not: he is like the
beasts that perish.

49:13 This their way is their folly: yet their posterity approve their
sayings. Selah.

49:14 Like sheep they are laid in the grave; death shall feed on them;
and the upright shall have dominion over them in the morning; and
their beauty shall consume in the grave from their dwelling.

49:15 But God will redeem my soul from the power of the grave: for he
shall receive me. Selah.

49:16 Be not thou afraid when one is made rich, when the glory of his
house is increased;

49:17 For when he dieth he shall carry nothing away: his glory shall
not descend after him.

49:18 Though while he lived he blessed his soul: and men will praise
thee, when thou doest well to thyself.

49:19 He shall go to the generation of his fathers; they shall never
see light.

49:20 Man that is in honour, and understandeth not, is like the beasts
that perish.



50:1 The mighty God, even the LORD, hath spoken, and called the earth
from the rising of the sun unto the going down thereof.

50:2 Out of Zion, the perfection of beauty, God hath shined.

50:3 Our God shall come, and shall not keep silence: a fire shall
devour before him, and it shall be very tempestuous round about him.

50:4 He shall call to the heavens from above, and to the earth, that
he may judge his people.

50:5 Gather my saints together unto me; those that have made a
covenant with me by sacrifice.

50:6 And the heavens shall declare his righteousness: for God is judge
himself. Selah.

50:7 Hear, O my people, and I will speak; O Israel, and I will testify
against thee: I am God, even thy God.

50:8 I will not reprove thee for thy sacrifices or thy burnt
offerings, to have been continually before me.

50:9 I will take no bullock out of thy house, nor he goats out of thy
folds.

50:10 For every beast of the forest is mine, and the cattle upon a
thousand hills.

50:11 I know all the fowls of the mountains: and the wild beasts of
the field are mine.

50:12 If I were hungry, I would not tell thee: for the world is mine,
and the fulness thereof.

50:13 Will I eat the flesh of bulls, or drink the blood of goats?

50:14 Offer unto God thanksgiving; and pay thy vows unto the most
High:

50:15 And call upon me in the day of trouble: I will deliver thee, and
thou shalt glorify me.

50:16 But unto the wicked God saith, What hast thou to do to declare
my statutes, or that thou shouldest take my covenant in thy mouth?

50:17 Seeing thou hatest instruction, and casteth my words behind
thee.

50:18 When thou sawest a thief, then thou consentedst with him, and
hast been partaker with adulterers.

50:19 Thou givest thy mouth to evil, and thy tongue frameth deceit.

50:20 Thou sittest and speakest against thy brother; thou slanderest
thine own mother's son.

50:21 These things hast thou done, and I kept silence; thou thoughtest
that I was altogether such an one as thyself: but I will reprove thee,
and set them in order before thine eyes.

50:22 Now consider this, ye that forget God, lest I tear you in
pieces, and there be none to deliver.

50:23 Whoso offereth praise glorifieth me: and to him that ordereth
his conversation aright will I shew the salvation of God.



51:1 Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy lovingkindness:
according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my
transgressions.

51:2 Wash me throughly from mine iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin.

51:3 For I acknowledge my transgressions: and my sin is ever before
me.

51:4 Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in thy
sight: that thou mightest be justified when thou speakest, and be
clear when thou judgest.

51:5 Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother
conceive me.

51:6 Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts: and in the
hidden part thou shalt make me to know wisdom.

51:7 Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: wash me, and I shall
be whiter than snow.

51:8 Make me to hear joy and gladness; that the bones which thou hast
broken may rejoice.

51:9 Hide thy face from my sins, and blot out all mine iniquities.

51:10 Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit
within me.

51:11 Cast me not away from thy presence; and take not thy holy spirit
from me.

51:12 Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation; and uphold me with thy
free spirit.

51:13 Then will I teach transgressors thy ways; and sinners shall be
converted unto thee.

51:14 Deliver me from bloodguiltiness, O God, thou God of my
salvation: and my tongue shall sing aloud of thy righteousness.

51:15 O Lord, open thou my lips; and my mouth shall shew forth thy
praise.

51:16 For thou desirest not sacrifice; else would I give it: thou
delightest not in burnt offering.

51:17 The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a
contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.

51:18 Do good in thy good pleasure unto Zion: build thou the walls of
Jerusalem.

51:19 Then shalt thou be pleased with the sacrifices of righteousness,
with burnt offering and whole burnt offering: then shall they offer
bullocks upon thine altar.



52:1 Why boastest thou thyself in mischief, O mighty man? the goodness
of God endureth continually.

52:2 The tongue deviseth mischiefs; like a sharp razor, working
deceitfully.

52:3 Thou lovest evil more than good; and lying rather than to speak
righteousness. Selah.

52:4 Thou lovest all devouring words, O thou deceitful tongue.

52:5 God shall likewise destroy thee for ever, he shall take thee
away, and pluck thee out of thy dwelling place, and root thee out of
the land of the living. Selah.

52:6 The righteous also shall see, and fear, and shall laugh at him:

52:7 Lo, this is the man that made not God his strength; but trusted
in the abundance of his riches, and strengthened himself in his
wickedness.

52:8 But I am like a green olive tree in the house of God: I trust in
the mercy of God for ever and ever.

52:9 I will praise thee for ever, because thou hast done it: and I
will wait on thy name; for it is good before thy saints.



53:1 The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. Corrupt are
they, and have done abominable iniquity: there is none that doeth
good.

53:2 God looked down from heaven upon the children of men, to see if
there were any that did understand, that did seek God.

53:3 Every one of them is gone back: they are altogether become
filthy; there is none that doeth good, no, not one.

53:4 Have the workers of iniquity no knowledge? who eat up my people
as they eat bread: they have not called upon God.

53:5 There were they in great fear, where no fear was: for God hath
scattered the bones of him that encampeth against thee: thou hast put
them to shame, because God hath despised them.

53:6 Oh that the salvation of Israel were come out of Zion! When God
bringeth back the captivity of his people, Jacob shall rejoice, and
Israel shall be glad.



54:1 Save me, O God, by thy name, and judge me by thy strength.

54:2 Hear my prayer, O God; give ear to the words of my mouth.

54:3 For strangers are risen up against me, and oppressors seek after
my soul: they have not set God before them. Selah.

54:4 Behold, God is mine helper: the Lord is with them that uphold my
soul.

54:5 He shall reward evil unto mine enemies: cut them off in thy
truth.

54:6 I will freely sacrifice unto thee: I will praise thy name, O
LORD; for it is good.

54:7 For he hath delivered me out of all trouble: and mine eye hath
seen his desire upon mine enemies.



55:1 Give ear to my prayer, O God; and hide not thyself from my
supplication.

55:2 Attend unto me, and hear me: I mourn in my complaint, and make a
noise;

55:3 Because of the voice of the enemy, because of the oppression of
the wicked: for they cast iniquity upon me, and in wrath they hate me.

55:4 My heart is sore pained within me: and the terrors of death are
fallen upon me.

55:5 Fearfulness and trembling are come upon me, and horror hath
overwhelmed me.

55:6 And I said, Oh that I had wings like a dove! for then would I fly
away, and be at rest.

55:7 Lo, then would I wander far off, and remain in the wilderness.
Selah.

55:8 I would hasten my escape from the windy storm and tempest.

55:9 Destroy, O Lord, and divide their tongues: for I have seen
violence and strife in the city.

55:10 Day and night they go about it upon the walls thereof: mischief
also and sorrow are in the midst of it.

55:11 Wickedness is in the midst thereof: deceit and guile depart not
from her streets.

55:12 For it was not an enemy that reproached me; then I could have
borne it: neither was it he that hated me that did magnify himself
against me; then I would have hid myself from him:

55:13 But it was thou, a man mine equal, my guide, and mine
acquaintance.

55:14 We took sweet counsel together, and walked unto the house of God
in company.

55:15 Let death seize upon them, and let them go down quick into hell:
for wickedness is in their dwellings, and among them.

55:16 As for me, I will call upon God; and the LORD shall save me.

55:17 Evening, and morning, and at noon, will I pray, and cry aloud:
and he shall hear my voice.

55:18 He hath delivered my soul in peace from the battle that was
against me: for there were many with me.

55:19 God shall hear, and afflict them, even he that abideth of old.

Selah. Because they have no changes, therefore they fear not God.

55:20 He hath put forth his hands against such as be at peace with
him: he hath broken his covenant.

55:21 The words of his mouth were smoother than butter, but war was in
his heart: his words were softer than oil, yet were they drawn swords.

55:22 Cast thy burden upon the LORD, and he shall sustain thee: he
shall never suffer the righteous to be moved.

55:23 But thou, O God, shalt bring them down into the pit of
destruction: bloody and deceitful men shall not live out half their
days; but I will trust in thee.



56:1 Be merciful unto me, O God: for man would swallow me up; he
fighting daily oppresseth me.

56:2 Mine enemies would daily swallow me up: for they be many that
fight against me, O thou most High.

56:3 What time I am afraid, I will trust in thee.

56:4 In God I will praise his word, in God I have put my trust; I will
not fear what flesh can do unto me.

56:5 Every day they wrest my words: all their thoughts are against me
for evil.

56:6 They gather themselves together, they hide themselves, they mark
my steps, when they wait for my soul.

56:7 Shall they escape by iniquity? in thine anger cast down the
people, O God.

56:8 Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle:
are they not in thy book?

56:9 When I cry unto thee, then shall mine enemies turn back: this I
know; for God is for me.

56:10 In God will I praise his word: in the LORD will I praise his
word.

56:11 In God have I put my trust: I will not be afraid what man can do
unto me.

56:12 Thy vows are upon me, O God: I will render praises unto thee.

56:13 For thou hast delivered my soul from death: wilt not thou
deliver my feet from falling, that I may walk before God in the light
of the living?



57:1 Be merciful unto me, O God, be merciful unto me: for my soul
trusteth in thee: yea, in the shadow of thy wings will I make my
refuge, until these calamities be overpast.

57:2 I will cry unto God most high; unto God that performeth all
things for me.

57:3 He shall send from heaven, and save me from the reproach of him
that would swallow me up. Selah. God shall send forth his mercy and
his truth.

57:4 My soul is among lions: and I lie even among them that are set on
fire, even the sons of men, whose teeth are spears and arrows, and
their tongue a sharp sword.

57:5 Be thou exalted, O God, above the heavens; let thy glory be above
all the earth.

57:6 They have prepared a net for my steps; my soul is bowed down:
they have digged a pit before me, into the midst whereof they are
fallen themselves. Selah.

57:7 My heart is fixed, O God, my heart is fixed: I will sing and give
praise.

57:8 Awake up, my glory; awake, psaltery and harp: I myself will awake
early.

57:9 I will praise thee, O Lord, among the people: I will sing unto
thee among the nations.

57:10 For thy mercy is great unto the heavens, and thy truth unto the
clouds.

57:11 Be thou exalted, O God, above the heavens: let thy glory be
above all the earth.



58:1 Do ye indeed speak righteousness, O congregation? do ye judge
uprightly, O ye sons of men?

58:2 Yea, in heart ye work wickedness; ye weigh the violence of your
hands in the earth.

58:3 The wicked are estranged from the womb: they go astray as soon as
they be born, speaking lies.

58:4 Their poison is like the poison of a serpent: they are like the
deaf adder that stoppeth her ear;

58:5 Which will not hearken to the voice of charmers, charming never
so wisely.

58:6 Break their teeth, O God, in their mouth: break out the great
teeth of the young lions, O LORD.

58:7 Let them melt away as waters which run continually: when he
bendeth his bow to shoot his arrows, let them be as cut in pieces.

58:8 As a snail which melteth, let every one of them pass away: like
the untimely birth of a woman, that they may not see the sun.

58:9 Before your pots can feel the thorns, he shall take them away as
with a whirlwind, both living, and in his wrath.

58:10 The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance: he
shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked.

58:11 So that a man shall say, Verily there is a reward for the
righteous: verily he is a God that judgeth in the earth.



59:1 Deliver me from mine enemies, O my God: defend me from them that
rise up against me.

59:2 Deliver me from the workers of iniquity, and save me from bloody
men.

59:3 For, lo, they lie in wait for my soul: the mighty are gathered
against me; not for my transgression, nor for my sin, O LORD.

59:4 They run and prepare themselves without my fault: awake to help
me, and behold.

59:5 Thou therefore, O LORD God of hosts, the God of Israel, awake to
visit all the heathen: be not merciful to any wicked transgressors.
Selah.

59:6 They return at evening: they make a noise like a dog, and go
round about the city.

59:7 Behold, they belch out with their mouth: swords are in their
lips: for who, say they, doth hear?

59:8 But thou, O LORD, shalt laugh at them; thou shalt have all the
heathen in derision.

59:9 Because of his strength will I wait upon thee: for God is my
defence.

59:10 The God of my mercy shall prevent me: God shall let me see my
desire upon mine enemies.

59:11 Slay them not, lest my people forget: scatter them by thy power;
and bring them down, O Lord our shield.

59:12 For the sin of their mouth and the words of their lips let them
even be taken in their pride: and for cursing and lying which they
speak.

59:13 Consume them in wrath, consume them, that they may not be: and
let them know that God ruleth in Jacob unto the ends of the earth.
Selah.

59:14 And at evening let them return; and let them make a noise like a
dog, and go round about the city.

59:15 Let them wander up and down for meat, and grudge if they be not
satisfied.

59:16 But I will sing of thy power; yea, I will sing aloud of thy
mercy in the morning: for thou hast been my defence and refuge in the
day of my trouble.

59:17 Unto thee, O my strength, will I sing: for God is my defence,
and the God of my mercy.



60:1 O God, thou hast cast us off, thou hast scattered us, thou hast
been displeased; O turn thyself to us again.

60:2 Thou hast made the earth to tremble; thou hast broken it: heal
the breaches thereof; for it shaketh.

60:3 Thou hast shewed thy people hard things: thou hast made us to
drink the wine of astonishment.

60:4 Thou hast given a banner to them that fear thee, that it may be
displayed because of the truth. Selah.

60:5 That thy beloved may be delivered; save with thy right hand, and
hear me.

60:6 God hath spoken in his holiness; I will rejoice, I will divide
Shechem, and mete out the valley of Succoth.

60:7 Gilead is mine, and Manasseh is mine; Ephraim also is the
strength of mine head; Judah is my lawgiver;

60:8 Moab is my washpot; over Edom will I cast out my shoe: Philistia,
triumph thou because of me.

60:9 Who will bring me into the strong city? who will lead me into
Edom?

60:10 Wilt not thou, O God, which hadst cast us off? and thou, O God,
which didst not go out with our armies?

60:11 Give us help from trouble: for vain is the help of man.

60:12 Through God we shall do valiantly: for he it is that shall tread
down our enemies.



61:1 Hear my cry, O God; attend unto my prayer.

61:2 From the end of the earth will I cry unto thee, when my heart is
overwhelmed: lead me to the rock that is higher than I.

61:3 For thou hast been a shelter for me, and a strong tower from the
enemy.

61:4 I will abide in thy tabernacle for ever: I will trust in the
covert of thy wings. Selah.

61:5 For thou, O God, hast heard my vows: thou hast given me the
heritage of those that fear thy name.

61:6 Thou wilt prolong the king's life: and his years as many
generations.

61:7 He shall abide before God for ever: O prepare mercy and truth,
which may preserve him.

61:8 So will I sing praise unto thy name for ever, that I may daily
perform my vows.



62:1 Truly my soul waiteth upon God: from him cometh my salvation.

62:2 He only is my rock and my salvation; he is my defence; I shall
not be greatly moved.

62:3 How long will ye imagine mischief against a man? ye shall be
slain all of you: as a bowing wall shall ye be, and as a tottering
fence.

62:4 They only consult to cast him down from his excellency: they
delight in lies: they bless with their mouth, but they curse inwardly.
Selah.

62:5 My soul, wait thou only upon God; for my expectation is from him.

62:6 He only is my rock and my salvation: he is my defence; I shall
not be moved.

62:7 In God is my salvation and my glory: the rock of my strength, and
my refuge, is in God.

62:8 Trust in him at all times; ye people, pour out your heart before
him: God is a refuge for us. Selah.

62:9 Surely men of low degree are vanity, and men of high degree are a
lie: to be laid in the balance, they are altogether lighter than
vanity.

62:10 Trust not in oppression, and become not vain in robbery: if
riches increase, set not your heart upon them.

62:11 God hath spoken once; twice have I heard this; that power
belongeth unto God.

62:12 Also unto thee, O Lord, belongeth mercy: for thou renderest to
every man according to his work.



63:1 O God, thou art my God; early will I seek thee: my soul thirsteth
for thee, my flesh longeth for thee in a dry and thirsty land, where
no water is;

63:2 To see thy power and thy glory, so as I have seen thee in the
sanctuary.

63:3 Because thy lovingkindness is better than life, my lips shall
praise thee.

63:4 Thus will I bless thee while I live: I will lift up my hands in
thy name.

63:5 My soul shall be satisfied as with marrow and fatness; and my
mouth shall praise thee with joyful lips:

63:6 When I remember thee upon my bed, and meditate on thee in the
night watches.

63:7 Because thou hast been my help, therefore in the shadow of thy
wings will I rejoice.

63:8 My soul followeth hard after thee: thy right hand upholdeth me.

63:9 But those that seek my soul, to destroy it, shall go into the
lower parts of the earth.

63:10 They shall fall by the sword: they shall be a portion for foxes.

63:11 But the king shall rejoice in God; every one that sweareth by
him shall glory: but the mouth of them that speak lies shall be
stopped.



64:1 Hear my voice, O God, in my prayer: preserve my life from fear of
the enemy.

64:2 Hide me from the secret counsel of the wicked; from the
insurrection of the workers of iniquity:

64:3 Who whet their tongue like a sword, and bend their bows to shoot
their arrows, even bitter words:

64:4 That they may shoot in secret at the perfect: suddenly do they
shoot at him, and fear not.

64:5 They encourage themselves in an evil matter: they commune of
laying snares privily; they say, Who shall see them?

64:6 They search out iniquities; they accomplish a diligent search:
both the inward thought of every one of them, and the heart, is deep.

64:7 But God shall shoot at them with an arrow; suddenly shall they be
wounded.

64:8 So they shall make their own tongue to fall upon themselves: all
that see them shall flee away.

64:9 And all men shall fear, and shall declare the work of God; for
they shall wisely consider of his doing.

64:10 The righteous shall be glad in the LORD, and shall trust in him;
and all the upright in heart shall glory.



65:1 Praise waiteth for thee, O God, in Sion: and unto thee shall the
vow be performed.

65:2 O thou that hearest prayer, unto thee shall all flesh come.

65:3 Iniquities prevail against me: as for our transgressions, thou
shalt purge them away.

65:4 Blessed is the man whom thou choosest, and causest to approach
unto thee, that he may dwell in thy courts: we shall be satisfied with
the goodness of thy house, even of thy holy temple.

65:5 By terrible things in righteousness wilt thou answer us, O God of
our salvation; who art the confidence of all the ends of the earth,
and of them that are afar off upon the sea:

65:6 Which by his strength setteth fast the mountains; being girded
with power:

65:7 Which stilleth the noise of the seas, the noise of their waves,
and the tumult of the people.

65:8 They also that dwell in the uttermost parts are afraid at thy
tokens: thou makest the outgoings of the morning and evening to
rejoice.

65:9 Thou visitest the earth, and waterest it: thou greatly enrichest
it with the river of God, which is full of water: thou preparest them
corn, when thou hast so provided for it.

65:10 Thou waterest the ridges thereof abundantly: thou settlest the
furrows thereof: thou makest it soft with showers: thou blessest the
springing thereof.

65:11 Thou crownest the year with thy goodness; and thy paths drop
fatness.

65:12 They drop upon the pastures of the wilderness: and the little
hills rejoice on every side.

65:13 The pastures are clothed with flocks; the valleys also are
covered over with corn; they shout for joy, they also sing.



66:1 Make a joyful noise unto God, all ye lands:

66:2 Sing forth the honour of his name: make his praise glorious.

66:3 Say unto God, How terrible art thou in thy works! through the
greatness of thy power shall thine enemies submit themselves unto
thee.

66:4 All the earth shall worship thee, and shall sing unto thee; they
shall sing to thy name. Selah.

66:5 Come and see the works of God: he is terrible in his doing toward
the children of men.

66:6 He turned the sea into dry land: they went through the flood on
foot: there did we rejoice in him.

66:7 He ruleth by his power for ever; his eyes behold the nations: let
not the rebellious exalt themselves. Selah.

66:8 O bless our God, ye people, and make the voice of his praise to
be heard:

66:9 Which holdeth our soul in life, and suffereth not our feet to be
moved.

66:10 For thou, O God, hast proved us: thou hast tried us, as silver
is tried.

66:11 Thou broughtest us into the net; thou laidst affliction upon our
loins.

66:12 Thou hast caused men to ride over our heads; we went through
fire and through water: but thou broughtest us out into a wealthy
place.

66:13 I will go into thy house with burnt offerings: I will pay thee
my vows,

66:14 Which my lips have uttered, and my mouth hath spoken, when I was
in trouble.

66:15 I will offer unto thee burnt sacrifices of fatlings, with the
incense of rams; I will offer bullocks with goats. Selah.

66:16 Come and hear, all ye that fear God, and I will declare what he
hath done for my soul.

66:17 I cried unto him with my mouth, and he was extolled with my
tongue.

66:18 If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me:

66:19 But verily God hath heard me; he hath attended to the voice of
my prayer.

66:20 Blessed be God, which hath not turned away my prayer, nor his
mercy from me.



67:1 God be merciful unto us, and bless us; and cause his face to
shine upon us; Selah.

67:2 That thy way may be known upon earth, thy saving health among all
nations.

67:3 Let the people praise thee, O God; let all the people praise
thee.

67:4 O let the nations be glad and sing for joy: for thou shalt judge
the people righteously, and govern the nations upon earth. Selah.

67:5 Let the people praise thee, O God; let all the people praise
thee.

67:6 Then shall the earth yield her increase; and God, even our own
God, shall bless us.

67:7 God shall bless us; and all the ends of the earth shall fear him.



68:1 Let God arise, let his enemies be scattered: let them also that
hate him flee before him.

68:2 As smoke is driven away, so drive them away: as wax melteth
before the fire, so let the wicked perish at the presence of God.

68:3 But let the righteous be glad; let them rejoice before God: yea,
let them exceedingly rejoice.

68:4 Sing unto God, sing praises to his name: extol him that rideth
upon the heavens by his name JAH, and rejoice before him.

68:5 A father of the fatherless, and a judge of the widows, is God in
his holy habitation.

68:6 God setteth the solitary in families: he bringeth out those which
are bound with chains: but the rebellious dwell in a dry land.

68:7 O God, when thou wentest forth before thy people, when thou didst
march through the wilderness; Selah:

68:8 The earth shook, the heavens also dropped at the presence of God:
even Sinai itself was moved at the presence of God, the God of Israel.

68:9 Thou, O God, didst send a plentiful rain, whereby thou didst
confirm thine inheritance, when it was weary.

68:10 Thy congregation hath dwelt therein: thou, O God, hast prepared
of thy goodness for the poor.

68:11 The Lord gave the word: great was the company of those that
published it.

68:12 Kings of armies did flee apace: and she that tarried at home
divided the spoil.

68:13 Though ye have lien among the pots, yet shall ye be as the wings
of a dove covered with silver, and her feathers with yellow gold.

68:14 When the Almighty scattered kings in it, it was white as snow in
Salmon.

68:15 The hill of God is as the hill of Bashan; an high hill as the
hill of Bashan.

68:16 Why leap ye, ye high hills? this is the hill which God desireth
to dwell in; yea, the LORD will dwell in it for ever.

68:17 The chariots of God are twenty thousand, even thousands of
angels: the Lord is among them, as in Sinai, in the holy place.

68:18 Thou hast ascended on high, thou hast led captivity captive:
thou hast received gifts for men; yea, for the rebellious also, that
the LORD God might dwell among them.

68:19 Blessed be the Lord, who daily loadeth us with benefits, even
the God of our salvation. Selah.

68:20 He that is our God is the God of salvation; and unto GOD the
Lord belong the issues from death.

68:21 But God shall wound the head of his enemies, and the hairy scalp
of such an one as goeth on still in his trespasses.

68:22 The Lord said, I will bring again from Bashan, I will bring my
people again from the depths of the sea:

68:23 That thy foot may be dipped in the blood of thine enemies, and
the tongue of thy dogs in the same.

68:24 They have seen thy goings, O God; even the goings of my God, my
King, in the sanctuary.

68:25 The singers went before, the players on instruments followed
after; among them were the damsels playing with timbrels.

68:26 Bless ye God in the congregations, even the Lord, from the
fountain of Israel.

68:27 There is little Benjamin with their ruler, the princes of Judah
and their council, the princes of Zebulun, and the princes of
Naphtali.

68:28 Thy God hath commanded thy strength: strengthen, O God, that
which thou hast wrought for us.

68:29 Because of thy temple at Jerusalem shall kings bring presents
unto thee.

68:30 Rebuke the company of spearmen, the multitude of the bulls, with
the calves of the people, till every one submit himself with pieces of
silver: scatter thou the people that delight in war.

68:31 Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out
her hands unto God.

68:32 Sing unto God, ye kingdoms of the earth; O sing praises unto the
Lord; Selah:

68:33 To him that rideth upon the heavens of heavens, which were of
old; lo, he doth send out his voice, and that a mighty voice.

68:34 Ascribe ye strength unto God: his excellency is over Israel, and
his strength is in the clouds.

68:35 O God, thou art terrible out of thy holy places: the God of
Israel is he that giveth strength and power unto his people. Blessed
be God.



69:1 Save me, O God; for the waters are come in unto my soul.

69:2 I sink in deep mire, where there is no standing: I am come into
deep waters, where the floods overflow me.

69:3 I am weary of my crying: my throat is dried: mine eyes fail while
I wait for my God.

69:4 They that hate me without a cause are more than the hairs of mine
head: they that would destroy me, being mine enemies wrongfully, are
mighty: then I restored that which I took not away.

69:5 O God, thou knowest my foolishness; and my sins are not hid from
thee.

69:6 Let not them that wait on thee, O Lord GOD of hosts, be ashamed
for my sake: let not those that seek thee be confounded for my sake, O
God of Israel.

69:7 Because for thy sake I have borne reproach; shame hath covered my
face.

69:8 I am become a stranger unto my brethren, and an alien unto my
mother's children.

69:9 For the zeal of thine house hath eaten me up; and the reproaches
of them that reproached thee are fallen upon me.

69:10 When I wept, and chastened my soul with fasting, that was to my
reproach.

69:11 I made sackcloth also my garment; and I became a proverb to
them.

69:12 They that sit in the gate speak against me; and I was the song
of the drunkards.

69:13 But as for me, my prayer is unto thee, O LORD, in an acceptable
time: O God, in the multitude of thy mercy hear me, in the truth of
thy salvation.

69:14 Deliver me out of the mire, and let me not sink: let me be
delivered from them that hate me, and out of the deep waters.

69:15 Let not the waterflood overflow me, neither let the deep swallow
me up, and let not the pit shut her mouth upon me.

69:16 Hear me, O LORD; for thy lovingkindness is good: turn unto me
according to the multitude of thy tender mercies.

69:17 And hide not thy face from thy servant; for I am in trouble:
hear me speedily.

69:18 Draw nigh unto my soul, and redeem it: deliver me because of
mine enemies.

69:19 Thou hast known my reproach, and my shame, and my dishonour:
mine adversaries are all before thee.

69:20 Reproach hath broken my heart; and I am full of heaviness: and I
looked for some to take pity, but there was none; and for comforters,
but I found none.

69:21 They gave me also gall for my meat; and in my thirst they gave
me vinegar to drink.

69:22 Let their table become a snare before them: and that which
should have been for their welfare, let it become a trap.

69:23 Let their eyes be darkened, that they see not; and make their
loins continually to shake.

69:24 Pour out thine indignation upon them, and let thy wrathful anger
take hold of them.

69:25 Let their habitation be desolate; and let none dwell in their
tents.

69:26 For they persecute him whom thou hast smitten; and they talk to
the grief of those whom thou hast wounded.

69:27 Add iniquity unto their iniquity: and let them not come into thy
righteousness.

69:28 Let them be blotted out of the book of the living, and not be
written with the righteous.

69:29 But I am poor and sorrowful: let thy salvation, O God, set me up
on high.

69:30 I will praise the name of God with a song, and will magnify him
with thanksgiving.

69:31 This also shall please the LORD better than an ox or bullock
that hath horns and hoofs.

69:32 The humble shall see this, and be glad: and your heart shall
live that seek God.

69:33 For the LORD heareth the poor, and despiseth not his prisoners.

69:34 Let the heaven and earth praise him, the seas, and every thing
that moveth therein.

69:35 For God will save Zion, and will build the cities of Judah: that
they may dwell there, and have it in possession.

69:36 The seed also of his servants shall inherit it: and they that
love his name shall dwell therein.



70:1 Make haste, O God, to deliver me; make haste to help me, O Lord.

70:2 Let them be ashamed and confounded that seek after my soul: let
them be turned backward, and put to confusion, that desire my hurt.

70:3 Let them be turned back for a reward of their shame that say,
Aha, aha.

70:4 Let all those that seek thee rejoice and be glad in thee: and let
such as love thy salvation say continually, Let God be magnified.

70:5 But I am poor and needy: make haste unto me, O God: thou art my
help and my deliverer; O LORD, make no tarrying.



71:1 In thee, O LORD, do I put my trust: let me never be put to
confusion.

71:2 Deliver me in thy righteousness, and cause me to escape: incline
thine ear unto me, and save me.

71:3 Be thou my strong habitation, whereunto I may continually resort:
thou hast given commandment to save me; for thou art my rock and my
fortress.

71:4 Deliver me, O my God, out of the hand of the wicked, out of the
hand of the unrighteous and cruel man.

71:5 For thou art my hope, O Lord GOD: thou art my trust from my
youth.

71:6 By thee have I been holden up from the womb: thou art he that
took me out of my mother's bowels: my praise shall be continually of
thee.

71:7 I am as a wonder unto many; but thou art my strong refuge.

71:8 Let my mouth be filled with thy praise and with thy honour all
the day.

71:9 Cast me not off in the time of old age; forsake me not when my
strength faileth.

71:10 For mine enemies speak against me; and they that lay wait for my
soul take counsel together,

71:11 Saying, God hath forsaken him: persecute and take him; for there
is none to deliver him.

71:12 O God, be not far from me: O my God, make haste for my help.

71:13 Let them be confounded and consumed that are adversaries to my
soul; let them be covered with reproach and dishonour that seek my
hurt.

71:14 But I will hope continually, and will yet praise thee more and
more.

71:15 My mouth shall shew forth thy righteousness and thy salvation
all the day; for I know not the numbers thereof.

71:16 I will go in the strength of the Lord GOD: I will make mention
of thy righteousness, even of thine only.

71:17 O God, thou hast taught me from my youth: and hitherto have I
declared thy wondrous works.

71:18 Now also when I am old and greyheaded, O God, forsake me not;
until I have shewed thy strength unto this generation, and thy power
to every one that is to come.

71:19 Thy righteousness also, O God, is very high, who hast done great
things: O God, who is like unto thee!

71:20 Thou, which hast shewed me great and sore troubles, shalt
quicken me again, and shalt bring me up again from the depths of the
earth.

71:21 Thou shalt increase my greatness, and comfort me on every side.

71:22 I will also praise thee with the psaltery, even thy truth, O my
God: unto thee will I sing with the harp, O thou Holy One of Israel.

71:23 My lips shall greatly rejoice when I sing unto thee; and my
soul, which thou hast redeemed.

71:24 My tongue also shall talk of thy righteousness all the day long:
for they are confounded, for they are brought unto shame, that seek my
hurt.



72:1 Give the king thy judgments, O God, and thy righteousness unto
the king's son.

72:2 He shall judge thy people with righteousness, and thy poor with
judgment.

72:3 The mountains shall bring peace to the people, and the little
hills, by righteousness.

72:4 He shall judge the poor of the people, he shall save the children
of the needy, and shall break in pieces the oppressor.

72:5 They shall fear thee as long as the sun and moon endure,
throughout all generations.

72:6 He shall come down like rain upon the mown grass: as showers that
water the earth.

72:7 In his days shall the righteous flourish; and abundance of peace
so long as the moon endureth.

72:8 He shall have dominion also from sea to sea, and from the river
unto the ends of the earth.

72:9 They that dwell in the wilderness shall bow before him; and his
enemies shall lick the dust.

72:10 The kings of Tarshish and of the isles shall bring presents: the
kings of Sheba and Seba shall offer gifts.

72:11 Yea, all kings shall fall down before him: all nations shall
serve him.

72:12 For he shall deliver the needy when he crieth; the poor also,
and him that hath no helper.

72:13 He shall spare the poor and needy, and shall save the souls of
the needy.

72:14 He shall redeem their soul from deceit and violence: and
precious shall their blood be in his sight.

72:15 And he shall live, and to him shall be given of the gold of
Sheba: prayer also shall be made for him continually; and daily shall
he be praised.

72:16 There shall be an handful of corn in the earth upon the top of
the mountains; the fruit thereof shall shake like Lebanon: and they of
the city shall flourish like grass of the earth.

72:17 His name shall endure for ever: his name shall be continued as
long as the sun: and men shall be blessed in him: all nations shall
call him blessed.

72:18 Blessed be the LORD God, the God of Israel, who only doeth
wondrous things.

72:19 And blessed be his glorious name for ever: and let the whole
earth be filled with his glory; Amen, and Amen.

72:20 The prayers of David the son of Jesse are ended.



73:1 Truly God is good to Israel, even to such as are of a clean
heart.

73:2 But as for me, my feet were almost gone; my steps had well nigh
slipped.

73:3 For I was envious at the foolish, when I saw the prosperity of
the wicked.

73:4 For there are no bands in their death: but their strength is
firm.

73:5 They are not in trouble as other men; neither are they plagued
like other men.

73:6 Therefore pride compasseth them about as a chain; violence
covereth them as a garment.

73:7 Their eyes stand out with fatness: they have more than heart
could wish.

73:8 They are corrupt, and speak wickedly concerning oppression: they
speak loftily.

73:9 They set their mouth against the heavens, and their tongue
walketh through the earth.

73:10 Therefore his people return hither: and waters of a full cup are
wrung out to them.

73:11 And they say, How doth God know? and is there knowledge in the
most High?

73:12 Behold, these are the ungodly, who prosper in the world; they
increase in riches.

73:13 Verily I have cleansed my heart in vain, and washed my hands in
innocency.

73:14 For all the day long have I been plagued, and chastened every
morning.

73:15 If I say, I will speak thus; behold, I should offend against the
generation of thy children.

73:16 When I thought to know this, it was too painful for me;

73:17 Until I went into the sanctuary of God; then understood I their
end.

73:18 Surely thou didst set them in slippery places: thou castedst
them down into destruction.

73:19 How are they brought into desolation, as in a moment! they are
utterly consumed with terrors.

73:20 As a dream when one awaketh; so, O Lord, when thou awakest, thou
shalt despise their image.

73:21 Thus my heart was grieved, and I was pricked in my reins.

73:22 So foolish was I, and ignorant: I was as a beast before thee.

73:23 Nevertheless I am continually with thee: thou hast holden me by
my right hand.

73:24 Thou shalt guide me with thy counsel, and afterward receive me
to glory.

73:25 Whom have I in heaven but thee? and there is none upon earth
that I desire beside thee.

73:26 My flesh and my heart faileth: but God is the strength of my
heart, and my portion for ever.

73:27 For, lo, they that are far from thee shall perish: thou hast
destroyed all them that go a whoring from thee.

73:28 But it is good for me to draw near to God: I have put my trust
in the Lord GOD, that I may declare all thy works.



74:1 O God, why hast thou cast us off for ever? why doth thine anger
smoke against the sheep of thy pasture?

74:2 Remember thy congregation, which thou hast purchased of old; the
rod of thine inheritance, which thou hast redeemed; this mount Zion,
wherein thou hast dwelt.

74:3 Lift up thy feet unto the perpetual desolations; even all that
the enemy hath done wickedly in the sanctuary.

74:4 Thine enemies roar in the midst of thy congregations; they set up
their ensigns for signs.

74:5 A man was famous according as he had lifted up axes upon the
thick trees.

74:6 But now they break down the carved work thereof at once with axes
and hammers.

74:7 They have cast fire into thy sanctuary, they have defiled by
casting down the dwelling place of thy name to the ground.

74:8 They said in their hearts, Let us destroy them together: they
have burned up all the synagogues of God in the land.

74:9 We see not our signs: there is no more any prophet: neither is
there among us any that knoweth how long.

74:10 O God, how long shall the adversary reproach? shall the enemy
blaspheme thy name for ever?

74:11 Why withdrawest thou thy hand, even thy right hand? pluck it out
of thy bosom.

74:12 For God is my King of old, working salvation in the midst of the
earth.

74:13 Thou didst divide the sea by thy strength: thou brakest the
heads of the dragons in the waters.

74:14 Thou brakest the heads of leviathan in pieces, and gavest him to
be meat to the people inhabiting the wilderness.

74:15 Thou didst cleave the fountain and the flood: thou driedst up
mighty rivers.

74:16 The day is thine, the night also is thine: thou hast prepared
the light and the sun.

74:17 Thou hast set all the borders of the earth: thou hast made
summer and winter.

74:18 Remember this, that the enemy hath reproached, O LORD, and that
the foolish people have blasphemed thy name.

74:19 O deliver not the soul of thy turtledove unto the multitude of
the wicked: forget not the congregation of thy poor for ever.

74:20 Have respect unto the covenant: for the dark places of the earth
are full of the habitations of cruelty.

74:21 O let not the oppressed return ashamed: let the poor and needy
praise thy name.

74:22 Arise, O God, plead thine own cause: remember how the foolish
man reproacheth thee daily.

74:23 Forget not the voice of thine enemies: the tumult of those that
rise up against thee increaseth continually.



75:1 Unto thee, O God, do we give thanks, unto thee do we give thanks:
for that thy name is near thy wondrous works declare.

75:2 When I shall receive the congregation I will judge uprightly.

75:3 The earth and all the inhabitants thereof are dissolved: I bear
up the pillars of it. Selah.

75:4 I said unto the fools, Deal not foolishly: and to the wicked,
Lift not up the horn:

75:5 Lift not up your horn on high: speak not with a stiff neck.

75:6 For promotion cometh neither from the east, nor from the west,
nor from the south.

75:7 But God is the judge: he putteth down one, and setteth up
another.

75:8 For in the hand of the LORD there is a cup, and the wine is red;
it is full of mixture; and he poureth out of the same: but the dregs
thereof, all the wicked of the earth shall wring them out, and drink
them.

75:9 But I will declare for ever; I will sing praises to the God of
Jacob.

75:10 All the horns of the wicked also will I cut off; but the horns
of the righteous shall be exalted.



76:1 In Judah is God known: his name is great in Israel.

76:2 In Salem also is his tabernacle, and his dwelling place in Zion.

76:3 There brake he the arrows of the bow, the shield, and the sword,
and the battle. Selah.

76:4 Thou art more glorious and excellent than the mountains of prey.

76:5 The stouthearted are spoiled, they have slept their sleep: and
none of the men of might have found their hands.

76:6 At thy rebuke, O God of Jacob, both the chariot and horse are
cast into a dead sleep.

76:7 Thou, even thou, art to be feared: and who may stand in thy sight
when once thou art angry?

76:8 Thou didst cause judgment to be heard from heaven; the earth
feared, and was still,

76:9 When God arose to judgment, to save all the meek of the earth.
Selah.

76:10 Surely the wrath of man shall praise thee: the remainder of
wrath shalt thou restrain.

76:11 Vow, and pay unto the LORD your God: let all that be round about
him bring presents unto him that ought to be feared.

76:12 He shall cut off the spirit of princes: he is terrible to the
kings of the earth.



77:1 I cried unto God with my voice, even unto God with my voice; and
he gave ear unto me.

77:2 In the day of my trouble I sought the Lord: my sore ran in the
night, and ceased not: my soul refused to be comforted.

77:3 I remembered God, and was troubled: I complained, and my spirit
was overwhelmed. Selah.

77:4 Thou holdest mine eyes waking: I am so troubled that I cannot
speak.

77:5 I have considered the days of old, the years of ancient times.

77:6 I call to remembrance my song in the night: I commune with mine
own heart: and my spirit made diligent search.

77:7 Will the Lord cast off for ever? and will he be favourable no
more?

77:8 Is his mercy clean gone for ever? doth his promise fail for
evermore?

77:9 Hath God forgotten to be gracious? hath he in anger shut up his
tender mercies? Selah.

77:10 And I said, This is my infirmity: but I will remember the years
of the right hand of the most High.

77:11 I will remember the works of the LORD: surely I will remember
thy wonders of old.

77:12 I will meditate also of all thy work, and talk of thy doings.

77:13 Thy way, O God, is in the sanctuary: who is so great a God as
our God?

77:14 Thou art the God that doest wonders: thou hast declared thy
strength among the people.

77:15 Thou hast with thine arm redeemed thy people, the sons of Jacob
and Joseph. Selah.

77:16 The waters saw thee, O God, the waters saw thee; they were
afraid: the depths also were troubled.

77:17 The clouds poured out water: the skies sent out a sound: thine
arrows also went abroad.

77:18 The voice of thy thunder was in the heaven: the lightnings
lightened the world: the earth trembled and shook.

77:19 Thy way is in the sea, and thy path in the great waters, and thy
footsteps are not known.

77:20 Thou leddest thy people like a flock by the hand of Moses and
Aaron.



78:1 Give ear, O my people, to my law: incline your ears to the words
of my mouth.

78:2 I will open my mouth in a parable: I will utter dark sayings of
old:

78:3 Which we have heard and known, and our fathers have told us.

78:4 We will not hide them from their children, shewing to the
generation to come the praises of the LORD, and his strength, and his
wonderful works that he hath done.

78:5 For he established a testimony in Jacob, and appointed a law in
Israel, which he commanded our fathers, that they should make them
known to their children:

78:6 That the generation to come might know them, even the children
which should be born; who should arise and declare them to their
children:

78:7 That they might set their hope in God, and not forget the works
of God, but keep his commandments:

78:8 And might not be as their fathers, a stubborn and rebellious
generation; a generation that set not their heart aright, and whose
spirit was not stedfast with God.

78:9 The children of Ephraim, being armed, and carrying bows, turned
back in the day of battle.

78:10 They kept not the covenant of God, and refused to walk in his
law;

78:11 And forgat his works, and his wonders that he had shewed them.

78:12 Marvellous things did he in the sight of their fathers, in the
land of Egypt, in the field of Zoan.

78:13 He divided the sea, and caused them to pass through; and he made
the waters to stand as an heap.

78:14 In the daytime also he led them with a cloud, and all the night
with a light of fire.

78:15 He clave the rocks in the wilderness, and gave them drink as out
of the great depths.

78:16 He brought streams also out of the rock, and caused waters to
run down like rivers.

78:17 And they sinned yet more against him by provoking the most High
in the wilderness.

78:18 And they tempted God in their heart by asking meat for their
lust.

78:19 Yea, they spake against God; they said, Can God furnish a table
in the wilderness?

78:20 Behold, he smote the rock, that the waters gushed out, and the
streams overflowed; can he give bread also? can he provide flesh for
his people?

78:21 Therefore the LORD heard this, and was wroth: so a fire was
kindled against Jacob, and anger also came up against Israel;

78:22 Because they believed not in God, and trusted not in his
salvation:

78:23 Though he had commanded the clouds from above, and opened the
doors of heaven,

78:24 And had rained down manna upon them to eat, and had given them
of the corn of heaven.

78:25 Man did eat angels' food: he sent them meat to the full.

78:26 He caused an east wind to blow in the heaven: and by his power
he brought in the south wind.

78:27 He rained flesh also upon them as dust, and feathered fowls like
as the sand of the sea:

78:28 And he let it fall in the midst of their camp, round about their
habitations.

78:29 So they did eat, and were well filled: for he gave them their
own desire;

78:30 They were not estranged from their lust. But while their meat
was yet in their mouths,

78:31 The wrath of God came upon them, and slew the fattest of them,
and smote down the chosen men of Israel.

78:32 For all this they sinned still, and believed not for his
wondrous works.

78:33 Therefore their days did he consume in vanity, and their years
in trouble.

78:34 When he slew them, then they sought him: and they returned and
enquired early after God.

78:35 And they remembered that God was their rock, and the high God
their redeemer.

78:36 Nevertheless they did flatter him with their mouth, and they
lied unto him with their tongues.

78:37 For their heart was not right with him, neither were they
stedfast in his covenant.

78:38 But he, being full of compassion, forgave their iniquity, and
destroyed them not: yea, many a time turned he his anger away, and did
not stir up all his wrath.

78:39 For he remembered that they were but flesh; a wind that passeth
away, and cometh not again.

78:40 How oft did they provoke him in the wilderness, and grieve him
in the desert!

78:41 Yea, they turned back and tempted God, and limited the Holy One
of Israel.

78:42 They remembered not his hand, nor the day when he delivered them
from the enemy.

78:43 How he had wrought his signs in Egypt, and his wonders in the
field of Zoan.

78:44 And had turned their rivers into blood; and their floods, that
they could not drink.

78:45 He sent divers sorts of flies among them, which devoured them;
and frogs, which destroyed them.

78:46 He gave also their increase unto the caterpiller, and their
labour unto the locust.

78:47 He destroyed their vines with hail, and their sycomore trees
with frost.

78:48 He gave up their cattle also to the hail, and their flocks to
hot thunderbolts.

78:49 He cast upon them the fierceness of his anger, wrath, and
indignation, and trouble, by sending evil angels among them.

78:50 He made a way to his anger; he spared not their soul from death,
but gave their life over to the pestilence;

78:51 And smote all the firstborn in Egypt; the chief of their
strength in the tabernacles of Ham:

78:52 But made his own people to go forth like sheep, and guided them
in the wilderness like a flock.

78:53 And he led them on safely, so that they feared not: but the sea
overwhelmed their enemies.

78:54 And he brought them to the border of his sanctuary, even to this
mountain, which his right hand had purchased.

78:55 He cast out the heathen also before them, and divided them an
inheritance by line, and made the tribes of Israel to dwell in their
tents.

78:56 Yet they tempted and provoked the most high God, and kept not
his testimonies:

78:57 But turned back, and dealt unfaithfully like their fathers: they
were turned aside like a deceitful bow.

78:58 For they provoked him to anger with their high places, and moved
him to jealousy with their graven images.

78:59 When God heard this, he was wroth, and greatly abhorred Israel:

78:60 So that he forsook the tabernacle of Shiloh, the tent which he
placed among men;

78:61 And delivered his strength into captivity, and his glory into
the enemy's hand.

78:62 He gave his people over also unto the sword; and was wroth with
his inheritance.

78:63 The fire consumed their young men; and their maidens were not
given to marriage.

78:64 Their priests fell by the sword; and their widows made no
lamentation.

78:65 Then the LORD awaked as one out of sleep, and like a mighty man
that shouteth by reason of wine.

78:66 And he smote his enemies in the hinder parts: he put them to a
perpetual reproach.

78:67 Moreover he refused the tabernacle of Joseph, and chose not the
tribe of Ephraim:

78:68 But chose the tribe of Judah, the mount Zion which he loved.

78:69 And he built his sanctuary like high palaces, like the earth
which he hath established for ever.

78:70 He chose David also his servant, and took him from the
sheepfolds:

78:71 From following the ewes great with young he brought him to feed
Jacob his people, and Israel his inheritance.

78:72 So he fed them according to the integrity of his heart; and
guided them by the skilfulness of his hands.



79:1 O God, the heathen are come into thine inheritance; thy holy
temple have they defiled; they have laid Jerusalem on heaps.

79:2 The dead bodies of thy servants have they given to be meat unto
the fowls of the heaven, the flesh of thy saints unto the beasts of
the earth.

79:3 Their blood have they shed like water round about Jerusalem; and
there was none to bury them.

79:4 We are become a reproach to our neighbours, a scorn and derision
to them that are round about us.

79:5 How long, LORD? wilt thou be angry for ever? shall thy jealousy
burn like fire?

79:6 Pour out thy wrath upon the heathen that have not known thee, and
upon the kingdoms that have not called upon thy name.

79:7 For they have devoured Jacob, and laid waste his dwelling place.

79:8 O remember not against us former iniquities: let thy tender
mercies speedily prevent us: for we are brought very low.

79:9 Help us, O God of our salvation, for the glory of thy name: and
deliver us, and purge away our sins, for thy name's sake.

79:10 Wherefore should the heathen say, Where is their God? let him be
known among the heathen in our sight by the revenging of the blood of
thy servants which is shed.

79:11 Let the sighing of the prisoner come before thee; according to
the greatness of thy power preserve thou those that are appointed to
die;

79:12 And render unto our neighbours sevenfold into their bosom their
reproach, wherewith they have reproached thee, O Lord.

79:13 So we thy people and sheep of thy pasture will give thee thanks
for ever: we will shew forth thy praise to all generations.



80:1 Give ear, O Shepherd of Israel, thou that leadest Joseph like a
flock; thou that dwellest between the cherubims, shine forth.

80:2 Before Ephraim and Benjamin and Manasseh stir up thy strength,
and come and save us.

80:3 Turn us again, O God, and cause thy face to shine; and we shall
be saved.

80:4 O LORD God of hosts, how long wilt thou be angry against the
prayer of thy people?

80:5 Thou feedest them with the bread of tears; and givest them tears
to drink in great measure.

80:6 Thou makest us a strife unto our neighbours: and our enemies
laugh among themselves.

80:7 Turn us again, O God of hosts, and cause thy face to shine; and
we shall be saved.

80:8 Thou hast brought a vine out of Egypt: thou hast cast out the
heathen, and planted it.

80:9 Thou preparedst room before it, and didst cause it to take deep
root, and it filled the land.

80:10 The hills were covered with the shadow of it, and the boughs
thereof were like the goodly cedars.

80:11 She sent out her boughs unto the sea, and her branches unto the
river.

80:12 Why hast thou then broken down her hedges, so that all they
which pass by the way do pluck her?

80:13 The boar out of the wood doth waste it, and the wild beast of
the field doth devour it.

80:14 Return, we beseech thee, O God of hosts: look down from heaven,
and behold, and visit this vine;

80:15 And the vineyard which thy right hand hath planted, and the
branch that thou madest strong for thyself.

80:16 It is burned with fire, it is cut down: they perish at the
rebuke of thy countenance.

80:17 Let thy hand be upon the man of thy right hand, upon the son of
man whom thou madest strong for thyself.

80:18 So will not we go back from thee: quicken us, and we will call
upon thy name.

80:19 Turn us again, O LORD God of hosts, cause thy face to shine; and
we shall be saved.



81:1 Sing aloud unto God our strength: make a joyful noise unto the
God of Jacob.

81:2 Take a psalm, and bring hither the timbrel, the pleasant harp
with the psaltery.

81:3 Blow up the trumpet in the new moon, in the time appointed, on
our solemn feast day.

81:4 For this was a statute for Israel, and a law of the God of Jacob.

81:5 This he ordained in Joseph for a testimony, when he went out
through the land of Egypt: where I heard a language that I understood
not.

81:6 I removed his shoulder from the burden: his hands were delivered
from the pots.

81:7 Thou calledst in trouble, and I delivered thee; I answered thee
in the secret place of thunder: I proved thee at the waters of
Meribah.

Selah.

81:8 Hear, O my people, and I will testify unto thee: O Israel, if
thou wilt hearken unto me;

81:9 There shall no strange god be in thee; neither shalt thou worship
any strange god.

81:10 I am the LORD thy God, which brought thee out of the land of
Egypt: open thy mouth wide, and I will fill it.

81:11 But my people would not hearken to my voice; and Israel would
none of me.

81:12 So I gave them up unto their own hearts' lust: and they walked
in their own counsels.

81:13 Oh that my people had hearkened unto me, and Israel had walked
in my ways!

81:14 I should soon have subdued their enemies, and turned my hand
against their adversaries.

81:15 The haters of the LORD should have submitted themselves unto
him: but their time should have endured for ever.

81:16 He should have fed them also with the finest of the wheat: and
with honey out of the rock should I have satisfied thee.



82:1 God standeth in the congregation of the mighty; he judgeth among
the gods.

82:2 How long will ye judge unjustly, and accept the persons of the
wicked? Selah.

82:3 Defend the poor and fatherless: do justice to the afflicted and
needy.

82:4 Deliver the poor and needy: rid them out of the hand of the
wicked.

82:5 They know not, neither will they understand; they walk on in
darkness: all the foundations of the earth are out of course.

82:6 I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most
High.

82:7 But ye shall die like men, and fall like one of the princes.

82:8 Arise, O God, judge the earth: for thou shalt inherit all
nations.



83:1 Keep not thou silence, O God: hold not thy peace, and be not
still, O God.

83:2 For, lo, thine enemies make a tumult: and they that hate thee
have lifted up the head.

83:3 They have taken crafty counsel against thy people, and consulted
against thy hidden ones.

83:4 They have said, Come, and let us cut them off from being a
nation; that the name of Israel may be no more in remembrance.

83:5 For they have consulted together with one consent: they are
confederate against thee:

83:6 The tabernacles of Edom, and the Ishmaelites; of Moab, and the
Hagarenes;

83:7 Gebal, and Ammon, and Amalek; the Philistines with the
inhabitants of Tyre;

83:8 Assur also is joined with them: they have holpen the children of
Lot.

Selah.

83:9 Do unto them as unto the Midianites; as to Sisera, as to Jabin,
at the brook of Kison:

83:10 Which perished at Endor: they became as dung for the earth.

83:11 Make their nobles like Oreb, and like Zeeb: yea, all their
princes as Zebah, and as Zalmunna:

83:12 Who said, Let us take to ourselves the houses of God in
possession.

83:13 O my God, make them like a wheel; as the stubble before the
wind.

83:14 As the fire burneth a wood, and as the flame setteth the
mountains on fire;

83:15 So persecute them with thy tempest, and make them afraid with
thy storm.

83:16 Fill their faces with shame; that they may seek thy name, O
LORD.

83:17 Let them be confounded and troubled for ever; yea, let them be
put to shame, and perish:

83:18 That men may know that thou, whose name alone is JEHOVAH, art
the most high over all the earth.



84:1 How amiable are thy tabernacles, O LORD of hosts!

84:2 My soul longeth, yea, even fainteth for the courts of the LORD:
my heart and my flesh crieth out for the living God.

84:3 Yea, the sparrow hath found an house, and the swallow a nest for
herself, where she may lay her young, even thine altars, O LORD of
hosts, my King, and my God.

84:4 Blessed are they that dwell in thy house: they will be still
praising thee. Selah.

84:5 Blessed is the man whose strength is in thee; in whose heart are
the ways of them.

84:6 Who passing through the valley of Baca make it a well; the rain
also filleth the pools.

84:7 They go from strength to strength, every one of them in Zion
appeareth before God.

84:8 O LORD God of hosts, hear my prayer: give ear, O God of Jacob.
Selah.

84:9 Behold, O God our shield, and look upon the face of thine
anointed.

84:10 For a day in thy courts is better than a thousand. I had rather
be a doorkeeper in the house of my God, than to dwell in the tents of
wickedness.

84:11 For the LORD God is a sun and shield: the LORD will give grace
and glory: no good thing will he withhold from them that walk
uprightly.

84:12 O LORD of hosts, blessed is the man that trusteth in thee.



85:1 Lord, thou hast been favourable unto thy land: thou hast brought
back the captivity of Jacob.

85:2 Thou hast forgiven the iniquity of thy people, thou hast covered
all their sin. Selah.

85:3 Thou hast taken away all thy wrath: thou hast turned thyself from
the fierceness of thine anger.

85:4 Turn us, O God of our salvation, and cause thine anger toward us
to cease.

85:5 Wilt thou be angry with us for ever? wilt thou draw out thine
anger to all generations?

85:6 Wilt thou not revive us again: that thy people may rejoice in
thee?

85:7 Shew us thy mercy, O LORD, and grant us thy salvation.

85:8 I will hear what God the LORD will speak: for he will speak peace
unto his people, and to his saints: but let them not turn again to
folly.

85:9 Surely his salvation is nigh them that fear him; that glory may
dwell in our land.

85:10 Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have
kissed each other.

85:11 Truth shall spring out of the earth; and righteousness shall
look down from heaven.

85:12 Yea, the LORD shall give that which is good; and our land shall
yield her increase.

85:13 Righteousness shall go before him; and shall set us in the way
of his steps.



86:1 Bow down thine ear, O LORD, hear me: for I am poor and needy.

86:2 Preserve my soul; for I am holy: O thou my God, save thy servant
that trusteth in thee.

86:3 Be merciful unto me, O Lord: for I cry unto thee daily.

86:4 Rejoice the soul of thy servant: for unto thee, O Lord, do I lift
up my soul.

86:5 For thou, Lord, art good, and ready to forgive; and plenteous in
mercy unto all them that call upon thee.

86:6 Give ear, O LORD, unto my prayer; and attend to the voice of my
supplications.

86:7 In the day of my trouble I will call upon thee: for thou wilt
answer me.

86:8 Among the gods there is none like unto thee, O Lord; neither are
there any works like unto thy works.

86:9 All nations whom thou hast made shall come and worship before
thee, O Lord; and shall glorify thy name.

86:10 For thou art great, and doest wondrous things: thou art God
alone.

86:11 Teach me thy way, O LORD; I will walk in thy truth: unite my
heart to fear thy name.

86:12 I will praise thee, O Lord my God, with all my heart: and I will
glorify thy name for evermore.

86:13 For great is thy mercy toward me: and thou hast delivered my
soul from the lowest hell.

86:14 O God, the proud are risen against me, and the assemblies of
violent men have sought after my soul; and have not set thee before
them.

86:15 But thou, O Lord, art a God full of compassion, and gracious,
long suffering, and plenteous in mercy and truth.

86:16 O turn unto me, and have mercy upon me; give thy strength unto
thy servant, and save the son of thine handmaid.

86:17 Shew me a token for good; that they which hate me may see it,
and be ashamed: because thou, LORD, hast holpen me, and comforted me.



87:1 His foundation is in the holy mountains.

87:2 The LORD loveth the gates of Zion more than all the dwellings of
Jacob.

87:3 Glorious things are spoken of thee, O city of God. Selah.

87:4 I will make mention of Rahab and Babylon to them that know me:
behold Philistia, and Tyre, with Ethiopia; this man was born there.

87:5 And of Zion it shall be said, This and that man was born in her:
and the highest himself shall establish her.

87:6 The LORD shall count, when he writeth up the people, that this
man was born there. Selah.

87:7 As well the singers as the players on instruments shall be there:
all my springs are in thee.



88:1 O lord God of my salvation, I have cried day and night before
thee:

88:2 Let my prayer come before thee: incline thine ear unto my cry;

88:3 For my soul is full of troubles: and my life draweth nigh unto
the grave.

88:4 I am counted with them that go down into the pit: I am as a man
that hath no strength:

88:5 Free among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave, whom
thou rememberest no more: and they are cut off from thy hand.

88:6 Thou hast laid me in the lowest pit, in darkness, in the deeps.

88:7 Thy wrath lieth hard upon me, and thou hast afflicted me with all
thy waves. Selah.

88:8 Thou hast put away mine acquaintance far from me; thou hast made
me an abomination unto them: I am shut up, and I cannot come forth.

88:9 Mine eye mourneth by reason of affliction: LORD, I have called
daily upon thee, I have stretched out my hands unto thee.

88:10 Wilt thou shew wonders to the dead? shall the dead arise and
praise thee? Selah.

88:11 Shall thy lovingkindness be declared in the grave? or thy
faithfulness in destruction?

88:12 Shall thy wonders be known in the dark? and thy righteousness in
the land of forgetfulness?

88:13 But unto thee have I cried, O LORD; and in the morning shall my
prayer prevent thee.

88:14 LORD, why castest thou off my soul? why hidest thou thy face
from me?

88:15 I am afflicted and ready to die from my youth up: while I suffer
thy terrors I am distracted.

88:16 Thy fierce wrath goeth over me; thy terrors have cut me off.

88:17 They came round about me daily like water; they compassed me
about together.

88:18 Lover and friend hast thou put far from me, and mine
acquaintance into darkness.



89:1 I will sing of the mercies of the LORD for ever: with my mouth
will I make known thy faithfulness to all generations.

89:2 For I have said, Mercy shall be built up for ever: thy
faithfulness shalt thou establish in the very heavens.

89:3 I have made a covenant with my chosen, I have sworn unto David my
servant,

89:4 Thy seed will I establish for ever, and build up thy throne to
all generations. Selah.

89:5 And the heavens shall praise thy wonders, O LORD: thy
faithfulness also in the congregation of the saints.

89:6 For who in the heaven can be compared unto the LORD? who among
the sons of the mighty can be likened unto the LORD?

89:7 God is greatly to be feared in the assembly of the saints, and to
be had in reverence of all them that are about him.

89:8 O LORD God of hosts, who is a strong LORD like unto thee? or to
thy faithfulness round about thee?

89:9 Thou rulest the raging of the sea: when the waves thereof arise,
thou stillest them.

89:10 Thou hast broken Rahab in pieces, as one that is slain; thou
hast scattered thine enemies with thy strong arm.

89:11 The heavens are thine, the earth also is thine: as for the world
and the fulness thereof, thou hast founded them.

89:12 The north and the south thou hast created them: Tabor and Hermon
shall rejoice in thy name.

89:13 Thou hast a mighty arm: strong is thy hand, and high is thy
right hand.

89:14 Justice and judgment are the habitation of thy throne: mercy and
truth shall go before thy face.

89:15 Blessed is the people that know the joyful sound: they shall
walk, O LORD, in the light of thy countenance.

89:16 In thy name shall they rejoice all the day: and in thy
righteousness shall they be exalted.

89:17 For thou art the glory of their strength: and in thy favour our
horn shall be exalted.

89:18 For the LORD is our defence; and the Holy One of Israel is our
king.

89:19 Then thou spakest in vision to thy holy one, and saidst, I have
laid help upon one that is mighty; I have exalted one chosen out of
the people.

89:20 I have found David my servant; with my holy oil have I anointed
him:

89:21 With whom my hand shall be established: mine arm also shall
strengthen him.

89:22 The enemy shall not exact upon him; nor the son of wickedness
afflict him.

89:23 And I will beat down his foes before his face, and plague them
that hate him.

89:24 But my faithfulness and my mercy shall be with him: and in my
name shall his horn be exalted.

89:25 I will set his hand also in the sea, and his right hand in the
rivers.

89:26 He shall cry unto me, Thou art my father, my God, and the rock
of my salvation.

89:27 Also I will make him my firstborn, higher than the kings of the
earth.

89:28 My mercy will I keep for him for evermore, and my covenant shall
stand fast with him.

89:29 His seed also will I make to endure for ever, and his throne as
the days of heaven.

89:30 If his children forsake my law, and walk not in my judgments;

89:31 If they break my statutes, and keep not my commandments;

89:32 Then will I visit their transgression with the rod, and their
iniquity with stripes.

89:33 Nevertheless my lovingkindness will I not utterly take from him,
nor suffer my faithfulness to fail.

89:34 My covenant will I not break, nor alter the thing that is gone
out of my lips.

89:35 Once have I sworn by my holiness that I will not lie unto David.

89:36 His seed shall endure for ever, and his throne as the sun before
me.

89:37 It shall be established for ever as the moon, and as a faithful
witness in heaven. Selah.

89:38 But thou hast cast off and abhorred, thou hast been wroth with
thine anointed.

89:39 Thou hast made void the covenant of thy servant: thou hast
profaned his crown by casting it to the ground.

89:40 Thou hast broken down all his hedges; thou hast brought his
strong holds to ruin.

89:41 All that pass by the way spoil him: he is a reproach to his
neighbours.

89:42 Thou hast set up the right hand of his adversaries; thou hast
made all his enemies to rejoice.

89:43 Thou hast also turned the edge of his sword, and hast not made
him to stand in the battle.

89:44 Thou hast made his glory to cease, and cast his throne down to
the ground.

89:45 The days of his youth hast thou shortened: thou hast covered him
with shame. Selah.

89:46 How long, LORD? wilt thou hide thyself for ever? shall thy wrath
burn like fire?

89:47 Remember how short my time is: wherefore hast thou made all men
in vain?

89:48 What man is he that liveth, and shall not see death? shall he
deliver his soul from the hand of the grave? Selah.

89:49 Lord, where are thy former lovingkindnesses, which thou swarest
unto David in thy truth?

89:50 Remember, Lord, the reproach of thy servants; how I do bear in
my bosom the reproach of all the mighty people;

89:51 Wherewith thine enemies have reproached, O LORD; wherewith they
have reproached the footsteps of thine anointed.

89:52 Blessed be the LORD for evermore. Amen, and Amen.



90:1 Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations.

90:2 Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst
formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting,
thou art God.

90:3 Thou turnest man to destruction; and sayest, Return, ye children
of men.

90:4 For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is
past, and as a watch in the night.

90:5 Thou carriest them away as with a flood; they are as a sleep: in
the morning they are like grass which groweth up.

90:6 In the morning it flourisheth, and groweth up; in the evening it
is cut down, and withereth.

90:7 For we are consumed by thine anger, and by thy wrath are we
troubled.

90:8 Thou hast set our iniquities before thee, our secret sins in the
light of thy countenance.

90:9 For all our days are passed away in thy wrath: we spend our years
as a tale that is told.

90:10 The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by
reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength
labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.

90:11 Who knoweth the power of thine anger? even according to thy
fear, so is thy wrath.

90:12 So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts
unto wisdom.

90:13 Return, O LORD, how long? and let it repent thee concerning thy
servants.

90:14 O satisfy us early with thy mercy; that we may rejoice and be
glad all our days.

90:15 Make us glad according to the days wherein thou hast afflicted
us, and the years wherein we have seen evil.

90:16 Let thy work appear unto thy servants, and thy glory unto their
children.

90:17 And let the beauty of the LORD our God be upon us: and establish
thou the work of our hands upon us; yea, the work of our hands
establish thou it.



91:1 He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide
under the shadow of the Almighty.

91:2 I will say of the LORD, He is my refuge and my fortress: my God;
in him will I trust.

91:3 Surely he shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler, and
from the noisome pestilence.

91:4 He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt
thou trust: his truth shall be thy shield and buckler.

91:5 Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the
arrow that flieth by day;

91:6 Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the
destruction that wasteth at noonday.

91:7 A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right
hand; but it shall not come nigh thee.

91:8 Only with thine eyes shalt thou behold and see the reward of the
wicked.

91:9 Because thou hast made the LORD, which is my refuge, even the
most High, thy habitation;

91:10 There shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come
nigh thy dwelling.

91:11 For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in
all thy ways.

91:12 They shall bear thee up in their hands, lest thou dash thy foot
against a stone.

91:13 Thou shalt tread upon the lion and adder: the young lion and the
dragon shalt thou trample under feet.

91:14 Because he hath set his love upon me, therefore will I deliver
him: I will set him on high, because he hath known my name.

91:15 He shall call upon me, and I will answer him: I will be with him
in trouble; I will deliver him, and honour him.

91:16 With long life will I satisfy him, and shew him my salvation.



92:1 It is a good thing to give thanks unto the Lord, and to sing
praises unto thy name, O most High:

92:2 To shew forth thy lovingkindness in the morning, and thy
faithfulness every night,

92:3 Upon an instrument of ten strings, and upon the psaltery; upon
the harp with a solemn sound.

92:4 For thou, LORD, hast made me glad through thy work: I will
triumph in the works of thy hands.

92:5 O LORD, how great are thy works! and thy thoughts are very deep.

92:6 A brutish man knoweth not; neither doth a fool understand this.

92:7 When the wicked spring as the grass, and when all the workers of
iniquity do flourish; it is that they shall be destroyed for ever:

92:8 But thou, LORD, art most high for evermore.

92:9 For, lo, thine enemies, O LORD, for, lo, thine enemies shall
perish; all the workers of iniquity shall be scattered.

92:10 But my horn shalt thou exalt like the horn of an unicorn: I
shall be anointed with fresh oil.

92:11 Mine eye also shall see my desire on mine enemies, and mine ears
shall hear my desire of the wicked that rise up against me.

92:12 The righteous shall flourish like the palm tree: he shall grow
like a cedar in Lebanon.

92:13 Those that be planted in the house of the LORD shall flourish in
the courts of our God.

92:14 They shall still bring forth fruit in old age; they shall be fat
and flourishing;

92:15 To shew that the LORD is upright: he is my rock, and there is no
unrighteousness in him.



93:1 The LORD reigneth, he is clothed with majesty; the LORD is
clothed with strength, wherewith he hath girded himself: the world
also is stablished, that it cannot be moved.

93:2 Thy throne is established of old: thou art from everlasting.

93:3 The floods have lifted up, O LORD, the floods have lifted up
their voice; the floods lift up their waves.

93:4 The LORD on high is mightier than the noise of many waters, yea,
than the mighty waves of the sea.

93:5 Thy testimonies are very sure: holiness becometh thine house, O
LORD, for ever.



94:1 O Lord God, to whom vengeance belongeth; O God, to whom vengeance
belongeth, shew thyself.

94:2 Lift up thyself, thou judge of the earth: render a reward to the
proud.

94:3 LORD, how long shall the wicked, how long shall the wicked
triumph?

94:4 How long shall they utter and speak hard things? and all the
workers of iniquity boast themselves?

94:5 They break in pieces thy people, O LORD, and afflict thine
heritage.

94:6 They slay the widow and the stranger, and murder the fatherless.

94:7 Yet they say, The LORD shall not see, neither shall the God of
Jacob regard it.

94:8 Understand, ye brutish among the people: and ye fools, when will
ye be wise?

94:9 He that planted the ear, shall he not hear? he that formed the
eye, shall he not see?

94:10 He that chastiseth the heathen, shall not he correct? he that
teacheth man knowledge, shall not he know?

94:11 The LORD knoweth the thoughts of man, that they are vanity.

94:12 Blessed is the man whom thou chastenest, O LORD, and teachest
him out of thy law;

94:13 That thou mayest give him rest from the days of adversity, until
the pit be digged for the wicked.

94:14 For the LORD will not cast off his people, neither will he
forsake his inheritance.

94:15 But judgment shall return unto righteousness: and all the
upright in heart shall follow it.

94:16 Who will rise up for me against the evildoers? or who will stand
up for me against the workers of iniquity?

94:17 Unless the LORD had been my help, my soul had almost dwelt in
silence.

94:18 When I said, My foot slippeth; thy mercy, O LORD, held me up.

94:19 In the multitude of my thoughts within me thy comforts delight
my soul.

94:20 Shall the throne of iniquity have fellowship with thee, which
frameth mischief by a law?

94:21 They gather themselves together against the soul of the
righteous, and condemn the innocent blood.

94:22 But the LORD is my defence; and my God is the rock of my refuge.

94:23 And he shall bring upon them their own iniquity, and shall cut
them off in their own wickedness; yea, the LORD our God shall cut them
off.



95:1 O come, let us sing unto the LORD: let us make a joyful noise to
the rock of our salvation.

95:2 Let us come before his presence with thanksgiving, and make a
joyful noise unto him with psalms.

95:3 For the LORD is a great God, and a great King above all gods.

95:4 In his hand are the deep places of the earth: the strength of the
hills is his also.

95:5 The sea is his, and he made it: and his hands formed the dry
land.

95:6 O come, let us worship and bow down: let us kneel before the LORD
our maker.

95:7 For he is our God; and we are the people of his pasture, and the
sheep of his hand. To day if ye will hear his voice,

95:8 Harden not your heart, as in the provocation, and as in the day
of temptation in the wilderness:

95:9 When your fathers tempted me, proved me, and saw my work.

95:10 Forty years long was I grieved with this generation, and said,
It is a people that do err in their heart, and they have not known my
ways:

95:11 Unto whom I sware in my wrath that they should not enter into my
rest.



96:1 O sing unto the LORD a new song: sing unto the LORD, all the
earth.

96:2 Sing unto the LORD, bless his name; shew forth his salvation from
day to day.

96:3 Declare his glory among the heathen, his wonders among all
people.

96:4 For the LORD is great, and greatly to be praised: he is to be
feared above all gods.

96:5 For all the gods of the nations are idols: but the LORD made the
heavens.

96:6 Honour and majesty are before him: strength and beauty are in his
sanctuary.

96:7 Give unto the LORD, O ye kindreds of the people, give unto the
LORD glory and strength.

96:8 Give unto the LORD the glory due unto his name: bring an
offering, and come into his courts.

96:9 O worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness: fear before him,
all the earth.

96:10 Say among the heathen that the LORD reigneth: the world also
shall be established that it shall not be moved: he shall judge the
people righteously.

96:11 Let the heavens rejoice, and let the earth be glad; let the sea
roar, and the fulness thereof.

96:12 Let the field be joyful, and all that is therein: then shall all
the trees of the wood rejoice

96:13 Before the LORD: for he cometh, for he cometh to judge the
earth: he shall judge the world with righteousness, and the people
with his truth.



97:1 The LORD reigneth; let the earth rejoice; let the multitude of
isles be glad thereof.

97:2 Clouds and darkness are round about him: righteousness and
judgment are the habitation of his throne.

97:3 A fire goeth before him, and burneth up his enemies round about.

97:4 His lightnings enlightened the world: the earth saw, and
trembled.

97:5 The hills melted like wax at the presence of the LORD, at the
presence of the Lord of the whole earth.

97:6 The heavens declare his righteousness, and all the people see his
glory.

97:7 Confounded be all they that serve graven images, that boast
themselves of idols: worship him, all ye gods.

97:8 Zion heard, and was glad; and the daughters of Judah rejoiced
because of thy judgments, O LORD.

97:9 For thou, LORD, art high above all the earth: thou art exalted
far above all gods.

97:10 Ye that love the LORD, hate evil: he preserveth the souls of his
saints; he delivereth them out of the hand of the wicked.

97:11 Light is sown for the righteous, and gladness for the upright in
heart.

97:12 Rejoice in the LORD, ye righteous; and give thanks at the
remembrance of his holiness.



98:1 O sing unto the LORD a new song; for he hath done marvellous
things: his right hand, and his holy arm, hath gotten him the victory.

98:2 The LORD hath made known his salvation: his righteousness hath he
openly shewed in the sight of the heathen.

98:3 He hath remembered his mercy and his truth toward the house of
Israel: all the ends of the earth have seen the salvation of our God.

98:4 Make a joyful noise unto the LORD, all the earth: make a loud
noise, and rejoice, and sing praise.

98:5 Sing unto the LORD with the harp; with the harp, and the voice of
a psalm.

98:6 With trumpets and sound of cornet make a joyful noise before the
LORD, the King.

98:7 Let the sea roar, and the fulness thereof; the world, and they
that dwell therein.

98:8 Let the floods clap their hands: let the hills be joyful together

98:9 Before the LORD; for he cometh to judge the earth: with
righteousness shall he judge the world, and the people with equity.



99:1 The LORD reigneth; let the people tremble: he sitteth between the
cherubims; let the earth be moved.

99:2 The LORD is great in Zion; and he is high above all the people.

99:3 Let them praise thy great and terrible name; for it is holy.

99:4 The king's strength also loveth judgment; thou dost establish
equity, thou executest judgment and righteousness in Jacob.

99:5 Exalt ye the LORD our God, and worship at his footstool; for he
is holy.

99:6 Moses and Aaron among his priests, and Samuel among them that
call upon his name; they called upon the LORD, and he answered them.

99:7 He spake unto them in the cloudy pillar: they kept his
testimonies, and the ordinance that he gave them.

99:8 Thou answeredst them, O LORD our God: thou wast a God that
forgavest them, though thou tookest vengeance of their inventions.

99:9 Exalt the LORD our God, and worship at his holy hill; for the
LORD our God is holy.



100:1 Make a joyful noise unto the LORD, all ye lands.

100:2 Serve the LORD with gladness: come before his presence with
singing.

100:3 Know ye that the LORD he is God: it is he that hath made us, and
not we ourselves; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.

100:4 Enter into his gates with thanksgiving, and into his courts with
praise: be thankful unto him, and bless his name.

100:5 For the LORD is good; his mercy is everlasting; and his truth
endureth to all generations.



101:1 I will sing of mercy and judgment: unto thee, O LORD, will I
sing.

101:2 I will behave myself wisely in a perfect way. O when wilt thou
come unto me? I will walk within my house with a perfect heart.

101:3 I will set no wicked thing before mine eyes: I hate the work of
them that turn aside; it shall not cleave to me.

101:4 A froward heart shall depart from me: I will not know a wicked
person.

101:5 Whoso privily slandereth his neighbour, him will I cut off: him
that hath an high look and a proud heart will not I suffer.

101:6 Mine eyes shall be upon the faithful of the land, that they may
dwell with me: he that walketh in a perfect way, he shall serve me.

101:7 He that worketh deceit shall not dwell within my house: he that
telleth lies shall not tarry in my sight.

101:8 I will early destroy all the wicked of the land; that I may cut
off all wicked doers from the city of the LORD.



102:1 Hear my prayer, O LORD, and let my cry come unto thee.

102:2 Hide not thy face from me in the day when I am in trouble;
incline thine ear unto me: in the day when I call answer me speedily.

102:3 For my days are consumed like smoke, and my bones are burned as
an hearth.

102:4 My heart is smitten, and withered like grass; so that I forget
to eat my bread.

102:5 By reason of the voice of my groaning my bones cleave to my
skin.

102:6 I am like a pelican of the wilderness: I am like an owl of the
desert.

102:7 I watch, and am as a sparrow alone upon the house top.

102:8 Mine enemies reproach me all the day; and they that are mad
against me are sworn against me.

102:9 For I have eaten ashes like bread, and mingled my drink with
weeping.

102:10 Because of thine indignation and thy wrath: for thou hast
lifted me up, and cast me down.

102:11 My days are like a shadow that declineth; and I am withered
like grass.

102:12 But thou, O LORD, shall endure for ever; and thy remembrance
unto all generations.

102:13 Thou shalt arise, and have mercy upon Zion: for the time to
favour her, yea, the set time, is come.

102:14 For thy servants take pleasure in her stones, and favour the
dust thereof.

102:15 So the heathen shall fear the name of the LORD, and all the
kings of the earth thy glory.

102:16 When the LORD shall build up Zion, he shall appear in his
glory.

102:17 He will regard the prayer of the destitute, and not despise
their prayer.

102:18 This shall be written for the generation to come: and the
people which shall be created shall praise the LORD.

102:19 For he hath looked down from the height of his sanctuary; from
heaven did the LORD behold the earth;

102:20 To hear the groaning of the prisoner; to loose those that are
appointed to death;

102:21 To declare the name of the LORD in Zion, and his praise in
Jerusalem;

102:22 When the people are gathered together, and the kingdoms, to
serve the LORD.

102:23 He weakened my strength in the way; he shortened my days.

102:24 I said, O my God, take me not away in the midst of my days: thy
years are throughout all generations.

102:25 Of old hast thou laid the foundation of the earth: and the
heavens are the work of thy hands.

102:26 They shall perish, but thou shalt endure: yea, all of them
shall wax old like a garment; as a vesture shalt thou change them, and
they shall be changed:

102:27 But thou art the same, and thy years shall have no end.

102:28 The children of thy servants shall continue, and their seed
shall be established before thee.



103:1 Bless the LORD, O my soul: and all that is within me, bless his
holy name.

103:2 Bless the LORD, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits:

103:3 Who forgiveth all thine iniquities; who healeth all thy
diseases;

103:4 Who redeemeth thy life from destruction; who crowneth thee with
lovingkindness and tender mercies;

103:5 Who satisfieth thy mouth with good things; so that thy youth is
renewed like the eagle's.

103:6 The LORD executeth righteousness and judgment for all that are
oppressed.

103:7 He made known his ways unto Moses, his acts unto the children of
Israel.

103:8 The LORD is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and plenteous
in mercy.

103:9 He will not always chide: neither will he keep his anger for
ever.

103:10 He hath not dealt with us after our sins; nor rewarded us
according to our iniquities.

103:11 For as the heaven is high above the earth, so great is his
mercy toward them that fear him.

103:12 As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our
transgressions from us.

103:13 Like as a father pitieth his children, so the LORD pitieth them
that fear him.

103:14 For he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust.

103:15 As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so
he flourisheth.

103:16 For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place
thereof shall know it no more.

103:17 But the mercy of the LORD is from everlasting to everlasting
upon them that fear him, and his righteousness unto children's
children;

103:18 To such as keep his covenant, and to those that remember his
commandments to do them.

103:19 The LORD hath prepared his throne in the heavens; and his
kingdom ruleth over all.

103:20 Bless the LORD, ye his angels, that excel in strength, that do
his commandments, hearkening unto the voice of his word.

103:21 Bless ye the LORD, all ye his hosts; ye ministers of his, that
do his pleasure.

103:22 Bless the LORD, all his works in all places of his dominion:
bless the LORD, O my soul.



104:1 Bless the LORD, O my soul. O LORD my God, thou art very great;
thou art clothed with honour and majesty.

104:2 Who coverest thyself with light as with a garment: who
stretchest out the heavens like a curtain:

104:3 Who layeth the beams of his chambers in the waters: who maketh
the clouds his chariot: who walketh upon the wings of the wind:

104:4 Who maketh his angels spirits; his ministers a flaming fire:

104:5 Who laid the foundations of the earth, that it should not be
removed for ever.

104:6 Thou coveredst it with the deep as with a garment: the waters
stood above the mountains.

104:7 At thy rebuke they fled; at the voice of thy thunder they hasted
away.

104:8 They go up by the mountains; they go down by the valleys unto
the place which thou hast founded for them.

104:9 Thou hast set a bound that they may not pass over; that they
turn not again to cover the earth.

104:10 He sendeth the springs into the valleys, which run among the
hills.

104:11 They give drink to every beast of the field: the wild asses
quench their thirst.

104:12 By them shall the fowls of the heaven have their habitation,
which sing among the branches.

104:13 He watereth the hills from his chambers: the earth is satisfied
with the fruit of thy works.

104:14 He causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, and herb for the
service of man: that he may bring forth food out of the earth;

104:15 And wine that maketh glad the heart of man, and oil to make his
face to shine, and bread which strengtheneth man's heart.

104:16 The trees of the LORD are full of sap; the cedars of Lebanon,
which he hath planted;

104:17 Where the birds make their nests: as for the stork, the fir
trees are her house.

104:18 The high hills are a refuge for the wild goats; and the rocks
for the conies.

104:19 He appointed the moon for seasons: the sun knoweth his going
down.

104:20 Thou makest darkness, and it is night: wherein all the beasts
of the forest do creep forth.

104:21 The young lions roar after their prey, and seek their meat from
God.

104:22 The sun ariseth, they gather themselves together, and lay them
down in their dens.

104:23 Man goeth forth unto his work and to his labour until the
evening.

104:24 O LORD, how manifold are thy works! in wisdom hast thou made
them all: the earth is full of thy riches.

104:25 So is this great and wide sea, wherein are things creeping
innumerable, both small and great beasts.

104:26 There go the ships: there is that leviathan, whom thou hast
made to play therein.

104:27 These wait all upon thee; that thou mayest give them their meat
in due season.

104:28 That thou givest them they gather: thou openest thine hand,
they are filled with good.

104:29 Thou hidest thy face, they are troubled: thou takest away their
breath, they die, and return to their dust.

104:30 Thou sendest forth thy spirit, they are created: and thou
renewest the face of the earth.

104:31 The glory of the LORD shall endure for ever: the LORD shall
rejoice in his works.

104:32 He looketh on the earth, and it trembleth: he toucheth the
hills, and they smoke.

104:33 I will sing unto the LORD as long as I live: I will sing praise
to my God while I have my being.

104:34 My meditation of him shall be sweet: I will be glad in the
LORD.

104:35 Let the sinners be consumed out of the earth, and let the
wicked be no more. Bless thou the LORD, O my soul. Praise ye the LORD.



105:1 O give thanks unto the LORD; call upon his name: make known his
deeds among the people.

105:2 Sing unto him, sing psalms unto him: talk ye of all his wondrous
works.

105:3 Glory ye in his holy name: let the heart of them rejoice that
seek the LORD.

105:4 Seek the LORD, and his strength: seek his face evermore.

105:5 Remember his marvellous works that he hath done; his wonders,
and the judgments of his mouth;

105:6 O ye seed of Abraham his servant, ye children of Jacob his
chosen.

105:7 He is the LORD our God: his judgments are in all the earth.

105:8 He hath remembered his covenant for ever, the word which he
commanded to a thousand generations.

105:9 Which covenant he made with Abraham, and his oath unto Isaac;

105:10 And confirmed the same unto Jacob for a law, and to Israel for
an everlasting covenant:

105:11 Saying, Unto thee will I give the land of Canaan, the lot of
your inheritance:

105:12 When they were but a few men in number; yea, very few, and
strangers in it.

105:13 When they went from one nation to another, from one kingdom to
another people;

105:14 He suffered no man to do them wrong: yea, he reproved kings for
their sakes;

105:15 Saying, Touch not mine anointed, and do my prophets no harm.

105:16 Moreover he called for a famine upon the land: he brake the
whole staff of bread.

105:17 He sent a man before them, even Joseph, who was sold for a
servant:

105:18 Whose feet they hurt with fetters: he was laid in iron:

105:19 Until the time that his word came: the word of the LORD tried
him.

105:20 The king sent and loosed him; even the ruler of the people, and
let him go free.

105:21 He made him lord of his house, and ruler of all his substance:

105:22 To bind his princes at his pleasure; and teach his senators
wisdom.

105:23 Israel also came into Egypt; and Jacob sojourned in the land of
Ham.

105:24 And he increased his people greatly; and made them stronger
than their enemies.

105:25 He turned their heart to hate his people, to deal subtilly with
his servants.

105:26 He sent Moses his servant; and Aaron whom he had chosen.

105:27 They shewed his signs among them, and wonders in the land of
Ham.

105:28 He sent darkness, and made it dark; and they rebelled not
against his word.

105:29 He turned their waters into blood, and slew their fish.

105:30 Their land brought forth frogs in abundance, in the chambers of
their kings.

105:31 He spake, and there came divers sorts of flies, and lice in all
their coasts.

105:32 He gave them hail for rain, and flaming fire in their land.

105:33 He smote their vines also and their fig trees; and brake the
trees of their coasts.

105:34 He spake, and the locusts came, and caterpillers, and that
without number,

105:35 And did eat up all the herbs in their land, and devoured the
fruit of their ground.

105:36 He smote also all the firstborn in their land, the chief of all
their strength.

105:37 He brought them forth also with silver and gold: and there was
not one feeble person among their tribes.

105:38 Egypt was glad when they departed: for the fear of them fell
upon them.

105:39 He spread a cloud for a covering; and fire to give light in the
night.

105:40 The people asked, and he brought quails, and satisfied them
with the bread of heaven.

105:41 He opened the rock, and the waters gushed out; they ran in the
dry places like a river.

105:42 For he remembered his holy promise, and Abraham his servant.

105:43 And he brought forth his people with joy, and his chosen with
gladness:

105:44 And gave them the lands of the heathen: and they inherited the
labour of the people;

105:45 That they might observe his statutes, and keep his laws. Praise
ye the LORD.



106:1 Praise ye the LORD. O give thanks unto the LORD; for he is good:
for his mercy endureth for ever.

106:2 Who can utter the mighty acts of the LORD? who can shew forth
all his praise?

106:3 Blessed are they that keep judgment, and he that doeth
righteousness at all times.

106:4 Remember me, O LORD, with the favour that thou bearest unto thy
people: O visit me with thy salvation;

106:5 That I may see the good of thy chosen, that I may rejoice in the
gladness of thy nation, that I may glory with thine inheritance.

106:6 We have sinned with our fathers, we have committed iniquity, we
have done wickedly.

106:7 Our fathers understood not thy wonders in Egypt; they remembered
not the multitude of thy mercies; but provoked him at the sea, even at
the Red sea.

106:8 Nevertheless he saved them for his name's sake, that he might
make his mighty power to be known.

106:9 He rebuked the Red sea also, and it was dried up: so he led them
through the depths, as through the wilderness.

106:10 And he saved them from the hand of him that hated them, and
redeemed them from the hand of the enemy.

106:11 And the waters covered their enemies: there was not one of them
left.

106:12 Then believed they his words; they sang his praise.

106:13 They soon forgat his works; they waited not for his counsel:

106:14 But lusted exceedingly in the wilderness, and tempted God in
the desert.

106:15 And he gave them their request; but sent leanness into their
soul.

106:16 They envied Moses also in the camp, and Aaron the saint of the
LORD.

106:17 The earth opened and swallowed up Dathan and covered the
company of Abiram.

106:18 And a fire was kindled in their company; the flame burned up
the wicked.

106:19 They made a calf in Horeb, and worshipped the molten image.

106:20 Thus they changed their glory into the similitude of an ox that
eateth grass.

106:21 They forgat God their saviour, which had done great things in
Egypt;

106:22 Wondrous works in the land of Ham, and terrible things by the
Red sea.

106:23 Therefore he said that he would destroy them, had not Moses his
chosen stood before him in the breach, to turn away his wrath, lest he
should destroy them.

106:24 Yea, they despised the pleasant land, they believed not his
word:

106:25 But murmured in their tents, and hearkened not unto the voice
of the LORD.

106:26 Therefore he lifted up his hand against them, to overthrow them
in the wilderness:

106:27 To overthrow their seed also among the nations, and to scatter
them in the lands.

106:28 They joined themselves also unto Baalpeor, and ate the
sacrifices of the dead.

106:29 Thus they provoked him to anger with their inventions: and the
plague brake in upon them.

106:30 Then stood up Phinehas, and executed judgment: and so the
plague was stayed.

106:31 And that was counted unto him for righteousness unto all
generations for evermore.

106:32 They angered him also at the waters of strife, so that it went
ill with Moses for their sakes:

106:33 Because they provoked his spirit, so that he spake unadvisedly
with his lips.

106:34 They did not destroy the nations, concerning whom the LORD
commanded them:

106:35 But were mingled among the heathen, and learned their works.

106:36 And they served their idols: which were a snare unto them.

106:37 Yea, they sacrificed their sons and their daughters unto
devils,

106:38 And shed innocent blood, even the blood of their sons and of
their daughters, whom they sacrificed unto the idols of Canaan: and
the land was polluted with blood.

106:39 Thus were they defiled with their own works, and went a whoring
with their own inventions.

106:40 Therefore was the wrath of the LORD kindled against his people,
insomuch that he abhorred his own inheritance.

106:41 And he gave them into the hand of the heathen; and they that
hated them ruled over them.

106:42 Their enemies also oppressed them, and they were brought into
subjection under their hand.

106:43 Many times did he deliver them; but they provoked him with
their counsel, and were brought low for their iniquity.

106:44 Nevertheless he regarded their affliction, when he heard their
cry:

106:45 And he remembered for them his covenant, and repented according
to the multitude of his mercies.

106:46 He made them also to be pitied of all those that carried them
captives.

106:47 Save us, O LORD our God, and gather us from among the heathen,
to give thanks unto thy holy name, and to triumph in thy praise.

106:48 Blessed be the LORD God of Israel from everlasting to
everlasting: and let all the people say, Amen. Praise ye the LORD.



107:1 O give thanks unto the LORD, for he is good: for his mercy
endureth for ever.

107:2 Let the redeemed of the LORD say so, whom he hath redeemed from
the hand of the enemy;

107:3 And gathered them out of the lands, from the east, and from the
west, from the north, and from the south.

107:4 They wandered in the wilderness in a solitary way; they found no
city to dwell in.

107:5 Hungry and thirsty, their soul fainted in them.

107:6 Then they cried unto the LORD in their trouble, and he delivered
them out of their distresses.

107:7 And he led them forth by the right way, that they might go to a
city of habitation.

107:8 Oh that men would praise the LORD for his goodness, and for his
wonderful works to the children of men!

107:9 For he satisfieth the longing soul, and filleth the hungry soul
with goodness.

107:10 Such as sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, being bound
in affliction and iron;

107:11 Because they rebelled against the words of God, and contemned
the counsel of the most High:

107:12 Therefore he brought down their heart with labour; they fell
down, and there was none to help.

107:13 Then they cried unto the LORD in their trouble, and he saved
them out of their distresses.

107:14 He brought them out of darkness and the shadow of death, and
brake their bands in sunder.

107:15 Oh that men would praise the LORD for his goodness, and for his
wonderful works to the children of men!

107:16 For he hath broken the gates of brass, and cut the bars of iron
in sunder.

107:17 Fools because of their transgression, and because of their
iniquities, are afflicted.

107:18 Their soul abhorreth all manner of meat; and they draw near
unto the gates of death.

107:19 Then they cry unto the LORD in their trouble, and he saveth
them out of their distresses.

107:20 He sent his word, and healed them, and delivered them from
their destructions.

107:21 Oh that men would praise the LORD for his goodness, and for his
wonderful works to the children of men!

107:22 And let them sacrifice the sacrifices of thanksgiving, and
declare his works with rejoicing.

107:23 They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in
great waters;

107:24 These see the works of the LORD, and his wonders in the deep.

107:25 For he commandeth, and raiseth the stormy wind, which lifteth
up the waves thereof.

107:26 They mount up to the heaven, they go down again to the depths:
their soul is melted because of trouble.

107:27 They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man, and are
at their wit's end.

107:28 Then they cry unto the LORD in their trouble, and he bringeth
them out of their distresses.

107:29 He maketh the storm a calm, so that the waves thereof are
still.

107:30 Then are they glad because they be quiet; so he bringeth them
unto their desired haven.

107:31 Oh that men would praise the LORD for his goodness, and for his
wonderful works to the children of men!

107:32 Let them exalt him also in the congregation of the people, and
praise him in the assembly of the elders.

107:33 He turneth rivers into a wilderness, and the watersprings into
dry ground;

107:34 A fruitful land into barrenness, for the wickedness of them
that dwell therein.

107:35 He turneth the wilderness into a standing water, and dry ground
into watersprings.

107:36 And there he maketh the hungry to dwell, that they may prepare
a city for habitation;

107:37 And sow the fields, and plant vineyards, which may yield fruits
of increase.

107:38 He blesseth them also, so that they are multiplied greatly; and
suffereth not their cattle to decrease.

107:39 Again, they are minished and brought low through oppression,
affliction, and sorrow.

107:40 He poureth contempt upon princes, and causeth them to wander in
the wilderness, where there is no way.

107:41 Yet setteth he the poor on high from affliction, and maketh him
families like a flock.

107:42 The righteous shall see it, and rejoice: and all iniquity shall
stop her mouth.

107:43 Whoso is wise, and will observe these things, even they shall
understand the lovingkindness of the LORD.



108:1 O god, my heart is fixed; I will sing and give praise, even with
my glory.

108:2 Awake, psaltery and harp: I myself will awake early.

108:3 I will praise thee, O LORD, among the people: and I will sing
praises unto thee among the nations.

108:4 For thy mercy is great above the heavens: and thy truth reacheth
unto the clouds.

108:5 Be thou exalted, O God, above the heavens: and thy glory above
all the earth;

108:6 That thy beloved may be delivered: save with thy right hand, and
answer me.

108:7 God hath spoken in his holiness; I will rejoice, I will divide
Shechem, and mete out the valley of Succoth.

108:8 Gilead is mine; Manasseh is mine; Ephraim also is the strength
of mine head; Judah is my lawgiver;

108:9 Moab is my washpot; over Edom will I cast out my shoe; over
Philistia will I triumph.

108:10 Who will bring me into the strong city? who will lead me into
Edom?

108:11 Wilt not thou, O God, who hast cast us off? and wilt not thou,
O God, go forth with our hosts?

108:12 Give us help from trouble: for vain is the help of man.

108:13 Through God we shall do valiantly: for he it is that shall
tread down our enemies.



109:1 Hold not thy peace, O God of my praise;

109:2 For the mouth of the wicked and the mouth of the deceitful are
opened against me: they have spoken against me with a lying tongue.

109:3 They compassed me about also with words of hatred; and fought
against me without a cause.

109:4 For my love they are my adversaries: but I give myself unto
prayer.

109:5 And they have rewarded me evil for good, and hatred for my love.

109:6 Set thou a wicked man over him: and let Satan stand at his right
hand.

109:7 When he shall be judged, let him be condemned: and let his
prayer become sin.

109:8 Let his days be few; and let another take his office.

109:9 Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.

109:10 Let his children be continually vagabonds, and beg: let them
seek their bread also out of their desolate places.

109:11 Let the extortioner catch all that he hath; and let the
strangers spoil his labour.

109:12 Let there be none to extend mercy unto him: neither let there
be any to favour his fatherless children.

109:13 Let his posterity be cut off; and in the generation following
let their name be blotted out.

109:14 Let the iniquity of his fathers be remembered with the LORD;
and let not the sin of his mother be blotted out.

109:15 Let them be before the LORD continually, that he may cut off
the memory of them from the earth.

109:16 Because that he remembered not to shew mercy, but persecuted
the poor and needy man, that he might even slay the broken in heart.

109:17 As he loved cursing, so let it come unto him: as he delighted
not in blessing, so let it be far from him.

109:18 As he clothed himself with cursing like as with his garment, so
let it come into his bowels like water, and like oil into his bones.

109:19 Let it be unto him as the garment which covereth him, and for a
girdle wherewith he is girded continually.

109:20 Let this be the reward of mine adversaries from the LORD, and
of them that speak evil against my soul.

109:21 But do thou for me, O GOD the Lord, for thy name's sake:
because thy mercy is good, deliver thou me.

109:22 For I am poor and needy, and my heart is wounded within me.

109:23 I am gone like the shadow when it declineth: I am tossed up and
down as the locust.

109:24 My knees are weak through fasting; and my flesh faileth of
fatness.

109:25 I became also a reproach unto them: when they looked upon me
they shaked their heads.

109:26 Help me, O LORD my God: O save me according to thy mercy:

109:27 That they may know that this is thy hand; that thou, LORD, hast
done it.

109:28 Let them curse, but bless thou: when they arise, let them be
ashamed; but let thy servant rejoice.

109:29 Let mine adversaries be clothed with shame, and let them cover
themselves with their own confusion, as with a mantle.

109:30 I will greatly praise the LORD with my mouth; yea, I will
praise him among the multitude.

109:31 For he shall stand at the right hand of the poor, to save him
from those that condemn his soul.



110:1 The LORD said unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand, until I
make thine enemies thy footstool.

110:2 The LORD shall send the rod of thy strength out of Zion: rule
thou in the midst of thine enemies.

110:3 Thy people shall be willing in the day of thy power, in the
beauties of holiness from the womb of the morning: thou hast the dew
of thy youth.

110:4 The LORD hath sworn, and will not repent, Thou art a priest for
ever after the order of Melchizedek.

110:5 The Lord at thy right hand shall strike through kings in the day
of his wrath.

110:6 He shall judge among the heathen, he shall fill the places with
the dead bodies; he shall wound the heads over many countries.

110:7 He shall drink of the brook in the way: therefore shall he lift
up the head.



111:1 Praise ye the LORD. I will praise the LORD with my whole heart,
in the assembly of the upright, and in the congregation.

111:2 The works of the LORD are great, sought out of all them that
have pleasure therein.

111:3 His work is honourable and glorious: and his righteousness
endureth for ever.

111:4 He hath made his wonderful works to be remembered: the LORD is
gracious and full of compassion.

111:5 He hath given meat unto them that fear him: he will ever be
mindful of his covenant.

111:6 He hath shewed his people the power of his works, that he may
give them the heritage of the heathen.

111:7 The works of his hands are verity and judgment; all his
commandments are sure.

111:8 They stand fast for ever and ever, and are done in truth and
uprightness.

111:9 He sent redemption unto his people: he hath commanded his
covenant for ever: holy and reverend is his name.

111:10 The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom: a good
understanding have all they that do his commandments: his praise
endureth for ever.



112:1 Praise ye the LORD. Blessed is the man that feareth the LORD,
that delighteth greatly in his commandments.

112:2 His seed shall be mighty upon earth: the generation of the
upright shall be blessed.

112:3 Wealth and riches shall be in his house: and his righteousness
endureth for ever.

112:4 Unto the upright there ariseth light in the darkness: he is
gracious, and full of compassion, and righteous.

112:5 A good man sheweth favour, and lendeth: he will guide his
affairs with discretion.

112:6 Surely he shall not be moved for ever: the righteous shall be in
everlasting remembrance.

112:7 He shall not be afraid of evil tidings: his heart is fixed,
trusting in the LORD.

112:8 His heart is established, he shall not be afraid, until he see
his desire upon his enemies.

112:9 He hath dispersed, he hath given to the poor; his righteousness
endureth for ever; his horn shall be exalted with honour.

112:10 The wicked shall see it, and be grieved; he shall gnash with
his teeth, and melt away: the desire of the wicked shall perish.



113:1 Praise ye the LORD. Praise, O ye servants of the LORD, praise
the name of the LORD.

113:2 Blessed be the name of the LORD from this time forth and for
evermore.

113:3 From the rising of the sun unto the going down of the same the
LORD's name is to be praised.

113:4 The LORD is high above all nations, and his glory above the
heavens.

113:5 Who is like unto the LORD our God, who dwelleth on high,

113:6 Who humbleth himself to behold the things that are in heaven,
and in the earth!

113:7 He raiseth up the poor out of the dust, and lifteth the needy
out of the dunghill;

113:8 That he may set him with princes, even with the princes of his
people.

113:9 He maketh the barren woman to keep house, and to be a joyful
mother of children. Praise ye the LORD.



114:1 When Israel went out of Egypt, the house of Jacob from a people
of strange language;

114:2 Judah was his sanctuary, and Israel his dominion.

114:3 The sea saw it, and fled: Jordan was driven back.

114:4 The mountains skipped like rams, and the little hills like
lambs.

114:5 What ailed thee, O thou sea, that thou fleddest? thou Jordan,
that thou wast driven back?

114:6 Ye mountains, that ye skipped like rams; and ye little hills,
like lambs?

114:7 Tremble, thou earth, at the presence of the Lord, at the
presence of the God of Jacob;

114:8 Which turned the rock into a standing water, the flint into a
fountain of waters.



115:1 Not unto us, O LORD, not unto us, but unto thy name give glory,
for thy mercy, and for thy truth's sake.

115:2 Wherefore should the heathen say, Where is now their God?

115:3 But our God is in the heavens: he hath done whatsoever he hath
pleased.

115:4 Their idols are silver and gold, the work of men's hands.

115:5 They have mouths, but they speak not: eyes have they, but they
see not:

115:6 They have ears, but they hear not: noses have they, but they
smell not:

115:7 They have hands, but they handle not: feet have they, but they
walk not: neither speak they through their throat.

115:8 They that make them are like unto them; so is every one that
trusteth in them.

115:9 O Israel, trust thou in the LORD: he is their help and their
shield.

115:10 O house of Aaron, trust in the LORD: he is their help and their
shield.

115:11 Ye that fear the LORD, trust in the LORD: he is their help and
their shield.

115:12 The LORD hath been mindful of us: he will bless us; he will
bless the house of Israel; he will bless the house of Aaron.

115:13 He will bless them that fear the LORD, both small and great.

115:14 The LORD shall increase you more and more, you and your
children.

115:15 Ye are blessed of the LORD which made heaven and earth.

115:16 The heaven, even the heavens, are the LORD's: but the earth
hath he given to the children of men.

115:17 The dead praise not the LORD, neither any that go down into
silence.

115:18 But we will bless the LORD from this time forth and for
evermore.

Praise the LORD.



116:1 I love the LORD, because he hath heard my voice and my
supplications.

116:2 Because he hath inclined his ear unto me, therefore will I call
upon him as long as I live.

116:3 The sorrows of death compassed me, and the pains of hell gat
hold upon me: I found trouble and sorrow.

116:4 Then called I upon the name of the LORD; O LORD, I beseech thee,
deliver my soul.

116:5 Gracious is the LORD, and righteous; yea, our God is merciful.

116:6 The LORD preserveth the simple: I was brought low, and he helped
me.

116:7 Return unto thy rest, O my soul; for the LORD hath dealt
bountifully with thee.

116:8 For thou hast delivered my soul from death, mine eyes from
tears, and my feet from falling.

116:9 I will walk before the LORD in the land of the living.

116:10 I believed, therefore have I spoken: I was greatly afflicted:

116:11 I said in my haste, All men are liars.

116:12 What shall I render unto the LORD for all his benefits toward
me?

116:13 I will take the cup of salvation, and call upon the name of the
LORD.

116:14 I will pay my vows unto the LORD now in the presence of all his
people.

116:15 Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his saints.

116:16 O LORD, truly I am thy servant; I am thy servant, and the son
of thine handmaid: thou hast loosed my bonds.

116:17 I will offer to thee the sacrifice of thanksgiving, and will
call upon the name of the LORD.

116:18 I will pay my vows unto the LORD now in the presence of all his
people.

116:19 In the courts of the LORD's house, in the midst of thee, O
Jerusalem. Praise ye the LORD.



117:1 O praise the LORD, all ye nations: praise him, all ye people.

117:2 For his merciful kindness is great toward us: and the truth of
the LORD endureth for ever. Praise ye the LORD.



118:1 O give thanks unto the LORD; for he is good: because his mercy
endureth for ever.

118:2 Let Israel now say, that his mercy endureth for ever.

118:3 Let the house of Aaron now say, that his mercy endureth for
ever.

118:4 Let them now that fear the LORD say, that his mercy endureth for
ever.

118:5 I called upon the LORD in distress: the LORD answered me, and
set me in a large place.

118:6 The LORD is on my side; I will not fear: what can man do unto
me?

118:7 The LORD taketh my part with them that help me: therefore shall
I see my desire upon them that hate me.

118:8 It is better to trust in the LORD than to put confidence in man.

118:9 It is better to trust in the LORD than to put confidence in
princes.

118:10 All nations compassed me about: but in the name of the LORD
will I destroy them.

118:11 They compassed me about; yea, they compassed me about: but in
the name of the LORD I will destroy them.

118:12 They compassed me about like bees: they are quenched as the
fire of thorns: for in the name of the LORD I will destroy them.

118:13 Thou hast thrust sore at me that I might fall: but the LORD
helped me.

118:14 The LORD is my strength and song, and is become my salvation.

118:15 The voice of rejoicing and salvation is in the tabernacles of
the righteous: the right hand of the LORD doeth valiantly.

118:16 The right hand of the LORD is exalted: the right hand of the
LORD doeth valiantly.

118:17 I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the LORD.

118:18 The LORD hath chastened me sore: but he hath not given me over
unto death.

118:19 Open to me the gates of righteousness: I will go into them, and
I will praise the LORD:

118:20 This gate of the LORD, into which the righteous shall enter.

118:21 I will praise thee: for thou hast heard me, and art become my
salvation.

118:22 The stone which the builders refused is become the head stone
of the corner.

118:23 This is the LORD's doing; it is marvellous in our eyes.

118:24 This is the day which the LORD hath made; we will rejoice and
be glad in it.

118:25 Save now, I beseech thee, O LORD: O LORD, I beseech thee, send
now prosperity.

118:26 Blessed be he that cometh in the name of the LORD: we have
blessed you out of the house of the LORD.

118:27 God is the LORD, which hath shewed us light: bind the sacrifice
with cords, even unto the horns of the altar.

118:28 Thou art my God, and I will praise thee: thou art my God, I
will exalt thee.

118:29 O give thanks unto the LORD; for he is good: for his mercy
endureth for ever.



119:1 Blessed are the undefiled in the way, who walk in the law of the
LORD.

119:2 Blessed are they that keep his testimonies, and that seek him
with the whole heart.

119:3 They also do no iniquity: they walk in his ways.

119:4 Thou hast commanded us to keep thy precepts diligently.

119:5 O that my ways were directed to keep thy statutes!

119:6 Then shall I not be ashamed, when I have respect unto all thy
commandments.

119:7 I will praise thee with uprightness of heart, when I shall have
learned thy righteous judgments.

119:8 I will keep thy statutes: O forsake me not utterly.

119:9 Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way? by taking heed
thereto according to thy word.

119:10 With my whole heart have I sought thee: O let me not wander
from thy commandments.

119:11 Thy word have I hid in mine heart, that I might not sin against
thee.

119:12 Blessed art thou, O LORD: teach me thy statutes.

119:13 With my lips have I declared all the judgments of thy mouth.

119:14 I have rejoiced in the way of thy testimonies, as much as in
all riches.

119:15 I will meditate in thy precepts, and have respect unto thy
ways.

119:16 I will delight myself in thy statutes: I will not forget thy
word.

119:17 Deal bountifully with thy servant, that I may live, and keep
thy word.

119:18 Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of
thy law.

119:19 I am a stranger in the earth: hide not thy commandments from
me.

119:20 My soul breaketh for the longing that it hath unto thy
judgments at all times.

119:21 Thou hast rebuked the proud that are cursed, which do err from
thy commandments.

119:22 Remove from me reproach and contempt; for I have kept thy
testimonies.

119:23 Princes also did sit and speak against me: but thy servant did
meditate in thy statutes.

119:24 Thy testimonies also are my delight and my counsellors.

119:25 My soul cleaveth unto the dust: quicken thou me according to
thy word.

119:26 I have declared my ways, and thou heardest me: teach me thy
statutes.

119:27 Make me to understand the way of thy precepts: so shall I talk
of thy wondrous works.

119:28 My soul melteth for heaviness: strengthen thou me according
unto thy word.

119:29 Remove from me the way of lying: and grant me thy law
graciously.

119:30 I have chosen the way of truth: thy judgments have I laid
before me.

119:31 I have stuck unto thy testimonies: O LORD, put me not to shame.

119:32 I will run the way of thy commandments, when thou shalt enlarge
my heart.

119:33 Teach me, O LORD, the way of thy statutes; and I shall keep it
unto the end.

119:34 Give me understanding, and I shall keep thy law; yea, I shall
observe it with my whole heart.

119:35 Make me to go in the path of thy commandments; for therein do I
delight.

119:36 Incline my heart unto thy testimonies, and not to covetousness.

119:37 Turn away mine eyes from beholding vanity; and quicken thou me
in thy way.

119:38 Stablish thy word unto thy servant, who is devoted to thy fear.

119:39 Turn away my reproach which I fear: for thy judgments are good.

119:40 Behold, I have longed after thy precepts: quicken me in thy
righteousness.

119:41 Let thy mercies come also unto me, O LORD, even thy salvation,
according to thy word.

119:42 So shall I have wherewith to answer him that reproacheth me:
for I trust in thy word.

119:43 And take not the word of truth utterly out of my mouth; for I
have hoped in thy judgments.

119:44 So shall I keep thy law continually for ever and ever.

119:45 And I will walk at liberty: for I seek thy precepts.

119:46 I will speak of thy testimonies also before kings, and will not
be ashamed.

119:47 And I will delight myself in thy commandments, which I have
loved.

119:48 My hands also will I lift up unto thy commandments, which I
have loved; and I will meditate in thy statutes.

119:49 Remember the word unto thy servant, upon which thou hast caused
me to hope.

119:50 This is my comfort in my affliction: for thy word hath
quickened me.

119:51 The proud have had me greatly in derision: yet have I not
declined from thy law.

119:52 I remembered thy judgments of old, O LORD; and have comforted
myself.

119:53 Horror hath taken hold upon me because of the wicked that
forsake thy law.

119:54 Thy statutes have been my songs in the house of my pilgrimage.

119:55 I have remembered thy name, O LORD, in the night, and have kept
thy law.

119:56 This I had, because I kept thy precepts.

119:57 Thou art my portion, O LORD: I have said that I would keep thy
words.

119:58 I intreated thy favour with my whole heart: be merciful unto me
according to thy word.

119:59 I thought on my ways, and turned my feet unto thy testimonies.

119:60 I made haste, and delayed not to keep thy commandments.

119:61 The bands of the wicked have robbed me: but I have not
forgotten thy law.

119:62 At midnight I will rise to give thanks unto thee because of thy
righteous judgments.

119:63 I am a companion of all them that fear thee, and of them that
keep thy precepts.

119:64 The earth, O LORD, is full of thy mercy: teach me thy statutes.

119:65 Thou hast dealt well with thy servant, O LORD, according unto
thy word.

119:66 Teach me good judgment and knowledge: for I have believed thy
commandments.

119:67 Before I was afflicted I went astray: but now have I kept thy
word.

119:68 Thou art good, and doest good; teach me thy statutes.

119:69 The proud have forged a lie against me: but I will keep thy
precepts with my whole heart.

119:70 Their heart is as fat as grease; but I delight in thy law.

119:71 It is good for me that I have been afflicted; that I might
learn thy statutes.

119:72 The law of thy mouth is better unto me than thousands of gold
and silver.

119:73 Thy hands have made me and fashioned me: give me understanding,
that I may learn thy commandments.

119:74 They that fear thee will be glad when they see me; because I
have hoped in thy word.

119:75 I know, O LORD, that thy judgments are right, and that thou in
faithfulness hast afflicted me.

119:76 Let, I pray thee, thy merciful kindness be for my comfort,
according to thy word unto thy servant.

119:77 Let thy tender mercies come unto me, that I may live: for thy
law is my delight.

119:78 Let the proud be ashamed; for they dealt perversely with me
without a cause: but I will meditate in thy precepts.

119:79 Let those that fear thee turn unto me, and those that have
known thy testimonies.

119:80 Let my heart be sound in thy statutes; that I be not ashamed.

119:81 My soul fainteth for thy salvation: but I hope in thy word.

119:82 Mine eyes fail for thy word, saying, When wilt thou comfort me?

119:83 For I am become like a bottle in the smoke; yet do I not forget
thy statutes.

119:84 How many are the days of thy servant? when wilt thou execute
judgment on them that persecute me?

119:85 The proud have digged pits for me, which are not after thy law.

119:86 All thy commandments are faithful: they persecute me
wrongfully; help thou me.

119:87 They had almost consumed me upon earth; but I forsook not thy
precepts.

119:88 Quicken me after thy lovingkindness; so shall I keep the
testimony of thy mouth.

119:89 For ever, O LORD, thy word is settled in heaven.

119:90 Thy faithfulness is unto all generations: thou hast established
the earth, and it abideth.

119:91 They continue this day according to thine ordinances: for all
are thy servants.

119:92 Unless thy law had been my delights, I should then have
perished in mine affliction.

119:93 I will never forget thy precepts: for with them thou hast
quickened me.

119:94 I am thine, save me: for I have sought thy precepts.

119:95 The wicked have waited for me to destroy me: but I will
consider thy testimonies.

119:96 I have seen an end of all perfection: but thy commandment is
exceeding broad.

119:97 O how I love thy law! it is my meditation all the day.

119:98 Thou through thy commandments hast made me wiser than mine
enemies: for they are ever with me.

119:99 I have more understanding than all my teachers: for thy
testimonies are my meditation.

119:100 I understand more than the ancients, because I keep thy
precepts.

119:101 I have refrained my feet from every evil way, that I might
keep thy word.

119:102 I have not departed from thy judgments: for thou hast taught
me.

119:103 How sweet are thy words unto my taste! yea, sweeter than honey
to my mouth!

119:104 Through thy precepts I get understanding: therefore I hate
every false way.

119:105 Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path.

119:106 I have sworn, and I will perform it, that I will keep thy
righteous judgments.

119:107 I am afflicted very much: quicken me, O LORD, according unto
thy word.

119:108 Accept, I beseech thee, the freewill offerings of my mouth, O
LORD, and teach me thy judgments.

119:109 My soul is continually in my hand: yet do I not forget thy
law.

119:110 The wicked have laid a snare for me: yet I erred not from thy
precepts.

119:111 Thy testimonies have I taken as an heritage for ever: for they
are the rejoicing of my heart.

119:112 I have inclined mine heart to perform thy statutes alway, even
unto the end.

119:113 I hate vain thoughts: but thy law do I love.

119:114 Thou art my hiding place and my shield: I hope in thy word.

119:115 Depart from me, ye evildoers: for I will keep the commandments
of my God.

119:116 Uphold me according unto thy word, that I may live: and let me
not be ashamed of my hope.

119:117 Hold thou me up, and I shall be safe: and I will have respect
unto thy statutes continually.

119:118 Thou hast trodden down all them that err from thy statutes:
for their deceit is falsehood.

119:119 Thou puttest away all the wicked of the earth like dross:
therefore I love thy testimonies.

119:120 My flesh trembleth for fear of thee; and I am afraid of thy
judgments.

119:121 I have done judgment and justice: leave me not to mine
oppressors.

119:122 Be surety for thy servant for good: let not the proud oppress
me.

119:123 Mine eyes fail for thy salvation, and for the word of thy
righteousness.

119:124 Deal with thy servant according unto thy mercy, and teach me
thy statutes.

119:125 I am thy servant; give me understanding, that I may know thy
testimonies.

119:126 It is time for thee, LORD, to work: for they have made void
thy law.

119:127 Therefore I love thy commandments above gold; yea, above fine
gold.

119:128 Therefore I esteem all thy precepts concerning all things to
be right; and I hate every false way.

119:129 Thy testimonies are wonderful: therefore doth my soul keep
them.

119:130 The entrance of thy words giveth light; it giveth
understanding unto the simple.

119:131 I opened my mouth, and panted: for I longed for thy
commandments.

119:132 Look thou upon me, and be merciful unto me, as thou usest to
do unto those that love thy name.

119:133 Order my steps in thy word: and let not any iniquity have
dominion over me.

119:134 Deliver me from the oppression of man: so will I keep thy
precepts.

119:135 Make thy face to shine upon thy servant; and teach me thy
statutes.

119:136 Rivers of waters run down mine eyes, because they keep not thy
law.

119:137 Righteous art thou, O LORD, and upright are thy judgments.

119:138 Thy testimonies that thou hast commanded are righteous and
very faithful.

119:139 My zeal hath consumed me, because mine enemies have forgotten
thy words.

119:140 Thy word is very pure: therefore thy servant loveth it.

119:141 I am small and despised: yet do not I forget thy precepts.

119:142 Thy righteousness is an everlasting righteousness, and thy law
is the truth.

119:143 Trouble and anguish have taken hold on me: yet thy
commandments are my delights.

119:144 The righteousness of thy testimonies is everlasting: give me
understanding, and I shall live.

119:145 I cried with my whole heart; hear me, O LORD: I will keep thy
statutes.

119:146 I cried unto thee; save me, and I shall keep thy testimonies.

119:147 I prevented the dawning of the morning, and cried: I hoped in
thy word.

119:148 Mine eyes prevent the night watches, that I might meditate in
thy word.

119:149 Hear my voice according unto thy lovingkindness: O LORD,
quicken me according to thy judgment.

119:150 They draw nigh that follow after mischief: they are far from
thy law.

119:151 Thou art near, O LORD; and all thy commandments are truth.

119:152 Concerning thy testimonies, I have known of old that thou hast
founded them for ever.

119:153 Consider mine affliction, and deliver me: for I do not forget
thy law.

119:154 Plead my cause, and deliver me: quicken me according to thy
word.

119:155 Salvation is far from the wicked: for they seek not thy
statutes.

119:156 Great are thy tender mercies, O LORD: quicken me according to
thy judgments.

119:157 Many are my persecutors and mine enemies; yet do I not decline
from thy testimonies.

119:158 I beheld the transgressors, and was grieved; because they kept
not thy word.

119:159 Consider how I love thy precepts: quicken me, O LORD,
according to thy lovingkindness.

119:160 Thy word is true from the beginning: and every one of thy
righteous judgments endureth for ever.

119:161 Princes have persecuted me without a cause: but my heart
standeth in awe of thy word.

119:162 I rejoice at thy word, as one that findeth great spoil.

119:163 I hate and abhor lying: but thy law do I love.

119:164 Seven times a day do I praise thee because of thy righteous
judgments.

119:165 Great peace have they which love thy law: and nothing shall
offend them.

119:166 LORD, I have hoped for thy salvation, and done thy
commandments.

119:167 My soul hath kept thy testimonies; and I love them
exceedingly.

119:168 I have kept thy precepts and thy testimonies: for all my ways
are before thee.

119:169 Let my cry come near before thee, O LORD: give me
understanding according to thy word.

119:170 Let my supplication come before thee: deliver me according to
thy word.

119:171 My lips shall utter praise, when thou hast taught me thy
statutes.

119:172 My tongue shall speak of thy word: for all thy commandments
are righteousness.

119:173 Let thine hand help me; for I have chosen thy precepts.

119:174 I have longed for thy salvation, O LORD; and thy law is my
delight.

119:175 Let my soul live, and it shall praise thee; and let thy
judgments help me.

119:176 I have gone astray like a lost sheep; seek thy servant; for I
do not forget thy commandments.



120:1 In my distress I cried unto the LORD, and he heard me.

120:2 Deliver my soul, O LORD, from lying lips, and from a deceitful
tongue.

120:3 What shall be given unto thee? or what shall be done unto thee,
thou false tongue?

120:4 Sharp arrows of the mighty, with coals of juniper.

120:5 Woe is me, that I sojourn in Mesech, that I dwell in the tents
of Kedar!

120:6 My soul hath long dwelt with him that hateth peace.

120:7 I am for peace: but when I speak, they are for war.



121:1 I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my
help.

121:2 My help cometh from the LORD, which made heaven and earth.

121:3 He will not suffer thy foot to be moved: he that keepeth thee
will not slumber.

121:4 Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.

121:5 The LORD is thy keeper: the LORD is thy shade upon thy right
hand.

121:6 The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night.

121:7 The LORD shall preserve thee from all evil: he shall preserve
thy soul.

121:8 The LORD shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from
this time forth, and even for evermore.



122:1 I was glad when they said unto me, Let us go into the house of
the LORD.

122:2 Our feet shall stand within thy gates, O Jerusalem.

122:3 Jerusalem is builded as a city that is compact together:

122:4 Whither the tribes go up, the tribes of the LORD, unto the
testimony of Israel, to give thanks unto the name of the LORD.

122:5 For there are set thrones of judgment, the thrones of the house
of David.

122:6 Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: they shall prosper that love
thee.

122:7 Peace be within thy walls, and prosperity within thy palaces.

122:8 For my brethren and companions' sakes, I will now say, Peace be
within thee.

122:9 Because of the house of the LORD our God I will seek thy good.



123:1 Unto thee lift I up mine eyes, O thou that dwellest in the
heavens.

123:2 Behold, as the eyes of servants look unto the hand of their
masters, and as the eyes of a maiden unto the hand of her mistress; so
our eyes wait upon the LORD our God, until that he have mercy upon us.

123:3 Have mercy upon us, O LORD, have mercy upon us: for we are
exceedingly filled with contempt.

123:4 Our soul is exceedingly filled with the scorning of those that
are at ease, and with the contempt of the proud.



124:1 If it had not been the LORD who was on our side, now may Israel
say;

124:2 If it had not been the LORD who was on our side, when men rose
up against us:

124:3 Then they had swallowed us up quick, when their wrath was
kindled against us:

124:4 Then the waters had overwhelmed us, the stream had gone over our
soul:

124:5 Then the proud waters had gone over our soul.

124:6 Blessed be the LORD, who hath not given us as a prey to their
teeth.

124:7 Our soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the fowlers:
the snare is broken, and we are escaped.

124:8 Our help is in the name of the LORD, who made heaven and earth.



125:1 They that trust in the LORD shall be as mount Zion, which cannot
be removed, but abideth for ever.

125:2 As the mountains are round about Jerusalem, so the LORD is round
about his people from henceforth even for ever.

125:3 For the rod of the wicked shall not rest upon the lot of the
righteous; lest the righteous put forth their hands unto iniquity.

125:4 Do good, O LORD, unto those that be good, and to them that are
upright in their hearts.

125:5 As for such as turn aside unto their crooked ways, the LORD
shall lead them forth with the workers of iniquity: but peace shall be
upon Israel.



126:1 When the LORD turned again the captivity of Zion, we were like
them that dream.

126:2 Then was our mouth filled with laughter, and our tongue with
singing: then said they among the heathen, The LORD hath done great
things for them.

126:3 The LORD hath done great things for us; whereof we are glad.

126:4 Turn again our captivity, O LORD, as the streams in the south.

126:5 They that sow in tears shall reap in joy.

126:6 He that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed, shall
doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him.



127:1 Except the LORD build the house, they labour in vain that build
it: except the LORD keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.

127:2 It is vain for you to rise up early, to sit up late, to eat the
bread of sorrows: for so he giveth his beloved sleep.

127:3 Lo, children are an heritage of the LORD: and the fruit of the
womb is his reward.

127:4 As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man; so are children of
the youth.

127:5 Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them: they shall
not be ashamed, but they shall speak with the enemies in the gate.



128:1 Blessed is every one that feareth the LORD; that walketh in his
ways.

128:2 For thou shalt eat the labour of thine hands: happy shalt thou
be, and it shall be well with thee.

128:3 Thy wife shall be as a fruitful vine by the sides of thine
house: thy children like olive plants round about thy table.

128:4 Behold, that thus shall the man be blessed that feareth the
LORD.

128:5 The LORD shall bless thee out of Zion: and thou shalt see the
good of Jerusalem all the days of thy life.

128:6 Yea, thou shalt see thy children's children, and peace upon
Israel.



129:1 Many a time have they afflicted me from my youth, may Israel now
say:

129:2 Many a time have they afflicted me from my youth: yet they have
not prevailed against me.

129:3 The plowers plowed upon my back: they made long their furrows.

129:4 The LORD is righteous: he hath cut asunder the cords of the
wicked.

129:5 Let them all be confounded and turned back that hate Zion.

129:6 Let them be as the grass upon the housetops, which withereth
afore it groweth up:

129:7 Wherewith the mower filleth not his hand; nor he that bindeth
sheaves his bosom.

129:8 Neither do they which go by say, The blessing of the LORD be
upon you: we bless you in the name of the LORD.



130:1 Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O LORD.

130:2 Lord, hear my voice: let thine ears be attentive to the voice of
my supplications.

130:3 If thou, LORD, shouldest mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall
stand?

130:4 But there is forgiveness with thee, that thou mayest be feared.

130:5 I wait for the LORD, my soul doth wait, and in his word do I
hope.

130:6 My soul waiteth for the Lord more than they that watch for the
morning: I say, more than they that watch for the morning.

130:7 Let Israel hope in the LORD: for with the LORD there is mercy,
and with him is plenteous redemption.

130:8 And he shall redeem Israel from all his iniquities.



131:1 Lord, my heart is not haughty, nor mine eyes lofty: neither do I
exercise myself in great matters, or in things too high for me.

131:2 Surely I have behaved and quieted myself, as a child that is
weaned of his mother: my soul is even as a weaned child.

131:3 Let Israel hope in the LORD from henceforth and for ever.



132:1 Lord, remember David, and all his afflictions:

132:2 How he sware unto the LORD, and vowed unto the mighty God of
Jacob;

132:3 Surely I will not come into the tabernacle of my house, nor go
up into my bed;

132:4 I will not give sleep to mine eyes, or slumber to mine eyelids,

132:5 Until I find out a place for the LORD, an habitation for the
mighty God of Jacob.

132:6 Lo, we heard of it at Ephratah: we found it in the fields of the
wood.

132:7 We will go into his tabernacles: we will worship at his
footstool.

132:8 Arise, O LORD, into thy rest; thou, and the ark of thy strength.

132:9 Let thy priests be clothed with righteousness; and let thy
saints shout for joy.

132:10 For thy servant David's sake turn not away the face of thine
anointed.

132:11 The LORD hath sworn in truth unto David; he will not turn from
it; Of the fruit of thy body will I set upon thy throne.

132:12 If thy children will keep my covenant and my testimony that I
shall teach them, their children shall also sit upon thy throne for
evermore.

132:13 For the LORD hath chosen Zion; he hath desired it for his
habitation.

132:14 This is my rest for ever: here will I dwell; for I have desired
it.

132:15 I will abundantly bless her provision: I will satisfy her poor
with bread.

132:16 I will also clothe her priests with salvation: and her saints
shall shout aloud for joy.

132:17 There will I make the horn of David to bud: I have ordained a
lamp for mine anointed.

132:18 His enemies will I clothe with shame: but upon himself shall
his crown flourish.



133:1 Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell
together in unity!

133:2 It is like the precious ointment upon the head, that ran down
upon the beard, even Aaron's beard: that went down to the skirts of
his garments;

133:3 As the dew of Hermon, and as the dew that descended upon the
mountains of Zion: for there the LORD commanded the blessing, even
life for evermore.



134:1 Behold, bless ye the LORD, all ye servants of the LORD, which by
night stand in the house of the LORD.

134:2 Lift up your hands in the sanctuary, and bless the LORD.

134:3 The LORD that made heaven and earth bless thee out of Zion.



135:1 Praise ye the LORD. Praise ye the name of the LORD; praise him,
O ye servants of the LORD.

135:2 Ye that stand in the house of the LORD, in the courts of the
house of our God.

135:3 Praise the LORD; for the LORD is good: sing praises unto his
name; for it is pleasant.

135:4 For the LORD hath chosen Jacob unto himself, and Israel for his
peculiar treasure.

135:5 For I know that the LORD is great, and that our Lord is above
all gods.

135:6 Whatsoever the LORD pleased, that did he in heaven, and in
earth, in the seas, and all deep places.

135:7 He causeth the vapours to ascend from the ends of the earth; he
maketh lightnings for the rain; he bringeth the wind out of his
treasuries.

135:8 Who smote the firstborn of Egypt, both of man and beast.

135:9 Who sent tokens and wonders into the midst of thee, O Egypt,
upon Pharaoh, and upon all his servants.

135:10 Who smote great nations, and slew mighty kings;

135:11 Sihon king of the Amorites, and Og king of Bashan, and all the
kingdoms of Canaan:

135:12 And gave their land for an heritage, an heritage unto Israel
his people.

135:13 Thy name, O LORD, endureth for ever; and thy memorial, O LORD,
throughout all generations.

135:14 For the LORD will judge his people, and he will repent himself
concerning his servants.

135:15 The idols of the heathen are silver and gold, the work of men's
hands.

135:16 They have mouths, but they speak not; eyes have they, but they
see not;

135:17 They have ears, but they hear not; neither is there any breath
in their mouths.

135:18 They that make them are like unto them: so is every one that
trusteth in them.

135:19 Bless the LORD, O house of Israel: bless the LORD, O house of
Aaron:

135:20 Bless the LORD, O house of Levi: ye that fear the LORD, bless
the LORD.

135:21 Blessed be the LORD out of Zion, which dwelleth at Jerusalem.

Praise ye the LORD.



136:1 O give thanks unto the LORD; for he is good: for his mercy
endureth for ever.

136:2 O give thanks unto the God of gods: for his mercy endureth for
ever.

136:3 O give thanks to the Lord of lords: for his mercy endureth for
ever.

136:4 To him who alone doeth great wonders: for his mercy endureth for
ever.

136:5 To him that by wisdom made the heavens: for his mercy endureth
for ever.

136:6 To him that stretched out the earth above the waters: for his
mercy endureth for ever.

136:7 To him that made great lights: for his mercy endureth for ever:

136:8 The sun to rule by day: for his mercy endureth for ever:

136:9 The moon and stars to rule by night: for his mercy endureth for
ever.

136:10 To him that smote Egypt in their firstborn: for his mercy
endureth for ever:

136:11 And brought out Israel from among them: for his mercy endureth
for ever:

136:12 With a strong hand, and with a stretched out arm: for his mercy
endureth for ever.

136:13 To him which divided the Red sea into parts: for his mercy
endureth for ever:

136:14 And made Israel to pass through the midst of it: for his mercy
endureth for ever:

136:15 But overthrew Pharaoh and his host in the Red sea: for his
mercy endureth for ever.

136:16 To him which led his people through the wilderness: for his
mercy endureth for ever.

136:17 To him which smote great kings: for his mercy endureth for
ever:

136:18 And slew famous kings: for his mercy endureth for ever:

136:19 Sihon king of the Amorites: for his mercy endureth for ever:

136:20 And Og the king of Bashan: for his mercy endureth for ever:

136:21 And gave their land for an heritage: for his mercy endureth for
ever:

136:22 Even an heritage unto Israel his servant: for his mercy
endureth for ever.

136:23 Who remembered us in our low estate: for his mercy endureth for
ever:

136:24 And hath redeemed us from our enemies: for his mercy endureth
for ever.

136:25 Who giveth food to all flesh: for his mercy endureth for ever.

136:26 O give thanks unto the God of heaven: for his mercy endureth
for ever.



137:1 By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when
we remembered Zion.

137:2 We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.

137:3 For there they that carried us away captive required of us a
song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us
one of the songs of Zion.

137:4 How shall we sing the LORD's song in a strange land?

137:5 If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her
cunning.

137:6 If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of
my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.

137:7 Remember, O LORD, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem;
who said, Rase it, rase it, even to the foundation thereof.

137:8 O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he
be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us.

137:9 Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones
against the stones.



138:1 I will praise thee with my whole heart: before the gods will I
sing praise unto thee.

138:2 I will worship toward thy holy temple, and praise thy name for
thy lovingkindness and for thy truth: for thou hast magnified thy word
above all thy name.

138:3 In the day when I cried thou answeredst me, and strengthenedst
me with strength in my soul.

138:4 All the kings of the earth shall praise thee, O LORD, when they
hear the words of thy mouth.

138:5 Yea, they shall sing in the ways of the LORD: for great is the
glory of the LORD.

138:6 Though the LORD be high, yet hath he respect unto the lowly: but
the proud he knoweth afar off.

138:7 Though I walk in the midst of trouble, thou wilt revive me: thou
shalt stretch forth thine hand against the wrath of mine enemies, and
thy right hand shall save me.

138:8 The LORD will perfect that which concerneth me: thy mercy, O
LORD, endureth for ever: forsake not the works of thine own hands.



139:1 O lord, thou hast searched me, and known me.

139:2 Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou
understandest my thought afar off.

139:3 Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted
with all my ways.

139:4 For there is not a word in my tongue, but, lo, O LORD, thou
knowest it altogether.

139:5 Thou hast beset me behind and before, and laid thine hand upon
me.

139:6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot
attain unto it.

139:7 Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from
thy presence?

139:8 If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in
hell, behold, thou art there.

139:9 If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost
parts of the sea;

139:10 Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall
hold me.

139:11 If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night
shall be light about me.

139:12 Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth
as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee.

139:13 For thou hast possessed my reins: thou hast covered me in my
mother's womb.

139:14 I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made:
marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well.

139:15 My substance was not hid from thee, when I was made in secret,
and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth.

139:16 Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in
thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were
fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.

139:17 How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God! how great is
the sum of them!

139:18 If I should count them, they are more in number than the sand:
when I awake, I am still with thee.

139:19 Surely thou wilt slay the wicked, O God: depart from me
therefore, ye bloody men.

139:20 For they speak against thee wickedly, and thine enemies take
thy name in vain.

139:21 Do not I hate them, O LORD, that hate thee? and am not I
grieved with those that rise up against thee?

139:22 I hate them with perfect hatred: I count them mine enemies.

139:23 Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my
thoughts:

139:24 And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the
way everlasting.



140:1 Deliver me, O LORD, from the evil man: preserve me from the
violent man;

140:2 Which imagine mischiefs in their heart; continually are they
gathered together for war.

140:3 They have sharpened their tongues like a serpent; adders' poison
is under their lips. Selah.

140:4 Keep me, O LORD, from the hands of the wicked; preserve me from
the violent man; who have purposed to overthrow my goings.

140:5 The proud have hid a snare for me, and cords; they have spread a
net by the wayside; they have set gins for me. Selah.

140:6 I said unto the LORD, Thou art my God: hear the voice of my
supplications, O LORD.

140:7 O GOD the Lord, the strength of my salvation, thou hast covered
my head in the day of battle.

140:8 Grant not, O LORD, the desires of the wicked: further not his
wicked device; lest they exalt themselves. Selah.

140:9 As for the head of those that compass me about, let the mischief
of their own lips cover them.

140:10 Let burning coals fall upon them: let them be cast into the
fire; into deep pits, that they rise not up again.

140:11 Let not an evil speaker be established in the earth: evil shall
hunt the violent man to overthrow him.

140:12 I know that the LORD will maintain the cause of the afflicted,
and the right of the poor.

140:13 Surely the righteous shall give thanks unto thy name: the
upright shall dwell in thy presence.



141:1 Lord, I cry unto thee: make haste unto me; give ear unto my
voice, when I cry unto thee.

141:2 Let my prayer be set forth before thee as incense; and the
lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice.

141:3 Set a watch, O LORD, before my mouth; keep the door of my lips.

141:4 Incline not my heart to any evil thing, to practise wicked works
with men that work iniquity: and let me not eat of their dainties.

141:5 Let the righteous smite me; it shall be a kindness: and let him
reprove me; it shall be an excellent oil, which shall not break my
head: for yet my prayer also shall be in their calamities.

141:6 When their judges are overthrown in stony places, they shall
hear my words; for they are sweet.

141:7 Our bones are scattered at the grave's mouth, as when one
cutteth and cleaveth wood upon the earth.

141:8 But mine eyes are unto thee, O GOD the Lord: in thee is my
trust; leave not my soul destitute.

141:9 Keep me from the snares which they have laid for me, and the
gins of the workers of iniquity.

141:10 Let the wicked fall into their own nets, whilst that I withal
escape.



142:1 I cried unto the LORD with my voice; with my voice unto the LORD
did I make my supplication.

142:2 I poured out my complaint before him; I shewed before him my
trouble.

142:3 When my spirit was overwhelmed within me, then thou knewest my
path.

In the way wherein I walked have they privily laid a snare for me.

142:4 I looked on my right hand, and beheld, but there was no man that
would know me: refuge failed me; no man cared for my soul.

142:5 I cried unto thee, O LORD: I said, Thou art my refuge and my
portion in the land of the living.

142:6 Attend unto my cry; for I am brought very low: deliver me from
my persecutors; for they are stronger than I.

142:7 Bring my soul out of prison, that I may praise thy name: the
righteous shall compass me about; for thou shalt deal bountifully with
me.



143:1 Hear my prayer, O LORD, give ear to my supplications: in thy
faithfulness answer me, and in thy righteousness.

143:2 And enter not into judgment with thy servant: for in thy sight
shall no man living be justified.

143:3 For the enemy hath persecuted my soul; he hath smitten my life
down to the ground; he hath made me to dwell in darkness, as those
that have been long dead.

143:4 Therefore is my spirit overwhelmed within me; my heart within me
is desolate.

143:5 I remember the days of old; I meditate on all thy works; I muse
on the work of thy hands.

143:6 I stretch forth my hands unto thee: my soul thirsteth after
thee, as a thirsty land. Selah.

143:7 Hear me speedily, O LORD: my spirit faileth: hide not thy face
from me, lest I be like unto them that go down into the pit.

143:8 Cause me to hear thy lovingkindness in the morning; for in thee
do I trust: cause me to know the way wherein I should walk; for I lift
up my soul unto thee.

143:9 Deliver me, O LORD, from mine enemies: I flee unto thee to hide
me.

143:10 Teach me to do thy will; for thou art my God: thy spirit is
good; lead me into the land of uprightness.

143:11 Quicken me, O LORD, for thy name's sake: for thy righteousness'
sake bring my soul out of trouble.

143:12 And of thy mercy cut off mine enemies, and destroy all them
that afflict my soul: for I am thy servant.



144:1 Blessed be the LORD my strength which teacheth my hands to war,
and my fingers to fight:

144:2 My goodness, and my fortress; my high tower, and my deliverer;
my shield, and he in whom I trust; who subdueth my people under me.

144:3 LORD, what is man, that thou takest knowledge of him! or the son
of man, that thou makest account of him!

144:4 Man is like to vanity: his days are as a shadow that passeth
away.

144:5 Bow thy heavens, O LORD, and come down: touch the mountains, and
they shall smoke.

144:6 Cast forth lightning, and scatter them: shoot out thine arrows,
and destroy them.

144:7 Send thine hand from above; rid me, and deliver me out of great
waters, from the hand of strange children;

144:8 Whose mouth speaketh vanity, and their right hand is a right
hand of falsehood.

144:9 I will sing a new song unto thee, O God: upon a psaltery and an
instrument of ten strings will I sing praises unto thee.

144:10 It is he that giveth salvation unto kings: who delivereth David
his servant from the hurtful sword.

144:11 Rid me, and deliver me from the hand of strange children, whose
mouth speaketh vanity, and their right hand is a right hand of
falsehood:

144:12 That our sons may be as plants grown up in their youth; that
our daughters may be as corner stones, polished after the similitude
of a palace:

144:13 That our garners may be full, affording all manner of store:
that our sheep may bring forth thousands and ten thousands in our
streets:

144:14 That our oxen may be strong to labour; that there be no
breaking in, nor going out; that there be no complaining in our
streets.

144:15 Happy is that people, that is in such a case: yea, happy is
that people, whose God is the LORD.



145:1 I will extol thee, my God, O king; and I will bless thy name for
ever and ever.

145:2 Every day will I bless thee; and I will praise thy name for ever
and ever.

145:3 Great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised; and his greatness
is unsearchable.

145:4 One generation shall praise thy works to another, and shall
declare thy mighty acts.

145:5 I will speak of the glorious honour of thy majesty, and of thy
wondrous works.

145:6 And men shall speak of the might of thy terrible acts: and I
will declare thy greatness.

145:7 They shall abundantly utter the memory of thy great goodness,
and shall sing of thy righteousness.

145:8 The LORD is gracious, and full of compassion; slow to anger, and
of great mercy.

145:9 The LORD is good to all: and his tender mercies are over all his
works.

145:10 All thy works shall praise thee, O LORD; and thy saints shall
bless thee.

145:11 They shall speak of the glory of thy kingdom, and talk of thy
power;

145:12 To make known to the sons of men his mighty acts, and the
glorious majesty of his kingdom.

145:13 Thy kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and thy dominion
endureth throughout all generations.

145:14 The LORD upholdeth all that fall, and raiseth up all those that
be bowed down.

145:15 The eyes of all wait upon thee; and thou givest them their meat
in due season.

145:16 Thou openest thine hand, and satisfiest the desire of every
living thing.

145:17 The LORD is righteous in all his ways, and holy in all his
works.

145:18 The LORD is nigh unto all them that call upon him, to all that
call upon him in truth.

145:19 He will fulfil the desire of them that fear him: he also will
hear their cry, and will save them.

145:20 The LORD preserveth all them that love him: but all the wicked
will he destroy.

145:21 My mouth shall speak the praise of the LORD: and let all flesh
bless his holy name for ever and ever.



146:1 Praise ye the LORD. Praise the LORD, O my soul.

146:2 While I live will I praise the LORD: I will sing praises unto my
God while I have any being.

146:3 Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom
there is no help.

146:4 His breath goeth forth, he returneth to his earth; in that very
day his thoughts perish.

146:5 Happy is he that hath the God of Jacob for his help, whose hope
is in the LORD his God:

146:6 Which made heaven, and earth, the sea, and all that therein is:
which keepeth truth for ever:

146:7 Which executeth judgment for the oppressed: which giveth food to
the hungry. The LORD looseth the prisoners:

146:8 The LORD openeth the eyes of the blind: the LORD raiseth them
that are bowed down: the LORD loveth the righteous:

146:9 The LORD preserveth the strangers; he relieveth the fatherless
and widow: but the way of the wicked he turneth upside down.

146:10 The LORD shall reign for ever, even thy God, O Zion, unto all
generations. Praise ye the LORD.



147:1 Praise ye the LORD: for it is good to sing praises unto our God;
for it is pleasant; and praise is comely.

147:2 The LORD doth build up Jerusalem: he gathereth together the
outcasts of Israel.

147:3 He healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds.

147:4 He telleth the number of the stars; he calleth them all by their
names.

147:5 Great is our Lord, and of great power: his understanding is
infinite.

147:6 The LORD lifteth up the meek: he casteth the wicked down to the
ground.

147:7 Sing unto the LORD with thanksgiving; sing praise upon the harp
unto our God:

147:8 Who covereth the heaven with clouds, who prepareth rain for the
earth, who maketh grass to grow upon the mountains.

147:9 He giveth to the beast his food, and to the young ravens which
cry.

147:10 He delighteth not in the strength of the horse: he taketh not
pleasure in the legs of a man.

147:11 The LORD taketh pleasure in them that fear him, in those that
hope in his mercy.

147:12 Praise the LORD, O Jerusalem; praise thy God, O Zion.

147:13 For he hath strengthened the bars of thy gates; he hath blessed
thy children within thee.

147:14 He maketh peace in thy borders, and filleth thee with the
finest of the wheat.

147:15 He sendeth forth his commandment upon earth: his word runneth
very swiftly.

147:16 He giveth snow like wool: he scattereth the hoarfrost like
ashes.

147:17 He casteth forth his ice like morsels: who can stand before his
cold?

147:18 He sendeth out his word, and melteth them: he causeth his wind
to blow, and the waters flow.

147:19 He sheweth his word unto Jacob, his statutes and his judgments
unto Israel.

147:20 He hath not dealt so with any nation: and as for his judgments,
they have not known them. Praise ye the LORD.



148:1 Praise ye the LORD. Praise ye the LORD from the heavens: praise
him in the heights.

148:2 Praise ye him, all his angels: praise ye him, all his hosts.

148:3 Praise ye him, sun and moon: praise him, all ye stars of light.

148:4 Praise him, ye heavens of heavens, and ye waters that be above
the heavens.

148:5 Let them praise the name of the LORD: for he commanded, and they
were created.

148:6 He hath also stablished them for ever and ever: he hath made a
decree which shall not pass.

148:7 Praise the LORD from the earth, ye dragons, and all deeps:

148:8 Fire, and hail; snow, and vapours; stormy wind fulfilling his
word:

148:9 Mountains, and all hills; fruitful trees, and all cedars:

148:10 Beasts, and all cattle; creeping things, and flying fowl:

148:11 Kings of the earth, and all people; princes, and all judges of
the earth:

148:12 Both young men, and maidens; old men, and children:

148:13 Let them praise the name of the LORD: for his name alone is
excellent; his glory is above the earth and heaven.

148:14 He also exalteth the horn of his people, the praise of all his
saints; even of the children of Israel, a people near unto him. Praise
ye the LORD.



149:1 Praise ye the LORD. Sing unto the LORD a new song, and his
praise in the congregation of saints.

149:2 Let Israel rejoice in him that made him: let the children of
Zion be joyful in their King.

149:3 Let them praise his name in the dance: let them sing praises
unto him with the timbrel and harp.

149:4 For the LORD taketh pleasure in his people: he will beautify the
meek with salvation.

149:5 Let the saints be joyful in glory: let them sing aloud upon
their beds.

149:6 Let the high praises of God be in their mouth, and a two-edged
sword in their hand;

149:7 To execute vengeance upon the heathen, and punishments upon the
people;

149:8 To bind their kings with chains, and their nobles with fetters
of iron;

149:9 To execute upon them the judgment written: this honour have all
his saints. Praise ye the LORD.



150:1 Praise ye the LORD. Praise God in his sanctuary: praise him in
the firmament of his power.

150:2 Praise him for his mighty acts: praise him according to his
excellent greatness.

150:3 Praise him with the sound of the trumpet: praise him with the
psaltery and harp.

150:4 Praise him with the timbrel and dance: praise him with stringed
instruments and organs.

150:5 Praise him upon the loud cymbals: praise him upon the high
sounding cymbals.

150:6 Let every thing that hath breath praise the LORD. Praise ye the LORD.




The Proverbs


1:1 The proverbs of Solomon the son of David, king of Israel; 1:2 To
know wisdom and instruction; to perceive the words of understanding;
1:3 To receive the instruction of wisdom, justice, and judgment, and
equity; 1:4 To give subtilty to the simple, to the young man knowledge
and discretion.

1:5 A wise man will hear, and will increase learning; and a man of
understanding shall attain unto wise counsels: 1:6 To understand a
proverb, and the interpretation; the words of the wise, and their dark
sayings.

1:7 The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge: but fools
despise wisdom and instruction.

1:8 My son, hear the instruction of thy father, and forsake not the
law of thy mother: 1:9 For they shall be an ornament of grace unto thy
head, and chains about thy neck.

1:10 My son, if sinners entice thee, consent thou not.

1:11 If they say, Come with us, let us lay wait for blood, let us lurk
privily for the innocent without cause: 1:12 Let us swallow them up
alive as the grave; and whole, as those that go down into the pit:
1:13 We shall find all precious substance, we shall fill our houses
with spoil: 1:14 Cast in thy lot among us; let us all have one purse:
1:15 My son, walk not thou in the way with them; refrain thy foot from
their path: 1:16 For their feet run to evil, and make haste to shed
blood.

1:17 Surely in vain the net is spread in the sight of any bird.

1:18 And they lay wait for their own blood; they lurk privily for
their own lives.

1:19 So are the ways of every one that is greedy of gain; which taketh
away the life of the owners thereof.

1:20 Wisdom crieth without; she uttereth her voice in the streets:
1:21 She crieth in the chief place of concourse, in the openings of
the gates: in the city she uttereth her words, saying, 1:22 How long,
ye simple ones, will ye love simplicity? and the scorners delight in
their scorning, and fools hate knowledge?  1:23 Turn you at my
reproof: behold, I will pour out my spirit unto you, I will make known
my words unto you.

1:24 Because I have called, and ye refused; I have stretched out my
hand, and no man regarded; 1:25 But ye have set at nought all my
counsel, and would none of my reproof: 1:26 I also will laugh at your
calamity; I will mock when your fear cometh; 1:27 When your fear
cometh as desolation, and your destruction cometh as a whirlwind; when
distress and anguish cometh upon you.

1:28 Then shall they call upon me, but I will not answer; they shall
seek me early, but they shall not find me: 1:29 For that they hated
knowledge, and did not choose the fear of the LORD: 1:30 They would
none of my counsel: they despised all my reproof.

1:31 Therefore shall they eat of the fruit of their own way, and be
filled with their own devices.

1:32 For the turning away of the simple shall slay them, and the
prosperity of fools shall destroy them.

1:33 But whoso hearkeneth unto me shall dwell safely, and shall be
quiet from fear of evil.

2:1 My son, if thou wilt receive my words, and hide my commandments
with thee; 2:2 So that thou incline thine ear unto wisdom, and apply
thine heart to understanding; 2:3 Yea, if thou criest after knowledge,
and liftest up thy voice for understanding; 2:4 If thou seekest her as
silver, and searchest for her as for hid treasures; 2:5 Then shalt
thou understand the fear of the LORD, and find the knowledge of God.

2:6 For the LORD giveth wisdom: out of his mouth cometh knowledge and
understanding.

2:7 He layeth up sound wisdom for the righteous: he is a buckler to
them that walk uprightly.

2:8 He keepeth the paths of judgment, and preserveth the way of his
saints.

2:9 Then shalt thou understand righteousness, and judgment, and
equity; yea, every good path.

2:10 When wisdom entereth into thine heart, and knowledge is pleasant
unto thy soul; 2:11 Discretion shall preserve thee, understanding
shall keep thee: 2:12 To deliver thee from the way of the evil man,
from the man that speaketh froward things; 2:13 Who leave the paths of
uprightness, to walk in the ways of darkness; 2:14 Who rejoice to do
evil, and delight in the frowardness of the wicked; 2:15 Whose ways
are crooked, and they froward in their paths: 2:16 To deliver thee
from the strange woman, even from the stranger which flattereth with
her words; 2:17 Which forsaketh the guide of her youth, and forgetteth
the covenant of her God.

2:18 For her house inclineth unto death, and her paths unto the dead.

2:19 None that go unto her return again, neither take they hold of the
paths of life.

2:20 That thou mayest walk in the way of good men, and keep the paths
of the righteous.

2:21 For the upright shall dwell in the land, and the perfect shall
remain in it.

2:22 But the wicked shall be cut off from the earth, and the
transgressors shall be rooted out of it.

3:1 My son, forget not my law; but let thine heart keep my
commandments: 3:2 For length of days, and long life, and peace, shall
they add to thee.

3:3 Let not mercy and truth forsake thee: bind them about thy neck;
write them upon the table of thine heart: 3:4 So shalt thou find
favour and good understanding in the sight of God and man.

3:5 Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine
own understanding.

3:6 In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths.

3:7 Be not wise in thine own eyes: fear the LORD, and depart from
evil.

3:8 It shall be health to thy navel, and marrow to thy bones.

3:9 Honour the LORD with thy substance, and with the firstfruits of
all thine increase: 3:10 So shall thy barns be filled with plenty, and
thy presses shall burst out with new wine.

3:11 My son, despise not the chastening of the LORD; neither be weary
of his correction: 3:12 For whom the LORD loveth he correcteth; even
as a father the son in whom he delighteth.

3:13 Happy is the man that findeth wisdom, and the man that getteth
understanding.

3:14 For the merchandise of it is better than the merchandise of
silver, and the gain thereof than fine gold.

3:15 She is more precious than rubies: and all the things thou canst
desire are not to be compared unto her.

3:16 Length of days is in her right hand; and in her left hand riches
and honour.

3:17 Her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace.

3:18 She is a tree of life to them that lay hold upon her: and happy
is every one that retaineth her.

3:19 The LORD by wisdom hath founded the earth; by understanding hath
he established the heavens.

3:20 By his knowledge the depths are broken up, and the clouds drop
down the dew.

3:21 My son, let not them depart from thine eyes: keep sound wisdom
and discretion: 3:22 So shall they be life unto thy soul, and grace to
thy neck.

3:23 Then shalt thou walk in thy way safely, and thy foot shall not
stumble.

3:24 When thou liest down, thou shalt not be afraid: yea, thou shalt
lie down, and thy sleep shall be sweet.

3:25 Be not afraid of sudden fear, neither of the desolation of the
wicked, when it cometh.

3:26 For the LORD shall be thy confidence, and shall keep thy foot
from being taken.

3:27 Withhold not good from them to whom it is due, when it is in the
power of thine hand to do it.

3:28 Say not unto thy neighbour, Go, and come again, and to morrow I
will give; when thou hast it by thee.

3:29 Devise not evil against thy neighbour, seeing he dwelleth
securely by thee.

3:30 Strive not with a man without cause, if he have done thee no
harm.

3:31 Envy thou not the oppressor, and choose none of his ways.

3:32 For the froward is abomination to the LORD: but his secret is
with the righteous.

3:33 The curse of the LORD is in the house of the wicked: but he
blesseth the habitation of the just.

3:34 Surely he scorneth the scorners: but he giveth grace unto the
lowly.

3:35 The wise shall inherit glory: but shame shall be the promotion of
fools.

4:1 Hear, ye children, the instruction of a father, and attend to know
understanding.

4:2 For I give you good doctrine, forsake ye not my law.

4:3 For I was my father's son, tender and only beloved in the sight of
my mother.

4:4 He taught me also, and said unto me, Let thine heart retain my
words: keep my commandments, and live.

4:5 Get wisdom, get understanding: forget it not; neither decline from
the words of my mouth.

4:6 Forsake her not, and she shall preserve thee: love her, and she
shall keep thee.

4:7 Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom: and with all
thy getting get understanding.

4:8 Exalt her, and she shall promote thee: she shall bring thee to
honour, when thou dost embrace her.

4:9 She shall give to thine head an ornament of grace: a crown of
glory shall she deliver to thee.

4:10 Hear, O my son, and receive my sayings; and the years of thy life
shall be many.

4:11 I have taught thee in the way of wisdom; I have led thee in right
paths.

4:12 When thou goest, thy steps shall not be straitened; and when thou
runnest, thou shalt not stumble.

4:13 Take fast hold of instruction; let her not go: keep her; for she
is thy life.

4:14 Enter not into the path of the wicked, and go not in the way of
evil men.

4:15 Avoid it, pass not by it, turn from it, and pass away.

4:16 For they sleep not, except they have done mischief; and their
sleep is taken away, unless they cause some to fall.

4:17 For they eat the bread of wickedness, and drink the wine of
violence.

4:18 But the path of the just is as the shining light, that shineth
more and more unto the perfect day.

4:19 The way of the wicked is as darkness: they know not at what they
stumble.

4:20 My son, attend to my words; incline thine ear unto my sayings.

4:21 Let them not depart from thine eyes; keep them in the midst of
thine heart.

4:22 For they are life unto those that find them, and health to all
their flesh.

4:23 Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues
of life.

4:24 Put away from thee a froward mouth, and perverse lips put far
from thee.

4:25 Let thine eyes look right on, and let thine eyelids look straight
before thee.

4:26 Ponder the path of thy feet, and let all thy ways be established.

4:27 Turn not to the right hand nor to the left: remove thy foot from
evil.

5:1 My son, attend unto my wisdom, and bow thine ear to my
understanding: 5:2 That thou mayest regard discretion, and that thy
lips may keep knowledge.

5:3 For the lips of a strange woman drop as an honeycomb, and her
mouth is smoother than oil: 5:4 But her end is bitter as wormwood,
sharp as a two-edged sword.

5:5 Her feet go down to death; her steps take hold on hell.

5:6 Lest thou shouldest ponder the path of life, her ways are
moveable, that thou canst not know them.

5:7 Hear me now therefore, O ye children, and depart not from the
words of my mouth.

5:8 Remove thy way far from her, and come not nigh the door of her
house: 5:9 Lest thou give thine honour unto others, and thy years unto
the cruel: 5:10 Lest strangers be filled with thy wealth; and thy
labours be in the house of a stranger; 5:11 And thou mourn at the
last, when thy flesh and thy body are consumed, 5:12 And say, How have
I hated instruction, and my heart despised reproof; 5:13 And have not
obeyed the voice of my teachers, nor inclined mine ear to them that
instructed me!  5:14 I was almost in all evil in the midst of the
congregation and assembly.

5:15 Drink waters out of thine own cistern, and running waters out of
thine own well.

5:16 Let thy fountains be dispersed abroad, and rivers of waters in
the streets.

5:17 Let them be only thine own, and not strangers' with thee.

5:18 Let thy fountain be blessed: and rejoice with the wife of thy
youth.

5:19 Let her be as the loving hind and pleasant roe; let her breasts
satisfy thee at all times; and be thou ravished always with her love.

5:20 And why wilt thou, my son, be ravished with a strange woman, and
embrace the bosom of a stranger?  5:21 For the ways of man are before
the eyes of the LORD, and he pondereth all his goings.

5:22 His own iniquities shall take the wicked himself, and he shall be
holden with the cords of his sins.

5:23 He shall die without instruction; and in the greatness of his
folly he shall go astray.

6:1 My son, if thou be surety for thy friend, if thou hast stricken
thy hand with a stranger, 6:2 Thou art snared with the words of thy
mouth, thou art taken with the words of thy mouth.

6:3 Do this now, my son, and deliver thyself, when thou art come into
the hand of thy friend; go, humble thyself, and make sure thy friend.

6:4 Give not sleep to thine eyes, nor slumber to thine eyelids.

6:5 Deliver thyself as a roe from the hand of the hunter, and as a
bird from the hand of the fowler.

6:6 Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise: 6:7
Which having no guide, overseer, or ruler, 6:8 Provideth her meat in
the summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest.

6:9 How long wilt thou sleep, O sluggard? when wilt thou arise out of
thy sleep?  6:10 Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little
folding of the hands to sleep: 6:11 So shall thy poverty come as one
that travelleth, and thy want as an armed man.

6:12 A naughty person, a wicked man, walketh with a froward mouth.

6:13 He winketh with his eyes, he speaketh with his feet, he teacheth
with his fingers; 6:14 Frowardness is in his heart, he deviseth
mischief continually; he soweth discord.

6:15 Therefore shall his calamity come suddenly; suddenly shall he be
broken without remedy.

6:16 These six things doth the LORD hate: yea, seven are an
abomination unto him: 6:17 A proud look, a lying tongue, and hands
that shed innocent blood, 6:18 An heart that deviseth wicked
imaginations, feet that be swift in running to mischief, 6:19 A false
witness that speaketh lies, and he that soweth discord among brethren.

6:20 My son, keep thy father's commandment, and forsake not the law of
thy mother: 6:21 Bind them continually upon thine heart, and tie them
about thy neck.

6:22 When thou goest, it shall lead thee; when thou sleepest, it shall
keep thee; and when thou awakest, it shall talk with thee.

6:23 For the commandment is a lamp; and the law is light; and reproofs
of instruction are the way of life: 6:24 To keep thee from the evil
woman, from the flattery of the tongue of a strange woman.

6:25 Lust not after her beauty in thine heart; neither let her take
thee with her eyelids.

6:26 For by means of a whorish woman a man is brought to a piece of
bread: and the adultress will hunt for the precious life.

6:27 Can a man take fire in his bosom, and his clothes not be burned?
6:28 Can one go upon hot coals, and his feet not be burned?  6:29 So
he that goeth in to his neighbour's wife; whosoever toucheth her shall
not be innocent.

6:30 Men do not despise a thief, if he steal to satisfy his soul when
he is hungry; 6:31 But if he be found, he shall restore sevenfold; he
shall give all the substance of his house.

6:32 But whoso committeth adultery with a woman lacketh understanding:
he that doeth it destroyeth his own soul.

6:33 A wound and dishonour shall he get; and his reproach shall not be
wiped away.

6:34 For jealousy is the rage of a man: therefore he will not spare in
the day of vengeance.

6:35 He will not regard any ransom; neither will he rest content,
though thou givest many gifts.

7:1 My son, keep my words, and lay up my commandments with thee.

7:2 Keep my commandments, and live; and my law as the apple of thine
eye.

7:3 Bind them upon thy fingers, write them upon the table of thine
heart.

7:4 Say unto wisdom, Thou art my sister; and call understanding thy
kinswoman: 7:5 That they may keep thee from the strange woman, from
the stranger which flattereth with her words.

7:6 For at the window of my house I looked through my casement, 7:7
And beheld among the simple ones, I discerned among the youths, a
young man void of understanding, 7:8 Passing through the street near
her corner; and he went the way to her house, 7:9 In the twilight, in
the evening, in the black and dark night: 7:10 And, behold, there met
him a woman with the attire of an harlot, and subtil of heart.

7:11 (She is loud and stubborn; her feet abide not in her house: 7:12
Now is she without, now in the streets, and lieth in wait at every
corner.)  7:13 So she caught him, and kissed him, and with an impudent
face said unto him, 7:14 I have peace offerings with me; this day have
I payed my vows.

7:15 Therefore came I forth to meet thee, diligently to seek thy face,
and I have found thee.

7:16 I have decked my bed with coverings of tapestry, with carved
works, with fine linen of Egypt.

7:17 I have perfumed my bed with myrrh, aloes, and cinnamon.

7:18 Come, let us take our fill of love until the morning: let us
solace ourselves with loves.

7:19 For the goodman is not at home, he is gone a long journey: 7:20
He hath taken a bag of money with him, and will come home at the day
appointed.

7:21 With her much fair speech she caused him to yield, with the
flattering of her lips she forced him.

7:22 He goeth after her straightway, as an ox goeth to the slaughter,
or as a fool to the correction of the stocks; 7:23 Till a dart strike
through his liver; as a bird hasteth to the snare, and knoweth not
that it is for his life.

7:24 Hearken unto me now therefore, O ye children, and attend to the
words of my mouth.

7:25 Let not thine heart decline to her ways, go not astray in her
paths.

7:26 For she hath cast down many wounded: yea, many strong men have
been slain by her.

7:27 Her house is the way to hell, going down to the chambers of
death.

8:1 Doth not wisdom cry? and understanding put forth her voice?  8:2
She standeth in the top of high places, by the way in the places of
the paths.

8:3 She crieth at the gates, at the entry of the city, at the coming
in at the doors.

8:4 Unto you, O men, I call; and my voice is to the sons of man.

8:5 O ye simple, understand wisdom: and, ye fools, be ye of an
understanding heart.

8:6 Hear; for I will speak of excellent things; and the opening of my
lips shall be right things.

8:7 For my mouth shall speak truth; and wickedness is an abomination
to my lips.

8:8 All the words of my mouth are in righteousness; there is nothing
froward or perverse in them.

8:9 They are all plain to him that understandeth, and right to them
that find knowledge.

8:10 Receive my instruction, and not silver; and knowledge rather than
choice gold.

8:11 For wisdom is better than rubies; and all the things that may be
desired are not to be compared to it.

8:12 I wisdom dwell with prudence, and find out knowledge of witty
inventions.

8:13 The fear of the LORD is to hate evil: pride, and arrogancy, and
the evil way, and the froward mouth, do I hate.

8:14 Counsel is mine, and sound wisdom: I am understanding; I have
strength.

8:15 By me kings reign, and princes decree justice.

8:16 By me princes rule, and nobles, even all the judges of the earth.

8:17 I love them that love me; and those that seek me early shall find
me.

8:18 Riches and honour are with me; yea, durable riches and
righteousness.

8:19 My fruit is better than gold, yea, than fine gold; and my revenue
than choice silver.

8:20 I lead in the way of righteousness, in the midst of the paths of
judgment: 8:21 That I may cause those that love me to inherit
substance; and I will fill their treasures.

8:22 The LORD possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his
works of old.

8:23 I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the
earth was.

8:24 When there were no depths, I was brought forth; when there were
no fountains abounding with water.

8:25 Before the mountains were settled, before the hills was I brought
forth: 8:26 While as yet he had not made the earth, nor the fields,
nor the highest part of the dust of the world.

8:27 When he prepared the heavens, I was there: when he set a compass
upon the face of the depth: 8:28 When he established the clouds above:
when he strengthened the fountains of the deep: 8:29 When he gave to
the sea his decree, that the waters should not pass his commandment:
when he appointed the foundations of the earth: 8:30 Then I was by
him, as one brought up with him: and I was daily his delight,
rejoicing always before him; 8:31 Rejoicing in the habitable part of
his earth; and my delights were with the sons of men.

8:32 Now therefore hearken unto me, O ye children: for blessed are
they that keep my ways.

8:33 Hear instruction, and be wise, and refuse it not.

8:34 Blessed is the man that heareth me, watching daily at my gates,
waiting at the posts of my doors.

8:35 For whoso findeth me findeth life, and shall obtain favour of the
LORD.

8:36 But he that sinneth against me wrongeth his own soul: all they
that hate me love death.

9:1 Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven
pillars: 9:2 She hath killed her beasts; she hath mingled her wine;
she hath also furnished her table.

9:3 She hath sent forth her maidens: she crieth upon the highest
places of the city, 9:4 Whoso is simple, let him turn in hither: as
for him that wanteth understanding, she saith to him, 9:5 Come, eat of
my bread, and drink of the wine which I have mingled.

9:6 Forsake the foolish, and live; and go in the way of understanding.

9:7 He that reproveth a scorner getteth to himself shame: and he that
rebuketh a wicked man getteth himself a blot.

9:8 Reprove not a scorner, lest he hate thee: rebuke a wise man, and
he will love thee.

9:9 Give instruction to a wise man, and he will be yet wiser: teach a
just man, and he will increase in learning.

9:10 The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom: and the
knowledge of the holy is understanding.

9:11 For by me thy days shall be multiplied, and the years of thy life
shall be increased.

9:12 If thou be wise, thou shalt be wise for thyself: but if thou
scornest, thou alone shalt bear it.

9:13 A foolish woman is clamorous: she is simple, and knoweth nothing.

9:14 For she sitteth at the door of her house, on a seat in the high
places of the city, 9:15 To call passengers who go right on their
ways: 9:16 Whoso is simple, let him turn in hither: and as for him
that wanteth understanding, she saith to him, 9:17 Stolen waters are
sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant.

9:18 But he knoweth not that the dead are there; and that her guests
are in the depths of hell.

10:1 The proverbs of Solomon. A wise son maketh a glad father: but a
foolish son is the heaviness of his mother.

10:2 Treasures of wickedness profit nothing: but righteousness
delivereth from death.

10:3 The LORD will not suffer the soul of the righteous to famish: but
he casteth away the substance of the wicked.

10:4 He becometh poor that dealeth with a slack hand: but the hand of
the diligent maketh rich.

10:5 He that gathereth in summer is a wise son: but he that sleepeth
in harvest is a son that causeth shame.

10:6 Blessings are upon the head of the just: but violence covereth
the mouth of the wicked.

10:7 The memory of the just is blessed: but the name of the wicked
shall rot.

10:8 The wise in heart will receive commandments: but a prating fool
shall fall.

10:9 He that walketh uprightly walketh surely: but he that perverteth
his ways shall be known.

10:10 He that winketh with the eye causeth sorrow: but a prating fool
shall fall.

10:11 The mouth of a righteous man is a well of life: but violence
covereth the mouth of the wicked.

10:12 Hatred stirreth up strifes: but love covereth all sins.

10:13 In the lips of him that hath understanding wisdom is found: but
a rod is for the back of him that is void of understanding.

10:14 Wise men lay up knowledge: but the mouth of the foolish is near
destruction.

10:15 The rich man's wealth is his strong city: the destruction of the
poor is their poverty.

10:16 The labour of the righteous tendeth to life: the fruit of the
wicked to sin.

10:17 He is in the way of life that keepeth instruction: but he that
refuseth reproof erreth.

10:18 He that hideth hatred with lying lips, and he that uttereth a
slander, is a fool.

10:19 In the multitude of words there wanteth not sin: but he that
refraineth his lips is wise.

10:20 The tongue of the just is as choice silver: the heart of the
wicked is little worth.

10:21 The lips of the righteous feed many: but fools die for want of
wisdom.

10:22 The blessing of the LORD, it maketh rich, and he addeth no
sorrow with it.

10:23 It is as sport to a fool to do mischief: but a man of
understanding hath wisdom.

10:24 The fear of the wicked, it shall come upon him: but the desire
of the righteous shall be granted.

10:25 As the whirlwind passeth, so is the wicked no more: but the
righteous is an everlasting foundation.

10:26 As vinegar to the teeth, and as smoke to the eyes, so is the
sluggard to them that send him.

10:27 The fear of the LORD prolongeth days: but the years of the
wicked shall be shortened.

10:28 The hope of the righteous shall be gladness: but the expectation
of the wicked shall perish.

10:29 The way of the LORD is strength to the upright: but destruction
shall be to the workers of iniquity.

10:30 The righteous shall never be removed: but the wicked shall not
inhabit the earth.

10:31 The mouth of the just bringeth forth wisdom: but the froward
tongue shall be cut out.

10:32 The lips of the righteous know what is acceptable: but the mouth
of the wicked speaketh frowardness.

11:1 A false balance is abomination to the LORD: but a just weight is
his delight.

11:2 When pride cometh, then cometh shame: but with the lowly is
wisdom.

11:3 The integrity of the upright shall guide them: but the
perverseness of transgressors shall destroy them.

11:4 Riches profit not in the day of wrath: but righteousness
delivereth from death.

11:5 The righteousness of the perfect shall direct his way: but the
wicked shall fall by his own wickedness.

11:6 The righteousness of the upright shall deliver them: but
transgressors shall be taken in their own naughtiness.

11:7 When a wicked man dieth, his expectation shall perish: and the
hope of unjust men perisheth.

11:8 The righteous is delivered out of trouble, and the wicked cometh
in his stead.

11:9 An hypocrite with his mouth destroyeth his neighbour: but through
knowledge shall the just be delivered.

11:10 When it goeth well with the righteous, the city rejoiceth: and
when the wicked perish, there is shouting.

11:11 By the blessing of the upright the city is exalted: but it is
overthrown by the mouth of the wicked.

11:12 He that is void of wisdom despiseth his neighbour: but a man of
understanding holdeth his peace.

11:13 A talebearer revealeth secrets: but he that is of a faithful
spirit concealeth the matter.

11:14 Where no counsel is, the people fall: but in the multitude of
counsellors there is safety.

11:15 He that is surety for a stranger shall smart for it: and he that
hateth suretiship is sure.

11:16 A gracious woman retaineth honour: and strong men retain riches.

11:17 The merciful man doeth good to his own soul: but he that is
cruel troubleth his own flesh.

11:18 The wicked worketh a deceitful work: but to him that soweth
righteousness shall be a sure reward.

11:19 As righteousness tendeth to life: so he that pursueth evil
pursueth it to his own death.

11:20 They that are of a froward heart are abomination to the LORD:
but such as are upright in their way are his delight.

11:21 Though hand join in hand, the wicked shall not be unpunished:
but the seed of the righteous shall be delivered.

11:22 As a jewel of gold in a swine's snout, so is a fair woman which
is without discretion.

11:23 The desire of the righteous is only good: but the expectation of
the wicked is wrath.

11:24 There is that scattereth, and yet increaseth; and there is that
withholdeth more than is meet, but it tendeth to poverty.

11:25 The liberal soul shall be made fat: and he that watereth shall
be watered also himself.

11:26 He that withholdeth corn, the people shall curse him: but
blessing shall be upon the head of him that selleth it.

11:27 He that diligently seeketh good procureth favour: but he that
seeketh mischief, it shall come unto him.

11:28 He that trusteth in his riches shall fall; but the righteous
shall flourish as a branch.

11:29 He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind: and the
fool shall be servant to the wise of heart.

11:30 The fruit of the righteous is a tree of life; and he that
winneth souls is wise.

11:31 Behold, the righteous shall be recompensed in the earth: much
more the wicked and the sinner.

12:1 Whoso loveth instruction loveth knowledge: but he that hateth
reproof is brutish.

12:2 A good man obtaineth favour of the LORD: but a man of wicked
devices will he condemn.

12:3 A man shall not be established by wickedness: but the root of the
righteous shall not be moved.

12:4 A virtuous woman is a crown to her husband: but she that maketh
ashamed is as rottenness in his bones.

12:5 The thoughts of the righteous are right: but the counsels of the
wicked are deceit.

12:6 The words of the wicked are to lie in wait for blood: but the
mouth of the upright shall deliver them.

12:7 The wicked are overthrown, and are not: but the house of the
righteous shall stand.

12:8 A man shall be commended according to his wisdom: but he that is
of a perverse heart shall be despised.

12:9 He that is despised, and hath a servant, is better than he that
honoureth himself, and lacketh bread.

12:10 A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast: but the tender
mercies of the wicked are cruel.

12:11 He that tilleth his land shall be satisfied with bread: but he
that followeth vain persons is void of understanding.

12:12 The wicked desireth the net of evil men: but the root of the
righteous yieldeth fruit.

12:13 The wicked is snared by the transgression of his lips: but the
just shall come out of trouble.

12:14 A man shall be satisfied with good by the fruit of his mouth:
and the recompence of a man's hands shall be rendered unto him.

12:15 The way of a fool is right in his own eyes: but he that
hearkeneth unto counsel is wise.

12:16 A fool's wrath is presently known: but a prudent man covereth
shame.

12:17 He that speaketh truth sheweth forth righteousness: but a false
witness deceit.

12:18 There is that speaketh like the piercings of a sword: but the
tongue of the wise is health.

12:19 The lip of truth shall be established for ever: but a lying
tongue is but for a moment.

12:20 Deceit is in the heart of them that imagine evil: but to the
counsellors of peace is joy.

12:21 There shall no evil happen to the just: but the wicked shall be
filled with mischief.

12:22 Lying lips are abomination to the LORD: but they that deal truly
are his delight.

12:23 A prudent man concealeth knowledge: but the heart of fools
proclaimeth foolishness.

12:24 The hand of the diligent shall bear rule: but the slothful shall
be under tribute.

12:25 Heaviness in the heart of man maketh it stoop: but a good word
maketh it glad.

12:26 The righteous is more excellent than his neighbour: but the way
of the wicked seduceth them.

12:27 The slothful man roasteth not that which he took in hunting: but
the substance of a diligent man is precious.

12:28 In the way of righteousness is life: and in the pathway thereof
there is no death.

13:1 A wise son heareth his father's instruction: but a scorner
heareth not rebuke.

13:2 A man shall eat good by the fruit of his mouth: but the soul of
the transgressors shall eat violence.

13:3 He that keepeth his mouth keepeth his life: but he that openeth
wide his lips shall have destruction.

13:4 The soul of the sluggard desireth, and hath nothing: but the soul
of the diligent shall be made fat.

13:5 A righteous man hateth lying: but a wicked man is loathsome, and
cometh to shame.

13:6 Righteousness keepeth him that is upright in the way: but
wickedness overthroweth the sinner.

13:7 There is that maketh himself rich, yet hath nothing: there is
that maketh himself poor, yet hath great riches.

13:8 The ransom of a man's life are his riches: but the poor heareth
not rebuke.

13:9 The light of the righteous rejoiceth: but the lamp of the wicked
shall be put out.

13:10 Only by pride cometh contention: but with the well advised is
wisdom.

13:11 Wealth gotten by vanity shall be diminished: but he that
gathereth by labour shall increase.

13:12 Hope deferred maketh the heart sick: but when the desire cometh,
it is a tree of life.

13:13 Whoso despiseth the word shall be destroyed: but he that feareth
the commandment shall be rewarded.

13:14 The law of the wise is a fountain of life, to depart from the
snares of death.

13:15 Good understanding giveth favour: but the way of transgressors
is hard.

13:16 Every prudent man dealeth with knowledge: but a fool layeth open
his folly.

13:17 A wicked messenger falleth into mischief: but a faithful
ambassador is health.

13:18 Poverty and shame shall be to him that refuseth instruction: but
he that regardeth reproof shall be honoured.

13:19 The desire accomplished is sweet to the soul: but it is
abomination to fools to depart from evil.

13:20 He that walketh with wise men shall be wise: but a companion of
fools shall be destroyed.

13:21 Evil pursueth sinners: but to the righteous good shall be
repayed.

13:22 A good man leaveth an inheritance to his children's children:
and the wealth of the sinner is laid up for the just.

13:23 Much food is in the tillage of the poor: but there is that is
destroyed for want of judgment.

13:24 He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him
chasteneth him betimes.

13:25 The righteous eateth to the satisfying of his soul: but the
belly of the wicked shall want.

14:1 Every wise woman buildeth her house: but the foolish plucketh it
down with her hands.

14:2 He that walketh in his uprightness feareth the LORD: but he that
is perverse in his ways despiseth him.

14:3 In the mouth of the foolish is a rod of pride: but the lips of
the wise shall preserve them.

14:4 Where no oxen are, the crib is clean: but much increase is by the
strength of the ox.

14:5 A faithful witness will not lie: but a false witness will utter
lies.

14:6 A scorner seeketh wisdom, and findeth it not: but knowledge is
easy unto him that understandeth.

14:7 Go from the presence of a foolish man, when thou perceivest not
in him the lips of knowledge.

14:8 The wisdom of the prudent is to understand his way: but the folly
of fools is deceit.

14:9 Fools make a mock at sin: but among the righteous there is
favour.

14:10 The heart knoweth his own bitterness; and a stranger doth not
intermeddle with his joy.

14:11 The house of the wicked shall be overthrown: but the tabernacle
of the upright shall flourish.

14:12 There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end
thereof are the ways of death.

14:13 Even in laughter the heart is sorrowful; and the end of that
mirth is heaviness.

14:14 The backslider in heart shall be filled with his own ways: and a
good man shall be satisfied from himself.

14:15 The simple believeth every word: but the prudent man looketh
well to his going.

14:16 A wise man feareth, and departeth from evil: but the fool
rageth, and is confident.

14:17 He that is soon angry dealeth foolishly: and a man of wicked
devices is hated.

14:18 The simple inherit folly: but the prudent are crowned with
knowledge.

14:19 The evil bow before the good; and the wicked at the gates of the
righteous.

14:20 The poor is hated even of his own neighbour: but the rich hath
many friends.

14:21 He that despiseth his neighbour sinneth: but he that hath mercy
on the poor, happy is he.

14:22 Do they not err that devise evil? but mercy and truth shall be
to them that devise good.

14:23 In all labour there is profit: but the talk of the lips tendeth
only to penury.

14:24 The crown of the wise is their riches: but the foolishness of
fools is folly.

14:25 A true witness delivereth souls: but a deceitful witness
speaketh lies.

14:26 In the fear of the LORD is strong confidence: and his children
shall have a place of refuge.

14:27 The fear of the LORD is a fountain of life, to depart from the
snares of death.

14:28 In the multitude of people is the king's honour: but in the want
of people is the destruction of the prince.

14:29 He that is slow to wrath is of great understanding: but he that
is hasty of spirit exalteth folly.

14:30 A sound heart is the life of the flesh: but envy the rottenness
of the bones.

14:31 He that oppresseth the poor reproacheth his Maker: but he that
honoureth him hath mercy on the poor.

14:32 The wicked is driven away in his wickedness: but the righteous
hath hope in his death.

14:33 Wisdom resteth in the heart of him that hath understanding: but
that which is in the midst of fools is made known.

14:34 Righteousness exalteth a nation: but sin is a reproach to any
people.

14:35 The king's favour is toward a wise servant: but his wrath is
against him that causeth shame.

15:1 A soft answer turneth away wrath: but grievous words stir up
anger.

15:2 The tongue of the wise useth knowledge aright: but the mouth of
fools poureth out foolishness.

15:3 The eyes of the LORD are in every place, beholding the evil and
the good.

15:4 A wholesome tongue is a tree of life: but perverseness therein is
a breach in the spirit.

15:5 A fool despiseth his father's instruction: but he that regardeth
reproof is prudent.

15:6 In the house of the righteous is much treasure: but in the
revenues of the wicked is trouble.

15:7 The lips of the wise disperse knowledge: but the heart of the
foolish doeth not so.

15:8 The sacrifice of the wicked is an abomination to the LORD: but
the prayer of the upright is his delight.

15:9 The way of the wicked is an abomination unto the LORD: but he
loveth him that followeth after righteousness.

15:10 Correction is grievous unto him that forsaketh the way: and he
that hateth reproof shall die.

15:11 Hell and destruction are before the LORD: how much more then the
hearts of the children of men?  15:12 A scorner loveth not one that
reproveth him: neither will he go unto the wise.

15:13 A merry heart maketh a cheerful countenance: but by sorrow of
the heart the spirit is broken.

15:14 The heart of him that hath understanding seeketh knowledge: but
the mouth of fools feedeth on foolishness.

15:15 All the days of the afflicted are evil: but he that is of a
merry heart hath a continual feast.

15:16 Better is little with the fear of the LORD than great treasure
and trouble therewith.

15:17 Better is a dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox and
hatred therewith.

15:18 A wrathful man stirreth up strife: but he that is slow to anger
appeaseth strife.

15:19 The way of the slothful man is as an hedge of thorns: but the
way of the righteous is made plain.

15:20 A wise son maketh a glad father: but a foolish man despiseth his
mother.

15:21 Folly is joy to him that is destitute of wisdom: but a man of
understanding walketh uprightly.

15:22 Without counsel purposes are disappointed: but in the multitude
of counsellors they are established.

15:23 A man hath joy by the answer of his mouth: and a word spoken in
due season, how good is it!  15:24 The way of life is above to the
wise, that he may depart from hell beneath.

15:25 The LORD will destroy the house of the proud: but he will
establish the border of the widow.

15:26 The thoughts of the wicked are an abomination to the LORD: but
the words of the pure are pleasant words.

15:27 He that is greedy of gain troubleth his own house; but he that
hateth gifts shall live.

15:28 The heart of the righteous studieth to answer: but the mouth of
the wicked poureth out evil things.

15:29 The LORD is far from the wicked: but he heareth the prayer of
the righteous.

15:30 The light of the eyes rejoiceth the heart: and a good report
maketh the bones fat.

15:31 The ear that heareth the reproof of life abideth among the wise.

15:32 He that refuseth instruction despiseth his own soul: but he that
heareth reproof getteth understanding.

15:33 The fear of the LORD is the instruction of wisdom; and before
honour is humility.

16:1 The preparations of the heart in man, and the answer of the
tongue, is from the LORD.

16:2 All the ways of a man are clean in his own eyes; but the LORD
weigheth the spirits.

16:3 Commit thy works unto the LORD, and thy thoughts shall be
established.

16:4 The LORD hath made all things for himself: yea, even the wicked
for the day of evil.

16:5 Every one that is proud in heart is an abomination to the LORD:
though hand join in hand, he shall not be unpunished.

16:6 By mercy and truth iniquity is purged: and by the fear of the
LORD men depart from evil.

16:7 When a man's ways please the LORD, he maketh even his enemies to
be at peace with him.

16:8 Better is a little with righteousness than great revenues without
right.

16:9 A man's heart deviseth his way: but the LORD directeth his steps.

16:10 A divine sentence is in the lips of the king: his mouth
transgresseth not in judgment.

16:11 A just weight and balance are the LORD's: all the weights of the
bag are his work.

16:12 It is an abomination to kings to commit wickedness: for the
throne is established by righteousness.

16:13 Righteous lips are the delight of kings; and they love him that
speaketh right.

16:14 The wrath of a king is as messengers of death: but a wise man
will pacify it.

16:15 In the light of the king's countenance is life; and his favour
is as a cloud of the latter rain.

16:16 How much better is it to get wisdom than gold! and to get
understanding rather to be chosen than silver!  16:17 The highway of
the upright is to depart from evil: he that keepeth his way preserveth
his soul.

16:18 Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a
fall.

16:19 Better it is to be of an humble spirit with the lowly, than to
divide the spoil with the proud.

16:20 He that handleth a matter wisely shall find good: and whoso
trusteth in the LORD, happy is he.

16:21 The wise in heart shall be called prudent: and the sweetness of
the lips increaseth learning.

16:22 Understanding is a wellspring of life unto him that hath it: but
the instruction of fools is folly.

16:23 The heart of the wise teacheth his mouth, and addeth learning to
his lips.

16:24 Pleasant words are as an honeycomb, sweet to the soul, and
health to the bones.

16:25 There is a way that seemeth right unto a man, but the end
thereof are the ways of death.

16:26 He that laboureth laboureth for himself; for his mouth craveth
it of him.

16:27 An ungodly man diggeth up evil: and in his lips there is as a
burning fire.

16:28 A froward man soweth strife: and a whisperer separateth chief
friends.

16:29 A violent man enticeth his neighbour, and leadeth him into the
way that is not good.

16:30 He shutteth his eyes to devise froward things: moving his lips
he bringeth evil to pass.

16:31 The hoary head is a crown of glory, if it be found in the way of
righteousness.

16:32 He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; and he that
ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city.

16:33 The lot is cast into the lap; but the whole disposing thereof is
of the LORD.

17:1 Better is a dry morsel, and quietness therewith, than an house
full of sacrifices with strife.

17:2 A wise servant shall have rule over a son that causeth shame, and
shall have part of the inheritance among the brethren.

17:3 The fining pot is for silver, and the furnace for gold: but the
LORD trieth the hearts.

17:4 A wicked doer giveth heed to false lips; and a liar giveth ear to
a naughty tongue.

17:5 Whoso mocketh the poor reproacheth his Maker: and he that is glad
at calamities shall not be unpunished.

17:6 Children's children are the crown of old men; and the glory of
children are their fathers.

17:7 Excellent speech becometh not a fool: much less do lying lips a
prince.

17:8 A gift is as a precious stone in the eyes of him that hath it:
whithersoever it turneth, it prospereth.

17:9 He that covereth a transgression seeketh love; but he that
repeateth a matter separateth very friends.

17:10 A reproof entereth more into a wise man than an hundred stripes
into a fool.

17:11 An evil man seeketh only rebellion: therefore a cruel messenger
shall be sent against him.

17:12 Let a bear robbed of her whelps meet a man, rather than a fool
in his folly.

17:13 Whoso rewardeth evil for good, evil shall not depart from his
house.

17:14 The beginning of strife is as when one letteth out water:
therefore leave off contention, before it be meddled with.

17:15 He that justifieth the wicked, and he that condemneth the just,
even they both are abomination to the LORD.

17:16 Wherefore is there a price in the hand of a fool to get wisdom,
seeing he hath no heart to it?  17:17 A friend loveth at all times,
and a brother is born for adversity.

17:18 A man void of understanding striketh hands, and becometh surety
in the presence of his friend.

17:19 He loveth transgression that loveth strife: and he that exalteth
his gate seeketh destruction.

17:20 He that hath a froward heart findeth no good: and he that hath a
perverse tongue falleth into mischief.

17:21 He that begetteth a fool doeth it to his sorrow: and the father
of a fool hath no joy.

17:22 A merry heart doeth good like a medicine: but a broken spirit
drieth the bones.

17:23 A wicked man taketh a gift out of the bosom to pervert the ways
of judgment.

17:24 Wisdom is before him that hath understanding; but the eyes of a
fool are in the ends of the earth.

17:25 A foolish son is a grief to his father, and bitterness to her
that bare him.

17:26 Also to punish the just is not good, nor to strike princes for
equity.

17:27 He that hath knowledge spareth his words: and a man of
understanding is of an excellent spirit.

17:28 Even a fool, when he holdeth his peace, is counted wise: and he
that shutteth his lips is esteemed a man of understanding.

18:1 Through desire a man, having separated himself, seeketh and
intermeddleth with all wisdom.

18:2 A fool hath no delight in understanding, but that his heart may
discover itself.

18:3 When the wicked cometh, then cometh also contempt, and with
ignominy reproach.

18:4 The words of a man's mouth are as deep waters, and the wellspring
of wisdom as a flowing brook.

18:5 It is not good to accept the person of the wicked, to overthrow
the righteous in judgment.

18:6 A fool's lips enter into contention, and his mouth calleth for
strokes.

18:7 A fool's mouth is his destruction, and his lips are the snare of
his soul.

18:8 The words of a talebearer are as wounds, and they go down into
the innermost parts of the belly.

18:9 He also that is slothful in his work is brother to him that is a
great waster.

18:10 The name of the LORD is a strong tower: the righteous runneth
into it, and is safe.

18:11 The rich man's wealth is his strong city, and as an high wall in
his own conceit.

18:12 Before destruction the heart of man is haughty, and before
honour is humility.

18:13 He that answereth a matter before he heareth it, it is folly and
shame unto him.

18:14 The spirit of a man will sustain his infirmity; but a wounded
spirit who can bear?  18:15 The heart of the prudent getteth
knowledge; and the ear of the wise seeketh knowledge.

18:16 A man's gift maketh room for him, and bringeth him before great
men.

18:17 He that is first in his own cause seemeth just; but his
neighbour cometh and searcheth him.

18:18 The lot causeth contentions to cease, and parteth between the
mighty.

18:19 A brother offended is harder to be won than a strong city: and
their contentions are like the bars of a castle.

18:20 A man's belly shall be satisfied with the fruit of his mouth;
and with the increase of his lips shall he be filled.

18:21 Death and life are in the power of the tongue: and they that
love it shall eat the fruit thereof.

18:22 Whoso findeth a wife findeth a good thing, and obtaineth favour
of the LORD.

18:23 The poor useth intreaties; but the rich answereth roughly.

18:24 A man that hath friends must shew himself friendly: and there is
a friend that sticketh closer than a brother.

19:1 Better is the poor that walketh in his integrity, than he that is
perverse in his lips, and is a fool.

19:2 Also, that the soul be without knowledge, it is not good; and he
that hasteth with his feet sinneth.

19:3 The foolishness of man perverteth his way: and his heart fretteth
against the LORD.

19:4 Wealth maketh many friends; but the poor is separated from his
neighbour.

19:5 A false witness shall not be unpunished, and he that speaketh
lies shall not escape.

19:6 Many will intreat the favour of the prince: and every man is a
friend to him that giveth gifts.

19:7 All the brethren of the poor do hate him: how much more do his
friends go far from him? he pursueth them with words, yet they are
wanting to him.

19:8 He that getteth wisdom loveth his own soul: he that keepeth
understanding shall find good.

19:9 A false witness shall not be unpunished, and he that speaketh
lies shall perish.

19:10 Delight is not seemly for a fool; much less for a servant to
have rule over princes.

19:11 The discretion of a man deferreth his anger; and it is his glory
to pass over a transgression.

19:12 The king's wrath is as the roaring of a lion; but his favour is
as dew upon the grass.

19:13 A foolish son is the calamity of his father: and the contentions
of a wife are a continual dropping.

19:14 House and riches are the inheritance of fathers: and a prudent
wife is from the LORD.

19:15 Slothfulness casteth into a deep sleep; and an idle soul shall
suffer hunger.

19:16 He that keepeth the commandment keepeth his own soul; but he
that despiseth his ways shall die.

19:17 He that hath pity upon the poor lendeth unto the LORD; and that
which he hath given will he pay him again.

19:18 Chasten thy son while there is hope, and let not thy soul spare
for his crying.

19:19 A man of great wrath shall suffer punishment: for if thou
deliver him, yet thou must do it again.

19:20 Hear counsel, and receive instruction, that thou mayest be wise
in thy latter end.

19:21 There are many devices in a man's heart; nevertheless the
counsel of the LORD, that shall stand.

19:22 The desire of a man is his kindness: and a poor man is better
than a liar.

19:23 The fear of the LORD tendeth to life: and he that hath it shall
abide satisfied; he shall not be visited with evil.

19:24 A slothful man hideth his hand in his bosom, and will not so
much as bring it to his mouth again.

19:25 Smite a scorner, and the simple will beware: and reprove one
that hath understanding, and he will understand knowledge.

19:26 He that wasteth his father, and chaseth away his mother, is a
son that causeth shame, and bringeth reproach.

19:27 Cease, my son, to hear the instruction that causeth to err from
the words of knowledge.

19:28 An ungodly witness scorneth judgment: and the mouth of the
wicked devoureth iniquity.

19:29 Judgments are prepared for scorners, and stripes for the back of
fools.

20:1 Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging: and whosoever is
deceived thereby is not wise.

20:2 The fear of a king is as the roaring of a lion: whoso provoketh
him to anger sinneth against his own soul.

20:3 It is an honour for a man to cease from strife: but every fool
will be meddling.

20:4 The sluggard will not plow by reason of the cold; therefore shall
he beg in harvest, and have nothing.

20:5 Counsel in the heart of man is like deep water; but a man of
understanding will draw it out.

20:6 Most men will proclaim every one his own goodness: but a faithful
man who can find?  20:7 The just man walketh in his integrity: his
children are blessed after him.

20:8 A king that sitteth in the throne of judgment scattereth away all
evil with his eyes.

20:9 Who can say, I have made my heart clean, I am pure from my sin?
20:10 Divers weights, and divers measures, both of them are alike
abomination to the LORD.

20:11 Even a child is known by his doings, whether his work be pure,
and whether it be right.

20:12 The hearing ear, and the seeing eye, the LORD hath made even
both of them.

20:13 Love not sleep, lest thou come to poverty; open thine eyes, and
thou shalt be satisfied with bread.

20:14 It is naught, it is naught, saith the buyer: but when he is gone
his way, then he boasteth.

20:15 There is gold, and a multitude of rubies: but the lips of
knowledge are a precious jewel.

20:16 Take his garment that is surety for a stranger: and take a
pledge of him for a strange woman.

20:17 Bread of deceit is sweet to a man; but afterwards his mouth
shall be filled with gravel.

20:18 Every purpose is established by counsel: and with good advice
make war.

20:19 He that goeth about as a talebearer revealeth secrets: therefore
meddle not with him that flattereth with his lips.

20:20 Whoso curseth his father or his mother, his lamp shall be put
out in obscure darkness.

20:21 An inheritance may be gotten hastily at the beginning; but the
end thereof shall not be blessed.

20:22 Say not thou, I will recompense evil; but wait on the LORD, and
he shall save thee.

20:23 Divers weights are an abomination unto the LORD; and a false
balance is not good.

20:24 Man's goings are of the LORD; how can a man then understand his
own way?  20:25 It is a snare to the man who devoureth that which is
holy, and after vows to make enquiry.

20:26 A wise king scattereth the wicked, and bringeth the wheel over
them.

20:27 The spirit of man is the candle of the LORD, searching all the
inward parts of the belly.

20:28 Mercy and truth preserve the king: and his throne is upholden by
mercy.

20:29 The glory of young men is their strength: and the beauty of old
men is the grey head.

20:30 The blueness of a wound cleanseth away evil: so do stripes the
inward parts of the belly.

21:1 The king's heart is in the hand of the LORD, as the rivers of
water: he turneth it whithersoever he will.

21:2 Every way of a man is right in his own eyes: but the LORD
pondereth the hearts.

21:3 To do justice and judgment is more acceptable to the LORD than
sacrifice.

21:4 An high look, and a proud heart, and the plowing of the wicked,
is sin.

21:5 The thoughts of the diligent tend only to plenteousness; but of
every one that is hasty only to want.

21:6 The getting of treasures by a lying tongue is a vanity tossed to
and fro of them that seek death.

21:7 The robbery of the wicked shall destroy them; because they refuse
to do judgment.

21:8 The way of man is froward and strange: but as for the pure, his
work is right.

21:9 It is better to dwell in a corner of the housetop, than with a
brawling woman in a wide house.

21:10 The soul of the wicked desireth evil: his neighbour findeth no
favour in his eyes.

21:11 When the scorner is punished, the simple is made wise: and when
the wise is instructed, he receiveth knowledge.

21:12 The righteous man wisely considereth the house of the wicked:
but God overthroweth the wicked for their wickedness.

21:13 Whoso stoppeth his ears at the cry of the poor, he also shall
cry himself, but shall not be heard.

21:14 A gift in secret pacifieth anger: and a reward in the bosom
strong wrath.

21:15 It is joy to the just to do judgment: but destruction shall be
to the workers of iniquity.

21:16 The man that wandereth out of the way of understanding shall
remain in the congregation of the dead.

21:17 He that loveth pleasure shall be a poor man: he that loveth wine
and oil shall not be rich.

21:18 The wicked shall be a ransom for the righteous, and the
transgressor for the upright.

21:19 It is better to dwell in the wilderness, than with a contentious
and an angry woman.

21:20 There is treasure to be desired and oil in the dwelling of the
wise; but a foolish man spendeth it up.

21:21 He that followeth after righteousness and mercy findeth life,
righteousness, and honour.

21:22 A wise man scaleth the city of the mighty, and casteth down the
strength of the confidence thereof.

21:23 Whoso keepeth his mouth and his tongue keepeth his soul from
troubles.

21:24 Proud and haughty scorner is his name, who dealeth in proud
wrath.

21:25 The desire of the slothful killeth him; for his hands refuse to
labour.

21:26 He coveteth greedily all the day long: but the righteous giveth
and spareth not.

21:27 The sacrifice of the wicked is abomination: how much more, when
he bringeth it with a wicked mind?  21:28 A false witness shall
perish: but the man that heareth speaketh constantly.

21:29 A wicked man hardeneth his face: but as for the upright, he
directeth his way.

21:30 There is no wisdom nor understanding nor counsel against the
LORD.

21:31 The horse is prepared against the day of battle: but safety is
of the LORD.

22:1 A GOOD name is rather to be chosen than great riches, and loving
favour rather than silver and gold.

22:2 The rich and poor meet together: the LORD is the maker of them
all.

22:3 A prudent man foreseeth the evil, and hideth himself: but the
simple pass on, and are punished.

22:4 By humility and the fear of the LORD are riches, and honour, and
life.

22:5 Thorns and snares are in the way of the froward: he that doth
keep his soul shall be far from them.

22:6 Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he
will not depart from it.

22:7 The rich ruleth over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the
lender.

22:8 He that soweth iniquity shall reap vanity: and the rod of his
anger shall fail.

22:9 He that hath a bountiful eye shall be blessed; for he giveth of
his bread to the poor.

22:10 Cast out the scorner, and contention shall go out; yea, strife
and reproach shall cease.

22:11 He that loveth pureness of heart, for the grace of his lips the
king shall be his friend.

22:12 The eyes of the LORD preserve knowledge, and he overthroweth the
words of the transgressor.

22:13 The slothful man saith, There is a lion without, I shall be
slain in the streets.

22:14 The mouth of strange women is a deep pit: he that is abhorred of
the LORD shall fall therein.

22:15 Foolishness is bound in the heart of a child; but the rod of
correction shall drive it far from him.

22:16 He that oppresseth the poor to increase his riches, and he that
giveth to the rich, shall surely come to want.

22:17 Bow down thine ear, and hear the words of the wise, and apply
thine heart unto my knowledge.

22:18 For it is a pleasant thing if thou keep them within thee; they
shall withal be fitted in thy lips.

22:19 That thy trust may be in the LORD, I have made known to thee
this day, even to thee.

22:20 Have not I written to thee excellent things in counsels and
knowledge, 22:21 That I might make thee know the certainty of the
words of truth; that thou mightest answer the words of truth to them
that send unto thee?  22:22 Rob not the poor, because he is poor:
neither oppress the afflicted in the gate: 22:23 For the LORD will
plead their cause, and spoil the soul of those that spoiled them.

22:24 Make no friendship with an angry man; and with a furious man
thou shalt not go: 22:25 Lest thou learn his ways, and get a snare to
thy soul.

22:26 Be not thou one of them that strike hands, or of them that are
sureties for debts.

22:27 If thou hast nothing to pay, why should he take away thy bed
from under thee?  22:28 Remove not the ancient landmark, which thy
fathers have set.

22:29 Seest thou a man diligent in his business? he shall stand before
kings; he shall not stand before mean men.

23:1 When thou sittest to eat with a ruler, consider diligently what
is before thee: 23:2 And put a knife to thy throat, if thou be a man
given to appetite.

23:3 Be not desirous of his dainties: for they are deceitful meat.

23:4 Labour not to be rich: cease from thine own wisdom.

23:5 Wilt thou set thine eyes upon that which is not? for riches
certainly make themselves wings; they fly away as an eagle toward
heaven.

23:6 Eat thou not the bread of him that hath an evil eye, neither
desire thou his dainty meats: 23:7 For as he thinketh in his heart, so
is he: Eat and drink, saith he to thee; but his heart is not with
thee.

23:8 The morsel which thou hast eaten shalt thou vomit up, and lose
thy sweet words.

23:9 Speak not in the ears of a fool: for he will despise the wisdom
of thy words.

23:10 Remove not the old landmark; and enter not into the fields of
the fatherless: 23:11 For their redeemer is mighty; he shall plead
their cause with thee.

23:12 Apply thine heart unto instruction, and thine ears to the words
of knowledge.

23:13 Withhold not correction from the child: for if thou beatest him
with the rod, he shall not die.

23:14 Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and shalt deliver his soul
from hell.

23:15 My son, if thine heart be wise, my heart shall rejoice, even
mine.

23:16 Yea, my reins shall rejoice, when thy lips speak right things.

23:17 Let not thine heart envy sinners: but be thou in the fear of the
LORD all the day long.

23:18 For surely there is an end; and thine expectation shall not be
cut off.

23:19 Hear thou, my son, and be wise, and guide thine heart in the
way.

23:20 Be not among winebibbers; among riotous eaters of flesh: 23:21
For the drunkard and the glutton shall come to poverty: and drowsiness
shall clothe a man with rags.

23:22 Hearken unto thy father that begat thee, and despise not thy
mother when she is old.

23:23 Buy the truth, and sell it not; also wisdom, and instruction,
and understanding.

23:24 The father of the righteous shall greatly rejoice: and he that
begetteth a wise child shall have joy of him.

23:25 Thy father and thy mother shall be glad, and she that bare thee
shall rejoice.

23:26 My son, give me thine heart, and let thine eyes observe my ways.

23:27 For a whore is a deep ditch; and a strange woman is a narrow
pit.

23:28 She also lieth in wait as for a prey, and increaseth the
transgressors among men.

23:29 Who hath woe? who hath sorrow? who hath contentions? who hath
babbling? who hath wounds without cause? who hath redness of eyes?
23:30 They that tarry long at the wine; they that go to seek mixed
wine.

23:31 Look not thou upon the wine when it is red, when it giveth his
colour in the cup, when it moveth itself aright.

23:32 At the last it biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an
adder.

23:33 Thine eyes shall behold strange women, and thine heart shall
utter perverse things.

23:34 Yea, thou shalt be as he that lieth down in the midst of the
sea, or as he that lieth upon the top of a mast.

23:35 They have stricken me, shalt thou say, and I was not sick; they
have beaten me, and I felt it not: when shall I awake? I will seek it
yet again.

24:1 Be not thou envious against evil men, neither desire to be with
them.

24:2 For their heart studieth destruction, and their lips talk of
mischief.

24:3 Through wisdom is an house builded; and by understanding it is
established: 24:4 And by knowledge shall the chambers be filled with
all precious and pleasant riches.

24:5 A wise man is strong; yea, a man of knowledge increaseth
strength.

24:6 For by wise counsel thou shalt make thy war: and in multitude of
counsellors there is safety.

24:7 Wisdom is too high for a fool: he openeth not his mouth in the
gate.

24:8 He that deviseth to do evil shall be called a mischievous person.

24:9 The thought of foolishness is sin: and the scorner is an
abomination to men.

24:10 If thou faint in the day of adversity, thy strength is small.

24:11 If thou forbear to deliver them that are drawn unto death, and
those that are ready to be slain; 24:12 If thou sayest, Behold, we
knew it not; doth not he that pondereth the heart consider it? and he
that keepeth thy soul, doth not he know it? and shall not he render to
every man according to his works?  24:13 My son, eat thou honey,
because it is good; and the honeycomb, which is sweet to thy taste:
24:14 So shall the knowledge of wisdom be unto thy soul: when thou
hast found it, then there shall be a reward, and thy expectation shall
not be cut off.

24:15 Lay not wait, O wicked man, against the dwelling of the
righteous; spoil not his resting place: 24:16 For a just man falleth
seven times, and riseth up again: but the wicked shall fall into
mischief.

24:17 Rejoice not when thine enemy falleth, and let not thine heart be
glad when he stumbleth: 24:18 Lest the LORD see it, and it displease
him, and he turn away his wrath from him.

24:19 Fret not thyself because of evil men, neither be thou envious at
the wicked: 24:20 For there shall be no reward to the evil man; the
candle of the wicked shall be put out.

24:21 My son, fear thou the LORD and the king: and meddle not with
them that are given to change: 24:22 For their calamity shall rise
suddenly; and who knoweth the ruin of them both?  24:23 These things
also belong to the wise. It is not good to have respect of persons in
judgment.

24:24 He that saith unto the wicked, Thou are righteous; him shall the
people curse, nations shall abhor him: 24:25 But to them that rebuke
him shall be delight, and a good blessing shall come upon them.

24:26 Every man shall kiss his lips that giveth a right answer.

24:27 Prepare thy work without, and make it fit for thyself in the
field; and afterwards build thine house.

24:28 Be not a witness against thy neighbour without cause; and
deceive not with thy lips.

24:29 Say not, I will do so to him as he hath done to me: I will
render to the man according to his work.

24:30 I went by the field of the slothful, and by the vineyard of the
man void of understanding; 24:31 And, lo, it was all grown over with
thorns, and nettles had covered the face thereof, and the stone wall
thereof was broken down.

24:32 Then I saw, and considered it well: I looked upon it, and
received instruction.

24:33 Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the
hands to sleep: 24:34 So shall thy poverty come as one that
travelleth; and thy want as an armed man.

25:1 These are also proverbs of Solomon, which the men of Hezekiah
king of Judah copied out.

25:2 It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honour of
kings is to search out a matter.

25:3 The heaven for height, and the earth for depth, and the heart of
kings is unsearchable.

25:4 Take away the dross from the silver, and there shall come forth a
vessel for the finer.

25:5 Take away the wicked from before the king, and his throne shall
be established in righteousness.

25:6 Put not forth thyself in the presence of the king, and stand not
in the place of great men: 25:7 For better it is that it be said unto
thee, Come up hither; than that thou shouldest be put lower in the
presence of the prince whom thine eyes have seen.

25:8 Go not forth hastily to strive, lest thou know not what to do in
the end thereof, when thy neighbour hath put thee to shame.

25:9 Debate thy cause with thy neighbour himself; and discover not a
secret to another: 25:10 Lest he that heareth it put thee to shame,
and thine infamy turn not away.

25:11 A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of
silver.

25:12 As an earring of gold, and an ornament of fine gold, so is a
wise reprover upon an obedient ear.

25:13 As the cold of snow in the time of harvest, so is a faithful
messenger to them that send him: for he refresheth the soul of his
masters.

25:14 Whoso boasteth himself of a false gift is like clouds and wind
without rain.

25:15 By long forbearing is a prince persuaded, and a soft tongue
breaketh the bone.

25:16 Hast thou found honey? eat so much as is sufficient for thee,
lest thou be filled therewith, and vomit it.

25:17 Withdraw thy foot from thy neighbour's house; lest he be weary
of thee, and so hate thee.

25:18 A man that beareth false witness against his neighbour is a
maul, and a sword, and a sharp arrow.

25:19 Confidence in an unfaithful man in time of trouble is like a
broken tooth, and a foot out of joint.

25:20 As he that taketh away a garment in cold weather, and as vinegar
upon nitre, so is he that singeth songs to an heavy heart.

25:21 If thine enemy be hungry, give him bread to eat; and if he be
thirsty, give him water to drink: 25:22 For thou shalt heap coals of
fire upon his head, and the LORD shall reward thee.

25:23 The north wind driveth away rain: so doth an angry countenance a
backbiting tongue.

25:24 It is better to dwell in the corner of the housetop, than with a
brawling woman and in a wide house.

25:25 As cold waters to a thirsty soul, so is good news from a far
country.

25:26 A righteous man falling down before the wicked is as a troubled
fountain, and a corrupt spring.

25:27 It is not good to eat much honey: so for men to search their own
glory is not glory.

25:28 He that hath no rule over his own spirit is like a city that is
broken down, and without walls.

26:1 As snow in summer, and as rain in harvest, so honour is not
seemly for a fool.

26:2 As the bird by wandering, as the swallow by flying, so the curse
causeless shall not come.

26:3 A whip for the horse, a bridle for the ass, and a rod for the
fool's back.

26:4 Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like
unto him.

26:5 Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own
conceit.

26:6 He that sendeth a message by the hand of a fool cutteth off the
feet, and drinketh damage.

26:7 The legs of the lame are not equal: so is a parable in the mouth
of fools.

26:8 As he that bindeth a stone in a sling, so is he that giveth
honour to a fool.

26:9 As a thorn goeth up into the hand of a drunkard, so is a parable
in the mouths of fools.

26:10 The great God that formed all things both rewardeth the fool,
and rewardeth transgressors.

26:11 As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his
folly.

26:12 Seest thou a man wise in his own conceit? there is more hope of
a fool than of him.

26:13 The slothful man saith, There is a lion in the way; a lion is in
the streets.

26:14 As the door turneth upon his hinges, so doth the slothful upon
his bed.

26:15 The slothful hideth his hand in his bosom; it grieveth him to
bring it again to his mouth.

26:16 The sluggard is wiser in his own conceit than seven men that can
render a reason.

26:17 He that passeth by, and meddleth with strife belonging not to
him, is like one that taketh a dog by the ears.

26:18 As a mad man who casteth firebrands, arrows, and death, 26:19 So
is the man that deceiveth his neighbour, and saith, Am not I in sport?
26:20 Where no wood is, there the fire goeth out: so where there is no
talebearer, the strife ceaseth.

26:21 As coals are to burning coals, and wood to fire; so is a
contentious man to kindle strife.

26:22 The words of a talebearer are as wounds, and they go down into
the innermost parts of the belly.

26:23 Burning lips and a wicked heart are like a potsherd covered with
silver dross.

26:24 He that hateth dissembleth with his lips, and layeth up deceit
within him; 26:25 When he speaketh fair, believe him not: for there
are seven abominations in his heart.

26:26 Whose hatred is covered by deceit, his wickedness shall be
shewed before the whole congregation.

26:27 Whoso diggeth a pit shall fall therein: and he that rolleth a
stone, it will return upon him.

26:28 A lying tongue hateth those that are afflicted by it; and a
flattering mouth worketh ruin.

27:1 Boast not thyself of to morrow; for thou knowest not what a day
may bring forth.

27:2 Let another man praise thee, and not thine own mouth; a stranger,
and not thine own lips.

27:3 A stone is heavy, and the sand weighty; but a fool's wrath is
heavier than them both.

27:4 Wrath is cruel, and anger is outrageous; but who is able to stand
before envy?  27:5 Open rebuke is better than secret love.

27:6 Faithful are the wounds of a friend; but the kisses of an enemy
are deceitful.

27:7 The full soul loatheth an honeycomb; but to the hungry soul every
bitter thing is sweet.

27:8 As a bird that wandereth from her nest, so is a man that
wandereth from his place.

27:9 Ointment and perfume rejoice the heart: so doth the sweetness of
a man's friend by hearty counsel.

27:10 Thine own friend, and thy father's friend, forsake not; neither
go into thy brother's house in the day of thy calamity: for better is
a neighbour that is near than a brother far off.

27:11 My son, be wise, and make my heart glad, that I may answer him
that reproacheth me.

27:12 A prudent man foreseeth the evil, and hideth himself; but the
simple pass on, and are punished.

27:13 Take his garment that is surety for a stranger, and take a
pledge of him for a strange woman.

27:14 He that blesseth his friend with a loud voice, rising early in
the morning, it shall be counted a curse to him.

27:15 A continual dropping in a very rainy day and a contentious woman
are alike.

27:16 Whosoever hideth her hideth the wind, and the ointment of his
right hand, which bewrayeth itself.

27:17 Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his
friend.

27:18 Whoso keepeth the fig tree shall eat the fruit thereof: so he
that waiteth on his master shall be honoured.

27:19 As in water face answereth to face, so the heart of man to man.

27:20 Hell and destruction are never full; so the eyes of man are
never satisfied.

27:21 As the fining pot for silver, and the furnace for gold; so is a
man to his praise.

27:22 Though thou shouldest bray a fool in a mortar among wheat with a
pestle, yet will not his foolishness depart from him.

27:23 Be thou diligent to know the state of thy flocks, and look well
to thy herds.

27:24 For riches are not for ever: and doth the crown endure to every
generation?  27:25 The hay appeareth, and the tender grass sheweth
itself, and herbs of the mountains are gathered.

27:26 The lambs are for thy clothing, and the goats are the price of
the field.

27:27 And thou shalt have goats' milk enough for thy food, for the
food of thy household, and for the maintenance for thy maidens.

28:1 The wicked flee when no man pursueth: but the righteous are bold
as a lion.

28:2 For the transgression of a land many are the princes thereof: but
by a man of understanding and knowledge the state thereof shall be
prolonged.

28:3 A poor man that oppresseth the poor is like a sweeping rain which
leaveth no food.

28:4 They that forsake the law praise the wicked: but such as keep the
law contend with them.

28:5 Evil men understand not judgment: but they that seek the LORD
understand all things.

28:6 Better is the poor that walketh in his uprightness, than he that
is perverse in his ways, though he be rich.

28:7 Whoso keepeth the law is a wise son: but he that is a companion
of riotous men shameth his father.

28:8 He that by usury and unjust gain increaseth his substance, he
shall gather it for him that will pity the poor.

28:9 He that turneth away his ear from hearing the law, even his
prayer shall be abomination.

28:10 Whoso causeth the righteous to go astray in an evil way, he
shall fall himself into his own pit: but the upright shall have good
things in possession.

28:11 The rich man is wise in his own conceit; but the poor that hath
understanding searcheth him out.

28:12 When righteous men do rejoice, there is great glory: but when
the wicked rise, a man is hidden.

28:13 He that covereth his sins shall not prosper: but whoso
confesseth and forsaketh them shall have mercy.

28:14 Happy is the man that feareth alway: but he that hardeneth his
heart shall fall into mischief.

28:15 As a roaring lion, and a ranging bear; so is a wicked ruler over
the poor people.

28:16 The prince that wanteth understanding is also a great oppressor:
but he that hateth covetousness shall prolong his days.

28:17 A man that doeth violence to the blood of any person shall flee
to the pit; let no man stay him.

28:18 Whoso walketh uprightly shall be saved: but he that is perverse
in his ways shall fall at once.

28:19 He that tilleth his land shall have plenty of bread: but he that
followeth after vain persons shall have poverty enough.

28:20 A faithful man shall abound with blessings: but he that maketh
haste to be rich shall not be innocent.

28:21 To have respect of persons is not good: for for a piece of bread
that man will transgress.

28:22 He that hasteth to be rich hath an evil eye, and considereth not
that poverty shall come upon him.

28:23 He that rebuketh a man afterwards shall find more favour than he
that flattereth with the tongue.

28:24 Whoso robbeth his father or his mother, and saith, It is no
transgression; the same is the companion of a destroyer.

28:25 He that is of a proud heart stirreth up strife: but he that
putteth his trust in the LORD shall be made fat.

28:26 He that trusteth in his own heart is a fool: but whoso walketh
wisely, he shall be delivered.

28:27 He that giveth unto the poor shall not lack: but he that hideth
his eyes shall have many a curse.

28:28 When the wicked rise, men hide themselves: but when they perish,
the righteous increase.

29:1 He, that being often reproved hardeneth his neck, shall suddenly
be destroyed, and that without remedy.

29:2 When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice: but when
the wicked beareth rule, the people mourn.

29:3 Whoso loveth wisdom rejoiceth his father: but he that keepeth
company with harlots spendeth his substance.

29:4 The king by judgment establisheth the land: but he that receiveth
gifts overthroweth it.

29:5 A man that flattereth his neighbour spreadeth a net for his feet.

29:6 In the transgression of an evil man there is a snare: but the
righteous doth sing and rejoice.

29:7 The righteous considereth the cause of the poor: but the wicked
regardeth not to know it.

29:8 Scornful men bring a city into a snare: but wise men turn away
wrath.

29:9 If a wise man contendeth with a foolish man, whether he rage or
laugh, there is no rest.

29:10 The bloodthirsty hate the upright: but the just seek his soul.

29:11 A fool uttereth all his mind: but a wise man keepeth it in till
afterwards.

29:12 If a ruler hearken to lies, all his servants are wicked.

29:13 The poor and the deceitful man meet together: the LORD
lighteneth both their eyes.

29:14 The king that faithfully judgeth the poor, his throne shall be
established for ever.

29:15 The rod and reproof give wisdom: but a child left to himself
bringeth his mother to shame.

29:16 When the wicked are multiplied, transgression increaseth: but
the righteous shall see their fall.

29:17 Correct thy son, and he shall give thee rest; yea, he shall give
delight unto thy soul.

29:18 Where there is no vision, the people perish: but he that keepeth
the law, happy is he.

29:19 A servant will not be corrected by words: for though he
understand he will not answer.

29:20 Seest thou a man that is hasty in his words? there is more hope
of a fool than of him.

29:21 He that delicately bringeth up his servant from a child shall
have him become his son at the length.

29:22 An angry man stirreth up strife, and a furious man aboundeth in
transgression.

29:23 A man's pride shall bring him low: but honour shall uphold the
humble in spirit.

29:24 Whoso is partner with a thief hateth his own soul: he heareth
cursing, and bewrayeth it not.

29:25 The fear of man bringeth a snare: but whoso putteth his trust in
the LORD shall be safe.

29:26 Many seek the ruler's favour; but every man's judgment cometh
from the LORD.

29:27 An unjust man is an abomination to the just: and he that is
upright in the way is abomination to the wicked.

30:1 The words of Agur the son of Jakeh, even the prophecy: the man
spake unto Ithiel, even unto Ithiel and Ucal, 30:2 Surely I am more
brutish than any man, and have not the understanding of a man.

30:3 I neither learned wisdom, nor have the knowledge of the holy.

30:4 Who hath ascended up into heaven, or descended? who hath gathered
the wind in his fists? who hath bound the waters in a garment? who
hath established all the ends of the earth? what is his name, and what
is his son's name, if thou canst tell?  30:5 Every word of God is
pure: he is a shield unto them that put their trust in him.

30:6 Add thou not unto his words, lest he reprove thee, and thou be
found a liar.

30:7 Two things have I required of thee; deny me them not before I
die: 30:8 Remove far from me vanity and lies: give me neither poverty
nor riches; feed me with food convenient for me: 30:9 Lest I be full,
and deny thee, and say, Who is the LORD? or lest I be poor, and steal,
and take the name of my God in vain.

30:10 Accuse not a servant unto his master, lest he curse thee, and
thou be found guilty.

30:11 There is a generation that curseth their father, and doth not
bless their mother.

30:12 There is a generation that are pure in their own eyes, and yet
is not washed from their filthiness.

30:13 There is a generation, O how lofty are their eyes! and their
eyelids are lifted up.

30:14 There is a generation, whose teeth are as swords, and their jaw
teeth as knives, to devour the poor from off the earth, and the needy
from among men.

30:15 The horseleach hath two daughters, crying, Give, give. There are
three things that are never satisfied, yea, four things say not, It is
enough: 30:16 The grave; and the barren womb; the earth that is not
filled with water; and the fire that saith not, It is enough.

30:17 The eye that mocketh at his father, and despiseth to obey his
mother, the ravens of the valley shall pick it out, and the young
eagles shall eat it.

30:18 There be three things which are too wonderful for me, yea, four
which I know not: 30:19 The way of an eagle in the air; the way of a
serpent upon a rock; the way of a ship in the midst of the sea; and
the way of a man with a maid.

30:20 Such is the way of an adulterous woman; she eateth, and wipeth
her mouth, and saith, I have done no wickedness.

30:21 For three things the earth is disquieted, and for four which it
cannot bear: 30:22 For a servant when he reigneth; and a fool when he
is filled with meat; 30:23 For an odious woman when she is married;
and an handmaid that is heir to her mistress.

30:24 There be four things which are little upon the earth, but they
are exceeding wise: 30:25 The ants are a people not strong, yet they
prepare their meat in the summer; 30:26 The conies are but a feeble
folk, yet make they their houses in the rocks; 30:27 The locusts have
no king, yet go they forth all of them by bands; 30:28 The spider
taketh hold with her hands, and is in kings' palaces.

30:29 There be three things which go well, yea, four are comely in
going: 30:30 A lion which is strongest among beasts, and turneth not
away for any; 30:31 A greyhound; an he goat also; and a king, against
whom there is no rising up.

30:32 If thou hast done foolishly in lifting up thyself, or if thou
hast thought evil, lay thine hand upon thy mouth.

30:33 Surely the churning of milk bringeth forth butter, and the
wringing of the nose bringeth forth blood: so the forcing of wrath
bringeth forth strife.

31:1 The words of king Lemuel, the prophecy that his mother taught
him.

31:2 What, my son? and what, the son of my womb? and what, the son of
my vows?  31:3 Give not thy strength unto women, nor thy ways to that
which destroyeth kings.

31:4 It is not for kings, O Lemuel, it is not for kings to drink wine;
nor for princes strong drink: 31:5 Lest they drink, and forget the
law, and pervert the judgment of any of the afflicted.

31:6 Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine unto
those that be of heavy hearts.

31:7 Let him drink, and forget his poverty, and remember his misery no
more.

31:8 Open thy mouth for the dumb in the cause of all such as are
appointed to destruction.

31:9 Open thy mouth, judge righteously, and plead the cause of the
poor and needy.

31:10 Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above
rubies.

31:11 The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her, so that he
shall have no need of spoil.

31:12 She will do him good and not evil all the days of her life.

31:13 She seeketh wool, and flax, and worketh willingly with her
hands.

31:14 She is like the merchants' ships; she bringeth her food from
afar.

31:15 She riseth also while it is yet night, and giveth meat to her
household, and a portion to her maidens.

31:16 She considereth a field, and buyeth it: with the fruit of her
hands she planteth a vineyard.

31:17 She girdeth her loins with strength, and strengtheneth her arms.

31:18 She perceiveth that her merchandise is good: her candle goeth
not out by night.

31:19 She layeth her hands to the spindle, and her hands hold the
distaff.

31:20 She stretcheth out her hand to the poor; yea, she reacheth forth
her hands to the needy.

31:21 She is not afraid of the snow for her household: for all her
household are clothed with scarlet.

31:22 She maketh herself coverings of tapestry; her clothing is silk
and purple.

31:23 Her husband is known in the gates, when he sitteth among the
elders of the land.

31:24 She maketh fine linen, and selleth it; and delivereth girdles
unto the merchant.

31:25 Strength and honour are her clothing; and she shall rejoice in
time to come.

31:26 She openeth her mouth with wisdom; and in her tongue is the law
of kindness.

31:27 She looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not
the bread of idleness.

31:28 Her children arise up, and call her blessed; her husband also,
and he praiseth her.

31:29 Many daughters have done virtuously, but thou excellest them
all.

31:30 Favour is deceitful, and beauty is vain: but a woman that
feareth the LORD, she shall be praised.

31:31 Give her of the fruit of her hands; and let her own works praise
her in the gates.




Ecclesiastes

or

The Preacher


1:1 The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem.

1:2 Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is
vanity.

1:3 What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the
sun?  1:4 One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh:
but the earth abideth for ever.

1:5 The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his
place where he arose.

1:6 The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north;
it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according
to his circuits.

1:7 All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the
place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.

1:8 All things are full of labour; man cannot utter it: the eye is not
satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.

1:9 The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that
which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing
under the sun.

1:10 Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it
hath been already of old time, which was before us.

1:11 There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be
any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come
after.

1:12 I the Preacher was king over Israel in Jerusalem.

1:13 And I gave my heart to seek and search out by wisdom concerning
all things that are done under heaven: this sore travail hath God
given to the sons of man to be exercised therewith.

1:14 I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and,
behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit.

1:15 That which is crooked cannot be made straight: and that which is
wanting cannot be numbered.

1:16 I communed with mine own heart, saying, Lo, I am come to great
estate, and have gotten more wisdom than all they that have been
before me in Jerusalem: yea, my heart had great experience of wisdom
and knowledge.

1:17 And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and
folly: I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit.

1:18 For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth
knowledge increaseth sorrow.

2:1 I said in mine heart, Go to now, I will prove thee with mirth,
therefore enjoy pleasure: and, behold, this also is vanity.

2:2 I said of laughter, It is mad: and of mirth, What doeth it?  2:3 I
sought in mine heart to give myself unto wine, yet acquainting mine
heart with wisdom; and to lay hold on folly, till I might see what was
that good for the sons of men, which they should do under the heaven
all the days of their life.

2:4 I made me great works; I builded me houses; I planted me
vineyards: 2:5 I made me gardens and orchards, and I planted trees in
them of all kind of fruits: 2:6 I made me pools of water, to water
therewith the wood that bringeth forth trees: 2:7 I got me servants
and maidens, and had servants born in my house; also I had great
possessions of great and small cattle above all that were in Jerusalem
before me: 2:8 I gathered me also silver and gold, and the peculiar
treasure of kings and of the provinces: I gat me men singers and women
singers, and the delights of the sons of men, as musical instruments,
and that of all sorts.

2:9 So I was great, and increased more than all that were before me in
Jerusalem: also my wisdom remained with me.

2:10 And whatsoever mine eyes desired I kept not from them, I withheld
not my heart from any joy; for my heart rejoiced in all my labour: and
this was my portion of all my labour.

2:11 Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on
the labour that I had laboured to do: and, behold, all was vanity and
vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun.

2:12 And I turned myself to behold wisdom, and madness, and folly: for
what can the man do that cometh after the king? even that which hath
been already done.

2:13 Then I saw that wisdom excelleth folly, as far as light excelleth
darkness.

2:14 The wise man's eyes are in his head; but the fool walketh in
darkness: and I myself perceived also that one event happeneth to them
all.

2:15 Then said I in my heart, As it happeneth to the fool, so it
happeneth even to me; and why was I then more wise? Then I said in my
heart, that this also is vanity.

2:16 For there is no remembrance of the wise more than of the fool for
ever; seeing that which now is in the days to come shall all be
forgotten.

And how dieth the wise man? as the fool.

2:17 Therefore I hated life; because the work that is wrought under
the sun is grievous unto me: for all is vanity and vexation of spirit.

2:18 Yea, I hated all my labour which I had taken under the sun:
because I should leave it unto the man that shall be after me.

2:19 And who knoweth whether he shall be a wise man or a fool? yet
shall he have rule over all my labour wherein I have laboured, and
wherein I have shewed myself wise under the sun. This is also vanity.

2:20 Therefore I went about to cause my heart to despair of all the
labour which I took under the sun.

2:21 For there is a man whose labour is in wisdom, and in knowledge,
and in equity; yet to a man that hath not laboured therein shall he
leave it for his portion. This also is vanity and a great evil.

2:22 For what hath man of all his labour, and of the vexation of his
heart, wherein he hath laboured under the sun?  2:23 For all his days
are sorrows, and his travail grief; yea, his heart taketh not rest in
the night. This is also vanity.

2:24 There is nothing better for a man, than that he should eat and
drink, and that he should make his soul enjoy good in his labour. This
also I saw, that it was from the hand of God.

2:25 For who can eat, or who else can hasten hereunto, more than I?
2:26 For God giveth to a man that is good in his sight wisdom, and
knowledge, and joy: but to the sinner he giveth travail, to gather and
to heap up, that he may give to him that is good before God. This also
is vanity and vexation of spirit.

3:1 To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose
under the heaven: 3:2 A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to
plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; 3:3 A time to
kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build
up; 3:4 A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a
time to dance; 3:5 A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather
stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from
embracing; 3:6 A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and
a time to cast away; 3:7 A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to
keep silence, and a time to speak; 3:8 A time to love, and a time to
hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.

3:9 What profit hath he that worketh in that wherein he laboureth?
3:10 I have seen the travail, which God hath given to the sons of men
to be exercised in it.

3:11 He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also he hath set
the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that
God maketh from the beginning to the end.

3:12 I know that there is no good in them, but for a man to rejoice,
and to do good in his life.

3:13 And also that every man should eat and drink, and enjoy the good
of all his labour, it is the gift of God.

3:14 I know that, whatsoever God doeth, it shall be for ever: nothing
can be put to it, nor any thing taken from it: and God doeth it, that
men should fear before him.

3:15 That which hath been is now; and that which is to be hath already
been; and God requireth that which is past.

3:16 And moreover I saw under the sun the place of judgment, that
wickedness was there; and the place of righteousness, that iniquity
was there.

3:17 I said in mine heart, God shall judge the righteous and the
wicked: for there is a time there for every purpose and for every
work.

3:18 I said in mine heart concerning the estate of the sons of men,
that God might manifest them, and that they might see that they
themselves are beasts.

3:19 For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even
one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea,
they have all one breath; so that a man hath no preeminence above a
beast: for all is vanity.

3:20 All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust
again.

3:21 Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward, and the spirit
of the beast that goeth downward to the earth?  3:22 Wherefore I
perceive that there is nothing better, than that a man should rejoice
in his own works; for that is his portion: for who shall bring him to
see what shall be after him?  4:1 So I returned, and considered all
the oppressions that are done under the sun: and behold the tears of
such as were oppressed, and they had no comforter; and on the side of
their oppressors there was power; but they had no comforter.

4:2 Wherefore I praised the dead which are already dead more than the
living which are yet alive.

4:3 Yea, better is he than both they, which hath not yet been, who
hath not seen the evil work that is done under the sun.

4:4 Again, I considered all travail, and every right work, that for
this a man is envied of his neighbour. This is also vanity and
vexation of spirit.

4:5 The fool foldeth his hands together, and eateth his own flesh.

4:6 Better is an handful with quietness, than both the hands full with
travail and vexation of spirit.

4:7 Then I returned, and I saw vanity under the sun.

4:8 There is one alone, and there is not a second; yea, he hath
neither child nor brother: yet is there no end of all his labour;
neither is his eye satisfied with riches; neither saith he, For whom
do I labour, and bereave my soul of good? This is also vanity, yea, it
is a sore travail.

4:9 Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their
labour.

4:10 For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him
that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up.

4:11 Again, if two lie together, then they have heat: but how can one
be warm alone?  4:12 And if one prevail against him, two shall
withstand him; and a threefold cord is not quickly broken.

4:13 Better is a poor and a wise child than an old and foolish king,
who will no more be admonished.

4:14 For out of prison he cometh to reign; whereas also he that is
born in his kingdom becometh poor.

4:15 I considered all the living which walk under the sun, with the
second child that shall stand up in his stead.

4:16 There is no end of all the people, even of all that have been
before them: they also that come after shall not rejoice in him.
Surely this also is vanity and vexation of spirit.

5:1 Keep thy foot when thou goest to the house of God, and be more
ready to hear, than to give the sacrifice of fools: for they consider
not that they do evil.

5:2 Be not rash with thy mouth, and let not thine heart be hasty to
utter any thing before God: for God is in heaven, and thou upon earth:
therefore let thy words be few.

5:3 For a dream cometh through the multitude of business; and a fool's
voice is known by multitude of words.

5:4 When thou vowest a vow unto God, defer not to pay it; for he hath
no pleasure in fools: pay that which thou hast vowed.

5:5 Better is it that thou shouldest not vow, than that thou shouldest
vow and not pay.

5:6 Suffer not thy mouth to cause thy flesh to sin; neither say thou
before the angel, that it was an error: wherefore should God be angry
at thy voice, and destroy the work of thine hands?  5:7 For in the
multitude of dreams and many words there are also divers vanities: but
fear thou God.

5:8 If thou seest the oppression of the poor, and violent perverting
of judgment and justice in a province, marvel not at the matter: for
he that is higher than the highest regardeth; and there be higher than
they.

5:9 Moreover the profit of the earth is for all: the king himself is
served by the field.

5:10 He that loveth silver shall not be satisfied with silver; nor he
that loveth abundance with increase: this is also vanity.

5:11 When goods increase, they are increased that eat them: and what
good is there to the owners thereof, saving the beholding of them with
their eyes?  5:12 The sleep of a labouring man is sweet, whether he
eat little or much: but the abundance of the rich will not suffer him
to sleep.

5:13 There is a sore evil which I have seen under the sun, namely,
riches kept for the owners thereof to their hurt.

5:14 But those riches perish by evil travail: and he begetteth a son,
and there is nothing in his hand.

5:15 As he came forth of his mother's womb, naked shall he return to
go as he came, and shall take nothing of his labour, which he may
carry away in his hand.

5:16 And this also is a sore evil, that in all points as he came, so
shall he go: and what profit hath he that hath laboured for the wind?
5:17 All his days also he eateth in darkness, and he hath much sorrow
and wrath with his sickness.

5:18 Behold that which I have seen: it is good and comely for one to
eat and to drink, and to enjoy the good of all his labour that he
taketh under the sun all the days of his life, which God giveth him:
for it is his portion.

5:19 Every man also to whom God hath given riches and wealth, and hath
given him power to eat thereof, and to take his portion, and to
rejoice in his labour; this is the gift of God.

5:20 For he shall not much remember the days of his life; because God
answereth him in the joy of his heart.

6:1 There is an evil which I have seen under the sun, and it is common
among men: 6:2 A man to whom God hath given riches, wealth, and
honour, so that he wanteth nothing for his soul of all that he
desireth, yet God giveth him not power to eat thereof, but a stranger
eateth it: this is vanity, and it is an evil disease.

6:3 If a man beget an hundred children, and live many years, so that
the days of his years be many, and his soul be not filled with good,
and also that he have no burial; I say, that an untimely birth is
better than he.

6:4 For he cometh in with vanity, and departeth in darkness, and his
name shall be covered with darkness.

6:5 Moreover he hath not seen the sun, nor known any thing: this hath
more rest than the other.

6:6 Yea, though he live a thousand years twice told, yet hath he seen
no good: do not all go to one place?  6:7 All the labour of man is for
his mouth, and yet the appetite is not filled.

6:8 For what hath the wise more than the fool? what hath the poor,
that knoweth to walk before the living?  6:9 Better is the sight of
the eyes than the wandering of the desire: this is also vanity and
vexation of spirit.

6:10 That which hath been is named already, and it is known that it is
man: neither may he contend with him that is mightier than he.

6:11 Seeing there be many things that increase vanity, what is man the
better?  6:12 For who knoweth what is good for man in this life, all
the days of his vain life which he spendeth as a shadow? for who can
tell a man what shall be after him under the sun?  7:1 A good name is
better than precious ointment; and the day of death than the day of
one's birth.

7:2 It is better to go to the house of mourning, than to go to the
house of feasting: for that is the end of all men; and the living will
lay it to his heart.

7:3 Sorrow is better than laughter: for by the sadness of the
countenance the heart is made better.

7:4 The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart
of fools is in the house of mirth.

7:5 It is better to hear the rebuke of the wise, than for a man to
hear the song of fools.

7:6 For as the crackling of thorns under a pot, so is the laughter of
the fool: this also is vanity.

7:7 Surely oppression maketh a wise man mad; and a gift destroyeth the
heart.

7:8 Better is the end of a thing than the beginning thereof: and the
patient in spirit is better than the proud in spirit.

7:9 Be not hasty in thy spirit to be angry: for anger resteth in the
bosom of fools.

7:10 Say not thou, What is the cause that the former days were better
than these? for thou dost not enquire wisely concerning this.

7:11 Wisdom is good with an inheritance: and by it there is profit to
them that see the sun.

7:12 For wisdom is a defence, and money is a defence: but the
excellency of knowledge is, that wisdom giveth life to them that have
it.

7:13 Consider the work of God: for who can make that straight, which
he hath made crooked?  7:14 In the day of prosperity be joyful, but in
the day of adversity consider: God also hath set the one over against
the other, to the end that man should find nothing after him.

7:15 All things have I seen in the days of my vanity: there is a just
man that perisheth in his righteousness, and there is a wicked man
that prolongeth his life in his wickedness.

7:16 Be not righteous over much; neither make thyself over wise: why
shouldest thou destroy thyself ?  7:17 Be not over much wicked,
neither be thou foolish: why shouldest thou die before thy time?  7:18
It is good that thou shouldest take hold of this; yea, also from this
withdraw not thine hand: for he that feareth God shall come forth of
them all.

7:19 Wisdom strengtheneth the wise more than ten mighty men which are
in the city.

7:20 For there is not a just man upon earth, that doeth good, and
sinneth not.

7:21 Also take no heed unto all words that are spoken; lest thou hear
thy servant curse thee: 7:22 For oftentimes also thine own heart
knoweth that thou thyself likewise hast cursed others.

7:23 All this have I proved by wisdom: I said, I will be wise; but it
was far from me.

7:24 That which is far off, and exceeding deep, who can find it out?
7:25 I applied mine heart to know, and to search, and to seek out
wisdom, and the reason of things, and to know the wickedness of folly,
even of foolishness and madness: 7:26 And I find more bitter than
death the woman, whose heart is snares and nets, and her hands as
bands: whoso pleaseth God shall escape from her; but the sinner shall
be taken by her.

7:27 Behold, this have I found, saith the preacher, counting one by
one, to find out the account: 7:28 Which yet my soul seeketh, but I
find not: one man among a thousand have I found; but a woman among all
those have I not found.

7:29 Lo, this only have I found, that God hath made man upright; but
they have sought out many inventions.

8:1 Who is as the wise man? and who knoweth the interpretation of a
thing?  a man's wisdom maketh his face to shine, and the boldness of
his face shall be changed.

8:2 I counsel thee to keep the king's commandment, and that in regard
of the oath of God.

8:3 Be not hasty to go out of his sight: stand not in an evil thing;
for he doeth whatsoever pleaseth him.

8:4 Where the word of a king is, there is power: and who may say unto
him, What doest thou?  8:5 Whoso keepeth the commandment shall feel no
evil thing: and a wise man's heart discerneth both time and judgment.

8:6 Because to every purpose there is time and judgment, therefore the
misery of man is great upon him.

8:7 For he knoweth not that which shall be: for who can tell him when
it shall be?  8:8 There is no man that hath power over the spirit to
retain the spirit; neither hath he power in the day of death: and
there is no discharge in that war; neither shall wickedness deliver
those that are given to it.

8:9 All this have I seen, and applied my heart unto every work that is
done under the sun: there is a time wherein one man ruleth over
another to his own hurt.

8:10 And so I saw the wicked buried, who had come and gone from the
place of the holy, and they were forgotten in the city where they had
so done: this is also vanity.

8:11 Because sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily,
therefore the heart of the sons of men is fully set in them to do
evil.

8:12 Though a sinner do evil an hundred times, and his days be
prolonged, yet surely I know that it shall be well with them that fear
God, which fear before him: 8:13 But it shall not be well with the
wicked, neither shall he prolong his days, which are as a shadow;
because he feareth not before God.

8:14 There is a vanity which is done upon the earth; that there be
just men, unto whom it happeneth according to the work of the wicked;
again, there be wicked men, to whom it happeneth according to the work
of the righteous: I said that this also is vanity.

8:15 Then I commended mirth, because a man hath no better thing under
the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry: for that shall
abide with him of his labour the days of his life, which God giveth
him under the sun.

8:16 When I applied mine heart to know wisdom, and to see the business
that is done upon the earth: (for also there is that neither day nor
night seeth sleep with his eyes:) 8:17 Then I beheld all the work of
God, that a man cannot find out the work that is done under the sun:
because though a man labour to seek it out, yet he shall not find it;
yea farther; though a wise man think to know it, yet shall he not be
able to find it.

9:1 For all this I considered in my heart even to declare all this,
that the righteous, and the wise, and their works, are in the hand of
God: no man knoweth either love or hatred by all that is before them.

9:2 All things come alike to all: there is one event to the righteous,
and to the wicked; to the good and to the clean, and to the unclean;
to him that sacrificeth, and to him that sacrificeth not: as is the
good, so is the sinner; and he that sweareth, as he that feareth an
oath.

9:3 This is an evil among all things that are done under the sun, that
there is one event unto all: yea, also the heart of the sons of men is
full of evil, and madness is in their heart while they live, and after
that they go to the dead.

9:4 For to him that is joined to all the living there is hope: for a
living dog is better than a dead lion.

9:5 For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any
thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is
forgotten.

9:6 Also their love, and their hatred, and their envy, is now
perished; neither have they any more a portion for ever in any thing
that is done under the sun.

9:7 Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a
merry heart; for God now accepteth thy works.

9:8 Let thy garments be always white; and let thy head lack no
ointment.

9:9 Live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest all the days of the
life of thy vanity, which he hath given thee under the sun, all the
days of thy vanity: for that is thy portion in this life, and in thy
labour which thou takest under the sun.

9:10 Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for
there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave,
whither thou goest.

9:11 I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the
swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise,
nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of
skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

9:12 For man also knoweth not his time: as the fishes that are taken
in an evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare; so are
the sons of men snared in an evil time, when it falleth suddenly upon
them.

9:13 This wisdom have I seen also under the sun, and it seemed great
unto me: 9:14 There was a little city, and few men within it; and
there came a great king against it, and besieged it, and built great
bulwarks against it: 9:15 Now there was found in it a poor wise man,
and he by his wisdom delivered the city; yet no man remembered that
same poor man.

9:16 Then said I, Wisdom is better than strength: nevertheless the
poor man's wisdom is despised, and his words are not heard.

9:17 The words of wise men are heard in quiet more than the cry of him
that ruleth among fools.

9:18 Wisdom is better than weapons of war: but one sinner destroyeth
much good.

10:1 Dead flies cause the ointment of the apothecary to send forth a
stinking savour: so doth a little folly him that is in reputation for
wisdom and honour.

10:2 A wise man's heart is at his right hand; but a fool's heart at
his left.

10:3 Yea also, when he that is a fool walketh by the way, his wisdom
faileth him, and he saith to every one that he is a fool.

10:4 If the spirit of the ruler rise up against thee, leave not thy
place; for yielding pacifieth great offences.

10:5 There is an evil which I have seen under the sun, as an error
which proceedeth from the ruler: 10:6 Folly is set in great dignity,
and the rich sit in low place.

10:7 I have seen servants upon horses, and princes walking as servants
upon the earth.

10:8 He that diggeth a pit shall fall into it; and whoso breaketh an
hedge, a serpent shall bite him.

10:9 Whoso removeth stones shall be hurt therewith; and he that
cleaveth wood shall be endangered thereby.

10:10 If the iron be blunt, and he do not whet the edge, then must he
put to more strength: but wisdom is profitable to direct.

10:11 Surely the serpent will bite without enchantment; and a babbler
is no better.

10:12 The words of a wise man's mouth are gracious; but the lips of a
fool will swallow up himself.

10:13 The beginning of the words of his mouth is foolishness: and the
end of his talk is mischievous madness.

10:14 A fool also is full of words: a man cannot tell what shall be;
and what shall be after him, who can tell him?  10:15 The labour of
the foolish wearieth every one of them, because he knoweth not how to
go to the city.

10:16 Woe to thee, O land, when thy king is a child, and thy princes
eat in the morning!  10:17 Blessed art thou, O land, when thy king is
the son of nobles, and thy princes eat in due season, for strength,
and not for drunkenness!  10:18 By much slothfulness the building
decayeth; and through idleness of the hands the house droppeth
through.

10:19 A feast is made for laughter, and wine maketh merry: but money
answereth all things.

10:20 Curse not the king, no not in thy thought; and curse not the
rich in thy bedchamber: for a bird of the air shall carry the voice,
and that which hath wings shall tell the matter.

11:1 Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many
days.

11:2 Give a portion to seven, and also to eight; for thou knowest not
what evil shall be upon the earth.

11:3 If the clouds be full of rain, they empty themselves upon the
earth: and if the tree fall toward the south, or toward the north, in
the place where the tree falleth, there it shall be.

11:4 He that observeth the wind shall not sow; and he that regardeth
the clouds shall not reap.

11:5 As thou knowest not what is the way of the spirit, nor how the
bones do grow in the womb of her that is with child: even so thou
knowest not the works of God who maketh all.

11:6 In the morning sow thy seed, and in the evening withhold not
thine hand: for thou knowest not whether shall prosper, either this or
that, or whether they both shall be alike good.

11:7 Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes
to behold the sun: 11:8 But if a man live many years, and rejoice in
them all; yet let him remember the days of darkness; for they shall be
many. All that cometh is vanity.

11:9 Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth; and let thy heart cheer thee
in the days of thy youth, and walk in the ways of thine heart, and in
the sight of thine eyes: but know thou, that for all these things God
will bring thee into judgment.

11:10 Therefore remove sorrow from thy heart, and put away evil from
thy flesh: for childhood and youth are vanity.

12:1 Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil
days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say, I have no
pleasure in them; 12:2 While the sun, or the light, or the moon, or
the stars, be not darkened, nor the clouds return after the rain: 12:3
In the day when the keepers of the house shall tremble, and the strong
men shall bow themselves, and the grinders cease because they are few,
and those that look out of the windows be darkened, 12:4 And the doors
shall be shut in the streets, when the sound of the grinding is low,
and he shall rise up at the voice of the bird, and all the daughters
of musick shall be brought low; 12:5 Also when they shall be afraid of
that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree
shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire
shall fail: because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go
about the streets: 12:6 Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the
golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or
the wheel broken at the cistern.

12:7 Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit
shall return unto God who gave it.

12:8 Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher; all is vanity.

12:9 And moreover, because the preacher was wise, he still taught the
people knowledge; yea, he gave good heed, and sought out, and set in
order many proverbs.

12:10 The preacher sought to find out acceptable words: and that which
was written was upright, even words of truth.

12:11 The words of the wise are as goads, and as nails fastened by the
masters of assemblies, which are given from one shepherd.

12:12 And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many
books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.

12:13 Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and
keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man.

12:14 For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret
thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil.




The Song of Solomon


1:1 The song of songs, which is Solomon's.

1:2 Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is
better than wine.

1:3 Because of the savour of thy good ointments thy name is as
ointment poured forth, therefore do the virgins love thee.

1:4 Draw me, we will run after thee: the king hath brought me into his
chambers: we will be glad and rejoice in thee, we will remember thy
love more than wine: the upright love thee.

1:5 I am black, but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, as the tents
of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon.

1:6 Look not upon me, because I am black, because the sun hath looked
upon me: my mother's children were angry with me; they made me the
keeper of the vineyards; but mine own vineyard have I not kept.

1:7 Tell me, O thou whom my soul loveth, where thou feedest, where
thou makest thy flock to rest at noon: for why should I be as one that
turneth aside by the flocks of thy companions?  1:8 If thou know not,
O thou fairest among women, go thy way forth by the footsteps of the
flock, and feed thy kids beside the shepherds' tents.

1:9 I have compared thee, O my love, to a company of horses in
Pharaoh's chariots.

1:10 Thy cheeks are comely with rows of jewels, thy neck with chains
of gold.

1:11 We will make thee borders of gold with studs of silver.

1:12 While the king sitteth at his table, my spikenard sendeth forth
the smell thereof.

1:13 A bundle of myrrh is my well-beloved unto me; he shall lie all
night betwixt my breasts.

1:14 My beloved is unto me as a cluster of camphire in the vineyards
of Engedi.

1:15 Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; thou hast
doves' eyes.

1:16 Behold, thou art fair, my beloved, yea, pleasant: also our bed is
green.

1:17 The beams of our house are cedar, and our rafters of fir.

2:1 I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys.

2:2 As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters.

2:3 As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved
among the sons. I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and
his fruit was sweet to my taste.

2:4 He brought me to the banqueting house, and his banner over me was
love.

2:5 Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick of
love.

2:6 His left hand is under my head, and his right hand doth embrace
me.

2:7 I charge you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, by the roes, and by the
hinds of the field, that ye stir not up, nor awake my love, till he
please.

2:8 The voice of my beloved! behold, he cometh leaping upon the
mountains, skipping upon the hills.

2:9 My beloved is like a roe or a young hart: behold, he standeth
behind our wall, he looketh forth at the windows, shewing himself
through the lattice.

2:10 My beloved spake, and said unto me, Rise up, my love, my fair
one, and come away.

2:11 For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; 2:12 The
flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come,
and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land; 2:13 The fig tree
putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give
a good smell. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.

2:14 O my dove, that art in the clefts of the rock, in the secret
places of the stairs, let me see thy countenance, let me hear thy
voice; for sweet is thy voice, and thy countenance is comely.

2:15 Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for
our vines have tender grapes.

2:16 My beloved is mine, and I am his: he feedeth among the lilies.

2:17 Until the day break, and the shadows flee away, turn, my beloved,
and be thou like a roe or a young hart upon the mountains of Bether.

3:1 By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth: I sought him,
but I found him not.

3:2 I will rise now, and go about the city in the streets, and in the
broad ways I will seek him whom my soul loveth: I sought him, but I
found him not.

3:3 The watchmen that go about the city found me: to whom I said, Saw
ye him whom my soul loveth?  3:4 It was but a little that I passed
from them, but I found him whom my soul loveth: I held him, and would
not let him go, until I had brought him into my mother's house, and
into the chamber of her that conceived me.

3:5 I charge you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, by the roes, and by the
hinds of the field, that ye stir not up, nor awake my love, till he
please.

3:6 Who is this that cometh out of the wilderness like pillars of
smoke, perfumed with myrrh and frankincense, with all powders of the
merchant?  3:7 Behold his bed, which is Solomon's; threescore valiant
men are about it, of the valiant of Israel.

3:8 They all hold swords, being expert in war: every man hath his
sword upon his thigh because of fear in the night.

3:9 King Solomon made himself a chariot of the wood of Lebanon.

3:10 He made the pillars thereof of silver, the bottom thereof of
gold, the covering of it of purple, the midst thereof being paved with
love, for the daughters of Jerusalem.

3:11 Go forth, O ye daughters of Zion, and behold king Solomon with
the crown wherewith his mother crowned him in the day of his
espousals, and in the day of the gladness of his heart.

4:1 Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; thou hast
doves' eyes within thy locks: thy hair is as a flock of goats, that
appear from mount Gilead.

4:2 Thy teeth are like a flock of sheep that are even shorn, which
came up from the washing; whereof every one bear twins, and none is
barren among them.

4:3 Thy lips are like a thread of scarlet, and thy speech is comely:
thy temples are like a piece of a pomegranate within thy locks.

4:4 Thy neck is like the tower of David builded for an armoury,
whereon there hang a thousand bucklers, all shields of mighty men.

4:5 Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins, which feed
among the lilies.

4:6 Until the day break, and the shadows flee away, I will get me to
the mountain of myrrh, and to the hill of frankincense.

4:7 Thou art all fair, my love; there is no spot in thee.

4:8 Come with me from Lebanon, my spouse, with me from Lebanon: look
from the top of Amana, from the top of Shenir and Hermon, from the
lions' dens, from the mountains of the leopards.

4:9 Thou hast ravished my heart, my sister, my spouse; thou hast
ravished my heart with one of thine eyes, with one chain of thy neck.

4:10 How fair is thy love, my sister, my spouse! how much better is
thy love than wine! and the smell of thine ointments than all spices!
4:11 Thy lips, O my spouse, drop as the honeycomb: honey and milk are
under thy tongue; and the smell of thy garments is like the smell of
Lebanon.

4:12 A garden inclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a
fountain sealed.

4:13 Thy plants are an orchard of pomegranates, with pleasant fruits;
camphire, with spikenard, 4:14 Spikenard and saffron; calamus and
cinnamon, with all trees of frankincense; myrrh and aloes, with all
the chief spices: 4:15 A fountain of gardens, a well of living waters,
and streams from Lebanon.

4:16 Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south; blow upon my garden,
that the spices thereof may flow out. Let my beloved come into his
garden, and eat his pleasant fruits.

5:1 I am come into my garden, my sister, my spouse: I have gathered my
myrrh with my spice; I have eaten my honeycomb with my honey; I have
drunk my wine with my milk: eat, O friends; drink, yea, drink
abundantly, O beloved.

5:2 I sleep, but my heart waketh: it is the voice of my beloved that
knocketh, saying, Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my
undefiled: for my head is filled with dew, and my locks with the drops
of the night.

5:3 I have put off my coat; how shall I put it on? I have washed my
feet; how shall I defile them?  5:4 My beloved put in his hand by the
hole of the door, and my bowels were moved for him.

5:5 I rose up to open to my beloved; and my hands dropped with myrrh,
and my fingers with sweet smelling myrrh, upon the handles of the
lock.

5:6 I opened to my beloved; but my beloved had withdrawn himself, and
was gone: my soul failed when he spake: I sought him, but I could not
find him; I called him, but he gave me no answer.

5:7 The watchmen that went about the city found me, they smote me,
they wounded me; the keepers of the walls took away my veil from me.

5:8 I charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem, if ye find my beloved,
that ye tell him, that I am sick of love.

5:9 What is thy beloved more than another beloved, O thou fairest
among women? what is thy beloved more than another beloved, that thou
dost so charge us?  5:10 My beloved is white and ruddy, the chiefest
among ten thousand.

5:11 His head is as the most fine gold, his locks are bushy, and black
as a raven.

5:12 His eyes are as the eyes of doves by the rivers of waters, washed
with milk, and fitly set.

5:13 His cheeks are as a bed of spices, as sweet flowers: his lips
like lilies, dropping sweet smelling myrrh.

5:14 His hands are as gold rings set with the beryl: his belly is as
bright ivory overlaid with sapphires.

5:15 His legs are as pillars of marble, set upon sockets of fine gold:
his countenance is as Lebanon, excellent as the cedars.

5:16 His mouth is most sweet: yea, he is altogether lovely. This is my
beloved, and this is my friend, O daughters of Jerusalem.

6:1 Whither is thy beloved gone, O thou fairest among women? whither
is thy beloved turned aside? that we may seek him with thee.

6:2 My beloved is gone down into his garden, to the beds of spices, to
feed in the gardens, and to gather lilies.

6:3 I am my beloved's, and my beloved is mine: he feedeth among the
lilies.

6:4 Thou art beautiful, O my love, as Tirzah, comely as Jerusalem,
terrible as an army with banners.

6:5 Turn away thine eyes from me, for they have overcome me: thy hair
is as a flock of goats that appear from Gilead.

6:6 Thy teeth are as a flock of sheep which go up from the washing,
whereof every one beareth twins, and there is not one barren among
them.

6:7 As a piece of a pomegranate are thy temples within thy locks.

6:8 There are threescore queens, and fourscore concubines, and virgins
without number.

6:9 My dove, my undefiled is but one; she is the only one of her
mother, she is the choice one of her that bare her. The daughters saw
her, and blessed her; yea, the queens and the concubines, and they
praised her.

6:10 Who is she that looketh forth as the morning, fair as the moon,
clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners?  6:11 I went
down into the garden of nuts to see the fruits of the valley, and to
see whether the vine flourished and the pomegranates budded.

6:12 Or ever I was aware, my soul made me like the chariots of
Amminadib.

6:13 Return, return, O Shulamite; return, return, that we may look
upon thee. What will ye see in the Shulamite? As it were the company
of two armies.

7:1 How beautiful are thy feet with shoes, O prince's daughter! the
joints of thy thighs are like jewels, the work of the hands of a
cunning workman.

7:2 Thy navel is like a round goblet, which wanteth not liquor: thy
belly is like an heap of wheat set about with lilies.

7:3 Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins.

7:4 Thy neck is as a tower of ivory; thine eyes like the fishpools in
Heshbon, by the gate of Bathrabbim: thy nose is as the tower of
Lebanon which looketh toward Damascus.

7:5 Thine head upon thee is like Carmel, and the hair of thine head
like purple; the king is held in the galleries.

7:6 How fair and how pleasant art thou, O love, for delights!  7:7
This thy stature is like to a palm tree, and thy breasts to clusters
of grapes.

7:8 I said, I will go up to the palm tree, I will take hold of the
boughs thereof: now also thy breasts shall be as clusters of the vine,
and the smell of thy nose like apples; 7:9 And the roof of thy mouth
like the best wine for my beloved, that goeth down sweetly, causing
the lips of those that are asleep to speak.

7:10 I am my beloved's, and his desire is toward me.

7:11 Come, my beloved, let us go forth into the field; let us lodge in
the villages.

7:12 Let us get up early to the vineyards; let us see if the vine
flourish, whether the tender grape appear, and the pomegranates bud
forth: there will I give thee my loves.

7:13 The mandrakes give a smell, and at our gates are all manner of
pleasant fruits, new and old, which I have laid up for thee, O my
beloved.

8:1 O that thou wert as my brother, that sucked the breasts of my
mother!  when I should find thee without, I would kiss thee; yea, I
should not be despised.

8:2 I would lead thee, and bring thee into my mother's house, who
would instruct me: I would cause thee to drink of spiced wine of the
juice of my pomegranate.

8:3 His left hand should be under my head, and his right hand should
embrace me.

8:4 I charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem, that ye stir not up, nor
awake my love, until he please.

8:5 Who is this that cometh up from the wilderness, leaning upon her
beloved? I raised thee up under the apple tree: there thy mother
brought thee forth: there she brought thee forth that bare thee.

8:6 Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for
love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave: the coals
thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame.

8:7 Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it:
if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would
utterly be contemned.

8:8 We have a little sister, and she hath no breasts: what shall we do
for our sister in the day when she shall be spoken for?  8:9 If she be
a wall, we will build upon her a palace of silver: and if she be a
door, we will inclose her with boards of cedar.

8:10 I am a wall, and my breasts like towers: then was I in his eyes
as one that found favour.

8:11 Solomon had a vineyard at Baalhamon; he let out the vineyard unto
keepers; every one for the fruit thereof was to bring a thousand
pieces of silver.

8:12 My vineyard, which is mine, is before me: thou, O Solomon, must
have a thousand, and those that keep the fruit thereof two hundred.

8:13 Thou that dwellest in the gardens, the companions hearken to thy
voice: cause me to hear it.

8:14 Make haste, my beloved, and be thou like to a roe or to a young
hart upon the mountains of spices.




The Book of the Prophet Isaiah


1:1 The vision of Isaiah the son of Amoz, which he saw concerning
Judah and Jerusalem in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah,
kings of Judah.

1:2 Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth: for the LORD hath spoken,
I have nourished and brought up children, and they have rebelled
against me.

1:3 The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master's crib: but
Israel doth not know, my people doth not consider.

1:4 Ah sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, a seed of
evildoers, children that are corrupters: they have forsaken the LORD,
they have provoked the Holy One of Israel unto anger, they are gone
away backward.

1:5 Why should ye be stricken any more? ye will revolt more and more:
the whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint.

1:6 From the sole of the foot even unto the head there is no soundness
in it; but wounds, and bruises, and putrifying sores: they have not
been closed, neither bound up, neither mollified with ointment.

1:7 Your country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire: your
land, strangers devour it in your presence, and it is desolate, as
overthrown by strangers.

1:8 And the daughter of Zion is left as a cottage in a vineyard, as a
lodge in a garden of cucumbers, as a besieged city.

1:9 Except the LORD of hosts had left unto us a very small remnant, we
should have been as Sodom, and we should have been like unto Gomorrah.

1:10 Hear the word of the LORD, ye rulers of Sodom; give ear unto the
law of our God, ye people of Gomorrah.

1:11 To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto me?
saith the LORD: I am full of the burnt offerings of rams, and the fat
of fed beasts; and I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of
lambs, or of he goats.

1:12 When ye come to appear before me, who hath required this at your
hand, to tread my courts?  1:13 Bring no more vain oblations; incense
is an abomination unto me; the new moons and sabbaths, the calling of
assemblies, I cannot away with; it is iniquity, even the solemn
meeting.

1:14 Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth: they are
a trouble unto me; I am weary to bear them.

1:15 And when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from
you: yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear: your hands are
full of blood.

1:16 Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings from
before mine eyes; cease to do evil; 1:17 Learn to do well; seek
judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the
widow.

1:18 Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD: though your
sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red
like crimson, they shall be as wool.

1:19 If ye be willing and obedient, ye shall eat the good of the land:
1:20 But if ye refuse and rebel, ye shall be devoured with the sword:
for the mouth of the LORD hath spoken it.

1:21 How is the faithful city become an harlot! it was full of
judgment; righteousness lodged in it; but now murderers.

1:22 Thy silver is become dross, thy wine mixed with water: 1:23 Thy
princes are rebellious, and companions of thieves: every one loveth
gifts, and followeth after rewards: they judge not the fatherless,
neither doth the cause of the widow come unto them.

1:24 Therefore saith the LORD, the LORD of hosts, the mighty One of
Israel, Ah, I will ease me of mine adversaries, and avenge me of mine
enemies: 1:25 And I will turn my hand upon thee, and purely purge away
thy dross, and take away all thy tin: 1:26 And I will restore thy
judges as at the first, and thy counsellors as at the beginning:
afterward thou shalt be called, The city of righteousness, the
faithful city.

1:27 Zion shall be redeemed with judgment, and her converts with
righteousness.

1:28 And the destruction of the transgressors and of the sinners shall
be together, and they that forsake the LORD shall be consumed.

1:29 For they shall be ashamed of the oaks which ye have desired, and
ye shall be confounded for the gardens that ye have chosen.

1:30 For ye shall be as an oak whose leaf fadeth, and as a garden that
hath no water.

1:31 And the strong shall be as tow, and the maker of it as a spark,
and they shall both burn together, and none shall quench them.

2:1 The word that Isaiah the son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and
Jerusalem.

2:2 And it shall come to pass in the last days, that the mountain of
the LORD's house shall be established in the top of the mountains, and
shall be exalted above the hills; and all nations shall flow unto it.

2:3 And many people shall go and say, Come ye, and let us go up to the
mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob; and he will
teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths: for out of Zion
shall go forth the law, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.

2:4 And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many
people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their
spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against
nation, neither shall they learn war any more.

2:5 O house of Jacob, come ye, and let us walk in the light of the
LORD.

2:6 Therefore thou hast forsaken thy people the house of Jacob,
because they be replenished from the east, and are soothsayers like
the Philistines, and they please themselves in the children of
strangers.

2:7 Their land also is full of silver and gold, neither is there any
end of their treasures; their land is also full of horses, neither is
there any end of their chariots: 2:8 Their land also is full of idols;
they worship the work of their own hands, that which their own fingers
have made: 2:9 And the mean man boweth down, and the great man
humbleth himself: therefore forgive them not.

2:10 Enter into the rock, and hide thee in the dust, for fear of the
LORD, and for the glory of his majesty.

2:11 The lofty looks of man shall be humbled, and the haughtiness of
men shall be bowed down, and the LORD alone shall be exalted in that
day.

2:12 For the day of the LORD of hosts shall be upon every one that is
proud and lofty, and upon every one that is lifted up; and he shall be
brought low: 2:13 And upon all the cedars of Lebanon, that are high
and lifted up, and upon all the oaks of Bashan, 2:14 And upon all the
high mountains, and upon all the hills that are lifted up, 2:15 And
upon every high tower, and upon every fenced wall, 2:16 And upon all
the ships of Tarshish, and upon all pleasant pictures.

2:17 And the loftiness of man shall be bowed down, and the haughtiness
of men shall be made low: and the LORD alone shall be exalted in that
day.

2:18 And the idols he shall utterly abolish.

2:19 And they shall go into the holes of the rocks, and into the caves
of the earth, for fear of the LORD, and for the glory of his majesty,
when he ariseth to shake terribly the earth.

2:20 In that day a man shall cast his idols of silver, and his idols
of gold, which they made each one for himself to worship, to the moles
and to the bats; 2:21 To go into the clefts of the rocks, and into the
tops of the ragged rocks, for fear of the LORD, and for the glory of
his majesty, when he ariseth to shake terribly the earth.

2:22 Cease ye from man, whose breath is in his nostrils: for wherein
is he to be accounted of ?  3:1 For, behold, the Lord, the LORD of
hosts, doth take away from Jerusalem and from Judah the stay and the
staff, the whole stay of bread, and the whole stay of water.

3:2 The mighty man, and the man of war, the judge, and the prophet,
and the prudent, and the ancient, 3:3 The captain of fifty, and the
honourable man, and the counsellor, and the cunning artificer, and the
eloquent orator.

3:4 And I will give children to be their princes, and babes shall rule
over them.

3:5 And the people shall be oppressed, every one by another, and every
one by his neighbour: the child shall behave himself proudly against
the ancient, and the base against the honourable.

3:6 When a man shall take hold of his brother of the house of his
father, saying, Thou hast clothing, be thou our ruler, and let this
ruin be under thy hand: 3:7 In that day shall he swear, saying, I will
not be an healer; for in my house is neither bread nor clothing: make
me not a ruler of the people.

3:8 For Jerusalem is ruined, and Judah is fallen: because their tongue
and their doings are against the LORD, to provoke the eyes of his
glory.

3:9 The shew of their countenance doth witness against them; and they
declare their sin as Sodom, they hide it not. Woe unto their soul! for
they have rewarded evil unto themselves.

3:10 Say ye to the righteous, that it shall be well with him: for they
shall eat the fruit of their doings.

3:11 Woe unto the wicked! it shall be ill with him: for the reward of
his hands shall be given him.

3:12 As for my people, children are their oppressors, and women rule
over them. O my people, they which lead thee cause thee to err, and
destroy the way of thy paths.

3:13 The LORD standeth up to plead, and standeth to judge the people.

3:14 The LORD will enter into judgment with the ancients of his
people, and the princes thereof: for ye have eaten up the vineyard;
the spoil of the poor is in your houses.

3:15 What mean ye that ye beat my people to pieces, and grind the
faces of the poor? saith the Lord GOD of hosts.

3:16 Moreover the LORD saith, Because the daughters of Zion are
haughty, and walk with stretched forth necks and wanton eyes, walking
and mincing as they go, and making a tinkling with their feet: 3:17
Therefore the LORD will smite with a scab the crown of the head of the
daughters of Zion, and the LORD will discover their secret parts.

3:18 In that day the Lord will take away the bravery of their tinkling
ornaments about their feet, and their cauls, and their round tires
like the moon, 3:19 The chains, and the bracelets, and the mufflers,
3:20 The bonnets, and the ornaments of the legs, and the headbands,
and the tablets, and the earrings, 3:21 The rings, and nose jewels,
3:22 The changeable suits of apparel, and the mantles, and the
wimples, and the crisping pins, 3:23 The glasses, and the fine linen,
and the hoods, and the vails.

3:24 And it shall come to pass, that instead of sweet smell there
shall be stink; and instead of a girdle a rent; and instead of well
set hair baldness; and instead of a stomacher a girding of sackcloth;
and burning instead of beauty.

3:25 Thy men shall fall by the sword, and thy mighty in the war.

3:26 And her gates shall lament and mourn; and she being desolate
shall sit upon the ground.

4:1 And in that day seven women shall take hold of one man, saying, We
will eat our own bread, and wear our own apparel: only let us be
called by thy name, to take away our reproach.

4:2 In that day shall the branch of the LORD be beautiful and
glorious, and the fruit of the earth shall be excellent and comely for
them that are escaped of Israel.

4:3 And it shall come to pass, that he that is left in Zion, and he
that remaineth in Jerusalem, shall be called holy, even every one that
is written among the living in Jerusalem: 4:4 When the Lord shall have
washed away the filth of the daughters of Zion, and shall have purged
the blood of Jerusalem from the midst thereof by the spirit of
judgment, and by the spirit of burning.

4:5 And the LORD will create upon every dwelling place of mount Zion,
and upon her assemblies, a cloud and smoke by day, and the shining of
a flaming fire by night: for upon all the glory shall be a defence.

4:6 And there shall be a tabernacle for a shadow in the day time from
the heat, and for a place of refuge, and for a covert from storm and
from rain.

5:1 Now will I sing to my wellbeloved a song of my beloved touching
his vineyard. My wellbeloved hath a vineyard in a very fruitful hill:
5:2 And he fenced it, and gathered out the stones thereof, and planted
it with the choicest vine, and built a tower in the midst of it, and
also made a winepress therein: and he looked that it should bring
forth grapes, and it brought forth wild grapes.

5:3 And now, O inhabitants of Jerusalem, and men of Judah, judge, I
pray you, betwixt me and my vineyard.

5:4 What could have been done more to my vineyard, that I have not
done in it? wherefore, when I looked that it should bring forth
grapes, brought it forth wild grapes?  5:5 And now go to; I will tell
you what I will do to my vineyard: I will take away the hedge thereof,
and it shall be eaten up; and break down the wall thereof, and it
shall be trodden down: 5:6 And I will lay it waste: it shall not be
pruned, nor digged; but there shall come up briers and thorns: I will
also command the clouds that they rain no rain upon it.

5:7 For the vineyard of the LORD of hosts is the house of Israel, and
the men of Judah his pleasant plant: and he looked for judgment, but
behold oppression; for righteousness, but behold a cry.

5:8 Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field,
till there be no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst of
the earth!  5:9 In mine ears said the LORD of hosts, Of a truth many
houses shall be desolate, even great and fair, without inhabitant.

5:10 Yea, ten acres of vineyard shall yield one bath, and the seed of
an homer shall yield an ephah.

5:11 Woe unto them that rise up early in the morning, that they may
follow strong drink; that continue until night, till wine inflame
them!  5:12 And the harp, and the viol, the tabret, and pipe, and
wine, are in their feasts: but they regard not the work of the LORD,
neither consider the operation of his hands.

5:13 Therefore my people are gone into captivity, because they have no
knowledge: and their honourable men are famished, and their multitude
dried up with thirst.

5:14 Therefore hell hath enlarged herself, and opened her mouth
without measure: and their glory, and their multitude, and their pomp,
and he that rejoiceth, shall descend into it.

5:15 And the mean man shall be brought down, and the mighty man shall
be humbled, and the eyes of the lofty shall be humbled: 5:16 But the
LORD of hosts shall be exalted in judgment, and God that is holy shall
be sanctified in righteousness.

5:17 Then shall the lambs feed after their manner, and the waste
places of the fat ones shall strangers eat.

5:18 Woe unto them that draw iniquity with cords of vanity, and sin as
it were with a cart rope: 5:19 That say, Let him make speed, and
hasten his work, that we may see it: and let the counsel of the Holy
One of Israel draw nigh and come, that we may know it!  5:20 Woe unto
them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light,
and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for
bitter!  5:21 Woe unto them that are wise in their own eyes, and
prudent in their own sight!  5:22 Woe unto them that are mighty to
drink wine, and men of strength to mingle strong drink: 5:23 Which
justify the wicked for reward, and take away the righteousness of the
righteous from him!  5:24 Therefore as the fire devoureth the stubble,
and the flame consumeth the chaff, so their root shall be as
rottenness, and their blossom shall go up as dust: because they have
cast away the law of the LORD of hosts, and despised the word of the
Holy One of Israel.

5:25 Therefore is the anger of the LORD kindled against his people,
and he hath stretched forth his hand against them, and hath smitten
them: and the hills did tremble, and their carcases were torn in the
midst of the streets.

For all this his anger is not turned away, but his hand is stretched
out still.

5:26 And he will lift up an ensign to the nations from far, and will
hiss unto them from the end of the earth: and, behold, they shall come
with speed swiftly: 5:27 None shall be weary nor stumble among them;
none shall slumber nor sleep; neither shall the girdle of their loins
be loosed, nor the latchet of their shoes be broken: 5:28 Whose arrows
are sharp, and all their bows bent, their horses' hoofs shall be
counted like flint, and their wheels like a whirlwind: 5:29 Their
roaring shall be like a lion, they shall roar like young lions: yea,
they shall roar, and lay hold of the prey, and shall carry it away
safe, and none shall deliver it.

5:30 And in that day they shall roar against them like the roaring of
the sea: and if one look unto the land, behold darkness and sorrow,
and the light is darkened in the heavens thereof.

6:1 In the year that king Uzziah died I saw also the LORD sitting upon
a throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple.

6:2 Above it stood the seraphims: each one had six wings; with twain
he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with
twain he did fly.

6:3 And one cried unto another, and said, Holy, holy, holy, is the
LORD of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory.

6:4 And the posts of the door moved at the voice of him that cried,
and the house was filled with smoke.

6:5 Then said I, Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of
unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips:
for mine eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts.

6:6 Then flew one of the seraphims unto me, having a live coal in his
hand, which he had taken with the tongs from off the altar: 6:7 And he
laid it upon my mouth, and said, Lo, this hath touched thy lips; and
thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin purged.

6:8 Also I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and
who will go for us? Then said I, Here am I; send me.

6:9 And he said, Go, and tell this people, Hear ye indeed, but
understand not; and see ye indeed, but perceive not.

6:10 Make the heart of this people fat, and make their ears heavy, and
shut their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their
ears, and understand with their heart, and convert, and be healed.

6:11 Then said I, Lord, how long? And he answered, Until the cities be
wasted without inhabitant, and the houses without man, and the land be
utterly desolate, 6:12 And the LORD have removed men far away, and
there be a great forsaking in the midst of the land.

6:13 But yet in it shall be a tenth, and it shall return, and shall be
eaten: as a teil tree, and as an oak, whose substance is in them, when
they cast their leaves: so the holy seed shall be the substance
thereof.

7:1 And it came to pass in the days of Ahaz the son of Jotham, the son
of Uzziah, king of Judah, that Rezin the king of Syria, and Pekah the
son of Remaliah, king of Israel, went up toward Jerusalem to war
against it, but could not prevail against it.

7:2 And it was told the house of David, saying, Syria is confederate
with Ephraim. And his heart was moved, and the heart of his people, as
the trees of the wood are moved with the wind.

7:3 Then said the LORD unto Isaiah, Go forth now to meet Ahaz, thou,
and Shearjashub thy son, at the end of the conduit of the upper pool
in the highway of the fuller's field; 7:4 And say unto him, Take heed,
and be quiet; fear not, neither be fainthearted for the two tails of
these smoking firebrands, for the fierce anger of Rezin with Syria,
and of the son of Remaliah.

7:5 Because Syria, Ephraim, and the son of Remaliah, have taken evil
counsel against thee, saying, 7:6 Let us go up against Judah, and vex
it, and let us make a breach therein for us, and set a king in the
midst of it, even the son of Tabeal: 7:7 Thus saith the Lord GOD, It
shall not stand, neither shall it come to pass.

7:8 For the head of Syria is Damascus, and the head of Damascus is
Rezin; and within threescore and five years shall Ephraim be broken,
that it be not a people.

7:9 And the head of Ephraim is Samaria, and the head of Samaria is
Remaliah's son. If ye will not believe, surely ye shall not be
established.

7:10 Moreover the LORD spake again unto Ahaz, saying, 7:11 Ask thee a
sign of the LORD thy God; ask it either in the depth, or in the height
above.

7:12 But Ahaz said, I will not ask, neither will I tempt the LORD.

7:13 And he said, Hear ye now, O house of David; Is it a small thing
for you to weary men, but will ye weary my God also?  7:14 Therefore
the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall
conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.

7:15 Butter and honey shall he eat, that he may know to refuse the
evil, and choose the good.

7:16 For before the child shall know to refuse the evil, and choose
the good, the land that thou abhorrest shall be forsaken of both her
kings.

7:17 The LORD shall bring upon thee, and upon thy people, and upon thy
father's house, days that have not come, from the day that Ephraim
departed from Judah; even the king of Assyria.

7:18 And it shall come to pass in that day, that the LORD shall hiss
for the fly that is in the uttermost part of the rivers of Egypt, and
for the bee that is in the land of Assyria.

7:19 And they shall come, and shall rest all of them in the desolate
valleys, and in the holes of the rocks, and upon all thorns, and upon
all bushes.

7:20 In the same day shall the Lord shave with a razor that is hired,
namely, by them beyond the river, by the king of Assyria, the head,
and the hair of the feet: and it shall also consume the beard.

7:21 And it shall come to pass in that day, that a man shall nourish a
young cow, and two sheep; 7:22 And it shall come to pass, for the
abundance of milk that they shall give he shall eat butter: for butter
and honey shall every one eat that is left in the land.

7:23 And it shall come to pass in that day, that every place shall be,
where there were a thousand vines at a thousand silverlings, it shall
even be for briers and thorns.

7:24 With arrows and with bows shall men come thither; because all the
land shall become briers and thorns.

7:25 And on all hills that shall be digged with the mattock, there
shall not come thither the fear of briers and thorns: but it shall be
for the sending forth of oxen, and for the treading of lesser cattle.

8:1 Moreover the LORD said unto me, Take thee a great roll, and write
in it with a man's pen concerning Mahershalalhashbaz.

8:2 And I took unto me faithful witnesses to record, Uriah the priest,
and Zechariah the son of Jeberechiah.

8:3 And I went unto the prophetess; and she conceived, and bare a son.

Then said the LORD to me, Call his name Mahershalalhashbaz.

8:4 For before the child shall have knowledge to cry, My father, and
my mother, the riches of Damascus and the spoil of Samaria shall be
taken away before the king of Assyria.

8:5 The LORD spake also unto me again, saying, 8:6 Forasmuch as this
people refuseth the waters of Shiloah that go softly, and rejoice in
Rezin and Remaliah's son; 8:7 Now therefore, behold, the Lord bringeth
up upon them the waters of the river, strong and many, even the king
of Assyria, and all his glory: and he shall come up over all his
channels, and go over all his banks: 8:8 And he shall pass through
Judah; he shall overflow and go over, he shall reach even to the neck;
and the stretching out of his wings shall fill the breadth of thy
land, O Immanuel.

8:9 Associate yourselves, O ye people, and ye shall be broken in
pieces; and give ear, all ye of far countries: gird yourselves, and ye
shall be broken in pieces; gird yourselves, and ye shall be broken in
pieces.

8:10 Take counsel together, and it shall come to nought; speak the
word, and it shall not stand: for God is with us.

8:11 For the LORD spake thus to me with a strong hand, and instructed
me that I should not walk in the way of this people, saying, 8:12 Say
ye not, A confederacy, to all them to whom this people shall say, A
confederacy; neither fear ye their fear, nor be afraid.

8:13 Sanctify the LORD of hosts himself; and let him be your fear, and
let him be your dread.

8:14 And he shall be for a sanctuary; but for a stone of stumbling and
for a rock of offence to both the houses of Israel, for a gin and for
a snare to the inhabitants of Jerusalem.

8:15 And many among them shall stumble, and fall, and be broken, and
be snared, and be taken.

8:16 Bind up the testimony, seal the law among my disciples.

8:17 And I will wait upon the LORD, that hideth his face from the
house of Jacob, and I will look for him.

8:18 Behold, I and the children whom the LORD hath given me are for
signs and for wonders in Israel from the LORD of hosts, which dwelleth
in mount Zion.

8:19 And when they shall say unto you, Seek unto them that have
familiar spirits, and unto wizards that peep, and that mutter: should
not a people seek unto their God? for the living to the dead?  8:20 To
the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this
word, it is because there is no light in them.

8:21 And they shall pass through it, hardly bestead and hungry: and it
shall come to pass, that when they shall be hungry, they shall fret
themselves, and curse their king and their God, and look upward.

8:22 And they shall look unto the earth; and behold trouble and
darkness, dimness of anguish; and they shall be driven to darkness.

9:1 Nevertheless the dimness shall not be such as was in her vexation,
when at the first he lightly afflicted the land of Zebulun and the
land of Naphtali, and afterward did more grievously afflict her by the
way of the sea, beyond Jordan, in Galilee of the nations.

9:2 The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light: they
that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the
light shined.

9:3 Thou hast multiplied the nation, and not increased the joy: they
joy before thee according to the joy in harvest, and as men rejoice
when they divide the spoil.

9:4 For thou hast broken the yoke of his burden, and the staff of his
shoulder, the rod of his oppressor, as in the day of Midian.

9:5 For every battle of the warrior is with confused noise, and
garments rolled in blood; but this shall be with burning and fuel of
fire.

9:6 For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the
government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called
Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The
Prince of Peace.

9:7 Of the increase of his government and peace there shall be no end,
upon the throne of David, and upon his kingdom, to order it, and to
establish it with judgment and with justice from henceforth even for
ever. The zeal of the LORD of hosts will perform this.

9:8 The Lord sent a word into Jacob, and it hath lighted upon Israel.

9:9 And all the people shall know, even Ephraim and the inhabitant of
Samaria, that say in the pride and stoutness of heart, 9:10 The bricks
are fallen down, but we will build with hewn stones: the sycomores are
cut down, but we will change them into cedars.

9:11 Therefore the LORD shall set up the adversaries of Rezin against
him, and join his enemies together; 9:12 The Syrians before, and the
Philistines behind; and they shall devour Israel with open mouth. For
all this his anger is not turned away, but his hand is stretched out
still.

9:13 For the people turneth not unto him that smiteth them, neither do
they seek the LORD of hosts.

9:14 Therefore the LORD will cut off from Israel head and tail, branch
and rush, in one day.

9:15 The ancient and honourable, he is the head; and the prophet that
teacheth lies, he is the tail.

9:16 For the leaders of this people cause them to err; and they that
are led of them are destroyed.

9:17 Therefore the LORD shall have no joy in their young men, neither
shall have mercy on their fatherless and widows: for every one is an
hypocrite and an evildoer, and every mouth speaketh folly. For all
this his anger is not turned away, but his hand is stretched out
still.

9:18 For wickedness burneth as the fire: it shall devour the briers
and thorns, and shall kindle in the thickets of the forest, and they
shall mount up like the lifting up of smoke.

9:19 Through the wrath of the LORD of hosts is the land darkened, and
the people shall be as the fuel of the fire: no man shall spare his
brother.

9:20 And he shall snatch on the right hand, and be hungry; and he
shall eat on the left hand, and they shall not be satisfied: they
shall eat every man the flesh of his own arm: 9:21 Manasseh, Ephraim;
and Ephraim, Manasseh: and they together shall be against Judah. For
all this his anger is not turned away, but his hand is stretched out
still.

10:1 Woe unto them that decree unrighteous decrees, and that write
grievousness which they have prescribed; 10:2 To turn aside the needy
from judgment, and to take away the right from the poor of my people,
that widows may be their prey, and that they may rob the fatherless!
10:3 And what will ye do in the day of visitation, and in the
desolation which shall come from far? to whom will ye flee for help?
and where will ye leave your glory?  10:4 Without me they shall bow
down under the prisoners, and they shall fall under the slain. For all
this his anger is not turned away, but his hand is stretched out
still.

10:5 O Assyrian, the rod of mine anger, and the staff in their hand is
mine indignation.

10:6 I will send him against an hypocritical nation, and against the
people of my wrath will I give him a charge, to take the spoil, and to
take the prey, and to tread them down like the mire of the streets.

10:7 Howbeit he meaneth not so, neither doth his heart think so; but
it is in his heart to destroy and cut off nations not a few.

10:8 For he saith, Are not my princes altogether kings?  10:9 Is not
Calno as Carchemish? is not Hamath as Arpad? is not Samaria as
Damascus?  10:10 As my hand hath found the kingdoms of the idols, and
whose graven images did excel them of Jerusalem and of Samaria; 10:11
Shall I not, as I have done unto Samaria and her idols, so do to
Jerusalem and her idols?  10:12 Wherefore it shall come to pass, that
when the Lord hath performed his whole work upon mount Zion and on
Jerusalem, I will punish the fruit of the stout heart of the king of
Assyria, and the glory of his high looks.

10:13 For he saith, By the strength of my hand I have done it, and by
my wisdom; for I am prudent: and I have removed the bounds of the
people, and have robbed their treasures, and I have put down the
inhabitants like a valiant man: 10:14 And my hand hath found as a nest
the riches of the people: and as one gathereth eggs that are left,
have I gathered all the earth; and there was none that moved the wing,
or opened the mouth, or peeped.

10:15 Shall the axe boast itself against him that heweth therewith? or
shall the saw magnify itself against him that shaketh it? as if the
rod should shake itself against them that lift it up, or as if the
staff should lift up itself, as if it were no wood.

10:16 Therefore shall the Lord, the Lord of hosts, send among his fat
ones leanness; and under his glory he shall kindle a burning like the
burning of a fire.

10:17 And the light of Israel shall be for a fire, and his Holy One
for a flame: and it shall burn and devour his thorns and his briers in
one day; 10:18 And shall consume the glory of his forest, and of his
fruitful field, both soul and body: and they shall be as when a
standard-bearer fainteth.

10:19 And the rest of the trees of his forest shall be few, that a
child may write them.

10:20 And it shall come to pass in that day, that the remnant of
Israel, and such as are escaped of the house of Jacob, shall no more
again stay upon him that smote them; but shall stay upon the LORD, the
Holy One of Israel, in truth.

10:21 The remnant shall return, even the remnant of Jacob, unto the
mighty God.

10:22 For though thy people Israel be as the sand of the sea, yet a
remnant of them shall return: the consumption decreed shall overflow
with righteousness.

10:23 For the Lord GOD of hosts shall make a consumption, even
determined, in the midst of all the land.

10:24 Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD of hosts, O my people that
dwellest in Zion, be not afraid of the Assyrian: he shall smite thee
with a rod, and shall lift up his staff against thee, after the manner
of Egypt.

10:25 For yet a very little while, and the indignation shall cease,
and mine anger in their destruction.

10:26 And the LORD of hosts shall stir up a scourge for him according
to the slaughter of Midian at the rock of Oreb: and as his rod was
upon the sea, so shall he lift it up after the manner of Egypt.

10:27 And it shall come to pass in that day, that his burden shall be
taken away from off thy shoulder, and his yoke from off thy neck, and
the yoke shall be destroyed because of the anointing.

10:28 He is come to Aiath, he is passed to Migron; at Michmash he hath
laid up his carriages: 10:29 They are gone over the passage: they have
taken up their lodging at Geba; Ramah is afraid; Gibeah of Saul is
fled.

10:30 Lift up thy voice, O daughter of Gallim: cause it to be heard
unto Laish, O poor Anathoth.

10:31 Madmenah is removed; the inhabitants of Gebim gather themselves
to flee.

10:32 As yet shall he remain at Nob that day: he shall shake his hand
against the mount of the daughter of Zion, the hill of Jerusalem.

10:33 Behold, the Lord, the LORD of hosts, shall lop the bough with
terror: and the high ones of stature shall be hewn down, and the
haughty shall be humbled.

10:34 And he shall cut down the thickets of the forest with iron, and
Lebanon shall fall by a mighty one.

11:1 And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a
Branch shall grow out of his roots: 11:2 And the spirit of the LORD
shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the
spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear
of the LORD; 11:3 And shall make him of quick understanding in the
fear of the LORD: and he shall not judge after the sight of his eyes,
neither reprove after the hearing of his ears: 11:4 But with
righteousness shall he judge the poor, and reprove with equity for the
meek of the earth: and he shall smite the earth: with the rod of his
mouth, and with the breath of his lips shall he slay the wicked.

11:5 And righteousness shall be the girdle of his loins, and
faithfulness the girdle of his reins.

11:6 The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall
lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling
together; and a little child shall lead them.

11:7 And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie
down together: and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.

11:8 And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the
weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice' den.

11:9 They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain: for the
earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD, as the waters cover
the sea.

11:10 And in that day there shall be a root of Jesse, which shall
stand for an ensign of the people; to it shall the Gentiles seek: and
his rest shall be glorious.

11:11 And it shall come to pass in that day, that the Lord shall set
his hand again the second time to recover the remnant of his people,
which shall be left, from Assyria, and from Egypt, and from Pathros,
and from Cush, and from Elam, and from Shinar, and from Hamath, and
from the islands of the sea.

11:12 And he shall set up an ensign for the nations, and shall
assemble the outcasts of Israel, and gather together the dispersed of
Judah from the four corners of the earth.

11:13 The envy also of Ephraim shall depart, and the adversaries of
Judah shall be cut off: Ephraim shall not envy Judah, and Judah shall
not vex Ephraim.

11:14 But they shall fly upon the shoulders of the Philistines toward
the west; they shall spoil them of the east together: they shall lay
their hand upon Edom and Moab; and the children of Ammon shall obey
them.

11:15 And the LORD shall utterly destroy the tongue of the Egyptian
sea; and with his mighty wind shall he shake his hand over the river,
and shall smite it in the seven streams, and make men go over dryshod.

11:16 And there shall be an highway for the remnant of his people,
which shall be left, from Assyria; like as it was to Israel in the day
that he came up out of the land of Egypt.

12:1 And in that day thou shalt say, O LORD, I will praise thee:
though thou wast angry with me, thine anger is turned away, and thou
comfortedst me.

12:2 Behold, God is my salvation; I will trust, and not be afraid: for
the LORD JEHOVAH is my strength and my song; he also is become my
salvation.

12:3 Therefore with joy shall ye draw water out of the wells of
salvation.

12:4 And in that day shall ye say, Praise the LORD, call upon his
name, declare his doings among the people, make mention that his name
is exalted.

12:5 Sing unto the LORD; for he hath done excellent things: this is
known in all the earth.

12:6 Cry out and shout, thou inhabitant of Zion: for great is the Holy
One of Israel in the midst of thee.

13:1 The burden of Babylon, which Isaiah the son of Amoz did see.

13:2 Lift ye up a banner upon the high mountain, exalt the voice unto
them, shake the hand, that they may go into the gates of the nobles.

13:3 I have commanded my sanctified ones, I have also called my mighty
ones for mine anger, even them that rejoice in my highness.

13:4 The noise of a multitude in the mountains, like as of a great
people; a tumultuous noise of the kingdoms of nations gathered
together: the LORD of hosts mustereth the host of the battle.

13:5 They come from a far country, from the end of heaven, even the
LORD, and the weapons of his indignation, to destroy the whole land.

13:6 Howl ye; for the day of the LORD is at hand; it shall come as a
destruction from the Almighty.

13:7 Therefore shall all hands be faint, and every man's heart shall
melt: 13:8 And they shall be afraid: pangs and sorrows shall take hold
of them; they shall be in pain as a woman that travaileth: they shall
be amazed one at another; their faces shall be as flames.

13:9 Behold, the day of the LORD cometh, cruel both with wrath and
fierce anger, to lay the land desolate: and he shall destroy the
sinners thereof out of it.

13:10 For the stars of heaven and the constellations thereof shall not
give their light: the sun shall be darkened in his going forth, and
the moon shall not cause her light to shine.

13:11 And I will punish the world for their evil, and the wicked for
their iniquity; and I will cause the arrogancy of the proud to cease,
and will lay low the haughtiness of the terrible.

13:12 I will make a man more precious than fine gold; even a man than
the golden wedge of Ophir.

13:13 Therefore I will shake the heavens, and the earth shall remove
out of her place, in the wrath of the LORD of hosts, and in the day of
his fierce anger.

13:14 And it shall be as the chased roe, and as a sheep that no man
taketh up: they shall every man turn to his own people, and flee every
one into his own land.

13:15 Every one that is found shall be thrust through; and every one
that is joined unto them shall fall by the sword.

13:16 Their children also shall be dashed to pieces before their eyes;
their houses shall be spoiled, and their wives ravished.

13:17 Behold, I will stir up the Medes against them, which shall not
regard silver; and as for gold, they shall not delight in it.

13:18 Their bows also shall dash the young men to pieces; and they
shall have no pity on the fruit of the womb; their eyes shall not
spare children.

13:19 And Babylon, the glory of kingdoms, the beauty of the Chaldees'
excellency, shall be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah.

13:20 It shall never be inhabited, neither shall it be dwelt in from
generation to generation: neither shall the Arabian pitch tent there;
neither shall the shepherds make their fold there.

13:21 But wild beasts of the desert shall lie there; and their houses
shall be full of doleful creatures; and owls shall dwell there, and
satyrs shall dance there.

13:22 And the wild beasts of the islands shall cry in their desolate
houses, and dragons in their pleasant palaces: and her time is near to
come, and her days shall not be prolonged.

14:1 For the LORD will have mercy on Jacob, and will yet choose
Israel, and set them in their own land: and the strangers shall be
joined with them, and they shall cleave to the house of Jacob.

14:2 And the people shall take them, and bring them to their place:
and the house of Israel shall possess them in the land of the LORD for
servants and handmaids: and they shall take them captives, whose
captives they were; and they shall rule over their oppressors.

14:3 And it shall come to pass in the day that the LORD shall give
thee rest from thy sorrow, and from thy fear, and from the hard
bondage wherein thou wast made to serve, 14:4 That thou shalt take up
this proverb against the king of Babylon, and say, How hath the
oppressor ceased! the golden city ceased!  14:5 The LORD hath broken
the staff of the wicked, and the sceptre of the rulers.

14:6 He who smote the people in wrath with a continual stroke, he that
ruled the nations in anger, is persecuted, and none hindereth.

14:7 The whole earth is at rest, and is quiet: they break forth into
singing.

14:8 Yea, the fir trees rejoice at thee, and the cedars of Lebanon,
saying, Since thou art laid down, no feller is come up against us.

14:9 Hell from beneath is moved for thee to meet thee at thy coming:
it stirreth up the dead for thee, even all the chief ones of the
earth; it hath raised up from their thrones all the kings of the
nations.

14:10 All they shall speak and say unto thee, Art thou also become
weak as we? art thou become like unto us?  14:11 Thy pomp is brought
down to the grave, and the noise of thy viols: the worm is spread
under thee, and the worms cover thee.

14:12 How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!
how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!
14:13 For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I
will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the
mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: 14:14 I will
ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High.

14:15 Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit.

14:16 They that see thee shall narrowly look upon thee, and consider
thee, saying, Is this the man that made the earth to tremble, that did
shake kingdoms; 14:17 That made the world as a wilderness, and
destroyed the cities thereof; that opened not the house of his
prisoners?  14:18 All the kings of the nations, even all of them, lie
in glory, every one in his own house.

14:19 But thou art cast out of thy grave like an abominable branch,
and as the raiment of those that are slain, thrust through with a
sword, that go down to the stones of the pit; as a carcase trodden
under feet.

14:20 Thou shalt not be joined with them in burial, because thou hast
destroyed thy land, and slain thy people: the seed of evildoers shall
never be renowned.

14:21 Prepare slaughter for his children for the iniquity of their
fathers; that they do not rise, nor possess the land, nor fill the
face of the world with cities.

14:22 For I will rise up against them, saith the LORD of hosts, and
cut off from Babylon the name, and remnant, and son, and nephew, saith
the LORD.

14:23 I will also make it a possession for the bittern, and pools of
water: and I will sweep it with the besom of destruction, saith the
LORD of hosts.

14:24 The LORD of hosts hath sworn, saying, Surely as I have thought,
so shall it come to pass; and as I have purposed, so shall it stand:
14:25 That I will break the Assyrian in my land, and upon my mountains
tread him under foot: then shall his yoke depart from off them, and
his burden depart from off their shoulders.

14:26 This is the purpose that is purposed upon the whole earth: and
this is the hand that is stretched out upon all the nations.

14:27 For the LORD of hosts hath purposed, and who shall disannul it?
and his hand is stretched out, and who shall turn it back?  14:28 In
the year that king Ahaz died was this burden.

14:29 Rejoice not thou, whole Palestina, because the rod of him that
smote thee is broken: for out of the serpent's root shall come forth a
cockatrice, and his fruit shall be a fiery flying serpent.

14:30 And the firstborn of the poor shall feed, and the needy shall
lie down in safety: and I will kill thy root with famine, and he shall
slay thy remnant.

14:31 Howl, O gate; cry, O city; thou, whole Palestina, art dissolved:
for there shall come from the north a smoke, and none shall be alone
in his appointed times.

14:32 What shall one then answer the messengers of the nation? That
the LORD hath founded Zion, and the poor of his people shall trust in
it.

15:1 The burden of Moab. Because in the night Ar of Moab is laid
waste, and brought to silence; because in the night Kir of Moab is
laid waste, and brought to silence; 15:2 He is gone up to Bajith, and
to Dibon, the high places, to weep: Moab shall howl over Nebo, and
over Medeba: on all their heads shall be baldness, and every beard cut
off.

15:3 In their streets they shall gird themselves with sackcloth: on
the tops of their houses, and in their streets, every one shall howl,
weeping abundantly.

15:4 And Heshbon shall cry, and Elealeh: their voice shall be heard
even unto Jahaz: therefore the armed soldiers of Moab shall cry out;
his life shall be grievous unto him.

15:5 My heart shall cry out for Moab; his fugitives shall flee unto
Zoar, an heifer of three years old: for by the mounting up of Luhith
with weeping shall they go it up; for in the way of Horonaim they
shall raise up a cry of destruction.

15:6 For the waters of Nimrim shall be desolate: for the hay is
withered away, the grass faileth, there is no green thing.

15:7 Therefore the abundance they have gotten, and that which they
have laid up, shall they carry away to the brook of the willows.

15:8 For the cry is gone round about the borders of Moab; the howling
thereof unto Eglaim, and the howling thereof unto Beerelim.

15:9 For the waters of Dimon shall be full of blood: for I will bring
more upon Dimon, lions upon him that escapeth of Moab, and upon the
remnant of the land.

16:1 Send ye the lamb to the ruler of the land from Sela to the
wilderness, unto the mount of the daughter of Zion.

16:2 For it shall be, that, as a wandering bird cast out of the nest,
so the daughters of Moab shall be at the fords of Arnon.

16:3 Take counsel, execute judgment; make thy shadow as the night in
the midst of the noonday; hide the outcasts; bewray not him that
wandereth.

16:4 Let mine outcasts dwell with thee, Moab; be thou a covert to them
from the face of the spoiler: for the extortioner is at an end, the
spoiler ceaseth, the oppressors are consumed out of the land.

16:5 And in mercy shall the throne be established: and he shall sit
upon it in truth in the tabernacle of David, judging, and seeking
judgment, and hasting righteousness.

16:6 We have heard of the pride of Moab; he is very proud: even of his
haughtiness, and his pride, and his wrath: but his lies shall not be
so.

16:7 Therefore shall Moab howl for Moab, every one shall howl: for the
foundations of Kirhareseth shall ye mourn; surely they are stricken.

16:8 For the fields of Heshbon languish, and the vine of Sibmah: the
lords of the heathen have broken down the principal plants thereof,
they are come even unto Jazer, they wandered through the wilderness:
her branches are stretched out, they are gone over the sea.

16:9 Therefore I will bewail with the weeping of Jazer the vine of
Sibmah: I will water thee with my tears, O Heshbon, and Elealeh: for
the shouting for thy summer fruits and for thy harvest is fallen.

16:10 And gladness is taken away, and joy out of the plentiful field;
and in the vineyards there shall be no singing, neither shall there be
shouting: the treaders shall tread out no wine in their presses; I
have made their vintage shouting to cease.

16:11 Wherefore my bowels shall sound like an harp for Moab, and mine
inward parts for Kirharesh.

16:12 And it shall come to pass, when it is seen that Moab is weary on
the high place, that he shall come to his sanctuary to pray; but he
shall not prevail.

16:13 This is the word that the LORD hath spoken concerning Moab since
that time.

16:14 But now the LORD hath spoken, saying, Within three years, as the
years of an hireling, and the glory of Moab shall be contemned, with
all that great multitude; and the remnant shall be very small and
feeble.

17:1 The burden of Damascus. Behold, Damascus is taken away from being
a city, and it shall be a ruinous heap.

17:2 The cities of Aroer are forsaken: they shall be for flocks, which
shall lie down, and none shall make them afraid.

17:3 The fortress also shall cease from Ephraim, and the kingdom from
Damascus, and the remnant of Syria: they shall be as the glory of the
children of Israel, saith the LORD of hosts.

17:4 And in that day it shall come to pass, that the glory of Jacob
shall be made thin, and the fatness of his flesh shall wax lean.

17:5 And it shall be as when the harvestman gathereth the corn, and
reapeth the ears with his arm; and it shall be as he that gathereth
ears in the valley of Rephaim.

17:6 Yet gleaning grapes shall be left in it, as the shaking of an
olive tree, two or three berries in the top of the uppermost bough,
four or five in the outmost fruitful branches thereof, saith the LORD
God of Israel.

17:7 At that day shall a man look to his Maker, and his eyes shall
have respect to the Holy One of Israel.

17:8 And he shall not look to the altars, the work of his hands,
neither shall respect that which his fingers have made, either the
groves, or the images.

17:9 In that day shall his strong cities be as a forsaken bough, and
an uppermost branch, which they left because of the children of
Israel: and there shall be desolation.

17:10 Because thou hast forgotten the God of thy salvation, and hast
not been mindful of the rock of thy strength, therefore shalt thou
plant pleasant plants, and shalt set it with strange slips: 17:11 In
the day shalt thou make thy plant to grow, and in the morning shalt
thou make thy seed to flourish: but the harvest shall be a heap in the
day of grief and of desperate sorrow.

17:12 Woe to the multitude of many people, which make a noise like the
noise of the seas; and to the rushing of nations, that make a rushing
like the rushing of mighty waters!  17:13 The nations shall rush like
the rushing of many waters: but God shall rebuke them, and they shall
flee far off, and shall be chased as the chaff of the mountains before
the wind, and like a rolling thing before the whirlwind.

17:14 And behold at eveningtide trouble; and before the morning he is
not.

This is the portion of them that spoil us, and the lot of them that
rob us.

18:1 Woe to the land shadowing with wings, which is beyond the rivers
of Ethiopia: 18:2 That sendeth ambassadors by the sea, even in vessels
of bulrushes upon the waters, saying, Go, ye swift messengers, to a
nation scattered and peeled, to a people terrible from their beginning
hitherto; a nation meted out and trodden down, whose land the rivers
have spoiled!  18:3 All ye inhabitants of the world, and dwellers on
the earth, see ye, when he lifteth up an ensign on the mountains; and
when he bloweth a trumpet, hear ye.

18:4 For so the LORD said unto me, I will take my rest, and I will
consider in my dwelling place like a clear heat upon herbs, and like a
cloud of dew in the heat of harvest.

18:5 For afore the harvest, when the bud is perfect, and the sour
grape is ripening in the flower, he shall both cut off the sprigs with
pruning hooks, and take away and cut down the branches.

18:6 They shall be left together unto the fowls of the mountains, and
to the beasts of the earth: and the fowls shall summer upon them, and
all the beasts of the earth shall winter upon them.

18:7 In that time shall the present be brought unto the LORD of hosts
of a people scattered and peeled, and from a people terrible from
their beginning hitherto; a nation meted out and trodden under foot,
whose land the rivers have spoiled, to the place of the name of the
LORD of hosts, the mount Zion.

19:1 The burden of Egypt. Behold, the LORD rideth upon a swift cloud,
and shall come into Egypt: and the idols of Egypt shall be moved at
his presence, and the heart of Egypt shall melt in the midst of it.

19:2 And I will set the Egyptians against the Egyptians: and they
shall fight every one against his brother, and every one against his
neighbour; city against city, and kingdom against kingdom.

19:3 And the spirit of Egypt shall fail in the midst thereof; and I
will destroy the counsel thereof: and they shall seek to the idols,
and to the charmers, and to them that have familiar spirits, and to
the wizards.

19:4 And the Egyptians will I give over into the hand of a cruel lord;
and a fierce king shall rule over them, saith the Lord, the LORD of
hosts.

19:5 And the waters shall fail from the sea, and the river shall be
wasted and dried up.

19:6 And they shall turn the rivers far away; and the brooks of
defence shall be emptied and dried up: the reeds and flags shall
wither.

19:7 The paper reeds by the brooks, by the mouth of the brooks, and
every thing sown by the brooks, shall wither, be driven away, and be
no more.

19:8 The fishers also shall mourn, and all they that cast angle into
the brooks shall lament, and they that spread nets upon the waters
shall languish.

19:9 Moreover they that work in fine flax, and they that weave
networks, shall be confounded.

19:10 And they shall be broken in the purposes thereof, all that make
sluices and ponds for fish.

19:11 Surely the princes of Zoan are fools, the counsel of the wise
counsellors of Pharaoh is become brutish: how say ye unto Pharaoh, I
am the son of the wise, the son of ancient kings?  19:12 Where are
they? where are thy wise men? and let them tell thee now, and let them
know what the LORD of hosts hath purposed upon Egypt.

19:13 The princes of Zoan are become fools, the princes of Noph are
deceived; they have also seduced Egypt, even they that are the stay of
the tribes thereof.

19:14 The LORD hath mingled a perverse spirit in the midst thereof:
and they have caused Egypt to err in every work thereof, as a drunken
man staggereth in his vomit.

19:15 Neither shall there be any work for Egypt, which the head or
tail, branch or rush, may do.

19:16 In that day shall Egypt be like unto women: and it shall be
afraid and fear because of the shaking of the hand of the LORD of
hosts, which he shaketh over it.

19:17 And the land of Judah shall be a terror unto Egypt, every one
that maketh mention thereof shall be afraid in himself, because of the
counsel of the LORD of hosts, which he hath determined against it.

19:18 In that day shall five cities in the land of Egypt speak the
language of Canaan, and swear to the LORD of hosts; one shall be
called, The city of destruction.

19:19 In that day shall there be an altar to the LORD in the midst of
the land of Egypt, and a pillar at the border thereof to the LORD.

19:20 And it shall be for a sign and for a witness unto the LORD of
hosts in the land of Egypt: for they shall cry unto the LORD because
of the oppressors, and he shall send them a saviour, and a great one,
and he shall deliver them.

19:21 And the LORD shall be known to Egypt, and the Egyptians shall
know the LORD in that day, and shall do sacrifice and oblation; yea,
they shall vow a vow unto the LORD, and perform it.

19:22 And the LORD shall smite Egypt: he shall smite and heal it: and
they shall return even to the LORD, and he shall be intreated of them,
and shall heal them.

19:23 In that day shall there be a highway out of Egypt to Assyria,
and the Assyrian shall come into Egypt, and the Egyptian into Assyria,
and the Egyptians shall serve with the Assyrians.

19:24 In that day shall Israel be the third with Egypt and with
Assyria, even a blessing in the midst of the land: 19:25 Whom the LORD
of hosts shall bless, saying, Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria
the work of my hands, and Israel mine inheritance.

20:1 In the year that Tartan came unto Ashdod, (when Sargon the king
of Assyria sent him,) and fought against Ashdod, and took it; 20:2 At
the same time spake the LORD by Isaiah the son of Amoz, saying, Go and
loose the sackcloth from off thy loins, and put off thy shoe from thy
foot. And he did so, walking naked and barefoot.

20:3 And the LORD said, Like as my servant Isaiah hath walked naked
and barefoot three years for a sign and wonder upon Egypt and upon
Ethiopia; 20:4 So shall the king of Assyria lead away the Egyptians
prisoners, and the Ethiopians captives, young and old, naked and
barefoot, even with their buttocks uncovered, to the shame of Egypt.

20:5 And they shall be afraid and ashamed of Ethiopia their
expectation, and of Egypt their glory.

20:6 And the inhabitant of this isle shall say in that day, Behold,
such is our expectation, whither we flee for help to be delivered from
the king of Assyria: and how shall we escape?  21:1 The burden of the
desert of the sea. As whirlwinds in the south pass through; so it
cometh from the desert, from a terrible land.

21:2 A grievous vision is declared unto me; the treacherous dealer
dealeth treacherously, and the spoiler spoileth. Go up, O Elam:
besiege, O Media; all the sighing thereof have I made to cease.

21:3 Therefore are my loins filled with pain: pangs have taken hold
upon me, as the pangs of a woman that travaileth: I was bowed down at
the hearing of it; I was dismayed at the seeing of it.

21:4 My heart panted, fearfulness affrighted me: the night of my
pleasure hath he turned into fear unto me.

21:5 Prepare the table, watch in the watchtower, eat, drink: arise, ye
princes, and anoint the shield.

21:6 For thus hath the LORD said unto me, Go, set a watchman, let him
declare what he seeth.

21:7 And he saw a chariot with a couple of horsemen, a chariot of
asses, and a chariot of camels; and he hearkened diligently with much
heed: 21:8 And he cried, A lion: My lord, I stand continually upon the
watchtower in the daytime, and I am set in my ward whole nights: 21:9
And, behold, here cometh a chariot of men, with a couple of horsemen.

And he answered and said, Babylon is fallen, is fallen; and all the
graven images of her gods he hath broken unto the ground.

21:10 O my threshing, and the corn of my floor: that which I have
heard of the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, have I declared unto
you.

21:11 The burden of Dumah. He calleth to me out of Seir, Watchman,
what of the night? Watchman, what of the night?  21:12 The watchman
said, The morning cometh, and also the night: if ye will enquire,
enquire ye: return, come.

21:13 The burden upon Arabia. In the forest in Arabia shall ye lodge,
O ye travelling companies of Dedanim.

21:14 The inhabitants of the land of Tema brought water to him that
was thirsty, they prevented with their bread him that fled.

21:15 For they fled from the swords, from the drawn sword, and from
the bent bow, and from the grievousness of war.

21:16 For thus hath the LORD said unto me, Within a year, according to
the years of an hireling, and all the glory of Kedar shall fail: 21:17
And the residue of the number of archers, the mighty men of the
children of Kedar, shall be diminished: for the LORD God of Israel
hath spoken it.

22:1 The burden of the valley of vision. What aileth thee now, that
thou art wholly gone up to the housetops?  22:2 Thou that art full of
stirs, a tumultuous city, joyous city: thy slain men are not slain
with the sword, nor dead in battle.

22:3 All thy rulers are fled together, they are bound by the archers:
all that are found in thee are bound together, which have fled from
far.

22:4 Therefore said I, Look away from me; I will weep bitterly, labour
not to comfort me, because of the spoiling of the daughter of my
people.

22:5 For it is a day of trouble, and of treading down, and of
perplexity by the Lord GOD of hosts in the valley of vision, breaking
down the walls, and of crying to the mountains.

22:6 And Elam bare the quiver with chariots of men and horsemen, and
Kir uncovered the shield.

22:7 And it shall come to pass, that thy choicest valleys shall be
full of chariots, and the horsemen shall set themselves in array at
the gate.

22:8 And he discovered the covering of Judah, and thou didst look in
that day to the armour of the house of the forest.

22:9 Ye have seen also the breaches of the city of David, that they
are many: and ye gathered together the waters of the lower pool.

22:10 And ye have numbered the houses of Jerusalem, and the houses
have ye broken down to fortify the wall.

22:11 Ye made also a ditch between the two walls for the water of the
old pool: but ye have not looked unto the maker thereof, neither had
respect unto him that fashioned it long ago.

22:12 And in that day did the Lord GOD of hosts call to weeping, and
to mourning, and to baldness, and to girding with sackcloth: 22:13 And
behold joy and gladness, slaying oxen, and killing sheep, eating
flesh, and drinking wine: let us eat and drink; for to morrow we shall
die.

22:14 And it was revealed in mine ears by the LORD of hosts, Surely
this iniquity shall not be purged from you till ye die, saith the Lord
GOD of hosts.

22:15 Thus saith the Lord GOD of hosts, Go, get thee unto this
treasurer, even unto Shebna, which is over the house, and say, 22:16
What hast thou here? and whom hast thou here, that thou hast hewed
thee out a sepulchre here, as he that heweth him out a sepulchre on
high, and that graveth an habitation for himself in a rock?  22:17
Behold, the LORD will carry thee away with a mighty captivity, and
will surely cover thee.

22:18 He will surely violently turn and toss thee like a ball into a
large country: there shalt thou die, and there the chariots of thy
glory shall be the shame of thy lord's house.

22:19 And I will drive thee from thy station, and from thy state shall
he pull thee down.

22:20 And it shall come to pass in that day, that I will call my
servant Eliakim the son of Hilkiah: 22:21 And I will clothe him with
thy robe, and strengthen him with thy girdle, and I will commit thy
government into his hand: and he shall be a father to the inhabitants
of Jerusalem, and to the house of Judah.

22:22 And the key of the house of David will I lay upon his shoulder;
so he shall open, and none shall shut; and he shall shut, and none
shall open.

22:23 And I will fasten him as a nail in a sure place; and he shall be
for a glorious throne to his father's house.

22:24 And they shall hang upon him all the glory of his father's
house, the offspring and the issue, all vessels of small quantity,
from the vessels of cups, even to all the vessels of flagons.

22:25 In that day, saith the LORD of hosts, shall the nail that is
fastened in the sure place be removed, and be cut down, and fall; and
the burden that was upon it shall be cut off: for the LORD hath spoken
it.

23:1 The burden of Tyre. Howl, ye ships of Tarshish; for it is laid
waste, so that there is no house, no entering in: from the land of
Chittim it is revealed to them.

23:2 Be still, ye inhabitants of the isle; thou whom the merchants of
Zidon, that pass over the sea, have replenished.

23:3 And by great waters the seed of Sihor, the harvest of the river,
is her revenue; and she is a mart of nations.

23:4 Be thou ashamed, O Zidon: for the sea hath spoken, even the
strength of the sea, saying, I travail not, nor bring forth children,
neither do I nourish up young men, nor bring up virgins.

23:5 As at the report concerning Egypt, so shall they be sorely pained
at the report of Tyre.

23:6 Pass ye over to Tarshish; howl, ye inhabitants of the isle.

23:7 Is this your joyous city, whose antiquity is of ancient days? her
own feet shall carry her afar off to sojourn.

23:8 Who hath taken this counsel against Tyre, the crowning city,
whose merchants are princes, whose traffickers are the honourable of
the earth?  23:9 The LORD of hosts hath purposed it, to stain the
pride of all glory, and to bring into contempt all the honourable of
the earth.

23:10 Pass through thy land as a river, O daughter of Tarshish: there
is no more strength.

23:11 He stretched out his hand over the sea, he shook the kingdoms:
the LORD hath given a commandment against the merchant city, to
destroy the strong holds thereof.

23:12 And he said, Thou shalt no more rejoice, O thou oppressed
virgin, daughter of Zidon: arise, pass over to Chittim; there also
shalt thou have no rest.

23:13 Behold the land of the Chaldeans; this people was not, till the
Assyrian founded it for them that dwell in the wilderness: they set up
the towers thereof, they raised up the palaces thereof; and he brought
it to ruin.

23:14 Howl, ye ships of Tarshish: for your strength is laid waste.

23:15 And it shall come to pass in that day, that Tyre shall be
forgotten seventy years, according to the days of one king: after the
end of seventy years shall Tyre sing as an harlot.

23:16 Take an harp, go about the city, thou harlot that hast been
forgotten; make sweet melody, sing many songs, that thou mayest be
remembered.

23:17 And it shall come to pass after the end of seventy years, that
the LORD will visit Tyre, and she shall turn to her hire, and shall
commit fornication with all the kingdoms of the world upon the face of
the earth.

23:18 And her merchandise and her hire shall be holiness to the LORD:
it shall not be treasured nor laid up; for her merchandise shall be
for them that dwell before the LORD, to eat sufficiently, and for
durable clothing.

24:1 Behold, the LORD maketh the earth empty, and maketh it waste, and
turneth it upside down, and scattereth abroad the inhabitants thereof.

24:2 And it shall be, as with the people, so with the priest; as with
the servant, so with his master; as with the maid, so with her
mistress; as with the buyer, so with the seller; as with the lender,
so with the borrower; as with the taker of usury, so with the giver of
usury to him.

24:3 The land shall be utterly emptied, and utterly spoiled: for the
LORD hath spoken this word.

24:4 The earth mourneth and fadeth away, the world languisheth and
fadeth away, the haughty people of the earth do languish.

24:5 The earth also is defiled under the inhabitants thereof; because
they have transgressed the laws, changed the ordinance, broken the
everlasting covenant.

24:6 Therefore hath the curse devoured the earth, and they that dwell
therein are desolate: therefore the inhabitants of the earth are
burned, and few men left.

24:7 The new wine mourneth, the vine languisheth, all the merryhearted
do sigh.

24:8 The mirth of tabrets ceaseth, the noise of them that rejoice
endeth, the joy of the harp ceaseth.

24:9 They shall not drink wine with a song; strong drink shall be
bitter to them that drink it.

24:10 The city of confusion is broken down: every house is shut up,
that no man may come in.

24:11 There is a crying for wine in the streets; all joy is darkened,
the mirth of the land is gone.

24:12 In the city is left desolation, and the gate is smitten with
destruction.

24:13 When thus it shall be in the midst of the land among the people,
there shall be as the shaking of an olive tree, and as the gleaning
grapes when the vintage is done.

24:14 They shall lift up their voice, they shall sing for the majesty
of the LORD, they shall cry aloud from the sea.

24:15 Wherefore glorify ye the LORD in the fires, even the name of the
LORD God of Israel in the isles of the sea.

24:16 From the uttermost part of the earth have we heard songs, even
glory to the righteous. But I said, My leanness, my leanness, woe unto
me! the treacherous dealers have dealt treacherously; yea, the
treacherous dealers have dealt very treacherously.

24:17 Fear, and the pit, and the snare, are upon thee, O inhabitant of
the earth.

24:18 And it shall come to pass, that he who fleeth from the noise of
the fear shall fall into the pit; and he that cometh up out of the
midst of the pit shall be taken in the snare: for the windows from on
high are open, and the foundations of the earth do shake.

24:19 The earth is utterly broken down, the earth is clean dissolved,
the earth is moved exceedingly.

24:20 The earth shall reel to and fro like a drunkard, and shall be
removed like a cottage; and the transgression thereof shall be heavy
upon it; and it shall fall, and not rise again.

24:21 And it shall come to pass in that day, that the LORD shall
punish the host of the high ones that are on high, and the kings of
the earth upon the earth.

24:22 And they shall be gathered together, as prisoners are gathered
in the pit, and shall be shut up in the prison, and after many days
shall they be visited.

24:23 Then the moon shall be confounded, and the sun ashamed, when the
LORD of hosts shall reign in mount Zion, and in Jerusalem, and before
his ancients gloriously.

25:1 O Lord, thou art my God; I will exalt thee, I will praise thy
name; for thou hast done wonderful things; thy counsels of old are
faithfulness and truth.

25:2 For thou hast made of a city an heap; of a defenced city a ruin:
a palace of strangers to be no city; it shall never be built.

25:3 Therefore shall the strong people glorify thee, the city of the
terrible nations shall fear thee.

25:4 For thou hast been a strength to the poor, a strength to the
needy in his distress, a refuge from the storm, a shadow from the
heat, when the blast of the terrible ones is as a storm against the
wall.

25:5 Thou shalt bring down the noise of strangers, as the heat in a
dry place; even the heat with the shadow of a cloud: the branch of the
terrible ones shall be brought low.

25:6 And in this mountain shall the LORD of hosts make unto all people
a feast of fat things, a feast of wines on the lees, of fat things
full of marrow, of wines on the lees well refined.

25:7 And he will destroy in this mountain the face of the covering
cast over all people, and the vail that is spread over all nations.

25:8 He will swallow up death in victory; and the Lord GOD will wipe
away tears from off all faces; and the rebuke of his people shall he
take away from off all the earth: for the LORD hath spoken it.

25:9 And it shall be said in that day, Lo, this is our God; we have
waited for him, and he will save us: this is the LORD; we have waited
for him, we will be glad and rejoice in his salvation.

25:10 For in this mountain shall the hand of the LORD rest, and Moab
shall be trodden down under him, even as straw is trodden down for the
dunghill.

25:11 And he shall spread forth his hands in the midst of them, as he
that swimmeth spreadeth forth his hands to swim: and he shall bring
down their pride together with the spoils of their hands.

25:12 And the fortress of the high fort of thy walls shall he bring
down, lay low, and bring to the ground, even to the dust.

26:1 In that day shall this song be sung in the land of Judah; We have
a strong city; salvation will God appoint for walls and bulwarks.

26:2 Open ye the gates, that the righteous nation which keepeth the
truth may enter in.

26:3 Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on
thee: because he trusteth in thee.

26:4 Trust ye in the LORD for ever: for in the LORD JEHOVAH is
everlasting strength: 26:5 For he bringeth down them that dwell on
high; the lofty city, he layeth it low; he layeth it low, even to the
ground; he bringeth it even to the dust.

26:6 The foot shall tread it down, even the feet of the poor, and the
steps of the needy.

26:7 The way of the just is uprightness: thou, most upright, dost
weigh the path of the just.

26:8 Yea, in the way of thy judgments, O LORD, have we waited for
thee; the desire of our soul is to thy name, and to the remembrance of
thee.

26:9 With my soul have I desired thee in the night; yea, with my
spirit within me will I seek thee early: for when thy judgments are in
the earth, the inhabitants of the world will learn righteousness.

26:10 Let favour be shewed to the wicked, yet will he not learn
righteousness: in the land of uprightness will he deal unjustly, and
will not behold the majesty of the LORD.

26:11 LORD, when thy hand is lifted up, they will not see: but they
shall see, and be ashamed for their envy at the people; yea, the fire
of thine enemies shall devour them.

26:12 LORD, thou wilt ordain peace for us: for thou also hast wrought
all our works in us.

26:13 O LORD our God, other lords beside thee have had dominion over
us: but by thee only will we make mention of thy name.

26:14 They are dead, they shall not live; they are deceased, they
shall not rise: therefore hast thou visited and destroyed them, and
made all their memory to perish.

26:15 Thou hast increased the nation, O LORD, thou hast increased the
nation: thou art glorified: thou hadst removed it far unto all the
ends of the earth.

26:16 LORD, in trouble have they visited thee, they poured out a
prayer when thy chastening was upon them.

26:17 Like as a woman with child, that draweth near the time of her
delivery, is in pain, and crieth out in her pangs; so have we been in
thy sight, O LORD.

26:18 We have been with child, we have been in pain, we have as it
were brought forth wind; we have not wrought any deliverance in the
earth; neither have the inhabitants of the world fallen.

26:19 Thy dead men shall live, together with my dead body shall they
arise. Awake and sing, ye that dwell in dust: for thy dew is as the
dew of herbs, and the earth shall cast out the dead.

26:20 Come, my people, enter thou into thy chambers, and shut thy
doors about thee: hide thyself as it were for a little moment, until
the indignation be overpast.

26:21 For, behold, the LORD cometh out of his place to punish the
inhabitants of the earth for their iniquity: the earth also shall
disclose her blood, and shall no more cover her slain.

27:1 In that day the LORD with his sore and great and strong sword
shall punish leviathan the piercing serpent, even leviathan that
crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea.

27:2 In that day sing ye unto her, A vineyard of red wine.

27:3 I the LORD do keep it; I will water it every moment: lest any
hurt it, I will keep it night and day.

27:4 Fury is not in me: who would set the briers and thorns against me
in battle? I would go through them, I would burn them together.

27:5 Or let him take hold of my strength, that he may make peace with
me; and he shall make peace with me.

27:6 He shall cause them that come of Jacob to take root: Israel shall
blossom and bud, and fill the face of the world with fruit.

27:7 Hath he smitten him, as he smote those that smote him? or is he
slain according to the slaughter of them that are slain by him?  27:8
In measure, when it shooteth forth, thou wilt debate with it: he
stayeth his rough wind in the day of the east wind.

27:9 By this therefore shall the iniquity of Jacob be purged; and this
is all the fruit to take away his sin; when he maketh all the stones
of the altar as chalkstones that are beaten in sunder, the groves and
images shall not stand up.

27:10 Yet the defenced city shall be desolate, and the habitation
forsaken, and left like a wilderness: there shall the calf feed, and
there shall he lie down, and consume the branches thereof.

27:11 When the boughs thereof are withered, they shall be broken off:
the women come, and set them on fire: for it is a people of no
understanding: therefore he that made them will not have mercy on
them, and he that formed them will shew them no favour.

27:12 And it shall come to pass in that day, that the LORD shall beat
off from the channel of the river unto the stream of Egypt, and ye
shall be gathered one by one, O ye children of Israel.

27:13 And it shall come to pass in that day, that the great trumpet
shall be blown, and they shall come which were ready to perish in the
land of Assyria, and the outcasts in the land of Egypt, and shall
worship the LORD in the holy mount at Jerusalem.

28:1 Woe to the crown of pride, to the drunkards of Ephraim, whose
glorious beauty is a fading flower, which are on the head of the fat
valleys of them that are overcome with wine!  28:2 Behold, the Lord
hath a mighty and strong one, which as a tempest of hail and a
destroying storm, as a flood of mighty waters overflowing, shall cast
down to the earth with the hand.

28:3 The crown of pride, the drunkards of Ephraim, shall be trodden
under feet: 28:4 And the glorious beauty, which is on the head of the
fat valley, shall be a fading flower, and as the hasty fruit before
the summer; which when he that looketh upon it seeth, while it is yet
in his hand he eateth it up.

28:5 In that day shall the LORD of hosts be for a crown of glory, and
for a diadem of beauty, unto the residue of his people, 28:6 And for a
spirit of judgment to him that sitteth in judgment, and for strength
to them that turn the battle to the gate.

28:7 But they also have erred through wine, and through strong drink
are out of the way; the priest and the prophet have erred through
strong drink, they are swallowed up of wine, they are out of the way
through strong drink; they err in vision, they stumble in judgment.

28:8 For all tables are full of vomit and filthiness, so that there is
no place clean.

28:9 Whom shall he teach knowledge? and whom shall he make to
understand doctrine? them that are weaned from the milk, and drawn
from the breasts.

28:10 For precept must be upon precept, precept upon precept; line
upon line, line upon line; here a little, and there a little: 28:11
For with stammering lips and another tongue will he speak to this
people.

28:12 To whom he said, This is the rest wherewith ye may cause the
weary to rest; and this is the refreshing: yet they would not hear.

28:13 But the word of the LORD was unto them precept upon precept,
precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line; here a little,
and there a little; that they might go, and fall backward, and be
broken, and snared, and taken.

28:14 Wherefore hear the word of the LORD, ye scornful men, that rule
this people which is in Jerusalem.

28:15 Because ye have said, We have made a covenant with death, and
with hell are we at agreement; when the overflowing scourge shall pass
through, it shall not come unto us: for we have made lies our refuge,
and under falsehood have we hid ourselves: 28:16 Therefore thus saith
the Lord GOD, Behold, I lay in Zion for a foundation a stone, a tried
stone, a precious corner stone, a sure foundation: he that believeth
shall not make haste.

28:17 Judgment also will I lay to the line, and righteousness to the
plummet: and the hail shall sweep away the refuge of lies, and the
waters shall overflow the hiding place.

28:18 And your covenant with death shall be disannulled, and your
agreement with hell shall not stand; when the overflowing scourge
shall pass through, then ye shall be trodden down by it.

28:19 From the time that it goeth forth it shall take you: for morning
by morning shall it pass over, by day and by night: and it shall be a
vexation only to understand the report.

28:20 For the bed is shorter than that a man can stretch himself on
it: and the covering narrower than that he can wrap himself in it.

28:21 For the LORD shall rise up as in mount Perazim, he shall be
wroth as in the valley of Gibeon, that he may do his work, his strange
work; and bring to pass his act, his strange act.

28:22 Now therefore be ye not mockers, lest your bands be made strong:
for I have heard from the Lord GOD of hosts a consumption, even
determined upon the whole earth.

28:23 Give ye ear, and hear my voice; hearken, and hear my speech.

28:24 Doth the plowman plow all day to sow? doth he open and break the
clods of his ground?  28:25 When he hath made plain the face thereof,
doth he not cast abroad the fitches, and scatter the cummin, and cast
in the principal wheat and the appointed barley and the rie in their
place?  28:26 For his God doth instruct him to discretion, and doth
teach him.

28:27 For the fitches are not threshed with a threshing instrument,
neither is a cart wheel turned about upon the cummin; but the fitches
are beaten out with a staff, and the cummin with a rod.

28:28 Bread corn is bruised; because he will not ever be threshing it,
nor break it with the wheel of his cart, nor bruise it with his
horsemen.

28:29 This also cometh forth from the LORD of hosts, which is
wonderful in counsel, and excellent in working.

29:1 Woe to Ariel, to Ariel, the city where David dwelt! add ye year
to year; let them kill sacrifices.

29:2 Yet I will distress Ariel, and there shall be heaviness and
sorrow: and it shall be unto me as Ariel.

29:3 And I will camp against thee round about, and will lay siege
against thee with a mount, and I will raise forts against thee.

29:4 And thou shalt be brought down, and shalt speak out of the
ground, and thy speech shall be low out of the dust, and thy voice
shall be, as of one that hath a familiar spirit, out of the ground,
and thy speech shall whisper out of the dust.

29:5 Moreover the multitude of thy strangers shall be like small dust,
and the multitude of the terrible ones shall be as chaff that passeth
away: yea, it shall be at an instant suddenly.

29:6 Thou shalt be visited of the LORD of hosts with thunder, and with
earthquake, and great noise, with storm and tempest, and the flame of
devouring fire.

29:7 And the multitude of all the nations that fight against Ariel,
even all that fight against her and her munition, and that distress
her, shall be as a dream of a night vision.

29:8 It shall even be as when an hungry man dreameth, and, behold, he
eateth; but he awaketh, and his soul is empty: or as when a thirsty
man dreameth, and, behold, he drinketh; but he awaketh, and, behold,
he is faint, and his soul hath appetite: so shall the multitude of all
the nations be, that fight against mount Zion.

29:9 Stay yourselves, and wonder; cry ye out, and cry: they are
drunken, but not with wine; they stagger, but not with strong drink.

29:10 For the LORD hath poured out upon you the spirit of deep sleep,
and hath closed your eyes: the prophets and your rulers, the seers
hath he covered.

29:11 And the vision of all is become unto you as the words of a book
that is sealed, which men deliver to one that is learned, saying, Read
this, I pray thee: and he saith, I cannot; for it is sealed: 29:12 And
the book is delivered to him that is not learned, saying, Read this, I
pray thee: and he saith, I am not learned.

29:13 Wherefore the Lord said, Forasmuch as this people draw near me
with their mouth, and with their lips do honour me, but have removed
their heart far from me, and their fear toward me is taught by the
precept of men: 29:14 Therefore, behold, I will proceed to do a
marvellous work among this people, even a marvellous work and a
wonder: for the wisdom of their wise men shall perish, and the
understanding of their prudent men shall be hid.

29:15 Woe unto them that seek deep to hide their counsel from the
LORD, and their works are in the dark, and they say, Who seeth us? and
who knoweth us?  29:16 Surely your turning of things upside down shall
be esteemed as the potter's clay: for shall the work say of him that
made it, He made me not? or shall the thing framed say of him that
framed it, He had no understanding?  29:17 Is it not yet a very little
while, and Lebanon shall be turned into a fruitful field, and the
fruitful field shall be esteemed as a forest?  29:18 And in that day
shall the deaf hear the words of the book, and the eyes of the blind
shall see out of obscurity, and out of darkness.

29:19 The meek also shall increase their joy in the LORD, and the poor
among men shall rejoice in the Holy One of Israel.

29:20 For the terrible one is brought to nought, and the scorner is
consumed, and all that watch for iniquity are cut off: 29:21 That make
a man an offender for a word, and lay a snare for him that reproveth
in the gate, and turn aside the just for a thing of nought.

29:22 Therefore thus saith the LORD, who redeemed Abraham, concerning
the house of Jacob, Jacob shall not now be ashamed, neither shall his
face now wax pale.

29:23 But when he seeth his children, the work of mine hands, in the
midst of him, they shall sanctify my name, and sanctify the Holy One
of Jacob, and shall fear the God of Israel.

29:24 They also that erred in spirit shall come to understanding, and
they that murmured shall learn doctrine.

30:1 Woe to the rebellious children, saith the LORD, that take
counsel, but not of me; and that cover with a covering, but not of my
spirit, that they may add sin to sin: 30:2 That walk to go down into
Egypt, and have not asked at my mouth; to strengthen themselves in the
strength of Pharaoh, and to trust in the shadow of Egypt!  30:3
Therefore shall the strength of Pharaoh be your shame, and the trust
in the shadow of Egypt your confusion.

30:4 For his princes were at Zoan, and his ambassadors came to Hanes.

30:5 They were all ashamed of a people that could not profit them, nor
be an help nor profit, but a shame, and also a reproach.

30:6 The burden of the beasts of the south: into the land of trouble
and anguish, from whence come the young and old lion, the viper and
fiery flying serpent, they will carry their riches upon the shoulders
of young asses, and their treasures upon the bunches of camels, to a
people that shall not profit them.

30:7 For the Egyptians shall help in vain, and to no purpose:
therefore have I cried concerning this, Their strength is to sit
still.

30:8 Now go, write it before them in a table, and note it in a book,
that it may be for the time to come for ever and ever: 30:9 That this
is a rebellious people, lying children, children that will not hear
the law of the LORD: 30:10 Which say to the seers, See not; and to the
prophets, Prophesy not unto us right things, speak unto us smooth
things, prophesy deceits: 30:11 Get you out of the way, turn aside out
of the path, cause the Holy One of Israel to cease from before us.

30:12 Wherefore thus saith the Holy One of Israel, Because ye despise
this word, and trust in oppression and perverseness, and stay thereon:
30:13 Therefore this iniquity shall be to you as a breach ready to
fall, swelling out in a high wall, whose breaking cometh suddenly at
an instant.

30:14 And he shall break it as the breaking of the potters' vessel
that is broken in pieces; he shall not spare: so that there shall not
be found in the bursting of it a sherd to take fire from the hearth,
or to take water withal out of the pit.

30:15 For thus saith the Lord GOD, the Holy One of Israel; In
returning and rest shall ye be saved; in quietness and in confidence
shall be your strength: and ye would not.

30:16 But ye said, No; for we will flee upon horses; therefore shall
ye flee: and, We will ride upon the swift; therefore shall they that
pursue you be swift.

30:17 One thousand shall flee at the rebuke of one; at the rebuke of
five shall ye flee: till ye be left as a beacon upon the top of a
mountain, and as an ensign on an hill.

30:18 And therefore will the LORD wait, that he may be gracious unto
you, and therefore will he be exalted, that he may have mercy upon
you: for the LORD is a God of judgment: blessed are all they that wait
for him.

30:19 For the people shall dwell in Zion at Jerusalem: thou shalt weep
no more: he will be very gracious unto thee at the voice of thy cry;
when he shall hear it, he will answer thee.

30:20 And though the Lord give you the bread of adversity, and the
water of affliction, yet shall not thy teachers be removed into a
corner any more, but thine eyes shall see thy teachers: 30:21 And
thine ears shall hear a word behind thee, saying, This is the way,
walk ye in it, when ye turn to the right hand, and when ye turn to the
left.

30:22 Ye shall defile also the covering of thy graven images of
silver, and the ornament of thy molten images of gold: thou shalt cast
them away as a menstruous cloth; thou shalt say unto it, Get thee
hence.

30:23 Then shall he give the rain of thy seed, that thou shalt sow the
ground withal; and bread of the increase of the earth, and it shall be
fat and plenteous: in that day shall thy cattle feed in large
pastures.

30:24 The oxen likewise and the young asses that ear the ground shall
eat clean provender, which hath been winnowed with the shovel and with
the fan.

30:25 And there shall be upon every high mountain, and upon every high
hill, rivers and streams of waters in the day of the great slaughter,
when the towers fall.

30:26 Moreover the light of the moon shall be as the light of the sun,
and the light of the sun shall be sevenfold, as the light of seven
days, in the day that the LORD bindeth up the breach of his people,
and healeth the stroke of their wound.

30:27 Behold, the name of the LORD cometh from far, burning with his
anger, and the burden thereof is heavy: his lips are full of
indignation, and his tongue as a devouring fire: 30:28 And his breath,
as an overflowing stream, shall reach to the midst of the neck, to
sift the nations with the sieve of vanity: and there shall be a bridle
in the jaws of the people, causing them to err.

30:29 Ye shall have a song, as in the night when a holy solemnity is
kept; and gladness of heart, as when one goeth with a pipe to come
into the mountain of the LORD, to the mighty One of Israel.

30:30 And the LORD shall cause his glorious voice to be heard, and
shall shew the lighting down of his arm, with the indignation of his
anger, and with the flame of a devouring fire, with scattering, and
tempest, and hailstones.

30:31 For through the voice of the LORD shall the Assyrian be beaten
down, which smote with a rod.

30:32 And in every place where the grounded staff shall pass, which
the LORD shall lay upon him, it shall be with tabrets and harps: and
in battles of shaking will he fight with it.

30:33 For Tophet is ordained of old; yea, for the king it is prepared;
he hath made it deep and large: the pile thereof is fire and much
wood; the breath of the LORD, like a stream of brimstone, doth kindle
it.

31:1 Woe to them that go down to Egypt for help; and stay on horses,
and trust in chariots, because they are many; and in horsemen, because
they are very strong; but they look not unto the Holy One of Israel,
neither seek the LORD!  31:2 Yet he also is wise, and will bring evil,
and will not call back his words: but will arise against the house of
the evildoers, and against the help of them that work iniquity.

31:3 Now the Egyptians are men, and not God; and their horses flesh,
and not spirit. When the LORD shall stretch out his hand, both he that
helpeth shall fall, and he that is holpen shall fall down, and they
all shall fail together.

31:4 For thus hath the LORD spoken unto me, Like as the lion and the
young lion roaring on his prey, when a multitude of shepherds is
called forth against him, he will not be afraid of their voice, nor
abase himself for the noise of them: so shall the LORD of hosts come
down to fight for mount Zion, and for the hill thereof.

31:5 As birds flying, so will the LORD of hosts defend Jerusalem;
defending also he will deliver it; and passing over he will preserve
it.

31:6 Turn ye unto him from whom the children of Israel have deeply
revolted.

31:7 For in that day every man shall cast away his idols of silver,
and his idols of gold, which your own hands have made unto you for a
sin.

31:8 Then shall the Assyrian fall with the sword, not of a mighty man;
and the sword, not of a mean man, shall devour him: but he shall flee
from the sword, and his young men shall be discomfited.

31:9 And he shall pass over to his strong hold for fear, and his
princes shall be afraid of the ensign, saith the LORD, whose fire is
in Zion, and his furnace in Jerusalem.

32:1 Behold, a king shall reign in righteousness, and princes shall
rule in judgment.

32:2 And a man shall be as an hiding place from the wind, and a covert
from the tempest; as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of
a great rock in a weary land.

32:3 And the eyes of them that see shall not be dim, and the ears of
them that hear shall hearken.

32:4 The heart also of the rash shall understand knowledge, and the
tongue of the stammerers shall be ready to speak plainly.

32:5 The vile person shall be no more called liberal, nor the churl
said to be bountiful.

32:6 For the vile person will speak villany, and his heart will work
iniquity, to practise hypocrisy, and to utter error against the LORD,
to make empty the soul of the hungry, and he will cause the drink of
the thirsty to fail.

32:7 The instruments also of the churl are evil: he deviseth wicked
devices to destroy the poor with lying words, even when the needy
speaketh right.

32:8 But the liberal deviseth liberal things; and by liberal things
shall he stand.

32:9 Rise up, ye women that are at ease; hear my voice, ye careless
daughters; give ear unto my speech.

32:10 Many days and years shall ye be troubled, ye careless women: for
the vintage shall fail, the gathering shall not come.

32:11 Tremble, ye women that are at ease; be troubled, ye careless
ones: strip you, and make you bare, and gird sackcloth upon your
loins.

32:12 They shall lament for the teats, for the pleasant fields, for
the fruitful vine.

32:13 Upon the land of my people shall come up thorns and briers; yea,
upon all the houses of joy in the joyous city: 32:14 Because the
palaces shall be forsaken; the multitude of the city shall be left;
the forts and towers shall be for dens for ever, a joy of wild asses,
a pasture of flocks; 32:15 Until the spirit be poured upon us from on
high, and the wilderness be a fruitful field, and the fruitful field
be counted for a forest.

32:16 Then judgment shall dwell in the wilderness, and righteousness
remain in the fruitful field.

32:17 And the work of righteousness shall be peace; and the effect of
righteousness quietness and assurance for ever.

32:18 And my people shall dwell in a peaceable habitation, and in sure
dwellings, and in quiet resting places; 32:19 When it shall hail,
coming down on the forest; and the city shall be low in a low place.

32:20 Blessed are ye that sow beside all waters, that send forth
thither the feet of the ox and the ass.

33:1 Woe to thee that spoilest, and thou wast not spoiled; and dealest
treacherously, and they dealt not treacherously with thee! when thou
shalt cease to spoil, thou shalt be spoiled; and when thou shalt make
an end to deal treacherously, they shall deal treacherously with thee.

33:2 O LORD, be gracious unto us; we have waited for thee: be thou
their arm every morning, our salvation also in the time of trouble.

33:3 At the noise of the tumult the people fled; at the lifting up of
thyself the nations were scattered.

33:4 And your spoil shall be gathered like the gathering of the
caterpiller: as the running to and fro of locusts shall he run upon
them.

33:5 The LORD is exalted; for he dwelleth on high: he hath filled Zion
with judgment and righteousness.

33:6 And wisdom and knowledge shall be the stability of thy times, and
strength of salvation: the fear of the LORD is his treasure.

33:7 Behold, their valiant ones shall cry without: the ambassadors of
peace shall weep bitterly.

33:8 The highways lie waste, the wayfaring man ceaseth: he hath broken
the covenant, he hath despised the cities, he regardeth no man.

33:9 The earth mourneth and languisheth: Lebanon is ashamed and hewn
down: Sharon is like a wilderness; and Bashan and Carmel shake off
their fruits.

33:10 Now will I rise, saith the LORD; now will I be exalted; now will
I lift up myself.

33:11 Ye shall conceive chaff, ye shall bring forth stubble: your
breath, as fire, shall devour you.

33:12 And the people shall be as the burnings of lime: as thorns cut
up shall they be burned in the fire.

33:13 Hear, ye that are far off, what I have done; and, ye that are
near, acknowledge my might.

33:14 The sinners in Zion are afraid; fearfulness hath surprised the
hypocrites. Who among us shall dwell with the devouring fire? who
among us shall dwell with everlasting burnings?  33:15 He that walketh
righteously, and speaketh uprightly; he that despiseth the gain of
oppressions, that shaketh his hands from holding of bribes, that
stoppeth his ears from hearing of blood, and shutteth his eyes from
seeing evil; 33:16 He shall dwell on high: his place of defence shall
be the munitions of rocks: bread shall be given him; his waters shall
be sure.

33:17 Thine eyes shall see the king in his beauty: they shall behold
the land that is very far off.

33:18 Thine heart shall meditate terror. Where is the scribe? where is
the receiver? where is he that counted the towers?  33:19 Thou shalt
not see a fierce people, a people of a deeper speech than thou canst
perceive; of a stammering tongue, that thou canst not understand.

33:20 Look upon Zion, the city of our solemnities: thine eyes shall
see Jerusalem a quiet habitation, a tabernacle that shall not be taken
down; not one of the stakes thereof shall ever be removed, neither
shall any of the cords thereof be broken.

33:21 But there the glorious LORD will be unto us a place of broad
rivers and streams; wherein shall go no galley with oars, neither
shall gallant ship pass thereby.

33:22 For the LORD is our judge, the LORD is our lawgiver, the LORD is
our king; he will save us.

33:23 Thy tacklings are loosed; they could not well strengthen their
mast, they could not spread the sail: then is the prey of a great
spoil divided; the lame take the prey.

33:24 And the inhabitant shall not say, I am sick: the people that
dwell therein shall be forgiven their iniquity.

34:1 Come near, ye nations, to hear; and hearken, ye people: let the
earth hear, and all that is therein; the world, and all things that
come forth of it.

34:2 For the indignation of the LORD is upon all nations, and his fury
upon all their armies: he hath utterly destroyed them, he hath
delivered them to the slaughter.

34:3 Their slain also shall be cast out, and their stink shall come up
out of their carcases, and the mountains shall be melted with their
blood.

34:4 And all the host of heaven shall be dissolved, and the heavens
shall be rolled together as a scroll: and all their host shall fall
down, as the leaf falleth off from the vine, and as a falling fig from
the fig tree.

34:5 For my sword shall be bathed in heaven: behold, it shall come
down upon Idumea, and upon the people of my curse, to judgment.

34:6 The sword of the LORD is filled with blood, it is made fat with
fatness, and with the blood of lambs and goats, with the fat of the
kidneys of rams: for the LORD hath a sacrifice in Bozrah, and a great
slaughter in the land of Idumea.

34:7 And the unicorns shall come down with them, and the bullocks with
the bulls; and their land shall be soaked with blood, and their dust
made fat with fatness.

34:8 For it is the day of the LORD's vengeance, and the year of
recompences for the controversy of Zion.

34:9 And the streams thereof shall be turned into pitch, and the dust
thereof into brimstone, and the land thereof shall become burning
pitch.

34:10 It shall not be quenched night nor day; the smoke thereof shall
go up for ever: from generation to generation it shall lie waste; none
shall pass through it for ever and ever.

34:11 But the cormorant and the bittern shall possess it; the owl also
and the raven shall dwell in it: and he shall stretch out upon it the
line of confusion, and the stones of emptiness.

34:12 They shall call the nobles thereof to the kingdom, but none
shall be there, and all her princes shall be nothing.

34:13 And thorns shall come up in her palaces, nettles and brambles in
the fortresses thereof: and it shall be an habitation of dragons, and
a court for owls.

34:14 The wild beasts of the desert shall also meet with the wild
beasts of the island, and the satyr shall cry to his fellow; the
screech owl also shall rest there, and find for herself a place of
rest.

34:15 There shall the great owl make her nest, and lay, and hatch, and
gather under her shadow: there shall the vultures also be gathered,
every one with her mate.

34:16 Seek ye out of the book of the LORD, and read: no one of these
shall fail, none shall want her mate: for my mouth it hath commanded,
and his spirit it hath gathered them.

34:17 And he hath cast the lot for them, and his hand hath divided it
unto them by line: they shall possess it for ever, from generation to
generation shall they dwell therein.

35:1 The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and
the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose.

35:2 It shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice even with joy and
singing: the glory of Lebanon shall be given unto it, the excellency
of Carmel and Sharon, they shall see the glory of the LORD, and the
excellency of our God.

35:3 Strengthen ye the weak hands, and confirm the feeble knees.

35:4 Say to them that are of a fearful heart, Be strong, fear not:
behold, your God will come with vengeance, even God with a recompence;
he will come and save you.

35:5 Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the
deaf shall be unstopped.

35:6 Then shall the lame man leap as an hart, and the tongue of the
dumb sing: for in the wilderness shall waters break out, and streams
in the desert.

35:7 And the parched ground shall become a pool, and the thirsty land
springs of water: in the habitation of dragons, where each lay, shall
be grass with reeds and rushes.

35:8 And an highway shall be there, and a way, and it shall be called
The way of holiness; the unclean shall not pass over it; but it shall
be for those: the wayfaring men, though fools, shall not err therein.

35:9 No lion shall be there, nor any ravenous beast shall go up
thereon, it shall not be found there; but the redeemed shall walk
there: 35:10 And the ransomed of the LORD shall return, and come to
Zion with songs and everlasting joy upon their heads: they shall
obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.

36:1 Now it came to pass in the fourteenth year of king Hezekiah, that
Sennacherib king of Assyria came up against all the defenced cities of
Judah, and took them.

36:2 And the king of Assyria sent Rabshakeh from Lachish to Jerusalem
unto king Hezekiah with a great army. And he stood by the conduit of
the upper pool in the highway of the fuller's field.

36:3 Then came forth unto him Eliakim, Hilkiah's son, which was over
the house, and Shebna the scribe, and Joah, Asaph's son, the recorder.

36:4 And Rabshakeh said unto them, Say ye now to Hezekiah, Thus saith
the great king, the king of Assyria, What confidence is this wherein
thou trustest?  36:5 I say, sayest thou, (but they are but vain words)
I have counsel and strength for war: now on whom dost thou trust, that
thou rebellest against me?  36:6 Lo, thou trustest in the staff of
this broken reed, on Egypt; whereon if a man lean, it will go into his
hand, and pierce it: so is Pharaoh king of Egypt to all that trust in
him.

36:7 But if thou say to me, We trust in the LORD our God: is it not
he, whose high places and whose altars Hezekiah hath taken away, and
said to Judah and to Jerusalem, Ye shall worship before this altar?
36:8 Now therefore give pledges, I pray thee, to my master the king of
Assyria, and I will give thee two thousand horses, if thou be able on
thy part to set riders upon them.

36:9 How then wilt thou turn away the face of one captain of the least
of my master's servants, and put thy trust on Egypt for chariots and
for horsemen?  36:10 And am I now come up without the LORD against
this land to destroy it? the LORD said unto me, Go up against this
land, and destroy it.

36:11 Then said Eliakim and Shebna and Joah unto Rabshakeh, Speak, I
pray thee, unto thy servants in the Syrian language; for we understand
it: and speak not to us in the Jews' language, in the ears of the
people that are on the wall.

36:12 But Rabshakeh said, Hath my master sent me to thy master and to
thee to speak these words? hath he not sent me to the men that sit
upon the wall, that they may eat their own dung, and drink their own
piss with you?  36:13 Then Rabshakeh stood, and cried with a loud
voice in the Jews' language, and said, Hear ye the words of the great
king, the king of Assyria.

36:14 Thus saith the king, Let not Hezekiah deceive you: for he shall
not be able to deliver you.

36:15 Neither let Hezekiah make you trust in the LORD, saying, The
LORD will surely deliver us: this city shall not be delivered into the
hand of the king of Assyria.

36:16 Hearken not to Hezekiah: for thus saith the king of Assyria,
Make an agreement with me by a present, and come out to me: and eat ye
every one of his vine, and every one of his fig tree, and drink ye
every one the waters of his own cistern; 36:17 Until I come and take
you away to a land like your own land, a land of corn and wine, a land
of bread and vineyards.

36:18 Beware lest Hezekiah persuade you, saying, the LORD will deliver
us.

Hath any of the gods of the nations delivered his land out of the hand
of the king of Assyria?  36:19 Where are the gods of Hamath and
Arphad? where are the gods of Sepharvaim? and have they delivered
Samaria out of my hand?  36:20 Who are they among all the gods of
these lands, that have delivered their land out of my hand, that the
LORD should deliver Jerusalem out of my hand?  36:21 But they held
their peace, and answered him not a word: for the king's commandment
was, saying, Answer him not.

36:22 Then came Eliakim, the son of Hilkiah, that was over the
household, and Shebna the scribe, and Joah, the son of Asaph, the
recorder, to Hezekiah with their clothes rent, and told him the words
of Rabshakeh.

37:1 And it came to pass, when king Hezekiah heard it, that he rent
his clothes, and covered himself with sackcloth, and went into the
house of the LORD.

37:2 And he sent Eliakim, who was over the household, and Shebna the
scribe, and the elders of the priests covered with sackcloth, unto
Isaiah the prophet the son of Amoz.

37:3 And they said unto him, Thus saith Hezekiah, This day is a day of
trouble, and of rebuke, and of blasphemy: for the children are come to
the birth, and there is not strength to bring forth.

37:4 It may be the LORD thy God will hear the words of Rabshakeh, whom
the king of Assyria his master hath sent to reproach the living God,
and will reprove the words which the LORD thy God hath heard:
wherefore lift up thy prayer for the remnant that is left.

37:5 So the servants of king Hezekiah came to Isaiah.

37:6 And Isaiah said unto them, Thus shall ye say unto your master,
Thus saith the LORD, Be not afraid of the words that thou hast heard,
wherewith the servants of the king of Assyria have blasphemed me.

37:7 Behold, I will send a blast upon him, and he shall hear a rumour,
and return to his own land; and I will cause him to fall by the sword
in his own land.

37:8 So Rabshakeh returned, and found the king of Assyria warring
against Libnah: for he had heard that he was departed from Lachish.

37:9 And he heard say concerning Tirhakah king of Ethiopia, He is come
forth to make war with thee. And when he heard it, he sent messengers
to Hezekiah, saying, 37:10 Thus shall ye speak to Hezekiah king of
Judah, saying, Let not thy God, in whom thou trustest, deceive thee,
saying, Jerusalem shall not be given into the hand of the king of
Assyria.

37:11 Behold, thou hast heard what the kings of Assyria have done to
all lands by destroying them utterly; and shalt thou be delivered?
37:12 Have the gods of the nations delivered them which my fathers
have destroyed, as Gozan, and Haran, and Rezeph, and the children of
Eden which were in Telassar?  37:13 Where is the king of Hamath, and
the king of Arphad, and the king of the city of Sepharvaim, Hena, and
Ivah?  37:14 And Hezekiah received the letter from the hand of the
messengers, and read it: and Hezekiah went up unto the house of the
LORD, and spread it before the LORD.

37:15 And Hezekiah prayed unto the LORD, saying, 37:16 O LORD of
hosts, God of Israel, that dwellest between the cherubims, thou art
the God, even thou alone, of all the kingdoms of the earth: thou hast
made heaven and earth.

37:17 Incline thine ear, O LORD, and hear; open thine eyes, O LORD,
and see: and hear all the words of Sennacherib, which hath sent to
reproach the living God.

37:18 Of a truth, LORD, the kings of Assyria have laid waste all the
nations, and their countries, 37:19 And have cast their gods into the
fire: for they were no gods, but the work of men's hands, wood and
stone: therefore they have destroyed them.

37:20 Now therefore, O LORD our God, save us from his hand, that all
the kingdoms of the earth may know that thou art the LORD, even thou
only.

37:21 Then Isaiah the son of Amoz sent unto Hezekiah, saying, Thus
saith the LORD God of Israel, Whereas thou hast prayed to me against
Sennacherib king of Assyria: 37:22 This is the word which the LORD
hath spoken concerning him; The virgin, the daughter of Zion, hath
despised thee, and laughed thee to scorn; the daughter of Jerusalem
hath shaken her head at thee.

37:23 Whom hast thou reproached and blasphemed? and against whom hast
thou exalted thy voice, and lifted up thine eyes on high? even against
the Holy One of Israel.

37:24 By thy servants hast thou reproached the Lord, and hast said, By
the multitude of my chariots am I come up to the height of the
mountains, to the sides of Lebanon; and I will cut down the tall
cedars thereof, and the choice fir trees thereof: and I will enter
into the height of his border, and the forest of his Carmel.

37:25 I have digged, and drunk water; and with the sole of my feet
have I dried up all the rivers of the besieged places.

37:26 Hast thou not heard long ago, how I have done it; and of ancient
times, that I have formed it? now have I brought it to pass, that thou
shouldest be to lay waste defenced cities into ruinous heaps.

37:27 Therefore their inhabitants were of small power, they were
dismayed and confounded: they were as the grass of the field, and as
the green herb, as the grass on the housetops, and as corn blasted
before it be grown up.

37:28 But I know thy abode, and thy going out, and thy coming in, and
thy rage against me.

37:29 Because thy rage against me, and thy tumult, is come up into
mine ears, therefore will I put my hook in thy nose, and my bridle in
thy lips, and I will turn thee back by the way by which thou camest.

37:30 And this shall be a sign unto thee, Ye shall eat this year such
as groweth of itself; and the second year that which springeth of the
same: and in the third year sow ye, and reap, and plant vineyards, and
eat the fruit thereof.

37:31 And the remnant that is escaped of the house of Judah shall
again take root downward, and bear fruit upward: 37:32 For out of
Jerusalem shall go forth a remnant, and they that escape out of mount
Zion: the zeal of the LORD of hosts shall do this.

37:33 Therefore thus saith the LORD concerning the king of Assyria, He
shall not come into this city, nor shoot an arrow there, nor come
before it with shields, nor cast a bank against it.

37:34 By the way that he came, by the same shall he return, and shall
not come into this city, saith the LORD.

37:35 For I will defend this city to save it for mine own sake, and
for my servant David's sake.

37:36 Then the angel of the LORD went forth, and smote in the camp of
the Assyrians a hundred and fourscore and five thousand: and when they
arose early in the morning, behold, they were all dead corpses.

37:37 So Sennacherib king of Assyria departed, and went and returned,
and dwelt at Nineveh.

37:38 And it came to pass, as he was worshipping in the house of
Nisroch his god, that Adrammelech and Sharezer his sons smote him with
the sword; and they escaped into the land of Armenia: and Esarhaddon
his son reigned in his stead.

38:1 In those days was Hezekiah sick unto death. And Isaiah the
prophet the son of Amoz came unto him, and said unto him, Thus saith
the LORD, Set thine house in order: for thou shalt die, and not live.

38:2 Then Hezekiah turned his face toward the wall, and prayed unto
the LORD, 38:3 And said, Remember now, O LORD, I beseech thee, how I
have walked before thee in truth and with a perfect heart, and have
done that which is good in thy sight. And Hezekiah wept sore.

38:4 Then came the word of the LORD to Isaiah, saying, 38:5 Go, and
say to Hezekiah, Thus saith the LORD, the God of David thy father, I
have heard thy prayer, I have seen thy tears: behold, I will add unto
thy days fifteen years.

38:6 And I will deliver thee and this city out of the hand of the king
of Assyria: and I will defend this city.

38:7 And this shall be a sign unto thee from the LORD, that the LORD
will do this thing that he hath spoken; 38:8 Behold, I will bring
again the shadow of the degrees, which is gone down in the sun dial of
Ahaz, ten degrees backward. So the sun returned ten degrees, by which
degrees it was gone down.

38:9 The writing of Hezekiah king of Judah, when he had been sick, and
was recovered of his sickness: 38:10 I said in the cutting off of my
days, I shall go to the gates of the grave: I am deprived of the
residue of my years.

38:11 I said, I shall not see the LORD, even the LORD, in the land of
the living: I shall behold man no more with the inhabitants of the
world.

38:12 Mine age is departed, and is removed from me as a shepherd's
tent: I have cut off like a weaver my life: he will cut me off with
pining sickness: from day even to night wilt thou make an end of me.

38:13 I reckoned till morning, that, as a lion, so will he break all
my bones: from day even to night wilt thou make an end of me.

38:14 Like a crane or a swallow, so did I chatter: I did mourn as a
dove: mine eyes fail with looking upward: O LORD, I am oppressed;
undertake for me.

38:15 What shall I say? he hath both spoken unto me, and himself hath
done it: I shall go softly all my years in the bitterness of my soul.

38:16 O LORD, by these things men live, and in all these things is the
life of my spirit: so wilt thou recover me, and make me to live.

38:17 Behold, for peace I had great bitterness: but thou hast in love
to my soul delivered it from the pit of corruption: for thou hast cast
all my sins behind thy back.

38:18 For the grave cannot praise thee, death can not celebrate thee:
they that go down into the pit cannot hope for thy truth.

38:19 The living, the living, he shall praise thee, as I do this day:
the father to the children shall make known thy truth.

38:20 The LORD was ready to save me: therefore we will sing my songs
to the stringed instruments all the days of our life in the house of
the LORD.

38:21 For Isaiah had said, Let them take a lump of figs, and lay it
for a plaister upon the boil, and he shall recover.

38:22 Hezekiah also had said, What is the sign that I shall go up to
the house of the LORD?  39:1 At that time Merodachbaladan, the son of
Baladan, king of Babylon, sent letters and a present to Hezekiah: for
he had heard that he had been sick, and was recovered.

39:2 And Hezekiah was glad of them, and shewed them the house of his
precious things, the silver, and the gold, and the spices, and the
precious ointment, and all the house of his armour, and all that was
found in his treasures: there was nothing in his house, nor in all his
dominion, that Hezekiah shewed them not.

39:3 Then came Isaiah the prophet unto king Hezekiah, and said unto
him, What said these men? and from whence came they unto thee? And
Hezekiah said, They are come from a far country unto me, even from
Babylon.

39:4 Then said he, What have they seen in thine house? And Hezekiah
answered, All that is in mine house have they seen: there is nothing
among my treasures that I have not shewed them.

39:5 Then said Isaiah to Hezekiah, Hear the word of the LORD of hosts:
39:6 Behold, the days come, that all that is in thine house, and that
which thy fathers have laid up in store until this day, shall be
carried to Babylon: nothing shall be left, saith the LORD.

39:7 And of thy sons that shall issue from thee, which thou shalt
beget, shall they take away; and they shall be eunuchs in the palace
of the king of Babylon.

39:8 Then said Hezekiah to Isaiah, Good is the word of the LORD which
thou hast spoken. He said moreover, For there shall be peace and truth
in my days.

40:1 Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God.

40:2 Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her
warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned: for she hath
received of the LORD's hand double for all her sins.

40:3 The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the
way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

40:4 Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall
be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough
places plain: 40:5 And the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and
all flesh shall see it together: for the mouth of the LORD hath spoken
it.

40:6 The voice said, Cry. And he said, What shall I cry? All flesh is
grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field:
40:7 The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: because the spirit of the
LORD bloweth upon it: surely the people is grass.

40:8 The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God
shall stand for ever.

40:9 O Zion, that bringest good tidings, get thee up into the high
mountain; O Jerusalem, that bringest good tidings, lift up thy voice
with strength; lift it up, be not afraid; say unto the cities of
Judah, Behold your God!  40:10 Behold, the Lord GOD will come with
strong hand, and his arm shall rule for him: behold, his reward is
with him, and his work before him.

40:11 He shall feed his flock like a shepherd: he shall gather the
lambs with his arm, and carry them in his bosom, and shall gently lead
those that are with young.

40:12 Who hath measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, and
meted out heaven with the span, and comprehended the dust of the earth
in a measure, and weighed the mountains in scales, and the hills in a
balance?  40:13 Who hath directed the Spirit of the LORD, or being his
counsellor hath taught him?  40:14 With whom took he counsel, and who
instructed him, and taught him in the path of judgment, and taught him
knowledge, and shewed to him the way of understanding?  40:15 Behold,
the nations are as a drop of a bucket, and are counted as the small
dust of the balance: behold, he taketh up the isles as a very little
thing.

40:16 And Lebanon is not sufficient to burn, nor the beasts thereof
sufficient for a burnt offering.

40:17 All nations before him are as nothing; and they are counted to
him less than nothing, and vanity.

40:18 To whom then will ye liken God? or what likeness will ye compare
unto him?  40:19 The workman melteth a graven image, and the goldsmith
spreadeth it over with gold, and casteth silver chains.

40:20 He that is so impoverished that he hath no oblation chooseth a
tree that will not rot; he seeketh unto him a cunning workman to
prepare a graven image, that shall not be moved.

40:21 Have ye not known? have ye not heard? hath it not been told you
from the beginning? have ye not understood from the foundations of the
earth?  40:22 It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and
the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the
heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in:
40:23 That bringeth the princes to nothing; he maketh the judges of
the earth as vanity.

40:24 Yea, they shall not be planted; yea, they shall not be sown:
yea, their stock shall not take root in the earth: and he shall also
blow upon them, and they shall wither, and the whirlwind shall take
them away as stubble.

40:25 To whom then will ye liken me, or shall I be equal? saith the
Holy One.

40:26 Lift up your eyes on high, and behold who hath created these
things, that bringeth out their host by number: he calleth them all by
names by the greatness of his might, for that he is strong in power;
not one faileth.

40:27 Why sayest thou, O Jacob, and speakest, O Israel, My way is hid
from the LORD, and my judgment is passed over from my God?  40:28 Hast
thou not known? hast thou not heard, that the everlasting God, the
LORD, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is
weary? there is no searching of his understanding.

40:29 He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might he
increaseth strength.

40:30 Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men
shall utterly fall: 40:31 But they that wait upon the LORD shall renew
their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall
run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.

41:1 Keep silence before me, O islands; and let the people renew their
strength: let them come near; then let them speak: let us come near
together to judgment.

41:2 Who raised up the righteous man from the east, called him to his
foot, gave the nations before him, and made him rule over kings? he
gave them as the dust to his sword, and as driven stubble to his bow.

41:3 He pursued them, and passed safely; even by the way that he had
not gone with his feet.

41:4 Who hath wrought and done it, calling the generations from the
beginning? I the LORD, the first, and with the last; I am he.

41:5 The isles saw it, and feared; the ends of the earth were afraid,
drew near, and came.

41:6 They helped every one his neighbour; and every one said to his
brother, Be of good courage.

41:7 So the carpenter encouraged the goldsmith, and he that smootheth
with the hammer him that smote the anvil, saying, It is ready for the
sodering: and he fastened it with nails, that it should not be moved.

41:8 But thou, Israel, art my servant, Jacob whom I have chosen, the
seed of Abraham my friend.

41:9 Thou whom I have taken from the ends of the earth, and called
thee from the chief men thereof, and said unto thee, Thou art my
servant; I have chosen thee, and not cast thee away.

41:10 Fear thou not; for I am with thee: be not dismayed; for I am thy
God: I will strengthen thee; yea, I will help thee; yea, I will uphold
thee with the right hand of my righteousness.

41:11 Behold, all they that were incensed against thee shall be
ashamed and confounded: they shall be as nothing; and they that strive
with thee shall perish.

41:12 Thou shalt seek them, and shalt not find them, even them that
contended with thee: they that war against thee shall be as nothing,
and as a thing of nought.

41:13 For I the LORD thy God will hold thy right hand, saying unto
thee, Fear not; I will help thee.

41:14 Fear not, thou worm Jacob, and ye men of Israel; I will help
thee, saith the LORD, and thy redeemer, the Holy One of Israel.

41:15 Behold, I will make thee a new sharp threshing instrument having
teeth: thou shalt thresh the mountains, and beat them small, and shalt
make the hills as chaff.

41:16 Thou shalt fan them, and the wind shall carry them away, and the
whirlwind shall scatter them: and thou shalt rejoice in the LORD, and
shalt glory in the Holy One of Israel.

41:17 When the poor and needy seek water, and there is none, and their
tongue faileth for thirst, I the LORD will hear them, I the God of
Israel will not forsake them.

41:18 I will open rivers in high places, and fountains in the midst of
the valleys: I will make the wilderness a pool of water, and the dry
land springs of water.

41:19 I will plant in the wilderness the cedar, the shittah tree, and
the myrtle, and the oil tree; I will set in the desert the fir tree,
and the pine, and the box tree together: 41:20 That they may see, and
know, and consider, and understand together, that the hand of the LORD
hath done this, and the Holy One of Israel hath created it.

41:21 Produce your cause, saith the LORD; bring forth your strong
reasons, saith the King of Jacob.

41:22 Let them bring them forth, and shew us what shall happen: let
them shew the former things, what they be, that we may consider them,
and know the latter end of them; or declare us things for to come.

41:23 Shew the things that are to come hereafter, that we may know
that ye are gods: yea, do good, or do evil, that we may be dismayed,
and behold it together.

41:24 Behold, ye are of nothing, and your work of nought: an
abomination is he that chooseth you.

41:25 I have raised up one from the north, and he shall come: from the
rising of the sun shall he call upon my name: and he shall come upon
princes as upon morter, and as the potter treadeth clay.

41:26 Who hath declared from the beginning, that we may know? and
beforetime, that we may say, He is righteous? yea, there is none that
sheweth, yea, there is none that declareth, yea, there is none that
heareth your words.

41:27 The first shall say to Zion, Behold, behold them: and I will
give to Jerusalem one that bringeth good tidings.

41:28 For I beheld, and there was no man; even among them, and there
was no counsellor, that, when I asked of them, could answer a word.

41:29 Behold, they are all vanity; their works are nothing: their
molten images are wind and confusion.

42:1 Behold my servant, whom I uphold; mine elect, in whom my soul
delighteth; I have put my spirit upon him: he shall bring forth
judgment to the Gentiles.

42:2 He shall not cry, nor lift up, nor cause his voice to be heard in
the street.

42:3 A bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he
not quench: he shall bring forth judgment unto truth.

42:4 He shall not fail nor be discouraged, till he have set judgment
in the earth: and the isles shall wait for his law.

42:5 Thus saith God the LORD, he that created the heavens, and
stretched them out; he that spread forth the earth, and that which
cometh out of it; he that giveth breath unto the people upon it, and
spirit to them that walk therein: 42:6 I the LORD have called thee in
righteousness, and will hold thine hand, and will keep thee, and give
thee for a covenant of the people, for a light of the Gentiles; 42:7
To open the blind eyes, to bring out the prisoners from the prison,
and them that sit in darkness out of the prison house.

42:8 I am the LORD: that is my name: and my glory will I not give to
another, neither my praise to graven images.

42:9 Behold, the former things are come to pass, and new things do I
declare: before they spring forth I tell you of them.

42:10 Sing unto the LORD a new song, and his praise from the end of
the earth, ye that go down to the sea, and all that is therein; the
isles, and the inhabitants thereof.

42:11 Let the wilderness and the cities thereof lift up their voice,
the villages that Kedar doth inhabit: let the inhabitants of the rock
sing, let them shout from the top of the mountains.

42:12 Let them give glory unto the LORD, and declare his praise in the
islands.

42:13 The LORD shall go forth as a mighty man, he shall stir up
jealousy like a man of war: he shall cry, yea, roar; he shall prevail
against his enemies.

42:14 I have long time holden my peace; I have been still, and
refrained myself: now will I cry like a travailing woman; I will
destroy and devour at once.

42:15 I will make waste mountains and hills, and dry up all their
herbs; and I will make the rivers islands, and I will dry up the
pools.

42:16 And I will bring the blind by a way that they knew not; I will
lead them in paths that they have not known: I will make darkness
light before them, and crooked things straight. These things will I do
unto them, and not forsake them.

42:17 They shall be turned back, they shall be greatly ashamed, that
trust in graven images, that say to the molten images, Ye are our
gods.

42:18 Hear, ye deaf; and look, ye blind, that ye may see.

42:19 Who is blind, but my servant? or deaf, as my messenger that I
sent?  who is blind as he that is perfect, and blind as the LORD's
servant?  42:20 Seeing many things, but thou observest not; opening
the ears, but he heareth not.

42:21 The LORD is well pleased for his righteousness' sake; he will
magnify the law, and make it honourable.

42:22 But this is a people robbed and spoiled; they are all of them
snared in holes, and they are hid in prison houses: they are for a
prey, and none delivereth; for a spoil, and none saith, Restore.

42:23 Who among you will give ear to this? who will hearken and hear
for the time to come?  42:24 Who gave Jacob for a spoil, and Israel to
the robbers? did not the LORD, he against whom we have sinned? for
they would not walk in his ways, neither were they obedient unto his
law.

42:25 Therefore he hath poured upon him the fury of his anger, and the
strength of battle: and it hath set him on fire round about, yet he
knew not; and it burned him, yet he laid it not to heart.

43:1 But now thus saith the LORD that created thee, O Jacob, and he
that formed thee, O Israel, Fear not: for I have redeemed thee, I have
called thee by thy name; thou art mine.

43:2 When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and
through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee: when thou walkest
through the fire, thou shalt not be burned; neither shall the flame
kindle upon thee.

43:3 For I am the LORD thy God, the Holy One of Israel, thy Saviour: I
gave Egypt for thy ransom, Ethiopia and Seba for thee.

43:4 Since thou wast precious in my sight, thou hast been honourable,
and I have loved thee: therefore will I give men for thee, and people
for thy life.

43:5 Fear not: for I am with thee: I will bring thy seed from the
east, and gather thee from the west; 43:6 I will say to the north,
Give up; and to the south, Keep not back: bring my sons from far, and
my daughters from the ends of the earth; 43:7 Even every one that is
called by my name: for I have created him for my glory, I have formed
him; yea, I have made him.

43:8 Bring forth the blind people that have eyes, and the deaf that
have ears.

43:9 Let all the nations be gathered together, and let the people be
assembled: who among them can declare this, and shew us former things?
let them bring forth their witnesses, that they may be justified: or
let them hear, and say, It is truth.

43:10 Ye are my witnesses, saith the LORD, and my servant whom I have
chosen: that ye may know and believe me, and understand that I am he:
before me there was no God formed, neither shall there be after me.

43:11 I, even I, am the LORD; and beside me there is no saviour.

43:12 I have declared, and have saved, and I have shewed, when there
was no strange god among you: therefore ye are my witnesses, saith the
LORD, that I am God.

43:13 Yea, before the day was I am he; and there is none that can
deliver out of my hand: I will work, and who shall let it?  43:14 Thus
saith the LORD, your redeemer, the Holy One of Israel; For your sake I
have sent to Babylon, and have brought down all their nobles, and the
Chaldeans, whose cry is in the ships.

43:15 I am the LORD, your Holy One, the creator of Israel, your King.

43:16 Thus saith the LORD, which maketh a way in the sea, and a path
in the mighty waters; 43:17 Which bringeth forth the chariot and
horse, the army and the power; they shall lie down together, they
shall not rise: they are extinct, they are quenched as tow.

43:18 Remember ye not the former things, neither consider the things
of old.

43:19 Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall
ye not know it? I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers
in the desert.

43:20 The beast of the field shall honour me, the dragons and the
owls: because I give waters in the wilderness, and rivers in the
desert, to give drink to my people, my chosen.

43:21 This people have I formed for myself; they shall shew forth my
praise.

43:22 But thou hast not called upon me, O Jacob; but thou hast been
weary of me, O Israel.

43:23 Thou hast not brought me the small cattle of thy burnt
offerings; neither hast thou honoured me with thy sacrifices. I have
not caused thee to serve with an offering, nor wearied thee with
incense.

43:24 Thou hast bought me no sweet cane with money, neither hast thou
filled me with the fat of thy sacrifices: but thou hast made me to
serve with thy sins, thou hast wearied me with thine iniquities.

43:25 I, even I, am he that blotteth out thy transgressions for mine
own sake, and will not remember thy sins.

43:26 Put me in remembrance: let us plead together: declare thou, that
thou mayest be justified.

43:27 Thy first father hath sinned, and thy teachers have transgressed
against me.

43:28 Therefore I have profaned the princes of the sanctuary, and have
given Jacob to the curse, and Israel to reproaches.

44:1 Yet now hear, O Jacob my servant; and Israel, whom I have chosen:
44:2 Thus saith the LORD that made thee, and formed thee from the
womb, which will help thee; Fear not, O Jacob, my servant; and thou,
Jesurun, whom I have chosen.

44:3 For I will pour water upon him that is thirsty, and floods upon
the dry ground: I will pour my spirit upon thy seed, and my blessing
upon thine offspring: 44:4 And they shall spring up as among the
grass, as willows by the water courses.

44:5 One shall say, I am the LORD's; and another shall call himself by
the name of Jacob; and another shall subscribe with his hand unto the
LORD, and surname himself by the name of Israel.

44:6 Thus saith the LORD the King of Israel, and his redeemer the LORD
of hosts; I am the first, and I am the last; and beside me there is no
God.

44:7 And who, as I, shall call, and shall declare it, and set it in
order for me, since I appointed the ancient people? and the things
that are coming, and shall come, let them shew unto them.

44:8 Fear ye not, neither be afraid: have not I told thee from that
time, and have declared it? ye are even my witnesses. Is there a God
beside me? yea, there is no God; I know not any.

44:9 They that make a graven image are all of them vanity; and their
delectable things shall not profit; and they are their own witnesses;
they see not, nor know; that they may be ashamed.

44:10 Who hath formed a god, or molten a graven image that is
profitable for nothing?  44:11 Behold, all his fellows shall be
ashamed: and the workmen, they are of men: let them all be gathered
together, let them stand up; yet they shall fear, and they shall be
ashamed together.

44:12 The smith with the tongs both worketh in the coals, and
fashioneth it with hammers, and worketh it with the strength of his
arms: yea, he is hungry, and his strength faileth: he drinketh no
water, and is faint.

44:13 The carpenter stretcheth out his rule; he marketh it out with a
line; he fitteth it with planes, and he marketh it out with the
compass, and maketh it after the figure of a man, according to the
beauty of a man; that it may remain in the house.

44:14 He heweth him down cedars, and taketh the cypress and the oak,
which he strengtheneth for himself among the trees of the forest: he
planteth an ash, and the rain doth nourish it.

44:15 Then shall it be for a man to burn: for he will take thereof,
and warm himself; yea, he kindleth it, and baketh bread; yea, he
maketh a god, and worshippeth it; he maketh it a graven image, and
falleth down thereto.

44:16 He burneth part thereof in the fire; with part thereof he eateth
flesh; he roasteth roast, and is satisfied: yea, he warmeth himself,
and saith, Aha, I am warm, I have seen the fire: 44:17 And the residue
thereof he maketh a god, even his graven image: he falleth down unto
it, and worshippeth it, and prayeth unto it, and saith, Deliver me;
for thou art my god.

44:18 They have not known nor understood: for he hath shut their eyes,
that they cannot see; and their hearts, that they cannot understand.

44:19 And none considereth in his heart, neither is there knowledge
nor understanding to say, I have burned part of it in the fire; yea,
also I have baked bread upon the coals thereof; I have roasted flesh,
and eaten it: and shall I make the residue thereof an abomination?
shall I fall down to the stock of a tree?  44:20 He feedeth on ashes:
a deceived heart hath turned him aside, that he cannot deliver his
soul, nor say, Is there not a lie in my right hand?  44:21 Remember
these, O Jacob and Israel; for thou art my servant: I have formed
thee; thou art my servant: O Israel, thou shalt not be forgotten of
me.

44:22 I have blotted out, as a thick cloud, thy transgressions, and,
as a cloud, thy sins: return unto me; for I have redeemed thee.

44:23 Sing, O ye heavens; for the LORD hath done it: shout, ye lower
parts of the earth: break forth into singing, ye mountains, O forest,
and every tree therein: for the LORD hath redeemed Jacob, and
glorified himself in Israel.

44:24 Thus saith the LORD, thy redeemer, and he that formed thee from
the womb, I am the LORD that maketh all things; that stretcheth forth
the heavens alone; that spreadeth abroad the earth by myself; 44:25
That frustrateth the tokens of the liars, and maketh diviners mad;
that turneth wise men backward, and maketh their knowledge foolish;
44:26 That confirmeth the word of his servant, and performeth the
counsel of his messengers; that saith to Jerusalem, Thou shalt be
inhabited; and to the cities of Judah, Ye shall be built, and I will
raise up the decayed places thereof: 44:27 That saith to the deep, Be
dry, and I will dry up thy rivers: 44:28 That saith of Cyrus, He is my
shepherd, and shall perform all my pleasure: even saying to Jerusalem,
Thou shalt be built; and to the temple, Thy foundation shall be laid.

45:1 Thus saith the LORD to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I
have holden, to subdue nations before him; and I will loose the loins
of kings, to open before him the two leaved gates; and the gates shall
not be shut; 45:2 I will go before thee, and make the crooked places
straight: I will break in pieces the gates of brass, and cut in sunder
the bars of iron: 45:3 And I will give thee the treasures of darkness,
and hidden riches of secret places, that thou mayest know that I, the
LORD, which call thee by thy name, am the God of Israel.

45:4 For Jacob my servant's sake, and Israel mine elect, I have even
called thee by thy name: I have surnamed thee, though thou hast not
known me.

45:5 I am the LORD, and there is none else, there is no God beside me:
I girded thee, though thou hast not known me: 45:6 That they may know
from the rising of the sun, and from the west, that there is none
beside me. I am the LORD, and there is none else.

45:7 I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create
evil: I the LORD do all these things.

45:8 Drop down, ye heavens, from above, and let the skies pour down
righteousness: let the earth open, and let them bring forth salvation,
and let righteousness spring up together; I the LORD have created it.

45:9 Woe unto him that striveth with his Maker! Let the potsherd
strive with the potsherds of the earth. Shall the clay say to him that
fashioneth it, What makest thou? or thy work, He hath no hands?  45:10
Woe unto him that saith unto his father, What begettest thou? or to
the woman, What hast thou brought forth?  45:11 Thus saith the LORD,
the Holy One of Israel, and his Maker, Ask me of things to come
concerning my sons, and concerning the work of my hands command ye me.

45:12 I have made the earth, and created man upon it: I, even my
hands, have stretched out the heavens, and all their host have I
commanded.

45:13 I have raised him up in righteousness, and I will direct all his
ways: he shall build my city, and he shall let go my captives, not for
price nor reward, saith the LORD of hosts.

45:14 Thus saith the LORD, The labour of Egypt, and merchandise of
Ethiopia and of the Sabeans, men of stature, shall come over unto
thee, and they shall be thine: they shall come after thee; in chains
they shall come over, and they shall fall down unto thee, they shall
make supplication unto thee, saying, Surely God is in thee; and there
is none else, there is no God.

45:15 Verily thou art a God that hidest thyself, O God of Israel, the
Saviour.

45:16 They shall be ashamed, and also confounded, all of them: they
shall go to confusion together that are makers of idols.

45:17 But Israel shall be saved in the LORD with an everlasting
salvation: ye shall not be ashamed nor confounded world without end.

45:18 For thus saith the LORD that created the heavens; God himself
that formed the earth and made it; he hath established it, he created
it not in vain, he formed it to be inhabited: I am the LORD; and there
is none else.

45:19 I have not spoken in secret, in a dark place of the earth: I
said not unto the seed of Jacob, Seek ye me in vain: I the LORD speak
righteousness, I declare things that are right.

45:20 Assemble yourselves and come; draw near together, ye that are
escaped of the nations: they have no knowledge that set up the wood of
their graven image, and pray unto a god that cannot save.

45:21 Tell ye, and bring them near; yea, let them take counsel
together: who hath declared this from ancient time? who hath told it
from that time?  have not I the LORD? and there is no God else beside
me; a just God and a Saviour; there is none beside me.

45:22 Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth: for I
am God, and there is none else.

45:23 I have sworn by myself, the word is gone out of my mouth in
righteousness, and shall not return, That unto me every knee shall
bow, every tongue shall swear.

45:24 Surely, shall one say, in the LORD have I righteousness and
strength: even to him shall men come; and all that are incensed
against him shall be ashamed.

45:25 In the LORD shall all the seed of Israel be justified, and shall
glory.

46:1 Bel boweth down, Nebo stoopeth, their idols were upon the beasts,
and upon the cattle: your carriages were heavy loaden; they are a
burden to the weary beast.

46:2 They stoop, they bow down together; they could not deliver the
burden, but themselves are gone into captivity.

46:3 Hearken unto me, O house of Jacob, and all the remnant of the
house of Israel, which are borne by me from the belly, which are
carried from the womb: 46:4 And even to your old age I am he; and even
to hoar hairs will I carry you: I have made, and I will bear; even I
will carry, and will deliver you.

46:5 To whom will ye liken me, and make me equal, and compare me, that
we may be like?  46:6 They lavish gold out of the bag, and weigh
silver in the balance, and hire a goldsmith; and he maketh it a god:
they fall down, yea, they worship.

46:7 They bear him upon the shoulder, they carry him, and set him in
his place, and he standeth; from his place shall he not remove: yea,
one shall cry unto him, yet can he not answer, nor save him out of his
trouble.

46:8 Remember this, and shew yourselves men: bring it again to mind, O
ye transgressors.

46:9 Remember the former things of old: for I am God, and there is
none else; I am God, and there is none like me, 46:10 Declaring the
end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things that are not
yet done, saying, My counsel shall stand, and I will do all my
pleasure: 46:11 Calling a ravenous bird from the east, the man that
executeth my counsel from a far country: yea, I have spoken it, I will
also bring it to pass; I have purposed it, I will also do it.

46:12 Hearken unto me, ye stouthearted, that are far from
righteousness: 46:13 I bring near my righteousness; it shall not be
far off, and my salvation shall not tarry: and I will place salvation
in Zion for Israel my glory.

47:1 Come down, and sit in the dust, O virgin daughter of Babylon, sit
on the ground: there is no throne, O daughter of the Chaldeans: for
thou shalt no more be called tender and delicate.

47:2 Take the millstones, and grind meal: uncover thy locks, make bare
the leg, uncover the thigh, pass over the rivers.

47:3 Thy nakedness shall be uncovered, yea, thy shame shall be seen: I
will take vengeance, and I will not meet thee as a man.

47:4 As for our redeemer, the LORD of hosts is his name, the Holy One
of Israel.

47:5 Sit thou silent, and get thee into darkness, O daughter of the
Chaldeans: for thou shalt no more be called, The lady of kingdoms.

47:6 I was wroth with my people, I have polluted mine inheritance, and
given them into thine hand: thou didst shew them no mercy; upon the
ancient hast thou very heavily laid thy yoke.

47:7 And thou saidst, I shall be a lady for ever: so that thou didst
not lay these things to thy heart, neither didst remember the latter
end of it.

47:8 Therefore hear now this, thou that art given to pleasures, that
dwellest carelessly, that sayest in thine heart, I am, and none else
beside me; I shall not sit as a widow, neither shall I know the loss
of children: 47:9 But these two things shall come to thee in a moment
in one day, the loss of children, and widowhood: they shall come upon
thee in their perfection for the multitude of thy sorceries, and for
the great abundance of thine enchantments.

47:10 For thou hast trusted in thy wickedness: thou hast said, None
seeth me. Thy wisdom and thy knowledge, it hath perverted thee; and
thou hast said in thine heart, I am, and none else beside me.

47:11 Therefore shall evil come upon thee; thou shalt not know from
whence it riseth: and mischief shall fall upon thee; thou shalt not be
able to put it off: and desolation shall come upon thee suddenly,
which thou shalt not know.

47:12 Stand now with thine enchantments, and with the multitude of thy
sorceries, wherein thou hast laboured from thy youth; if so be thou
shalt be able to profit, if so be thou mayest prevail.

47:13 Thou art wearied in the multitude of thy counsels. Let now the
astrologers, the stargazers, the monthly prognosticators, stand up,
and save thee from these things that shall come upon thee.

47:14 Behold, they shall be as stubble; the fire shall burn them; they
shall not deliver themselves from the power of the flame: there shall
not be a coal to warm at, nor fire to sit before it.

47:15 Thus shall they be unto thee with whom thou hast laboured, even
thy merchants, from thy youth: they shall wander every one to his
quarter; none shall save thee.

48:1 Hear ye this, O house of Jacob, which are called by the name of
Israel, and are come forth out of the waters of Judah, which swear by
the name of the LORD, and make mention of the God of Israel, but not
in truth, nor in righteousness.

48:2 For they call themselves of the holy city, and stay themselves
upon the God of Israel; The LORD of hosts is his name.

48:3 I have declared the former things from the beginning; and they
went forth out of my mouth, and I shewed them; I did them suddenly,
and they came to pass.

48:4 Because I knew that thou art obstinate, and thy neck is an iron
sinew, and thy brow brass; 48:5 I have even from the beginning
declared it to thee; before it came to pass I shewed it thee: lest
thou shouldest say, Mine idol hath done them, and my graven image, and
my molten image, hath commanded them.

48:6 Thou hast heard, see all this; and will not ye declare it? I have
shewed thee new things from this time, even hidden things, and thou
didst not know them.

48:7 They are created now, and not from the beginning; even before the
day when thou heardest them not; lest thou shouldest say, Behold, I
knew them.

48:8 Yea, thou heardest not; yea, thou knewest not; yea, from that
time that thine ear was not opened: for I knew that thou wouldest deal
very treacherously, and wast called a transgressor from the womb.

48:9 For my name's sake will I defer mine anger, and for my praise
will I refrain for thee, that I cut thee not off.

48:10 Behold, I have refined thee, but not with silver; I have chosen
thee in the furnace of affliction.

48:11 For mine own sake, even for mine own sake, will I do it: for how
should my name be polluted? and I will not give my glory unto another.

48:12 Hearken unto me, O Jacob and Israel, my called; I am he; I am
the first, I also am the last.

48:13 Mine hand also hath laid the foundation of the earth, and my
right hand hath spanned the heavens: when I call unto them, they stand
up together.

48:14 All ye, assemble yourselves, and hear; which among them hath
declared these things? The LORD hath loved him: he will do his
pleasure on Babylon, and his arm shall be on the Chaldeans.

48:15 I, even I, have spoken; yea, I have called him: I have brought
him, and he shall make his way prosperous.

48:16 Come ye near unto me, hear ye this; I have not spoken in secret
from the beginning; from the time that it was, there am I: and now the
Lord GOD, and his Spirit, hath sent me.

48:17 Thus saith the LORD, thy Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel; I am
the LORD thy God which teacheth thee to profit, which leadeth thee by
the way that thou shouldest go.

48:18 O that thou hadst hearkened to my commandments! then had thy
peace been as a river, and thy righteousness as the waves of the sea:
48:19 Thy seed also had been as the sand, and the offspring of thy
bowels like the gravel thereof; his name should not have been cut off
nor destroyed from before me.

48:20 Go ye forth of Babylon, flee ye from the Chaldeans, with a voice
of singing declare ye, tell this, utter it even to the end of the
earth; say ye, The LORD hath redeemed his servant Jacob.

48:21 And they thirsted not when he led them through the deserts: he
caused the waters to flow out of the rock for them: he clave the rock
also, and the waters gushed out.

48:22 There is no peace, saith the LORD, unto the wicked.

49:1 Listen, O isles, unto me; and hearken, ye people, from far; The
LORD hath called me from the womb; from the bowels of my mother hath
he made mention of my name.

49:2 And he hath made my mouth like a sharp sword; in the shadow of
his hand hath he hid me, and made me a polished shaft; in his quiver
hath he hid me; 49:3 And said unto me, Thou art my servant, O Israel,
in whom I will be glorified.

49:4 Then I said, I have laboured in vain, I have spent my strength
for nought, and in vain: yet surely my judgment is with the LORD, and
my work with my God.

49:5 And now, saith the LORD that formed me from the womb to be his
servant, to bring Jacob again to him, Though Israel be not gathered,
yet shall I be glorious in the eyes of the LORD, and my God shall be
my strength.

49:6 And he said, It is a light thing that thou shouldest be my
servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob, and to restore the preserved
of Israel: I will also give thee for a light to the Gentiles, that
thou mayest be my salvation unto the end of the earth.

49:7 Thus saith the LORD, the Redeemer of Israel, and his Holy One, to
him whom man despiseth, to him whom the nation abhorreth, to a servant
of rulers, Kings shall see and arise, princes also shall worship,
because of the LORD that is faithful, and the Holy One of Israel, and
he shall choose thee.

49:8 Thus saith the LORD, In an acceptable time have I heard thee, and
in a day of salvation have I helped thee: and I will preserve thee,
and give thee for a covenant of the people, to establish the earth, to
cause to inherit the desolate heritages; 49:9 That thou mayest say to
the prisoners, Go forth; to them that are in darkness, Shew
yourselves. They shall feed in the ways, and their pastures shall be
in all high places.

49:10 They shall not hunger nor thirst; neither shall the heat nor sun
smite them: for he that hath mercy on them shall lead them, even by
the springs of water shall he guide them.

49:11 And I will make all my mountains a way, and my highways shall be
exalted.

49:12 Behold, these shall come from far: and, lo, these from the north
and from the west; and these from the land of Sinim.

49:13 Sing, O heavens; and be joyful, O earth; and break forth into
singing, O mountains: for the LORD hath comforted his people, and will
have mercy upon his afflicted.

49:14 But Zion said, The LORD hath forsaken me, and my Lord hath
forgotten me.

49:15 Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have
compassion on the son of her womb? yea, they may forget, yet will I
not forget thee.

49:16 Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands; thy walls
are continually before me.

49:17 Thy children shall make haste; thy destroyers and they that made
thee waste shall go forth of thee.

49:18 Lift up thine eyes round about, and behold: all these gather
themselves together, and come to thee. As I live, saith the LORD, thou
shalt surely clothe thee with them all, as with an ornament, and bind
them on thee, as a bride doeth.

49:19 For thy waste and thy desolate places, and the land of thy
destruction, shall even now be too narrow by reason of the
inhabitants, and they that swallowed thee up shall be far away.

49:20 The children which thou shalt have, after thou hast lost the
other, shall say again in thine ears, The place is too strait for me:
give place to me that I may dwell.

49:21 Then shalt thou say in thine heart, Who hath begotten me these,
seeing I have lost my children, and am desolate, a captive, and
removing to and fro? and who hath brought up these? Behold, I was left
alone; these, where had they been?  49:22 Thus saith the Lord GOD,
Behold, I will lift up mine hand to the Gentiles, and set up my
standard to the people: and they shall bring thy sons in their arms,
and thy daughters shall be carried upon their shoulders.

49:23 And kings shall be thy nursing fathers, and their queens thy
nursing mothers: they shall bow down to thee with their face toward
the earth, and lick up the dust of thy feet; and thou shalt know that
I am the LORD: for they shall not be ashamed that wait for me.

49:24 Shall the prey be taken from the mighty, or the lawful captive
delivered?  49:25 But thus saith the LORD, Even the captives of the
mighty shall be taken away, and the prey of the terrible shall be
delivered: for I will contend with him that contendeth with thee, and
I will save thy children.

49:26 And I will feed them that oppress thee with their own flesh; and
they shall be drunken with their own blood, as with sweet wine: and
all flesh shall know that I the LORD am thy Saviour and thy Redeemer,
the mighty One of Jacob.

50:1 Thus saith the LORD, Where is the bill of your mother's
divorcement, whom I have put away? or which of my creditors is it to
whom I have sold you?  Behold, for your iniquities have ye sold
yourselves, and for your transgressions is your mother put away.

50:2 Wherefore, when I came, was there no man? when I called, was
there none to answer? Is my hand shortened at all, that it cannot
redeem? or have I no power to deliver? behold, at my rebuke I dry up
the sea, I make the rivers a wilderness: their fish stinketh, because
there is no water, and dieth for thirst.

50:3 I clothe the heavens with blackness, and I make sackcloth their
covering.

50:4 The Lord GOD hath given me the tongue of the learned, that I
should know how to speak a word in season to him that is weary: he
wakeneth morning by morning, he wakeneth mine ear to hear as the
learned.

50:5 The Lord GOD hath opened mine ear, and I was not rebellious,
neither turned away back.

50:6 I gave my back to the smiters, and my cheeks to them that plucked
off the hair: I hid not my face from shame and spitting.

50:7 For the Lord GOD will help me; therefore shall I not be
confounded: therefore have I set my face like a flint, and I know that
I shall not be ashamed.

50:8 He is near that justifieth me; who will contend with me? let us
stand together: who is mine adversary? let him come near to me.

50:9 Behold, the Lord GOD will help me; who is he that shall condemn
me?  lo, they all shall wax old as a garment; the moth shall eat them
up.

50:10 Who is among you that feareth the LORD, that obeyeth the voice
of his servant, that walketh in darkness, and hath no light? let him
trust in the name of the LORD, and stay upon his God.

50:11 Behold, all ye that kindle a fire, that compass yourselves about
with sparks: walk in the light of your fire, and in the sparks that ye
have kindled. This shall ye have of mine hand; ye shall lie down in
sorrow.

51:1 Hearken to me, ye that follow after righteousness, ye that seek
the LORD: look unto the rock whence ye are hewn, and to the hole of
the pit whence ye are digged.

51:2 Look unto Abraham your father, and unto Sarah that bare you: for
I called him alone, and blessed him, and increased him.

51:3 For the LORD shall comfort Zion: he will comfort all her waste
places; and he will make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like
the garden of the LORD; joy and gladness shall be found therein,
thanksgiving, and the voice of melody.

51:4 Hearken unto me, my people; and give ear unto me, O my nation:
for a law shall proceed from me, and I will make my judgment to rest
for a light of the people.

51:5 My righteousness is near; my salvation is gone forth, and mine
arms shall judge the people; the isles shall wait upon me, and on mine
arm shall they trust.

51:6 Lift up your eyes to the heavens, and look upon the earth
beneath: for the heavens shall vanish away like smoke, and the earth
shall wax old like a garment, and they that dwell therein shall die in
like manner: but my salvation shall be for ever, and my righteousness
shall not be abolished.

51:7 Hearken unto me, ye that know righteousness, the people in whose
heart is my law; fear ye not the reproach of men, neither be ye afraid
of their revilings.

51:8 For the moth shall eat them up like a garment, and the worm shall
eat them like wool: but my righteousness shall be for ever, and my
salvation from generation to generation.

51:9 Awake, awake, put on strength, O arm of the LORD; awake, as in
the ancient days, in the generations of old. Art thou not it that hath
cut Rahab, and wounded the dragon?  51:10 Art thou not it which hath
dried the sea, the waters of the great deep; that hath made the depths
of the sea a way for the ransomed to pass over?  51:11 Therefore the
redeemed of the LORD shall return, and come with singing unto Zion;
and everlasting joy shall be upon their head: they shall obtain
gladness and joy; and sorrow and mourning shall flee away.

51:12 I, even I, am he that comforteth you: who art thou, that thou
shouldest be afraid of a man that shall die, and of the son of man
which shall be made as grass; 51:13 And forgettest the LORD thy maker,
that hath stretched forth the heavens, and laid the foundations of the
earth; and hast feared continually every day because of the fury of
the oppressor, as if he were ready to destroy? and where is the fury
of the oppressor?  51:14 The captive exile hasteneth that he may be
loosed, and that he should not die in the pit, nor that his bread
should fail.

51:15 But I am the LORD thy God, that divided the sea, whose waves
roared: The LORD of hosts is his name.

51:16 And I have put my words in thy mouth, and I have covered thee in
the shadow of mine hand, that I may plant the heavens, and lay the
foundations of the earth, and say unto Zion, Thou art my people.

51:17 Awake, awake, stand up, O Jerusalem, which hast drunk at the
hand of the LORD the cup of his fury; thou hast drunken the dregs of
the cup of trembling, and wrung them out.

51:18 There is none to guide her among all the sons whom she hath
brought forth; neither is there any that taketh her by the hand of all
the sons that she hath brought up.

51:19 These two things are come unto thee; who shall be sorry for
thee?  desolation, and destruction, and the famine, and the sword: by
whom shall I comfort thee?  51:20 Thy sons have fainted, they lie at
the head of all the streets, as a wild bull in a net: they are full of
the fury of the LORD, the rebuke of thy God.

51:21 Therefore hear now this, thou afflicted, and drunken, but not
with wine: 51:22 Thus saith thy Lord the LORD, and thy God that
pleadeth the cause of his people, Behold, I have taken out of thine
hand the cup of trembling, even the dregs of the cup of my fury; thou
shalt no more drink it again: 51:23 But I will put it into the hand of
them that afflict thee; which have said to thy soul, Bow down, that we
may go over: and thou hast laid thy body as the ground, and as the
street, to them that went over.

52:1 Awake, awake; put on thy strength, O Zion; put on thy beautiful
garments, O Jerusalem, the holy city: for henceforth there shall no
more come into thee the uncircumcised and the unclean.

52:2 Shake thyself from the dust; arise, and sit down, O Jerusalem:
loose thyself from the bands of thy neck, O captive daughter of Zion.

52:3 For thus saith the LORD, Ye have sold yourselves for nought; and
ye shall be redeemed without money.

52:4 For thus saith the Lord GOD, My people went down aforetime into
Egypt to sojourn there; and the Assyrian oppressed them without cause.

52:5 Now therefore, what have I here, saith the LORD, that my people
is taken away for nought? they that rule over them make them to howl,
saith the LORD; and my name continually every day is blasphemed.

52:6 Therefore my people shall know my name: therefore they shall know
in that day that I am he that doth speak: behold, it is I.

52:7 How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that
bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace; that bringeth good
tidings of good, that publisheth salvation; that saith unto Zion, Thy
God reigneth!  52:8 Thy watchmen shall lift up the voice; with the
voice together shall they sing: for they shall see eye to eye, when
the LORD shall bring again Zion.

52:9 Break forth into joy, sing together, ye waste places of
Jerusalem: for the LORD hath comforted his people, he hath redeemed
Jerusalem.

52:10 The LORD hath made bare his holy arm in the eyes of all the
nations; and all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of our
God.

52:11 Depart ye, depart ye, go ye out from thence, touch no unclean
thing; go ye out of the midst of her; be ye clean, that bear the
vessels of the LORD.

52:12 For ye shall not go out with haste, nor go by flight: for the
LORD will go before you; and the God of Israel will be your rereward.

52:13 Behold, my servant shall deal prudently, he shall be exalted and
extolled, and be very high.

52:14 As many were astonied at thee; his visage was so marred more
than any man, and his form more than the sons of men: 52:15 So shall
he sprinkle many nations; the kings shall shut their mouths at him:
for that which had not been told them shall they see; and that which
they had not heard shall they consider.

53:1 Who hath believed our report? and to whom is the arm of the LORD
revealed?  53:2 For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and
as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and
when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him.

53:3 He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and
acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he
was despised, and we esteemed him not.

53:4 Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we
did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.

53:5 But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our
iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his
stripes we are healed.

53:6 All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to
his own way; and the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.

53:7 He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his
mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before
her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.

53:8 He was taken from prison and from judgment: and who shall declare
his generation? for he was cut off out of the land of the living: for
the transgression of my people was he stricken.

53:9 And he made his grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his
death; because he had done no violence, neither was any deceit in his
mouth.

53:10 Yet it pleased the LORD to bruise him; he hath put him to grief:
when thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his
seed, he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the LORD shall
prosper in his hand.

53:11 He shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied:
by his knowledge shall my righteous servant justify many; for he shall
bear their iniquities.

53:12 Therefore will I divide him a portion with the great, and he
shall divide the spoil with the strong; because he hath poured out his
soul unto death: and he was numbered with the transgressors; and he
bare the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.

54:1 Sing, O barren, thou that didst not bear; break forth into
singing, and cry aloud, thou that didst not travail with child: for
more are the children of the desolate than the children of the married
wife, saith the LORD.

54:2 Enlarge the place of thy tent, and let them stretch forth the
curtains of thine habitations: spare not, lengthen thy cords, and
strengthen thy stakes; 54:3 For thou shalt break forth on the right
hand and on the left; and thy seed shall inherit the Gentiles, and
make the desolate cities to be inhabited.

54:4 Fear not; for thou shalt not be ashamed: neither be thou
confounded; for thou shalt not be put to shame: for thou shalt forget
the shame of thy youth, and shalt not remember the reproach of thy
widowhood any more.

54:5 For thy Maker is thine husband; the LORD of hosts is his name;
and thy Redeemer the Holy One of Israel; The God of the whole earth
shall he be called.

54:6 For the LORD hath called thee as a woman forsaken and grieved in
spirit, and a wife of youth, when thou wast refused, saith thy God.

54:7 For a small moment have I forsaken thee; but with great mercies
will I gather thee.

54:8 In a little wrath I hid my face from thee for a moment; but with
everlasting kindness will I have mercy on thee, saith the LORD thy
Redeemer.

54:9 For this is as the waters of Noah unto me: for as I have sworn
that the waters of Noah should no more go over the earth; so have I
sworn that I would not be wroth with thee, nor rebuke thee.

54:10 For the mountains shall depart, and the hills be removed; but my
kindness shall not depart from thee, neither shall the covenant of my
peace be removed, saith the LORD that hath mercy on thee.

54:11 O thou afflicted, tossed with tempest, and not comforted,
behold, I will lay thy stones with fair colours, and lay thy
foundations with sapphires.

54:12 And I will make thy windows of agates, and thy gates of
carbuncles, and all thy borders of pleasant stones.

54:13 And all thy children shall be taught of the LORD; and great
shall be the peace of thy children.

54:14 In righteousness shalt thou be established: thou shalt be far
from oppression; for thou shalt not fear: and from terror; for it
shall not come near thee.

54:15 Behold, they shall surely gather together, but not by me:
whosoever shall gather together against thee shall fall for thy sake.

54:16 Behold, I have created the smith that bloweth the coals in the
fire, and that bringeth forth an instrument for his work; and I have
created the waster to destroy.

54:17 No weapon that is formed against thee shall prosper; and every
tongue that shall rise against thee in judgment thou shalt condemn.
This is the heritage of the servants of the LORD, and their
righteousness is of me, saith the LORD.

55:1 Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that
hath no money; come ye, buy, and eat; yea, come, buy wine and milk
without money and without price.

55:2 Wherefore do ye spend money for that which is not bread? and your
labour for that which satisfieth not? hearken diligently unto me, and
eat ye that which is good, and let your soul delight itself in
fatness.

55:3 Incline your ear, and come unto me: hear, and your soul shall
live; and I will make an everlasting covenant with you, even the sure
mercies of David.

55:4 Behold, I have given him for a witness to the people, a leader
and commander to the people.

55:5 Behold, thou shalt call a nation that thou knowest not, and
nations that knew not thee shall run unto thee because of the LORD thy
God, and for the Holy One of Israel; for he hath glorified thee.

55:6 Seek ye the LORD while he may be found, call ye upon him while he
is near: 55:7 Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man
his thoughts: and let him return unto the LORD, and he will have mercy
upon him; and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.

55:8 For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my
ways, saith the LORD.

55:9 For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways
higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.

55:10 For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, and
returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring
forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower, and bread to the
eater: 55:11 So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it
shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I
please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it.

55:12 For ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace: the
mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and
all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.

55:13 Instead of the thorn shall come up the fir tree, and instead of
the brier shall come up the myrtle tree: and it shall be to the LORD
for a name, for an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off.

56:1 Thus saith the LORD, Keep ye judgment, and do justice: for my
salvation is near to come, and my righteousness to be revealed.

56:2 Blessed is the man that doeth this, and the son of man that
layeth hold on it; that keepeth the sabbath from polluting it, and
keepeth his hand from doing any evil.

56:3 Neither let the son of the stranger, that hath joined himself to
the LORD, speak, saying, The LORD hath utterly separated me from his
people: neither let the eunuch say, Behold, I am a dry tree.

56:4 For thus saith the LORD unto the eunuchs that keep my sabbaths,
and choose the things that please me, and take hold of my covenant;
56:5 Even unto them will I give in mine house and within my walls a
place and a name better than of sons and of daughters: I will give
them an everlasting name, that shall not be cut off.

56:6 Also the sons of the stranger, that join themselves to the LORD,
to serve him, and to love the name of the LORD, to be his servants,
every one that keepeth the sabbath from polluting it, and taketh hold
of my covenant; 56:7 Even them will I bring to my holy mountain, and
make them joyful in my house of prayer: their burnt offerings and
their sacrifices shall be accepted upon mine altar; for mine house
shall be called an house of prayer for all people.

56:8 The Lord GOD, which gathereth the outcasts of Israel saith, Yet
will I gather others to him, beside those that are gathered unto him.

56:9 All ye beasts of the field, come to devour, yea, all ye beasts in
the forest.

56:10 His watchmen are blind: they are all ignorant, they are all dumb
dogs, they cannot bark; sleeping, lying down, loving to slumber.

56:11 Yea, they are greedy dogs which can never have enough, and they
are shepherds that cannot understand: they all look to their own way,
every one for his gain, from his quarter.

56:12 Come ye, say they, I will fetch wine, and we will fill ourselves
with strong drink; and to morrow shall be as this day, and much more
abundant.

57:1 The righteous perisheth, and no man layeth it to heart: and
merciful men are taken away, none considering that the righteous is
taken away from the evil to come.

57:2 He shall enter into peace: they shall rest in their beds, each
one walking in his uprightness.

57:3 But draw near hither, ye sons of the sorceress, the seed of the
adulterer and the whore.

57:4 Against whom do ye sport yourselves? against whom make ye a wide
mouth, and draw out the tongue? are ye not children of transgression,
a seed of falsehood.

57:5 Enflaming yourselves with idols under every green tree, slaying
the children in the valleys under the clifts of the rocks?  57:6 Among
the smooth stones of the stream is thy portion; they, they are thy
lot: even to them hast thou poured a drink offering, thou hast offered
a meat offering. Should I receive comfort in these?  57:7 Upon a lofty
and high mountain hast thou set thy bed: even thither wentest thou up
to offer sacrifice.

57:8 Behind the doors also and the posts hast thou set up thy
remembrance: for thou hast discovered thyself to another than me, and
art gone up; thou hast enlarged thy bed, and made thee a covenant with
them; thou lovedst their bed where thou sawest it.

57:9 And thou wentest to the king with ointment, and didst increase
thy perfumes, and didst send thy messengers far off, and didst debase
thyself even unto hell.

57:10 Thou art wearied in the greatness of thy way; yet saidst thou
not, There is no hope: thou hast found the life of thine hand;
therefore thou wast not grieved.

57:11 And of whom hast thou been afraid or feared, that thou hast
lied, and hast not remembered me, nor laid it to thy heart? have not I
held my peace even of old, and thou fearest me not?  57:12 I will
declare thy righteousness, and thy works; for they shall not profit
thee.

57:13 When thou criest, let thy companies deliver thee; but the wind
shall carry them all away; vanity shall take them: but he that putteth
his trust in me shall possess the land, and shall inherit my holy
mountain; 57:14 And shall say, Cast ye up, cast ye up, prepare the
way, take up the stumblingblock out of the way of my people.

57:15 For thus saith the high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity,
whose name is Holy; I dwell in the high and holy place, with him also
that is of a contrite and humble spirit, to revive the spirit of the
humble, and to revive the heart of the contrite ones.

57:16 For I will not contend for ever, neither will I be always wroth:
for the spirit should fail before me, and the souls which I have made.

57:17 For the iniquity of his covetousness was I wroth, and smote him:
I hid me, and was wroth, and he went on frowardly in the way of his
heart.

57:18 I have seen his ways, and will heal him: I will lead him also,
and restore comforts unto him and to his mourners.

57:19 I create the fruit of the lips; Peace, peace to him that is far
off, and to him that is near, saith the LORD; and I will heal him.

57:20 But the wicked are like the troubled sea, when it cannot rest,
whose waters cast up mire and dirt.

57:21 There is no peace, saith my God, to the wicked.

58:1 Cry aloud, spare not, lift up thy voice like a trumpet, and shew
my people their transgression, and the house of Jacob their sins.

58:2 Yet they seek me daily, and delight to know my ways, as a nation
that did righteousness, and forsook not the ordinance of their God:
they ask of me the ordinances of justice; they take delight in
approaching to God.

58:3 Wherefore have we fasted, say they, and thou seest not? wherefore
have we afflicted our soul, and thou takest no knowledge? Behold, in
the day of your fast ye find pleasure, and exact all your labours.

58:4 Behold, ye fast for strife and debate, and to smite with the fist
of wickedness: ye shall not fast as ye do this day, to make your voice
to be heard on high.

58:5 Is it such a fast that I have chosen? a day for a man to afflict
his soul? is it to bow down his head as a bulrush, and to spread
sackcloth and ashes under him? wilt thou call this a fast, and an
acceptable day to the LORD?  58:6 Is not this the fast that I have
chosen? to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens,
and to let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke?  58:7
Is it not to deal thy bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the
poor that are cast out to thy house? when thou seest the naked, that
thou cover him; and that thou hide not thyself from thine own flesh?
58:8 Then shall thy light break forth as the morning, and thine health
shall spring forth speedily: and thy righteousness shall go before
thee; the glory of the LORD shall be thy rereward.

58:9 Then shalt thou call, and the LORD shall answer; thou shalt cry,
and he shall say, Here I am. If thou take away from the midst of thee
the yoke, the putting forth of the finger, and speaking vanity; 58:10
And if thou draw out thy soul to the hungry, and satisfy the afflicted
soul; then shall thy light rise in obscurity, and thy darkness be as
the noon day: 58:11 And the LORD shall guide thee continually, and
satisfy thy soul in drought, and make fat thy bones: and thou shalt be
like a watered garden, and like a spring of water, whose waters fail
not.

58:12 And they that shall be of thee shall build the old waste places:
thou shalt raise up the foundations of many generations; and thou
shalt be called, The repairer of the breach, The restorer of paths to
dwell in.

58:13 If thou turn away thy foot from the sabbath, from doing thy
pleasure on my holy day; and call the sabbath a delight, the holy of
the LORD, honourable; and shalt honour him, not doing thine own ways,
nor finding thine own pleasure, nor speaking thine own words: 58:14
Then shalt thou delight thyself in the LORD; and I will cause thee to
ride upon the high places of the earth, and feed thee with the
heritage of Jacob thy father: for the mouth of the LORD hath spoken
it.

59:1 Behold, the LORD's hand is not shortened, that it cannot save;
neither his ear heavy, that it cannot hear: 59:2 But your iniquities
have separated between you and your God, and your sins have hid his
face from you, that he will not hear.

59:3 For your hands are defiled with blood, and your fingers with
iniquity; your lips have spoken lies, your tongue hath muttered
perverseness.

59:4 None calleth for justice, nor any pleadeth for truth: they trust
in vanity, and speak lies; they conceive mischief, and bring forth
iniquity.

59:5 They hatch cockatrice' eggs, and weave the spider's web: he that
eateth of their eggs dieth, and that which is crushed breaketh out
into a viper.

59:6 Their webs shall not become garments, neither shall they cover
themselves with their works: their works are works of iniquity, and
the act of violence is in their hands.

59:7 Their feet run to evil, and they make haste to shed innocent
blood: their thoughts are thoughts of iniquity; wasting and
destruction are in their paths.

59:8 The way of peace they know not; and there is no judgment in their
goings: they have made them crooked paths: whosoever goeth therein
shall not know peace.

59:9 Therefore is judgment far from us, neither doth justice overtake
us: we wait for light, but behold obscurity; for brightness, but we
walk in darkness.

59:10 We grope for the wall like the blind, and we grope as if we had
no eyes: we stumble at noon day as in the night; we are in desolate
places as dead men.

59:11 We roar all like bears, and mourn sore like doves: we look for
judgment, but there is none; for salvation, but it is far off from us.

59:12 For our transgressions are multiplied before thee, and our sins
testify against us: for our transgressions are with us; and as for our
iniquities, we know them; 59:13 In transgressing and lying against the
LORD, and departing away from our God, speaking oppression and revolt,
conceiving and uttering from the heart words of falsehood.

59:14 And judgment is turned away backward, and justice standeth afar
off: for truth is fallen in the street, and equity cannot enter.

59:15 Yea, truth faileth; and he that departeth from evil maketh
himself a prey: and the LORD saw it, and it displeased him that there
was no judgment.

59:16 And he saw that there was no man, and wondered that there was no
intercessor: therefore his arm brought salvation unto him; and his
righteousness, it sustained him.

59:17 For he put on righteousness as a breastplate, and an helmet of
salvation upon his head; and he put on the garments of vengeance for
clothing, and was clad with zeal as a cloak.

59:18 According to their deeds, accordingly he will repay, fury to his
adversaries, recompence to his enemies; to the islands he will repay
recompence.

59:19 So shall they fear the name of the LORD from the west, and his
glory from the rising of the sun. When the enemy shall come in like a
flood, the Spirit of the LORD shall lift up a standard against him.

59:20 And the Redeemer shall come to Zion, and unto them that turn
from transgression in Jacob, saith the LORD.

59:21 As for me, this is my covenant with them, saith the LORD; My
spirit that is upon thee, and my words which I have put in thy mouth,
shall not depart out of thy mouth, nor out of the mouth of thy seed,
nor out of the mouth of thy seed's seed, saith the LORD, from
henceforth and for ever.

60:1 Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the LORD is
risen upon thee.

60:2 For, behold, the darkness shall cover the earth, and gross
darkness the people: but the LORD shall arise upon thee, and his glory
shall be seen upon thee.

60:3 And the Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the
brightness of thy rising.

60:4 Lift up thine eyes round about, and see: all they gather
themselves together, they come to thee: thy sons shall come from far,
and thy daughters shall be nursed at thy side.

60:5 Then thou shalt see, and flow together, and thine heart shall
fear, and be enlarged; because the abundance of the sea shall be
converted unto thee, the forces of the Gentiles shall come unto thee.

60:6 The multitude of camels shall cover thee, the dromedaries of
Midian and Ephah; all they from Sheba shall come: they shall bring
gold and incense; and they shall shew forth the praises of the LORD.

60:7 All the flocks of Kedar shall be gathered together unto thee, the
rams of Nebaioth shall minister unto thee: they shall come up with
acceptance on mine altar, and I will glorify the house of my glory.

60:8 Who are these that fly as a cloud, and as the doves to their
windows?  60:9 Surely the isles shall wait for me, and the ships of
Tarshish first, to bring thy sons from far, their silver and their
gold with them, unto the name of the LORD thy God, and to the Holy One
of Israel, because he hath glorified thee.

60:10 And the sons of strangers shall build up thy walls, and their
kings shall minister unto thee: for in my wrath I smote thee, but in
my favour have I had mercy on thee.

60:11 Therefore thy gates shall be open continually; they shall not be
shut day nor night; that men may bring unto thee the forces of the
Gentiles, and that their kings may be brought.

60:12 For the nation and kingdom that will not serve thee shall
perish; yea, those nations shall be utterly wasted.

60:13 The glory of Lebanon shall come unto thee, the fir tree, the
pine tree, and the box together, to beautify the place of my
sanctuary; and I will make the place of my feet glorious.

60:14 The sons also of them that afflicted thee shall come bending
unto thee; and all they that despised thee shall bow themselves down
at the soles of thy feet; and they shall call thee; The city of the
LORD, The Zion of the Holy One of Israel.

60:15 Whereas thou has been forsaken and hated, so that no man went
through thee, I will make thee an eternal excellency, a joy of many
generations.

60:16 Thou shalt also suck the milk of the Gentiles, and shalt suck
the breast of kings: and thou shalt know that I the LORD am thy
Saviour and thy Redeemer, the mighty One of Jacob.

60:17 For brass I will bring gold, and for iron I will bring silver,
and for wood brass, and for stones iron: I will also make thy officers
peace, and thine exactors righteousness.

60:18 Violence shall no more be heard in thy land, wasting nor
destruction within thy borders; but thou shalt call thy walls
Salvation, and thy gates Praise.

60:19 The sun shall be no more thy light by day; neither for
brightness shall the moon give light unto thee: but the LORD shall be
unto thee an everlasting light, and thy God thy glory.

60:20 Thy sun shall no more go down; neither shall thy moon withdraw
itself: for the LORD shall be thine everlasting light, and the days of
thy mourning shall be ended.

60:21 Thy people also shall be all righteous: they shall inherit the
land for ever, the branch of my planting, the work of my hands, that I
may be glorified.

60:22 A little one shall become a thousand, and a small one a strong
nation: I the LORD will hasten it in his time.

61:1 The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me; because the LORD hath
anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to
bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and
the opening of the prison to them that are bound; 61:2 To proclaim the
acceptable year of the LORD, and the day of vengeance of our God; to
comfort all that mourn; 61:3 To appoint unto them that mourn in Zion,
to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the
garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness; that they might be
called trees of righteousness, the planting of the LORD, that he might
be glorified.

61:4 And they shall build the old wastes, they shall raise up the
former desolations, and they shall repair the waste cities, the
desolations of many generations.

61:5 And strangers shall stand and feed your flocks, and the sons of
the alien shall be your plowmen and your vinedressers.

61:6 But ye shall be named the Priests of the LORD: men shall call you
the Ministers of our God: ye shall eat the riches of the Gentiles, and
in their glory shall ye boast yourselves.

61:7 For your shame ye shall have double; and for confusion they shall
rejoice in their portion: therefore in their land they shall possess
the double: everlasting joy shall be unto them.

61:8 For I the LORD love judgment, I hate robbery for burnt offering;
and I will direct their work in truth, and I will make an everlasting
covenant with them.

61:9 And their seed shall be known among the Gentiles, and their
offspring among the people: all that see them shall acknowledge them,
that they are the seed which the LORD hath blessed.

61:10 I will greatly rejoice in the LORD, my soul shall be joyful in
my God; for he hath clothed me with the garments of salvation, he hath
covered me with the robe of righteousness, as a bridegroom decketh
himself with ornaments, and as a bride adorneth herself with her
jewels.

61:11 For as the earth bringeth forth her bud, and as the garden
causeth the things that are sown in it to spring forth; so the Lord
GOD will cause righteousness and praise to spring forth before all the
nations.

62:1 For Zion's sake will I not hold my peace, and for Jerusalem's
sake I will not rest, until the righteousness thereof go forth as
brightness, and the salvation thereof as a lamp that burneth.

62:2 And the Gentiles shall see thy righteousness, and all kings thy
glory: and thou shalt be called by a new name, which the mouth of the
LORD shall name.

62:3 Thou shalt also be a crown of glory in the hand of the LORD, and
a royal diadem in the hand of thy God.

62:4 Thou shalt no more be termed Forsaken; neither shall thy land any
more be termed Desolate: but thou shalt be called Hephzibah, and thy
land Beulah: for the LORD delighteth in thee, and thy land shall be
married.

62:5 For as a young man marrieth a virgin, so shall thy sons marry
thee: and as the bridegroom rejoiceth over the bride, so shall thy God
rejoice over thee.

62:6 I have set watchmen upon thy walls, O Jerusalem, which shall
never hold their peace day nor night: ye that make mention of the
LORD, keep not silence, 62:7 And give him no rest, till he establish,
and till he make Jerusalem a praise in the earth.

62:8 The LORD hath sworn by his right hand, and by the arm of his
strength, Surely I will no more give thy corn to be meat for thine
enemies; and the sons of the stranger shall not drink thy wine, for
the which thou hast laboured: 62:9 But they that have gathered it
shall eat it, and praise the LORD; and they that have brought it
together shall drink it in the courts of my holiness.

62:10 Go through, go through the gates; prepare ye the way of the
people; cast up, cast up the highway; gather out the stones; lift up a
standard for the people.

62:11 Behold, the LORD hath proclaimed unto the end of the world, Say
ye to the daughter of Zion, Behold, thy salvation cometh; behold, his
reward is with him, and his work before him.

62:12 And they shall call them, The holy people, The redeemed of the
LORD: and thou shalt be called, Sought out, A city not forsaken.

63:1 Who is this that cometh from Edom, with dyed garments from
Bozrah?  this that is glorious in his apparel, travelling in the
greatness of his strength? I that speak in righteousness, mighty to
save.

63:2 Wherefore art thou red in thine apparel, and thy garments like
him that treadeth in the winefat?  63:3 I have trodden the winepress
alone; and of the people there was none with me: for I will tread them
in mine anger, and trample them in my fury; and their blood shall be
sprinkled upon my garments, and I will stain all my raiment.

63:4 For the day of vengeance is in mine heart, and the year of my
redeemed is come.

63:5 And I looked, and there was none to help; and I wondered that
there was none to uphold: therefore mine own arm brought salvation
unto me; and my fury, it upheld me.

63:6 And I will tread down the people in mine anger, and make them
drunk in my fury, and I will bring down their strength to the earth.

63:7 I will mention the lovingkindnesses of the LORD, and the praises
of the LORD, according to all that the LORD hath bestowed on us, and
the great goodness toward the house of Israel, which he hath bestowed
on them according to his mercies, and according to the multitude of
his lovingkindnesses.

63:8 For he said, Surely they are my people, children that will not
lie: so he was their Saviour.

63:9 In all their affliction he was afflicted, and the angel of his
presence saved them: in his love and in his pity he redeemed them; and
he bare them, and carried them all the days of old.

63:10 But they rebelled, and vexed his holy Spirit: therefore he was
turned to be their enemy, and he fought against them.

63:11 Then he remembered the days of old, Moses, and his people,
saying, Where is he that brought them up out of the sea with the
shepherd of his flock? where is he that put his holy Spirit within
him?  63:12 That led them by the right hand of Moses with his glorious
arm, dividing the water before them, to make himself an everlasting
name?  63:13 That led them through the deep, as an horse in the
wilderness, that they should not stumble?  63:14 As a beast goeth down
into the valley, the Spirit of the LORD caused him to rest: so didst
thou lead thy people, to make thyself a glorious name.

63:15 Look down from heaven, and behold from the habitation of thy
holiness and of thy glory: where is thy zeal and thy strength, the
sounding of thy bowels and of thy mercies toward me? are they
restrained?  63:16 Doubtless thou art our father, though Abraham be
ignorant of us, and Israel acknowledge us not: thou, O LORD, art our
father, our redeemer; thy name is from everlasting.

63:17 O LORD, why hast thou made us to err from thy ways, and hardened
our heart from thy fear? Return for thy servants' sake, the tribes of
thine inheritance.

63:18 The people of thy holiness have possessed it but a little while:
our adversaries have trodden down thy sanctuary.

63:19 We are thine: thou never barest rule over them; they were not
called by thy name.

64:1 Oh that thou wouldest rend the heavens, that thou wouldest come
down, that the mountains might flow down at thy presence, 64:2 As when
the melting fire burneth, the fire causeth the waters to boil, to make
thy name known to thine adversaries, that the nations may tremble at
thy presence!  64:3 When thou didst terrible things which we looked
not for, thou camest down, the mountains flowed down at thy presence.

64:4 For since the beginning of the world men have not heard, nor
perceived by the ear, neither hath the eye seen, O God, beside thee,
what he hath prepared for him that waiteth for him.

64:5 Thou meetest him that rejoiceth and worketh righteousness, those
that remember thee in thy ways: behold, thou art wroth; for we have
sinned: in those is continuance, and we shall be saved.

64:6 But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses
are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities,
like the wind, have taken us away.

64:7 And there is none that calleth upon thy name, that stirreth up
himself to take hold of thee: for thou hast hid thy face from us, and
hast consumed us, because of our iniquities.

64:8 But now, O LORD, thou art our father; we are the clay, and thou
our potter; and we all are the work of thy hand.

64:9 Be not wroth very sore, O LORD, neither remember iniquity for
ever: behold, see, we beseech thee, we are all thy people.

64:10 Thy holy cities are a wilderness, Zion is a wilderness,
Jerusalem a desolation.

64:11 Our holy and our beautiful house, where our fathers praised
thee, is burned up with fire: and all our pleasant things are laid
waste.

64:12 Wilt thou refrain thyself for these things, O LORD? wilt thou
hold thy peace, and afflict us very sore?  65:1 I am sought of them
that asked not for me; I am found of them that sought me not: I said,
Behold me, behold me, unto a nation that was not called by my name.

65:2 I have spread out my hands all the day unto a rebellious people,
which walketh in a way that was not good, after their own thoughts;
65:3 A people that provoketh me to anger continually to my face; that
sacrificeth in gardens, and burneth incense upon altars of brick; 65:4
Which remain among the graves, and lodge in the monuments, which eat
swine's flesh, and broth of abominable things is in their vessels;
65:5 Which say, Stand by thyself, come not near to me; for I am holier
than thou. These are a smoke in my nose, a fire that burneth all the
day.

65:6 Behold, it is written before me: I will not keep silence, but
will recompense, even recompense into their bosom, 65:7 Your
iniquities, and the iniquities of your fathers together, saith the
LORD, which have burned incense upon the mountains, and blasphemed me
upon the hills: therefore will I measure their former work into their
bosom.

65:8 Thus saith the LORD, As the new wine is found in the cluster, and
one saith, Destroy it not; for a blessing is in it: so will I do for
my servants' sakes, that I may not destroy them all.

65:9 And I will bring forth a seed out of Jacob, and out of Judah an
inheritor of my mountains: and mine elect shall inherit it, and my
servants shall dwell there.

65:10 And Sharon shall be a fold of flocks, and the valley of Achor a
place for the herds to lie down in, for my people that have sought me.

65:11 But ye are they that forsake the LORD, that forget my holy
mountain, that prepare a table for that troop, and that furnish the
drink offering unto that number.

65:12 Therefore will I number you to the sword, and ye shall all bow
down to the slaughter: because when I called, ye did not answer; when
I spake, ye did not hear; but did evil before mine eyes, and did
choose that wherein I delighted not.

65:13 Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD, Behold, my servants shall
eat, but ye shall be hungry: behold, my servants shall drink, but ye
shall be thirsty: behold, my servants shall rejoice, but ye shall be
ashamed: 65:14 Behold, my servants shall sing for joy of heart, but ye
shall cry for sorrow of heart, and shall howl for vexation of spirit.

65:15 And ye shall leave your name for a curse unto my chosen: for the
Lord GOD shall slay thee, and call his servants by another name: 65:16
That he who blesseth himself in the earth shall bless himself in the
God of truth; and he that sweareth in the earth shall swear by the God
of truth; because the former troubles are forgotten, and because they
are hid from mine eyes.

65:17 For, behold, I create new heavens and a new earth: and the
former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind.

65:18 But be ye glad and rejoice for ever in that which I create: for,
behold, I create Jerusalem a rejoicing, and her people a joy.

65:19 And I will rejoice in Jerusalem, and joy in my people: and the
voice of weeping shall be no more heard in her, nor the voice of
crying.

65:20 There shall be no more thence an infant of days, nor an old man
that hath not filled his days: for the child shall die an hundred
years old; but the sinner being an hundred years old shall be
accursed.

65:21 And they shall build houses, and inhabit them; and they shall
plant vineyards, and eat the fruit of them.

65:22 They shall not build, and another inhabit; they shall not plant,
and another eat: for as the days of a tree are the days of my people,
and mine elect shall long enjoy the work of their hands.

65:23 They shall not labour in vain, nor bring forth for trouble; for
they are the seed of the blessed of the LORD, and their offspring with
them.

65:24 And it shall come to pass, that before they call, I will answer;
and while they are yet speaking, I will hear.

65:25 The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, and the lion shall
eat straw like the bullock: and dust shall be the serpent's meat. They
shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain, saith the LORD.

66:1 Thus saith the LORD, The heaven is my throne, and the earth is my
footstool: where is the house that ye build unto me? and where is the
place of my rest?  66:2 For all those things hath mine hand made, and
all those things have been, saith the LORD: but to this man will I
look, even to him that is poor and of a contrite spirit, and trembleth
at my word.

66:3 He that killeth an ox is as if he slew a man; he that sacrificeth
a lamb, as if he cut off a dog's neck; he that offereth an oblation,
as if he offered swine's blood; he that burneth incense, as if he
blessed an idol.

Yea, they have chosen their own ways, and their soul delighteth in
their abominations.

66:4 I also will choose their delusions, and will bring their fears
upon them; because when I called, none did answer; when I spake, they
did not hear: but they did evil before mine eyes, and chose that in
which I delighted not.

66:5 Hear the word of the LORD, ye that tremble at his word; Your
brethren that hated you, that cast you out for my name's sake, said,
Let the LORD be glorified: but he shall appear to your joy, and they
shall be ashamed.

66:6 A voice of noise from the city, a voice from the temple, a voice
of the LORD that rendereth recompence to his enemies.

66:7 Before she travailed, she brought forth; before her pain came,
she was delivered of a man child.

66:8 Who hath heard such a thing? who hath seen such things? Shall the
earth be made to bring forth in one day? or shall a nation be born at
once?  for as soon as Zion travailed, she brought forth her children.

66:9 Shall I bring to the birth, and not cause to bring forth? saith
the LORD: shall I cause to bring forth, and shut the womb? saith thy
God.

66:10 Rejoice ye with Jerusalem, and be glad with her, all ye that
love her: rejoice for joy with her, all ye that mourn for her: 66:11
That ye may suck, and be satisfied with the breasts of her
consolations; that ye may milk out, and be delighted with the
abundance of her glory.

66:12 For thus saith the LORD, Behold, I will extend peace to her like
a river, and the glory of the Gentiles like a flowing stream: then
shall ye suck, ye shall be borne upon her sides, and be dandled upon
her knees.

66:13 As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you; and ye
shall be comforted in Jerusalem.

66:14 And when ye see this, your heart shall rejoice, and your bones
shall flourish like an herb: and the hand of the LORD shall be known
toward his servants, and his indignation toward his enemies.

66:15 For, behold, the LORD will come with fire, and with his chariots
like a whirlwind, to render his anger with fury, and his rebuke with
flames of fire.

66:16 For by fire and by his sword will the LORD plead with all flesh:
and the slain of the LORD shall be many.

66:17 They that sanctify themselves, and purify themselves in the
gardens behind one tree in the midst, eating swine's flesh, and the
abomination, and the mouse, shall be consumed together, saith the
LORD.

66:18 For I know their works and their thoughts: it shall come, that I
will gather all nations and tongues; and they shall come, and see my
glory.

66:19 And I will set a sign among them, and I will send those that
escape of them unto the nations, to Tarshish, Pul, and Lud, that draw
the bow, to Tubal, and Javan, to the isles afar off, that have not
heard my fame, neither have seen my glory; and they shall declare my
glory among the Gentiles.

66:20 And they shall bring all your brethren for an offering unto the
LORD out of all nations upon horses, and in chariots, and in litters,
and upon mules, and upon swift beasts, to my holy mountain Jerusalem,
saith the LORD, as the children of Israel bring an offering in a clean
vessel into the house of the LORD.

66:21 And I will also take of them for priests and for Levites, saith
the LORD.

66:22 For as the new heavens and the new earth, which I will make,
shall remain before me, saith the LORD, so shall your seed and your
name remain.

66:23 And it shall come to pass, that from one new moon to another,
and from one sabbath to another, shall all flesh come to worship
before me, saith the LORD.

66:24 And they shall go forth, and look upon the carcases of the men
that have transgressed against me: for their worm shall not die,
neither shall their fire be quenched; and they shall be an abhorring
unto all flesh.




The Book of the Prophet Jeremiah


1:1 The words of Jeremiah the son of Hilkiah, of the priests that
were in Anathoth in the land of Benjamin: 1:2 To whom the word of the
LORD came in the days of Josiah the son of Amon king of Judah, in the
thirteenth year of his reign.

1:3 It came also in the days of Jehoiakim the son of Josiah king of
Judah, unto the end of the eleventh year of Zedekiah the son of Josiah
king of Judah, unto the carrying away of Jerusalem captive in the
fifth month.

1:4 Then the word of the LORD came unto me, saying, 1:5 Before I
formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out
of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the
nations.

1:6 Then said I, Ah, Lord GOD! behold, I cannot speak: for I am a
child.

1:7 But the LORD said unto me, Say not, I am a child: for thou shalt
go to all that I shall send thee, and whatsoever I command thee thou
shalt speak.

1:8 Be not afraid of their faces: for I am with thee to deliver thee,
saith the LORD.

1:9 Then the LORD put forth his hand, and touched my mouth. And the
LORD said unto me, Behold, I have put my words in thy mouth.

1:10 See, I have this day set thee over the nations and over the
kingdoms, to root out, and to pull down, and to destroy, and to throw
down, to build, and to plant.

1:11 Moreover the word of the LORD came unto me, saying, Jeremiah,
what seest thou? And I said, I see a rod of an almond tree.

1:12 Then said the LORD unto me, Thou hast well seen: for I will
hasten my word to perform it.

1:13 And the word of the LORD came unto me the second time, saying,
What seest thou? And I said, I see a seething pot; and the face
thereof is toward the north.

1:14 Then the LORD said unto me, Out of the north an evil shall break
forth upon all the inhabitants of the land.

1:15 For, lo, I will call all the families of the kingdoms of the
north, saith the LORD; and they shall come, and they shall set every
one his throne at the entering of the gates of Jerusalem, and against
all the walls thereof round about, and against all the cities of
Judah.

1:16 And I will utter my judgments against them touching all their
wickedness, who have forsaken me, and have burned incense unto other
gods, and worshipped the works of their own hands.

1:17 Thou therefore gird up thy loins, and arise, and speak unto them
all that I command thee: be not dismayed at their faces, lest I
confound thee before them.

1:18 For, behold, I have made thee this day a defenced city, and an
iron pillar, and brasen walls against the whole land, against the
kings of Judah, against the princes thereof, against the priests
thereof, and against the people of the land.

1:19 And they shall fight against thee; but they shall not prevail
against thee; for I am with thee, saith the LORD, to deliver thee.

2:1 Moreover the word of the LORD came to me, saying, 2:2 Go and cry
in the ears of Jerusalem, saying, Thus saith the LORD; I remember
thee, the kindness of thy youth, the love of thine espousals, when
thou wentest after me in the wilderness, in a land that was not sown.

2:3 Israel was holiness unto the LORD, and the firstfruits of his
increase: all that devour him shall offend; evil shall come upon them,
saith the LORD.

2:4 Hear ye the word of the LORD, O house of Jacob, and all the
families of the house of Israel: 2:5 Thus saith the LORD, What
iniquity have your fathers found in me, that they are gone far from
me, and have walked after vanity, and are become vain?  2:6 Neither
said they, Where is the LORD that brought us up out of the land of
Egypt, that led us through the wilderness, through a land of deserts
and of pits, through a land of drought, and of the shadow of death,
through a land that no man passed through, and where no man dwelt?
2:7 And I brought you into a plentiful country, to eat the fruit
thereof and the goodness thereof; but when ye entered, ye defiled my
land, and made mine heritage an abomination.

2:8 The priests said not, Where is the LORD? and they that handle the
law knew me not: the pastors also transgressed against me, and the
prophets prophesied by Baal, and walked after things that do not
profit.

2:9 Wherefore I will yet plead with you, saith the LORD, and with your
children's children will I plead.

2:10 For pass over the isles of Chittim, and see; and send unto Kedar,
and consider diligently, and see if there be such a thing.

2:11 Hath a nation changed their gods, which are yet no gods? but my
people have changed their glory for that which doth not profit.

2:12 Be astonished, O ye heavens, at this, and be horribly afraid, be
ye very desolate, saith the LORD.

2:13 For my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me the
fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken
cisterns, that can hold no water.

2:14 Is Israel a servant? is he a homeborn slave? why is he spoiled?
2:15 The young lions roared upon him, and yelled, and they made his
land waste: his cities are burned without inhabitant.

2:16 Also the children of Noph and Tahapanes have broken the crown of
thy head.

2:17 Hast thou not procured this unto thyself, in that thou hast
forsaken the LORD thy God, when he led thee by the way?  2:18 And now
what hast thou to do in the way of Egypt, to drink the waters of
Sihor? or what hast thou to do in the way of Assyria, to drink the
waters of the river?  2:19 Thine own wickedness shall correct thee,
and thy backslidings shall reprove thee: know therefore and see that
it is an evil thing and bitter, that thou hast forsaken the LORD thy
God, and that my fear is not in thee, saith the Lord GOD of hosts.

2:20 For of old time I have broken thy yoke, and burst thy bands; and
thou saidst, I will not transgress; when upon every high hill and
under every green tree thou wanderest, playing the harlot.

2:21 Yet I had planted thee a noble vine, wholly a right seed: how
then art thou turned into the degenerate plant of a strange vine unto
me?  2:22 For though thou wash thee with nitre, and take thee much
soap, yet thine iniquity is marked before me, saith the Lord GOD.

2:23 How canst thou say, I am not polluted, I have not gone after
Baalim?  see thy way in the valley, know what thou hast done: thou art
a swift dromedary traversing her ways; 2:24 A wild ass used to the
wilderness, that snuffeth up the wind at her pleasure; in her occasion
who can turn her away? all they that seek her will not weary
themselves; in her month they shall find her.

2:25 Withhold thy foot from being unshod, and thy throat from thirst:
but thou saidst, There is no hope: no; for I have loved strangers, and
after them will I go.

2:26 As the thief is ashamed when he is found, so is the house of
Israel ashamed; they, their kings, their princes, and their priests,
and their prophets.

2:27 Saying to a stock, Thou art my father; and to a stone, Thou hast
brought me forth: for they have turned their back unto me, and not
their face: but in the time of their trouble they will say, Arise, and
save us.

2:28 But where are thy gods that thou hast made thee? let them arise,
if they can save thee in the time of thy trouble: for according to the
number of thy cities are thy gods, O Judah.

2:29 Wherefore will ye plead with me? ye all have transgressed against
me, saith the LORD.

2:30 In vain have I smitten your children; they received no
correction: your own sword hath devoured your prophets, like a
destroying lion.

2:31 O generation, see ye the word of the LORD. Have I been a
wilderness unto Israel? a land of darkness? wherefore say my people,
We are lords; we will come no more unto thee?  2:32 Can a maid forget
her ornaments, or a bride her attire? yet my people have forgotten me
days without number.

2:33 Why trimmest thou thy way to seek love? therefore hast thou also
taught the wicked ones thy ways.

2:34 Also in thy skirts is found the blood of the souls of the poor
innocents: I have not found it by secret search, but upon all these.

2:35 Yet thou sayest, Because I am innocent, surely his anger shall
turn from me. Behold, I will plead with thee, because thou sayest, I
have not sinned.

2:36 Why gaddest thou about so much to change thy way? thou also shalt
be ashamed of Egypt, as thou wast ashamed of Assyria.

2:37 Yea, thou shalt go forth from him, and thine hands upon thine
head: for the LORD hath rejected thy confidences, and thou shalt not
prosper in them.

3:1 They say, If a man put away his wife, and she go from him, and
become another man's, shall he return unto her again? shall not that
land be greatly polluted? but thou hast played the harlot with many
lovers; yet return again to me, saith the LORD.

3:2 Lift up thine eyes unto the high places, and see where thou hast
not been lien with. In the ways hast thou sat for them, as the Arabian
in the wilderness; and thou hast polluted the land with thy whoredoms
and with thy wickedness.

3:3 Therefore the showers have been withholden, and there hath been no
latter rain; and thou hadst a whore's forehead, thou refusedst to be
ashamed.

3:4 Wilt thou not from this time cry unto me, My father, thou art the
guide of my youth?  3:5 Will he reserve his anger for ever? will he
keep it to the end?  Behold, thou hast spoken and done evil things as
thou couldest.

3:6 The LORD said also unto me in the days of Josiah the king, Hast
thou seen that which backsliding Israel hath done? she is gone up upon
every high mountain and under every green tree, and there hath played
the harlot.

3:7 And I said after she had done all these things, Turn thou unto me.
But she returned not. And her treacherous sister Judah saw it.

3:8 And I saw, when for all the causes whereby backsliding Israel
committed adultery I had put her away, and given her a bill of
divorce; yet her treacherous sister Judah feared not, but went and
played the harlot also.

3:9 And it came to pass through the lightness of her whoredom, that
she defiled the land, and committed adultery with stones and with
stocks.

3:10 And yet for all this her treacherous sister Judah hath not turned
unto me with her whole heart, but feignedly, saith the LORD.

3:11 And the LORD said unto me, The backsliding Israel hath justified
herself more than treacherous Judah.

3:12 Go and proclaim these words toward the north, and say, Return,
thou backsliding Israel, saith the LORD; and I will not cause mine
anger to fall upon you: for I am merciful, saith the LORD, and I will
not keep anger for ever.

3:13 Only acknowledge thine iniquity, that thou hast transgressed
against the LORD thy God, and hast scattered thy ways to the strangers
under every green tree, and ye have not obeyed my voice, saith the
LORD.

3:14 Turn, O backsliding children, saith the LORD; for I am married
unto you: and I will take you one of a city, and two of a family, and
I will bring you to Zion: 3:15 And I will give you pastors according
to mine heart, which shall feed you with knowledge and understanding.

3:16 And it shall come to pass, when ye be multiplied and increased in
the land, in those days, saith the LORD, they shall say no more, The
ark of the covenant of the LORD: neither shall it come to mind:
neither shall they remember it; neither shall they visit it; neither
shall that be done any more.

3:17 At that time they shall call Jerusalem the throne of the LORD;
and all the nations shall be gathered unto it, to the name of the
LORD, to Jerusalem: neither shall they walk any more after the
imagination of their evil heart.

3:18 In those days the house of Judah shall walk with the house of
Israel, and they shall come together out of the land of the north to
the land that I have given for an inheritance unto your fathers.

3:19 But I said, How shall I put thee among the children, and give
thee a pleasant land, a goodly heritage of the hosts of nations? and I
said, Thou shalt call me, My father; and shalt not turn away from me.

3:20 Surely as a wife treacherously departeth from her husband, so
have ye dealt treacherously with me, O house of Israel, saith the
LORD.

3:21 A voice was heard upon the high places, weeping and supplications
of the children of Israel: for they have perverted their way, and they
have forgotten the LORD their God.

3:22 Return, ye backsliding children, and I will heal your
backslidings.

Behold, we come unto thee; for thou art the LORD our God.

3:23 Truly in vain is salvation hoped for from the hills, and from the
multitude of mountains: truly in the LORD our God is the salvation of
Israel.

3:24 For shame hath devoured the labour of our fathers from our youth;
their flocks and their herds, their sons and their daughters.

3:25 We lie down in our shame, and our confusion covereth us: for we
have sinned against the LORD our God, we and our fathers, from our
youth even unto this day, and have not obeyed the voice of the LORD
our God.

4:1 If thou wilt return, O Israel, saith the LORD, return unto me: and
if thou wilt put away thine abominations out of my sight, then shalt
thou not remove.

4:2 And thou shalt swear, The LORD liveth, in truth, in judgment, and
in righteousness; and the nations shall bless themselves in him, and
in him shall they glory.

4:3 For thus saith the LORD to the men of Judah and Jerusalem, Break
up your fallow ground, and sow not among thorns.

4:4 Circumcise yourselves to the LORD, and take away the foreskins of
your heart, ye men of Judah and inhabitants of Jerusalem: lest my fury
come forth like fire, and burn that none can quench it, because of the
evil of your doings.

4:5 Declare ye in Judah, and publish in Jerusalem; and say, Blow ye
the trumpet in the land: cry, gather together, and say, Assemble
yourselves, and let us go into the defenced cities.

4:6 Set up the standard toward Zion: retire, stay not: for I will
bring evil from the north, and a great destruction.

4:7 The lion is come up from his thicket, and the destroyer of the
Gentiles is on his way; he is gone forth from his place to make thy
land desolate; and thy cities shall be laid waste, without an
inhabitant.

4:8 For this gird you with sackcloth, lament and howl: for the fierce
anger of the LORD is not turned back from us.

4:9 And it shall come to pass at that day, saith the LORD, that the
heart of the king shall perish, and the heart of the princes; and the
priests shall be astonished, and the prophets shall wonder.

4:10 Then said I, Ah, Lord GOD! surely thou hast greatly deceived this
people and Jerusalem, saying, Ye shall have peace; whereas the sword
reacheth unto the soul.

4:11 At that time shall it be said to this people and to Jerusalem, A
dry wind of the high places in the wilderness toward the daughter of
my people, not to fan, nor to cleanse, 4:12 Even a full wind from
those places shall come unto me: now also will I give sentence against
them.

4:13 Behold, he shall come up as clouds, and his chariots shall be as
a whirlwind: his horses are swifter than eagles. Woe unto us! for we
are spoiled.

4:14 O Jerusalem, wash thine heart from wickedness, that thou mayest
be saved. How long shall thy vain thoughts lodge within thee?  4:15
For a voice declareth from Dan, and publisheth affliction from mount
Ephraim.

4:16 Make ye mention to the nations; behold, publish against
Jerusalem, that watchers come from a far country, and give out their
voice against the cities of Judah.

4:17 As keepers of a field, are they against her round about; because
she hath been rebellious against me, saith the LORD.

4:18 Thy way and thy doings have procured these things unto thee; this
is thy wickedness, because it is bitter, because it reacheth unto
thine heart.

4:19 My bowels, my bowels! I am pained at my very heart; my heart
maketh a noise in me; I cannot hold my peace, because thou hast heard,
O my soul, the sound of the trumpet, the alarm of war.

4:20 Destruction upon destruction is cried; for the whole land is
spoiled: suddenly are my tents spoiled, and my curtains in a moment.

4:21 How long shall I see the standard, and hear the sound of the
trumpet?  4:22 For my people is foolish, they have not known me; they
are sottish children, and they have none understanding: they are wise
to do evil, but to do good they have no knowledge.

4:23 I beheld the earth, and, lo, it was without form, and void; and
the heavens, and they had no light.

4:24 I beheld the mountains, and, lo, they trembled, and all the hills
moved lightly.

4:25 I beheld, and, lo, there was no man, and all the birds of the
heavens were fled.

4:26 I beheld, and, lo, the fruitful place was a wilderness, and all
the cities thereof were broken down at the presence of the LORD, and
by his fierce anger.

4:27 For thus hath the LORD said, The whole land shall be desolate;
yet will I not make a full end.

4:28 For this shall the earth mourn, and the heavens above be black;
because I have spoken it, I have purposed it, and will not repent,
neither will I turn back from it.

4:29 The whole city shall flee for the noise of the horsemen and
bowmen; they shall go into thickets, and climb up upon the rocks:
every city shall be forsaken, and not a man dwell therein.

4:30 And when thou art spoiled, what wilt thou do? Though thou
clothest thyself with crimson, though thou deckest thee with ornaments
of gold, though thou rentest thy face with painting, in vain shalt
thou make thyself fair; thy lovers will despise thee, they will seek
thy life.

4:31 For I have heard a voice as of a woman in travail, and the
anguish as of her that bringeth forth her first child, the voice of
the daughter of Zion, that bewaileth herself, that spreadeth her
hands, saying, Woe is me now! for my soul is wearied because of
murderers.

5:1 Run ye to and fro through the streets of Jerusalem, and see now,
and know, and seek in the broad places thereof, if ye can find a man,
if there be any that executeth judgment, that seeketh the truth; and I
will pardon it.

5:2 And though they say, The LORD liveth; surely they swear falsely.

5:3 O LORD, are not thine eyes upon the truth? thou hast stricken
them, but they have not grieved; thou hast consumed them, but they
have refused to receive correction: they have made their faces harder
than a rock; they have refused to return.

5:4 Therefore I said, Surely these are poor; they are foolish: for
they know not the way of the LORD, nor the judgment of their God.

5:5 I will get me unto the great men, and will speak unto them; for
they have known the way of the LORD, and the judgment of their God:
but these have altogether broken the yoke, and burst the bonds.

5:6 Wherefore a lion out of the forest shall slay them, and a wolf of
the evenings shall spoil them, a leopard shall watch over their
cities: every one that goeth out thence shall be torn in pieces:
because their transgressions are many, and their backslidings are
increased.

5:7 How shall I pardon thee for this? thy children have forsaken me,
and sworn by them that are no gods: when I had fed them to the full,
they then committed adultery, and assembled themselves by troops in
the harlots' houses.

5:8 They were as fed horses in the morning: every one neighed after
his neighbour's wife.

5:9 Shall I not visit for these things? saith the LORD: and shall not
my soul be avenged on such a nation as this?  5:10 Go ye up upon her
walls, and destroy; but make not a full end: take away her
battlements; for they are not the LORD's.

5:11 For the house of Israel and the house of Judah have dealt very
treacherously against me, saith the LORD.

5:12 They have belied the LORD, and said, It is not he; neither shall
evil come upon us; neither shall we see sword nor famine: 5:13 And the
prophets shall become wind, and the word is not in them: thus shall it
be done unto them.

5:14 Wherefore thus saith the LORD God of hosts, Because ye speak this
word, behold, I will make my words in thy mouth fire, and this people
wood, and it shall devour them.

5:15 Lo, I will bring a nation upon you from far, O house of Israel,
saith the LORD: it is a mighty nation, it is an ancient nation, a
nation whose language thou knowest not, neither understandest what
they say.

5:16 Their quiver is as an open sepulchre, they are all mighty men.

5:17 And they shall eat up thine harvest, and thy bread, which thy
sons and thy daughters should eat: they shall eat up thy flocks and
thine herds: they shall eat up thy vines and thy fig trees: they shall
impoverish thy fenced cities, wherein thou trustedst, with the sword.

5:18 Nevertheless in those days, saith the LORD, I will not make a
full end with you.

5:19 And it shall come to pass, when ye shall say, Wherefore doeth the
LORD our God all these things unto us? then shalt thou answer them,
Like as ye have forsaken me, and served strange gods in your land, so
shall ye serve strangers in a land that is not your's.

5:20 Declare this in the house of Jacob, and publish it in Judah,
saying, 5:21 Hear now this, O foolish people, and without
understanding; which have eyes, and see not; which have ears, and hear
not: 5:22 Fear ye not me? saith the LORD: will ye not tremble at my
presence, which have placed the sand for the bound of the sea by a
perpetual decree, that it cannot pass it: and though the waves thereof
toss themselves, yet can they not prevail; though they roar, yet can
they not pass over it?  5:23 But this people hath a revolting and a
rebellious heart; they are revolted and gone.

5:24 Neither say they in their heart, Let us now fear the LORD our
God, that giveth rain, both the former and the latter, in his season:
he reserveth unto us the appointed weeks of the harvest.

5:25 Your iniquities have turned away these things, and your sins have
withholden good things from you.

5:26 For among my people are found wicked men: they lay wait, as he
that setteth snares; they set a trap, they catch men.

5:27 As a cage is full of birds, so are their houses full of deceit:
therefore they are become great, and waxen rich.

5:28 They are waxen fat, they shine: yea, they overpass the deeds of
the wicked: they judge not the cause, the cause of the fatherless, yet
they prosper; and the right of the needy do they not judge.

5:29 Shall I not visit for these things? saith the LORD: shall not my
soul be avenged on such a nation as this?  5:30 A wonderful and
horrible thing is committed in the land; 5:31 The prophets prophesy
falsely, and the priests bear rule by their means; and my people love
to have it so: and what will ye do in the end thereof?  6:1 O ye
children of Benjamin, gather yourselves to flee out of the midst of
Jerusalem, and blow the trumpet in Tekoa, and set up a sign of fire in
Bethhaccerem: for evil appeareth out of the north, and great
destruction.

6:2 I have likened the daughter of Zion to a comely and delicate
woman.

6:3 The shepherds with their flocks shall come unto her; they shall
pitch their tents against her round about; they shall feed every one
in his place.

6:4 Prepare ye war against her; arise, and let us go up at noon. Woe
unto us! for the day goeth away, for the shadows of the evening are
stretched out.

6:5 Arise, and let us go by night, and let us destroy her palaces.

6:6 For thus hath the LORD of hosts said, Hew ye down trees, and cast
a mount against Jerusalem: this is the city to be visited; she is
wholly oppression in the midst of her.

6:7 As a fountain casteth out her waters, so she casteth out her
wickedness: violence and spoil is heard in her; before me continually
is grief and wounds.

6:8 Be thou instructed, O Jerusalem, lest my soul depart from thee;
lest I make thee desolate, a land not inhabited.

6:9 Thus saith the LORD of hosts, They shall throughly glean the
remnant of Israel as a vine: turn back thine hand as a grapegatherer
into the baskets.

6:10 To whom shall I speak, and give warning, that they may hear?
behold, their ear is uncircumcised, and they cannot hearken: behold,
the word of the LORD is unto them a reproach; they have no delight in
it.

6:11 Therefore I am full of the fury of the LORD; I am weary with
holding in: I will pour it out upon the children abroad, and upon the
assembly of young men together: for even the husband with the wife
shall be taken, the aged with him that is full of days.

6:12 And their houses shall be turned unto others, with their fields
and wives together: for I will stretch out my hand upon the
inhabitants of the land, saith the LORD.

6:13 For from the least of them even unto the greatest of them every
one is given to covetousness; and from the prophet even unto the
priest every one dealeth falsely.

6:14 They have healed also the hurt of the daughter of my people
slightly, saying, Peace, peace; when there is no peace.

6:15 Were they ashamed when they had committed abomination? nay, they
were not at all ashamed, neither could they blush: therefore they
shall fall among them that fall: at the time that I visit them they
shall be cast down, saith the LORD.

6:16 Thus saith the LORD, Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for
the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall
find rest for your souls. But they said, We will not walk therein.

6:17 Also I set watchmen over you, saying, Hearken to the sound of the
trumpet. But they said, We will not hearken.

6:18 Therefore hear, ye nations, and know, O congregation, what is
among them.

6:19 Hear, O earth: behold, I will bring evil upon this people, even
the fruit of their thoughts, because they have not hearkened unto my
words, nor to my law, but rejected it.

6:20 To what purpose cometh there to me incense from Sheba, and the
sweet cane from a far country? your burnt offerings are not
acceptable, nor your sacrifices sweet unto me.

6:21 Therefore thus saith the LORD, Behold, I will lay stumblingblocks
before this people, and the fathers and the sons together shall fall
upon them; the neighbour and his friend shall perish.

6:22 Thus saith the LORD, Behold, a people cometh from the north
country, and a great nation shall be raised from the sides of the
earth.

6:23 They shall lay hold on bow and spear; they are cruel, and have no
mercy; their voice roareth like the sea; and they ride upon horses,
set in array as men for war against thee, O daughter of Zion.

6:24 We have heard the fame thereof: our hands wax feeble: anguish
hath taken hold of us, and pain, as of a woman in travail.

6:25 Go not forth into the field, nor walk by the way; for the sword
of the enemy and fear is on every side.

6:26 O daughter of my people, gird thee with sackcloth, and wallow
thyself in ashes: make thee mourning, as for an only son, most bitter
lamentation: for the spoiler shall suddenly come upon us.

6:27 I have set thee for a tower and a fortress among my people, that
thou mayest know and try their way.

6:28 They are all grievous revolters, walking with slanders: they are
brass and iron; they are all corrupters.

6:29 The bellows are burned, the lead is consumed of the fire; the
founder melteth in vain: for the wicked are not plucked away.

6:30 Reprobate silver shall men call them, because the LORD hath
rejected them.

7:1 The word that came to Jeremiah from the LORD, saying, 7:2 Stand in
the gate of the LORD's house, and proclaim there this word, and say,
Hear the word of the LORD, all ye of Judah, that enter in at these
gates to worship the LORD.

7:3 Thus saith the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, Amend your ways
and your doings, and I will cause you to dwell in this place.

7:4 Trust ye not in lying words, saying, The temple of the LORD, The
temple of the LORD, The temple of the LORD, are these.

7:5 For if ye throughly amend your ways and your doings; if ye
throughly execute judgment between a man and his neighbour; 7:6 If ye
oppress not the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow, and shed not
innocent blood in this place, neither walk after other gods to your
hurt: 7:7 Then will I cause you to dwell in this place, in the land
that I gave to your fathers, for ever and ever.

7:8 Behold, ye trust in lying words, that cannot profit.

7:9 Will ye steal, murder, and commit adultery, and swear falsely, and
burn incense unto Baal, and walk after other gods whom ye know not;
7:10 And come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my
name, and say, We are delivered to do all these abominations?  7:11 Is
this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in
your eyes? Behold, even I have seen it, saith the LORD.

7:12 But go ye now unto my place which was in Shiloh, where I set my
name at the first, and see what I did to it for the wickedness of my
people Israel.

7:13 And now, because ye have done all these works, saith the LORD,
and I spake unto you, rising up early and speaking, but ye heard not;
and I called you, but ye answered not; 7:14 Therefore will I do unto
this house, which is called by my name, wherein ye trust, and unto the
place which I gave to you and to your fathers, as I have done to
Shiloh.

7:15 And I will cast you out of my sight, as I have cast out all your
brethren, even the whole seed of Ephraim.

7:16 Therefore pray not thou for this people, neither lift up cry nor
prayer for them, neither make intercession to me: for I will not hear
thee.

7:17 Seest thou not what they do in the cities of Judah and in the
streets of Jerusalem?  7:18 The children gather wood, and the fathers
kindle the fire, and the women knead their dough, to make cakes to the
queen of heaven, and to pour out drink offerings unto other gods, that
they may provoke me to anger.

7:19 Do they provoke me to anger? saith the LORD: do they not provoke
themselves to the confusion of their own faces?  7:20 Therefore thus
saith the Lord GOD; Behold, mine anger and my fury shall be poured out
upon this place, upon man, and upon beast, and upon the trees of the
field, and upon the fruit of the ground; and it shall burn, and shall
not be quenched.

7:21 Thus saith the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel; Put your burnt
offerings unto your sacrifices, and eat flesh.

7:22 For I spake not unto your fathers, nor commanded them in the day
that I brought them out of the land of Egypt, concerning burnt
offerings or sacrifices: 7:23 But this thing commanded I them, saying,
Obey my voice, and I will be your God, and ye shall be my people: and
walk ye in all the ways that I have commanded you, that it may be well
unto you.

7:24 But they hearkened not, nor inclined their ear, but walked in the
counsels and in the imagination of their evil heart, and went
backward, and not forward.

7:25 Since the day that your fathers came forth out of the land of
Egypt unto this day I have even sent unto you all my servants the
prophets, daily rising up early and sending them: 7:26 Yet they
hearkened not unto me, nor inclined their ear, but hardened their
neck: they did worse than their fathers.

7:27 Therefore thou shalt speak all these words unto them; but they
will not hearken to thee: thou shalt also call unto them; but they
will not answer thee.

7:28 But thou shalt say unto them, This is a nation that obeyeth not
the voice of the LORD their God, nor receiveth correction: truth is
perished, and is cut off from their mouth.

7:29 Cut off thine hair, O Jerusalem, and cast it away, and take up a
lamentation on high places; for the LORD hath rejected and forsaken
the generation of his wrath.

7:30 For the children of Judah have done evil in my sight, saith the
LORD: they have set their abominations in the house which is called by
my name, to pollute it.

7:31 And they have built the high places of Tophet, which is in the
valley of the son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in
the fire; which I commanded them not, neither came it into my heart.

7:32 Therefore, behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that it shall
no more be called Tophet, nor the valley of the son of Hinnom, but the
valley of slaughter: for they shall bury in Tophet, till there be no
place.

7:33 And the carcases of this people shall be meat for the fowls of
the heaven, and for the beasts of the earth; and none shall fray them
away.

7:34 Then will I cause to cease from the cities of Judah, and from the
streets of Jerusalem, the voice of mirth, and the voice of gladness,
the voice of the bridegroom, and the voice of the bride: for the land
shall be desolate.

8:1 At that time, saith the LORD, they shall bring out the bones of
the kings of Judah, and the bones of his princes, and the bones of the
priests, and the bones of the prophets, and the bones of the
inhabitants of Jerusalem, out of their graves: 8:2 And they shall
spread them before the sun, and the moon, and all the host of heaven,
whom they have loved, and whom they have served, and after whom they
have walked, and whom they have sought, and whom they have worshipped:
they shall not be gathered, nor be buried; they shall be for dung upon
the face of the earth.

8:3 And death shall be chosen rather than life by all the residue of
them that remain of this evil family, which remain in all the places
whither I have driven them, saith the LORD of hosts.

8:4 Moreover thou shalt say unto them, Thus saith the LORD; Shall they
fall, and not arise? shall he turn away, and not return?  8:5 Why then
is this people of Jerusalem slidden back by a perpetual backsliding?
they hold fast deceit, they refuse to return.

8:6 I hearkened and heard, but they spake not aright: no man repented
him of his wickedness, saying, What have I done? every one turned to
his course, as the horse rusheth into the battle.

8:7 Yea, the stork in the heaven knoweth her appointed times; and the
turtle and the crane and the swallow observe the time of their coming;
but my people know not the judgment of the LORD.

8:8 How do ye say, We are wise, and the law of the LORD is with us?
Lo, certainly in vain made he it; the pen of the scribes is in vain.

8:9 The wise men are ashamed, they are dismayed and taken: lo, they
have rejected the word of the LORD; and what wisdom is in them?  8:10
Therefore will I give their wives unto others, and their fields to
them that shall inherit them: for every one from the least even unto
the greatest is given to covetousness, from the prophet even unto the
priest every one dealeth falsely.

8:11 For they have healed the hurt of the daughter of my people
slightly, saying, Peace, peace; when there is no peace.

8:12 Were they ashamed when they had committed abomination? nay, they
were not at all ashamed, neither could they blush: therefore shall
they fall among them that fall: in the time of their visitation they
shall be cast down, saith the LORD.

8:13 I will surely consume them, saith the LORD: there shall be no
grapes on the vine, nor figs on the fig tree, and the leaf shall fade;
and the things that I have given them shall pass away from them.

8:14 Why do we sit still? assemble yourselves, and let us enter into
the defenced cities, and let us be silent there: for the LORD our God
hath put us to silence, and given us water of gall to drink, because
we have sinned against the LORD.

8:15 We looked for peace, but no good came; and for a time of health,
and behold trouble!  8:16 The snorting of his horses was heard from
Dan: the whole land trembled at the sound of the neighing of his
strong ones; for they are come, and have devoured the land, and all
that is in it; the city, and those that dwell therein.

8:17 For, behold, I will send serpents, cockatrices, among you, which
will not be charmed, and they shall bite you, saith the LORD.

8:18 When I would comfort myself against sorrow, my heart is faint in
me.

8:19 Behold the voice of the cry of the daughter of my people because
of them that dwell in a far country: Is not the LORD in Zion? is not
her king in her? Why have they provoked me to anger with their graven
images, and with strange vanities?  8:20 The harvest is past, the
summer is ended, and we are not saved.

8:21 For the hurt of the daughter of my people am I hurt; I am black;
astonishment hath taken hold on me.

8:22 Is there no balm in Gilead; is there no physician there? why then
is not the health of the daughter of my people recovered?  9:1 Oh that
my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might
weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people!  9:2 Oh
that I had in the wilderness a lodging place of wayfaring men; that I
might leave my people, and go from them! for they be all adulterers,
an assembly of treacherous men.

9:3 And they bend their tongues like their bow for lies: but they are
not valiant for the truth upon the earth; for they proceed from evil
to evil, and they know not me, saith the LORD.

9:4 Take ye heed every one of his neighbour, and trust ye not in any
brother: for every brother will utterly supplant, and every neighbour
will walk with slanders.

9:5 And they will deceive every one his neighbour, and will not speak
the truth: they have taught their tongue to speak lies, and weary
themselves to commit iniquity.

9:6 Thine habitation is in the midst of deceit; through deceit they
refuse to know me, saith the LORD.

9:7 Therefore thus saith the LORD of hosts, Behold, I will melt them,
and try them; for how shall I do for the daughter of my people?  9:8
Their tongue is as an arrow shot out; it speaketh deceit: one speaketh
peaceably to his neighbour with his mouth, but in heart he layeth his
wait.

9:9 Shall I not visit them for these things? saith the LORD: shall not
my soul be avenged on such a nation as this?  9:10 For the mountains
will I take up a weeping and wailing, and for the habitations of the
wilderness a lamentation, because they are burned up, so that none can
pass through them; neither can men hear the voice of the cattle; both
the fowl of the heavens and the beast are fled; they are gone.

9:11 And I will make Jerusalem heaps, and a den of dragons; and I will
make the cities of Judah desolate, without an inhabitant.

9:12 Who is the wise man, that may understand this? and who is he to
whom the mouth of the LORD hath spoken, that he may declare it, for
what the land perisheth and is burned up like a wilderness, that none
passeth through?  9:13 And the LORD saith, Because they have forsaken
my law which I set before them, and have not obeyed my voice, neither
walked therein; 9:14 But have walked after the imagination of their
own heart, and after Baalim, which their fathers taught them: 9:15
Therefore thus saith the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel; Behold, I
will feed them, even this people, with wormwood, and give them water
of gall to drink.

9:16 I will scatter them also among the heathen, whom neither they nor
their fathers have known: and I will send a sword after them, till I
have consumed them.

9:17 Thus saith the LORD of hosts, Consider ye, and call for the
mourning women, that they may come; and send for cunning women, that
they may come: 9:18 And let them make haste, and take up a wailing for
us, that our eyes may run down with tears, and our eyelids gush out
with waters.

9:19 For a voice of wailing is heard out of Zion, How are we spoiled!
we are greatly confounded, because we have forsaken the land, because
our dwellings have cast us out.

9:20 Yet hear the word of the LORD, O ye women, and let your ear
receive the word of his mouth, and teach your daughters wailing, and
every one her neighbour lamentation.

9:21 For death is come up into our windows, and is entered into our
palaces, to cut off the children from without, and the young men from
the streets.

9:22 Speak, Thus saith the LORD, Even the carcases of men shall fall
as dung upon the open field, and as the handful after the harvestman,
and none shall gather them.

9:23 Thus saith the LORD, Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom,
neither let the mighty man glory in his might, let not the rich man
glory in his riches: 9:24 But let him that glorieth glory in this,
that he understandeth and knoweth me, that I am the LORD which
exercise lovingkindness, judgment, and righteousness, in the earth:
for in these things I delight, saith the LORD.

9:25 Behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will punish all
them which are circumcised with the uncircumcised; 9:26 Egypt, and
Judah, and Edom, and the children of Ammon, and Moab, and all that are
in the utmost corners, that dwell in the wilderness: for all these
nations are uncircumcised, and all the house of Israel are
uncircumcised in the heart.

10:1 Hear ye the word which the LORD speaketh unto you, O house of
Israel: 10:2 Thus saith the LORD, Learn not the way of the heathen,
and be not dismayed at the signs of heaven; for the heathen are
dismayed at them.

10:3 For the customs of the people are vain: for one cutteth a tree
out of the forest, the work of the hands of the workman, with the axe.

10:4 They deck it with silver and with gold; they fasten it with nails
and with hammers, that it move not.

10:5 They are upright as the palm tree, but speak not: they must needs
be borne, because they cannot go. Be not afraid of them; for they
cannot do evil, neither also is it in them to do good.

10:6 Forasmuch as there is none like unto thee, O LORD; thou art
great, and thy name is great in might.

10:7 Who would not fear thee, O King of nations? for to thee doth it
appertain: forasmuch as among all the wise men of the nations, and in
all their kingdoms, there is none like unto thee.

10:8 But they are altogether brutish and foolish: the stock is a
doctrine of vanities.

10:9 Silver spread into plates is brought from Tarshish, and gold from
Uphaz, the work of the workman, and of the hands of the founder: blue
and purple is their clothing: they are all the work of cunning men.

10:10 But the LORD is the true God, he is the living God, and an
everlasting king: at his wrath the earth shall tremble, and the
nations shall not be able to abide his indignation.

10:11 Thus shall ye say unto them, The gods that have not made the
heavens and the earth, even they shall perish from the earth, and from
under these heavens.

10:12 He hath made the earth by his power, he hath established the
world by his wisdom, and hath stretched out the heavens by his
discretion.

10:13 When he uttereth his voice, there is a multitude of waters in
the heavens, and he causeth the vapours to ascend from the ends of the
earth; he maketh lightnings with rain, and bringeth forth the wind out
of his treasures.

10:14 Every man is brutish in his knowledge: every founder is
confounded by the graven image: for his molten image is falsehood, and
there is no breath in them.

10:15 They are vanity, and the work of errors: in the time of their
visitation they shall perish.

10:16 The portion of Jacob is not like them: for he is the former of
all things; and Israel is the rod of his inheritance: The LORD of
hosts is his name.

10:17 Gather up thy wares out of the land, O inhabitant of the
fortress.

10:18 For thus saith the LORD, Behold, I will sling out the
inhabitants of the land at this once, and will distress them, that
they may find it so.

10:19 Woe is me for my hurt! my wound is grievous; but I said, Truly
this is a grief, and I must bear it.

10:20 My tabernacle is spoiled, and all my cords are broken: my
children are gone forth of me, and they are not: there is none to
stretch forth my tent any more, and to set up my curtains.

10:21 For the pastors are become brutish, and have not sought the
LORD: therefore they shall not prosper, and all their flocks shall be
scattered.

10:22 Behold, the noise of the bruit is come, and a great commotion
out of the north country, to make the cities of Judah desolate, and a
den of dragons.

10:23 O LORD, I know that the way of man is not in himself: it is not
in man that walketh to direct his steps.

10:24 O LORD, correct me, but with judgment; not in thine anger, lest
thou bring me to nothing.

10:25 Pour out thy fury upon the heathen that know thee not, and upon
the families that call not on thy name: for they have eaten up Jacob,
and devoured him, and consumed him, and have made his habitation
desolate.

11:1 The word that came to Jeremiah from the LORD saying, 11:2 Hear ye
the words of this covenant, and speak unto the men of Judah, and to
the inhabitants of Jerusalem; 11:3 And say thou unto them, Thus saith
the LORD God of Israel; Cursed be the man that obeyeth not the words
of this covenant, 11:4 Which I commanded your fathers in the day that
I brought them forth out of the land of Egypt, from the iron furnace,
saying, Obey my voice, and do them, according to all which I command
you: so shall ye be my people, and I will be your God: 11:5 That I may
perform the oath which I have sworn unto your fathers, to give them a
land flowing with milk and honey, as it is this day. Then answered I,
and said, So be it, O LORD.

11:6 Then the LORD said unto me, Proclaim all these words in the
cities of Judah, and in the streets of Jerusalem, saying, Hear ye the
words of this covenant, and do them.

11:7 For I earnestly protested unto your fathers in the day that I
brought them up out of the land of Egypt, even unto this day, rising
early and protesting, saying, Obey my voice.

11:8 Yet they obeyed not, nor inclined their ear, but walked every one
in the imagination of their evil heart: therefore I will bring upon
them all the words of this covenant, which I commanded them to do: but
they did them not.

11:9 And the LORD said unto me, A conspiracy is found among the men of
Judah, and among the inhabitants of Jerusalem.

11:10 They are turned back to the iniquities of their forefathers,
which refused to hear my words; and they went after other gods to
serve them: the house of Israel and the house of Judah have broken my
covenant which I made with their fathers.

11:11 Therefore thus saith the LORD, Behold, I will bring evil upon
them, which they shall not be able to escape; and though they shall
cry unto me, I will not hearken unto them.

11:12 Then shall the cities of Judah and inhabitants of Jerusalem go,
and cry unto the gods unto whom they offer incense: but they shall not
save them at all in the time of their trouble.

11:13 For according to the number of thy cities were thy gods, O
Judah; and according to the number of the streets of Jerusalem have ye
set up altars to that shameful thing, even altars to burn incense unto
Baal.

11:14 Therefore pray not thou for this people, neither lift up a cry
or prayer for them: for I will not hear them in the time that they cry
unto me for their trouble.

11:15 What hath my beloved to do in mine house, seeing she hath
wrought lewdness with many, and the holy flesh is passed from thee?
when thou doest evil, then thou rejoicest.

11:16 The LORD called thy name, A green olive tree, fair, and of
goodly fruit: with the noise of a great tumult he hath kindled fire
upon it, and the branches of it are broken.

11:17 For the LORD of hosts, that planted thee, hath pronounced evil
against thee, for the evil of the house of Israel and of the house of
Judah, which they have done against themselves to provoke me to anger
in offering incense unto Baal.

11:18 And the LORD hath given me knowledge of it, and I know it: then
thou shewedst me their doings.

11:19 But I was like a lamb or an ox that is brought to the slaughter;
and I knew not that they had devised devices against me, saying, Let
us destroy the tree with the fruit thereof, and let us cut him off
from the land of the living, that his name may be no more remembered.

11:20 But, O LORD of hosts, that judgest righteously, that triest the
reins and the heart, let me see thy vengeance on them: for unto thee
have I revealed my cause.

11:21 Therefore thus saith the LORD of the men of Anathoth, that seek
thy life, saying, Prophesy not in the name of the LORD, that thou die
not by our hand: 11:22 Therefore thus saith the LORD of hosts, Behold,
I will punish them: the young men shall die by the sword; their sons
and their daughters shall die by famine: 11:23 And there shall be no
remnant of them: for I will bring evil upon the men of Anathoth, even
the year of their visitation.

12:1 Righteous art thou, O LORD, when I plead with thee: yet let me
talk with thee of thy judgments: Wherefore doth the way of the wicked
prosper?  wherefore are all they happy that deal very treacherously?
12:2 Thou hast planted them, yea, they have taken root: they grow,
yea, they bring forth fruit: thou art near in their mouth, and far
from their reins.

12:3 But thou, O LORD, knowest me: thou hast seen me, and tried mine
heart toward thee: pull them out like sheep for the slaughter, and
prepare them for the day of slaughter.

12:4 How long shall the land mourn, and the herbs of every field
wither, for the wickedness of them that dwell therein? the beasts are
consumed, and the birds; because they said, He shall not see our last
end.

12:5 If thou hast run with the footmen, and they have wearied thee,
then how canst thou contend with horses? and if in the land of peace,
wherein thou trustedst, they wearied thee, then how wilt thou do in
the swelling of Jordan?  12:6 For even thy brethren, and the house of
thy father, even they have dealt treacherously with thee; yea, they
have called a multitude after thee: believe them not, though they
speak fair words unto thee.

12:7 I have forsaken mine house, I have left mine heritage; I have
given the dearly beloved of my soul into the hand of her enemies.

12:8 Mine heritage is unto me as a lion in the forest; it crieth out
against me: therefore have I hated it.

12:9 Mine heritage is unto me as a speckled bird, the birds round
about are against her; come ye, assemble all the beasts of the field,
come to devour.

12:10 Many pastors have destroyed my vineyard, they have trodden my
portion under foot, they have made my pleasant portion a desolate
wilderness.

12:11 They have made it desolate, and being desolate it mourneth unto
me; the whole land is made desolate, because no man layeth it to
heart.

12:12 The spoilers are come upon all high places through the
wilderness: for the sword of the LORD shall devour from the one end of
the land even to the other end of the land: no flesh shall have peace.

12:13 They have sown wheat, but shall reap thorns: they have put
themselves to pain, but shall not profit: and they shall be ashamed of
your revenues because of the fierce anger of the LORD.

12:14 Thus saith the LORD against all mine evil neighbours, that touch
the inheritance which I have caused my people Israel to inherit;
Behold, I will pluck them out of their land, and pluck out the house
of Judah from among them.

12:15 And it shall come to pass, after that I have plucked them out I
will return, and have compassion on them, and will bring them again,
every man to his heritage, and every man to his land.

12:16 And it shall come to pass, if they will diligently learn the
ways of my people, to swear by my name, The LORD liveth; as they
taught my people to swear by Baal; then shall they be built in the
midst of my people.

12:17 But if they will not obey, I will utterly pluck up and destroy
that nation, saith the LORD.

13:1 Thus saith the LORD unto me, Go and get thee a linen girdle, and
put it upon thy loins, and put it not in water.

13:2 So I got a girdle according to the word of the LORD, and put it
on my loins.

13:3 And the word of the LORD came unto me the second time, saying,
13:4 Take the girdle that thou hast got, which is upon thy loins, and
arise, go to Euphrates, and hide it there in a hole of the rock.

13:5 So I went, and hid it by Euphrates, as the LORD commanded me.

13:6 And it came to pass after many days, that the LORD said unto me,
Arise, go to Euphrates, and take the girdle from thence, which I
commanded thee to hide there.

13:7 Then I went to Euphrates, and digged, and took the girdle from
the place where I had hid it: and, behold, the girdle was marred, it
was profitable for nothing.

13:8 Then the word of the LORD came unto me, saying, 13:9 Thus saith
the LORD, After this manner will I mar the pride of Judah, and the
great pride of Jerusalem.

13:10 This evil people, which refuse to hear my words, which walk in
the imagination of their heart, and walk after other gods, to serve
them, and to worship them, shall even be as this girdle, which is good
for nothing.

13:11 For as the girdle cleaveth to the loins of a man, so have I
caused to cleave unto me the whole house of Israel and the whole house
of Judah, saith the LORD; that they might be unto me for a people, and
for a name, and for a praise, and for a glory: but they would not
hear.

13:12 Therefore thou shalt speak unto them this word; Thus saith the
LORD God of Israel, Every bottle shall be filled with wine: and they
shall say unto thee, Do we not certainly know that every bottle shall
be filled with wine?  13:13 Then shalt thou say unto them, Thus saith
the LORD, Behold, I will fill all the inhabitants of this land, even
the kings that sit upon David's throne, and the priests, and the
prophets, and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem, with drunkenness.

13:14 And I will dash them one against another, even the fathers and
the sons together, saith the LORD: I will not pity, nor spare, nor
have mercy, but destroy them.

13:15 Hear ye, and give ear; be not proud: for the LORD hath spoken.

13:16 Give glory to the LORD your God, before he cause darkness, and
before your feet stumble upon the dark mountains, and, while ye look
for light, he turn it into the shadow of death, and make it gross
darkness.

13:17 But if ye will not hear it, my soul shall weep in secret places
for your pride; and mine eye shall weep sore, and run down with tears,
because the LORD's flock is carried away captive.

13:18 Say unto the king and to the queen, Humble yourselves, sit down:
for your principalities shall come down, even the crown of your glory.

13:19 The cities of the south shall be shut up, and none shall open
them: Judah shall be carried away captive all of it, it shall be
wholly carried away captive.

13:20 Lift up your eyes, and behold them that come from the north:
where is the flock that was given thee, thy beautiful flock?  13:21
What wilt thou say when he shall punish thee? for thou hast taught
them to be captains, and as chief over thee: shall not sorrows take
thee, as a woman in travail?  13:22 And if thou say in thine heart,
Wherefore come these things upon me?  For the greatness of thine
iniquity are thy skirts discovered, and thy heels made bare.

13:23 Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots?
then may ye also do good, that are accustomed to do evil.

13:24 Therefore will I scatter them as the stubble that passeth away
by the wind of the wilderness.

13:25 This is thy lot, the portion of thy measures from me, saith the
LORD; because thou hast forgotten me, and trusted in falsehood.

13:26 Therefore will I discover thy skirts upon thy face, that thy
shame may appear.

13:27 I have seen thine adulteries, and thy neighings, the lewdness of
thy whoredom, and thine abominations on the hills in the fields. Woe
unto thee, O Jerusalem! wilt thou not be made clean? when shall it
once be?  14:1 The word of the LORD that came to Jeremiah concerning
the dearth.

14:2 Judah mourneth, and the gates thereof languish; they are black
unto the ground; and the cry of Jerusalem is gone up.

14:3 And their nobles have sent their little ones to the waters: they
came to the pits, and found no water; they returned with their vessels
empty; they were ashamed and confounded, and covered their heads.

14:4 Because the ground is chapt, for there was no rain in the earth,
the plowmen were ashamed, they covered their heads.

14:5 Yea, the hind also calved in the field, and forsook it, because
there was no grass.

14:6 And the wild asses did stand in the high places, they snuffed up
the wind like dragons; their eyes did fail, because there was no
grass.

14:7 O LORD, though our iniquities testify against us, do thou it for
thy name's sake: for our backslidings are many; we have sinned against
thee.

14:8 O the hope of Israel, the saviour thereof in time of trouble, why
shouldest thou be as a stranger in the land, and as a wayfaring man
that turneth aside to tarry for a night?  14:9 Why shouldest thou be
as a man astonied, as a mighty man that cannot save? yet thou, O LORD,
art in the midst of us, and we are called by thy name; leave us not.

14:10 Thus saith the LORD unto this people, Thus have they loved to
wander, they have not refrained their feet, therefore the LORD doth
not accept them; he will now remember their iniquity, and visit their
sins.

14:11 Then said the LORD unto me, Pray not for this people for their
good.

14:12 When they fast, I will not hear their cry; and when they offer
burnt offering and an oblation, I will not accept them: but I will
consume them by the sword, and by the famine, and by the pestilence.

14:13 Then said I, Ah, Lord GOD! behold, the prophets say unto them,
Ye shall not see the sword, neither shall ye have famine; but I will
give you assured peace in this place.

14:14 Then the LORD said unto me, The prophets prophesy lies in my
name: I sent them not, neither have I commanded them, neither spake
unto them: they prophesy unto you a false vision and divination, and a
thing of nought, and the deceit of their heart.

14:15 Therefore thus saith the LORD concerning the prophets that
prophesy in my name, and I sent them not, yet they say, Sword and
famine shall not be in this land; By sword and famine shall those
prophets be consumed.

14:16 And the people to whom they prophesy shall be cast out in the
streets of Jerusalem because of the famine and the sword; and they
shall have none to bury them, them, their wives, nor their sons, nor
their daughters: for I will pour their wickedness upon them.

14:17 Therefore thou shalt say this word unto them; Let mine eyes run
down with tears night and day, and let them not cease: for the virgin
daughter of my people is broken with a great breach, with a very
grievous blow.

14:18 If I go forth into the field, then behold the slain with the
sword!  and if I enter into the city, then behold them that are sick
with famine!  yea, both the prophet and the priest go about into a
land that they know not.

14:19 Hast thou utterly rejected Judah? hath thy soul lothed Zion? why
hast thou smitten us, and there is no healing for us? we looked for
peace, and there is no good; and for the time of healing, and behold
trouble!  14:20 We acknowledge, O LORD, our wickedness, and the
iniquity of our fathers: for we have sinned against thee.

14:21 Do not abhor us, for thy name's sake, do not disgrace the throne
of thy glory: remember, break not thy covenant with us.

14:22 Are there any among the vanities of the Gentiles that can cause
rain? or can the heavens give showers? art not thou he, O LORD our
God?  therefore we will wait upon thee: for thou hast made all these
things.

15:1 Then said the LORD unto me, Though Moses and Samuel stood before
me, yet my mind could not be toward this people: cast them out of my
sight, and let them go forth.

15:2 And it shall come to pass, if they say unto thee, Whither shall
we go forth? then thou shalt tell them, Thus saith the LORD; Such as
are for death, to death; and such as are for the sword, to the sword;
and such as are for the famine, to the famine; and such as are for the
captivity, to the captivity.

15:3 And I will appoint over them four kinds, saith the LORD: the
sword to slay, and the dogs to tear, and the fowls of the heaven, and
the beasts of the earth, to devour and destroy.

15:4 And I will cause them to be removed into all kingdoms of the
earth, because of Manasseh the son of Hezekiah king of Judah, for that
which he did in Jerusalem.

15:5 For who shall have pity upon thee, O Jerusalem? or who shall
bemoan thee? or who shall go aside to ask how thou doest?  15:6 Thou
hast forsaken me, saith the LORD, thou art gone backward: therefore
will I stretch out my hand against thee, and destroy thee; I am weary
with repenting.

15:7 And I will fan them with a fan in the gates of the land; I will
bereave them of children, I will destroy my people since they return
not from their ways.

15:8 Their widows are increased to me above the sand of the seas: I
have brought upon them against the mother of the young men a spoiler
at noonday: I have caused him to fall upon it suddenly, and terrors
upon the city.

15:9 She that hath borne seven languisheth: she hath given up the
ghost; her sun is gone down while it was yet day: she hath been
ashamed and confounded: and the residue of them will I deliver to the
sword before their enemies, saith the LORD.

15:10 Woe is me, my mother, that thou hast borne me a man of strife
and a man of contention to the whole earth! I have neither lent on
usury, nor men have lent to me on usury; yet every one of them doth
curse me.

15:11 The LORD said, Verily it shall be well with thy remnant; verily
I will cause the enemy to entreat thee well in the time of evil and in
the time of affliction.

15:12 Shall iron break the northern iron and the steel?  15:13 Thy
substance and thy treasures will I give to the spoil without price,
and that for all thy sins, even in all thy borders.

15:14 And I will make thee to pass with thine enemies into a land
which thou knowest not: for a fire is kindled in mine anger, which
shall burn upon you.

15:15 O LORD, thou knowest: remember me, and visit me, and revenge me
of my persecutors; take me not away in thy longsuffering: know that
for thy sake I have suffered rebuke.

15:16 Thy words were found, and I did eat them; and thy word was unto
me the joy and rejoicing of mine heart: for I am called by thy name, O
LORD God of hosts.

15:17 I sat not in the assembly of the mockers, nor rejoiced; I sat
alone because of thy hand: for thou hast filled me with indignation.

15:18 Why is my pain perpetual, and my wound incurable, which refuseth
to be healed? wilt thou be altogether unto me as a liar, and as waters
that fail?  15:19 Therefore thus saith the LORD, If thou return, then
will I bring thee again, and thou shalt stand before me: and if thou
take forth the precious from the vile, thou shalt be as my mouth: let
them return unto thee; but return not thou unto them.

15:20 And I will make thee unto this people a fenced brasen wall: and
they shall fight against thee, but they shall not prevail against
thee: for I am with thee to save thee and to deliver thee, saith the
LORD.

15:21 And I will deliver thee out of the hand of the wicked, and I
will redeem thee out of the hand of the terrible.

16:1 The word of the LORD came also unto me, saying, 16:2 Thou shalt
not take thee a wife, neither shalt thou have sons or daughters in
this place.

16:3 For thus saith the LORD concerning the sons and concerning the
daughters that are born in this place, and concerning their mothers
that bare them, and concerning their fathers that begat them in this
land; 16:4 They shall die of grievous deaths; they shall not be
lamented; neither shall they be buried; but they shall be as dung upon
the face of the earth: and they shall be consumed by the sword, and by
famine; and their carcases shall be meat for the fowls of heaven, and
for the beasts of the earth.

16:5 For thus saith the LORD, Enter not into the house of mourning,
neither go to lament nor bemoan them: for I have taken away my peace
from this people, saith the LORD, even lovingkindness and mercies.

16:6 Both the great and the small shall die in this land: they shall
not be buried, neither shall men lament for them, nor cut themselves,
nor make themselves bald for them: 16:7 Neither shall men tear
themselves for them in mourning, to comfort them for the dead; neither
shall men give them the cup of consolation to drink for their father
or for their mother.

16:8 Thou shalt not also go into the house of feasting, to sit with
them to eat and to drink.

16:9 For thus saith the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel; Behold, I
will cause to cease out of this place in your eyes, and in your days,
the voice of mirth, and the voice of gladness, the voice of the
bridegroom, and the voice of the bride.

16:10 And it shall come to pass, when thou shalt shew this people all
these words, and they shall say unto thee, Wherefore hath the LORD
pronounced all this great evil against us? or what is our iniquity? or
what is our sin that we have committed against the LORD our God?
16:11 Then shalt thou say unto them, Because your fathers have
forsaken me, saith the LORD, and have walked after other gods, and
have served them, and have worshipped them, and have forsaken me, and
have not kept my law; 16:12 And ye have done worse than your fathers;
for, behold, ye walk every one after the imagination of his evil
heart, that they may not hearken unto me: 16:13 Therefore will I cast
you out of this land into a land that ye know not, neither ye nor your
fathers; and there shall ye serve other gods day and night; where I
will not shew you favour.

16:14 Therefore, behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that it shall
no more be said, The LORD liveth, that brought up the children of
Israel out of the land of Egypt; 16:15 But, The LORD liveth, that
brought up the children of Israel from the land of the north, and from
all the lands whither he had driven them: and I will bring them again
into their land that I gave unto their fathers.

16:16 Behold, I will send for many fishers, saith the LORD, and they
shall fish them; and after will I send for many hunters, and they
shall hunt them from every mountain, and from every hill, and out of
the holes of the rocks.

16:17 For mine eyes are upon all their ways: they are not hid from my
face, neither is their iniquity hid from mine eyes.

16:18 And first I will recompense their iniquity and their sin double;
because they have defiled my land, they have filled mine inheritance
with the carcases of their detestable and abominable things.

16:19 O LORD, my strength, and my fortress, and my refuge in the day
of affliction, the Gentiles shall come unto thee from the ends of the
earth, and shall say, Surely our fathers have inherited lies, vanity,
and things wherein there is no profit.

16:20 Shall a man make gods unto himself, and they are no gods?  16:21
Therefore, behold, I will this once cause them to know, I will cause
them to know mine hand and my might; and they shall know that my name
is The LORD.

17:1 The sin of Judah is written with a pen of iron, and with the
point of a diamond: it is graven upon the table of their heart, and
upon the horns of your altars; 17:2 Whilst their children remember
their altars and their groves by the green trees upon the high hills.

17:3 O my mountain in the field, I will give thy substance and all thy
treasures to the spoil, and thy high places for sin, throughout all
thy borders.

17:4 And thou, even thyself, shalt discontinue from thine heritage
that I gave thee; and I will cause thee to serve thine enemies in the
land which thou knowest not: for ye have kindled a fire in mine anger,
which shall burn for ever.

17:5 Thus saith the LORD; Cursed be the man that trusteth in man, and
maketh flesh his arm, and whose heart departeth from the LORD.

17:6 For he shall be like the heath in the desert, and shall not see
when good cometh; but shall inhabit the parched places in the
wilderness, in a salt land and not inhabited.

17:7 Blessed is the man that trusteth in the LORD, and whose hope the
LORD is.

17:8 For he shall be as a tree planted by the waters, and that
spreadeth out her roots by the river, and shall not see when heat
cometh, but her leaf shall be green; and shall not be careful in the
year of drought, neither shall cease from yielding fruit.

17:9 The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked:
who can know it?  17:10 I the LORD search the heart, I try the reins,
even to give every man according to his ways, and according to the
fruit of his doings.

17:11 As the partridge sitteth on eggs, and hatcheth them not; so he
that getteth riches, and not by right, shall leave them in the midst
of his days, and at his end shall be a fool.

17:12 A glorious high throne from the beginning is the place of our
sanctuary.

17:13 O LORD, the hope of Israel, all that forsake thee shall be
ashamed, and they that depart from me shall be written in the earth,
because they have forsaken the LORD, the fountain of living waters.

17:14 Heal me, O LORD, and I shall be healed; save me, and I shall be
saved: for thou art my praise.

17:15 Behold, they say unto me, Where is the word of the LORD? let it
come now.

17:16 As for me, I have not hastened from being a pastor to follow
thee: neither have I desired the woeful day; thou knowest: that which
came out of my lips was right before thee.

17:17 Be not a terror unto me: thou art my hope in the day of evil.

17:18 Let them be confounded that persecute me, but let not me be
confounded: let them be dismayed, but let not me be dismayed: bring
upon them the day of evil, and destroy them with double destruction.

17:19 Thus said the LORD unto me; Go and stand in the gate of the
children of the people, whereby the kings of Judah come in, and by the
which they go out, and in all the gates of Jerusalem; 17:20 And say
unto them, Hear ye the word of the LORD, ye kings of Judah, and all
Judah, and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem, that enter in by these
gates: 17:21 Thus saith the LORD; Take heed to yourselves, and bear no
burden on the sabbath day, nor bring it in by the gates of Jerusalem;
17:22 Neither carry forth a burden out of your houses on the sabbath
day, neither do ye any work, but hallow ye the sabbath day, as I
commanded your fathers.

17:23 But they obeyed not, neither inclined their ear, but made their
neck stiff, that they might not hear, nor receive instruction.

17:24 And it shall come to pass, if ye diligently hearken unto me,
saith the LORD, to bring in no burden through the gates of this city
on the sabbath day, but hallow the sabbath day, to do no work therein;
17:25 Then shall there enter into the gates of this city kings and
princes sitting upon the throne of David, riding in chariots and on
horses, they, and their princes, the men of Judah, and the inhabitants
of Jerusalem: and this city shall remain for ever.

17:26 And they shall come from the cities of Judah, and from the
places about Jerusalem, and from the land of Benjamin, and from the
plain, and from the mountains, and from the south, bringing burnt
offerings, and sacrifices, and meat offerings, and incense, and
bringing sacrifices of praise, unto the house of the LORD.

17:27 But if ye will not hearken unto me to hallow the sabbath day,
and not to bear a burden, even entering in at the gates of Jerusalem
on the sabbath day; then will I kindle a fire in the gates thereof,
and it shall devour the palaces of Jerusalem, and it shall not be
quenched.

18:1 The word which came to Jeremiah from the LORD, saying, 18:2
Arise, and go down to the potter's house, and there I will cause thee
to hear my words.

18:3 Then I went down to the potter's house, and, behold, he wrought a
work on the wheels.

18:4 And the vessel that he made of clay was marred in the hand of the
potter: so he made it again another vessel, as seemed good to the
potter to make it.

18:5 Then the word of the LORD came to me, saying, 18:6 O house of
Israel, cannot I do with you as this potter? saith the LORD. Behold,
as the clay is in the potter's hand, so are ye in mine hand, O house
of Israel.

18:7 At what instant I shall speak concerning a nation, and concerning
a kingdom, to pluck up, and to pull down, and to destroy it; 18:8 If
that nation, against whom I have pronounced, turn from their evil, I
will repent of the evil that I thought to do unto them.

18:9 And at what instant I shall speak concerning a nation, and
concerning a kingdom, to build and to plant it; 18:10 If it do evil in
my sight, that it obey not my voice, then I will repent of the good,
wherewith I said I would benefit them.

18:11 Now therefore go to, speak to the men of Judah, and to the
inhabitants of Jerusalem, saying, Thus saith the LORD; Behold, I frame
evil against you, and devise a device against you: return ye now every
one from his evil way, and make your ways and your doings good.

18:12 And they said, There is no hope: but we will walk after our own
devices, and we will every one do the imagination of his evil heart.

18:13 Therefore thus saith the LORD; Ask ye now among the heathen, who
hath heard such things: the virgin of Israel hath done a very horrible
thing.

18:14 Will a man leave the snow of Lebanon which cometh from the rock
of the field? or shall the cold flowing waters that come from another
place be forsaken?  18:15 Because my people hath forgotten me, they
have burned incense to vanity, and they have caused them to stumble in
their ways from the ancient paths, to walk in paths, in a way not cast
up; 18:16 To make their land desolate, and a perpetual hissing; every
one that passeth thereby shall be astonished, and wag his head.

18:17 I will scatter them as with an east wind before the enemy; I
will shew them the back, and not the face, in the day of their
calamity.

18:18 Then said they, Come and let us devise devices against Jeremiah;
for the law shall not perish from the priest, nor counsel from the
wise, nor the word from the prophet. Come, and let us smite him with
the tongue, and let us not give heed to any of his words.

18:19 Give heed to me, O LORD, and hearken to the voice of them that
contend with me.

18:20 Shall evil be recompensed for good? for they have digged a pit
for my soul. Remember that I stood before thee to speak good for them,
and to turn away thy wrath from them.

18:21 Therefore deliver up their children to the famine, and pour out
their blood by the force of the sword; and let their wives be bereaved
of their children, and be widows; and let their men be put to death;
let their young men be slain by the sword in battle.

18:22 Let a cry be heard from their houses, when thou shalt bring a
troop suddenly upon them: for they have digged a pit to take me, and
hid snares for my feet.

18:23 Yet, LORD, thou knowest all their counsel against me to slay me:
forgive not their iniquity, neither blot out their sin from thy sight,
but let them be overthrown before thee; deal thus with them in the
time of thine anger.

19:1 Thus saith the LORD, Go and get a potter's earthen bottle, and
take of the ancients of the people, and of the ancients of the
priests; 19:2 And go forth unto the valley of the son of Hinnom, which
is by the entry of the east gate, and proclaim there the words that I
shall tell thee, 19:3 And say, Hear ye the word of the LORD, O kings
of Judah, and inhabitants of Jerusalem; Thus saith the LORD of hosts,
the God of Israel; Behold, I will bring evil upon this place, the
which whosoever heareth, his ears shall tingle.

19:4 Because they have forsaken me, and have estranged this place, and
have burned incense in it unto other gods, whom neither they nor their
fathers have known, nor the kings of Judah, and have filled this place
with the blood of innocents; 19:5 They have built also the high places
of Baal, to burn their sons with fire for burnt offerings unto Baal,
which I commanded not, nor spake it, neither came it into my mind:
19:6 Therefore, behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that this place
shall no more be called Tophet, nor The valley of the son of Hinnom,
but The valley of slaughter.

19:7 And I will make void the counsel of Judah and Jerusalem in this
place; and I will cause them to fall by the sword before their
enemies, and by the hands of them that seek their lives: and their
carcases will I give to be meat for the fowls of the heaven, and for
the beasts of the earth.

19:8 And I will make this city desolate, and an hissing; every one
that passeth thereby shall be astonished and hiss because of all the
plagues thereof.

19:9 And I will cause them to eat the flesh of their sons and the
flesh of their daughters, and they shall eat every one the flesh of
his friend in the siege and straitness, wherewith their enemies, and
they that seek their lives, shall straiten them.

19:10 Then shalt thou break the bottle in the sight of the men that go
with thee, 19:11 And shalt say unto them, Thus saith the LORD of
hosts; Even so will I break this people and this city, as one breaketh
a potter's vessel, that cannot be made whole again: and they shall
bury them in Tophet, till there be no place to bury.

19:12 Thus will I do unto this place, saith the LORD, and to the
inhabitants thereof, and even make this city as Tophet: 19:13 And the
houses of Jerusalem, and the houses of the kings of Judah, shall be
defiled as the place of Tophet, because of all the houses upon whose
roofs they have burned incense unto all the host of heaven, and have
poured out drink offerings unto other gods.

19:14 Then came Jeremiah from Tophet, whither the LORD had sent him to
prophesy; and he stood in the court of the LORD's house; and said to
all the people, 19:15 Thus saith the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel;
Behold, I will bring upon this city and upon all her towns all the
evil that I have pronounced against it, because they have hardened
their necks, that they might not hear my words.

20:1 Now Pashur the son of Immer the priest, who was also chief
governor in the house of the LORD, heard that Jeremiah prophesied
these things.

20:2 Then Pashur smote Jeremiah the prophet, and put him in the stocks
that were in the high gate of Benjamin, which was by the house of the
LORD.

20:3 And it came to pass on the morrow, that Pashur brought forth
Jeremiah out of the stocks. Then said Jeremiah unto him, The LORD hath
not called thy name Pashur, but Magormissabib.

20:4 For thus saith the LORD, Behold, I will make thee a terror to
thyself, and to all thy friends: and they shall fall by the sword of
their enemies, and thine eyes shall behold it: and I will give all
Judah into the hand of the king of Babylon, and he shall carry them
captive into Babylon, and shall slay them with the sword.

20:5 Moreover I will deliver all the strength of this city, and all
the labours thereof, and all the precious things thereof, and all the
treasures of the kings of Judah will I give into the hand of their
enemies, which shall spoil them, and take them, and carry them to
Babylon.

20:6 And thou, Pashur, and all that dwell in thine house shall go into
captivity: and thou shalt come to Babylon, and there thou shalt die,
and shalt be buried there, thou, and all thy friends, to whom thou
hast prophesied lies.

20:7 O LORD, thou hast deceived me, and I was deceived; thou art
stronger than I, and hast prevailed: I am in derision daily, every one
mocketh me.

20:8 For since I spake, I cried out, I cried violence and spoil;
because the word of the LORD was made a reproach unto me, and a
derision, daily.

20:9 Then I said, I will not make mention of him, nor speak any more
in his name. But his word was in mine heart as a burning fire shut up
in my bones, and I was weary with forbearing, and I could not stay.

20:10 For I heard the defaming of many, fear on every side. Report,
say they, and we will report it. All my familiars watched for my
halting, saying, Peradventure he will be enticed, and we shall prevail
against him, and we shall take our revenge on him.

20:11 But the LORD is with me as a mighty terrible one: therefore my
persecutors shall stumble, and they shall not prevail: they shall be
greatly ashamed; for they shall not prosper: their everlasting
confusion shall never be forgotten.

20:12 But, O LORD of hosts, that triest the righteous, and seest the
reins and the heart, let me see thy vengeance on them: for unto thee
have I opened my cause.

20:13 Sing unto the LORD, praise ye the LORD: for he hath delivered
the soul of the poor from the hand of evildoers.

20:14 Cursed be the day wherein I was born: let not the day wherein my
mother bare me be blessed.

20:15 Cursed be the man who brought tidings to my father, saying, A
man child is born unto thee; making him very glad.

20:16 And let that man be as the cities which the LORD overthrew, and
repented not: and let him hear the cry in the morning, and the
shouting at noontide; 20:17 Because he slew me not from the womb; or
that my mother might have been my grave, and her womb to be always
great with me.

20:18 Wherefore came I forth out of the womb to see labour and sorrow,
that my days should be consumed with shame?  21:1 The word which came
unto Jeremiah from the LORD, when king Zedekiah sent unto him Pashur
the son of Melchiah, and Zephaniah the son of Maaseiah the priest,
saying, 21:2 Enquire, I pray thee, of the LORD for us; for
Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon maketh war against us; if so be that
the LORD will deal with us according to all his wondrous works, that
he may go up from us.

21:3 Then said Jeremiah unto them, Thus shall ye say to Zedekiah: 21:4
Thus saith the LORD God of Israel; Behold, I will turn back the
weapons of war that are in your hands, wherewith ye fight against the
king of Babylon, and against the Chaldeans, which besiege you without
the walls, and I will assemble them into the midst of this city.

21:5 And I myself will fight against you with an outstretched hand and
with a strong arm, even in anger, and in fury, and in great wrath.

21:6 And I will smite the inhabitants of this city, both man and
beast: they shall die of a great pestilence.

21:7 And afterward, saith the LORD, I will deliver Zedekiah king of
Judah, and his servants, and the people, and such as are left in this
city from the pestilence, from the sword, and from the famine, into
the hand of Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon, and into the hand of their
enemies, and into the hand of those that seek their life: and he shall
smite them with the edge of the sword; he shall not spare them,
neither have pity, nor have mercy.

21:8 And unto this people thou shalt say, Thus saith the LORD; Behold,
I set before you the way of life, and the way of death.

21:9 He that abideth in this city shall die by the sword, and by the
famine, and by the pestilence: but he that goeth out, and falleth to
the Chaldeans that besiege you, he shall live, and his life shall be
unto him for a prey.

21:10 For I have set my face against this city for evil, and not for
good, saith the LORD: it shall be given into the hand of the king of
Babylon, and he shall burn it with fire.

21:11 And touching the house of the king of Judah, say, Hear ye the
word of the LORD; 21:12 O house of David, thus saith the LORD; Execute
judgment in the morning, and deliver him that is spoiled out of the
hand of the oppressor, lest my fury go out like fire, and burn that
none can quench it, because of the evil of your doings.

21:13 Behold, I am against thee, O inhabitant of the valley, and rock
of the plain, saith the LORD; which say, Who shall come down against
us? or who shall enter into our habitations?  21:14 But I will punish
you according to the fruit of your doings, saith the LORD: and I will
kindle a fire in the forest thereof, and it shall devour all things
round about it.

22:1 Thus saith the LORD; Go down to the house of the king of Judah,
and speak there this word, 22:2 And say, Hear the word of the LORD, O
king of Judah, that sittest upon the throne of David, thou, and thy
servants, and thy people that enter in by these gates: 22:3 Thus saith
the LORD; Execute ye judgment and righteousness, and deliver the
spoiled out of the hand of the oppressor: and do no wrong, do no
violence to the stranger, the fatherless, nor the widow, neither shed
innocent blood in this place.

22:4 For if ye do this thing indeed, then shall there enter in by the
gates of this house kings sitting upon the throne of David, riding in
chariots and on horses, he, and his servants, and his people.

22:5 But if ye will not hear these words, I swear by myself, saith the
LORD, that this house shall become a desolation.

22:6 For thus saith the LORD unto the king's house of Judah; Thou art
Gilead unto me, and the head of Lebanon: yet surely I will make thee a
wilderness, and cities which are not inhabited.

22:7 And I will prepare destroyers against thee, every one with his
weapons: and they shall cut down thy choice cedars, and cast them into
the fire.

22:8 And many nations shall pass by this city, and they shall say
every man to his neighbour, Wherefore hath the LORD done thus unto
this great city?  22:9 Then they shall answer, Because they have
forsaken the covenant of the LORD their God, and worshipped other
gods, and served them.

22:10 Weep ye not for the dead, neither bemoan him: but weep sore for
him that goeth away: for he shall return no more, nor see his native
country.

22:11 For thus saith the LORD touching Shallum the son of Josiah king
of Judah, which reigned instead of Josiah his father, which went forth
out of this place; He shall not return thither any more: 22:12 But he
shall die in the place whither they have led him captive, and shall
see this land no more.

22:13 Woe unto him that buildeth his house by unrighteousness, and his
chambers by wrong; that useth his neighbour's service without wages,
and giveth him not for his work; 22:14 That saith, I will build me a
wide house and large chambers, and cutteth him out windows; and it is
cieled with cedar, and painted with vermilion.

22:15 Shalt thou reign, because thou closest thyself in cedar? did not
thy father eat and drink, and do judgment and justice, and then it was
well with him?  22:16 He judged the cause of the poor and needy; then
it was well with him: was not this to know me? saith the LORD.

22:17 But thine eyes and thine heart are not but for thy covetousness,
and for to shed innocent blood, and for oppression, and for violence,
to do it.

22:18 Therefore thus saith the LORD concerning Jehoiakim the son of
Josiah king of Judah; They shall not lament for him, saying, Ah my
brother! or, Ah sister! they shall not lament for him, saying, Ah
lord! or, Ah his glory!  22:19 He shall be buried with the burial of
an ass, drawn and cast forth beyond the gates of Jerusalem.

22:20 Go up to Lebanon, and cry; and lift up thy voice in Bashan, and
cry from the passages: for all thy lovers are destroyed.

22:21 I spake unto thee in thy prosperity; but thou saidst, I will not
hear. This hath been thy manner from thy youth, that thou obeyedst not
my voice.

22:22 The wind shall eat up all thy pastors, and thy lovers shall go
into captivity: surely then shalt thou be ashamed and confounded for
all thy wickedness.

22:23 O inhabitant of Lebanon, that makest thy nest in the cedars, how
gracious shalt thou be when pangs come upon thee, the pain as of a
woman in travail!  22:24 As I live, saith the LORD, though Coniah the
son of Jehoiakim king of Judah were the signet upon my right hand, yet
would I pluck thee thence; 22:25 And I will give thee into the hand of
them that seek thy life, and into the hand of them whose face thou
fearest, even into the hand of Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon, and
into the hand of the Chaldeans.

22:26 And I will cast thee out, and thy mother that bare thee, into
another country, where ye were not born; and there shall ye die.

22:27 But to the land whereunto they desire to return, thither shall
they not return.

22:28 Is this man Coniah a despised broken idol? is he a vessel
wherein is no pleasure? wherefore are they cast out, he and his seed,
and are cast into a land which they know not?  22:29 O earth, earth,
earth, hear the word of the LORD.

22:30 Thus saith the LORD, Write ye this man childless, a man that
shall not prosper in his days: for no man of his seed shall prosper,
sitting upon the throne of David, and ruling any more in Judah.

23:1 Woe be unto the pastors that destroy and scatter the sheep of my
pasture! saith the LORD.

23:2 Therefore thus saith the LORD God of Israel against the pastors
that feed my people; Ye have scattered my flock, and driven them away,
and have not visited them: behold, I will visit upon you the evil of
your doings, saith the LORD.

23:3 And I will gather the remnant of my flock out of all countries
whither I have driven them, and will bring them again to their folds;
and they shall be fruitful and increase.

23:4 And I will set up shepherds over them which shall feed them: and
they shall fear no more, nor be dismayed, neither shall they be
lacking, saith the LORD.

23:5 Behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will raise unto
David a righteous Branch, and a King shall reign and prosper, and
shall execute judgment and justice in the earth.

23:6 In his days Judah shall be saved, and Israel shall dwell safely:
and this is his name whereby he shall be called, THE LORD OUR
RIGHTEOUSNESS.

23:7 Therefore, behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that they shall
no more say, The LORD liveth, which brought up the children of Israel
out of the land of Egypt; 23:8 But, The LORD liveth, which brought up
and which led the seed of the house of Israel out of the north
country, and from all countries whither I had driven them; and they
shall dwell in their own land.

23:9 Mine heart within me is broken because of the prophets; all my
bones shake; I am like a drunken man, and like a man whom wine hath
overcome, because of the LORD, and because of the words of his
holiness.

23:10 For the land is full of adulterers; for because of swearing the
land mourneth; the pleasant places of the wilderness are dried up, and
their course is evil, and their force is not right.

23:11 For both prophet and priest are profane; yea, in my house have I
found their wickedness, saith the LORD.

23:12 Wherefore their way shall be unto them as slippery ways in the
darkness: they shall be driven on, and fall therein: for I will bring
evil upon them, even the year of their visitation, saith the LORD.

23:13 And I have seen folly in the prophets of Samaria; they
prophesied in Baal, and caused my people Israel to err.

23:14 I have seen also in the prophets of Jerusalem an horrible thing:
they commit adultery, and walk in lies: they strengthen also the hands
of evildoers, that none doth return from his wickedness; they are all
of them unto me as Sodom, and the inhabitants thereof as Gomorrah.

23:15 Therefore thus saith the LORD of hosts concerning the prophets;
Behold, I will feed them with wormwood, and make them drink the water
of gall: for from the prophets of Jerusalem is profaneness gone forth
into all the land.

23:16 Thus saith the LORD of hosts, Hearken not unto the words of the
prophets that prophesy unto you: they make you vain: they speak a
vision of their own heart, and not out of the mouth of the LORD.

23:17 They say still unto them that despise me, The LORD hath said, Ye
shall have peace; and they say unto every one that walketh after the
imagination of his own heart, No evil shall come upon you.

23:18 For who hath stood in the counsel of the LORD, and hath
perceived and heard his word? who hath marked his word, and heard it?
23:19 Behold, a whirlwind of the LORD is gone forth in fury, even a
grievous whirlwind: it shall fall grievously upon the head of the
wicked.

23:20 The anger of the LORD shall not return, until he have executed,
and till he have performed the thoughts of his heart: in the latter
days ye shall consider it perfectly.

23:21 I have not sent these prophets, yet they ran: I have not spoken
to them, yet they prophesied.

23:22 But if they had stood in my counsel, and had caused my people to
hear my words, then they should have turned them from their evil way,
and from the evil of their doings.

23:23 Am I a God at hand, saith the LORD, and not a God afar off?
23:24 Can any hide himself in secret places that I shall not see him?
saith the LORD. Do not I fill heaven and earth? saith the LORD.

23:25 I have heard what the prophets said, that prophesy lies in my
name, saying, I have dreamed, I have dreamed.

23:26 How long shall this be in the heart of the prophets that
prophesy lies? yea, they are prophets of the deceit of their own
heart; 23:27 Which think to cause my people to forget my name by their
dreams which they tell every man to his neighbour, as their fathers
have forgotten my name for Baal.

23:28 The prophet that hath a dream, let him tell a dream; and he that
hath my word, let him speak my word faithfully. What is the chaff to
the wheat? saith the LORD.

23:29 Is not my word like as a fire? saith the LORD; and like a hammer
that breaketh the rock in pieces?  23:30 Therefore, behold, I am
against the prophets, saith the LORD, that steal my words every one
from his neighbour.

23:31 Behold, I am against the prophets, saith the LORD, that use
their tongues, and say, He saith.

23:32 Behold, I am against them that prophesy false dreams, saith the
LORD, and do tell them, and cause my people to err by their lies, and
by their lightness; yet I sent them not, nor commanded them: therefore
they shall not profit this people at all, saith the LORD.

23:33 And when this people, or the prophet, or a priest, shall ask
thee, saying, What is the burden of the LORD? thou shalt then say unto
them, What burden? I will even forsake you, saith the LORD.

23:34 And as for the prophet, and the priest, and the people, that
shall say, The burden of the LORD, I will even punish that man and his
house.

23:35 Thus shall ye say every one to his neighbour, and every one to
his brother, What hath the LORD answered? and, What hath the LORD
spoken?  23:36 And the burden of the LORD shall ye mention no more:
for every man's word shall be his burden; for ye have perverted the
words of the living God, of the LORD of hosts our God.

23:37 Thus shalt thou say to the prophet, What hath the LORD answered
thee? and, What hath the LORD spoken?  23:38 But since ye say, The
burden of the LORD; therefore thus saith the LORD; Because ye say this
word, The burden of the LORD, and I have sent unto you, saying, Ye
shall not say, The burden of the LORD; 23:39 Therefore, behold, I,
even I, will utterly forget you, and I will forsake you, and the city
that I gave you and your fathers, and cast you out of my presence:
23:40 And I will bring an everlasting reproach upon you, and a
perpetual shame, which shall not be forgotten.

24:1 The LORD shewed me, and, behold, two baskets of figs were set
before the temple of the LORD, after that Nebuchadrezzar king of
Babylon had carried away captive Jeconiah the son of Jehoiakim king of
Judah, and the princes of Judah, with the carpenters and smiths, from
Jerusalem, and had brought them to Babylon.

24:2 One basket had very good figs, even like the figs that are first
ripe: and the other basket had very naughty figs, which could not be
eaten, they were so bad.

24:3 Then said the LORD unto me, What seest thou, Jeremiah? And I
said, Figs; the good figs, very good; and the evil, very evil, that
cannot be eaten, they are so evil.

24:4 Again the word of the LORD came unto me, saying, 24:5 Thus saith
the LORD, the God of Israel; Like these good figs, so will I
acknowledge them that are carried away captive of Judah, whom I have
sent out of this place into the land of the Chaldeans for their good.

24:6 For I will set mine eyes upon them for good, and I will bring
them again to this land: and I will build them, and not pull them
down; and I will plant them, and not pluck them up.

24:7 And I will give them an heart to know me, that I am the LORD: and
they shall be my people, and I will be their God: for they shall
return unto me with their whole heart.

24:8 And as the evil figs, which cannot be eaten, they are so evil;
surely thus saith the LORD, So will I give Zedekiah the king of Judah,
and his princes, and the residue of Jerusalem, that remain in this
land, and them that dwell in the land of Egypt: 24:9 And I will
deliver them to be removed into all the kingdoms of the earth for
their hurt, to be a reproach and a proverb, a taunt and a curse, in
all places whither I shall drive them.

24:10 And I will send the sword, the famine, and the pestilence, among
them, till they be consumed from off the land that I gave unto them
and to their fathers.

25:1 The word that came to Jeremiah concerning all the people of Judah
in the fourth year of Jehoiakim the son of Josiah king of Judah, that
was the first year of Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon; 25:2 The which
Jeremiah the prophet spake unto all the people of Judah, and to all
the inhabitants of Jerusalem, saying, 25:3 From the thirteenth year of
Josiah the son of Amon king of Judah, even unto this day, that is the
three and twentieth year, the word of the LORD hath come unto me, and
I have spoken unto you, rising early and speaking; but ye have not
hearkened.

25:4 And the LORD hath sent unto you all his servants the prophets,
rising early and sending them; but ye have not hearkened, nor inclined
your ear to hear.

25:5 They said, Turn ye again now every one from his evil way, and
from the evil of your doings, and dwell in the land that the LORD hath
given unto you and to your fathers for ever and ever: 25:6 And go not
after other gods to serve them, and to worship them, and provoke me
not to anger with the works of your hands; and I will do you no hurt.

25:7 Yet ye have not hearkened unto me, saith the LORD; that ye might
provoke me to anger with the works of your hands to your own hurt.

25:8 Therefore thus saith the LORD of hosts; Because ye have not heard
my words, 25:9 Behold, I will send and take all the families of the
north, saith the LORD, and Nebuchadrezzar the king of Babylon, my
servant, and will bring them against this land, and against the
inhabitants thereof, and against all these nations round about, and
will utterly destroy them, and make them an astonishment, and an
hissing, and perpetual desolations.

25:10 Moreover I will take from them the voice of mirth, and the voice
of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom, and the voice of the bride,
the sound of the millstones, and the light of the candle.

25:11 And this whole land shall be a desolation, and an astonishment;
and these nations shall serve the king of Babylon seventy years.

25:12 And it shall come to pass, when seventy years are accomplished,
that I will punish the king of Babylon, and that nation, saith the
LORD, for their iniquity, and the land of the Chaldeans, and will make
it perpetual desolations.

25:13 And I will bring upon that land all my words which I have
pronounced against it, even all that is written in this book, which
Jeremiah hath prophesied against all the nations.

25:14 For many nations and great kings shall serve themselves of them
also: and I will recompense them according to their deeds, and
according to the works of their own hands.

25:15 For thus saith the LORD God of Israel unto me; Take the wine cup
of this fury at my hand, and cause all the nations, to whom I send
thee, to drink it.

25:16 And they shall drink, and be moved, and be mad, because of the
sword that I will send among them.

25:17 Then took I the cup at the LORD's hand, and made all the nations
to drink, unto whom the LORD had sent me: 25:18 To wit, Jerusalem, and
the cities of Judah, and the kings thereof, and the princes thereof,
to make them a desolation, an astonishment, an hissing, and a curse;
as it is this day; 25:19 Pharaoh king of Egypt, and his servants, and
his princes, and all his people; 25:20 And all the mingled people, and
all the kings of the land of Uz, and all the kings of the land of the
Philistines, and Ashkelon, and Azzah, and Ekron, and the remnant of
Ashdod, 25:21 Edom, and Moab, and the children of Ammon, 25:22 And all
the kings of Tyrus, and all the kings of Zidon, and the kings of the
isles which are beyond the sea, 25:23 Dedan, and Tema, and Buz, and
all that are in the utmost corners, 25:24 And all the kings of Arabia,
and all the kings of the mingled people that dwell in the desert,
25:25 And all the kings of Zimri, and all the kings of Elam, and all
the kings of the Medes, 25:26 And all the kings of the north, far and
near, one with another, and all the kingdoms of the world, which are
upon the face of the earth: and the king of Sheshach shall drink after
them.

25:27 Therefore thou shalt say unto them, Thus saith the LORD of
hosts, the God of Israel; Drink ye, and be drunken, and spue, and
fall, and rise no more, because of the sword which I will send among
you.

25:28 And it shall be, if they refuse to take the cup at thine hand to
drink, then shalt thou say unto them, Thus saith the LORD of hosts; Ye
shall certainly drink.

25:29 For, lo, I begin to bring evil on the city which is called by my
name, and should ye be utterly unpunished? Ye shall not be unpunished:
for I will call for a sword upon all the inhabitants of the earth,
saith the LORD of hosts.

25:30 Therefore prophesy thou against them all these words, and say
unto them, The LORD shall roar from on high, and utter his voice from
his holy habitation; he shall mightily roar upon his habitation; he
shall give a shout, as they that tread the grapes, against all the
inhabitants of the earth.

25:31 A noise shall come even to the ends of the earth; for the LORD
hath a controversy with the nations, he will plead with all flesh; he
will give them that are wicked to the sword, saith the LORD.

25:32 Thus saith the LORD of hosts, Behold, evil shall go forth from
nation to nation, and a great whirlwind shall be raised up from the
coasts of the earth.

25:33 And the slain of the LORD shall be at that day from one end of
the earth even unto the other end of the earth: they shall not be
lamented, neither gathered, nor buried; they shall be dung upon the
ground.

25:34 Howl, ye shepherds, and cry; and wallow yourselves in the ashes,
ye principal of the flock: for the days of your slaughter and of your
dispersions are accomplished; and ye shall fall like a pleasant
vessel.

25:35 And the shepherds shall have no way to flee, nor the principal
of the flock to escape.

25:36 A voice of the cry of the shepherds, and an howling of the
principal of the flock, shall be heard: for the LORD hath spoiled
their pasture.

25:37 And the peaceable habitations are cut down because of the fierce
anger of the LORD.

25:38 He hath forsaken his covert, as the lion: for their land is
desolate because of the fierceness of the oppressor, and because of
his fierce anger.

26:1 In the beginning of the reign of Jehoiakim the son of Josiah king
of Judah came this word from the LORD, saying, 26:2 Thus saith the
LORD; Stand in the court of the LORD's house, and speak unto all the
cities of Judah, which come to worship in the LORD's house, all the
words that I command thee to speak unto them; diminish not a word:
26:3 If so be they will hearken, and turn every man from his evil way,
that I may repent me of the evil, which I purpose to do unto them
because of the evil of their doings.

26:4 And thou shalt say unto them, Thus saith the LORD; If ye will not
hearken to me, to walk in my law, which I have set before you, 26:5 To
hearken to the words of my servants the prophets, whom I sent unto
you, both rising up early, and sending them, but ye have not
hearkened; 26:6 Then will I make this house like Shiloh, and will make
this city a curse to all the nations of the earth.

26:7 So the priests and the prophets and all the people heard Jeremiah
speaking these words in the house of the LORD.

26:8 Now it came to pass, when Jeremiah had made an end of speaking
all that the LORD had commanded him to speak unto all the people, that
the priests and the prophets and all the people took him, saying, Thou
shalt surely die.

26:9 Why hast thou prophesied in the name of the LORD, saying, This
house shall be like Shiloh, and this city shall be desolate without an
inhabitant?  And all the people were gathered against Jeremiah in the
house of the LORD.

26:10 When the princes of Judah heard these things, then they came up
from the king's house unto the house of the LORD, and sat down in the
entry of the new gate of the LORD's house.

26:11 Then spake the priests and the prophets unto the princes and to
all the people, saying, This man is worthy to die; for he hath
prophesied against this city, as ye have heard with your ears.

26:12 Then spake Jeremiah unto all the princes and to all the people,
saying, The LORD sent me to prophesy against this house and against
this city all the words that ye have heard.

26:13 Therefore now amend your ways and your doings, and obey the
voice of the LORD your God; and the LORD will repent him of the evil
that he hath pronounced against you.

26:14 As for me, behold, I am in your hand: do with me as seemeth good
and meet unto you.

26:15 But know ye for certain, that if ye put me to death, ye shall
surely bring innocent blood upon yourselves, and upon this city, and
upon the inhabitants thereof: for of a truth the LORD hath sent me
unto you to speak all these words in your ears.

26:16 Then said the princes and all the people unto the priests and to
the prophets; This man is not worthy to die: for he hath spoken to us
in the name of the LORD our God.

26:17 Then rose up certain of the elders of the land, and spake to all
the assembly of the people, saying, 26:18 Micah the Morasthite
prophesied in the days of Hezekiah king of Judah, and spake to all the
people of Judah, saying, Thus saith the LORD of hosts; Zion shall be
plowed like a field, and Jerusalem shall become heaps, and the
mountain of the house as the high places of a forest.

26:19 Did Hezekiah king of Judah and all Judah put him at all to
death?  did he not fear the LORD, and besought the LORD, and the LORD
repented him of the evil which he had pronounced against them? Thus
might we procure great evil against our souls.

26:20 And there was also a man that prophesied in the name of the
LORD, Urijah the son of Shemaiah of Kirjathjearim, who prophesied
against this city and against this land according to all the words of
Jeremiah.

26:21 And when Jehoiakim the king, with all his mighty men, and all
the princes, heard his words, the king sought to put him to death: but
when Urijah heard it, he was afraid, and fled, and went into Egypt;
26:22 And Jehoiakim the king sent men into Egypt, namely, Elnathan the
son of Achbor, and certain men with him into Egypt.

26:23 And they fetched forth Urijah out of Egypt, and brought him unto
Jehoiakim the king; who slew him with the sword, and cast his dead
body into the graves of the common people.

26:24 Nevertheless the hand of Ahikam the son of Shaphan was with
Jeremiah, that they should not give him into the hand of the people to
put him to death.

27:1 In the beginning of the reign of Jehoiakim the son of Josiah king
of Judah came this word unto Jeremiah from the LORD, saying, 27:2 Thus
saith the LORD to me; Make thee bonds and yokes, and put them upon thy
neck, 27:3 And send them to the king of Edom, and to the king of Moab,
and to the king of the Ammonites, and to the king of Tyrus, and to the
king of Zidon, by the hand of the messengers which come to Jerusalem
unto Zedekiah king of Judah; 27:4 And command them to say unto their
masters, Thus saith the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel; Thus shall
ye say unto your masters; 27:5 I have made the earth, the man and the
beast that are upon the ground, by my great power and by my
outstretched arm, and have given it unto whom it seemed meet unto me.

27:6 And now have I given all these lands into the hand of
Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon, my servant; and the beasts of the
field have I given him also to serve him.

27:7 And all nations shall serve him, and his son, and his son's son,
until the very time of his land come: and then many nations and great
kings shall serve themselves of him.

27:8 And it shall come to pass, that the nation and kingdom which will
not serve the same Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon, and that will
not put their neck under the yoke of the king of Babylon, that nation
will I punish, saith the LORD, with the sword, and with the famine,
and with the pestilence, until I have consumed them by his hand.

27:9 Therefore hearken not ye to your prophets, nor to your diviners,
nor to your dreamers, nor to your enchanters, nor to your sorcerers,
which speak unto you, saying, Ye shall not serve the king of Babylon:
27:10 For they prophesy a lie unto you, to remove you far from your
land; and that I should drive you out, and ye should perish.

27:11 But the nations that bring their neck under the yoke of the king
of Babylon, and serve him, those will I let remain still in their own
land, saith the LORD; and they shall till it, and dwell therein.

27:12 I spake also to Zedekiah king of Judah according to all these
words, saying, Bring your necks under the yoke of the king of Babylon,
and serve him and his people, and live.

27:13 Why will ye die, thou and thy people, by the sword, by the
famine, and by the pestilence, as the LORD hath spoken against the
nation that will not serve the king of Babylon?  27:14 Therefore
hearken not unto the words of the prophets that speak unto you,
saying, Ye shall not serve the king of Babylon: for they prophesy a
lie unto you.

27:15 For I have not sent them, saith the LORD, yet they prophesy a
lie in my name; that I might drive you out, and that ye might perish,
ye, and the prophets that prophesy unto you.

27:16 Also I spake to the priests and to all this people, saying, Thus
saith the LORD; Hearken not to the words of your prophets that
prophesy unto you, saying, Behold, the vessels of the LORD's house
shall now shortly be brought again from Babylon: for they prophesy a
lie unto you.

27:17 Hearken not unto them; serve the king of Babylon, and live:
wherefore should this city be laid waste?  27:18 But if they be
prophets, and if the word of the LORD be with them, let them now make
intercession to the LORD of hosts, that the vessels which are left in
the house of the LORD, and in the house of the king of Judah, and at
Jerusalem, go not to Babylon.

27:19 For thus saith the LORD of hosts concerning the pillars, and
concerning the sea, and concerning the bases, and concerning the
residue of the vessels that remain in this city.

27:20 Which Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon took not, when he carried
away captive Jeconiah the son of Jehoiakim king of Judah from
Jerusalem to Babylon, and all the nobles of Judah and Jerusalem; 27:21
Yea, thus saith the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, concerning the
vessels that remain in the house of the LORD, and in the house of the
king of Judah and of Jerusalem; 27:22 They shall be carried to
Babylon, and there shall they be until the day that I visit them,
saith the LORD; then will I bring them up, and restore them to this
place.

28:1 And it came to pass the same year, in the beginning of the reign
of Zedekiah king of Judah, in the fourth year, and in the fifth month,
that Hananiah the son of Azur the prophet, which was of Gibeon, spake
unto me in the house of the LORD, in the presence of the priests and
of all the people, saying, 28:2 Thus speaketh the LORD of hosts, the
God of Israel, saying, I have broken the yoke of the king of Babylon.

28:3 Within two full years will I bring again into this place all the
vessels of the LORD's house, that Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon took
away from this place, and carried them to Babylon: 28:4 And I will
bring again to this place Jeconiah the son of Jehoiakim king of Judah,
with all the captives of Judah, that went into Babylon, saith the
LORD: for I will break the yoke of the king of Babylon.

28:5 Then the prophet Jeremiah said unto the prophet Hananiah in the
presence of the priests, and in the presence of all the people that
stood in the house of the LORD, 28:6 Even the prophet Jeremiah said,
Amen: the LORD do so: the LORD perform thy words which thou hast
prophesied, to bring again the vessels of the LORD's house, and all
that is carried away captive, from Babylon into this place.

28:7 Nevertheless hear thou now this word that I speak in thine ears,
and in the ears of all the people; 28:8 The prophets that have been
before me and before thee of old prophesied both against many
countries, and against great kingdoms, of war, and of evil, and of
pestilence.

28:9 The prophet which prophesieth of peace, when the word of the
prophet shall come to pass, then shall the prophet be known, that the
LORD hath truly sent him.

28:10 Then Hananiah the prophet took the yoke from off the prophet
Jeremiah's neck, and brake it.

28:11 And Hananiah spake in the presence of all the people, saying,
Thus saith the LORD; Even so will I break the yoke of Nebuchadnezzar
king of Babylon from the neck of all nations within the space of two
full years. And the prophet Jeremiah went his way.

28:12 Then the word of the LORD came unto Jeremiah the prophet, after
that Hananiah the prophet had broken the yoke from off the neck of the
prophet Jeremiah, saying, 28:13 Go and tell Hananiah, saying, Thus
saith the LORD; Thou hast broken the yokes of wood; but thou shalt
make for them yokes of iron.

28:14 For thus saith the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel; I have put
a yoke of iron upon the neck of all these nations, that they may serve
Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon; and they shall serve him: and I have
given him the beasts of the field also.

28:15 Then said the prophet Jeremiah unto Hananiah the prophet, Hear
now, Hananiah; The LORD hath not sent thee; but thou makest this
people to trust in a lie.

28:16 Therefore thus saith the LORD; Behold, I will cast thee from off
the face of the earth: this year thou shalt die, because thou hast
taught rebellion against the LORD.

28:17 So Hananiah the prophet died the same year in the seventh month.

29:1 Now these are the words of the letter that Jeremiah the prophet
sent from Jerusalem unto the residue of the elders which were carried
away captives, and to the priests, and to the prophets, and to all the
people whom Nebuchadnezzar had carried away captive from Jerusalem to
Babylon; 29:2 (After that Jeconiah the king, and the queen, and the
eunuchs, the princes of Judah and Jerusalem, and the carpenters, and
the smiths, were departed from Jerusalem;) 29:3 By the hand of Elasah
the son of Shaphan, and Gemariah the son of Hilkiah, (whom Zedekiah
king of Judah sent unto Babylon to Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon)
saying, 29:4 Thus saith the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, unto all
that are carried away captives, whom I have caused to be carried away
from Jerusalem unto Babylon; 29:5 Build ye houses, and dwell in them;
and plant gardens, and eat the fruit of them; 29:6 Take ye wives, and
beget sons and daughters; and take wives for your sons, and give your
daughters to husbands, that they may bear sons and daughters; that ye
may be increased there, and not diminished.

29:7 And seek the peace of the city whither I have caused you to be
carried away captives, and pray unto the LORD for it: for in the peace
thereof shall ye have peace.

29:8 For thus saith the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel; Let not your
prophets and your diviners, that be in the midst of you, deceive you,
neither hearken to your dreams which ye cause to be dreamed.

29:9 For they prophesy falsely unto you in my name: I have not sent
them, saith the LORD.

29:10 For thus saith the LORD, That after seventy years be
accomplished at Babylon I will visit you, and perform my good word
toward you, in causing you to return to this place.

29:11 For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the LORD,
thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end.

29:12 Then shall ye call upon me, and ye shall go and pray unto me,
and I will hearken unto you.

29:13 And ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me
with all your heart.

29:14 And I will be found of you, saith the LORD: and I will turn away
your captivity, and I will gather you from all the nations, and from
all the places whither I have driven you, saith the LORD; and I will
bring you again into the place whence I caused you to be carried away
captive.

29:15 Because ye have said, The LORD hath raised us up prophets in
Babylon; 29:16 Know that thus saith the LORD of the king that sitteth
upon the throne of David, and of all the people that dwelleth in this
city, and of your brethren that are not gone forth with you into
captivity; 29:17 Thus saith the LORD of hosts; Behold, I will send
upon them the sword, the famine, and the pestilence, and will make
them like vile figs, that cannot be eaten, they are so evil.

29:18 And I will persecute them with the sword, with the famine, and
with the pestilence, and will deliver them to be removed to all the
kingdoms of the earth, to be a curse, and an astonishment, and an
hissing, and a reproach, among all the nations whither I have driven
them: 29:19 Because they have not hearkened to my words, saith the
LORD, which I sent unto them by my servants the prophets, rising up
early and sending them; but ye would not hear, saith the LORD.

29:20 Hear ye therefore the word of the LORD, all ye of the captivity,
whom I have sent from Jerusalem to Babylon: 29:21 Thus saith the LORD
of hosts, the God of Israel, of Ahab the son of Kolaiah, and of
Zedekiah the son of Maaseiah, which prophesy a lie unto you in my
name; Behold, I will deliver them into the hand of Nebuchadrezzar king
of Babylon; and he shall slay them before your eyes; 29:22 And of them
shall be taken up a curse by all the captivity of Judah which are in
Babylon, saying, The LORD make thee like Zedekiah and like Ahab, whom
the king of Babylon roasted in the fire; 29:23 Because they have
committed villany in Israel, and have committed adultery with their
neighbours' wives, and have spoken lying words in my name, which I
have not commanded them; even I know, and am a witness, saith the
LORD.

29:24 Thus shalt thou also speak to Shemaiah the Nehelamite, saying,
29:25 Thus speaketh the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, saying,
Because thou hast sent letters in thy name unto all the people that
are at Jerusalem, and to Zephaniah the son of Maaseiah the priest, and
to all the priests, saying, 29:26 The LORD hath made thee priest in
the stead of Jehoiada the priest, that ye should be officers in the
house of the LORD, for every man that is mad, and maketh himself a
prophet, that thou shouldest put him in prison, and in the stocks.

29:27 Now therefore why hast thou not reproved Jeremiah of Anathoth,
which maketh himself a prophet to you?  29:28 For therefore he sent
unto us in Babylon, saying, This captivity is long: build ye houses,
and dwell in them; and plant gardens, and eat the fruit of them.

29:29 And Zephaniah the priest read this letter in the ears of
Jeremiah the prophet.

29:30 Then came the word of the LORD unto Jeremiah, saying, 29:31 Send
to all them of the captivity, saying, Thus saith the LORD concerning
Shemaiah the Nehelamite; Because that Shemaiah hath prophesied unto
you, and I sent him not, and he caused you to trust in a lie: 29:32
Therefore thus saith the LORD; Behold, I will punish Shemaiah the
Nehelamite, and his seed: he shall not have a man to dwell among this
people; neither shall he behold the good that I will do for my people,
saith the LORD; because he hath taught rebellion against the LORD.

30:1 The word that came to Jeremiah from the LORD, saying, 30:2 Thus
speaketh the LORD God of Israel, saying, Write thee all the words that
I have spoken unto thee in a book.

30:3 For, lo, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will bring again
the captivity of my people Israel and Judah, saith the LORD: and I
will cause them to return to the land that I gave to their fathers,
and they shall possess it.

30:4 And these are the words that the LORD spake concerning Israel and
concerning Judah.

30:5 For thus saith the LORD; We have heard a voice of trembling, of
fear, and not of peace.

30:6 Ask ye now, and see whether a man doth travail with child?
wherefore do I see every man with his hands on his loins, as a woman
in travail, and all faces are turned into paleness?  30:7 Alas! for
that day is great, so that none is like it: it is even the time of
Jacob's trouble, but he shall be saved out of it.

30:8 For it shall come to pass in that day, saith the LORD of hosts,
that I will break his yoke from off thy neck, and will burst thy
bonds, and strangers shall no more serve themselves of him: 30:9 But
they shall serve the LORD their God, and David their king, whom I will
raise up unto them.

30:10 Therefore fear thou not, O my servant Jacob, saith the LORD;
neither be dismayed, O Israel: for, lo, I will save thee from afar,
and thy seed from the land of their captivity; and Jacob shall return,
and shall be in rest, and be quiet, and none shall make him afraid.

30:11 For I am with thee, saith the LORD, to save thee: though I make
a full end of all nations whither I have scattered thee, yet I will
not make a full end of thee: but I will correct thee in measure, and
will not leave thee altogether unpunished.

30:12 For thus saith the LORD, Thy bruise is incurable, and thy wound
is grievous.

30:13 There is none to plead thy cause, that thou mayest be bound up:
thou hast no healing medicines.

30:14 All thy lovers have forgotten thee; they seek thee not; for I
have wounded thee with the wound of an enemy, with the chastisement of
a cruel one, for the multitude of thine iniquity; because thy sins
were increased.

30:15 Why criest thou for thine affliction? thy sorrow is incurable
for the multitude of thine iniquity: because thy sins were increased,
I have done these things unto thee.

30:16 Therefore all they that devour thee shall be devoured; and all
thine adversaries, every one of them, shall go into captivity; and
they that spoil thee shall be a spoil, and all that prey upon thee
will I give for a prey.

30:17 For I will restore health unto thee, and I will heal thee of thy
wounds, saith the LORD; because they called thee an Outcast, saying,
This is Zion, whom no man seeketh after.

30:18 Thus saith the LORD; Behold, I will bring again the captivity of
Jacob's tents, and have mercy on his dwellingplaces; and the city
shall be builded upon her own heap, and the palace shall remain after
the manner thereof.

30:19 And out of them shall proceed thanksgiving and the voice of them
that make merry: and I will multiply them, and they shall not be few;
I will also glorify them, and they shall not be small.

30:20 Their children also shall be as aforetime, and their
congregation shall be established before me, and I will punish all
that oppress them.

30:21 And their nobles shall be of themselves, and their governor
shall proceed from the midst of them; and I will cause him to draw
near, and he shall approach unto me: for who is this that engaged his
heart to approach unto me? saith the LORD.

30:22 And ye shall be my people, and I will be your God.

30:23 Behold, the whirlwind of the LORD goeth forth with fury, a
continuing whirlwind: it shall fall with pain upon the head of the
wicked.

30:24 The fierce anger of the LORD shall not return, until he hath
done it, and until he have performed the intents of his heart: in the
latter days ye shall consider it.

31:1 At the same time, saith the LORD, will I be the God of all the
families of Israel, and they shall be my people.

31:2 Thus saith the LORD, The people which were left of the sword
found grace in the wilderness; even Israel, when I went to cause him
to rest.

31:3 The LORD hath appeared of old unto me, saying, Yea, I have loved
thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I
drawn thee.

31:4 Again I will build thee, and thou shalt be built, O virgin of
Israel: thou shalt again be adorned with thy tabrets, and shalt go
forth in the dances of them that make merry.

31:5 Thou shalt yet plant vines upon the mountains of Samaria: the
planters shall plant, and shall eat them as common things.

31:6 For there shall be a day, that the watchmen upon the mount
Ephraim shall cry, Arise ye, and let us go up to Zion unto the LORD
our God.

31:7 For thus saith the LORD; Sing with gladness for Jacob, and shout
among the chief of the nations: publish ye, praise ye, and say, O
LORD, save thy people, the remnant of Israel.

31:8 Behold, I will bring them from the north country, and gather them
from the coasts of the earth, and with them the blind and the lame,
the woman with child and her that travaileth with child together: a
great company shall return thither.

31:9 They shall come with weeping, and with supplications will I lead
them: I will cause them to walk by the rivers of waters in a straight
way, wherein they shall not stumble: for I am a father to Israel, and
Ephraim is my firstborn.

31:10 Hear the word of the LORD, O ye nations, and declare it in the
isles afar off, and say, He that scattered Israel will gather him, and
keep him, as a shepherd doth his flock.

31:11 For the LORD hath redeemed Jacob, and ransomed him from the hand
of him that was stronger than he.

31:12 Therefore they shall come and sing in the height of Zion, and
shall flow together to the goodness of the LORD, for wheat, and for
wine, and for oil, and for the young of the flock and of the herd: and
their soul shall be as a watered garden; and they shall not sorrow any
more at all.

31:13 Then shall the virgin rejoice in the dance, both young men and
old together: for I will turn their mourning into joy, and will
comfort them, and make them rejoice from their sorrow.

31:14 And I will satiate the soul of the priests with fatness, and my
people shall be satisfied with my goodness, saith the LORD.

31:15 Thus saith the LORD; A voice was heard in Ramah, lamentation,
and bitter weeping; Rahel weeping for her children refused to be
comforted for her children, because they were not.

31:16 Thus saith the LORD; Refrain thy voice from weeping, and thine
eyes from tears: for thy work shall be rewarded, saith the LORD; and
they shall come again from the land of the enemy.

31:17 And there is hope in thine end, saith the LORD, that thy
children shall come again to their own border.

31:18 I have surely heard Ephraim bemoaning himself thus; Thou hast
chastised me, and I was chastised, as a bullock unaccustomed to the
yoke: turn thou me, and I shall be turned; for thou art the LORD my
God.

31:19 Surely after that I was turned, I repented; and after that I was
instructed, I smote upon my thigh: I was ashamed, yea, even
confounded, because I did bear the reproach of my youth.

31:20 Is Ephraim my dear son? is he a pleasant child? for since I
spake against him, I do earnestly remember him still: therefore my
bowels are troubled for him; I will surely have mercy upon him, saith
the LORD.

31:21 Set thee up waymarks, make thee high heaps: set thine heart
toward the highway, even the way which thou wentest: turn again, O
virgin of Israel, turn again to these thy cities.

31:22 How long wilt thou go about, O thou backsliding daughter? for
the LORD hath created a new thing in the earth, A woman shall compass
a man.

31:23 Thus saith the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel; As yet they
shall use this speech in the land of Judah and in the cities thereof,
when I shall bring again their captivity; The LORD bless thee, O
habitation of justice, and mountain of holiness.

31:24 And there shall dwell in Judah itself, and in all the cities
thereof together, husbandmen, and they that go forth with flocks.

31:25 For I have satiated the weary soul, and I have replenished every
sorrowful soul.

31:26 Upon this I awaked, and beheld; and my sleep was sweet unto me.

31:27 Behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will sow the house
of Israel and the house of Judah with the seed of man, and with the
seed of beast.

31:28 And it shall come to pass, that like as I have watched over
them, to pluck up, and to break down, and to throw down, and to
destroy, and to afflict; so will I watch over them, to build, and to
plant, saith the LORD.

31:29 In those days they shall say no more, The fathers have eaten a
sour grape, and the children's teeth are set on edge.

31:30 But every one shall die for his own iniquity: every man that
eateth the sour grape, his teeth shall be set on edge.

31:31 Behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will make a new
covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah: 31:32
Not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the
day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of
Egypt; which my covenant they brake, although I was an husband unto
them, saith the LORD: 31:33 But this shall be the covenant that I will
make with the house of Israel; After those days, saith the LORD, I
will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts;
and will be their God, and they shall be my people.

31:34 And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and every
man his brother, saying, Know the LORD: for they shall all know me,
from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the LORD: for
I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.

31:35 Thus saith the LORD, which giveth the sun for a light by day,
and the ordinances of the moon and of the stars for a light by night,
which divideth the sea when the waves thereof roar; The LORD of hosts
is his name: 31:36 If those ordinances depart from before me, saith
the LORD, then the seed of Israel also shall cease from being a nation
before me for ever.

31:37 Thus saith the LORD; If heaven above can be measured, and the
foundations of the earth searched out beneath, I will also cast off
all the seed of Israel for all that they have done, saith the LORD.

31:38 Behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that the city shall be
built to the LORD from the tower of Hananeel unto the gate of the
corner.

31:39 And the measuring line shall yet go forth over against it upon
the hill Gareb, and shall compass about to Goath.

31:40 And the whole valley of the dead bodies, and of the ashes, and
all the fields unto the brook of Kidron, unto the corner of the horse
gate toward the east, shall be holy unto the LORD; it shall not be
plucked up, nor thrown down any more for ever.

32:1 The word that came to Jeremiah from the LORD in the tenth year of
Zedekiah king of Judah, which was the eighteenth year of
Nebuchadrezzar.

32:2 For then the king of Babylon's army besieged Jerusalem: and
Jeremiah the prophet was shut up in the court of the prison, which was
in the king of Judah's house.

32:3 For Zedekiah king of Judah had shut him up, saying, Wherefore
dost thou prophesy, and say, Thus saith the LORD, Behold, I will give
this city into the hand of the king of Babylon, and he shall take it;
32:4 And Zedekiah king of Judah shall not escape out of the hand of
the Chaldeans, but shall surely be delivered into the hand of the king
of Babylon, and shall speak with him mouth to mouth, and his eyes
shall behold his eyes; 32:5 And he shall lead Zedekiah to Babylon, and
there shall he be until I visit him, saith the LORD: though ye fight
with the Chaldeans, ye shall not prosper.

32:6 And Jeremiah said, The word of the LORD came unto me, saying,
32:7 Behold, Hanameel the son of Shallum thine uncle shall come unto
thee saying, Buy thee my field that is in Anathoth: for the right of
redemption is thine to buy it.

32:8 So Hanameel mine uncle's son came to me in the court of the
prison according to the word of the LORD, and said unto me, Buy my
field, I pray thee, that is in Anathoth, which is in the country of
Benjamin: for the right of inheritance is thine, and the redemption is
thine; buy it for thyself.

Then I knew that this was the word of the LORD.

32:9 And I bought the field of Hanameel my uncle's son, that was in
Anathoth, and weighed him the money, even seventeen shekels of silver.

32:10 And I subscribed the evidence, and sealed it, and took
witnesses, and weighed him the money in the balances.

32:11 So I took the evidence of the purchase, both that which was
sealed according to the law and custom, and that which was open: 32:12
And I gave the evidence of the purchase unto Baruch the son of Neriah,
the son of Maaseiah, in the sight of Hanameel mine uncle's son, and in
the presence of the witnesses that subscribed the book of the
purchase, before all the Jews that sat in the court of the prison.

32:13 And I charged Baruch before them, saying, 32:14 Thus saith the
LORD of hosts, the God of Israel; Take these evidences, this evidence
of the purchase, both which is sealed, and this evidence which is
open; and put them in an earthen vessel, that they may continue many
days.

32:15 For thus saith the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel; Houses and
fields and vineyards shall be possessed again in this land.

32:16 Now when I had delivered the evidence of the purchase unto
Baruch the son of Neriah, I prayed unto the LORD, saying, 32:17 Ah
Lord GOD! behold, thou hast made the heaven and the earth by thy great
power and stretched out arm, and there is nothing too hard for thee:
32:18 Thou shewest lovingkindness unto thousands, and recompensest the
iniquity of the fathers into the bosom of their children after them:
the Great, the Mighty God, the LORD of hosts, is his name, 32:19 Great
in counsel, and mighty in work: for thine eyes are open upon all the
ways of the sons of men: to give every one according to his ways, and
according to the fruit of his doings: 32:20 Which hast set signs and
wonders in the land of Egypt, even unto this day, and in Israel, and
among other men; and hast made thee a name, as at this day; 32:21 And
hast brought forth thy people Israel out of the land of Egypt with
signs, and with wonders, and with a strong hand, and with a stretched
out arm, and with great terror; 32:22 And hast given them this land,
which thou didst swear to their fathers to give them, a land flowing
with milk and honey; 32:23 And they came in, and possessed it; but
they obeyed not thy voice, neither walked in thy law; they have done
nothing of all that thou commandedst them to do: therefore thou hast
caused all this evil to come upon them: 32:24 Behold the mounts, they
are come unto the city to take it; and the city is given into the hand
of the Chaldeans, that fight against it, because of the sword, and of
the famine, and of the pestilence: and what thou hast spoken is come
to pass; and, behold, thou seest it.

32:25 And thou hast said unto me, O Lord GOD, Buy thee the field for
money, and take witnesses; for the city is given into the hand of the
Chaldeans.

32:26 Then came the word of the LORD unto Jeremiah, saying, 32:27
Behold, I am the LORD, the God of all flesh: is there any thing too
hard for me?  32:28 Therefore thus saith the LORD; Behold, I will give
this city into the hand of the Chaldeans, and into the hand of
Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon, and he shall take it: 32:29 And the
Chaldeans, that fight against this city, shall come and set fire on
this city, and burn it with the houses, upon whose roofs they have
offered incense unto Baal, and poured out drink offerings unto other
gods, to provoke me to anger.

32:30 For the children of Israel and the children of Judah have only
done evil before me from their youth: for the children of Israel have
only provoked me to anger with the work of their hands, saith the
LORD.

32:31 For this city hath been to me as a provocation of mine anger and
of my fury from the day that they built it even unto this day; that I
should remove it from before my face, 32:32 Because of all the evil of
the children of Israel and of the children of Judah, which they have
done to provoke me to anger, they, their kings, their princes, their
priests, and their prophets, and the men of Judah, and the inhabitants
of Jerusalem.

32:33 And they have turned unto me the back, and not the face: though
I taught them, rising up early and teaching them, yet they have not
hearkened to receive instruction.

32:34 But they set their abominations in the house, which is called by
my name, to defile it.

32:35 And they built the high places of Baal, which are in the valley
of the son of Hinnom, to cause their sons and their daughters to pass
through the fire unto Molech; which I commanded them not, neither came
it into my mind, that they should do this abomination, to cause Judah
to sin.

32:36 And now therefore thus saith the LORD, the God of Israel,
concerning this city, whereof ye say, It shall be delivered into the
hand of the king of Babylon by the sword, and by the famine, and by
the pestilence; 32:37 Behold, I will gather them out of all countries,
whither I have driven them in mine anger, and in my fury, and in great
wrath; and I will bring them again unto this place, and I will cause
them to dwell safely: 32:38 And they shall be my people, and I will be
their God: 32:39 And I will give them one heart, and one way, that
they may fear me for ever, for the good of them, and of their children
after them: 32:40 And I will make an everlasting covenant with them,
that I will not turn away from them, to do them good; but I will put
my fear in their hearts, that they shall not depart from me.

32:41 Yea, I will rejoice over them to do them good, and I will plant
them in this land assuredly with my whole heart and with my whole
soul.

32:42 For thus saith the LORD; Like as I have brought all this great
evil upon this people, so will I bring upon them all the good that I
have promised them.

32:43 And fields shall be bought in this land, whereof ye say, It is
desolate without man or beast; it is given into the hand of the
Chaldeans.

32:44 Men shall buy fields for money, and subscribe evidences, and
seal them, and take witnesses in the land of Benjamin, and in the
places about Jerusalem, and in the cities of Judah, and in the cities
of the mountains, and in the cities of the valley, and in the cities
of the south: for I will cause their captivity to return, saith the
LORD.

33:1 Moreover the word of the LORD came unto Jeremiah the second time,
while he was yet shut up in the court of the prison, saying, 33:2 Thus
saith the LORD the maker thereof, the LORD that formed it, to
establish it; the LORD is his name; 33:3 Call unto me, and I will
answer thee, and shew thee great and mighty things, which thou knowest
not.

33:4 For thus saith the LORD, the God of Israel, concerning the houses
of this city, and concerning the houses of the kings of Judah, which
are thrown down by the mounts, and by the sword; 33:5 They come to
fight with the Chaldeans, but it is to fill them with the dead bodies
of men, whom I have slain in mine anger and in my fury, and for all
whose wickedness I have hid my face from this city.

33:6 Behold, I will bring it health and cure, and I will cure them,
and will reveal unto them the abundance of peace and truth.

33:7 And I will cause the captivity of Judah and the captivity of
Israel to return, and will build them, as at the first.

33:8 And I will cleanse them from all their iniquity, whereby they
have sinned against me; and I will pardon all their iniquities,
whereby they have sinned, and whereby they have transgressed against
me.

33:9 And it shall be to me a name of joy, a praise and an honour
before all the nations of the earth, which shall hear all the good
that I do unto them: and they shall fear and tremble for all the
goodness and for all the prosperity that I procure unto it.

33:10 Thus saith the LORD; Again there shall be heard in this place,
which ye say shall be desolate without man and without beast, even in
the cities of Judah, and in the streets of Jerusalem, that are
desolate, without man, and without inhabitant, and without beast,
33:11 The voice of joy, and the voice of gladness, the voice of the
bridegroom, and the voice of the bride, the voice of them that shall
say, Praise the LORD of hosts: for the LORD is good; for his mercy
endureth for ever: and of them that shall bring the sacrifice of
praise into the house of the LORD. For I will cause to return the
captivity of the land, as at the first, saith the LORD.

33:12 Thus saith the LORD of hosts; Again in this place, which is
desolate without man and without beast, and in all the cities thereof,
shall be an habitation of shepherds causing their flocks to lie down.

33:13 In the cities of the mountains, in the cities of the vale, and
in the cities of the south, and in the land of Benjamin, and in the
places about Jerusalem, and in the cities of Judah, shall the flocks
pass again under the hands of him that telleth them, saith the LORD.

33:14 Behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will perform that
good thing which I have promised unto the house of Israel and to the
house of Judah.

33:15 In those days, and at that time, will I cause the Branch of
righteousness to grow up unto David; and he shall execute judgment and
righteousness in the land.

33:16 In those days shall Judah be saved, and Jerusalem shall dwell
safely: and this is the name wherewith she shall be called, The LORD
our righteousness.

33:17 For thus saith the LORD; David shall never want a man to sit
upon the throne of the house of Israel; 33:18 Neither shall the
priests the Levites want a man before me to offer burnt offerings, and
to kindle meat offerings, and to do sacrifice continually.

33:19 And the word of the LORD came unto Jeremiah, saying, 33:20 Thus
saith the LORD; If ye can break my covenant of the day, and my
covenant of the night, and that there should not be day and night in
their season; 33:21 Then may also my covenant be broken with David my
servant, that he should not have a son to reign upon his throne; and
with the Levites the priests, my ministers.

33:22 As the host of heaven cannot be numbered, neither the sand of
the sea measured: so will I multiply the seed of David my servant, and
the Levites that minister unto me.

33:23 Moreover the word of the LORD came to Jeremiah, saying, 33:24
Considerest thou not what this people have spoken, saying, The two
families which the LORD hath chosen, he hath even cast them off? thus
they have despised my people, that they should be no more a nation
before them.

33:25 Thus saith the LORD; If my covenant be not with day and night,
and if I have not appointed the ordinances of heaven and earth; 33:26
Then will I cast away the seed of Jacob and David my servant, so that
I will not take any of his seed to be rulers over the seed of Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob: for I will cause their captivity to return, and have
mercy on them.

34:1 The word which came unto Jeremiah from the LORD, when
Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, and all his army, and all the kingdoms
of the earth of his dominion, and all the people, fought against
Jerusalem, and against all the cities thereof, saying, 34:2 Thus saith
the LORD, the God of Israel; Go and speak to Zedekiah king of Judah,
and tell him, Thus saith the LORD; Behold, I will give this city into
the hand of the king of Babylon, and he shall burn it with fire: 34:3
And thou shalt not escape out of his hand, but shalt surely be taken,
and delivered into his hand; and thine eyes shall behold the eyes of
the king of Babylon, and he shall speak with thee mouth to mouth, and
thou shalt go to Babylon.

34:4 Yet hear the word of the LORD, O Zedekiah king of Judah; Thus
saith the LORD of thee, Thou shalt not die by the sword: 34:5 But thou
shalt die in peace: and with the burnings of thy fathers, the former
kings which were before thee, so shall they burn odours for thee; and
they will lament thee, saying, Ah lord! for I have pronounced the
word, saith the LORD.

34:6 Then Jeremiah the prophet spake all these words unto Zedekiah
king of Judah in Jerusalem, 34:7 When the king of Babylon's army
fought against Jerusalem, and against all the cities of Judah that
were left, against Lachish, and against Azekah: for these defenced
cities remained of the cities of Judah.

34:8 This is the word that came unto Jeremiah from the LORD, after
that the king Zedekiah had made a covenant with all the people which
were at Jerusalem, to proclaim liberty unto them; 34:9 That every man
should let his manservant, and every man his maidservant, being an
Hebrew or an Hebrewess, go free; that none should serve himself of
them, to wit, of a Jew his brother.

34:10 Now when all the princes, and all the people, which had entered
into the covenant, heard that every one should let his manservant, and
every one his maidservant, go free, that none should serve themselves
of them any more, then they obeyed, and let them go.

34:11 But afterward they turned, and caused the servants and the
handmaids, whom they had let go free, to return, and brought them into
subjection for servants and for handmaids.

34:12 Therefore the word of the LORD came to Jeremiah from the LORD,
saying, 34:13 Thus saith the LORD, the God of Israel; I made a
covenant with your fathers in the day that I brought them forth out of
the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondmen, saying, 34:14 At the
end of seven years let ye go every man his brother an Hebrew, which
hath been sold unto thee; and when he hath served thee six years, thou
shalt let him go free from thee: but your fathers hearkened not unto
me, neither inclined their ear.

34:15 And ye were now turned, and had done right in my sight, in
proclaiming liberty every man to his neighbour; and ye had made a
covenant before me in the house which is called by my name: 34:16 But
ye turned and polluted my name, and caused every man his servant, and
every man his handmaid, whom ye had set at liberty at their pleasure,
to return, and brought them into subjection, to be unto you for
servants and for handmaids.

34:17 Therefore thus saith the LORD; Ye have not hearkened unto me, in
proclaiming liberty, every one to his brother, and every man to his
neighbour: behold, I proclaim a liberty for you, saith the LORD, to
the sword, to the pestilence, and to the famine; and I will make you
to be removed into all the kingdoms of the earth.

34:18 And I will give the men that have transgressed my covenant,
which have not performed the words of the covenant which they had made
before me, when they cut the calf in twain, and passed between the
parts thereof, 34:19 The princes of Judah, and the princes of
Jerusalem, the eunuchs, and the priests, and all the people of the
land, which passed between the parts of the calf; 34:20 I will even
give them into the hand of their enemies, and into the hand of them
that seek their life: and their dead bodies shall be for meat unto the
fowls of the heaven, and to the beasts of the earth.

34:21 And Zedekiah king of Judah and his princes will I give into the
hand of their enemies, and into the hand of them that seek their life,
and into the hand of the king of Babylon's army, which are gone up
from you.

34:22 Behold, I will command, saith the LORD, and cause them to return
to this city; and they shall fight against it, and take it, and burn
it with fire: and I will make the cities of Judah a desolation without
an inhabitant.

35:1 The word which came unto Jeremiah from the LORD in the days of
Jehoiakim the son of Josiah king of Judah, saying, 35:2 Go unto the
house of the Rechabites, and speak unto them, and bring them into the
house of the LORD, into one of the chambers, and give them wine to
drink.

35:3 Then I took Jaazaniah the son of Jeremiah, the son of Habaziniah,
and his brethren, and all his sons, and the whole house of the
Rechabites; 35:4 And I brought them into the house of the LORD, into
the chamber of the sons of Hanan, the son of Igdaliah, a man of God,
which was by the chamber of the princes, which was above the chamber
of Maaseiah the son of Shallum, the keeper of the door: 35:5 And I set
before the sons of the house of the Rechabites pots full of wine, and
cups, and I said unto them, Drink ye wine.

35:6 But they said, We will drink no wine: for Jonadab the son of
Rechab our father commanded us, saying, Ye shall drink no wine,
neither ye, nor your sons for ever: 35:7 Neither shall ye build house,
nor sow seed, nor plant vineyard, nor have any: but all your days ye
shall dwell in tents; that ye may live many days in the land where ye
be strangers.

35:8 Thus have we obeyed the voice of Jonadab the son of Rechab our
father in all that he hath charged us, to drink no wine all our days,
we, our wives, our sons, nor our daughters; 35:9 Nor to build houses
for us to dwell in: neither have we vineyard, nor field, nor seed:
35:10 But we have dwelt in tents, and have obeyed, and done according
to all that Jonadab our father commanded us.

35:11 But it came to pass, when Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon came up
into the land, that we said, Come, and let us go to Jerusalem for fear
of the army of the Chaldeans, and for fear of the army of the Syrians:
so we dwell at Jerusalem.

35:12 Then came the word of the LORD unto Jeremiah, saying, 35:13 Thus
saith the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel; Go and tell the men of
Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem, Will ye not receive
instruction to hearken to my words? saith the LORD.

35:14 The words of Jonadab the son of Rechab, that he commanded his
sons not to drink wine, are performed; for unto this day they drink
none, but obey their father's commandment: notwithstanding I have
spoken unto you, rising early and speaking; but ye hearkened not unto
me.

35:15 I have sent also unto you all my servants the prophets, rising
up early and sending them, saying, Return ye now every man from his
evil way, and amend your doings, and go not after other gods to serve
them, and ye shall dwell in the land which I have given to you and to
your fathers: but ye have not inclined your ear, nor hearkened unto
me.

35:16 Because the sons of Jonadab the son of Rechab have performed the
commandment of their father, which he commanded them; but this people
hath not hearkened unto me: 35:17 Therefore thus saith the LORD God of
hosts, the God of Israel; Behold, I will bring upon Judah and upon all
the inhabitants of Jerusalem all the evil that I have pronounced
against them: because I have spoken unto them, but they have not
heard; and I have called unto them, but they have not answered.

35:18 And Jeremiah said unto the house of the Rechabites, Thus saith
the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel; Because ye have obeyed the
commandment of Jonadab your father, and kept all his precepts, and
done according unto all that he hath commanded you: 35:19 Therefore
thus saith the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel; Jonadab the son of
Rechab shall not want a man to stand before me for ever.

36:1 And it came to pass in the fourth year of Jehoiakim the son of
Josiah king of Judah, that this word came unto Jeremiah from the LORD,
saying, 36:2 Take thee a roll of a book, and write therein all the
words that I have spoken unto thee against Israel, and against Judah,
and against all the nations, from the day I spake unto thee, from the
days of Josiah, even unto this day.

36:3 It may be that the house of Judah will hear all the evil which I
purpose to do unto them; that they may return every man from his evil
way; that I may forgive their iniquity and their sin.

36:4 Then Jeremiah called Baruch the son of Neriah: and Baruch wrote
from the mouth of Jeremiah all the words of the LORD, which he had
spoken unto him, upon a roll of a book.

36:5 And Jeremiah commanded Baruch, saying, I am shut up; I cannot go
into the house of the LORD: 36:6 Therefore go thou, and read in the
roll, which thou hast written from my mouth, the words of the LORD in
the ears of the people in the LORD's house upon the fasting day: and
also thou shalt read them in the ears of all Judah that come out of
their cities.

36:7 It may be they will present their supplication before the LORD,
and will return every one from his evil way: for great is the anger
and the fury that the LORD hath pronounced against this people.

36:8 And Baruch the son of Neriah did according to all that Jeremiah
the prophet commanded him, reading in the book the words of the LORD
in the LORD's house.

36:9 And it came to pass in the fifth year of Jehoiakim the son of
Josiah king of Judah, in the ninth month, that they proclaimed a fast
before the LORD to all the people in Jerusalem, and to all the people
that came from the cities of Judah unto Jerusalem.

36:10 Then read Baruch in the book the words of Jeremiah in the house
of the LORD, in the chamber of Gemariah the son of Shaphan the scribe,
in the higher court, at the entry of the new gate of the LORD's house,
in the ears of all the people.

36:11 When Michaiah the son of Gemariah, the son of Shaphan, had heard
out of the book all the words of the LORD, 36:12 Then he went down
into the king's house, into the scribe's chamber: and, lo, all the
princes sat there, even Elishama the scribe, and Delaiah the son of
Shemaiah, and Elnathan the son of Achbor, and Gemariah the son of
Shaphan, and Zedekiah the son of Hananiah, and all the princes.

36:13 Then Michaiah declared unto them all the words that he had
heard, when Baruch read the book in the ears of the people.

36:14 Therefore all the princes sent Jehudi the son of Nethaniah, the
son of Shelemiah, the son of Cushi, unto Baruch, saying, Take in thine
hand the roll wherein thou hast read in the ears of the people, and
come. So Baruch the son of Neriah took the roll in his hand, and came
unto them.

36:15 And they said unto him, Sit down now, and read it in our ears.
So Baruch read it in their ears.

36:16 Now it came to pass, when they had heard all the words, they
were afraid both one and other, and said unto Baruch, We will surely
tell the king of all these words.

36:17 And they asked Baruch, saying, Tell us now, How didst thou write
all these words at his mouth?  36:18 Then Baruch answered them, He
pronounced all these words unto me with his mouth, and I wrote them
with ink in the book.

36:19 Then said the princes unto Baruch, Go, hide thee, thou and
Jeremiah; and let no man know where ye be.

36:20 And they went in to the king into the court, but they laid up
the roll in the chamber of Elishama the scribe, and told all the words
in the ears of the king.

36:21 So the king sent Jehudi to fetch the roll: and he took it out of
Elishama the scribe's chamber. And Jehudi read it in the ears of the
king, and in the ears of all the princes which stood beside the king.

36:22 Now the king sat in the winterhouse in the ninth month: and
there was a fire on the hearth burning before him.

36:23 And it came to pass, that when Jehudi had read three or four
leaves, he cut it with the penknife, and cast it into the fire that
was on the hearth, until all the roll was consumed in the fire that
was on the hearth.

36:24 Yet they were not afraid, nor rent their garments, neither the
king, nor any of his servants that heard all these words.

36:25 Nevertheless Elnathan and Delaiah and Gemariah had made
intercession to the king that he would not burn the roll: but he would
not hear them.

36:26 But the king commanded Jerahmeel the son of Hammelech, and
Seraiah the son of Azriel, and Shelemiah the son of Abdeel, to take
Baruch the scribe and Jeremiah the prophet: but the LORD hid them.

36:27 Then the word of the LORD came to Jeremiah, after that the king
had burned the roll, and the words which Baruch wrote at the mouth of
Jeremiah, saying, 36:28 Take thee again another roll, and write in it
all the former words that were in the first roll, which Jehoiakim the
king of Judah hath burned.

36:29 And thou shalt say to Jehoiakim king of Judah, Thus saith the
LORD; Thou hast burned this roll, saying, Why hast thou written
therein, saying, The king of Babylon shall certainly come and destroy
this land, and shall cause to cease from thence man and beast?  36:30
Therefore thus saith the LORD of Jehoiakim king of Judah; He shall
have none to sit upon the throne of David: and his dead body shall be
cast out in the day to the heat, and in the night to the frost.

36:31 And I will punish him and his seed and his servants for their
iniquity; and I will bring upon them, and upon the inhabitants of
Jerusalem, and upon the men of Judah, all the evil that I have
pronounced against them; but they hearkened not.

36:32 Then took Jeremiah another roll, and gave it to Baruch the
scribe, the son of Neriah; who wrote therein from the mouth of
Jeremiah all the words of the book which Jehoiakim king of Judah had
burned in the fire: and there were added besides unto them many like
words.

37:1 And king Zedekiah the son of Josiah reigned instead of Coniah the
son of Jehoiakim, whom Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon made king in the
land of Judah.

37:2 But neither he, nor his servants, nor the people of the land, did
hearken unto the words of the LORD, which he spake by the prophet
Jeremiah.

37:3 And Zedekiah the king sent Jehucal the son of Shelemiah and
Zephaniah the son of Maaseiah the priest to the prophet Jeremiah,
saying, Pray now unto the LORD our God for us.

37:4 Now Jeremiah came in and went out among the people: for they had
not put him into prison.

37:5 Then Pharaoh's army was come forth out of Egypt: and when the
Chaldeans that besieged Jerusalem heard tidings of them, they departed
from Jerusalem.

37:6 Then came the word of the LORD unto the prophet Jeremiah saying,
37:7 Thus saith the LORD, the God of Israel; Thus shall ye say to the
king of Judah, that sent you unto me to enquire of me; Behold,
Pharaoh's army, which is come forth to help you, shall return to Egypt
into their own land.

37:8 And the Chaldeans shall come again, and fight against this city,
and take it, and burn it with fire.

37:9 Thus saith the LORD; Deceive not yourselves, saying, The
Chaldeans shall surely depart from us: for they shall not depart.

37:10 For though ye had smitten the whole army of the Chaldeans that
fight against you, and there remained but wounded men among them, yet
should they rise up every man in his tent, and burn this city with
fire.

37:11 And it came to pass, that when the army of the Chaldeans was
broken up from Jerusalem for fear of Pharaoh's army, 37:12 Then
Jeremiah went forth out of Jerusalem to go into the land of Benjamin,
to separate himself thence in the midst of the people.

37:13 And when he was in the gate of Benjamin, a captain of the ward
was there, whose name was Irijah, the son of Shelemiah, the son of
Hananiah; and he took Jeremiah the prophet, saying, Thou fallest away
to the Chaldeans.

37:14 Then said Jeremiah, It is false; I fall not away to the
Chaldeans.

But he hearkened not to him: so Irijah took Jeremiah, and brought him
to the princes.

37:15 Wherefore the princes were wroth with Jeremiah, and smote him,
and put him in prison in the house of Jonathan the scribe: for they
had made that the prison.

37:16 When Jeremiah was entered into the dungeon, and into the cabins,
and Jeremiah had remained there many days; 37:17 Then Zedekiah the
king sent, and took him out: and the king asked him secretly in his
house, and said, Is there any word from the LORD? And Jeremiah said,
There is: for, said he, thou shalt be delivered into the hand of the
king of Babylon.

37:18 Moreover Jeremiah said unto king Zedekiah, What have I offended
against thee, or against thy servants, or against this people, that ye
have put me in prison?  37:19 Where are now your prophets which
prophesied unto you, saying, The king of Babylon shall not come
against you, nor against this land?  37:20 Therefore hear now, I pray
thee, O my lord the king: let my supplication, I pray thee, be
accepted before thee; that thou cause me not to return to the house of
Jonathan the scribe, lest I die there.

37:21 Then Zedekiah the king commanded that they should commit
Jeremiah into the court of the prison, and that they should give him
daily a piece of bread out of the bakers' street, until all the bread
in the city were spent.

Thus Jeremiah remained in the court of the prison.

38:1 Then Shephatiah the son of Mattan, and Gedaliah the son of
Pashur, and Jucal the son of Shelemiah, and Pashur the son of
Malchiah, heard the words that Jeremiah had spoken unto all the
people, saying, 38:2 Thus saith the LORD, He that remaineth in this
city shall die by the sword, by the famine, and by the pestilence: but
he that goeth forth to the Chaldeans shall live; for he shall have his
life for a prey, and shall live.

38:3 Thus saith the LORD, This city shall surely be given into the
hand of the king of Babylon's army, which shall take it.

38:4 Therefore the princes said unto the king, We beseech thee, let
this man be put to death: for thus he weakeneth the hands of the men
of war that remain in this city, and the hands of all the people, in
speaking such words unto them: for this man seeketh not the welfare of
this people, but the hurt.

38:5 Then Zedekiah the king said, Behold, he is in your hand: for the
king is not he that can do any thing against you.

38:6 Then took they Jeremiah, and cast him into the dungeon of
Malchiah the son of Hammelech, that was in the court of the prison:
and they let down Jeremiah with cords. And in the dungeon there was no
water, but mire: so Jeremiah sunk in the mire.

38:7 Now when Ebedmelech the Ethiopian, one of the eunuchs which was
in the king's house, heard that they had put Jeremiah in the dungeon;
the king then sitting in the gate of Benjamin; 38:8 Ebedmelech went
forth out of the king's house, and spake to the king saying, 38:9 My
lord the king, these men have done evil in all that they have done to
Jeremiah the prophet, whom they have cast into the dungeon; and he is
like to die for hunger in the place where he is: for there is no more
bread in the city.

38:10 Then the king commanded Ebedmelech the Ethiopian, saying, Take
from hence thirty men with thee, and take up Jeremiah the prophet out
of the dungeon, before he die.

38:11 So Ebedmelech took the men with him, and went into the house of
the king under the treasury, and took thence old cast clouts and old
rotten rags, and let them down by cords into the dungeon to Jeremiah.

38:12 And Ebedmelech the Ethiopian said unto Jeremiah, Put now these
old cast clouts and rotten rags under thine armholes under the cords.
And Jeremiah did so.

38:13 So they drew up Jeremiah with cords, and took him up out of the
dungeon: and Jeremiah remained in the court of the prison.

38:14 Then Zedekiah the king sent, and took Jeremiah the prophet unto
him into the third entry that is in the house of the LORD: and the
king said unto Jeremiah, I will ask thee a thing; hide nothing from
me.

38:15 Then Jeremiah said unto Zedekiah, If I declare it unto thee,
wilt thou not surely put me to death? and if I give thee counsel, wilt
thou not hearken unto me?  38:16 So Zedekiah the king sware secretly
unto Jeremiah, saying, As the LORD liveth, that made us this soul, I
will not put thee to death, neither will I give thee into the hand of
these men that seek thy life.

38:17 Then said Jeremiah unto Zedekiah, Thus saith the LORD, the God
of hosts, the God of Israel; If thou wilt assuredly go forth unto the
king of Babylon's princes, then thy soul shall live, and this city
shall not be burned with fire; and thou shalt live, and thine house:
38:18 But if thou wilt not go forth to the king of Babylon's princes,
then shall this city be given into the hand of the Chaldeans, and they
shall burn it with fire, and thou shalt not escape out of their hand.

38:19 And Zedekiah the king said unto Jeremiah, I am afraid of the
Jews that are fallen to the Chaldeans, lest they deliver me into their
hand, and they mock me.

38:20 But Jeremiah said, They shall not deliver thee. Obey, I beseech
thee, the voice of the LORD, which I speak unto thee: so it shall be
well unto thee, and thy soul shall live.

38:21 But if thou refuse to go forth, this is the word that the LORD
hath shewed me: 38:22 And, behold, all the women that are left in the
king of Judah's house shall be brought forth to the king of Babylon's
princes, and those women shall say, Thy friends have set thee on, and
have prevailed against thee: thy feet are sunk in the mire, and they
are turned away back.

38:23 So they shall bring out all thy wives and thy children to the
Chaldeans: and thou shalt not escape out of their hand, but shalt be
taken by the hand of the king of Babylon: and thou shalt cause this
city to be burned with fire.

38:24 Then said Zedekiah unto Jeremiah, Let no man know of these
words, and thou shalt not die.

38:25 But if the princes hear that I have talked with thee, and they
come unto thee, and say unto thee, Declare unto us now what thou hast
said unto the king, hide it not from us, and we will not put thee to
death; also what the king said unto thee: 38:26 Then thou shalt say
unto them, I presented my supplication before the king, that he would
not cause me to return to Jonathan's house, to die there.

38:27 Then came all the princes unto Jeremiah, and asked him: and he
told them according to all these words that the king had commanded. So
they left off speaking with him; for the matter was not perceived.

38:28 So Jeremiah abode in the court of the prison until the day that
Jerusalem was taken: and he was there when Jerusalem was taken.

39:1 In the ninth year of Zedekiah king of Judah, in the tenth month,
came Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon and all his army against
Jerusalem, and they besieged it.

39:2 And in the eleventh year of Zedekiah, in the fourth month, the
ninth day of the month, the city was broken up.

39:3 And all the princes of the king of Babylon came in, and sat in
the middle gate, even Nergalsharezer, Samgarnebo, Sarsechim, Rabsaris,
Nergalsharezer, Rabmag, with all the residue of the princes of the
king of Babylon.

39:4 And it came to pass, that when Zedekiah the king of Judah saw
them, and all the men of war, then they fled, and went forth out of
the city by night, by the way of the king's garden, by the gate
betwixt the two walls: and he went out the way of the plain.

39:5 But the Chaldeans' army pursued after them, and overtook Zedekiah
in the plains of Jericho: and when they had taken him, they brought
him up to Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon to Riblah in the land of
Hamath, where he gave judgment upon him.

39:6 Then the king of Babylon slew the sons of Zedekiah in Riblah
before his eyes: also the king of Babylon slew all the nobles of
Judah.

39:7 Moreover he put out Zedekiah's eyes, and bound him with chains,
to carry him to Babylon.

39:8 And the Chaldeans burned the king's house, and the houses of the
people, with fire, and brake down the walls of Jerusalem.

39:9 Then Nebuzaradan the captain of the guard carried away captive
into Babylon the remnant of the people that remained in the city, and
those that fell away, that fell to him, with the rest of the people
that remained.

39:10 But Nebuzaradan the captain of the guard left of the poor of the
people, which had nothing, in the land of Judah, and gave them
vineyards and fields at the same time.

39:11 Now Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon gave charge concerning
Jeremiah to Nebuzaradan the captain of the guard, saying, 39:12 Take
him, and look well to him, and do him no harm; but do unto him even as
he shall say unto thee.

39:13 So Nebuzaradan the captain of the guard sent, and Nebushasban,
Rabsaris, and Nergalsharezer, Rabmag, and all the king of Babylon's
princes; 39:14 Even they sent, and took Jeremiah out of the court of
the prison, and committed him unto Gedaliah the son of Ahikam the son
of Shaphan, that he should carry him home: so he dwelt among the
people.

39:15 Now the word of the LORD came unto Jeremiah, while he was shut
up in the court of the prison, saying, 39:16 Go and speak to
Ebedmelech the Ethiopian, saying, Thus saith the LORD of hosts, the
God of Israel; Behold, I will bring my words upon this city for evil,
and not for good; and they shall be accomplished in that day before
thee.

39:17 But I will deliver thee in that day, saith the LORD: and thou
shalt not be given into the hand of the men of whom thou art afraid.

39:18 For I will surely deliver thee, and thou shalt not fall by the
sword, but thy life shall be for a prey unto thee: because thou hast
put thy trust in me, saith the LORD.

40:1 The word that came to Jeremiah from the LORD, after that
Nebuzaradan the captain of the guard had let him go from Ramah, when
he had taken him being bound in chains among all that were carried
away captive of Jerusalem and Judah, which were carried away captive
unto Babylon.

40:2 And the captain of the guard took Jeremiah, and said unto him,
The LORD thy God hath pronounced this evil upon this place.

40:3 Now the LORD hath brought it, and done according as he hath said:
because ye have sinned against the LORD, and have not obeyed his
voice, therefore this thing is come upon you.

40:4 And now, behold, I loose thee this day from the chains which were
upon thine hand. If it seem good unto thee to come with me into
Babylon, come; and I will look well unto thee: but if it seem ill unto
thee to come with me into Babylon, forbear: behold, all the land is
before thee: whither it seemeth good and convenient for thee to go,
thither go.

40:5 Now while he was not yet gone back, he said, Go back also to
Gedaliah the son of Ahikam the son of Shaphan, whom the king of
Babylon hath made governor over the cities of Judah, and dwell with
him among the people: or go wheresoever it seemeth convenient unto
thee to go. So the captain of the guard gave him victuals and a
reward, and let him go.

40:6 Then went Jeremiah unto Gedaliah the son of Ahikam to Mizpah; and
dwelt with him among the people that were left in the land.

40:7 Now when all the captains of the forces which were in the fields,
even they and their men, heard that the king of Babylon had made
Gedaliah the son of Ahikam governor in the land, and had committed
unto him men, and women, and children, and of the poor of the land, of
them that were not carried away captive to Babylon; 40:8 Then they
came to Gedaliah to Mizpah, even Ishmael the son of Nethaniah, and
Johanan and Jonathan the sons of Kareah, and Seraiah the son of
Tanhumeth, and the sons of Ephai the Netophathite, and Jezaniah the
son of a Maachathite, they and their men.

40:9 And Gedaliah the son of Ahikam the son of Shaphan sware unto them
and to their men, saying, Fear not to serve the Chaldeans: dwell in
the land, and serve the king of Babylon, and it shall be well with
you.

40:10 As for me, behold, I will dwell at Mizpah, to serve the
Chaldeans, which will come unto us: but ye, gather ye wine, and summer
fruits, and oil, and put them in your vessels, and dwell in your
cities that ye have taken.

40:11 Likewise when all the Jews that were in Moab, and among the
Ammonites, and in Edom, and that were in all the countries, heard that
the king of Babylon had left a remnant of Judah, and that he had set
over them Gedaliah the son of Ahikam the son of Shaphan; 40:12 Even
all the Jews returned out of all places whither they were driven, and
came to the land of Judah, to Gedaliah, unto Mizpah, and gathered wine
and summer fruits very much.

40:13 Moreover Johanan the son of Kareah, and all the captains of the
forces that were in the fields, came to Gedaliah to Mizpah, 40:14 And
said unto him, Dost thou certainly know that Baalis the king of the
Ammonites hath sent Ishmael the son of Nethaniah to slay thee? But
Gedaliah the son of Ahikam believed them not.

40:15 Then Johanan the son of Kareah spake to Gedaliah in Mizpah
secretly saying, Let me go, I pray thee, and I will slay Ishmael the
son of Nethaniah, and no man shall know it: wherefore should he slay
thee, that all the Jews which are gathered unto thee should be
scattered, and the remnant in Judah perish?  40:16 But Gedaliah the
son of Ahikam said unto Johanan the son of Kareah, Thou shalt not do
this thing: for thou speakest falsely of Ishmael.

41:1 Now it came to pass in the seventh month, that Ishmael the son of
Nethaniah the son of Elishama, of the seed royal, and the princes of
the king, even ten men with him, came unto Gedaliah the son of Ahikam
to Mizpah; and there they did eat bread together in Mizpah.

41:2 Then arose Ishmael the son of Nethaniah, and the ten men that
were with him, and smote Gedaliah the son of Ahikam the son of Shaphan
with the sword, and slew him, whom the king of Babylon had made
governor over the land.

41:3 Ishmael also slew all the Jews that were with him, even with
Gedaliah, at Mizpah, and the Chaldeans that were found there, and the
men of war.

41:4 And it came to pass the second day after he had slain Gedaliah,
and no man knew it, 41:5 That there came certain from Shechem, from
Shiloh, and from Samaria, even fourscore men, having their beards
shaven, and their clothes rent, and having cut themselves, with
offerings and incense in their hand, to bring them to the house of the
LORD.

41:6 And Ishmael the son of Nethaniah went forth from Mizpah to meet
them, weeping all along as he went: and it came to pass, as he met
them, he said unto them, Come to Gedaliah the son of Ahikam.

41:7 And it was so, when they came into the midst of the city, that
Ishmael the son of Nethaniah slew them, and cast them into the midst
of the pit, he, and the men that were with him.

41:8 But ten men were found among them that said unto Ishmael, Slay us
not: for we have treasures in the field, of wheat, and of barley, and
of oil, and of honey. So he forbare, and slew them not among their
brethren.

41:9 Now the pit wherein Ishmael had cast all the dead bodies of the
men, whom he had slain because of Gedaliah, was it which Asa the king
had made for fear of Baasha king of Israel: and Ishmael the son of
Nethaniah filled it with them that were slain.

41:10 Then Ishmael carried away captive all the residue of the people
that were in Mizpah, even the king's daughters, and all the people
that remained in Mizpah, whom Nebuzaradan the captain of the guard had
committed to Gedaliah the son of Ahikam: and Ishmael the son of
Nethaniah carried them away captive, and departed to go over to the
Ammonites.

41:11 But when Johanan the son of Kareah, and all the captains of the
forces that were with him, heard of all the evil that Ishmael the son
of Nethaniah had done, 41:12 Then they took all the men, and went to
fight with Ishmael the son of Nethaniah, and found him by the great
waters that are in Gibeon.

41:13 Now it came to pass, that when all the people which were with
Ishmael saw Johanan the son of Kareah, and all the captains of the
forces that were with him, then they were glad.

41:14 So all the people that Ishmael had carried away captive from
Mizpah cast about and returned, and went unto Johanan the son of
Kareah.

41:15 But Ishmael the son of Nethaniah escaped from Johanan with eight
men, and went to the Ammonites.

41:16 Then took Johanan the son of Kareah, and all the captains of the
forces that were with him, all the remnant of the people whom he had
recovered from Ishmael the son of Nethaniah, from Mizpah, after that
he had slain Gedaliah the son of Ahikam, even mighty men of war, and
the women, and the children, and the eunuchs, whom he had brought
again from Gibeon: 41:17 And they departed, and dwelt in the
habitation of Chimham, which is by Bethlehem, to go to enter into
Egypt, 41:18 Because of the Chaldeans: for they were afraid of them,
because Ishmael the son of Nethaniah had slain Gedaliah the son of
Ahikam, whom the king of Babylon made governor in the land.

42:1 Then all the captains of the forces, and Johanan the son of
Kareah, and Jezaniah the son of Hoshaiah, and all the people from the
least even unto the greatest, came near, 42:2 And said unto Jeremiah
the prophet, Let, we beseech thee, our supplication be accepted before
thee, and pray for us unto the LORD thy God, even for all this
remnant; (for we are left but a few of many, as thine eyes do behold
us:) 42:3 That the LORD thy God may shew us the way wherein we may
walk, and the thing that we may do.

42:4 Then Jeremiah the prophet said unto them, I have heard you;
behold, I will pray unto the LORD your God according to your words;
and it shall come to pass, that whatsoever thing the LORD shall answer
you, I will declare it unto you; I will keep nothing back from you.

42:5 Then they said to Jeremiah, The LORD be a true and faithful
witness between us, if we do not even according to all things for the
which the LORD thy God shall send thee to us.

42:6 Whether it be good, or whether it be evil, we will obey the voice
of the LORD our God, to whom we send thee; that it may be well with
us, when we obey the voice of the LORD our God.

42:7 And it came to pass after ten days, that the word of the LORD
came unto Jeremiah.

42:8 Then called he Johanan the son of Kareah, and all the captains of
the forces which were with him, and all the people from the least even
to the greatest, 42:9 And said unto them, Thus saith the LORD, the God
of Israel, unto whom ye sent me to present your supplication before
him; 42:10 If ye will still abide in this land, then will I build you,
and not pull you down, and I will plant you, and not pluck you up: for
I repent me of the evil that I have done unto you.

42:11 Be not afraid of the king of Babylon, of whom ye are afraid; be
not afraid of him, saith the LORD: for I am with you to save you, and
to deliver you from his hand.

42:12 And I will shew mercies unto you, that he may have mercy upon
you, and cause you to return to your own land.

42:13 But if ye say, We will not dwell in this land, neither obey the
voice of the LORD your God, 42:14 Saying, No; but we will go into the
land of Egypt, where we shall see no war, nor hear the sound of the
trumpet, nor have hunger of bread; and there will we dwell: 42:15 And
now therefore hear the word of the LORD, ye remnant of Judah; Thus
saith the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel; If ye wholly set your
faces to enter into Egypt, and go to sojourn there; 42:16 Then it
shall come to pass, that the sword, which ye feared, shall overtake
you there in the land of Egypt, and the famine, whereof ye were
afraid, shall follow close after you there in Egypt; and there ye
shall die.

42:17 So shall it be with all the men that set their faces to go into
Egypt to sojourn there; they shall die by the sword, by the famine,
and by the pestilence: and none of them shall remain or escape from
the evil that I will bring upon them.

42:18 For thus saith the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel; As mine
anger and my fury hath been poured forth upon the inhabitants of
Jerusalem; so shall my fury be poured forth upon you, when ye shall
enter into Egypt: and ye shall be an execration, and an astonishment,
and a curse, and a reproach; and ye shall see this place no more.

42:19 The LORD hath said concerning you, O ye remnant of Judah; Go ye
not into Egypt: know certainly that I have admonished you this day.

42:20 For ye dissembled in your hearts, when ye sent me unto the LORD
your God, saying, Pray for us unto the LORD our God; and according
unto all that the LORD our God shall say, so declare unto us, and we
will do it.

42:21 And now I have this day declared it to you; but ye have not
obeyed the voice of the LORD your God, nor any thing for the which he
hath sent me unto you.

42:22 Now therefore know certainly that ye shall die by the sword, by
the famine, and by the pestilence, in the place whither ye desire to
go and to sojourn.

43:1 And it came to pass, that when Jeremiah had made an end of
speaking unto all the people all the words of the LORD their God, for
which the LORD their God had sent him to them, even all these words,
43:2 Then spake Azariah the son of Hoshaiah, and Johanan the son of
Kareah, and all the proud men, saying unto Jeremiah, Thou speakest
falsely: the LORD our God hath not sent thee to say, Go not into Egypt
to sojourn there: 43:3 But Baruch the son of Neriah setteth thee on
against us, for to deliver us into the hand of the Chaldeans, that
they might put us to death, and carry us away captives into Babylon.

43:4 So Johanan the son of Kareah, and all the captains of the forces,
and all the people, obeyed not the voice of the LORD, to dwell in the
land of Judah.

43:5 But Johanan the son of Kareah, and all the captains of the
forces, took all the remnant of Judah, that were returned from all
nations, whither they had been driven, to dwell in the land of Judah;
43:6 Even men, and women, and children, and the king's daughters, and
every person that Nebuzaradan the captain of the guard had left with
Gedaliah the son of Ahikam the son of Shaphan, and Jeremiah the
prophet, and Baruch the son of Neriah.

43:7 So they came into the land of Egypt: for they obeyed not the
voice of the LORD: thus came they even to Tahpanhes.

43:8 Then came the word of the LORD unto Jeremiah in Tahpanhes,
saying, 43:9 Take great stones in thine hand, and hide them in the
clay in the brickkiln, which is at the entry of Pharaoh's house in
Tahpanhes, in the sight of the men of Judah; 43:10 And say unto them,
Thus saith the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel; Behold, I will send
and take Nebuchadrezzar the king of Babylon, my servant, and will set
his throne upon these stones that I have hid; and he shall spread his
royal pavilion over them.

43:11 And when he cometh, he shall smite the land of Egypt, and
deliver such as are for death to death; and such as are for captivity
to captivity; and such as are for the sword to the sword.

43:12 And I will kindle a fire in the houses of the gods of Egypt; and
he shall burn them, and carry them away captives: and he shall array
himself with the land of Egypt, as a shepherd putteth on his garment;
and he shall go forth from thence in peace.

43:13 He shall break also the images of Bethshemesh, that is in the
land of Egypt; and the houses of the gods of the Egyptians shall he
burn with fire.

44:1 The word that came to Jeremiah concerning all the Jews which
dwell in the land of Egypt, which dwell at Migdol, and at Tahpanhes,
and at Noph, and in the country of Pathros, saying, 44:2 Thus saith
the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel; Ye have seen all the evil that I
have brought upon Jerusalem, and upon all the cities of Judah; and,
behold, this day they are a desolation, and no man dwelleth therein,
44:3 Because of their wickedness which they have committed to provoke
me to anger, in that they went to burn incense, and to serve other
gods, whom they knew not, neither they, ye, nor your fathers.

44:4 Howbeit I sent unto you all my servants the prophets, rising
early and sending them, saying, Oh, do not this abominable thing that
I hate.

44:5 But they hearkened not, nor inclined their ear to turn from their
wickedness, to burn no incense unto other gods.

44:6 Wherefore my fury and mine anger was poured forth, and was
kindled in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem; and
they are wasted and desolate, as at this day.

44:7 Therefore now thus saith the LORD, the God of hosts, the God of
Israel; Wherefore commit ye this great evil against your souls, to cut
off from you man and woman, child and suckling, out of Judah, to leave
you none to remain; 44:8 In that ye provoke me unto wrath with the
works of your hands, burning incense unto other gods in the land of
Egypt, whither ye be gone to dwell, that ye might cut yourselves off,
and that ye might be a curse and a reproach among all the nations of
the earth?  44:9 Have ye forgotten the wickedness of your fathers, and
the wickedness of the kings of Judah, and the wickedness of their
wives, and your own wickedness, and the wickedness of your wives,
which they have committed in the land of Judah, and in the streets of
Jerusalem?  44:10 They are not humbled even unto this day, neither
have they feared, nor walked in my law, nor in my statutes, that I set
before you and before your fathers.

44:11 Therefore thus saith the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel;
Behold, I will set my face against you for evil, and to cut off all
Judah.

44:12 And I will take the remnant of Judah, that have set their faces
to go into the land of Egypt to sojourn there, and they shall all be
consumed, and fall in the land of Egypt; they shall even be consumed
by the sword and by the famine: they shall die, from the least even
unto the greatest, by the sword and by the famine: and they shall be
an execration, and an astonishment, and a curse, and a reproach.

44:13 For I will punish them that dwell in the land of Egypt, as I
have punished Jerusalem, by the sword, by the famine, and by the
pestilence: 44:14 So that none of the remnant of Judah, which are gone
into the land of Egypt to sojourn there, shall escape or remain, that
they should return into the land of Judah, to the which they have a
desire to return to dwell there: for none shall return but such as
shall escape.

44:15 Then all the men which knew that their wives had burned incense
unto other gods, and all the women that stood by, a great multitude,
even all the people that dwelt in the land of Egypt, in Pathros,
answered Jeremiah, saying, 44:16 As for the word that thou hast spoken
unto us in the name of the LORD, we will not hearken unto thee.

44:17 But we will certainly do whatsoever thing goeth forth out of our
own mouth, to burn incense unto the queen of heaven, and to pour out
drink offerings unto her, as we have done, we, and our fathers, our
kings, and our princes, in the cities of Judah, and in the streets of
Jerusalem: for then had we plenty of victuals, and were well, and saw
no evil.

44:18 But since we left off to burn incense to the queen of heaven,
and to pour out drink offerings unto her, we have wanted all things,
and have been consumed by the sword and by the famine.

44:19 And when we burned incense to the queen of heaven, and poured
out drink offerings unto her, did we make her cakes to worship her,
and pour out drink offerings unto her, without our men?  44:20 Then
Jeremiah said unto all the people, to the men, and to the women, and
to all the people which had given him that answer, saying, 44:21 The
incense that ye burned in the cities of Judah, and in the streets of
Jerusalem, ye, and your fathers, your kings, and your princes, and the
people of the land, did not the LORD remember them, and came it not
into his mind?  44:22 So that the LORD could no longer bear, because
of the evil of your doings, and because of the abominations which ye
have committed; therefore is your land a desolation, and an
astonishment, and a curse, without an inhabitant, as at this day.

44:23 Because ye have burned incense, and because ye have sinned
against the LORD, and have not obeyed the voice of the LORD, nor
walked in his law, nor in his statutes, nor in his testimonies;
therefore this evil is happened unto you, as at this day.

44:24 Moreover Jeremiah said unto all the people, and to all the
women, Hear the word of the LORD, all Judah that are in the land of
Egypt: 44:25 Thus saith the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, saying;
Ye and your wives have both spoken with your mouths, and fulfilled
with your hand, saying, We will surely perform our vows that we have
vowed, to burn incense to the queen of heaven, and to pour out drink
offerings unto her: ye will surely accomplish your vows, and surely
perform your vows.

44:26 Therefore hear ye the word of the LORD, all Judah that dwell in
the land of Egypt; Behold, I have sworn by my great name, saith the
LORD, that my name shall no more be named in the mouth of any man of
Judah in all the land of Egypt, saying, The Lord GOD liveth.

44:27 Behold, I will watch over them for evil, and not for good: and
all the men of Judah that are in the land of Egypt shall be consumed
by the sword and by the famine, until there be an end of them.

44:28 Yet a small number that escape the sword shall return out of the
land of Egypt into the land of Judah, and all the remnant of Judah,
that are gone into the land of Egypt to sojourn there, shall know
whose words shall stand, mine, or their's.

44:29 And this shall be a sign unto you, saith the LORD, that I will
punish you in this place, that ye may know that my words shall surely
stand against you for evil: 44:30 Thus saith the LORD; Behold, I will
give Pharaohhophra king of Egypt into the hand of his enemies, and
into the hand of them that seek his life; as I gave Zedekiah king of
Judah into the hand of Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon, his enemy, and
that sought his life.

45:1 The word that Jeremiah the prophet spake unto Baruch the son of
Neriah, when he had written these words in a book at the mouth of
Jeremiah, in the fourth year of Jehoiakim the son of Josiah king of
Judah, saying, 45:2 Thus saith the LORD, the God of Israel, unto thee,
O Baruch: 45:3 Thou didst say, Woe is me now! for the LORD hath added
grief to my sorrow; I fainted in my sighing, and I find no rest.

45:4 Thus shalt thou say unto him, The LORD saith thus; Behold, that
which I have built will I break down, and that which I have planted I
will pluck up, even this whole land.

45:5 And seekest thou great things for thyself? seek them not: for,
behold, I will bring evil upon all flesh, saith the LORD: but thy life
will I give unto thee for a prey in all places whither thou goest.

46:1 The word of the LORD which came to Jeremiah the prophet against
the Gentiles; 46:2 Against Egypt, against the army of Pharaohnecho
king of Egypt, which was by the river Euphrates in Carchemish, which
Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon smote in the fourth year of Jehoiakim
the son of Josiah king of Judah.

46:3 Order ye the buckler and shield, and draw near to battle.

46:4 Harness the horses; and get up, ye horsemen, and stand forth with
your helmets; furbish the spears, and put on the brigandines.

46:5 Wherefore have I seen them dismayed and turned away back? and
their mighty ones are beaten down, and are fled apace, and look not
back: for fear was round about, saith the LORD.

46:6 Let not the swift flee away, nor the mighty man escape; they
shall stumble, and fall toward the north by the river Euphrates.

46:7 Who is this that cometh up as a flood, whose waters are moved as
the rivers?  46:8 Egypt riseth up like a flood, and his waters are
moved like the rivers; and he saith, I will go up, and will cover the
earth; I will destroy the city and the inhabitants thereof.

46:9 Come up, ye horses; and rage, ye chariots; and let the mighty men
come forth; the Ethiopians and the Libyans, that handle the shield;
and the Lydians, that handle and bend the bow.

46:10 For this is the day of the Lord GOD of hosts, a day of
vengeance, that he may avenge him of his adversaries: and the sword
shall devour, and it shall be satiate and made drunk with their blood:
for the Lord GOD of hosts hath a sacrifice in the north country by the
river Euphrates.

46:11 Go up into Gilead, and take balm, O virgin, the daughter of
Egypt: in vain shalt thou use many medicines; for thou shalt not be
cured.

46:12 The nations have heard of thy shame, and thy cry hath filled the
land: for the mighty man hath stumbled against the mighty, and they
are fallen both together.

46:13 The word that the LORD spake to Jeremiah the prophet, how
Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon should come and smite the land of
Egypt.

46:14 Declare ye in Egypt, and publish in Migdol, and publish in Noph
and in Tahpanhes: say ye, Stand fast, and prepare thee; for the sword
shall devour round about thee.

46:15 Why are thy valiant men swept away? they stood not, because the
LORD did drive them.

46:16 He made many to fall, yea, one fell upon another: and they said,
Arise, and let us go again to our own people, and to the land of our
nativity, from the oppressing sword.

46:17 They did cry there, Pharaoh king of Egypt is but a noise; he
hath passed the time appointed.

46:18 As I live, saith the King, whose name is the LORD of hosts,
Surely as Tabor is among the mountains, and as Carmel by the sea, so
shall he come.

46:19 O thou daughter dwelling in Egypt, furnish thyself to go into
captivity: for Noph shall be waste and desolate without an inhabitant.

46:20 Egypt is like a very fair heifer, but destruction cometh; it
cometh out of the north.

46:21 Also her hired men are in the midst of her like fatted bullocks;
for they also are turned back, and are fled away together: they did
not stand, because the day of their calamity was come upon them, and
the time of their visitation.

46:22 The voice thereof shall go like a serpent; for they shall march
with an army, and come against her with axes, as hewers of wood.

46:23 They shall cut down her forest, saith the LORD, though it cannot
be searched; because they are more than the grasshoppers, and are
innumerable.

46:24 The daughter of Egypt shall be confounded; she shall be
delivered into the hand of the people of the north.

46:25 The LORD of hosts, the God of Israel, saith; Behold, I will
punish the multitude of No, and Pharaoh, and Egypt, with their gods,
and their kings; even Pharaoh, and all them that trust in him: 46:26
And I will deliver them into the hand of those that seek their lives,
and into the hand of Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon, and into the hand
of his servants: and afterward it shall be inhabited, as in the days
of old, saith the LORD.

46:27 But fear not thou, O my servant Jacob, and be not dismayed, O
Israel: for, behold, I will save thee from afar off, and thy seed from
the land of their captivity; and Jacob shall return, and be in rest
and at ease, and none shall make him afraid.

46:28 Fear thou not, O Jacob my servant, saith the LORD: for I am with
thee; for I will make a full end of all the nations whither I have
driven thee: but I will not make a full end of thee, but correct thee
in measure; yet will I not leave thee wholly unpunished.

47:1 The word of the LORD that came to Jeremiah the prophet against
the Philistines, before that Pharaoh smote Gaza.

47:2 Thus saith the LORD; Behold, waters rise up out of the north, and
shall be an overflowing flood, and shall overflow the land, and all
that is therein; the city, and them that dwell therein: then the men
shall cry, and all the inhabitants of the land shall howl.

47:3 At the noise of the stamping of the hoofs of his strong horses,
at the rushing of his chariots, and at the rumbling of his wheels, the
fathers shall not look back to their children for feebleness of hands;
47:4 Because of the day that cometh to spoil all the Philistines, and
to cut off from Tyrus and Zidon every helper that remaineth: for the
LORD will spoil the Philistines, the remnant of the country of
Caphtor.

47:5 Baldness is come upon Gaza; Ashkelon is cut off with the remnant
of their valley: how long wilt thou cut thyself?  47:6 O thou sword of
the LORD, how long will it be ere thou be quiet? put up thyself into
thy scabbard, rest, and be still.

47:7 How can it be quiet, seeing the LORD hath given it a charge
against Ashkelon, and against the sea shore? there hath he appointed
it.

48:1 Against Moab thus saith the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel; Woe
unto Nebo! for it is spoiled: Kiriathaim is confounded and taken:
Misgab is confounded and dismayed.

48:2 There shall be no more praise of Moab: in Heshbon they have
devised evil against it; come, and let us cut it off from being a
nation. Also thou shalt be cut down, O Madmen; the sword shall pursue
thee.

48:3 A voice of crying shall be from Horonaim, spoiling and great
destruction.

48:4 Moab is destroyed; her little ones have caused a cry to be heard.

48:5 For in the going up of Luhith continual weeping shall go up; for
in the going down of Horonaim the enemies have heard a cry of
destruction.

48:6 Flee, save your lives, and be like the heath in the wilderness.

48:7 For because thou hast trusted in thy works and in thy treasures,
thou shalt also be taken: and Chemosh shall go forth into captivity
with his priests and his princes together.

48:8 And the spoiler shall come upon every city, and no city shall
escape: the valley also shall perish, and the plain shall be
destroyed, as the LORD hath spoken.

48:9 Give wings unto Moab, that it may flee and get away: for the
cities thereof shall be desolate, without any to dwell therein.

48:10 Cursed be he that doeth the work of the LORD deceitfully, and
cursed be he that keepeth back his sword from blood.

48:11 Moab hath been at ease from his youth, and he hath settled on
his lees, and hath not been emptied from vessel to vessel, neither
hath he gone into captivity: therefore his taste remained in him, and
his scent is not changed.

48:12 Therefore, behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will
send unto him wanderers, that shall cause him to wander, and shall
empty his vessels, and break their bottles.

48:13 And Moab shall be ashamed of Chemosh, as the house of Israel was
ashamed of Bethel their confidence.

48:14 How say ye, We are mighty and strong men for the war?  48:15
Moab is spoiled, and gone up out of her cities, and his chosen young
men are gone down to the slaughter, saith the King, whose name is the
LORD of hosts.

48:16 The calamity of Moab is near to come, and his affliction hasteth
fast.

48:17 All ye that are about him, bemoan him; and all ye that know his
name, say, How is the strong staff broken, and the beautiful rod!
48:18 Thou daughter that dost inhabit Dibon, come down from thy glory,
and sit in thirst; for the spoiler of Moab shall come upon thee, and
he shall destroy thy strong holds.

48:19 O inhabitant of Aroer, stand by the way, and espy; ask him that
fleeth, and her that escapeth, and say, What is done?  48:20 Moab is
confounded; for it is broken down: howl and cry; tell ye it in Arnon,
that Moab is spoiled, 48:21 And judgment is come upon the plain
country; upon Holon, and upon Jahazah, and upon Mephaath, 48:22 And
upon Dibon, and upon Nebo, and upon Bethdiblathaim, 48:23 And upon
Kiriathaim, and upon Bethgamul, and upon Bethmeon, 48:24 And upon
Kerioth, and upon Bozrah, and upon all the cities of the land of Moab,
far or near.

48:25 The horn of Moab is cut off, and his arm is broken, saith the
LORD.

48:26 Make ye him drunken: for he magnified himself against the LORD:
Moab also shall wallow in his vomit, and he also shall be in derision.

48:27 For was not Israel a derision unto thee? was he found among
thieves?  for since thou spakest of him, thou skippedst for joy.

48:28 O ye that dwell in Moab, leave the cities, and dwell in the
rock, and be like the dove that maketh her nest in the sides of the
hole's mouth.

48:29 We have heard the pride of Moab, (he is exceeding proud) his
loftiness, and his arrogancy, and his pride, and the haughtiness of
his heart.

48:30 I know his wrath, saith the LORD; but it shall not be so; his
lies shall not so effect it.

48:31 Therefore will I howl for Moab, and I will cry out for all Moab;
mine heart shall mourn for the men of Kirheres.

48:32 O vine of Sibmah, I will weep for thee with the weeping of
Jazer: thy plants are gone over the sea, they reach even to the sea of
Jazer: the spoiler is fallen upon thy summer fruits and upon thy
vintage.

48:33 And joy and gladness is taken from the plentiful field, and from
the land of Moab, and I have caused wine to fail from the winepresses:
none shall tread with shouting; their shouting shall be no shouting.

48:34 From the cry of Heshbon even unto Elealeh, and even unto Jahaz,
have they uttered their voice, from Zoar even unto Horonaim, as an
heifer of three years old: for the waters also of Nimrim shall be
desolate.

48:35 Moreover I will cause to cease in Moab, saith the LORD, him that
offereth in the high places, and him that burneth incense to his gods.

48:36 Therefore mine heart shall sound for Moab like pipes, and mine
heart shall sound like pipes for the men of Kirheres: because the
riches that he hath gotten are perished.

48:37 For every head shall be bald, and every beard clipped: upon all
the hands shall be cuttings, and upon the loins sackcloth.

48:38 There shall be lamentation generally upon all the housetops of
Moab, and in the streets thereof: for I have broken Moab like a vessel
wherein is no pleasure, saith the LORD.

48:39 They shall howl, saying, How is it broken down! how hath Moab
turned the back with shame! so shall Moab be a derision and a
dismaying to all them about him.

48:40 For thus saith the LORD; Behold, he shall fly as an eagle, and
shall spread his wings over Moab.

48:41 Kerioth is taken, and the strong holds are surprised, and the
mighty men's hearts in Moab at that day shall be as the heart of a
woman in her pangs.

48:42 And Moab shall be destroyed from being a people, because he hath
magnified himself against the LORD.

48:43 Fear, and the pit, and the snare, shall be upon thee, O
inhabitant of Moab, saith the LORD.

48:44 He that fleeth from the fear shall fall into the pit; and he
that getteth up out of the pit shall be taken in the snare: for I will
bring upon it, even upon Moab, the year of their visitation, saith the
LORD.

48:45 They that fled stood under the shadow of Heshbon because of the
force: but a fire shall come forth out of Heshbon, and a flame from
the midst of Sihon, and shall devour the corner of Moab, and the crown
of the head of the tumultuous ones.

48:46 Woe be unto thee, O Moab! the people of Chemosh perisheth: for
thy sons are taken captives, and thy daughters captives.

48:47 Yet will I bring again the captivity of Moab in the latter days,
saith the LORD. Thus far is the judgment of Moab.

49:1 Concerning the Ammonites, thus saith the LORD; Hath Israel no
sons?  hath he no heir? why then doth their king inherit Gad, and his
people dwell in his cities?  49:2 Therefore, behold, the days come,
saith the LORD, that I will cause an alarm of war to be heard in
Rabbah of the Ammonites; and it shall be a desolate heap, and her
daughters shall be burned with fire: then shall Israel be heir unto
them that were his heirs, saith the LORD.

49:3 Howl, O Heshbon, for Ai is spoiled: cry, ye daughters of Rabbah,
gird you with sackcloth; lament, and run to and fro by the hedges; for
their king shall go into captivity, and his priests and his princes
together.

49:4 Wherefore gloriest thou in the valleys, thy flowing valley, O
backsliding daughter? that trusted in her treasures, saying, Who shall
come unto me?  49:5 Behold, I will bring a fear upon thee, saith the
Lord GOD of hosts, from all those that be about thee; and ye shall be
driven out every man right forth; and none shall gather up him that
wandereth.

49:6 And afterward I will bring again the captivity of the children of
Ammon, saith the LORD.

49:7 Concerning Edom, thus saith the LORD of hosts; Is wisdom no more
in Teman? is counsel perished from the prudent? is their wisdom
vanished?  49:8 Flee ye, turn back, dwell deep, O inhabitants of
Dedan; for I will bring the calamity of Esau upon him, the time that I
will visit him.

49:9 If grapegatherers come to thee, would they not leave some
gleaning grapes? if thieves by night, they will destroy till they have
enough.

49:10 But I have made Esau bare, I have uncovered his secret places,
and he shall not be able to hide himself: his seed is spoiled, and his
brethren, and his neighbours, and he is not.

49:11 Leave thy fatherless children, I will preserve them alive; and
let thy widows trust in me.

49:12 For thus saith the LORD; Behold, they whose judgment was not to
drink of the cup have assuredly drunken; and art thou he that shall
altogether go unpunished? thou shalt not go unpunished, but thou shalt
surely drink of it.

49:13 For I have sworn by myself, saith the LORD, that Bozrah shall
become a desolation, a reproach, a waste, and a curse; and all the
cities thereof shall be perpetual wastes.

49:14 I have heard a rumour from the LORD, and an ambassador is sent
unto the heathen, saying, Gather ye together, and come against her,
and rise up to the battle.

49:15 For, lo, I will make thee small among the heathen, and despised
among men.

49:16 Thy terribleness hath deceived thee, and the pride of thine
heart, O thou that dwellest in the clefts of the rock, that holdest
the height of the hill: though thou shouldest make thy nest as high as
the eagle, I will bring thee down from thence, saith the LORD.

49:17 Also Edom shall be a desolation: every one that goeth by it
shall be astonished, and shall hiss at all the plagues thereof.

49:18 As in the overthrow of Sodom and Gomorrah and the neighbour
cities thereof, saith the LORD, no man shall abide there, neither
shall a son of man dwell in it.

49:19 Behold, he shall come up like a lion from the swelling of Jordan
against the habitation of the strong: but I will suddenly make him run
away from her: and who is a chosen man, that I may appoint over her?
for who is like me? and who will appoint me the time? and who is that
shepherd that will stand before me?  49:20 Therefore hear the counsel
of the LORD, that he hath taken against Edom; and his purposes, that
he hath purposed against the inhabitants of Teman: Surely the least of
the flock shall draw them out: surely he shall make their habitations
desolate with them.

49:21 The earth is moved at the noise of their fall, at the cry the
noise thereof was heard in the Red sea.

49:22 Behold, he shall come up and fly as the eagle, and spread his
wings over Bozrah: and at that day shall the heart of the mighty men
of Edom be as the heart of a woman in her pangs.

49:23 Concerning Damascus. Hamath is confounded, and Arpad: for they
have heard evil tidings: they are fainthearted; there is sorrow on the
sea; it cannot be quiet.

49:24 Damascus is waxed feeble, and turneth herself to flee, and fear
hath seized on her: anguish and sorrows have taken her, as a woman in
travail.

49:25 How is the city of praise not left, the city of my joy!  49:26
Therefore her young men shall fall in her streets, and all the men of
war shall be cut off in that day, saith the LORD of hosts.

49:27 And I will kindle a fire in the wall of Damascus, and it shall
consume the palaces of Benhadad.

49:28 Concerning Kedar, and concerning the kingdoms of Hazor, which
Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon shall smite, thus saith the LORD; Arise
ye, go up to Kedar, and spoil the men of the east.

49:29 Their tents and their flocks shall they take away: they shall
take to themselves their curtains, and all their vessels, and their
camels; and they shall cry unto them, Fear is on every side.

49:30 Flee, get you far off, dwell deep, O ye inhabitants of Hazor,
saith the LORD; for Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon hath taken counsel
against you, and hath conceived a purpose against you.

49:31 Arise, get you up unto the wealthy nation, that dwelleth without
care, saith the LORD, which have neither gates nor bars, which dwell
alone.

49:32 And their camels shall be a booty, and the multitude of their
cattle a spoil: and I will scatter into all winds them that are in the
utmost corners; and I will bring their calamity from all sides
thereof, saith the LORD.

49:33 And Hazor shall be a dwelling for dragons, and a desolation for
ever: there shall no man abide there, nor any son of man dwell in it.

49:34 The word of the LORD that came to Jeremiah the prophet against
Elam in the beginning of the reign of Zedekiah king of Judah, saying,
49:35 Thus saith the LORD of hosts; Behold, I will break the bow of
Elam, the chief of their might.

49:36 And upon Elam will I bring the four winds from the four quarters
of heaven, and will scatter them toward all those winds; and there
shall be no nation whither the outcasts of Elam shall not come.

49:37 For I will cause Elam to be dismayed before their enemies, and
before them that seek their life: and I will bring evil upon them,
even my fierce anger, saith the LORD; and I will send the sword after
them, till I have consumed them: 49:38 And I will set my throne in
Elam, and will destroy from thence the king and the princes, saith the
LORD.

49:39 But it shall come to pass in the latter days, that I will bring
again the captivity of Elam, saith the LORD.

50:1 The word that the LORD spake against Babylon and against the land
of the Chaldeans by Jeremiah the prophet.

50:2 Declare ye among the nations, and publish, and set up a standard;
publish, and conceal not: say, Babylon is taken, Bel is confounded,
Merodach is broken in pieces; her idols are confounded, her images are
broken in pieces.

50:3 For out of the north there cometh up a nation against her, which
shall make her land desolate, and none shall dwell therein: they shall
remove, they shall depart, both man and beast.

50:4 In those days, and in that time, saith the LORD, the children of
Israel shall come, they and the children of Judah together, going and
weeping: they shall go, and seek the LORD their God.

50:5 They shall ask the way to Zion with their faces thitherward,
saying, Come, and let us join ourselves to the LORD in a perpetual
covenant that shall not be forgotten.

50:6 My people hath been lost sheep: their shepherds have caused them
to go astray, they have turned them away on the mountains: they have
gone from mountain to hill, they have forgotten their restingplace.

50:7 All that found them have devoured them: and their adversaries
said, We offend not, because they have sinned against the LORD, the
habitation of justice, even the LORD, the hope of their fathers.

50:8 Remove out of the midst of Babylon, and go forth out of the land
of the Chaldeans, and be as the he goats before the flocks.

50:9 For, lo, I will raise and cause to come up against Babylon an
assembly of great nations from the north country: and they shall set
themselves in array against her; from thence she shall be taken: their
arrows shall be as of a mighty expert man; none shall return in vain.

50:10 And Chaldea shall be a spoil: all that spoil her shall be
satisfied, saith the LORD.

50:11 Because ye were glad, because ye rejoiced, O ye destroyers of
mine heritage, because ye are grown fat as the heifer at grass, and
bellow as bulls; 50:12 Your mother shall be sore confounded; she that
bare you shall be ashamed: behold, the hindermost of the nations shall
be a wilderness, a dry land, and a desert.

50:13 Because of the wrath of the LORD it shall not be inhabited, but
it shall be wholly desolate: every one that goeth by Babylon shall be
astonished, and hiss at all her plagues.

50:14 Put yourselves in array against Babylon round about: all ye that
bend the bow, shoot at her, spare no arrows: for she hath sinned
against the LORD.

50:15 Shout against her round about: she hath given her hand: her
foundations are fallen, her walls are thrown down: for it is the
vengeance of the LORD: take vengeance upon her; as she hath done, do
unto her.

50:16 Cut off the sower from Babylon, and him that handleth the sickle
in the time of harvest: for fear of the oppressing sword they shall
turn every one to his people, and they shall flee every one to his own
land.

50:17 Israel is a scattered sheep; the lions have driven him away:
first the king of Assyria hath devoured him; and last this
Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon hath broken his bones.

50:18 Therefore thus saith the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel;
Behold, I will punish the king of Babylon and his land, as I have
punished the king of Assyria.

50:19 And I will bring Israel again to his habitation, and he shall
feed on Carmel and Bashan, and his soul shall be satisfied upon mount
Ephraim and Gilead.

50:20 In those days, and in that time, saith the LORD, the iniquity of
Israel shall be sought for, and there shall be none; and the sins of
Judah, and they shall not be found: for I will pardon them whom I
reserve.

50:21 Go up against the land of Merathaim, even against it, and
against the inhabitants of Pekod: waste and utterly destroy after
them, saith the LORD, and do according to all that I have commanded
thee.

50:22 A sound of battle is in the land, and of great destruction.

50:23 How is the hammer of the whole earth cut asunder and broken! how
is Babylon become a desolation among the nations!  50:24 I have laid a
snare for thee, and thou art also taken, O Babylon, and thou wast not
aware: thou art found, and also caught, because thou hast striven
against the LORD.

50:25 The LORD hath opened his armoury, and hath brought forth the
weapons of his indignation: for this is the work of the Lord GOD of
hosts in the land of the Chaldeans.

50:26 Come against her from the utmost border, open her storehouses:
cast her up as heaps, and destroy her utterly: let nothing of her be
left.

50:27 Slay all her bullocks; let them go down to the slaughter: woe
unto them! for their day is come, the time of their visitation.

50:28 The voice of them that flee and escape out of the land of
Babylon, to declare in Zion the vengeance of the LORD our God, the
vengeance of his temple.

50:29 Call together the archers against Babylon: all ye that bend the
bow, camp against it round about; let none thereof escape: recompense
her according to her work; according to all that she hath done, do
unto her: for she hath been proud against the LORD, against the Holy
One of Israel.

50:30 Therefore shall her young men fall in the streets, and all her
men of war shall be cut off in that day, saith the LORD.

50:31 Behold, I am against thee, O thou most proud, saith the Lord GOD
of hosts: for thy day is come, the time that I will visit thee.

50:32 And the most proud shall stumble and fall, and none shall raise
him up: and I will kindle a fire in his cities, and it shall devour
all round about him.

50:33 Thus saith the LORD of hosts; The children of Israel and the
children of Judah were oppressed together: and all that took them
captives held them fast; they refused to let them go.

50:34 Their Redeemer is strong; the LORD of hosts is his name: he
shall throughly plead their cause, that he may give rest to the land,
and disquiet the inhabitants of Babylon.

50:35 A sword is upon the Chaldeans, saith the LORD, and upon the
inhabitants of Babylon, and upon her princes, and upon her wise men.

50:36 A sword is upon the liars; and they shall dote: a sword is upon
her mighty men; and they shall be dismayed.

50:37 A sword is upon their horses, and upon their chariots, and upon
all the mingled people that are in the midst of her; and they shall
become as women: a sword is upon her treasures; and they shall be
robbed.

50:38 A drought is upon her waters; and they shall be dried up: for it
is the land of graven images, and they are mad upon their idols.

50:39 Therefore the wild beasts of the desert with the wild beasts of
the islands shall dwell there, and the owls shall dwell therein: and
it shall be no more inhabited for ever; neither shall it be dwelt in
from generation to generation.

50:40 As God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah and the neighbour cities
thereof, saith the LORD; so shall no man abide there, neither shall
any son of man dwell therein.

50:41 Behold, a people shall come from the north, and a great nation,
and many kings shall be raised up from the coasts of the earth.

50:42 They shall hold the bow and the lance: they are cruel, and will
not shew mercy: their voice shall roar like the sea, and they shall
ride upon horses, every one put in array, like a man to the battle,
against thee, O daughter of Babylon.

50:43 The king of Babylon hath heard the report of them, and his hands
waxed feeble: anguish took hold of him, and pangs as of a woman in
travail.

50:44 Behold, he shall come up like a lion from the swelling of Jordan
unto the habitation of the strong: but I will make them suddenly run
away from her: and who is a chosen man, that I may appoint over her?
for who is like me? and who will appoint me the time? and who is that
shepherd that will stand before me?  50:45 Therefore hear ye the
counsel of the LORD, that he hath taken against Babylon; and his
purposes, that he hath purposed against the land of the Chaldeans:
Surely the least of the flock shall draw them out: surely he shall
make their habitation desolate with them.

50:46 At the noise of the taking of Babylon the earth is moved, and
the cry is heard among the nations.

51:1 Thus saith the LORD; Behold, I will raise up against Babylon, and
against them that dwell in the midst of them that rise up against me,
a destroying wind; 51:2 And will send unto Babylon fanners, that shall
fan her, and shall empty her land: for in the day of trouble they
shall be against her round about.

51:3 Against him that bendeth let the archer bend his bow, and against
him that lifteth himself up in his brigandine: and spare ye not her
young men; destroy ye utterly all her host.

51:4 Thus the slain shall fall in the land of the Chaldeans, and they
that are thrust through in her streets.

51:5 For Israel hath not been forsaken, nor Judah of his God, of the
LORD of hosts; though their land was filled with sin against the Holy
One of Israel.

51:6 Flee out of the midst of Babylon, and deliver every man his soul:
be not cut off in her iniquity; for this is the time of the LORD's
vengeance; he will render unto her a recompence.

51:7 Babylon hath been a golden cup in the LORD's hand, that made all
the earth drunken: the nations have drunken of her wine; therefore the
nations are mad.

51:8 Babylon is suddenly fallen and destroyed: howl for her; take balm
for her pain, if so be she may be healed.

51:9 We would have healed Babylon, but she is not healed: forsake her,
and let us go every one into his own country: for her judgment
reacheth unto heaven, and is lifted up even to the skies.

51:10 The LORD hath brought forth our righteousness: come, and let us
declare in Zion the work of the LORD our God.

51:11 Make bright the arrows; gather the shields: the LORD hath raised
up the spirit of the kings of the Medes: for his device is against
Babylon, to destroy it; because it is the vengeance of the LORD, the
vengeance of his temple.

51:12 Set up the standard upon the walls of Babylon, make the watch
strong, set up the watchmen, prepare the ambushes: for the LORD hath
both devised and done that which he spake against the inhabitants of
Babylon.

51:13 O thou that dwellest upon many waters, abundant in treasures,
thine end is come, and the measure of thy covetousness.

51:14 The LORD of hosts hath sworn by himself, saying, Surely I will
fill thee with men, as with caterpillers; and they shall lift up a
shout against thee.

51:15 He hath made the earth by his power, he hath established the
world by his wisdom, and hath stretched out the heaven by his
understanding.

51:16 When he uttereth his voice, there is a multitude of waters in
the heavens; and he causeth the vapours to ascend from the ends of the
earth: he maketh lightnings with rain, and bringeth forth the wind out
of his treasures.

51:17 Every man is brutish by his knowledge; every founder is
confounded by the graven image: for his molten image is falsehood, and
there is no breath in them.

51:18 They are vanity, the work of errors: in the time of their
visitation they shall perish.

51:19 The portion of Jacob is not like them; for he is the former of
all things: and Israel is the rod of his inheritance: the LORD of
hosts is his name.

51:20 Thou art my battle axe and weapons of war: for with thee will I
break in pieces the nations, and with thee will I destroy kingdoms;
51:21 And with thee will I break in pieces the horse and his rider;
and with thee will I break in pieces the chariot and his rider; 51:22
With thee also will I break in pieces man and woman; and with thee
will I break in pieces old and young; and with thee will I break in
pieces the young man and the maid; 51:23 I will also break in pieces
with thee the shepherd and his flock; and with thee will I break in
pieces the husbandman and his yoke of oxen; and with thee will I break
in pieces captains and rulers.

51:24 And I will render unto Babylon and to all the inhabitants of
Chaldea all their evil that they have done in Zion in your sight,
saith the LORD.

51:25 Behold, I am against thee, O destroying mountain, saith the
LORD, which destroyest all the earth: and I will stretch out mine hand
upon thee, and roll thee down from the rocks, and will make thee a
burnt mountain.

51:26 And they shall not take of thee a stone for a corner, nor a
stone for foundations; but thou shalt be desolate for ever, saith the
LORD.

51:27 Set ye up a standard in the land, blow the trumpet among the
nations, prepare the nations against her, call together against her
the kingdoms of Ararat, Minni, and Ashchenaz; appoint a captain
against her; cause the horses to come up as the rough caterpillers.

51:28 Prepare against her the nations with the kings of the Medes, the
captains thereof, and all the rulers thereof, and all the land of his
dominion.

51:29 And the land shall tremble and sorrow: for every purpose of the
LORD shall be performed against Babylon, to make the land of Babylon a
desolation without an inhabitant.

51:30 The mighty men of Babylon have forborn to fight, they have
remained in their holds: their might hath failed; they became as
women: they have burned her dwellingplaces; her bars are broken.

51:31 One post shall run to meet another, and one messenger to meet
another, to shew the king of Babylon that his city is taken at one
end, 51:32 And that the passages are stopped, and the reeds they have
burned with fire, and the men of war are affrighted.

51:33 For thus saith the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel; The
daughter of Babylon is like a threshingfloor, it is time to thresh
her: yet a little while, and the time of her harvest shall come.

51:34 Nebuchadrezzar the king of Babylon hath devoured me, he hath
crushed me, he hath made me an empty vessel, he hath swallowed me up
like a dragon, he hath filled his belly with my delicates, he hath
cast me out.

51:35 The violence done to me and to my flesh be upon Babylon, shall
the inhabitant of Zion say; and my blood upon the inhabitants of
Chaldea, shall Jerusalem say.

51:36 Therefore thus saith the LORD; Behold, I will plead thy cause,
and take vengeance for thee; and I will dry up her sea, and make her
springs dry.

51:37 And Babylon shall become heaps, a dwellingplace for dragons, an
astonishment, and an hissing, without an inhabitant.

51:38 They shall roar together like lions: they shall yell as lions'
whelps.

51:39 In their heat I will make their feasts, and I will make them
drunken, that they may rejoice, and sleep a perpetual sleep, and not
wake, saith the LORD.

51:40 I will bring them down like lambs to the slaughter, like rams
with he goats.

51:41 How is Sheshach taken! and how is the praise of the whole earth
surprised! how is Babylon become an astonishment among the nations!
51:42 The sea is come up upon Babylon: she is covered with the
multitude of the waves thereof.

51:43 Her cities are a desolation, a dry land, and a wilderness, a
land wherein no man dwelleth, neither doth any son of man pass
thereby.

51:44 And I will punish Bel in Babylon, and I will bring forth out of
his mouth that which he hath swallowed up: and the nations shall not
flow together any more unto him: yea, the wall of Babylon shall fall.

51:45 My people, go ye out of the midst of her, and deliver ye every
man his soul from the fierce anger of the LORD.

51:46 And lest your heart faint, and ye fear for the rumour that shall
be heard in the land; a rumour shall both come one year, and after
that in another year shall come a rumour, and violence in the land,
ruler against ruler.

51:47 Therefore, behold, the days come, that I will do judgment upon
the graven images of Babylon: and her whole land shall be confounded,
and all her slain shall fall in the midst of her.

51:48 Then the heaven and the earth, and all that is therein, shall
sing for Babylon: for the spoilers shall come unto her from the north,
saith the LORD.

51:49 As Babylon hath caused the slain of Israel to fall, so at
Babylon shall fall the slain of all the earth.

51:50 Ye that have escaped the sword, go away, stand not still:
remember the LORD afar off, and let Jerusalem come into your mind.

51:51 We are confounded, because we have heard reproach: shame hath
covered our faces: for strangers are come into the sanctuaries of the
LORD's house.

51:52 Wherefore, behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will do
judgment upon her graven images: and through all her land the wounded
shall groan.

51:53 Though Babylon should mount up to heaven, and though she should
fortify the height of her strength, yet from me shall spoilers come
unto her, saith the LORD.

51:54 A sound of a cry cometh from Babylon, and great destruction from
the land of the Chaldeans: 51:55 Because the LORD hath spoiled
Babylon, and destroyed out of her the great voice; when her waves do
roar like great waters, a noise of their voice is uttered: 51:56
Because the spoiler is come upon her, even upon Babylon, and her
mighty men are taken, every one of their bows is broken: for the LORD
God of recompences shall surely requite.

51:57 And I will make drunk her princes, and her wise men, her
captains, and her rulers, and her mighty men: and they shall sleep a
perpetual sleep, and not wake, saith the King, whose name is the LORD
of hosts.

51:58 Thus saith the LORD of hosts; The broad walls of Babylon shall
be utterly broken, and her high gates shall be burned with fire; and
the people shall labour in vain, and the folk in the fire, and they
shall be weary.

51:59 The word which Jeremiah the prophet commanded Seraiah the son of
Neriah, the son of Maaseiah, when he went with Zedekiah the king of
Judah into Babylon in the fourth year of his reign. And this Seraiah
was a quiet prince.

51:60 So Jeremiah wrote in a book all the evil that should come upon
Babylon, even all these words that are written against Babylon.

51:61 And Jeremiah said to Seraiah, When thou comest to Babylon, and
shalt see, and shalt read all these words; 51:62 Then shalt thou say,
O LORD, thou hast spoken against this place, to cut it off, that none
shall remain in it, neither man nor beast, but that it shall be
desolate for ever.

51:63 And it shall be, when thou hast made an end of reading this
book, that thou shalt bind a stone to it, and cast it into the midst
of Euphrates: 51:64 And thou shalt say, Thus shall Babylon sink, and
shall not rise from the evil that I will bring upon her: and they
shall be weary. Thus far are the words of Jeremiah.

52:1 Zedekiah was one and twenty years old when he began to reign, and
he reigned eleven years in Jerusalem. And his mother's name was
Hamutal the daughter of Jeremiah of Libnah.

52:2 And he did that which was evil in the eyes of the LORD, according
to all that Jehoiakim had done.

52:3 For through the anger of the LORD it came to pass in Jerusalem
and Judah, till he had cast them out from his presence, that Zedekiah
rebelled against the king of Babylon.

52:4 And it came to pass in the ninth year of his reign, in the tenth
month, in the tenth day of the month, that Nebuchadrezzar king of
Babylon came, he and all his army, against Jerusalem, and pitched
against it, and built forts against it round about.

52:5 So the city was besieged unto the eleventh year of king Zedekiah.

52:6 And in the fourth month, in the ninth day of the month, the
famine was sore in the city, so that there was no bread for the people
of the land.

52:7 Then the city was broken up, and all the men of war fled, and
went forth out of the city by night by the way of the gate between the
two walls, which was by the king's garden; (now the Chaldeans were by
the city round about:) and they went by the way of the plain.

52:8 But the army of the Chaldeans pursued after the king, and
overtook Zedekiah in the plains of Jericho; and all his army was
scattered from him.

52:9 Then they took the king, and carried him up unto the king of
Babylon to Riblah in the land of Hamath; where he gave judgment upon
him.

52:10 And the king of Babylon slew the sons of Zedekiah before his
eyes: he slew also all the princes of Judah in Riblah.

52:11 Then he put out the eyes of Zedekiah; and the king of Babylon
bound him in chains, and carried him to Babylon, and put him in prison
till the day of his death.

52:12 Now in the fifth month, in the tenth day of the month, which was
the nineteenth year of Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon, came
Nebuzaradan, captain of the guard, which served the king of Babylon,
into Jerusalem, 52:13 And burned the house of the LORD, and the king's
house; and all the houses of Jerusalem, and all the houses of the
great men, burned he with fire: 52:14 And all the army of the
Chaldeans, that were with the captain of the guard, brake down all the
walls of Jerusalem round about.

52:15 Then Nebuzaradan the captain of the guard carried away captive
certain of the poor of the people, and the residue of the people that
remained in the city, and those that fell away, that fell to the king
of Babylon, and the rest of the multitude.

52:16 But Nebuzaradan the captain of the guard left certain of the
poor of the land for vinedressers and for husbandmen.

52:17 Also the pillars of brass that were in the house of the LORD,
and the bases, and the brasen sea that was in the house of the LORD,
the Chaldeans brake, and carried all the brass of them to Babylon.

52:18 The caldrons also, and the shovels, and the snuffers, and the
bowls, and the spoons, and all the vessels of brass wherewith they
ministered, took they away.

52:19 And the basons, and the firepans, and the bowls, and the
caldrons, and the candlesticks, and the spoons, and the cups; that
which was of gold in gold, and that which was of silver in silver,
took the captain of the guard away.

52:20 The two pillars, one sea, and twelve brasen bulls that were
under the bases, which king Solomon had made in the house of the LORD:
the brass of all these vessels was without weight.

52:21 And concerning the pillars, the height of one pillar was
eighteen cubits; and a fillet of twelve cubits did compass it; and the
thickness thereof was four fingers: it was hollow.

52:22 And a chapiter of brass was upon it; and the height of one
chapiter was five cubits, with network and pomegranates upon the
chapiters round about, all of brass. The second pillar also and the
pomegranates were like unto these.

52:23 And there were ninety and six pomegranates on a side; and all
the pomegranates upon the network were an hundred round about.

52:24 And the captain of the guard took Seraiah the chief priest, and
Zephaniah the second priest, and the three keepers of the door: 52:25
He took also out of the city an eunuch, which had the charge of the
men of war; and seven men of them that were near the king's person,
which were found in the city; and the principal scribe of the host,
who mustered the people of the land; and threescore men of the people
of the land, that were found in the midst of the city.

52:26 So Nebuzaradan the captain of the guard took them, and brought
them to the king of Babylon to Riblah.

52:27 And the king of Babylon smote them, and put them to death in
Riblah in the land of Hamath. Thus Judah was carried away captive out
of his own land.

52:28 This is the people whom Nebuchadrezzar carried away captive: in
the seventh year three thousand Jews and three and twenty: 52:29 In
the eighteenth year of Nebuchadrezzar he carried away captive from
Jerusalem eight hundred thirty and two persons: 52:30 In the three and
twentieth year of Nebuchadrezzar Nebuzaradan the captain of the guard
carried away captive of the Jews seven hundred forty and five persons:
all the persons were four thousand and six hundred.

52:31 And it came to pass in the seven and thirtieth year of the
captivity of Jehoiachin king of Judah, in the twelfth month, in the
five and twentieth day of the month, that Evilmerodach king of Babylon
in the first year of his reign lifted up the head of Jehoiachin king
of Judah, and brought him forth out of prison.

52:32 And spake kindly unto him, and set his throne above the throne
of the kings that were with him in Babylon, 52:33 And changed his
prison garments: and he did continually eat bread before him all the
days of his life.

52:34 And for his diet, there was a continual diet given him of the
king of Babylon, every day a portion until the day of his death, all
the days of his life.




The Lamentations of Jeremiah


1:1 How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! how is
she become as a widow! she that was great among the nations, and
princess among the provinces, how is she become tributary!  1:2 She
weepeth sore in the night, and her tears are on her cheeks: among all
her lovers she hath none to comfort her: all her friends have dealt
treacherously with her, they are become her enemies.

1:3 Judah is gone into captivity because of affliction, and because of
great servitude: she dwelleth among the heathen, she findeth no rest:
all her persecutors overtook her between the straits.

1:4 The ways of Zion do mourn, because none come to the solemn feasts:
all her gates are desolate: her priests sigh, her virgins are
afflicted, and she is in bitterness.

1:5 Her adversaries are the chief, her enemies prosper; for the LORD
hath afflicted her for the multitude of her transgressions: her
children are gone into captivity before the enemy.

1:6 And from the daughter of Zion all her beauty is departed: her
princes are become like harts that find no pasture, and they are gone
without strength before the pursuer.

1:7 Jerusalem remembered in the days of her affliction and of her
miseries all her pleasant things that she had in the days of old, when
her people fell into the hand of the enemy, and none did help her: the
adversaries saw her, and did mock at her sabbaths.

1:8 Jerusalem hath grievously sinned; therefore she is removed: all
that honoured her despise her, because they have seen her nakedness:
yea, she sigheth, and turneth backward.

1:9 Her filthiness is in her skirts; she remembereth not her last end;
therefore she came down wonderfully: she had no comforter. O LORD,
behold my affliction: for the enemy hath magnified himself.

1:10 The adversary hath spread out his hand upon all her pleasant
things: for she hath seen that the heathen entered into her sanctuary,
whom thou didst command that they should not enter into thy
congregation.

1:11 All her people sigh, they seek bread; they have given their
pleasant things for meat to relieve the soul: see, O LORD, and
consider; for I am become vile.

1:12 Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? behold, and see if
there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow, which is done unto me,
wherewith the LORD hath afflicted me in the day of his fierce anger.

1:13 From above hath he sent fire into my bones, and it prevaileth
against them: he hath spread a net for my feet, he hath turned me
back: he hath made me desolate and faint all the day.

1:14 The yoke of my transgressions is bound by his hand: they are
wreathed, and come up upon my neck: he hath made my strength to fall,
the LORD hath delivered me into their hands, from whom I am not able
to rise up.

1:15 The LORD hath trodden under foot all my mighty men in the midst
of me: he hath called an assembly against me to crush my young men:
the LORD hath trodden the virgin, the daughter of Judah, as in a
winepress.

1:16 For these things I weep; mine eye, mine eye runneth down with
water, because the comforter that should relieve my soul is far from
me: my children are desolate, because the enemy prevailed.

1:17 Zion spreadeth forth her hands, and there is none to comfort her:
the LORD hath commanded concerning Jacob, that his adversaries should
be round about him: Jerusalem is as a menstruous woman among them.

1:18 The LORD is righteous; for I have rebelled against his
commandment: hear, I pray you, all people, and behold my sorrow: my
virgins and my young men are gone into captivity.

1:19 I called for my lovers, but they deceived me: my priests and mine
elders gave up the ghost in the city, while they sought their meat to
relieve their souls.

1:20 Behold, O LORD; for I am in distress: my bowels are troubled;
mine heart is turned within me; for I have grievously rebelled: abroad
the sword bereaveth, at home there is as death.

1:21 They have heard that I sigh: there is none to comfort me: all
mine enemies have heard of my trouble; they are glad that thou hast
done it: thou wilt bring the day that thou hast called, and they shall
be like unto me.

1:22 Let all their wickedness come before thee; and do unto them, as
thou hast done unto me for all my transgressions: for my sighs are
many, and my heart is faint.

2:1 How hath the LORD covered the daughter of Zion with a cloud in his
anger, and cast down from heaven unto the earth the beauty of Israel,
and remembered not his footstool in the day of his anger!  2:2 The
LORD hath swallowed up all the habitations of Jacob, and hath not
pitied: he hath thrown down in his wrath the strong holds of the
daughter of Judah; he hath brought them down to the ground: he hath
polluted the kingdom and the princes thereof.

2:3 He hath cut off in his fierce anger all the horn of Israel: he
hath drawn back his right hand from before the enemy, and he burned
against Jacob like a flaming fire, which devoureth round about.

2:4 He hath bent his bow like an enemy: he stood with his right hand
as an adversary, and slew all that were pleasant to the eye in the
tabernacle of the daughter of Zion: he poured out his fury like fire.

2:5 The LORD was as an enemy: he hath swallowed up Israel, he hath
swallowed up all her palaces: he hath destroyed his strong holds, and
hath increased in the daughter of Judah mourning and lamentation.

2:6 And he hath violently taken away his tabernacle, as if it were of
a garden: he hath destroyed his places of the assembly: the LORD hath
caused the solemn feasts and sabbaths to be forgotten in Zion, and
hath despised in the indignation of his anger the king and the priest.

2:7 The LORD hath cast off his altar, he hath abhorred his sanctuary,
he hath given up into the hand of the enemy the walls of her palaces;
they have made a noise in the house of the LORD, as in the day of a
solemn feast.

2:8 The LORD hath purposed to destroy the wall of the daughter of
Zion: he hath stretched out a line, he hath not withdrawn his hand
from destroying: therefore he made the rampart and the wall to lament;
they languished together.

2:9 Her gates are sunk into the ground; he hath destroyed and broken
her bars: her king and her princes are among the Gentiles: the law is
no more; her prophets also find no vision from the LORD.

2:10 The elders of the daughter of Zion sit upon the ground, and keep
silence: they have cast up dust upon their heads; they have girded
themselves with sackcloth: the virgins of Jerusalem hang down their
heads to the ground.

2:11 Mine eyes do fail with tears, my bowels are troubled, my liver is
poured upon the earth, for the destruction of the daughter of my
people; because the children and the sucklings swoon in the streets of
the city.

2:12 They say to their mothers, Where is corn and wine? when they
swooned as the wounded in the streets of the city, when their soul was
poured out into their mothers' bosom.

2:13 What thing shall I take to witness for thee? what thing shall I
liken to thee, O daughter of Jerusalem? what shall I equal to thee,
that I may comfort thee, O virgin daughter of Zion? for thy breach is
great like the sea: who can heal thee?  2:14 Thy prophets have seen
vain and foolish things for thee: and they have not discovered thine
iniquity, to turn away thy captivity; but have seen for thee false
burdens and causes of banishment.

2:15 All that pass by clap their hands at thee; they hiss and wag
their head at the daughter of Jerusalem, saying, Is this the city that
men call The perfection of beauty, The joy of the whole earth?  2:16
All thine enemies have opened their mouth against thee: they hiss and
gnash the teeth: they say, We have swallowed her up: certainly this is
the day that we looked for; we have found, we have seen it.

2:17 The LORD hath done that which he had devised; he hath fulfilled
his word that he had commanded in the days of old: he hath thrown
down, and hath not pitied: and he hath caused thine enemy to rejoice
over thee, he hath set up the horn of thine adversaries.

2:18 Their heart cried unto the LORD, O wall of the daughter of Zion,
let tears run down like a river day and night: give thyself no rest;
let not the apple of thine eye cease.

2:19 Arise, cry out in the night: in the beginning of the watches pour
out thine heart like water before the face of the LORD: lift up thy
hands toward him for the life of thy young children, that faint for
hunger in the top of every street.

2:20 Behold, O LORD, and consider to whom thou hast done this. Shall
the women eat their fruit, and children of a span long? shall the
priest and the prophet be slain in the sanctuary of the Lord?  2:21
The young and the old lie on the ground in the streets: my virgins and
my young men are fallen by the sword; thou hast slain them in the day
of thine anger; thou hast killed, and not pitied.

2:22 Thou hast called as in a solemn day my terrors round about, so
that in the day of the LORD's anger none escaped nor remained: those
that I have swaddled and brought up hath mine enemy consumed.

3:1 I AM the man that hath seen affliction by the rod of his wrath.

3:2 He hath led me, and brought me into darkness, but not into light.

3:3 Surely against me is he turned; he turneth his hand against me all
the day.

3:4 My flesh and my skin hath he made old; he hath broken my bones.

3:5 He hath builded against me, and compassed me with gall and
travail.

3:6 He hath set me in dark places, as they that be dead of old.

3:7 He hath hedged me about, that I cannot get out: he hath made my
chain heavy.

3:8 Also when I cry and shout, he shutteth out my prayer.

3:9 He hath inclosed my ways with hewn stone, he hath made my paths
crooked.

3:10 He was unto me as a bear lying in wait, and as a lion in secret
places.

3:11 He hath turned aside my ways, and pulled me in pieces: he hath
made me desolate.

3:12 He hath bent his bow, and set me as a mark for the arrow.

3:13 He hath caused the arrows of his quiver to enter into my reins.

3:14 I was a derision to all my people; and their song all the day.

3:15 He hath filled me with bitterness, he hath made me drunken with
wormwood.

3:16 He hath also broken my teeth with gravel stones, he hath covered
me with ashes.

3:17 And thou hast removed my soul far off from peace: I forgat
prosperity.

3:18 And I said, My strength and my hope is perished from the LORD:
3:19 Remembering mine affliction and my misery, the wormwood and the
gall.

3:20 My soul hath them still in remembrance, and is humbled in me.

3:21 This I recall to my mind, therefore have I hope.

3:22 It is of the LORD's mercies that we are not consumed, because his
compassions fail not.

3:23 They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness.

3:24 The LORD is my portion, saith my soul; therefore will I hope in
him.

3:25 The LORD is good unto them that wait for him, to the soul that
seeketh him.

3:26 It is good that a man should both hope and quietly wait for the
salvation of the LORD.

3:27 It is good for a man that he bear the yoke of his youth.

3:28 He sitteth alone and keepeth silence, because he hath borne it
upon him.

3:29 He putteth his mouth in the dust; if so be there may be hope.

3:30 He giveth his cheek to him that smiteth him: he is filled full
with reproach.

3:31 For the LORD will not cast off for ever: 3:32 But though he cause
grief, yet will he have compassion according to the multitude of his
mercies.

3:33 For he doth not afflict willingly nor grieve the children of men.

3:34 To crush under his feet all the prisoners of the earth.

3:35 To turn aside the right of a man before the face of the most
High, 3:36 To subvert a man in his cause, the LORD approveth not.

3:37 Who is he that saith, and it cometh to pass, when the Lord
commandeth it not?  3:38 Out of the mouth of the most High proceedeth
not evil and good?  3:39 Wherefore doth a living man complain, a man
for the punishment of his sins?  3:40 Let us search and try our ways,
and turn again to the LORD.

3:41 Let us lift up our heart with our hands unto God in the heavens.

3:42 We have transgressed and have rebelled: thou hast not pardoned.

3:43 Thou hast covered with anger, and persecuted us: thou hast slain,
thou hast not pitied.

3:44 Thou hast covered thyself with a cloud, that our prayer should
not pass through.

3:45 Thou hast made us as the offscouring and refuse in the midst of
the people.

3:46 All our enemies have opened their mouths against us.

3:47 Fear and a snare is come upon us, desolation and destruction.

3:48 Mine eye runneth down with rivers of water for the destruction of
the daughter of my people.

3:49 Mine eye trickleth down, and ceaseth not, without any
intermission.

3:50 Till the LORD look down, and behold from heaven.

3:51 Mine eye affecteth mine heart because of all the daughters of my
city.

3:52 Mine enemies chased me sore, like a bird, without cause.

3:53 They have cut off my life in the dungeon, and cast a stone upon
me.

3:54 Waters flowed over mine head; then I said, I am cut off.

3:55 I called upon thy name, O LORD, out of the low dungeon.

3:56 Thou hast heard my voice: hide not thine ear at my breathing, at
my cry.

3:57 Thou drewest near in the day that I called upon thee: thou
saidst, Fear not.

3:58 O LORD, thou hast pleaded the causes of my soul; thou hast
redeemed my life.

3:59 O LORD, thou hast seen my wrong: judge thou my cause.

3:60 Thou hast seen all their vengeance and all their imaginations
against me.

3:61 Thou hast heard their reproach, O LORD, and all their
imaginations against me; 3:62 The lips of those that rose up against
me, and their device against me all the day.

3:63 Behold their sitting down, and their rising up; I am their
musick.

3:64 Render unto them a recompence, O LORD, according to the work of
their hands.

3:65 Give them sorrow of heart, thy curse unto them.

3:66 Persecute and destroy them in anger from under the heavens of the
LORD.

4:1 How is the gold become dim! how is the most fine gold changed! the
stones of the sanctuary are poured out in the top of every street.

4:2 The precious sons of Zion, comparable to fine gold, how are they
esteemed as earthen pitchers, the work of the hands of the potter!
4:3 Even the sea monsters draw out the breast, they give suck to their
young ones: the daughter of my people is become cruel, like the
ostriches in the wilderness.

4:4 The tongue of the sucking child cleaveth to the roof of his mouth
for thirst: the young children ask bread, and no man breaketh it unto
them.

4:5 They that did feed delicately are desolate in the streets: they
that were brought up in scarlet embrace dunghills.

4:6 For the punishment of the iniquity of the daughter of my people is
greater than the punishment of the sin of Sodom, that was overthrown
as in a moment, and no hands stayed on her.

4:7 Her Nazarites were purer than snow, they were whiter than milk,
they were more ruddy in body than rubies, their polishing was of
sapphire: 4:8 Their visage is blacker than a coal; they are not known
in the streets: their skin cleaveth to their bones; it is withered, it
is become like a stick.

4:9 They that be slain with the sword are better than they that be
slain with hunger: for these pine away, stricken through for want of
the fruits of the field.

4:10 The hands of the pitiful women have sodden their own children:
they were their meat in the destruction of the daughter of my people.

4:11 The LORD hath accomplished his fury; he hath poured out his
fierce anger, and hath kindled a fire in Zion, and it hath devoured
the foundations thereof.

4:12 The kings of the earth, and all the inhabitants of the world,
would not have believed that the adversary and the enemy should have
entered into the gates of Jerusalem.

4:13 For the sins of her prophets, and the iniquities of her priests,
that have shed the blood of the just in the midst of her, 4:14 They
have wandered as blind men in the streets, they have polluted
themselves with blood, so that men could not touch their garments.

4:15 They cried unto them, Depart ye; it is unclean; depart, depart,
touch not: when they fled away and wandered, they said among the
heathen, They shall no more sojourn there.

4:16 The anger of the LORD hath divided them; he will no more regard
them: they respected not the persons of the priests, they favoured not
the elders.

4:17 As for us, our eyes as yet failed for our vain help: in our
watching we have watched for a nation that could not save us.

4:18 They hunt our steps, that we cannot go in our streets: our end is
near, our days are fulfilled; for our end is come.

4:19 Our persecutors are swifter than the eagles of the heaven: they
pursued us upon the mountains, they laid wait for us in the
wilderness.

4:20 The breath of our nostrils, the anointed of the LORD, was taken
in their pits, of whom we said, Under his shadow we shall live among
the heathen.

4:21 Rejoice and be glad, O daughter of Edom, that dwellest in the
land of Uz; the cup also shall pass through unto thee: thou shalt be
drunken, and shalt make thyself naked.

4:22 The punishment of thine iniquity is accomplished, O daughter of
Zion; he will no more carry thee away into captivity: he will visit
thine iniquity, O daughter of Edom; he will discover thy sins.

5:1 Remember, O LORD, what is come upon us: consider, and behold our
reproach.

5:2 Our inheritance is turned to strangers, our houses to aliens.

5:3 We are orphans and fatherless, our mothers are as widows.

5:4 We have drunken our water for money; our wood is sold unto us.

5:5 Our necks are under persecution: we labour, and have no rest.

5:6 We have given the hand to the Egyptians, and to the Assyrians, to
be satisfied with bread.

5:7 Our fathers have sinned, and are not; and we have borne their
iniquities.

5:8 Servants have ruled over us: there is none that doth deliver us
out of their hand.

5:9 We gat our bread with the peril of our lives because of the sword
of the wilderness.

5:10 Our skin was black like an oven because of the terrible famine.

5:11 They ravished the women in Zion, and the maids in the cities of
Judah.

5:12 Princes are hanged up by their hand: the faces of elders were not
honoured.

5:13 They took the young men to grind, and the children fell under the
wood.

5:14 The elders have ceased from the gate, the young men from their
musick.

5:15 The joy of our heart is ceased; our dance is turned into
mourning.

5:16 The crown is fallen from our head: woe unto us, that we have
sinned!  5:17 For this our heart is faint; for these things our eyes
are dim.

5:18 Because of the mountain of Zion, which is desolate, the foxes
walk upon it.

5:19 Thou, O LORD, remainest for ever; thy throne from generation to
generation.

5:20 Wherefore dost thou forget us for ever, and forsake us so long
time?  5:21 Turn thou us unto thee, O LORD, and we shall be turned;
renew our days as of old.

5:22 But thou hast utterly rejected us; thou art very wroth against us.




The Book of the Prophet Ezekiel


1:1 Now it came to pass in the thirtieth year, in the fourth month,
in the fifth day of the month, as I was among the captives by the river
of Chebar, that the heavens were opened, and I saw visions of God.

1:2 In the fifth day of the month, which was the fifth year of king
Jehoiachin's captivity, 1:3 The word of the LORD came expressly unto
Ezekiel the priest, the son of Buzi, in the land of the Chaldeans by
the river Chebar; and the hand of the LORD was there upon him.

1:4 And I looked, and, behold, a whirlwind came out of the north, a
great cloud, and a fire infolding itself, and a brightness was about
it, and out of the midst thereof as the colour of amber, out of the
midst of the fire.

1:5 Also out of the midst thereof came the likeness of four living
creatures. And this was their appearance; they had the likeness of a
man.

1:6 And every one had four faces, and every one had four wings.

1:7 And their feet were straight feet; and the sole of their feet was
like the sole of a calf's foot: and they sparkled like the colour of
burnished brass.

1:8 And they had the hands of a man under their wings on their four
sides; and they four had their faces and their wings.

1:9 Their wings were joined one to another; they turned not when they
went; they went every one straight forward.

1:10 As for the likeness of their faces, they four had the face of a
man, and the face of a lion, on the right side: and they four had the
face of an ox on the left side; they four also had the face of an
eagle.

1:11 Thus were their faces: and their wings were stretched upward; two
wings of every one were joined one to another, and two covered their
bodies.

1:12 And they went every one straight forward: whither the spirit was
to go, they went; and they turned not when they went.

1:13 As for the likeness of the living creatures, their appearance was
like burning coals of fire, and like the appearance of lamps: it went
up and down among the living creatures; and the fire was bright, and
out of the fire went forth lightning.

1:14 And the living creatures ran and returned as the appearance of a
flash of lightning.

1:15 Now as I beheld the living creatures, behold one wheel upon the
earth by the living creatures, with his four faces.

1:16 The appearance of the wheels and their work was like unto the
colour of a beryl: and they four had one likeness: and their
appearance and their work was as it were a wheel in the middle of a
wheel.

1:17 When they went, they went upon their four sides: and they turned
not when they went.

1:18 As for their rings, they were so high that they were dreadful;
and their rings were full of eyes round about them four.

1:19 And when the living creatures went, the wheels went by them: and
when the living creatures were lifted up from the earth, the wheels
were lifted up.

1:20 Whithersoever the spirit was to go, they went, thither was their
spirit to go; and the wheels were lifted up over against them: for the
spirit of the living creature was in the wheels.

1:21 When those went, these went; and when those stood, these stood;
and when those were lifted up from the earth, the wheels were lifted
up over against them: for the spirit of the living creature was in the
wheels.

1:22 And the likeness of the firmament upon the heads of the living
creature was as the colour of the terrible crystal, stretched forth
over their heads above.

1:23 And under the firmament were their wings straight, the one toward
the other: every one had two, which covered on this side, and every
one had two, which covered on that side, their bodies.

1:24 And when they went, I heard the noise of their wings, like the
noise of great waters, as the voice of the Almighty, the voice of
speech, as the noise of an host: when they stood, they let down their
wings.

1:25 And there was a voice from the firmament that was over their
heads, when they stood, and had let down their wings.

1:26 And above the firmament that was over their heads was the
likeness of a throne, as the appearance of a sapphire stone: and upon
the likeness of the throne was the likeness as the appearance of a man
above upon it.

1:27 And I saw as the colour of amber, as the appearance of fire round
about within it, from the appearance of his loins even upward, and
from the appearance of his loins even downward, I saw as it were the
appearance of fire, and it had brightness round about.

1:28 As the appearance of the bow that is in the cloud in the day of
rain, so was the appearance of the brightness round about. This was
the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD. And when I
saw it, I fell upon my face, and I heard a voice of one that spake.

2:1 And he said unto me, Son of man, stand upon thy feet, and I will
speak unto thee.

2:2 And the spirit entered into me when he spake unto me, and set me
upon my feet, that I heard him that spake unto me.

2:3 And he said unto me, Son of man, I send thee to the children of
Israel, to a rebellious nation that hath rebelled against me: they and
their fathers have transgressed against me, even unto this very day.

2:4 For they are impudent children and stiffhearted. I do send thee
unto them; and thou shalt say unto them, Thus saith the Lord GOD.

2:5 And they, whether they will hear, or whether they will forbear,
(for they are a rebellious house,) yet shall know that there hath been
a prophet among them.

2:6 And thou, son of man, be not afraid of them, neither be afraid of
their words, though briers and thorns be with thee, and thou dost
dwell among scorpions: be not afraid of their words, nor be dismayed
at their looks, though they be a rebellious house.

2:7 And thou shalt speak my words unto them, whether they will hear,
or whether they will forbear: for they are most rebellious.

2:8 But thou, son of man, hear what I say unto thee; Be not thou
rebellious like that rebellious house: open thy mouth, and eat that I
give thee.

2:9 And when I looked, behold, an hand was sent unto me; and, lo, a
roll of a book was therein; 2:10 And he spread it before me; and it
was written within and without: and there was written therein
lamentations, and mourning, and woe.

3:1 Moreover he said unto me, Son of man, eat that thou findest; eat
this roll, and go speak unto the house of Israel.

3:2 So I opened my mouth, and he caused me to eat that roll.

3:3 And he said unto me, Son of man, cause thy belly to eat, and fill
thy bowels with this roll that I give thee. Then did I eat it; and it
was in my mouth as honey for sweetness.

3:4 And he said unto me, Son of man, go, get thee unto the house of
Israel, and speak with my words unto them.

3:5 For thou art not sent to a people of a strange speech and of an
hard language, but to the house of Israel; 3:6 Not to many people of a
strange speech and of an hard language, whose words thou canst not
understand. Surely, had I sent thee to them, they would have hearkened
unto thee.

3:7 But the house of Israel will not hearken unto thee; for they will
not hearken unto me: for all the house of Israel are impudent and
hardhearted.

3:8 Behold, I have made thy face strong against their faces, and thy
forehead strong against their foreheads.

3:9 As an adamant harder than flint have I made thy forehead: fear
them not, neither be dismayed at their looks, though they be a
rebellious house.

3:10 Moreover he said unto me, Son of man, all my words that I shall
speak unto thee receive in thine heart, and hear with thine ears.

3:11 And go, get thee to them of the captivity, unto the children of
thy people, and speak unto them, and tell them, Thus saith the Lord
GOD; whether they will hear, or whether they will forbear.

3:12 Then the spirit took me up, and I heard behind me a voice of a
great rushing, saying, Blessed be the glory of the LORD from his
place.

3:13 I heard also the noise of the wings of the living creatures that
touched one another, and the noise of the wheels over against them,
and a noise of a great rushing.

3:14 So the spirit lifted me up, and took me away, and I went in
bitterness, in the heat of my spirit; but the hand of the LORD was
strong upon me.

3:15 Then I came to them of the captivity at Telabib, that dwelt by
the river of Chebar, and I sat where they sat, and remained there
astonished among them seven days.

3:16 And it came to pass at the end of seven days, that the word of
the LORD came unto me, saying, 3:17 Son of man, I have made thee a
watchman unto the house of Israel: therefore hear the word at my
mouth, and give them warning from me.

3:18 When I say unto the wicked, Thou shalt surely die; and thou
givest him not warning, nor speakest to warn the wicked from his
wicked way, to save his life; the same wicked man shall die in his
iniquity; but his blood will I require at thine hand.

3:19 Yet if thou warn the wicked, and he turn not from his wickedness,
nor from his wicked way, he shall die in his iniquity; but thou hast
delivered thy soul.

3:20 Again, When a righteous man doth turn from his righteousness, and
commit iniquity, and I lay a stumbling-block before him, he shall die:
because thou hast not given him warning, he shall die in his sin, and
his righteousness which he hath done shall not be remembered; but his
blood will I require at thine hand.

3:21 Nevertheless if thou warn the righteous man, that the righteous
sin not, and he doth not sin, he shall surely live, because he is
warned; also thou hast delivered thy soul.

3:22 And the hand of the LORD was there upon me; and he said unto me,
Arise, go forth into the plain, and I will there talk with thee.

3:23 Then I arose, and went forth into the plain: and, behold, the
glory of the LORD stood there, as the glory which I saw by the river
of Chebar: and I fell on my face.

3:24 Then the spirit entered into me, and set me upon my feet, and
spake with me, and said unto me, Go, shut thyself within thine house.

3:25 But thou, O son of man, behold, they shall put bands upon thee,
and shall bind thee with them, and thou shalt not go out among them:
3:26 And I will make thy tongue cleave to the roof of thy mouth, that
thou shalt be dumb, and shalt not be to them a reprover: for they are
a rebellious house.

3:27 But when I speak with thee, I will open thy mouth, and thou shalt
say unto them, Thus saith the Lord GOD; He that heareth, let him hear;
and he that forbeareth, let him forbear: for they are a rebellious
house.

4:1 Thou also, son of man, take thee a tile, and lay it before thee,
and pourtray upon it the city, even Jerusalem: 4:2 And lay siege
against it, and build a fort against it, and cast a mount against it;
set the camp also against it, and set battering rams against it round
about.

4:3 Moreover take thou unto thee an iron pan, and set it for a wall of
iron between thee and the city: and set thy face against it, and it
shall be besieged, and thou shalt lay siege against it. This shall be
a sign to the house of Israel.

4:4 Lie thou also upon thy left side, and lay the iniquity of the
house of Israel upon it: according to the number of the days that thou
shalt lie upon it thou shalt bear their iniquity.

4:5 For I have laid upon thee the years of their iniquity, according
to the number of the days, three hundred and ninety days: so shalt
thou bear the iniquity of the house of Israel.

4:6 And when thou hast accomplished them, lie again on thy right side,
and thou shalt bear the iniquity of the house of Judah forty days: I
have appointed thee each day for a year.

4:7 Therefore thou shalt set thy face toward the siege of Jerusalem,
and thine arm shall be uncovered, and thou shalt prophesy against it.

4:8 And, behold, I will lay bands upon thee, and thou shalt not turn
thee from one side to another, till thou hast ended the days of thy
siege.

4:9 Take thou also unto thee wheat, and barley, and beans, and
lentiles, and millet, and fitches, and put them in one vessel, and
make thee bread thereof, according to the number of the days that thou
shalt lie upon thy side, three hundred and ninety days shalt thou eat
thereof.

4:10 And thy meat which thou shalt eat shall be by weight, twenty
shekels a day: from time to time shalt thou eat it.

4:11 Thou shalt drink also water by measure, the sixth part of an hin:
from time to time shalt thou drink.

4:12 And thou shalt eat it as barley cakes, and thou shalt bake it
with dung that cometh out of man, in their sight.

4:13 And the LORD said, Even thus shall the children of Israel eat
their defiled bread among the Gentiles, whither I will drive them.

4:14 Then said I, Ah Lord GOD! behold, my soul hath not been polluted:
for from my youth up even till now have I not eaten of that which
dieth of itself, or is torn in pieces; neither came there abominable
flesh into my mouth.

4:15 Then he said unto me, Lo, I have given thee cow's dung for man's
dung, and thou shalt prepare thy bread therewith.

4:16 Moreover he said unto me, Son of man, behold, I will break the
staff of bread in Jerusalem: and they shall eat bread by weight, and
with care; and they shall drink water by measure, and with
astonishment: 4:17 That they may want bread and water, and be astonied
one with another, and consume away for their iniquity.

5:1 And thou, son of man, take thee a sharp knife, take thee a
barber's razor, and cause it to pass upon thine head and upon thy
beard: then take thee balances to weigh, and divide the hair.

5:2 Thou shalt burn with fire a third part in the midst of the city,
when the days of the siege are fulfilled: and thou shalt take a third
part, and smite about it with a knife: and a third part thou shalt
scatter in the wind; and I will draw out a sword after them.

5:3 Thou shalt also take thereof a few in number, and bind them in thy
skirts.

5:4 Then take of them again, and cast them into the midst of the fire,
and burn them in the fire; for thereof shall a fire come forth into
all the house of Israel.

5:5 Thus saith the Lord GOD; This is Jerusalem: I have set it in the
midst of the nations and countries that are round about her.

5:6 And she hath changed my judgments into wickedness more than the
nations, and my statutes more than the countries that are round about
her: for they have refused my judgments and my statutes, they have not
walked in them.

5:7 Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD; Because ye multiplied more than
the nations that are round about you, and have not walked in my
statutes, neither have kept my judgments, neither have done according
to the judgments of the nations that are round about you; 5:8
Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I, even I, am against thee,
and will execute judgments in the midst of thee in the sight of the
nations.

5:9 And I will do in thee that which I have not done, and whereunto I
will not do any more the like, because of all thine abominations.

5:10 Therefore the fathers shall eat the sons in the midst of thee,
and the sons shall eat their fathers; and I will execute judgments in
thee, and the whole remnant of thee will I scatter into all the winds.

5:11 Wherefore, as I live, saith the Lord GOD; Surely, because thou
hast defiled my sanctuary with all thy detestable things, and with all
thine abominations, therefore will I also diminish thee; neither shall
mine eye spare, neither will I have any pity.

5:12 A third part of thee shall die with the pestilence, and with
famine shall they be consumed in the midst of thee: and a third part
shall fall by the sword round about thee; and I will scatter a third
part into all the winds, and I will draw out a sword after them.

5:13 Thus shall mine anger be accomplished, and I will cause my fury
to rest upon them, and I will be comforted: and they shall know that I
the LORD have spoken it in my zeal, when I have accomplished my fury
in them.

5:14 Moreover I will make thee waste, and a reproach among the nations
that are round about thee, in the sight of all that pass by.

5:15 So it shall be a reproach and a taunt, an instruction and an
astonishment unto the nations that are round about thee, when I shall
execute judgments in thee in anger and in fury and in furious rebukes.
I the LORD have spoken it.

5:16 When I shall send upon them the evil arrows of famine, which
shall be for their destruction, and which I will send to destroy you:
and I will increase the famine upon you, and will break your staff of
bread: 5:17 So will I send upon you famine and evil beasts, and they
shall bereave thee: and pestilence and blood shall pass through thee;
and I will bring the sword upon thee. I the LORD have spoken it.

6:1 And the word of the LORD came unto me, saying, 6:2 Son of man, set
thy face toward the mountains of Israel, and prophesy against them,
6:3 And say, Ye mountains of Israel, hear the word of the Lord GOD;
Thus saith the Lord GOD to the mountains, and to the hills, to the
rivers, and to the valleys; Behold, I, even I, will bring a sword upon
you, and I will destroy your high places.

6:4 And your altars shall be desolate, and your images shall be
broken: and I will cast down your slain men before your idols.

6:5 And I will lay the dead carcases of the children of Israel before
their idols; and I will scatter your bones round about your altars.

6:6 In all your dwellingplaces the cities shall be laid waste, and the
high places shall be desolate; that your altars may be laid waste and
made desolate, and your idols may be broken and cease, and your images
may be cut down, and your works may be abolished.

6:7 And the slain shall fall in the midst of you, and ye shall know
that I am the LORD.

6:8 Yet will I leave a remnant, that ye may have some that shall
escape the sword among the nations, when ye shall be scattered through
the countries.

6:9 And they that escape of you shall remember me among the nations
whither they shall be carried captives, because I am broken with their
whorish heart, which hath departed from me, and with their eyes, which
go a whoring after their idols: and they shall lothe themselves for
the evils which they have committed in all their abominations.

6:10 And they shall know that I am the LORD, and that I have not said
in vain that I would do this evil unto them.

6:11 Thus saith the Lord GOD; Smite with thine hand, and stamp with
thy foot, and say, Alas for all the evil abominations of the house of
Israel! for they shall fall by the sword, by the famine, and by the
pestilence.

6:12 He that is far off shall die of the pestilence; and he that is
near shall fall by the sword; and he that remaineth and is besieged
shall die by the famine: thus will I accomplish my fury upon them.

6:13 Then shall ye know that I am the LORD, when their slain men shall
be among their idols round about their altars, upon every high hill,
in all the tops of the mountains, and under every green tree, and
under every thick oak, the place where they did offer sweet savour to
all their idols.

6:14 So will I stretch out my hand upon them, and make the land
desolate, yea, more desolate than the wilderness toward Diblath, in
all their habitations: and they shall know that I am the LORD.

7:1 Moreover the word of the LORD came unto me, saying, 7:2 Also, thou
son of man, thus saith the Lord GOD unto the land of Israel; An end,
the end is come upon the four corners of the land.

7:3 Now is the end come upon thee, and I will send mine anger upon
thee, and will judge thee according to thy ways, and will recompense
upon thee all thine abominations.

7:4 And mine eye shall not spare thee, neither will I have pity: but I
will recompense thy ways upon thee, and thine abominations shall be in
the midst of thee: and ye shall know that I am the LORD.

7:5 Thus saith the Lord GOD; An evil, an only evil, behold, is come.

7:6 An end is come, the end is come: it watcheth for thee; behold, it
is come.

7:7 The morning is come unto thee, O thou that dwellest in the land:
the time is come, the day of trouble is near, and not the sounding
again of the mountains.

7:8 Now will I shortly pour out my fury upon thee, and accomplish mine
anger upon thee: and I will judge thee according to thy ways, and will
recompense thee for all thine abominations.

7:9 And mine eye shall not spare, neither will I have pity: I will
recompense thee according to thy ways and thine abominations that are
in the midst of thee; and ye shall know that I am the LORD that
smiteth.

7:10 Behold the day, behold, it is come: the morning is gone forth;
the rod hath blossomed, pride hath budded.

7:11 Violence is risen up into a rod of wickedness: none of them shall
remain, nor of their multitude, nor of any of their's: neither shall
there be wailing for them.

7:12 The time is come, the day draweth near: let not the buyer
rejoice, nor the seller mourn: for wrath is upon all the multitude
thereof.

7:13 For the seller shall not return to that which is sold, although
they were yet alive: for the vision is touching the whole multitude
thereof, which shall not return; neither shall any strengthen himself
in the iniquity of his life.

7:14 They have blown the trumpet, even to make all ready; but none
goeth to the battle: for my wrath is upon all the multitude thereof.

7:15 The sword is without, and the pestilence and the famine within:
he that is in the field shall die with the sword; and he that is in
the city, famine and pestilence shall devour him.

7:16 But they that escape of them shall escape, and shall be on the
mountains like doves of the valleys, all of them mourning, every one
for his iniquity.

7:17 All hands shall be feeble, and all knees shall be weak as water.

7:18 They shall also gird themselves with sackcloth, and horror shall
cover them; and shame shall be upon all faces, and baldness upon all
their heads.

7:19 They shall cast their silver in the streets, and their gold shall
be removed: their silver and their gold shall not be able to deliver
them in the day of the wrath of the LORD: they shall not satisfy their
souls, neither fill their bowels: because it is the stumblingblock of
their iniquity.

7:20 As for the beauty of his ornament, he set it in majesty: but they
made the images of their abominations and of their detestable things
therein: therefore have I set it far from them.

7:21 And I will give it into the hands of the strangers for a prey,
and to the wicked of the earth for a spoil; and they shall pollute it.

7:22 My face will I turn also from them, and they shall pollute my
secret place: for the robbers shall enter into it, and defile it.

7:23 Make a chain: for the land is full of bloody crimes, and the city
is full of violence.

7:24 Wherefore I will bring the worst of the heathen, and they shall
possess their houses: I will also make the pomp of the strong to
cease; and their holy places shall be defiled.

7:25 Destruction cometh; and they shall seek peace, and there shall be
none.

7:26 Mischief shall come upon mischief, and rumour shall be upon
rumour; then shall they seek a vision of the prophet; but the law
shall perish from the priest, and counsel from the ancients.

7:27 The king shall mourn, and the prince shall be clothed with
desolation, and the hands of the people of the land shall be troubled:
I will do unto them after their way, and according to their deserts
will I judge them; and they shall know that I am the LORD.

8:1 And it came to pass in the sixth year, in the sixth month, in the
fifth day of the month, as I sat in mine house, and the elders of
Judah sat before me, that the hand of the Lord GOD fell there upon me.

8:2 Then I beheld, and lo a likeness as the appearance of fire: from
the appearance of his loins even downward, fire; and from his loins
even upward, as the appearance of brightness, as the colour of amber.

8:3 And he put forth the form of an hand, and took me by a lock of
mine head; and the spirit lifted me up between the earth and the
heaven, and brought me in the visions of God to Jerusalem, to the door
of the inner gate that looketh toward the north; where was the seat of
the image of jealousy, which provoketh to jealousy.

8:4 And, behold, the glory of the God of Israel was there, according
to the vision that I saw in the plain.

8:5 Then said he unto me, Son of man, lift up thine eyes now the way
toward the north. So I lifted up mine eyes the way toward the north,
and behold northward at the gate of the altar this image of jealousy
in the entry.

8:6 He said furthermore unto me, Son of man, seest thou what they do?
even the great abominations that the house of Israel committeth here,
that I should go far off from my sanctuary? but turn thee yet again,
and thou shalt see greater abominations.

8:7 And he brought me to the door of the court; and when I looked,
behold a hole in the wall.

8:8 Then said he unto me, Son of man, dig now in the wall: and when I
had digged in the wall, behold a door.

8:9 And he said unto me, Go in, and behold the wicked abominations
that they do here.

8:10 So I went in and saw; and behold every form of creeping things,
and abominable beasts, and all the idols of the house of Israel,
pourtrayed upon the wall round about.

8:11 And there stood before them seventy men of the ancients of the
house of Israel, and in the midst of them stood Jaazaniah the son of
Shaphan, with every man his censer in his hand; and a thick cloud of
incense went up.

8:12 Then said he unto me, Son of man, hast thou seen what the
ancients of the house of Israel do in the dark, every man in the
chambers of his imagery? for they say, the LORD seeth us not; the LORD
hath forsaken the earth.

8:13 He said also unto me, Turn thee yet again, and thou shalt see
greater abominations that they do.

8:14 Then he brought me to the door of the gate of the LORD's house
which was toward the north; and, behold, there sat women weeping for
Tammuz.

8:15 Then said he unto me, Hast thou seen this, O son of man? turn
thee yet again, and thou shalt see greater abominations than these.

8:16 And he brought me into the inner court of the LORD's house, and,
behold, at the door of the temple of the LORD, between the porch and
the altar, were about five and twenty men, with their backs toward the
temple of the LORD, and their faces toward the east; and they
worshipped the sun toward the east.

8:17 Then he said unto me, Hast thou seen this, O son of man? Is it a
light thing to the house of Judah that they commit the abominations
which they commit here? for they have filled the land with violence,
and have returned to provoke me to anger: and, lo, they put the branch
to their nose.

8:18 Therefore will I also deal in fury: mine eye shall not spare,
neither will I have pity: and though they cry in mine ears with a loud
voice, yet will I not hear them.

9:1 He cried also in mine ears with a loud voice, saying, Cause them
that have charge over the city to draw near, even every man with his
destroying weapon in his hand.

9:2 And, behold, six men came from the way of the higher gate, which
lieth toward the north, and every man a slaughter weapon in his hand;
and one man among them was clothed with linen, with a writer's inkhorn
by his side: and they went in, and stood beside the brasen altar.

9:3 And the glory of the God of Israel was gone up from the cherub,
whereupon he was, to the threshold of the house. And he called to the
man clothed with linen, which had the writer's inkhorn by his side;
9:4 And the LORD said unto him, Go through the midst of the city,
through the midst of Jerusalem, and set a mark upon the foreheads of
the men that sigh and that cry for all the abominations that be done
in the midst thereof.

9:5 And to the others he said in mine hearing, Go ye after him through
the city, and smite: let not your eye spare, neither have ye pity: 9:6
Slay utterly old and young, both maids, and little children, and
women: but come not near any man upon whom is the mark; and begin at
my sanctuary. Then they began at the ancient men which were before the
house.

9:7 And he said unto them, Defile the house, and fill the courts with
the slain: go ye forth. And they went forth, and slew in the city.

9:8 And it came to pass, while they were slaying them, and I was left,
that I fell upon my face, and cried, and said, Ah Lord GOD! wilt thou
destroy all the residue of Israel in thy pouring out of thy fury upon
Jerusalem?  9:9 Then said he unto me, The iniquity of the house of
Israel and Judah is exceeding great, and the land is full of blood,
and the city full of perverseness: for they say, The LORD hath
forsaken the earth, and the LORD seeth not.

9:10 And as for me also, mine eye shall not spare, neither will I have
pity, but I will recompense their way upon their head.

9:11 And, behold, the man clothed with linen, which had the inkhorn by
his side, reported the matter, saying, I have done as thou hast
commanded me.

10:1 Then I looked, and, behold, in the firmament that was above the
head of the cherubims there appeared over them as it were a sapphire
stone, as the appearance of the likeness of a throne.

10:2 And he spake unto the man clothed with linen, and said, Go in
between the wheels, even under the cherub, and fill thine hand with
coals of fire from between the cherubims, and scatter them over the
city. And he went in in my sight.

10:3 Now the cherubims stood on the right side of the house, when the
man went in; and the cloud filled the inner court.

10:4 Then the glory of the LORD went up from the cherub, and stood
over the threshold of the house; and the house was filled with the
cloud, and the court was full of the brightness of the LORD's glory.

10:5 And the sound of the cherubims' wings was heard even to the outer
court, as the voice of the Almighty God when he speaketh.

10:6 And it came to pass, that when he had commanded the man clothed
with linen, saying, Take fire from between the wheels, from between
the cherubims; then he went in, and stood beside the wheels.

10:7 And one cherub stretched forth his hand from between the
cherubims unto the fire that was between the cherubims, and took
thereof, and put it into the hands of him that was clothed with linen:
who took it, and went out.

10:8 And there appeared in the cherubims the form of a man's hand
under their wings.

10:9 And when I looked, behold the four wheels by the cherubims, one
wheel by one cherub, and another wheel by another cherub: and the
appearance of the wheels was as the colour of a beryl stone.

10:10 And as for their appearances, they four had one likeness, as if
a wheel had been in the midst of a wheel.

10:11 When they went, they went upon their four sides; they turned not
as they went, but to the place whither the head looked they followed
it; they turned not as they went.

10:12 And their whole body, and their backs, and their hands, and
their wings, and the wheels, were full of eyes round about, even the
wheels that they four had.

10:13 As for the wheels, it was cried unto them in my hearing, O
wheel.

10:14 And every one had four faces: the first face was the face of a
cherub, and the second face was the face of a man, and the third the
face of a lion, and the fourth the face of an eagle.

10:15 And the cherubims were lifted up. This is the living creature
that I saw by the river of Chebar.

10:16 And when the cherubims went, the wheels went by them: and when
the cherubims lifted up their wings to mount up from the earth, the
same wheels also turned not from beside them.

10:17 When they stood, these stood; and when they were lifted up,
these lifted up themselves also: for the spirit of the living creature
was in them.

10:18 Then the glory of the LORD departed from off the threshold of
the house, and stood over the cherubims.

10:19 And the cherubims lifted up their wings, and mounted up from the
earth in my sight: when they went out, the wheels also were beside
them, and every one stood at the door of the east gate of the LORD's
house; and the glory of the God of Israel was over them above.

10:20 This is the living creature that I saw under the God of Israel
by the river of Chebar; and I knew that they were the cherubims.

10:21 Every one had four faces apiece, and every one four wings; and
the likeness of the hands of a man was under their wings.

10:22 And the likeness of their faces was the same faces which I saw
by the river of Chebar, their appearances and themselves: they went
every one straight forward.

11:1 Moreover the spirit lifted me up, and brought me unto the east
gate of the LORD's house, which looketh eastward: and behold at the
door of the gate five and twenty men; among whom I saw Jaazaniah the
son of Azur, and Pelatiah the son of Benaiah, princes of the people.

11:2 Then said he unto me, Son of man, these are the men that devise
mischief, and give wicked counsel in this city: 11:3 Which say, It is
not near; let us build houses: this city is the caldron, and we be the
flesh.

11:4 Therefore prophesy against them, prophesy, O son of man.

11:5 And the Spirit of the LORD fell upon me, and said unto me, Speak;
Thus saith the LORD; Thus have ye said, O house of Israel: for I know
the things that come into your mind, every one of them.

11:6 Ye have multiplied your slain in this city, and ye have filled
the streets thereof with the slain.

11:7 Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD; Your slain whom ye have laid
in the midst of it, they are the flesh, and this city is the caldron:
but I will bring you forth out of the midst of it.

11:8 Ye have feared the sword; and I will bring a sword upon you,
saith the Lord GOD.

11:9 And I will bring you out of the midst thereof, and deliver you
into the hands of strangers, and will execute judgments among you.

11:10 Ye shall fall by the sword; I will judge you in the border of
Israel; and ye shall know that I am the LORD.

11:11 This city shall not be your caldron, neither shall ye be the
flesh in the midst thereof; but I will judge you in the border of
Israel: 11:12 And ye shall know that I am the LORD: for ye have not
walked in my statutes, neither executed my judgments, but have done
after the manners of the heathen that are round about you.

11:13 And it came to pass, when I prophesied, that Pelatiah the son of
Benaiah died. Then fell I down upon my face, and cried with a loud
voice, and said, Ah Lord GOD! wilt thou make a full end of the remnant
of Israel?  11:14 Again the word of the LORD came unto me, saying,
11:15 Son of man, thy brethren, even thy brethren, the men of thy
kindred, and all the house of Israel wholly, are they unto whom the
inhabitants of Jerusalem have said, Get you far from the LORD: unto us
is this land given in possession.

11:16 Therefore say, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Although I have cast
them far off among the heathen, and although I have scattered them
among the countries, yet will I be to them as a little sanctuary in
the countries where they shall come.

11:17 Therefore say, Thus saith the Lord GOD; I will even gather you
from the people, and assemble you out of the countries where ye have
been scattered, and I will give you the land of Israel.

11:18 And they shall come thither, and they shall take away all the
detestable things thereof and all the abominations thereof from
thence.

11:19 And I will give them one heart, and I will put a new spirit
within you; and I will take the stony heart out of their flesh, and
will give them an heart of flesh: 11:20 That they may walk in my
statutes, and keep mine ordinances, and do them: and they shall be my
people, and I will be their God.

11:21 But as for them whose heart walketh after the heart of their
detestable things and their abominations, I will recompense their way
upon their own heads, saith the Lord GOD.

11:22 Then did the cherubims lift up their wings, and the wheels
beside them; and the glory of the God of Israel was over them above.

11:23 And the glory of the LORD went up from the midst of the city,
and stood upon the mountain which is on the east side of the city.

11:24 Afterwards the spirit took me up, and brought me in a vision by
the Spirit of God into Chaldea, to them of the captivity. So the
vision that I had seen went up from me.

11:25 Then I spake unto them of the captivity all the things that the
LORD had shewed me.

12:1 The word of the LORD also came unto me, saying, 12:2 Son of man,
thou dwellest in the midst of a rebellious house, which have eyes to
see, and see not; they have ears to hear, and hear not: for they are a
rebellious house.

12:3 Therefore, thou son of man, prepare thee stuff for removing, and
remove by day in their sight; and thou shalt remove from thy place to
another place in their sight: it may be they will consider, though
they be a rebellious house.

12:4 Then shalt thou bring forth thy stuff by day in their sight, as
stuff for removing: and thou shalt go forth at even in their sight, as
they that go forth into captivity.

12:5 Dig thou through the wall in their sight, and carry out thereby.

12:6 In their sight shalt thou bear it upon thy shoulders, and carry
it forth in the twilight: thou shalt cover thy face, that thou see not
the ground: for I have set thee for a sign unto the house of Israel.

12:7 And I did so as I was commanded: I brought forth my stuff by day,
as stuff for captivity, and in the even I digged through the wall with
mine hand; I brought it forth in the twilight, and I bare it upon my
shoulder in their sight.

12:8 And in the morning came the word of the LORD unto me, saying,
12:9 Son of man, hath not the house of Israel, the rebellious house,
said unto thee, What doest thou?  12:10 Say thou unto them, Thus saith
the Lord GOD; This burden concerneth the prince in Jerusalem, and all
the house of Israel that are among them.

12:11 Say, I am your sign: like as I have done, so shall it be done
unto them: they shall remove and go into captivity.

12:12 And the prince that is among them shall bear upon his shoulder
in the twilight, and shall go forth: they shall dig through the wall
to carry out thereby: he shall cover his face, that he see not the
ground with his eyes.

12:13 My net also will I spread upon him, and he shall be taken in my
snare: and I will bring him to Babylon to the land of the Chaldeans;
yet shall he not see it, though he shall die there.

12:14 And I will scatter toward every wind all that are about him to
help him, and all his bands; and I will draw out the sword after them.

12:15 And they shall know that I am the LORD, when I shall scatter
them among the nations, and disperse them in the countries.

12:16 But I will leave a few men of them from the sword, from the
famine, and from the pestilence; that they may declare all their
abominations among the heathen whither they come; and they shall know
that I am the LORD.

12:17 Moreover the word of the LORD came to me, saying, 12:18 Son of
man, eat thy bread with quaking, and drink thy water with trembling
and with carefulness; 12:19 And say unto the people of the land, Thus
saith the Lord GOD of the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and of the land of
Israel; They shall eat their bread with carefulness, and drink their
water with astonishment, that her land may be desolate from all that
is therein, because of the violence of all them that dwell therein.

12:20 And the cities that are inhabited shall be laid waste, and the
land shall be desolate; and ye shall know that I am the LORD.

12:21 And the word of the LORD came unto me, saying, 12:22 Son of man,
what is that proverb that ye have in the land of Israel, saying, The
days are prolonged, and every vision faileth?  12:23 Tell them
therefore, Thus saith the Lord GOD; I will make this proverb to cease,
and they shall no more use it as a proverb in Israel; but say unto
them, The days are at hand, and the effect of every vision.

12:24 For there shall be no more any vain vision nor flattering
divination within the house of Israel.

12:25 For I am the LORD: I will speak, and the word that I shall speak
shall come to pass; it shall be no more prolonged: for in your days, O
rebellious house, will I say the word, and will perform it, saith the
Lord GOD.

12:26 Again the word of the LORD came to me, saying.

12:27 Son of man, behold, they of the house of Israel say, The vision
that he seeth is for many days to come, and he prophesieth of the
times that are far off.

12:28 Therefore say unto them, Thus saith the Lord GOD; There shall
none of my words be prolonged any more, but the word which I have
spoken shall be done, saith the Lord GOD.

13:1 And the word of the LORD came unto me, saying, 13:2 Son of man,
prophesy against the prophets of Israel that prophesy, and say thou
unto them that prophesy out of their own hearts, Hear ye the word of
the LORD; 13:3 Thus saith the Lord GOD; Woe unto the foolish prophets,
that follow their own spirit, and have seen nothing!  13:4 O Israel,
thy prophets are like the foxes in the deserts.

13:5 Ye have not gone up into the gaps, neither made up the hedge for
the house of Israel to stand in the battle in the day of the LORD.

13:6 They have seen vanity and lying divination, saying, The LORD
saith: and the LORD hath not sent them: and they have made others to
hope that they would confirm the word.

13:7 Have ye not seen a vain vision, and have ye not spoken a lying
divination, whereas ye say, The LORD saith it; albeit I have not
spoken?  13:8 Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD; Because ye have
spoken vanity, and seen lies, therefore, behold, I am against you,
saith the Lord GOD.

13:9 And mine hand shall be upon the prophets that see vanity, and
that divine lies: they shall not be in the assembly of my people,
neither shall they be written in the writing of the house of Israel,
neither shall they enter into the land of Israel; and ye shall know
that I am the Lord GOD.

13:10 Because, even because they have seduced my people, saying,
Peace; and there was no peace; and one built up a wall, and, lo,
others daubed it with untempered morter: 13:11 Say unto them which
daub it with untempered morter, that it shall fall: there shall be an
overflowing shower; and ye, O great hailstones, shall fall; and a
stormy wind shall rend it.

13:12 Lo, when the wall is fallen, shall it not be said unto you,
Where is the daubing wherewith ye have daubed it?  13:13 Therefore
thus saith the Lord GOD; I will even rend it with a stormy wind in my
fury; and there shall be an overflowing shower in mine anger, and
great hailstones in my fury to consume it.

13:14 So will I break down the wall that ye have daubed with
untempered morter, and bring it down to the ground, so that the
foundation thereof shall be discovered, and it shall fall, and ye
shall be consumed in the midst thereof: and ye shall know that I am
the LORD.

13:15 Thus will I accomplish my wrath upon the wall, and upon them
that have daubed it with untempered morter, and will say unto you, The
wall is no more, neither they that daubed it; 13:16 To wit, the
prophets of Israel which prophesy concerning Jerusalem, and which see
visions of peace for her, and there is no peace, saith the Lord GOD.

13:17 Likewise, thou son of man, set thy face against the daughters of
thy people, which prophesy out of their own heart; and prophesy thou
against them, 13:18 And say, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Woe to the women
that sew pillows to all armholes, and make kerchiefs upon the head of
every stature to hunt souls! Will ye hunt the souls of my people, and
will ye save the souls alive that come unto you?  13:19 And will ye
pollute me among my people for handfuls of barley and for pieces of
bread, to slay the souls that should not die, and to save the souls
alive that should not live, by your lying to my people that hear your
lies?  13:20 Wherefore thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I am against
your pillows, wherewith ye there hunt the souls to make them fly, and
I will tear them from your arms, and will let the souls go, even the
souls that ye hunt to make them fly.

13:21 Your kerchiefs also will I tear, and deliver my people out of
your hand, and they shall be no more in your hand to be hunted; and ye
shall know that I am the LORD.

13:22 Because with lies ye have made the heart of the righteous sad,
whom I have not made sad; and strengthened the hands of the wicked,
that he should not return from his wicked way, by promising him life:
13:23 Therefore ye shall see no more vanity, nor divine divinations:
for I will deliver my people out of your hand: and ye shall know that
I am the LORD.

14:1 Then came certain of the elders of Israel unto me, and sat before
me.

14:2 And the word of the LORD came unto me, saying, 14:3 Son of man,
these men have set up their idols in their heart, and put the
stumblingblock of their iniquity before their face: should I be
enquired of at all by them?  14:4 Therefore speak unto them, and say
unto them, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Every man of the house of Israel
that setteth up his idols in his heart, and putteth the stumblingblock
of his iniquity before his face, and cometh to the prophet; I the LORD
will answer him that cometh according to the multitude of his idols;
14:5 That I may take the house of Israel in their own heart, because
they are all estranged from me through their idols.

14:6 Therefore say unto the house of Israel, Thus saith the Lord GOD;
Repent, and turn yourselves from your idols; and turn away your faces
from all your abominations.

14:7 For every one of the house of Israel, or of the stranger that
sojourneth in Israel, which separateth himself from me, and setteth up
his idols in his heart, and putteth the stumblingblock of his iniquity
before his face, and cometh to a prophet to enquire of him concerning
me; I the LORD will answer him by myself: 14:8 And I will set my face
against that man, and will make him a sign and a proverb, and I will
cut him off from the midst of my people; and ye shall know that I am
the LORD.

14:9 And if the prophet be deceived when he hath spoken a thing, I the
LORD have deceived that prophet, and I will stretch out my hand upon
him, and will destroy him from the midst of my people Israel.

14:10 And they shall bear the punishment of their iniquity: the
punishment of the prophet shall be even as the punishment of him that
seeketh unto him; 14:11 That the house of Israel may go no more astray
from me, neither be polluted any more with all their transgressions;
but that they may be my people, and I may be their God, saith the Lord
GOD.

14:12 The word of the LORD came again to me, saying, 14:13 Son of man,
when the land sinneth against me by trespassing grievously, then will
I stretch out mine hand upon it, and will break the staff of the bread
thereof, and will send famine upon it, and will cut off man and beast
from it: 14:14 Though these three men, Noah, Daniel, and Job, were in
it, they should deliver but their own souls by their righteousness,
saith the Lord GOD.

14:15 If I cause noisome beasts to pass through the land, and they
spoil it, so that it be desolate, that no man may pass through because
of the beasts: 14:16 Though these three men were in it, as I live,
saith the Lord GOD, they shall deliver neither sons nor daughters;
they only shall be delivered, but the land shall be desolate.

14:17 Or if I bring a sword upon that land, and say, Sword, go through
the land; so that I cut off man and beast from it: 14:18 Though these
three men were in it, as I live, saith the Lord GOD, they shall
deliver neither sons nor daughters, but they only shall be delivered
themselves.

14:19 Or if I send a pestilence into that land, and pour out my fury
upon it in blood, to cut off from it man and beast: 14:20 Though Noah,
Daniel, and Job were in it, as I live, saith the Lord GOD, they shall
deliver neither son nor daughter; they shall but deliver their own
souls by their righteousness.

14:21 For thus saith the Lord GOD; How much more when I send my four
sore judgments upon Jerusalem, the sword, and the famine, and the
noisome beast, and the pestilence, to cut off from it man and beast?
14:22 Yet, behold, therein shall be left a remnant that shall be
brought forth, both sons and daughters: behold, they shall come forth
unto you, and ye shall see their way and their doings: and ye shall be
comforted concerning the evil that I have brought upon Jerusalem, even
concerning all that I have brought upon it.

14:23 And they shall comfort you, when ye see their ways and their
doings: and ye shall know that I have not done without cause all that
I have done in it, saith the Lord GOD.

15:1 And the word of the LORD came unto me, saying, 15:2 Son of man,
what is the vine tree more than any tree, or than a branch which is
among the trees of the forest?  15:3 Shall wood be taken thereof to do
any work? or will men take a pin of it to hang any vessel thereon?
15:4 Behold, it is cast into the fire for fuel; the fire devoureth
both the ends of it, and the midst of it is burned. Is it meet for any
work?  15:5 Behold, when it was whole, it was meet for no work: how
much less shall it be meet yet for any work, when the fire hath
devoured it, and it is burned?  15:6 Therefore thus saith the Lord
GOD; As the vine tree among the trees of the forest, which I have
given to the fire for fuel, so will I give the inhabitants of
Jerusalem.

15:7 And I will set my face against them; they shall go out from one
fire, and another fire shall devour them; and ye shall know that I am
the LORD, when I set my face against them.

15:8 And I will make the land desolate, because they have committed a
trespass, saith the Lord GOD.

16:1 Again the word of the LORD came unto me, saying, 16:2 Son of man,
cause Jerusalem to know her abominations, 16:3 And say, Thus saith the
Lord GOD unto Jerusalem; Thy birth and thy nativity is of the land of
Canaan; thy father was an Amorite, and thy mother an Hittite.

16:4 And as for thy nativity, in the day thou wast born thy navel was
not cut, neither wast thou washed in water to supple thee; thou wast
not salted at all, nor swaddled at all.

16:5 None eye pitied thee, to do any of these unto thee, to have
compassion upon thee; but thou wast cast out in the open field, to the
lothing of thy person, in the day that thou wast born.

16:6 And when I passed by thee, and saw thee polluted in thine own
blood, I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live; yea, I said
unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live.

16:7 I have caused thee to multiply as the bud of the field, and thou
hast increased and waxen great, and thou art come to excellent
ornaments: thy breasts are fashioned, and thine hair is grown, whereas
thou wast naked and bare.

16:8 Now when I passed by thee, and looked upon thee, behold, thy time
was the time of love; and I spread my skirt over thee, and covered thy
nakedness: yea, I sware unto thee, and entered into a covenant with
thee, saith the Lord GOD, and thou becamest mine.

16:9 Then washed I thee with water; yea, I throughly washed away thy
blood from thee, and I anointed thee with oil.

16:10 I clothed thee also with broidered work, and shod thee with
badgers' skin, and I girded thee about with fine linen, and I covered
thee with silk.

16:11 I decked thee also with ornaments, and I put bracelets upon thy
hands, and a chain on thy neck.

16:12 And I put a jewel on thy forehead, and earrings in thine ears,
and a beautiful crown upon thine head.

16:13 Thus wast thou decked with gold and silver; and thy raiment was
of fine linen, and silk, and broidered work; thou didst eat fine
flour, and honey, and oil: and thou wast exceeding beautiful, and thou
didst prosper into a kingdom.

16:14 And thy renown went forth among the heathen for thy beauty: for
it was perfect through my comeliness, which I had put upon thee, saith
the Lord GOD.

16:15 But thou didst trust in thine own beauty, and playedst the
harlot because of thy renown, and pouredst out thy fornications on
every one that passed by; his it was.

16:16 And of thy garments thou didst take, and deckedst thy high
places with divers colours, and playedst the harlot thereupon: the
like things shall not come, neither shall it be so.

16:17 Thou hast also taken thy fair jewels of my gold and of my
silver, which I had given thee, and madest to thyself images of men,
and didst commit whoredom with them, 16:18 And tookest thy broidered
garments, and coveredst them: and thou hast set mine oil and mine
incense before them.

16:19 My meat also which I gave thee, fine flour, and oil, and honey,
wherewith I fed thee, thou hast even set it before them for a sweet
savour: and thus it was, saith the Lord GOD.

16:20 Moreover thou hast taken thy sons and thy daughters, whom thou
hast borne unto me, and these hast thou sacrificed unto them to be
devoured. Is this of thy whoredoms a small matter, 16:21 That thou
hast slain my children, and delivered them to cause them to pass
through the fire for them?  16:22 And in all thine abominations and
thy whoredoms thou hast not remembered the days of thy youth, when
thou wast naked and bare, and wast polluted in thy blood.

16:23 And it came to pass after all thy wickedness, (woe, woe unto
thee!  saith the LORD GOD;) 16:24 That thou hast also built unto thee
an eminent place, and hast made thee an high place in every street.

16:25 Thou hast built thy high place at every head of the way, and
hast made thy beauty to be abhorred, and hast opened thy feet to every
one that passed by, and multiplied thy whoredoms.

16:26 Thou hast also committed fornication with the Egyptians thy
neighbours, great of flesh; and hast increased thy whoredoms, to
provoke me to anger.

16:27 Behold, therefore I have stretched out my hand over thee, and
have diminished thine ordinary food, and delivered thee unto the will
of them that hate thee, the daughters of the Philistines, which are
ashamed of thy lewd way.

16:28 Thou hast played the whore also with the Assyrians, because thou
wast unsatiable; yea, thou hast played the harlot with them, and yet
couldest not be satisfied.

16:29 Thou hast moreover multiplied thy fornication in the land of
Canaan unto Chaldea; and yet thou wast not satisfied therewith.

16:30 How weak is thine heart, saith the LORD GOD, seeing thou doest
all these things, the work of an imperious whorish woman; 16:31 In
that thou buildest thine eminent place in the head of every way, and
makest thine high place in every street; and hast not been as an
harlot, in that thou scornest hire; 16:32 But as a wife that
committeth adultery, which taketh strangers instead of her husband!
16:33 They give gifts to all whores: but thou givest thy gifts to all
thy lovers, and hirest them, that they may come unto thee on every
side for thy whoredom.

16:34 And the contrary is in thee from other women in thy whoredoms,
whereas none followeth thee to commit whoredoms: and in that thou
givest a reward, and no reward is given unto thee, therefore thou art
contrary.

16:35 Wherefore, O harlot, hear the word of the LORD: 16:36 Thus saith
the Lord GOD; Because thy filthiness was poured out, and thy nakedness
discovered through thy whoredoms with thy lovers, and with all the
idols of thy abominations, and by the blood of thy children, which
thou didst give unto them; 16:37 Behold, therefore I will gather all
thy lovers, with whom thou hast taken pleasure, and all them that thou
hast loved, with all them that thou hast hated; I will even gather
them round about against thee, and will discover thy nakedness unto
them, that they may see all thy nakedness.

16:38 And I will judge thee, as women that break wedlock and shed
blood are judged; and I will give thee blood in fury and jealousy.

16:39 And I will also give thee into their hand, and they shall throw
down thine eminent place, and shall break down thy high places: they
shall strip thee also of thy clothes, and shall take thy fair jewels,
and leave thee naked and bare.

16:40 They shall also bring up a company against thee, and they shall
stone thee with stones, and thrust thee through with their swords.

16:41 And they shall burn thine houses with fire, and execute
judgments upon thee in the sight of many women: and I will cause thee
to cease from playing the harlot, and thou also shalt give no hire any
more.

16:42 So will I make my fury toward thee to rest, and my jealousy
shall depart from thee, and I will be quiet, and will be no more
angry.

16:43 Because thou hast not remembered the days of thy youth, but hast
fretted me in all these things; behold, therefore I also will
recompense thy way upon thine head, saith the Lord GOD: and thou shalt
not commit this lewdness above all thine abominations.

16:44 Behold, every one that useth proverbs shall use this proverb
against thee, saying, As is the mother, so is her daughter.

16:45 Thou art thy mother's daughter, that lotheth her husband and her
children; and thou art the sister of thy sisters, which lothed their
husbands and their children: your mother was an Hittite, and your
father an Amorite.

16:46 And thine elder sister is Samaria, she and her daughters that
dwell at thy left hand: and thy younger sister, that dwelleth at thy
right hand, is Sodom and her daughters.

16:47 Yet hast thou not walked after their ways, nor done after their
abominations: but, as if that were a very little thing, thou wast
corrupted more than they in all thy ways.

16:48 As I live, saith the Lord GOD, Sodom thy sister hath not done,
she nor her daughters, as thou hast done, thou and thy daughters.

16:49 Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride,
fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her
daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy.

16:50 And they were haughty, and committed abomination before me:
therefore I took them away as I saw good.

16:51 Neither hath Samaria committed half of thy sins; but thou hast
multiplied thine abominations more than they, and hast justified thy
sisters in all thine abominations which thou hast done.

16:52 Thou also, which hast judged thy sisters, bear thine own shame
for thy sins that thou hast committed more abominable than they: they
are more righteous than thou: yea, be thou confounded also, and bear
thy shame, in that thou hast justified thy sisters.

16:53 When I shall bring again their captivity, the captivity of Sodom
and her daughters, and the captivity of Samaria and her daughters,
then will I bring again the captivity of thy captives in the midst of
them: 16:54 That thou mayest bear thine own shame, and mayest be
confounded in all that thou hast done, in that thou art a comfort unto
them.

16:55 When thy sisters, Sodom and her daughters, shall return to their
former estate, and Samaria and her daughters shall return to their
former estate, then thou and thy daughters shall return to your former
estate.

16:56 For thy sister Sodom was not mentioned by thy mouth in the day
of thy pride, 16:57 Before thy wickedness was discovered, as at the
time of thy reproach of the daughters of Syria, and all that are round
about her, the daughters of the Philistines, which despise thee round
about.

16:58 Thou hast borne thy lewdness and thine abominations, saith the
LORD.

16:59 For thus saith the Lord GOD; I will even deal with thee as thou
hast done, which hast despised the oath in breaking the covenant.

16:60 Nevertheless I will remember my covenant with thee in the days
of thy youth, and I will establish unto thee an everlasting covenant.

16:61 Then thou shalt remember thy ways, and be ashamed, when thou
shalt receive thy sisters, thine elder and thy younger: and I will
give them unto thee for daughters, but not by thy covenant.

16:62 And I will establish my covenant with thee; and thou shalt know
that I am the LORD: 16:63 That thou mayest remember, and be
confounded, and never open thy mouth any more because of thy shame,
when I am pacified toward thee for all that thou hast done, saith the
Lord GOD.

17:1 And the word of the LORD came unto me, saying, 17:2 Son of man,
put forth a riddle, and speak a parable unto the house of Israel; 17:3
And say, Thus saith the Lord GOD; A great eagle with great wings,
longwinged, full of feathers, which had divers colours, came unto
Lebanon, and took the highest branch of the cedar: 17:4 He cropped off
the top of his young twigs, and carried it into a land of traffick; he
set it in a city of merchants.

17:5 He took also of the seed of the land, and planted it in a
fruitful field; he placed it by great waters, and set it as a willow
tree.

17:6 And it grew, and became a spreading vine of low stature, whose
branches turned toward him, and the roots thereof were under him: so
it became a vine, and brought forth branches, and shot forth sprigs.

17:7 There was also another great eagle with great wings and many
feathers: and, behold, this vine did bend her roots toward him, and
shot forth her branches toward him, that he might water it by the
furrows of her plantation.

17:8 It was planted in a good soil by great waters, that it might
bring forth branches, and that it might bear fruit, that it might be a
goodly vine.

17:9 Say thou, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Shall it prosper? shall he not
pull up the roots thereof, and cut off the fruit thereof, that it
wither? it shall wither in all the leaves of her spring, even without
great power or many people to pluck it up by the roots thereof.

17:10 Yea, behold, being planted, shall it prosper? shall it not
utterly wither, when the east wind toucheth it? it shall wither in the
furrows where it grew.

17:11 Moreover the word of the LORD came unto me, saying, 17:12 Say
now to the rebellious house, Know ye not what these things mean?  tell
them, Behold, the king of Babylon is come to Jerusalem, and hath taken
the king thereof, and the princes thereof, and led them with him to
Babylon; 17:13 And hath taken of the king's seed, and made a covenant
with him, and hath taken an oath of him: he hath also taken the mighty
of the land: 17:14 That the kingdom might be base, that it might not
lift itself up, but that by keeping of his covenant it might stand.

17:15 But he rebelled against him in sending his ambassadors into
Egypt, that they might give him horses and much people. Shall he
prosper? shall he escape that doeth such things? or shall he break the
covenant, and be delivered?  17:16 As I live, saith the Lord GOD,
surely in the place where the king dwelleth that made him king, whose
oath he despised, and whose covenant he brake, even with him in the
midst of Babylon he shall die.

17:17 Neither shall Pharaoh with his mighty army and great company
make for him in the war, by casting up mounts, and building forts, to
cut off many persons: 17:18 Seeing he despised the oath by breaking
the covenant, when, lo, he had given his hand, and hath done all these
things, he shall not escape.

17:19 Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD; As I live, surely mine oath
that he hath despised, and my covenant that he hath broken, even it
will I recompense upon his own head.

17:20 And I will spread my net upon him, and he shall be taken in my
snare, and I will bring him to Babylon, and will plead with him there
for his trespass that he hath trespassed against me.

17:21 And all his fugitives with all his bands shall fall by the
sword, and they that remain shall be scattered toward all winds: and
ye shall know that I the LORD have spoken it.

17:22 Thus saith the Lord GOD; I will also take of the highest branch
of the high cedar, and will set it; I will crop off from the top of
his young twigs a tender one, and will plant it upon an high mountain
and eminent: 17:23 In the mountain of the height of Israel will I
plant it: and it shall bring forth boughs, and bear fruit, and be a
goodly cedar: and under it shall dwell all fowl of every wing; in the
shadow of the branches thereof shall they dwell.

17:24 And all the trees of the field shall know that I the LORD have
brought down the high tree, have exalted the low tree, have dried up
the green tree, and have made the dry tree to flourish: I the LORD
have spoken and have done it.

18:1 The word of the LORD came unto me again, saying, 18:2 What mean
ye, that ye use this proverb concerning the land of Israel, saying,
The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set
on edge?  18:3 As I live, saith the Lord GOD, ye shall not have
occasion any more to use this proverb in Israel.

18:4 Behold, all souls are mine; as the soul of the father, so also
the soul of the son is mine: the soul that sinneth, it shall die.

18:5 But if a man be just, and do that which is lawful and right, 18:6
And hath not eaten upon the mountains, neither hath lifted up his eyes
to the idols of the house of Israel, neither hath defiled his
neighbour's wife, neither hath come near to a menstruous woman, 18:7
And hath not oppressed any, but hath restored to the debtor his
pledge, hath spoiled none by violence, hath given his bread to the
hungry, and hath covered the naked with a garment; 18:8 He that hath
not given forth upon usury, neither hath taken any increase, that hath
withdrawn his hand from iniquity, hath executed true judgment between
man and man, 18:9 Hath walked in my statutes, and hath kept my
judgments, to deal truly; he is just, he shall surely live, saith the
Lord GOD.

18:10 If he beget a son that is a robber, a shedder of blood, and that
doeth the like to any one of these things, 18:11 And that doeth not
any of those duties, but even hath eaten upon the mountains, and
defiled his neighbour's wife, 18:12 Hath oppressed the poor and needy,
hath spoiled by violence, hath not restored the pledge, and hath
lifted up his eyes to the idols, hath committed abomination, 18:13
Hath given forth upon usury, and hath taken increase: shall he then
live? he shall not live: he hath done all these abominations; he shall
surely die; his blood shall be upon him.

18:14 Now, lo, if he beget a son, that seeth all his father's sins
which he hath done, and considereth, and doeth not such like, 18:15
That hath not eaten upon the mountains, neither hath lifted up his
eyes to the idols of the house of Israel, hath not defiled his
neighbour's wife, 18:16 Neither hath oppressed any, hath not
withholden the pledge, neither hath spoiled by violence, but hath
given his bread to the hungry, and hath covered the naked with a
garment, 18:17 That hath taken off his hand from the poor, that hath
not received usury nor increase, hath executed my judgments, hath
walked in my statutes; he shall not die for the iniquity of his
father, he shall surely live.

18:18 As for his father, because he cruelly oppressed, spoiled his
brother by violence, and did that which is not good among his people,
lo, even he shall die in his iniquity.

18:19 Yet say ye, Why? doth not the son bear the iniquity of the
father?  When the son hath done that which is lawful and right, and
hath kept all my statutes, and hath done them, he shall surely live.

18:20 The soul that sinneth, it shall die. The son shall not bear the
iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of
the son: the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the
wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him.

18:21 But if the wicked will turn from all his sins that he hath
committed, and keep all my statutes, and do that which is lawful and
right, he shall surely live, he shall not die.

18:22 All his transgressions that he hath committed, they shall not be
mentioned unto him: in his righteousness that he hath done he shall
live.

18:23 Have I any pleasure at all that the wicked should die? saith the
Lord GOD: and not that he should return from his ways, and live?
18:24 But when the righteous turneth away from his righteousness, and
committeth iniquity, and doeth according to all the abominations that
the wicked man doeth, shall he live? All his righteousness that he
hath done shall not be mentioned: in his trespass that he hath
trespassed, and in his sin that he hath sinned, in them shall he die.

18:25 Yet ye say, The way of the LORD is not equal. Hear now, O house
of Israel; Is not my way equal? are not your ways unequal?  18:26 When
a righteous man turneth away from his righteousness, and committeth
iniquity, and dieth in them; for his iniquity that he hath done shall
he die.

18:27 Again, when the wicked man turneth away from his wickedness that
he hath committed, and doeth that which is lawful and right, he shall
save his soul alive.

18:28 Because he considereth, and turneth away from all his
transgressions that he hath committed, he shall surely live, he shall
not die.

18:29 Yet saith the house of Israel, The way of the LORD is not equal.
O house of Israel, are not my ways equal? are not your ways unequal?
18:30 Therefore I will judge you, O house of Israel, every one
according to his ways, saith the Lord GOD. Repent, and turn yourselves
from all your transgressions; so iniquity shall not be your ruin.

18:31 Cast away from you all your transgressions, whereby ye have
transgressed; and make you a new heart and a new spirit: for why will
ye die, O house of Israel?  18:32 For I have no pleasure in the death
of him that dieth, saith the Lord GOD: wherefore turn yourselves, and
live ye.

19:1 Moreover take thou up a lamentation for the princes of Israel,
19:2 And say, What is thy mother? A lioness: she lay down among lions,
she nourished her whelps among young lions.

19:3 And she brought up one of her whelps: it became a young lion, and
it learned to catch the prey; it devoured men.

19:4 The nations also heard of him; he was taken in their pit, and
they brought him with chains unto the land of Egypt.

19:5 Now when she saw that she had waited, and her hope was lost, then
she took another of her whelps, and made him a young lion.

19:6 And he went up and down among the lions, he became a young lion,
and learned to catch the prey, and devoured men.

19:7 And he knew their desolate palaces, and he laid waste their
cities; and the land was desolate, and the fulness thereof, by the
noise of his roaring.

19:8 Then the nations set against him on every side from the
provinces, and spread their net over him: he was taken in their pit.

19:9 And they put him in ward in chains, and brought him to the king
of Babylon: they brought him into holds, that his voice should no more
be heard upon the mountains of Israel.

19:10 Thy mother is like a vine in thy blood, planted by the waters:
she was fruitful and full of branches by reason of many waters.

19:11 And she had strong rods for the sceptres of them that bare rule,
and her stature was exalted among the thick branches, and she appeared
in her height with the multitude of her branches.

19:12 But she was plucked up in fury, she was cast down to the ground,
and the east wind dried up her fruit: her strong rods were broken and
withered; the fire consumed them.

19:13 And now she is planted in the wilderness, in a dry and thirsty
ground.

19:14 And fire is gone out of a rod of her branches, which hath
devoured her fruit, so that she hath no strong rod to be a sceptre to
rule. This is a lamentation, and shall be for a lamentation.

20:1 And it came to pass in the seventh year, in the fifth month, the
tenth day of the month, that certain of the elders of Israel came to
enquire of the LORD, and sat before me.

20:2 Then came the word of the LORD unto me, saying, 20:3 Son of man,
speak unto the elders of Israel, and say unto them, Thus saith the
Lord GOD; Are ye come to enquire of me? As I live, saith the Lord GOD,
I will not be enquired of by you.

20:4 Wilt thou judge them, son of man, wilt thou judge them? cause
them to know the abominations of their fathers: 20:5 And say unto
them, Thus saith the Lord GOD; In the day when I chose Israel, and
lifted up mine hand unto the seed of the house of Jacob, and made
myself known unto them in the land of Egypt, when I lifted up mine
hand unto them, saying, I am the LORD your God; 20:6 In the day that I
lifted up mine hand unto them, to bring them forth of the land of
Egypt into a land that I had espied for them, flowing with milk and
honey, which is the glory of all lands: 20:7 Then said I unto them,
Cast ye away every man the abominations of his eyes, and defile not
yourselves with the idols of Egypt: I am the LORD your God.

20:8 But they rebelled against me, and would not hearken unto me: they
did not every man cast away the abominations of their eyes, neither
did they forsake the idols of Egypt: then I said, I will pour out my
fury upon them, to accomplish my anger against them in the midst of
the land of Egypt.

20:9 But I wrought for my name's sake, that it should not be polluted
before the heathen, among whom they were, in whose sight I made myself
known unto them, in bringing them forth out of the land of Egypt.

20:10 Wherefore I caused them to go forth out of the land of Egypt,
and brought them into the wilderness.

20:11 And I gave them my statutes, and shewed them my judgments, which
if a man do, he shall even live in them.

20:12 Moreover also I gave them my sabbaths, to be a sign between me
and them, that they might know that I am the LORD that sanctify them.

20:13 But the house of Israel rebelled against me in the wilderness:
they walked not in my statutes, and they despised my judgments, which
if a man do, he shall even live in them; and my sabbaths they greatly
polluted: then I said, I would pour out my fury upon them in the
wilderness, to consume them.

20:14 But I wrought for my name's sake, that it should not be polluted
before the heathen, in whose sight I brought them out.

20:15 Yet also I lifted up my hand unto them in the wilderness, that I
would not bring them into the land which I had given them, flowing
with milk and honey, which is the glory of all lands; 20:16 Because
they despised my judgments, and walked not in my statutes, but
polluted my sabbaths: for their heart went after their idols.

20:17 Nevertheless mine eye spared them from destroying them, neither
did I make an end of them in the wilderness.

20:18 But I said unto their children in the wilderness, Walk ye not in
the statutes of your fathers, neither observe their judgments, nor
defile yourselves with their idols: 20:19 I am the LORD your God; walk
in my statutes, and keep my judgments, and do them; 20:20 And hallow
my sabbaths; and they shall be a sign between me and you, that ye may
know that I am the LORD your God.

20:21 Notwithstanding the children rebelled against me: they walked
not in my statutes, neither kept my judgments to do them, which if a
man do, he shall even live in them; they polluted my sabbaths: then I
said, I would pour out my fury upon them, to accomplish my anger
against them in the wilderness.

20:22 Nevertheless I withdrew mine hand, and wrought for my name's
sake, that it should not be polluted in the sight of the heathen, in
whose sight I brought them forth.

20:23 I lifted up mine hand unto them also in the wilderness, that I
would scatter them among the heathen, and disperse them through the
countries; 20:24 Because they had not executed my judgments, but had
despised my statutes, and had polluted my sabbaths, and their eyes
were after their fathers' idols.

20:25 Wherefore I gave them also statutes that were not good, and
judgments whereby they should not live; 20:26 And I polluted them in
their own gifts, in that they caused to pass through the fire all that
openeth the womb, that I might make them desolate, to the end that
they might know that I am the LORD.

20:27 Therefore, son of man, speak unto the house of Israel, and say
unto them, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Yet in this your fathers have
blasphemed me, in that they have committed a trespass against me.

20:28 For when I had brought them into the land, for the which I
lifted up mine hand to give it to them, then they saw every high hill,
and all the thick trees, and they offered there their sacrifices, and
there they presented the provocation of their offering: there also
they made their sweet savour, and poured out there their drink
offerings.

20:29 Then I said unto them, What is the high place whereunto ye go?
And the name whereof is called Bamah unto this day.

20:30 Wherefore say unto the house of Israel, Thus saith the Lord GOD;
Are ye polluted after the manner of your fathers? and commit ye
whoredom after their abominations?  20:31 For when ye offer your
gifts, when ye make your sons to pass through the fire, ye pollute
yourselves with all your idols, even unto this day: and shall I be
enquired of by you, O house of Israel? As I live, saith the Lord GOD,
I will not be enquired of by you.

20:32 And that which cometh into your mind shall not be at all, that
ye say, We will be as the heathen, as the families of the countries,
to serve wood and stone.

20:33 As I live, saith the Lord GOD, surely with a mighty hand, and
with a stretched out arm, and with fury poured out, will I rule over
you: 20:34 And I will bring you out from the people, and will gather
you out of the countries wherein ye are scattered, with a mighty hand,
and with a stretched out arm, and with fury poured out.

20:35 And I will bring you into the wilderness of the people, and
there will I plead with you face to face.

20:36 Like as I pleaded with your fathers in the wilderness of the
land of Egypt, so will I plead with you, saith the Lord GOD.

20:37 And I will cause you to pass under the rod, and I will bring you
into the bond of the covenant: 20:38 And I will purge out from among
you the rebels, and them that transgress against me: I will bring them
forth out of the country where they sojourn, and they shall not enter
into the land of Israel: and ye shall know that I am the LORD.

20:39 As for you, O house of Israel, thus saith the Lord GOD; Go ye,
serve ye every one his idols, and hereafter also, if ye will not
hearken unto me: but pollute ye my holy name no more with your gifts,
and with your idols.

20:40 For in mine holy mountain, in the mountain of the height of
Israel, saith the Lord GOD, there shall all the house of Israel, all
of them in the land, serve me: there will I accept them, and there
will I require your offerings, and the firstfruits of your oblations,
with all your holy things.

20:41 I will accept you with your sweet savour, when I bring you out
from the people, and gather you out of the countries wherein ye have
been scattered; and I will be sanctified in you before the heathen.

20:42 And ye shall know that I am the LORD, when I shall bring you
into the land of Israel, into the country for the which I lifted up
mine hand to give it to your fathers.

20:43 And there shall ye remember your ways, and all your doings,
wherein ye have been defiled; and ye shall lothe yourselves in your
own sight for all your evils that ye have committed.

20:44 And ye shall know that I am the LORD when I have wrought with
you for my name's sake, not according to your wicked ways, nor
according to your corrupt doings, O ye house of Israel, saith the Lord
GOD.

20:45 Moreover the word of the LORD came unto me, saying, 20:46 Son of
man, set thy face toward the south, and drop thy word toward the
south, and prophesy against the forest of the south field; 20:47 And
say to the forest of the south, Hear the word of the LORD; Thus saith
the Lord GOD; Behold, I will kindle a fire in thee, and it shall
devour every green tree in thee, and every dry tree: the flaming flame
shall not be quenched, and all faces from the south to the north shall
be burned therein.

20:48 And all flesh shall see that I the LORD have kindled it: it
shall not be quenched.

20:49 Then said I, Ah Lord GOD! they say of me, Doth he not speak
parables?  21:1 And the word of the LORD came unto me, saying, 21:2
Son of man, set thy face toward Jerusalem, and drop thy word toward
the holy places, and prophesy against the land of Israel, 21:3 And say
to the land of Israel, Thus saith the LORD; Behold, I am against thee,
and will draw forth my sword out of his sheath, and will cut off from
thee the righteous and the wicked.

21:4 Seeing then that I will cut off from thee the righteous and the
wicked, therefore shall my sword go forth out of his sheath against
all flesh from the south to the north: 21:5 That all flesh may know
that I the LORD have drawn forth my sword out of his sheath: it shall
not return any more.

21:6 Sigh therefore, thou son of man, with the breaking of thy loins;
and with bitterness sigh before their eyes.

21:7 And it shall be, when they say unto thee, Wherefore sighest thou?
that thou shalt answer, For the tidings; because it cometh: and every
heart shall melt, and all hands shall be feeble, and every spirit
shall faint, and all knees shall be weak as water: behold, it cometh,
and shall be brought to pass, saith the Lord GOD.

21:8 Again the word of the LORD came unto me, saying, 21:9 Son of man,
prophesy, and say, Thus saith the LORD; Say, A sword, a sword is
sharpened, and also furbished: 21:10 It is sharpened to make a sore
slaughter; it is furbished that it may glitter: should we then make
mirth? it contemneth the rod of my son, as every tree.

21:11 And he hath given it to be furbished, that it may be handled:
this sword is sharpened, and it is furbished, to give it into the hand
of the slayer.

21:12 Cry and howl, son of man: for it shall be upon my people, it
shall be upon all the princes of Israel: terrors by reason of the
sword shall be upon my people: smite therefore upon thy thigh.

21:13 Because it is a trial, and what if the sword contemn even the
rod?  it shall be no more, saith the Lord GOD.

21:14 Thou therefore, son of man, prophesy, and smite thine hands
together. and let the sword be doubled the third time, the sword of
the slain: it is the sword of the great men that are slain, which
entereth into their privy chambers.

21:15 I have set the point of the sword against all their gates, that
their heart may faint, and their ruins be multiplied: ah! it is made
bright, it is wrapped up for the slaughter.

21:16 Go thee one way or other, either on the right hand, or on the
left, whithersoever thy face is set.

21:17 I will also smite mine hands together, and I will cause my fury
to rest: I the LORD have said it.

21:18 The word of the LORD came unto me again, saying, 21:19 Also,
thou son of man, appoint thee two ways, that the sword of the king of
Babylon may come: both twain shall come forth out of one land: and
choose thou a place, choose it at the head of the way to the city.

21:20 Appoint a way, that the sword may come to Rabbath of the
Ammonites, and to Judah in Jerusalem the defenced.

21:21 For the king of Babylon stood at the parting of the way, at the
head of the two ways, to use divination: he made his arrows bright, he
consulted with images, he looked in the liver.

21:22 At his right hand was the divination for Jerusalem, to appoint
captains, to open the mouth in the slaughter, to lift up the voice
with shouting, to appoint battering rams against the gates, to cast a
mount, and to build a fort.

21:23 And it shall be unto them as a false divination in their sight,
to them that have sworn oaths: but he will call to remembrance the
iniquity, that they may be taken.

21:24 Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD; Because ye have made your
iniquity to be remembered, in that your transgressions are discovered,
so that in all your doings your sins do appear; because, I say, that
ye are come to remembrance, ye shall be taken with the hand.

21:25 And thou, profane wicked prince of Israel, whose day is come,
when iniquity shall have an end, 21:26 Thus saith the Lord GOD; Remove
the diadem, and take off the crown: this shall not be the same: exalt
him that is low, and abase him that is high.

21:27 I will overturn, overturn, overturn, it: and it shall be no
more, until he come whose right it is; and I will give it him.

21:28 And thou, son of man, prophesy and say, Thus saith the Lord GOD
concerning the Ammonites, and concerning their reproach; even say
thou, The sword, the sword is drawn: for the slaughter it is
furbished, to consume because of the glittering: 21:29 Whiles they see
vanity unto thee, whiles they divine a lie unto thee, to bring thee
upon the necks of them that are slain, of the wicked, whose day is
come, when their iniquity shall have an end.

21:30 Shall I cause it to return into his sheath? I will judge thee in
the place where thou wast created, in the land of thy nativity.

21:31 And I will pour out mine indignation upon thee, I will blow
against thee in the fire of my wrath, and deliver thee into the hand
of brutish men, and skilful to destroy.

21:32 Thou shalt be for fuel to the fire; thy blood shall be in the
midst of the land; thou shalt be no more remembered: for I the LORD
have spoken it.

22:1 Moreover the word of the LORD came unto me, saying, 22:2 Now,
thou son of man, wilt thou judge, wilt thou judge the bloody city?
yea, thou shalt shew her all her abominations.

22:3 Then say thou, Thus saith the Lord GOD, The city sheddeth blood
in the midst of it, that her time may come, and maketh idols against
herself to defile herself.

22:4 Thou art become guilty in thy blood that thou hast shed; and hast
defiled thyself in thine idols which thou hast made; and thou hast
caused thy days to draw near, and art come even unto thy years:
therefore have I made thee a reproach unto the heathen, and a mocking
to all countries.

22:5 Those that be near, and those that be far from thee, shall mock
thee, which art infamous and much vexed.

22:6 Behold, the princes of Israel, every one were in thee to their
power to shed blood.

22:7 In thee have they set light by father and mother: in the midst of
thee have they dealt by oppression with the stranger: in thee have
they vexed the fatherless and the widow.

22:8 Thou hast despised mine holy things, and hast profaned my
sabbaths.

22:9 In thee are men that carry tales to shed blood: and in thee they
eat upon the mountains: in the midst of thee they commit lewdness.

22:10 In thee have they discovered their fathers' nakedness: in thee
have they humbled her that was set apart for pollution.

22:11 And one hath committed abomination with his neighbour's wife;
and another hath lewdly defiled his daughter in law; and another in
thee hath humbled his sister, his father's daughter.

22:12 In thee have they taken gifts to shed blood; thou hast taken
usury and increase, and thou hast greedily gained of thy neighbours by
extortion, and hast forgotten me, saith the Lord GOD.

22:13 Behold, therefore I have smitten mine hand at thy dishonest gain
which thou hast made, and at thy blood which hath been in the midst of
thee.

22:14 Can thine heart endure, or can thine hands be strong, in the
days that I shall deal with thee? I the LORD have spoken it, and will
do it.

22:15 And I will scatter thee among the heathen, and disperse thee in
the countries, and will consume thy filthiness out of thee.

22:16 And thou shalt take thine inheritance in thyself in the sight of
the heathen, and thou shalt know that I am the LORD.

22:17 And the word of the LORD came unto me, saying, 22:18 Son of man,
the house of Israel is to me become dross: all they are brass, and
tin, and iron, and lead, in the midst of the furnace; they are even
the dross of silver.

22:19 Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD; Because ye are all become
dross, behold, therefore I will gather you into the midst of
Jerusalem.

22:20 As they gather silver, and brass, and iron, and lead, and tin,
into the midst of the furnace, to blow the fire upon it, to melt it;
so will I gather you in mine anger and in my fury, and I will leave
you there, and melt you.

22:21 Yea, I will gather you, and blow upon you in the fire of my
wrath, and ye shall be melted in the midst therof.

22:22 As silver is melted in the midst of the furnace, so shall ye be
melted in the midst thereof; and ye shall know that I the LORD have
poured out my fury upon you.

22:23 And the word of the LORD came unto me, saying, 22:24 Son of man,
say unto her, Thou art the land that is not cleansed, nor rained upon
in the day of indignation.

22:25 There is a conspiracy of her prophets in the midst thereof, like
a roaring lion ravening the prey; they have devoured souls; they have
taken the treasure and precious things; they have made her many widows
in the midst thereof.

22:26 Her priests have violated my law, and have profaned mine holy
things: they have put no difference between the holy and profane,
neither have they shewed difference between the unclean and the clean,
and have hid their eyes from my sabbaths, and I am profaned among
them.

22:27 Her princes in the midst thereof are like wolves ravening the
prey, to shed blood, and to destroy souls, to get dishonest gain.

22:28 And her prophets have daubed them with untempered morter, seeing
vanity, and divining lies unto them, saying, Thus saith the Lord GOD,
when the LORD hath not spoken.

22:29 The people of the land have used oppression, and exercised
robbery, and have vexed the poor and needy: yea, they have oppressed
the stranger wrongfully.

22:30 And I sought for a man among them, that should make up the
hedge, and stand in the gap before me for the land, that I should not
destroy it: but I found none.

22:31 Therefore have I poured out mine indignation upon them; I have
consumed them with the fire of my wrath: their own way have I
recompensed upon their heads, saith the Lord GOD.

23:1 The word of the LORD came again unto me, saying, 23:2 Son of man,
there were two women, the daughters of one mother: 23:3 And they
committed whoredoms in Egypt; they committed whoredoms in their youth:
there were their breasts pressed, and there they bruised the teats of
their virginity.

23:4 And the names of them were Aholah the elder, and Aholibah her
sister: and they were mine, and they bare sons and daughters. Thus
were their names; Samaria is Aholah, and Jerusalem Aholibah.

23:5 And Aholah played the harlot when she was mine; and she doted on
her lovers, on the Assyrians her neighbours, 23:6 Which were clothed
with blue, captains and rulers, all of them desirable young men,
horsemen riding upon horses.

23:7 Thus she committed her whoredoms with them, with all them that
were the chosen men of Assyria, and with all on whom she doted: with
all their idols she defiled herself.

23:8 Neither left she her whoredoms brought from Egypt: for in her
youth they lay with her, and they bruised the breasts of her
virginity, and poured their whoredom upon her.

23:9 Wherefore I have delivered her into the hand of her lovers, into
the hand of the Assyrians, upon whom she doted.

23:10 These discovered her nakedness: they took her sons and her
daughters, and slew her with the sword: and she became famous among
women; for they had executed judgment upon her.

23:11 And when her sister Aholibah saw this, she was more corrupt in
her inordinate love than she, and in her whoredoms more than her
sister in her whoredoms.

23:12 She doted upon the Assyrians her neighbours, captains and rulers
clothed most gorgeously, horsemen riding upon horses, all of them
desirable young men.

23:13 Then I saw that she was defiled, that they took both one way,
23:14 And that she increased her whoredoms: for when she saw men
pourtrayed upon the wall, the images of the Chaldeans pourtrayed with
vermilion, 23:15 Girded with girdles upon their loins, exceeding in
dyed attire upon their heads, all of them princes to look to, after
the manner of the Babylonians of Chaldea, the land of their nativity:
23:16 And as soon as she saw them with her eyes, she doted upon them,
and sent messengers unto them into Chaldea.

23:17 And the Babylonians came to her into the bed of love, and they
defiled her with their whoredom, and she was polluted with them, and
her mind was alienated from them.

23:18 So she discovered her whoredoms, and discovered her nakedness:
then my mind was alienated from her, like as my mind was alienated
from her sister.

23:19 Yet she multiplied her whoredoms, in calling to remembrance the
days of her youth, wherein she had played the harlot in the land of
Egypt.

23:20 For she doted upon their paramours, whose flesh is as the flesh
of asses, and whose issue is like the issue of horses.

23:21 Thus thou calledst to remembrance the lewdness of thy youth, in
bruising thy teats by the Egyptians for the paps of thy youth.

23:22 Therefore, O Aholibah, thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I will
raise up thy lovers against thee, from whom thy mind is alienated, and
I will bring them against thee on every side; 23:23 The Babylonians,
and all the Chaldeans, Pekod, and Shoa, and Koa, and all the Assyrians
with them: all of them desirable young men, captains and rulers, great
lords and renowned, all of them riding upon horses.

23:24 And they shall come against thee with chariots, wagons, and
wheels, and with an assembly of people, which shall set against thee
buckler and shield and helmet round about: and I will set judgment
before them, and they shall judge thee according to their judgments.

23:25 And I will set my jealousy against thee, and they shall deal
furiously with thee: they shall take away thy nose and thine ears; and
thy remnant shall fall by the sword: they shall take thy sons and thy
daughters; and thy residue shall be devoured by the fire.

23:26 They shall also strip thee out of thy clothes, and take away thy
fair jewels.

23:27 Thus will I make thy lewdness to cease from thee, and thy
whoredom brought from the land of Egypt: so that thou shalt not lift
up thine eyes unto them, nor remember Egypt any more.

23:28 For thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I will deliver thee into
the hand of them whom thou hatest, into the hand of them from whom thy
mind is alienated: 23:29 And they shall deal with thee hatefully, and
shall take away all thy labour, and shall leave thee naked and bare:
and the nakedness of thy whoredoms shall be discovered, both thy
lewdness and thy whoredoms.

23:30 I will do these things unto thee, because thou hast gone a
whoring after the heathen, and because thou art polluted with their
idols.

23:31 Thou hast walked in the way of thy sister; therefore will I give
her cup into thine hand.

23:32 Thus saith the Lord GOD; Thou shalt drink of thy sister's cup
deep and large: thou shalt be laughed to scorn and had in derision; it
containeth much.

23:33 Thou shalt be filled with drunkenness and sorrow, with the cup
of astonishment and desolation, with the cup of thy sister Samaria.

23:34 Thou shalt even drink it and suck it out, and thou shalt break
the sherds thereof, and pluck off thine own breasts: for I have spoken
it, saith the Lord GOD.

23:35 Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD; Because thou hast forgotten
me, and cast me behind thy back, therefore bear thou also thy lewdness
and thy whoredoms.

23:36 The LORD said moreover unto me; Son of man, wilt thou judge
Aholah and Aholibah? yea, declare unto them their abominations; 23:37
That they have committed adultery, and blood is in their hands, and
with their idols have they committed adultery, and have also caused
their sons, whom they bare unto me, to pass for them through the fire,
to devour them.

23:38 Moreover this they have done unto me: they have defiled my
sanctuary in the same day, and have profaned my sabbaths.

23:39 For when they had slain their children to their idols, then they
came the same day into my sanctuary to profane it; and, lo, thus have
they done in the midst of mine house.

23:40 And furthermore, that ye have sent for men to come from far,
unto whom a messenger was sent; and, lo, they came: for whom thou
didst wash thyself, paintedst thy eyes, and deckedst thyself with
ornaments, 23:41 And satest upon a stately bed, and a table prepared
before it, whereupon thou hast set mine incense and mine oil.

23:42 And a voice of a multitude being at ease was with her: and with
the men of the common sort were brought Sabeans from the wilderness,
which put bracelets upon their hands, and beautiful crowns upon their
heads.

23:43 Then said I unto her that was old in adulteries, Will they now
commit whoredoms with her, and she with them?  23:44 Yet they went in
unto her, as they go in unto a woman that playeth the harlot: so went
they in unto Aholah and unto Aholibah, the lewd women.

23:45 And the righteous men, they shall judge them after the manner of
adulteresses, and after the manner of women that shed blood; because
they are adulteresses, and blood is in their hands.

23:46 For thus saith the Lord GOD; I will bring up a company upon
them, and will give them to be removed and spoiled.

23:47 And the company shall stone them with stones, and dispatch them
with their swords; they shall slay their sons and their daughters, and
burn up their houses with fire.

23:48 Thus will I cause lewdness to cease out of the land, that all
women may be taught not to do after your lewdness.

23:49 And they shall recompense your lewdness upon you, and ye shall
bear the sins of your idols: and ye shall know that I am the Lord GOD.

24:1 Again in the ninth year, in the tenth month, in the tenth day of
the month, the word of the LORD came unto me, saying, 24:2 Son of man,
write thee the name of the day, even of this same day: the king of
Babylon set himself against Jerusalem this same day.

24:3 And utter a parable unto the rebellious house, and say unto them,
Thus saith the Lord GOD; Set on a pot, set it on, and also pour water
into it: 24:4 Gather the pieces thereof into it, even every good
piece, the thigh, and the shoulder; fill it with the choice bones.

24:5 Take the choice of the flock, and burn also the bones under it,
and make it boil well, and let them seethe the bones of it therein.

24:6 Wherefore thus saith the Lord GOD; Woe to the bloody city, to the
pot whose scum is therein, and whose scum is not gone out of it! bring
it out piece by piece; let no lot fall upon it.

24:7 For her blood is in the midst of her; she set it upon the top of
a rock; she poured it not upon the ground, to cover it with dust; 24:8
That it might cause fury to come up to take vengeance; I have set her
blood upon the top of a rock, that it should not be covered.

24:9 Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD; Woe to the bloody city! I will
even make the pile for fire great.

24:10 Heap on wood, kindle the fire, consume the flesh, and spice it
well, and let the bones be burned.

24:11 Then set it empty upon the coals thereof, that the brass of it
may be hot, and may burn, and that the filthiness of it may be molten
in it, that the scum of it may be consumed.

24:12 She hath wearied herself with lies, and her great scum went not
forth out of her: her scum shall be in the fire.

24:13 In thy filthiness is lewdness: because I have purged thee, and
thou wast not purged, thou shalt not be purged from thy filthiness any
more, till I have caused my fury to rest upon thee.

24:14 I the LORD have spoken it: it shall come to pass, and I will do
it; I will not go back, neither will I spare, neither will I repent;
according to thy ways, and according to thy doings, shall they judge
thee, saith the Lord GOD.

24:15 Also the word of the LORD came unto me, saying, 24:16 Son of
man, behold, I take away from thee the desire of thine eyes with a
stroke: yet neither shalt thou mourn nor weep, neither shall thy tears
run down.

24:17 Forbear to cry, make no mourning for the dead, bind the tire of
thine head upon thee, and put on thy shoes upon thy feet, and cover
not thy lips, and eat not the bread of men.

24:18 So I spake unto the people in the morning: and at even my wife
died; and I did in the morning as I was commanded.

24:19 And the people said unto me, Wilt thou not tell us what these
things are to us, that thou doest so?  24:20 Then I answered them, The
word of the LORD came unto me, saying, 24:21 Speak unto the house of
Israel, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I will profane my sanctuary,
the excellency of your strength, the desire of your eyes, and that
which your soul pitieth; and your sons and your daughters whom ye have
left shall fall by the sword.

24:22 And ye shall do as I have done: ye shall not cover your lips,
nor eat the bread of men.

24:23 And your tires shall be upon your heads, and your shoes upon
your feet: ye shall not mourn nor weep; but ye shall pine away for
your iniquities, and mourn one toward another.

24:24 Thus Ezekiel is unto you a sign: according to all that he hath
done shall ye do: and when this cometh, ye shall know that I am the
Lord GOD.

24:25 Also, thou son of man, shall it not be in the day when I take
from them their strength, the joy of their glory, the desire of their
eyes, and that whereupon they set their minds, their sons and their
daughters, 24:26 That he that escapeth in that day shall come unto
thee, to cause thee to hear it with thine ears?  24:27 In that day
shall thy mouth be opened to him which is escaped, and thou shalt
speak, and be no more dumb: and thou shalt be a sign unto them; and
they shall know that I am the LORD.

25:1 The word of the LORD came again unto me, saying, 25:2 Son of man,
set thy face against the Ammonites, and prophesy against them; 25:3
And say unto the Ammonites, Hear the word of the Lord GOD; Thus saith
the Lord GOD; Because thou saidst, Aha, against my sanctuary, when it
was profaned; and against the land of Israel, when it was desolate;
and against the house of Judah, when they went into captivity; 25:4
Behold, therefore I will deliver thee to the men of the east for a
possession, and they shall set their palaces in thee, and make their
dwellings in thee: they shall eat thy fruit, and they shall drink thy
milk.

25:5 And I will make Rabbah a stable for camels, and the Ammonites a
couching place for flocks: and ye shall know that I am the LORD.

25:6 For thus saith the Lord GOD; Because thou hast clapped thine
hands, and stamped with the feet, and rejoiced in heart with all thy
despite against the land of Israel; 25:7 Behold, therefore I will
stretch out mine hand upon thee, and will deliver thee for a spoil to
the heathen; and I will cut thee off from the people, and I will cause
thee to perish out of the countries: I will destroy thee; and thou
shalt know that I am the LORD.

25:8 Thus saith the Lord GOD; Because that Moab and Seir do say,
Behold, the house of Judah is like unto all the heathen; 25:9
Therefore, behold, I will open the side of Moab from the cities, from
his cities which are on his frontiers, the glory of the country,
Bethjeshimoth, Baalmeon, and Kiriathaim, 25:10 Unto the men of the
east with the Ammonites, and will give them in possession, that the
Ammonites may not be remembered among the nations.

25:11 And I will execute judgments upon Moab; and they shall know that
I am the LORD.

25:12 Thus saith the Lord GOD; Because that Edom hath dealt against
the house of Judah by taking vengeance, and hath greatly offended, and
revenged himself upon them; 25:13 Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD; I
will also stretch out mine hand upon Edom, and will cut off man and
beast from it; and I will make it desolate from Teman; and they of
Dedan shall fall by the sword.

25:14 And I will lay my vengeance upon Edom by the hand of my people
Israel: and they shall do in Edom according to mine anger and
according to my fury; and they shall know my vengeance, saith the Lord
GOD.

25:15 Thus saith the Lord GOD; Because the Philistines have dealt by
revenge, and have taken vengeance with a despiteful heart, to destroy
it for the old hatred; 25:16 Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD;
Behold, I will stretch out mine hand upon the Philistines, and I will
cut off the Cherethims, and destroy the remnant of the sea coast.

25:17 And I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious
rebukes; and they shall know that I am the LORD, when I shall lay my
vengeance upon them.

26:1 And it came to pass in the eleventh year, in the first day of the
month, that the word of the LORD came unto me, saying, 26:2 Son of
man, because that Tyrus hath said against Jerusalem, Aha, she is
broken that was the gates of the people: she is turned unto me: I
shall be replenished, now she is laid waste: 26:3 Therefore thus saith
the Lord GOD; Behold, I am against thee, O Tyrus, and will cause many
nations to come up against thee, as the sea causeth his waves to come
up.

26:4 And they shall destroy the walls of Tyrus, and break down her
towers: I will also scrape her dust from her, and make her like the
top of a rock.

26:5 It shall be a place for the spreading of nets in the midst of the
sea: for I have spoken it, saith the Lord GOD: and it shall become a
spoil to the nations.

26:6 And her daughters which are in the field shall be slain by the
sword; and they shall know that I am the LORD.

26:7 For thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I will bring upon Tyrus
Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon, a king of kings, from the north, with
horses, and with chariots, and with horsemen, and companies, and much
people.

26:8 He shall slay with the sword thy daughters in the field: and he
shall make a fort against thee, and cast a mount against thee, and
lift up the buckler against thee.

26:9 And he shall set engines of war against thy walls, and with his
axes he shall break down thy towers.

26:10 By reason of the abundance of his horses their dust shall cover
thee: thy walls shall shake at the noise of the horsemen, and of the
wheels, and of the chariots, when he shall enter into thy gates, as
men enter into a city wherein is made a breach.

26:11 With the hoofs of his horses shall he tread down all thy
streets: he shall slay thy people by the sword, and thy strong
garrisons shall go down to the ground.

26:12 And they shall make a spoil of thy riches, and make a prey of
thy merchandise: and they shall break down thy walls, and destroy thy
pleasant houses: and they shall lay thy stones and thy timber and thy
dust in the midst of the water.

26:13 And I will cause the noise of thy songs to cease; and the sound
of thy harps shall be no more heard.

26:14 And I will make thee like the top of a rock: thou shalt be a
place to spread nets upon; thou shalt be built no more: for I the LORD
have spoken it, saith the Lord GOD.

26:15 Thus saith the Lord GOD to Tyrus; Shall not the isles shake at
the sound of thy fall, when the wounded cry, when the slaughter is
made in the midst of thee?  26:16 Then all the princes of the sea
shall come down from their thrones, and lay away their robes, and put
off their broidered garments: they shall clothe themselves with
trembling; they shall sit upon the ground, and shall tremble at every
moment, and be astonished at thee.

26:17 And they shall take up a lamentation for thee, and say to thee,
How art thou destroyed, that wast inhabited of seafaring men, the
renowned city, which wast strong in the sea, she and her inhabitants,
which cause their terror to be on all that haunt it!  26:18 Now shall
the isles tremble in the day of thy fall; yea, the isles that are in
the sea shall be troubled at thy departure.

26:19 For thus saith the Lord GOD; When I shall make thee a desolate
city, like the cities that are not inhabited; when I shall bring up
the deep upon thee, and great waters shall cover thee; 26:20 When I
shall bring thee down with them that descend into the pit, with the
people of old time, and shall set thee in the low parts of the earth,
in places desolate of old, with them that go down to the pit, that
thou be not inhabited; and I shall set glory in the land of the
living; 26:21 I will make thee a terror, and thou shalt be no more:
though thou be sought for, yet shalt thou never be found again, saith
the Lord GOD.

27:1 The word of the LORD came again unto me, saying, 27:2 Now, thou
son of man, take up a lamentation for Tyrus; 27:3 And say unto Tyrus,
O thou that art situate at the entry of the sea, which art a merchant
of the people for many isles, Thus saith the Lord GOD; O Tyrus, thou
hast said, I am of perfect beauty.

27:4 Thy borders are in the midst of the seas, thy builders have
perfected thy beauty.

27:5 They have made all thy ship boards of fir trees of Senir: they
have taken cedars from Lebanon to make masts for thee.

27:6 Of the oaks of Bashan have they made thine oars; the company of
the Ashurites have made thy benches of ivory, brought out of the isles
of Chittim.

27:7 Fine linen with broidered work from Egypt was that which thou
spreadest forth to be thy sail; blue and purple from the isles of
Elishah was that which covered thee.

27:8 The inhabitants of Zidon and Arvad were thy mariners: thy wise
men, O Tyrus, that were in thee, were thy pilots.

27:9 The ancients of Gebal and the wise men thereof were in thee thy
calkers: all the ships of the sea with their mariners were in thee to
occupy thy merchandise.

27:10 They of Persia and of Lud and of Phut were in thine army, thy
men of war: they hanged the shield and helmet in thee; they set forth
thy comeliness.

27:11 The men of Arvad with thine army were upon thy walls round
about, and the Gammadims were in thy towers: they hanged their shields
upon thy walls round about; they have made thy beauty perfect.

27:12 Tarshish was thy merchant by reason of the multitude of all kind
of riches; with silver, iron, tin, and lead, they traded in thy fairs.

27:13 Javan, Tubal, and Meshech, they were thy merchants: they traded
the persons of men and vessels of brass in thy market.

27:14 They of the house of Togarmah traded in thy fairs with horses
and horsemen and mules.

27:15 The men of Dedan were thy merchants; many isles were the
merchandise of thine hand: they brought thee for a present horns of
ivory and ebony.

27:16 Syria was thy merchant by reason of the multitude of the wares
of thy making: they occupied in thy fairs with emeralds, purple, and
broidered work, and fine linen, and coral, and agate.

27:17 Judah, and the land of Israel, they were thy merchants: they
traded in thy market wheat of Minnith, and Pannag, and honey, and oil,
and balm.

27:18 Damascus was thy merchant in the multitude of the wares of thy
making, for the multitude of all riches; in the wine of Helbon, and
white wool.

27:19 Dan also and Javan going to and fro occupied in thy fairs:
bright iron, cassia, and calamus, were in thy market.

27:20 Dedan was thy merchant in precious clothes for chariots.

27:21 Arabia, and all the princes of Kedar, they occupied with thee in
lambs, and rams, and goats: in these were they thy merchants.

27:22 The merchants of Sheba and Raamah, they were thy merchants: they
occupied in thy fairs with chief of all spices, and with all precious
stones, and gold.

27:23 Haran, and Canneh, and Eden, the merchants of Sheba, Asshur, and
Chilmad, were thy merchants.

27:24 These were thy merchants in all sorts of things, in blue
clothes, and broidered work, and in chests of rich apparel, bound with
cords, and made of cedar, among thy merchandise.

27:25 The ships of Tarshish did sing of thee in thy market: and thou
wast replenished, and made very glorious in the midst of the seas.

27:26 Thy rowers have brought thee into great waters: the east wind
hath broken thee in the midst of the seas.

27:27 Thy riches, and thy fairs, thy merchandise, thy mariners, and
thy pilots, thy calkers, and the occupiers of thy merchandise, and all
thy men of war, that are in thee, and in all thy company which is in
the midst of thee, shall fall into the midst of the seas in the day of
thy ruin.

27:28 The suburbs shall shake at the sound of the cry of thy pilots.

27:29 And all that handle the oar, the mariners, and all the pilots of
the sea, shall come down from their ships, they shall stand upon the
land; 27:30 And shall cause their voice to be heard against thee, and
shall cry bitterly, and shall cast up dust upon their heads, they
shall wallow themselves in the ashes: 27:31 And they shall make
themselves utterly bald for thee, and gird them with sackcloth, and
they shall weep for thee with bitterness of heart and bitter wailing.

27:32 And in their wailing they shall take up a lamentation for thee,
and lament over thee, saying, What city is like Tyrus, like the
destroyed in the midst of the sea?  27:33 When thy wares went forth
out of the seas, thou filledst many people; thou didst enrich the
kings of the earth with the multitude of thy riches and of thy
merchandise.

27:34 In the time when thou shalt be broken by the seas in the depths
of the waters thy merchandise and all thy company in the midst of thee
shall fall.

27:35 All the inhabitants of the isles shall be astonished at thee,
and their kings shall be sore afraid, they shall be troubled in their
countenance.

27:36 The merchants among the people shall hiss at thee; thou shalt be
a terror, and never shalt be any more.

28:1 The word of the LORD came again unto me, saying, 28:2 Son of man,
say unto the prince of Tyrus, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Because thine
heart is lifted up, and thou hast said, I am a God, I sit in the seat
of God, in the midst of the seas; yet thou art a man, and not God,
though thou set thine heart as the heart of God: 28:3 Behold, thou art
wiser than Daniel; there is no secret that they can hide from thee:
28:4 With thy wisdom and with thine understanding thou hast gotten
thee riches, and hast gotten gold and silver into thy treasures: 28:5
By thy great wisdom and by thy traffick hast thou increased thy
riches, and thine heart is lifted up because of thy riches: 28:6
Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD; Because thou hast set thine heart
as the heart of God; 28:7 Behold, therefore I will bring strangers
upon thee, the terrible of the nations: and they shall draw their
swords against the beauty of thy wisdom, and they shall defile thy
brightness.

28:8 They shall bring thee down to the pit, and thou shalt die the
deaths of them that are slain in the midst of the seas.

28:9 Wilt thou yet say before him that slayeth thee, I am God? but
thou shalt be a man, and no God, in the hand of him that slayeth thee.

28:10 Thou shalt die the deaths of the uncircumcised by the hand of
strangers: for I have spoken it, saith the Lord GOD.

28:11 Moreover the word of the LORD came unto me, saying, 28:12 Son of
man, take up a lamentation upon the king of Tyrus, and say unto him,
Thus saith the Lord GOD; Thou sealest up the sum, full of wisdom, and
perfect in beauty.

28:13 Thou hast been in Eden the garden of God; every precious stone
was thy covering, the sardius, topaz, and the diamond, the beryl, the
onyx, and the jasper, the sapphire, the emerald, and the carbuncle,
and gold: the workmanship of thy tabrets and of thy pipes was prepared
in thee in the day that thou wast created.

28:14 Thou art the anointed cherub that covereth; and I have set thee
so: thou wast upon the holy mountain of God; thou hast walked up and
down in the midst of the stones of fire.

28:15 Thou wast perfect in thy ways from the day that thou wast
created, till iniquity was found in thee.

28:16 By the multitude of thy merchandise they have filled the midst
of thee with violence, and thou hast sinned: therefore I will cast
thee as profane out of the mountain of God: and I will destroy thee, O
covering cherub, from the midst of the stones of fire.

28:17 Thine heart was lifted up because of thy beauty, thou hast
corrupted thy wisdom by reason of thy brightness: I will cast thee to
the ground, I will lay thee before kings, that they may behold thee.

28:18 Thou hast defiled thy sanctuaries by the multitude of thine
iniquities, by the iniquity of thy traffick; therefore will I bring
forth a fire from the midst of thee, it shall devour thee, and I will
bring thee to ashes upon the earth in the sight of all them that
behold thee.

28:19 All they that know thee among the people shall be astonished at
thee: thou shalt be a terror, and never shalt thou be any more.

28:20 Again the word of the LORD came unto me, saying, 28:21 Son of
man, set thy face against Zidon, and prophesy against it, 28:22 And
say, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I am against thee, O Zidon; and
I will be glorified in the midst of thee: and they shall know that I
am the LORD, when I shall have executed judgments in her, and shall be
sanctified in her.

28:23 For I will send into her pestilence, and blood into her streets;
and the wounded shall be judged in the midst of her by the sword upon
her on every side; and they shall know that I am the LORD.

28:24 And there shall be no more a pricking brier unto the house of
Israel, nor any grieving thorn of all that are round about them, that
despised them; and they shall know that I am the Lord GOD.

28:25 Thus saith the Lord GOD; When I shall have gathered the house of
Israel from the people among whom they are scattered, and shall be
sanctified in them in the sight of the heathen, then shall they dwell
in their land that I have given to my servant Jacob.

28:26 And they shall dwell safely therein, and shall build houses, and
plant vineyards; yea, they shall dwell with confidence, when I have
executed judgments upon all those that despise them round about them;
and they shall know that I am the LORD their God.

29:1 In the tenth year, in the tenth month, in the twelfth day of the
month, the word of the LORD came unto me, saying, 29:2 Son of man, set
thy face against Pharaoh king of Egypt, and prophesy against him, and
against all Egypt: 29:3 Speak, and say, Thus saith the Lord GOD;
Behold, I am against thee, Pharaoh king of Egypt, the great dragon
that lieth in the midst of his rivers, which hath said, My river is
mine own, and I have made it for myself.

29:4 But I will put hooks in thy jaws, and I will cause the fish of
thy rivers to stick unto thy scales, and I will bring thee up out of
the midst of thy rivers, and all the fish of thy rivers shall stick
unto thy scales.

29:5 And I will leave thee thrown into the wilderness, thee and all
the fish of thy rivers: thou shalt fall upon the open fields; thou
shalt not be brought together, nor gathered: I have given thee for
meat to the beasts of the field and to the fowls of the heaven.

29:6 And all the inhabitants of Egypt shall know that I am the LORD,
because they have been a staff of reed to the house of Israel.

29:7 When they took hold of thee by thy hand, thou didst break, and
rend all their shoulder: and when they leaned upon thee, thou brakest,
and madest all their loins to be at a stand.

29:8 Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I will bring a sword
upon thee, and cut off man and beast out of thee.

29:9 And the land of Egypt shall be desolate and waste; and they shall
know that I am the LORD: because he hath said, The river is mine, and
I have made it.

29:10 Behold, therefore I am against thee, and against thy rivers, and
I will make the land of Egypt utterly waste and desolate, from the
tower of Syene even unto the border of Ethiopia.

29:11 No foot of man shall pass through it, nor foot of beast shall
pass through it, neither shall it be inhabited forty years.

29:12 And I will make the land of Egypt desolate in the midst of the
countries that are desolate, and her cities among the cities that are
laid waste shall be desolate forty years: and I will scatter the
Egyptians among the nations, and will disperse them through the
countries.

29:13 Yet thus saith the Lord GOD; At the end of forty years will I
gather the Egyptians from the people whither they were scattered:
29:14 And I will bring again the captivity of Egypt, and will cause
them to return into the land of Pathros, into the land of their
habitation; and they shall be there a base kingdom.

29:15 It shall be the basest of the kingdoms; neither shall it exalt
itself any more above the nations: for I will diminish them, that they
shall no more rule over the nations.

29:16 And it shall be no more the confidence of the house of Israel,
which bringeth their iniquity to remembrance, when they shall look
after them: but they shall know that I am the Lord GOD.

29:17 And it came to pass in the seven and twentieth year, in the
first month, in the first day of the month, the word of the LORD came
unto me, saying, 29:18 Son of man, Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon
caused his army to serve a great service against Tyrus: every head was
made bald, and every shoulder was peeled: yet had he no wages, nor his
army, for Tyrus, for the service that he had served against it: 29:19
Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I will give the land of
Egypt unto Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon; and he shall take her
multitude, and take her spoil, and take her prey; and it shall be the
wages for his army.

29:20 I have given him the land of Egypt for his labour wherewith he
served against it, because they wrought for me, saith the Lord GOD.

29:21 In that day will I cause the horn of the house of Israel to bud
forth, and I will give thee the opening of the mouth in the midst of
them; and they shall know that I am the LORD.

30:1 The word of the LORD came again unto me, saying, 30:2 Son of man,
prophesy and say, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Howl ye, Woe worth the day!
30:3 For the day is near, even the day of the LORD is near, a cloudy
day; it shall be the time of the heathen.

30:4 And the sword shall come upon Egypt, and great pain shall be in
Ethiopia, when the slain shall fall in Egypt, and they shall take away
her multitude, and her foundations shall be broken down.

30:5 Ethiopia, and Libya, and Lydia, and all the mingled people, and
Chub, and the men of the land that is in league, shall fall with them
by the sword.

30:6 Thus saith the LORD; They also that uphold Egypt shall fall; and
the pride of her power shall come down: from the tower of Syene shall
they fall in it by the sword, saith the Lord GOD.

30:7 And they shall be desolate in the midst of the countries that are
desolate, and her cities shall be in the midst of the cities that are
wasted.

30:8 And they shall know that I am the LORD, when I have set a fire in
Egypt, and when all her helpers shall be destroyed.

30:9 In that day shall messengers go forth from me in ships to make
the careless Ethiopians afraid, and great pain shall come upon them,
as in the day of Egypt: for, lo, it cometh.

30:10 Thus saith the Lord GOD; I will also make the multitude of Egypt
to cease by the hand of Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon.

30:11 He and his people with him, the terrible of the nations, shall
be brought to destroy the land: and they shall draw their swords
against Egypt, and fill the land with the slain.

30:12 And I will make the rivers dry, and sell the land into the hand
of the wicked: and I will make the land waste, and all that is
therein, by the hand of strangers: I the LORD have spoken it.

30:13 Thus saith the Lord GOD; I will also destroy the idols, and I
will cause their images to cease out of Noph; and there shall be no
more a prince of the land of Egypt: and I will put a fear in the land
of Egypt.

30:14 And I will make Pathros desolate, and will set fire in Zoan, and
will execute judgments in No.

30:15 And I will pour my fury upon Sin, the strength of Egypt; and I
will cut off the multitude of No.

30:16 And I will set fire in Egypt: Sin shall have great pain, and No
shall be rent asunder, and Noph shall have distresses daily.

30:17 The young men of Aven and of Pibeseth shall fall by the sword:
and these cities shall go into captivity.

30:18 At Tehaphnehes also the day shall be darkened, when I shall
break there the yokes of Egypt: and the pomp of her strength shall
cease in her: as for her, a cloud shall cover her, and her daughters
shall go into captivity.

30:19 Thus will I execute judgments in Egypt: and they shall know that
I am the LORD.

30:20 And it came to pass in the eleventh year, in the first month, in
the seventh day of the month, that the word of the LORD came unto me,
saying, 30:21 Son of man, I have broken the arm of Pharaoh king of
Egypt; and, lo, it shall not be bound up to be healed, to put a roller
to bind it, to make it strong to hold the sword.

30:22 Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I am against Pharaoh
king of Egypt, and will break his arms, the strong, and that which was
broken; and I will cause the sword to fall out of his hand.

30:23 And I will scatter the Egyptians among the nations, and will
disperse them through the countries.

30:24 And I will strengthen the arms of the king of Babylon, and put
my sword in his hand: but I will break Pharaoh's arms, and he shall
groan before him with the groanings of a deadly wounded man.

30:25 But I will strengthen the arms of the king of Babylon, and the
arms of Pharaoh shall fall down; and they shall know that I am the
LORD, when I shall put my sword into the hand of the king of Babylon,
and he shall stretch it out upon the land of Egypt.

30:26 And I will scatter the Egyptians among the nations, and disperse
them among the countries; and they shall know that I am the LORD.

31:1 And it came to pass in the eleventh year, in the third month, in
the first day of the month, that the word of the LORD came unto me,
saying, 31:2 Son of man, speak unto Pharaoh king of Egypt, and to his
multitude; Whom art thou like in thy greatness?  31:3 Behold, the
Assyrian was a cedar in Lebanon with fair branches, and with a
shadowing shroud, and of an high stature; and his top was among the
thick boughs.

31:4 The waters made him great, the deep set him up on high with her
rivers running round about his plants, and sent her little rivers unto
all the trees of the field.

31:5 Therefore his height was exalted above all the trees of the
field, and his boughs were multiplied, and his branches became long
because of the multitude of waters, when he shot forth.

31:6 All the fowls of heaven made their nests in his boughs, and under
his branches did all the beasts of the field bring forth their young,
and under his shadow dwelt all great nations.

31:7 Thus was he fair in his greatness, in the length of his branches:
for his root was by great waters.

31:8 The cedars in the garden of God could not hide him: the fir trees
were not like his boughs, and the chestnut trees were not like his
branches; nor any tree in the garden of God was like unto him in his
beauty.

31:9 I have made him fair by the multitude of his branches: so that
all the trees of Eden, that were in the garden of God, envied him.

31:10 Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD; Because thou hast lifted up
thyself in height, and he hath shot up his top among the thick boughs,
and his heart is lifted up in his height; 31:11 I have therefore
delivered him into the hand of the mighty one of the heathen; he shall
surely deal with him: I have driven him out for his wickedness.

31:12 And strangers, the terrible of the nations, have cut him off,
and have left him: upon the mountains and in all the valleys his
branches are fallen, and his boughs are broken by all the rivers of
the land; and all the people of the earth are gone down from his
shadow, and have left him.

31:13 Upon his ruin shall all the fowls of the heaven remain, and all
the beasts of the field shall be upon his branches: 31:14 To the end
that none of all the trees by the waters exalt themselves for their
height, neither shoot up their top among the thick boughs, neither
their trees stand up in their height, all that drink water: for they
are all delivered unto death, to the nether parts of the earth, in the
midst of the children of men, with them that go down to the pit.

31:15 Thus saith the Lord GOD; In the day when he went down to the
grave I caused a mourning: I covered the deep for him, and I
restrained the floods thereof, and the great waters were stayed: and I
caused Lebanon to mourn for him, and all the trees of the field
fainted for him.

31:16 I made the nations to shake at the sound of his fall, when I
cast him down to hell with them that descend into the pit: and all the
trees of Eden, the choice and best of Lebanon, all that drink water,
shall be comforted in the nether parts of the earth.

31:17 They also went down into hell with him unto them that be slain
with the sword; and they that were his arm, that dwelt under his
shadow in the midst of the heathen.

31:18 To whom art thou thus like in glory and in greatness among the
trees of Eden? yet shalt thou be brought down with the trees of Eden
unto the nether parts of the earth: thou shalt lie in the midst of the
uncircumcised with them that be slain by the sword. This is Pharaoh
and all his multitude, saith the Lord GOD.

32:1 And it came to pass in the twelfth year, in the twelfth month, in
the first day of the month, that the word of the LORD came unto me,
saying, 32:2 Son of man, take up a lamentation for Pharaoh king of
Egypt, and say unto him, Thou art like a young lion of the nations,
and thou art as a whale in the seas: and thou camest forth with thy
rivers, and troubledst the waters with thy feet, and fouledst their
rivers.

32:3 Thus saith the Lord GOD; I will therefore spread out my net over
thee with a company of many people; and they shall bring thee up in my
net.

32:4 Then will I leave thee upon the land, I will cast thee forth upon
the open field, and will cause all the fowls of the heaven to remain
upon thee, and I will fill the beasts of the whole earth with thee.

32:5 And I will lay thy flesh upon the mountains, and fill the valleys
with thy height.

32:6 I will also water with thy blood the land wherein thou swimmest,
even to the mountains; and the rivers shall be full of thee.

32:7 And when I shall put thee out, I will cover the heaven, and make
the stars thereof dark; I will cover the sun with a cloud, and the
moon shall not give her light.

32:8 All the bright lights of heaven will I make dark over thee, and
set darkness upon thy land, saith the Lord GOD.

32:9 I will also vex the hearts of many people, when I shall bring thy
destruction among the nations, into the countries which thou hast not
known.

32:10 Yea, I will make many people amazed at thee, and their kings
shall be horribly afraid for thee, when I shall brandish my sword
before them; and they shall tremble at every moment, every man for his
own life, in the day of thy fall.

32:11 For thus saith the Lord GOD; The sword of the king of Babylon
shall come upon thee.

32:12 By the swords of the mighty will I cause thy multitude to fall,
the terrible of the nations, all of them: and they shall spoil the
pomp of Egypt, and all the multitude thereof shall be destroyed.

32:13 I will destroy also all the beasts thereof from beside the great
waters; neither shall the foot of man trouble them any more, nor the
hoofs of beasts trouble them.

32:14 Then will I make their waters deep, and cause their rivers to
run like oil, saith the Lord GOD.

32:15 When I shall make the land of Egypt desolate, and the country
shall be destitute of that whereof it was full, when I shall smite all
them that dwell therein, then shall they know that I am the LORD.

32:16 This is the lamentation wherewith they shall lament her: the
daughters of the nations shall lament her: they shall lament for her,
even for Egypt, and for all her multitude, saith the Lord GOD.

32:17 It came to pass also in the twelfth year, in the fifteenth day
of the month, that the word of the LORD came unto me, saying, 32:18
Son of man, wail for the multitude of Egypt, and cast them down, even
her, and the daughters of the famous nations, unto the nether parts of
the earth, with them that go down into the pit.

32:19 Whom dost thou pass in beauty? go down, and be thou laid with
the uncircumcised.

32:20 They shall fall in the midst of them that are slain by the
sword: she is delivered to the sword: draw her and all her multitudes.

32:21 The strong among the mighty shall speak to him out of the midst
of hell with them that help him: they are gone down, they lie
uncircumcised, slain by the sword.

32:22 Asshur is there and all her company: his graves are about him:
all of them slain, fallen by the sword: 32:23 Whose graves are set in
the sides of the pit, and her company is round about her grave: all of
them slain, fallen by the sword, which caused terror in the land of
the living.

32:24 There is Elam and all her multitude round about her grave, all
of them slain, fallen by the sword, which are gone down uncircumcised
into the nether parts of the earth, which caused their terror in the
land of the living; yet have they borne their shame with them that go
down to the pit.

32:25 They have set her a bed in the midst of the slain with all her
multitude: her graves are round about him: all of them uncircumcised,
slain by the sword: though their terror was caused in the land of the
living, yet have they borne their shame with them that go down to the
pit: he is put in the midst of them that be slain.

32:26 There is Meshech, Tubal, and all her multitude: her graves are
round about him: all of them uncircumcised, slain by the sword, though
they caused their terror in the land of the living.

32:27 And they shall not lie with the mighty that are fallen of the
uncircumcised, which are gone down to hell with their weapons of war:
and they have laid their swords under their heads, but their
iniquities shall be upon their bones, though they were the terror of
the mighty in the land of the living.

32:28 Yea, thou shalt be broken in the midst of the uncircumcised, and
shalt lie with them that are slain with the sword.

32:29 There is Edom, her kings, and all her princes, which with their
might are laid by them that were slain by the sword: they shall lie
with the uncircumcised, and with them that go down to the pit.

32:30 There be the princes of the north, all of them, and all the
Zidonians, which are gone down with the slain; with their terror they
are ashamed of their might; and they lie uncircumcised with them that
be slain by the sword, and bear their shame with them that go down to
the pit.

32:31 Pharaoh shall see them, and shall be comforted over all his
multitude, even Pharaoh and all his army slain by the sword, saith the
Lord GOD.

32:32 For I have caused my terror in the land of the living: and he
shall be laid in the midst of the uncircumcised with them that are
slain with the sword, even Pharaoh and all his multitude, saith the
Lord GOD.

33:1 Again the word of the LORD came unto me, saying, 33:2 Son of man,
speak to the children of thy people, and say unto them, When I bring
the sword upon a land, if the people of the land take a man of their
coasts, and set him for their watchman: 33:3 If when he seeth the
sword come upon the land, he blow the trumpet, and warn the people;
33:4 Then whosoever heareth the sound of the trumpet, and taketh not
warning; if the sword come, and take him away, his blood shall be upon
his own head.

33:5 He heard the sound of the trumpet, and took not warning; his
blood shall be upon him. But he that taketh warning shall deliver his
soul.

33:6 But if the watchman see the sword come, and blow not the trumpet,
and the people be not warned; if the sword come, and take any person
from among them, he is taken away in his iniquity; but his blood will
I require at the watchman's hand.

33:7 So thou, O son of man, I have set thee a watchman unto the house
of Israel; therefore thou shalt hear the word at my mouth, and warn
them from me.

33:8 When I say unto the wicked, O wicked man, thou shalt surely die;
if thou dost not speak to warn the wicked from his way, that wicked
man shall die in his iniquity; but his blood will I require at thine
hand.

33:9 Nevertheless, if thou warn the wicked of his way to turn from it;
if he do not turn from his way, he shall die in his iniquity; but thou
hast delivered thy soul.

33:10 Therefore, O thou son of man, speak unto the house of Israel;
Thus ye speak, saying, If our transgressions and our sins be upon us,
and we pine away in them, how should we then live?  33:11 Say unto
them, As I live, saith the Lord GOD, I have no pleasure in the death
of the wicked; but that the wicked turn from his way and live: turn
ye, turn ye from your evil ways; for why will ye die, O house of
Israel?  33:12 Therefore, thou son of man, say unto the children of
thy people, The righteousness of the righteous shall not deliver him
in the day of his transgression: as for the wickedness of the wicked,
he shall not fall thereby in the day that he turneth from his
wickedness; neither shall the righteous be able to live for his
righteousness in the day that he sinneth.

33:13 When I shall say to the righteous, that he shall surely live; if
he trust to his own righteousness, and commit iniquity, all his
righteousnesses shall not be remembered; but for his iniquity that he
hath committed, he shall die for it.

33:14 Again, when I say unto the wicked, Thou shalt surely die; if he
turn from his sin, and do that which is lawful and right; 33:15 If the
wicked restore the pledge, give again that he had robbed, walk in the
statutes of life, without committing iniquity; he shall surely live,
he shall not die.

33:16 None of his sins that he hath committed shall be mentioned unto
him: he hath done that which is lawful and right; he shall surely
live.

33:17 Yet the children of thy people say, The way of the Lord is not
equal: but as for them, their way is not equal.

33:18 When the righteous turneth from his righteousness, and
committeth iniquity, he shall even die thereby.

33:19 But if the wicked turn from his wickedness, and do that which is
lawful and right, he shall live thereby.

33:20 Yet ye say, The way of the Lord is not equal. O ye house of
Israel, I will judge you every one after his ways.

33:21 And it came to pass in the twelfth year of our captivity, in the
tenth month, in the fifth day of the month, that one that had escaped
out of Jerusalem came unto me, saying, The city is smitten.

33:22 Now the hand of the LORD was upon me in the evening, afore he
that was escaped came; and had opened my mouth, until he came to me in
the morning; and my mouth was opened, and I was no more dumb.

33:23 Then the word of the LORD came unto me, saying, 33:24 Son of
man, they that inhabit those wastes of the land of Israel speak,
saying, Abraham was one, and he inherited the land: but we are many;
the land is given us for inheritance.

33:25 Wherefore say unto them, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Ye eat with
the blood, and lift up your eyes toward your idols, and shed blood:
and shall ye possess the land?  33:26 Ye stand upon your sword, ye
work abomination, and ye defile every one his neighbour's wife: and
shall ye possess the land?  33:27 Say thou thus unto them, Thus saith
the Lord GOD; As I live, surely they that are in the wastes shall fall
by the sword, and him that is in the open field will I give to the
beasts to be devoured, and they that be in the forts and in the caves
shall die of the pestilence.

33:28 For I will lay the land most desolate, and the pomp of her
strength shall cease; and the mountains of Israel shall be desolate,
that none shall pass through.

33:29 Then shall they know that I am the LORD, when I have laid the
land most desolate because of all their abominations which they have
committed.

33:30 Also, thou son of man, the children of thy people still are
talking against thee by the walls and in the doors of the houses, and
speak one to another, every one to his brother, saying, Come, I pray
you, and hear what is the word that cometh forth from the LORD.

33:31 And they come unto thee as the people cometh, and they sit
before thee as my people, and they hear thy words, but they will not
do them: for with their mouth they shew much love, but their heart
goeth after their covetousness.

33:32 And, lo, thou art unto them as a very lovely song of one that
hath a pleasant voice, and can play well on an instrument: for they
hear thy words, but they do them not.

33:33 And when this cometh to pass, (lo, it will come,) then shall
they know that a prophet hath been among them.

34:1 And the word of the LORD came unto me, saying, 34:2 Son of man,
prophesy against the shepherds of Israel, prophesy, and say unto them,
Thus saith the Lord GOD unto the shepherds; Woe be to the shepherds of
Israel that do feed themselves! should not the shepherds feed the
flocks?  34:3 Ye eat the fat, and ye clothe you with the wool, ye kill
them that are fed: but ye feed not the flock.

34:4 The diseased have ye not strengthened, neither have ye healed
that which was sick, neither have ye bound up that which was broken,
neither have ye brought again that which was driven away, neither have
ye sought that which was lost; but with force and with cruelty have ye
ruled them.

34:5 And they were scattered, because there is no shepherd: and they
became meat to all the beasts of the field, when they were scattered.

34:6 My sheep wandered through all the mountains, and upon every high
hill: yea, my flock was scattered upon all the face of the earth, and
none did search or seek after them.

34:7 Therefore, ye shepherds, hear the word of the LORD; 34:8 As I
live, saith the Lord GOD, surely because my flock became a prey, and
my flock became meat to every beast of the field, because there was no
shepherd, neither did my shepherds search for my flock, but the
shepherds fed themselves, and fed not my flock; 34:9 Therefore, O ye
shepherds, hear the word of the LORD; 34:10 Thus saith the Lord GOD;
Behold, I am against the shepherds; and I will require my flock at
their hand, and cause them to cease from feeding the flock; neither
shall the shepherds feed themselves any more; for I will deliver my
flock from their mouth, that they may not be meat for them.

34:11 For thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I, even I, will both search
my sheep, and seek them out.

34:12 As a shepherd seeketh out his flock in the day that he is among
his sheep that are scattered; so will I seek out my sheep, and will
deliver them out of all places where they have been scattered in the
cloudy and dark day.

34:13 And I will bring them out from the people, and gather them from
the countries, and will bring them to their own land, and feed them
upon the mountains of Israel by the rivers, and in all the inhabited
places of the country.

34:14 I will feed them in a good pasture, and upon the high mountains
of Israel shall their fold be: there shall they lie in a good fold,
and in a fat pasture shall they feed upon the mountains of Israel.

34:15 I will feed my flock, and I will cause them to lie down, saith
the Lord GOD.

34:16 I will seek that which was lost, and bring again that which was
driven away, and will bind up that which was broken, and will
strengthen that which was sick: but I will destroy the fat and the
strong; I will feed them with judgment.

34:17 And as for you, O my flock, thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I
judge between cattle and cattle, between the rams and the he goats.

34:18 Seemeth it a small thing unto you to have eaten up the good
pasture, but ye must tread down with your feet the residue of your
pastures? and to have drunk of the deep waters, but ye must foul the
residue with your feet?  34:19 And as for my flock, they eat that
which ye have trodden with your feet; and they drink that which ye
have fouled with your feet.

34:20 Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD unto them; Behold, I, even I,
will judge between the fat cattle and between the lean cattle.

34:21 Because ye have thrust with side and with shoulder, and pushed
all the diseased with your horns, till ye have scattered them abroad;
34:22 Therefore will I save my flock, and they shall no more be a
prey; and I will judge between cattle and cattle.

34:23 And I will set up one shepherd over them, and he shall feed
them, even my servant David; he shall feed them, and he shall be their
shepherd.

34:24 And I the LORD will be their God, and my servant David a prince
among them; I the LORD have spoken it.

34:25 And I will make with them a covenant of peace, and will cause
the evil beasts to cease out of the land: and they shall dwell safely
in the wilderness, and sleep in the woods.

34:26 And I will make them and the places round about my hill a
blessing; and I will cause the shower to come down in his season;
there shall be showers of blessing.

34:27 And the tree of the field shall yield her fruit, and the earth
shall yield her increase, and they shall be safe in their land, and
shall know that I am the LORD, when I have broken the bands of their
yoke, and delivered them out of the hand of those that served
themselves of them.

34:28 And they shall no more be a prey to the heathen, neither shall
the beast of the land devour them; but they shall dwell safely, and
none shall make them afraid.

34:29 And I will raise up for them a plant of renown, and they shall
be no more consumed with hunger in the land, neither bear the shame of
the heathen any more.

34:30 Thus shall they know that I the LORD their God am with them, and
that they, even the house of Israel, are my people, saith the Lord
GOD.

34:31 And ye my flock, the flock of my pasture, are men, and I am your
God, saith the Lord GOD.

35:1 Moreover the word of the LORD came unto me, saying, 35:2 Son of
man, set thy face against mount Seir, and prophesy against it, 35:3
And say unto it, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, O mount Seir, I am
against thee, and I will stretch out mine hand against thee, and I
will make thee most desolate.

35:4 I will lay thy cities waste, and thou shalt be desolate, and thou
shalt know that I am the LORD.

35:5 Because thou hast had a perpetual hatred, and hast shed the blood
of the children of Israel by the force of the sword in the time of
their calamity, in the time that their iniquity had an end: 35:6
Therefore, as I live, saith the Lord GOD, I will prepare thee unto
blood, and blood shall pursue thee: sith thou hast not hated blood,
even blood shall pursue thee.

35:7 Thus will I make mount Seir most desolate, and cut off from it
him that passeth out and him that returneth.

35:8 And I will fill his mountains with his slain men: in thy hills,
and in thy valleys, and in all thy rivers, shall they fall that are
slain with the sword.

35:9 I will make thee perpetual desolations, and thy cities shall not
return: and ye shall know that I am the LORD.

35:10 Because thou hast said, These two nations and these two
countries shall be mine, and we will possess it; whereas the LORD was
there: 35:11 Therefore, as I live, saith the Lord GOD, I will even do
according to thine anger, and according to thine envy which thou hast
used out of thy hatred against them; and I will make myself known
among them, when I have judged thee.

35:12 And thou shalt know that I am the LORD, and that I have heard
all thy blasphemies which thou hast spoken against the mountains of
Israel, saying, They are laid desolate, they are given us to consume.

35:13 Thus with your mouth ye have boasted against me, and have
multiplied your words against me: I have heard them.

35:14 Thus saith the Lord GOD; When the whole earth rejoiceth, I will
make thee desolate.

35:15 As thou didst rejoice at the inheritance of the house of Israel,
because it was desolate, so will I do unto thee: thou shalt be
desolate, O mount Seir, and all Idumea, even all of it: and they shall
know that I am the LORD.

36:1 Also, thou son of man, prophesy unto the mountains of Israel, and
say, Ye mountains of Israel, hear the word of the LORD: 36:2 Thus
saith the Lord GOD; Because the enemy hath said against you, Aha, even
the ancient high places are ours in possession: 36:3 Therefore
prophesy and say, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Because they have made you
desolate, and swallowed you up on every side, that ye might be a
possession unto the residue of the heathen, and ye are taken up in the
lips of talkers, and are an infamy of the people: 36:4 Therefore, ye
mountains of Israel, hear the word of the Lord GOD; Thus saith the
Lord GOD to the mountains, and to the hills, to the rivers, and to the
valleys, to the desolate wastes, and to the cities that are forsaken,
which became a prey and derision to the residue of the heathen that
are round about; 36:5 Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD; Surely in the
fire of my jealousy have I spoken against the residue of the heathen,
and against all Idumea, which have appointed my land into their
possession with the joy of all their heart, with despiteful minds, to
cast it out for a prey.

36:6 Prophesy therefore concerning the land of Israel, and say unto
the mountains, and to the hills, to the rivers, and to the valleys,
Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I have spoken in my jealousy and in
my fury, because ye have borne the shame of the heathen: 36:7
Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD; I have lifted up mine hand, Surely
the heathen that are about you, they shall bear their shame.

36:8 But ye, O mountains of Israel, ye shall shoot forth your
branches, and yield your fruit to my people of Israel; for they are at
hand to come.

36:9 For, behold, I am for you, and I will turn unto you, and ye shall
be tilled and sown: 36:10 And I will multiply men upon you, all the
house of Israel, even all of it: and the cities shall be inhabited,
and the wastes shall be builded: 36:11 And I will multiply upon you
man and beast; and they shall increase and bring fruit: and I will
settle you after your old estates, and will do better unto you than at
your beginnings: and ye shall know that I am the LORD.

36:12 Yea, I will cause men to walk upon you, even my people Israel;
and they shall possess thee, and thou shalt be their inheritance, and
thou shalt no more henceforth bereave them of men.

36:13 Thus saith the Lord GOD; Because they say unto you, Thou land
devourest up men, and hast bereaved thy nations: 36:14 Therefore thou
shalt devour men no more, neither bereave thy nations any more, saith
the Lord GOD.

36:15 Neither will I cause men to hear in thee the shame of the
heathen any more, neither shalt thou bear the reproach of the people
any more, neither shalt thou cause thy nations to fall any more, saith
the Lord GOD.

36:16 Moreover the word of the LORD came unto me, saying, 36:17 Son of
man, when the house of Israel dwelt in their own land, they defiled it
by their own way and by their doings: their way was before me as the
uncleanness of a removed woman.

36:18 Wherefore I poured my fury upon them for the blood that they had
shed upon the land, and for their idols wherewith they had polluted
it: 36:19 And I scattered them among the heathen, and they were
dispersed through the countries: according to their way and according
to their doings I judged them.

36:20 And when they entered unto the heathen, whither they went, they
profaned my holy name, when they said to them, These are the people of
the LORD, and are gone forth out of his land.

36:21 But I had pity for mine holy name, which the house of Israel had
profaned among the heathen, whither they went.

36:22 Therefore say unto the house of Israel, thus saith the Lord GOD;
I do not this for your sakes, O house of Israel, but for mine holy
name's sake, which ye have profaned among the heathen, whither ye
went.

36:23 And I will sanctify my great name, which was profaned among the
heathen, which ye have profaned in the midst of them; and the heathen
shall know that I am the LORD, saith the Lord GOD, when I shall be
sanctified in you before their eyes.

36:24 For I will take you from among the heathen, and gather you out
of all countries, and will bring you into your own land.

36:25 Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be
clean: from all your filthiness, and from all your idols, will I
cleanse you.

36:26 A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put
within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh,
and I will give you an heart of flesh.

36:27 And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my
statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments, and do them.

36:28 And ye shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers; and
ye shall be my people, and I will be your God.

36:29 I will also save you from all your uncleannesses: and I will
call for the corn, and will increase it, and lay no famine upon you.

36:30 And I will multiply the fruit of the tree, and the increase of
the field, that ye shall receive no more reproach of famine among the
heathen.

36:31 Then shall ye remember your own evil ways, and your doings that
were not good, and shall lothe yourselves in your own sight for your
iniquities and for your abominations.

36:32 Not for your sakes do I this, saith the Lord GOD, be it known
unto you: be ashamed and confounded for your own ways, O house of
Israel.

36:33 Thus saith the Lord GOD; In the day that I shall have cleansed
you from all your iniquities I will also cause you to dwell in the
cities, and the wastes shall be builded.

36:34 And the desolate land shall be tilled, whereas it lay desolate
in the sight of all that passed by.

36:35 And they shall say, This land that was desolate is become like
the garden of Eden; and the waste and desolate and ruined cities are
become fenced, and are inhabited.

36:36 Then the heathen that are left round about you shall know that I
the LORD build the ruined places, and plant that that was desolate: I
the LORD have spoken it, and I will do it.

36:37 Thus saith the Lord GOD; I will yet for this be enquired of by
the house of Israel, to do it for them; I will increase them with men
like a flock.

36:38 As the holy flock, as the flock of Jerusalem in her solemn
feasts; so shall the waste cities be filled with flocks of men: and
they shall know that I am the LORD.

37:1 The hand of the LORD was upon me, and carried me out in the
spirit of the LORD, and set me down in the midst of the valley which
was full of bones, 37:2 And caused me to pass by them round about:
and, behold, there were very many in the open valley; and, lo, they
were very dry.

37:3 And he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live? And I
answered, O Lord GOD, thou knowest.

37:4 Again he said unto me, Prophesy upon these bones, and say unto
them, O ye dry bones, hear the word of the LORD.

37:5 Thus saith the Lord GOD unto these bones; Behold, I will cause
breath to enter into you, and ye shall live: 37:6 And I will lay
sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you with
skin, and put breath in you, and ye shall live; and ye shall know that
I am the LORD.

37:7 So I prophesied as I was commanded: and as I prophesied, there
was a noise, and behold a shaking, and the bones came together, bone
to his bone.

37:8 And when I beheld, lo, the sinews and the flesh came up upon
them, and the skin covered them above: but there was no breath in
them.

37:9 Then said he unto me, Prophesy unto the wind, prophesy, son of
man, and say to the wind, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Come from the four
winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.

37:10 So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into
them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great
army.

37:11 Then he said unto me, Son of man, these bones are the whole
house of Israel: behold, they say, Our bones are dried, and our hope
is lost: we are cut off for our parts.

37:12 Therefore prophesy and say unto them, Thus saith the Lord GOD;
Behold, O my people, I will open your graves, and cause you to come up
out of your graves, and bring you into the land of Israel.

37:13 And ye shall know that I am the LORD, when I have opened your
graves, O my people, and brought you up out of your graves, 37:14 And
shall put my spirit in you, and ye shall live, and I shall place you
in your own land: then shall ye know that I the LORD have spoken it,
and performed it, saith the LORD.

37:15 The word of the LORD came again unto me, saying, 37:16 Moreover,
thou son of man, take thee one stick, and write upon it, For Judah,
and for the children of Israel his companions: then take another
stick, and write upon it, For Joseph, the stick of Ephraim and for all
the house of Israel his companions: 37:17 And join them one to another
into one stick; and they shall become one in thine hand.

37:18 And when the children of thy people shall speak unto thee,
saying, Wilt thou not shew us what thou meanest by these?  37:19 Say
unto them, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I will take the stick of
Joseph, which is in the hand of Ephraim, and the tribes of Israel his
fellows, and will put them with him, even with the stick of Judah, and
make them one stick, and they shall be one in mine hand.

37:20 And the sticks whereon thou writest shall be in thine hand
before their eyes.

37:21 And say unto them, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I will take
the children of Israel from among the heathen, whither they be gone,
and will gather them on every side, and bring them into their own
land: 37:22 And I will make them one nation in the land upon the
mountains of Israel; and one king shall be king to them all: and they
shall be no more two nations, neither shall they be divided into two
kingdoms any more at all.

37:23 Neither shall they defile themselves any more with their idols,
nor with their detestable things, nor with any of their
transgressions: but I will save them out of all their dwellingplaces,
wherein they have sinned, and will cleanse them: so shall they be my
people, and I will be their God.

37:24 And David my servant shall be king over them; and they all shall
have one shepherd: they shall also walk in my judgments, and observe
my statutes, and do them.

37:25 And they shall dwell in the land that I have given unto Jacob my
servant, wherein your fathers have dwelt; and they shall dwell
therein, even they, and their children, and their children's children
for ever: and my servant David shall be their prince for ever.

37:26 Moreover I will make a covenant of peace with them; it shall be
an everlasting covenant with them: and I will place them, and multiply
them, and will set my sanctuary in the midst of them for evermore.

37:27 My tabernacle also shall be with them: yea, I will be their God,
and they shall be my people.

37:28 And the heathen shall know that I the LORD do sanctify Israel,
when my sanctuary shall be in the midst of them for evermore.

38:1 And the word of the LORD came unto me, saying, 38:2 Son of man,
set thy face against Gog, the land of Magog, the chief prince of
Meshech and Tubal, and prophesy against him, 38:3 And say, Thus saith
the Lord GOD; Behold, I am against thee, O Gog, the chief prince of
Meshech and Tubal: 38:4 And I will turn thee back, and put hooks into
thy jaws, and I will bring thee forth, and all thine army, horses and
horsemen, all of them clothed with all sorts of armour, even a great
company with bucklers and shields, all of them handling swords: 38:5
Persia, Ethiopia, and Libya with them; all of them with shield and
helmet: 38:6 Gomer, and all his bands; the house of Togarmah of the
north quarters, and all his bands: and many people with thee.

38:7 Be thou prepared, and prepare for thyself, thou, and all thy
company that are assembled unto thee, and be thou a guard unto them.

38:8 After many days thou shalt be visited: in the latter years thou
shalt come into the land that is brought back from the sword, and is
gathered out of many people, against the mountains of Israel, which
have been always waste: but it is brought forth out of the nations,
and they shall dwell safely all of them.

38:9 Thou shalt ascend and come like a storm, thou shalt be like a
cloud to cover the land, thou, and all thy bands, and many people with
thee.

38:10 Thus saith the Lord GOD; It shall also come to pass, that at the
same time shall things come into thy mind, and thou shalt think an
evil thought: 38:11 And thou shalt say, I will go up to the land of
unwalled villages; I will go to them that are at rest, that dwell
safely, all of them dwelling without walls, and having neither bars
nor gates, 38:12 To take a spoil, and to take a prey; to turn thine
hand upon the desolate places that are now inhabited, and upon the
people that are gathered out of the nations, which have gotten cattle
and goods, that dwell in the midst of the land.

38:13 Sheba, and Dedan, and the merchants of Tarshish, with all the
young lions thereof, shall say unto thee, Art thou come to take a
spoil? hast thou gathered thy company to take a prey? to carry away
silver and gold, to take away cattle and goods, to take a great spoil?
38:14 Therefore, son of man, prophesy and say unto Gog, Thus saith the
Lord GOD; In that day when my people of Israel dwelleth safely, shalt
thou not know it?  38:15 And thou shalt come from thy place out of the
north parts, thou, and many people with thee, all of them riding upon
horses, a great company, and a mighty army: 38:16 And thou shalt come
up against my people of Israel, as a cloud to cover the land; it shall
be in the latter days, and I will bring thee against my land, that the
heathen may know me, when I shall be sanctified in thee, O Gog, before
their eyes.

38:17 Thus saith the Lord GOD; Art thou he of whom I have spoken in
old time by my servants the prophets of Israel, which prophesied in
those days many years that I would bring thee against them?  38:18 And
it shall come to pass at the same time when Gog shall come against the
land of Israel, saith the Lord GOD, that my fury shall come up in my
face.

38:19 For in my jealousy and in the fire of my wrath have I spoken,
Surely in that day there shall be a great shaking in the land of
Israel; 38:20 So that the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the
heaven, and the beasts of the field, and all creeping things that
creep upon the earth, and all the men that are upon the face of the
earth, shall shake at my presence, and the mountains shall be thrown
down, and the steep places shall fall, and every wall shall fall to
the ground.

38:21 And I will call for a sword against him throughout all my
mountains, saith the Lord GOD: every man's sword shall be against his
brother.

38:22 And I will plead against him with pestilence and with blood; and
I will rain upon him, and upon his bands, and upon the many people
that are with him, an overflowing rain, and great hailstones, fire,
and brimstone.

38:23 Thus will I magnify myself, and sanctify myself; and I will be
known in the eyes of many nations, and they shall know that I am the
LORD.

39:1 Therefore, thou son of man, prophesy against Gog, and say, Thus
saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I am against thee, O Gog, the chief prince
of Meshech and Tubal: 39:2 And I will turn thee back, and leave but
the sixth part of thee, and will cause thee to come up from the north
parts, and will bring thee upon the mountains of Israel: 39:3 And I
will smite thy bow out of thy left hand, and will cause thine arrows
to fall out of thy right hand.

39:4 Thou shalt fall upon the mountains of Israel, thou, and all thy
bands, and the people that is with thee: I will give thee unto the
ravenous birds of every sort, and to the beasts of the field to be
devoured.

39:5 Thou shalt fall upon the open field: for I have spoken it, saith
the Lord GOD.

39:6 And I will send a fire on Magog, and among them that dwell
carelessly in the isles: and they shall know that I am the LORD.

39:7 So will I make my holy name known in the midst of my people
Israel; and I will not let them pollute my holy name any more: and the
heathen shall know that I am the LORD, the Holy One in Israel.

39:8 Behold, it is come, and it is done, saith the Lord GOD; this is
the day whereof I have spoken.

39:9 And they that dwell in the cities of Israel shall go forth, and
shall set on fire and burn the weapons, both the shields and the
bucklers, the bows and the arrows, and the handstaves, and the spears,
and they shall burn them with fire seven years: 39:10 So that they
shall take no wood out of the field, neither cut down any out of the
forests; for they shall burn the weapons with fire: and they shall
spoil those that spoiled them, and rob those that robbed them, saith
the Lord GOD.

39:11 And it shall come to pass in that day, that I will give unto Gog
a place there of graves in Israel, the valley of the passengers on the
east of the sea: and it shall stop the noses of the passengers: and
there shall they bury Gog and all his multitude: and they shall call
it The valley of Hamongog.

39:12 And seven months shall the house of Israel be burying of them,
that they may cleanse the land.

39:13 Yea, all the people of the land shall bury them; and it shall be
to them a renown the day that I shall be glorified, saith the Lord
GOD.

39:14 And they shall sever out men of continual employment, passing
through the land to bury with the passengers those that remain upon
the face of the earth, to cleanse it: after the end of seven months
shall they search.

39:15 And the passengers that pass through the land, when any seeth a
man's bone, then shall he set up a sign by it, till the buriers have
buried it in the valley of Hamongog.

39:16 And also the name of the city shall be Hamonah. Thus shall they
cleanse the land.

39:17 And, thou son of man, thus saith the Lord GOD; Speak unto every
feathered fowl, and to every beast of the field, Assemble yourselves,
and come; gather yourselves on every side to my sacrifice that I do
sacrifice for you, even a great sacrifice upon the mountains of
Israel, that ye may eat flesh, and drink blood.

39:18 Ye shall eat the flesh of the mighty, and drink the blood of the
princes of the earth, of rams, of lambs, and of goats, of bullocks,
all of them fatlings of Bashan.

39:19 And ye shall eat fat till ye be full, and drink blood till ye be
drunken, of my sacrifice which I have sacrificed for you.

39:20 Thus ye shall be filled at my table with horses and chariots,
with mighty men, and with all men of war, saith the Lord GOD.

39:21 And I will set my glory among the heathen, and all the heathen
shall see my judgment that I have executed, and my hand that I have
laid upon them.

39:22 So the house of Israel shall know that I am the LORD their God
from that day and forward.

39:23 And the heathen shall know that the house of Israel went into
captivity for their iniquity: because they trespassed against me,
therefore hid I my face from them, and gave them into the hand of
their enemies: so fell they all by the sword.

39:24 According to their uncleanness and according to their
transgressions have I done unto them, and hid my face from them.

39:25 Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD; Now will I bring again the
captivity of Jacob, and have mercy upon the whole house of Israel, and
will be jealous for my holy name; 39:26 After that they have borne
their shame, and all their trespasses whereby they have trespassed
against me, when they dwelt safely in their land, and none made them
afraid.

39:27 When I have brought them again from the people, and gathered
them out of their enemies' lands, and am sanctified in them in the
sight of many nations; 39:28 Then shall they know that I am the LORD
their God, which caused them to be led into captivity among the
heathen: but I have gathered them unto their own land, and have left
none of them any more there.

39:29 Neither will I hide my face any more from them: for I have
poured out my spirit upon the house of Israel, saith the Lord GOD.

40:1 In the five and twentieth year of our captivity, in the beginning
of the year, in the tenth day of the month, in the fourteenth year
after that the city was smitten, in the selfsame day the hand of the
LORD was upon me, and brought me thither.

40:2 In the visions of God brought he me into the land of Israel, and
set me upon a very high mountain, by which was as the frame of a city
on the south.

40:3 And he brought me thither, and, behold, there was a man, whose
appearance was like the appearance of brass, with a line of flax in
his hand, and a measuring reed; and he stood in the gate.

40:4 And the man said unto me, Son of man, behold with thine eyes, and
hear with thine ears, and set thine heart upon all that I shall shew
thee; for to the intent that I might shew them unto thee art thou
brought hither: declare all that thou seest to the house of Israel.

40:5 And behold a wall on the outside of the house round about, and in
the man's hand a measuring reed of six cubits long by the cubit and an
hand breadth: so he measured the breadth of the building, one reed;
and the height, one reed.

40:6 Then came he unto the gate which looketh toward the east, and
went up the stairs thereof, and measured the threshold of the gate,
which was one reed broad; and the other threshold of the gate, which
was one reed broad.

40:7 And every little chamber was one reed long, and one reed broad;
and between the little chambers were five cubits; and the threshold of
the gate by the porch of the gate within was one reed.

40:8 He measured also the porch of the gate within, one reed.

40:9 Then measured he the porch of the gate, eight cubits; and the
posts thereof, two cubits; and the porch of the gate was inward.

40:10 And the little chambers of the gate eastward were three on this
side, and three on that side; they three were of one measure: and the
posts had one measure on this side and on that side.

40:11 And he measured the breadth of the entry of the gate, ten
cubits; and the length of the gate, thirteen cubits.

40:12 The space also before the little chambers was one cubit on this
side, and the space was one cubit on that side: and the little
chambers were six cubits on this side, and six cubits on that side.

40:13 He measured then the gate from the roof of one little chamber to
the roof of another: the breadth was five and twenty cubits, door
against door.

40:14 He made also posts of threescore cubits, even unto the post of
the court round about the gate.

40:15 And from the face of the gate of the entrance unto the face of
the porch of the inner gate were fifty cubits.

40:16 And there were narrow windows to the little chambers, and to
their posts within the gate round about, and likewise to the arches:
and windows were round about inward: and upon each post were palm
trees.

40:17 Then brought he me into the outward court, and, lo, there were
chambers, and a pavement made for the court round about: thirty
chambers were upon the pavement.

40:18 And the pavement by the side of the gates over against the
length of the gates was the lower pavement.

40:19 Then he measured the breadth from the forefront of the lower
gate unto the forefront of the inner court without, an hundred cubits
eastward and northward.

40:20 And the gate of the outward court that looked toward the north,
he measured the length thereof, and the breadth thereof.

40:21 And the little chambers thereof were three on this side and
three on that side; and the posts thereof and the arches thereof were
after the measure of the first gate: the length thereof was fifty
cubits, and the breadth five and twenty cubits.

40:22 And their windows, and their arches, and their palm trees, were
after the measure of the gate that looketh toward the east; and they
went up unto it by seven steps; and the arches thereof were before
them.

40:23 And the gate of the inner court was over against the gate toward
the north, and toward the east; and he measured from gate to gate an
hundred cubits.

40:24 After that he brought me toward the south, and behold a gate
toward the south: and he measured the posts thereof and the arches
thereof according to these measures.

40:25 And there were windows in it and in the arches thereof round
about, like those windows: the length was fifty cubits, and the
breadth five and twenty cubits.

40:26 And there were seven steps to go up to it, and the arches
thereof were before them: and it had palm trees, one on this side, and
another on that side, upon the posts thereof.

40:27 And there was a gate in the inner court toward the south: and he
measured from gate to gate toward the south an hundred cubits.

40:28 And he brought me to the inner court by the south gate: and he
measured the south gate according to these measures; 40:29 And the
little chambers thereof, and the posts thereof, and the arches
thereof, according to these measures: and there were windows in it and
in the arches thereof round about: it was fifty cubits long, and five
and twenty cubits broad.

40:30 And the arches round about were five and twenty cubits long, and
five cubits broad.

40:31 And the arches thereof were toward the utter court; and palm
trees were upon the posts thereof: and the going up to it had eight
steps.

40:32 And he brought me into the inner court toward the east: and he
measured the gate according to these measures.

40:33 And the little chambers thereof, and the posts thereof, and the
arches thereof, were according to these measures: and there were
windows therein and in the arches thereof round about: it was fifty
cubits long, and five and twenty cubits broad.

40:34 And the arches thereof were toward the outward court; and palm
trees were upon the posts thereof, on this side, and on that side: and
the going up to it had eight steps.

40:35 And he brought me to the north gate, and measured it according
to these measures; 40:36 The little chambers thereof, the posts
thereof, and the arches thereof, and the windows to it round about:
the length was fifty cubits, and the breadth five and twenty cubits.

40:37 And the posts thereof were toward the utter court; and palm
trees were upon the posts thereof, on this side, and on that side: and
the going up to it had eight steps.

40:38 And the chambers and the entries thereof were by the posts of
the gates, where they washed the burnt offering.

40:39 And in the porch of the gate were two tables on this side, and
two tables on that side, to slay thereon the burnt offering and the
sin offering and the trespass offering.

40:40 And at the side without, as one goeth up to the entry of the
north gate, were two tables; and on the other side, which was at the
porch of the gate, were two tables.

40:41 Four tables were on this side, and four tables on that side, by
the side of the gate; eight tables, whereupon they slew their
sacrifices.

40:42 And the four tables were of hewn stone for the burnt offering,
of a cubit and an half long, and a cubit and an half broad, and one
cubit high: whereupon also they laid the instruments wherewith they
slew the burnt offering and the sacrifice.

40:43 And within were hooks, an hand broad, fastened round about: and
upon the tables was the flesh of the offering.

40:44 And without the inner gate were the chambers of the singers in
the inner court, which was at the side of the north gate; and their
prospect was toward the south: one at the side of the east gate having
the prospect toward the north.

40:45 And he said unto me, This chamber, whose prospect is toward the
south, is for the priests, the keepers of the charge of the house.

40:46 And the chamber whose prospect is toward the north is for the
priests, the keepers of the charge of the altar: these are the sons of
Zadok among the sons of Levi, which come near to the LORD to minister
unto him.

40:47 So he measured the court, an hundred cubits long, and an hundred
cubits broad, foursquare; and the altar that was before the house.

40:48 And he brought me to the porch of the house, and measured each
post of the porch, five cubits on this side, and five cubits on that
side: and the breadth of the gate was three cubits on this side, and
three cubits on that side.

40:49 The length of the porch was twenty cubits, and the breadth
eleven cubits, and he brought me by the steps whereby they went up to
it: and there were pillars by the posts, one on this side, and another
on that side.

41:1 Afterward he brought me to the temple, and measured the posts,
six cubits broad on the one side, and six cubits broad on the other
side, which was the breadth of the tabernacle.

41:2 And the breadth of the door was ten cubits; and the sides of the
door were five cubits on the one side, and five cubits on the other
side: and he measured the length thereof, forty cubits: and the
breadth, twenty cubits.

41:3 Then went he inward, and measured the post of the door, two
cubits; and the door, six cubits; and the breadth of the door, seven
cubits.

41:4 So he measured the length thereof, twenty cubits; and the
breadth, twenty cubits, before the temple: and he said unto me, This
is the most holy place.

41:5 After he measured the wall of the house, six cubits; and the
breadth of every side chamber, four cubits, round about the house on
every side.

41:6 And the side chambers were three, one over another, and thirty in
order; and they entered into the wall which was of the house for the
side chambers round about, that they might have hold, but they had not
hold in the wall of the house.

41:7 And there was an enlarging, and a winding about still upward to
the side chambers: for the winding about of the house went still
upward round about the house: therefore the breadth of the house was
still upward, and so increased from the lowest chamber to the highest
by the midst.

41:8 I saw also the height of the house round about: the foundations
of the side chambers were a full reed of six great cubits.

41:9 The thickness of the wall, which was for the side chamber
without, was five cubits: and that which was left was the place of the
side chambers that were within.

41:10 And between the chambers was the wideness of twenty cubits round
about the house on every side.

41:11 And the doors of the side chambers were toward the place that
was left, one door toward the north, and another door toward the
south: and the breadth of the place that was left was five cubits
round about.

41:12 Now the building that was before the separate place at the end
toward the west was seventy cubits broad; and the wall of the building
was five cubits thick round about, and the length thereof ninety
cubits.

41:13 So he measured the house, an hundred cubits long; and the
separate place, and the building, with the walls thereof, an hundred
cubits long; 41:14 Also the breadth of the face of the house, and of
the separate place toward the east, an hundred cubits.

41:15 And he measured the length of the building over against the
separate place which was behind it, and the galleries thereof on the
one side and on the other side, an hundred cubits, with the inner
temple, and the porches of the court; 41:16 The door posts, and the
narrow windows, and the galleries round about on their three stories,
over against the door, cieled with wood round about, and from the
ground up to the windows, and the windows were covered; 41:17 To that
above the door, even unto the inner house, and without, and by all the
wall round about within and without, by measure.

41:18 And it was made with cherubims and palm trees, so that a palm
tree was between a cherub and a cherub; and every cherub had two
faces; 41:19 So that the face of a man was toward the palm tree on the
one side, and the face of a young lion toward the palm tree on the
other side: it was made through all the house round about.

41:20 From the ground unto above the door were cherubims and palm
trees made, and on the wall of the temple.

41:21 The posts of the temple were squared, and the face of the
sanctuary; the appearance of the one as the appearance of the other.

41:22 The altar of wood was three cubits high, and the length thereof
two cubits; and the corners thereof, and the length thereof, and the
walls thereof, were of wood: and he said unto me, This is the table
that is before the LORD.

41:23 And the temple and the sanctuary had two doors.

41:24 And the doors had two leaves apiece, two turning leaves; two
leaves for the one door, and two leaves for the other door.

41:25 And there were made on them, on the doors of the temple,
cherubims and palm trees, like as were made upon the walls; and there
were thick planks upon the face of the porch without.

41:26 And there were narrow windows and palm trees on the one side and
on the other side, on the sides of the porch, and upon the side
chambers of the house, and thick planks.

42:1 Then he brought me forth into the utter court, the way toward the
north: and he brought me into the chamber that was over against the
separate place, and which was before the building toward the north.

42:2 Before the length of an hundred cubits was the north door, and
the breadth was fifty cubits.

42:3 Over against the twenty cubits which were for the inner court,
and over against the pavement which was for the utter court, was
gallery against gallery in three stories.

42:4 And before the chambers was a walk to ten cubits breadth inward,
a way of one cubit; and their doors toward the north.

42:5 Now the upper chambers were shorter: for the galleries were
higher than these, than the lower, and than the middlemost of the
building.

42:6 For they were in three stories, but had not pillars as the
pillars of the courts: therefore the building was straitened more than
the lowest and the middlemost from the ground.

42:7 And the wall that was without over against the chambers, toward
the utter court on the forepart of the chambers, the length thereof
was fifty cubits.

42:8 For the length of the chambers that were in the utter court was
fifty cubits: and, lo, before the temple were an hundred cubits.

42:9 And from under these chambers was the entry on the east side, as
one goeth into them from the utter court.

42:10 The chambers were in the thickness of the wall of the court
toward the east, over against the separate place, and over against the
building.

42:11 And the way before them was like the appearance of the chambers
which were toward the north, as long as they, and as broad as they:
and all their goings out were both according to their fashions, and
according to their doors.

42:12 And according to the doors of the chambers that were toward the
south was a door in the head of the way, even the way directly before
the wall toward the east, as one entereth into them.

42:13 Then said he unto me, The north chambers and the south chambers,
which are before the separate place, they be holy chambers, where the
priests that approach unto the LORD shall eat the most holy things:
there shall they lay the most holy things, and the meat offering, and
the sin offering, and the trespass offering; for the place is holy.

42:14 When the priests enter therein, then shall they not go out of
the holy place into the utter court, but there they shall lay their
garments wherein they minister; for they are holy; and shall put on
other garments, and shall approach to those things which are for the
people.

42:15 Now when he had made an end of measuring the inner house, he
brought me forth toward the gate whose prospect is toward the east,
and measured it round about.

42:16 He measured the east side with the measuring reed, five hundred
reeds, with the measuring reed round about.

42:17 He measured the north side, five hundred reeds, with the
measuring reed round about.

42:18 He measured the south side, five hundred reeds, with the
measuring reed.

42:19 He turned about to the west side, and measured five hundred
reeds with the measuring reed.

42:20 He measured it by the four sides: it had a wall round about,
five hundred reeds long, and five hundred broad, to make a separation
between the sanctuary and the profane place.

43:1 Afterward he brought me to the gate, even the gate that looketh
toward the east: 43:2 And, behold, the glory of the God of Israel came
from the way of the east: and his voice was like a noise of many
waters: and the earth shined with his glory.

43:3 And it was according to the appearance of the vision which I saw,
even according to the vision that I saw when I came to destroy the
city: and the visions were like the vision that I saw by the river
Chebar; and I fell upon my face.

43:4 And the glory of the LORD came into the house by the way of the
gate whose prospect is toward the east.

43:5 So the spirit took me up, and brought me into the inner court;
and, behold, the glory of the LORD filled the house.

43:6 And I heard him speaking unto me out of the house; and the man
stood by me.

43:7 And he said unto me, Son of man, the place of my throne, and the
place of the soles of my feet, where I will dwell in the midst of the
children of Israel for ever, and my holy name, shall the house of
Israel no more defile, neither they, nor their kings, by their
whoredom, nor by the carcases of their kings in their high places.

43:8 In their setting of their threshold by my thresholds, and their
post by my posts, and the wall between me and them, they have even
defiled my holy name by their abominations that they have committed:
wherefore I have consumed them in mine anger.

43:9 Now let them put away their whoredom, and the carcases of their
kings, far from me, and I will dwell in the midst of them for ever.

43:10 Thou son of man, shew the house to the house of Israel, that
they may be ashamed of their iniquities: and let them measure the
pattern.

43:11 And if they be ashamed of all that they have done, shew them the
form of the house, and the fashion thereof, and the goings out
thereof, and the comings in thereof, and all the forms thereof, and
all the ordinances thereof, and all the forms thereof, and all the
laws thereof: and write it in their sight, that they may keep the
whole form thereof, and all the ordinances thereof, and do them.

43:12 This is the law of the house; Upon the top of the mountain the
whole limit thereof round about shall be most holy. Behold, this is
the law of the house.

43:13 And these are the measures of the altar after the cubits: The
cubit is a cubit and an hand breadth; even the bottom shall be a
cubit, and the breadth a cubit, and the border thereof by the edge
thereof round about shall be a span: and this shall be the higher
place of the altar.

43:14 And from the bottom upon the ground even to the lower settle
shall be two cubits, and the breadth one cubit; and from the lesser
settle even to the greater settle shall be four cubits, and the
breadth one cubit.

43:15 So the altar shall be four cubits; and from the altar and upward
shall be four horns.

43:16 And the altar shall be twelve cubits long, twelve broad, square
in the four squares thereof.

43:17 And the settle shall be fourteen cubits long and fourteen broad
in the four squares thereof; and the border about it shall be half a
cubit; and the bottom thereof shall be a cubit about; and his stairs
shall look toward the east.

43:18 And he said unto me, Son of man, thus saith the Lord GOD; These
are the ordinances of the altar in the day when they shall make it, to
offer burnt offerings thereon, and to sprinkle blood thereon.

43:19 And thou shalt give to the priests the Levites that be of the
seed of Zadok, which approach unto me, to minister unto me, saith the
Lord GOD, a young bullock for a sin offering.

43:20 And thou shalt take of the blood thereof, and put it on the four
horns of it, and on the four corners of the settle, and upon the
border round about: thus shalt thou cleanse and purge it.

43:21 Thou shalt take the bullock also of the sin offering, and he
shall burn it in the appointed place of the house, without the
sanctuary.

43:22 And on the second day thou shalt offer a kid of the goats
without blemish for a sin offering; and they shall cleanse the altar,
as they did cleanse it with the bullock.

43:23 When thou hast made an end of cleansing it, thou shalt offer a
young bullock without blemish, and a ram out of the flock without
blemish.

43:24 And thou shalt offer them before the LORD, and the priests shall
cast salt upon them, and they shall offer them up for a burnt offering
unto the LORD.

43:25 Seven days shalt thou prepare every day a goat for a sin
offering: they shall also prepare a young bullock, and a ram out of
the flock, without blemish.

43:26 Seven days shall they purge the altar and purify it; and they
shall consecrate themselves.

43:27 And when these days are expired, it shall be, that upon the
eighth day, and so forward, the priests shall make your burnt
offerings upon the altar, and your peace offerings; and I will accept
you, saith the Lord GOD.

44:1 Then he brought me back the way of the gate of the outward
sanctuary which looketh toward the east; and it was shut.

44:2 Then said the LORD unto me; This gate shall be shut, it shall not
be opened, and no man shall enter in by it; because the LORD, the God
of Israel, hath entered in by it, therefore it shall be shut.

44:3 It is for the prince; the prince, he shall sit in it to eat bread
before the LORD; he shall enter by the way of the porch of that gate,
and shall go out by the way of the same.

44:4 Then brought he me the way of the north gate before the house:
and I looked, and, behold, the glory of the LORD filled the house of
the LORD: and I fell upon my face.

44:5 And the LORD said unto me, Son of man, mark well, and behold with
thine eyes, and hear with thine ears all that I say unto thee
concerning all the ordinances of the house of the LORD, and all the
laws thereof; and mark well the entering in of the house, with every
going forth of the sanctuary.

44:6 And thou shalt say to the rebellious, even to the house of
Israel, Thus saith the Lord GOD; O ye house of Israel, let it suffice
you of all your abominations, 44:7 In that ye have brought into my
sanctuary strangers, uncircumcised in heart, and uncircumcised in
flesh, to be in my sanctuary, to pollute it, even my house, when ye
offer my bread, the fat and the blood, and they have broken my
covenant because of all your abominations.

44:8 And ye have not kept the charge of mine holy things: but ye have
set keepers of my charge in my sanctuary for yourselves.

44:9 Thus saith the Lord GOD; No stranger, uncircumcised in heart, nor
uncircumcised in flesh, shall enter into my sanctuary, of any stranger
that is among the children of Israel.

44:10 And the Levites that are gone away far from me, when Israel went
astray, which went astray away from me after their idols; they shall
even bear their iniquity.

44:11 Yet they shall be ministers in my sanctuary, having charge at
the gates of the house, and ministering to the house: they shall slay
the burnt offering and the sacrifice for the people, and they shall
stand before them to minister unto them.

44:12 Because they ministered unto them before their idols, and caused
the house of Israel to fall into iniquity; therefore have I lifted up
mine hand against them, saith the Lord GOD, and they shall bear their
iniquity.

44:13 And they shall not come near unto me, to do the office of a
priest unto me, nor to come near to any of my holy things, in the most
holy place: but they shall bear their shame, and their abominations
which they have committed.

44:14 But I will make them keepers of the charge of the house, for all
the service thereof, and for all that shall be done therein.

44:15 But the priests the Levites, the sons of Zadok, that kept the
charge of my sanctuary when the children of Israel went astray from
me, they shall come near to me to minister unto me, and they shall
stand before me to offer unto me the fat and the blood, saith the Lord
GOD: 44:16 They shall enter into my sanctuary, and they shall come
near to my table, to minister unto me, and they shall keep my charge.

44:17 And it shall come to pass, that when they enter in at the gates
of the inner court, they shall be clothed with linen garments; and no
wool shall come upon them, whiles they minister in the gates of the
inner court, and within.

44:18 They shall have linen bonnets upon their heads, and shall have
linen breeches upon their loins; they shall not gird themselves with
any thing that causeth sweat.

44:19 And when they go forth into the utter court, even into the utter
court to the people, they shall put off their garments wherein they
ministered, and lay them in the holy chambers, and they shall put on
other garments; and they shall not sanctify the people with their
garments.

44:20 Neither shall they shave their heads, nor suffer their locks to
grow long; they shall only poll their heads.

44:21 Neither shall any priest drink wine, when they enter into the
inner court.

44:22 Neither shall they take for their wives a widow, nor her that is
put away: but they shall take maidens of the seed of the house of
Israel, or a widow that had a priest before.

44:23 And they shall teach my people the difference between the holy
and profane, and cause them to discern between the unclean and the
clean.

44:24 And in controversy they shall stand in judgment; and they shall
judge it according to my judgments: and they shall keep my laws and my
statutes in all mine assemblies; and they shall hallow my sabbaths.

44:25 And they shall come at no dead person to defile themselves: but
for father, or for mother, or for son, or for daughter, for brother,
or for sister that hath had no husband, they may defile themselves.

44:26 And after he is cleansed, they shall reckon unto him seven days.

44:27 And in the day that he goeth into the sanctuary, unto the inner
court, to minister in the sanctuary, he shall offer his sin offering,
saith the Lord GOD.

44:28 And it shall be unto them for an inheritance: I am their
inheritance: and ye shall give them no possession in Israel: I am
their possession.

44:29 They shall eat the meat offering, and the sin offering, and the
trespass offering: and every dedicated thing in Israel shall be
theirs.

44:30 And the first of all the firstfruits of all things, and every
oblation of all, of every sort of your oblations, shall be the
priest's: ye shall also give unto the priest the first of your dough,
that he may cause the blessing to rest in thine house.

44:31 The priests shall not eat of any thing that is dead of itself,
or torn, whether it be fowl or beast.

45:1 Moreover, when ye shall divide by lot the land for inheritance,
ye shall offer an oblation unto the LORD, an holy portion of the land:
the length shall be the length of five and twenty thousand reeds, and
the breadth shall be ten thousand. This shall be holy in all the
borders thereof round about.

45:2 Of this there shall be for the sanctuary five hundred in length,
with five hundred in breadth, square round about; and fifty cubits
round about for the suburbs thereof.

45:3 And of this measure shalt thou measure the length of five and
twenty thousand, and the breadth of ten thousand: and in it shall be
the sanctuary and the most holy place.

45:4 The holy portion of the land shall be for the priests the
ministers of the sanctuary, which shall come near to minister unto the
LORD: and it shall be a place for their houses, and an holy place for
the sanctuary.

45:5 And the five and twenty thousand of length, and the ten thousand
of breadth shall also the Levites, the ministers of the house, have
for themselves, for a possession for twenty chambers.

45:6 And ye shall appoint the possession of the city five thousand
broad, and five and twenty thousand long, over against the oblation of
the holy portion: it shall be for the whole house of Israel.

45:7 And a portion shall be for the prince on the one side and on the
other side of the oblation of the holy portion, and of the possession
of the city, before the oblation of the holy portion, and before the
possession of the city, from the west side westward, and from the east
side eastward: and the length shall be over against one of the
portions, from the west border unto the east border.

45:8 In the land shall be his possession in Israel: and my princes
shall no more oppress my people; and the rest of the land shall they
give to the house of Israel according to their tribes.

45:9 Thus saith the Lord GOD; Let it suffice you, O princes of Israel:
remove violence and spoil, and execute judgment and justice, take away
your exactions from my people, saith the Lord GOD.

45:10 Ye shall have just balances, and a just ephah, and a just bath.

45:11 The ephah and the bath shall be of one measure, that the bath
may contain the tenth part of an homer, and the ephah the tenth part
of an homer: the measure thereof shall be after the homer.

45:12 And the shekel shall be twenty gerahs: twenty shekels, five and
twenty shekels, fifteen shekels, shall be your maneh.

45:13 This is the oblation that ye shall offer; the sixth part of an
ephah of an homer of wheat, and ye shall give the sixth part of an
ephah of an homer of barley: 45:14 Concerning the ordinance of oil,
the bath of oil, ye shall offer the tenth part of a bath out of the
cor, which is an homer of ten baths; for ten baths are an homer: 45:15
And one lamb out of the flock, out of two hundred, out of the fat
pastures of Israel; for a meat offering, and for a burnt offering, and
for peace offerings, to make reconciliation for them, saith the Lord
GOD.

45:16 All the people of the land shall give this oblation for the
prince in Israel.

45:17 And it shall be the prince's part to give burnt offerings, and
meat offerings, and drink offerings, in the feasts, and in the new
moons, and in the sabbaths, in all solemnities of the house of Israel:
he shall prepare the sin offering, and the meat offering, and the
burnt offering, and the peace offerings, to make reconciliation for
the house of Israel.

45:18 Thus saith the Lord GOD; In the first month, in the first day of
the month, thou shalt take a young bullock without blemish, and
cleanse the sanctuary: 45:19 And the priest shall take of the blood of
the sin offering, and put it upon the posts of the house, and upon the
four corners of the settle of the altar, and upon the posts of the
gate of the inner court.

45:20 And so thou shalt do the seventh day of the month for every one
that erreth, and for him that is simple: so shall ye reconcile the
house.

45:21 In the first month, in the fourteenth day of the month, ye shall
have the passover, a feast of seven days; unleavened bread shall be
eaten.

45:22 And upon that day shall the prince prepare for himself and for
all the people of the land a bullock for a sin offering.

45:23 And seven days of the feast he shall prepare a burnt offering to
the LORD, seven bullocks and seven rams without blemish daily the
seven days; and a kid of the goats daily for a sin offering.

45:24 And he shall prepare a meat offering of an ephah for a bullock,
and an ephah for a ram, and an hin of oil for an ephah.

45:25 In the seventh month, in the fifteenth day of the month, shall
he do the like in the feast of the seven days, according to the sin
offering, according to the burnt offering, and according to the meat
offering, and according to the oil.

46:1 Thus saith the Lord GOD; The gate of the inner court that looketh
toward the east shall be shut the six working days; but on the sabbath
it shall be opened, and in the day of the new moon it shall be opened.

46:2 And the prince shall enter by the way of the porch of that gate
without, and shall stand by the post of the gate, and the priests
shall prepare his burnt offering and his peace offerings, and he shall
worship at the threshold of the gate: then he shall go forth; but the
gate shall not be shut until the evening.

46:3 Likewise the people of the land shall worship at the door of this
gate before the LORD in the sabbaths and in the new moons.

46:4 And the burnt offering that the prince shall offer unto the LORD
in the sabbath day shall be six lambs without blemish, and a ram
without blemish.

46:5 And the meat offering shall be an ephah for a ram, and the meat
offering for the lambs as he shall be able to give, and an hin of oil
to an ephah.

46:6 And in the day of the new moon it shall be a young bullock
without blemish, and six lambs, and a ram: they shall be without
blemish.

46:7 And he shall prepare a meat offering, an ephah for a bullock, and
an ephah for a ram, and for the lambs according as his hand shall
attain unto, and an hin of oil to an ephah.

46:8 And when the prince shall enter, he shall go in by the way of the
porch of that gate, and he shall go forth by the way thereof.

46:9 But when the people of the land shall come before the LORD in the
solemn feasts, he that entereth in by the way of the north gate to
worship shall go out by the way of the south gate; and he that
entereth by the way of the south gate shall go forth by the way of the
north gate: he shall not return by the way of the gate whereby he came
in, but shall go forth over against it.

46:10 And the prince in the midst of them, when they go in, shall go
in; and when they go forth, shall go forth.

46:11 And in the feasts and in the solemnities the meat offering shall
be an ephah to a bullock, and an ephah to a ram, and to the lambs as
he is able to give, and an hin of oil to an ephah.

46:12 Now when the prince shall prepare a voluntary burnt offering or
peace offerings voluntarily unto the LORD, one shall then open him the
gate that looketh toward the east, and he shall prepare his burnt
offering and his peace offerings, as he did on the sabbath day: then
he shall go forth; and after his going forth one shall shut the gate.

46:13 Thou shalt daily prepare a burnt offering unto the LORD of a
lamb of the first year without blemish: thou shalt prepare it every
morning.

46:14 And thou shalt prepare a meat offering for it every morning, the
sixth part of an ephah, and the third part of an hin of oil, to temper
with the fine flour; a meat offering continually by a perpetual
ordinance unto the LORD.

46:15 Thus shall they prepare the lamb, and the meat offering, and the
oil, every morning for a continual burnt offering.

46:16 Thus saith the Lord GOD; If the prince give a gift unto any of
his sons, the inheritance thereof shall be his sons'; it shall be
their possession by inheritance.

46:17 But if he give a gift of his inheritance to one of his servants,
then it shall be his to the year of liberty; after it shall return to
the prince: but his inheritance shall be his sons' for them.

46:18 Moreover the prince shall not take of the people's inheritance
by oppression, to thrust them out of their possession; but he shall
give his sons inheritance out of his own possession: that my people be
not scattered every man from his possession.

46:19 After he brought me through the entry, which was at the side of
the gate, into the holy chambers of the priests, which looked toward
the north: and, behold, there was a place on the two sides westward.

46:20 Then said he unto me, This is the place where the priests shall
boil the trespass offering and the sin offering, where they shall bake
the meat offering; that they bear them not out into the utter court,
to sanctify the people.

46:21 Then he brought me forth into the utter court, and caused me to
pass by the four corners of the court; and, behold, in every corner of
the court there was a court.

46:22 In the four corners of the court there were courts joined of
forty cubits long and thirty broad: these four corners were of one
measure.

46:23 And there was a row of building round about in them, round about
them four, and it was made with boiling places under the rows round
about.

46:24 Then said he unto me, These are the places of them that boil,
where the ministers of the house shall boil the sacrifice of the
people.

47:1 Afterward he brought me again unto the door of the house; and,
behold, waters issued out from under the threshold of the house
eastward: for the forefront of the house stood toward the east, and
the waters came down from under from the right side of the house, at
the south side of the altar.

47:2 Then brought he me out of the way of the gate northward, and led
me about the way without unto the utter gate by the way that looketh
eastward; and, behold, there ran out waters on the right side.

47:3 And when the man that had the line in his hand went forth
eastward, he measured a thousand cubits, and he brought me through the
waters; the waters were to the ankles.

47:4 Again he measured a thousand, and brought me through the waters;
the waters were to the knees. Again he measured a thousand, and
brought me through; the waters were to the loins.

47:5 Afterward he measured a thousand; and it was a river that I could
not pass over: for the waters were risen, waters to swim in, a river
that could not be passed over.

47:6 And he said unto me, Son of man, hast thou seen this? Then he
brought me, and caused me to return to the brink of the river.

47:7 Now when I had returned, behold, at the bank of the river were
very many trees on the one side and on the other.

47:8 Then said he unto me, These waters issue out toward the east
country, and go down into the desert, and go into the sea: which being
brought forth into the sea, the waters shall be healed.

47:9 And it shall come to pass, that every thing that liveth, which
moveth, whithersoever the rivers shall come, shall live: and there
shall be a very great multitude of fish, because these waters shall
come thither: for they shall be healed; and every thing shall live
whither the river cometh.

47:10 And it shall come to pass, that the fishers shall stand upon it
from Engedi even unto Eneglaim; they shall be a place to spread forth
nets; their fish shall be according to their kinds, as the fish of the
great sea, exceeding many.

47:11 But the miry places thereof and the marishes thereof shall not
be healed; they shall be given to salt.

47:12 And by the river upon the bank thereof, on this side and on that
side, shall grow all trees for meat, whose leaf shall not fade,
neither shall the fruit thereof be consumed: it shall bring forth new
fruit according to his months, because their waters they issued out of
the sanctuary: and the fruit thereof shall be for meat, and the leaf
thereof for medicine.

47:13 Thus saith the Lord GOD; This shall be the border, whereby ye
shall inherit the land according to the twelve tribes of Israel:
Joseph shall have two portions.

47:14 And ye shall inherit it, one as well as another: concerning the
which I lifted up mine hand to give it unto your fathers: and this
land shall fall unto you for inheritance.

47:15 And this shall be the border of the land toward the north side,
from the great sea, the way of Hethlon, as men go to Zedad; 47:16
Hamath, Berothah, Sibraim, which is between the border of Damascus and
the border of Hamath; Hazarhatticon, which is by the coast of Hauran.

47:17 And the border from the sea shall be Hazarenan, the border of
Damascus, and the north northward, and the border of Hamath. And this
is the north side.

47:18 And the east side ye shall measure from Hauran, and from
Damascus, and from Gilead, and from the land of Israel by Jordan, from
the border unto the east sea. And this is the east side.

47:19 And the south side southward, from Tamar even to the waters of
strife in Kadesh, the river to the great sea. And this is the south
side southward.

47:20 The west side also shall be the great sea from the border, till
a man come over against Hamath. This is the west side.

47:21 So shall ye divide this land unto you according to the tribes of
Israel.

47:22 And it shall come to pass, that ye shall divide it by lot for an
inheritance unto you, and to the strangers that sojourn among you,
which shall beget children among you: and they shall be unto you as
born in the country among the children of Israel; they shall have
inheritance with you among the tribes of Israel.

47:23 And it shall come to pass, that in what tribe the stranger
sojourneth, there shall ye give him his inheritance, saith the Lord
GOD.

48:1 Now these are the names of the tribes. From the north end to the
coast of the way of Hethlon, as one goeth to Hamath, Hazarenan, the
border of Damascus northward, to the coast of Hamath; for these are
his sides east and west; a portion for Dan.

48:2 And by the border of Dan, from the east side unto the west side,
a portion for Asher.

48:3 And by the border of Asher, from the east side even unto the west
side, a portion for Naphtali.

48:4 And by the border of Naphtali, from the east side unto the west
side, a portion for Manasseh.

48:5 And by the border of Manasseh, from the east side unto the west
side, a portion for Ephraim.

48:6 And by the border of Ephraim, from the east side even unto the
west side, a portion for Reuben.

48:7 And by the border of Reuben, from the east side unto the west
side, a portion for Judah.

48:8 And by the border of Judah, from the east side unto the west
side, shall be the offering which ye shall offer of five and twenty
thousand reeds in breadth, and in length as one of the other parts,
from the east side unto the west side: and the sanctuary shall be in
the midst of it.

48:9 The oblation that ye shall offer unto the LORD shall be of five
and twenty thousand in length, and of ten thousand in breadth.

48:10 And for them, even for the priests, shall be this holy oblation;
toward the north five and twenty thousand in length, and toward the
west ten thousand in breadth, and toward the east ten thousand in
breadth, and toward the south five and twenty thousand in length: and
the sanctuary of the LORD shall be in the midst thereof.

48:11 It shall be for the priests that are sanctified of the sons of
Zadok; which have kept my charge, which went not astray when the
children of Israel went astray, as the Levites went astray.

48:12 And this oblation of the land that is offered shall be unto them
a thing most holy by the border of the Levites.

48:13 And over against the border of the priests the Levites shall
have five and twenty thousand in length, and ten thousand in breadth:
all the length shall be five and twenty thousand, and the breadth ten
thousand.

48:14 And they shall not sell of it, neither exchange, nor alienate
the firstfruits of the land: for it is holy unto the LORD.

48:15 And the five thousand, that are left in the breadth over against
the five and twenty thousand, shall be a profane place for the city,
for dwelling, and for suburbs: and the city shall be in the midst
thereof.

48:16 And these shall be the measures thereof; the north side four
thousand and five hundred, and the south side four thousand and five
hundred, and on the east side four thousand and five hundred, and the
west side four thousand and five hundred.

48:17 And the suburbs of the city shall be toward the north two
hundred and fifty, and toward the south two hundred and fifty, and
toward the east two hundred and fifty, and toward the west two hundred
and fifty.

48:18 And the residue in length over against the oblation of the holy
portion shall be ten thousand eastward, and ten thousand westward: and
it shall be over against the oblation of the holy portion; and the
increase thereof shall be for food unto them that serve the city.

48:19 And they that serve the city shall serve it out of all the
tribes of Israel.

48:20 All the oblation shall be five and twenty thousand by five and
twenty thousand: ye shall offer the holy oblation foursquare, with the
possession of the city.

48:21 And the residue shall be for the prince, on the one side and on
the other of the holy oblation, and of the possession of the city,
over against the five and twenty thousand of the oblation toward the
east border, and westward over against the five and twenty thousand
toward the west border, over against the portions for the prince: and
it shall be the holy oblation; and the sanctuary of the house shall be
in the midst thereof.

48:22 Moreover from the possession of the Levites, and from the
possession of the city, being in the midst of that which is the
prince's, between the border of Judah and the border of Benjamin,
shall be for the prince.

48:23 As for the rest of the tribes, from the east side unto the west
side, Benjamin shall have a portion.

48:24 And by the border of Benjamin, from the east side unto the west
side, Simeon shall have a portion.

48:25 And by the border of Simeon, from the east side unto the west
side, Issachar a portion.

48:26 And by the border of Issachar, from the east side unto the west
side, Zebulun a portion.

48:27 And by the border of Zebulun, from the east side unto the west
side, Gad a portion.

48:28 And by the border of Gad, at the south side southward, the
border shall be even from Tamar unto the waters of strife in Kadesh,
and to the river toward the great sea.

48:29 This is the land which ye shall divide by lot unto the tribes of
Israel for inheritance, and these are their portions, saith the Lord
GOD.

48:30 And these are the goings out of the city on the north side, four
thousand and five hundred measures.

48:31 And the gates of the city shall be after the names of the tribes
of Israel: three gates northward; one gate of Reuben, one gate of
Judah, one gate of Levi.

48:32 And at the east side four thousand and five hundred: and three
gates; and one gate of Joseph, one gate of Benjamin, one gate of Dan.

48:33 And at the south side four thousand and five hundred measures:
and three gates; one gate of Simeon, one gate of Issachar, one gate of
Zebulun.

48:34 At the west side four thousand and five hundred, with their
three gates; one gate of Gad, one gate of Asher, one gate of Naphtali.

48:35 It was round about eighteen thousand measures: and the name of
the city from that day shall be, The LORD is there.




The Book of Daniel


1:1 In the third year of the reign of Jehoiakim king of Judah came
Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon unto Jerusalem, and besieged it.

1:2 And the Lord gave Jehoiakim king of Judah into his hand, with part
of the vessels of the house of God: which he carried into the land of
Shinar to the house of his god; and he brought the vessels into the
treasure house of his god.

1:3 And the king spake unto Ashpenaz the master of his eunuchs, that
he should bring certain of the children of Israel, and of the king's
seed, and of the princes; 1:4 Children in whom was no blemish, but
well favoured, and skilful in all wisdom, and cunning in knowledge,
and understanding science, and such as had ability in them to stand in
the king's palace, and whom they might teach the learning and the
tongue of the Chaldeans.

1:5 And the king appointed them a daily provision of the king's meat,
and of the wine which he drank: so nourishing them three years, that
at the end thereof they might stand before the king.

1:6 Now among these were of the children of Judah, Daniel, Hananiah,
Mishael, and Azariah: 1:7 Unto whom the prince of the eunuchs gave
names: for he gave unto Daniel the name of Belteshazzar; and to
Hananiah, of Shadrach; and to Mishael, of Meshach; and to Azariah, of
Abednego.

1:8 But Daniel purposed in his heart that he would not defile himself
with the portion of the king's meat, nor with the wine which he drank:
therefore he requested of the prince of the eunuchs that he might not
defile himself.

1:9 Now God had brought Daniel into favour and tender love with the
prince of the eunuchs.

1:10 And the prince of the eunuchs said unto Daniel, I fear my lord
the king, who hath appointed your meat and your drink: for why should
he see your faces worse liking than the children which are of your
sort? then shall ye make me endanger my head to the king.

1:11 Then said Daniel to Melzar, whom the prince of the eunuchs had
set over Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, 1:12 Prove thy
servants, I beseech thee, ten days; and let them give us pulse to eat,
and water to drink.

1:13 Then let our countenances be looked upon before thee, and the
countenance of the children that eat of the portion of the king's
meat: and as thou seest, deal with thy servants.

1:14 So he consented to them in this matter, and proved them ten days.

1:15 And at the end of ten days their countenances appeared fairer and
fatter in flesh than all the children which did eat the portion of the
king's meat.

1:16 Thus Melzar took away the portion of their meat, and the wine
that they should drink; and gave them pulse.

1:17 As for these four children, God gave them knowledge and skill in
all learning and wisdom: and Daniel had understanding in all visions
and dreams.

1:18 Now at the end of the days that the king had said he should bring
them in, then the prince of the eunuchs brought them in before
Nebuchadnezzar.

1:19 And the king communed with them; and among them all was found
none like Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah: therefore stood they
before the king.

1:20 And in all matters of wisdom and understanding, that the king
enquired of them, he found them ten times better than all the
magicians and astrologers that were in all his realm.

1:21 And Daniel continued even unto the first year of king Cyrus.

2:1 And in the second year of the reign of Nebuchadnezzar
Nebuchadnezzar dreamed dreams, wherewith his spirit was troubled, and
his sleep brake from him.

2:2 Then the king commanded to call the magicians, and the
astrologers, and the sorcerers, and the Chaldeans, for to shew the
king his dreams. So they came and stood before the king.

2:3 And the king said unto them, I have dreamed a dream, and my spirit
was troubled to know the dream.

2:4 Then spake the Chaldeans to the king in Syriack, O king, live for
ever: tell thy servants the dream, and we will shew the
interpretation.

2:5 The king answered and said to the Chaldeans, The thing is gone
from me: if ye will not make known unto me the dream, with the
interpretation thereof, ye shall be cut in pieces, and your houses
shall be made a dunghill.

2:6 But if ye shew the dream, and the interpretation thereof, ye shall
receive of me gifts and rewards and great honour: therefore shew me
the dream, and the interpretation thereof.

2:7 They answered again and said, Let the king tell his servants the
dream, and we will shew the interpretation of it.

2:8 The king answered and said, I know of certainty that ye would gain
the time, because ye see the thing is gone from me.

2:9 But if ye will not make known unto me the dream, there is but one
decree for you: for ye have prepared lying and corrupt words to speak
before me, till the time be changed: therefore tell me the dream, and
I shall know that ye can shew me the interpretation thereof.

2:10 The Chaldeans answered before the king, and said, There is not a
man upon the earth that can shew the king's matter: therefore there is
no king, lord, nor ruler, that asked such things at any magician, or
astrologer, or Chaldean.

2:11 And it is a rare thing that the king requireth, and there is none
other that can shew it before the king, except the gods, whose
dwelling is not with flesh.

2:12 For this cause the king was angry and very furious, and commanded
to destroy all the wise men of Babylon.

2:13 And the decree went forth that the wise men should be slain; and
they sought Daniel and his fellows to be slain.

2:14 Then Daniel answered with counsel and wisdom to Arioch the
captain of the king's guard, which was gone forth to slay the wise men
of Babylon: 2:15 He answered and said to Arioch the king's captain,
Why is the decree so hasty from the king? Then Arioch made the thing
known to Daniel.

2:16 Then Daniel went in, and desired of the king that he would give
him time, and that he would shew the king the interpretation.

2:17 Then Daniel went to his house, and made the thing known to
Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, his companions: 2:18 That they would
desire mercies of the God of heaven concerning this secret; that
Daniel and his fellows should not perish with the rest of the wise men
of Babylon.

2:19 Then was the secret revealed unto Daniel in a night vision. Then
Daniel blessed the God of heaven.

2:20 Daniel answered and said, Blessed be the name of God for ever and
ever: for wisdom and might are his: 2:21 And he changeth the times and
the seasons: he removeth kings, and setteth up kings: he giveth wisdom
unto the wise, and knowledge to them that know understanding: 2:22 He
revealeth the deep and secret things: he knoweth what is in the
darkness, and the light dwelleth with him.

2:23 I thank thee, and praise thee, O thou God of my fathers, who hast
given me wisdom and might, and hast made known unto me now what we
desired of thee: for thou hast now made known unto us the king's
matter.

2:24 Therefore Daniel went in unto Arioch, whom the king had ordained
to destroy the wise men of Babylon: he went and said thus unto him;
Destroy not the wise men of Babylon: bring me in before the king, and
I will shew unto the king the interpretation.

2:25 Then Arioch brought in Daniel before the king in haste, and said
thus unto him, I have found a man of the captives of Judah, that will
make known unto the king the interpretation.

2:26 The king answered and said to Daniel, whose name was
Belteshazzar, Art thou able to make known unto me the dream which I
have seen, and the interpretation thereof?  2:27 Daniel answered in
the presence of the king, and said, The secret which the king hath
demanded cannot the wise men, the astrologers, the magicians, the
soothsayers, shew unto the king; 2:28 But there is a God in heaven
that revealeth secrets, and maketh known to the king Nebuchadnezzar
what shall be in the latter days. Thy dream, and the visions of thy
head upon thy bed, are these; 2:29 As for thee, O king, thy thoughts
came into thy mind upon thy bed, what should come to pass hereafter:
and he that revealeth secrets maketh known to thee what shall come to
pass.

2:30 But as for me, this secret is not revealed to me for any wisdom
that I have more than any living, but for their sakes that shall make
known the interpretation to the king, and that thou mightest know the
thoughts of thy heart.

2:31 Thou, O king, sawest, and behold a great image. This great image,
whose brightness was excellent, stood before thee; and the form
thereof was terrible.

2:32 This image's head was of fine gold, his breast and his arms of
silver, his belly and his thighs of brass, 2:33 His legs of iron, his
feet part of iron and part of clay.

2:34 Thou sawest till that a stone was cut out without hands, which
smote the image upon his feet that were of iron and clay, and brake
them to pieces.

2:35 Then was the iron, the clay, the brass, the silver, and the gold,
broken to pieces together, and became like the chaff of the summer
threshingfloors; and the wind carried them away, that no place was
found for them: and the stone that smote the image became a great
mountain, and filled the whole earth.

2:36 This is the dream; and we will tell the interpretation thereof
before the king.

2:37 Thou, O king, art a king of kings: for the God of heaven hath
given thee a kingdom, power, and strength, and glory.

2:38 And wheresoever the children of men dwell, the beasts of the
field and the fowls of the heaven hath he given into thine hand, and
hath made thee ruler over them all. Thou art this head of gold.

2:39 And after thee shall arise another kingdom inferior to thee, and
another third kingdom of brass, which shall bear rule over all the
earth.

2:40 And the fourth kingdom shall be strong as iron: forasmuch as iron
breaketh in pieces and subdueth all things: and as iron that breaketh
all these, shall it break in pieces and bruise.

2:41 And whereas thou sawest the feet and toes, part of potters' clay,
and part of iron, the kingdom shall be divided; but there shall be in
it of the strength of the iron, forasmuch as thou sawest the iron
mixed with miry clay.

2:42 And as the toes of the feet were part of iron, and part of clay,
so the kingdom shall be partly strong, and partly broken.

2:43 And whereas thou sawest iron mixed with miry clay, they shall
mingle themselves with the seed of men: but they shall not cleave one
to another, even as iron is not mixed with clay.

2:44 And in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a
kingdom, which shall never be destroyed: and the kingdom shall not be
left to other people, but it shall break in pieces and consume all
these kingdoms, and it shall stand for ever.

2:45 Forasmuch as thou sawest that the stone was cut out of the
mountain without hands, and that it brake in pieces the iron, the
brass, the clay, the silver, and the gold; the great God hath made
known to the king what shall come to pass hereafter: and the dream is
certain, and the interpretation thereof sure.

2:46 Then the king Nebuchadnezzar fell upon his face, and worshipped
Daniel, and commanded that they should offer an oblation and sweet
odours unto him.

2:47 The king answered unto Daniel, and said, Of a truth it is, that
your God is a God of gods, and a Lord of kings, and a revealer of
secrets, seeing thou couldest reveal this secret.

2:48 Then the king made Daniel a great man, and gave him many great
gifts, and made him ruler over the whole province of Babylon, and
chief of the governors over all the wise men of Babylon.

2:49 Then Daniel requested of the king, and he set Shadrach, Meshach,
and Abednego, over the affairs of the province of Babylon: but Daniel
sat in the gate of the king.

3:1 Nebuchadnezzar the king made an image of gold, whose height was
threescore cubits, and the breadth thereof six cubits: he set it up in
the plain of Dura, in the province of Babylon.

3:2 Then Nebuchadnezzar the king sent to gather together the princes,
the governors, and the captains, the judges, the treasurers, the
counsellors, the sheriffs, and all the rulers of the provinces, to
come to the dedication of the image which Nebuchadnezzar the king had
set up.

3:3 Then the princes, the governors, and captains, the judges, the
treasurers, the counsellors, the sheriffs, and all the rulers of the
provinces, were gathered together unto the dedication of the image
that Nebuchadnezzar the king had set up; and they stood before the
image that Nebuchadnezzar had set up.

3:4 Then an herald cried aloud, To you it is commanded, O people,
nations, and languages, 3:5 That at what time ye hear the sound of the
cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery, dulcimer, and all kinds of
musick, ye fall down and worship the golden image that Nebuchadnezzar
the king hath set up: 3:6 And whoso falleth not down and worshippeth
shall the same hour be cast into the midst of a burning fiery furnace.

3:7 Therefore at that time, when all the people heard the sound of the
cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery, and all kinds of musick, all
the people, the nations, and the languages, fell down and worshipped
the golden image that Nebuchadnezzar the king had set up.

3:8 Wherefore at that time certain Chaldeans came near, and accused
the Jews.

3:9 They spake and said to the king Nebuchadnezzar, O king, live for
ever.

3:10 Thou, O king, hast made a decree, that every man that shall hear
the sound of the cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery, and dulcimer,
and all kinds of musick, shall fall down and worship the golden image:
3:11 And whoso falleth not down and worshippeth, that he should be
cast into the midst of a burning fiery furnace.

3:12 There are certain Jews whom thou hast set over the affairs of the
province of Babylon, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego; these men, O
king, have not regarded thee: they serve not thy gods, nor worship the
golden image which thou hast set up.

3:13 Then Nebuchadnezzar in his rage and fury commanded to bring
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. Then they brought these men before
the king.

3:14 Nebuchadnezzar spake and said unto them, Is it true, O Shadrach,
Meshach, and Abednego, do not ye serve my gods, nor worship the golden
image which I have set up?  3:15 Now if ye be ready that at what time
ye hear the sound of the cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery, and
dulcimer, and all kinds of musick, ye fall down and worship the image
which I have made; well: but if ye worship not, ye shall be cast the
same hour into the midst of a burning fiery furnace; and who is that
God that shall deliver you out of my hands?  3:16 Shadrach, Meshach,
and Abednego, answered and said to the king, O Nebuchadnezzar, we are
not careful to answer thee in this matter.

3:17 If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the
burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of thine hand, O
king.

3:18 But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve
thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up.

3:19 Then was Nebuchadnezzar full of fury, and the form of his visage
was changed against Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego: therefore he
spake, and commanded that they should heat the furnace one seven times
more than it was wont to be heated.

3:20 And he commanded the most mighty men that were in his army to
bind Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, and to cast them into the
burning fiery furnace.

3:21 Then these men were bound in their coats, their hosen, and their
hats, and their other garments, and were cast into the midst of the
burning fiery furnace.

3:22 Therefore because the king's commandment was urgent, and the
furnace exceeding hot, the flames of the fire slew those men that took
up Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.

3:23 And these three men, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, fell down
bound into the midst of the burning fiery furnace.

3:24 Then Nebuchadnezzar the king was astonied, and rose up in haste,
and spake, and said unto his counsellors, Did not we cast three men
bound into the midst of the fire? They answered and said unto the
king, True, O king.

3:25 He answered and said, Lo, I see four men loose, walking in the
midst of the fire, and they have no hurt; and the form of the fourth
is like the Son of God.

3:26 Then Nebuchadnezzar came near to the mouth of the burning fiery
furnace, and spake, and said, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, ye
servants of the most high God, come forth, and come hither. Then
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, came forth of the midst of the fire.

3:27 And the princes, governors, and captains, and the king's
counsellors, being gathered together, saw these men, upon whose bodies
the fire had no power, nor was an hair of their head singed, neither
were their coats changed, nor the smell of fire had passed on them.

3:28 Then Nebuchadnezzar spake, and said, Blessed be the God of
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who hath sent his angel, and
delivered his servants that trusted in him, and have changed the
king's word, and yielded their bodies, that they might not serve nor
worship any god, except their own God.

3:29 Therefore I make a decree, That every people, nation, and
language, which speak any thing amiss against the God of Shadrach,
Meshach, and Abednego, shall be cut in pieces, and their houses shall
be made a dunghill: because there is no other God that can deliver
after this sort.

3:30 Then the king promoted Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, in the
province of Babylon.

4:1 Nebuchadnezzar the king, unto all people, nations, and languages,
that dwell in all the earth; Peace be multiplied unto you.

4:2 I thought it good to shew the signs and wonders that the high God
hath wrought toward me.

4:3 How great are his signs! and how mighty are his wonders! his
kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and his dominion is from generation
to generation.

4:4 I Nebuchadnezzar was at rest in mine house, and flourishing in my
palace: 4:5 I saw a dream which made me afraid, and the thoughts upon
my bed and the visions of my head troubled me.

4:6 Therefore made I a decree to bring in all the wise men of Babylon
before me, that they might make known unto me the interpretation of
the dream.

4:7 Then came in the magicians, the astrologers, the Chaldeans, and
the soothsayers: and I told the dream before them; but they did not
make known unto me the interpretation thereof.

4:8 But at the last Daniel came in before me, whose name was
Belteshazzar, according to the name of my God, and in whom is the
spirit of the holy gods: and before him I told the dream, saying, 4:9
O Belteshazzar, master of the magicians, because I know that the
spirit of the holy gods is in thee, and no secret troubleth thee, tell
me the visions of my dream that I have seen, and the interpretation
thereof.

4:10 Thus were the visions of mine head in my bed; I saw, and behold a
tree in the midst of the earth, and the height thereof was great.

4:11 The tree grew, and was strong, and the height thereof reached
unto heaven, and the sight thereof to the end of all the earth: 4:12
The leaves thereof were fair, and the fruit thereof much, and in it
was meat for all: the beasts of the field had shadow under it, and the
fowls of the heaven dwelt in the boughs thereof, and all flesh was fed
of it.

4:13 I saw in the visions of my head upon my bed, and, behold, a
watcher and an holy one came down from heaven; 4:14 He cried aloud,
and said thus, Hew down the tree, and cut off his branches, shake off
his leaves, and scatter his fruit: let the beasts get away from under
it, and the fowls from his branches: 4:15 Nevertheless leave the stump
of his roots in the earth, even with a band of iron and brass, in the
tender grass of the field; and let it be wet with the dew of heaven,
and let his portion be with the beasts in the grass of the earth: 4:16
Let his heart be changed from man's, and let a beast's heart be given
unto him; and let seven times pass over him.

4:17 This matter is by the decree of the watchers, and the demand by
the word of the holy ones: to the intent that the living may know that
the most High ruleth in the kingdom of men, and giveth it to
whomsoever he will, and setteth up over it the basest of men.

4:18 This dream I king Nebuchadnezzar have seen. Now thou, O
Belteshazzar, declare the interpretation thereof, forasmuch as all the
wise men of my kingdom are not able to make known unto me the
interpretation: but thou art able; for the spirit of the holy gods is
in thee.

4:19 Then Daniel, whose name was Belteshazzar, was astonied for one
hour, and his thoughts troubled him. The king spake, and said,
Belteshazzar, let not the dream, or the interpretation thereof,
trouble thee. Belteshazzar answered and said, My lord, the dream be to
them that hate thee, and the interpretation thereof to thine enemies.

4:20 The tree that thou sawest, which grew, and was strong, whose
height reached unto the heaven, and the sight thereof to all the
earth; 4:21 Whose leaves were fair, and the fruit thereof much, and in
it was meat for all; under which the beasts of the field dwelt, and
upon whose branches the fowls of the heaven had their habitation: 4:22
It is thou, O king, that art grown and become strong: for thy
greatness is grown, and reacheth unto heaven, and thy dominion to the
end of the earth.

4:23 And whereas the king saw a watcher and an holy one coming down
from heaven, and saying, Hew the tree down, and destroy it; yet leave
the stump of the roots thereof in the earth, even with a band of iron
and brass, in the tender grass of the field; and let it be wet with
the dew of heaven, and let his portion be with the beasts of the
field, till seven times pass over him; 4:24 This is the
interpretation, O king, and this is the decree of the most High, which
is come upon my lord the king: 4:25 That they shall drive thee from
men, and thy dwelling shall be with the beasts of the field, and they
shall make thee to eat grass as oxen, and they shall wet thee with the
dew of heaven, and seven times shall pass over thee, till thou know
that the most High ruleth in the kingdom of men, and giveth it to
whomsoever he will.

4:26 And whereas they commanded to leave the stump of the tree roots;
thy kingdom shall be sure unto thee, after that thou shalt have known
that the heavens do rule.

4:27 Wherefore, O king, let my counsel be acceptable unto thee, and
break off thy sins by righteousness, and thine iniquities by shewing
mercy to the poor; if it may be a lengthening of thy tranquillity.

4:28 All this came upon the king Nebuchadnezzar.

4:29 At the end of twelve months he walked in the palace of the
kingdom of Babylon.

4:30 The king spake, and said, Is not this great Babylon, that I have
built for the house of the kingdom by the might of my power, and for
the honour of my majesty?  4:31 While the word was in the king's
mouth, there fell a voice from heaven, saying, O king Nebuchadnezzar,
to thee it is spoken; The kingdom is departed from thee.

4:32 And they shall drive thee from men, and thy dwelling shall be
with the beasts of the field: they shall make thee to eat grass as
oxen, and seven times shall pass over thee, until thou know that the
most High ruleth in the kingdom of men, and giveth it to whomsoever he
will.

4:33 The same hour was the thing fulfilled upon Nebuchadnezzar: and he
was driven from men, and did eat grass as oxen, and his body was wet
with the dew of heaven, till his hairs were grown like eagles'
feathers, and his nails like birds' claws.

4:34 And at the end of the days I Nebuchadnezzar lifted up mine eyes
unto heaven, and mine understanding returned unto me, and I blessed
the most High, and I praised and honoured him that liveth for ever,
whose dominion is an everlasting dominion, and his kingdom is from
generation to generation: 4:35 And all the inhabitants of the earth
are reputed as nothing: and he doeth according to his will in the army
of heaven, and among the inhabitants of the earth: and none can stay
his hand, or say unto him, What doest thou?  4:36 At the same time my
reason returned unto me; and for the glory of my kingdom, mine honour
and brightness returned unto me; and my counsellors and my lords
sought unto me; and I was established in my kingdom, and excellent
majesty was added unto me.

4:37 Now I Nebuchadnezzar praise and extol and honour the King of
heaven, all whose works are truth, and his ways judgment: and those
that walk in pride he is able to abase.

5:1 Belshazzar the king made a great feast to a thousand of his lords,
and drank wine before the thousand.

5:2 Belshazzar, whiles he tasted the wine, commanded to bring the
golden and silver vessels which his father Nebuchadnezzar had taken
out of the temple which was in Jerusalem; that the king, and his
princes, his wives, and his concubines, might drink therein.

5:3 Then they brought the golden vessels that were taken out of the
temple of the house of God which was at Jerusalem; and the king, and
his princes, his wives, and his concubines, drank in them.

5:4 They drank wine, and praised the gods of gold, and of silver, of
brass, of iron, of wood, and of stone.

5:5 In the same hour came forth fingers of a man's hand, and wrote
over against the candlestick upon the plaister of the wall of the
king's palace: and the king saw the part of the hand that wrote.

5:6 Then the king's countenance was changed, and his thoughts troubled
him, so that the joints of his loins were loosed, and his knees smote
one against another.

5:7 The king cried aloud to bring in the astrologers, the Chaldeans,
and the soothsayers. And the king spake, and said to the wise men of
Babylon, Whosoever shall read this writing, and shew me the
interpretation thereof, shall be clothed with scarlet, and have a
chain of gold about his neck, and shall be the third ruler in the
kingdom.

5:8 Then came in all the king's wise men: but they could not read the
writing, nor make known to the king the interpretation thereof.

5:9 Then was king Belshazzar greatly troubled, and his countenance was
changed in him, and his lords were astonied.

5:10 Now the queen by reason of the words of the king and his lords
came into the banquet house: and the queen spake and said, O king,
live for ever: let not thy thoughts trouble thee, nor let thy
countenance be changed: 5:11 There is a man in thy kingdom, in whom is
the spirit of the holy gods; and in the days of thy father light and
understanding and wisdom, like the wisdom of the gods, was found in
him; whom the king Nebuchadnezzar thy father, the king, I say, thy
father, made master of the magicians, astrologers, Chaldeans, and
soothsayers; 5:12 Forasmuch as an excellent spirit, and knowledge, and
understanding, interpreting of dreams, and shewing of hard sentences,
and dissolving of doubts, were found in the same Daniel, whom the king
named Belteshazzar: now let Daniel be called, and he will shew the
interpretation.

5:13 Then was Daniel brought in before the king. And the king spake
and said unto Daniel, Art thou that Daniel, which art of the children
of the captivity of Judah, whom the king my father brought out of
Jewry?  5:14 I have even heard of thee, that the spirit of the gods is
in thee, and that light and understanding and excellent wisdom is
found in thee.

5:15 And now the wise men, the astrologers, have been brought in
before me, that they should read this writing, and make known unto me
the interpretation thereof: but they could not shew the interpretation
of the thing: 5:16 And I have heard of thee, that thou canst make
interpretations, and dissolve doubts: now if thou canst read the
writing, and make known to me the interpretation thereof, thou shalt
be clothed with scarlet, and have a chain of gold about thy neck, and
shalt be the third ruler in the kingdom.

5:17 Then Daniel answered and said before the king, Let thy gifts be
to thyself, and give thy rewards to another; yet I will read the
writing unto the king, and make known to him the interpretation.

5:18 O thou king, the most high God gave Nebuchadnezzar thy father a
kingdom, and majesty, and glory, and honour: 5:19 And for the majesty
that he gave him, all people, nations, and languages, trembled and
feared before him: whom he would he slew; and whom he would he kept
alive; and whom he would he set up; and whom he would he put down.

5:20 But when his heart was lifted up, and his mind hardened in pride,
he was deposed from his kingly throne, and they took his glory from
him: 5:21 And he was driven from the sons of men; and his heart was
made like the beasts, and his dwelling was with the wild asses: they
fed him with grass like oxen, and his body was wet with the dew of
heaven; till he knew that the most high God ruled in the kingdom of
men, and that he appointeth over it whomsoever he will.

5:22 And thou his son, O Belshazzar, hast not humbled thine heart,
though thou knewest all this; 5:23 But hast lifted up thyself against
the Lord of heaven; and they have brought the vessels of his house
before thee, and thou, and thy lords, thy wives, and thy concubines,
have drunk wine in them; and thou hast praised the gods of silver, and
gold, of brass, iron, wood, and stone, which see not, nor hear, nor
know: and the God in whose hand thy breath is, and whose are all thy
ways, hast thou not glorified: 5:24 Then was the part of the hand sent
from him; and this writing was written.

5:25 And this is the writing that was written, MENE, MENE, TEKEL,
UPHARSIN.

5:26 This is the interpretation of the thing: MENE; God hath numbered
thy kingdom, and finished it.

5:27 TEKEL; Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting.

5:28 PERES; Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and
Persians.

5:29 Then commanded Belshazzar, and they clothed Daniel with scarlet,
and put a chain of gold about his neck, and made a proclamation
concerning him, that he should be the third ruler in the kingdom.

5:30 In that night was Belshazzar the king of the Chaldeans slain.

5:31 And Darius the Median took the kingdom, being about threescore
and two years old.

6:1 It pleased Darius to set over the kingdom an hundred and twenty
princes, which should be over the whole kingdom; 6:2 And over these
three presidents; of whom Daniel was first: that the princes might
give accounts unto them, and the king should have no damage.

6:3 Then this Daniel was preferred above the presidents and princes,
because an excellent spirit was in him; and the king thought to set
him over the whole realm.

6:4 Then the presidents and princes sought to find occasion against
Daniel concerning the kingdom; but they could find none occasion nor
fault; forasmuch as he was faithful, neither was there any error or
fault found in him.

6:5 Then said these men, We shall not find any occasion against this
Daniel, except we find it against him concerning the law of his God.

6:6 Then these presidents and princes assembled together to the king,
and said thus unto him, King Darius, live for ever.

6:7 All the presidents of the kingdom, the governors, and the princes,
the counsellors, and the captains, have consulted together to
establish a royal statute, and to make a firm decree, that whosoever
shall ask a petition of any God or man for thirty days, save of thee,
O king, he shall be cast into the den of lions.

6:8 Now, O king, establish the decree, and sign the writing, that it
be not changed, according to the law of the Medes and Persians, which
altereth not.

6:9 Wherefore king Darius signed the writing and the decree.

6:10 Now when Daniel knew that the writing was signed, he went into
his house; and his windows being open in his chamber toward Jerusalem,
he kneeled upon his knees three times a day, and prayed, and gave
thanks before his God, as he did aforetime.

6:11 Then these men assembled, and found Daniel praying and making
supplication before his God.

6:12 Then they came near, and spake before the king concerning the
king's decree; Hast thou not signed a decree, that every man that
shall ask a petition of any God or man within thirty days, save of
thee, O king, shall be cast into the den of lions? The king answered
and said, The thing is true, according to the law of the Medes and
Persians, which altereth not.

6:13 Then answered they and said before the king, That Daniel, which
is of the children of the captivity of Judah, regardeth not thee, O
king, nor the decree that thou hast signed, but maketh his petition
three times a day.

6:14 Then the king, when he heard these words, was sore displeased
with himself, and set his heart on Daniel to deliver him: and he
laboured till the going down of the sun to deliver him.

6:15 Then these men assembled unto the king, and said unto the king,
Know, O king, that the law of the Medes and Persians is, That no
decree nor statute which the king establisheth may be changed.

6:16 Then the king commanded, and they brought Daniel, and cast him
into the den of lions. Now the king spake and said unto Daniel, Thy
God whom thou servest continually, he will deliver thee.

6:17 And a stone was brought, and laid upon the mouth of the den; and
the king sealed it with his own signet, and with the signet of his
lords; that the purpose might not be changed concerning Daniel.

6:18 Then the king went to his palace, and passed the night fasting:
neither were instruments of musick brought before him: and his sleep
went from him.

6:19 Then the king arose very early in the morning, and went in haste
unto the den of lions.

6:20 And when he came to the den, he cried with a lamentable voice
unto Daniel: and the king spake and said to Daniel, O Daniel, servant
of the living God, is thy God, whom thou servest continually, able to
deliver thee from the lions?  6:21 Then said Daniel unto the king, O
king, live for ever.

6:22 My God hath sent his angel, and hath shut the lions' mouths, that
they have not hurt me: forasmuch as before him innocency was found in
me; and also before thee, O king, have I done no hurt.

6:23 Then was the king exceedingly glad for him, and commanded that
they should take Daniel up out of the den. So Daniel was taken up out
of the den, and no manner of hurt was found upon him, because he
believed in his God.

6:24 And the king commanded, and they brought those men which had
accused Daniel, and they cast them into the den of lions, them, their
children, and their wives; and the lions had the mastery of them, and
brake all their bones in pieces or ever they came at the bottom of the
den.

6:25 Then king Darius wrote unto all people, nations, and languages,
that dwell in all the earth; Peace be multiplied unto you.

6:26 I make a decree, That in every dominion of my kingdom men tremble
and fear before the God of Daniel: for he is the living God, and
stedfast for ever, and his kingdom that which shall not be destroyed,
and his dominion shall be even unto the end.

6:27 He delivereth and rescueth, and he worketh signs and wonders in
heaven and in earth, who hath delivered Daniel from the power of the
lions.

6:28 So this Daniel prospered in the reign of Darius, and in the reign
of Cyrus the Persian.

7:1 In the first year of Belshazzar king of Babylon Daniel had a dream
and visions of his head upon his bed: then he wrote the dream, and
told the sum of the matters.

7:2 Daniel spake and said, I saw in my vision by night, and, behold,
the four winds of the heaven strove upon the great sea.

7:3 And four great beasts came up from the sea, diverse one from
another.

7:4 The first was like a lion, and had eagle's wings: I beheld till
the wings thereof were plucked, and it was lifted up from the earth,
and made stand upon the feet as a man, and a man's heart was given to
it.

7:5 And behold another beast, a second, like to a bear, and it raised
up itself on one side, and it had three ribs in the mouth of it
between the teeth of it: and they said thus unto it, Arise, devour
much flesh.

7:6 After this I beheld, and lo another, like a leopard, which had
upon the back of it four wings of a fowl; the beast had also four
heads; and dominion was given to it.

7:7 After this I saw in the night visions, and behold a fourth beast,
dreadful and terrible, and strong exceedingly; and it had great iron
teeth: it devoured and brake in pieces, and stamped the residue with
the feet of it: and it was diverse from all the beasts that were
before it; and it had ten horns.

7:8 I considered the horns, and, behold, there came up among them
another little horn, before whom there were three of the first horns
plucked up by the roots: and, behold, in this horn were eyes like the
eyes of man, and a mouth speaking great things.

7:9 I beheld till the thrones were cast down, and the Ancient of days
did sit, whose garment was white as snow, and the hair of his head
like the pure wool: his throne was like the fiery flame, and his
wheels as burning fire.

7:10 A fiery stream issued and came forth from before him: thousand
thousands ministered unto him, and ten thousand times ten thousand
stood before him: the judgment was set, and the books were opened.

7:11 I beheld then because of the voice of the great words which the
horn spake: I beheld even till the beast was slain, and his body
destroyed, and given to the burning flame.

7:12 As concerning the rest of the beasts, they had their dominion
taken away: yet their lives were prolonged for a season and time.

7:13 I saw in the night visions, and, behold, one like the Son of man
came with the clouds of heaven, and came to the Ancient of days, and
they brought him near before him.

7:14 And there was given him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that
all people, nations, and languages, should serve him: his dominion is
an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom
that which shall not be destroyed.

7:15 I Daniel was grieved in my spirit in the midst of my body, and
the visions of my head troubled me.

7:16 I came near unto one of them that stood by, and asked him the
truth of all this. So he told me, and made me know the interpretation
of the things.

7:17 These great beasts, which are four, are four kings, which shall
arise out of the earth.

7:18 But the saints of the most High shall take the kingdom, and
possess the kingdom for ever, even for ever and ever.

7:19 Then I would know the truth of the fourth beast, which was
diverse from all the others, exceeding dreadful, whose teeth were of
iron, and his nails of brass; which devoured, brake in pieces, and
stamped the residue with his feet; 7:20 And of the ten horns that were
in his head, and of the other which came up, and before whom three
fell; even of that horn that had eyes, and a mouth that spake very
great things, whose look was more stout than his fellows.

7:21 I beheld, and the same horn made war with the saints, and
prevailed against them; 7:22 Until the Ancient of days came, and
judgment was given to the saints of the most High; and the time came
that the saints possessed the kingdom.

7:23 Thus he said, The fourth beast shall be the fourth kingdom upon
earth, which shall be diverse from all kingdoms, and shall devour the
whole earth, and shall tread it down, and break it in pieces.

7:24 And the ten horns out of this kingdom are ten kings that shall
arise: and another shall rise after them; and he shall be diverse from
the first, and he shall subdue three kings.

7:25 And he shall speak great words against the most High, and shall
wear out the saints of the most High, and think to change times and
laws: and they shall be given into his hand until a time and times and
the dividing of time.

7:26 But the judgment shall sit, and they shall take away his
dominion, to consume and to destroy it unto the end.

7:27 And the kingdom and dominion, and the greatness of the kingdom
under the whole heaven, shall be given to the people of the saints of
the most High, whose kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and all
dominions shall serve and obey him.

7:28 Hitherto is the end of the matter. As for me Daniel, my
cogitations much troubled me, and my countenance changed in me: but I
kept the matter in my heart.

8:1 In the third year of the reign of king Belshazzar a vision
appeared unto me, even unto me Daniel, after that which appeared unto
me at the first.

8:2 And I saw in a vision; and it came to pass, when I saw, that I was
at Shushan in the palace, which is in the province of Elam; and I saw
in a vision, and I was by the river of Ulai.

8:3 Then I lifted up mine eyes, and saw, and, behold, there stood
before the river a ram which had two horns: and the two horns were
high; but one was higher than the other, and the higher came up last.

8:4 I saw the ram pushing westward, and northward, and southward; so
that no beasts might stand before him, neither was there any that
could deliver out of his hand; but he did according to his will, and
became great.

8:5 And as I was considering, behold, an he goat came from the west on
the face of the whole earth, and touched not the ground: and the goat
had a notable horn between his eyes.

8:6 And he came to the ram that had two horns, which I had seen
standing before the river, and ran unto him in the fury of his power.

8:7 And I saw him come close unto the ram, and he was moved with
choler against him, and smote the ram, and brake his two horns: and
there was no power in the ram to stand before him, but he cast him
down to the ground, and stamped upon him: and there was none that
could deliver the ram out of his hand.

8:8 Therefore the he goat waxed very great: and when he was strong,
the great horn was broken; and for it came up four notable ones toward
the four winds of heaven.

8:9 And out of one of them came forth a little horn, which waxed
exceeding great, toward the south, and toward the east, and toward the
pleasant land.

8:10 And it waxed great, even to the host of heaven; and it cast down
some of the host and of the stars to the ground, and stamped upon
them.

8:11 Yea, he magnified himself even to the prince of the host, and by
him the daily sacrifice was taken away, and the place of the sanctuary
was cast down.

8:12 And an host was given him against the daily sacrifice by reason
of transgression, and it cast down the truth to the ground; and it
practised, and prospered.

8:13 Then I heard one saint speaking, and another saint said unto that
certain saint which spake, How long shall be the vision concerning the
daily sacrifice, and the transgression of desolation, to give both the
sanctuary and the host to be trodden under foot?  8:14 And he said
unto me, Unto two thousand and three hundred days; then shall the
sanctuary be cleansed.

8:15 And it came to pass, when I, even I Daniel, had seen the vision,
and sought for the meaning, then, behold, there stood before me as the
appearance of a man.

8:16 And I heard a man's voice between the banks of Ulai, which
called, and said, Gabriel, make this man to understand the vision.

8:17 So he came near where I stood: and when he came, I was afraid,
and fell upon my face: but he said unto me, Understand, O son of man:
for at the time of the end shall be the vision.

8:18 Now as he was speaking with me, I was in a deep sleep on my face
toward the ground: but he touched me, and set me upright.

8:19 And he said, Behold, I will make thee know what shall be in the
last end of the indignation: for at the time appointed the end shall
be.

8:20 The ram which thou sawest having two horns are the kings of Media
and Persia.

8:21 And the rough goat is the king of Grecia: and the great horn that
is between his eyes is the first king.

8:22 Now that being broken, whereas four stood up for it, four
kingdoms shall stand up out of the nation, but not in his power.

8:23 And in the latter time of their kingdom, when the transgressors
are come to the full, a king of fierce countenance, and understanding
dark sentences, shall stand up.

8:24 And his power shall be mighty, but not by his own power: and he
shall destroy wonderfully, and shall prosper, and practise, and shall
destroy the mighty and the holy people.

8:25 And through his policy also he shall cause craft to prosper in
his hand; and he shall magnify himself in his heart, and by peace
shall destroy many: he shall also stand up against the Prince of
princes; but he shall be broken without hand.

8:26 And the vision of the evening and the morning which was told is
true: wherefore shut thou up the vision; for it shall be for many
days.

8:27 And I Daniel fainted, and was sick certain days; afterward I rose
up, and did the king's business; and I was astonished at the vision,
but none understood it.

9:1 In the first year of Darius the son of Ahasuerus, of the seed of
the Medes, which was made king over the realm of the Chaldeans; 9:2 In
the first year of his reign I Daniel understood by books the number of
the years, whereof the word of the LORD came to Jeremiah the prophet,
that he would accomplish seventy years in the desolations of
Jerusalem.

9:3 And I set my face unto the Lord God, to seek by prayer and
supplications, with fasting, and sackcloth, and ashes: 9:4 And I
prayed unto the LORD my God, and made my confession, and said, O Lord,
the great and dreadful God, keeping the covenant and mercy to them
that love him, and to them that keep his commandments; 9:5 We have
sinned, and have committed iniquity, and have done wickedly, and have
rebelled, even by departing from thy precepts and from thy judgments:
9:6 Neither have we hearkened unto thy servants the prophets, which
spake in thy name to our kings, our princes, and our fathers, and to
all the people of the land.

9:7 O LORD, righteousness belongeth unto thee, but unto us confusion
of faces, as at this day; to the men of Judah, and to the inhabitants
of Jerusalem, and unto all Israel, that are near, and that are far
off, through all the countries whither thou hast driven them, because
of their trespass that they have trespassed against thee.

9:8 O Lord, to us belongeth confusion of face, to our kings, to our
princes, and to our fathers, because we have sinned against thee.

9:9 To the Lord our God belong mercies and forgivenesses, though we
have rebelled against him; 9:10 Neither have we obeyed the voice of
the LORD our God, to walk in his laws, which he set before us by his
servants the prophets.

9:11 Yea, all Israel have transgressed thy law, even by departing,
that they might not obey thy voice; therefore the curse is poured upon
us, and the oath that is written in the law of Moses the servant of
God, because we have sinned against him.

9:12 And he hath confirmed his words, which he spake against us, and
against our judges that judged us, by bringing upon us a great evil:
for under the whole heaven hath not been done as hath been done upon
Jerusalem.

9:13 As it is written in the law of Moses, all this evil is come upon
us: yet made we not our prayer before the LORD our God, that we might
turn from our iniquities, and understand thy truth.

9:14 Therefore hath the LORD watched upon the evil, and brought it
upon us: for the LORD our God is righteous in all his works which he
doeth: for we obeyed not his voice.

9:15 And now, O Lord our God, that hast brought thy people forth out
of the land of Egypt with a mighty hand, and hast gotten thee renown,
as at this day; we have sinned, we have done wickedly.

9:16 O LORD, according to all thy righteousness, I beseech thee, let
thine anger and thy fury be turned away from thy city Jerusalem, thy
holy mountain: because for our sins, and for the iniquities of our
fathers, Jerusalem and thy people are become a reproach to all that
are about us.

9:17 Now therefore, O our God, hear the prayer of thy servant, and his
supplications, and cause thy face to shine upon thy sanctuary that is
desolate, for the Lord's sake.

9:18 O my God, incline thine ear, and hear; open thine eyes, and
behold our desolations, and the city which is called by thy name: for
we do not present our supplications before thee for our
righteousnesses, but for thy great mercies.

9:19 O Lord, hear; O Lord, forgive; O Lord, hearken and do; defer not,
for thine own sake, O my God: for thy city and thy people are called
by thy name.

9:20 And whiles I was speaking, and praying, and confessing my sin and
the sin of my people Israel, and presenting my supplication before the
LORD my God for the holy mountain of my God; 9:21 Yea, whiles I was
speaking in prayer, even the man Gabriel, whom I had seen in the
vision at the beginning, being caused to fly swiftly, touched me about
the time of the evening oblation.

9:22 And he informed me, and talked with me, and said, O Daniel, I am
now come forth to give thee skill and understanding.

9:23 At the beginning of thy supplications the commandment came forth,
and I am come to shew thee; for thou art greatly beloved: therefore
understand the matter, and consider the vision.

9:24 Seventy weeks are determined upon thy people and upon thy holy
city, to finish the transgression, and to make an end of sins, and to
make reconciliation for iniquity, and to bring in everlasting
righteousness, and to seal up the vision and prophecy, and to anoint
the most Holy.

9:25 Know therefore and understand, that from the going forth of the
commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem unto the Messiah the
Prince shall be seven weeks, and threescore and two weeks: the street
shall be built again, and the wall, even in troublous times.

9:26 And after threescore and two weeks shall Messiah be cut off, but
not for himself: and the people of the prince that shall come shall
destroy the city and the sanctuary; and the end thereof shall be with
a flood, and unto the end of the war desolations are determined.

9:27 And he shall confirm the covenant with many for one week: and in
the midst of the week he shall cause the sacrifice and the oblation to
cease, and for the overspreading of abominations he shall make it
desolate, even until the consummation, and that determined shall be
poured upon the desolate.

10:1 In the third year of Cyrus king of Persia a thing was revealed
unto Daniel, whose name was called Belteshazzar; and the thing was
true, but the time appointed was long: and he understood the thing,
and had understanding of the vision.

10:2 In those days I Daniel was mourning three full weeks.

10:3 I ate no pleasant bread, neither came flesh nor wine in my mouth,
neither did I anoint myself at all, till three whole weeks were
fulfilled.

10:4 And in the four and twentieth day of the first month, as I was by
the side of the great river, which is Hiddekel; 10:5 Then I lifted up
mine eyes, and looked, and behold a certain man clothed in linen,
whose loins were girded with fine gold of Uphaz: 10:6 His body also
was like the beryl, and his face as the appearance of lightning, and
his eyes as lamps of fire, and his arms and his feet like in colour to
polished brass, and the voice of his words like the voice of a
multitude.

10:7 And I Daniel alone saw the vision: for the men that were with me
saw not the vision; but a great quaking fell upon them, so that they
fled to hide themselves.

10:8 Therefore I was left alone, and saw this great vision, and there
remained no strength in me: for my comeliness was turned in me into
corruption, and I retained no strength.

10:9 Yet heard I the voice of his words: and when I heard the voice of
his words, then was I in a deep sleep on my face, and my face toward
the ground.

10:10 And, behold, an hand touched me, which set me upon my knees and
upon the palms of my hands.

10:11 And he said unto me, O Daniel, a man greatly beloved, understand
the words that I speak unto thee, and stand upright: for unto thee am
I now sent.

And when he had spoken this word unto me, I stood trembling.

10:12 Then said he unto me, Fear not, Daniel: for from the first day
that thou didst set thine heart to understand, and to chasten thyself
before thy God, thy words were heard, and I am come for thy words.

10:13 But the prince of the kingdom of Persia withstood me one and
twenty days: but, lo, Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help
me; and I remained there with the kings of Persia.

10:14 Now I am come to make thee understand what shall befall thy
people in the latter days: for yet the vision is for many days.

10:15 And when he had spoken such words unto me, I set my face toward
the ground, and I became dumb.

10:16 And, behold, one like the similitude of the sons of men touched
my lips: then I opened my mouth, and spake, and said unto him that
stood before me, O my lord, by the vision my sorrows are turned upon
me, and I have retained no strength.

10:17 For how can the servant of this my lord talk with this my lord?
for as for me, straightway there remained no strength in me, neither
is there breath left in me.

10:18 Then there came again and touched me one like the appearance of
a man, and he strengthened me, 10:19 And said, O man greatly beloved,
fear not: peace be unto thee, be strong, yea, be strong. And when he
had spoken unto me, I was strengthened, and said, Let my lord speak;
for thou hast strengthened me.

10:20 Then said he, Knowest thou wherefore I come unto thee? and now
will I return to fight with the prince of Persia: and when I am gone
forth, lo, the prince of Grecia shall come.

10:21 But I will shew thee that which is noted in the scripture of
truth: and there is none that holdeth with me in these things, but
Michael your prince.

11:1 Also I in the first year of Darius the Mede, even I, stood to
confirm and to strengthen him.

11:2 And now will I shew thee the truth. Behold, there shall stand up
yet three kings in Persia; and the fourth shall be far richer than
they all: and by his strength through his riches he shall stir up all
against the realm of Grecia.

11:3 And a mighty king shall stand up, that shall rule with great
dominion, and do according to his will.

11:4 And when he shall stand up, his kingdom shall be broken, and
shall be divided toward the four winds of heaven; and not to his
posterity, nor according to his dominion which he ruled: for his
kingdom shall be plucked up, even for others beside those.

11:5 And the king of the south shall be strong, and one of his
princes; and he shall be strong above him, and have dominion; his
dominion shall be a great dominion.

11:6 And in the end of years they shall join themselves together; for
the king's daughter of the south shall come to the king of the north
to make an agreement: but she shall not retain the power of the arm;
neither shall he stand, nor his arm: but she shall be given up, and
they that brought her, and he that begat her, and he that strengthened
her in these times.

11:7 But out of a branch of her roots shall one stand up in his
estate, which shall come with an army, and shall enter into the
fortress of the king of the north, and shall deal against them, and
shall prevail: 11:8 And shall also carry captives into Egypt their
gods, with their princes, and with their precious vessels of silver
and of gold; and he shall continue more years than the king of the
north.

11:9 So the king of the south shall come into his kingdom, and shall
return into his own land.

11:10 But his sons shall be stirred up, and shall assemble a multitude
of great forces: and one shall certainly come, and overflow, and pass
through: then shall he return, and be stirred up, even to his
fortress.

11:11 And the king of the south shall be moved with choler, and shall
come forth and fight with him, even with the king of the north: and he
shall set forth a great multitude; but the multitude shall be given
into his hand.

11:12 And when he hath taken away the multitude, his heart shall be
lifted up; and he shall cast down many ten thousands: but he shall not
be strengthened by it.

11:13 For the king of the north shall return, and shall set forth a
multitude greater than the former, and shall certainly come after
certain years with a great army and with much riches.

11:14 And in those times there shall many stand up against the king of
the south: also the robbers of thy people shall exalt themselves to
establish the vision; but they shall fall.

11:15 So the king of the north shall come, and cast up a mount, and
take the most fenced cities: and the arms of the south shall not
withstand, neither his chosen people, neither shall there be any
strength to withstand.

11:16 But he that cometh against him shall do according to his own
will, and none shall stand before him: and he shall stand in the
glorious land, which by his hand shall be consumed.

11:17 He shall also set his face to enter with the strength of his
whole kingdom, and upright ones with him; thus shall he do: and he
shall give him the daughter of women, corrupting her: but she shall
not stand on his side, neither be for him.

11:18 After this shall he turn his face unto the isles, and shall take
many: but a prince for his own behalf shall cause the reproach offered
by him to cease; without his own reproach he shall cause it to turn
upon him.

11:19 Then he shall turn his face toward the fort of his own land: but
he shall stumble and fall, and not be found.

11:20 Then shall stand up in his estate a raiser of taxes in the glory
of the kingdom: but within few days he shall be destroyed, neither in
anger, nor in battle.

11:21 And in his estate shall stand up a vile person, to whom they
shall not give the honour of the kingdom: but he shall come in
peaceably, and obtain the kingdom by flatteries.

11:22 And with the arms of a flood shall they be overflown from before
him, and shall be broken; yea, also the prince of the covenant.

11:23 And after the league made with him he shall work deceitfully:
for he shall come up, and shall become strong with a small people.

11:24 He shall enter peaceably even upon the fattest places of the
province; and he shall do that which his fathers have not done, nor
his fathers' fathers; he shall scatter among them the prey, and spoil,
and riches: yea, and he shall forecast his devices against the strong
holds, even for a time.

11:25 And he shall stir up his power and his courage against the king
of the south with a great army; and the king of the south shall be
stirred up to battle with a very great and mighty army; but he shall
not stand: for they shall forecast devices against him.

11:26 Yea, they that feed of the portion of his meat shall destroy
him, and his army shall overflow: and many shall fall down slain.

11:27 And both of these kings' hearts shall be to do mischief, and
they shall speak lies at one table; but it shall not prosper: for yet
the end shall be at the time appointed.

11:28 Then shall he return into his land with great riches; and his
heart shall be against the holy covenant; and he shall do exploits,
and return to his own land.

11:29 At the time appointed he shall return, and come toward the
south; but it shall not be as the former, or as the latter.

11:30 For the ships of Chittim shall come against him: therefore he
shall be grieved, and return, and have indignation against the holy
covenant: so shall he do; he shall even return, and have intelligence
with them that forsake the holy covenant.

11:31 And arms shall stand on his part, and they shall pollute the
sanctuary of strength, and shall take away the daily sacrifice, and
they shall place the abomination that maketh desolate.

11:32 And such as do wickedly against the covenant shall he corrupt by
flatteries: but the people that do know their God shall be strong, and
do exploits.

11:33 And they that understand among the people shall instruct many:
yet they shall fall by the sword, and by flame, by captivity, and by
spoil, many days.

11:34 Now when they shall fall, they shall be holpen with a little
help: but many shall cleave to them with flatteries.

11:35 And some of them of understanding shall fall, to try them, and
to purge, and to make them white, even to the time of the end: because
it is yet for a time appointed.

11:36 And the king shall do according to his will; and he shall exalt
himself, and magnify himself above every god, and shall speak
marvellous things against the God of gods, and shall prosper till the
indignation be accomplished: for that that is determined shall be
done.

11:37 Neither shall he regard the God of his fathers, nor the desire
of women, nor regard any god: for he shall magnify himself above all.

11:38 But in his estate shall he honour the God of forces: and a god
whom his fathers knew not shall he honour with gold, and silver, and
with precious stones, and pleasant things.

11:39 Thus shall he do in the most strong holds with a strange god,
whom he shall acknowledge and increase with glory: and he shall cause
them to rule over many, and shall divide the land for gain.

11:40 And at the time of the end shall the king of the south push at
him: and the king of the north shall come against him like a
whirlwind, with chariots, and with horsemen, and with many ships; and
he shall enter into the countries, and shall overflow and pass over.

11:41 He shall enter also into the glorious land, and many countries
shall be overthrown: but these shall escape out of his hand, even
Edom, and Moab, and the chief of the children of Ammon.

11:42 He shall stretch forth his hand also upon the countries: and the
land of Egypt shall not escape.

11:43 But he shall have power over the treasures of gold and of
silver, and over all the precious things of Egypt: and the Libyans and
the Ethiopians shall be at his steps.

11:44 But tidings out of the east and out of the north shall trouble
him: therefore he shall go forth with great fury to destroy, and
utterly to make away many.

11:45 And he shall plant the tabernacles of his palace between the
seas in the glorious holy mountain; yet he shall come to his end, and
none shall help him.

12:1 And at that time shall Michael stand up, the great prince which
standeth for the children of thy people: and there shall be a time of
trouble, such as never was since there was a nation even to that same
time: and at that time thy people shall be delivered, every one that
shall be found written in the book.

12:2 And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake,
some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.

12:3 And they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the
firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for
ever and ever.

12:4 But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to
the time of the end: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be
increased.

12:5 Then I Daniel looked, and, behold, there stood other two, the one
on this side of the bank of the river, and the other on that side of
the bank of the river.

12:6 And one said to the man clothed in linen, which was upon the
waters of the river, How long shall it be to the end of these wonders?
12:7 And I heard the man clothed in linen, which was upon the waters
of the river, when he held up his right hand and his left hand unto
heaven, and sware by him that liveth for ever that it shall be for a
time, times, and an half; and when he shall have accomplished to
scatter the power of the holy people, all these things shall be
finished.

12:8 And I heard, but I understood not: then said I, O my Lord, what
shall be the end of these things?  12:9 And he said, Go thy way,
Daniel: for the words are closed up and sealed till the time of the
end.

12:10 Many shall be purified, and made white, and tried; but the
wicked shall do wickedly: and none of the wicked shall understand; but
the wise shall understand.

12:11 And from the time that the daily sacrifice shall be taken away,
and the abomination that maketh desolate set up, there shall be a
thousand two hundred and ninety days.

12:12 Blessed is he that waiteth, and cometh to the thousand three
hundred and five and thirty days.

12:13 But go thou thy way till the end be: for thou shalt rest,
and stand in thy lot at the end of the days.




Hosea


1:1 The word of the LORD that came unto Hosea, the son of Beeri, in
the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah, and in
the days of Jeroboam the son of Joash, king of Israel.

1:2 The beginning of the word of the LORD by Hosea. And the LORD said
to Hosea, Go, take unto thee a wife of whoredoms and children of
whoredoms: for the land hath committed great whoredom, departing from
the LORD.

1:3 So he went and took Gomer the daughter of Diblaim; which
conceived, and bare him a son.

1:4 And the LORD said unto him, Call his name Jezreel; for yet a
little while, and I will avenge the blood of Jezreel upon the house of
Jehu, and will cause to cease the kingdom of the house of Israel.

1:5 And it shall come to pass at that day, that I will break the bow
of Israel, in the valley of Jezreel.

1:6 And she conceived again, and bare a daughter. And God said unto
him, Call her name Loruhamah: for I will no more have mercy upon the
house of Israel; but I will utterly take them away.

1:7 But I will have mercy upon the house of Judah, and will save them
by the LORD their God, and will not save them by bow, nor by sword,
nor by battle, by horses, nor by horsemen.

1:8 Now when she had weaned Loruhamah, she conceived, and bare a son.

1:9 Then said God, Call his name Loammi: for ye are not my people, and
I will not be your God.

1:10 Yet the number of the children of Israel shall be as the sand of
the sea, which cannot be measured nor numbered; and it shall come to
pass, that in the place where it was said unto them, Ye are not my
people, there it shall be said unto them, Ye are the sons of the
living God.

1:11 Then shall the children of Judah and the children of Israel be
gathered together, and appoint themselves one head, and they shall
come up out of the land: for great shall be the day of Jezreel.

2:1 Say ye unto your brethren, Ammi; and to your sisters, Ruhamah.

2:2 Plead with your mother, plead: for she is not my wife, neither am
I her husband: let her therefore put away her whoredoms out of her
sight, and her adulteries from between her breasts; 2:3 Lest I strip
her naked, and set her as in the day that she was born, and make her
as a wilderness, and set her like a dry land, and slay her with
thirst.

2:4 And I will not have mercy upon her children; for they be the
children of whoredoms.

2:5 For their mother hath played the harlot: she that conceived them
hath done shamefully: for she said, I will go after my lovers, that
give me my bread and my water, my wool and my flax, mine oil and my
drink.

2:6 Therefore, behold, I will hedge up thy way with thorns, and make a
wall, that she shall not find her paths.

2:7 And she shall follow after her lovers, but she shall not overtake
them; and she shall seek them, but shall not find them: then shall she
say, I will go and return to my first husband; for then was it better
with me than now.

2:8 For she did not know that I gave her corn, and wine, and oil, and
multiplied her silver and gold, which they prepared for Baal.

2:9 Therefore will I return, and take away my corn in the time
thereof, and my wine in the season thereof, and will recover my wool
and my flax given to cover her nakedness.

2:10 And now will I discover her lewdness in the sight of her lovers,
and none shall deliver her out of mine hand.

2:11 I will also cause all her mirth to cease, her feast days, her new
moons, and her sabbaths, and all her solemn feasts.

2:12 And I will destroy her vines and her fig trees, whereof she hath
said, These are my rewards that my lovers have given me: and I will
make them a forest, and the beasts of the field shall eat them.

2:13 And I will visit upon her the days of Baalim, wherein she burned
incense to them, and she decked herself with her earrings and her
jewels, and she went after her lovers, and forgat me, saith the LORD.

2:14 Therefore, behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the
wilderness, and speak comfortably unto her.

2:15 And I will give her her vineyards from thence, and the valley of
Achor for a door of hope: and she shall sing there, as in the days of
her youth, and as in the day when she came up out of the land of
Egypt.

2:16 And it shall be at that day, saith the LORD, that thou shalt call
me Ishi; and shalt call me no more Baali.

2:17 For I will take away the names of Baalim out of her mouth, and
they shall no more be remembered by their name.

2:18 And in that day will I make a covenant for them with the beasts
of the field and with the fowls of heaven, and with the creeping
things of the ground: and I will break the bow and the sword and the
battle out of the earth, and will make them to lie down safely.

2:19 And I will betroth thee unto me for ever; yea, I will betroth
thee unto me in righteousness, and in judgment, and in lovingkindness,
and in mercies.

2:20 I will even betroth thee unto me in faithfulness: and thou shalt
know the LORD.

2:21 And it shall come to pass in that day, I will hear, saith the
LORD, I will hear the heavens, and they shall hear the earth; 2:22 And
the earth shall hear the corn, and the wine, and the oil; and they
shall hear Jezreel.

2:23 And I will sow her unto me in the earth; and I will have mercy
upon her that had not obtained mercy; and I will say to them which
were not my people, Thou art my people; and they shall say, Thou art
my God.

3:1 Then said the LORD unto me, Go yet, love a woman beloved of her
friend, yet an adulteress, according to the love of the LORD toward
the children of Israel, who look to other gods, and love flagons of
wine.

3:2 So I bought her to me for fifteen pieces of silver, and for an
homer of barley, and an half homer of barley: 3:3 And I said unto her,
Thou shalt abide for me many days; thou shalt not play the harlot, and
thou shalt not be for another man: so will I also be for thee.

3:4 For the children of Israel shall abide many days without a king,
and without a prince, and without a sacrifice, and without an image,
and without an ephod, and without teraphim: 3:5 Afterward shall the
children of Israel return, and seek the LORD their God, and David
their king; and shall fear the LORD and his goodness in the latter
days.

4:1 Hear the word of the LORD, ye children of Israel: for the LORD
hath a controversy with the inhabitants of the land, because there is
no truth, nor mercy, nor knowledge of God in the land.

4:2 By swearing, and lying, and killing, and stealing, and committing
adultery, they break out, and blood toucheth blood.

4:3 Therefore shall the land mourn, and every one that dwelleth
therein shall languish, with the beasts of the field, and with the
fowls of heaven; yea, the fishes of the sea also shall be taken away.

4:4 Yet let no man strive, nor reprove another: for thy people are as
they that strive with the priest.

4:5 Therefore shalt thou fall in the day, and the prophet also shall
fall with thee in the night, and I will destroy thy mother.

4:6 My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge: because thou hast
rejected knowledge, I will also reject thee, that thou shalt be no
priest to me: seeing thou hast forgotten the law of thy God, I will
also forget thy children.

4:7 As they were increased, so they sinned against me: therefore will
I change their glory into shame.

4:8 They eat up the sin of my people, and they set their heart on
their iniquity.

4:9 And there shall be, like people, like priest: and I will punish
them for their ways, and reward them their doings.

4:10 For they shall eat, and not have enough: they shall commit
whoredom, and shall not increase: because they have left off to take
heed to the LORD.

4:11 Whoredom and wine and new wine take away the heart.

4:12 My people ask counsel at their stocks, and their staff declareth
unto them: for the spirit of whoredoms hath caused them to err, and
they have gone a whoring from under their God.

4:13 They sacrifice upon the tops of the mountains, and burn incense
upon the hills, under oaks and poplars and elms, because the shadow
thereof is good: therefore your daughters shall commit whoredom, and
your spouses shall commit adultery.

4:14 I will not punish your daughters when they commit whoredom, nor
your spouses when they commit adultery: for themselves are separated
with whores, and they sacrifice with harlots: therefore the people
that doth not understand shall fall.

4:15 Though thou, Israel, play the harlot, yet let not Judah offend;
and come not ye unto Gilgal, neither go ye up to Bethaven, nor swear,
The LORD liveth.

4:16 For Israel slideth back as a backsliding heifer: now the LORD
will feed them as a lamb in a large place.

4:17 Ephraim is joined to idols: let him alone.

4:18 Their drink is sour: they have committed whoredom continually:
her rulers with shame do love, Give ye.

4:19 The wind hath bound her up in her wings, and they shall be
ashamed because of their sacrifices.

5:1 Hear ye this, O priests; and hearken, ye house of Israel; and give
ye ear, O house of the king; for judgment is toward you, because ye
have been a snare on Mizpah, and a net spread upon Tabor.

5:2 And the revolters are profound to make slaughter, though I have
been a rebuker of them all.

5:3 I know Ephraim, and Israel is not hid from me: for now, O Ephraim,
thou committest whoredom, and Israel is defiled.

5:4 They will not frame their doings to turn unto their God: for the
spirit of whoredoms is in the midst of them, and they have not known
the LORD.

5:5 And the pride of Israel doth testify to his face: therefore shall
Israel and Ephraim fall in their iniquity: Judah also shall fall with
them.

5:6 They shall go with their flocks and with their herds to seek the
LORD; but they shall not find him; he hath withdrawn himself from
them.

5:7 They have dealt treacherously against the LORD: for they have
begotten strange children: now shall a month devour them with their
portions.

5:8 Blow ye the cornet in Gibeah, and the trumpet in Ramah: cry aloud
at Bethaven, after thee, O Benjamin.

5:9 Ephraim shall be desolate in the day of rebuke: among the tribes
of Israel have I made known that which shall surely be.

5:10 The princes of Judah were like them that remove the bound:
therefore I will pour out my wrath upon them like water.

5:11 Ephraim is oppressed and broken in judgment, because he willingly
walked after the commandment.

5:12 Therefore will I be unto Ephraim as a moth, and to the house of
Judah as rottenness.

5:13 When Ephraim saw his sickness, and Judah saw his wound, then went
Ephraim to the Assyrian, and sent to king Jareb: yet could he not heal
you, nor cure you of your wound.

5:14 For I will be unto Ephraim as a lion, and as a young lion to the
house of Judah: I, even I, will tear and go away; I will take away,
and none shall rescue him.

5:15 I will go and return to my place, till they acknowledge their
offence, and seek my face: in their affliction they will seek me
early.

6:1 Come, and let us return unto the LORD: for he hath torn, and he
will heal us; he hath smitten, and he will bind us up.

6:2 After two days will he revive us: in the third day he will raise
us up, and we shall live in his sight.

6:3 Then shall we know, if we follow on to know the LORD: his going
forth is prepared as the morning; and he shall come unto us as the
rain, as the latter and former rain unto the earth.

6:4 O Ephraim, what shall I do unto thee? O Judah, what shall I do
unto thee? for your goodness is as a morning cloud, and as the early
dew it goeth away.

6:5 Therefore have I hewed them by the prophets; I have slain them by
the words of my mouth: and thy judgments are as the light that goeth
forth.

6:6 For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God
more than burnt offerings.

6:7 But they like men have transgressed the covenant: there have they
dealt treacherously against me.

6:8 Gilead is a city of them that work iniquity, and is polluted with
blood.

6:9 And as troops of robbers wait for a man, so the company of priests
murder in the way by consent: for they commit lewdness.

6:10 I have seen an horrible thing in the house of Israel: there is
the whoredom of Ephraim, Israel is defiled.

6:11 Also, O Judah, he hath set an harvest for thee, when I returned
the captivity of my people.

7:1 When I would have healed Israel, then the iniquity of Ephraim was
discovered, and the wickedness of Samaria: for they commit falsehood;
and the thief cometh in, and the troop of robbers spoileth without.

7:2 And they consider not in their hearts that I remember all their
wickedness: now their own doings have beset them about; they are
before my face.

7:3 They make the king glad with their wickedness, and the princes
with their lies.

7:4 They are all adulterers, as an oven heated by the baker, who
ceaseth from raising after he hath kneaded the dough, until it be
leavened.

7:5 In the day of our king the princes have made him sick with bottles
of wine; he stretched out his hand with scorners.

7:6 For they have made ready their heart like an oven, whiles they lie
in wait: their baker sleepeth all the night; in the morning it burneth
as a flaming fire.

7:7 They are all hot as an oven, and have devoured their judges; all
their kings are fallen: there is none among them that calleth unto me.

7:8 Ephraim, he hath mixed himself among the people; Ephraim is a cake
not turned.

7:9 Strangers have devoured his strength, and he knoweth it not: yea,
gray hairs are here and there upon him, yet he knoweth not.

7:10 And the pride of Israel testifieth to his face: and they do not
return to the LORD their God, nor seek him for all this.

7:11 Ephraim also is like a silly dove without heart: they call to
Egypt, they go to Assyria.

7:12 When they shall go, I will spread my net upon them; I will bring
them down as the fowls of the heaven; I will chastise them, as their
congregation hath heard.

7:13 Woe unto them! for they have fled from me: destruction unto them!
because they have transgressed against me: though I have redeemed
them, yet they have spoken lies against me.

7:14 And they have not cried unto me with their heart, when they
howled upon their beds: they assemble themselves for corn and wine,
and they rebel against me.

7:15 Though I have bound and strengthened their arms, yet do they
imagine mischief against me.

7:16 They return, but not to the most High: they are like a deceitful
bow: their princes shall fall by the sword for the rage of their
tongue: this shall be their derision in the land of Egypt.

8:1 Set the trumpet to thy mouth. He shall come as an eagle against
the house of the LORD, because they have transgressed my covenant, and
trespassed against my law.

8:2 Israel shall cry unto me, My God, we know thee.

8:3 Israel hath cast off the thing that is good: the enemy shall
pursue him.

8:4 They have set up kings, but not by me: they have made princes, and
I knew it not: of their silver and their gold have they made them
idols, that they may be cut off.

8:5 Thy calf, O Samaria, hath cast thee off; mine anger is kindled
against them: how long will it be ere they attain to innocency?  8:6
For from Israel was it also: the workman made it; therefore it is not
God: but the calf of Samaria shall be broken in pieces.

8:7 For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind: it
hath no stalk; the bud shall yield no meal: if so be it yield, the
strangers shall swallow it up.

8:8 Israel is swallowed up: now shall they be among the Gentiles as a
vessel wherein is no pleasure.

8:9 For they are gone up to Assyria, a wild ass alone by himself:
Ephraim hath hired lovers.

8:10 Yea, though they have hired among the nations, now will I gather
them, and they shall sorrow a little for the burden of the king of
princes.

8:11 Because Ephraim hath made many altars to sin, altars shall be
unto him to sin.

8:12 I have written to him the great things of my law, but they were
counted as a strange thing.

8:13 They sacrifice flesh for the sacrifices of mine offerings, and
eat it; but the LORD accepteth them not; now will he remember their
iniquity, and visit their sins: they shall return to Egypt.

8:14 For Israel hath forgotten his Maker, and buildeth temples; and
Judah hath multiplied fenced cities: but I will send a fire upon his
cities, and it shall devour the palaces thereof.

9:1 Rejoice not, O Israel, for joy, as other people: for thou hast
gone a whoring from thy God, thou hast loved a reward upon every
cornfloor.

9:2 The floor and the winepress shall not feed them, and the new wine
shall fail in her.

9:3 They shall not dwell in the LORD's land; but Ephraim shall return
to Egypt, and they shall eat unclean things in Assyria.

9:4 They shall not offer wine offerings to the LORD, neither shall
they be pleasing unto him: their sacrifices shall be unto them as the
bread of mourners; all that eat thereof shall be polluted: for their
bread for their soul shall not come into the house of the LORD.

9:5 What will ye do in the solemn day, and in the day of the feast of
the LORD?  9:6 For, lo, they are gone because of destruction: Egypt
shall gather them up, Memphis shall bury them: the pleasant places for
their silver, nettles shall possess them: thorns shall be in their
tabernacles.

9:7 The days of visitation are come, the days of recompence are come;
Israel shall know it: the prophet is a fool, the spiritual man is mad,
for the multitude of thine iniquity, and the great hatred.

9:8 The watchman of Ephraim was with my God: but the prophet is a
snare of a fowler in all his ways, and hatred in the house of his God.

9:9 They have deeply corrupted themselves, as in the days of Gibeah:
therefore he will remember their iniquity, he will visit their sins.

9:10 I found Israel like grapes in the wilderness; I saw your fathers
as the firstripe in the fig tree at her first time: but they went to
Baalpeor, and separated themselves unto that shame; and their
abominations were according as they loved.

9:11 As for Ephraim, their glory shall fly away like a bird, from the
birth, and from the womb, and from the conception.

9:12 Though they bring up their children, yet will I bereave them,
that there shall not be a man left: yea, woe also to them when I
depart from them!  9:13 Ephraim, as I saw Tyrus, is planted in a
pleasant place: but Ephraim shall bring forth his children to the
murderer.

9:14 Give them, O LORD: what wilt thou give? give them a miscarrying
womb and dry breasts.

9:15 All their wickedness is in Gilgal: for there I hated them: for
the wickedness of their doings I will drive them out of mine house, I
will love them no more: all their princes are revolters.

9:16 Ephraim is smitten, their root is dried up, they shall bear no
fruit: yea, though they bring forth, yet will I slay even the beloved
fruit of their womb.

9:17 My God will cast them away, because they did not hearken unto
him: and they shall be wanderers among the nations.

10:1 Israel is an empty vine, he bringeth forth fruit unto himself:
according to the multitude of his fruit he hath increased the altars;
according to the goodness of his land they have made goodly images.

10:2 Their heart is divided; now shall they be found faulty: he shall
break down their altars, he shall spoil their images.

10:3 For now they shall say, We have no king, because we feared not
the LORD; what then should a king do to us?  10:4 They have spoken
words, swearing falsely in making a covenant: thus judgment springeth
up as hemlock in the furrows of the field.

10:5 The inhabitants of Samaria shall fear because of the calves of
Bethaven: for the people thereof shall mourn over it, and the priests
thereof that rejoiced on it, for the glory thereof, because it is
departed from it.

10:6 It shall be also carried unto Assyria for a present to king
Jareb: Ephraim shall receive shame, and Israel shall be ashamed of his
own counsel.

10:7 As for Samaria, her king is cut off as the foam upon the water.

10:8 The high places also of Aven, the sin of Israel, shall be
destroyed: the thorn and the thistle shall come up on their altars;
and they shall say to the mountains, Cover us; and to the hills, Fall
on us.

10:9 O Israel, thou hast sinned from the days of Gibeah: there they
stood: the battle in Gibeah against the children of iniquity did not
overtake them.

10:10 It is in my desire that I should chastise them; and the people
shall be gathered against them, when they shall bind themselves in
their two furrows.

10:11 And Ephraim is as an heifer that is taught, and loveth to tread
out the corn; but I passed over upon her fair neck: I will make
Ephraim to ride; Judah shall plow, and Jacob shall break his clods.

10:12 Sow to yourselves in righteousness, reap in mercy; break up your
fallow ground: for it is time to seek the LORD, till he come and rain
righteousness upon you.

10:13 Ye have plowed wickedness, ye have reaped iniquity; ye have
eaten the fruit of lies: because thou didst trust in thy way, in the
multitude of thy mighty men.

10:14 Therefore shall a tumult arise among thy people, and all thy
fortresses shall be spoiled, as Shalman spoiled Betharbel in the day
of battle: the mother was dashed in pieces upon her children.

10:15 So shall Bethel do unto you because of your great wickedness: in
a morning shall the king of Israel utterly be cut off.

11:1 When Israel was a child, then I loved him, and called my son out
of Egypt.

11:2 As they called them, so they went from them: they sacrificed unto
Baalim, and burned incense to graven images.

11:3 I taught Ephraim also to go, taking them by their arms; but they
knew not that I healed them.

11:4 I drew them with cords of a man, with bands of love: and I was to
them as they that take off the yoke on their jaws, and I laid meat
unto them.

11:5 He shall not return into the land of Egypt, and the Assyrian
shall be his king, because they refused to return.

11:6 And the sword shall abide on his cities, and shall consume his
branches, and devour them, because of their own counsels.

11:7 And my people are bent to backsliding from me: though they called
them to the most High, none at all would exalt him.

11:8 How shall I give thee up, Ephraim? how shall I deliver thee,
Israel?  how shall I make thee as Admah? how shall I set thee as
Zeboim? mine heart is turned within me, my repentings are kindled
together.

11:9 I will not execute the fierceness of mine anger, I will not
return to destroy Ephraim: for I am God, and not man; the Holy One in
the midst of thee: and I will not enter into the city.

11:10 They shall walk after the LORD: he shall roar like a lion: when
he shall roar, then the children shall tremble from the west.

11:11 They shall tremble as a bird out of Egypt, and as a dove out of
the land of Assyria: and I will place them in their houses, saith the
LORD.

11:12 Ephraim compasseth me about with lies, and the house of Israel
with deceit: but Judah yet ruleth with God, and is faithful with the
saints.

12:1 Ephraim feedeth on wind, and followeth after the east wind: he
daily increaseth lies and desolation; and they do make a covenant with
the Assyrians, and oil is carried into Egypt.

12:2 The LORD hath also a controversy with Judah, and will punish
Jacob according to his ways; according to his doings will he
recompense him.

12:3 He took his brother by the heel in the womb, and by his strength
he had power with God: 12:4 Yea, he had power over the angel, and
prevailed: he wept, and made supplication unto him: he found him in
Bethel, and there he spake with us; 12:5 Even the LORD God of hosts;
the LORD is his memorial.

12:6 Therefore turn thou to thy God: keep mercy and judgment and wait
on thy God continually.

12:7 He is a merchant, the balances of deceit are in his hand: he
loveth to oppress.

12:8 And Ephraim said, Yet I am become rich, I have found me out
substance: in all my labours they shall find none iniquity in me that
were sin.

12:9 And I that am the LORD thy God from the land of Egypt will yet
make thee to dwell in tabernacles, as in the days of the solemn feast.

12:10 I have also spoken by the prophets, and I have multiplied
visions, and used similitudes, by the ministry of the prophets.

12:11 Is there iniquity in Gilead? surely they are vanity: they
sacrifice bullocks in Gilgal; yea, their altars are as heaps in the
furrows of the fields.

12:12 And Jacob fled into the country of Syria, and Israel served for
a wife, and for a wife he kept sheep.

12:13 And by a prophet the LORD brought Israel out of Egypt, and by a
prophet was he preserved.

12:14 Ephraim provoked him to anger most bitterly: therefore shall he
leave his blood upon him, and his reproach shall his LORD return unto
him.

13:1 When Ephraim spake trembling, he exalted himself in Israel; but
when he offended in Baal, he died.

13:2 And now they sin more and more, and have made them molten images
of their silver, and idols according to their own understanding, all
of it the work of the craftsmen: they say of them, Let the men that
sacrifice kiss the calves.

13:3 Therefore they shall be as the morning cloud and as the early dew
that passeth away, as the chaff that is driven with the whirlwind out
of the floor, and as the smoke out of the chimney.

13:4 Yet I am the LORD thy God from the land of Egypt, and thou shalt
know no god but me: for there is no saviour beside me.

13:5 I did know thee in the wilderness, in the land of great drought.

13:6 According to their pasture, so were they filled; they were
filled, and their heart was exalted; therefore have they forgotten me.

13:7 Therefore I will be unto them as a lion: as a leopard by the way
will I observe them: 13:8 I will meet them as a bear that is bereaved
of her whelps, and will rend the caul of their heart, and there will I
devour them like a lion: the wild beast shall tear them.

13:9 O Israel, thou hast destroyed thyself; but in me is thine help.

13:10 I will be thy king: where is any other that may save thee in all
thy cities? and thy judges of whom thou saidst, Give me a king and
princes?  13:11 I gave thee a king in mine anger, and took him away in
my wrath.

13:12 The iniquity of Ephraim is bound up; his sin is hid.

13:13 The sorrows of a travailing woman shall come upon him: he is an
unwise son; for he should not stay long in the place of the breaking
forth of children.

13:14 I will ransom them from the power of the grave; I will redeem
them from death: O death, I will be thy plagues; O grave, I will be
thy destruction: repentance shall be hid from mine eyes.

13:15 Though he be fruitful among his brethren, an east wind shall
come, the wind of the LORD shall come up from the wilderness, and his
spring shall become dry, and his fountain shall be dried up: he shall
spoil the treasure of all pleasant vessels.

13:16 Samaria shall become desolate; for she hath rebelled against her
God: they shall fall by the sword: their infants shall be dashed in
pieces, and their women with child shall be ripped up.

14:1 O israel, return unto the LORD thy God; for thou hast fallen by
thine iniquity.

14:2 Take with you words, and turn to the LORD: say unto him, Take
away all iniquity, and receive us graciously: so will we render the
calves of our lips.

14:3 Asshur shall not save us; we will not ride upon horses: neither
will we say any more to the work of our hands, Ye are our gods: for in
thee the fatherless findeth mercy.

14:4 I will heal their backsliding, I will love them freely: for mine
anger is turned away from him.

14:5 I will be as the dew unto Israel: he shall grow as the lily, and
cast forth his roots as Lebanon.

14:6 His branches shall spread, and his beauty shall be as the olive
tree, and his smell as Lebanon.

14:7 They that dwell under his shadow shall return; they shall revive
as the corn, and grow as the vine: the scent thereof shall be as the
wine of Lebanon.

14:8 Ephraim shall say, What have I to do any more with idols? I have
heard him, and observed him: I am like a green fir tree. From me is
thy fruit found.

14:9 Who is wise, and he shall understand these things? prudent, and
he shall know them? for the ways of the LORD are right, and the just
shall walk in them: but the transgressors shall fall therein.




Joel


1:1 The word of the LORD that came to Joel the son of Pethuel.

1:2 Hear this, ye old men, and give ear, all ye inhabitants of the land.

Hath this been in your days, or even in the days of your fathers?  1:3
Tell ye your children of it, and let your children tell their
children, and their children another generation.

1:4 That which the palmerworm hath left hath the locust eaten; and
that which the locust hath left hath the cankerworm eaten; and that
which the cankerworm hath left hath the caterpiller eaten.

1:5 Awake, ye drunkards, and weep; and howl, all ye drinkers of wine,
because of the new wine; for it is cut off from your mouth.

1:6 For a nation is come up upon my land, strong, and without number,
whose teeth are the teeth of a lion, and he hath the cheek teeth of a
great lion.

1:7 He hath laid my vine waste, and barked my fig tree: he hath made
it clean bare, and cast it away; the branches thereof are made white.

1:8 Lament like a virgin girded with sackcloth for the husband of her
youth.

1:9 The meat offering and the drink offering is cut off from the house
of the LORD; the priests, the LORD's ministers, mourn.

1:10 The field is wasted, the land mourneth; for the corn is wasted:
the new wine is dried up, the oil languisheth.

1:11 Be ye ashamed, O ye husbandmen; howl, O ye vinedressers, for the
wheat and for the barley; because the harvest of the field is
perished.

1:12 The vine is dried up, and the fig tree languisheth; the
pomegranate tree, the palm tree also, and the apple tree, even all the
trees of the field, are withered: because joy is withered away from
the sons of men.

1:13 Gird yourselves, and lament, ye priests: howl, ye ministers of
the altar: come, lie all night in sackcloth, ye ministers of my God:
for the meat offering and the drink offering is withholden from the
house of your God.

1:14 Sanctify ye a fast, call a solemn assembly, gather the elders and
all the inhabitants of the land into the house of the LORD your God,
and cry unto the LORD, 1:15 Alas for the day! for the day of the LORD
is at hand, and as a destruction from the Almighty shall it come.

1:16 Is not the meat cut off before our eyes, yea, joy and gladness
from the house of our God?  1:17 The seed is rotten under their clods,
the garners are laid desolate, the barns are broken down; for the corn
is withered.

1:18 How do the beasts groan! the herds of cattle are perplexed,
because they have no pasture; yea, the flocks of sheep are made
desolate.

1:19 O LORD, to thee will I cry: for the fire hath devoured the
pastures of the wilderness, and the flame hath burned all the trees of
the field.

1:20 The beasts of the field cry also unto thee: for the rivers of
waters are dried up, and the fire hath devoured the pastures of the
wilderness.

2:1 Blow ye the trumpet in Zion, and sound an alarm in my holy
mountain: let all the inhabitants of the land tremble: for the day of
the LORD cometh, for it is nigh at hand; 2:2 A day of darkness and of
gloominess, a day of clouds and of thick darkness, as the morning
spread upon the mountains: a great people and a strong; there hath not
been ever the like, neither shall be any more after it, even to the
years of many generations.

2:3 A fire devoureth before them; and behind them a flame burneth: the
land is as the garden of Eden before them, and behind them a desolate
wilderness; yea, and nothing shall escape them.

2:4 The appearance of them is as the appearance of horses; and as
horsemen, so shall they run.

2:5 Like the noise of chariots on the tops of mountains shall they
leap, like the noise of a flame of fire that devoureth the stubble, as
a strong people set in battle array.

2:6 Before their face the people shall be much pained: all faces shall
gather blackness.

2:7 They shall run like mighty men; they shall climb the wall like men
of war; and they shall march every one on his ways, and they shall not
break their ranks: 2:8 Neither shall one thrust another; they shall
walk every one in his path: and when they fall upon the sword, they
shall not be wounded.

2:9 They shall run to and fro in the city; they shall run upon the
wall, they shall climb up upon the houses; they shall enter in at the
windows like a thief.

2:10 The earth shall quake before them; the heavens shall tremble: the
sun and the moon shall be dark, and the stars shall withdraw their
shining: 2:11 And the LORD shall utter his voice before his army: for
his camp is very great: for he is strong that executeth his word: for
the day of the LORD is great and very terrible; and who can abide it?
2:12 Therefore also now, saith the LORD, turn ye even to me with all
your heart, and with fasting, and with weeping, and with mourning:
2:13 And rend your heart, and not your garments, and turn unto the
LORD your God: for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of
great kindness, and repenteth him of the evil.

2:14 Who knoweth if he will return and repent, and leave a blessing
behind him; even a meat offering and a drink offering unto the LORD
your God?  2:15 Blow the trumpet in Zion, sanctify a fast, call a
solemn assembly: 2:16 Gather the people, sanctify the congregation,
assemble the elders, gather the children, and those that suck the
breasts: let the bridegroom go forth of his chamber, and the bride out
of her closet.

2:17 Let the priests, the ministers of the LORD, weep between the
porch and the altar, and let them say, Spare thy people, O LORD, and
give not thine heritage to reproach, that the heathen should rule over
them: wherefore should they say among the people, Where is their God?
2:18 Then will the LORD be jealous for his land, and pity his people.

2:19 Yea, the LORD will answer and say unto his people, Behold, I will
send you corn, and wine, and oil, and ye shall be satisfied therewith:
and I will no more make you a reproach among the heathen: 2:20 But I
will remove far off from you the northern army, and will drive him
into a land barren and desolate, with his face toward the east sea,
and his hinder part toward the utmost sea, and his stink shall come
up, and his ill savour shall come up, because he hath done great
things.

2:21 Fear not, O land; be glad and rejoice: for the LORD will do great
things.

2:22 Be not afraid, ye beasts of the field: for the pastures of the
wilderness do spring, for the tree beareth her fruit, the fig tree and
the vine do yield their strength.

2:23 Be glad then, ye children of Zion, and rejoice in the LORD your
God: for he hath given you the former rain moderately, and he will
cause to come down for you the rain, the former rain, and the latter
rain in the first month.

2:24 And the floors shall be full of wheat, and the vats shall
overflow with wine and oil.

2:25 And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten,
the cankerworm, and the caterpiller, and the palmerworm, my great army
which I sent among you.

2:26 And ye shall eat in plenty, and be satisfied, and praise the name
of the LORD your God, that hath dealt wondrously with you: and my
people shall never be ashamed.

2:27 And ye shall know that I am in the midst of Israel, and that I am
the LORD your God, and none else: and my people shall never be
ashamed.

2:28 And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my
spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall
prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see
visions: 2:29 And also upon the servants and upon the handmaids in
those days will I pour out my spirit.

2:30 And I will shew wonders in the heavens and in the earth, blood,
and fire, and pillars of smoke.

2:31 The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood,
before the great and terrible day of the LORD come.

2:32 And it shall come to pass, that whosoever shall call on the name
of the LORD shall be delivered: for in mount Zion and in Jerusalem
shall be deliverance, as the LORD hath said, and in the remnant whom
the LORD shall call.

3:1 For, behold, in those days, and in that time, when I shall bring
again the captivity of Judah and Jerusalem, 3:2 I will also gather all
nations, and will bring them down into the valley of Jehoshaphat, and
will plead with them there for my people and for my heritage Israel,
whom they have scattered among the nations, and parted my land.

3:3 And they have cast lots for my people; and have given a boy for an
harlot, and sold a girl for wine, that they might drink.

3:4 Yea, and what have ye to do with me, O Tyre, and Zidon, and all
the coasts of Palestine? will ye render me a recompence? and if ye
recompense me, swiftly and speedily will I return your recompence upon
your own head; 3:5 Because ye have taken my silver and my gold, and
have carried into your temples my goodly pleasant things: 3:6 The
children also of Judah and the children of Jerusalem have ye sold unto
the Grecians, that ye might remove them far from their border.

3:7 Behold, I will raise them out of the place whither ye have sold
them, and will return your recompence upon your own head: 3:8 And I
will sell your sons and your daughters into the hand of the children
of Judah, and they shall sell them to the Sabeans, to a people far
off: for the LORD hath spoken it.

3:9 Proclaim ye this among the Gentiles; Prepare war, wake up the
mighty men, let all the men of war draw near; let them come up: 3:10
Beat your plowshares into swords and your pruninghooks into spears:
let the weak say, I am strong.

3:11 Assemble yourselves, and come, all ye heathen, and gather
yourselves together round about: thither cause thy mighty ones to come
down, O LORD.

3:12 Let the heathen be wakened, and come up to the valley of
Jehoshaphat: for there will I sit to judge all the heathen round
about.

3:13 Put ye in the sickle, for the harvest is ripe: come, get you
down; for the press is full, the fats overflow; for their wickedness
is great.

3:14 Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision: for the day of
the LORD is near in the valley of decision.

3:15 The sun and the moon shall be darkened, and the stars shall
withdraw their shining.

3:16 The LORD also shall roar out of Zion, and utter his voice from
Jerusalem; and the heavens and the earth shall shake: but the LORD
will be the hope of his people, and the strength of the children of
Israel.

3:17 So shall ye know that I am the LORD your God dwelling in Zion, my
holy mountain: then shall Jerusalem be holy, and there shall no
strangers pass through her any more.

3:18 And it shall come to pass in that day, that the mountains shall
drop down new wine, and the hills shall flow with milk, and all the
rivers of Judah shall flow with waters, and a fountain shall come
forth out of the house of the LORD, and shall water the valley of
Shittim.

3:19 Egypt shall be a desolation, and Edom shall be a desolate
wilderness, for the violence against the children of Judah, because
they have shed innocent blood in their land.

3:20 But Judah shall dwell for ever, and Jerusalem from generation to
generation.

3:21 For I will cleanse their blood that I have not cleansed: for the
LORD dwelleth in Zion.




Amos


1:1 The words of Amos, who was among the herdmen of Tekoa, which he
saw concerning Israel in the days of Uzziah king of Judah, and in the
days of Jeroboam the son of Joash king of Israel, two years before the
earthquake.

1:2 And he said, The LORD will roar from Zion, and utter his voice
from Jerusalem; and the habitations of the shepherds shall mourn, and
the top of Carmel shall wither.

1:3 Thus saith the LORD; For three transgressions of Damascus, and for
four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof; because they have
threshed Gilead with threshing instruments of iron: 1:4 But I will
send a fire into the house of Hazael, which shall devour the palaces
of Benhadad.

1:5 I will break also the bar of Damascus, and cut off the inhabitant
from the plain of Aven, and him that holdeth the sceptre from the
house of Eden: and the people of Syria shall go into captivity unto
Kir, saith the LORD.

1:6 Thus saith the LORD; For three transgressions of Gaza, and for
four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof; because they
carried away captive the whole captivity, to deliver them up to Edom:
1:7 But I will send a fire on the wall of Gaza, which shall devour the
palaces thereof: 1:8 And I will cut off the inhabitant from Ashdod,
and him that holdeth the sceptre from Ashkelon, and I will turn mine
hand against Ekron: and the remnant of the Philistines shall perish,
saith the Lord GOD.

1:9 Thus saith the LORD; For three transgressions of Tyrus, and for
four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof; because they
delivered up the whole captivity to Edom, and remembered not the
brotherly covenant: 1:10 But I will send a fire on the wall of Tyrus,
which shall devour the palaces thereof.

1:11 Thus saith the LORD; For three transgressions of Edom, and for
four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof; because he did
pursue his brother with the sword, and did cast off all pity, and his
anger did tear perpetually, and he kept his wrath for ever: 1:12 But I
will send a fire upon Teman, which shall devour the palaces of Bozrah.

1:13 Thus saith the LORD; For three transgressions of the children of
Ammon, and for four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof;
because they have ripped up the women with child of Gilead, that they
might enlarge their border: 1:14 But I will kindle a fire in the wall
of Rabbah, and it shall devour the palaces thereof, with shouting in
the day of battle, with a tempest in the day of the whirlwind: 1:15
And their king shall go into captivity, he and his princes together,
saith the LORD.

2:1 Thus saith the LORD; For three transgressions of Moab, and for
four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof; because he burned
the bones of the king of Edom into lime: 2:2 But I will send a fire
upon Moab, and it shall devour the palaces of Kirioth: and Moab shall
die with tumult, with shouting, and with the sound of the trumpet: 2:3
And I will cut off the judge from the midst thereof, and will slay all
the princes thereof with him, saith the LORD.

2:4 Thus saith the LORD; For three transgressions of Judah, and for
four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof; because they have
despised the law of the LORD, and have not kept his commandments, and
their lies caused them to err, after the which their fathers have
walked: 2:5 But I will send a fire upon Judah, and it shall devour the
palaces of Jerusalem.

2:6 Thus saith the LORD; For three transgressions of Israel, and for
four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof; because they sold
the righteous for silver, and the poor for a pair of shoes; 2:7 That
pant after the dust of the earth on the head of the poor, and turn
aside the way of the meek: and a man and his father will go in unto
the same maid, to profane my holy name: 2:8 And they lay themselves
down upon clothes laid to pledge by every altar, and they drink the
wine of the condemned in the house of their god.

2:9 Yet destroyed I the Amorite before them, whose height was like the
height of the cedars, and he was strong as the oaks; yet I destroyed
his fruit from above, and his roots from beneath.

2:10 Also I brought you up from the land of Egypt, and led you forty
years through the wilderness, to possess the land of the Amorite.

2:11 And I raised up of your sons for prophets, and of your young men
for Nazarites. Is it not even thus, O ye children of Israel? saith the
LORD.

2:12 But ye gave the Nazarites wine to drink; and commanded the
prophets, saying, Prophesy not.

2:13 Behold, I am pressed under you, as a cart is pressed that is full
of sheaves.

2:14 Therefore the flight shall perish from the swift, and the strong
shall not strengthen his force, neither shall the mighty deliver
himself: 2:15 Neither shall he stand that handleth the bow; and he
that is swift of foot shall not deliver himself: neither shall he that
rideth the horse deliver himself.

2:16 And he that is courageous among the mighty shall flee away naked
in that day, saith the LORD.

3:1 Hear this word that the LORD hath spoken against you, O children
of Israel, against the whole family which I brought up from the land
of Egypt, saying, 3:2 You only have I known of all the families of the
earth: therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities.

3:3 Can two walk together, except they be agreed?  3:4 Will a lion
roar in the forest, when he hath no prey? will a young lion cry out of
his den, if he have taken nothing?  3:5 Can a bird fall in a snare
upon the earth, where no gin is for him?  shall one take up a snare
from the earth, and have taken nothing at all?  3:6 Shall a trumpet be
blown in the city, and the people not be afraid?  shall there be evil
in a city, and the LORD hath not done it?  3:7 Surely the Lord GOD
will do nothing, but he revealeth his secret unto his servants the
prophets.

3:8 The lion hath roared, who will not fear? the Lord GOD hath spoken,
who can but prophesy?  3:9 Publish in the palaces at Ashdod, and in
the palaces in the land of Egypt, and say, Assemble yourselves upon
the mountains of Samaria, and behold the great tumults in the midst
thereof, and the oppressed in the midst thereof.

3:10 For they know not to do right, saith the LORD, who store up
violence and robbery in their palaces.

3:11 Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD; An adversary there shall be
even round about the land; and he shall bring down thy strength from
thee, and thy palaces shall be spoiled.

3:12 Thus saith the LORD; As the shepherd taketh out of the mouth of
the lion two legs, or a piece of an ear; so shall the children of
Israel be taken out that dwell in Samaria in the corner of a bed, and
in Damascus in a couch.

3:13 Hear ye, and testify in the house of Jacob, saith the Lord GOD,
the God of hosts, 3:14 That in the day that I shall visit the
transgressions of Israel upon him I will also visit the altars of
Bethel: and the horns of the altar shall be cut off, and fall to the
ground.

3:15 And I will smite the winter house with the summer house; and the
houses of ivory shall perish, and the great houses shall have an end,
saith the LORD.

4:1 Hear this word, ye kine of Bashan, that are in the mountain of
Samaria, which oppress the poor, which crush the needy, which say to
their masters, Bring, and let us drink.

4:2 The Lord GOD hath sworn by his holiness, that, lo, the days shall
come upon you, that he will take you away with hooks, and your
posterity with fishhooks.

4:3 And ye shall go out at the breaches, every cow at that which is
before her; and ye shall cast them into the palace, saith the LORD.

4:4 Come to Bethel, and transgress; at Gilgal multiply transgression;
and bring your sacrifices every morning, and your tithes after three
years: 4:5 And offer a sacrifice of thanksgiving with leaven, and
proclaim and publish the free offerings: for this liketh you, O ye
children of Israel, saith the Lord GOD.

4:6 And I also have given you cleanness of teeth in all your cities,
and want of bread in all your places: yet have ye not returned unto
me, saith the LORD.

4:7 And also I have withholden the rain from you, when there were yet
three months to the harvest: and I caused it to rain upon one city,
and caused it not to rain upon another city: one piece was rained
upon, and the piece whereupon it rained not withered.

4:8 So two or three cities wandered unto one city, to drink water; but
they were not satisfied: yet have ye not returned unto me, saith the
LORD.

4:9 I have smitten you with blasting and mildew: when your gardens and
your vineyards and your fig trees and your olive trees increased, the
palmerworm devoured them: yet have ye not returned unto me, saith the
LORD.

4:10 I have sent among you the pestilence after the manner of Egypt:
your young men have I slain with the sword, and have taken away your
horses; and I have made the stink of your camps to come up unto your
nostrils: yet have ye not returned unto me, saith the LORD.

4:11 I have overthrown some of you, as God overthrew Sodom and
Gomorrah, and ye were as a firebrand plucked out of the burning: yet
have ye not returned unto me, saith the LORD.

4:12 Therefore thus will I do unto thee, O Israel: and because I will
do this unto thee, prepare to meet thy God, O Israel.

4:13 For, lo, he that formeth the mountains, and createth the wind,
and declareth unto man what is his thought, that maketh the morning
darkness, and treadeth upon the high places of the earth, The LORD,
The God of hosts, is his name.

5:1 Hear ye this word which I take up against you, even a lamentation,
O house of Israel.

5:2 The virgin of Israel is fallen; she shall no more rise: she is
forsaken upon her land; there is none to raise her up.

5:3 For thus saith the Lord GOD; The city that went out by a thousand
shall leave an hundred, and that which went forth by an hundred shall
leave ten, to the house of Israel.

5:4 For thus saith the LORD unto the house of Israel, Seek ye me, and
ye shall live: 5:5 But seek not Bethel, nor enter into Gilgal, and
pass not to Beersheba: for Gilgal shall surely go into captivity, and
Bethel shall come to nought.

5:6 Seek the LORD, and ye shall live; lest he break out like fire in
the house of Joseph, and devour it, and there be none to quench it in
Bethel.

5:7 Ye who turn judgment to wormwood, and leave off righteousness in
the earth, 5:8 Seek him that maketh the seven stars and Orion, and
turneth the shadow of death into the morning, and maketh the day dark
with night: that calleth for the waters of the sea, and poureth them
out upon the face of the earth: The LORD is his name: 5:9 That
strengtheneth the spoiled against the strong, so that the spoiled
shall come against the fortress.

5:10 They hate him that rebuketh in the gate, and they abhor him that
speaketh uprightly.

5:11 Forasmuch therefore as your treading is upon the poor, and ye
take from him burdens of wheat: ye have built houses of hewn stone,
but ye shall not dwell in them; ye have planted pleasant vineyards,
but ye shall not drink wine of them.

5:12 For I know your manifold transgressions and your mighty sins:
they afflict the just, they take a bribe, and they turn aside the poor
in the gate from their right.

5:13 Therefore the prudent shall keep silence in that time; for it is
an evil time.

5:14 Seek good, and not evil, that ye may live: and so the LORD, the
God of hosts, shall be with you, as ye have spoken.

5:15 Hate the evil, and love the good, and establish judgment in the
gate: it may be that the LORD God of hosts will be gracious unto the
remnant of Joseph.

5:16 Therefore the LORD, the God of hosts, the LORD, saith thus;
Wailing shall be in all streets; and they shall say in all the
highways, Alas! alas!  and they shall call the husbandman to mourning,
and such as are skilful of lamentation to wailing.

5:17 And in all vineyards shall be wailing: for I will pass through
thee, saith the LORD.

5:18 Woe unto you that desire the day of the LORD! to what end is it
for you? the day of the LORD is darkness, and not light.

5:19 As if a man did flee from a lion, and a bear met him; or went
into the house, and leaned his hand on the wall, and a serpent bit
him.

5:20 Shall not the day of the LORD be darkness, and not light? even
very dark, and no brightness in it?  5:21 I hate, I despise your feast
days, and I will not smell in your solemn assemblies.

5:22 Though ye offer me burnt offerings and your meat offerings, I
will not accept them: neither will I regard the peace offerings of
your fat beasts.

5:23 Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs; for I will not
hear the melody of thy viols.

5:24 But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a
mighty stream.

5:25 Have ye offered unto me sacrifices and offerings in the
wilderness forty years, O house of Israel?  5:26 But ye have borne the
tabernacle of your Moloch and Chiun your images, the star of your god,
which ye made to yourselves.

5:27 Therefore will I cause you to go into captivity beyond Damascus,
saith the LORD, whose name is The God of hosts.

6:1 Woe to them that are at ease in Zion, and trust in the mountain of
Samaria, which are named chief of the nations, to whom the house of
Israel came!  6:2 Pass ye unto Calneh, and see; and from thence go ye
to Hamath the great: then go down to Gath of the Philistines: be they
better than these kingdoms? or their border greater than your border?
6:3 Ye that put far away the evil day, and cause the seat of violence
to come near; 6:4 That lie upon beds of ivory, and stretch themselves
upon their couches, and eat the lambs out of the flock, and the calves
out of the midst of the stall; 6:5 That chant to the sound of the
viol, and invent to themselves instruments of musick, like David; 6:6
That drink wine in bowls, and anoint themselves with the chief
ointments: but they are not grieved for the affliction of Joseph.

6:7 Therefore now shall they go captive with the first that go
captive, and the banquet of them that stretched themselves shall be
removed.

6:8 The Lord GOD hath sworn by himself, saith the LORD the God of
hosts, I abhor the excellency of Jacob, and hate his palaces:
therefore will I deliver up the city with all that is therein.

6:9 And it shall come to pass, if there remain ten men in one house,
that they shall die.

6:10 And a man's uncle shall take him up, and he that burneth him, to
bring out the bones out of the house, and shall say unto him that is
by the sides of the house, Is there yet any with thee? and he shall
say, No. Then shall he say, Hold thy tongue: for we may not make
mention of the name of the LORD.

6:11 For, behold, the LORD commandeth, and he will smite the great
house with breaches, and the little house with clefts.

6:12 Shall horses run upon the rock? will one plow there with oxen?
for ye have turned judgment into gall, and the fruit of righteousness
into hemlock: 6:13 Ye which rejoice in a thing of nought, which say,
Have we not taken to us horns by our own strength?  6:14 But, behold,
I will raise up against you a nation, O house of Israel, saith the
LORD the God of hosts; and they shall afflict you from the entering in
of Hemath unto the river of the wilderness.

7:1 Thus hath the Lord GOD shewed unto me; and, behold, he formed
grasshoppers in the beginning of the shooting up of the latter growth;
and, lo, it was the latter growth after the king's mowings.

7:2 And it came to pass, that when they had made an end of eating the
grass of the land, then I said, O Lord GOD, forgive, I beseech thee:
by whom shall Jacob arise? for he is small.

7:3 The LORD repented for this: It shall not be, saith the LORD.

7:4 Thus hath the Lord GOD shewed unto me: and, behold, the Lord GOD
called to contend by fire, and it devoured the great deep, and did eat
up a part.

7:5 Then said I, O Lord GOD, cease, I beseech thee: by whom shall
Jacob arise? for he is small.

7:6 The LORD repented for this: This also shall not be, saith the Lord
GOD.

7:7 Thus he shewed me: and, behold, the LORD stood upon a wall made by
a plumbline, with a plumbline in his hand.

7:8 And the LORD said unto me, Amos, what seest thou? And I said, A
plumbline. Then said the LORD, Behold, I will set a plumbline in the
midst of my people Israel: I will not again pass by them any more: 7:9
And the high places of Isaac shall be desolate, and the sanctuaries of
Israel shall be laid waste; and I will rise against the house of
Jeroboam with the sword.

7:10 Then Amaziah the priest of Bethel sent to Jeroboam king of
Israel, saying, Amos hath conspired against thee in the midst of the
house of Israel: the land is not able to bear all his words.

7:11 For thus Amos saith, Jeroboam shall die by the sword, and Israel
shall surely be led away captive out of their own land.

7:12 Also Amaziah said unto Amos, O thou seer, go, flee thee away into
the land of Judah, and there eat bread, and prophesy there: 7:13 But
prophesy not again any more at Bethel: for it is the king's chapel,
and it is the king's court.

7:14 Then answered Amos, and said to Amaziah, I was no prophet,
neither was I a prophet's son; but I was an herdman, and a gatherer of
sycomore fruit: 7:15 And the LORD took me as I followed the flock, and
the LORD said unto me, Go, prophesy unto my people Israel.

7:16 Now therefore hear thou the word of the LORD: Thou sayest,
Prophesy not against Israel, and drop not thy word against the house
of Isaac.

7:17 Therefore thus saith the LORD; Thy wife shall be an harlot in the
city, and thy sons and thy daughters shall fall by the sword, and thy
land shall be divided by line; and thou shalt die in a polluted land:
and Israel shall surely go into captivity forth of his land.

8:1 Thus hath the Lord GOD shewed unto me: and behold a basket of
summer fruit.

8:2 And he said, Amos, what seest thou? And I said, A basket of summer
fruit. Then said the LORD unto me, The end is come upon my people of
Israel; I will not again pass by them any more.

8:3 And the songs of the temple shall be howlings in that day, saith
the Lord GOD: there shall be many dead bodies in every place; they
shall cast them forth with silence.

8:4 Hear this, O ye that swallow up the needy, even to make the poor
of the land to fail, 8:5 Saying, When will the new moon be gone, that
we may sell corn? and the sabbath, that we may set forth wheat, making
the ephah small, and the shekel great, and falsifying the balances by
deceit?  8:6 That we may buy the poor for silver, and the needy for a
pair of shoes; yea, and sell the refuse of the wheat?  8:7 The LORD
hath sworn by the excellency of Jacob, Surely I will never forget any
of their works.

8:8 Shall not the land tremble for this, and every one mourn that
dwelleth therein? and it shall rise up wholly as a flood; and it shall
be cast out and drowned, as by the flood of Egypt.

8:9 And it shall come to pass in that day, saith the Lord GOD, that I
will cause the sun to go down at noon, and I will darken the earth in
the clear day: 8:10 And I will turn your feasts into mourning, and all
your songs into lamentation; and I will bring up sackcloth upon all
loins, and baldness upon every head; and I will make it as the
mourning of an only son, and the end thereof as a bitter day.

8:11 Behold, the days come, saith the Lord GOD, that I will send a
famine in the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but
of hearing the words of the LORD: 8:12 And they shall wander from sea
to sea, and from the north even to the east, they shall run to and fro
to seek the word of the LORD, and shall not find it.

8:13 In that day shall the fair virgins and young men faint for
thirst.

8:14 They that swear by the sin of Samaria, and say, Thy god, O Dan,
liveth; and, The manner of Beersheba liveth; even they shall fall, and
never rise up again.

9:1 I saw the LORD standing upon the altar: and he said, Smite the
lintel of the door, that the posts may shake: and cut them in the
head, all of them; and I will slay the last of them with the sword: he
that fleeth of them shall not flee away, and he that escapeth of them
shall not be delivered.

9:2 Though they dig into hell, thence shall mine hand take them;
though they climb up to heaven, thence will I bring them down: 9:3 And
though they hide themselves in the top of Carmel, I will search and
take them out thence; and though they be hid from my sight in the
bottom of the sea, thence will I command the serpent, and he shall
bite them: 9:4 And though they go into captivity before their enemies,
thence will I command the sword, and it shall slay them: and I will
set mine eyes upon them for evil, and not for good.

9:5 And the Lord GOD of hosts is he that toucheth the land, and it
shall melt, and all that dwell therein shall mourn: and it shall rise
up wholly like a flood; and shall be drowned, as by the flood of
Egypt.

9:6 It is he that buildeth his stories in the heaven, and hath founded
his troop in the earth; he that calleth for the waters of the sea, and
poureth them out upon the face of the earth: The LORD is his name.

9:7 Are ye not as children of the Ethiopians unto me, O children of
Israel? saith the LORD. Have not I brought up Israel out of the land
of Egypt? and the Philistines from Caphtor, and the Syrians from Kir?
9:8 Behold, the eyes of the Lord GOD are upon the sinful kingdom, and
I will destroy it from off the face of the earth; saving that I will
not utterly destroy the house of Jacob, saith the LORD.

9:9 For, lo, I will command, and I will sift the house of Israel among
all nations, like as corn is sifted in a sieve, yet shall not the
least grain fall upon the earth.

9:10 All the sinners of my people shall die by the sword, which say,
The evil shall not overtake nor prevent us.

9:11 In that day will I raise up the tabernacle of David that is
fallen, and close up the breaches thereof; and I will raise up his
ruins, and I will build it as in the days of old: 9:12 That they may
possess the remnant of Edom, and of all the heathen, which are called
by my name, saith the LORD that doeth this.

9:13 Behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that the plowman shall
overtake the reaper, and the treader of grapes him that soweth seed;
and the mountains shall drop sweet wine, and all the hills shall melt.

9:14 And I will bring again the captivity of my people of Israel, and
they shall build the waste cities, and inhabit them; and they shall
plant vineyards, and drink the wine thereof; they shall also make
gardens, and eat the fruit of them.

9:15 And I will plant them upon their land, and they shall no more be
pulled up out of their land which I have given them, saith the LORD
thy God.




Obadiah


1:1 The vision of Obadiah. Thus saith the Lord GOD concerning Edom;
We have heard a rumour from the LORD, and an ambassador is sent among
the heathen, Arise ye, and let us rise up against her in battle.

1:2 Behold, I have made thee small among the heathen: thou art greatly
despised.

1:3 The pride of thine heart hath deceived thee, thou that dwellest in
the clefts of the rock, whose habitation is high; that saith in his
heart, Who shall bring me down to the ground?  1:4 Though thou exalt
thyself as the eagle, and though thou set thy nest among the stars,
thence will I bring thee down, saith the LORD.

1:5 If thieves came to thee, if robbers by night, (how art thou cut
off!)  would they not have stolen till they had enough? if the
grapegatherers came to thee, would they not leave some grapes?  1:6
How are the things of Esau searched out! how are his hidden things
sought up!  1:7 All the men of thy confederacy have brought thee even
to the border: the men that were at peace with thee have deceived
thee, and prevailed against thee; that they eat thy bread have laid a
wound under thee: there is none understanding in him.

1:8 Shall I not in that day, saith the LORD, even destroy the wise men
out of Edom, and understanding out of the mount of Esau?  1:9 And thy
mighty men, O Teman, shall be dismayed, to the end that every one of
the mount of Esau may be cut off by slaughter.

1:10 For thy violence against thy brother Jacob shame shall cover
thee, and thou shalt be cut off for ever.

1:11 In the day that thou stoodest on the other side, in the day that
the strangers carried away captive his forces, and foreigners entered
into his gates, and cast lots upon Jerusalem, even thou wast as one of
them.

1:12 But thou shouldest not have looked on the day of thy brother in
the day that he became a stranger; neither shouldest thou have
rejoiced over the children of Judah in the day of their destruction;
neither shouldest thou have spoken proudly in the day of distress.

1:13 Thou shouldest not have entered into the gate of my people in the
day of their calamity; yea, thou shouldest not have looked on their
affliction in the day of their calamity, nor have laid hands on their
substance in the day of their calamity; 1:14 Neither shouldest thou
have stood in the crossway, to cut off those of his that did escape;
neither shouldest thou have delivered up those of his that did remain
in the day of distress.

1:15 For the day of the LORD is near upon all the heathen: as thou
hast done, it shall be done unto thee: thy reward shall return upon
thine own head.

1:16 For as ye have drunk upon my holy mountain, so shall all the
heathen drink continually, yea, they shall drink, and they shall
swallow down, and they shall be as though they had not been.

1:17 But upon mount Zion shall be deliverance, and there shall be
holiness; and the house of Jacob shall possess their possessions.

1:18 And the house of Jacob shall be a fire, and the house of Joseph a
flame, and the house of Esau for stubble, and they shall kindle in
them, and devour them; and there shall not be any remaining of the
house of Esau; for the LORD hath spoken it.

1:19 And they of the south shall possess the mount of Esau; and they
of the plain the Philistines: and they shall possess the fields of
Ephraim, and the fields of Samaria: and Benjamin shall possess Gilead.

1:20 And the captivity of this host of the children of Israel shall
possess that of the Canaanites, even unto Zarephath; and the captivity
of Jerusalem, which is in Sepharad, shall possess the cities of the
south.

1:21 And saviours shall come up on mount Zion to judge the mount of
Esau; and the kingdom shall be the LORD's.




Jonah


1:1 Now the word of the LORD came unto Jonah the son of Amittai,
saying, 1:2 Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it;
for their wickedness is come up before me.

1:3 But Jonah rose up to flee unto Tarshish from the presence of the
LORD, and went down to Joppa; and he found a ship going to Tarshish:
so he paid the fare thereof, and went down into it, to go with them
unto Tarshish from the presence of the LORD.

1:4 But the LORD sent out a great wind into the sea, and there was a
mighty tempest in the sea, so that the ship was like to be broken.

1:5 Then the mariners were afraid, and cried every man unto his god,
and cast forth the wares that were in the ship into the sea, to
lighten it of them. But Jonah was gone down into the sides of the
ship; and he lay, and was fast asleep.

1:6 So the shipmaster came to him, and said unto him, What meanest
thou, O sleeper? arise, call upon thy God, if so be that God will
think upon us, that we perish not.

1:7 And they said every one to his fellow, Come, and let us cast lots,
that we may know for whose cause this evil is upon us. So they cast
lots, and the lot fell upon Jonah.

1:8 Then said they unto him, Tell us, we pray thee, for whose cause
this evil is upon us; What is thine occupation? and whence comest
thou? what is thy country? and of what people art thou?  1:9 And he
said unto them, I am an Hebrew; and I fear the LORD, the God of
heaven, which hath made the sea and the dry land.

1:10 Then were the men exceedingly afraid, and said unto him. Why hast
thou done this? For the men knew that he fled from the presence of the
LORD, because he had told them.

1:11 Then said they unto him, What shall we do unto thee, that the sea
may be calm unto us? for the sea wrought, and was tempestuous.

1:12 And he said unto them, Take me up, and cast me forth into the
sea; so shall the sea be calm unto you: for I know that for my sake
this great tempest is upon you.

1:13 Nevertheless the men rowed hard to bring it to the land; but they
could not: for the sea wrought, and was tempestuous against them.

1:14 Wherefore they cried unto the LORD, and said, We beseech thee, O
LORD, we beseech thee, let us not perish for this man's life, and lay
not upon us innocent blood: for thou, O LORD, hast done as it pleased
thee.

1:15 So they look up Jonah, and cast him forth into the sea: and the
sea ceased from her raging.

1:16 Then the men feared the LORD exceedingly, and offered a sacrifice
unto the LORD, and made vows.

1:17 Now the LORD had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And
Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.

2:1 Then Jonah prayed unto the LORD his God out of the fish's belly,
2:2 And said, I cried by reason of mine affliction unto the LORD, and
he heard me; out of the belly of hell cried I, and thou heardest my
voice.

2:3 For thou hadst cast me into the deep, in the midst of the seas;
and the floods compassed me about: all thy billows and thy waves
passed over me.

2:4 Then I said, I am cast out of thy sight; yet I will look again
toward thy holy temple.

2:5 The waters compassed me about, even to the soul: the depth closed
me round about, the weeds were wrapped about my head.

2:6 I went down to the bottoms of the mountains; the earth with her
bars was about me for ever: yet hast thou brought up my life from
corruption, O LORD my God.

2:7 When my soul fainted within me I remembered the LORD: and my
prayer came in unto thee, into thine holy temple.

2:8 They that observe lying vanities forsake their own mercy.

2:9 But I will sacrifice unto thee with the voice of thanksgiving; I
will pay that that I have vowed. Salvation is of the LORD.

2:10 And the LORD spake unto the fish, and it vomited out Jonah upon
the dry land.

3:1 And the word of the LORD came unto Jonah the second time, saying,
3:2 Arise, go unto Nineveh, that great city, and preach unto it the
preaching that I bid thee.

3:3 So Jonah arose, and went unto Nineveh, according to the word of
the LORD. Now Nineveh was an exceeding great city of three days'
journey.

3:4 And Jonah began to enter into the city a day's journey, and he
cried, and said, Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.

3:5 So the people of Nineveh believed God, and proclaimed a fast, and
put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them even to the least of them.

3:6 For word came unto the king of Nineveh, and he arose from his
throne, and he laid his robe from him, and covered him with sackcloth,
and sat in ashes.

3:7 And he caused it to be proclaimed and published through Nineveh by
the decree of the king and his nobles, saying, Let neither man nor
beast, herd nor flock, taste any thing: let them not feed, nor drink
water: 3:8 But let man and beast be covered with sackcloth, and cry
mightily unto God: yea, let them turn every one from his evil way, and
from the violence that is in their hands.

3:9 Who can tell if God will turn and repent, and turn away from his
fierce anger, that we perish not?  3:10 And God saw their works, that
they turned from their evil way; and God repented of the evil, that he
had said that he would do unto them; and he did it not.

4:1 But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was very angry.

4:2 And he prayed unto the LORD, and said, I pray thee, O LORD, was
not this my saying, when I was yet in my country? Therefore I fled
before unto Tarshish: for I knew that thou art a gracious God, and
merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repentest thee of
the evil.

4:3 Therefore now, O LORD, take, I beseech thee, my life from me; for
it is better for me to die than to live.

4:4 Then said the LORD, Doest thou well to be angry?  4:5 So Jonah
went out of the city, and sat on the east side of the city, and there
made him a booth, and sat under it in the shadow, till he might see
what would become of the city.

4:6 And the LORD God prepared a gourd, and made it to come up over
Jonah, that it might be a shadow over his head, to deliver him from
his grief. So Jonah was exceeding glad of the gourd.

4:7 But God prepared a worm when the morning rose the next day, and it
smote the gourd that it withered.

4:8 And it came to pass, when the sun did arise, that God prepared a
vehement east wind; and the sun beat upon the head of Jonah, that he
fainted, and wished in himself to die, and said, It is better for me
to die than to live.

4:9 And God said to Jonah, Doest thou well to be angry for the gourd?
And he said, I do well to be angry, even unto death.

4:10 Then said the LORD, Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for the
which thou hast not laboured, neither madest it grow; which came up in
a night, and perished in a night: 4:11 And should not I spare Nineveh,
that great city, wherein are more then sixscore thousand persons that
cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also
much cattle?




Micah


1:1 The word of the LORD that came to Micah the Morasthite in the
days of Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah, which he saw
concerning Samaria and Jerusalem.

1:2 Hear, all ye people; hearken, O earth, and all that therein is:
and let the Lord GOD be witness against you, the LORD from his holy
temple.

1:3 For, behold, the LORD cometh forth out of his place, and will come
down, and tread upon the high places of the earth.

1:4 And the mountains shall be molten under him, and the valleys shall
be cleft, as wax before the fire, and as the waters that are poured
down a steep place.

1:5 For the transgression of Jacob is all this, and for the sins of
the house of Israel. What is the transgression of Jacob? is it not
Samaria? and what are the high places of Judah? are they not
Jerusalem?  1:6 Therefore I will make Samaria as an heap of the field,
and as plantings of a vineyard: and I will pour down the stones
thereof into the valley, and I will discover the foundations thereof.

1:7 And all the graven images thereof shall be beaten to pieces, and
all the hires thereof shall be burned with the fire, and all the idols
thereof will I lay desolate: for she gathered it of the hire of an
harlot, and they shall return to the hire of an harlot.

1:8 Therefore I will wail and howl, I will go stripped and naked: I
will make a wailing like the dragons, and mourning as the owls.

1:9 For her wound is incurable; for it is come unto Judah; he is come
unto the gate of my people, even to Jerusalem.

1:10 Declare ye it not at Gath, weep ye not at all: in the house of
Aphrah roll thyself in the dust.

1:11 Pass ye away, thou inhabitant of Saphir, having thy shame naked:
the inhabitant of Zaanan came not forth in the mourning of Bethezel;
he shall receive of you his standing.

1:12 For the inhabitant of Maroth waited carefully for good: but evil
came down from the LORD unto the gate of Jerusalem.

1:13 O thou inhabitant of Lachish, bind the chariot to the swift
beast: she is the beginning of the sin to the daughter of Zion: for
the transgressions of Israel were found in thee.

1:14 Therefore shalt thou give presents to Moreshethgath: the houses
of Achzib shall be a lie to the kings of Israel.

1:15 Yet will I bring an heir unto thee, O inhabitant of Mareshah: he
shall come unto Adullam the glory of Israel.

1:16 Make thee bald, and poll thee for thy delicate children; enlarge
thy baldness as the eagle; for they are gone into captivity from thee.

2:1 Woe to them that devise iniquity, and work evil upon their beds!
when the morning is light, they practise it, because it is in the
power of their hand.

2:2 And they covet fields, and take them by violence; and houses, and
take them away: so they oppress a man and his house, even a man and
his heritage.

2:3 Therefore thus saith the LORD; Behold, against this family do I
devise an evil, from which ye shall not remove your necks; neither
shall ye go haughtily: for this time is evil.

2:4 In that day shall one take up a parable against you, and lament
with a doleful lamentation, and say, We be utterly spoiled: he hath
changed the portion of my people: how hath he removed it from me!
turning away he hath divided our fields.

2:5 Therefore thou shalt have none that shall cast a cord by lot in
the congregation of the LORD.

2:6 Prophesy ye not, say they to them that prophesy: they shall not
prophesy to them, that they shall not take shame.

2:7 O thou that art named the house of Jacob, is the spirit of the
LORD straitened? are these his doings? do not my words do good to him
that walketh uprightly?  2:8 Even of late my people is risen up as an
enemy: ye pull off the robe with the garment from them that pass by
securely as men averse from war.

2:9 The women of my people have ye cast out from their pleasant
houses; from their children have ye taken away my glory for ever.

2:10 Arise ye, and depart; for this is not your rest: because it is
polluted, it shall destroy you, even with a sore destruction.

2:11 If a man walking in the spirit and falsehood do lie, saying, I
will prophesy unto thee of wine and of strong drink; he shall even be
the prophet of this people.

2:12 I will surely assemble, O Jacob, all of thee; I will surely
gather the remnant of Israel; I will put them together as the sheep of
Bozrah, as the flock in the midst of their fold: they shall make great
noise by reason of the multitude of men.

2:13 The breaker is come up before them: they have broken up, and have
passed through the gate, and are gone out by it: and their king shall
pass before them, and the LORD on the head of them.

3:1 And I said, Hear, I pray you, O heads of Jacob, and ye princes of
the house of Israel; Is it not for you to know judgment?  3:2 Who hate
the good, and love the evil; who pluck off their skin from off them,
and their flesh from off their bones; 3:3 Who also eat the flesh of my
people, and flay their skin from off them; and they break their bones,
and chop them in pieces, as for the pot, and as flesh within the
caldron.

3:4 Then shall they cry unto the LORD, but he will not hear them: he
will even hide his face from them at that time, as they have behaved
themselves ill in their doings.

3:5 Thus saith the LORD concerning the prophets that make my people
err, that bite with their teeth, and cry, Peace; and he that putteth
not into their mouths, they even prepare war against him.

3:6 Therefore night shall be unto you, that ye shall not have a
vision; and it shall be dark unto you, that ye shall not divine; and
the sun shall go down over the prophets, and the day shall be dark
over them.

3:7 Then shall the seers be ashamed, and the diviners confounded: yea,
they shall all cover their lips; for there is no answer of God.

3:8 But truly I am full of power by the spirit of the LORD, and of
judgment, and of might, to declare unto Jacob his transgression, and
to Israel his sin.

3:9 Hear this, I pray you, ye heads of the house of Jacob, and princes
of the house of Israel, that abhor judgment, and pervert all equity.

3:10 They build up Zion with blood, and Jerusalem with iniquity.

3:11 The heads thereof judge for reward, and the priests thereof teach
for hire, and the prophets thereof divine for money: yet will they
lean upon the LORD, and say, Is not the LORD among us? none evil can
come upon us.

3:12 Therefore shall Zion for your sake be plowed as a field, and
Jerusalem shall become heaps, and the mountain of the house as the
high places of the forest.

4:1 But in the last days it shall come to pass, that the mountain of
the house of the LORD shall be established in the top of the
mountains, and it shall be exalted above the hills; and people shall
flow unto it.

4:2 And many nations shall come, and say, Come, and let us go up to
the mountain of the LORD, and to the house of the God of Jacob; and he
will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths: for the law
shall go forth of Zion, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.

4:3 And he shall judge among many people, and rebuke strong nations
afar off; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their
spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up a sword against
nation, neither shall they learn war any more.

4:4 But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig
tree; and none shall make them afraid: for the mouth of the LORD of
hosts hath spoken it.

4:5 For all people will walk every one in the name of his god, and we
will walk in the name of the LORD our God for ever and ever.

4:6 In that day, saith the LORD, will I assemble her that halteth, and
I will gather her that is driven out, and her that I have afflicted;
4:7 And I will make her that halted a remnant, and her that was cast
far off a strong nation: and the LORD shall reign over them in mount
Zion from henceforth, even for ever.

4:8 And thou, O tower of the flock, the strong hold of the daughter of
Zion, unto thee shall it come, even the first dominion; the kingdom
shall come to the daughter of Jerusalem.

4:9 Now why dost thou cry out aloud? is there no king in thee? is thy
counsellor perished? for pangs have taken thee as a woman in travail.

4:10 Be in pain, and labour to bring forth, O daughter of Zion, like a
woman in travail: for now shalt thou go forth out of the city, and
thou shalt dwell in the field, and thou shalt go even to Babylon;
there shalt thou be delivered; there the LORD shall redeem thee from
the hand of thine enemies.

4:11 Now also many nations are gathered against thee, that say, Let
her be defiled, and let our eye look upon Zion.

4:12 But they know not the thoughts of the LORD, neither understand
they his counsel: for he shall gather them as the sheaves into the
floor.

4:13 Arise and thresh, O daughter of Zion: for I will make thine horn
iron, and I will make thy hoofs brass: and thou shalt beat in pieces
many people: and I will consecrate their gain unto the LORD, and their
substance unto the Lord of the whole earth.

5:1 Now gather thyself in troops, O daughter of troops: he hath laid
siege against us: they shall smite the judge of Israel with a rod upon
the cheek.

5:2 But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the
thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me that
is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old,
from everlasting.

5:3 Therefore will he give them up, until the time that she which
travaileth hath brought forth: then the remnant of his brethren shall
return unto the children of Israel.

5:4 And he shall stand and feed in the strength of the LORD, in the
majesty of the name of the LORD his God; and they shall abide: for now
shall he be great unto the ends of the earth.

5:5 And this man shall be the peace, when the Assyrian shall come into
our land: and when he shall tread in our palaces, then shall we raise
against him seven shepherds, and eight principal men.

5:6 And they shall waste the land of Assyria with the sword, and the
land of Nimrod in the entrances thereof: thus shall he deliver us from
the Assyrian, when he cometh into our land, and when he treadeth
within our borders.

5:7 And the remnant of Jacob shall be in the midst of many people as a
dew from the LORD, as the showers upon the grass, that tarrieth not
for man, nor waiteth for the sons of men.

5:8 And the remnant of Jacob shall be among the Gentiles in the midst
of many people as a lion among the beasts of the forest, as a young
lion among the flocks of sheep: who, if he go through, both treadeth
down, and teareth in pieces, and none can deliver.

5:9 Thine hand shall be lifted up upon thine adversaries, and all
thine enemies shall be cut off.

5:10 And it shall come to pass in that day, saith the LORD, that I
will cut off thy horses out of the midst of thee, and I will destroy
thy chariots: 5:11 And I will cut off the cities of thy land, and
throw down all thy strong holds: 5:12 And I will cut off witchcrafts
out of thine hand; and thou shalt have no more soothsayers: 5:13 Thy
graven images also will I cut off, and thy standing images out of the
midst of thee; and thou shalt no more worship the work of thine hands.

5:14 And I will pluck up thy groves out of the midst of thee: so will
I destroy thy cities.

5:15 And I will execute vengeance in anger and fury upon the heathen,
such as they have not heard.

6:1 Hear ye now what the LORD saith; Arise, contend thou before the
mountains, and let the hills hear thy voice.

6:2 Hear ye, O mountains, the LORD's controversy, and ye strong
foundations of the earth: for the LORD hath a controversy with his
people, and he will plead with Israel.

6:3 O my people, what have I done unto thee? and wherein have I
wearied thee? testify against me.

6:4 For I brought thee up out of the land of Egypt, and redeemed thee
out of the house of servants; and I sent before thee Moses, Aaron, and
Miriam.

6:5 O my people, remember now what Balak king of Moab consulted, and
what Balaam the son of Beor answered him from Shittim unto Gilgal;
that ye may know the righteousness of the LORD.

6:6 Wherewith shall I come before the LORD, and bow myself before the
high God? shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves of
a year old?  6:7 Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams, or
with ten thousands of rivers of oil? shall I give my firstborn for my
transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?  6:8 He
hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require
of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with
thy God?  6:9 The LORD's voice crieth unto the city, and the man of
wisdom shall see thy name: hear ye the rod, and who hath appointed it.

6:10 Are there yet the treasures of wickedness in the house of the
wicked, and the scant measure that is abominable?  6:11 Shall I count
them pure with the wicked balances, and with the bag of deceitful
weights?  6:12 For the rich men thereof are full of violence, and the
inhabitants thereof have spoken lies, and their tongue is deceitful in
their mouth.

6:13 Therefore also will I make thee sick in smiting thee, in making
thee desolate because of thy sins.

6:14 Thou shalt eat, but not be satisfied; and thy casting down shall
be in the midst of thee; and thou shalt take hold, but shalt not
deliver; and that which thou deliverest will I give up to the sword.

6:15 Thou shalt sow, but thou shalt not reap; thou shalt tread the
olives, but thou shalt not anoint thee with oil; and sweet wine, but
shalt not drink wine.

6:16 For the statutes of Omri are kept, and all the works of the house
of Ahab, and ye walk in their counsels; that I should make thee a
desolation, and the inhabitants thereof an hissing: therefore ye shall
bear the reproach of my people.

7:1 Woe is me! for I am as when they have gathered the summer fruits,
as the grapegleanings of the vintage: there is no cluster to eat: my
soul desired the firstripe fruit.

7:2 The good man is perished out of the earth: and there is none
upright among men: they all lie in wait for blood; they hunt every man
his brother with a net.

7:3 That they may do evil with both hands earnestly, the prince
asketh, and the judge asketh for a reward; and the great man, he
uttereth his mischievous desire: so they wrap it up.

7:4 The best of them is as a brier: the most upright is sharper than a
thorn hedge: the day of thy watchmen and thy visitation cometh; now
shall be their perplexity.

7:5 Trust ye not in a friend, put ye not confidence in a guide: keep
the doors of thy mouth from her that lieth in thy bosom.

7:6 For the son dishonoureth the father, the daughter riseth up
against her mother, the daughter in law against her mother in law; a
man's enemies are the men of his own house.

7:7 Therefore I will look unto the LORD; I will wait for the God of my
salvation: my God will hear me.

7:8 Rejoice not against me, O mine enemy: when I fall, I shall arise;
when I sit in darkness, the LORD shall be a light unto me.

7:9 I will bear the indignation of the LORD, because I have sinned
against him, until he plead my cause, and execute judgment for me: he
will bring me forth to the light, and I shall behold his
righteousness.

7:10 Then she that is mine enemy shall see it, and shame shall cover
her which said unto me, Where is the LORD thy God? mine eyes shall
behold her: now shall she be trodden down as the mire of the streets.

7:11 In the day that thy walls are to be built, in that day shall the
decree be far removed.

7:12 In that day also he shall come even to thee from Assyria, and
from the fortified cities, and from the fortress even to the river,
and from sea to sea, and from mountain to mountain.

7:13 Notwithstanding the land shall be desolate because of them that
dwell therein, for the fruit of their doings.

7:14 Feed thy people with thy rod, the flock of thine heritage, which
dwell solitarily in the wood, in the midst of Carmel: let them feed in
Bashan and Gilead, as in the days of old.

7:15 According to the days of thy coming out of the land of Egypt will
I shew unto him marvellous things.

7:16 The nations shall see and be confounded at all their might: they
shall lay their hand upon their mouth, their ears shall be deaf.

7:17 They shall lick the dust like a serpent, they shall move out of
their holes like worms of the earth: they shall be afraid of the LORD
our God, and shall fear because of thee.

7:18 Who is a God like unto thee, that pardoneth iniquity, and passeth
by the transgression of the remnant of his heritage? he retaineth not
his anger for ever, because he delighteth in mercy.

7:19 He will turn again, he will have compassion upon us; he will
subdue our iniquities; and thou wilt cast all their sins into the
depths of the sea.

7:20 Thou wilt perform the truth to Jacob, and the mercy to Abraham,
which thou hast sworn unto our fathers from the days of old.




Nahum


1:1 The burden of Nineveh. The book of the vision of Nahum the Elkoshite.

1:2 God is jealous, and the LORD revengeth; the LORD revengeth, and is
furious; the LORD will take vengeance on his adversaries, and he
reserveth wrath for his enemies.

1:3 The LORD is slow to anger, and great in power, and will not at all
acquit the wicked: the LORD hath his way in the whirlwind and in the
storm, and the clouds are the dust of his feet.

1:4 He rebuketh the sea, and maketh it dry, and drieth up all the
rivers: Bashan languisheth, and Carmel, and the flower of Lebanon
languisheth.

1:5 The mountains quake at him, and the hills melt, and the earth is
burned at his presence, yea, the world, and all that dwell therein.

1:6 Who can stand before his indignation? and who can abide in the
fierceness of his anger? his fury is poured out like fire, and the
rocks are thrown down by him.

1:7 The LORD is good, a strong hold in the day of trouble; and he
knoweth them that trust in him.

1:8 But with an overrunning flood he will make an utter end of the
place thereof, and darkness shall pursue his enemies.

1:9 What do ye imagine against the LORD? he will make an utter end:
affliction shall not rise up the second time.

1:10 For while they be folden together as thorns, and while they are
drunken as drunkards, they shall be devoured as stubble fully dry.

1:11 There is one come out of thee, that imagineth evil against the
LORD, a wicked counsellor.

1:12 Thus saith the LORD; Though they be quiet, and likewise many, yet
thus shall they be cut down, when he shall pass through. Though I have
afflicted thee, I will afflict thee no more.

1:13 For now will I break his yoke from off thee, and will burst thy
bonds in sunder.

1:14 And the LORD hath given a commandment concerning thee, that no
more of thy name be sown: out of the house of thy gods will I cut off
the graven image and the molten image: I will make thy grave; for thou
art vile.

1:15 Behold upon the mountains the feet of him that bringeth good
tidings, that publisheth peace! O Judah, keep thy solemn feasts,
perform thy vows: for the wicked shall no more pass through thee; he
is utterly cut off.

2:1 He that dasheth in pieces is come up before thy face: keep the
munition, watch the way, make thy loins strong, fortify thy power
mightily.

2:2 For the LORD hath turned away the excellency of Jacob, as the
excellency of Israel: for the emptiers have emptied them out, and
marred their vine branches.

2:3 The shield of his mighty men is made red, the valiant men are in
scarlet: the chariots shall be with flaming torches in the day of his
preparation, and the fir trees shall be terribly shaken.

2:4 The chariots shall rage in the streets, they shall justle one
against another in the broad ways: they shall seem like torches, they
shall run like the lightnings.

2:5 He shall recount his worthies: they shall stumble in their walk;
they shall make haste to the wall thereof, and the defence shall be
prepared.

2:6 The gates of the rivers shall be opened, and the palace shall be
dissolved.

2:7 And Huzzab shall be led away captive, she shall be brought up, and
her maids shall lead her as with the voice of doves, tabering upon
their breasts.

2:8 But Nineveh is of old like a pool of water: yet they shall flee
away.

Stand, stand, shall they cry; but none shall look back.

2:9 Take ye the spoil of silver, take the spoil of gold: for there is
none end of the store and glory out of all the pleasant furniture.

2:10 She is empty, and void, and waste: and the heart melteth, and the
knees smite together, and much pain is in all loins, and the faces of
them all gather blackness.

2:11 Where is the dwelling of the lions, and the feedingplace of the
young lions, where the lion, even the old lion, walked, and the lion's
whelp, and none made them afraid?  2:12 The lion did tear in pieces
enough for his whelps, and strangled for his lionesses, and filled his
holes with prey, and his dens with ravin.

2:13 Behold, I am against thee, saith the LORD of hosts, and I will
burn her chariots in the smoke, and the sword shall devour thy young
lions: and I will cut off thy prey from the earth, and the voice of
thy messengers shall no more be heard.

3:1 Woe to the bloody city! it is all full of lies and robbery; the
prey departeth not; 3:2 The noise of a whip, and the noise of the
rattling of the wheels, and of the pransing horses, and of the jumping
chariots.

3:3 The horseman lifteth up both the bright sword and the glittering
spear: and there is a multitude of slain, and a great number of
carcases; and there is none end of their corpses; they stumble upon
their corpses: 3:4 Because of the multitude of the whoredoms of the
wellfavoured harlot, the mistress of witchcrafts, that selleth nations
through her whoredoms, and families through her witchcrafts.

3:5 Behold, I am against thee, saith the LORD of hosts; and I will
discover thy skirts upon thy face, and I will shew the nations thy
nakedness, and the kingdoms thy shame.

3:6 And I will cast abominable filth upon thee, and make thee vile,
and will set thee as a gazingstock.

3:7 And it shall come to pass, that all they that look upon thee shall
flee from thee, and say, Nineveh is laid waste: who will bemoan her?
whence shall I seek comforters for thee?  3:8 Art thou better than
populous No, that was situate among the rivers, that had the waters
round about it, whose rampart was the sea, and her wall was from the
sea?  3:9 Ethiopia and Egypt were her strength, and it was infinite;
Put and Lubim were thy helpers.

3:10 Yet was she carried away, she went into captivity: her young
children also were dashed in pieces at the top of all the streets: and
they cast lots for her honourable men, and all her great men were
bound in chains.

3:11 Thou also shalt be drunken: thou shalt be hid, thou also shalt
seek strength because of the enemy.

3:12 All thy strong holds shall be like fig trees with the firstripe
figs: if they be shaken, they shall even fall into the mouth of the
eater.

3:13 Behold, thy people in the midst of thee are women: the gates of
thy land shall be set wide open unto thine enemies: the fire shall
devour thy bars.

3:14 Draw thee waters for the siege, fortify thy strong holds: go into
clay, and tread the morter, make strong the brickkiln.

3:15 There shall the fire devour thee; the sword shall cut thee off,
it shall eat thee up like the cankerworm: make thyself many as the
cankerworm, make thyself many as the locusts.

3:16 Thou hast multiplied thy merchants above the stars of heaven: the
cankerworm spoileth, and fleeth away.

3:17 Thy crowned are as the locusts, and thy captains as the great
grasshoppers, which camp in the hedges in the cold day, but when the
sun ariseth they flee away, and their place is not known where they
are.

3:18 Thy shepherds slumber, O king of Assyria: thy nobles shall dwell
in the dust: thy people is scattered upon the mountains, and no man
gathereth them.

3:19 There is no healing of thy bruise; thy wound is grievous: all
that hear the bruit of thee shall clap the hands over thee: for upon
whom hath not thy wickedness passed continually?




Habakkuk


1:1 The burden which Habakkuk the prophet did see.

1:2 O LORD, how long shall I cry, and thou wilt not hear! even cry out
unto thee of violence, and thou wilt not save!  1:3 Why dost thou shew
me iniquity, and cause me to behold grievance? for spoiling and
violence are before me: and there are that raise up strife and
contention.

1:4 Therefore the law is slacked, and judgment doth never go forth:
for the wicked doth compass about the righteous; therefore wrong
judgment proceedeth.

1:5 Behold ye among the heathen, and regard, and wonder marvelously:
for I will work a work in your days which ye will not believe, though
it be told you.

1:6 For, lo, I raise up the Chaldeans, that bitter and hasty nation,
which shall march through the breadth of the land, to possess the
dwellingplaces that are not their's.

1:7 They are terrible and dreadful: their judgment and their dignity
shall proceed of themselves.

1:8 Their horses also are swifter than the leopards, and are more
fierce than the evening wolves: and their horsemen shall spread
themselves, and their horsemen shall come from far; they shall fly as
the eagle that hasteth to eat.

1:9 They shall come all for violence: their faces shall sup up as the
east wind, and they shall gather the captivity as the sand.

1:10 And they shall scoff at the kings, and the princes shall be a
scorn unto them: they shall deride every strong hold; for they shall
heap dust, and take it.

1:11 Then shall his mind change, and he shall pass over, and offend,
imputing this his power unto his god.

1:12 Art thou not from everlasting, O LORD my God, mine Holy One? we
shall not die. O LORD, thou hast ordained them for judgment; and, O
mighty God, thou hast established them for correction.

1:13 Thou art of purer eyes than to behold evil, and canst not look on
iniquity: wherefore lookest thou upon them that deal treacherously,
and holdest thy tongue when the wicked devoureth the man that is more
righteous than he?  1:14 And makest men as the fishes of the sea, as
the creeping things, that have no ruler over them?  1:15 They take up
all of them with the angle, they catch them in their net, and gather
them in their drag: therefore they rejoice and are glad.

1:16 Therefore they sacrifice unto their net, and burn incense unto
their drag; because by them their portion is fat, and their meat
plenteous.

1:17 Shall they therefore empty their net, and not spare continually
to slay the nations?  2:1 I will stand upon my watch, and set me upon
the tower, and will watch to see what he will say unto me, and what I
shall answer when I am reproved.

2:2 And the LORD answered me, and said, Write the vision, and make it
plain upon tables, that he may run that readeth it.

2:3 For the vision is yet for an appointed time, but at the end it
shall speak, and not lie: though it tarry, wait for it; because it
will surely come, it will not tarry.

2:4 Behold, his soul which is lifted up is not upright in him: but the
just shall live by his faith.

2:5 Yea also, because he transgresseth by wine, he is a proud man,
neither keepeth at home, who enlargeth his desire as hell, and is as
death, and cannot be satisfied, but gathereth unto him all nations,
and heapeth unto him all people: 2:6 Shall not all these take up a
parable against him, and a taunting proverb against him, and say, Woe
to him that increaseth that which is not his! how long? and to him
that ladeth himself with thick clay!  2:7 Shall they not rise up
suddenly that shall bite thee, and awake that shall vex thee, and thou
shalt be for booties unto them?  2:8 Because thou hast spoiled many
nations, all the remnant of the people shall spoil thee; because of
men's blood, and for the violence of the land, of the city, and of all
that dwell therein.

2:9 Woe to him that coveteth an evil covetousness to his house, that
he may set his nest on high, that he may be delivered from the power
of evil!  2:10 Thou hast consulted shame to thy house by cutting off
many people, and hast sinned against thy soul.

2:11 For the stone shall cry out of the wall, and the beam out of the
timber shall answer it.

2:12 Woe to him that buildeth a town with blood, and stablisheth a
city by iniquity!  2:13 Behold, is it not of the LORD of hosts that
the people shall labour in the very fire, and the people shall weary
themselves for very vanity?  2:14 For the earth shall be filled with
the knowledge of the glory of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea.

2:15 Woe unto him that giveth his neighbour drink, that puttest thy
bottle to him, and makest him drunken also, that thou mayest look on
their nakedness!  2:16 Thou art filled with shame for glory: drink
thou also, and let thy foreskin be uncovered: the cup of the LORD's
right hand shall be turned unto thee, and shameful spewing shall be on
thy glory.

2:17 For the violence of Lebanon shall cover thee, and the spoil of
beasts, which made them afraid, because of men's blood, and for the
violence of the land, of the city, and of all that dwell therein.

2:18 What profiteth the graven image that the maker thereof hath
graven it; the molten image, and a teacher of lies, that the maker of
his work trusteth therein, to make dumb idols?  2:19 Woe unto him that
saith to the wood, Awake; to the dumb stone, Arise, it shall teach!
Behold, it is laid over with gold and silver, and there is no breath
at all in the midst of it.

2:20 But the LORD is in his holy temple: let all the earth keep
silence before him.

3:1 A prayer of Habakkuk the prophet upon Shigionoth.

3:2 O LORD, I have heard thy speech, and was afraid: O LORD, revive
thy work in the midst of the years, in the midst of the years make
known; in wrath remember mercy.

3:3 God came from Teman, and the Holy One from mount Paran. Selah. His
glory covered the heavens, and the earth was full of his praise.

3:4 And his brightness was as the light; he had horns coming out of
his hand: and there was the hiding of his power.

3:5 Before him went the pestilence, and burning coals went forth at
his feet.

3:6 He stood, and measured the earth: he beheld, and drove asunder the
nations; and the everlasting mountains were scattered, the perpetual
hills did bow: his ways are everlasting.

3:7 I saw the tents of Cushan in affliction: and the curtains of the
land of Midian did tremble.

3:8 Was the LORD displeased against the rivers? was thine anger
against the rivers? was thy wrath against the sea, that thou didst
ride upon thine horses and thy chariots of salvation?  3:9 Thy bow was
made quite naked, according to the oaths of the tribes, even thy word.
Selah. Thou didst cleave the earth with rivers.

3:10 The mountains saw thee, and they trembled: the overflowing of the
water passed by: the deep uttered his voice, and lifted up his hands
on high.

3:11 The sun and moon stood still in their habitation: at the light of
thine arrows they went, and at the shining of thy glittering spear.

3:12 Thou didst march through the land in indignation, thou didst
thresh the heathen in anger.

3:13 Thou wentest forth for the salvation of thy people, even for
salvation with thine anointed; thou woundedst the head out of the
house of the wicked, by discovering the foundation unto the neck.
Selah.

3:14 Thou didst strike through with his staves the head of his
villages: they came out as a whirlwind to scatter me: their rejoicing
was as to devour the poor secretly.

3:15 Thou didst walk through the sea with thine horses, through the
heap of great waters.

3:16 When I heard, my belly trembled; my lips quivered at the voice:
rottenness entered into my bones, and I trembled in myself, that I
might rest in the day of trouble: when he cometh up unto the people,
he will invade them with his troops.

3:17 Although the fig tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be
in the vines; the labour of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall
yield no meat; the flock shall be cut off from the fold, and there
shall be no herd in the stalls: 3:18 Yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I
will joy in the God of my salvation.

3:19 The LORD God is my strength, and he will make my feet like hinds'
feet, and he will make me to walk upon mine high places. To the chief
singer on my stringed instruments.




Zephaniah


1:1 The word of the LORD which came unto Zephaniah the son of Cushi,
the son of Gedaliah, the son of Amariah, the son of Hizkiah, in the
days of Josiah the son of Amon, king of Judah.

1:2 I will utterly consume all things from off the land, saith the
LORD.

1:3 I will consume man and beast; I will consume the fowls of the
heaven, and the fishes of the sea, and the stumbling blocks with the
wicked: and I will cut off man from off the land, saith the LORD.

1:4 I will also stretch out mine hand upon Judah, and upon all the
inhabitants of Jerusalem; and I will cut off the remnant of Baal from
this place, and the name of the Chemarims with the priests; 1:5 And
them that worship the host of heaven upon the housetops; and them that
worship and that swear by the LORD, and that swear by Malcham; 1:6 And
them that are turned back from the LORD; and those that have not
sought the LORD, nor enquired for him.

1:7 Hold thy peace at the presence of the Lord GOD: for the day of the
LORD is at hand: for the LORD hath prepared a sacrifice, he hath bid
his guests.

1:8 And it shall come to pass in the day of the LORD's sacrifice, that
I will punish the princes, and the king's children, and all such as
are clothed with strange apparel.

1:9 In the same day also will I punish all those that leap on the
threshold, which fill their masters' houses with violence and deceit.

1:10 And it shall come to pass in that day, saith the LORD, that there
shall be the noise of a cry from the fish gate, and an howling from
the second, and a great crashing from the hills.

1:11 Howl, ye inhabitants of Maktesh, for all the merchant people are
cut down; all they that bear silver are cut off.

1:12 And it shall come to pass at that time, that I will search
Jerusalem with candles, and punish the men that are settled on their
lees: that say in their heart, The LORD will not do good, neither will
he do evil.

1:13 Therefore their goods shall become a booty, and their houses a
desolation: they shall also build houses, but not inhabit them; and
they shall plant vineyards, but not drink the wine thereof.

1:14 The great day of the LORD is near, it is near, and hasteth
greatly, even the voice of the day of the LORD: the mighty man shall
cry there bitterly.

1:15 That day is a day of wrath, a day of trouble and distress, a day
of wasteness and desolation, a day of darkness and gloominess, a day
of clouds and thick darkness, 1:16 A day of the trumpet and alarm
against the fenced cities, and against the high towers.

1:17 And I will bring distress upon men, that they shall walk like
blind men, because they have sinned against the LORD: and their blood
shall be poured out as dust, and their flesh as the dung.

1:18 Neither their silver nor their gold shall be able to deliver them
in the day of the LORD's wrath; but the whole land shall be devoured
by the fire of his jealousy: for he shall make even a speedy riddance
of all them that dwell in the land.

2:1 Gather yourselves together, yea, gather together, O nation not
desired; 2:2 Before the decree bring forth, before the day pass as the
chaff, before the fierce anger of the LORD come upon you, before the
day of the LORD's anger come upon you.

2:3 Seek ye the LORD, all ye meek of the earth, which have wrought his
judgment; seek righteousness, seek meekness: it may be ye shall be hid
in the day of the LORD's anger.

2:4 For Gaza shall be forsaken, and Ashkelon a desolation: they shall
drive out Ashdod at the noon day, and Ekron shall be rooted up.

2:5 Woe unto the inhabitants of the sea coast, the nation of the
Cherethites! the word of the LORD is against you; O Canaan, the land
of the Philistines, I will even destroy thee, that there shall be no
inhabitant.

2:6 And the sea coast shall be dwellings and cottages for shepherds,
and folds for flocks.

2:7 And the coast shall be for the remnant of the house of Judah; they
shall feed thereupon: in the houses of Ashkelon shall they lie down in
the evening: for the LORD their God shall visit them, and turn away
their captivity.

2:8 I have heard the reproach of Moab, and the revilings of the
children of Ammon, whereby they have reproached my people, and
magnified themselves against their border.

2:9 Therefore as I live, saith the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel,
Surely Moab shall be as Sodom, and the children of Ammon as Gomorrah,
even the breeding of nettles, and saltpits, and a perpetual
desolation: the residue of my people shall spoil them, and the remnant
of my people shall possess them.

2:10 This shall they have for their pride, because they have
reproached and magnified themselves against the people of the LORD of
hosts.

2:11 The LORD will be terrible unto them: for he will famish all the
gods of the earth; and men shall worship him, every one from his
place, even all the isles of the heathen.

2:12 Ye Ethiopians also, ye shall be slain by my sword.

2:13 And he will stretch out his hand against the north, and destroy
Assyria; and will make Nineveh a desolation, and dry like a
wilderness.

2:14 And flocks shall lie down in the midst of her, all the beasts of
the nations: both the cormorant and the bittern shall lodge in the
upper lintels of it; their voice shall sing in the windows; desolation
shall be in the thresholds; for he shall uncover the cedar work.

2:15 This is the rejoicing city that dwelt carelessly, that said in
her heart, I am, and there is none beside me: how is she become a
desolation, a place for beasts to lie down in! every one that passeth
by her shall hiss, and wag his hand.

3:1 Woe to her that is filthy and polluted, to the oppressing city!
3:2 She obeyed not the voice; she received not correction; she trusted
not in the LORD; she drew not near to her God.

3:3 Her princes within her are roaring lions; her judges are evening
wolves; they gnaw not the bones till the morrow.

3:4 Her prophets are light and treacherous persons: her priests have
polluted the sanctuary, they have done violence to the law.

3:5 The just LORD is in the midst thereof; he will not do iniquity:
every morning doth he bring his judgment to light, he faileth not; but
the unjust knoweth no shame.

3:6 I have cut off the nations: their towers are desolate; I made
their streets waste, that none passeth by: their cities are destroyed,
so that there is no man, that there is none inhabitant.

3:7 I said, Surely thou wilt fear me, thou wilt receive instruction;
so their dwelling should not be cut off, howsoever I punished them:
but they rose early, and corrupted all their doings.

3:8 Therefore wait ye upon me, saith the LORD, until the day that I
rise up to the prey: for my determination is to gather the nations,
that I may assemble the kingdoms, to pour upon them mine indignation,
even all my fierce anger: for all the earth shall be devoured with the
fire of my jealousy.

3:9 For then will I turn to the people a pure language, that they may
all call upon the name of the LORD, to serve him with one consent.

3:10 From beyond the rivers of Ethiopia my suppliants, even the
daughter of my dispersed, shall bring mine offering.

3:11 In that day shalt thou not be ashamed for all thy doings, wherein
thou hast transgressed against me: for then I will take away out of
the midst of thee them that rejoice in thy pride, and thou shalt no
more be haughty because of my holy mountain.

3:12 I will also leave in the midst of thee an afflicted and poor
people, and they shall trust in the name of the LORD.

3:13 The remnant of Israel shall not do iniquity, nor speak lies;
neither shall a deceitful tongue be found in their mouth: for they
shall feed and lie down, and none shall make them afraid.

3:14 Sing, O daughter of Zion; shout, O Israel; be glad and rejoice
with all the heart, O daughter of Jerusalem.

3:15 The LORD hath taken away thy judgments, he hath cast out thine
enemy: the king of Israel, even the LORD, is in the midst of thee:
thou shalt not see evil any more.

3:16 In that day it shall be said to Jerusalem, Fear thou not: and to
Zion, Let not thine hands be slack.

3:17 The LORD thy God in the midst of thee is mighty; he will save, he
will rejoice over thee with joy; he will rest in his love, he will joy
over thee with singing.

3:18 I will gather them that are sorrowful for the solemn assembly,
who are of thee, to whom the reproach of it was a burden.

3:19 Behold, at that time I will undo all that afflict thee: and I
will save her that halteth, and gather her that was driven out; and I
will get them praise and fame in every land where they have been put
to shame.

3:20 At that time will I bring you again, even in the time that I
gather you: for I will make you a name and a praise among all people
of the earth, when I turn back your captivity before your eyes,
saith the LORD.




Haggai


1:1 In the second year of Darius the king, in the sixth month, in the
first day of the month, came the word of the LORD by Haggai the
prophet unto Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel, governor of Judah, and
to Joshua the son of Josedech, the high priest, saying, 1:2 Thus
speaketh the LORD of hosts, saying, This people say, The time is not
come, the time that the LORD's house should be built.

1:3 Then came the word of the LORD by Haggai the prophet, saying, 1:4
Is it time for you, O ye, to dwell in your cieled houses, and this
house lie waste?  1:5 Now therefore thus saith the LORD of hosts;
Consider your ways.

1:6 Ye have sown much, and bring in little; ye eat, but ye have not
enough; ye drink, but ye are not filled with drink; ye clothe you, but
there is none warm; and he that earneth wages earneth wages to put it
into a bag with holes.

1:7 Thus saith the LORD of hosts; Consider your ways.

1:8 Go up to the mountain, and bring wood, and build the house; and I
will take pleasure in it, and I will be glorified, saith the LORD.

1:9 Ye looked for much, and, lo it came to little; and when ye brought
it home, I did blow upon it. Why? saith the LORD of hosts. Because of
mine house that is waste, and ye run every man unto his own house.

1:10 Therefore the heaven over you is stayed from dew, and the earth
is stayed from her fruit.

1:11 And I called for a drought upon the land, and upon the mountains,
and upon the corn, and upon the new wine, and upon the oil, and upon
that which the ground bringeth forth, and upon men, and upon cattle,
and upon all the labour of the hands.

1:12 Then Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel, and Joshua the son of
Josedech, the high priest, with all the remnant of the people, obeyed
the voice of the LORD their God, and the words of Haggai the prophet,
as the LORD their God had sent him, and the people did fear before the
LORD.

1:13 Then spake Haggai the LORD's messenger in the LORD's message unto
the people, saying, I am with you, saith the LORD.

1:14 And the LORD stirred up the spirit of Zerubbabel the son of
Shealtiel, governor of Judah, and the spirit of Joshua the son of
Josedech, the high priest, and the spirit of all the remnant of the
people; and they came and did work in the house of the LORD of hosts,
their God, 1:15 In the four and twentieth day of the sixth month, in
the second year of Darius the king.

2:1 In the seventh month, in the one and twentieth day of the month,
came the word of the LORD by the prophet Haggai, saying, 2:2 Speak now
to Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel, governor of Judah, and to Joshua
the son of Josedech, the high priest, and to the residue of the
people, saying, 2:3 Who is left among you that saw this house in her
first glory? and how do ye see it now? is it not in your eyes in
comparison of it as nothing?  2:4 Yet now be strong, O Zerubbabel,
saith the LORD; and be strong, O Joshua, son of Josedech, the high
priest; and be strong, all ye people of the land, saith the LORD, and
work: for I am with you, saith the LORD of hosts: 2:5 According to the
word that I covenanted with you when ye came out of Egypt, so my
spirit remaineth among you: fear ye not.

2:6 For thus saith the LORD of hosts; Yet once, it is a little while,
and I will shake the heavens, and the earth, and the sea, and the dry
land; 2:7 And I will shake all nations, and the desire of all nations
shall come: and I will fill this house with glory, saith the LORD of
hosts.

2:8 The silver is mine, and the gold is mine, saith the LORD of hosts.

2:9 The glory of this latter house shall be greater than of the
former, saith the LORD of hosts: and in this place will I give peace,
saith the LORD of hosts.

2:10 In the four and twentieth day of the ninth month, in the second
year of Darius, came the word of the LORD by Haggai the prophet,
saying, 2:11 Thus saith the LORD of hosts; Ask now the priests
concerning the law, saying, 2:12 If one bear holy flesh in the skirt
of his garment, and with his skirt do touch bread, or pottage, or
wine, or oil, or any meat, shall it be holy? And the priests answered
and said, No.

2:13 Then said Haggai, If one that is unclean by a dead body touch any
of these, shall it be unclean? And the priests answered and said, It
shall be unclean.

2:14 Then answered Haggai, and said, So is this people, and so is this
nation before me, saith the LORD; and so is every work of their hands;
and that which they offer there is unclean.

2:15 And now, I pray you, consider from this day and upward, from
before a stone was laid upon a stone in the temple of the LORD: 2:16
Since those days were, when one came to an heap of twenty measures,
there were but ten: when one came to the pressfat for to draw out
fifty vessels out of the press, there were but twenty.

2:17 I smote you with blasting and with mildew and with hail in all
the labours of your hands; yet ye turned not to me, saith the LORD.

2:18 Consider now from this day and upward, from the four and
twentieth day of the ninth month, even from the day that the
foundation of the LORD's temple was laid, consider it.

2:19 Is the seed yet in the barn? yea, as yet the vine, and the fig
tree, and the pomegranate, and the olive tree, hath not brought forth:
from this day will I bless you.

2:20 And again the word of the LORD came unto Haggai in the four and
twentieth day of the month, saying, 2:21 Speak to Zerubbabel, governor
of Judah, saying, I will shake the heavens and the earth; 2:22 And I
will overthrow the throne of kingdoms, and I will destroy the strength
of the kingdoms of the heathen; and I will overthrow the chariots, and
those that ride in them; and the horses and their riders shall come
down, every one by the sword of his brother.

2:23 In that day, saith the LORD of hosts, will I take thee, O
Zerubbabel, my servant, the son of Shealtiel, saith the LORD, and will
make thee as a signet: for I have chosen thee, saith the LORD of hosts.




Zechariah


1:1 In the eighth month, in the second year of Darius, came the word
of the LORD unto Zechariah, the son of Berechiah, the son of Iddo the
prophet, saying, 1:2 The LORD hath been sore displeased with your
fathers.

1:3 Therefore say thou unto them, Thus saith the LORD of hosts; Turn
ye unto me, saith the LORD of hosts, and I will turn unto you, saith
the LORD of hosts.

1:4 Be ye not as your fathers, unto whom the former prophets have
cried, saying, Thus saith the LORD of hosts; Turn ye now from your
evil ways, and from your evil doings: but they did not hear, nor
hearken unto me, saith the LORD.

1:5 Your fathers, where are they? and the prophets, do they live for
ever?  1:6 But my words and my statutes, which I commanded my servants
the prophets, did they not take hold of your fathers? and they
returned and said, Like as the LORD of hosts thought to do unto us,
according to our ways, and according to our doings, so hath he dealt
with us.

1:7 Upon the four and twentieth day of the eleventh month, which is
the month Sebat, in the second year of Darius, came the word of the
LORD unto Zechariah, the son of Berechiah, the son of Iddo the
prophet, saying, 1:8 I saw by night, and behold a man riding upon a
red horse, and he stood among the myrtle trees that were in the
bottom; and behind him were there red horses, speckled, and white.

1:9 Then said I, O my lord, what are these? And the angel that talked
with me said unto me, I will shew thee what these be.

1:10 And the man that stood among the myrtle trees answered and said,
These are they whom the LORD hath sent to walk to and fro through the
earth.

1:11 And they answered the angel of the LORD that stood among the
myrtle trees, and said, We have walked to and fro through the earth,
and, behold, all the earth sitteth still, and is at rest.

1:12 Then the angel of the LORD answered and said, O LORD of hosts,
how long wilt thou not have mercy on Jerusalem and on the cities of
Judah, against which thou hast had indignation these threescore and
ten years?  1:13 And the LORD answered the angel that talked with me
with good words and comfortable words.

1:14 So the angel that communed with me said unto me, Cry thou,
saying, Thus saith the LORD of hosts; I am jealous for Jerusalem and
for Zion with a great jealousy.

1:15 And I am very sore displeased with the heathen that are at ease:
for I was but a little displeased, and they helped forward the
affliction.

1:16 Therefore thus saith the LORD; I am returned to Jerusalem with
mercies: my house shall be built in it, saith the LORD of hosts, and a
line shall be stretched forth upon Jerusalem.

1:17 Cry yet, saying, Thus saith the LORD of hosts; My cities through
prosperity shall yet be spread abroad; and the LORD shall yet comfort
Zion, and shall yet choose Jerusalem.

1:18 Then lifted I up mine eyes, and saw, and behold four horns.

1:19 And I said unto the angel that talked with me, What be these? And
he answered me, These are the horns which have scattered Judah,
Israel, and Jerusalem.

1:20 And the LORD shewed me four carpenters.

1:21 Then said I, What come these to do? And he spake, saying, These
are the horns which have scattered Judah, so that no man did lift up
his head: but these are come to fray them, to cast out the horns of
the Gentiles, which lifted up their horn over the land of Judah to
scatter it.

2:1 I lifted up mine eyes again, and looked, and behold a man with a
measuring line in his hand.

2:2 Then said I, Whither goest thou? And he said unto me, To measure
Jerusalem, to see what is the breadth thereof, and what is the length
thereof.

2:3 And, behold, the angel that talked with me went forth, and another
angel went out to meet him, 2:4 And said unto him, Run, speak to this
young man, saying, Jerusalem shall be inhabited as towns without walls
for the multitude of men and cattle therein: 2:5 For I, saith the
LORD, will be unto her a wall of fire round about, and will be the
glory in the midst of her.

2:6 Ho, ho, come forth, and flee from the land of the north, saith the
LORD: for I have spread you abroad as the four winds of the heaven,
saith the LORD.

2:7 Deliver thyself, O Zion, that dwellest with the daughter of
Babylon.

2:8 For thus saith the LORD of hosts; After the glory hath he sent me
unto the nations which spoiled you: for he that toucheth you toucheth
the apple of his eye.

2:9 For, behold, I will shake mine hand upon them, and they shall be a
spoil to their servants: and ye shall know that the LORD of hosts hath
sent me.

2:10 Sing and rejoice, O daughter of Zion: for, lo, I come, and I will
dwell in the midst of thee, saith the LORD.

2:11 And many nations shall be joined to the LORD in that day, and
shall be my people: and I will dwell in the midst of thee, and thou
shalt know that the LORD of hosts hath sent me unto thee.

2:12 And the LORD shall inherit Judah his portion in the holy land,
and shall choose Jerusalem again.

2:13 Be silent, O all flesh, before the LORD: for he is raised up out
of his holy habitation.

3:1 And he shewed me Joshua the high priest standing before the angel
of the LORD, and Satan standing at his right hand to resist him.

3:2 And the LORD said unto Satan, The LORD rebuke thee, O Satan; even
the LORD that hath chosen Jerusalem rebuke thee: is not this a brand
plucked out of the fire?  3:3 Now Joshua was clothed with filthy
garments, and stood before the angel.

3:4 And he answered and spake unto those that stood before him,
saying, Take away the filthy garments from him. And unto him he said,
Behold, I have caused thine iniquity to pass from thee, and I will
clothe thee with change of raiment.

3:5 And I said, Let them set a fair mitre upon his head. So they set a
fair mitre upon his head, and clothed him with garments. And the angel
of the LORD stood by.

3:6 And the angel of the LORD protested unto Joshua, saying, 3:7 Thus
saith the LORD of hosts; If thou wilt walk in my ways, and if thou
wilt keep my charge, then thou shalt also judge my house, and shalt
also keep my courts, and I will give thee places to walk among these
that stand by.

3:8 Hear now, O Joshua the high priest, thou, and thy fellows that sit
before thee: for they are men wondered at: for, behold, I will bring
forth my servant the BRANCH.

3:9 For behold the stone that I have laid before Joshua; upon one
stone shall be seven eyes: behold, I will engrave the graving thereof,
saith the LORD of hosts, and I will remove the iniquity of that land
in one day.

3:10 In that day, saith the LORD of hosts, shall ye call every man his
neighbour under the vine and under the fig tree.

4:1 And the angel that talked with me came again, and waked me, as a
man that is wakened out of his sleep.

4:2 And said unto me, What seest thou? And I said, I have looked, and
behold a candlestick all of gold, with a bowl upon the top of it, and
his seven lamps thereon, and seven pipes to the seven lamps, which are
upon the top thereof: 4:3 And two olive trees by it, one upon the
right side of the bowl, and the other upon the left side thereof.

4:4 So I answered and spake to the angel that talked with me, saying,
What are these, my lord?  4:5 Then the angel that talked with me
answered and said unto me, Knowest thou not what these be? And I said,
No, my lord.

4:6 Then he answered and spake unto me, saying, This is the word of
the LORD unto Zerubbabel, saying, Not by might, nor by power, but by
my spirit, saith the LORD of hosts.

4:7 Who art thou, O great mountain? before Zerubbabel thou shalt
become a plain: and he shall bring forth the headstone thereof with
shoutings, crying, Grace, grace unto it.

4:8 Moreover the word of the LORD came unto me, saying, 4:9 The hands
of Zerubbabel have laid the foundation of this house; his hands shall
also finish it; and thou shalt know that the LORD of hosts hath sent
me unto you.

4:10 For who hath despised the day of small things? for they shall
rejoice, and shall see the plummet in the hand of Zerubbabel with
those seven; they are the eyes of the LORD, which run to and fro
through the whole earth.

4:11 Then answered I, and said unto him, What are these two olive
trees upon the right side of the candlestick and upon the left side
thereof?  4:12 And I answered again, and said unto him, What be these
two olive branches which through the two golden pipes empty the golden
oil out of themselves?  4:13 And he answered me and said, Knowest thou
not what these be? And I said, No, my lord.

4:14 Then said he, These are the two anointed ones, that stand by the
LORD of the whole earth.

5:1 Then I turned, and lifted up mine eyes, and looked, and behold a
flying roll.

5:2 And he said unto me, What seest thou? And I answered, I see a
flying roll; the length thereof is twenty cubits, and the breadth
thereof ten cubits.

5:3 Then said he unto me, This is the curse that goeth forth over the
face of the whole earth: for every one that stealeth shall be cut off
as on this side according to it; and every one that sweareth shall be
cut off as on that side according to it.

5:4 I will bring it forth, saith the LORD of hosts, and it shall enter
into the house of the thief, and into the house of him that sweareth
falsely by my name: and it shall remain in the midst of his house, and
shall consume it with the timber thereof and the stones thereof.

5:5 Then the angel that talked with me went forth, and said unto me,
Lift up now thine eyes, and see what is this that goeth forth.

5:6 And I said, What is it? And he said, This is an ephah that goeth
forth. He said moreover, This is their resemblance through all the
earth.

5:7 And, behold, there was lifted up a talent of lead: and this is a
woman that sitteth in the midst of the ephah.

5:8 And he said, This is wickedness. And he cast it into the midst of
the ephah; and he cast the weight of lead upon the mouth thereof.

5:9 Then lifted I up mine eyes, and looked, and, behold, there came
out two women, and the wind was in their wings; for they had wings
like the wings of a stork: and they lifted up the ephah between the
earth and the heaven.

5:10 Then said I to the angel that talked with me, Whither do these
bear the ephah?  5:11 And he said unto me, To build it an house in the
land of Shinar: and it shall be established, and set there upon her
own base.

6:1 And I turned, and lifted up mine eyes, and looked, and, behold,
there came four chariots out from between two mountains; and the
mountains were mountains of brass.

6:2 In the first chariot were red horses; and in the second chariot
black horses; 6:3 And in the third chariot white horses; and in the
fourth chariot grisled and bay horses.

6:4 Then I answered and said unto the angel that talked with me, What
are these, my lord?  6:5 And the angel answered and said unto me,
These are the four spirits of the heavens, which go forth from
standing before the LORD of all the earth.

6:6 The black horses which are therein go forth into the north
country; and the white go forth after them; and the grisled go forth
toward the south country.

6:7 And the bay went forth, and sought to go that they might walk to
and fro through the earth: and he said, Get you hence, walk to and fro
through the earth. So they walked to and fro through the earth.

6:8 Then cried he upon me, and spake unto me, saying, Behold, these
that go toward the north country have quieted my spirit in the north
country.

6:9 And the word of the LORD came unto me, saying, 6:10 Take of them
of the captivity, even of Heldai, of Tobijah, and of Jedaiah, which
are come from Babylon, and come thou the same day, and go into the
house of Josiah the son of Zephaniah; 6:11 Then take silver and gold,
and make crowns, and set them upon the head of Joshua the son of
Josedech, the high priest; 6:12 And speak unto him, saying, Thus
speaketh the LORD of hosts, saying, Behold the man whose name is The
BRANCH; and he shall grow up out of his place, and he shall build the
temple of the LORD: 6:13 Even he shall build the temple of the LORD;
and he shall bear the glory, and shall sit and rule upon his throne;
and he shall be a priest upon his throne: and the counsel of peace
shall be between them both.

6:14 And the crowns shall be to Helem, and to Tobijah, and to Jedaiah,
and to Hen the son of Zephaniah, for a memorial in the temple of the
LORD.

6:15 And they that are far off shall come and build in the temple of
the LORD, and ye shall know that the LORD of hosts hath sent me unto
you. And this shall come to pass, if ye will diligently obey the voice
of the LORD your God.

7:1 And it came to pass in the fourth year of king Darius, that the
word of the LORD came unto Zechariah in the fourth day of the ninth
month, even in Chisleu; 7:2 When they had sent unto the house of God
Sherezer and Regemmelech, and their men, to pray before the LORD, 7:3
And to speak unto the priests which were in the house of the LORD of
hosts, and to the prophets, saying, Should I weep in the fifth month,
separating myself, as I have done these so many years?  7:4 Then came
the word of the LORD of hosts unto me, saying, 7:5 Speak unto all the
people of the land, and to the priests, saying, When ye fasted and
mourned in the fifth and seventh month, even those seventy years, did
ye at all fast unto me, even to me?  7:6 And when ye did eat, and when
ye did drink, did not ye eat for yourselves, and drink for yourselves?
7:7 Should ye not hear the words which the LORD hath cried by the
former prophets, when Jerusalem was inhabited and in prosperity, and
the cities thereof round about her, when men inhabited the south and
the plain?  7:8 And the word of the LORD came unto Zechariah, saying,
7:9 Thus speaketh the LORD of hosts, saying, Execute true judgment,
and shew mercy and compassions every man to his brother: 7:10 And
oppress not the widow, nor the fatherless, the stranger, nor the poor;
and let none of you imagine evil against his brother in your heart.

7:11 But they refused to hearken, and pulled away the shoulder, and
stopped their ears, that they should not hear.

7:12 Yea, they made their hearts as an adamant stone, lest they should
hear the law, and the words which the LORD of hosts hath sent in his
spirit by the former prophets: therefore came a great wrath from the
LORD of hosts.

7:13 Therefore it is come to pass, that as he cried, and they would
not hear; so they cried, and I would not hear, saith the LORD of
hosts: 7:14 But I scattered them with a whirlwind among all the
nations whom they knew not. Thus the land was desolate after them,
that no man passed through nor returned: for they laid the pleasant
land desolate.

8:1 Again the word of the LORD of hosts came to me, saying, 8:2 Thus
saith the LORD of hosts; I was jealous for Zion with great jealousy,
and I was jealous for her with great fury.

8:3 Thus saith the LORD; I am returned unto Zion, and will dwell in
the midst of Jerusalem: and Jerusalem shall be called a city of truth;
and the mountain of the LORD of hosts the holy mountain.

8:4 Thus saith the LORD of hosts; There shall yet old men and old
women dwell in the streets of Jerusalem, and every man with his staff
in his hand for very age.

8:5 And the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls
playing in the streets thereof.

8:6 Thus saith the LORD of hosts; If it be marvellous in the eyes of
the remnant of this people in these days, should it also be marvellous
in mine eyes? saith the LORD of hosts.

8:7 Thus saith the LORD of hosts; Behold, I will save my people from
the east country, and from the west country; 8:8 And I will bring
them, and they shall dwell in the midst of Jerusalem: and they shall
be my people, and I will be their God, in truth and in righteousness.

8:9 Thus saith the LORD of hosts; Let your hands be strong, ye that
hear in these days these words by the mouth of the prophets, which
were in the day that the foundation of the house of the LORD of hosts
was laid, that the temple might be built.

8:10 For before these days there was no hire for man, nor any hire for
beast; neither was there any peace to him that went out or came in
because of the affliction: for I set all men every one against his
neighbour.

8:11 But now I will not be unto the residue of this people as in the
former days, saith the LORD of hosts.

8:12 For the seed shall be prosperous; the vine shall give her fruit,
and the ground shall give her increase, and the heavens shall give
their dew; and I will cause the remnant of this people to possess all
these things.

8:13 And it shall come to pass, that as ye were a curse among the
heathen, O house of Judah, and house of Israel; so will I save you,
and ye shall be a blessing: fear not, but let your hands be strong.

8:14 For thus saith the LORD of hosts; As I thought to punish you,
when your fathers provoked me to wrath, saith the LORD of hosts, and I
repented not: 8:15 So again have I thought in these days to do well
unto Jerusalem and to the house of Judah: fear ye not.

8:16 These are the things that ye shall do; Speak ye every man the
truth to his neighbour; execute the judgment of truth and peace in
your gates: 8:17 And let none of you imagine evil in your hearts
against his neighbour; and love no false oath: for all these are
things that I hate, saith the LORD.

8:18 And the word of the LORD of hosts came unto me, saying, 8:19 Thus
saith the LORD of hosts; The fast of the fourth month, and the fast of
the fifth, and the fast of the seventh, and the fast of the tenth,
shall be to the house of Judah joy and gladness, and cheerful feasts;
therefore love the truth and peace.

8:20 Thus saith the LORD of hosts; It shall yet come to pass, that
there shall come people, and the inhabitants of many cities: 8:21 And
the inhabitants of one city shall go to another, saying, Let us go
speedily to pray before the LORD, and to seek the LORD of hosts: I
will go also.

8:22 Yea, many people and strong nations shall come to seek the LORD
of hosts in Jerusalem, and to pray before the LORD.

8:23 Thus saith the LORD of hosts; In those days it shall come to
pass, that ten men shall take hold out of all languages of the
nations, even shall take hold of the skirt of him that is a Jew,
saying, We will go with you: for we have heard that God is with you.

9:1 The burden of the word of the LORD in the land of Hadrach, and
Damascus shall be the rest thereof: when the eyes of man, as of all
the tribes of Israel, shall be toward the LORD.

9:2 And Hamath also shall border thereby; Tyrus, and Zidon, though it
be very wise.

9:3 And Tyrus did build herself a strong hold, and heaped up silver as
the dust, and fine gold as the mire of the streets.

9:4 Behold, the LORD will cast her out, and he will smite her power in
the sea; and she shall be devoured with fire.

9:5 Ashkelon shall see it, and fear; Gaza also shall see it, and be
very sorrowful, and Ekron; for her expectation shall be ashamed; and
the king shall perish from Gaza, and Ashkelon shall not be inhabited.

9:6 And a bastard shall dwell in Ashdod, and I will cut off the pride
of the Philistines.

9:7 And I will take away his blood out of his mouth, and his
abominations from between his teeth: but he that remaineth, even he,
shall be for our God, and he shall be as a governor in Judah, and
Ekron as a Jebusite.

9:8 And I will encamp about mine house because of the army, because of
him that passeth by, and because of him that returneth: and no
oppressor shall pass through them any more: for now have I seen with
mine eyes.

9:9 Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; shout, O daughter of
Jerusalem: behold, thy King cometh unto thee: he is just, and having
salvation; lowly, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of
an ass.

9:10 And I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim, and the horse from
Jerusalem, and the battle bow shall be cut off: and he shall speak
peace unto the heathen: and his dominion shall be from sea even to
sea, and from the river even to the ends of the earth.

9:11 As for thee also, by the blood of thy covenant I have sent forth
thy prisoners out of the pit wherein is no water.

9:12 Turn you to the strong hold, ye prisoners of hope: even to day do
I declare that I will render double unto thee; 9:13 When I have bent
Judah for me, filled the bow with Ephraim, and raised up thy sons, O
Zion, against thy sons, O Greece, and made thee as the sword of a
mighty man.

9:14 And the LORD shall be seen over them, and his arrow shall go
forth as the lightning: and the LORD God shall blow the trumpet, and
shall go with whirlwinds of the south.

9:15 The LORD of hosts shall defend them; and they shall devour, and
subdue with sling stones; and they shall drink, and make a noise as
through wine; and they shall be filled like bowls, and as the corners
of the altar.

9:16 And the LORD their God shall save them in that day as the flock
of his people: for they shall be as the stones of a crown, lifted up
as an ensign upon his land.

9:17 For how great is his goodness, and how great is his beauty! corn
shall make the young men cheerful, and new wine the maids.

10:1 Ask ye of the LORD rain in the time of the latter rain; so the
LORD shall make bright clouds, and give them showers of rain, to every
one grass in the field.

10:2 For the idols have spoken vanity, and the diviners have seen a
lie, and have told false dreams; they comfort in vain: therefore they
went their way as a flock, they were troubled, because there was no
shepherd.

10:3 Mine anger was kindled against the shepherds, and I punished the
goats: for the LORD of hosts hath visited his flock the house of
Judah, and hath made them as his goodly horse in the battle.

10:4 Out of him came forth the corner, out of him the nail, out of him
the battle bow, out of him every oppressor together.

10:5 And they shall be as mighty men, which tread down their enemies
in the mire of the streets in the battle: and they shall fight,
because the LORD is with them, and the riders on horses shall be
confounded.

10:6 And I will strengthen the house of Judah, and I will save the
house of Joseph, and I will bring them again to place them; for I have
mercy upon them: and they shall be as though I had not cast them off:
for I am the LORD their God, and will hear them.

10:7 And they of Ephraim shall be like a mighty man, and their heart
shall rejoice as through wine: yea, their children shall see it, and
be glad; their heart shall rejoice in the LORD.

10:8 I will hiss for them, and gather them; for I have redeemed them:
and they shall increase as they have increased.

10:9 And I will sow them among the people: and they shall remember me
in far countries; and they shall live with their children, and turn
again.

10:10 I will bring them again also out of the land of Egypt, and
gather them out of Assyria; and I will bring them into the land of
Gilead and Lebanon; and place shall not be found for them.

10:11 And he shall pass through the sea with affliction, and shall
smite the waves in the sea, and all the deeps of the river shall dry
up: and the pride of Assyria shall be brought down, and the sceptre of
Egypt shall depart away.

10:12 And I will strengthen them in the LORD; and they shall walk up
and down in his name, saith the LORD.

11:1 Open thy doors, O Lebanon, that the fire may devour thy cedars.

11:2 Howl, fir tree; for the cedar is fallen; because the mighty are
spoiled: howl, O ye oaks of Bashan; for the forest of the vintage is
come down.

11:3 There is a voice of the howling of the shepherds; for their glory
is spoiled: a voice of the roaring of young lions; for the pride of
Jordan is spoiled.

11:4 Thus saith the LORD my God; Feed the flock of the slaughter; 11:5
Whose possessors slay them, and hold themselves not guilty: and they
that sell them say, Blessed be the LORD; for I am rich: and their own
shepherds pity them not.

11:6 For I will no more pity the inhabitants of the land, saith the
LORD: but, lo, I will deliver the men every one into his neighbour's
hand, and into the hand of his king: and they shall smite the land,
and out of their hand I will not deliver them.

11:7 And I will feed the flock of slaughter, even you, O poor of the
flock. And I took unto me two staves; the one I called Beauty, and the
other I called Bands; and I fed the flock.

11:8 Three shepherds also I cut off in one month; and my soul lothed
them, and their soul also abhorred me.

11:9 Then said I, I will not feed you: that that dieth, let it die;
and that that is to be cut off, let it be cut off; and let the rest
eat every one the flesh of another.

11:10 And I took my staff, even Beauty, and cut it asunder, that I
might break my covenant which I had made with all the people.

11:11 And it was broken in that day: and so the poor of the flock that
waited upon me knew that it was the word of the LORD.

11:12 And I said unto them, If ye think good, give me my price; and if
not, forbear. So they weighed for my price thirty pieces of silver.

11:13 And the LORD said unto me, Cast it unto the potter: a goodly
price that I was prised at of them. And I took the thirty pieces of
silver, and cast them to the potter in the house of the LORD.

11:14 Then I cut asunder mine other staff, even Bands, that I might
break the brotherhood between Judah and Israel.

11:15 And the LORD said unto me, Take unto thee yet the instruments of
a foolish shepherd.

11:16 For, lo, I will raise up a shepherd in the land, which shall not
visit those that be cut off, neither shall seek the young one, nor
heal that that is broken, nor feed that that standeth still: but he
shall eat the flesh of the fat, and tear their claws in pieces.

11:17 Woe to the idol shepherd that leaveth the flock! the sword shall
be upon his arm, and upon his right eye: his arm shall be clean dried
up, and his right eye shall be utterly darkened.

12:1 The burden of the word of the LORD for Israel, saith the LORD,
which stretcheth forth the heavens, and layeth the foundation of the
earth, and formeth the spirit of man within him.

12:2 Behold, I will make Jerusalem a cup of trembling unto all the
people round about, when they shall be in the siege both against Judah
and against Jerusalem.

12:3 And in that day will I make Jerusalem a burdensome stone for all
people: all that burden themselves with it shall be cut in pieces,
though all the people of the earth be gathered together against it.

12:4 In that day, saith the LORD, I will smite every horse with
astonishment, and his rider with madness: and I will open mine eyes
upon the house of Judah, and will smite every horse of the people with
blindness.

12:5 And the governors of Judah shall say in their heart, The
inhabitants of Jerusalem shall be my strength in the LORD of hosts
their God.

12:6 In that day will I make the governors of Judah like an hearth of
fire among the wood, and like a torch of fire in a sheaf; and they
shall devour all the people round about, on the right hand and on the
left: and Jerusalem shall be inhabited again in her own place, even in
Jerusalem.

12:7 The LORD also shall save the tents of Judah first, that the glory
of the house of David and the glory of the inhabitants of Jerusalem do
not magnify themselves against Judah.

12:8 In that day shall the LORD defend the inhabitants of Jerusalem;
and he that is feeble among them at that day shall be as David; and
the house of David shall be as God, as the angel of the LORD before
them.

12:9 And it shall come to pass in that day, that I will seek to
destroy all the nations that come against Jerusalem.

12:10 And I will pour upon the house of David, and upon the
inhabitants of Jerusalem, the spirit of grace and of supplications:
and they shall look upon me whom they have pierced, and they shall
mourn for him, as one mourneth for his only son, and shall be in
bitterness for him, as one that is in bitterness for his firstborn.

12:11 In that day shall there be a great mourning in Jerusalem, as the
mourning of Hadadrimmon in the valley of Megiddon.

12:12 And the land shall mourn, every family apart; the family of the
house of David apart, and their wives apart; the family of the house
of Nathan apart, and their wives apart; 12:13 The family of the house
of Levi apart, and their wives apart; the family of Shimei apart, and
their wives apart; 12:14 All the families that remain, every family
apart, and their wives apart.

13:1 In that day there shall be a fountain opened to the house of
David and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem for sin and for uncleanness.

13:2 And it shall come to pass in that day, saith the LORD of hosts,
that I will cut off the names of the idols out of the land, and they
shall no more be remembered: and also I will cause the prophets and
the unclean spirit to pass out of the land.

13:3 And it shall come to pass, that when any shall yet prophesy, then
his father and his mother that begat him shall say unto him, Thou
shalt not live; for thou speakest lies in the name of the LORD: and
his father and his mother that begat him shall thrust him through when
he prophesieth.

13:4 And it shall come to pass in that day, that the prophets shall be
ashamed every one of his vision, when he hath prophesied; neither
shall they wear a rough garment to deceive: 13:5 But he shall say, I
am no prophet, I am an husbandman; for man taught me to keep cattle
from my youth.

13:6 And one shall say unto him, What are these wounds in thine hands?
Then he shall answer, Those with which I was wounded in the house of
my friends.

13:7 Awake, O sword, against my shepherd, and against the man that is
my fellow, saith the LORD of hosts: smite the shepherd, and the sheep
shall be scattered: and I will turn mine hand upon the little ones.

13:8 And it shall come to pass, that in all the land, saith the LORD,
two parts therein shall be cut off and die; but the third shall be
left therein.

13:9 And I will bring the third part through the fire, and will refine
them as silver is refined, and will try them as gold is tried: they
shall call on my name, and I will hear them: I will say, It is my
people: and they shall say, The LORD is my God.

14:1 Behold, the day of the LORD cometh, and thy spoil shall be
divided in the midst of thee.

14:2 For I will gather all nations against Jerusalem to battle; and
the city shall be taken, and the houses rifled, and the women
ravished; and half of the city shall go forth into captivity, and the
residue of the people shall not be cut off from the city.

14:3 Then shall the LORD go forth, and fight against those nations, as
when he fought in the day of battle.

14:4 And his feet shall stand in that day upon the mount of Olives,
which is before Jerusalem on the east, and the mount of Olives shall
cleave in the midst thereof toward the east and toward the west, and
there shall be a very great valley; and half of the mountain shall
remove toward the north, and half of it toward the south.

14:5 And ye shall flee to the valley of the mountains; for the valley
of the mountains shall reach unto Azal: yea, ye shall flee, like as ye
fled from before the earthquake in the days of Uzziah king of Judah:
and the LORD my God shall come, and all the saints with thee.

14:6 And it shall come to pass in that day, that the light shall not
be clear, nor dark: 14:7 But it shall be one day which shall be known
to the LORD, not day, nor night: but it shall come to pass, that at
evening time it shall be light.

14:8 And it shall be in that day, that living waters shall go out from
Jerusalem; half of them toward the former sea, and half of them toward
the hinder sea: in summer and in winter shall it be.

14:9 And the LORD shall be king over all the earth: in that day shall
there be one LORD, and his name one.

14:10 All the land shall be turned as a plain from Geba to Rimmon
south of Jerusalem: and it shall be lifted up, and inhabited in her
place, from Benjamin's gate unto the place of the first gate, unto the
corner gate, and from the tower of Hananeel unto the king's
winepresses.

14:11 And men shall dwell in it, and there shall be no more utter
destruction; but Jerusalem shall be safely inhabited.

14:12 And this shall be the plague wherewith the LORD will smite all
the people that have fought against Jerusalem; Their flesh shall
consume away while they stand upon their feet, and their eyes shall
consume away in their holes, and their tongue shall consume away in
their mouth.

14:13 And it shall come to pass in that day, that a great tumult from
the LORD shall be among them; and they shall lay hold every one on the
hand of his neighbour, and his hand shall rise up against the hand of
his neighbour.

14:14 And Judah also shall fight at Jerusalem; and the wealth of all
the heathen round about shall be gathered together, gold, and silver,
and apparel, in great abundance.

14:15 And so shall be the plague of the horse, of the mule, of the
camel, and of the ass, and of all the beasts that shall be in these
tents, as this plague.

14:16 And it shall come to pass, that every one that is left of all
the nations which came against Jerusalem shall even go up from year to
year to worship the King, the LORD of hosts, and to keep the feast of
tabernacles.

14:17 And it shall be, that whoso will not come up of all the families
of the earth unto Jerusalem to worship the King, the LORD of hosts,
even upon them shall be no rain.

14:18 And if the family of Egypt go not up, and come not, that have no
rain; there shall be the plague, wherewith the LORD will smite the
heathen that come not up to keep the feast of tabernacles.

14:19 This shall be the punishment of Egypt, and the punishment of all
nations that come not up to keep the feast of tabernacles.

14:20 In that day shall there be upon the bells of the horses,
HOLINESS UNTO THE LORD; and the pots in the LORD's house shall be like
the bowls before the altar.

14:21 Yea, every pot in Jerusalem and in Judah shall be holiness unto
the LORD of hosts: and all they that sacrifice shall come and take of
them, and seethe therein: and in that day there shall be no more the
Canaanite in the house of the LORD of hosts.




Malachi


1:1 The burden of the word of the LORD to Israel by Malachi.

1:2 I have loved you, saith the LORD. Yet ye say, Wherein hast thou
loved us? Was not Esau Jacob's brother? saith the LORD: yet I loved
Jacob, 1:3 And I hated Esau, and laid his mountains and his heritage
waste for the dragons of the wilderness.

1:4 Whereas Edom saith, We are impoverished, but we will return and
build the desolate places; thus saith the LORD of hosts, They shall
build, but I will throw down; and they shall call them, The border of
wickedness, and, The people against whom the LORD hath indignation for
ever.

1:5 And your eyes shall see, and ye shall say, The LORD will be
magnified from the border of Israel.

1:6 A son honoureth his father, and a servant his master: if then I be
a father, where is mine honour? and if I be a master, where is my
fear? saith the LORD of hosts unto you, O priests, that despise my
name. And ye say, Wherein have we despised thy name?  1:7 Ye offer
polluted bread upon mine altar; and ye say, Wherein have we polluted
thee? In that ye say, The table of the LORD is contemptible.

1:8 And if ye offer the blind for sacrifice, is it not evil? and if ye
offer the lame and sick, is it not evil? offer it now unto thy
governor; will he be pleased with thee, or accept thy person? saith
the LORD of hosts.

1:9 And now, I pray you, beseech God that he will be gracious unto us:
this hath been by your means: will he regard your persons? saith the
LORD of hosts.

1:10 Who is there even among you that would shut the doors for nought?
neither do ye kindle fire on mine altar for nought. I have no pleasure
in you, saith the LORD of hosts, neither will I accept an offering at
your hand.

1:11 For from the rising of the sun even unto the going down of the
same my name shall be great among the Gentiles; and in every place
incense shall be offered unto my name, and a pure offering: for my
name shall be great among the heathen, saith the LORD of hosts.

1:12 But ye have profaned it, in that ye say, The table of the LORD is
polluted; and the fruit thereof, even his meat, is contemptible.

1:13 Ye said also, Behold, what a weariness is it! and ye have snuffed
at it, saith the LORD of hosts; and ye brought that which was torn,
and the lame, and the sick; thus ye brought an offering: should I
accept this of your hand? saith the LORD.

1:14 But cursed be the deceiver, which hath in his flock a male, and
voweth, and sacrificeth unto the LORD a corrupt thing: for I am a
great King, saith the LORD of hosts, and my name is dreadful among the
heathen.

2:1 And now, O ye priests, this commandment is for you.

2:2 If ye will not hear, and if ye will not lay it to heart, to give
glory unto my name, saith the LORD of hosts, I will even send a curse
upon you, and I will curse your blessings: yea, I have cursed them
already, because ye do not lay it to heart.

2:3 Behold, I will corrupt your seed, and spread dung upon your faces,
even the dung of your solemn feasts; and one shall take you away with
it.

2:4 And ye shall know that I have sent this commandment unto you, that
my covenant might be with Levi, saith the LORD of hosts.

2:5 My covenant was with him of life and peace; and I gave them to him
for the fear wherewith he feared me, and was afraid before my name.

2:6 The law of truth was in his mouth, and iniquity was not found in
his lips: he walked with me in peace and equity, and did turn many
away from iniquity.

2:7 For the priest's lips should keep knowledge, and they should seek
the law at his mouth: for he is the messenger of the LORD of hosts.

2:8 But ye are departed out of the way; ye have caused many to stumble
at the law; ye have corrupted the covenant of Levi, saith the LORD of
hosts.

2:9 Therefore have I also made you contemptible and base before all
the people, according as ye have not kept my ways, but have been
partial in the law.

2:10 Have we not all one father? hath not one God created us? why do
we deal treacherously every man against his brother, by profaning the
covenant of our fathers?  2:11 Judah hath dealt treacherously, and an
abomination is committed in Israel and in Jerusalem; for Judah hath
profaned the holiness of the LORD which he loved, and hath married the
daughter of a strange god.

2:12 The LORD will cut off the man that doeth this, the master and the
scholar, out of the tabernacles of Jacob, and him that offereth an
offering unto the LORD of hosts.

2:13 And this have ye done again, covering the altar of the LORD with
tears, with weeping, and with crying out, insomuch that he regardeth
not the offering any more, or receiveth it with good will at your
hand.

2:14 Yet ye say, Wherefore? Because the LORD hath been witness between
thee and the wife of thy youth, against whom thou hast dealt
treacherously: yet is she thy companion, and the wife of thy covenant.

2:15 And did not he make one? Yet had he the residue of the spirit.
And wherefore one? That he might seek a godly seed. Therefore take
heed to your spirit, and let none deal treacherously against the wife
of his youth.

2:16 For the LORD, the God of Israel, saith that he hateth putting
away: for one covereth violence with his garment, saith the LORD of
hosts: therefore take heed to your spirit, that ye deal not
treacherously.

2:17 Ye have wearied the LORD with your words. Yet ye say, Wherein
have we wearied him? When ye say, Every one that doeth evil is good in
the sight of the LORD, and he delighteth in them; or, Where is the God
of judgment?  3:1 Behold, I will send my messenger, and he shall
prepare the way before me: and the LORD, whom ye seek, shall suddenly
come to his temple, even the messenger of the covenant, whom ye
delight in: behold, he shall come, saith the LORD of hosts.

3:2 But who may abide the day of his coming? and who shall stand when
he appeareth? for he is like a refiner's fire, and like fullers' soap:
3:3 And he shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver: and he shall
purify the sons of Levi, and purge them as gold and silver, that they
may offer unto the LORD an offering in righteousness.

3:4 Then shall the offering of Judah and Jerusalem be pleasant unto
the LORD, as in the days of old, and as in former years.

3:5 And I will come near to you to judgment; and I will be a swift
witness against the sorcerers, and against the adulterers, and against
false swearers, and against those that oppress the hireling in his
wages, the widow, and the fatherless, and that turn aside the stranger
from his right, and fear not me, saith the LORD of hosts.

3:6 For I am the LORD, I change not; therefore ye sons of Jacob are
not consumed.

3:7 Even from the days of your fathers ye are gone away from mine
ordinances, and have not kept them. Return unto me, and I will return
unto you, saith the LORD of hosts. But ye said, Wherein shall we
return?  3:8 Will a man rob God? Yet ye have robbed me. But ye say,
Wherein have we robbed thee? In tithes and offerings.

3:9 Ye are cursed with a curse: for ye have robbed me, even this whole
nation.

3:10 Bring ye all the tithes into the storehouse, that there may be
meat in mine house, and prove me now herewith, saith the LORD of
hosts, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out
a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it.

3:11 And I will rebuke the devourer for your sakes, and he shall not
destroy the fruits of your ground; neither shall your vine cast her
fruit before the time in the field, saith the LORD of hosts.

3:12 And all nations shall call you blessed: for ye shall be a
delightsome land, saith the LORD of hosts.

3:13 Your words have been stout against me, saith the LORD. Yet ye
say, What have we spoken so much against thee?  3:14 Ye have said, It
is vain to serve God: and what profit is it that we have kept his
ordinance, and that we have walked mournfully before the LORD of
hosts?  3:15 And now we call the proud happy; yea, they that work
wickedness are set up; yea, they that tempt God are even delivered.

3:16 Then they that feared the LORD spake often one to another: and
the LORD hearkened, and heard it, and a book of remembrance was
written before him for them that feared the LORD, and that thought
upon his name.

3:17 And they shall be mine, saith the LORD of hosts, in that day when
I make up my jewels; and I will spare them, as a man spareth his own
son that serveth him.

3:18 Then shall ye return, and discern between the righteous and the
wicked, between him that serveth God and him that serveth him not.

4:1 For, behold, the day cometh, that shall burn as an oven; and all
the proud, yea, and all that do wickedly, shall be stubble: and the
day that cometh shall burn them up, saith the LORD of hosts, that it
shall leave them neither root nor branch.

4:2 But unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness
arise with healing in his wings; and ye shall go forth, and grow up as
calves of the stall.

4:3 And ye shall tread down the wicked; for they shall be ashes under
the soles of your feet in the day that I shall do this, saith the LORD
of hosts.

4:4 Remember ye the law of Moses my servant, which I commanded unto
him in Horeb for all Israel, with the statutes and judgments.

4:5 Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of
the great and dreadful day of the LORD: 4:6 And he shall turn the
heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to
their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.


***




The New Testament of the King James Bible




The Gospel According to Saint Matthew


1:1 The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the
son of Abraham.

1:2 Abraham begat Isaac; and Isaac begat Jacob; and Jacob begat Judas
and his brethren; 1:3 And Judas begat Phares and Zara of Thamar; and
Phares begat Esrom; and Esrom begat Aram; 1:4 And Aram begat Aminadab;
and Aminadab begat Naasson; and Naasson begat Salmon; 1:5 And Salmon
begat Booz of Rachab; and Booz begat Obed of Ruth; and Obed begat
Jesse; 1:6 And Jesse begat David the king; and David the king begat
Solomon of her that had been the wife of Urias; 1:7 And Solomon begat
Roboam; and Roboam begat Abia; and Abia begat Asa; 1:8 And Asa begat
Josaphat; and Josaphat begat Joram; and Joram begat Ozias; 1:9 And
Ozias begat Joatham; and Joatham begat Achaz; and Achaz begat Ezekias;
1:10 And Ezekias begat Manasses; and Manasses begat Amon; and Amon
begat Josias; 1:11 And Josias begat Jechonias and his brethren, about
the time they were carried away to Babylon: 1:12 And after they were
brought to Babylon, Jechonias begat Salathiel; and Salathiel begat
Zorobabel; 1:13 And Zorobabel begat Abiud; and Abiud begat Eliakim;
and Eliakim begat Azor; 1:14 And Azor begat Sadoc; and Sadoc begat
Achim; and Achim begat Eliud; 1:15 And Eliud begat Eleazar; and
Eleazar begat Matthan; and Matthan begat Jacob; 1:16 And Jacob begat
Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, who is called
Christ.

1:17 So all the generations from Abraham to David are fourteen
generations; and from David until the carrying away into Babylon are
fourteen generations; and from the carrying away into Babylon unto
Christ are fourteen generations.

1:18 Now the birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise: When as his
mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came together, she was
found with child of the Holy Ghost.

1:19 Then Joseph her husband, being a just man, and not willing to
make her a publick example, was minded to put her away privily.

1:20 But while he thought on these things, behold, the angel of the
LORD appeared unto him in a dream, saying, Joseph, thou son of David,
fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife: for that which is conceived
in her is of the Holy Ghost.

1:21 And she shall bring forth a son, and thou shalt call his name
JESUS: for he shall save his people from their sins.

1:22 Now all this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was
spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, 1:23 Behold, a virgin shall
be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his
name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us.

1:24 Then Joseph being raised from sleep did as the angel of the Lord
had bidden him, and took unto him his wife: 1:25 And knew her not till
she had brought forth her firstborn son: and he called his name JESUS.

2:1 Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of
Herod the king, behold, there came wise men from the east to
Jerusalem, 2:2 Saying, Where is he that is born King of the Jews? for
we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him.

2:3 When Herod the king had heard these things, he was troubled, and
all Jerusalem with him.

2:4 And when he had gathered all the chief priests and scribes of the
people together, he demanded of them where Christ should be born.

2:5 And they said unto him, In Bethlehem of Judaea: for thus it is
written by the prophet, 2:6 And thou Bethlehem, in the land of Juda,
art not the least among the princes of Juda: for out of thee shall
come a Governor, that shall rule my people Israel.

2:7 Then Herod, when he had privily called the wise men, enquired of
them diligently what time the star appeared.

2:8 And he sent them to Bethlehem, and said, Go and search diligently
for the young child; and when ye have found him, bring me word again,
that I may come and worship him also.

2:9 When they had heard the king, they departed; and, lo, the star,
which they saw in the east, went before them, till it came and stood
over where the young child was.

2:10 When they saw the star, they rejoiced with exceeding great joy.

2:11 And when they were come into the house, they saw the young child
with Mary his mother, and fell down, and worshipped him: and when they
had opened their treasures, they presented unto him gifts; gold, and
frankincense and myrrh.

2:12 And being warned of God in a dream that they should not return to
Herod, they departed into their own country another way.

2:13 And when they were departed, behold, the angel of the Lord
appeareth to Joseph in a dream, saying, Arise, and take the young
child and his mother, and flee into Egypt, and be thou there until I
bring thee word: for Herod will seek the young child to destroy him.

2:14 When he arose, he took the young child and his mother by night,
and departed into Egypt: 2:15 And was there until the death of Herod:
that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the
prophet, saying, Out of Egypt have I called my son.

2:16 Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked of the wise men, was
exceeding wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the children that were
in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and
under, according to the time which he had diligently enquired of the
wise men.

2:17 Then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremy the prophet,
saying, 2:18 In Rama was there a voice heard, lamentation, and
weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and
would not be comforted, because they are not.

2:19 But when Herod was dead, behold, an angel of the Lord appeareth
in a dream to Joseph in Egypt, 2:20 Saying, Arise, and take the young
child and his mother, and go into the land of Israel: for they are
dead which sought the young child's life.

2:21 And he arose, and took the young child and his mother, and came
into the land of Israel.

2:22 But when he heard that Archelaus did reign in Judaea in the room
of his father Herod, he was afraid to go thither: notwithstanding,
being warned of God in a dream, he turned aside into the parts of
Galilee: 2:23 And he came and dwelt in a city called Nazareth: that it
might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophets, He shall be
called a Nazarene.

3:1 In those days came John the Baptist, preaching in the wilderness
of Judaea, 3:2 And saying, Repent ye: for the kingdom of heaven is at
hand.

3:3 For this is he that was spoken of by the prophet Esaias, saying,
The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the
Lord, make his paths straight.

3:4 And the same John had his raiment of camel's hair, and a leathern
girdle about his loins; and his meat was locusts and wild honey.

3:5 Then went out to him Jerusalem, and all Judaea, and all the region
round about Jordan, 3:6 And were baptized of him in Jordan, confessing
their sins.

3:7 But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees come to his
baptism, he said unto them, O generation of vipers, who hath warned
you to flee from the wrath to come?  3:8 Bring forth therefore fruits
meet for repentance: 3:9 And think not to say within yourselves, We
have Abraham to our father: for I say unto you, that God is able of
these stones to raise up children unto Abraham.

3:10 And now also the axe is laid unto the root of the trees:
therefore every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down,
and cast into the fire.

3:11 I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance. but he that
cometh after me is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to
bear: he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire: 3:12
Whose fan is in his hand, and he will throughly purge his floor, and
gather his wheat into the garner; but he will burn up the chaff with
unquenchable fire.

3:13 Then cometh Jesus from Galilee to Jordan unto John, to be
baptized of him.

3:14 But John forbad him, saying, I have need to be baptized of thee,
and comest thou to me?  3:15 And Jesus answering said unto him, Suffer
it to be so now: for thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness.
Then he suffered him.

3:16 And Jesus, when he was baptized, went up straightway out of the
water: and, lo, the heavens were opened unto him, and he saw the
Spirit of God descending like a dove, and lighting upon him: 3:17 And
lo a voice from heaven, saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am
well pleased.

4:1 Then was Jesus led up of the spirit into the wilderness to be
tempted of the devil.

4:2 And when he had fasted forty days and forty nights, he was
afterward an hungred.

4:3 And when the tempter came to him, he said, If thou be the Son of
God, command that these stones be made bread.

4:4 But he answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live by
bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of
God.

4:5 Then the devil taketh him up into the holy city, and setteth him
on a pinnacle of the temple, 4:6 And saith unto him, If thou be the
Son of God, cast thyself down: for it is written, He shall give his
angels charge concerning thee: and in their hands they shall bear thee
up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone.

4:7 Jesus said unto him, It is written again, Thou shalt not tempt the
Lord thy God.

4:8 Again, the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain,
and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them;
4:9 And saith unto him, All these things will I give thee, if thou
wilt fall down and worship me.

4:10 Then saith Jesus unto him, Get thee hence, Satan: for it is
written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou
serve.

4:11 Then the devil leaveth him, and, behold, angels came and
ministered unto him.

4:12 Now when Jesus had heard that John was cast into prison, he
departed into Galilee; 4:13 And leaving Nazareth, he came and dwelt in
Capernaum, which is upon the sea coast, in the borders of Zabulon and
Nephthalim: 4:14 That it might be fulfilled which was spoken by Esaias
the prophet, saying, 4:15 The land of Zabulon, and the land of
Nephthalim, by the way of the sea, beyond Jordan, Galilee of the
Gentiles; 4:16 The people which sat in darkness saw great light; and
to them which sat in the region and shadow of death light is sprung
up.

4:17 From that time Jesus began to preach, and to say, Repent: for the
kingdom of heaven is at hand.

4:18 And Jesus, walking by the sea of Galilee, saw two brethren, Simon
called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea: for
they were fishers.

4:19 And he saith unto them, Follow me, and I will make you fishers of
men.

4:20 And they straightway left their nets, and followed him.

4:21 And going on from thence, he saw other two brethren, James the
son of Zebedee, and John his brother, in a ship with Zebedee their
father, mending their nets; and he called them.

4:22 And they immediately left the ship and their father, and followed
him.

4:23 And Jesus went about all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues,
and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing all manner of
sickness and all manner of disease among the people.

4:24 And his fame went throughout all Syria: and they brought unto him
all sick people that were taken with divers diseases and torments, and
those which were possessed with devils, and those which were lunatick,
and those that had the palsy; and he healed them.

4:25 And there followed him great multitudes of people from Galilee,
and from Decapolis, and from Jerusalem, and from Judaea, and from
beyond Jordan.

5:1 And seeing the multitudes, he went up into a mountain: and when he
was set, his disciples came unto him: 5:2 And he opened his mouth, and
taught them, saying, 5:3 Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is
the kingdom of heaven.

5:4 Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.

5:5 Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.

5:6 Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness:
for they shall be filled.

5:7 Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.

5:8 Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.

5:9 Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children
of God.

5:10 Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake:
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

5:11 Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and
shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.

5:12 Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in
heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.

5:13 Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his
savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for
nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men.

5:14 Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill
cannot be hid.

5:15 Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on
a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house.

5:16 Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good
works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.

5:17 Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I
am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.

5:18 For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or
one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.

5:19 Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments,
and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of
heaven: but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be
called great in the kingdom of heaven.

5:20 For I say unto you, That except your righteousness shall exceed
the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case
enter into the kingdom of heaven.

5:21 Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt
not kill; and whosoever shall kill shall be in danger of the judgment:
5:22 But I say unto you, That whosoever is angry with his brother
without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment: and whosoever
shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the council: but
whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire.

5:23 Therefore if thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there
rememberest that thy brother hath ought against thee; 5:24 Leave there
thy gift before the altar, and go thy way; first be reconciled to thy
brother, and then come and offer thy gift.

5:25 Agree with thine adversary quickly, whiles thou art in the way
with him; lest at any time the adversary deliver thee to the judge,
and the judge deliver thee to the officer, and thou be cast into
prison.

5:26 Verily I say unto thee, Thou shalt by no means come out thence,
till thou hast paid the uttermost farthing.

5:27 Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt
not commit adultery: 5:28 But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh
on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already
in his heart.

5:29 And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from
thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should
perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.

5:30 And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from
thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should
perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.

5:31 It hath been said, Whosoever shall put away his wife, let him
give her a writing of divorcement: 5:32 But I say unto you, That
whosoever shall put away his wife, saving for the cause of
fornication, causeth her to commit adultery: and whosoever shall marry
her that is divorced committeth adultery.

5:33 Again, ye have heard that it hath been said by them of old time,
Thou shalt not forswear thyself, but shalt perform unto the Lord thine
oaths: 5:34 But I say unto you, Swear not at all; neither by heaven;
for it is God's throne: 5:35 Nor by the earth; for it is his
footstool: neither by Jerusalem; for it is the city of the great King.

5:36 Neither shalt thou swear by thy head, because thou canst not make
one hair white or black.

5:37 But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever
is more than these cometh of evil.

5:38 Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a
tooth for a tooth: 5:39 But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil:
but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the
other also.

5:40 And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat,
let him have thy cloak also.

5:41 And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain.

5:42 Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of
thee turn not thou away.

5:43 Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy
neighbour, and hate thine enemy.

5:44 But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you,
do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully
use you, and persecute you; 5:45 That ye may be the children of your
Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil
and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.

5:46 For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not
even the publicans the same?  5:47 And if ye salute your brethren
only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans so?  5:48
Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is
perfect.

6:1 Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them:
otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven.

6:2 Therefore when thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet
before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the
streets, that they may have glory of men. Verily I say unto you, They
have their reward.

6:3 But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy
right hand doeth: 6:4 That thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father
which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly.

6:5 And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are:
for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of
the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They
have their reward.

6:6 But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou
hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy
Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.

6:7 But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do: for
they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking.

6:8 Be not ye therefore like unto them: for your Father knoweth what
things ye have need of, before ye ask him.

6:9 After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in
heaven, Hallowed be thy name.

6:10 Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.

6:11 Give us this day our daily bread.

6:12 And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.

6:13 And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For
thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.

6:14 For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will
also forgive you: 6:15 But if ye forgive not men their trespasses,
neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.

6:16 Moreover when ye fast, be not, as the hypocrites, of a sad
countenance: for they disfigure their faces, that they may appear unto
men to fast. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.

6:17 But thou, when thou fastest, anoint thine head, and wash thy
face; 6:18 That thou appear not unto men to fast, but unto thy Father
which is in secret: and thy Father, which seeth in secret, shall
reward thee openly.

6:19 Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and
rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: 6:20 But
lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust
doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: 6:21
For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

6:22 The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be
single, thy whole body shall be full of light.

6:23 But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of
darkness.

If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that
darkness!  6:24 No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate
the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and
despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.

6:25 Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye
shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye
shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than
raiment?  6:26 Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither
do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth
them. Are ye not much better than they?  6:27 Which of you by taking
thought can add one cubit unto his stature?  6:28 And why take ye
thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow;
they toil not, neither do they spin: 6:29 And yet I say unto you, That
even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.

6:30 Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day
is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe
you, O ye of little faith?  6:31 Therefore take no thought, saying,
What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we
be clothed?  6:32 (For after all these things do the Gentiles seek:)
for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these
things.

6:33 But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and
all these things shall be added unto you.

6:34 Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall
take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the
evil thereof.

7:1 Judge not, that ye be not judged.

7:2 For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what
measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.

7:3 And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but
considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?  7:4 Or how wilt
thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye;
and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?  7:5 Thou hypocrite, first
cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see
clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.

7:6 Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your
pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn
again and rend you.

7:7 Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock,
and it shall be opened unto you: 7:8 For every one that asketh
receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it
shall be opened.

7:9 Or what man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he
give him a stone?  7:10 Or if he ask a fish, will he give him a
serpent?  7:11 If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts
unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven
give good things to them that ask him?  7:12 Therefore all things
whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them:
for this is the law and the prophets.

7:13 Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad
is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in
thereat: 7:14 Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which
leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.

7:15 Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing,
but inwardly they are ravening wolves.

7:16 Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of
thorns, or figs of thistles?  7:17 Even so every good tree bringeth
forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.

7:18 A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt
tree bring forth good fruit.

7:19 Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and
cast into the fire.

7:20 Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.

7:21 Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into
the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which
is in heaven.

7:22 Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not
prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in
thy name done many wonderful works?  7:23 And then will I profess unto
them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.

7:24 Therefore whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth
them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a
rock: 7:25 And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds
blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded
upon a rock.

7:26 And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them
not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon
the sand: 7:27 And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the
winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the
fall of it.

7:28 And it came to pass, when Jesus had ended these sayings, the
people were astonished at his doctrine: 7:29 For he taught them as one
having authority, and not as the scribes.

8:1 When he was come down from the mountain, great multitudes followed
him.

8:2 And, behold, there came a leper and worshipped him, saying, Lord,
if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean.

8:3 And Jesus put forth his hand, and touched him, saying, I will; be
thou clean. And immediately his leprosy was cleansed.

8:4 And Jesus saith unto him, See thou tell no man; but go thy way,
shew thyself to the priest, and offer the gift that Moses commanded,
for a testimony unto them.

8:5 And when Jesus was entered into Capernaum, there came unto him a
centurion, beseeching him, 8:6 And saying, Lord, my servant lieth at
home sick of the palsy, grievously tormented.

8:7 And Jesus saith unto him, I will come and heal him.

8:8 The centurion answered and said, Lord, I am not worthy that thou
shouldest come under my roof: but speak the word only, and my servant
shall be healed.

8:9 For I am a man under authority, having soldiers under me: and I
say to this man, Go, and he goeth; and to another, Come, and he
cometh; and to my servant, Do this, and he doeth it.

8:10 When Jesus heard it, he marvelled, and said to them that
followed, Verily I say unto you, I have not found so great faith, no,
not in Israel.

8:11 And I say unto you, That many shall come from the east and west,
and shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom
of heaven.

8:12 But the children of the kingdom shall be cast out into outer
darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

8:13 And Jesus said unto the centurion, Go thy way; and as thou hast
believed, so be it done unto thee. And his servant was healed in the
selfsame hour.

8:14 And when Jesus was come into Peter's house, he saw his wife's
mother laid, and sick of a fever.

8:15 And he touched her hand, and the fever left her: and she arose,
and ministered unto them.

8:16 When the even was come, they brought unto him many that were
possessed with devils: and he cast out the spirits with his word, and
healed all that were sick: 8:17 That it might be fulfilled which was
spoken by Esaias the prophet, saying, Himself took our infirmities,
and bare our sicknesses.

8:18 Now when Jesus saw great multitudes about him, he gave
commandment to depart unto the other side.

8:19 And a certain scribe came, and said unto him, Master, I will
follow thee whithersoever thou goest.

8:20 And Jesus saith unto him, The foxes have holes, and the birds of
the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.

8:21 And another of his disciples said unto him, Lord, suffer me first
to go and bury my father.

8:22 But Jesus said unto him, Follow me; and let the dead bury their
dead.

8:23 And when he was entered into a ship, his disciples followed him.

8:24 And, behold, there arose a great tempest in the sea, insomuch
that the ship was covered with the waves: but he was asleep.

8:25 And his disciples came to him, and awoke him, saying, Lord, save
us: we perish.

8:26 And he saith unto them, Why are ye fearful, O ye of little faith?
Then he arose, and rebuked the winds and the sea; and there was a
great calm.

8:27 But the men marvelled, saying, What manner of man is this, that
even the winds and the sea obey him!  8:28 And when he was come to the
other side into the country of the Gergesenes, there met him two
possessed with devils, coming out of the tombs, exceeding fierce, so
that no man might pass by that way.

8:29 And, behold, they cried out, saying, What have we to do with
thee, Jesus, thou Son of God? art thou come hither to torment us
before the time?  8:30 And there was a good way off from them an herd
of many swine feeding.

8:31 So the devils besought him, saying, If thou cast us out, suffer
us to go away into the herd of swine.

8:32 And he said unto them, Go. And when they were come out, they went
into the herd of swine: and, behold, the whole herd of swine ran
violently down a steep place into the sea, and perished in the waters.

8:33 And they that kept them fled, and went their ways into the city,
and told every thing, and what was befallen to the possessed of the
devils.

8:34 And, behold, the whole city came out to meet Jesus: and when they
saw him, they besought him that he would depart out of their coasts.

9:1 And he entered into a ship, and passed over, and came into his own
city.

9:2 And, behold, they brought to him a man sick of the palsy, lying on
a bed: and Jesus seeing their faith said unto the sick of the palsy;
Son, be of good cheer; thy sins be forgiven thee.

9:3 And, behold, certain of the scribes said within themselves, This
man blasphemeth.

9:4 And Jesus knowing their thoughts said, Wherefore think ye evil in
your hearts?  9:5 For whether is easier, to say, Thy sins be forgiven
thee; or to say, Arise, and walk?  9:6 But that ye may know that the
Son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins, (then saith he to the
sick of the palsy,) Arise, take up thy bed, and go unto thine house.

9:7 And he arose, and departed to his house.

9:8 But when the multitudes saw it, they marvelled, and glorified God,
which had given such power unto men.

9:9 And as Jesus passed forth from thence, he saw a man, named
Matthew, sitting at the receipt of custom: and he saith unto him,
Follow me. And he arose, and followed him.

9:10 And it came to pass, as Jesus sat at meat in the house, behold,
many publicans and sinners came and sat down with him and his
disciples.

9:11 And when the Pharisees saw it, they said unto his disciples, Why
eateth your Master with publicans and sinners?  9:12 But when Jesus
heard that, he said unto them, They that be whole need not a
physician, but they that are sick.

9:13 But go ye and learn what that meaneth, I will have mercy, and not
sacrifice: for I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to
repentance.

9:14 Then came to him the disciples of John, saying, Why do we and the
Pharisees fast oft, but thy disciples fast not?  9:15 And Jesus said
unto them, Can the children of the bridechamber mourn, as long as the
bridegroom is with them? but the days will come, when the bridegroom
shall be taken from them, and then shall they fast.

9:16 No man putteth a piece of new cloth unto an old garment, for that
which is put in to fill it up taketh from the garment, and the rent is
made worse.

9:17 Neither do men put new wine into old bottles: else the bottles
break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish: but they put
new wine into new bottles, and both are preserved.

9:18 While he spake these things unto them, behold, there came a
certain ruler, and worshipped him, saying, My daughter is even now
dead: but come and lay thy hand upon her, and she shall live.

9:19 And Jesus arose, and followed him, and so did his disciples.

9:20 And, behold, a woman, which was diseased with an issue of blood
twelve years, came behind him, and touched the hem of his garment:
9:21 For she said within herself, If I may but touch his garment, I
shall be whole.

9:22 But Jesus turned him about, and when he saw her, he said,
Daughter, be of good comfort; thy faith hath made thee whole. And the
woman was made whole from that hour.

9:23 And when Jesus came into the ruler's house, and saw the minstrels
and the people making a noise, 9:24 He said unto them, Give place: for
the maid is not dead, but sleepeth. And they laughed him to scorn.

9:25 But when the people were put forth, he went in, and took her by
the hand, and the maid arose.

9:26 And the fame hereof went abroad into all that land.

9:27 And when Jesus departed thence, two blind men followed him,
crying, and saying, Thou son of David, have mercy on us.

9:28 And when he was come into the house, the blind men came to him:
and Jesus saith unto them, Believe ye that I am able to do this? They
said unto him, Yea, Lord.

9:29 Then touched he their eyes, saying, According to your faith be it
unto you.

9:30 And their eyes were opened; and Jesus straitly charged them,
saying, See that no man know it.

9:31 But they, when they were departed, spread abroad his fame in all
that country.

9:32 As they went out, behold, they brought to him a dumb man
possessed with a devil.

9:33 And when the devil was cast out, the dumb spake: and the
multitudes marvelled, saying, It was never so seen in Israel.

9:34 But the Pharisees said, He casteth out devils through the prince
of the devils.

9:35 And Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in
their synagogues, and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing
every sickness and every disease among the people.

9:36 But when he saw the multitudes, he was moved with compassion on
them, because they fainted, and were scattered abroad, as sheep having
no shepherd.

9:37 Then saith he unto his disciples, The harvest truly is plenteous,
but the labourers are few; 9:38 Pray ye therefore the Lord of the
harvest, that he will send forth labourers into his harvest.

10:1 And when he had called unto him his twelve disciples, he gave
them power against unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to heal all
manner of sickness and all manner of disease.

10:2 Now the names of the twelve apostles are these; The first, Simon,
who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother; James the son of Zebedee,
and John his brother; 10:3 Philip, and Bartholomew; Thomas, and
Matthew the publican; James the son of Alphaeus, and Lebbaeus, whose
surname was Thaddaeus; 10:4 Simon the Canaanite, and Judas Iscariot,
who also betrayed him.

10:5 These twelve Jesus sent forth, and commanded them, saying, Go not
into the way of the Gentiles, and into any city of the Samaritans
enter ye not: 10:6 But go rather to the lost sheep of the house of
Israel.

10:7 And as ye go, preach, saying, The kingdom of heaven is at hand.

10:8 Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out
devils: freely ye have received, freely give.

10:9 Provide neither gold, nor silver, nor brass in your purses, 10:10
Nor scrip for your journey, neither two coats, neither shoes, nor yet
staves: for the workman is worthy of his meat.

10:11 And into whatsoever city or town ye shall enter, enquire who in
it is worthy; and there abide till ye go thence.

10:12 And when ye come into an house, salute it.

10:13 And if the house be worthy, let your peace come upon it: but if
it be not worthy, let your peace return to you.

10:14 And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear your words, when
ye depart out of that house or city, shake off the dust of your feet.

10:15 Verily I say unto you, It shall be more tolerable for the land
of Sodom and Gomorrha in the day of judgment, than for that city.

10:16 Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye
therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.

10:17 But beware of men: for they will deliver you up to the councils,
and they will scourge you in their synagogues; 10:18 And ye shall be
brought before governors and kings for my sake, for a testimony
against them and the Gentiles.

10:19 But when they deliver you up, take no thought how or what ye
shall speak: for it shall be given you in that same hour what ye shall
speak.

10:20 For it is not ye that speak, but the Spirit of your Father which
speaketh in you.

10:21 And the brother shall deliver up the brother to death, and the
father the child: and the children shall rise up against their
parents, and cause them to be put to death.

10:22 And ye shall be hated of all men for my name's sake: but he that
endureth to the end shall be saved.

10:23 But when they persecute you in this city, flee ye into another:
for verily I say unto you, Ye shall not have gone over the cities of
Israel, till the Son of man be come.

10:24 The disciple is not above his master, nor the servant above his
lord.

10:25 It is enough for the disciple that he be as his master, and the
servant as his lord. If they have called the master of the house
Beelzebub, how much more shall they call them of his household?  10:26
Fear them not therefore: for there is nothing covered, that shall not
be revealed; and hid, that shall not be known.

10:27 What I tell you in darkness, that speak ye in light: and what ye
hear in the ear, that preach ye upon the housetops.

10:28 And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill
the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and
body in hell.

10:29 Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall
not fall on the ground without your Father.

10:30 But the very hairs of your head are all numbered.

10:31 Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows.

10:32 Whosoever therefore shall confess me before men, him will I
confess also before my Father which is in heaven.

10:33 But whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny
before my Father which is in heaven.

10:34 Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to
send peace, but a sword.

10:35 For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and
the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her
mother in law.

10:36 And a man's foes shall be they of his own household.

10:37 He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of
me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of
me.

10:38 And he that taketh not his cross, and followeth after me, is not
worthy of me.

10:39 He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his
life for my sake shall find it.

10:40 He that receiveth you receiveth me, and he that receiveth me
receiveth him that sent me.

10:41 He that receiveth a prophet in the name of a prophet shall
receive a prophet's reward; and he that receiveth a righteous man in
the name of a righteous man shall receive a righteous man's reward.

10:42 And whosoever shall give to drink unto one of these little ones
a cup of cold water only in the name of a disciple, verily I say unto
you, he shall in no wise lose his reward.

11:1 And it came to pass, when Jesus had made an end of commanding his
twelve disciples, he departed thence to teach and to preach in their
cities.

11:2 Now when John had heard in the prison the works of Christ, he
sent two of his disciples, 11:3 And said unto him, Art thou he that
should come, or do we look for another?  11:4 Jesus answered and said
unto them, Go and shew John again those things which ye do hear and
see: 11:5 The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers
are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor
have the gospel preached to them.

11:6 And blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended in me.

11:7 And as they departed, Jesus began to say unto the multitudes
concerning John, What went ye out into the wilderness to see? A reed
shaken with the wind?  11:8 But what went ye out for to see? A man
clothed in soft raiment?  behold, they that wear soft clothing are in
kings' houses.

11:9 But what went ye out for to see? A prophet? yea, I say unto you,
and more than a prophet.

11:10 For this is he, of whom it is written, Behold, I send my
messenger before thy face, which shall prepare thy way before thee.

11:11 Verily I say unto you, Among them that are born of women there
hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist: notwithstanding he
that is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.

11:12 And from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of
heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force.

11:13 For all the prophets and the law prophesied until John.

11:14 And if ye will receive it, this is Elias, which was for to come.

11:15 He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.

11:16 But whereunto shall I liken this generation? It is like unto
children sitting in the markets, and calling unto their fellows, 11:17
And saying, We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced; we have
mourned unto you, and ye have not lamented.

11:18 For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, He hath
a devil.

11:19 The Son of man came eating and drinking, and they say, Behold a
man gluttonous, and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners.
But wisdom is justified of her children.

11:20 Then began he to upbraid the cities wherein most of his mighty
works were done, because they repented not: 11:21 Woe unto thee,
Chorazin! woe unto thee, Bethsaida! for if the mighty works, which
were done in you, had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have
repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes.

11:22 But I say unto you, It shall be more tolerable for Tyre and
Sidon at the day of judgment, than for you.

11:23 And thou, Capernaum, which art exalted unto heaven, shalt be
brought down to hell: for if the mighty works, which have been done in
thee, had been done in Sodom, it would have remained until this day.

11:24 But I say unto you, That it shall be more tolerable for the land
of Sodom in the day of judgment, than for thee.

11:25 At that time Jesus answered and said, I thank thee, O Father,
Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things from the
wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes.

11:26 Even so, Father: for so it seemed good in thy sight.

11:27 All things are delivered unto me of my Father: and no man
knoweth the Son, but the Father; neither knoweth any man the Father,
save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him.

11:28 Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will
give you rest.

11:29 Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly
in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls.

11:30 For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

12:1 At that time Jesus went on the sabbath day through the corn; and
his disciples were an hungred, and began to pluck the ears of corn and
to eat.

12:2 But when the Pharisees saw it, they said unto him, Behold, thy
disciples do that which is not lawful to do upon the sabbath day.

12:3 But he said unto them, Have ye not read what David did, when he
was an hungred, and they that were with him; 12:4 How he entered into
the house of God, and did eat the shewbread, which was not lawful for
him to eat, neither for them which were with him, but only for the
priests?  12:5 Or have ye not read in the law, how that on the sabbath
days the priests in the temple profane the sabbath, and are blameless?
12:6 But I say unto you, That in this place is one greater than the
temple.

12:7 But if ye had known what this meaneth, I will have mercy, and not
sacrifice, ye would not have condemned the guiltless.

12:8 For the Son of man is Lord even of the sabbath day.

12:9 And when he was departed thence, he went into their synagogue:
12:10 And, behold, there was a man which had his hand withered. And
they asked him, saying, Is it lawful to heal on the sabbath days? that
they might accuse him.

12:11 And he said unto them, What man shall there be among you, that
shall have one sheep, and if it fall into a pit on the sabbath day,
will he not lay hold on it, and lift it out?  12:12 How much then is a
man better than a sheep? Wherefore it is lawful to do well on the
sabbath days.

12:13 Then saith he to the man, Stretch forth thine hand. And he
stretched it forth; and it was restored whole, like as the other.

12:14 Then the Pharisees went out, and held a council against him, how
they might destroy him.

12:15 But when Jesus knew it, he withdrew himself from thence: and
great multitudes followed him, and he healed them all; 12:16 And
charged them that they should not make him known: 12:17 That it might
be fulfilled which was spoken by Esaias the prophet, saying, 12:18
Behold my servant, whom I have chosen; my beloved, in whom my soul is
well pleased: I will put my spirit upon him, and he shall shew
judgment to the Gentiles.

12:19 He shall not strive, nor cry; neither shall any man hear his
voice in the streets.

12:20 A bruised reed shall he not break, and smoking flax shall he not
quench, till he send forth judgment unto victory.

12:21 And in his name shall the Gentiles trust.

12:22 Then was brought unto him one possessed with a devil, blind, and
dumb: and he healed him, insomuch that the blind and dumb both spake
and saw.

12:23 And all the people were amazed, and said, Is not this the son of
David?  12:24 But when the Pharisees heard it, they said, This fellow
doth not cast out devils, but by Beelzebub the prince of the devils.

12:25 And Jesus knew their thoughts, and said unto them, Every kingdom
divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or
house divided against itself shall not stand: 12:26 And if Satan cast
out Satan, he is divided against himself; how shall then his kingdom
stand?  12:27 And if I by Beelzebub cast out devils, by whom do your
children cast them out? therefore they shall be your judges.

12:28 But if I cast out devils by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom
of God is come unto you.

12:29 Or else how can one enter into a strong man's house, and spoil
his goods, except he first bind the strong man? and then he will spoil
his house.

12:30 He that is not with me is against me; and he that gathereth not
with me scattereth abroad.

12:31 Wherefore I say unto you, All manner of sin and blasphemy shall
be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall
not be forgiven unto men.

12:32 And whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of man, it shall
be forgiven him: but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it
shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world
to come.

12:33 Either make the tree good, and his fruit good; or else make the
tree corrupt, and his fruit corrupt: for the tree is known by his
fruit.

12:34 O generation of vipers, how can ye, being evil, speak good
things?  for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.

12:35 A good man out of the good treasure of the heart bringeth forth
good things: and an evil man out of the evil treasure bringeth forth
evil things.

12:36 But I say unto you, That every idle word that men shall speak,
they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment.

12:37 For by thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou
shalt be condemned.

12:38 Then certain of the scribes and of the Pharisees answered,
saying, Master, we would see a sign from thee.

12:39 But he answered and said unto them, An evil and adulterous
generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given to
it, but the sign of the prophet Jonas: 12:40 For as Jonas was three
days and three nights in the whale's belly; so shall the Son of man be
three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.

12:41 The men of Nineveh shall rise in judgment with this generation,
and shall condemn it: because they repented at the preaching of Jonas;
and, behold, a greater than Jonas is here.

12:42 The queen of the south shall rise up in the judgment with this
generation, and shall condemn it: for she came from the uttermost
parts of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon; and, behold, a
greater than Solomon is here.

12:43 When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through
dry places, seeking rest, and findeth none.

12:44 Then he saith, I will return into my house from whence I came
out; and when he is come, he findeth it empty, swept, and garnished.

12:45 Then goeth he, and taketh with himself seven other spirits more
wicked than himself, and they enter in and dwell there: and the last
state of that man is worse than the first. Even so shall it be also
unto this wicked generation.

12:46 While he yet talked to the people, behold, his mother and his
brethren stood without, desiring to speak with him.

12:47 Then one said unto him, Behold, thy mother and thy brethren
stand without, desiring to speak with thee.

12:48 But he answered and said unto him that told him, Who is my
mother?  and who are my brethren?  12:49 And he stretched forth his
hand toward his disciples, and said, Behold my mother and my brethren!
12:50 For whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven,
the same is my brother, and sister, and mother.

13:1 The same day went Jesus out of the house, and sat by the sea
side.

13:2 And great multitudes were gathered together unto him, so that he
went into a ship, and sat; and the whole multitude stood on the shore.

13:3 And he spake many things unto them in parables, saying, Behold, a
sower went forth to sow; 13:4 And when he sowed, some seeds fell by
the way side, and the fowls came and devoured them up: 13:5 Some fell
upon stony places, where they had not much earth: and forthwith they
sprung up, because they had no deepness of earth: 13:6 And when the
sun was up, they were scorched; and because they had no root, they
withered away.

13:7 And some fell among thorns; and the thorns sprung up, and choked
them: 13:8 But other fell into good ground, and brought forth fruit,
some an hundredfold, some sixtyfold, some thirtyfold.

13:9 Who hath ears to hear, let him hear.

13:10 And the disciples came, and said unto him, Why speakest thou
unto them in parables?  13:11 He answered and said unto them, Because
it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven,
but to them it is not given.

13:12 For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have
more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away
even that he hath.

13:13 Therefore speak I to them in parables: because they seeing see
not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand.

13:14 And in them is fulfilled the prophecy of Esaias, which saith, By
hearing ye shall hear, and shall not understand; and seeing ye shall
see, and shall not perceive: 13:15 For this people's heart is waxed
gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have
closed; lest at any time they should see with their eyes and hear with
their ears, and should understand with their heart, and should be
converted, and I should heal them.

13:16 But blessed are your eyes, for they see: and your ears, for they
hear.

13:17 For verily I say unto you, That many prophets and righteous men
have desired to see those things which ye see, and have not seen them;
and to hear those things which ye hear, and have not heard them.

13:18 Hear ye therefore the parable of the sower.

13:19 When any one heareth the word of the kingdom, and understandeth
it not, then cometh the wicked one, and catcheth away that which was
sown in his heart. This is he which received seed by the way side.

13:20 But he that received the seed into stony places, the same is he
that heareth the word, and anon with joy receiveth it; 13:21 Yet hath
he not root in himself, but dureth for a while: for when tribulation
or persecution ariseth because of the word, by and by he is offended.

13:22 He also that received seed among the thorns is he that heareth
the word; and the care of this world, and the deceitfulness of riches,
choke the word, and he becometh unfruitful.

13:23 But he that received seed into the good ground is he that
heareth the word, and understandeth it; which also beareth fruit, and
bringeth forth, some an hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.

13:24 Another parable put he forth unto them, saying, The kingdom of
heaven is likened unto a man which sowed good seed in his field: 13:25
But while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat,
and went his way.

13:26 But when the blade was sprung up, and brought forth fruit, then
appeared the tares also.

13:27 So the servants of the householder came and said unto him, Sir,
didst not thou sow good seed in thy field? from whence then hath it
tares?  13:28 He said unto them, An enemy hath done this. The servants
said unto him, Wilt thou then that we go and gather them up?  13:29
But he said, Nay; lest while ye gather up the tares, ye root up also
the wheat with them.

13:30 Let both grow together until the harvest: and in the time of
harvest I will say to the reapers, Gather ye together first the tares,
and bind them in bundles to burn them: but gather the wheat into my
barn.

13:31 Another parable put he forth unto them, saying, The kingdom of
heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and sowed
in his field: 13:32 Which indeed is the least of all seeds: but when
it is grown, it is the greatest among herbs, and becometh a tree, so
that the birds of the air come and lodge in the branches thereof.

13:33 Another parable spake he unto them; The kingdom of heaven is
like unto leaven, which a woman took, and hid in three measures of
meal, till the whole was leavened.

13:34 All these things spake Jesus unto the multitude in parables; and
without a parable spake he not unto them: 13:35 That it might be
fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, saying, I will open my
mouth in parables; I will utter things which have been kept secret
from the foundation of the world.

13:36 Then Jesus sent the multitude away, and went into the house: and
his disciples came unto him, saying, Declare unto us the parable of
the tares of the field.

13:37 He answered and said unto them, He that soweth the good seed is
the Son of man; 13:38 The field is the world; the good seed are the
children of the kingdom; but the tares are the children of the wicked
one; 13:39 The enemy that sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the
end of the world; and the reapers are the angels.

13:40 As therefore the tares are gathered and burned in the fire; so
shall it be in the end of this world.

13:41 The Son of man shall send forth his angels, and they shall
gather out of his kingdom all things that offend, and them which do
iniquity; 13:42 And shall cast them into a furnace of fire: there
shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth.

13:43 Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the kingdom
of their Father. Who hath ears to hear, let him hear.

13:44 Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto treasure hid in a
field; the which when a man hath found, he hideth, and for joy thereof
goeth and selleth all that he hath, and buyeth that field.

13:45 Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant man,
seeking goodly pearls: 13:46 Who, when he had found one pearl of great
price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it.

13:47 Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a net, that was cast
into the sea, and gathered of every kind: 13:48 Which, when it was
full, they drew to shore, and sat down, and gathered the good into
vessels, but cast the bad away.

13:49 So shall it be at the end of the world: the angels shall come
forth, and sever the wicked from among the just, 13:50 And shall cast
them into the furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of
teeth.

13:51 Jesus saith unto them, Have ye understood all these things? They
say unto him, Yea, Lord.

13:52 Then said he unto them, Therefore every scribe which is
instructed unto the kingdom of heaven is like unto a man that is an
householder, which bringeth forth out of his treasure things new and
old.

13:53 And it came to pass, that when Jesus had finished these
parables, he departed thence.

13:54 And when he was come into his own country, he taught them in
their synagogue, insomuch that they were astonished, and said, Whence
hath this man this wisdom, and these mighty works?  13:55 Is not this
the carpenter's son? is not his mother called Mary? and his brethren,
James, and Joses, and Simon, and Judas?  13:56 And his sisters, are
they not all with us? Whence then hath this man all these things?
13:57 And they were offended in him. But Jesus said unto them, A
prophet is not without honour, save in his own country, and in his own
house.

13:58 And he did not many mighty works there because of their
unbelief.

14:1 At that time Herod the tetrarch heard of the fame of Jesus, 14:2
And said unto his servants, This is John the Baptist; he is risen from
the dead; and therefore mighty works do shew forth themselves in him.

14:3 For Herod had laid hold on John, and bound him, and put him in
prison for Herodias' sake, his brother Philip's wife.

14:4 For John said unto him, It is not lawful for thee to have her.

14:5 And when he would have put him to death, he feared the multitude,
because they counted him as a prophet.

14:6 But when Herod's birthday was kept, the daughter of Herodias
danced before them, and pleased Herod.

14:7 Whereupon he promised with an oath to give her whatsoever she
would ask.

14:8 And she, being before instructed of her mother, said, Give me
here John Baptist's head in a charger.

14:9 And the king was sorry: nevertheless for the oath's sake, and
them which sat with him at meat, he commanded it to be given her.

14:10 And he sent, and beheaded John in the prison.

14:11 And his head was brought in a charger, and given to the damsel:
and she brought it to her mother.

14:12 And his disciples came, and took up the body, and buried it, and
went and told Jesus.

14:13 When Jesus heard of it, he departed thence by ship into a desert
place apart: and when the people had heard thereof, they followed him
on foot out of the cities.

14:14 And Jesus went forth, and saw a great multitude, and was moved
with compassion toward them, and he healed their sick.

14:15 And when it was evening, his disciples came to him, saying, This
is a desert place, and the time is now past; send the multitude away,
that they may go into the villages, and buy themselves victuals.

14:16 But Jesus said unto them, They need not depart; give ye them to
eat.

14:17 And they say unto him, We have here but five loaves, and two
fishes.

14:18 He said, Bring them hither to me.

14:19 And he commanded the multitude to sit down on the grass, and
took the five loaves, and the two fishes, and looking up to heaven, he
blessed, and brake, and gave the loaves to his disciples, and the
disciples to the multitude.

14:20 And they did all eat, and were filled: and they took up of the
fragments that remained twelve baskets full.

14:21 And they that had eaten were about five thousand men, beside
women and children.

14:22 And straightway Jesus constrained his disciples to get into a
ship, and to go before him unto the other side, while he sent the
multitudes away.

14:23 And when he had sent the multitudes away, he went up into a
mountain apart to pray: and when the evening was come, he was there
alone.

14:24 But the ship was now in the midst of the sea, tossed with waves:
for the wind was contrary.

14:25 And in the fourth watch of the night Jesus went unto them,
walking on the sea.

14:26 And when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were
troubled, saying, It is a spirit; and they cried out for fear.

14:27 But straightway Jesus spake unto them, saying, Be of good cheer;
it is I; be not afraid.

14:28 And Peter answered him and said, Lord, if it be thou, bid me
come unto thee on the water.

14:29 And he said, Come. And when Peter was come down out of the ship,
he walked on the water, to go to Jesus.

14:30 But when he saw the wind boisterous, he was afraid; and
beginning to sink, he cried, saying, Lord, save me.

14:31 And immediately Jesus stretched forth his hand, and caught him,
and said unto him, O thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?
14:32 And when they were come into the ship, the wind ceased.

14:33 Then they that were in the ship came and worshipped him, saying,
Of a truth thou art the Son of God.

14:34 And when they were gone over, they came into the land of
Gennesaret.

14:35 And when the men of that place had knowledge of him, they sent
out into all that country round about, and brought unto him all that
were diseased; 14:36 And besought him that they might only touch the
hem of his garment: and as many as touched were made perfectly whole.

15:1 Then came to Jesus scribes and Pharisees, which were of
Jerusalem, saying, 15:2 Why do thy disciples transgress the tradition
of the elders? for they wash not their hands when they eat bread.

15:3 But he answered and said unto them, Why do ye also transgress the
commandment of God by your tradition?  15:4 For God commanded, saying,
Honour thy father and mother: and, He that curseth father or mother,
let him die the death.

15:5 But ye say, Whosoever shall say to his father or his mother, It
is a gift, by whatsoever thou mightest be profited by me; 15:6 And
honour not his father or his mother, he shall be free. Thus have ye
made the commandment of God of none effect by your tradition.

15:7 Ye hypocrites, well did Esaias prophesy of you, saying, 15:8 This
people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth, and honoureth me with
their lips; but their heart is far from me.

15:9 But in vain they do worship me, teaching for doctrines the
commandments of men.

15:10 And he called the multitude, and said unto them, Hear, and
understand: 15:11 Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man;
but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man.

15:12 Then came his disciples, and said unto him, Knowest thou that
the Pharisees were offended, after they heard this saying?  15:13 But
he answered and said, Every plant, which my heavenly Father hath not
planted, shall be rooted up.

15:14 Let them alone: they be blind leaders of the blind. And if the
blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.

15:15 Then answered Peter and said unto him, Declare unto us this
parable.

15:16 And Jesus said, Are ye also yet without understanding?  15:17 Do
not ye yet understand, that whatsoever entereth in at the mouth goeth
into the belly, and is cast out into the draught?  15:18 But those
things which proceed out of the mouth come forth from the heart; and
they defile the man.

15:19 For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries,
fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies: 15:20 These are the
things which defile a man: but to eat with unwashen hands defileth not
a man.

15:21 Then Jesus went thence, and departed into the coasts of Tyre and
Sidon.

15:22 And, behold, a woman of Canaan came out of the same coasts, and
cried unto him, saying, Have mercy on me, O Lord, thou son of David;
my daughter is grievously vexed with a devil.

15:23 But he answered her not a word. And his disciples came and
besought him, saying, Send her away; for she crieth after us.

15:24 But he answered and said, I am not sent but unto the lost sheep
of the house of Israel.

15:25 Then came she and worshipped him, saying, Lord, help me.

15:26 But he answered and said, It is not meet to take the children's
bread, and to cast it to dogs.

15:27 And she said, Truth, Lord: yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which
fall from their masters' table.

15:28 Then Jesus answered and said unto her, O woman, great is thy
faith: be it unto thee even as thou wilt. And her daughter was made
whole from that very hour.

15:29 And Jesus departed from thence, and came nigh unto the sea of
Galilee; and went up into a mountain, and sat down there.

15:30 And great multitudes came unto him, having with them those that
were lame, blind, dumb, maimed, and many others, and cast them down at
Jesus' feet; and he healed them: 15:31 Insomuch that the multitude
wondered, when they saw the dumb to speak, the maimed to be whole, the
lame to walk, and the blind to see: and they glorified the God of
Israel.

15:32 Then Jesus called his disciples unto him, and said, I have
compassion on the multitude, because they continue with me now three
days, and have nothing to eat: and I will not send them away fasting,
lest they faint in the way.

15:33 And his disciples say unto him, Whence should we have so much
bread in the wilderness, as to fill so great a multitude?  15:34 And
Jesus saith unto them, How many loaves have ye? And they said, Seven,
and a few little fishes.

15:35 And he commanded the multitude to sit down on the ground.

15:36 And he took the seven loaves and the fishes, and gave thanks,
and brake them, and gave to his disciples, and the disciples to the
multitude.

15:37 And they did all eat, and were filled: and they took up of the
broken meat that was left seven baskets full.

15:38 And they that did eat were four thousand men, beside women and
children.

15:39 And he sent away the multitude, and took ship, and came into the
coasts of Magdala.

16:1 The Pharisees also with the Sadducees came, and tempting desired
him that he would shew them a sign from heaven.

16:2 He answered and said unto them, When it is evening, ye say, It
will be fair weather: for the sky is red.

16:3 And in the morning, It will be foul weather to day: for the sky
is red and lowering. O ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the
sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times?  16:4 A wicked and
adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be
given unto it, but the sign of the prophet Jonas. And he left them,
and departed.

16:5 And when his disciples were come to the other side, they had
forgotten to take bread.

16:6 Then Jesus said unto them, Take heed and beware of the leaven of
the Pharisees and of the Sadducees.

16:7 And they reasoned among themselves, saying, It is because we have
taken no bread.

16:8 Which when Jesus perceived, he said unto them, O ye of little
faith, why reason ye among yourselves, because ye have brought no
bread?  16:9 Do ye not yet understand, neither remember the five
loaves of the five thousand, and how many baskets ye took up?  16:10
Neither the seven loaves of the four thousand, and how many baskets ye
took up?  16:11 How is it that ye do not understand that I spake it
not to you concerning bread, that ye should beware of the leaven of
the Pharisees and of the Sadducees?  16:12 Then understood they how
that he bade them not beware of the leaven of bread, but of the
doctrine of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees.

16:13 When Jesus came into the coasts of Caesarea Philippi, he asked
his disciples, saying, Whom do men say that I the Son of man am?
16:14 And they said, Some say that thou art John the Baptist: some,
Elias; and others, Jeremias, or one of the prophets.

16:15 He saith unto them, But whom say ye that I am?  16:16 And Simon
Peter answered and said, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living
God.

16:17 And Jesus answered and said unto him, Blessed art thou, Simon
Barjona: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my
Father which is in heaven.

16:18 And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this
rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail
against it.

16:19 And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and
whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and
whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.

16:20 Then charged he his disciples that they should tell no man that
he was Jesus the Christ.

16:21 From that time forth began Jesus to shew unto his disciples, how
that he must go unto Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the elders
and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised again the
third day.

16:22 Then Peter took him, and began to rebuke him, saying, Be it far
from thee, Lord: this shall not be unto thee.

16:23 But he turned, and said unto Peter, Get thee behind me, Satan:
thou art an offence unto me: for thou savourest not the things that be
of God, but those that be of men.

16:24 Then said Jesus unto his disciples, If any man will come after
me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.

16:25 For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever
will lose his life for my sake shall find it.

16:26 For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world,
and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his
soul?  16:27 For the Son of man shall come in the glory of his Father
with his angels; and then he shall reward every man according to his
works.

16:28 Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall
not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his
kingdom.

17:1 And after six days Jesus taketh Peter, James, and John his
brother, and bringeth them up into an high mountain apart, 17:2 And
was transfigured before them: and his face did shine as the sun, and
his raiment was white as the light.

17:3 And, behold, there appeared unto them Moses and Elias talking
with him.

17:4 Then answered Peter, and said unto Jesus, Lord, it is good for us
to be here: if thou wilt, let us make here three tabernacles; one for
thee, and one for Moses, and one for Elias.

17:5 While he yet spake, behold, a bright cloud overshadowed them: and
behold a voice out of the cloud, which said, This is my beloved Son,
in whom I am well pleased; hear ye him.

17:6 And when the disciples heard it, they fell on their face, and
were sore afraid.

17:7 And Jesus came and touched them, and said, Arise, and be not
afraid.

17:8 And when they had lifted up their eyes, they saw no man, save
Jesus only.

17:9 And as they came down from the mountain, Jesus charged them,
saying, Tell the vision to no man, until the Son of man be risen again
from the dead.

17:10 And his disciples asked him, saying, Why then say the scribes
that Elias must first come?  17:11 And Jesus answered and said unto
them, Elias truly shall first come, and restore all things.

17:12 But I say unto you, That Elias is come already, and they knew
him not, but have done unto him whatsoever they listed. Likewise shall
also the Son of man suffer of them.

17:13 Then the disciples understood that he spake unto them of John
the Baptist.

17:14 And when they were come to the multitude, there came to him a
certain man, kneeling down to him, and saying, 17:15 Lord, have mercy
on my son: for he is lunatick, and sore vexed: for ofttimes he falleth
into the fire, and oft into the water.

17:16 And I brought him to thy disciples, and they could not cure him.

17:17 Then Jesus answered and said, O faithless and perverse
generation, how long shall I be with you? how long shall I suffer you?
bring him hither to me.

17:18 And Jesus rebuked the devil; and he departed out of him: and the
child was cured from that very hour.

17:19 Then came the disciples to Jesus apart, and said, Why could not
we cast him out?  17:20 And Jesus said unto them, Because of your
unbelief: for verily I say unto you, If ye have faith as a grain of
mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder
place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you.

17:21 Howbeit this kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting.

17:22 And while they abode in Galilee, Jesus said unto them, The Son
of man shall be betrayed into the hands of men: 17:23 And they shall
kill him, and the third day he shall be raised again.

And they were exceeding sorry.

17:24 And when they were come to Capernaum, they that received tribute
money came to Peter, and said, Doth not your master pay tribute?
17:25 He saith, Yes. And when he was come into the house, Jesus
prevented him, saying, What thinkest thou, Simon? of whom do the kings
of the earth take custom or tribute? of their own children, or of
strangers?  17:26 Peter saith unto him, Of strangers. Jesus saith unto
him, Then are the children free.

17:27 Notwithstanding, lest we should offend them, go thou to the sea,
and cast an hook, and take up the fish that first cometh up; and when
thou hast opened his mouth, thou shalt find a piece of money: that
take, and give unto them for me and thee.

18:1 At the same time came the disciples unto Jesus, saying, Who is
the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?  18:2 And Jesus called a little
child unto him, and set him in the midst of them, 18:3 And said,
Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little
children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.

18:4 Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child,
the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven.

18:5 And whoso shall receive one such little child in my name
receiveth me.

18:6 But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in
me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his
neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.

18:7 Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that
offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!  18:8
Wherefore if thy hand or thy foot offend thee, cut them off, and cast
them from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life halt or
maimed, rather than having two hands or two feet to be cast into
everlasting fire.

18:9 And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from
thee: it is better for thee to enter into life with one eye, rather
than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire.

18:10 Take heed that ye despise not one of these little ones; for I
say unto you, That in heaven their angels do always behold the face of
my Father which is in heaven.

18:11 For the Son of man is come to save that which was lost.

18:12 How think ye? if a man have an hundred sheep, and one of them be
gone astray, doth he not leave the ninety and nine, and goeth into the
mountains, and seeketh that which is gone astray?  18:13 And if so be
that he find it, verily I say unto you, he rejoiceth more of that
sheep, than of the ninety and nine which went not astray.

18:14 Even so it is not the will of your Father which is in heaven,
that one of these little ones should perish.

18:15 Moreover if thy brother shall trespass against thee, go and tell
him his fault between thee and him alone: if he shall hear thee, thou
hast gained thy brother.

18:16 But if he will not hear thee, then take with thee one or two
more, that in the mouth of two or three witnesses every word may be
established.

18:17 And if he shall neglect to hear them, tell it unto the church:
but if he neglect to hear the church, let him be unto thee as an
heathen man and a publican.

18:18 Verily I say unto you, Whatsoever ye shall bind on earth shall
be bound in heaven: and whatsoever ye shall loose on earth shall be
loosed in heaven.

18:19 Again I say unto you, That if two of you shall agree on earth as
touching any thing that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of
my Father which is in heaven.

18:20 For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there
am I in the midst of them.

18:21 Then came Peter to him, and said, Lord, how oft shall my brother
sin against me, and I forgive him? till seven times?  18:22 Jesus
saith unto him, I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but, Until
seventy times seven.

18:23 Therefore is the kingdom of heaven likened unto a certain king,
which would take account of his servants.

18:24 And when he had begun to reckon, one was brought unto him, which
owed him ten thousand talents.

18:25 But forasmuch as he had not to pay, his lord commanded him to be
sold, and his wife, and children, and all that he had, and payment to
be made.

18:26 The servant therefore fell down, and worshipped him, saying,
Lord, have patience with me, and I will pay thee all.

18:27 Then the lord of that servant was moved with compassion, and
loosed him, and forgave him the debt.

18:28 But the same servant went out, and found one of his
fellowservants, which owed him an hundred pence: and he laid hands on
him, and took him by the throat, saying, Pay me that thou owest.

18:29 And his fellowservant fell down at his feet, and besought him,
saying, Have patience with me, and I will pay thee all.

18:30 And he would not: but went and cast him into prison, till he
should pay the debt.

18:31 So when his fellowservants saw what was done, they were very
sorry, and came and told unto their lord all that was done.

18:32 Then his lord, after that he had called him, said unto him, O
thou wicked servant, I forgave thee all that debt, because thou
desiredst me: 18:33 Shouldest not thou also have had compassion on thy
fellowservant, even as I had pity on thee?  18:34 And his lord was
wroth, and delivered him to the tormentors, till he should pay all
that was due unto him.

18:35 So likewise shall my heavenly Father do also unto you, if ye
from your hearts forgive not every one his brother their trespasses.

19:1 And it came to pass, that when Jesus had finished these sayings,
he departed from Galilee, and came into the coasts of Judaea beyond
Jordan; 19:2 And great multitudes followed him; and he healed them
there.

19:3 The Pharisees also came unto him, tempting him, and saying unto
him, Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife for every cause?
19:4 And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that he
which made them at the beginning made them male and female, 19:5 And
said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall
cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh?  19:6 Wherefore
they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined
together, let not man put asunder.

19:7 They say unto him, Why did Moses then command to give a writing
of divorcement, and to put her away?  19:8 He saith unto them, Moses
because of the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put away your
wives: but from the beginning it was not so.

19:9 And I say unto you, Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it
be for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery: and
whoso marrieth her which is put away doth commit adultery.

19:10 His disciples say unto him, If the case of the man be so with
his wife, it is not good to marry.

19:11 But he said unto them, All men cannot receive this saying, save
they to whom it is given.

19:12 For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their
mother's womb: and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of
men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the
kingdom of heaven's sake. He that is able to receive it, let him
receive it.

19:13 Then were there brought unto him little children, that he should
put his hands on them, and pray: and the disciples rebuked them.

19:14 But Jesus said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to
come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.

19:15 And he laid his hands on them, and departed thence.

19:16 And, behold, one came and said unto him, Good Master, what good
thing shall I do, that I may have eternal life?  19:17 And he said
unto him, Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that
is, God: but if thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments.

19:18 He saith unto him, Which? Jesus said, Thou shalt do no murder,
Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not
bear false witness, 19:19 Honour thy father and thy mother: and, Thou
shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.

19:20 The young man saith unto him, All these things have I kept from
my youth up: what lack I yet?  19:21 Jesus said unto him, If thou wilt
be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou
shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me.

19:22 But when the young man heard that saying, he went away
sorrowful: for he had great possessions.

19:23 Then said Jesus unto his disciples, Verily I say unto you, That
a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven.

19:24 And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through
the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of
God.

19:25 When his disciples heard it, they were exceedingly amazed,
saying, Who then can be saved?  19:26 But Jesus beheld them, and said
unto them, With men this is impossible; but with God all things are
possible.

19:27 Then answered Peter and said unto him, Behold, we have forsaken
all, and followed thee; what shall we have therefore?  19:28 And Jesus
said unto them, Verily I say unto you, That ye which have followed me,
in the regeneration when the Son of man shall sit in the throne of his
glory, ye also shall sit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve
tribes of Israel.

19:29 And every one that hath forsaken houses, or brethren, or
sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my
name's sake, shall receive an hundredfold, and shall inherit
everlasting life.

19:30 But many that are first shall be last; and the last shall be
first.

20:1 For the kingdom of heaven is like unto a man that is an
householder, which went out early in the morning to hire labourers
into his vineyard.

20:2 And when he had agreed with the labourers for a penny a day, he
sent them into his vineyard.

20:3 And he went out about the third hour, and saw others standing
idle in the marketplace, 20:4 And said unto them; Go ye also into the
vineyard, and whatsoever is right I will give you. And they went their
way.

20:5 Again he went out about the sixth and ninth hour, and did
likewise.

20:6 And about the eleventh hour he went out, and found others
standing idle, and saith unto them, Why stand ye here all the day
idle?  20:7 They say unto him, Because no man hath hired us. He saith
unto them, Go ye also into the vineyard; and whatsoever is right, that
shall ye receive.

20:8 So when even was come, the lord of the vineyard saith unto his
steward, Call the labourers, and give them their hire, beginning from
the last unto the first.

20:9 And when they came that were hired about the eleventh hour, they
received every man a penny.

20:10 But when the first came, they supposed that they should have
received more; and they likewise received every man a penny.

20:11 And when they had received it, they murmured against the goodman
of the house, 20:12 Saying, These last have wrought but one hour, and
thou hast made them equal unto us, which have borne the burden and
heat of the day.

20:13 But he answered one of them, and said, Friend, I do thee no
wrong: didst not thou agree with me for a penny?  20:14 Take that
thine is, and go thy way: I will give unto this last, even as unto
thee.

20:15 Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own? Is
thine eye evil, because I am good?  20:16 So the last shall be first,
and the first last: for many be called, but few chosen.

20:17 And Jesus going up to Jerusalem took the twelve disciples apart
in the way, and said unto them, 20:18 Behold, we go up to Jerusalem;
and the Son of man shall be betrayed unto the chief priests and unto
the scribes, and they shall condemn him to death, 20:19 And shall
deliver him to the Gentiles to mock, and to scourge, and to crucify
him: and the third day he shall rise again.

20:20 Then came to him the mother of Zebedees children with her sons,
worshipping him, and desiring a certain thing of him.

20:21 And he said unto her, What wilt thou? She saith unto him, Grant
that these my two sons may sit, the one on thy right hand, and the
other on the left, in thy kingdom.

20:22 But Jesus answered and said, Ye know not what ye ask. Are ye
able to drink of the cup that I shall drink of, and to be baptized
with the baptism that I am baptized with? They say unto him, We are
able.

20:23 And he saith unto them, Ye shall drink indeed of my cup, and be
baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with: but to sit on my
right hand, and on my left, is not mine to give, but it shall be given
to them for whom it is prepared of my Father.

20:24 And when the ten heard it, they were moved with indignation
against the two brethren.

20:25 But Jesus called them unto him, and said, Ye know that the
princes of the Gentiles exercise dominion over them, and they that are
great exercise authority upon them.

20:26 But it shall not be so among you: but whosoever will be great
among you, let him be your minister; 20:27 And whosoever will be chief
among you, let him be your servant: 20:28 Even as the Son of man came
not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a
ransom for many.

20:29 And as they departed from Jericho, a great multitude followed
him.

20:30 And, behold, two blind men sitting by the way side, when they
heard that Jesus passed by, cried out, saying, Have mercy on us, O
Lord, thou son of David.

20:31 And the multitude rebuked them, because they should hold their
peace: but they cried the more, saying, Have mercy on us, O Lord, thou
son of David.

20:32 And Jesus stood still, and called them, and said, What will ye
that I shall do unto you?  20:33 They say unto him, Lord, that our
eyes may be opened.

20:34 So Jesus had compassion on them, and touched their eyes: and
immediately their eyes received sight, and they followed him.

21:1 And when they drew nigh unto Jerusalem, and were come to
Bethphage, unto the mount of Olives, then sent Jesus two disciples,
21:2 Saying unto them, Go into the village over against you, and
straightway ye shall find an ass tied, and a colt with her: loose
them, and bring them unto me.

21:3 And if any man say ought unto you, ye shall say, The Lord hath
need of them; and straightway he will send them.

21:4 All this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by
the prophet, saying, 21:5 Tell ye the daughter of Sion, Behold, thy
King cometh unto thee, meek, and sitting upon an ass, and a colt the
foal of an ass.

21:6 And the disciples went, and did as Jesus commanded them, 21:7 And
brought the ass, and the colt, and put on them their clothes, and they
set him thereon.

21:8 And a very great multitude spread their garments in the way;
others cut down branches from the trees, and strawed them in the way.

21:9 And the multitudes that went before, and that followed, cried,
saying, Hosanna to the son of David: Blessed is he that cometh in the
name of the Lord; Hosanna in the highest.

21:10 And when he was come into Jerusalem, all the city was moved,
saying, Who is this?  21:11 And the multitude said, This is Jesus the
prophet of Nazareth of Galilee.

21:12 And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them
that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the
moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves, 21:13 And said
unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of
prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.

21:14 And the blind and the lame came to him in the temple; and he
healed them.

21:15 And when the chief priests and scribes saw the wonderful things
that he did, and the children crying in the temple, and saying,
Hosanna to the son of David; they were sore displeased, 21:16 And said
unto him, Hearest thou what these say? And Jesus saith unto them, Yea;
have ye never read, Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings thou hast
perfected praise?  21:17 And he left them, and went out of the city
into Bethany; and he lodged there.

21:18 Now in the morning as he returned into the city, he hungered.

21:19 And when he saw a fig tree in the way, he came to it, and found
nothing thereon, but leaves only, and said unto it, Let no fruit grow
on thee henceforward for ever. And presently the fig tree withered
away.

21:20 And when the disciples saw it, they marvelled, saying, How soon
is the fig tree withered away!  21:21 Jesus answered and said unto
them, Verily I say unto you, If ye have faith, and doubt not, ye shall
not only do this which is done to the fig tree, but also if ye shall
say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the
sea; it shall be done.

21:22 And all things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye
shall receive.

21:23 And when he was come into the temple, the chief priests and the
elders of the people came unto him as he was teaching, and said, By
what authority doest thou these things? and who gave thee this
authority?  21:24 And Jesus answered and said unto them, I also will
ask you one thing, which if ye tell me, I in like wise will tell you
by what authority I do these things.

21:25 The baptism of John, whence was it? from heaven, or of men? And
they reasoned with themselves, saying, If we shall say, From heaven;
he will say unto us, Why did ye not then believe him?  21:26 But if we
shall say, Of men; we fear the people; for all hold John as a prophet.

21:27 And they answered Jesus, and said, We cannot tell. And he said
unto them, Neither tell I you by what authority I do these things.

21:28 But what think ye? A certain man had two sons; and he came to
the first, and said, Son, go work to day in my vineyard.

21:29 He answered and said, I will not: but afterward he repented, and
went.

21:30 And he came to the second, and said likewise. And he answered
and said, I go, sir: and went not.

21:31 Whether of them twain did the will of his father? They say unto
him, The first. Jesus saith unto them, Verily I say unto you, That the
publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you.

21:32 For John came unto you in the way of righteousness, and ye
believed him not: but the publicans and the harlots believed him: and
ye, when ye had seen it, repented not afterward, that ye might believe
him.

21:33 Hear another parable: There was a certain householder, which
planted a vineyard, and hedged it round about, and digged a winepress
in it, and built a tower, and let it out to husbandmen, and went into
a far country: 21:34 And when the time of the fruit drew near, he sent
his servants to the husbandmen, that they might receive the fruits of
it.

21:35 And the husbandmen took his servants, and beat one, and killed
another, and stoned another.

21:36 Again, he sent other servants more than the first: and they did
unto them likewise.

21:37 But last of all he sent unto them his son, saying, They will
reverence my son.

21:38 But when the husbandmen saw the son, they said among themselves,
This is the heir; come, let us kill him, and let us seize on his
inheritance.

21:39 And they caught him, and cast him out of the vineyard, and slew
him.

21:40 When the lord therefore of the vineyard cometh, what will he do
unto those husbandmen?  21:41 They say unto him, He will miserably
destroy those wicked men, and will let out his vineyard unto other
husbandmen, which shall render him the fruits in their seasons.

21:42 Jesus saith unto them, Did ye never read in the scriptures, The
stone which the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the
corner: this is the Lord's doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes?
21:43 Therefore say I unto you, The kingdom of God shall be taken from
you, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof.

21:44 And whosoever shall fall on this stone shall be broken: but on
whomsoever it shall fall, it will grind him to powder.

21:45 And when the chief priests and Pharisees had heard his parables,
they perceived that he spake of them.

21:46 But when they sought to lay hands on him, they feared the
multitude, because they took him for a prophet.

22:1 And Jesus answered and spake unto them again by parables, and
said, 22:2 The kingdom of heaven is like unto a certain king, which
made a marriage for his son, 22:3 And sent forth his servants to call
them that were bidden to the wedding: and they would not come.

22:4 Again, he sent forth other servants, saying, Tell them which are
bidden, Behold, I have prepared my dinner: my oxen and my fatlings are
killed, and all things are ready: come unto the marriage.

22:5 But they made light of it, and went their ways, one to his farm,
another to his merchandise: 22:6 And the remnant took his servants,
and entreated them spitefully, and slew them.

22:7 But when the king heard thereof, he was wroth: and he sent forth
his armies, and destroyed those murderers, and burned up their city.

22:8 Then saith he to his servants, The wedding is ready, but they
which were bidden were not worthy.

22:9 Go ye therefore into the highways, and as many as ye shall find,
bid to the marriage.

22:10 So those servants went out into the highways, and gathered
together all as many as they found, both bad and good: and the wedding
was furnished with guests.

22:11 And when the king came in to see the guests, he saw there a man
which had not on a wedding garment: 22:12 And he saith unto him,
Friend, how camest thou in hither not having a wedding garment? And he
was speechless.

22:13 Then said the king to the servants, Bind him hand and foot, and
take him away, and cast him into outer darkness, there shall be
weeping and gnashing of teeth.

22:14 For many are called, but few are chosen.

22:15 Then went the Pharisees, and took counsel how they might
entangle him in his talk.

22:16 And they sent out unto him their disciples with the Herodians,
saying, Master, we know that thou art true, and teachest the way of
God in truth, neither carest thou for any man: for thou regardest not
the person of men.

22:17 Tell us therefore, What thinkest thou? Is it lawful to give
tribute unto Caesar, or not?  22:18 But Jesus perceived their
wickedness, and said, Why tempt ye me, ye hypocrites?  22:19 Shew me
the tribute money. And they brought unto him a penny.

22:20 And he saith unto them, Whose is this image and superscription?
22:21 They say unto him, Caesar's. Then saith he unto them, Render
therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the
things that are God's.

22:22 When they had heard these words, they marvelled, and left him,
and went their way.

22:23 The same day came to him the Sadducees, which say that there is
no resurrection, and asked him, 22:24 Saying, Master, Moses said, If a
man die, having no children, his brother shall marry his wife, and
raise up seed unto his brother.

22:25 Now there were with us seven brethren: and the first, when he
had married a wife, deceased, and, having no issue, left his wife unto
his brother: 22:26 Likewise the second also, and the third, unto the
seventh.

22:27 And last of all the woman died also.

22:28 Therefore in the resurrection whose wife shall she be of the
seven?  for they all had her.

22:29 Jesus answered and said unto them, Ye do err, not knowing the
scriptures, nor the power of God.

22:30 For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in
marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven.

22:31 But as touching the resurrection of the dead, have ye not read
that which was spoken unto you by God, saying, 22:32 I am the God of
Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob?  God is not the
God of the dead, but of the living.

22:33 And when the multitude heard this, they were astonished at his
doctrine.

22:34 But when the Pharisees had heard that he had put the Sadducees
to silence, they were gathered together.

22:35 Then one of them, which was a lawyer, asked him a question,
tempting him, and saying, 22:36 Master, which is the great commandment
in the law?  22:37 Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy
God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.

22:38 This is the first and great commandment.

22:39 And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as
thyself.

22:40 On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

22:41 While the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them,
22:42 Saying, What think ye of Christ? whose son is he? They say unto
him, The son of David.

22:43 He saith unto them, How then doth David in spirit call him Lord,
saying, 22:44 The LORD said unto my Lord, Sit thou on my right hand,
till I make thine enemies thy footstool?  22:45 If David then call him
Lord, how is he his son?  22:46 And no man was able to answer him a
word, neither durst any man from that day forth ask him any more
questions.

23:1 Then spake Jesus to the multitude, and to his disciples, 23:2
Saying The scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses' seat: 23:3 All
therefore whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe and do; but do
not ye after their works: for they say, and do not.

23:4 For they bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay
them on men's shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with
one of their fingers.

23:5 But all their works they do for to be seen of men: they make
broad their phylacteries, and enlarge the borders of their garments,
23:6 And love the uppermost rooms at feasts, and the chief seats in
the synagogues, 23:7 And greetings in the markets, and to be called of
men, Rabbi, Rabbi.

23:8 But be not ye called Rabbi: for one is your Master, even Christ;
and all ye are brethren.

23:9 And call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your
Father, which is in heaven.

23:10 Neither be ye called masters: for one is your Master, even
Christ.

23:11 But he that is greatest among you shall be your servant.

23:12 And whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that
shall humble himself shall be exalted.

23:13 But woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut
up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves,
neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in.

23:14 Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye devour
widows' houses, and for a pretence make long prayer: therefore ye
shall receive the greater damnation.

23:15 Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass
sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him
twofold more the child of hell than yourselves.

23:16 Woe unto you, ye blind guides, which say, Whosoever shall swear
by the temple, it is nothing; but whosoever shall swear by the gold of
the temple, he is a debtor!  23:17 Ye fools and blind: for whether is
greater, the gold, or the temple that sanctifieth the gold?  23:18
And, Whosoever shall swear by the altar, it is nothing; but whosoever
sweareth by the gift that is upon it, he is guilty.

23:19 Ye fools and blind: for whether is greater, the gift, or the
altar that sanctifieth the gift?  23:20 Whoso therefore shall swear by
the altar, sweareth by it, and by all things thereon.

23:21 And whoso shall swear by the temple, sweareth by it, and by him
that dwelleth therein.

23:22 And he that shall swear by heaven, sweareth by the throne of
God, and by him that sitteth thereon.

23:23 Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay
tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier
matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have
done, and not to leave the other undone.

23:24 Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel.

23:25 Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye make
clean the outside of the cup and of the platter, but within they are
full of extortion and excess.

23:26 Thou blind Pharisee, cleanse first that which is within the cup
and platter, that the outside of them may be clean also.

23:27 Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like
unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are
within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness.

23:28 Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within
ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.

23:29 Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! because ye
build the tombs of the prophets, and garnish the sepulchres of the
righteous, 23:30 And say, If we had been in the days of our fathers,
we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the
prophets.

23:31 Wherefore ye be witnesses unto yourselves, that ye are the
children of them which killed the prophets.

23:32 Fill ye up then the measure of your fathers.

23:33 Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the
damnation of hell?  23:34 Wherefore, behold, I send unto you prophets,
and wise men, and scribes: and some of them ye shall kill and crucify;
and some of them shall ye scourge in your synagogues, and persecute
them from city to city: 23:35 That upon you may come all the righteous
blood shed upon the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel unto the
blood of Zacharias son of Barachias, whom ye slew between the temple
and the altar.

23:36 Verily I say unto you, All these things shall come upon this
generation.

23:37 O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and
stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered
thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her
wings, and ye would not!  23:38 Behold, your house is left unto you
desolate.

23:39 For I say unto you, Ye shall not see me henceforth, till ye
shall say, Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord.

24:1 And Jesus went out, and departed from the temple: and his
disciples came to him for to shew him the buildings of the temple.

24:2 And Jesus said unto them, See ye not all these things? verily I
say unto you, There shall not be left here one stone upon another,
that shall not be thrown down.

24:3 And as he sat upon the mount of Olives, the disciples came unto
him privately, saying, Tell us, when shall these things be? and what
shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world?  24:4
And Jesus answered and said unto them, Take heed that no man deceive
you.

24:5 For many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall
deceive many.

24:6 And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not
troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not
yet.

24:7 For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against
kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes,
in divers places.

24:8 All these are the beginning of sorrows.

24:9 Then shall they deliver you up to be afflicted, and shall kill
you: and ye shall be hated of all nations for my name's sake.

24:10 And then shall many be offended, and shall betray one another,
and shall hate one another.

24:11 And many false prophets shall rise, and shall deceive many.

24:12 And because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax
cold.

24:13 But he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved.

24:14 And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the
world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come.

24:15 When ye therefore shall see the abomination of desolation,
spoken of by Daniel the prophet, stand in the holy place, (whoso
readeth, let him understand:) 24:16 Then let them which be in Judaea
flee into the mountains: 24:17 Let him which is on the housetop not
come down to take any thing out of his house: 24:18 Neither let him
which is in the field return back to take his clothes.

24:19 And woe unto them that are with child, and to them that give
suck in those days!  24:20 But pray ye that your flight be not in the
winter, neither on the sabbath day: 24:21 For then shall be great
tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world to this
time, no, nor ever shall be.

24:22 And except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh
be saved: but for the elect's sake those days shall be shortened.

24:23 Then if any man shall say unto you, Lo, here is Christ, or
there; believe it not.

24:24 For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and
shall shew great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were
possible, they shall deceive the very elect.

24:25 Behold, I have told you before.

24:26 Wherefore if they shall say unto you, Behold, he is in the
desert; go not forth: behold, he is in the secret chambers; believe it
not.

24:27 For as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even
unto the west; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.

24:28 For wheresoever the carcase is, there will the eagles be
gathered together.

24:29 Immediately after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be
darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall
fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken: 24:30
And then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven: and then
shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of
man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.

24:31 And he shall send his angels with a great sound of a trumpet,
and they shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from one
end of heaven to the other.

24:32 Now learn a parable of the fig tree; When his branch is yet
tender, and putteth forth leaves, ye know that summer is nigh: 24:33
So likewise ye, when ye shall see all these things, know that it is
near, even at the doors.

24:34 Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass, till all
these things be fulfilled.

24:35 Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass
away.

24:36 But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of
heaven, but my Father only.

24:37 But as the days of Noe were, so shall also the coming of the Son
of man be.

24:38 For as in the days that were before the flood they were eating
and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noe
entered into the ark, 24:39 And knew not until the flood came, and
took them all away; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.

24:40 Then shall two be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the
other left.

24:41 Two women shall be grinding at the mill; the one shall be taken,
and the other left.

24:42 Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come.

24:43 But know this, that if the goodman of the house had known in
what watch the thief would come, he would have watched, and would not
have suffered his house to be broken up.

24:44 Therefore be ye also ready: for in such an hour as ye think not
the Son of man cometh.

24:45 Who then is a faithful and wise servant, whom his lord hath made
ruler over his household, to give them meat in due season?  24:46
Blessed is that servant, whom his lord when he cometh shall find so
doing.

24:47 Verily I say unto you, That he shall make him ruler over all his
goods.

24:48 But and if that evil servant shall say in his heart, My lord
delayeth his coming; 24:49 And shall begin to smite his
fellowservants, and to eat and drink with the drunken; 24:50 The lord
of that servant shall come in a day when he looketh not for him, and
in an hour that he is not aware of, 24:51 And shall cut him asunder,
and appoint him his portion with the hypocrites: there shall be
weeping and gnashing of teeth.

25:1 Then shall the kingdom of heaven be likened unto ten virgins,
which took their lamps, and went forth to meet the bridegroom.

25:2 And five of them were wise, and five were foolish.

25:3 They that were foolish took their lamps, and took no oil with
them: 25:4 But the wise took oil in their vessels with their lamps.

25:5 While the bridegroom tarried, they all slumbered and slept.

25:6 And at midnight there was a cry made, Behold, the bridegroom
cometh; go ye out to meet him.

25:7 Then all those virgins arose, and trimmed their lamps.

25:8 And the foolish said unto the wise, Give us of your oil; for our
lamps are gone out.

25:9 But the wise answered, saying, Not so; lest there be not enough
for us and you: but go ye rather to them that sell, and buy for
yourselves.

25:10 And while they went to buy, the bridegroom came; and they that
were ready went in with him to the marriage: and the door was shut.

25:11 Afterward came also the other virgins, saying, Lord, Lord, open
to us.

25:12 But he answered and said, Verily I say unto you, I know you not.

25:13 Watch therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour
wherein the Son of man cometh.

25:14 For the kingdom of heaven is as a man travelling into a far
country, who called his own servants, and delivered unto them his
goods.

25:15 And unto one he gave five talents, to another two, and to
another one; to every man according to his several ability; and
straightway took his journey.

25:16 Then he that had received the five talents went and traded with
the same, and made them other five talents.

25:17 And likewise he that had received two, he also gained other two.

25:18 But he that had received one went and digged in the earth, and
hid his lord's money.

25:19 After a long time the lord of those servants cometh, and
reckoneth with them.

25:20 And so he that had received five talents came and brought other
five talents, saying, Lord, thou deliveredst unto me five talents:
behold, I have gained beside them five talents more.

25:21 His lord said unto him, Well done, thou good and faithful
servant: thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee
ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord.

25:22 He also that had received two talents came and said, Lord, thou
deliveredst unto me two talents: behold, I have gained two other
talents beside them.

25:23 His lord said unto him, Well done, good and faithful servant;
thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over
many things: enter thou into the joy of thy lord.

25:24 Then he which had received the one talent came and said, Lord, I
knew thee that thou art an hard man, reaping where thou hast not sown,
and gathering where thou hast not strawed: 25:25 And I was afraid, and
went and hid thy talent in the earth: lo, there thou hast that is
thine.

25:26 His lord answered and said unto him, Thou wicked and slothful
servant, thou knewest that I reap where I sowed not, and gather where
I have not strawed: 25:27 Thou oughtest therefore to have put my money
to the exchangers, and then at my coming I should have received mine
own with usury.

25:28 Take therefore the talent from him, and give it unto him which
hath ten talents.

25:29 For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have
abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that
which he hath.

25:30 And cast ye the unprofitable servant into outer darkness: there
shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

25:31 When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy
angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory: 25:32
And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate
them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the
goats: 25:33 And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the
goats on the left.

25:34 Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye
blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the
foundation of the world: 25:35 For I was an hungred, and ye gave me
meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye
took me in: 25:36 Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited
me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.

25:37 Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we
thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink?  25:38
When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed
thee?  25:39 Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto
thee?  25:40 And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say
unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these
my brethren, ye have done it unto me.

25:41 Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from
me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his
angels: 25:42 For I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was
thirsty, and ye gave me no drink: 25:43 I was a stranger, and ye took
me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye
visited me not.

25:44 Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee
an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in
prison, and did not minister unto thee?  25:45 Then shall he answer
them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one
of the least of these, ye did it not to me.

25:46 And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the
righteous into life eternal.

26:1 And it came to pass, when Jesus had finished all these sayings,
he said unto his disciples, 26:2 Ye know that after two days is the
feast of the passover, and the Son of man is betrayed to be crucified.

26:3 Then assembled together the chief priests, and the scribes, and
the elders of the people, unto the palace of the high priest, who was
called Caiaphas, 26:4 And consulted that they might take Jesus by
subtilty, and kill him.

26:5 But they said, Not on the feast day, lest there be an uproar
among the people.

26:6 Now when Jesus was in Bethany, in the house of Simon the leper,
26:7 There came unto him a woman having an alabaster box of very
precious ointment, and poured it on his head, as he sat at meat.

26:8 But when his disciples saw it, they had indignation, saying, To
what purpose is this waste?  26:9 For this ointment might have been
sold for much, and given to the poor.

26:10 When Jesus understood it, he said unto them, Why trouble ye the
woman? for she hath wrought a good work upon me.

26:11 For ye have the poor always with you; but me ye have not always.

26:12 For in that she hath poured this ointment on my body, she did it
for my burial.

26:13 Verily I say unto you, Wheresoever this gospel shall be preached
in the whole world, there shall also this, that this woman hath done,
be told for a memorial of her.

26:14 Then one of the twelve, called Judas Iscariot, went unto the
chief priests, 26:15 And said unto them, What will ye give me, and I
will deliver him unto you? And they covenanted with him for thirty
pieces of silver.

26:16 And from that time he sought opportunity to betray him.

26:17 Now the first day of the feast of unleavened bread the disciples
came to Jesus, saying unto him, Where wilt thou that we prepare for
thee to eat the passover?  26:18 And he said, Go into the city to such
a man, and say unto him, The Master saith, My time is at hand; I will
keep the passover at thy house with my disciples.

26:19 And the disciples did as Jesus had appointed them; and they made
ready the passover.

26:20 Now when the even was come, he sat down with the twelve.

26:21 And as they did eat, he said, Verily I say unto you, that one of
you shall betray me.

26:22 And they were exceeding sorrowful, and began every one of them
to say unto him, Lord, is it I?  26:23 And he answered and said, He
that dippeth his hand with me in the dish, the same shall betray me.

26:24 The Son of man goeth as it is written of him: but woe unto that
man by whom the Son of man is betrayed! it had been good for that man
if he had not been born.

26:25 Then Judas, which betrayed him, answered and said, Master, is it
I?  He said unto him, Thou hast said.

26:26 And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and
brake it, and gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is
my body.

26:27 And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them,
saying, Drink ye all of it; 26:28 For this is my blood of the new
testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins.

26:29 But I say unto you, I will not drink henceforth of this fruit of
the vine, until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father's
kingdom.

26:30 And when they had sung an hymn, they went out into the mount of
Olives.

26:31 Then saith Jesus unto them, All ye shall be offended because of
me this night: for it is written, I will smite the shepherd, and the
sheep of the flock shall be scattered abroad.

26:32 But after I am risen again, I will go before you into Galilee.

26:33 Peter answered and said unto him, Though all men shall be
offended because of thee, yet will I never be offended.

26:34 Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, That this night,
before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thrice.

26:35 Peter said unto him, Though I should die with thee, yet will I
not deny thee. Likewise also said all the disciples.

26:36 Then cometh Jesus with them unto a place called Gethsemane, and
saith unto the disciples, Sit ye here, while I go and pray yonder.

26:37 And he took with him Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, and
began to be sorrowful and very heavy.

26:38 Then saith he unto them, My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even
unto death: tarry ye here, and watch with me.

26:39 And he went a little farther, and fell on his face, and prayed,
saying, O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me:
nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt.

26:40 And he cometh unto the disciples, and findeth them asleep, and
saith unto Peter, What, could ye not watch with me one hour?  26:41
Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation: the spirit indeed
is willing, but the flesh is weak.

26:42 He went away again the second time, and prayed, saying, O my
Father, if this cup may not pass away from me, except I drink it, thy
will be done.

26:43 And he came and found them asleep again: for their eyes were
heavy.

26:44 And he left them, and went away again, and prayed the third
time, saying the same words.

26:45 Then cometh he to his disciples, and saith unto them, Sleep on
now, and take your rest: behold, the hour is at hand, and the Son of
man is betrayed into the hands of sinners.

26:46 Rise, let us be going: behold, he is at hand that doth betray
me.

26:47 And while he yet spake, lo, Judas, one of the twelve, came, and
with him a great multitude with swords and staves, from the chief
priests and elders of the people.

26:48 Now he that betrayed him gave them a sign, saying, Whomsoever I
shall kiss, that same is he: hold him fast.

26:49 And forthwith he came to Jesus, and said, Hail, master; and
kissed him.

26:50 And Jesus said unto him, Friend, wherefore art thou come? Then
came they, and laid hands on Jesus and took him.

26:51 And, behold, one of them which were with Jesus stretched out his
hand, and drew his sword, and struck a servant of the high priest's,
and smote off his ear.

26:52 Then said Jesus unto him, Put up again thy sword into his place:
for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.

26:53 Thinkest thou that I cannot now pray to my Father, and he shall
presently give me more than twelve legions of angels?  26:54 But how
then shall the scriptures be fulfilled, that thus it must be?  26:55
In that same hour said Jesus to the multitudes, Are ye come out as
against a thief with swords and staves for to take me? I sat daily
with you teaching in the temple, and ye laid no hold on me.

26:56 But all this was done, that the scriptures of the prophets might
be fulfilled. Then all the disciples forsook him, and fled.

26:57 And they that had laid hold on Jesus led him away to Caiaphas
the high priest, where the scribes and the elders were assembled.

26:58 But Peter followed him afar off unto the high priest's palace,
and went in, and sat with the servants, to see the end.

26:59 Now the chief priests, and elders, and all the council, sought
false witness against Jesus, to put him to death; 26:60 But found
none: yea, though many false witnesses came, yet found they none. At
the last came two false witnesses, 26:61 And said, This fellow said, I
am able to destroy the temple of God, and to build it in three days.

26:62 And the high priest arose, and said unto him, Answerest thou
nothing? what is it which these witness against thee?  26:63 But Jesus
held his peace, And the high priest answered and said unto him, I
adjure thee by the living God, that thou tell us whether thou be the
Christ, the Son of God.

26:64 Jesus saith unto him, Thou hast said: nevertheless I say unto
you, Hereafter shall ye see the Son of man sitting on the right hand
of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven.

26:65 Then the high priest rent his clothes, saying, He hath spoken
blasphemy; what further need have we of witnesses? behold, now ye have
heard his blasphemy.

26:66 What think ye? They answered and said, He is guilty of death.

26:67 Then did they spit in his face, and buffeted him; and others
smote him with the palms of their hands, 26:68 Saying, Prophesy unto
us, thou Christ, Who is he that smote thee?  26:69 Now Peter sat
without in the palace: and a damsel came unto him, saying, Thou also
wast with Jesus of Galilee.

26:70 But he denied before them all, saying, I know not what thou
sayest.

26:71 And when he was gone out into the porch, another maid saw him,
and said unto them that were there, This fellow was also with Jesus of
Nazareth.

26:72 And again he denied with an oath, I do not know the man.

26:73 And after a while came unto him they that stood by, and said to
Peter, Surely thou also art one of them; for thy speech bewrayeth
thee.

26:74 Then began he to curse and to swear, saying, I know not the man.
And immediately the cock crew.

26:75 And Peter remembered the word of Jesus, which said unto him,
Before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thrice. And he went out, and
wept bitterly.

27:1 When the morning was come, all the chief priests and elders of
the people took counsel against Jesus to put him to death: 27:2 And
when they had bound him, they led him away, and delivered him to
Pontius Pilate the governor.

27:3 Then Judas, which had betrayed him, when he saw that he was
condemned, repented himself, and brought again the thirty pieces of
silver to the chief priests and elders, 27:4 Saying, I have sinned in
that I have betrayed the innocent blood. And they said, What is that
to us? see thou to that.

27:5 And he cast down the pieces of silver in the temple, and
departed, and went and hanged himself.

27:6 And the chief priests took the silver pieces, and said, It is not
lawful for to put them into the treasury, because it is the price of
blood.

27:7 And they took counsel, and bought with them the potter's field,
to bury strangers in.

27:8 Wherefore that field was called, The field of blood, unto this
day.

27:9 Then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremy the prophet,
saying, And they took the thirty pieces of silver, the price of him
that was valued, whom they of the children of Israel did value; 27:10
And gave them for the potter's field, as the Lord appointed me.

27:11 And Jesus stood before the governor: and the governor asked him,
saying, Art thou the King of the Jews? And Jesus said unto him, Thou
sayest.

27:12 And when he was accused of the chief priests and elders, he
answered nothing.

27:13 Then said Pilate unto him, Hearest thou not how many things they
witness against thee?  27:14 And he answered him to never a word;
insomuch that the governor marvelled greatly.

27:15 Now at that feast the governor was wont to release unto the
people a prisoner, whom they would.

27:16 And they had then a notable prisoner, called Barabbas.

27:17 Therefore when they were gathered together, Pilate said unto
them, Whom will ye that I release unto you? Barabbas, or Jesus which
is called Christ?  27:18 For he knew that for envy they had delivered
him.

27:19 When he was set down on the judgment seat, his wife sent unto
him, saying, Have thou nothing to do with that just man: for I have
suffered many things this day in a dream because of him.

27:20 But the chief priests and elders persuaded the multitude that
they should ask Barabbas, and destroy Jesus.

27:21 The governor answered and said unto them, Whether of the twain
will ye that I release unto you? They said, Barabbas.

27:22 Pilate saith unto them, What shall I do then with Jesus which is
called Christ? They all say unto him, Let him be crucified.

27:23 And the governor said, Why, what evil hath he done? But they
cried out the more, saying, Let him be crucified.

27:24 When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing, but that rather a
tumult was made, he took water, and washed his hands before the
multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person: see
ye to it.

27:25 Then answered all the people, and said, His blood be on us, and
on our children.

27:26 Then released he Barabbas unto them: and when he had scourged
Jesus, he delivered him to be crucified.

27:27 Then the soldiers of the governor took Jesus into the common
hall, and gathered unto him the whole band of soldiers.

27:28 And they stripped him, and put on him a scarlet robe.

27:29 And when they had platted a crown of thorns, they put it upon
his head, and a reed in his right hand: and they bowed the knee before
him, and mocked him, saying, Hail, King of the Jews!  27:30 And they
spit upon him, and took the reed, and smote him on the head.

27:31 And after that they had mocked him, they took the robe off from
him, and put his own raiment on him, and led him away to crucify him.

27:32 And as they came out, they found a man of Cyrene, Simon by name:
him they compelled to bear his cross.

27:33 And when they were come unto a place called Golgotha, that is to
say, a place of a skull, 27:34 They gave him vinegar to drink mingled
with gall: and when he had tasted thereof, he would not drink.

27:35 And they crucified him, and parted his garments, casting lots:
that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, They
parted my garments among them, and upon my vesture did they cast lots.

27:36 And sitting down they watched him there; 27:37 And set up over
his head his accusation written, THIS IS JESUS THE KING OF THE JEWS.

27:38 Then were there two thieves crucified with him, one on the right
hand, and another on the left.

27:39 And they that passed by reviled him, wagging their heads, 27:40
And saying, Thou that destroyest the temple, and buildest it in three
days, save thyself. If thou be the Son of God, come down from the
cross.

27:41 Likewise also the chief priests mocking him, with the scribes
and elders, said, 27:42 He saved others; himself he cannot save. If he
be the King of Israel, let him now come down from the cross, and we
will believe him.

27:43 He trusted in God; let him deliver him now, if he will have him:
for he said, I am the Son of God.

27:44 The thieves also, which were crucified with him, cast the same
in his teeth.

27:45 Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land
unto the ninth hour.

27:46 And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying,
Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is to say, My God, my God, why hast
thou forsaken me?  27:47 Some of them that stood there, when they
heard that, said, This man calleth for Elias.

27:48 And straightway one of them ran, and took a spunge, and filled
it with vinegar, and put it on a reed, and gave him to drink.

27:49 The rest said, Let be, let us see whether Elias will come to
save him.

27:50 Jesus, when he had cried again with a loud voice, yielded up the
ghost.

27:51 And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the
top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent; 27:52
And the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept
arose, 27:53 And came out of the graves after his resurrection, and
went into the holy city, and appeared unto many.

27:54 Now when the centurion, and they that were with him, watching
Jesus, saw the earthquake, and those things that were done, they
feared greatly, saying, Truly this was the Son of God.

27:55 And many women were there beholding afar off, which followed
Jesus from Galilee, ministering unto him: 27:56 Among which was Mary
Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James and Joses, and the mother of
Zebedees children.

27:57 When the even was come, there came a rich man of Arimathaea,
named Joseph, who also himself was Jesus' disciple: 27:58 He went to
Pilate, and begged the body of Jesus. Then Pilate commanded the body
to be delivered.

27:59 And when Joseph had taken the body, he wrapped it in a clean
linen cloth, 27:60 And laid it in his own new tomb, which he had hewn
out in the rock: and he rolled a great stone to the door of the
sepulchre, and departed.

27:61 And there was Mary Magdalene, and the other Mary, sitting over
against the sepulchre.

27:62 Now the next day, that followed the day of the preparation, the
chief priests and Pharisees came together unto Pilate, 27:63 Saying,
Sir, we remember that that deceiver said, while he was yet alive,
After three days I will rise again.

27:64 Command therefore that the sepulchre be made sure until the
third day, lest his disciples come by night, and steal him away, and
say unto the people, He is risen from the dead: so the last error
shall be worse than the first.

27:65 Pilate said unto them, Ye have a watch: go your way, make it as
sure as ye can.

27:66 So they went, and made the sepulchre sure, sealing the stone,
and setting a watch.

28:1 In the end of the sabbath, as it began to dawn toward the first
day of the week, came Mary Magdalene and the other Mary to see the
sepulchre.

28:2 And, behold, there was a great earthquake: for the angel of the
Lord descended from heaven, and came and rolled back the stone from
the door, and sat upon it.

28:3 His countenance was like lightning, and his raiment white as
snow: 28:4 And for fear of him the keepers did shake, and became as
dead men.

28:5 And the angel answered and said unto the women, Fear not ye: for
I know that ye seek Jesus, which was crucified.

28:6 He is not here: for he is risen, as he said. Come, see the place
where the Lord lay.

28:7 And go quickly, and tell his disciples that he is risen from the
dead; and, behold, he goeth before you into Galilee; there shall ye
see him: lo, I have told you.

28:8 And they departed quickly from the sepulchre with fear and great
joy; and did run to bring his disciples word.

28:9 And as they went to tell his disciples, behold, Jesus met them,
saying, All hail. And they came and held him by the feet, and
worshipped him.

28:10 Then said Jesus unto them, Be not afraid: go tell my brethren
that they go into Galilee, and there shall they see me.

28:11 Now when they were going, behold, some of the watch came into
the city, and shewed unto the chief priests all the things that were
done.

28:12 And when they were assembled with the elders, and had taken
counsel, they gave large money unto the soldiers, 28:13 Saying, Say
ye, His disciples came by night, and stole him away while we slept.

28:14 And if this come to the governor's ears, we will persuade him,
and secure you.

28:15 So they took the money, and did as they were taught: and this
saying is commonly reported among the Jews until this day.

28:16 Then the eleven disciples went away into Galilee, into a
mountain where Jesus had appointed them.

28:17 And when they saw him, they worshipped him: but some doubted.

28:18 And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given
unto me in heaven and in earth.

28:19 Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the
name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: 28:20
Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you:
and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. Amen.




The Gospel According to Saint Mark


1:1 The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God; 1:2
As it is written in the prophets, Behold, I send my messenger before
thy face, which shall prepare thy way before thee.

1:3 The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of
the Lord, make his paths straight.

1:4 John did baptize in the wilderness, and preach the baptism of
repentance for the remission of sins.

1:5 And there went out unto him all the land of Judaea, and they of
Jerusalem, and were all baptized of him in the river of Jordan,
confessing their sins.

1:6 And John was clothed with camel's hair, and with a girdle of a
skin about his loins; and he did eat locusts and wild honey; 1:7 And
preached, saying, There cometh one mightier than I after me, the
latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to stoop down and unloose.

1:8 I indeed have baptized you with water: but he shall baptize you
with the Holy Ghost.

1:9 And it came to pass in those days, that Jesus came from Nazareth
of Galilee, and was baptized of John in Jordan.

1:10 And straightway coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens
opened, and the Spirit like a dove descending upon him: 1:11 And there
came a voice from heaven, saying, Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I
am well pleased.

1:12 And immediately the spirit driveth him into the wilderness.

1:13 And he was there in the wilderness forty days, tempted of Satan;
and was with the wild beasts; and the angels ministered unto him.

1:14 Now after that John was put in prison, Jesus came into Galilee,
preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God, 1:15 And saying, The time
is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and
believe the gospel.

1:16 Now as he walked by the sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and Andrew
his brother casting a net into the sea: for they were fishers.

1:17 And Jesus said unto them, Come ye after me, and I will make you
to become fishers of men.

1:18 And straightway they forsook their nets, and followed him.

1:19 And when he had gone a little farther thence, he saw James the
son of Zebedee, and John his brother, who also were in the ship
mending their nets.

1:20 And straightway he called them: and they left their father
Zebedee in the ship with the hired servants, and went after him.

1:21 And they went into Capernaum; and straightway on the sabbath day
he entered into the synagogue, and taught.

1:22 And they were astonished at his doctrine: for he taught them as
one that had authority, and not as the scribes.

1:23 And there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit;
and he cried out, 1:24 Saying, Let us alone; what have we to do with
thee, thou Jesus of Nazareth? art thou come to destroy us? I know thee
who thou art, the Holy One of God.

1:25 And Jesus rebuked him, saying, Hold thy peace, and come out of
him.

1:26 And when the unclean spirit had torn him, and cried with a loud
voice, he came out of him.

1:27 And they were all amazed, insomuch that they questioned among
themselves, saying, What thing is this? what new doctrine is this? for
with authority commandeth he even the unclean spirits, and they do
obey him.

1:28 And immediately his fame spread abroad throughout all the region
round about Galilee.

1:29 And forthwith, when they were come out of the synagogue, they
entered into the house of Simon and Andrew, with James and John.

1:30 But Simon's wife's mother lay sick of a fever, and anon they tell
him of her.

1:31 And he came and took her by the hand, and lifted her up; and
immediately the fever left her, and she ministered unto them.

1:32 And at even, when the sun did set, they brought unto him all that
were diseased, and them that were possessed with devils.

1:33 And all the city was gathered together at the door.

1:34 And he healed many that were sick of divers diseases, and cast
out many devils; and suffered not the devils to speak, because they
knew him.

1:35 And in the morning, rising up a great while before day, he went
out, and departed into a solitary place, and there prayed.

1:36 And Simon and they that were with him followed after him.

1:37 And when they had found him, they said unto him, All men seek for
thee.

1:38 And he said unto them, Let us go into the next towns, that I may
preach there also: for therefore came I forth.

1:39 And he preached in their synagogues throughout all Galilee, and
cast out devils.

1:40 And there came a leper to him, beseeching him, and kneeling down
to him, and saying unto him, If thou wilt, thou canst make me clean.

1:41 And Jesus, moved with compassion, put forth his hand, and touched
him, and saith unto him, I will; be thou clean.

1:42 And as soon as he had spoken, immediately the leprosy departed
from him, and he was cleansed.

1:43 And he straitly charged him, and forthwith sent him away; 1:44
And saith unto him, See thou say nothing to any man: but go thy way,
shew thyself to the priest, and offer for thy cleansing those things
which Moses commanded, for a testimony unto them.

1:45 But he went out, and began to publish it much, and to blaze
abroad the matter, insomuch that Jesus could no more openly enter into
the city, but was without in desert places: and they came to him from
every quarter.

2:1 And again he entered into Capernaum after some days; and it was
noised that he was in the house.

2:2 And straightway many were gathered together, insomuch that there
was no room to receive them, no, not so much as about the door: and he
preached the word unto them.

2:3 And they come unto him, bringing one sick of the palsy, which was
borne of four.

2:4 And when they could not come nigh unto him for the press, they
uncovered the roof where he was: and when they had broken it up, they
let down the bed wherein the sick of the palsy lay.

2:5 When Jesus saw their faith, he said unto the sick of the palsy,
Son, thy sins be forgiven thee.

2:6 But there was certain of the scribes sitting there, and reasoning
in their hearts, 2:7 Why doth this man thus speak blasphemies? who can
forgive sins but God only?  2:8 And immediately when Jesus perceived
in his spirit that they so reasoned within themselves, he said unto
them, Why reason ye these things in your hearts?  2:9 Whether is it
easier to say to the sick of the palsy, Thy sins be forgiven thee; or
to say, Arise, and take up thy bed, and walk?  2:10 But that ye may
know that the Son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins, (he
saith to the sick of the palsy,) 2:11 I say unto thee, Arise, and take
up thy bed, and go thy way into thine house.

2:12 And immediately he arose, took up the bed, and went forth before
them all; insomuch that they were all amazed, and glorified God,
saying, We never saw it on this fashion.

2:13 And he went forth again by the sea side; and all the multitude
resorted unto him, and he taught them.

2:14 And as he passed by, he saw Levi the son of Alphaeus sitting at
the receipt of custom, and said unto him, Follow me. And he arose and
followed him.

2:15 And it came to pass, that, as Jesus sat at meat in his house,
many publicans and sinners sat also together with Jesus and his
disciples: for there were many, and they followed him.

2:16 And when the scribes and Pharisees saw him eat with publicans and
sinners, they said unto his disciples, How is it that he eateth and
drinketh with publicans and sinners?  2:17 When Jesus heard it, he
saith unto them, They that are whole have no need of the physician,
but they that are sick: I came not to call the righteous, but sinners
to repentance.

2:18 And the disciples of John and of the Pharisees used to fast: and
they come and say unto him, Why do the disciples of John and of the
Pharisees fast, but thy disciples fast not?  2:19 And Jesus said unto
them, Can the children of the bridechamber fast, while the bridegroom
is with them? as long as they have the bridegroom with them, they
cannot fast.

2:20 But the days will come, when the bridegroom shall be taken away
from them, and then shall they fast in those days.

2:21 No man also seweth a piece of new cloth on an old garment: else
the new piece that filled it up taketh away from the old, and the rent
is made worse.

2:22 And no man putteth new wine into old bottles: else the new wine
doth burst the bottles, and the wine is spilled, and the bottles will
be marred: but new wine must be put into new bottles.

2:23 And it came to pass, that he went through the corn fields on the
sabbath day; and his disciples began, as they went, to pluck the ears
of corn.

2:24 And the Pharisees said unto him, Behold, why do they on the
sabbath day that which is not lawful?  2:25 And he said unto them,
Have ye never read what David did, when he had need, and was an
hungred, he, and they that were with him?  2:26 How he went into the
house of God in the days of Abiathar the high priest, and did eat the
shewbread, which is not lawful to eat but for the priests, and gave
also to them which were with him?  2:27 And he said unto them, The
sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath: 2:28 Therefore
the Son of man is Lord also of the sabbath.

3:1 And he entered again into the synagogue; and there was a man there
which had a withered hand.

3:2 And they watched him, whether he would heal him on the sabbath
day; that they might accuse him.

3:3 And he saith unto the man which had the withered hand, Stand
forth.

3:4 And he saith unto them, Is it lawful to do good on the sabbath
days, or to do evil? to save life, or to kill? But they held their
peace.

3:5 And when he had looked round about on them with anger, being
grieved for the hardness of their hearts, he saith unto the man,
Stretch forth thine hand. And he stretched it out: and his hand was
restored whole as the other.

3:6 And the Pharisees went forth, and straightway took counsel with
the Herodians against him, how they might destroy him.

3:7 But Jesus withdrew himself with his disciples to the sea: and a
great multitude from Galilee followed him, and from Judaea, 3:8 And
from Jerusalem, and from Idumaea, and from beyond Jordan; and they
about Tyre and Sidon, a great multitude, when they had heard what
great things he did, came unto him.

3:9 And he spake to his disciples, that a small ship should wait on
him because of the multitude, lest they should throng him.

3:10 For he had healed many; insomuch that they pressed upon him for
to touch him, as many as had plagues.

3:11 And unclean spirits, when they saw him, fell down before him, and
cried, saying, Thou art the Son of God.

3:12 And he straitly charged them that they should not make him known.

3:13 And he goeth up into a mountain, and calleth unto him whom he
would: and they came unto him.

3:14 And he ordained twelve, that they should be with him, and that he
might send them forth to preach, 3:15 And to have power to heal
sicknesses, and to cast out devils: 3:16 And Simon he surnamed Peter;
3:17 And James the son of Zebedee, and John the brother of James; and
he surnamed them Boanerges, which is, The sons of thunder: 3:18 And
Andrew, and Philip, and Bartholomew, and Matthew, and Thomas, and
James the son of Alphaeus, and Thaddaeus, and Simon the Canaanite,
3:19 And Judas Iscariot, which also betrayed him: and they went into
an house.

3:20 And the multitude cometh together again, so that they could not
so much as eat bread.

3:21 And when his friends heard of it, they went out to lay hold on
him: for they said, He is beside himself.

3:22 And the scribes which came down from Jerusalem said, He hath
Beelzebub, and by the prince of the devils casteth he out devils.

3:23 And he called them unto him, and said unto them in parables, How
can Satan cast out Satan?  3:24 And if a kingdom be divided against
itself, that kingdom cannot stand.

3:25 And if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot
stand.

3:26 And if Satan rise up against himself, and be divided, he cannot
stand, but hath an end.

3:27 No man can enter into a strong man's house, and spoil his goods,
except he will first bind the strong man; and then he will spoil his
house.

3:28 Verily I say unto you, All sins shall be forgiven unto the sons
of men, and blasphemies wherewith soever they shall blaspheme: 3:29
But he that shall blaspheme against the Holy Ghost hath never
forgiveness, but is in danger of eternal damnation.

3:30 Because they said, He hath an unclean spirit.

3:31 There came then his brethren and his mother, and, standing
without, sent unto him, calling him.

3:32 And the multitude sat about him, and they said unto him, Behold,
thy mother and thy brethren without seek for thee.

3:33 And he answered them, saying, Who is my mother, or my brethren?
3:34 And he looked round about on them which sat about him, and said,
Behold my mother and my brethren!  3:35 For whosoever shall do the
will of God, the same is my brother, and my sister, and mother.

4:1 And he began again to teach by the sea side: and there was
gathered unto him a great multitude, so that he entered into a ship,
and sat in the sea; and the whole multitude was by the sea on the
land.

4:2 And he taught them many things by parables, and said unto them in
his doctrine, 4:3 Hearken; Behold, there went out a sower to sow: 4:4
And it came to pass, as he sowed, some fell by the way side, and the
fowls of the air came and devoured it up.

4:5 And some fell on stony ground, where it had not much earth; and
immediately it sprang up, because it had no depth of earth: 4:6 But
when the sun was up, it was scorched; and because it had no root, it
withered away.

4:7 And some fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up, and choked it,
and it yielded no fruit.

4:8 And other fell on good ground, and did yield fruit that sprang up
and increased; and brought forth, some thirty, and some sixty, and
some an hundred.

4:9 And he said unto them, He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.

4:10 And when he was alone, they that were about him with the twelve
asked of him the parable.

4:11 And he said unto them, Unto you it is given to know the mystery
of the kingdom of God: but unto them that are without, all these
things are done in parables: 4:12 That seeing they may see, and not
perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand; lest at any
time they should be converted, and their sins should be forgiven them.

4:13 And he said unto them, Know ye not this parable? and how then
will ye know all parables?  4:14 The sower soweth the word.

4:15 And these are they by the way side, where the word is sown; but
when they have heard, Satan cometh immediately, and taketh away the
word that was sown in their hearts.

4:16 And these are they likewise which are sown on stony ground; who,
when they have heard the word, immediately receive it with gladness;
4:17 And have no root in themselves, and so endure but for a time:
afterward, when affliction or persecution ariseth for the word's sake,
immediately they are offended.

4:18 And these are they which are sown among thorns; such as hear the
word, 4:19 And the cares of this world, and the deceitfulness of
riches, and the lusts of other things entering in, choke the word, and
it becometh unfruitful.

4:20 And these are they which are sown on good ground; such as hear
the word, and receive it, and bring forth fruit, some thirtyfold, some
sixty, and some an hundred.

4:21 And he said unto them, Is a candle brought to be put under a
bushel, or under a bed? and not to be set on a candlestick?  4:22 For
there is nothing hid, which shall not be manifested; neither was any
thing kept secret, but that it should come abroad.

4:23 If any man have ears to hear, let him hear.

4:24 And he said unto them, Take heed what ye hear: with what measure
ye mete, it shall be measured to you: and unto you that hear shall
more be given.

4:25 For he that hath, to him shall be given: and he that hath not,
from him shall be taken even that which he hath.

4:26 And he said, So is the kingdom of God, as if a man should cast
seed into the ground; 4:27 And should sleep, and rise night and day,
and the seed should spring and grow up, he knoweth not how.

4:28 For the earth bringeth forth fruit of herself; first the blade,
then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear.

4:29 But when the fruit is brought forth, immediately he putteth in
the sickle, because the harvest is come.

4:30 And he said, Whereunto shall we liken the kingdom of God? or with
what comparison shall we compare it?  4:31 It is like a grain of
mustard seed, which, when it is sown in the earth, is less than all
the seeds that be in the earth: 4:32 But when it is sown, it groweth
up, and becometh greater than all herbs, and shooteth out great
branches; so that the fowls of the air may lodge under the shadow of
it.

4:33 And with many such parables spake he the word unto them, as they
were able to hear it.

4:34 But without a parable spake he not unto them: and when they were
alone, he expounded all things to his disciples.

4:35 And the same day, when the even was come, he saith unto them, Let
us pass over unto the other side.

4:36 And when they had sent away the multitude, they took him even as
he was in the ship. And there were also with him other little ships.

4:37 And there arose a great storm of wind, and the waves beat into
the ship, so that it was now full.

4:38 And he was in the hinder part of the ship, asleep on a pillow:
and they awake him, and say unto him, Master, carest thou not that we
perish?  4:39 And he arose, and rebuked the wind, and said unto the
sea, Peace, be still. And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm.

4:40 And he said unto them, Why are ye so fearful? how is it that ye
have no faith?  4:41 And they feared exceedingly, and said one to
another, What manner of man is this, that even the wind and the sea
obey him?  5:1 And they came over unto the other side of the sea, into
the country of the Gadarenes.

5:2 And when he was come out of the ship, immediately there met him
out of the tombs a man with an unclean spirit, 5:3 Who had his
dwelling among the tombs; and no man could bind him, no, not with
chains: 5:4 Because that he had been often bound with fetters and
chains, and the chains had been plucked asunder by him, and the
fetters broken in pieces: neither could any man tame him.

5:5 And always, night and day, he was in the mountains, and in the
tombs, crying, and cutting himself with stones.

5:6 But when he saw Jesus afar off, he ran and worshipped him, 5:7 And
cried with a loud voice, and said, What have I to do with thee, Jesus,
thou Son of the most high God? I adjure thee by God, that thou torment
me not.

5:8 For he said unto him, Come out of the man, thou unclean spirit.

5:9 And he asked him, What is thy name? And he answered, saying, My
name is Legion: for we are many.

5:10 And he besought him much that he would not send them away out of
the country.

5:11 Now there was there nigh unto the mountains a great herd of swine
feeding.

5:12 And all the devils besought him, saying, Send us into the swine,
that we may enter into them.

5:13 And forthwith Jesus gave them leave. And the unclean spirits went
out, and entered into the swine: and the herd ran violently down a
steep place into the sea, (they were about two thousand;) and were
choked in the sea.

5:14 And they that fed the swine fled, and told it in the city, and in
the country. And they went out to see what it was that was done.

5:15 And they come to Jesus, and see him that was possessed with the
devil, and had the legion, sitting, and clothed, and in his right
mind: and they were afraid.

5:16 And they that saw it told them how it befell to him that was
possessed with the devil, and also concerning the swine.

5:17 And they began to pray him to depart out of their coasts.

5:18 And when he was come into the ship, he that had been possessed
with the devil prayed him that he might be with him.

5:19 Howbeit Jesus suffered him not, but saith unto him, Go home to
thy friends, and tell them how great things the Lord hath done for
thee, and hath had compassion on thee.

5:20 And he departed, and began to publish in Decapolis how great
things Jesus had done for him: and all men did marvel.

5:21 And when Jesus was passed over again by ship unto the other side,
much people gathered unto him: and he was nigh unto the sea.

5:22 And, behold, there cometh one of the rulers of the synagogue,
Jairus by name; and when he saw him, he fell at his feet, 5:23 And
besought him greatly, saying, My little daughter lieth at the point of
death: I pray thee, come and lay thy hands on her, that she may be
healed; and she shall live.

5:24 And Jesus went with him; and much people followed him, and
thronged him.

5:25 And a certain woman, which had an issue of blood twelve years,
5:26 And had suffered many things of many physicians, and had spent
all that she had, and was nothing bettered, but rather grew worse,
5:27 When she had heard of Jesus, came in the press behind, and
touched his garment.

5:28 For she said, If I may touch but his clothes, I shall be whole.

5:29 And straightway the fountain of her blood was dried up; and she
felt in her body that she was healed of that plague.

5:30 And Jesus, immediately knowing in himself that virtue had gone
out of him, turned him about in the press, and said, Who touched my
clothes?  5:31 And his disciples said unto him, Thou seest the
multitude thronging thee, and sayest thou, Who touched me?  5:32 And
he looked round about to see her that had done this thing.

5:33 But the woman fearing and trembling, knowing what was done in
her, came and fell down before him, and told him all the truth.

5:34 And he said unto her, Daughter, thy faith hath made thee whole;
go in peace, and be whole of thy plague.

5:35 While he yet spake, there came from the ruler of the synagogue's
house certain which said, Thy daughter is dead: why troublest thou the
Master any further?  5:36 As soon as Jesus heard the word that was
spoken, he saith unto the ruler of the synagogue, Be not afraid, only
believe.

5:37 And he suffered no man to follow him, save Peter, and James, and
John the brother of James.

5:38 And he cometh to the house of the ruler of the synagogue, and
seeth the tumult, and them that wept and wailed greatly.

5:39 And when he was come in, he saith unto them, Why make ye this
ado, and weep? the damsel is not dead, but sleepeth.

5:40 And they laughed him to scorn. But when he had put them all out,
he taketh the father and the mother of the damsel, and them that were
with him, and entereth in where the damsel was lying.

5:41 And he took the damsel by the hand, and said unto her, Talitha
cumi; which is, being interpreted, Damsel, I say unto thee, arise.

5:42 And straightway the damsel arose, and walked; for she was of the
age of twelve years. And they were astonished with a great
astonishment.

5:43 And he charged them straitly that no man should know it; and
commanded that something should be given her to eat.

6:1 And he went out from thence, and came into his own country; and
his disciples follow him.

6:2 And when the sabbath day was come, he began to teach in the
synagogue: and many hearing him were astonished, saying, From whence
hath this man these things? and what wisdom is this which is given
unto him, that even such mighty works are wrought by his hands?  6:3
Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James, and
Joses, and of Juda, and Simon? and are not his sisters here with us?
And they were offended at him.

6:4 But Jesus, said unto them, A prophet is not without honour, but in
his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house.

6:5 And he could there do no mighty work, save that he laid his hands
upon a few sick folk, and healed them.

6:6 And he marvelled because of their unbelief. And he went round
about the villages, teaching.

6:7 And he called unto him the twelve, and began to send them forth by
two and two; and gave them power over unclean spirits; 6:8 And
commanded them that they should take nothing for their journey, save a
staff only; no scrip, no bread, no money in their purse: 6:9 But be
shod with sandals; and not put on two coats.

6:10 And he said unto them, In what place soever ye enter into an
house, there abide till ye depart from that place.

6:11 And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear you, when ye depart
thence, shake off the dust under your feet for a testimony against
them.

Verily I say unto you, It shall be more tolerable for Sodom and
Gomorrha in the day of judgment, than for that city.

6:12 And they went out, and preached that men should repent.

6:13 And they cast out many devils, and anointed with oil many that
were sick, and healed them.

6:14 And king Herod heard of him; (for his name was spread abroad:)
and he said, That John the Baptist was risen from the dead, and
therefore mighty works do shew forth themselves in him.

6:15 Others said, That it is Elias. And others said, That it is a
prophet, or as one of the prophets.

6:16 But when Herod heard thereof, he said, It is John, whom I
beheaded: he is risen from the dead.

6:17 For Herod himself had sent forth and laid hold upon John, and
bound him in prison for Herodias' sake, his brother Philip's wife: for
he had married her.

6:18 For John had said unto Herod, It is not lawful for thee to have
thy brother's wife.

6:19 Therefore Herodias had a quarrel against him, and would have
killed him; but she could not: 6:20 For Herod feared John, knowing
that he was a just man and an holy, and observed him; and when he
heard him, he did many things, and heard him gladly.

6:21 And when a convenient day was come, that Herod on his birthday
made a supper to his lords, high captains, and chief estates of
Galilee; 6:22 And when the daughter of the said Herodias came in, and
danced, and pleased Herod and them that sat with him, the king said
unto the damsel, Ask of me whatsoever thou wilt, and I will give it
thee.

6:23 And he sware unto her, Whatsoever thou shalt ask of me, I will
give it thee, unto the half of my kingdom.

6:24 And she went forth, and said unto her mother, What shall I ask?
And she said, The head of John the Baptist.

6:25 And she came in straightway with haste unto the king, and asked,
saying, I will that thou give me by and by in a charger the head of
John the Baptist.

6:26 And the king was exceeding sorry; yet for his oath's sake, and
for their sakes which sat with him, he would not reject her.

6:27 And immediately the king sent an executioner, and commanded his
head to be brought: and he went and beheaded him in the prison, 6:28
And brought his head in a charger, and gave it to the damsel: and the
damsel gave it to her mother.

6:29 And when his disciples heard of it, they came and took up his
corpse, and laid it in a tomb.

6:30 And the apostles gathered themselves together unto Jesus, and
told him all things, both what they had done, and what they had
taught.

6:31 And he said unto them, Come ye yourselves apart into a desert
place, and rest a while: for there were many coming and going, and
they had no leisure so much as to eat.

6:32 And they departed into a desert place by ship privately.

6:33 And the people saw them departing, and many knew him, and ran
afoot thither out of all cities, and outwent them, and came together
unto him.

6:34 And Jesus, when he came out, saw much people, and was moved with
compassion toward them, because they were as sheep not having a
shepherd: and he began to teach them many things.

6:35 And when the day was now far spent, his disciples came unto him,
and said, This is a desert place, and now the time is far passed: 6:36
Send them away, that they may go into the country round about, and
into the villages, and buy themselves bread: for they have nothing to
eat.

6:37 He answered and said unto them, Give ye them to eat. And they say
unto him, Shall we go and buy two hundred pennyworth of bread, and
give them to eat?  6:38 He saith unto them, How many loaves have ye?
go and see. And when they knew, they say, Five, and two fishes.

6:39 And he commanded them to make all sit down by companies upon the
green grass.

6:40 And they sat down in ranks, by hundreds, and by fifties.

6:41 And when he had taken the five loaves and the two fishes, he
looked up to heaven, and blessed, and brake the loaves, and gave them
to his disciples to set before them; and the two fishes divided he
among them all.

6:42 And they did all eat, and were filled.

6:43 And they took up twelve baskets full of the fragments, and of the
fishes.

6:44 And they that did eat of the loaves were about five thousand men.

6:45 And straightway he constrained his disciples to get into the
ship, and to go to the other side before unto Bethsaida, while he sent
away the people.

6:46 And when he had sent them away, he departed into a mountain to
pray.

6:47 And when even was come, the ship was in the midst of the sea, and
he alone on the land.

6:48 And he saw them toiling in rowing; for the wind was contrary unto
them: and about the fourth watch of the night he cometh unto them,
walking upon the sea, and would have passed by them.

6:49 But when they saw him walking upon the sea, they supposed it had
been a spirit, and cried out: 6:50 For they all saw him, and were
troubled. And immediately he talked with them, and saith unto them, Be
of good cheer: it is I; be not afraid.

6:51 And he went up unto them into the ship; and the wind ceased: and
they were sore amazed in themselves beyond measure, and wondered.

6:52 For they considered not the miracle of the loaves: for their
heart was hardened.

6:53 And when they had passed over, they came into the land of
Gennesaret, and drew to the shore.

6:54 And when they were come out of the ship, straightway they knew
him, 6:55 And ran through that whole region round about, and began to
carry about in beds those that were sick, where they heard he was.

6:56 And whithersoever he entered, into villages, or cities, or
country, they laid the sick in the streets, and besought him that they
might touch if it were but the border of his garment: and as many as
touched him were made whole.

7:1 Then came together unto him the Pharisees, and certain of the
scribes, which came from Jerusalem.

7:2 And when they saw some of his disciples eat bread with defiled,
that is to say, with unwashen, hands, they found fault.

7:3 For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, except they wash their hands
oft, eat not, holding the tradition of the elders.

7:4 And when they come from the market, except they wash, they eat
not.

And many other things there be, which they have received to hold, as
the washing of cups, and pots, brasen vessels, and of tables.

7:5 Then the Pharisees and scribes asked him, Why walk not thy
disciples according to the tradition of the elders, but eat bread with
unwashen hands?  7:6 He answered and said unto them, Well hath Esaias
prophesied of you hypocrites, as it is written, This people honoureth
me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.

7:7 Howbeit in vain do they worship me, teaching for doctrines the
commandments of men.

7:8 For laying aside the commandment of God, ye hold the tradition of
men, as the washing of pots and cups: and many other such like things
ye do.

7:9 And he said unto them, Full well ye reject the commandment of God,
that ye may keep your own tradition.

7:10 For Moses said, Honour thy father and thy mother; and, Whoso
curseth father or mother, let him die the death: 7:11 But ye say, If a
man shall say to his father or mother, It is Corban, that is to say, a
gift, by whatsoever thou mightest be profited by me; he shall be free.

7:12 And ye suffer him no more to do ought for his father or his
mother; 7:13 Making the word of God of none effect through your
tradition, which ye have delivered: and many such like things do ye.

7:14 And when he had called all the people unto him, he said unto
them, Hearken unto me every one of you, and understand: 7:15 There is
nothing from without a man, that entering into him can defile him: but
the things which come out of him, those are they that defile the man.

7:16 If any man have ears to hear, let him hear.

7:17 And when he was entered into the house from the people, his
disciples asked him concerning the parable.

7:18 And he saith unto them, Are ye so without understanding also? Do
ye not perceive, that whatsoever thing from without entereth into the
man, it cannot defile him; 7:19 Because it entereth not into his
heart, but into the belly, and goeth out into the draught, purging all
meats?  7:20 And he said, That which cometh out of the man, that
defileth the man.

7:21 For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts,
adulteries, fornications, murders, 7:22 Thefts, covetousness,
wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride,
foolishness: 7:23 All these evil things come from within, and defile
the man.

7:24 And from thence he arose, and went into the borders of Tyre and
Sidon, and entered into an house, and would have no man know it: but
he could not be hid.

7:25 For a certain woman, whose young daughter had an unclean spirit,
heard of him, and came and fell at his feet: 7:26 The woman was a
Greek, a Syrophenician by nation; and she besought him that he would
cast forth the devil out of her daughter.

7:27 But Jesus said unto her, Let the children first be filled: for it
is not meet to take the children's bread, and to cast it unto the
dogs.

7:28 And she answered and said unto him, Yes, Lord: yet the dogs under
the table eat of the children's crumbs.

7:29 And he said unto her, For this saying go thy way; the devil is
gone out of thy daughter.

7:30 And when she was come to her house, she found the devil gone out,
and her daughter laid upon the bed.

7:31 And again, departing from the coasts of Tyre and Sidon, he came
unto the sea of Galilee, through the midst of the coasts of Decapolis.

7:32 And they bring unto him one that was deaf, and had an impediment
in his speech; and they beseech him to put his hand upon him.

7:33 And he took him aside from the multitude, and put his fingers
into his ears, and he spit, and touched his tongue; 7:34 And looking
up to heaven, he sighed, and saith unto him, Ephphatha, that is, Be
opened.

7:35 And straightway his ears were opened, and the string of his
tongue was loosed, and he spake plain.

7:36 And he charged them that they should tell no man: but the more he
charged them, so much the more a great deal they published it; 7:37
And were beyond measure astonished, saying, He hath done all things
well: he maketh both the deaf to hear, and the dumb to speak.

8:1 In those days the multitude being very great, and having nothing
to eat, Jesus called his disciples unto him, and saith unto them, 8:2
I have compassion on the multitude, because they have now been with me
three days, and have nothing to eat: 8:3 And if I send them away
fasting to their own houses, they will faint by the way: for divers of
them came from far.

8:4 And his disciples answered him, From whence can a man satisfy
these men with bread here in the wilderness?  8:5 And he asked them,
How many loaves have ye? And they said, Seven.

8:6 And he commanded the people to sit down on the ground: and he took
the seven loaves, and gave thanks, and brake, and gave to his
disciples to set before them; and they did set them before the people.

8:7 And they had a few small fishes: and he blessed, and commanded to
set them also before them.

8:8 So they did eat, and were filled: and they took up of the broken
meat that was left seven baskets.

8:9 And they that had eaten were about four thousand: and he sent them
away.

8:10 And straightway he entered into a ship with his disciples, and
came into the parts of Dalmanutha.

8:11 And the Pharisees came forth, and began to question with him,
seeking of him a sign from heaven, tempting him.

8:12 And he sighed deeply in his spirit, and saith, Why doth this
generation seek after a sign? verily I say unto you, There shall no
sign be given unto this generation.

8:13 And he left them, and entering into the ship again departed to
the other side.

8:14 Now the disciples had forgotten to take bread, neither had they
in the ship with them more than one loaf.

8:15 And he charged them, saying, Take heed, beware of the leaven of
the Pharisees, and of the leaven of Herod.

8:16 And they reasoned among themselves, saying, It is because we have
no bread.

8:17 And when Jesus knew it, he saith unto them, Why reason ye,
because ye have no bread? perceive ye not yet, neither understand?
have ye your heart yet hardened?  8:18 Having eyes, see ye not? and
having ears, hear ye not? and do ye not remember?  8:19 When I brake
the five loaves among five thousand, how many baskets full of
fragments took ye up? They say unto him, Twelve.

8:20 And when the seven among four thousand, how many baskets full of
fragments took ye up? And they said, Seven.

8:21 And he said unto them, How is it that ye do not understand?  8:22
And he cometh to Bethsaida; and they bring a blind man unto him, and
besought him to touch him.

8:23 And he took the blind man by the hand, and led him out of the
town; and when he had spit on his eyes, and put his hands upon him, he
asked him if he saw ought.

8:24 And he looked up, and said, I see men as trees, walking.

8:25 After that he put his hands again upon his eyes, and made him
look up: and he was restored, and saw every man clearly.

8:26 And he sent him away to his house, saying, Neither go into the
town, nor tell it to any in the town.

8:27 And Jesus went out, and his disciples, into the towns of Caesarea
Philippi: and by the way he asked his disciples, saying unto them,
Whom do men say that I am?  8:28 And they answered, John the Baptist;
but some say, Elias; and others, One of the prophets.

8:29 And he saith unto them, But whom say ye that I am? And Peter
answereth and saith unto him, Thou art the Christ.

8:30 And he charged them that they should tell no man of him.

8:31 And he began to teach them, that the Son of man must suffer many
things, and be rejected of the elders, and of the chief priests, and
scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.

8:32 And he spake that saying openly. And Peter took him, and began to
rebuke him.

8:33 But when he had turned about and looked on his disciples, he
rebuked Peter, saying, Get thee behind me, Satan: for thou savourest
not the things that be of God, but the things that be of men.

8:34 And when he had called the people unto him with his disciples
also, he said unto them, Whosoever will come after me, let him deny
himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.

8:35 For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever
shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel's, the same shall save
it.

8:36 For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world,
and lose his own soul?  8:37 Or what shall a man give in exchange for
his soul?  8:38 Whosoever therefore shall be ashamed of me and of my
words in this adulterous and sinful generation; of him also shall the
Son of man be ashamed, when he cometh in the glory of his Father with
the holy angels.

9:1 And he said unto them, Verily I say unto you, That there be some
of them that stand here, which shall not taste of death, till they
have seen the kingdom of God come with power.

9:2 And after six days Jesus taketh with him Peter, and James, and
John, and leadeth them up into an high mountain apart by themselves:
and he was transfigured before them.

9:3 And his raiment became shining, exceeding white as snow; so as no
fuller on earth can white them.

9:4 And there appeared unto them Elias with Moses: and they were
talking with Jesus.

9:5 And Peter answered and said to Jesus, Master, it is good for us to
be here: and let us make three tabernacles; one for thee, and one for
Moses, and one for Elias.

9:6 For he wist not what to say; for they were sore afraid.

9:7 And there was a cloud that overshadowed them: and a voice came out
of the cloud, saying, This is my beloved Son: hear him.

9:8 And suddenly, when they had looked round about, they saw no man
any more, save Jesus only with themselves.

9:9 And as they came down from the mountain, he charged them that they
should tell no man what things they had seen, till the Son of man were
risen from the dead.

9:10 And they kept that saying with themselves, questioning one with
another what the rising from the dead should mean.

9:11 And they asked him, saying, Why say the scribes that Elias must
first come?  9:12 And he answered and told them, Elias verily cometh
first, and restoreth all things; and how it is written of the Son of
man, that he must suffer many things, and be set at nought.

9:13 But I say unto you, That Elias is indeed come, and they have done
unto him whatsoever they listed, as it is written of him.

9:14 And when he came to his disciples, he saw a great multitude about
them, and the scribes questioning with them.

9:15 And straightway all the people, when they beheld him, were
greatly amazed, and running to him saluted him.

9:16 And he asked the scribes, What question ye with them?  9:17 And
one of the multitude answered and said, Master, I have brought unto
thee my son, which hath a dumb spirit; 9:18 And wheresoever he taketh
him, he teareth him: and he foameth, and gnasheth with his teeth, and
pineth away: and I spake to thy disciples that they should cast him
out; and they could not.

9:19 He answereth him, and saith, O faithless generation, how long
shall I be with you? how long shall I suffer you? bring him unto me.

9:20 And they brought him unto him: and when he saw him, straightway
the spirit tare him; and he fell on the ground, and wallowed foaming.

9:21 And he asked his father, How long is it ago since this came unto
him?  And he said, Of a child.

9:22 And ofttimes it hath cast him into the fire, and into the waters,
to destroy him: but if thou canst do any thing, have compassion on us,
and help us.

9:23 Jesus said unto him, If thou canst believe, all things are
possible to him that believeth.

9:24 And straightway the father of the child cried out, and said with
tears, Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.

9:25 When Jesus saw that the people came running together, he rebuked
the foul spirit, saying unto him, Thou dumb and deaf spirit, I charge
thee, come out of him, and enter no more into him.

9:26 And the spirit cried, and rent him sore, and came out of him: and
he was as one dead; insomuch that many said, He is dead.

9:27 But Jesus took him by the hand, and lifted him up; and he arose.

9:28 And when he was come into the house, his disciples asked him
privately, Why could not we cast him out?  9:29 And he said unto them,
This kind can come forth by nothing, but by prayer and fasting.

9:30 And they departed thence, and passed through Galilee; and he
would not that any man should know it.

9:31 For he taught his disciples, and said unto them, The Son of man
is delivered into the hands of men, and they shall kill him; and after
that he is killed, he shall rise the third day.

9:32 But they understood not that saying, and were afraid to ask him.

9:33 And he came to Capernaum: and being in the house he asked them,
What was it that ye disputed among yourselves by the way?  9:34 But
they held their peace: for by the way they had disputed among
themselves, who should be the greatest.

9:35 And he sat down, and called the twelve, and saith unto them, If
any man desire to be first, the same shall be last of all, and servant
of all.

9:36 And he took a child, and set him in the midst of them: and when
he had taken him in his arms, he said unto them, 9:37 Whosoever shall
receive one of such children in my name, receiveth me: and whosoever
shall receive me, receiveth not me, but him that sent me.

9:38 And John answered him, saying, Master, we saw one casting out
devils in thy name, and he followeth not us: and we forbad him,
because he followeth not us.

9:39 But Jesus said, Forbid him not: for there is no man which shall
do a miracle in my name, that can lightly speak evil of me.

9:40 For he that is not against us is on our part.

9:41 For whosoever shall give you a cup of water to drink in my name,
because ye belong to Christ, verily I say unto you, he shall not lose
his reward.

9:42 And whosoever shall offend one of these little ones that believe
in me, it is better for him that a millstone were hanged about his
neck, and he were cast into the sea.

9:43 And if thy hand offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to
enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into
the fire that never shall be quenched: 9:44 Where their worm dieth
not, and the fire is not quenched.

9:45 And if thy foot offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to
enter halt into life, than having two feet to be cast into hell, into
the fire that never shall be quenched: 9:46 Where their worm dieth
not, and the fire is not quenched.

9:47 And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out: it is better for thee
to enter into the kingdom of God with one eye, than having two eyes to
be cast into hell fire: 9:48 Where their worm dieth not, and the fire
is not quenched.

9:49 For every one shall be salted with fire, and every sacrifice
shall be salted with salt.

9:50 Salt is good: but if the salt have lost his saltness, wherewith
will ye season it? Have salt in yourselves, and have peace one with
another.

10:1 And he arose from thence, and cometh into the coasts of Judaea by
the farther side of Jordan: and the people resort unto him again; and,
as he was wont, he taught them again.

10:2 And the Pharisees came to him, and asked him, Is it lawful for a
man to put away his wife? tempting him.

10:3 And he answered and said unto them, What did Moses command you?
10:4 And they said, Moses suffered to write a bill of divorcement, and
to put her away.

10:5 And Jesus answered and said unto them, For the hardness of your
heart he wrote you this precept.

10:6 But from the beginning of the creation God made them male and
female.

10:7 For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and
cleave to his wife; 10:8 And they twain shall be one flesh: so then
they are no more twain, but one flesh.

10:9 What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.

10:10 And in the house his disciples asked him again of the same
matter.

10:11 And he saith unto them, Whosoever shall put away his wife, and
marry another, committeth adultery against her.

10:12 And if a woman shall put away her husband, and be married to
another, she committeth adultery.

10:13 And they brought young children to him, that he should touch
them: and his disciples rebuked those that brought them.

10:14 But when Jesus saw it, he was much displeased, and said unto
them, Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not:
for of such is the kingdom of God.

10:15 Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom
of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein.

10:16 And he took them up in his arms, put his hands upon them, and
blessed them.

10:17 And when he was gone forth into the way, there came one running,
and kneeled to him, and asked him, Good Master, what shall I do that I
may inherit eternal life?  10:18 And Jesus said unto him, Why callest
thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God.

10:19 Thou knowest the commandments, Do not commit adultery, Do not
kill, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Defraud not, Honour thy
father and mother.  10:20 And he answered and said unto him, Master,
all these have I observed from my youth.

10:21 Then Jesus beholding him loved him, and said unto him, One thing
thou lackest: go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the
poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, take up the
cross, and follow me.

10:22 And he was sad at that saying, and went away grieved: for he had
great possessions.

10:23 And Jesus looked round about, and saith unto his disciples, How
hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God!
10:24 And the disciples were astonished at his words. But Jesus
answereth again, and saith unto them, Children, how hard is it for
them that trust in riches to enter into the kingdom of God!  10:25 It
is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a
rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.

10:26 And they were astonished out of measure, saying among
themselves, Who then can be saved?  10:27 And Jesus looking upon them
saith, With men it is impossible, but not with God: for with God all
things are possible.

10:28 Then Peter began to say unto him, Lo, we have left all, and have
followed thee.

10:29 And Jesus answered and said, Verily I say unto you, There is no
man that hath left house, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or
mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my sake, and the gospel's,
10:30 But he shall receive an hundredfold now in this time, houses,
and brethren, and sisters, and mothers, and children, and lands, with
persecutions; and in the world to come eternal life.

10:31 But many that are first shall be last; and the last first.

10:32 And they were in the way going up to Jerusalem; and Jesus went
before them: and they were amazed; and as they followed, they were
afraid.

And he took again the twelve, and began to tell them what things
should happen unto him, 10:33 Saying, Behold, we go up to Jerusalem;
and the Son of man shall be delivered unto the chief priests, and unto
the scribes; and they shall condemn him to death, and shall deliver
him to the Gentiles: 10:34 And they shall mock him, and shall scourge
him, and shall spit upon him, and shall kill him: and the third day he
shall rise again.

10:35 And James and John, the sons of Zebedee, come unto him, saying,
Master, we would that thou shouldest do for us whatsoever we shall
desire.

10:36 And he said unto them, What would ye that I should do for you?
10:37 They said unto him, Grant unto us that we may sit, one on thy
right hand, and the other on thy left hand, in thy glory.

10:38 But Jesus said unto them, Ye know not what ye ask: can ye drink
of the cup that I drink of? and be baptized with the baptism that I am
baptized with?  10:39 And they said unto him, We can. And Jesus said
unto them, Ye shall indeed drink of the cup that I drink of; and with
the baptism that I am baptized withal shall ye be baptized: 10:40 But
to sit on my right hand and on my left hand is not mine to give; but
it shall be given to them for whom it is prepared.

10:41 And when the ten heard it, they began to be much displeased with
James and John.

10:42 But Jesus called them to him, and saith unto them, Ye know that
they which are accounted to rule over the Gentiles exercise lordship
over them; and their great ones exercise authority upon them.

10:43 But so shall it not be among you: but whosoever will be great
among you, shall be your minister: 10:44 And whosoever of you will be
the chiefest, shall be servant of all.

10:45 For even the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to
minister, and to give his life a ransom for many.

10:46 And they came to Jericho: and as he went out of Jericho with his
disciples and a great number of people, blind Bartimaeus, the son of
Timaeus, sat by the highway side begging.

10:47 And when he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to cry
out, and say, Jesus, thou son of David, have mercy on me.

10:48 And many charged him that he should hold his peace: but he cried
the more a great deal, Thou son of David, have mercy on me.

10:49 And Jesus stood still, and commanded him to be called. And they
call the blind man, saying unto him, Be of good comfort, rise; he
calleth thee.

10:50 And he, casting away his garment, rose, and came to Jesus.

10:51 And Jesus answered and said unto him, What wilt thou that I
should do unto thee? The blind man said unto him, Lord, that I might
receive my sight.

10:52 And Jesus said unto him, Go thy way; thy faith hath made thee
whole.

And immediately he received his sight, and followed Jesus in the way.

11:1 And when they came nigh to Jerusalem, unto Bethphage and Bethany,
at the mount of Olives, he sendeth forth two of his disciples, 11:2
And saith unto them, Go your way into the village over against you:
and as soon as ye be entered into it, ye shall find a colt tied,
whereon never man sat; loose him, and bring him.

11:3 And if any man say unto you, Why do ye this? say ye that the Lord
hath need of him; and straightway he will send him hither.

11:4 And they went their way, and found the colt tied by the door
without in a place where two ways met; and they loose him.

11:5 And certain of them that stood there said unto them, What do ye,
loosing the colt?  11:6 And they said unto them even as Jesus had
commanded: and they let them go.

11:7 And they brought the colt to Jesus, and cast their garments on
him; and he sat upon him.

11:8 And many spread their garments in the way: and others cut down
branches off the trees, and strawed them in the way.

11:9 And they that went before, and they that followed, cried, saying,
Hosanna; Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord: 11:10
Blessed be the kingdom of our father David, that cometh in the name of
the Lord: Hosanna in the highest.

11:11 And Jesus entered into Jerusalem, and into the temple: and when
he had looked round about upon all things, and now the eventide was
come, he went out unto Bethany with the twelve.

11:12 And on the morrow, when they were come from Bethany, he was
hungry: 11:13 And seeing a fig tree afar off having leaves, he came,
if haply he might find any thing thereon: and when he came to it, he
found nothing but leaves; for the time of figs was not yet.

11:14 And Jesus answered and said unto it, No man eat fruit of thee
hereafter for ever. And his disciples heard it.

11:15 And they come to Jerusalem: and Jesus went into the temple, and
began to cast out them that sold and bought in the temple, and
overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that
sold doves; 11:16 And would not suffer that any man should carry any
vessel through the temple.

11:17 And he taught, saying unto them, Is it not written, My house
shall be called of all nations the house of prayer? but ye have made
it a den of thieves.

11:18 And the scribes and chief priests heard it, and sought how they
might destroy him: for they feared him, because all the people was
astonished at his doctrine.

11:19 And when even was come, he went out of the city.

11:20 And in the morning, as they passed by, they saw the fig tree
dried up from the roots.

11:21 And Peter calling to remembrance saith unto him, Master, behold,
the fig tree which thou cursedst is withered away.

11:22 And Jesus answering saith unto them, Have faith in God.

11:23 For verily I say unto you, That whosoever shall say unto this
mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; and shall
not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he
saith shall come to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith.

11:24 Therefore I say unto you, What things soever ye desire, when ye
pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them.

11:25 And when ye stand praying, forgive, if ye have ought against
any: that your Father also which is in heaven may forgive you your
trespasses.

11:26 But if ye do not forgive, neither will your Father which is in
heaven forgive your trespasses.

11:27 And they come again to Jerusalem: and as he was walking in the
temple, there come to him the chief priests, and the scribes, and the
elders, 11:28 And say unto him, By what authority doest thou these
things? and who gave thee this authority to do these things?  11:29
And Jesus answered and said unto them, I will also ask of you one
question, and answer me, and I will tell you by what authority I do
these things.

11:30 The baptism of John, was it from heaven, or of men? answer me.

11:31 And they reasoned with themselves, saying, If we shall say, From
heaven; he will say, Why then did ye not believe him?  11:32 But if we
shall say, Of men; they feared the people: for all men counted John,
that he was a prophet indeed.

11:33 And they answered and said unto Jesus, We cannot tell. And Jesus
answering saith unto them, Neither do I tell you by what authority I
do these things.

12:1 And he began to speak unto them by parables. A certain man
planted a vineyard, and set an hedge about it, and digged a place for
the winefat, and built a tower, and let it out to husbandmen, and went
into a far country.

12:2 And at the season he sent to the husbandmen a servant, that he
might receive from the husbandmen of the fruit of the vineyard.

12:3 And they caught him, and beat him, and sent him away empty.

12:4 And again he sent unto them another servant; and at him they cast
stones, and wounded him in the head, and sent him away shamefully
handled.

12:5 And again he sent another; and him they killed, and many others;
beating some, and killing some.

12:6 Having yet therefore one son, his wellbeloved, he sent him also
last unto them, saying, They will reverence my son.

12:7 But those husbandmen said among themselves, This is the heir;
come, let us kill him, and the inheritance shall be our's.

12:8 And they took him, and killed him, and cast him out of the
vineyard.

12:9 What shall therefore the lord of the vineyard do? he will come
and destroy the husbandmen, and will give the vineyard unto others.

12:10 And have ye not read this scripture; The stone which the
builders rejected is become the head of the corner: 12:11 This was the
Lord's doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes?  12:12 And they sought
to lay hold on him, but feared the people: for they knew that he had
spoken the parable against them: and they left him, and went their
way.

12:13 And they send unto him certain of the Pharisees and of the
Herodians, to catch him in his words.

12:14 And when they were come, they say unto him, Master, we know that
thou art true, and carest for no man: for thou regardest not the
person of men, but teachest the way of God in truth: Is it lawful to
give tribute to Caesar, or not?  12:15 Shall we give, or shall we not
give? But he, knowing their hypocrisy, said unto them, Why tempt ye
me? bring me a penny, that I may see it.

12:16 And they brought it. And he saith unto them, Whose is this image
and superscription? And they said unto him, Caesar's.

12:17 And Jesus answering said unto them, Render to Caesar the things
that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's. And they
marvelled at him.

12:18 Then come unto him the Sadducees, which say there is no
resurrection; and they asked him, saying, 12:19 Master, Moses wrote
unto us, If a man's brother die, and leave his wife behind him, and
leave no children, that his brother should take his wife, and raise up
seed unto his brother.

12:20 Now there were seven brethren: and the first took a wife, and
dying left no seed.

12:21 And the second took her, and died, neither left he any seed: and
the third likewise.

12:22 And the seven had her, and left no seed: last of all the woman
died also.

12:23 In the resurrection therefore, when they shall rise, whose wife
shall she be of them? for the seven had her to wife.

12:24 And Jesus answering said unto them, Do ye not therefore err,
because ye know not the scriptures, neither the power of God?  12:25
For when they shall rise from the dead, they neither marry, nor are
given in marriage; but are as the angels which are in heaven.

12:26 And as touching the dead, that they rise: have ye not read in
the book of Moses, how in the bush God spake unto him, saying, I am
the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob?  12:27
He is not the God of the dead, but the God of the living: ye therefore
do greatly err.

12:28 And one of the scribes came, and having heard them reasoning
together, and perceiving that he had answered them well, asked him,
Which is the first commandment of all?  12:29 And Jesus answered him,
The first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God
is one Lord: 12:30 And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy
heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy
strength: this is the first commandment.

12:31 And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy
neighbour as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than
these.

12:32 And the scribe said unto him, Well, Master, thou hast said the
truth: for there is one God; and there is none other but he: 12:33 And
to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and
with all the soul, and with all the strength, and to love his
neighbour as himself, is more than all whole burnt offerings and
sacrifices.

12:34 And when Jesus saw that he answered discreetly, he said unto
him, Thou art not far from the kingdom of God. And no man after that
durst ask him any question.

12:35 And Jesus answered and said, while he taught in the temple, How
say the scribes that Christ is the son of David?  12:36 For David
himself said by the Holy Ghost, The LORD said to my Lord, Sit thou on
my right hand, till I make thine enemies thy footstool.

12:37 David therefore himself calleth him Lord; and whence is he then
his son? And the common people heard him gladly.

12:38 And he said unto them in his doctrine, Beware of the scribes,
which love to go in long clothing, and love salutations in the
marketplaces, 12:39 And the chief seats in the synagogues, and the
uppermost rooms at feasts: 12:40 Which devour widows' houses, and for
a pretence make long prayers: these shall receive greater damnation.

12:41 And Jesus sat over against the treasury, and beheld how the
people cast money into the treasury: and many that were rich cast in
much.

12:42 And there came a certain poor widow, and she threw in two mites,
which make a farthing.

12:43 And he called unto him his disciples, and saith unto them,
Verily I say unto you, That this poor widow hath cast more in, than
all they which have cast into the treasury: 12:44 For all they did
cast in of their abundance; but she of her want did cast in all that
she had, even all her living.

13:1 And as he went out of the temple, one of his disciples saith unto
him, Master, see what manner of stones and what buildings are here!
13:2 And Jesus answering said unto him, Seest thou these great
buildings?  there shall not be left one stone upon another, that shall
not be thrown down.

13:3 And as he sat upon the mount of Olives over against the temple,
Peter and James and John and Andrew asked him privately, 13:4 Tell us,
when shall these things be? and what shall be the sign when all these
things shall be fulfilled?  13:5 And Jesus answering them began to
say, Take heed lest any man deceive you: 13:6 For many shall come in
my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many.

13:7 And when ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars, be ye not
troubled: for such things must needs be; but the end shall not be yet.

13:8 For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against
kingdom: and there shall be earthquakes in divers places, and there
shall be famines and troubles: these are the beginnings of sorrows.

13:9 But take heed to yourselves: for they shall deliver you up to
councils; and in the synagogues ye shall be beaten: and ye shall be
brought before rulers and kings for my sake, for a testimony against
them.

13:10 And the gospel must first be published among all nations.

13:11 But when they shall lead you, and deliver you up, take no
thought beforehand what ye shall speak, neither do ye premeditate: but
whatsoever shall be given you in that hour, that speak ye: for it is
not ye that speak, but the Holy Ghost.

13:12 Now the brother shall betray the brother to death, and the
father the son; and children shall rise up against their parents, and
shall cause them to be put to death.

13:13 And ye shall be hated of all men for my name's sake: but he that
shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved.

13:14 But when ye shall see the abomination of desolation, spoken of
by Daniel the prophet, standing where it ought not, (let him that
readeth understand,) then let them that be in Judaea flee to the
mountains: 13:15 And let him that is on the housetop not go down into
the house, neither enter therein, to take any thing out of his house:
13:16 And let him that is in the field not turn back again for to take
up his garment.

13:17 But woe to them that are with child, and to them that give suck
in those days!  13:18 And pray ye that your flight be not in the
winter.

13:19 For in those days shall be affliction, such as was not from the
beginning of the creation which God created unto this time, neither
shall be.

13:20 And except that the Lord had shortened those days, no flesh
should be saved: but for the elect's sake, whom he hath chosen, he
hath shortened the days.

13:21 And then if any man shall say to you, Lo, here is Christ; or,
lo, he is there; believe him not: 13:22 For false Christs and false
prophets shall rise, and shall shew signs and wonders, to seduce, if
it were possible, even the elect.

13:23 But take ye heed: behold, I have foretold you all things.

13:24 But in those days, after that tribulation, the sun shall be
darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, 13:25 And the stars
of heaven shall fall, and the powers that are in heaven shall be
shaken.

13:26 And then shall they see the Son of man coming in the clouds with
great power and glory.

13:27 And then shall he send his angels, and shall gather together his
elect from the four winds, from the uttermost part of the earth to the
uttermost part of heaven.

13:28 Now learn a parable of the fig tree; When her branch is yet
tender, and putteth forth leaves, ye know that summer is near: 13:29
So ye in like manner, when ye shall see these things come to pass,
know that it is nigh, even at the doors.

13:30 Verily I say unto you, that this generation shall not pass, till
all these things be done.

13:31 Heaven and earth shall pass away: but my words shall not pass
away.

13:32 But of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels
which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father.

13:33 Take ye heed, watch and pray: for ye know not when the time is.

13:34 For the Son of Man is as a man taking a far journey, who left
his house, and gave authority to his servants, and to every man his
work, and commanded the porter to watch.

13:35 Watch ye therefore: for ye know not when the master of the house
cometh, at even, or at midnight, or at the cockcrowing, or in the
morning: 13:36 Lest coming suddenly he find you sleeping.

13:37 And what I say unto you I say unto all, Watch.

14:1 After two days was the feast of the passover, and of unleavened
bread: and the chief priests and the scribes sought how they might
take him by craft, and put him to death.

14:2 But they said, Not on the feast day, lest there be an uproar of
the people.

14:3 And being in Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, as he sat
at meat, there came a woman having an alabaster box of ointment of
spikenard very precious; and she brake the box, and poured it on his
head.

14:4 And there were some that had indignation within themselves, and
said, Why was this waste of the ointment made?  14:5 For it might have
been sold for more than three hundred pence, and have been given to
the poor. And they murmured against her.

14:6 And Jesus said, Let her alone; why trouble ye her? she hath
wrought a good work on me.

14:7 For ye have the poor with you always, and whensoever ye will ye
may do them good: but me ye have not always.

14:8 She hath done what she could: she is come aforehand to anoint my
body to the burying.

14:9 Verily I say unto you, Wheresoever this gospel shall be preached
throughout the whole world, this also that she hath done shall be
spoken of for a memorial of her.

14:10 And Judas Iscariot, one of the twelve, went unto the chief
priests, to betray him unto them.

14:11 And when they heard it, they were glad, and promised to give him
money. And he sought how he might conveniently betray him.

14:12 And the first day of unleavened bread, when they killed the
passover, his disciples said unto him, Where wilt thou that we go and
prepare that thou mayest eat the passover?  14:13 And he sendeth forth
two of his disciples, and saith unto them, Go ye into the city, and
there shall meet you a man bearing a pitcher of water: follow him.

14:14 And wheresoever he shall go in, say ye to the goodman of the
house, The Master saith, Where is the guestchamber, where I shall eat
the passover with my disciples?  14:15 And he will shew you a large
upper room furnished and prepared: there make ready for us.

14:16 And his disciples went forth, and came into the city, and found
as he had said unto them: and they made ready the passover.

14:17 And in the evening he cometh with the twelve.

14:18 And as they sat and did eat, Jesus said, Verily I say unto you,
One of you which eateth with me shall betray me.

14:19 And they began to be sorrowful, and to say unto him one by one,
Is it I? and another said, Is it I?  14:20 And he answered and said
unto them, It is one of the twelve, that dippeth with me in the dish.

14:21 The Son of man indeed goeth, as it is written of him: but woe to
that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed! good were it for that man
if he had never been born.

14:22 And as they did eat, Jesus took bread, and blessed, and brake
it, and gave to them, and said, Take, eat: this is my body.

14:23 And he took the cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to
them: and they all drank of it.

14:24 And he said unto them, This is my blood of the new testament,
which is shed for many.

14:25 Verily I say unto you, I will drink no more of the fruit of the
vine, until that day that I drink it new in the kingdom of God.

14:26 And when they had sung an hymn, they went out into the mount of
Olives.

14:27 And Jesus saith unto them, All ye shall be offended because of
me this night: for it is written, I will smite the shepherd, and the
sheep shall be scattered.

14:28 But after that I am risen, I will go before you into Galilee.

14:29 But Peter said unto him, Although all shall be offended, yet
will not I.

14:30 And Jesus saith unto him, Verily I say unto thee, That this day,
even in this night, before the cock crow twice, thou shalt deny me
thrice.

14:31 But he spake the more vehemently, If I should die with thee, I
will not deny thee in any wise. Likewise also said they all.

14:32 And they came to a place which was named Gethsemane: and he
saith to his disciples, Sit ye here, while I shall pray.

14:33 And he taketh with him Peter and James and John, and began to be
sore amazed, and to be very heavy; 14:34 And saith unto them, My soul
is exceeding sorrowful unto death: tarry ye here, and watch.

14:35 And he went forward a little, and fell on the ground, and prayed
that, if it were possible, the hour might pass from him.

14:36 And he said, Abba, Father, all things are possible unto thee;
take away this cup from me: nevertheless not what I will, but what
thou wilt.

14:37 And he cometh, and findeth them sleeping, and saith unto Peter,
Simon, sleepest thou? couldest not thou watch one hour?  14:38 Watch
ye and pray, lest ye enter into temptation. The spirit truly is ready,
but the flesh is weak.

14:39 And again he went away, and prayed, and spake the same words.

14:40 And when he returned, he found them asleep again, (for their
eyes were heavy,) neither wist they what to answer him.

14:41 And he cometh the third time, and saith unto them, Sleep on now,
and take your rest: it is enough, the hour is come; behold, the Son of
man is betrayed into the hands of sinners.

14:42 Rise up, let us go; lo, he that betrayeth me is at hand.

14:43 And immediately, while he yet spake, cometh Judas, one of the
twelve, and with him a great multitude with swords and staves, from
the chief priests and the scribes and the elders.

14:44 And he that betrayed him had given them a token, saying,
Whomsoever I shall kiss, that same is he; take him, and lead him away
safely.

14:45 And as soon as he was come, he goeth straightway to him, and
saith, Master, master; and kissed him.

14:46 And they laid their hands on him, and took him.

14:47 And one of them that stood by drew a sword, and smote a servant
of the high priest, and cut off his ear.

14:48 And Jesus answered and said unto them, Are ye come out, as
against a thief, with swords and with staves to take me?  14:49 I was
daily with you in the temple teaching, and ye took me not: but the
scriptures must be fulfilled.

14:50 And they all forsook him, and fled.

14:51 And there followed him a certain young man, having a linen cloth
cast about his naked body; and the young men laid hold on him: 14:52
And he left the linen cloth, and fled from them naked.

14:53 And they led Jesus away to the high priest: and with him were
assembled all the chief priests and the elders and the scribes.

14:54 And Peter followed him afar off, even into the palace of the
high priest: and he sat with the servants, and warmed himself at the
fire.

14:55 And the chief priests and all the council sought for witness
against Jesus to put him to death; and found none.

14:56 For many bare false witness against him, but their witness
agreed not together.

14:57 And there arose certain, and bare false witness against him,
saying, 14:58 We heard him say, I will destroy this temple that is
made with hands, and within three days I will build another made
without hands.

14:59 But neither so did their witness agree together.

14:60 And the high priest stood up in the midst, and asked Jesus,
saying, Answerest thou nothing? what is it which these witness against
thee?  14:61 But he held his peace, and answered nothing. Again the
high priest asked him, and said unto him, Art thou the Christ, the Son
of the Blessed?  14:62 And Jesus said, I am: and ye shall see the Son
of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of
heaven.

14:63 Then the high priest rent his clothes, and saith, What need we
any further witnesses?  14:64 Ye have heard the blasphemy: what think
ye? And they all condemned him to be guilty of death.

14:65 And some began to spit on him, and to cover his face, and to
buffet him, and to say unto him, Prophesy: and the servants did strike
him with the palms of their hands.

14:66 And as Peter was beneath in the palace, there cometh one of the
maids of the high priest: 14:67 And when she saw Peter warming
himself, she looked upon him, and said, And thou also wast with Jesus
of Nazareth.

14:68 But he denied, saying, I know not, neither understand I what
thou sayest. And he went out into the porch; and the cock crew.

14:69 And a maid saw him again, and began to say to them that stood
by, This is one of them.

14:70 And he denied it again. And a little after, they that stood by
said again to Peter, Surely thou art one of them: for thou art a
Galilaean, and thy speech agreeth thereto.

14:71 But he began to curse and to swear, saying, I know not this man
of whom ye speak.

14:72 And the second time the cock crew. And Peter called to mind the
word that Jesus said unto him, Before the cock crow twice, thou shalt
deny me thrice. And when he thought thereon, he wept.

15:1 And straightway in the morning the chief priests held a
consultation with the elders and scribes and the whole council, and
bound Jesus, and carried him away, and delivered him to Pilate.

15:2 And Pilate asked him, Art thou the King of the Jews? And he
answering said unto them, Thou sayest it.

15:3 And the chief priests accused him of many things: but he answered
nothing.

15:4 And Pilate asked him again, saying, Answerest thou nothing?
behold how many things they witness against thee.

15:5 But Jesus yet answered nothing; so that Pilate marvelled.

15:6 Now at that feast he released unto them one prisoner, whomsoever
they desired.

15:7 And there was one named Barabbas, which lay bound with them that
had made insurrection with him, who had committed murder in the
insurrection.

15:8 And the multitude crying aloud began to desire him to do as he
had ever done unto them.

15:9 But Pilate answered them, saying, Will ye that I release unto you
the King of the Jews?  15:10 For he knew that the chief priests had
delivered him for envy.

15:11 But the chief priests moved the people, that he should rather
release Barabbas unto them.

15:12 And Pilate answered and said again unto them, What will ye then
that I shall do unto him whom ye call the King of the Jews?  15:13 And
they cried out again, Crucify him.

15:14 Then Pilate said unto them, Why, what evil hath he done? And
they cried out the more exceedingly, Crucify him.

15:15 And so Pilate, willing to content the people, released Barabbas
unto them, and delivered Jesus, when he had scourged him, to be
crucified.

15:16 And the soldiers led him away into the hall, called Praetorium;
and they call together the whole band.

15:17 And they clothed him with purple, and platted a crown of thorns,
and put it about his head, 15:18 And began to salute him, Hail, King
of the Jews!  15:19 And they smote him on the head with a reed, and
did spit upon him, and bowing their knees worshipped him.

15:20 And when they had mocked him, they took off the purple from him,
and put his own clothes on him, and led him out to crucify him.

15:21 And they compel one Simon a Cyrenian, who passed by, coming out
of the country, the father of Alexander and Rufus, to bear his cross.

15:22 And they bring him unto the place Golgotha, which is, being
interpreted, The place of a skull.

15:23 And they gave him to drink wine mingled with myrrh: but he
received it not.

15:24 And when they had crucified him, they parted his garments,
casting lots upon them, what every man should take.

15:25 And it was the third hour, and they crucified him.

15:26 And the superscription of his accusation was written over, THE
KING OF THE JEWS.

15:27 And with him they crucify two thieves; the one on his right
hand, and the other on his left.

15:28 And the scripture was fulfilled, which saith, And he was
numbered with the transgressors.

15:29 And they that passed by railed on him, wagging their heads, and
saying, Ah, thou that destroyest the temple, and buildest it in three
days, 15:30 Save thyself, and come down from the cross.

15:31 Likewise also the chief priests mocking said among themselves
with the scribes, He saved others; himself he cannot save.

15:32 Let Christ the King of Israel descend now from the cross, that
we may see and believe. And they that were crucified with him reviled
him.

15:33 And when the sixth hour was come, there was darkness over the
whole land until the ninth hour.

15:34 And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying,
Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? which is, being interpreted, My God, my
God, why hast thou forsaken me?  15:35 And some of them that stood by,
when they heard it, said, Behold, he calleth Elias.

15:36 And one ran and filled a spunge full of vinegar, and put it on a
reed, and gave him to drink, saying, Let alone; let us see whether
Elias will come to take him down.

15:37 And Jesus cried with a loud voice, and gave up the ghost.

15:38 And the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the
bottom.

15:39 And when the centurion, which stood over against him, saw that
he so cried out, and gave up the ghost, he said, Truly this man was
the Son of God.

15:40 There were also women looking on afar off: among whom was Mary
Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James the less and of Joses, and
Salome; 15:41 (Who also, when he was in Galilee, followed him, and
ministered unto him;) and many other women which came up with him unto
Jerusalem.

15:42 And now when the even was come, because it was the preparation,
that is, the day before the sabbath, 15:43 Joseph of Arimathaea, an
honourable counsellor, which also waited for the kingdom of God, came,
and went in boldly unto Pilate, and craved the body of Jesus.

15:44 And Pilate marvelled if he were already dead: and calling unto
him the centurion, he asked him whether he had been any while dead.

15:45 And when he knew it of the centurion, he gave the body to
Joseph.

15:46 And he bought fine linen, and took him down, and wrapped him in
the linen, and laid him in a sepulchre which was hewn out of a rock,
and rolled a stone unto the door of the sepulchre.

15:47 And Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Joses beheld where he
was laid.

16:1 And when the sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the
mother of James, and Salome, had bought sweet spices, that they might
come and anoint him.

16:2 And very early in the morning the first day of the week, they
came unto the sepulchre at the rising of the sun.

16:3 And they said among themselves, Who shall roll us away the stone
from the door of the sepulchre?  16:4 And when they looked, they saw
that the stone was rolled away: for it was very great.

16:5 And entering into the sepulchre, they saw a young man sitting on
the right side, clothed in a long white garment; and they were
affrighted.

16:6 And he saith unto them, Be not affrighted: Ye seek Jesus of
Nazareth, which was crucified: he is risen; he is not here: behold the
place where they laid him.

16:7 But go your way, tell his disciples and Peter that he goeth
before you into Galilee: there shall ye see him, as he said unto you.

16:8 And they went out quickly, and fled from the sepulchre; for they
trembled and were amazed: neither said they any thing to any man; for
they were afraid.

16:9 Now when Jesus was risen early the first day of the week, he
appeared first to Mary Magdalene, out of whom he had cast seven
devils.

16:10 And she went and told them that had been with him, as they
mourned and wept.

16:11 And they, when they had heard that he was alive, and had been
seen of her, believed not.

16:12 After that he appeared in another form unto two of them, as they
walked, and went into the country.

16:13 And they went and told it unto the residue: neither believed
they them.

16:14 Afterward he appeared unto the eleven as they sat at meat, and
upbraided them with their unbelief and hardness of heart, because they
believed not them which had seen him after he was risen.

16:15 And he said unto them, Go ye into all the world, and preach the
gospel to every creature.

16:16 He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that
believeth not shall be damned.

16:17 And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall
they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; 16:18 They
shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall
not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall
recover.

16:19 So then after the Lord had spoken unto them, he was received up
into heaven, and sat on the right hand of God.

16:20 And they went forth, and preached every where, the Lord working
with them, and confirming the word with signs following. Amen.




The Gospel According to Saint Luke


1:1 Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to set forth in order a
declaration of those things which are most surely believed among us,
1:2 Even as they delivered them unto us, which from the beginning were
eyewitnesses, and ministers of the word; 1:3 It seemed good to me
also, having had perfect understanding of all things from the very
first, to write unto thee in order, most excellent Theophilus, 1:4
That thou mightest know the certainty of those things, wherein thou
hast been instructed.

1:5 THERE was in the days of Herod, the king of Judaea, a certain
priest named Zacharias, of the course of Abia: and his wife was of the
daughters of Aaron, and her name was Elisabeth.

1:6 And they were both righteous before God, walking in all the
commandments and ordinances of the Lord blameless.

1:7 And they had no child, because that Elisabeth was barren, and they
both were now well stricken in years.

1:8 And it came to pass, that while he executed the priest's office
before God in the order of his course, 1:9 According to the custom of
the priest's office, his lot was to burn incense when he went into the
temple of the Lord.

1:10 And the whole multitude of the people were praying without at the
time of incense.

1:11 And there appeared unto him an angel of the Lord standing on the
right side of the altar of incense.

1:12 And when Zacharias saw him, he was troubled, and fear fell upon
him.

1:13 But the angel said unto him, Fear not, Zacharias: for thy prayer
is heard; and thy wife Elisabeth shall bear thee a son, and thou shalt
call his name John.

1:14 And thou shalt have joy and gladness; and many shall rejoice at
his birth.

1:15 For he shall be great in the sight of the Lord, and shall drink
neither wine nor strong drink; and he shall be filled with the Holy
Ghost, even from his mother's womb.

1:16 And many of the children of Israel shall he turn to the Lord
their God.

1:17 And he shall go before him in the spirit and power of Elias, to
turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to
the wisdom of the just; to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.

1:18 And Zacharias said unto the angel, Whereby shall I know this? for
I am an old man, and my wife well stricken in years.

1:19 And the angel answering said unto him, I am Gabriel, that stand
in the presence of God; and am sent to speak unto thee, and to shew
thee these glad tidings.

1:20 And, behold, thou shalt be dumb, and not able to speak, until the
day that these things shall be performed, because thou believest not
my words, which shall be fulfilled in their season.

1:21 And the people waited for Zacharias, and marvelled that he
tarried so long in the temple.

1:22 And when he came out, he could not speak unto them: and they
perceived that he had seen a vision in the temple: for he beckoned
unto them, and remained speechless.

1:23 And it came to pass, that, as soon as the days of his
ministration were accomplished, he departed to his own house.

1:24 And after those days his wife Elisabeth conceived, and hid
herself five months, saying, 1:25 Thus hath the Lord dealt with me in
the days wherein he looked on me, to take away my reproach among men.

1:26 And in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God unto a
city of Galilee, named Nazareth, 1:27 To a virgin espoused to a man
whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin's name
was Mary.

1:28 And the angel came in unto her, and said, Hail, thou that art
highly favoured, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women.

1:29 And when she saw him, she was troubled at his saying, and cast in
her mind what manner of salutation this should be.

1:30 And the angel said unto her, Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found
favour with God.

1:31 And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a
son, and shalt call his name JESUS.

1:32 He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest:
and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David:
1:33 And he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his
kingdom there shall be no end.

1:34 Then said Mary unto the angel, How shall this be, seeing I know
not a man?  1:35 And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy
Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall
overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of
thee shall be called the Son of God.

1:36 And, behold, thy cousin Elisabeth, she hath also conceived a son
in her old age: and this is the sixth month with her, who was called
barren.

1:37 For with God nothing shall be impossible.

1:38 And Mary said, Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me
according to thy word. And the angel departed from her.

1:39 And Mary arose in those days, and went into the hill country with
haste, into a city of Juda; 1:40 And entered into the house of
Zacharias, and saluted Elisabeth.

1:41 And it came to pass, that, when Elisabeth heard the salutation of
Mary, the babe leaped in her womb; and Elisabeth was filled with the
Holy Ghost: 1:42 And she spake out with a loud voice, and said,
Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb.

1:43 And whence is this to me, that the mother of my Lord should come
to me?  1:44 For, lo, as soon as the voice of thy salutation sounded
in mine ears, the babe leaped in my womb for joy.

1:45 And blessed is she that believed: for there shall be a
performance of those things which were told her from the Lord.

1:46 And Mary said, My soul doth magnify the Lord, 1:47 And my spirit
hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.

1:48 For he hath regarded the low estate of his handmaiden: for,
behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed.

1:49 For he that is mighty hath done to me great things; and holy is
his name.

1:50 And his mercy is on them that fear him from generation to
generation.

1:51 He hath shewed strength with his arm; he hath scattered the proud
in the imagination of their hearts.

1:52 He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of
low degree.

1:53 He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath
sent empty away.

1:54 He hath holpen his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy;
1:55 As he spake to our fathers, to Abraham, and to his seed for ever.

1:56 And Mary abode with her about three months, and returned to her
own house.

1:57 Now Elisabeth's full time came that she should be delivered; and
she brought forth a son.

1:58 And her neighbours and her cousins heard how the Lord had shewed
great mercy upon her; and they rejoiced with her.

1:59 And it came to pass, that on the eighth day they came to
circumcise the child; and they called him Zacharias, after the name of
his father.

1:60 And his mother answered and said, Not so; but he shall be called
John.

1:61 And they said unto her, There is none of thy kindred that is
called by this name.

1:62 And they made signs to his father, how he would have him called.

1:63 And he asked for a writing table, and wrote, saying, His name is
John. And they marvelled all.

1:64 And his mouth was opened immediately, and his tongue loosed, and
he spake, and praised God.

1:65 And fear came on all that dwelt round about them: and all these
sayings were noised abroad throughout all the hill country of Judaea.

1:66 And all they that heard them laid them up in their hearts,
saying, What manner of child shall this be! And the hand of the Lord
was with him.

1:67 And his father Zacharias was filled with the Holy Ghost, and
prophesied, saying, 1:68 Blessed be the Lord God of Israel; for he
hath visited and redeemed his people, 1:69 And hath raised up an horn
of salvation for us in the house of his servant David; 1:70 As he
spake by the mouth of his holy prophets, which have been since the
world began: 1:71 That we should be saved from our enemies, and from
the hand of all that hate us; 1:72 To perform the mercy promised to
our fathers, and to remember his holy covenant; 1:73 The oath which he
sware to our father Abraham, 1:74 That he would grant unto us, that we
being delivered out of the hand of our enemies might serve him without
fear, 1:75 In holiness and righteousness before him, all the days of
our life.

1:76 And thou, child, shalt be called the prophet of the Highest: for
thou shalt go before the face of the Lord to prepare his ways; 1:77 To
give knowledge of salvation unto his people by the remission of their
sins, 1:78 Through the tender mercy of our God; whereby the dayspring
from on high hath visited us, 1:79 To give light to them that sit in
darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of
peace.

1:80 And the child grew, and waxed strong in spirit, and was in the
deserts till the day of his shewing unto Israel.

2:1 And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree
from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed.

2:2 (And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of
Syria.)  2:3 And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city.

2:4 And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth,
into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem;
(because he was of the house and lineage of David:) 2:5 To be taxed
with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child.

2:6 And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were
accomplished that she should be delivered.

2:7 And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in
swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room
for them in the inn.

2:8 And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field,
keeping watch over their flock by night.

2:9 And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of
the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.

2:10 And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you
good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.

2:11 For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour,
which is Christ the Lord.

2:12 And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped
in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.

2:13 And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly
host praising God, and saying, 2:14 Glory to God in the highest, and
on earth peace, good will toward men.

2:15 And it came to pass, as the angels were gone away from them into
heaven, the shepherds said one to another, Let us now go even unto
Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord
hath made known unto us.

2:16 And they came with haste, and found Mary, and Joseph, and the
babe lying in a manger.

2:17 And when they had seen it, they made known abroad the saying
which was told them concerning this child.

2:18 And all they that heard it wondered at those things which were
told them by the shepherds.

2:19 But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.

2:20 And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all
the things that they had heard and seen, as it was told unto them.

2:21 And when eight days were accomplished for the circumcising of the
child, his name was called JESUS, which was so named of the angel
before he was conceived in the womb.

2:22 And when the days of her purification according to the law of
Moses were accomplished, they brought him to Jerusalem, to present him
to the Lord; 2:23 (As it is written in the law of the LORD, Every male
that openeth the womb shall be called holy to the Lord;) 2:24 And to
offer a sacrifice according to that which is said in the law of the
Lord, A pair of turtledoves, or two young pigeons.

2:25 And, behold, there was a man in Jerusalem, whose name was Simeon;
and the same man was just and devout, waiting for the consolation of
Israel: and the Holy Ghost was upon him.

2:26 And it was revealed unto him by the Holy Ghost, that he should
not see death, before he had seen the Lord's Christ.

2:27 And he came by the Spirit into the temple: and when the parents
brought in the child Jesus, to do for him after the custom of the law,
2:28 Then took he him up in his arms, and blessed God, and said, 2:29
Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy
word: 2:30 For mine eyes have seen thy salvation, 2:31 Which thou hast
prepared before the face of all people; 2:32 A light to lighten the
Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel.

2:33 And Joseph and his mother marvelled at those things which were
spoken of him.

2:34 And Simeon blessed them, and said unto Mary his mother, Behold,
this child is set for the fall and rising again of many in Israel; and
for a sign which shall be spoken against; 2:35 (Yea, a sword shall
pierce through thy own soul also,) that the thoughts of many hearts
may be revealed.

2:36 And there was one Anna, a prophetess, the daughter of Phanuel, of
the tribe of Aser: she was of a great age, and had lived with an
husband seven years from her virginity; 2:37 And she was a widow of
about fourscore and four years, which departed not from the temple,
but served God with fastings and prayers night and day.

2:38 And she coming in that instant gave thanks likewise unto the
Lord, and spake of him to all them that looked for redemption in
Jerusalem.

2:39 And when they had performed all things according to the law of
the Lord, they returned into Galilee, to their own city Nazareth.

2:40 And the child grew, and waxed strong in spirit, filled with
wisdom: and the grace of God was upon him.

2:41 Now his parents went to Jerusalem every year at the feast of the
passover.

2:42 And when he was twelve years old, they went up to Jerusalem after
the custom of the feast.

2:43 And when they had fulfilled the days, as they returned, the child
Jesus tarried behind in Jerusalem; and Joseph and his mother knew not
of it.

2:44 But they, supposing him to have been in the company, went a day's
journey; and they sought him among their kinsfolk and acquaintance.

2:45 And when they found him not, they turned back again to Jerusalem,
seeking him.

2:46 And it came to pass, that after three days they found him in the
temple, sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them, and
asking them questions.

2:47 And all that heard him were astonished at his understanding and
answers.

2:48 And when they saw him, they were amazed: and his mother said unto
him, Son, why hast thou thus dealt with us? behold, thy father and I
have sought thee sorrowing.

2:49 And he said unto them, How is it that ye sought me? wist ye not
that I must be about my Father's business?  2:50 And they understood
not the saying which he spake unto them.

2:51 And he went down with them, and came to Nazareth, and was subject
unto them: but his mother kept all these sayings in her heart.

2:52 And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God
and man.

3:1 Now in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius
Pilate being governor of Judaea, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee,
and his brother Philip tetrarch of Ituraea and of the region of
Trachonitis, and Lysanias the tetrarch of Abilene, 3:2 Annas and
Caiaphas being the high priests, the word of God came unto John the
son of Zacharias in the wilderness.

3:3 And he came into all the country about Jordan, preaching the
baptism of repentance for the remission of sins; 3:4 As it is written
in the book of the words of Esaias the prophet, saying, The voice of
one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his
paths straight.

3:5 Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be
brought low; and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough
ways shall be made smooth; 3:6 And all flesh shall see the salvation
of God.

3:7 Then said he to the multitude that came forth to be baptized of
him, O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the
wrath to come?  3:8 Bring forth therefore fruits worthy of repentance,
and begin not to say within yourselves, We have Abraham to our father:
for I say unto you, That God is able of these stones to raise up
children unto Abraham.

3:9 And now also the axe is laid unto the root of the trees: every
tree therefore which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and
cast into the fire.

3:10 And the people asked him, saying, What shall we do then?  3:11 He
answereth and saith unto them, He that hath two coats, let him impart
to him that hath none; and he that hath meat, let him do likewise.

3:12 Then came also publicans to be baptized, and said unto him,
Master, what shall we do?  3:13 And he said unto them, Exact no more
than that which is appointed you.

3:14 And the soldiers likewise demanded of him, saying, And what shall
we do? And he said unto them, Do violence to no man, neither accuse
any falsely; and be content with your wages.

3:15 And as the people were in expectation, and all men mused in their
hearts of John, whether he were the Christ, or not; 3:16 John
answered, saying unto them all, I indeed baptize you with water; but
one mightier than I cometh, the latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy
to unloose: he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with fire:
3:17 Whose fan is in his hand, and he will throughly purge his floor,
and will gather the wheat into his garner; but the chaff he will burn
with fire unquenchable.

3:18 And many other things in his exhortation preached he unto the
people.

3:19 But Herod the tetrarch, being reproved by him for Herodias his
brother Philip's wife, and for all the evils which Herod had done,
3:20 Added yet this above all, that he shut up John in prison.

3:21 Now when all the people were baptized, it came to pass, that
Jesus also being baptized, and praying, the heaven was opened, 3:22
And the Holy Ghost descended in a bodily shape like a dove upon him,
and a voice came from heaven, which said, Thou art my beloved Son; in
thee I am well pleased.

3:23 And Jesus himself began to be about thirty years of age, being
(as was supposed) the son of Joseph, which was the son of Heli, 3:24
Which was the son of Matthat, which was the son of Levi, which was the
son of Melchi, which was the son of Janna, which was the son of
Joseph, 3:25 Which was the son of Mattathias, which was the son of
Amos, which was the son of Naum, which was the son of Esli, which was
the son of Nagge, 3:26 Which was the son of Maath, which was the son
of Mattathias, which was the son of Semei, which was the son of
Joseph, which was the son of Juda, 3:27 Which was the son of Joanna,
which was the son of Rhesa, which was the son of Zorobabel, which was
the son of Salathiel, which was the son of Neri, 3:28 Which was the
son of Melchi, which was the son of Addi, which was the son of Cosam,
which was the son of Elmodam, which was the son of Er, 3:29 Which was
the son of Jose, which was the son of Eliezer, which was the son of
Jorim, which was the son of Matthat, which was the son of Levi, 3:30
Which was the son of Simeon, which was the son of Juda, which was the
son of Joseph, which was the son of Jonan, which was the son of
Eliakim, 3:31 Which was the son of Melea, which was the son of Menan,
which was the son of Mattatha, which was the son of Nathan, which was
the son of David, 3:32 Which was the son of Jesse, which was the son
of Obed, which was the son of Booz, which was the son of Salmon, which
was the son of Naasson, 3:33 Which was the son of Aminadab, which was
the son of Aram, which was the son of Esrom, which was the son of
Phares, which was the son of Juda, 3:34 Which was the son of Jacob,
which was the son of Isaac, which was the son of Abraham, which was
the son of Thara, which was the son of Nachor, 3:35 Which was the son
of Saruch, which was the son of Ragau, which was the son of Phalec,
which was the son of Heber, which was the son of Sala, 3:36 Which was
the son of Cainan, which was the son of Arphaxad, which was the son of
Sem, which was the son of Noe, which was the son of Lamech, 3:37 Which
was the son of Mathusala, which was the son of Enoch, which was the
son of Jared, which was the son of Maleleel, which was the son of
Cainan, 3:38 Which was the son of Enos, which was the son of Seth,
which was the son of Adam, which was the son of God.

4:1 And Jesus being full of the Holy Ghost returned from Jordan, and
was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, 4:2 Being forty days
tempted of the devil. And in those days he did eat nothing: and when
they were ended, he afterward hungered.

4:3 And the devil said unto him, If thou be the Son of God, command
this stone that it be made bread.

4:4 And Jesus answered him, saying, It is written, That man shall not
live by bread alone, but by every word of God.

4:5 And the devil, taking him up into an high mountain, shewed unto
him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time.

4:6 And the devil said unto him, All this power will I give thee, and
the glory of them: for that is delivered unto me; and to whomsoever I
will I give it.

4:7 If thou therefore wilt worship me, all shall be thine.

4:8 And Jesus answered and said unto him, Get thee behind me, Satan:
for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only
shalt thou serve.

4:9 And he brought him to Jerusalem, and set him on a pinnacle of the
temple, and said unto him, If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself
down from hence: 4:10 For it is written, He shall give his angels
charge over thee, to keep thee: 4:11 And in their hands they shall
bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone.

4:12 And Jesus answering said unto him, It is said, Thou shalt not
tempt the Lord thy God.

4:13 And when the devil had ended all the temptation, he departed from
him for a season.

4:14 And Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit into Galilee: and
there went out a fame of him through all the region round about.

4:15 And he taught in their synagogues, being glorified of all.

4:16 And he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up: and, as
his custom was, he went into the synagogue on the sabbath day, and
stood up for to read.

4:17 And there was delivered unto him the book of the prophet Esaias.
And when he had opened the book, he found the place where it was
written, 4:18 The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath
anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal
the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and
recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are
bruised, 4:19 To preach the acceptable year of the Lord.

4:20 And he closed the book, and he gave it again to the minister, and
sat down. And the eyes of all them that were in the synagogue were
fastened on him.

4:21 And he began to say unto them, This day is this scripture
fulfilled in your ears.

4:22 And all bare him witness, and wondered at the gracious words
which proceeded out of his mouth. And they said, Is not this Joseph's
son?  4:23 And he said unto them, Ye will surely say unto me this
proverb, Physician, heal thyself: whatsoever we have heard done in
Capernaum, do also here in thy country.

4:24 And he said, Verily I say unto you, No prophet is accepted in his
own country.

4:25 But I tell you of a truth, many widows were in Israel in the days
of Elias, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, when
great famine was throughout all the land; 4:26 But unto none of them
was Elias sent, save unto Sarepta, a city of Sidon, unto a woman that
was a widow.

4:27 And many lepers were in Israel in the time of Eliseus the
prophet; and none of them was cleansed, saving Naaman the Syrian.

4:28 And all they in the synagogue, when they heard these things, were
filled with wrath, 4:29 And rose up, and thrust him out of the city,
and led him unto the brow of the hill whereon their city was built,
that they might cast him down headlong.

4:30 But he passing through the midst of them went his way, 4:31 And
came down to Capernaum, a city of Galilee, and taught them on the
sabbath days.

4:32 And they were astonished at his doctrine: for his word was with
power.

4:33 And in the synagogue there was a man, which had a spirit of an
unclean devil, and cried out with a loud voice, 4:34 Saying, Let us
alone; what have we to do with thee, thou Jesus of Nazareth? art thou
come to destroy us? I know thee who thou art; the Holy One of God.

4:35 And Jesus rebuked him, saying, Hold thy peace, and come out of
him.

And when the devil had thrown him in the midst, he came out of him,
and hurt him not.

4:36 And they were all amazed, and spake among themselves, saying,
What a word is this! for with authority and power he commandeth the
unclean spirits, and they come out.

4:37 And the fame of him went out into every place of the country
round about.

4:38 And he arose out of the synagogue, and entered into Simon's
house.

And Simon's wife's mother was taken with a great fever; and they
besought him for her.

4:39 And he stood over her, and rebuked the fever; and it left her:
and immediately she arose and ministered unto them.

4:40 Now when the sun was setting, all they that had any sick with
divers diseases brought them unto him; and he laid his hands on every
one of them, and healed them.

4:41 And devils also came out of many, crying out, and saying, Thou
art Christ the Son of God. And he rebuking them suffered them not to
speak: for they knew that he was Christ.

4:42 And when it was day, he departed and went into a desert place:
and the people sought him, and came unto him, and stayed him, that he
should not depart from them.

4:43 And he said unto them, I must preach the kingdom of God to other
cities also: for therefore am I sent.

4:44 And he preached in the synagogues of Galilee.

5:1 And it came to pass, that, as the people pressed upon him to hear
the word of God, he stood by the lake of Gennesaret, 5:2 And saw two
ships standing by the lake: but the fishermen were gone out of them,
and were washing their nets.

5:3 And he entered into one of the ships, which was Simon's, and
prayed him that he would thrust out a little from the land. And he sat
down, and taught the people out of the ship.

5:4 Now when he had left speaking, he said unto Simon, Launch out into
the deep, and let down your nets for a draught.

5:5 And Simon answering said unto him, Master, we have toiled all the
night, and have taken nothing: nevertheless at thy word I will let
down the net.

5:6 And when they had this done, they inclosed a great multitude of
fishes: and their net brake.

5:7 And they beckoned unto their partners, which were in the other
ship, that they should come and help them. And they came, and filled
both the ships, so that they began to sink.

5:8 When Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus' knees, saying,
Depart from me; for I am a sinful man, O Lord.

5:9 For he was astonished, and all that were with him, at the draught
of the fishes which they had taken: 5:10 And so was also James, and
John, the sons of Zebedee, which were partners with Simon. And Jesus
said unto Simon, Fear not; from henceforth thou shalt catch men.

5:11 And when they had brought their ships to land, they forsook all,
and followed him.

5:12 And it came to pass, when he was in a certain city, behold a man
full of leprosy: who seeing Jesus fell on his face, and besought him,
saying, Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean.

5:13 And he put forth his hand, and touched him, saying, I will: be
thou clean. And immediately the leprosy departed from him.

5:14 And he charged him to tell no man: but go, and shew thyself to
the priest, and offer for thy cleansing, according as Moses commanded,
for a testimony unto them.

5:15 But so much the more went there a fame abroad of him: and great
multitudes came together to hear, and to be healed by him of their
infirmities.

5:16 And he withdrew himself into the wilderness, and prayed.

5:17 And it came to pass on a certain day, as he was teaching, that
there were Pharisees and doctors of the law sitting by, which were
come out of every town of Galilee, and Judaea, and Jerusalem: and the
power of the Lord was present to heal them.

5:18 And, behold, men brought in a bed a man which was taken with a
palsy: and they sought means to bring him in, and to lay him before
him.

5:19 And when they could not find by what way they might bring him in
because of the multitude, they went upon the housetop, and let him
down through the tiling with his couch into the midst before Jesus.

5:20 And when he saw their faith, he said unto him, Man, thy sins are
forgiven thee.

5:21 And the scribes and the Pharisees began to reason, saying, Who is
this which speaketh blasphemies? Who can forgive sins, but God alone?
5:22 But when Jesus perceived their thoughts, he answering said unto
them, What reason ye in your hearts?  5:23 Whether is easier, to say,
Thy sins be forgiven thee; or to say, Rise up and walk?  5:24 But that
ye may know that the Son of man hath power upon earth to forgive sins,
(he said unto the sick of the palsy,) I say unto thee, Arise, and take
up thy couch, and go into thine house.

5:25 And immediately he rose up before them, and took up that whereon
he lay, and departed to his own house, glorifying God.

5:26 And they were all amazed, and they glorified God, and were filled
with fear, saying, We have seen strange things to day.

5:27 And after these things he went forth, and saw a publican, named
Levi, sitting at the receipt of custom: and he said unto him, Follow
me.

5:28 And he left all, rose up, and followed him.

5:29 And Levi made him a great feast in his own house: and there was a
great company of publicans and of others that sat down with them.

5:30 But their scribes and Pharisees murmured against his disciples,
saying, Why do ye eat and drink with publicans and sinners?  5:31 And
Jesus answering said unto them, They that are whole need not a
physician; but they that are sick.

5:32 I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.

5:33 And they said unto him, Why do the disciples of John fast often,
and make prayers, and likewise the disciples of the Pharisees; but
thine eat and drink?  5:34 And he said unto them, Can ye make the
children of the bridechamber fast, while the bridegroom is with them?
5:35 But the days will come, when the bridegroom shall be taken away
from them, and then shall they fast in those days.

5:36 And he spake also a parable unto them; No man putteth a piece of
a new garment upon an old; if otherwise, then both the new maketh a
rent, and the piece that was taken out of the new agreeth not with the
old.

5:37 And no man putteth new wine into old bottles; else the new wine
will burst the bottles, and be spilled, and the bottles shall perish.

5:38 But new wine must be put into new bottles; and both are
preserved.

5:39 No man also having drunk old wine straightway desireth new: for
he saith, The old is better.

6:1 And it came to pass on the second sabbath after the first, that he
went through the corn fields; and his disciples plucked the ears of
corn, and did eat, rubbing them in their hands.

6:2 And certain of the Pharisees said unto them, Why do ye that which
is not lawful to do on the sabbath days?  6:3 And Jesus answering them
said, Have ye not read so much as this, what David did, when himself
was an hungred, and they which were with him; 6:4 How he went into the
house of God, and did take and eat the shewbread, and gave also to
them that were with him; which it is not lawful to eat but for the
priests alone?  6:5 And he said unto them, That the Son of man is Lord
also of the sabbath.

6:6 And it came to pass also on another sabbath, that he entered into
the synagogue and taught: and there was a man whose right hand was
withered.

6:7 And the scribes and Pharisees watched him, whether he would heal
on the sabbath day; that they might find an accusation against him.

6:8 But he knew their thoughts, and said to the man which had the
withered hand, Rise up, and stand forth in the midst. And he arose and
stood forth.

6:9 Then said Jesus unto them, I will ask you one thing; Is it lawful
on the sabbath days to do good, or to do evil? to save life, or to
destroy it?  6:10 And looking round about upon them all, he said unto
the man, Stretch forth thy hand. And he did so: and his hand was
restored whole as the other.

6:11 And they were filled with madness; and communed one with another
what they might do to Jesus.

6:12 And it came to pass in those days, that he went out into a
mountain to pray, and continued all night in prayer to God.

6:13 And when it was day, he called unto him his disciples: and of
them he chose twelve, whom also he named apostles; 6:14 Simon, (whom
he also named Peter,) and Andrew his brother, James and John, Philip
and Bartholomew, 6:15 Matthew and Thomas, James the son of Alphaeus,
and Simon called Zelotes, 6:16 And Judas the brother of James, and
Judas Iscariot, which also was the traitor.

6:17 And he came down with them, and stood in the plain, and the
company of his disciples, and a great multitude of people out of all
Judaea and Jerusalem, and from the sea coast of Tyre and Sidon, which
came to hear him, and to be healed of their diseases; 6:18 And they
that were vexed with unclean spirits: and they were healed.

6:19 And the whole multitude sought to touch him: for there went
virtue out of him, and healed them all.

6:20 And he lifted up his eyes on his disciples, and said, Blessed be
ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of God.

6:21 Blessed are ye that hunger now: for ye shall be filled. Blessed
are ye that weep now: for ye shall laugh.

6:22 Blessed are ye, when men shall hate you, and when they shall
separate you from their company, and shall reproach you, and cast out
your name as evil, for the Son of man's sake.

6:23 Rejoice ye in that day, and leap for joy: for, behold, your
reward is great in heaven: for in the like manner did their fathers
unto the prophets.

6:24 But woe unto you that are rich! for ye have received your
consolation.

6:25 Woe unto you that are full! for ye shall hunger. Woe unto you
that laugh now! for ye shall mourn and weep.

6:26 Woe unto you, when all men shall speak well of you! for so did
their fathers to the false prophets.

6:27 But I say unto you which hear, Love your enemies, do good to them
which hate you, 6:28 Bless them that curse you, and pray for them
which despitefully use you.

6:29 And unto him that smiteth thee on the one cheek offer also the
other; and him that taketh away thy cloak forbid not to take thy coat
also.

6:30 Give to every man that asketh of thee; and of him that taketh
away thy goods ask them not again.

6:31 And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them
likewise.

6:32 For if ye love them which love you, what thank have ye? for
sinners also love those that love them.

6:33 And if ye do good to them which do good to you, what thank have
ye?  for sinners also do even the same.

6:34 And if ye lend to them of whom ye hope to receive, what thank
have ye? for sinners also lend to sinners, to receive as much again.

6:35 But love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for
nothing again; and your reward shall be great, and ye shall be the
children of the Highest: for he is kind unto the unthankful and to the
evil.

6:36 Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful.

6:37 Judge not, and ye shall not be judged: condemn not, and ye shall
not be condemned: forgive, and ye shall be forgiven: 6:38 Give, and it
shall be given unto you; good measure, pressed down, and shaken
together, and running over, shall men give into your bosom. For with
the same measure that ye mete withal it shall be measured to you
again.

6:39 And he spake a parable unto them, Can the blind lead the blind?
shall they not both fall into the ditch?  6:40 The disciple is not
above his master: but every one that is perfect shall be as his
master.

6:41 And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but
perceivest not the beam that is in thine own eye?  6:42 Either how
canst thou say to thy brother, Brother, let me pull out the mote that
is in thine eye, when thou thyself beholdest not the beam that is in
thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam out of thine
own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to pull out the mote that is
in thy brother's eye.

6:43 For a good tree bringeth not forth corrupt fruit; neither doth a
corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.

6:44 For every tree is known by his own fruit. For of thorns men do
not gather figs, nor of a bramble bush gather they grapes.

6:45 A good man out of the good treasure of his heart bringeth forth
that which is good; and an evil man out of the evil treasure of his
heart bringeth forth that which is evil: for of the abundance of the
heart his mouth speaketh.

6:46 And why call ye me, Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I
say?  6:47 Whosoever cometh to me, and heareth my sayings, and doeth
them, I will shew you to whom he is like: 6:48 He is like a man which
built an house, and digged deep, and laid the foundation on a rock:
and when the flood arose, the stream beat vehemently upon that house,
and could not shake it: for it was founded upon a rock.

6:49 But he that heareth, and doeth not, is like a man that without a
foundation built an house upon the earth; against which the stream did
beat vehemently, and immediately it fell; and the ruin of that house
was great.

7:1 Now when he had ended all his sayings in the audience of the
people, he entered into Capernaum.

7:2 And a certain centurion's servant, who was dear unto him, was
sick, and ready to die.

7:3 And when he heard of Jesus, he sent unto him the elders of the
Jews, beseeching him that he would come and heal his servant.

7:4 And when they came to Jesus, they besought him instantly, saying,
That he was worthy for whom he should do this: 7:5 For he loveth our
nation, and he hath built us a synagogue.

7:6 Then Jesus went with them. And when he was now not far from the
house, the centurion sent friends to him, saying unto him, Lord,
trouble not thyself: for I am not worthy that thou shouldest enter
under my roof: 7:7 Wherefore neither thought I myself worthy to come
unto thee: but say in a word, and my servant shall be healed.

7:8 For I also am a man set under authority, having under me soldiers,
and I say unto one, Go, and he goeth; and to another, Come, and he
cometh; and to my servant, Do this, and he doeth it.

7:9 When Jesus heard these things, he marvelled at him, and turned him
about, and said unto the people that followed him, I say unto you, I
have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel.

7:10 And they that were sent, returning to the house, found the
servant whole that had been sick.

7:11 And it came to pass the day after, that he went into a city
called Nain; and many of his disciples went with him, and much people.

7:12 Now when he came nigh to the gate of the city, behold, there was
a dead man carried out, the only son of his mother, and she was a
widow: and much people of the city was with her.

7:13 And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her, and said
unto her, Weep not.

7:14 And he came and touched the bier: and they that bare him stood
still.

And he said, Young man, I say unto thee, Arise.

7:15 And he that was dead sat up, and began to speak. And he delivered
him to his mother.

7:16 And there came a fear on all: and they glorified God, saying,
That a great prophet is risen up among us; and, That God hath visited
his people.

7:17 And this rumour of him went forth throughout all Judaea, and
throughout all the region round about.

7:18 And the disciples of John shewed him of all these things.

7:19 And John calling unto him two of his disciples sent them to
Jesus, saying, Art thou he that should come? or look we for another?
7:20 When the men were come unto him, they said, John Baptist hath
sent us unto thee, saying, Art thou he that should come? or look we
for another?  7:21 And in that same hour he cured many of their
infirmities and plagues, and of evil spirits; and unto many that were
blind he gave sight.

7:22 Then Jesus answering said unto them, Go your way, and tell John
what things ye have seen and heard; how that the blind see, the lame
walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, to
the poor the gospel is preached.

7:23 And blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended in me.

7:24 And when the messengers of John were departed, he began to speak
unto the people concerning John, What went ye out into the wilderness
for to see?  A reed shaken with the wind?  7:25 But what went ye out
for to see? A man clothed in soft raiment?  Behold, they which are
gorgeously apparelled, and live delicately, are in kings' courts.

7:26 But what went ye out for to see? A prophet? Yea, I say unto you,
and much more than a prophet.

7:27 This is he, of whom it is written, Behold, I send my messenger
before thy face, which shall prepare thy way before thee.

7:28 For I say unto you, Among those that are born of women there is
not a greater prophet than John the Baptist: but he that is least in
the kingdom of God is greater than he.

7:29 And all the people that heard him, and the publicans, justified
God, being baptized with the baptism of John.

7:30 But the Pharisees and lawyers rejected the counsel of God against
themselves, being not baptized of him.

7:31 And the Lord said, Whereunto then shall I liken the men of this
generation? and to what are they like?  7:32 They are like unto
children sitting in the marketplace, and calling one to another, and
saying, We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced; we have
mourned to you, and ye have not wept.

7:33 For John the Baptist came neither eating bread nor drinking wine;
and ye say, He hath a devil.

7:34 The Son of man is come eating and drinking; and ye say, Behold a
gluttonous man, and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners!
7:35 But wisdom is justified of all her children.

7:36 And one of the Pharisees desired him that he would eat with him.
And he went into the Pharisee's house, and sat down to meat.

7:37 And, behold, a woman in the city, which was a sinner, when she
knew that Jesus sat at meat in the Pharisee's house, brought an
alabaster box of ointment, 7:38 And stood at his feet behind him
weeping, and began to wash his feet with tears, and did wipe them with
the hairs of her head, and kissed his feet, and anointed them with the
ointment.

7:39 Now when the Pharisee which had bidden him saw it, he spake
within himself, saying, This man, if he were a prophet, would have
known who and what manner of woman this is that toucheth him: for she
is a sinner.

7:40 And Jesus answering said unto him, Simon, I have somewhat to say
unto thee. And he saith, Master, say on.

7:41 There was a certain creditor which had two debtors: the one owed
five hundred pence, and the other fifty.

7:42 And when they had nothing to pay, he frankly forgave them both.
Tell me therefore, which of them will love him most?  7:43 Simon
answered and said, I suppose that he, to whom he forgave most.

And he said unto him, Thou hast rightly judged.

7:44 And he turned to the woman, and said unto Simon, Seest thou this
woman? I entered into thine house, thou gavest me no water for my
feet: but she hath washed my feet with tears, and wiped them with the
hairs of her head.

7:45 Thou gavest me no kiss: but this woman since the time I came in
hath not ceased to kiss my feet.

7:46 My head with oil thou didst not anoint: but this woman hath
anointed my feet with ointment.

7:47 Wherefore I say unto thee, Her sins, which are many, are
forgiven; for she loved much: but to whom little is forgiven, the same
loveth little.

7:48 And he said unto her, Thy sins are forgiven.

7:49 And they that sat at meat with him began to say within
themselves, Who is this that forgiveth sins also?  7:50 And he said to
the woman, Thy faith hath saved thee; go in peace.

8:1 And it came to pass afterward, that he went throughout every city
and village, preaching and shewing the glad tidings of the kingdom of
God: and the twelve were with him, 8:2 And certain women, which had
been healed of evil spirits and infirmities, Mary called Magdalene,
out of whom went seven devils, 8:3 And Joanna the wife of Chuza
Herod's steward, and Susanna, and many others, which ministered unto
him of their substance.

8:4 And when much people were gathered together, and were come to him
out of every city, he spake by a parable: 8:5 A sower went out to sow
his seed: and as he sowed, some fell by the way side; and it was
trodden down, and the fowls of the air devoured it.

8:6 And some fell upon a rock; and as soon as it was sprung up, it
withered away, because it lacked moisture.

8:7 And some fell among thorns; and the thorns sprang up with it, and
choked it.

8:8 And other fell on good ground, and sprang up, and bare fruit an
hundredfold. And when he had said these things, he cried, He that hath
ears to hear, let him hear.

8:9 And his disciples asked him, saying, What might this parable be?
8:10 And he said, Unto you it is given to know the mysteries of the
kingdom of God: but to others in parables; that seeing they might not
see, and hearing they might not understand.

8:11 Now the parable is this: The seed is the word of God.

8:12 Those by the way side are they that hear; then cometh the devil,
and taketh away the word out of their hearts, lest they should believe
and be saved.

8:13 They on the rock are they, which, when they hear, receive the
word with joy; and these have no root, which for a while believe, and
in time of temptation fall away.

8:14 And that which fell among thorns are they, which, when they have
heard, go forth, and are choked with cares and riches and pleasures of
this life, and bring no fruit to perfection.

8:15 But that on the good ground are they, which in an honest and good
heart, having heard the word, keep it, and bring forth fruit with
patience.

8:16 No man, when he hath lighted a candle, covereth it with a vessel,
or putteth it under a bed; but setteth it on a candlestick, that they
which enter in may see the light.

8:17 For nothing is secret, that shall not be made manifest; neither
any thing hid, that shall not be known and come abroad.

8:18 Take heed therefore how ye hear: for whosoever hath, to him shall
be given; and whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken even that
which he seemeth to have.

8:19 Then came to him his mother and his brethren, and could not come
at him for the press.

8:20 And it was told him by certain which said, Thy mother and thy
brethren stand without, desiring to see thee.

8:21 And he answered and said unto them, My mother and my brethren are
these which hear the word of God, and do it.

8:22 Now it came to pass on a certain day, that he went into a ship
with his disciples: and he said unto them, Let us go over unto the
other side of the lake. And they launched forth.

8:23 But as they sailed he fell asleep: and there came down a storm of
wind on the lake; and they were filled with water, and were in
jeopardy.

8:24 And they came to him, and awoke him, saying, Master, master, we
perish. Then he arose, and rebuked the wind and the raging of the
water: and they ceased, and there was a calm.

8:25 And he said unto them, Where is your faith? And they being afraid
wondered, saying one to another, What manner of man is this! for he
commandeth even the winds and water, and they obey him.

8:26 And they arrived at the country of the Gadarenes, which is over
against Galilee.

8:27 And when he went forth to land, there met him out of the city a
certain man, which had devils long time, and ware no clothes, neither
abode in any house, but in the tombs.

8:28 When he saw Jesus, he cried out, and fell down before him, and
with a loud voice said, What have I to do with thee, Jesus, thou Son
of God most high? I beseech thee, torment me not.

8:29 (For he had commanded the unclean spirit to come out of the man.
For oftentimes it had caught him: and he was kept bound with chains
and in fetters; and he brake the bands, and was driven of the devil
into the wilderness.)  8:30 And Jesus asked him, saying, What is thy
name? And he said, Legion: because many devils were entered into him.

8:31 And they besought him that he would not command them to go out
into the deep.

8:32 And there was there an herd of many swine feeding on the
mountain: and they besought him that he would suffer them to enter
into them. And he suffered them.

8:33 Then went the devils out of the man, and entered into the swine:
and the herd ran violently down a steep place into the lake, and were
choked.

8:34 When they that fed them saw what was done, they fled, and went
and told it in the city and in the country.

8:35 Then they went out to see what was done; and came to Jesus, and
found the man, out of whom the devils were departed, sitting at the
feet of Jesus, clothed, and in his right mind: and they were afraid.

8:36 They also which saw it told them by what means he that was
possessed of the devils was healed.

8:37 Then the whole multitude of the country of the Gadarenes round
about besought him to depart from them; for they were taken with great
fear: and he went up into the ship, and returned back again.

8:38 Now the man out of whom the devils were departed besought him
that he might be with him: but Jesus sent him away, saying, 8:39
Return to thine own house, and shew how great things God hath done
unto thee. And he went his way, and published throughout the whole
city how great things Jesus had done unto him.

8:40 And it came to pass, that, when Jesus was returned, the people
gladly received him: for they were all waiting for him.

8:41 And, behold, there came a man named Jairus, and he was a ruler of
the synagogue: and he fell down at Jesus' feet, and besought him that
he would come into his house: 8:42 For he had one only daughter, about
twelve years of age, and she lay a dying. But as he went the people
thronged him.

8:43 And a woman having an issue of blood twelve years, which had
spent all her living upon physicians, neither could be healed of any,
8:44 Came behind him, and touched the border of his garment: and
immediately her issue of blood stanched.

8:45 And Jesus said, Who touched me? When all denied, Peter and they
that were with him said, Master, the multitude throng thee and press
thee, and sayest thou, Who touched me?  8:46 And Jesus said, Somebody
hath touched me: for I perceive that virtue is gone out of me.

8:47 And when the woman saw that she was not hid, she came trembling,
and falling down before him, she declared unto him before all the
people for what cause she had touched him, and how she was healed
immediately.

8:48 And he said unto her, Daughter, be of good comfort: thy faith
hath made thee whole; go in peace.

8:49 While he yet spake, there cometh one from the ruler of the
synagogue's house, saying to him, Thy daughter is dead; trouble not
the Master.

8:50 But when Jesus heard it, he answered him, saying, Fear not:
believe only, and she shall be made whole.

8:51 And when he came into the house, he suffered no man to go in,
save Peter, and James, and John, and the father and the mother of the
maiden.

8:52 And all wept, and bewailed her: but he said, Weep not; she is not
dead, but sleepeth.

8:53 And they laughed him to scorn, knowing that she was dead.

8:54 And he put them all out, and took her by the hand, and called,
saying, Maid, arise.

8:55 And her spirit came again, and she arose straightway: and he
commanded to give her meat.

8:56 And her parents were astonished: but he charged them that they
should tell no man what was done.

9:1 Then he called his twelve disciples together, and gave them power
and authority over all devils, and to cure diseases.

9:2 And he sent them to preach the kingdom of God, and to heal the
sick.

9:3 And he said unto them, Take nothing for your journey, neither
staves, nor scrip, neither bread, neither money; neither have two
coats apiece.

9:4 And whatsoever house ye enter into, there abide, and thence
depart.

9:5 And whosoever will not receive you, when ye go out of that city,
shake off the very dust from your feet for a testimony against them.

9:6 And they departed, and went through the towns, preaching the
gospel, and healing every where.

9:7 Now Herod the tetrarch heard of all that was done by him: and he
was perplexed, because that it was said of some, that John was risen
from the dead; 9:8 And of some, that Elias had appeared; and of
others, that one of the old prophets was risen again.

9:9 And Herod said, John have I beheaded: but who is this, of whom I
hear such things? And he desired to see him.

9:10 And the apostles, when they were returned, told him all that they
had done. And he took them, and went aside privately into a desert
place belonging to the city called Bethsaida.

9:11 And the people, when they knew it, followed him: and he received
them, and spake unto them of the kingdom of God, and healed them that
had need of healing.

9:12 And when the day began to wear away, then came the twelve, and
said unto him, Send the multitude away, that they may go into the
towns and country round about, and lodge, and get victuals: for we are
here in a desert place.

9:13 But he said unto them, Give ye them to eat. And they said, We
have no more but five loaves and two fishes; except we should go and
buy meat for all this people.

9:14 For they were about five thousand men. And he said to his
disciples, Make them sit down by fifties in a company.

9:15 And they did so, and made them all sit down.

9:16 Then he took the five loaves and the two fishes, and looking up
to heaven, he blessed them, and brake, and gave to the disciples to
set before the multitude.

9:17 And they did eat, and were all filled: and there was taken up of
fragments that remained to them twelve baskets.

9:18 And it came to pass, as he was alone praying, his disciples were
with him: and he asked them, saying, Whom say the people that I am?
9:19 They answering said, John the Baptist; but some say, Elias; and
others say, that one of the old prophets is risen again.

9:20 He said unto them, But whom say ye that I am? Peter answering
said, The Christ of God.

9:21 And he straitly charged them, and commanded them to tell no man
that thing; 9:22 Saying, The Son of man must suffer many things, and
be rejected of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be slain,
and be raised the third day.

9:23 And he said to them all, If any man will come after me, let him
deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me.

9:24 For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: but whosoever
will lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it.

9:25 For what is a man advantaged, if he gain the whole world, and
lose himself, or be cast away?  9:26 For whosoever shall be ashamed of
me and of my words, of him shall the Son of man be ashamed, when he
shall come in his own glory, and in his Father's, and of the holy
angels.

9:27 But I tell you of a truth, there be some standing here, which
shall not taste of death, till they see the kingdom of God.

9:28 And it came to pass about an eight days after these sayings, he
took Peter and John and James, and went up into a mountain to pray.

9:29 And as he prayed, the fashion of his countenance was altered, and
his raiment was white and glistering.

9:30 And, behold, there talked with him two men, which were Moses and
Elias: 9:31 Who appeared in glory, and spake of his decease which he
should accomplish at Jerusalem.

9:32 But Peter and they that were with him were heavy with sleep: and
when they were awake, they saw his glory, and the two men that stood
with him.

9:33 And it came to pass, as they departed from him, Peter said unto
Jesus, Master, it is good for us to be here: and let us make three
tabernacles; one for thee, and one for Moses, and one for Elias: not
knowing what he said.

9:34 While he thus spake, there came a cloud, and overshadowed them:
and they feared as they entered into the cloud.

9:35 And there came a voice out of the cloud, saying, This is my
beloved Son: hear him.

9:36 And when the voice was past, Jesus was found alone. And they kept
it close, and told no man in those days any of those things which they
had seen.

9:37 And it came to pass, that on the next day, when they were come
down from the hill, much people met him.

9:38 And, behold, a man of the company cried out, saying, Master, I
beseech thee, look upon my son: for he is mine only child.

9:39 And, lo, a spirit taketh him, and he suddenly crieth out; and it
teareth him that he foameth again, and bruising him hardly departeth
from him.

9:40 And I besought thy disciples to cast him out; and they could not.

9:41 And Jesus answering said, O faithless and perverse generation,
how long shall I be with you, and suffer you? Bring thy son hither.

9:42 And as he was yet a coming, the devil threw him down, and tare
him.

And Jesus rebuked the unclean spirit, and healed the child, and
delivered him again to his father.

9:43 And they were all amazed at the mighty power of God. But while
they wondered every one at all things which Jesus did, he said unto
his disciples, 9:44 Let these sayings sink down into your ears: for
the Son of man shall be delivered into the hands of men.

9:45 But they understood not this saying, and it was hid from them,
that they perceived it not: and they feared to ask him of that saying.

9:46 Then there arose a reasoning among them, which of them should be
greatest.

9:47 And Jesus, perceiving the thought of their heart, took a child,
and set him by him, 9:48 And said unto them, Whosoever shall receive
this child in my name receiveth me: and whosoever shall receive me
receiveth him that sent me: for he that is least among you all, the
same shall be great.

9:49 And John answered and said, Master, we saw one casting out devils
in thy name; and we forbad him, because he followeth not with us.

9:50 And Jesus said unto him, Forbid him not: for he that is not
against us is for us.

9:51 And it came to pass, when the time was come that he should be
received up, he stedfastly set his face to go to Jerusalem, 9:52 And
sent messengers before his face: and they went, and entered into a
village of the Samaritans, to make ready for him.

9:53 And they did not receive him, because his face was as though he
would go to Jerusalem.

9:54 And when his disciples James and John saw this, they said, Lord,
wilt thou that we command fire to come down from heaven, and consume
them, even as Elias did?  9:55 But he turned, and rebuked them, and
said, Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of.

9:56 For the Son of man is not come to destroy men's lives, but to
save them. And they went to another village.

9:57 And it came to pass, that, as they went in the way, a certain man
said unto him, Lord, I will follow thee whithersoever thou goest.

9:58 And Jesus said unto him, Foxes have holes, and birds of the air
have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.

9:59 And he said unto another, Follow me. But he said, Lord, suffer me
first to go and bury my father.

9:60 Jesus said unto him, Let the dead bury their dead: but go thou
and preach the kingdom of God.

9:61 And another also said, Lord, I will follow thee; but let me first
go bid them farewell, which are at home at my house.

9:62 And Jesus said unto him, No man, having put his hand to the
plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.

10:1 After these things the LORD appointed other seventy also, and
sent them two and two before his face into every city and place,
whither he himself would come.

10:2 Therefore said he unto them, The harvest truly is great, but the
labourers are few: pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he
would send forth labourers into his harvest.

10:3 Go your ways: behold, I send you forth as lambs among wolves.

10:4 Carry neither purse, nor scrip, nor shoes: and salute no man by
the way.

10:5 And into whatsoever house ye enter, first say, Peace be to this
house.

10:6 And if the son of peace be there, your peace shall rest upon it:
if not, it shall turn to you again.

10:7 And in the same house remain, eating and drinking such things as
they give: for the labourer is worthy of his hire. Go not from house
to house.

10:8 And into whatsoever city ye enter, and they receive you, eat such
things as are set before you: 10:9 And heal the sick that are therein,
and say unto them, The kingdom of God is come nigh unto you.

10:10 But into whatsoever city ye enter, and they receive you not, go
your ways out into the streets of the same, and say, 10:11 Even the
very dust of your city, which cleaveth on us, we do wipe off against
you: notwithstanding be ye sure of this, that the kingdom of God is
come nigh unto you.

10:12 But I say unto you, that it shall be more tolerable in that day
for Sodom, than for that city.

10:13 Woe unto thee, Chorazin! woe unto thee, Bethsaida! for if the
mighty works had been done in Tyre and Sidon, which have been done in
you, they had a great while ago repented, sitting in sackcloth and
ashes.

10:14 But it shall be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon at the
judgment, than for you.

10:15 And thou, Capernaum, which art exalted to heaven, shalt be
thrust down to hell.

10:16 He that heareth you heareth me; and he that despiseth you
despiseth me; and he that despiseth me despiseth him that sent me.

10:17 And the seventy returned again with joy, saying, Lord, even the
devils are subject unto us through thy name.

10:18 And he said unto them, I beheld Satan as lightning fall from
heaven.

10:19 Behold, I give unto you power to tread on serpents and
scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy: and nothing shall by
any means hurt you.

10:20 Notwithstanding in this rejoice not, that the spirits are
subject unto you; but rather rejoice, because your names are written
in heaven.

10:21 In that hour Jesus rejoiced in spirit, and said, I thank thee, O
Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hid these things from
the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes: even so,
Father; for so it seemed good in thy sight.

10:22 All things are delivered to me of my Father: and no man knoweth
who the Son is, but the Father; and who the Father is, but the Son,
and he to whom the Son will reveal him.

10:23 And he turned him unto his disciples, and said privately,
Blessed are the eyes which see the things that ye see: 10:24 For I
tell you, that many prophets and kings have desired to see those
things which ye see, and have not seen them; and to hear those things
which ye hear, and have not heard them.

10:25 And, behold, a certain lawyer stood up, and tempted him, saying,
Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?  10:26 He said unto
him, What is written in the law? how readest thou?  10:27 And he
answering said, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart,
and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy
mind; and thy neighbour as thyself.

10:28 And he said unto him, Thou hast answered right: this do, and
thou shalt live.

10:29 But he, willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And who is
my neighbour?  10:30 And Jesus answering said, A certain man went down
from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, which stripped him
of his raiment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead.

10:31 And by chance there came down a certain priest that way: and
when he saw him, he passed by on the other side.

10:32 And likewise a Levite, when he was at the place, came and looked
on him, and passed by on the other side.

10:33 But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was: and
when he saw him, he had compassion on him, 10:34 And went to him, and
bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own
beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him.

10:35 And on the morrow when he departed, he took out two pence, and
gave them to the host, and said unto him, Take care of him; and
whatsoever thou spendest more, when I come again, I will repay thee.

10:36 Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him
that fell among the thieves?  10:37 And he said, He that shewed mercy
on him. Then said Jesus unto him, Go, and do thou likewise.

10:38 Now it came to pass, as they went, that he entered into a
certain village: and a certain woman named Martha received him into
her house.

10:39 And she had a sister called Mary, which also sat at Jesus' feet,
and heard his word.

10:40 But Martha was cumbered about much serving, and came to him, and
said, Lord, dost thou not care that my sister hath left me to serve
alone?  bid her therefore that she help me.

10:41 And Jesus answered and said unto her, Martha, Martha, thou art
careful and troubled about many things: 10:42 But one thing is
needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken
away from her.

11:1 And it came to pass, that, as he was praying in a certain place,
when he ceased, one of his disciples said unto him, Lord, teach us to
pray, as John also taught his disciples.

11:2 And he said unto them, When ye pray, say, Our Father which art in
heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, as
in heaven, so in earth.

11:3 Give us day by day our daily bread.

11:4 And forgive us our sins; for we also forgive every one that is
indebted to us. And lead us not into temptation; but deliver us from
evil.

11:5 And he said unto them, Which of you shall have a friend, and
shall go unto him at midnight, and say unto him, Friend, lend me three
loaves; 11:6 For a friend of mine in his journey is come to me, and I
have nothing to set before him?  11:7 And he from within shall answer
and say, Trouble me not: the door is now shut, and my children are
with me in bed; I cannot rise and give thee.

11:8 I say unto you, Though he will not rise and give him, because he
is his friend, yet because of his importunity he will rise and give
him as many as he needeth.

11:9 And I say unto you, Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye
shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.

11:10 For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh
findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.

11:11 If a son shall ask bread of any of you that is a father, will he
give him a stone? or if he ask a fish, will he for a fish give him a
serpent?  11:12 Or if he shall ask an egg, will he offer him a
scorpion?  11:13 If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts
unto your children: how much more shall your heavenly Father give the
Holy Spirit to them that ask him?  11:14 And he was casting out a
devil, and it was dumb. And it came to pass, when the devil was gone
out, the dumb spake; and the people wondered.

11:15 But some of them said, He casteth out devils through Beelzebub
the chief of the devils.

11:16 And others, tempting him, sought of him a sign from heaven.

11:17 But he, knowing their thoughts, said unto them, Every kingdom
divided against itself is brought to desolation; and a house divided
against a house falleth.

11:18 If Satan also be divided against himself, how shall his kingdom
stand? because ye say that I cast out devils through Beelzebub.

11:19 And if I by Beelzebub cast out devils, by whom do your sons cast
them out? therefore shall they be your judges.

11:20 But if I with the finger of God cast out devils, no doubt the
kingdom of God is come upon you.

11:21 When a strong man armed keepeth his palace, his goods are in
peace: 11:22 But when a stronger than he shall come upon him, and
overcome him, he taketh from him all his armour wherein he trusted,
and divideth his spoils.

11:23 He that is not with me is against me: and he that gathereth not
with me scattereth.

11:24 When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through
dry places, seeking rest; and finding none, he saith, I will return
unto my house whence I came out.

11:25 And when he cometh, he findeth it swept and garnished.

11:26 Then goeth he, and taketh to him seven other spirits more wicked
than himself; and they enter in, and dwell there: and the last state
of that man is worse than the first.

11:27 And it came to pass, as he spake these things, a certain woman
of the company lifted up her voice, and said unto him, Blessed is the
womb that bare thee, and the paps which thou hast sucked.

11:28 But he said, Yea rather, blessed are they that hear the word of
God, and keep it.

11:29 And when the people were gathered thick together, he began to
say, This is an evil generation: they seek a sign; and there shall no
sign be given it, but the sign of Jonas the prophet.

11:30 For as Jonas was a sign unto the Ninevites, so shall also the
Son of man be to this generation.

11:31 The queen of the south shall rise up in the judgment with the
men of this generation, and condemn them: for she came from the utmost
parts of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon; and, behold, a
greater than Solomon is here.

11:32 The men of Nineve shall rise up in the judgment with this
generation, and shall condemn it: for they repented at the preaching
of Jonas; and, behold, a greater than Jonas is here.

11:33 No man, when he hath lighted a candle, putteth it in a secret
place, neither under a bushel, but on a candlestick, that they which
come in may see the light.

11:34 The light of the body is the eye: therefore when thine eye is
single, thy whole body also is full of light; but when thine eye is
evil, thy body also is full of darkness.

11:35 Take heed therefore that the light which is in thee be not
darkness.

11:36 If thy whole body therefore be full of light, having no part
dark, the whole shall be full of light, as when the bright shining of
a candle doth give thee light.

11:37 And as he spake, a certain Pharisee besought him to dine with
him: and he went in, and sat down to meat.

11:38 And when the Pharisee saw it, he marvelled that he had not first
washed before dinner.

11:39 And the Lord said unto him, Now do ye Pharisees make clean the
outside of the cup and the platter; but your inward part is full of
ravening and wickedness.

11:40 Ye fools, did not he that made that which is without make that
which is within also?  11:41 But rather give alms of such things as ye
have; and, behold, all things are clean unto you.

11:42 But woe unto you, Pharisees! for ye tithe mint and rue and all
manner of herbs, and pass over judgment and the love of God: these
ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone.

11:43 Woe unto you, Pharisees! for ye love the uppermost seats in the
synagogues, and greetings in the markets.

11:44 Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are as
graves which appear not, and the men that walk over them are not aware
of them.

11:45 Then answered one of the lawyers, and said unto him, Master,
thus saying thou reproachest us also.

11:46 And he said, Woe unto you also, ye lawyers! for ye lade men with
burdens grievous to be borne, and ye yourselves touch not the burdens
with one of your fingers.

11:47 Woe unto you! for ye build the sepulchres of the prophets, and
your fathers killed them.

11:48 Truly ye bear witness that ye allow the deeds of your fathers:
for they indeed killed them, and ye build their sepulchres.

11:49 Therefore also said the wisdom of God, I will send them prophets
and apostles, and some of them they shall slay and persecute: 11:50
That the blood of all the prophets, which was shed from the foundation
of the world, may be required of this generation; 11:51 From the blood
of Abel unto the blood of Zacharias which perished between the altar
and the temple: verily I say unto you, It shall be required of this
generation.

11:52 Woe unto you, lawyers! for ye have taken away the key of
knowledge: ye entered not in yourselves, and them that were entering
in ye hindered.

11:53 And as he said these things unto them, the scribes and the
Pharisees began to urge him vehemently, and to provoke him to speak of
many things: 11:54 Laying wait for him, and seeking to catch something
out of his mouth, that they might accuse him.

12:1 In the mean time, when there were gathered together an
innumerable multitude of people, insomuch that they trode one upon
another, he began to say unto his disciples first of all, Beware ye of
the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy.

12:2 For there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; neither
hid, that shall not be known.

12:3 Therefore whatsoever ye have spoken in darkness shall be heard in
the light; and that which ye have spoken in the ear in closets shall
be proclaimed upon the housetops.

12:4 And I say unto you my friends, Be not afraid of them that kill
the body, and after that have no more that they can do.

12:5 But I will forewarn you whom ye shall fear: Fear him, which after
he hath killed hath power to cast into hell; yea, I say unto you, Fear
him.

12:6 Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings, and not one of them
is forgotten before God?  12:7 But even the very hairs of your head
are all numbered. Fear not therefore: ye are of more value than many
sparrows.

12:8 Also I say unto you, Whosoever shall confess me before men, him
shall the Son of man also confess before the angels of God: 12:9 But
he that denieth me before men shall be denied before the angels of
God.

12:10 And whosoever shall speak a word against the Son of man, it
shall be forgiven him: but unto him that blasphemeth against the Holy
Ghost it shall not be forgiven.

12:11 And when they bring you unto the synagogues, and unto
magistrates, and powers, take ye no thought how or what thing ye shall
answer, or what ye shall say: 12:12 For the Holy Ghost shall teach you
in the same hour what ye ought to say.

12:13 And one of the company said unto him, Master, speak to my
brother, that he divide the inheritance with me.

12:14 And he said unto him, Man, who made me a judge or a divider over
you?  12:15 And he said unto them, Take heed, and beware of
covetousness: for a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the
things which he possesseth.

12:16 And he spake a parable unto them, saying, The ground of a
certain rich man brought forth plentifully: 12:17 And he thought
within himself, saying, What shall I do, because I have no room where
to bestow my fruits?  12:18 And he said, This will I do: I will pull
down my barns, and build greater; and there will I bestow all my
fruits and my goods.

12:19 And I will say to my soul, Soul, thou hast much goods laid up
for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry.

12:20 But God said unto him, Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be
required of thee: then whose shall those things be, which thou hast
provided?  12:21 So is he that layeth up treasure for himself, and is
not rich toward God.

12:22 And he said unto his disciples, Therefore I say unto you, Take
no thought for your life, what ye shall eat; neither for the body,
what ye shall put on.

12:23 The life is more than meat, and the body is more than raiment.

12:24 Consider the ravens: for they neither sow nor reap; which
neither have storehouse nor barn; and God feedeth them: how much more
are ye better than the fowls?  12:25 And which of you with taking
thought can add to his stature one cubit?  12:26 If ye then be not
able to do that thing which is least, why take ye thought for the
rest?  12:27 Consider the lilies how they grow: they toil not, they
spin not; and yet I say unto you, that Solomon in all his glory was
not arrayed like one of these.

12:28 If then God so clothe the grass, which is to day in the field,
and to morrow is cast into the oven; how much more will he clothe you,
O ye of little faith?  12:29 And seek not ye what ye shall eat, or
what ye shall drink, neither be ye of doubtful mind.

12:30 For all these things do the nations of the world seek after: and
your Father knoweth that ye have need of these things.

12:31 But rather seek ye the kingdom of God; and all these things
shall be added unto you.

12:32 Fear not, little flock; for it is your Father's good pleasure to
give you the kingdom.

12:33 Sell that ye have, and give alms; provide yourselves bags which
wax not old, a treasure in the heavens that faileth not, where no
thief approacheth, neither moth corrupteth.

12:34 For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

12:35 Let your loins be girded about, and your lights burning; 12:36
And ye yourselves like unto men that wait for their lord, when he will
return from the wedding; that when he cometh and knocketh, they may
open unto him immediately.

12:37 Blessed are those servants, whom the lord when he cometh shall
find watching: verily I say unto you, that he shall gird himself, and
make them to sit down to meat, and will come forth and serve them.

12:38 And if he shall come in the second watch, or come in the third
watch, and find them so, blessed are those servants.

12:39 And this know, that if the goodman of the house had known what
hour the thief would come, he would have watched, and not have
suffered his house to be broken through.

12:40 Be ye therefore ready also: for the Son of man cometh at an hour
when ye think not.

12:41 Then Peter said unto him, Lord, speakest thou this parable unto
us, or even to all?  12:42 And the Lord said, Who then is that
faithful and wise steward, whom his lord shall make ruler over his
household, to give them their portion of meat in due season?  12:43
Blessed is that servant, whom his lord when he cometh shall find so
doing.

12:44 Of a truth I say unto you, that he will make him ruler over all
that he hath.

12:45 But and if that servant say in his heart, My lord delayeth his
coming; and shall begin to beat the menservants and maidens, and to
eat and drink, and to be drunken; 12:46 The lord of that servant will
come in a day when he looketh not for him, and at an hour when he is
not aware, and will cut him in sunder, and will appoint him his
portion with the unbelievers.

12:47 And that servant, which knew his lord's will, and prepared not
himself, neither did according to his will, shall be beaten with many
stripes.

12:48 But he that knew not, and did commit things worthy of stripes,
shall be beaten with few stripes. For unto whomsoever much is given,
of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of
him they will ask the more.

12:49 I am come to send fire on the earth; and what will I, if it be
already kindled?  12:50 But I have a baptism to be baptized with; and
how am I straitened till it be accomplished!  12:51 Suppose ye that I
am come to give peace on earth? I tell you, Nay; but rather division:
12:52 For from henceforth there shall be five in one house divided,
three against two, and two against three.

12:53 The father shall be divided against the son, and the son against
the father; the mother against the daughter, and the daughter against
the mother; the mother in law against her daughter in law, and the
daughter in law against her mother in law.

12:54 And he said also to the people, When ye see a cloud rise out of
the west, straightway ye say, There cometh a shower; and so it is.

12:55 And when ye see the south wind blow, ye say, There will be heat;
and it cometh to pass.

12:56 Ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky and of the
earth; but how is it that ye do not discern this time?  12:57 Yea, and
why even of yourselves judge ye not what is right?  12:58 When thou
goest with thine adversary to the magistrate, as thou art in the way,
give diligence that thou mayest be delivered from him; lest he hale
thee to the judge, and the judge deliver thee to the officer, and the
officer cast thee into prison.

12:59 I tell thee, thou shalt not depart thence, till thou hast paid
the very last mite.

13:1 There were present at that season some that told him of the
Galilaeans, whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices.

13:2 And Jesus answering said unto them, Suppose ye that these
Galilaeans were sinners above all the Galilaeans, because they
suffered such things?  13:3 I tell you, Nay: but, except ye repent, ye
shall all likewise perish.

13:4 Or those eighteen, upon whom the tower in Siloam fell, and slew
them, think ye that they were sinners above all men that dwelt in
Jerusalem?  13:5 I tell you, Nay: but, except ye repent, ye shall all
likewise perish.

13:6 He spake also this parable; A certain man had a fig tree planted
in his vineyard; and he came and sought fruit thereon, and found none.

13:7 Then said he unto the dresser of his vineyard, Behold, these
three years I come seeking fruit on this fig tree, and find none: cut
it down; why cumbereth it the ground?  13:8 And he answering said unto
him, Lord, let it alone this year also, till I shall dig about it, and
dung it: 13:9 And if it bear fruit, well: and if not, then after that
thou shalt cut it down.

13:10 And he was teaching in one of the synagogues on the sabbath.

13:11 And, behold, there was a woman which had a spirit of infirmity
eighteen years, and was bowed together, and could in no wise lift up
herself.

13:12 And when Jesus saw her, he called her to him, and said unto her,
Woman, thou art loosed from thine infirmity.

13:13 And he laid his hands on her: and immediately she was made
straight, and glorified God.

13:14 And the ruler of the synagogue answered with indignation,
because that Jesus had healed on the sabbath day, and said unto the
people, There are six days in which men ought to work: in them
therefore come and be healed, and not on the sabbath day.

13:15 The Lord then answered him, and said, Thou hypocrite, doth not
each one of you on the sabbath loose his ox or his ass from the stall,
and lead him away to watering?  13:16 And ought not this woman, being
a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan hath bound, lo, these eighteen
years, be loosed from this bond on the sabbath day?  13:17 And when he
had said these things, all his adversaries were ashamed: and all the
people rejoiced for all the glorious things that were done by him.

13:18 Then said he, Unto what is the kingdom of God like? and
whereunto shall I resemble it?  13:19 It is like a grain of mustard
seed, which a man took, and cast into his garden; and it grew, and
waxed a great tree; and the fowls of the air lodged in the branches of
it.

13:20 And again he said, Whereunto shall I liken the kingdom of God?
13:21 It is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures
of meal, till the whole was leavened.

13:22 And he went through the cities and villages, teaching, and
journeying toward Jerusalem.

13:23 Then said one unto him, Lord, are there few that be saved? And
he said unto them, 13:24 Strive to enter in at the strait gate: for
many, I say unto you, will seek to enter in, and shall not be able.

13:25 When once the master of the house is risen up, and hath shut to
the door, and ye begin to stand without, and to knock at the door,
saying, Lord, Lord, open unto us; and he shall answer and say unto
you, I know you not whence ye are: 13:26 Then shall ye begin to say,
We have eaten and drunk in thy presence, and thou hast taught in our
streets.

13:27 But he shall say, I tell you, I know you not whence ye are;
depart from me, all ye workers of iniquity.

13:28 There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth, when ye shall see
Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, and all the prophets, in the kingdom of
God, and you yourselves thrust out.

13:29 And they shall come from the east, and from the west, and from
the north, and from the south, and shall sit down in the kingdom of
God.

13:30 And, behold, there are last which shall be first, and there are
first which shall be last.

13:31 The same day there came certain of the Pharisees, saying unto
him, Get thee out, and depart hence: for Herod will kill thee.

13:32 And he said unto them, Go ye, and tell that fox, Behold, I cast
out devils, and I do cures to day and to morrow, and the third day I
shall be perfected.

13:33 Nevertheless I must walk to day, and to morrow, and the day
following: for it cannot be that a prophet perish out of Jerusalem.

13:34 O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, which killest the prophets, and stonest
them that are sent unto thee; how often would I have gathered thy
children together, as a hen doth gather her brood under her wings, and
ye would not!  13:35 Behold, your house is left unto you desolate: and
verily I say unto you, Ye shall not see me, until the time come when
ye shall say, Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord.

14:1 And it came to pass, as he went into the house of one of the
chief Pharisees to eat bread on the sabbath day, that they watched
him.

14:2 And, behold, there was a certain man before him which had the
dropsy.

14:3 And Jesus answering spake unto the lawyers and Pharisees, saying,
Is it lawful to heal on the sabbath day?  14:4 And they held their
peace. And he took him, and healed him, and let him go; 14:5 And
answered them, saying, Which of you shall have an ass or an ox fallen
into a pit, and will not straightway pull him out on the sabbath day?
14:6 And they could not answer him again to these things.

14:7 And he put forth a parable to those which were bidden, when he
marked how they chose out the chief rooms; saying unto them.

14:8 When thou art bidden of any man to a wedding, sit not down in the
highest room; lest a more honourable man than thou be bidden of him;
14:9 And he that bade thee and him come and say to thee, Give this man
place; and thou begin with shame to take the lowest room.

14:10 But when thou art bidden, go and sit down in the lowest room;
that when he that bade thee cometh, he may say unto thee, Friend, go
up higher: then shalt thou have worship in the presence of them that
sit at meat with thee.

14:11 For whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that
humbleth himself shall be exalted.

14:12 Then said he also to him that bade him, When thou makest a
dinner or a supper, call not thy friends, nor thy brethren, neither
thy kinsmen, nor thy rich neighbours; lest they also bid thee again,
and a recompence be made thee.

14:13 But when thou makest a feast, call the poor, the maimed, the
lame, the blind: 14:14 And thou shalt be blessed; for they cannot
recompense thee: for thou shalt be recompensed at the resurrection of
the just.

14:15 And when one of them that sat at meat with him heard these
things, he said unto him, Blessed is he that shall eat bread in the
kingdom of God.

14:16 Then said he unto him, A certain man made a great supper, and
bade many: 14:17 And sent his servant at supper time to say to them
that were bidden, Come; for all things are now ready.

14:18 And they all with one consent began to make excuse. The first
said unto him, I have bought a piece of ground, and I must needs go
and see it: I pray thee have me excused.

14:19 And another said, I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I go to
prove them: I pray thee have me excused.

14:20 And another said, I have married a wife, and therefore I cannot
come.

14:21 So that servant came, and shewed his lord these things. Then the
master of the house being angry said to his servant, Go out quickly
into the streets and lanes of the city, and bring in hither the poor,
and the maimed, and the halt, and the blind.

14:22 And the servant said, Lord, it is done as thou hast commanded,
and yet there is room.

14:23 And the lord said unto the servant, Go out into the highways and
hedges, and compel them to come in, that my house may be filled.

14:24 For I say unto you, That none of those men which were bidden
shall taste of my supper.

14:25 And there went great multitudes with him: and he turned, and
said unto them, 14:26 If any man come to me, and hate not his father,
and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea,
and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.

14:27 And whosoever doth not bear his cross, and come after me, cannot
be my disciple.

14:28 For which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down
first, and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it?
14:29 Lest haply, after he hath laid the foundation, and is not able
to finish it, all that behold it begin to mock him, 14:30 Saying, This
man began to build, and was not able to finish.

14:31 Or what king, going to make war against another king, sitteth
not down first, and consulteth whether he be able with ten thousand to
meet him that cometh against him with twenty thousand?  14:32 Or else,
while the other is yet a great way off, he sendeth an ambassage, and
desireth conditions of peace.

14:33 So likewise, whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that
he hath, he cannot be my disciple.

14:34 Salt is good: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith
shall it be seasoned?  14:35 It is neither fit for the land, nor yet
for the dunghill; but men cast it out. He that hath ears to hear, let
him hear.

15:1 Then drew near unto him all the publicans and sinners for to hear
him.

15:2 And the Pharisees and scribes murmured, saying, This man
receiveth sinners, and eateth with them.

15:3 And he spake this parable unto them, saying, 15:4 What man of
you, having an hundred sheep, if he lose one of them, doth not leave
the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which is
lost, until he find it?  15:5 And when he hath found it, he layeth it
on his shoulders, rejoicing.

15:6 And when he cometh home, he calleth together his friends and
neighbours, saying unto them, Rejoice with me; for I have found my
sheep which was lost.

15:7 I say unto you, that likewise joy shall be in heaven over one
sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons,
which need no repentance.

15:8 Either what woman having ten pieces of silver, if she lose one
piece, doth not light a candle, and sweep the house, and seek
diligently till she find it?  15:9 And when she hath found it, she
calleth her friends and her neighbours together, saying, Rejoice with
me; for I have found the piece which I had lost.

15:10 Likewise, I say unto you, there is joy in the presence of the
angels of God over one sinner that repenteth.

15:11 And he said, A certain man had two sons: 15:12 And the younger
of them said to his father, Father, give me the portion of goods that
falleth to me. And he divided unto them his living.

15:13 And not many days after the younger son gathered all together,
and took his journey into a far country, and there wasted his
substance with riotous living.

15:14 And when he had spent all, there arose a mighty famine in that
land; and he began to be in want.

15:15 And he went and joined himself to a citizen of that country; and
he sent him into his fields to feed swine.

15:16 And he would fain have filled his belly with the husks that the
swine did eat: and no man gave unto him.

15:17 And when he came to himself, he said, How many hired servants of
my father's have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger!
15:18 I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father,
I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, 15:19 And am no more
worthy to be called thy son: make me as one of thy hired servants.

15:20 And he arose, and came to his father. But when he was yet a
great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and
fell on his neck, and kissed him.

15:21 And the son said unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven,
and in thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called thy son.

15:22 But the father said to his servants, Bring forth the best robe,
and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet:
15:23 And bring hither the fatted calf, and kill it; and let us eat,
and be merry: 15:24 For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he
was lost, and is found. And they began to be merry.

15:25 Now his elder son was in the field: and as he came and drew nigh
to the house, he heard musick and dancing.

15:26 And he called one of the servants, and asked what these things
meant.

15:27 And he said unto him, Thy brother is come; and thy father hath
killed the fatted calf, because he hath received him safe and sound.

15:28 And he was angry, and would not go in: therefore came his father
out, and intreated him.

15:29 And he answering said to his father, Lo, these many years do I
serve thee, neither transgressed I at any time thy commandment: and
yet thou never gavest me a kid, that I might make merry with my
friends: 15:30 But as soon as this thy son was come, which hath
devoured thy living with harlots, thou hast killed for him the fatted
calf.

15:31 And he said unto him, Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I
have is thine.

15:32 It was meet that we should make merry, and be glad: for this thy
brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found.

16:1 And he said also unto his disciples, There was a certain rich
man, which had a steward; and the same was accused unto him that he
had wasted his goods.

16:2 And he called him, and said unto him, How is it that I hear this
of thee? give an account of thy stewardship; for thou mayest be no
longer steward.

16:3 Then the steward said within himself, What shall I do? for my
lord taketh away from me the stewardship: I cannot dig; to beg I am
ashamed.

16:4 I am resolved what to do, that, when I am put out of the
stewardship, they may receive me into their houses.

16:5 So he called every one of his lord's debtors unto him, and said
unto the first, How much owest thou unto my lord?  16:6 And he said,
An hundred measures of oil. And he said unto him, Take thy bill, and
sit down quickly, and write fifty.

16:7 Then said he to another, And how much owest thou? And he said, An
hundred measures of wheat. And he said unto him, Take thy bill, and
write fourscore.

16:8 And the lord commended the unjust steward, because he had done
wisely: for the children of this world are in their generation wiser
than the children of light.

16:9 And I say unto you, Make to yourselves friends of the mammon of
unrighteousness; that, when ye fail, they may receive you into
everlasting habitations.

16:10 He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in
much: and he that is unjust in the least is unjust also in much.

16:11 If therefore ye have not been faithful in the unrighteous
mammon, who will commit to your trust the true riches?  16:12 And if
ye have not been faithful in that which is another man's, who shall
give you that which is your own?  16:13 No servant can serve two
masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else
he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God
and mammon.

16:14 And the Pharisees also, who were covetous, heard all these
things: and they derided him.

16:15 And he said unto them, Ye are they which justify yourselves
before men; but God knoweth your hearts: for that which is highly
esteemed among men is abomination in the sight of God.

16:16 The law and the prophets were until John: since that time the
kingdom of God is preached, and every man presseth into it.

16:17 And it is easier for heaven and earth to pass, than one tittle
of the law to fail.

16:18 Whosoever putteth away his wife, and marrieth another,
committeth adultery: and whosoever marrieth her that is put away from
her husband committeth adultery.

16:19 There was a certain rich man, which was clothed in purple and
fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day: 16:20 And there was a
certain beggar named Lazarus, which was laid at his gate, full of
sores, 16:21 And desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from
the rich man's table: moreover the dogs came and licked his sores.

16:22 And it came to pass, that the beggar died, and was carried by
the angels into Abraham's bosom: the rich man also died, and was
buried; 16:23 And in hell he lift up his eyes, being in torments, and
seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom.

16:24 And he cried and said, Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and
send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool
my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame.

16:25 But Abraham said, Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime
receivedst thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things: but now
he is comforted, and thou art tormented.

16:26 And beside all this, between us and you there is a great gulf
fixed: so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot; neither
can they pass to us, that would come from thence.

16:27 Then he said, I pray thee therefore, father, that thou wouldest
send him to my father's house: 16:28 For I have five brethren; that he
may testify unto them, lest they also come into this place of torment.

16:29 Abraham saith unto him, They have Moses and the prophets; let
them hear them.

16:30 And he said, Nay, father Abraham: but if one went unto them from
the dead, they will repent.

16:31 And he said unto him, If they hear not Moses and the prophets,
neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead.

17:1 Then said he unto the disciples, It is impossible but that
offences will come: but woe unto him, through whom they come!  17:2 It
were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and
he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little
ones.

17:3 Take heed to yourselves: If thy brother trespass against thee,
rebuke him; and if he repent, forgive him.

17:4 And if he trespass against thee seven times in a day, and seven
times in a day turn again to thee, saying, I repent; thou shalt
forgive him.

17:5 And the apostles said unto the Lord, Increase our faith.

17:6 And the Lord said, If ye had faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye
might say unto this sycamine tree, Be thou plucked up by the root, and
be thou planted in the sea; and it should obey you.

17:7 But which of you, having a servant plowing or feeding cattle,
will say unto him by and by, when he is come from the field, Go and
sit down to meat?  17:8 And will not rather say unto him, Make ready
wherewith I may sup, and gird thyself, and serve me, till I have eaten
and drunken; and afterward thou shalt eat and drink?  17:9 Doth he
thank that servant because he did the things that were commanded him?
I trow not.

17:10 So likewise ye, when ye shall have done all those things which
are commanded you, say, We are unprofitable servants: we have done
that which was our duty to do.

17:11 And it came to pass, as he went to Jerusalem, that he passed
through the midst of Samaria and Galilee.

17:12 And as he entered into a certain village, there met him ten men
that were lepers, which stood afar off: 17:13 And they lifted up their
voices, and said, Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.

17:14 And when he saw them, he said unto them, Go shew yourselves unto
the priests. And it came to pass, that, as they went, they were
cleansed.

17:15 And one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back,
and with a loud voice glorified God, 17:16 And fell down on his face
at his feet, giving him thanks: and he was a Samaritan.

17:17 And Jesus answering said, Were there not ten cleansed? but where
are the nine?  17:18 There are not found that returned to give glory
to God, save this stranger.

17:19 And he said unto him, Arise, go thy way: thy faith hath made
thee whole.

17:20 And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of
God should come, he answered them and said, The kingdom of God cometh
not with observation: 17:21 Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo
there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.

17:22 And he said unto the disciples, The days will come, when ye
shall desire to see one of the days of the Son of man, and ye shall
not see it.

17:23 And they shall say to you, See here; or, see there: go not after
them, nor follow them.

17:24 For as the lightning, that lighteneth out of the one part under
heaven, shineth unto the other part under heaven; so shall also the
Son of man be in his day.

17:25 But first must he suffer many things, and be rejected of this
generation.

17:26 And as it was in the days of Noe, so shall it be also in the
days of the Son of man.

17:27 They did eat, they drank, they married wives, they were given in
marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark, and the flood
came, and destroyed them all.

17:28 Likewise also as it was in the days of Lot; they did eat, they
drank, they bought, they sold, they planted, they builded; 17:29 But
the same day that Lot went out of Sodom it rained fire and brimstone
from heaven, and destroyed them all.

17:30 Even thus shall it be in the day when the Son of man is
revealed.

17:31 In that day, he which shall be upon the housetop, and his stuff
in the house, let him not come down to take it away: and he that is in
the field, let him likewise not return back.

17:32 Remember Lot's wife.

17:33 Whosoever shall seek to save his life shall lose it; and
whosoever shall lose his life shall preserve it.

17:34 I tell you, in that night there shall be two men in one bed; the
one shall be taken, and the other shall be left.

17:35 Two women shall be grinding together; the one shall be taken,
and the other left.

17:36 Two men shall be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the
other left.

17:37 And they answered and said unto him, Where, Lord? And he said
unto them, Wheresoever the body is, thither will the eagles be
gathered together.

18:1 And he spake a parable unto them to this end, that men ought
always to pray, and not to faint; 18:2 Saying, There was in a city a
judge, which feared not God, neither regarded man: 18:3 And there was
a widow in that city; and she came unto him, saying, Avenge me of mine
adversary.

18:4 And he would not for a while: but afterward he said within
himself, Though I fear not God, nor regard man; 18:5 Yet because this
widow troubleth me, I will avenge her, lest by her continual coming
she weary me.

18:6 And the Lord said, Hear what the unjust judge saith.

18:7 And shall not God avenge his own elect, which cry day and night
unto him, though he bear long with them?  18:8 I tell you that he will
avenge them speedily. Nevertheless when the Son of man cometh, shall
he find faith on the earth?  18:9 And he spake this parable unto
certain which trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and
despised others: 18:10 Two men went up into the temple to pray; the
one a Pharisee, and the other a publican.

18:11 The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, God, I thank
thee, that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust,
adulterers, or even as this publican.

18:12 I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of all that I possess.

18:13 And the publican, standing afar off, would not lift up so much
as his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, God be
merciful to me a sinner.

18:14 I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather
than the other: for every one that exalteth himself shall be abased;
and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.

18:15 And they brought unto him also infants, that he would touch
them: but when his disciples saw it, they rebuked them.

18:16 But Jesus called them unto him, and said, Suffer little children
to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of
God.

18:17 Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom
of God as a little child shall in no wise enter therein.

18:18 And a certain ruler asked him, saying, Good Master, what shall I
do to inherit eternal life?  18:19 And Jesus said unto him, Why
callest thou me good? none is good, save one, that is, God.

18:20 Thou knowest the commandments, Do not commit adultery, Do not
kill, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Honour thy father and
thy mother.

18:21 And he said, All these have I kept from my youth up.

18:22 Now when Jesus heard these things, he said unto him, Yet lackest
thou one thing: sell all that thou hast, and distribute unto the poor,
and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, follow me.

18:23 And when he heard this, he was very sorrowful: for he was very
rich.

18:24 And when Jesus saw that he was very sorrowful, he said, How
hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God!
18:25 For it is easier for a camel to go through a needle's eye, than
for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.

18:26 And they that heard it said, Who then can be saved?  18:27 And
he said, The things which are impossible with men are possible with
God.

18:28 Then Peter said, Lo, we have left all, and followed thee.

18:29 And he said unto them, Verily I say unto you, There is no man
that hath left house, or parents, or brethren, or wife, or children,
for the kingdom of God's sake, 18:30 Who shall not receive manifold
more in this present time, and in the world to come life everlasting.

18:31 Then he took unto him the twelve, and said unto them, Behold, we
go up to Jerusalem, and all things that are written by the prophets
concerning the Son of man shall be accomplished.

18:32 For he shall be delivered unto the Gentiles, and shall be
mocked, and spitefully entreated, and spitted on: 18:33 And they shall
scourge him, and put him to death: and the third day he shall rise
again.

18:34 And they understood none of these things: and this saying was
hid from them, neither knew they the things which were spoken.

18:35 And it came to pass, that as he was come nigh unto Jericho, a
certain blind man sat by the way side begging: 18:36 And hearing the
multitude pass by, he asked what it meant.

18:37 And they told him, that Jesus of Nazareth passeth by.

18:38 And he cried, saying, Jesus, thou son of David, have mercy on
me.

18:39 And they which went before rebuked him, that he should hold his
peace: but he cried so much the more, Thou son of David, have mercy on
me.

18:40 And Jesus stood, and commanded him to be brought unto him: and
when he was come near, he asked him, 18:41 Saying, What wilt thou that
I shall do unto thee? And he said, Lord, that I may receive my sight.

18:42 And Jesus said unto him, Receive thy sight: thy faith hath saved
thee.

18:43 And immediately he received his sight, and followed him,
glorifying God: and all the people, when they saw it, gave praise unto
God.

19:1 And Jesus entered and passed through Jericho.

19:2 And, behold, there was a man named Zacchaeus, which was the chief
among the publicans, and he was rich.

19:3 And he sought to see Jesus who he was; and could not for the
press, because he was little of stature.

19:4 And he ran before, and climbed up into a sycomore tree to see
him: for he was to pass that way.

19:5 And when Jesus came to the place, he looked up, and saw him, and
said unto him, Zacchaeus, make haste, and come down; for to day I must
abide at thy house.

19:6 And he made haste, and came down, and received him joyfully.

19:7 And when they saw it, they all murmured, saying, That he was gone
to be guest with a man that is a sinner.

19:8 And Zacchaeus stood, and said unto the Lord: Behold, Lord, the
half of my goods I give to the poor; and if I have taken any thing
from any man by false accusation, I restore him fourfold.

19:9 And Jesus said unto him, This day is salvation come to this
house, forsomuch as he also is a son of Abraham.

19:10 For the Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was
lost.

19:11 And as they heard these things, he added and spake a parable,
because he was nigh to Jerusalem, and because they thought that the
kingdom of God should immediately appear.

19:12 He said therefore, A certain nobleman went into a far country to
receive for himself a kingdom, and to return.

19:13 And he called his ten servants, and delivered them ten pounds,
and said unto them, Occupy till I come.

19:14 But his citizens hated him, and sent a message after him,
saying, We will not have this man to reign over us.

19:15 And it came to pass, that when he was returned, having received
the kingdom, then he commanded these servants to be called unto him,
to whom he had given the money, that he might know how much every man
had gained by trading.

19:16 Then came the first, saying, Lord, thy pound hath gained ten
pounds.

19:17 And he said unto him, Well, thou good servant: because thou hast
been faithful in a very little, have thou authority over ten cities.

19:18 And the second came, saying, Lord, thy pound hath gained five
pounds.

19:19 And he said likewise to him, Be thou also over five cities.

19:20 And another came, saying, Lord, behold, here is thy pound, which
I have kept laid up in a napkin: 19:21 For I feared thee, because thou
art an austere man: thou takest up that thou layedst not down, and
reapest that thou didst not sow.

19:22 And he saith unto him, Out of thine own mouth will I judge thee,
thou wicked servant. Thou knewest that I was an austere man, taking up
that I laid not down, and reaping that I did not sow: 19:23 Wherefore
then gavest not thou my money into the bank, that at my coming I might
have required mine own with usury?  19:24 And he said unto them that
stood by, Take from him the pound, and give it to him that hath ten
pounds.

19:25 (And they said unto him, Lord, he hath ten pounds.)  19:26 For I
say unto you, That unto every one which hath shall be given; and from
him that hath not, even that he hath shall be taken away from him.

19:27 But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over
them, bring hither, and slay them before me.

19:28 And when he had thus spoken, he went before, ascending up to
Jerusalem.

19:29 And it came to pass, when he was come nigh to Bethphage and
Bethany, at the mount called the mount of Olives, he sent two of his
disciples, 19:30 Saying, Go ye into the village over against you; in
the which at your entering ye shall find a colt tied, whereon yet
never man sat: loose him, and bring him hither.

19:31 And if any man ask you, Why do ye loose him? thus shall ye say
unto him, Because the Lord hath need of him.

19:32 And they that were sent went their way, and found even as he had
said unto them.

19:33 And as they were loosing the colt, the owners thereof said unto
them, Why loose ye the colt?  19:34 And they said, The Lord hath need
of him.

19:35 And they brought him to Jesus: and they cast their garments upon
the colt, and they set Jesus thereon.

19:36 And as he went, they spread their clothes in the way.

19:37 And when he was come nigh, even now at the descent of the mount
of Olives, the whole multitude of the disciples began to rejoice and
praise God with a loud voice for all the mighty works that they had
seen; 19:38 Saying, Blessed be the King that cometh in the name of the
Lord: peace in heaven, and glory in the highest.

19:39 And some of the Pharisees from among the multitude said unto
him, Master, rebuke thy disciples.

19:40 And he answered and said unto them, I tell you that, if these
should hold their peace, the stones would immediately cry out.

19:41 And when he was come near, he beheld the city, and wept over it,
19:42 Saying, If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy
day, the things which belong unto thy peace! but now they are hid from
thine eyes.

19:43 For the days shall come upon thee, that thine enemies shall cast
a trench about thee, and compass thee round, and keep thee in on every
side, 19:44 And shall lay thee even with the ground, and thy children
within thee; and they shall not leave in thee one stone upon another;
because thou knewest not the time of thy visitation.

19:45 And he went into the temple, and began to cast out them that
sold therein, and them that bought; 19:46 Saying unto them, It is
written, My house is the house of prayer: but ye have made it a den of
thieves.

19:47 And he taught daily in the temple. But the chief priests and the
scribes and the chief of the people sought to destroy him, 19:48 And
could not find what they might do: for all the people were very
attentive to hear him.

20:1 And it came to pass, that on one of those days, as he taught the
people in the temple, and preached the gospel, the chief priests and
the scribes came upon him with the elders, 20:2 And spake unto him,
saying, Tell us, by what authority doest thou these things? or who is
he that gave thee this authority?  20:3 And he answered and said unto
them, I will also ask you one thing; and answer me: 20:4 The baptism
of John, was it from heaven, or of men?  20:5 And they reasoned with
themselves, saying, If we shall say, From heaven; he will say, Why
then believed ye him not?  20:6 But and if we say, Of men; all the
people will stone us: for they be persuaded that John was a prophet.

20:7 And they answered, that they could not tell whence it was.

20:8 And Jesus said unto them, Neither tell I you by what authority I
do these things.

20:9 Then began he to speak to the people this parable; A certain man
planted a vineyard, and let it forth to husbandmen, and went into a
far country for a long time.

20:10 And at the season he sent a servant to the husbandmen, that they
should give him of the fruit of the vineyard: but the husbandmen beat
him, and sent him away empty.

20:11 And again he sent another servant: and they beat him also, and
entreated him shamefully, and sent him away empty.

20:12 And again he sent a third: and they wounded him also, and cast
him out.

20:13 Then said the lord of the vineyard, What shall I do? I will send
my beloved son: it may be they will reverence him when they see him.

20:14 But when the husbandmen saw him, they reasoned among themselves,
saying, This is the heir: come, let us kill him, that the inheritance
may be ours.

20:15 So they cast him out of the vineyard, and killed him. What
therefore shall the lord of the vineyard do unto them?  20:16 He shall
come and destroy these husbandmen, and shall give the vineyard to
others. And when they heard it, they said, God forbid.

20:17 And he beheld them, and said, What is this then that is written,
The stone which the builders rejected, the same is become the head of
the corner?  20:18 Whosoever shall fall upon that stone shall be
broken; but on whomsoever it shall fall, it will grind him to powder.

20:19 And the chief priests and the scribes the same hour sought to
lay hands on him; and they feared the people: for they perceived that
he had spoken this parable against them.

20:20 And they watched him, and sent forth spies, which should feign
themselves just men, that they might take hold of his words, that so
they might deliver him unto the power and authority of the governor.

20:21 And they asked him, saying, Master, we know that thou sayest and
teachest rightly, neither acceptest thou the person of any, but
teachest the way of God truly: 20:22 Is it lawful for us to give
tribute unto Caesar, or no?  20:23 But he perceived their craftiness,
and said unto them, Why tempt ye me?  20:24 Shew me a penny. Whose
image and superscription hath it? They answered and said, Caesar's.

20:25 And he said unto them, Render therefore unto Caesar the things
which be Caesar's, and unto God the things which be God's.

20:26 And they could not take hold of his words before the people: and
they marvelled at his answer, and held their peace.

20:27 Then came to him certain of the Sadducees, which deny that there
is any resurrection; and they asked him, 20:28 Saying, Master, Moses
wrote unto us, If any man's brother die, having a wife, and he die
without children, that his brother should take his wife, and raise up
seed unto his brother.

20:29 There were therefore seven brethren: and the first took a wife,
and died without children.

20:30 And the second took her to wife, and he died childless.

20:31 And the third took her; and in like manner the seven also: and
they left no children, and died.

20:32 Last of all the woman died also.

20:33 Therefore in the resurrection whose wife of them is she? for
seven had her to wife.

20:34 And Jesus answering said unto them, The children of this world
marry, and are given in marriage: 20:35 But they which shall be
accounted worthy to obtain that world, and the resurrection from the
dead, neither marry, nor are given in marriage: 20:36 Neither can they
die any more: for they are equal unto the angels; and are the children
of God, being the children of the resurrection.

20:37 Now that the dead are raised, even Moses shewed at the bush,
when he calleth the Lord the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and
the God of Jacob.

20:38 For he is not a God of the dead, but of the living: for all live
unto him.

20:39 Then certain of the scribes answering said, Master, thou hast
well said.

20:40 And after that they durst not ask him any question at all.

20:41 And he said unto them, How say they that Christ is David's son?
20:42 And David himself saith in the book of Psalms, The LORD said
unto my Lord, Sit thou on my right hand, 20:43 Till I make thine
enemies thy footstool.

20:44 David therefore calleth him Lord, how is he then his son?  20:45
Then in the audience of all the people he said unto his disciples,
20:46 Beware of the scribes, which desire to walk in long robes, and
love greetings in the markets, and the highest seats in the
synagogues, and the chief rooms at feasts; 20:47 Which devour widows'
houses, and for a shew make long prayers: the same shall receive
greater damnation.

21:1 And he looked up, and saw the rich men casting their gifts into
the treasury.

21:2 And he saw also a certain poor widow casting in thither two
mites.

21:3 And he said, Of a truth I say unto you, that this poor widow hath
cast in more than they all: 21:4 For all these have of their abundance
cast in unto the offerings of God: but she of her penury hath cast in
all the living that she had.

21:5 And as some spake of the temple, how it was adorned with goodly
stones and gifts, he said, 21:6 As for these things which ye behold,
the days will come, in the which there shall not be left one stone
upon another, that shall not be thrown down.

21:7 And they asked him, saying, Master, but when shall these things
be?  and what sign will there be when these things shall come to pass?
21:8 And he said, Take heed that ye be not deceived: for many shall
come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and the time draweth near: go ye
not therefore after them.

21:9 But when ye shall hear of wars and commotions, be not terrified:
for these things must first come to pass; but the end is not by and
by.

21:10 Then said he unto them, Nation shall rise against nation, and
kingdom against kingdom: 21:11 And great earthquakes shall be in
divers places, and famines, and pestilences; and fearful sights and
great signs shall there be from heaven.

21:12 But before all these, they shall lay their hands on you, and
persecute you, delivering you up to the synagogues, and into prisons,
being brought before kings and rulers for my name's sake.

21:13 And it shall turn to you for a testimony.

21:14 Settle it therefore in your hearts, not to meditate before what
ye shall answer: 21:15 For I will give you a mouth and wisdom, which
all your adversaries shall not be able to gainsay nor resist.

21:16 And ye shall be betrayed both by parents, and brethren, and
kinsfolks, and friends; and some of you shall they cause to be put to
death.

21:17 And ye shall be hated of all men for my name's sake.

21:18 But there shall not an hair of your head perish.

21:19 In your patience possess ye your souls.

21:20 And when ye shall see Jerusalem compassed with armies, then know
that the desolation thereof is nigh.

21:21 Then let them which are in Judaea flee to the mountains; and let
them which are in the midst of it depart out; and let not them that
are in the countries enter thereinto.

21:22 For these be the days of vengeance, that all things which are
written may be fulfilled.

21:23 But woe unto them that are with child, and to them that give
suck, in those days! for there shall be great distress in the land,
and wrath upon this people.

21:24 And they shall fall by the edge of the sword, and shall be led
away captive into all nations: and Jerusalem shall be trodden down of
the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled.

21:25 And there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the
stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity; the
sea and the waves roaring; 21:26 Men's hearts failing them for fear,
and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth: for
the powers of heaven shall be shaken.

21:27 And then shall they see the Son of man coming in a cloud with
power and great glory.

21:28 And when these things begin to come to pass, then look up, and
lift up your heads; for your redemption draweth nigh.

21:29 And he spake to them a parable; Behold the fig tree, and all the
trees; 21:30 When they now shoot forth, ye see and know of your own
selves that summer is now nigh at hand.

21:31 So likewise ye, when ye see these things come to pass, know ye
that the kingdom of God is nigh at hand.

21:32 Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass away, till
all be fulfilled.

21:33 Heaven and earth shall pass away: but my words shall not pass
away.

21:34 And take heed to yourselves, lest at any time your hearts be
overcharged with surfeiting, and drunkenness, and cares of this life,
and so that day come upon you unawares.

21:35 For as a snare shall it come on all them that dwell on the face
of the whole earth.

21:36 Watch ye therefore, and pray always, that ye may be accounted
worthy to escape all these things that shall come to pass, and to
stand before the Son of man.

21:37 And in the day time he was teaching in the temple; and at night
he went out, and abode in the mount that is called the mount of
Olives.

21:38 And all the people came early in the morning to him in the
temple, for to hear him.

22:1 Now the feast of unleavened bread drew nigh, which is called the
Passover.

22:2 And the chief priests and scribes sought how they might kill him;
for they feared the people.

22:3 Then entered Satan into Judas surnamed Iscariot, being of the
number of the twelve.

22:4 And he went his way, and communed with the chief priests and
captains, how he might betray him unto them.

22:5 And they were glad, and covenanted to give him money.

22:6 And he promised, and sought opportunity to betray him unto them
in the absence of the multitude.

22:7 Then came the day of unleavened bread, when the passover must be
killed.

22:8 And he sent Peter and John, saying, Go and prepare us the
passover, that we may eat.

22:9 And they said unto him, Where wilt thou that we prepare?  22:10
And he said unto them, Behold, when ye are entered into the city,
there shall a man meet you, bearing a pitcher of water; follow him
into the house where he entereth in.

22:11 And ye shall say unto the goodman of the house, The Master saith
unto thee, Where is the guestchamber, where I shall eat the passover
with my disciples?  22:12 And he shall shew you a large upper room
furnished: there make ready.

22:13 And they went, and found as he had said unto them: and they made
ready the passover.

22:14 And when the hour was come, he sat down, and the twelve apostles
with him.

22:15 And he said unto them, With desire I have desired to eat this
passover with you before I suffer: 22:16 For I say unto you, I will
not any more eat thereof, until it be fulfilled in the kingdom of God.

22:17 And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and said, Take this, and
divide it among yourselves: 22:18 For I say unto you, I will not drink
of the fruit of the vine, until the kingdom of God shall come.

22:19 And he took bread, and gave thanks, and brake it, and gave unto
them, saying, This is my body which is given for you: this do in
remembrance of me.

22:20 Likewise also the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new
testament in my blood, which is shed for you.

22:21 But, behold, the hand of him that betrayeth me is with me on the
table.

22:22 And truly the Son of man goeth, as it was determined: but woe
unto that man by whom he is betrayed!  22:23 And they began to enquire
among themselves, which of them it was that should do this thing.

22:24 And there was also a strife among them, which of them should be
accounted the greatest.

22:25 And he said unto them, The kings of the Gentiles exercise
lordship over them; and they that exercise authority upon them are
called benefactors.

22:26 But ye shall not be so: but he that is greatest among you, let
him be as the younger; and he that is chief, as he that doth serve.

22:27 For whether is greater, he that sitteth at meat, or he that
serveth?  is not he that sitteth at meat? but I am among you as he
that serveth.

22:28 Ye are they which have continued with me in my temptations.

22:29 And I appoint unto you a kingdom, as my Father hath appointed
unto me; 22:30 That ye may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom,
and sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel.

22:31 And the Lord said, Simon, Simon, behold, Satan hath desired to
have you, that he may sift you as wheat: 22:32 But I have prayed for
thee, that thy faith fail not: and when thou art converted, strengthen
thy brethren.

22:33 And he said unto him, Lord, I am ready to go with thee, both
into prison, and to death.

22:34 And he said, I tell thee, Peter, the cock shall not crow this
day, before that thou shalt thrice deny that thou knowest me.

22:35 And he said unto them, When I sent you without purse, and scrip,
and shoes, lacked ye any thing? And they said, Nothing.

22:36 Then said he unto them, But now, he that hath a purse, let him
take it, and likewise his scrip: and he that hath no sword, let him
sell his garment, and buy one.

22:37 For I say unto you, that this that is written must yet be
accomplished in me, And he was reckoned among the transgressors: for
the things concerning me have an end.

22:38 And they said, Lord, behold, here are two swords. And he said
unto them, It is enough.

22:39 And he came out, and went, as he was wont, to the mount of
Olives; and his disciples also followed him.

22:40 And when he was at the place, he said unto them, Pray that ye
enter not into temptation.

22:41 And he was withdrawn from them about a stone's cast, and kneeled
down, and prayed, 22:42 Saying, Father, if thou be willing, remove
this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.

22:43 And there appeared an angel unto him from heaven, strengthening
him.

22:44 And being in an agony he prayed more earnestly: and his sweat
was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground.

22:45 And when he rose up from prayer, and was come to his disciples,
he found them sleeping for sorrow, 22:46 And said unto them, Why sleep
ye? rise and pray, lest ye enter into temptation.

22:47 And while he yet spake, behold a multitude, and he that was
called Judas, one of the twelve, went before them, and drew near unto
Jesus to kiss him.

22:48 But Jesus said unto him, Judas, betrayest thou the Son of man
with a kiss?  22:49 When they which were about him saw what would
follow, they said unto him, Lord, shall we smite with the sword?
22:50 And one of them smote the servant of the high priest, and cut
off his right ear.

22:51 And Jesus answered and said, Suffer ye thus far. And he touched
his ear, and healed him.

22:52 Then Jesus said unto the chief priests, and captains of the
temple, and the elders, which were come to him, Be ye come out, as
against a thief, with swords and staves?  22:53 When I was daily with
you in the temple, ye stretched forth no hands against me: but this is
your hour, and the power of darkness.

22:54 Then took they him, and led him, and brought him into the high
priest's house. And Peter followed afar off.

22:55 And when they had kindled a fire in the midst of the hall, and
were set down together, Peter sat down among them.

22:56 But a certain maid beheld him as he sat by the fire, and
earnestly looked upon him, and said, This man was also with him.

22:57 And he denied him, saying, Woman, I know him not.

22:58 And after a little while another saw him, and said, Thou art
also of them. And Peter said, Man, I am not.

22:59 And about the space of one hour after another confidently
affirmed, saying, Of a truth this fellow also was with him: for he is
a Galilaean.

22:60 And Peter said, Man, I know not what thou sayest. And
immediately, while he yet spake, the cock crew.

22:61 And the Lord turned, and looked upon Peter. And Peter remembered
the word of the Lord, how he had said unto him, Before the cock crow,
thou shalt deny me thrice.

22:62 And Peter went out, and wept bitterly.

22:63 And the men that held Jesus mocked him, and smote him.

22:64 And when they had blindfolded him, they struck him on the face,
and asked him, saying, Prophesy, who is it that smote thee?  22:65 And
many other things blasphemously spake they against him.

22:66 And as soon as it was day, the elders of the people and the
chief priests and the scribes came together, and led him into their
council, saying, 22:67 Art thou the Christ? tell us. And he said unto
them, If I tell you, ye will not believe: 22:68 And if I also ask you,
ye will not answer me, nor let me go.

22:69 Hereafter shall the Son of man sit on the right hand of the
power of God.

22:70 Then said they all, Art thou then the Son of God? And he said
unto them, Ye say that I am.

22:71 And they said, What need we any further witness? for we
ourselves have heard of his own mouth.

23:1 And the whole multitude of them arose, and led him unto Pilate.

23:2 And they began to accuse him, saying, We found this fellow
perverting the nation, and forbidding to give tribute to Caesar,
saying that he himself is Christ a King.

23:3 And Pilate asked him, saying, Art thou the King of the Jews? And
he answered him and said, Thou sayest it.

23:4 Then said Pilate to the chief priests and to the people, I find
no fault in this man.

23:5 And they were the more fierce, saying, He stirreth up the people,
teaching throughout all Jewry, beginning from Galilee to this place.

23:6 When Pilate heard of Galilee, he asked whether the man were a
Galilaean.

23:7 And as soon as he knew that he belonged unto Herod's
jurisdiction, he sent him to Herod, who himself also was at Jerusalem
at that time.

23:8 And when Herod saw Jesus, he was exceeding glad: for he was
desirous to see him of a long season, because he had heard many things
of him; and he hoped to have seen some miracle done by him.

23:9 Then he questioned with him in many words; but he answered him
nothing.

23:10 And the chief priests and scribes stood and vehemently accused
him.

23:11 And Herod with his men of war set him at nought, and mocked him,
and arrayed him in a gorgeous robe, and sent him again to Pilate.

23:12 And the same day Pilate and Herod were made friends together:
for before they were at enmity between themselves.

23:13 And Pilate, when he had called together the chief priests and
the rulers and the people, 23:14 Said unto them, Ye have brought this
man unto me, as one that perverteth the people: and, behold, I, having
examined him before you, have found no fault in this man touching
those things whereof ye accuse him: 23:15 No, nor yet Herod: for I
sent you to him; and, lo, nothing worthy of death is done unto him.

23:16 I will therefore chastise him, and release him.

23:17 (For of necessity he must release one unto them at the feast.)
23:18 And they cried out all at once, saying, Away with this man, and
release unto us Barabbas: 23:19 (Who for a certain sedition made in
the city, and for murder, was cast into prison.)  23:20 Pilate
therefore, willing to release Jesus, spake again to them.

23:21 But they cried, saying, Crucify him, crucify him.

23:22 And he said unto them the third time, Why, what evil hath he
done? I have found no cause of death in him: I will therefore chastise
him, and let him go.

23:23 And they were instant with loud voices, requiring that he might
be crucified. And the voices of them and of the chief priests
prevailed.

23:24 And Pilate gave sentence that it should be as they required.

23:25 And he released unto them him that for sedition and murder was
cast into prison, whom they had desired; but he delivered Jesus to
their will.

23:26 And as they led him away, they laid hold upon one Simon, a
Cyrenian, coming out of the country, and on him they laid the cross,
that he might bear it after Jesus.

23:27 And there followed him a great company of people, and of women,
which also bewailed and lamented him.

23:28 But Jesus turning unto them said, Daughters of Jerusalem, weep
not for me, but weep for yourselves, and for your children.

23:29 For, behold, the days are coming, in the which they shall say,
Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bare, and the paps
which never gave suck.

23:30 Then shall they begin to say to the mountains, Fall on us; and
to the hills, Cover us.

23:31 For if they do these things in a green tree, what shall be done
in the dry?  23:32 And there were also two other, malefactors, led
with him to be put to death.

23:33 And when they were come to the place, which is called Calvary,
there they crucified him, and the malefactors, one on the right hand,
and the other on the left.

23:34 Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they know not what
they do. And they parted his raiment, and cast lots.

23:35 And the people stood beholding. And the rulers also with them
derided him, saying, He saved others; let him save himself, if he be
Christ, the chosen of God.

23:36 And the soldiers also mocked him, coming to him, and offering
him vinegar, 23:37 And saying, If thou be the king of the Jews, save
thyself.

23:38 And a superscription also was written over him in letters of
Greek, and Latin, and Hebrew, THIS IS THE KING OF THE JEWS.

23:39 And one of the malefactors which were hanged railed on him,
saying, If thou be Christ, save thyself and us.

23:40 But the other answering rebuked him, saying, Dost not thou fear
God, seeing thou art in the same condemnation?  23:41 And we indeed
justly; for we receive the due reward of our deeds: but this man hath
done nothing amiss.

23:42 And he said unto Jesus, Lord, remember me when thou comest into
thy kingdom.

23:43 And Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, To day shalt
thou be with me in paradise.

23:44 And it was about the sixth hour, and there was a darkness over
all the earth until the ninth hour.

23:45 And the sun was darkened, and the veil of the temple was rent in
the midst.

23:46 And when Jesus had cried with a loud voice, he said, Father,
into thy hands I commend my spirit: and having said thus, he gave up
the ghost.

23:47 Now when the centurion saw what was done, he glorified God,
saying, Certainly this was a righteous man.

23:48 And all the people that came together to that sight, beholding
the things which were done, smote their breasts, and returned.

23:49 And all his acquaintance, and the women that followed him from
Galilee, stood afar off, beholding these things.

23:50 And, behold, there was a man named Joseph, a counsellor; and he
was a good man, and a just: 23:51 (The same had not consented to the
counsel and deed of them;) he was of Arimathaea, a city of the Jews:
who also himself waited for the kingdom of God.

23:52 This man went unto Pilate, and begged the body of Jesus.

23:53 And he took it down, and wrapped it in linen, and laid it in a
sepulchre that was hewn in stone, wherein never man before was laid.

23:54 And that day was the preparation, and the sabbath drew on.

23:55 And the women also, which came with him from Galilee, followed
after, and beheld the sepulchre, and how his body was laid.

23:56 And they returned, and prepared spices and ointments; and rested
the sabbath day according to the commandment.

24:1 Now upon the first day of the week, very early in the morning,
they came unto the sepulchre, bringing the spices which they had
prepared, and certain others with them.

24:2 And they found the stone rolled away from the sepulchre.

24:3 And they entered in, and found not the body of the Lord Jesus.

24:4 And it came to pass, as they were much perplexed thereabout,
behold, two men stood by them in shining garments: 24:5 And as they
were afraid, and bowed down their faces to the earth, they said unto
them, Why seek ye the living among the dead?  24:6 He is not here, but
is risen: remember how he spake unto you when he was yet in Galilee,
24:7 Saying, The Son of man must be delivered into the hands of sinful
men, and be crucified, and the third day rise again.

24:8 And they remembered his words, 24:9 And returned from the
sepulchre, and told all these things unto the eleven, and to all the
rest.

24:10 It was Mary Magdalene and Joanna, and Mary the mother of James,
and other women that were with them, which told these things unto the
apostles.

24:11 And their words seemed to them as idle tales, and they believed
them not.

24:12 Then arose Peter, and ran unto the sepulchre; and stooping down,
he beheld the linen clothes laid by themselves, and departed,
wondering in himself at that which was come to pass.

24:13 And, behold, two of them went that same day to a village called
Emmaus, which was from Jerusalem about threescore furlongs.

24:14 And they talked together of all these things which had happened.

24:15 And it came to pass, that, while they communed together and
reasoned, Jesus himself drew near, and went with them.

24:16 But their eyes were holden that they should not know him.

24:17 And he said unto them, What manner of communications are these
that ye have one to another, as ye walk, and are sad?  24:18 And the
one of them, whose name was Cleopas, answering said unto him, Art thou
only a stranger in Jerusalem, and hast not known the things which are
come to pass there in these days?  24:19 And he said unto them, What
things? And they said unto him, Concerning Jesus of Nazareth, which
was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people:
24:20 And how the chief priests and our rulers delivered him to be
condemned to death, and have crucified him.

24:21 But we trusted that it had been he which should have redeemed
Israel: and beside all this, to day is the third day since these
things were done.

24:22 Yea, and certain women also of our company made us astonished,
which were early at the sepulchre; 24:23 And when they found not his
body, they came, saying, that they had also seen a vision of angels,
which said that he was alive.

24:24 And certain of them which were with us went to the sepulchre,
and found it even so as the women had said: but him they saw not.

24:25 Then he said unto them, O fools, and slow of heart to believe
all that the prophets have spoken: 24:26 Ought not Christ to have
suffered these things, and to enter into his glory?  24:27 And
beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all
the scriptures the things concerning himself.

24:28 And they drew nigh unto the village, whither they went: and he
made as though he would have gone further.

24:29 But they constrained him, saying, Abide with us: for it is
toward evening, and the day is far spent. And he went in to tarry with
them.

24:30 And it came to pass, as he sat at meat with them, he took bread,
and blessed it, and brake, and gave to them.

24:31 And their eyes were opened, and they knew him; and he vanished
out of their sight.

24:32 And they said one to another, Did not our heart burn within us,
while he talked with us by the way, and while he opened to us the
scriptures?  24:33 And they rose up the same hour, and returned to
Jerusalem, and found the eleven gathered together, and them that were
with them, 24:34 Saying, The Lord is risen indeed, and hath appeared
to Simon.

24:35 And they told what things were done in the way, and how he was
known of them in breaking of bread.

24:36 And as they thus spake, Jesus himself stood in the midst of
them, and saith unto them, Peace be unto you.

24:37 But they were terrified and affrighted, and supposed that they
had seen a spirit.

24:38 And he said unto them, Why are ye troubled? and why do thoughts
arise in your hearts?  24:39 Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I
myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as
ye see me have.

24:40 And when he had thus spoken, he shewed them his hands and his
feet.

24:41 And while they yet believed not for joy, and wondered, he said
unto them, Have ye here any meat?  24:42 And they gave him a piece of
a broiled fish, and of an honeycomb.

24:43 And he took it, and did eat before them.

24:44 And he said unto them, These are the words which I spake unto
you, while I was yet with you, that all things must be fulfilled,
which were written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in
the psalms, concerning me.

24:45 Then opened he their understanding, that they might understand
the scriptures, 24:46 And said unto them, Thus it is written, and thus
it behoved Christ to suffer, and to rise from the dead the third day:
24:47 And that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in
his name among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem.

24:48 And ye are witnesses of these things.

24:49 And, behold, I send the promise of my Father upon you: but tarry
ye in the city of Jerusalem, until ye be endued with power from on
high.

24:50 And he led them out as far as to Bethany, and he lifted up his
hands, and blessed them.

24:51 And it came to pass, while he blessed them, he was parted from
them, and carried up into heaven.

24:52 And they worshipped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great
joy: 24:53 And were continually in the temple, praising and blessing
God. Amen.




The Gospel According to Saint John


1:1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the
Word was God.

1:2 The same was in the beginning with God.

1:3 All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing
made that was made.

1:4 In him was life; and the life was the light of men.

1:5 And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended
it not.

1:6 There was a man sent from God, whose name was John.

1:7 The same came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light, that
all men through him might believe.

1:8 He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light.

1:9 That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into
the world.

1:10 He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world
knew him not.

1:11 He came unto his own, and his own received him not.

1:12 But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the
sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: 1:13 Which were
born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of
man, but of God.

1:14 And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld
his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of
grace and truth.

1:15 John bare witness of him, and cried, saying, This was he of whom
I spake, He that cometh after me is preferred before me: for he was
before me.

1:16 And of his fulness have all we received, and grace for grace.

1:17 For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus
Christ.

1:18 No man hath seen God at any time, the only begotten Son, which is
in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.

1:19 And this is the record of John, when the Jews sent priests and
Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, Who art thou?  1:20 And he
confessed, and denied not; but confessed, I am not the Christ.

1:21 And they asked him, What then? Art thou Elias? And he saith, I am
not. Art thou that prophet? And he answered, No.

1:22 Then said they unto him, Who art thou? that we may give an answer
to them that sent us. What sayest thou of thyself?  1:23 He said, I am
the voice of one crying in the wilderness, Make straight the way of
the Lord, as said the prophet Esaias.

1:24 And they which were sent were of the Pharisees.

1:25 And they asked him, and said unto him, Why baptizest thou then,
if thou be not that Christ, nor Elias, neither that prophet?  1:26
John answered them, saying, I baptize with water: but there standeth
one among you, whom ye know not; 1:27 He it is, who coming after me is
preferred before me, whose shoe's latchet I am not worthy to unloose.

1:28 These things were done in Bethabara beyond Jordan, where John was
baptizing.

1:29 The next day John seeth Jesus coming unto him, and saith, Behold
the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.

1:30 This is he of whom I said, After me cometh a man which is
preferred before me: for he was before me.

1:31 And I knew him not: but that he should be made manifest to
Israel, therefore am I come baptizing with water.

1:32 And John bare record, saying, I saw the Spirit descending from
heaven like a dove, and it abode upon him.

1:33 And I knew him not: but he that sent me to baptize with water,
the same said unto me, Upon whom thou shalt see the Spirit descending,
and remaining on him, the same is he which baptizeth with the Holy
Ghost.

1:34 And I saw, and bare record that this is the Son of God.

1:35 Again the next day after John stood, and two of his disciples;
1:36 And looking upon Jesus as he walked, he saith, Behold the Lamb of
God!  1:37 And the two disciples heard him speak, and they followed
Jesus.

1:38 Then Jesus turned, and saw them following, and saith unto them,
What seek ye? They said unto him, Rabbi, (which is to say, being
interpreted, Master,) where dwellest thou?  1:39 He saith unto them,
Come and see. They came and saw where he dwelt, and abode with him
that day: for it was about the tenth hour.

1:40 One of the two which heard John speak, and followed him, was
Andrew, Simon Peter's brother.

1:41 He first findeth his own brother Simon, and saith unto him, We
have found the Messias, which is, being interpreted, the Christ.

1:42 And he brought him to Jesus. And when Jesus beheld him, he said,
Thou art Simon the son of Jona: thou shalt be called Cephas, which is
by interpretation, A stone.

1:43 The day following Jesus would go forth into Galilee, and findeth
Philip, and saith unto him, Follow me.

1:44 Now Philip was of Bethsaida, the city of Andrew and Peter.

1:45 Philip findeth Nathanael, and saith unto him, We have found him,
of whom Moses in the law, and the prophets, did write, Jesus of
Nazareth, the son of Joseph.

1:46 And Nathanael said unto him, Can there any good thing come out of
Nazareth? Philip saith unto him, Come and see.

1:47 Jesus saw Nathanael coming to him, and saith of him, Behold an
Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile!  1:48 Nathanael saith unto him,
Whence knowest thou me? Jesus answered and said unto him, Before that
Philip called thee, when thou wast under the fig tree, I saw thee.

1:49 Nathanael answered and saith unto him, Rabbi, thou art the Son of
God; thou art the King of Israel.

1:50 Jesus answered and said unto him, Because I said unto thee, I saw
thee under the fig tree, believest thou? thou shalt see greater things
than these.

1:51 And he saith unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Hereafter
ye shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and
descending upon the Son of man.

2:1 And the third day there was a marriage in Cana of Galilee; and the
mother of Jesus was there: 2:2 And both Jesus was called, and his
disciples, to the marriage.

2:3 And when they wanted wine, the mother of Jesus saith unto him,
They have no wine.

2:4 Jesus saith unto her, Woman, what have I to do with thee? mine
hour is not yet come.

2:5 His mother saith unto the servants, Whatsoever he saith unto you,
do it.

2:6 And there were set there six waterpots of stone, after the manner
of the purifying of the Jews, containing two or three firkins apiece.

2:7 Jesus saith unto them, Fill the waterpots with water. And they
filled them up to the brim.

2:8 And he saith unto them, Draw out now, and bear unto the governor
of the feast. And they bare it.

2:9 When the ruler of the feast had tasted the water that was made
wine, and knew not whence it was: (but the servants which drew the
water knew;) the governor of the feast called the bridegroom, 2:10 And
saith unto him, Every man at the beginning doth set forth good wine;
and when men have well drunk, then that which is worse: but thou hast
kept the good wine until now.

2:11 This beginning of miracles did Jesus in Cana of Galilee, and
manifested forth his glory; and his disciples believed on him.

2:12 After this he went down to Capernaum, he, and his mother, and his
brethren, and his disciples: and they continued there not many days.

2:13 And the Jews' passover was at hand, and Jesus went up to
Jerusalem.

2:14 And found in the temple those that sold oxen and sheep and doves,
and the changers of money sitting: 2:15 And when he had made a scourge
of small cords, he drove them all out of the temple, and the sheep,
and the oxen; and poured out the changers' money, and overthrew the
tables; 2:16 And said unto them that sold doves, Take these things
hence; make not my Father's house an house of merchandise.

2:17 And his disciples remembered that it was written, The zeal of
thine house hath eaten me up.

2:18 Then answered the Jews and said unto him, What sign shewest thou
unto us, seeing that thou doest these things?  2:19 Jesus answered and
said unto them, Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it
up.

2:20 Then said the Jews, Forty and six years was this temple in
building, and wilt thou rear it up in three days?  2:21 But he spake
of the temple of his body.

2:22 When therefore he was risen from the dead, his disciples
remembered that he had said this unto them; and they believed the
scripture, and the word which Jesus had said.

2:23 Now when he was in Jerusalem at the passover, in the feast day,
many believed in his name, when they saw the miracles which he did.

2:24 But Jesus did not commit himself unto them, because he knew all
men, 2:25 And needed not that any should testify of man: for he knew
what was in man.

3:1 There was a man of the Pharisees, named Nicodemus, a ruler of the
Jews: 3:2 The same came to Jesus by night, and said unto him, Rabbi,
we know that thou art a teacher come from God: for no man can do these
miracles that thou doest, except God be with him.

3:3 Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee,
Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.

3:4 Nicodemus saith unto him, How can a man be born when he is old?
can he enter the second time into his mother's womb, and be born?  3:5
Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born
of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.

3:6 That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born
of the Spirit is spirit.

3:7 Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again.

3:8 The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound
thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so
is every one that is born of the Spirit.

3:9 Nicodemus answered and said unto him, How can these things be?
3:10 Jesus answered and said unto him, Art thou a master of Israel,
and knowest not these things?  3:11 Verily, verily, I say unto thee,
We speak that we do know, and testify that we have seen; and ye
receive not our witness.

3:12 If I have told you earthly things, and ye believe not, how shall
ye believe, if I tell you of heavenly things?  3:13 And no man hath
ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son
of man which is in heaven.

3:14 And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so
must the Son of man be lifted up: 3:15 That whosoever believeth in him
should not perish, but have eternal life.

3:16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son,
that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have
everlasting life.

3:17 For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but
that the world through him might be saved.

3:18 He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth
not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of
the only begotten Son of God.

3:19 And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world,
and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were
evil.

3:20 For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to
the light, lest his deeds should be reproved.

3:21 But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may
be made manifest, that they are wrought in God.

3:22 After these things came Jesus and his disciples into the land of
Judaea; and there he tarried with them, and baptized.

3:23 And John also was baptizing in Aenon near to Salim, because there
was much water there: and they came, and were baptized.

3:24 For John was not yet cast into prison.

3:25 Then there arose a question between some of John's disciples and
the Jews about purifying.

3:26 And they came unto John, and said unto him, Rabbi, he that was
with thee beyond Jordan, to whom thou barest witness, behold, the same
baptizeth, and all men come to him.

3:27 John answered and said, A man can receive nothing, except it be
given him from heaven.

3:28 Ye yourselves bear me witness, that I said, I am not the Christ,
but that I am sent before him.

3:29 He that hath the bride is the bridegroom: but the friend of the
bridegroom, which standeth and heareth him, rejoiceth greatly because
of the bridegroom's voice: this my joy therefore is fulfilled.

3:30 He must increase, but I must decrease.

3:31 He that cometh from above is above all: he that is of the earth
is earthly, and speaketh of the earth: he that cometh from heaven is
above all.

3:32 And what he hath seen and heard, that he testifieth; and no man
receiveth his testimony.

3:33 He that hath received his testimony hath set to his seal that God
is true.

3:34 For he whom God hath sent speaketh the words of God: for God
giveth not the Spirit by measure unto him.

3:35 The Father loveth the Son, and hath given all things into his
hand.

3:36 He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life: and he that
believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth
on him.

4:1 When therefore the LORD knew how the Pharisees had heard that
Jesus made and baptized more disciples than John, 4:2 (Though Jesus
himself baptized not, but his disciples,) 4:3 He left Judaea, and
departed again into Galilee.

4:4 And he must needs go through Samaria.

4:5 Then cometh he to a city of Samaria, which is called Sychar, near
to the parcel of ground that Jacob gave to his son Joseph.

4:6 Now Jacob's well was there. Jesus therefore, being wearied with
his journey, sat thus on the well: and it was about the sixth hour.

4:7 There cometh a woman of Samaria to draw water: Jesus saith unto
her, Give me to drink.

4:8 (For his disciples were gone away unto the city to buy meat.)  4:9
Then saith the woman of Samaria unto him, How is it that thou, being a
Jew, askest drink of me, which am a woman of Samaria? for the Jews
have no dealings with the Samaritans.

4:10 Jesus answered and said unto her, If thou knewest the gift of
God, and who it is that saith to thee, Give me to drink; thou wouldest
have asked of him, and he would have given thee living water.

4:11 The woman saith unto him, Sir, thou hast nothing to draw with,
and the well is deep: from whence then hast thou that living water?
4:12 Art thou greater than our father Jacob, which gave us the well,
and drank thereof himself, and his children, and his cattle?  4:13
Jesus answered and said unto her, Whosoever drinketh of this water
shall thirst again: 4:14 But whosoever drinketh of the water that I
shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him
shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.

4:15 The woman saith unto him, Sir, give me this water, that I thirst
not, neither come hither to draw.

4:16 Jesus saith unto her, Go, call thy husband, and come hither.

4:17 The woman answered and said, I have no husband. Jesus said unto
her, Thou hast well said, I have no husband: 4:18 For thou hast had
five husbands; and he whom thou now hast is not thy husband: in that
saidst thou truly.

4:19 The woman saith unto him, Sir, I perceive that thou art a
prophet.

4:20 Our fathers worshipped in this mountain; and ye say, that in
Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship.

4:21 Jesus saith unto her, Woman, believe me, the hour cometh, when ye
shall neither in this mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem, worship the
Father.

4:22 Ye worship ye know not what: we know what we worship: for
salvation is of the Jews.

4:23 But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall
worship the Father in spirit and in truth: for the Father seeketh such
to worship him.

4:24 God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in
spirit and in truth.

4:25 The woman saith unto him, I know that Messias cometh, which is
called Christ: when he is come, he will tell us all things.

4:26 Jesus saith unto her, I that speak unto thee am he.

4:27 And upon this came his disciples, and marvelled that he talked
with the woman: yet no man said, What seekest thou? or, Why talkest
thou with her?  4:28 The woman then left her waterpot, and went her
way into the city, and saith to the men, 4:29 Come, see a man, which
told me all things that ever I did: is not this the Christ?  4:30 Then
they went out of the city, and came unto him.

4:31 In the mean while his disciples prayed him, saying, Master, eat.

4:32 But he said unto them, I have meat to eat that ye know not of.

4:33 Therefore said the disciples one to another, Hath any man brought
him ought to eat?  4:34 Jesus saith unto them, My meat is to do the
will of him that sent me, and to finish his work.

4:35 Say not ye, There are yet four months, and then cometh harvest?
behold, I say unto you, Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields; for
they are white already to harvest.

4:36 And he that reapeth receiveth wages, and gathereth fruit unto
life eternal: that both he that soweth and he that reapeth may rejoice
together.

4:37 And herein is that saying true, One soweth, and another reapeth.

4:38 I sent you to reap that whereon ye bestowed no labour: other men
laboured, and ye are entered into their labours.

4:39 And many of the Samaritans of that city believed on him for the
saying of the woman, which testified, He told me all that ever I did.

4:40 So when the Samaritans were come unto him, they besought him that
he would tarry with them: and he abode there two days.

4:41 And many more believed because of his own word; 4:42 And said
unto the woman, Now we believe, not because of thy saying: for we have
heard him ourselves, and know that this is indeed the Christ, the
Saviour of the world.

4:43 Now after two days he departed thence, and went into Galilee.

4:44 For Jesus himself testified, that a prophet hath no honour in his
own country.

4:45 Then when he was come into Galilee, the Galilaeans received him,
having seen all the things that he did at Jerusalem at the feast: for
they also went unto the feast.

4:46 So Jesus came again into Cana of Galilee, where he made the water
wine. And there was a certain nobleman, whose son was sick at
Capernaum.

4:47 When he heard that Jesus was come out of Judaea into Galilee, he
went unto him, and besought him that he would come down, and heal his
son: for he was at the point of death.

4:48 Then said Jesus unto him, Except ye see signs and wonders, ye
will not believe.

4:49 The nobleman saith unto him, Sir, come down ere my child die.

4:50 Jesus saith unto him, Go thy way; thy son liveth. And the man
believed the word that Jesus had spoken unto him, and he went his way.

4:51 And as he was now going down, his servants met him, and told him,
saying, Thy son liveth.

4:52 Then enquired he of them the hour when he began to amend. And
they said unto him, Yesterday at the seventh hour the fever left him.

4:53 So the father knew that it was at the same hour, in the which
Jesus said unto him, Thy son liveth: and himself believed, and his
whole house.

4:54 This is again the second miracle that Jesus did, when he was come
out of Judaea into Galilee.

5:1 After this there was a feast of the Jews; and Jesus went up to
Jerusalem.

5:2 Now there is at Jerusalem by the sheep market a pool, which is
called in the Hebrew tongue Bethesda, having five porches.

5:3 In these lay a great multitude of impotent folk, of blind, halt,
withered, waiting for the moving of the water.

5:4 For an angel went down at a certain season into the pool, and
troubled the water: whosoever then first after the troubling of the
water stepped in was made whole of whatsoever disease he had.

5:5 And a certain man was there, which had an infirmity thirty and
eight years.

5:6 When Jesus saw him lie, and knew that he had been now a long time
in that case, he saith unto him, Wilt thou be made whole?  5:7 The
impotent man answered him, Sir, I have no man, when the water is
troubled, to put me into the pool: but while I am coming, another
steppeth down before me.

5:8 Jesus saith unto him, Rise, take up thy bed, and walk.

5:9 And immediately the man was made whole, and took up his bed, and
walked: and on the same day was the sabbath.

5:10 The Jews therefore said unto him that was cured, It is the
sabbath day: it is not lawful for thee to carry thy bed.

5:11 He answered them, He that made me whole, the same said unto me,
Take up thy bed, and walk.

5:12 Then asked they him, What man is that which said unto thee, Take
up thy bed, and walk?  5:13 And he that was healed wist not who it
was: for Jesus had conveyed himself away, a multitude being in that
place.

5:14 Afterward Jesus findeth him in the temple, and said unto him,
Behold, thou art made whole: sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto
thee.

5:15 The man departed, and told the Jews that it was Jesus, which had
made him whole.

5:16 And therefore did the Jews persecute Jesus, and sought to slay
him, because he had done these things on the sabbath day.

5:17 But Jesus answered them, My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.

5:18 Therefore the Jews sought the more to kill him, because he not
only had broken the sabbath, but said also that God was his Father,
making himself equal with God.

5:19 Then answered Jesus and said unto them, Verily, verily, I say
unto you, The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the
Father do: for what things soever he doeth, these also doeth the Son
likewise.

5:20 For the Father loveth the Son, and sheweth him all things that
himself doeth: and he will shew him greater works than these, that ye
may marvel.

5:21 For as the Father raiseth up the dead, and quickeneth them; even
so the Son quickeneth whom he will.

5:22 For the Father judgeth no man, but hath committed all judgment
unto the Son: 5:23 That all men should honour the Son, even as they
honour the Father.

He that honoureth not the Son honoureth not the Father which hath sent
him.

5:24 Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth my word, and
believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not
come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life.

5:25 Verily, verily, I say unto you, The hour is coming, and now is,
when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God: and they that
hear shall live.

5:26 For as the Father hath life in himself; so hath he given to the
Son to have life in himself; 5:27 And hath given him authority to
execute judgment also, because he is the Son of man.

5:28 Marvel not at this: for the hour is coming, in the which all that
are in the graves shall hear his voice, 5:29 And shall come forth;
they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that
have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation.

5:30 I can of mine own self do nothing: as I hear, I judge: and my
judgment is just; because I seek not mine own will, but the will of
the Father which hath sent me.

5:31 If I bear witness of myself, my witness is not true.

5:32 There is another that beareth witness of me; and I know that the
witness which he witnesseth of me is true.

5:33 Ye sent unto John, and he bare witness unto the truth.

5:34 But I receive not testimony from man: but these things I say,
that ye might be saved.

5:35 He was a burning and a shining light: and ye were willing for a
season to rejoice in his light.

5:36 But I have greater witness than that of John: for the works which
the Father hath given me to finish, the same works that I do, bear
witness of me, that the Father hath sent me.

5:37 And the Father himself, which hath sent me, hath borne witness of
me.

Ye have neither heard his voice at any time, nor seen his shape.

5:38 And ye have not his word abiding in you: for whom he hath sent,
him ye believe not.

5:39 Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life:
and they are they which testify of me.

5:40 And ye will not come to me, that ye might have life.

5:41 I receive not honour from men.

5:42 But I know you, that ye have not the love of God in you.

5:43 I am come in my Father's name, and ye receive me not: if another
shall come in his own name, him ye will receive.

5:44 How can ye believe, which receive honour one of another, and seek
not the honour that cometh from God only?  5:45 Do not think that I
will accuse you to the Father: there is one that accuseth you, even
Moses, in whom ye trust.

5:46 For had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed me; for he
wrote of me.

5:47 But if ye believe not his writings, how shall ye believe my
words?  6:1 After these things Jesus went over the sea of Galilee,
which is the sea of Tiberias.

6:2 And a great multitude followed him, because they saw his miracles
which he did on them that were diseased.

6:3 And Jesus went up into a mountain, and there he sat with his
disciples.

6:4 And the passover, a feast of the Jews, was nigh.

6:5 When Jesus then lifted up his eyes, and saw a great company come
unto him, he saith unto Philip, Whence shall we buy bread, that these
may eat?  6:6 And this he said to prove him: for he himself knew what
he would do.

6:7 Philip answered him, Two hundred pennyworth of bread is not
sufficient for them, that every one of them may take a little.

6:8 One of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter's brother, saith unto
him, 6:9 There is a lad here, which hath five barley loaves, and two
small fishes: but what are they among so many?  6:10 And Jesus said,
Make the men sit down. Now there was much grass in the place. So the
men sat down, in number about five thousand.

6:11 And Jesus took the loaves; and when he had given thanks, he
distributed to the disciples, and the disciples to them that were set
down; and likewise of the fishes as much as they would.

6:12 When they were filled, he said unto his disciples, Gather up the
fragments that remain, that nothing be lost.

6:13 Therefore they gathered them together, and filled twelve baskets
with the fragments of the five barley loaves, which remained over and
above unto them that had eaten.

6:14 Then those men, when they had seen the miracle that Jesus did,
said, This is of a truth that prophet that should come into the world.

6:15 When Jesus therefore perceived that they would come and take him
by force, to make him a king, he departed again into a mountain
himself alone.

6:16 And when even was now come, his disciples went down unto the sea,
6:17 And entered into a ship, and went over the sea toward Capernaum.
And it was now dark, and Jesus was not come to them.

6:18 And the sea arose by reason of a great wind that blew.

6:19 So when they had rowed about five and twenty or thirty furlongs,
they see Jesus walking on the sea, and drawing nigh unto the ship: and
they were afraid.

6:20 But he saith unto them, It is I; be not afraid.

6:21 Then they willingly received him into the ship: and immediately
the ship was at the land whither they went.

6:22 The day following, when the people which stood on the other side
of the sea saw that there was none other boat there, save that one
whereinto his disciples were entered, and that Jesus went not with his
disciples into the boat, but that his disciples were gone away alone;
6:23 (Howbeit there came other boats from Tiberias nigh unto the place
where they did eat bread, after that the Lord had given thanks:) 6:24
When the people therefore saw that Jesus was not there, neither his
disciples, they also took shipping, and came to Capernaum, seeking for
Jesus.

6:25 And when they had found him on the other side of the sea, they
said unto him, Rabbi, when camest thou hither?  6:26 Jesus answered
them and said, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Ye seek me, not because
ye saw the miracles, but because ye did eat of the loaves, and were
filled.

6:27 Labour not for the meat which perisheth, but for that meat which
endureth unto everlasting life, which the Son of man shall give unto
you: for him hath God the Father sealed.

6:28 Then said they unto him, What shall we do, that we might work the
works of God?  6:29 Jesus answered and said unto them, This is the
work of God, that ye believe on him whom he hath sent.

6:30 They said therefore unto him, What sign shewest thou then, that
we may see, and believe thee? what dost thou work?  6:31 Our fathers
did eat manna in the desert; as it is written, He gave them bread from
heaven to eat.

6:32 Then Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Moses
gave you not that bread from heaven; but my Father giveth you the true
bread from heaven.

6:33 For the bread of God is he which cometh down from heaven, and
giveth life unto the world.

6:34 Then said they unto him, Lord, evermore give us this bread.

6:35 And Jesus said unto them, I am the bread of life: he that cometh
to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never
thirst.

6:36 But I said unto you, That ye also have seen me, and believe not.

6:37 All that the Father giveth me shall come to me; and him that
cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.

6:38 For I came down from heaven, not to do mine own will, but the
will of him that sent me.

6:39 And this is the Father's will which hath sent me, that of all
which he hath given me I should lose nothing, but should raise it up
again at the last day.

6:40 And this is the will of him that sent me, that every one which
seeth the Son, and believeth on him, may have everlasting life: and I
will raise him up at the last day.

6:41 The Jews then murmured at him, because he said, I am the bread
which came down from heaven.

6:42 And they said, Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father
and mother we know? how is it then that he saith, I came down from
heaven?  6:43 Jesus therefore answered and said unto them, Murmur not
among yourselves.

6:44 No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw
him: and I will raise him up at the last day.

6:45 It is written in the prophets, And they shall be all taught of
God.

Every man therefore that hath heard, and hath learned of the Father,
cometh unto me.

6:46 Not that any man hath seen the Father, save he which is of God,
he hath seen the Father.

6:47 Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me hath
everlasting life.

6:48 I am that bread of life.

6:49 Your fathers did eat manna in the wilderness, and are dead.

6:50 This is the bread which cometh down from heaven, that a man may
eat thereof, and not die.

6:51 I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat
of this bread, he shall live for ever: and the bread that I will give
is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.

6:52 The Jews therefore strove among themselves, saying, How can this
man give us his flesh to eat?  6:53 Then Jesus said unto them, Verily,
verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and
drink his blood, ye have no life in you.

6:54 Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life;
and I will raise him up at the last day.

6:55 For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed.

6:56 He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me,
and I in him.

6:57 As the living Father hath sent me, and I live by the Father: so
he that eateth me, even he shall live by me.

6:58 This is that bread which came down from heaven: not as your
fathers did eat manna, and are dead: he that eateth of this bread
shall live for ever.

6:59 These things said he in the synagogue, as he taught in Capernaum.

6:60 Many therefore of his disciples, when they had heard this, said,
This is an hard saying; who can hear it?  6:61 When Jesus knew in
himself that his disciples murmured at it, he said unto them, Doth
this offend you?  6:62 What and if ye shall see the Son of man ascend
up where he was before?  6:63 It is the spirit that quickeneth; the
flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are
spirit, and they are life.

6:64 But there are some of you that believe not. For Jesus knew from
the beginning who they were that believed not, and who should betray
him.

6:65 And he said, Therefore said I unto you, that no man can come unto
me, except it were given unto him of my Father.

6:66 From that time many of his disciples went back, and walked no
more with him.

6:67 Then said Jesus unto the twelve, Will ye also go away?  6:68 Then
Simon Peter answered him, Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the
words of eternal life.

6:69 And we believe and are sure that thou art that Christ, the Son of
the living God.

6:70 Jesus answered them, Have not I chosen you twelve, and one of you
is a devil?  6:71 He spake of Judas Iscariot the son of Simon: for he
it was that should betray him, being one of the twelve.

7:1 After these things Jesus walked in Galilee: for he would not walk
in Jewry, because the Jews sought to kill him.

7:2 Now the Jew's feast of tabernacles was at hand.

7:3 His brethren therefore said unto him, Depart hence, and go into
Judaea, that thy disciples also may see the works that thou doest.

7:4 For there is no man that doeth any thing in secret, and he himself
seeketh to be known openly. If thou do these things, shew thyself to
the world.

7:5 For neither did his brethren believe in him.

7:6 Then Jesus said unto them, My time is not yet come: but your time
is alway ready.

7:7 The world cannot hate you; but me it hateth, because I testify of
it, that the works thereof are evil.

7:8 Go ye up unto this feast: I go not up yet unto this feast: for my
time is not yet full come.

7:9 When he had said these words unto them, he abode still in Galilee.

7:10 But when his brethren were gone up, then went he also up unto the
feast, not openly, but as it were in secret.

7:11 Then the Jews sought him at the feast, and said, Where is he?
7:12 And there was much murmuring among the people concerning him: for
some said, He is a good man: others said, Nay; but he deceiveth the
people.

7:13 Howbeit no man spake openly of him for fear of the Jews.

7:14 Now about the midst of the feast Jesus went up into the temple,
and taught.

7:15 And the Jews marvelled, saying, How knoweth this man letters,
having never learned?  7:16 Jesus answered them, and said, My doctrine
is not mine, but his that sent me.

7:17 If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine,
whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself.

7:18 He that speaketh of himself seeketh his own glory: but he that
seeketh his glory that sent him, the same is true, and no
unrighteousness is in him.

7:19 Did not Moses give you the law, and yet none of you keepeth the
law?  Why go ye about to kill me?  7:20 The people answered and said,
Thou hast a devil: who goeth about to kill thee?  7:21 Jesus answered
and said unto them, I have done one work, and ye all marvel.

7:22 Moses therefore gave unto you circumcision; (not because it is of
Moses, but of the fathers;) and ye on the sabbath day circumcise a
man.

7:23 If a man on the sabbath day receive circumcision, that the law of
Moses should not be broken; are ye angry at me, because I have made a
man every whit whole on the sabbath day?  7:24 Judge not according to
the appearance, but judge righteous judgment.

7:25 Then said some of them of Jerusalem, Is not this he, whom they
seek to kill?  7:26 But, lo, he speaketh boldly, and they say nothing
unto him. Do the rulers know indeed that this is the very Christ?
7:27 Howbeit we know this man whence he is: but when Christ cometh, no
man knoweth whence he is.

7:28 Then cried Jesus in the temple as he taught, saying, Ye both know
me, and ye know whence I am: and I am not come of myself, but he that
sent me is true, whom ye know not.

7:29 But I know him: for I am from him, and he hath sent me.

7:30 Then they sought to take him: but no man laid hands on him,
because his hour was not yet come.

7:31 And many of the people believed on him, and said, When Christ
cometh, will he do more miracles than these which this man hath done?
7:32 The Pharisees heard that the people murmured such things
concerning him; and the Pharisees and the chief priests sent officers
to take him.

7:33 Then said Jesus unto them, Yet a little while am I with you, and
then I go unto him that sent me.

7:34 Ye shall seek me, and shall not find me: and where I am, thither
ye cannot come.

7:35 Then said the Jews among themselves, Whither will he go, that we
shall not find him? will he go unto the dispersed among the Gentiles,
and teach the Gentiles?  7:36 What manner of saying is this that he
said, Ye shall seek me, and shall not find me: and where I am, thither
ye cannot come?  7:37 In the last day, that great day of the feast,
Jesus stood and cried, saying, If any man thirst, let him come unto
me, and drink.

7:38 He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his
belly shall flow rivers of living water.

7:39 (But this spake he of the Spirit, which they that believe on him
should receive: for the Holy Ghost was not yet given; because that
Jesus was not yet glorified.)  7:40 Many of the people therefore, when
they heard this saying, said, Of a truth this is the Prophet.

7:41 Others said, This is the Christ. But some said, Shall Christ come
out of Galilee?  7:42 Hath not the scripture said, That Christ cometh
of the seed of David, and out of the town of Bethlehem, where David
was?  7:43 So there was a division among the people because of him.

7:44 And some of them would have taken him; but no man laid hands on
him.

7:45 Then came the officers to the chief priests and Pharisees; and
they said unto them, Why have ye not brought him?  7:46 The officers
answered, Never man spake like this man.

7:47 Then answered them the Pharisees, Are ye also deceived?  7:48
Have any of the rulers or of the Pharisees believed on him?  7:49 But
this people who knoweth not the law are cursed.

7:50 Nicodemus saith unto them, (he that came to Jesus by night, being
one of them,) 7:51 Doth our law judge any man, before it hear him, and
know what he doeth?  7:52 They answered and said unto him, Art thou
also of Galilee?  Search, and look: for out of Galilee ariseth no
prophet.

7:53 And every man went unto his own house.

8:1 Jesus went unto the mount of Olives.

8:2 And early in the morning he came again into the temple, and all
the people came unto him; and he sat down, and taught them.

8:3 And the scribes and Pharisees brought unto him a woman taken in
adultery; and when they had set her in the midst, 8:4 They say unto
him, Master, this woman was taken in adultery, in the very act.

8:5 Now Moses in the law commanded us, that such should be stoned: but
what sayest thou?  8:6 This they said, tempting him, that they might
have to accuse him. But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote
on the ground, as though he heard them not.

8:7 So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said
unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a
stone at her.

8:8 And again he stooped down, and wrote on the ground.

8:9 And they which heard it, being convicted by their own conscience,
went out one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last: and
Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst.

8:10 When Jesus had lifted up himself, and saw none but the woman, he
said unto her, Woman, where are those thine accusers? hath no man
condemned thee?  8:11 She said, No man, Lord. And Jesus said unto her,
Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more.

8:12 Then spake Jesus again unto them, saying, I am the light of the
world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have
the light of life.

8:13 The Pharisees therefore said unto him, Thou bearest record of
thyself; thy record is not true.

8:14 Jesus answered and said unto them, Though I bear record of
myself, yet my record is true: for I know whence I came, and whither I
go; but ye cannot tell whence I come, and whither I go.

8:15 Ye judge after the flesh; I judge no man.

8:16 And yet if I judge, my judgment is true: for I am not alone, but
I and the Father that sent me.

8:17 It is also written in your law, that the testimony of two men is
true.

8:18 I am one that bear witness of myself, and the Father that sent me
beareth witness of me.

8:19 Then said they unto him, Where is thy Father? Jesus answered, Ye
neither know me, nor my Father: if ye had known me, ye should have
known my Father also.

8:20 These words spake Jesus in the treasury, as he taught in the
temple: and no man laid hands on him; for his hour was not yet come.

8:21 Then said Jesus again unto them, I go my way, and ye shall seek
me, and shall die in your sins: whither I go, ye cannot come.

8:22 Then said the Jews, Will he kill himself? because he saith,
Whither I go, ye cannot come.

8:23 And he said unto them, Ye are from beneath; I am from above: ye
are of this world; I am not of this world.

8:24 I said therefore unto you, that ye shall die in your sins: for if
ye believe not that I am he, ye shall die in your sins.

8:25 Then said they unto him, Who art thou? And Jesus saith unto them,
Even the same that I said unto you from the beginning.

8:26 I have many things to say and to judge of you: but he that sent
me is true; and I speak to the world those things which I have heard
of him.

8:27 They understood not that he spake to them of the Father.

8:28 Then said Jesus unto them, When ye have lifted up the Son of man,
then shall ye know that I am he, and that I do nothing of myself; but
as my Father hath taught me, I speak these things.

8:29 And he that sent me is with me: the Father hath not left me
alone; for I do always those things that please him.

8:30 As he spake these words, many believed on him.

8:31 Then said Jesus to those Jews which believed on him, If ye
continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed; 8:32 And ye
shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.

8:33 They answered him, We be Abraham's seed, and were never in
bondage to any man: how sayest thou, Ye shall be made free?  8:34
Jesus answered them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whosoever
committeth sin is the servant of sin.

8:35 And the servant abideth not in the house for ever: but the Son
abideth ever.

8:36 If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free
indeed.

8:37 I know that ye are Abraham's seed; but ye seek to kill me,
because my word hath no place in you.

8:38 I speak that which I have seen with my Father: and ye do that
which ye have seen with your father.

8:39 They answered and said unto him, Abraham is our father. Jesus
saith unto them, If ye were Abraham's children, ye would do the works
of Abraham.

8:40 But now ye seek to kill me, a man that hath told you the truth,
which I have heard of God: this did not Abraham.

8:41 Ye do the deeds of your father. Then said they to him, We be not
born of fornication; we have one Father, even God.

8:42 Jesus said unto them, If God were your Father, ye would love me:
for I proceeded forth and came from God; neither came I of myself, but
he sent me.

8:43 Why do ye not understand my speech? even because ye cannot hear
my word.

8:44 Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye
will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the
truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he
speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.

8:45 And because I tell you the truth, ye believe me not.

8:46 Which of you convinceth me of sin? And if I say the truth, why do
ye not believe me?  8:47 He that is of God heareth God's words: ye
therefore hear them not, because ye are not of God.

8:48 Then answered the Jews, and said unto him, Say we not well that
thou art a Samaritan, and hast a devil?  8:49 Jesus answered, I have
not a devil; but I honour my Father, and ye do dishonour me.

8:50 And I seek not mine own glory: there is one that seeketh and
judgeth.

8:51 Verily, verily, I say unto you, If a man keep my saying, he shall
never see death.

8:52 Then said the Jews unto him, Now we know that thou hast a devil.

Abraham is dead, and the prophets; and thou sayest, If a man keep my
saying, he shall never taste of death.

8:53 Art thou greater than our father Abraham, which is dead? and the
prophets are dead: whom makest thou thyself?  8:54 Jesus answered, If
I honour myself, my honour is nothing: it is my Father that honoureth
me; of whom ye say, that he is your God: 8:55 Yet ye have not known
him; but I know him: and if I should say, I know him not, I shall be a
liar like unto you: but I know him, and keep his saying.

8:56 Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day: and he saw it, and
was glad.

8:57 Then said the Jews unto him, Thou art not yet fifty years old,
and hast thou seen Abraham?  8:58 Jesus said unto them, Verily,
verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am.

8:59 Then took they up stones to cast at him: but Jesus hid himself,
and went out of the temple, going through the midst of them, and so
passed by.

9:1 And as Jesus passed by, he saw a man which was blind from his
birth.

9:2 And his disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did sin, this
man, or his parents, that he was born blind?  9:3 Jesus answered,
Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of
God should be made manifest in him.

9:4 I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day: the
night cometh, when no man can work.

9:5 As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.

9:6 When he had thus spoken, he spat on the ground, and made clay of
the spittle, and he anointed the eyes of the blind man with the clay,
9:7 And said unto him, Go, wash in the pool of Siloam, (which is by
interpretation, Sent.) He went his way therefore, and washed, and came
seeing.

9:8 The neighbours therefore, and they which before had seen him that
he was blind, said, Is not this he that sat and begged?  9:9 Some
said, This is he: others said, He is like him: but he said, I am he.

9:10 Therefore said they unto him, How were thine eyes opened?  9:11
He answered and said, A man that is called Jesus made clay, and
anointed mine eyes, and said unto me, Go to the pool of Siloam, and
wash: and I went and washed, and I received sight.

9:12 Then said they unto him, Where is he? He said, I know not.

9:13 They brought to the Pharisees him that aforetime was blind.

9:14 And it was the sabbath day when Jesus made the clay, and opened
his eyes.

9:15 Then again the Pharisees also asked him how he had received his
sight. He said unto them, He put clay upon mine eyes, and I washed,
and do see.

9:16 Therefore said some of the Pharisees, This man is not of God,
because he keepeth not the sabbath day. Others said, How can a man
that is a sinner do such miracles? And there was a division among
them.

9:17 They say unto the blind man again, What sayest thou of him, that
he hath opened thine eyes? He said, He is a prophet.

9:18 But the Jews did not believe concerning him, that he had been
blind, and received his sight, until they called the parents of him
that had received his sight.

9:19 And they asked them, saying, Is this your son, who ye say was
born blind? how then doth he now see?  9:20 His parents answered them
and said, We know that this is our son, and that he was born blind:
9:21 But by what means he now seeth, we know not; or who hath opened
his eyes, we know not: he is of age; ask him: he shall speak for
himself.

9:22 These words spake his parents, because they feared the Jews: for
the Jews had agreed already, that if any man did confess that he was
Christ, he should be put out of the synagogue.

9:23 Therefore said his parents, He is of age; ask him.

9:24 Then again called they the man that was blind, and said unto him,
Give God the praise: we know that this man is a sinner.

9:25 He answered and said, Whether he be a sinner or no, I know not:
one thing I know, that, whereas I was blind, now I see.

9:26 Then said they to him again, What did he to thee? how opened he
thine eyes?  9:27 He answered them, I have told you already, and ye
did not hear: wherefore would ye hear it again? will ye also be his
disciples?  9:28 Then they reviled him, and said, Thou art his
disciple; but we are Moses' disciples.

9:29 We know that God spake unto Moses: as for this fellow, we know
not from whence he is.

9:30 The man answered and said unto them, Why herein is a marvellous
thing, that ye know not from whence he is, and yet he hath opened mine
eyes.

9:31 Now we know that God heareth not sinners: but if any man be a
worshipper of God, and doeth his will, him he heareth.

9:32 Since the world began was it not heard that any man opened the
eyes of one that was born blind.

9:33 If this man were not of God, he could do nothing.

9:34 They answered and said unto him, Thou wast altogether born in
sins, and dost thou teach us? And they cast him out.

9:35 Jesus heard that they had cast him out; and when he had found
him, he said unto him, Dost thou believe on the Son of God?  9:36 He
answered and said, Who is he, Lord, that I might believe on him?  9:37
And Jesus said unto him, Thou hast both seen him, and it is he that
talketh with thee.

9:38 And he said, Lord, I believe. And he worshipped him.

9:39 And Jesus said, For judgment I am come into this world, that they
which see not might see; and that they which see might be made blind.

9:40 And some of the Pharisees which were with him heard these words,
and said unto him, Are we blind also?  9:41 Jesus said unto them, If
ye were blind, ye should have no sin: but now ye say, We see;
therefore your sin remaineth.

10:1 Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that entereth not by the door
into the sheepfold, but climbeth up some other way, the same is a
thief and a robber.

10:2 But he that entereth in by the door is the shepherd of the sheep.

10:3 To him the porter openeth; and the sheep hear his voice: and he
calleth his own sheep by name, and leadeth them out.

10:4 And when he putteth forth his own sheep, he goeth before them,
and the sheep follow him: for they know his voice.

10:5 And a stranger will they not follow, but will flee from him: for
they know not the voice of strangers.

10:6 This parable spake Jesus unto them: but they understood not what
things they were which he spake unto them.

10:7 Then said Jesus unto them again, Verily, verily, I say unto you,
I am the door of the sheep.

10:8 All that ever came before me are thieves and robbers: but the
sheep did not hear them.

10:9 I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved, and
shall go in and out, and find pasture.

10:10 The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to
destroy: I am come that they might have life, and that they might have
it more abundantly.

10:11 I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his life for
the sheep.

10:12 But he that is an hireling, and not the shepherd, whose own the
sheep are not, seeth the wolf coming, and leaveth the sheep, and
fleeth: and the wolf catcheth them, and scattereth the sheep.

10:13 The hireling fleeth, because he is an hireling, and careth not
for the sheep.

10:14 I am the good shepherd, and know my sheep, and am known of mine.

10:15 As the Father knoweth me, even so know I the Father: and I lay
down my life for the sheep.

10:16 And other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also I
must bring, and they shall hear my voice; and there shall be one fold,
and one shepherd.

10:17 Therefore doth my Father love me, because I lay down my life,
that I might take it again.

10:18 No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have
power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again. This
commandment have I received of my Father.

10:19 There was a division therefore again among the Jews for these
sayings.

10:20 And many of them said, He hath a devil, and is mad; why hear ye
him?  10:21 Others said, These are not the words of him that hath a
devil. Can a devil open the eyes of the blind?  10:22 And it was at
Jerusalem the feast of the dedication, and it was winter.

10:23 And Jesus walked in the temple in Solomon's porch.

10:24 Then came the Jews round about him, and said unto him, How long
dost thou make us to doubt? If thou be the Christ, tell us plainly.

10:25 Jesus answered them, I told you, and ye believed not: the works
that I do in my Father's name, they bear witness of me.

10:26 But ye believe not, because ye are not of my sheep, as I said
unto you.

10:27 My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me:
10:28 And I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish,
neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand.

10:29 My Father, which gave them me, is greater than all; and no man
is able to pluck them out of my Father's hand.

10:30 I and my Father are one.

10:31 Then the Jews took up stones again to stone him.

10:32 Jesus answered them, Many good works have I shewed you from my
Father; for which of those works do ye stone me?  10:33 The Jews
answered him, saying, For a good work we stone thee not; but for
blasphemy; and because that thou, being a man, makest thyself God.

10:34 Jesus answered them, Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye
are gods?  10:35 If he called them gods, unto whom the word of God
came, and the scripture cannot be broken; 10:36 Say ye of him, whom
the Father hath sanctified, and sent into the world, Thou blasphemest;
because I said, I am the Son of God?  10:37 If I do not the works of
my Father, believe me not.

10:38 But if I do, though ye believe not me, believe the works: that
ye may know, and believe, that the Father is in me, and I in him.

10:39 Therefore they sought again to take him: but he escaped out of
their hand, 10:40 And went away again beyond Jordan into the place
where John at first baptized; and there he abode.

10:41 And many resorted unto him, and said, John did no miracle: but
all things that John spake of this man were true.

10:42 And many believed on him there.

11:1 Now a certain man was sick, named Lazarus, of Bethany, the town
of Mary and her sister Martha.

11:2 (It was that Mary which anointed the Lord with ointment, and
wiped his feet with her hair, whose brother Lazarus was sick.)  11:3
Therefore his sisters sent unto him, saying, Lord, behold, he whom
thou lovest is sick.

11:4 When Jesus heard that, he said, This sickness is not unto death,
but for the glory of God, that the Son of God might be glorified
thereby.

11:5 Now Jesus loved Martha, and her sister, and Lazarus.

11:6 When he had heard therefore that he was sick, he abode two days
still in the same place where he was.

11:7 Then after that saith he to his disciples, Let us go into Judaea
again.

11:8 His disciples say unto him, Master, the Jews of late sought to
stone thee; and goest thou thither again?  11:9 Jesus answered, Are
there not twelve hours in the day? If any man walk in the day, he
stumbleth not, because he seeth the light of this world.

11:10 But if a man walk in the night, he stumbleth, because there is
no light in him.

11:11 These things said he: and after that he saith unto them, Our
friend Lazarus sleepeth; but I go, that I may awake him out of sleep.

11:12 Then said his disciples, Lord, if he sleep, he shall do well.

11:13 Howbeit Jesus spake of his death: but they thought that he had
spoken of taking of rest in sleep.

11:14 Then said Jesus unto them plainly, Lazarus is dead.

11:15 And I am glad for your sakes that I was not there, to the intent
ye may believe; nevertheless let us go unto him.

11:16 Then said Thomas, which is called Didymus, unto his
fellowdisciples, Let us also go, that we may die with him.

11:17 Then when Jesus came, he found that he had lain in the grave
four days already.

11:18 Now Bethany was nigh unto Jerusalem, about fifteen furlongs off:
11:19 And many of the Jews came to Martha and Mary, to comfort them
concerning their brother.

11:20 Then Martha, as soon as she heard that Jesus was coming, went
and met him: but Mary sat still in the house.

11:21 Then said Martha unto Jesus, Lord, if thou hadst been here, my
brother had not died.

11:22 But I know, that even now, whatsoever thou wilt ask of God, God
will give it thee.

11:23 Jesus saith unto her, Thy brother shall rise again.

11:24 Martha saith unto him, I know that he shall rise again in the
resurrection at the last day.

11:25 Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he
that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: 11:26
And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. Believest
thou this?  11:27 She saith unto him, Yea, Lord: I believe that thou
art the Christ, the Son of God, which should come into the world.

11:28 And when she had so said, she went her way, and called Mary her
sister secretly, saying, The Master is come, and calleth for thee.

11:29 As soon as she heard that, she arose quickly, and came unto him.

11:30 Now Jesus was not yet come into the town, but was in that place
where Martha met him.

11:31 The Jews then which were with her in the house, and comforted
her, when they saw Mary, that she rose up hastily and went out,
followed her, saying, She goeth unto the grave to weep there.

11:32 Then when Mary was come where Jesus was, and saw him, she fell
down at his feet, saying unto him, Lord, if thou hadst been here, my
brother had not died.

11:33 When Jesus therefore saw her weeping, and the Jews also weeping
which came with her, he groaned in the spirit, and was troubled.

11:34 And said, Where have ye laid him? They said unto him, Lord, come
and see.

11:35 Jesus wept.

11:36 Then said the Jews, Behold how he loved him!  11:37 And some of
them said, Could not this man, which opened the eyes of the blind,
have caused that even this man should not have died?  11:38 Jesus
therefore again groaning in himself cometh to the grave. It was a
cave, and a stone lay upon it.

11:39 Jesus said, Take ye away the stone. Martha, the sister of him
that was dead, saith unto him, Lord, by this time he stinketh: for he
hath been dead four days.

11:40 Jesus saith unto her, Said I not unto thee, that, if thou
wouldest believe, thou shouldest see the glory of God?  11:41 Then
they took away the stone from the place where the dead was laid. And
Jesus lifted up his eyes, and said, Father, I thank thee that thou
hast heard me.

11:42 And I knew that thou hearest me always: but because of the
people which stand by I said it, that they may believe that thou hast
sent me.

11:43 And when he thus had spoken, he cried with a loud voice,
Lazarus, come forth.

11:44 And he that was dead came forth, bound hand and foot with
graveclothes: and his face was bound about with a napkin. Jesus saith
unto them, Loose him, and let him go.

11:45 Then many of the Jews which came to Mary, and had seen the
things which Jesus did, believed on him.

11:46 But some of them went their ways to the Pharisees, and told them
what things Jesus had done.

11:47 Then gathered the chief priests and the Pharisees a council, and
said, What do we? for this man doeth many miracles.

11:48 If we let him thus alone, all men will believe on him: and the
Romans shall come and take away both our place and nation.

11:49 And one of them, named Caiaphas, being the high priest that same
year, said unto them, Ye know nothing at all, 11:50 Nor consider that
it is expedient for us, that one man should die for the people, and
that the whole nation perish not.

11:51 And this spake he not of himself: but being high priest that
year, he prophesied that Jesus should die for that nation; 11:52 And
not for that nation only, but that also he should gather together in
one the children of God that were scattered abroad.

11:53 Then from that day forth they took counsel together for to put
him to death.

11:54 Jesus therefore walked no more openly among the Jews; but went
thence unto a country near to the wilderness, into a city called
Ephraim, and there continued with his disciples.

11:55 And the Jews' passover was nigh at hand: and many went out of
the country up to Jerusalem before the passover, to purify themselves.

11:56 Then sought they for Jesus, and spake among themselves, as they
stood in the temple, What think ye, that he will not come to the
feast?  11:57 Now both the chief priests and the Pharisees had given a
commandment, that, if any man knew where he were, he should shew it,
that they might take him.

12:1 Then Jesus six days before the passover came to Bethany, where
Lazarus was, which had been dead, whom he raised from the dead.

12:2 There they made him a supper; and Martha served: but Lazarus was
one of them that sat at the table with him.

12:3 Then took Mary a pound of ointment of spikenard, very costly, and
anointed the feet of Jesus, and wiped his feet with her hair: and the
house was filled with the odour of the ointment.

12:4 Then saith one of his disciples, Judas Iscariot, Simon's son,
which should betray him, 12:5 Why was not this ointment sold for three
hundred pence, and given to the poor?  12:6 This he said, not that he
cared for the poor; but because he was a thief, and had the bag, and
bare what was put therein.

12:7 Then said Jesus, Let her alone: against the day of my burying
hath she kept this.

12:8 For the poor always ye have with you; but me ye have not always.

12:9 Much people of the Jews therefore knew that he was there: and
they came not for Jesus' sake only, but that they might see Lazarus
also, whom he had raised from the dead.

12:10 But the chief priests consulted that they might put Lazarus also
to death; 12:11 Because that by reason of him many of the Jews went
away, and believed on Jesus.

12:12 On the next day much people that were come to the feast, when
they heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem, 12:13 Took branches of
palm trees, and went forth to meet him, and cried, Hosanna: Blessed is
the King of Israel that cometh in the name of the Lord.

12:14 And Jesus, when he had found a young ass, sat thereon; as it is
written, 12:15 Fear not, daughter of Sion: behold, thy King cometh,
sitting on an ass's colt.

12:16 These things understood not his disciples at the first: but when
Jesus was glorified, then remembered they that these things were
written of him, and that they had done these things unto him.

12:17 The people therefore that was with him when he called Lazarus
out of his grave, and raised him from the dead, bare record.

12:18 For this cause the people also met him, for that they heard that
he had done this miracle.

12:19 The Pharisees therefore said among themselves, Perceive ye how
ye prevail nothing? behold, the world is gone after him.

12:20 And there were certain Greeks among them that came up to worship
at the feast: 12:21 The same came therefore to Philip, which was of
Bethsaida of Galilee, and desired him, saying, Sir, we would see
Jesus.

12:22 Philip cometh and telleth Andrew: and again Andrew and Philip
tell Jesus.

12:23 And Jesus answered them, saying, The hour is come, that the Son
of man should be glorified.

12:24 Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into
the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth
much fruit.

12:25 He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his
life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal.

12:26 If any man serve me, let him follow me; and where I am, there
shall also my servant be: if any man serve me, him will my Father
honour.

12:27 Now is my soul troubled; and what shall I say? Father, save me
from this hour: but for this cause came I unto this hour.

12:28 Father, glorify thy name. Then came there a voice from heaven,
saying, I have both glorified it, and will glorify it again.

12:29 The people therefore, that stood by, and heard it, said that it
thundered: others said, An angel spake to him.

12:30 Jesus answered and said, This voice came not because of me, but
for your sakes.

12:31 Now is the judgment of this world: now shall the prince of this
world be cast out.

12:32 And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto
me.

12:33 This he said, signifying what death he should die.

12:34 The people answered him, We have heard out of the law that
Christ abideth for ever: and how sayest thou, The Son of man must be
lifted up? who is this Son of man?  12:35 Then Jesus said unto them,
Yet a little while is the light with you.

Walk while ye have the light, lest darkness come upon you: for he that
walketh in darkness knoweth not whither he goeth.

12:36 While ye have light, believe in the light, that ye may be the
children of light. These things spake Jesus, and departed, and did
hide himself from them.

12:37 But though he had done so many miracles before them, yet they
believed not on him: 12:38 That the saying of Esaias the prophet might
be fulfilled, which he spake, Lord, who hath believed our report? and
to whom hath the arm of the Lord been revealed?  12:39 Therefore they
could not believe, because that Esaias said again, 12:40 He hath
blinded their eyes, and hardened their heart; that they should not see
with their eyes, nor understand with their heart, and be converted,
and I should heal them.

12:41 These things said Esaias, when he saw his glory, and spake of
him.

12:42 Nevertheless among the chief rulers also many believed on him;
but because of the Pharisees they did not confess him, lest they
should be put out of the synagogue: 12:43 For they loved the praise of
men more than the praise of God.

12:44 Jesus cried and said, He that believeth on me, believeth not on
me, but on him that sent me.

12:45 And he that seeth me seeth him that sent me.

12:46 I am come a light into the world, that whosoever believeth on me
should not abide in darkness.

12:47 And if any man hear my words, and believe not, I judge him not:
for I came not to judge the world, but to save the world.

12:48 He that rejecteth me, and receiveth not my words, hath one that
judgeth him: the word that I have spoken, the same shall judge him in
the last day.

12:49 For I have not spoken of myself; but the Father which sent me,
he gave me a commandment, what I should say, and what I should speak.

12:50 And I know that his commandment is life everlasting: whatsoever
I speak therefore, even as the Father said unto me, so I speak.

13:1 Now before the feast of the passover, when Jesus knew that his
hour was come that he should depart out of this world unto the Father,
having loved his own which were in the world, he loved them unto the
end.

13:2 And supper being ended, the devil having now put into the heart
of Judas Iscariot, Simon's son, to betray him; 13:3 Jesus knowing that
the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he was come
from God, and went to God; 13:4 He riseth from supper, and laid aside
his garments; and took a towel, and girded himself.

13:5 After that he poureth water into a bason, and began to wash the
disciples' feet, and to wipe them with the towel wherewith he was
girded.

13:6 Then cometh he to Simon Peter: and Peter saith unto him, Lord,
dost thou wash my feet?  13:7 Jesus answered and said unto him, What I
do thou knowest not now; but thou shalt know hereafter.

13:8 Peter saith unto him, Thou shalt never wash my feet. Jesus
answered him, If I wash thee not, thou hast no part with me.

13:9 Simon Peter saith unto him, Lord, not my feet only, but also my
hands and my head.

13:10 Jesus saith to him, He that is washed needeth not save to wash
his feet, but is clean every whit: and ye are clean, but not all.

13:11 For he knew who should betray him; therefore said he, Ye are not
all clean.

13:12 So after he had washed their feet, and had taken his garments,
and was set down again, he said unto them, Know ye what I have done to
you?  13:13 Ye call me Master and Lord: and ye say well; for so I am.

13:14 If I then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet; ye also
ought to wash one another's feet.

13:15 For I have given you an example, that ye should do as I have
done to you.

13:16 Verily, verily, I say unto you, The servant is not greater than
his lord; neither he that is sent greater than he that sent him.

13:17 If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do them.

13:18 I speak not of you all: I know whom I have chosen: but that the
scripture may be fulfilled, He that eateth bread with me hath lifted
up his heel against me.

13:19 Now I tell you before it come, that, when it is come to pass, ye
may believe that I am he.

13:20 Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that receiveth whomsoever I
send receiveth me; and he that receiveth me receiveth him that sent
me.

13:21 When Jesus had thus said, he was troubled in spirit, and
testified, and said, Verily, verily, I say unto you, that one of you
shall betray me.

13:22 Then the disciples looked one on another, doubting of whom he
spake.

13:23 Now there was leaning on Jesus' bosom one of his disciples, whom
Jesus loved.

13:24 Simon Peter therefore beckoned to him, that he should ask who it
should be of whom he spake.

13:25 He then lying on Jesus' breast saith unto him, Lord, who is it?
13:26 Jesus answered, He it is, to whom I shall give a sop, when I
have dipped it. And when he had dipped the sop, he gave it to Judas
Iscariot, the son of Simon.

13:27 And after the sop Satan entered into him. Then said Jesus unto
him, That thou doest, do quickly.

13:28 Now no man at the table knew for what intent he spake this unto
him.

13:29 For some of them thought, because Judas had the bag, that Jesus
had said unto him, Buy those things that we have need of against the
feast; or, that he should give something to the poor.

13:30 He then having received the sop went immediately out: and it was
night.

13:31 Therefore, when he was gone out, Jesus said, Now is the Son of
man glorified, and God is glorified in him.

13:32 If God be glorified in him, God shall also glorify him in
himself, and shall straightway glorify him.

13:33 Little children, yet a little while I am with you. Ye shall seek
me: and as I said unto the Jews, Whither I go, ye cannot come; so now
I say to you.

13:34 A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as
I have loved you, that ye also love one another.

13:35 By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have
love one to another.

13:36 Simon Peter said unto him, Lord, whither goest thou? Jesus
answered him, Whither I go, thou canst not follow me now; but thou
shalt follow me afterwards.

13:37 Peter said unto him, Lord, why cannot I follow thee now? I will
lay down my life for thy sake.

13:38 Jesus answered him, Wilt thou lay down thy life for my sake?
Verily, verily, I say unto thee, The cock shall not crow, till thou
hast denied me thrice.

14:1 Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also
in me.

14:2 In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I
would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.

14:3 And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and
receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.

14:4 And whither I go ye know, and the way ye know.

14:5 Thomas saith unto him, Lord, we know not whither thou goest; and
how can we know the way?  14:6 Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the
truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.

14:7 If ye had known me, ye should have known my Father also: and from
henceforth ye know him, and have seen him.

14:8 Philip saith unto him, Lord, shew us the Father, and it sufficeth
us.

14:9 Jesus saith unto him, Have I been so long time with you, and yet
hast thou not known me, Philip? he that hath seen me hath seen the
Father; and how sayest thou then, Shew us the Father?  14:10 Believest
thou not that I am in the Father, and the Father in me?  the words
that I speak unto you I speak not of myself: but the Father that
dwelleth in me, he doeth the works.

14:11 Believe me that I am in the Father, and the Father in me: or
else believe me for the very works' sake.

14:12 Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the
works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall
he do; because I go unto my Father.

14:13 And whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do, that the
Father may be glorified in the Son.

14:14 If ye shall ask any thing in my name, I will do it.

14:15 If ye love me, keep my commandments.

14:16 And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another
Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever; 14:17 Even the Spirit
of truth; whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not,
neither knoweth him: but ye know him; for he dwelleth with you, and
shall be in you.

14:18 I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you.

14:19 Yet a little while, and the world seeth me no more; but ye see
me: because I live, ye shall live also.

14:20 At that day ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me,
and I in you.

14:21 He that hath my commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that
loveth me: and he that loveth me shall be loved of my Father, and I
will love him, and will manifest myself to him.

14:22 Judas saith unto him, not Iscariot, Lord, how is it that thou
wilt manifest thyself unto us, and not unto the world?  14:23 Jesus
answered and said unto him, If a man love me, he will keep my words:
and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our
abode with him.

14:24 He that loveth me not keepeth not my sayings: and the word which
ye hear is not mine, but the Father's which sent me.

14:25 These things have I spoken unto you, being yet present with you.

14:26 But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will
send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things
to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.

14:27 Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the
world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither
let it be afraid.

14:28 Ye have heard how I said unto you, I go away, and come again
unto you. If ye loved me, ye would rejoice, because I said, I go unto
the Father: for my Father is greater than I.

14:29 And now I have told you before it come to pass, that, when it is
come to pass, ye might believe.

14:30 Hereafter I will not talk much with you: for the prince of this
world cometh, and hath nothing in me.

14:31 But that the world may know that I love the Father; and as the
Father gave me commandment, even so I do. Arise, let us go hence.

15:1 I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman.

15:2 Every branch in me that beareth not fruit he taketh away: and
every branch that beareth fruit, he purgeth it, that it may bring
forth more fruit.

15:3 Now ye are clean through the word which I have spoken unto you.

15:4 Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of
itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide
in me.

15:5 I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I
in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do
nothing.

15:6 If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is
withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they
are burned.

15:7 If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ye shall ask what
ye will, and it shall be done unto you.

15:8 Herein is my Father glorified, that ye bear much fruit; so shall
ye be my disciples.

15:9 As the Father hath loved me, so have I loved you: continue ye in
my love.

15:10 If ye keep my commandments, ye shall abide in my love; even as I
have kept my Father's commandments, and abide in his love.

15:11 These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in
you, and that your joy might be full.

15:12 This is my commandment, That ye love one another, as I have
loved you.

15:13 Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life
for his friends.

15:14 Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you.

15:15 Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not
what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for all things
that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you.

15:16 Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you,
that ye should go and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should
remain: that whatsoever ye shall ask of the Father in my name, he may
give it you.

15:17 These things I command you, that ye love one another.

15:18 If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated
you.

15:19 If ye were of the world, the world would love his own: but
because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the
world, therefore the world hateth you.

15:20 Remember the word that I said unto you, The servant is not
greater than his lord. If they have persecuted me, they will also
persecute you; if they have kept my saying, they will keep yours also.

15:21 But all these things will they do unto you for my name's sake,
because they know not him that sent me.

15:22 If I had not come and spoken unto them, they had not had sin:
but now they have no cloak for their sin.

15:23 He that hateth me hateth my Father also.

15:24 If I had not done among them the works which none other man did,
they had not had sin: but now have they both seen and hated both me
and my Father.

15:25 But this cometh to pass, that the word might be fulfilled that
is written in their law, They hated me without a cause.

15:26 But when the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from
the Father, even the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the
Father, he shall testify of me: 15:27 And ye also shall bear witness,
because ye have been with me from the beginning.

16:1 These things have I spoken unto you, that ye should not be
offended.

16:2 They shall put you out of the synagogues: yea, the time cometh,
that whosoever killeth you will think that he doeth God service.

16:3 And these things will they do unto you, because they have not
known the Father, nor me.

16:4 But these things have I told you, that when the time shall come,
ye may remember that I told you of them. And these things I said not
unto you at the beginning, because I was with you.

16:5 But now I go my way to him that sent me; and none of you asketh
me, Whither goest thou?  16:6 But because I have said these things
unto you, sorrow hath filled your heart.

16:7 Nevertheless I tell you the truth; It is expedient for you that I
go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you;
but if I depart, I will send him unto you.

16:8 And when he is come, he will reprove the world of sin, and of
righteousness, and of judgment: 16:9 Of sin, because they believe not
on me; 16:10 Of righteousness, because I go to my Father, and ye see
me no more; 16:11 Of judgment, because the prince of this world is
judged.

16:12 I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them
now.

16:13 Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you
into all truth: for he shall not speak of himself; but whatsoever he
shall hear, that shall he speak: and he will shew you things to come.

16:14 He shall glorify me: for he shall receive of mine, and shall
shew it unto you.

16:15 All things that the Father hath are mine: therefore said I, that
he shall take of mine, and shall shew it unto you.

16:16 A little while, and ye shall not see me: and again, a little
while, and ye shall see me, because I go to the Father.

16:17 Then said some of his disciples among themselves, What is this
that he saith unto us, A little while, and ye shall not see me: and
again, a little while, and ye shall see me: and, Because I go to the
Father?  16:18 They said therefore, What is this that he saith, A
little while? we cannot tell what he saith.

16:19 Now Jesus knew that they were desirous to ask him, and said unto
them, Do ye enquire among yourselves of that I said, A little while,
and ye shall not see me: and again, a little while, and ye shall see
me?  16:20 Verily, verily, I say unto you, That ye shall weep and
lament, but the world shall rejoice: and ye shall be sorrowful, but
your sorrow shall be turned into joy.

16:21 A woman when she is in travail hath sorrow, because her hour is
come: but as soon as she is delivered of the child, she remembereth no
more the anguish, for joy that a man is born into the world.

16:22 And ye now therefore have sorrow: but I will see you again, and
your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you.

16:23 And in that day ye shall ask me nothing. Verily, verily, I say
unto you, Whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in my name, he will give
it you.

16:24 Hitherto have ye asked nothing in my name: ask, and ye shall
receive, that your joy may be full.

16:25 These things have I spoken unto you in proverbs: but the time
cometh, when I shall no more speak unto you in proverbs, but I shall
shew you plainly of the Father.

16:26 At that day ye shall ask in my name: and I say not unto you,
that I will pray the Father for you: 16:27 For the Father himself
loveth you, because ye have loved me, and have believed that I came
out from God.

16:28 I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world: again,
I leave the world, and go to the Father.

16:29 His disciples said unto him, Lo, now speakest thou plainly, and
speakest no proverb.

16:30 Now are we sure that thou knowest all things, and needest not
that any man should ask thee: by this we believe that thou camest
forth from God.

16:31 Jesus answered them, Do ye now believe?  16:32 Behold, the hour
cometh, yea, is now come, that ye shall be scattered, every man to his
own, and shall leave me alone: and yet I am not alone, because the
Father is with me.

16:33 These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have
peace.

In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have
overcome the world.

17:1 These words spake Jesus, and lifted up his eyes to heaven, and
said, Father, the hour is come; glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may
glorify thee: 17:2 As thou hast given him power over all flesh, that
he should give eternal life to as many as thou hast given him.

17:3 And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true
God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.

17:4 I have glorified thee on the earth: I have finished the work
which thou gavest me to do.

17:5 And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the
glory which I had with thee before the world was.

17:6 I have manifested thy name unto the men which thou gavest me out
of the world: thine they were, and thou gavest them me; and they have
kept thy word.

17:7 Now they have known that all things whatsoever thou hast given me
are of thee.

17:8 For I have given unto them the words which thou gavest me; and
they have received them, and have known surely that I came out from
thee, and they have believed that thou didst send me.

17:9 I pray for them: I pray not for the world, but for them which
thou hast given me; for they are thine.

17:10 And all mine are thine, and thine are mine; and I am glorified
in them.

17:11 And now I am no more in the world, but these are in the world,
and I come to thee. Holy Father, keep through thine own name those
whom thou hast given me, that they may be one, as we are.

17:12 While I was with them in the world, I kept them in thy name:
those that thou gavest me I have kept, and none of them is lost, but
the son of perdition; that the scripture might be fulfilled.

17:13 And now come I to thee; and these things I speak in the world,
that they might have my joy fulfilled in themselves.

17:14 I have given them thy word; and the world hath hated them,
because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.

17:15 I pray not that thou shouldest take them out of the world, but
that thou shouldest keep them from the evil.

17:16 They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.

17:17 Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth.

17:18 As thou hast sent me into the world, even so have I also sent
them into the world.

17:19 And for their sakes I sanctify myself, that they also might be
sanctified through the truth.

17:20 Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall
believe on me through their word; 17:21 That they all may be one; as
thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in
us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me.

17:22 And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them; that they
may be one, even as we are one: 17:23 I in them, and thou in me, that
they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that thou
hast sent me, and hast loved them, as thou hast loved me.

17:24 Father, I will that they also, whom thou hast given me, be with
me where I am; that they may behold my glory, which thou hast given
me: for thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world.

17:25 O righteous Father, the world hath not known thee: but I have
known thee, and these have known that thou hast sent me.

17:26 And I have declared unto them thy name, and will declare it:
that the love wherewith thou hast loved me may be in them, and I in
them.

18:1 When Jesus had spoken these words, he went forth with his
disciples over the brook Cedron, where was a garden, into the which he
entered, and his disciples.

18:2 And Judas also, which betrayed him, knew the place: for Jesus
ofttimes resorted thither with his disciples.

18:3 Judas then, having received a band of men and officers from the
chief priests and Pharisees, cometh thither with lanterns and torches
and weapons.

18:4 Jesus therefore, knowing all things that should come upon him,
went forth, and said unto them, Whom seek ye?  18:5 They answered him,
Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus saith unto them, I am he.

And Judas also, which betrayed him, stood with them.

18:6 As soon then as he had said unto them, I am he, they went
backward, and fell to the ground.

18:7 Then asked he them again, Whom seek ye? And they said, Jesus of
Nazareth.

18:8 Jesus answered, I have told you that I am he: if therefore ye
seek me, let these go their way: 18:9 That the saying might be
fulfilled, which he spake, Of them which thou gavest me have I lost
none.

18:10 Then Simon Peter having a sword drew it, and smote the high
priest's servant, and cut off his right ear. The servant's name was
Malchus.

18:11 Then said Jesus unto Peter, Put up thy sword into the sheath:
the cup which my Father hath given me, shall I not drink it?  18:12
Then the band and the captain and officers of the Jews took Jesus, and
bound him, 18:13 And led him away to Annas first; for he was father in
law to Caiaphas, which was the high priest that same year.

18:14 Now Caiaphas was he, which gave counsel to the Jews, that it was
expedient that one man should die for the people.

18:15 And Simon Peter followed Jesus, and so did another disciple:
that disciple was known unto the high priest, and went in with Jesus
into the palace of the high priest.

18:16 But Peter stood at the door without. Then went out that other
disciple, which was known unto the high priest, and spake unto her
that kept the door, and brought in Peter.

18:17 Then saith the damsel that kept the door unto Peter, Art not
thou also one of this man's disciples? He saith, I am not.

18:18 And the servants and officers stood there, who had made a fire
of coals; for it was cold: and they warmed themselves: and Peter stood
with them, and warmed himself.

18:19 The high priest then asked Jesus of his disciples, and of his
doctrine.

18:20 Jesus answered him, I spake openly to the world; I ever taught
in the synagogue, and in the temple, whither the Jews always resort;
and in secret have I said nothing.

18:21 Why askest thou me? ask them which heard me, what I have said
unto them: behold, they know what I said.

18:22 And when he had thus spoken, one of the officers which stood by
struck Jesus with the palm of his hand, saying, Answerest thou the
high priest so?  18:23 Jesus answered him, If I have spoken evil, bear
witness of the evil: but if well, why smitest thou me?  18:24 Now
Annas had sent him bound unto Caiaphas the high priest.

18:25 And Simon Peter stood and warmed himself. They said therefore
unto him, Art not thou also one of his disciples? He denied it, and
said, I am not.

18:26 One of the servants of the high priest, being his kinsman whose
ear Peter cut off, saith, Did not I see thee in the garden with him?
18:27 Peter then denied again: and immediately the cock crew.

18:28 Then led they Jesus from Caiaphas unto the hall of judgment: and
it was early; and they themselves went not into the judgment hall,
lest they should be defiled; but that they might eat the passover.

18:29 Pilate then went out unto them, and said, What accusation bring
ye against this man?  18:30 They answered and said unto him, If he
were not a malefactor, we would not have delivered him up unto thee.

18:31 Then said Pilate unto them, Take ye him, and judge him according
to your law. The Jews therefore said unto him, It is not lawful for us
to put any man to death: 18:32 That the saying of Jesus might be
fulfilled, which he spake, signifying what death he should die.

18:33 Then Pilate entered into the judgment hall again, and called
Jesus, and said unto him, Art thou the King of the Jews?  18:34 Jesus
answered him, Sayest thou this thing of thyself, or did others tell it
thee of me?  18:35 Pilate answered, Am I a Jew? Thine own nation and
the chief priests have delivered thee unto me: what hast thou done?
18:36 Jesus answered, My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom
were of this world, then would my servants fight, that I should not be
delivered to the Jews: but now is my kingdom not from hence.

18:37 Pilate therefore said unto him, Art thou a king then? Jesus
answered, Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end was I born, and
for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto
the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.

18:38 Pilate saith unto him, What is truth? And when he had said this,
he went out again unto the Jews, and saith unto them, I find in him no
fault at all.

18:39 But ye have a custom, that I should release unto you one at the
passover: will ye therefore that I release unto you the King of the
Jews?  18:40 Then cried they all again, saying, Not this man, but
Barabbas. Now Barabbas was a robber.

19:1 Then Pilate therefore took Jesus, and scourged him.

19:2 And the soldiers platted a crown of thorns, and put it on his
head, and they put on him a purple robe, 19:3 And said, Hail, King of
the Jews! and they smote him with their hands.

19:4 Pilate therefore went forth again, and saith unto them, Behold, I
bring him forth to you, that ye may know that I find no fault in him.

19:5 Then came Jesus forth, wearing the crown of thorns, and the
purple robe. And Pilate saith unto them, Behold the man!  19:6 When
the chief priests therefore and officers saw him, they cried out,
saying, Crucify him, crucify him. Pilate saith unto them, Take ye him,
and crucify him: for I find no fault in him.

19:7 The Jews answered him, We have a law, and by our law he ought to
die, because he made himself the Son of God.

19:8 When Pilate therefore heard that saying, he was the more afraid;
19:9 And went again into the judgment hall, and saith unto Jesus,
Whence art thou? But Jesus gave him no answer.

19:10 Then saith Pilate unto him, Speakest thou not unto me? knowest
thou not that I have power to crucify thee, and have power to release
thee?  19:11 Jesus answered, Thou couldest have no power at all
against me, except it were given thee from above: therefore he that
delivered me unto thee hath the greater sin.

19:12 And from thenceforth Pilate sought to release him: but the Jews
cried out, saying, If thou let this man go, thou art not Caesar's
friend: whosoever maketh himself a king speaketh against Caesar.

19:13 When Pilate therefore heard that saying, he brought Jesus forth,
and sat down in the judgment seat in a place that is called the
Pavement, but in the Hebrew, Gabbatha.

19:14 And it was the preparation of the passover, and about the sixth
hour: and he saith unto the Jews, Behold your King!  19:15 But they
cried out, Away with him, away with him, crucify him.

Pilate saith unto them, Shall I crucify your King? The chief priests
answered, We have no king but Caesar.

19:16 Then delivered he him therefore unto them to be crucified. And
they took Jesus, and led him away.

19:17 And he bearing his cross went forth into a place called the
place of a skull, which is called in the Hebrew Golgotha: 19:18 Where
they crucified him, and two other with him, on either side one, and
Jesus in the midst.

19:19 And Pilate wrote a title, and put it on the cross. And the
writing was JESUS OF NAZARETH THE KING OF THE JEWS.

19:20 This title then read many of the Jews: for the place where Jesus
was crucified was nigh to the city: and it was written in Hebrew, and
Greek, and Latin.

19:21 Then said the chief priests of the Jews to Pilate, Write not,
The King of the Jews; but that he said, I am King of the Jews.

19:22 Pilate answered, What I have written I have written.

19:23 Then the soldiers, when they had crucified Jesus, took his
garments, and made four parts, to every soldier a part; and also his
coat: now the coat was without seam, woven from the top throughout.

19:24 They said therefore among themselves, Let us not rend it, but
cast lots for it, whose it shall be: that the scripture might be
fulfilled, which saith, They parted my raiment among them, and for my
vesture they did cast lots. These things therefore the soldiers did.

19:25 Now there stood by the cross of Jesus his mother, and his
mother's sister, Mary the wife of Cleophas, and Mary Magdalene.

19:26 When Jesus therefore saw his mother, and the disciple standing
by, whom he loved, he saith unto his mother, Woman, behold thy son!
19:27 Then saith he to the disciple, Behold thy mother! And from that
hour that disciple took her unto his own home.

19:28 After this, Jesus knowing that all things were now accomplished,
that the scripture might be fulfilled, saith, I thirst.

19:29 Now there was set a vessel full of vinegar: and they filled a
spunge with vinegar, and put it upon hyssop, and put it to his mouth.

19:30 When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said, It is
finished: and he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost.

19:31 The Jews therefore, because it was the preparation, that the
bodies should not remain upon the cross on the sabbath day, (for that
sabbath day was an high day,) besought Pilate that their legs might be
broken, and that they might be taken away.

19:32 Then came the soldiers, and brake the legs of the first, and of
the other which was crucified with him.

19:33 But when they came to Jesus, and saw that he was dead already,
they brake not his legs: 19:34 But one of the soldiers with a spear
pierced his side, and forthwith came there out blood and water.

19:35 And he that saw it bare record, and his record is true: and he
knoweth that he saith true, that ye might believe.

19:36 For these things were done, that the scripture should be
fulfilled, A bone of him shall not be broken.

19:37 And again another scripture saith, They shall look on him whom
they pierced.

19:38 And after this Joseph of Arimathaea, being a disciple of Jesus,
but secretly for fear of the Jews, besought Pilate that he might take
away the body of Jesus: and Pilate gave him leave. He came therefore,
and took the body of Jesus.

19:39 And there came also Nicodemus, which at the first came to Jesus
by night, and brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about an hundred
pound weight.

19:40 Then took they the body of Jesus, and wound it in linen clothes
with the spices, as the manner of the Jews is to bury.

19:41 Now in the place where he was crucified there was a garden; and
in the garden a new sepulchre, wherein was never man yet laid.

19:42 There laid they Jesus therefore because of the Jews' preparation
day; for the sepulchre was nigh at hand.

20:1 The first day of the week cometh Mary Magdalene early, when it
was yet dark, unto the sepulchre, and seeth the stone taken away from
the sepulchre.

20:2 Then she runneth, and cometh to Simon Peter, and to the other
disciple, whom Jesus loved, and saith unto them, They have taken away
the LORD out of the sepulchre, and we know not where they have laid
him.

20:3 Peter therefore went forth, and that other disciple, and came to
the sepulchre.

20:4 So they ran both together: and the other disciple did outrun
Peter, and came first to the sepulchre.

20:5 And he stooping down, and looking in, saw the linen clothes
lying; yet went he not in.

20:6 Then cometh Simon Peter following him, and went into the
sepulchre, and seeth the linen clothes lie, 20:7 And the napkin, that
was about his head, not lying with the linen clothes, but wrapped
together in a place by itself.

20:8 Then went in also that other disciple, which came first to the
sepulchre, and he saw, and believed.

20:9 For as yet they knew not the scripture, that he must rise again
from the dead.

20:10 Then the disciples went away again unto their own home.

20:11 But Mary stood without at the sepulchre weeping: and as she
wept, she stooped down, and looked into the sepulchre, 20:12 And seeth
two angels in white sitting, the one at the head, and the other at the
feet, where the body of Jesus had lain.

20:13 And they say unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? She saith unto
them, Because they have taken away my LORD, and I know not where they
have laid him.

20:14 And when she had thus said, she turned herself back, and saw
Jesus standing, and knew not that it was Jesus.

20:15 Jesus saith unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? whom seekest
thou?  She, supposing him to be the gardener, saith unto him, Sir, if
thou have borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I
will take him away.

20:16 Jesus saith unto her, Mary. She turned herself, and saith unto
him, Rabboni; which is to say, Master.

20:17 Jesus saith unto her, Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to
my Father: but go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my
Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God.

20:18 Mary Magdalene came and told the disciples that she had seen the
LORD, and that he had spoken these things unto her.

20:19 Then the same day at evening, being the first day of the week,
when the doors were shut where the disciples were assembled for fear
of the Jews, came Jesus and stood in the midst, and saith unto them,
Peace be unto you.

20:20 And when he had so said, he shewed unto them his hands and his
side.

Then were the disciples glad, when they saw the LORD.

20:21 Then said Jesus to them again, Peace be unto you: as my Father
hath sent me, even so send I you.

20:22 And when he had said this, he breathed on them, and saith unto
them, Receive ye the Holy Ghost: 20:23 Whose soever sins ye remit,
they are remitted unto them; and whose soever sins ye retain, they are
retained.

20:24 But Thomas, one of the twelve, called Didymus, was not with them
when Jesus came.

20:25 The other disciples therefore said unto him, We have seen the
LORD.

But he said unto them, Except I shall see in his hands the print of
the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust
my hand into his side, I will not believe.

20:26 And after eight days again his disciples were within, and Thomas
with them: then came Jesus, the doors being shut, and stood in the
midst, and said, Peace be unto you.

20:27 Then saith he to Thomas, Reach hither thy finger, and behold my
hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be
not faithless, but believing.

20:28 And Thomas answered and said unto him, My LORD and my God.

20:29 Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou
hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have
believed.

20:30 And many other signs truly did Jesus in the presence of his
disciples, which are not written in this book: 20:31 But these are
written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of
God; and that believing ye might have life through his name.

21:1 After these things Jesus shewed himself again to the disciples at
the sea of Tiberias; and on this wise shewed he himself.

21:2 There were together Simon Peter, and Thomas called Didymus, and
Nathanael of Cana in Galilee, and the sons of Zebedee, and two other
of his disciples.

21:3 Simon Peter saith unto them, I go a fishing. They say unto him,
We also go with thee. They went forth, and entered into a ship
immediately; and that night they caught nothing.

21:4 But when the morning was now come, Jesus stood on the shore: but
the disciples knew not that it was Jesus.

21:5 Then Jesus saith unto them, Children, have ye any meat? They
answered him, No.

21:6 And he said unto them, Cast the net on the right side of the
ship, and ye shall find. They cast therefore, and now they were not
able to draw it for the multitude of fishes.

21:7 Therefore that disciple whom Jesus loved saith unto Peter, It is
the Lord. Now when Simon Peter heard that it was the Lord, he girt his
fisher's coat unto him, (for he was naked,) and did cast himself into
the sea.

21:8 And the other disciples came in a little ship; (for they were not
far from land, but as it were two hundred cubits,) dragging the net
with fishes.

21:9 As soon then as they were come to land, they saw a fire of coals
there, and fish laid thereon, and bread.

21:10 Jesus saith unto them, Bring of the fish which ye have now
caught.

21:11 Simon Peter went up, and drew the net to land full of great
fishes, an hundred and fifty and three: and for all there were so
many, yet was not the net broken.

21:12 Jesus saith unto them, Come and dine. And none of the disciples
durst ask him, Who art thou? knowing that it was the Lord.

21:13 Jesus then cometh, and taketh bread, and giveth them, and fish
likewise.

21:14 This is now the third time that Jesus shewed himself to his
disciples, after that he was risen from the dead.

21:15 So when they had dined, Jesus saith to Simon Peter, Simon, son
of Jonas, lovest thou me more than these? He saith unto him, Yea,
Lord; thou knowest that I love thee. He saith unto him, Feed my lambs.

21:16 He saith to him again the second time, Simon, son of Jonas,
lovest thou me? He saith unto him, Yea, Lord; thou knowest that I love
thee. He saith unto him, Feed my sheep.

21:17 He saith unto him the third time, Simon, son of Jonas, lovest
thou me? Peter was grieved because he said unto him the third time,
Lovest thou me? And he said unto him, Lord, thou knowest all things;
thou knowest that I love thee. Jesus saith unto him, Feed my sheep.

21:18 Verily, verily, I say unto thee, When thou wast young, thou
girdest thyself, and walkedst whither thou wouldest: but when thou
shalt be old, thou shalt stretch forth thy hands, and another shall
gird thee, and carry thee whither thou wouldest not.

21:19 This spake he, signifying by what death he should glorify God.
And when he had spoken this, he saith unto him, Follow me.

21:20 Then Peter, turning about, seeth the disciple whom Jesus loved
following; which also leaned on his breast at supper, and said, Lord,
which is he that betrayeth thee?  21:21 Peter seeing him saith to
Jesus, Lord, and what shall this man do?  21:22 Jesus saith unto him,
If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee? follow thou
me.

21:23 Then went this saying abroad among the brethren, that that
disciple should not die: yet Jesus said not unto him, He shall not
die; but, If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee?
21:24 This is the disciple which testifieth of these things, and wrote
these things: and we know that his testimony is true.

21:25 And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which,
if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world
itself could not contain the books that should be written. Amen.




The Acts of the Apostles


1:1 The former treatise have I made, O Theophilus, of all that Jesus
began both to do and teach, 1:2 Until the day in which he was taken
up, after that he through the Holy Ghost had given commandments unto
the apostles whom he had chosen: 1:3 To whom also he shewed himself
alive after his passion by many infallible proofs, being seen of them
forty days, and speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of
God: 1:4 And, being assembled together with them, commanded them that
they should not depart from Jerusalem, but wait for the promise of the
Father, which, saith he, ye have heard of me.

1:5 For John truly baptized with water; but ye shall be baptized with
the Holy Ghost not many days hence.

1:6 When they therefore were come together, they asked of him, saying,
Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel?  1:7
And he said unto them, It is not for you to know the times or the
seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power.

1:8 But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon
you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all
Judaea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.

1:9 And when he had spoken these things, while they beheld, he was
taken up; and a cloud received him out of their sight.

1:10 And while they looked stedfastly toward heaven as he went up,
behold, two men stood by them in white apparel; 1:11 Which also said,
Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven? this same
Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like
manner as ye have seen him go into heaven.

1:12 Then returned they unto Jerusalem from the mount called Olivet,
which is from Jerusalem a sabbath day's journey.

1:13 And when they were come in, they went up into an upper room,
where abode both Peter, and James, and John, and Andrew, Philip, and
Thomas, Bartholomew, and Matthew, James the son of Alphaeus, and Simon
Zelotes, and Judas the brother of James.

1:14 These all continued with one accord in prayer and supplication,
with the women, and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brethren.

1:15 And in those days Peter stood up in the midst of the disciples,
and said, (the number of names together were about an hundred and
twenty,) 1:16 Men and brethren, this scripture must needs have been
fulfilled, which the Holy Ghost by the mouth of David spake before
concerning Judas, which was guide to them that took Jesus.

1:17 For he was numbered with us, and had obtained part of this
ministry.

1:18 Now this man purchased a field with the reward of iniquity; and
falling headlong, he burst asunder in the midst, and all his bowels
gushed out.

1:19 And it was known unto all the dwellers at Jerusalem; insomuch as
that field is called in their proper tongue, Aceldama, that is to say,
The field of blood.

1:20 For it is written in the book of Psalms, Let his habitation be
desolate, and let no man dwell therein: and his bishoprick let another
take.

1:21 Wherefore of these men which have companied with us all the time
that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, 1:22 Beginning from the
baptism of John, unto that same day that he was taken up from us, must
one be ordained to be a witness with us of his resurrection.

1:23 And they appointed two, Joseph called Barsabas, who was surnamed
Justus, and Matthias.

1:24 And they prayed, and said, Thou, Lord, which knowest the hearts
of all men, shew whether of these two thou hast chosen, 1:25 That he
may take part of this ministry and apostleship, from which Judas by
transgression fell, that he might go to his own place.

1:26 And they gave forth their lots; and the lot fell upon Matthias;
and he was numbered with the eleven apostles.

2:1 And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with
one accord in one place.

2:2 And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty
wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting.

2:3 And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and
it sat upon each of them.

2:4 And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak
with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.

2:5 And there were dwelling at Jerusalem Jews, devout men, out of
every nation under heaven.

2:6 Now when this was noised abroad, the multitude came together, and
were confounded, because that every man heard them speak in his own
language.

2:7 And they were all amazed and marvelled, saying one to another,
Behold, are not all these which speak Galilaeans?  2:8 And how hear we
every man in our own tongue, wherein we were born?  2:9 Parthians, and
Medes, and Elamites, and the dwellers in Mesopotamia, and in Judaea,
and Cappadocia, in Pontus, and Asia, 2:10 Phrygia, and Pamphylia, in
Egypt, and in the parts of Libya about Cyrene, and strangers of Rome,
Jews and proselytes, 2:11 Cretes and Arabians, we do hear them speak
in our tongues the wonderful works of God.

2:12 And they were all amazed, and were in doubt, saying one to
another, What meaneth this?  2:13 Others mocking said, These men are
full of new wine.

2:14 But Peter, standing up with the eleven, lifted up his voice, and
said unto them, Ye men of Judaea, and all ye that dwell at Jerusalem,
be this known unto you, and hearken to my words: 2:15 For these are
not drunken, as ye suppose, seeing it is but the third hour of the
day.

2:16 But this is that which was spoken by the prophet Joel; 2:17 And
it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of
my Spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall
prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall
dream dreams: 2:18 And on my servants and on my handmaidens I will
pour out in those days of my Spirit; and they shall prophesy: 2:19 And
I will shew wonders in heaven above, and signs in the earth beneath;
blood, and fire, and vapour of smoke: 2:20 The sun shall be turned
into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and notable
day of the Lord come: 2:21 And it shall come to pass, that whosoever
shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved.

2:22 Ye men of Israel, hear these words; Jesus of Nazareth, a man
approved of God among you by miracles and wonders and signs, which God
did by him in the midst of you, as ye yourselves also know: 2:23 Him,
being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God,
ye have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain: 2:24 Whom
God hath raised up, having loosed the pains of death: because it was
not possible that he should be holden of it.

2:25 For David speaketh concerning him, I foresaw the Lord always
before my face, for he is on my right hand, that I should not be
moved: 2:26 Therefore did my heart rejoice, and my tongue was glad;
moreover also my flesh shall rest in hope: 2:27 Because thou wilt not
leave my soul in hell, neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see
corruption.

2:28 Thou hast made known to me the ways of life; thou shalt make me
full of joy with thy countenance.

2:29 Men and brethren, let me freely speak unto you of the patriarch
David, that he is both dead and buried, and his sepulchre is with us
unto this day.

2:30 Therefore being a prophet, and knowing that God had sworn with an
oath to him, that of the fruit of his loins, according to the flesh,
he would raise up Christ to sit on his throne; 2:31 He seeing this
before spake of the resurrection of Christ, that his soul was not left
in hell, neither his flesh did see corruption.

2:32 This Jesus hath God raised up, whereof we all are witnesses.

2:33 Therefore being by the right hand of God exalted, and having
received of the Father the promise of the Holy Ghost, he hath shed
forth this, which ye now see and hear.

2:34 For David is not ascended into the heavens: but he saith himself,
The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou on my right hand, 2:35 Until I
make thy foes thy footstool.

2:36 Therefore let all the house of Israel know assuredly, that God
hath made the same Jesus, whom ye have crucified, both Lord and
Christ.

2:37 Now when they heard this, they were pricked in their heart, and
said unto Peter and to the rest of the apostles, Men and brethren,
what shall we do?  2:38 Then Peter said unto them, Repent, and be
baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the
remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost.

2:39 For the promise is unto you, and to your children, and to all
that are afar off, even as many as the LORD our God shall call.

2:40 And with many other words did he testify and exhort, saying, Save
yourselves from this untoward generation.

2:41 Then they that gladly received his word were baptized: and the
same day there were added unto them about three thousand souls.

2:42 And they continued stedfastly in the apostles' doctrine and
fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers.

2:43 And fear came upon every soul: and many wonders and signs were
done by the apostles.

2:44 And all that believed were together, and had all things common;
2:45 And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men,
as every man had need.

2:46 And they, continuing daily with one accord in the temple, and
breaking bread from house to house, did eat their meat with gladness
and singleness of heart, 2:47 Praising God, and having favour with all
the people. And the Lord added to the church daily such as should be
saved.

3:1 Now Peter and John went up together into the temple at the hour of
prayer, being the ninth hour.

3:2 And a certain man lame from his mother's womb was carried, whom
they laid daily at the gate of the temple which is called Beautiful,
to ask alms of them that entered into the temple; 3:3 Who seeing Peter
and John about to go into the temple asked an alms.

3:4 And Peter, fastening his eyes upon him with John, said, Look on
us.

3:5 And he gave heed unto them, expecting to receive something of
them.

3:6 Then Peter said, Silver and gold have I none; but such as I have
give I thee: In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth rise up and walk.

3:7 And he took him by the right hand, and lifted him up: and
immediately his feet and ankle bones received strength.

3:8 And he leaping up stood, and walked, and entered with them into
the temple, walking, and leaping, and praising God.

3:9 And all the people saw him walking and praising God: 3:10 And they
knew that it was he which sat for alms at the Beautiful gate of the
temple: and they were filled with wonder and amazement at that which
had happened unto him.

3:11 And as the lame man which was healed held Peter and John, all the
people ran together unto them in the porch that is called Solomon's,
greatly wondering.

3:12 And when Peter saw it, he answered unto the people, Ye men of
Israel, why marvel ye at this? or why look ye so earnestly on us, as
though by our own power or holiness we had made this man to walk?
3:13 The God of Abraham, and of Isaac, and of Jacob, the God of our
fathers, hath glorified his Son Jesus; whom ye delivered up, and
denied him in the presence of Pilate, when he was determined to let
him go.

3:14 But ye denied the Holy One and the Just, and desired a murderer
to be granted unto you; 3:15 And killed the Prince of life, whom God
hath raised from the dead; whereof we are witnesses.

3:16 And his name through faith in his name hath made this man strong,
whom ye see and know: yea, the faith which is by him hath given him
this perfect soundness in the presence of you all.

3:17 And now, brethren, I wot that through ignorance ye did it, as did
also your rulers.

3:18 But those things, which God before had shewed by the mouth of all
his prophets, that Christ should suffer, he hath so fulfilled.

3:19 Repent ye therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be
blotted out, when the times of refreshing shall come from the presence
of the Lord.

3:20 And he shall send Jesus Christ, which before was preached unto
you: 3:21 Whom the heaven must receive until the times of restitution
of all things, which God hath spoken by the mouth of all his holy
prophets since the world began.

3:22 For Moses truly said unto the fathers, A prophet shall the Lord
your God raise up unto you of your brethren, like unto me; him shall
ye hear in all things whatsoever he shall say unto you.

3:23 And it shall come to pass, that every soul, which will not hear
that prophet, shall be destroyed from among the people.

3:24 Yea, and all the prophets from Samuel and those that follow
after, as many as have spoken, have likewise foretold of these days.

3:25 Ye are the children of the prophets, and of the covenant which
God made with our fathers, saying unto Abraham, And in thy seed shall
all the kindreds of the earth be blessed.

3:26 Unto you first God, having raised up his Son Jesus, sent him to
bless you, in turning away every one of you from his iniquities.

4:1 And as they spake unto the people, the priests, and the captain of
the temple, and the Sadducees, came upon them, 4:2 Being grieved that
they taught the people, and preached through Jesus the resurrection
from the dead.

4:3 And they laid hands on them, and put them in hold unto the next
day: for it was now eventide.

4:4 Howbeit many of them which heard the word believed; and the number
of the men was about five thousand.

4:5 And it came to pass on the morrow, that their rulers, and elders,
and scribes, 4:6 And Annas the high priest, and Caiaphas, and John,
and Alexander, and as many as were of the kindred of the high priest,
were gathered together at Jerusalem.

4:7 And when they had set them in the midst, they asked, By what
power, or by what name, have ye done this?  4:8 Then Peter, filled
with the Holy Ghost, said unto them, Ye rulers of the people, and
elders of Israel, 4:9 If we this day be examined of the good deed done
to the impotent man, by what means he is made whole; 4:10 Be it known
unto you all, and to all the people of Israel, that by the name of
Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom ye crucified, whom God raised from the
dead, even by him doth this man stand here before you whole.

4:11 This is the stone which was set at nought of you builders, which
is become the head of the corner.

4:12 Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other
name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved.

4:13 Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived
that they were unlearned and ignorant men, they marvelled; and they
took knowledge of them, that they had been with Jesus.

4:14 And beholding the man which was healed standing with them, they
could say nothing against it.

4:15 But when they had commanded them to go aside out of the council,
they conferred among themselves, 4:16 Saying, What shall we do to
these men? for that indeed a notable miracle hath been done by them is
manifest to all them that dwell in Jerusalem; and we cannot deny it.

4:17 But that it spread no further among the people, let us straitly
threaten them, that they speak henceforth to no man in this name.

4:18 And they called them, and commanded them not to speak at all nor
teach in the name of Jesus.

4:19 But Peter and John answered and said unto them, Whether it be
right in the sight of God to hearken unto you more than unto God,
judge ye.

4:20 For we cannot but speak the things which we have seen and heard.

4:21 So when they had further threatened them, they let them go,
finding nothing how they might punish them, because of the people: for
all men glorified God for that which was done.

4:22 For the man was above forty years old, on whom this miracle of
healing was shewed.

4:23 And being let go, they went to their own company, and reported
all that the chief priests and elders had said unto them.

4:24 And when they heard that, they lifted up their voice to God with
one accord, and said, Lord, thou art God, which hast made heaven, and
earth, and the sea, and all that in them is: 4:25 Who by the mouth of
thy servant David hast said, Why did the heathen rage, and the people
imagine vain things?  4:26 The kings of the earth stood up, and the
rulers were gathered together against the Lord, and against his
Christ.

4:27 For of a truth against thy holy child Jesus, whom thou hast
anointed, both Herod, and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles, and the
people of Israel, were gathered together, 4:28 For to do whatsoever
thy hand and thy counsel determined before to be done.

4:29 And now, Lord, behold their threatenings: and grant unto thy
servants, that with all boldness they may speak thy word, 4:30 By
stretching forth thine hand to heal; and that signs and wonders may be
done by the name of thy holy child Jesus.

4:31 And when they had prayed, the place was shaken where they were
assembled together; and they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and
they spake the word of God with boldness.

4:32 And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of
one soul: neither said any of them that ought of the things which he
possessed was his own; but they had all things common.

4:33 And with great power gave the apostles witness of the
resurrection of the Lord Jesus: and great grace was upon them all.

4:34 Neither was there any among them that lacked: for as many as were
possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the prices of the
things that were sold, 4:35 And laid them down at the apostles' feet:
and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need.

4:36 And Joses, who by the apostles was surnamed Barnabas, (which is,
being interpreted, The son of consolation,) a Levite, and of the
country of Cyprus, 4:37 Having land, sold it, and brought the money,
and laid it at the apostles' feet.

5:1 But a certain man named Ananias, with Sapphira his wife, sold a
possession, 5:2 And kept back part of the price, his wife also being
privy to it, and brought a certain part, and laid it at the apostles'
feet.

5:3 But Peter said, Ananias, why hath Satan filled thine heart to lie
to the Holy Ghost, and to keep back part of the price of the land?
5:4 Whiles it remained, was it not thine own? and after it was sold,
was it not in thine own power? why hast thou conceived this thing in
thine heart?  thou hast not lied unto men, but unto God.

5:5 And Ananias hearing these words fell down, and gave up the ghost:
and great fear came on all them that heard these things.

5:6 And the young men arose, wound him up, and carried him out, and
buried him.

5:7 And it was about the space of three hours after, when his wife,
not knowing what was done, came in.

5:8 And Peter answered unto her, Tell me whether ye sold the land for
so much? And she said, Yea, for so much.

5:9 Then Peter said unto her, How is it that ye have agreed together
to tempt the Spirit of the Lord? behold, the feet of them which have
buried thy husband are at the door, and shall carry thee out.

5:10 Then fell she down straightway at his feet, and yielded up the
ghost: and the young men came in, and found her dead, and, carrying
her forth, buried her by her husband.

5:11 And great fear came upon all the church, and upon as many as
heard these things.

5:12 And by the hands of the apostles were many signs and wonders
wrought among the people; (and they were all with one accord in
Solomon's porch.

5:13 And of the rest durst no man join himself to them: but the people
magnified them.

5:14 And believers were the more added to the Lord, multitudes both of
men and women.)  5:15 Insomuch that they brought forth the sick into
the streets, and laid them on beds and couches, that at the least the
shadow of Peter passing by might overshadow some of them.

5:16 There came also a multitude out of the cities round about unto
Jerusalem, bringing sick folks, and them which were vexed with unclean
spirits: and they were healed every one.

5:17 Then the high priest rose up, and all they that were with him,
(which is the sect of the Sadducees,) and were filled with
indignation, 5:18 And laid their hands on the apostles, and put them
in the common prison.

5:19 But the angel of the Lord by night opened the prison doors, and
brought them forth, and said, 5:20 Go, stand and speak in the temple
to the people all the words of this life.

5:21 And when they heard that, they entered into the temple early in
the morning, and taught. But the high priest came, and they that were
with him, and called the council together, and all the senate of the
children of Israel, and sent to the prison to have them brought.

5:22 But when the officers came, and found them not in the prison,
they returned and told, 5:23 Saying, The prison truly found we shut
with all safety, and the keepers standing without before the doors:
but when we had opened, we found no man within.

5:24 Now when the high priest and the captain of the temple and the
chief priests heard these things, they doubted of them whereunto this
would grow.

5:25 Then came one and told them, saying, Behold, the men whom ye put
in prison are standing in the temple, and teaching the people.

5:26 Then went the captain with the officers, and brought them without
violence: for they feared the people, lest they should have been
stoned.

5:27 And when they had brought them, they set them before the council:
and the high priest asked them, 5:28 Saying, Did not we straitly
command you that ye should not teach in this name? and, behold, ye
have filled Jerusalem with your doctrine, and intend to bring this
man's blood upon us.

5:29 Then Peter and the other apostles answered and said, We ought to
obey God rather than men.

5:30 The God of our fathers raised up Jesus, whom ye slew and hanged
on a tree.

5:31 Him hath God exalted with his right hand to be a Prince and a
Saviour, for to give repentance to Israel, and forgiveness of sins.

5:32 And we are his witnesses of these things; and so is also the Holy
Ghost, whom God hath given to them that obey him.

5:33 When they heard that, they were cut to the heart, and took
counsel to slay them.

5:34 Then stood there up one in the council, a Pharisee, named
Gamaliel, a doctor of the law, had in reputation among all the people,
and commanded to put the apostles forth a little space; 5:35 And said
unto them, Ye men of Israel, take heed to yourselves what ye intend to
do as touching these men.

5:36 For before these days rose up Theudas, boasting himself to be
somebody; to whom a number of men, about four hundred, joined
themselves: who was slain; and all, as many as obeyed him, were
scattered, and brought to nought.

5:37 After this man rose up Judas of Galilee in the days of the
taxing, and drew away much people after him: he also perished; and
all, even as many as obeyed him, were dispersed.

5:38 And now I say unto you, Refrain from these men, and let them
alone: for if this counsel or this work be of men, it will come to
nought: 5:39 But if it be of God, ye cannot overthrow it; lest haply
ye be found even to fight against God.

5:40 And to him they agreed: and when they had called the apostles,
and beaten them, they commanded that they should not speak in the name
of Jesus, and let them go.

5:41 And they departed from the presence of the council, rejoicing
that they were counted worthy to suffer shame for his name.

5:42 And daily in the temple, and in every house, they ceased not to
teach and preach Jesus Christ.

6:1 And in those days, when the number of the disciples was
multiplied, there arose a murmuring of the Grecians against the
Hebrews, because their widows were neglected in the daily
ministration.

6:2 Then the twelve called the multitude of the disciples unto them,
and said, It is not reason that we should leave the word of God, and
serve tables.

6:3 Wherefore, brethren, look ye out among you seven men of honest
report, full of the Holy Ghost and wisdom, whom we may appoint over
this business.

6:4 But we will give ourselves continually to prayer, and to the
ministry of the word.

6:5 And the saying pleased the whole multitude: and they chose
Stephen, a man full of faith and of the Holy Ghost, and Philip, and
Prochorus, and Nicanor, and Timon, and Parmenas, and Nicolas a
proselyte of Antioch: 6:6 Whom they set before the apostles: and when
they had prayed, they laid their hands on them.

6:7 And the word of God increased; and the number of the disciples
multiplied in Jerusalem greatly; and a great company of the priests
were obedient to the faith.

6:8 And Stephen, full of faith and power, did great wonders and
miracles among the people.

6:9 Then there arose certain of the synagogue, which is called the
synagogue of the Libertines, and Cyrenians, and Alexandrians, and of
them of Cilicia and of Asia, disputing with Stephen.

6:10 And they were not able to resist the wisdom and the spirit by
which he spake.

6:11 Then they suborned men, which said, We have heard him speak
blasphemous words against Moses, and against God.

6:12 And they stirred up the people, and the elders, and the scribes,
and came upon him, and caught him, and brought him to the council,
6:13 And set up false witnesses, which said, This man ceaseth not to
speak blasphemous words against this holy place, and the law: 6:14 For
we have heard him say, that this Jesus of Nazareth shall destroy this
place, and shall change the customs which Moses delivered us.

6:15 And all that sat in the council, looking stedfastly on him, saw
his face as it had been the face of an angel.

7:1 Then said the high priest, Are these things so?  7:2 And he said,
Men, brethren, and fathers, hearken; The God of glory appeared unto
our father Abraham, when he was in Mesopotamia, before he dwelt in
Charran, 7:3 And said unto him, Get thee out of thy country, and from
thy kindred, and come into the land which I shall shew thee.

7:4 Then came he out of the land of the Chaldaeans, and dwelt in
Charran: and from thence, when his father was dead, he removed him
into this land, wherein ye now dwell.

7:5 And he gave him none inheritance in it, no, not so much as to set
his foot on: yet he promised that he would give it to him for a
possession, and to his seed after him, when as yet he had no child.

7:6 And God spake on this wise, That his seed should sojourn in a
strange land; and that they should bring them into bondage, and
entreat them evil four hundred years.

7:7 And the nation to whom they shall be in bondage will I judge, said
God: and after that shall they come forth, and serve me in this place.

7:8 And he gave him the covenant of circumcision: and so Abraham begat
Isaac, and circumcised him the eighth day; and Isaac begat Jacob; and
Jacob begat the twelve patriarchs.

7:9 And the patriarchs, moved with envy, sold Joseph into Egypt: but
God was with him, 7:10 And delivered him out of all his afflictions,
and gave him favour and wisdom in the sight of Pharaoh king of Egypt;
and he made him governor over Egypt and all his house.

7:11 Now there came a dearth over all the land of Egypt and Chanaan,
and great affliction: and our fathers found no sustenance.

7:12 But when Jacob heard that there was corn in Egypt, he sent out
our fathers first.

7:13 And at the second time Joseph was made known to his brethren; and
Joseph's kindred was made known unto Pharaoh.

7:14 Then sent Joseph, and called his father Jacob to him, and all his
kindred, threescore and fifteen souls.

7:15 So Jacob went down into Egypt, and died, he, and our fathers,
7:16 And were carried over into Sychem, and laid in the sepulchre that
Abraham bought for a sum of money of the sons of Emmor the father of
Sychem.

7:17 But when the time of the promise drew nigh, which God had sworn
to Abraham, the people grew and multiplied in Egypt, 7:18 Till another
king arose, which knew not Joseph.

7:19 The same dealt subtilly with our kindred, and evil entreated our
fathers, so that they cast out their young children, to the end they
might not live.

7:20 In which time Moses was born, and was exceeding fair, and
nourished up in his father's house three months: 7:21 And when he was
cast out, Pharaoh's daughter took him up, and nourished him for her
own son.

7:22 And Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and was
mighty in words and in deeds.

7:23 And when he was full forty years old, it came into his heart to
visit his brethren the children of Israel.

7:24 And seeing one of them suffer wrong, he defended him, and avenged
him that was oppressed, and smote the Egyptian: 7:25 For he supposed
his brethren would have understood how that God by his hand would
deliver them: but they understood not.

7:26 And the next day he shewed himself unto them as they strove, and
would have set them at one again, saying, Sirs, ye are brethren; why
do ye wrong one to another?  7:27 But he that did his neighbour wrong
thrust him away, saying, Who made thee a ruler and a judge over us?
7:28 Wilt thou kill me, as thou diddest the Egyptian yesterday?  7:29
Then fled Moses at this saying, and was a stranger in the land of
Madian, where he begat two sons.

7:30 And when forty years were expired, there appeared to him in the
wilderness of mount Sina an angel of the Lord in a flame of fire in a
bush.

7:31 When Moses saw it, he wondered at the sight: and as he drew near
to behold it, the voice of the LORD came unto him, 7:32 Saying, I am
the God of thy fathers, the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and
the God of Jacob. Then Moses trembled, and durst not behold.

7:33 Then said the Lord to him, Put off thy shoes from thy feet: for
the place where thou standest is holy ground.

7:34 I have seen, I have seen the affliction of my people which is in
Egypt, and I have heard their groaning, and am come down to deliver
them. And now come, I will send thee into Egypt.

7:35 This Moses whom they refused, saying, Who made thee a ruler and a
judge? the same did God send to be a ruler and a deliverer by the hand
of the angel which appeared to him in the bush.

7:36 He brought them out, after that he had shewed wonders and signs
in the land of Egypt, and in the Red sea, and in the wilderness forty
years.

7:37 This is that Moses, which said unto the children of Israel, A
prophet shall the Lord your God raise up unto you of your brethren,
like unto me; him shall ye hear.

7:38 This is he, that was in the church in the wilderness with the
angel which spake to him in the mount Sina, and with our fathers: who
received the lively oracles to give unto us: 7:39 To whom our fathers
would not obey, but thrust him from them, and in their hearts turned
back again into Egypt, 7:40 Saying unto Aaron, Make us gods to go
before us: for as for this Moses, which brought us out of the land of
Egypt, we wot not what is become of him.

7:41 And they made a calf in those days, and offered sacrifice unto
the idol, and rejoiced in the works of their own hands.

7:42 Then God turned, and gave them up to worship the host of heaven;
as it is written in the book of the prophets, O ye house of Israel,
have ye offered to me slain beasts and sacrifices by the space of
forty years in the wilderness?  7:43 Yea, ye took up the tabernacle of
Moloch, and the star of your god Remphan, figures which ye made to
worship them: and I will carry you away beyond Babylon.

7:44 Our fathers had the tabernacle of witness in the wilderness, as
he had appointed, speaking unto Moses, that he should make it
according to the fashion that he had seen.

7:45 Which also our fathers that came after brought in with Jesus into
the possession of the Gentiles, whom God drave out before the face of
our fathers, unto the days of David; 7:46 Who found favour before God,
and desired to find a tabernacle for the God of Jacob.

7:47 But Solomon built him an house.

7:48 Howbeit the most High dwelleth not in temples made with hands; as
saith the prophet, 7:49 Heaven is my throne, and earth is my
footstool: what house will ye build me? saith the Lord: or what is the
place of my rest?  7:50 Hath not my hand made all these things?  7:51
Ye stiffnecked and uncircumcised in heart and ears, ye do always
resist the Holy Ghost: as your fathers did, so do ye.

7:52 Which of the prophets have not your fathers persecuted? and they
have slain them which shewed before of the coming of the Just One; of
whom ye have been now the betrayers and murderers: 7:53 Who have
received the law by the disposition of angels, and have not kept it.

7:54 When they heard these things, they were cut to the heart, and
they gnashed on him with their teeth.

7:55 But he, being full of the Holy Ghost, looked up stedfastly into
heaven, and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing on the right hand
of God, 7:56 And said, Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son
of man standing on the right hand of God.

7:57 Then they cried out with a loud voice, and stopped their ears,
and ran upon him with one accord, 7:58 And cast him out of the city,
and stoned him: and the witnesses laid down their clothes at a young
man's feet, whose name was Saul.

7:59 And they stoned Stephen, calling upon God, and saying, Lord
Jesus, receive my spirit.

7:60 And he kneeled down, and cried with a loud voice, Lord, lay not
this sin to their charge. And when he had said this, he fell asleep.

8:1 And Saul was consenting unto his death. And at that time there was
a great persecution against the church which was at Jerusalem; and
they were all scattered abroad throughout the regions of Judaea and
Samaria, except the apostles.

8:2 And devout men carried Stephen to his burial, and made great
lamentation over him.

8:3 As for Saul, he made havock of the church, entering into every
house, and haling men and women committed them to prison.

8:4 Therefore they that were scattered abroad went every where
preaching the word.

8:5 Then Philip went down to the city of Samaria, and preached Christ
unto them.

8:6 And the people with one accord gave heed unto those things which
Philip spake, hearing and seeing the miracles which he did.

8:7 For unclean spirits, crying with loud voice, came out of many that
were possessed with them: and many taken with palsies, and that were
lame, were healed.

8:8 And there was great joy in that city.

8:9 But there was a certain man, called Simon, which beforetime in the
same city used sorcery, and bewitched the people of Samaria, giving
out that himself was some great one: 8:10 To whom they all gave heed,
from the least to the greatest, saying, This man is the great power of
God.

8:11 And to him they had regard, because that of long time he had
bewitched them with sorceries.

8:12 But when they believed Philip preaching the things concerning the
kingdom of God, and the name of Jesus Christ, they were baptized, both
men and women.

8:13 Then Simon himself believed also: and when he was baptized, he
continued with Philip, and wondered, beholding the miracles and signs
which were done.

8:14 Now when the apostles which were at Jerusalem heard that Samaria
had received the word of God, they sent unto them Peter and John: 8:15
Who, when they were come down, prayed for them, that they might
receive the Holy Ghost: 8:16 (For as yet he was fallen upon none of
them: only they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus.)  8:17
Then laid they their hands on them, and they received the Holy Ghost.

8:18 And when Simon saw that through laying on of the apostles' hands
the Holy Ghost was given, he offered them money, 8:19 Saying, Give me
also this power, that on whomsoever I lay hands, he may receive the
Holy Ghost.

8:20 But Peter said unto him, Thy money perish with thee, because thou
hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money.

8:21 Thou hast neither part nor lot in this matter: for thy heart is
not right in the sight of God.

8:22 Repent therefore of this thy wickedness, and pray God, if perhaps
the thought of thine heart may be forgiven thee.

8:23 For I perceive that thou art in the gall of bitterness, and in
the bond of iniquity.

8:24 Then answered Simon, and said, Pray ye to the LORD for me, that
none of these things which ye have spoken come upon me.

8:25 And they, when they had testified and preached the word of the
Lord, returned to Jerusalem, and preached the gospel in many villages
of the Samaritans.

8:26 And the angel of the Lord spake unto Philip, saying, Arise, and
go toward the south unto the way that goeth down from Jerusalem unto
Gaza, which is desert.

8:27 And he arose and went: and, behold, a man of Ethiopia, an eunuch
of great authority under Candace queen of the Ethiopians, who had the
charge of all her treasure, and had come to Jerusalem for to worship,
8:28 Was returning, and sitting in his chariot read Esaias the
prophet.

8:29 Then the Spirit said unto Philip, Go near, and join thyself to
this chariot.

8:30 And Philip ran thither to him, and heard him read the prophet
Esaias, and said, Understandest thou what thou readest?  8:31 And he
said, How can I, except some man should guide me? And he desired
Philip that he would come up and sit with him.

8:32 The place of the scripture which he read was this, He was led as
a sheep to the slaughter; and like a lamb dumb before his shearer, so
opened he not his mouth: 8:33 In his humiliation his judgment was
taken away: and who shall declare his generation? for his life is
taken from the earth.

8:34 And the eunuch answered Philip, and said, I pray thee, of whom
speaketh the prophet this? of himself, or of some other man?  8:35
Then Philip opened his mouth, and began at the same scripture, and
preached unto him Jesus.

8:36 And as they went on their way, they came unto a certain water:
and the eunuch said, See, here is water; what doth hinder me to be
baptized?  8:37 And Philip said, If thou believest with all thine
heart, thou mayest.

And he answered and said, I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of
God.

8:38 And he commanded the chariot to stand still: and they went down
both into the water, both Philip and the eunuch; and he baptized him.

8:39 And when they were come up out of the water, the Spirit of the
Lord caught away Philip, that the eunuch saw him no more: and he went
on his way rejoicing.

8:40 But Philip was found at Azotus: and passing through he preached
in all the cities, till he came to Caesarea.

9:1 And Saul, yet breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the
disciples of the Lord, went unto the high priest, 9:2 And desired of
him letters to Damascus to the synagogues, that if he found any of
this way, whether they were men or women, he might bring them bound
unto Jerusalem.

9:3 And as he journeyed, he came near Damascus: and suddenly there
shined round about him a light from heaven: 9:4 And he fell to the
earth, and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest
thou me?  9:5 And he said, Who art thou, Lord? And the Lord said, I am
Jesus whom thou persecutest: it is hard for thee to kick against the
pricks.

9:6 And he trembling and astonished said, Lord, what wilt thou have me
to do? And the Lord said unto him, Arise, and go into the city, and it
shall be told thee what thou must do.

9:7 And the men which journeyed with him stood speechless, hearing a
voice, but seeing no man.

9:8 And Saul arose from the earth; and when his eyes were opened, he
saw no man: but they led him by the hand, and brought him into
Damascus.

9:9 And he was three days without sight, and neither did eat nor
drink.

9:10 And there was a certain disciple at Damascus, named Ananias; and
to him said the Lord in a vision, Ananias. And he said, Behold, I am
here, Lord.

9:11 And the Lord said unto him, Arise, and go into the street which
is called Straight, and enquire in the house of Judas for one called
Saul, of Tarsus: for, behold, he prayeth, 9:12 And hath seen in a
vision a man named Ananias coming in, and putting his hand on him,
that he might receive his sight.

9:13 Then Ananias answered, Lord, I have heard by many of this man,
how much evil he hath done to thy saints at Jerusalem: 9:14 And here
he hath authority from the chief priests to bind all that call on thy
name.

9:15 But the Lord said unto him, Go thy way: for he is a chosen vessel
unto me, to bear my name before the Gentiles, and kings, and the
children of Israel: 9:16 For I will shew him how great things he must
suffer for my name's sake.

9:17 And Ananias went his way, and entered into the house; and putting
his hands on him said, Brother Saul, the Lord, even Jesus, that
appeared unto thee in the way as thou camest, hath sent me, that thou
mightest receive thy sight, and be filled with the Holy Ghost.

9:18 And immediately there fell from his eyes as it had been scales:
and he received sight forthwith, and arose, and was baptized.

9:19 And when he had received meat, he was strengthened. Then was Saul
certain days with the disciples which were at Damascus.

9:20 And straightway he preached Christ in the synagogues, that he is
the Son of God.

9:21 But all that heard him were amazed, and said; Is not this he that
destroyed them which called on this name in Jerusalem, and came hither
for that intent, that he might bring them bound unto the chief
priests?  9:22 But Saul increased the more in strength, and confounded
the Jews which dwelt at Damascus, proving that this is very Christ.

9:23 And after that many days were fulfilled, the Jews took counsel to
kill him: 9:24 But their laying await was known of Saul. And they
watched the gates day and night to kill him.

9:25 Then the disciples took him by night, and let him down by the
wall in a basket.

9:26 And when Saul was come to Jerusalem, he assayed to join himself
to the disciples: but they were all afraid of him, and believed not
that he was a disciple.

9:27 But Barnabas took him, and brought him to the apostles, and
declared unto them how he had seen the Lord in the way, and that he
had spoken to him, and how he had preached boldly at Damascus in the
name of Jesus.

9:28 And he was with them coming in and going out at Jerusalem.

9:29 And he spake boldly in the name of the Lord Jesus, and disputed
against the Grecians: but they went about to slay him.

9:30 Which when the brethren knew, they brought him down to Caesarea,
and sent him forth to Tarsus.

9:31 Then had the churches rest throughout all Judaea and Galilee and
Samaria, and were edified; and walking in the fear of the Lord, and in
the comfort of the Holy Ghost, were multiplied.

9:32 And it came to pass, as Peter passed throughout all quarters, he
came down also to the saints which dwelt at Lydda.

9:33 And there he found a certain man named Aeneas, which had kept his
bed eight years, and was sick of the palsy.

9:34 And Peter said unto him, Aeneas, Jesus Christ maketh thee whole:
arise, and make thy bed. And he arose immediately.

9:35 And all that dwelt at Lydda and Saron saw him, and turned to the
Lord.

9:36 Now there was at Joppa a certain disciple named Tabitha, which by
interpretation is called Dorcas: this woman was full of good works and
almsdeeds which she did.

9:37 And it came to pass in those days, that she was sick, and died:
whom when they had washed, they laid her in an upper chamber.

9:38 And forasmuch as Lydda was nigh to Joppa, and the disciples had
heard that Peter was there, they sent unto him two men, desiring him
that he would not delay to come to them.

9:39 Then Peter arose and went with them. When he was come, they
brought him into the upper chamber: and all the widows stood by him
weeping, and shewing the coats and garments which Dorcas made, while
she was with them.

9:40 But Peter put them all forth, and kneeled down, and prayed; and
turning him to the body said, Tabitha, arise. And she opened her eyes:
and when she saw Peter, she sat up.

9:41 And he gave her his hand, and lifted her up, and when he had
called the saints and widows, presented her alive.

9:42 And it was known throughout all Joppa; and many believed in the
Lord.

9:43 And it came to pass, that he tarried many days in Joppa with one
Simon a tanner.

10:1 There was a certain man in Caesarea called Cornelius, a centurion
of the band called the Italian band, 10:2 A devout man, and one that
feared God with all his house, which gave much alms to the people, and
prayed to God alway.

10:3 He saw in a vision evidently about the ninth hour of the day an
angel of God coming in to him, and saying unto him, Cornelius.

10:4 And when he looked on him, he was afraid, and said, What is it,
Lord?  And he said unto him, Thy prayers and thine alms are come up
for a memorial before God.

10:5 And now send men to Joppa, and call for one Simon, whose surname
is Peter: 10:6 He lodgeth with one Simon a tanner, whose house is by
the sea side: he shall tell thee what thou oughtest to do.

10:7 And when the angel which spake unto Cornelius was departed, he
called two of his household servants, and a devout soldier of them
that waited on him continually; 10:8 And when he had declared all
these things unto them, he sent them to Joppa.

10:9 On the morrow, as they went on their journey, and drew nigh unto
the city, Peter went up upon the housetop to pray about the sixth
hour: 10:10 And he became very hungry, and would have eaten: but while
they made ready, he fell into a trance, 10:11 And saw heaven opened,
and a certain vessel descending upon him, as it had been a great sheet
knit at the four corners, and let down to the earth: 10:12 Wherein
were all manner of fourfooted beasts of the earth, and wild beasts,
and creeping things, and fowls of the air.

10:13 And there came a voice to him, Rise, Peter; kill, and eat.

10:14 But Peter said, Not so, Lord; for I have never eaten any thing
that is common or unclean.

10:15 And the voice spake unto him again the second time, What God
hath cleansed, that call not thou common.

10:16 This was done thrice: and the vessel was received up again into
heaven.

10:17 Now while Peter doubted in himself what this vision which he had
seen should mean, behold, the men which were sent from Cornelius had
made enquiry for Simon's house, and stood before the gate, 10:18 And
called, and asked whether Simon, which was surnamed Peter, were lodged
there.

10:19 While Peter thought on the vision, the Spirit said unto him,
Behold, three men seek thee.

10:20 Arise therefore, and get thee down, and go with them, doubting
nothing: for I have sent them.

10:21 Then Peter went down to the men which were sent unto him from
Cornelius; and said, Behold, I am he whom ye seek: what is the cause
wherefore ye are come?  10:22 And they said, Cornelius the centurion,
a just man, and one that feareth God, and of good report among all the
nation of the Jews, was warned from God by an holy angel to send for
thee into his house, and to hear words of thee.

10:23 Then called he them in, and lodged them. And on the morrow Peter
went away with them, and certain brethren from Joppa accompanied him.

10:24 And the morrow after they entered into Caesarea. And Cornelius
waited for them, and he had called together his kinsmen and near
friends.

10:25 And as Peter was coming in, Cornelius met him, and fell down at
his feet, and worshipped him.

10:26 But Peter took him up, saying, Stand up; I myself also am a man.

10:27 And as he talked with him, he went in, and found many that were
come together.

10:28 And he said unto them, Ye know how that it is an unlawful thing
for a man that is a Jew to keep company, or come unto one of another
nation; but God hath shewed me that I should not call any man common
or unclean.

10:29 Therefore came I unto you without gainsaying, as soon as I was
sent for: I ask therefore for what intent ye have sent for me?  10:30
And Cornelius said, Four days ago I was fasting until this hour; and
at the ninth hour I prayed in my house, and, behold, a man stood
before me in bright clothing, 10:31 And said, Cornelius, thy prayer is
heard, and thine alms are had in remembrance in the sight of God.

10:32 Send therefore to Joppa, and call hither Simon, whose surname is
Peter; he is lodged in the house of one Simon a tanner by the sea
side: who, when he cometh, shall speak unto thee.

10:33 Immediately therefore I sent to thee; and thou hast well done
that thou art come. Now therefore are we all here present before God,
to hear all things that are commanded thee of God.

10:34 Then Peter opened his mouth, and said, Of a truth I perceive
that God is no respecter of persons: 10:35 But in every nation he that
feareth him, and worketh righteousness, is accepted with him.

10:36 The word which God sent unto the children of Israel, preaching
peace by Jesus Christ: (he is Lord of all:) 10:37 That word, I say, ye
know, which was published throughout all Judaea, and began from
Galilee, after the baptism which John preached; 10:38 How God anointed
Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and with power: who went about
doing good, and healing all that were oppressed of the devil; for God
was with him.

10:39 And we are witnesses of all things which he did both in the land
of the Jews, and in Jerusalem; whom they slew and hanged on a tree:
10:40 Him God raised up the third day, and shewed him openly; 10:41
Not to all the people, but unto witnesses chosen before God, even to
us, who did eat and drink with him after he rose from the dead.

10:42 And he commanded us to preach unto the people, and to testify
that it is he which was ordained of God to be the Judge of quick and
dead.

10:43 To him give all the prophets witness, that through his name
whosoever believeth in him shall receive remission of sins.

10:44 While Peter yet spake these words, the Holy Ghost fell on all
them which heard the word.

10:45 And they of the circumcision which believed were astonished, as
many as came with Peter, because that on the Gentiles also was poured
out the gift of the Holy Ghost.

10:46 For they heard them speak with tongues, and magnify God. Then
answered Peter, 10:47 Can any man forbid water, that these should not
be baptized, which have received the Holy Ghost as well as we?  10:48
And he commanded them to be baptized in the name of the Lord. Then
prayed they him to tarry certain days.

11:1 And the apostles and brethren that were in Judaea heard that the
Gentiles had also received the word of God.

11:2 And when Peter was come up to Jerusalem, they that were of the
circumcision contended with him, 11:3 Saying, Thou wentest in to men
uncircumcised, and didst eat with them.

11:4 But Peter rehearsed the matter from the beginning, and expounded
it by order unto them, saying, 11:5 I was in the city of Joppa
praying: and in a trance I saw a vision, A certain vessel descend, as
it had been a great sheet, let down from heaven by four corners; and
it came even to me: 11:6 Upon the which when I had fastened mine eyes,
I considered, and saw fourfooted beasts of the earth, and wild beasts,
and creeping things, and fowls of the air.

11:7 And I heard a voice saying unto me, Arise, Peter; slay and eat.

11:8 But I said, Not so, Lord: for nothing common or unclean hath at
any time entered into my mouth.

11:9 But the voice answered me again from heaven, What God hath
cleansed, that call not thou common.

11:10 And this was done three times: and all were drawn up again into
heaven.

11:11 And, behold, immediately there were three men already come unto
the house where I was, sent from Caesarea unto me.

11:12 And the Spirit bade me go with them, nothing doubting. Moreover
these six brethren accompanied me, and we entered into the man's
house: 11:13 And he shewed us how he had seen an angel in his house,
which stood and said unto him, Send men to Joppa, and call for Simon,
whose surname is Peter; 11:14 Who shall tell thee words, whereby thou
and all thy house shall be saved.

11:15 And as I began to speak, the Holy Ghost fell on them, as on us
at the beginning.

11:16 Then remembered I the word of the Lord, how that he said, John
indeed baptized with water; but ye shall be baptized with the Holy
Ghost.

11:17 Forasmuch then as God gave them the like gift as he did unto us,
who believed on the Lord Jesus Christ; what was I, that I could
withstand God?  11:18 When they heard these things, they held their
peace, and glorified God, saying, Then hath God also to the Gentiles
granted repentance unto life.

11:19 Now they which were scattered abroad upon the persecution that
arose about Stephen travelled as far as Phenice, and Cyprus, and
Antioch, preaching the word to none but unto the Jews only.

11:20 And some of them were men of Cyprus and Cyrene, which, when they
were come to Antioch, spake unto the Grecians, preaching the LORD
Jesus.

11:21 And the hand of the Lord was with them: and a great number
believed, and turned unto the Lord.

11:22 Then tidings of these things came unto the ears of the church
which was in Jerusalem: and they sent forth Barnabas, that he should
go as far as Antioch.

11:23 Who, when he came, and had seen the grace of God, was glad, and
exhorted them all, that with purpose of heart they would cleave unto
the Lord.

11:24 For he was a good man, and full of the Holy Ghost and of faith:
and much people was added unto the Lord.

11:25 Then departed Barnabas to Tarsus, for to seek Saul: 11:26 And
when he had found him, he brought him unto Antioch. And it came to
pass, that a whole year they assembled themselves with the church, and
taught much people. And the disciples were called Christians first in
Antioch.

11:27 And in these days came prophets from Jerusalem unto Antioch.

11:28 And there stood up one of them named Agabus, and signified by
the Spirit that there should be great dearth throughout all the world:
which came to pass in the days of Claudius Caesar.

11:29 Then the disciples, every man according to his ability,
determined to send relief unto the brethren which dwelt in Judaea:
11:30 Which also they did, and sent it to the elders by the hands of
Barnabas and Saul.

12:1 Now about that time Herod the king stretched forth his hands to
vex certain of the church.

12:2 And he killed James the brother of John with the sword.

12:3 And because he saw it pleased the Jews, he proceeded further to
take Peter also. (Then were the days of unleavened bread.)  12:4 And
when he had apprehended him, he put him in prison, and delivered him
to four quaternions of soldiers to keep him; intending after Easter to
bring him forth to the people.

12:5 Peter therefore was kept in prison: but prayer was made without
ceasing of the church unto God for him.

12:6 And when Herod would have brought him forth, the same night Peter
was sleeping between two soldiers, bound with two chains: and the
keepers before the door kept the prison.

12:7 And, behold, the angel of the Lord came upon him, and a light
shined in the prison: and he smote Peter on the side, and raised him
up, saying, Arise up quickly. And his chains fell off from his hands.

12:8 And the angel said unto him, Gird thyself, and bind on thy
sandals.

And so he did. And he saith unto him, Cast thy garment about thee, and
follow me.

12:9 And he went out, and followed him; and wist not that it was true
which was done by the angel; but thought he saw a vision.

12:10 When they were past the first and the second ward, they came
unto the iron gate that leadeth unto the city; which opened to them of
his own accord: and they went out, and passed on through one street;
and forthwith the angel departed from him.

12:11 And when Peter was come to himself, he said, Now I know of a
surety, that the LORD hath sent his angel, and hath delivered me out
of the hand of Herod, and from all the expectation of the people of
the Jews.

12:12 And when he had considered the thing, he came to the house of
Mary the mother of John, whose surname was Mark; where many were
gathered together praying.

12:13 And as Peter knocked at the door of the gate, a damsel came to
hearken, named Rhoda.

12:14 And when she knew Peter's voice, she opened not the gate for
gladness, but ran in, and told how Peter stood before the gate.

12:15 And they said unto her, Thou art mad. But she constantly
affirmed that it was even so. Then said they, It is his angel.

12:16 But Peter continued knocking: and when they had opened the door,
and saw him, they were astonished.

12:17 But he, beckoning unto them with the hand to hold their peace,
declared unto them how the Lord had brought him out of the prison. And
he said, Go shew these things unto James, and to the brethren. And he
departed, and went into another place.

12:18 Now as soon as it was day, there was no small stir among the
soldiers, what was become of Peter.

12:19 And when Herod had sought for him, and found him not, he
examined the keepers, and commanded that they should be put to death.
And he went down from Judaea to Caesarea, and there abode.

12:20 And Herod was highly displeased with them of Tyre and Sidon: but
they came with one accord to him, and, having made Blastus the king's
chamberlain their friend, desired peace; because their country was
nourished by the king's country.

12:21 And upon a set day Herod, arrayed in royal apparel, sat upon his
throne, and made an oration unto them.

12:22 And the people gave a shout, saying, It is the voice of a god,
and not of a man.

12:23 And immediately the angel of the Lord smote him, because he gave
not God the glory: and he was eaten of worms, and gave up the ghost.

12:24 But the word of God grew and multiplied.

12:25 And Barnabas and Saul returned from Jerusalem, when they had
fulfilled their ministry, and took with them John, whose surname was
Mark.

13:1 Now there were in the church that was at Antioch certain prophets
and teachers; as Barnabas, and Simeon that was called Niger, and
Lucius of Cyrene, and Manaen, which had been brought up with Herod the
tetrarch, and Saul.

13:2 As they ministered to the Lord, and fasted, the Holy Ghost said,
Separate me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have called
them.

13:3 And when they had fasted and prayed, and laid their hands on
them, they sent them away.

13:4 So they, being sent forth by the Holy Ghost, departed unto
Seleucia; and from thence they sailed to Cyprus.

13:5 And when they were at Salamis, they preached the word of God in
the synagogues of the Jews: and they had also John to their minister.

13:6 And when they had gone through the isle unto Paphos, they found a
certain sorcerer, a false prophet, a Jew, whose name was Barjesus:
13:7 Which was with the deputy of the country, Sergius Paulus, a
prudent man; who called for Barnabas and Saul, and desired to hear the
word of God.

13:8 But Elymas the sorcerer (for so is his name by interpretation)
withstood them, seeking to turn away the deputy from the faith.

13:9 Then Saul, (who also is called Paul,) filled with the Holy Ghost,
set his eyes on him.

13:10 And said, O full of all subtilty and all mischief, thou child of
the devil, thou enemy of all righteousness, wilt thou not cease to
pervert the right ways of the Lord?  13:11 And now, behold, the hand
of the Lord is upon thee, and thou shalt be blind, not seeing the sun
for a season. And immediately there fell on him a mist and a darkness;
and he went about seeking some to lead him by the hand.

13:12 Then the deputy, when he saw what was done, believed, being
astonished at the doctrine of the Lord.

13:13 Now when Paul and his company loosed from Paphos, they came to
Perga in Pamphylia: and John departing from them returned to
Jerusalem.

13:14 But when they departed from Perga, they came to Antioch in
Pisidia, and went into the synagogue on the sabbath day, and sat down.

13:15 And after the reading of the law and the prophets the rulers of
the synagogue sent unto them, saying, Ye men and brethren, if ye have
any word of exhortation for the people, say on.

13:16 Then Paul stood up, and beckoning with his hand said, Men of
Israel, and ye that fear God, give audience.

13:17 The God of this people of Israel chose our fathers, and exalted
the people when they dwelt as strangers in the land of Egypt, and with
an high arm brought he them out of it.

13:18 And about the time of forty years suffered he their manners in
the wilderness.

13:19 And when he had destroyed seven nations in the land of Chanaan,
he divided their land to them by lot.

13:20 And after that he gave unto them judges about the space of four
hundred and fifty years, until Samuel the prophet.

13:21 And afterward they desired a king: and God gave unto them Saul
the son of Cis, a man of the tribe of Benjamin, by the space of forty
years.

13:22 And when he had removed him, he raised up unto them David to be
their king; to whom also he gave their testimony, and said, I have
found David the son of Jesse, a man after mine own heart, which shall
fulfil all my will.

13:23 Of this man's seed hath God according to his promise raised unto
Israel a Saviour, Jesus: 13:24 When John had first preached before his
coming the baptism of repentance to all the people of Israel.

13:25 And as John fulfilled his course, he said, Whom think ye that I
am?  I am not he. But, behold, there cometh one after me, whose shoes
of his feet I am not worthy to loose.

13:26 Men and brethren, children of the stock of Abraham, and
whosoever among you feareth God, to you is the word of this salvation
sent.

13:27 For they that dwell at Jerusalem, and their rulers, because they
knew him not, nor yet the voices of the prophets which are read every
sabbath day, they have fulfilled them in condemning him.

13:28 And though they found no cause of death in him, yet desired they
Pilate that he should be slain.

13:29 And when they had fulfilled all that was written of him, they
took him down from the tree, and laid him in a sepulchre.

13:30 But God raised him from the dead: 13:31 And he was seen many
days of them which came up with him from Galilee to Jerusalem, who are
his witnesses unto the people.

13:32 And we declare unto you glad tidings, how that the promise which
was made unto the fathers, 13:33 God hath fulfilled the same unto us
their children, in that he hath raised up Jesus again; as it is also
written in the second psalm, Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten
thee.

13:34 And as concerning that he raised him up from the dead, now no
more to return to corruption, he said on this wise, I will give you
the sure mercies of David.

13:35 Wherefore he saith also in another psalm, Thou shalt not suffer
thine Holy One to see corruption.

13:36 For David, after he had served his own generation by the will of
God, fell on sleep, and was laid unto his fathers, and saw corruption:
13:37 But he, whom God raised again, saw no corruption.

13:38 Be it known unto you therefore, men and brethren, that through
this man is preached unto you the forgiveness of sins: 13:39 And by
him all that believe are justified from all things, from which ye
could not be justified by the law of Moses.

13:40 Beware therefore, lest that come upon you, which is spoken of in
the prophets; 13:41 Behold, ye despisers, and wonder, and perish: for
I work a work in your days, a work which ye shall in no wise believe,
though a man declare it unto you.

13:42 And when the Jews were gone out of the synagogue, the Gentiles
besought that these words might be preached to them the next sabbath.

13:43 Now when the congregation was broken up, many of the Jews and
religious proselytes followed Paul and Barnabas: who, speaking to
them, persuaded them to continue in the grace of God.

13:44 And the next sabbath day came almost the whole city together to
hear the word of God.

13:45 But when the Jews saw the multitudes, they were filled with
envy, and spake against those things which were spoken by Paul,
contradicting and blaspheming.

13:46 Then Paul and Barnabas waxed bold, and said, It was necessary
that the word of God should first have been spoken to you: but seeing
ye put it from you, and judge yourselves unworthy of everlasting life,
lo, we turn to the Gentiles.

13:47 For so hath the Lord commanded us, saying, I have set thee to be
a light of the Gentiles, that thou shouldest be for salvation unto the
ends of the earth.

13:48 And when the Gentiles heard this, they were glad, and glorified
the word of the Lord: and as many as were ordained to eternal life
believed.

13:49 And the word of the Lord was published throughout all the
region.

13:50 But the Jews stirred up the devout and honourable women, and the
chief men of the city, and raised persecution against Paul and
Barnabas, and expelled them out of their coasts.

13:51 But they shook off the dust of their feet against them, and came
unto Iconium.

13:52 And the disciples were filled with joy, and with the Holy Ghost.

14:1 And it came to pass in Iconium, that they went both together into
the synagogue of the Jews, and so spake, that a great multitude both
of the Jews and also of the Greeks believed.

14:2 But the unbelieving Jews stirred up the Gentiles, and made their
minds evil affected against the brethren.

14:3 Long time therefore abode they speaking boldly in the Lord, which
gave testimony unto the word of his grace, and granted signs and
wonders to be done by their hands.

14:4 But the multitude of the city was divided: and part held with the
Jews, and part with the apostles.

14:5 And when there was an assault made both of the Gentiles, and also
of the Jews with their rulers, to use them despitefully, and to stone
them, 14:6 They were ware of it, and fled unto Lystra and Derbe,
cities of Lycaonia, and unto the region that lieth round about: 14:7
And there they preached the gospel.

14:8 And there sat a certain man at Lystra, impotent in his feet,
being a cripple from his mother's womb, who never had walked: 14:9 The
same heard Paul speak: who stedfastly beholding him, and perceiving
that he had faith to be healed, 14:10 Said with a loud voice, Stand
upright on thy feet. And he leaped and walked.

14:11 And when the people saw what Paul had done, they lifted up their
voices, saying in the speech of Lycaonia, The gods are come down to us
in the likeness of men.

14:12 And they called Barnabas, Jupiter; and Paul, Mercurius, because
he was the chief speaker.

14:13 Then the priest of Jupiter, which was before their city, brought
oxen and garlands unto the gates, and would have done sacrifice with
the people.

14:14 Which when the apostles, Barnabas and Paul, heard of, they rent
their clothes, and ran in among the people, crying out, 14:15 And
saying, Sirs, why do ye these things? We also are men of like passions
with you, and preach unto you that ye should turn from these vanities
unto the living God, which made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and
all things that are therein: 14:16 Who in times past suffered all
nations to walk in their own ways.

14:17 Nevertheless he left not himself without witness, in that he did
good, and gave us rain from heaven, and fruitful seasons, filling our
hearts with food and gladness.

14:18 And with these sayings scarce restrained they the people, that
they had not done sacrifice unto them.

14:19 And there came thither certain Jews from Antioch and Iconium,
who persuaded the people, and having stoned Paul, drew him out of the
city, supposing he had been dead.

14:20 Howbeit, as the disciples stood round about him, he rose up, and
came into the city: and the next day he departed with Barnabas to
Derbe.

14:21 And when they had preached the gospel to that city, and had
taught many, they returned again to Lystra, and to Iconium, and
Antioch, 14:22 Confirming the souls of the disciples, and exhorting
them to continue in the faith, and that we must through much
tribulation enter into the kingdom of God.

14:23 And when they had ordained them elders in every church, and had
prayed with fasting, they commended them to the Lord, on whom they
believed.

14:24 And after they had passed throughout Pisidia, they came to
Pamphylia.

14:25 And when they had preached the word in Perga, they went down
into Attalia: 14:26 And thence sailed to Antioch, from whence they had
been recommended to the grace of God for the work which they
fulfilled.

14:27 And when they were come, and had gathered the church together,
they rehearsed all that God had done with them, and how he had opened
the door of faith unto the Gentiles.

14:28 And there they abode long time with the disciples.

15:1 And certain men which came down from Judaea taught the brethren,
and said, Except ye be circumcised after the manner of Moses, ye
cannot be saved.

15:2 When therefore Paul and Barnabas had no small dissension and
disputation with them, they determined that Paul and Barnabas, and
certain other of them, should go up to Jerusalem unto the apostles and
elders about this question.

15:3 And being brought on their way by the church, they passed through
Phenice and Samaria, declaring the conversion of the Gentiles: and
they caused great joy unto all the brethren.

15:4 And when they were come to Jerusalem, they were received of the
church, and of the apostles and elders, and they declared all things
that God had done with them.

15:5 But there rose up certain of the sect of the Pharisees which
believed, saying, That it was needful to circumcise them, and to
command them to keep the law of Moses.

15:6 And the apostles and elders came together for to consider of this
matter.

15:7 And when there had been much disputing, Peter rose up, and said
unto them, Men and brethren, ye know how that a good while ago God
made choice among us, that the Gentiles by my mouth should hear the
word of the gospel, and believe.

15:8 And God, which knoweth the hearts, bare them witness, giving them
the Holy Ghost, even as he did unto us; 15:9 And put no difference
between us and them, purifying their hearts by faith.

15:10 Now therefore why tempt ye God, to put a yoke upon the neck of
the disciples, which neither our fathers nor we were able to bear?
15:11 But we believe that through the grace of the LORD Jesus Christ
we shall be saved, even as they.

15:12 Then all the multitude kept silence, and gave audience to
Barnabas and Paul, declaring what miracles and wonders God had wrought
among the Gentiles by them.

15:13 And after they had held their peace, James answered, saying, Men
and brethren, hearken unto me: 15:14 Simeon hath declared how God at
the first did visit the Gentiles, to take out of them a people for his
name.

15:15 And to this agree the words of the prophets; as it is written,
15:16 After this I will return, and will build again the tabernacle of
David, which is fallen down; and I will build again the ruins thereof,
and I will set it up: 15:17 That the residue of men might seek after
the Lord, and all the Gentiles, upon whom my name is called, saith the
Lord, who doeth all these things.

15:18 Known unto God are all his works from the beginning of the
world.

15:19 Wherefore my sentence is, that we trouble not them, which from
among the Gentiles are turned to God: 15:20 But that we write unto
them, that they abstain from pollutions of idols, and from
fornication, and from things strangled, and from blood.

15:21 For Moses of old time hath in every city them that preach him,
being read in the synagogues every sabbath day.

15:22 Then pleased it the apostles and elders with the whole church,
to send chosen men of their own company to Antioch with Paul and
Barnabas; namely, Judas surnamed Barsabas and Silas, chief men among
the brethren: 15:23 And they wrote letters by them after this manner;
The apostles and elders and brethren send greeting unto the brethren
which are of the Gentiles in Antioch and Syria and Cilicia.

15:24 Forasmuch as we have heard, that certain which went out from us
have troubled you with words, subverting your souls, saying, Ye must
be circumcised, and keep the law: to whom we gave no such commandment:
15:25 It seemed good unto us, being assembled with one accord, to send
chosen men unto you with our beloved Barnabas and Paul, 15:26 Men that
have hazarded their lives for the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.

15:27 We have sent therefore Judas and Silas, who shall also tell you
the same things by mouth.

15:28 For it seemed good to the Holy Ghost, and to us, to lay upon you
no greater burden than these necessary things; 15:29 That ye abstain
from meats offered to idols, and from blood, and from things
strangled, and from fornication: from which if ye keep yourselves, ye
shall do well. Fare ye well.

15:30 So when they were dismissed, they came to Antioch: and when they
had gathered the multitude together, they delivered the epistle: 15:31
Which when they had read, they rejoiced for the consolation.

15:32 And Judas and Silas, being prophets also themselves, exhorted
the brethren with many words, and confirmed them.

15:33 And after they had tarried there a space, they were let go in
peace from the brethren unto the apostles.

15:34 Notwithstanding it pleased Silas to abide there still.

15:35 Paul also and Barnabas continued in Antioch, teaching and
preaching the word of the Lord, with many others also.

15:36 And some days after Paul said unto Barnabas, Let us go again and
visit our brethren in every city where we have preached the word of
the LORD, and see how they do.

15:37 And Barnabas determined to take with them John, whose surname
was Mark.

15:38 But Paul thought not good to take him with them, who departed
from them from Pamphylia, and went not with them to the work.

15:39 And the contention was so sharp between them, that they departed
asunder one from the other: and so Barnabas took Mark, and sailed unto
Cyprus; 15:40 And Paul chose Silas, and departed, being recommended by
the brethren unto the grace of God.

15:41 And he went through Syria and Cilicia, confirming the churches.

16:1 Then came he to Derbe and Lystra: and, behold, a certain disciple
was there, named Timotheus, the son of a certain woman, which was a
Jewess, and believed; but his father was a Greek: 16:2 Which was well
reported of by the brethren that were at Lystra and Iconium.

16:3 Him would Paul have to go forth with him; and took and
circumcised him because of the Jews which were in those quarters: for
they knew all that his father was a Greek.

16:4 And as they went through the cities, they delivered them the
decrees for to keep, that were ordained of the apostles and elders
which were at Jerusalem.

16:5 And so were the churches established in the faith, and increased
in number daily.

16:6 Now when they had gone throughout Phrygia and the region of
Galatia, and were forbidden of the Holy Ghost to preach the word in
Asia, 16:7 After they were come to Mysia, they assayed to go into
Bithynia: but the Spirit suffered them not.

16:8 And they passing by Mysia came down to Troas.

16:9 And a vision appeared to Paul in the night; There stood a man of
Macedonia, and prayed him, saying, Come over into Macedonia, and help
us.

16:10 And after he had seen the vision, immediately we endeavoured to
go into Macedonia, assuredly gathering that the Lord had called us for
to preach the gospel unto them.

16:11 Therefore loosing from Troas, we came with a straight course to
Samothracia, and the next day to Neapolis; 16:12 And from thence to
Philippi, which is the chief city of that part of Macedonia, and a
colony: and we were in that city abiding certain days.

16:13 And on the sabbath we went out of the city by a river side,
where prayer was wont to be made; and we sat down, and spake unto the
women which resorted thither.

16:14 And a certain woman named Lydia, a seller of purple, of the city
of Thyatira, which worshipped God, heard us: whose heart the Lord
opened, that she attended unto the things which were spoken of Paul.

16:15 And when she was baptized, and her household, she besought us,
saying, If ye have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come into my
house, and abide there. And she constrained us.

16:16 And it came to pass, as we went to prayer, a certain damsel
possessed with a spirit of divination met us, which brought her
masters much gain by soothsaying: 16:17 The same followed Paul and us,
and cried, saying, These men are the servants of the most high God,
which shew unto us the way of salvation.

16:18 And this did she many days. But Paul, being grieved, turned and
said to the spirit, I command thee in the name of Jesus Christ to come
out of her.

And he came out the same hour.

16:19 And when her masters saw that the hope of their gains was gone,
they caught Paul and Silas, and drew them into the marketplace unto
the rulers, 16:20 And brought them to the magistrates, saying, These
men, being Jews, do exceedingly trouble our city, 16:21 And teach
customs, which are not lawful for us to receive, neither to observe,
being Romans.

16:22 And the multitude rose up together against them: and the
magistrates rent off their clothes, and commanded to beat them.

16:23 And when they had laid many stripes upon them, they cast them
into prison, charging the jailor to keep them safely: 16:24 Who,
having received such a charge, thrust them into the inner prison, and
made their feet fast in the stocks.

16:25 And at midnight Paul and Silas prayed, and sang praises unto
God: and the prisoners heard them.

16:26 And suddenly there was a great earthquake, so that the
foundations of the prison were shaken: and immediately all the doors
were opened, and every one's bands were loosed.

16:27 And the keeper of the prison awaking out of his sleep, and
seeing the prison doors open, he drew out his sword, and would have
killed himself, supposing that the prisoners had been fled.

16:28 But Paul cried with a loud voice, saying, Do thyself no harm:
for we are all here.

16:29 Then he called for a light, and sprang in, and came trembling,
and fell down before Paul and Silas, 16:30 And brought them out, and
said, Sirs, what must I do to be saved?  16:31 And they said, Believe
on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house.

16:32 And they spake unto him the word of the Lord, and to all that
were in his house.

16:33 And he took them the same hour of the night, and washed their
stripes; and was baptized, he and all his, straightway.

16:34 And when he had brought them into his house, he set meat before
them, and rejoiced, believing in God with all his house.

16:35 And when it was day, the magistrates sent the serjeants, saying,
Let those men go.

16:36 And the keeper of the prison told this saying to Paul, The
magistrates have sent to let you go: now therefore depart, and go in
peace.

16:37 But Paul said unto them, They have beaten us openly uncondemned,
being Romans, and have cast us into prison; and now do they thrust us
out privily? nay verily; but let them come themselves and fetch us
out.

16:38 And the serjeants told these words unto the magistrates: and
they feared, when they heard that they were Romans.

16:39 And they came and besought them, and brought them out, and
desired them to depart out of the city.

16:40 And they went out of the prison, and entered into the house of
Lydia: and when they had seen the brethren, they comforted them, and
departed.

17:1 Now when they had passed through Amphipolis and Apollonia, they
came to Thessalonica, where was a synagogue of the Jews: 17:2 And
Paul, as his manner was, went in unto them, and three sabbath days
reasoned with them out of the scriptures, 17:3 Opening and alleging,
that Christ must needs have suffered, and risen again from the dead;
and that this Jesus, whom I preach unto you, is Christ.

17:4 And some of them believed, and consorted with Paul and Silas; and
of the devout Greeks a great multitude, and of the chief women not a
few.

17:5 But the Jews which believed not, moved with envy, took unto them
certain lewd fellows of the baser sort, and gathered a company, and
set all the city on an uproar, and assaulted the house of Jason, and
sought to bring them out to the people.

17:6 And when they found them not, they drew Jason and certain
brethren unto the rulers of the city, crying, These that have turned
the world upside down are come hither also; 17:7 Whom Jason hath
received: and these all do contrary to the decrees of Caesar, saying
that there is another king, one Jesus.

17:8 And they troubled the people and the rulers of the city, when
they heard these things.

17:9 And when they had taken security of Jason, and of the other, they
let them go.

17:10 And the brethren immediately sent away Paul and Silas by night
unto Berea: who coming thither went into the synagogue of the Jews.

17:11 These were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they
received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the
scriptures daily, whether those things were so.

17:12 Therefore many of them believed; also of honourable women which
were Greeks, and of men, not a few.

17:13 But when the Jews of Thessalonica had knowledge that the word of
God was preached of Paul at Berea, they came thither also, and stirred
up the people.

17:14 And then immediately the brethren sent away Paul to go as it
were to the sea: but Silas and Timotheus abode there still.

17:15 And they that conducted Paul brought him unto Athens: and
receiving a commandment unto Silas and Timotheus for to come to him
with all speed, they departed.

17:16 Now while Paul waited for them at Athens, his spirit was stirred
in him, when he saw the city wholly given to idolatry.

17:17 Therefore disputed he in the synagogue with the Jews, and with
the devout persons, and in the market daily with them that met with
him.

17:18 Then certain philosophers of the Epicureans, and of the Stoicks,
encountered him. And some said, What will this babbler say? other
some, He seemeth to be a setter forth of strange gods: because he
preached unto them Jesus, and the resurrection.

17:19 And they took him, and brought him unto Areopagus, saying, May
we know what this new doctrine, whereof thou speakest, is?  17:20 For
thou bringest certain strange things to our ears: we would know
therefore what these things mean.

17:21 (For all the Athenians and strangers which were there spent
their time in nothing else, but either to tell, or to hear some new
thing.)  17:22 Then Paul stood in the midst of Mars' hill, and said,
Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too
superstitious.

17:23 For as I passed by, and beheld your devotions, I found an altar
with this inscription, TO THE UNKNOWN GOD. Whom therefore ye
ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you.

17:24 God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he
is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands;
17:25 Neither is worshipped with men's hands, as though he needed any
thing, seeing he giveth to all life, and breath, and all things; 17:26
And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the
face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and
the bounds of their habitation; 17:27 That they should seek the Lord,
if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far
from every one of us: 17:28 For in him we live, and move, and have our
being; as certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also
his offspring.

17:29 Forasmuch then as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to
think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven
by art and man's device.

17:30 And the times of this ignorance God winked at; but now
commandeth all men every where to repent: 17:31 Because he hath
appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world in righteousness
by that man whom he hath ordained; whereof he hath given assurance
unto all men, in that he hath raised him from the dead.

17:32 And when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some
mocked: and others said, We will hear thee again of this matter.

17:33 So Paul departed from among them.

17:34 Howbeit certain men clave unto him, and believed: among the
which was Dionysius the Areopagite, and a woman named Damaris, and
others with them.

18:1 After these things Paul departed from Athens, and came to
Corinth; 18:2 And found a certain Jew named Aquila, born in Pontus,
lately come from Italy, with his wife Priscilla; (because that
Claudius had commanded all Jews to depart from Rome:) and came unto
them.

18:3 And because he was of the same craft, he abode with them, and
wrought: for by their occupation they were tentmakers.

18:4 And he reasoned in the synagogue every sabbath, and persuaded the
Jews and the Greeks.

18:5 And when Silas and Timotheus were come from Macedonia, Paul was
pressed in the spirit, and testified to the Jews that Jesus was
Christ.

18:6 And when they opposed themselves, and blasphemed, he shook his
raiment, and said unto them, Your blood be upon your own heads; I am
clean; from henceforth I will go unto the Gentiles.

18:7 And he departed thence, and entered into a certain man's house,
named Justus, one that worshipped God, whose house joined hard to the
synagogue.

18:8 And Crispus, the chief ruler of the synagogue, believed on the
Lord with all his house; and many of the Corinthians hearing believed,
and were baptized.

18:9 Then spake the Lord to Paul in the night by a vision, Be not
afraid, but speak, and hold not thy peace: 18:10 For I am with thee,
and no man shall set on thee to hurt thee: for I have much people in
this city.

18:11 And he continued there a year and six months, teaching the word
of God among them.

18:12 And when Gallio was the deputy of Achaia, the Jews made
insurrection with one accord against Paul, and brought him to the
judgment seat, 18:13 Saying, This fellow persuadeth men to worship God
contrary to the law.

18:14 And when Paul was now about to open his mouth, Gallio said unto
the Jews, If it were a matter of wrong or wicked lewdness, O ye Jews,
reason would that I should bear with you: 18:15 But if it be a
question of words and names, and of your law, look ye to it; for I
will be no judge of such matters.

18:16 And he drave them from the judgment seat.

18:17 Then all the Greeks took Sosthenes, the chief ruler of the
synagogue, and beat him before the judgment seat. And Gallio cared for
none of those things.

18:18 And Paul after this tarried there yet a good while, and then
took his leave of the brethren, and sailed thence into Syria, and with
him Priscilla and Aquila; having shorn his head in Cenchrea: for he
had a vow.

18:19 And he came to Ephesus, and left them there: but he himself
entered into the synagogue, and reasoned with the Jews.

18:20 When they desired him to tarry longer time with them, he
consented not; 18:21 But bade them farewell, saying, I must by all
means keep this feast that cometh in Jerusalem: but I will return
again unto you, if God will. And he sailed from Ephesus.

18:22 And when he had landed at Caesarea, and gone up, and saluted the
church, he went down to Antioch.

18:23 And after he had spent some time there, he departed, and went
over all the country of Galatia and Phrygia in order, strengthening
all the disciples.

18:24 And a certain Jew named Apollos, born at Alexandria, an eloquent
man, and mighty in the scriptures, came to Ephesus.

18:25 This man was instructed in the way of the Lord; and being
fervent in the spirit, he spake and taught diligently the things of
the Lord, knowing only the baptism of John.

18:26 And he began to speak boldly in the synagogue: whom when Aquila
and Priscilla had heard, they took him unto them, and expounded unto
him the way of God more perfectly.

18:27 And when he was disposed to pass into Achaia, the brethren
wrote, exhorting the disciples to receive him: who, when he was come,
helped them much which had believed through grace: 18:28 For he
mightily convinced the Jews, and that publickly, shewing by the
scriptures that Jesus was Christ.

19:1 And it came to pass, that, while Apollos was at Corinth, Paul
having passed through the upper coasts came to Ephesus: and finding
certain disciples, 19:2 He said unto them, Have ye received the Holy
Ghost since ye believed?  And they said unto him, We have not so much
as heard whether there be any Holy Ghost.

19:3 And he said unto them, Unto what then were ye baptized? And they
said, Unto John's baptism.

19:4 Then said Paul, John verily baptized with the baptism of
repentance, saying unto the people, that they should believe on him
which should come after him, that is, on Christ Jesus.

19:5 When they heard this, they were baptized in the name of the Lord
Jesus.

19:6 And when Paul had laid his hands upon them, the Holy Ghost came
on them; and they spake with tongues, and prophesied.

19:7 And all the men were about twelve.

19:8 And he went into the synagogue, and spake boldly for the space of
three months, disputing and persuading the things concerning the
kingdom of God.

19:9 But when divers were hardened, and believed not, but spake evil
of that way before the multitude, he departed from them, and separated
the disciples, disputing daily in the school of one Tyrannus.

19:10 And this continued by the space of two years; so that all they
which dwelt in Asia heard the word of the Lord Jesus, both Jews and
Greeks.

19:11 And God wrought special miracles by the hands of Paul: 19:12 So
that from his body were brought unto the sick handkerchiefs or aprons,
and the diseases departed from them, and the evil spirits went out of
them.

19:13 Then certain of the vagabond Jews, exorcists, took upon them to
call over them which had evil spirits the name of the LORD Jesus,
saying, We adjure you by Jesus whom Paul preacheth.

19:14 And there were seven sons of one Sceva, a Jew, and chief of the
priests, which did so.

19:15 And the evil spirit answered and said, Jesus I know, and Paul I
know; but who are ye?  19:16 And the man in whom the evil spirit was
leaped on them, and overcame them, and prevailed against them, so that
they fled out of that house naked and wounded.

19:17 And this was known to all the Jews and Greeks also dwelling at
Ephesus; and fear fell on them all, and the name of the Lord Jesus was
magnified.

19:18 And many that believed came, and confessed, and shewed their
deeds.

19:19 Many of them also which used curious arts brought their books
together, and burned them before all men: and they counted the price
of them, and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver.

19:20 So mightily grew the word of God and prevailed.

19:21 After these things were ended, Paul purposed in the spirit, when
he had passed through Macedonia and Achaia, to go to Jerusalem,
saying, After I have been there, I must also see Rome.

19:22 So he sent into Macedonia two of them that ministered unto him,
Timotheus and Erastus; but he himself stayed in Asia for a season.

19:23 And the same time there arose no small stir about that way.

19:24 For a certain man named Demetrius, a silversmith, which made
silver shrines for Diana, brought no small gain unto the craftsmen;
19:25 Whom he called together with the workmen of like occupation, and
said, Sirs, ye know that by this craft we have our wealth.

19:26 Moreover ye see and hear, that not alone at Ephesus, but almost
throughout all Asia, this Paul hath persuaded and turned away much
people, saying that they be no gods, which are made with hands: 19:27
So that not only this our craft is in danger to be set at nought; but
also that the temple of the great goddess Diana should be despised,
and her magnificence should be destroyed, whom all Asia and the world
worshippeth.

19:28 And when they heard these sayings, they were full of wrath, and
cried out, saying, Great is Diana of the Ephesians.

19:29 And the whole city was filled with confusion: and having caught
Gaius and Aristarchus, men of Macedonia, Paul's companions in travel,
they rushed with one accord into the theatre.

19:30 And when Paul would have entered in unto the people, the
disciples suffered him not.

19:31 And certain of the chief of Asia, which were his friends, sent
unto him, desiring him that he would not adventure himself into the
theatre.

19:32 Some therefore cried one thing, and some another: for the
assembly was confused: and the more part knew not wherefore they were
come together.

19:33 And they drew Alexander out of the multitude, the Jews putting
him forward. And Alexander beckoned with the hand, and would have made
his defence unto the people.

19:34 But when they knew that he was a Jew, all with one voice about
the space of two hours cried out, Great is Diana of the Ephesians.

19:35 And when the townclerk had appeased the people, he said, Ye men
of Ephesus, what man is there that knoweth not how that the city of
the Ephesians is a worshipper of the great goddess Diana, and of the
image which fell down from Jupiter?  19:36 Seeing then that these
things cannot be spoken against, ye ought to be quiet, and to do
nothing rashly.

19:37 For ye have brought hither these men, which are neither robbers
of churches, nor yet blasphemers of your goddess.

19:38 Wherefore if Demetrius, and the craftsmen which are with him,
have a matter against any man, the law is open, and there are
deputies: let them implead one another.

19:39 But if ye enquire any thing concerning other matters, it shall
be determined in a lawful assembly.

19:40 For we are in danger to be called in question for this day's
uproar, there being no cause whereby we may give an account of this
concourse.

19:41 And when he had thus spoken, he dismissed the assembly.

20:1 And after the uproar was ceased, Paul called unto him the
disciples, and embraced them, and departed for to go into Macedonia.

20:2 And when he had gone over those parts, and had given them much
exhortation, he came into Greece, 20:3 And there abode three months.
And when the Jews laid wait for him, as he was about to sail into
Syria, he purposed to return through Macedonia.

20:4 And there accompanied him into Asia Sopater of Berea; and of the
Thessalonians, Aristarchus and Secundus; and Gaius of Derbe, and
Timotheus; and of Asia, Tychicus and Trophimus.

20:5 These going before tarried for us at Troas.

20:6 And we sailed away from Philippi after the days of unleavened
bread, and came unto them to Troas in five days; where we abode seven
days.

20:7 And upon the first day of the week, when the disciples came
together to break bread, Paul preached unto them, ready to depart on
the morrow; and continued his speech until midnight.

20:8 And there were many lights in the upper chamber, where they were
gathered together.

20:9 And there sat in a window a certain young man named Eutychus,
being fallen into a deep sleep: and as Paul was long preaching, he
sunk down with sleep, and fell down from the third loft, and was taken
up dead.

20:10 And Paul went down, and fell on him, and embracing him said,
Trouble not yourselves; for his life is in him.

20:11 When he therefore was come up again, and had broken bread, and
eaten, and talked a long while, even till break of day, so he
departed.

20:12 And they brought the young man alive, and were not a little
comforted.

20:13 And we went before to ship, and sailed unto Assos, there
intending to take in Paul: for so had he appointed, minding himself to
go afoot.

20:14 And when he met with us at Assos, we took him in, and came to
Mitylene.

20:15 And we sailed thence, and came the next day over against Chios;
and the next day we arrived at Samos, and tarried at Trogyllium; and
the next day we came to Miletus.

20:16 For Paul had determined to sail by Ephesus, because he would not
spend the time in Asia: for he hasted, if it were possible for him, to
be at Jerusalem the day of Pentecost.

20:17 And from Miletus he sent to Ephesus, and called the elders of
the church.

20:18 And when they were come to him, he said unto them, Ye know, from
the first day that I came into Asia, after what manner I have been
with you at all seasons, 20:19 Serving the LORD with all humility of
mind, and with many tears, and temptations, which befell me by the
lying in wait of the Jews: 20:20 And how I kept back nothing that was
profitable unto you, but have shewed you, and have taught you
publickly, and from house to house, 20:21 Testifying both to the Jews,
and also to the Greeks, repentance toward God, and faith toward our
Lord Jesus Christ.

20:22 And now, behold, I go bound in the spirit unto Jerusalem, not
knowing the things that shall befall me there: 20:23 Save that the
Holy Ghost witnesseth in every city, saying that bonds and afflictions
abide me.

20:24 But none of these things move me, neither count I my life dear
unto myself, so that I might finish my course with joy, and the
ministry, which I have received of the Lord Jesus, to testify the
gospel of the grace of God.

20:25 And now, behold, I know that ye all, among whom I have gone
preaching the kingdom of God, shall see my face no more.

20:26 Wherefore I take you to record this day, that I am pure from the
blood of all men.

20:27 For I have not shunned to declare unto you all the counsel of
God.

20:28 Take heed therefore unto yourselves, and to all the flock, over
the which the Holy Ghost hath made you overseers, to feed the church
of God, which he hath purchased with his own blood.

20:29 For I know this, that after my departing shall grievous wolves
enter in among you, not sparing the flock.

20:30 Also of your own selves shall men arise, speaking perverse
things, to draw away disciples after them.

20:31 Therefore watch, and remember, that by the space of three years
I ceased not to warn every one night and day with tears.

20:32 And now, brethren, I commend you to God, and to the word of his
grace, which is able to build you up, and to give you an inheritance
among all them which are sanctified.

20:33 I have coveted no man's silver, or gold, or apparel.

20:34 Yea, ye yourselves know, that these hands have ministered unto
my necessities, and to them that were with me.

20:35 I have shewed you all things, how that so labouring ye ought to
support the weak, and to remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he
said, It is more blessed to give than to receive.

20:36 And when he had thus spoken, he kneeled down, and prayed with
them all.

20:37 And they all wept sore, and fell on Paul's neck, and kissed him,
20:38 Sorrowing most of all for the words which he spake, that they
should see his face no more. And they accompanied him unto the ship.

21:1 And it came to pass, that after we were gotten from them, and had
launched, we came with a straight course unto Coos, and the day
following unto Rhodes, and from thence unto Patara: 21:2 And finding a
ship sailing over unto Phenicia, we went aboard, and set forth.

21:3 Now when we had discovered Cyprus, we left it on the left hand,
and sailed into Syria, and landed at Tyre: for there the ship was to
unlade her burden.

21:4 And finding disciples, we tarried there seven days: who said to
Paul through the Spirit, that he should not go up to Jerusalem.

21:5 And when we had accomplished those days, we departed and went our
way; and they all brought us on our way, with wives and children, till
we were out of the city: and we kneeled down on the shore, and prayed.

21:6 And when we had taken our leave one of another, we took ship; and
they returned home again.

21:7 And when we had finished our course from Tyre, we came to
Ptolemais, and saluted the brethren, and abode with them one day.

21:8 And the next day we that were of Paul's company departed, and
came unto Caesarea: and we entered into the house of Philip the
evangelist, which was one of the seven; and abode with him.

21:9 And the same man had four daughters, virgins, which did prophesy.

21:10 And as we tarried there many days, there came down from Judaea a
certain prophet, named Agabus.

21:11 And when he was come unto us, he took Paul's girdle, and bound
his own hands and feet, and said, Thus saith the Holy Ghost, So shall
the Jews at Jerusalem bind the man that owneth this girdle, and shall
deliver him into the hands of the Gentiles.

21:12 And when we heard these things, both we, and they of that place,
besought him not to go up to Jerusalem.

21:13 Then Paul answered, What mean ye to weep and to break mine
heart?  for I am ready not to be bound only, but also to die at
Jerusalem for the name of the Lord Jesus.

21:14 And when he would not be persuaded, we ceased, saying, The will
of the Lord be done.

21:15 And after those days we took up our carriages, and went up to
Jerusalem.

21:16 There went with us also certain of the disciples of Caesarea,
and brought with them one Mnason of Cyprus, an old disciple, with whom
we should lodge.

21:17 And when we were come to Jerusalem, the brethren received us
gladly.

21:18 And the day following Paul went in with us unto James; and all
the elders were present.

21:19 And when he had saluted them, he declared particularly what
things God had wrought among the Gentiles by his ministry.

21:20 And when they heard it, they glorified the Lord, and said unto
him, Thou seest, brother, how many thousands of Jews there are which
believe; and they are all zealous of the law: 21:21 And they are
informed of thee, that thou teachest all the Jews which are among the
Gentiles to forsake Moses, saying that they ought not to circumcise
their children, neither to walk after the customs.

21:22 What is it therefore? the multitude must needs come together:
for they will hear that thou art come.

21:23 Do therefore this that we say to thee: We have four men which
have a vow on them; 21:24 Them take, and purify thyself with them, and
be at charges with them, that they may shave their heads: and all may
know that those things, whereof they were informed concerning thee,
are nothing; but that thou thyself also walkest orderly, and keepest
the law.

21:25 As touching the Gentiles which believe, we have written and
concluded that they observe no such thing, save only that they keep
themselves from things offered to idols, and from blood, and from
strangled, and from fornication.

21:26 Then Paul took the men, and the next day purifying himself with
them entered into the temple, to signify the accomplishment of the
days of purification, until that an offering should be offered for
every one of them.

21:27 And when the seven days were almost ended, the Jews which were
of Asia, when they saw him in the temple, stirred up all the people,
and laid hands on him, 21:28 Crying out, Men of Israel, help: This is
the man, that teacheth all men every where against the people, and the
law, and this place: and further brought Greeks also into the temple,
and hath polluted this holy place.

21:29 (For they had seen before with him in the city Trophimus an
Ephesian, whom they supposed that Paul had brought into the temple.)
21:30 And all the city was moved, and the people ran together: and
they took Paul, and drew him out of the temple: and forthwith the
doors were shut.

21:31 And as they went about to kill him, tidings came unto the chief
captain of the band, that all Jerusalem was in an uproar.

21:32 Who immediately took soldiers and centurions, and ran down unto
them: and when they saw the chief captain and the soldiers, they left
beating of Paul.

21:33 Then the chief captain came near, and took him, and commanded
him to be bound with two chains; and demanded who he was, and what he
had done.

21:34 And some cried one thing, some another, among the multitude: and
when he could not know the certainty for the tumult, he commanded him
to be carried into the castle.

21:35 And when he came upon the stairs, so it was, that he was borne
of the soldiers for the violence of the people.

21:36 For the multitude of the people followed after, crying, Away
with him.

21:37 And as Paul was to be led into the castle, he said unto the
chief captain, May I speak unto thee? Who said, Canst thou speak
Greek?  21:38 Art not thou that Egyptian, which before these days
madest an uproar, and leddest out into the wilderness four thousand
men that were murderers?  21:39 But Paul said, I am a man which am a
Jew of Tarsus, a city in Cilicia, a citizen of no mean city: and, I
beseech thee, suffer me to speak unto the people.

21:40 And when he had given him licence, Paul stood on the stairs, and
beckoned with the hand unto the people. And when there was made a
great silence, he spake unto them in the Hebrew tongue, saying, 22:1
Men, brethren, and fathers, hear ye my defence which I make now unto
you.

22:2 (And when they heard that he spake in the Hebrew tongue to them,
they kept the more silence: and he saith,) 22:3 I am verily a man
which am a Jew, born in Tarsus, a city in Cilicia, yet brought up in
this city at the feet of Gamaliel, and taught according to the perfect
manner of the law of the fathers, and was zealous toward God, as ye
all are this day.

22:4 And I persecuted this way unto the death, binding and delivering
into prisons both men and women.

22:5 As also the high priest doth bear me witness, and all the estate
of the elders: from whom also I received letters unto the brethren,
and went to Damascus, to bring them which were there bound unto
Jerusalem, for to be punished.

22:6 And it came to pass, that, as I made my journey, and was come
nigh unto Damascus about noon, suddenly there shone from heaven a
great light round about me.

22:7 And I fell unto the ground, and heard a voice saying unto me,
Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?  22:8 And I answered, Who art
thou, Lord? And he said unto me, I am Jesus of Nazareth, whom thou
persecutest.

22:9 And they that were with me saw indeed the light, and were afraid;
but they heard not the voice of him that spake to me.

22:10 And I said, What shall I do, LORD? And the Lord said unto me,
Arise, and go into Damascus; and there it shall be told thee of all
things which are appointed for thee to do.

22:11 And when I could not see for the glory of that light, being led
by the hand of them that were with me, I came into Damascus.

22:12 And one Ananias, a devout man according to the law, having a
good report of all the Jews which dwelt there, 22:13 Came unto me, and
stood, and said unto me, Brother Saul, receive thy sight. And the same
hour I looked up upon him.

22:14 And he said, The God of our fathers hath chosen thee, that thou
shouldest know his will, and see that Just One, and shouldest hear the
voice of his mouth.

22:15 For thou shalt be his witness unto all men of what thou hast
seen and heard.

22:16 And now why tarriest thou? arise, and be baptized, and wash away
thy sins, calling on the name of the Lord.

22:17 And it came to pass, that, when I was come again to Jerusalem,
even while I prayed in the temple, I was in a trance; 22:18 And saw
him saying unto me, Make haste, and get thee quickly out of Jerusalem:
for they will not receive thy testimony concerning me.

22:19 And I said, Lord, they know that I imprisoned and beat in every
synagogue them that believed on thee: 22:20 And when the blood of thy
martyr Stephen was shed, I also was standing by, and consenting unto
his death, and kept the raiment of them that slew him.

22:21 And he said unto me, Depart: for I will send thee far hence unto
the Gentiles.

22:22 And they gave him audience unto this word, and then lifted up
their voices, and said, Away with such a fellow from the earth: for it
is not fit that he should live.

22:23 And as they cried out, and cast off their clothes, and threw
dust into the air, 22:24 The chief captain commanded him to be brought
into the castle, and bade that he should be examined by scourging;
that he might know wherefore they cried so against him.

22:25 And as they bound him with thongs, Paul said unto the centurion
that stood by, Is it lawful for you to scourge a man that is a Roman,
and uncondemned?  22:26 When the centurion heard that, he went and
told the chief captain, saying, Take heed what thou doest: for this
man is a Roman.

22:27 Then the chief captain came, and said unto him, Tell me, art
thou a Roman? He said, Yea.

22:28 And the chief captain answered, With a great sum obtained I this
freedom. And Paul said, But I was free born.

22:29 Then straightway they departed from him which should have
examined him: and the chief captain also was afraid, after he knew
that he was a Roman, and because he had bound him.

22:30 On the morrow, because he would have known the certainty
wherefore he was accused of the Jews, he loosed him from his bands,
and commanded the chief priests and all their council to appear, and
brought Paul down, and set him before them.

23:1 And Paul, earnestly beholding the council, said, Men and
brethren, I have lived in all good conscience before God until this
day.

23:2 And the high priest Ananias commanded them that stood by him to
smite him on the mouth.

23:3 Then said Paul unto him, God shall smite thee, thou whited wall:
for sittest thou to judge me after the law, and commandest me to be
smitten contrary to the law?  23:4 And they that stood by said,
Revilest thou God's high priest?  23:5 Then said Paul, I wist not,
brethren, that he was the high priest: for it is written, Thou shalt
not speak evil of the ruler of thy people.

23:6 But when Paul perceived that the one part were Sadducees, and the
other Pharisees, he cried out in the council, Men and brethren, I am a
Pharisee, the son of a Pharisee: of the hope and resurrection of the
dead I am called in question.

23:7 And when he had so said, there arose a dissension between the
Pharisees and the Sadducees: and the multitude was divided.

23:8 For the Sadducees say that there is no resurrection, neither
angel, nor spirit: but the Pharisees confess both.

23:9 And there arose a great cry: and the scribes that were of the
Pharisees' part arose, and strove, saying, We find no evil in this
man: but if a spirit or an angel hath spoken to him, let us not fight
against God.

23:10 And when there arose a great dissension, the chief captain,
fearing lest Paul should have been pulled in pieces of them, commanded
the soldiers to go down, and to take him by force from among them, and
to bring him into the castle.

23:11 And the night following the Lord stood by him, and said, Be of
good cheer, Paul: for as thou hast testified of me in Jerusalem, so
must thou bear witness also at Rome.

23:12 And when it was day, certain of the Jews banded together, and
bound themselves under a curse, saying that they would neither eat nor
drink till they had killed Paul.

23:13 And they were more than forty which had made this conspiracy.

23:14 And they came to the chief priests and elders, and said, We have
bound ourselves under a great curse, that we will eat nothing until we
have slain Paul.

23:15 Now therefore ye with the council signify to the chief captain
that he bring him down unto you to morrow, as though ye would enquire
something more perfectly concerning him: and we, or ever he come near,
are ready to kill him.

23:16 And when Paul's sister's son heard of their lying in wait, he
went and entered into the castle, and told Paul.

23:17 Then Paul called one of the centurions unto him, and said, Bring
this young man unto the chief captain: for he hath a certain thing to
tell him.

23:18 So he took him, and brought him to the chief captain, and said,
Paul the prisoner called me unto him, and prayed me to bring this
young man unto thee, who hath something to say unto thee.

23:19 Then the chief captain took him by the hand, and went with him
aside privately, and asked him, What is that thou hast to tell me?
23:20 And he said, The Jews have agreed to desire thee that thou
wouldest bring down Paul to morrow into the council, as though they
would enquire somewhat of him more perfectly.

23:21 But do not thou yield unto them: for there lie in wait for him
of them more than forty men, which have bound themselves with an oath,
that they will neither eat nor drink till they have killed him: and
now are they ready, looking for a promise from thee.

23:22 So the chief captain then let the young man depart, and charged
him, See thou tell no man that thou hast shewed these things to me.

23:23 And he called unto him two centurions, saying, Make ready two
hundred soldiers to go to Caesarea, and horsemen threescore and ten,
and spearmen two hundred, at the third hour of the night; 23:24 And
provide them beasts, that they may set Paul on, and bring him safe
unto Felix the governor.

23:25 And he wrote a letter after this manner: 23:26 Claudius Lysias
unto the most excellent governor Felix sendeth greeting.

23:27 This man was taken of the Jews, and should have been killed of
them: then came I with an army, and rescued him, having understood
that he was a Roman.

23:28 And when I would have known the cause wherefore they accused
him, I brought him forth into their council: 23:29 Whom I perceived to
be accused of questions of their law, but to have nothing laid to his
charge worthy of death or of bonds.

23:30 And when it was told me how that the Jews laid wait for the man,
I sent straightway to thee, and gave commandment to his accusers also
to say before thee what they had against him. Farewell.

23:31 Then the soldiers, as it was commanded them, took Paul, and
brought him by night to Antipatris.

23:32 On the morrow they left the horsemen to go with him, and
returned to the castle: 23:33 Who, when they came to Caesarea and
delivered the epistle to the governor, presented Paul also before him.

23:34 And when the governor had read the letter, he asked of what
province he was. And when he understood that he was of Cilicia; 23:35
I will hear thee, said he, when thine accusers are also come. And he
commanded him to be kept in Herod's judgment hall.

24:1 And after five days Ananias the high priest descended with the
elders, and with a certain orator named Tertullus, who informed the
governor against Paul.

24:2 And when he was called forth, Tertullus began to accuse him,
saying, Seeing that by thee we enjoy great quietness, and that very
worthy deeds are done unto this nation by thy providence, 24:3 We
accept it always, and in all places, most noble Felix, with all
thankfulness.

24:4 Notwithstanding, that I be not further tedious unto thee, I pray
thee that thou wouldest hear us of thy clemency a few words.

24:5 For we have found this man a pestilent fellow, and a mover of
sedition among all the Jews throughout the world, and a ringleader of
the sect of the Nazarenes: 24:6 Who also hath gone about to profane
the temple: whom we took, and would have judged according to our law.

24:7 But the chief captain Lysias came upon us, and with great
violence took him away out of our hands, 24:8 Commanding his accusers
to come unto thee: by examining of whom thyself mayest take knowledge
of all these things, whereof we accuse him.

24:9 And the Jews also assented, saying that these things were so.

24:10 Then Paul, after that the governor had beckoned unto him to
speak, answered, Forasmuch as I know that thou hast been of many years
a judge unto this nation, I do the more cheerfully answer for myself:
24:11 Because that thou mayest understand, that there are yet but
twelve days since I went up to Jerusalem for to worship.

24:12 And they neither found me in the temple disputing with any man,
neither raising up the people, neither in the synagogues, nor in the
city: 24:13 Neither can they prove the things whereof they now accuse
me.

24:14 But this I confess unto thee, that after the way which they call
heresy, so worship I the God of my fathers, believing all things which
are written in the law and in the prophets: 24:15 And have hope toward
God, which they themselves also allow, that there shall be a
resurrection of the dead, both of the just and unjust.

24:16 And herein do I exercise myself, to have always a conscience
void to offence toward God, and toward men.

24:17 Now after many years I came to bring alms to my nation, and
offerings.

24:18 Whereupon certain Jews from Asia found me purified in the
temple, neither with multitude, nor with tumult.

24:19 Who ought to have been here before thee, and object, if they had
ought against me.

24:20 Or else let these same here say, if they have found any evil
doing in me, while I stood before the council, 24:21 Except it be for
this one voice, that I cried standing among them, Touching the
resurrection of the dead I am called in question by you this day.

24:22 And when Felix heard these things, having more perfect knowledge
of that way, he deferred them, and said, When Lysias the chief captain
shall come down, I will know the uttermost of your matter.

24:23 And he commanded a centurion to keep Paul, and to let him have
liberty, and that he should forbid none of his acquaintance to
minister or come unto him.

24:24 And after certain days, when Felix came with his wife Drusilla,
which was a Jewess, he sent for Paul, and heard him concerning the
faith in Christ.

24:25 And as he reasoned of righteousness, temperance, and judgment to
come, Felix trembled, and answered, Go thy way for this time; when I
have a convenient season, I will call for thee.

24:26 He hoped also that money should have been given him of Paul,
that he might loose him: wherefore he sent for him the oftener, and
communed with him.

24:27 But after two years Porcius Festus came into Felix' room: and
Felix, willing to shew the Jews a pleasure, left Paul bound.

25:1 Now when Festus was come into the province, after three days he
ascended from Caesarea to Jerusalem.

25:2 Then the high priest and the chief of the Jews informed him
against Paul, and besought him, 25:3 And desired favour against him,
that he would send for him to Jerusalem, laying wait in the way to
kill him.

25:4 But Festus answered, that Paul should be kept at Caesarea, and
that he himself would depart shortly thither.

25:5 Let them therefore, said he, which among you are able, go down
with me, and accuse this man, if there be any wickedness in him.

25:6 And when he had tarried among them more than ten days, he went
down unto Caesarea; and the next day sitting on the judgment seat
commanded Paul to be brought.

25:7 And when he was come, the Jews which came down from Jerusalem
stood round about, and laid many and grievous complaints against Paul,
which they could not prove.

25:8 While he answered for himself, Neither against the law of the
Jews, neither against the temple, nor yet against Caesar, have I
offended any thing at all.

25:9 But Festus, willing to do the Jews a pleasure, answered Paul, and
said, Wilt thou go up to Jerusalem, and there be judged of these
things before me?  25:10 Then said Paul, I stand at Caesar's judgment
seat, where I ought to be judged: to the Jews have I done no wrong, as
thou very well knowest.

25:11 For if I be an offender, or have committed any thing worthy of
death, I refuse not to die: but if there be none of these things
whereof these accuse me, no man may deliver me unto them. I appeal
unto Caesar.

25:12 Then Festus, when he had conferred with the council, answered,
Hast thou appealed unto Caesar? unto Caesar shalt thou go.

25:13 And after certain days king Agrippa and Bernice came unto
Caesarea to salute Festus.

25:14 And when they had been there many days, Festus declared Paul's
cause unto the king, saying, There is a certain man left in bonds by
Felix: 25:15 About whom, when I was at Jerusalem, the chief priests
and the elders of the Jews informed me, desiring to have judgment
against him.

25:16 To whom I answered, It is not the manner of the Romans to
deliver any man to die, before that he which is accused have the
accusers face to face, and have licence to answer for himself
concerning the crime laid against him.

25:17 Therefore, when they were come hither, without any delay on the
morrow I sat on the judgment seat, and commanded the man to be brought
forth.

25:18 Against whom when the accusers stood up, they brought none
accusation of such things as I supposed: 25:19 But had certain
questions against him of their own superstition, and of one Jesus,
which was dead, whom Paul affirmed to be alive.

25:20 And because I doubted of such manner of questions, I asked him
whether he would go to Jerusalem, and there be judged of these
matters.

25:21 But when Paul had appealed to be reserved unto the hearing of
Augustus, I commanded him to be kept till I might send him to Caesar.

25:22 Then Agrippa said unto Festus, I would also hear the man myself.
To morrow, said he, thou shalt hear him.

25:23 And on the morrow, when Agrippa was come, and Bernice, with
great pomp, and was entered into the place of hearing, with the chief
captains, and principal men of the city, at Festus' commandment Paul
was brought forth.

25:24 And Festus said, King Agrippa, and all men which are here
present with us, ye see this man, about whom all the multitude of the
Jews have dealt with me, both at Jerusalem, and also here, crying that
he ought not to live any longer.

25:25 But when I found that he had committed nothing worthy of death,
and that he himself hath appealed to Augustus, I have determined to
send him.

25:26 Of whom I have no certain thing to write unto my lord. Wherefore
I have brought him forth before you, and specially before thee, O king
Agrippa, that, after examination had, I might have somewhat to write.

25:27 For it seemeth to me unreasonable to send a prisoner, and not
withal to signify the crimes laid against him.

26:1 Then Agrippa said unto Paul, Thou art permitted to speak for
thyself.

Then Paul stretched forth the hand, and answered for himself: 26:2 I
think myself happy, king Agrippa, because I shall answer for myself
this day before thee touching all the things whereof I am accused of
the Jews: 26:3 Especially because I know thee to be expert in all
customs and questions which are among the Jews: wherefore I beseech
thee to hear me patiently.

26:4 My manner of life from my youth, which was at the first among
mine own nation at Jerusalem, know all the Jews; 26:5 Which knew me
from the beginning, if they would testify, that after the most
straitest sect of our religion I lived a Pharisee.

26:6 And now I stand and am judged for the hope of the promise made of
God, unto our fathers: 26:7 Unto which promise our twelve tribes,
instantly serving God day and night, hope to come. For which hope's
sake, king Agrippa, I am accused of the Jews.

26:8 Why should it be thought a thing incredible with you, that God
should raise the dead?  26:9 I verily thought with myself, that I
ought to do many things contrary to the name of Jesus of Nazareth.

26:10 Which thing I also did in Jerusalem: and many of the saints did
I shut up in prison, having received authority from the chief priests;
and when they were put to death, I gave my voice against them.

26:11 And I punished them oft in every synagogue, and compelled them
to blaspheme; and being exceedingly mad against them, I persecuted
them even unto strange cities.

26:12 Whereupon as I went to Damascus with authority and commission
from the chief priests, 26:13 At midday, O king, I saw in the way a
light from heaven, above the brightness of the sun, shining round
about me and them which journeyed with me.

26:14 And when we were all fallen to the earth, I heard a voice
speaking unto me, and saying in the Hebrew tongue, Saul, Saul, why
persecutest thou me? it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.

26:15 And I said, Who art thou, Lord? And he said, I am Jesus whom
thou persecutest.

26:16 But rise, and stand upon thy feet: for I have appeared unto thee
for this purpose, to make thee a minister and a witness both of these
things which thou hast seen, and of those things in the which I will
appear unto thee; 26:17 Delivering thee from the people, and from the
Gentiles, unto whom now I send thee, 26:18 To open their eyes, and to
turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto
God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins, and inheritance among
them which are sanctified by faith that is in me.

26:19 Whereupon, O king Agrippa, I was not disobedient unto the
heavenly vision: 26:20 But shewed first unto them of Damascus, and at
Jerusalem, and throughout all the coasts of Judaea, and then to the
Gentiles, that they should repent and turn to God, and do works meet
for repentance.

26:21 For these causes the Jews caught me in the temple, and went
about to kill me.

26:22 Having therefore obtained help of God, I continue unto this day,
witnessing both to small and great, saying none other things than
those which the prophets and Moses did say should come: 26:23 That
Christ should suffer, and that he should be the first that should rise
from the dead, and should shew light unto the people, and to the
Gentiles.

26:24 And as he thus spake for himself, Festus said with a loud voice,
Paul, thou art beside thyself; much learning doth make thee mad.

26:25 But he said, I am not mad, most noble Festus; but speak forth
the words of truth and soberness.

26:26 For the king knoweth of these things, before whom also I speak
freely: for I am persuaded that none of these things are hidden from
him; for this thing was not done in a corner.

26:27 King Agrippa, believest thou the prophets? I know that thou
believest.

26:28 Then Agrippa said unto Paul, Almost thou persuadest me to be a
Christian.

26:29 And Paul said, I would to God, that not only thou, but also all
that hear me this day, were both almost, and altogether such as I am,
except these bonds.

26:30 And when he had thus spoken, the king rose up, and the governor,
and Bernice, and they that sat with them: 26:31 And when they were
gone aside, they talked between themselves, saying, This man doeth
nothing worthy of death or of bonds.

26:32 Then said Agrippa unto Festus, This man might have been set at
liberty, if he had not appealed unto Caesar.

27:1 And when it was determined that we should sail into Italy, they
delivered Paul and certain other prisoners unto one named Julius, a
centurion of Augustus' band.

27:2 And entering into a ship of Adramyttium, we launched, meaning to
sail by the coasts of Asia; one Aristarchus, a Macedonian of
Thessalonica, being with us.

27:3 And the next day we touched at Sidon. And Julius courteously
entreated Paul, and gave him liberty to go unto his friends to refresh
himself.

27:4 And when we had launched from thence, we sailed under Cyprus,
because the winds were contrary.

27:5 And when we had sailed over the sea of Cilicia and Pamphylia, we
came to Myra, a city of Lycia.

27:6 And there the centurion found a ship of Alexandria sailing into
Italy; and he put us therein.

27:7 And when we had sailed slowly many days, and scarce were come
over against Cnidus, the wind not suffering us, we sailed under Crete,
over against Salmone; 27:8 And, hardly passing it, came unto a place
which is called The fair havens; nigh whereunto was the city of Lasea.

27:9 Now when much time was spent, and when sailing was now dangerous,
because the fast was now already past, Paul admonished them, 27:10 And
said unto them, Sirs, I perceive that this voyage will be with hurt
and much damage, not only of the lading and ship, but also of our
lives.

27:11 Nevertheless the centurion believed the master and the owner of
the ship, more than those things which were spoken by Paul.

27:12 And because the haven was not commodious to winter in, the more
part advised to depart thence also, if by any means they might attain
to Phenice, and there to winter; which is an haven of Crete, and lieth
toward the south west and north west.

27:13 And when the south wind blew softly, supposing that they had
obtained their purpose, loosing thence, they sailed close by Crete.

27:14 But not long after there arose against it a tempestuous wind,
called Euroclydon.

27:15 And when the ship was caught, and could not bear up into the
wind, we let her drive.

27:16 And running under a certain island which is called Clauda, we
had much work to come by the boat: 27:17 Which when they had taken up,
they used helps, undergirding the ship; and, fearing lest they should
fall into the quicksands, strake sail, and so were driven.

27:18 And we being exceedingly tossed with a tempest, the next day
they lightened the ship; 27:19 And the third day we cast out with our
own hands the tackling of the ship.

27:20 And when neither sun nor stars in many days appeared, and no
small tempest lay on us, all hope that we should be saved was then
taken away.

27:21 But after long abstinence Paul stood forth in the midst of them,
and said, Sirs, ye should have hearkened unto me, and not have loosed
from Crete, and to have gained this harm and loss.

27:22 And now I exhort you to be of good cheer: for there shall be no
loss of any man's life among you, but of the ship.

27:23 For there stood by me this night the angel of God, whose I am,
and whom I serve, 27:24 Saying, Fear not, Paul; thou must be brought
before Caesar: and, lo, God hath given thee all them that sail with
thee.

27:25 Wherefore, sirs, be of good cheer: for I believe God, that it
shall be even as it was told me.

27:26 Howbeit we must be cast upon a certain island.

27:27 But when the fourteenth night was come, as we were driven up and
down in Adria, about midnight the shipmen deemed that they drew near
to some country; 27:28 And sounded, and found it twenty fathoms: and
when they had gone a little further, they sounded again, and found it
fifteen fathoms.

27:29 Then fearing lest we should have fallen upon rocks, they cast
four anchors out of the stern, and wished for the day.

27:30 And as the shipmen were about to flee out of the ship, when they
had let down the boat into the sea, under colour as though they would
have cast anchors out of the foreship, 27:31 Paul said to the
centurion and to the soldiers, Except these abide in the ship, ye
cannot be saved.

27:32 Then the soldiers cut off the ropes of the boat, and let her
fall off.

27:33 And while the day was coming on, Paul besought them all to take
meat, saying, This day is the fourteenth day that ye have tarried and
continued fasting, having taken nothing.

27:34 Wherefore I pray you to take some meat: for this is for your
health: for there shall not an hair fall from the head of any of you.

27:35 And when he had thus spoken, he took bread, and gave thanks to
God in presence of them all: and when he had broken it, he began to
eat.

27:36 Then were they all of good cheer, and they also took some meat.

27:37 And we were in all in the ship two hundred threescore and
sixteen souls.

27:38 And when they had eaten enough, they lightened the ship, and
cast out the wheat into the sea.

27:39 And when it was day, they knew not the land: but they discovered
a certain creek with a shore, into the which they were minded, if it
were possible, to thrust in the ship.

27:40 And when they had taken up the anchors, they committed
themselves unto the sea, and loosed the rudder bands, and hoised up
the mainsail to the wind, and made toward shore.

27:41 And falling into a place where two seas met, they ran the ship
aground; and the forepart stuck fast, and remained unmoveable, but the
hinder part was broken with the violence of the waves.

27:42 And the soldiers' counsel was to kill the prisoners, lest any of
them should swim out, and escape.

27:43 But the centurion, willing to save Paul, kept them from their
purpose; and commanded that they which could swim should cast
themselves first into the sea, and get to land: 27:44 And the rest,
some on boards, and some on broken pieces of the ship.

And so it came to pass, that they escaped all safe to land.

28:1 And when they were escaped, then they knew that the island was
called Melita.

28:2 And the barbarous people shewed us no little kindness: for they
kindled a fire, and received us every one, because of the present
rain, and because of the cold.

28:3 And when Paul had gathered a bundle of sticks, and laid them on
the fire, there came a viper out of the heat, and fastened on his
hand.

28:4 And when the barbarians saw the venomous beast hang on his hand,
they said among themselves, No doubt this man is a murderer, whom,
though he hath escaped the sea, yet vengeance suffereth not to live.

28:5 And he shook off the beast into the fire, and felt no harm.

28:6 Howbeit they looked when he should have swollen, or fallen down
dead suddenly: but after they had looked a great while, and saw no
harm come to him, they changed their minds, and said that he was a
god.

28:7 In the same quarters were possessions of the chief man of the
island, whose name was Publius; who received us, and lodged us three
days courteously.

28:8 And it came to pass, that the father of Publius lay sick of a
fever and of a bloody flux: to whom Paul entered in, and prayed, and
laid his hands on him, and healed him.

28:9 So when this was done, others also, which had diseases in the
island, came, and were healed: 28:10 Who also honoured us with many
honours; and when we departed, they laded us with such things as were
necessary.

28:11 And after three months we departed in a ship of Alexandria,
which had wintered in the isle, whose sign was Castor and Pollux.

28:12 And landing at Syracuse, we tarried there three days.

28:13 And from thence we fetched a compass, and came to Rhegium: and
after one day the south wind blew, and we came the next day to
Puteoli: 28:14 Where we found brethren, and were desired to tarry with
them seven days: and so we went toward Rome.

28:15 And from thence, when the brethren heard of us, they came to
meet us as far as Appii forum, and The three taverns: whom when Paul
saw, he thanked God, and took courage.

28:16 And when we came to Rome, the centurion delivered the prisoners
to the captain of the guard: but Paul was suffered to dwell by himself
with a soldier that kept him.

28:17 And it came to pass, that after three days Paul called the chief
of the Jews together: and when they were come together, he said unto
them, Men and brethren, though I have committed nothing against the
people, or customs of our fathers, yet was I delivered prisoner from
Jerusalem into the hands of the Romans.

28:18 Who, when they had examined me, would have let me go, because
there was no cause of death in me.

28:19 But when the Jews spake against it, I was constrained to appeal
unto Caesar; not that I had ought to accuse my nation of.

28:20 For this cause therefore have I called for you, to see you, and
to speak with you: because that for the hope of Israel I am bound with
this chain.

28:21 And they said unto him, We neither received letters out of
Judaea concerning thee, neither any of the brethren that came shewed
or spake any harm of thee.

28:22 But we desire to hear of thee what thou thinkest: for as
concerning this sect, we know that every where it is spoken against.

28:23 And when they had appointed him a day, there came many to him
into his lodging; to whom he expounded and testified the kingdom of
God, persuading them concerning Jesus, both out of the law of Moses,
and out of the prophets, from morning till evening.

28:24 And some believed the things which were spoken, and some
believed not.

28:25 And when they agreed not among themselves, they departed, after
that Paul had spoken one word, Well spake the Holy Ghost by Esaias the
prophet unto our fathers, 28:26 Saying, Go unto this people, and say,
Hearing ye shall hear, and shall not understand; and seeing ye shall
see, and not perceive: 28:27 For the heart of this people is waxed
gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes have they
closed; lest they should see with their eyes, and hear with their
ears, and understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I
should heal them.

28:28 Be it known therefore unto you, that the salvation of God is
sent unto the Gentiles, and that they will hear it.

28:29 And when he had said these words, the Jews departed, and had
great reasoning among themselves.

28:30 And Paul dwelt two whole years in his own hired house, and
received all that came in unto him, 28:31 Preaching the kingdom of
God, and teaching those things which concern the Lord Jesus Christ,
with all confidence, no man forbidding him.




The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Romans


1:1 Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle,
separated unto the gospel of God, 1:2 (Which he had promised afore by
his prophets in the holy scriptures,) 1:3 Concerning his Son Jesus
Christ our Lord, which was made of the seed of David according to the
flesh; 1:4 And declared to be the Son of God with power, according to
the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead: 1:5 By whom
we have received grace and apostleship, for obedience to the faith
among all nations, for his name: 1:6 Among whom are ye also the called
of Jesus Christ: 1:7 To all that be in Rome, beloved of God, called to
be saints: Grace to you and peace from God our Father, and the Lord
Jesus Christ.

1:8 First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for you all, that your
faith is spoken of throughout the whole world.

1:9 For God is my witness, whom I serve with my spirit in the gospel
of his Son, that without ceasing I make mention of you always in my
prayers; 1:10 Making request, if by any means now at length I might
have a prosperous journey by the will of God to come unto you.

1:11 For I long to see you, that I may impart unto you some spiritual
gift, to the end ye may be established; 1:12 That is, that I may be
comforted together with you by the mutual faith both of you and me.

1:13 Now I would not have you ignorant, brethren, that oftentimes I
purposed to come unto you, (but was let hitherto,) that I might have
some fruit among you also, even as among other Gentiles.

1:14 I am debtor both to the Greeks, and to the Barbarians; both to
the wise, and to the unwise.

1:15 So, as much as in me is, I am ready to preach the gospel to you
that are at Rome also.

1:16 For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power
of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first,
and also to the Greek.

1:17 For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to
faith: as it is written, The just shall live by faith.

1:18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all
ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in
unrighteousness; 1:19 Because that which may be known of God is
manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them.

1:20 For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world
are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even
his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse: 1:21
Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God,
neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and
their foolish heart was darkened.

1:22 Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, 1:23 And
changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to
corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping
things.

1:24 Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts
of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves:
1:25 Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and
served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever.
Amen.

1:26 For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even
their women did change the natural use into that which is against
nature: 1:27 And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the
woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working
that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of
their error which was meet.

1:28 And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge,
God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are
not convenient; 1:29 Being filled with all unrighteousness,
fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy,
murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers, 1:30 Backbiters, haters
of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things,
disobedient to parents, 1:31 Without understanding, covenantbreakers,
without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful: 1:32 Who knowing
the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of
death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them.

2:1 Therefore thou art inexcusable, O man, whosoever thou art that
judgest: for wherein thou judgest another, thou condemnest thyself;
for thou that judgest doest the same things.

2:2 But we are sure that the judgment of God is according to truth
against them which commit such things.

2:3 And thinkest thou this, O man, that judgest them which do such
things, and doest the same, that thou shalt escape the judgment of
God?  2:4 Or despisest thou the riches of his goodness and forbearance
and longsuffering; not knowing that the goodness of God leadeth thee
to repentance?  2:5 But after thy hardness and impenitent heart
treasurest up unto thyself wrath against the day of wrath and
revelation of the righteous judgment of God; 2:6 Who will render to
every man according to his deeds: 2:7 To them who by patient
continuance in well doing seek for glory and honour and immortality,
eternal life: 2:8 But unto them that are contentious, and do not obey
the truth, but obey unrighteousness, indignation and wrath, 2:9
Tribulation and anguish, upon every soul of man that doeth evil, of
the Jew first, and also of the Gentile; 2:10 But glory, honour, and
peace, to every man that worketh good, to the Jew first, and also to
the Gentile: 2:11 For there is no respect of persons with God.

2:12 For as many as have sinned without law shall also perish without
law: and as many as have sinned in the law shall be judged by the law;
2:13 (For not the hearers of the law are just before God, but the
doers of the law shall be justified.

2:14 For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the
things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto
themselves: 2:15 Which shew the work of the law written in their
hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the
mean while accusing or else excusing one another;) 2:16 In the day
when God shall judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ according to
my gospel.

2:17 Behold, thou art called a Jew, and restest in the law, and makest
thy boast of God, 2:18 And knowest his will, and approvest the things
that are more excellent, being instructed out of the law; 2:19 And art
confident that thou thyself art a guide of the blind, a light of them
which are in darkness, 2:20 An instructor of the foolish, a teacher of
babes, which hast the form of knowledge and of the truth in the law.

2:21 Thou therefore which teachest another, teachest thou not thyself?
thou that preachest a man should not steal, dost thou steal?  2:22
Thou that sayest a man should not commit adultery, dost thou commit
adultery? thou that abhorrest idols, dost thou commit sacrilege?  2:23
Thou that makest thy boast of the law, through breaking the law
dishonourest thou God?  2:24 For the name of God is blasphemed among
the Gentiles through you, as it is written.

2:25 For circumcision verily profiteth, if thou keep the law: but if
thou be a breaker of the law, thy circumcision is made uncircumcision.

2:26 Therefore if the uncircumcision keep the righteousness of the
law, shall not his uncircumcision be counted for circumcision?  2:27
And shall not uncircumcision which is by nature, if it fulfil the law,
judge thee, who by the letter and circumcision dost transgress the
law?  2:28 For he is not a Jew, which is one outwardly; neither is
that circumcision, which is outward in the flesh: 2:29 But he is a
Jew, which is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in
the spirit, and not in the letter; whose praise is not of men, but of
God.

3:1 What advantage then hath the Jew? or what profit is there of
circumcision?  3:2 Much every way: chiefly, because that unto them
were committed the oracles of God.

3:3 For what if some did not believe? shall their unbelief make the
faith of God without effect?  3:4 God forbid: yea, let God be true,
but every man a liar; as it is written, That thou mightest be
justified in thy sayings, and mightest overcome when thou art judged.

3:5 But if our unrighteousness commend the righteousness of God, what
shall we say? Is God unrighteous who taketh vengeance? (I speak as a
man) 3:6 God forbid: for then how shall God judge the world?  3:7 For
if the truth of God hath more abounded through my lie unto his glory;
why yet am I also judged as a sinner?  3:8 And not rather, (as we be
slanderously reported, and as some affirm that we say,) Let us do
evil, that good may come? whose damnation is just.

3:9 What then? are we better than they? No, in no wise: for we have
before proved both Jews and Gentiles, that they are all under sin;
3:10 As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one: 3:11
There is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after
God.

3:12 They are all gone out of the way, they are together become
unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no, not one.

3:13 Their throat is an open sepulchre; with their tongues they have
used deceit; the poison of asps is under their lips: 3:14 Whose mouth
is full of cursing and bitterness: 3:15 Their feet are swift to shed
blood: 3:16 Destruction and misery are in their ways: 3:17 And the way
of peace have they not known: 3:18 There is no fear of God before
their eyes.

3:19 Now we know that what things soever the law saith, it saith to
them who are under the law: that every mouth may be stopped, and all
the world may become guilty before God.

3:20 Therefore by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be
justified in his sight: for by the law is the knowledge of sin.

3:21 But now the righteousness of God without the law is manifested,
being witnessed by the law and the prophets; 3:22 Even the
righteousness of God which is by faith of Jesus Christ unto all and
upon all them that believe: for there is no difference: 3:23 For all
have sinned, and come short of the glory of God; 3:24 Being justified
freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus:
3:25 Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his
blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are
past, through the forbearance of God; 3:26 To declare, I say, at this
time his righteousness: that he might be just, and the justifier of
him which believeth in Jesus.

3:27 Where is boasting then? It is excluded. By what law? of works?
Nay: but by the law of faith.

3:28 Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith without
the deeds of the law.

3:29 Is he the God of the Jews only? is he not also of the Gentiles?
Yes, of the Gentiles also: 3:30 Seeing it is one God, which shall
justify the circumcision by faith, and uncircumcision through faith.

3:31 Do we then make void the law through faith? God forbid: yea, we
establish the law.

4:1 What shall we say then that Abraham our father, as pertaining to
the flesh, hath found?  4:2 For if Abraham were justified by works, he
hath whereof to glory; but not before God.

4:3 For what saith the scripture? Abraham believed God, and it was
counted unto him for righteousness.

4:4 Now to him that worketh is the reward not reckoned of grace, but
of debt.

4:5 But to him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth
the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness.

4:6 Even as David also describeth the blessedness of the man, unto
whom God imputeth righteousness without works, 4:7 Saying, Blessed are
they whose iniquities are forgiven, and whose sins are covered.

4:8 Blessed is the man to whom the Lord will not impute sin.

4:9 Cometh this blessedness then upon the circumcision only, or upon
the uncircumcision also? for we say that faith was reckoned to Abraham
for righteousness.

4:10 How was it then reckoned? when he was in circumcision, or in
uncircumcision? Not in circumcision, but in uncircumcision.

4:11 And he received the sign of circumcision, a seal of the
righteousness of the faith which he had yet being uncircumcised: that
he might be the father of all them that believe, though they be not
circumcised; that righteousness might be imputed unto them also: 4:12
And the father of circumcision to them who are not of the circumcision
only, but who also walk in the steps of that faith of our father
Abraham, which he had being yet uncircumcised.

4:13 For the promise, that he should be the heir of the world, was not
to Abraham, or to his seed, through the law, but through the
righteousness of faith.

4:14 For if they which are of the law be heirs, faith is made void,
and the promise made of none effect: 4:15 Because the law worketh
wrath: for where no law is, there is no transgression.

4:16 Therefore it is of faith, that it might be by grace; to the end
the promise might be sure to all the seed; not to that only which is
of the law, but to that also which is of the faith of Abraham; who is
the father of us all, 4:17 (As it is written, I have made thee a
father of many nations,) before him whom he believed, even God, who
quickeneth the dead, and calleth those things which be not as though
they were.

4:18 Who against hope believed in hope, that he might become the
father of many nations, according to that which was spoken, So shall
thy seed be.

4:19 And being not weak in faith, he considered not his own body now
dead, when he was about an hundred years old, neither yet the deadness
of Sarah's womb: 4:20 He staggered not at the promise of God through
unbelief; but was strong in faith, giving glory to God; 4:21 And being
fully persuaded that, what he had promised, he was able also to
perform.

4:22 And therefore it was imputed to him for righteousness.

4:23 Now it was not written for his sake alone, that it was imputed to
him; 4:24 But for us also, to whom it shall be imputed, if we believe
on him that raised up Jesus our Lord from the dead; 4:25 Who was
delivered for our offences, and was raised again for our
justification.

5:1 Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through
our Lord Jesus Christ: 5:2 By whom also we have access by faith into
this grace wherein we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God.

5:3 And not only so, but we glory in tribulations also: knowing that
tribulation worketh patience; 5:4 And patience, experience; and
experience, hope: 5:5 And hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of
God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto
us.

5:6 For when we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for
the ungodly.

5:7 For scarcely for a righteous man will one die: yet peradventure
for a good man some would even dare to die.

5:8 But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet
sinners, Christ died for us.

5:9 Much more then, being now justified by his blood, we shall be
saved from wrath through him.

5:10 For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the
death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by
his life.

5:11 And not only so, but we also joy in God through our Lord Jesus
Christ, by whom we have now received the atonement.

5:12 Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by
sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned: 5:13
(For until the law sin was in the world: but sin is not imputed when
there is no law.

5:14 Nevertheless death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over them
that had not sinned after the similitude of Adam's transgression, who
is the figure of him that was to come.

5:15 But not as the offence, so also is the free gift. For if through
the offence of one many be dead, much more the grace of God, and the
gift by grace, which is by one man, Jesus Christ, hath abounded unto
many.

5:16 And not as it was by one that sinned, so is the gift: for the
judgment was by one to condemnation, but the free gift is of many
offences unto justification.

5:17 For if by one man's offence death reigned by one; much more they
which receive abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness
shall reign in life by one, Jesus Christ.)  5:18 Therefore as by the
offence of one judgment came upon all men to condemnation; even so by
the righteousness of one the free gift came upon all men unto
justification of life.

5:19 For as by one man's disobedience many were made sinners, so by
the obedience of one shall many be made righteous.

5:20 Moreover the law entered, that the offence might abound. But
where sin abounded, grace did much more abound: 5:21 That as sin hath
reigned unto death, even so might grace reign through righteousness
unto eternal life by Jesus Christ our Lord.

6:1 What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may
abound?  6:2 God forbid. How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any
longer therein?  6:3 Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized
into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death?  6:4 Therefore we are
buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised
up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should
walk in newness of life.

6:5 For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death,
we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection: 6:6 Knowing
this, that our old man is crucified with him, that the body of sin
might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin.

6:7 For he that is dead is freed from sin.

6:8 Now if we be dead with Christ, we believe that we shall also live
with him: 6:9 Knowing that Christ being raised from the dead dieth no
more; death hath no more dominion over him.

6:10 For in that he died, he died unto sin once: but in that he
liveth, he liveth unto God.

6:11 Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin,
but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord.

6:12 Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, that ye should
obey it in the lusts thereof.

6:13 Neither yield ye your members as instruments of unrighteousness
unto sin: but yield yourselves unto God, as those that are alive from
the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness unto God.

6:14 For sin shall not have dominion over you: for ye are not under
the law, but under grace.

6:15 What then? shall we sin, because we are not under the law, but
under grace? God forbid.

6:16 Know ye not, that to whom ye yield yourselves servants to obey,
his servants ye are to whom ye obey; whether of sin unto death, or of
obedience unto righteousness?  6:17 But God be thanked, that ye were
the servants of sin, but ye have obeyed from the heart that form of
doctrine which was delivered you.

6:18 Being then made free from sin, ye became the servants of
righteousness.

6:19 I speak after the manner of men because of the infirmity of your
flesh: for as ye have yielded your members servants to uncleanness and
to iniquity unto iniquity; even so now yield your members servants to
righteousness unto holiness.

6:20 For when ye were the servants of sin, ye were free from
righteousness.

6:21 What fruit had ye then in those things whereof ye are now
ashamed?  for the end of those things is death.

6:22 But now being made free from sin, and become servants to God, ye
have your fruit unto holiness, and the end everlasting life.

6:23 For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal
life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

7:1 Know ye not, brethren, (for I speak to them that know the law,)
how that the law hath dominion over a man as long as he liveth?  7:2
For the woman which hath an husband is bound by the law to her husband
so long as he liveth; but if the husband be dead, she is loosed from
the law of her husband.

7:3 So then if, while her husband liveth, she be married to another
man, she shall be called an adulteress: but if her husband be dead,
she is free from that law; so that she is no adulteress, though she be
married to another man.

7:4 Wherefore, my brethren, ye also are become dead to the law by the
body of Christ; that ye should be married to another, even to him who
is raised from the dead, that we should bring forth fruit unto God.

7:5 For when we were in the flesh, the motions of sins, which were by
the law, did work in our members to bring forth fruit unto death.

7:6 But now we are delivered from the law, that being dead wherein we
were held; that we should serve in newness of spirit, and not in the
oldness of the letter.

7:7 What shall we say then? Is the law sin? God forbid. Nay, I had not
known sin, but by the law: for I had not known lust, except the law
had said, Thou shalt not covet.

7:8 But sin, taking occasion by the commandment, wrought in me all
manner of concupiscence. For without the law sin was dead.

7:9 For I was alive without the law once: but when the commandment
came, sin revived, and I died.

7:10 And the commandment, which was ordained to life, I found to be
unto death.

7:11 For sin, taking occasion by the commandment, deceived me, and by
it slew me.

7:12 Wherefore the law is holy, and the commandment holy, and just,
and good.

7:13 Was then that which is good made death unto me? God forbid. But
sin, that it might appear sin, working death in me by that which is
good; that sin by the commandment might become exceeding sinful.

7:14 For we know that the law is spiritual: but I am carnal, sold
under sin.

7:15 For that which I do I allow not: for what I would, that do I not;
but what I hate, that do I.

7:16 If then I do that which I would not, I consent unto the law that
it is good.

7:17 Now then it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me.

7:18 For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good
thing: for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which
is good I find not.

7:19 For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would
not, that I do.

7:20 Now if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin
that dwelleth in me.

7:21 I find then a law, that, when I would do good, evil is present
with me.

7:22 For I delight in the law of God after the inward man: 7:23 But I
see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and
bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members.

7:24 O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of
this death?  7:25 I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord. So then
with the mind I myself serve the law of God; but with the flesh the
law of sin.

8:1 There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ
Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.

8:2 For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me
free from the law of sin and death.

8:3 For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the
flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and
for sin, condemned sin in the flesh: 8:4 That the righteousness of the
law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after
the Spirit.

8:5 For they that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh;
but they that are after the Spirit the things of the Spirit.

8:6 For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded
is life and peace.

8:7 Because the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not
subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be.

8:8 So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God.

8:9 But ye are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if so be that the
Spirit of God dwell in you. Now if any man have not the Spirit of
Christ, he is none of his.

8:10 And if Christ be in you, the body is dead because of sin; but the
Spirit is life because of righteousness.

8:11 But if the Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell
in you, he that raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your
mortal bodies by his Spirit that dwelleth in you.

8:12 Therefore, brethren, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live
after the flesh.

8:13 For if ye live after the flesh, ye shall die: but if ye through
the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live.

8:14 For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of
God.

8:15 For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but
ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father.

8:16 The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are
the children of God: 8:17 And if children, then heirs; heirs of God,
and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we
may be also glorified together.

8:18 For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not
worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us.

8:19 For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the
manifestation of the sons of God.

8:20 For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but
by reason of him who hath subjected the same in hope, 8:21 Because the
creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption
into the glorious liberty of the children of God.

8:22 For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in
pain together until now.

8:23 And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the firstfruits
of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for
the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body.

8:24 For we are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope: for
what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for?  8:25 But if we hope for
that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it.

8:26 Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not
what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh
intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.

8:27 And he that searcheth the hearts knoweth what is the mind of the
Spirit, because he maketh intercession for the saints according to the
will of God.

8:28 And we know that all things work together for good to them that
love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.

8:29 For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be
conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn
among many brethren.

8:30 Moreover whom he did predestinate, them he also called: and whom
he called, them he also justified: and whom he justified, them he also
glorified.

8:31 What shall we then say to these things? If God be for us, who can
be against us?  8:32 He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him
up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all
things?  8:33 Who shall lay any thing to the charge of God's elect? It
is God that justifieth.

8:34 Who is he that condemneth? It is Christ that died, yea rather,
that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God, who also
maketh intercession for us.

8:35 Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation,
or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or
sword?  8:36 As it is written, For thy sake we are killed all the day
long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.

8:37 Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him
that loved us.

8:38 For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor
principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come,
8:39 Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to
separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

9:1 I say the truth in Christ, I lie not, my conscience also bearing
me witness in the Holy Ghost, 9:2 That I have great heaviness and
continual sorrow in my heart.

9:3 For I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my
brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh: 9:4 Who are Israelites;
to whom pertaineth the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and
the giving of the law, and the service of God, and the promises; 9:5
Whose are the fathers, and of whom as concerning the flesh Christ
came, who is over all, God blessed for ever. Amen.

9:6 Not as though the word of God hath taken none effect. For they are
not all Israel, which are of Israel: 9:7 Neither, because they are the
seed of Abraham, are they all children: but, In Isaac shall thy seed
be called.

9:8 That is, They which are the children of the flesh, these are not
the children of God: but the children of the promise are counted for
the seed.

9:9 For this is the word of promise, At this time will I come, and
Sarah shall have a son.

9:10 And not only this; but when Rebecca also had conceived by one,
even by our father Isaac; 9:11 (For the children being not yet born,
neither having done any good or evil, that the purpose of God
according to election might stand, not of works, but of him that
calleth;) 9:12 It was said unto her, The elder shall serve the
younger.

9:13 As it is written, Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated.

9:14 What shall we say then? Is there unrighteousness with God? God
forbid.

9:15 For he saith to Moses, I will have mercy on whom I will have
mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.

9:16 So then it is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth,
but of God that sheweth mercy.

9:17 For the scripture saith unto Pharaoh, Even for this same purpose
have I raised thee up, that I might shew my power in thee, and that my
name might be declared throughout all the earth.

9:18 Therefore hath he mercy on whom he will have mercy, and whom he
will he hardeneth.

9:19 Thou wilt say then unto me, Why doth he yet find fault? For who
hath resisted his will?  9:20 Nay but, O man, who art thou that
repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed
it, Why hast thou made me thus?  9:21 Hath not the potter power over
the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another
unto dishonour?  9:22 What if God, willing to shew his wrath, and to
make his power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of
wrath fitted to destruction: 9:23 And that he might make known the
riches of his glory on the vessels of mercy, which he had afore
prepared unto glory, 9:24 Even us, whom he hath called, not of the
Jews only, but also of the Gentiles?  9:25 As he saith also in Osee, I
will call them my people, which were not my people; and her beloved,
which was not beloved.

9:26 And it shall come to pass, that in the place where it was said
unto them, Ye are not my people; there shall they be called the
children of the living God.

9:27 Esaias also crieth concerning Israel, Though the number of the
children of Israel be as the sand of the sea, a remnant shall be
saved: 9:28 For he will finish the work, and cut it short in
righteousness: because a short work will the Lord make upon the earth.

9:29 And as Esaias said before, Except the Lord of Sabaoth had left us
a seed, we had been as Sodoma, and been made like unto Gomorrha.

9:30 What shall we say then? That the Gentiles, which followed not
after righteousness, have attained to righteousness, even the
righteousness which is of faith.

9:31 But Israel, which followed after the law of righteousness, hath
not attained to the law of righteousness.

9:32 Wherefore? Because they sought it not by faith, but as it were by
the works of the law. For they stumbled at that stumblingstone; 9:33
As it is written, Behold, I lay in Sion a stumblingstone and rock of
offence: and whosoever believeth on him shall not be ashamed.

10:1 Brethren, my heart's desire and prayer to God for Israel is, that
they might be saved.

10:2 For I bear them record that they have a zeal of God, but not
according to knowledge.

10:3 For they being ignorant of God's righteousness, and going about
to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted themselves
unto the righteousness of God.

10:4 For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to every one
that believeth.

10:5 For Moses describeth the righteousness which is of the law, That
the man which doeth those things shall live by them.

10:6 But the righteousness which is of faith speaketh on this wise,
Say not in thine heart, Who shall ascend into heaven? (that is, to
bring Christ down from above:) 10:7 Or, Who shall descend into the
deep? (that is, to bring up Christ again from the dead.)  10:8 But
what saith it? The word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth, and in thy
heart: that is, the word of faith, which we preach; 10:9 That if thou
shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in
thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be
saved.

10:10 For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with
the mouth confession is made unto salvation.

10:11 For the scripture saith, Whosoever believeth on him shall not be
ashamed.

10:12 For there is no difference between the Jew and the Greek: for
the same Lord over all is rich unto all that call upon him.

10:13 For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be
saved.

10:14 How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed?
and how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? and how
shall they hear without a preacher?  10:15 And how shall they preach,
except they be sent? as it is written, How beautiful are the feet of
them that preach the gospel of peace, and bring glad tidings of good
things!  10:16 But they have not all obeyed the gospel. For Esaias
saith, Lord, who hath believed our report?  10:17 So then faith cometh
by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.

10:18 But I say, Have they not heard? Yes verily, their sound went
into all the earth, and their words unto the ends of the world.

10:19 But I say, Did not Israel know? First Moses saith, I will
provoke you to jealousy by them that are no people, and by a foolish
nation I will anger you.

10:20 But Esaias is very bold, and saith, I was found of them that
sought me not; I was made manifest unto them that asked not after me.

10:21 But to Israel he saith, All day long I have stretched forth my
hands unto a disobedient and gainsaying people.

11:1 I say then, Hath God cast away his people? God forbid. For I also
am an Israelite, of the seed of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin.

11:2 God hath not cast away his people which he foreknew. Wot ye not
what the scripture saith of Elias? how he maketh intercession to God
against Israel saying, 11:3 Lord, they have killed thy prophets, and
digged down thine altars; and I am left alone, and they seek my life.

11:4 But what saith the answer of God unto him? I have reserved to
myself seven thousand men, who have not bowed the knee to the image of
Baal.

11:5 Even so then at this present time also there is a remnant
according to the election of grace.

11:6 And if by grace, then is it no more of works: otherwise grace is
no more grace. But if it be of works, then it is no more grace:
otherwise work is no more work.

11:7 What then? Israel hath not obtained that which he seeketh for;
but the election hath obtained it, and the rest were blinded.

11:8 (According as it is written, God hath given them the spirit of
slumber, eyes that they should not see, and ears that they should not
hear;) unto this day.

11:9 And David saith, Let their table be made a snare, and a trap, and
a stumblingblock, and a recompence unto them: 11:10 Let their eyes be
darkened, that they may not see, and bow down their back alway.

11:11 I say then, Have they stumbled that they should fall? God
forbid: but rather through their fall salvation is come unto the
Gentiles, for to provoke them to jealousy.

11:12 Now if the fall of them be the riches of the world, and the
diminishing of them the riches of the Gentiles; how much more their
fulness?  11:13 For I speak to you Gentiles, inasmuch as I am the
apostle of the Gentiles, I magnify mine office: 11:14 If by any means
I may provoke to emulation them which are my flesh, and might save
some of them.

11:15 For if the casting away of them be the reconciling of the world,
what shall the receiving of them be, but life from the dead?  11:16
For if the firstfruit be holy, the lump is also holy: and if the root
be holy, so are the branches.

11:17 And if some of the branches be broken off, and thou, being a
wild olive tree, wert graffed in among them, and with them partakest
of the root and fatness of the olive tree; 11:18 Boast not against the
branches. But if thou boast, thou bearest not the root, but the root
thee.

11:19 Thou wilt say then, The branches were broken off, that I might
be graffed in.

11:20 Well; because of unbelief they were broken off, and thou
standest by faith. Be not highminded, but fear: 11:21 For if God
spared not the natural branches, take heed lest he also spare not
thee.

11:22 Behold therefore the goodness and severity of God: on them which
fell, severity; but toward thee, goodness, if thou continue in his
goodness: otherwise thou also shalt be cut off.

11:23 And they also, if they abide not still in unbelief, shall be
graffed in: for God is able to graff them in again.

11:24 For if thou wert cut out of the olive tree which is wild by
nature, and wert graffed contrary to nature into a good olive tree:
how much more shall these, which be the natural branches, be graffed
into their own olive tree?  11:25 For I would not, brethren, that ye
should be ignorant of this mystery, lest ye should be wise in your own
conceits; that blindness in part is happened to Israel, until the
fulness of the Gentiles be come in.

11:26 And so all Israel shall be saved: as it is written, There shall
come out of Sion the Deliverer, and shall turn away ungodliness from
Jacob: 11:27 For this is my covenant unto them, when I shall take away
their sins.

11:28 As concerning the gospel, they are enemies for your sakes: but
as touching the election, they are beloved for the father's sakes.

11:29 For the gifts and calling of God are without repentance.

11:30 For as ye in times past have not believed God, yet have now
obtained mercy through their unbelief: 11:31 Even so have these also
now not believed, that through your mercy they also may obtain mercy.

11:32 For God hath concluded them all in unbelief, that he might have
mercy upon all.

11:33 O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of
God!  how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding
out!  11:34 For who hath known the mind of the Lord? or who hath been
his counsellor?  11:35 Or who hath first given to him, and it shall be
recompensed unto him again?  11:36 For of him, and through him, and to
him, are all things: to whom be glory for ever. Amen.

12:1 I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye
present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God,
which is your reasonable service.

12:2 And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the
renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and
acceptable, and perfect, will of God.

12:3 For I say, through the grace given unto me, to every man that is
among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think;
but to think soberly, according as God hath dealt to every man the
measure of faith.

12:4 For as we have many members in one body, and all members have not
the same office: 12:5 So we, being many, are one body in Christ, and
every one members one of another.

12:6 Having then gifts differing according to the grace that is given
to us, whether prophecy, let us prophesy according to the proportion
of faith; 12:7 Or ministry, let us wait on our ministering: or he that
teacheth, on teaching; 12:8 Or he that exhorteth, on exhortation: he
that giveth, let him do it with simplicity; he that ruleth, with
diligence; he that sheweth mercy, with cheerfulness.

12:9 Let love be without dissimulation. Abhor that which is evil;
cleave to that which is good.

12:10 Be kindly affectioned one to another with brotherly love; in
honour preferring one another; 12:11 Not slothful in business; fervent
in spirit; serving the Lord; 12:12 Rejoicing in hope; patient in
tribulation; continuing instant in prayer; 12:13 Distributing to the
necessity of saints; given to hospitality.

12:14 Bless them which persecute you: bless, and curse not.

12:15 Rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep.

12:16 Be of the same mind one toward another. Mind not high things,
but condescend to men of low estate. Be not wise in your own conceits.

12:17 Recompense to no man evil for evil. Provide things honest in the
sight of all men.

12:18 If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with
all men.

12:19 Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place
unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith
the Lord.

12:20 Therefore if thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give
him drink: for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head.

12:21 Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.

13:1 Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no
power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God.

13:2 Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance
of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation.

13:3 For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil. Wilt
thou then not be afraid of the power? do that which is good, and thou
shalt have praise of the same: 13:4 For he is the minister of God to
thee for good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he
beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a
revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil.

13:5 Wherefore ye must needs be subject, not only for wrath, but also
for conscience sake.

13:6 For for this cause pay ye tribute also: for they are God's
ministers, attending continually upon this very thing.

13:7 Render therefore to all their dues: tribute to whom tribute is
due; custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honour to whom honour.

13:8 Owe no man any thing, but to love one another: for he that loveth
another hath fulfilled the law.

13:9 For this, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not kill,
Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness, Thou shalt
not covet; and if there be any other commandment, it is briefly
comprehended in this saying, namely, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as
thyself.

13:10 Love worketh no ill to his neighbour: therefore love is the
fulfilling of the law.

13:11 And that, knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake
out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed.

13:12 The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore
cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light.

13:13 Let us walk honestly, as in the day; not in rioting and
drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and
envying.

13:14 But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for
the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof.

14:1 Him that is weak in the faith receive ye, but not to doubtful
disputations.

14:2 For one believeth that he may eat all things: another, who is
weak, eateth herbs.

14:3 Let not him that eateth despise him that eateth not; and let not
him which eateth not judge him that eateth: for God hath received him.

14:4 Who art thou that judgest another man's servant? to his own
master he standeth or falleth. Yea, he shall be holden up: for God is
able to make him stand.

14:5 One man esteemeth one day above another: another esteemeth every
day alike. Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind.

14:6 He that regardeth the day, regardeth it unto the Lord; and he
that regardeth not the day, to the Lord he doth not regard it. He that
eateth, eateth to the Lord, for he giveth God thanks; and he that
eateth not, to the Lord he eateth not, and giveth God thanks.

14:7 For none of us liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself.

14:8 For whether we live, we live unto the Lord; and whether we die,
we die unto the Lord: whether we live therefore, or die, we are the
Lord's.

14:9 For to this end Christ both died, and rose, and revived, that he
might be Lord both of the dead and living.

14:10 But why dost thou judge thy brother? or why dost thou set at
nought thy brother? for we shall all stand before the judgment seat of
Christ.

14:11 For it is written, As I live, saith the Lord, every knee shall
bow to me, and every tongue shall confess to God.

14:12 So then every one of us shall give account of himself to God.

14:13 Let us not therefore judge one another any more: but judge this
rather, that no man put a stumblingblock or an occasion to fall in his
brother's way.

14:14 I know, and am persuaded by the Lord Jesus, that there is
nothing unclean of itself: but to him that esteemeth any thing to be
unclean, to him it is unclean.

14:15 But if thy brother be grieved with thy meat, now walkest thou
not charitably. Destroy not him with thy meat, for whom Christ died.

14:16 Let not then your good be evil spoken of: 14:17 For the kingdom
of God is not meat and drink; but righteousness, and peace, and joy in
the Holy Ghost.

14:18 For he that in these things serveth Christ is acceptable to God,
and approved of men.

14:19 Let us therefore follow after the things which make for peace,
and things wherewith one may edify another.

14:20 For meat destroy not the work of God. All things indeed are
pure; but it is evil for that man who eateth with offence.

14:21 It is good neither to eat flesh, nor to drink wine, nor any
thing whereby thy brother stumbleth, or is offended, or is made weak.

14:22 Hast thou faith? have it to thyself before God. Happy is he that
condemneth not himself in that thing which he alloweth.

14:23 And he that doubteth is damned if he eat, because he eateth not
of faith: for whatsoever is not of faith is sin.

15:1 We then that are strong ought to bear the infirmities of the
weak, and not to please ourselves.

15:2 Let every one of us please his neighbour for his good to
edification.

15:3 For even Christ pleased not himself; but, as it is written, The
reproaches of them that reproached thee fell on me.

15:4 For whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our
learning, that we through patience and comfort of the scriptures might
have hope.

15:5 Now the God of patience and consolation grant you to be
likeminded one toward another according to Christ Jesus: 15:6 That ye
may with one mind and one mouth glorify God, even the Father of our
Lord Jesus Christ.

15:7 Wherefore receive ye one another, as Christ also received us to
the glory of God.

15:8 Now I say that Jesus Christ was a minister of the circumcision
for the truth of God, to confirm the promises made unto the fathers:
15:9 And that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy; as it is
written, For this cause I will confess to thee among the Gentiles, and
sing unto thy name.

15:10 And again he saith, Rejoice, ye Gentiles, with his people.

15:11 And again, Praise the Lord, all ye Gentiles; and laud him, all
ye people.

15:12 And again, Esaias saith, There shall be a root of Jesse, and he
that shall rise to reign over the Gentiles; in him shall the Gentiles
trust.

15:13 Now the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in
believing, that ye may abound in hope, through the power of the Holy
Ghost.

15:14 And I myself also am persuaded of you, my brethren, that ye also
are full of goodness, filled with all knowledge, able also to admonish
one another.

15:15 Nevertheless, brethren, I have written the more boldly unto you
in some sort, as putting you in mind, because of the grace that is
given to me of God, 15:16 That I should be the minister of Jesus
Christ to the Gentiles, ministering the gospel of God, that the
offering up of the Gentiles might be acceptable, being sanctified by
the Holy Ghost.

15:17 I have therefore whereof I may glory through Jesus Christ in
those things which pertain to God.

15:18 For I will not dare to speak of any of those things which Christ
hath not wrought by me, to make the Gentiles obedient, by word and
deed, 15:19 Through mighty signs and wonders, by the power of the
Spirit of God; so that from Jerusalem, and round about unto Illyricum,
I have fully preached the gospel of Christ.

15:20 Yea, so have I strived to preach the gospel, not where Christ
was named, lest I should build upon another man's foundation: 15:21
But as it is written, To whom he was not spoken of, they shall see:
and they that have not heard shall understand.

15:22 For which cause also I have been much hindered from coming to
you.

15:23 But now having no more place in these parts, and having a great
desire these many years to come unto you; 15:24 Whensoever I take my
journey into Spain, I will come to you: for I trust to see you in my
journey, and to be brought on my way thitherward by you, if first I be
somewhat filled with your company.

15:25 But now I go unto Jerusalem to minister unto the saints.

15:26 For it hath pleased them of Macedonia and Achaia to make a
certain contribution for the poor saints which are at Jerusalem.

15:27 It hath pleased them verily; and their debtors they are. For if
the Gentiles have been made partakers of their spiritual things, their
duty is also to minister unto them in carnal things.

15:28 When therefore I have performed this, and have sealed to them
this fruit, I will come by you into Spain.

15:29 And I am sure that, when I come unto you, I shall come in the
fulness of the blessing of the gospel of Christ.

15:30 Now I beseech you, brethren, for the Lord Jesus Christ's sake,
and for the love of the Spirit, that ye strive together with me in
your prayers to God for me; 15:31 That I may be delivered from them
that do not believe in Judaea; and that my service which I have for
Jerusalem may be accepted of the saints; 15:32 That I may come unto
you with joy by the will of God, and may with you be refreshed.

15:33 Now the God of peace be with you all. Amen.

16:1 I commend unto you Phebe our sister, which is a servant of the
church which is at Cenchrea: 16:2 That ye receive her in the Lord, as
becometh saints, and that ye assist her in whatsoever business she
hath need of you: for she hath been a succourer of many, and of myself
also.

16:3 Greet Priscilla and Aquila my helpers in Christ Jesus: 16:4 Who
have for my life laid down their own necks: unto whom not only I give
thanks, but also all the churches of the Gentiles.

16:5 Likewise greet the church that is in their house. Salute my
well-beloved Epaenetus, who is the firstfruits of Achaia unto Christ.

16:6 Greet Mary, who bestowed much labour on us.

16:7 Salute Andronicus and Junia, my kinsmen, and my fellow-prisoners,
who are of note among the apostles, who also were in Christ before me.

16:8 Greet Amplias my beloved in the Lord.

16:9 Salute Urbane, our helper in Christ, and Stachys my beloved.

16:10 Salute Apelles approved in Christ. Salute them which are of
Aristobulus' household.

16:11 Salute Herodion my kinsman. Greet them that be of the household
of Narcissus, which are in the Lord.

16:12 Salute Tryphena and Tryphosa, who labour in the Lord. Salute the
beloved Persis, which laboured much in the Lord.

16:13 Salute Rufus chosen in the Lord, and his mother and mine.

16:14 Salute Asyncritus, Phlegon, Hermas, Patrobas, Hermes, and the
brethren which are with them.

16:15 Salute Philologus, and Julia, Nereus, and his sister, and
Olympas, and all the saints which are with them.

16:16 Salute one another with an holy kiss. The churches of Christ
salute you.

16:17 Now I beseech you, brethren, mark them which cause divisions and
offences contrary to the doctrine which ye have learned; and avoid
them.

16:18 For they that are such serve not our Lord Jesus Christ, but
their own belly; and by good words and fair speeches deceive the
hearts of the simple.

16:19 For your obedience is come abroad unto all men. I am glad
therefore on your behalf: but yet I would have you wise unto that
which is good, and simple concerning evil.

16:20 And the God of peace shall bruise Satan under your feet shortly.
The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you. Amen.

16:21 Timotheus my workfellow, and Lucius, and Jason, and Sosipater,
my kinsmen, salute you.

16:22 I Tertius, who wrote this epistle, salute you in the Lord.

16:23 Gaius mine host, and of the whole church, saluteth you. Erastus
the chamberlain of the city saluteth you, and Quartus a brother.

16:24 The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen.

16:25 Now to him that is of power to stablish you according to my
gospel, and the preaching of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation
of the mystery, which was kept secret since the world began, 16:26 But
now is made manifest, and by the scriptures of the prophets, according
to the commandment of the everlasting God, made known to all nations
for the obedience of faith: 16:27 To God only wise, be glory through
Jesus Christ for ever. Amen.




The First Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Corinthians


1:1 Paul called to be an apostle of Jesus Christ through the will of
God, and Sosthenes our brother, 1:2 Unto the church of God which is at
Corinth, to them that are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be
saints, with all that in every place call upon the name of Jesus
Christ our Lord, both their's and our's: 1:3 Grace be unto you, and
peace, from God our Father, and from the Lord Jesus Christ.

1:4 I thank my God always on your behalf, for the grace of God which
is given you by Jesus Christ; 1:5 That in every thing ye are enriched
by him, in all utterance, and in all knowledge; 1:6 Even as the
testimony of Christ was confirmed in you: 1:7 So that ye come behind
in no gift; waiting for the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ: 1:8 Who
shall also confirm you unto the end, that ye may be blameless in the
day of our Lord Jesus Christ.

1:9 God is faithful, by whom ye were called unto the fellowship of his
Son Jesus Christ our Lord.

1:10 Now I beseech you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus
Christ, that ye all speak the same thing, and that there be no
divisions among you; but that ye be perfectly joined together in the
same mind and in the same judgment.

1:11 For it hath been declared unto me of you, my brethren, by them
which are of the house of Chloe, that there are contentions among you.

1:12 Now this I say, that every one of you saith, I am of Paul; and I
of Apollos; and I of Cephas; and I of Christ.

1:13 Is Christ divided? was Paul crucified for you? or were ye
baptized in the name of Paul?  1:14 I thank God that I baptized none
of you, but Crispus and Gaius; 1:15 Lest any should say that I had
baptized in mine own name.

1:16 And I baptized also the household of Stephanas: besides, I know
not whether I baptized any other.

1:17 For Christ sent me not to baptize, but to preach the gospel: not
with wisdom of words, lest the cross of Christ should be made of none
effect.

1:18 For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish
foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God.

1:19 For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and
will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent.

1:20 Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of
this world? hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?  1:21
For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God,
it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that
believe.

1:22 For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom:
1:23 But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumblingblock,
and unto the Greeks foolishness; 1:24 But unto them which are called,
both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God.

1:25 Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the
weakness of God is stronger than men.

1:26 For ye see your calling, brethren, how that not many wise men
after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called: 1:27 But
God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise;
and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the
things which are mighty; 1:28 And base things of the world, and things
which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to
bring to nought things that are: 1:29 That no flesh should glory in
his presence.

1:30 But of him are ye in Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us
wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption: 1:31
That, according as it is written, He that glorieth, let him glory in
the Lord.

2:1 And I, brethren, when I came to you, came not with excellency of
speech or of wisdom, declaring unto you the testimony of God.

2:2 For I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus
Christ, and him crucified.

2:3 And I was with you in weakness, and in fear, and in much
trembling.

2:4 And my speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of
man's wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power: 2:5
That your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the
power of God.

2:6 Howbeit we speak wisdom among them that are perfect: yet not the
wisdom of this world, nor of the princes of this world, that come to
nought: 2:7 But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the
hidden wisdom, which God ordained before the world unto our glory: 2:8
Which none of the princes of this world knew: for had they known it,
they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.

2:9 But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither
have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared
for them that love him.

2:10 But God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit: for the Spirit
searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God.

2:11 For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man
which is in him? even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the
Spirit of God.

2:12 Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit
which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given
to us of God.

2:13 Which things also we speak, not in the words which man's wisdom
teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth; comparing spiritual
things with spiritual.

2:14 But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of
God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them,
because they are spiritually discerned.

2:15 But he that is spiritual judgeth all things, yet he himself is
judged of no man.

2:16 For who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he may instruct
him?  But we have the mind of Christ.

3:1 And I, brethren, could not speak unto you as unto spiritual, but
as unto carnal, even as unto babes in Christ.

3:2 I have fed you with milk, and not with meat: for hitherto ye were
not able to bear it, neither yet now are ye able.

3:3 For ye are yet carnal: for whereas there is among you envying, and
strife, and divisions, are ye not carnal, and walk as men?  3:4 For
while one saith, I am of Paul; and another, I am of Apollos; are ye
not carnal?  3:5 Who then is Paul, and who is Apollos, but ministers
by whom ye believed, even as the Lord gave to every man?  3:6 I have
planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase.

3:7 So then neither is he that planteth any thing, neither he that
watereth; but God that giveth the increase.

3:8 Now he that planteth and he that watereth are one: and every man
shall receive his own reward according to his own labour.

3:9 For we are labourers together with God: ye are God's husbandry, ye
are God's building.

3:10 According to the grace of God which is given unto me, as a wise
masterbuilder, I have laid the foundation, and another buildeth
thereon. But let every man take heed how he buildeth thereupon.

3:11 For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is
Jesus Christ.

3:12 Now if any man build upon this foundation gold, silver, precious
stones, wood, hay, stubble; 3:13 Every man's work shall be made
manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed
by fire; and the fire shall try every man's work of what sort it is.

3:14 If any man's work abide which he hath built thereupon, he shall
receive a reward.

3:15 If any man's work shall be burned, he shall suffer loss: but he
himself shall be saved; yet so as by fire.

3:16 Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of
God dwelleth in you?  3:17 If any man defile the temple of God, him
shall God destroy; for the temple of God is holy, which temple ye are.

3:18 Let no man deceive himself. If any man among you seemeth to be
wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise.

3:19 For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. For it is
written, He taketh the wise in their own craftiness.

3:20 And again, The Lord knoweth the thoughts of the wise, that they
are vain.

3:21 Therefore let no man glory in men. For all things are your's;
3:22 Whether Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas, or the world, or life, or
death, or things present, or things to come; all are your's; 3:23 And
ye are Christ's; and Christ is God's.

4:1 Let a man so account of us, as of the ministers of Christ, and
stewards of the mysteries of God.

4:2 Moreover it is required in stewards, that a man be found faithful.

4:3 But with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged of
you, or of man's judgment: yea, I judge not mine own self.

4:4 For I know nothing by myself; yet am I not hereby justified: but
he that judgeth me is the Lord.

4:5 Therefore judge nothing before the time, until the Lord come, who
both will bring to light the hidden things of darkness, and will make
manifest the counsels of the hearts: and then shall every man have
praise of God.

4:6 And these things, brethren, I have in a figure transferred to
myself and to Apollos for your sakes; that ye might learn in us not to
think of men above that which is written, that no one of you be puffed
up for one against another.

4:7 For who maketh thee to differ from another? and what hast thou
that thou didst not receive? now if thou didst receive it, why dost
thou glory, as if thou hadst not received it?  4:8 Now ye are full,
now ye are rich, ye have reigned as kings without us: and I would to
God ye did reign, that we also might reign with you.

4:9 For I think that God hath set forth us the apostles last, as it
were appointed to death: for we are made a spectacle unto the world,
and to angels, and to men.

4:10 We are fools for Christ's sake, but ye are wise in Christ; we are
weak, but ye are strong; ye are honourable, but we are despised.

4:11 Even unto this present hour we both hunger, and thirst, and are
naked, and are buffeted, and have no certain dwellingplace; 4:12 And
labour, working with our own hands: being reviled, we bless; being
persecuted, we suffer it: 4:13 Being defamed, we intreat: we are made
as the filth of the world, and are the offscouring of all things unto
this day.

4:14 I write not these things to shame you, but as my beloved sons I
warn you.

4:15 For though ye have ten thousand instructers in Christ, yet have
ye not many fathers: for in Christ Jesus I have begotten you through
the gospel.

4:16 Wherefore I beseech you, be ye followers of me.

4:17 For this cause have I sent unto you Timotheus, who is my beloved
son, and faithful in the Lord, who shall bring you into remembrance of
my ways which be in Christ, as I teach every where in every church.

4:18 Now some are puffed up, as though I would not come to you.

4:19 But I will come to you shortly, if the Lord will, and will know,
not the speech of them which are puffed up, but the power.

4:20 For the kingdom of God is not in word, but in power.

4:21 What will ye? shall I come unto you with a rod, or in love, and
in the spirit of meekness?  5:1 It is reported commonly that there is
fornication among you, and such fornication as is not so much as named
among the Gentiles, that one should have his father's wife.

5:2 And ye are puffed up, and have not rather mourned, that he that
hath done this deed might be taken away from among you.

5:3 For I verily, as absent in body, but present in spirit, have
judged already, as though I were present, concerning him that hath so
done this deed, 5:4 In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, when ye are
gathered together, and my spirit, with the power of our Lord Jesus
Christ, 5:5 To deliver such an one unto Satan for the destruction of
the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.

5:6 Your glorying is not good. Know ye not that a little leaven
leaveneth the whole lump?  5:7 Purge out therefore the old leaven,
that ye may be a new lump, as ye are unleavened. For even Christ our
passover is sacrificed for us: 5:8 Therefore let us keep the feast,
not with old leaven, neither with the leaven of malice and wickedness;
but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.

5:9 I wrote unto you in an epistle not to company with fornicators:
5:10 Yet not altogether with the fornicators of this world, or with
the covetous, or extortioners, or with idolaters; for then must ye
needs go out of the world.

5:11 But now I have written unto you not to keep company, if any man
that is called a brother be a fornicator, or covetous, or an idolater,
or a railer, or a drunkard, or an extortioner; with such an one no not
to eat.

5:12 For what have I to do to judge them also that are without? do not
ye judge them that are within?  5:13 But them that are without God
judgeth. Therefore put away from among yourselves that wicked person.

6:1 Dare any of you, having a matter against another, go to law before
the unjust, and not before the saints?  6:2 Do ye not know that the
saints shall judge the world? and if the world shall be judged by you,
are ye unworthy to judge the smallest matters?  6:3 Know ye not that
we shall judge angels? how much more things that pertain to this life?
6:4 If then ye have judgments of things pertaining to this life, set
them to judge who are least esteemed in the church.

6:5 I speak to your shame. Is it so, that there is not a wise man
among you? no, not one that shall be able to judge between his
brethren?  6:6 But brother goeth to law with brother, and that before
the unbelievers.

6:7 Now therefore there is utterly a fault among you, because ye go to
law one with another. Why do ye not rather take wrong? why do ye not
rather suffer yourselves to be defrauded?  6:8 Nay, ye do wrong, and
defraud, and that your brethren.

6:9 Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of
God?  Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor
adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind,
6:10 Nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor
extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God.

6:11 And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are
sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by
the Spirit of our God.

6:12 All things are lawful unto me, but all things are not expedient:
all things are lawful for me, but I will not be brought under the
power of any.

6:13 Meats for the belly, and the belly for meats: but God shall
destroy both it and them. Now the body is not for fornication, but for
the Lord; and the Lord for the body.

6:14 And God hath both raised up the Lord, and will also raise up us
by his own power.

6:15 Know ye not that your bodies are the members of Christ? shall I
then take the members of Christ, and make them the members of an
harlot? God forbid.

6:16 What? know ye not that he which is joined to an harlot is one
body?  for two, saith he, shall be one flesh.

6:17 But he that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit.

6:18 Flee fornication. Every sin that a man doeth is without the body;
but he that committeth fornication sinneth against his own body.

6:19 What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost
which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own?  6:20
For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body,
and in your spirit, which are God's.

7:1 Now concerning the things whereof ye wrote unto me: It is good for
a man not to touch a woman.

7:2 Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own
wife, and let every woman have her own husband.

7:3 Let the husband render unto the wife due benevolence: and likewise
also the wife unto the husband.

7:4 The wife hath not power of her own body, but the husband: and
likewise also the husband hath not power of his own body, but the
wife.

7:5 Defraud ye not one the other, except it be with consent for a
time, that ye may give yourselves to fasting and prayer; and come
together again, that Satan tempt you not for your incontinency.

7:6 But I speak this by permission, and not of commandment.

7:7 For I would that all men were even as I myself. But every man hath
his proper gift of God, one after this manner, and another after that.

7:8 I say therefore to the unmarried and widows, It is good for them
if they abide even as I.

7:9 But if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to
marry than to burn.

7:10 And unto the married I command, yet not I, but the Lord, Let not
the wife depart from her husband: 7:11 But and if she depart, let her
remain unmarried or be reconciled to her husband: and let not the
husband put away his wife.

7:12 But to the rest speak I, not the Lord: If any brother hath a wife
that believeth not, and she be pleased to dwell with him, let him not
put her away.

7:13 And the woman which hath an husband that believeth not, and if he
be pleased to dwell with her, let her not leave him.

7:14 For the unbelieving husband is sanctified by the wife, and the
unbelieving wife is sanctified by the husband: else were your children
unclean; but now are they holy.

7:15 But if the unbelieving depart, let him depart. A brother or a
sister is not under bondage in such cases: but God hath called us to
peace.

7:16 For what knowest thou, O wife, whether thou shalt save thy
husband?  or how knowest thou, O man, whether thou shalt save thy
wife?  7:17 But as God hath distributed to every man, as the Lord hath
called every one, so let him walk. And so ordain I in all churches.

7:18 Is any man called being circumcised? let him not become
uncircumcised. Is any called in uncircumcision? let him not be
circumcised.

7:19 Circumcision is nothing, and uncircumcision is nothing, but the
keeping of the commandments of God.

7:20 Let every man abide in the same calling wherein he was called.

7:21 Art thou called being a servant? care not for it: but if thou
mayest be made free, use it rather.

7:22 For he that is called in the Lord, being a servant, is the Lord's
freeman: likewise also he that is called, being free, is Christ's
servant.

7:23 Ye are bought with a price; be not ye the servants of men.

7:24 Brethren, let every man, wherein he is called, therein abide with
God.

7:25 Now concerning virgins I have no commandment of the Lord: yet I
give my judgment, as one that hath obtained mercy of the Lord to be
faithful.

7:26 I suppose therefore that this is good for the present distress, I
say, that it is good for a man so to be.

7:27 Art thou bound unto a wife? seek not to be loosed. Art thou
loosed from a wife? seek not a wife.

7:28 But and if thou marry, thou hast not sinned; and if a virgin
marry, she hath not sinned. Nevertheless such shall have trouble in
the flesh: but I spare you.

7:29 But this I say, brethren, the time is short: it remaineth, that
both they that have wives be as though they had none; 7:30 And they
that weep, as though they wept not; and they that rejoice, as though
they rejoiced not; and they that buy, as though they possessed not;
7:31 And they that use this world, as not abusing it: for the fashion
of this world passeth away.

7:32 But I would have you without carefulness. He that is unmarried
careth for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please the
Lord: 7:33 But he that is married careth for the things that are of
the world, how he may please his wife.

7:34 There is difference also between a wife and a virgin. The
unmarried woman careth for the things of the Lord, that she may be
holy both in body and in spirit: but she that is married careth for
the things of the world, how she may please her husband.

7:35 And this I speak for your own profit; not that I may cast a snare
upon you, but for that which is comely, and that ye may attend upon
the Lord without distraction.

7:36 But if any man think that he behaveth himself uncomely toward his
virgin, if she pass the flower of her age, and need so require, let
him do what he will, he sinneth not: let them marry.

7:37 Nevertheless he that standeth stedfast in his heart, having no
necessity, but hath power over his own will, and hath so decreed in
his heart that he will keep his virgin, doeth well.

7:38 So then he that giveth her in marriage doeth well; but he that
giveth her not in marriage doeth better.

7:39 The wife is bound by the law as long as her husband liveth; but
if her husband be dead, she is at liberty to be married to whom she
will; only in the Lord.

7:40 But she is happier if she so abide, after my judgment: and I
think also that I have the Spirit of God.

8:1 Now as touching things offered unto idols, we know that we all
have knowledge. Knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth.

8:2 And if any man think that he knoweth any thing, he knoweth nothing
yet as he ought to know.

8:3 But if any man love God, the same is known of him.

8:4 As concerning therefore the eating of those things that are
offered in sacrifice unto idols, we know that an idol is nothing in
the world, and that there is none other God but one.

8:5 For though there be that are called gods, whether in heaven or in
earth, (as there be gods many, and lords many,) 8:6 But to us there is
but one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we in him; and
one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we by him.

8:7 Howbeit there is not in every man that knowledge: for some with
conscience of the idol unto this hour eat it as a thing offered unto
an idol; and their conscience being weak is defiled.

8:8 But meat commendeth us not to God: for neither, if we eat, are we
the better; neither, if we eat not, are we the worse.

8:9 But take heed lest by any means this liberty of your's become a
stumblingblock to them that are weak.

8:10 For if any man see thee which hast knowledge sit at meat in the
idol's temple, shall not the conscience of him which is weak be
emboldened to eat those things which are offered to idols; 8:11 And
through thy knowledge shall the weak brother perish, for whom Christ
died?  8:12 But when ye sin so against the brethren, and wound their
weak conscience, ye sin against Christ.

8:13 Wherefore, if meat make my brother to offend, I will eat no flesh
while the world standeth, lest I make my brother to offend.

9:1 Am I not an apostle? am I not free? have I not seen Jesus Christ
our Lord? are not ye my work in the Lord?  9:2 If I be not an apostle
unto others, yet doubtless I am to you: for the seal of mine
apostleship are ye in the Lord.

9:3 Mine answer to them that do examine me is this, 9:4 Have we not
power to eat and to drink?  9:5 Have we not power to lead about a
sister, a wife, as well as other apostles, and as the brethren of the
Lord, and Cephas?  9:6 Or I only and Barnabas, have not we power to
forbear working?  9:7 Who goeth a warfare any time at his own charges?
who planteth a vineyard, and eateth not of the fruit thereof? or who
feedeth a flock, and eateth not of the milk of the flock?  9:8 Say I
these things as a man? or saith not the law the same also?  9:9 For it
is written in the law of Moses, Thou shalt not muzzle the mouth of the
ox that treadeth out the corn. Doth God take care for oxen?  9:10 Or
saith he it altogether for our sakes? For our sakes, no doubt, this is
written: that he that ploweth should plow in hope; and that he that
thresheth in hope should be partaker of his hope.

9:11 If we have sown unto you spiritual things, is it a great thing if
we shall reap your carnal things?  9:12 If others be partakers of this
power over you, are not we rather?  Nevertheless we have not used this
power; but suffer all things, lest we should hinder the gospel of
Christ.

9:13 Do ye not know that they which minister about holy things live of
the things of the temple? and they which wait at the altar are
partakers with the altar?  9:14 Even so hath the Lord ordained that
they which preach the gospel should live of the gospel.

9:15 But I have used none of these things: neither have I written
these things, that it should be so done unto me: for it were better
for me to die, than that any man should make my glorying void.

9:16 For though I preach the gospel, I have nothing to glory of: for
necessity is laid upon me; yea, woe is unto me, if I preach not the
gospel!  9:17 For if I do this thing willingly, I have a reward: but
if against my will, a dispensation of the gospel is committed unto me.

9:18 What is my reward then? Verily that, when I preach the gospel, I
may make the gospel of Christ without charge, that I abuse not my
power in the gospel.

9:19 For though I be free from all men, yet have I made myself servant
unto all, that I might gain the more.

9:20 And unto the Jews I became as a Jew, that I might gain the Jews;
to them that are under the law, as under the law, that I might gain
them that are under the law; 9:21 To them that are without law, as
without law, (being not without law to God, but under the law to
Christ,) that I might gain them that are without law.

9:22 To the weak became I as weak, that I might gain the weak: I am
made all things to all men, that I might by all means save some.

9:23 And this I do for the gospel's sake, that I might be partaker
thereof with you.

9:24 Know ye not that they which run in a race run all, but one
receiveth the prize? So run, that ye may obtain.

9:25 And every man that striveth for the mastery is temperate in all
things. Now they do it to obtain a corruptible crown; but we an
incorruptible.

9:26 I therefore so run, not as uncertainly; so fight I, not as one
that beateth the air: 9:27 But I keep under my body, and bring it into
subjection: lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, I
myself should be a castaway.

10:1 Moreover, brethren, I would not that ye should be ignorant, how
that all our fathers were under the cloud, and all passed through the
sea; 10:2 And were all baptized unto Moses in the cloud and in the
sea; 10:3 And did all eat the same spiritual meat; 10:4 And did all
drink the same spiritual drink: for they drank of that spiritual Rock
that followed them: and that Rock was Christ.

10:5 But with many of them God was not well pleased: for they were
overthrown in the wilderness.

10:6 Now these things were our examples, to the intent we should not
lust after evil things, as they also lusted.

10:7 Neither be ye idolaters, as were some of them; as it is written,
The people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to play.

10:8 Neither let us commit fornication, as some of them committed, and
fell in one day three and twenty thousand.

10:9 Neither let us tempt Christ, as some of them also tempted, and
were destroyed of serpents.

10:10 Neither murmur ye, as some of them also murmured, and were
destroyed of the destroyer.

10:11 Now all these things happened unto them for ensamples: and they
are written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the world are
come.

10:12 Wherefore let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he
fall.

10:13 There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man:
but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that
ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape,
that ye may be able to bear it.

10:14 Wherefore, my dearly beloved, flee from idolatry.

10:15 I speak as to wise men; judge ye what I say.

10:16 The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not the communion of
the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not the communion
of the body of Christ?  10:17 For we being many are one bread, and one
body: for we are all partakers of that one bread.

10:18 Behold Israel after the flesh: are not they which eat of the
sacrifices partakers of the altar?  10:19 What say I then? that the
idol is any thing, or that which is offered in sacrifice to idols is
any thing?  10:20 But I say, that the things which the Gentiles
sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils, and not to God: and I would not
that ye should have fellowship with devils.

10:21 Ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord, and the cup of devils: ye
cannot be partakers of the Lord's table, and of the table of devils.

10:22 Do we provoke the Lord to jealousy? are we stronger than he?
10:23 All things are lawful for me, but all things are not expedient:
all things are lawful for me, but all things edify not.

10:24 Let no man seek his own, but every man another's wealth.

10:25 Whatsoever is sold in the shambles, that eat, asking no question
for conscience sake: 10:26 For the earth is the Lord's, and the
fulness thereof.

10:27 If any of them that believe not bid you to a feast, and ye be
disposed to go; whatsoever is set before you, eat, asking no question
for conscience sake.

10:28 But if any man say unto you, This is offered in sacrifice unto
idols, eat not for his sake that shewed it, and for conscience sake:
for the earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof: 10:29
Conscience, I say, not thine own, but of the other: for why is my
liberty judged of another man's conscience?  10:30 For if I by grace
be a partaker, why am I evil spoken of for that for which I give
thanks?  10:31 Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye
do, do all to the glory of God.

10:32 Give none offence, neither to the Jews, nor to the Gentiles, nor
to the church of God: 10:33 Even as I please all men in all things,
not seeking mine own profit, but the profit of many, that they may be
saved.

11:1 Be ye followers of me, even as I also am of Christ.

11:2 Now I praise you, brethren, that ye remember me in all things,
and keep the ordinances, as I delivered them to you.

11:3 But I would have you know, that the head of every man is Christ;
and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God.

11:4 Every man praying or prophesying, having his head covered,
dishonoureth his head.

11:5 But every woman that prayeth or prophesieth with her head
uncovered dishonoureth her head: for that is even all one as if she
were shaven.

11:6 For if the woman be not covered, let her also be shorn: but if it
be a shame for a woman to be shorn or shaven, let her be covered.

11:7 For a man indeed ought not to cover his head, forasmuch as he is
the image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the man.

11:8 For the man is not of the woman: but the woman of the man.

11:9 Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the
man.

11:10 For this cause ought the woman to have power on her head because
of the angels.

11:11 Nevertheless neither is the man without the woman, neither the
woman without the man, in the Lord.

11:12 For as the woman is of the man, even so is the man also by the
woman; but all things of God.

11:13 Judge in yourselves: is it comely that a woman pray unto God
uncovered?  11:14 Doth not even nature itself teach you, that, if a
man have long hair, it is a shame unto him?  11:15 But if a woman have
long hair, it is a glory to her: for her hair is given her for a
covering.

11:16 But if any man seem to be contentious, we have no such custom,
neither the churches of God.

11:17 Now in this that I declare unto you I praise you not, that ye
come together not for the better, but for the worse.

11:18 For first of all, when ye come together in the church, I hear
that there be divisions among you; and I partly believe it.

11:19 For there must be also heresies among you, that they which are
approved may be made manifest among you.

11:20 When ye come together therefore into one place, this is not to
eat the Lord's supper.

11:21 For in eating every one taketh before other his own supper: and
one is hungry, and another is drunken.

11:22 What? have ye not houses to eat and to drink in? or despise ye
the church of God, and shame them that have not? What shall I say to
you? shall I praise you in this? I praise you not.

11:23 For I have received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto
you, That the Lord Jesus the same night in which he was betrayed took
bread: 11:24 And when he had given thanks, he brake it, and said,
Take, eat: this is my body, which is broken for you: this do in
remembrance of me.

11:25 After the same manner also he took the cup, when he had supped,
saying, This cup is the new testament in my blood: this do ye, as oft
as ye drink it, in remembrance of me.

11:26 For as often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do
shew the Lord's death till he come.

11:27 Wherefore whosoever shall eat this bread, and drink this cup of
the Lord, unworthily, shall be guilty of the body and blood of the
Lord.

11:28 But let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of that bread,
and drink of that cup.

11:29 For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh
damnation to himself, not discerning the Lord's body.

11:30 For this cause many are weak and sickly among you, and many
sleep.

11:31 For if we would judge ourselves, we should not be judged.

11:32 But when we are judged, we are chastened of the Lord, that we
should not be condemned with the world.

11:33 Wherefore, my brethren, when ye come together to eat, tarry one
for another.

11:34 And if any man hunger, let him eat at home; that ye come not
together unto condemnation. And the rest will I set in order when I
come.

12:1 Now concerning spiritual gifts, brethren, I would not have you
ignorant.

12:2 Ye know that ye were Gentiles, carried away unto these dumb
idols, even as ye were led.

12:3 Wherefore I give you to understand, that no man speaking by the
Spirit of God calleth Jesus accursed: and that no man can say that
Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Ghost.

12:4 Now there are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit.

12:5 And there are differences of administrations, but the same Lord.

12:6 And there are diversities of operations, but it is the same God
which worketh all in all.

12:7 But the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to
profit withal.

12:8 For to one is given by the Spirit the word of wisdom; to another
the word of knowledge by the same Spirit; 12:9 To another faith by the
same Spirit; to another the gifts of healing by the same Spirit; 12:10
To another the working of miracles; to another prophecy; to another
discerning of spirits; to another divers kinds of tongues; to another
the interpretation of tongues: 12:11 But all these worketh that one
and the selfsame Spirit, dividing to every man severally as he will.

12:12 For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the
members of that one body, being many, are one body: so also is Christ.

12:13 For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body, whether we
be Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free; and have been all
made to drink into one Spirit.

12:14 For the body is not one member, but many.

12:15 If the foot shall say, Because I am not the hand, I am not of
the body; is it therefore not of the body?  12:16 And if the ear shall
say, Because I am not the eye, I am not of the body; is it therefore
not of the body?  12:17 If the whole body were an eye, where were the
hearing? If the whole were hearing, where were the smelling?  12:18
But now hath God set the members every one of them in the body, as it
hath pleased him.

12:19 And if they were all one member, where were the body?  12:20 But
now are they many members, yet but one body.

12:21 And the eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee:
nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of you.

12:22 Nay, much more those members of the body, which seem to be more
feeble, are necessary: 12:23 And those members of the body, which we
think to be less honourable, upon these we bestow more abundant
honour; and our uncomely parts have more abundant comeliness.

12:24 For our comely parts have no need: but God hath tempered the
body together, having given more abundant honour to that part which
lacked.

12:25 That there should be no schism in the body; but that the members
should have the same care one for another.

12:26 And whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it;
or one member be honoured, all the members rejoice with it.

12:27 Now ye are the body of Christ, and members in particular.

12:28 And God hath set some in the church, first apostles, secondarily
prophets, thirdly teachers, after that miracles, then gifts of
healings, helps, governments, diversities of tongues.

12:29 Are all apostles? are all prophets? are all teachers? are all
workers of miracles?  12:30 Have all the gifts of healing? do all
speak with tongues? do all interpret?  12:31 But covet earnestly the
best gifts: and yet shew I unto you a more excellent way.

13:1 Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have
not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.

13:2 And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all
mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I
could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.

13:3 And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I
give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me
nothing.

13:4 Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity
vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, 13:5 Doth not behave itself
unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no
evil; 13:6 Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; 13:7
Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth
all things.

13:8 Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they
shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there
be knowledge, it shall vanish away.

13:9 For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.

13:10 But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in
part shall be done away.

13:11 When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child,
I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish
things.

13:12 For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face:
now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

13:13 And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the
greatest of these is charity.

14:1 Follow after charity, and desire spiritual gifts, but rather that
ye may prophesy.

14:2 For he that speaketh in an unknown tongue speaketh not unto men,
but unto God: for no man understandeth him; howbeit in the spirit he
speaketh mysteries.

14:3 But he that prophesieth speaketh unto men to edification, and
exhortation, and comfort.

14:4 He that speaketh in an unknown tongue edifieth himself; but he
that prophesieth edifieth the church.

14:5 I would that ye all spake with tongues but rather that ye
prophesied: for greater is he that prophesieth than he that speaketh
with tongues, except he interpret, that the church may receive
edifying.

14:6 Now, brethren, if I come unto you speaking with tongues, what
shall I profit you, except I shall speak to you either by revelation,
or by knowledge, or by prophesying, or by doctrine?  14:7 And even
things without life giving sound, whether pipe or harp, except they
give a distinction in the sounds, how shall it be known what is piped
or harped?  14:8 For if the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall
prepare himself to the battle?  14:9 So likewise ye, except ye utter
by the tongue words easy to be understood, how shall it be known what
is spoken? for ye shall speak into the air.

14:10 There are, it may be, so many kinds of voices in the world, and
none of them is without signification.

14:11 Therefore if I know not the meaning of the voice, I shall be
unto him that speaketh a barbarian, and he that speaketh shall be a
barbarian unto me.

14:12 Even so ye, forasmuch as ye are zealous of spiritual gifts, seek
that ye may excel to the edifying of the church.

14:13 Wherefore let him that speaketh in an unknown tongue pray that
he may interpret.

14:14 For if I pray in an unknown tongue, my spirit prayeth, but my
understanding is unfruitful.

14:15 What is it then? I will pray with the spirit, and I will pray
with the understanding also: I will sing with the spirit, and I will
sing with the understanding also.

14:16 Else when thou shalt bless with the spirit, how shall he that
occupieth the room of the unlearned say Amen at thy giving of thanks,
seeing he understandeth not what thou sayest?  14:17 For thou verily
givest thanks well, but the other is not edified.

14:18 I thank my God, I speak with tongues more than ye all: 14:19 Yet
in the church I had rather speak five words with my understanding,
that by my voice I might teach others also, than ten thousand words in
an unknown tongue.

14:20 Brethren, be not children in understanding: howbeit in malice be
ye children, but in understanding be men.

14:21 In the law it is written, With men of other tongues and other
lips will I speak unto this people; and yet for all that will they not
hear me, saith the LORD.

14:22 Wherefore tongues are for a sign, not to them that believe, but
to them that believe not: but prophesying serveth not for them that
believe not, but for them which believe.

14:23 If therefore the whole church be come together into one place,
and all speak with tongues, and there come in those that are
unlearned, or unbelievers, will they not say that ye are mad?  14:24
But if all prophesy, and there come in one that believeth not, or one
unlearned, he is convinced of all, he is judged of all: 14:25 And thus
are the secrets of his heart made manifest; and so falling down on his
face he will worship God, and report that God is in you of a truth.

14:26 How is it then, brethren? when ye come together, every one of
you hath a psalm, hath a doctrine, hath a tongue, hath a revelation,
hath an interpretation. Let all things be done unto edifying.

14:27 If any man speak in an unknown tongue, let it be by two, or at
the most by three, and that by course; and let one interpret.

14:28 But if there be no interpreter, let him keep silence in the
church; and let him speak to himself, and to God.

14:29 Let the prophets speak two or three, and let the other judge.

14:30 If any thing be revealed to another that sitteth by, let the
first hold his peace.

14:31 For ye may all prophesy one by one, that all may learn, and all
may be comforted.

14:32 And the spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets.

14:33 For God is not the author of confusion, but of peace, as in all
churches of the saints.

14:34 Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not
permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under
obedience as also saith the law.

14:35 And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at
home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church.

14:36 What? came the word of God out from you? or came it unto you
only?  14:37 If any man think himself to be a prophet, or spiritual,
let him acknowledge that the things that I write unto you are the
commandments of the Lord.

14:38 But if any man be ignorant, let him be ignorant.

14:39 Wherefore, brethren, covet to prophesy, and forbid not to speak
with tongues.

14:40 Let all things be done decently and in order.

15:1 Moreover, brethren, I declare unto you the gospel which I
preached unto you, which also ye have received, and wherein ye stand;
15:2 By which also ye are saved, if ye keep in memory what I preached
unto you, unless ye have believed in vain.

15:3 For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received,
how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; 15:4
And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according
to the scriptures: 15:5 And that he was seen of Cephas, then of the
twelve: 15:6 After that, he was seen of above five hundred brethren at
once; of whom the greater part remain unto this present, but some are
fallen asleep.

15:7 After that, he was seen of James; then of all the apostles.

15:8 And last of all he was seen of me also, as of one born out of due
time.

15:9 For I am the least of the apostles, that am not meet to be called
an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.

15:10 But by the grace of God I am what I am: and his grace which was
bestowed upon me was not in vain; but I laboured more abundantly than
they all: yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me.

15:11 Therefore whether it were I or they, so we preach, and so ye
believed.

15:12 Now if Christ be preached that he rose from the dead, how say
some among you that there is no resurrection of the dead?  15:13 But
if there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen:
15:14 And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your
faith is also vain.

15:15 Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God; because we have
testified of God that he raised up Christ: whom he raised not up, if
so be that the dead rise not.

15:16 For if the dead rise not, then is not Christ raised: 15:17 And
if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins.

15:18 Then they also which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished.

15:19 If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men
most miserable.

15:20 But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the
firstfruits of them that slept.

15:21 For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection
of the dead.

15:22 For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made
alive.

15:23 But every man in his own order: Christ the firstfruits;
afterward they that are Christ's at his coming.

15:24 Then cometh the end, when he shall have delivered up the kingdom
to God, even the Father; when he shall have put down all rule and all
authority and power.

15:25 For he must reign, till he hath put all enemies under his feet.

15:26 The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.

15:27 For he hath put all things under his feet. But when he saith all
things are put under him, it is manifest that he is excepted, which
did put all things under him.

15:28 And when all things shall be subdued unto him, then shall the
Son also himself be subject unto him that put all things under him,
that God may be all in all.

15:29 Else what shall they do which are baptized for the dead, if the
dead rise not at all? why are they then baptized for the dead?  15:30
And why stand we in jeopardy every hour?  15:31 I protest by your
rejoicing which I have in Christ Jesus our LORD, I die daily.

15:32 If after the manner of men I have fought with beasts at Ephesus,
what advantageth it me, if the dead rise not? let us eat and drink;
for to morrow we die.

15:33 Be not deceived: evil communications corrupt good manners.

15:34 Awake to righteousness, and sin not; for some have not the
knowledge of God: I speak this to your shame.

15:35 But some man will say, How are the dead raised up? and with what
body do they come?  15:36 Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not
quickened, except it die: 15:37 And that which thou sowest, thou
sowest not that body that shall be, but bare grain, it may chance of
wheat, or of some other grain: 15:38 But God giveth it a body as it
hath pleased him, and to every seed his own body.

15:39 All flesh is not the same flesh: but there is one kind of flesh
of men, another flesh of beasts, another of fishes, and another of
birds.

15:40 There are also celestial bodies, and bodies terrestrial: but the
glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial is
another.

15:41 There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon,
and another glory of the stars: for one star differeth from another
star in glory.

15:42 So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in
corruption; it is raised in incorruption: 15:43 It is sown in
dishonour; it is raised in glory: it is sown in weakness; it is raised
in power: 15:44 It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual
body. There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body.

15:45 And so it is written, The first man Adam was made a living soul;
the last Adam was made a quickening spirit.

15:46 Howbeit that was not first which is spiritual, but that which is
natural; and afterward that which is spiritual.

15:47 The first man is of the earth, earthy; the second man is the
Lord from heaven.

15:48 As is the earthy, such are they also that are earthy: and as is
the heavenly, such are they also that are heavenly.

15:49 And as we have borne the image of the earthy, we shall also bear
the image of the heavenly.

15:50 Now this I say, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit
the kingdom of God; neither doth corruption inherit incorruption.

15:51 Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we
shall all be changed, 15:52 In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye,
at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be
raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.

15:53 For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal
must put on immortality.

15:54 So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and
this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to
pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory.

15:55 O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?
15:56 The sting of death is sin; and the strength of sin is the law.

15:57 But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our
Lord Jesus Christ.

15:58 Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye stedfast, unmoveable,
always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that
your labour is not in vain in the Lord.

16:1 Now concerning the collection for the saints, as I have given
order to the churches of Galatia, even so do ye.

16:2 Upon the first day of the week let every one of you lay by him in
store, as God hath prospered him, that there be no gatherings when I
come.

16:3 And when I come, whomsoever ye shall approve by your letters,
them will I send to bring your liberality unto Jerusalem.

16:4 And if it be meet that I go also, they shall go with me.

16:5 Now I will come unto you, when I shall pass through Macedonia:
for I do pass through Macedonia.

16:6 And it may be that I will abide, yea, and winter with you, that
ye may bring me on my journey whithersoever I go.

16:7 For I will not see you now by the way; but I trust to tarry a
while with you, if the Lord permit.

16:8 But I will tarry at Ephesus until Pentecost.

16:9 For a great door and effectual is opened unto me, and there are
many adversaries.

16:10 Now if Timotheus come, see that he may be with you without fear:
for he worketh the work of the Lord, as I also do.

16:11 Let no man therefore despise him: but conduct him forth in
peace, that he may come unto me: for I look for him with the brethren.

16:12 As touching our brother Apollos, I greatly desired him to come
unto you with the brethren: but his will was not at all to come at
this time; but he will come when he shall have convenient time.

16:13 Watch ye, stand fast in the faith, quit you like men, be strong.

16:14 Let all your things be done with charity.

16:15 I beseech you, brethren, (ye know the house of Stephanas, that
it is the firstfruits of Achaia, and that they have addicted
themselves to the ministry of the saints,) 16:16 That ye submit
yourselves unto such, and to every one that helpeth with us, and
laboureth.

16:17 I am glad of the coming of Stephanas and Fortunatus and
Achaicus: for that which was lacking on your part they have supplied.

16:18 For they have refreshed my spirit and your's: therefore
acknowledge ye them that are such.

16:19 The churches of Asia salute you. Aquila and Priscilla salute you
much in the Lord, with the church that is in their house.

16:20 All the brethren greet you. Greet ye one another with
an holy kiss.

16:21 The salutation of me Paul with mine own hand.

16:22 If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be
Anathema Maranatha.

16:23 The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you.

16:24 My love be with you all in Christ Jesus. Amen.




The Second Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Corinthians


1:1 Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God, and Timothy
our brother, unto the church of God which is at Corinth, with all the
saints which are in all Achaia: 1:2 Grace be to you and peace from God
our Father, and from the Lord Jesus Christ.

1:3 Blessed be God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the
Father of mercies, and the God of all comfort; 1:4 Who comforteth us
in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort them which are
in any trouble, by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of
God.

1:5 For as the sufferings of Christ abound in us, so our consolation
also aboundeth by Christ.

1:6 And whether we be afflicted, it is for your consolation and
salvation, which is effectual in the enduring of the same sufferings
which we also suffer: or whether we be comforted, it is for your
consolation and salvation.

1:7 And our hope of you is stedfast, knowing, that as ye are partakers
of the sufferings, so shall ye be also of the consolation.

1:8 For we would not, brethren, have you ignorant of our trouble which
came to us in Asia, that we were pressed out of measure, above
strength, insomuch that we despaired even of life: 1:9 But we had the
sentence of death in ourselves, that we should not trust in ourselves,
but in God which raiseth the dead: 1:10 Who delivered us from so great
a death, and doth deliver: in whom we trust that he will yet deliver
us; 1:11 Ye also helping together by prayer for us, that for the gift
bestowed upon us by the means of many persons thanks may be given by
many on our behalf.

1:12 For our rejoicing is this, the testimony of our conscience, that
in simplicity and godly sincerity, not with fleshly wisdom, but by the
grace of God, we have had our conversation in the world, and more
abundantly to you-ward.

1:13 For we write none other things unto you, than what ye read or
acknowledge; and I trust ye shall acknowledge even to the end; 1:14 As
also ye have acknowledged us in part, that we are your rejoicing, even
as ye also are our's in the day of the Lord Jesus.

1:15 And in this confidence I was minded to come unto you before, that
ye might have a second benefit; 1:16 And to pass by you into
Macedonia, and to come again out of Macedonia unto you, and of you to
be brought on my way toward Judaea.

1:17 When I therefore was thus minded, did I use lightness? or the
things that I purpose, do I purpose according to the flesh, that with
me there should be yea yea, and nay nay?  1:18 But as God is true, our
word toward you was not yea and nay.

1:19 For the Son of God, Jesus Christ, who was preached among you by
us, even by me and Silvanus and Timotheus, was not yea and nay, but in
him was yea.

1:20 For all the promises of God in him are yea, and in him Amen, unto
the glory of God by us.

1:21 Now he which stablisheth us with you in Christ, and hath anointed
us, is God; 1:22 Who hath also sealed us, and given the earnest of the
Spirit in our hearts.

1:23 Moreover I call God for a record upon my soul, that to spare you
I came not as yet unto Corinth.

1:24 Not for that we have dominion over your faith, but are helpers of
your joy: for by faith ye stand.

2:1 But I determined this with myself, that I would not come again to
you in heaviness.

2:2 For if I make you sorry, who is he then that maketh me glad, but
the same which is made sorry by me?  2:3 And I wrote this same unto
you, lest, when I came, I should have sorrow from them of whom I ought
to rejoice; having confidence in you all, that my joy is the joy of
you all.

2:4 For out of much affliction and anguish of heart I wrote unto you
with many tears; not that ye should be grieved, but that ye might know
the love which I have more abundantly unto you.

2:5 But if any have caused grief, he hath not grieved me, but in part:
that I may not overcharge you all.

2:6 Sufficient to such a man is this punishment, which was inflicted
of many.

2:7 So that contrariwise ye ought rather to forgive him, and comfort
him, lest perhaps such a one should be swallowed up with overmuch
sorrow.

2:8 Wherefore I beseech you that ye would confirm your love toward
him.

2:9 For to this end also did I write, that I might know the proof of
you, whether ye be obedient in all things.

2:10 To whom ye forgive any thing, I forgive also: for if I forgave
any thing, to whom I forgave it, for your sakes forgave I it in the
person of Christ; 2:11 Lest Satan should get an advantage of us: for
we are not ignorant of his devices.

2:12 Furthermore, when I came to Troas to preach Christ's gospel, and
a door was opened unto me of the Lord, 2:13 I had no rest in my
spirit, because I found not Titus my brother: but taking my leave of
them, I went from thence into Macedonia.

2:14 Now thanks be unto God, which always causeth us to triumph in
Christ, and maketh manifest the savour of his knowledge by us in every
place.

2:15 For we are unto God a sweet savour of Christ, in them that are
saved, and in them that perish: 2:16 To the one we are the savour of
death unto death; and to the other the savour of life unto life. And
who is sufficient for these things?  2:17 For we are not as many,
which corrupt the word of God: but as of sincerity, but as of God, in
the sight of God speak we in Christ.

3:1 Do we begin again to commend ourselves? or need we, as some
others, epistles of commendation to you, or letters of commendation
from you?  3:2 Ye are our epistle written in our hearts, known and
read of all men: 3:3 Forasmuch as ye are manifestly declared to be the
epistle of Christ ministered by us, written not with ink, but with the
Spirit of the living God; not in tables of stone, but in fleshy tables
of the heart.

3:4 And such trust have we through Christ to God-ward: 3:5 Not that we
are sufficient of ourselves to think any thing as of ourselves; but
our sufficiency is of God; 3:6 Who also hath made us able ministers of
the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the
letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.

3:7 But if the ministration of death, written and engraven in stones,
was glorious, so that the children of Israel could not stedfastly
behold the face of Moses for the glory of his countenance; which glory
was to be done away: 3:8 How shall not the ministration of the spirit
be rather glorious?  3:9 For if the ministration of condemnation be
glory, much more doth the ministration of righteousness exceed in
glory.

3:10 For even that which was made glorious had no glory in this
respect, by reason of the glory that excelleth.

3:11 For if that which is done away was glorious, much more that which
remaineth is glorious.

3:12 Seeing then that we have such hope, we use great plainness of
speech: 3:13 And not as Moses, which put a vail over his face, that
the children of Israel could not stedfastly look to the end of that
which is abolished: 3:14 But their minds were blinded: for until this
day remaineth the same vail untaken away in the reading of the old
testament; which vail is done away in Christ.

3:15 But even unto this day, when Moses is read, the vail is upon
their heart.

3:16 Nevertheless when it shall turn to the Lord, the vail shall be
taken away.

3:17 Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is,
there is liberty.

3:18 But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of
the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as
by the Spirit of the LORD.

4:1 Therefore seeing we have this ministry, as we have received mercy,
we faint not; 4:2 But have renounced the hidden things of dishonesty,
not walking in craftiness, nor handling the word of God deceitfully;
but by manifestation of the truth commending ourselves to every man's
conscience in the sight of God.

4:3 But if our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost: 4:4 In
whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which
believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is
the image of God, should shine unto them.

4:5 For we preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord; and
ourselves your servants for Jesus' sake.

4:6 For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath
shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory
of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

4:7 But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency
of the power may be of God, and not of us.

4:8 We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are
perplexed, but not in despair; 4:9 Persecuted, but not forsaken; cast
down, but not destroyed; 4:10 Always bearing about in the body the
dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made
manifest in our body.

4:11 For we which live are alway delivered unto death for Jesus' sake,
that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our mortal
flesh.

4:12 So then death worketh in us, but life in you.

4:13 We having the same spirit of faith, according as it is written, I
believed, and therefore have I spoken; we also believe, and therefore
speak; 4:14 Knowing that he which raised up the Lord Jesus shall raise
up us also by Jesus, and shall present us with you.

4:15 For all things are for your sakes, that the abundant grace might
through the thanksgiving of many redound to the glory of God.

4:16 For which cause we faint not; but though our outward man perish,
yet the inward man is renewed day by day.

4:17 For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for
us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory; 4:18 While we
look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not
seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which
are not seen are eternal.

5:1 For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were
dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not made with hands,
eternal in the heavens.

5:2 For in this we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed upon with
our house which is from heaven: 5:3 If so be that being clothed we
shall not be found naked.

5:4 For we that are in this tabernacle do groan, being burdened: not
for that we would be unclothed, but clothed upon, that mortality might
be swallowed up of life.

5:5 Now he that hath wrought us for the selfsame thing is God, who
also hath given unto us the earnest of the Spirit.

5:6 Therefore we are always confident, knowing that, whilst we are at
home in the body, we are absent from the Lord: 5:7 (For we walk by
faith, not by sight:) 5:8 We are confident, I say, and willing rather
to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord.

5:9 Wherefore we labour, that, whether present or absent, we may be
accepted of him.

5:10 For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ; that
every one may receive the things done in his body, according to that
he hath done, whether it be good or bad.

5:11 Knowing therefore the terror of the Lord, we persuade men; but we
are made manifest unto God; and I trust also are made manifest in your
consciences.

5:12 For we commend not ourselves again unto you, but give you
occasion to glory on our behalf, that ye may have somewhat to answer
them which glory in appearance, and not in heart.

5:13 For whether we be beside ourselves, it is to God: or whether we
be sober, it is for your cause.

5:14 For the love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge,
that if one died for all, then were all dead: 5:15 And that he died
for all, that they which live should not henceforth live unto
themselves, but unto him which died for them, and rose again.

5:16 Wherefore henceforth know we no man after the flesh: yea, though
we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now henceforth know we him
no more.

5:17 Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old
things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.

5:18 And all things are of God, who hath reconciled us to himself by
Jesus Christ, and hath given to us the ministry of reconciliation;
5:19 To wit, that God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto
himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them; and hath committed
unto us the word of reconciliation.

5:20 Now then we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech
you by us: we pray you in Christ's stead, be ye reconciled to God.

5:21 For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we
might be made the righteousness of God in him.

6:1 We then, as workers together with him, beseech you also that ye
receive not the grace of God in vain.

6:2 (For he saith, I have heard thee in a time accepted, and in the
day of salvation have I succoured thee: behold, now is the accepted
time; behold, now is the day of salvation.)  6:3 Giving no offence in
any thing, that the ministry be not blamed: 6:4 But in all things
approving ourselves as the ministers of God, in much patience, in
afflictions, in necessities, in distresses, 6:5 In stripes, in
imprisonments, in tumults, in labours, in watchings, in fastings; 6:6
By pureness, by knowledge, by longsuffering, by kindness, by the Holy
Ghost, by love unfeigned, 6:7 By the word of truth, by the power of
God, by the armour of righteousness on the right hand and on the left,
6:8 By honour and dishonour, by evil report and good report: as
deceivers, and yet true; 6:9 As unknown, and yet well known; as dying,
and, behold, we live; as chastened, and not killed; 6:10 As sorrowful,
yet alway rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing,
and yet possessing all things.

6:11 O ye Corinthians, our mouth is open unto you, our heart is
enlarged.

6:12 Ye are not straitened in us, but ye are straitened in your own
bowels.

6:13 Now for a recompence in the same, (I speak as unto my children,)
be ye also enlarged.

6:14 Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what
fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion
hath light with darkness?  6:15 And what concord hath Christ with
Belial? or what part hath he that believeth with an infidel?  6:16 And
what agreement hath the temple of God with idols? for ye are the
temple of the living God; as God hath said, I will dwell in them, and
walk in them; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.

6:17 Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the
Lord, and touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive you.

6:18 And will be a Father unto you, and ye shall be my sons and
daughters, saith the Lord Almighty.

7:1 Having therefore these promises, dearly beloved, let us cleanse
ourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit, perfecting
holiness in the fear of God.

7:2 Receive us; we have wronged no man, we have corrupted no man, we
have defrauded no man.

7:3 I speak not this to condemn you: for I have said before, that ye
are in our hearts to die and live with you.

7:4 Great is my boldness of speech toward you, great is my glorying of
you: I am filled with comfort, I am exceeding joyful in all our
tribulation.

7:5 For, when we were come into Macedonia, our flesh had no rest, but
we were troubled on every side; without were fightings, within were
fears.

7:6 Nevertheless God, that comforteth those that are cast down,
comforted us by the coming of Titus; 7:7 And not by his coming only,
but by the consolation wherewith he was comforted in you, when he told
us your earnest desire, your mourning, your fervent mind toward me; so
that I rejoiced the more.

7:8 For though I made you sorry with a letter, I do not repent, though
I did repent: for I perceive that the same epistle hath made you
sorry, though it were but for a season.

7:9 Now I rejoice, not that ye were made sorry, but that ye sorrowed
to repentance: for ye were made sorry after a godly manner, that ye
might receive damage by us in nothing.

7:10 For godly sorrow worketh repentance to salvation not to be
repented of: but the sorrow of the world worketh death.

7:11 For behold this selfsame thing, that ye sorrowed after a godly
sort, what carefulness it wrought in you, yea, what clearing of
yourselves, yea, what indignation, yea, what fear, yea, what vehement
desire, yea, what zeal, yea, what revenge! In all things ye have
approved yourselves to be clear in this matter.

7:12 Wherefore, though I wrote unto you, I did it not for his cause
that had done the wrong, nor for his cause that suffered wrong, but
that our care for you in the sight of God might appear unto you.

7:13 Therefore we were comforted in your comfort: yea, and exceedingly
the more joyed we for the joy of Titus, because his spirit was
refreshed by you all.

7:14 For if I have boasted any thing to him of you, I am not ashamed;
but as we spake all things to you in truth, even so our boasting,
which I made before Titus, is found a truth.

7:15 And his inward affection is more abundant toward you, whilst he
remembereth the obedience of you all, how with fear and trembling ye
received him.

7:16 I rejoice therefore that I have confidence in you in all things.

8:1 Moreover, brethren, we do you to wit of the grace of God bestowed
on the churches of Macedonia; 8:2 How that in a great trial of
affliction the abundance of their joy and their deep poverty abounded
unto the riches of their liberality.

8:3 For to their power, I bear record, yea, and beyond their power
they were willing of themselves; 8:4 Praying us with much intreaty
that we would receive the gift, and take upon us the fellowship of the
ministering to the saints.

8:5 And this they did, not as we hoped, but first gave their own
selves to the Lord, and unto us by the will of God.

8:6 Insomuch that we desired Titus, that as he had begun, so he would
also finish in you the same grace also.

8:7 Therefore, as ye abound in every thing, in faith, and utterance,
and knowledge, and in all diligence, and in your love to us, see that
ye abound in this grace also.

8:8 I speak not by commandment, but by occasion of the forwardness of
others, and to prove the sincerity of your love.

8:9 For ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though he
was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, that ye through his
poverty might be rich.

8:10 And herein I give my advice: for this is expedient for you, who
have begun before, not only to do, but also to be forward a year ago.

8:11 Now therefore perform the doing of it; that as there was a
readiness to will, so there may be a performance also out of that
which ye have.

8:12 For if there be first a willing mind, it is accepted according to
that a man hath, and not according to that he hath not.

8:13 For I mean not that other men be eased, and ye burdened: 8:14 But
by an equality, that now at this time your abundance may be a supply
for their want, that their abundance also may be a supply for your
want: that there may be equality: 8:15 As it is written, He that had
gathered much had nothing over; and he that had gathered little had no
lack.

8:16 But thanks be to God, which put the same earnest care into the
heart of Titus for you.

8:17 For indeed he accepted the exhortation; but being more forward,
of his own accord he went unto you.

8:18 And we have sent with him the brother, whose praise is in the
gospel throughout all the churches; 8:19 And not that only, but who
was also chosen of the churches to travel with us with this grace,
which is administered by us to the glory of the same Lord, and
declaration of your ready mind: 8:20 Avoiding this, that no man should
blame us in this abundance which is administered by us: 8:21 Providing
for honest things, not only in the sight of the Lord, but also in the
sight of men.

8:22 And we have sent with them our brother, whom we have oftentimes
proved diligent in many things, but now much more diligent, upon the
great confidence which I have in you.

8:23 Whether any do enquire of Titus, he is my partner and
fellowhelper concerning you: or our brethren be enquired of, they are
the messengers of the churches, and the glory of Christ.

8:24 Wherefore shew ye to them, and before the churches, the proof of
your love, and of our boasting on your behalf.

9:1 For as touching the ministering to the saints, it is superfluous
for me to write to you: 9:2 For I know the forwardness of your mind,
for which I boast of you to them of Macedonia, that Achaia was ready a
year ago; and your zeal hath provoked very many.

9:3 Yet have I sent the brethren, lest our boasting of you should be
in vain in this behalf; that, as I said, ye may be ready: 9:4 Lest
haply if they of Macedonia come with me, and find you unprepared, we
(that we say not, ye) should be ashamed in this same confident
boasting.

9:5 Therefore I thought it necessary to exhort the brethren, that they
would go before unto you, and make up beforehand your bounty, whereof
ye had notice before, that the same might be ready, as a matter of
bounty, and not as of covetousness.

9:6 But this I say, He which soweth sparingly shall reap also
sparingly; and he which soweth bountifully shall reap also
bountifully.

9:7 Every man according as he purposeth in his heart, so let him give;
not grudgingly, or of necessity: for God loveth a cheerful giver.

9:8 And God is able to make all grace abound toward you; that ye,
always having all sufficiency in all things, may abound to every good
work: 9:9 (As it is written, He hath dispersed abroad; he hath given
to the poor: his righteousness remaineth for ever.

9:10 Now he that ministereth seed to the sower both minister bread for
your food, and multiply your seed sown, and increase the fruits of
your righteousness;) 9:11 Being enriched in every thing to all
bountifulness, which causeth through us thanksgiving to God.

9:12 For the administration of this service not only supplieth the
want of the saints, but is abundant also by many thanksgivings unto
God; 9:13 Whiles by the experiment of this ministration they glorify
God for your professed subjection unto the gospel of Christ, and for
your liberal distribution unto them, and unto all men; 9:14 And by
their prayer for you, which long after you for the exceeding grace of
God in you.

9:15 Thanks be unto God for his unspeakable gift.

10:1 Now I Paul myself beseech you by the meekness and gentleness of
Christ, who in presence am base among you, but being absent am bold
toward you: 10:2 But I beseech you, that I may not be bold when I am
present with that confidence, wherewith I think to be bold against
some, which think of us as if we walked according to the flesh.

10:3 For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war after the flesh:
10:4 (For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty
through God to the pulling down of strong holds;) 10:5 Casting down
imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the
knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the
obedience of Christ; 10:6 And having in a readiness to revenge all
disobedience, when your obedience is fulfilled.

10:7 Do ye look on things after the outward appearance? If any man
trust to himself that he is Christ's, let him of himself think this
again, that, as he is Christ's, even so are we Christ's.

10:8 For though I should boast somewhat more of our authority, which
the Lord hath given us for edification, and not for your destruction,
I should not be ashamed: 10:9 That I may not seem as if I would
terrify you by letters.

10:10 For his letters, say they, are weighty and powerful; but his
bodily presence is weak, and his speech contemptible.

10:11 Let such an one think this, that, such as we are in word by
letters when we are absent, such will we be also in deed when we are
present.

10:12 For we dare not make ourselves of the number, or compare
ourselves with some that commend themselves: but they measuring
themselves by themselves, and comparing themselves among themselves,
are not wise.

10:13 But we will not boast of things without our measure, but
according to the measure of the rule which God hath distributed to us,
a measure to reach even unto you.

10:14 For we stretch not ourselves beyond our measure, as though we
reached not unto you: for we are come as far as to you also in
preaching the gospel of Christ: 10:15 Not boasting of things without
our measure, that is, of other men's labours; but having hope, when
your faith is increased, that we shall be enlarged by you according to
our rule abundantly, 10:16 To preach the gospel in the regions beyond
you, and not to boast in another man's line of things made ready to
our hand.

10:17 But he that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord.

10:18 For not he that commendeth himself is approved, but whom the
Lord commendeth.

11:1 Would to God ye could bear with me a little in my folly: and
indeed bear with me.

11:2 For I am jealous over you with godly jealousy: for I have
espoused you to one husband, that I may present you as a chaste virgin
to Christ.

11:3 But I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve
through his subtilty, so your minds should be corrupted from the
simplicity that is in Christ.

11:4 For if he that cometh preacheth another Jesus, whom we have not
preached, or if ye receive another spirit, which ye have not received,
or another gospel, which ye have not accepted, ye might well bear with
him.

11:5 For I suppose I was not a whit behind the very chiefest apostles.

11:6 But though I be rude in speech, yet not in knowledge; but we have
been throughly made manifest among you in all things.

11:7 Have I committed an offence in abasing myself that ye might be
exalted, because I have preached to you the gospel of God freely?
11:8 I robbed other churches, taking wages of them, to do you service.

11:9 And when I was present with you, and wanted, I was chargeable to
no man: for that which was lacking to me the brethren which came from
Macedonia supplied: and in all things I have kept myself from being
burdensome unto you, and so will I keep myself.

11:10 As the truth of Christ is in me, no man shall stop me of this
boasting in the regions of Achaia.

11:11 Wherefore? because I love you not? God knoweth.

11:12 But what I do, that I will do, that I may cut off occasion from
them which desire occasion; that wherein they glory, they may be found
even as we.

11:13 For such are false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming
themselves into the apostles of Christ.

11:14 And no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of
light.

11:15 Therefore it is no great thing if his ministers also be
transformed as the ministers of righteousness; whose end shall be
according to their works.

11:16 I say again, Let no man think me a fool; if otherwise, yet as a
fool receive me, that I may boast myself a little.

11:17 That which I speak, I speak it not after the Lord, but as it
were foolishly, in this confidence of boasting.

11:18 Seeing that many glory after the flesh, I will glory also.

11:19 For ye suffer fools gladly, seeing ye yourselves are wise.

11:20 For ye suffer, if a man bring you into bondage, if a man devour
you, if a man take of you, if a man exalt himself, if a man smite you
on the face.

11:21 I speak as concerning reproach, as though we had been weak.
Howbeit whereinsoever any is bold, (I speak foolishly,) I am bold
also.

11:22 Are they Hebrews? so am I. Are they Israelites? so am I. Are
they the seed of Abraham? so am I.

11:23 Are they ministers of Christ? (I speak as a fool) I am more; in
labours more abundant, in stripes above measure, in prisons more
frequent, in deaths oft.

11:24 Of the Jews five times received I forty stripes save one.

11:25 Thrice was I beaten with rods, once was I stoned, thrice I
suffered shipwreck, a night and a day I have been in the deep; 11:26
In journeyings often, in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in
perils by mine own countrymen, in perils by the heathen, in perils in
the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils
among false brethren; 11:27 In weariness and painfulness, in watchings
often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness.

11:28 Beside those things that are without, that which cometh upon me
daily, the care of all the churches.

11:29 Who is weak, and I am not weak? who is offended, and I burn not?
11:30 If I must needs glory, I will glory of the things which concern
mine infirmities.

11:31 The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, which is blessed
for evermore, knoweth that I lie not.

11:32 In Damascus the governor under Aretas the king kept the city of
the Damascenes with a garrison, desirous to apprehend me: 11:33 And
through a window in a basket was I let down by the wall, and escaped
his hands.

12:1 It is not expedient for me doubtless to glory. I will come to
visions and revelations of the Lord.

12:2 I knew a man in Christ above fourteen years ago, (whether in the
body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell: God
knoweth;) such an one caught up to the third heaven.

12:3 And I knew such a man, (whether in the body, or out of the body,
I cannot tell: God knoweth;) 12:4 How that he was caught up into
paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a
man to utter.

12:5 Of such an one will I glory: yet of myself I will not glory, but
in mine infirmities.

12:6 For though I would desire to glory, I shall not be a fool; for I
will say the truth: but now I forbear, lest any man should think of me
above that which he seeth me to be, or that he heareth of me.

12:7 And lest I should be exalted above measure through the abundance
of the revelations, there was given to me a thorn in the flesh, the
messenger of Satan to buffet me, lest I should be exalted above
measure.

12:8 For this thing I besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart
from me.

12:9 And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my
strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I
rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon
me.

12:10 Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in
necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ's sake: for
when I am weak, then am I strong.

12:11 I am become a fool in glorying; ye have compelled me: for I
ought to have been commended of you: for in nothing am I behind the
very chiefest apostles, though I be nothing.

12:12 Truly the signs of an apostle were wrought among you in all
patience, in signs, and wonders, and mighty deeds.

12:13 For what is it wherein ye were inferior to other churches,
except it be that I myself was not burdensome to you? forgive me this
wrong.

12:14 Behold, the third time I am ready to come to you; and I will not
be burdensome to you: for I seek not your's but you: for the children
ought not to lay up for the parents, but the parents for the children.

12:15 And I will very gladly spend and be spent for you; though the
more abundantly I love you, the less I be loved.

12:16 But be it so, I did not burden you: nevertheless, being crafty,
I caught you with guile.

12:17 Did I make a gain of you by any of them whom I sent unto you?
12:18 I desired Titus, and with him I sent a brother. Did Titus make a
gain of you? walked we not in the same spirit? walked we not in the
same steps?  12:19 Again, think ye that we excuse ourselves unto you?
we speak before God in Christ: but we do all things, dearly beloved,
for your edifying.

12:20 For I fear, lest, when I come, I shall not find you such as I
would, and that I shall be found unto you such as ye would not: lest
there be debates, envyings, wraths, strifes, backbitings, whisperings,
swellings, tumults: 12:21 And lest, when I come again, my God will
humble me among you, and that I shall bewail many which have sinned
already, and have not repented of the uncleanness and fornication and
lasciviousness which they have committed.

13:1 This is the third time I am coming to you. In the mouth of two or
three witnesses shall every word be established.

13:2 I told you before, and foretell you, as if I were present, the
second time; and being absent now I write to them which heretofore
have sinned, and to all other, that, if I come again, I will not
spare: 13:3 Since ye seek a proof of Christ speaking in me, which to
you-ward is not weak, but is mighty in you.

13:4 For though he was crucified through weakness, yet he liveth by
the power of God. For we also are weak in him, but we shall live with
him by the power of God toward you.

13:5 Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith; prove your own
selves. Know ye not your own selves, how that Jesus Christ is in you,
except ye be reprobates?  13:6 But I trust that ye shall know that we
are not reprobates.

13:7 Now I pray to God that ye do no evil; not that we should appear
approved, but that ye should do that which is honest, though we be as
reprobates.

13:8 For we can do nothing against the truth, but for the truth.

13:9 For we are glad, when we are weak, and ye are strong: and this
also we wish, even your perfection.

13:10 Therefore I write these things being absent, lest being present
I should use sharpness, according to the power which the Lord hath
given me to edification, and not to destruction.

13:11 Finally, brethren, farewell. Be perfect, be of good comfort, be
of one mind, live in peace; and the God of love and peace shall be
with you.

13:12 Greet one another with an holy kiss.

13:13 All the saints salute you.

13:14 The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the
communion of the Holy Ghost, be with you all. Amen.




The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Galatians


1:1 Paul, an apostle, (not of men, neither by man, but by Jesus
Christ, and God the Father, who raised him from the dead;) 1:2 And all
the brethren which are with me, unto the churches of Galatia: 1:3
Grace be to you and peace from God the Father, and from our Lord Jesus
Christ, 1:4 Who gave himself for our sins, that he might deliver us
from this present evil world, according to the will of God and our
Father: 1:5 To whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.

1:6 I marvel that ye are so soon removed from him that called you into
the grace of Christ unto another gospel: 1:7 Which is not another; but
there be some that trouble you, and would pervert the gospel of
Christ.

1:8 But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel
unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be
accursed.

1:9 As we said before, so say I now again, if any man preach any other
gospel unto you than that ye have received, let him be accursed.

1:10 For do I now persuade men, or God? or do I seek to please men?
for if I yet pleased men, I should not be the servant of Christ.

1:11 But I certify you, brethren, that the gospel which was preached
of me is not after man.

1:12 For I neither received it of man, neither was I taught it, but by
the revelation of Jesus Christ.

1:13 For ye have heard of my conversation in time past in the Jews'
religion, how that beyond measure I persecuted the church of God, and
wasted it: 1:14 And profited in the Jews' religion above many my
equals in mine own nation, being more exceedingly zealous of the
traditions of my fathers.

1:15 But when it pleased God, who separated me from my mother's womb,
and called me by his grace, 1:16 To reveal his Son in me, that I might
preach him among the heathen; immediately I conferred not with flesh
and blood: 1:17 Neither went I up to Jerusalem to them which were
apostles before me; but I went into Arabia, and returned again unto
Damascus.

1:18 Then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to see Peter, and
abode with him fifteen days.

1:19 But other of the apostles saw I none, save James the Lord's
brother.

1:20 Now the things which I write unto you, behold, before God, I lie
not.

1:21 Afterwards I came into the regions of Syria and Cilicia; 1:22 And
was unknown by face unto the churches of Judaea which were in Christ:
1:23 But they had heard only, That he which persecuted us in times
past now preacheth the faith which once he destroyed.

1:24 And they glorified God in me.

2:1 Then fourteen years after I went up again to Jerusalem with
Barnabas, and took Titus with me also.

2:2 And I went up by revelation, and communicated unto them that
gospel which I preach among the Gentiles, but privately to them which
were of reputation, lest by any means I should run, or had run, in
vain.

2:3 But neither Titus, who was with me, being a Greek, was compelled
to be circumcised: 2:4 And that because of false brethren unawares
brought in, who came in privily to spy out our liberty which we have
in Christ Jesus, that they might bring us into bondage: 2:5 To whom we
gave place by subjection, no, not for an hour; that the truth of the
gospel might continue with you.

2:6 But of these who seemed to be somewhat, (whatsoever they were, it
maketh no matter to me: God accepteth no man's person:) for they who
seemed to be somewhat in conference added nothing to me: 2:7 But
contrariwise, when they saw that the gospel of the uncircumcision was
committed unto me, as the gospel of the circumcision was unto Peter;
2:8 (For he that wrought effectually in Peter to the apostleship of
the circumcision, the same was mighty in me toward the Gentiles:) 2:9
And when James, Cephas, and John, who seemed to be pillars, perceived
the grace that was given unto me, they gave to me and Barnabas the
right hands of fellowship; that we should go unto the heathen, and
they unto the circumcision.

2:10 Only they would that we should remember the poor; the same which
I also was forward to do.

2:11 But when Peter was come to Antioch, I withstood him to the face,
because he was to be blamed.

2:12 For before that certain came from James, he did eat with the
Gentiles: but when they were come, he withdrew and separated himself,
fearing them which were of the circumcision.

2:13 And the other Jews dissembled likewise with him; insomuch that
Barnabas also was carried away with their dissimulation.

2:14 But when I saw that they walked not uprightly according to the
truth of the gospel, I said unto Peter before them all, If thou, being
a Jew, livest after the manner of Gentiles, and not as do the Jews,
why compellest thou the Gentiles to live as do the Jews?  2:15 We who
are Jews by nature, and not sinners of the Gentiles, 2:16 Knowing that
a man is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of
Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Jesus Christ, that we might be
justified by the faith of Christ, and not by the works of the law: for
by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified.

2:17 But if, while we seek to be justified by Christ, we ourselves
also are found sinners, is therefore Christ the minister of sin? God
forbid.

2:18 For if I build again the things which I destroyed, I make myself
a transgressor.

2:19 For I through the law am dead to the law, that I might live unto
God.

2:20 I am crucified with Christ: neverthless I live; yet not I, but
Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live
by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.

2:21 I do not frustrate the grace of God: for if righteousness come by
the law, then Christ is dead in vain.

3:1 O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you, that ye should not
obey the truth, before whose eyes Jesus Christ hath been evidently set
forth, crucified among you?  3:2 This only would I learn of you,
Received ye the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of
faith?  3:3 Are ye so foolish? having begun in the Spirit, are ye now
made perfect by the flesh?  3:4 Have ye suffered so many things in
vain? if it be yet in vain.

3:5 He therefore that ministereth to you the Spirit, and worketh
miracles among you, doeth he it by the works of the law, or by the
hearing of faith?  3:6 Even as Abraham believed God, and it was
accounted to him for righteousness.

3:7 Know ye therefore that they which are of faith, the same are the
children of Abraham.

3:8 And the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the heathen
through faith, preached before the gospel unto Abraham, saying, In
thee shall all nations be blessed.

3:9 So then they which be of faith are blessed with faithful Abraham.

3:10 For as many as are of the works of the law are under the curse:
for it is written, Cursed is every one that continueth not in all
things which are written in the book of the law to do them.

3:11 But that no man is justified by the law in the sight of God, it
is evident: for, The just shall live by faith.

3:12 And the law is not of faith: but, The man that doeth them shall
live in them.

3:13 Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a
curse for us: for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a
tree: 3:14 That the blessing of Abraham might come on the Gentiles
through Jesus Christ; that we might receive the promise of the Spirit
through faith.

3:15 Brethren, I speak after the manner of men; Though it be but a
man's covenant, yet if it be confirmed, no man disannulleth, or addeth
thereto.

3:16 Now to Abraham and his seed were the promises made. He saith not,
And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed, which is
Christ.

3:17 And this I say, that the covenant, that was confirmed before of
God in Christ, the law, which was four hundred and thirty years after,
cannot disannul, that it should make the promise of none effect.

3:18 For if the inheritance be of the law, it is no more of promise:
but God gave it to Abraham by promise.

3:19 Wherefore then serveth the law? It was added because of
transgressions, till the seed should come to whom the promise was
made; and it was ordained by angels in the hand of a mediator.

3:20 Now a mediator is not a mediator of one, but God is one.

3:21 Is the law then against the promises of God? God forbid: for if
there had been a law given which could have given life, verily
righteousness should have been by the law.

3:22 But the scripture hath concluded all under sin, that the promise
by faith of Jesus Christ might be given to them that believe.

3:23 But before faith came, we were kept under the law, shut up unto
the faith which should afterwards be revealed.

3:24 Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ,
that we might be justified by faith.

3:25 But after that faith is come, we are no longer under a
schoolmaster.

3:26 For ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus.

3:27 For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on
Christ.

3:28 There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free,
there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.

3:29 And if ye be Christ's, then are ye Abraham's seed, and heirs
according to the promise.

4:1 Now I say, That the heir, as long as he is a child, differeth
nothing from a servant, though he be lord of all; 4:2 But is under
tutors and governors until the time appointed of the father.

4:3 Even so we, when we were children, were in bondage under the
elements of the world: 4:4 But when the fulness of the time was come,
God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, 4:5 To
redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the
adoption of sons.

4:6 And because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of his Son
into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father.

4:7 Wherefore thou art no more a servant, but a son; and if a son,
then an heir of God through Christ.

4:8 Howbeit then, when ye knew not God, ye did service unto them which
by nature are no gods.

4:9 But now, after that ye have known God, or rather are known of God,
how turn ye again to the weak and beggarly elements, whereunto ye
desire again to be in bondage?  4:10 Ye observe days, and months, and
times, and years.

4:11 I am afraid of you, lest I have bestowed upon you labour in vain.

4:12 Brethren, I beseech you, be as I am; for I am as ye are: ye have
not injured me at all.

4:13 Ye know how through infirmity of the flesh I preached the gospel
unto you at the first.

4:14 And my temptation which was in my flesh ye despised not, nor
rejected; but received me as an angel of God, even as Christ Jesus.

4:15 Where is then the blessedness ye spake of? for I bear you record,
that, if it had been possible, ye would have plucked out your own
eyes, and have given them to me.

4:16 Am I therefore become your enemy, because I tell you the truth?
4:17 They zealously affect you, but not well; yea, they would exclude
you, that ye might affect them.

4:18 But it is good to be zealously affected always in a good thing,
and not only when I am present with you.

4:19 My little children, of whom I travail in birth again until Christ
be formed in you, 4:20 I desire to be present with you now, and to
change my voice; for I stand in doubt of you.

4:21 Tell me, ye that desire to be under the law, do ye not hear the
law?  4:22 For it is written, that Abraham had two sons, the one by a
bondmaid, the other by a freewoman.

4:23 But he who was of the bondwoman was born after the flesh; but he
of the freewoman was by promise.

4:24 Which things are an allegory: for these are the two covenants;
the one from the mount Sinai, which gendereth to bondage, which is
Agar.

4:25 For this Agar is mount Sinai in Arabia, and answereth to
Jerusalem which now is, and is in bondage with her children.

4:26 But Jerusalem which is above is free, which is the mother of us
all.

4:27 For it is written, Rejoice, thou barren that bearest not; break
forth and cry, thou that travailest not: for the desolate hath many
more children than she which hath an husband.

4:28 Now we, brethren, as Isaac was, are the children of promise.

4:29 But as then he that was born after the flesh persecuted him that
was born after the Spirit, even so it is now.

4:30 Nevertheless what saith the scripture? Cast out the bondwoman and
her son: for the son of the bondwoman shall not be heir with the son
of the freewoman.

4:31 So then, brethren, we are not children of the bondwoman, but of
the free.

5:1 Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us
free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.

5:2 Behold, I Paul say unto you, that if ye be circumcised, Christ
shall profit you nothing.

5:3 For I testify again to every man that is circumcised, that he is a
debtor to do the whole law.

5:4 Christ is become of no effect unto you, whosoever of you are
justified by the law; ye are fallen from grace.

5:5 For we through the Spirit wait for the hope of righteousness by
faith.

5:6 For in Jesus Christ neither circumcision availeth any thing, nor
uncircumcision; but faith which worketh by love.

5:7 Ye did run well; who did hinder you that ye should not obey the
truth?  5:8 This persuasion cometh not of him that calleth you.

5:9 A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump.

5:10 I have confidence in you through the Lord, that ye will be none
otherwise minded: but he that troubleth you shall bear his judgment,
whosoever he be.

5:11 And I, brethren, if I yet preach circumcision, why do I yet
suffer persecution? then is the offence of the cross ceased.

5:12 I would they were even cut off which trouble you.

5:13 For, brethren, ye have been called unto liberty; only use not
liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another.

5:14 For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this; Thou
shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.

5:15 But if ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye be not
consumed one of another.

5:16 This I say then, Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the
lust of the flesh.

5:17 For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against
the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other: so that ye
cannot do the things that ye would.

5:18 But if ye be led of the Spirit, ye are not under the law.

5:19 Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these;
Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, 5:20 Idolatry,
witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions,
heresies, 5:21 Envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such
like: of the which I tell you before, as I have also told you in time
past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of
God.

5:22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering,
gentleness, goodness, faith, 5:23 Meekness, temperance: against such
there is no law.

5:24 And they that are Christ's have crucified the flesh with the
affections and lusts.

5:25 If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit.

5:26 Let us not be desirous of vain glory, provoking one another,
envying one another.

6:1 Brethren, if a man be overtaken in a fault, ye which are
spiritual, restore such an one in the spirit of meekness; considering
thyself, lest thou also be tempted.

6:2 Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.

6:3 For if a man think himself to be something, when he is nothing, he
deceiveth himself.

6:4 But let every man prove his own work, and then shall he have
rejoicing in himself alone, and not in another.

6:5 For every man shall bear his own burden.

6:6 Let him that is taught in the word communicate unto him that
teacheth in all good things.

6:7 Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth,
that shall he also reap.

6:8 For he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap
corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap
life everlasting.

6:9 And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall
reap, if we faint not.

6:10 As we have therefore opportunity, let us do good unto all men,
especially unto them who are of the household of faith.

6:11 Ye see how large a letter I have written unto you with mine own
hand.

6:12 As many as desire to make a fair shew in the flesh, they
constrain you to be circumcised; only lest they should suffer
persecution for the cross of Christ.

6:13 For neither they themselves who are circumcised keep the law; but
desire to have you circumcised, that they may glory in your flesh.

6:14 But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord
Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the
world.

6:15 For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth any thing, nor
uncircumcision, but a new creature.

6:16 And as many as walk according to this rule, peace be on them, and
mercy, and upon the Israel of God.

6:17 From henceforth let no man trouble me: for I bear in my body the
marks of the Lord Jesus.

6:18 Brethren, the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit.

Amen.




The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Ephesians


1:1 Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God, to the
saints which are at Ephesus, and to the faithful in Christ Jesus:
1:2 Grace be to you, and peace, from God our Father, and from the Lord
Jesus Christ.

1:3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath
blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ:
1:4 According as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the
world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love:
1:5 Having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus
Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will, 1:6 To
the praise of the glory of his grace, wherein he hath made us accepted
in the beloved.

1:7 In whom we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of
sins, according to the riches of his grace; 1:8 Wherein he hath
abounded toward us in all wisdom and prudence; 1:9 Having made known
unto us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure which
he hath purposed in himself: 1:10 That in the dispensation of the
fulness of times he might gather together in one all things in Christ,
both which are in heaven, and which are on earth; even in him: 1:11 In
whom also we have obtained an inheritance, being predestinated
according to the purpose of him who worketh all things after the
counsel of his own will: 1:12 That we should be to the praise of his
glory, who first trusted in Christ.

1:13 In whom ye also trusted, after that ye heard the word of truth,
the gospel of your salvation: in whom also after that ye believed, ye
were sealed with that holy Spirit of promise, 1:14 Which is the
earnest of our inheritance until the redemption of the purchased
possession, unto the praise of his glory.

1:15 Wherefore I also, after I heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus,
and love unto all the saints, 1:16 Cease not to give thanks for you,
making mention of you in my prayers; 1:17 That the God of our Lord
Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give unto you the spirit of
wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him: 1:18 The eyes of your
understanding being enlightened; that ye may know what is the hope of
his calling, and what the riches of the glory of his inheritance in
the saints, 1:19 And what is the exceeding greatness of his power to
us-ward who believe, according to the working of his mighty power,
1:20 Which he wrought in Christ, when he raised him from the dead, and
set him at his own right hand in the heavenly places, 1:21 Far above
all principality, and power, and might, and dominion, and every name
that is named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to
come: 1:22 And hath put all things under his feet, and gave him to be
the head over all things to the church, 1:23 Which is his body, the
fulness of him that filleth all in all.

2:1 And you hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins;
2:2 Wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of this
world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit
that now worketh in the children of disobedience: 2:3 Among whom also
we all had our conversation in times past in the lusts of our flesh,
fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind; and were by
nature the children of wrath, even as others.

2:4 But God, who is rich in mercy, for his great love wherewith he
loved us, 2:5 Even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us
together with Christ, (by grace ye are saved;) 2:6 And hath raised us
up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ
Jesus: 2:7 That in the ages to come he might shew the exceeding riches
of his grace in his kindness toward us through Christ Jesus.

2:8 For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of
yourselves: it is the gift of God: 2:9 Not of works, lest any man
should boast.

2:10 For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good
works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them.

2:11 Wherefore remember, that ye being in time past Gentiles in the
flesh, who are called Uncircumcision by that which is called the
Circumcision in the flesh made by hands; 2:12 That at that time ye
were without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and
strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without
God in the world: 2:13 But now in Christ Jesus ye who sometimes were
far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ.

2:14 For he is our peace, who hath made both one, and hath broken down
the middle wall of partition between us; 2:15 Having abolished in his
flesh the enmity, even the law of commandments contained in
ordinances; for to make in himself of twain one new man, so making
peace; 2:16 And that he might reconcile both unto God in one body by
the cross, having slain the enmity thereby: 2:17 And came and preached
peace to you which were afar off, and to them that were nigh.

2:18 For through him we both have access by one Spirit unto the
Father.

2:19 Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but
fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God; 2:20 And
are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus
Christ himself being the chief corner stone; 2:21 In whom all the
building fitly framed together groweth unto an holy temple in the
Lord: 2:22 In whom ye also are builded together for an habitation of
God through the Spirit.

3:1 For this cause I Paul, the prisoner of Jesus Christ for you
Gentiles, 3:2 If ye have heard of the dispensation of the grace of God
which is given me to you-ward: 3:3 How that by revelation he made
known unto me the mystery; (as I wrote afore in few words, 3:4
Whereby, when ye read, ye may understand my knowledge in the mystery
of Christ) 3:5 Which in other ages was not made known unto the sons of
men, as it is now revealed unto his holy apostles and prophets by the
Spirit; 3:6 That the Gentiles should be fellowheirs, and of the same
body, and partakers of his promise in Christ by the gospel: 3:7
Whereof I was made a minister, according to the gift of the grace of
God given unto me by the effectual working of his power.

3:8 Unto me, who am less than the least of all saints, is this grace
given, that I should preach among the Gentiles the unsearchable riches
of Christ; 3:9 And to make all men see what is the fellowship of the
mystery, which from the beginning of the world hath been hid in God,
who created all things by Jesus Christ: 3:10 To the intent that now
unto the principalities and powers in heavenly places might be known
by the church the manifold wisdom of God, 3:11 According to the
eternal purpose which he purposed in Christ Jesus our Lord: 3:12 In
whom we have boldness and access with confidence by the faith of him.

3:13 Wherefore I desire that ye faint not at my tribulations for you,
which is your glory.

3:14 For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus
Christ, 3:15 Of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named,
3:16 That he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to
be strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man; 3:17 That
Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; that ye, being rooted and
grounded in love, 3:18 May be able to comprehend with all saints what
is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height; 3:19 And to know
the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled
with all the fulness of God.

3:20 Now unto him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all
that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us, 3:21
Unto him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus throughout all ages,
world without end. Amen.

4:1 I therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, beseech you that ye walk
worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called, 4:2 With all lowliness
and meekness, with longsuffering, forbearing one another in love; 4:3
Endeavouring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.

4:4 There is one body, and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one
hope of your calling; 4:5 One Lord, one faith, one baptism, 4:6 One
God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you
all.

4:7 But unto every one of us is given grace according to the measure
of the gift of Christ.

4:8 Wherefore he saith, When he ascended up on high, he led captivity
captive, and gave gifts unto men.

4:9 (Now that he ascended, what is it but that he also descended first
into the lower parts of the earth?  4:10 He that descended is the same
also that ascended up far above all heavens, that he might fill all
things.)  4:11 And he gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and
some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers; 4:12 For the
perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the
edifying of the body of Christ: 4:13 Till we all come in the unity of
the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man,
unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ: 4:14 That we
henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about
with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning
craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive; 4:15 But speaking the
truth in love, may grow up into him in all things, which is the head,
even Christ: 4:16 From whom the whole body fitly joined together and
compacted by that which every joint supplieth, according to the
effectual working in the measure of every part, maketh increase of the
body unto the edifying of itself in love.

4:17 This I say therefore, and testify in the Lord, that ye henceforth
walk not as other Gentiles walk, in the vanity of their mind, 4:18
Having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of
God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of
their heart: 4:19 Who being past feeling have given themselves over
unto lasciviousness, to work all uncleanness with greediness.

4:20 But ye have not so learned Christ; 4:21 If so be that ye have
heard him, and have been taught by him, as the truth is in Jesus: 4:22
That ye put off concerning the former conversation the old man, which
is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts; 4:23 And be renewed in
the spirit of your mind; 4:24 And that ye put on the new man, which
after God is created in righteousness and true holiness.

4:25 Wherefore putting away lying, speak every man truth with his
neighbour: for we are members one of another.

4:26 Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the sun go down upon your
wrath: 4:27 Neither give place to the devil.

4:28 Let him that stole steal no more: but rather let him labour,
working with his hands the thing which is good, that he may have to
give to him that needeth.

4:29 Let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, but that
which is good to the use of edifying, that it may minister grace unto
the hearers.

4:30 And grieve not the holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto
the day of redemption.

4:31 Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil
speaking, be put away from you, with all malice: 4:32 And be ye kind
one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for
Christ's sake hath forgiven you.

5:1 Be ye therefore followers of God, as dear children; 5:2 And walk
in love, as Christ also hath loved us, and hath given himself for us
an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweetsmelling savour.

5:3 But fornication, and all uncleanness, or covetousness, let it not
be once named among you, as becometh saints; 5:4 Neither filthiness,
nor foolish talking, nor jesting, which are not convenient: but rather
giving of thanks.

5:5 For this ye know, that no whoremonger, nor unclean person, nor
covetous man, who is an idolater, hath any inheritance in the kingdom
of Christ and of God.

5:6 Let no man deceive you with vain words: for because of these
things cometh the wrath of God upon the children of disobedience.

5:7 Be not ye therefore partakers with them.

5:8 For ye were sometimes darkness, but now are ye light in the Lord:
walk as children of light: 5:9 (For the fruit of the Spirit is in all
goodness and righteousness and truth;) 5:10 Proving what is acceptable
unto the Lord.

5:11 And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but
rather reprove them.

5:12 For it is a shame even to speak of those things which are done of
them in secret.

5:13 But all things that are reproved are made manifest by the light:
for whatsoever doth make manifest is light.

5:14 Wherefore he saith, Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the
dead, and Christ shall give thee light.

5:15 See then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise,
5:16 Redeeming the time, because the days are evil.

5:17 Wherefore be ye not unwise, but understanding what the will of
the Lord is.

5:18 And be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess; but be filled with
the Spirit; 5:19 Speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and
spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord;
5:20 Giving thanks always for all things unto God and the Father in
the name of our Lord Jesus Christ; 5:21 Submitting yourselves one to
another in the fear of God.

5:22 Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the
Lord.

5:23 For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the
head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body.

5:24 Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives
be to their own husbands in every thing.

5:25 Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church,
and gave himself for it; 5:26 That he might sanctify and cleanse it
with the washing of water by the word, 5:27 That he might present it
to himself a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such
thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish.

5:28 So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that
loveth his wife loveth himself.

5:29 For no man ever yet hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and
cherisheth it, even as the Lord the church: 5:30 For we are members of
his body, of his flesh, and of his bones.

5:31 For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall
be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh.

5:32 This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the
church.

5:33 Nevertheless let every one of you in particular so love his wife
even as himself; and the wife see that she reverence her husband.

6:1 Children, obey your parents in the Lord: for this is right.

6:2 Honour thy father and mother; which is the first commandment with
promise; 6:3 That it may be well with thee, and thou mayest live long
on the earth.

6:4 And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring
them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.

6:5 Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to
the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as
unto Christ; 6:6 Not with eyeservice, as menpleasers; but as the
servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart; 6:7 With
good will doing service, as to the Lord, and not to men: 6:8 Knowing
that whatsoever good thing any man doeth, the same shall he receive of
the Lord, whether he be bond or free.

6:9 And, ye masters, do the same things unto them, forbearing
threatening: knowing that your Master also is in heaven; neither is
there respect of persons with him.

6:10 Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord, and in the power of
his might.

6:11 Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand
against the wiles of the devil.

6:12 For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against
principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of
this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.

6:13 Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be
able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand.

6:14 Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and
having on the breastplate of righteousness; 6:15 And your feet shod
with the preparation of the gospel of peace; 6:16 Above all, taking
the shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the
fiery darts of the wicked.

6:17 And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit,
which is the word of God: 6:18 Praying always with all prayer and
supplication in the Spirit, and watching thereunto with all
perseverance and supplication for all saints; 6:19 And for me, that
utterance may be given unto me, that I may open my mouth boldly, to
make known the mystery of the gospel, 6:20 For which I am an
ambassador in bonds: that therein I may speak boldly, as I ought to
speak.

6:21 But that ye also may know my affairs, and how I do, Tychicus, a
beloved brother and faithful minister in the Lord, shall make known to
you all things: 6:22 Whom I have sent unto you for the same purpose,
that ye might know our affairs, and that he might comfort your hearts.

6:23 Peace be to the brethren, and love with faith, from God the
Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

6:24 Grace be with all them that love our Lord Jesus Christ in
sincerity.

Amen.




The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Philippians


1:1 Paul and Timotheus, the servants of Jesus Christ, to all the
saints in Christ Jesus which are at Philippi, with the bishops and
deacons: 1:2 Grace be unto you, and peace, from God our Father, and
from the Lord Jesus Christ.

1:3 I thank my God upon every remembrance of you, 1:4 Always in every
prayer of mine for you all making request with joy, 1:5 For your
fellowship in the gospel from the first day until now; 1:6 Being
confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in
you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ: 1:7 Even as it is
meet for me to think this of you all, because I have you in my heart;
inasmuch as both in my bonds, and in the defence and confirmation of
the gospel, ye all are partakers of my grace.

1:8 For God is my record, how greatly I long after you all in the
bowels of Jesus Christ.

1:9 And this I pray, that your love may abound yet more and more in
knowledge and in all judgment; 1:10 That ye may approve things that
are excellent; that ye may be sincere and without offence till the day
of Christ.

1:11 Being filled with the fruits of righteousness, which are by Jesus
Christ, unto the glory and praise of God.

1:12 But I would ye should understand, brethren, that the things which
happened unto me have fallen out rather unto the furtherance of the
gospel; 1:13 So that my bonds in Christ are manifest in all the
palace, and in all other places; 1:14 And many of the brethren in the
Lord, waxing confident by my bonds, are much more bold to speak the
word without fear.

1:15 Some indeed preach Christ even of envy and strife; and some also
of good will: 1:16 The one preach Christ of contention, not sincerely,
supposing to add affliction to my bonds: 1:17 But the other of love,
knowing that I am set for the defence of the gospel.

1:18 What then? notwithstanding, every way, whether in pretence, or in
truth, Christ is preached; and I therein do rejoice, yea, and will
rejoice.

1:19 For I know that this shall turn to my salvation through your
prayer, and the supply of the Spirit of Jesus Christ, 1:20 According
to my earnest expectation and my hope, that in nothing I shall be
ashamed, but that with all boldness, as always, so now also Christ
shall be magnified in my body, whether it be by life, or by death.

1:21 For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.

1:22 But if I live in the flesh, this is the fruit of my labour: yet
what I shall choose I wot not.

1:23 For I am in a strait betwixt two, having a desire to depart, and
to be with Christ; which is far better: 1:24 Nevertheless to abide in
the flesh is more needful for you.

1:25 And having this confidence, I know that I shall abide and
continue with you all for your furtherance and joy of faith; 1:26 That
your rejoicing may be more abundant in Jesus Christ for me by my
coming to you again.

1:27 Only let your conversation be as it becometh the gospel of
Christ: that whether I come and see you, or else be absent, I may hear
of your affairs, that ye stand fast in one spirit, with one mind
striving together for the faith of the gospel; 1:28 And in nothing
terrified by your adversaries: which is to them an evident token of
perdition, but to you of salvation, and that of God.

1:29 For unto you it is given in the behalf of Christ, not only to
believe on him, but also to suffer for his sake; 1:30 Having the same
conflict which ye saw in me, and now hear to be in me.

2:1 If there be therefore any consolation in Christ, if any comfort of
love, if any fellowship of the Spirit, if any bowels and mercies, 2:2
Fulfil ye my joy, that ye be likeminded, having the same love, being
of one accord, of one mind.

2:3 Let nothing be done through strife or vainglory; but in lowliness
of mind let each esteem other better than themselves.

2:4 Look not every man on his own things, but every man also on the
things of others.

2:5 Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: 2:6 Who,
being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God:
2:7 But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a
servant, and was made in the likeness of men: 2:8 And being found in
fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death,
even the death of the cross.

2:9 Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name
which is above every name: 2:10 That at the name of Jesus every knee
should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under
the earth; 2:11 And that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ
is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

2:12 Wherefore, my beloved, as ye have always obeyed, not as in my
presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own
salvation with fear and trembling.

2:13 For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his
good pleasure.

2:14 Do all things without murmurings and disputings: 2:15 That ye may
be blameless and harmless, the sons of God, without rebuke, in the
midst of a crooked and perverse nation, among whom ye shine as lights
in the world; 2:16 Holding forth the word of life; that I may rejoice
in the day of Christ, that I have not run in vain, neither laboured in
vain.

2:17 Yea, and if I be offered upon the sacrifice and service of your
faith, I joy, and rejoice with you all.

2:18 For the same cause also do ye joy, and rejoice with me.

2:19 But I trust in the Lord Jesus to send Timotheus shortly unto you,
that I also may be of good comfort, when I know your state.

2:20 For I have no man likeminded, who will naturally care for your
state.

2:21 For all seek their own, not the things which are Jesus Christ's.

2:22 But ye know the proof of him, that, as a son with the father, he
hath served with me in the gospel.

2:23 Him therefore I hope to send presently, so soon as I shall see
how it will go with me.

2:24 But I trust in the Lord that I also myself shall come shortly.

2:25 Yet I supposed it necessary to send to you Epaphroditus, my
brother, and companion in labour, and fellowsoldier, but your
messenger, and he that ministered to my wants.

2:26 For he longed after you all, and was full of heaviness, because
that ye had heard that he had been sick.

2:27 For indeed he was sick nigh unto death: but God had mercy on him;
and not on him only, but on me also, lest I should have sorrow upon
sorrow.

2:28 I sent him therefore the more carefully, that, when ye see him
again, ye may rejoice, and that I may be the less sorrowful.

2:29 Receive him therefore in the Lord with all gladness; and hold
such in reputation: 2:30 Because for the work of Christ he was nigh
unto death, not regarding his life, to supply your lack of service
toward me.

3:1 Finally, my brethren, rejoice in the Lord. To write the same
things to you, to me indeed is not grievous, but for you it is safe.

3:2 Beware of dogs, beware of evil workers, beware of the concision.

3:3 For we are the circumcision, which worship God in the spirit, and
rejoice in Christ Jesus, and have no confidence in the flesh.

3:4 Though I might also have confidence in the flesh. If any other man
thinketh that he hath whereof he might trust in the flesh, I more: 3:5
Circumcised the eighth day, of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of
Benjamin, an Hebrew of the Hebrews; as touching the law, a Pharisee;
3:6 Concerning zeal, persecuting the church; touching the
righteousness which is in the law, blameless.

3:7 But what things were gain to me, those I counted loss for Christ.

3:8 Yea doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency
of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the
loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ,
3:9 And be found in him, not having mine own righteousness, which is
of the law, but that which is through the faith of Christ, the
righteousness which is of God by faith: 3:10 That I may know him, and
the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings,
being made conformable unto his death; 3:11 If by any means I might
attain unto the resurrection of the dead.

3:12 Not as though I had already attained, either were already
perfect: but I follow after, if that I may apprehend that for which
also I am apprehended of Christ Jesus.

3:13 Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one
thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching
forth unto those things which are before, 3:14 I press toward the mark
for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.

3:15 Let us therefore, as many as be perfect, be thus minded: and if
in any thing ye be otherwise minded, God shall reveal even this unto
you.

3:16 Nevertheless, whereto we have already attained, let us walk by
the same rule, let us mind the same thing.

3:17 Brethren, be followers together of me, and mark them which walk
so as ye have us for an ensample.

3:18 (For many walk, of whom I have told you often, and now tell you
even weeping, that they are the enemies of the cross of Christ: 3:19
Whose end is destruction, whose God is their belly, and whose glory is
in their shame, who mind earthly things.)  3:20 For our conversation
is in heaven; from whence also we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus
Christ: 3:21 Who shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned
like unto his glorious body, according to the working whereby he is
able even to subdue all things unto himself.

4:1 Therefore, my brethren dearly beloved and longed for, my joy and
crown, so stand fast in the Lord, my dearly beloved.

4:2 I beseech Euodias, and beseech Syntyche, that they be of the same
mind in the Lord.

4:3 And I intreat thee also, true yokefellow, help those women which
laboured with me in the gospel, with Clement also, and with other my
fellowlabourers, whose names are in the book of life.

4:4 Rejoice in the Lord alway: and again I say, Rejoice.

4:5 Let your moderation be known unto all men. The Lord is at hand.

4:6 Be careful for nothing; but in every thing by prayer and
supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto
God.

4:7 And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep
your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.

4:8 Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things
are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure,
whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if
there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these
things.

4:9 Those things, which ye have both learned, and received, and heard,
and seen in me, do: and the God of peace shall be with you.

4:10 But I rejoiced in the Lord greatly, that now at the last your
care of me hath flourished again; wherein ye were also careful, but ye
lacked opportunity.

4:11 Not that I speak in respect of want: for I have learned, in
whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content.

4:12 I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound: every
where and in all things I am instructed both to be full and to be
hungry, both to abound and to suffer need.

4:13 I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.

4:14 Notwithstanding ye have well done, that ye did communicate with
my affliction.

4:15 Now ye Philippians know also, that in the beginning of the
gospel, when I departed from Macedonia, no church communicated with me
as concerning giving and receiving, but ye only.

4:16 For even in Thessalonica ye sent once and again unto my
necessity.

4:17 Not because I desire a gift: but I desire fruit that may abound
to your account.

4:18 But I have all, and abound: I am full, having received of
Epaphroditus the things which were sent from you, an odour of a sweet
smell, a sacrifice acceptable, wellpleasing to God.

4:19 But my God shall supply all your need according to his riches in
glory by Christ Jesus.

4:20 Now unto God and our Father be glory for ever and ever. Amen.

4:21 Salute every saint in Christ Jesus. The brethren which are with
me greet you.

4:22 All the saints salute you, chiefly they that are of Caesar's
household.

4:23 The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen.




The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Colossians


1:1  Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God,
and Timotheus our brother, 1:2  To the saints and faithful brethren
in Christ which are at Colosse: Grace be unto you, and peace,
from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

1:3  We give thanks to God and the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, praying
always for you,
1:4  Since we heard of your faith in Christ Jesus, and of the love which ye
have to all the saints,
1:5  For the hope which is laid up for you in heaven, whereof ye heard
before in the word of the truth of the gospel;
1:6  Which is come unto you, as it is in all the world; and bringeth forth
fruit, as it doth also in you, since the day ye heard of it, and knew the
grace of God in truth:
1:7  As ye also learned of Epaphras our dear fellowservant, who is for you
a faithful minister of Christ;
1:8  Who also declared unto us your love in the Spirit.

1:9  For this cause we also, since the day we heard it, do not cease to
pray for you, and to desire that ye might be filled with the knowledge of his
will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding;
1:10  That ye might walk worthy of the Lord unto all pleasing, being
fruitful in every good work, and increasing in the knowledge of God;
1:11  Strengthened with all might, according to his glorious power, unto
all patience and longsuffering with joyfulness;
1:12  Giving thanks unto the Father, which hath made us meet to be
partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light:
1:13  Who hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated
us into the kingdom of his dear Son:
1:14  In whom we have redemption through his blood, even the forgiveness of
sins:
1:15  Who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every
creature:
1:16  For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are
in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or
principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him:
1:17  And he is before all things, and by him all things consist.

1:18  And he is the head of the body, the church: who is the beginning, the
firstborn from the dead; that in all things he might have the preeminence.

1:19  For it pleased the Father that in him should all fulness dwell;
1:20  And, having made peace through the blood of his cross, by him to
reconcile all things unto himself; by him, I say, whether they be things in
earth, or things in heaven.

1:21  And you, that were sometime alienated and enemies in your mind by
wicked works, yet now hath he reconciled
1:22  In the body of his flesh through death, to present you holy and
unblameable and unreproveable in his sight:
1:23  If ye continue in the faith grounded and settled, and be not moved
away from the hope of the gospel, which ye have heard, and which was preached
to every creature which is under heaven; whereof I Paul am made a minister;
1:24  Who now rejoice in my sufferings for you, and fill up that which is
behind of the afflictions of Christ in my flesh for his body's sake, which is
the church:
1:25  Whereof I am made a minister, according to the dispensation of God
which is given to me for you, to fulfil the word of God;
1:26  Even the mystery which hath been hid from ages and from generations,
but now is made manifest to his saints:
1:27  To whom God would make known what is the riches of the glory of this
mystery among the Gentiles; which is Christ in you, the hope of glory:
1:28  Whom we preach, warning every man, and teaching every man in all
wisdom; that we may present every man perfect in Christ Jesus:
1:29  Whereunto I also labour, striving according to his working, which
worketh in me mightily.

2:1  For I would that ye knew what great conflict I have for you, and for
them at Laodicea, and for as many as have not seen my face in the flesh;
2:2  That their hearts might be comforted, being knit together in love, and
unto all riches of the full assurance of understanding, to the
acknowledgement of the mystery of God, and of the Father, and of Christ;
2:3  In whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.

2:4  And this I say, lest any man should beguile you with enticing words.

2:5  For though I be absent in the flesh, yet am I with you in the spirit,
joying and beholding your order, and the stedfastness of your faith in
Christ.

2:6  As ye have therefore received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk ye in
him:
2:7  Rooted and built up in him, and stablished in the faith, as ye have
been taught, abounding therein with thanksgiving.

2:8  Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit,
after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after
Christ.

2:9  For in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily.

2:10  And ye are complete in him, which is the head of all principality and
power:
2:11  In whom also ye are circumcised with the circumcision made without
hands, in putting off the body of the sins of the flesh by the circumcision
of Christ:
2:12  Buried with him in baptism, wherein also ye are risen with him
through the faith of the operation of God, who hath raised him from the dead.

2:13  And you, being dead in your sins and the uncircumcision of your
flesh, hath he quickened together with him, having forgiven you all
trespasses;
2:14  Blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, which
was contrary to us, and took it out of the way, nailing it to his cross;
2:15  And having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a shew of them
openly, triumphing over them in it.

2:16  Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of
an holyday, or of the new moon, or of the sabbath days:
2:17  Which are a shadow of things to come; but the body is of Christ.

2:18  Let no man beguile you of your reward in a voluntary humility and
worshipping of angels, intruding into those things which he hath not seen,
vainly puffed up by his fleshly mind,
2:19  And not holding the Head, from which all the body by joints and bands
having nourishment ministered, and knit together, increaseth with the
increase of God.

2:20  Wherefore if ye be dead with Christ from the rudiments of the world,
why, as though living in the world, are ye subject to ordinances,
2:21  (Touch not; taste not; handle not;
2:22  Which all are to perish with the using;) after the commandments and
doctrines of men?
2:23  Which things have indeed a shew of wisdom in will worship, and
humility, and neglecting of the body: not in any honour to the satisfying
of the flesh.

3:1  If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above,
where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God.

3:2  Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth.

3:3  For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.

3:4  When Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then shall ye also appear
with him in glory.

3:5  Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth; fornication,
uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence, and covetousness,
which is idolatry:
3:6  For which things' sake the wrath of God cometh on the children of
disobedience:
3:7  In the which ye also walked some time, when ye lived in them.

3:8  But now ye also put off all these; anger, wrath, malice, blasphemy,
filthy communication out of your mouth.

3:9  Lie not one to another, seeing that ye have put off the old man with
his deeds;
3:10  And have put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the
image of him that created him:
3:11  Where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor
uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ is all, and in
all.

3:12  Put on therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, bowels of
mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, longsuffering;
3:13  Forbearing one another, and forgiving one another, if any man have a
quarrel against any: even as Christ forgave you, so also do ye.

3:14  And above all these things put on charity, which is the bond of
perfectness.

3:15  And let the peace of God rule in your hearts, to the which also ye
are called in one body; and be ye thankful.

3:16  Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom; teaching
and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing
with grace in your hearts to the Lord.

3:17  And whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord
Jesus, giving thanks to God and the Father by him.

3:18  Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as it is fit in the
Lord.

3:19  Husbands, love your wives, and be not bitter against them.

3:20  Children, obey your parents in all things: for this is well pleasing
unto the Lord.

3:21  Fathers, provoke not your children to anger, lest they be
discouraged.

3:22  Servants, obey in all things your masters according to the flesh; not
with eyeservice, as menpleasers; but in singleness of heart, fearing God;
3:23  And whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto
men;
3:24  Knowing that of the Lord ye shall receive the reward of the
inheritance: for ye serve the Lord Christ.

3:25  But he that doeth wrong shall receive for the wrong which he hath
done: and there is no respect of persons.

4:1  Masters, give unto your servants that which is just and equal; knowing
that ye also have a Master in heaven.

4:2  Continue in prayer, and watch in the same with thanksgiving;
4:3  Withal praying also for us, that God would open unto us a door of
utterance, to speak the mystery of Christ, for which I am also in bonds:
4:4  That I may make it manifest, as I ought to speak.

4:5  Walk in wisdom toward them that are without, redeeming the time.

4:6  Let your speech be alway with grace, seasoned with salt, that ye may
know how ye ought to answer every man.

4:7  All my state shall Tychicus declare unto you, who is a beloved
brother, and a faithful minister and fellowservant in the Lord:
4:8  Whom I have sent unto you for the same purpose, that he might know
your estate, and comfort your hearts;
4:9  With Onesimus, a faithful and beloved brother, who is one of you. They
shall make known unto you all things which are done here.

4:10  Aristarchus my fellowprisoner saluteth you, and Marcus, sister's son
to Barnabas, (touching whom ye received commandments: if he come unto you,
receive him;)
4:11  And Jesus, which is called Justus, who are of the circumcision. These
only are my fellowworkers unto the kingdom of God, which have been a comfort
unto me.

4:12  Epaphras, who is one of you, a servant of Christ, saluteth you,
always labouring fervently for you in prayers, that ye may stand perfect and
complete in all the will of God.

4:13  For I bear him record, that he hath a great zeal for you, and them
that are in Laodicea, and them in Hierapolis.

4:14  Luke, the beloved physician, and Demas, greet you.

4:15  Salute the brethren which are in Laodicea, and Nymphas, and the
church which is in his house.

4:16  And when this epistle is read among you, cause that it be read also
in the church of the Laodiceans; and that ye likewise read the epistle from
Laodicea.

4:17  And say to Archippus, Take heed to the ministry which thou hast
received in the Lord, that thou fulfil it.

4:18  The salutation by the hand of me Paul. Remember my bonds. Grace be
with you. Amen.




The First Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Thessalonians


1:1 Paul, and Silvanus, and Timotheus, unto the church of the
Thessalonians which is in God the Father and in the Lord Jesus Christ:
Grace be unto you, and peace, from God our Father, and the Lord Jesus
Christ.

1:2 We give thanks to God always for you all, making mention of you in
our prayers; 1:3 Remembering without ceasing your work of faith, and
labour of love, and patience of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ, in the
sight of God and our Father; 1:4 Knowing, brethren beloved, your
election of God.

1:5 For our gospel came not unto you in word only, but also in power,
and in the Holy Ghost, and in much assurance; as ye know what manner
of men we were among you for your sake.

1:6 And ye became followers of us, and of the Lord, having received
the word in much affliction, with joy of the Holy Ghost.

1:7 So that ye were ensamples to all that believe in Macedonia and
Achaia.

1:8 For from you sounded out the word of the Lord not only in
Macedonia and Achaia, but also in every place your faith to God-ward
is spread abroad; so that we need not to speak any thing.

1:9 For they themselves shew of us what manner of entering in we had
unto you, and how ye turned to God from idols to serve the living and
true God; 1:10 And to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised
from the dead, even Jesus, which delivered us from the wrath to come.

2:1 For yourselves, brethren, know our entrance in unto you, that it
was not in vain: 2:2 But even after that we had suffered before, and
were shamefully entreated, as ye know, at Philippi, we were bold in
our God to speak unto you the gospel of God with much contention.

2:3 For our exhortation was not of deceit, nor of uncleanness, nor in
guile: 2:4 But as we were allowed of God to be put in trust with the
gospel, even so we speak; not as pleasing men, but God, which trieth
our hearts.

2:5 For neither at any time used we flattering words, as ye know, nor
a cloke of covetousness; God is witness: 2:6 Nor of men sought we
glory, neither of you, nor yet of others, when we might have been
burdensome, as the apostles of Christ.

2:7 But we were gentle among you, even as a nurse cherisheth her
children: 2:8 So being affectionately desirous of you, we were willing
to have imparted unto you, not the gospel of God only, but also our
own souls, because ye were dear unto us.

2:9 For ye remember, brethren, our labour and travail: for labouring
night and day, because we would not be chargeable unto any of you, we
preached unto you the gospel of God.

2:10 Ye are witnesses, and God also, how holily and justly and
unblameably we behaved ourselves among you that believe: 2:11 As ye
know how we exhorted and comforted and charged every one of you, as a
father doth his children, 2:12 That ye would walk worthy of God, who
hath called you unto his kingdom and glory.

2:13 For this cause also thank we God without ceasing, because, when
ye received the word of God which ye heard of us, ye received it not
as the word of men, but as it is in truth, the word of God, which
effectually worketh also in you that believe.

2:14 For ye, brethren, became followers of the churches of God which
in Judaea are in Christ Jesus: for ye also have suffered like things
of your own countrymen, even as they have of the Jews: 2:15 Who both
killed the Lord Jesus, and their own prophets, and have persecuted us;
and they please not God, and are contrary to all men: 2:16 Forbidding
us to speak to the Gentiles that they might be saved, to fill up their
sins alway: for the wrath is come upon them to the uttermost.

2:17 But we, brethren, being taken from you for a short time in
presence, not in heart, endeavoured the more abundantly to see your
face with great desire.

2:18 Wherefore we would have come unto you, even I Paul, once and
again; but Satan hindered us.

2:19 For what is our hope, or joy, or crown of rejoicing? Are not even
ye in the presence of our Lord Jesus Christ at his coming?  2:20 For
ye are our glory and joy.

3:1 Wherefore when we could no longer forbear, we thought it good to
be left at Athens alone; 3:2 And sent Timotheus, our brother, and
minister of God, and our fellowlabourer in the gospel of Christ, to
establish you, and to comfort you concerning your faith: 3:3 That no
man should be moved by these afflictions: for yourselves know that we
are appointed thereunto.

3:4 For verily, when we were with you, we told you before that we
should suffer tribulation; even as it came to pass, and ye know.

3:5 For this cause, when I could no longer forbear, I sent to know
your faith, lest by some means the tempter have tempted you, and our
labour be in vain.

3:6 But now when Timotheus came from you unto us, and brought us good
tidings of your faith and charity, and that ye have good remembrance
of us always, desiring greatly to see us, as we also to see you: 3:7
Therefore, brethren, we were comforted over you in all our affliction
and distress by your faith: 3:8 For now we live, if ye stand fast in
the Lord.

3:9 For what thanks can we render to God again for you, for all the
joy wherewith we joy for your sakes before our God; 3:10 Night and day
praying exceedingly that we might see your face, and might perfect
that which is lacking in your faith?  3:11 Now God himself and our
Father, and our Lord Jesus Christ, direct our way unto you.

3:12 And the Lord make you to increase and abound in love one toward
another, and toward all men, even as we do toward you: 3:13 To the end
he may stablish your hearts unblameable in holiness before God, even
our Father, at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ with all his
saints.

4:1 Furthermore then we beseech you, brethren, and exhort you by the
Lord Jesus, that as ye have received of us how ye ought to walk and to
please God, so ye would abound more and more.

4:2 For ye know what commandments we gave you by the Lord Jesus.

4:3 For this is the will of God, even your sanctification, that ye
should abstain from fornication: 4:4 That every one of you should know
how to possess his vessel in sanctification and honour; 4:5 Not in the
lust of concupiscence, even as the Gentiles which know not God: 4:6
That no man go beyond and defraud his brother in any matter: because
that the Lord is the avenger of all such, as we also have forewarned
you and testified.

4:7 For God hath not called us unto uncleanness, but unto holiness.

4:8 He therefore that despiseth, despiseth not man, but God, who hath
also given unto us his holy Spirit.

4:9 But as touching brotherly love ye need not that I write unto you:
for ye yourselves are taught of God to love one another.

4:10 And indeed ye do it toward all the brethren which are in all
Macedonia: but we beseech you, brethren, that ye increase more and
more; 4:11 And that ye study to be quiet, and to do your own business,
and to work with your own hands, as we commanded you; 4:12 That ye may
walk honestly toward them that are without, and that ye may have lack
of nothing.

4:13 But I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning
them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not, even as others which have
no hope.

4:14 For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them
also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him.

4:15 For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord, that we which
are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord shall not prevent
them which are asleep.

4:16 For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with
the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in
Christ shall rise first: 4:17 Then we which are alive and remain shall
be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the
air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.

4:18 Wherefore comfort one another with these words.

5:1 But of the times and the seasons, brethren, ye have no need that I
write unto you.

5:2 For yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so cometh
as a thief in the night.

5:3 For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction
cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall
not escape.

5:4 But ye, brethren, are not in darkness, that that day should
overtake you as a thief.

5:5 Ye are all the children of light, and the children of the day: we
are not of the night, nor of darkness.

5:6 Therefore let us not sleep, as do others; but let us watch and be
sober.

5:7 For they that sleep sleep in the night; and they that be drunken
are drunken in the night.

5:8 But let us, who are of the day, be sober, putting on the
breastplate of faith and love; and for an helmet, the hope of
salvation.

5:9 For God hath not appointed us to wrath, but to obtain salvation by
our Lord Jesus Christ, 5:10 Who died for us, that, whether we wake or
sleep, we should live together with him.

5:11 Wherefore comfort yourselves together, and edify one another,
even as also ye do.

5:12 And we beseech you, brethren, to know them which labour among
you, and are over you in the Lord, and admonish you; 5:13 And to
esteem them very highly in love for their work's sake. And be at peace
among yourselves.

5:14 Now we exhort you, brethren, warn them that are unruly, comfort
the feebleminded, support the weak, be patient toward all men.

5:15 See that none render evil for evil unto any man; but ever follow
that which is good, both among yourselves, and to all men.

5:16 Rejoice evermore.

5:17 Pray without ceasing.

5:18 In every thing give thanks: for this is the will of God in Christ
Jesus concerning you.

5:19 Quench not the Spirit.

5:20 Despise not prophesyings.

5:21 Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.

5:22 Abstain from all appearance of evil.

5:23 And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly; and I pray God
your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the
coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.

5:24 Faithful is he that calleth you, who also will do it.

5:25 Brethren, pray for us.

5:26 Greet all the brethren with an holy kiss.

5:27 I charge you by the Lord that this epistle be read unto all the
holy brethren.

5:28 The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you. Amen.




The Second Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Thessalonians


1:1 Paul, and Silvanus, and Timotheus, unto the church of the
Thessalonians in God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ: 1:2 Grace
unto you, and peace, from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

1:3 We are bound to thank God always for you, brethren, as it is meet,
because that your faith groweth exceedingly, and the charity of every
one of you all toward each other aboundeth; 1:4 So that we ourselves
glory in you in the churches of God for your patience and faith in all
your persecutions and tribulations that ye endure: 1:5 Which is a
manifest token of the righteous judgment of God, that ye may be
counted worthy of the kingdom of God, for which ye also suffer: 1:6
Seeing it is a righteous thing with God to recompense tribulation to
them that trouble you; 1:7 And to you who are troubled rest with us,
when the Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven with his mighty
angels, 1:8 In flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know not
God, and that obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ: 1:9 Who
shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of
the Lord, and from the glory of his power; 1:10 When he shall come to
be glorified in his saints, and to be admired in all them that believe
(because our testimony among you was believed) in that day.

1:11 Wherefore also we pray always for you, that our God would count
you worthy of this calling, and fulfil all the good pleasure of his
goodness, and the work of faith with power: 1:12 That the name of our
Lord Jesus Christ may be glorified in you, and ye in him, according to
the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ.

2:1 Now we beseech you, brethren, by the coming of our Lord Jesus
Christ, and by our gathering together unto him, 2:2 That ye be not
soon shaken in mind, or be troubled, neither by spirit, nor by word,
nor by letter as from us, as that the day of Christ is at hand.

2:3 Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come,
except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be
revealed, the son of perdition; 2:4 Who opposeth and exalteth himself
above all that is called God, or that is worshipped; so that he as God
sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God.

2:5 Remember ye not, that, when I was yet with you, I told you these
things?  2:6 And now ye know what withholdeth that he might be
revealed in his time.

2:7 For the mystery of iniquity doth already work: only he who now
letteth will let, until he be taken out of the way.

2:8 And then shall that Wicked be revealed, whom the Lord shall
consume with the spirit of his mouth, and shall destroy with the
brightness of his coming: 2:9 Even him, whose coming is after the
working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders, 2:10 And
with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish;
because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be
saved.

2:11 And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they
should believe a lie: 2:12 That they all might be damned who believed
not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness.

2:13 But we are bound to give thanks alway to God for you, brethren
beloved of the Lord, because God hath from the beginning chosen you to
salvation through sanctification of the Spirit and belief of the
truth: 2:14 Whereunto he called you by our gospel, to the obtaining of
the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ.

2:15 Therefore, brethren, stand fast, and hold the traditions which ye
have been taught, whether by word, or our epistle.

2:16 Now our Lord Jesus Christ himself, and God, even our Father,
which hath loved us, and hath given us everlasting consolation and
good hope through grace, 2:17 Comfort your hearts, and stablish you in
every good word and work.

3:1 Finally, brethren, pray for us, that the word of the Lord may have
free course, and be glorified, even as it is with you: 3:2 And that we
may be delivered from unreasonable and wicked men: for all men have
not faith.

3:3 But the Lord is faithful, who shall stablish you, and keep you
from evil.

3:4 And we have confidence in the Lord touching you, that ye both do
and will do the things which we command you.

3:5 And the Lord direct your hearts into the love of God, and into the
patient waiting for Christ.

3:6 Now we command you, brethren, in the name of our Lord Jesus
Christ, that ye withdraw yourselves from every brother that walketh
disorderly, and not after the tradition which he received of us.

3:7 For yourselves know how ye ought to follow us: for we behaved not
ourselves disorderly among you; 3:8 Neither did we eat any man's bread
for nought; but wrought with labour and travail night and day, that we
might not be chargeable to any of you: 3:9 Not because we have not
power, but to make ourselves an ensample unto you to follow us.

3:10 For even when we were with you, this we commanded you, that if
any would not work, neither should he eat.

3:11 For we hear that there are some which walk among you disorderly,
working not at all, but are busybodies.

3:12 Now them that are such we command and exhort by our Lord Jesus
Christ, that with quietness they work, and eat their own bread.

3:13 But ye, brethren, be not weary in well doing.

3:14 And if any man obey not our word by this epistle, note that man,
and have no company with him, that he may be ashamed.

3:15 Yet count him not as an enemy, but admonish him as a brother.

3:16 Now the Lord of peace himself give you peace always by all means.
The Lord be with you all.

3:17 The salutation of Paul with mine own hand, which is the token in
every epistle: so I write.

3:18 The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen.




The First Epistle of Paul the Apostle to Timothy


1:1 Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ by the commandment of God our
Saviour, and Lord Jesus Christ, which is our hope; 1:2 Unto Timothy,
my own son in the faith: Grace, mercy, and peace, from God our Father
and Jesus Christ our Lord.

1:3 As I besought thee to abide still at Ephesus, when I went into
Macedonia, that thou mightest charge some that they teach no other
doctrine, 1:4 Neither give heed to fables and endless genealogies,
which minister questions, rather than godly edifying which is in
faith: so do.

1:5 Now the end of the commandment is charity out of a pure heart, and
of a good conscience, and of faith unfeigned: 1:6 From which some
having swerved have turned aside unto vain jangling; 1:7 Desiring to
be teachers of the law; understanding neither what they say, nor
whereof they affirm.

1:8 But we know that the law is good, if a man use it lawfully; 1:9
Knowing this, that the law is not made for a righteous man, but for
the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and for sinners, for
unholy and profane, for murderers of fathers and murderers of mothers,
for manslayers, 1:10 For whoremongers, for them that defile themselves
with mankind, for menstealers, for liars, for perjured persons, and if
there be any other thing that is contrary to sound doctrine; 1:11
According to the glorious gospel of the blessed God, which was
committed to my trust.

1:12 And I thank Christ Jesus our Lord, who hath enabled me, for that
he counted me faithful, putting me into the ministry; 1:13 Who was
before a blasphemer, and a persecutor, and injurious: but I obtained
mercy, because I did it ignorantly in unbelief.

1:14 And the grace of our Lord was exceeding abundant with faith and
love which is in Christ Jesus.

1:15 This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that
Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief.

1:16 Howbeit for this cause I obtained mercy, that in me first Jesus
Christ might shew forth all longsuffering, for a pattern to them which
should hereafter believe on him to life everlasting.

1:17 Now unto the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only wise
God, be honour and glory for ever and ever. Amen.

1:18 This charge I commit unto thee, son Timothy, according to the
prophecies which went before on thee, that thou by them mightest war a
good warfare; 1:19 Holding faith, and a good conscience; which some
having put away concerning faith have made shipwreck: 1:20 Of whom is
Hymenaeus and Alexander; whom I have delivered unto Satan, that they
may learn not to blaspheme.

2:1 I exhort therefore, that, first of all, supplications, prayers,
intercessions, and giving of thanks, be made for all men; 2:2 For
kings, and for all that are in authority; that we may lead a quiet and
peaceable life in all godliness and honesty.

2:3 For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Saviour;
2:4 Who will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge
of the truth.

2:5 For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the
man Christ Jesus; 2:6 Who gave himself a ransom for all, to be
testified in due time.

2:7 Whereunto I am ordained a preacher, and an apostle, (I speak the
truth in Christ, and lie not;) a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and
verity.

2:8 I will therefore that men pray every where, lifting up holy hands,
without wrath and doubting.

2:9 In like manner also, that women adorn themselves in modest
apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety; not with broided hair, or
gold, or pearls, or costly array; 2:10 But (which becometh women
professing godliness) with good works.

2:11 Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection.

2:12 But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over
the man, but to be in silence.

2:13 For Adam was first formed, then Eve.

2:14 And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in
the transgression.

2:15 Notwithstanding she shall be saved in childbearing, if they
continue in faith and charity and holiness with sobriety.

3:1 This is a true saying, If a man desire the office of a bishop, he
desireth a good work.

3:2 A bishop then must be blameless, the husband of one wife,
vigilant, sober, of good behaviour, given to hospitality, apt to
teach; 3:3 Not given to wine, no striker, not greedy of filthy lucre;
but patient, not a brawler, not covetous; 3:4 One that ruleth well his
own house, having his children in subjection with all gravity; 3:5
(For if a man know not how to rule his own house, how shall he take
care of the church of God?)  3:6 Not a novice, lest being lifted up
with pride he fall into the condemnation of the devil.

3:7 Moreover he must have a good report of them which are without;
lest he fall into reproach and the snare of the devil.

3:8 Likewise must the deacons be grave, not doubletongued, not given
to much wine, not greedy of filthy lucre; 3:9 Holding the mystery of
the faith in a pure conscience.

3:10 And let these also first be proved; then let them use the office
of a deacon, being found blameless.

3:11 Even so must their wives be grave, not slanderers, sober,
faithful in all things.

3:12 Let the deacons be the husbands of one wife, ruling their
children and their own houses well.

3:13 For they that have used the office of a deacon well purchase to
themselves a good degree, and great boldness in the faith which is in
Christ Jesus.

3:14 These things write I unto thee, hoping to come unto thee shortly:
3:15 But if I tarry long, that thou mayest know how thou oughtest to
behave thyself in the house of God, which is the church of the living
God, the pillar and ground of the truth.

3:16 And without controversy great is the mystery of godliness: God
was manifest in the flesh, justified in the Spirit, seen of angels,
preached unto the Gentiles, believed on in the world, received up into
glory.

4:1 Now the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some
shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and
doctrines of devils; 4:2 Speaking lies in hypocrisy; having their
conscience seared with a hot iron; 4:3 Forbidding to marry, and
commanding to abstain from meats, which God hath created to be
received with thanksgiving of them which believe and know the truth.

4:4 For every creature of God is good, and nothing to be refused, if
it be received with thanksgiving: 4:5 For it is sanctified by the word
of God and prayer.

4:6 If thou put the brethren in remembrance of these things, thou
shalt be a good minister of Jesus Christ, nourished up in the words of
faith and of good doctrine, whereunto thou hast attained.

4:7 But refuse profane and old wives' fables, and exercise thyself
rather unto godliness.

4:8 For bodily exercise profiteth little: but godliness is profitable
unto all things, having promise of the life that now is, and of that
which is to come.

4:9 This is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptation.

4:10 For therefore we both labour and suffer reproach, because we
trust in the living God, who is the Saviour of all men, specially of
those that believe.

4:11 These things command and teach.

4:12 Let no man despise thy youth; but be thou an example of the
believers, in word, in conversation, in charity, in spirit, in faith,
in purity.

4:13 Till I come, give attendance to reading, to exhortation, to
doctrine.

4:14 Neglect not the gift that is in thee, which was given thee by
prophecy, with the laying on of the hands of the presbytery.

4:15 Meditate upon these things; give thyself wholly to them; that thy
profiting may appear to all.

4:16 Take heed unto thyself, and unto the doctrine; continue in them:
for in doing this thou shalt both save thyself, and them that hear
thee.

5:1 Rebuke not an elder, but intreat him as a father; and the younger
men as brethren; 5:2 The elder women as mothers; the younger as
sisters, with all purity.

5:3 Honour widows that are widows indeed.

5:4 But if any widow have children or nephews, let them learn first to
shew piety at home, and to requite their parents: for that is good and
acceptable before God.

5:5 Now she that is a widow indeed, and desolate, trusteth in God, and
continueth in supplications and prayers night and day.

5:6 But she that liveth in pleasure is dead while she liveth.

5:7 And these things give in charge, that they may be blameless.

5:8 But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his
own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.

5:9 Let not a widow be taken into the number under threescore years
old, having been the wife of one man.

5:10 Well reported of for good works; if she have brought up children,
if she have lodged strangers, if she have washed the saints' feet, if
she have relieved the afflicted, if she have diligently followed every
good work.

5:11 But the younger widows refuse: for when they have begun to wax
wanton against Christ, they will marry; 5:12 Having damnation, because
they have cast off their first faith.

5:13 And withal they learn to be idle, wandering about from house to
house; and not only idle, but tattlers also and busybodies, speaking
things which they ought not.

5:14 I will therefore that the younger women marry, bear children,
guide the house, give none occasion to the adversary to speak
reproachfully.

5:15 For some are already turned aside after Satan.

5:16 If any man or woman that believeth have widows, let them relieve
them, and let not the church be charged; that it may relieve them that
are widows indeed.

5:17 Let the elders that rule well be counted worthy of double honour,
especially they who labour in the word and doctrine.

5:18 For the scripture saith, Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that
treadeth out the corn. And, The labourer is worthy of his reward.

5:19 Against an elder receive not an accusation, but before two or
three witnesses.

5:20 Them that sin rebuke before all, that others also may fear.

5:21 I charge thee before God, and the Lord Jesus Christ, and the
elect angels, that thou observe these things without preferring one
before another, doing nothing by partiality.

5:22 Lay hands suddenly on no man, neither be partaker of other men's
sins: keep thyself pure.

5:23 Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach's
sake and thine often infirmities.

5:24 Some men's sins are open beforehand, going before to judgment;
and some men they follow after.

5:25 Likewise also the good works of some are manifest beforehand; and
they that are otherwise cannot be hid.

6:1 Let as many servants as are under the yoke count their own masters
worthy of all honour, that the name of God and his doctrine be not
blasphemed.

6:2 And they that have believing masters, let them not despise them,
because they are brethren; but rather do them service, because they
are faithful and beloved, partakers of the benefit. These things teach
and exhort.

6:3 If any man teach otherwise, and consent not to wholesome words,
even the words of our Lord Jesus Christ, and to the doctrine which is
according to godliness; 6:4 He is proud, knowing nothing, but doting
about questions and strifes of words, whereof cometh envy, strife,
railings, evil surmisings, 6:5 Perverse disputings of men of corrupt
minds, and destitute of the truth, supposing that gain is godliness:
from such withdraw thyself.

6:6 But godliness with contentment is great gain.

6:7 For we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can
carry nothing out.

6:8 And having food and raiment let us be therewith content.

6:9 But they that will be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and
into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction
and perdition.

6:10 For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some
coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves
through with many sorrows.

6:11 But thou, O man of God, flee these things; and follow after
righteousness, godliness, faith, love, patience, meekness.

6:12 Fight the good fight of faith, lay hold on eternal life,
whereunto thou art also called, and hast professed a good profession
before many witnesses.

6:13 I give thee charge in the sight of God, who quickeneth all
things, and before Christ Jesus, who before Pontius Pilate witnessed a
good confession; 6:14 That thou keep this commandment without spot,
unrebukable, until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ: 6:15 Which
in his times he shall shew, who is the blessed and only Potentate, the
King of kings, and Lord of lords; 6:16 Who only hath immortality,
dwelling in the light which no man can approach unto; whom no man hath
seen, nor can see: to whom be honour and power everlasting. Amen.

6:17 Charge them that are rich in this world, that they be not
highminded, nor trust in uncertain riches, but in the living God, who
giveth us richly all things to enjoy; 6:18 That they do good, that
they be rich in good works, ready to distribute, willing to
communicate; 6:19 Laying up in store for themselves a good foundation
against the time to come, that they may lay hold on eternal life.

6:20 O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding
profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so
called: 6:21 Which some professing have erred concerning the faith.
Grace be with thee. Amen.




The Second Epistle of Paul the Apostle to Timothy


1:1 Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God, according to
the promise of life which is in Christ Jesus, 1:2 To Timothy,
my dearly beloved son: Grace, mercy, and peace, from God the Father
and Christ Jesus our Lord.

1:3 I thank God, whom I serve from my forefathers with pure
conscience, that without ceasing I have remembrance of thee in my
prayers night and day; 1:4 Greatly desiring to see thee, being mindful
of thy tears, that I may be filled with joy; 1:5 When I call to
remembrance the unfeigned faith that is in thee, which dwelt first in
thy grandmother Lois, and thy mother Eunice; and I am persuaded that
in thee also.

1:6 Wherefore I put thee in remembrance that thou stir up the gift of
God, which is in thee by the putting on of my hands.

1:7 For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of
love, and of a sound mind.

1:8 Be not thou therefore ashamed of the testimony of our Lord, nor of
me his prisoner: but be thou partaker of the afflictions of the gospel
according to the power of God; 1:9 Who hath saved us, and called us
with an holy calling, not according to our works, but according to his
own purpose and grace, which was given us in Christ Jesus before the
world began, 1:10 But is now made manifest by the appearing of our
Saviour Jesus Christ, who hath abolished death, and hath brought life
and immortality to light through the gospel: 1:11 Whereunto I am
appointed a preacher, and an apostle, and a teacher of the Gentiles.

1:12 For the which cause I also suffer these things: nevertheless I am
not ashamed: for I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he
is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day.

1:13 Hold fast the form of sound words, which thou hast heard of me,
in faith and love which is in Christ Jesus.

1:14 That good thing which was committed unto thee keep by the Holy
Ghost which dwelleth in us.

1:15 This thou knowest, that all they which are in Asia be turned away
from me; of whom are Phygellus and Hermogenes.

1:16 The Lord give mercy unto the house of Onesiphorus; for he oft
refreshed me, and was not ashamed of my chain: 1:17 But, when he was
in Rome, he sought me out very diligently, and found me.

1:18 The Lord grant unto him that he may find mercy of the Lord in
that day: and in how many things he ministered unto me at Ephesus,
thou knowest very well.

2:1 Thou therefore, my son, be strong in the grace that is in Christ
Jesus.

2:2 And the things that thou hast heard of me among many witnesses,
the same commit thou to faithful men, who shall be able to teach
others also.

2:3 Thou therefore endure hardness, as a good soldier of Jesus Christ.

2:4 No man that warreth entangleth himself with the affairs of this
life; that he may please him who hath chosen him to be a soldier.

2:5 And if a man also strive for masteries, yet is he not crowned,
except he strive lawfully.

2:6 The husbandman that laboureth must be first partaker of the
fruits.

2:7 Consider what I say; and the Lord give thee understanding in all
things.

2:8 Remember that Jesus Christ of the seed of David was raised from
the dead according to my gospel: 2:9 Wherein I suffer trouble, as an
evil doer, even unto bonds; but the word of God is not bound.

2:10 Therefore I endure all things for the elect's sakes, that they
may also obtain the salvation which is in Christ Jesus with eternal
glory.

2:11 It is a faithful saying: For if we be dead with him, we shall
also live with him: 2:12 If we suffer, we shall also reign with him:
if we deny him, he also will deny us: 2:13 If we believe not, yet he
abideth faithful: he cannot deny himself.

2:14 Of these things put them in remembrance, charging them before the
Lord that they strive not about words to no profit, but to the
subverting of the hearers.

2:15 Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth
not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.

2:16 But shun profane and vain babblings: for they will increase unto
more ungodliness.

2:17 And their word will eat as doth a canker: of whom is Hymenaeus
and Philetus; 2:18 Who concerning the truth have erred, saying that
the resurrection is past already; and overthrow the faith of some.

2:19 Nevertheless the foundation of God standeth sure, having this
seal, The Lord knoweth them that are his. And, Let every one that
nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity.

2:20 But in a great house there are not only vessels of gold and of
silver, but also of wood and of earth; and some to honour, and some to
dishonour.

2:21 If a man therefore purge himself from these, he shall be a vessel
unto honour, sanctified, and meet for the master's use, and prepared
unto every good work.

2:22 Flee also youthful lusts: but follow righteousness, faith,
charity, peace, with them that call on the Lord out of a pure heart.

2:23 But foolish and unlearned questions avoid, knowing that they do
gender strifes.

2:24 And the servant of the Lord must not strive; but be gentle unto
all men, apt to teach, patient, 2:25 In meekness instructing those
that oppose themselves; if God peradventure will give them repentance
to the acknowledging of the truth; 2:26 And that they may recover
themselves out of the snare of the devil, who are taken captive by him
at his will.

3:1 This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come.

3:2 For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters,
proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, 3:3
Without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent,
fierce, despisers of those that are good, 3:4 Traitors, heady,
highminded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God; 3:5 Having a
form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away.

3:6 For of this sort are they which creep into houses, and lead
captive silly women laden with sins, led away with divers lusts, 3:7
Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.

3:8 Now as Jannes and Jambres withstood Moses, so do these also resist
the truth: men of corrupt minds, reprobate concerning the faith.

3:9 But they shall proceed no further: for their folly shall be
manifest unto all men, as their's also was.

3:10 But thou hast fully known my doctrine, manner of life, purpose,
faith, longsuffering, charity, patience, 3:11 Persecutions,
afflictions, which came unto me at Antioch, at Iconium, at Lystra;
what persecutions I endured: but out of them all the Lord delivered
me.

3:12 Yea, and all that will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer
persecution.

3:13 But evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving,
and being deceived.

3:14 But continue thou in the things which thou hast learned and hast
been assured of, knowing of whom thou hast learned them; 3:15 And that
from a child thou hast known the holy scriptures, which are able to
make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus.

3:16 All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable
for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in
righteousness: 3:17 That the man of God may be perfect, throughly
furnished unto all good works.

4:1 I charge thee therefore before God, and the Lord Jesus Christ, who
shall judge the quick and the dead at his appearing and his kingdom;
4:2 Preach the word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove,
rebuke, exhort with all longsuffering and doctrine.

4:3 For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine;
but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers,
having itching ears; 4:4 And they shall turn away their ears from the
truth, and shall be turned unto fables.

4:5 But watch thou in all things, endure afflictions, do the work of
an evangelist, make full proof of thy ministry.

4:6 For I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is
at hand.

4:7 I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept
the faith: 4:8 Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of
righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give me at
that day: and not to me only, but unto all them also that love his
appearing.

4:9 Do thy diligence to come shortly unto me: 4:10 For Demas hath
forsaken me, having loved this present world, and is departed unto
Thessalonica; Crescens to Galatia, Titus unto Dalmatia.

4:11 Only Luke is with me. Take Mark, and bring him with thee: for he
is profitable to me for the ministry.

4:12 And Tychicus have I sent to Ephesus.

4:13 The cloke that I left at Troas with Carpus, when thou comest,
bring with thee, and the books, but especially the parchments.

4:14 Alexander the coppersmith did me much evil: the Lord reward him
according to his works: 4:15 Of whom be thou ware also; for he hath
greatly withstood our words.

4:16 At my first answer no man stood with me, but all men forsook me:
I pray God that it may not be laid to their charge.

4:17 Notwithstanding the Lord stood with me, and strengthened me; that
by me the preaching might be fully known, and that all the Gentiles
might hear: and I was delivered out of the mouth of the lion.

4:18 And the Lord shall deliver me from every evil work, and will
preserve me unto his heavenly kingdom: to whom be glory for ever and
ever. Amen.

4:19 Salute Prisca and Aquila, and the household of Onesiphorus.

4:20 Erastus abode at Corinth: but Trophimus have I left at Miletum
sick.

4:21 Do thy diligence to come before winter. Eubulus greeteth thee,
and Pudens, and Linus, and Claudia, and all the brethren.

4:22 The Lord Jesus Christ be with thy spirit. Grace be with you.
Amen.




The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to Titus


1:1 Paul, a servant of God, and an apostle of Jesus Christ, according
to the faith of God's elect, and the acknowledging of the truth which
is after godliness; 1:2 In hope of eternal life, which God, that
cannot lie, promised before the world began; 1:3 But hath in due times
manifested his word through preaching, which is committed unto me
according to the commandment of God our Saviour; 1:4 To Titus, mine
own son after the common faith: Grace, mercy, and peace, from God the
Father and the Lord Jesus Christ our Saviour.

1:5 For this cause left I thee in Crete, that thou shouldest set in
order the things that are wanting, and ordain elders in every city, as
I had appointed thee: 1:6 If any be blameless, the husband of one
wife, having faithful children not accused of riot or unruly.

1:7 For a bishop must be blameless, as the steward of God; not
selfwilled, not soon angry, not given to wine, no striker, not given
to filthy lucre; 1:8 But a lover of hospitality, a lover of good men,
sober, just, holy, temperate; 1:9 Holding fast the faithful word as he
hath been taught, that he may be able by sound doctrine both to exhort
and to convince the gainsayers.

1:10 For there are many unruly and vain talkers and deceivers,
specially they of the circumcision: 1:11 Whose mouths must be stopped,
who subvert whole houses, teaching things which they ought not, for
filthy lucre's sake.

1:12 One of themselves, even a prophet of their own, said, The
Cretians are alway liars, evil beasts, slow bellies.

1:13 This witness is true. Wherefore rebuke them sharply, that they
may be sound in the faith; 1:14 Not giving heed to Jewish fables, and
commandments of men, that turn from the truth.

1:15 Unto the pure all things are pure: but unto them that are defiled
and unbelieving is nothing pure; but even their mind and conscience is
defiled.

1:16 They profess that they know God; but in works they deny him,
being abominable, and disobedient, and unto every good work reprobate.

2:1 But speak thou the things which become sound doctrine: 2:2 That
the aged men be sober, grave, temperate, sound in faith, in charity,
in patience.

2:3 The aged women likewise, that they be in behaviour as becometh
holiness, not false accusers, not given to much wine, teachers of good
things; 2:4 That they may teach the young women to be sober, to love
their husbands, to love their children, 2:5 To be discreet, chaste,
keepers at home, good, obedient to their own husbands, that the word
of God be not blasphemed.

2:6 Young men likewise exhort to be sober minded.

2:7 In all things shewing thyself a pattern of good works: in doctrine
shewing uncorruptness, gravity, sincerity, 2:8 Sound speech, that
cannot be condemned; that he that is of the contrary part may be
ashamed, having no evil thing to say of you.

2:9 Exhort servants to be obedient unto their own masters, and to
please them well in all things; not answering again; 2:10 Not
purloining, but shewing all good fidelity; that they may adorn the
doctrine of God our Saviour in all things.

2:11 For the grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all
men, 2:12 Teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we
should live soberly, righteously, and godly, in this present world;
2:13 Looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the
great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ; 2:14 Who gave himself for us,
that he might redeem us from all iniquity, and purify unto himself a
peculiar people, zealous of good works.

2:15 These things speak, and exhort, and rebuke with all authority.
Let no man despise thee.

3:1 Put them in mind to be subject to principalities and powers, to
obey magistrates, to be ready to every good work, 3:2 To speak evil of
no man, to be no brawlers, but gentle, shewing all meekness unto all
men.

3:3 For we ourselves also were sometimes foolish, disobedient,
deceived, serving divers lusts and pleasures, living in malice and
envy, hateful, and hating one another.

3:4 But after that the kindness and love of God our Saviour toward man
appeared, 3:5 Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but
according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration,
and renewing of the Holy Ghost; 3:6 Which he shed on us abundantly
through Jesus Christ our Saviour; 3:7 That being justified by his
grace, we should be made heirs according to the hope of eternal life.

3:8 This is a faithful saying, and these things I will that thou
affirm constantly, that they which have believed in God might be
careful to maintain good works. These things are good and profitable
unto men.

3:9 But avoid foolish questions, and genealogies, and contentions, and
strivings about the law; for they are unprofitable and vain.

3:10 A man that is an heretick after the first and second admonition
reject; 3:11 Knowing that he that is such is subverted, and sinneth,
being condemned of himself.

3:12 When I shall send Artemas unto thee, or Tychicus, be diligent to
come unto me to Nicopolis: for I have determined there to winter.

3:13 Bring Zenas the lawyer and Apollos on their journey diligently,
that nothing be wanting unto them.

3:14 And let our's also learn to maintain good works for necessary
uses, that they be not unfruitful.

3:15 All that are with me salute thee. Greet them that love us in the
faith. Grace be with you all. Amen.




The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to Philemon


1:1 Paul, a prisoner of Jesus Christ, and Timothy our brother, unto
Philemon our dearly beloved, and fellowlabourer, 1:2 And to our
beloved Apphia, and Archippus our fellowsoldier, and to the church in
thy house: 1:3 Grace to you, and peace, from God our Father and the
Lord Jesus Christ.

1:4 I thank my God, making mention of thee always in my prayers, 1:5
Hearing of thy love and faith, which thou hast toward the Lord Jesus,
and toward all saints; 1:6 That the communication of thy faith may
become effectual by the acknowledging of every good thing which is in
you in Christ Jesus.

1:7 For we have great joy and consolation in thy love, because the
bowels of the saints are refreshed by thee, brother.

1:8 Wherefore, though I might be much bold in Christ to enjoin thee
that which is convenient, 1:9 Yet for love's sake I rather beseech
thee, being such an one as Paul the aged, and now also a prisoner of
Jesus Christ.

1:10 I beseech thee for my son Onesimus, whom I have begotten in my
bonds: 1:11 Which in time past was to thee unprofitable, but now
profitable to thee and to me: 1:12 Whom I have sent again: thou
therefore receive him, that is, mine own bowels: 1:13 Whom I would
have retained with me, that in thy stead he might have ministered unto
me in the bonds of the gospel: 1:14 But without thy mind would I do
nothing; that thy benefit should not be as it were of necessity, but
willingly.

1:15 For perhaps he therefore departed for a season, that thou
shouldest receive him for ever; 1:16 Not now as a servant, but above a
servant, a brother beloved, specially to me, but how much more unto
thee, both in the flesh, and in the Lord?  1:17 If thou count me
therefore a partner, receive him as myself.

1:18 If he hath wronged thee, or oweth thee ought, put that on mine
account; 1:19 I Paul have written it with mine own hand, I will repay
it: albeit I do not say to thee how thou owest unto me even thine own
self besides.

1:20 Yea, brother, let me have joy of thee in the Lord: refresh my
bowels in the Lord.

1:21 Having confidence in thy obedience I wrote unto thee, knowing
that thou wilt also do more than I say.

1:22 But withal prepare me also a lodging: for I trust that through
your prayers I shall be given unto you.

1:23 There salute thee Epaphras, my fellowprisoner in Christ Jesus;
1:24 Marcus, Aristarchus, Demas, Lucas, my fellowlabourers.

1:25 The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit. Amen.




The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Hebrews


1:1 God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past
unto the fathers by the prophets, 1:2 Hath in these last days spoken
unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom
also he made the worlds; 1:3 Who being the brightness of his glory,
and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the
word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down on
the right hand of the Majesty on high: 1:4 Being made so much better
than the angels, as he hath by inheritance obtained a more excellent
name than they.

1:5 For unto which of the angels said he at any time, Thou art my Son,
this day have I begotten thee? And again, I will be to him a Father,
and he shall be to me a Son?  1:6 And again, when he bringeth in the
firstbegotten into the world, he saith, And let all the angels of God
worship him.

1:7 And of the angels he saith, Who maketh his angels spirits, and his
ministers a flame of fire.

1:8 But unto the Son he saith, Thy throne, O God, is for ever and
ever: a sceptre of righteousness is the sceptre of thy kingdom.

1:9 Thou hast loved righteousness, and hated iniquity; therefore God,
even thy God, hath anointed thee with the oil of gladness above thy
fellows.

1:10 And, Thou, Lord, in the beginning hast laid the foundation of the
earth; and the heavens are the works of thine hands: 1:11 They shall
perish; but thou remainest; and they all shall wax old as doth a
garment; 1:12 And as a vesture shalt thou fold them up, and they shall
be changed: but thou art the same, and thy years shall not fail.

1:13 But to which of the angels said he at any time, Sit on my right
hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool?  1:14 Are they not all
ministering spirits, sent forth to minister for them who shall be
heirs of salvation?  2:1 Therefore we ought to give the more earnest
heed to the things which we have heard, lest at any time we should let
them slip.

2:2 For if the word spoken by angels was stedfast, and every
transgression and disobedience received a just recompence of reward;
2:3 How shall we escape, if we neglect so great salvation; which at
the first began to be spoken by the Lord, and was confirmed unto us by
them that heard him; 2:4 God also bearing them witness, both with
signs and wonders, and with divers miracles, and gifts of the Holy
Ghost, according to his own will?  2:5 For unto the angels hath he not
put in subjection the world to come, whereof we speak.

2:6 But one in a certain place testified, saying, What is man, that
thou art mindful of him? or the son of man that thou visitest him?
2:7 Thou madest him a little lower than the angels; thou crownedst him
with glory and honour, and didst set him over the works of thy hands:
2:8 Thou hast put all things in subjection under his feet. For in that
he put all in subjection under him, he left nothing that is not put
under him.

But now we see not yet all things put under him.

2:9 But we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels for
the suffering of death, crowned with glory and honour; that he by the
grace of God should taste death for every man.

2:10 For it became him, for whom are all things, and by whom are all
things, in bringing many sons unto glory, to make the captain of their
salvation perfect through sufferings.

2:11 For both he that sanctifieth and they who are sanctified are all
of one: for which cause he is not ashamed to call them brethren, 2:12
Saying, I will declare thy name unto my brethren, in the midst of the
church will I sing praise unto thee.

2:13 And again, I will put my trust in him. And again, Behold I and
the children which God hath given me.

2:14 Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood,
he also himself likewise took part of the same; that through death he
might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil;
2:15 And deliver them who through fear of death were all their
lifetime subject to bondage.

2:16 For verily he took not on him the nature of angels; but he took
on him the seed of Abraham.

2:17 Wherefore in all things it behoved him to be made like unto his
brethren, that he might be a merciful and faithful high priest in
things pertaining to God, to make reconciliation for the sins of the
people.

2:18 For in that he himself hath suffered being tempted, he is able to
succour them that are tempted.

3:1 Wherefore, holy brethren, partakers of the heavenly calling,
consider the Apostle and High Priest of our profession, Christ Jesus;
3:2 Who was faithful to him that appointed him, as also Moses was
faithful in all his house.

3:3 For this man was counted worthy of more glory than Moses, inasmuch
as he who hath builded the house hath more honour than the house.

3:4 For every house is builded by some man; but he that built all
things is God.

3:5 And Moses verily was faithful in all his house, as a servant, for
a testimony of those things which were to be spoken after; 3:6 But
Christ as a son over his own house; whose house are we, if we hold
fast the confidence and the rejoicing of the hope firm unto the end.

3:7 Wherefore (as the Holy Ghost saith, To day if ye will hear his
voice, 3:8 Harden not your hearts, as in the provocation, in the day
of temptation in the wilderness: 3:9 When your fathers tempted me,
proved me, and saw my works forty years.

3:10 Wherefore I was grieved with that generation, and said, They do
alway err in their heart; and they have not known my ways.

3:11 So I sware in my wrath, They shall not enter into my rest.)  3:12
Take heed, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of
unbelief, in departing from the living God.

3:13 But exhort one another daily, while it is called To day; lest any
of you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin.

3:14 For we are made partakers of Christ, if we hold the beginning of
our confidence stedfast unto the end; 3:15 While it is said, To day if
ye will hear his voice, harden not your hearts, as in the provocation.

3:16 For some, when they had heard, did provoke: howbeit not all that
came out of Egypt by Moses.

3:17 But with whom was he grieved forty years? was it not with them
that had sinned, whose carcases fell in the wilderness?  3:18 And to
whom sware he that they should not enter into his rest, but to them
that believed not?  3:19 So we see that they could not enter in
because of unbelief.

4:1 Let us therefore fear, lest, a promise being left us of entering
into his rest, any of you should seem to come short of it.

4:2 For unto us was the gospel preached, as well as unto them: but the
word preached did not profit them, not being mixed with faith in them
that heard it.

4:3 For we which have believed do enter into rest, as he said, As I
have sworn in my wrath, if they shall enter into my rest: although the
works were finished from the foundation of the world.

4:4 For he spake in a certain place of the seventh day on this wise,
And God did rest the seventh day from all his works.

4:5 And in this place again, If they shall enter into my rest.

4:6 Seeing therefore it remaineth that some must enter therein, and
they to whom it was first preached entered not in because of unbelief:
4:7 Again, he limiteth a certain day, saying in David, To day, after
so long a time; as it is said, To day if ye will hear his voice,
harden not your hearts.

4:8 For if Jesus had given them rest, then would he not afterward have
spoken of another day.

4:9 There remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God.

4:10 For he that is entered into his rest, he also hath ceased from
his own works, as God did from his.

4:11 Let us labour therefore to enter into that rest, lest any man
fall after the same example of unbelief.

4:12 For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any
twoedged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and
spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the
thoughts and intents of the heart.

4:13 Neither is there any creature that is not manifest in his sight:
but all things are naked and opened unto the eyes of him with whom we
have to do.

4:14 Seeing then that we have a great high priest, that is passed into
the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast our profession.

4:15 For we have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the
feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we
are, yet without sin.

4:16 Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we
may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need.

5:1 For every high priest taken from among men is ordained for men in
things pertaining to God, that he may offer both gifts and sacrifices
for sins: 5:2 Who can have compassion on the ignorant, and on them
that are out of the way; for that he himself also is compassed with
infirmity.

5:3 And by reason hereof he ought, as for the people, so also for
himself, to offer for sins.

5:4 And no man taketh this honour unto himself, but he that is called
of God, as was Aaron.

5:5 So also Christ glorified not himself to be made an high priest;
but he that said unto him, Thou art my Son, to day have I begotten
thee.

5:6 As he saith also in another place, Thou art a priest for ever
after the order of Melchisedec.

5:7 Who in the days of his flesh, when he had offered up prayers and
supplications with strong crying and tears unto him that was able to
save him from death, and was heard in that he feared; 5:8 Though he
were a Son, yet learned he obedience by the things which he suffered;
5:9 And being made perfect, he became the author of eternal salvation
unto all them that obey him; 5:10 Called of God an high priest after
the order of Melchisedec.

5:11 Of whom we have many things to say, and hard to be uttered,
seeing ye are dull of hearing.

5:12 For when for the time ye ought to be teachers, ye have need that
one teach you again which be the first principles of the oracles of
God; and are become such as have need of milk, and not of strong meat.

5:13 For every one that useth milk is unskilful in the word of
righteousness: for he is a babe.

5:14 But strong meat belongeth to them that are of full age, even
those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both
good and evil.

6:1 Therefore leaving the principles of the doctrine of Christ, let us
go on unto perfection; not laying again the foundation of repentance
from dead works, and of faith toward God, 6:2 Of the doctrine of
baptisms, and of laying on of hands, and of resurrection of the dead,
and of eternal judgment.

6:3 And this will we do, if God permit.

6:4 For it is impossible for those who were once enlightened, and have
tasted of the heavenly gift, and were made partakers of the Holy
Ghost, 6:5 And have tasted the good word of God, and the powers of the
world to come, 6:6 If they shall fall away, to renew them again unto
repentance; seeing they crucify to themselves the Son of God afresh,
and put him to an open shame.

6:7 For the earth which drinketh in the rain that cometh oft upon it,
and bringeth forth herbs meet for them by whom it is dressed,
receiveth blessing from God: 6:8 But that which beareth thorns and
briers is rejected, and is nigh unto cursing; whose end is to be
burned.

6:9 But, beloved, we are persuaded better things of you, and things
that accompany salvation, though we thus speak.

6:10 For God is not unrighteous to forget your work and labour of
love, which ye have shewed toward his name, in that ye have ministered
to the saints, and do minister.

6:11 And we desire that every one of you do shew the same diligence to
the full assurance of hope unto the end: 6:12 That ye be not slothful,
but followers of them who through faith and patience inherit the
promises.

6:13 For when God made promise to Abraham, because he could swear by
no greater, he sware by himself, 6:14 Saying, Surely blessing I will
bless thee, and multiplying I will multiply thee.

6:15 And so, after he had patiently endured, he obtained the promise.

6:16 For men verily swear by the greater: and an oath for confirmation
is to them an end of all strife.

6:17 Wherein God, willing more abundantly to shew unto the heirs of
promise the immutability of his counsel, confirmed it by an oath: 6:18
That by two immutable things, in which it was impossible for God to
lie, we might have a strong consolation, who have fled for refuge to
lay hold upon the hope set before us: 6:19 Which hope we have as an
anchor of the soul, both sure and stedfast, and which entereth into
that within the veil; 6:20 Whither the forerunner is for us entered,
even Jesus, made an high priest for ever after the order of
Melchisedec.

7:1 For this Melchisedec, king of Salem, priest of the most high God,
who met Abraham returning from the slaughter of the kings, and blessed
him; 7:2 To whom also Abraham gave a tenth part of all; first being by
interpretation King of righteousness, and after that also King of
Salem, which is, King of peace; 7:3 Without father, without mother,
without descent, having neither beginning of days, nor end of life;
but made like unto the Son of God; abideth a priest continually.

7:4 Now consider how great this man was, unto whom even the patriarch
Abraham gave the tenth of the spoils.

7:5 And verily they that are of the sons of Levi, who receive the
office of the priesthood, have a commandment to take tithes of the
people according to the law, that is, of their brethren, though they
come out of the loins of Abraham: 7:6 But he whose descent is not
counted from them received tithes of Abraham, and blessed him that had
the promises.

7:7 And without all contradiction the less is blessed of the better.

7:8 And here men that die receive tithes; but there he receiveth them,
of whom it is witnessed that he liveth.

7:9 And as I may so say, Levi also, who receiveth tithes, payed tithes
in Abraham.

7:10 For he was yet in the loins of his father, when Melchisedec met
him.

7:11 If therefore perfection were by the Levitical priesthood, (for
under it the people received the law,) what further need was there
that another priest should rise after the order of Melchisedec, and
not be called after the order of Aaron?  7:12 For the priesthood being
changed, there is made of necessity a change also of the law.

7:13 For he of whom these things are spoken pertaineth to another
tribe, of which no man gave attendance at the altar.

7:14 For it is evident that our Lord sprang out of Juda; of which
tribe Moses spake nothing concerning priesthood.

7:15 And it is yet far more evident: for that after the similitude of
Melchisedec there ariseth another priest, 7:16 Who is made, not after
the law of a carnal commandment, but after the power of an endless
life.

7:17 For he testifieth, Thou art a priest for ever after the order of
Melchisedec.

7:18 For there is verily a disannulling of the commandment going
before for the weakness and unprofitableness thereof.

7:19 For the law made nothing perfect, but the bringing in of a better
hope did; by the which we draw nigh unto God.

7:20 And inasmuch as not without an oath he was made priest: 7:21 (For
those priests were made without an oath; but this with an oath by him
that said unto him, The Lord sware and will not repent, Thou art a
priest for ever after the order of Melchisedec:) 7:22 By so much was
Jesus made a surety of a better testament.

7:23 And they truly were many priests, because they were not suffered
to continue by reason of death: 7:24 But this man, because he
continueth ever, hath an unchangeable priesthood.

7:25 Wherefore he is able also to save them to the uttermost that come
unto God by him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them.

7:26 For such an high priest became us, who is holy, harmless,
undefiled, separate from sinners, and made higher than the heavens;
7:27 Who needeth not daily, as those high priests, to offer up
sacrifice, first for his own sins, and then for the people's: for this
he did once, when he offered up himself.

7:28 For the law maketh men high priests which have infirmity; but the
word of the oath, which was since the law, maketh the Son, who is
consecrated for evermore.

8:1 Now of the things which we have spoken this is the sum: We have
such an high priest, who is set on the right hand of the throne of the
Majesty in the heavens; 8:2 A minister of the sanctuary, and of the
true tabernacle, which the Lord pitched, and not man.

8:3 For every high priest is ordained to offer gifts and sacrifices:
wherefore it is of necessity that this man have somewhat also to
offer.

8:4 For if he were on earth, he should not be a priest, seeing that
there are priests that offer gifts according to the law: 8:5 Who serve
unto the example and shadow of heavenly things, as Moses was
admonished of God when he was about to make the tabernacle: for, See,
saith he, that thou make all things according to the pattern shewed to
thee in the mount.

8:6 But now hath he obtained a more excellent ministry, by how much
also he is the mediator of a better covenant, which was established
upon better promises.

8:7 For if that first covenant had been faultless, then should no
place have been sought for the second.

8:8 For finding fault with them, he saith, Behold, the days come,
saith the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of
Israel and with the house of Judah: 8:9 Not according to the covenant
that I made with their fathers in the day when I took them by the hand
to lead them out of the land of Egypt; because they continued not in
my covenant, and I regarded them not, saith the Lord.

8:10 For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of
Israel after those days, saith the Lord; I will put my laws into their
mind, and write them in their hearts: and I will be to them a God, and
they shall be to me a people: 8:11 And they shall not teach every man
his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord: for
all shall know me, from the least to the greatest.

8:12 For I will be merciful to their unrighteousness, and their sins
and their iniquities will I remember no more.

8:13 In that he saith, A new covenant, he hath made the first old. Now
that which decayeth and waxeth old is ready to vanish away.

9:1 Then verily the first covenant had also ordinances of divine
service, and a worldly sanctuary.

9:2 For there was a tabernacle made; the first, wherein was the
candlestick, and the table, and the shewbread; which is called the
sanctuary.

9:3 And after the second veil, the tabernacle which is called the
Holiest of all; 9:4 Which had the golden censer, and the ark of the
covenant overlaid round about with gold, wherein was the golden pot
that had manna, and Aaron's rod that budded, and the tables of the
covenant; 9:5 And over it the cherubims of glory shadowing the
mercyseat; of which we cannot now speak particularly.

9:6 Now when these things were thus ordained, the priests went always
into the first tabernacle, accomplishing the service of God.

9:7 But into the second went the high priest alone once every year,
not without blood, which he offered for himself, and for the errors of
the people: 9:8 The Holy Ghost this signifying, that the way into the
holiest of all was not yet made manifest, while as the first
tabernacle was yet standing: 9:9 Which was a figure for the time then
present, in which were offered both gifts and sacrifices, that could
not make him that did the service perfect, as pertaining to the
conscience; 9:10 Which stood only in meats and drinks, and divers
washings, and carnal ordinances, imposed on them until the time of
reformation.

9:11 But Christ being come an high priest of good things to come, by a
greater and more perfect tabernacle, not made with hands, that is to
say, not of this building; 9:12 Neither by the blood of goats and
calves, but by his own blood he entered in once into the holy place,
having obtained eternal redemption for us.

9:13 For if the blood of bulls and of goats, and the ashes of an
heifer sprinkling the unclean, sanctifieth to the purifying of the
flesh: 9:14 How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the
eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, purge your
conscience from dead works to serve the living God?  9:15 And for this
cause he is the mediator of the new testament, that by means of death,
for the redemption of the transgressions that were under the first
testament, they which are called might receive the promise of eternal
inheritance.

9:16 For where a testament is, there must also of necessity be the
death of the testator.

9:17 For a testament is of force after men are dead: otherwise it is
of no strength at all while the testator liveth.

9:18 Whereupon neither the first testament was dedicated without
blood.

9:19 For when Moses had spoken every precept to all the people
according to the law, he took the blood of calves and of goats, with
water, and scarlet wool, and hyssop, and sprinkled both the book, and
all the people, 9:20 Saying, This is the blood of the testament which
God hath enjoined unto you.

9:21 Moreover he sprinkled with blood both the tabernacle, and all the
vessels of the ministry.

9:22 And almost all things are by the law purged with blood; and
without shedding of blood is no remission.

9:23 It was therefore necessary that the patterns of things in the
heavens should be purified with these; but the heavenly things
themselves with better sacrifices than these.

9:24 For Christ is not entered into the holy places made with hands,
which are the figures of the true; but into heaven itself, now to
appear in the presence of God for us: 9:25 Nor yet that he should
offer himself often, as the high priest entereth into the holy place
every year with blood of others; 9:26 For then must he often have
suffered since the foundation of the world: but now once in the end of
the world hath he appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of
himself.

9:27 And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the
judgment: 9:28 So Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many;
and unto them that look for him shall he appear the second time
without sin unto salvation.

10:1 For the law having a shadow of good things to come, and not the
very image of the things, can never with those sacrifices which they
offered year by year continually make the comers thereunto perfect.

10:2 For then would they not have ceased to be offered? because that
the worshippers once purged should have had no more conscience of
sins.

10:3 But in those sacrifices there is a remembrance again made of sins
every year.

10:4 For it is not possible that the blood of bulls and of goats
should take away sins.

10:5 Wherefore when he cometh into the world, he saith, Sacrifice and
offering thou wouldest not, but a body hast thou prepared me: 10:6 In
burnt offerings and sacrifices for sin thou hast had no pleasure.

10:7 Then said I, Lo, I come (in the volume of the book it is written
of me,) to do thy will, O God.

10:8 Above when he said, Sacrifice and offering and burnt offerings
and offering for sin thou wouldest not, neither hadst pleasure
therein; which are offered by the law; 10:9 Then said he, Lo, I come
to do thy will, O God. He taketh away the first, that he may establish
the second.

10:10 By the which will we are sanctified through the offering of the
body of Jesus Christ once for all.

10:11 And every priest standeth daily ministering and offering
oftentimes the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins: 10:12
But this man, after he had offered one sacrifice for sins for ever,
sat down on the right hand of God; 10:13 From henceforth expecting
till his enemies be made his footstool.

10:14 For by one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are
sanctified.

10:15 Whereof the Holy Ghost also is a witness to us: for after that
he had said before, 10:16 This is the covenant that I will make with
them after those days, saith the Lord, I will put my laws into their
hearts, and in their minds will I write them; 10:17 And their sins and
iniquities will I remember no more.

10:18 Now where remission of these is, there is no more offering for
sin.

10:19 Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest
by the blood of Jesus, 10:20 By a new and living way, which he hath
consecrated for us, through the veil, that is to say, his flesh; 10:21
And having an high priest over the house of God; 10:22 Let us draw
near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts
sprinkled from an evil conscience, and our bodies washed with pure
water.

10:23 Let us hold fast the profession of our faith without wavering;
(for he is faithful that promised;) 10:24 And let us consider one
another to provoke unto love and to good works: 10:25 Not forsaking
the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is; but
exhorting one another: and so much the more, as ye see the day
approaching.

10:26 For if we sin wilfully after that we have received the knowledge
of the truth, there remaineth no more sacrifice for sins, 10:27 But a
certain fearful looking for of judgment and fiery indignation, which
shall devour the adversaries.

10:28 He that despised Moses' law died without mercy under two or
three witnesses: 10:29 Of how much sorer punishment, suppose ye, shall
he be thought worthy, who hath trodden under foot the Son of God, and
hath counted the blood of the covenant, wherewith he was sanctified,
an unholy thing, and hath done despite unto the Spirit of grace?
10:30 For we know him that hath said, Vengeance belongeth unto me, I
will recompense, saith the Lord. And again, The Lord shall judge his
people.

10:31 It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

10:32 But call to remembrance the former days, in which, after ye were
illuminated, ye endured a great fight of afflictions; 10:33 Partly,
whilst ye were made a gazingstock both by reproaches and afflictions;
and partly, whilst ye became companions of them that were so used.

10:34 For ye had compassion of me in my bonds, and took joyfully the
spoiling of your goods, knowing in yourselves that ye have in heaven a
better and an enduring substance.

10:35 Cast not away therefore your confidence, which hath great
recompence of reward.

10:36 For ye have need of patience, that, after ye have done the will
of God, ye might receive the promise.

10:37 For yet a little while, and he that shall come will come, and
will not tarry.

10:38 Now the just shall live by faith: but if any man draw back, my
soul shall have no pleasure in him.

10:39 But we are not of them who draw back unto perdition; but of them
that believe to the saving of the soul.

11:1 Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of
things not seen.

11:2 For by it the elders obtained a good report.

11:3 Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the
word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things
which do appear.

11:4 By faith Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than
Cain, by which he obtained witness that he was righteous, God
testifying of his gifts: and by it he being dead yet speaketh.

11:5 By faith Enoch was translated that he should not see death; and
was not found, because God had translated him: for before his
translation he had this testimony, that he pleased God.

11:6 But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that
cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of
them that diligently seek him.

11:7 By faith Noah, being warned of God of things not seen as yet,
moved with fear, prepared an ark to the saving of his house; by the
which he condemned the world, and became heir of the righteousness
which is by faith.

11:8 By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which
he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed; and he went out,
not knowing whither he went.

11:9 By faith he sojourned in the land of promise, as in a strange
country, dwelling in tabernacles with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with
him of the same promise: 11:10 For he looked for a city which hath
foundations, whose builder and maker is God.

11:11 Through faith also Sara herself received strength to conceive
seed, and was delivered of a child when she was past age, because she
judged him faithful who had promised.

11:12 Therefore sprang there even of one, and him as good as dead, so
many as the stars of the sky in multitude, and as the sand which is by
the sea shore innumerable.

11:13 These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but
having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced
them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the
earth.

11:14 For they that say such things declare plainly that they seek a
country.

11:15 And truly, if they had been mindful of that country from whence
they came out, they might have had opportunity to have returned.

11:16 But now they desire a better country, that is, an heavenly:
wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God: for he hath
prepared for them a city.

11:17 By faith Abraham, when he was tried, offered up Isaac: and he
that had received the promises offered up his only begotten son, 11:18
Of whom it was said, That in Isaac shall thy seed be called: 11:19
Accounting that God was able to raise him up, even from the dead; from
whence also he received him in a figure.

11:20 By faith Isaac blessed Jacob and Esau concerning things to come.

11:21 By faith Jacob, when he was a dying, blessed both the sons of
Joseph; and worshipped, leaning upon the top of his staff.

11:22 By faith Joseph, when he died, made mention of the departing of
the children of Israel; and gave commandment concerning his bones.

11:23 By faith Moses, when he was born, was hid three months of his
parents, because they saw he was a proper child; and they were not
afraid of the king's commandment.

11:24 By faith Moses, when he was come to years, refused to be called
the son of Pharaoh's daughter; 11:25 Choosing rather to suffer
affliction with the people of God, than to enjoy the pleasures of sin
for a season; 11:26 Esteeming the reproach of Christ greater riches
than the treasures in Egypt: for he had respect unto the recompence of
the reward.

11:27 By faith he forsook Egypt, not fearing the wrath of the king:
for he endured, as seeing him who is invisible.

11:28 Through faith he kept the passover, and the sprinkling of blood,
lest he that destroyed the firstborn should touch them.

11:29 By faith they passed through the Red sea as by dry land: which
the Egyptians assaying to do were drowned.

11:30 By faith the walls of Jericho fell down, after they were
compassed about seven days.

11:31 By faith the harlot Rahab perished not with them that believed
not, when she had received the spies with peace.

11:32 And what shall I more say? for the time would fail me to tell of
Gedeon, and of Barak, and of Samson, and of Jephthae; of David also,
and Samuel, and of the prophets: 11:33 Who through faith subdued
kingdoms, wrought righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the mouths
of lions.

11:34 Quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword,
out of weakness were made strong, waxed valiant in fight, turned to
flight the armies of the aliens.

11:35 Women received their dead raised to life again: and others were
tortured, not accepting deliverance; that they might obtain a better
resurrection: 11:36 And others had trial of cruel mockings and
scourgings, yea, moreover of bonds and imprisonment: 11:37 They were
stoned, they were sawn asunder, were tempted, were slain with the
sword: they wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins; being
destitute, afflicted, tormented; 11:38 (Of whom the world was not
worthy:) they wandered in deserts, and in mountains, and in dens and
caves of the earth.

11:39 And these all, having obtained a good report through faith,
received not the promise: 11:40 God having provided some better thing
for us, that they without us should not be made perfect.

12:1 Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a
cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which
doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is
set before us, 12:2 Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our
faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross,
despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne
of God.

12:3 For consider him that endured such contradiction of sinners
against himself, lest ye be wearied and faint in your minds.

12:4 Ye have not yet resisted unto blood, striving against sin.

12:5 And ye have forgotten the exhortation which speaketh unto you as
unto children, My son, despise not thou the chastening of the Lord,
nor faint when thou art rebuked of him: 12:6 For whom the Lord loveth
he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth.

12:7 If ye endure chastening, God dealeth with you as with sons; for
what son is he whom the father chasteneth not?  12:8 But if ye be
without chastisement, whereof all are partakers, then are ye bastards,
and not sons.

12:9 Furthermore we have had fathers of our flesh which corrected us,
and we gave them reverence: shall we not much rather be in subjection
unto the Father of spirits, and live?  12:10 For they verily for a few
days chastened us after their own pleasure; but he for our profit,
that we might be partakers of his holiness.

12:11 Now no chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous, but
grievous: nevertheless afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of
righteousness unto them which are exercised thereby.

12:12 Wherefore lift up the hands which hang down, and the feeble
knees; 12:13 And make straight paths for your feet, lest that which is
lame be turned out of the way; but let it rather be healed.

12:14 Follow peace with all men, and holiness, without which no man
shall see the Lord: 12:15 Looking diligently lest any man fail of the
grace of God; lest any root of bitterness springing up trouble you,
and thereby many be defiled; 12:16 Lest there be any fornicator, or
profane person, as Esau, who for one morsel of meat sold his
birthright.

12:17 For ye know how that afterward, when he would have inherited the
blessing, he was rejected: for he found no place of repentance, though
he sought it carefully with tears.

12:18 For ye are not come unto the mount that might be touched, and
that burned with fire, nor unto blackness, and darkness, and tempest,
12:19 And the sound of a trumpet, and the voice of words; which voice
they that heard intreated that the word should not be spoken to them
any more: 12:20 (For they could not endure that which was commanded,
And if so much as a beast touch the mountain, it shall be stoned, or
thrust through with a dart: 12:21 And so terrible was the sight, that
Moses said, I exceedingly fear and quake:) 12:22 But ye are come unto
mount Sion, and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly
Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company of angels, 12:23 To the
general assembly and church of the firstborn, which are written in
heaven, and to God the Judge of all, and to the spirits of just men
made perfect, 12:24 And to Jesus the mediator of the new covenant, and
to the blood of sprinkling, that speaketh better things than that of
Abel.

12:25 See that ye refuse not him that speaketh. For if they escaped
not who refused him that spake on earth, much more shall not we
escape, if we turn away from him that speaketh from heaven: 12:26
Whose voice then shook the earth: but now he hath promised, saying,
Yet once more I shake not the earth only, but also heaven.

12:27 And this word, Yet once more, signifieth the removing of those
things that are shaken, as of things that are made, that those things
which cannot be shaken may remain.

12:28 Wherefore we receiving a kingdom which cannot be moved, let us
have grace, whereby we may serve God acceptably with reverence and
godly fear: 12:29 For our God is a consuming fire.

13:1 Let brotherly love continue.

13:2 Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have
entertained angels unawares.

13:3 Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them; and them
which suffer adversity, as being yourselves also in the body.

13:4 Marriage is honourable in all, and the bed undefiled: but
whoremongers and adulterers God will judge.

13:5 Let your conversation be without covetousness; and be content
with such things as ye have: for he hath said, I will never leave
thee, nor forsake thee.

13:6 So that we may boldly say, The Lord is my helper, and I will not
fear what man shall do unto me.

13:7 Remember them which have the rule over you, who have spoken unto
you the word of God: whose faith follow, considering the end of their
conversation.

13:8 Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever.

13:9 Be not carried about with divers and strange doctrines. For it is
a good thing that the heart be established with grace; not with meats,
which have not profited them that have been occupied therein.

13:10 We have an altar, whereof they have no right to eat which serve
the tabernacle.

13:11 For the bodies of those beasts, whose blood is brought into the
sanctuary by the high priest for sin, are burned without the camp.

13:12 Wherefore Jesus also, that he might sanctify the people with his
own blood, suffered without the gate.

13:13 Let us go forth therefore unto him without the camp, bearing his
reproach.

13:14 For here have we no continuing city, but we seek one to come.

13:15 By him therefore let us offer the sacrifice of praise to God
continually, that is, the fruit of our lips giving thanks to his name.

13:16 But to do good and to communicate forget not: for with such
sacrifices God is well pleased.

13:17 Obey them that have the rule over you, and submit yourselves:
for they watch for your souls, as they that must give account, that
they may do it with joy, and not with grief: for that is unprofitable
for you.

13:18 Pray for us: for we trust we have a good conscience, in all
things willing to live honestly.

13:19 But I beseech you the rather to do this, that I may be restored
to you the sooner.

13:20 Now the God of peace, that brought again from the dead our Lord
Jesus, that great shepherd of the sheep, through the blood of the
everlasting covenant, 13:21 Make you perfect in every good work to do
his will, working in you that which is wellpleasing in his sight,
through Jesus Christ; to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.

13:22 And I beseech you, brethren, suffer the word of exhortation: for
I have written a letter unto you in few words.

13:23 Know ye that our brother Timothy is set at liberty; with whom,
if he come shortly, I will see you.

13:24 Salute all them that have the rule over you, and all the saints.

They of Italy salute you.

13:25 Grace be with you all. Amen.




The General Epistle of James


1:1 James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,
to the twelve tribes which are scattered abroad, greeting.

1:2 My brethren, count it all joy when ye fall into divers
temptations; 1:3 Knowing this, that the trying of your faith worketh
patience.

1:4 But let patience have her perfect work, that ye may be perfect and
entire, wanting nothing.

1:5 If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all
men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him.

1:6 But let him ask in faith, nothing wavering. For he that wavereth
is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed.

1:7 For let not that man think that he shall receive any thing of the
Lord.

1:8 A double minded man is unstable in all his ways.

1:9 Let the brother of low degree rejoice in that he is exalted: 1:10
But the rich, in that he is made low: because as the flower of the
grass he shall pass away.

1:11 For the sun is no sooner risen with a burning heat, but it
withereth the grass, and the flower thereof falleth, and the grace of
the fashion of it perisheth: so also shall the rich man fade away in
his ways.

1:12 Blessed is the man that endureth temptation: for when he is
tried, he shall receive the crown of life, which the Lord hath
promised to them that love him.

1:13 Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God: for God
cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man: 1:14 But
every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and
enticed.

1:15 Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin,
when it is finished, bringeth forth death.

1:16 Do not err, my beloved brethren.

1:17 Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh
down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither
shadow of turning.

1:18 Of his own will begat he us with the word of truth, that we
should be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures.

1:19 Wherefore, my beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear,
slow to speak, slow to wrath: 1:20 For the wrath of man worketh not
the righteousness of God.

1:21 Wherefore lay apart all filthiness and superfluity of
naughtiness, and receive with meekness the engrafted word, which is
able to save your souls.

1:22 But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your
own selves.

1:23 For if any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he is like
unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass: 1:24 For he
beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what
manner of man he was.

1:25 But whoso looketh into the perfect law of liberty, and continueth
therein, he being not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work, this
man shall be blessed in his deed.

1:26 If any man among you seem to be religious, and bridleth not his
tongue, but deceiveth his own heart, this man's religion is vain.

1:27 Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To
visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep
himself unspotted from the world.

2:1 My brethren, have not the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord
of glory, with respect of persons.

2:2 For if there come unto your assembly a man with a gold ring, in
goodly apparel, and there come in also a poor man in vile raiment; 2:3
And ye have respect to him that weareth the gay clothing, and say unto
him, Sit thou here in a good place; and say to the poor, Stand thou
there, or sit here under my footstool: 2:4 Are ye not then partial in
yourselves, and are become judges of evil thoughts?  2:5 Hearken, my
beloved brethren, Hath not God chosen the poor of this world rich in
faith, and heirs of the kingdom which he hath promised to them that
love him?  2:6 But ye have despised the poor. Do not rich men oppress
you, and draw you before the judgment seats?  2:7 Do not they
blaspheme that worthy name by the which ye are called?  2:8 If ye
fulfil the royal law according to the scripture, Thou shalt love thy
neighbour as thyself, ye do well: 2:9 But if ye have respect to
persons, ye commit sin, and are convinced of the law as transgressors.

2:10 For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one
point, he is guilty of all.

2:11 For he that said, Do not commit adultery, said also, Do not kill.
Now if thou commit no adultery, yet if thou kill, thou art become a
transgressor of the law.

2:12 So speak ye, and so do, as they that shall be judged by the law
of liberty.

2:13 For he shall have judgment without mercy, that hath shewed no
mercy; and mercy rejoiceth against judgment.

2:14 What doth it profit, my brethren, though a man say he hath faith,
and have not works? can faith save him?  2:15 If a brother or sister
be naked, and destitute of daily food, 2:16 And one of you say unto
them, Depart in peace, be ye warmed and filled; notwithstanding ye
give them not those things which are needful to the body; what doth it
profit?  2:17 Even so faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being
alone.

2:18 Yea, a man may say, Thou hast faith, and I have works: shew me
thy faith without thy works, and I will shew thee my faith by my
works.

2:19 Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the devils
also believe, and tremble.

2:20 But wilt thou know, O vain man, that faith without works is dead?
2:21 Was not Abraham our father justified by works, when he had
offered Isaac his son upon the altar?  2:22 Seest thou how faith
wrought with his works, and by works was faith made perfect?  2:23 And
the scripture was fulfilled which saith, Abraham believed God, and it
was imputed unto him for righteousness: and he was called the Friend
of God.

2:24 Ye see then how that by works a man is justified, and not by
faith only.

2:25 Likewise also was not Rahab the harlot justified by works, when
she had received the messengers, and had sent them out another way?
2:26 For as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without
works is dead also.

3:1 My brethren, be not many masters, knowing that we shall receive
the greater condemnation.

3:2 For in many things we offend all. If any man offend not in word,
the same is a perfect man, and able also to bridle the whole body.

3:3 Behold, we put bits in the horses' mouths, that they may obey us;
and we turn about their whole body.

3:4 Behold also the ships, which though they be so great, and are
driven of fierce winds, yet are they turned about with a very small
helm, whithersoever the governor listeth.

3:5 Even so the tongue is a little member, and boasteth great things.

Behold, how great a matter a little fire kindleth!  3:6 And the tongue
is a fire, a world of iniquity: so is the tongue among our members,
that it defileth the whole body, and setteth on fire the course of
nature; and it is set on fire of hell.

3:7 For every kind of beasts, and of birds, and of serpents, and of
things in the sea, is tamed, and hath been tamed of mankind: 3:8 But
the tongue can no man tame; it is an unruly evil, full of deadly
poison.

3:9 Therewith bless we God, even the Father; and therewith curse we
men, which are made after the similitude of God.

3:10 Out of the same mouth proceedeth blessing and cursing. My
brethren, these things ought not so to be.

3:11 Doth a fountain send forth at the same place sweet water and
bitter?  3:12 Can the fig tree, my brethren, bear olive berries?
either a vine, figs? so can no fountain both yield salt water and
fresh.

3:13 Who is a wise man and endued with knowledge among you? let him
shew out of a good conversation his works with meekness of wisdom.

3:14 But if ye have bitter envying and strife in your hearts, glory
not, and lie not against the truth.

3:15 This wisdom descendeth not from above, but is earthly, sensual,
devilish.

3:16 For where envying and strife is, there is confusion and every
evil work.

3:17 But the wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable,
gentle, and easy to be intreated, full of mercy and good fruits,
without partiality, and without hypocrisy.

3:18 And the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace of them that make
peace.

4:1 From whence come wars and fightings among you? come they not
hence, even of your lusts that war in your members?  4:2 Ye lust, and
have not: ye kill, and desire to have, and cannot obtain: ye fight and
war, yet ye have not, because ye ask not.

4:3 Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume
it upon your lusts.

4:4 Ye adulterers and adulteresses, know ye not that the friendship of
the world is enmity with God? whosoever therefore will be a friend of
the world is the enemy of God.

4:5 Do ye think that the scripture saith in vain, The spirit that
dwelleth in us lusteth to envy?  4:6 But he giveth more grace.
Wherefore he saith, God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace unto the
humble.

4:7 Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will
flee from you.

4:8 Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you. Cleanse your
hands, ye sinners; and purify your hearts, ye double minded.

4:9 Be afflicted, and mourn, and weep: let your laughter be turned to
mourning, and your joy to heaviness.

4:10 Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and he shall lift you
up.

4:11 Speak not evil one of another, brethren. He that speaketh evil of
his brother, and judgeth his brother, speaketh evil of the law, and
judgeth the law: but if thou judge the law, thou art not a doer of the
law, but a judge.

4:12 There is one lawgiver, who is able to save and to destroy: who
art thou that judgest another?  4:13 Go to now, ye that say, To day or
to morrow we will go into such a city, and continue there a year, and
buy and sell, and get gain: 4:14 Whereas ye know not what shall be on
the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth
for a little time, and then vanisheth away.

4:15 For that ye ought to say, If the Lord will, we shall live, and do
this, or that.

4:16 But now ye rejoice in your boastings: all such rejoicing is evil.

4:17 Therefore to him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to
him it is sin.

5:1 Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall
come upon you.

5:2 Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are motheaten.

5:3 Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a
witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have
heaped treasure together for the last days.

5:4 Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your
fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth: and the cries of
them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of
sabaoth.

5:5 Ye have lived in pleasure on the earth, and been wanton; ye have
nourished your hearts, as in a day of slaughter.

5:6 Ye have condemned and killed the just; and he doth not resist you.

5:7 Be patient therefore, brethren, unto the coming of the Lord.

Behold, the husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth,
and hath long patience for it, until he receive the early and latter
rain.

5:8 Be ye also patient; stablish your hearts: for the coming of the
Lord draweth nigh.

5:9 Grudge not one against another, brethren, lest ye be condemned:
behold, the judge standeth before the door.

5:10 Take, my brethren, the prophets, who have spoken in the name of
the Lord, for an example of suffering affliction, and of patience.

5:11 Behold, we count them happy which endure. Ye have heard of the
patience of Job, and have seen the end of the Lord; that the Lord is
very pitiful, and of tender mercy.

5:12 But above all things, my brethren, swear not, neither by heaven,
neither by the earth, neither by any other oath: but let your yea be
yea; and your nay, nay; lest ye fall into condemnation.

5:13 Is any among you afflicted? let him pray. Is any merry? let him
sing psalms.

5:14 Is any sick among you? let him call for the elders of the church;
and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the
Lord: 5:15 And the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord
shall raise him up; and if he have committed sins, they shall be
forgiven him.

5:16 Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another,
that ye may be healed. The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man
availeth much.

5:17 Elias was a man subject to like passions as we are, and he prayed
earnestly that it might not rain: and it rained not on the earth by
the space of three years and six months.

5:18 And he prayed again, and the heaven gave rain, and the earth
brought forth her fruit.

5:19 Brethren, if any of you do err from the truth, and one convert
him; 5:20 Let him know, that he which converteth the sinner from the
error of his way shall save a soul from death, and shall hide a
multitude of sins.




The First Epistle General of Peter


1:1 Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, to the strangers scattered
throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia, 1:2 Elect
according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through
sanctification of the Spirit, unto obedience and sprinkling of the
blood of Jesus Christ: Grace unto you, and peace, be multiplied.

1:3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, which
according to his abundant mercy hath begotten us again unto a lively
hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, 1:4 To an
inheritance incorruptible, and undefiled, and that fadeth not away,
reserved in heaven for you, 1:5 Who are kept by the power of God
through faith unto salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.

1:6 Wherein ye greatly rejoice, though now for a season, if need be,
ye are in heaviness through manifold temptations: 1:7 That the trial
of your faith, being much more precious than of gold that perisheth,
though it be tried with fire, might be found unto praise and honour
and glory at the appearing of Jesus Christ: 1:8 Whom having not seen,
ye love; in whom, though now ye see him not, yet believing, ye rejoice
with joy unspeakable and full of glory: 1:9 Receiving the end of your
faith, even the salvation of your souls.

1:10 Of which salvation the prophets have enquired and searched
diligently, who prophesied of the grace that should come unto you:
1:11 Searching what, or what manner of time the Spirit of Christ which
was in them did signify, when it testified beforehand the sufferings
of Christ, and the glory that should follow.

1:12 Unto whom it was revealed, that not unto themselves, but unto us
they did minister the things, which are now reported unto you by them
that have preached the gospel unto you with the Holy Ghost sent down
from heaven; which things the angels desire to look into.

1:13 Wherefore gird up the loins of your mind, be sober, and hope to
the end for the grace that is to be brought unto you at the revelation
of Jesus Christ; 1:14 As obedient children, not fashioning yourselves
according to the former lusts in your ignorance: 1:15 But as he which
hath called you is holy, so be ye holy in all manner of conversation;
1:16 Because it is written, Be ye holy; for I am holy.

1:17 And if ye call on the Father, who without respect of persons
judgeth according to every man's work, pass the time of your
sojourning here in fear: 1:18 Forasmuch as ye know that ye were not
redeemed with corruptible things, as silver and gold, from your vain
conversation received by tradition from your fathers; 1:19 But with
the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without
spot: 1:20 Who verily was foreordained before the foundation of the
world, but was manifest in these last times for you, 1:21 Who by him
do believe in God, that raised him up from the dead, and gave him
glory; that your faith and hope might be in God.

1:22 Seeing ye have purified your souls in obeying the truth through
the Spirit unto unfeigned love of the brethren, see that ye love one
another with a pure heart fervently: 1:23 Being born again, not of
corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God, which
liveth and abideth for ever.

1:24 For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower
of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away:
1:25 But the word of the Lord endureth for ever. And this is the word
which by the gospel is preached unto you.

2:1 Wherefore laying aside all malice, and all guile, and hypocrisies,
and envies, all evil speakings, 2:2 As newborn babes, desire the
sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby: 2:3 If so be ye
have tasted that the Lord is gracious.

2:4 To whom coming, as unto a living stone, disallowed indeed of men,
but chosen of God, and precious, 2:5 Ye also, as lively stones, are
built up a spiritual house, an holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual
sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ.

2:6 Wherefore also it is contained in the scripture, Behold, I lay in
Sion a chief corner stone, elect, precious: and he that believeth on
him shall not be confounded.

2:7 Unto you therefore which believe he is precious: but unto them
which be disobedient, the stone which the builders disallowed, the
same is made the head of the corner, 2:8 And a stone of stumbling, and
a rock of offence, even to them which stumble at the word, being
disobedient: whereunto also they were appointed.

2:9 But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy
nation, a peculiar people; that ye should shew forth the praises of
him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvellous light;
2:10 Which in time past were not a people, but are now the people of
God: which had not obtained mercy, but now have obtained mercy.

2:11 Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, abstain
from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul; 2:12 Having your
conversation honest among the Gentiles: that, whereas they speak
against you as evildoers, they may by your good works, which they
shall behold, glorify God in the day of visitation.

2:13 Submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord's sake:
whether it be to the king, as supreme; 2:14 Or unto governors, as unto
them that are sent by him for the punishment of evildoers, and for the
praise of them that do well.

2:15 For so is the will of God, that with well doing ye may put to
silence the ignorance of foolish men: 2:16 As free, and not using your
liberty for a cloke of maliciousness, but as the servants of God.

2:17 Honour all men. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honour the king.

2:18 Servants, be subject to your masters with all fear; not only to
the good and gentle, but also to the froward.

2:19 For this is thankworthy, if a man for conscience toward God
endure grief, suffering wrongfully.

2:20 For what glory is it, if, when ye be buffeted for your faults, ye
shall take it patiently? but if, when ye do well, and suffer for it,
ye take it patiently, this is acceptable with God.

2:21 For even hereunto were ye called: because Christ also suffered
for us, leaving us an example, that ye should follow his steps: 2:22
Who did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth: 2:23 Who, when
he was reviled, reviled not again; when he suffered, he threatened
not; but committed himself to him that judgeth righteously: 2:24 Who
his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being
dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were
healed.

2:25 For ye were as sheep going astray; but are now returned unto the
Shepherd and Bishop of your souls.

3:1 Likewise, ye wives, be in subjection to your own husbands; that,
if any obey not the word, they also may without the word be won by the
conversation of the wives; 3:2 While they behold your chaste
conversation coupled with fear.

3:3 Whose adorning let it not be that outward adorning of plaiting the
hair, and of wearing of gold, or of putting on of apparel; 3:4 But let
it be the hidden man of the heart, in that which is not corruptible,
even the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit, which is in the sight of
God of great price.

3:5 For after this manner in the old time the holy women also, who
trusted in God, adorned themselves, being in subjection unto their own
husbands: 3:6 Even as Sara obeyed Abraham, calling him lord: whose
daughters ye are, as long as ye do well, and are not afraid with any
amazement.

3:7 Likewise, ye husbands, dwell with them according to knowledge,
giving honour unto the wife, as unto the weaker vessel, and as being
heirs together of the grace of life; that your prayers be not
hindered.

3:8 Finally, be ye all of one mind, having compassion one of another,
love as brethren, be pitiful, be courteous: 3:9 Not rendering evil for
evil, or railing for railing: but contrariwise blessing; knowing that
ye are thereunto called, that ye should inherit a blessing.

3:10 For he that will love life, and see good days, let him refrain
his tongue from evil, and his lips that they speak no guile: 3:11 Let
him eschew evil, and do good; let him seek peace, and ensue it.

3:12 For the eyes of the Lord are over the righteous, and his ears are
open unto their prayers: but the face of the Lord is against them that
do evil.

3:13 And who is he that will harm you, if ye be followers of that
which is good?  3:14 But and if ye suffer for righteousness' sake,
happy are ye: and be not afraid of their terror, neither be troubled;
3:15 But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to
give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that
is in you with meekness and fear: 3:16 Having a good conscience; that,
whereas they speak evil of you, as of evildoers, they may be ashamed
that falsely accuse your good conversation in Christ.

3:17 For it is better, if the will of God be so, that ye suffer for
well doing, than for evil doing.

3:18 For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the
unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the
flesh, but quickened by the Spirit: 3:19 By which also he went and
preached unto the spirits in prison; 3:20 Which sometime were
disobedient, when once the longsuffering of God waited in the days of
Noah, while the ark was a preparing, wherein few, that is, eight souls
were saved by water.

3:21 The like figure whereunto even baptism doth also now save us (not
the putting away of the filth of the flesh, but the answer of a good
conscience toward God,) by the resurrection of Jesus Christ: 3:22 Who
is gone into heaven, and is on the right hand of God; angels and
authorities and powers being made subject unto him.

4:1 Forasmuch then as Christ hath suffered for us in the flesh, arm
yourselves likewise with the same mind: for he that hath suffered in
the flesh hath ceased from sin; 4:2 That he no longer should live the
rest of his time in the flesh to the lusts of men, but to the will of
God.

4:3 For the time past of our life may suffice us to have wrought the
will of the Gentiles, when we walked in lasciviousness, lusts, excess
of wine, revellings, banquetings, and abominable idolatries: 4:4
Wherein they think it strange that ye run not with them to the same
excess of riot, speaking evil of you: 4:5 Who shall give account to
him that is ready to judge the quick and the dead.

4:6 For for this cause was the gospel preached also to them that are
dead, that they might be judged according to men in the flesh, but
live according to God in the spirit.

4:7 But the end of all things is at hand: be ye therefore sober, and
watch unto prayer.

4:8 And above all things have fervent charity among yourselves: for
charity shall cover the multitude of sins.

4:9 Use hospitality one to another without grudging.

4:10 As every man hath received the gift, even so minister the same
one to another, as good stewards of the manifold grace of God.

4:11 If any man speak, let him speak as the oracles of God; if any man
minister, let him do it as of the ability which God giveth: that God
in all things may be glorified through Jesus Christ, to whom be praise
and dominion for ever and ever. Amen.

4:12 Beloved, think it not strange concerning the fiery trial which is
to try you, as though some strange thing happened unto you: 4:13 But
rejoice, inasmuch as ye are partakers of Christ's sufferings; that,
when his glory shall be revealed, ye may be glad also with exceeding
joy.

4:14 If ye be reproached for the name of Christ, happy are ye; for the
spirit of glory and of God resteth upon you: on their part he is evil
spoken of, but on your part he is glorified.

4:15 But let none of you suffer as a murderer, or as a thief, or as an
evildoer, or as a busybody in other men's matters.

4:16 Yet if any man suffer as a Christian, let him not be ashamed; but
let him glorify God on this behalf.

4:17 For the time is come that judgment must begin at the house of
God: and if it first begin at us, what shall the end be of them that
obey not the gospel of God?  4:18 And if the righteous scarcely be
saved, where shall the ungodly and the sinner appear?  4:19 Wherefore
let them that suffer according to the will of God commit the keeping
of their souls to him in well doing, as unto a faithful Creator.

5:1 The elders which are among you I exhort, who am also an elder, and
a witness of the sufferings of Christ, and also a partaker of the
glory that shall be revealed: 5:2 Feed the flock of God which is among
you, taking the oversight thereof, not by constraint, but willingly;
not for filthy lucre, but of a ready mind; 5:3 Neither as being lords
over God's heritage, but being ensamples to the flock.

5:4 And when the chief Shepherd shall appear, ye shall receive a crown
of glory that fadeth not away.

5:5 Likewise, ye younger, submit yourselves unto the elder. Yea, all
of you be subject one to another, and be clothed with humility: for
God resisteth the proud, and giveth grace to the humble.

5:6 Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, that he
may exalt you in due time: 5:7 Casting all your care upon him; for he
careth for you.

5:8 Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a
roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour: 5:9 Whom
resist stedfast in the faith, knowing that the same afflictions are
accomplished in your brethren that are in the world.

5:10 But the God of all grace, who hath called us unto his eternal
glory by Christ Jesus, after that ye have suffered a while, make you
perfect, stablish, strengthen, settle you.

5:11 To him be glory and dominion for ever and ever. Amen.

5:12 By Silvanus, a faithful brother unto you, as I suppose, I have
written briefly, exhorting, and testifying that this is the true grace
of God wherein ye stand.

5:13 The church that is at Babylon, elected together with you,
saluteth you; and so doth Marcus my son.

5:14 Greet ye one another with a kiss of charity. Peace be with you
all that are in Christ Jesus. Amen.




The Second General Epistle of Peter


1:1 Simon Peter, a servant and an apostle of Jesus Christ, to them
that have obtained like precious faith with us through the
righteousness of God and our Saviour Jesus Christ: 1:2 Grace and peace
be multiplied unto you through the knowledge of God, and of Jesus our
Lord, 1:3 According as his divine power hath given unto us all things
that pertain unto life and godliness, through the knowledge of him
that hath called us to glory and virtue: 1:4 Whereby are given unto us
exceeding great and precious promises: that by these ye might be
partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is
in the world through lust.

1:5 And beside this, giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue;
and to virtue knowledge; 1:6 And to knowledge temperance; and to
temperance patience; and to patience godliness; 1:7 And to godliness
brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness charity.

1:8 For if these things be in you, and abound, they make you that ye
shall neither be barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord
Jesus Christ.

1:9 But he that lacketh these things is blind, and cannot see afar
off, and hath forgotten that he was purged from his old sins.

1:10 Wherefore the rather, brethren, give diligence to make your
calling and election sure: for if ye do these things, ye shall never
fall: 1:11 For so an entrance shall be ministered unto you abundantly
into the everlasting kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

1:12 Wherefore I will not be negligent to put you always in
remembrance of these things, though ye know them, and be established
in the present truth.

1:13 Yea, I think it meet, as long as I am in this tabernacle, to stir
you up by putting you in remembrance; 1:14 Knowing that shortly I must
put off this my tabernacle, even as our Lord Jesus Christ hath shewed
me.

1:15 Moreover I will endeavour that ye may be able after my decease to
have these things always in remembrance.

1:16 For we have not followed cunningly devised fables, when we made
known unto you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were
eyewitnesses of his majesty.

1:17 For he received from God the Father honour and glory, when there
came such a voice to him from the excellent glory, This is my beloved
Son, in whom I am well pleased.

1:18 And this voice which came from heaven we heard, when we were with
him in the holy mount.

1:19 We have also a more sure word of prophecy; whereunto ye do well
that ye take heed, as unto a light that shineth in a dark place, until
the day dawn, and the day star arise in your hearts: 1:20 Knowing this
first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private
interpretation.

1:21 For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but
holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.

2:1 But there were false prophets also among the people, even as there
shall be false teachers among you, who privily shall bring in damnable
heresies, even denying the Lord that bought them, and bring upon
themselves swift destruction.

2:2 And many shall follow their pernicious ways; by reason of whom the
way of truth shall be evil spoken of.

2:3 And through covetousness shall they with feigned words make
merchandise of you: whose judgment now of a long time lingereth not,
and their damnation slumbereth not.

2:4 For if God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down
to hell, and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved
unto judgment; 2:5 And spared not the old world, but saved Noah the
eighth person, a preacher of righteousness, bringing in the flood upon
the world of the ungodly; 2:6 And turning the cities of Sodom and
Gomorrha into ashes condemned them with an overthrow, making them an
ensample unto those that after should live ungodly; 2:7 And delivered
just Lot, vexed with the filthy conversation of the wicked: 2:8 (For
that righteous man dwelling among them, in seeing and hearing, vexed
his righteous soul from day to day with their unlawful deeds;) 2:9 The
Lord knoweth how to deliver the godly out of temptations, and to
reserve the unjust unto the day of judgment to be punished: 2:10 But
chiefly them that walk after the flesh in the lust of uncleanness, and
despise government. Presumptuous are they, selfwilled, they are not
afraid to speak evil of dignities.

2:11 Whereas angels, which are greater in power and might, bring not
railing accusation against them before the Lord.

2:12 But these, as natural brute beasts, made to be taken and
destroyed, speak evil of the things that they understand not; and
shall utterly perish in their own corruption; 2:13 And shall receive
the reward of unrighteousness, as they that count it pleasure to riot
in the day time. Spots they are and blemishes, sporting themselves
with their own deceivings while they feast with you; 2:14 Having eyes
full of adultery, and that cannot cease from sin; beguiling unstable
souls: an heart they have exercised with covetous practices; cursed
children: 2:15 Which have forsaken the right way, and are gone astray,
following the way of Balaam the son of Bosor, who loved the wages of
unrighteousness; 2:16 But was rebuked for his iniquity: the dumb ass
speaking with man's voice forbad the madness of the prophet.

2:17 These are wells without water, clouds that are carried with a
tempest; to whom the mist of darkness is reserved for ever.

2:18 For when they speak great swelling words of vanity, they allure
through the lusts of the flesh, through much wantonness, those that
were clean escaped from them who live in error.

2:19 While they promise them liberty, they themselves are the servants
of corruption: for of whom a man is overcome, of the same is he
brought in bondage.

2:20 For if after they have escaped the pollutions of the world
through the knowledge of the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, they are
again entangled therein, and overcome, the latter end is worse with
them than the beginning.

2:21 For it had been better for them not to have known the way of
righteousness, than, after they have known it, to turn from the holy
commandment delivered unto them.

2:22 But it is happened unto them according to the true proverb, The
dog is turned to his own vomit again; and the sow that was washed to
her wallowing in the mire.

3:1 This second epistle, beloved, I now write unto you; in both which
I stir up your pure minds by way of remembrance: 3:2 That ye may be
mindful of the words which were spoken before by the holy prophets,
and of the commandment of us the apostles of the Lord and Saviour: 3:3
Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers,
walking after their own lusts, 3:4 And saying, Where is the promise of
his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as
they were from the beginning of the creation.

3:5 For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God
the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and
in the water: 3:6 Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed
with water, perished: 3:7 But the heavens and the earth, which are
now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against
the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men.

3:8 But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is
with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.

3:9 The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count
slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any
should perish, but that all should come to repentance.

3:10 But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the
which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements
shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are
therein shall be burned up.

3:11 Seeing then that all these things shall be dissolved, what manner
of persons ought ye to be in all holy conversation and godliness, 3:12
Looking for and hasting unto the coming of the day of God, wherein the
heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt
with fervent heat?  3:13 Nevertheless we, according to his promise,
look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness.

3:14 Wherefore, beloved, seeing that ye look for such things, be
diligent that ye may be found of him in peace, without spot, and
blameless.

3:15 And account that the longsuffering of our Lord is salvation; even
as our beloved brother Paul also according to the wisdom given unto
him hath written unto you; 3:16 As also in all his epistles, speaking
in them of these things; in which are some things hard to be
understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they
do also the other scriptures, unto their own destruction.

3:17 Ye therefore, beloved, seeing ye know these things before, beware
lest ye also, being led away with the error of the wicked, fall from
your own stedfastness.

3:18 But grow in grace, and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour
Jesus Christ. To him be glory both now and for ever. Amen.




The First Epistle General of John


1:1 That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we
have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have
handled, of the Word of life; 1:2 (For the life was manifested, and we
have seen it, and bear witness, and shew unto you that eternal life,
which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us;) 1:3 That which
we have seen and heard declare we unto you, that ye also may have
fellowship with us: and truly our fellowship is with the Father, and
with his Son Jesus Christ.

1:4 And these things write we unto you, that your joy may be full.

1:5 This then is the message which we have heard of him, and declare
unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.

1:6 If we say that we have fellowship with him, and walk in darkness,
we lie, and do not the truth: 1:7 But if we walk in the light, as he
is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of
Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin.

1:8 If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth
is not in us.

1:9 If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our
sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

1:10 If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his
word is not in us.

2:1 My little children, these things write I unto you, that ye sin
not.

And if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ
the righteous: 2:2 And he is the propitiation for our sins: and not
for our's only, but also for the sins of the whole world.

2:3 And hereby we do know that we know him, if we keep his
commandments.

2:4 He that saith, I know him, and keepeth not his commandments, is a
liar, and the truth is not in him.

2:5 But whoso keepeth his word, in him verily is the love of God
perfected: hereby know we that we are in him.

2:6 He that saith he abideth in him ought himself also so to walk,
even as he walked.

2:7 Brethren, I write no new commandment unto you, but an old
commandment which ye had from the beginning. The old commandment is
the word which ye have heard from the beginning.

2:8 Again, a new commandment I write unto you, which thing is true in
him and in you: because the darkness is past, and the true light now
shineth.

2:9 He that saith he is in the light, and hateth his brother, is in
darkness even until now.

2:10 He that loveth his brother abideth in the light, and there is
none occasion of stumbling in him.

2:11 But he that hateth his brother is in darkness, and walketh in
darkness, and knoweth not whither he goeth, because that darkness hath
blinded his eyes.

2:12 I write unto you, little children, because your sins are forgiven
you for his name's sake.

2:13 I write unto you, fathers, because ye have known him that is from
the beginning. I write unto you, young men, because ye have overcome
the wicked one. I write unto you, little children, because ye have
known the Father.

2:14 I have written unto you, fathers, because ye have known him that
is from the beginning. I have written unto you, young men, because ye
are strong, and the word of God abideth in you, and ye have overcome
the wicked one.

2:15 Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If
any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.

2:16 For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust
of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of
the world.

2:17 And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that
doeth the will of God abideth for ever.

2:18 Little children, it is the last time: and as ye have heard that
antichrist shall come, even now are there many antichrists; whereby we
know that it is the last time.

2:19 They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had
been of us, they would no doubt have continued with us: but they went
out, that they might be made manifest that they were not all of us.

2:20 But ye have an unction from the Holy One, and ye know all things.

2:21 I have not written unto you because ye know not the truth, but
because ye know it, and that no lie is of the truth.

2:22 Who is a liar but he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ? He is
antichrist, that denieth the Father and the Son.

2:23 Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father: he that
acknowledgeth the Son hath the Father also.

2:24 Let that therefore abide in you, which ye have heard from the
beginning. If that which ye have heard from the beginning shall remain
in you, ye also shall continue in the Son, and in the Father.

2:25 And this is the promise that he hath promised us, even eternal
life.

2:26 These things have I written unto you concerning them that seduce
you.

2:27 But the anointing which ye have received of him abideth in you,
and ye need not that any man teach you: but as the same anointing
teacheth you of all things, and is truth, and is no lie, and even as
it hath taught you, ye shall abide in him.

2:28 And now, little children, abide in him; that, when he shall
appear, we may have confidence, and not be ashamed before him at his
coming.

2:29 If ye know that he is righteous, ye know that every one that
doeth righteousness is born of him.

3:1 Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that
we should be called the sons of God: therefore the world knoweth us
not, because it knew him not.

3:2 Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear
what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be
like him; for we shall see him as he is.

3:3 And every man that hath this hope in him purifieth himself, even
as he is pure.

3:4 Whosoever committeth sin transgresseth also the law: for sin is
the transgression of the law.

3:5 And ye know that he was manifested to take away our sins; and in
him is no sin.

3:6 Whosoever abideth in him sinneth not: whosoever sinneth hath not
seen him, neither known him.

3:7 Little children, let no man deceive you: he that doeth
righteousness is righteous, even as he is righteous.

3:8 He that committeth sin is of the devil; for the devil sinneth from
the beginning. For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that he
might destroy the works of the devil.

3:9 Whosoever is born of God doth not commit sin; for his seed
remaineth in him: and he cannot sin, because he is born of God.

3:10 In this the children of God are manifest, and the children of the
devil: whosoever doeth not righteousness is not of God, neither he
that loveth not his brother.

3:11 For this is the message that ye heard from the beginning, that we
should love one another.

3:12 Not as Cain, who was of that wicked one, and slew his brother.
And wherefore slew he him? Because his own works were evil, and his
brother's righteous.

3:13 Marvel not, my brethren, if the world hate you.

3:14 We know that we have passed from death unto life, because we love
the brethren. He that loveth not his brother abideth in death.

3:15 Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer: and ye know that no
murderer hath eternal life abiding in him.

3:16 Hereby perceive we the love of God, because he laid down his life
for us: and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.

3:17 But whoso hath this world's good, and seeth his brother have
need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth
the love of God in him?  3:18 My little children, let us not love in
word, neither in tongue; but in deed and in truth.

3:19 And hereby we know that we are of the truth, and shall assure our
hearts before him.

3:20 For if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and
knoweth all things.

3:21 Beloved, if our heart condemn us not, then have we confidence
toward God.

3:22 And whatsoever we ask, we receive of him, because we keep his
commandments, and do those things that are pleasing in his sight.

3:23 And this is his commandment, That we should believe on the name
of his Son Jesus Christ, and love one another, as he gave us
commandment.

3:24 And he that keepeth his commandments dwelleth in him, and he in
him.

And hereby we know that he abideth in us, by the Spirit which he hath
given us.

4:1 Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether
they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the
world.

4:2 Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesseth
that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God: 4:3 And every spirit
that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of
God: and this is that spirit of antichrist, whereof ye have heard that
it should come; and even now already is it in the world.

4:4 Ye are of God, little children, and have overcome them: because
greater is he that is in you, than he that is in the world.

4:5 They are of the world: therefore speak they of the world, and the
world heareth them.

4:6 We are of God: he that knoweth God heareth us; he that is not of
God heareth not us. Hereby know we the spirit of truth, and the spirit
of error.

4:7 Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every
one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God.

4:8 He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.

4:9 In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God
sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through
him.

4:10 Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and
sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.

4:11 Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another.

4:12 No man hath seen God at any time. If we love one another, God
dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us.

4:13 Hereby know we that we dwell in him, and he in us, because he
hath given us of his Spirit.

4:14 And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to
be the Saviour of the world.

4:15 Whosoever shall confess that Jesus is the Son of God, God
dwelleth in him, and he in God.

4:16 And we have known and believed the love that God hath to us. God
is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him.

4:17 Herein is our love made perfect, that we may have boldness in the
day of judgment: because as he is, so are we in this world.

4:18 There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear:
because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in
love.

4:19 We love him, because he first loved us.

4:20 If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar:
for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love
God whom he hath not seen?  4:21 And this commandment have we from
him, That he who loveth God love his brother also.

5:1 Whosoever believeth that Jesus is the Christ is born of God: and
every one that loveth him that begat loveth him also that is begotten
of him.

5:2 By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love
God, and keep his commandments.

5:3 For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments: and
his commandments are not grievous.

5:4 For whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world: and this is
the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith.

5:5 Who is he that overcometh the world, but he that believeth that
Jesus is the Son of God?  5:6 This is he that came by water and blood,
even Jesus Christ; not by water only, but by water and blood. And it
is the Spirit that beareth witness, because the Spirit is truth.

5:7 For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the
Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.

5:8 And there are three that bear witness in earth, the Spirit, and
the water, and the blood: and these three agree in one.

5:9 If we receive the witness of men, the witness of God is greater:
for this is the witness of God which he hath testified of his Son.

5:10 He that believeth on the Son of God hath the witness in himself:
he that believeth not God hath made him a liar; because he believeth
not the record that God gave of his Son.

5:11 And this is the record, that God hath given to us eternal life,
and this life is in his Son.

5:12 He that hath the Son hath life; and he that hath not the Son of
God hath not life.

5:13 These things have I written unto you that believe on the name of
the Son of God; that ye may know that ye have eternal life, and that
ye may believe on the name of the Son of God.

5:14 And this is the confidence that we have in him, that, if we ask
any thing according to his will, he heareth us: 5:15 And if we know
that he hear us, whatsoever we ask, we know that we have the petitions
that we desired of him.

5:16 If any man see his brother sin a sin which is not unto death, he
shall ask, and he shall give him life for them that sin not unto
death. There is a sin unto death: I do not say that he shall pray for
it.

5:17 All unrighteousness is sin: and there is a sin not unto death.

5:18 We know that whosoever is born of God sinneth not; but he that is
begotten of God keepeth himself, and that wicked one toucheth him not.

5:19 And we know that we are of God, and the whole world lieth in
wickedness.

5:20 And we know that the Son of God is come, and hath given us an
understanding, that we may know him that is true, and we are in him
that is true, even in his Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God, and
eternal life.

5:21 Little children, keep yourselves from idols. Amen.




The Second Epistle General of John


1:1 The elder unto the elect lady and her children, whom I love in
the truth; and not I only, but also all they that have known the
truth; 1:2 For the truth's sake, which dwelleth in us, and shall be
with us for ever.

1:3 Grace be with you, mercy, and peace, from God the Father, and from
the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of the Father, in truth and love.

1:4 I rejoiced greatly that I found of thy children walking in truth,
as we have received a commandment from the Father.

1:5 And now I beseech thee, lady, not as though I wrote a new
commandment unto thee, but that which we had from the beginning, that
we love one another.

1:6 And this is love, that we walk after his commandments. This is the
commandment, That, as ye have heard from the beginning, ye should walk
in it.

1:7 For many deceivers are entered into the world, who confess not
that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh. This is a deceiver and an
antichrist.

1:8 Look to yourselves, that we lose not those things which we have
wrought, but that we receive a full reward.

1:9 Whosoever transgresseth, and abideth not in the doctrine of
Christ, hath not God. He that abideth in the doctrine of Christ, he
hath both the Father and the Son.

1:10 If there come any unto you, and bring not this doctrine, receive
him not into your house, neither bid him God speed: 1:11 For he that
biddeth him God speed is partaker of his evil deeds.

1:12 Having many things to write unto you, I would not write with
paper and ink: but I trust to come unto you, and speak face to face,
that our joy may be full.

1:13 The children of thy elect sister greet thee. Amen.




The Third Epistle General of John


1:1 The elder unto the wellbeloved Gaius, whom I love in the truth.

1:2 Beloved, I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be
in health, even as thy soul prospereth.

1:3 For I rejoiced greatly, when the brethren came and testified of
the truth that is in thee, even as thou walkest in the truth.

1:4 I have no greater joy than to hear that my children walk in truth.

1:5 Beloved, thou doest faithfully whatsoever thou doest to the
brethren, and to strangers; 1:6 Which have borne witness of thy
charity before the church: whom if thou bring forward on their journey
after a godly sort, thou shalt do well: 1:7 Because that for his
name's sake they went forth, taking nothing of the Gentiles.

1:8 We therefore ought to receive such, that we might be fellowhelpers
to the truth.

1:9 I wrote unto the church: but Diotrephes, who loveth to have the
preeminence among them, receiveth us not.

1:10 Wherefore, if I come, I will remember his deeds which he doeth,
prating against us with malicious words: and not content therewith,
neither doth he himself receive the brethren, and forbiddeth them that
would, and casteth them out of the church.

1:11 Beloved, follow not that which is evil, but that which is good.
He that doeth good is of God: but he that doeth evil hath not seen
God.

1:12 Demetrius hath good report of all men, and of the truth itself:
yea, and we also bear record; and ye know that our record is true.

1:13 I had many things to write, but I will not with ink and pen write
unto thee: 1:14 But I trust I shall shortly see thee, and we shall
speak face to face. Peace be to thee. Our friends salute thee. Greet
the friends by name.




The General Epistle of Jude


1:1 Jude, the servant of Jesus Christ, and brother of James, to them
that are sanctified by God the Father, and preserved in Jesus Christ,
and called: 1:2 Mercy unto you, and peace, and love, be multiplied.

1:3 Beloved, when I gave all diligence to write unto you of the common
salvation, it was needful for me to write unto you, and exhort you
that ye should earnestly contend for the faith which was once
delivered unto the saints.

1:4 For there are certain men crept in unawares, who were before of
old ordained to this condemnation, ungodly men, turning the grace of
our God into lasciviousness, and denying the only Lord God, and our
Lord Jesus Christ.

1:5 I will therefore put you in remembrance, though ye once knew this,
how that the Lord, having saved the people out of the land of Egypt,
afterward destroyed them that believed not.

1:6 And the angels which kept not their first estate, but left their
own habitation, he hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness
unto the judgment of the great day.

1:7 Even as Sodom and Gomorrha, and the cities about them in like
manner, giving themselves over to fornication, and going after strange
flesh, are set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of
eternal fire.

1:8 Likewise also these filthy dreamers defile the flesh, despise
dominion, and speak evil of dignities.

1:9 Yet Michael the archangel, when contending with the devil he
disputed about the body of Moses, durst not bring against him a
railing accusation, but said, The Lord rebuke thee.

1:10 But these speak evil of those things which they know not: but
what they know naturally, as brute beasts, in those things they
corrupt themselves.

1:11 Woe unto them! for they have gone in the way of Cain, and ran
greedily after the error of Balaam for reward, and perished in the
gainsaying of Core.

1:12 These are spots in your feasts of charity, when they feast with
you, feeding themselves without fear: clouds they are without water,
carried about of winds; trees whose fruit withereth, without fruit,
twice dead, plucked up by the roots; 1:13 Raging waves of the sea,
foaming out their own shame; wandering stars, to whom is reserved the
blackness of darkness for ever.

1:14 And Enoch also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied of these,
saying, Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousands of his saints, 1:15
To execute judgment upon all, and to convince all that are ungodly
among them of all their ungodly deeds which they have ungodly
committed, and of all their hard speeches which ungodly sinners have
spoken against him.

1:16 These are murmurers, complainers, walking after their own lusts;
and their mouth speaketh great swelling words, having men's persons in
admiration because of advantage.

1:17 But, beloved, remember ye the words which were spoken before of
the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ; 1:18 How that they told you
there should be mockers in the last time, who should walk after their
own ungodly lusts.

1:19 These be they who separate themselves, sensual, having not the
Spirit.

1:20 But ye, beloved, building up yourselves on your most holy faith,
praying in the Holy Ghost, 1:21 Keep yourselves in the love of God,
looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life.

1:22 And of some have compassion, making a difference: 1:23 And others
save with fear, pulling them out of the fire; hating even the garment
spotted by the flesh.

1:24 Now unto him that is able to keep you from falling, and to
present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding
joy, 1:25 To the only wise God our Saviour, be glory and majesty,
dominion and power, both now and ever. Amen.




The Revelation of Saint John the Devine


1:1 The Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave unto him, to shew
unto his servants things which must shortly come to pass; and he sent
and signified it by his angel unto his servant John: 1:2 Who bare
record of the word of God, and of the testimony of Jesus Christ, and
of all things that he saw.

1:3 Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear the words of this
prophecy, and keep those things which are written therein: for the
time is at hand.

1:4 John to the seven churches which are in Asia: Grace be unto you,
and peace, from him which is, and which was, and which is to come; and
from the seven Spirits which are before his throne; 1:5 And from Jesus
Christ, who is the faithful witness, and the first begotten of the
dead, and the prince of the kings of the earth. Unto him that loved
us, and washed us from our sins in his own blood, 1:6 And hath made us
kings and priests unto God and his Father; to him be glory and
dominion for ever and ever. Amen.

1:7 Behold, he cometh with clouds; and every eye shall see him, and
they also which pierced him: and all kindreds of the earth shall wail
because of him. Even so, Amen.

1:8 I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the
Lord, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty.

1:9 I John, who also am your brother, and companion in tribulation,
and in the kingdom and patience of Jesus Christ, was in the isle that
is called Patmos, for the word of God, and for the testimony of Jesus
Christ.

1:10 I was in the Spirit on the Lord's day, and heard behind me a
great voice, as of a trumpet, 1:11 Saying, I am Alpha and Omega, the
first and the last: and, What thou seest, write in a book, and send it
unto the seven churches which are in Asia; unto Ephesus, and unto
Smyrna, and unto Pergamos, and unto Thyatira, and unto Sardis, and
unto Philadelphia, and unto Laodicea.

1:12 And I turned to see the voice that spake with me. And being
turned, I saw seven golden candlesticks; 1:13 And in the midst of the
seven candlesticks one like unto the Son of man, clothed with a
garment down to the foot, and girt about the paps with a golden
girdle.

1:14 His head and his hairs were white like wool, as white as snow;
and his eyes were as a flame of fire; 1:15 And his feet like unto fine
brass, as if they burned in a furnace; and his voice as the sound of
many waters.

1:16 And he had in his right hand seven stars: and out of his mouth
went a sharp twoedged sword: and his countenance was as the sun
shineth in his strength.

1:17 And when I saw him, I fell at his feet as dead. And he laid his
right hand upon me, saying unto me, Fear not; I am the first and the
last: 1:18 I am he that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive
for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death.

1:19 Write the things which thou hast seen, and the things which are,
and the things which shall be hereafter; 1:20 The mystery of the seven
stars which thou sawest in my right hand, and the seven golden
candlesticks. The seven stars are the angels of the seven churches:
and the seven candlesticks which thou sawest are the seven churches.

2:1 Unto the angel of the church of Ephesus write; These things saith
he that holdeth the seven stars in his right hand, who walketh in the
midst of the seven golden candlesticks; 2:2 I know thy works, and thy
labour, and thy patience, and how thou canst not bear them which are
evil: and thou hast tried them which say they are apostles, and are
not, and hast found them liars: 2:3 And hast borne, and hast patience,
and for my name's sake hast laboured, and hast not fainted.

2:4 Nevertheless I have somewhat against thee, because thou hast left
thy first love.

2:5 Remember therefore from whence thou art fallen, and repent, and do
the first works; or else I will come unto thee quickly, and will
remove thy candlestick out of his place, except thou repent.

2:6 But this thou hast, that thou hatest the deeds of the
Nicolaitanes, which I also hate.

2:7 He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the
churches; To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of
life, which is in the midst of the paradise of God.

2:8 And unto the angel of the church in Smyrna write; These things
saith the first and the last, which was dead, and is alive; 2:9 I know
thy works, and tribulation, and poverty, (but thou art rich) and I
know the blasphemy of them which say they are Jews, and are not, but
are the synagogue of Satan.

2:10 Fear none of those things which thou shalt suffer: behold, the
devil shall cast some of you into prison, that ye may be tried; and ye
shall have tribulation ten days: be thou faithful unto death, and I
will give thee a crown of life.

2:11 He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the
churches; He that overcometh shall not be hurt of the second death.

2:12 And to the angel of the church in Pergamos write; These things
saith he which hath the sharp sword with two edges; 2:13 I know thy
works, and where thou dwellest, even where Satan's seat is: and thou
holdest fast my name, and hast not denied my faith, even in those days
wherein Antipas was my faithful martyr, who was slain among you, where
Satan dwelleth.

2:14 But I have a few things against thee, because thou hast there
them that hold the doctrine of Balaam, who taught Balac to cast a
stumblingblock before the children of Israel, to eat things sacrificed
unto idols, and to commit fornication.

2:15 So hast thou also them that hold the doctrine of the
Nicolaitanes, which thing I hate.

2:16 Repent; or else I will come unto thee quickly, and will fight
against them with the sword of my mouth.

2:17 He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the
churches; To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the hidden
manna, and will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name
written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it.

2:18 And unto the angel of the church in Thyatira write; These things
saith the Son of God, who hath his eyes like unto a flame of fire, and
his feet are like fine brass; 2:19 I know thy works, and charity, and
service, and faith, and thy patience, and thy works; and the last to
be more than the first.

2:20 Notwithstanding I have a few things against thee, because thou
sufferest that woman Jezebel, which calleth herself a prophetess, to
teach and to seduce my servants to commit fornication, and to eat
things sacrificed unto idols.

2:21 And I gave her space to repent of her fornication; and she
repented not.

2:22 Behold, I will cast her into a bed, and them that commit adultery
with her into great tribulation, except they repent of their deeds.

2:23 And I will kill her children with death; and all the churches
shall know that I am he which searcheth the reins and hearts: and I
will give unto every one of you according to your works.

2:24 But unto you I say, and unto the rest in Thyatira, as many as
have not this doctrine, and which have not known the depths of Satan,
as they speak; I will put upon you none other burden.

2:25 But that which ye have already hold fast till I come.

2:26 And he that overcometh, and keepeth my works unto the end, to him
will I give power over the nations: 2:27 And he shall rule them with a
rod of iron; as the vessels of a potter shall they be broken to
shivers: even as I received of my Father.

2:28 And I will give him the morning star.

2:29 He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the
churches.

3:1 And unto the angel of the church in Sardis write; These things
saith he that hath the seven Spirits of God, and the seven stars; I
know thy works, that thou hast a name that thou livest, and art dead.

3:2 Be watchful, and strengthen the things which remain, that are
ready to die: for I have not found thy works perfect before God.

3:3 Remember therefore how thou hast received and heard, and hold
fast, and repent. If therefore thou shalt not watch, I will come on
thee as a thief, and thou shalt not know what hour I will come upon
thee.

3:4 Thou hast a few names even in Sardis which have not defiled their
garments; and they shall walk with me in white: for they are worthy.

3:5 He that overcometh, the same shall be clothed in white raiment;
and I will not blot out his name out of the book of life, but I will
confess his name before my Father, and before his angels.

3:6 He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the
churches.

3:7 And to the angel of the church in Philadelphia write; These things
saith he that is holy, he that is true, he that hath the key of David,
he that openeth, and no man shutteth; and shutteth, and no man
openeth; 3:8 I know thy works: behold, I have set before thee an open
door, and no man can shut it: for thou hast a little strength, and
hast kept my word, and hast not denied my name.

3:9 Behold, I will make them of the synagogue of Satan, which say they
are Jews, and are not, but do lie; behold, I will make them to come
and worship before thy feet, and to know that I have loved thee.

3:10 Because thou hast kept the word of my patience, I also will keep
thee from the hour of temptation, which shall come upon all the world,
to try them that dwell upon the earth.

3:11 Behold, I come quickly: hold that fast which thou hast, that no
man take thy crown.

3:12 Him that overcometh will I make a pillar in the temple of my God,
and he shall go no more out: and I will write upon him the name of my
God, and the name of the city of my God, which is new Jerusalem, which
cometh down out of heaven from my God: and I will write upon him my
new name.

3:13 He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the
churches.

3:14 And unto the angel of the church of the Laodiceans write; These
things saith the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of
the creation of God; 3:15 I know thy works, that thou art neither cold
nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot.

3:16 So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I
will spue thee out of my mouth.

3:17 Because thou sayest, I am rich, and increased with goods, and
have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou art wretched, and
miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked: 3:18 I counsel thee to buy
of me gold tried in the fire, that thou mayest be rich; and white
raiment, that thou mayest be clothed, and that the shame of thy
nakedness do not appear; and anoint thine eyes with eyesalve, that
thou mayest see.

3:19 As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten: be zealous therefore,
and repent.

3:20 Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice,
and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and
he with me.

3:21 To him that overcometh will I grant to sit with me in my throne,
even as I also overcame, and am set down with my Father in his throne.

3:22 He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the
churches.

4:1 After this I looked, and, behold, a door was opened in heaven: and
the first voice which I heard was as it were of a trumpet talking with
me; which said, Come up hither, and I will shew thee things which must
be hereafter.

4:2 And immediately I was in the spirit: and, behold, a throne was set
in heaven, and one sat on the throne.

4:3 And he that sat was to look upon like a jasper and a sardine
stone: and there was a rainbow round about the throne, in sight like
unto an emerald.

4:4 And round about the throne were four and twenty seats: and upon
the seats I saw four and twenty elders sitting, clothed in white
raiment; and they had on their heads crowns of gold.

4:5 And out of the throne proceeded lightnings and thunderings and
voices: and there were seven lamps of fire burning before the throne,
which are the seven Spirits of God.

4:6 And before the throne there was a sea of glass like unto crystal:
and in the midst of the throne, and round about the throne, were four
beasts full of eyes before and behind.

4:7 And the first beast was like a lion, and the second beast like a
calf, and the third beast had a face as a man, and the fourth beast
was like a flying eagle.

4:8 And the four beasts had each of them six wings about him; and they
were full of eyes within: and they rest not day and night, saying,
Holy, holy, holy, LORD God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to
come.

4:9 And when those beasts give glory and honour and thanks to him that
sat on the throne, who liveth for ever and ever, 4:10 The four and
twenty elders fall down before him that sat on the throne, and worship
him that liveth for ever and ever, and cast their crowns before the
throne, saying, 4:11 Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and
honour and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy
pleasure they are and were created.

5:1 And I saw in the right hand of him that sat on the throne a book
written within and on the backside, sealed with seven seals.

5:2 And I saw a strong angel proclaiming with a loud voice, Who is
worthy to open the book, and to loose the seals thereof?  5:3 And no
man in heaven, nor in earth, neither under the earth, was able to open
the book, neither to look thereon.

5:4 And I wept much, because no man was found worthy to open and to
read the book, neither to look thereon.

5:5 And one of the elders saith unto me, Weep not: behold, the Lion of
the tribe of Juda, the Root of David, hath prevailed to open the book,
and to loose the seven seals thereof.

5:6 And I beheld, and, lo, in the midst of the throne and of the four
beasts, and in the midst of the elders, stood a Lamb as it had been
slain, having seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven Spirits
of God sent forth into all the earth.

5:7 And he came and took the book out of the right hand of him that
sat upon the throne.

5:8 And when he had taken the book, the four beasts and four and
twenty elders fell down before the Lamb, having every one of them
harps, and golden vials full of odours, which are the prayers of
saints.

5:9 And they sung a new song, saying, Thou art worthy to take the
book, and to open the seals thereof: for thou wast slain, and hast
redeemed us to God by thy blood out of every kindred, and tongue, and
people, and nation; 5:10 And hast made us unto our God kings and
priests: and we shall reign on the earth.

5:11 And I beheld, and I heard the voice of many angels round about
the throne and the beasts and the elders: and the number of them was
ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands; 5:12
Saying with a loud voice, Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive
power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory,
and blessing.

5:13 And every creature which is in heaven, and on the earth, and
under the earth, and such as are in the sea, and all that are in them,
heard I saying, Blessing, and honour, and glory, and power, be unto
him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb for ever and ever.

5:14 And the four beasts said, Amen. And the four and twenty elders
fell down and worshipped him that liveth for ever and ever.

6:1 And I saw when the Lamb opened one of the seals, and I heard, as
it were the noise of thunder, one of the four beasts saying, Come and
see.

6:2 And I saw, and behold a white horse: and he that sat on him had a
bow; and a crown was given unto him: and he went forth conquering, and
to conquer.

6:3 And when he had opened the second seal, I heard the second beast
say, Come and see.

6:4 And there went out another horse that was red: and power was given
to him that sat thereon to take peace from the earth, and that they
should kill one another: and there was given unto him a great sword.

6:5 And when he had opened the third seal, I heard the third beast
say, Come and see. And I beheld, and lo a black horse; and he that sat
on him had a pair of balances in his hand.

6:6 And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts say, A measure
of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and
see thou hurt not the oil and the wine.

6:7 And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the
fourth beast say, Come and see.

6:8 And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on
him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto
them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with
hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.

6:9 And when he had opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the
souls of them that were slain for the word of God, and for the
testimony which they held: 6:10 And they cried with a loud voice,
saying, How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and
avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?  6:11 And white
robes were given unto every one of them; and it was said unto them,
that they should rest yet for a little season, until their
fellowservants also and their brethren, that should be killed as they
were, should be fulfilled.

6:12 And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there
was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair,
and the moon became as blood; 6:13 And the stars of heaven fell unto
the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is
shaken of a mighty wind.

6:14 And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together;
and every mountain and island were moved out of their places.

6:15 And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men,
and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and
every free man, hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the
mountains; 6:16 And said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and
hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the
wrath of the Lamb: 6:17 For the great day of his wrath is come; and
who shall be able to stand?  7:1 And after these things I saw four
angels standing on the four corners of the earth, holding the four
winds of the earth, that the wind should not blow on the earth, nor on
the sea, nor on any tree.

7:2 And I saw another angel ascending from the east, having the seal
of the living God: and he cried with a loud voice to the four angels,
to whom it was given to hurt the earth and the sea, 7:3 Saying, Hurt
not the earth, neither the sea, nor the trees, till we have sealed the
servants of our God in their foreheads.

7:4 And I heard the number of them which were sealed: and there were
sealed an hundred and forty and four thousand of all the tribes of the
children of Israel.

7:5 Of the tribe of Juda were sealed twelve thousand. Of the tribe of
Reuben were sealed twelve thousand. Of the tribe of Gad were sealed
twelve thousand.

7:6 Of the tribe of Aser were sealed twelve thousand. Of the tribe of
Nephthalim were sealed twelve thousand. Of the tribe of Manasses were
sealed twelve thousand.

7:7 Of the tribe of Simeon were sealed twelve thousand. Of the tribe
of Levi were sealed twelve thousand. Of the tribe of Issachar were
sealed twelve thousand.

7:8 Of the tribe of Zabulon were sealed twelve thousand. Of the tribe
of Joseph were sealed twelve thousand. Of the tribe of Benjamin were
sealed twelve thousand.

7:9 After this I beheld, and, lo, a great multitude, which no man
could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues,
stood before the throne, and before the Lamb, clothed with white
robes, and palms in their hands; 7:10 And cried with a loud voice,
saying, Salvation to our God which sitteth upon the throne, and unto
the Lamb.

7:11 And all the angels stood round about the throne, and about the
elders and the four beasts, and fell before the throne on their faces,
and worshipped God, 7:12 Saying, Amen: Blessing, and glory, and
wisdom, and thanksgiving, and honour, and power, and might, be unto
our God for ever and ever. Amen.

7:13 And one of the elders answered, saying unto me, What are these
which are arrayed in white robes? and whence came they?  7:14 And I
said unto him, Sir, thou knowest. And he said to me, These are they
which came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and
made them white in the blood of the Lamb.

7:15 Therefore are they before the throne of God, and serve him day
and night in his temple: and he that sitteth on the throne shall dwell
among them.

7:16 They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more; neither shall
the sun light on them, nor any heat.

7:17 For the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them,
and shall lead them unto living fountains of waters: and God shall
wipe away all tears from their eyes.

8:1 And when he had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in
heaven about the space of half an hour.

8:2 And I saw the seven angels which stood before God; and to them
were given seven trumpets.

8:3 And another angel came and stood at the altar, having a golden
censer; and there was given unto him much incense, that he should
offer it with the prayers of all saints upon the golden altar which
was before the throne.

8:4 And the smoke of the incense, which came with the prayers of the
saints, ascended up before God out of the angel's hand.

8:5 And the angel took the censer, and filled it with fire of the
altar, and cast it into the earth: and there were voices, and
thunderings, and lightnings, and an earthquake.

8:6 And the seven angels which had the seven trumpets prepared
themselves to sound.

8:7 The first angel sounded, and there followed hail and fire mingled
with blood, and they were cast upon the earth: and the third part of
trees was burnt up, and all green grass was burnt up.

8:8 And the second angel sounded, and as it were a great mountain
burning with fire was cast into the sea: and the third part of the sea
became blood; 8:9 And the third part of the creatures which were in
the sea, and had life, died; and the third part of the ships were
destroyed.

8:10 And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from
heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of
the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters; 8:11 And the name of the
star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became
wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made
bitter.

8:12 And the fourth angel sounded, and the third part of the sun was
smitten, and the third part of the moon, and the third part of the
stars; so as the third part of them was darkened, and the day shone
not for a third part of it, and the night likewise.

8:13 And I beheld, and heard an angel flying through the midst of
heaven, saying with a loud voice, Woe, woe, woe, to the inhabiters of
the earth by reason of the other voices of the trumpet of the three
angels, which are yet to sound!  9:1 And the fifth angel sounded, and
I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth: and to him was given the
key of the bottomless pit.

9:2 And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of
the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were
darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit.

9:3 And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth: and unto
them was given power, as the scorpions of the earth have power.

9:4 And it was commanded them that they should not hurt the grass of
the earth, neither any green thing, neither any tree; but only those
men which have not the seal of God in their foreheads.

9:5 And to them it was given that they should not kill them, but that
they should be tormented five months: and their torment was as the
torment of a scorpion, when he striketh a man.

9:6 And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and
shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.

9:7 And the shapes of the locusts were like unto horses prepared unto
battle; and on their heads were as it were crowns like gold, and their
faces were as the faces of men.

9:8 And they had hair as the hair of women, and their teeth were as
the teeth of lions.

9:9 And they had breastplates, as it were breastplates of iron; and
the sound of their wings was as the sound of chariots of many horses
running to battle.

9:10 And they had tails like unto scorpions, and there were stings in
their tails: and their power was to hurt men five months.

9:11 And they had a king over them, which is the angel of the
bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon, but in the
Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon.

9:12 One woe is past; and, behold, there come two woes more hereafter.

9:13 And the sixth angel sounded, and I heard a voice from the four
horns of the golden altar which is before God, 9:14 Saying to the
sixth angel which had the trumpet, Loose the four angels which are
bound in the great river Euphrates.

9:15 And the four angels were loosed, which were prepared for an hour,
and a day, and a month, and a year, for to slay the third part of men.

9:16 And the number of the army of the horsemen were two hundred
thousand thousand: and I heard the number of them.

9:17 And thus I saw the horses in the vision, and them that sat on
them, having breastplates of fire, and of jacinth, and brimstone: and
the heads of the horses were as the heads of lions; and out of their
mouths issued fire and smoke and brimstone.

9:18 By these three was the third part of men killed, by the fire, and
by the smoke, and by the brimstone, which issued out of their mouths.

9:19 For their power is in their mouth, and in their tails: for their
tails were like unto serpents, and had heads, and with them they do
hurt.

9:20 And the rest of the men which were not killed by these plagues
yet repented not of the works of their hands, that they should not
worship devils, and idols of gold, and silver, and brass, and stone,
and of wood: which neither can see, nor hear, nor walk: 9:21 Neither
repented they of their murders, nor of their sorceries, nor of their
fornication, nor of their thefts.

10:1 And I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed
with a cloud: and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was as it
were the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire: 10:2 And he had in his
hand a little book open: and he set his right foot upon the sea, and
his left foot on the earth, 10:3 And cried with a loud voice, as when
a lion roareth: and when he had cried, seven thunders uttered their
voices.

10:4 And when the seven thunders had uttered their voices, I was about
to write: and I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, Seal up
those things which the seven thunders uttered, and write them not.

10:5 And the angel which I saw stand upon the sea and upon the earth
lifted up his hand to heaven, 10:6 And sware by him that liveth for
ever and ever, who created heaven, and the things that therein are,
and the earth, and the things that therein are, and the sea, and the
things which are therein, that there should be time no longer: 10:7
But in the days of the voice of the seventh angel, when he shall begin
to sound, the mystery of God should be finished, as he hath declared
to his servants the prophets.

10:8 And the voice which I heard from heaven spake unto me again, and
said, Go and take the little book which is open in the hand of the
angel which standeth upon the sea and upon the earth.

10:9 And I went unto the angel, and said unto him, Give me the little
book. And he said unto me, Take it, and eat it up; and it shall make
thy belly bitter, but it shall be in thy mouth sweet as honey.

10:10 And I took the little book out of the angel's hand, and ate it
up; and it was in my mouth sweet as honey: and as soon as I had eaten
it, my belly was bitter.

10:11 And he said unto me, Thou must prophesy again before many
peoples, and nations, and tongues, and kings.

11:1 And there was given me a reed like unto a rod: and the angel
stood, saying, Rise, and measure the temple of God, and the altar, and
them that worship therein.

11:2 But the court which is without the temple leave out, and measure
it not; for it is given unto the Gentiles: and the holy city shall
they tread under foot forty and two months.

11:3 And I will give power unto my two witnesses, and they shall
prophesy a thousand two hundred and threescore days, clothed in
sackcloth.

11:4 These are the two olive trees, and the two candlesticks standing
before the God of the earth.

11:5 And if any man will hurt them, fire proceedeth out of their
mouth, and devoureth their enemies: and if any man will hurt them, he
must in this manner be killed.

11:6 These have power to shut heaven, that it rain not in the days of
their prophecy: and have power over waters to turn them to blood, and
to smite the earth with all plagues, as often as they will.

11:7 And when they shall have finished their testimony, the beast that
ascendeth out of the bottomless pit shall make war against them, and
shall overcome them, and kill them.

11:8 And their dead bodies shall lie in the street of the great city,
which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt, where also our Lord was
crucified.

11:9 And they of the people and kindreds and tongues and nations shall
see their dead bodies three days and an half, and shall not suffer
their dead bodies to be put in graves.

11:10 And they that dwell upon the earth shall rejoice over them, and
make merry, and shall send gifts one to another; because these two
prophets tormented them that dwelt on the earth.

11:11 And after three days and an half the spirit of life from God
entered into them, and they stood upon their feet; and great fear fell
upon them which saw them.

11:12 And they heard a great voice from heaven saying unto them, Come
up hither. And they ascended up to heaven in a cloud; and their
enemies beheld them.

11:13 And the same hour was there a great earthquake, and the tenth
part of the city fell, and in the earthquake were slain of men seven
thousand: and the remnant were affrighted, and gave glory to the God
of heaven.

11:14 The second woe is past; and, behold, the third woe cometh
quickly.

11:15 And the seventh angel sounded; and there were great voices in
heaven, saying, The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of
our Lord, and of his Christ; and he shall reign for ever and ever.

11:16 And the four and twenty elders, which sat before God on their
seats, fell upon their faces, and worshipped God, 11:17 Saying, We
give thee thanks, O LORD God Almighty, which art, and wast, and art to
come; because thou hast taken to thee thy great power, and hast
reigned.

11:18 And the nations were angry, and thy wrath is come, and the time
of the dead, that they should be judged, and that thou shouldest give
reward unto thy servants the prophets, and to the saints, and them
that fear thy name, small and great; and shouldest destroy them which
destroy the earth.

11:19 And the temple of God was opened in heaven, and there was seen
in his temple the ark of his testament: and there were lightnings, and
voices, and thunderings, and an earthquake, and great hail.

12:1 And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with
the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of
twelve stars: 12:2 And she being with child cried, travailing in
birth, and pained to be delivered.

12:3 And there appeared another wonder in heaven; and behold a great
red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon
his heads.

12:4 And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did
cast them to the earth: and the dragon stood before the woman which
was ready to be delivered, for to devour her child as soon as it was
born.

12:5 And she brought forth a man child, who was to rule all nations
with a rod of iron: and her child was caught up unto God, and to his
throne.

12:6 And the woman fled into the wilderness, where she hath a place
prepared of God, that they should feed her there a thousand two
hundred and threescore days.

12:7 And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought
against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, 12:8 And
prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven.

12:9 And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the
Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out
into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.

12:10 And I heard a loud voice saying in heaven, Now is come
salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of
his Christ: for the accuser of our brethren is cast down, which
accused them before our God day and night.

12:11 And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word
of their testimony; and they loved not their lives unto the death.

12:12 Therefore rejoice, ye heavens, and ye that dwell in them. Woe to
the inhabiters of the earth and of the sea! for the devil is come down
unto you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a
short time.

12:13 And when the dragon saw that he was cast unto the earth, he
persecuted the woman which brought forth the man child.

12:14 And to the woman were given two wings of a great eagle, that she
might fly into the wilderness, into her place, where she is nourished
for a time, and times, and half a time, from the face of the serpent.

12:15 And the serpent cast out of his mouth water as a flood after the
woman, that he might cause her to be carried away of the flood.

12:16 And the earth helped the woman, and the earth opened her mouth,
and swallowed up the flood which the dragon cast out of his mouth.

12:17 And the dragon was wroth with the woman, and went to make war
with the remnant of her seed, which keep the commandments of God, and
have the testimony of Jesus Christ.

13:1 And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out
of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten
crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.

13:2 And the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet
were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion: and
the dragon gave him his power, and his seat, and great authority.

13:3 And I saw one of his heads as it were wounded to death; and his
deadly wound was healed: and all the world wondered after the beast.

13:4 And they worshipped the dragon which gave power unto the beast:
and they worshipped the beast, saying, Who is like unto the beast? who
is able to make war with him?  13:5 And there was given unto him a
mouth speaking great things and blasphemies; and power was given unto
him to continue forty and two months.

13:6 And he opened his mouth in blasphemy against God, to blaspheme
his name, and his tabernacle, and them that dwell in heaven.

13:7 And it was given unto him to make war with the saints, and to
overcome them: and power was given him over all kindreds, and tongues,
and nations.

13:8 And all that dwell upon the earth shall worship him, whose names
are not written in the book of life of the Lamb slain from the
foundation of the world.

13:9 If any man have an ear, let him hear.

13:10 He that leadeth into captivity shall go into captivity: he that
killeth with the sword must be killed with the sword. Here is the
patience and the faith of the saints.

13:11 And I beheld another beast coming up out of the earth; and he
had two horns like a lamb, and he spake as a dragon.

13:12 And he exerciseth all the power of the first beast before him,
and causeth the earth and them which dwell therein to worship the
first beast, whose deadly wound was healed.

13:13 And he doeth great wonders, so that he maketh fire come down
from heaven on the earth in the sight of men, 13:14 And deceiveth them
that dwell on the earth by the means of those miracles which he had
power to do in the sight of the beast; saying to them that dwell on
the earth, that they should make an image to the beast, which had the
wound by a sword, and did live.

13:15 And he had power to give life unto the image of the beast, that
the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as
would not worship the image of the beast should be killed.

13:16 And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free
and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their
foreheads: 13:17 And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had
the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.

13:18 Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number
of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six
hundred threescore and six.

14:1 And I looked, and, lo, a Lamb stood on the mount Sion, and with
him an hundred forty and four thousand, having his Father's name
written in their foreheads.

14:2 And I heard a voice from heaven, as the voice of many waters, and
as the voice of a great thunder: and I heard the voice of harpers
harping with their harps: 14:3 And they sung as it were a new song
before the throne, and before the four beasts, and the elders: and no
man could learn that song but the hundred and forty and four thousand,
which were redeemed from the earth.

14:4 These are they which were not defiled with women; for they are
virgins. These are they which follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth.
These were redeemed from among men, being the firstfruits unto God and
to the Lamb.

14:5 And in their mouth was found no guile: for they are without fault
before the throne of God.

14:6 And I saw another angel fly in the midst of heaven, having the
everlasting gospel to preach unto them that dwell on the earth, and to
every nation, and kindred, and tongue, and people, 14:7 Saying with a
loud voice, Fear God, and give glory to him; for the hour of his
judgment is come: and worship him that made heaven, and earth, and the
sea, and the fountains of waters.

14:8 And there followed another angel, saying, Babylon is fallen, is
fallen, that great city, because she made all nations drink of the
wine of the wrath of her fornication.

14:9 And the third angel followed them, saying with a loud voice, If
any man worship the beast and his image, and receive his mark in his
forehead, or in his hand, 14:10 The same shall drink of the wine of
the wrath of God, which is poured out without mixture into the cup of
his indignation; and he shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in
the presence of the holy angels, and in the presence of the Lamb:
14:11 And the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever:
and they have no rest day nor night, who worship the beast and his
image, and whosoever receiveth the mark of his name.

14:12 Here is the patience of the saints: here are they that keep the
commandments of God, and the faith of Jesus.

14:13 And I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, Write, Blessed
are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth: Yea, saith the
Spirit, that they may rest from their labours; and their works do
follow them.

14:14 And I looked, and behold a white cloud, and upon the cloud one
sat like unto the Son of man, having on his head a golden crown, and
in his hand a sharp sickle.

14:15 And another angel came out of the temple, crying with a loud
voice to him that sat on the cloud, Thrust in thy sickle, and reap:
for the time is come for thee to reap; for the harvest of the earth is
ripe.

14:16 And he that sat on the cloud thrust in his sickle on the earth;
and the earth was reaped.

14:17 And another angel came out of the temple which is in heaven, he
also having a sharp sickle.

14:18 And another angel came out from the altar, which had power over
fire; and cried with a loud cry to him that had the sharp sickle,
saying, Thrust in thy sharp sickle, and gather the clusters of the
vine of the earth; for her grapes are fully ripe.

14:19 And the angel thrust in his sickle into the earth, and gathered
the vine of the earth, and cast it into the great winepress of the
wrath of God.

14:20 And the winepress was trodden without the city, and blood came
out of the winepress, even unto the horse bridles, by the space of a
thousand and six hundred furlongs.

15:1 And I saw another sign in heaven, great and marvellous, seven
angels having the seven last plagues; for in them is filled up the
wrath of God.

15:2 And I saw as it were a sea of glass mingled with fire: and them
that had gotten the victory over the beast, and over his image, and
over his mark, and over the number of his name, stand on the sea of
glass, having the harps of God.

15:3 And they sing the song of Moses the servant of God, and the song
of the Lamb, saying, Great and marvellous are thy works, Lord God
Almighty; just and true are thy ways, thou King of saints.

15:4 Who shall not fear thee, O Lord, and glorify thy name? for thou
only art holy: for all nations shall come and worship before thee; for
thy judgments are made manifest.

15:5 And after that I looked, and, behold, the temple of the
tabernacle of the testimony in heaven was opened: 15:6 And the seven
angels came out of the temple, having the seven plagues, clothed in
pure and white linen, and having their breasts girded with golden
girdles.

15:7 And one of the four beasts gave unto the seven angels seven
golden vials full of the wrath of God, who liveth for ever and ever.

15:8 And the temple was filled with smoke from the glory of God, and
from his power; and no man was able to enter into the temple, till the
seven plagues of the seven angels were fulfilled.

16:1 And I heard a great voice out of the temple saying to the seven
angels, Go your ways, and pour out the vials of the wrath of God upon
the earth.

16:2 And the first went, and poured out his vial upon the earth; and
there fell a noisome and grievous sore upon the men which had the mark
of the beast, and upon them which worshipped his image.

16:3 And the second angel poured out his vial upon the sea; and it
became as the blood of a dead man: and every living soul died in the
sea.

16:4 And the third angel poured out his vial upon the rivers and
fountains of waters; and they became blood.

16:5 And I heard the angel of the waters say, Thou art righteous, O
Lord, which art, and wast, and shalt be, because thou hast judged
thus.

16:6 For they have shed the blood of saints and prophets, and thou
hast given them blood to drink; for they are worthy.

16:7 And I heard another out of the altar say, Even so, Lord God
Almighty, true and righteous are thy judgments.

16:8 And the fourth angel poured out his vial upon the sun; and power
was given unto him to scorch men with fire.

16:9 And men were scorched with great heat, and blasphemed the name of
God, which hath power over these plagues: and they repented not to
give him glory.

16:10 And the fifth angel poured out his vial upon the seat of the
beast; and his kingdom was full of darkness; and they gnawed their
tongues for pain, 16:11 And blasphemed the God of heaven because of
their pains and their sores, and repented not of their deeds.

16:12 And the sixth angel poured out his vial upon the great river
Euphrates; and the water thereof was dried up, that the way of the
kings of the east might be prepared.

16:13 And I saw three unclean spirits like frogs come out of the mouth
of the dragon, and out of the mouth of the beast, and out of the mouth
of the false prophet.

16:14 For they are the spirits of devils, working miracles, which go
forth unto the kings of the earth and of the whole world, to gather
them to the battle of that great day of God Almighty.

16:15 Behold, I come as a thief. Blessed is he that watcheth, and
keepeth his garments, lest he walk naked, and they see his shame.

16:16 And he gathered them together into a place called in the Hebrew
tongue Armageddon.

16:17 And the seventh angel poured out his vial into the air; and
there came a great voice out of the temple of heaven, from the throne,
saying, It is done.

16:18 And there were voices, and thunders, and lightnings; and there
was a great earthquake, such as was not since men were upon the earth,
so mighty an earthquake, and so great.

16:19 And the great city was divided into three parts, and the cities
of the nations fell: and great Babylon came in remembrance before God,
to give unto her the cup of the wine of the fierceness of his wrath.

16:20 And every island fled away, and the mountains were not found.

16:21 And there fell upon men a great hail out of heaven, every stone
about the weight of a talent: and men blasphemed God because of the
plague of the hail; for the plague thereof was exceeding great.

17:1 And there came one of the seven angels which had the seven vials,
and talked with me, saying unto me, Come hither; I will shew unto thee
the judgment of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters: 17:2
With whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and the
inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her
fornication.

17:3 So he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness: and I
saw a woman sit upon a scarlet coloured beast, full of names of
blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns.

17:4 And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and
decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup
in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication:
17:5 And upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE
GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH.

17:6 And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and
with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus: and when I saw her, I wondered
with great admiration.

17:7 And the angel said unto me, Wherefore didst thou marvel? I will
tell thee the mystery of the woman, and of the beast that carrieth
her, which hath the seven heads and ten horns.

17:8 The beast that thou sawest was, and is not; and shall ascend out
of the bottomless pit, and go into perdition: and they that dwell on
the earth shall wonder, whose names were not written in the book of
life from the foundation of the world, when they behold the beast that
was, and is not, and yet is.

17:9 And here is the mind which hath wisdom. The seven heads are seven
mountains, on which the woman sitteth.

17:10 And there are seven kings: five are fallen, and one is, and the
other is not yet come; and when he cometh, he must continue a short
space.

17:11 And the beast that was, and is not, even he is the eighth, and
is of the seven, and goeth into perdition.

17:12 And the ten horns which thou sawest are ten kings, which have
received no kingdom as yet; but receive power as kings one hour with
the beast.

17:13 These have one mind, and shall give their power and strength
unto the beast.

17:14 These shall make war with the Lamb, and the Lamb shall overcome
them: for he is Lord of lords, and King of kings: and they that are
with him are called, and chosen, and faithful.

17:15 And he saith unto me, The waters which thou sawest, where the
whore sitteth, are peoples, and multitudes, and nations, and tongues.

17:16 And the ten horns which thou sawest upon the beast, these shall
hate the whore, and shall make her desolate and naked, and shall eat
her flesh, and burn her with fire.

17:17 For God hath put in their hearts to fulfil his will, and to
agree, and give their kingdom unto the beast, until the words of God
shall be fulfilled.

17:18 And the woman which thou sawest is that great city, which
reigneth over the kings of the earth.

18:1 And after these things I saw another angel come down from heaven,
having great power; and the earth was lightened with his glory.

18:2 And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the
great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils,
and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and
hateful bird.

18:3 For all nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her
fornication, and the kings of the earth have committed fornication
with her, and the merchants of the earth are waxed rich through the
abundance of her delicacies.

18:4 And I heard another voice from heaven, saying, Come out of her,
my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive
not of her plagues.

18:5 For her sins have reached unto heaven, and God hath remembered
her iniquities.

18:6 Reward her even as she rewarded you, and double unto her double
according to her works: in the cup which she hath filled fill to her
double.

18:7 How much she hath glorified herself, and lived deliciously, so
much torment and sorrow give her: for she saith in her heart, I sit a
queen, and am no widow, and shall see no sorrow.

18:8 Therefore shall her plagues come in one day, death, and mourning,
and famine; and she shall be utterly burned with fire: for strong is
the Lord God who judgeth her.

18:9 And the kings of the earth, who have committed fornication and
lived deliciously with her, shall bewail her, and lament for her, when
they shall see the smoke of her burning, 18:10 Standing afar off for
the fear of her torment, saying, Alas, alas that great city Babylon,
that mighty city! for in one hour is thy judgment come.

18:11 And the merchants of the earth shall weep and mourn over her;
for no man buyeth their merchandise any more: 18:12 The merchandise of
gold, and silver, and precious stones, and of pearls, and fine linen,
and purple, and silk, and scarlet, and all thyine wood, and all manner
vessels of ivory, and all manner vessels of most precious wood, and of
brass, and iron, and marble, 18:13 And cinnamon, and odours, and
ointments, and frankincense, and wine, and oil, and fine flour, and
wheat, and beasts, and sheep, and horses, and chariots, and slaves,
and souls of men.

18:14 And the fruits that thy soul lusted after are departed from
thee, and all things which were dainty and goodly are departed from
thee, and thou shalt find them no more at all.

18:15 The merchants of these things, which were made rich by her,
shall stand afar off for the fear of her torment, weeping and wailing,
18:16 And saying, Alas, alas that great city, that was clothed in fine
linen, and purple, and scarlet, and decked with gold, and precious
stones, and pearls!  18:17 For in one hour so great riches is come to
nought. And every shipmaster, and all the company in ships, and
sailors, and as many as trade by sea, stood afar off, 18:18 And cried
when they saw the smoke of her burning, saying, What city is like unto
this great city!  18:19 And they cast dust on their heads, and cried,
weeping and wailing, saying, Alas, alas that great city, wherein were
made rich all that had ships in the sea by reason of her costliness!
for in one hour is she made desolate.

18:20 Rejoice over her, thou heaven, and ye holy apostles and
prophets; for God hath avenged you on her.

18:21 And a mighty angel took up a stone like a great millstone, and
cast it into the sea, saying, Thus with violence shall that great city
Babylon be thrown down, and shall be found no more at all.

18:22 And the voice of harpers, and musicians, and of pipers, and
trumpeters, shall be heard no more at all in thee; and no craftsman,
of whatsoever craft he be, shall be found any more in thee; and the
sound of a millstone shall be heard no more at all in thee; 18:23 And
the light of a candle shall shine no more at all in thee; and the
voice of the bridegroom and of the bride shall be heard no more at all
in thee: for thy merchants were the great men of the earth; for by thy
sorceries were all nations deceived.

18:24 And in her was found the blood of prophets, and of saints, and
of all that were slain upon the earth.

19:1 And after these things I heard a great voice of much people in
heaven, saying, Alleluia; Salvation, and glory, and honour, and power,
unto the Lord our God: 19:2 For true and righteous are his judgments:
for he hath judged the great whore, which did corrupt the earth with
her fornication, and hath avenged the blood of his servants at her
hand.

19:3 And again they said, Alleluia And her smoke rose up for ever and
ever.

19:4 And the four and twenty elders and the four beasts fell down and
worshipped God that sat on the throne, saying, Amen; Alleluia.

19:5 And a voice came out of the throne, saying, Praise our God, all
ye his servants, and ye that fear him, both small and great.

19:6 And I heard as it were the voice of a great multitude, and as the
voice of many waters, and as the voice of mighty thunderings, saying,
Alleluia: for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth.

19:7 Let us be glad and rejoice, and give honour to him: for the
marriage of the Lamb is come, and his wife hath made herself ready.

19:8 And to her was granted that she should be arrayed in fine linen,
clean and white: for the fine linen is the righteousness of saints.

19:9 And he saith unto me, Write, Blessed are they which are called
unto the marriage supper of the Lamb. And he saith unto me, These are
the true sayings of God.

19:10 And I fell at his feet to worship him. And he said unto me, See
thou do it not: I am thy fellowservant, and of thy brethren that have
the testimony of Jesus: worship God: for the testimony of Jesus is the
spirit of prophecy.

19:11 And I saw heaven opened, and behold a white horse; and he that
sat upon him was called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he
doth judge and make war.

19:12 His eyes were as a flame of fire, and on his head were many
crowns; and he had a name written, that no man knew, but he himself.

19:13 And he was clothed with a vesture dipped in blood: and his name
is called The Word of God.

19:14 And the armies which were in heaven followed him upon white
horses, clothed in fine linen, white and clean.

19:15 And out of his mouth goeth a sharp sword, that with it he should
smite the nations: and he shall rule them with a rod of iron: and he
treadeth the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God.

19:16 And he hath on his vesture and on his thigh a name written, KING
OF KINGS, AND LORD OF LORDS.

19:17 And I saw an angel standing in the sun; and he cried with a loud
voice, saying to all the fowls that fly in the midst of heaven, Come
and gather yourselves together unto the supper of the great God; 19:18
That ye may eat the flesh of kings, and the flesh of captains, and the
flesh of mighty men, and the flesh of horses, and of them that sit on
them, and the flesh of all men, both free and bond, both small and
great.

19:19 And I saw the beast, and the kings of the earth, and their
armies, gathered together to make war against him that sat on the
horse, and against his army.

19:20 And the beast was taken, and with him the false prophet that
wrought miracles before him, with which he deceived them that had
received the mark of the beast, and them that worshipped his image.
These both were cast alive into a lake of fire burning with brimstone.

19:21 And the remnant were slain with the sword of him that sat upon
the horse, which sword proceeded out of his mouth: and all the fowls
were filled with their flesh.

20:1 And I saw an angel come down from heaven, having the key of the
bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand.

20:2 And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the
Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years, 20:3 And cast him
into the bottomless pit, and shut him up, and set a seal upon him,
that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years
should be fulfilled: and after that he must be loosed a little season.

20:4 And I saw thrones, and they sat upon them, and judgment was given
unto them: and I saw the souls of them that were beheaded for the
witness of Jesus, and for the word of God, and which had not
worshipped the beast, neither his image, neither had received his mark
upon their foreheads, or in their hands; and they lived and reigned
with Christ a thousand years.

20:5 But the rest of the dead lived not again until the thousand years
were finished. This is the first resurrection.

20:6 Blessed and holy is he that hath part in the first resurrection:
on such the second death hath no power, but they shall be priests of
God and of Christ, and shall reign with him a thousand years.

20:7 And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed
out of his prison, 20:8 And shall go out to deceive the nations which
are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog, and Magog, to gather them
together to battle: the number of whom is as the sand of the sea.

20:9 And they went up on the breadth of the earth, and compassed the
camp of the saints about, and the beloved city: and fire came down
from God out of heaven, and devoured them.

20:10 And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire
and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are, and shall be
tormented day and night for ever and ever.

20:11 And I saw a great white throne, and him that sat on it, from
whose face the earth and the heaven fled away; and there was found no
place for them.

20:12 And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the
books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of
life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written
in the books, according to their works.

20:13 And the sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and
hell delivered up the dead which were in them: and they were judged
every man according to their works.

20:14 And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. This is the
second death.

20:15 And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast
into the lake of fire.

21:1 And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and
the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.

21:2 And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God
out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.

21:3 And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the
tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they
shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their
God.

21:4 And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there
shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall
there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.

21:5 And he that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things
new.

And he said unto me, Write: for these words are true and faithful.

21:6 And he said unto me, It is done. I am Alpha and Omega, the
beginning and the end. I will give unto him that is athirst of the
fountain of the water of life freely.

21:7 He that overcometh shall inherit all things; and I will be his
God, and he shall be my son.

21:8 But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and
murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all
liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and
brimstone: which is the second death.

21:9 And there came unto me one of the seven angels which had the
seven vials full of the seven last plagues, and talked with me,
saying, Come hither, I will shew thee the bride, the Lamb's wife.

21:10 And he carried me away in the spirit to a great and high
mountain, and shewed me that great city, the holy Jerusalem,
descending out of heaven from God, 21:11 Having the glory of God: and
her light was like unto a stone most precious, even like a jasper
stone, clear as crystal; 21:12 And had a wall great and high, and had
twelve gates, and at the gates twelve angels, and names written
thereon, which are the names of the twelve tribes of the children of
Israel: 21:13 On the east three gates; on the north three gates; on
the south three gates; and on the west three gates.

21:14 And the wall of the city had twelve foundations, and in them the
names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb.

21:15 And he that talked with me had a golden reed to measure the
city, and the gates thereof, and the wall thereof.

21:16 And the city lieth foursquare, and the length is as large as the
breadth: and he measured the city with the reed, twelve thousand
furlongs.

The length and the breadth and the height of it are equal.

21:17 And he measured the wall thereof, an hundred and forty and four
cubits, according to the measure of a man, that is, of the angel.

21:18 And the building of the wall of it was of jasper: and the city
was pure gold, like unto clear glass.

21:19 And the foundations of the wall of the city were garnished with
all manner of precious stones. The first foundation was jasper; the
second, sapphire; the third, a chalcedony; the fourth, an emerald;
21:20 The fifth, sardonyx; the sixth, sardius; the seventh,
chrysolyte; the eighth, beryl; the ninth, a topaz; the tenth, a
chrysoprasus; the eleventh, a jacinth; the twelfth, an amethyst.

21:21 And the twelve gates were twelve pearls: every several gate was
of one pearl: and the street of the city was pure gold, as it were
transparent glass.

21:22 And I saw no temple therein: for the Lord God Almighty and the
Lamb are the temple of it.

21:23 And the city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to
shine in it: for the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the
light thereof.

21:24 And the nations of them which are saved shall walk in the light
of it: and the kings of the earth do bring their glory and honour into
it.

21:25 And the gates of it shall not be shut at all by day: for there
shall be no night there.

21:26 And they shall bring the glory and honour of the nations into
it.

21:27 And there shall in no wise enter into it any thing that
defileth, neither whatsoever worketh abomination, or maketh a lie: but
they which are written in the Lamb's book of life.

22:1 And he shewed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal,
proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb.

22:2 In the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the
river, was there the tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits,
and yielded her fruit every month: and the leaves of the tree were for
the healing of the nations.

22:3 And there shall be no more curse: but the throne of God and of
the Lamb shall be in it; and his servants shall serve him: 22:4 And
they shall see his face; and his name shall be in their foreheads.

22:5 And there shall be no night there; and they need no candle,
neither light of the sun; for the Lord God giveth them light: and they
shall reign for ever and ever.

22:6 And he said unto me, These sayings are faithful and true: and the
Lord God of the holy prophets sent his angel to shew unto his servants
the things which must shortly be done.

22:7 Behold, I come quickly: blessed is he that keepeth the sayings of
the prophecy of this book.

22:8 And I John saw these things, and heard them. And when I had heard
and seen, I fell down to worship before the feet of the angel which
shewed me these things.

22:9 Then saith he unto me, See thou do it not: for I am thy
fellowservant, and of thy brethren the prophets, and of them which
keep the sayings of this book: worship God.

22:10 And he saith unto me, Seal not the sayings of the prophecy of
this book: for the time is at hand.

22:11 He that is unjust, let him be unjust still: and he which is
filthy, let him be filthy still: and he that is righteous, let him be
righteous still: and he that is holy, let him be holy still.

22:12 And, behold, I come quickly; and my reward is with me, to give
every man according as his work shall be.

22:13 I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and
the last.

22:14 Blessed are they that do his commandments, that they may have
right to the tree of life, and may enter in through the gates into the
city.

22:15 For without are dogs, and sorcerers, and whoremongers, and
murderers, and idolaters, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie.

22:16 I Jesus have sent mine angel to testify unto you these things in
the churches. I am the root and the offspring of David, and the bright
and morning star.

22:17 And the Spirit and the bride say, Come. And let him that heareth
say, Come. And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let
him take the water of life freely.

22:18 For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the
prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God
shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book: 22:19
And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this
prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and
out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book.

22:20 He which testifieth these things saith, Surely I come quickly.
Amen.

Even so, come, Lord Jesus.

22:21 The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen.












End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The King James Bible

*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE KING JAMES BIBLE ***

***** This file should be named 10.txt or 10.zip *****
This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
        http://www.gutenberg.org/1/10/



Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
will be renamed.

Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
redistribution.



*** START: FULL LICENSE ***

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK

To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
http://gutenberg.org/license).


Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
electronic works

1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.

1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
works.  See paragraph 1.E below.

1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.

1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
States.

1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:

1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
copied or distributed:

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
1.E.9.

1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.

1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.

1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
Gutenberg-tm License.

1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.

1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.

1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
that

- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."

- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
     License.  You must require such a user to return or
     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
     Project Gutenberg-tm works.

- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
     of receipt of the work.

- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.

1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.

1.F.

1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
your equipment.

1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
DAMAGE.

1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
opportunities to fix the problem.

1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.

1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.

1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.


Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm

Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
people in all walks of life.

Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
assistance they need, are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.


Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation

The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
http://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.

The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
page at http://pglaf.org

For additional contact information:
     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
     Chief Executive and Director
     gbnewby@pglaf.org


Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation

Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
status with the IRS.

The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
particular state visit http://pglaf.org

While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
approach us with offers to donate.

International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.

Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate


Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
works.

Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.


Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.


Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:

     http://www.gutenberg.org

This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
The Project Gutenberg EBook of Ulysses, by James Joyce

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org


Title: Ulysses

Author: James Joyce

Posting Date: August 1, 2008 [EBook #4300]
Release Date: July, 2003
[Last updated: November 17, 2011]

Language: English


*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ULYSSES ***




Produced by Col Choat





ULYSSES

by James Joyce




-- I --

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of
lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown,
ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air. He
held the bowl aloft and intoned:

--_Introibo ad altare Dei_.

Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called out coarsely:

--Come up, Kinch! Come up, you fearful jesuit!

Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest. He faced about
and blessed gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding land and the
awaking mountains. Then, catching sight of Stephen Dedalus, he bent
towards him and made rapid crosses in the air, gurgling in his throat
and shaking his head. Stephen Dedalus, displeased and sleepy, leaned
his arms on the top of the staircase and looked coldly at the shaking
gurgling face that blessed him, equine in its length, and at the light
untonsured hair, grained and hued like pale oak.

Buck Mulligan peeped an instant under the mirror and then covered the
bowl smartly.

--Back to barracks! he said sternly.

He added in a preacher's tone:

--For this, O dearly beloved, is the genuine Christine: body and soul
and blood and ouns. Slow music, please. Shut your eyes, gents. One
moment. A little trouble about those white corpuscles. Silence, all.

He peered sideways up and gave a long slow whistle of call, then paused
awhile in rapt attention, his even white teeth glistening here and there
with gold points. Chrysostomos. Two strong shrill whistles answered
through the calm.

--Thanks, old chap, he cried briskly. That will do nicely. Switch off
the current, will you?

He skipped off the gunrest and looked gravely at his watcher, gathering
about his legs the loose folds of his gown. The plump shadowed face and
sullen oval jowl recalled a prelate, patron of arts in the middle ages.
A pleasant smile broke quietly over his lips.

--The mockery of it! he said gaily. Your absurd name, an ancient Greek!

He pointed his finger in friendly jest and went over to the parapet,
laughing to himself. Stephen Dedalus stepped up, followed him wearily
halfway and sat down on the edge of the gunrest, watching him still as
he propped his mirror on the parapet, dipped the brush in the bowl and
lathered cheeks and neck.

Buck Mulligan's gay voice went on.

--My name is absurd too: Malachi Mulligan, two dactyls. But it has a
Hellenic ring, hasn't it? Tripping and sunny like the buck himself.
We must go to Athens. Will you come if I can get the aunt to fork out
twenty quid?

He laid the brush aside and, laughing with delight, cried:

--Will he come? The jejune jesuit!

Ceasing, he began to shave with care.

--Tell me, Mulligan, Stephen said quietly.

--Yes, my love?

--How long is Haines going to stay in this tower?

Buck Mulligan showed a shaven cheek over his right shoulder.

--God, isn't he dreadful? he said frankly. A ponderous Saxon. He thinks
you're not a gentleman. God, these bloody English! Bursting with money
and indigestion. Because he comes from Oxford. You know, Dedalus, you
have the real Oxford manner. He can't make you out. O, my name for you
is the best: Kinch, the knife-blade.

He shaved warily over his chin.

--He was raving all night about a black panther, Stephen said. Where is
his guncase?

--A woful lunatic! Mulligan said. Were you in a funk?

--I was, Stephen said with energy and growing fear. Out here in the dark
with a man I don't know raving and moaning to himself about shooting a
black panther. You saved men from drowning. I'm not a hero, however. If
he stays on here I am off.

Buck Mulligan frowned at the lather on his razorblade. He hopped down
from his perch and began to search his trouser pockets hastily.

--Scutter! he cried thickly.

He came over to the gunrest and, thrusting a hand into Stephen's upper
pocket, said:

--Lend us a loan of your noserag to wipe my razor.

Stephen suffered him to pull out and hold up on show by its corner a
dirty crumpled handkerchief. Buck Mulligan wiped the razorblade neatly.
Then, gazing over the handkerchief, he said:

--The bard's noserag! A new art colour for our Irish poets: snotgreen.
You can almost taste it, can't you?

He mounted to the parapet again and gazed out over Dublin bay, his fair
oakpale hair stirring slightly.

--God! he said quietly. Isn't the sea what Algy calls it: a grey
sweet mother? The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea. _Epi oinopa
ponton_. Ah, Dedalus, the Greeks! I must teach you. You must read them
in the original. _Thalatta! Thalatta_! She is our great sweet mother.
Come and look.

Stephen stood up and went over to the parapet. Leaning on it he looked
down on the water and on the mailboat clearing the harbourmouth of
Kingstown.

--Our mighty mother! Buck Mulligan said.

He turned abruptly his grey searching eyes from the sea to Stephen's
face.

--The aunt thinks you killed your mother, he said. That's why she won't
let me have anything to do with you.

--Someone killed her, Stephen said gloomily.

--You could have knelt down, damn it, Kinch, when your dying mother
asked you, Buck Mulligan said. I'm hyperborean as much as you. But to
think of your mother begging you with her last breath to kneel down and
pray for her. And you refused. There is something sinister in you...

He broke off and lathered again lightly his farther cheek. A tolerant
smile curled his lips.

--But a lovely mummer! he murmured to himself. Kinch, the loveliest
mummer of them all!

He shaved evenly and with care, in silence, seriously.

Stephen, an elbow rested on the jagged granite, leaned his palm against
his brow and gazed at the fraying edge of his shiny black coat-sleeve.
Pain, that was not yet the pain of love, fretted his heart. Silently, in
a dream she had come to him after her death, her wasted body within its
loose brown graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her
breath, that had bent upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odour of
wetted ashes. Across the threadbare cuffedge he saw the sea hailed as a
great sweet mother by the wellfed voice beside him. The ring of bay
and skyline held a dull green mass of liquid. A bowl of white china had
stood beside her deathbed holding the green sluggish bile which she had
torn up from her rotting liver by fits of loud groaning vomiting.

Buck Mulligan wiped again his razorblade.

--Ah, poor dogsbody! he said in a kind voice. I must give you a shirt
and a few noserags. How are the secondhand breeks?

--They fit well enough, Stephen answered.

Buck Mulligan attacked the hollow beneath his underlip.

--The mockery of it, he said contentedly. Secondleg they should be. God
knows what poxy bowsy left them off. I have a lovely pair with a hair
stripe, grey. You'll look spiffing in them. I'm not joking, Kinch. You
look damn well when you're dressed.

--Thanks, Stephen said. I can't wear them if they are grey.

--He can't wear them, Buck Mulligan told his face in the mirror.
Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can't wear grey
trousers.

He folded his razor neatly and with stroking palps of fingers felt the
smooth skin.

Stephen turned his gaze from the sea and to the plump face with its
smokeblue mobile eyes.

--That fellow I was with in the Ship last night, said Buck Mulligan,
says you have g.p.i. He's up in Dottyville with Connolly Norman. General
paralysis of the insane!

He swept the mirror a half circle in the air to flash the tidings abroad
in sunlight now radiant on the sea. His curling shaven lips laughed and
the edges of his white glittering teeth. Laughter seized all his strong
wellknit trunk.

--Look at yourself, he said, you dreadful bard!

Stephen bent forward and peered at the mirror held out to him, cleft by
a crooked crack. Hair on end. As he and others see me. Who chose this
face for me? This dogsbody to rid of vermin. It asks me too.

--I pinched it out of the skivvy's room, Buck Mulligan said. It does her
all right. The aunt always keeps plainlooking servants for Malachi. Lead
him not into temptation. And her name is Ursula.

Laughing again, he brought the mirror away from Stephen's peering eyes.

--The rage of Caliban at not seeing his face in a mirror, he said. If
Wilde were only alive to see you!

Drawing back and pointing, Stephen said with bitterness:

--It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked looking-glass of a servant.

Buck Mulligan suddenly linked his arm in Stephen's and walked with him
round the tower, his razor and mirror clacking in the pocket where he
had thrust them.

--It's not fair to tease you like that, Kinch, is it? he said kindly.
God knows you have more spirit than any of them.

Parried again. He fears the lancet of my art as I fear that of his. The
cold steelpen.

--Cracked lookingglass of a servant! Tell that to the oxy chap
downstairs and touch him for a guinea. He's stinking with money and
thinks you're not a gentleman. His old fellow made his tin by selling
jalap to Zulus or some bloody swindle or other. God, Kinch, if you and I
could only work together we might do something for the island. Hellenise
it.

Cranly's arm. His arm.

--And to think of your having to beg from these swine. I'm the only one
that knows what you are. Why don't you trust me more? What have you
up your nose against me? Is it Haines? If he makes any noise here I'll
bring down Seymour and we'll give him a ragging worse than they gave
Clive Kempthorpe.

Young shouts of moneyed voices in Clive Kempthorpe's rooms. Palefaces:
they hold their ribs with laughter, one clasping another. O, I shall
expire! Break the news to her gently, Aubrey! I shall die! With slit
ribbons of his shirt whipping the air he hops and hobbles round the
table, with trousers down at heels, chased by Ades of Magdalen with the
tailor's shears. A scared calf's face gilded with marmalade. I don't
want to be debagged! Don't you play the giddy ox with me!

Shouts from the open window startling evening in the quadrangle. A deaf
gardener, aproned, masked with Matthew Arnold's face, pushes his mower
on the sombre lawn watching narrowly the dancing motes of grasshalms.

To ourselves... new paganism... omphalos.

--Let him stay, Stephen said. There's nothing wrong with him except at
night.

--Then what is it? Buck Mulligan asked impatiently. Cough it up. I'm
quite frank with you. What have you against me now?

They halted, looking towards the blunt cape of Bray Head that lay on the
water like the snout of a sleeping whale. Stephen freed his arm quietly.

--Do you wish me to tell you? he asked.

--Yes, what is it? Buck Mulligan answered. I don't remember anything.

He looked in Stephen's face as he spoke. A light wind passed his brow,
fanning softly his fair uncombed hair and stirring silver points of
anxiety in his eyes.

Stephen, depressed by his own voice, said:

--Do you remember the first day I went to your house after my mother's
death?

Buck Mulligan frowned quickly and said:

--What? Where? I can't remember anything. I remember only ideas and
sensations. Why? What happened in the name of God?

--You were making tea, Stephen said, and went across the landing to
get more hot water. Your mother and some visitor came out of the
drawingroom. She asked you who was in your room.

--Yes? Buck Mulligan said. What did I say? I forget.

--You said, Stephen answered, _O, it's only Dedalus whose mother is
beastly dead._

A flush which made him seem younger and more engaging rose to Buck
Mulligan's cheek.

--Did I say that? he asked. Well? What harm is that?

He shook his constraint from him nervously.

--And what is death, he asked, your mother's or yours or my own? You
saw only your mother die. I see them pop off every day in the Mater and
Richmond and cut up into tripes in the dissectingroom. It's a beastly
thing and nothing else. It simply doesn't matter. You wouldn't kneel
down to pray for your mother on her deathbed when she asked you. Why?
Because you have the cursed jesuit strain in you, only it's injected the
wrong way. To me it's all a mockery and beastly. Her cerebral lobes
are not functioning. She calls the doctor sir Peter Teazle and picks
buttercups off the quilt. Humour her till it's over. You crossed her
last wish in death and yet you sulk with me because I don't whinge like
some hired mute from Lalouette's. Absurd! I suppose I did say it. I
didn't mean to offend the memory of your mother.

He had spoken himself into boldness. Stephen, shielding the gaping
wounds which the words had left in his heart, said very coldly:

--I am not thinking of the offence to my mother.

--Of what then? Buck Mulligan asked.

--Of the offence to me, Stephen answered.

Buck Mulligan swung round on his heel.

--O, an impossible person! he exclaimed.

He walked off quickly round the parapet. Stephen stood at his post,
gazing over the calm sea towards the headland. Sea and headland now grew
dim. Pulses were beating in his eyes, veiling their sight, and he felt
the fever of his cheeks.

A voice within the tower called loudly:

--Are you up there, Mulligan?

--I'm coming, Buck Mulligan answered.

He turned towards Stephen and said:

--Look at the sea. What does it care about offences? Chuck Loyola,
Kinch, and come on down. The Sassenach wants his morning rashers.

His head halted again for a moment at the top of the staircase, level
with the roof:

--Don't mope over it all day, he said. I'm inconsequent. Give up the
moody brooding.

His head vanished but the drone of his descending voice boomed out of
the stairhead:

     _And no more turn aside and brood
     Upon love's bitter mystery
     For Fergus rules the brazen cars._


Woodshadows floated silently by through the morning peace from the
stairhead seaward where he gazed. Inshore and farther out the mirror of
water whitened, spurned by lightshod hurrying feet. White breast of
the dim sea. The twining stresses, two by two. A hand plucking the
harpstrings, merging their twining chords. Wavewhite wedded words
shimmering on the dim tide.

A cloud began to cover the sun slowly, wholly, shadowing the bay in
deeper green. It lay beneath him, a bowl of bitter waters. Fergus' song:
I sang it alone in the house, holding down the long dark chords. Her
door was open: she wanted to hear my music. Silent with awe and pity
I went to her bedside. She was crying in her wretched bed. For those
words, Stephen: love's bitter mystery.

Where now?

Her secrets: old featherfans, tasselled dancecards, powdered with musk,
a gaud of amber beads in her locked drawer. A birdcage hung in the sunny
window of her house when she was a girl. She heard old Royce sing in the
pantomime of Turko the Terrible and laughed with others when he sang:

     _I am the boy
     That can enjoy
     Invisibility._


Phantasmal mirth, folded away: muskperfumed.

_And no more turn aside and brood._


Folded away in the memory of nature with her toys. Memories beset his
brooding brain. Her glass of water from the kitchen tap when she had
approached the sacrament. A cored apple, filled with brown sugar,
roasting for her at the hob on a dark autumn evening. Her shapely
fingernails reddened by the blood of squashed lice from the children's
shirts.

In a dream, silently, she had come to him, her wasted body within its
loose graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath,
bent over him with mute secret words, a faint odour of wetted ashes.

Her glazing eyes, staring out of death, to shake and bend my soul. On me
alone. The ghostcandle to light her agony. Ghostly light on the tortured
face. Her hoarse loud breath rattling in horror, while all prayed on
their knees. Her eyes on me to strike me down. _Liliata rutilantium te
confessorum turma circumdet: iubilantium te virginum chorus excipiat._

Ghoul! Chewer of corpses!

No, mother! Let me be and let me live.

--Kinch ahoy!

Buck Mulligan's voice sang from within the tower. It came nearer up the
staircase, calling again. Stephen, still trembling at his soul's cry,
heard warm running sunlight and in the air behind him friendly words.

--Dedalus, come down, like a good mosey. Breakfast is ready. Haines is
apologising for waking us last night. It's all right.

--I'm coming, Stephen said, turning.

--Do, for Jesus' sake, Buck Mulligan said. For my sake and for all our
sakes.

His head disappeared and reappeared.

--I told him your symbol of Irish art. He says it's very clever. Touch
him for a quid, will you? A guinea, I mean.

--I get paid this morning, Stephen said.

--The school kip? Buck Mulligan said. How much? Four quid? Lend us one.

--If you want it, Stephen said.

--Four shining sovereigns, Buck Mulligan cried with delight. We'll
have a glorious drunk to astonish the druidy druids. Four omnipotent
sovereigns.

He flung up his hands and tramped down the stone stairs, singing out of
tune with a Cockney accent:

     _O, won't we have a merry time,
     Drinking whisky, beer and wine!
     On coronation,
     Coronation day!
     O, won't we have a merry time
     On coronation day!_


Warm sunshine merrying over the sea. The nickel shavingbowl shone,
forgotten, on the parapet. Why should I bring it down? Or leave it there
all day, forgotten friendship?

He went over to it, held it in his hands awhile, feeling its coolness,
smelling the clammy slaver of the lather in which the brush was stuck.
So I carried the boat of incense then at Clongowes. I am another now and
yet the same. A servant too. A server of a servant.

In the gloomy domed livingroom of the tower Buck Mulligan's gowned form
moved briskly to and fro about the hearth, hiding and revealing its
yellow glow. Two shafts of soft daylight fell across the flagged floor
from the high barbacans: and at the meeting of their rays a cloud of
coalsmoke and fumes of fried grease floated, turning.

--We'll be choked, Buck Mulligan said. Haines, open that door, will you?

Stephen laid the shavingbowl on the locker. A tall figure rose from the
hammock where it had been sitting, went to the doorway and pulled open
the inner doors.

--Have you the key? a voice asked.

--Dedalus has it, Buck Mulligan said. Janey Mack, I'm choked!

He howled, without looking up from the fire:

--Kinch!

--It's in the lock, Stephen said, coming forward.

The key scraped round harshly twice and, when the heavy door had been
set ajar, welcome light and bright air entered. Haines stood at the
doorway, looking out. Stephen haled his upended valise to the table and
sat down to wait. Buck Mulligan tossed the fry on to the dish beside
him. Then he carried the dish and a large teapot over to the table, set
them down heavily and sighed with relief.

--I'm melting, he said, as the candle remarked when... But, hush! Not a
word more on that subject! Kinch, wake up! Bread, butter, honey. Haines,
come in. The grub is ready. Bless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts.
Where's the sugar? O, jay, there's no milk.

Stephen fetched the loaf and the pot of honey and the buttercooler from
the locker. Buck Mulligan sat down in a sudden pet.

--What sort of a kip is this? he said. I told her to come after eight.

--We can drink it black, Stephen said thirstily. There's a lemon in the
locker.

--O, damn you and your Paris fads! Buck Mulligan said. I want Sandycove
milk.

Haines came in from the doorway and said quietly:

--That woman is coming up with the milk.

--The blessings of God on you! Buck Mulligan cried, jumping up from his
chair. Sit down. Pour out the tea there. The sugar is in the bag. Here,
I can't go fumbling at the damned eggs.

He hacked through the fry on the dish and slapped it out on three
plates, saying:

--_In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti._

Haines sat down to pour out the tea.

--I'm giving you two lumps each, he said. But, I say, Mulligan, you do
make strong tea, don't you?

Buck Mulligan, hewing thick slices from the loaf, said in an old woman's
wheedling voice:

--When I makes tea I makes tea, as old mother Grogan said. And when I
makes water I makes water.

--By Jove, it is tea, Haines said.

Buck Mulligan went on hewing and wheedling:

--_So I do, Mrs Cahill,_ says she. _Begob, ma'am,_ says Mrs Cahill, _God
send you don't make them in the one pot._

He lunged towards his messmates in turn a thick slice of bread, impaled
on his knife.

--That's folk, he said very earnestly, for your book, Haines. Five
lines of text and ten pages of notes about the folk and the fishgods of
Dundrum. Printed by the weird sisters in the year of the big wind.

He turned to Stephen and asked in a fine puzzled voice, lifting his
brows:

--Can you recall, brother, is mother Grogan's tea and water pot spoken
of in the Mabinogion or is it in the Upanishads?

--I doubt it, said Stephen gravely.

--Do you now? Buck Mulligan said in the same tone. Your reasons, pray?

--I fancy, Stephen said as he ate, it did not exist in or out of the
Mabinogion. Mother Grogan was, one imagines, a kinswoman of Mary Ann.

Buck Mulligan's face smiled with delight.

--Charming! he said in a finical sweet voice, showing his white teeth
and blinking his eyes pleasantly. Do you think she was? Quite charming!

Then, suddenly overclouding all his features, he growled in a hoarsened
rasping voice as he hewed again vigorously at the loaf:

     _--For old Mary Ann
     She doesn't care a damn.
     But, hising up her petticoats..._


He crammed his mouth with fry and munched and droned.

The doorway was darkened by an entering form.

--The milk, sir!

--Come in, ma'am, Mulligan said. Kinch, get the jug.

An old woman came forward and stood by Stephen's elbow.

--That's a lovely morning, sir, she said. Glory be to God.

--To whom? Mulligan said, glancing at her. Ah, to be sure!

Stephen reached back and took the milkjug from the locker.

--The islanders, Mulligan said to Haines casually, speak frequently of
the collector of prepuces.

--How much, sir? asked the old woman.

--A quart, Stephen said.

He watched her pour into the measure and thence into the jug rich white
milk, not hers. Old shrunken paps. She poured again a measureful and
a tilly. Old and secret she had entered from a morning world, maybe
a messenger. She praised the goodness of the milk, pouring it out.
Crouching by a patient cow at daybreak in the lush field, a witch on her
toadstool, her wrinkled fingers quick at the squirting dugs. They lowed
about her whom they knew, dewsilky cattle. Silk of the kine and poor old
woman, names given her in old times. A wandering crone, lowly form of
an immortal serving her conqueror and her gay betrayer, their common
cuckquean, a messenger from the secret morning. To serve or to upbraid,
whether he could not tell: but scorned to beg her favour.

--It is indeed, ma'am, Buck Mulligan said, pouring milk into their cups.

--Taste it, sir, she said.

He drank at her bidding.

--If we could live on good food like that, he said to her somewhat
loudly, we wouldn't have the country full of rotten teeth and rotten
guts. Living in a bogswamp, eating cheap food and the streets paved with
dust, horsedung and consumptives' spits.

--Are you a medical student, sir? the old woman asked.

--I am, ma'am, Buck Mulligan answered.

--Look at that now, she said.

Stephen listened in scornful silence. She bows her old head to a voice
that speaks to her loudly, her bonesetter, her medicineman: me she
slights. To the voice that will shrive and oil for the grave all there
is of her but her woman's unclean loins, of man's flesh made not in
God's likeness, the serpent's prey. And to the loud voice that now bids
her be silent with wondering unsteady eyes.

--Do you understand what he says? Stephen asked her.

--Is it French you are talking, sir? the old woman said to Haines.

Haines spoke to her again a longer speech, confidently.

--Irish, Buck Mulligan said. Is there Gaelic on you?

--I thought it was Irish, she said, by the sound of it. Are you from the
west, sir?

--I am an Englishman, Haines answered.

--He's English, Buck Mulligan said, and he thinks we ought to speak
Irish in Ireland.

--Sure we ought to, the old woman said, and I'm ashamed I don't speak
the language myself. I'm told it's a grand language by them that knows.

--Grand is no name for it, said Buck Mulligan. Wonderful entirely. Fill
us out some more tea, Kinch. Would you like a cup, ma'am?

--No, thank you, sir, the old woman said, slipping the ring of the
milkcan on her forearm and about to go.

Haines said to her:

--Have you your bill? We had better pay her, Mulligan, hadn't we?

Stephen filled again the three cups.

--Bill, sir? she said, halting. Well, it's seven mornings a pint at
twopence is seven twos is a shilling and twopence over and these three
mornings a quart at fourpence is three quarts is a shilling. That's a
shilling and one and two is two and two, sir.

Buck Mulligan sighed and, having filled his mouth with a crust thickly
buttered on both sides, stretched forth his legs and began to search his
trouser pockets.

--Pay up and look pleasant, Haines said to him, smiling.

Stephen filled a third cup, a spoonful of tea colouring faintly the
thick rich milk. Buck Mulligan brought up a florin, twisted it round in
his fingers and cried:

--A miracle!

He passed it along the table towards the old woman, saying:

--Ask nothing more of me, sweet. All I can give you I give.

Stephen laid the coin in her uneager hand.

--We'll owe twopence, he said.

--Time enough, sir, she said, taking the coin. Time enough. Good
morning, sir.

She curtseyed and went out, followed by Buck Mulligan's tender chant:

     _--Heart of my heart, were it more,
     More would be laid at your feet._


He turned to Stephen and said:

--Seriously, Dedalus. I'm stony. Hurry out to your school kip and bring
us back some money. Today the bards must drink and junket. Ireland
expects that every man this day will do his duty.

--That reminds me, Haines said, rising, that I have to visit your
national library today.

--Our swim first, Buck Mulligan said.

He turned to Stephen and asked blandly:

--Is this the day for your monthly wash, Kinch?

Then he said to Haines:

--The unclean bard makes a point of washing once a month.

--All Ireland is washed by the gulfstream, Stephen said as he let honey
trickle over a slice of the loaf.

Haines from the corner where he was knotting easily a scarf about the
loose collar of his tennis shirt spoke:

--I intend to make a collection of your sayings if you will let me.

Speaking to me. They wash and tub and scrub. Agenbite of inwit.
Conscience. Yet here's a spot.

--That one about the cracked lookingglass of a servant being the symbol
of Irish art is deuced good.

Buck Mulligan kicked Stephen's foot under the table and said with warmth
of tone:

--Wait till you hear him on Hamlet, Haines.

--Well, I mean it, Haines said, still speaking to Stephen. I was just
thinking of it when that poor old creature came in.

--Would I make any money by it? Stephen asked.

Haines laughed and, as he took his soft grey hat from the holdfast of
the hammock, said:

--I don't know, I'm sure.

He strolled out to the doorway. Buck Mulligan bent across to Stephen and
said with coarse vigour:

--You put your hoof in it now. What did you say that for?

--Well? Stephen said. The problem is to get money. From whom? From the
milkwoman or from him. It's a toss up, I think.

--I blow him out about you, Buck Mulligan said, and then you come along
with your lousy leer and your gloomy jesuit jibes.

--I see little hope, Stephen said, from her or from him.

Buck Mulligan sighed tragically and laid his hand on Stephen's arm.

--From me, Kinch, he said.

In a suddenly changed tone he added:

--To tell you the God's truth I think you're right. Damn all else they
are good for. Why don't you play them as I do? To hell with them all.
Let us get out of the kip.

He stood up, gravely ungirdled and disrobed himself of his gown, saying
resignedly:

--Mulligan is stripped of his garments.

He emptied his pockets on to the table.

--There's your snotrag, he said.

And putting on his stiff collar and rebellious tie he spoke to them,
chiding them, and to his dangling watchchain. His hands plunged and
rummaged in his trunk while he called for a clean handkerchief. God,
we'll simply have to dress the character. I want puce gloves and
green boots. Contradiction. Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I
contradict myself. Mercurial Malachi. A limp black missile flew out of
his talking hands.

--And there's your Latin quarter hat, he said.

Stephen picked it up and put it on. Haines called to them from the
doorway:

--Are you coming, you fellows?

--I'm ready, Buck Mulligan answered, going towards the door. Come out,
Kinch. You have eaten all we left, I suppose. Resigned he passed out
with grave words and gait, saying, wellnigh with sorrow:

--And going forth he met Butterly.

Stephen, taking his ashplant from its leaningplace, followed them out
and, as they went down the ladder, pulled to the slow iron door and
locked it. He put the huge key in his inner pocket.

At the foot of the ladder Buck Mulligan asked:

--Did you bring the key?

--I have it, Stephen said, preceding them.

He walked on. Behind him he heard Buck Mulligan club with his heavy
bathtowel the leader shoots of ferns or grasses.

--Down, sir! How dare you, sir!

Haines asked:

--Do you pay rent for this tower?

--Twelve quid, Buck Mulligan said.

--To the secretary of state for war, Stephen added over his shoulder.

They halted while Haines surveyed the tower and said at last:

--Rather bleak in wintertime, I should say. Martello you call it?

--Billy Pitt had them built, Buck Mulligan said, when the French were on
the sea. But ours is the _omphalos_.

--What is your idea of Hamlet? Haines asked Stephen.

--No, no, Buck Mulligan shouted in pain. I'm not equal to Thomas Aquinas
and the fiftyfive reasons he has made out to prop it up. Wait till I
have a few pints in me first.

He turned to Stephen, saying, as he pulled down neatly the peaks of his
primrose waistcoat:

--You couldn't manage it under three pints, Kinch, could you?

--It has waited so long, Stephen said listlessly, it can wait longer.

--You pique my curiosity, Haines said amiably. Is it some paradox?

--Pooh! Buck Mulligan said. We have grown out of Wilde and paradoxes.
It's quite simple. He proves by algebra that Hamlet's grandson is
Shakespeare's grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own
father.

--What? Haines said, beginning to point at Stephen. He himself?

Buck Mulligan slung his towel stolewise round his neck and, bending in
loose laughter, said to Stephen's ear:

--O, shade of Kinch the elder! Japhet in search of a father!

--We're always tired in the morning, Stephen said to Haines. And it is
rather long to tell.

Buck Mulligan, walking forward again, raised his hands.

--The sacred pint alone can unbind the tongue of Dedalus, he said.

--I mean to say, Haines explained to Stephen as they followed, this
tower and these cliffs here remind me somehow of Elsinore. _That beetles
o'er his base into the sea,_ isn't it?

Buck Mulligan turned suddenly for an instant towards Stephen but did
not speak. In the bright silent instant Stephen saw his own image in
cheap dusty mourning between their gay attires.

--It's a wonderful tale, Haines said, bringing them to halt again.

Eyes, pale as the sea the wind had freshened, paler, firm and prudent.
The seas' ruler, he gazed southward over the bay, empty save for the
smokeplume of the mailboat vague on the bright skyline and a sail
tacking by the Muglins.

--I read a theological interpretation of it somewhere, he said bemused.
The Father and the Son idea. The Son striving to be atoned with the
Father.

Buck Mulligan at once put on a blithe broadly smiling face. He looked
at them, his wellshaped mouth open happily, his eyes, from which he had
suddenly withdrawn all shrewd sense, blinking with mad gaiety. He moved
a doll's head to and fro, the brims of his Panama hat quivering, and
began to chant in a quiet happy foolish voice:

     _--I'm the queerest young fellow that ever you heard.
     My mother's a jew, my father's a bird.
     With Joseph the joiner I cannot agree.
     So here's to disciples and Calvary._


He held up a forefinger of warning.

     _--If anyone thinks that I amn't divine
     He'll get no free drinks when I'm making the wine
     But have to drink water and wish it were plain
     That i make when the wine becomes water again._


He tugged swiftly at Stephen's ashplant in farewell and, running forward
to a brow of the cliff, fluttered his hands at his sides like fins or
wings of one about to rise in the air, and chanted:

     _--Goodbye, now, goodbye! Write down all I said
     And tell Tom, Dick and Harry I rose from the dead.
     What's bred in the bone cannot fail me to fly
     And Olivet's breezy... Goodbye, now, goodbye!_


He capered before them down towards the fortyfoot hole, fluttering his
winglike hands, leaping nimbly, Mercury's hat quivering in the fresh
wind that bore back to them his brief birdsweet cries.

Haines, who had been laughing guardedly, walked on beside Stephen and
said:

--We oughtn't to laugh, I suppose. He's rather blasphemous. I'm not a
believer myself, that is to say. Still his gaiety takes the harm out of
it somehow, doesn't it? What did he call it? Joseph the Joiner?

--The ballad of joking Jesus, Stephen answered.

--O, Haines said, you have heard it before?

--Three times a day, after meals, Stephen said drily.

--You're not a believer, are you? Haines asked. I mean, a believer in
the narrow sense of the word. Creation from nothing and miracles and a
personal God.

--There's only one sense of the word, it seems to me, Stephen said.

Haines stopped to take out a smooth silver case in which twinkled a
green stone. He sprang it open with his thumb and offered it.

--Thank you, Stephen said, taking a cigarette.

Haines helped himself and snapped the case to. He put it back in his
sidepocket and took from his waistcoatpocket a nickel tinderbox, sprang
it open too, and, having lit his cigarette, held the flaming spunk
towards Stephen in the shell of his hands.

--Yes, of course, he said, as they went on again. Either you believe
or you don't, isn't it? Personally I couldn't stomach that idea of a
personal God. You don't stand for that, I suppose?

--You behold in me, Stephen said with grim displeasure, a horrible
example of free thought.

He walked on, waiting to be spoken to, trailing his ashplant by his
side. Its ferrule followed lightly on the path, squealing at his heels.
My familiar, after me, calling, Steeeeeeeeeeeephen! A wavering line
along the path. They will walk on it tonight, coming here in the dark.
He wants that key. It is mine. I paid the rent. Now I eat his salt
bread. Give him the key too. All. He will ask for it. That was in his
eyes.

--After all, Haines began...

Stephen turned and saw that the cold gaze which had measured him was not
all unkind.

--After all, I should think you are able to free yourself. You are your
own master, it seems to me.

--I am a servant of two masters, Stephen said, an English and an
Italian.

--Italian? Haines said.

A crazy queen, old and jealous. Kneel down before me.

--And a third, Stephen said, there is who wants me for odd jobs.

--Italian? Haines said again. What do you mean?

--The imperial British state, Stephen answered, his colour rising, and
the holy Roman catholic and apostolic church.

Haines detached from his underlip some fibres of tobacco before he
spoke.

--I can quite understand that, he said calmly. An Irishman must think
like that, I daresay. We feel in England that we have treated you rather
unfairly. It seems history is to blame.

The proud potent titles clanged over Stephen's memory the triumph
of their brazen bells: _et unam sanctam catholicam et apostolicam
ecclesiam:_ the slow growth and change of rite and dogma like his own
rare thoughts, a chemistry of stars. Symbol of the apostles in the
mass for pope Marcellus, the voices blended, singing alone loud in
affirmation: and behind their chant the vigilant angel of the church
militant disarmed and menaced her heresiarchs. A horde of heresies
fleeing with mitres awry: Photius and the brood of mockers of
whom Mulligan was one, and Arius, warring his life long upon the
consubstantiality of the Son with the Father, and Valentine, spurning
Christ's terrene body, and the subtle African heresiarch Sabellius who
held that the Father was Himself His own Son. Words Mulligan had spoken
a moment since in mockery to the stranger. Idle mockery. The void
awaits surely all them that weave the wind: a menace, a disarming and a
worsting from those embattled angels of the church, Michael's host,
who defend her ever in the hour of conflict with their lances and their
shields.

Hear, hear! Prolonged applause. _Zut! Nom de Dieu!_

--Of course I'm a Britisher, Haines's voice said, and I feel as one. I
don't want to see my country fall into the hands of German jews either.
That's our national problem, I'm afraid, just now.

Two men stood at the verge of the cliff, watching: businessman, boatman.

--She's making for Bullock harbour.

The boatman nodded towards the north of the bay with some disdain.

--There's five fathoms out there, he said. It'll be swept up that way
when the tide comes in about one. It's nine days today.

The man that was drowned. A sail veering about the blank bay waiting
for a swollen bundle to bob up, roll over to the sun a puffy face,
saltwhite. Here I am.

They followed the winding path down to the creek. Buck Mulligan stood on
a stone, in shirtsleeves, his unclipped tie rippling over his shoulder.
A young man clinging to a spur of rock near him, moved slowly frogwise
his green legs in the deep jelly of the water.

--Is the brother with you, Malachi?

--Down in Westmeath. With the Bannons.

--Still there? I got a card from Bannon. Says he found a sweet young
thing down there. Photo girl he calls her.

--Snapshot, eh? Brief exposure.

Buck Mulligan sat down to unlace his boots. An elderly man shot up near
the spur of rock a blowing red face. He scrambled up by the stones,
water glistening on his pate and on its garland of grey hair, water
rilling over his chest and paunch and spilling jets out of his black
sagging loincloth.

Buck Mulligan made way for him to scramble past and, glancing at Haines
and Stephen, crossed himself piously with his thumbnail at brow and lips
and breastbone.

--Seymour's back in town, the young man said, grasping again his spur of
rock. Chucked medicine and going in for the army.

--Ah, go to God! Buck Mulligan said.

--Going over next week to stew. You know that red Carlisle girl, Lily?

--Yes.

--Spooning with him last night on the pier. The father is rotto with
money.

--Is she up the pole?

--Better ask Seymour that.

--Seymour a bleeding officer! Buck Mulligan said.

He nodded to himself as he drew off his trousers and stood up, saying
tritely:

--Redheaded women buck like goats.

He broke off in alarm, feeling his side under his flapping shirt.

--My twelfth rib is gone, he cried. I'm the _Uebermensch._ Toothless
Kinch and I, the supermen.

He struggled out of his shirt and flung it behind him to where his
clothes lay.

--Are you going in here, Malachi?

--Yes. Make room in the bed.

The young man shoved himself backward through the water and reached
the middle of the creek in two long clean strokes. Haines sat down on a
stone, smoking.

--Are you not coming in? Buck Mulligan asked.

--Later on, Haines said. Not on my breakfast.

Stephen turned away.

--I'm going, Mulligan, he said.

--Give us that key, Kinch, Buck Mulligan said, to keep my chemise flat.

Stephen handed him the key. Buck Mulligan laid it across his heaped
clothes.

--And twopence, he said, for a pint. Throw it there.

Stephen threw two pennies on the soft heap. Dressing, undressing. Buck
Mulligan erect, with joined hands before him, said solemnly:

--He who stealeth from the poor lendeth to the Lord. Thus spake
Zarathustra.

His plump body plunged.

--We'll see you again, Haines said, turning as Stephen walked up the
path and smiling at wild Irish.

Horn of a bull, hoof of a horse, smile of a Saxon.

--The Ship, Buck Mulligan cried. Half twelve.

--Good, Stephen said.

He walked along the upwardcurving path.

     _Liliata rutilantium.
     Turma circumdet.
     Iubilantium te virginum._


The priest's grey nimbus in a niche where he dressed discreetly. I will
not sleep here tonight. Home also I cannot go.

A voice, sweettoned and sustained, called to him from the sea. Turning
the curve he waved his hand. It called again. A sleek brown head, a
seal's, far out on the water, round.

Usurper.



--You, Cochrane, what city sent for him?

--Tarentum, sir.

--Very good. Well?

--There was a battle, sir.

--Very good. Where?

The boy's blank face asked the blank window.

Fabled by the daughters of memory. And yet it was in some way if not as
memory fabled it. A phrase, then, of impatience, thud of Blake's wings
of excess. I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling
masonry, and time one livid final flame. What's left us then?

--I forget the place, sir. 279 B. C.

--Asculum, Stephen said, glancing at the name and date in the
gorescarred book.

--Yes, sir. And he said: _Another victory like that and we are done
for._

That phrase the world had remembered. A dull ease of the mind. From
a hill above a corpsestrewn plain a general speaking to his officers,
leaned upon his spear. Any general to any officers. They lend ear.

--You, Armstrong, Stephen said. What was the end of Pyrrhus?

--End of Pyrrhus, sir?

--I know, sir. Ask me, sir, Comyn said.

--Wait. You, Armstrong. Do you know anything about Pyrrhus?

A bag of figrolls lay snugly in Armstrong's satchel. He curled them
between his palms at whiles and swallowed them softly. Crumbs adhered to
the tissue of his lips. A sweetened boy's breath. Welloff people, proud
that their eldest son was in the navy. Vico road, Dalkey.

--Pyrrhus, sir? Pyrrhus, a pier.

All laughed. Mirthless high malicious laughter. Armstrong looked round
at his classmates, silly glee in profile. In a moment they will laugh
more loudly, aware of my lack of rule and of the fees their papas pay.

--Tell me now, Stephen said, poking the boy's shoulder with the book,
what is a pier.

--A pier, sir, Armstrong said. A thing out in the water. A kind of a
bridge. Kingstown pier, sir.

Some laughed again: mirthless but with meaning. Two in the back bench
whispered. Yes. They knew: had never learned nor ever been innocent.
All. With envy he watched their faces: Edith, Ethel, Gerty, Lily. Their
likes: their breaths, too, sweetened with tea and jam, their bracelets
tittering in the struggle.

--Kingstown pier, Stephen said. Yes, a disappointed bridge.

The words troubled their gaze.

--How, sir? Comyn asked. A bridge is across a river.

For Haines's chapbook. No-one here to hear. Tonight deftly amid wild
drink and talk, to pierce the polished mail of his mind. What then? A
jester at the court of his master, indulged and disesteemed, winning a
clement master's praise. Why had they chosen all that part? Not wholly
for the smooth caress. For them too history was a tale like any other
too often heard, their land a pawnshop.

Had Pyrrhus not fallen by a beldam's hand in Argos or Julius Caesar not
been knifed to death. They are not to be thought away. Time has
branded them and fettered they are lodged in the room of the infinite
possibilities they have ousted. But can those have been possible seeing
that they never were? Or was that only possible which came to pass?
Weave, weaver of the wind.

--Tell us a story, sir.

--O, do, sir. A ghoststory.

--Where do you begin in this? Stephen asked, opening another book.

-_-Weep no more,_ Comyn said.

--Go on then, Talbot.

--And the story, sir?

--After, Stephen said. Go on, Talbot.

A swarthy boy opened a book and propped it nimbly under the breastwork
of his satchel. He recited jerks of verse with odd glances at the text:

     _--Weep no more, woful shepherds, weep no more
     For Lycidas, your sorrow, is not dead,
     Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor..._


It must be a movement then, an actuality of the possible as possible.
Aristotle's phrase formed itself within the gabbled verses and floated
out into the studious silence of the library of Saint Genevieve where he
had read, sheltered from the sin of Paris, night by night. By his elbow
a delicate Siamese conned a handbook of strategy. Fed and feeding brains
about me: under glowlamps, impaled, with faintly beating feelers: and
in my mind's darkness a sloth of the underworld, reluctant, shy of
brightness, shifting her dragon scaly folds. Thought is the thought of
thought. Tranquil brightness. The soul is in a manner all that is: the
soul is the form of forms. Tranquility sudden, vast, candescent: form of
forms.

Talbot repeated:

     _--Through the dear might of Him that walked the waves,
     Through the dear might..._


--Turn over, Stephen said quietly. I don't see anything.

--What, sir? Talbot asked simply, bending forward.

His hand turned the page over. He leaned back and went on again, having
just remembered. Of him that walked the waves. Here also over these
craven hearts his shadow lies and on the scoffer's heart and lips and
on mine. It lies upon their eager faces who offered him a coin of the
tribute. To Caesar what is Caesar's, to God what is God's. A long
look from dark eyes, a riddling sentence to be woven and woven on the
church's looms. Ay.

     _Riddle me, riddle me, randy ro.
     My father gave me seeds to sow._


Talbot slid his closed book into his satchel.

--Have I heard all? Stephen asked.

--Yes, sir. Hockey at ten, sir.

--Half day, sir. Thursday.

--Who can answer a riddle? Stephen asked.

They bundled their books away, pencils clacking, pages rustling.
Crowding together they strapped and buckled their satchels, all gabbling
gaily:

--A riddle, sir? Ask me, sir.

--O, ask me, sir.

--A hard one, sir.

--This is the riddle, Stephen said:

     _The cock crew,
     The sky was blue:
     The bells in heaven
     Were striking eleven.
     'Tis time for this poor soul
     To go to heaven._


What is that?

--What, sir?

--Again, sir. We didn't hear.

Their eyes grew bigger as the lines were repeated. After a silence
Cochrane said:

--What is it, sir? We give it up.

Stephen, his throat itching, answered:

--The fox burying his grandmother under a hollybush.

He stood up and gave a shout of nervous laughter to which their cries
echoed dismay.

A stick struck the door and a voice in the corridor called:

--Hockey!

They broke asunder, sidling out of their benches, leaping them. Quickly
they were gone and from the lumberroom came the rattle of sticks and
clamour of their boots and tongues.

Sargent who alone had lingered came forward slowly, showing an open
copybook. His thick hair and scraggy neck gave witness of unreadiness
and through his misty glasses weak eyes looked up pleading. On his
cheek, dull and bloodless, a soft stain of ink lay, dateshaped, recent
and damp as a snail's bed.

He held out his copybook. The word _Sums_ was written on the headline.
Beneath were sloping figures and at the foot a crooked signature with
blind loops and a blot. Cyril Sargent: his name and seal.

--Mr Deasy told me to write them out all again, he said, and show them
to you, sir.

Stephen touched the edges of the book. Futility.

--Do you understand how to do them now? he asked.

--Numbers eleven to fifteen, Sargent answered. Mr Deasy said I was to
copy them off the board, sir.

--Can you do them yourself? Stephen asked.

--No, sir.

Ugly and futile: lean neck and thick hair and a stain of ink, a snail's
bed. Yet someone had loved him, borne him in her arms and in her heart.
But for her the race of the world would have trampled him underfoot,
a squashed boneless snail. She had loved his weak watery blood drained
from her own. Was that then real? The only true thing in life? His
mother's prostrate body the fiery Columbanus in holy zeal bestrode.
She was no more: the trembling skeleton of a twig burnt in the fire,
an odour of rosewood and wetted ashes. She had saved him from being
trampled underfoot and had gone, scarcely having been. A poor soul
gone to heaven: and on a heath beneath winking stars a fox, red reek
of rapine in his fur, with merciless bright eyes scraped in the earth,
listened, scraped up the earth, listened, scraped and scraped.

Sitting at his side Stephen solved out the problem. He proves by algebra
that Shakespeare's ghost is Hamlet's grandfather. Sargent peered askance
through his slanted glasses. Hockeysticks rattled in the lumberroom: the
hollow knock of a ball and calls from the field.

Across the page the symbols moved in grave morrice, in the mummery of
their letters, wearing quaint caps of squares and cubes. Give hands,
traverse, bow to partner: so: imps of fancy of the Moors. Gone too from
the world, Averroes and Moses Maimonides, dark men in mien and movement,
flashing in their mocking mirrors the obscure soul of the world, a
darkness shining in brightness which brightness could not comprehend.

--Do you understand now? Can you work the second for yourself?

--Yes, sir.

In long shaky strokes Sargent copied the data. Waiting always for a word
of help his hand moved faithfully the unsteady symbols, a faint hue of
shame flickering behind his dull skin. _Amor matris:_ subjective and
objective genitive. With her weak blood and wheysour milk she had fed
him and hid from sight of others his swaddling bands.

Like him was I, these sloping shoulders, this gracelessness. My
childhood bends beside me. Too far for me to lay a hand there once or
lightly. Mine is far and his secret as our eyes. Secrets, silent, stony
sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their
tyranny: tyrants, willing to be dethroned.

The sum was done.

--It is very simple, Stephen said as he stood up.

--Yes, sir. Thanks, Sargent answered.

He dried the page with a sheet of thin blottingpaper and carried his
copybook back to his bench.

--You had better get your stick and go out to the others, Stephen said
as he followed towards the door the boy's graceless form.

--Yes, sir.

In the corridor his name was heard, called from the playfield.

--Sargent!

--Run on, Stephen said. Mr Deasy is calling you.

He stood in the porch and watched the laggard hurry towards the scrappy
field where sharp voices were in strife. They were sorted in teams and
Mr Deasy came away stepping over wisps of grass with gaitered feet. When
he had reached the schoolhouse voices again contending called to him. He
turned his angry white moustache.

--What is it now? he cried continually without listening.

--Cochrane and Halliday are on the same side, sir, Stephen said.

--Will you wait in my study for a moment, Mr Deasy said, till I restore
order here.

And as he stepped fussily back across the field his old man's voice
cried sternly:

--What is the matter? What is it now?

Their sharp voices cried about him on all sides: their many forms closed
round him, the garish sunshine bleaching the honey of his illdyed head.

Stale smoky air hung in the study with the smell of drab abraded leather
of its chairs. As on the first day he bargained with me here. As it was
in the beginning, is now. On the sideboard the tray of Stuart coins,
base treasure of a bog: and ever shall be. And snug in their spooncase
of purple plush, faded, the twelve apostles having preached to all the
gentiles: world without end.

A hasty step over the stone porch and in the corridor. Blowing out his
rare moustache Mr Deasy halted at the table.

--First, our little financial settlement, he said.

He brought out of his coat a pocketbook bound by a leather thong. It
slapped open and he took from it two notes, one of joined halves, and
laid them carefully on the table.

--Two, he said, strapping and stowing his pocketbook away.

And now his strongroom for the gold. Stephen's embarrassed hand moved
over the shells heaped in the cold stone mortar: whelks and money
cowries and leopard shells: and this, whorled as an emir's turban, and
this, the scallop of saint James. An old pilgrim's hoard, dead treasure,
hollow shells.

A sovereign fell, bright and new, on the soft pile of the tablecloth.

--Three, Mr Deasy said, turning his little savingsbox about in his hand.
These are handy things to have. See. This is for sovereigns. This is for
shillings. Sixpences, halfcrowns. And here crowns. See.

He shot from it two crowns and two shillings.

--Three twelve, he said. I think you'll find that's right.

--Thank you, sir, Stephen said, gathering the money together with shy
haste and putting it all in a pocket of his trousers.

--No thanks at all, Mr Deasy said. You have earned it.

Stephen's hand, free again, went back to the hollow shells. Symbols too
of beauty and of power. A lump in my pocket: symbols soiled by greed and
misery.

--Don't carry it like that, Mr Deasy said. You'll pull it out somewhere
and lose it. You just buy one of these machines. You'll find them very
handy.

Answer something.

--Mine would be often empty, Stephen said.

The same room and hour, the same wisdom: and I the same. Three times
now. Three nooses round me here. Well? I can break them in this instant
if I will.

--Because you don't save, Mr Deasy said, pointing his finger. You don't
know yet what money is. Money is power. When you have lived as long as I
have. I know, I know. If youth but knew. But what does Shakespeare say?
_Put but money in thy purse._

--Iago, Stephen murmured.

He lifted his gaze from the idle shells to the old man's stare.

--He knew what money was, Mr Deasy said. He made money. A poet, yes, but
an Englishman too. Do you know what is the pride of the English? Do you
know what is the proudest word you will ever hear from an Englishman's
mouth?

The seas' ruler. His seacold eyes looked on the empty bay: it seems
history is to blame: on me and on my words, unhating.

--That on his empire, Stephen said, the sun never sets.

--Ba! Mr Deasy cried. That's not English. A French Celt said that. He
tapped his savingsbox against his thumbnail.

--I will tell you, he said solemnly, what is his proudest boast. _I paid
my way._

Good man, good man.

_--I paid my way. I never borrowed a shilling in my life._ Can you feel
that? _I owe nothing._ Can you?

Mulligan, nine pounds, three pairs of socks, one pair brogues, ties.
Curran, ten guineas. McCann, one guinea. Fred Ryan, two shillings.
Temple, two lunches. Russell, one guinea, Cousins, ten shillings, Bob
Reynolds, half a guinea, Koehler, three guineas, Mrs MacKernan, five
weeks' board. The lump I have is useless.

--For the moment, no, Stephen answered.

Mr Deasy laughed with rich delight, putting back his savingsbox.

--I knew you couldn't, he said joyously. But one day you must feel it.
We are a generous people but we must also be just.

--I fear those big words, Stephen said, which make us so unhappy.

Mr Deasy stared sternly for some moments over the mantelpiece at the
shapely bulk of a man in tartan filibegs: Albert Edward, prince of
Wales.

--You think me an old fogey and an old tory, his thoughtful voice said.
I saw three generations since O'Connell's time. I remember the famine in
'46. Do you know that the orange lodges agitated for repeal of the
union twenty years before O'Connell did or before the prelates of your
communion denounced him as a demagogue? You fenians forget some things.

Glorious, pious and immortal memory. The lodge of Diamond in Armagh the
splendid behung with corpses of papishes. Hoarse, masked and armed, the
planters' covenant. The black north and true blue bible. Croppies lie
down.

Stephen sketched a brief gesture.

--I have rebel blood in me too, Mr Deasy said. On the spindle side. But
I am descended from sir John Blackwood who voted for the union. We are
all Irish, all kings' sons.

--Alas, Stephen said.

--_Per vias rectas_, Mr Deasy said firmly, was his motto. He voted for
it and put on his topboots to ride to Dublin from the Ards of Down to do
so.

     _Lal the ral the ra
     The rocky road to Dublin._


A gruff squire on horseback with shiny topboots. Soft day, sir John!
Soft day, your honour!... Day!... Day!... Two topboots jog dangling
on to Dublin. Lal the ral the ra. Lal the ral the raddy.

--That reminds me, Mr Deasy said. You can do me a favour, Mr Dedalus,
with some of your literary friends. I have a letter here for the press.
Sit down a moment. I have just to copy the end.

He went to the desk near the window, pulled in his chair twice and read
off some words from the sheet on the drum of his typewriter.

--Sit down. Excuse me, he said over his shoulder, _the dictates of
common sense._ Just a moment.

He peered from under his shaggy brows at the manuscript by his elbow
and, muttering, began to prod the stiff buttons of the keyboard slowly,
sometimes blowing as he screwed up the drum to erase an error.

Stephen seated himself noiselessly before the princely presence. Framed
around the walls images of vanished horses stood in homage, their meek
heads poised in air: lord Hastings' Repulse, the duke of Westminster's
Shotover, the duke of Beaufort's Ceylon, _prix de Paris_, 1866. Elfin
riders sat them, watchful of a sign. He saw their speeds, backing king's
colours, and shouted with the shouts of vanished crowds.

--Full stop, Mr Deasy bade his keys. But prompt ventilation of this
allimportant question...

Where Cranly led me to get rich quick, hunting his winners among the
mudsplashed brakes, amid the bawls of bookies on their pitches and reek
of the canteen, over the motley slush. Fair Rebel! Fair Rebel! Even
money the favourite: ten to one the field. Dicers and thimbleriggers
we hurried by after the hoofs, the vying caps and jackets and past
the meatfaced woman, a butcher's dame, nuzzling thirstily her clove of
orange.

Shouts rang shrill from the boys' playfield and a whirring whistle.

Again: a goal. I am among them, among their battling bodies in a medley,
the joust of life. You mean that knockkneed mother's darling who seems
to be slightly crawsick? Jousts. Time shocked rebounds, shock by shock.
Jousts, slush and uproar of battles, the frozen deathspew of the slain,
a shout of spearspikes baited with men's bloodied guts.

--Now then, Mr Deasy said, rising.

He came to the table, pinning together his sheets. Stephen stood up.

--I have put the matter into a nutshell, Mr Deasy said. It's about
the foot and mouth disease. Just look through it. There can be no two
opinions on the matter.

May I trespass on your valuable space. That doctrine of _laissez faire_
which so often in our history. Our cattle trade. The way of all our old
industries. Liverpool ring which jockeyed the Galway harbour scheme.
European conflagration. Grain supplies through the narrow waters of
the channel. The pluterperfect imperturbability of the department of
agriculture. Pardoned a classical allusion. Cassandra. By a woman who
was no better than she should be. To come to the point at issue.

--I don't mince words, do I? Mr Deasy asked as Stephen read on.

Foot and mouth disease. Known as Koch's preparation. Serum and virus.
Percentage of salted horses. Rinderpest. Emperor's horses at Murzsteg,
lower Austria. Veterinary surgeons. Mr Henry Blackwood Price. Courteous
offer a fair trial. Dictates of common sense. Allimportant question. In
every sense of the word take the bull by the horns. Thanking you for the
hospitality of your columns.

--I want that to be printed and read, Mr Deasy said. You will see at the
next outbreak they will put an embargo on Irish cattle. And it can
be cured. It is cured. My cousin, Blackwood Price, writes to me it is
regularly treated and cured in Austria by cattledoctors there. They
offer to come over here. I am trying to work up influence with
the department. Now I'm going to try publicity. I am surrounded by
difficulties, by... intrigues by... backstairs influence by...

He raised his forefinger and beat the air oldly before his voice spoke.

--Mark my words, Mr Dedalus, he said. England is in the hands of the
jews. In all the highest places: her finance, her press. And they are
the signs of a nation's decay. Wherever they gather they eat up the
nation's vital strength. I have seen it coming these years. As sure
as we are standing here the jew merchants are already at their work of
destruction. Old England is dying.

He stepped swiftly off, his eyes coming to blue life as they passed a
broad sunbeam. He faced about and back again.

--Dying, he said again, if not dead by now.

     _The harlot's cry from street to street
     Shall weave old England's windingsheet._


His eyes open wide in vision stared sternly across the sunbeam in which
he halted.

--A merchant, Stephen said, is one who buys cheap and sells dear, jew or
gentile, is he not?

--They sinned against the light, Mr Deasy said gravely. And you can see
the darkness in their eyes. And that is why they are wanderers on the
earth to this day.

On the steps of the Paris stock exchange the goldskinned men quoting
prices on their gemmed fingers. Gabble of geese. They swarmed loud,
uncouth about the temple, their heads thickplotting under maladroit silk
hats. Not theirs: these clothes, this speech, these gestures. Their full
slow eyes belied the words, the gestures eager and unoffending, but
knew the rancours massed about them and knew their zeal was vain. Vain
patience to heap and hoard. Time surely would scatter all. A hoard
heaped by the roadside: plundered and passing on. Their eyes knew their
years of wandering and, patient, knew the dishonours of their flesh.

--Who has not? Stephen said.

--What do you mean? Mr Deasy asked.

He came forward a pace and stood by the table. His underjaw fell
sideways open uncertainly. Is this old wisdom? He waits to hear from me.

--History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

From the playfield the boys raised a shout. A whirring whistle: goal.
What if that nightmare gave you a back kick?

--The ways of the Creator are not our ways, Mr Deasy said. All human
history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God.

Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window, saying:

--That is God.

Hooray! Ay! Whrrwhee!

--What? Mr Deasy asked.

--A shout in the street, Stephen answered, shrugging his shoulders.

Mr Deasy looked down and held for awhile the wings of his nose tweaked
between his fingers. Looking up again he set them free.

--I am happier than you are, he said. We have committed many errors and
many sins. A woman brought sin into the world. For a woman who was no
better than she should be, Helen, the runaway wife of Menelaus, ten
years the Greeks made war on Troy. A faithless wife first brought the
strangers to our shore here, MacMurrough's wife and her leman, O'Rourke,
prince of Breffni. A woman too brought Parnell low. Many errors, many
failures but not the one sin. I am a struggler now at the end of my
days. But I will fight for the right till the end.

     _For Ulster will fight
     And Ulster will be right._


Stephen raised the sheets in his hand.

--Well, sir, he began...

--I foresee, Mr Deasy said, that you will not remain here very long
at this work. You were not born to be a teacher, I think. Perhaps I am
wrong.

--A learner rather, Stephen said.

And here what will you learn more?

Mr Deasy shook his head.

--Who knows? he said. To learn one must be humble. But life is the great
teacher.

Stephen rustled the sheets again.

--As regards these, he began.

--Yes, Mr Deasy said. You have two copies there. If you can have them
published at once.

_ Telegraph. Irish Homestead._

--I will try, Stephen said, and let you know tomorrow. I know two
editors slightly.

--That will do, Mr Deasy said briskly. I wrote last night to Mr Field,
M.P. There is a meeting of the cattletraders' association today at the
City Arms hotel. I asked him to lay my letter before the meeting. You
see if you can get it into your two papers. What are they?

_--The Evening Telegraph..._

--That will do, Mr Deasy said. There is no time to lose. Now I have to
answer that letter from my cousin.

--Good morning, sir, Stephen said, putting the sheets in his pocket.
Thank you.

--Not at all, Mr Deasy said as he searched the papers on his desk. I
like to break a lance with you, old as I am.

--Good morning, sir, Stephen said again, bowing to his bent back.

He went out by the open porch and down the gravel path under the trees,
hearing the cries of voices and crack of sticks from the playfield.
The lions couchant on the pillars as he passed out through the gate:
toothless terrors. Still I will help him in his fight. Mulligan will dub
me a new name: the bullockbefriending bard.

--Mr Dedalus!

Running after me. No more letters, I hope.

--Just one moment.

--Yes, sir, Stephen said, turning back at the gate.

Mr Deasy halted, breathing hard and swallowing his breath.

--I just wanted to say, he said. Ireland, they say, has the honour of
being the only country which never persecuted the jews. Do you know
that? No. And do you know why?

He frowned sternly on the bright air.

--Why, sir? Stephen asked, beginning to smile.

--Because she never let them in, Mr Deasy said solemnly.

A coughball of laughter leaped from his throat dragging after it a
rattling chain of phlegm. He turned back quickly, coughing, laughing,
his lifted arms waving to the air.

--She never let them in, he cried again through his laughter as he
stamped on gaitered feet over the gravel of the path. That's why.

On his wise shoulders through the checkerwork of leaves the sun flung
spangles, dancing coins.


Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought
through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn
and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver,
rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies.
Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By
knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a
millionaire, _maestro di color che sanno_. Limit of the diaphane in. Why
in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it it
is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.


Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and
shells. You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time.
A very short space of time through very short times of space. Five, six:
the _nacheinander_. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the
audible. Open your eyes. No. Jesus! If I fell over a cliff that beetles
o'er his base, fell through the _nebeneinander_ ineluctably! I am
getting on nicely in the dark. My ash sword hangs at my side. Tap with
it: they do. My two feet in his boots are at the ends of his legs,
_nebeneinander_. Sounds solid: made by the mallet of _Los Demiurgos_.
Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount strand? Crush, crack, crick,
crick. Wild sea money. Dominie Deasy kens them a'. Won't you come to
Sandymount, Madeline the mare?


Rhythm begins, you see. I hear. Acatalectic tetrameter of iambs
marching. No, agallop: _deline the mare_.

Open your eyes now. I will. One moment. Has all vanished since? If I
open and am for ever in the black adiaphane. _Basta_! I will see if I
can see.

See now. There all the time without you: and ever shall be, world
without end.

They came down the steps from Leahy's terrace prudently, _Frauenzimmer_:
and down the shelving shore flabbily, their splayed feet sinking in
the silted sand. Like me, like Algy, coming down to our mighty mother.
Number one swung lourdily her midwife's bag, the other's gamp poked in
the beach. From the liberties, out for the day. Mrs Florence MacCabe,
relict of the late Patk MacCabe, deeply lamented, of Bride Street. One
of her sisterhood lugged me squealing into life. Creation from nothing.
What has she in the bag? A misbirth with a trailing navelcord, hushed
in ruddy wool. The cords of all link back, strandentwining cable of
all flesh. That is why mystic monks. Will you be as gods? Gaze in your
omphalos. Hello! Kinch here. Put me on to Edenville. Aleph, alpha:
nought, nought, one.

Spouse and helpmate of Adam Kadmon: Heva, naked Eve. She had no navel.
Gaze. Belly without blemish, bulging big, a buckler of taut vellum,
no, whiteheaped corn, orient and immortal, standing from everlasting to
everlasting. Womb of sin.

Wombed in sin darkness I was too, made not begotten. By them, the man
with my voice and my eyes and a ghostwoman with ashes on her breath.
They clasped and sundered, did the coupler's will. From before the ages
He willed me and now may not will me away or ever. A _lex eterna_ stays
about Him. Is that then the divine substance wherein Father and Son are
consubstantial? Where is poor dear Arius to try conclusions? Warring
his life long upon the contransmagnificandjewbangtantiality. Illstarred
heresiarch' In a Greek watercloset he breathed his last: euthanasia.
With beaded mitre and with crozier, stalled upon his throne, widower of
a widowed see, with upstiffed omophorion, with clotted hinderparts.

Airs romped round him, nipping and eager airs. They are coming, waves.
The whitemaned seahorses, champing, brightwindbridled, the steeds of
Mananaan.

I mustn't forget his letter for the press. And after? The Ship, half
twelve. By the way go easy with that money like a good young imbecile.

Yes, I must.

His pace slackened. Here. Am I going to aunt Sara's or not? My
consubstantial father's voice. Did you see anything of your artist
brother Stephen lately? No? Sure he's not down in Strasburg terrace with
his aunt Sally? Couldn't he fly a bit higher than that, eh? And and and
and tell us, Stephen, how is uncle Si? O, weeping God, the things I
married into! De boys up in de hayloft. The drunken little costdrawer
and his brother, the cornet player. Highly respectable gondoliers! And
skeweyed Walter sirring his father, no less! Sir. Yes, sir. No, sir.
Jesus wept: and no wonder, by Christ!

I pull the wheezy bell of their shuttered cottage: and wait. They take
me for a dun, peer out from a coign of vantage.

--It's Stephen, sir.

--Let him in. Let Stephen in.

A bolt drawn back and Walter welcomes me.

--We thought you were someone else.

In his broad bed nuncle Richie, pillowed and blanketed, extends over the
hillock of his knees a sturdy forearm. Cleanchested. He has washed the
upper moiety.

--Morrow, nephew.

He lays aside the lapboard whereon he drafts his bills of costs for
the eyes of master Goff and master Shapland Tandy, filing consents and
common searches and a writ of _Duces Tecum_. A bogoak frame over his
bald head: Wilde's _Requiescat_. The drone of his misleading whistle
brings Walter back.

--Yes, sir?

--Malt for Richie and Stephen, tell mother. Where is she?

--Bathing Crissie, sir.

Papa's little bedpal. Lump of love.

--No, uncle Richie...

--Call me Richie. Damn your lithia water. It lowers. Whusky!

--Uncle Richie, really...

--Sit down or by the law Harry I'll knock you down.

Walter squints vainly for a chair.

--He has nothing to sit down on, sir.

--He has nowhere to put it, you mug. Bring in our chippendale chair.
Would you like a bite of something? None of your damned lawdeedaw airs
here. The rich of a rasher fried with a herring? Sure? So much the
better. We have nothing in the house but backache pills.

_All'erta_!

He drones bars of Ferrando's _aria di sortita_. The grandest number,
Stephen, in the whole opera. Listen.

His tuneful whistle sounds again, finely shaded, with rushes of the air,
his fists bigdrumming on his padded knees.

This wind is sweeter.

Houses of decay, mine, his and all. You told the Clongowes gentry you
had an uncle a judge and an uncle a general in the army. Come out of
them, Stephen. Beauty is not there. Nor in the stagnant bay of Marsh's
library where you read the fading prophecies of Joachim Abbas. For whom?
The hundredheaded rabble of the cathedral close. A hater of his kind
ran from them to the wood of madness, his mane foaming in the moon,
his eyeballs stars. Houyhnhnm, horsenostrilled. The oval equine
faces, Temple, Buck Mulligan, Foxy Campbell, Lanternjaws. Abbas
father,--furious dean, what offence laid fire to their brains? Paff!
_Descende, calve, ut ne amplius decalveris_. A garland of grey hair
on his comminated head see him me clambering down to the footpace
(_descende_!), clutching a monstrance, basiliskeyed. Get down, baldpoll!
A choir gives back menace and echo, assisting about the altar's horns,
the snorted Latin of jackpriests moving burly in their albs, tonsured
and oiled and gelded, fat with the fat of kidneys of wheat.

And at the same instant perhaps a priest round the corner is elevating
it. Dringdring! And two streets off another locking it into a pyx.
Dringadring! And in a ladychapel another taking housel all to his own
cheek. Dringdring! Down, up, forward, back. Dan Occam thought of that,
invincible doctor. A misty English morning the imp hypostasis tickled
his brain. Bringing his host down and kneeling he heard twine with his
second bell the first bell in the transept (he is lifting his) and,
rising, heard (now I am lifting) their two bells (he is kneeling) twang
in diphthong.

Cousin Stephen, you will never be a saint. Isle of saints. You were
awfully holy, weren't you? You prayed to the Blessed Virgin that you
might not have a red nose. You prayed to the devil in Serpentine avenue
that the fubsy widow in front might lift her clothes still more from the
wet street. _O si, certo_! Sell your soul for that, do, dyed rags pinned
round a squaw. More tell me, more still!! On the top of the Howth tram
alone crying to the rain: Naked women! _naked women_! What about that,
eh?

What about what? What else were they invented for?

Reading two pages apiece of seven books every night, eh? I was young.
You bowed to yourself in the mirror, stepping forward to applause
earnestly, striking face. Hurray for the Goddamned idiot! Hray! No-one
saw: tell no-one. Books you were going to write with letters for titles.
Have you read his F? O yes, but I prefer Q. Yes, but W is wonderful. O
yes, W. Remember your epiphanies written on green oval leaves, deeply
deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the
world, including Alexandria? Someone was to read them there after a few
thousand years, a mahamanvantara. Pico della Mirandola like. Ay, very
like a whale. When one reads these strange pages of one long gone one
feels that one is at one with one who once...

The grainy sand had gone from under his feet. His boots trod again
a damp crackling mast, razorshells, squeaking pebbles, that on the
unnumbered pebbles beats, wood sieved by the shipworm, lost Armada.
Unwholesome sandflats waited to suck his treading soles, breathing
upward sewage breath, a pocket of seaweed smouldered in seafire under a
midden of man's ashes. He coasted them, walking warily. A porterbottle
stood up, stogged to its waist, in the cakey sand dough. A sentinel:
isle of dreadful thirst. Broken hoops on the shore; at the land a maze
of dark cunning nets; farther away chalkscrawled backdoors and on the
higher beach a dryingline with two crucified shirts. Ringsend: wigwams
of brown steersmen and master mariners. Human shells.

He halted. I have passed the way to aunt Sara's. Am I not going there?
Seems not. No-one about. He turned northeast and crossed the firmer sand
towards the Pigeonhouse.

_--Qui vous a mis dans cette fichue position?_

_--c'est le pigeon, Joseph._

Patrice, home on furlough, lapped warm milk with me in the bar MacMahon.
Son of the wild goose, Kevin Egan of Paris. My father's a bird, he
lapped the sweet _lait chaud_ with pink young tongue, plump bunny's
face. Lap, _lapin._ He hopes to win in the _gros lots_. About the nature
of women he read in Michelet. But he must send me _La Vie de Jesus_ by
M. Leo Taxil. Lent it to his friend.

_--C'est tordant, vous savez. Moi, je suis socialiste. Je ne crois pas
en l'existence de Dieu. Faut pas le dire a mon p-re._

_--Il croit?_

_--Mon pere, oui._

_Schluss_. He laps.

My Latin quarter hat. God, we simply must dress the character. I want
puce gloves. You were a student, weren't you? Of what in the other
devil's name? Paysayenn. P. C. N., you know: _physiques, chimiques et
naturelles_. Aha. Eating your groatsworth of _mou en civet_, fleshpots
of Egypt, elbowed by belching cabmen. Just say in the most natural
tone: when I was in Paris; _boul' Mich'_, I used to. Yes, used to
carry punched tickets to prove an alibi if they arrested you for murder
somewhere. Justice. On the night of the seventeenth of February 1904 the
prisoner was seen by two witnesses. Other fellow did it: other me.
Hat, tie, overcoat, nose. _Lui, c'est moi_. You seem to have enjoyed
yourself.

Proudly walking. Whom were you trying to walk like? Forget: a
dispossessed. With mother's money order, eight shillings, the banging
door of the post office slammed in your face by the usher. Hunger
toothache. _Encore deux minutes_. Look clock. Must get. _Ferme_. Hired
dog! Shoot him to bloody bits with a bang shotgun, bits man spattered
walls all brass buttons. Bits all khrrrrklak in place clack back. Not
hurt? O, that's all right. Shake hands. See what I meant, see? O, that's
all right. Shake a shake. O, that's all only all right.

You were going to do wonders, what? Missionary to Europe after fiery
Columbanus. Fiacre and Scotus on their creepystools in heaven spilt from
their pintpots, loudlatinlaughing: _Euge! Euge_! Pretending to speak
broken English as you dragged your valise, porter threepence, across
the slimy pier at Newhaven. _Comment?_ Rich booty you brought back; _Le
Tutu_, five tattered numbers of _Pantalon Blanc et Culotte Rouge_; a
blue French telegram, curiosity to show:

--Mother dying come home father.

The aunt thinks you killed your mother. That's why she won't.

     _Then here's a health to Mulligan's aunt
     And I'll tell you the reason why.
     She always kept things decent in
     The Hannigan famileye._


His feet marched in sudden proud rhythm over the sand furrows, along by
the boulders of the south wall. He stared at them proudly, piled stone
mammoth skulls. Gold light on sea, on sand, on boulders. The sun is
there, the slender trees, the lemon houses.

Paris rawly waking, crude sunlight on her lemon streets. Moist pith of
farls of bread, the froggreen wormwood, her matin incense, court
the air. Belluomo rises from the bed of his wife's lover's wife, the
kerchiefed housewife is astir, a saucer of acetic acid in her hand. In
Rodot's Yvonne and Madeleine newmake their tumbled beauties, shattering
with gold teeth _chaussons_ of pastry, their mouths yellowed with the
_pus_ of _flan breton_. Faces of Paris men go by, their wellpleased
pleasers, curled conquistadores.

Noon slumbers. Kevin Egan rolls gunpowder cigarettes through fingers
smeared with printer's ink, sipping his green fairy as Patrice his
white. About us gobblers fork spiced beans down their gullets. _Un demi
setier!_ A jet of coffee steam from the burnished caldron. She serves me
at his beck. _Il est irlandais. Hollandais? Non fromage. Deux irlandais,
nous, Irlande, vous savez ah, oui!_ She thought you wanted a cheese
_hollandais_. Your postprandial, do you know that word? Postprandial.
There was a fellow I knew once in Barcelona, queer fellow, used to call
it his postprandial. Well: _slainte_! Around the slabbed tables the
tangle of wined breaths and grumbling gorges. His breath hangs over our
saucestained plates, the green fairy's fang thrusting between his lips.
Of Ireland, the Dalcassians, of hopes, conspiracies, of Arthur Griffith
now, A E, pimander, good shepherd of men. To yoke me as his yokefellow,
our crimes our common cause. You're your father's son. I know the voice.
His fustian shirt, sanguineflowered, trembles its Spanish tassels at
his secrets. M. Drumont, famous journalist, Drumont, know what he called
queen Victoria? Old hag with the yellow teeth. _Vieille ogresse_
with the _dents jaunes_. Maud Gonne, beautiful woman, _La Patrie_, M.
Millevoye, Felix Faure, know how he died? Licentious men. The froeken,
_bonne a tout faire_, who rubs male nakedness in the bath at Upsala.
_Moi faire_, she said, _Tous les messieurs_. Not this _Monsieur_, I
said. Most licentious custom. Bath a most private thing. I wouldn't let
my brother, not even my own brother, most lascivious thing. Green eyes,
I see you. Fang, I feel. Lascivious people.

The blue fuse burns deadly between hands and burns clear. Loose
tobaccoshreds catch fire: a flame and acrid smoke light our corner. Raw
facebones under his peep of day boy's hat. How the head centre got away,
authentic version. Got up as a young bride, man, veil, orangeblossoms,
drove out the road to Malahide. Did, faith. Of lost leaders, the
betrayed, wild escapes. Disguises, clutched at, gone, not here.

Spurned lover. I was a strapping young gossoon at that time, I tell you.
I'll show you my likeness one day. I was, faith. Lover, for her love he
prowled with colonel Richard Burke, tanist of his sept, under the walls
of Clerkenwell and, crouching, saw a flame of vengeance hurl them upward
in the fog. Shattered glass and toppling masonry. In gay Paree he hides,
Egan of Paris, unsought by any save by me. Making his day's stations,
the dingy printingcase, his three taverns, the Montmartre lair he sleeps
short night in, rue de la Goutte-d'Or, damascened with flyblown faces of
the gone. Loveless, landless, wifeless. She is quite nicey comfy
without her outcast man, madame in rue Git-le-Coeur, canary and two
buck lodgers. Peachy cheeks, a zebra skirt, frisky as a young thing's.
Spurned and undespairing. Tell Pat you saw me, won't you? I wanted to
get poor Pat a job one time. _Mon fils_, soldier of France. I taught him
to sing _The boys of Kilkenny are stout roaring blades_. Know that old
lay? I taught Patrice that. Old Kilkenny: saint Canice, Strongbow's
castle on the Nore. Goes like this. O, O. He takes me, Napper Tandy, by
the hand.

     _O, O THE BOYS OF
     KILKENNY..._


Weak wasting hand on mine. They have forgotten Kevin Egan, not he them.
Remembering thee, O Sion.

He had come nearer the edge of the sea and wet sand slapped his boots.
The new air greeted him, harping in wild nerves, wind of wild air of
seeds of brightness. Here, I am not walking out to the Kish lightship,
am I? He stood suddenly, his feet beginning to sink slowly in the
quaking soil. Turn back.

Turning, he scanned the shore south, his feet sinking again slowly
in new sockets. The cold domed room of the tower waits. Through the
barbacans the shafts of light are moving ever, slowly ever as my
feet are sinking, creeping duskward over the dial floor. Blue dusk,
nightfall, deep blue night. In the darkness of the dome they wait,
their pushedback chairs, my obelisk valise, around a board of abandoned
platters. Who to clear it? He has the key. I will not sleep there when
this night comes. A shut door of a silent tower, entombing their--blind
bodies, the panthersahib and his pointer. Call: no answer. He lifted his
feet up from the suck and turned back by the mole of boulders. Take
all, keep all. My soul walks with me, form of forms. So in the moon's
midwatches I pace the path above the rocks, in sable silvered, hearing
Elsinore's tempting flood.

The flood is following me. I can watch it flow past from here. Get back
then by the Poolbeg road to the strand there. He climbed over the sedge
and eely oarweeds and sat on a stool of rock, resting his ashplant in a
grike.

A bloated carcass of a dog lay lolled on bladderwrack. Before him the
gunwale of a boat, sunk in sand. _Un coche ensablé_ Louis Veuillot
called Gautier's prose. These heavy sands are language tide and wind
have silted here. And these, the stoneheaps of dead builders, a warren
of weasel rats. Hide gold there. Try it. You have some. Sands and
stones. Heavy of the past. Sir Lout's toys. Mind you don't get one
bang on the ear. I'm the bloody well gigant rolls all them bloody well
boulders, bones for my steppingstones. Feefawfum. I zmellz de bloodz odz
an Iridzman.

A point, live dog, grew into sight running across the sweep of sand.
Lord, is he going to attack me? Respect his liberty. You will not
be master of others or their slave. I have my stick. Sit tight. From
farther away, walking shoreward across from the crested tide, figures,
two. The two maries. They have tucked it safe mong the bulrushes.
Peekaboo. I see you. No, the dog. He is running back to them. Who?

Galleys of the Lochlanns ran here to beach, in quest of prey, their
bloodbeaked prows riding low on a molten pewter surf. Dane vikings,
torcs of tomahawks aglitter on their breasts when Malachi wore the
collar of gold. A school of turlehide whales stranded in hot noon,
spouting, hobbling in the shallows. Then from the starving cagework city
a horde of jerkined dwarfs, my people, with flayers' knives, running,
scaling, hacking in green blubbery whalemeat. Famine, plague and
slaughters. Their blood is in me, their lusts my waves. I moved among
them on the frozen Liffey, that I, a changeling, among the spluttering
resin fires. I spoke to no-one: none to me.

The dog's bark ran towards him, stopped, ran back. Dog of my enemy. I
just simply stood pale, silent, bayed about. _Terribilia meditans_. A
primrose doublet, fortune's knave, smiled on my fear. For that are you
pining, the bark of their applause? Pretenders: live their lives. The
Bruce's brother, Thomas Fitzgerald, silken knight, Perkin Warbeck,
York's false scion, in breeches of silk of whiterose ivory, wonder of
a day, and Lambert Simnel, with a tail of nans and sutlers, a scullion
crowned. All kings' sons. Paradise of pretenders then and now. He saved
men from drowning and you shake at a cur's yelping. But the courtiers
who mocked Guido in Or san Michele were in their own house. House of...
We don't want any of your medieval abstrusiosities. Would you do what he
did? A boat would be near, a lifebuoy. _Natürlich_, put there for you.
Would you or would you not? The man that was drowned nine days ago off
Maiden's rock. They are waiting for him now. The truth, spit it out. I
would want to. I would try. I am not a strong swimmer. Water cold soft.
When I put my face into it in the basin at Clongowes. Can't see! Who's
behind me? Out quickly, quickly! Do you see the tide flowing quickly in
on all sides, sheeting the lows of sand quickly, shellcocoacoloured? If
I had land under my feet. I want his life still to be his, mine to be
mine. A drowning man. His human eyes scream to me out of horror of his
death. I... With him together down... I could not save her. Waters:
bitter death: lost.

A woman and a man. I see her skirties. Pinned up, I bet.

Their dog ambled about a bank of dwindling sand, trotting, sniffing on
all sides. Looking for something lost in a past life. Suddenly he made
off like a bounding hare, ears flung back, chasing the shadow of a
lowskimming gull. The man's shrieked whistle struck his limp ears. He
turned, bounded back, came nearer, trotted on twinkling shanks. On a
field tenney a buck, trippant, proper, unattired. At the lacefringe of
the tide he halted with stiff forehoofs, seawardpointed ears. His
snout lifted barked at the wavenoise, herds of seamorse. They serpented
towards his feet, curling, unfurling many crests, every ninth, breaking,
plashing, from far, from farther out, waves and waves.

Cocklepickers. They waded a little way in the water and, stooping,
soused their bags and, lifting them again, waded out. The dog yelped
running to them, reared up and pawed them, dropping on all fours, again
reared up at them with mute bearish fawning. Unheeded he kept by them as
they came towards the drier sand, a rag of wolf's tongue redpanting from
his jaws. His speckled body ambled ahead of them and then loped off at a
calf's gallop. The carcass lay on his path. He stopped, sniffed, stalked
round it, brother, nosing closer, went round it, sniffling rapidly like
a dog all over the dead dog's bedraggled fell. Dogskull, dogsniff, eyes
on the ground, moves to one great goal. Ah, poor dogsbody! Here lies
poor dogsbody's body.

--Tatters! Out of that, you mongrel!

The cry brought him skulking back to his master and a blunt bootless
kick sent him unscathed across a spit of sand, crouched in flight. He
slunk back in a curve. Doesn't see me. Along by the edge of the mole he
lolloped, dawdled, smelt a rock and from under a cocked hindleg pissed
against it. He trotted forward and, lifting again his hindleg, pissed
quick short at an unsmelt rock. The simple pleasures of the poor. His
hindpaws then scattered the sand: then his forepaws dabbled and delved.
Something he buried there, his grandmother. He rooted in the sand,
dabbling, delving and stopped to listen to the air, scraped up the sand
again with a fury of his claws, soon ceasing, a pard, a panther, got in
spousebreach, vulturing the dead.

After he woke me last night same dream or was it? Wait. Open hallway.
Street of harlots. Remember. Haroun al Raschid. I am almosting it. That
man led me, spoke. I was not afraid. The melon he had he held against my
face. Smiled: creamfruit smell. That was the rule, said. In. Come. Red
carpet spread. You will see who.

Shouldering their bags they trudged, the red Egyptians. His blued feet
out of turnedup trousers slapped the clammy sand, a dull brick muffler
strangling his unshaven neck. With woman steps she followed: the
ruffian and his strolling mort. Spoils slung at her back. Loose sand and
shellgrit crusted her bare feet. About her windraw face hair trailed.
Behind her lord, his helpmate, bing awast to Romeville. When night hides
her body's flaws calling under her brown shawl from an archway
where dogs have mired. Her fancyman is treating two Royal Dublins in
O'Loughlin's of Blackpitts. Buss her, wap in rogues' rum lingo, for, O,
my dimber wapping dell! A shefiend's whiteness under her rancid rags.
Fumbally's lane that night: the tanyard smells.

     _White thy fambles, red thy gan
     And thy quarrons dainty is.
     Couch a hogshead with me then.
     In the darkmans clip and kiss._


Morose delectation Aquinas tunbelly calls this, _frate porcospino_.
Unfallen Adam rode and not rutted. Call away let him: _thy quarrons
dainty is_. Language no whit worse than his. Monkwords, marybeads jabber
on their girdles: roguewords, tough nuggets patter in their pockets.

Passing now.

A side eye at my Hamlet hat. If I were suddenly naked here as I sit? I
am not. Across the sands of all the world, followed by the sun's flaming
sword, to the west, trekking to evening lands. She trudges, schlepps,
trains, drags, trascines her load. A tide westering, moondrawn, in
her wake. Tides, myriadislanded, within her, blood not mine, _oinopa
ponton_, a winedark sea. Behold the handmaid of the moon. In sleep
the wet sign calls her hour, bids her rise. Bridebed, childbed, bed of
death, ghostcandled. _Omnis caro ad te veniet_. He comes, pale vampire,
through storm his eyes, his bat sails bloodying the sea, mouth to her
mouth's kiss.

Here. Put a pin in that chap, will you? My tablets. Mouth to her kiss.

No. Must be two of em. Glue em well. Mouth to her mouth's kiss.

His lips lipped and mouthed fleshless lips of air: mouth to her moomb.
Oomb, allwombing tomb. His mouth moulded issuing breath, unspeeched:
ooeeehah: roar of cataractic planets, globed, blazing, roaring
wayawayawayawayaway. Paper. The banknotes, blast them. Old Deasy's
letter. Here. Thanking you for the hospitality tear the blank end off.
Turning his back to the sun he bent over far to a table of rock and
scribbled words. That's twice I forgot to take slips from the library
counter.

His shadow lay over the rocks as he bent, ending. Why not endless till
the farthest star? Darkly they are there behind this light, darkness
shining in the brightness, delta of Cassiopeia, worlds. Me sits there
with his augur's rod of ash, in borrowed sandals, by day beside a livid
sea, unbeheld, in violet night walking beneath a reign of uncouth stars.
I throw this ended shadow from me, manshape ineluctable, call it back.
Endless, would it be mine, form of my form? Who watches me here? Who
ever anywhere will read these written words? Signs on a white field.
Somewhere to someone in your flutiest voice. The good bishop of Cloyne
took the veil of the temple out of his shovel hat: veil of space with
coloured emblems hatched on its field. Hold hard. Coloured on a flat:
yes, that's right. Flat I see, then think distance, near, far, flat
I see, east, back. Ah, see now! Falls back suddenly, frozen in
stereoscope. Click does the trick. You find my words dark. Darkness is
in our souls do you not think? Flutier. Our souls, shamewounded by our
sins, cling to us yet more, a woman to her lover clinging, the more the
more.

She trusts me, her hand gentle, the longlashed eyes. Now where the blue
hell am I bringing her beyond the veil? Into the ineluctable modality of
the ineluctable visuality. She, she, she. What she? The virgin at Hodges
Figgis' window on Monday looking in for one of the alphabet books you
were going to write. Keen glance you gave her. Wrist through the
braided jesse of her sunshade. She lives in Leeson park with a grief
and kickshaws, a lady of letters. Talk that to someone else, Stevie: a
pickmeup. Bet she wears those curse of God stays suspenders and
yellow stockings, darned with lumpy wool. Talk about apple dumplings,
_piuttosto_. Where are your wits?

Touch me. Soft eyes. Soft soft soft hand. I am lonely here. O, touch me
soon, now. What is that word known to all men? I am quiet here alone.
Sad too. Touch, touch me.

He lay back at full stretch over the sharp rocks, cramming the scribbled
note and pencil into a pock his hat. His hat down on his eyes. That is
Kevin Egan's movement I made, nodding for his nap, sabbath sleep. _Et
vidit Deus. Et erant valde bona_. Alo! _Bonjour_. Welcome as the flowers
in May. Under its leaf he watched through peacocktwittering lashes the
southing sun. I am caught in this burning scene. Pan's hour, the faunal
noon. Among gumheavy serpentplants, milkoozing fruits, where on the
tawny waters leaves lie wide. Pain is far.

     _And no more turn aside and brood._

His gaze brooded on his broadtoed boots, a buck's castoffs,
_nebeneinander_. He counted the creases of rucked leather wherein
another's foot had nested warm. The foot that beat the ground in
tripudium, foot I dislove. But you were delighted when Esther Osvalt's
shoe went on you: girl I knew in Paris. _Tiens, quel petit pied!_
Staunch friend, a brother soul: Wilde's love that dare not speak its
name. His arm: Cranly's arm. He now will leave me. And the blame? As I
am. As I am. All or not at all.

In long lassoes from the Cock lake the water flowed full, covering
greengoldenly lagoons of sand, rising, flowing. My ashplant will float
away. I shall wait. No, they will pass on, passing, chafing against the
low rocks, swirling, passing. Better get this job over quick. Listen: a
fourworded wavespeech: seesoo, hrss, rsseeiss, ooos. Vehement breath of
waters amid seasnakes, rearing horses, rocks. In cups of rocks it slops:
flop, slop, slap: bounded in barrels. And, spent, its speech ceases. It
flows purling, widely flowing, floating foampool, flower unfurling.

Under the upswelling tide he saw the writhing weeds lift languidly and
sway reluctant arms, hising up their petticoats, in whispering water
swaying and upturning coy silver fronds. Day by day: night by night:
lifted, flooded and let fall. Lord, they are weary; and, whispered to,
they sigh. Saint Ambrose heard it, sigh of leaves and waves, waiting,
awaiting the fullness of their times, _diebus ac noctibus iniurias
patiens ingemiscit_. To no end gathered; vainly then released,
forthflowing, wending back: loom of the moon. Weary too in sight of
lovers, lascivious men, a naked woman shining in her courts, she draws a
toil of waters.

Five fathoms out there. Full fathom five thy father lies. At one, he
said. Found drowned. High water at Dublin bar. Driving before it a loose
drift of rubble, fanshoals of fishes, silly shells. A corpse rising
saltwhite from the undertow, bobbing a pace a pace a porpoise landward.
There he is. Hook it quick. Pull. Sunk though he be beneath the watery
floor. We have him. Easy now.

Bag of corpsegas sopping in foul brine. A quiver of minnows, fat of a
spongy titbit, flash through the slits of his buttoned trouserfly.
God becomes man becomes fish becomes barnacle goose becomes featherbed
mountain. Dead breaths I living breathe, tread dead dust, devour a
urinous offal from all dead. Hauled stark over the gunwale he breathes
upward the stench of his green grave, his leprous nosehole snoring to
the sun.

A seachange this, brown eyes saltblue. Seadeath, mildest of all deaths
known to man. Old Father Ocean. _Prix de paris_: beware of imitations.
Just you give it a fair trial. We enjoyed ourselves immensely.

Come. I thirst. Clouding over. No black clouds anywhere, are there?
Thunderstorm. Allbright he falls, proud lightning of the intellect,
_Lucifer, dico, qui nescit occasum_. No. My cockle hat and staff and
hismy sandal shoon. Where? To evening lands. Evening will find itself.

He took the hilt of his ashplant, lunging with it softly, dallying
still. Yes, evening will find itself in me, without me. All days make
their end. By the way next when is it Tuesday will be the longest
day. Of all the glad new year, mother, the rum tum tiddledy tum. Lawn
Tennyson, gentleman poet. _Già_. For the old hag with the yellow teeth.
And Monsieur Drumont, gentleman journalist. _Già_. My teeth are very
bad. Why, I wonder. Feel. That one is going too. Shells. Ought I go to a
dentist, I wonder, with that money? That one. This. Toothless Kinch, the
superman. Why is that, I wonder, or does it mean something perhaps?

My handkerchief. He threw it. I remember. Did I not take it up?

His hand groped vainly in his pockets. No, I didn't. Better buy one.

He laid the dry snot picked from his nostril on a ledge of rock,
carefully. For the rest let look who will.

Behind. Perhaps there is someone.

He turned his face over a shoulder, rere regardant. Moving through the
air high spars of a threemaster, her sails brailed up on the crosstrees,
homing, upstream, silently moving, a silent ship. +




-- II --

Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls.
He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart,
liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes. Most of all
he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of
faintly scented urine.

Kidneys were in his mind as he moved about the kitchen softly, righting
her breakfast things on the humpy tray. Gelid light and air were in the
kitchen but out of doors gentle summer morning everywhere. Made him feel
a bit peckish.

The coals were reddening.

Another slice of bread and butter: three, four: right. She didn't like
her plate full. Right. He turned from the tray, lifted the kettle off
the hob and set it sideways on the fire. It sat there, dull and squat,
its spout stuck out. Cup of tea soon. Good. Mouth dry. The cat walked
stiffly round a leg of the table with tail on high.

--Mkgnao!

--O, there you are, Mr Bloom said, turning from the fire.

The cat mewed in answer and stalked again stiffly round a leg of the
table, mewing. Just how she stalks over my writingtable. Prr. Scratch my
head. Prr.

Mr Bloom watched curiously, kindly the lithe black form. Clean to see:
the gloss of her sleek hide, the white button under the butt of her
tail, the green flashing eyes. He bent down to her, his hands on his
knees.

--Milk for the pussens, he said.

--Mrkgnao! the cat cried.

They call them stupid. They understand what we say better than we
understand them. She understands all she wants to. Vindictive too.
Cruel. Her nature. Curious mice never squeal. Seem to like it. Wonder
what I look like to her. Height of a tower? No, she can jump me.

--Afraid of the chickens she is, he said mockingly. Afraid of the
chookchooks. I never saw such a stupid pussens as the pussens.

Cruel. Her nature. Curious mice never squeal. Seem to like it.

--Mrkrgnao! the cat said loudly.

She blinked up out of her avid shameclosing eyes, mewing plaintively
and long, showing him her milkwhite teeth. He watched the dark eyeslits
narrowing with greed till her eyes were green stones. Then he went to
the dresser, took the jug Hanlon's milkman had just filled for him,
poured warmbubbled milk on a saucer and set it slowly on the floor.

--Gurrhr! she cried, running to lap.

He watched the bristles shining wirily in the weak light as she tipped
three times and licked lightly. Wonder is it true if you clip them they
can't mouse after. Why? They shine in the dark, perhaps, the tips. Or
kind of feelers in the dark, perhaps.

He listened to her licking lap. Ham and eggs, no. No good eggs with this
drouth. Want pure fresh water. Thursday: not a good day either for a
mutton kidney at Buckley's. Fried with butter, a shake of pepper. Better
a pork kidney at Dlugacz's. While the kettle is boiling. She lapped
slower, then licking the saucer clean. Why are their tongues so rough?
To lap better, all porous holes. Nothing she can eat? He glanced round
him. No.

On quietly creaky boots he went up the staircase to the hall, paused by
the bedroom door. She might like something tasty. Thin bread and butter
she likes in the morning. Still perhaps: once in a way.

He said softly in the bare hall:

--I'm going round the corner. Be back in a minute.

And when he had heard his voice say it he added:

--You don't want anything for breakfast?

A sleepy soft grunt answered:

--Mn.

No. She didn't want anything. He heard then a warm heavy sigh, softer,
as she turned over and the loose brass quoits of the bedstead jingled.
Must get those settled really. Pity. All the way from Gibraltar.
Forgotten any little Spanish she knew. Wonder what her father gave for
it. Old style. Ah yes! of course. Bought it at the governor's auction.
Got a short knock. Hard as nails at a bargain, old Tweedy. Yes, sir. At
Plevna that was. I rose from the ranks, sir, and I'm proud of it.
Still he had brains enough to make that corner in stamps. Now that was
farseeing.

His hand took his hat from the peg over his initialled heavy overcoat
and his lost property office secondhand waterproof. Stamps: stickyback
pictures. Daresay lots of officers are in the swim too. Course they do.
The sweated legend in the crown of his hat told him mutely: Plasto's
high grade ha. He peeped quickly inside the leather headband. White slip
of paper. Quite safe.

On the doorstep he felt in his hip pocket for the latchkey. Not there.
In the trousers I left off. Must get it. Potato I have. Creaky wardrobe.
No use disturbing her. She turned over sleepily that time. He pulled
the halldoor to after him very quietly, more, till the footleaf dropped
gently over the threshold, a limp lid. Looked shut. All right till I
come back anyhow.

He crossed to the bright side, avoiding the loose cellarflap of number
seventyfive. The sun was nearing the steeple of George's church. Be a
warm day I fancy. Specially in these black clothes feel it more. Black
conducts, reflects, (refracts is it?), the heat. But I couldn't go in
that light suit. Make a picnic of it. His eyelids sank quietly often as
he walked in happy warmth. Boland's breadvan delivering with trays our
daily but she prefers yesterday's loaves turnovers crisp crowns hot.
Makes you feel young. Somewhere in the east: early morning: set off at
dawn. Travel round in front of the sun, steal a day's march on him. Keep
it up for ever never grow a day older technically. Walk along a strand,
strange land, come to a city gate, sentry there, old ranker too, old
Tweedy's big moustaches, leaning on a long kind of a spear. Wander
through awned streets. Turbaned faces going by. Dark caves of carpet
shops, big man, Turko the terrible, seated crosslegged, smoking a coiled
pipe. Cries of sellers in the streets. Drink water scented with fennel,
sherbet. Dander along all day. Might meet a robber or two. Well,
meet him. Getting on to sundown. The shadows of the mosques among the
pillars: priest with a scroll rolled up. A shiver of the trees, signal,
the evening wind. I pass on. Fading gold sky. A mother watches me from
her doorway. She calls her children home in their dark language. High
wall: beyond strings twanged. Night sky, moon, violet, colour of Molly's
new garters. Strings. Listen. A girl playing one of those instruments
what do you call them: dulcimers. I pass.

Probably not a bit like it really. Kind of stuff you read: in the track
of the sun. Sunburst on the titlepage. He smiled, pleasing himself. What
Arthur Griffith said about the headpiece over the _Freeman_ leader: a
homerule sun rising up in the northwest from the laneway behind the bank
of Ireland. He prolonged his pleased smile. Ikey touch that: homerule
sun rising up in the north-west.

He approached Larry O'Rourke's. From the cellar grating floated up the
flabby gush of porter. Through the open doorway the bar squirted out
whiffs of ginger, teadust, biscuitmush. Good house, however: just the
end of the city traffic. For instance M'Auley's down there: n. g. as
position. Of course if they ran a tramline along the North Circular from
the cattlemarket to the quays value would go up like a shot.

Baldhead over the blind. Cute old codger. No use canvassing him for an
ad. Still he knows his own business best. There he is, sure enough, my
bold Larry, leaning against the sugarbin in his shirtsleeves watching
the aproned curate swab up with mop and bucket. Simon Dedalus takes him
off to a tee with his eyes screwed up. Do you know what I'm going to
tell you? What's that, Mr O'Rourke? Do you know what? The Russians,
they'd only be an eight o'clock breakfast for the Japanese.

Stop and say a word: about the funeral perhaps. Sad thing about poor
Dignam, Mr O'Rourke.

Turning into Dorset street he said freshly in greeting through the
doorway:

--Good day, Mr O'Rourke.

--Good day to you.

--Lovely weather, sir.

--'Tis all that.

Where do they get the money? Coming up redheaded curates from the county
Leitrim, rinsing empties and old man in the cellar. Then, lo and behold,
they blossom out as Adam Findlaters or Dan Tallons. Then thin of the
competition. General thirst. Good puzzle would be cross Dublin without
passing a pub. Save it they can't. Off the drunks perhaps. Put down
three and carry five. What is that, a bob here and there, dribs and
drabs. On the wholesale orders perhaps. Doing a double shuffle with the
town travellers. Square it you with the boss and we'll split the job,
see?

How much would that tot to off the porter in the month? Say ten barrels
of stuff. Say he got ten per cent off. O more. Fifteen. He passed Saint
Joseph's National school. Brats' clamour. Windows open. Fresh air
helps memory. Or a lilt. Ahbeesee defeegee kelomen opeecue rustyouvee
doubleyou. Boys are they? Yes. Inishturk. Inishark. Inishboffin. At
their joggerfry. Mine. Slieve Bloom.

He halted before Dlugacz's window, staring at the hanks of sausages,
polonies, black and white. Fifteen multiplied by. The figures whitened
in his mind, unsolved: displeased, he let them fade. The shiny links,
packed with forcemeat, fed his gaze and he breathed in tranquilly the
lukewarm breath of cooked spicy pigs' blood.

A kidney oozed bloodgouts on the willowpatterned dish: the last. He
stood by the nextdoor girl at the counter. Would she buy it too, calling
the items from a slip in her hand? Chapped: washingsoda. And a pound and
a half of Denny's sausages. His eyes rested on her vigorous hips.
Woods his name is. Wonder what he does. Wife is oldish. New blood.
No followers allowed. Strong pair of arms. Whacking a carpet on the
clothesline. She does whack it, by George. The way her crooked skirt
swings at each whack.

The ferreteyed porkbutcher folded the sausages he had snipped off with
blotchy fingers, sausagepink. Sound meat there: like a stallfed heifer.

He took a page up from the pile of cut sheets: the model farm at
Kinnereth on the lakeshore of Tiberias. Can become ideal winter
sanatorium. Moses Montefiore. I thought he was. Farmhouse, wall round
it, blurred cattle cropping. He held the page from him: interesting:
read it nearer, the title, the blurred cropping cattle, the page
rustling. A young white heifer. Those mornings in the cattlemarket, the
beasts lowing in their pens, branded sheep, flop and fall of dung, the
breeders in hobnailed boots trudging through the litter, slapping a palm
on a ripemeated hindquarter, there's a prime one, unpeeled switches in
their hands. He held the page aslant patiently, bending his senses and
his will, his soft subject gaze at rest. The crooked skirt swinging,
whack by whack by whack.

The porkbutcher snapped two sheets from the pile, wrapped up her prime
sausages and made a red grimace.

--Now, my miss, he said.

She tendered a coin, smiling boldly, holding her thick wrist out.

--Thank you, my miss. And one shilling threepence change. For you,
please?

Mr Bloom pointed quickly. To catch up and walk behind her if she went
slowly, behind her moving hams. Pleasant to see first thing in the
morning. Hurry up, damn it. Make hay while the sun shines. She stood
outside the shop in sunlight and sauntered lazily to the right. He
sighed down his nose: they never understand. Sodachapped hands. Crusted
toenails too. Brown scapulars in tatters, defending her both ways.
The sting of disregard glowed to weak pleasure within his breast. For
another: a constable off duty cuddling her in Eccles lane. They like
them sizeable. Prime sausage. O please, Mr Policeman, I'm lost in the
wood.

--Threepence, please.

His hand accepted the moist tender gland and slid it into a sidepocket.
Then it fetched up three coins from his trousers' pocket and laid them
on the rubber prickles. They lay, were read quickly and quickly slid,
disc by disc, into the till.

--Thank you, sir. Another time.

A speck of eager fire from foxeyes thanked him. He withdrew his gaze
after an instant. No: better not: another time.

--Good morning, he said, moving away.

--Good morning, sir.

No sign. Gone. What matter?

He walked back along Dorset street, reading gravely. Agendath Netaim:
planters' company. To purchase waste sandy tracts from Turkish
government and plant with eucalyptus trees. Excellent for shade, fuel
and construction. Orangegroves and immense melonfields north of Jaffa.
You pay eighty marks and they plant a dunam of land for you with olives,
oranges, almonds or citrons. Olives cheaper: oranges need artificial
irrigation. Every year you get a sending of the crop. Your name entered
for life as owner in the book of the union. Can pay ten down and the
balance in yearly instalments. Bleibtreustrasse 34, Berlin, W. 15.

Nothing doing. Still an idea behind it.

He looked at the cattle, blurred in silver heat. Silverpowdered
olivetrees. Quiet long days: pruning, ripening. Olives are packed in
jars, eh? I have a few left from Andrews. Molly spitting them out. Knows
the taste of them now. Oranges in tissue paper packed in crates. Citrons
too. Wonder is poor Citron still in Saint Kevin's parade. And Mastiansky
with the old cither. Pleasant evenings we had then. Molly in Citron's
basketchair. Nice to hold, cool waxen fruit, hold in the hand, lift it
to the nostrils and smell the perfume. Like that, heavy, sweet, wild
perfume. Always the same, year after year. They fetched high prices too,
Moisel told me. Arbutus place: Pleasants street: pleasant old times.
Must be without a flaw, he said. Coming all that way: Spain, Gibraltar,
Mediterranean, the Levant. Crates lined up on the quayside at Jaffa,
chap ticking them off in a book, navvies handling them barefoot in
soiled dungarees. There's whatdoyoucallhim out of. How do you? Doesn't
see. Chap you know just to salute bit of a bore. His back is like that
Norwegian captain's. Wonder if I'll meet him today. Watering cart. To
provoke the rain. On earth as it is in heaven.

A cloud began to cover the sun slowly, wholly. Grey. Far.

No, not like that. A barren land, bare waste. Vulcanic lake, the dead
sea: no fish, weedless, sunk deep in the earth. No wind could lift those
waves, grey metal, poisonous foggy waters. Brimstone they called it
raining down: the cities of the plain: Sodom, Gomorrah, Edom. All dead
names. A dead sea in a dead land, grey and old. Old now. It bore the
oldest, the first race. A bent hag crossed from Cassidy's, clutching a
naggin bottle by the neck. The oldest people. Wandered far away over
all the earth, captivity to captivity, multiplying, dying, being born
everywhere. It lay there now. Now it could bear no more. Dead: an old
woman's: the grey sunken cunt of the world.

Desolation.

Grey horror seared his flesh. Folding the page into his pocket he turned
into Eccles street, hurrying homeward. Cold oils slid along his veins,
chilling his blood: age crusting him with a salt cloak. Well, I am here
now. Yes, I am here now. Morning mouth bad images. Got up wrong side of
the bed. Must begin again those Sandow's exercises. On the hands down.
Blotchy brown brick houses. Number eighty still unlet. Why is that?
Valuation is only twenty-eight. Towers, Battersby, North, MacArthur:
parlour windows plastered with bills. Plasters on a sore eye. To smell
the gentle smoke of tea, fume of the pan, sizzling butter. Be near her
ample bedwarmed flesh. Yes, yes.

Quick warm sunlight came running from Berkeley road, swiftly, in slim
sandals, along the brightening footpath. Runs, she runs to meet me, a
girl with gold hair on the wind.

Two letters and a card lay on the hallfloor. He stooped and gathered
them. Mrs Marion Bloom. His quickened heart slowed at once. Bold hand.
Mrs Marion.

--Poldy!

Entering the bedroom he halfclosed his eyes and walked through warm
yellow twilight towards her tousled head.

--Who are the letters for?

He looked at them. Mullingar. Milly.

--A letter for me from Milly, he said carefully, and a card to you. And
a letter for you.

He laid her card and letter on the twill bedspread near the curve of her
knees.

--Do you want the blind up?

Letting the blind up by gentle tugs halfway his backward eye saw her
glance at the letter and tuck it under her pillow.

--That do? he asked, turning.

She was reading the card, propped on her elbow.

--She got the things, she said.

He waited till she had laid the card aside and curled herself back
slowly with a snug sigh.

--Hurry up with that tea, she said. I'm parched.

--The kettle is boiling, he said.

But he delayed to clear the chair: her striped petticoat, tossed soiled
linen: and lifted all in an armful on to the foot of the bed.

As he went down the kitchen stairs she called:

--Poldy!

--What?

--Scald the teapot.

On the boil sure enough: a plume of steam from the spout. He scalded and
rinsed out the teapot and put in four full spoons of tea, tilting the
kettle then to let the water flow in. Having set it to draw he took off
the kettle, crushed the pan flat on the live coals and watched the lump
of butter slide and melt. While he unwrapped the kidney the cat mewed
hungrily against him. Give her too much meat she won't mouse. Say they
won't eat pork. Kosher. Here. He let the bloodsmeared paper fall to
her and dropped the kidney amid the sizzling butter sauce. Pepper. He
sprinkled it through his fingers ringwise from the chipped eggcup.

Then he slit open his letter, glancing down the page and over. Thanks:
new tam: Mr Coghlan: lough Owel picnic: young student: Blazes Boylan's
seaside girls.

The tea was drawn. He filled his own moustachecup, sham crown

Derby, smiling. Silly Milly's birthday gift. Only five she was then. No,
wait: four. I gave her the amberoid necklace she broke. Putting pieces
of folded brown paper in the letterbox for her. He smiled, pouring.

     _O, Milly Bloom, you are my darling.
     You are my lookingglass from night to morning.
     I'd rather have you without a farthing
     Than Katey Keogh with her ass and garden._


Poor old professor Goodwin. Dreadful old case. Still he was a courteous
old chap. Oldfashioned way he used to bow Molly off the platform. And
the little mirror in his silk hat. The night Milly brought it into
the parlour. O, look what I found in professor Goodwin's hat! All we
laughed. Sex breaking out even then. Pert little piece she was.

He prodded a fork into the kidney and slapped it over: then fitted the
teapot on the tray. Its hump bumped as he took it up. Everything on
it? Bread and butter, four, sugar, spoon, her cream. Yes. He carried it
upstairs, his thumb hooked in the teapot handle.

Nudging the door open with his knee he carried the tray in and set it on
the chair by the bedhead.

--What a time you were! she said.

She set the brasses jingling as she raised herself briskly, an elbow on
the pillow. He looked calmly down on her bulk and between her large soft
bubs, sloping within her nightdress like a shegoat's udder. The warmth
of her couched body rose on the air, mingling with the fragrance of the
tea she poured.

A strip of torn envelope peeped from under the dimpled pillow. In the
act of going he stayed to straighten the bedspread.

--Who was the letter from? he asked.

Bold hand. Marion.

--O, Boylan, she said. He's bringing the programme.

--What are you singing?

--_La ci darem_ with J. C. Doyle, she said, and _Love's Old Sweet Song_.

Her full lips, drinking, smiled. Rather stale smell that incense leaves
next day. Like foul flowerwater.

--Would you like the window open a little?

She doubled a slice of bread into her mouth, asking:

--What time is the funeral?

--Eleven, I think, he answered. I didn't see the paper.

Following the pointing of her finger he took up a leg of her soiled
drawers from the bed. No? Then, a twisted grey garter looped round a
stocking: rumpled, shiny sole.

--No: that book.

Other stocking. Her petticoat.

--It must have fell down, she said.

He felt here and there. _Voglio e non vorrei_. Wonder if she pronounces
that right: _voglio_. Not in the bed. Must have slid down. He stooped
and lifted the valance. The book, fallen, sprawled against the bulge of
the orangekeyed chamberpot.

--Show here, she said. I put a mark in it. There's a word I wanted to
ask you.

She swallowed a draught of tea from her cup held by nothandle and,
having wiped her fingertips smartly on the blanket, began to search the
text with the hairpin till she reached the word.

--Met him what? he asked.

--Here, she said. What does that mean?

He leaned downward and read near her polished thumbnail.

--Metempsychosis?

--Yes. Who's he when he's at home?

--Metempsychosis, he said, frowning. It's Greek: from the Greek. That
means the transmigration of souls.

--O, rocks! she said. Tell us in plain words.

He smiled, glancing askance at her mocking eyes. The same young eyes.
The first night after the charades. Dolphin's Barn. He turned over
the smudged pages. _Ruby: the Pride of the Ring_. Hello. Illustration.
Fierce Italian with carriagewhip. Must be Ruby pride of the on the floor
naked. Sheet kindly lent. _The monster Maffei desisted and flung his
victim from him with an oath_. Cruelty behind it all. Doped animals.
Trapeze at Hengler's. Had to look the other way. Mob gaping. Break your
neck and we'll break our sides. Families of them. Bone them young so
they metamspychosis. That we live after death. Our souls. That a man's
soul after he dies. Dignam's soul...

--Did you finish it? he asked.

--Yes, she said. There's nothing smutty in it. Is she in love with the
first fellow all the time?

--Never read it. Do you want another?

--Yes. Get another of Paul de Kock's. Nice name he has.

She poured more tea into her cup, watching it flow sideways.

Must get that Capel street library book renewed or they'll write to
Kearney, my guarantor. Reincarnation: that's the word.

--Some people believe, he said, that we go on living in another body
after death, that we lived before. They call it reincarnation. That
we all lived before on the earth thousands of years ago or some other
planet. They say we have forgotten it. Some say they remember their past
lives.

The sluggish cream wound curdling spirals through her tea. Bette remind
her of the word: metempsychosis. An example would be better. An example?

The _Bath of the Nymph_ over the bed. Given away with the Easter number
of _Photo Bits_: Splendid masterpiece in art colours. Tea before you
put milk in. Not unlike her with her hair down: slimmer. Three and six
I gave for the frame. She said it would look nice over the bed. Naked
nymphs: Greece: and for instance all the people that lived then.

He turned the pages back.

--Metempsychosis, he said, is what the ancient Greeks called it. They
used to believe you could be changed into an animal or a tree, for
instance. What they called nymphs, for example.

Her spoon ceased to stir up the sugar. She gazed straight before her,
inhaling through her arched nostrils.

--There's a smell of burn, she said. Did you leave anything on the fire?

--The kidney! he cried suddenly.

He fitted the book roughly into his inner pocket and, stubbing his toes
against the broken commode, hurried out towards the smell, stepping
hastily down the stairs with a flurried stork's legs. Pungent smoke shot
up in an angry jet from a side of the pan. By prodding a prong of the
fork under the kidney he detached it and turned it turtle on its back.
Only a little burnt. He tossed it off the pan on to a plate and let the
scanty brown gravy trickle over it.

Cup of tea now. He sat down, cut and buttered a slice of the loaf.
He shore away the burnt flesh and flung it to the cat. Then he put a
forkful into his mouth, chewing with discernment the toothsome pliant
meat. Done to a turn. A mouthful of tea. Then he cut away dies of bread,
sopped one in the gravy and put it in his mouth. What was that about
some young student and a picnic? He creased out the letter at his side,
reading it slowly as he chewed, sopping another die of bread in the
gravy and raising it to his mouth.

Dearest Papli

Thanks ever so much for the lovely birthday present. It suits me
splendid. Everyone says I am quite the belle in my new tam. I got
mummy's Iovely box of creams and am writing. They are lovely. I am
getting on swimming in the photo business now. Mr Coghlan took one of me
and Mrs. Will send when developed. We did great biz yesterday. Fair day
and all the beef to the heels were in. We are going to lough Owel on
Monday with a few friends to make a scrap picnic. Give my love to
mummy and to yourself a big kiss and thanks. I hear them at the piano
downstairs. There is to be a concert in the Greville Arms on Saturday.
There is a young student comes here some evenings named Bannon his
cousins or something are big swells and he sings Boylan's (I was on the
pop of writing Blazes Boylan's) song about those seaside girls. Tell him
silly Milly sends my best respects. I must now close with fondest love

Your fond daughter, MILLY.

P. S. Excuse bad writing am in hurry. Byby. M.

Fifteen yesterday. Curious, fifteenth of the month too. Her first
birthday away from home. Separation. Remember the summer morning she
was born, running to knock up Mrs Thornton in Denzille street. Jolly old
woman. Lot of babies she must have helped into the world. She knew from
the first poor little Rudy wouldn't live. Well, God is good, sir. She
knew at once. He would be eleven now if he had lived.

His vacant face stared pityingly at the postscript. Excuse bad writing.
Hurry. Piano downstairs. Coming out of her shell. Row with her in the
XL Cafe about the bracelet. Wouldn't eat her cakes or speak or look.
Saucebox. He sopped other dies of bread in the gravy and ate piece after
piece of kidney. Twelve and six a week. Not much. Still, she might do
worse. Music hall stage. Young student. He drank a draught of cooler tea
to wash down his meal. Then he read the letter again: twice.

O, well: she knows how to mind herself. But if not? No, nothing has
happened. Of course it might. Wait in any case till it does. A wild
piece of goods. Her slim legs running up the staircase. Destiny.
Ripening now.

Vain: very.

He smiled with troubled affection at the kitchen window. Day I caught
her in the street pinching her cheeks to make them red. Anemic a little.
Was given milk too long. On the ERIN'S KING that day round the Kish.
Damned old tub pitching about. Not a bit funky. Her pale blue scarf
loose in the wind with her hair. _All dimpled cheeks and curls, Your
head it simply swirls._


Seaside girls. Torn envelope. Hands stuck in his trousers' pockets,
jarvey off for the day, singing. Friend of the family. Swurls, he says.
Pier with lamps, summer evening, band,

     _Those girls, those girls,
     Those lovely seaside girls._


Milly too. Young kisses: the first. Far away now past. Mrs Marion.
Reading, lying back now, counting the strands of her hair, smiling,
braiding.

A soft qualm, regret, flowed down his backbone, increasing. Will happen,
yes. Prevent. Useless: can't move. Girl's sweet light lips. Will happen
too. He felt the flowing qualm spread over him. Useless to move now.
Lips kissed, kissing, kissed. Full gluey woman's lips.

Better where she is down there: away. Occupy her. Wanted a dog to pass
the time. Might take a trip down there. August bank holiday, only two
and six return. Six weeks off, however. Might work a press pass. Or
through M'Coy.

The cat, having cleaned all her fur, returned to the meatstained paper,
nosed at it and stalked to the door. She looked back at him, mewing.
Wants to go out. Wait before a door sometime it will open. Let her wait.
Has the fidgets. Electric. Thunder in the air. Was washing at her ear
with her back to the fire too.

He felt heavy, full: then a gentle loosening of his bowels. He stood up,
undoing the waistband of his trousers. The cat mewed to him.

--Miaow! he said in answer. Wait till I'm ready.

Heaviness: hot day coming. Too much trouble to fag up the stairs to the
landing.

A paper. He liked to read at stool. Hope no ape comes knocking just as
I'm.

In the tabledrawer he found an old number of _Titbits_. He folded it
under his armpit, went to the door and opened it. The cat went up in
soft bounds. Ah, wanted to go upstairs, curl up in a ball on the bed.

Listening, he heard her voice:

--Come, come, pussy. Come.

He went out through the backdoor into the garden: stood to listen
towards the next garden. No sound. Perhaps hanging clothes out to dry.
The maid was in the garden. Fine morning.

He bent down to regard a lean file of spearmint growing by the wall.
Make a summerhouse here. Scarlet runners. Virginia creepers. Want to
manure the whole place over, scabby soil. A coat of liver of sulphur.
All soil like that without dung. Household slops. Loam, what is this
that is? The hens in the next garden: their droppings are very good top
dressing. Best of all though are the cattle, especially when they are
fed on those oilcakes. Mulch of dung. Best thing to clean ladies' kid
gloves. Dirty cleans. Ashes too. Reclaim the whole place. Grow peas in
that corner there. Lettuce. Always have fresh greens then. Still gardens
have their drawbacks. That bee or bluebottle here Whitmonday.

He walked on. Where is my hat, by the way? Must have put it back on the
peg. Or hanging up on the floor. Funny I don't remember that. Hallstand
too full. Four umbrellas, her raincloak. Picking up the letters.
Drago's shopbell ringing. Queer I was just thinking that moment. Brown
brillantined hair over his collar. Just had a wash and brushup. Wonder
have I time for a bath this morning. Tara street. Chap in the paybox
there got away James Stephens, they say. O'Brien.

Deep voice that fellow Dlugacz has. Agendath what is it? Now, my miss.
Enthusiast.

He kicked open the crazy door of the jakes. Better be careful not to get
these trousers dirty for the funeral. He went in, bowing his head
under the low lintel. Leaving the door ajar, amid the stench of mouldy
limewash and stale cobwebs he undid his braces. Before sitting down he
peered through a chink up at the nextdoor windows. The king was in his
countinghouse. Nobody.

Asquat on the cuckstool he folded out his paper, turning its pages over
on his bared knees. Something new and easy. No great hurry. Keep it a
bit. Our prize titbit: _Matcham's Masterstroke_. Written by Mr Philip
Beaufoy, Playgoers' Club, London. Payment at the rate of one guinea
a column has been made to the writer. Three and a half. Three pounds
three. Three pounds, thirteen and six.

Quietly he read, restraining himself, the first column and, yielding but
resisting, began the second. Midway, his last resistance yielding, he
allowed his bowels to ease themselves quietly as he read, reading still
patiently that slight constipation of yesterday quite gone. Hope it's
not too big bring on piles again. No, just right. So. Ah! Costive. One
tabloid of cascara sagrada. Life might be so. It did not move or touch
him but it was something quick and neat. Print anything now. Silly
season. He read on, seated calm above his own rising smell. Neat
certainly. _Matcham often thinks of the masterstroke by which he won the
laughing witch who now_. Begins and ends morally. _Hand in hand_. Smart.
He glanced back through what he had read and, while feeling his water
flow quietly, he envied kindly Mr Beaufoy who had written it and
received payment of three pounds, thirteen and six.

Might manage a sketch. By Mr and Mrs L. M. Bloom. Invent a story for
some proverb. Which? Time I used to try jotting down on my cuff what she
said dressing. Dislike dressing together. Nicked myself shaving. Biting
her nether lip, hooking the placket of her skirt. Timing her. 9.l5.
Did Roberts pay you yet? 9.20. What had Gretta Conroy on? 9.23. What
possessed me to buy this comb? 9.24. I'm swelled after that cabbage. A
speck of dust on the patent leather of her boot.

Rubbing smartly in turn each welt against her stockinged calf. Morning
after the bazaar dance when May's band played Ponchielli's dance of the
hours. Explain that: morning hours, noon, then evening coming on, then
night hours. Washing her teeth. That was the first night. Her head
dancing. Her fansticks clicking. Is that Boylan well off? He has money.
Why? I noticed he had a good rich smell off his breath dancing. No use
humming then. Allude to it. Strange kind of music that last night. The
mirror was in shadow. She rubbed her handglass briskly on her woollen
vest against her full wagging bub. Peering into it. Lines in her eyes.
It wouldn't pan out somehow.

Evening hours, girls in grey gauze. Night hours then: black with daggers
and eyemasks. Poetical idea: pink, then golden, then grey, then black.
Still, true to life also. Day: then the night.

He tore away half the prize story sharply and wiped himself with it.
Then he girded up his trousers, braced and buttoned himself. He pulled
back the jerky shaky door of the jakes and came forth from the gloom
into the air.

In the bright light, lightened and cooled in limb, he eyed carefully his
black trousers: the ends, the knees, the houghs of the knees. What time
is the funeral? Better find out in the paper.

A creak and a dark whirr in the air high up. The bells of George's
church. They tolled the hour: loud dark iron.

     _Heigho! Heigho!
     Heigho! Heigho!
     Heigho! Heigho!_


Quarter to. There again: the overtone following through the air, third.

Poor Dignam!


By lorries along sir John Rogerson's quay Mr Bloom walked soberly, past
Windmill lane, Leask's the linseed crusher, the postal telegraph office.
Could have given that address too. And past the sailors' home. He turned
from the morning noises of the quayside and walked through Lime street.
By Brady's cottages a boy for the skins lolled, his bucket of offal
linked, smoking a chewed fagbutt. A smaller girl with scars of eczema
on her forehead eyed him, listlessly holding her battered caskhoop. Tell
him if he smokes he won't grow. O let him! His life isn't such a bed of
roses. Waiting outside pubs to bring da home. Come home to ma, da.
Slack hour: won't be many there. He crossed Townsend street, passed
the frowning face of Bethel. El, yes: house of: Aleph, Beth. And past
Nichols' the undertaker. At eleven it is. Time enough. Daresay Corny
Kelleher bagged the job for O'Neill's. Singing with his eyes shut.
Corny. Met her once in the park. In the dark. What a lark. Police tout.
Her name and address she then told with my tooraloom tooraloom tay.
O, surely he bagged it. Bury him cheap in a whatyoumaycall. With my
tooraloom, tooraloom, tooraloom, tooraloom.


In Westland row he halted before the window of the Belfast and Oriental
Tea Company and read the legends of leadpapered packets: choice blend,
finest quality, family tea. Rather warm. Tea. Must get some from Tom
Kernan. Couldn't ask him at a funeral, though. While his eyes still read
blandly he took off his hat quietly inhaling his hairoil and sent his
right hand with slow grace over his brow and hair. Very warm morning.
Under their dropped lids his eyes found the tiny bow of the leather
headband inside his high grade ha. Just there. His right hand came down
into the bowl of his hat. His fingers found quickly a card behind the
headband and transferred it to his waistcoat pocket.

So warm. His right hand once more more slowly went over his brow and
hair. Then he put on his hat again, relieved: and read again: choice
blend, made of the finest Ceylon brands. The far east. Lovely spot it
must be: the garden of the world, big lazy leaves to float about on,
cactuses, flowery meads, snaky lianas they call them. Wonder is it like
that. Those Cinghalese lobbing about in the sun in _dolce far niente_,
not doing a hand's turn all day. Sleep six months out of twelve. Too hot
to quarrel. Influence of the climate. Lethargy. Flowers of idleness. The
air feeds most. Azotes. Hothouse in Botanic gardens. Sensitive plants.
Waterlilies. Petals too tired to. Sleeping sickness in the air. Walk on
roseleaves. Imagine trying to eat tripe and cowheel. Where was the chap
I saw in that picture somewhere? Ah yes, in the dead sea floating on his
back, reading a book with a parasol open. Couldn't sink if you tried: so
thick with salt. Because the weight of the water, no, the weight of
the body in the water is equal to the weight of the what? Or is it the
volume is equal to the weight? It's a law something like that. Vance in
High school cracking his fingerjoints, teaching. The college curriculum.
Cracking curriculum. What is weight really when you say the weight?
Thirtytwo feet per second per second. Law of falling bodies: per second
per second. They all fall to the ground. The earth. It's the force of
gravity of the earth is the weight.

He turned away and sauntered across the road. How did she walk with her
sausages? Like that something. As he walked he took the folded _Freeman_
from his sidepocket, unfolded it, rolled it lengthwise in a baton and
tapped it at each sauntering step against his trouserleg. Careless air:
just drop in to see. Per second per second. Per second for every second
it means. From the curbstone he darted a keen glance through the door of
the postoffice. Too late box. Post here. No-one. In.

He handed the card through the brass grill.

--Are there any letters for me? he asked.

While the postmistress searched a pigeonhole he gazed at the recruiting
poster with soldiers of all arms on parade: and held the tip of his
baton against his nostrils, smelling freshprinted rag paper. No answer
probably. Went too far last time.

The postmistress handed him back through the grill his card with a
letter. He thanked her and glanced rapidly at the typed envelope.

Henry Flower Esq, c/o P. O. Westland Row, City.

Answered anyhow. He slipped card and letter into his sidepocket,
reviewing again the soldiers on parade. Where's old Tweedy's regiment?
Castoff soldier. There: bearskin cap and hackle plume. No, he's a
grenadier. Pointed cuffs. There he is: royal Dublin fusiliers. Redcoats.
Too showy. That must be why the women go after them. Uniform. Easier to
enlist and drill. Maud Gonne's letter about taking them off O'Connell
street at night: disgrace to our Irish capital. Griffith's paper is on
the same tack now: an army rotten with venereal disease: overseas or
halfseasover empire. Half baked they look: hypnotised like. Eyes front.
Mark time. Table: able. Bed: ed. The King's own. Never see him dressed
up as a fireman or a bobby. A mason, yes.

He strolled out of the postoffice and turned to the right. Talk: as if
that would mend matters. His hand went into his pocket and a forefinger
felt its way under the flap of the envelope, ripping it open in jerks.
Women will pay a lot of heed, I don't think. His fingers drew forth the
letter the letter and crumpled the envelope in his pocket. Something
pinned on: photo perhaps. Hair? No.

M'Coy. Get rid of him quickly. Take me out of my way. Hate company when
you.

--Hello, Bloom. Where are you off to?

--Hello, M'Coy. Nowhere in particular.

--How's the body?

--Fine. How are you?

--Just keeping alive, M'Coy said.

His eyes on the black tie and clothes he asked with low respect:

--Is there any... no trouble I hope? I see you're...

--O, no, Mr Bloom said. Poor Dignam, you know. The funeral is today.

--To be sure, poor fellow. So it is. What time?

A photo it isn't. A badge maybe.

--E... eleven, Mr Bloom answered.

--I must try to get out there, M'Coy said. Eleven, is it? I only heard
it last night. Who was telling me? Holohan. You know Hoppy?

--I know.

Mr Bloom gazed across the road at the outsider drawn up before the door
of the Grosvenor. The porter hoisted the valise up on the well. She
stood still, waiting, while the man, husband, brother, like her,
searched his pockets for change. Stylish kind of coat with that roll
collar, warm for a day like this, looks like blanketcloth. Careless
stand of her with her hands in those patch pockets. Like that haughty
creature at the polo match. Women all for caste till you touch the spot.
Handsome is and handsome does. Reserved about to yield. The honourable
Mrs and Brutus is an honourable man. Possess her once take the starch
out of her.

--I was with Bob Doran, he's on one of his periodical bends, and what do
you call him Bantam Lyons. Just down there in Conway's we were.

Doran Lyons in Conway's. She raised a gloved hand to her hair. In came
Hoppy. Having a wet. Drawing back his head and gazing far from beneath
his vailed eyelids he saw the bright fawn skin shine in the glare, the
braided drums. Clearly I can see today. Moisture about gives long sight
perhaps. Talking of one thing or another. Lady's hand. Which side will
she get up?

--And he said: _Sad thing about our poor friend Paddy! What Paddy?_ I
said. _Poor little Paddy Dignam_, he said.

Off to the country: Broadstone probably. High brown boots with laces
dangling. Wellturned foot. What is he foostering over that change for?
Sees me looking. Eye out for other fellow always. Good fallback. Two
strings to her bow.

--_Why?_ I said. _What's wrong with him?_ I said.

Proud: rich: silk stockings.

--Yes, Mr Bloom said.

He moved a little to the side of M'Coy's talking head. Getting up in a
minute.

--_What's wrong with him_? He said. _He's dead_, he said. And, faith,
he filled up. _Is it Paddy Dignam_? I said. I couldn't believe it when I
heard it. I was with him no later than Friday last or Thursday was it in
the Arch. _Yes,_ he said. _He's gone. He died on Monday, poor fellow_.
Watch! Watch! Silk flash rich stockings white. Watch!

A heavy tramcar honking its gong slewed between.

Lost it. Curse your noisy pugnose. Feels locked out of it. Paradise and
the peri. Always happening like that. The very moment. Girl in Eustace
street hallway Monday was it settling her garter. Her friend covering
the display of _esprit de corps_. Well, what are you gaping at?

--Yes, yes, Mr Bloom said after a dull sigh. Another gone.

--One of the best, M'Coy said.

The tram passed. They drove off towards the Loop Line bridge, her rich
gloved hand on the steel grip. Flicker, flicker: the laceflare of her
hat in the sun: flicker, flick.

--Wife well, I suppose? M'Coy's changed voice said.

--O, yes, Mr Bloom said. Tiptop, thanks.

He unrolled the newspaper baton idly and read idly:

_What is home without Plumtree's Potted Meat? Incomplete With it an
abode of bliss._

--My missus has just got an engagement. At least it's not settled yet.

Valise tack again. By the way no harm. I'm off that, thanks.

Mr Bloom turned his largelidded eyes with unhasty friendliness.

--My wife too, he said. She's going to sing at a swagger affair in the
Ulster Hall, Belfast, on the twenty-fifth.

--That so? M'Coy said. Glad to hear that, old man. Who's getting it up?

Mrs Marion Bloom. Not up yet. Queen was in her bedroom eating bread and.
No book. Blackened court cards laid along her thigh by sevens. Dark lady
and fair man. Letter. Cat furry black ball. Torn strip of envelope.

     _Love's
     Old
     Sweet
     Song
     Comes lo-ove's old..._

--It's a kind of a tour, don't you see, Mr Bloom said thoughtfully.
_Sweeeet song_. There's a committee formed. Part shares and part
profits.

M'Coy nodded, picking at his moustache stubble.

--O, well, he said. That's good news.

He moved to go.

--Well, glad to see you looking fit, he said. Meet you knocking around.

--Yes, Mr Bloom said.

--Tell you what, M'Coy said. You might put down my name at the funeral,
will you? I'd like to go but I mightn't be able, you see. There's a
drowning case at Sandycove may turn up and then the coroner and myself
would have to go down if the body is found. You just shove in my name if
I'm not there, will you?

--I'll do that, Mr Bloom said, moving to get off. That'll be all right.

--Right, M'Coy said brightly. Thanks, old man. I'd go if I possibly
could. Well, tolloll. Just C. P. M'Coy will do.

--That will be done, Mr Bloom answered firmly.

Didn't catch me napping that wheeze. The quick touch. Soft mark. I'd
like my job. Valise I have a particular fancy for. Leather. Capped
corners, rivetted edges, double action lever lock. Bob Cowley lent him
his for the Wicklow regatta concert last year and never heard tidings of
it from that good day to this.

Mr Bloom, strolling towards Brunswick street, smiled. My missus has just
got an. Reedy freckled soprano. Cheeseparing nose. Nice enough in its
way: for a little ballad. No guts in it. You and me, don't you know:
in the same boat. Softsoaping. Give you the needle that would. Can't
he hear the difference? Think he's that way inclined a bit. Against
my grain somehow. Thought that Belfast would fetch him. I hope that
smallpox up there doesn't get worse. Suppose she wouldn't let herself be
vaccinated again. Your wife and my wife.

Wonder is he pimping after me?

Mr Bloom stood at the corner, his eyes wandering over the multicoloured
hoardings. Cantrell and Cochrane's Ginger Ale (Aromatic). Clery's Summer
Sale. No, he's going on straight. Hello. _Leah_ tonight. Mrs Bandmann
Palmer. Like to see her again in that. _Hamlet_ she played last night.
Male impersonator. Perhaps he was a woman. Why Ophelia committed
suicide. Poor papa! How he used to talk of Kate Bateman in that. Outside
the Adelphi in London waited all the afternoon to get in. Year before
I was born that was: sixtyfive. And Ristori in Vienna. What is this the
right name is? By Mosenthal it is. Rachel, is it? No. The scene he was
always talking about where the old blind Abraham recognises the voice
and puts his fingers on his face.

Nathan's voice! His son's voice! I hear the voice of Nathan who left his
father to die of grief and misery in my arms, who left the house of his
father and left the God of his father.

Every word is so deep, Leopold.

Poor papa! Poor man! I'm glad I didn't go into the room to look at his
face. That day! O, dear! O, dear! Ffoo! Well, perhaps it was best for
him.

Mr Bloom went round the corner and passed the drooping nags of the
hazard. No use thinking of it any more. Nosebag time. Wish I hadn't met
that M'Coy fellow.

He came nearer and heard a crunching of gilded oats, the gently champing
teeth. Their full buck eyes regarded him as he went by, amid the sweet
oaten reek of horsepiss. Their Eldorado. Poor jugginses! Damn all they
know or care about anything with their long noses stuck in nosebags.
Too full for words. Still they get their feed all right and their doss.
Gelded too: a stump of black guttapercha wagging limp between their
haunches. Might be happy all the same that way. Good poor brutes they
look. Still their neigh can be very irritating.

He drew the letter from his pocket and folded it into the newspaper he
carried. Might just walk into her here. The lane is safer.

He passed the cabman's shelter. Curious the life of drifting cabbies.
All weathers, all places, time or setdown, no will of their own. _Voglio
e non_. Like to give them an odd cigarette. Sociable. Shout a few flying
syllables as they pass. He hummed:

     _La ci darem la mano
     La la lala la la._

He turned into Cumberland street and, going on some paces, halted in the
lee of the station wall. No-one. Meade's timberyard. Piled balks. Ruins
and tenements. With careful tread he passed over a hopscotch court with
its forgotten pickeystone. Not a sinner. Near the timberyard a squatted
child at marbles, alone, shooting the taw with a cunnythumb. A wise
tabby, a blinking sphinx, watched from her warm sill. Pity to disturb
them. Mohammed cut a piece out of his mantle not to wake her. Open it.
And once I played marbles when I went to that old dame's school. She
liked mignonette. Mrs Ellis's. And Mr? He opened the letter within the
newspaper.

A flower. I think it's a. A yellow flower with flattened petals. Not
annoyed then? What does she say?

Dear Henry

I got your last letter to me and thank you very much for it. I am sorry
you did not like my last letter. Why did you enclose the stamps? I am
awfully angry with you. I do wish I could punish you for that. I called
you naughty boy because I do not like that other world. Please tell me
what is the real meaning of that word? Are you not happy in your home
you poor little naughty boy? I do wish I could do something for you.
Please tell me what you think of poor me. I often think of the beautiful
name you have. Dear Henry, when will we meet? I think of you so often
you have no idea. I have never felt myself so much drawn to a man as
you. I feel so bad about. Please write me a long letter and tell me
more. Remember if you do not I will punish you. So now you know what I
will do to you, you naughty boy, if you do not wrote. O how I long to
meet you. Henry dear, do not deny my request before my patience are
exhausted. Then I will tell you all. Goodbye now, naughty darling, I
have such a bad headache. today. and write _by return_ to your longing

Martha

P. S. Do tell me what kind of perfume does your wife use. I want to
know.

He tore the flower gravely from its pinhold smelt its almost no smell
and placed it in his heart pocket. Language of flowers. They like it
because no-one can hear. Or a poison bouquet to strike him down. Then
walking slowly forward he read the letter again, murmuring here and
there a word. Angry tulips with you darling manflower punish your cactus
if you don't please poor forgetmenot how I long violets to dear roses
when we soon anemone meet all naughty nightstalk wife Martha's perfume.
Having read it all he took it from the newspaper and put it back in his
sidepocket.

Weak joy opened his lips. Changed since the first letter. Wonder did she
wrote it herself. Doing the indignant: a girl of good family like me,
respectable character. Could meet one Sunday after the rosary. Thank
you: not having any. Usual love scrimmage. Then running round corners.
Bad as a row with Molly. Cigar has a cooling effect. Narcotic. Go
further next time. Naughty boy: punish: afraid of words, of course.
Brutal, why not? Try it anyhow. A bit at a time.

Fingering still the letter in his pocket he drew the pin out of it.
Common pin, eh? He threw it on the road. Out of her clothes somewhere:
pinned together. Queer the number of pins they always have. No roses
without thorns.

Flat Dublin voices bawled in his head. Those two sluts that night in the
Coombe, linked together in the rain.

     _O, Mary lost the pin of her drawers.
     She didn't know what to do
     To keep it up
     To keep it up._

It? Them. Such a bad headache. Has her roses probably. Or sitting all
day typing. Eyefocus bad for stomach nerves. What perfume does your wife
use. Now could you make out a thing like that?

     _To keep it up._

Martha, Mary. I saw that picture somewhere I forget now old master or
faked for money. He is sitting in their house, talking. Mysterious. Also
the two sluts in the Coombe would listen.

     _To keep it up._

Nice kind of evening feeling. No more wandering about. Just loll there:
quiet dusk: let everything rip. Forget. Tell about places you have been,
strange customs. The other one, jar on her head, was getting the supper:
fruit, olives, lovely cool water out of a well, stonecold like the hole
in the wall at Ashtown. Must carry a paper goblet next time I go to the
trottingmatches. She listens with big dark soft eyes. Tell her: more and
more: all. Then a sigh: silence. Long long long rest.

Going under the railway arch he took out the envelope, tore it swiftly
in shreds and scattered them towards the road. The shreds fluttered
away, sank in the dank air: a white flutter, then all sank.

Henry Flower. You could tear up a cheque for a hundred pounds in the
same way. Simple bit of paper. Lord Iveagh once cashed a sevenfigure
cheque for a million in the bank of Ireland. Shows you the money to be
made out of porter. Still the other brother lord Ardilaun has to change
his shirt four times a day, they say. Skin breeds lice or vermin. A
million pounds, wait a moment. Twopence a pint, fourpence a quart,
eightpence a gallon of porter, no, one and fourpence a gallon of porter.
One and four into twenty: fifteen about. Yes, exactly. Fifteen millions
of barrels of porter.

What am I saying barrels? Gallons. About a million barrels all the same.

An incoming train clanked heavily above his head, coach after coach.
Barrels bumped in his head: dull porter slopped and churned inside.
The bungholes sprang open and a huge dull flood leaked out, flowing
together, winding through mudflats all over the level land, a lazy
pooling swirl of liquor bearing along wideleaved flowers of its froth.

He had reached the open backdoor of All Hallows. Stepping into the porch
he doffed his hat, took the card from his pocket and tucked it again
behind the leather headband. Damn it. I might have tried to work M'Coy
for a pass to Mullingar.

Same notice on the door. Sermon by the very reverend John Conmee S.J.
on saint Peter Claver S.J. and the African Mission. Prayers for the
conversion of Gladstone they had too when he was almost unconscious. The
protestants are the same. Convert Dr William J. Walsh D.D. to the true
religion. Save China's millions. Wonder how they explain it to the
heathen Chinee. Prefer an ounce of opium. Celestials. Rank heresy for
them. Buddha their god lying on his side in the museum. Taking it easy
with hand under his cheek. Josssticks burning. Not like Ecce Homo. Crown
of thorns and cross. Clever idea Saint Patrick the shamrock. Chopsticks?
Conmee: Martin Cunningham knows him: distinguishedlooking. Sorry I
didn't work him about getting Molly into the choir instead of that
Father Farley who looked a fool but wasn't. They're taught that. He's
not going out in bluey specs with the sweat rolling off him to baptise
blacks, is he? The glasses would take their fancy, flashing. Like to see
them sitting round in a ring with blub lips, entranced, listening. Still
life. Lap it up like milk, I suppose.

The cold smell of sacred stone called him. He trod the worn steps,
pushed the swingdoor and entered softly by the rere.

Something going on: some sodality. Pity so empty. Nice discreet place
to be next some girl. Who is my neighbour? Jammed by the hour to slow
music. That woman at midnight mass. Seventh heaven. Women knelt in the
benches with crimson halters round their necks, heads bowed. A batch
knelt at the altarrails. The priest went along by them, murmuring,
holding the thing in his hands. He stopped at each, took out a
communion, shook a drop or two (are they in water?) off it and put it
neatly into her mouth. Her hat and head sank. Then the next one. Her hat
sank at once. Then the next one: a small old woman. The priest bent down
to put it into her mouth, murmuring all the time. Latin. The next one.
Shut your eyes and open your mouth. What? _Corpus:_ body. Corpse. Good
idea the Latin. Stupefies them first. Hospice for the dying. They
don't seem to chew it: only swallow it down. Rum idea: eating bits of a
corpse. Why the cannibals cotton to it.

He stood aside watching their blind masks pass down the aisle, one by
one, and seek their places. He approached a bench and seated himself in
its corner, nursing his hat and newspaper. These pots we have to wear.
We ought to have hats modelled on our heads. They were about him here
and there, with heads still bowed in their crimson halters, waiting for
it to melt in their stomachs. Something like those mazzoth: it's that
sort of bread: unleavened shewbread. Look at them. Now I bet it makes
them feel happy. Lollipop. It does. Yes, bread of angels it's called.
There's a big idea behind it, kind of kingdom of God is within you feel.
First communicants. Hokypoky penny a lump. Then feel all like one family
party, same in the theatre, all in the same swim. They do. I'm sure of
that. Not so lonely. In our confraternity. Then come out a bit spreeish.
Let off steam. Thing is if you really believe in it. Lourdes cure,
waters of oblivion, and the Knock apparition, statues bleeding. Old
fellow asleep near that confessionbox. Hence those snores. Blind faith.
Safe in the arms of kingdom come. Lulls all pain. Wake this time next
year.

He saw the priest stow the communion cup away, well in, and kneel an
instant before it, showing a large grey bootsole from under the lace
affair he had on. Suppose he lost the pin of his. He wouldn't know what
to do to. Bald spot behind. Letters on his back: I.N.R.I? No: I.H.S.
Molly told me one time I asked her. I have sinned: or no: I have
suffered, it is. And the other one? Iron nails ran in.

Meet one Sunday after the rosary. Do not deny my request. Turn up with
a veil and black bag. Dusk and the light behind her. She might be here
with a ribbon round her neck and do the other thing all the same on the
sly. Their character. That fellow that turned queen's evidence on the
invincibles he used to receive the, Carey was his name, the communion
every morning. This very church. Peter Carey, yes. No, Peter Claver I am
thinking of. Denis Carey. And just imagine that. Wife and six children
at home. And plotting that murder all the time. Those crawthumpers,
now that's a good name for them, there's always something shiftylooking
about them. They're not straight men of business either. O, no, she's
not here: the flower: no, no. By the way, did I tear up that envelope?
Yes: under the bridge.

The priest was rinsing out the chalice: then he tossed off the dregs
smartly. Wine. Makes it more aristocratic than for example if he drank
what they are used to Guinness's porter or some temperance beverage
Wheatley's Dublin hop bitters or Cantrell and Cochrane's ginger ale
(aromatic). Doesn't give them any of it: shew wine: only the other.
Cold comfort. Pious fraud but quite right: otherwise they'd have one old
booser worse than another coming along, cadging for a drink. Queer the
whole atmosphere of the. Quite right. Perfectly right that is.

Mr Bloom looked back towards the choir. Not going to be any music. Pity.
Who has the organ here I wonder? Old Glynn he knew how to make that
instrument talk, the _vibrato_: fifty pounds a year they say he had in
Gardiner street. Molly was in fine voice that day, the _Stabat Mater_
of Rossini. Father Bernard Vaughan's sermon first. Christ or Pilate?
Christ, but don't keep us all night over it. Music they wanted.
Footdrill stopped. Could hear a pin drop. I told her to pitch her voice
against that corner. I could feel the thrill in the air, the full, the
people looking up:

_Quis est homo._

Some of that old sacred music splendid. Mercadante: seven last words.
Mozart's twelfth mass: _Gloria_ in that. Those old popes keen on music,
on art and statues and pictures of all kinds. Palestrina for example
too. They had a gay old time while it lasted. Healthy too, chanting,
regular hours, then brew liqueurs. Benedictine. Green Chartreuse. Still,
having eunuchs in their choir that was coming it a bit thick. What kind
of voice is it? Must be curious to hear after their own strong basses.
Connoisseurs. Suppose they wouldn't feel anything after. Kind of a
placid. No worry. Fall into flesh, don't they? Gluttons, tall, long
legs. Who knows? Eunuch. One way out of it.

He saw the priest bend down and kiss the altar and then face about and
bless all the people. All crossed themselves and stood up. Mr Bloom
glanced about him and then stood up, looking over the risen hats. Stand
up at the gospel of course. Then all settled down on their knees again
and he sat back quietly in his bench. The priest came down from the
altar, holding the thing out from him, and he and the massboy answered
each other in Latin. Then the priest knelt down and began to read off a
card:

--O God, our refuge and our strength...

Mr Bloom put his face forward to catch the words. English. Throw them
the bone. I remember slightly. How long since your last mass? Glorious
and immaculate virgin. Joseph, her spouse. Peter and Paul. More
interesting if you understood what it was all about. Wonderful
organisation certainly, goes like clockwork. Confession. Everyone wants
to. Then I will tell you all. Penance. Punish me, please. Great weapon
in their hands. More than doctor or solicitor. Woman dying to. And I
schschschschschsch. And did you chachachachacha? And why did you? Look
down at her ring to find an excuse. Whispering gallery walls have ears.
Husband learn to his surprise. God's little joke. Then out she comes.
Repentance skindeep. Lovely shame. Pray at an altar. Hail Mary and Holy
Mary. Flowers, incense, candles melting. Hide her blushes. Salvation
army blatant imitation. Reformed prostitute will address the meeting.
How I found the Lord. Squareheaded chaps those must be in Rome: they
work the whole show. And don't they rake in the money too? Bequests
also: to the P.P. for the time being in his absolute discretion.
Masses for the repose of my soul to be said publicly with open doors.
Monasteries and convents. The priest in that Fermanagh will case in the
witnessbox. No browbeating him. He had his answer pat for everything.
Liberty and exaltation of our holy mother the church. The doctors of the
church: they mapped out the whole theology of it.

The priest prayed:

--Blessed Michael, archangel, defend us in the hour of conflict. Be
our safeguard against the wickedness and snares of the devil (may God
restrain him, we humbly pray!): and do thou, O prince of the heavenly
host, by the power of God thrust Satan down to hell and with him those
other wicked spirits who wander through the world for the ruin of souls.

The priest and the massboy stood up and walked off. All over. The women
remained behind: thanksgiving.

Better be shoving along. Brother Buzz. Come around with the plate
perhaps. Pay your Easter duty.

He stood up. Hello. Were those two buttons of my waistcoat open all the
time? Women enjoy it. Never tell you. But we. Excuse, miss, there's a
(whh!) just a (whh!) fluff. Or their skirt behind, placket unhooked.
Glimpses of the moon. Annoyed if you don't. Why didn't you tell me
before. Still like you better untidy. Good job it wasn't farther south.
He passed, discreetly buttoning, down the aisle and out through the main
door into the light. He stood a moment unseeing by the cold black marble
bowl while before him and behind two worshippers dipped furtive hands in
the low tide of holy water. Trams: a car of Prescott's dyeworks: a widow
in her weeds. Notice because I'm in mourning myself. He covered himself.
How goes the time? Quarter past. Time enough yet. Better get that lotion
made up. Where is this? Ah yes, the last time. Sweny's in Lincoln place.
Chemists rarely move. Their green and gold beaconjars too heavy to stir.
Hamilton Long's, founded in the year of the flood. Huguenot churchyard
near there. Visit some day.

He walked southward along Westland row. But the recipe is in the other
trousers. O, and I forgot that latchkey too. Bore this funeral affair.
O well, poor fellow, it's not his fault. When was it I got it made up
last? Wait. I changed a sovereign I remember. First of the month it must
have been or the second. O, he can look it up in the prescriptions book.

The chemist turned back page after page. Sandy shrivelled smell he seems
to have. Shrunken skull. And old. Quest for the philosopher's stone. The
alchemists. Drugs age you after mental excitement. Lethargy then. Why?
Reaction. A lifetime in a night. Gradually changes your character.
Living all the day among herbs, ointments, disinfectants. All his
alabaster lilypots. Mortar and pestle. Aq. Dist. Fol. Laur. Te Virid.
Smell almost cure you like the dentist's doorbell. Doctor Whack. He
ought to physic himself a bit. Electuary or emulsion. The first fellow
that picked an herb to cure himself had a bit of pluck. Simples. Want to
be careful. Enough stuff here to chloroform you. Test: turns blue
litmus paper red. Chloroform. Overdose of laudanum. Sleeping draughts.
Lovephiltres. Paragoric poppysyrup bad for cough. Clogs the pores or the
phlegm. Poisons the only cures. Remedy where you least expect it. Clever
of nature.

--About a fortnight ago, sir?

--Yes, Mr Bloom said.

He waited by the counter, inhaling slowly the keen reek of drugs, the
dusty dry smell of sponges and loofahs. Lot of time taken up telling
your aches and pains.

--Sweet almond oil and tincture of benzoin, Mr Bloom said, and then
orangeflower water...

It certainly did make her skin so delicate white like wax.

--And white wax also, he said.

Brings out the darkness of her eyes. Looking at me, the sheet up to
her eyes, Spanish, smelling herself, when I was fixing the links in my
cuffs. Those homely recipes are often the best: strawberries for the
teeth: nettles and rainwater: oatmeal they say steeped in buttermilk.
Skinfood. One of the old queen's sons, duke of Albany was it? had only
one skin. Leopold, yes. Three we have. Warts, bunions and pimples to
make it worse. But you want a perfume too. What perfume does your? _Peau
d'Espagne_. That orangeflower water is so fresh. Nice smell these soaps
have. Pure curd soap. Time to get a bath round the corner. Hammam.
Turkish. Massage. Dirt gets rolled up in your navel. Nicer if a nice
girl did it. Also I think I. Yes I. Do it in the bath. Curious longing
I. Water to water. Combine business with pleasure. Pity no time for
massage. Feel fresh then all the day. Funeral be rather glum.

--Yes, sir, the chemist said. That was two and nine. Have you brought a
bottle?

--No, Mr Bloom said. Make it up, please. I'll call later in the day and
I'll take one of these soaps. How much are they?

--Fourpence, sir.

Mr Bloom raised a cake to his nostrils. Sweet lemony wax.

--I'll take this one, he said. That makes three and a penny.

--Yes, sir, the chemist said. You can pay all together, sir, when you
come back.

--Good, Mr Bloom said.

He strolled out of the shop, the newspaper baton under his armpit, the
coolwrappered soap in his left hand.

At his armpit Bantam Lyons' voice and hand said:

--Hello, Bloom. What's the best news? Is that today's? Show us a minute.

Shaved off his moustache again, by Jove! Long cold upper lip. To look
younger. He does look balmy. Younger than I am.

Bantam Lyons's yellow blacknailed fingers unrolled the baton. Wants a
wash too. Take off the rough dirt. Good morning, have you used Pears'
soap? Dandruff on his shoulders. Scalp wants oiling.

--I want to see about that French horse that's running today, Bantam
Lyons said. Where the bugger is it?

He rustled the pleated pages, jerking his chin on his high collar.
Barber's itch. Tight collar he'll lose his hair. Better leave him the
paper and get shut of him.

--You can keep it, Mr Bloom said.

--Ascot. Gold cup. Wait, Bantam Lyons muttered. Half a mo. Maximum the
second.

--I was just going to throw it away, Mr Bloom said.

Bantam Lyons raised his eyes suddenly and leered weakly.

--What's that? his sharp voice said.

--I say you can keep it, Mr Bloom answered. I was going to throw it away
that moment.

Bantam Lyons doubted an instant, leering: then thrust the outspread
sheets back on Mr Bloom's arms.

--I'll risk it, he said. Here, thanks.

He sped off towards Conway's corner. God speed scut.

Mr Bloom folded the sheets again to a neat square and lodged the soap
in it, smiling. Silly lips of that chap. Betting. Regular hotbed of it
lately. Messenger boys stealing to put on sixpence. Raffle for large
tender turkey. Your Christmas dinner for threepence. Jack Fleming
embezzling to gamble then smuggled off to America. Keeps a hotel now.
They never come back. Fleshpots of Egypt.

He walked cheerfully towards the mosque of the baths. Remind you of a
mosque, redbaked bricks, the minarets. College sports today I see. He
eyed the horseshoe poster over the gate of college park: cyclist doubled
up like a cod in a pot. Damn bad ad. Now if they had made it round
like a wheel. Then the spokes: sports, sports, sports: and the hub big:
college. Something to catch the eye.

There's Hornblower standing at the porter's lodge. Keep him on hands:
might take a turn in there on the nod. How do you do, Mr Hornblower? How
do you do, sir?

Heavenly weather really. If life was always like that. Cricket weather.
Sit around under sunshades. Over after over. Out. They can't play it
here. Duck for six wickets. Still Captain Culler broke a window in the
Kildare street club with a slog to square leg. Donnybrook fair more
in their line. And the skulls we were acracking when M'Carthy took the
floor. Heatwave. Won't last. Always passing, the stream of life, which
in the stream of life we trace is dearer than them all.

Enjoy a bath now: clean trough of water, cool enamel, the gentle tepid
stream. This is my body.

He foresaw his pale body reclined in it at full, naked, in a womb of
warmth, oiled by scented melting soap, softly laved. He saw his
trunk and limbs riprippled over and sustained, buoyed lightly upward,
lemonyellow: his navel, bud of flesh: and saw the dark tangled curls of
his bush floating, floating hair of the stream around the limp father of
thousands, a languid floating flower.



Martin Cunningham, first, poked his silkhatted head into the creaking
carriage and, entering deftly, seated himself. Mr Power stepped in after
him, curving his height with care.

--Come on, Simon.

--After you, Mr Bloom said.

Mr Dedalus covered himself quickly and got in, saying:

Yes, yes.

--Are we all here now? Martin Cunningham asked. Come along, Bloom.

Mr Bloom entered and sat in the vacant place. He pulled the door to
after him and slammed it twice till it shut tight. He passed an arm
through the armstrap and looked seriously from the open carriagewindow
at the lowered blinds of the avenue. One dragged aside: an old woman
peeping. Nose whiteflattened against the pane. Thanking her stars she
was passed over. Extraordinary the interest they take in a corpse. Glad
to see us go we give them such trouble coming. Job seems to suit them.
Huggermugger in corners. Slop about in slipperslappers for fear he'd
wake. Then getting it ready. Laying it out. Molly and Mrs Fleming making
the bed. Pull it more to your side. Our windingsheet. Never know who
will touch you dead. Wash and shampoo. I believe they clip the nails and
the hair. Keep a bit in an envelope. Grows all the same after. Unclean
job.

All waited. Nothing was said. Stowing in the wreaths probably. I am
sitting on something hard. Ah, that soap: in my hip pocket. Better shift
it out of that. Wait for an opportunity.

All waited. Then wheels were heard from in front, turning: then nearer:
then horses' hoofs. A jolt. Their carriage began to move, creaking and
swaying. Other hoofs and creaking wheels started behind. The blinds of
the avenue passed and number nine with its craped knocker, door ajar. At
walking pace.

They waited still, their knees jogging, till they had turned and were
passing along the tramtracks. Tritonville road. Quicker. The wheels
rattled rolling over the cobbled causeway and the crazy glasses shook
rattling in the doorframes.

--What way is he taking us? Mr Power asked through both windows.

--Irishtown, Martin Cunningham said. Ringsend. Brunswick street.

Mr Dedalus nodded, looking out.

--That's a fine old custom, he said. I am glad to see it has not died
out.

All watched awhile through their windows caps and hats lifted by
passers. Respect. The carriage swerved from the tramtrack to the
smoother road past Watery lane. Mr Bloom at gaze saw a lithe young man,
clad in mourning, a wide hat.

--There's a friend of yours gone by, Dedalus, he said.

--Who is that?

--Your son and heir.

--Where is he? Mr Dedalus said, stretching over across.

The carriage, passing the open drains and mounds of rippedup roadway
before the tenement houses, lurched round the corner and, swerving back
to the tramtrack, rolled on noisily with chattering wheels. Mr Dedalus
fell back, saying:

--Was that Mulligan cad with him? His _fidus Achates_!

--No, Mr Bloom said. He was alone.

--Down with his aunt Sally, I suppose, Mr Dedalus said, the Goulding
faction, the drunken little costdrawer and Crissie, papa's little lump
of dung, the wise child that knows her own father.

Mr Bloom smiled joylessly on Ringsend road. Wallace Bros: the
bottleworks: Dodder bridge.

Richie Goulding and the legal bag. Goulding, Collis and Ward he calls
the firm. His jokes are getting a bit damp. Great card he was. Waltzing
in Stamer street with Ignatius Gallaher on a Sunday morning, the
landlady's two hats pinned on his head. Out on the rampage all night.
Beginning to tell on him now: that backache of his, I fear. Wife ironing
his back. Thinks he'll cure it with pills. All breadcrumbs they are.
About six hundred per cent profit.

--He's in with a lowdown crowd, Mr Dedalus snarled. That Mulligan is a
contaminated bloody doubledyed ruffian by all accounts. His name stinks
all over Dublin. But with the help of God and His blessed mother I'll
make it my business to write a letter one of those days to his mother
or his aunt or whatever she is that will open her eye as wide as a gate.
I'll tickle his catastrophe, believe you me.

He cried above the clatter of the wheels:

--I won't have her bastard of a nephew ruin my son. A counterjumper's
son. Selling tapes in my cousin, Peter Paul M'Swiney's. Not likely.

He ceased. Mr Bloom glanced from his angry moustache to Mr Power's mild
face and Martin Cunningham's eyes and beard, gravely shaking. Noisy
selfwilled man. Full of his son. He is right. Something to hand on. If
little Rudy had lived. See him grow up. Hear his voice in the house.
Walking beside Molly in an Eton suit. My son. Me in his eyes. Strange
feeling it would be. From me. Just a chance. Must have been that morning
in Raymond terrace she was at the window watching the two dogs at it by
the wall of the cease to do evil. And the sergeant grinning up. She had
that cream gown on with the rip she never stitched. Give us a touch,
Poldy. God, I'm dying for it. How life begins.

Got big then. Had to refuse the Greystones concert. My son inside her.
I could have helped him on in life. I could. Make him independent. Learn
German too.

--Are we late? Mr Power asked.

--Ten minutes, Martin Cunningham said, looking at his watch.

Molly. Milly. Same thing watered down. Her tomboy oaths. O jumping
Jupiter! Ye gods and little fishes! Still, she's a dear girl. Soon be a
woman. Mullingar. Dearest Papli. Young student. Yes, yes: a woman too.
Life, life.

The carriage heeled over and back, their four trunks swaying.

--Corny might have given us a more commodious yoke, Mr Power said.

--He might, Mr Dedalus said, if he hadn't that squint troubling him. Do
you follow me?

He closed his left eye. Martin Cunningham began to brush away
crustcrumbs from under his thighs.

--What is this, he said, in the name of God? Crumbs?

--Someone seems to have been making a picnic party here lately, Mr Power
said.

All raised their thighs and eyed with disfavour the mildewed buttonless
leather of the seats. Mr Dedalus, twisting his nose, frowned downward
and said:

--Unless I'm greatly mistaken. What do you think, Martin?

--It struck me too, Martin Cunningham said.

Mr Bloom set his thigh down. Glad I took that bath. Feel my feet quite
clean. But I wish Mrs Fleming had darned these socks better.

Mr Dedalus sighed resignedly.

--After all, he said, it's the most natural thing in the world.

--Did Tom Kernan turn up? Martin Cunningham asked, twirling the peak of
his beard gently.

--Yes, Mr Bloom answered. He's behind with Ned Lambert and Hynes.

--And Corny Kelleher himself? Mr Power asked.

--At the cemetery, Martin Cunningham said.

--I met M'Coy this morning, Mr Bloom said. He said he'd try to come.

The carriage halted short.

--What's wrong?

--We're stopped.

--Where are we?

Mr Bloom put his head out of the window.

--The grand canal, he said.

Gasworks. Whooping cough they say it cures. Good job Milly never got
it. Poor children! Doubles them up black and blue in convulsions. Shame
really. Got off lightly with illnesses compared. Only measles. Flaxseed
tea. Scarlatina, influenza epidemics. Canvassing for death. Don't miss
this chance. Dogs' home over there. Poor old Athos! Be good to Athos,
Leopold, is my last wish. Thy will be done. We obey them in the grave.
A dying scrawl. He took it to heart, pined away. Quiet brute. Old men's
dogs usually are.

A raindrop spat on his hat. He drew back and saw an instant of shower
spray dots over the grey flags. Apart. Curious. Like through a colander.
I thought it would. My boots were creaking I remember now.

--The weather is changing, he said quietly.

--A pity it did not keep up fine, Martin Cunningham said.

--Wanted for the country, Mr Power said. There's the sun again coming
out.

Mr Dedalus, peering through his glasses towards the veiled sun, hurled a
mute curse at the sky.

--It's as uncertain as a child's bottom, he said.

--We're off again.

The carriage turned again its stiff wheels and their trunks swayed
gently. Martin Cunningham twirled more quickly the peak of his beard.

--Tom Kernan was immense last night, he said. And Paddy Leonard taking
him off to his face.

--O, draw him out, Martin, Mr Power said eagerly. Wait till you hear
him, Simon, on Ben Dollard's singing of _The Croppy Boy_.

--Immense, Martin Cunningham said pompously. _His singing of that simple
ballad, Martin, is the most trenchant rendering I ever heard in the
whole course of my experience._

--Trenchant, Mr Power said laughing. He's dead nuts on that. And the
retrospective arrangement.

--Did you read Dan Dawson's speech? Martin Cunningham asked.

--I did not then, Mr Dedalus said. Where is it?

--In the paper this morning.

Mr Bloom took the paper from his inside pocket. That book I must change
for her.

--No, no, Mr Dedalus said quickly. Later on please.

Mr Bloom's glance travelled down the edge of the paper, scanning the
deaths: Callan, Coleman, Dignam, Fawcett, Lowry, Naumann, Peake, what
Peake is that? is it the chap was in Crosbie and Alleyne's? no, Sexton,
Urbright. Inked characters fast fading on the frayed breaking paper.
Thanks to the Little Flower. Sadly missed. To the inexpressible grief of
his. Aged 88 after a long and tedious illness. Month's mind: Quinlan. On
whose soul Sweet Jesus have mercy.

_It is now a month since dear Henry fled To his home up above in the sky
While his family weeps and mourns his loss Hoping some day to meet him
on high._

I tore up the envelope? Yes. Where did I put her letter after I read it
in the bath? He patted his waistcoatpocket. There all right. Dear Henry
fled. Before my patience are exhausted.

National school. Meade's yard. The hazard. Only two there now. Nodding.
Full as a tick. Too much bone in their skulls. The other trotting round
with a fare. An hour ago I was passing there. The jarvies raised their
hats.

A pointsman's back straightened itself upright suddenly against a
tramway standard by Mr Bloom's window. Couldn't they invent something
automatic so that the wheel itself much handier? Well but that fellow
would lose his job then? Well but then another fellow would get a job
making the new invention?

Antient concert rooms. Nothing on there. A man in a buff suit with a
crape armlet. Not much grief there. Quarter mourning. People in law
perhaps.

They went past the bleak pulpit of saint Mark's, under the railway
bridge, past the Queen's theatre: in silence. Hoardings: Eugene
Stratton, Mrs Bandmann Palmer. Could I go to see LEAH tonight, I wonder.
I said I. Or the _Lily of Killarney_? Elster Grimes Opera Company. Big
powerful change. Wet bright bills for next week. _Fun on the Bristol_.
Martin Cunningham could work a pass for the Gaiety. Have to stand a
drink or two. As broad as it's long.

He's coming in the afternoon. Her songs.

Plasto's. Sir Philip Crampton's memorial fountain bust. Who was he?

--How do you do? Martin Cunningham said, raising his palm to his brow in
salute.

--He doesn't see us, Mr Power said. Yes, he does. How do you do?

--Who? Mr Dedalus asked.

--Blazes Boylan, Mr Power said. There he is airing his quiff.

Just that moment I was thinking.

Mr Dedalus bent across to salute. From the door of the Red Bank the
white disc of a straw hat flashed reply: spruce figure: passed.

Mr Bloom reviewed the nails of his left hand, then those of his right
hand. The nails, yes. Is there anything more in him that they she sees?
Fascination. Worst man in Dublin. That keeps him alive. They sometimes
feel what a person is. Instinct. But a type like that. My nails. I
am just looking at them: well pared. And after: thinking alone. Body
getting a bit softy. I would notice that: from remembering. What causes
that? I suppose the skin can't contract quickly enough when the flesh
falls off. But the shape is there. The shape is there still. Shoulders.
Hips. Plump. Night of the dance dressing. Shift stuck between the cheeks
behind.

He clasped his hands between his knees and, satisfied, sent his vacant
glance over their faces.

Mr Power asked:

--How is the concert tour getting on, Bloom?

--O, very well, Mr Bloom said. I hear great accounts of it. It's a good
idea, you see...

--Are you going yourself?

--Well no, Mr Bloom said. In point of fact I have to go down to the
county Clare on some private business. You see the idea is to tour the
chief towns. What you lose on one you can make up on the other.

--Quite so, Martin Cunningham said. Mary Anderson is up there now.

Have you good artists?

--Louis Werner is touring her, Mr Bloom said. O yes, we'll have all
topnobbers. J. C. Doyle and John MacCormack I hope and. The best, in
fact.

--And _Madame_, Mr Power said smiling. Last but not least.

Mr Bloom unclasped his hands in a gesture of soft politeness and clasped
them. Smith O'Brien. Someone has laid a bunch of flowers there. Woman.
Must be his deathday. For many happy returns. The carriage wheeling by
Farrell's statue united noiselessly their unresisting knees.

Oot: a dullgarbed old man from the curbstone tendered his wares, his
mouth opening: oot.

--Four bootlaces for a penny.

Wonder why he was struck off the rolls. Had his office in Hume street.
Same house as Molly's namesake, Tweedy, crown solicitor for Waterford.
Has that silk hat ever since. Relics of old decency. Mourning too.
Terrible comedown, poor wretch! Kicked about like snuff at a wake.
O'Callaghan on his last legs.

And _Madame_. Twenty past eleven. Up. Mrs Fleming is in to clean. Doing
her hair, humming. _voglio e non vorrei_. No. _vorrei e non_. Looking at
the tips of her hairs to see if they are split. _Mi trema un poco
il_. Beautiful on that _tre_ her voice is: weeping tone. A thrush. A
throstle. There is a word throstle that expresses that.

His eyes passed lightly over Mr Power's goodlooking face. Greyish over
the ears. _Madame_: smiling. I smiled back. A smile goes a long way.
Only politeness perhaps. Nice fellow. Who knows is that true about the
woman he keeps? Not pleasant for the wife. Yet they say, who was it
told me, there is no carnal. You would imagine that would get played
out pretty quick. Yes, it was Crofton met him one evening bringing her
a pound of rumpsteak. What is this she was? Barmaid in Jury's. Or the
Moira, was it?

They passed under the hugecloaked Liberator's form.

Martin Cunningham nudged Mr Power.

--Of the tribe of Reuben, he said.

A tall blackbearded figure, bent on a stick, stumping round the corner
of Elvery's Elephant house, showed them a curved hand open on his spine.

--In all his pristine beauty, Mr Power said.

Mr Dedalus looked after the stumping figure and said mildly:

--The devil break the hasp of your back!

Mr Power, collapsing in laughter, shaded his face from the window as the
carriage passed Gray's statue.

--We have all been there, Martin Cunningham said broadly.

His eyes met Mr Bloom's eyes. He caressed his beard, adding:

--Well, nearly all of us.

Mr Bloom began to speak with sudden eagerness to his companions' faces.

--That's an awfully good one that's going the rounds about Reuben J and
the son.

--About the boatman? Mr Power asked.

--Yes. Isn't it awfully good?

--What is that? Mr Dedalus asked. I didn't hear it.

--There was a girl in the case, Mr Bloom began, and he determined to
send him to the Isle of Man out of harm's way but when they were both
...

--What? Mr Dedalus asked. That confirmed bloody hobbledehoy is it?

--Yes, Mr Bloom said. They were both on the way to the boat and he tried
to drown...

--Drown Barabbas! Mr Dedalus cried. I wish to Christ he did!

Mr Power sent a long laugh down his shaded nostrils.

--No, Mr Bloom said, the son himself...

Martin Cunningham thwarted his speech rudely:

--Reuben and the son were piking it down the quay next the river on
their way to the Isle of Man boat and the young chiseller suddenly got
loose and over the wall with him into the Liffey.

--For God's sake! Mr Dedalus exclaimed in fright. Is he dead?

--Dead! Martin Cunningham cried. Not he! A boatman got a pole and fished
him out by the slack of the breeches and he was landed up to the father
on the quay more dead than alive. Half the town was there.

--Yes, Mr Bloom said. But the funny part is...

--And Reuben J, Martin Cunningham said, gave the boatman a florin for
saving his son's life.

A stifled sigh came from under Mr Power's hand.

--O, he did, Martin Cunningham affirmed. Like a hero. A silver florin.

--Isn't it awfully good? Mr Bloom said eagerly.

--One and eightpence too much, Mr Dedalus said drily.

Mr Power's choked laugh burst quietly in the carriage.

Nelson's pillar.

--Eight plums a penny! Eight for a penny!

--We had better look a little serious, Martin Cunningham said.

Mr Dedalus sighed.

--Ah then indeed, he said, poor little Paddy wouldn't grudge us a laugh.
Many a good one he told himself.

--The Lord forgive me! Mr Power said, wiping his wet eyes with his
fingers. Poor Paddy! I little thought a week ago when I saw him last and
he was in his usual health that I'd be driving after him like this. He's
gone from us.

--As decent a little man as ever wore a hat, Mr Dedalus said. He went
very suddenly.

--Breakdown, Martin Cunningham said. Heart.

He tapped his chest sadly.

Blazing face: redhot. Too much John Barleycorn. Cure for a red nose.
Drink like the devil till it turns adelite. A lot of money he spent
colouring it.

Mr Power gazed at the passing houses with rueful apprehension.

--He had a sudden death, poor fellow, he said.

--The best death, Mr Bloom said.

Their wide open eyes looked at him.

--No suffering, he said. A moment and all is over. Like dying in sleep.

No-one spoke.

Dead side of the street this. Dull business by day, land agents,
temperance hotel, Falconer's railway guide, civil service college,
Gill's, catholic club, the industrious blind. Why? Some reason. Sun or
wind. At night too. Chummies and slaveys. Under the patronage of the
late Father Mathew. Foundation stone for Parnell. Breakdown. Heart.

White horses with white frontlet plumes came round the Rotunda corner,
galloping. A tiny coffin flashed by. In a hurry to bury. A mourning
coach. Unmarried. Black for the married. Piebald for bachelors. Dun for
a nun.

--Sad, Martin Cunningham said. A child.

A dwarf's face, mauve and wrinkled like little Rudy's was. Dwarf's body,
weak as putty, in a whitelined deal box. Burial friendly society
pays. Penny a week for a sod of turf. Our. Little. Beggar. Baby. Meant
nothing. Mistake of nature. If it's healthy it's from the mother. If not
from the man. Better luck next time.

--Poor little thing, Mr Dedalus said. It's well out of it.

The carriage climbed more slowly the hill of Rutland square. Rattle his
bones. Over the stones. Only a pauper. Nobody owns.

--In the midst of life, Martin Cunningham said.

--But the worst of all, Mr Power said, is the man who takes his own
life.

Martin Cunningham drew out his watch briskly, coughed and put it back.

--The greatest disgrace to have in the family, Mr Power added.

--Temporary insanity, of course, Martin Cunningham said decisively. We
must take a charitable view of it.

--They say a man who does it is a coward, Mr Dedalus said.

--It is not for us to judge, Martin Cunningham said.

Mr Bloom, about to speak, closed his lips again. Martin Cunningham's
large eyes. Looking away now. Sympathetic human man he is. Intelligent.
Like Shakespeare's face. Always a good word to say. They have no mercy
on that here or infanticide. Refuse christian burial. They used to drive
a stake of wood through his heart in the grave. As if it wasn't broken
already. Yet sometimes they repent too late. Found in the riverbed
clutching rushes. He looked at me. And that awful drunkard of a wife
of his. Setting up house for her time after time and then pawning the
furniture on him every Saturday almost. Leading him the life of the
damned. Wear the heart out of a stone, that. Monday morning. Start
afresh. Shoulder to the wheel. Lord, she must have looked a sight
that night Dedalus told me he was in there. Drunk about the place and
capering with Martin's umbrella.

     _And they call me the jewel of Asia,
     Of Asia,
     The Geisha._

He looked away from me. He knows. Rattle his bones.

That afternoon of the inquest. The redlabelled bottle on the table. The
room in the hotel with hunting pictures. Stuffy it was. Sunlight through
the slats of the Venetian blind. The coroner's sunlit ears, big and
hairy. Boots giving evidence. Thought he was asleep first. Then saw like
yellow streaks on his face. Had slipped down to the foot of the bed.
Verdict: overdose. Death by misadventure. The letter. For my son
Leopold.

No more pain. Wake no more. Nobody owns.

The carriage rattled swiftly along Blessington street. Over the stones.

--We are going the pace, I think, Martin Cunningham said.

--God grant he doesn't upset us on the road, Mr Power said.

--I hope not, Martin Cunningham said. That will be a great race tomorrow
in Germany. The Gordon Bennett.

--Yes, by Jove, Mr Dedalus said. That will be worth seeing, faith.

As they turned into Berkeley street a streetorgan near the Basin sent
over and after them a rollicking rattling song of the halls. Has anybody
here seen Kelly? Kay ee double ell wy. Dead March from _Saul._ He's
as bad as old Antonio. He left me on my ownio. Pirouette! The _Mater
Misericordiae_. Eccles street. My house down there. Big place. Ward for
incurables there. Very encouraging. Our Lady's Hospice for the dying.
Deadhouse handy underneath. Where old Mrs Riordan died. They look
terrible the women. Her feeding cup and rubbing her mouth with the
spoon. Then the screen round her bed for her to die. Nice young student
that was dressed that bite the bee gave me. He's gone over to the
lying-in hospital they told me. From one extreme to the other. The
carriage galloped round a corner: stopped.

--What's wrong now?

A divided drove of branded cattle passed the windows, lowing, slouching
by on padded hoofs, whisking their tails slowly on their clotted bony
croups. Outside them and through them ran raddled sheep bleating their
fear.

--Emigrants, Mr Power said.

--Huuuh! the drover's voice cried, his switch sounding on their flanks.

Huuuh! out of that!

Thursday, of course. Tomorrow is killing day. Springers. Cuffe sold them
about twentyseven quid each. For Liverpool probably. Roastbeef for old
England. They buy up all the juicy ones. And then the fifth quarter
lost: all that raw stuff, hide, hair, horns. Comes to a big thing in a
year. Dead meat trade. Byproducts of the slaughterhouses for tanneries,
soap, margarine. Wonder if that dodge works now getting dicky meat off
the train at Clonsilla.

The carriage moved on through the drove.

--I can't make out why the corporation doesn't run a tramline from the
parkgate to the quays, Mr Bloom said. All those animals could be taken
in trucks down to the boats.

--Instead of blocking up the thoroughfare, Martin Cunningham said. Quite
right. They ought to.

--Yes, Mr Bloom said, and another thing I often thought, is to have
municipal funeral trams like they have in Milan, you know. Run the line
out to the cemetery gates and have special trams, hearse and carriage
and all. Don't you see what I mean?

--O, that be damned for a story, Mr Dedalus said. Pullman car and saloon
diningroom.

--A poor lookout for Corny, Mr Power added.

--Why? Mr Bloom asked, turning to Mr Dedalus. Wouldn't it be more decent
than galloping two abreast?

--Well, there's something in that, Mr Dedalus granted.

--And, Martin Cunningham said, we wouldn't have scenes like that when
the hearse capsized round Dunphy's and upset the coffin on to the road.

--That was terrible, Mr Power's shocked face said, and the corpse fell
about the road. Terrible!

--First round Dunphy's, Mr Dedalus said, nodding. Gordon Bennett cup.

--Praises be to God! Martin Cunningham said piously.

Bom! Upset. A coffin bumped out on to the road. Burst open. Paddy Dignam
shot out and rolling over stiff in the dust in a brown habit too large
for him. Red face: grey now. Mouth fallen open. Asking what's up now.
Quite right to close it. Looks horrid open. Then the insides decompose
quickly. Much better to close up all the orifices. Yes, also. With wax.
The sphincter loose. Seal up all.

--Dunphy's, Mr Power announced as the carriage turned right.

Dunphy's corner. Mourning coaches drawn up, drowning their grief. A
pause by the wayside. Tiptop position for a pub. Expect we'll pull up
here on the way back to drink his health. Pass round the consolation.
Elixir of life.

But suppose now it did happen. Would he bleed if a nail say cut him
in the knocking about? He would and he wouldn't, I suppose. Depends on
where. The circulation stops. Still some might ooze out of an artery. It
would be better to bury them in red: a dark red.

In silence they drove along Phibsborough road. An empty hearse trotted
by, coming from the cemetery: looks relieved.

Crossguns bridge: the royal canal.

Water rushed roaring through the sluices. A man stood on his
dropping barge, between clamps of turf. On the towpath by the lock a
slacktethered horse. Aboard of the _Bugabu._

Their eyes watched him. On the slow weedy waterway he had floated on his
raft coastward over Ireland drawn by a haulage rope past beds of
reeds, over slime, mudchoked bottles, carrion dogs. Athlone, Mullingar,
Moyvalley, I could make a walking tour to see Milly by the canal. Or
cycle down. Hire some old crock, safety. Wren had one the other day at
the auction but a lady's. Developing waterways. James M'Cann's hobby
to row me o'er the ferry. Cheaper transit. By easy stages. Houseboats.
Camping out. Also hearses. To heaven by water. Perhaps I will without
writing. Come as a surprise, Leixlip, Clonsilla. Dropping down lock by
lock to Dublin. With turf from the midland bogs. Salute. He lifted his
brown straw hat, saluting Paddy Dignam.

They drove on past Brian Boroimhe house. Near it now.

--I wonder how is our friend Fogarty getting on, Mr Power said.

--Better ask Tom Kernan, Mr Dedalus said.

--How is that? Martin Cunningham said. Left him weeping, I suppose?

--Though lost to sight, Mr Dedalus said, to memory dear.

The carriage steered left for Finglas road.

The stonecutter's yard on the right. Last lap. Crowded on the spit of
land silent shapes appeared, white, sorrowful, holding out calm hands,
knelt in grief, pointing. Fragments of shapes, hewn. In white silence:
appealing. The best obtainable. Thos. H. Dennany, monumental builder and
sculptor.

Passed.

On the curbstone before Jimmy Geary, the sexton's, an old tramp sat,
grumbling, emptying the dirt and stones out of his huge dustbrown
yawning boot. After life's journey.

Gloomy gardens then went by: one by one: gloomy houses.

Mr Power pointed.

--That is where Childs was murdered, he said. The last house.

--So it is, Mr Dedalus said. A gruesome case. Seymour Bushe got him off.
Murdered his brother. Or so they said.

--The crown had no evidence, Mr Power said.

--Only circumstantial, Martin Cunningham added. That's the maxim of the
law. Better for ninetynine guilty to escape than for one innocent person
to be wrongfully condemned.

They looked. Murderer's ground. It passed darkly. Shuttered, tenantless,
unweeded garden. Whole place gone to hell. Wrongfully condemned. Murder.
The murderer's image in the eye of the murdered. They love reading about
it. Man's head found in a garden. Her clothing consisted of. How she met
her death. Recent outrage. The weapon used. Murderer is still at large.
Clues. A shoelace. The body to be exhumed. Murder will out.

Cramped in this carriage. She mightn't like me to come that way without
letting her know. Must be careful about women. Catch them once with
their pants down. Never forgive you after. Fifteen.

The high railings of Prospect rippled past their gaze. Dark poplars,
rare white forms. Forms more frequent, white shapes thronged amid the
trees, white forms and fragments streaming by mutely, sustaining vain
gestures on the air.

The felly harshed against the curbstone: stopped. Martin Cunningham put
out his arm and, wrenching back the handle, shoved the door open with
his knee. He stepped out. Mr Power and Mr Dedalus followed.

Change that soap now. Mr Bloom's hand unbuttoned his hip pocket swiftly
and transferred the paperstuck soap to his inner handkerchief pocket.
He stepped out of the carriage, replacing the newspaper his other hand
still held.

Paltry funeral: coach and three carriages. It's all the same.
Pallbearers, gold reins, requiem mass, firing a volley. Pomp of death.
Beyond the hind carriage a hawker stood by his barrow of cakes and
fruit. Simnel cakes those are, stuck together: cakes for the dead.
Dogbiscuits. Who ate them? Mourners coming out.

He followed his companions. Mr Kernan and Ned Lambert followed, Hynes
walking after them. Corny Kelleher stood by the opened hearse and took
out the two wreaths. He handed one to the boy.

Where is that child's funeral disappeared to?

A team of horses passed from Finglas with toiling plodding tread,
dragging through the funereal silence a creaking waggon on which lay a
granite block. The waggoner marching at their head saluted.

Coffin now. Got here before us, dead as he is. Horse looking round at it
with his plume skeowways. Dull eye: collar tight on his neck, pressing
on a bloodvessel or something. Do they know what they cart out here
every day? Must be twenty or thirty funerals every day. Then Mount
Jerome for the protestants. Funerals all over the world everywhere every
minute. Shovelling them under by the cartload doublequick. Thousands
every hour. Too many in the world.

Mourners came out through the gates: woman and a girl. Leanjawed harpy,
hard woman at a bargain, her bonnet awry. Girl's face stained with dirt
and tears, holding the woman's arm, looking up at her for a sign to cry.
Fish's face, bloodless and livid.

The mutes shouldered the coffin and bore it in through the gates. So
much dead weight. Felt heavier myself stepping out of that bath. First
the stiff: then the friends of the stiff. Corny Kelleher and the
boy followed with their wreaths. Who is that beside them? Ah, the
brother-in-law.

All walked after.

Martin Cunningham whispered:

--I was in mortal agony with you talking of suicide before Bloom.

--What? Mr Power whispered. How so?

--His father poisoned himself, Martin Cunningham whispered. Had the
Queen's hotel in Ennis. You heard him say he was going to Clare.
Anniversary.

--O God! Mr Power whispered. First I heard of it. Poisoned himself?

He glanced behind him to where a face with dark thinking eyes followed
towards the cardinal's mausoleum. Speaking.

--Was he insured? Mr Bloom asked.

--I believe so, Mr Kernan answered. But the policy was heavily
mortgaged. Martin is trying to get the youngster into Artane.

--How many children did he leave?

--Five. Ned Lambert says he'll try to get one of the girls into Todd's.

--A sad case, Mr Bloom said gently. Five young children.

--A great blow to the poor wife, Mr Kernan added.

--Indeed yes, Mr Bloom agreed.

Has the laugh at him now.

He looked down at the boots he had blacked and polished. She had
outlived him. Lost her husband. More dead for her than for me. One must
outlive the other. Wise men say. There are more women than men in the
world. Condole with her. Your terrible loss. I hope you'll soon follow
him. For Hindu widows only. She would marry another. Him? No. Yet who
knows after. Widowhood not the thing since the old queen died. Drawn on
a guncarriage. Victoria and Albert. Frogmore memorial mourning. But
in the end she put a few violets in her bonnet. Vain in her heart of
hearts. All for a shadow. Consort not even a king. Her son was the
substance. Something new to hope for not like the past she wanted back,
waiting. It never comes. One must go first: alone, under the ground: and
lie no more in her warm bed.

--How are you, Simon? Ned Lambert said softly, clasping hands. Haven't
seen you for a month of Sundays.

--Never better. How are all in Cork's own town?

--I was down there for the Cork park races on Easter Monday, Ned Lambert
said. Same old six and eightpence. Stopped with Dick Tivy.

--And how is Dick, the solid man?

--Nothing between himself and heaven, Ned Lambert answered.

--By the holy Paul! Mr Dedalus said in subdued wonder. Dick Tivy bald?

--Martin is going to get up a whip for the youngsters, Ned Lambert said,
pointing ahead. A few bob a skull. Just to keep them going till the
insurance is cleared up.

--Yes, yes, Mr Dedalus said dubiously. Is that the eldest boy in front?

--Yes, Ned Lambert said, with the wife's brother. John Henry Menton is
behind. He put down his name for a quid.

--I'll engage he did, Mr Dedalus said. I often told poor Paddy he ought
to mind that job. John Henry is not the worst in the world.

--How did he lose it? Ned Lambert asked. Liquor, what?

--Many a good man's fault, Mr Dedalus said with a sigh.

They halted about the door of the mortuary chapel. Mr Bloom stood behind
the boy with the wreath looking down at his sleekcombed hair and at the
slender furrowed neck inside his brandnew collar. Poor boy! Was he there
when the father? Both unconscious. Lighten up at the last moment
and recognise for the last time. All he might have done. I owe three
shillings to O'Grady. Would he understand? The mutes bore the coffin
into the chapel. Which end is his head?

After a moment he followed the others in, blinking in the screened
light. The coffin lay on its bier before the chancel, four tall yellow
candles at its corners. Always in front of us. Corny Kelleher, laying a
wreath at each fore corner, beckoned to the boy to kneel. The mourners
knelt here and there in prayingdesks. Mr Bloom stood behind near the
font and, when all had knelt, dropped carefully his unfolded newspaper
from his pocket and knelt his right knee upon it. He fitted his black
hat gently on his left knee and, holding its brim, bent over piously.

A server bearing a brass bucket with something in it came out through a
door. The whitesmocked priest came after him, tidying his stole with one
hand, balancing with the other a little book against his toad's belly.
Who'll read the book? I, said the rook.

They halted by the bier and the priest began to read out of his book
with a fluent croak.

Father Coffey. I knew his name was like a coffin. _Domine-namine._ Bully
about the muzzle he looks. Bosses the show. Muscular christian. Woe
betide anyone that looks crooked at him: priest. Thou art Peter. Burst
sideways like a sheep in clover Dedalus says he will. With a belly on
him like a poisoned pup. Most amusing expressions that man finds. Hhhn:
burst sideways.

_--Non intres in judicium cum servo tuo, Domine._

Makes them feel more important to be prayed over in Latin. Requiem mass.
Crape weepers. Blackedged notepaper. Your name on the altarlist. Chilly
place this. Want to feed well, sitting in there all the morning in the
gloom kicking his heels waiting for the next please. Eyes of a toad too.
What swells him up that way? Molly gets swelled after cabbage. Air of
the place maybe. Looks full up of bad gas. Must be an infernal lot
of bad gas round the place. Butchers, for instance: they get like raw
beefsteaks. Who was telling me? Mervyn Browne. Down in the vaults of
saint Werburgh's lovely old organ hundred and fifty they have to bore a
hole in the coffins sometimes to let out the bad gas and burn it. Out it
rushes: blue. One whiff of that and you're a goner.

My kneecap is hurting me. Ow. That's better.

The priest took a stick with a knob at the end of it out of the boy's
bucket and shook it over the coffin. Then he walked to the other end and
shook it again. Then he came back and put it back in the bucket. As you
were before you rested. It's all written down: he has to do it.

_--Et ne nos inducas in tentationem._

The server piped the answers in the treble. I often thought it would be
better to have boy servants. Up to fifteen or so. After that, of course
...

Holy water that was, I expect. Shaking sleep out of it. He must be fed
up with that job, shaking that thing over all the corpses they trot up.
What harm if he could see what he was shaking it over. Every mortal
day a fresh batch: middleaged men, old women, children, women dead in
childbirth, men with beards, baldheaded businessmen, consumptive girls
with little sparrows' breasts. All the year round he prayed the same
thing over them all and shook water on top of them: sleep. On Dignam
now.

_--In paradisum._

Said he was going to paradise or is in paradise. Says that over
everybody. Tiresome kind of a job. But he has to say something.

The priest closed his book and went off, followed by the server. Corny
Kelleher opened the sidedoors and the gravediggers came in, hoisted the
coffin again, carried it out and shoved it on their cart. Corny Kelleher
gave one wreath to the boy and one to the brother-in-law. All followed
them out of the sidedoors into the mild grey air. Mr Bloom came last
folding his paper again into his pocket. He gazed gravely at the ground
till the coffincart wheeled off to the left. The metal wheels ground the
gravel with a sharp grating cry and the pack of blunt boots followed the
trundled barrow along a lane of sepulchres.

The ree the ra the ree the ra the roo. Lord, I mustn't lilt here.

--The O'Connell circle, Mr Dedalus said about him.

Mr Power's soft eyes went up to the apex of the lofty cone.

--He's at rest, he said, in the middle of his people, old Dan O'. But
his heart is buried in Rome. How many broken hearts are buried here,
Simon!

--Her grave is over there, Jack, Mr Dedalus said. I'll soon be stretched
beside her. Let Him take me whenever He likes.

Breaking down, he began to weep to himself quietly, stumbling a little
in his walk. Mr Power took his arm.

--She's better where she is, he said kindly.

--I suppose so, Mr Dedalus said with a weak gasp. I suppose she is in
heaven if there is a heaven.

Corny Kelleher stepped aside from his rank and allowed the mourners to
plod by.

--Sad occasions, Mr Kernan began politely.

Mr Bloom closed his eyes and sadly twice bowed his head.

--The others are putting on their hats, Mr Kernan said. I suppose we can
do so too. We are the last. This cemetery is a treacherous place.

They covered their heads.

--The reverend gentleman read the service too quickly, don't you think?
Mr Kernan said with reproof.

Mr Bloom nodded gravely looking in the quick bloodshot eyes. Secret
eyes, secretsearching. Mason, I think: not sure. Beside him again. We
are the last. In the same boat. Hope he'll say something else.

Mr Kernan added:

--The service of the Irish church used in Mount Jerome is simpler, more
impressive I must say.

Mr Bloom gave prudent assent. The language of course was another thing.

Mr Kernan said with solemnity:

--_I am the resurrection and the life_. That touches a man's inmost
heart.

--It does, Mr Bloom said.

Your heart perhaps but what price the fellow in the six feet by two
with his toes to the daisies? No touching that. Seat of the affections.
Broken heart. A pump after all, pumping thousands of gallons of blood
every day. One fine day it gets bunged up: and there you are. Lots of
them lying around here: lungs, hearts, livers. Old rusty pumps: damn
the thing else. The resurrection and the life. Once you are dead you are
dead. That last day idea. Knocking them all up out of their graves. Come
forth, Lazarus! And he came fifth and lost the job. Get up! Last day!
Then every fellow mousing around for his liver and his lights and the
rest of his traps. Find damn all of himself that morning. Pennyweight of
powder in a skull. Twelve grammes one pennyweight. Troy measure.

Corny Kelleher fell into step at their side.

--Everything went off A1, he said. What?

He looked on them from his drawling eye. Policeman's shoulders. With
your tooraloom tooraloom.

--As it should be, Mr Kernan said.

--What? Eh? Corny Kelleher said.

Mr Kernan assured him.

--Who is that chap behind with Tom Kernan? John Henry Menton asked. I
know his face.

Ned Lambert glanced back.

--Bloom, he said, Madame Marion Tweedy that was, is, I mean, the
soprano. She's his wife.

--O, to be sure, John Henry Menton said. I haven't seen her for some
time. He was a finelooking woman. I danced with her, wait, fifteen
seventeen golden years ago, at Mat Dillon's in Roundtown. And a good
armful she was.

He looked behind through the others.

--What is he? he asked. What does he do? Wasn't he in the stationery
line? I fell foul of him one evening, I remember, at bowls.

Ned Lambert smiled.

--Yes, he was, he said, in Wisdom Hely's. A traveller for blottingpaper.

--In God's name, John Henry Menton said, what did she marry a coon like
that for? She had plenty of game in her then.

--Has still, Ned Lambert said. He does some canvassing for ads.

John Henry Menton's large eyes stared ahead.

The barrow turned into a side lane. A portly man, ambushed among the
grasses, raised his hat in homage. The gravediggers touched their caps.

--John O'Connell, Mr Power said pleased. He never forgets a friend.

Mr O'Connell shook all their hands in silence. Mr Dedalus said:

--I am come to pay you another visit.

--My dear Simon, the caretaker answered in a low voice. I don't want
your custom at all.

Saluting Ned Lambert and John Henry Menton he walked on at Martin
Cunningham's side puzzling two long keys at his back.

--Did you hear that one, he asked them, about Mulcahy from the Coombe?

--I did not, Martin Cunningham said.

They bent their silk hats in concert and Hynes inclined his ear. The
caretaker hung his thumbs in the loops of his gold watchchain and spoke
in a discreet tone to their vacant smiles.

--They tell the story, he said, that two drunks came out here one foggy
evening to look for the grave of a friend of theirs. They asked for
Mulcahy from the Coombe and were told where he was buried. After
traipsing about in the fog they found the grave sure enough. One of the
drunks spelt out the name: Terence Mulcahy. The other drunk was blinking
up at a statue of Our Saviour the widow had got put up.

The caretaker blinked up at one of the sepulchres they passed. He
resumed:

--And, after blinking up at the sacred figure, _Not a bloody bit like
the man_, says he. _That's not Mulcahy_, says he, _whoever done it_.

Rewarded by smiles he fell back and spoke with Corny Kelleher, accepting
the dockets given him, turning them over and scanning them as he walked.

--That's all done with a purpose, Martin Cunningham explained to Hynes.

--I know, Hynes said. I know that.

--To cheer a fellow up, Martin Cunningham said. It's pure
goodheartedness: damn the thing else.

Mr Bloom admired the caretaker's prosperous bulk. All want to be on good
terms with him. Decent fellow, John O'Connell, real good sort. Keys:
like Keyes's ad: no fear of anyone getting out. No passout checks.
_Habeas corpus_. I must see about that ad after the funeral. Did I
write Ballsbridge on the envelope I took to cover when she disturbed me
writing to Martha? Hope it's not chucked in the dead letter office. Be
the better of a shave. Grey sprouting beard. That's the first sign when
the hairs come out grey. And temper getting cross. Silver threads among
the grey. Fancy being his wife. Wonder he had the gumption to propose to
any girl. Come out and live in the graveyard. Dangle that before her. It
might thrill her first. Courting death... Shades of night hovering
here with all the dead stretched about. The shadows of the tombs when
churchyards yawn and Daniel O'Connell must be a descendant I suppose
who is this used to say he was a queer breedy man great catholic all the
same like a big giant in the dark. Will o' the wisp. Gas of graves.
Want to keep her mind off it to conceive at all. Women especially are so
touchy. Tell her a ghost story in bed to make her sleep. Have you ever
seen a ghost? Well, I have. It was a pitchdark night. The clock was on
the stroke of twelve. Still they'd kiss all right if properly keyed up.
Whores in Turkish graveyards. Learn anything if taken young. You might
pick up a young widow here. Men like that. Love among the tombstones.
Romeo. Spice of pleasure. In the midst of death we are in life. Both
ends meet. Tantalising for the poor dead. Smell of grilled beefsteaks to
the starving. Gnawing their vitals. Desire to grig people. Molly wanting
to do it at the window. Eight children he has anyway.

He has seen a fair share go under in his time, lying around him field
after field. Holy fields. More room if they buried them standing.
Sitting or kneeling you couldn't. Standing? His head might come up some
day above ground in a landslip with his hand pointing. All honeycombed
the ground must be: oblong cells. And very neat he keeps it too: trim
grass and edgings. His garden Major Gamble calls Mount Jerome. Well,
so it is. Ought to be flowers of sleep. Chinese cemeteries with giant
poppies growing produce the best opium Mastiansky told me. The Botanic
Gardens are just over there. It's the blood sinking in the earth gives
new life. Same idea those jews they said killed the christian boy. Every
man his price. Well preserved fat corpse, gentleman, epicure, invaluable
for fruit garden. A bargain. By carcass of William Wilkinson, auditor
and accountant, lately deceased, three pounds thirteen and six. With
thanks.

I daresay the soil would be quite fat with corpsemanure, bones, flesh,
nails. Charnelhouses. Dreadful. Turning green and pink decomposing. Rot
quick in damp earth. The lean old ones tougher. Then a kind of a tallowy
kind of a cheesy. Then begin to get black, black treacle oozing out of
them. Then dried up. Deathmoths. Of course the cells or whatever they
are go on living. Changing about. Live for ever practically. Nothing to
feed on feed on themselves.

But they must breed a devil of a lot of maggots. Soil must be simply
swirling with them. Your head it simply swurls. Those pretty little
seaside gurls. He looks cheerful enough over it. Gives him a sense of
power seeing all the others go under first. Wonder how he looks at life.
Cracking his jokes too: warms the cockles of his heart. The one about
the bulletin. Spurgeon went to heaven 4 a.m. this morning. 11 p.m.
(closing time). Not arrived yet. Peter. The dead themselves the men
anyhow would like to hear an odd joke or the women to know what's in
fashion. A juicy pear or ladies' punch, hot, strong and sweet. Keep
out the damp. You must laugh sometimes so better do it that way.
Gravediggers in _Hamlet_. Shows the profound knowledge of the human
heart. Daren't joke about the dead for two years at least. _De mortuis
nil nisi prius_. Go out of mourning first. Hard to imagine his funeral.
Seems a sort of a joke. Read your own obituary notice they say you live
longer. Gives you second wind. New lease of life.

--How many have-you for tomorrow? the caretaker asked.

--Two, Corny Kelleher said. Half ten and eleven.

The caretaker put the papers in his pocket. The barrow had ceased to
trundle. The mourners split and moved to each side of the hole, stepping
with care round the graves. The gravediggers bore the coffin and set its
nose on the brink, looping the bands round it.

Burying him. We come to bury Caesar. His ides of March or June. He
doesn't know who is here nor care. Now who is that lankylooking galoot
over there in the macintosh? Now who is he I'd like to know? Now I'd
give a trifle to know who he is. Always someone turns up you never
dreamt of. A fellow could live on his lonesome all his life. Yes, he
could. Still he'd have to get someone to sod him after he died though he
could dig his own grave. We all do. Only man buries. No, ants too. First
thing strikes anybody. Bury the dead. Say Robinson Crusoe was true to
life. Well then Friday buried him. Every Friday buries a Thursday if you
come to look at it.

     _O, poor Robinson Crusoe!
     How could you possibly do so?_

Poor Dignam! His last lie on the earth in his box. When you think of
them all it does seem a waste of wood. All gnawed through. They could
invent a handsome bier with a kind of panel sliding, let it down that
way. Ay but they might object to be buried out of another fellow's.
They're so particular. Lay me in my native earth. Bit of clay from
the holy land. Only a mother and deadborn child ever buried in the one
coffin. I see what it means. I see. To protect him as long as possible
even in the earth. The Irishman's house is his coffin. Embalming in
catacombs, mummies the same idea.

Mr Bloom stood far back, his hat in his hand, counting the bared heads.
Twelve. I'm thirteen. No. The chap in the macintosh is thirteen. Death's
number. Where the deuce did he pop out of? He wasn't in the chapel, that
I'll swear. Silly superstition that about thirteen.

Nice soft tweed Ned Lambert has in that suit. Tinge of purple. I had
one like that when we lived in Lombard street west. Dressy fellow he was
once. Used to change three suits in the day. Must get that grey suit
of mine turned by Mesias. Hello. It's dyed. His wife I forgot he's not
married or his landlady ought to have picked out those threads for him.

The coffin dived out of sight, eased down by the men straddled on the
gravetrestles. They struggled up and out: and all uncovered. Twenty.

Pause.

If we were all suddenly somebody else.

Far away a donkey brayed. Rain. No such ass. Never see a dead one, they
say. Shame of death. They hide. Also poor papa went away.

Gentle sweet air blew round the bared heads in a whisper. Whisper. The
boy by the gravehead held his wreath with both hands staring quietly in
the black open space. Mr Bloom moved behind the portly kindly caretaker.
Wellcut frockcoat. Weighing them up perhaps to see which will go next.
Well, it is a long rest. Feel no more. It's the moment you feel. Must be
damned unpleasant. Can't believe it at first. Mistake must be: someone
else. Try the house opposite. Wait, I wanted to. I haven't yet. Then
darkened deathchamber. Light they want. Whispering around you. Would you
like to see a priest? Then rambling and wandering. Delirium all you hid
all your life. The death struggle. His sleep is not natural. Press his
lower eyelid. Watching is his nose pointed is his jaw sinking are the
soles of his feet yellow. Pull the pillow away and finish it off on the
floor since he's doomed. Devil in that picture of sinner's death showing
him a woman. Dying to embrace her in his shirt. Last act of _Lucia.
Shall i nevermore behold thee_? Bam! He expires. Gone at last. People
talk about you a bit: forget you. Don't forget to pray for him. Remember
him in your prayers. Even Parnell. Ivy day dying out. Then they follow:
dropping into a hole, one after the other.

We are praying now for the repose of his soul. Hoping you're well and
not in hell. Nice change of air. Out of the fryingpan of life into the
fire of purgatory.

Does he ever think of the hole waiting for himself? They say you do when
you shiver in the sun. Someone walking over it. Callboy's warning. Near
you. Mine over there towards Finglas, the plot I bought. Mamma, poor
mamma, and little Rudy.

The gravediggers took up their spades and flung heavy clods of clay in
on the coffin. Mr Bloom turned away his face. And if he was alive all
the time? Whew! By jingo, that would be awful! No, no: he is dead, of
course. Of course he is dead. Monday he died. They ought to have
some law to pierce the heart and make sure or an electric clock or
a telephone in the coffin and some kind of a canvas airhole. Flag of
distress. Three days. Rather long to keep them in summer. Just as well
to get shut of them as soon as you are sure there's no.

The clay fell softer. Begin to be forgotten. Out of sight, out of mind.

The caretaker moved away a few paces and put on his hat. Had enough of
it. The mourners took heart of grace, one by one, covering themselves
without show. Mr Bloom put on his hat and saw the portly figure make its
way deftly through the maze of graves. Quietly, sure of his ground, he
traversed the dismal fields.

Hynes jotting down something in his notebook. Ah, the names. But he
knows them all. No: coming to me.

--I am just taking the names, Hynes said below his breath. What is your
christian name? I'm not sure.

--L, Mr Bloom said. Leopold. And you might put down M'Coy's name too. He
asked me to.

--Charley, Hynes said writing. I know. He was on the _Freeman_ once.

So he was before he got the job in the morgue under Louis Byrne. Good
idea a postmortem for doctors. Find out what they imagine they know.
He died of a Tuesday. Got the run. Levanted with the cash of a few ads.
Charley, you're my darling. That was why he asked me to. O well, does
no harm. I saw to that, M'Coy. Thanks, old chap: much obliged. Leave him
under an obligation: costs nothing.

--And tell us, Hynes said, do you know that fellow in the, fellow was
over there in the...

He looked around.

--Macintosh. Yes, I saw him, Mr Bloom said. Where is he now?

--M'Intosh, Hynes said scribbling. I don't know who he is. Is that his
name?

He moved away, looking about him.

--No, Mr Bloom began, turning and stopping. I say, Hynes!

Didn't hear. What? Where has he disappeared to? Not a sign. Well of all
the. Has anybody here seen? Kay ee double ell. Become invisible. Good
Lord, what became of him?

A seventh gravedigger came beside Mr Bloom to take up an idle spade.

--O, excuse me!

He stepped aside nimbly.

Clay, brown, damp, began to be seen in the hole. It rose. Nearly over.
A mound of damp clods rose more, rose, and the gravediggers rested their
spades. All uncovered again for a few instants. The boy propped
his wreath against a corner: the brother-in-law his on a lump. The
gravediggers put on their caps and carried their earthy spades towards
the barrow. Then knocked the blades lightly on the turf: clean. One bent
to pluck from the haft a long tuft of grass. One, leaving his mates,
walked slowly on with shouldered weapon, its blade blueglancing.
Silently at the gravehead another coiled the coffinband. His navelcord.
The brother-in-law, turning away, placed something in his free hand.
Thanks in silence. Sorry, sir: trouble. Headshake. I know that. For
yourselves just.

The mourners moved away slowly without aim, by devious paths, staying at
whiles to read a name on a tomb.

--Let us go round by the chief's grave, Hynes said. We have time.

--Let us, Mr Power said.

They turned to the right, following their slow thoughts. With awe Mr
Power's blank voice spoke:

--Some say he is not in that grave at all. That the coffin was filled
with stones. That one day he will come again.

Hynes shook his head.

--Parnell will never come again, he said. He's there, all that was
mortal of him. Peace to his ashes.

Mr Bloom walked unheeded along his grove by saddened angels, crosses,
broken pillars, family vaults, stone hopes praying with upcast eyes,
old Ireland's hearts and hands. More sensible to spend the money on some
charity for the living. Pray for the repose of the soul of. Does anybody
really? Plant him and have done with him. Like down a coalshoot. Then
lump them together to save time. All souls' day. Twentyseventh I'll be
at his grave. Ten shillings for the gardener. He keeps it free of weeds.
Old man himself. Bent down double with his shears clipping. Near death's
door. Who passed away. Who departed this life. As if they did it of
their own accord. Got the shove, all of them. Who kicked the
bucket. More interesting if they told you what they were. So and So,
wheelwright. I travelled for cork lino. I paid five shillings in the
pound. Or a woman's with her saucepan. I cooked good Irish stew.
Eulogy in a country churchyard it ought to be that poem of whose is it
Wordsworth or Thomas Campbell. Entered into rest the protestants put it.
Old Dr Murren's. The great physician called him home. Well it's God's
acre for them. Nice country residence. Newly plastered and painted.
Ideal spot to have a quiet smoke and read the _Church Times._ Marriage
ads they never try to beautify. Rusty wreaths hung on knobs, garlands of
bronzefoil. Better value that for the money. Still, the flowers are more
poetical. The other gets rather tiresome, never withering. Expresses
nothing. Immortelles.

A bird sat tamely perched on a poplar branch. Like stuffed. Like the
wedding present alderman Hooper gave us. Hoo! Not a budge out of him.
Knows there are no catapults to let fly at him. Dead animal even sadder.
Silly-Milly burying the little dead bird in the kitchen matchbox, a
daisychain and bits of broken chainies on the grave.

The Sacred Heart that is: showing it. Heart on his sleeve. Ought to be
sideways and red it should be painted like a real heart. Ireland was
dedicated to it or whatever that. Seems anything but pleased. Why this
infliction? Would birds come then and peck like the boy with the basket
of fruit but he said no because they ought to have been afraid of the
boy. Apollo that was.

How many! All these here once walked round Dublin. Faithful departed. As
you are now so once were we.

Besides how could you remember everybody? Eyes, walk, voice. Well, the
voice, yes: gramophone. Have a gramophone in every grave or keep it in
the house. After dinner on a Sunday. Put on poor old greatgrandfather.
Kraahraark! Hellohellohello amawfullyglad kraark awfullygladaseeagain
hellohello amawf krpthsth. Remind you of the voice like the photograph
reminds you of the face. Otherwise you couldn't remember the face after
fifteen years, say. For instance who? For instance some fellow that died
when I was in Wisdom Hely's.

Rtststr! A rattle of pebbles. Wait. Stop!

He looked down intently into a stone crypt. Some animal. Wait. There he
goes.

An obese grey rat toddled along the side of the crypt, moving the
pebbles. An old stager: greatgrandfather: he knows the ropes. The grey
alive crushed itself in under the plinth, wriggled itself in under it.
Good hidingplace for treasure.

Who lives there? Are laid the remains of Robert Emery. Robert Emmet was
buried here by torchlight, wasn't he? Making his rounds.

Tail gone now.

One of those chaps would make short work of a fellow. Pick the bones
clean no matter who it was. Ordinary meat for them. A corpse is meat
gone bad. Well and what's cheese? Corpse of milk. I read in that
_Voyages in China_ that the Chinese say a white man smells like a
corpse. Cremation better. Priests dead against it. Devilling for the
other firm. Wholesale burners and Dutch oven dealers. Time of the
plague. Quicklime feverpits to eat them. Lethal chamber. Ashes to ashes.
Or bury at sea. Where is that Parsee tower of silence? Eaten by birds.
Earth, fire, water. Drowning they say is the pleasantest. See your whole
life in a flash. But being brought back to life no. Can't bury in the
air however. Out of a flying machine. Wonder does the news go about
whenever a fresh one is let down. Underground communication. We learned
that from them. Wouldn't be surprised. Regular square feed for them.
Flies come before he's well dead. Got wind of Dignam. They wouldn't care
about the smell of it. Saltwhite crumbling mush of corpse: smell, taste
like raw white turnips.

The gates glimmered in front: still open. Back to the world again.
Enough of this place. Brings you a bit nearer every time. Last time I
was here was Mrs Sinico's funeral. Poor papa too. The love that kills.
And even scraping up the earth at night with a lantern like that case
I read of to get at fresh buried females or even putrefied with running
gravesores. Give you the creeps after a bit. I will appear to you after
death. You will see my ghost after death. My ghost will haunt you after
death. There is another world after death named hell. I do not like that
other world she wrote. No more do I. Plenty to see and hear and feel
yet. Feel live warm beings near you. Let them sleep in their maggoty
beds. They are not going to get me this innings. Warm beds: warm
fullblooded life.

Martin Cunningham emerged from a sidepath, talking gravely.

Solicitor, I think. I know his face. Menton, John Henry, solicitor,
commissioner for oaths and affidavits. Dignam used to be in his office.
Mat Dillon's long ago. Jolly Mat. Convivial evenings. Cold fowl, cigars,
the Tantalus glasses. Heart of gold really. Yes, Menton. Got his rag out
that evening on the bowlinggreen because I sailed inside him. Pure fluke
of mine: the bias. Why he took such a rooted dislike to me. Hate
at first sight. Molly and Floey Dillon linked under the lilactree,
laughing. Fellow always like that, mortified if women are by.

Got a dinge in the side of his hat. Carriage probably.

--Excuse me, sir, Mr Bloom said beside them.

They stopped.

--Your hat is a little crushed, Mr Bloom said pointing.

John Henry Menton stared at him for an instant without moving.

--There, Martin Cunningham helped, pointing also. John Henry Menton took
off his hat, bulged out the dinge and smoothed the nap with care on his
coatsleeve. He clapped the hat on his head again.

--It's all right now, Martin Cunningham said.

John Henry Menton jerked his head down in acknowledgment.

--Thank you, he said shortly.

They walked on towards the gates. Mr Bloom, chapfallen, drew behind
a few paces so as not to overhear. Martin laying down the law. Martin
could wind a sappyhead like that round his little finger, without his
seeing it.

Oyster eyes. Never mind. Be sorry after perhaps when it dawns on him.
Get the pull over him that way.

Thank you. How grand we are this morning!


IN THE HEART OF THE HIBERNIAN METROPOLIS


Before Nelson's pillar trams slowed, shunted, changed trolley, started
for Blackrock, Kingstown and Dalkey, Clonskea, Rathgar and Terenure,
Palmerston Park and upper Rathmines, Sandymount Green, Rathmines,
Ringsend and Sandymount Tower, Harold's Cross. The hoarse Dublin United
Tramway Company's timekeeper bawled them off:

--Rathgar and Terenure!

--Come on, Sandymount Green!

Right and left parallel clanging ringing a doubledecker and a singledeck
moved from their railheads, swerved to the down line, glided parallel.

--Start, Palmerston Park!


THE WEARER OF THE CROWN


Under the porch of the general post office shoeblacks called and
polished. Parked in North Prince's street His Majesty's vermilion
mailcars, bearing on their sides the royal initials, E. R., received
loudly flung sacks of letters, postcards, lettercards, parcels, insured
and paid, for local, provincial, British and overseas delivery.

GENTLEMEN OF THE PRESS


Grossbooted draymen rolled barrels dullthudding out of Prince's stores
and bumped them up on the brewery float. On the brewery float bumped
dullthudding barrels rolled by grossbooted draymen out of Prince's
stores.

--There it is, Red Murray said. Alexander Keyes.

--Just cut it out, will you? Mr Bloom said, and I'll take it round to
the _Telegraph_ office.

The door of Ruttledge's office creaked again. Davy Stephens, minute in a
large capecoat, a small felt hat crowning his ringlets, passed out with
a roll of papers under his cape, a king's courier.

Red Murray's long shears sliced out the advertisement from the newspaper
in four clean strokes. Scissors and paste.

--I'll go through the printingworks, Mr Bloom said, taking the cut
square.

--Of course, if he wants a par, Red Murray said earnestly, a pen behind
his ear, we can do him one.

--Right, Mr Bloom said with a nod. I'll rub that in.

We.

WILLIAM BRAYDEN, ESQUIRE, OF OAKLANDS, SANDYMOUNT


Red Murray touched Mr Bloom's arm with the shears and whispered:

--Brayden.

Mr Bloom turned and saw the liveried porter raise his lettered cap as a
stately figure entered between the newsboards of the _Weekly Freeman
and National Press_ and the _Freeman's Journal and National Press_.
Dullthudding Guinness's barrels. It passed statelily up the staircase,
steered by an umbrella, a solemn beardframed face. The broadcloth back
ascended each step: back. All his brains are in the nape of his neck,
Simon Dedalus says. Welts of flesh behind on him. Fat folds of neck,
fat, neck, fat, neck.

--Don't you think his face is like Our Saviour? Red Murray whispered.

The door of Ruttledge's office whispered: ee: cree. They always build
one door opposite another for the wind to. Way in. Way out.

Our Saviour: beardframed oval face: talking in the dusk. Mary, Martha.
Steered by an umbrella sword to the footlights: Mario the tenor.

--Or like Mario, Mr Bloom said.

--Yes, Red Murray agreed. But Mario was said to be the picture of Our
Saviour.

Jesusmario with rougy cheeks, doublet and spindle legs. Hand on his
heart. In _Martha._

     _Co-ome thou lost one,
     Co-ome thou dear one!_

THE CROZIER AND THE PEN


--His grace phoned down twice this morning, Red Murray said gravely.

They watched the knees, legs, boots vanish. Neck.

A telegram boy stepped in nimbly, threw an envelope on the counter and
stepped off posthaste with a word:

_--Freeman!_

Mr Bloom said slowly:

--Well, he is one of our saviours also.

A meek smile accompanied him as he lifted the counterflap, as he passed
in through a sidedoor and along the warm dark stairs and passage,
along the now reverberating boards. But will he save the circulation?
Thumping. Thumping.

He pushed in the glass swingdoor and entered, stepping over strewn
packing paper. Through a lane of clanking drums he made his way towards
Nannetti's reading closet.

WITH UNFEIGNED REGRET IT IS WE ANNOUNCE THE DISSOLUTION OF A MOST
RESPECTED DUBLIN BURGESS


Hynes here too: account of the funeral probably. Thumping. Thump. This
morning the remains of the late Mr Patrick Dignam. Machines. Smash a man
to atoms if they got him caught. Rule the world today. His machineries
are pegging away too. Like these, got out of hand: fermenting. Working
away, tearing away. And that old grey rat tearing to get in.

HOW A GREAT DAILY ORGAN IS TURNED OUT


Mr Bloom halted behind the foreman's spare body, admiring a glossy
crown.

Strange he never saw his real country. Ireland my country. Member for
College green. He boomed that workaday worker tack for all it was worth.
It's the ads and side features sell a weekly, not the stale news in the
official gazette. Queen Anne is dead. Published by authority in the year
one thousand and. Demesne situate in the townland of Rosenallis, barony
of Tinnahinch. To all whom it may concern schedule pursuant to statute
showing return of number of mules and jennets exported from Ballina.
Nature notes. Cartoons. Phil Blake's weekly Pat and Bull story. Uncle
Toby's page for tiny tots. Country bumpkin's queries. Dear Mr Editor,
what is a good cure for flatulence? I'd like that part. Learn a lot
teaching others. The personal note. M. A. P. Mainly all pictures.
Shapely bathers on golden strand. World's biggest balloon. Double
marriage of sisters celebrated. Two bridegrooms laughing heartily at
each other. Cuprani too, printer. More Irish than the Irish.

The machines clanked in threefour time. Thump, thump, thump. Now if he
got paralysed there and no-one knew how to stop them they'd clank on and
on the same, print it over and over and up and back. Monkeydoodle the
whole thing. Want a cool head.

--Well, get it into the evening edition, councillor, Hynes said.

Soon be calling him my lord mayor. Long John is backing him, they say.

The foreman, without answering, scribbled press on a corner of the sheet
and made a sign to a typesetter. He handed the sheet silently over the
dirty glass screen.

--Right: thanks, Hynes said moving off.

Mr Bloom stood in his way.

--If you want to draw the cashier is just going to lunch, he said,
pointing backward with his thumb.

--Did you? Hynes asked.

--Mm, Mr Bloom said. Look sharp and you'll catch him.

--Thanks, old man, Hynes said. I'll tap him too.

He hurried on eagerly towards the _Freeman's Journal_.

Three bob I lent him in Meagher's. Three weeks. Third hint.

WE SEE THE CANVASSER AT WORK


Mr Bloom laid his cutting on Mr Nannetti's desk.

--Excuse me, councillor, he said. This ad, you see. Keyes, you remember?

Mr Nannetti considered the cutting awhile and nodded.

--He wants it in for July, Mr Bloom said.

The foreman moved his pencil towards it.

--But wait, Mr Bloom said. He wants it changed. Keyes, you see. He wants
two keys at the top.

Hell of a racket they make. He doesn't hear it. Nannan. Iron nerves.
Maybe he understands what I.

The foreman turned round to hear patiently and, lifting an elbow, began
to scratch slowly in the armpit of his alpaca jacket.

--Like that, Mr Bloom said, crossing his forefingers at the top.

Let him take that in first.

Mr Bloom, glancing sideways up from the cross he had made, saw the
foreman's sallow face, think he has a touch of jaundice, and beyond the
obedient reels feeding in huge webs of paper. Clank it. Clank it. Miles
of it unreeled. What becomes of it after? O, wrap up meat, parcels:
various uses, thousand and one things.

Slipping his words deftly into the pauses of the clanking he drew
swiftly on the scarred woodwork.

HOUSE OF KEY(E)S


--Like that, see. Two crossed keys here. A circle. Then here the name.
Alexander Keyes, tea, wine and spirit merchant. So on.

Better not teach him his own business.

--You know yourself, councillor, just what he wants. Then round the top
in leaded: the house of keys. You see? Do you think that's a good idea?

The foreman moved his scratching hand to his lower ribs and scratched
there quietly.

--The idea, Mr Bloom said, is the house of keys. You know, councillor,
the Manx parliament. Innuendo of home rule. Tourists, you know, from the
isle of Man. Catches the eye, you see. Can you do that?

I could ask him perhaps about how to pronounce that _voglio._ But then
if he didn't know only make it awkward for him. Better not.

--We can do that, the foreman said. Have you the design?

--I can get it, Mr Bloom said. It was in a Kilkenny paper. He has a
house there too. I'll just run out and ask him. Well, you can do that
and just a little par calling attention. You know the usual. Highclass
licensed premises. Longfelt want. So on.

The foreman thought for an instant.

--We can do that, he said. Let him give us a three months' renewal.

A typesetter brought him a limp galleypage. He began to check it
silently. Mr Bloom stood by, hearing the loud throbs of cranks, watching
the silent typesetters at their cases.

ORTHOGRAPHICAL


Want to be sure of his spelling. Proof fever. Martin Cunningham forgot
to give us his spellingbee conundrum this morning. It is amusing to view
the unpar one ar alleled embarra two ars is it? double ess ment of a
harassed pedlar while gauging au the symmetry with a y of a peeled pear
under a cemetery wall. Silly, isn't it? Cemetery put in of course on
account of the symmetry.

I should have said when he clapped on his topper. Thank you. I ought
to have said something about an old hat or something. No. I could have
said. Looks as good as new now. See his phiz then.

Sllt. The nethermost deck of the first machine jogged forward its
flyboard with sllt the first batch of quirefolded papers. Sllt. Almost
human the way it sllt to call attention. Doing its level best to speak.
That door too sllt creaking, asking to be shut. Everything speaks in its
own way. Sllt.

NOTED CHURCHMAN AN OCCASIONAL CONTRIBUTOR


The foreman handed back the galleypage suddenly, saying:

--Wait. Where's the archbishop's letter? It's to be repeated in the
_Telegraph._ Where's what's his name?

He looked about him round his loud unanswering machines.

--Monks, sir? a voice asked from the castingbox.

--Ay. Where's Monks?

--Monks!

Mr Bloom took up his cutting. Time to get out.

--Then I'll get the design, Mr Nannetti, he said, and you'll give it a
good place I know.

--Monks!

--Yes, sir.

Three months' renewal. Want to get some wind off my chest first. Try it
anyhow. Rub in August: good idea: horseshow month. Ballsbridge. Tourists
over for the show.

A DAYFATHER


He walked on through the caseroom passing an old man, bowed, spectacled,
aproned. Old Monks, the dayfather. Queer lot of stuff he must have put
through his hands in his time: obituary notices, pubs' ads, speeches,
divorce suits, found drowned. Nearing the end of his tether now. Sober
serious man with a bit in the savingsbank I'd say. Wife a good cook and
washer. Daughter working the machine in the parlour. Plain Jane, no damn
nonsense. AND IT WAS THE FEAST OF THE PASSOVER


He stayed in his walk to watch a typesetter neatly distributing type.
Reads it backwards first. Quickly he does it. Must require some practice
that. mangiD kcirtaP. Poor papa with his hagadah book, reading backwards
with his finger to me. Pessach. Next year in Jerusalem. Dear, O dear!
All that long business about that brought us out of the land of Egypt
and into the house of bondage _Alleluia. Shema Israel Adonai Elohenu_.
No, that's the other. Then the twelve brothers, Jacob's sons. And then
the lamb and the cat and the dog and the stick and the water and the
butcher. And then the angel of death kills the butcher and he kills the
ox and the dog kills the cat. Sounds a bit silly till you come to look
into it well. Justice it means but it's everybody eating everyone else.
That's what life is after all. How quickly he does that job. Practice
makes perfect. Seems to see with his fingers.

Mr Bloom passed on out of the clanking noises through the gallery on to
the landing. Now am I going to tram it out all the way and then catch
him out perhaps. Better phone him up first. Number? Yes. Same as
Citron's house. Twentyeight. Twentyeight double four.

ONLY ONCE MORE THAT SOAP


He went down the house staircase. Who the deuce scrawled all over those
walls with matches? Looks as if they did it for a bet. Heavy greasy
smell there always is in those works. Lukewarm glue in Thom's next door
when I was there.

He took out his handkerchief to dab his nose. Citronlemon? Ah, the soap
I put there. Lose it out of that pocket. Putting back his handkerchief
he took out the soap and stowed it away, buttoned, into the hip pocket
of his trousers.

What perfume does your wife use? I could go home still: tram: something
I forgot. Just to see: before: dressing. No. Here. No.

A sudden screech of laughter came from the _Evening Telegraph_ office.
Know who that is. What's up? Pop in a minute to phone. Ned Lambert it
is.

He entered softly.

ERIN, GREEN GEM OF THE SILVER SEA


--The ghost walks, professor MacHugh murmured softly, biscuitfully to
the dusty windowpane.

Mr Dedalus, staring from the empty fireplace at Ned Lambert's quizzing
face, asked of it sourly:

--Agonising Christ, wouldn't it give you a heartburn on your arse?

Ned Lambert, seated on the table, read on:

--_Or again, note the meanderings of some purling rill as it babbles
on its way, tho' quarrelling with the stony obstacles, to the tumbling
waters of Neptune's blue domain, 'mid mossy banks, fanned by gentlest
zephyrs, played on by the glorious sunlight or 'neath the shadows cast
o'er its pensive bosom by the overarching leafage of the giants of
the forest_. What about that, Simon? he asked over the fringe of his
newspaper. How's that for high?

--Changing his drink, Mr Dedalus said.

Ned Lambert, laughing, struck the newspaper on his knees, repeating:

--_The pensive bosom and the overarsing leafage_. O boys! O boys!

--And Xenophon looked upon Marathon, Mr Dedalus said, looking again on
the fireplace and to the window, and Marathon looked on the sea.

--That will do, professor MacHugh cried from the window. I don't want to
hear any more of the stuff.

He ate off the crescent of water biscuit he had been nibbling and,
hungered, made ready to nibble the biscuit in his other hand.

High falutin stuff. Bladderbags. Ned Lambert is taking a day off I see.
Rather upsets a man's day, a funeral does. He has influence they
say. Old Chatterton, the vicechancellor, is his granduncle or his
greatgranduncle. Close on ninety they say. Subleader for his death
written this long time perhaps. Living to spite them. Might go first
himself. Johnny, make room for your uncle. The right honourable Hedges
Eyre Chatterton. Daresay he writes him an odd shaky cheque or two on
gale days. Windfall when he kicks out. Alleluia.

--Just another spasm, Ned Lambert said.

--What is it? Mr Bloom asked.

--A recently discovered fragment of Cicero, professor MacHugh answered
with pomp of tone. _Our lovely land_. SHORT BUT TO THE POINT


--Whose land? Mr Bloom said simply.

--Most pertinent question, the professor said between his chews. With an
accent on the whose.

--Dan Dawson's land Mr Dedalus said.

--Is it his speech last night? Mr Bloom asked.

Ned Lambert nodded.

--But listen to this, he said.

The doorknob hit Mr Bloom in the small of the back as the door was
pushed in.

--Excuse me, J. J. O'Molloy said, entering.

Mr Bloom moved nimbly aside.

--I beg yours, he said.

--Good day, Jack.

--Come in. Come in.

--Good day.

--How are you, Dedalus?

--Well. And yourself?

J. J. O'Molloy shook his head.

SAD


Cleverest fellow at the junior bar he used to be. Decline, poor chap.
That hectic flush spells finis for a man. Touch and go with him. What's
in the wind, I wonder. Money worry.

--_Or again if we but climb the serried mountain peaks._

--You're looking extra.

--Is the editor to be seen? J. J. O'Molloy asked, looking towards the
inner door.

--Very much so, professor MacHugh said. To be seen and heard. He's in
his sanctum with Lenehan.

J. J. O'Molloy strolled to the sloping desk and began to turn back the
pink pages of the file.

Practice dwindling. A mighthavebeen. Losing heart. Gambling. Debts of
honour. Reaping the whirlwind. Used to get good retainers from D. and T.
Fitzgerald. Their wigs to show the grey matter. Brains on their sleeve
like the statue in Glasnevin. Believe he does some literary work for the
_Express_ with Gabriel Conroy. Wellread fellow. Myles Crawford began
on the _Independent._ Funny the way those newspaper men veer about when
they get wind of a new opening. Weathercocks. Hot and cold in the same
breath. Wouldn't know which to believe. One story good till you hear
the next. Go for one another baldheaded in the papers and then all blows
over. Hail fellow well met the next moment.

--Ah, listen to this for God' sake, Ned Lambert pleaded. _Or again if we
but climb the serried mountain peaks..._

--Bombast! the professor broke in testily. Enough of the inflated
windbag!

--_Peaks_, Ned Lambert went on, _towering high on high, to bathe our
souls, as it were..._

--Bathe his lips, Mr Dedalus said. Blessed and eternal God! Yes? Is he
taking anything for it?

_--As 'twere, in the peerless panorama of Ireland's portfolio,
unmatched, despite their wellpraised prototypes in other vaunted prize
regions, for very beauty, of bosky grove and undulating plain and
luscious pastureland of vernal green, steeped in the transcendent
translucent glow of our mild mysterious Irish twilight..._

HIS NATIVE DORIC


--The moon, professor MacHugh said. He forgot Hamlet.

_--That mantles the vista far and wide and wait till the glowing orb of
the moon shine forth to irradiate her silver effulgence..._

--O! Mr Dedalus cried, giving vent to a hopeless groan. Shite and
onions! That'll do, Ned. Life is too short.

He took off his silk hat and, blowing out impatiently his bushy
moustache, welshcombed his hair with raking fingers.

Ned Lambert tossed the newspaper aside, chuckling with delight. An
instant after a hoarse bark of laughter burst over professor MacHugh's
unshaven blackspectacled face.

--Doughy Daw! he cried.

WHAT WETHERUP SAID


All very fine to jeer at it now in cold print but it goes down like hot
cake that stuff. He was in the bakery line too, wasn't he? Why they call
him Doughy Daw. Feathered his nest well anyhow. Daughter engaged to that
chap in the inland revenue office with the motor. Hooked that nicely.
Entertainments. Open house. Big blowout. Wetherup always said that. Get
a grip of them by the stomach.

The inner door was opened violently and a scarlet beaked face, crested
by a comb of feathery hair, thrust itself in. The bold blue eyes stared
about them and the harsh voice asked:

--What is it?

--And here comes the sham squire himself! professor MacHugh said
grandly.

--Getonouthat, you bloody old pedagogue! the editor said in recognition.

--Come, Ned, Mr Dedalus said, putting on his hat. I must get a drink
after that.

--Drink! the editor cried. No drinks served before mass.

--Quite right too, Mr Dedalus said, going out. Come on, Ned.

Ned Lambert sidled down from the table. The editor's blue eyes roved
towards Mr Bloom's face, shadowed by a smile.

--Will you join us, Myles? Ned Lambert asked.

MEMORABLE BATTLES RECALLED


--North Cork militia! the editor cried, striding to the mantelpiece. We
won every time! North Cork and Spanish officers!

--Where was that, Myles? Ned Lambert asked with a reflective glance at
his toecaps.

--In Ohio! the editor shouted.

--So it was, begad, Ned Lambert agreed.

Passing out he whispered to J. J. O'Molloy:

--Incipient jigs. Sad case.

--Ohio! the editor crowed in high treble from his uplifted scarlet face.
My Ohio!

--A perfect cretic! the professor said. Long, short and long.

O, HARP EOLIAN!


He took a reel of dental floss from his waistcoat pocket and, breaking
off a piece, twanged it smartly between two and two of his resonant
unwashed teeth.

--Bingbang, bangbang.

Mr Bloom, seeing the coast clear, made for the inner door.

--Just a moment, Mr Crawford, he said. I just want to phone about an ad.

He went in.

--What about that leader this evening? professor MacHugh asked, coming
to the editor and laying a firm hand on his shoulder.

--That'll be all right, Myles Crawford said more calmly. Never you fret.
Hello, Jack. That's all right.

--Good day, Myles, J. J. O'Molloy said, letting the pages he held slip
limply back on the file. Is that Canada swindle case on today?

The telephone whirred inside.

--Twentyeight... No, twenty... Double four... Yes.

SPOT THE WINNER


Lenehan came out of the inner office with SPORT'S tissues.

--Who wants a dead cert for the Gold cup? he asked. Sceptre with O.
Madden up.

He tossed the tissues on to the table.

Screams of newsboys barefoot in the hall rushed near and the door was
flung open.

--Hush, Lenehan said. I hear feetstoops.

Professor MacHugh strode across the room and seized the cringing urchin
by the collar as the others scampered out of the hall and down the
steps. The tissues rustled up in the draught, floated softly in the air
blue scrawls and under the table came to earth.

--It wasn't me, sir. It was the big fellow shoved me, sir.

--Throw him out and shut the door, the editor said. There's a hurricane
blowing.

Lenehan began to paw the tissues up from the floor, grunting as he
stooped twice.

--Waiting for the racing special, sir, the newsboy said. It was Pat
Farrell shoved me, sir.

He pointed to two faces peering in round the doorframe.

--Him, sir.

--Out of this with you, professor MacHugh said gruffly.

He hustled the boy out and banged the door to.

J. J. O'Molloy turned the files crackingly over, murmuring, seeking:

--Continued on page six, column four.

--Yes, _Evening Telegraph_ here, Mr Bloom phoned from the inner office.
Is the boss...? Yes, _Telegraph_... To where? Aha! Which auction rooms
?... Aha! I see... Right. I'll catch him.

A COLLISION ENSUES


The bell whirred again as he rang off. He came in quickly and bumped
against Lenehan who was struggling up with the second tissue.

--_Pardon, monsieur_, Lenehan said, clutching him for an instant and
making a grimace.

--My fault, Mr Bloom said, suffering his grip. Are you hurt? I'm in a
hurry.

--Knee, Lenehan said.

He made a comic face and whined, rubbing his knee:

--The accumulation of the _anno Domini_.

--Sorry, Mr Bloom said.

He went to the door and, holding it ajar, paused. J. J. O'Molloy slapped
the heavy pages over. The noise of two shrill voices, a mouthorgan,
echoed in the bare hallway from the newsboys squatted on the doorsteps:

     _--We are the boys of Wexford
     Who fought with heart and hand._

EXIT BLOOM


--I'm just running round to Bachelor's walk, Mr Bloom said, about this
ad of Keyes's. Want to fix it up. They tell me he's round there in
Dillon's.

He looked indecisively for a moment at their faces. The editor who,
leaning against the mantelshelf, had propped his head on his hand,
suddenly stretched forth an arm amply.

--Begone! he said. The world is before you.

--Back in no time, Mr Bloom said, hurrying out.

J. J. O'Molloy took the tissues from Lenehan's hand and read them,
blowing them apart gently, without comment.

--He'll get that advertisement, the professor said, staring through his
blackrimmed spectacles over the crossblind. Look at the young scamps
after him.

--Show. Where? Lenehan cried, running to the window.

A STREET CORTEGE


Both smiled over the crossblind at the file of capering newsboys in Mr
Bloom's wake, the last zigzagging white on the breeze a mocking kite, a
tail of white bowknots.

--Look at the young guttersnipe behind him hue and cry, Lenehan said,
and you'll kick. O, my rib risible! Taking off his flat spaugs and the
walk. Small nines. Steal upon larks.

He began to mazurka in swift caricature across the floor on sliding
feet past the fireplace to J. J. O'Molloy who placed the tissues in his
receiving hands.

--What's that? Myles Crawford said with a start. Where are the other two
gone?

--Who? the professor said, turning. They're gone round to the Oval for a
drink. Paddy Hooper is there with Jack Hall. Came over last night.

--Come on then, Myles Crawford said. Where's my hat?

He walked jerkily into the office behind, parting the vent of his
jacket, jingling his keys in his back pocket. They jingled then in the
air and against the wood as he locked his desk drawer.

--He's pretty well on, professor MacHugh said in a low voice.

--Seems to be, J. J. O'Molloy said, taking out a cigarettecase in
murmuring meditation, but it is not always as it seems. Who has the most
matches?

THE CALUMET OF PEACE


He offered a cigarette to the professor and took one himself. Lenehan
promptly struck a match for them and lit their cigarettes in turn. J. J.
O'Molloy opened his case again and offered it.

--_Thanky vous_, Lenehan said, helping himself.

The editor came from the inner office, a straw hat awry on his brow. He
declaimed in song, pointing sternly at professor MacHugh:

_--'Twas rank and fame that tempted thee, 'Twas empire charmed thy
heart._

The professor grinned, locking his long lips.

--Eh? You bloody old Roman empire? Myles Crawford said.

He took a cigarette from the open case. Lenehan, lighting it for him
with quick grace, said:

--Silence for my brandnew riddle!

--_Imperium romanum_, J. J. O'Molloy said gently. It sounds nobler than
British or Brixton. The word reminds one somehow of fat in the fire.

Myles Crawford blew his first puff violently towards the ceiling.

--That's it, he said. We are the fat. You and I are the fat in the fire.
We haven't got the chance of a snowball in hell.

THE GRANDEUR THAT WAS ROME


--Wait a moment, professor MacHugh said, raising two quiet claws. We
mustn't be led away by words, by sounds of words. We think of Rome,
imperial, imperious, imperative.

He extended elocutionary arms from frayed stained shirtcuffs, pausing:

--What was their civilisation? Vast, I allow: but vile. Cloacae: sewers.
The Jews in the wilderness and on the mountaintop said: _It is meet
to be here. Let us build an altar to Jehovah_. The Roman, like the
Englishman who follows in his footsteps, brought to every new shore on
which he set his foot (on our shore he never set it) only his cloacal
obsession. He gazed about him in his toga and he said: _It is meet to be
here. Let us construct a watercloset._

--Which they accordingly did do, Lenehan said. Our old ancient
ancestors, as we read in the first chapter of Guinness's, were partial
to the running stream.

--They were nature's gentlemen, J. J. O'Molloy murmured. But we have
also Roman law.

--And Pontius Pilate is its prophet, professor MacHugh responded.

--Do you know that story about chief baron Palles? J. J. O'Molloy asked.
It was at the royal university dinner. Everything was going swimmingly
...

--First my riddle, Lenehan said. Are you ready?

Mr O'Madden Burke, tall in copious grey of Donegal tweed, came in from
the hallway. Stephen Dedalus, behind him, uncovered as he entered.

--_Entrez, mes enfants!_ Lenehan cried.

--I escort a suppliant, Mr O'Madden Burke said melodiously. Youth led by
Experience visits Notoriety.

--How do you do? the editor said, holding out a hand. Come in. Your
governor is just gone.???


Lenehan said to all:

--Silence! What opera resembles a railwayline? Reflect, ponder,
excogitate, reply.

Stephen handed over the typed sheets, pointing to the title and
signature.

--Who? the editor asked.

Bit torn off.

--Mr Garrett Deasy, Stephen said.

--That old pelters, the editor said. Who tore it? Was he short taken?

     _On swift sail flaming
     From storm and south
     He comes, pale vampire,
     Mouth to my mouth._

--Good day, Stephen, the professor said, coming to peer over their
shoulders. Foot and mouth? Are you turned...?

Bullockbefriending bard.

SHINDY IN WELLKNOWN RESTAURANT


--Good day, sir, Stephen answered blushing. The letter is not mine. Mr
Garrett Deasy asked me to...

--O, I know him, Myles Crawford said, and I knew his wife too. The
bloodiest old tartar God ever made. By Jesus, she had the foot and mouth
disease and no mistake! The night she threw the soup in the waiter's
face in the Star and Garter. Oho!

A woman brought sin into the world. For Helen, the runaway wife of
Menelaus, ten years the Greeks. O'Rourke, prince of Breffni.

--Is he a widower? Stephen asked.

--Ay, a grass one, Myles Crawford said, his eye running down the
typescript. Emperor's horses. Habsburg. An Irishman saved his life on
the ramparts of Vienna. Don't you forget! Maximilian Karl O'Donnell,
graf von Tirconnell in Ireland. Sent his heir over to make the king
an Austrian fieldmarshal now. Going to be trouble there one day. Wild
geese. O yes, every time. Don't you forget that!

--The moot point is did he forget it, J. J. O'Molloy said quietly,
turning a horseshoe paperweight. Saving princes is a thank you job.

Professor MacHugh turned on him.

--And if not? he said.

--I'll tell you how it was, Myles Crawford began. A Hungarian it was one
day... LOST CAUSES

NOBLE MARQUESS MENTIONED


--We were always loyal to lost causes, the professor said. Success for
us is the death of the intellect and of the imagination. We were never
loyal to the successful. We serve them. I teach the blatant Latin
language. I speak the tongue of a race the acme of whose mentality is
the maxim: time is money. Material domination. _Dominus!_ Lord! Where is
the spirituality? Lord Jesus? Lord Salisbury? A sofa in a westend club.
But the Greek!

KYRIE ELEISON!


A smile of light brightened his darkrimmed eyes, lengthened his long
lips.

--The Greek! he said again. _Kyrios!_ Shining word! The vowels the
Semite and the Saxon know not. _Kyrie!_ The radiance of the intellect.
I ought to profess Greek, the language of the mind. _Kyrie eleison!_ The
closetmaker and the cloacamaker will never be lords of our spirit. We
are liege subjects of the catholic chivalry of Europe that foundered at
Trafalgar and of the empire of the spirit, not an _imperium,_ that
went under with the Athenian fleets at Aegospotami. Yes, yes. They went
under. Pyrrhus, misled by an oracle, made a last attempt to retrieve the
fortunes of Greece. Loyal to a lost cause.

He strode away from them towards the window.

--They went forth to battle, Mr O'Madden Burke said greyly, but they
always fell.

--Boohoo! Lenehan wept with a little noise. Owing to a brick received in
the latter half of the _matinée_. Poor, poor, poor Pyrrhus!

He whispered then near Stephen's ear:

LENEHAN'S LIMERICK


     _There's a ponderous pundit MacHugh
     Who wears goggles of ebony hue.
     As he mostly sees double
     To wear them why trouble?
     I can't see the Joe Miller. Can you?_

In mourning for Sallust, Mulligan says. Whose mother is beastly dead.

Myles Crawford crammed the sheets into a sidepocket.

--That'll be all right, he said. I'll read the rest after. That'll be
all right.

Lenehan extended his hands in protest.

--But my riddle! he said. What opera is like a railwayline?

--Opera? Mr O'Madden Burke's sphinx face reriddled.

Lenehan announced gladly:

--_The Rose of Castile_. See the wheeze? Rows of cast steel. Gee!

He poked Mr O'Madden Burke mildly in the spleen. Mr O'Madden Burke fell
back with grace on his umbrella, feigning a gasp.

--Help! he sighed. I feel a strong weakness.

Lenehan, rising to tiptoe, fanned his face rapidly with the rustling
tissues.

The professor, returning by way of the files, swept his hand across
Stephen's and Mr O'Madden Burke's loose ties.

--Paris, past and present, he said. You look like communards.

--Like fellows who had blown up the Bastile, J. J. O'Molloy said in
quiet mockery. Or was it you shot the lord lieutenant of Finland between
you? You look as though you had done the deed. General Bobrikoff.

OMNIUM GATHERUM


--We were only thinking about it, Stephen said.

--All the talents, Myles Crawford said. Law, the classics...

--The turf, Lenehan put in.

--Literature, the press.

--If Bloom were here, the professor said. The gentle art of
advertisement.

--And Madam Bloom, Mr O'Madden Burke added. The vocal muse. Dublin's
prime favourite.

Lenehan gave a loud cough.

--Ahem! he said very softly. O, for a fresh of breath air! I caught a
cold in the park. The gate was open.

YOU CAN DO IT!


The editor laid a nervous hand on Stephen's shoulder.

--I want you to write something for me, he said. Something with a bite
in it. You can do it. I see it in your face. _In the lexicon of youth_
...

See it in your face. See it in your eye. Lazy idle little schemer.

--Foot and mouth disease! the editor cried in scornful invective. Great
nationalist meeting in Borris-in-Ossory. All balls! Bulldosing the
public! Give them something with a bite in it. Put us all into it, damn
its soul. Father, Son and Holy Ghost and Jakes M'Carthy.

--We can all supply mental pabulum, Mr O'Madden Burke said.

Stephen raised his eyes to the bold unheeding stare.

--He wants you for the pressgang, J. J. O'Molloy said.

THE GREAT GALLAHER


--You can do it, Myles Crawford repeated, clenching his hand in
emphasis. Wait a minute. We'll paralyse Europe as Ignatius Gallaher
used to say when he was on the shaughraun, doing billiardmarking in the
Clarence. Gallaher, that was a pressman for you. That was a pen. You
know how he made his mark? I'll tell you. That was the smartest piece of
journalism ever known. That was in eightyone, sixth of May, time of
the invincibles, murder in the Phoenix park, before you were born, I
suppose. I'll show you.

He pushed past them to the files.

--Look at here, he said turning. The _New York World_ cabled for a
special. Remember that time?

Professor MacHugh nodded.

--_New York World_, the editor said, excitedly pushing back his straw
hat. Where it took place. Tim Kelly, or Kavanagh I mean. Joe Brady and
the rest of them. Where Skin-the-Goat drove the car. Whole route, see?

--Skin-the-Goat, Mr O'Madden Burke said. Fitzharris. He has that
cabman's shelter, they say, down there at Butt bridge. Holohan told me.
You know Holohan?

--Hop and carry one, is it? Myles Crawford said.

--And poor Gumley is down there too, so he told me, minding stones for
the corporation. A night watchman.

Stephen turned in surprise.

--Gumley? he said. You don't say so? A friend of my father's, is it?

--Never mind Gumley, Myles Crawford cried angrily. Let Gumley mind
the stones, see they don't run away. Look at here. What did Ignatius
Gallaher do? I'll tell you. Inspiration of genius. Cabled right away.
Have you _Weekly Freeman_ of 17 March? Right. Have you got that?

He flung back pages of the files and stuck his finger on a point.

--Take page four, advertisement for Bransome's coffee, let us say. Have
you got that? Right.

The telephone whirred.

A DISTANT VOICE


--I'll answer it, the professor said, going.

--B is parkgate. Good.

His finger leaped and struck point after point, vibrating.

--T is viceregal lodge. C is where murder took place. K is Knockmaroon
gate.

The loose flesh of his neck shook like a cock's wattles. An illstarched
dicky jutted up and with a rude gesture he thrust it back into his
waistcoat.

--Hello? _Evening Telegraph_ here... Hello?... Who's there?... Yes...
Yes... Yes.

--F to P is the route Skin-the-Goat drove the car for an alibi,
Inchicore, Roundtown, Windy Arbour, Palmerston Park, Ranelagh. F.A.B.P.
Got that? X is Davy's publichouse in upper Leeson street.

The professor came to the inner door.

--Bloom is at the telephone, he said.

--Tell him go to hell, the editor said promptly. X is Davy's
publichouse, see? CLEVER, VERY


--Clever, Lenehan said. Very.

--Gave it to them on a hot plate, Myles Crawford said, the whole bloody
history.

Nightmare from which you will never awake.

--I saw it, the editor said proudly. I was present. Dick Adams, the
besthearted bloody Corkman the Lord ever put the breath of life in, and
myself.

Lenehan bowed to a shape of air, announcing:

--Madam, I'm Adam. And Able was I ere I saw Elba.

--History! Myles Crawford cried. The Old Woman of Prince's street was
there first. There was weeping and gnashing of teeth over that. Out of
an advertisement. Gregor Grey made the design for it. That gave him the
leg up. Then Paddy Hooper worked Tay Pay who took him on to the _Star._
Now he's got in with Blumenfeld. That's press. That's talent. Pyatt! He
was all their daddies!

--The father of scare journalism, Lenehan confirmed, and the
brother-in-law of Chris Callinan.

--Hello?... Are you there?... Yes, he's here still. Come across
yourself.

--Where do you find a pressman like that now, eh? the editor cried. He
flung the pages down.

--Clamn dever, Lenehan said to Mr O'Madden Burke.

--Very smart, Mr O'Madden Burke said.

Professor MacHugh came from the inner office.

--Talking about the invincibles, he said, did you see that some hawkers
were up before the recorder?

--O yes, J. J. O'Molloy said eagerly. Lady Dudley was walking home
through the park to see all the trees that were blown down by that
cyclone last year and thought she'd buy a view of Dublin. And it
turned out to be a commemoration postcard of Joe Brady or Number One or
Skin-the-Goat. Right outside the viceregal lodge, imagine!

--They're only in the hook and eye department, Myles Crawford said.
Psha! Press and the bar! Where have you a man now at the bar like those
fellows, like Whiteside, like Isaac Butt, like silvertongued O'Hagan.
Eh? Ah, bloody nonsense. Psha! Only in the halfpenny place.

His mouth continued to twitch unspeaking in nervous curls of disdain.

Would anyone wish that mouth for her kiss? How do you know? Why did you
write it then?

RHYMES AND REASONS


Mouth, south. Is the mouth south someway? Or the south a mouth? Must be
some. South, pout, out, shout, drouth. Rhymes: two men dressed the same,
looking the same, two by two.

     _........................ la tua pace
    .................. che parlar ti piace
    .... mentreché il vento, come fa, si tace._

He saw them three by three, approaching girls, in green, in rose, in
russet, entwining, _per l'aer perso_, in mauve, in purple, _quella
pacifica oriafiamma_, gold of oriflamme, _di rimirar fe piu ardenti._
But I old men, penitent, leadenfooted, underdarkneath the night: mouth
south: tomb womb.

--Speak up for yourself, Mr O'Madden Burke said.

SUFFICIENT FOR THE DAY...


J. J. O'Molloy, smiling palely, took up the gage.

--My dear Myles, he said, flinging his cigarette aside, you put a false
construction on my words. I hold no brief, as at present advised, for
the third profession qua profession but your Cork legs are running away
with you. Why not bring in Henry Grattan and Flood and Demosthenes and
Edmund Burke? Ignatius Gallaher we all know and his Chapelizod boss,
Harmsworth of the farthing press, and his American cousin of the Bowery
guttersheet not to mention _Paddy Kelly's Budget, Pue's Occurrences_
and our watchful friend _The Skibbereen Eagle_. Why bring in a master
of forensic eloquence like Whiteside? Sufficient for the day is the
newspaper thereof. LINKS WITH BYGONE DAYS OF YORE


--Grattan and Flood wrote for this very paper, the editor cried in his
face. Irish volunteers. Where are you now? Established 1763. Dr Lucas.
Who have you now like John Philpot Curran? Psha!

--Well, J. J. O'Molloy said, Bushe K.C., for example.

--Bushe? the editor said. Well, yes: Bushe, yes. He has a strain of it
in his blood. Kendal Bushe or I mean Seymour Bushe.

--He would have been on the bench long ago, the professor said, only for
... But no matter.

J. J. O'Molloy turned to Stephen and said quietly and slowly:

--One of the most polished periods I think I ever listened to in my life
fell from the lips of Seymour Bushe. It was in that case of fratricide,
the Childs murder case. Bushe defended him. _And in the porches of mine
ear did pour._


By the way how did he find that out? He died in his sleep. Or the other
story, beast with two backs?

--What was that? the professor asked.

ITALIA, MAGISTRA ARTIUM


--He spoke on the law of evidence, J. J. O'Molloy said, of Roman justice
as contrasted with the earlier Mosaic code, the _lex talionis_. And he
cited the Moses of Michelangelo in the vatican.

--Ha.

--A few wellchosen words, Lenehan prefaced. Silence!

Pause. J. J. O'Molloy took out his cigarettecase.

False lull. Something quite ordinary.

Messenger took out his matchbox thoughtfully and lit his cigar.

I have often thought since on looking back over that strange time that
it was that small act, trivial in itself, that striking of that match,
that determined the whole aftercourse of both our lives. A POLISHED
PERIOD


J. J. O'Molloy resumed, moulding his words:

--He said of it: _that stony effigy in frozen music, horned and
terrible, of the human form divine, that eternal symbol of wisdom and
of prophecy which, if aught that the imagination or the hand of sculptor
has wrought in marble of soultransfigured and of soultransfiguring
deserves to live, deserves to live._

His slim hand with a wave graced echo and fall.

--Fine! Myles Crawford said at once.

--The divine afflatus, Mr O'Madden Burke said.

--You like it? J. J. O'Molloy asked Stephen.

Stephen, his blood wooed by grace of language and gesture, blushed. He
took a cigarette from the case. J. J. O'Molloy offered his case to Myles
Crawford. Lenehan lit their cigarettes as before and took his trophy,
saying:

--Muchibus thankibus.

A MAN OF HIGH MORALE


--Professor Magennis was speaking to me about you, J. J. O'Molloy said
to Stephen. What do you think really of that hermetic crowd, the opal
hush poets: A. E. the mastermystic? That Blavatsky woman started it.
She was a nice old bag of tricks. A. E. has been telling some yankee
interviewer that you came to him in the small hours of the morning to
ask him about planes of consciousness. Magennis thinks you must have
been pulling A. E.'s leg. He is a man of the very highest morale,
Magennis.

Speaking about me. What did he say? What did he say? What did he say
about me? Don't ask.

--No, thanks, professor MacHugh said, waving the cigarettecase aside.
Wait a moment. Let me say one thing. The finest display of oratory I
ever heard was a speech made by John F Taylor at the college historical
society. Mr Justice Fitzgibbon, the present lord justice of appeal, had
spoken and the paper under debate was an essay (new for those days),
advocating the revival of the Irish tongue.

He turned towards Myles Crawford and said:

--You know Gerald Fitzgibbon. Then you can imagine the style of his
discourse.

--He is sitting with Tim Healy, J. J. O'Molloy said, rumour has it, on
the Trinity college estates commission.

--He is sitting with a sweet thing, Myles Crawford said, in a child's
frock. Go on. Well?

--It was the speech, mark you, the professor said, of a finished orator,
full of courteous haughtiness and pouring in chastened diction I will
not say the vials of his wrath but pouring the proud man's contumely
upon the new movement. It was then a new movement. We were weak,
therefore worthless.

He closed his long thin lips an instant but, eager to be on, raised
an outspanned hand to his spectacles and, with trembling thumb and
ringfinger touching lightly the black rims, steadied them to a new
focus.

IMPROMPTU


In ferial tone he addressed J. J. O'Molloy:

--Taylor had come there, you must know, from a sickbed. That he
had prepared his speech I do not believe for there was not even one
shorthandwriter in the hall. His dark lean face had a growth of shaggy
beard round it. He wore a loose white silk neckcloth and altogether he
looked (though he was not) a dying man.

His gaze turned at once but slowly from J. J. O'Molloy's towards
Stephen's face and then bent at once to the ground, seeking. His
unglazed linen collar appeared behind his bent head, soiled by his
withering hair. Still seeking, he said:

--When Fitzgibbon's speech had ended John F Taylor rose to reply.
Briefly, as well as I can bring them to mind, his words were these.

He raised his head firmly. His eyes bethought themselves once more.
Witless shellfish swam in the gross lenses to and fro, seeking outlet.

He began:

_--Mr Chairman, ladies and gentlemen: Great was my admiration in
listening to the remarks addressed to the youth of Ireland a moment
since by my learned friend. It seemed to me that I had been transported
into a country far away from this country, into an age remote from
this age, that I stood in ancient Egypt and that I was listening to the
speech of some highpriest of that land addressed to the youthful Moses._

His listeners held their cigarettes poised to hear, their smokes
ascending in frail stalks that flowered with his speech. _And let our
crooked smokes._ Noble words coming. Look out. Could you try your hand
at it yourself?

_--And it seemed to me that I heard the voice of that Egyptian
highpriest raised in a tone of like haughtiness and like pride. I heard
his words and their meaning was revealed to me._

FROM THE FATHERS


It was revealed to me that those things are good which yet are corrupted
which neither if they were supremely good nor unless they were good
could be corrupted. Ah, curse you! That's saint Augustine.

_--Why will you jews not accept our culture, our religion and our
language? You are a tribe of nomad herdsmen: we are a mighty people. You
have no cities nor no wealth: our cities are hives of humanity and
our galleys, trireme and quadrireme, laden with all manner merchandise
furrow the waters of the known globe. You have but emerged from
primitive conditions: we have a literature, a priesthood, an agelong
history and a polity._

Nile.

Child, man, effigy.

By the Nilebank the babemaries kneel, cradle of bulrushes: a man supple
in combat: stonehorned, stonebearded, heart of stone.

_--You pray to a local and obscure idol: our temples, majestic and
mysterious, are the abodes of Isis and Osiris, of Horus and Ammon Ra.
Yours serfdom, awe and humbleness: ours thunder and the seas. Israel
is weak and few are her children: Egypt is an host and terrible are her
arms. Vagrants and daylabourers are you called: the world trembles at
our name._

A dumb belch of hunger cleft his speech. He lifted his voice above it
boldly:

_--But, ladies and gentlemen, had the youthful Moses listened to and
accepted that view of life, had he bowed his head and bowed his will
and bowed his spirit before that arrogant admonition he would never have
brought the chosen people out of their house of bondage, nor followed
the pillar of the cloud by day. He would never have spoken with the
Eternal amid lightnings on Sinai's mountaintop nor ever have come down
with the light of inspiration shining in his countenance and bearing in
his arms the tables of the law, graven in the language of the outlaw._

He ceased and looked at them, enjoying a silence.

OMINOUS--FOR HIM!

J. J. O'Molloy said not without regret:

--And yet he died without having entered the land of promise.

--A sudden--at--the--moment--though--from--lingering--illness--often--
previously--expectorated--demise, Lenehan added. And with a great future
behind him.

The troop of bare feet was heard rushing along the hallway and pattering
up the staircase.

--That is oratory, the professor said uncontradicted. Gone with the
wind. Hosts at Mullaghmast and Tara of the kings. Miles of ears of
porches. The tribune's words, howled and scattered to the four winds.
A people sheltered within his voice. Dead noise. Akasic records of all
that ever anywhere wherever was. Love and laud him: me no more.

I have money.

--Gentlemen, Stephen said. As the next motion on the agenda paper may I
suggest that the house do now adjourn?

--You take my breath away. It is not perchance a French compliment?
Mr O'Madden Burke asked. 'Tis the hour, methinks, when the winejug,
metaphorically speaking, is most grateful in Ye ancient hostelry.

--That it be and hereby is resolutely resolved. All that are in favour
say ay, Lenehan announced. The contrary no. I declare it carried. To
which particular boosing shed?... My casting vote is: Mooney's!

He led the way, admonishing:

--We will sternly refuse to partake of strong waters, will we not? Yes,
we will not. By no manner of means.

Mr O'Madden Burke, following close, said with an ally's lunge of his
umbrella:

--Lay on, Macduff!

--Chip of the old block! the editor cried, clapping Stephen on the
shoulder. Let us go. Where are those blasted keys?

He fumbled in his pocket pulling out the crushed typesheets.

--Foot and mouth. I know. That'll be all right. That'll go in. Where are
they? That's all right.

He thrust the sheets back and went into the inner office. LET US HOPE


J. J. O'Molloy, about to follow him in, said quietly to Stephen:

--I hope you will live to see it published. Myles, one moment.

He went into the inner office, closing the door behind him.

--Come along, Stephen, the professor said. That is fine, isn't it? It
has the prophetic vision. _Fuit Ilium!_ The sack of windy Troy. Kingdoms
of this world. The masters of the Mediterranean are fellaheen today.

The first newsboy came pattering down the stairs at their heels and
rushed out into the street, yelling:

--Racing special!

Dublin. I have much, much to learn.

They turned to the left along Abbey street.

--I have a vision too, Stephen said.

--Yes? the professor said, skipping to get into step. Crawford will
follow.

Another newsboy shot past them, yelling as he ran:

--Racing special!

DEAR DIRTY DUBLIN


Dubliners.

--Two Dublin vestals, Stephen said, elderly and pious, have lived fifty
and fiftythree years in Fumbally's lane.

--Where is that? the professor asked.

--Off Blackpitts, Stephen said.

Damp night reeking of hungry dough. Against the wall. Face glistering
tallow under her fustian shawl. Frantic hearts. Akasic records. Quicker,
darlint!

On now. Dare it. Let there be life.

--They want to see the views of Dublin from the top of Nelson's pillar.
They save up three and tenpence in a red tin letterbox moneybox. They
shake out the threepenny bits and sixpences and coax out the pennies
with the blade of a knife. Two and three in silver and one and seven
in coppers. They put on their bonnets and best clothes and take their
umbrellas for fear it may come on to rain.

--Wise virgins, professor MacHugh said.

LIFE ON THE RAW


--They buy one and fourpenceworth of brawn and four slices of panloaf at
the north city diningrooms in Marlborough street from Miss Kate Collins,
proprietress... They purchase four and twenty ripe plums from a girl
at the foot of Nelson's pillar to take off the thirst of the brawn. They
give two threepenny bits to the gentleman at the turnstile and begin
to waddle slowly up the winding staircase, grunting, encouraging each
other, afraid of the dark, panting, one asking the other have you the
brawn, praising God and the Blessed Virgin, threatening to come down,
peeping at the airslits. Glory be to God. They had no idea it was that
high.

Their names are Anne Kearns and Florence MacCabe. Anne Kearns has the
lumbago for which she rubs on Lourdes water, given her by a lady who got
a bottleful from a passionist father. Florence MacCabe takes a crubeen
and a bottle of double X for supper every Saturday.

--Antithesis, the professor said nodding twice. Vestal virgins. I can
see them. What's keeping our friend?

He turned.

A bevy of scampering newsboys rushed down the steps, scattering in all
directions, yelling, their white papers fluttering. Hard after them
Myles Crawford appeared on the steps, his hat aureoling his scarlet
face, talking with J. J. O'Molloy.

--Come along, the professor cried, waving his arm.

He set off again to walk by Stephen's side. RETURN OF BLOOM


--Yes, he said. I see them.

Mr Bloom, breathless, caught in a whirl of wild newsboys near the
offices of the _Irish Catholic and Dublin Penny Journal_, called:

--Mr Crawford! A moment!

--_Telegraph_! Racing special!

--What is it? Myles Crawford said, falling back a pace.

A newsboy cried in Mr Bloom's face:

--Terrible tragedy in Rathmines! A child bit by a bellows!

INTERVIEW WITH THE EDITOR


--Just this ad, Mr Bloom said, pushing through towards the steps,
puffing, and taking the cutting from his pocket. I spoke with Mr Keyes
just now. He'll give a renewal for two months, he says. After he'll
see. But he wants a par to call attention in the _Telegraph_ too,
the Saturday pink. And he wants it copied if it's not too late I told
councillor Nannetti from the _Kilkenny People_. I can have access to
it in the national library. House of keys, don't you see? His name is
Keyes. It's a play on the name. But he practically promised he'd give
the renewal. But he wants just a little puff. What will I tell him, Mr
Crawford? K.M.A.


--Will you tell him he can kiss my arse? Myles Crawford said throwing
out his arm for emphasis. Tell him that straight from the stable.

A bit nervy. Look out for squalls. All off for a drink. Arm in arm.
Lenehan's yachting cap on the cadge beyond. Usual blarney. Wonder is
that young Dedalus the moving spirit. Has a good pair of boots on him
today. Last time I saw him he had his heels on view. Been walking in
muck somewhere. Careless chap. What was he doing in Irishtown?

--Well, Mr Bloom said, his eyes returning, if I can get the design I
suppose it's worth a short par. He'd give the ad, I think. I'll tell him
... K.M.R.I.A.


--He can kiss my royal Irish arse, Myles Crawford cried loudly over his
shoulder. Any time he likes, tell him.

While Mr Bloom stood weighing the point and about to smile he strode on
jerkily.

RAISING THE WIND


--_Nulla bona_, Jack, he said, raising his hand to his chin. I'm up to
here. I've been through the hoop myself. I was looking for a fellow to
back a bill for me no later than last week. Sorry, Jack. You must take
the will for the deed. With a heart and a half if I could raise the wind
anyhow.

J. J. O'Molloy pulled a long face and walked on silently. They caught up
on the others and walked abreast.

--When they have eaten the brawn and the bread and wiped their twenty
fingers in the paper the bread was wrapped in they go nearer to the
railings.

--Something for you, the professor explained to Myles Crawford. Two old
Dublin women on the top of Nelson's pillar.

SOME COLUMN!--THAT'S WHAT WADDLER ONE SAID


--That's new, Myles Crawford said. That's copy. Out for the waxies
Dargle. Two old trickies, what?

--But they are afraid the pillar will fall, Stephen went on. They see
the roofs and argue about where the different churches are: Rathmines'
blue dome, Adam and Eve's, saint Laurence O'Toole's. But it makes them
giddy to look so they pull up their skirts...

THOSE SLIGHTLY RAMBUNCTIOUS FEMALES


--Easy all, Myles Crawford said. No poetic licence. We're in the
archdiocese here.

--And settle down on their striped petticoats, peering up at the statue
of the onehandled adulterer.

--Onehandled adulterer! the professor cried. I like that. I see the
idea. I see what you mean.

DAMES DONATE DUBLIN'S CITS SPEEDPILLS VELOCITOUS AEROLITHS, BELIEF


--It gives them a crick in their necks, Stephen said, and they are too
tired to look up or down or to speak. They put the bag of plums between
them and eat the plums out of it, one after another, wiping off with
their handkerchiefs the plumjuice that dribbles out of their mouths and
spitting the plumstones slowly out between the railings.

He gave a sudden loud young laugh as a close. Lenehan and Mr O'Madden
Burke, hearing, turned, beckoned and led on across towards Mooney's.

--Finished? Myles Crawford said. So long as they do no worse.

SOPHIST WALLOPS HAUGHTY HELEN SQUARE ON PROBOSCIS. SPARTANS GNASH
MOLARS. ITHACANS VOW PEN IS CHAMP.


--You remind me of Antisthenes, the professor said, a disciple of
Gorgias, the sophist. It is said of him that none could tell if he were
bitterer against others or against himself. He was the son of a noble
and a bondwoman. And he wrote a book in which he took away the palm of
beauty from Argive Helen and handed it to poor Penelope.

Poor Penelope. Penelope Rich.

They made ready to cross O'Connell street.

HELLO THERE, CENTRAL!


At various points along the eight lines tramcars with motionless
trolleys stood in their tracks, bound for or from Rathmines,
Rathfarnham, Blackrock, Kingstown and Dalkey, Sandymount Green, Ringsend
and Sandymount Tower, Donnybrook, Palmerston Park and Upper Rathmines,
all still, becalmed in short circuit. Hackney cars, cabs, delivery
waggons, mailvans, private broughams, aerated mineral water floats with
rattling crates of bottles, rattled, rolled, horsedrawn, rapidly.

WHAT?--AND LIKEWISE--WHERE?


--But what do you call it? Myles Crawford asked. Where did they get the
plums?

VIRGILIAN, SAYS PEDAGOGUE. SOPHOMORE PLUMPS FOR OLD MAN MOSES.


--Call it, wait, the professor said, opening his long lips wide to
reflect. Call it, let me see. Call it: _deus nobis haec otia fecit._

--No, Stephen said. I call it _A Pisgah Sight of Palestine or the
Parable of The Plums._

--I see, the professor said.

He laughed richly.

--I see, he said again with new pleasure. Moses and the promised land.
We gave him that idea, he added to J. J. O'Molloy.

HORATIO IS CYNOSURE THIS FAIR JUNE DAY


J. J. O'Molloy sent a weary sidelong glance towards the statue and held
his peace.

--I see, the professor said.

He halted on sir John Gray's pavement island and peered aloft at Nelson
through the meshes of his wry smile.

DIMINISHED DIGITS PROVE TOO TITILLATING FOR FRISKY FRUMPS. ANNE WIMBLES,
FLO WANGLES--YET CAN YOU BLAME THEM?


--Onehandled adulterer, he said smiling grimly. That tickles me, I must
say.

--Tickled the old ones too, Myles Crawford said, if the God Almighty's
truth was known.


Pineapple rock, lemon platt, butter scotch. A sugarsticky girl
shovelling scoopfuls of creams for a christian brother. Some school
treat. Bad for their tummies. Lozenge and comfit manufacturer to His
Majesty the King. God. Save. Our. Sitting on his throne sucking red
jujubes white.


A sombre Y.M.C.A. young man, watchful among the warm sweet fumes of
Graham Lemon's, placed a throwaway in a hand of Mr Bloom.

Heart to heart talks.

Bloo... Me? No.

Blood of the Lamb.

His slow feet walked him riverward, reading. Are you saved? All are
washed in the blood of the lamb. God wants blood victim. Birth, hymen,
martyr, war, foundation of a building, sacrifice, kidney burntoffering,
druids' altars. Elijah is coming. Dr John Alexander Dowie restorer of
the church in Zion is coming.

_Is coming! Is coming!! Is coming!!! All heartily welcome._ Paying game.
Torry and Alexander last year. Polygamy. His wife will put the stopper
on that. Where was that ad some Birmingham firm the luminous crucifix.
Our Saviour. Wake up in the dead of night and see him on the wall,
hanging. Pepper's ghost idea. Iron nails ran in.


Phosphorus it must be done with. If you leave a bit of codfish for
instance. I could see the bluey silver over it. Night I went down to the
pantry in the kitchen. Don't like all the smells in it waiting to rush
out. What was it she wanted? The Malaga raisins. Thinking of Spain.
Before Rudy was born. The phosphorescence, that bluey greeny. Very good
for the brain.

From Butler's monument house corner he glanced along Bachelor's walk.
Dedalus' daughter there still outside Dillon's auctionrooms. Must be
selling off some old furniture. Knew her eyes at once from the father.
Lobbing about waiting for him. Home always breaks up when the mother
goes. Fifteen children he had. Birth every year almost. That's in their
theology or the priest won't give the poor woman the confession, the
absolution. Increase and multiply. Did you ever hear such an idea? Eat
you out of house and home. No families themselves to feed. Living on the
fat of the land. Their butteries and larders. I'd like to see them do
the black fast Yom Kippur. Crossbuns. One meal and a collation for fear
he'd collapse on the altar. A housekeeper of one of those fellows if you
could pick it out of her. Never pick it out of her. Like getting l.s.d.
out of him. Does himself well. No guests. All for number one. Watching
his water. Bring your own bread and butter. His reverence: mum's the
word.

Good Lord, that poor child's dress is in flitters. Underfed she looks
too. Potatoes and marge, marge and potatoes. It's after they feel it.
Proof of the pudding. Undermines the constitution.

As he set foot on O'Connell bridge a puffball of smoke plumed up from
the parapet. Brewery barge with export stout. England. Sea air sours it,
I heard. Be interesting some day get a pass through Hancock to see the
brewery. Regular world in itself. Vats of porter wonderful. Rats get in
too. Drink themselves bloated as big as a collie floating. Dead drunk on
the porter. Drink till they puke again like christians. Imagine drinking
that! Rats: vats. Well, of course, if we knew all the things.

Looking down he saw flapping strongly, wheeling between the gaunt
quaywalls, gulls. Rough weather outside. If I threw myself down? Reuben
J's son must have swallowed a good bellyful of that sewage. One and
eightpence too much. Hhhhm. It's the droll way he comes out with the
things. Knows how to tell a story too.

They wheeled lower. Looking for grub. Wait.

He threw down among them a crumpled paper ball. Elijah thirtytwo feet
per sec is com. Not a bit. The ball bobbed unheeded on the wake of
swells, floated under by the bridgepiers. Not such damn fools. Also the
day I threw that stale cake out of the Erin's King picked it up in the
wake fifty yards astern. Live by their wits. They wheeled, flapping.

     _The hungry famished gull
     Flaps o'er the waters dull._

That is how poets write, the similar sounds. But then Shakespeare has
no rhymes: blank verse. The flow of the language it is. The thoughts.
Solemn.


     _Hamlet, I am thy father's spirit
     Doomed for a certain time to walk the earth._
     --Two apples a penny! Two for a penny!


His gaze passed over the glazed apples serried on her stand. Australians
they must be this time of year. Shiny peels: polishes them up with a rag
or a handkerchief.

Wait. Those poor birds.

He halted again and bought from the old applewoman two Banbury cakes for
a penny and broke the brittle paste and threw its fragments down into
the Liffey. See that? The gulls swooped silently, two, then all from
their heights, pouncing on prey. Gone. Every morsel.

Aware of their greed and cunning he shook the powdery crumb from his
hands. They never expected that. Manna. Live on fish, fishy flesh they
have, all seabirds, gulls, seagoose. Swans from Anna Liffey swim down
here sometimes to preen themselves. No accounting for tastes. Wonder
what kind is swanmeat. Robinson Crusoe had to live on them.

They wheeled flapping weakly. I'm not going to throw any more. Penny
quite enough. Lot of thanks I get. Not even a caw. They spread foot and
mouth disease too. If you cram a turkey say on chestnutmeal it tastes
like that. Eat pig like pig. But then why is it that saltwater fish are
not salty? How is that?

His eyes sought answer from the river and saw a rowboat rock at anchor
on the treacly swells lazily its plastered board.

_Kino's_ 11/- _Trousers_

Good idea that. Wonder if he pays rent to the corporation. How can you
own water really? It's always flowing in a stream, never the same, which
in the stream of life we trace. Because life is a stream. All kinds of
places are good for ads. That quack doctor for the clap used to be stuck
up in all the greenhouses. Never see it now. Strictly confidential. Dr
Hy Franks. Didn't cost him a red like Maginni the dancing master self
advertisement. Got fellows to stick them up or stick them up himself for
that matter on the q. t. running in to loosen a button. Flybynight.
Just the place too. POST NO BILLS. POST 110 PILLS. Some chap with a dose
burning him.

If he...?

O!

Eh?

No... No.

No, no. I don't believe it. He wouldn't surely?

No, no.

Mr Bloom moved forward, raising his troubled eyes. Think no more about
that. After one. Timeball on the ballastoffice is down. Dunsink time.
Fascinating little book that is of sir Robert Ball's. Parallax. I never
exactly understood. There's a priest. Could ask him. Par it's Greek:
parallel, parallax. Met him pike hoses she called it till I told her
about the transmigration. O rocks!

Mr Bloom smiled O rocks at two windows of the ballastoffice. She's right
after all. Only big words for ordinary things on account of the sound.
She's not exactly witty. Can be rude too. Blurt out what I was thinking.
Still, I don't know. She used to say Ben Dollard had a base barreltone
voice. He has legs like barrels and you'd think he was singing into a
barrel. Now, isn't that wit. They used to call him big Ben. Not half as
witty as calling him base barreltone. Appetite like an albatross. Get
outside of a baron of beef. Powerful man he was at stowing away number
one Bass. Barrel of Bass. See? It all works out.

A procession of whitesmocked sandwichmen marched slowly towards him
along the gutter, scarlet sashes across their boards. Bargains. Like
that priest they are this morning: we have sinned: we have suffered. He
read the scarlet letters on their five tall white hats: H. E. L. Y. S.
Wisdom Hely's. Y lagging behind drew a chunk of bread from under his
foreboard, crammed it into his mouth and munched as he walked. Our
staple food. Three bob a day, walking along the gutters, street after
street. Just keep skin and bone together, bread and skilly. They are
not Boyl: no, M Glade's men. Doesn't bring in any business either.
I suggested to him about a transparent showcart with two smart girls
sitting inside writing letters, copybooks, envelopes, blottingpaper. I
bet that would have caught on. Smart girls writing something catch the
eye at once. Everyone dying to know what she's writing. Get twenty of
them round you if you stare at nothing. Have a finger in the pie. Women
too. Curiosity. Pillar of salt. Wouldn't have it of course because he
didn't think of it himself first. Or the inkbottle I suggested with a
false stain of black celluloid. His ideas for ads like Plumtree's potted
under the obituaries, cold meat department. You can't lick 'em. What?
Our envelopes. Hello, Jones, where are you going? Can't stop, Robinson,
I am hastening to purchase the only reliable inkeraser _Kansell,_ sold
by Hely's Ltd, 85 Dame street. Well out of that ruck I am. Devil of a
job it was collecting accounts of those convents. Tranquilla convent.
That was a nice nun there, really sweet face. Wimple suited her small
head. Sister? Sister? I am sure she was crossed in love by her eyes.
Very hard to bargain with that sort of a woman. I disturbed her at her
devotions that morning. But glad to communicate with the outside world.
Our great day, she said. Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Sweet name
too: caramel. She knew I, I think she knew by the way she. If she had
married she would have changed. I suppose they really were short of
money. Fried everything in the best butter all the same. No lard for
them. My heart's broke eating dripping. They like buttering themselves
in and out. Molly tasting it, her veil up. Sister? Pat Claffey, the
pawnbroker's daughter. It was a nun they say invented barbed wire.

He crossed Westmoreland street when apostrophe S had plodded by. Rover
cycleshop. Those races are on today. How long ago is that? Year Phil
Gilligan died. We were in Lombard street west. Wait: was in Thom's.
Got the job in Wisdom Hely's year we married. Six years. Ten years ago:
ninetyfour he died yes that's right the big fire at Arnott's. Val Dillon
was lord mayor. The Glencree dinner. Alderman Robert O'Reilly emptying
the port into his soup before the flag fell. Bobbob lapping it for the
inner alderman. Couldn't hear what the band played. For what we have
already received may the Lord make us. Milly was a kiddy then. Molly
had that elephantgrey dress with the braided frogs. Mantailored with
selfcovered buttons. She didn't like it because I sprained my ankle
first day she wore choir picnic at the Sugarloaf. As if that. Old
Goodwin's tall hat done up with some sticky stuff. Flies' picnic
too. Never put a dress on her back like it. Fitted her like a glove,
shoulders and hips. Just beginning to plump it out well. Rabbitpie we
had that day. People looking after her.

Happy. Happier then. Snug little room that was with the red wallpaper.
Dockrell's, one and ninepence a dozen. Milly's tubbing night. American
soap I bought: elderflower. Cosy smell of her bathwater. Funny she
looked soaped all over. Shapely too. Now photography. Poor papa's
daguerreotype atelier he told me of. Hereditary taste.

He walked along the curbstone.

Stream of life. What was the name of that priestylooking chap was always
squinting in when he passed? Weak eyes, woman. Stopped in Citron's saint
Kevin's parade. Pen something. Pendennis? My memory is getting. Pen
...? Of course it's years ago. Noise of the trams probably. Well, if he
couldn't remember the dayfather's name that he sees every day.

Bartell d'Arcy was the tenor, just coming out then. Seeing her home
after practice. Conceited fellow with his waxedup moustache. Gave her
that song _Winds that blow from the south_.

Windy night that was I went to fetch her there was that lodge meeting on
about those lottery tickets after Goodwin's concert in the supperroom or
oakroom of the Mansion house. He and I behind. Sheet of her music blew
out of my hand against the High school railings. Lucky it didn't.
Thing like that spoils the effect of a night for her. Professor Goodwin
linking her in front. Shaky on his pins, poor old sot. His farewell
concerts. Positively last appearance on any stage. May be for months and
may be for never. Remember her laughing at the wind, her blizzard collar
up. Corner of Harcourt road remember that gust. Brrfoo! Blew up all her
skirts and her boa nearly smothered old Goodwin. She did get flushed
in the wind. Remember when we got home raking up the fire and frying up
those pieces of lap of mutton for her supper with the Chutney sauce she
liked. And the mulled rum. Could see her in the bedroom from the hearth
unclamping the busk of her stays: white.

Swish and soft flop her stays made on the bed. Always warm from her.
Always liked to let her self out. Sitting there after till near two
taking out her hairpins. Milly tucked up in beddyhouse. Happy. Happy.
That was the night...

--O, Mr Bloom, how do you do?

--O, how do you do, Mrs Breen?

--No use complaining. How is Molly those times? Haven't seen her for
ages.

--In the pink, Mr Bloom said gaily. Milly has a position down in
Mullingar, you know.

--Go away! Isn't that grand for her?

--Yes. In a photographer's there. Getting on like a house on fire. How
are all your charges?

--All on the baker's list, Mrs Breen said.

How many has she? No other in sight.

--You're in black, I see. You have no...

--No, Mr Bloom said. I have just come from a funeral.

Going to crop up all day, I foresee. Who's dead, when and what did he
die of? Turn up like a bad penny.

--O, dear me, Mrs Breen said. I hope it wasn't any near relation.

May as well get her sympathy.

--Dignam, Mr Bloom said. An old friend of mine. He died quite suddenly,
poor fellow. Heart trouble, I believe. Funeral was this morning.

_Your funeral's tomorrow While you're coming through the rye.
Diddlediddle dumdum Diddlediddle..._

--Sad to lose the old friends, Mrs Breen's womaneyes said melancholily.

Now that's quite enough about that. Just: quietly: husband.

--And your lord and master?

Mrs Breen turned up her two large eyes. Hasn't lost them anyhow.

--O, don't be talking! she said. He's a caution to rattlesnakes. He's
in there now with his lawbooks finding out the law of libel. He has me
heartscalded. Wait till I show you.

Hot mockturtle vapour and steam of newbaked jampuffs rolypoly poured
out from Harrison's. The heavy noonreek tickled the top of Mr Bloom's
gullet. Want to make good pastry, butter, best flour, Demerara sugar,
or they'd taste it with the hot tea. Or is it from her? A barefoot
arab stood over the grating, breathing in the fumes. Deaden the gnaw of
hunger that way. Pleasure or pain is it? Penny dinner. Knife and fork
chained to the table.

Opening her handbag, chipped leather. Hatpin: ought to have a guard on
those things. Stick it in a chap's eye in the tram. Rummaging. Open.
Money. Please take one. Devils if they lose sixpence. Raise Cain.
Husband barging. Where's the ten shillings I gave you on Monday? Are
you feeding your little brother's family? Soiled handkerchief:
medicinebottle. Pastille that was fell. What is she?...

--There must be a new moon out, she said. He's always bad then. Do you
know what he did last night?

Her hand ceased to rummage. Her eyes fixed themselves on him, wide in
alarm, yet smiling.

--What? Mr Bloom asked.

Let her speak. Look straight in her eyes. I believe you. Trust me.

--Woke me up in the night, she said. Dream he had, a nightmare.

Indiges.

--Said the ace of spades was walking up the stairs.

--The ace of spades! Mr Bloom said.

She took a folded postcard from her handbag.

--Read that, she said. He got it this morning.

--What is it? Mr Bloom asked, taking the card. U.P.?

--U.P.: up, she said. Someone taking a rise out of him. It's a great
shame for them whoever he is.

--Indeed it is, Mr Bloom said.

She took back the card, sighing.

--And now he's going round to Mr Menton's office. He's going to take an
action for ten thousand pounds, he says.

She folded the card into her untidy bag and snapped the catch.

Same blue serge dress she had two years ago, the nap bleaching. Seen its
best days. Wispish hair over her ears. And that dowdy toque: three old
grapes to take the harm out of it. Shabby genteel. She used to be a
tasty dresser. Lines round her mouth. Only a year or so older than
Molly.

See the eye that woman gave her, passing. Cruel. The unfair sex.

He looked still at her, holding back behind his look his discontent.
Pungent mockturtle oxtail mulligatawny. I'm hungry too. Flakes of pastry
on the gusset of her dress: daub of sugary flour stuck to her cheek.
Rhubarb tart with liberal fillings, rich fruit interior. Josie Powell
that was. In Luke Doyle's long ago. Dolphin's Barn, the charades. U.P.:
up.

Change the subject.

--Do you ever see anything of Mrs Beaufoy? Mr Bloom asked.

--Mina Purefoy? she said.

Philip Beaufoy I was thinking. Playgoers' Club. Matcham often thinks of
the masterstroke. Did I pull the chain? Yes. The last act.

--Yes.

--I just called to ask on the way in is she over it. She's in the
lying-in hospital in Holles street. Dr Horne got her in. She's three
days bad now.

--O, Mr Bloom said. I'm sorry to hear that.

--Yes, Mrs Breen said. And a houseful of kids at home. It's a very stiff
birth, the nurse told me.

---O, Mr Bloom said.

His heavy pitying gaze absorbed her news. His tongue clacked in
compassion. Dth! Dth!

--I'm sorry to hear that, he said. Poor thing! Three days! That's
terrible for her.

Mrs Breen nodded.

--She was taken bad on the Tuesday...

Mr Bloom touched her funnybone gently, warning her:

--Mind! Let this man pass.

A bony form strode along the curbstone from the river staring with a
rapt gaze into the sunlight through a heavystringed glass. Tight as a
skullpiece a tiny hat gripped his head. From his arm a folded dustcoat,
a stick and an umbrella dangled to his stride.

--Watch him, Mr Bloom said. He always walks outside the lampposts.
Watch!

--Who is he if it's a fair question? Mrs Breen asked. Is he dotty?

--His name is Cashel Boyle O'Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell, Mr
Bloom said smiling. Watch!

--He has enough of them, she said. Denis will be like that one of these
days.

She broke off suddenly.

--There he is, she said. I must go after him. Goodbye. Remember me to
Molly, won't you?

--I will, Mr Bloom said.

He watched her dodge through passers towards the shopfronts. Denis Breen
in skimpy frockcoat and blue canvas shoes shuffled out of Harrison's
hugging two heavy tomes to his ribs. Blown in from the bay. Like old
times. He suffered her to overtake him without surprise and thrust
his dull grey beard towards her, his loose jaw wagging as he spoke
earnestly.

Meshuggah. Off his chump.

Mr Bloom walked on again easily, seeing ahead of him in sunlight the
tight skullpiece, the dangling stickumbrelladustcoat. Going the two
days. Watch him! Out he goes again. One way of getting on in the world.
And that other old mosey lunatic in those duds. Hard time she must have
with him.

U.P.: up. I'll take my oath that's Alf Bergan or Richie Goulding. Wrote
it for a lark in the Scotch house I bet anything. Round to Menton's
office. His oyster eyes staring at the postcard. Be a feast for the
gods.

He passed the _Irish Times_. There might be other answers Iying there.
Like to answer them all. Good system for criminals. Code. At their lunch
now. Clerk with the glasses there doesn't know me. O, leave them there
to simmer. Enough bother wading through fortyfour of them. Wanted, smart
lady typist to aid gentleman in literary work. I called you naughty
darling because I do not like that other world. Please tell me what is
the meaning. Please tell me what perfume does your wife. Tell me who
made the world. The way they spring those questions on you. And the
other one Lizzie Twigg. My literary efforts have had the good fortune to
meet with the approval of the eminent poet A. E. (Mr Geo. Russell). No
time to do her hair drinking sloppy tea with a book of poetry.

Best paper by long chalks for a small ad. Got the provinces now. Cook
and general, exc. cuisine, housemaid kept. Wanted live man for spirit
counter. Resp. girl (R.C.) wishes to hear of post in fruit or pork shop.
James Carlisle made that. Six and a half per cent dividend. Made a big
deal on Coates's shares. Ca' canny. Cunning old Scotch hunks. All the
toady news. Our gracious and popular vicereine. Bought the _Irish Field_
now. Lady Mountcashel has quite recovered after her confinement and
rode out with the Ward Union staghounds at the enlargement yesterday
at Rathoath. Uneatable fox. Pothunters too. Fear injects juices make
it tender enough for them. Riding astride. Sit her horse like a man.
Weightcarrying huntress. No sidesaddle or pillion for her, not for Joe.
First to the meet and in at the death. Strong as a brood mare some of
those horsey women. Swagger around livery stables. Toss off a glass
of brandy neat while you'd say knife. That one at the Grosvenor this
morning. Up with her on the car: wishswish. Stonewall or fivebarred gate
put her mount to it. Think that pugnosed driver did it out of spite. Who
is this she was like? O yes! Mrs Miriam Dandrade that sold me her old
wraps and black underclothes in the Shelbourne hotel. Divorced Spanish
American. Didn't take a feather out of her my handling them. As if I was
her clotheshorse. Saw her in the viceregal party when Stubbs the park
ranger got me in with Whelan of the _Express._ Scavenging what the
quality left. High tea. Mayonnaise I poured on the plums thinking it was
custard. Her ears ought to have tingled for a few weeks after. Want to
be a bull for her. Born courtesan. No nursery work for her, thanks.

Poor Mrs Purefoy! Methodist husband. Method in his madness. Saffron bun
and milk and soda lunch in the educational dairy. Y. M. C. A. Eating
with a stopwatch, thirtytwo chews to the minute. And still his
muttonchop whiskers grew. Supposed to be well connected. Theodore's
cousin in Dublin Castle. One tony relative in every family. Hardy
annuals he presents her with. Saw him out at the Three Jolly Topers
marching along bareheaded and his eldest boy carrying one in a
marketnet. The squallers. Poor thing! Then having to give the breast
year after year all hours of the night. Selfish those t.t's are. Dog in
the manger. Only one lump of sugar in my tea, if you please.

He stood at Fleet street crossing. Luncheon interval. A sixpenny at
Rowe's? Must look up that ad in the national library. An eightpenny in
the Burton. Better. On my way.

He walked on past Bolton's Westmoreland house. Tea. Tea. Tea. I forgot
to tap Tom Kernan.

Sss. Dth, dth, dth! Three days imagine groaning on a bed with a
vinegared handkerchief round her forehead, her belly swollen out. Phew!
Dreadful simply! Child's head too big: forceps. Doubled up inside her
trying to butt its way out blindly, groping for the way out. Kill me
that would. Lucky Molly got over hers lightly. They ought to invent
something to stop that. Life with hard labour. Twilight sleep idea:
queen Victoria was given that. Nine she had. A good layer. Old
woman that lived in a shoe she had so many children. Suppose he was
consumptive. Time someone thought about it instead of gassing about the
what was it the pensive bosom of the silver effulgence. Flapdoodle to
feed fools on. They could easily have big establishments whole thing
quite painless out of all the taxes give every child born five quid at
compound interest up to twentyone five per cent is a hundred shillings
and five tiresome pounds multiply by twenty decimal system encourage
people to put by money save hundred and ten and a bit twentyone years
want to work it out on paper come to a tidy sum more than you think.

Not stillborn of course. They are not even registered. Trouble for
nothing.

Funny sight two of them together, their bellies out. Molly and Mrs
Moisel. Mothers' meeting. Phthisis retires for the time being, then
returns. How flat they look all of a sudden after. Peaceful eyes. Weight
off their mind. Old Mrs Thornton was a jolly old soul. All my babies,
she said. The spoon of pap in her mouth before she fed them. O, that's
nyumnyum. Got her hand crushed by old Tom Wall's son. His first bow to
the public. Head like a prize pumpkin. Snuffy Dr Murren. People knocking
them up at all hours. For God' sake, doctor. Wife in her throes. Then
keep them waiting months for their fee. To attendance on your wife. No
gratitude in people. Humane doctors, most of them.

Before the huge high door of the Irish house of parliament a flock of
pigeons flew. Their little frolic after meals. Who will we do it on? I
pick the fellow in black. Here goes. Here's good luck. Must be thrilling
from the air. Apjohn, myself and Owen Goldberg up in the trees near
Goose green playing the monkeys. Mackerel they called me.

A squad of constables debouched from College street, marching in Indian
file. Goosestep. Foodheated faces, sweating helmets, patting their
truncheons. After their feed with a good load of fat soup under their
belts. Policeman's lot is oft a happy one. They split up in groups and
scattered, saluting, towards their beats. Let out to graze. Best moment
to attack one in pudding time. A punch in his dinner. A squad of others,
marching irregularly, rounded Trinity railings making for the station.
Bound for their troughs. Prepare to receive cavalry. Prepare to receive
soup.

He crossed under Tommy Moore's roguish finger. They did right to put him
up over a urinal: meeting of the waters. Ought to be places for women.
Running into cakeshops. Settle my hat straight. _There is not in this
wide world a vallee_. Great song of Julia Morkan's. Kept her voice up to
the very last. Pupil of Michael Balfe's, wasn't she?

He gazed after the last broad tunic. Nasty customers to tackle. Jack
Power could a tale unfold: father a G man. If a fellow gave them trouble
being lagged they let him have it hot and heavy in the bridewell.
Can't blame them after all with the job they have especially the young
hornies. That horsepoliceman the day Joe Chamberlain was given his
degree in Trinity he got a run for his money. My word he did! His
horse's hoofs clattering after us down Abbey street. Lucky I had the
presence of mind to dive into Manning's or I was souped. He did come a
wallop, by George. Must have cracked his skull on the cobblestones. I
oughtn't to have got myself swept along with those medicals. And the
Trinity jibs in their mortarboards. Looking for trouble. Still I got to
know that young Dixon who dressed that sting for me in the Mater and now
he's in Holles street where Mrs Purefoy. Wheels within wheels. Police
whistle in my ears still. All skedaddled. Why he fixed on me. Give me in
charge. Right here it began.

--Up the Boers!

--Three cheers for De Wet!

--We'll hang Joe Chamberlain on a sourapple tree.

Silly billies: mob of young cubs yelling their guts out. Vinegar hill.
The Butter exchange band. Few years' time half of them magistrates and
civil servants. War comes on: into the army helterskelter: same fellows
used to. Whether on the scaffold high.

Never know who you're talking to. Corny Kelleher he has Harvey Duff in
his eye. Like that Peter or Denis or James Carey that blew the gaff on
the invincibles. Member of the corporation too. Egging raw youths on to
get in the know all the time drawing secret service pay from the castle.
Drop him like a hot potato. Why those plainclothes men are always
courting slaveys. Easily twig a man used to uniform. Squarepushing up
against a backdoor. Maul her a bit. Then the next thing on the menu. And
who is the gentleman does be visiting there? Was the young master saying
anything? Peeping Tom through the keyhole. Decoy duck. Hotblooded young
student fooling round her fat arms ironing.

--Are those yours, Mary?

--I don't wear such things... Stop or I'll tell the missus on you. Out
half the night.

--There are great times coming, Mary. Wait till you see.

--Ah, gelong with your great times coming.

Barmaids too. Tobaccoshopgirls.

James Stephens' idea was the best. He knew them. Circles of ten so that
a fellow couldn't round on more than his own ring. Sinn Fein. Back out
you get the knife. Hidden hand. Stay in. The firing squad. Turnkey's
daughter got him out of Richmond, off from Lusk. Putting up in the
Buckingham Palace hotel under their very noses. Garibaldi.

You must have a certain fascination: Parnell. Arthur Griffith is a
squareheaded fellow but he has no go in him for the mob. Or gas about
our lovely land. Gammon and spinach. Dublin Bakery Company's tearoom.
Debating societies. That republicanism is the best form of government.
That the language question should take precedence of the economic
question. Have your daughters inveigling them to your house. Stuff them
up with meat and drink. Michaelmas goose. Here's a good lump of thyme
seasoning under the apron for you. Have another quart of goosegrease
before it gets too cold. Halffed enthusiasts. Penny roll and a walk with
the band. No grace for the carver. The thought that the other chap pays
best sauce in the world. Make themselves thoroughly at home. Show us
over those apricots, meaning peaches. The not far distant day. Homerule
sun rising up in the northwest.

His smile faded as he walked, a heavy cloud hiding the sun slowly,
shadowing Trinity's surly front. Trams passed one another, ingoing,
outgoing, clanging. Useless words. Things go on same, day after day:
squads of police marching out, back: trams in, out. Those two loonies
mooching about. Dignam carted off. Mina Purefoy swollen belly on a
bed groaning to have a child tugged out of her. One born every second
somewhere. Other dying every second. Since I fed the birds five minutes.
Three hundred kicked the bucket. Other three hundred born, washing the
blood off, all are washed in the blood of the lamb, bawling maaaaaa.

Cityful passing away, other cityful coming, passing away too: other
coming on, passing on. Houses, lines of houses, streets, miles of
pavements, piledup bricks, stones. Changing hands. This owner, that.
Landlord never dies they say. Other steps into his shoes when he gets
his notice to quit. They buy the place up with gold and still they have
all the gold. Swindle in it somewhere. Piled up in cities, worn away age
after age. Pyramids in sand. Built on bread and onions. Slaves Chinese
wall. Babylon. Big stones left. Round towers. Rest rubble, sprawling
suburbs, jerrybuilt. Kerwan's mushroom houses built of breeze. Shelter,
for the night.

No-one is anything.

This is the very worst hour of the day. Vitality. Dull, gloomy: hate
this hour. Feel as if I had been eaten and spewed.

Provost's house. The reverend Dr Salmon: tinned salmon. Well tinned in
there. Like a mortuary chapel. Wouldn't live in it if they paid me. Hope
they have liver and bacon today. Nature abhors a vacuum.

The sun freed itself slowly and lit glints of light among the silverware
opposite in Walter Sexton's window by which John Howard Parnell passed,
unseeing.

There he is: the brother. Image of him. Haunting face. Now that's a
coincidence. Course hundreds of times you think of a person and don't
meet him. Like a man walking in his sleep. No-one knows him. Must be a
corporation meeting today. They say he never put on the city marshal's
uniform since he got the job. Charley Kavanagh used to come out on
his high horse, cocked hat, puffed, powdered and shaved. Look at the
woebegone walk of him. Eaten a bad egg. Poached eyes on ghost. I have a
pain. Great man's brother: his brother's brother. He'd look nice on the
city charger. Drop into the D.B.C. probably for his coffee, play chess
there. His brother used men as pawns. Let them all go to pot. Afraid to
pass a remark on him. Freeze them up with that eye of his. That's the
fascination: the name. All a bit touched. Mad Fanny and his other sister
Mrs Dickinson driving about with scarlet harness. Bolt upright lik
surgeon M'Ardle. Still David Sheehy beat him for south Meath. Apply
for the Chiltern Hundreds and retire into public life. The patriot's
banquet. Eating orangepeels in the park. Simon Dedalus said when they
put him in parliament that Parnell would come back from the grave and
lead him out of the house of commons by the arm.

--Of the twoheaded octopus, one of whose heads is the head upon which
the ends of the world have forgotten to come while the other speaks with
a Scotch accent. The tentacles...

They passed from behind Mr Bloom along the curbstone. Beard and bicycle.
Young woman.

And there he is too. Now that's really a coincidence: second time.
Coming events cast their shadows before. With the approval of the
eminent poet, Mr Geo. Russell. That might be Lizzie Twigg with him. A.
E.: what does that mean? Initials perhaps. Albert Edward, Arthur Edmund,
Alphonsus Eb Ed El Esquire. What was he saying? The ends of the world
with a Scotch accent. Tentacles: octopus. Something occult: symbolism.
Holding forth. She's taking it all in. Not saying a word. To aid
gentleman in literary work.

His eyes followed the high figure in homespun, beard and bicycle,
a listening woman at his side. Coming from the vegetarian. Only
weggebobbles and fruit. Don't eat a beefsteak. If you do the eyes of
that cow will pursue you through all eternity. They say it's healthier.
Windandwatery though. Tried it. Keep you on the run all day. Bad as
a bloater. Dreams all night. Why do they call that thing they gave me
nutsteak? Nutarians. Fruitarians. To give you the idea you are eating
rumpsteak. Absurd. Salty too. They cook in soda. Keep you sitting by the
tap all night.

Her stockings are loose over her ankles. I detest that: so tasteless.
Those literary etherial people they are all. Dreamy, cloudy,
symbolistic. Esthetes they are. I wouldn't be surprised if it was that
kind of food you see produces the like waves of the brain the poetical.
For example one of those policemen sweating Irish stew into their shirts
you couldn't squeeze a line of poetry out of him. Don't know what poetry
is even. Must be in a certain mood.

     _The dreamy cloudy gull
     Waves o'er the waters dull._

He crossed at Nassau street corner and stood before the window of Yeates
and Son, pricing the fieldglasses. Or will I drop into old Harris's and
have a chat with young Sinclair? Wellmannered fellow. Probably at his
lunch. Must get those old glasses of mine set right. Goerz lenses six
guineas. Germans making their way everywhere. Sell on easy terms to
capture trade. Undercutting. Might chance on a pair in the railway lost
property office. Astonishing the things people leave behind them in
trains and cloakrooms. What do they be thinking about? Women too.
Incredible. Last year travelling to Ennis had to pick up that farmer's
daughter's ba and hand it to her at Limerick junction. Unclaimed money
too. There's a little watch up there on the roof of the bank to test
those glasses by.


His lids came down on the lower rims of his irides. Can't see it. If you
imagine it's there you can almost see it. Can't see it.

He faced about and, standing between the awnings, held out his right
hand at arm's length towards the sun. Wanted to try that often. Yes:
completely. The tip of his little finger blotted out the sun's disk.
Must be the focus where the rays cross. If I had black glasses.
Interesting. There was a lot of talk about those sunspots when we
were in Lombard street west. Looking up from the back garden. Terrific
explosions they are. There will be a total eclipse this year: autumn
some time.

Now that I come to think of it that ball falls at Greenwich time. It's
the clock is worked by an electric wire from Dunsink. Must go out there
some first Saturday of the month. If I could get an introduction to
professor Joly or learn up something about his family. That would do to:
man always feels complimented. Flattery where least expected. Nobleman
proud to be descended from some king's mistress. His foremother. Lay it
on with a trowel. Cap in hand goes through the land. Not go in and blurt
out what you know you're not to: what's parallax? Show this gentleman
the door.

Ah.

His hand fell to his side again.

Never know anything about it. Waste of time. Gasballs spinning about,
crossing each other, passing. Same old dingdong always. Gas: then solid:
then world: then cold: then dead shell drifting around, frozen rock,
like that pineapple rock. The moon. Must be a new moon out, she said. I
believe there is.

He went on by la maison Claire.

Wait. The full moon was the night we were Sunday fortnight exactly there
is a new moon. Walking down by the Tolka. Not bad for a Fairview moon.
She was humming. The young May moon she's beaming, love. He other side
of her. Elbow, arm. He. Glowworm's la-amp is gleaming, love. Touch.
Fingers. Asking. Answer. Yes.

Stop. Stop. If it was it was. Must.

Mr Bloom, quickbreathing, slowlier walking passed Adam court.

With a keep quiet relief his eyes took note this is the street here
middle of the day of Bob Doran's bottle shoulders. On his annual bend,
M Coy said. They drink in order to say or do something or _cherchez la
femme_. Up in the Coombe with chummies and streetwalkers and then the
rest of the year sober as a judge.

Yes. Thought so. Sloping into the Empire. Gone. Plain soda would do him
good. Where Pat Kinsella had his Harp theatre before Whitbred ran the
Queen's. Broth of a boy. Dion Boucicault business with his harvestmoon
face in a poky bonnet. Three Purty Maids from School. How time flies,
eh? Showing long red pantaloons under his skirts. Drinkers, drinking,
laughed spluttering, their drink against their breath. More power, Pat.
Coarse red: fun for drunkards: guffaw and smoke. Take off that white
hat. His parboiled eyes. Where is he now? Beggar somewhere. The harp
that once did starve us all.

I was happier then. Or was that I? Or am I now I? Twentyeight I was. She
twentythree. When we left Lombard street west something changed. Could
never like it again after Rudy. Can't bring back time. Like holding
water in your hand. Would you go back to then? Just beginning then.
Would you? Are you not happy in your home you poor little naughty boy?
Wants to sew on buttons for me. I must answer. Write it in the library.

Grafton street gay with housed awnings lured his senses. Muslin prints,
silkdames and dowagers, jingle of harnesses, hoofthuds lowringing in the
baking causeway. Thick feet that woman has in the white stockings. Hope
the rain mucks them up on her. Countrybred chawbacon. All the beef to
the heels were in. Always gives a woman clumsy feet. Molly looks out of
plumb.

He passed, dallying, the windows of Brown Thomas, silk mercers. Cascades
of ribbons. Flimsy China silks. A tilted urn poured from its mouth a
flood of bloodhued poplin: lustrous blood. The huguenots brought that
here. _La causa è santa_! Tara tara. Great chorus that. Taree tara. Must
be washed in rainwater. Meyerbeer. Tara: bom bom bom.

Pincushions. I'm a long time threatening to buy one. Sticking them all
over the place. Needles in window curtains.

He bared slightly his left forearm. Scrape: nearly gone. Not today
anyhow. Must go back for that lotion. For her birthday perhaps.
Junejulyaugseptember eighth. Nearly three months off. Then she mightn't
like it. Women won't pick up pins. Say it cuts lo.

Gleaming silks, petticoats on slim brass rails, rays of flat silk
stockings.

Useless to go back. Had to be. Tell me all.

High voices. Sunwarm silk. Jingling harnesses. All for a woman, home and
houses, silkwebs, silver, rich fruits spicy from Jaffa. Agendath Netaim.
Wealth of the world.

A warm human plumpness settled down on his brain. His brain yielded.
Perfume of embraces all him assailed. With hungered flesh obscurely, he
mutely craved to adore.

Duke street. Here we are. Must eat. The Burton. Feel better then.

He turned Combridge's corner, still pursued. Jingling, hoofthuds.
Perfumed bodies, warm, full. All kissed, yielded: in deep summer fields,
tangled pressed grass, in trickling hallways of tenements, along sofas,
creaking beds.

--Jack, love!

--Darling!

--Kiss me, Reggy!

--My boy!

--Love!

His heart astir he pushed in the door of the Burton restaurant. Stink
gripped his trembling breath: pungent meatjuice, slush of greens. See
the animals feed.

Men, men, men.

Perched on high stools by the bar, hats shoved back, at the tables
calling for more bread no charge, swilling, wolfing gobfuls of sloppy
food, their eyes bulging, wiping wetted moustaches. A pallid suetfaced
young man polished his tumbler knife fork and spoon with his napkin. New
set of microbes. A man with an infant's saucestained napkin tucked round
him shovelled gurgling soup down his gullet. A man spitting back on his
plate: halfmasticated gristle: gums: no teeth to chewchewchew it. Chump
chop from the grill. Bolting to get it over. Sad booser's eyes. Bitten
off more than he can chew. Am I like that? See ourselves as others see
us. Hungry man is an angry man. Working tooth and jaw. Don't! O! A bone!
That last pagan king of Ireland Cormac in the schoolpoem choked himself
at Sletty southward of the Boyne. Wonder what he was eating. Something
galoptious. Saint Patrick converted him to Christianity. Couldn't
swallow it all however.

--Roast beef and cabbage.

--One stew.

Smells of men. His gorge rose. Spaton sawdust, sweetish warmish
cigarette smoke, reek of plug, spilt beer, men's beery piss, the stale
of ferment.

Couldn't eat a morsel here. Fellow sharpening knife and fork to eat all
before him, old chap picking his tootles. Slight spasm, full, chewing
the cud. Before and after. Grace after meals. Look on this picture then
on that. Scoffing up stewgravy with sopping sippets of bread. Lick it
off the plate, man! Get out of this.

He gazed round the stooled and tabled eaters, tightening the wings of
his nose.

--Two stouts here.

--One corned and cabbage.

That fellow ramming a knifeful of cabbage down as if his life depended
on it. Good stroke. Give me the fidgets to look. Safer to eat from his
three hands. Tear it limb from limb. Second nature to him. Born with a
silver knife in his mouth. That's witty, I think. Or no. Silver means
born rich. Born with a knife. But then the allusion is lost.

An illgirt server gathered sticky clattering plates. Rock, the head
bailiff, standing at the bar blew the foamy crown from his tankard. Well
up: it splashed yellow near his boot. A diner, knife and fork upright,
elbows on table, ready for a second helping stared towards the foodlift
across his stained square of newspaper. Other chap telling him something
with his mouth full. Sympathetic listener. Table talk. I munched hum un
thu Unchster Bunk un Munchday. Ha? Did you, faith?

Mr Bloom raised two fingers doubtfully to his lips. His eyes said:

--Not here. Don't see him.

Out. I hate dirty eaters.

He backed towards the door. Get a light snack in Davy Byrne's. Stopgap.
Keep me going. Had a good breakfast.

--Roast and mashed here.

--Pint of stout.

Every fellow for his own, tooth and nail. Gulp. Grub. Gulp. Gobstuff.

He came out into clearer air and turned back towards Grafton street. Eat
or be eaten. Kill! Kill!

Suppose that communal kitchen years to come perhaps. All trotting down
with porringers and tommycans to be filled. Devour contents in the
street. John Howard Parnell example the provost of Trinity every
mother's son don't talk of your provosts and provost of Trinity women
and children cabmen priests parsons fieldmarshals archbishops. From
Ailesbury road, Clyde road, artisans' dwellings, north Dublin union,
lord mayor in his gingerbread coach, old queen in a bathchair. My
plate's empty. After you with our incorporated drinkingcup. Like sir
Philip Crampton's fountain. Rub off the microbes with your handkerchief.
Next chap rubs on a new batch with his. Father O'Flynn would make
hares of them all. Have rows all the same. All for number one. Children
fighting for the scrapings of the pot. Want a souppot as big as the
Phoenix park. Harpooning flitches and hindquarters out of it. Hate
people all round you. City Arms hotel _table d'hôte_ she called it.
Soup, joint and sweet. Never know whose thoughts you're chewing. Then
who'd wash up all the plates and forks? Might be all feeding on tabloids
that time. Teeth getting worse and worse.

After all there's a lot in that vegetarian fine flavour of things from
the earth garlic of course it stinks after Italian organgrinders crisp
of onions mushrooms truffles. Pain to the animal too. Pluck and draw
fowl. Wretched brutes there at the cattlemarket waiting for the poleaxe
to split their skulls open. Moo. Poor trembling calves. Meh. Staggering
bob. Bubble and squeak. Butchers' buckets wobbly lights. Give us that
brisket off the hook. Plup. Rawhead and bloody bones. Flayed glasseyed
sheep hung from their haunches, sheepsnouts bloodypapered snivelling
nosejam on sawdust. Top and lashers going out. Don't maul them pieces,
young one.

Hot fresh blood they prescribe for decline. Blood always needed.
Insidious. Lick it up smokinghot, thick sugary. Famished ghosts.

Ah, I'm hungry.

He entered Davy Byrne's. Moral pub. He doesn't chat. Stands a drink now
and then. But in leapyear once in four. Cashed a cheque for me once.

What will I take now? He drew his watch. Let me see now. Shandygaff?

--Hello, Bloom, Nosey Flynn said from his nook.

--Hello, Flynn.

--How's things?

--Tiptop... Let me see. I'll take a glass of burgundy and... let me
see.

Sardines on the shelves. Almost taste them by looking. Sandwich? Ham
and his descendants musterred and bred there. Potted meats. What is home
without Plumtree's potted meat? Incomplete. What a stupid ad! Under the
obituary notices they stuck it. All up a plumtree. Dignam's potted meat.
Cannibals would with lemon and rice. White missionary too salty. Like
pickled pork. Expect the chief consumes the parts of honour. Ought to be
tough from exercise. His wives in a row to watch the effect. _There was
a right royal old nigger. Who ate or something the somethings of the
reverend Mr MacTrigger_. With it an abode of bliss. Lord knows what
concoction. Cauls mouldy tripes windpipes faked and minced up. Puzzle
find the meat. Kosher. No meat and milk together. Hygiene that was what
they call now. Yom Kippur fast spring cleaning of inside. Peace and
war depend on some fellow's digestion. Religions. Christmas turkeys and
geese. Slaughter of innocents. Eat drink and be merry. Then casual wards
full after. Heads bandaged. Cheese digests all but itself. Mity cheese.

--Have you a cheese sandwich?

--Yes, sir.

Like a few olives too if they had them. Italian I prefer. Good glass of
burgundy take away that. Lubricate. A nice salad, cool as a cucumber,
Tom Kernan can dress. Puts gusto into it. Pure olive oil. Milly served
me that cutlet with a sprig of parsley. Take one Spanish onion. God made
food, the devil the cooks. Devilled crab.

--Wife well?

--Quite well, thanks... A cheese sandwich, then. Gorgonzola, have you?

--Yes, sir.

Nosey Flynn sipped his grog.

--Doing any singing those times?

Look at his mouth. Could whistle in his own ear. Flap ears to match.
Music. Knows as much about it as my coachman. Still better tell him.
Does no harm. Free ad.

--She's engaged for a big tour end of this month. You may have heard
perhaps.

--No. O, that's the style. Who's getting it up?

The curate served.

--How much is that?

--Seven d., sir... Thank you, sir.

Mr Bloom cut his sandwich into slender strips. _Mr MacTrigger_. Easier
than the dreamy creamy stuff. _His five hundred wives. Had the time of
their lives._

--Mustard, sir?

--Thank you.

He studded under each lifted strip yellow blobs. _Their lives_. I have
it. _It grew bigger and bigger and bigger_.

--Getting it up? he said. Well, it's like a company idea, you see. Part
shares and part profits.

--Ay, now I remember, Nosey Flynn said, putting his hand in his pocket
to scratch his groin. Who is this was telling me? Isn't Blazes Boylan
mixed up in it?

A warm shock of air heat of mustard hanched on Mr Bloom's heart. He
raised his eyes and met the stare of a bilious clock. Two. Pub clock
five minutes fast. Time going on. Hands moving. Two. Not yet.

His midriff yearned then upward, sank within him, yearned more longly,
longingly.

Wine.

He smellsipped the cordial juice and, bidding his throat strongly to
speed it, set his wineglass delicately down.

--Yes, he said. He's the organiser in point of fact.

No fear: no brains.

Nosey Flynn snuffled and scratched. Flea having a good square meal.

--He had a good slice of luck, Jack Mooney was telling me, over that
boxingmatch Myler Keogh won again that soldier in the Portobello
barracks. By God, he had the little kipper down in the county Carlow he
was telling me...

Hope that dewdrop doesn't come down into his glass. No, snuffled it up.

--For near a month, man, before it came off. Sucking duck eggs by God
till further orders. Keep him off the boose, see? O, by God, Blazes is a
hairy chap.

Davy Byrne came forward from the hindbar in tuckstitched shirtsleeves,
cleaning his lips with two wipes of his napkin. Herring's blush. Whose
smile upon each feature plays with such and such replete. Too much fat
on the parsnips.

--And here's himself and pepper on him, Nosey Flynn said. Can you give
us a good one for the Gold cup?

--I'm off that, Mr Flynn, Davy Byrne answered. I never put anything on a
horse.

--You're right there, Nosey Flynn said.

Mr Bloom ate his strips of sandwich, fresh clean bread, with relish of
disgust pungent mustard, the feety savour of green cheese. Sips of his
wine soothed his palate. Not logwood that. Tastes fuller this weather
with the chill off.

Nice quiet bar. Nice piece of wood in that counter. Nicely planed. Like
the way it curves there.

--I wouldn't do anything at all in that line, Davy Byrne said. It ruined
many a man, the same horses.

Vintners' sweepstake. Licensed for the sale of beer, wine and spirits
for consumption on the premises. Heads I win tails you lose.

--True for you, Nosey Flynn said. Unless you're in the know. There's
no straight sport going now. Lenehan gets some good ones. He's giving
Sceptre today. Zinfandel's the favourite, lord Howard de Walden's, won
at Epsom. Morny Cannon is riding him. I could have got seven to one
against Saint Amant a fortnight before.

--That so? Davy Byrne said...

He went towards the window and, taking up the pettycash book, scanned
its pages.

--I could, faith, Nosey Flynn said, snuffling. That was a rare bit of
horseflesh. Saint Frusquin was her sire. She won in a thunderstorm,
Rothschild's filly, with wadding in her ears. Blue jacket and yellow
cap. Bad luck to big Ben Dollard and his John O'Gaunt. He put me off it.
Ay.

He drank resignedly from his tumbler, running his fingers down the
flutes.

--Ay, he said, sighing.

Mr Bloom, champing, standing, looked upon his sigh. Nosey numbskull.
Will I tell him that horse Lenehan? He knows already. Better let him
forget. Go and lose more. Fool and his money. Dewdrop coming down again.
Cold nose he'd have kissing a woman. Still they might like. Prickly
beards they like. Dogs' cold noses. Old Mrs Riordan with the rumbling
stomach's Skye terrier in the City Arms hotel. Molly fondling him in her
lap. O, the big doggybowwowsywowsy!

Wine soaked and softened rolled pith of bread mustard a moment mawkish
cheese. Nice wine it is. Taste it better because I'm not thirsty. Bath
of course does that. Just a bite or two. Then about six o'clock I can.
Six. Six. Time will be gone then. She...

Mild fire of wine kindled his veins. I wanted that badly. Felt so
off colour. His eyes unhungrily saw shelves of tins: sardines, gaudy
lobsters' claws. All the odd things people pick up for food. Out of
shells, periwinkles with a pin, off trees, snails out of the ground the
French eat, out of the sea with bait on a hook. Silly fish learn nothing
in a thousand years. If you didn't know risky putting anything into your
mouth. Poisonous berries. Johnny Magories. Roundness you think good.
Gaudy colour warns you off. One fellow told another and so on. Try it
on the dog first. Led on by the smell or the look. Tempting fruit.
Ice cones. Cream. Instinct. Orangegroves for instance. Need artificial
irrigation. Bleibtreustrasse. Yes but what about oysters. Unsightly like
a clot of phlegm. Filthy shells. Devil to open them too. Who found them
out? Garbage, sewage they feed on. Fizz and Red bank oysters. Effect
on the sexual. Aphrodis. He was in the Red Bank this morning. Was he
oysters old fish at table perhaps he young flesh in bed no June has
no ar no oysters. But there are people like things high. Tainted game.
Jugged hare. First catch your hare. Chinese eating eggs fifty years old,
blue and green again. Dinner of thirty courses. Each dish harmless might
mix inside. Idea for a poison mystery. That archduke Leopold was it no
yes or was it Otto one of those Habsburgs? Or who was it used to eat the
scruff off his own head? Cheapest lunch in town. Of course aristocrats,
then the others copy to be in the fashion. Milly too rock oil and flour.
Raw pastry I like myself. Half the catch of oysters they throw back in
the sea to keep up the price. Cheap no-one would buy. Caviare. Do the
grand. Hock in green glasses. Swell blowout. Lady this. Powdered bosom
pearls. The _élite. Crème de la crème_. They want special dishes to
pretend they're. Hermit with a platter of pulse keep down the stings
of the flesh. Know me come eat with me. Royal sturgeon high sheriff,
Coffey, the butcher, right to venisons of the forest from his ex. Send
him back the half of a cow. Spread I saw down in the Master of the
Rolls' kitchen area. Whitehatted _chef_ like a rabbi. Combustible duck.
Curly cabbage _à la duchesse de Parme_. Just as well to write it on the
bill of fare so you can know what you've eaten. Too many drugs spoil the
broth. I know it myself. Dosing it with Edwards' desiccated soup. Geese
stuffed silly for them. Lobsters boiled alive. Do ptake some ptarmigan.
Wouldn't mind being a waiter in a swell hotel. Tips, evening dress,
halfnaked ladies. May I tempt you to a little more filleted lemon sole,
miss Dubedat? Yes, do bedad. And she did bedad. Huguenot name I expect
that. A miss Dubedat lived in Killiney, I remember. _Du, de la_ French.
Still it's the same fish perhaps old Micky Hanlon of Moore street ripped
the guts out of making money hand over fist finger in fishes' gills
can't write his name on a cheque think he was painting the landscape
with his mouth twisted. Moooikill A Aitcha Ha ignorant as a kish of
brogues, worth fifty thousand pounds.

Stuck on the pane two flies buzzed, stuck.

Glowing wine on his palate lingered swallowed. Crushing in the winepress
grapes of Burgundy. Sun's heat it is. Seems to a secret touch telling me
memory. Touched his sense moistened remembered. Hidden under wild ferns
on Howth below us bay sleeping: sky. No sound. The sky. The bay purple
by the Lion's head. Green by Drumleck. Yellowgreen towards Sutton.
Fields of undersea, the lines faint brown in grass, buried cities.
Pillowed on my coat she had her hair, earwigs in the heather scrub
my hand under her nape, you'll toss me all. O wonder! Coolsoft with
ointments her hand touched me, caressed: her eyes upon me did not turn
away. Ravished over her I lay, full lips full open, kissed her mouth.
Yum. Softly she gave me in my mouth the seedcake warm and chewed.
Mawkish pulp her mouth had mumbled sweetsour of her spittle. Joy: I ate
it: joy. Young life, her lips that gave me pouting. Soft warm sticky
gumjelly lips. Flowers her eyes were, take me, willing eyes. Pebbles
fell. She lay still. A goat. No-one. High on Ben Howth rhododendrons a
nannygoat walking surefooted, dropping currants. Screened under ferns
she laughed warmfolded. Wildly I lay on her, kissed her: eyes, her lips,
her stretched neck beating, woman's breasts full in her blouse of nun's
veiling, fat nipples upright. Hot I tongued her. She kissed me. I was
kissed. All yielding she tossed my hair. Kissed, she kissed me.

Me. And me now.

Stuck, the flies buzzed.

His downcast eyes followed the silent veining of the oaken slab. Beauty:
it curves: curves are beauty. Shapely goddesses, Venus, Juno: curves the
world admires. Can see them library museum standing in the round hall,
naked goddesses. Aids to digestion. They don't care what man looks. All
to see. Never speaking. I mean to say to fellows like Flynn. Suppose she
did Pygmalion and Galatea what would she say first? Mortal! Put you in
your proper place. Quaffing nectar at mess with gods golden dishes, all
ambrosial. Not like a tanner lunch we have, boiled mutton, carrots and
turnips, bottle of Allsop. Nectar imagine it drinking electricity: gods'
food. Lovely forms of women sculped Junonian. Immortal lovely. And we
stuffing food in one hole and out behind: food, chyle, blood, dung,
earth, food: have to feed it like stoking an engine. They have no. Never
looked. I'll look today. Keeper won't see. Bend down let something drop
see if she.

Dribbling a quiet message from his bladder came to go to do not to
do there to do. A man and ready he drained his glass to the lees and
walked, to men too they gave themselves, manly conscious, lay with men
lovers, a youth enjoyed her, to the yard.

When the sound of his boots had ceased Davy Byrne said from his book:

--What is this he is? Isn't he in the insurance line?

--He's out of that long ago, Nosey Flynn said. He does canvassing for
the _Freeman._

--I know him well to see, Davy Byrne said. Is he in trouble?

--Trouble? Nosey Flynn said. Not that I heard of. Why?

--I noticed he was in mourning.

--Was he? Nosey Flynn said. So he was, faith. I asked him how was all at
home. You're right, by God. So he was.

--I never broach the subject, Davy Byrne said humanely, if I see a
gentleman is in trouble that way. It only brings it up fresh in their
minds.

--It's not the wife anyhow, Nosey Flynn said. I met him the day before
yesterday and he coming out of that Irish farm dairy John Wyse Nolan's
wife has in Henry street with a jar of cream in his hand taking it home
to his better half. She's well nourished, I tell you. Plovers on toast.

--And is he doing for the _Freeman?_ Davy Byrne said.

Nosey Flynn pursed his lips.

---He doesn't buy cream on the ads he picks up. You can make bacon of
that.

--How so? Davy Byrne asked, coming from his book.

Nosey Flynn made swift passes in the air with juggling fingers. He
winked.

--He's in the craft, he said.

---Do you tell me so? Davy Byrne said.

--Very much so, Nosey Flynn said. Ancient free and accepted order. He's
an excellent brother. Light, life and love, by God. They give him a leg
up. I was told that by a--well, I won't say who.

--Is that a fact?

--O, it's a fine order, Nosey Flynn said. They stick to you when you're
down. I know a fellow was trying to get into it. But they're as close as
damn it. By God they did right to keep the women out of it.

Davy Byrne smiledyawnednodded all in one:

--Iiiiiichaaaaaaach!

--There was one woman, Nosey Flynn said, hid herself in a clock to find
out what they do be doing. But be damned but they smelt her out and
swore her in on the spot a master mason. That was one of the saint
Legers of Doneraile.

Davy Byrne, sated after his yawn, said with tearwashed eyes:

--And is that a fact? Decent quiet man he is. I often saw him in here
and I never once saw him--you know, over the line.

--God Almighty couldn't make him drunk, Nosey Flynn said firmly. Slips
off when the fun gets too hot. Didn't you see him look at his watch? Ah,
you weren't there. If you ask him to have a drink first thing he does
he outs with the watch to see what he ought to imbibe. Declare to God he
does.

--There are some like that, Davy Byrne said. He's a safe man, I'd say.

--He's not too bad, Nosey Flynn said, snuffling it up. He's been known
to put his hand down too to help a fellow. Give the devil his due. O,
Bloom has his good points. But there's one thing he'll never do.

His hand scrawled a dry pen signature beside his grog.

--I know, Davy Byrne said.

--Nothing in black and white, Nosey Flynn said.

Paddy Leonard and Bantam Lyons came in. Tom Rochford followed frowning,
a plaining hand on his claret waistcoat.

--Day, Mr Byrne.

--Day, gentlemen.

They paused at the counter.

--Who's standing? Paddy Leonard asked.

--I'm sitting anyhow, Nosey Flynn answered.

--Well, what'll it be? Paddy Leonard asked.

--I'll take a stone ginger, Bantam Lyons said.

--How much? Paddy Leonard cried. Since when, for God' sake? What's
yours, Tom?

--How is the main drainage? Nosey Flynn asked, sipping.

For answer Tom Rochford pressed his hand to his breastbone and
hiccupped.

--Would I trouble you for a glass of fresh water, Mr Byrne? he said.

--Certainly, sir.

Paddy Leonard eyed his alemates.

--Lord love a duck, he said. Look at what I'm standing drinks to! Cold
water and gingerpop! Two fellows that would suck whisky off a sore leg.
He has some bloody horse up his sleeve for the Gold cup. A dead snip.

--Zinfandel is it? Nosey Flynn asked.

Tom Rochford spilt powder from a twisted paper into the water set before
him.

--That cursed dyspepsia, he said before drinking.

--Breadsoda is very good, Davy Byrne said.

Tom Rochford nodded and drank.

--Is it Zinfandel?

--Say nothing! Bantam Lyons winked. I'm going to plunge five bob on my
own.

--Tell us if you're worth your salt and be damned to you, Paddy Leonard
said. Who gave it to you?

Mr Bloom on his way out raised three fingers in greeting.

--So long! Nosey Flynn said.

The others turned.

--That's the man now that gave it to me, Bantam Lyons whispered.

--Prrwht! Paddy Leonard said with scorn. Mr Byrne, sir, we'll take two
of your small Jamesons after that and a...

--Stone ginger, Davy Byrne added civilly.

--Ay, Paddy Leonard said. A suckingbottle for the baby.

Mr Bloom walked towards Dawson street, his tongue brushing his teeth
smooth. Something green it would have to be: spinach, say. Then with
those Rontgen rays searchlight you could.

At Duke lane a ravenous terrier choked up a sick knuckly cud on the
cobblestones and lapped it with new zest. Surfeit. Returned with thanks
having fully digested the contents. First sweet then savoury. Mr Bloom
coasted warily. Ruminants. His second course. Their upper jaw they move.
Wonder if Tom Rochford will do anything with that invention of his?
Wasting time explaining it to Flynn's mouth. Lean people long mouths.
Ought to be a hall or a place where inventors could go in and invent
free. Course then you'd have all the cranks pestering.

He hummed, prolonging in solemn echo the closes of the bars:

_Don Giovanni, a cenar teco M'invitasti._

Feel better. Burgundy. Good pick me up. Who distilled first? Some chap
in the blues. Dutch courage. That _Kilkenny People_ in the national
library now I must.

Bare clean closestools waiting in the window of William Miller, plumber,
turned back his thoughts. They could: and watch it all the way down,
swallow a pin sometimes come out of the ribs years after, tour round the
body changing biliary duct spleen squirting liver gastric juice coils of
intestines like pipes. But the poor buffer would have to stand all the
time with his insides entrails on show. Science.

--_A cenar teco._

What does that _teco_ mean? Tonight perhaps.

     _Don Giovanni, thou hast me invited
     To come to supper tonight,
     The rum the rumdum._

Doesn't go properly.

Keyes: two months if I get Nannetti to. That'll be two pounds ten about
two pounds eight. Three Hynes owes me. Two eleven. Prescott's dyeworks
van over there. If I get Billy Prescott's ad: two fifteen. Five guineas
about. On the pig's back.

Could buy one of those silk petticoats for Molly, colour of her new
garters.

Today. Today. Not think.

Tour the south then. What about English wateringplaces? Brighton,
Margate. Piers by moonlight. Her voice floating out. Those lovely
seaside girls. Against John Long's a drowsing loafer lounged in heavy
thought, gnawing a crusted knuckle. Handy man wants job. Small wages.
Will eat anything.

Mr Bloom turned at Gray's confectioner's window of unbought tarts and
passed the reverend Thomas Connellan's bookstore. _Why I left the church
of Rome? Birds' Nest._ Women run him. They say they used to give pauper
children soup to change to protestants in the time of the potato blight.
Society over the way papa went to for the conversion of poor jews. Same
bait. Why we left the church of Rome.

A blind stripling stood tapping the curbstone with his slender cane. No
tram in sight. Wants to cross.

--Do you want to cross? Mr Bloom asked.

The blind stripling did not answer. His wallface frowned weakly. He
moved his head uncertainly.

--You're in Dawson street, Mr Bloom said. Molesworth street is opposite.
Do you want to cross? There's nothing in the way.

The cane moved out trembling to the left. Mr Bloom's eye followed its
line and saw again the dyeworks' van drawn up before Drago's. Where I
saw his brillantined hair just when I was. Horse drooping. Driver in
John Long's. Slaking his drouth.

--There's a van there, Mr Bloom said, but it's not moving. I'll see you
across. Do you want to go to Molesworth street?

--Yes, the stripling answered. South Frederick street.

--Come, Mr Bloom said.

He touched the thin elbow gently: then took the limp seeing hand to
guide it forward.

Say something to him. Better not do the condescending. They mistrust
what you tell them. Pass a common remark.

--The rain kept off.

No answer.

Stains on his coat. Slobbers his food, I suppose. Tastes all different
for him. Have to be spoonfed first. Like a child's hand, his hand. Like
Milly's was. Sensitive. Sizing me up I daresay from my hand. Wonder
if he has a name. Van. Keep his cane clear of the horse's legs: tired
drudge get his doze. That's right. Clear. Behind a bull: in front of a
horse.

--Thanks, sir.

Knows I'm a man. Voice.

--Right now? First turn to the left.

The blind stripling tapped the curbstone and went on his way, drawing
his cane back, feeling again.

Mr Bloom walked behind the eyeless feet, a flatcut suit of herringbone
tweed. Poor young fellow! How on earth did he know that van was there?
Must have felt it. See things in their forehead perhaps: kind of sense
of volume. Weight or size of it, something blacker than the dark. Wonder
would he feel it if something was removed. Feel a gap. Queer idea of
Dublin he must have, tapping his way round by the stones. Could he walk
in a beeline if he hadn't that cane? Bloodless pious face like a fellow
going in to be a priest.

Penrose! That was that chap's name.

Look at all the things they can learn to do. Read with their fingers.
Tune pianos. Or we are surprised they have any brains. Why we think a
deformed person or a hunchback clever if he says something we might say.
Of course the other senses are more. Embroider. Plait baskets. People
ought to help. Workbasket I could buy for Molly's birthday. Hates
sewing. Might take an objection. Dark men they call them.

Sense of smell must be stronger too. Smells on all sides, bunched
together. Each street different smell. Each person too. Then the spring,
the summer: smells. Tastes? They say you can't taste wines with your
eyes shut or a cold in the head. Also smoke in the dark they say get no
pleasure.

And with a woman, for instance. More shameless not seeing. That girl
passing the Stewart institution, head in the air. Look at me. I have
them all on. Must be strange not to see her. Kind of a form in his
mind's eye. The voice, temperatures: when he touches her with his
fingers must almost see the lines, the curves. His hands on her hair,
for instance. Say it was black, for instance. Good. We call it black.
Then passing over her white skin. Different feel perhaps. Feeling of
white.

Postoffice. Must answer. Fag today. Send her a postal order two
shillings, half a crown. Accept my little present. Stationer's just here
too. Wait. Think over it.

With a gentle finger he felt ever so slowly the hair combed back above
his ears. Again. Fibres of fine fine straw. Then gently his finger felt
the skin of his right cheek. Downy hair there too. Not smooth enough.
The belly is the smoothest. No-one about. There he goes into Frederick
street. Perhaps to Levenston's dancing academy piano. Might be settling
my braces.

Walking by Doran's publichouse he slid his hand between his waistcoat
and trousers and, pulling aside his shirt gently, felt a slack fold of
his belly. But I know it's whitey yellow. Want to try in the dark to
see.

He withdrew his hand and pulled his dress to.

Poor fellow! Quite a boy. Terrible. Really terrible. What dreams would
he have, not seeing? Life a dream for him. Where is the justice being
born that way? All those women and children excursion beanfeast burned
and drowned in New York. Holocaust. Karma they call that transmigration
for sins you did in a past life the reincarnation met him pike hoses.
Dear, dear, dear. Pity, of course: but somehow you can't cotton on to
them someway.

Sir Frederick Falkiner going into the freemasons' hall. Solemn as Troy.
After his good lunch in Earlsfort terrace. Old legal cronies cracking
a magnum. Tales of the bench and assizes and annals of the bluecoat
school. I sentenced him to ten years. I suppose he'd turn up his nose
at that stuff I drank. Vintage wine for them, the year marked on a
dusty bottle. Has his own ideas of justice in the recorder's court.
Wellmeaning old man. Police chargesheets crammed with cases get their
percentage manufacturing crime. Sends them to the rightabout. The devil
on moneylenders. Gave Reuben J. a great strawcalling. Now he's really
what they call a dirty jew. Power those judges have. Crusty old topers
in wigs. Bear with a sore paw. And may the Lord have mercy on your soul.

Hello, placard. Mirus bazaar. His Excellency the lord lieutenant.
Sixteenth. Today it is. In aid of funds for Mercer's hospital. _The
Messiah_ was first given for that. Yes. Handel. What about going out
there: Ballsbridge. Drop in on Keyes. No use sticking to him like a
leech. Wear out my welcome. Sure to know someone on the gate.

Mr Bloom came to Kildare street. First I must. Library.

Straw hat in sunlight. Tan shoes. Turnedup trousers. It is. It is.

His heart quopped softly. To the right. Museum. Goddesses. He swerved to
the right.

Is it? Almost certain. Won't look. Wine in my face. Why did I? Too
heady. Yes, it is. The walk. Not see. Get on.

Making for the museum gate with long windy steps he lifted his eyes.
Handsome building. Sir Thomas Deane designed. Not following me?

Didn't see me perhaps. Light in his eyes.

The flutter of his breath came forth in short sighs. Quick. Cold
statues: quiet there. Safe in a minute.

No. Didn't see me. After two. Just at the gate.

My heart!

His eyes beating looked steadfastly at cream curves of stone. Sir Thomas
Deane was the Greek architecture.

Look for something I.

His hasty hand went quick into a pocket, took out, read unfolded
Agendath Netaim. Where did I?

Busy looking.

He thrust back quick Agendath.

Afternoon she said.

I am looking for that. Yes, that. Try all pockets. Handker. _Freeman._
Where did I? Ah, yes. Trousers. Potato. Purse. Where?

Hurry. Walk quietly. Moment more. My heart.

His hand looking for the where did I put found in his hip pocket soap
lotion have to call tepid paper stuck. Ah soap there I yes. Gate.

Safe!


Urbane, to comfort them, the quaker librarian purred:


--And we have, have we not, those priceless pages of _Wilhelm Meister_.
A great poet on a great brother poet. A hesitating soul taking arms
against a sea of troubles, torn by conflicting doubts, as one sees in
real life.

He came a step a sinkapace forward on neatsleather creaking and a step
backward a sinkapace on the solemn floor.

A noiseless attendant setting open the door but slightly made him a
noiseless beck.

--Directly, said he, creaking to go, albeit lingering. The beautiful
ineffectual dreamer who comes to grief against hard facts. One always
feels that Goethe's judgments are so true. True in the larger analysis.

Twicreakingly analysis he corantoed off. Bald, most zealous by the door
he gave his large ear all to the attendant's words: heard them: and was
gone.

Two left.

--Monsieur de la Palice, Stephen sneered, was alive fifteen minutes
before his death.

--Have you found those six brave medicals, John Eglinton asked with
elder's gall, to write _Paradise Lost_ at your dictation? _The Sorrows
of Satan_ he calls it.

Smile. Smile Cranly's smile.

     _First he tickled her
     Then he patted her
     Then he passed the female catheter.
     For he was a medical
     Jolly old medi..._

--I feel you would need one more for _Hamlet._ Seven is dear to the
mystic mind. The shining seven W.B. calls them.

Glittereyed his rufous skull close to his greencapped desklamp sought
the face bearded amid darkgreener shadow, an ollav, holyeyed. He laughed
low: a sizar's laugh of Trinity: unanswered.

     _Orchestral Satan, weeping many a rood
     Tears such as angels weep.
     Ed egli avea del cul fatto trombetta._

He holds my follies hostage.

Cranly's eleven true Wicklowmen to free their sireland. Gaptoothed
Kathleen, her four beautiful green fields, the stranger in her house.
And one more to hail him: _ave, rabbi_: the Tinahely twelve. In the
shadow of the glen he cooees for them. My soul's youth I gave him, night
by night. God speed. Good hunting.

Mulligan has my telegram.

Folly. Persist.

--Our young Irish bards, John Eglinton censured, have yet to create a
figure which the world will set beside Saxon Shakespeare's Hamlet though
I admire him, as old Ben did, on this side idolatry.

--All these questions are purely academic, Russell oracled out of his
shadow. I mean, whether Hamlet is Shakespeare or James I or Essex.
Clergymen's discussions of the historicity of Jesus. Art has to reveal
to us ideas, formless spiritual essences. The supreme question about a
work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring. The painting of
Gustave Moreau is the painting of ideas. The deepest poetry of Shelley,
the words of Hamlet bring our minds into contact with the eternal
wisdom, Plato's world of ideas. All the rest is the speculation of
schoolboys for schoolboys.

A. E. has been telling some yankee interviewer. Wall, tarnation strike
me!

--The schoolmen were schoolboys first, Stephen said superpolitely.
Aristotle was once Plato's schoolboy.

--And has remained so, one should hope, John Eglinton sedately said. One
can see him, a model schoolboy with his diploma under his arm.

He laughed again at the now smiling bearded face.

Formless spiritual. Father, Word and Holy Breath. Allfather, the
heavenly man. Hiesos Kristos, magician of the beautiful, the Logos who
suffers in us at every moment. This verily is that. I am the fire upon
the altar. I am the sacrificial butter.

Dunlop, Judge, the noblest Roman of them all, A.E., Arval, the Name
Ineffable, in heaven hight: K.H., their master, whose identity is no
secret to adepts. Brothers of the great white lodge always watching
to see if they can help. The Christ with the bridesister, moisture of
light, born of an ensouled virgin, repentant sophia, departed to the
plane of buddhi. The life esoteric is not for ordinary person. O.P.
must work off bad karma first. Mrs Cooper Oakley once glimpsed our very
illustrious sister H.P.B.'s elemental.

O, fie! Out on't! _Pfuiteufel!_ You naughtn't to look, missus, so you
naughtn't when a lady's ashowing of her elemental.

Mr Best entered, tall, young, mild, light. He bore in his hand with
grace a notebook, new, large, clean, bright.

--That model schoolboy, Stephen said, would find Hamlet's musings about
the afterlife of his princely soul, the improbable, insignificant and
undramatic monologue, as shallow as Plato's.

John Eglinton, frowning, said, waxing wroth:

--Upon my word it makes my blood boil to hear anyone compare Aristotle
with Plato.

--Which of the two, Stephen asked, would have banished me from his
commonwealth?

Unsheathe your dagger definitions. Horseness is the whatness of
allhorse. Streams of tendency and eons they worship. God: noise in the
street: very peripatetic. Space: what you damn well have to see. Through
spaces smaller than red globules of man's blood they creepycrawl after
Blake's buttocks into eternity of which this vegetable world is but a
shadow. Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to
the past.

Mr Best came forward, amiable, towards his colleague.

--Haines is gone, he said.

--Is he?

--I was showing him Jubainville's book. He's quite enthusiastic, don't
you know, about Hyde's _Lovesongs of Connacht._ I couldn't bring him in
to hear the discussion. He's gone to Gill's to buy it.

     _Bound thee forth, my booklet, quick
     To greet the callous public.
     Writ, I ween, 'twas not my wish
     In lean unlovely English._

--The peatsmoke is going to his head, John Eglinton opined.

We feel in England. Penitent thief. Gone. I smoked his baccy. Green
twinkling stone. An emerald set in the ring of the sea.

--People do not know how dangerous lovesongs can be, the auric egg of
Russell warned occultly. The movements which work revolutions in the
world are born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant's heart on the
hillside. For them the earth is not an exploitable ground but the
living mother. The rarefied air of the academy and the arena produce the
sixshilling novel, the musichall song. France produces the finest flower
of corruption in Mallarme but the desirable life is revealed only to the
poor of heart, the life of Homer's Phaeacians.

From these words Mr Best turned an unoffending face to Stephen.

--Mallarme, don't you know, he said, has written those wonderful prose
poems Stephen MacKenna used to read to me in Paris. The one about
_Hamlet._ He says: _il se promène, lisant au livre de lui-même_, don't
you know, _reading the book of himself_. He describes _Hamlet_ given in
a French town, don't you know, a provincial town. They advertised it.

His free hand graciously wrote tiny signs in air.

     _HAMLET
     ou
     LE DISTRAIT
     Pièce de Shakespeare_

He repeated to John Eglinton's newgathered frown:

--_Pièce de Shakespeare_, don't you know. It's so French. The French
point of view. _Hamlet ou_...

--The absentminded beggar, Stephen ended.

John Eglinton laughed.

--Yes, I suppose it would be, he said. Excellent people, no doubt, but
distressingly shortsighted in some matters.

Sumptuous and stagnant exaggeration of murder.

--A deathsman of the soul Robert Greene called him, Stephen said. Not
for nothing was he a butcher's son, wielding the sledded poleaxe and
spitting in his palms. Nine lives are taken off for his father's one.
Our Father who art in purgatory. Khaki Hamlets don't hesitate to
shoot. The bloodboltered shambles in act five is a forecast of the
concentration camp sung by Mr Swinburne.

Cranly, I his mute orderly, following battles from afar.

_Whelps and dams of murderous foes whom none But we had spared..._

Between the Saxon smile and yankee yawp. The devil and the deep sea.

--He will have it that _Hamlet_ is a ghoststory, John Eglinton said
for Mr Best's behoof. Like the fat boy in Pickwick he wants to make our
flesh creep.

_List! List! O List!_

My flesh hears him: creeping, hears.

_If thou didst ever..._

--What is a ghost? Stephen said with tingling energy. One who has faded
into impalpability through death, through absence, through change of
manners. Elizabethan London lay as far from Stratford as corrupt Paris
lies from virgin Dublin. Who is the ghost from _limbo patrum_, returning
to the world that has forgotten him? Who is King Hamlet?

John Eglinton shifted his spare body, leaning back to judge.

Lifted.

--It is this hour of a day in mid June, Stephen said, begging with
a swift glance their hearing. The flag is up on the playhouse by the
bankside. The bear Sackerson growls in the pit near it, Paris garden.
Canvasclimbers who sailed with Drake chew their sausages among the
groundlings.

Local colour. Work in all you know. Make them accomplices.

--Shakespeare has left the huguenot's house in Silver street and walks
by the swanmews along the riverbank. But he does not stay to feed the
pen chivying her game of cygnets towards the rushes. The swan of Avon
has other thoughts.

Composition of place. Ignatius Loyola, make haste to help me!

--The play begins. A player comes on under the shadow, made up in the
castoff mail of a court buck, a wellset man with a bass voice. It is the
ghost, the king, a king and no king, and the player is Shakespeare who
has studied _Hamlet_ all the years of his life which were not vanity in
order to play the part of the spectre. He speaks the words to Burbage,
the young player who stands before him beyond the rack of cerecloth,
calling him by a name:

_Hamlet, I am thy father's spirit,_

bidding him list. To a son he speaks, the son of his soul, the prince,
young Hamlet and to the son of his body, Hamnet Shakespeare, who has
died in Stratford that his namesake may live for ever.

Is it possible that that player Shakespeare, a ghost by absence, and in
the vesture of buried Denmark, a ghost by death, speaking his own words
to his own son's name (had Hamnet Shakespeare lived he would have been
prince Hamlet's twin), is it possible, I want to know, or probable that
he did not draw or foresee the logical conclusion of those premises: you
are the dispossessed son: I am the murdered father: your mother is the
guilty queen, Ann Shakespeare, born Hathaway?

--But this prying into the family life of a great man, Russell began
impatiently.

Art thou there, truepenny?

--Interesting only to the parish clerk. I mean, we have the plays. I
mean when we read the poetry of _King Lear_ what is it to us how the
poet lived? As for living our servants can do that for us, Villiers de
l'Isle has said. Peeping and prying into greenroom gossip of the day,
the poet's drinking, the poet's debts. We have _King Lear_: and it is
immortal.

Mr Best's face, appealed to, agreed.

_Flow over them with your waves and with your waters, Mananaan, Mananaan
MacLir..._

How now, sirrah, that pound he lent you when you were hungry?

Marry, I wanted it.

Take thou this noble.

Go to! You spent most of it in Georgina Johnson's bed, clergyman's
daughter. Agenbite of inwit.

Do you intend to pay it back?

O, yes.

When? Now?

Well... No.

When, then?

I paid my way. I paid my way.

Steady on. He's from beyant Boyne water. The northeast corner. You owe
it.

Wait. Five months. Molecules all change. I am other I now. Other I got
pound.

Buzz. Buzz.

But I, entelechy, form of forms, am I by memory because under
everchanging forms.

I that sinned and prayed and fasted.

A child Conmee saved from pandies.

I, I and I. I.

A.E.I.O.U.

--Do you mean to fly in the face of the tradition of three centuries?
John Eglinton's carping voice asked. Her ghost at least has been laid
for ever. She died, for literature at least, before she was born.

--She died, Stephen retorted, sixtyseven years after she was born. She
saw him into and out of the world. She took his first embraces. She bore
his children and she laid pennies on his eyes to keep his eyelids closed
when he lay on his deathbed.

Mother's deathbed. Candle. The sheeted mirror. Who brought me into
this world lies there, bronzelidded, under few cheap flowers. _Liliata
rutilantium._

I wept alone.

John Eglinton looked in the tangled glowworm of his lamp.

--The world believes that Shakespeare made a mistake, he said, and got
out of it as quickly and as best he could.

--Bosh! Stephen said rudely. A man of genius makes no mistakes. His
errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.

Portals of discovery opened to let in the quaker librarian,
softcreakfooted, bald, eared and assiduous.

--A shrew, John Eglinton said shrewdly, is not a useful portal of
discovery, one should imagine. What useful discovery did Socrates learn
from Xanthippe?

--Dialectic, Stephen answered: and from his mother how to bring thoughts
into the world. What he learnt from his other wife Myrto (_absit
nomen!_), Socratididion's Epipsychidion, no man, not a woman, will ever
know. But neither the midwife's lore nor the caudlelectures saved him
from the archons of Sinn Fein and their naggin of hemlock.

--But Ann Hathaway? Mr Best's quiet voice said forgetfully. Yes, we seem
to be forgetting her as Shakespeare himself forgot her.

His look went from brooder's beard to carper's skull, to remind, to
chide them not unkindly, then to the baldpink lollard costard, guiltless
though maligned.

--He had a good groatsworth of wit, Stephen said, and no truant memory.
He carried a memory in his wallet as he trudged to Romeville whistling
_The girl I left behind me._ If the earthquake did not time it we should
know where to place poor Wat, sitting in his form, the cry of hounds,
the studded bridle and her blue windows. That memory, _Venus and
Adonis_, lay in the bedchamber of every light-of-love in London.
Is Katharine the shrew illfavoured? Hortensio calls her young and
beautiful. Do you think the writer of _Antony and Cleopatra_, a
passionate pilgrim, had his eyes in the back of his head that he chose
the ugliest doxy in all Warwickshire to lie withal? Good: he left her
and gained the world of men. But his boywomen are the women of a boy.
Their life, thought, speech are lent them by males. He chose badly? He
was chosen, it seems to me. If others have their will Ann hath a way.
By cock, she was to blame. She put the comether on him, sweet and
twentysix. The greyeyed goddess who bends over the boy Adonis, stooping
to conquer, as prologue to the swelling act, is a boldfaced Stratford
wench who tumbles in a cornfield a lover younger than herself.

And my turn? When?

Come!

--Ryefield, Mr Best said brightly, gladly, raising his new book, gladly,
brightly.

He murmured then with blond delight for all:

_Between the acres of the rye These pretty countryfolk would lie._

Paris: the wellpleased pleaser.

A tall figure in bearded homespun rose from shadow and unveiled its
cooperative watch.

--I am afraid I am due at the _Homestead._

Whither away? Exploitable ground.

--Are you going? John Eglinton's active eyebrows asked. Shall we see you
at Moore's tonight? Piper is coming.

--Piper! Mr Best piped. Is Piper back?

Peter Piper pecked a peck of pick of peck of pickled pepper.

--I don't know if I can. Thursday. We have our meeting. If I can get
away in time.

Yogibogeybox in Dawson chambers. _Isis Unveiled._ Their Pali book we
tried to pawn. Crosslegged under an umbrel umbershoot he thrones an
Aztec logos, functioning on astral levels, their oversoul, mahamahatma.
The faithful hermetists await the light, ripe for chelaship,
ringroundabout him. Louis H. Victory. T. Caulfield Irwin. Lotus ladies
tend them i'the eyes, their pineal glands aglow. Filled with his god,
he thrones, Buddh under plantain. Gulfer of souls, engulfer. Hesouls,
shesouls, shoals of souls. Engulfed with wailing creecries, whirled,
whirling, they bewail.

     _In quintessential triviality
     For years in this fleshcase a shesoul dwelt._

--They say we are to have a literary surprise, the quaker librarian
said, friendly and earnest. Mr Russell, rumour has it, is gathering
together a sheaf of our younger poets' verses. We are all looking
forward anxiously.

Anxiously he glanced in the cone of lamplight where three faces,
lighted, shone.

See this. Remember.

Stephen looked down on a wide headless caubeen, hung on his
ashplanthandle over his knee. My casque and sword. Touch lightly with
two index fingers. Aristotle's experiment. One or two? Necessity is that
in virtue of which it is impossible that one can be otherwise. Argal,
one hat is one hat.

Listen.

Young Colum and Starkey. George Roberts is doing the commercial part.
Longworth will give it a good puff in the _Express._ O, will he? I liked
Colum's _Drover._ Yes, I think he has that queer thing genius. Do you
think he has genius really? Yeats admired his line: _As in wild earth
a Grecian vase_. Did he? I hope you'll be able to come tonight. Malachi
Mulligan is coming too. Moore asked him to bring Haines. Did you hear
Miss Mitchell's joke about Moore and Martyn? That Moore is Martyn's
wild oats? Awfully clever, isn't it? They remind one of Don Quixote and
Sancho Panza. Our national epic has yet to be written, Dr Sigerson says.
Moore is the man for it. A knight of the rueful countenance here in
Dublin. With a saffron kilt? O'Neill Russell? O, yes, he must speak the
grand old tongue. And his Dulcinea? James Stephens is doing some clever
sketches. We are becoming important, it seems.

Cordelia. _Cordoglio._ Lir's loneliest daughter.

Nookshotten. Now your best French polish.

--Thank you very much, Mr Russell, Stephen said, rising. If you will be
so kind as to give the letter to Mr Norman...

--O, yes. If he considers it important it will go in. We have so much
correspondence.

--I understand, Stephen said. Thanks.

God ild you. The pigs' paper. Bullockbefriending.

Synge has promised me an article for _Dana_ too. Are we going to be
read? I feel we are. The Gaelic league wants something in Irish. I hope
you will come round tonight. Bring Starkey.

Stephen sat down.

The quaker librarian came from the leavetakers. Blushing, his mask said:

--Mr Dedalus, your views are most illuminating.

He creaked to and fro, tiptoing up nearer heaven by the altitude of a
chopine, and, covered by the noise of outgoing, said low:

--Is it your view, then, that she was not faithful to the poet?

Alarmed face asks me. Why did he come? Courtesy or an inward light?

--Where there is a reconciliation, Stephen said, there must have been
first a sundering.

--Yes.

Christfox in leather trews, hiding, a runaway in blighted treeforks,
from hue and cry. Knowing no vixen, walking lonely in the chase. Women
he won to him, tender people, a whore of Babylon, ladies of justices,
bully tapsters' wives. Fox and geese. And in New Place a slack
dishonoured body that once was comely, once as sweet, as fresh as
cinnamon, now her leaves falling, all, bare, frighted of the narrow
grave and unforgiven.

--Yes. So you think...

The door closed behind the outgoer.

Rest suddenly possessed the discreet vaulted cell, rest of warm and
brooding air.

A vestal's lamp.

Here he ponders things that were not: what Caesar would have lived to do
had he believed the soothsayer: what might have been: possibilities of
the possible as possible: things not known: what name Achilles bore when
he lived among women.

Coffined thoughts around me, in mummycases, embalmed in spice of words.
Thoth, god of libraries, a birdgod, moonycrowned. And I heard the
voice of that Egyptian highpriest. _In painted chambers loaded with
tilebooks._

They are still. Once quick in the brains of men. Still: but an itch of
death is in them, to tell me in my ear a maudlin tale, urge me to wreak
their will.

--Certainly, John Eglinton mused, of all great men he is the most
enigmatic. We know nothing but that he lived and suffered. Not even so
much. Others abide our question. A shadow hangs over all the rest.

--But _Hamlet_ is so personal, isn't it? Mr Best pleaded. I mean, a kind
of private paper, don't you know, of his private life. I mean, I don't
care a button, don't you know, who is killed or who is guilty...

He rested an innocent book on the edge of the desk, smiling his
defiance. His private papers in the original. _Ta an bad ar an tir. Taim
in mo shagart_. Put beurla on it, littlejohn.

Quoth littlejohn Eglinton:

--I was prepared for paradoxes from what Malachi Mulligan told us but
I may as well warn you that if you want to shake my belief that
Shakespeare is Hamlet you have a stern task before you.

Bear with me.

Stephen withstood the bane of miscreant eyes glinting stern under
wrinkled brows. A basilisk. _E quando vede l'uomo l'attosca_. Messer
Brunetto, I thank thee for the word.

--As we, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies, Stephen said,
from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and fro, so does the artist
weave and unweave his image. And as the mole on my right breast is where
it was when I was born, though all my body has been woven of new stuff
time after time, so through the ghost of the unquiet father the image
of the unliving son looks forth. In the intense instant of imagination,
when the mind, Shelley says, is a fading coal, that which I was is that
which I am and that which in possibility I may come to be. So in the
future, the sister of the past, I may see myself as I sit here now but
by reflection from that which then I shall be.

Drummond of Hawthornden helped you at that stile.

--Yes, Mr Best said youngly. I feel Hamlet quite young. The bitterness
might be from the father but the passages with Ophelia are surely from
the son.

Has the wrong sow by the lug. He is in my father. I am in his son.

--That mole is the last to go, Stephen said, laughing.

John Eglinton made a nothing pleasing mow.

--If that were the birthmark of genius, he said, genius would be a
drug in the market. The plays of Shakespeare's later years which Renan
admired so much breathe another spirit.

--The spirit of reconciliation, the quaker librarian breathed.

--There can be no reconciliation, Stephen said, if there has not been a
sundering.

Said that.

--If you want to know what are the events which cast their shadow over
the hell of time of _King Lear, Othello, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida,_
look to see when and how the shadow lifts. What softens the heart of a
man, shipwrecked in storms dire, Tried, like another Ulysses, Pericles,
prince of Tyre?

Head, redconecapped, buffeted, brineblinded.

--A child, a girl, placed in his arms, Marina.

--The leaning of sophists towards the bypaths of apocrypha is a constant
quantity, John Eglinton detected. The highroads are dreary but they lead
to the town.

Good Bacon: gone musty. Shakespeare Bacon's wild oats. Cypherjugglers
going the highroads. Seekers on the great quest. What town, good
masters? Mummed in names: A. E., eon: Magee, John Eglinton. East of the
sun, west of the moon: _Tir na n-og_. Booted the twain and staved.

_How many miles to Dublin? Three score and ten, sir. Will we be there by
candlelight?_

--Mr Brandes accepts it, Stephen said, as the first play of the closing
period.

--Does he? What does Mr Sidney Lee, or Mr Simon Lazarus as some aver his
name is, say of it?

--Marina, Stephen said, a child of storm, Miranda, a wonder, Perdita,
that which was lost. What was lost is given back to him: his daughter's
child. _My dearest wife_, Pericles says, _was like this maid._ Will any
man love the daughter if he has not loved the mother?

--The art of being a grandfather, Mr Best gan murmur. _l'art d'être
grand_...

--Will he not see reborn in her, with the memory of his own youth added,
another image?

Do you know what you are talking about? Love, yes. Word known to all
men. Amor vero aliquid alicui bonum vult unde et ea quae concupiscimus
...

--His own image to a man with that queer thing genius is the standard of
all experience, material and moral. Such an appeal will touch him. The
images of other males of his blood will repel him. He will see in them
grotesque attempts of nature to foretell or to repeat himself.

The benign forehead of the quaker librarian enkindled rosily with hope.

--I hope Mr Dedalus will work out his theory for the enlightenment of
the public. And we ought to mention another Irish commentator, Mr George
Bernard Shaw. Nor should we forget Mr Frank Harris. His articles on
Shakespeare in the _Saturday Review_ were surely brilliant. Oddly
enough he too draws for us an unhappy relation with the dark lady of the
sonnets. The favoured rival is William Herbert, earl of Pembroke. I own
that if the poet must be rejected such a rejection would seem more in
harmony with--what shall I say?--our notions of what ought not to have
been.

Felicitously he ceased and held a meek head among them, auk's egg, prize
of their fray.

He thous and thees her with grave husbandwords. Dost love, Miriam? Dost
love thy man?

--That may be too, Stephen said. There's a saying of Goethe's which Mr
Magee likes to quote. Beware of what you wish for in youth because
you will get it in middle life. Why does he send to one who is
a _buonaroba,_ a bay where all men ride, a maid of honour with a
scandalous girlhood, a lordling to woo for him? He was himself a lord
of language and had made himself a coistrel gentleman and he had written
_Romeo and Juliet_. Why? Belief in himself has been untimely killed. He
was overborne in a cornfield first (ryefield, I should say) and he will
never be a victor in his own eyes after nor play victoriously the game
of laugh and lie down. Assumed dongiovannism will not save him. No later
undoing will undo the first undoing. The tusk of the boar has wounded
him there where love lies ableeding. If the shrew is worsted yet there
remains to her woman's invisible weapon. There is, I feel in the words,
some goad of the flesh driving him into a new passion, a darker shadow
of the first, darkening even his own understanding of himself. A like
fate awaits him and the two rages commingle in a whirlpool.

They list. And in the porches of their ears I pour.

--The soul has been before stricken mortally, a poison poured in the
porch of a sleeping ear. But those who are done to death in sleep cannot
know the manner of their quell unless their Creator endow their souls
with that knowledge in the life to come. The poisoning and the beast
with two backs that urged it King Hamlet's ghost could not know of were
he not endowed with knowledge by his creator. That is why the speech
(his lean unlovely English) is always turned elsewhere, backward.
Ravisher and ravished, what he would but would not, go with him from
Lucrece's bluecircled ivory globes to Imogen's breast, bare, with its
mole cinquespotted. He goes back, weary of the creation he has piled up
to hide him from himself, an old dog licking an old sore. But, because
loss is his gain, he passes on towards eternity in undiminished
personality, untaught by the wisdom he has written or by the laws he
has revealed. His beaver is up. He is a ghost, a shadow now, the wind by
Elsinore's rocks or what you will, the sea's voice, a voice heard
only in the heart of him who is the substance of his shadow, the son
consubstantial with the father.

--Amen! was responded from the doorway.

Hast thou found me, O mine enemy?

_Entr'acte_.

A ribald face, sullen as a dean's, Buck Mulligan came forward, then
blithe in motley, towards the greeting of their smiles. My telegram.

--You were speaking of the gaseous vertebrate, if I mistake not? he
asked of Stephen.

Primrosevested he greeted gaily with his doffed Panama as with a bauble.

They make him welcome. _Was Du verlachst wirst Du noch dienen._

Brood of mockers: Photius, pseudomalachi, Johann Most.

He Who Himself begot middler the Holy Ghost and Himself sent Himself,
Agenbuyer, between Himself and others, Who, put upon by His fiends,
stripped and whipped, was nailed like bat to barndoor, starved on
crosstree, Who let Him bury, stood up, harrowed hell, fared into heaven
and there these nineteen hundred years sitteth on the right hand of His
Own Self but yet shall come in the latter day to doom the quick and dead
when all the quick shall be dead already.

Glo--o--ri--a in ex--cel--sis De--o.

He lifts his hands. Veils fall. O, flowers! Bells with bells with bells
aquiring.

--Yes, indeed, the quaker librarian said. A most instructive discussion.
Mr Mulligan, I'll be bound, has his theory too of the play and of
Shakespeare. All sides of life should be represented.

He smiled on all sides equally.

Buck Mulligan thought, puzzled:

--Shakespeare? he said. I seem to know the name.

A flying sunny smile rayed in his loose features.

--To be sure, he said, remembering brightly. The chap that writes like
Synge.

Mr Best turned to him.

--Haines missed you, he said. Did you meet him? He'll see you after at
the D. B. C. He's gone to Gill's to buy Hyde's _Lovesongs of Connacht_.

--I came through the museum, Buck Mulligan said. Was he here?

--The bard's fellowcountrymen, John Eglinton answered, are rather tired
perhaps of our brilliancies of theorising. I hear that an actress played
Hamlet for the fourhundredandeighth time last night in Dublin. Vining
held that the prince was a woman. Has no-one made him out to be an
Irishman? Judge Barton, I believe, is searching for some clues. He
swears (His Highness not His Lordship) by saint Patrick.

--The most brilliant of all is that story of Wilde's, Mr Best said,
lifting his brilliant notebook. That _Portrait of Mr W. H._ where he
proves that the sonnets were written by a Willie Hughes, a man all hues.

--For Willie Hughes, is it not? the quaker librarian asked.

Or Hughie Wills? Mr William Himself. W. H.: who am I?

--I mean, for Willie Hughes, Mr Best said, amending his gloss easily. Of
course it's all paradox, don't you know, Hughes and hews and hues,
the colour, but it's so typical the way he works it out. It's the very
essence of Wilde, don't you know. The light touch.

His glance touched their faces lightly as he smiled, a blond ephebe.
Tame essence of Wilde.

You're darned witty. Three drams of usquebaugh you drank with Dan
Deasy's ducats.

How much did I spend? O, a few shillings.

For a plump of pressmen. Humour wet and dry.

Wit. You would give your five wits for youth's proud livery he pranks
in. Lineaments of gratified desire.

There be many mo. Take her for me. In pairing time. Jove, a cool ruttime
send them. Yea, turtledove her.

Eve. Naked wheatbellied sin. A snake coils her, fang in's kiss.

--Do you think it is only a paradox? the quaker librarian was asking.
The mocker is never taken seriously when he is most serious.

They talked seriously of mocker's seriousness.

Buck Mulligan's again heavy face eyed Stephen awhile. Then, his head
wagging, he came near, drew a folded telegram from his pocket. His
mobile lips read, smiling with new delight.

--Telegram! he said. Wonderful inspiration! Telegram! A papal bull!

He sat on a corner of the unlit desk, reading aloud joyfully:

--_The sentimentalist is he who would enjoy without incurring the
immense debtorship for a thing done._ Signed: Dedalus. Where did you
launch it from? The kips? No. College Green. Have you drunk the four
quid? The aunt is going to call on your unsubstantial father. Telegram!
Malachi Mulligan, The Ship, lower Abbey street. O, you peerless mummer!
O, you priestified Kinchite!

Joyfully he thrust message and envelope into a pocket but keened in a
querulous brogue:

--It's what I'm telling you, mister honey, it's queer and sick we were,
Haines and myself, the time himself brought it in. 'Twas murmur we did
for a gallus potion would rouse a friar, I'm thinking, and he limp with
leching. And we one hour and two hours and three hours in Connery's
sitting civil waiting for pints apiece.

He wailed:

--And we to be there, mavrone, and you to be unbeknownst sending us your
conglomerations the way we to have our tongues out a yard long like the
drouthy clerics do be fainting for a pussful.

Stephen laughed.

Quickly, warningfully Buck Mulligan bent down.

--The tramper Synge is looking for you, he said, to murder you. He
heard you pissed on his halldoor in Glasthule. He's out in pampooties to
murder you.

--Me! Stephen exclaimed. That was your contribution to literature.

Buck Mulligan gleefully bent back, laughing to the dark eavesdropping
ceiling.

--Murder you! he laughed.

Harsh gargoyle face that warred against me over our mess of hash
of lights in rue Saint-André-des-Arts. In words of words for words,
palabras. Oisin with Patrick. Faunman he met in Clamart woods,
brandishing a winebottle. _C'est vendredi saint!_ Murthering Irish. His
image, wandering, he met. I mine. I met a fool i'the forest.

--Mr Lyster, an attendant said from the door ajar.

--... in which everyone can find his own. So Mr Justice Madden in his
_Diary of Master William Silence_ has found the hunting terms... Yes?
What is it?

--There's a gentleman here, sir, the attendant said, coming forward and
offering a card. From the _Freeman._ He wants to see the files of the
_Kilkenny People_ for last year.

--Certainly, certainly, certainly. Is the gentleman?...

He took the eager card, glanced, not saw, laid down unglanced, looked,
asked, creaked, asked:

--Is he?... O, there!

Brisk in a galliard he was off, out. In the daylit corridor he talked
with voluble pains of zeal, in duty bound, most fair, most kind, most
honest broadbrim.

--This gentleman? _Freeman's Journal? Kilkenny People?_ To be sure. Good
day, sir. _Kilkenny_... We have certainly...

A patient silhouette waited, listening.

--All the leading provincial... _Northern Whig, Cork Examiner,
Enniscorthy Guardian,_ 1903... Will you please?... Evans, conduct this
gentleman... If you just follow the atten... Or, please allow me...
This way... Please, sir...

Voluble, dutiful, he led the way to all the provincial papers, a bowing
dark figure following his hasty heels.

The door closed.

--The sheeny! Buck Mulligan cried.

He jumped up and snatched the card.

--What's his name? Ikey Moses? Bloom.

He rattled on:

--Jehovah, collector of prepuces, is no more. I found him over in the
museum where I went to hail the foamborn Aphrodite. The Greek mouth that
has never been twisted in prayer. Every day we must do homage to her.
_Life of life, thy lips enkindle._

Suddenly he turned to Stephen:

--He knows you. He knows your old fellow. O, I fear me, he is Greeker
than the Greeks. His pale Galilean eyes were upon her mesial groove.
Venus Kallipyge. O, the thunder of those loins! _The god pursuing the
maiden hid_.

--We want to hear more, John Eglinton decided with Mr Best's approval.
We begin to be interested in Mrs S. Till now we had thought of her, if
at all, as a patient Griselda, a Penelope stayathome.

--Antisthenes, pupil of Gorgias, Stephen said, took the palm of beauty
from Kyrios Menelaus' brooddam, Argive Helen, the wooden mare of Troy
in whom a score of heroes slept, and handed it to poor Penelope. Twenty
years he lived in London and, during part of that time, he drew a salary
equal to that of the lord chancellor of Ireland. His life was rich. His
art, more than the art of feudalism as Walt Whitman called it, is the
art of surfeit. Hot herringpies, green mugs of sack, honeysauces, sugar
of roses, marchpane, gooseberried pigeons, ringocandies. Sir Walter
Raleigh, when they arrested him, had half a million francs on his
back including a pair of fancy stays. The gombeenwoman Eliza Tudor had
underlinen enough to vie with her of Sheba. Twenty years he dallied
there between conjugial love and its chaste delights and scortatory love
and its foul pleasures. You know Manningham's story of the burgher's
wife who bade Dick Burbage to her bed after she had seen him in _Richard
III_ and how Shakespeare, overhearing, without more ado about nothing,
took the cow by the horns and, when Burbage came knocking at the gate,
answered from the capon's blankets: _William the conqueror came before
Richard III_. And the gay lakin, mistress Fitton, mount and cry O,
and his dainty birdsnies, lady Penelope Rich, a clean quality woman is
suited for a player, and the punks of the bankside, a penny a time.

Cours la Reine. _Encore vingt sous. Nous ferons de petites cochonneries.
Minette? Tu veux?_

--The height of fine society. And sir William Davenant of oxford's
mother with her cup of canary for any cockcanary.

Buck Mulligan, his pious eyes upturned, prayed:

--Blessed Margaret Mary Anycock!

--And Harry of six wives' daughter. And other lady friends from
neighbour seats as Lawn Tennyson, gentleman poet, sings. But all those
twenty years what do you suppose poor Penelope in Stratford was doing
behind the diamond panes?

Do and do. Thing done. In a rosery of Fetter lane of Gerard, herbalist,
he walks, greyedauburn. An azured harebell like her veins. Lids of
Juno's eyes, violets. He walks. One life is all. One body. Do. But do.
Afar, in a reek of lust and squalor, hands are laid on whiteness.

Buck Mulligan rapped John Eglinton's desk sharply.

--Whom do you suspect? he challenged.

--Say that he is the spurned lover in the sonnets. Once spurned twice
spurned. But the court wanton spurned him for a lord, his dearmylove.

Love that dare not speak its name.

--As an Englishman, you mean, John sturdy Eglinton put in, he loved a
lord.

Old wall where sudden lizards flash. At Charenton I watched them.

--It seems so, Stephen said, when he wants to do for him, and for all
other and singular uneared wombs, the holy office an ostler does for the
stallion. Maybe, like Socrates, he had a midwife to mother as he had a
shrew to wife. But she, the giglot wanton, did not break a bedvow. Two
deeds are rank in that ghost's mind: a broken vow and the dullbrained
yokel on whom her favour has declined, deceased husband's brother. Sweet
Ann, I take it, was hot in the blood. Once a wooer, twice a wooer.

Stephen turned boldly in his chair.

--The burden of proof is with you not with me, he said frowning. If you
deny that in the fifth scene of _Hamlet_ he has branded her with infamy
tell me why there is no mention of her during the thirtyfour years
between the day she married him and the day she buried him. All those
women saw their men down and under: Mary, her goodman John, Ann, her
poor dear Willun, when he went and died on her, raging that he was the
first to go, Joan, her four brothers, Judith, her husband and all her
sons, Susan, her husband too, while Susan's daughter, Elizabeth, to use
granddaddy's words, wed her second, having killed her first.

O, yes, mention there is. In the years when he was living richly in
royal London to pay a debt she had to borrow forty shillings from her
father's shepherd. Explain you then. Explain the swansong too wherein he
has commended her to posterity.

He faced their silence.

     To whom thus Eglinton:
     You mean the will.
     But that has been explained, I believe, by jurists.
     She was entitled to her widow's dower
     At common law. His legal knowledge was great
     Our judges tell us.
     Him Satan fleers,
     Mocker:
     And therefore he left out her name
     From the first draft but he did not leave out
     The presents for his granddaughter, for his daughters,
     For his sister, for his old cronies in Stratford
     And in London. And therefore when he was urged,
     As I believe, to name her
     He left her his
     Secondbest
     Bed.
     _Punkt._
     Leftherhis
     Secondbest
     Leftherhis
     Bestabed
     Secabest
     Leftabed.


Woa!

--Pretty countryfolk had few chattels then, John Eglinton observed, as
they have still if our peasant plays are true to type.

--He was a rich country gentleman, Stephen said, with a coat of arms
and landed estate at Stratford and a house in Ireland yard, a capitalist
shareholder, a bill promoter, a tithefarmer. Why did he not leave her
his best bed if he wished her to snore away the rest of her nights in
peace?

--It is clear that there were two beds, a best and a secondbest, Mr
Secondbest Best said finely.

--_Separatio a mensa et a thalamo_, bettered Buck Mulligan and was
smiled on.

--Antiquity mentions famous beds, Second Eglinton puckered, bedsmiling.
Let me think.

--Antiquity mentions that Stagyrite schoolurchin and bald heathen sage,
Stephen said, who when dying in exile frees and endows his slaves, pays
tribute to his elders, wills to be laid in earth near the bones of his
dead wife and bids his friends be kind to an old mistress (don't forget
Nell Gwynn Herpyllis) and let her live in his villa.

--Do you mean he died so? Mr Best asked with slight concern. I mean...

--He died dead drunk, Buck Mulligan capped. A quart of ale is a dish for
a king. O, I must tell you what Dowden said!

--What? asked Besteglinton.

William Shakespeare and company, limited. The people's William. For
terms apply: E. Dowden, Highfield house...

--Lovely! Buck Mulligan suspired amorously. I asked him what he thought
of the charge of pederasty brought against the bard. He lifted his hands
and said: _All we can say is that life ran very high in those days._
Lovely!

Catamite.

--The sense of beauty leads us astray, said beautifulinsadness Best to
ugling Eglinton.

Steadfast John replied severe:

--The doctor can tell us what those words mean. You cannot eat your cake
and have it.

Sayest thou so? Will they wrest from us, from me, the palm of beauty?

--And the sense of property, Stephen said. He drew Shylock out of his
own long pocket. The son of a maltjobber and moneylender he was himself
a cornjobber and moneylender, with ten tods of corn hoarded in the
famine riots. His borrowers are no doubt those divers of worship
mentioned by Chettle Falstaff who reported his uprightness of dealing.
He sued a fellowplayer for the price of a few bags of malt and exacted
his pound of flesh in interest for every money lent. How else could
Aubrey's ostler and callboy get rich quick? All events brought grist to
his mill. Shylock chimes with the jewbaiting that followed the hanging
and quartering of the queen's leech Lopez, his jew's heart being plucked
forth while the sheeny was yet alive: _Hamlet_ and _Macbeth_ with
the coming to the throne of a Scotch philosophaster with a turn for
witchroasting. The lost armada is his jeer in _Love's Labour Lost_.
His pageants, the histories, sail fullbellied on a tide of Mafeking
enthusiasm. Warwickshire jesuits are tried and we have a porter's theory
of equivocation. The _Sea Venture_ comes home from Bermudas and the play
Renan admired is written with Patsy Caliban, our American cousin.
The sugared sonnets follow Sidney's. As for fay Elizabeth, otherwise
carrotty Bess, the gross virgin who inspired _The Merry Wives of
Windsor_, let some meinherr from Almany grope his life long for deephid
meanings in the depths of the buckbasket.

I think you're getting on very nicely. Just mix up a mixture of
theolologicophilolological. _Mingo, minxi, mictum, mingere._

--Prove that he was a jew, John Eglinton dared,'expectantly. Your dean
of studies holds he was a holy Roman.

_Sufflaminandus sum._

--He was made in Germany, Stephen replied, as the champion French
polisher of Italian scandals.

--A myriadminded man, Mr Best reminded. Coleridge called him
myriadminded.

_Amplius. In societate humana hoc est maxime necessarium ut sit amicitia
inter multos._

--Saint Thomas, Stephen began...

--_Ora pro nobis_, Monk Mulligan groaned, sinking to a chair.

There he keened a wailing rune.

--_Pogue mahone! Acushla machree!_ It's destroyed we are from this day!
It's destroyed we are surely!

All smiled their smiles.

--Saint Thomas, Stephen smiling said, whose gorbellied works I enjoy
reading in the original, writing of incest from a standpoint different
from that of the new Viennese school Mr Magee spoke of, likens it in his
wise and curious way to an avarice of the emotions. He means that the
love so given to one near in blood is covetously withheld from some
stranger who, it may be, hungers for it. Jews, whom christians tax with
avarice, are of all races the most given to intermarriage. Accusations
are made in anger. The christian laws which built up the hoards of the
jews (for whom, as for the lollards, storm was shelter) bound their
affections too with hoops of steel. Whether these be sins or virtues old
Nobodaddy will tell us at doomsday leet. But a man who holds so tightly
to what he calls his rights over what he calls his debts will hold
tightly also to what he calls his rights over her whom he calls his
wife. No sir smile neighbour shall covet his ox or his wife or his
manservant or his maidservant or his jackass.

--Or his jennyass, Buck Mulligan antiphoned.

--Gentle Will is being roughly handled, gentle Mr Best said gently.

--Which will? gagged sweetly Buck Mulligan. We are getting mixed.

--The will to live, John Eglinton philosophised, for poor Ann, Will's
widow, is the will to die.

_--Requiescat!_ Stephen prayed.

     _What of all the will to do?
     It has vanished long ago..._

--She lies laid out in stark stiffness in that secondbest bed, the
mobled queen, even though you prove that a bed in those days was as
rare as a motorcar is now and that its carvings were the wonder of seven
parishes. In old age she takes up with gospellers (one stayed with her
at New Place and drank a quart of sack the town council paid for but in
which bed he slept it skills not to ask) and heard she had a soul. She
read or had read to her his chapbooks preferring them to the _Merry
Wives_ and, loosing her nightly waters on the jordan, she thought
over _Hooks and Eyes for Believers' Breeches_ and _The most Spiritual
Snuffbox to Make the Most Devout Souls Sneeze_. Venus has twisted her
lips in prayer. Agenbite of inwit: remorse of conscience. It is an age
of exhausted whoredom groping for its god.

--History shows that to be true, _inquit Eglintonus Chronolologos_. The
ages succeed one another. But we have it on high authority that a man's
worst enemies shall be those of his own house and family. I feel that
Russell is right. What do we care for his wife or father? I should say
that only family poets have family lives. Falstaff was not a family man.
I feel that the fat knight is his supreme creation.

Lean, he lay back. Shy, deny thy kindred, the unco guid. Shy, supping
with the godless, he sneaks the cup. A sire in Ultonian Antrim bade it
him. Visits him here on quarter days. Mr Magee, sir, there's a gentleman
to see you. Me? Says he's your father, sir. Give me my Wordsworth. Enter
Magee Mor Matthew, a rugged rough rugheaded kern, in strossers with
a buttoned codpiece, his nether stocks bemired with clauber of ten
forests, a wand of wilding in his hand.

Your own? He knows your old fellow. The widower.

Hurrying to her squalid deathlair from gay Paris on the quayside I
touched his hand. The voice, new warmth, speaking. Dr Bob Kenny is
attending her. The eyes that wish me well. But do not know me.

--A father, Stephen said, battling against hopelessness, is a necessary
evil. He wrote the play in the months that followed his father's death.
If you hold that he, a greying man with two marriageable daughters, with
thirtyfive years of life, _nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita_, with
fifty of experience, is the beardless undergraduate from Wittenberg then
you must hold that his seventyyear old mother is the lustful queen. No.
The corpse of John Shakespeare does not walk the night. From hour to
hour it rots and rots. He rests, disarmed of fatherhood, having devised
that mystical estate upon his son. Boccaccio's Calandrino was the first
and last man who felt himself with child. Fatherhood, in the sense of
conscious begetting, is unknown to man. It is a mystical estate, an
apostolic succession, from only begetter to only begotten. On that
mystery and not on the madonna which the cunning Italian intellect
flung to the mob of Europe the church is founded and founded irremovably
because founded, like the world, macro and microcosm, upon the void.
Upon incertitude, upon unlikelihood. _Amor matris_, subjective and
objective genitive, may be the only true thing in life. Paternity may be
a legal fiction. Who is the father of any son that any son should love
him or he any son?

What the hell are you driving at?

I know. Shut up. Blast you. I have reasons.

_Amplius. Adhuc. Iterum. Postea._

Are you condemned to do this?

--They are sundered by a bodily shame so steadfast that the criminal
annals of the world, stained with all other incests and bestialities,
hardly record its breach. Sons with mothers, sires with daughters,
lesbic sisters, loves that dare not speak their name, nephews with
grandmothers, jailbirds with keyholes, queens with prize bulls. The son
unborn mars beauty: born, he brings pain, divides affection, increases
care. He is a new male: his growth is his father's decline, his youth
his father's envy, his friend his father's enemy.

In rue Monsieur-le-Prince I thought it.

--What links them in nature? An instant of blind rut.

Am I a father? If I were?

Shrunken uncertain hand.

--Sabellius, the African, subtlest heresiarch of all the beasts of the
field, held that the Father was Himself His Own Son. The bulldog of
Aquin, with whom no word shall be impossible, refutes him. Well: if
the father who has not a son be not a father can the son who has not a
father be a son? When Rutlandbaconsouthamptonshakespeare or another poet
of the same name in the comedy of errors wrote _Hamlet_ he was not the
father of his own son merely but, being no more a son, he was and felt
himself the father of all his race, the father of his own grandfather,
the father of his unborn grandson who, by the same token, never was
born, for nature, as Mr Magee understands her, abhors perfection.

Eglintoneyes, quick with pleasure, looked up shybrightly. Gladly
glancing, a merry puritan, through the twisted eglantine.

Flatter. Rarely. But flatter.

--Himself his own father, Sonmulligan told himself. Wait. I am big with
child. I have an unborn child in my brain. Pallas Athena! A play! The
play's the thing! Let me parturiate!

He clasped his paunchbrow with both birthaiding hands.

--As for his family, Stephen said, his mother's name lives in the
forest of Arden. Her death brought from him the scene with Volumnia in
_Coriolanus._ His boyson's death is the deathscene of young Arthur in
_King John._ Hamlet, the black prince, is Hamnet Shakespeare. Who the
girls in _The Tempest_, in _Pericles,_ in _Winter's Tale_ are we know.
Who Cleopatra, fleshpot of Egypt, and Cressid and Venus are we may
guess. But there is another member of his family who is recorded.

--The plot thickens, John Eglinton said.

The quaker librarian, quaking, tiptoed in, quake, his mask, quake, with
haste, quake, quack.

Door closed. Cell. Day.

They list. Three. They.

I you he they.

Come, mess.

STEPHEN: He had three brothers, Gilbert, Edmund, Richard. Gilbert in his
old age told some cavaliers he got a pass for nowt from Maister Gatherer
one time mass he did and he seen his brud Maister Wull the playwriter up
in Lunnon in a wrastling play wud a man on's back. The playhouse sausage
filled Gilbert's soul. He is nowhere: but an Edmund and a Richard are
recorded in the works of sweet William.

MAGEEGLINJOHN: Names! What's in a name?

BEST: That is my name, Richard, don't you know. I hope you are going to
say a good word for Richard, don't you know, for my sake. _(Laughter)_


BUCKMULLIGAN: (_Piano, diminuendo_)

     _Then outspoke medical Dick
     To his comrade medical Davy..._

STEPHEN: In his trinity of black Wills, the villain shakebags, Iago,
Richard Crookback, Edmund in _King Lear_, two bear the wicked uncles'
names. Nay, that last play was written or being written while his
brother Edmund lay dying in Southwark.

BEST: I hope Edmund is going to catch it. I don't want Richard, my name
...

_(Laughter)_

QUAKERLYSTER: (_A tempo_) But he that filches from me my good name...

STEPHEN: _(Stringendo)_ He has hidden his own name, a fair name,
William, in the plays, a super here, a clown there, as a painter of old
Italy set his face in a dark corner of his canvas. He has revealed it in
the sonnets where there is Will in overplus. Like John o'Gaunt his name
is dear to him, as dear as the coat and crest he toadied for, on a bend
sable a spear or steeled argent, honorificabilitudinitatibus, dearer
than his glory of greatest shakescene in the country. What's in a name?
That is what we ask ourselves in childhood when we write the name that
we are told is ours. A star, a daystar, a firedrake, rose at his birth.
It shone by day in the heavens alone, brighter than Venus in the
night, and by night it shone over delta in Cassiopeia, the recumbent
constellation which is the signature of his initial among the stars. His
eyes watched it, lowlying on the horizon, eastward of the bear, as
he walked by the slumberous summer fields at midnight returning from
Shottery and from her arms.

Both satisfied. I too.

Don't tell them he was nine years old when it was quenched.

And from her arms.

Wait to be wooed and won. Ay, meacock. Who will woo you?

Read the skies. _Autontimorumenos. Bous Stephanoumenos._ Where's your
configuration? Stephen, Stephen, cut the bread even. S. D: _sua donna.
Già: di lui. gelindo risolve di non amare_ S. D.

--What is that, Mr Dedalus? the quaker librarian asked. Was it a
celestial phenomenon?

--A star by night, Stephen said. A pillar of the cloud by day.

What more's to speak?

Stephen looked on his hat, his stick, his boots.

_Stephanos,_ my crown. My sword. His boots are spoiling the shape of my
feet. Buy a pair. Holes in my socks. Handkerchief too.

--You make good use of the name, John Eglinton allowed. Your own name is
strange enough. I suppose it explains your fantastical humour.

Me, Magee and Mulligan.

Fabulous artificer. The hawklike man. You flew. Whereto?
Newhaven-Dieppe, steerage passenger. Paris and back. Lapwing. Icarus.
_Pater, ait._ Seabedabbled, fallen, weltering. Lapwing you are. Lapwing
be.

Mr Best eagerquietly lifted his book to say:

--That's very interesting because that brother motive, don't you know,
we find also in the old Irish myths. Just what you say. The three
brothers Shakespeare. In Grimm too, don't you know, the fairytales. The
third brother that always marries the sleeping beauty and wins the best
prize.

Best of Best brothers. Good, better, best.

The quaker librarian springhalted near.

--I should like to know, he said, which brother you... I understand you
to suggest there was misconduct with one of the brothers... But perhaps
I am anticipating?

He caught himself in the act: looked at all: refrained.

An attendant from the doorway called:

--Mr Lyster! Father Dineen wants...

--O, Father Dineen! Directly.

Swiftly rectly creaking rectly rectly he was rectly gone.

John Eglinton touched the foil.

--Come, he said. Let us hear what you have to say of Richard and Edmund.
You kept them for the last, didn't you?

--In asking you to remember those two noble kinsmen nuncle Richie and
nuncle Edmund, Stephen answered, I feel I am asking too much perhaps. A
brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella.

Lapwing.

Where is your brother? Apothecaries' hall. My whetstone. Him, then
Cranly, Mulligan: now these. Speech, speech. But act. Act speech. They
mock to try you. Act. Be acted on.

Lapwing.

I am tired of my voice, the voice of Esau. My kingdom for a drink.

On.

--You will say those names were already in the chronicles from which he
took the stuff of his plays. Why did he take them rather than others?
Richard, a whoreson crookback, misbegotten, makes love to a widowed Ann
(what's in a name?), woos and wins her, a whoreson merry widow. Richard
the conqueror, third brother, came after William the conquered. The
other four acts of that play hang limply from that first. Of all his
kings Richard is the only king unshielded by Shakespeare's reverence,
the angel of the world. Why is the underplot of _King Lear_ in which
Edmund figures lifted out of Sidney's _Arcadia_ and spatchcocked on to a
Celtic legend older than history?

--That was Will's way, John Eglinton defended. We should not now combine
a Norse saga with an excerpt from a novel by George Meredith. _Que
voulez-vous?_ Moore would say. He puts Bohemia on the seacoast and makes
Ulysses quote Aristotle.

--Why? Stephen answered himself. Because the theme of the false or
the usurping or the adulterous brother or all three in one is to
Shakespeare, what the poor are not, always with him. The note of
banishment, banishment from the heart, banishment from home, sounds
uninterruptedly from _The Two Gentlemen of Verona_ onward till Prospero
breaks his staff, buries it certain fathoms in the earth and drowns his
book. It doubles itself in the middle of his life, reflects itself in
another, repeats itself, protasis, epitasis, catastasis, catastrophe.
It repeats itself again when he is near the grave, when his married
daughter Susan, chip of the old block, is accused of adultery. But it
was the original sin that darkened his understanding, weakened his will
and left in him a strong inclination to evil. The words are those of
my lords bishops of Maynooth. An original sin and, like original sin,
committed by another in whose sin he too has sinned. It is between the
lines of his last written words, it is petrified on his tombstone under
which her four bones are not to be laid. Age has not withered it. Beauty
and peace have not done it away. It is in infinite variety everywhere in
the world he has created, in _Much Ado about Nothing_, twice in _As you
like It_, in _The Tempest_, in _Hamlet,_ in _Measure for Measure_--and
in all the other plays which I have not read.

He laughed to free his mind from his mind's bondage.

Judge Eglinton summed up.

--The truth is midway, he affirmed. He is the ghost and the prince. He
is all in all.

--He is, Stephen said. The boy of act one is the mature man of act five.
All in all. In _Cymbeline,_ in _Othello_ he is bawd and cuckold. He acts
and is acted on. Lover of an ideal or a perversion, like Jose he
kills the real Carmen. His unremitting intellect is the hornmad Iago
ceaselessly willing that the moor in him shall suffer.

--Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Cuck Mulligan clucked lewdly. O word of fear!

Dark dome received, reverbed.

--And what a character is Iago! undaunted John Eglinton exclaimed. When
all is said Dumas _fils_ (or is it Dumas _père?)_ is right. After God
Shakespeare has created most.

--Man delights him not nor woman neither, Stephen said. He returns after
a life of absence to that spot of earth where he was born, where he has
always been, man and boy, a silent witness and there, his journey of
life ended, he plants his mulberrytree in the earth. Then dies. The
motion is ended. Gravediggers bury Hamlet _(père?)_ and Hamlet _fils._
A king and a prince at last in death, with incidental music. And, what
though murdered and betrayed, bewept by all frail tender hearts for,
Dane or Dubliner, sorrow for the dead is the only husband from whom
they refuse to be divorced. If you like the epilogue look long on it:
prosperous Prospero, the good man rewarded, Lizzie, grandpa's lump of
love, and nuncle Richie, the bad man taken off by poetic justice to the
place where the bad niggers go. Strong curtain. He found in the world
without as actual what was in his world within as possible. Maeterlinck
says: _If Socrates leave his house today he will find the sage seated
on his doorstep. If Judas go forth tonight it is to Judas his steps
will tend._ Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through
ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives,
widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves. The playwright
who wrote the folio of this world and wrote it badly (He gave us light
first and the sun two days later), the lord of things as they are whom
the most Roman of catholics call _dio boia_, hangman god, is doubtless
all in all in all of us, ostler and butcher, and would be bawd and
cuckold too but that in the economy of heaven, foretold by Hamlet, there
are no more marriages, glorified man, an androgynous angel, being a wife
unto himself.

_--Eureka!_ Buck Mulligan cried. _Eureka!_

Suddenly happied he jumped up and reached in a stride John Eglinton's
desk.

--May I? he said. The Lord has spoken to Malachi.

He began to scribble on a slip of paper.

Take some slips from the counter going out.

--Those who are married, Mr Best, douce herald, said, all save one,
shall live. The rest shall keep as they are.

He laughed, unmarried, at Eglinton Johannes, of arts a bachelor.

Unwed, unfancied, ware of wiles, they fingerponder nightly each his
variorum edition of _The Taming of the Shrew._

--You are a delusion, said roundly John Eglinton to Stephen. You have
brought us all this way to show us a French triangle. Do you believe
your own theory?

--No, Stephen said promptly.

--Are you going to write it? Mr Best asked. You ought to make it a
dialogue, don't you know, like the Platonic dialogues Wilde wrote.

John Eclecticon doubly smiled.

--Well, in that case, he said, I don't see why you should expect payment
for it since you don't believe it yourself. Dowden believes there is
some mystery in _Hamlet_ but will say no more. Herr Bleibtreu, the man
Piper met in Berlin, who is working up that Rutland theory, believes
that the secret is hidden in the Stratford monument. He is going to
visit the present duke, Piper says, and prove to him that his ancestor
wrote the plays. It will come as a surprise to his grace. But he
believes his theory.

I believe, O Lord, help my unbelief. That is, help me to believe or help
me to unbelieve? Who helps to believe? _Egomen._ Who to unbelieve? Other
chap.

--You are the only contributor to _Dana_ who asks for pieces of silver.
Then I don't know about the next number. Fred Ryan wants space for an
article on economics.

Fraidrine. Two pieces of silver he lent me. Tide you over. Economics.

--For a guinea, Stephen said, you can publish this interview.

Buck Mulligan stood up from his laughing scribbling, laughing: and then
gravely said, honeying malice:

--I called upon the bard Kinch at his summer residence in upper
Mecklenburgh street and found him deep in the study of the _Summa contra
Gentiles_ in the company of two gonorrheal ladies, Fresh Nelly and
Rosalie, the coalquay whore.

He broke away.

--Come, Kinch. Come, wandering Aengus of the birds.

Come, Kinch. You have eaten all we left. Ay. I will serve you your orts
and offals.

Stephen rose.

Life is many days. This will end.

--We shall see you tonight, John Eglinton said. _Notre ami_ Moore says
Malachi Mulligan must be there.

Buck Mulligan flaunted his slip and panama.

--Monsieur Moore, he said, lecturer on French letters to the youth of
Ireland. I'll be there. Come, Kinch, the bards must drink. Can you walk
straight?

Laughing, he...

Swill till eleven. Irish nights entertainment.

Lubber...

Stephen followed a lubber...

One day in the national library we had a discussion. Shakes. After. His
lub back: I followed. I gall his kibe.

Stephen, greeting, then all amort, followed a lubber jester, a wellkempt
head, newbarbered, out of the vaulted cell into a shattering daylight of
no thought.

What have I learned? Of them? Of me?

Walk like Haines now.

The constant readers' room. In the readers' book Cashel Boyle O'Connor
Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell parafes his polysyllables. Item: was Hamlet
mad? The quaker's pate godlily with a priesteen in booktalk.

--O please do, sir... I shall be most pleased...

Amused Buck Mulligan mused in pleasant murmur with himself, selfnodding:

--A pleased bottom.

The turnstile.

Is that?... Blueribboned hat... Idly writing... What? Looked?...

The curving balustrade: smoothsliding Mincius.

Puck Mulligan, panamahelmeted, went step by step, iambing, trolling:

_John Eglinton, my jo, John, Why won't you wed a wife?_

He spluttered to the air:

--O, the chinless Chinaman! Chin Chon Eg Lin Ton. We went over to their
playbox, Haines and I, the plumbers' hall. Our players are creating a
new art for Europe like the Greeks or M. Maeterlinck. Abbey Theatre! I
smell the pubic sweat of monks.

He spat blank.

Forgot: any more than he forgot the whipping lousy Lucy gave him. And
left the _femme de trente ans._ And why no other children born? And his
first child a girl?

Afterwit. Go back.

The dour recluse still there (he has his cake) and the douce youngling,
minion of pleasure, Phedo's toyable fair hair.

Eh... I just eh... wanted... I forgot... he...

--Longworth and M'Curdy Atkinson were there...

Puck Mulligan footed featly, trilling:

     _I hardly hear the purlieu cry
     Or a tommy talk as I pass one by
     Before my thoughts begin to run
     On F. M'Curdy Atkinson,
     The same that had the wooden leg
     And that filibustering filibeg
     That never dared to slake his drouth,
     Magee that had the chinless mouth.
     Being afraid to marry on earth
     They masturbated for all they were worth._


Jest on. Know thyself.

Halted, below me, a quizzer looks at me. I halt.

--Mournful mummer, Buck Mulligan moaned. Synge has left off wearing
black to be like nature. Only crows, priests and English coal are black.

A laugh tripped over his lips.

--Longworth is awfully sick, he said, after what you wrote about that
old hake Gregory. O you inquisitional drunken jewjesuit! She gets you
a job on the paper and then you go and slate her drivel to Jaysus.
Couldn't you do the Yeats touch?

He went on and down, mopping, chanting with waving graceful arms:

--The most beautiful book that has come out of our country in my time.
One thinks of Homer.

He stopped at the stairfoot.

--I have conceived a play for the mummers, he said solemnly.

The pillared Moorish hall, shadows entwined. Gone the nine men's morrice
with caps of indices.

In sweetly varying voices Buck Mulligan read his tablet: _Everyman His
own Wife or A Honeymoon in the Hand (a national immorality in three
orgasms) by Ballocky Mulligan._


He turned a happy patch's smirk to Stephen, saying:

--The disguise, I fear, is thin. But listen.

He read, _marcato:_

--Characters:

     TODY TOSTOFF (a ruined Pole)
     CRAB (a bushranger)
     MEDICAL DICK )
     and          ) (two birds with one stone)
     MEDICAL DAVY )
     MOTHER GROGAN (a watercarrier)
     FRESH NELLY
     and
     ROSALIE (the coalquay whore).

He laughed, lolling a to and fro head, walking on, followed by Stephen:
and mirthfully he told the shadows, souls of men:

--O, the night in the Camden hall when the daughters of Erin had to
lift their skirts to step over you as you lay in your mulberrycoloured,
multicoloured, multitudinous vomit!

--The most innocent son of Erin, Stephen said, for whom they ever lifted
them.

About to pass through the doorway, feeling one behind, he stood aside.

Part. The moment is now. Where then? If Socrates leave his house today,
if Judas go forth tonight. Why? That lies in space which I in time must
come to, ineluctably.

My will: his will that fronts me. Seas between.

A man passed out between them, bowing, greeting.

--Good day again, Buck Mulligan said.

The portico.

Here I watched the birds for augury. Aengus of the birds. They go, they
come. Last night I flew. Easily flew. Men wondered. Street of harlots
after. A creamfruit melon he held to me. In. You will see.

--The wandering jew, Buck Mulligan whispered with clown's awe. Did you
see his eye? He looked upon you to lust after you. I fear thee, ancient
mariner. O, Kinch, thou art in peril. Get thee a breechpad.

Manner of Oxenford.

Day. Wheelbarrow sun over arch of bridge.

A dark back went before them, step of a pard, down, out by the gateway,
under portcullis barbs.

They followed.

Offend me still. Speak on.

Kind air defined the coigns of houses in Kildare street. No birds. Frail
from the housetops two plumes of smoke ascended, pluming, and in a flaw
of softness softly were blown.

Cease to strive. Peace of the druid priests of Cymbeline: hierophantic:
from wide earth an altar.

     _Laud we the gods
     And let our crooked smokes climb to their nostrils
     From our bless'd altars._


The superior, the very reverend John Conmee S.J. reset his smooth watch
in his interior pocket as he came down the presbytery steps. Five to
three. Just nice time to walk to Artane. What was that boy's name again?
Dignam. Yes. _Vere dignum et iustum est._ Brother Swan was the person
to see. Mr Cunningham's letter. Yes. Oblige him, if possible. Good
practical catholic: useful at mission time.

A onelegged sailor, swinging himself onward by lazy jerks of his
crutches, growled some notes. He jerked short before the convent of the
sisters of charity and held out a peaked cap for alms towards the very
reverend John Conmee S. J. Father Conmee blessed him in the sun for his
purse held, he knew, one silver crown.

Father Conmee crossed to Mountjoy square. He thought, but not for long,
of soldiers and sailors, whose legs had been shot off by cannonballs,
ending their days in some pauper ward, and of cardinal Wolsey's words:
_If I had served my God as I have served my king He would not have
abandoned me in my old days._ He walked by the treeshade of sunnywinking
leaves: and towards him came the wife of Mr David Sheehy M.P.

--Very well, indeed, father. And you, father?

Father Conmee was wonderfully well indeed. He would go to Buxton
probably for the waters. And her boys, were they getting on well at
Belvedere? Was that so? Father Conmee was very glad indeed to hear that.
And Mr Sheehy himself? Still in London. The house was still sitting, to
be sure it was. Beautiful weather it was, delightful indeed. Yes, it was
very probable that Father Bernard Vaughan would come again to preach. O,
yes: a very great success. A wonderful man really.

Father Conmee was very glad to see the wife of Mr David Sheehy M.P.
Iooking so well and he begged to be remembered to Mr David Sheehy M.P.
Yes, he would certainly call.

--Good afternoon, Mrs Sheehy.

Father Conmee doffed his silk hat and smiled, as he took leave, at the
jet beads of her mantilla inkshining in the sun. And smiled yet again,
in going. He had cleaned his teeth, he knew, with arecanut paste.

Father Conmee walked and, walking, smiled for he thought on Father
Bernard Vaughan's droll eyes and cockney voice.

--Pilate! Wy don't you old back that owlin mob?

A zealous man, however. Really he was. And really did great good in his
way. Beyond a doubt. He loved Ireland, he said, and he loved the Irish.
Of good family too would one think it? Welsh, were they not?

O, lest he forget. That letter to father provincial.

Father Conmee stopped three little schoolboys at the corner of Mountjoy
square. Yes: they were from Belvedere. The little house. Aha. And were
they good boys at school? O. That was very good now. And what was his
name? Jack Sohan. And his name? Ger. Gallaher. And the other little man?
His name was Brunny Lynam. O, that was a very nice name to have.

Father Conmee gave a letter from his breast to Master Brunny Lynam and
pointed to the red pillarbox at the corner of Fitzgibbon street.

--But mind you don't post yourself into the box, little man, he said.

The boys sixeyed Father Conmee and laughed:

--O, sir.

--Well, let me see if you can post a letter, Father Conmee said.

Master Brunny Lynam ran across the road and put Father Conmee's letter
to father provincial into the mouth of the bright red letterbox. Father
Conmee smiled and nodded and smiled and walked along Mountjoy square
east.

Mr Denis J Maginni, professor of dancing &c, in silk hat, slate
frockcoat with silk facings, white kerchief tie, tight lavender
trousers, canary gloves and pointed patent boots, walking with grave
deportment most respectfully took the curbstone as he passed lady
Maxwell at the corner of Dignam's court.

Was that not Mrs M'Guinness?

Mrs M'Guinness, stately, silverhaired, bowed to Father Conmee from the
farther footpath along which she sailed. And Father Conmee smiled and
saluted. How did she do?

A fine carriage she had. Like Mary, queen of Scots, something. And to
think that she was a pawnbroker! Well, now! Such a... what should he
say?... such a queenly mien.

Father Conmee walked down Great Charles street and glanced at the shutup
free church on his left. The reverend T. R. Greene B.A. will (D.V.)
speak. The incumbent they called him. He felt it incumbent on him to say
a few words. But one should be charitable. Invincible ignorance. They
acted according to their lights.

Father Conmee turned the corner and walked along the North Circular
road. It was a wonder that there was not a tramline in such an important
thoroughfare. Surely, there ought to be.

A band of satchelled schoolboys crossed from Richmond street. All
raised untidy caps. Father Conmee greeted them more than once benignly.
Christian brother boys.

Father Conmee smelt incense on his right hand as he walked. Saint
Joseph's church, Portland row. For aged and virtuous females.
Father Conmee raised his hat to the Blessed Sacrament. Virtuous: but
occasionally they were also badtempered.

Near Aldborough house Father Conmee thought of that spendthrift
nobleman. And now it was an office or something.

Father Conmee began to walk along the North Strand road and was saluted
by Mr William Gallagher who stood in the doorway of his shop. Father
Conmee saluted Mr William Gallagher and perceived the odours that came
from baconflitches and ample cools of butter. He passed Grogan's the
Tobacconist against which newsboards leaned and told of a dreadful
catastrophe in New York. In America those things were continually
happening. Unfortunate people to die like that, unprepared. Still, an
act of perfect contrition.

Father Conmee went by Daniel Bergin's publichouse against the window of
which two unlabouring men lounged. They saluted him and were saluted.

Father Conmee passed H. J. O'Neill's funeral establishment where Corny
Kelleher totted figures in the daybook while he chewed a blade of hay.
A constable on his beat saluted Father Conmee and Father Conmee saluted
the constable. In Youkstetter's, the porkbutcher's, Father Conmee
observed pig's puddings, white and black and red, lie neatly curled in
tubes.

Moored under the trees of Charleville Mall Father Conmee saw a
turfbarge, a towhorse with pendent head, a bargeman with a hat of dirty
straw seated amidships, smoking and staring at a branch of poplar above
him. It was idyllic: and Father Conmee reflected on the providence of
the Creator who had made turf to be in bogs whence men might dig it
out and bring it to town and hamlet to make fires in the houses of poor
people.

On Newcomen bridge the very reverend John Conmee S.J. of saint Francis
Xavier's church, upper Gardiner street, stepped on to an outward bound
tram.

Off an inward bound tram stepped the reverend Nicholas Dudley C. C. of
saint Agatha's church, north William street, on to Newcomen bridge.

At Newcomen bridge Father Conmee stepped into an outward bound tram for
he disliked to traverse on foot the dingy way past Mud Island.

Father Conmee sat in a corner of the tramcar, a blue ticket tucked with
care in the eye of one plump kid glove, while four shillings, a sixpence
and five pennies chuted from his other plump glovepalm into his purse.
Passing the ivy church he reflected that the ticket inspector usually
made his visit when one had carelessly thrown away the ticket. The
solemnity of the occupants of the car seemed to Father Conmee excessive
for a journey so short and cheap. Father Conmee liked cheerful decorum.

It was a peaceful day. The gentleman with the glasses opposite Father
Conmee had finished explaining and looked down. His wife, Father Conmee
supposed. A tiny yawn opened the mouth of the wife of the gentleman with
the glasses. She raised her small gloved fist, yawned ever so gently,
tiptapping her small gloved fist on her opening mouth and smiled tinily,
sweetly.

Father Conmee perceived her perfume in the car. He perceived also that
the awkward man at the other side of her was sitting on the edge of the
seat.

Father Conmee at the altarrails placed the host with difficulty in the
mouth of the awkward old man who had the shaky head.

At Annesley bridge the tram halted and, when it was about to go, an old
woman rose suddenly from her place to alight. The conductor pulled the
bellstrap to stay the car for her. She passed out with her basket and
a marketnet: and Father Conmee saw the conductor help her and net and
basket down: and Father Conmee thought that, as she had nearly passed
the end of the penny fare, she was one of those good souls who had
always to be told twice _bless you, my child,_ that they have been
absolved, _pray for me._ But they had so many worries in life, so many
cares, poor creatures.

From the hoardings Mr Eugene Stratton grimaced with thick niggerlips at
Father Conmee.

Father Conmee thought of the souls of black and brown and yellow men and
of his sermon on saint Peter Claver S.J. and the African mission and of
the propagation of the faith and of the millions of black and brown and
yellow souls that had not received the baptism of water when their last
hour came like a thief in the night. That book by the Belgian jesuit,
_Le Nombre des Élus,_ seemed to Father Conmee a reasonable plea. Those
were millions of human souls created by God in His Own likeness to
whom the faith had not (D.V.) been brought. But they were God's souls,
created by God. It seemed to Father Conmee a pity that they should all
be lost, a waste, if one might say.

At the Howth road stop Father Conmee alighted, was saluted by the
conductor and saluted in his turn.

The Malahide road was quiet. It pleased Father Conmee, road and name.
The joybells were ringing in gay Malahide. Lord Talbot de Malahide,
immediate hereditary lord admiral of Malahide and the seas adjoining.
Then came the call to arms and she was maid, wife and widow in one day.
Those were old worldish days, loyal times in joyous townlands, old times
in the barony.

Father Conmee, walking, thought of his little book _Old Times in the
Barony_ and of the book that might be written about jesuit houses and of
Mary Rochfort, daughter of lord Molesworth, first countess of Belvedere.

A listless lady, no more young, walked alone the shore of lough Ennel,
Mary, first countess of Belvedere, listlessly walking in the evening,
not startled when an otter plunged. Who could know the truth? Not the
jealous lord Belvedere and not her confessor if she had not committed
adultery fully, _eiaculatio seminis inter vas naturale mulieris,_ with
her husband's brother? She would half confess if she had not all sinned
as women did. Only God knew and she and he, her husband's brother.

Father Conmee thought of that tyrannous incontinence, needed however for
man's race on earth, and of the ways of God which were not our ways.

Don John Conmee walked and moved in times of yore. He was humane and
honoured there. He bore in mind secrets confessed and he smiled at
smiling noble faces in a beeswaxed drawingroom, ceiled with full fruit
clusters. And the hands of a bride and of a bridegroom, noble to noble,
were impalmed by Don John Conmee.

It was a charming day.

The lychgate of a field showed Father Conmee breadths of cabbages,
curtseying to him with ample underleaves. The sky showed him a flock of
small white clouds going slowly down the wind. _Moutonner,_ the French
said. A just and homely word.

Father Conmee, reading his office, watched a flock of muttoning clouds
over Rathcoffey. His thinsocked ankles were tickled by the stubble of
Clongowes field. He walked there, reading in the evening, and heard
the cries of the boys' lines at their play, young cries in the quiet
evening. He was their rector: his reign was mild.

Father Conmee drew off his gloves and took his rededged breviary out. An
ivory bookmark told him the page.

Nones. He should have read that before lunch. But lady Maxwell had come.

Father Conmee read in secret _Pater_ and _Ave_ and crossed his breast.
_Deus in adiutorium._

He walked calmly and read mutely the nones, walking and reading till he
came to _Res_ in _Beati immaculati: Principium verborum tuorum veritas:
in eternum omnia indicia iustitiae tuae._

A flushed young man came from a gap of a hedge and after him came a
young woman with wild nodding daisies in her hand. The young man raised
his cap abruptly: the young woman abruptly bent and with slow care
detached from her light skirt a clinging twig.

Father Conmee blessed both gravely and turned a thin page of his
breviary. _Sin: Principes persecuti sunt me gratis: et a verbis tuis
formidavit cor meum._

* * * * *

Corny Kelleher closed his long daybook and glanced with his drooping eye
at a pine coffinlid sentried in a corner. He pulled himself erect,
went to it and, spinning it on its axle, viewed its shape and brass
furnishings. Chewing his blade of hay he laid the coffinlid by and came
to the doorway. There he tilted his hatbrim to give shade to his eyes
and leaned against the doorcase, looking idly out.

Father John Conmee stepped into the Dollymount tram on Newcomen bridge.

Corny Kelleher locked his largefooted boots and gazed, his hat
downtilted, chewing his blade of hay.

Constable 57C, on his beat, stood to pass the time of day.

--That's a fine day, Mr Kelleher.

--Ay, Corny Kelleher said.

--It's very close, the constable said.

Corny Kelleher sped a silent jet of hayjuice arching from his mouth
while a generous white arm from a window in Eccles street flung forth a
coin.

--What's the best news? he asked.

--I seen that particular party last evening, the constable said with
bated breath.

* * * * *

A onelegged sailor crutched himself round MacConnell's corner, skirting
Rabaiotti's icecream car, and jerked himself up Eccles street. Towards
Larry O'Rourke, in shirtsleeves in his doorway, he growled unamiably:

--_For England_...

He swung himself violently forward past Katey and Boody Dedalus, halted
and growled:

--_home and beauty._

J. J. O'Molloy's white careworn face was told that Mr Lambert was in the
warehouse with a visitor.

A stout lady stopped, took a copper coin from her purse and dropped it
into the cap held out to her. The sailor grumbled thanks, glanced sourly
at the unheeding windows, sank his head and swung himself forward four
strides.

He halted and growled angrily:

--_For England_...

Two barefoot urchins, sucking long liquorice laces, halted near him,
gaping at his stump with their yellowslobbered mouths.

He swung himself forward in vigorous jerks, halted, lifted his head
towards a window and bayed deeply:

--_home and beauty._

The gay sweet chirping whistling within went on a bar or two, ceased.
The blind of the window was drawn aside. A card _Unfurnished Apartments_
slipped from the sash and fell. A plump bare generous arm shone, was
seen, held forth from a white petticoatbodice and taut shiftstraps. A
woman's hand flung forth a coin over the area railings. It fell on the
path.

One of the urchins ran to it, picked it up and dropped it into the
minstrel's cap, saying:

--There, sir.

* * * * *

Katey and Boody Dedalus shoved in the door of the closesteaming kitchen.

--Did you put in the books? Boody asked.

Maggy at the range rammed down a greyish mass beneath bubbling suds
twice with her potstick and wiped her brow.

--They wouldn't give anything on them, she said.

Father Conmee walked through Clongowes fields, his thinsocked ankles
tickled by stubble.

--Where did you try? Boody asked.

--M'Guinness's.

Boody stamped her foot and threw her satchel on the table.

--Bad cess to her big face! she cried.

Katey went to the range and peered with squinting eyes.

--What's in the pot? she asked.

--Shirts, Maggy said.

Boody cried angrily:

--Crickey, is there nothing for us to eat?

Katey, lifting the kettlelid in a pad of her stained skirt, asked:

--And what's in this?

A heavy fume gushed in answer.

--Peasoup, Maggy said.

--Where did you get it? Katey asked.

--Sister Mary Patrick, Maggy said.

The lacquey rang his bell.

--Barang!

Boody sat down at the table and said hungrily:

--Give us it here.

Maggy poured yellow thick soup from the kettle into a bowl. Katey,
sitting opposite Boody, said quietly, as her fingertip lifted to her
mouth random crumbs:

--A good job we have that much. Where's Dilly?

--Gone to meet father, Maggy said.

Boody, breaking big chunks of bread into the yellow soup, added:

--Our father who art not in heaven.

Maggy, pouring yellow soup in Katey's bowl, exclaimed:

--Boody! For shame!

A skiff, a crumpled throwaway, Elijah is coming, rode lightly down the
Liffey, under Loopline bridge, shooting the rapids where water chafed
around the bridgepiers, sailing eastward past hulls and anchorchains,
between the Customhouse old dock and George's quay.

* * * * *

The blond girl in Thornton's bedded the wicker basket with rustling
fibre. Blazes Boylan handed her the bottle swathed in pink tissue paper
and a small jar.

--Put these in first, will you? he said.

--Yes, sir, the blond girl said. And the fruit on top.

--That'll do, game ball, Blazes Boylan said.

She bestowed fat pears neatly, head by tail, and among them ripe
shamefaced peaches.

Blazes Boylan walked here and there in new tan shoes about the
fruitsmelling shop, lifting fruits, young juicy crinkled and plump red
tomatoes, sniffing smells.

H. E. L. Y.'S filed before him, tallwhitehatted, past Tangier lane,
plodding towards their goal.

He turned suddenly from a chip of strawberries, drew a gold watch from
his fob and held it at its chain's length.

--Can you send them by tram? Now?

A darkbacked figure under Merchants' arch scanned books on the hawker's
cart.

--Certainly, sir. Is it in the city?

--O, yes, Blazes Boylan said. Ten minutes.

The blond girl handed him a docket and pencil.

--Will you write the address, sir?

Blazes Boylan at the counter wrote and pushed the docket to her.

--Send it at once, will you? he said. It's for an invalid.

--Yes, sir. I will, sir.

Blazes Boylan rattled merry money in his trousers' pocket.

--What's the damage? he asked.

The blond girl's slim fingers reckoned the fruits.

Blazes Boylan looked into the cut of her blouse. A young pullet. He took
a red carnation from the tall stemglass.

--This for me? he asked gallantly.

The blond girl glanced sideways at him, got up regardless, with his tie
a bit crooked, blushing.

--Yes, sir, she said.

Bending archly she reckoned again fat pears and blushing peaches.

Blazes Boylan looked in her blouse with more favour, the stalk of the
red flower between his smiling teeth.

--May I say a word to your telephone, missy? he asked roguishly.

* * * * *

_--Ma!_ Almidano Artifoni said.

He gazed over Stephen's shoulder at Goldsmith's knobby poll.

Two carfuls of tourists passed slowly, their women sitting fore,
gripping the handrests. Palefaces. Men's arms frankly round their
stunted forms. They looked from Trinity to the blind columned porch of
the bank of Ireland where pigeons roocoocooed.

--_Anch'io ho avuto di queste idee, ALMIDANO ARTIFONI SAID, quand' ero
giovine come Lei. Eppoi mi sono convinto che il mondo è una bestia.
É peccato. Perchè la sua voce... sarebbe un cespite di rendita, via.
Invece, Lei si sacrifica._

--_Sacrifizio incruento,_ Stephen said smiling, swaying his ashplant in
slow swingswong from its midpoint, lightly.

_--Speriamo,_ the round mustachioed face said pleasantly. _Ma, dia retta
a me. Ci rifletta_.

By the stern stone hand of Grattan, bidding halt, an Inchicore tram
unloaded straggling Highland soldiers of a band.

--_Ci rifletterò,_ Stephen said, glancing down the solid trouserleg.

--_Ma, sul serio, eh?_ Almidano Artifoni said.

His heavy hand took Stephen's firmly. Human eyes. They gazed curiously
an instant and turned quickly towards a Dalkey tram.

_--Eccolo,_ Almidano Artifoni said in friendly haste. _Venga a trovarmi
e ci pensi. Addio, caro._

--_Arrivederla, maestro,_ Stephen said, raising his hat when his hand
was freed. _E grazie._

--_Di che?_ Almidano Artifoni said. _Scusi, eh? Tante belle cose!_

Almidano Artifoni, holding up a baton of rolled music as a signal,
trotted on stout trousers after the Dalkey tram. In vain he trotted,
signalling in vain among the rout of barekneed gillies smuggling
implements of music through Trinity gates.

* * * * *

Miss Dunne hid the Capel street library copy of _The Woman in White_
far back in her drawer and rolled a sheet of gaudy notepaper into her
typewriter.

Too much mystery business in it. Is he in love with that one, Marion?
Change it and get another by Mary Cecil Haye.

The disk shot down the groove, wobbled a while, ceased and ogled them:
six.

Miss Dunne clicked on the keyboard:

--16 June 1904.

Five tallwhitehatted sandwichmen between Monypeny's corner and the slab
where Wolfe Tone's statue was not, eeled themselves turning H. E. L.
Y.'S and plodded back as they had come.

Then she stared at the large poster of Marie Kendall, charming
soubrette, and, listlessly lolling, scribbled on the jotter sixteens and
capital esses. Mustard hair and dauby cheeks. She's not nicelooking,
is she? The way she's holding up her bit of a skirt. Wonder will that
fellow be at the band tonight. If I could get that dressmaker to make a
concertina skirt like Susy Nagle's. They kick out grand. Shannon and
all the boatclub swells never took his eyes off her. Hope to goodness he
won't keep me here till seven.

The telephone rang rudely by her ear.

--Hello. Yes, sir. No, sir. Yes, sir. I'll ring them up after five. Only
those two, sir, for Belfast and Liverpool. All right, sir. Then I can go
after six if you're not back. A quarter after. Yes, sir. Twentyseven and
six. I'll tell him. Yes: one, seven, six.

She scribbled three figures on an envelope.

--Mr Boylan! Hello! That gentleman from SPORT was in looking for you. Mr
Lenehan, yes. He said he'll be in the Ormond at four. No, sir. Yes, sir.
I'll ring them up after five.

* * * * *

Two pink faces turned in the flare of the tiny torch.

--Who's that? Ned Lambert asked. Is that Crotty?

--Ringabella and Crosshaven, a voice replied groping for foothold.

--Hello, Jack, is that yourself? Ned Lambert said, raising in salute his
pliant lath among the flickering arches. Come on. Mind your steps there.

The vesta in the clergyman's uplifted hand consumed itself in a long
soft flame and was let fall. At their feet its red speck died: and
mouldy air closed round them.

--How interesting! a refined accent said in the gloom.

--Yes, sir, Ned Lambert said heartily. We are standing in the historic
council chamber of saint Mary's abbey where silken Thomas proclaimed
himself a rebel in 1534. This is the most historic spot in all Dublin.
O'Madden Burke is going to write something about it one of these days.
The old bank of Ireland was over the way till the time of the union and
the original jews' temple was here too before they built their synagogue
over in Adelaide road. You were never here before, Jack, were you?

--No, Ned.

--He rode down through Dame walk, the refined accent said, if my memory
serves me. The mansion of the Kildares was in Thomas court.

--That's right, Ned Lambert said. That's quite right, sir.

--If you will be so kind then, the clergyman said, the next time to
allow me perhaps...

--Certainly, Ned Lambert said. Bring the camera whenever you like. I'll
get those bags cleared away from the windows. You can take it from here
or from here.

In the still faint light he moved about, tapping with his lath the piled
seedbags and points of vantage on the floor.

From a long face a beard and gaze hung on a chessboard.

--I'm deeply obliged, Mr Lambert, the clergyman said. I won't trespass
on your valuable time...

--You're welcome, sir, Ned Lambert said. Drop in whenever you like. Next
week, say. Can you see?

--Yes, yes. Good afternoon, Mr Lambert. Very pleased to have met you.

--Pleasure is mine, sir, Ned Lambert answered.

He followed his guest to the outlet and then whirled his lath away among
the pillars. With J. J. O'Molloy he came forth slowly into Mary's abbey
where draymen were loading floats with sacks of carob and palmnut meal,
O'Connor, Wexford.

He stood to read the card in his hand.

--The reverend Hugh C. Love, Rathcoffey. Present address: Saint
Michael's, Sallins. Nice young chap he is. He's writing a book about the
Fitzgeralds he told me. He's well up in history, faith.

The young woman with slow care detached from her light skirt a clinging
twig.

--I thought you were at a new gunpowder plot, J. J. O'Molloy said.

Ned Lambert cracked his fingers in the air.

--God! he cried. I forgot to tell him that one about the earl of Kildare
after he set fire to Cashel cathedral. You know that one? _I'm bloody
sorry I did it,_ says he, _but I declare to God I thought the archbishop
was inside._ He mightn't like it, though. What? God, I'll tell him
anyhow. That was the great earl, the Fitzgerald Mor. Hot members they
were all of them, the Geraldines.

The horses he passed started nervously under their slack harness. He
slapped a piebald haunch quivering near him and cried:

--Woa, sonny!

He turned to J. J. O'Molloy and asked:

--Well, Jack. What is it? What's the trouble? Wait awhile. Hold hard.

With gaping mouth and head far back he stood still and, after an
instant, sneezed loudly.

--Chow! he said. Blast you!

--The dust from those sacks, J. J. O'Molloy said politely.

--No, Ned Lambert gasped, I caught a... cold night before... blast
your soul... night before last... and there was a hell of a lot of
draught...

He held his handkerchief ready for the coming...

--I was... Glasnevin this morning... poor little... what do you call
him... Chow!... Mother of Moses!

* * * * *

Tom Rochford took the top disk from the pile he clasped against his
claret waistcoat.

--See? he said. Say it's turn six. In here, see. Turn Now On.

He slid it into the left slot for them. It shot down the groove, wobbled
a while, ceased, ogling them: six.

Lawyers of the past, haughty, pleading, beheld pass from the
consolidated taxing office to Nisi Prius court Richie Goulding carrying
the costbag of Goulding, Collis and Ward and heard rustling from the
admiralty division of king's bench to the court of appeal an elderly
female with false teeth smiling incredulously and a black silk skirt of
great amplitude.

--See? he said. See now the last one I put in is over here: Turns Over.
The impact. Leverage, see?

He showed them the rising column of disks on the right.

--Smart idea, Nosey Flynn said, snuffling. So a fellow coming in late
can see what turn is on and what turns are over.

--See? Tom Rochford said.

He slid in a disk for himself: and watched it shoot, wobble, ogle, stop:
four. Turn Now On.

--I'll see him now in the Ormond, Lenehan said, and sound him. One good
turn deserves another.

--Do, Tom Rochford said. Tell him I'm Boylan with impatience.

--Goodnight, M'Coy said abruptly. When you two begin

Nosey Flynn stooped towards the lever, snuffling at it.

--But how does it work here, Tommy? he asked.

--Tooraloo, Lenehan said. See you later.

He followed M'Coy out across the tiny square of Crampton court.

--He's a hero, he said simply.

--I know, M'Coy said. The drain, you mean.

--Drain? Lenehan said. It was down a manhole.

They passed Dan Lowry's musichall where Marie Kendall, charming
soubrette, smiled on them from a poster a dauby smile.

Going down the path of Sycamore street beside the Empire musichall
Lenehan showed M'Coy how the whole thing was. One of those manholes like
a bloody gaspipe and there was the poor devil stuck down in it, half
choked with sewer gas. Down went Tom Rochford anyhow, booky's vest and
all, with the rope round him. And be damned but he got the rope round
the poor devil and the two were hauled up.

--The act of a hero, he said.

At the Dolphin they halted to allow the ambulance car to gallop past
them for Jervis street.

--This way, he said, walking to the right. I want to pop into Lynam's
to see Sceptre's starting price. What's the time by your gold watch and
chain?

M'Coy peered into Marcus Tertius Moses' sombre office, then at O'Neill's
clock.

--After three, he said. Who's riding her?

--O. Madden, Lenehan said. And a game filly she is.

While he waited in Temple bar M'Coy dodged a banana peel with gentle
pushes of his toe from the path to the gutter. Fellow might damn easy
get a nasty fall there coming along tight in the dark.

The gates of the drive opened wide to give egress to the viceregal
cavalcade.

--Even money, Lenehan said returning. I knocked against Bantam Lyons
in there going to back a bloody horse someone gave him that hasn't an
earthly. Through here.

They went up the steps and under Merchants' arch. A darkbacked figure
scanned books on the hawker's cart.

--There he is, Lenehan said.

--Wonder what he's buying, M'Coy said, glancing behind.

--_Leopoldo or the Bloom is on the Rye,_ Lenehan said.

--He's dead nuts on sales, M'Coy said. I was with him one day and he
bought a book from an old one in Liffey street for two bob. There were
fine plates in it worth double the money, the stars and the moon and
comets with long tails. Astronomy it was about.

Lenehan laughed.

--I'll tell you a damn good one about comets' tails, he said. Come over
in the sun.

They crossed to the metal bridge and went along Wellington quay by the
riverwall.

Master Patrick Aloysius Dignam came out of Mangan's, late Fehrenbach's,
carrying a pound and a half of porksteaks.

--There was a long spread out at Glencree reformatory, Lenehan said
eagerly. The annual dinner, you know. Boiled shirt affair. The lord
mayor was there, Val Dillon it was, and sir Charles Cameron and Dan
Dawson spoke and there was music. Bartell d'Arcy sang and Benjamin
Dollard...

--I know, M'Coy broke in. My missus sang there once.

--Did she? Lenehan said.

A card _Unfurnished Apartments_ reappeared on the windowsash of number 7
Eccles street.

He checked his tale a moment but broke out in a wheezy laugh.

--But wait till I tell you, he said. Delahunt of Camden street had the
catering and yours truly was chief bottlewasher. Bloom and the wife were
there. Lashings of stuff we put up: port wine and sherry and curacao to
which we did ample justice. Fast and furious it was. After liquids came
solids. Cold joints galore and mince pies...

--I know, M'Coy said. The year the missus was there...

Lenehan linked his arm warmly.

--But wait till I tell you, he said. We had a midnight lunch too after
all the jollification and when we sallied forth it was blue o'clock the
morning after the night before. Coming home it was a gorgeous winter's
night on the Featherbed Mountain. Bloom and Chris Callinan were on one
side of the car and I was with the wife on the other. We started singing
glees and duets: _Lo, the early beam of morning_. She was well primed
with a good load of Delahunt's port under her bellyband. Every jolt the
bloody car gave I had her bumping up against me. Hell's delights! She
has a fine pair, God bless her. Like that.

He held his caved hands a cubit from him, frowning:

--I was tucking the rug under her and settling her boa all the time.
Know what I mean?

His hands moulded ample curves of air. He shut his eyes tight in
delight, his body shrinking, and blew a sweet chirp from his lips.

--The lad stood to attention anyhow, he said with a sigh. She's a gamey
mare and no mistake. Bloom was pointing out all the stars and the comets
in the heavens to Chris Callinan and the jarvey: the great bear and
Hercules and the dragon, and the whole jingbang lot. But, by God, I was
lost, so to speak, in the milky way. He knows them all, faith. At last
she spotted a weeny weeshy one miles away. _And what star is that,
Poldy?_ says she. By God, she had Bloom cornered. _That one, is it?_
says Chris Callinan, _sure that's only what you might call a pinprick._
By God, he wasn't far wide of the mark.

Lenehan stopped and leaned on the riverwall, panting with soft laughter.

--I'm weak, he gasped.

M'Coy's white face smiled about it at instants and grew grave. Lenehan
walked on again. He lifted his yachtingcap and scratched his hindhead
rapidly. He glanced sideways in the sunlight at M'Coy.

--He's a cultured allroundman, Bloom is, he said seriously. He's not one
of your common or garden... you know... There's a touch of the artist
about old Bloom.

* * * * *

Mr Bloom turned over idly pages of _The Awful Disclosures of Maria
Monk,_ then of Aristotle's _Masterpiece._ Crooked botched print. Plates:
infants cuddled in a ball in bloodred wombs like livers of slaughtered
cows. Lots of them like that at this moment all over the world. All
butting with their skulls to get out of it. Child born every minute
somewhere. Mrs Purefoy.

He laid both books aside and glanced at the third: _Tales of the Ghetto_
by Leopold von Sacher Masoch.

--That I had, he said, pushing it by.

The shopman let two volumes fall on the counter.

--Them are two good ones, he said.

Onions of his breath came across the counter out of his ruined mouth.
He bent to make a bundle of the other books, hugged them against his
unbuttoned waistcoat and bore them off behind the dingy curtain.

On O'Connell bridge many persons observed the grave deportment and gay
apparel of Mr Denis J Maginni, professor of dancing &c.

Mr Bloom, alone, looked at the titles. _Fair Tyrants_ by James
Lovebirch. Know the kind that is. Had it? Yes.

He opened it. Thought so.

A woman's voice behind the dingy curtain. Listen: the man.

No: she wouldn't like that much. Got her it once.

He read the other title: _Sweets of Sin_. More in her line. Let us see.

He read where his finger opened.

_--All the dollarbills her husband gave her were spent in the stores on
wondrous gowns and costliest frillies. For him! For raoul!_

Yes. This. Here. Try.

--_Her mouth glued on his in a luscious voluptuous kiss while his hands
felt for the opulent curves inside her deshabillé._

Yes. Take this. The end.

--_You are late, he spoke hoarsely, eying her with a suspicious glare.
The beautiful woman threw off her sabletrimmed wrap, displaying her
queenly shoulders and heaving embonpoint. An imperceptible smile played
round her perfect lips as she turned to him calmly._

Mr Bloom read again: _The beautiful woman._

Warmth showered gently over him, cowing his flesh. Flesh yielded amply
amid rumpled clothes: whites of eyes swooning up. His nostrils arched
themselves for prey. Melting breast ointments (_for Him! For Raoul!_).
Armpits' oniony sweat. Fishgluey slime (_her heaving embonpoint!_).
Feel! Press! Crushed! Sulphur dung of lions!

Young! Young!

An elderly female, no more young, left the building of the courts of
chancery, king's bench, exchequer and common pleas, having heard in
the lord chancellor's court the case in lunacy of Potterton, in the
admiralty division the summons, exparte motion, of the owners of the
Lady Cairns versus the owners of the barque Mona, in the court of appeal
reservation of judgment in the case of Harvey versus the Ocean Accident
and Guarantee Corporation.

Phlegmy coughs shook the air of the bookshop, bulging out the dingy
curtains. The shopman's uncombed grey head came out and his unshaven
reddened face, coughing. He raked his throat rudely, puked phlegm on the
floor. He put his boot on what he had spat, wiping his sole along it,
and bent, showing a rawskinned crown, scantily haired.

Mr Bloom beheld it.

Mastering his troubled breath, he said:

--I'll take this one.

The shopman lifted eyes bleared with old rheum.

--_Sweets of Sin,_ he said, tapping on it. That's a good one.

* * * * *

The lacquey by the door of Dillon's auctionrooms shook his handbell
twice again and viewed himself in the chalked mirror of the cabinet.

Dilly Dedalus, loitering by the curbstone, heard the beats of the
bell, the cries of the auctioneer within. Four and nine. Those lovely
curtains. Five shillings. Cosy curtains. Selling new at two guineas. Any
advance on five shillings? Going for five shillings.

The lacquey lifted his handbell and shook it:

--Barang!

Bang of the lastlap bell spurred the halfmile wheelmen to their sprint.
J. A. Jackson, W. E. Wylie, A. Munro and H. T. Gahan, their stretched
necks wagging, negotiated the curve by the College library.

Mr Dedalus, tugging a long moustache, came round from Williams's row. He
halted near his daughter.

--It's time for you, she said.

--Stand up straight for the love of the lord Jesus, Mr Dedalus said.
Are you trying to imitate your uncle John, the cornetplayer, head upon
shoulder? Melancholy God!

Dilly shrugged her shoulders. Mr Dedalus placed his hands on them and
held them back.

--Stand up straight, girl, he said. You'll get curvature of the spine.
Do you know what you look like?

He let his head sink suddenly down and forward, hunching his shoulders
and dropping his underjaw.

--Give it up, father, Dilly said. All the people are looking at you.

Mr Dedalus drew himself upright and tugged again at his moustache.

--Did you get any money? Dilly asked.

--Where would I get money? Mr Dedalus said. There is no-one in Dublin
would lend me fourpence.

--You got some, Dilly said, looking in his eyes.

--How do you know that? Mr Dedalus asked, his tongue in his cheek.

Mr Kernan, pleased with the order he had booked, walked boldly along
James's street.

--I know you did, Dilly answered. Were you in the Scotch house now?

--I was not, then, Mr Dedalus said, smiling. Was it the little nuns
taught you to be so saucy? Here.

He handed her a shilling.

--See if you can do anything with that, he said.

--I suppose you got five, Dilly said. Give me more than that.

--Wait awhile, Mr Dedalus said threateningly. You're like the rest of
them, are you? An insolent pack of little bitches since your poor mother
died. But wait awhile. You'll all get a short shrift and a long day from
me. Low blackguardism! I'm going to get rid of you. Wouldn't care if I
was stretched out stiff. He's dead. The man upstairs is dead.

He left her and walked on. Dilly followed quickly and pulled his coat.

--Well, what is it? he said, stopping.

The lacquey rang his bell behind their backs.

--Barang!

--Curse your bloody blatant soul, Mr Dedalus cried, turning on him.

The lacquey, aware of comment, shook the lolling clapper of his bell but
feebly:

--Bang!

Mr Dedalus stared at him.

--Watch him, he said. It's instructive. I wonder will he allow us to
talk.

--You got more than that, father, Dilly said.

--I'm going to show you a little trick, Mr Dedalus said. I'll leave
you all where Jesus left the jews. Look, there's all I have. I got
two shillings from Jack Power and I spent twopence for a shave for the
funeral.

He drew forth a handful of copper coins, nervously.

--Can't you look for some money somewhere? Dilly said.

Mr Dedalus thought and nodded.

--I will, he said gravely. I looked all along the gutter in O'Connell
street. I'll try this one now.

--You're very funny, Dilly said, grinning.

--Here, Mr Dedalus said, handing her two pennies. Get a glass of milk
for yourself and a bun or a something. I'll be home shortly.

He put the other coins in his pocket and started to walk on.

The viceregal cavalcade passed, greeted by obsequious policemen, out of
Parkgate.

--I'm sure you have another shilling, Dilly said.

The lacquey banged loudly.

Mr Dedalus amid the din walked off, murmuring to himself with a pursing
mincing mouth gently:

--The little nuns! Nice little things! O, sure they wouldn't do
anything! O, sure they wouldn't really! Is it little sister Monica!

* * * * *

From the sundial towards James's gate walked Mr Kernan, pleased with the
order he had booked for Pulbrook Robertson, boldly along James's street,
past Shackleton's offices. Got round him all right. How do you do, Mr
Crimmins? First rate, sir. I was afraid you might be up in your other
establishment in Pimlico. How are things going? Just keeping alive.
Lovely weather we're having. Yes, indeed. Good for the country. Those
farmers are always grumbling. I'll just take a thimbleful of your best
gin, Mr Crimmins. A small gin, sir. Yes, sir. Terrible affair that
General Slocum explosion. Terrible, terrible! A thousand casualties. And
heartrending scenes. Men trampling down women and children. Most brutal
thing. What do they say was the cause? Spontaneous combustion. Most
scandalous revelation. Not a single lifeboat would float and the
firehose all burst. What I can't understand is how the inspectors ever
allowed a boat like that... Now, you're talking straight, Mr Crimmins.
You know why? Palm oil. Is that a fact? Without a doubt. Well now, look
at that. And America they say is the land of the free. I thought we were
bad here.

I smiled at him. _America,_ I said quietly, just like that. _What is
it? The sweepings of every country including our own. Isn't that true?_
That's a fact.

Graft, my dear sir. Well, of course, where there's money going there's
always someone to pick it up.

Saw him looking at my frockcoat. Dress does it. Nothing like a dressy
appearance. Bowls them over.

--Hello, Simon, Father Cowley said. How are things?

--Hello, Bob, old man, Mr Dedalus answered, stopping.

Mr Kernan halted and preened himself before the sloping mirror of Peter
Kennedy, hairdresser. Stylish coat, beyond a doubt. Scott of Dawson
street. Well worth the half sovereign I gave Neary for it. Never built
under three guineas. Fits me down to the ground. Some Kildare street
club toff had it probably. John Mulligan, the manager of the Hibernian
bank, gave me a very sharp eye yesterday on Carlisle bridge as if he
remembered me.

Aham! Must dress the character for those fellows. Knight of the road.
Gentleman. And now, Mr Crimmins, may we have the honour of your custom
again, sir. The cup that cheers but not inebriates, as the old saying
has it.

North wall and sir John Rogerson's quay, with hulls and anchorchains,
sailing westward, sailed by a skiff, a crumpled throwaway, rocked on the
ferrywash, Elijah is coming.

Mr Kernan glanced in farewell at his image. High colour, of course.
Grizzled moustache. Returned Indian officer. Bravely he bore his stumpy
body forward on spatted feet, squaring his shoulders. Is that Ned
Lambert's brother over the way, Sam? What? Yes. He's as like it as damn
it. No. The windscreen of that motorcar in the sun there. Just a flash
like that. Damn like him.

Aham! Hot spirit of juniper juice warmed his vitals and his breath. Good
drop of gin, that was. His frocktails winked in bright sunshine to his
fat strut.

Down there Emmet was hanged, drawn and quartered. Greasy black rope.
Dogs licking the blood off the street when the lord lieutenant's wife
drove by in her noddy.

Bad times those were. Well, well. Over and done with. Great topers too.
Fourbottle men.

Let me see. Is he buried in saint Michan's? Or no, there was a midnight
burial in Glasnevin. Corpse brought in through a secret door in the
wall. Dignam is there now. Went out in a puff. Well, well. Better turn
down here. Make a detour.

Mr Kernan turned and walked down the slope of Watling street by
the corner of Guinness's visitors' waitingroom. Outside the Dublin
Distillers Company's stores an outside car without fare or jarvey stood,
the reins knotted to the wheel. Damn dangerous thing. Some Tipperary
bosthoon endangering the lives of the citizens. Runaway horse.

Denis Breen with his tomes, weary of having waited an hour in John
Henry Menton's office, led his wife over O'Connell bridge, bound for the
office of Messrs Collis and Ward.

Mr Kernan approached Island street.

Times of the troubles. Must ask Ned Lambert to lend me those
reminiscences of sir Jonah Barrington. When you look back on it all
now in a kind of retrospective arrangement. Gaming at Daly's. No
cardsharping then. One of those fellows got his hand nailed to the table
by a dagger. Somewhere here lord Edward Fitzgerald escaped from major
Sirr. Stables behind Moira house.

Damn good gin that was.

Fine dashing young nobleman. Good stock, of course. That ruffian, that
sham squire, with his violet gloves gave him away. Course they were
on the wrong side. They rose in dark and evil days. Fine poem that
is: Ingram. They were gentlemen. Ben Dollard does sing that ballad
touchingly. Masterly rendition.

_At the siege of Ross did my father fall._

A cavalcade in easy trot along Pembroke quay passed, outriders leaping,
leaping in their, in their saddles. Frockcoats. Cream sunshades.

Mr Kernan hurried forward, blowing pursily.

His Excellency! Too bad! Just missed that by a hair. Damn it! What a
pity!

* * * * *

Stephen Dedalus watched through the webbed window the lapidary's fingers
prove a timedulled chain. Dust webbed the window and the showtrays. Dust
darkened the toiling fingers with their vulture nails. Dust slept
on dull coils of bronze and silver, lozenges of cinnabar, on rubies,
leprous and winedark stones.

Born all in the dark wormy earth, cold specks of fire, evil, lights
shining in the darkness. Where fallen archangels flung the stars of
their brows. Muddy swinesnouts, hands, root and root, gripe and wrest
them.

She dances in a foul gloom where gum bums with garlic. A sailorman,
rustbearded, sips from a beaker rum and eyes her. A long and seafed
silent rut. She dances, capers, wagging her sowish haunches and her
hips, on her gross belly flapping a ruby egg.

Old Russell with a smeared shammy rag burnished again his gem, turned it
and held it at the point of his Moses' beard. Grandfather ape gloating
on a stolen hoard.

And you who wrest old images from the burial earth? The brainsick words
of sophists: Antisthenes. A lore of drugs. Orient and immortal wheat
standing from everlasting to everlasting.

Two old women fresh from their whiff of the briny trudged through
Irishtown along London bridge road, one with a sanded tired umbrella,
one with a midwife's bag in which eleven cockles rolled.

The whirr of flapping leathern bands and hum of dynamos from the
powerhouse urged Stephen to be on. Beingless beings. Stop! Throb always
without you and the throb always within. Your heart you sing of. I
between them. Where? Between two roaring worlds where they swirl, I.
Shatter them, one and both. But stun myself too in the blow. Shatter me
you who can. Bawd and butcher were the words. I say! Not yet awhile. A
look around.

Yes, quite true. Very large and wonderful and keeps famous time. You say
right, sir. A Monday morning, 'twas so, indeed.

Stephen went down Bedford row, the handle of the ash clacking against
his shoulderblade. In Clohissey's window a faded 1860 print of Heenan
boxing Sayers held his eye. Staring backers with square hats stood
round the roped prizering. The heavyweights in tight loincloths proposed
gently each to other his bulbous fists. And they are throbbing: heroes'
hearts.

He turned and halted by the slanted bookcart.

--Twopence each, the huckster said. Four for sixpence.

Tattered pages. _The Irish Beekeeper. Life and Miracles of the Curé of
Ars. Pocket Guide to Killarney._

I might find here one of my pawned schoolprizes. _Stephano Dedalo,
alumno optimo, palmam ferenti._

Father Conmee, having read his little hours, walked through the hamlet
of Donnycarney, murmuring vespers.

Binding too good probably. What is this? Eighth and ninth book of Moses.
Secret of all secrets. Seal of King David. Thumbed pages: read and read.
Who has passed here before me? How to soften chapped hands. Recipe for
white wine vinegar. How to win a woman's love. For me this. Say the
following talisman three times with hands folded:

--_Se el yilo nebrakada femininum! Amor me solo! Sanktus! Amen._

Who wrote this? Charms and invocations of the most blessed abbot Peter
Salanka to all true believers divulged. As good as any other abbot's
charms, as mumbling Joachim's. Down, baldynoddle, or we'll wool your
wool.

--What are you doing here, Stephen?

Dilly's high shoulders and shabby dress.

Shut the book quick. Don't let see.

--What are you doing? Stephen said.

A Stuart face of nonesuch Charles, lank locks falling at its sides. It
glowed as she crouched feeding the fire with broken boots. I told her
of Paris. Late lieabed under a quilt of old overcoats, fingering a
pinchbeck bracelet, Dan Kelly's token. _Nebrakada femininum._

--What have you there? Stephen asked.

--I bought it from the other cart for a penny, Dilly said, laughing
nervously. Is it any good?

My eyes they say she has. Do others see me so? Quick, far and daring.
Shadow of my mind.

He took the coverless book from her hand. Chardenal's French primer.

--What did you buy that for? he asked. To learn French?

She nodded, reddening and closing tight her lips.

Show no surprise. Quite natural.

--Here, Stephen said. It's all right. Mind Maggy doesn't pawn it on you.
I suppose all my books are gone.

--Some, Dilly said. We had to.

She is drowning. Agenbite. Save her. Agenbite. All against us. She will
drown me with her, eyes and hair. Lank coils of seaweed hair around me,
my heart, my soul. Salt green death.

We.

Agenbite of inwit. Inwit's agenbite.

Misery! Misery!

* * * * *

--Hello, Simon, Father Cowley said. How are things?

--Hello, Bob, old man, Mr Dedalus answered, stopping.

They clasped hands loudly outside Reddy and Daughter's. Father Cowley
brushed his moustache often downward with a scooping hand.

--What's the best news? Mr Dedalus said.

--Why then not much, Father Cowley said. I'm barricaded up, Simon, with
two men prowling around the house trying to effect an entrance.

--Jolly, Mr Dedalus said. Who is it?

--O, Father Cowley said. A certain gombeen man of our acquaintance.

--With a broken back, is it? Mr Dedalus asked.

--The same, Simon, Father Cowley answered. Reuben of that ilk. I'm just
waiting for Ben Dollard. He's going to say a word to long John to get
him to take those two men off. All I want is a little time.

He looked with vague hope up and down the quay, a big apple bulging in
his neck.

--I know, Mr Dedalus said, nodding. Poor old bockedy Ben! He's always
doing a good turn for someone. Hold hard!

He put on his glasses and gazed towards the metal bridge an instant.

--There he is, by God, he said, arse and pockets.

Ben Dollard's loose blue cutaway and square hat above large slops
crossed the quay in full gait from the metal bridge. He came towards
them at an amble, scratching actively behind his coattails.

As he came near Mr Dedalus greeted:

--Hold that fellow with the bad trousers.

--Hold him now, Ben Dollard said.

Mr Dedalus eyed with cold wandering scorn various points of Ben
Dollard's figure. Then, turning to Father Cowley with a nod, he muttered
sneeringly:

--That's a pretty garment, isn't it, for a summer's day?

--Why, God eternally curse your soul, Ben Dollard growled furiously, I
threw out more clothes in my time than you ever saw.

He stood beside them beaming, on them first and on his roomy clothes
from points of which Mr Dedalus flicked fluff, saying:

--They were made for a man in his health, Ben, anyhow.

--Bad luck to the jewman that made them, Ben Dollard said. Thanks be to
God he's not paid yet.

--And how is that _basso profondo_, Benjamin? Father Cowley asked.

Cashel Boyle O'Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell, murmuring,
glassyeyed, strode past the Kildare street club.

Ben Dollard frowned and, making suddenly a chanter's mouth, gave forth a
deep note.

--Aw! he said.

--That's the style, Mr Dedalus said, nodding to its drone.

--What about that? Ben Dollard said. Not too dusty? What?

He turned to both.

--That'll do, Father Cowley said, nodding also.

The reverend Hugh C. Love walked from the old chapterhouse of saint
Mary's abbey past James and Charles Kennedy's, rectifiers, attended by
Geraldines tall and personable, towards the Tholsel beyond the ford of
hurdles.

Ben Dollard with a heavy list towards the shopfronts led them forward,
his joyful fingers in the air.

--Come along with me to the subsheriff's office, he said. I want to
show you the new beauty Rock has for a bailiff. He's a cross between
Lobengula and Lynchehaun. He's well worth seeing, mind you. Come along.
I saw John Henry Menton casually in the Bodega just now and it will cost
me a fall if I don't... Wait awhile... We're on the right lay, Bob,
believe you me.

--For a few days tell him, Father Cowley said anxiously.

Ben Dollard halted and stared, his loud orifice open, a dangling button
of his coat wagging brightbacked from its thread as he wiped away the
heavy shraums that clogged his eyes to hear aright.

--What few days? he boomed. Hasn't your landlord distrained for rent?

--He has, Father Cowley said.

--Then our friend's writ is not worth the paper it's printed on, Ben
Dollard said. The landlord has the prior claim. I gave him all the
particulars. 29 Windsor avenue. Love is the name?

--That's right, Father Cowley said. The reverend Mr Love. He's a
minister in the country somewhere. But are you sure of that?

--You can tell Barabbas from me, Ben Dollard said, that he can put that
writ where Jacko put the nuts.

He led Father Cowley boldly forward, linked to his bulk.

--Filberts I believe they were, Mr Dedalus said, as he dropped his
glasses on his coatfront, following them.

* * * * *

--The youngster will be all right, Martin Cunningham said, as they
passed out of the Castleyard gate.

The policeman touched his forehead.

--God bless you, Martin Cunningham said, cheerily.

He signed to the waiting jarvey who chucked at the reins and set on
towards Lord Edward street.

Bronze by gold, Miss Kennedy's head by Miss Douce's head, appeared above
the crossblind of the Ormond hotel.

--Yes, Martin Cunningham said, fingering his beard. I wrote to Father
Conmee and laid the whole case before him.

--You could try our friend, Mr Power suggested backward.

--Boyd? Martin Cunningham said shortly. Touch me not.

John Wyse Nolan, lagging behind, reading the list, came after them
quickly down Cork hill.

On the steps of the City hall Councillor Nannetti, descending, hailed
Alderman Cowley and Councillor Abraham Lyon ascending.

The castle car wheeled empty into upper Exchange street.

--Look here, Martin, John Wyse Nolan said, overtaking them at the _Mail_
office. I see Bloom put his name down for five shillings.

--Quite right, Martin Cunningham said, taking the list. And put down the
five shillings too.

--Without a second word either, Mr Power said.

--Strange but true, Martin Cunningham added.

John Wyse Nolan opened wide eyes.

--I'll say there is much kindness in the jew, he quoted, elegantly.

They went down Parliament street.

--There's Jimmy Henry, Mr Power said, just heading for Kavanagh's.

--Righto, Martin Cunningham said. Here goes.

Outside _la Maison Claire_ Blazes Boylan waylaid Jack Mooney's
brother-in-law, humpy, tight, making for the liberties.

John Wyse Nolan fell back with Mr Power, while Martin Cunningham took
the elbow of a dapper little man in a shower of hail suit, who walked
uncertainly, with hasty steps past Micky Anderson's watches.

--The assistant town clerk's corns are giving him some trouble, John
Wyse Nolan told Mr Power.

They followed round the corner towards James Kavanagh's winerooms. The
empty castle car fronted them at rest in Essex gate. Martin Cunningham,
speaking always, showed often the list at which Jimmy Henry did not
glance.

--And long John Fanning is here too, John Wyse Nolan said, as large as
life.

The tall form of long John Fanning filled the doorway where he stood.

--Good day, Mr Subsheriff, Martin Cunningham said, as all halted and
greeted.

Long John Fanning made no way for them. He removed his large Henry Clay
decisively and his large fierce eyes scowled intelligently over all
their faces.

--Are the conscript fathers pursuing their peaceful deliberations? he
said with rich acrid utterance to the assistant town clerk.

Hell open to christians they were having, Jimmy Henry said pettishly,
about their damned Irish language. Where was the marshal, he wanted
to know, to keep order in the council chamber. And old Barlow the
macebearer laid up with asthma, no mace on the table, nothing in order,
no quorum even, and Hutchinson, the lord mayor, in Llandudno and little
Lorcan Sherlock doing _locum tenens_ for him. Damned Irish language,
language of our forefathers.

Long John Fanning blew a plume of smoke from his lips.

Martin Cunningham spoke by turns, twirling the peak of his beard, to the
assistant town clerk and the subsheriff, while John Wyse Nolan held his
peace.

--What Dignam was that? long John Fanning asked.

Jimmy Henry made a grimace and lifted his left foot.

--O, my corns! he said plaintively. Come upstairs for goodness' sake
till I sit down somewhere. Uff! Ooo! Mind!

Testily he made room for himself beside long John Fanning's flank and
passed in and up the stairs.

--Come on up, Martin Cunningham said to the subsheriff. I don't think
you knew him or perhaps you did, though.

With John Wyse Nolan Mr Power followed them in.

--Decent little soul he was, Mr Power said to the stalwart back of long
John Fanning ascending towards long John Fanning in the mirror.

--Rather lowsized. Dignam of Menton's office that was, Martin Cunningham
said.

Long John Fanning could not remember him.

Clatter of horsehoofs sounded from the air.

--What's that? Martin Cunningham said.

All turned where they stood. John Wyse Nolan came down again. From the
cool shadow of the doorway he saw the horses pass Parliament street,
harness and glossy pasterns in sunlight shimmering. Gaily they went past
before his cool unfriendly eyes, not quickly. In saddles of the leaders,
leaping leaders, rode outriders.

--What was it? Martin Cunningham asked, as they went on up the
staircase.

--The lord lieutenantgeneral and general governor of Ireland, John Wyse
Nolan answered from the stairfoot.

* * * * *

As they trod across the thick carpet Buck Mulligan whispered behind his
Panama to Haines:

--Parnell's brother. There in the corner.

They chose a small table near the window, opposite a longfaced man whose
beard and gaze hung intently down on a chessboard.

--Is that he? Haines asked, twisting round in his seat.

--Yes, Mulligan said. That's John Howard, his brother, our city marshal.

John Howard Parnell translated a white bishop quietly and his grey claw
went up again to his forehead whereat it rested. An instant after, under
its screen, his eyes looked quickly, ghostbright, at his foe and fell
once more upon a working corner.

--I'll take a _mélange,_ Haines said to the waitress.

--Two _mélanges,_ Buck Mulligan said. And bring us some scones and
butter and some cakes as well.

When she had gone he said, laughing:

--We call it D.B.C. because they have damn bad cakes. O, but you missed
Dedalus on _Hamlet._

Haines opened his newbought book.

--I'm sorry, he said. Shakespeare is the happy huntingground of all
minds that have lost their balance.

The onelegged sailor growled at the area of 14 Nelson street:

--_England expects_...

Buck Mulligan's primrose waistcoat shook gaily to his laughter.

--You should see him, he said, when his body loses its balance.
Wandering Aengus I call him.

--I am sure he has an _idée fixe,_ Haines said, pinching his chin
thoughtfully with thumb and forefinger. Now I am speculating what it
would be likely to be. Such persons always have.

Buck Mulligan bent across the table gravely.

--They drove his wits astray, he said, by visions of hell. He will never
capture the Attic note. The note of Swinburne, of all poets, the white
death and the ruddy birth. That is his tragedy. He can never be a poet.
The joy of creation...

--Eternal punishment, Haines said, nodding curtly. I see. I tackled him
this morning on belief. There was something on his mind, I saw.
It's rather interesting because professor Pokorny of Vienna makes an
interesting point out of that.

Buck Mulligan's watchful eyes saw the waitress come. He helped her to
unload her tray.

--He can find no trace of hell in ancient Irish myth, Haines said, amid
the cheerful cups. The moral idea seems lacking, the sense of destiny,
of retribution. Rather strange he should have just that fixed idea. Does
he write anything for your movement?

He sank two lumps of sugar deftly longwise through the whipped cream.
Buck Mulligan slit a steaming scone in two and plastered butter over its
smoking pith. He bit off a soft piece hungrily.

--Ten years, he said, chewing and laughing. He is going to write
something in ten years.

--Seems a long way off, Haines said, thoughtfully lifting his spoon.
Still, I shouldn't wonder if he did after all.

He tasted a spoonful from the creamy cone of his cup.

--This is real Irish cream I take it, he said with forbearance. I don't
want to be imposed on.

Elijah, skiff, light crumpled throwaway, sailed eastward by flanks of
ships and trawlers, amid an archipelago of corks, beyond new Wapping
street past Benson's ferry, and by the threemasted schooner _Rosevean_
from Bridgwater with bricks.

* * * * *

Almidano Artifoni walked past Holles street, past Sewell's yard.
Behind him Cashel Boyle O'Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell, with
stickumbrelladustcoat dangling, shunned the lamp before Mr Law Smith's
house and, crossing, walked along Merrion square. Distantly behind him a
blind stripling tapped his way by the wall of College park.

Cashel Boyle O'Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell walked as far as
Mr Lewis Werner's cheerful windows, then turned and strode back along
Merrion square, his stickumbrelladustcoat dangling.

At the corner of Wilde's house he halted, frowned at Elijah's name
announced on the Metropolitan hall, frowned at the distant pleasance of
duke's lawn. His eyeglass flashed frowning in the sun. With ratsteeth
bared he muttered:

--_Coactus volui._

He strode on for Clare street, grinding his fierce word.

As he strode past Mr Bloom's dental windows the sway of his dustcoat
brushed rudely from its angle a slender tapping cane and swept onwards,
having buffeted a thewless body. The blind stripling turned his sickly
face after the striding form.

--God's curse on you, he said sourly, whoever you are! You're blinder
nor I am, you bitch's bastard!

* * * * *

Opposite Ruggy O'Donohoe's Master Patrick Aloysius Dignam, pawing the
pound and a half of Mangan's, late Fehrenbach's, porksteaks he had been
sent for, went along warm Wicklow street dawdling. It was too blooming
dull sitting in the parlour with Mrs Stoer and Mrs Quigley and Mrs
MacDowell and the blind down and they all at their sniffles and sipping
sups of the superior tawny sherry uncle Barney brought from Tunney's.
And they eating crumbs of the cottage fruitcake, jawing the whole
blooming time and sighing.

After Wicklow lane the window of Madame Doyle, courtdress milliner,
stopped him. He stood looking in at the two puckers stripped to their
pelts and putting up their props. From the sidemirrors two mourning
Masters Dignam gaped silently. Myler Keogh, Dublin's pet lamb, will
meet sergeantmajor Bennett, the Portobello bruiser, for a purse of fifty
sovereigns. Gob, that'd be a good pucking match to see. Myler Keogh,
that's the chap sparring out to him with the green sash. Two bar
entrance, soldiers half price. I could easy do a bunk on ma. Master
Dignam on his left turned as he turned. That's me in mourning. When
is it? May the twentysecond. Sure, the blooming thing is all over. He
turned to the right and on his right Master Dignam turned, his cap awry,
his collar sticking up. Buttoning it down, his chin lifted, he saw the
image of Marie Kendall, charming soubrette, beside the two puckers. One
of them mots that do be in the packets of fags Stoer smokes that his old
fellow welted hell out of him for one time he found out.

Master Dignam got his collar down and dawdled on. The best pucker going
for strength was Fitzsimons. One puck in the wind from that fellow would
knock you into the middle of next week, man. But the best pucker for
science was Jem Corbet before Fitzsimons knocked the stuffings out of
him, dodging and all.

In Grafton street Master Dignam saw a red flower in a toff's mouth and
a swell pair of kicks on him and he listening to what the drunk was
telling him and grinning all the time.

No Sandymount tram.

Master Dignam walked along Nassau street, shifted the porksteaks to
his other hand. His collar sprang up again and he tugged it down. The
blooming stud was too small for the buttonhole of the shirt, blooming
end to it. He met schoolboys with satchels. I'm not going tomorrow
either, stay away till Monday. He met other schoolboys. Do they notice
I'm in mourning? Uncle Barney said he'd get it into the paper tonight.
Then they'll all see it in the paper and read my name printed and pa's
name.

His face got all grey instead of being red like it was and there was a
fly walking over it up to his eye. The scrunch that was when they
were screwing the screws into the coffin: and the bumps when they were
bringing it downstairs.

Pa was inside it and ma crying in the parlour and uncle Barney telling
the men how to get it round the bend. A big coffin it was, and high and
heavylooking. How was that? The last night pa was boosed he was standing
on the landing there bawling out for his boots to go out to Tunney's for
to boose more and he looked butty and short in his shirt. Never see him
again. Death, that is. Pa is dead. My father is dead. He told me to be
a good son to ma. I couldn't hear the other things he said but I saw
his tongue and his teeth trying to say it better. Poor pa. That was
Mr Dignam, my father. I hope he's in purgatory now because he went to
confession to Father Conroy on Saturday night.

* * * * *

William Humble, earl of Dudley, and lady Dudley, accompanied by
lieutenantcolonel Heseltine, drove out after luncheon from the viceregal
lodge. In the following carriage were the honourable Mrs Paget, Miss de
Courcy and the honourable Gerald Ward A.D.C. in attendance.

The cavalcade passed out by the lower gate of Phoenix park saluted by
obsequious policemen and proceeded past Kingsbridge along the northern
quays. The viceroy was most cordially greeted on his way through the
metropolis. At Bloody bridge Mr Thomas Kernan beyond the river greeted
him vainly from afar Between Queen's and Whitworth bridges lord Dudley's
viceregal carriages passed and were unsaluted by Mr Dudley White, B.
L., M. A., who stood on Arran quay outside Mrs M. E. White's, the
pawnbroker's, at the corner of Arran street west stroking his nose with
his forefinger, undecided whether he should arrive at Phibsborough
more quickly by a triple change of tram or by hailing a car or on foot
through Smithfield, Constitution hill and Broadstone terminus. In the
porch of Four Courts Richie Goulding with the costbag of Goulding,
Collis and Ward saw him with surprise. Past Richmond bridge at the
doorstep of the office of Reuben J Dodd, solicitor, agent for the
Patriotic Insurance Company, an elderly female about to enter changed
her plan and retracing her steps by King's windows smiled credulously
on the representative of His Majesty. From its sluice in Wood quay wall
under Tom Devan's office Poddle river hung out in fealty a tongue of
liquid sewage. Above the crossblind of the Ormond hotel, gold by bronze,
Miss Kennedy's head by Miss Douce's head watched and admired. On Ormond
quay Mr Simon Dedalus, steering his way from the greenhouse for the
subsheriff's office, stood still in midstreet and brought his hat low.
His Excellency graciously returned Mr Dedalus' greeting. From Cahill's
corner the reverend Hugh C. Love, M.A., made obeisance unperceived,
mindful of lords deputies whose hands benignant had held of yore rich
advowsons. On Grattan bridge Lenehan and M'Coy, taking leave of each
other, watched the carriages go by. Passing by Roger Greene's office and
Dollard's big red printinghouse Gerty MacDowell, carrying the Catesby's
cork lino letters for her father who was laid up, knew by the style
it was the lord and lady lieutenant but she couldn't see what Her
Excellency had on because the tram and Spring's big yellow furniture van
had to stop in front of her on account of its being the lord lieutenant.
Beyond Lundy Foot's from the shaded door of Kavanagh's winerooms
John Wyse Nolan smiled with unseen coldness towards the lord
lieutenantgeneral and general governor of Ireland. The Right Honourable
William Humble, earl of Dudley, G. C. V. O., passed Micky Anderson's all
times ticking watches and Henry and James's wax smartsuited freshcheeked
models, the gentleman Henry, _dernier cri_ James. Over against Dame gate
Tom Rochford and Nosey Flynn watched the approach of the cavalcade. Tom
Rochford, seeing the eyes of lady Dudley fixed on him, took his thumbs
quickly out of the pockets of his claret waistcoat and doffed his cap to
her. A charming _soubrette,_ great Marie Kendall, with dauby cheeks and
lifted skirt smiled daubily from her poster upon William Humble, earl
of Dudley, and upon lieutenantcolonel H. G. Heseltine, and also upon
the honourable Gerald Ward A. D. C. From the window of the D. B. C. Buck
Mulligan gaily, and Haines gravely, gazed down on the viceregal equipage
over the shoulders of eager guests, whose mass of forms darkened the
chessboard whereon John Howard Parnell looked intently. In Fownes's
street Dilly Dedalus, straining her sight upward from Chardenal's first
French primer, saw sunshades spanned and wheelspokes spinning in the
glare. John Henry Menton, filling the doorway of Commercial Buildings,
stared from winebig oyster eyes, holding a fat gold hunter watch not
looked at in his fat left hand not feeling it. Where the foreleg of King
Billy's horse pawed the air Mrs Breen plucked her hastening husband
back from under the hoofs of the outriders. She shouted in his ear the
tidings. Understanding, he shifted his tomes to his left breast
and saluted the second carriage. The honourable Gerald Ward A.D.C.,
agreeably surprised, made haste to reply. At Ponsonby's corner a jaded
white flagon H. halted and four tallhatted white flagons halted behind
him, E.L.Y'S, while outriders pranced past and carriages. Opposite
Pigott's music warerooms Mr Denis J Maginni, professor of dancing &c,
gaily apparelled, gravely walked, outpassed by a viceroy and unobserved.
By the provost's wall came jauntily Blazes Boylan, stepping in tan shoes
and socks with skyblue clocks to the refrain of _My girl's a Yorkshire
girl._

Blazes Boylan presented to the leaders' skyblue frontlets and high
action a skyblue tie, a widebrimmed straw hat at a rakish angle and a
suit of indigo serge. His hands in his jacket pockets forgot to salute
but he offered to the three ladies the bold admiration of his eyes and
the red flower between his lips. As they drove along Nassau street His
Excellency drew the attention of his bowing consort to the programme of
music which was being discoursed in College park. Unseen brazen highland
laddies blared and drumthumped after the _cortège_:

     _But though she's a factory lass
     And wears no fancy clothes.
     Baraabum.
     Yet I've a sort of a
     Yorkshire relish for
     My little Yorkshire rose.
     Baraabum._

Thither of the wall the quartermile flat handicappers, M. C. Green, H.
Shrift, T. M. Patey, C. Scaife, J. B. Jeffs, G. N. Morphy, F. Stevenson,
C. Adderly and W. C. Huggard, started in pursuit. Striding past Finn's
hotel Cashel Boyle O'Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell stared through a
fierce eyeglass across the carriages at the head of Mr M. E. Solomons
in the window of the Austro-Hungarian viceconsulate. Deep in Leinster
street by Trinity's postern a loyal king's man, Hornblower, touched
his tallyho cap. As the glossy horses pranced by Merrion square Master
Patrick Aloysius Dignam, waiting, saw salutes being given to the gent
with the topper and raised also his new black cap with fingers greased
by porksteak paper. His collar too sprang up. The viceroy, on his way to
inaugurate the Mirus bazaar in aid of funds for Mercer's hospital,
drove with his following towards Lower Mount street. He passed a blind
stripling opposite Broadbent's. In Lower Mount street a pedestrian in a
brown macintosh, eating dry bread, passed swiftly and unscathed across
the viceroy's path. At the Royal Canal bridge, from his hoarding,
Mr Eugene Stratton, his blub lips agrin, bade all comers welcome to
Pembroke township. At Haddington road corner two sanded women halted
themselves, an umbrella and a bag in which eleven cockles rolled to view
with wonder the lord mayor and lady mayoress without his golden chain.
On Northumberland and Lansdowne roads His Excellency acknowledged
punctually salutes from rare male walkers, the salute of two small
schoolboys at the garden gate of the house said to have been admired
by the late queen when visiting the Irish capital with her husband, the
prince consort, in 1849 and the salute of Almidano Artifoni's sturdy
trousers swallowed by a closing door.



Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyringing Imperthnthn thnthnthn.

Chips, picking chips off rocky thumbnail, chips.

Horrid! And gold flushed more.

A husky fifenote blew.

Blew. Blue bloom is on the.

Goldpinnacled hair.

A jumping rose on satiny breast of satin, rose of Castile.

Trilling, trilling: Idolores.

Peep! Who's in the... peepofgold?

Tink cried to bronze in pity.

And a call, pure, long and throbbing. Longindying call.

Decoy. Soft word. But look: the bright stars fade. Notes chirruping
answer.

O rose! Castile. The morn is breaking.

Jingle jingle jaunted jingling.

Coin rang. Clock clacked.

Avowal. _Sonnez._ I could. Rebound of garter. Not leave thee. Smack. _La
cloche!_ Thigh smack. Avowal. Warm. Sweetheart, goodbye!

Jingle. Bloo.

Boomed crashing chords. When love absorbs. War! War! The tympanum.

A sail! A veil awave upon the waves.

Lost. Throstle fluted. All is lost now.

Horn. Hawhorn.

When first he saw. Alas!

Full tup. Full throb.

Warbling. Ah, lure! Alluring.

Martha! Come!

Clapclap. Clipclap. Clappyclap.

Goodgod henev erheard inall.

Deaf bald Pat brought pad knife took up.

A moonlit nightcall: far, far.

I feel so sad. P. S. So lonely blooming.

Listen!

The spiked and winding cold seahorn. Have you the? Each, and for other,
plash and silent roar.

Pearls: when she. Liszt's rhapsodies. Hissss.

You don't?

Did not: no, no: believe: Lidlyd. With a cock with a carra.

Black. Deepsounding. Do, Ben, do.

Wait while you wait. Hee hee. Wait while you hee.

But wait!

Low in dark middle earth. Embedded ore.

Naminedamine. Preacher is he:

All gone. All fallen.

Tiny, her tremulous fernfoils of maidenhair.

Amen! He gnashed in fury.

Fro. To, fro. A baton cool protruding.

Bronzelydia by Minagold.

By bronze, by gold, in oceangreen of shadow. Bloom. Old Bloom.

One rapped, one tapped, with a carra, with a cock.

Pray for him! Pray, good people!

His gouty fingers nakkering.

Big Benaben. Big Benben.

Last rose Castile of summer left bloom I feel so sad alone.

Pwee! Little wind piped wee.

True men. Lid Ker Cow De and Doll. Ay, ay. Like you men. Will lift your
tschink with tschunk.

Fff! Oo!

Where bronze from anear? Where gold from afar? Where hoofs?

Rrrpr. Kraa. Kraandl.

Then not till then. My eppripfftaph. Be pfrwritt.

Done.

Begin!

Bronze by gold, miss Douce's head by miss Kennedy's head, over the
crossblind of the Ormond bar heard the viceregal hoofs go by, ringing
steel.

--Is that her? asked miss Kennedy.

Miss Douce said yes, sitting with his ex, pearl grey and _eau de Nil._

--Exquisite contrast, miss Kennedy said.

When all agog miss Douce said eagerly:

--Look at the fellow in the tall silk.

--Who? Where? gold asked more eagerly.

--In the second carriage, miss Douce's wet lips said, laughing in the
sun.

He's looking. Mind till I see.

She darted, bronze, to the backmost corner, flattening her face against
the pane in a halo of hurried breath.

Her wet lips tittered:

--He's killed looking back.

She laughed:

--O wept! Aren't men frightful idiots?

With sadness.

Miss Kennedy sauntered sadly from bright light, twining a loose hair
behind an ear. Sauntering sadly, gold no more, she twisted twined a
hair.

Sadly she twined in sauntering gold hair behind a curving ear.

--It's them has the fine times, sadly then she said.

A man.

Bloowho went by by Moulang's pipes bearing in his breast the sweets
of sin, by Wine's antiques, in memory bearing sweet sinful words, by
Carroll's dusky battered plate, for Raoul.

The boots to them, them in the bar, them barmaids came. For them
unheeding him he banged on the counter his tray of chattering china. And

--There's your teas, he said.

Miss Kennedy with manners transposed the teatray down to an upturned
lithia crate, safe from eyes, low.

--What is it? loud boots unmannerly asked.

--Find out, miss Douce retorted, leaving her spyingpoint.

--Your _beau,_ is it?

A haughty bronze replied:

--I'll complain to Mrs de Massey on you if I hear any more of your
impertinent insolence.

--Imperthnthn thnthnthn, bootssnout sniffed rudely, as he retreated as
she threatened as he had come.

Bloom.

On her flower frowning miss Douce said:

--Most aggravating that young brat is. If he doesn't conduct himself
I'll wring his ear for him a yard long.

Ladylike in exquisite contrast.

--Take no notice, miss Kennedy rejoined.

She poured in a teacup tea, then back in the teapot tea. They cowered
under their reef of counter, waiting on footstools, crates upturned,
waiting for their teas to draw. They pawed their blouses, both of black
satin, two and nine a yard, waiting for their teas to draw, and two and
seven.

Yes, bronze from anear, by gold from afar, heard steel from anear, hoofs
ring from afar, and heard steelhoofs ringhoof ringsteel.

--Am I awfully sunburnt?

Miss bronze unbloused her neck.

--No, said miss Kennedy. It gets brown after. Did you try the borax with
the cherry laurel water?

Miss Douce halfstood to see her skin askance in the barmirror
gildedlettered where hock and claret glasses shimmered and in their
midst a shell.

--And leave it to my hands, she said.

--Try it with the glycerine, miss Kennedy advised.

Bidding her neck and hands adieu miss Douce

--Those things only bring out a rash, replied, reseated. I asked that
old fogey in Boyd's for something for my skin.

Miss Kennedy, pouring now a fulldrawn tea, grimaced and prayed:

--O, don't remind me of him for mercy' sake!

--But wait till I tell you, miss Douce entreated.

Sweet tea miss Kennedy having poured with milk plugged both two ears
with little fingers.

--No, don't, she cried.

--I won't listen, she cried.

But Bloom?

Miss Douce grunted in snuffy fogey's tone:

--For your what? says he.

Miss Kennedy unplugged her ears to hear, to speak: but said, but prayed
again:

--Don't let me think of him or I'll expire. The hideous old wretch! That
night in the Antient Concert Rooms.

She sipped distastefully her brew, hot tea, a sip, sipped, sweet tea.

--Here he was, miss Douce said, cocking her bronze head three quarters,
ruffling her nosewings. Hufa! Hufa!

Shrill shriek of laughter sprang from miss Kennedy's throat. Miss Douce
huffed and snorted down her nostrils that quivered imperthnthn like a
snout in quest.

--O! shrieking, miss Kennedy cried. Will you ever forget his goggle eye?

Miss Douce chimed in in deep bronze laughter, shouting:

--And your other eye!

Bloowhose dark eye read Aaron Figatner's name. Why do I always think
Figather? Gathering figs, I think. And Prosper Lore's huguenot name.
By Bassi's blessed virgins Bloom's dark eyes went by. Bluerobed, white
under, come to me. God they believe she is: or goddess. Those today. I
could not see. That fellow spoke. A student. After with Dedalus' son.
He might be Mulligan. All comely virgins. That brings those rakes of
fellows in: her white.

By went his eyes. The sweets of sin. Sweet are the sweets.

Of sin.

In a giggling peal young goldbronze voices blended, Douce with Kennedy
your other eye. They threw young heads back, bronze gigglegold, to let
freefly their laughter, screaming, your other, signals to each other,
high piercing notes.

Ah, panting, sighing, sighing, ah, fordone, their mirth died down.

Miss Kennedy lipped her cup again, raised, drank a sip and
gigglegiggled. Miss Douce, bending over the teatray, ruffled again her
nose and rolled droll fattened eyes. Again Kennygiggles, stooping,
her fair pinnacles of hair, stooping, her tortoise napecomb showed,
spluttered out of her mouth her tea, choking in tea and laughter,
coughing with choking, crying:

--O greasy eyes! Imagine being married to a man like that! she cried.
With his bit of beard!

Douce gave full vent to a splendid yell, a full yell of full woman,
delight, joy, indignation.

--Married to the greasy nose! she yelled.

Shrill, with deep laughter, after, gold after bronze, they urged each
each to peal after peal, ringing in changes, bronzegold, goldbronze,
shrilldeep, to laughter after laughter. And then laughed more. Greasy I
knows. Exhausted, breathless, their shaken heads they laid, braided and
pinnacled by glossycombed, against the counterledge. All flushed (O!),
panting, sweating (O!), all breathless.

Married to Bloom, to greaseabloom.

--O saints above! miss Douce said, sighed above her jumping rose. I
wished

I hadn't laughed so much. I feel all wet.

--O, miss Douce! miss Kennedy protested. You horrid thing!

And flushed yet more (you horrid!), more goldenly.

By Cantwell's offices roved Greaseabloom, by Ceppi's virgins, bright of
their oils. Nannetti's father hawked those things about, wheedling at
doors as I. Religion pays. Must see him for that par. Eat first. I want.
Not yet. At four, she said. Time ever passing. Clockhands turning. On.
Where eat? The Clarence, Dolphin. On. For Raoul. Eat. If I net five
guineas with those ads. The violet silk petticoats. Not yet. The sweets
of sin.

Flushed less, still less, goldenly paled.

Into their bar strolled Mr Dedalus. Chips, picking chips off one of his
rocky thumbnails. Chips. He strolled.

--O, welcome back, miss Douce.

He held her hand. Enjoyed her holidays?

--Tiptop.

He hoped she had nice weather in Rostrevor.

--Gorgeous, she said. Look at the holy show I am. Lying out on the
strand all day.

Bronze whiteness.

--That was exceedingly naughty of you, Mr Dedalus told her and pressed
her hand indulgently. Tempting poor simple males.

Miss Douce of satin douced her arm away.

--O go away! she said. You're very simple, I don't think.

He was.

--Well now I am, he mused. I looked so simple in the cradle they
christened me simple Simon.

--You must have been a doaty, miss Douce made answer. And what did the
doctor order today?

--Well now, he mused, whatever you say yourself. I think I'll trouble
you for some fresh water and a half glass of whisky.

Jingle.

--With the greatest alacrity, miss Douce agreed.

With grace of alacrity towards the mirror gilt Cantrell and Cochrane's
she turned herself. With grace she tapped a measure of gold whisky from
her crystal keg. Forth from the skirt of his coat Mr Dedalus brought
pouch and pipe. Alacrity she served. He blew through the flue two husky
fifenotes.

--By Jove, he mused, I often wanted to see the Mourne mountains. Must
be a great tonic in the air down there. But a long threatening comes at
last, they say. Yes. Yes.

Yes. He fingered shreds of hair, her maidenhair, her mermaid's, into the
bowl. Chips. Shreds. Musing. Mute.

None nought said nothing. Yes.

Gaily miss Douce polished a tumbler, trilling:

--_O, Idolores, queen of the eastern seas!_

--Was Mr Lidwell in today?

In came Lenehan. Round him peered Lenehan. Mr Bloom reached Essex
bridge. Yes, Mr Bloom crossed bridge of Yessex. To Martha I must write.
Buy paper. Daly's. Girl there civil. Bloom. Old Bloom. Blue bloom is on
the rye.

--He was in at lunchtime, miss Douce said.

Lenehan came forward.

--Was Mr Boylan looking for me?

He asked. She answered:

--Miss Kennedy, was Mr Boylan in while I was upstairs?

She asked. Miss voice of Kennedy answered, a second teacup poised, her
gaze upon a page:

--No. He was not.

Miss gaze of Kennedy, heard, not seen, read on. Lenehan round the
sandwichbell wound his round body round.

--Peep! Who's in the corner?

No glance of Kennedy rewarding him he yet made overtures. To mind her
stops. To read only the black ones: round o and crooked ess.

Jingle jaunty jingle.

Girlgold she read and did not glance. Take no notice. She took no notice
while he read by rote a solfa fable for her, plappering flatly:

--Ah fox met ah stork. Said thee fox too thee stork: Will you put your
bill down inn my troath and pull upp ah bone?

He droned in vain. Miss Douce turned to her tea aside.

He sighed aside:

--Ah me! O my!

He greeted Mr Dedalus and got a nod.

--Greetings from the famous son of a famous father.

--Who may he be? Mr Dedalus asked.

Lenehan opened most genial arms. Who?

--Who may he be? he asked. Can you ask? Stephen, the youthful bard.

Dry.

Mr Dedalus, famous father, laid by his dry filled pipe.

--I see, he said. I didn't recognise him for the moment. I hear he is
keeping very select company. Have you seen him lately?

He had.

--I quaffed the nectarbowl with him this very day, said Lenehan. In
Mooney's _en ville_ and in Mooney's _sur mer._ He had received the rhino
for the labour of his muse.

He smiled at bronze's teabathed lips, at listening lips and eyes:

--The _élite_ of Erin hung upon his lips. The ponderous pundit, Hugh

MacHugh, Dublin's most brilliant scribe and editor and that minstrel boy
of the wild wet west who is known by the euphonious appellation of the
O'Madden Burke.

After an interval Mr Dedalus raised his grog and

--That must have been highly diverting, said he. I see.

He see. He drank. With faraway mourning mountain eye. Set down his
glass.

He looked towards the saloon door.

--I see you have moved the piano.

--The tuner was in today, miss Douce replied, tuning it for the smoking
concert and I never heard such an exquisite player.

--Is that a fact?

--Didn't he, miss Kennedy? The real classical, you know. And blind too,
poor fellow. Not twenty I'm sure he was.

--Is that a fact? Mr Dedalus said.

He drank and strayed away.

--So sad to look at his face, miss Douce condoled.

God's curse on bitch's bastard.

Tink to her pity cried a diner's bell. To the door of the bar and
diningroom came bald Pat, came bothered Pat, came Pat, waiter of Ormond.
Lager for diner. Lager without alacrity she served.

With patience Lenehan waited for Boylan with impatience, for
jinglejaunty blazes boy.

Upholding the lid he (who?) gazed in the coffin (coffin?) at the oblique
triple (piano!) wires. He pressed (the same who pressed indulgently her
hand), soft pedalling, a triple of keys to see the thicknesses of felt
advancing, to hear the muffled hammerfall in action.

Two sheets cream vellum paper one reserve two envelopes when I was in
Wisdom Hely's wise Bloom in Daly's Henry Flower bought. Are you not
happy in your home? Flower to console me and a pin cuts lo. Means
something, language of flow. Was it a daisy? Innocence that is.
Respectable girl meet after mass. Thanks awfully muchly. Wise Bloom eyed
on the door a poster, a swaying mermaid smoking mid nice waves. Smoke
mermaids, coolest whiff of all. Hair streaming: lovelorn. For some man.
For Raoul. He eyed and saw afar on Essex bridge a gay hat riding on a
jaunting car. It is. Again. Third time. Coincidence.

Jingling on supple rubbers it jaunted from the bridge to Ormond quay.
Follow. Risk it. Go quick. At four. Near now. Out.

--Twopence, sir, the shopgirl dared to say.

--Aha... I was forgetting... Excuse...

--And four.

At four she. Winsomely she on Bloohimwhom smiled. Bloo smi qui go.
Ternoon. Think you're the only pebble on the beach? Does that to all.

For men.

In drowsy silence gold bent on her page.

From the saloon a call came, long in dying. That was a tuningfork the
tuner had that he forgot that he now struck. A call again. That he now
poised that it now throbbed. You hear? It throbbed, pure, purer, softly
and softlier, its buzzing prongs. Longer in dying call.

Pat paid for diner's popcorked bottle: and over tumbler, tray and
popcorked bottle ere he went he whispered, bald and bothered, with miss

Douce.

--_The bright stars fade_...

A voiceless song sang from within, singing:

--... _the morn is breaking._

A duodene of birdnotes chirruped bright treble answer under sensitive
hands. Brightly the keys, all twinkling, linked, all harpsichording,
called to a voice to sing the strain of dewy morn, of youth, of love's
leavetaking, life's, love's morn.

--_The dewdrops pearl_...

Lenehan's lips over the counter lisped a low whistle of decoy.

--But look this way, he said, rose of Castile.

Jingle jaunted by the curb and stopped.

She rose and closed her reading, rose of Castile: fretted, forlorn,
dreamily rose.

--Did she fall or was she pushed? he asked her.

She answered, slighting:

--Ask no questions and you'll hear no lies.

Like lady, ladylike.

Blazes Boylan's smart tan shoes creaked on the barfloor where he strode.
Yes, gold from anear by bronze from afar. Lenehan heard and knew and
hailed him:

--See the conquering hero comes.

Between the car and window, warily walking, went Bloom, unconquered
hero. See me he might. The seat he sat on: warm. Black wary hecat walked
towards Richie Goulding's legal bag, lifted aloft, saluting.

--_And I from thee_...

--I heard you were round, said Blazes Boylan.

He touched to fair miss Kennedy a rim of his slanted straw. She smiled
on him. But sister bronze outsmiled her, preening for him her richer
hair, a bosom and a rose.

Smart Boylan bespoke potions.

--What's your cry? Glass of bitter? Glass of bitter, please, and a
sloegin for me. Wire in yet?

Not yet. At four she. Who said four?

Cowley's red lugs and bulging apple in the door of the sheriff's office.

Avoid. Goulding a chance. What is he doing in the Ormond? Car waiting.

Wait.

Hello. Where off to? Something to eat? I too was just. In here. What,
Ormond? Best value in Dublin. Is that so? Diningroom. Sit tight there.
See, not be seen. I think I'll join you. Come on. Richie led on. Bloom
followed bag. Dinner fit for a prince.

Miss Douce reached high to take a flagon, stretching her satin arm, her
bust, that all but burst, so high.

--O! O! jerked Lenehan, gasping at each stretch. O!

But easily she seized her prey and led it low in triumph.

--Why don't you grow? asked Blazes Boylan.

Shebronze, dealing from her oblique jar thick syrupy liquor for his
lips, looked as it flowed (flower in his coat: who gave him?), and
syrupped with her voice:

--Fine goods in small parcels.

That is to say she. Neatly she poured slowsyrupy sloe.

--Here's fortune, Blazes said.

He pitched a broad coin down. Coin rang.

--Hold on, said Lenehan, till I...

--Fortune, he wished, lifting his bubbled ale.

--Sceptre will win in a canter, he said.

--I plunged a bit, said Boylan winking and drinking. Not on my own, you
know. Fancy of a friend of mine.

Lenehan still drank and grinned at his tilted ale and at miss Douce's
lips that all but hummed, not shut, the oceansong her lips had trilled.

Idolores. The eastern seas.

Clock whirred. Miss Kennedy passed their way (flower, wonder who gave),
bearing away teatray. Clock clacked.

Miss Douce took Boylan's coin, struck boldly the cashregister. It
clanged. Clock clacked. Fair one of Egypt teased and sorted in the till
and hummed and handed coins in change. Look to the west. A clack. For
me.

--What time is that? asked Blazes Boylan. Four?

O'clock.

Lenehan, small eyes ahunger on her humming, bust ahumming, tugged Blazes
Boylan's elbowsleeve.

--Let's hear the time, he said.

The bag of Goulding, Collis, Ward led Bloom by ryebloom flowered tables.
Aimless he chose with agitated aim, bald Pat attending, a table near
the door. Be near. At four. Has he forgotten? Perhaps a trick. Not come:
whet appetite. I couldn't do. Wait, wait. Pat, waiter, waited.

Sparkling bronze azure eyed Blazure's skyblue bow and eyes.

--Go on, pressed Lenehan. There's no-one. He never heard.

--... _to Flora's lips did hie._

High, a high note pealed in the treble clear.

Bronzedouce communing with her rose that sank and rose sought

Blazes Boylan's flower and eyes.

--Please, please.

He pleaded over returning phrases of avowal.

--_I could not leave thee_...

--Afterwits, miss Douce promised coyly.

--No, now, urged Lenehan. _Sonnezlacloche!_ O do! There's no-one.

She looked. Quick. Miss Kenn out of earshot. Sudden bent. Two kindling
faces watched her bend.

Quavering the chords strayed from the air, found it again, lost chord,
and lost and found it, faltering.

--Go on! Do! _Sonnez!_

Bending, she nipped a peak of skirt above her knee. Delayed. Taunted
them still, bending, suspending, with wilful eyes.

_--Sonnez!_

Smack. She set free sudden in rebound her nipped elastic garter
smackwarm against her smackable a woman's warmhosed thigh.

--_La Cloche!_ cried gleeful Lenehan. Trained by owner. No sawdust
there.

She smilesmirked supercilious (wept! aren't men?), but, lightward
gliding, mild she smiled on Boylan.

--You're the essence of vulgarity, she in gliding said.

Boylan, eyed, eyed. Tossed to fat lips his chalice, drank off his
chalice tiny, sucking the last fat violet syrupy drops. His spellbound
eyes went after, after her gliding head as it went down the bar by
mirrors, gilded arch for ginger ale, hock and claret glasses shimmering,
a spiky shell, where it concerted, mirrored, bronze with sunnier bronze.

Yes, bronze from anearby.

--... _Sweetheart, goodbye!_

--I'm off, said Boylan with impatience.

He slid his chalice brisk away, grasped his change.

--Wait a shake, begged Lenehan, drinking quickly. I wanted to tell you.

Tom Rochford...

--Come on to blazes, said Blazes Boylan, going.

Lenehan gulped to go.

--Got the horn or what? he said. Wait. I'm coming.

He followed the hasty creaking shoes but stood by nimbly by the
threshold, saluting forms, a bulky with a slender.

--How do you do, Mr Dollard?

--Eh? How do? How do? Ben Dollard's vague bass answered, turning an
instant from Father Cowley's woe. He won't give you any trouble, Bob.
Alf Bergan will speak to the long fellow. We'll put a barleystraw in
that Judas Iscariot's ear this time.

Sighing Mr Dedalus came through the saloon, a finger soothing an eyelid.

--Hoho, we will, Ben Dollard yodled jollily. Come on, Simon. Give us a
ditty. We heard the piano.

Bald Pat, bothered waiter, waited for drink orders. Power for Richie.
And Bloom? Let me see. Not make him walk twice. His corns. Four now. How
warm this black is. Course nerves a bit. Refracts (is it?) heat. Let me
see. Cider. Yes, bottle of cider.

--What's that? Mr Dedalus said. I was only vamping, man.

--Come on, come on, Ben Dollard called. Begone dull care. Come, Bob.

He ambled Dollard, bulky slops, before them (hold that fellow with the:
hold him now) into the saloon. He plumped him Dollard on the stool. His
gouty paws plumped chords. Plumped, stopped abrupt.

Bald Pat in the doorway met tealess gold returning. Bothered, he wanted
Power and cider. Bronze by the window, watched, bronze from afar.

Jingle a tinkle jaunted.

Bloom heard a jing, a little sound. He's off. Light sob of breath Bloom
sighed on the silent bluehued flowers. Jingling. He's gone. Jingle.
Hear.

--Love and War, Ben, Mr Dedalus said. God be with old times.

Miss Douce's brave eyes, unregarded, turned from the crossblind, smitten
by sunlight. Gone. Pensive (who knows?), smitten (the smiting light),
she lowered the dropblind with a sliding cord. She drew down pensive
(why did he go so quick when I?) about her bronze, over the bar where
bald stood by sister gold, inexquisite contrast, contrast inexquisite
nonexquisite, slow cool dim seagreen sliding depth of shadow, _eau de
Nil._

--Poor old Goodwin was the pianist that night, Father Cowley reminded
them. There was a slight difference of opinion between himself and the
Collard grand.

There was.

--A symposium all his own, Mr Dedalus said. The devil wouldn't stop him.
He was a crotchety old fellow in the primary stage of drink.

--God, do you remember? Ben bulky Dollard said, turning from the
punished keyboard. And by Japers I had no wedding garment.

They laughed all three. He had no wed. All trio laughed. No wedding
garment.

--Our friend Bloom turned in handy that night, Mr Dedalus said. Where's
my pipe, by the way?

He wandered back to the bar to the lost chord pipe. Bald Pat carried two
diners' drinks, Richie and Poldy. And Father Cowley laughed again.

--I saved the situation, Ben, I think.

--You did, averred Ben Dollard. I remember those tight trousers too.
That was a brilliant idea, Bob.

Father Cowley blushed to his brilliant purply lobes. He saved the situa.
Tight trou. Brilliant ide.

--I knew he was on the rocks, he said. The wife was playing the piano in
the coffee palace on Saturdays for a very trifling consideration and
who was it gave me the wheeze she was doing the other business? Do you
remember? We had to search all Holles street to find them till the
chap in Keogh's gave us the number. Remember? Ben remembered, his broad
visage wondering.

--By God, she had some luxurious operacloaks and things there.

Mr Dedalus wandered back, pipe in hand.

--Merrion square style. Balldresses, by God, and court dresses. He
wouldn't take any money either. What? Any God's quantity of cocked hats
and boleros and trunkhose. What?

--Ay, ay, Mr Dedalus nodded. Mrs Marion Bloom has left off clothes of
all descriptions.

Jingle jaunted down the quays. Blazes sprawled on bounding tyres.

Liver and bacon. Steak and kidney pie. Right, sir. Right, Pat.

Mrs Marion. Met him pike hoses. Smell of burn. Of Paul de Kock. Nice
name he.

--What's this her name was? A buxom lassy. Marion...

--Tweedy.

--Yes. Is she alive?

--And kicking.

--She was a daughter of...

--Daughter of the regiment.

--Yes, begad. I remember the old drummajor.

Mr Dedalus struck, whizzed, lit, puffed savoury puff after

--Irish? I don't know, faith. Is she, Simon?

Puff after stiff, a puff, strong, savoury, crackling.

--Buccinator muscle is... What?... Bit rusty... O, she is... My
Irish Molly, O.

He puffed a pungent plumy blast.

--From the rock of Gibraltar... all the way.

They pined in depth of ocean shadow, gold by the beerpull, bronze
by maraschino, thoughtful all two. Mina Kennedy, 4 Lismore terrace,
Drumcondra with Idolores, a queen, Dolores, silent.

Pat served, uncovered dishes. Leopold cut liverslices. As said before he
ate with relish the inner organs, nutty gizzards, fried cods' roes while
Richie Goulding, Collis, Ward ate steak and kidney, steak then kidney,
bite by bite of pie he ate Bloom ate they ate.

Bloom with Goulding, married in silence, ate. Dinners fit for princes.

By Bachelor's walk jogjaunty jingled Blazes Boylan, bachelor, in sun in
heat, mare's glossy rump atrot, with flick of whip, on bounding tyres:
sprawled, warmseated, Boylan impatience, ardentbold. Horn. Have you the?
Horn. Have you the? Haw haw horn.

Over their voices Dollard bassooned attack, booming over bombarding
chords:

--_When love absorbs my ardent soul_...

Roll of Bensoulbenjamin rolled to the quivery loveshivery roofpanes.

--War! War! cried Father Cowley. You're the warrior.

--So I am, Ben Warrior laughed. I was thinking of your landlord. Love or
money.

He stopped. He wagged huge beard, huge face over his blunder huge.

--Sure, you'd burst the tympanum of her ear, man, Mr Dedalus said
through smoke aroma, with an organ like yours.

In bearded abundant laughter Dollard shook upon the keyboard. He would.

--Not to mention another membrane, Father Cowley added. Half time, Ben.
_Amoroso ma non troppo._ Let me there.

Miss Kennedy served two gentlemen with tankards of cool stout. She
passed a remark. It was indeed, first gentleman said, beautiful weather.
They drank cool stout. Did she know where the lord lieutenant was going?
And heard steelhoofs ringhoof ring. No, she couldn't say. But it would
be in the paper. O, she need not trouble. No trouble. She waved about
her outspread _Independent,_ searching, the lord lieutenant, her
pinnacles of hair slowmoving, lord lieuten. Too much trouble,
first gentleman said. O, not in the least. Way he looked that. Lord
lieutenant. Gold by bronze heard iron steel.

     --............ _my ardent soul_
     _I care not foror the morrow._

In liver gravy Bloom mashed mashed potatoes. Love and War someone is.
Ben Dollard's famous. Night he ran round to us to borrow a dress suit
for that concert. Trousers tight as a drum on him. Musical porkers.
Molly did laugh when he went out. Threw herself back across the bed,
screaming, kicking. With all his belongings on show. O saints above,
I'm drenched! O, the women in the front row! O, I never laughed so many!
Well, of course that's what gives him the base barreltone. For instance
eunuchs. Wonder who's playing. Nice touch. Must be Cowley. Musical.
Knows whatever note you play. Bad breath he has, poor chap. Stopped.

Miss Douce, engaging, Lydia Douce, bowed to suave solicitor, George
Lidwell, gentleman, entering. Good afternoon. She gave her moist (a
lady's) hand to his firm clasp. Afternoon. Yes, she was back. To the old
dingdong again.

--Your friends are inside, Mr Lidwell.

George Lidwell, suave, solicited, held a lydiahand.

Bloom ate liv as said before. Clean here at least. That chap in the
Burton, gummy with gristle. No-one here: Goulding and I. Clean tables,
flowers, mitres of napkins. Pat to and fro. Bald Pat. Nothing to do.
Best value in Dub.

Piano again. Cowley it is. Way he sits in to it, like one together,
mutual understanding. Tiresome shapers scraping fiddles, eye on the
bowend, sawing the cello, remind you of toothache. Her high long snore.
Night we were in the box. Trombone under blowing like a grampus, between
the acts, other brass chap unscrewing, emptying spittle. Conductor's
legs too, bagstrousers, jiggedy jiggedy. Do right to hide them.

Jiggedy jingle jaunty jaunty.

Only the harp. Lovely. Gold glowering light. Girl touched it. Poop of a
lovely. Gravy's rather good fit for a. Golden ship. Erin. The harp that
once or twice. Cool hands. Ben Howth, the rhododendrons. We are their
harps. I. He. Old. Young.

--Ah, I couldn't, man, Mr Dedalus said, shy, listless.

Strongly.

--Go on, blast you! Ben Dollard growled. Get it out in bits.

--_M'appari,_ Simon, Father Cowley said.

Down stage he strode some paces, grave, tall in affliction, his long
arms outheld. Hoarsely the apple of his throat hoarsed softly. Softly he
sang to a dusty seascape there: _A Last Farewell._ A headland, a ship, a
sail upon the billows. Farewell. A lovely girl, her veil awave upon the
wind upon the headland, wind around her.

Cowley sang:

     _--M'appari tutt'amor:
     Il mio sguardo l'incontr..._

She waved, unhearing Cowley, her veil, to one departing, dear one, to
wind, love, speeding sail, return.

--Go on, Simon.

--Ah, sure, my dancing days are done, Ben... Well...

Mr Dedalus laid his pipe to rest beside the tuningfork and, sitting,
touched the obedient keys.

--No, Simon, Father Cowley turned. Play it in the original. One flat.

The keys, obedient, rose higher, told, faltered, confessed, confused.

Up stage strode Father Cowley.

--Here, Simon, I'll accompany you, he said. Get up.

By Graham Lemon's pineapple rock, by Elvery's elephant jingly jogged.
Steak, kidney, liver, mashed, at meat fit for princes sat princes Bloom
and Goulding. Princes at meat they raised and drank, Power and cider.

Most beautiful tenor air ever written, Richie said: _Sonnambula._ He
heard Joe Maas sing that one night. Ah, what M'Guckin! Yes. In his way.
Choirboy style. Maas was the boy. Massboy. A lyrical tenor if you like.
Never forget it. Never.

Tenderly Bloom over liverless bacon saw the tightened features strain.
Backache he. Bright's bright eye. Next item on the programme. Paying the
piper. Pills, pounded bread, worth a guinea a box. Stave it off awhile.
Sings too: _Down among the dead men._ Appropriate. Kidney pie. Sweets to
the. Not making much hand of it. Best value in. Characteristic of him.
Power. Particular about his drink. Flaw in the glass, fresh Vartry
water. Fecking matches from counters to save. Then squander a sovereign
in dribs and drabs. And when he's wanted not a farthing. Screwed
refusing to pay his fare. Curious types.

Never would Richie forget that night. As long as he lived: never. In the
gods of the old Royal with little Peake. And when the first note.

Speech paused on Richie's lips.

Coming out with a whopper now. Rhapsodies about damn all.

Believes his own lies. Does really. Wonderful liar. But want a good
memory.

--Which air is that? asked Leopold Bloom.

--_All is lost now_.

Richie cocked his lips apout. A low incipient note sweet banshee
murmured: all. A thrush. A throstle. His breath, birdsweet, good teeth
he's proud of, fluted with plaintive woe. Is lost. Rich sound. Two
notes in one there. Blackbird I heard in the hawthorn valley. Taking my
motives he twined and turned them. All most too new call is lost in all.
Echo. How sweet the answer. How is that done? All lost now. Mournful he
whistled. Fall, surrender, lost.

Bloom bent leopold ear, turning a fringe of doyley down under the vase.
Order. Yes, I remember. Lovely air. In sleep she went to him. Innocence
in the moon. Brave. Don't know their danger. Still hold her back. Call
name. Touch water. Jingle jaunty. Too late. She longed to go. That's
why. Woman. As easy stop the sea. Yes: all is lost.

--A beautiful air, said Bloom lost Leopold. I know it well.

Never in all his life had Richie Goulding.

He knows it well too. Or he feels. Still harping on his daughter. Wise
child that knows her father, Dedalus said. Me?

Bloom askance over liverless saw. Face of the all is lost. Rollicking
Richie once. Jokes old stale now. Wagging his ear. Napkinring in his
eye. Now begging letters he sends his son with. Crosseyed Walter sir I
did sir. Wouldn't trouble only I was expecting some money. Apologise.

Piano again. Sounds better than last time I heard. Tuned probably.
Stopped again.

Dollard and Cowley still urged the lingering singer out with it.

--With it, Simon.

--It, Simon.

--Ladies and gentlemen, I am most deeply obliged by your kind
solicitations.

--It, Simon.

--I have no money but if you will lend me your attention I shall
endeavour to sing to you of a heart bowed down.

By the sandwichbell in screening shadow Lydia, her bronze and rose, a
lady's grace, gave and withheld: as in cool glaucous _eau de Nil_ Mina
to tankards two her pinnacles of gold.

The harping chords of prelude closed. A chord, longdrawn, expectant,
drew a voice away.

--_When first I saw that form endearing_...

Richie turned.

--Si Dedalus' voice, he said.

Braintipped, cheek touched with flame, they listened feeling that flow
endearing flow over skin limbs human heart soul spine. Bloom signed to
Pat, bald Pat is a waiter hard of hearing, to set ajar the door of the
bar. The door of the bar. So. That will do. Pat, waiter, waited, waiting
to hear, for he was hard of hear by the door.

--_Sorrow from me seemed to depart._

Through the hush of air a voice sang to them, low, not rain, not leaves
in murmur, like no voice of strings or reeds or whatdoyoucallthem
dulcimers touching their still ears with words, still hearts of their
each his remembered lives. Good, good to hear: sorrow from them each
seemed to from both depart when first they heard. When first they saw,
lost Richie Poldy, mercy of beauty, heard from a person wouldn't expect
it in the least, her first merciful lovesoft oftloved word.

Love that is singing: love's old sweet song. Bloom unwound slowly the
elastic band of his packet. Love's old sweet _sonnez la_ gold. Bloom
wound a skein round four forkfingers, stretched it, relaxed, and wound
it round his troubled double, fourfold, in octave, gyved them fast.

--_Full of hope and all delighted_...

Tenors get women by the score. Increase their flow. Throw flower at his
feet. When will we meet? My head it simply. Jingle all delighted. He
can't sing for tall hats. Your head it simply swurls. Perfumed for him.
What perfume does your wife? I want to know. Jing. Stop. Knock. Last
look at mirror always before she answers the door. The hall. There? How
do you? I do well. There? What? Or? Phial of cachous, kissing comfits,
in her satchel. Yes? Hands felt for the opulent.

Alas the voice rose, sighing, changed: loud, full, shining, proud.

--_But alas, 'twas idle dreaming_...

Glorious tone he has still. Cork air softer also their brogue. Silly
man! Could have made oceans of money. Singing wrong words. Wore out
his wife: now sings. But hard to tell. Only the two themselves. If he
doesn't break down. Keep a trot for the avenue. His hands and feet sing
too. Drink. Nerves overstrung. Must be abstemious to sing. Jenny Lind
soup: stock, sage, raw eggs, half pint of cream. For creamy dreamy.

Tenderness it welled: slow, swelling, full it throbbed. That's the chat.
Ha, give! Take! Throb, a throb, a pulsing proud erect.

Words? Music? No: it's what's behind.

Bloom looped, unlooped, noded, disnoded.

Bloom. Flood of warm jamjam lickitup secretness flowed to flow in music
out, in desire, dark to lick flow invading. Tipping her tepping her
tapping her topping her. Tup. Pores to dilate dilating. Tup. The joy
the feel the warm the. Tup. To pour o'er sluices pouring gushes. Flood,
gush, flow, joygush, tupthrob. Now! Language of love.

--... _ray of hope is_...

Beaming. Lydia for Lidwell squeak scarcely hear so ladylike the muse
unsqueaked a ray of hopk.

_Martha_ it is. Coincidence. Just going to write. Lionel's song.
Lovely name you have. Can't write. Accept my little pres. Play on her
heartstrings pursestrings too. She's a. I called you naughty boy. Still
the name: Martha. How strange! Today.

The voice of Lionel returned, weaker but unwearied. It sang again to
Richie Poldy Lydia Lidwell also sang to Pat open mouth ear waiting to
wait. How first he saw that form endearing, how sorrow seemed to part,
how look, form, word charmed him Gould Lidwell, won Pat Bloom's heart.

Wish I could see his face, though. Explain better. Why the barber in
Drago's always looked my face when I spoke his face in the glass. Still
hear it better here than in the bar though farther.

--_Each graceful look_...

First night when first I saw her at Mat Dillon's in Terenure. Yellow,
black lace she wore. Musical chairs. We two the last. Fate. After her.
Fate.

Round and round slow. Quick round. We two. All looked. Halt. Down she
sat. All ousted looked. Lips laughing. Yellow knees.

--_Charmed my eye_...

Singing. _Waiting_ she sang. I turned her music. Full voice of perfume
of what perfume does your lilactrees. Bosom I saw, both full, throat
warbling. First I saw. She thanked me. Why did she me? Fate. Spanishy
eyes. Under a peartree alone patio this hour in old Madrid one side in
shadow Dolores shedolores. At me. Luring. Ah, alluring.

--_Martha! Ah, Martha!_

Quitting all languor Lionel cried in grief, in cry of passion dominant
to love to return with deepening yet with rising chords of harmony. In
cry of lionel loneliness that she should know, must martha feel. For
only her he waited. Where? Here there try there here all try where.
Somewhere.

     --_Co-ome, thou lost one!
     Co-ome, thou dear one!_

Alone. One love. One hope. One comfort me. Martha, chestnote, return!

_--Come!_

It soared, a bird, it held its flight, a swift pure cry, soar silver orb
it leaped serene, speeding, sustained, to come, don't spin it out too
long long breath he breath long life, soaring high, high resplendent,
aflame, crowned, high in the effulgence symbolistic, high, of the
etherial bosom, high, of the high vast irradiation everywhere all
soaring all around about the all, the endlessnessnessness...

--_To me!_

Siopold!

Consumed.

Come. Well sung. All clapped. She ought to. Come. To me, to him, to her,
you too, me, us.

--Bravo! Clapclap. Good man, Simon. Clappyclapclap. Encore! Clapclipclap
clap. Sound as a bell. Bravo, Simon! Clapclopclap. Encore, enclap, said,
cried, clapped all, Ben Dollard, Lydia Douce, George Lidwell, Pat, Mina
Kennedy, two gentlemen with two tankards, Cowley, first gent with tank
and bronze miss Douce and gold MJiss Mina.

Blazes Boylan's smart tan shoes creaked on the barfloor, said before.
Jingle by monuments of sir John Gray, Horatio onehandled Nelson,
reverend father Theobald Mathew, jaunted, as said before just now.
Atrot, in heat, heatseated. _Cloche. Sonnez la. Cloche. Sonnez la._
Slower the mare went up the hill by the Rotunda, Rutland square. Too
slow for Boylan, blazes Boylan, impatience Boylan, joggled the mare.

An afterclang of Cowley's chords closed, died on the air made richer.

And Richie Goulding drank his Power and Leopold Bloom his cider drank,
Lidwell his Guinness, second gentleman said they would partake of two
more tankards if she did not mind. Miss Kennedy smirked, disserving,
coral lips, at first, at second. She did not mind.

--Seven days in jail, Ben Dollard said, on bread and water. Then you'd
sing, Simon, like a garden thrush.

Lionel Simon, singer, laughed. Father Bob Cowley played. Mina Kennedy
served. Second gentleman paid. Tom Kernan strutted in. Lydia, admired,
admired. But Bloom sang dumb.

Admiring.

Richie, admiring, descanted on that man's glorious voice. He remembered
one night long ago. Never forget that night. Si sang _'Twas rank and
fame_: in Ned Lambert's 'twas. Good God he never heard in all his life a
note like that he never did _then false one we had better part_ so clear
so God he never heard _since love lives not_ a clinking voice lives not
ask Lambert he can tell you too.

Goulding, a flush struggling in his pale, told Mr Bloom, face of the
night, Si in Ned Lambert's, Dedalus house, sang _'Twas rank and fame._

He, Mr Bloom, listened while he, Richie Goulding, told him, Mr Bloom, of
the night he, Richie, heard him, Si Dedalus, sing 'TWAS RANK AND FAME in
his, Ned Lambert's, house.

Brothers-in-law: relations. We never speak as we pass by. Rift in the
lute I think. Treats him with scorn. See. He admires him all the more.
The night Si sang. The human voice, two tiny silky chords, wonderful,
more than all others.

That voice was a lamentation. Calmer now. It's in the silence after you
feel you hear. Vibrations. Now silent air.

Bloom ungyved his crisscrossed hands and with slack fingers plucked the
slender catgut thong. He drew and plucked. It buzz, it twanged. While
Goulding talked of Barraclough's voice production, while Tom Kernan,
harking back in a retrospective sort of arrangement talked to listening
Father Cowley, who played a voluntary, who nodded as he played. While
big Ben Dollard talked with Simon Dedalus, lighting, who nodded as he
smoked, who smoked.

Thou lost one. All songs on that theme. Yet more Bloom stretched his
string. Cruel it seems. Let people get fond of each other: lure them on.
Then tear asunder. Death. Explos. Knock on the head. Outtohelloutofthat.
Human life. Dignam. Ugh, that rat's tail wriggling! Five bob I gave.
_Corpus paradisum._ Corncrake croaker: belly like a poisoned pup. Gone.
They sing. Forgotten. I too; And one day she with. Leave her: get
tired. Suffer then. Snivel. Big spanishy eyes goggling at nothing. Her
wavyavyeavyheavyeavyevyevyhair un comb:'d.

Yet too much happy bores. He stretched more, more. Are you not happy in
your? Twang. It snapped.

Jingle into Dorset street.

Miss Douce withdrew her satiny arm, reproachful, pleased.

--Don't make half so free, said she, till we are better acquainted.

George Lidwell told her really and truly: but she did not believe.

First gentleman told Mina that was so. She asked him was that so. And
second tankard told her so. That that was so.

Miss Douce, miss Lydia, did not believe: miss Kennedy, Mina, did not
believe: George Lidwell, no: miss Dou did not: the first, the first:
gent with the tank: believe, no, no: did not, miss Kenn: Lidlydiawell:
the tank.

Better write it here. Quills in the postoffice chewed and twisted.

Bald Pat at a sign drew nigh. A pen and ink. He went. A pad. He went. A
pad to blot. He heard, deaf Pat.

--Yes, Mr Bloom said, teasing the curling catgut line. It certainly is.
Few lines will do. My present. All that Italian florid music is. Who
is this wrote? Know the name you know better. Take out sheet notepaper,
envelope: unconcerned. It's so characteristic.

--Grandest number in the whole opera, Goulding said.

--It is, Bloom said.

Numbers it is. All music when you come to think. Two multiplied by two
divided by half is twice one. Vibrations: chords those are. One plus two
plus six is seven. Do anything you like with figures juggling. Always
find out this equal to that. Symmetry under a cemetery wall. He doesn't
see my mourning. Callous: all for his own gut. Musemathematics. And you
think you're listening to the etherial. But suppose you said it like:
Martha, seven times nine minus x is thirtyfive thousand. Fall quite
flat. It's on account of the sounds it is.

Instance he's playing now. Improvising. Might be what you like, till you
hear the words. Want to listen sharp. Hard. Begin all right: then hear
chords a bit off: feel lost a bit. In and out of sacks, over barrels,
through wirefences, obstacle race. Time makes the tune. Question of mood
you're in. Still always nice to hear. Except scales up and down, girls
learning. Two together nextdoor neighbours. Ought to invent dummy pianos
for that. _Blumenlied_ I bought for her. The name. Playing it slow,
a girl, night I came home, the girl. Door of the stables near Cecilia
street. Milly no taste. Queer because we both, I mean.

Bald deaf Pat brought quite flat pad ink. Pat set with ink pen quite
flat pad. Pat took plate dish knife fork. Pat went.

It was the only language Mr Dedalus said to Ben. He heard them as a
boy in Ringabella, Crosshaven, Ringabella, singing their barcaroles.
Queenstown harbour full of Italian ships. Walking, you know, Ben, in the
moonlight with those earthquake hats. Blending their voices. God, such
music, Ben. Heard as a boy. Cross Ringabella haven mooncarole.

Sour pipe removed he held a shield of hand beside his lips that cooed a
moonlight nightcall, clear from anear, a call from afar, replying.

Down the edge of his _Freeman_ baton ranged Bloom's, your other eye,
scanning for where did I see that. Callan, Coleman, Dignam Patrick.
Heigho! Heigho! Fawcett. Aha! Just I was looking...

Hope he's not looking, cute as a rat. He held unfurled his _Freeman._
Can't see now. Remember write Greek ees. Bloom dipped, Bloo mur: dear
sir. Dear Henry wrote: dear Mady. Got your lett and flow. Hell did I
put? Some pock or oth. It is utterl imposs. Underline _imposs._ To write
today.

Bore this. Bored Bloom tambourined gently with I am just reflecting
fingers on flat pad Pat brought.

On. Know what I mean. No, change that ee. Accep my poor litt pres
enclos. Ask her no answ. Hold on. Five Dig. Two about here. Penny the
gulls. Elijah is com. Seven Davy Byrne's. Is eight about. Say half a
crown. My poor little pres: p. o. two and six. Write me a long. Do you
despise? Jingle, have you the? So excited. Why do you call me naught?
You naughty too? O, Mairy lost the string of her. Bye for today. Yes,
yes, will tell you. Want to. To keep it up. Call me that other. Other
world she wrote. My patience are exhaust. To keep it up. You must
believe. Believe. The tank. It. Is. True.

Folly am I writing? Husbands don't. That's marriage does, their wives.
Because I'm away from. Suppose. But how? She must. Keep young. If she
found out. Card in my high grade ha. No, not tell all. Useless pain. If
they don't see. Woman. Sauce for the gander.

A hackney car, number three hundred and twentyfour, driver Barton James
of number one Harmony avenue, Donnybrook, on which sat a fare, a young
gentleman, stylishly dressed in an indigoblue serge suit made by George
Robert Mesias, tailor and cutter, of number five Eden quay, and wearing
a straw hat very dressy, bought of John Plasto of number one Great
Brunswick street, hatter. Eh? This is the jingle that joggled and
jingled. By Dlugacz' porkshop bright tubes of Agendath trotted a
gallantbuttocked mare.

--Answering an ad? keen Richie's eyes asked Bloom.

--Yes, Mr Bloom said. Town traveller. Nothing doing, I expect.

Bloom mur: best references. But Henry wrote: it will excite me. You
know how. In haste. Henry. Greek ee. Better add postscript. What is he
playing now? Improvising. Intermezzo. P. S. The rum tum tum. How will
you pun? You punish me? Crooked skirt swinging, whack by. Tell me I want
to. Know. O. Course if I didn't I wouldn't ask. La la la ree. Trails off
there sad in minor. Why minor sad? Sign H. They like sad tail at end. P.
P. S. La la la ree. I feel so sad today. La ree. So lonely. Dee.

He blotted quick on pad of Pat. Envel. Address. Just copy out of paper.
Murmured: Messrs Callan, Coleman and Co, limited. Henry wrote:

Miss Martha Clifford c/o P. O. Dolphin's Barn Lane Dublin

Blot over the other so he can't read. There. Right. Idea prize titbit.
Something detective read off blottingpad. Payment at the rate of guinea
per col. Matcham often thinks the laughing witch. Poor Mrs Purefoy. U.
P: up.

Too poetical that about the sad. Music did that. Music hath charms.
Shakespeare said. Quotations every day in the year. To be or not to be.
Wisdom while you wait.

In Gerard's rosery of Fetter lane he walks, greyedauburn. One life is
all. One body. Do. But do.

Done anyhow. Postal order, stamp. Postoffice lower down. Walk now.
Enough. Barney Kiernan's I promised to meet them. Dislike that job.

House of mourning. Walk. Pat! Doesn't hear. Deaf beetle he is.

Car near there now. Talk. Talk. Pat! Doesn't. Settling those napkins.
Lot of ground he must cover in the day. Paint face behind on him then
he'd be two. Wish they'd sing more. Keep my mind off.

Bald Pat who is bothered mitred the napkins. Pat is a waiter hard of his
hearing. Pat is a waiter who waits while you wait. Hee hee hee hee. He
waits while you wait. Hee hee. A waiter is he. Hee hee hee hee. He waits
while you wait. While you wait if you wait he will wait while you wait.
Hee hee hee hee. Hoh. Wait while you wait.

Douce now. Douce Lydia. Bronze and rose.

She had a gorgeous, simply gorgeous, time. And look at the lovely shell
she brought.

To the end of the bar to him she bore lightly the spiked and winding
seahorn that he, George Lidwell, solicitor, might hear.

--Listen! she bade him.

Under Tom Kernan's ginhot words the accompanist wove music slow.
Authentic fact. How Walter Bapty lost his voice. Well, sir, the husband
took him by the throat. _Scoundrel,_ said he, _You'll sing no more
lovesongs._ He did, faith, sir Tom. Bob Cowley wove. Tenors get wom.
Cowley lay back.

Ah, now he heard, she holding it to his ear. Hear! He heard.

Wonderful. She held it to her own. And through the sifted light pale
gold in contrast glided. To hear.

Tap.

Bloom through the bardoor saw a shell held at their ears. He heard more
faintly that that they heard, each for herself alone, then each for
other, hearing the plash of waves, loudly, a silent roar.

Bronze by a weary gold, anear, afar, they listened.

Her ear too is a shell, the peeping lobe there. Been to the seaside.
Lovely seaside girls. Skin tanned raw. Should have put on coldcream
first make it brown. Buttered toast. O and that lotion mustn't forget.
Fever near her mouth. Your head it simply. Hair braided over: shell with
seaweed. Why do they hide their ears with seaweed hair? And Turks the
mouth, why? Her eyes over the sheet. Yashmak. Find the way in. A cave.
No admittance except on business.

The sea they think they hear. Singing. A roar. The blood it is. Souse in
the ear sometimes. Well, it's a sea. Corpuscle islands.

Wonderful really. So distinct. Again. George Lidwell held its murmur,
hearing: then laid it by, gently.

--What are the wild waves saying? he asked her, smiled.

Charming, seasmiling and unanswering Lydia on Lidwell smiled.

Tap.

By Larry O'Rourke's, by Larry, bold Larry O', Boylan swayed and Boylan
turned.

From the forsaken shell miss Mina glided to her tankards waiting. No,
she was not so lonely archly miss Douce's head let Mr Lidwell know.
Walks in the moonlight by the sea. No, not alone. With whom? She nobly
answered: with a gentleman friend.

Bob Cowley's twinkling fingers in the treble played again. The landlord
has the prior. A little time. Long John. Big Ben. Lightly he played a
light bright tinkling measure for tripping ladies, arch and smiling,
and for their gallants, gentlemen friends. One: one, one, one, one, one:
two, one, three, four.

Sea, wind, leaves, thunder, waters, cows lowing, the cattlemarket,
cocks, hens don't crow, snakes hissss. There's music everywhere.
Ruttledge's door: ee creaking. No, that's noise. Minuet of _Don
Giovanni_ he's playing now. Court dresses of all descriptions in castle
chambers dancing. Misery. Peasants outside. Green starving faces eating
dockleaves. Nice that is. Look: look, look, look, look, look: you look
at us.

That's joyful I can feel. Never have written it. Why? My joy is other
joy. But both are joys. Yes, joy it must be. Mere fact of music shows
you are. Often thought she was in the dumps till she began to lilt. Then
know.

M'Coy valise. My wife and your wife. Squealing cat. Like tearing silk.
Tongue when she talks like the clapper of a bellows. They can't manage
men's intervals. Gap in their voices too. Fill me. I'm warm, dark, open.
Molly in _quis est homo_: Mercadante. My ear against the wall to hear.
Want a woman who can deliver the goods.

Jog jig jogged stopped. Dandy tan shoe of dandy Boylan socks skyblue
clocks came light to earth.

O, look we are so! Chamber music. Could make a kind of pun on that.
It is a kind of music I often thought when she. Acoustics that is.
Tinkling. Empty vessels make most noise. Because the acoustics, the
resonance changes according as the weight of the water is equal to
the law of falling water. Like those rhapsodies of Liszt's, Hungarian,
gipsyeyed. Pearls. Drops. Rain. Diddleiddle addleaddle ooddleooddle.
Hissss. Now. Maybe now. Before.

One rapped on a door, one tapped with a knock, did he knock Paul de Kock
with a loud proud knocker with a cock carracarracarra cock. Cockcock.

Tap.

--_Qui sdegno,_ Ben, said Father Cowley.

--No, Ben, Tom Kernan interfered. _The Croppy Boy._ Our native Doric.

--Ay do, Ben, Mr Dedalus said. Good men and true.

--Do, do, they begged in one.

I'll go. Here, Pat, return. Come. He came, he came, he did not stay. To
me. How much?

--What key? Six sharps?

--F sharp major, Ben Dollard said.

Bob Cowley's outstretched talons griped the black deepsounding chords.

Must go prince Bloom told Richie prince. No, Richie said. Yes, must. Got
money somewhere. He's on for a razzle backache spree. Much? He seehears
lipspeech. One and nine. Penny for yourself. Here. Give him twopence
tip. Deaf, bothered. But perhaps he has wife and family waiting, waiting
Patty come home. Hee hee hee hee. Deaf wait while they wait.

But wait. But hear. Chords dark. Lugugugubrious. Low. In a cave of the
dark middle earth. Embedded ore. Lumpmusic.

The voice of dark age, of unlove, earth's fatigue made grave approach
and painful, come from afar, from hoary mountains, called on good men
and true. The priest he sought. With him would he speak a word.

Tap.

Ben Dollard's voice. Base barreltone. Doing his level best to say it.
Croak of vast manless moonless womoonless marsh. Other comedown. Big
ships' chandler's business he did once. Remember: rosiny ropes, ships'
lanterns. Failed to the tune of ten thousand pounds. Now in the Iveagh
home. Cubicle number so and so. Number one Bass did that for him.

The priest's at home. A false priest's servant bade him welcome. Step
in. The holy father. With bows a traitor servant. Curlycues of chords.

Ruin them. Wreck their lives. Then build them cubicles to end their days
in. Hushaby. Lullaby. Die, dog. Little dog, die.

The voice of warning, solemn warning, told them the youth had entered
a lonely hall, told them how solemn fell his footsteps there, told them
the gloomy chamber, the vested priest sitting to shrive.

Decent soul. Bit addled now. Thinks he'll win in _Answers,_ poets'
picture puzzle. We hand you crisp five pound note. Bird sitting hatching
in a nest. Lay of the last minstrel he thought it was. See blank tee
what domestic animal? Tee dash ar most courageous mariner. Good voice he
has still. No eunuch yet with all his belongings.

Listen. Bloom listened. Richie Goulding listened. And by the door deaf
Pat, bald Pat, tipped Pat, listened. The chords harped slower.

The voice of penance and of grief came slow, embellished, tremulous.
Ben's contrite beard confessed. _in nomine Domini,_ in God's name he
knelt. He beat his hand upon his breast, confessing: _mea culpa._

Latin again. That holds them like birdlime. Priest with the communion
corpus for those women. Chap in the mortuary, coffin or coffey,
_corpusnomine._ Wonder where that rat is by now. Scrape.

Tap.

They listened. Tankards and miss Kennedy. George Lidwell, eyelid well
expressive, fullbusted satin. Kernan. Si.

The sighing voice of sorrow sang. His sins. Since Easter he had cursed
three times. You bitch's bast. And once at masstime he had gone to play.
Once by the churchyard he had passed and for his mother's rest he had
not prayed. A boy. A croppy boy.

Bronze, listening, by the beerpull gazed far away. Soulfully. Doesn't
half know I'm. Molly great dab at seeing anyone looking.

Bronze gazed far sideways. Mirror there. Is that best side of her face?
They always know. Knock at the door. Last tip to titivate.

Cockcarracarra.

What do they think when they hear music? Way to catch rattlesnakes.
Night Michael Gunn gave us the box. Tuning up. Shah of Persia liked
that best. Remind him of home sweet home. Wiped his nose in curtain too.
Custom his country perhaps. That's music too. Not as bad as it sounds.
Tootling. Brasses braying asses through uptrunks. Doublebasses helpless,
gashes in their sides. Woodwinds mooing cows. Semigrand open crocodile
music hath jaws. Woodwind like Goodwin's name.

She looked fine. Her crocus dress she wore lowcut, belongings on show.
Clove her breath was always in theatre when she bent to ask a question.
Told her what Spinoza says in that book of poor papa's. Hypnotised,
listening. Eyes like that. She bent. Chap in dresscircle staring down
into her with his operaglass for all he was worth. Beauty of music you
must hear twice. Nature woman half a look. God made the country man the
tune. Met him pike hoses. Philosophy. O rocks!

All gone. All fallen. At the siege of Ross his father, at Gorey all his
brothers fell. To Wexford, we are the boys of Wexford, he would. Last of
his name and race.

I too. Last of my race. Milly young student. Well, my fault perhaps. No
son. Rudy. Too late now. Or if not? If not? If still?

He bore no hate.

Hate. Love. Those are names. Rudy. Soon I am old. Big Ben his voice
unfolded. Great voice Richie Goulding said, a flush struggling in his
pale, to Bloom soon old. But when was young?

Ireland comes now. My country above the king. She listens. Who fears to
speak of nineteen four? Time to be shoving. Looked enough.

--_Bless me, father,_ Dollard the croppy cried. _Bless me and let me
go._

Tap.

Bloom looked, unblessed to go. Got up to kill: on eighteen bob a week.
Fellows shell out the dibs. Want to keep your weathereye open. Those
girls, those lovely. By the sad sea waves. Chorusgirl's romance. Letters
read out for breach of promise. From Chickabiddy's owny Mumpsypum.
Laughter in court. Henry. I never signed it. The lovely name you.

Low sank the music, air and words. Then hastened. The false priest
rustling soldier from his cassock. A yeoman captain. They know it all by
heart. The thrill they itch for. Yeoman cap.

Tap. Tap.

Thrilled she listened, bending in sympathy to hear.

Blank face. Virgin should say: or fingered only. Write something on it:
page. If not what becomes of them? Decline, despair. Keeps them young.
Even admire themselves. See. Play on her. Lip blow. Body of white woman,
a flute alive. Blow gentle. Loud. Three holes, all women. Goddess I
didn't see. They want it. Not too much polite. That's why he gets them.
Gold in your pocket, brass in your face. Say something. Make her hear.
With look to look. Songs without words. Molly, that hurdygurdy boy.
She knew he meant the monkey was sick. Or because so like the Spanish.
Understand animals too that way. Solomon did. Gift of nature.

Ventriloquise. My lips closed. Think in my stom. What?

Will? You? I. Want. You. To.

With hoarse rude fury the yeoman cursed, swelling in apoplectic bitch's
bastard. A good thought, boy, to come. One hour's your time to live,
your last.

Tap. Tap.

Thrill now. Pity they feel. To wipe away a tear for martyrs that want
to, dying to, die. For all things dying, for all things born. Poor Mrs
Purefoy. Hope she's over. Because their wombs.

A liquid of womb of woman eyeball gazed under a fence of lashes, calmly,
hearing. See real beauty of the eye when she not speaks. On yonder
river. At each slow satiny heaving bosom's wave (her heaving embon) red
rose rose slowly sank red rose. Heartbeats: her breath: breath that is
life. And all the tiny tiny fernfoils trembled of maidenhair.

But look. The bright stars fade. O rose! Castile. The morn. Ha. Lidwell.
For him then not for. Infatuated. I like that? See her from here though.
Popped corks, splashes of beerfroth, stacks of empties.

On the smooth jutting beerpull laid Lydia hand, lightly, plumply, leave
it to my hands. All lost in pity for croppy. Fro, to: to, fro: over
the polished knob (she knows his eyes, my eyes, her eyes) her thumb and
finger passed in pity: passed, reposed and, gently touching, then slid
so smoothly, slowly down, a cool firm white enamel baton protruding
through their sliding ring.

With a cock with a carra.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

I hold this house. Amen. He gnashed in fury. Traitors swing.

The chords consented. Very sad thing. But had to be. Get out before the
end. Thanks, that was heavenly. Where's my hat. Pass by her. Can leave
that Freeman. Letter I have. Suppose she were the? No. Walk, walk,
walk. Like Cashel Boylo Connoro Coylo Tisdall Maurice Tisntdall Farrell.
Waaaaaaalk.

Well, I must be. Are you off? Yrfmstbyes. Blmstup. O'er ryehigh blue.
Ow. Bloom stood up. Soap feeling rather sticky behind. Must have
sweated: music. That lotion, remember. Well, so long. High grade. Card
inside. Yes.

By deaf Pat in the doorway straining ear Bloom passed.

At Geneva barrack that young man died. At Passage was his body laid.
Dolor! O, he dolores! The voice of the mournful chanter called to
dolorous prayer.

By rose, by satiny bosom, by the fondling hand, by slops, by empties,
by popped corks, greeting in going, past eyes and maidenhair, bronze and
faint gold in deepseashadow, went Bloom, soft Bloom, I feel so lonely
Bloom.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

Pray for him, prayed the bass of Dollard. You who hear in peace. Breathe
a prayer, drop a tear, good men, good people. He was the croppy boy.

Scaring eavesdropping boots croppy bootsboy Bloom in the Ormond hallway
heard the growls and roars of bravo, fat backslapping, their boots all
treading, boots not the boots the boy. General chorus off for a swill to
wash it down. Glad I avoided.

--Come on, Ben, Simon Dedalus cried. By God, you're as good as ever you
were.

--Better, said Tomgin Kernan. Most trenchant rendition of that ballad,
upon my soul and honour It is.

--Lablache, said Father Cowley.

Ben Dollard bulkily cachuchad towards the bar, mightily praisefed
and all big roseate, on heavyfooted feet, his gouty fingers nakkering
castagnettes in the air.

Big Benaben Dollard. Big Benben. Big Benben.

Rrr.

And deepmoved all, Simon trumping compassion from foghorn nose, all
laughing they brought him forth, Ben Dollard, in right good cheer.

--You're looking rubicund, George Lidwell said.

Miss Douce composed her rose to wait.

--Ben machree, said Mr Dedalus, clapping Ben's fat back shoulderblade.
Fit as a fiddle only he has a lot of adipose tissue concealed about his
person.

Rrrrrrrsss.

--Fat of death, Simon, Ben Dollard growled.

Richie rift in the lute alone sat: Goulding, Collis, Ward. Uncertainly
he waited. Unpaid Pat too.

Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.

Miss Mina Kennedy brought near her lips to ear of tankard one.

--Mr Dollard, they murmured low.

--Dollard, murmured tankard.

Tank one believed: miss Kenn when she: that doll he was: she doll: the
tank.

He murmured that he knew the name. The name was familiar to him, that
is to say. That was to say he had heard the name of. Dollard, was it?
Dollard, yes.

Yes, her lips said more loudly, Mr Dollard. He sang that song lovely,
murmured Mina. Mr Dollard. And _The last rose of summer_ was a lovely
song. Mina loved that song. Tankard loved the song that Mina.

'Tis the last rose of summer dollard left bloom felt wind wound round
inside.

Gassy thing that cider: binding too. Wait. Postoffice near Reuben J's
one and eightpence too. Get shut of it. Dodge round by Greek street.
Wish I hadn't promised to meet. Freer in air. Music. Gets on your
nerves. Beerpull. Her hand that rocks the cradle rules the. Ben Howth.
That rules the world.

Far. Far. Far. Far.

Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.

Up the quay went Lionelleopold, naughty Henry with letter for Mady, with
sweets of sin with frillies for Raoul with met him pike hoses went Poldy
on.

Tap blind walked tapping by the tap the curbstone tapping, tap by tap.

Cowley, he stuns himself with it: kind of drunkenness. Better give way
only half way the way of a man with a maid. Instance enthusiasts. All
ears. Not lose a demisemiquaver. Eyes shut. Head nodding in time. Dotty.
You daren't budge. Thinking strictly prohibited. Always talking shop.
Fiddlefaddle about notes.

All a kind of attempt to talk. Unpleasant when it stops because you
never know exac. Organ in Gardiner street. Old Glynn fifty quid a year.
Queer up there in the cockloft, alone, with stops and locks and keys.
Seated all day at the organ. Maunder on for hours, talking to himself or
the other fellow blowing the bellows. Growl angry, then shriek cursing
(want to have wadding or something in his no don't she cried), then all
of a soft sudden wee little wee little pipy wind.

Pwee! A wee little wind piped eeee. In Bloom's little wee.

--Was he? Mr Dedalus said, returning with fetched pipe. I was with him
this morning at poor little Paddy Dignam's...

--Ay, the Lord have mercy on him.

--By the bye there's a tuningfork in there on the...

Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.

--The wife has a fine voice. Or had. What? Lidwell asked.

--O, that must be the tuner, Lydia said to Simonlionel first I saw,
forgot it when he was here.

Blind he was she told George Lidwell second I saw. And played so
exquisitely, treat to hear. Exquisite contrast: bronzelid, minagold.

--Shout! Ben Dollard shouted, pouring. Sing out!

--'lldo! cried Father Cowley.

Rrrrrr.

I feel I want...

Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap

--Very, Mr Dedalus said, staring hard at a headless sardine.

Under the sandwichbell lay on a bier of bread one last, one lonely, last
sardine of summer. Bloom alone.

--Very, he stared. The lower register, for choice.

Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.

Bloom went by Barry's. Wish I could. Wait. That wonderworker if I had.
Twentyfour solicitors in that one house. Counted them. Litigation. Love
one another. Piles of parchment. Messrs Pick and Pocket have power of
attorney. Goulding, Collis, Ward.

But for example the chap that wallops the big drum. His vocation: Mickey
Rooney's band. Wonder how it first struck him. Sitting at home after
pig's cheek and cabbage nursing it in the armchair. Rehearsing his band
part. Pom. Pompedy. Jolly for the wife. Asses' skins. Welt them through
life, then wallop after death. Pom. Wallop. Seems to be what you call
yashmak or I mean kismet. Fate.

Tap. Tap. A stripling, blind, with a tapping cane came taptaptapping by
Daly's window where a mermaid hair all streaming (but he couldn't see)
blew whiffs of a mermaid (blind couldn't), mermaid, coolest whiff of
all.

Instruments. A blade of grass, shell of her hands, then blow. Even
comb and tissuepaper you can knock a tune out of. Molly in her shift in
Lombard street west, hair down. I suppose each kind of trade made its
own, don't you see? Hunter with a horn. Haw. Have you the? _Cloche.
Sonnez la._ Shepherd his pipe. Pwee little wee. Policeman a whistle.
Locks and keys! Sweep! Four o'clock's all's well! Sleep! All is lost
now. Drum? Pompedy. Wait. I know. Towncrier, bumbailiff. Long John.
Waken the dead. Pom. Dignam. Poor little _nominedomine._ Pom. It is
music. I mean of course it's all pom pom pom very much what they call
_da capo._ Still you can hear. As we march, we march along, march along.
Pom.

I must really. Fff. Now if I did that at a banquet. Just a question of
custom shah of Persia. Breathe a prayer, drop a tear. All the same
he must have been a bit of a natural not to see it was a yeoman cap.
Muffled up. Wonder who was that chap at the grave in the brown macin. O,
the whore of the lane!

A frowsy whore with black straw sailor hat askew came glazily in the day
along the quay towards Mr Bloom. When first he saw that form endearing?
Yes, it is. I feel so lonely. Wet night in the lane. Horn. Who had
the? Heehaw shesaw. Off her beat here. What is she? Hope she. Psst! Any
chance of your wash. Knew Molly. Had me decked. Stout lady does be with
you in the brown costume. Put you off your stroke, that. Appointment
we made knowing we'd never, well hardly ever. Too dear too near to home
sweet home. Sees me, does she? Looks a fright in the day. Face like dip.
Damn her. O, well, she has to live like the rest. Look in here.

In Lionel Marks's antique saleshop window haughty Henry Lionel Leopold
dear Henry Flower earnestly Mr Leopold Bloom envisaged battered
candlesticks melodeon oozing maggoty blowbags. Bargain: six bob. Might
learn to play. Cheap. Let her pass. Course everything is dear if you
don't want it. That's what good salesman is. Make you buy what he wants
to sell. Chap sold me the Swedish razor he shaved me with. Wanted to
charge me for the edge he gave it. She's passing now. Six bob.

Must be the cider or perhaps the burgund.

Near bronze from anear near gold from afar they chinked their clinking
glasses all, brighteyed and gallant, before bronze Lydia's tempting last
rose of summer, rose of Castile. First Lid, De, Cow, Ker, Doll, a fifth:
Lidwell, Si Dedalus, Bob Cowley, Kernan and big Ben Dollard.

Tap. A youth entered a lonely Ormond hall.

Bloom viewed a gallant pictured hero in Lionel Marks's window. Robert
Emmet's last words. Seven last words. Of Meyerbeer that is.

--True men like you men.

--Ay, ay, Ben.

--Will lift your glass with us.

They lifted.

Tschink. Tschunk.

Tip. An unseeing stripling stood in the door. He saw not bronze. He saw
not gold. Nor Ben nor Bob nor Tom nor Si nor George nor tanks nor Richie
nor Pat. Hee hee hee hee. He did not see.

Seabloom, greaseabloom viewed last words. Softly. _When my country takes
her place among._

Prrprr.

Must be the bur.

Fff! Oo. Rrpr.

_Nations of the earth._ No-one behind. She's passed. _Then and not till
then._ Tram kran kran kran. Good oppor. Coming. Krandlkrankran. I'm
sure it's the burgund. Yes. One, two. _Let my epitaph be._ Kraaaaaa.
_Written. I have._

Pprrpffrrppffff.

_Done._



I was just passing the time of day with old Troy of the D. M. P. at the
corner of Arbour hill there and be damned but a bloody sweep came along
and he near drove his gear into my eye. I turned around to let him have
the weight of my tongue when who should I see dodging along Stony Batter
only Joe Hynes.

--Lo, Joe, says I. How are you blowing? Did you see that bloody
chimneysweep near shove my eye out with his brush?

--Soot's luck, says Joe. Who's the old ballocks you were talking to?

--Old Troy, says I, was in the force. I'm on two minds not to give that
fellow in charge for obstructing the thoroughfare with his brooms and
ladders.

--What are you doing round those parts? says Joe.

--Devil a much, says I. There's a bloody big foxy thief beyond by the
garrison church at the corner of Chicken lane--old Troy was just giving
me a wrinkle about him--lifted any God's quantity of tea and sugar
to pay three bob a week said he had a farm in the county Down off a
hop-of-my-thumb by the name of Moses Herzog over there near Heytesbury
street.

--Circumcised? says Joe.

--Ay, says I. A bit off the top. An old plumber named Geraghty. I'm
hanging on to his taw now for the past fortnight and I can't get a penny
out of him.

--That the lay you're on now? says Joe.

--Ay, says I. How are the mighty fallen! Collector of bad and doubtful
debts. But that's the most notorious bloody robber you'd meet in a day's
walk and the face on him all pockmarks would hold a shower of rain.
_Tell him,_ says he, _I dare him,_ says he, _and I doubledare him
to send you round here again or if he does,_ says he, _I'll have
him summonsed up before the court, so I will, for trading without a
licence._ And he after stuffing himself till he's fit to burst. Jesus,
I had to laugh at the little jewy getting his shirt out. _He drink me my
teas. He eat me my sugars. Because he no pay me my moneys?_

For nonperishable goods bought of Moses Herzog, of 13 Saint Kevin's
parade in the city of Dublin, Wood quay ward, merchant, hereinafter
called the vendor, and sold and delivered to Michael E. Geraghty,
esquire, of 29 Arbour hill in the city of Dublin, Arran quay ward,
gentleman, hereinafter called the purchaser, videlicet, five pounds
avoirdupois of first choice tea at three shillings and no pence per
pound avoirdupois and three stone avoirdupois of sugar, crushed crystal,
at threepence per pound avoirdupois, the said purchaser debtor to the
said vendor of one pound five shillings and sixpence sterling for value
received which amount shall be paid by said purchaser to said vendor in
weekly instalments every seven calendar days of three shillings and no
pence sterling: and the said nonperishable goods shall not be pawned or
pledged or sold or otherwise alienated by the said purchaser but shall
be and remain and be held to be the sole and exclusive property of the
said vendor to be disposed of at his good will and pleasure until the
said amount shall have been duly paid by the said purchaser to the said
vendor in the manner herein set forth as this day hereby agreed between
the said vendor, his heirs, successors, trustees and assigns of the one
part and the said purchaser, his heirs, successors, trustees and assigns
of the other part.

--Are you a strict t.t.? says Joe.

--Not taking anything between drinks, says I.

--What about paying our respects to our friend? says Joe.

--Who? says I. Sure, he's out in John of God's off his head, poor man.

--Drinking his own stuff? says Joe.

--Ay, says I. Whisky and water on the brain.

--Come around to Barney Kiernan's, says Joe. I want to see the citizen.

--Barney mavourneen's be it, says I. Anything strange or wonderful, Joe?

--Not a word, says Joe. I was up at that meeting in the City Arms.

---What was that, Joe? says I.

--Cattle traders, says Joe, about the foot and mouth disease. I want to
give the citizen the hard word about it.

So we went around by the Linenhall barracks and the back of the
courthouse talking of one thing or another. Decent fellow Joe when he
has it but sure like that he never has it. Jesus, I couldn't get over
that bloody foxy Geraghty, the daylight robber. For trading without a
licence, says he.

In Inisfail the fair there lies a land, the land of holy Michan. There
rises a watchtower beheld of men afar. There sleep the mighty dead as in
life they slept, warriors and princes of high renown. A pleasant land
it is in sooth of murmuring waters, fishful streams where sport the
gurnard, the plaice, the roach, the halibut, the gibbed haddock, the
grilse, the dab, the brill, the flounder, the pollock, the mixed coarse
fish generally and other denizens of the aqueous kingdom too numerous to
be enumerated. In the mild breezes of the west and of the east the lofty
trees wave in different directions their firstclass foliage, the wafty
sycamore, the Lebanonian cedar, the exalted planetree, the eugenic
eucalyptus and other ornaments of the arboreal world with which
that region is thoroughly well supplied. Lovely maidens sit in close
proximity to the roots of the lovely trees singing the most lovely songs
while they play with all kinds of lovely objects as for example golden
ingots, silvery fishes, crans of herrings, drafts of eels, codlings,
creels of fingerlings, purple seagems and playful insects. And heroes
voyage from afar to woo them, from Eblana to Slievemargy, the peerless
princes of unfettered Munster and of Connacht the just and of smooth
sleek Leinster and of Cruahan's land and of Armagh the splendid and of
the noble district of Boyle, princes, the sons of kings.

And there rises a shining palace whose crystal glittering roof is seen
by mariners who traverse the extensive sea in barks built expressly for
that purpose, and thither come all herds and fatlings and firstfruits
of that land for O'Connell Fitzsimon takes toll of them, a chieftain
descended from chieftains. Thither the extremely large wains bring
foison of the fields, flaskets of cauliflowers, floats of spinach,
pineapple chunks, Rangoon beans, strikes of tomatoes, drums of figs,
drills of Swedes, spherical potatoes and tallies of iridescent kale,
York and Savoy, and trays of onions, pearls of the earth, and punnets of
mushrooms and custard marrows and fat vetches and bere and rape and red
green yellow brown russet sweet big bitter ripe pomellated apples and
chips of strawberries and sieves of gooseberries, pulpy and pelurious,
and strawberries fit for princes and raspberries from their canes.

I dare him, says he, and I doubledare him. Come out here, Geraghty, you
notorious bloody hill and dale robber!

And by that way wend the herds innumerable of bellwethers and flushed
ewes and shearling rams and lambs and stubble geese and medium steers
and roaring mares and polled calves and longwoods and storesheep and
Cuffe's prime springers and culls and sowpigs and baconhogs and the
various different varieties of highly distinguished swine and Angus
heifers and polly bulllocks of immaculate pedigree together with prime
premiated milchcows and beeves: and there is ever heard a trampling,
cackling, roaring, lowing, bleating, bellowing, rumbling, grunting,
champing, chewing, of sheep and pigs and heavyhooved kine from
pasturelands of Lusk and Rush and Carrickmines and from the streamy
vales of Thomond, from the M'Gillicuddy's reeks the inaccessible and
lordly Shannon the unfathomable, and from the gentle declivities of the
place of the race of Kiar, their udders distended with superabundance of
milk and butts of butter and rennets of cheese and farmer's firkins and
targets of lamb and crannocks of corn and oblong eggs in great hundreds,
various in size, the agate with this dun.

So we turned into Barney Kiernan's and there, sure enough, was the
citizen up in the corner having a great confab with himself and that
bloody mangy mongrel, Garryowen, and he waiting for what the sky would
drop in the way of drink.

--There he is, says I, in his gloryhole, with his cruiskeen lawn and his
load of papers, working for the cause.

The bloody mongrel let a grouse out of him would give you the creeps. Be
a corporal work of mercy if someone would take the life of that bloody
dog. I'm told for a fact he ate a good part of the breeches off a
constabulary man in Santry that came round one time with a blue paper
about a licence.

--Stand and deliver, says he.

--That's all right, citizen, says Joe. Friends here.

--Pass, friends, says he.

Then he rubs his hand in his eye and says he:

--What's your opinion of the times?

Doing the rapparee and Rory of the hill. But, begob, Joe was equal to
the occasion.

--I think the markets are on a rise, says he, sliding his hand down his
fork.

So begob the citizen claps his paw on his knee and he says:

--Foreign wars is the cause of it.

And says Joe, sticking his thumb in his pocket:

--It's the Russians wish to tyrannise.

--Arrah, give over your bloody codding, Joe, says I. I've a thirst on me
I wouldn't sell for half a crown.

--Give it a name, citizen, says Joe.

--Wine of the country, says he.

--What's yours? says Joe.

--Ditto MacAnaspey, says I.

--Three pints, Terry, says Joe. And how's the old heart, citizen? says
he.

--Never better, _a chara_, says he. What Garry? Are we going to win? Eh?

And with that he took the bloody old towser by the scruff of the neck
and, by Jesus, he near throttled him.

The figure seated on a large boulder at the foot of a round tower was
that of a broadshouldered deepchested stronglimbed frankeyed redhaired
freelyfreckled shaggybearded widemouthed largenosed longheaded
deepvoiced barekneed brawnyhanded hairylegged ruddyfaced sinewyarmed
hero. From shoulder to shoulder he measured several ells and his
rocklike mountainous knees were covered, as was likewise the rest of his
body wherever visible, with a strong growth of tawny prickly hair in
hue and toughness similar to the mountain gorse (_Ulex Europeus_).
The widewinged nostrils, from which bristles of the same tawny hue
projected, were of such capaciousness that within their cavernous
obscurity the fieldlark might easily have lodged her nest. The eyes
in which a tear and a smile strove ever for the mastery were of the
dimensions of a goodsized cauliflower. A powerful current of warm breath
issued at regular intervals from the profound cavity of his mouth
while in rhythmic resonance the loud strong hale reverberations of his
formidable heart thundered rumblingly causing the ground, the summit of
the lofty tower and the still loftier walls of the cave to vibrate and
tremble.

He wore a long unsleeved garment of recently flayed oxhide reaching
to the knees in a loose kilt and this was bound about his middle by
a girdle of plaited straw and rushes. Beneath this he wore trews of
deerskin, roughly stitched with gut. His nether extremities were encased
in high Balbriggan buskins dyed in lichen purple, the feet being shod
with brogues of salted cowhide laced with the windpipe of the same
beast. From his girdle hung a row of seastones which jangled at every
movement of his portentous frame and on these were graven with rude
yet striking art the tribal images of many Irish heroes and heroines of
antiquity, Cuchulin, Conn of hundred battles, Niall of nine hostages,
Brian of Kincora, the ardri Malachi, Art MacMurragh, Shane O'Neill,
Father John Murphy, Owen Roe, Patrick Sarsfield, Red Hugh O'Donnell,
Red Jim MacDermott, Soggarth Eoghan O'Growney, Michael Dwyer, Francy
Higgins, Henry Joy M'Cracken, Goliath, Horace Wheatley, Thomas Conneff,
Peg Woffington, the Village Blacksmith, Captain Moonlight, Captain
Boycott, Dante Alighieri, Christopher Columbus, S. Fursa, S. Brendan,
Marshal MacMahon, Charlemagne, Theobald Wolfe Tone, the Mother of the
Maccabees, the Last of the Mohicans, the Rose of Castile, the Man for
Galway, The Man that Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo, The Man in the Gap,
The Woman Who Didn't, Benjamin Franklin, Napoleon Bonaparte, John L.
Sullivan, Cleopatra, Savourneen Deelish, Julius Caesar, Paracelsus, sir
Thomas Lipton, William Tell, Michelangelo Hayes, Muhammad, the Bride of
Lammermoor, Peter the Hermit, Peter the Packer, Dark Rosaleen, Patrick
W. Shakespeare, Brian Confucius, Murtagh Gutenberg, Patricio Velasquez,
Captain Nemo, Tristan and Isolde, the first Prince of Wales, Thomas
Cook and Son, the Bold Soldier Boy, Arrah na Pogue, Dick Turpin, Ludwig
Beethoven, the Colleen Bawn, Waddler Healy, Angus the Culdee, Dolly
Mount, Sidney Parade, Ben Howth, Valentine Greatrakes, Adam and Eve,
Arthur Wellesley, Boss Croker, Herodotus, Jack the Giantkiller, Gautama
Buddha, Lady Godiva, The Lily of Killarney, Balor of the Evil Eye,
the Queen of Sheba, Acky Nagle, Joe Nagle, Alessandro Volta, Jeremiah
O'Donovan Rossa, Don Philip O'Sullivan Beare. A couched spear of
acuminated granite rested by him while at his feet reposed a savage
animal of the canine tribe whose stertorous gasps announced that he was
sunk in uneasy slumber, a supposition confirmed by hoarse growls and
spasmodic movements which his master repressed from time to time
by tranquilising blows of a mighty cudgel rudely fashioned out of
paleolithic stone.

So anyhow Terry brought the three pints Joe was standing and begob the
sight nearly left my eyes when I saw him land out a quid O, as true as
I'm telling you. A goodlooking sovereign.

--And there's more where that came from, says he.

--Were you robbing the poorbox, Joe? says I.

--Sweat of my brow, says Joe. 'Twas the prudent member gave me the
wheeze.

--I saw him before I met you, says I, sloping around by Pill lane and
Greek street with his cod's eye counting up all the guts of the fish.

Who comes through Michan's land, bedight in sable armour? O'Bloom,
the son of Rory: it is he. Impervious to fear is Rory's son: he of the
prudent soul.

--For the old woman of Prince's street, says the citizen, the subsidised
organ. The pledgebound party on the floor of the house. And look at this
blasted rag, says he. Look at this, says he. _The Irish Independent,_ if
you please, founded by Parnell to be the workingman's friend. Listen to
the births and deaths in the _Irish all for Ireland Independent,_ and
I'll thank you and the marriages.

And he starts reading them out:

--Gordon, Barnfield crescent, Exeter; Redmayne of Iffley, Saint Anne's
on Sea: the wife of William T Redmayne of a son. How's that, eh? Wright
and Flint, Vincent and Gillett to Rotha Marion daughter of Rosa and the
late George Alfred Gillett, 179 Clapham road, Stockwell, Playwood and
Ridsdale at Saint Jude's, Kensington by the very reverend Dr Forrest,
dean of Worcester. Eh? Deaths. Bristow, at Whitehall lane, London: Carr,
Stoke Newington, of gastritis and heart disease: Cockburn, at the Moat
house, Chepstow...

--I know that fellow, says Joe, from bitter experience.

--Cockburn. Dimsey, wife of David Dimsey, late of the admiralty: Miller,
Tottenham, aged eightyfive: Welsh, June 12, at 35 Canning street,
Liverpool, Isabella Helen. How's that for a national press, eh, my brown
son! How's that for Martin Murphy, the Bantry jobber?

--Ah, well, says Joe, handing round the boose. Thanks be to God they had
the start of us. Drink that, citizen.

--I will, says he, honourable person.

--Health, Joe, says I. And all down the form.

Ah! Ow! Don't be talking! I was blue mouldy for the want of that pint.
Declare to God I could hear it hit the pit of my stomach with a click.

And lo, as they quaffed their cup of joy, a godlike messenger came
swiftly in, radiant as the eye of heaven, a comely youth and behind him
there passed an elder of noble gait and countenance, bearing the sacred
scrolls of law and with him his lady wife a dame of peerless lineage,
fairest of her race.

Little Alf Bergan popped in round the door and hid behind Barney's
snug, squeezed up with the laughing. And who was sitting up there in
the corner that I hadn't seen snoring drunk blind to the world only Bob
Doran. I didn't know what was up and Alf kept making signs out of the
door. And begob what was it only that bloody old pantaloon Denis Breen
in his bathslippers with two bloody big books tucked under his oxter and
the wife hotfoot after him, unfortunate wretched woman, trotting like a
poodle. I thought Alf would split.

--Look at him, says he. Breen. He's traipsing all round Dublin with a
postcard someone sent him with U. p: up on it to take a li...

And he doubled up.

--Take a what? says I.

--Libel action, says he, for ten thousand pounds.

--O hell! says I.

The bloody mongrel began to growl that'd put the fear of God in you
seeing something was up but the citizen gave him a kick in the ribs.

_--Bi i dho husht,_ says he.

--Who? says Joe.

--Breen, says Alf. He was in John Henry Menton's and then he went round
to Collis and Ward's and then Tom Rochford met him and sent him round to
the subsheriff's for a lark. O God, I've a pain laughing. U. p: up. The
long fellow gave him an eye as good as a process and now the bloody old
lunatic is gone round to Green street to look for a G man.

--When is long John going to hang that fellow in Mountjoy? says Joe.

--Bergan, says Bob Doran, waking up. Is that Alf Bergan?

--Yes, says Alf. Hanging? Wait till I show you. Here, Terry, give us a
pony. That bloody old fool! Ten thousand pounds. You should have seen
long John's eye. U. p...

And he started laughing.

--Who are you laughing at? says Bob Doran. Is that Bergan?

--Hurry up, Terry boy, says Alf.

Terence O'Ryan heard him and straightway brought him a crystal cup
full of the foamy ebon ale which the noble twin brothers Bungiveagh and
Bungardilaun brew ever in their divine alevats, cunning as the sons of
deathless Leda. For they garner the succulent berries of the hop and
mass and sift and bruise and brew them and they mix therewith sour
juices and bring the must to the sacred fire and cease not night or day
from their toil, those cunning brothers, lords of the vat.

Then did you, chivalrous Terence, hand forth, as to the manner born,
that nectarous beverage and you offered the crystal cup to him that
thirsted, the soul of chivalry, in beauty akin to the immortals.

But he, the young chief of the O'Bergan's, could ill brook to be outdone
in generous deeds but gave therefor with gracious gesture a testoon of
costliest bronze. Thereon embossed in excellent smithwork was seen
the image of a queen of regal port, scion of the house of Brunswick,
Victoria her name, Her Most Excellent Majesty, by grace of God of the
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and of the British dominions
beyond the sea, queen, defender of the faith, Empress of India, even
she, who bore rule, a victress over many peoples, the wellbeloved, for
they knew and loved her from the rising of the sun to the going down
thereof, the pale, the dark, the ruddy and the ethiop.

--What's that bloody freemason doing, says the citizen, prowling up and
down outside?

--What's that? says Joe.

--Here you are, says Alf, chucking out the rhino. Talking about hanging,
I'll show you something you never saw. Hangmen's letters. Look at here.

So he took a bundle of wisps of letters and envelopes out of his pocket.

--Are you codding? says I.

--Honest injun, says Alf. Read them.

So Joe took up the letters.

--Who are you laughing at? says Bob Doran.

So I saw there was going to be a bit of a dust Bob's a queer chap when
the porter's up in him so says I just to make talk:

--How's Willy Murray those times, Alf?

--I don't know, says Alf I saw him just now in Capel street with Paddy
Dignam. Only I was running after that...

--You what? says Joe, throwing down the letters. With who?

--With Dignam, says Alf.

--Is it Paddy? says Joe.

--Yes, says Alf. Why?

--Don't you know he's dead? says Joe.

--Paddy Dignam dead! says Alf.

--Ay, says Joe.

--Sure I'm after seeing him not five minutes ago, says Alf, as plain as
a pikestaff.

--Who's dead? says Bob Doran.

--You saw his ghost then, says Joe, God between us and harm.

--What? says Alf. Good Christ, only five... What?... And Willy Murray
with him, the two of them there near whatdoyoucallhim's... What? Dignam
dead?

--What about Dignam? says Bob Doran. Who's talking about...?

--Dead! says Alf. He's no more dead than you are.

--Maybe so, says Joe. They took the liberty of burying him this morning
anyhow.

--Paddy? says Alf.

--Ay, says Joe. He paid the debt of nature, God be merciful to him.

--Good Christ! says Alf.

Begob he was what you might call flabbergasted.

In the darkness spirit hands were felt to flutter and when prayer by
tantras had been directed to the proper quarter a faint but increasing
luminosity of ruby light became gradually visible, the apparition of
the etheric double being particularly lifelike owing to the discharge
of jivic rays from the crown of the head and face. Communication was
effected through the pituitary body and also by means of the orangefiery
and scarlet rays emanating from the sacral region and solar plexus.
Questioned by his earthname as to his whereabouts in the heavenworld he
stated that he was now on the path of pr l ya or return but was still
submitted to trial at the hands of certain bloodthirsty entities on the
lower astral levels. In reply to a question as to his first sensations
in the great divide beyond he stated that previously he had seen as in a
glass darkly but that those who had passed over had summit possibilities
of atmic development opened up to them. Interrogated as to whether life
there resembled our experience in the flesh he stated that he had heard
from more favoured beings now in the spirit that their abodes were
equipped with every modern home comfort such as talafana, alavatar,
hatakalda, wataklasat and that the highest adepts were steeped in
waves of volupcy of the very purest nature. Having requested a quart of
buttermilk this was brought and evidently afforded relief. Asked if he
had any message for the living he exhorted all who were still at the
wrong side of Maya to acknowledge the true path for it was reported
in devanic circles that Mars and Jupiter were out for mischief on the
eastern angle where the ram has power. It was then queried whether there
were any special desires on the part of the defunct and the reply was:
_We greet you, friends of earth, who are still in the body. Mind C. K.
doesn't pile it on._ It was ascertained that the reference was to Mr
Cornelius Kelleher, manager of Messrs H. J. O'Neill's popular
funeral establishment, a personal friend of the defunct, who had been
responsible for the carrying out of the interment arrangements. Before
departing he requested that it should be told to his dear son Patsy that
the other boot which he had been looking for was at present under the
commode in the return room and that the pair should be sent to Cullen's
to be soled only as the heels were still good. He stated that this had
greatly perturbed his peace of mind in the other region and earnestly
requested that his desire should be made known.

Assurances were given that the matter would be attended to and it was
intimated that this had given satisfaction.

He is gone from mortal haunts: O'Dignam, sun of our morning. Fleet was
his foot on the bracken: Patrick of the beamy brow. Wail, Banba, with
your wind: and wail, O ocean, with your whirlwind.

--There he is again, says the citizen, staring out.

--Who? says I.

--Bloom, says he. He's on point duty up and down there for the last ten
minutes.

And, begob, I saw his physog do a peep in and then slidder off again.

Little Alf was knocked bawways. Faith, he was.

--Good Christ! says he. I could have sworn it was him.

And says Bob Doran, with the hat on the back of his poll, lowest
blackguard in Dublin when he's under the influence:

--Who said Christ is good?

--I beg your parsnips, says Alf.

--Is that a good Christ, says Bob Doran, to take away poor little Willy
Dignam?

--Ah, well, says Alf, trying to pass it off. He's over all his troubles.

But Bob Doran shouts out of him.

--He's a bloody ruffian, I say, to take away poor little Willy Dignam.

Terry came down and tipped him the wink to keep quiet, that they didn't
want that kind of talk in a respectable licensed premises. And Bob Doran
starts doing the weeps about Paddy Dignam, true as you're there.

--The finest man, says he, snivelling, the finest purest character.

The tear is bloody near your eye. Talking through his bloody hat. Fitter
for him go home to the little sleepwalking bitch he married, Mooney, the
bumbailiff's daughter, mother kept a kip in Hardwicke street, that
used to be stravaging about the landings Bantam Lyons told me that was
stopping there at two in the morning without a stitch on her, exposing
her person, open to all comers, fair field and no favour.

--The noblest, the truest, says he. And he's gone, poor little Willy,
poor little Paddy Dignam.

And mournful and with a heavy heart he bewept the extinction of that
beam of heaven.

Old Garryowen started growling again at Bloom that was skeezing round
the door.

--Come in, come on, he won't eat you, says the citizen.

So Bloom slopes in with his cod's eye on the dog and he asks Terry was
Martin Cunningham there.

--O, Christ M'Keown, says Joe, reading one of the letters. Listen to
this, will you?

And he starts reading out one.

_7 Hunter Street, Liverpool. To the High Sheriff of Dublin, Dublin._

_Honoured sir i beg to offer my services in the abovementioned painful
case i hanged Joe Gann in Bootle jail on the 12 of Febuary 1900 and i
hanged..._

--Show us, Joe, says I.

--_... private Arthur Chace for fowl murder of Jessie Tilsit in
Pentonville prison and i was assistant when..._

--Jesus, says I.

--_... Billington executed the awful murderer Toad Smith..._

The citizen made a grab at the letter.

--Hold hard, says Joe, _i have a special nack of putting the noose once
in he can't get out hoping to be favoured i remain, honoured sir, my
terms is five ginnees._

_H. RUMBOLD, MASTER BARBER._

--And a barbarous bloody barbarian he is too, says the citizen.

--And the dirty scrawl of the wretch, says Joe. Here, says he, take them
to hell out of my sight, Alf. Hello, Bloom, says he, what will you have?

So they started arguing about the point, Bloom saying he wouldn't and he
couldn't and excuse him no offence and all to that and then he said well
he'd just take a cigar. Gob, he's a prudent member and no mistake.

--Give us one of your prime stinkers, Terry, says Joe.

And Alf was telling us there was one chap sent in a mourning card with a
black border round it.

--They're all barbers, says he, from the black country that would hang
their own fathers for five quid down and travelling expenses.

And he was telling us there's two fellows waiting below to pull his
heels down when he gets the drop and choke him properly and then they
chop up the rope after and sell the bits for a few bob a skull.

In the dark land they bide, the vengeful knights of the razor. Their
deadly coil they grasp: yea, and therein they lead to Erebus whatsoever
wight hath done a deed of blood for I will on nowise suffer it even so
saith the Lord.

So they started talking about capital punishment and of course Bloom
comes out with the why and the wherefore and all the codology of the
business and the old dog smelling him all the time I'm told those jewies
does have a sort of a queer odour coming off them for dogs about I don't
know what all deterrent effect and so forth and so on.

--There's one thing it hasn't a deterrent effect on, says Alf.

--What's that? says Joe.

--The poor bugger's tool that's being hanged, says Alf.

--That so? says Joe.

--God's truth, says Alf. I heard that from the head warder that was in

Kilmainham when they hanged Joe Brady, the invincible. He told me when
they cut him down after the drop it was standing up in their faces like
a poker.

--Ruling passion strong in death, says Joe, as someone said.

--That can be explained by science, says Bloom. It's only a natural
phenomenon, don't you see, because on account of the...

And then he starts with his jawbreakers about phenomenon and science and
this phenomenon and the other phenomenon.

The distinguished scientist Herr Professor Luitpold Blumenduft tendered
medical evidence to the effect that the instantaneous fracture of the
cervical vertebrae and consequent scission of the spinal cord would,
according to the best approved tradition of medical science, be
calculated to inevitably produce in the human subject a violent
ganglionic stimulus of the nerve centres of the genital apparatus,
thereby causing the elastic pores of the _corpora cavernosa_ to rapidly
dilate in such a way as to instantaneously facilitate the flow of blood
to that part of the human anatomy known as the penis or male organ
resulting in the phenomenon which has been denominated by the faculty
a morbid upwards and outwards philoprogenitive erection _in articulo
mortis per diminutionem capitis._

So of course the citizen was only waiting for the wink of the word and
he starts gassing out of him about the invincibles and the old guard and
the men of sixtyseven and who fears to speak of ninetyeight and Joe with
him about all the fellows that were hanged, drawn and transported for
the cause by drumhead courtmartial and a new Ireland and new this, that
and the other. Talking about new Ireland he ought to go and get a new
dog so he ought. Mangy ravenous brute sniffing and sneezing all round
the place and scratching his scabs. And round he goes to Bob Doran that
was standing Alf a half one sucking up for what he could get. So of
course Bob Doran starts doing the bloody fool with him:

--Give us the paw! Give the paw, doggy! Good old doggy! Give the paw
here! Give us the paw!

Arrah, bloody end to the paw he'd paw and Alf trying to keep him from
tumbling off the bloody stool atop of the bloody old dog and he talking
all kinds of drivel about training by kindness and thoroughbred dog and
intelligent dog: give you the bloody pip. Then he starts scraping a few
bits of old biscuit out of the bottom of a Jacobs' tin he told Terry to
bring. Gob, he golloped it down like old boots and his tongue hanging
out of him a yard long for more. Near ate the tin and all, hungry bloody
mongrel.

And the citizen and Bloom having an argument about the point, the
brothers Sheares and Wolfe Tone beyond on Arbour Hill and Robert Emmet
and die for your country, the Tommy Moore touch about Sara Curran and
she's far from the land. And Bloom, of course, with his knockmedown
cigar putting on swank with his lardy face. Phenomenon! The fat heap he
married is a nice old phenomenon with a back on her like a ballalley.
Time they were stopping up in the _City Arms_ pisser Burke told me there
was an old one there with a cracked loodheramaun of a nephew and Bloom
trying to get the soft side of her doing the mollycoddle playing bézique
to come in for a bit of the wampum in her will and not eating meat of a
Friday because the old one was always thumping her craw and taking the
lout out for a walk. And one time he led him the rounds of Dublin and,
by the holy farmer, he never cried crack till he brought him home as
drunk as a boiled owl and he said he did it to teach him the evils of
alcohol and by herrings, if the three women didn't near roast him, it's
a queer story, the old one, Bloom's wife and Mrs O'Dowd that kept the
hotel. Jesus, I had to laugh at pisser Burke taking them off chewing
the fat. And Bloom with his _but don't you see?_ and _but on the other
hand_. And sure, more be token, the lout I'm told was in Power's after,
the blender's, round in Cope street going home footless in a cab five
times in the week after drinking his way through all the samples in the
bloody establishment. Phenomenon!

--The memory of the dead, says the citizen taking up his pintglass and
glaring at Bloom.

--Ay, ay, says Joe.

--You don't grasp my point, says Bloom. What I mean is...

--_Sinn Fein!_ says the citizen. _Sinn Fein amhain!_ The friends we love
are by our side and the foes we hate before us.

The last farewell was affecting in the extreme. From the belfries far
and near the funereal deathbell tolled unceasingly while all around the
gloomy precincts rolled the ominous warning of a hundred muffled drums
punctuated by the hollow booming of pieces of ordnance. The deafening
claps of thunder and the dazzling flashes of lightning which lit up
the ghastly scene testified that the artillery of heaven had lent its
supernatural pomp to the already gruesome spectacle. A torrential rain
poured down from the floodgates of the angry heavens upon the
bared heads of the assembled multitude which numbered at the
lowest computation five hundred thousand persons. A posse of Dublin
Metropolitan police superintended by the Chief Commissioner in person
maintained order in the vast throng for whom the York street brass and
reed band whiled away the intervening time by admirably rendering on
their blackdraped instruments the matchless melody endeared to us from
the cradle by Speranza's plaintive muse. Special quick excursion trains
and upholstered charabancs had been provided for the comfort of our
country cousins of whom there were large contingents. Considerable
amusement was caused by the favourite Dublin streetsingers L-n-h-n and
M-ll-g-n who sang _The Night before Larry was stretched_ in their usual
mirth-provoking fashion. Our two inimitable drolls did a roaring trade
with their broadsheets among lovers of the comedy element and nobody
who has a corner in his heart for real Irish fun without vulgarity
will grudge them their hardearned pennies. The children of the Male and
Female Foundling Hospital who thronged the windows overlooking the scene
were delighted with this unexpected addition to the day's entertainment
and a word of praise is due to the Little Sisters of the Poor for their
excellent idea of affording the poor fatherless and motherless children
a genuinely instructive treat. The viceregal houseparty which included
many wellknown ladies was chaperoned by Their Excellencies to the most
favourable positions on the grandstand while the picturesque foreign
delegation known as the Friends of the Emerald Isle was accommodated
on a tribune directly opposite. The delegation, present in full force,
consisted of Commendatore Bacibaci Beninobenone (the semiparalysed
_doyen_ of the party who had to be assisted to his seat by the aid of a
powerful steam crane), Monsieur Pierrepaul Petitépatant, the Grandjoker
Vladinmire Pokethankertscheff, the Archjoker Leopold Rudolph von
Schwanzenbad-Hodenthaler, Countess Marha Virága Kisászony Putrápesthi,
Hiram Y. Bomboost, Count Athanatos Karamelopulos, Ali Baba Backsheesh
Rahat Lokum Effendi, Senor Hidalgo Caballero Don Pecadillo y Palabras
y Paternoster de la Malora de la Malaria, Hokopoko Harakiri, Hi Hung
Chang, Olaf Kobberkeddelsen, Mynheer Trik van Trumps, Pan Poleaxe
Paddyrisky, Goosepond Prhklstr Kratchinabritchisitch, Borus
Hupinkoff, Herr Hurhausdirektorpresident Hans Chuechli-Steuerli,
Nationalgymnasiummuseumsanatoriumandsuspensoriumsordinaryprivatdocent
-generalhistoryspecialprofessordoctor Kriegfried Ueberallgemein. All the
delegates without exception expressed themselves in the strongest
possible heterogeneous terms concerning the nameless barbarity which
they had been called upon to witness. An animated altercation (in which
all took part) ensued among the F. O. T. E. I. as to whether the eighth
or the ninth of March was the correct date of the birth of Ireland's
patron saint. In the course of the argument cannonballs, scimitars,
boomerangs, blunderbusses, stinkpots, meatchoppers, umbrellas,
catapults, knuckledusters, sandbags, lumps of pig iron were resorted to
and blows were freely exchanged. The baby policeman, Constable
MacFadden, summoned by special courier from Booterstown, quickly
restored order and with lightning promptitude proposed the seventeenth
of the month as a solution equally honourable for both contending
parties. The readywitted ninefooter's suggestion at once appealed to all
and was unanimously accepted. Constable MacFadden was heartily
congratulated by all the F.O.T.E.I., several of whom were bleeding
profusely. Commendatore Beninobenone having been extricated from
underneath the presidential armchair, it was explained by his legal
adviser Avvocato Pagamimi that the various articles secreted in his
thirtytwo pockets had been abstracted by him during the affray from the
pockets of his junior colleagues in the hope of bringing them to their
senses. The objects (which included several hundred ladies' and
gentlemen's gold and silver watches) were promptly restored to their
rightful owners and general harmony reigned supreme.

Quietly, unassumingly Rumbold stepped on to the scaffold in faultless
morning dress and wearing his favourite flower, the _Gladiolus
Cruentus_. He announced his presence by that gentle Rumboldian cough
which so many have tried (unsuccessfully) to imitate--short,
painstaking yet withal so characteristic of the man. The arrival of the
worldrenowned headsman was greeted by a roar of acclamation from the
huge concourse, the viceregal ladies waving their handkerchiefs in
their excitement while the even more excitable foreign delegates
cheered vociferously in a medley of cries, _hoch, banzai, eljen, zivio,
chinchin, polla kronia, hiphip, vive, Allah_, amid which the ringing
_evviva_ of the delegate of the land of song (a high double F recalling
those piercingly lovely notes with which the eunuch Catalani beglamoured
our greatgreatgrandmothers) was easily distinguishable. It was exactly
seventeen o'clock. The signal for prayer was then promptly given by
megaphone and in an instant all heads were bared, the commendatore's
patriarchal sombrero, which has been in the possession of his family
since the revolution of Rienzi, being removed by his medical adviser
in attendance, Dr Pippi. The learned prelate who administered the last
comforts of holy religion to the hero martyr when about to pay the death
penalty knelt in a most christian spirit in a pool of rainwater, his
cassock above his hoary head, and offered up to the throne of grace
fervent prayers of supplication. Hand by the block stood the grim figure
of the executioner, his visage being concealed in a tengallon pot
with two circular perforated apertures through which his eyes glowered
furiously. As he awaited the fatal signal he tested the edge of his
horrible weapon by honing it upon his brawny forearm or decapitated
in rapid succession a flock of sheep which had been provided by the
admirers of his fell but necessary office. On a handsome mahogany table
near him were neatly arranged the quartering knife, the various
finely tempered disembowelling appliances (specially supplied by the
worldfamous firm of cutlers, Messrs John Round and Sons, Sheffield),
a terra cotta saucepan for the reception of the duodenum, colon,
blind intestine and appendix etc when successfully extracted and two
commodious milkjugs destined to receive the most precious blood of the
most precious victim. The housesteward of the amalgamated cats' and
dogs' home was in attendance to convey these vessels when replenished
to that beneficent institution. Quite an excellent repast consisting of
rashers and eggs, fried steak and onions, done to a nicety, delicious
hot breakfast rolls and invigorating tea had been considerately provided
by the authorities for the consumption of the central figure of the
tragedy who was in capital spirits when prepared for death and evinced
the keenest interest in the proceedings from beginning to end but he,
with an abnegation rare in these our times, rose nobly to the occasion
and expressed the dying wish (immediately acceded to) that the meal
should be divided in aliquot parts among the members of the sick and
indigent roomkeepers' association as a token of his regard and esteem.
The _nec_ and _non plus ultra_ of emotion were reached when the blushing
bride elect burst her way through the serried ranks of the bystanders
and flung herself upon the muscular bosom of him who was about to be
launched into eternity for her sake. The hero folded her willowy form in
a loving embrace murmuring fondly _Sheila, my own_. Encouraged by
this use of her christian name she kissed passionately all the various
suitable areas of his person which the decencies of prison garb
permitted her ardour to reach. She swore to him as they mingled the salt
streams of their tears that she would ever cherish his memory, that she
would never forget her hero boy who went to his death with a song on his
lips as if he were but going to a hurling match in Clonturk park. She
brought back to his recollection the happy days of blissful childhood
together on the banks of Anna Liffey when they had indulged in the
innocent pastimes of the young and, oblivious of the dreadful present,
they both laughed heartily, all the spectators, including the venerable
pastor, joining in the general merriment. That monster audience simply
rocked with delight. But anon they were overcome with grief and clasped
their hands for the last time. A fresh torrent of tears burst from their
lachrymal ducts and the vast concourse of people, touched to the inmost
core, broke into heartrending sobs, not the least affected being the
aged prebendary himself. Big strong men, officers of the peace and
genial giants of the royal Irish constabulary, were making frank use of
their handkerchiefs and it is safe to say that there was not a dry eye
in that record assemblage. A most romantic incident occurred when a
handsome young Oxford graduate, noted for his chivalry towards the fair
sex, stepped forward and, presenting his visiting card, bankbook
and genealogical tree, solicited the hand of the hapless young lady,
requesting her to name the day, and was accepted on the spot. Every lady
in the audience was presented with a tasteful souvenir of the occasion
in the shape of a skull and crossbones brooch, a timely and generous
act which evoked a fresh outburst of emotion: and when the gallant young
Oxonian (the bearer, by the way, of one of the most timehonoured names
in Albion's history) placed on the finger of his blushing _fiancée_ an
expensive engagement ring with emeralds set in the form of a
fourleaved shamrock the excitement knew no bounds. Nay, even the
ster provostmarshal, lieutenantcolonel Tomkin-Maxwell ffrenchmullan
Tomlinson, who presided on the sad occasion, he who had blown a
considerable number of sepoys from the cannonmouth without flinching,
could not now restrain his natural emotion. With his mailed gauntlet
he brushed away a furtive tear and was overheard, by those privileged
burghers who happened to be in his immediate _entourage,_ to murmur to
himself in a faltering undertone:

--God blimey if she aint a clinker, that there bleeding tart. Blimey it
makes me kind of bleeding cry, straight, it does, when I sees her cause
I thinks of my old mashtub what's waiting for me down Limehouse way.

So then the citizen begins talking about the Irish language and the
corporation meeting and all to that and the shoneens that can't speak
their own language and Joe chipping in because he stuck someone for a
quid and Bloom putting in his old goo with his twopenny stump that
he cadged off of Joe and talking about the Gaelic league and the
antitreating league and drink, the curse of Ireland. Antitreating is
about the size of it. Gob, he'd let you pour all manner of drink down
his throat till the Lord would call him before you'd ever see the froth
of his pint. And one night I went in with a fellow into one of their
musical evenings, song and dance about she could get up on a truss of
hay she could my Maureen Lay and there was a fellow with a Ballyhooly
blue ribbon badge spiffing out of him in Irish and a lot of colleen
bawns going about with temperance beverages and selling medals
and oranges and lemonade and a few old dry buns, gob, flahoolagh
entertainment, don't be talking. Ireland sober is Ireland free. And
then an old fellow starts blowing into his bagpipes and all the gougers
shuffling their feet to the tune the old cow died of. And one or two
sky pilots having an eye around that there was no goings on with the
females, hitting below the belt.

So howandever, as I was saying, the old dog seeing the tin was empty
starts mousing around by Joe and me. I'd train him by kindness, so I
would, if he was my dog. Give him a rousing fine kick now and again
where it wouldn't blind him.

--Afraid he'll bite you? says the citizen, jeering.

--No, says I. But he might take my leg for a lamppost.

So he calls the old dog over.

--What's on you, Garry? says he.

Then he starts hauling and mauling and talking to him in Irish and the
old towser growling, letting on to answer, like a duet in the opera.
Such growling you never heard as they let off between them. Someone that
has nothing better to do ought to write a letter _pro bono publico_ to
the papers about the muzzling order for a dog the like of that. Growling
and grousing and his eye all bloodshot from the drouth is in it and the
hydrophobia dropping out of his jaws.

All those who are interested in the spread of human culture among the
lower animals (and their name is legion) should make a point of not
missing the really marvellous exhibition of cynanthropy given by the
famous old Irish red setter wolfdog formerly known by the _sobriquet_ of
Garryowen and recently rechristened by his large circle of friends and
acquaintances Owen Garry. The exhibition, which is the result of years
of training by kindness and a carefully thoughtout dietary system,
comprises, among other achievements, the recitation of verse. Our
greatest living phonetic expert (wild horses shall not drag it from us!)
has left no stone unturned in his efforts to delucidate and compare
the verse recited and has found it bears a _striking_ resemblance (the
italics are ours) to the ranns of ancient Celtic bards. We are not
speaking so much of those delightful lovesongs with which the writer who
conceals his identity under the graceful pseudonym of the Little
Sweet Branch has familiarised the bookloving world but rather (as
a contributor D. O. C. points out in an interesting communication
published by an evening contemporary) of the harsher and more personal
note which is found in the satirical effusions of the famous Raftery and
of Donal MacConsidine to say nothing of a more modern lyrist at present
very much in the public eye. We subjoin a specimen which has been
rendered into English by an eminent scholar whose name for the moment we
are not at liberty to disclose though we believe that our readers will
find the topical allusion rather more than an indication. The metrical
system of the canine original, which recalls the intricate alliterative
and isosyllabic rules of the Welsh englyn, is infinitely more
complicated but we believe our readers will agree that the spirit has
been well caught. Perhaps it should be added that the effect is greatly
increased if Owen's verse be spoken somewhat slowly and indistinctly in
a tone suggestive of suppressed rancour.

     _The curse of my curses
     Seven days every day
     And seven dry Thursdays
     On you, Barney Kiernan,
     Has no sup of water
     To cool my courage,
     And my guts red roaring
     After Lowry's lights._

So he told Terry to bring some water for the dog and, gob, you could
hear him lapping it up a mile off. And Joe asked him would he have
another.

--I will, says he, _a chara_, to show there's no ill feeling.

Gob, he's not as green as he's cabbagelooking. Arsing around from one
pub to another, leaving it to your own honour, with old Giltrap's dog
and getting fed up by the ratepayers and corporators. Entertainment for
man and beast. And says Joe:

--Could you make a hole in another pint?

--Could a swim duck? says I.

--Same again, Terry, says Joe. Are you sure you won't have anything in
the way of liquid refreshment? says he.

--Thank you, no, says Bloom. As a matter of fact I just wanted to meet
Martin Cunningham, don't you see, about this insurance of poor Dignam's.
Martin asked me to go to the house. You see, he, Dignam, I mean, didn't
serve any notice of the assignment on the company at the time and
nominally under the act the mortgagee can't recover on the policy.

--Holy Wars, says Joe, laughing, that's a good one if old Shylock is
landed. So the wife comes out top dog, what?

--Well, that's a point, says Bloom, for the wife's admirers.

--Whose admirers? says Joe.

--The wife's advisers, I mean, says Bloom.

Then he starts all confused mucking it up about mortgagor under the act
like the lord chancellor giving it out on the bench and for the benefit
of the wife and that a trust is created but on the other hand that
Dignam owed Bridgeman the money and if now the wife or the widow
contested the mortgagee's right till he near had the head of me addled
with his mortgagor under the act. He was bloody safe he wasn't run in
himself under the act that time as a rogue and vagabond only he had a
friend in court. Selling bazaar tickets or what do you call it royal
Hungarian privileged lottery. True as you're there. O, commend me to an
israelite! Royal and privileged Hungarian robbery.

So Bob Doran comes lurching around asking Bloom to tell Mrs Dignam he
was sorry for her trouble and he was very sorry about the funeral and
to tell her that he said and everyone who knew him said that there was
never a truer, a finer than poor little Willy that's dead to tell her.
Choking with bloody foolery. And shaking Bloom's hand doing the tragic
to tell her that. Shake hands, brother. You're a rogue and I'm another.

--Let me, said he, so far presume upon our acquaintance which, however
slight it may appear if judged by the standard of mere time, is founded,
as I hope and believe, on a sentiment of mutual esteem as to request of
you this favour. But, should I have overstepped the limits of reserve
let the sincerity of my feelings be the excuse for my boldness.

--No, rejoined the other, I appreciate to the full the motives which
actuate your conduct and I shall discharge the office you entrust to
me consoled by the reflection that, though the errand be one of sorrow,
this proof of your confidence sweetens in some measure the bitterness of
the cup.

--Then suffer me to take your hand, said he. The goodness of your heart,
I feel sure, will dictate to you better than my inadequate words
the expressions which are most suitable to convey an emotion whose
poignancy, were I to give vent to my feelings, would deprive me even of
speech.

And off with him and out trying to walk straight. Boosed at five
o'clock. Night he was near being lagged only Paddy Leonard knew the
bobby, 14A. Blind to the world up in a shebeen in Bride street after
closing time, fornicating with two shawls and a bully on guard, drinking
porter out of teacups. And calling himself a Frenchy for the shawls,
Joseph Manuo, and talking against the Catholic religion, and he serving
mass in Adam and Eve's when he was young with his eyes shut, who wrote
the new testament, and the old testament, and hugging and smugging. And
the two shawls killed with the laughing, picking his pockets, the bloody
fool and he spilling the porter all over the bed and the two shawls
screeching laughing at one another. _How is your testament? Have you got
an old testament?_ Only Paddy was passing there, I tell you what. Then
see him of a Sunday with his little concubine of a wife, and she wagging
her tail up the aisle of the chapel with her patent boots on her, no
less, and her violets, nice as pie, doing the little lady. Jack Mooney's
sister. And the old prostitute of a mother procuring rooms to street
couples. Gob, Jack made him toe the line. Told him if he didn't patch up
the pot, Jesus, he'd kick the shite out of him.

So Terry brought the three pints.

--Here, says Joe, doing the honours. Here, citizen.

--_Slan leat_, says he.

--Fortune, Joe, says I. Good health, citizen.

Gob, he had his mouth half way down the tumbler already. Want a small
fortune to keep him in drinks.

--Who is the long fellow running for the mayoralty, Alf? says Joe.

--Friend of yours, says Alf.

--Nannan? says Joe. The mimber?

--I won't mention any names, says Alf.

--I thought so, says Joe. I saw him up at that meeting now with William
Field, M. P., the cattle traders.

--Hairy Iopas, says the citizen, that exploded volcano, the darling of
all countries and the idol of his own.

So Joe starts telling the citizen about the foot and mouth disease
and the cattle traders and taking action in the matter and the citizen
sending them all to the rightabout and Bloom coming out with his
sheepdip for the scab and a hoose drench for coughing calves and the
guaranteed remedy for timber tongue. Because he was up one time in a
knacker's yard. Walking about with his book and pencil here's my head
and my heels are coming till Joe Cuffe gave him the order of the boot
for giving lip to a grazier. Mister Knowall. Teach your grandmother how
to milk ducks. Pisser Burke was telling me in the hotel the wife used
to be in rivers of tears some times with Mrs O'Dowd crying her eyes out
with her eight inches of fat all over her. Couldn't loosen her farting
strings but old cod's eye was waltzing around her showing her how to do
it. What's your programme today? Ay. Humane methods. Because the poor
animals suffer and experts say and the best known remedy that doesn't
cause pain to the animal and on the sore spot administer gently. Gob,
he'd have a soft hand under a hen.

Ga Ga Gara. Klook Klook Klook. Black Liz is our hen. She lays eggs for
us. When she lays her egg she is so glad. Gara. Klook Klook Klook. Then
comes good uncle Leo. He puts his hand under black Liz and takes her
fresh egg. Ga ga ga ga Gara. Klook Klook Klook.

--Anyhow, says Joe, Field and Nannetti are going over tonight to London
to ask about it on the floor of the house of commons.

--Are you sure, says Bloom, the councillor is going? I wanted to see
him, as it happens.

--Well, he's going off by the mailboat, says Joe, tonight.

--That's too bad, says Bloom. I wanted particularly. Perhaps only Mr
Field is going. I couldn't phone. No. You're sure?

--Nannan's going too, says Joe. The league told him to ask a question
tomorrow about the commissioner of police forbidding Irish games in the
park. What do you think of that, citizen? _The Sluagh na h-Eireann_.

Mr Cowe Conacre (Multifarnham. Nat.): Arising out of the question of
my honourable friend, the member for Shillelagh, may I ask the right
honourable gentleman whether the government has issued orders that these
animals shall be slaughtered though no medical evidence is forthcoming
as to their pathological condition?

Mr Allfours (Tamoshant. Con.): Honourable members are already in
possession of the evidence produced before a committee of the whole
house. I feel I cannot usefully add anything to that. The answer to the
honourable member's question is in the affirmative.

Mr Orelli O'Reilly (Montenotte. Nat.): Have similar orders been issued
for the slaughter of human animals who dare to play Irish games in the
Phoenix park?

Mr Allfours: The answer is in the negative.

Mr Cowe Conacre: Has the right honourable gentleman's famous
Mitchelstown telegram inspired the policy of gentlemen on the Treasury
bench? (O! O!)

Mr Allfours: I must have notice of that question.

Mr Staylewit (Buncombe. Ind.): Don't hesitate to shoot.

(Ironical opposition cheers.)

The speaker: Order! Order!

(The house rises. Cheers.)

--There's the man, says Joe, that made the Gaelic sports revival. There
he is sitting there. The man that got away James Stephens. The champion
of all Ireland at putting the sixteen pound shot. What was your best
throw, citizen?

--_Na bacleis_, says the citizen, letting on to be modest. There was a
time I was as good as the next fellow anyhow.

--Put it there, citizen, says Joe. You were and a bloody sight better.

--Is that really a fact? says Alf.

--Yes, says Bloom. That's well known. Did you not know that?

So off they started about Irish sports and shoneen games the like of
lawn tennis and about hurley and putting the stone and racy of the soil
and building up a nation once again and all to that. And of course Bloom
had to have his say too about if a fellow had a rower's heart violent
exercise was bad. I declare to my antimacassar if you took up a straw
from the bloody floor and if you said to Bloom: _Look at, Bloom. Do you
see that straw? That's a straw_. Declare to my aunt he'd talk about it
for an hour so he would and talk steady.

A most interesting discussion took place in the ancient hall of _Brian
O'ciarnain's_ in _Sraid na Bretaine Bheag_, under the auspices of
_Sluagh na h-Eireann_, on the revival of ancient Gaelic sports and the
importance of physical culture, as understood in ancient Greece and
ancient Rome and ancient Ireland, for the development of the race.
The venerable president of the noble order was in the chair and the
attendance was of large dimensions. After an instructive discourse by
the chairman, a magnificent oration eloquently and forcibly expressed,
a most interesting and instructive discussion of the usual high standard
of excellence ensued as to the desirability of the revivability of
the ancient games and sports of our ancient Panceltic forefathers. The
wellknown and highly respected worker in the cause of our old tongue, Mr
Joseph M'Carthy Hynes, made an eloquent appeal for the resuscitation of
the ancient Gaelic sports and pastimes, practised morning and evening
by Finn MacCool, as calculated to revive the best traditions of manly
strength and prowess handed down to us from ancient ages. L. Bloom, who
met with a mixed reception of applause and hisses, having espoused the
negative the vocalist chairman brought the discussion to a close, in
response to repeated requests and hearty plaudits from all parts of
a bumper house, by a remarkably noteworthy rendering of the immortal
Thomas Osborne Davis' evergreen verses (happily too familiar to need
recalling here) _A nation once again_ in the execution of which the
veteran patriot champion may be said without fear of contradiction
to have fairly excelled himself. The Irish Caruso-Garibaldi was in
superlative form and his stentorian notes were heard to the greatest
advantage in the timehonoured anthem sung as only our citizen can sing
it. His superb highclass vocalism, which by its superquality greatly
enhanced his already international reputation, was vociferously
applauded by the large audience among which were to be noticed many
prominent members of the clergy as well as representatives of the press
and the bar and the other learned professions. The proceedings then
terminated.

Amongst the clergy present were the very rev. William Delany, S. J., L.
L. D.; the rt rev. Gerald Molloy, D. D.; the rev. P. J. Kavanagh, C. S.
Sp.; the rev. T. Waters, C. C.; the rev. John M. Ivers, P. P.; the rev.
P. J. Cleary, O. S. F.; the rev. L. J. Hickey, O. P.; the very rev. Fr.
Nicholas, O. S. F. C.; the very rev. B. Gorman, O. D. C.; the rev. T.
Maher, S. J.; the very rev. James Murphy, S. J.; the rev. John Lavery,
V. F.; the very rev. William Doherty, D. D.; the rev. Peter Fagan, O.
M.; the rev. T. Brangan, O. S. A.; the rev. J. Flavin, C. C.; the
rev. M. A. Hackett, C. C.; the rev. W. Hurley, C. C.; the rt rev. Mgr
M'Manus, V. G.; the rev. B. R. Slattery, O. M. I.; the very rev. M.
D. Scally, P. P.; the rev. F. T. Purcell, O. P.; the very rev. Timothy
canon Gorman, P. P.; the rev. J. Flanagan, C. C. The laity included P.
Fay, T. Quirke, etc., etc.

--Talking about violent exercise, says Alf, were you at that
Keogh-Bennett match?

--No, says Joe.

--I heard So and So made a cool hundred quid over it, says Alf.

--Who? Blazes? says Joe.

And says Bloom:

--What I meant about tennis, for example, is the agility and training
the eye.

--Ay, Blazes, says Alf. He let out that Myler was on the beer to run up
the odds and he swatting all the time.

--We know him, says the citizen. The traitor's son. We know what put
English gold in his pocket.

---True for you, says Joe.

And Bloom cuts in again about lawn tennis and the circulation of the
blood, asking Alf:

--Now, don't you think, Bergan?

--Myler dusted the floor with him, says Alf. Heenan and Sayers was only
a bloody fool to it. Handed him the father and mother of a beating. See
the little kipper not up to his navel and the big fellow swiping. God,
he gave him one last puck in the wind, Queensberry rules and all, made
him puke what he never ate.

It was a historic and a hefty battle when Myler and Percy were scheduled
to don the gloves for the purse of fifty sovereigns. Handicapped as he
was by lack of poundage, Dublin's pet lamb made up for it by superlative
skill in ringcraft. The final bout of fireworks was a gruelling for both
champions. The welterweight sergeantmajor had tapped some lively claret
in the previous mixup during which Keogh had been receivergeneral of
rights and lefts, the artilleryman putting in some neat work on the
pet's nose, and Myler came on looking groggy. The soldier got to
business, leading off with a powerful left jab to which the Irish
gladiator retaliated by shooting out a stiff one flush to the point of
Bennett's jaw. The redcoat ducked but the Dubliner lifted him with a
left hook, the body punch being a fine one. The men came to handigrips.
Myler quickly became busy and got his man under, the bout ending with
the bulkier man on the ropes, Myler punishing him. The Englishman, whose
right eye was nearly closed, took his corner where he was liberally
drenched with water and when the bell went came on gamey and brimful of
pluck, confident of knocking out the fistic Eblanite in jigtime. It was
a fight to a finish and the best man for it. The two fought like tigers
and excitement ran fever high. The referee twice cautioned Pucking Percy
for holding but the pet was tricky and his footwork a treat to watch.
After a brisk exchange of courtesies during which a smart upper cut of
the military man brought blood freely from his opponent's mouth the
lamb suddenly waded in all over his man and landed a terrific left to
Battling Bennett's stomach, flooring him flat. It was a knockout clean
and clever. Amid tense expectation the Portobello bruiser was being
counted out when Bennett's second Ole Pfotts Wettstein threw in the
towel and the Santry boy was declared victor to the frenzied cheers of
the public who broke through the ringropes and fairly mobbed him with
delight.

--He knows which side his bread is buttered, says Alf. I hear he's
running a concert tour now up in the north.

--He is, says Joe. Isn't he?

--Who? says Bloom. Ah, yes. That's quite true. Yes, a kind of summer
tour, you see. Just a holiday.

--Mrs B. is the bright particular star, isn't she? says Joe.

--My wife? says Bloom. She's singing, yes. I think it will be a success
too.

He's an excellent man to organise. Excellent.

Hoho begob says I to myself says I. That explains the milk in the
cocoanut and absence of hair on the animal's chest. Blazes doing the
tootle on the flute. Concert tour. Dirty Dan the dodger's son off Island
bridge that sold the same horses twice over to the government to fight
the Boers. Old Whatwhat. I called about the poor and water rate, Mr
Boylan. You what? The water rate, Mr Boylan. You whatwhat? That's the
bucko that'll organise her, take my tip. 'Twixt me and you Caddareesh.

Pride of Calpe's rocky mount, the ravenhaired daughter of Tweedy. There
grew she to peerless beauty where loquat and almond scent the air. The
gardens of Alameda knew her step: the garths of olives knew and bowed.
The chaste spouse of Leopold is she: Marion of the bountiful bosoms.

And lo, there entered one of the clan of the O'Molloy's, a comely hero
of white face yet withal somewhat ruddy, his majesty's counsel learned
in the law, and with him the prince and heir of the noble line of
Lambert.

--Hello, Ned.

--Hello, Alf.

--Hello, Jack.

--Hello, Joe.

--God save you, says the citizen.

--Save you kindly, says J. J. What'll it be, Ned?

--Half one, says Ned.

So J. J. ordered the drinks.

--Were you round at the court? says Joe.

--Yes, says J. J. He'll square that, Ned, says he.

--Hope so, says Ned.

Now what were those two at? J. J. getting him off the grand jury list
and the other give him a leg over the stile. With his name in Stubbs's.
Playing cards, hobnobbing with flash toffs with a swank glass in their
eye, adrinking fizz and he half smothered in writs and garnishee orders.
Pawning his gold watch in Cummins of Francis street where no-one would
know him in the private office when I was there with Pisser releasing
his boots out of the pop. What's your name, sir? Dunne, says he. Ay, and
done says I. Gob, he'll come home by weeping cross one of those days,
I'm thinking.

--Did you see that bloody lunatic Breen round there? says Alf. U. p: up.

--Yes, says J. J. Looking for a private detective.

--Ay, says Ned. And he wanted right go wrong to address the court only
Corny Kelleher got round him telling him to get the handwriting examined
first.

--Ten thousand pounds, says Alf, laughing. God, I'd give anything to
hear him before a judge and jury.

--Was it you did it, Alf? says Joe. The truth, the whole truth and
nothing but the truth, so help you Jimmy Johnson.

--Me? says Alf. Don't cast your nasturtiums on my character.

--Whatever statement you make, says Joe, will be taken down in evidence
against you.

--Of course an action would lie, says J. J. It implies that he is not
_compos mentis_. U. p: up.

_--Compos_ your eye! says Alf, laughing. Do you know that he's balmy?
Look at his head. Do you know that some mornings he has to get his hat
on with a shoehorn.

--Yes, says J. J., but the truth of a libel is no defence to an
indictment for publishing it in the eyes of the law.

--Ha ha, Alf, says Joe.

--Still, says Bloom, on account of the poor woman, I mean his wife.

--Pity about her, says the citizen. Or any other woman marries a half
and half.

--How half and half? says Bloom. Do you mean he...

--Half and half I mean, says the citizen. A fellow that's neither fish
nor flesh.

--Nor good red herring, says Joe.

--That what's I mean, says the citizen. A pishogue, if you know what
that is.

Begob I saw there was trouble coming. And Bloom explaining he meant on
account of it being cruel for the wife having to go round after the
old stuttering fool. Cruelty to animals so it is to let that bloody
povertystricken Breen out on grass with his beard out tripping him,
bringing down the rain. And she with her nose cockahoop after she
married him because a cousin of his old fellow's was pewopener to the
pope. Picture of him on the wall with his Smashall Sweeney's moustaches,
the signior Brini from Summerhill, the eyetallyano, papal Zouave to the
Holy Father, has left the quay and gone to Moss street. And who was
he, tell us? A nobody, two pair back and passages, at seven shillings a
week, and he covered with all kinds of breastplates bidding defiance to
the world.

--And moreover, says J. J., a postcard is publication. It was held to
be sufficient evidence of malice in the testcase Sadgrove v. Hole. In my
opinion an action might lie.

Six and eightpence, please. Who wants your opinion? Let us drink our
pints in peace. Gob, we won't be let even do that much itself.

--Well, good health, Jack, says Ned.

--Good health, Ned, says J. J.

---There he is again, says Joe.

--Where? says Alf.

And begob there he was passing the door with his books under his oxter
and the wife beside him and Corny Kelleher with his wall eye looking in
as they went past, talking to him like a father, trying to sell him a
secondhand coffin.

--How did that Canada swindle case go off? says Joe.

--Remanded, says J. J.

One of the bottlenosed fraternity it was went by the name of James
Wought alias Saphiro alias Spark and Spiro, put an ad in the papers
saying he'd give a passage to Canada for twenty bob. What? Do you see
any green in the white of my eye? Course it was a bloody barney. What?
Swindled them all, skivvies and badhachs from the county Meath, ay, and
his own kidney too. J. J. was telling us there was an ancient Hebrew
Zaretsky or something weeping in the witnessbox with his hat on him,
swearing by the holy Moses he was stuck for two quid.

--Who tried the case? says Joe.

--Recorder, says Ned.

--Poor old sir Frederick, says Alf, you can cod him up to the two eyes.

--Heart as big as a lion, says Ned. Tell him a tale of woe about arrears
of rent and a sick wife and a squad of kids and, faith, he'll dissolve
in tears on the bench.

--Ay, says Alf. Reuben J was bloody lucky he didn't clap him in the dock
the other day for suing poor little Gumley that's minding stones, for
the corporation there near Butt bridge.

And he starts taking off the old recorder letting on to cry:

--A most scandalous thing! This poor hardworking man! How many children?
Ten, did you say?

--Yes, your worship. And my wife has the typhoid.

--And the wife with typhoid fever! Scandalous! Leave the court
immediately, sir. No, sir, I'll make no order for payment. How dare you,
sir, come up before me and ask me to make an order! A poor hardworking
industrious man! I dismiss the case.

And whereas on the sixteenth day of the month of the oxeyed goddess and
in the third week after the feastday of the Holy and Undivided Trinity,
the daughter of the skies, the virgin moon being then in her first
quarter, it came to pass that those learned judges repaired them to the
halls of law. There master Courtenay, sitting in his own chamber, gave
his rede and master Justice Andrews, sitting without a jury in the
probate court, weighed well and pondered the claim of the first
chargeant upon the property in the matter of the will propounded and
final testamentary disposition _in re_ the real and personal estate of
the late lamented Jacob Halliday, vintner, deceased, versus Livingstone,
an infant, of unsound mind, and another. And to the solemn court of
Green street there came sir Frederick the Falconer. And he sat him there
about the hour of five o'clock to administer the law of the brehons at
the commission for all that and those parts to be holden in and for the
county of the city of Dublin. And there sat with him the high sinhedrim
of the twelve tribes of Iar, for every tribe one man, of the tribe of
Patrick and of the tribe of Hugh and of the tribe of Owen and of the
tribe of Conn and of the tribe of Oscar and of the tribe of Fergus and
of the tribe of Finn and of the tribe of Dermot and of the tribe of
Cormac and of the tribe of Kevin and of the tribe of Caolte and of the
tribe of Ossian, there being in all twelve good men and true. And he
conjured them by Him who died on rood that they should well and
truly try and true deliverance make in the issue joined between their
sovereign lord the king and the prisoner at the bar and true verdict
give according to the evidence so help them God and kiss the book. And
they rose in their seats, those twelve of Iar, and they swore by
the name of Him Who is from everlasting that they would do His
rightwiseness. And straightway the minions of the law led forth from
their donjon keep one whom the sleuthhounds of justice had apprehended
in consequence of information received. And they shackled him hand and
foot and would take of him ne bail ne mainprise but preferred a charge
against him for he was a malefactor.

--Those are nice things, says the citizen, coming over here to Ireland
filling the country with bugs.

So Bloom lets on he heard nothing and he starts talking with Joe,
telling him he needn't trouble about that little matter till the first
but if he would just say a word to Mr Crawford. And so Joe swore high
and holy by this and by that he'd do the devil and all.

--Because, you see, says Bloom, for an advertisement you must have
repetition. That's the whole secret.

--Rely on me, says Joe.

--Swindling the peasants, says the citizen, and the poor of Ireland. We
want no more strangers in our house.

--O, I'm sure that will be all right, Hynes, says Bloom. It's just that
Keyes, you see.

--Consider that done, says Joe.

--Very kind of you, says Bloom.

--The strangers, says the citizen. Our own fault. We let them come in.
We brought them in. The adulteress and her paramour brought the Saxon
robbers here.

--Decree _nisi,_ says J. J.

And Bloom letting on to be awfully deeply interested in nothing, a
spider's web in the corner behind the barrel, and the citizen scowling
after him and the old dog at his feet looking up to know who to bite and
when.

--A dishonoured wife, says the citizen, that's what's the cause of all
our misfortunes.

--And here she is, says Alf, that was giggling over the _Police Gazette_
with Terry on the counter, in all her warpaint.

--Give us a squint at her, says I.

And what was it only one of the smutty yankee pictures Terry borrows off
of Corny Kelleher. Secrets for enlarging your private parts. Misconduct
of society belle. Norman W. Tupper, wealthy Chicago contractor, finds
pretty but faithless wife in lap of officer Taylor. Belle in her
bloomers misconducting herself, and her fancyman feeling for her tickles
and Norman W. Tupper bouncing in with his peashooter just in time to be
late after she doing the trick of the loop with officer Taylor.

--O jakers, Jenny, says Joe, how short your shirt is!

--There's hair, Joe, says I. Get a queer old tailend of corned beef off
of that one, what?

So anyhow in came John Wyse Nolan and Lenehan with him with a face on
him as long as a late breakfast.

--Well, says the citizen, what's the latest from the scene of action?
What did those tinkers in the city hall at their caucus meeting decide
about the Irish language?

O'Nolan, clad in shining armour, low bending made obeisance to the
puissant and high and mighty chief of all Erin and did him to wit of
that which had befallen, how that the grave elders of the most obedient
city, second of the realm, had met them in the tholsel, and there, after
due prayers to the gods who dwell in ether supernal, had taken solemn
counsel whereby they might, if so be it might be, bring once more into
honour among mortal men the winged speech of the seadivided Gael.

--It's on the march, says the citizen. To hell with the bloody brutal
Sassenachs and their _patois._

So J. J. puts in a word, doing the toff about one story was good till
you heard another and blinking facts and the Nelson policy, putting your
blind eye to the telescope and drawing up a bill of attainder to impeach
a nation, and Bloom trying to back him up moderation and botheration and
their colonies and their civilisation.

--Their syphilisation, you mean, says the citizen. To hell with
them! The curse of a goodfornothing God light sideways on the bloody
thicklugged sons of whores' gets! No music and no art and no literature
worthy of the name. Any civilisation they have they stole from us.
Tonguetied sons of bastards' ghosts.

--The European family, says J. J....

--They're not European, says the citizen. I was in Europe with Kevin
Egan of Paris. You wouldn't see a trace of them or their language
anywhere in Europe except in a _cabinet d'aisance._

And says John Wyse:

--Full many a flower is born to blush unseen.

And says Lenehan that knows a bit of the lingo:

--_Conspuez les Anglais! Perfide Albion!_

He said and then lifted he in his rude great brawny strengthy hands the
medher of dark strong foamy ale and, uttering his tribal slogan _Lamh
Dearg Abu_, he drank to the undoing of his foes, a race of mighty
valorous heroes, rulers of the waves, who sit on thrones of alabaster
silent as the deathless gods.

--What's up with you, says I to Lenehan. You look like a fellow that had
lost a bob and found a tanner.

--Gold cup, says he.

--Who won, Mr Lenehan? says Terry.

_--Throwaway,_ says he, at twenty to one. A rank outsider. And the rest
nowhere.

--And Bass's mare? says Terry.

--Still running, says he. We're all in a cart. Boylan plunged two quid
on my tip _Sceptre_ for himself and a lady friend.

--I had half a crown myself, says Terry, on _Zinfandel_ that Mr Flynn
gave me. Lord Howard de Walden's.

--Twenty to one, says Lenehan. Such is life in an outhouse. _Throwaway,_
says he. Takes the biscuit, and talking about bunions. Frailty, thy name
is _Sceptre._

So he went over to the biscuit tin Bob Doran left to see if there was
anything he could lift on the nod, the old cur after him backing his
luck with his mangy snout up. Old Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard.

--Not there, my child, says he.

--Keep your pecker up, says Joe. She'd have won the money only for the
other dog.

And J. J. and the citizen arguing about law and history with Bloom
sticking in an odd word.

--Some people, says Bloom, can see the mote in others' eyes but they
can't see the beam in their own.

--_Raimeis_, says the citizen. There's no-one as blind as the fellow
that won't see, if you know what that means. Where are our missing
twenty millions of Irish should be here today instead of four, our lost
tribes? And our potteries and textiles, the finest in the whole world!
And our wool that was sold in Rome in the time of Juvenal and our flax
and our damask from the looms of Antrim and our Limerick lace, our
tanneries and our white flint glass down there by Ballybough and our
Huguenot poplin that we have since Jacquard de Lyon and our woven silk
and our Foxford tweeds and ivory raised point from the Carmelite convent
in New Ross, nothing like it in the whole wide world. Where are the
Greek merchants that came through the pillars of Hercules, the Gibraltar
now grabbed by the foe of mankind, with gold and Tyrian purple to
sell in Wexford at the fair of Carmen? Read Tacitus and Ptolemy, even
Giraldus Cambrensis. Wine, peltries, Connemara marble, silver from
Tipperary, second to none, our farfamed horses even today, the Irish
hobbies, with king Philip of Spain offering to pay customs duties for
the right to fish in our waters. What do the yellowjohns of Anglia owe
us for our ruined trade and our ruined hearths? And the beds of the
Barrow and Shannon they won't deepen with millions of acres of marsh and
bog to make us all die of consumption?

--As treeless as Portugal we'll be soon, says John Wyse, or Heligoland
with its one tree if something is not done to reafforest the land.
Larches, firs, all the trees of the conifer family are going fast. I was
reading a report of lord Castletown's...

--Save them, says the citizen, the giant ash of Galway and the chieftain
elm of Kildare with a fortyfoot bole and an acre of foliage. Save the
trees of Ireland for the future men of Ireland on the fair hills of
Eire, O.

--Europe has its eyes on you, says Lenehan.

The fashionable international world attended EN MASSE this afternoon
at the wedding of the chevalier Jean Wyse de Neaulan, grand high chief
ranger of the Irish National Foresters, with Miss Fir Conifer of Pine
Valley. Lady Sylvester Elmshade, Mrs Barbara Lovebirch, Mrs Poll Ash,
Mrs Holly Hazeleyes, Miss Daphne Bays, Miss Dorothy Canebrake, Mrs Clyde
Twelvetrees, Mrs Rowan Greene, Mrs Helen Vinegadding, Miss Virginia
Creeper, Miss Gladys Beech, Miss Olive Garth, Miss Blanche Maple, Mrs
Maud Mahogany, Miss Myra Myrtle, Miss Priscilla Elderflower, Miss
Bee Honeysuckle, Miss Grace Poplar, Miss O Mimosa San, Miss Rachel
Cedarfrond, the Misses Lilian and Viola Lilac, Miss Timidity Aspenall,
Mrs Kitty Dewey-Mosse, Miss May Hawthorne, Mrs Gloriana Palme, Mrs Liana
Forrest, Mrs Arabella Blackwood and Mrs Norma Holyoake of Oakholme Regis
graced the ceremony by their presence. The bride who was given away by
her father, the M'Conifer of the Glands, looked exquisitely charming in
a creation carried out in green mercerised silk, moulded on an underslip
of gloaming grey, sashed with a yoke of broad emerald and finished with
a triple flounce of darkerhued fringe, the scheme being relieved by
bretelles and hip insertions of acorn bronze. The maids of honour, Miss
Larch Conifer and Miss Spruce Conifer, sisters of the bride, wore very
becoming costumes in the same tone, a dainty _motif_ of plume rose being
worked into the pleats in a pinstripe and repeated capriciously in the
jadegreen toques in the form of heron feathers of paletinted coral.
Senhor Enrique Flor presided at the organ with his wellknown ability
and, in addition to the prescribed numbers of the nuptial mass, played
a new and striking arrangement of _Woodman, spare that tree_ at the
conclusion of the service. On leaving the church of Saint Fiacre _in
Horto_ after the papal blessing the happy pair were subjected to a
playful crossfire of hazelnuts, beechmast, bayleaves, catkins of willow,
ivytod, hollyberries, mistletoe sprigs and quicken shoots. Mr and Mrs
Wyse Conifer Neaulan will spend a quiet honeymoon in the Black Forest.

--And our eyes are on Europe, says the citizen. We had our trade with
Spain and the French and with the Flemings before those mongrels were
pupped, Spanish ale in Galway, the winebark on the winedark waterway.

--And will again, says Joe.

--And with the help of the holy mother of God we will again, says the
citizen, clapping his thigh, our harbours that are empty will be full
again, Queenstown, Kinsale, Galway, Blacksod Bay, Ventry in the kingdom
of Kerry, Killybegs, the third largest harbour in the wide world with
a fleet of masts of the Galway Lynches and the Cavan O'Reillys and the
O'Kennedys of Dublin when the earl of Desmond could make a treaty with
the emperor Charles the Fifth himself. And will again, says he, when the
first Irish battleship is seen breasting the waves with our own flag to
the fore, none of your Henry Tudor's harps, no, the oldest flag afloat,
the flag of the province of Desmond and Thomond, three crowns on a blue
field, the three sons of Milesius.

And he took the last swig out of the pint. Moya. All wind and piss like
a tanyard cat. Cows in Connacht have long horns. As much as his bloody
life is worth to go down and address his tall talk to the assembled
multitude in Shanagolden where he daren't show his nose with the Molly
Maguires looking for him to let daylight through him for grabbing the
holding of an evicted tenant.

--Hear, hear to that, says John Wyse. What will you have?

--An imperial yeomanry, says Lenehan, to celebrate the occasion.

--Half one, Terry, says John Wyse, and a hands up. Terry! Are you
asleep?

--Yes, sir, says Terry. Small whisky and bottle of Allsop. Right, sir.

Hanging over the bloody paper with Alf looking for spicy bits instead of
attending to the general public. Picture of a butting match, trying to
crack their bloody skulls, one chap going for the other with his head
down like a bull at a gate. And another one: _Black Beast Burned in
Omaha, Ga_. A lot of Deadwood Dicks in slouch hats and they firing at a
Sambo strung up in a tree with his tongue out and a bonfire under
him. Gob, they ought to drown him in the sea after and electrocute and
crucify him to make sure of their job.

--But what about the fighting navy, says Ned, that keeps our foes at
bay?

--I'll tell you what about it, says the citizen. Hell upon earth it is.
Read the revelations that's going on in the papers about flogging on
the training ships at Portsmouth. A fellow writes that calls himself
_Disgusted One_.

So he starts telling us about corporal punishment and about the crew
of tars and officers and rearadmirals drawn up in cocked hats and the
parson with his protestant bible to witness punishment and a young lad
brought out, howling for his ma, and they tie him down on the buttend of
a gun.

--A rump and dozen, says the citizen, was what that old ruffian sir John
Beresford called it but the modern God's Englishman calls it caning on
the breech.

And says John Wyse:

--'Tis a custom more honoured in the breach than in the observance.

Then he was telling us the master at arms comes along with a long cane
and he draws out and he flogs the bloody backside off of the poor lad
till he yells meila murder.

--That's your glorious British navy, says the citizen, that bosses the
earth.

The fellows that never will be slaves, with the only hereditary chamber
on the face of God's earth and their land in the hands of a dozen
gamehogs and cottonball barons. That's the great empire they boast about
of drudges and whipped serfs.

--On which the sun never rises, says Joe.

--And the tragedy of it is, says the citizen, they believe it. The
unfortunate yahoos believe it.

They believe in rod, the scourger almighty, creator of hell upon earth,
and in Jacky Tar, the son of a gun, who was conceived of unholy boast,
born of the fighting navy, suffered under rump and dozen, was scarified,
flayed and curried, yelled like bloody hell, the third day he arose
again from the bed, steered into haven, sitteth on his beamend till
further orders whence he shall come to drudge for a living and be paid.

--But, says Bloom, isn't discipline the same everywhere. I mean wouldn't
it be the same here if you put force against force?

Didn't I tell you? As true as I'm drinking this porter if he was at his
last gasp he'd try to downface you that dying was living.

--We'll put force against force, says the citizen. We have our greater
Ireland beyond the sea. They were driven out of house and home in the
black 47. Their mudcabins and their shielings by the roadside were laid
low by the batteringram and the _Times_ rubbed its hands and told the
whitelivered Saxons there would soon be as few Irish in Ireland as
redskins in America. Even the Grand Turk sent us his piastres. But the
Sassenach tried to starve the nation at home while the land was full
of crops that the British hyenas bought and sold in Rio de Janeiro. Ay,
they drove out the peasants in hordes. Twenty thousand of them died in
the coffinships. But those that came to the land of the free remember
the land of bondage. And they will come again and with a vengeance, no
cravens, the sons of Granuaile, the champions of Kathleen ni Houlihan.

--Perfectly true, says Bloom. But my point was...

--We are a long time waiting for that day, citizen, says Ned. Since the
poor old woman told us that the French were on the sea and landed at
Killala.

--Ay, says John Wyse. We fought for the royal Stuarts that reneged us
against the Williamites and they betrayed us. Remember Limerick and the
broken treatystone. We gave our best blood to France and Spain, the
wild geese. Fontenoy, eh? And Sarsfield and O'Donnell, duke of Tetuan
in Spain, and Ulysses Browne of Camus that was fieldmarshal to Maria
Teresa. But what did we ever get for it?

--The French! says the citizen. Set of dancing masters! Do you know
what it is? They were never worth a roasted fart to Ireland. Aren't they
trying to make an _Entente cordiale_ now at Tay Pay's dinnerparty with
perfidious Albion? Firebrands of Europe and they always were.

--_Conspuez les Français_, says Lenehan, nobbling his beer.

--And as for the Prooshians and the Hanoverians, says Joe, haven't we
had enough of those sausageeating bastards on the throne from George the
elector down to the German lad and the flatulent old bitch that's dead?

Jesus, I had to laugh at the way he came out with that about the old one
with the winkers on her, blind drunk in her royal palace every night of
God, old Vic, with her jorum of mountain dew and her coachman carting
her up body and bones to roll into bed and she pulling him by the
whiskers and singing him old bits of songs about _Ehren on the Rhine_
and come where the boose is cheaper.

--Well, says J. J. We have Edward the peacemaker now.

--Tell that to a fool, says the citizen. There's a bloody sight more pox
than pax about that boyo. Edward Guelph-Wettin!

--And what do you think, says Joe, of the holy boys, the priests
and bishops of Ireland doing up his room in Maynooth in His Satanic
Majesty's racing colours and sticking up pictures of all the horses his
jockeys rode. The earl of Dublin, no less.

--They ought to have stuck up all the women he rode himself, says little
Alf.

And says J. J.:

--Considerations of space influenced their lordships' decision.

--Will you try another, citizen? says Joe.

--Yes, sir, says he. I will.

--You? says Joe.

--Beholden to you, Joe, says I. May your shadow never grow less.

--Repeat that dose, says Joe.

Bloom was talking and talking with John Wyse and he quite excited with
his dunducketymudcoloured mug on him and his old plumeyes rolling about.

--Persecution, says he, all the history of the world is full of it.
Perpetuating national hatred among nations.

--But do you know what a nation means? says John Wyse.

--Yes, says Bloom.

--What is it? says John Wyse.

--A nation? says Bloom. A nation is the same people living in the same
place.

--By God, then, says Ned, laughing, if that's so I'm a nation for I'm
living in the same place for the past five years.

So of course everyone had the laugh at Bloom and says he, trying to muck
out of it:

--Or also living in different places.

--That covers my case, says Joe.

--What is your nation if I may ask? says the citizen.

--Ireland, says Bloom. I was born here. Ireland.

The citizen said nothing only cleared the spit out of his gullet and,
gob, he spat a Red bank oyster out of him right in the corner.

--After you with the push, Joe, says he, taking out his handkerchief to
swab himself dry.

--Here you are, citizen, says Joe. Take that in your right hand and
repeat after me the following words.

The muchtreasured and intricately embroidered ancient Irish facecloth
attributed to Solomon of Droma and Manus Tomaltach og MacDonogh, authors
of the Book of Ballymote, was then carefully produced and called forth
prolonged admiration. No need to dwell on the legendary beauty of the
cornerpieces, the acme of art, wherein one can distinctly discern each
of the four evangelists in turn presenting to each of the four masters
his evangelical symbol, a bogoak sceptre, a North American puma (a far
nobler king of beasts than the British article, be it said in passing),
a Kerry calf and a golden eagle from Carrantuohill. The scenes depicted
on the emunctory field, showing our ancient duns and raths and cromlechs
and grianauns and seats of learning and maledictive stones, are as
wonderfully beautiful and the pigments as delicate as when the Sligo
illuminators gave free rein to their artistic fantasy long long ago in
the time of the Barmecides. Glendalough, the lovely lakes of Killarney,
the ruins of Clonmacnois, Cong Abbey, Glen Inagh and the Twelve Pins,
Ireland's Eye, the Green Hills of Tallaght, Croagh Patrick, the brewery
of Messrs Arthur Guinness, Son and Company (Limited), Lough Neagh's
banks, the vale of Ovoca, Isolde's tower, the Mapas obelisk, Sir Patrick
Dun's hospital, Cape Clear, the glen of Aherlow, Lynch's castle, the
Scotch house, Rathdown Union Workhouse at Loughlinstown, Tullamore jail,
Castleconnel rapids, Kilballymacshonakill, the cross at Monasterboice,
Jury's Hotel, S. Patrick's Purgatory, the Salmon Leap, Maynooth college
refectory, Curley's hole, the three birthplaces of the first duke of
Wellington, the rock of Cashel, the bog of Allen, the Henry Street
Warehouse, Fingal's Cave--all these moving scenes are still there for us
today rendered more beautiful still by the waters of sorrow which have
passed over them and by the rich incrustations of time.

--Show us over the drink, says I. Which is which?

--That's mine, says Joe, as the devil said to the dead policeman.

--And I belong to a race too, says Bloom, that is hated and persecuted.
Also now. This very moment. This very instant.

Gob, he near burnt his fingers with the butt of his old cigar.

--Robbed, says he. Plundered. Insulted. Persecuted. Taking what belongs
to us by right. At this very moment, says he, putting up his fist, sold
by auction in Morocco like slaves or cattle.

--Are you talking about the new Jerusalem? says the citizen.

--I'm talking about injustice, says Bloom.

--Right, says John Wyse. Stand up to it then with force like men.

That's an almanac picture for you. Mark for a softnosed bullet. Old
lardyface standing up to the business end of a gun. Gob, he'd adorn a
sweepingbrush, so he would, if he only had a nurse's apron on him. And
then he collapses all of a sudden, twisting around all the opposite, as
limp as a wet rag.

--But it's no use, says he. Force, hatred, history, all that. That's not
life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it's
the very opposite of that that is really life.

--What? says Alf.

--Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred. I must go now, says
he to John Wyse. Just round to the court a moment to see if Martin is
there. If he comes just say I'll be back in a second. Just a moment.

Who's hindering you? And off he pops like greased lightning.

--A new apostle to the gentiles, says the citizen. Universal love.

--Well, says John Wyse. Isn't that what we're told. Love your neighbour.

--That chap? says the citizen. Beggar my neighbour is his motto. Love,
moya! He's a nice pattern of a Romeo and Juliet.

Love loves to love love. Nurse loves the new chemist. Constable 14A
loves Mary Kelly. Gerty MacDowell loves the boy that has the bicycle. M.
B. loves a fair gentleman. Li Chi Han lovey up kissy Cha Pu Chow. Jumbo,
the elephant, loves Alice, the elephant. Old Mr Verschoyle with the ear
trumpet loves old Mrs Verschoyle with the turnedin eye. The man in the
brown macintosh loves a lady who is dead. His Majesty the King loves Her
Majesty the Queen. Mrs Norman W. Tupper loves officer Taylor. You love
a certain person. And this person loves that other person because
everybody loves somebody but God loves everybody.

--Well, Joe, says I, your very good health and song. More power,
citizen.

--Hurrah, there, says Joe.

--The blessing of God and Mary and Patrick on you, says the citizen.

And he ups with his pint to wet his whistle.

--We know those canters, says he, preaching and picking your pocket.
What about sanctimonious Cromwell and his ironsides that put the women
and children of Drogheda to the sword with the bible text _God is love_
pasted round the mouth of his cannon? The bible! Did you read that skit
in the _United Irishman_ today about that Zulu chief that's visiting
England?

--What's that? says Joe.

So the citizen takes up one of his paraphernalia papers and he starts
reading out:

--A delegation of the chief cotton magnates of Manchester was presented
yesterday to His Majesty the Alaki of Abeakuta by Gold Stick in Waiting,
Lord Walkup of Walkup on Eggs, to tender to His Majesty the heartfelt
thanks of British traders for the facilities afforded them in his
dominions. The delegation partook of luncheon at the conclusion of which
the dusky potentate, in the course of a happy speech, freely translated
by the British chaplain, the reverend Ananias Praisegod Barebones,
tendered his best thanks to Massa Walkup and emphasised the cordial
relations existing between Abeakuta and the British empire, stating that
he treasured as one of his dearest possessions an illuminated bible,
the volume of the word of God and the secret of England's greatness,
graciously presented to him by the white chief woman, the great squaw
Victoria, with a personal dedication from the august hand of the Royal
Donor. The Alaki then drank a lovingcup of firstshot usquebaugh to the
toast _Black and White_ from the skull of his immediate predecessor in
the dynasty Kakachakachak, surnamed Forty Warts, after which he visited
the chief factory of Cottonopolis and signed his mark in the visitors'
book, subsequently executing a charming old Abeakutic wardance, in the
course of which he swallowed several knives and forks, amid hilarious
applause from the girl hands.

--Widow woman, says Ned. I wouldn't doubt her. Wonder did he put that
bible to the same use as I would.

--Same only more so, says Lenehan. And thereafter in that fruitful land
the broadleaved mango flourished exceedingly.

--Is that by Griffith? says John Wyse.

--No, says the citizen. It's not signed Shanganagh. It's only
initialled: P.

--And a very good initial too, says Joe.

--That's how it's worked, says the citizen. Trade follows the flag.

--Well, says J. J., if they're any worse than those Belgians in the
Congo Free State they must be bad. Did you read that report by a man
what's this his name is?

--Casement, says the citizen. He's an Irishman.

--Yes, that's the man, says J. J. Raping the women and girls and
flogging the natives on the belly to squeeze all the red rubber they can
out of them.

--I know where he's gone, says Lenehan, cracking his fingers.

--Who? says I.

--Bloom, says he. The courthouse is a blind. He had a few bob on
_Throwaway_ and he's gone to gather in the shekels.

--Is it that whiteeyed kaffir? says the citizen, that never backed a
horse in anger in his life?

--That's where he's gone, says Lenehan. I met Bantam Lyons going to back
that horse only I put him off it and he told me Bloom gave him the tip.
Bet you what you like he has a hundred shillings to five on. He's the
only man in Dublin has it. A dark horse.

--He's a bloody dark horse himself, says Joe.

--Mind, Joe, says I. Show us the entrance out.

--There you are, says Terry.

Goodbye Ireland I'm going to Gort. So I just went round the back of
the yard to pumpship and begob (hundred shillings to five) while I was
letting off my _(Throwaway_ twenty to) letting off my load gob says I
to myself I knew he was uneasy in his (two pints off of Joe and one in
Slattery's off) in his mind to get off the mark to (hundred shillings
is five quid) and when they were in the (dark horse) pisser Burke was
telling me card party and letting on the child was sick (gob, must have
done about a gallon) flabbyarse of a wife speaking down the tube _she's
better_ or _she's_ (ow!) all a plan so he could vamoose with the pool if
he won or (Jesus, full up I was) trading without a licence (ow!) Ireland
my nation says he (hoik! phthook!) never be up to those bloody (there's
the last of it) Jerusalem (ah!) cuckoos.

So anyhow when I got back they were at it dingdong, John Wyse saying it
was Bloom gave the ideas for Sinn Fein to Griffith to put in his paper
all kinds of jerrymandering, packed juries and swindling the taxes off
of the government and appointing consuls all over the world to walk
about selling Irish industries. Robbing Peter to pay Paul. Gob, that
puts the bloody kybosh on it if old sloppy eyes is mucking up the show.
Give us a bloody chance. God save Ireland from the likes of that bloody
mouseabout. Mr Bloom with his argol bargol. And his old fellow before
him perpetrating frauds, old Methusalem Bloom, the robbing bagman, that
poisoned himself with the prussic acid after he swamping the country
with his baubles and his penny diamonds. Loans by post on easy terms.
Any amount of money advanced on note of hand. Distance no object. No
security. Gob, he's like Lanty MacHale's goat that'd go a piece of the
road with every one.

--Well, it's a fact, says John Wyse. And there's the man now that'll
tell you all about it, Martin Cunningham.

Sure enough the castle car drove up with Martin on it and Jack Power
with him and a fellow named Crofter or Crofton, pensioner out of
the collector general's, an orangeman Blackburn does have on the
registration and he drawing his pay or Crawford gallivanting around the
country at the king's expense.

Our travellers reached the rustic hostelry and alighted from their
palfreys.

--Ho, varlet! cried he, who by his mien seemed the leader of the party.
Saucy knave! To us!

So saying he knocked loudly with his swordhilt upon the open lattice.

Mine host came forth at the summons, girding him with his tabard.

--Give you good den, my masters, said he with an obsequious bow.

--Bestir thyself, sirrah! cried he who had knocked. Look to our steeds.
And for ourselves give us of your best for ifaith we need it.

--Lackaday, good masters, said the host, my poor house has but a bare
larder. I know not what to offer your lordships.

--How now, fellow? cried the second of the party, a man of pleasant
countenance, So servest thou the king's messengers, master Taptun?

An instantaneous change overspread the landlord's visage.

--Cry you mercy, gentlemen, he said humbly. An you be the king's
messengers (God shield His Majesty!) you shall not want for aught. The
king's friends (God bless His Majesty!) shall not go afasting in my
house I warrant me.

--Then about! cried the traveller who had not spoken, a lusty
trencherman by his aspect. Hast aught to give us?

Mine host bowed again as he made answer:

--What say you, good masters, to a squab pigeon pasty, some collops of
venison, a saddle of veal, widgeon with crisp hog's bacon, a boar's head
with pistachios, a bason of jolly custard, a medlar tansy and a flagon
of old Rhenish?

--Gadzooks! cried the last speaker. That likes me well. Pistachios!

--Aha! cried he of the pleasant countenance. A poor house and a bare
larder, quotha! 'Tis a merry rogue.

So in comes Martin asking where was Bloom.

--Where is he? says Lenehan. Defrauding widows and orphans.

--Isn't that a fact, says John Wyse, what I was telling the citizen
about Bloom and the Sinn Fein?

--That's so, says Martin. Or so they allege.

--Who made those allegations? says Alf.

--I, says Joe. I'm the alligator.

--And after all, says John Wyse, why can't a jew love his country like
the next fellow?

--Why not? says J. J., when he's quite sure which country it is.

--Is he a jew or a gentile or a holy Roman or a swaddler or what the
hell is he? says Ned. Or who is he? No offence, Crofton.

--Who is Junius? says J. J.

--We don't want him, says Crofter the Orangeman or presbyterian.

--He's a perverted jew, says Martin, from a place in Hungary and it was
he drew up all the plans according to the Hungarian system. We know that
in the castle.

--Isn't he a cousin of Bloom the dentist? says Jack Power.

--Not at all, says Martin. Only namesakes. His name was Virag, the
father's name that poisoned himself. He changed it by deedpoll, the
father did.

--That's the new Messiah for Ireland! says the citizen. Island of saints
and sages!

--Well, they're still waiting for their redeemer, says Martin. For that
matter so are we.

--Yes, says J. J., and every male that's born they think it may be their
Messiah. And every jew is in a tall state of excitement, I believe, till
he knows if he's a father or a mother.

--Expecting every moment will be his next, says Lenehan.

--O, by God, says Ned, you should have seen Bloom before that son of his
that died was born. I met him one day in the south city markets buying a
tin of Neave's food six weeks before the wife was delivered.

--_En ventre sa mère_, says J. J.

--Do you call that a man? says the citizen.

--I wonder did he ever put it out of sight, says Joe.

--Well, there were two children born anyhow, says Jack Power.

--And who does he suspect? says the citizen.

Gob, there's many a true word spoken in jest. One of those mixed
middlings he is. Lying up in the hotel Pisser was telling me once a
month with headache like a totty with her courses. Do you know what I'm
telling you? It'd be an act of God to take a hold of a fellow the like
of that and throw him in the bloody sea. Justifiable homicide, so it
would. Then sloping off with his five quid without putting up a pint of
stuff like a man. Give us your blessing. Not as much as would blind your
eye.

--Charity to the neighbour, says Martin. But where is he? We can't wait.

--A wolf in sheep's clothing, says the citizen. That's what he is. Virag
from Hungary! Ahasuerus I call him. Cursed by God.

--Have you time for a brief libation, Martin? says Ned.

--Only one, says Martin. We must be quick. J. J. and S.

--You, Jack? Crofton? Three half ones, Terry.

--Saint Patrick would want to land again at Ballykinlar and convert us,
says the citizen, after allowing things like that to contaminate our
shores.

--Well, says Martin, rapping for his glass. God bless all here is my
prayer.

--Amen, says the citizen.

--And I'm sure He will, says Joe.

And at the sound of the sacring bell, headed by a crucifer with
acolytes, thurifers, boatbearers, readers, ostiarii, deacons and
subdeacons, the blessed company drew nigh of mitred abbots and priors
and guardians and monks and friars: the monks of Benedict of Spoleto,
Carthusians and Camaldolesi, Cistercians and Olivetans, Oratorians
and Vallombrosans, and the friars of Augustine, Brigittines,
Premonstratensians, Servi, Trinitarians, and the children of Peter
Nolasco: and therewith from Carmel mount the children of Elijah prophet
led by Albert bishop and by Teresa of Avila, calced and other: and
friars, brown and grey, sons of poor Francis, capuchins, cordeliers,
minimes and observants and the daughters of Clara: and the sons of
Dominic, the friars preachers, and the sons of Vincent: and the monks
of S. Wolstan: and Ignatius his children: and the confraternity of the
christian brothers led by the reverend brother Edmund Ignatius Rice. And
after came all saints and martyrs, virgins and confessors: S. Cyr and
S. Isidore Arator and S. James the Less and S. Phocas of Sinope and S.
Julian Hospitator and S. Felix de Cantalice and S. Simon Stylites and
S. Stephen Protomartyr and S. John of God and S. Ferreol and S. Leugarde
and S. Theodotus and S. Vulmar and S. Richard and S. Vincent de Paul and
S. Martin of Todi and S. Martin of Tours and S. Alfred and S. Joseph and
S. Denis and S. Cornelius and S. Leopold and S. Bernard and S. Terence
and S. Edward and S. Owen Caniculus and S. Anonymous and S. Eponymous
and S. Pseudonymous and S. Homonymous and S. Paronymous and S.
Synonymous and S. Laurence O'Toole and S. James of Dingle and
Compostella and S. Columcille and S. Columba and S. Celestine and S.
Colman and S. Kevin and S. Brendan and S. Frigidian and S. Senan and S.
Fachtna and S. Columbanus and S. Gall and S. Fursey and S. Fintan and S.
Fiacre and S. John Nepomuc and S. Thomas Aquinas and S. Ives of Brittany
and S. Michan and S. Herman-Joseph and the three patrons of holy youth
S. Aloysius Gonzaga and S. Stanislaus Kostka and S. John Berchmans
and the saints Gervasius, Servasius and Bonifacius and S. Bride and S.
Kieran and S. Canice of Kilkenny and S. Jarlath of Tuam and S. Finbarr
and S. Pappin of Ballymun and Brother Aloysius Pacificus and Brother
Louis Bellicosus and the saints Rose of Lima and of Viterbo and S.
Martha of Bethany and S. Mary of Egypt and S. Lucy and S. Brigid and
S. Attracta and S. Dympna and S. Ita and S. Marion Calpensis and
the Blessed Sister Teresa of the Child Jesus and S. Barbara and S.
Scholastica and S. Ursula with eleven thousand virgins. And all came
with nimbi and aureoles and gloriae, bearing palms and harps and swords
and olive crowns, in robes whereon were woven the blessed symbols of
their efficacies, inkhorns, arrows, loaves, cruses, fetters, axes,
trees, bridges, babes in a bathtub, shells, wallets, shears, keys,
dragons, lilies, buckshot, beards, hogs, lamps, bellows, beehives,
soupladles, stars, snakes, anvils, boxes of vaseline, bells, crutches,
forceps, stags' horns, watertight boots, hawks, millstones, eyes on a
dish, wax candles, aspergills, unicorns. And as they wended their way by
Nelson's Pillar, Henry street, Mary street, Capel street, Little Britain
street chanting the introit in _Epiphania Domini_ which beginneth
_Surge, illuminare_ and thereafter most sweetly the gradual _Omnes_
which saith _de Saba venient_ they did divers wonders such as casting
out devils, raising the dead to life, multiplying fishes, healing the
halt and the blind, discovering various articles which had been mislaid,
interpreting and fulfilling the scriptures, blessing and prophesying.
And last, beneath a canopy of cloth of gold came the reverend Father
O'Flynn attended by Malachi and Patrick. And when the good fathers
had reached the appointed place, the house of Bernard Kiernan and Co,
limited, 8, 9 and 10 little Britain street, wholesale grocers, wine
and brandy shippers, licensed fo the sale of beer, wine and spirits for
consumption on the premises, the celebrant blessed the house and censed
the mullioned windows and the groynes and the vaults and the arrises and
the capitals and the pediments and the cornices and the engrailed arches
and the spires and the cupolas and sprinkled the lintels thereof with
blessed water and prayed that God might bless that house as he had
blessed the house of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and make the angels of
His light to inhabit therein. And entering he blessed the viands and the
beverages and the company of all the blessed answered his prayers.

--_Adiutorium nostrum in nomine Domini._

--_Qui fecit coelum et terram._

--_Dominus vobiscum._

--_Et cum spiritu tuo._

And he laid his hands upon that he blessed and gave thanks and he prayed
and they all with him prayed:

--_Deus, cuius verbo sanctificantur omnia, benedictionem tuam effunde
super creaturas istas: et praesta ut quisquis eis secundum legem et
voluntatem Tuam cum gratiarum actione usus fuerit per invocationem
sanctissimi nominis Tui corporis sanitatem et animae tutelam Te auctore
percipiat per Christum Dominum nostrum._

--And so say all of us, says Jack.

--Thousand a year, Lambert, says Crofton or Crawford.

--Right, says Ned, taking up his John Jameson. And butter for fish.

I was just looking around to see who the happy thought would strike when
be damned but in he comes again letting on to be in a hell of a hurry.

--I was just round at the courthouse, says he, looking for you. I hope
I'm not...

--No, says Martin, we're ready.

Courthouse my eye and your pockets hanging down with gold and silver.
Mean bloody scut. Stand us a drink itself. Devil a sweet fear! There's
a jew for you! All for number one. Cute as a shithouse rat. Hundred to
five.

--Don't tell anyone, says the citizen,

--Beg your pardon, says he.

--Come on boys, says Martin, seeing it was looking blue. Come along now.

--Don't tell anyone, says the citizen, letting a bawl out of him. It's a
secret.

And the bloody dog woke up and let a growl.

--Bye bye all, says Martin.

And he got them out as quick as he could, Jack Power and Crofton or
whatever you call him and him in the middle of them letting on to be all
at sea and up with them on the bloody jaunting car.

---Off with you, says

Martin to the jarvey.

The milkwhite dolphin tossed his mane and, rising in the golden poop the
helmsman spread the bellying sail upon the wind and stood off forward
with all sail set, the spinnaker to larboard. A many comely nymphs drew
nigh to starboard and to larboard and, clinging to the sides of
the noble bark, they linked their shining forms as doth the cunning
wheelwright when he fashions about the heart of his wheel the
equidistant rays whereof each one is sister to another and he binds them
all with an outer ring and giveth speed to the feet of men whenas they
ride to a hosting or contend for the smile of ladies fair. Even so did
they come and set them, those willing nymphs, the undying sisters. And
they laughed, sporting in a circle of their foam: and the bark clave the
waves.

But begob I was just lowering the heel of the pint when I saw the
citizen getting up to waddle to the door, puffing and blowing with the
dropsy, and he cursing the curse of Cromwell on him, bell, book and
candle in Irish, spitting and spatting out of him and Joe and little Alf
round him like a leprechaun trying to peacify him.

--Let me alone, says he.

And begob he got as far as the door and they holding him and he bawls
out of him:

--Three cheers for Israel!

Arrah, sit down on the parliamentary side of your arse for Christ' sake
and don't be making a public exhibition of yourself. Jesus, there's
always some bloody clown or other kicking up a bloody murder about
bloody nothing. Gob, it'd turn the porter sour in your guts, so it
would.

And all the ragamuffins and sluts of the nation round the door and
Martin telling the jarvey to drive ahead and the citizen bawling and Alf
and Joe at him to whisht and he on his high horse about the jews and
the loafers calling for a speech and Jack Power trying to get him to sit
down on the car and hold his bloody jaw and a loafer with a patch over
his eye starts singing _If the man in the moon was a jew, jew, jew_ and
a slut shouts out of her:

--Eh, mister! Your fly is open, mister!

And says he:

--Mendelssohn was a jew and Karl Marx and Mercadante and Spinoza. And
the Saviour was a jew and his father was a jew. Your God.

--He had no father, says Martin. That'll do now. Drive ahead.

--Whose God? says the citizen.

--Well, his uncle was a jew, says he. Your God was a jew. Christ was a
jew like me.

Gob, the citizen made a plunge back into the shop.

--By Jesus, says he, I'll brain that bloody jewman for using the holy
name.

By Jesus, I'll crucify him so I will. Give us that biscuitbox here.

--Stop! Stop! says Joe.

A large and appreciative gathering of friends and acquaintances from
the metropolis and greater Dublin assembled in their thousands to bid
farewell to Nagyasagos uram Lipoti Virag, late of Messrs Alexander
Thom's, printers to His Majesty, on the occasion of his departure
for the distant clime of Szazharminczbrojugulyas-Dugulas (Meadow of
Murmuring Waters). The ceremony which went off with great _éclat_ was
characterised by the most affecting cordiality. An illuminated scroll
of ancient Irish vellum, the work of Irish artists, was presented to
the distinguished phenomenologist on behalf of a large section of the
community and was accompanied by the gift of a silver casket, tastefully
executed in the style of ancient Celtic ornament, a work which reflects
every credit on the makers, Messrs Jacob _agus_ Jacob. The departing
guest was the recipient of a hearty ovation, many of those who were
present being visibly moved when the select orchestra of Irish pipes
struck up the wellknown strains of _Come back to Erin_, followed
immediately by _Rakoczsy's March_. Tarbarrels and bonfires were lighted
along the coastline of the four seas on the summits of the Hill of
Howth, Three Rock Mountain, Sugarloaf, Bray Head, the mountains of
Mourne, the Galtees, the Ox and Donegal and Sperrin peaks, the Nagles
and the Bograghs, the Connemara hills, the reeks of M Gillicuddy, Slieve
Aughty, Slieve Bernagh and Slieve Bloom. Amid cheers that rent the
welkin, responded to by answering cheers from a big muster of
henchmen on the distant Cambrian and Caledonian hills, the mastodontic
pleasureship slowly moved away saluted by a final floral tribute from
the representatives of the fair sex who were present in large numbers
while, as it proceeded down the river, escorted by a flotilla of barges,
the flags of the Ballast office and Custom House were dipped in salute
as were also those of the electrical power station at the
Pigeonhouse and the Poolbeg Light. _Visszontlátásra, kedves baráton!
Visszontlátásra!_ Gone but not forgotten.

Gob, the devil wouldn't stop him till he got hold of the bloody tin
anyhow and out with him and little Alf hanging on to his elbow and he
shouting like a stuck pig, as good as any bloody play in the Queen's
royal theatre:

--Where is he till I murder him?

And Ned and J. J. paralysed with the laughing.

--Bloody wars, says I, I'll be in for the last gospel.

But as luck would have it the jarvey got the nag's head round the other
way and off with him.

--Hold on, citizen, says Joe. Stop!

Begob he drew his hand and made a swipe and let fly. Mercy of God the
sun was in his eyes or he'd have left him for dead. Gob, he near sent it
into the county Longford. The bloody nag took fright and the old
mongrel after the car like bloody hell and all the populace shouting and
laughing and the old tinbox clattering along the street.

The catastrophe was terrific and instantaneous in its effect. The
observatory of Dunsink registered in all eleven shocks, all of the fifth
grade of Mercalli's scale, and there is no record extant of a similar
seismic disturbance in our island since the earthquake of 1534, the year
of the rebellion of Silken Thomas. The epicentre appears to have been
that part of the metropolis which constitutes the Inn's Quay ward and
parish of Saint Michan covering a surface of fortyone acres, two roods
and one square pole or perch. All the lordly residences in the vicinity
of the palace of justice were demolished and that noble edifice itself,
in which at the time of the catastrophe important legal debates were in
progress, is literally a mass of ruins beneath which it is to be
feared all the occupants have been buried alive. From the reports of
eyewitnesses it transpires that the seismic waves were accompanied by
a violent atmospheric perturbation of cyclonic character. An article of
headgear since ascertained to belong to the much respected clerk of the
crown and peace Mr George Fottrell and a silk umbrella with gold handle
with the engraved initials, crest, coat of arms and house number of
the erudite and worshipful chairman of quarter sessions sir Frederick
Falkiner, recorder of Dublin, have been discovered by search parties
in remote parts of the island respectively, the former on the third
basaltic ridge of the giant's causeway, the latter embedded to the
extent of one foot three inches in the sandy beach of Holeopen bay near
the old head of Kinsale. Other eyewitnesses depose that they observed
an incandescent object of enormous proportions hurtling through the
atmosphere at a terrifying velocity in a trajectory directed southwest
by west. Messages of condolence and sympathy are being hourly received
from all parts of the different continents and the sovereign pontiff has
been graciously pleased to decree that a special _missa pro defunctis_
shall be celebrated simultaneously by the ordinaries of each and every
cathedral church of all the episcopal dioceses subject to the spiritual
authority of the Holy See in suffrage of the souls of those faithful
departed who have been so unexpectedly called away from our midst.
The work of salvage, removal of _débris,_ human remains etc has been
entrusted to Messrs Michael Meade and Son, 159 Great Brunswick street,
and Messrs T. and C. Martin, 77, 78, 79 and 80 North Wall, assisted by
the men and officers of the Duke of Cornwall's light infantry under the
general supervision of H. R. H., rear admiral, the right honourable sir
Hercules Hannibal Habeas Corpus Anderson, K. G., K. P., K. T., P. C., K.
C. B., M. P, J. P., M. B., D. S. O., S. O. D., M. F. H., M. R. I. A., B.
L., Mus. Doc., P. L. G., F. T. C. D., F. R. U. I., F. R. C. P. I. and F.
R. C. S. I.

You never saw the like of it in all your born puff. Gob, if he got that
lottery ticket on the side of his poll he'd remember the gold cup, he
would so, but begob the citizen would have been lagged for assault and
battery and Joe for aiding and abetting. The jarvey saved his life by
furious driving as sure as God made Moses. What? O, Jesus, he did. And
he let a volley of oaths after him.

--Did I kill him, says he, or what?

And he shouting to the bloody dog:

--After him, Garry! After him, boy!

And the last we saw was the bloody car rounding the corner and old
sheepsface on it gesticulating and the bloody mongrel after it with his
lugs back for all he was bloody well worth to tear him limb from limb.
Hundred to five! Jesus, he took the value of it out of him, I promise
you.

When, lo, there came about them all a great brightness and they beheld
the chariot wherein He stood ascend to heaven. And they beheld Him in
the chariot, clothed upon in the glory of the brightness, having raiment
as of the sun, fair as the moon and terrible that for awe they durst not
look upon Him. And there came a voice out of heaven, calling: _Elijah!
Elijah!_ And He answered with a main cry: _Abba! Adonai!_ And they
beheld Him even Him, ben Bloom Elijah, amid clouds of angels ascend
to the glory of the brightness at an angle of fortyfive degrees over
Donohoe's in Little Green street like a shot off a shovel.



The summer evening had begun to fold the world in its mysterious
embrace. Far away in the west the sun was setting and the last glow of
all too fleeting day lingered lovingly on sea and strand, on the proud
promontory of dear old Howth guarding as ever the waters of the bay, on
the weedgrown rocks along Sandymount shore and, last but not least, on
the quiet church whence there streamed forth at times upon the stillness
the voice of prayer to her who is in her pure radiance a beacon ever to
the stormtossed heart of man, Mary, star of the sea.

The three girl friends were seated on the rocks, enjoying the evening
scene and the air which was fresh but not too chilly. Many a time and
oft were they wont to come there to that favourite nook to have a cosy
chat beside the sparkling waves and discuss matters feminine, Cissy
Caffrey and Edy Boardman with the baby in the pushcar and Tommy and
Jacky Caffrey, two little curlyheaded boys, dressed in sailor suits with
caps to match and the name H.M.S. Belleisle printed on both. For Tommy
and Jacky Caffrey were twins, scarce four years old and very noisy and
spoiled twins sometimes but for all that darling little fellows with
bright merry faces and endearing ways about them. They were dabbling in
the sand with their spades and buckets, building castles as children do,
or playing with their big coloured ball, happy as the day was long. And
Edy Boardman was rocking the chubby baby to and fro in the pushcar while
that young gentleman fairly chuckled with delight. He was but eleven
months and nine days old and, though still a tiny toddler, was just
beginning to lisp his first babyish words. Cissy Caffrey bent over to
him to tease his fat little plucks and the dainty dimple in his chin.

--Now, baby, Cissy Caffrey said. Say out big, big. I want a drink of
water.

And baby prattled after her:

--A jink a jink a jawbo.

Cissy Caffrey cuddled the wee chap for she was awfully fond of children,
so patient with little sufferers and Tommy Caffrey could never be got to
take his castor oil unless it was Cissy Caffrey that held his nose and
promised him the scatty heel of the loaf or brown bread with golden
syrup on. What a persuasive power that girl had! But to be sure baby
Boardman was as good as gold, a perfect little dote in his new fancy
bib. None of your spoilt beauties, Flora MacFlimsy sort, was Cissy
Caffrey. A truerhearted lass never drew the breath of life, always with
a laugh in her gipsylike eyes and a frolicsome word on her cherryripe
red lips, a girl lovable in the extreme. And Edy Boardman laughed too at
the quaint language of little brother.

But just then there was a slight altercation between Master Tommy and
Master Jacky. Boys will be boys and our two twins were no exception
to this golden rule. The apple of discord was a certain castle of sand
which Master Jacky had built and Master Tommy would have it right go
wrong that it was to be architecturally improved by a frontdoor like the
Martello tower had. But if Master Tommy was headstrong Master Jacky was
selfwilled too and, true to the maxim that every little Irishman's house
is his castle, he fell upon his hated rival and to such purpose that the
wouldbe assailant came to grief and (alas to relate!) the coveted castle
too. Needless to say the cries of discomfited Master Tommy drew the
attention of the girl friends.

--Come here, Tommy, his sister called imperatively. At once! And you,
Jacky, for shame to throw poor Tommy in the dirty sand. Wait till I
catch you for that.

His eyes misty with unshed tears Master Tommy came at her call for their
big sister's word was law with the twins. And in a sad plight he was
too after his misadventure. His little man-o'-war top and unmentionables
were full of sand but Cissy was a past mistress in the art of smoothing
over life's tiny troubles and very quickly not one speck of sand was to
be seen on his smart little suit. Still the blue eyes were glistening
with hot tears that would well up so she kissed away the hurtness and
shook her hand at Master Jacky the culprit and said if she was near him
she wouldn't be far from him, her eyes dancing in admonition.

--Nasty bold Jacky! she cried.

She put an arm round the little mariner and coaxed winningly:

--What's your name? Butter and cream?

--Tell us who is your sweetheart, spoke Edy Boardman. Is Cissy your
sweetheart?

--Nao, tearful Tommy said.

--Is Edy Boardman your sweetheart? Cissy queried.

--Nao, Tommy said.

--I know, Edy Boardman said none too amiably with an arch glance from
her shortsighted eyes. I know who is Tommy's sweetheart. Gerty is
Tommy's sweetheart.

--Nao, Tommy said on the verge of tears.

Cissy's quick motherwit guessed what was amiss and she whispered to
Edy Boardman to take him there behind the pushcar where the gentleman
couldn't see and to mind he didn't wet his new tan shoes.

But who was Gerty?

Gerty MacDowell who was seated near her companions, lost in thought,
gazing far away into the distance was, in very truth, as fair a specimen
of winsome Irish girlhood as one could wish to see. She was pronounced
beautiful by all who knew her though, as folks often said, she was
more a Giltrap than a MacDowell. Her figure was slight and graceful,
inclining even to fragility but those iron jelloids she had been taking
of late had done her a world of good much better than the Widow Welch's
female pills and she was much better of those discharges she used to
get and that tired feeling. The waxen pallor of her face was almost
spiritual in its ivorylike purity though her rosebud mouth was a genuine
Cupid's bow, Greekly perfect. Her hands were of finely veined alabaster
with tapering fingers and as white as lemonjuice and queen of ointments
could make them though it was not true that she used to wear kid gloves
in bed or take a milk footbath either. Bertha Supple told that once to
Edy Boardman, a deliberate lie, when she was black out at daggers drawn
with Gerty (the girl chums had of course their little tiffs from time to
time like the rest of mortals) and she told her not to let on whatever
she did that it was her that told her or she'd never speak to her
again. No. Honour where honour is due. There was an innate refinement,
a languid queenly _hauteur_ about Gerty which was unmistakably evidenced
in her delicate hands and higharched instep. Had kind fate but willed
her to be born a gentlewoman of high degree in her own right and had
she only received the benefit of a good education Gerty MacDowell might
easily have held her own beside any lady in the land and have seen
herself exquisitely gowned with jewels on her brow and patrician suitors
at her feet vying with one another to pay their devoirs to her.
Mayhap it was this, the love that might have been, that lent to her
softlyfeatured face at whiles a look, tense with suppressed meaning,
that imparted a strange yearning tendency to the beautiful eyes, a charm
few could resist. Why have women such eyes of witchery? Gerty's were of
the bluest Irish blue, set off by lustrous lashes and dark expressive
brows. Time was when those brows were not so silkily seductive. It
was Madame Vera Verity, directress of the Woman Beautiful page of the
Princess Novelette, who had first advised her to try eyebrowleine which
gave that haunting expression to the eyes, so becoming in leaders
of fashion, and she had never regretted it. Then there was blushing
scientifically cured and how to be tall increase your height and you
have a beautiful face but your nose? That would suit Mrs Dignam because
she had a button one. But Gerty's crowning glory was her wealth of
wonderful hair. It was dark brown with a natural wave in it. She had cut
it that very morning on account of the new moon and it nestled about
her pretty head in a profusion of luxuriant clusters and pared her nails
too, Thursday for wealth. And just now at Edy's words as a telltale
flush, delicate as the faintest rosebloom, crept into her cheeks she
looked so lovely in her sweet girlish shyness that of a surety God's
fair land of Ireland did not hold her equal.

For an instant she was silent with rather sad downcast eyes. She
was about to retort but something checked the words on her tongue.
Inclination prompted her to speak out: dignity told her to be silent.
The pretty lips pouted awhile but then she glanced up and broke out into
a joyous little laugh which had in it all the freshness of a young May
morning. She knew right well, no-one better, what made squinty Edy
say that because of him cooling in his attentions when it was simply a
lovers' quarrel. As per usual somebody's nose was out of joint about the
boy that had the bicycle off the London bridge road always riding up
and down in front of her window. Only now his father kept him in in the
evenings studying hard to get an exhibition in the intermediate that was
on and he was going to go to Trinity college to study for a doctor when
he left the high school like his brother W. E. Wylie who was racing
in the bicycle races in Trinity college university. Little recked he
perhaps for what she felt, that dull aching void in her heart sometimes,
piercing to the core. Yet he was young and perchance he might learn
to love her in time. They were protestants in his family and of course
Gerty knew Who came first and after Him the Blessed Virgin and then
Saint Joseph. But he was undeniably handsome with an exquisite nose and
he was what he looked, every inch a gentleman, the shape of his head too
at the back without his cap on that she would know anywhere something
off the common and the way he turned the bicycle at the lamp with his
hands off the bars and also the nice perfume of those good cigarettes
and besides they were both of a size too he and she and that was why Edy
Boardman thought she was so frightfully clever because he didn't go and
ride up and down in front of her bit of a garden.

Gerty was dressed simply but with the instinctive taste of a votary of
Dame Fashion for she felt that there was just a might that he might be
out. A neat blouse of electric blue selftinted by dolly dyes (because it
was expected in the _Lady's Pictorial_ that electric blue would be worn)
with a smart vee opening down to the division and kerchief pocket (in
which she always kept a piece of cottonwool scented with her
favourite perfume because the handkerchief spoiled the sit) and a navy
threequarter skirt cut to the stride showed off her slim graceful figure
to perfection. She wore a coquettish little love of a hat of wideleaved
nigger straw contrast trimmed with an underbrim of eggblue chenille and
at the side a butterfly bow of silk to tone. All Tuesday week afternoon
she was hunting to match that chenille but at last she found what she
wanted at Clery's summer sales, the very it, slightly shopsoiled but you
would never notice, seven fingers two and a penny. She did it up all by
herself and what joy was hers when she tried it on then, smiling at the
lovely reflection which the mirror gave back to her! And when she put
it on the waterjug to keep the shape she knew that that would take the
shine out of some people she knew. Her shoes were the newest thing in
footwear (Edy Boardman prided herself that she was very _petite_ but she
never had a foot like Gerty MacDowell, a five, and never would ash,
oak or elm) with patent toecaps and just one smart buckle over
her higharched instep. Her wellturned ankle displayed its perfect
proportions beneath her skirt and just the proper amount and no more of
her shapely limbs encased in finespun hose with highspliced heels and
wide garter tops. As for undies they were Gerty's chief care and who
that knows the fluttering hopes and fears of sweet seventeen (though
Gerty would never see seventeen again) can find it in his heart to
blame her? She had four dinky sets with awfully pretty stitchery,
three garments and nighties extra, and each set slotted with different
coloured ribbons, rosepink, pale blue, mauve and peagreen, and she aired
them herself and blued them when they came home from the wash and ironed
them and she had a brickbat to keep the iron on because she wouldn't
trust those washerwomen as far as she'd see them scorching the things.
She was wearing the blue for luck, hoping against hope, her own colour
and lucky too for a bride to have a bit of blue somewhere on her because
the green she wore that day week brought grief because his father
brought him in to study for the intermediate exhibition and because
she thought perhaps he might be out because when she was dressing that
morning she nearly slipped up the old pair on her inside out and that
was for luck and lovers' meeting if you put those things on inside
out or if they got untied that he was thinking about you so long as it
wasn't of a Friday.

And yet and yet! That strained look on her face! A gnawing sorrow is
there all the time. Her very soul is in her eyes and she would give
worlds to be in the privacy of her own familiar chamber where,
giving way to tears, she could have a good cry and relieve her pentup
feelingsthough not too much because she knew how to cry nicely before
the mirror. You are lovely, Gerty, it said. The paly light of evening
falls upon a face infinitely sad and wistful. Gerty MacDowell yearns
in vain. Yes, she had known from the very first that her daydream of a
marriage has been arranged and the weddingbells ringing for Mrs Reggy
Wylie T. C. D. (because the one who married the elder brother would be
Mrs Wylie) and in the fashionable intelligence Mrs Gertrude Wylie was
wearing a sumptuous confection of grey trimmed with expensive blue fox
was not to be. He was too young to understand. He would not believe in
love, a woman's birthright. The night of the party long ago in Stoer's
(he was still in short trousers) when they were alone and he stole
an arm round her waist she went white to the very lips. He called her
little one in a strangely husky voice and snatched a half kiss (the
first!) but it was only the end of her nose and then he hastened from
the room with a remark about refreshments. Impetuous fellow! Strength of
character had never been Reggy Wylie's strong point and he who would
woo and win Gerty MacDowell must be a man among men. But waiting, always
waiting to be asked and it was leap year too and would soon be over. No
prince charming is her beau ideal to lay a rare and wondrous love at her
feet but rather a manly man with a strong quiet face who had not found
his ideal, perhaps his hair slightly flecked with grey, and who would
understand, take her in his sheltering arms, strain her to him in all
the strength of his deep passionate nature and comfort her with a long
long kiss. It would be like heaven. For such a one she yearns this balmy
summer eve. With all the heart of her she longs to be his only, his
affianced bride for riches for poor, in sickness in health, till death
us two part, from this to this day forward.

And while Edy Boardman was with little Tommy behind the pushcar she was
just thinking would the day ever come when she could call herself his
little wife to be. Then they could talk about her till they went blue in
the face, Bertha Supple too, and Edy, little spitfire, because she would
be twentytwo in November. She would care for him with creature comforts
too for Gerty was womanly wise and knew that a mere man liked that
feeling of hominess. Her griddlecakes done to a goldenbrown hue and
queen Ann's pudding of delightful creaminess had won golden opinions
from all because she had a lucky hand also for lighting a fire, dredge
in the fine selfraising flour and always stir in the same direction,
then cream the milk and sugar and whisk well the white of eggs though
she didn't like the eating part when there were any people that made her
shy and often she wondered why you couldn't eat something poetical like
violets or roses and they would have a beautifully appointed drawingroom
with pictures and engravings and the photograph of grandpapa Giltrap's
lovely dog Garryowen that almost talked it was so human and chintz
covers for the chairs and that silver toastrack in Clery's summer
jumble sales like they have in rich houses. He would be tall with
broad shoulders (she had always admired tall men for a husband) with
glistening white teeth under his carefully trimmed sweeping moustache
and they would go on the continent for their honeymoon (three wonderful
weeks!) and then, when they settled down in a nice snug and cosy little
homely house, every morning they would both have brekky, simple but
perfectly served, for their own two selves and before he went out to
business he would give his dear little wifey a good hearty hug and gaze
for a moment deep down into her eyes.

Edy Boardman asked Tommy Caffrey was he done and he said yes so then she
buttoned up his little knickerbockers for him and told him to run off
and play with Jacky and to be good now and not to fight. But Tommy said
he wanted the ball and Edy told him no that baby was playing with the
ball and if he took it there'd be wigs on the green but Tommy said it
was his ball and he wanted his ball and he pranced on the ground, if
you please. The temper of him! O, he was a man already was little Tommy
Caffrey since he was out of pinnies. Edy told him no, no and to be off
now with him and she told Cissy Caffrey not to give in to him.

--You're not my sister, naughty Tommy said. It's my ball.

But Cissy Caffrey told baby Boardman to look up, look up high at her
finger and she snatched the ball quickly and threw it along the sand and
Tommy after it in full career, having won the day.

--Anything for a quiet life, laughed Ciss.

And she tickled tiny tot's two cheeks to make him forget and played
here's the lord mayor, here's his two horses, here's his gingerbread
carriage and here he walks in, chinchopper, chinchopper, chinchopper
chin. But Edy got as cross as two sticks about him getting his own way
like that from everyone always petting him.

--I'd like to give him something, she said, so I would, where I won't
say.

--On the beeoteetom, laughed Cissy merrily.

Gerty MacDowell bent down her head and crimsoned at the idea of Cissy
saying an unladylike thing like that out loud she'd be ashamed of her
life to say, flushing a deep rosy red, and Edy Boardman said she was
sure the gentleman opposite heard what she said. But not a pin cared
Ciss.

--Let him! she said with a pert toss of her head and a piquant tilt of
her nose. Give it to him too on the same place as quick as I'd look at
him.

Madcap Ciss with her golliwog curls. You had to laugh at her sometimes.
For instance when she asked you would you have some more Chinese tea and
jaspberry ram and when she drew the jugs too and the men's faces on her
nails with red ink make you split your sides or when she wanted to go
where you know she said she wanted to run and pay a visit to the Miss
White. That was just like Cissycums. O, and will you ever forget her the
evening she dressed up in her father's suit and hat and the burned cork
moustache and walked down Tritonville road, smoking a cigarette. There
was none to come up to her for fun. But she was sincerity itself, one of
the bravest and truest hearts heaven ever made, not one of your twofaced
things, too sweet to be wholesome.

And then there came out upon the air the sound of voices and the pealing
anthem of the organ. It was the men's temperance retreat conducted
by the missioner, the reverend John Hughes S. J., rosary, sermon and
benediction of the Most Blessed Sacrament. They were there gathered
together without distinction of social class (and a most edifying
spectacle it was to see) in that simple fane beside the waves, after the
storms of this weary world, kneeling before the feet of the immaculate,
reciting the litany of Our Lady of Loreto, beseeching her to intercede
for them, the old familiar words, holy Mary, holy virgin of virgins. How
sad to poor Gerty's ears! Had her father only avoided the clutches of
the demon drink, by taking the pledge or those powders the drink habit
cured in Pearson's Weekly, she might now be rolling in her carriage,
second to none. Over and over had she told herself that as she mused by
the dying embers in a brown study without the lamp because she hated two
lights or oftentimes gazing out of the window dreamily by the hour at
the rain falling on the rusty bucket, thinking. But that vile decoction
which has ruined so many hearths and homes had cist its shadow over her
childhood days. Nay, she had even witnessed in the home circle deeds of
violence caused by intemperance and had seen her own father, a prey to
the fumes of intoxication, forget himself completely for if there was
one thing of all things that Gerty knew it was that the man who lifts
his hand to a woman save in the way of kindness, deserves to be branded
as the lowest of the low.

And still the voices sang in supplication to the Virgin most powerful,
Virgin most merciful. And Gerty, rapt in thought, scarce saw or heard
her companions or the twins at their boyish gambols or the gentleman
off Sandymount green that Cissy Caffrey called the man that was so like
himself passing along the strand taking a short walk. You never saw him
any way screwed but still and for all that she would not like him for a
father because he was too old or something or on account of his face
(it was a palpable case of Doctor Fell) or his carbuncly nose with the
pimples on it and his sandy moustache a bit white under his nose. Poor
father! With all his faults she loved him still when he sang _Tell me,
Mary, how to woo thee_ or _My love and cottage near Rochelle_ and they
had stewed cockles and lettuce with Lazenby's salad dressing for
supper and when he sang _The moon hath raised_ with Mr Dignam that
died suddenly and was buried, God have mercy on him, from a stroke. Her
mother's birthday that was and Charley was home on his holidays and Tom
and Mr Dignam and Mrs and Patsy and Freddy Dignam and they were to have
had a group taken. No-one would have thought the end was so near. Now he
was laid to rest. And her mother said to him to let that be a warning to
him for the rest of his days and he couldn't even go to the funeral on
account of the gout and she had to go into town to bring him the
letters and samples from his office about Catesby's cork lino, artistic,
standard designs, fit for a palace, gives tiptop wear and always bright
and cheery in the home.

A sterling good daughter was Gerty just like a second mother in the
house, a ministering angel too with a little heart worth its weight in
gold. And when her mother had those raging splitting headaches who was
it rubbed the menthol cone on her forehead but Gerty though she didn't
like her mother's taking pinches of snuff and that was the only single
thing they ever had words about, taking snuff. Everyone thought the
world of her for her gentle ways. It was Gerty who turned off the gas at
the main every night and it was Gerty who tacked up on the wall of that
place where she never forgot every fortnight the chlorate of lime Mr
Tunney the grocer's christmas almanac, the picture of halcyon days
where a young gentleman in the costume they used to wear then with a
threecornered hat was offering a bunch of flowers to his ladylove with
oldtime chivalry through her lattice window. You could see there was a
story behind it. The colours were done something lovely. She was in
a soft clinging white in a studied attitude and the gentleman was in
chocolate and he looked a thorough aristocrat. She often looked at them
dreamily when she went there for a certain purpose and felt her own
arms that were white and soft just like hers with the sleeves back
and thought about those times because she had found out in Walker's
pronouncing dictionary that belonged to grandpapa Giltrap about the
halcyon days what they meant.

The twins were now playing in the most approved brotherly fashion
till at last Master Jacky who was really as bold as brass there was
no getting behind that deliberately kicked the ball as hard as ever he
could down towards the seaweedy rocks. Needless to say poor Tommy was
not slow to voice his dismay but luckily the gentleman in black who was
sitting there by himself came gallantly to the rescue and intercepted
the ball. Our two champions claimed their plaything with lusty cries and
to avoid trouble Cissy Caffrey called to the gentleman to throw it to
her please. The gentleman aimed the ball once or twice and then threw
it up the strand towards Cissy Caffrey but it rolled down the slope and
stopped right under Gerty's skirt near the little pool by the rock. The
twins clamoured again for it and Cissy told her to kick it away and
let them fight for it so Gerty drew back her foot but she wished their
stupid ball hadn't come rolling down to her and she gave a kick but she
missed and Edy and Cissy laughed.

--If you fail try again, Edy Boardman said.

Gerty smiled assent and bit her lip. A delicate pink crept into her
pretty cheek but she was determined to let them see so she just lifted
her skirt a little but just enough and took good aim and gave the ball a
jolly good kick and it went ever so far and the two twins after it down
towards the shingle. Pure jealousy of course it was nothing else to draw
attention on account of the gentleman opposite looking. She felt the
warm flush, a danger signal always with Gerty MacDowell, surging and
flaming into her cheeks. Till then they had only exchanged glances of
the most casual but now under the brim of her new hat she ventured a
look at him and the face that met her gaze there in the twilight, wan
and strangely drawn, seemed to her the saddest she had ever seen.

Through the open window of the church the fragrant incense was wafted
and with it the fragrant names of her who was conceived without stain of
original sin, spiritual vessel, pray for us, honourable vessel, pray
for us, vessel of singular devotion, pray for us, mystical rose. And
careworn hearts were there and toilers for their daily bread and many
who had erred and wandered, their eyes wet with contrition but for all
that bright with hope for the reverend father Father Hughes had told
them what the great saint Bernard said in his famous prayer of Mary, the
most pious Virgin's intercessory power that it was not recorded in any
age that those who implored her powerful protection were ever abandoned
by her.

The twins were now playing again right merrily for the troubles of
childhood are but as fleeting summer showers. Cissy Caffrey played with
baby Boardman till he crowed with glee, clapping baby hands in air. Peep
she cried behind the hood of the pushcar and Edy asked where was Cissy
gone and then Cissy popped up her head and cried ah! and, my word,
didn't the little chap enjoy that! And then she told him to say papa.

--Say papa, baby. Say pa pa pa pa pa pa pa.

And baby did his level best to say it for he was very intelligent for
eleven months everyone said and big for his age and the picture of
health, a perfect little bunch of love, and he would certainly turn out
to be something great, they said.

--Haja ja ja haja.

Cissy wiped his little mouth with the dribbling bib and wanted him to
sit up properly and say pa pa pa but when she undid the strap she cried
out, holy saint Denis, that he was possing wet and to double the half
blanket the other way under him. Of course his infant majesty was most
obstreperous at such toilet formalities and he let everyone know it:

--Habaa baaaahabaaa baaaa.

And two great big lovely big tears coursing down his cheeks. It was all
no use soothering him with no, nono, baby, no and telling him about the
geegee and where was the puffpuff but Ciss, always readywitted, gave
him in his mouth the teat of the suckingbottle and the young heathen was
quickly appeased.

Gerty wished to goodness they would take their squalling baby home out
of that and not get on her nerves, no hour to be out, and the little
brats of twins. She gazed out towards the distant sea. It was like the
paintings that man used to do on the pavement with all the coloured
chalks and such a pity too leaving them there to be all blotted out, the
evening and the clouds coming out and the Bailey light on Howth and to
hear the music like that and the perfume of those incense they burned
in the church like a kind of waft. And while she gazed her heart went
pitapat. Yes, it was her he was looking at, and there was meaning in his
look. His eyes burned into her as though they would search her through
and through, read her very soul. Wonderful eyes they were, superbly
expressive, but could you trust them? People were so queer. She could
see at once by his dark eyes and his pale intellectual face that he
was a foreigner, the image of the photo she had of Martin Harvey, the
matinee idol, only for the moustache which she preferred because she
wasn't stagestruck like Winny Rippingham that wanted they two to always
dress the same on account of a play but she could not see whether he had
an aquiline nose or a slightly _retroussé_ from where he was sitting.
He was in deep mourning, she could see that, and the story of a haunting
sorrow was written on his face. She would have given worlds to know what
it was. He was looking up so intently, so still, and he saw her kick the
ball and perhaps he could see the bright steel buckles of her shoes if
she swung them like that thoughtfully with the toes down. She was glad
that something told her to put on the transparent stockings thinking
Reggy Wylie might be out but that was far away. Here was that of which
she had so often dreamed. It was he who mattered and there was joy on
her face because she wanted him because she felt instinctively that he
was like no-one else. The very heart of the girlwoman went out to him,
her dreamhusband, because she knew on the instant it was him. If he had
suffered, more sinned against than sinning, or even, even, if he had
been himself a sinner, a wicked man, she cared not. Even if he was a
protestant or methodist she could convert him easily if he truly loved
her. There were wounds that wanted healing with heartbalm. She was a
womanly woman not like other flighty girls unfeminine he had known,
those cyclists showing off what they hadn't got and she just yearned to
know all, to forgive all if she could make him fall in love with her,
make him forget the memory of the past. Then mayhap he would embrace her
gently, like a real man, crushing her soft body to him, and love her,
his ownest girlie, for herself alone.

Refuge of sinners. Comfortress of the afflicted. _Ora pro nobis_. Well
has it been said that whosoever prays to her with faith and constancy
can never be lost or cast away: and fitly is she too a haven of refuge
for the afflicted because of the seven dolours which transpierced
her own heart. Gerty could picture the whole scene in the church, the
stained glass windows lighted up, the candles, the flowers and the blue
banners of the blessed Virgin's sodality and Father Conroy was helping
Canon O'Hanlon at the altar, carrying things in and out with his eyes
cast down. He looked almost a saint and his confessionbox was so quiet
and clean and dark and his hands were just like white wax and if ever
she became a Dominican nun in their white habit perhaps he might come to
the convent for the novena of Saint Dominic. He told her that time when
she told him about that in confession, crimsoning up to the roots of her
hair for fear he could see, not to be troubled because that was only the
voice of nature and we were all subject to nature's laws, he said, in
this life and that that was no sin because that came from the nature of
woman instituted by God, he said, and that Our Blessed Lady herself said
to the archangel Gabriel be it done unto me according to Thy Word. He
was so kind and holy and often and often she thought and thought could
she work a ruched teacosy with embroidered floral design for him as a
present or a clock but they had a clock she noticed on the mantelpiece
white and gold with a canarybird that came out of a little house to tell
the time the day she went there about the flowers for the forty hours'
adoration because it was hard to know what sort of a present to give or
perhaps an album of illuminated views of Dublin or some place.

The exasperating little brats of twins began to quarrel again and Jacky
threw the ball out towards the sea and they both ran after it. Little
monkeys common as ditchwater. Someone ought to take them and give them
a good hiding for themselves to keep them in their places, the both of
them. And Cissy and Edy shouted after them to come back because they
were afraid the tide might come in on them and be drowned.

--Jacky! Tommy!

Not they! What a great notion they had! So Cissy said it was the very
last time she'd ever bring them out. She jumped up and called them and
she ran down the slope past him, tossing her hair behind her which had
a good enough colour if there had been more of it but with all the
thingamerry she was always rubbing into it she couldn't get it to grow
long because it wasn't natural so she could just go and throw her hat at
it. She ran with long gandery strides it was a wonder she didn't rip up
her skirt at the side that was too tight on her because there was a lot
of the tomboy about Cissy Caffrey and she was a forward piece whenever
she thought she had a good opportunity to show and just because she was
a good runner she ran like that so that he could see all the end of her
petticoat running and her skinny shanks up as far as possible. It
would have served her just right if she had tripped up over something
accidentally on purpose with her high crooked French heels on her to
make her look tall and got a fine tumble. _Tableau!_ That would have
been a very charming expose for a gentleman like that to witness.

Queen of angels, queen of patriarchs, queen of prophets, of all saints,
they prayed, queen of the most holy rosary and then Father Conroy handed
the thurible to Canon O'Hanlon and he put in the incense and censed the
Blessed Sacrament and Cissy Caffrey caught the two twins and she was
itching to give them a ringing good clip on the ear but she didn't
because she thought he might be watching but she never made a bigger
mistake in all her life because Gerty could see without looking that
he never took his eyes off of her and then Canon O'Hanlon handed the
thurible back to Father Conroy and knelt down looking up at the Blessed
Sacrament and the choir began to sing the _Tantum ergo_ and she just
swung her foot in and out in time as the music rose and fell to
the _Tantumer gosa cramen tum_. Three and eleven she paid for those
stockings in Sparrow's of George's street on the Tuesday, no the Monday
before Easter and there wasn't a brack on them and that was what he
was looking at, transparent, and not at her insignificant ones that had
neither shape nor form (the cheek of her!) because he had eyes in his
head to see the difference for himself.

Cissy came up along the strand with the two twins and their ball with
her hat anyhow on her to one side after her run and she did look a
streel tugging the two kids along with the flimsy blouse she bought only
a fortnight before like a rag on her back and a bit of her petticoat
hanging like a caricature. Gerty just took off her hat for a moment to
settle her hair and a prettier, a daintier head of nutbrown tresses was
never seen on a girl's shoulders--a radiant little vision, in sooth,
almost maddening in its sweetness. You would have to travel many a long
mile before you found a head of hair the like of that. She could almost
see the swift answering flash of admiration in his eyes that set her
tingling in every nerve. She put on her hat so that she could see from
underneath the brim and swung her buckled shoe faster for her breath
caught as she caught the expression in his eyes. He was eying her as a
snake eyes its prey. Her woman's instinct told her that she had raised
the devil in him and at the thought a burning scarlet swept from throat
to brow till the lovely colour of her face became a glorious rose.

Edy Boardman was noticing it too because she was squinting at Gerty,
half smiling, with her specs like an old maid, pretending to nurse the
baby. Irritable little gnat she was and always would be and that was why
no-one could get on with her poking her nose into what was no concern of
hers. And she said to Gerty:

--A penny for your thoughts.

--What? replied Gerty with a smile reinforced by the whitest of teeth. I
was only wondering was it late.

Because she wished to goodness they'd take the snottynosed twins and
their babby home to the mischief out of that so that was why she just
gave a gentle hint about its being late. And when Cissy came up Edy
asked her the time and Miss Cissy, as glib as you like, said it was half
past kissing time, time to kiss again. But Edy wanted to know because
they were told to be in early.

--Wait, said Cissy, I'll run ask my uncle Peter over there what's the
time by his conundrum.

So over she went and when he saw her coming she could see him take his
hand out of his pocket, getting nervous, and beginning to play with his
watchchain, looking up at the church. Passionate nature though he was
Gerty could see that he had enormous control over himself. One moment he
had been there, fascinated by a loveliness that made him gaze, and the
next moment it was the quiet gravefaced gentleman, selfcontrol expressed
in every line of his distinguishedlooking figure.

Cissy said to excuse her would he mind please telling her what was the
right time and Gerty could see him taking out his watch, listening to it
and looking up and clearing his throat and he said he was very sorry his
watch was stopped but he thought it must be after eight because the
sun was set. His voice had a cultured ring in it and though he spoke in
measured accents there was a suspicion of a quiver in the mellow tones.
Cissy said thanks and came back with her tongue out and said uncle said
his waterworks were out of order.

Then they sang the second verse of the _Tantum ergo_ and Canon O'Hanlon
got up again and censed the Blessed Sacrament and knelt down and he told
Father Conroy that one of the candles was just going to set fire to the
flowers and Father Conroy got up and settled it all right and she could
see the gentleman winding his watch and listening to the works and she
swung her leg more in and out in time. It was getting darker but he
could see and he was looking all the time that he was winding the watch
or whatever he was doing to it and then he put it back and put his hands
back into his pockets. She felt a kind of a sensation rushing all over
her and she knew by the feel of her scalp and that irritation against
her stays that that thing must be coming on because the last time too
was when she clipped her hair on account of the moon. His dark eyes
fixed themselves on her again drinking in her every contour, literally
worshipping at her shrine. If ever there was undisguised admiration in a
man's passionate gaze it was there plain to be seen on that man's face.
It is for you, Gertrude MacDowell, and you know it.

Edy began to get ready to go and it was high time for her and Gerty
noticed that that little hint she gave had had the desired effect
because it was a long way along the strand to where there was the place
to push up the pushcar and Cissy took off the twins' caps and tidied
their hair to make herself attractive of course and Canon O'Hanlon stood
up with his cope poking up at his neck and Father Conroy handed him the
card to read off and he read out _Panem de coelo praestitisti eis_ and
Edy and Cissy were talking about the time all the time and asking her
but Gerty could pay them back in their own coin and she just answered
with scathing politeness when Edy asked her was she heartbroken about
her best boy throwing her over. Gerty winced sharply. A brief cold blaze
shone from her eyes that spoke volumes of scorn immeasurable. It hurt--O
yes, it cut deep because Edy had her own quiet way of saying things
like that she knew would wound like the confounded little cat she was.
Gerty's lips parted swiftly to frame the word but she fought back
the sob that rose to her throat, so slim, so flawless, so beautifully
moulded it seemed one an artist might have dreamed of. She had loved him
better than he knew. Lighthearted deceiver and fickle like all his sex
he would never understand what he had meant to her and for an instant
there was in the blue eyes a quick stinging of tears. Their eyes were
probing her mercilessly but with a brave effort she sparkled back in
sympathy as she glanced at her new conquest for them to see.

--O, responded Gerty, quick as lightning, laughing, and the proud head
flashed up. I can throw my cap at who I like because it's leap year.

Her words rang out crystalclear, more musical than the cooing of the
ringdove, but they cut the silence icily. There was that in her young
voice that told that she was not a one to be lightly trifled with. As
for Mr Reggy with his swank and his bit of money she could just chuck
him aside as if he was so much filth and never again would she cast as
much as a second thought on him and tear his silly postcard into a dozen
pieces. And if ever after he dared to presume she could give him one
look of measured scorn that would make him shrivel up on the spot. Miss
puny little Edy's countenance fell to no slight extent and Gerty could
see by her looking as black as thunder that she was simply in a towering
rage though she hid it, the little kinnatt, because that shaft had
struck home for her petty jealousy and they both knew that she was
something aloof, apart, in another sphere, that she was not of them and
never would be and there was somebody else too that knew it and saw it
so they could put that in their pipe and smoke it.

Edy straightened up baby Boardman to get ready to go and Cissy tucked in
the ball and the spades and buckets and it was high time too because the
sandman was on his way for Master Boardman junior. And Cissy told him
too that billy winks was coming and that baby was to go deedaw and baby
looked just too ducky, laughing up out of his gleeful eyes, and Cissy
poked him like that out of fun in his wee fat tummy and baby, without as
much as by your leave, sent up his compliments to all and sundry on to
his brandnew dribbling bib.

--O my! Puddeny pie! protested Ciss. He has his bib destroyed.

The slight _contretemps_ claimed her attention but in two twos she set
that little matter to rights.

Gerty stifled a smothered exclamation and gave a nervous cough and Edy
asked what and she was just going to tell her to catch it while it was
flying but she was ever ladylike in her deportment so she simply passed
it off with consummate tact by saying that that was the benediction
because just then the bell rang out from the steeple over the quiet
seashore because Canon O'Hanlon was up on the altar with the veil that
Father Conroy put round his shoulders giving the benediction with the
Blessed Sacrament in his hands.

How moving the scene there in the gathering twilight, the last glimpse
of Erin, the touching chime of those evening bells and at the same
time a bat flew forth from the ivied belfry through the dusk, hither,
thither, with a tiny lost cry. And she could see far away the lights of
the lighthouses so picturesque she would have loved to do with a box of
paints because it was easier than to make a man and soon the lamplighter
would be going his rounds past the presbyterian church grounds and along
by shady Tritonville avenue where the couples walked and lighting the
lamp near her window where Reggy Wylie used to turn his freewheel like
she read in that book _The Lamplighter_ by Miss Cummins, author of
_Mabel Vaughan_ and other tales. For Gerty had her dreams that no-one
knew of. She loved to read poetry and when she got a keepsake from
Bertha Supple of that lovely confession album with the coralpink cover
to write her thoughts in she laid it in the drawer of her toilettable
which, though it did not err on the side of luxury, was scrupulously
neat and clean. It was there she kept her girlish treasure trove, the
tortoiseshell combs, her child of Mary badge, the whiterose scent, the
eyebrowleine, her alabaster pouncetbox and the ribbons to change
when her things came home from the wash and there were some beautiful
thoughts written in it in violet ink that she bought in Hely's of Dame
Street for she felt that she too could write poetry if she could only
express herself like that poem that appealed to her so deeply that
she had copied out of the newspaper she found one evening round the
potherbs. _Art thou real, my ideal?_ it was called by Louis J Walsh,
Magherafelt, and after there was something about _twilight, wilt thou
ever?_ and ofttimes the beauty of poetry, so sad in its transient
loveliness, had misted her eyes with silent tears for she felt that
the years were slipping by for her, one by one, and but for that one
shortcoming she knew she need fear no competition and that was an
accident coming down Dalkey hill and she always tried to conceal it.
But it must end, she felt. If she saw that magic lure in his eyes there
would be no holding back for her. Love laughs at locksmiths. She
would make the great sacrifice. Her every effort would be to share his
thoughts. Dearer than the whole world would she be to him and gild his
days with happiness. There was the allimportant question and she was
dying to know was he a married man or a widower who had lost his wife
or some tragedy like the nobleman with the foreign name from the land
of song had to have her put into a madhouse, cruel only to be kind.
But even if--what then? Would it make a very great difference? From
everything in the least indelicate her finebred nature instinctively
recoiled. She loathed that sort of person, the fallen women off the
accommodation walk beside the Dodder that went with the soldiers and
coarse men with no respect for a girl's honour, degrading the sex and
being taken up to the police station. No, no: not that. They would be
just good friends like a big brother and sister without all that other
in spite of the conventions of Society with a big ess. Perhaps it was
an old flame he was in mourning for from the days beyond recall. She
thought she understood. She would try to understand him because men were
so different. The old love was waiting, waiting with little white
hands stretched out, with blue appealing eyes. Heart of mine! She would
follow, her dream of love, the dictates of her heart that told her he
was her all in all, the only man in all the world for her for love was
the master guide. Nothing else mattered. Come what might she would be
wild, untrammelled, free.

Canon O'Hanlon put the Blessed Sacrament back into the tabernacle and
genuflected and the choir sang _Laudate Dominum omnes gentes_ and then
he locked the tabernacle door because the benediction was over and
Father Conroy handed him his hat to put on and crosscat Edy asked wasn't
she coming but Jacky Caffrey called out:

--O, look, Cissy!

And they all looked was it sheet lightning but Tommy saw it too over the
trees beside the church, blue and then green and purple.

--It's fireworks, Cissy Caffrey said.

And they all ran down the strand to see over the houses and the church,
helterskelter, Edy with the pushcar with baby Boardman in it and Cissy
holding Tommy and Jacky by the hand so they wouldn't fall running.

--Come on, Gerty, Cissy called. It's the bazaar fireworks.

But Gerty was adamant. She had no intention of being at their beck and
call. If they could run like rossies she could sit so she said she could
see from where she was. The eyes that were fastened upon her set her
pulses tingling. She looked at him a moment, meeting his glance, and
a light broke in upon her. Whitehot passion was in that face, passion
silent as the grave, and it had made her his. At last they were left
alone without the others to pry and pass remarks and she knew he could
be trusted to the death, steadfast, a sterling man, a man of inflexible
honour to his fingertips. His hands and face were working and a tremour
went over her. She leaned back far to look up where the fireworks were
and she caught her knee in her hands so as not to fall back looking up
and there was no-one to see only him and her when she revealed all her
graceful beautifully shaped legs like that, supply soft and delicately
rounded, and she seemed to hear the panting of his heart, his hoarse
breathing, because she knew too about the passion of men like that,
hotblooded, because Bertha Supple told her once in dead secret and made
her swear she'd never about the gentleman lodger that was staying with
them out of the Congested Districts Board that had pictures cut out of
papers of those skirtdancers and highkickers and she said he used to do
something not very nice that you could imagine sometimes in the bed. But
this was altogether different from a thing like that because there was
all the difference because she could almost feel him draw her face to
his and the first quick hot touch of his handsome lips. Besides there
was absolution so long as you didn't do the other thing before being
married and there ought to be women priests that would understand
without your telling out and Cissy Caffrey too sometimes had that dreamy
kind of dreamy look in her eyes so that she too, my dear, and Winny
Rippingham so mad about actors' photographs and besides it was on
account of that other thing coming on the way it did.

And Jacky Caffrey shouted to look, there was another and she leaned back
and the garters were blue to match on account of the transparent and
they all saw it and they all shouted to look, look, there it was and
she leaned back ever so far to see the fireworks and something queer was
flying through the air, a soft thing, to and fro, dark. And she saw a
long Roman candle going up over the trees, up, up, and, in the tense
hush, they were all breathless with excitement as it went higher and
higher and she had to lean back more and more to look up after it, high,
high, almost out of sight, and her face was suffused with a divine, an
entrancing blush from straining back and he could see her other things
too, nainsook knickers, the fabric that caresses the skin, better than
those other pettiwidth, the green, four and eleven, on account of being
white and she let him and she saw that he saw and then it went so high
it went out of sight a moment and she was trembling in every limb from
being bent so far back that he had a full view high up above her knee
where no-one ever not even on the swing or wading and she wasn't ashamed
and he wasn't either to look in that immodest way like that because he
couldn't resist the sight of the wondrous revealment half offered like
those skirtdancers behaving so immodest before gentlemen looking and he
kept on looking, looking. She would fain have cried to him chokingly,
held out her snowy slender arms to him to come, to feel his lips laid on
her white brow, the cry of a young girl's love, a little strangled cry,
wrung from her, that cry that has rung through the ages. And then a
rocket sprang and bang shot blind blank and O! then the Roman candle
burst and it was like a sigh of O! and everyone cried O! O! in raptures
and it gushed out of it a stream of rain gold hair threads and they
shed and ah! they were all greeny dewy stars falling with golden, O so
lovely, O, soft, sweet, soft!

Then all melted away dewily in the grey air: all was silent. Ah! She
glanced at him as she bent forward quickly, a pathetic little glance of
piteous protest, of shy reproach under which he coloured like a girl He
was leaning back against the rock behind. Leopold Bloom (for it is he)
stands silent, with bowed head before those young guileless eyes. What a
brute he had been! At it again? A fair unsullied soul had called to him
and, wretch that he was, how had he answered? An utter cad he had been!
He of all men! But there was an infinite store of mercy in those eyes,
for him too a word of pardon even though he had erred and sinned and
wandered. Should a girl tell? No, a thousand times no. That was their
secret, only theirs, alone in the hiding twilight and there was none to
know or tell save the little bat that flew so softly through the evening
to and fro and little bats don't tell.

Cissy Caffrey whistled, imitating the boys in the football field to show
what a great person she was: and then she cried:

--Gerty! Gerty! We're going. Come on. We can see from farther up.

Gerty had an idea, one of love's little ruses. She slipped a hand into
her kerchief pocket and took out the wadding and waved in reply of
course without letting him and then slipped it back. Wonder if he's too
far to. She rose. Was it goodbye? No. She had to go but they would meet
again, there, and she would dream of that till then, tomorrow, of her
dream of yester eve. She drew herself up to her full height. Their souls
met in a last lingering glance and the eyes that reached her heart, full
of a strange shining, hung enraptured on her sweet flowerlike face. She
half smiled at him wanly, a sweet forgiving smile, a smile that verged
on tears, and then they parted.

Slowly, without looking back she went down the uneven strand to Cissy,
to Edy to Jacky and Tommy Caffrey, to little baby Boardman. It was
darker now and there were stones and bits of wood on the strand and
slippy seaweed. She walked with a certain quiet dignity characteristic
of her but with care and very slowly because--because Gerty MacDowell
was...

Tight boots? No. She's lame! O!

Mr Bloom watched her as she limped away. Poor girl! That's why she's
left on the shelf and the others did a sprint. Thought something was
wrong by the cut of her jib. Jilted beauty. A defect is ten times worse
in a woman. But makes them polite. Glad I didn't know it when she was on
show. Hot little devil all the same. I wouldn't mind. Curiosity like a
nun or a negress or a girl with glasses. That squinty one is delicate.
Near her monthlies, I expect, makes them feel ticklish. I have such
a bad headache today. Where did I put the letter? Yes, all right. All
kinds of crazy longings. Licking pennies. Girl in Tranquilla convent
that nun told me liked to smell rock oil. Virgins go mad in the end I
suppose. Sister? How many women in Dublin have it today? Martha, she.
Something in the air. That's the moon. But then why don't all women
menstruate at the same time with the same moon, I mean? Depends on the
time they were born I suppose. Or all start scratch then get out of
step. Sometimes Molly and Milly together. Anyhow I got the best of that.
Damned glad I didn't do it in the bath this morning over her silly I
will punish you letter. Made up for that tramdriver this morning. That
gouger M'Coy stopping me to say nothing. And his wife engagement in the
country valise, voice like a pickaxe. Thankful for small mercies.
Cheap too. Yours for the asking. Because they want it themselves. Their
natural craving. Shoals of them every evening poured out of offices.
Reserve better. Don't want it they throw it at you. Catch em alive, O.
Pity they can't see themselves. A dream of wellfilled hose. Where was
that? Ah, yes. Mutoscope pictures in Capel street: for men only. Peeping
Tom. Willy's hat and what the girls did with it. Do they snapshot those
girls or is it all a fake? _Lingerie_ does it. Felt for the curves
inside her _deshabillé._ Excites them also when they're. I'm all clean
come and dirty me. And they like dressing one another for the sacrifice.
Milly delighted with Molly's new blouse. At first. Put them all on to
take them all off. Molly. Why I bought her the violet garters. Us too:
the tie he wore, his lovely socks and turnedup trousers. He wore a pair
of gaiters the night that first we met. His lovely shirt was shining
beneath his what? of jet. Say a woman loses a charm with every pin she
takes out. Pinned together. O, Mairy lost the pin of her. Dressed up to
the nines for somebody. Fashion part of their charm. Just changes when
you're on the track of the secret. Except the east: Mary, Martha: now as
then. No reasonable offer refused. She wasn't in a hurry either. Always
off to a fellow when they are. They never forget an appointment. Out on
spec probably. They believe in chance because like themselves. And the
others inclined to give her an odd dig. Girl friends at school, arms
round each other's necks or with ten fingers locked, kissing and
whispering secrets about nothing in the convent garden. Nuns with
whitewashed faces, cool coifs and their rosaries going up and down,
vindictive too for what they can't get. Barbed wire. Be sure now and
write to me. And I'll write to you. Now won't you? Molly and Josie
Powell. Till Mr Right comes along, then meet once in a blue moon.
_Tableau!_ O, look who it is for the love of God! How are you at all?
What have you been doing with yourself? Kiss and delighted to, kiss,
to see you. Picking holes in each other's appearance. You're looking
splendid. Sister souls. Showing their teeth at one another. How many
have you left? Wouldn't lend each other a pinch of salt.

Ah!

Devils they are when that's coming on them. Dark devilish appearance.
Molly often told me feel things a ton weight. Scratch the sole of my
foot. O that way! O, that's exquisite! Feel it myself too. Good to rest
once in a way. Wonder if it's bad to go with them then. Safe in one way.
Turns milk, makes fiddlestrings snap. Something about withering plants I
read in a garden. Besides they say if the flower withers she wears she's
a flirt. All are. Daresay she felt 1. When you feel like that you often
meet what you feel. Liked me or what? Dress they look at. Always know a
fellow courting: collars and cuffs. Well cocks and lions do the same
and stags. Same time might prefer a tie undone or something. Trousers?
Suppose I when I was? No. Gently does it. Dislike rough and tumble. Kiss
in the dark and never tell. Saw something in me. Wonder what. Sooner
have me as I am than some poet chap with bearsgrease plastery hair,
lovelock over his dexter optic. To aid gentleman in literary. Ought to
attend to my appearance my age. Didn't let her see me in profile. Still,
you never know. Pretty girls and ugly men marrying. Beauty and the
beast. Besides I can't be so if Molly. Took off her hat to show her
hair. Wide brim. Bought to hide her face, meeting someone might know
her, bend down or carry a bunch of flowers to smell. Hair strong in rut.
Ten bob I got for Molly's combings when we were on the rocks in Holles
street. Why not? Suppose he gave her money. Why not? All a prejudice.
She's worth ten, fifteen, more, a pound. What? I think so. All that for
nothing. Bold hand: Mrs Marion. Did I forget to write address on
that letter like the postcard I sent to Flynn? And the day I went to
Drimmie's without a necktie. Wrangle with Molly it was put me off. No,
I remember. Richie Goulding: he's another. Weighs on his mind. Funny
my watch stopped at half past four. Dust. Shark liver oil they use to
clean. Could do it myself. Save. Was that just when he, she?

O, he did. Into her. She did. Done.

Ah!

Mr Bloom with careful hand recomposed his wet shirt. O Lord, that little
limping devil. Begins to feel cold and clammy. Aftereffect not pleasant.
Still you have to get rid of it someway. They don't care. Complimented
perhaps. Go home to nicey bread and milky and say night prayers with the
kiddies. Well, aren't they? See her as she is spoil all. Must have
the stage setting, the rouge, costume, position, music. The name too.
_Amours_ of actresses. Nell Gwynn, Mrs Bracegirdle, Maud Branscombe.
Curtain up. Moonlight silver effulgence. Maiden discovered with pensive
bosom. Little sweetheart come and kiss me. Still, I feel. The strength
it gives a man. That's the secret of it. Good job I let off there behind
the wall coming out of Dignam's. Cider that was. Otherwise I couldn't
have. Makes you want to sing after. _Lacaus esant taratara_. Suppose I
spoke to her. What about? Bad plan however if you don't know how to end
the conversation. Ask them a question they ask you another. Good idea if
you're stuck. Gain time. But then you're in a cart. Wonderful of course
if you say: good evening, and you see she's on for it: good evening. O
but the dark evening in the Appian way I nearly spoke to Mrs Clinch O
thinking she was. Whew! Girl in Meath street that night. All the dirty
things I made her say. All wrong of course. My arks she called it. It's
so hard to find one who. Aho! If you don't answer when they solicit must
be horrible for them till they harden. And kissed my hand when I gave
her the extra two shillings. Parrots. Press the button and the bird will
squeak. Wish she hadn't called me sir. O, her mouth in the dark! And you
a married man with a single girl! That's what they enjoy. Taking a man
from another woman. Or even hear of it. Different with me. Glad to get
away from other chap's wife. Eating off his cold plate. Chap in the
Burton today spitting back gumchewed gristle. French letter still in
my pocketbook. Cause of half the trouble. But might happen sometime,
I don't think. Come in, all is prepared. I dreamt. What? Worst is
beginning. How they change the venue when it's not what they like. Ask
you do you like mushrooms because she once knew a gentleman who. Or ask
you what someone was going to say when he changed his mind and stopped.
Yet if I went the whole hog, say: I want to, something like that.
Because I did. She too. Offend her. Then make it up. Pretend to want
something awfully, then cry off for her sake. Flatters them. She must
have been thinking of someone else all the time. What harm? Must since
she came to the use of reason, he, he and he. First kiss does the trick.
The propitious moment. Something inside them goes pop. Mushy like, tell
by their eye, on the sly. First thoughts are best. Remember that till
their dying day. Molly, lieutenant Mulvey that kissed her under the
Moorish wall beside the gardens. Fifteen she told me. But her breasts
were developed. Fell asleep then. After Glencree dinner that was when we
drove home. Featherbed mountain. Gnashing her teeth in sleep. Lord mayor
had his eye on her too. Val Dillon. Apoplectic.

There she is with them down there for the fireworks. My fireworks. Up
like a rocket, down like a stick. And the children, twins they must
be, waiting for something to happen. Want to be grownups. Dressing in
mother's clothes. Time enough, understand all the ways of the world. And
the dark one with the mop head and the nigger mouth. I knew she could
whistle. Mouth made for that. Like Molly. Why that highclass whore in
Jammet's wore her veil only to her nose. Would you mind, please, telling
me the right time? I'll tell you the right time up a dark lane.
Say prunes and prisms forty times every morning, cure for fat lips.
Caressing the little boy too. Onlookers see most of the game. Of course
they understand birds, animals, babies. In their line.

Didn't look back when she was going down the strand. Wouldn't give that
satisfaction. Those girls, those girls, those lovely seaside girls. Fine
eyes she had, clear. It's the white of the eye brings that out not so
much the pupil. Did she know what I? Course. Like a cat sitting beyond
a dog's jump. Women never meet one like that Wilkins in the high school
drawing a picture of Venus with all his belongings on show. Call that
innocence? Poor idiot! His wife has her work cut out for her. Never see
them sit on a bench marked _Wet Paint_. Eyes all over them. Look under
the bed for what's not there. Longing to get the fright of their lives.
Sharp as needles they are. When I said to Molly the man at the corner of
Cuffe street was goodlooking, thought she might like, twigged at once he
had a false arm. Had, too. Where do they get that? Typist going up Roger
Greene's stairs two at a time to show her understandings. Handed down
from father to, mother to daughter, I mean. Bred in the bone. Milly for
example drying her handkerchief on the mirror to save the ironing. Best
place for an ad to catch a woman's eye on a mirror. And when I sent
her for Molly's Paisley shawl to Prescott's by the way that ad I must,
carrying home the change in her stocking! Clever little minx. I never
told her. Neat way she carries parcels too. Attract men, small thing
like that. Holding up her hand, shaking it, to let the blood flow back
when it was red. Who did you learn that from? Nobody. Something the
nurse taught me. O, don't they know! Three years old she was in front of
Molly's dressingtable, just before we left Lombard street west. Me have
a nice pace. Mullingar. Who knows? Ways of the world. Young student.
Straight on her pins anyway not like the other. Still she was game.
Lord, I am wet. Devil you are. Swell of her calf. Transparent stockings,
stretched to breaking point. Not like that frump today. A. E. Rumpled
stockings. Or the one in Grafton street. White. Wow! Beef to the heel.

A monkey puzzle rocket burst, spluttering in darting crackles. Zrads and
zrads, zrads, zrads. And Cissy and Tommy and Jacky ran out to see and
Edy after with the pushcar and then Gerty beyond the curve of the rocks.
Will she? Watch! Watch! See! Looked round. She smelt an onion. Darling,
I saw, your. I saw all.

Lord!

Did me good all the same. Off colour after Kiernan's, Dignam's. For
this relief much thanks. In _Hamlet,_ that is. Lord! It was all things
combined. Excitement. When she leaned back, felt an ache at the butt
of my tongue. Your head it simply swirls. He's right. Might have made a
worse fool of myself however. Instead of talking about nothing. Then
I will tell you all. Still it was a kind of language between us. It
couldn't be? No, Gerty they called her. Might be false name however like
my name and the address Dolphin's barn a blind.

_Her maiden name was Jemina Brown And she lived with her mother in
Irishtown._

Place made me think of that I suppose. All tarred with the same brush
Wiping pens in their stockings. But the ball rolled down to her as if
it understood. Every bullet has its billet. Course I never could throw
anything straight at school. Crooked as a ram's horn. Sad however
because it lasts only a few years till they settle down to potwalloping
and papa's pants will soon fit Willy and fuller's earth for the baby
when they hold him out to do ah ah. No soft job. Saves them. Keeps
them out of harm's way. Nature. Washing child, washing corpse. Dignam.
Children's hands always round them. Cocoanut skulls, monkeys, not even
closed at first, sour milk in their swaddles and tainted curds. Oughtn't
to have given that child an empty teat to suck. Fill it up with wind.
Mrs Beaufoy, Purefoy. Must call to the hospital. Wonder is nurse Callan
there still. She used to look over some nights when Molly was in the
Coffee Palace. That young doctor O'Hare I noticed her brushing his coat.
And Mrs Breen and Mrs Dignam once like that too, marriageable. Worst
of all at night Mrs Duggan told me in the City Arms. Husband rolling in
drunk, stink of pub off him like a polecat. Have that in your nose in
the dark, whiff of stale boose. Then ask in the morning: was I drunk
last night? Bad policy however to fault the husband. Chickens come home
to roost. They stick by one another like glue. Maybe the women's fault
also. That's where Molly can knock spots off them. It's the blood of the
south. Moorish. Also the form, the figure. Hands felt for the opulent.
Just compare for instance those others. Wife locked up at home, skeleton
in the cupboard. Allow me to introduce my. Then they trot you out some
kind of a nondescript, wouldn't know what to call her. Always see a
fellow's weak point in his wife. Still there's destiny in it, falling
in love. Have their own secrets between them. Chaps that would go to the
dogs if some woman didn't take them in hand. Then little chits of girls,
height of a shilling in coppers, with little hubbies. As God made them
he matched them. Sometimes children turn out well enough. Twice nought
makes one. Or old rich chap of seventy and blushing bride. Marry in May
and repent in December. This wet is very unpleasant. Stuck. Well the
foreskin is not back. Better detach.

Ow!

Other hand a sixfooter with a wifey up to his watchpocket. Long and
the short of it. Big he and little she. Very strange about my watch.
Wristwatches are always going wrong. Wonder is there any magnetic
influence between the person because that was about the time he. Yes, I
suppose, at once. Cat's away, the mice will play. I remember looking
in Pill lane. Also that now is magnetism. Back of everything magnetism.
Earth for instance pulling this and being pulled. That causes movement.
And time, well that's the time the movement takes. Then if one thing
stopped the whole ghesabo would stop bit by bit. Because it's all
arranged. Magnetic needle tells you what's going on in the sun, the
stars. Little piece of steel iron. When you hold out the fork. Come.
Come. Tip. Woman and man that is. Fork and steel. Molly, he. Dress up
and look and suggest and let you see and see more and defy you if you're
a man to see that and, like a sneeze coming, legs, look, look and if you
have any guts in you. Tip. Have to let fly.

Wonder how is she feeling in that region. Shame all put on before third
person. More put out about a hole in her stocking. Molly, her underjaw
stuck out, head back, about the farmer in the ridingboots and spurs at
the horse show. And when the painters were in Lombard street west.
Fine voice that fellow had. How Giuglini began. Smell that I did. Like
flowers. It was too. Violets. Came from the turpentine probably in the
paint. Make their own use of everything. Same time doing it scraped her
slipper on the floor so they wouldn't hear. But lots of them can't kick
the beam, I think. Keep that thing up for hours. Kind of a general all
round over me and half down my back.

Wait. Hm. Hm. Yes. That's her perfume. Why she waved her hand. I leave
you this to think of me when I'm far away on the pillow. What is it?
Heliotrope? No. Hyacinth? Hm. Roses, I think. She'd like scent of that
kind. Sweet and cheap: soon sour. Why Molly likes opoponax. Suits her,
with a little jessamine mixed. Her high notes and her low notes. At the
dance night she met him, dance of the hours. Heat brought it out. She
was wearing her black and it had the perfume of the time before. Good
conductor, is it? Or bad? Light too. Suppose there's some connection.
For instance if you go into a cellar where it's dark. Mysterious thing
too. Why did I smell it only now? Took its time in coming like herself,
slow but sure. Suppose it's ever so many millions of tiny grains
blown across. Yes, it is. Because those spice islands, Cinghalese this
morning, smell them leagues off. Tell you what it is. It's like a fine
fine veil or web they have all over the skin, fine like what do you
call it gossamer, and they're always spinning it out of them, fine as
anything, like rainbow colours without knowing it. Clings to everything
she takes off. Vamp of her stockings. Warm shoe. Stays. Drawers: little
kick, taking them off. Byby till next time. Also the cat likes to sniff
in her shift on the bed. Know her smell in a thousand. Bathwater too.
Reminds me of strawberries and cream. Wonder where it is really. There
or the armpits or under the neck. Because you get it out of all holes
and corners. Hyacinth perfume made of oil of ether or something.
Muskrat. Bag under their tails. One grain pour off odour for years. Dogs
at each other behind. Good evening. Evening. How do you sniff? Hm. Hm.
Very well, thank you. Animals go by that. Yes now, look at it that way.
We're the same. Some women, instance, warn you off when they have their
period. Come near. Then get a hogo you could hang your hat on. Like
what? Potted herrings gone stale or. Boof! Please keep off the grass.

Perhaps they get a man smell off us. What though? Cigary gloves long
John had on his desk the other day. Breath? What you eat and drink gives
that. No. Mansmell, I mean. Must be connected with that because priests
that are supposed to be are different. Women buzz round it like flies
round treacle. Railed off the altar get on to it at any cost. The tree
of forbidden priest. O, father, will you? Let me be the first to. That
diffuses itself all through the body, permeates. Source of life. And
it's extremely curious the smell. Celery sauce. Let me.

Mr Bloom inserted his nose. Hm. Into the. Hm. Opening of his waistcoat.
Almonds or. No. Lemons it is. Ah no, that's the soap.

O by the by that lotion. I knew there was something on my mind. Never
went back and the soap not paid. Dislike carrying bottles like that hag
this morning. Hynes might have paid me that three shillings. I could
mention Meagher's just to remind him. Still if he works that paragraph.
Two and nine. Bad opinion of me he'll have. Call tomorrow. How much do
I owe you? Three and nine? Two and nine, sir. Ah. Might stop him giving
credit another time. Lose your customers that way. Pubs do. Fellows run
up a bill on the slate and then slinking around the back streets into
somewhere else.

Here's this nobleman passed before. Blown in from the bay. Just went as
far as turn back. Always at home at dinnertime. Looks mangled out: had a
good tuck in. Enjoying nature now. Grace after meals. After supper walk
a mile. Sure he has a small bank balance somewhere, government sit. Walk
after him now make him awkward like those newsboys me today. Still you
learn something. See ourselves as others see us. So long as women don't
mock what matter? That's the way to find out. Ask yourself who is he
now. _The Mystery Man on the Beach_, prize titbit story by Mr Leopold
Bloom. Payment at the rate of one guinea per column. And that fellow
today at the graveside in the brown macintosh. Corns on his kismet
however. Healthy perhaps absorb all the. Whistle brings rain they say.
Must be some somewhere. Salt in the Ormond damp. The body feels the
atmosphere. Old Betty's joints are on the rack. Mother Shipton's
prophecy that is about ships around they fly in the twinkling. No. Signs
of rain it is. The royal reader. And distant hills seem coming nigh.

Howth. Bailey light. Two, four, six, eight, nine. See. Has to change or
they might think it a house. Wreckers. Grace Darling. People afraid of
the dark. Also glowworms, cyclists: lightingup time. Jewels diamonds
flash better. Women. Light is a kind of reassuring. Not going to hurt
you. Better now of course than long ago. Country roads. Run you through
the small guts for nothing. Still two types there are you bob against.
Scowl or smile. Pardon! Not at all. Best time to spray plants too in
the shade after the sun. Some light still. Red rays are longest. Roygbiv
Vance taught us: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. A
star I see. Venus? Can't tell yet. Two. When three it's night. Were
those nightclouds there all the time? Looks like a phantom ship. No.
Wait. Trees are they? An optical illusion. Mirage. Land of the setting
sun this. Homerule sun setting in the southeast. My native land,
goodnight.

Dew falling. Bad for you, dear, to sit on that stone. Brings on white
fluxions. Never have little baby then less he was big strong fight his
way up through. Might get piles myself. Sticks too like a summer cold,
sore on the mouth. Cut with grass or paper worst. Friction of the
position. Like to be that rock she sat on. O sweet little, you don't
know how nice you looked. I begin to like them at that age. Green
apples. Grab at all that offer. Suppose it's the only time we cross
legs, seated. Also the library today: those girl graduates. Happy chairs
under them. But it's the evening influence. They feel all that. Open
like flowers, know their hours, sunflowers, Jerusalem artichokes, in
ballrooms, chandeliers, avenues under the lamps. Nightstock in Mat
Dillon's garden where I kissed her shoulder. Wish I had a full length
oilpainting of her then. June that was too I wooed. The year returns.
History repeats itself. Ye crags and peaks I'm with you once again.
Life, love, voyage round your own little world. And now? Sad about her
lame of course but must be on your guard not to feel too much pity. They
take advantage.

All quiet on Howth now. The distant hills seem. Where we. The
rhododendrons. I am a fool perhaps. He gets the plums, and I the
plumstones. Where I come in. All that old hill has seen. Names change:
that's all. Lovers: yum yum.

Tired I feel now. Will I get up? O wait. Drained all the manhood out of
me, little wretch. She kissed me. Never again. My youth. Only once it
comes. Or hers. Take the train there tomorrow. No. Returning not the
same. Like kids your second visit to a house. The new I want. Nothing
new under the sun. Care of P. O. Dolphin's Barn. Are you not happy in
your? Naughty darling. At Dolphin's barn charades in Luke Doyle's house.
Mat Dillon and his bevy of daughters: Tiny, Atty, Floey, Maimy, Louy,
Hetty. Molly too. Eightyseven that was. Year before we. And the old
major, partial to his drop of spirits. Curious she an only child, I an
only child. So it returns. Think you're escaping and run into yourself.
Longest way round is the shortest way home. And just when he and she.
Circus horse walking in a ring. Rip van Winkle we played. Rip: tear in
Henny Doyle's overcoat. Van: breadvan delivering. Winkle: cockles and
periwinkles. Then I did Rip van Winkle coming back. She leaned on the
sideboard watching. Moorish eyes. Twenty years asleep in Sleepy Hollow.
All changed. Forgotten. The young are old. His gun rusty from the dew.

Ba. What is that flying about? Swallow? Bat probably. Thinks I'm a tree,
so blind. Have birds no smell? Metempsychosis. They believed you could
be changed into a tree from grief. Weeping willow. Ba. There he goes.
Funny little beggar. Wonder where he lives. Belfry up there. Very
likely. Hanging by his heels in the odour of sanctity. Bell scared him
out, I suppose. Mass seems to be over. Could hear them all at it. Pray
for us. And pray for us. And pray for us. Good idea the repetition. Same
thing with ads. Buy from us. And buy from us. Yes, there's the light in
the priest's house. Their frugal meal. Remember about the mistake in the
valuation when I was in Thom's. Twentyeight it is. Two houses they have.
Gabriel Conroy's brother is curate. Ba. Again. Wonder why they come out
at night like mice. They're a mixed breed. Birds are like hopping mice.
What frightens them, light or noise? Better sit still. All instinct
like the bird in drouth got water out of the end of a jar by throwing
in pebbles. Like a little man in a cloak he is with tiny hands. Weeny
bones. Almost see them shimmering, kind of a bluey white. Colours depend
on the light you see. Stare the sun for example like the eagle then look
at a shoe see a blotch blob yellowish. Wants to stamp his trademark on
everything. Instance, that cat this morning on the staircase. Colour of
brown turf. Say you never see them with three colours. Not true. That
half tabbywhite tortoiseshell in the _City Arms_ with the letter em on
her forehead. Body fifty different colours. Howth a while ago amethyst.
Glass flashing. That's how that wise man what's his name with the
burning glass. Then the heather goes on fire. It can't be tourists'
matches. What? Perhaps the sticks dry rub together in the wind and
light. Or broken bottles in the furze act as a burning glass in the sun.
Archimedes. I have it! My memory's not so bad.

Ba. Who knows what they're always flying for. Insects? That bee last
week got into the room playing with his shadow on the ceiling. Might
be the one bit me, come back to see. Birds too. Never find out. Or what
they say. Like our small talk. And says she and says he. Nerve they have
to fly over the ocean and back. Lots must be killed in storms, telegraph
wires. Dreadful life sailors have too. Big brutes of oceangoing steamers
floundering along in the dark, lowing out like seacows. _Faugh a
Ballagh!_ Out of that, bloody curse to you! Others in vessels, bit of
a handkerchief sail, pitched about like snuff at a wake when the stormy
winds do blow. Married too. Sometimes away for years at the ends of the
earth somewhere. No ends really because it's round. Wife in every port
they say. She has a good job if she minds it till Johnny comes marching
home again. If ever he does. Smelling the tail end of ports. How can
they like the sea? Yet they do. The anchor's weighed. Off he sails with
a scapular or a medal on him for luck. Well. And the tephilim no what's
this they call it poor papa's father had on his door to touch. That
brought us out of the land of Egypt and into the house of bondage.
Something in all those superstitions because when you go out never know
what dangers. Hanging on to a plank or astride of a beam for grim life,
lifebelt round him, gulping salt water, and that's the last of his nibs
till the sharks catch hold of him. Do fish ever get seasick?

Then you have a beautiful calm without a cloud, smooth sea, placid,
crew and cargo in smithereens, Davy Jones' locker, moon looking down so
peaceful. Not my fault, old cockalorum.

A last lonely candle wandered up the sky from Mirus bazaar in search of
funds for Mercer's hospital and broke, drooping, and shed a cluster
of violet but one white stars. They floated, fell: they faded. The
shepherd's hour: the hour of folding: hour of tryst. From house to
house, giving his everwelcome double knock, went the nine o'clock
postman, the glowworm's lamp at his belt gleaming here and there through
the laurel hedges. And among the five young trees a hoisted lintstock
lit the lamp at Leahy's terrace. By screens of lighted windows, by equal
gardens a shrill voice went crying, wailing: _Evening Telegraph, stop
press edition! Result of the Gold Cup race!_ and from the door of
Dignam's house a boy ran out and called. Twittering the bat flew here,
flew there. Far out over the sands the coming surf crept, grey. Howth
settled for slumber, tired of long days, of yumyum rhododendrons (he was
old) and felt gladly the night breeze lift, ruffle his fell of ferns.
He lay but opened a red eye unsleeping, deep and slowly breathing,
slumberous but awake. And far on Kish bank the anchored lightship
twinkled, winked at Mr Bloom.

Life those chaps out there must have, stuck in the same spot. Irish
Lights board. Penance for their sins. Coastguards too. Rocket and
breeches buoy and lifeboat. Day we went out for the pleasure cruise in
the Erin's King, throwing them the sack of old papers. Bears in the zoo.
Filthy trip. Drunkards out to shake up their livers. Puking overboard
to feed the herrings. Nausea. And the women, fear of God in their faces.
Milly, no sign of funk. Her blue scarf loose, laughing. Don't know what
death is at that age. And then their stomachs clean. But being lost they
fear. When we hid behind the tree at Crumlin. I didn't want to. Mamma!
Mamma! Babes in the wood. Frightening them with masks too. Throwing them
up in the air to catch them. I'll murder you. Is it only half fun? Or
children playing battle. Whole earnest. How can people aim guns at each
other. Sometimes they go off. Poor kids! Only troubles wildfire and
nettlerash. Calomel purge I got her for that. After getting better
asleep with Molly. Very same teeth she has. What do they love? Another
themselves? But the morning she chased her with the umbrella. Perhaps so
as not to hurt. I felt her pulse. Ticking. Little hand it was: now big.
Dearest Papli. All that the hand says when you touch. Loved to count
my waistcoat buttons. Her first stays I remember. Made me laugh to see.
Little paps to begin with. Left one is more sensitive, I think. Mine
too. Nearer the heart? Padding themselves out if fat is in fashion. Her
growing pains at night, calling, wakening me. Frightened she was when
her nature came on her first. Poor child! Strange moment for the mother
too. Brings back her girlhood. Gibraltar. Looking from Buena Vista.
O'Hara's tower. The seabirds screaming. Old Barbary ape that gobbled all
his family. Sundown, gunfire for the men to cross the lines. Looking
out over the sea she told me. Evening like this, but clear, no clouds.
I always thought I'd marry a lord or a rich gentleman coming with a
private yacht. _Buenas noches, señorita. El hombre ama la muchacha
hermosa_. Why me? Because you were so foreign from the others.

Better not stick here all night like a limpet. This weather makes you
dull. Must be getting on for nine by the light. Go home. Too late for
_Leah, Lily of Killarney._ No. Might be still up. Call to the hospital
to see. Hope she's over. Long day I've had. Martha, the bath, funeral,
house of Keyes, museum with those goddesses, Dedalus' song. Then that
bawler in Barney Kiernan's. Got my own back there. Drunken ranters what
I said about his God made him wince. Mistake to hit back. Or? No.
Ought to go home and laugh at themselves. Always want to be swilling in
company. Afraid to be alone like a child of two. Suppose he hit me. Look
at it other way round. Not so bad then. Perhaps not to hurt he meant.
Three cheers for Israel. Three cheers for the sister-in-law he hawked
about, three fangs in her mouth. Same style of beauty. Particularly nice
old party for a cup of tea. The sister of the wife of the wild man of
Borneo has just come to town. Imagine that in the early morning at close
range. Everyone to his taste as Morris said when he kissed the cow. But
Dignam's put the boots on it. Houses of mourning so depressing because
you never know. Anyhow she wants the money. Must call to those Scottish
Widows as I promised. Strange name. Takes it for granted we're going to
pop off first. That widow on Monday was it outside Cramer's that
looked at me. Buried the poor husband but progressing favourably on
the premium. Her widow's mite. Well? What do you expect her to do? Must
wheedle her way along. Widower I hate to see. Looks so forlorn. Poor man
O'Connor wife and five children poisoned by mussels here. The sewage.
Hopeless. Some good matronly woman in a porkpie hat to mother him. Take
him in tow, platter face and a large apron. Ladies' grey flannelette
bloomers, three shillings a pair, astonishing bargain. Plain and loved,
loved for ever, they say. Ugly: no woman thinks she is. Love, lie and be
handsome for tomorrow we die. See him sometimes walking about trying to
find out who played the trick. U. p: up. Fate that is. He, not me. Also
a shop often noticed. Curse seems to dog it. Dreamt last night? Wait.
Something confused. She had red slippers on. Turkish. Wore the breeches.
Suppose she does? Would I like her in pyjamas? Damned hard to answer.
Nannetti's gone. Mailboat. Near Holyhead by now. Must nail that ad
of Keyes's. Work Hynes and Crawford. Petticoats for Molly. She has
something to put in them. What's that? Might be money.

Mr Bloom stooped and turned over a piece of paper on the strand. He
brought it near his eyes and peered. Letter? No. Can't read. Better go.
Better. I'm tired to move. Page of an old copybook. All those holes and
pebbles. Who could count them? Never know what you find. Bottle with
story of a treasure in it, thrown from a wreck. Parcels post. Children
always want to throw things in the sea. Trust? Bread cast on the waters.
What's this? Bit of stick.

O! Exhausted that female has me. Not so young now. Will she come here
tomorrow? Wait for her somewhere for ever. Must come back. Murderers do.
Will I?

Mr Bloom with his stick gently vexed the thick sand at his foot. Write a
message for her. Might remain. What?

I.

Some flatfoot tramp on it in the morning. Useless. Washed away. Tide
comes here. Saw a pool near her foot. Bend, see my face there, dark
mirror, breathe on it, stirs. All these rocks with lines and scars and
letters. O, those transparent! Besides they don't know. What is the
meaning of that other world. I called you naughty boy because I do not
like.

AM. A.

No room. Let it go.

Mr Bloom effaced the letters with his slow boot. Hopeless thing sand.
Nothing grows in it. All fades. No fear of big vessels coming up here.
Except Guinness's barges. Round the Kish in eighty days. Done half by
design.

He flung his wooden pen away. The stick fell in silted sand, stuck. Now
if you were trying to do that for a week on end you couldn't. Chance.
We'll never meet again. But it was lovely. Goodbye, dear. Thanks. Made
me feel so young.

Short snooze now if I had. Must be near nine. Liverpool boat long gone..
Not even the smoke. And she can do the other. Did too. And Belfast. I
won't go. Race there, race back to Ennis. Let him. Just close my eyes
a moment. Won't sleep, though. Half dream. It never comes the same. Bat
again. No harm in him. Just a few.

O sweety all your little girlwhite up I saw dirty bracegirdle made me do
love sticky we two naughty Grace darling she him half past the bed met
him pike hoses frillies for Raoul de perfume your wife black hair heave
under embon _señorita_ young eyes Mulvey plump bubs me breadvan Winkle
red slippers she rusty sleep wander years of dreams return tail end
Agendath swoony lovey showed me her next year in drawers return next in
her next her next.

A bat flew. Here. There. Here. Far in the grey a bell chimed. Mr Bloom
with open mouth, his left boot sanded sideways, leaned, breathed. Just
for a few

     _Cuckoo
     Cuckoo
     Cuckoo._

The clock on the mantelpiece in the priest's house cooed where Canon
O'Hanlon and Father Conroy and the reverend John Hughes S. J. were
taking tea and sodabread and butter and fried mutton chops with catsup
and talking about

     _Cuckoo
     Cuckoo
     Cuckoo._

Because it was a little canarybird that came out of its little house
to tell the time that Gerty MacDowell noticed the time she was there
because she was as quick as anything about a thing like that, was Gerty
MacDowell, and she noticed at once that that foreign gentleman that was
sitting on the rocks looking was

     _Cuckoo
     Cuckoo
     Cuckoo._


Deshil Holles Eamus. Deshil Holles Eamus. Deshil Holles Eamus.

Send us bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening and wombfruit. Send
us bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening and wombfruit. Send us
bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening and wombfruit.

Hoopsa boyaboy hoopsa! Hoopsa boyaboy hoopsa! Hoopsa boyaboy hoopsa!

Universally that person's acumen is esteemed very little perceptive
concerning whatsoever matters are being held as most profitably by
mortals with sapience endowed to be studied who is ignorant of that
which the most in doctrine erudite and certainly by reason of that in
them high mind's ornament deserving of veneration constantly maintain
when by general consent they affirm that other circumstances being
equal by no exterior splendour is the prosperity of a nation more
efficaciously asserted than by the measure of how far forward may
have progressed the tribute of its solicitude for that proliferent
continuance which of evils the original if it be absent when fortunately
present constitutes the certain sign of omnipotent nature's incorrupted
benefaction. For who is there who anything of some significance has
apprehended but is conscious that that exterior splendour may be the
surface of a downwardtending lutulent reality or on the contrary anyone
so is there unilluminated as not to perceive that as no nature's boon
can contend against the bounty of increase so it behoves every most just
citizen to become the exhortator and admonisher of his semblables and
to tremble lest what had in the past been by the nation excellently
commenced might be in the future not with similar excellence
accomplished if an inverecund habit shall have gradually traduced
the honourable by ancestors transmitted customs to that thither of
profundity that that one was audacious excessively who would have the
hardihood to rise affirming that no more odious offence can for anyone
be than to oblivious neglect to consign that evangel simultaneously
command and promise which on all mortals with prophecy of abundance
or with diminution's menace that exalted of reiteratedly procreating
function ever irrevocably enjoined?

It is not why therefore we shall wonder if, as the best historians
relate, among the Celts, who nothing that was not in its nature
admirable admired, the art of medicine shall have been highly honoured.
Not to speak of hostels, leperyards, sweating chambers, plaguegraves,
their greatest doctors, the O'Shiels, the O'Hickeys, the O'Lees,
have sedulously set down the divers methods by which the sick and the
relapsed found again health whether the malady had been the trembling
withering or loose boyconnell flux. Certainly in every public work which
in it anything of gravity contains preparation should be with importance
commensurate and therefore a plan was by them adopted (whether by having
preconsidered or as the maturation of experience it is difficult in
being said which the discrepant opinions of subsequent inquirers are not
up to the present congrued to render manifest) whereby maternity was so
far from all accident possibility removed that whatever care the patient
in that all hardest of woman hour chiefly required and not solely
for the copiously opulent but also for her who not being sufficiently
moneyed scarcely and often not even scarcely could subsist valiantly and
for an inconsiderable emolument was provided.

To her nothing already then and thenceforward was anyway able to be
molestful for this chiefly felt all citizens except with proliferent
mothers prosperity at all not to can be and as they had received
eternity gods mortals generation to befit them her beholding, when the
case was so hoving itself, parturient in vehicle thereward carrying
desire immense among all one another was impelling on of her to be
received into that domicile. O thing of prudent nation not merely in
being seen but also even in being related worthy of being praised that
they her by anticipation went seeing mother, that she by them suddenly
to be about to be cherished had been begun she felt!

Before born bliss babe had. Within womb won he worship. Whatever in that
one case done commodiously done was. A couch by midwives attended with
wholesome food reposeful, cleanest swaddles as though forthbringing were
now done and by wise foresight set: but to this no less of what drugs
there is need and surgical implements which are pertaining to her
case not omitting aspect of all very distracting spectacles in various
latitudes by our terrestrial orb offered together with images, divine
and human, the cogitation of which by sejunct females is to tumescence
conducive or eases issue in the high sunbright wellbuilt fair home of
mothers when, ostensibly far gone and reproductitive, it is come by her
thereto to lie in, her term up.

Some man that wayfaring was stood by housedoor at night's oncoming. Of
Israel's folk was that man that on earth wandering far had fared. Stark
ruth of man his errand that him lone led till that house.

Of that house A. Horne is lord. Seventy beds keeps he there teeming
mothers are wont that they lie for to thole and bring forth bairns hale
so God's angel to Mary quoth. Watchers tway there walk, white sisters
in ward sleepless. Smarts they still, sickness soothing: in twelve moons
thrice an hundred. Truest bedthanes they twain are, for Horne holding
wariest ward.

In ward wary the watcher hearing come that man mildhearted eft rising
with swire ywimpled to him her gate wide undid. Lo, levin leaping
lightens in eyeblink Ireland's westward welkin. Full she drad that
God the Wreaker all mankind would fordo with water for his evil sins.
Christ's rood made she on breastbone and him drew that he would rathe
infare under her thatch. That man her will wotting worthful went in
Horne's house.

Loth to irk in Horne's hall hat holding the seeker stood. On her stow he
ere was living with dear wife and lovesome daughter that then over land
and seafloor nine years had long outwandered. Once her in townhithe
meeting he to her bow had not doffed. Her to forgive now he craved with
good ground of her allowed that that of him swiftseen face, hers, so
young then had looked. Light swift her eyes kindled, bloom of blushes
his word winning.

As her eyes then ongot his weeds swart therefor sorrow she feared. Glad
after she was that ere adread was. Her he asked if O'Hare Doctor tidings
sent from far coast and she with grameful sigh him answered that O'Hare
Doctor in heaven was. Sad was the man that word to hear that him so
heavied in bowels ruthful. All she there told him, ruing death for
friend so young, algate sore unwilling God's rightwiseness to withsay.
She said that he had a fair sweet death through God His goodness with
masspriest to be shriven, holy housel and sick men's oil to his limbs.
The man then right earnest asked the nun of which death the dead man was
died and the nun answered him and said that he was died in Mona Island
through bellycrab three year agone come Childermas and she prayed to God
the Allruthful to have his dear soul in his undeathliness. He heard her
sad words, in held hat sad staring. So stood they there both awhile in
wanhope sorrowing one with other.

Therefore, everyman, look to that last end that is thy death and the
dust that gripeth on every man that is born of woman for as he came
naked forth from his mother's womb so naked shall he wend him at the
last for to go as he came.

The man that was come in to the house then spoke to the nursingwoman and
he asked her how it fared with the woman that lay there in childbed.
The nursingwoman answered him and said that that woman was in throes
now full three days and that it would be a hard birth unneth to bear
but that now in a little it would be. She said thereto that she had
seen many births of women but never was none so hard as was that woman's
birth. Then she set it all forth to him for because she knew the man
that time was had lived nigh that house. The man hearkened to her words
for he felt with wonder women's woe in the travail that they have of
motherhood and he wondered to look on her face that was a fair face for
any man to see but yet was she left after long years a handmaid. Nine
twelve bloodflows chiding her childless.

And whiles they spake the door of the castle was opened and there nighed
them a mickle noise as of many that sat there at meat. And there came
against the place as they stood a young learningknight yclept Dixon. And
the traveller Leopold was couth to him sithen it had happed that they
had had ado each with other in the house of misericord where this
learningknight lay by cause the traveller Leopold came there to be
healed for he was sore wounded in his breast by a spear wherewith a
horrible and dreadful dragon was smitten him for which he did do make
a salve of volatile salt and chrism as much as he might suffice. And he
said now that he should go in to that castle for to make merry with
them that were there. And the traveller Leopold said that he should go
otherwhither for he was a man of cautels and a subtile. Also the lady
was of his avis and repreved the learningknight though she trowed well
that the traveller had said thing that was false for his subtility. But
the learningknight would not hear say nay nor do her mandement ne have
him in aught contrarious to his list and he said how it was a marvellous
castle. And the traveller Leopold went into the castle for to rest him
for a space being sore of limb after many marches environing in divers
lands and sometime venery.

And in the castle was set a board that was of the birchwood of Finlandy
and it was upheld by four dwarfmen of that country but they durst not
move more for enchantment. And on this board were frightful swords and
knives that are made in a great cavern by swinking demons out of white
flames that they fix then in the horns of buffalos and stags that there
abound marvellously. And there were vessels that are wrought by magic of
Mahound out of seasand and the air by a warlock with his breath that he
blases in to them like to bubbles. And full fair cheer and rich was on
the board that no wight could devise a fuller ne richer. And there was
a vat of silver that was moved by craft to open in the which lay strange
fishes withouten heads though misbelieving men nie that this be possible
thing without they see it natheless they are so. And these fishes lie
in an oily water brought there from Portugal land because of the fatness
that therein is like to the juices of the olivepress. And also it was
a marvel to see in that castle how by magic they make a compost out of
fecund wheatkidneys out of Chaldee that by aid of certain angry spirits
that they do in to it swells up wondrously like to a vast mountain. And
they teach the serpents there to entwine themselves up on long sticks
out of the ground and of the scales of these serpents they brew out a
brewage like to mead.

And the learning knight let pour for childe Leopold a draught and halp
thereto the while all they that were there drank every each. And childe
Leopold did up his beaver for to pleasure him and took apertly somewhat
in amity for he never drank no manner of mead which he then put by and
anon full privily he voided the more part in his neighbour glass and
his neighbour nist not of this wile. And he sat down in that castle with
them for to rest him there awhile. Thanked be Almighty God.

This meanwhile this good sister stood by the door and begged them at the
reverence of Jesu our alther liege Lord to leave their wassailing for
there was above one quick with child, a gentle dame, whose time hied
fast. Sir Leopold heard on the upfloor cry on high and he wondered what
cry that it was whether of child or woman and I marvel, said he, that it
be not come or now. Meseems it dureth overlong. And he was ware and saw
a franklin that hight Lenehan on that side the table that was older than
any of the tother and for that they both were knights virtuous in the
one emprise and eke by cause that he was elder he spoke to him full
gently. But, said he, or it be long too she will bring forth by God His
bounty and have joy of her childing for she hath waited marvellous long.
And the franklin that had drunken said, Expecting each moment to be her
next. Also he took the cup that stood tofore him for him needed never
none asking nor desiring of him to drink and, Now drink, said he, fully
delectably, and he quaffed as far as he might to their both's health for
he was a passing good man of his lustiness. And sir Leopold that was the
goodliest guest that ever sat in scholars' hall and that was the meekest
man and the kindest that ever laid husbandly hand under hen and that was
the very truest knight of the world one that ever did minion service
to lady gentle pledged him courtly in the cup. Woman's woe with wonder
pondering.

Now let us speak of that fellowship that was there to the intent to be
drunken an they might. There was a sort of scholars along either side
the board, that is to wit, Dixon yclept junior of saint Mary Merciable's
with other his fellows Lynch and Madden, scholars of medicine, and the
franklin that hight Lenehan and one from Alba Longa, one Crotthers, and
young Stephen that had mien of a frere that was at head of the board
and Costello that men clepen Punch Costello all long of a mastery of
him erewhile gested (and of all them, reserved young Stephen, he was the
most drunken that demanded still of more mead) and beside the meek sir
Leopold. But on young Malachi they waited for that he promised to have
come and such as intended to no goodness said how he had broke his avow.
And sir Leopold sat with them for he bore fast friendship to sir Simon
and to this his son young Stephen and for that his languor becalmed him
there after longest wanderings insomuch as they feasted him for that
time in the honourablest manner. Ruth red him, love led on with will to
wander, loth to leave.

For they were right witty scholars. And he heard their aresouns each gen
other as touching birth and righteousness, young Madden maintaining that
put such case it were hard the wife to die (for so it had fallen out a
matter of some year agone with a woman of Eblana in Horne's house that
now was trespassed out of this world and the self night next before her
death all leeches and pothecaries had taken counsel of her case). And
they said farther she should live because in the beginning, they said,
the woman should bring forth in pain and wherefore they that were of
this imagination affirmed how young Madden had said truth for he had
conscience to let her die. And not few and of these was young Lynch
were in doubt that the world was now right evil governed as it was never
other howbeit the mean people believed it otherwise but the law nor his
judges did provide no remedy. A redress God grant. This was scant said
but all cried with one acclaim nay, by our Virgin Mother, the wife
should live and the babe to die. In colour whereof they waxed hot
upon that head what with argument and what for their drinking but the
franklin Lenehan was prompt each when to pour them ale so that at the
least way mirth might not lack. Then young Madden showed all the whole
affair and said how that she was dead and how for holy religion sake by
rede of palmer and bedesman and for a vow he had made to Saint Ultan of
Arbraccan her goodman husband would not let her death whereby they were
all wondrous grieved. To whom young Stephen had these words following:
Murmur, sirs, is eke oft among lay folk. Both babe and parent now
glorify their Maker, the one in limbo gloom, the other in purgefire.
But, gramercy, what of those Godpossibled souls that we nightly
impossibilise, which is the sin against the Holy Ghost, Very God, Lord
and Giver of Life? For, sirs, he said, our lust is brief. We are means
to those small creatures within us and nature has other ends than we.
Then said Dixon junior to Punch Costello wist he what ends. But he had
overmuch drunken and the best word he could have of him was that he
would ever dishonest a woman whoso she were or wife or maid or leman if
it so fortuned him to be delivered of his spleen of lustihead. Whereat
Crotthers of Alba Longa sang young Malachi's praise of that beast the
unicorn how once in the millennium he cometh by his horn, the other all
this while, pricked forward with their jibes wherewith they did malice
him, witnessing all and several by saint Foutinus his engines that
he was able to do any manner of thing that lay in man to do. Thereat
laughed they all right jocundly only young Stephen and sir Leopold which
never durst laugh too open by reason of a strange humour which he would
not bewray and also for that he rued for her that bare whoso she might
be or wheresoever. Then spake young Stephen orgulous of mother Church
that would cast him out of her bosom, of law of canons, of Lilith,
patron of abortions, of bigness wrought by wind of seeds of brightness
or by potency of vampires mouth to mouth or, as Virgilius saith, by the
influence of the occident or by the reek of moonflower or an she lie
with a woman which her man has but lain with, _effectu secuto_, or
peradventure in her bath according to the opinions of Averroes and Moses
Maimonides. He said also how at the end of the second month a human soul
was infused and how in all our holy mother foldeth ever souls for God's
greater glory whereas that earthly mother which was but a dam to bear
beastly should die by canon for so saith he that holdeth the fisherman's
seal, even that blessed Peter on which rock was holy church for all ages
founded. All they bachelors then asked of sir Leopold would he in like
case so jeopard her person as risk life to save life. A wariness of
mind he would answer as fitted all and, laying hand to jaw, he said
dissembling, as his wont was, that as it was informed him, who had ever
loved the art of physic as might a layman, and agreeing also with his
experience of so seldomseen an accident it was good for that mother
Church belike at one blow had birth and death pence and in such sort
deliverly he scaped their questions. That is truth, pardy, said Dixon,
and, or I err, a pregnant word. Which hearing young Stephen was a
marvellous glad man and he averred that he who stealeth from the poor
lendeth to the Lord for he was of a wild manner when he was drunken and
that he was now in that taking it appeared eftsoons.

But sir Leopold was passing grave maugre his word by cause he still had
pity of the terrorcausing shrieking of shrill women in their labour
and as he was minded of his good lady Marion that had borne him an only
manchild which on his eleventh day on live had died and no man of art
could save so dark is destiny. And she was wondrous stricken of heart
for that evil hap and for his burial did him on a fair corselet of
lamb's wool, the flower of the flock, lest he might perish utterly and
lie akeled (for it was then about the midst of the winter) and now Sir
Leopold that had of his body no manchild for an heir looked upon him his
friend's son and was shut up in sorrow for his forepassed happiness and
as sad as he was that him failed a son of such gentle courage (for all
accounted him of real parts) so grieved he also in no less measure
for young Stephen for that he lived riotously with those wastrels and
murdered his goods with whores.

About that present time young Stephen filled all cups that stood empty
so as there remained but little mo if the prudenter had not shadowed
their approach from him that still plied it very busily who, praying for
the intentions of the sovereign pontiff, he gave them for a pledge the
vicar of Christ which also as he said is vicar of Bray. Now drink we,
quod he, of this mazer and quaff ye this mead which is not indeed parcel
of my body but my soul's bodiment. Leave ye fraction of bread to them
that live by bread alone. Be not afeard neither for any want for this
will comfort more than the other will dismay. See ye here. And he showed
them glistering coins of the tribute and goldsmith notes the worth of
two pound nineteen shilling that he had, he said, for a song which he
writ. They all admired to see the foresaid riches in such dearth of
money as was herebefore. His words were then these as followeth: Know
all men, he said, time's ruins build eternity's mansions. What means
this? Desire's wind blasts the thorntree but after it becomes from a
bramblebush to be a rose upon the rood of time. Mark me now. In woman's
womb word is made flesh but in the spirit of the maker all flesh
that passes becomes the word that shall not pass away. This is the
postcreation. _Omnis caro ad te veniet_. No question but her name is
puissant who aventried the dear corse of our Agenbuyer, Healer and Herd,
our mighty mother and mother most venerable and Bernardus saith aptly
that She hath an _omnipotentiam deiparae supplicem_, that is to wit, an
almightiness of petition because she is the second Eve and she won
us, saith Augustine too, whereas that other, our grandam, which we are
linked up with by successive anastomosis of navelcords sold us all,
seed, breed and generation, for a penny pippin. But here is the matter
now. Or she knew him, that second I say, and was but creature of her
creature, _vergine madre, figlia di tuo figlio_, or she knew him not and
then stands she in the one denial or ignorancy with Peter Piscator who
lives in the house that Jack built and with Joseph the joiner patron of
the happy demise of all unhappy marriages, _parceque M. Léo Taxil nous
a dit que qui l'avait mise dans cette fichue position c'était le
sacre pigeon, ventre de Dieu! Entweder_ transubstantiality ODER
consubstantiality but in no case subsubstantiality. And all cried out
upon it for a very scurvy word. A pregnancy without joy, he said, a
birth without pangs, a body without blemish, a belly without bigness.
Let the lewd with faith and fervour worship. With will will we
withstand, withsay.

Hereupon Punch Costello dinged with his fist upon the board and would
sing a bawdy catch _Staboo Stabella_ about a wench that was put in pod
of a jolly swashbuckler in Almany which he did straightways now attack:
_The first three months she was not well, Staboo,_ when here nurse
Quigley from the door angerly bid them hist ye should shame you nor
was it not meet as she remembered them being her mind was to have all
orderly against lord Andrew came for because she was jealous that
no gasteful turmoil might shorten the honour of her guard. It was an
ancient and a sad matron of a sedate look and christian walking,
in habit dun beseeming her megrims and wrinkled visage, nor did her
hortative want of it effect for incontinently Punch Costello was of them
all embraided and they reclaimed the churl with civil rudeness some and
shaked him with menace of blandishments others whiles they all chode
with him, a murrain seize the dolt, what a devil he would be at, thou
chuff, thou puny, thou got in peasestraw, thou losel, thou chitterling,
thou spawn of a rebel, thou dykedropt, thou abortion thou, to shut up
his drunken drool out of that like a curse of God ape, the good sir
Leopold that had for his cognisance the flower of quiet, margerain
gentle, advising also the time's occasion as most sacred and most worthy
to be most sacred. In Horne's house rest should reign.

To be short this passage was scarce by when Master Dixon of Mary in
Eccles, goodly grinning, asked young Stephen what was the reason why he
had not cided to take friar's vows and he answered him obedience in the
womb, chastity in the tomb but involuntary poverty all his days. Master
Lenehan at this made return that he had heard of those nefarious deeds
and how, as he heard hereof counted, he had besmirched the lily virtue
of a confiding female which was corruption of minors and they all
intershowed it too, waxing merry and toasting to his fathership. But he
said very entirely it was clean contrary to their suppose for he was
the eternal son and ever virgin. Thereat mirth grew in them the more and
they rehearsed to him his curious rite of wedlock for the disrobing and
deflowering of spouses, as the priests use in Madagascar island, she
to be in guise of white and saffron, her groom in white and grain, with
burning of nard and tapers, on a bridebed while clerks sung kyries and
the anthem _Ut novetur sexus omnis corporis mysterium_ till she was
there unmaided. He gave them then a much admirable hymen minim by those
delicate poets Master John Fletcher and Master Francis Beaumont that is
in their _Maid's Tragedy_ that was writ for a like twining of lovers:
_To bed, to bed_ was the burden of it to be played with accompanable
concent upon the virginals. An exquisite dulcet epithalame of most
mollificative suadency for juveniles amatory whom the odoriferous
flambeaus of the paranymphs have escorted to the quadrupedal proscenium
of connubial communion. Well met they were, said Master Dixon, joyed,
but, harkee, young sir, better were they named Beau Mount and Lecher
for, by my troth, of such a mingling much might come. Young Stephen said
indeed to his best remembrance they had but the one doxy between them
and she of the stews to make shift with in delights amorous for life ran
very high in those days and the custom of the country approved with it.
Greater love than this, he said, no man hath that a man lay down his
wife for his friend. Go thou and do likewise. Thus, or words to that
effect, saith Zarathustra, sometime regius professor of French letters
to the university of Oxtail nor breathed there ever that man to whom
mankind was more beholden. Bring a stranger within thy tower it will
go hard but thou wilt have the secondbest bed. _Orate, fratres, pro
memetipso_. And all the people shall say, Amen. Remember, Erin, thy
generations and thy days of old, how thou settedst little by me and by
my word and broughtedst in a stranger to my gates to commit fornication
in my sight and to wax fat and kick like Jeshurum. Therefore hast thou
sinned against my light and hast made me, thy lord, to be the slave of
servants. Return, return, Clan Milly: forget me not, O Milesian. Why
hast thou done this abomination before me that thou didst spurn me for
a merchant of jalaps and didst deny me to the Roman and to the Indian of
dark speech with whom thy daughters did lie luxuriously? Look forth now,
my people, upon the land of behest, even from Horeb and from Nebo and
from Pisgah and from the Horns of Hatten unto a land flowing with milk
and money. But thou hast suckled me with a bitter milk: my moon and my
sun thou hast quenched for ever. And thou hast left me alone for ever
in the dark ways of my bitterness: and with a kiss of ashes hast thou
kissed my mouth. This tenebrosity of the interior, he proceeded to say,
hath not been illumined by the wit of the septuagint nor so much as
mentioned for the Orient from on high Which brake hell's gates visited a
darkness that was foraneous. Assuefaction minorates atrocities (as Tully
saith of his darling Stoics) and Hamlet his father showeth the prince no
blister of combustion. The adiaphane in the noon of life is an Egypt's
plague which in the nights of prenativity and postmortemity is their
most proper _ubi_ and _quomodo_. And as the ends and ultimates of
all things accord in some mean and measure with their inceptions and
originals, that same multiplicit concordance which leads forth growth
from birth accomplishing by a retrogressive metamorphosis that minishing
and ablation towards the final which is agreeable unto nature so is it
with our subsolar being. The aged sisters draw us into life: we wail,
batten, sport, clip, clasp, sunder, dwindle, die: over us dead they
bend. First, saved from waters of old Nile, among bulrushes, a bed
of fasciated wattles: at last the cavity of a mountain, an occulted
sepulchre amid the conclamation of the hillcat and the ossifrage. And as
no man knows the ubicity of his tumulus nor to what processes we shall
thereby be ushered nor whether to Tophet or to Edenville in the like way
is all hidden when we would backward see from what region of remoteness
the whatness of our whoness hath fetched his whenceness.

Thereto Punch Costello roared out mainly _Etienne chanson_ but he loudly
bid them, lo, wisdom hath built herself a house, this vast majestic
longstablished vault, the crystal palace of the Creator, all in applepie
order, a penny for him who finds the pea.

     _Behold the mansion reared by dedal Jack
     See the malt stored in many a refluent sack,
     In the proud cirque of Jackjohn's bivouac._

A black crack of noise in the street here, alack, bawled back. Loud on
left Thor thundered: in anger awful the hammerhurler. Came now the storm
that hist his heart. And Master Lynch bade him have a care to flout and
witwanton as the god self was angered for his hellprate and paganry. And
he that had erst challenged to be so doughty waxed wan as they might all
mark and shrank together and his pitch that was before so haught uplift
was now of a sudden quite plucked down and his heart shook within the
cage of his breast as he tasted the rumour of that storm. Then did some
mock and some jeer and Punch Costello fell hard again to his yale which
Master Lenehan vowed he would do after and he was indeed but a word and
a blow on any the least colour. But the braggart boaster cried that an
old Nobodaddy was in his cups it was muchwhat indifferent and he would
not lag behind his lead. But this was only to dye his desperation as
cowed he crouched in Horne's hall. He drank indeed at one draught to
pluck up a heart of any grace for it thundered long rumblingly over all
the heavens so that Master Madden, being godly certain whiles, knocked
him on his ribs upon that crack of doom and Master Bloom, at the
braggart's side, spoke to him calming words to slumber his great fear,
advertising how it was no other thing but a hubbub noise that he heard,
the discharge of fluid from the thunderhead, look you, having taken
place, and all of the order of a natural phenomenon.

But was young Boasthard's fear vanquished by Calmer's words? No, for he
had in his bosom a spike named Bitterness which could not by words be
done away. And was he then neither calm like the one nor godly like the
other? He was neither as much as he would have liked to be either. But
could he not have endeavoured to have found again as in his youth the
bottle Holiness that then he lived withal? Indeed no for Grace was not
there to find that bottle. Heard he then in that clap the voice of the
god Bringforth or, what Calmer said, a hubbub of Phenomenon? Heard?
Why, he could not but hear unless he had plugged him up the tube
Understanding (which he had not done). For through that tube he saw that
he was in the land of Phenomenon where he must for a certain one day die
as he was like the rest too a passing show. And would he not accept to
die like the rest and pass away? By no means would he though he must nor
would he make more shows according as men do with wives which Phenomenon
has commanded them to do by the book Law. Then wotted he nought of that
other land which is called Believe-on-Me, that is the land of promise
which behoves to the king Delightful and shall be for ever where there
is no death and no birth neither wiving nor mothering at which all shall
come as many as believe on it? Yes, Pious had told him of that land and
Chaste had pointed him to the way but the reason was that in the way he
fell in with a certain whore of an eyepleasing exterior whose name, she
said, is Bird-in-the-Hand and she beguiled him wrongways from the true
path by her flatteries that she said to him as, Ho, you pretty man, turn
aside hither and I will show you a brave place, and she lay at him so
flatteringly that she had him in her grot which is named Two-in-the-Bush
or, by some learned, Carnal Concupiscence.

This was it what all that company that sat there at commons in Manse
of Mothers the most lusted after and if they met with this whore
Bird-in-the-Hand (which was within all foul plagues, monsters and a
wicked devil) they would strain the last but they would make at her and
know her. For regarding Believe-on-Me they said it was nought else
but notion and they could conceive no thought of it for, first,
Two-in-the-Bush whither she ticed them was the very goodliest grot and
in it were four pillows on which were four tickets with these words
printed on them, Pickaback and Topsyturvy and Shameface and Cheek by
Jowl and, second, for that foul plague Allpox and the monsters they
cared not for them for Preservative had given them a stout shield of
oxengut and, third, that they might take no hurt neither from Offspring
that was that wicked devil by virtue of this same shield which was
named Killchild. So were they all in their blind fancy, Mr Cavil and Mr
Sometimes Godly, Mr Ape Swillale, Mr False Franklin, Mr Dainty Dixon,
Young Boasthard and Mr Cautious Calmer. Wherein, O wretched company,
were ye all deceived for that was the voice of the god that was in a
very grievous rage that he would presently lift his arm up and
spill their souls for their abuses and their spillings done by them
contrariwise to his word which forth to bring brenningly biddeth.

So Thursday sixteenth June Patk. Dignam laid in clay of an apoplexy and
after hard drought, please God, rained, a bargeman coming in by water a
fifty mile or thereabout with turf saying the seed won't sprout, fields
athirst, very sadcoloured and stunk mightily, the quags and tofts too.
Hard to breathe and all the young quicks clean consumed without sprinkle
this long while back as no man remembered to be without. The rosy buds
all gone brown and spread out blobs and on the hills nought but dry flag
and faggots that would catch at first fire. All the world saying, for
aught they knew, the big wind of last February a year that did havoc the
land so pitifully a small thing beside this barrenness. But by and
by, as said, this evening after sundown, the wind sitting in the
west, biggish swollen clouds to be seen as the night increased and the
weatherwise poring up at them and some sheet lightnings at first and
after, past ten of the clock, one great stroke with a long thunder and
in a brace of shakes all scamper pellmell within door for the smoking
shower, the men making shelter for their straws with a clout or
kerchief, womenfolk skipping off with kirtles catched up soon as the
pour came. In Ely place, Baggot street, Duke's lawn, thence through
Merrion green up to Holles street a swash of water flowing that was
before bonedry and not one chair or coach or fiacre seen about but
no more crack after that first. Over against the Rt. Hon. Mr Justice
Fitzgibbon's door (that is to sit with Mr Healy the lawyer upon the
college lands) Mal. Mulligan a gentleman's gentleman that had but come
from Mr Moore's the writer's (that was a papish but is now, folk say,
a good Williamite) chanced against Alec. Bannon in a cut bob (which are
now in with dance cloaks of Kendal green) that was new got to town from
Mullingar with the stage where his coz and Mal M's brother will stay a
month yet till Saint Swithin and asks what in the earth he does there,
he bound home and he to Andrew Horne's being stayed for to crush a cup
of wine, so he said, but would tell him of a skittish heifer, big of
her age and beef to the heel, and all this while poured with rain and
so both together on to Horne's. There Leop. Bloom of Crawford's journal
sitting snug with a covey of wags, likely brangling fellows, Dixon jun.,
scholar of my lady of Mercy's, Vin. Lynch, a Scots fellow, Will. Madden,
T. Lenehan, very sad about a racer he fancied and Stephen D. Leop. Bloom
there for a languor he had but was now better, be having dreamed tonight
a strange fancy of his dame Mrs Moll with red slippers on in a pair of
Turkey trunks which is thought by those in ken to be for a change and
Mistress Purefoy there, that got in through pleading her belly, and now
on the stools, poor body, two days past her term, the midwives sore put
to it and can't deliver, she queasy for a bowl of riceslop that is a
shrewd drier up of the insides and her breath very heavy more than good
and should be a bullyboy from the knocks, they say, but God give her
soon issue. 'Tis her ninth chick to live, I hear, and Lady day bit off
her last chick's nails that was then a twelvemonth and with other three
all breastfed that died written out in a fair hand in the king's bible.
Her hub fifty odd and a methodist but takes the sacrament and is to
be seen any fair sabbath with a pair of his boys off Bullock harbour
dapping on the sound with a heavybraked reel or in a punt he has
trailing for flounder and pollock and catches a fine bag, I hear. In sum
an infinite great fall of rain and all refreshed and will much increase
the harvest yet those in ken say after wind and water fire shall come
for a prognostication of Malachi's almanac (and I hear that Mr Russell
has done a prophetical charm of the same gist out of the Hindustanish
for his farmer's gazette) to have three things in all but this a mere
fetch without bottom of reason for old crones and bairns yet sometimes
they are found in the right guess with their queerities no telling how.

With this came up Lenehan to the feet of the table to say how the letter
was in that night's gazette and he made a show to find it about him
(for he swore with an oath that he had been at pains about it) but on
Stephen's persuasion he gave over the search and was bidden to sit near
by which he did mighty brisk. He was a kind of sport gentleman that
went for a merryandrew or honest pickle and what belonged of women,
horseflesh or hot scandal he had it pat. To tell the truth he was mean
in fortunes and for the most part hankered about the coffeehouses
and low taverns with crimps, ostlers, bookies, Paul's men, runners,
flatcaps, waistcoateers, ladies of the bagnio and other rogues of the
game or with a chanceable catchpole or a tipstaff often at nights
till broad day of whom he picked up between his sackpossets much loose
gossip. He took his ordinary at a boilingcook's and if he had but gotten
into him a mess of broken victuals or a platter of tripes with a bare
tester in his purse he could always bring himself off with his tongue,
some randy quip he had from a punk or whatnot that every mother's son of
them would burst their sides. The other, Costello that is, hearing this
talk asked was it poetry or a tale. Faith, no, he says, Frank (that was
his name), 'tis all about Kerry cows that are to be butchered along of
the plague. But they can go hang, says he with a wink, for me with their
bully beef, a pox on it. There's as good fish in this tin as ever came
out of it and very friendly he offered to take of some salty sprats that
stood by which he had eyed wishly in the meantime and found the place
which was indeed the chief design of his embassy as he was sharpset.
_Mort aux vaches_, says Frank then in the French language that had been
indentured to a brandyshipper that has a winelodge in Bordeaux and he
spoke French like a gentleman too. From a child this Frank had been
a donought that his father, a headborough, who could ill keep him to
school to learn his letters and the use of the globes, matriculated at
the university to study the mechanics but he took the bit between his
teeth like a raw colt and was more familiar with the justiciary and the
parish beadle than with his volumes. One time he would be a playactor,
then a sutler or a welsher, then nought would keep him from the bearpit
and the cocking main, then he was for the ocean sea or to hoof it on
the roads with the romany folk, kidnapping a squire's heir by favour of
moonlight or fecking maids' linen or choking chicken behind a hedge. He
had been off as many times as a cat has lives and back again with naked
pockets as many more to his father the headborough who shed a pint
of tears as often as he saw him. What, says Mr Leopold with his hands
across, that was earnest to know the drift of it, will they slaughter
all? I protest I saw them but this day morning going to the Liverpool
boats, says he. I can scarce believe 'tis so bad, says he. And he had
experience of the like brood beasts and of springers, greasy hoggets and
wether wool, having been some years before actuary for Mr Joseph Cuffe,
a worthy salesmaster that drove his trade for live stock and meadow
auctions hard by Mr Gavin Low's yard in Prussia street. I question with
you there, says he. More like 'tis the hoose or the timber tongue. Mr
Stephen, a little moved but very handsomely told him no such matter and
that he had dispatches from the emperor's chief tailtickler thanking
him for the hospitality, that was sending over Doctor Rinderpest, the
bestquoted cowcatcher in all Muscovy, with a bolus or two of physic to
take the bull by the horns. Come, come, says Mr Vincent, plain dealing.
He'll find himself on the horns of a dilemma if he meddles with a
bull that's Irish, says he. Irish by name and irish by nature, says Mr
Stephen, and he sent the ale purling about, an Irish bull in an English
chinashop. I conceive you, says Mr Dixon. It is that same bull that was
sent to our island by farmer Nicholas, the bravest cattlebreeder of them
all, with an emerald ring in his nose. True for you, says Mr Vincent
cross the table, and a bullseye into the bargain, says he, and a plumper
and a portlier bull, says he, never shit on shamrock. He had horns
galore, a coat of cloth of gold and a sweet smoky breath coming out of
his nostrils so that the women of our island, leaving doughballs and
rollingpins, followed after him hanging his bulliness in daisychains.
What for that, says Mr Dixon, but before he came over farmer Nicholas
that was a eunuch had him properly gelded by a college of doctors who
were no better off than himself. So be off now, says he, and do all my
cousin german the lord Harry tells you and take a farmer's blessing, and
with that he slapped his posteriors very soundly. But the slap and the
blessing stood him friend, says Mr Vincent, for to make up he taught him
a trick worth two of the other so that maid, wife, abbess and widow to
this day affirm that they would rather any time of the month whisper
in his ear in the dark of a cowhouse or get a lick on the nape from his
long holy tongue than lie with the finest strapping young ravisher in
the four fields of all Ireland. Another then put in his word: And they
dressed him, says he, in a point shift and petticoat with a tippet and
girdle and ruffles on his wrists and clipped his forelock and rubbed him
all over with spermacetic oil and built stables for him at every turn of
the road with a gold manger in each full of the best hay in the market
so that he could doss and dung to his heart's content. By this time the
father of the faithful (for so they called him) was grown so heavy that
he could scarce walk to pasture. To remedy which our cozening dames and
damsels brought him his fodder in their apronlaps and as soon as his
belly was full he would rear up on his hind uarters to show their
ladyships a mystery and roar and bellow out of him in bulls' language
and they all after him. Ay, says another, and so pampered was he that he
would suffer nought to grow in all the land but green grass for himself
(for that was the only colour to his mind) and there was a board put up
on a hillock in the middle of the island with a printed notice, saying:
By the Lord Harry, Green is the grass that grows on the ground. And,
says Mr Dixon, if ever he got scent of a cattleraider in Roscommon or
the wilds of Connemara or a husbandman in Sligo that was sowing as much
as a handful of mustard or a bag of rapeseed out he'd run amok over half
the countryside rooting up with his horns whatever was planted and all
by lord Harry's orders. There was bad blood between them at first, says
Mr Vincent, and the lord Harry called farmer Nicholas all the old Nicks
in the world and an old whoremaster that kept seven trulls in his house
and I'll meddle in his matters, says he. I'll make that animal smell
hell, says he, with the help of that good pizzle my father left me. But
one evening, says Mr Dixon, when the lord Harry was cleaning his royal
pelt to go to dinner after winning a boatrace (he had spade oars for
himself but the first rule of the course was that the others were to row
with pitchforks) he discovered in himself a wonderful likeness to a bull
and on picking up a blackthumbed chapbook that he kept in the pantry
he found sure enough that he was a lefthanded descendant of the famous
champion bull of the Romans, _Bos Bovum_, which is good bog Latin for
boss of the show. After that, says Mr Vincent, the lord Harry put his
head into a cow's drinkingtrough in the presence of all his courtiers
and pulling it out again told them all his new name. Then, with the
water running off him, he got into an old smock and skirt that had
belonged to his grandmother and bought a grammar of the bulls' language
to study but he could never learn a word of it except the first personal
pronoun which he copied out big and got off by heart and if ever he went
out for a walk he filled his pockets with chalk to write it upon what
took his fancy, the side of a rock or a teahouse table or a bale of
cotton or a corkfloat. In short, he and the bull of Ireland were soon as
fast friends as an arse and a shirt. They were, says Mr Stephen, and
the end was that the men of the island seeing no help was toward, as
the ungrate women were all of one mind, made a wherry raft, loaded
themselves and their bundles of chattels on shipboard, set all masts
erect, manned the yards, sprang their luff, heaved to, spread three
sheets in the wind, put her head between wind and water, weighed anchor,
ported her helm, ran up the jolly Roger, gave three times three, let the
bullgine run, pushed off in their bumboat and put to sea to recover
the main of America. Which was the occasion, says Mr Vincent, of the
composing by a boatswain of that rollicking chanty:

     _--Pope Peter's but a pissabed.
     A man's a man for a' that._

Our worthy acquaintance Mr Malachi Mulligan now appeared in the doorway
as the students were finishing their apologue accompanied with a friend
whom he had just rencountered, a young gentleman, his name Alec Bannon,
who had late come to town, it being his intention to buy a colour or a
cornetcy in the fencibles and list for the wars. Mr Mulligan was civil
enough to express some relish of it all the more as it jumped with a
project of his own for the cure of the very evil that had been touched
on. Whereat he handed round to the company a set of pasteboard cards
which he had had printed that day at Mr Quinnell's bearing a legend
printed in fair italics: _Mr Malachi Mulligan. Fertiliser and Incubator.
Lambay Island_. His project, as he went on to expound, was to withdraw
from the round of idle pleasures such as form the chief business of sir
Fopling Popinjay and sir Milksop Quidnunc in town and to devote himself
to the noblest task for which our bodily organism has been framed. Well,
let us hear of it, good my friend, said Mr Dixon. I make no doubt it
smacks of wenching. Come, be seated, both. 'Tis as cheap sitting as
standing. Mr Mulligan accepted of the invitation and, expatiating upon
his design, told his hearers that he had been led into this thought by
a consideration of the causes of sterility, both the inhibitory and the
prohibitory, whether the inhibition in its turn were due to conjugal
vexations or to a parsimony of the balance as well as whether the
prohibition proceeded from defects congenital or from proclivities
acquired. It grieved him plaguily, he said, to see the nuptial couch
defrauded of its dearest pledges: and to reflect upon so many agreeable
females with rich jointures, a prey to the vilest bonzes, who hide their
flambeau under a bushel in an uncongenial cloister or lose their womanly
bloom in the embraces of some unaccountable muskin when they might
multiply the inlets of happiness, sacrificing the inestimable jewel of
their sex when a hundred pretty fellows were at hand to caress, this, he
assured them, made his heart weep. To curb this inconvenient (which
he concluded due to a suppression of latent heat), having advised with
certain counsellors of worth and inspected into this matter, he had
resolved to purchase in fee simple for ever the freehold of Lambay
island from its holder, lord Talbot de Malahide, a Tory gentleman of
note much in favour with our ascendancy party. He proposed to set up
there a national fertilising farm to be named _Omphalos_ with an obelisk
hewn and erected after the fashion of Egypt and to offer his dutiful
yeoman services for the fecundation of any female of what grade of life
soever who should there direct to him with the desire of fulfilling the
functions of her natural. Money was no object, he said, nor would he
take a penny for his pains. The poorest kitchenwench no less than the
opulent lady of fashion, if so be their constructions and their tempers
were warm persuaders for their petitions, would find in him their man.
For his nutriment he shewed how he would feed himself exclusively upon a
diet of savoury tubercles and fish and coneys there, the flesh of these
latter prolific rodents being highly recommended for his purpose, both
broiled and stewed with a blade of mace and a pod or two of capsicum
chillies. After this homily which he delivered with much warmth of
asseveration Mr Mulligan in a trice put off from his hat a kerchief with
which he had shielded it. They both, it seems, had been overtaken by the
rain and for all their mending their pace had taken water, as might be
observed by Mr Mulligan's smallclothes of a hodden grey which was now
somewhat piebald. His project meanwhile was very favourably entertained
by his auditors and won hearty eulogies from all though Mr Dixon of
Mary's excepted to it, asking with a finicking air did he purpose also
to carry coals to Newcastle. Mr Mulligan however made court to the
scholarly by an apt quotation from the classics which, as it dwelt
upon his memory, seemed to him a sound and tasteful support of his
contention: _Talis ac tanta depravatio hujus seculi, O quirites,
ut matresfamiliarum nostrae lascivas cujuslibet semiviri libici
titillationes testibus ponderosis atque excelsis erectionibus
centurionum Romanorum magnopere anteponunt_, while for those of ruder
wit he drove home his point by analogies of the animal kingdom more
suitable to their stomach, the buck and doe of the forest glade, the
farmyard drake and duck.

Valuing himself not a little upon his elegance, being indeed a proper
man of person, this talkative now applied himself to his dress with
animadversions of some heat upon the sudden whimsy of the atmospherics
while the company lavished their encomiums upon the project he had
advanced. The young gentleman, his friend, overjoyed as he was at a
passage that had late befallen him, could not forbear to tell it his
nearest neighbour. Mr Mulligan, now perceiving the table, asked for whom
were those loaves and fishes and, seeing the stranger, he made him
a civil bow and said, Pray, sir, was you in need of any professional
assistance we could give? Who, upon his offer, thanked him very
heartily, though preserving his proper distance, and replied that he was
come there about a lady, now an inmate of Horne's house, that was in an
interesting condition, poor body, from woman's woe (and here he fetched
a deep sigh) to know if her happiness had yet taken place. Mr Dixon,
to turn the table, took on to ask of Mr Mulligan himself whether
his incipient ventripotence, upon which he rallied him, betokened an
ovoblastic gestation in the prostatic utricle or male womb or was due,
as with the noted physician, Mr Austin Meldon, to a wolf in the stomach.
For answer Mr Mulligan, in a gale of laughter at his smalls, smote
himself bravely below the diaphragm, exclaiming with an admirable droll
mimic of Mother Grogan (the most excellent creature of her sex though
'tis pity she's a trollop): There's a belly that never bore a bastard.
This was so happy a conceit that it renewed the storm of mirth and threw
the whole room into the most violent agitations of delight. The spry
rattle had run on in the same vein of mimicry but for some larum in the
antechamber.

Here the listener who was none other than the Scotch student, a little
fume of a fellow, blond as tow, congratulated in the liveliest fashion
with the young gentleman and, interrupting the narrative at a salient
point, having desired his visavis with a polite beck to have the
obligingness to pass him a flagon of cordial waters at the same time by
a questioning poise of the head (a whole century of polite breeding had
not achieved so nice a gesture) to which was united an equivalent but
contrary balance of the bottle asked the narrator as plainly as was ever
done in words if he might treat him with a cup of it. _Mais bien sûr_,
noble stranger, said he cheerily, _et mille compliments_. That you may
and very opportunely. There wanted nothing but this cup to crown my
felicity. But, gracious heaven, was I left with but a crust in my wallet
and a cupful of water from the well, my God, I would accept of them and
find it in my heart to kneel down upon the ground and give thanks to
the powers above for the happiness vouchsafed me by the Giver of good
things. With these words he approached the goblet to his lips, took a
complacent draught of the cordial, slicked his hair and, opening his
bosom, out popped a locket that hung from a silk riband, that very
picture which he had cherished ever since her hand had wrote therein.
Gazing upon those features with a world of tenderness, Ah, Monsieur, he
said, had you but beheld her as I did with these eyes at that affecting
instant with her dainty tucker and her new coquette cap (a gift for her
feastday as she told me prettily) in such an artless disorder, of so
melting a tenderness, 'pon my conscience, even you, Monsieur, had been
impelled by generous nature to deliver yourself wholly into the hands of
such an enemy or to quit the field for ever. I declare, I was never so
touched in all my life. God, I thank thee, as the Author of my days!
Thrice happy will he be whom so amiable a creature will bless with her
favours. A sigh of affection gave eloquence to these words and, having
replaced the locket in his bosom, he wiped his eye and sighed again.
Beneficent Disseminator of blessings to all Thy creatures, how great
and universal must be that sweetest of Thy tyrannies which can hold in
thrall the free and the bond, the simple swain and the polished coxcomb,
the lover in the heyday of reckless passion and the husband of maturer
years. But indeed, sir, I wander from the point. How mingled and
imperfect are all our sublunary joys. Maledicity! he exclaimed in
anguish. Would to God that foresight had but remembered me to take my
cloak along! I could weep to think of it. Then, though it had poured
seven showers, we were neither of us a penny the worse. But beshrew me,
he cried, clapping hand to his forehead, tomorrow will be a new day and,
thousand thunders, I know of a _marchand de capotes_, Monsieur Poyntz,
from whom I can have for a livre as snug a cloak of the French fashion
as ever kept a lady from wetting. Tut, tut! cries Le Fecondateur,
tripping in, my friend Monsieur Moore, that most accomplished traveller
(I have just cracked a half bottle AVEC LUI in a circle of the best wits
of the town), is my authority that in Cape Horn, _ventre biche_, they
have a rain that will wet through any, even the stoutest cloak. A
drenching of that violence, he tells me, _sans blague_, has sent more
than one luckless fellow in good earnest posthaste to another world.
Pooh! A _livre!_ cries Monsieur Lynch. The clumsy things are dear at a
sou. One umbrella, were it no bigger than a fairy mushroom, is worth ten
such stopgaps. No woman of any wit would wear one. My dear Kitty told me
today that she would dance in a deluge before ever she would starve in
such an ark of salvation for, as she reminded me (blushing piquantly and
whispering in my ear though there was none to snap her words but giddy
butterflies), dame Nature, by the divine blessing, has implanted it in
our hearts and it has become a household word that _il y a deux choses_
for which the innocence of our original garb, in other circumstances a
breach of the proprieties, is the fittest, nay, the only garment. The
first, said she (and here my pretty philosopher, as I handed her to her
tilbury, to fix my attention, gently tipped with her tongue the outer
chamber of my ear), the first is a bath... But at this point a bell
tinkling in the hall cut short a discourse which promised so bravely for
the enrichment of our store of knowledge.

Amid the general vacant hilarity of the assembly a bell rang and, while
all were conjecturing what might be the cause, Miss Callan entered and,
having spoken a few words in a low tone to young Mr Dixon, retired with
a profound bow to the company. The presence even for a moment among a
party of debauchees of a woman endued with every quality of modesty and
not less severe than beautiful refrained the humourous sallies even of
the most licentious but her departure was the signal for an outbreak of
ribaldry. Strike me silly, said Costello, a low fellow who was fuddled.
A monstrous fine bit of cowflesh! I'll be sworn she has rendezvoused
you. What, you dog? Have you a way with them? Gad's bud, immensely
so, said Mr Lynch. The bedside manner it is that they use in the Mater
hospice. Demme, does not Doctor O'Gargle chuck the nuns there under the
chin. As I look to be saved I had it from my Kitty who has been wardmaid
there any time these seven months. Lawksamercy, doctor, cried the young
blood in the primrose vest, feigning a womanish simper and with immodest
squirmings of his body, how you do tease a body! Drat the man! Bless
me, I'm all of a wibbly wobbly. Why, you're as bad as dear little Father
Cantekissem, that you are! May this pot of four half choke me, cried
Costello, if she aint in the family way. I knows a lady what's got a
white swelling quick as I claps eyes on her. The young surgeon, however,
rose and begged the company to excuse his retreat as the nurse had just
then informed him that he was needed in the ward. Merciful providence
had been pleased to put a period to the sufferings of the lady who was
_enceinte_ which she had borne with a laudable fortitude and she had
given birth to a bouncing boy. I want patience, said he, with those
who, without wit to enliven or learning to instruct, revile an ennobling
profession which, saving the reverence due to the Deity, is the greatest
power for happiness upon the earth. I am positive when I say that if
need were I could produce a cloud of witnesses to the excellence of
her noble exercitations which, so far from being a byword, should be a
glorious incentive in the human breast. I cannot away with them. What?
Malign such an one, the amiable Miss Callan, who is the lustre of
her own sex and the astonishment of ours? And at an instant the most
momentous that can befall a puny child of clay? Perish the thought! I
shudder to think of the future of a race where the seeds of such malice
have been sown and where no right reverence is rendered to mother and
maid in house of Horne. Having delivered himself of this rebuke he
saluted those present on the by and repaired to the door. A murmur
of approval arose from all and some were for ejecting the low soaker
without more ado, a design which would have been effected nor would
he have received more than his bare deserts had he not abridged his
transgression by affirming with a horrid imprecation (for he swore a
round hand) that he was as good a son of the true fold as ever drew
breath. Stap my vitals, said he, them was always the sentiments of
honest Frank Costello which I was bred up most particular to honour thy
father and thy mother that had the best hand to a rolypoly or a hasty
pudding as you ever see what I always looks back on with a loving heart.

To revert to Mr Bloom who, after his first entry, had been conscious of
some impudent mocks which he however had borne with as being the fruits
of that age upon which it is commonly charged that it knows not
pity. The young sparks, it is true, were as full of extravagancies
as overgrown children: the words of their tumultuary discussions
were difficultly understood and not often nice: their testiness and
outrageous _mots_ were such that his intellects resiled from: nor were
they scrupulously sensible of the proprieties though their fund of
strong animal spirits spoke in their behalf. But the word of Mr Costello
was an unwelcome language for him for he nauseated the wretch that
seemed to him a cropeared creature of a misshapen gibbosity, born out
of wedlock and thrust like a crookback toothed and feet first into the
world, which the dint of the surgeon's pliers in his skull lent indeed
a colour to, so as to put him in thought of that missing link of
creation's chain desiderated by the late ingenious Mr Darwin. It was now
for more than the middle span of our allotted years that he had passed
through the thousand vicissitudes of existence and, being of a wary
ascendancy and self a man of rare forecast, he had enjoined his heart
to repress all motions of a rising choler and, by intercepting them
with the readiest precaution, foster within his breast that plenitude
of sufferance which base minds jeer at, rash judgers scorn and all find
tolerable and but tolerable. To those who create themselves wits at the
cost of feminine delicacy (a habit of mind which he never did hold
with) to them he would concede neither to bear the name nor to herit
the tradition of a proper breeding: while for such that, having lost
all forbearance, can lose no more, there remained the sharp antidote of
experience to cause their insolency to beat a precipitate and inglorious
retreat. Not but what he could feel with mettlesome youth which, caring
nought for the mows of dotards or the gruntlings of the severe, is ever
(as the chaste fancy of the Holy Writer expresses it) for eating of the
tree forbid it yet not so far forth as to pretermit humanity upon any
condition soever towards a gentlewoman when she was about her lawful
occasions. To conclude, while from the sister's words he had reckoned
upon a speedy delivery he was, however, it must be owned, not a little
alleviated by the intelligence that the issue so auspicated after an
ordeal of such duress now testified once more to the mercy as well as to
the bounty of the Supreme Being.

Accordingly he broke his mind to his neighbour, saying that, to express
his notion of the thing, his opinion (who ought not perchance to express
one) was that one must have a cold constitution and a frigid genius not
to be rejoiced by this freshest news of the fruition of her confinement
since she had been in such pain through no fault of hers. The dressy
young blade said it was her husband's that put her in that expectation
or at least it ought to be unless she were another Ephesian matron. I
must acquaint you, said Mr Crotthers, clapping on the table so as to
evoke a resonant comment of emphasis, old Glory Allelujurum was round
again today, an elderly man with dundrearies, preferring through his
nose a request to have word of Wilhelmina, my life, as he calls her. I
bade him hold himself in readiness for that the event would burst anon.
'Slife, I'll be round with you. I cannot but extol the virile potency of
the old bucko that could still knock another child out of her. All fell
to praising of it, each after his own fashion, though the same young
blade held with his former view that another than her conjugial had
been the man in the gap, a clerk in orders, a linkboy (virtuous) or
an itinerant vendor of articles needed in every household. Singular,
communed the guest with himself, the wonderfully unequal faculty of
metempsychosis possessed by them, that the puerperal dormitory and the
dissecting theatre should be the seminaries of such frivolity, that the
mere acquisition of academic titles should suffice to transform in a
pinch of time these votaries of levity into exemplary practitioners of
an art which most men anywise eminent have esteemed the noblest. But,
he further added, it is mayhap to relieve the pentup feelings that in
common oppress them for I have more than once observed that birds of a
feather laugh together.

But with what fitness, let it be asked of the noble lord, his patron,
has this alien, whom the concession of a gracious prince has admitted
to civic rights, constituted himself the lord paramount of our
internal polity? Where is now that gratitude which loyalty should have
counselled? During the recent war whenever the enemy had a temporary
advantage with his granados did this traitor to his kind not seize that
moment to discharge his piece against the empire of which he is a tenant
at will while he trembled for the security of his four per cents? Has he
forgotten this as he forgets all benefits received? Or is it that from
being a deluder of others he has become at last his own dupe as he is,
if report belie him not, his own and his only enjoyer? Far be it from
candour to violate the bedchamber of a respectable lady, the daughter of
a gallant major, or to cast the most distant reflections upon her
virtue but if he challenges attention there (as it was indeed highly his
interest not to have done) then be it so. Unhappy woman, she has been
too long and too persistently denied her legitimate prerogative to
listen to his objurgations with any other feeling than the derision of
the desperate. He says this, a censor of morals, a very pelican in his
piety, who did not scruple, oblivious of the ties of nature, to attempt
illicit intercourse with a female domestic drawn from the lowest strata
of society! Nay, had the hussy's scouringbrush not been her tutelary
angel, it had gone with her as hard as with Hagar, the Egyptian! In the
question of the grazing lands his peevish asperity is notorious and in
Mr Cuffe's hearing brought upon him from an indignant rancher a scathing
retort couched in terms as straightforward as they were bucolic. It ill
becomes him to preach that gospel. Has he not nearer home a seedfield
that lies fallow for the want of the ploughshare? A habit reprehensible
at puberty is second nature and an opprobrium in middle life. If he must
dispense his balm of Gilead in nostrums and apothegms of dubious taste
to restore to health a generation of unfledged profligates let his
practice consist better with the doctrines that now engross him. His
marital breast is the repository of secrets which decorum is reluctant
to adduce. The lewd suggestions of some faded beauty may console him for
a consort neglected and debauched but this new exponent of morals and
healer of ills is at his best an exotic tree which, when rooted in
its native orient, throve and flourished and was abundant in balm
but, transplanted to a clime more temperate, its roots have lost their
quondam vigour while the stuff that comes away from it is stagnant, acid
and inoperative.

The news was imparted with a circumspection recalling the ceremonial
usage of the Sublime Porte by the second female infirmarian to the
junior medical officer in residence, who in his turn announced to the
delegation that an heir had been born, When he had betaken himself
to the women's apartment to assist at the prescribed ceremony of the
afterbirth in the presence of the secretary of state for domestic
affairs and the members of the privy council, silent in unanimous
exhaustion and approbation the delegates, chafing under the length and
solemnity of their vigil and hoping that the joyful occurrence would
palliate a licence which the simultaneous absence of abigail and
obstetrician rendered the easier, broke out at once into a strife of
tongues. In vain the voice of Mr Canvasser Bloom was heard endeavouring
to urge, to mollify, to refrain. The moment was too propitious for the
display of that discursiveness which seemed the only bond of union among
tempers so divergent. Every phase of the situation was successively
eviscerated: the prenatal repugnance of uterine brothers, the Caesarean
section, posthumity with respect to the father and, that rarer form,
with respect to the mother, the fratricidal case known as the Childs
Murder and rendered memorable by the impassioned plea of Mr Advocate
Bushe which secured the acquittal of the wrongfully accused, the
rights of primogeniture and king's bounty touching twins and triplets,
miscarriages and infanticides, simulated or dissimulated, the acardiac
_foetus in foetu_ and aprosopia due to a congestion, the agnathia
of certain chinless Chinamen (cited by Mr Candidate Mulligan) in
consequence of defective reunion of the maxillary knobs along the medial
line so that (as he said) one ear could hear what the other spoke, the
benefits of anesthesia or twilight sleep, the prolongation of labour
pains in advanced gravidancy by reason of pressure on the vein, the
premature relentment of the amniotic fluid (as exemplified in the
actual case) with consequent peril of sepsis to the matrix, artificial
insemination by means of syringes, involution of the womb consequent
upon the menopause, the problem of the perpetration of the species in
the case of females impregnated by delinquent rape, that distressing
manner of delivery called by the Brandenburghers _Sturzgeburt,_ the
recorded instances of multiseminal, twikindled and monstrous births
conceived during the catamenic period or of consanguineous parents--in
a word all the cases of human nativity which Aristotle has classified
in his masterpiece with chromolithographic illustrations. The gravest
problems of obstetrics and forensic medicine were examined with as much
animation as the most popular beliefs on the state of pregnancy such as
the forbidding to a gravid woman to step over a countrystile lest,
by her movement, the navelcord should strangle her creature and
the injunction upon her in the event of a yearning, ardently and
ineffectually entertained, to place her hand against that part of her
person which long usage has consecrated as the seat of castigation.
The abnormalities of harelip, breastmole, supernumerary digits, negro's
inkle, strawberry mark and portwine stain were alleged by one as a
_prima facie_ and natural hypothetical explanation of those swineheaded
(the case of Madame Grissel Steevens was not forgotten) or doghaired
infants occasionally born. The hypothesis of a plasmic memory, advanced
by the Caledonian envoy and worthy of the metaphysical traditions of
the land he stood for, envisaged in such cases an arrest of embryonic
development at some stage antecedent to the human. An outlandish
delegate sustained against both these views, with such heat as almost
carried conviction, the theory of copulation between women and the males
of brutes, his authority being his own avouchment in support of fables
such as that of the Minotaur which the genius of the elegant Latin poet
has handed down to us in the pages of his Metamorphoses. The impression
made by his words was immediate but shortlived. It was effaced as easily
as it had been evoked by an allocution from Mr Candidate Mulligan in
that vein of pleasantry which none better than he knew how to affect,
postulating as the supremest object of desire a nice clean old man.
Contemporaneously, a heated argument having arisen between Mr Delegate
Madden and Mr Candidate Lynch regarding the juridical and theological
dilemma created in the event of one Siamese twin predeceasing the other,
the difficulty by mutual consent was referred to Mr Canvasser Bloom
for instant submittal to Mr Coadjutor Deacon Dedalus. Hitherto silent,
whether the better to show by preternatural gravity that curious dignity
of the garb with which he was invested or in obedience to an inward
voice, he delivered briefly and, as some thought, perfunctorily the
ecclesiastical ordinance forbidding man to put asunder what God has
joined.

But Malachias' tale began to freeze them with horror. He conjured up the
scene before them. The secret panel beside the chimney slid back and
in the recess appeared... Haines! Which of us did not feel his flesh
creep! He had a portfolio full of Celtic literature in one hand, in the
other a phial marked _Poison._ Surprise, horror, loathing were depicted
on all faces while he eyed them with a ghostly grin. I anticipated some
such reception, he began with an eldritch laugh, for which, it seems,
history is to blame. Yes, it is true. I am the murderer of Samuel
Childs. And how I am punished! The inferno has no terrors for me. This
is the appearance is on me. Tare and ages, what way would I be resting
at all, he muttered thickly, and I tramping Dublin this while back
with my share of songs and himself after me the like of a soulth or a
bullawurrus? My hell, and Ireland's, is in this life. It is what I tried
to obliterate my crime. Distractions, rookshooting, the Erse language
(he recited some), laudanum (he raised the phial to his lips), camping
out. In vain! His spectre stalks me. Dope is my only hope... Ah!
Destruction! The black panther! With a cry he suddenly vanished and the
panel slid back. An instant later his head appeared in the door opposite
and said: Meet me at Westland Row station at ten past eleven. He was
gone. Tears gushed from the eyes of the dissipated host. The seer
raised his hand to heaven, murmuring: The vendetta of Mananaun! The
sage repeated: _Lex talionis_. The sentimentalist is he who would enjoy
without incurring the immense debtorship for a thing done. Malachias,
overcome by emotion, ceased. The mystery was unveiled. Haines was the
third brother. His real name was Childs. The black panther was himself
the ghost of his own father. He drank drugs to obliterate. For this
relief much thanks. The lonely house by the graveyard is uninhabited.
No soul will live there. The spider pitches her web in the solitude.
The nocturnal rat peers from his hole. A curse is on it. It is haunted.
Murderer's ground.

What is the age of the soul of man? As she hath the virtue of the
chameleon to change her hue at every new approach, to be gay with the
merry and mournful with the downcast, so too is her age changeable as
her mood. No longer is Leopold, as he sits there, ruminating, chewing
the cud of reminiscence, that staid agent of publicity and holder of a
modest substance in the funds. A score of years are blown away. He is
young Leopold. There, as in a retrospective arrangement, a mirror within
a mirror (hey, presto!), he beholdeth himself. That young figure of then
is seen, precociously manly, walking on a nipping morning from the old
house in Clanbrassil street to the high school, his booksatchel on
him bandolierwise, and in it a goodly hunk of wheaten loaf, a mother's
thought. Or it is the same figure, a year or so gone over, in his first
hard hat (ah, that was a day!), already on the road, a fullfledged
traveller for the family firm, equipped with an orderbook, a scented
handkerchief (not for show only), his case of bright trinketware (alas!
a thing now of the past!) and a quiverful of compliant smiles for this
or that halfwon housewife reckoning it out upon her fingertips or for
a budding virgin, shyly acknowledging (but the heart? tell me!) his
studied baisemoins. The scent, the smile, but, more than these, the dark
eyes and oleaginous address, brought home at duskfall many a commission
to the head of the firm, seated with Jacob's pipe after like labours in
the paternal ingle (a meal of noodles, you may be sure, is aheating),
reading through round horned spectacles some paper from the Europe of a
month before. But hey, presto, the mirror is breathed on and the young
knighterrant recedes, shrivels, dwindles to a tiny speck within the
mist. Now he is himself paternal and these about him might be his
sons. Who can say? The wise father knows his own child. He thinks of a
drizzling night in Hatch street, hard by the bonded stores there, the
first. Together (she is a poor waif, a child of shame, yours and mine
and of all for a bare shilling and her luckpenny), together they hear
the heavy tread of the watch as two raincaped shadows pass the new royal
university. Bridie! Bridie Kelly! He will never forget the name, ever
remember the night: first night, the bridenight. They are entwined
in nethermost darkness, the willer with the willed, and in an instant
(_fiat_!) light shall flood the world. Did heart leap to heart? Nay,
fair reader. In a breath 'twas done but--hold! Back! It must not be! In
terror the poor girl flees away through the murk. She is the bride of
darkness, a daughter of night. She dare not bear the sunnygolden babe
of day. No, Leopold. Name and memory solace thee not. That youthful
illusion of thy strength was taken from thee--and in vain. No son of thy
loins is by thee. There is none now to be for Leopold, what Leopold was
for Rudolph.

The voices blend and fuse in clouded silence: silence that is the
infinite of space: and swiftly, silently the soul is wafted over regions
of cycles of generations that have lived. A region where grey twilight
ever descends, never falls on wide sagegreen pasturefields, shedding her
dusk, scattering a perennial dew of stars. She follows her mother with
ungainly steps, a mare leading her fillyfoal. Twilight phantoms
are they, yet moulded in prophetic grace of structure, slim shapely
haunches, a supple tendonous neck, the meek apprehensive skull. They
fade, sad phantoms: all is gone. Agendath is a waste land, a home of
screechowls and the sandblind upupa. Netaim, the golden, is no more. And
on the highway of the clouds they come, muttering thunder of rebellion,
the ghosts of beasts. Huuh! Hark! Huuh! Parallax stalks behind and goads
them, the lancinating lightnings of whose brow are scorpions. Elk and
yak, the bulls of Bashan and of Babylon, mammoth and mastodon, they come
trooping to the sunken sea, _Lacus Mortis_. Ominous revengeful zodiacal
host! They moan, passing upon the clouds, horned and capricorned, the
trumpeted with the tusked, the lionmaned, the giantantlered, snouter
and crawler, rodent, ruminant and pachyderm, all their moving moaning
multitude, murderers of the sun.

Onward to the dead sea they tramp to drink, unslaked and with horrible
gulpings, the salt somnolent inexhaustible flood. And the equine portent
grows again, magnified in the deserted heavens, nay to heaven's own
magnitude, till it looms, vast, over the house of Virgo. And lo, wonder
of metempsychosis, it is she, the everlasting bride, harbinger of the
daystar, the bride, ever virgin. It is she, Martha, thou lost one,
Millicent, the young, the dear, the radiant. How serene does she now
arise, a queen among the Pleiades, in the penultimate antelucan hour,
shod in sandals of bright gold, coifed with a veil of what do you call
it gossamer. It floats, it flows about her starborn flesh and loose it
streams, emerald, sapphire, mauve and heliotrope, sustained on currents
of the cold interstellar wind, winding, coiling, simply swirling,
writhing in the skies a mysterious writing till, after a myriad
metamorphoses of symbol, it blazes, Alpha, a ruby and triangled sign
upon the forehead of Taurus.

Francis was reminding Stephen of years before when they had been at
school together in Conmee's time. He asked about Glaucon, Alcibiades,
Pisistratus. Where were they now? Neither knew. You have spoken of the
past and its phantoms, Stephen said. Why think of them? If I call them
into life across the waters of Lethe will not the poor ghosts troop to
my call? Who supposes it? I, Bous Stephanoumenos, bullockbefriending
bard, am lord and giver of their life. He encircled his gadding hair
with a coronal of vineleaves, smiling at Vincent. That answer and those
leaves, Vincent said to him, will adorn you more fitly when something
more, and greatly more, than a capful of light odes can call your genius
father. All who wish you well hope this for you. All desire to see
you bring forth the work you meditate, to acclaim you Stephaneforos. I
heartily wish you may not fail them. O no, Vincent Lenehan said, laying
a hand on the shoulder near him. Have no fear. He could not leave his
mother an orphan. The young man's face grew dark. All could see how hard
it was for him to be reminded of his promise and of his recent loss. He
would have withdrawn from the feast had not the noise of voices allayed
the smart. Madden had lost five drachmas on Sceptre for a whim of the
rider's name: Lenehan as much more. He told them of the race. The flag
fell and, huuh! off, scamper, the mare ran out freshly with 0. Madden
up. She was leading the field. All hearts were beating. Even Phyllis
could not contain herself. She waved her scarf and cried: Huzzah!
Sceptre wins! But in the straight on the run home when all were in close
order the dark horse Throwaway drew level, reached, outstripped her. All
was lost now. Phyllis was silent: her eyes were sad anemones. Juno, she
cried, I am undone. But her lover consoled her and brought her a bright
casket of gold in which lay some oval sugarplums which she partook. A
tear fell: one only. A whacking fine whip, said Lenehan, is W. Lane.
Four winners yesterday and three today. What rider is like him? Mount
him on the camel or the boisterous buffalo the victory in a hack canter
is still his. But let us bear it as was the ancient wont. Mercy on the
luckless! Poor Sceptre! he said with a light sigh. She is not the filly
that she was. Never, by this hand, shall we behold such another. By gad,
sir, a queen of them. Do you remember her, Vincent? I wish you could
have seen my queen today, Vincent said. How young she was and radiant
(Lalage were scarce fair beside her) in her yellow shoes and frock of
muslin, I do not know the right name of it. The chestnuts that shaded
us were in bloom: the air drooped with their persuasive odour and with
pollen floating by us. In the sunny patches one might easily have
cooked on a stone a batch of those buns with Corinth fruit in them that
Periplipomenes sells in his booth near the bridge. But she had nought
for her teeth but the arm with which I held her and in that she nibbled
mischievously when I pressed too close. A week ago she lay ill, four
days on the couch, but today she was free, blithe, mocked at peril.
She is more taking then. Her posies tool Mad romp that she is, she had
pulled her fill as we reclined together. And in your ear, my friend, you
will not think who met us as we left the field. Conmee himself! He was
walking by the hedge, reading, I think a brevier book with, I doubt not,
a witty letter in it from Glycera or Chloe to keep the page. The sweet
creature turned all colours in her confusion, feigning to reprove a
slight disorder in her dress: a slip of underwood clung there for the
very trees adore her. When Conmee had passed she glanced at her lovely
echo in that little mirror she carries. But he had been kind. In going
by he had blessed us. The gods too are ever kind, Lenehan said. If I had
poor luck with Bass's mare perhaps this draught of his may serve me more
propensely. He was laying his hand upon a winejar: Malachi saw it and
withheld his act, pointing to the stranger and to the scarlet label.
Warily, Malachi whispered, preserve a druid silence. His soul is far
away. It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be
born. Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the
incorruptible eon of the gods. Do you not think it, Stephen? Theosophos
told me so, Stephen answered, whom in a previous existence Egyptian
priests initiated into the mysteries of karmic law. The lords of the
moon, Theosophos told me, an orangefiery shipload from planet Alpha
of the lunar chain would not assume the etheric doubles and these
were therefore incarnated by the rubycoloured egos from the second
constellation.

However, as a matter of fact though, the preposterous surmise about him
being in some description of a doldrums or other or mesmerised which
was entirely due to a misconception of the shallowest character, was
not the case at all. The individual whose visual organs while the above
was going on were at this juncture commencing to exhibit symptoms of
animation was as astute if not astuter than any man living and anybody
that conjectured the contrary would have found themselves pretty
speedily in the wrong shop. During the past four minutes or thereabouts
he had been staring hard at a certain amount of number one Bass bottled
by Messrs Bass and Co at Burton-on-Trent which happened to be situated
amongst a lot of others right opposite to where he was and which was
certainly calculated to attract anyone's remark on account of its
scarlet appearance. He was simply and solely, as it subsequently
transpired for reasons best known to himself, which put quite an
altogether different complexion on the proceedings, after the moment
before's observations about boyhood days and the turf, recollecting two
or three private transactions of his own which the other two were as
mutually innocent of as the babe unborn. Eventually, however, both
their eyes met and as soon as it began to dawn on him that the other was
endeavouring to help himself to the thing he involuntarily determined
to help him himself and so he accordingly took hold of the neck of the
mediumsized glass recipient which contained the fluid sought after and
made a capacious hole in it by pouring a lot of it out with, also at the
same time, however, a considerable degree of attentiveness in order not
to upset any of the beer that was in it about the place.

The debate which ensued was in its scope and progress an epitome of the
course of life. Neither place nor council was lacking in dignity. The
debaters were the keenest in the land, the theme they were engaged on
the loftiest and most vital. The high hall of Horne's house had never
beheld an assembly so representative and so varied nor had the
old rafters of that establishment ever listened to a language so
encyclopaedic. A gallant scene in truth it made. Crotthers was there at
the foot of the table in his striking Highland garb, his face glowing
from the briny airs of the Mull of Galloway. There too, opposite to him,
was Lynch whose countenance bore already the stigmata of early depravity
and premature wisdom. Next the Scotchman was the place assigned to
Costello, the eccentric, while at his side was seated in stolid repose
the squat form of Madden. The chair of the resident indeed stood vacant
before the hearth but on either flank of it the figure of Bannon in
explorer's kit of tweed shorts and salted cowhide brogues contrasted
sharply with the primrose elegance and townbred manners of Malachi
Roland St John Mulligan. Lastly at the head of the board was the young
poet who found a refuge from his labours of pedagogy and metaphysical
inquisition in the convivial atmosphere of Socratic discussion, while
to right and left of him were accommodated the flippant prognosticator,
fresh from the hippodrome, and that vigilant wanderer, soiled by the
dust of travel and combat and stained by the mire of an indelible
dishonour, but from whose steadfast and constant heart no lure or peril
or threat or degradation could ever efface the image of that voluptuous
loveliness which the inspired pencil of Lafayette has limned for ages
yet to come.

It had better be stated here and now at the outset that the perverted
transcendentalism to which Mr S. Dedalus' (Div. Scep.) contentions
would appear to prove him pretty badly addicted runs directly counter to
accepted scientific methods. Science, it cannot be too often repeated,
deals with tangible phenomena. The man of science like the man in the
street has to face hardheaded facts that cannot be blinked and explain
them as best he can. There may be, it is true, some questions which
science cannot answer--at present--such as the first problem submitted
by Mr L. Bloom (Pubb. Canv.) regarding the future determination of sex.
Must we accept the view of Empedocles of Trinacria that the right ovary
(the postmenstrual period, assert others) is responsible for the birth
of males or are the too long neglected spermatozoa or nemasperms the
differentiating factors or is it, as most embryologists incline to
opine, such as Culpepper, Spallanzani, Blumenbach, Lusk, Hertwig,
Leopold and Valenti, a mixture of both? This would be tantamount to
a cooperation (one of nature's favourite devices) between the _nisus
formativus_ of the nemasperm on the one hand and on the other a happily
chosen position, _succubitus felix_ of the passive element. The other
problem raised by the same inquirer is scarcely less vital: infant
mortality. It is interesting because, as he pertinently remarks, we
are all born in the same way but we all die in different ways. Mr M.
Mulligan (Hyg. et Eug. Doc.) blames the sanitary conditions in which
our greylunged citizens contract adenoids, pulmonary complaints etc. by
inhaling the bacteria which lurk in dust. These factors, he alleged,
and the revolting spectacles offered by our streets, hideous publicity
posters, religious ministers of all denominations, mutilated soldiers
and sailors, exposed scorbutic cardrivers, the suspended carcases of
dead animals, paranoic bachelors and unfructified duennas--these, he
said, were accountable for any and every fallingoff in the calibre of
the race. Kalipedia, he prophesied, would soon be generally adopted
and all the graces of life, genuinely good music, agreeable literature,
light philosophy, instructive pictures, plastercast reproductions of
the classical statues such as Venus and Apollo, artistic coloured
photographs of prize babies, all these little attentions would enable
ladies who were in a particular condition to pass the intervening months
in a most enjoyable manner. Mr J. Crotthers (Disc. Bacc.) attributes
some of these demises to abdominal trauma in the case of women workers
subjected to heavy labours in the workshop and to marital discipline in
the home but by far the vast majority to neglect, private or official,
culminating in the exposure of newborn infants, the practice of criminal
abortion or in the atrocious crime of infanticide. Although the former
(we are thinking of neglect) is undoubtedly only too true the case he
cites of nurses forgetting to count the sponges in the peritoneal cavity
is too rare to be normative. In fact when one comes to look into it the
wonder is that so many pregnancies and deliveries go off so well as they
do, all things considered and in spite of our human shortcomings which
often baulk nature in her intentions. An ingenious suggestion is
that thrown out by Mr V. Lynch (Bacc. Arith.) that both natality and
mortality, as well as all other phenomena of evolution, tidal movements,
lunar phases, blood temperatures, diseases in general, everything, in
fine, in nature's vast workshop from the extinction of some remote sun
to the blossoming of one of the countless flowers which beautify our
public parks is subject to a law of numeration as yet unascertained.
Still the plain straightforward question why a child of normally healthy
parents and seemingly a healthy child and properly looked after succumbs
unaccountably in early childhood (though other children of the same
marriage do not) must certainly, in the poet's words, give us pause.
Nature, we may rest assured, has her own good and cogent reasons for
whatever she does and in all probability such deaths are due to some law
of anticipation by which organisms in which morbous germs have taken
up their residence (modern science has conclusively shown that only the
plasmic substance can be said to be immortal) tend to disappear at an
increasingly earlier stage of development, an arrangement which, though
productive of pain to some of our feelings (notably the maternal), is
nevertheless, some of us think, in the long run beneficial to the
race in general in securing thereby the survival of the fittest. Mr S.
Dedalus' (Div. Scep.) remark (or should it be called an interruption?)
that an omnivorous being which can masticate, deglute, digest and
apparently pass through the ordinary channel with pluterperfect
imperturbability such multifarious aliments as cancrenous females
emaciated by parturition, corpulent professional gentlemen, not to speak
of jaundiced politicians and chlorotic nuns, might possibly find gastric
relief in an innocent collation of staggering bob, reveals as nought
else could and in a very unsavoury light the tendency above alluded to.
For the enlightenment of those who are not so intimately acquainted with
the minutiae of the municipal abattoir as this morbidminded esthete and
embryo philosopher who for all his overweening bumptiousness in things
scientific can scarcely distinguish an acid from an alkali prides
himself on being, it should perhaps be stated that staggering bob in
the vile parlance of our lowerclass licensed victuallers signifies the
cookable and eatable flesh of a calf newly dropped from its mother. In
a recent public controversy with Mr L. Bloom (Pubb. Canv.) which took
place in the commons' hall of the National Maternity Hospital, 29, 30
and 31 Holles street, of which, as is well known, Dr A. Horne (Lic. in
Midw., F. K. Q. C. P. I.) is the able and popular master, he is reported
by eyewitnesses as having stated that once a woman has let the cat
into the bag (an esthete's allusion, presumably, to one of the most
complicated and marvellous of all nature's processes--the act of sexual
congress) she must let it out again or give it life, as he phrased it,
to save her own. At the risk of her own, was the telling rejoinder of
his interlocutor, none the less effective for the moderate and measured
tone in which it was delivered.

Meanwhile the skill and patience of the physician had brought about a
happy _accouchement._ It had been a weary weary while both for patient
and doctor. All that surgical skill could do was done and the brave
woman had manfully helped. She had. She had fought the good fight and
now she was very very happy. Those who have passed on, who have gone
before, are happy too as they gaze down and smile upon the touching
scene. Reverently look at her as she reclines there with the motherlight
in her eyes, that longing hunger for baby fingers (a pretty sight it is
to see), in the first bloom of her new motherhood, breathing a silent
prayer of thanksgiving to One above, the Universal Husband. And as her
loving eyes behold her babe she wishes only one blessing more, to have
her dear Doady there with her to share her joy, to lay in his arms that
mite of God's clay, the fruit of their lawful embraces. He is older now
(you and I may whisper it) and a trifle stooped in the shoulders yet
in the whirligig of years a grave dignity has come to the conscientious
second accountant of the Ulster bank, College Green branch. O Doady,
loved one of old, faithful lifemate now, it may never be again, that
faroff time of the roses! With the old shake of her pretty head she
recalls those days. God! How beautiful now across the mist of years! But
their children are grouped in her imagination about the bedside, hers
and his, Charley, Mary Alice, Frederick Albert (if he had lived), Mamy,
Budgy (Victoria Frances), Tom, Violet Constance Louisa, darling little
Bobsy (called after our famous hero of the South African war, lord Bobs
of Waterford and Candahar) and now this last pledge of their union, a
Purefoy if ever there was one, with the true Purefoy nose. Young hopeful
will be christened Mortimer Edward after the influential third cousin of
Mr Purefoy in the Treasury Remembrancer's office, Dublin Castle. And so
time wags on: but father Cronion has dealt lightly here. No, let no sigh
break from that bosom, dear gentle Mina. And Doady, knock the ashes from
your pipe, the seasoned briar you still fancy when the curfew rings for
you (may it be the distant day!) and dout the light whereby you read
in the Sacred Book for the oil too has run low, and so with a tranquil
heart to bed, to rest. He knows and will call in His own good time. You
too have fought the good fight and played loyally your man's part. Sir,
to you my hand. Well done, thou good and faithful servant!

There are sins or (let us call them as the world calls them) evil
memories which are hidden away by man in the darkest places of the heart
but they abide there and wait. He may suffer their memory to grow dim,
let them be as though they had not been and all but persuade himself
that they were not or at least were otherwise. Yet a chance word will
call them forth suddenly and they will rise up to confront him in the
most various circumstances, a vision or a dream, or while timbrel
and harp soothe his senses or amid the cool silver tranquility of the
evening or at the feast, at midnight, when he is now filled with wine.
Not to insult over him will the vision come as over one that lies under
her wrath, not for vengeance to cut him off from the living but shrouded
in the piteous vesture of the past, silent, remote, reproachful.

The stranger still regarded on the face before him a slow recession of
that false calm there, imposed, as it seemed, by habit or some studied
trick, upon words so embittered as to accuse in their speaker an
unhealthiness, a _flair,_ for the cruder things of life. A scene
disengages itself in the observer's memory, evoked, it would seem, by
a word of so natural a homeliness as if those days were really present
there (as some thought) with their immediate pleasures. A shaven space
of lawn one soft May evening, the wellremembered grove of lilacs at
Roundtown, purple and white, fragrant slender spectators of the game but
with much real interest in the pellets as they run slowly forward over
the sward or collide and stop, one by its fellow, with a brief alert
shock. And yonder about that grey urn where the water moves at times
in thoughtful irrigation you saw another as fragrant sisterhood, Floey,
Atty, Tiny and their darker friend with I know not what of arresting in
her pose then, Our Lady of the Cherries, a comely brace of them pendent
from an ear, bringing out the foreign warmth of the skin so daintily
against the cool ardent fruit. A lad of four or five in linseywoolsey
(blossomtime but there will be cheer in the kindly hearth when ere long
the bowls are gathered and hutched) is standing on the urn secured by
that circle of girlish fond hands. He frowns a little just as this young
man does now with a perhaps too conscious enjoyment of the danger but
must needs glance at whiles towards where his mother watches from the
PIAZZETTA giving upon the flowerclose with a faint shadow of remoteness
or of reproach (_alles Vergangliche_) in her glad look.

Mark this farther and remember. The end comes suddenly. Enter that
antechamber of birth where the studious are assembled and note their
faces. Nothing, as it seems, there of rash or violent. Quietude of
custody, rather, befitting their station in that house, the vigilant
watch of shepherds and of angels about a crib in Bethlehem of Juda long
ago. But as before the lightning the serried stormclouds, heavy with
preponderant excess of moisture, in swollen masses turgidly distended,
compass earth and sky in one vast slumber, impending above parched field
and drowsy oxen and blighted growth of shrub and verdure till in an
instant a flash rives their centres and with the reverberation of the
thunder the cloudburst pours its torrent, so and not otherwise was the
transformation, violent and instantaneous, upon the utterance of the
word.

Burke's! outflings my lord Stephen, giving the cry, and a tag and
bobtail of all them after, cockerel, jackanapes, welsher, pilldoctor,
punctual Bloom at heels with a universal grabbing at headgear,
ashplants, bilbos, Panama hats and scabbards, Zermatt alpenstocks and
what not. A dedale of lusty youth, noble every student there. Nurse
Callan taken aback in the hallway cannot stay them nor smiling surgeon
coming downstairs with news of placentation ended, a full pound if a
milligramme. They hark him on. The door! It is open? Ha! They are out,
tumultuously, off for a minute's race, all bravely legging it, Burke's
of Denzille and Holles their ulterior goal. Dixon follows giving them
sharp language but raps out an oath, he too, and on. Bloom stays with
nurse a thought to send a kind word to happy mother and nurseling up
there. Doctor Diet and Doctor Quiet. Looks she too not other now? Ward
of watching in Horne's house has told its tale in that washedout pallor.
Then all being gone, a glance of motherwit helping, he whispers close in
going: Madam, when comes the storkbird for thee?

The air without is impregnated with raindew moisture, life essence
celestial, glistening on Dublin stone there under starshiny _coelum._
God's air, the Allfather's air, scintillant circumambient cessile air.
Breathe it deep into thee. By heaven, Theodore Purefoy, thou hast done a
doughty deed and no botch! Thou art, I vow, the remarkablest progenitor
barring none in this chaffering allincluding most farraginous chronicle.
Astounding! In her lay a Godframed Godgiven preformed possibility which
thou hast fructified with thy modicum of man's work. Cleave to her!
Serve! Toil on, labour like a very bandog and let scholarment and all
Malthusiasts go hang. Thou art all their daddies, Theodore. Art drooping
under thy load, bemoiled with butcher's bills at home and ingots (not
thine!) in the countinghouse? Head up! For every newbegotten thou shalt
gather thy homer of ripe wheat. See, thy fleece is drenched. Dost envy
Darby Dullman there with his Joan? A canting jay and a rheumeyed
curdog is all their progeny. Pshaw, I tell thee! He is a mule, a dead
gasteropod, without vim or stamina, not worth a cracked kreutzer.
Copulation without population! No, say I! Herod's slaughter of the
innocents were the truer name. Vegetables, forsooth, and sterile
cohabitation! Give her beefsteaks, red, raw, bleeding! She is a hoary
pandemonium of ills, enlarged glands, mumps, quinsy, bunions, hayfever,
bedsores, ringworm, floating kidney, Derbyshire neck, warts, bilious
attacks, gallstones, cold feet, varicose veins. A truce to threnes and
trentals and jeremies and all such congenital defunctive music! Twenty
years of it, regret them not. With thee it was not as with many that
will and would and wait and never--do. Thou sawest thy America, thy
lifetask, and didst charge to cover like the transpontine bison. How
saith Zarathustra? _Deine Kuh Trübsal melkest Du. Nun Trinkst Du die
süsse Milch des Euters_. See! it displodes for thee in abundance. Drink,
man, an udderful! Mother's milk, Purefoy, the milk of human kin, milk
too of those burgeoning stars overhead rutilant in thin rainvapour,
punch milk, such as those rioters will quaff in their guzzling den, milk
of madness, the honeymilk of Canaan's land. Thy cow's dug was tough,
what? Ay, but her milk is hot and sweet and fattening. No dollop this
but thick rich bonnyclaber. To her, old patriarch! Pap! _Per deam
Partulam et Pertundam nunc est bibendum_!

All off for a buster, armstrong, hollering down the street. Bonafides.
Where you slep las nigh? Timothy of the battered naggin. Like ole
Billyo. Any brollies or gumboots in the fambly? Where the Henry Nevil's
sawbones and ole clo? Sorra one o' me knows. Hurrah there, Dix! Forward
to the ribbon counter. Where's Punch? All serene. Jay, look at the
drunken minister coming out of the maternity hospal! _Benedicat vos
omnipotens Deus, Pater et Filius_. A make, mister. The Denzille lane
boys. Hell, blast ye! Scoot. Righto, Isaacs, shove em out of the
bleeding limelight. Yous join uz, dear sir? No hentrusion in life. Lou
heap good man. Allee samee dis bunch. _En avant, mes enfants_! Fire
away number one on the gun. Burke's! Burke's! Thence they advanced five
parasangs. Slattery's mounted foot. Where's that bleeding awfur? Parson
Steve, apostates' creed! No, no, Mulligan! Abaft there! Shove ahead.
Keep a watch on the clock. Chuckingout time. Mullee! What's on you? _Ma
mère m'a mariée._ British Beatitudes! _Retamplatan Digidi Boumboum_.
Ayes have it. To be printed and bound at the Druiddrum press by two
designing females. Calf covers of pissedon green. Last word in art
shades. Most beautiful book come out of Ireland my time. _Silentium!_
Get a spurt on. Tention. Proceed to nearest canteen and there annex
liquor stores. March! Tramp, tramp, tramp, the boys are (atitudes!)
parching. Beer, beef, business, bibles, bulldogs battleships, buggery
and bishops. Whether on the scaffold high. Beer, beef, trample the
bibles. When for Irelandear. Trample the trampellers. Thunderation! Keep
the durned millingtary step. We fall. Bishops boosebox. Halt! Heave to.
Rugger. Scrum in. No touch kicking. Wow, my tootsies! You hurt? Most
amazingly sorry!

Query. Who's astanding this here do? Proud possessor of damnall. Declare
misery. Bet to the ropes. Me nantee saltee. Not a red at me this week
gone. Yours? Mead of our fathers for the _Übermensch._ Dittoh. Five
number ones. You, sir? Ginger cordial. Chase me, the cabby's caudle.
Stimulate the caloric. Winding of his ticker. Stopped short never to go
again when the old. Absinthe for me, savvy? _Caramba!_ Have an eggnog or
a prairie oyster. Enemy? Avuncular's got my timepiece. Ten to. Obligated
awful. Don't mention it. Got a pectoral trauma, eh, Dix? Pos fact. Got
bet be a boomblebee whenever he wus settin sleepin in hes bit garten.
Digs up near the Mater. Buckled he is. Know his dona? Yup, sartin I do.
Full of a dure. See her in her dishybilly. Peels off a credit. Lovey
lovekin. None of your lean kine, not much. Pull down the blind, love.
Two Ardilauns. Same here. Look slippery. If you fall don't wait to get
up. Five, seven, nine. Fine! Got a prime pair of mincepies, no kid. And
her take me to rests and her anker of rum. Must be seen to be believed.
Your starving eyes and allbeplastered neck you stole my heart, O
gluepot. Sir? Spud again the rheumatiz? All poppycock, you'll scuse me
saying. For the hoi polloi. I vear thee beest a gert vool. Well, doc?
Back fro Lapland? Your corporosity sagaciating O K? How's the squaws
and papooses? Womanbody after going on the straw? Stand and deliver.
Password. There's hair. Ours the white death and the ruddy birth. Hi!
Spit in your own eye, boss! Mummer's wire. Cribbed out of Meredith.
Jesified, orchidised, polycimical jesuit! Aunty mine's writing Pa Kinch.
Baddybad Stephen lead astray goodygood Malachi.

Hurroo! Collar the leather, youngun. Roun wi the nappy. Here, Jock braw
Hielentman's your barleybree. Lang may your lum reek and your kailpot
boil! My tipple. _Merci._ Here's to us. How's that? Leg before wicket.
Don't stain my brandnew sitinems. Give's a shake of peppe, you there.
Catch aholt. Caraway seed to carry away. Twig? Shrieks of silence. Every
cove to his gentry mort. Venus Pandemos. _Les petites femmes_. Bold bad
girl from the town of Mullingar. Tell her I was axing at her. Hauding
Sara by the wame. On the road to Malahide. Me? If she who seduced me had
left but the name. What do you want for ninepence? Machree, macruiskeen.
Smutty Moll for a mattress jig. And a pull all together. _Ex!_

Waiting, guvnor? Most deciduously. Bet your boots on. Stunned like,
seeing as how no shiners is acoming. Underconstumble? He've got the
chink _ad lib_. Seed near free poun on un a spell ago a said war hisn.
Us come right in on your invite, see? Up to you, matey. Out with the
oof. Two bar and a wing. You larn that go off of they there Frenchy
bilks? Won't wash here for nuts nohow. Lil chile velly solly. Ise de
cutest colour coon down our side. Gawds teruth, Chawley. We are nae fou.
We're nae tha fou. Au reservoir, mossoo. Tanks you.

'Tis, sure. What say? In the speakeasy. Tight. I shee you, shir. Bantam,
two days teetee. Bowsing nowt but claretwine. Garn! Have a glint, do.
Gum, I'm jiggered. And been to barber he have. Too full for words. With
a railway bloke. How come you so? Opera he'd like? Rose of Castile. Rows
of cast. Police! Some H2O for a gent fainted. Look at Bantam's flowers.
Gemini. He's going to holler. The colleen bawn. My colleen bawn. O,
cheese it! Shut his blurry Dutch oven with a firm hand. Had the winner
today till I tipped him a dead cert. The ruffin cly the nab of Stephen
Hand as give me the jady coppaleen. He strike a telegramboy paddock wire
big bug Bass to the depot. Shove him a joey and grahamise. Mare on form
hot order. Guinea to a goosegog. Tell a cram, that. Gospeltrue. Criminal
diversion? I think that yes. Sure thing. Land him in chokeechokee if the
harman beck copped the game. Madden back Madden's a maddening back. O
lust our refuge and our strength. Decamping. Must you go? Off to mammy.
Stand by. Hide my blushes someone. All in if he spots me. Come ahome,
our Bantam. Horryvar, mong vioo. Dinna forget the cowslips for hersel.
Cornfide. Wha gev ye thon colt? Pal to pal. Jannock. Of John Thomas, her
spouse. No fake, old man Leo. S'elp me, honest injun. Shiver my timbers
if I had. There's a great big holy friar. Vyfor you no me tell? Vel,
I ses, if that aint a sheeny nachez, vel, I vil get misha mishinnah.
Through yerd our lord, Amen.

You move a motion? Steve boy, you're going it some. More bluggy
drunkables? Will immensely splendiferous stander permit one stooder of
most extreme poverty and one largesize grandacious thirst to terminate
one expensive inaugurated libation? Give's a breather. Landlord,
landlord, have you good wine, staboo? Hoots, mon, a wee drap to pree.
Cut and come again. Right. Boniface! Absinthe the lot. _Nos omnes
biberimus viridum toxicum diabolus capiat posterioria nostria_.
Closingtime, gents. Eh? Rome boose for the Bloom toff. I hear you say
onions? Bloo? Cadges ads. Photo's papli, by all that's gorgeous. Play
low, pardner. Slide. _Bonsoir la compagnie_. And snares of the poxfiend.
Where's the buck and Namby Amby? Skunked? Leg bail. Aweel, ye maun e'en
gang yer gates. Checkmate. King to tower. Kind Kristyann wil yu help
yung man hoose frend tuk bungellow kee tu find plais whear tu lay crown
of his hed 2 night. Crickey, I'm about sprung. Tarnally dog gone my
shins if this beent the bestest puttiest longbreak yet. Item, curate,
couple of cookies for this child. Cot's plood and prandypalls, none! Not
a pite of sheeses? Thrust syphilis down to hell and with him those other
licensed spirits. Time, gents! Who wander through the world. Health all!
_a la vôtre_!

Golly, whatten tunket's yon guy in the mackintosh? Dusty Rhodes. Peep
at his wearables. By mighty! What's he got? Jubilee mutton. Bovril,
by James. Wants it real bad. D'ye ken bare socks? Seedy cuss in the
Richmond? Rawthere! Thought he had a deposit of lead in his penis.
Trumpery insanity. Bartle the Bread we calls him. That, sir, was once
a prosperous cit. Man all tattered and torn that married a maiden all
forlorn. Slung her hook, she did. Here see lost love. Walking Mackintosh
of lonely canyon. Tuck and turn in. Schedule time. Nix for the hornies.
Pardon? Seen him today at a runefal? Chum o' yourn passed in his checks?
Ludamassy! Pore piccaninnies! Thou'll no be telling me thot, Pold veg!
Did ums blubble bigsplash crytears cos fren Padney was took off in black
bag? Of all de darkies Massa Pat was verra best. I never see the like
since I was born. _Tiens, tiens_, but it is well sad, that, my faith,
yes. O, get, rev on a gradient one in nine. Live axle drives are souped.
Lay you two to one Jenatzy licks him ruddy well hollow. Jappies? High
angle fire, inyah! Sunk by war specials. Be worse for him, says he, nor
any Rooshian. Time all. There's eleven of them. Get ye gone. Forward,
woozy wobblers! Night. Night. May Allah the Excellent One your soul this
night ever tremendously conserve.

Your attention! We're nae tha fou. The Leith police dismisseth us. The
least tholice. Ware hawks for the chap puking. Unwell in his abominable
regions. Yooka. Night. Mona, my true love. Yook. Mona, my own love. Ook.

Hark! Shut your obstropolos. Pflaap! Pflaap! Blaze on. There she goes.
Brigade! Bout ship. Mount street way. Cut up! Pflaap! Tally ho. You not
come? Run, skelter, race. Pflaaaap!

Lynch! Hey? Sign on long o' me. Denzille lane this way. Change here for
Bawdyhouse. We two, she said, will seek the kips where shady Mary is.
Righto, any old time. _Laetabuntur in cubilibus suis_. You coming long?
Whisper, who the sooty hell's the johnny in the black duds? Hush! Sinned
against the light and even now that day is at hand when he shall come to
judge the world by fire. Pflaap! _Ut implerentur scripturae_. Strike
up a ballad. Then outspake medical Dick to his comrade medical Davy.
Christicle, who's this excrement yellow gospeller on the Merrion
hall? Elijah is coming! Washed in the blood of the Lamb. Come on you
winefizzling, ginsizzling, booseguzzling existences! Come on, you
dog-gone, bullnecked, beetlebrowed, hogjowled, peanutbrained, weaseleyed
fourflushers, false alarms and excess baggage! Come on, you triple
extract of infamy! Alexander J Christ Dowie, that's my name, that's
yanked to glory most half this planet from Frisco beach to Vladivostok.
The Deity aint no nickel dime bumshow. I put it to you that He's on the
square and a corking fine business proposition. He's the grandest thing
yet and don't you forget it. Shout salvation in King Jesus. You'll
need to rise precious early you sinner there, if you want to diddle the
Almighty God. Pflaaaap! Not half. He's got a coughmixture with a punch
in it for you, my friend, in his back pocket. Just you try it on.



_The Mabbot street entrance of nighttown, before which stretches
an uncobbled tramsiding set with skeleton tracks, red and green
will-o'-the-wisps and danger signals. Rows of grimy houses with gaping
doors. Rare lamps with faint rainbow fins. Round Rabaiotti's halted ice
gondola stunted men and women squabble. They grab wafers between which
are wedged lumps of coral and copper snow. Sucking, they scatter slowly.
Children. The swancomb of the gondola, highreared, forges on through the
murk, white and blue under a lighthouse. Whistles call and answer._

THE CALLS: Wait, my love, and I'll be with you.

THE ANSWERS: Round behind the stable.

_(A deafmute idiot with goggle eyes, his shapeless mouth dribbling,
jerks past, shaken in Saint Vitus' dance. A chain of children 's hands
imprisons him.)_

THE CHILDREN: Kithogue! Salute!

THE IDIOT: _(Lifts a palsied left arm and gurgles)_ Grhahute!

THE CHILDREN: Where's the great light?

THE IDIOT: _(Gobbing)_ Ghaghahest.

_(They release him. He jerks on. A pigmy woman swings on a rope slung
between two railings, counting. A form sprawled against a dustbin and
muffled by its arm and hat snores, groans, grinding growling teeth, and
snores again. On a step a gnome totting among a rubbishtip crouches
to shoulder a sack of rags and bones. A crone standing by with a smoky
oillamp rams her last bottle in the maw of his sack. He heaves his
booty, tugs askew his peaked cap and hobbles off mutely. The crone
makes back for her lair, swaying her lamp. A bandy child, asquat on the
doorstep with a paper shuttlecock, crawls sidling after her in spurts,
clutches her skirt, scrambles up. A drunken navvy grips with both hands
the railings of an area, lurching heavily. At a comer two night watch in
shouldercapes, their hands upon their staffholsters, loom tall. A plate
crashes: a woman screams: a child wails. Oaths of a man roar, mutter,
cease. Figures wander, lurk, peer from warrens. In a room lit by a
candle stuck in a bottleneck a slut combs out the tatts from the hair
of a scrofulous child. Cissy Caffrey's voice, still young, sings shrill
from a lane.)_

CISSY CAFFREY:

     _I gave it to Molly
     Because she was jolly,
     The leg of the duck,
     The leg of the duck._

_(Private Carr and Private Compton, swaggersticks tight in their oxters,
as they march unsteadily rightaboutface and burst together from their
mouths a volleyed fart. Laughter of men from the lane. A hoarse virago
retorts.)_

THE VIRAGO: Signs on you, hairy arse. More power the Cavan girl.

CISSY CAFFREY: More luck to me. Cavan, Cootehill and Belturbet. _(She
sings)_

     _I gave it to Nelly
     To stick in her belly,
     The leg of the duck,
     The leg of the duck._

_(Private Carr and Private Compton turn and counterretort, their tunics
bloodbright in a lampglow, black sockets of caps on their blond cropped
polls. Stephen Dedalus and Lynch pass through the crowd close to the
redcoats.)_

PRIVATE COMPTON: _(Jerks his finger)_ Way for the parson.

PRIVATE CARR: _(Turns and calls)_ What ho, parson!

CISSY CAFFREY: _(Her voice soaring higher)_

     _She has it, she got it,
     Wherever she put it,
     The leg of the duck._

_(Stephen, flourishing the ashplant in his left hand, chants with joy
the_ introit _for paschal time. Lynch, his jockeycap low on his brow,
attends him, a sneer of discontent wrinkling his face.)_

STEPHEN: _Vidi aquam egredientem de templo a latere dextro. Alleluia_.

_(The famished snaggletusks of an elderly bawd protrude from a
doorway.)_

THE BAWD: _(Her voice whispering huskily)_ Sst! Come here till I tell
you. Maidenhead inside. Sst!

STEPHEN: _(Altius aliquantulum) Et omnes ad quos pervenit aqua ista_.

THE BAWD: _(Spits in their trail her jet of venom)_ Trinity medicals.
Fallopian tube. All prick and no pence.

_(Edy Boardman, sniffling, crouched with bertha supple, draws her shawl
across her nostrils.)_

EDY BOARDMAN: _(Bickering)_ And says the one: I seen you up Faithful
place with your squarepusher, the greaser off the railway, in his
cometobed hat. Did you, says I. That's not for you to say, says I. You
never seen me in the mantrap with a married highlander, says I. The
likes of her! Stag that one is! Stubborn as a mule! And her walking with
two fellows the one time, Kilbride, the enginedriver, and lancecorporal
Oliphant.

STEPHEN: _(Ttriumphaliter) Salvi facti sunt._

_(He flourishes his ashplant, shivering the lamp image, shattering light
over the world. A liver and white spaniel on the prowl slinks after him,
growling. Lynch scares it with a kick.)_

LYNCH: So that?

STEPHEN: (_Looks behind_) So that gesture, not music not odour, would be
a universal language, the gift of tongues rendering visible not the lay
sense but the first entelechy, the structural rhythm.

LYNCH: Pornosophical philotheology. Metaphysics in Mecklenburgh street!

STEPHEN: We have shrewridden Shakespeare and henpecked Socrates. Even
the allwisest Stagyrite was bitted, bridled and mounted by a light of
love.

LYNCH: Ba!

STEPHEN: Anyway, who wants two gestures to illustrate a loaf and a jug?
This movement illustrates the loaf and jug of bread or wine in Omar.
Hold my stick.

LYNCH: Damn your yellow stick. Where are we going?

STEPHEN: Lecherous lynx, _to la belle dame sans merci,_ Georgina
Johnson, _ad deam qui laetificat iuventutem meam._

_(Stephen thrusts the ashplant on him and slowly holds out his hands,
his head going back till both hands are a span from his breast, down
turned, in planes intersecting, the fingers about to part, the left
being higher.)_

LYNCH: Which is the jug of bread? It skills not. That or the
customhouse. Illustrate thou. Here take your crutch and walk.

_(They pass. Tommy Caffrey scrambles to a gaslamp and, clasping, climbs
in spasms. From the top spur he slides down. Jacky Caffrey clasps to
climb. The navvy lurches against the lamp. The twins scuttle off in the
dark. The navvy, swaying, presses a forefinger against a wing of his
nose and ejects from the farther nostril a long liquid jet of snot.
Shouldering the lamp he staggers away through the crowd with his flaring
cresset._

_Snakes of river fog creep slowly. From drains, clefts, cesspools,
middens arise on all sides stagnant fumes. A glow leaps in the south
beyond the seaward reaches of the river. The navvy, staggering forward,
cleaves the crowd and lurches towards the tramsiding on the farther side
under the railway bridge bloom appears, flushed, panting, cramming bread
and chocolate into a sidepocket. From Gillen's hairdresser's window a
composite portrait shows him gallant Nelson's image. A concave mirror
at the side presents to him lovelorn longlost lugubru Booloohoom. Grave
Gladstone sees him level, Bloom for Bloom. he passes, struck by the
stare of truculent Wellington, but in the convex mirror grin unstruck
the bonham eyes and fatchuck cheekchops of Jollypoldy the rixdix doldy._

_At Antonio Pabaiotti's door Bloom halts, sweated under the bright
arclamp. He disappears. In a moment he reappears and hurries on.)_

BLOOM: Fish and taters. N. g. Ah!

_(He disappears into Olhausen's, the porkbutcher's, under the downcoming
rollshutter. A few moments later he emerges from under the shutter,
puffing Poldy, blowing Bloohoom. In each hand he holds a parcel, one
containing a lukewarm pig's crubeen, the other a cold sheep's trotter,
sprinkled with wholepepper. He gasps, standing upright. Then bending to
one side he presses a parcel against his ribs and groans.)_

BLOOM: Stitch in my side. Why did I run?

_(He takes breath with care and goes forward slowly towards the lampset
siding. The glow leaps again.)_

BLOOM: What is that? A flasher? Searchlight.

_(He stands at Cormack's corner, watching)_

BLOOM: _Aurora borealis_ or a steel foundry? Ah, the brigade, of course.
South side anyhow. Big blaze. Might be his house. Beggar's bush. We're
safe. _(He hums cheerfully)_ London's burning, London's burning! On
fire, on fire! (_He catches sight of the navvy lurching through the
crowd at the farther side of Talbot street_) I'll miss him. Run. Quick.
Better cross here.

_(He darts to cross the road. Urchins shout.)_

THE URCHINS: Mind out, mister! (_Two cyclists, with lighted paper
lanterns aswing, swim by him, grazing him, their bells rattling_)

THE BELLS: Haltyaltyaltyall.

BLOOM: _(Halts erect, stung by a spasm)_ Ow!

_(He looks round, darts forward suddenly. Through rising fog a dragon
sandstrewer, travelling at caution, slews heavily down upon him,
its huge red headlight winking, its trolley hissing on the wire. The
motorman bangs his footgong.)_

THE GONG: Bang Bang Bla Bak Blud Bugg Bloo.

_(The brake cracks violently. Bloom, raising a policeman's whitegloved
hand, blunders stifflegged out of the track. The motorman, thrown
forward, pugnosed, on the guidewheel, yells as he slides past over
chains and keys.)_

THE MOTORMAN: Hey, shitbreeches, are you doing the hat trick?

BLOOM: _(Bloom trickleaps to the curbstone and halts again. He brushes a
mudflake from his cheek with a parcelled hand.)_ No thoroughfare. Close
shave that but cured the stitch. Must take up Sandow's exercises again.
On the hands down. Insure against street accident too. The Providential.
_(He feels his trouser pocket)_ Poor mamma's panacea. Heel easily catch
in track or bootlace in a cog. Day the wheel of the black Maria peeled
off my shoe at Leonard's corner. Third time is the charm. Shoe trick.
Insolent driver. I ought to report him. Tension makes them nervous.
Might be the fellow balked me this morning with that horsey woman. Same
style of beauty. Quick of him all the same. The stiff walk. True word
spoken in jest. That awful cramp in Lad lane. Something poisonous I
ate. Emblem of luck. Why? Probably lost cattle. Mark of the beast. _(He
closes his eyes an instant)_ Bit light in the head. Monthly or effect of
the other. Brainfogfag. That tired feeling. Too much for me now. Ow!

(A sinister figure leans on plaited legs against o'beirne's wall, a
visage unknown, injected with dark mercury. From under a wideleaved
sombrero the figure regards him with evil eye.)

BLOOM: _Buenas noches, señorita Blanca, que calle es esta?_

THE FIGURE: (_Impassive, raises a signal arm_) Password. _Sraid Mabbot._

BLOOM: Haha. _Merci._ Esperanto. _Slan leath. (He mutters)_ Gaelic
league spy, sent by that fireeater.

_(He steps forward. A sackshouldered ragman bars his path. He steps
left, ragsackman left.)_

BLOOM: I beg. (_He swerves, sidles, stepaside, slips past and on_.)

BLOOM: Keep to the right, right, right. If there is a signpost planted
by the Touring Club at Stepaside who procured that public boon? I who
lost my way and contributed to the columns of the _Irish Cyclist_ the
letter headed _In darkest Stepaside_. Keep, keep, keep to the right.
Rags and bones at midnight. A fence more likely. First place murderer
makes for. Wash off his sins of the world.

_(Jacky Caffrey, hunted by Tommy Caffrey, runs full tilt against
Bloom.)_

BLOOM: O

_(Shocked, on weak hams, he halts. Tommy and Jacky vanish there, there.
Bloom pats with parcelled hands watch fobpocket, bookpocket, pursepoket,
sweets of sin, potato soap.)_

BLOOM: Beware of pickpockets. Old thieves' dodge. Collide. Then snatch
your purse.

_(The retriever approaches sniffing, nose to the ground. A sprawled form
sneezes. A stooped bearded figure appears garbed in the long caftan
of an elder in Zion and a smokingcap with magenta tassels. Horned
spectacles hang down at the wings of the nose. Yellow poison streaks are
on the drawn face.)_

RUDOLPH: Second halfcrown waste money today. I told you not go with
drunken goy ever. So you catch no money.

BLOOM: _(Hides the crubeen and trotter behind his back and, crestfallen,
feels warm and cold feetmeat) Ja, ich weiss, papachi._

RUDOLPH: What you making down this place? Have you no soul? _(with
feeble vulture talons he feels the silent face of Bloom)_ Are you not
my son Leopold, the grandson of Leopold? Are you not my dear son Leopold
who left the house of his father and left the god of his fathers Abraham
and Jacob?

BLOOM: _(With precaution)_ I suppose so, father. Mosenthal. All that's
left of him.

RUDOLPH: _(Severely)_ One night they bring you home drunk as dog after
spend your good money. What you call them running chaps?

BLOOM: _(In youth's smart blue Oxford suit with white vestslips,
narrowshouldered, in brown Alpine hat, wearing gent's sterling silver
waterbury keyless watch and double curb Albert with seal attached, one
side of him coated with stiffening mud)_ Harriers, father. Only that
once.

RUDOLPH: Once! Mud head to foot. Cut your hand open. Lockjaw. They make
you kaputt, Leopoldleben. You watch them chaps.

BLOOM: _(Weakly)_ They challenged me to a sprint. It was muddy. I
slipped.

RUDOLPH: _(With contempt) Goim nachez_! Nice spectacles for your poor
mother!

BLOOM: Mamma!

ELLEN BLOOM: _(In pantomime dame's stringed mobcap, widow Twankey's
crinoline and bustle, blouse with muttonleg sleeves buttoned behind,
grey mittens and cameo brooch, her plaited hair in a crispine net,
appears over the staircase banisters, a slanted candlestick in her hand,
and cries out in shrill alarm)_ O blessed Redeemer, what have they done
to him! My smelling salts! _(She hauls up a reef of skirt and ransacks
the pouch of her striped blay petticoat. A phial, an Agnus Dei, a
shrivelled potato and a celluloid doll fall out)_ Sacred Heart of Mary,
where were you at all at all?

_(Bloom, mumbling, his eyes downcast, begins to bestow his parcels in
his filled pockets but desists, muttering.)_

A VOICE: _(Sharply)_ Poldy!

BLOOM: Who? _(He ducks and wards off a blow clumsily)_ At your service.

_(He looks up. Beside her mirage of datepalms a handsome woman in
Turkish costume stands before him. Opulent curves fill out her scarlet
trousers and jacket, slashed with gold. A wide yellow cummerbund girdles
her. A white yashmak, violet in the night, covers her face, leaving free
only her large dark eyes and raven hair.)_

BLOOM: Molly!

MARION: Welly? Mrs Marion from this out, my dear man, when you speak to
me. _(Satirically)_ Has poor little hubby cold feet waiting so long?

BLOOM: _(Shifts from foot to foot)_ No, no. Not the least little bit.

_(He breathes in deep agitation, swallowing gulps of air, questions,
hopes, crubeens for her supper, things to tell her, excuse, desire,
spellbound. A coin gleams on her forehead. On her feet are jewelled
toerings. Her ankles are linked by a slender fetterchain. Beside her
a camel, hooded with a turreting turban, waits. A silk ladder of
innumerable rungs climbs to his bobbing howdah. He ambles near with
disgruntled hindquarters. Fiercely she slaps his haunch, her goldcurb
wristbangles angriling, scolding him in Moorish.)_

MARION: Nebrakada! Femininum!

_(The camel, lifting a foreleg, plucks from a tree a large mango fruit,
offers it to his mistress, blinking, in his cloven hoof, then droops his
head and, grunting, with uplifted neck, fumbles to kneel. Bloom stoops
his back for leapfrog.)_

BLOOM: I can give you... I mean as your business menagerer... Mrs
Marion... if you...

MARION: So you notice some change? _(Her hands passing slowly over her
trinketed stomacher, a slow friendly mockery in her eyes)_ O Poldy,
Poldy, you are a poor old stick in the mud! Go and see life. See the
wide world.

BLOOM: I was just going back for that lotion whitewax, orangeflower
water. Shop closes early on Thursday. But the first thing in the
morning. _(He pats divers pockets)_ This moving kidney. Ah!

_(He points to the south, then to the east. A cake of new clean lemon
soap arises, diffusing light and perfume.)_

THE SOAP: We're a capital couple are Bloom and I. He brightens the
earth. I polish the sky.


_(The freckled face of Sweny, the druggist, appears in the disc of the
soapsun.)_

SWENY: Three and a penny, please.

BLOOM: Yes. For my wife. Mrs Marion. Special recipe.

MARION: _(Softly)_ Poldy!

BLOOM: Yes, ma'am?

MARION: _ti trema un poco il cuore?_

_(In disdain she saunters away, plump as a pampered pouter pigeon,
humming the duet from_ Don Giovanni.)

BLOOM: Are you sure about that _voglio_? I mean the pronunciati...

_(He follows, followed by the sniffing terrier. The elderly bawd seizes
his sleeve, the bristles of her chinmole glittering.)_

THE BAWD: Ten shillings a maidenhead. Fresh thing was never touched.
Fifteen. There's no-one in it only her old father that's dead drunk.

_(She points. In the gap of her dark den furtive, rainbedraggled, Bridie
Kelly stands.)_

BRIDIE: Hatch street. Any good in your mind?

_(With a squeak she flaps her bat shawl and runs. A burly rough pursues
with booted strides. He stumbles on the steps, recovers, plunges into
gloom. Weak squeaks of laughter are heard, weaker.)_

THE BAWD: _(Her wolfeyes shining)_ He's getting his pleasure. You won't
get a virgin in the flash houses. Ten shillings. Don't be all night
before the polis in plain clothes sees us. Sixtyseven is a bitch.

_(Leering, Gerty Macdowell limps forward. She draws from behind, ogling,
and shows coyly her bloodied clout.)_

GERTY: With all my worldly goods I thee and thou. _(She murmurs)_ You
did that. I hate you.

BLOOM: I? When? You're dreaming. I never saw you.

THE BAWD: Leave the gentleman alone, you cheat. Writing the gentleman
false letters. Streetwalking and soliciting. Better for your mother take
the strap to you at the bedpost, hussy like you.

GERTY: _(To Bloom)_ When you saw all the secrets of my bottom drawer.
_(She paws his sleeve, slobbering)_ Dirty married man! I love you for
doing that to me.

_(She glides away crookedly. Mrs Breen in man's frieze overcoat
with loose bellows pockets, stands in the causeway, her roguish eyes
wideopen, smiling in all her herbivorous buckteeth.)_

MRS BREEN: Mr...

BLOOM: _(Coughs gravely)_ Madam, when we last had this pleasure by
letter dated the sixteenth instant...

MRS BREEN: Mr Bloom! You down here in the haunts of sin! I caught you
nicely! Scamp!

BLOOM: _(Hurriedly)_ Not so loud my name. Whatever do you think of me?
Don't give me away. Walls have ears. How do you do? It's ages since I.
You're looking splendid. Absolutely it. Seasonable weather we are having
this time of year. Black refracts heat. Short cut home here. Interesting
quarter. Rescue of fallen women. Magdalen asylum. I am the secretary...

MRS BREEN: _(Holds up a finger)_ Now, don't tell a big fib! I know
somebody won't like that. O just wait till I see Molly! _(Slily)_
Account for yourself this very sminute or woe betide you!

BLOOM: _(Looks behind)_ She often said she'd like to visit. Slumming.
The exotic, you see. Negro servants in livery too if she had money.
Othello black brute. Eugene Stratton. Even the bones and cornerman at
the Livermore christies. Bohee brothers. Sweep for that matter.

_(Tom and Sam Bohee, coloured coons in white duck suits, scarlet socks,
upstarched Sambo chokers and large scarlet asters in their buttonholes,
leap out. Each has his banjo slung. Their paler smaller negroid hands
jingle the twingtwang wires. Flashing white Kaffir eyes and tusks they
rattle through a breakdown in clumsy clogs, twinging, singing, back to
back, toe heel, heel toe, with smackfatclacking nigger lips.)_

TOM AND SAM:

     There's someone in the house with Dina
     There's someone in the house, I know,
     There's someone in the house with Dina
     Playing on the old banjo.

_(They whisk black masks from raw babby faces: then, chuckling,
chortling, trumming, twanging, they diddle diddle cakewalk dance away.)_

BLOOM: _(With a sour tenderish smile)_ A little frivol, shall we, if
you are so inclined? Would you like me perhaps to embrace you just for a
fraction of a second?

MRS BREEN: _(Screams gaily)_ O, you ruck! You ought to see yourself!

BLOOM: For old sake' sake. I only meant a square party, a mixed marriage
mingling of our different little conjugials. You know I had a soft
corner for you. _(Gloomily)_ 'Twas I sent you that valentine of the dear
gazelle.

MRS BREEN: Glory Alice, you do look a holy show! Killing simply. _(She
puts out her hand inquisitively)_ What are you hiding behind your back?
Tell us, there's a dear.

BLOOM: _(Seizes her wrist with his free hand)_ Josie Powell that was,
prettiest deb in Dublin. How time flies by! Do you remember, harking
back in a retrospective arrangement, Old Christmas night, Georgina
Simpson's housewarming while they were playing the Irving Bishop game,
finding the pin blindfold and thoughtreading? Subject, what is in this
snuffbox?

MRS BREEN: You were the lion of the night with your seriocomic
recitation and you looked the part. You were always a favourite with the
ladies.

BLOOM: _(Squire of dames, in dinner jacket with wateredsilk facings,
blue masonic badge in his buttonhole, black bow and mother-of-pearl
studs, a prismatic champagne glass tilted in his hand)_ Ladies and
gentlemen, I give you Ireland, home and beauty.

MRS BREEN: The dear dead days beyond recall. Love's old sweet song.

BLOOM: _(Meaningfully dropping his voice)_ I confess I'm teapot with
curiosity to find out whether some person's something is a little teapot
at present.

MRS BREEN: _(Gushingly)_ Tremendously teapot! London's teapot and I'm
simply teapot all over me! _(She rubs sides with him)_ After the parlour
mystery games and the crackers from the tree we sat on the staircase
ottoman. Under the mistletoe. Two is company.

BLOOM: _(Wearing a purple Napoleon hat with an amber halfmoon, his
fingers and thumb passing slowly down to her soft moist meaty palm which
she surrenders gently)_ The witching hour of night. I took the splinter
out of this hand, carefully, slowly. _(Tenderly, as he slips on her
finger a ruby ring) Là ci darem la mano._

MRS BREEN: _(In a onepiece evening frock executed in moonlight blue, a
tinsel sylph's diadem on her brow with her dancecard fallen beside
her moonblue satin slipper, curves her palm softly, breathing quickly)
Voglio e non._ You're hot! You're scalding! The left hand nearest the
heart.

BLOOM: When you made your present choice they said it was beauty and
the beast. I can never forgive you for that. _(His clenched fist at
his brow)_ Think what it means. All you meant to me then. _(Hoarsely)_
Woman, it's breaking me!

_(Denis Breen, whitetallhatted, with Wisdom Hely's sandwich-boards,
shuffles past them in carpet slippers, his dull beard thrust out,
muttering to right and left. Little Alf Bergan, cloaked in the pall of
the ace of spades, dogs him to left and right, doubled in laughter.)_

ALF BERGAN: _(Points jeering at the sandwichboards)_ U. p: Up.

MRS BREEN: _(To Bloom)_ High jinks below stairs. _(She gives him the
glad eye)_ Why didn't you kiss the spot to make it well? You wanted to.

BLOOM: _(Shocked)_ Molly's best friend! Could you?

MRS BREEN: _(Her pulpy tongue between her lips, offers a pigeon kiss)_
Hnhn. The answer is a lemon. Have you a little present for me there?

BLOOM: _(Offhandedly)_ Kosher. A snack for supper. The home without
potted meat is incomplete. I was at _Leah._ Mrs Bandmann Palmer.
Trenchant exponent of Shakespeare. Unfortunately threw away the
programme. Rattling good place round there for pigs' feet. Feel.

_(Richie Goulding, three ladies' hats pinned on his head, appears
weighted to one side by the black legal bag of Collis and Ward on which
a skull and crossbones are painted in white limewash. He opens it
and shows it full of polonies, kippered herrings, Findon haddies and
tightpacked pills.)_

RICHIE: Best value in Dub.

_(Bald Pat, bothered beetle, stands on the curbstone, folding his
napkin, waiting to wait.)_

PAT: _(Advances with a tilted dish of spillspilling gravy)_ Steak and
kidney. Bottle of lager. Hee hee hee. Wait till I wait.

RICHIE: Goodgod. Inev erate inall...

_(With hanging head he marches doggedly forward. The navvy, lurching by,
gores him with his flaming pronghorn.)_

RICHIE: _(With a cry of pain, his hand to his back)_ Ah! Bright's!
Lights!

BLOOM: _(Ooints to the navvy)_ A spy. Don't attract attention. I hate
stupid crowds. I am not on pleasure bent. I am in a grave predicament.

MRS BREEN: Humbugging and deluthering as per usual with your cock and
bull story.

BLOOM: I want to tell you a little secret about how I came to be here.
But you must never tell. Not even Molly. I have a most particular
reason.

MRS BREEN: _(All agog)_ O, not for worlds.

BLOOM: Let's walk on. Shall us?

MRS BREEN: Let's.

_(The bawd makes an unheeded sign. Bloom walks on with Mrs Breen. The
terrier follows, whining piteously, wagging his tail.)_

THE BAWD: Jewman's melt!

BLOOM: _(In an oatmeal sporting suit, a sprig of woodbine in the lapel,
tony buff shirt, shepherd's plaid Saint Andrew's cross scarftie, white
spats, fawn dustcoat on his arm, tawny red brogues, fieldglasses in
bandolier and a grey billycock hat)_ Do you remember a long long time,
years and years ago, just after Milly, Marionette we called her, was
weaned when we all went together to Fairyhouse races, was it?

MRS BREEN: _(In smart Saxe tailormade, white velours hat and spider
veil)_ Leopardstown.

BLOOM: I mean, Leopardstown. And Molly won seven shillings on a three
year old named Nevertell and coming home along by Foxrock in that old
fiveseater shanderadan of a waggonette you were in your heyday then and
you had on that new hat of white velours with a surround of molefur that
Mrs Hayes advised you to buy because it was marked down to nineteen and
eleven, a bit of wire and an old rag of velveteen, and I'll lay you what
you like she did it on purpose...

MRS BREEN: She did, of course, the cat! Don't tell me! Nice adviser!

BLOOM: Because it didn't suit you one quarter as well as the other ducky
little tammy toque with the bird of paradise wing in it that I admired
on you and you honestly looked just too fetching in it though it was a
pity to kill it, you cruel naughty creature, little mite of a thing with
a heart the size of a fullstop.

MRS BREEN: _(Squeezes his arm, simpers)_ Naughty cruel I was!

BLOOM: _(Low, secretly, ever more rapidly)_ And Molly was eating a
sandwich of spiced beef out of Mrs Joe Gallaher's lunch basket. Frankly,
though she had her advisers or admirers, I never cared much for her
style. She was...

MRS BREEN: Too...

BLOOM: Yes. And Molly was laughing because Rogers and Maggot O'Reilly
were mimicking a cock as we passed a farmhouse and Marcus Tertius Moses,
the tea merchant, drove past us in a gig with his daughter, Dancer Moses
was her name, and the poodle in her lap bridled up and you asked me if I
ever heard or read or knew or came across...

MRS BREEN: _(Eagerly)_ Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

_(She fades from his side. Followed by the whining dog he walks on
towards hellsgates. In an archway a standing woman, bent forward, her
feet apart, pisses cowily. Outside a shuttered pub a bunch of loiterers
listen to a tale which their brokensnouted gaffer rasps out with raucous
humour. An armless pair of them flop wrestling, growling, in maimed
sodden playfight.)_

THE GAFFER: _(Crouches, his voice twisted in his snout)_ And when Cairns
came down from the scaffolding in Beaver street what was he after doing
it into only into the bucket of porter that was there waiting on the
shavings for Derwan's plasterers.

THE LOITERERS: _(Guffaw with cleft palates)_ O jays!

_(Their paintspeckled hats wag. Spattered with size and lime of their
lodges they frisk limblessly about him.)_

BLOOM: Coincidence too. They think it funny. Anything but that. Broad
daylight. Trying to walk. Lucky no woman.

THE LOITERERS: Jays, that's a good one. Glauber salts. O jays, into the
men's porter.

_(Bloom passes. Cheap whores, singly, coupled, shawled, dishevelled,
call from lanes, doors, corners.)_

THE WHORES:

     Are you going far, queer fellow?
     How's your middle leg?
     Got a match on you?
     Eh, come here till I stiffen it for you.


_(He plodges through their sump towards the lighted street beyond. From
a bulge of window curtains a gramophone rears a battered brazen trunk.
In the shadow a shebeenkeeper haggles with the navvy and the two
redcoats.)_

THE NAVVY: _(Belching)_ Where's the bloody house?

THE SHEBEENKEEPER: Purdon street. Shilling a bottle of stout.
Respectable woman.

THE NAVVY: _(Gripping the two redcoats, staggers forward with them)_
Come on, you British army!

PRIVATE CARR: _(Behind his back)_ He aint half balmy.

PRIVATE COMPTON: _(Laughs)_ What ho!

PRIVATE CARR: _(To the navvy)_ Portobello barracks canteen. You ask for
Carr. Just Carr.

THE NAVVY: _(Shouts)_

We are the boys. Of Wexford.

PRIVATE COMPTON: Say! What price the sergeantmajor?

PRIVATE CARR: Bennett? He's my pal. I love old Bennett.

THE NAVVY: _(Shouts)_

     The galling chain.
     And free our native land.

_(He staggers forward, dragging them with him. Bloom stops, at fault.
The dog approaches, his tongue outlolling, panting)_

BLOOM: Wildgoose chase this. Disorderly houses. Lord knows where they
are gone. Drunks cover distance double quick. Nice mixup. Scene at
Westland row. Then jump in first class with third ticket. Then too far.
Train with engine behind. Might have taken me to Malahide or a siding
for the night or collision. Second drink does it. Once is a dose. What
am I following him for? Still, he's the best of that lot. If I hadn't
heard about Mrs Beaufoy Purefoy I wouldn't have gone and wouldn't have
met. Kismet. He'll lose that cash. Relieving office here. Good biz for
cheapjacks, organs. What do ye lack? Soon got, soon gone. Might have
lost my life too with that mangongwheeltracktrolleyglarejuggernaut only
for presence of mind. Can't always save you, though. If I had passed
Truelock's window that day two minutes later would have been shot.
Absence of body. Still if bullet only went through my coat get damages
for shock, five hundred pounds. What was he? Kildare street club toff.
God help his gamekeeper.

_(He gazes ahead, reading on the wall a scrawled chalk legend_ Wet Dream
_and a phallic design._) Odd! Molly drawing on the frosted carriagepane
at Kingstown. What's that like? _(Gaudy dollwomen loll in the lighted
doorways, in window embrasures, smoking birdseye cigarettes. The
odour of the sicksweet weed floats towards him in slow round ovalling
wreaths.)_

THE WREATHS: Sweet are the sweets. Sweets of sin.

BLOOM: My spine's a bit limp. Go or turn? And this food? Eat it and get
all pigsticky. Absurd I am. Waste of money. One and eightpence too
much. _(The retriever drives a cold snivelling muzzle against his hand,
wagging his tail.)_ Strange how they take to me. Even that brute today.
Better speak to him first. Like women they like _rencontres._ Stinks
like a polecat. _Chacun son gout_. He might be mad. Dogdays. Uncertain
in his movements. Good fellow! Fido! Good fellow! Garryowen! _(The
wolfdog sprawls on his back, wriggling obscenely with begging paws, his
long black tongue lolling out.)_ Influence of his surroundings. Give
and have done with it. Provided nobody. _(Calling encouraging words he
shambles back with a furtive poacher's tread, dogged by the setter into
a dark stalestunk corner. He unrolls one parcel and goes to dump the
crubeen softly but holds back and feels the trotter.)_ Sizeable for
threepence. But then I have it in my left hand. Calls for more effort.
Why? Smaller from want of use. O, let it slide. Two and six.

_(With regret he lets the unrolled crubeen and trotter slide. The
mastiff mauls the bundle clumsily and gluts himself with growling greed,
crunching the bones. Two raincaped watch approach, silent, vigilant.
They murmur together.)_

THE WATCH: Bloom. Of Bloom. For Bloom. Bloom.

_(Each lays hand on Bloom's shoulder.)_

FIRST WATCH: Caught in the act. Commit no nuisance.

BLOOM: _(Stammers)_ I am doing good to others.

_(A covey of gulls, storm petrels, rises hungrily from Liffey slime with
Banbury cakes in their beaks.)_

THE GULLS: Kaw kave kankury kake.

BLOOM: The friend of man. Trained by kindness.

_(He points. Bob Doran, toppling from a high barstool, sways over the
munching spaniel.)_

BOB DORAN: Towser. Give us the paw. Give the paw.

_(The bulldog growls, his scruff standing, a gobbet of pig's knuckle
between his molars through which rabid scumspittle dribbles. Bob Doran
fills silently into an area.)_

SECOND WATCH: Prevention of cruelty to animals.

BLOOM: _(Enthusiastically)_ A noble work! I scolded that tramdriver on
Harold's cross bridge for illusing the poor horse with his harness scab.
Bad French I got for my pains. Of course it was frosty and the last
tram. All tales of circus life are highly demoralising.

_(Signor Maffei, passionpale, in liontamer's costume with diamond studs
in his shirtfront, steps forward, holding a circus paperhoop, a
curling carriagewhip and a revolver with which he covers the gorging
boarhound.)_

SIGNOR MAFFEI: _(With a sinister smile)_ Ladies and gentlemen, my
educated greyhound. It was I broke in the bucking broncho Ajax with my
patent spiked saddle for carnivores. Lash under the belly with a knotted
thong. Block tackle and a strangling pulley will bring your lion to
heel, no matter how fractious, even _Leo ferox_ there, the Libyan
maneater. A redhot crowbar and some liniment rubbing on the burning part
produced Fritz of Amsterdam, the thinking hyena. _(He glares)_ I possess
the Indian sign. The glint of my eye does it with these breastsparklers.
_(With a bewitching smile)_ I now introduce Mademoiselle Ruby, the pride
of the ring.

FIRST WATCH: Come. Name and address.

BLOOM: I have forgotten for the moment. Ah, yes! _(He takes off his high
grade hat, saluting)_ Dr Bloom, Leopold, dental surgeon. You have heard
of von Blum Pasha. Umpteen millions. _Donnerwetter!_ Owns half Austria.
Egypt. Cousin.

FIRST WATCH: Proof.

_(A card falls from inside the leather headband of Bloom's hat.)_

BLOOM: _(In red fez, cadi's dress coat with broad green sash, wearing
a false badge of the Legion of Honour, picks up the card hastily and
offers it)_ Allow me. My club is the Junior Army and Navy. Solicitors:
Messrs John Henry Menton, 27 Bachelor's Walk.

FIRST WATCH: _(Reads)_ Henry Flower. No fixed abode. Unlawfully watching
and besetting.

SECOND WATCH: An alibi. You are cautioned.

BLOOM: _(Produces from his heartpocket a crumpled yellow flower)_ This
is the flower in question. It was given me by a man I don't know his
name. _(Plausibly)_ You know that old joke, rose of Castile. Bloom. The
change of name. Virag. _(He murmurs privately and confidentially)_ We
are engaged you see, sergeant. Lady in the case. Love entanglement. _(He
shoulders the second watch gently)_ Dash it all. It's a way we gallants
have in the navy. Uniform that does it. _(He turns gravely to the first
watch)_ Still, of course, you do get your Waterloo sometimes. Drop in
some evening and have a glass of old Burgundy. _(To the second watch
gaily)_ I'll introduce you, inspector. She's game. Do it in the shake of
a lamb's tail.

_(A dark mercurialised face appears, leading a veiled figure.)_

THE DARK MERCURY: The Castle is looking for him. He was drummed out of
the army.

MARTHA: _(Thickveiled, a crimson halter round her neck, a copy of
the_ Irish Times _in her hand, in tone of reproach, pointing)_ Henry!
Leopold! Lionel, thou lost one! Clear my name.

FIRST WATCH: _(Sternly)_ Come to the station.

BLOOM: _(Scared, hats himself, steps back, then, plucking at his heart
and lifting his right forearm on the square, he gives the sign and
dueguard of fellowcraft)_ No, no, worshipful master, light of love.
Mistaken identity. The Lyons mail. Lesurques and Dubosc. You remember
the Childs fratricide case. We medical men. By striking him dead with
a hatchet. I am wrongfully accused. Better one guilty escape than
ninetynine wrongfully condemned.

MARTHA: _(Sobbing behind her veil)_ Breach of promise. My real name
is Peggy Griffin. He wrote to me that he was miserable. I'll tell my
brother, the Bective rugger fullback, on you, heartless flirt.

BLOOM: _(Behind his hand)_ She's drunk. The woman is inebriated. _(He
murmurs vaguely the pass of Ephraim)_ Shitbroleeth.

SECOND WATCH: _(Tears in his eyes, to Bloom)_ You ought to be thoroughly
well ashamed of yourself.

BLOOM: Gentlemen of the jury, let me explain. A pure mare's nest. I am
a man misunderstood. I am being made a scapegoat of. I am a respectable
married man, without a stain on my character. I live in Eccles street.
My wife, I am the daughter of a most distinguished commander, a gallant
upstanding gentleman, what do you call him, Majorgeneral Brian Tweedy,
one of Britain's fighting men who helped to win our battles. Got his
majority for the heroic defence of Rorke's Drift.

FIRST WATCH: Regiment.

BLOOM: _(Turns to the gallery)_ The royal Dublins, boys, the salt of the
earth, known the world over. I think I see some old comrades in arms
up there among you. The R. D. F., with our own Metropolitan police,
guardians of our homes, the pluckiest lads and the finest body of men,
as physique, in the service of our sovereign.

A VOICE: Turncoat! Up the Boers! Who booed Joe Chamberlain?

BLOOM: _(His hand on the shoulder of the first watch)_ My old dad too
was a J. P. I'm as staunch a Britisher as you are, sir. I fought with
the colours for king and country in the absentminded war under general
Gough in the park and was disabled at Spion Kop and Bloemfontein, was
mentioned in dispatches. I did all a white man could. _(With quiet
feeling)_ Jim Bludso. Hold her nozzle again the bank.

FIRST WATCH: Profession or trade.

BLOOM: Well, I follow a literary occupation, author-journalist. In fact
we are just bringing out a collection of prize stories of which I am the
inventor, something that is an entirely new departure. I am connected
with the British and Irish press. If you ring up...

_(Myles Crawford strides out jerkily, a quill between his teeth. His
scarlet beak blazes within the aureole of his straw hat. He dangles
a hank of Spanish onions in one hand and holds with the other hand a
telephone receiver nozzle to his ear.)_

MYLES CRAWFORD: _(His cock's wattles wagging)_ Hello, seventyseven
eightfour. Hello. _Freeman's Urinal_ and _Weekly Arsewipe_ here.
Paralyse Europe. You which? Bluebags? Who writes? Is it Bloom?

_(Mr Philip Beaufoy, palefaced, stands in the witnessbox, in accurate
morning dress, outbreast pocket with peak of handkerchief showing,
creased lavender trousers and patent boots. He carries a large portfolio
labelled_ Matcham's Masterstrokes.)

BEAUFOY: _(Drawls)_ No, you aren't. Not by a long shot if I know it.
I don't see it that's all. No born gentleman, no-one with the most
rudimentary promptings of a gentleman would stoop to such particularly
loathsome conduct. One of those, my lord. A plagiarist. A soapy sneak
masquerading as a litterateur. It's perfectly obvious that with the most
inherent baseness he has cribbed some of my bestselling copy, really
gorgeous stuff, a perfect gem, the love passages in which are beneath
suspicion. The Beaufoy books of love and great possessions, with which
your lordship is doubtless familiar, are a household word throughout the
kingdom.

BLOOM: _(Murmurs with hangdog meekness glum)_ That bit about the
laughing witch hand in hand I take exception to, if I may...

BEAUFOY: _(His lip upcurled, smiles superciliously on the court)_ You
funny ass, you! You're too beastly awfully weird for words! I don't
think you need over excessively disincommodate yourself in that regard.
My literary agent Mr J. B. Pinker is in attendance. I presume, my
lord, we shall receive the usual witnesses' fees, shan't we? We are
considerably out of pocket over this bally pressman johnny, this jackdaw
of Rheims, who has not even been to a university.

BLOOM: _(Indistinctly)_ University of life. Bad art.

BEAUFOY: _(Shouts)_ It's a damnably foul lie, showing the moral
rottenness of the man! _(He extends his portfolio)_ We have here damning
evidence, the _corpus delicti_, my lord, a specimen of my maturer work
disfigured by the hallmark of the beast.

A VOICE FROM THE GALLERY:

Moses, Moses, king of the jews, Wiped his arse in the Daily News.

BLOOM: _(Bravely)_ Overdrawn.

BEAUFOY: You low cad! You ought to be ducked in the horsepond, you
rotter! _(To the court)_ Why, look at the man's private life! Leading
a quadruple existence! Street angel and house devil. Not fit to be
mentioned in mixed society! The archconspirator of the age!

BLOOM: _(To the court)_ And he, a bachelor, how...

FIRST WATCH: The King versus Bloom. Call the woman Driscoll.

THE CRIER: Mary Driscoll, scullerymaid!

_(Mary Driscoll, a slipshod servant girl, approaches. She has a bucket
on the crook of her arm and a scouringbrush in her hand.)_

SECOND WATCH: Another! Are you of the unfortunate class?

MARY DRISCOLL: _(Indignantly)_ I'm not a bad one. I bear a respectable
character and was four months in my last place. I was in a situation,
six pounds a year and my chances with Fridays out and I had to leave
owing to his carryings on.

FIRST WATCH: What do you tax him with?

MARY DRISCOLL: He made a certain suggestion but I thought more of myself
as poor as I am.

BLOOM: _(In housejacket of ripplecloth, flannel trousers, heelless
slippers, unshaven, his hair rumpled: softly)_ I treated you white.
I gave you mementos, smart emerald garters far above your station.
Incautiously I took your part when you were accused of pilfering.
There's a medium in all things. Play cricket.

MARY DRISCOLL: _(Excitedly)_ As God is looking down on me this night if
ever I laid a hand to them oysters!

FIRST WATCH: The offence complained of? Did something happen?

MARY DRISCOLL: He surprised me in the rere of the premises, Your honour,
when the missus was out shopping one morning with a request for a safety
pin. He held me and I was discoloured in four places as a result. And he
interfered twict with my clothing.

BLOOM: She counterassaulted.

MARY DRISCOLL: _(Scornfully)_ I had more respect for the scouringbrush,
so I had. I remonstrated with him, Your lord, and he remarked: keep it
quiet.

_(General laughter.)_

GEORGE FOTTRELL: _(Clerk of the crown and peace, resonantly)_ Order in
court! The accused will now make a bogus statement.

_(Bloom, pleading not guilty and holding a fullblown waterlily, begins
a long unintelligible speech. They would hear what counsel had to say in
his stirring address to the grand jury. He was down and out but, though
branded as a black sheep, if he might say so, he meant to reform, to
retrieve the memory of the past in a purely sisterly way and return to
nature as a purely domestic animal. A sevenmonths' child, he had been
carefully brought up and nurtured by an aged bedridden parent. There
might have been lapses of an erring father but he wanted to turn over
a new leaf and now, when at long last in sight of the whipping post,
to lead a homely life in the evening of his days, permeated by the
affectionate surroundings of the heaving bosom of the family. An
acclimatised Britisher, he had seen that summer eve from the footplate
of an engine cab of the Loop line railway company while the rain
refrained from falling glimpses, as it were, through the windows of
loveful households in Dublin city and urban district of scenes truly
rural of happiness of the better land with Dockrell's wallpaper at one
and ninepence a dozen, innocent Britishborn bairns lisping prayers to
the Sacred Infant, youthful scholars grappling with their pensums or
model young ladies playing on the pianoforte or anon all with fervour
reciting the family rosary round the crackling Yulelog while in the
boreens and green lanes the colleens with their swains strolled what
times the strains of the organtoned melodeon Britannia metalbound with
four acting stops and twelvefold bellows, a sacrifice, greatest bargain
ever..._

_(Renewed laughter. He mumbles incoherently. Reporters complain that
they cannot hear.)_

LONGHAND AND SHORTHAND: _(Without looking up from their notebooks)_
Loosen his boots.

PROFESSOR MACHUGH: _(From the presstable, coughs and calls)_ Cough it
up, man. Get it out in bits.

_(The crossexamination proceeds re Bloom and the bucket. A large bucket.
Bloom himself. Bowel trouble. In Beaver street Gripe, yes. Quite bad.
A plasterer's bucket. By walking stifflegged. Suffered untold misery.
Deadly agony. About noon. Love or burgundy. Yes, some spinach. Crucial
moment. He did not look in the bucket Nobody. Rather a mess. Not
completely._ A Titbits _back number_.)

_(Uproar and catcalls. Bloom in a torn frockcoat stained with whitewash,
dinged silk hat sideways on his head, a strip of stickingplaster across
his nose, talks inaudibly.)_

J. J. O'MOLLOY: _(In barrister's grey wig and stuffgown, speaking with
a voice of pained protest)_ This is no place for indecent levity at
the expense of an erring mortal disguised in liquor. We are not in a
beargarden nor at an Oxford rag nor is this a travesty of justice. My
client is an infant, a poor foreign immigrant who started scratch as
a stowaway and is now trying to turn an honest penny. The trumped up
misdemeanour was due to a momentary aberration of heredity, brought on
by hallucination, such familiarities as the alleged guilty occurrence
being quite permitted in my client's native place, the land of the
Pharaoh. _Prima facie_, I put it to you that there was no attempt at
carnally knowing. Intimacy did not occur and the offence complained of
by Driscoll, that her virtue was solicited, was not repeated. I would
deal in especial with atavism. There have been cases of shipwreck and
somnambulism in my client's family. If the accused could speak he could
a tale unfold--one of the strangest that have ever been narrated between
the covers of a book. He himself, my lord, is a physical wreck from
cobbler's weak chest. His submission is that he is of Mongolian
extraction and irresponsible for his actions. Not all there, in fact.

BLOOM: _(Barefoot, pigeonbreasted, in lascar's vest and trousers,
apologetic toes turned in, opens his tiny mole's eyes and looks about
him dazedly, passing a slow hand across his forehead. Then he hitches
his belt sailor fashion and with a shrug of oriental obeisance salutes
the court, pointing one thumb heavenward.)_ Him makee velly muchee fine
night. _(He begins to lilt simply)_

     Li li poo lil chile
     Blingee pigfoot evly night
     Payee two shilly...

_(He is howled down.)_

J. J. O'MOLLOY: _(Hotly to the populace)_ This is a lonehand fight. By
Hades, I will not have any client of mine gagged and badgered in this
fashion by a pack of curs and laughing hyenas. The Mosaic code has
superseded the law of the jungle. I say it and I say it emphatically,
without wishing for one moment to defeat the ends of justice, accused
was not accessory before the act and prosecutrix has not been tampered
with. The young person was treated by defendant as if she were his very
own daughter. _(Bloom takes J. J. O'Molloy's hand and raises it to his
lips.)_ I shall call rebutting evidence to prove up to the hilt that the
hidden hand is again at its old game. When in doubt persecute Bloom. My
client, an innately bashful man, would be the last man in the world to
do anything ungentlemanly which injured modesty could object to or
cast a stone at a girl who took the wrong turning when some dastard,
responsible for her condition, had worked his own sweet will on her. He
wants to go straight. I regard him as the whitest man I know. He is down
on his luck at present owing to the mortgaging of his extensive property
at Agendath Netaim in faraway Asia Minor, slides of which will now be
shown. _(To Bloom)_ I suggest that you will do the handsome thing.

BLOOM: A penny in the pound.

_(The image of the lake of Kinnereth with blurred cattle cropping in
silver haze is projected on the wall. Moses Dlugacz, ferreteyed albino,
in blue dungarees, stands up in the gallery, holding in each hand an
orange citron and a pork kidney.)_

DLUGACZ: _(Hoarsely)_ Bleibtreustrasse, Berlin, W.13.

_(J. J. O'Molloy steps on to a low plinth and holds the lapel of his
coat with solemnity. His face lengthens, grows pale and bearded, with
sunken eyes, the blotches of phthisis and hectic cheekbones of John F.
Taylor. He applies his handkerchief to his mouth and scrutinises the
galloping tide of rosepink blood.)_

J.J.O'MOLLOY: _(Almost voicelessly)_ Excuse me. I am suffering from a
severe chill, have recently come from a sickbed. A few wellchosen words.
_(He assumes the avine head, foxy moustache and proboscidal eloquence of
Seymour Bushe.)_ When the angel's book comes to be opened if aught
that the pensive bosom has inaugurated of soultransfigured and of
soultransfiguring deserves to live I say accord the prisoner at the bar
the sacred benefit of the doubt. _(A paper with something written on it
is handed into court._)

BLOOM: _(In court dress)_ Can give best references. Messrs Callan,
Coleman. Mr Wisdom Hely J. P. My old chief Joe Cuffe. Mr V. B. Dillon,
ex lord mayor of Dublin. I have moved in the charmed circle of the
highest... Queens of Dublin society. _(Carelessly)_ I was just chatting
this afternoon at the viceregal lodge to my old pals, sir Robert and
lady Ball, astronomer royal at the levee. Sir Bob, I said...

MRS YELVERTON BARRY: _(In lowcorsaged opal balldress and elbowlength
ivory gloves, wearing a sabletrimmed brickquilted dolman, a comb of
brilliants and panache of osprey in her hair)_ Arrest him, constable. He
wrote me an anonymous letter in prentice backhand when my husband was
in the North Riding of Tipperary on the Munster circuit, signed James
Lovebirch. He said that he had seen from the gods my peerless globes as
I sat in a box of the _Theatre Royal_ at a command performance of _La
Cigale_. I deeply inflamed him, he said. He made improper overtures
to me to misconduct myself at half past four p.m. on the following
Thursday, Dunsink time. He offered to send me through the post a work
of fiction by Monsieur Paul de Kock, entitled _The Girl with the Three
Pairs of Stays_.

MRS BELLINGHAM: _(In cap and seal coney mantle, wrapped up to the
nose, steps out of her brougham and scans through tortoiseshell
quizzing-glasses which she takes from inside her huge opossum muff)_
Also to me. Yes, I believe it is the same objectionable person. Because
he closed my carriage door outside sir Thornley Stoker's one sleety day
during the cold snap of February ninetythree when even the grid of the
wastepipe and the ballstop in my bath cistern were frozen. Subsequently
he enclosed a bloom of edelweiss culled on the heights, as he said,
in my honour. I had it examined by a botanical expert and elicited the
information that it was ablossom of the homegrown potato plant purloined
from a forcingcase of the model farm.

MRS YELVERTON BARRY: Shame on him!

_(A crowd of sluts and ragamuffins surges forward)_

THE SLUTS AND RAGAMUFFINS: _(Screaming)_ Stop thief! Hurrah there,
Bluebeard! Three cheers for Ikey Mo!

SECOND WATCH: _(Produces handcuffs)_ Here are the darbies.

MRS BELLINGHAM: He addressed me in several handwritings with fulsome
compliments as a Venus in furs and alleged profound pity for my
frostbound coachman Palmer while in the same breath he expressed himself
as envious of his earflaps and fleecy sheepskins and of his fortunate
proximity to my person, when standing behind my chair wearing my livery
and the armorial bearings of the Bellingham escutcheon garnished sable,
a buck's head couped or. He lauded almost extravagantly my nether
extremities, my swelling calves in silk hose drawn up to the limit, and
eulogised glowingly my other hidden treasures in priceless lace which,
he said, he could conjure up. He urged me (stating that he felt it
his mission in life to urge me) to defile the marriage bed, to commit
adultery at the earliest possible opportunity.

THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS: _(In amazon costume, hard hat,
jackboots cockspurred, vermilion waistcoat, fawn musketeer gauntlets
with braided drums, long train held up and hunting crop with which she
strikes her welt constantly)_ Also me. Because he saw me on the polo
ground of the Phoenix park at the match All Ireland versus the Rest of
Ireland. My eyes, I know, shone divinely as I watched Captain Slogger
Dennehy of the Inniskillings win the final chukkar on his darling cob
_Centaur._ This plebeian Don Juan observed me from behind a hackney car
and sent me in double envelopes an obscene photograph, such as are sold
after dark on Paris boulevards, insulting to any lady. I have it still.
It represents a partially nude señorita, frail and lovely (his wife, as
he solemnly assured me, taken by him from nature), practising illicit
intercourse with a muscular torero, evidently a blackguard. He urged me
to do likewise, to misbehave, to sin with officers of the garrison. He
implored me to soil his letter in an unspeakable manner, to chastise
him as he richly deserves, to bestride and ride him, to give him a most
vicious horsewhipping.

MRS BELLINGHAM: Me too.

MRS YELVERTON BARRY: Me too.

_(Several highly respectable Dublin ladies hold up improper letters
received from Bloom.)_

THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS: _(Stamps her jingling spurs in a
sudden paroxysm of fury)_ I will, by the God above me. I'll scourge the
pigeonlivered cur as long as I can stand over him. I'll flay him alive.

BLOOM: _(His eyes closing, quails expectantly)_ Here? _(He squirms)_
Again! _(He pants cringing)_ I love the danger.

THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS: Very much so! I'll make it hot for
you. I'll make you dance Jack Latten for that.

MRS BELLINGHAM: Tan his breech well, the upstart! Write the stars and
stripes on it!

MRS YELVERTON BARRY: Disgraceful! There's no excuse for him! A married
man!

BLOOM: All these people. I meant only the spanking idea. A warm tingling
glow without effusion. Refined birching to stimulate the circulation.

THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS: _(Laughs derisively)_ O, did you, my
fine fellow? Well, by the living God, you'll get the surprise of your
life now, believe me, the most unmerciful hiding a man ever bargained
for. You have lashed the dormant tigress in my nature into fury.

MRS BELLINGHAM: _(Shakes her muff and quizzing-glasses vindictively)_
Make him smart, Hanna dear. Give him ginger. Thrash the mongrel within
an inch of his life. The cat-o'-nine-tails. Geld him. Vivisect him.

BLOOM: _(Shuddering, shrinking, joins his hands: with hangdog mien)_ O
cold! O shivery! It was your ambrosial beauty. Forget, forgive. Kismet.
Let me off this once. _(He offers the other cheek)_

MRS YELVERTON BARRY: _(Severely)_ Don't do so on any account, Mrs
Talboys! He should be soundly trounced!

THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS: _(Unbuttoning her gauntlet
violently)_ I'll do no such thing. Pigdog and always was ever since
he was pupped! To dare address me! I'll flog him black and blue in
the public streets. I'll dig my spurs in him up to the rowel. He is a
wellknown cuckold. _(She swishes her huntingcrop savagely in the air)_
Take down his trousers without loss of time. Come here, sir! Quick!
Ready?

BLOOM: _(Trembling, beginning to obey)_ The weather has been so warm.

_(Davy Stephens, ringletted, passes with a bevy of barefoot newsboys.)_

DAVY STEPHENS: _Messenger of the Sacred Heart and Evening Telegraph_
with Saint Patrick's Day supplement. Containing the new addresses of all
the cuckolds in Dublin.

_(The very reverend Canon O'Hanlon in cloth of gold cope elevates and
exposes a marble timepiece. Before him Father Conroy and the reverend
John Hughes S.J. bend low.)_

THE TIMEPIECE: _(Unportalling)_

     Cuckoo.
     Cuckoo.
     Cuckoo.

_(The brass quoits of a bed are heard to jingle.)_

THE QUOITS: Jigjag. Jigajiga. Jigjag.

_(A panel of fog rolls back rapidly, revealing rapidly in the jurybox
the faces of Martin Cunningham, foreman, silkhatted, Jack Power, Simon
Dedalus, Tom Kernan, Ned Lambert, John Henry Menton Myles Crawford,
Lenehan, Paddy Leonard, Nosey Flynn, M'Coy and the featureless face of a
Nameless One.)_

THE NAMELESS ONE: Bareback riding. Weight for age. Gob, he organised
her.

THE JURORS: _(All their heads turned to his voice)_ Really?

THE NAMELESS ONE: _(Snarls)_ Arse over tip. Hundred shillings to five.

THE JURORS: _(All their heads lowered in assent)_ Most of us thought as
much.

FIRST WATCH: He is a marked man. Another girl's plait cut. Wanted: Jack
the Ripper. A thousand pounds reward.

SECOND WATCH: _(Awed, whispers)_ And in black. A mormon. Anarchist.

THE CRIER: _(Loudly)_ Whereas Leopold Bloom of no fixed abode is a
wellknown dynamitard, forger, bigamist, bawd and cuckold and a public
nuisance to the citizens of Dublin and whereas at this commission of
assizes the most honourable...

_(His Honour, sir Frederick Falkiner, recorder of Dublin, in judicial
garb of grey stone rises from the bench, stonebearded. He bears in his
arms an umbrella sceptre. From his forehead arise starkly the Mosaic
ramshorns.)_

THE RECORDER: I will put an end to this white slave traffic and rid
Dublin of this odious pest. Scandalous! _(He dons the black cap)_ Let
him be taken, Mr Subsheriff, from the dock where he now stands and
detained in custody in Mountjoy prison during His Majesty's pleasure
and there be hanged by the neck until he is dead and therein fail not
at your peril or may the Lord have mercy on your soul. Remove him. _(A
black skullcap descends upon his head.)_

_(The subsheriff Long John Fanning appears, smoking a pungent Henry
Clay.)_

LONG JOHN FANNING: _(Scowls and calls with rich rolling utterance)_
Who'll hang Judas Iscariot?

_(H. Rumbold, master barber, in a bloodcoloured jerkin and tanner's
apron, a rope coiled over his shoulder, mounts the block. A life
preserver and a nailstudded bludgeon are stuck in his belt. He rubs
grimly his grappling hands, knobbed with knuckledusters.)_

RUMBOLD: _(To the recorder with sinister familiarity)_ Hanging Harry,
your Majesty, the Mersey terror. Five guineas a jugular. Neck or
nothing.

_(The bells of George's church toll slowly, loud dark iron.)_

THE BELLS: Heigho! Heigho!

BLOOM: _(Desperately)_ Wait. Stop. Gulls. Good heart. I saw. Innocence.
Girl in the monkeyhouse. Zoo. Lewd chimpanzee. _(Breathlessly)_ Pelvic
basin. Her artless blush unmanned me. _(Overcome with emotion)_ I left
the precincts. (He turns to a figure in the crowd, appealing) Hynes, may
I speak to you? You know me. That three shillings you can keep. If you
want a little more...

HYNES: _(Coldly)_ You are a perfect stranger.

SECOND WATCH: _(Points to the corner)_ The bomb is here.

FIRST WATCH: Infernal machine with a time fuse.

BLOOM: No, no. Pig's feet. I was at a funeral.

FIRST WATCH: _(Draws his truncheon)_ Liar!

_(The beagle lifts his snout, showing the grey scorbutic face of Paddy
Dignam. He has gnawed all. He exhales a putrid carcasefed breath.
He grows to human size and shape. His dachshund coat becomes a brown
mortuary habit. His green eye flashes bloodshot. Half of one ear, all
the nose and both thumbs are ghouleaten.)_

PADDY DIGNAM: _(In a hollow voice)_ It is true. It was my funeral.
Doctor Finucane pronounced life extinct when I succumbed to the disease
from natural causes.

_(He lifts his mutilated ashen face moonwards and bays lugubriously.)_

BLOOM: _(In triumph)_ You hear?

PADDY DIGNAM: Bloom, I am Paddy Dignam's spirit. List, list, O list!

BLOOM: The voice is the voice of Esau.

SECOND WATCH: _(Blesses himself)_ How is that possible?

FIRST WATCH: It is not in the penny catechism.

PADDY DIGNAM: By metempsychosis. Spooks.

A VOICE: O rocks.

PADDY DIGNAM: _(Earnestly)_ Once I was in the employ of Mr J. H. Menton,
solicitor, commissioner for oaths and affidavits, of 27 Bachelor's Walk.
Now I am defunct, the wall of the heart hypertrophied. Hard lines. The
poor wife was awfully cut up. How is she bearing it? Keep her off that
bottle of sherry. _(He looks round him)_ A lamp. I must satisfy an
animal need. That buttermilk didn't agree with me.

_(The portly figure of John O'Connell, caretaker, stands forth, holding
a bunch of keys tied with crape. Beside him stands Father Coffey,
chaplain, toadbellied, wrynecked, in a surplice and bandanna nightcap,
holding sleepily a staff twisted poppies.)_

FATHER COFFEY: _(Yawns, then chants with a hoarse croak)_ Namine.
Jacobs. Vobiscuits. Amen.

JOHN O'CONNELL: _(Foghorns stormily through his megaphone)_ Dignam,
Patrick T, deceased.

PADDY DIGNAM: _(With pricked up ears, winces)_ Overtones. _(He wriggles
forward and places an ear to the ground)_ My master's voice!

JOHN O'CONNELL: Burial docket letter number U. P. eightyfive thousand.
Field seventeen. House of Keys. Plot, one hundred and one.

_(Paddy Dignam listens with visible effort, thinking, his tail
stiffpointcd, his ears cocked.)_

PADDY DIGNAM: Pray for the repose of his soul.

_(He worms down through a coalhole, his brown habit trailing its tether
over rattling pebbles. After him toddles an obese grandfather rat on
fungus turtle paws under a grey carapace. Dignam's voice, muffled, is
heard baying under ground:_ Dignam's dead and gone below. _Tom Rochford,
robinredbreasted, in cap and breeches, jumps from his twocolumned
machine.)_

TOM ROCHFORD: _(A hand to his breastbone, bows)_ Reuben J. A florin I
find him. _(He fixes the manhole with a resolute stare)_ My turn now on.
Follow me up to Carlow.

_(He executes a daredevil salmon leap in the air and is engulfed in the
coalhole. Two discs on the columns wobble, eyes of nought. All recedes.
Bloom plodges forward again through the sump. Kisses chirp amid
the rifts of fog a piano sounds. He stands before a lighted house,
listening. The kisses, winging from their bowers fly about him,
twittering, warbling, cooing.)_

THE KISSES: _(Warbling)_ Leo! _(Twittering)_ Icky licky micky sticky for
Leo! _(Cooing)_ Coo coocoo! Yummyyum, Womwom! _(Warbling)_ Big comebig!
Pirouette! Leopopold! _(Twittering)_ Leeolee! _(Warbling)_ O Leo!

_(They rustle, flutter upon his garments, alight, bright giddy flecks,
silvery sequins.)_

BLOOM: A man's touch. Sad music. Church music. Perhaps here.

_(Zoe Higgins, a young whore in a sapphire slip, closed with three
bronze buckles, a slim black velvet fillet round her throat, nods, trips
down the steps and accosts him.)_

ZOE: Are you looking for someone? He's inside with his friend.

BLOOM: Is this Mrs Mack's?

ZOE: No, eightyone. Mrs Cohen's. You might go farther and fare worse.
Mother Slipperslapper. _(Familiarly)_ She's on the job herself tonight
with the vet her tipster that gives her all the winners and pays for
her son in Oxford. Working overtime but her luck's turned today.
_(Suspiciously)_ You're not his father, are you?

BLOOM: Not I!

ZOE: You both in black. Has little mousey any tickles tonight?

_(His skin, alert, feels her fingertips approach. A hand glides over his
left thigh.)_

ZOE: How's the nuts?

BLOOM: Off side. Curiously they are on the right. Heavier, I suppose.
One in a million my tailor, Mesias, says.

ZOE: _(In sudden alarm)_ You've a hard chancre.

BLOOM: Not likely.

ZOE: I feel it.

_(Her hand slides into his left trouser pocket and brings out a hard
black shrivelled potato. She regards it and Bloom with dumb moist
lips.)_

BLOOM: A talisman. Heirloom.

ZOE: For Zoe? For keeps? For being so nice, eh?

_(She puts the potato greedily into a pocket then links his arm,
cuddling him with supple warmth. He smiles uneasily. Slowly, note by
note, oriental music is played. He gazes in the tawny crystal of her
eyes, ringed with kohol. His smile softens.)_

ZOE: You'll know me the next time.

BLOOM: _(Forlornly)_ I never loved a dear gazelle but it was sure to...

_(Gazelles are leaping, feeding on the mountains. Near are lakes. Round
their shores file shadows black of cedargroves. Aroma rises, a strong
hairgrowth of resin. It burns, the orient, a sky of sapphire, cleft by
the bronze flight of eagles. Under it lies the womancity nude, white,
still, cool, in luxury. A fountain murmurs among damask roses. Mammoth
roses murmur of scarlet winegrapes. A wine of shame, lust, blood exudes,
strangely murmuring.)_

ZOE: _(Murmuring singsong with the music, her odalisk lips lusciously
smeared with salve of swinefat and rosewater) Schorach ani wenowach,
benoith Hierushaloim._

BLOOM: _(Fascinated)_ I thought you were of good stock by your accent.

ZOE: And you know what thought did?

_(She bites his ear gently with little goldstopped teeth, sending on
him a cloying breath of stale garlic. The roses draw apart, disclose a
sepulchre of the gold of kings and their mouldering bones.)_

BLOOM: _(Draws back, mechanically caressing her right bub with a flat
awkward hand)_ Are you a Dublin girl?

ZOE: _(Catches a stray hair deftly and twists it to her coil)_ No bloody
fear. I'm English. Have you a swaggerroot?

BLOOM: _(As before)_ Rarely smoke, dear. Cigar now and then. Childish
device. _(Lewdly)_ The mouth can be better engaged than with a cylinder
of rank weed.

ZOE: Go on. Make a stump speech out of it.

BLOOM: _(In workman's corduroy overalls, black gansy with red floating
tie and apache cap)_ Mankind is incorrigible. Sir Walter Ralegh brought
from the new world that potato and that weed, the one a killer of
pestilence by absorption, the other a poisoner of the ear, eye, heart,
memory, will understanding, all. That is to say he brought the poison
a hundred years before another person whose name I forget brought the
food. Suicide. Lies. All our habits. Why, look at our public life!

_(Midnight chimes from distant steeples.)_

THE CHIMES: Turn again, Leopold! Lord mayor of Dublin!

BLOOM: _(In alderman's gown and chain)_ Electors of Arran Quay, Inns
Quay, Rotunda, Mountjoy and North Dock, better run a tramline, I say,
from the cattlemarket to the river. That's the music of the future.
That's my programme. _Cui bono_? But our bucaneering Vanderdeckens in
their phantom ship of finance...

AN ELECTOR: Three times three for our future chief magistrate!

_(The aurora borealis of the torchlight procession leaps.)_

THE TORCHBEARERS: Hooray!

_(Several wellknown burgesses, city magnates and freemen of the city
shake hands with Bloom and congratulate him. Timothy Harrington, late
thrice Lord Mayor of Dublin, imposing in mayoral scarlet, gold chain and
white silk tie, confers with councillor Lorcan Sherlock, locum tenens.
They nod vigorously in agreement.)_

LATE LORD MAYOR HARRINGTON: _(In scarlet robe with mace, gold mayoral
chain and large white silk scarf)_ That alderman sir Leo Bloom's speech
be printed at the expense of the ratepayers. That the house in which
he was born be ornamented with a commemorative tablet and that the
thoroughfare hitherto known as Cow Parlour off Cork street be henceforth
designated Boulevard Bloom.

COUNCILLOR LORCAN SHERLOCK: Carried unanimously.

BLOOM: _(Impassionedly)_ These flying Dutchmen or lying Dutchmen as
they recline in their upholstered poop, casting dice, what reck they?
Machines is their cry, their chimera, their panacea. Laboursaving
apparatuses, supplanters, bugbears, manufactured monsters for mutual
murder, hideous hobgoblins produced by a horde of capitalistic lusts
upon our prostituted labour. The poor man starves while they are
grassing their royal mountain stags or shooting peasants and phartridges
in their purblind pomp of pelf and power. But their reign is rover for
rever and ever and ev...

_(Prolonged applause. Venetian masts, maypoles and festal arches spring
up. A streamer bearing the legends_ Cead Mile Failte _and_ Mah Ttob
Melek Israel _Spans the street. All the windows are thronged with
sightseers, chiefly ladies. Along the route the regiments of the
royal Dublin Fusiliers, the King's own Scottish Borderers, the Cameron
Highlanders and the Welsh Fusiliers standing to attention, keep back
the crowd. Boys from High school are perched on the lampposts,
telegraph poles, windowsills, cornices, gutters, chimneypots, railings,
rainspouts, whistling and cheering the pillar of the cloud appears. A
fife and drum band is heard in the distance playing the Kol Nidre. The
beaters approach with imperial eagles hoisted, trailing banners and
waving oriental palms. The chryselephantine papal standard rises high,
surrounded by pennons of the civic flag. The van of the procession
appears headed by John Howard Parnell, city marshal, in a chessboard
tabard, the Athlone Poursuivant and Ulster King of Arms. They are
followed by the Right Honourable Joseph Hutchinson, lord mayor of
Dublin, his lordship the lord mayor of Cork, their worships the
mayors of Limerick, Galway, Sligo and Waterford, twentyeight Irish
representative peers, sirdars, grandees and maharajahs bearing the cloth
of estate, the Dublin Metropolitan Fire Brigade, the chapter of the
saints of finance in their plutocratic order of precedence, the bishop
of Down and Connor, His Eminence Michael cardinal Logue, archbishop of
Armagh, primate of all Ireland, His Grace, the most reverend Dr William
Alexander, archbishop of Armagh, primate of all Ireland, the chief
rabbi, the presbyterian moderator, the heads of the baptist, anabaptist,
methodist and Moravian chapels and the honorary secretary of the society
of friends. After them march the guilds and trades and trainbands
with flying colours: coopers, bird fanciers, millwrights, newspaper
canvassers, law scriveners, masseurs, vintners, trussmakers,
chimneysweeps, lard refiners, tabinet and poplin weavers, farriers,
Italian warehousemen, church decorators, bootjack manufacturers,
undertakers, silk mercers, lapidaries, salesmasters, corkcutters,
assessors of fire losses, dyers and cleaners, export bottlers,
fellmongers, ticketwriters, heraldic seal engravers, horse repository
hands, bullion brokers, cricket and archery outfitters, riddlemakers,
egg and potato factors, hosiers and glovers, plumbing contractors. After
them march gentlemen of the bedchamber, Black Rod, Deputy Garter,
Gold Stick, the master of horse, the lord great chamberlain, the earl
marshal, the high constable carrying the sword of state, saint Stephen's
iron crown, the chalice and bible. Four buglers on foot blow a sennet.
Beefeaters reply, winding clarions of welcome. Under an arch of triumph
Bloom appears, bareheaded, in a crimson velvet mantle trimmed with
ermine, bearing Saint Edward's staff the orb and sceptre with the dove,
the curtana. He is seated on a milkwhite horse with long flowing crimson
tail, richly caparisoned, with golden headstall. Wild excitement. The
ladies from their balconies throw down rosepetals. The air is perfumed
with essences. The men cheer. Bloom's boys run amid the bystanders with
branches of hawthorn and wrenbushes.)_

BLOOM'S BOYS:

     The wren, the wren,
     The king of all birds,
     Saint Stephen's his day
     Was caught in the furze.


A BLACKSMITH: _(Murmurs)_ For the honour of God! And is that Bloom? He
scarcely looks thirtyone.

A PAVIOR AND FLAGGER: That's the famous Bloom now, the world's greatest
reformer. Hats off!

_(All uncover their heads. Women whisper eagerly.)_

A MILLIONAIRESS: _(Richly)_ Isn't he simply wonderful?

A NOBLEWOMAN: _(Nobly)_ All that man has seen!

A FEMINIST: _(Masculinely)_ And done!

A BELLHANGER: A classic face! He has the forehead of a thinker.

_(Bloom's weather. A sunburst appears in the northwest.)_

THE BISHOP OF DOWN AND CONNOR: I here present your undoubted
emperor-president and king-chairman, the most serene and potent and very
puissant ruler of this realm. God save Leopold the First!

ALL: God save Leopold the First!

BLOOM: _(In dalmatic and purple mantle, to the bishop of Down and
Connor, with dignity)_ Thanks, somewhat eminent sir.

WILLIAM, ARCHBISHOP OF ARMAGH: _(In purple stock and shovel hat)_
Will you to your power cause law and mercy to be executed in all your
judgments in Ireland and territories thereunto belonging?

BLOOM: _(Placing his right hand on his testicles, swears)_ So may the
Creator deal with me. All this I promise to do.

MICHAEL, ARCHBISHOP OF ARMAGH: _(Pours a cruse of hairoil over Bloom's
head) Gaudium magnum annuntio vobis. Habemus carneficem._ Leopold,
Patrick, Andrew, David, George, be thou anointed!

_(Bloom assumes a mantle of cloth of gold and puts on a ruby ring. He
ascends and stands on the stone of destiny. The representative peers put
on at the same time their twentyeight crowns. Joybells ring in Christ
church, Saint Patrick's, George's and gay Malahide. Mirus bazaar
fireworks go up from all sides with symbolical phallopyrotechnic
designs. The peers do homage, one by one, approaching and
genuflecting.)_

THE PEERS: I do become your liege man of life and limb to earthly
worship.

_(Bloom holds up his right hand on which sparkles the Koh-i-Noor
diamond. His palfrey neighs. Immediate silence. Wireless
intercontinental and interplanetary transmitters are set for reception
of message.)_

BLOOM: My subjects! We hereby nominate our faithful charger Copula Felix
hereditary Grand Vizier and announce that we have this day repudiated
our former spouse and have bestowed our royal hand upon the princess
Selene, the splendour of night.

_(The former morganatic spouse of Bloom is hastily removed in the Black
Maria. The princess Selene, in moonblue robes, a silver crescent on her
head, descends from a Sedan chair, borne by two giants. An outburst of
cheering.)_

JOHN HOWARD PARNELL: _(Raises the royal standard)_ Illustrious Bloom!
Successor to my famous brother!

BLOOM: _(Embraces John Howard Parnell)_ We thank you from our heart,
John, for this right royal welcome to green Erin, the promised land of
our common ancestors.

_(The freedom of the city is presented to him embodied in a charter. The
keys of Dublin, crossed on a crimson cushion, are given to him. He shows
all that he is wearing green socks.)_

TOM KERNAN: You deserve it, your honour.

BLOOM: On this day twenty years ago we overcame the hereditary enemy at
Ladysmith. Our howitzers and camel swivel guns played on his lines with
telling effect. Half a league onward! They charge! All is lost now! Do
we yield? No! We drive them headlong! Lo! We charge! Deploying to the
left our light horse swept across the heights of Plevna and, uttering
their warcry _Bonafide Sabaoth_, sabred the Saracen gunners to a man.

THE CHAPEL OF FREEMAN TYPESETTERS: Hear! Hear!

JOHN WYSE NOLAN: There's the man that got away James Stephens.

A BLUECOAT SCHOOLBOY: Bravo!

AN OLD RESIDENT: You're a credit to your country, sir, that's what you
are.

AN APPLEWOMAN: He's a man like Ireland wants.

BLOOM: My beloved subjects, a new era is about to dawn. I, Bloom, tell
you verily it is even now at hand. Yea, on the word of a Bloom, ye shall
ere long enter into the golden city which is to be, the new Bloomusalem
in the Nova Hibernia of the future.

_(Thirtytwo workmen, wearing rosettes, from all the counties of Ireland,
under the guidance of Derwan the builder, construct the new Bloomusalem.
It is a colossal edifice with crystal roof, built in the shape of a
huge pork kidney, containing forty thousand rooms. In the course of its
extension several buildings and monuments are demolished. Government
offices are temporarily transferred to railway sheds. Numerous houses
are razed to the ground. The inhabitants are lodged in barrels and
boxes, all marked in red with the letters: L. B. several paupers
fill from a ladder. A part of the walls of Dublin, crowded with loyal
sightseers, collapses.)_

THE SIGHTSEERS: _(Dying) Morituri te salutant. (They die)_

_(A man in a brown macintosh springs up through a trapdoor. He points an
elongated finger at Bloom.)_

THE MAN IN THE MACINTOSH: Don't you believe a word he says. That man is
Leopold M'Intosh, the notorious fireraiser. His real name is Higgins.

BLOOM: Shoot him! Dog of a christian! So much for M'Intosh!

_(A cannonshot. The man in the macintosh disappears. Bloom with his
sceptre strikes down poppies. The instantaneous deaths of many
powerful enemies, graziers, members of parliament, members of standing
committees, are reported. Bloom's bodyguard distribute Maundy money,
commemoration medals, loaves and fishes, temperance badges, expensive
Henry Clay cigars, free cowbones for soup, rubber preservatives in
sealed envelopes tied with gold thread, butter scotch, pineapple rock,_
billets doux _in the form of cocked hats, readymade suits, porringers
of toad in the hole, bottles of Jeyes' Fluid, purchase stamps, 40 days'
indulgences, spurious coins, dairyfed pork sausages, theatre passes,
season tickets available for all tramlines, coupons of the royal and
privileged Hungarian lottery, penny dinner counters, cheap reprints of
the World's Twelve Worst Books: Froggy And Fritz (politic), Care of the
Baby (infantilic), 50 Meals for 7/6 (culinic), Was Jesus a Sun Myth?
(historic), Expel that Pain (medic), Infant's Compendium of the
Universe (cosmic), Let's All Chortle (hilaric), Canvasser's Vade Mecum
(journalic), Loveletters of Mother Assistant (erotic), Who's Who in
Space (astric), Songs that Reached Our Heart (melodic), Pennywise's Way
to Wealth (parsimonic). A general rush and scramble. Women press forward
to touch the hem of Bloom's robe. The Lady Gwendolen Dubedat bursts
through the throng, leaps on his horse and kisses him on both cheeks
amid great acclamation. A magnesium flashlight photograph is taken.
Babes and sucklings are held up.)_

THE WOMEN: Little father! Little father!

THE BABES AND SUCKLINGS:

     Clap clap hands till Poldy comes home,
     Cakes in his pocket for Leo alone.


_(Bloom, bending down, pokes Baby Boardman gently in the stomach.)_

BABY BOARDMAN: _(Hiccups, curdled milk flowing from his mouth)_
Hajajaja.

BLOOM: _(Shaking hands with a blind stripling)_ My more than Brother!
_(Placing his arms round the shoulders of an old couple)_ Dear old
friends! _(He plays pussy fourcorners with ragged boys and girls)_
Peep! Bopeep! _(He wheels twins in a perambulator)_ Ticktacktwo
wouldyousetashoe? _(He performs juggler's tricks, draws red, orange,
yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet silk handkerchiefs from his
mouth)_ Roygbiv. 32 feet per second. _(He consoles a widow)_ Absence
makes the heart grow younger. _(He dances the Highland fling with
grotesque antics)_ Leg it, ye devils! _(He kisses the bedsores of a
palsied veteran_) Honourable wounds! _(He trips up a fit policeman)_
U. p: up. U. p: up. _(He whispers in the ear of a blushing waitress and
laughs kindly)_ Ah, naughty, naughty! _(He eats a raw turnip offered
him by Maurice Butterly, farmer)_ Fine! Splendid! _(He refuses to
accept three shillings offered him by Joseph Hynes, journalist)_ My dear
fellow, not at all! (He gives his coat to a beggar) Please accept. _(He
takes part in a stomach race with elderly male and female cripples)_
Come on, boys! Wriggle it, girls!

THE CITIZEN: _(Choked with emotion, brushes aside a tear in his emerald
muffler)_ May the good God bless him!

_(The rams' horns sound for silence. The standard of Zion is hoisted.)_

BLOOM: _(Uncloaks impressively, revealing obesity, unrolls a paper and
reads solemnly)_ Aleph Beth Ghimel Daleth Hagadah Tephilim Kosher Yom
Kippur Hanukah Roschaschana Beni Brith Bar Mitzvah Mazzoth Askenazim
Meshuggah Talith.

_(An official translation is read by Jimmy Henry, assistant town
clerk.)_

JIMMY HENRY: The Court of Conscience is now open. His Most Catholic
Majesty will now administer open air justice. Free medical and legal
advice, solution of doubles and other problems. All cordially invited.
Given at this our loyal city of Dublin in the year I of the Paradisiacal
Era.

PADDY LEONARD: What am I to do about my rates and taxes?

BLOOM: Pay them, my friend.

PADDY LEONARD: Thank you.

NOSEY FLYNN: Can I raise a mortgage on my fire insurance?

BLOOM: _(Obdurately)_ Sirs, take notice that by the law of torts you are
bound over in your own recognisances for six months in the sum of five
pounds.

J. J. O'MOLLOY: A Daniel did I say? Nay! A Peter O'Brien!

NOSEY FLYNN: Where do I draw the five pounds?

PISSER BURKE: For bladder trouble?

BLOOM:

     _Acid. nit. hydrochlor. dil.,_ 20 minims
     _Tinct. nux vom.,_ 5 minims
     _Extr. taraxel. iiq.,_ 30 minims.
     _Aq. dis. ter in die._

CHRIS CALLINAN: What is the parallax of the subsolar ecliptic of
Aldebaran?

BLOOM: Pleased to hear from you, Chris. K. II.

JOE HYNES: Why aren't you in uniform?

BLOOM: When my progenitor of sainted memory wore the uniform of the
Austrian despot in a dank prison where was yours?

BEN DOLLARD: Pansies?

BLOOM: Embellish (beautify) suburban gardens.

BEN DOLLARD: When twins arrive?

BLOOM: Father (pater, dad) starts thinking.

LARRY O'ROURKE: An eightday licence for my new premises. You remember
me, sir Leo, when you were in number seven. I'm sending around a dozen
of stout for the missus.

BLOOM: _(Coldly)_ You have the advantage of me. Lady Bloom accepts no
presents.

CROFTON: This is indeed a festivity.

BLOOM: _(Solemnly)_ You call it a festivity. I call it a sacrament.

ALEXANDER KEYES: When will we have our own house of keys?

BLOOM: I stand for the reform of municipal morals and the plain ten
commandments. New worlds for old. Union of all, jew, moslem and gentile.
Three acres and a cow for all children of nature. Saloon motor hearses.
Compulsory manual labour for all. All parks open to the public day and
night. Electric dishscrubbers. Tuberculosis, lunacy, war and mendicancy
must now cease. General amnesty, weekly carnival with masked licence,
bonuses for all, esperanto the universal language with universal
brotherhood. No more patriotism of barspongers and dropsical impostors.
Free money, free rent, free love and a free lay church in a free lay
state.

O'MADDEN BURKE: Free fox in a free henroost.

DAVY BYRNE: _(Yawning)_ Iiiiiiiiiaaaaaaach!

BLOOM: Mixed races and mixed marriage.

LENEHAN: What about mixed bathing?

_(bloom explains to those near him his schemes for social regeneration.
All agree with him. The keeper of the Kildare Street Museum appears,
dragging a lorry on which are the shaking statues of several naked
goddesses, Venus Callipyge, Venus Pandemos, Venus Metempsychosis, and
plaster figures, also naked, representing the new nine muses, Commerce,
Operatic Music, Amor, Publicity, Manufacture, Liberty of Speech, Plural
Voting, Gastronomy, Private Hygiene, Seaside Concert Entertainments,
Painless Obstetrics and Astronomy for the People.)_

FATHER FARLEY: He is an episcopalian, an agnostic, an anythingarian
seeking to overthrow our holy faith.

MRS RIORDAN: _(Tears up her will)_ I'm disappointed in you! You bad man!

MOTHER GROGAN: _(Removes her boot to throw it at Bloom)_ You beast! You
abominable person!

NOSEY FLYNN: Give us a tune, Bloom. One of the old sweet songs.

BLOOM: _(With rollicking humour)_

     I vowed that I never would leave her,
     She turned out a cruel deceiver.
     With my tooraloom tooraloom tooraloom tooraloom.

HOPPY HOLOHAN: Good old Bloom! There's nobody like him after all.

PADDY LEONARD: Stage Irishman!

BLOOM: What railway opera is like a tramline in Gibraltar? The Rows of
Casteele._(Laughter.)_

LENEHAN: Plagiarist! Down with Bloom!

THE VEILED SIBYL: _(Enthusiastically)_ I'm a Bloomite and I glory in it.
I believe in him in spite of all. I'd give my life for him, the funniest
man on earth.

BLOOM: _(Winks at the bystanders)_ I bet she's a bonny lassie.

THEODORE PUREFOY: _(In fishingcap and oilskin jacket)_ He employs a
mechanical device to frustrate the sacred ends of nature.

THE VEILED SIBYL: _(Stabs herself)_ My hero god! _(She dies)_

_(Many most attractive and enthusiastic women also commit suicide by
stabbing, drowning, drinking prussic acid, aconite, arsenic, opening
their veins, refusing food, casting themselves under steamrollers, from
the top of Nelson's Pillar, into the great vat of Guinness's brewery,
asphyxiating themselves by placing their heads in gasovens, hanging
themselves in stylish garters, leaping from windows of different
storeys.)_

ALEXANDER J DOWIE: _(Violently)_ Fellowchristians and antiBloomites, the
man called Bloom is from the roots of hell, a disgrace to christian
men. A fiendish libertine from his earliest years this stinking goat
of Mendes gave precocious signs of infantile debauchery, recalling the
cities of the plain, with a dissolute granddam. This vile hypocrite,
bronzed with infamy, is the white bull mentioned in the Apocalypse.
A worshipper of the Scarlet Woman, intrigue is the very breath of his
nostrils. The stake faggots and the caldron of boiling oil are for him.
Caliban!

THE MOB: Lynch him! Roast him! He's as bad as Parnell was. Mr Fox!

_(Mother Grogan throws her boot at Bloom. Several shopkeepers from upper
and lower Dorset street throw objects of little or no commercial value,
hambones, condensed milk tins, unsaleable cabbage, stale bread, sheep's
tails, odd pieces of fat.)_

BLOOM: _(Excitedly)_ This is midsummer madness, some ghastly joke again.
By heaven, I am guiltless as the unsunned snow! It was my brother Henry.
He is my double. He lives in number 2 Dolphin's Barn. Slander, the
viper, has wrongfully accused me. Fellowcountrymen, _sgenl inn ban bata
coisde gan capall._ I call on my old friend, Dr Malachi Mulligan, sex
specialist, to give medical testimony on my behalf.

DR MULLIGAN: _(In motor jerkin, green motorgoggles on his brow)_ Dr
Bloom is bisexually abnormal. He has recently escaped from Dr Eustace's
private asylum for demented gentlemen. Born out of bedlock hereditary
epilepsy is present, the consequence of unbridled lust. Traces of
elephantiasis have been discovered among his ascendants. There are
marked symptoms of chronic exhibitionism. Ambidexterity is also
latent. He is prematurely bald from selfabuse, perversely idealistic in
consequence, a reformed rake, and has metal teeth. In consequence of a
family complex he has temporarily lost his memory and I believe him
to be more sinned against than sinning. I have made a pervaginal
examination and, after application of the acid test to 5427 anal,
axillary, pectoral and pubic hairs, I declare him to be _virgo intacta._

_(Bloom holds his high grade hat over his genital organs.)_

DR MADDEN: Hypsospadia is also marked. In the interest of coming
generations I suggest that the parts affected should be preserved in
spirits of wine in the national teratological museum.

DR CROTTHERS: I have examined the patient's urine. It is albuminoid.
Salivation is insufficient, the patellar reflex intermittent.

DR PUNCH COSTELLO: The _fetor judaicus_ is most perceptible.

DR DIXON: _(Reads a bill of health)_ Professor Bloom is a finished
example of the new womanly man. His moral nature is simple and lovable.
Many have found him a dear man, a dear person. He is a rather quaint
fellow on the whole, coy though not feebleminded in the medical sense.
He has written a really beautiful letter, a poem in itself, to the court
missionary of the Reformed Priests' Protection Society which clears up
everything. He is practically a total abstainer and I can affirm that
he sleeps on a straw litter and eats the most Spartan food, cold dried
grocer's peas. He wears a hairshirt of pure Irish manufacture winter and
summer and scourges himself every Saturday. He was, I understand, at one
time a firstclass misdemeanant in Glencree reformatory. Another report
states that he was a very posthumous child. I appeal for clemency in the
name of the most sacred word our vocal organs have ever been called upon
to speak. He is about to have a baby.

_(General commotion and compassion. Women faint. A wealthy American
makes a street collection for Bloom. Gold and silver coins, blank
cheques, banknotes, jewels, treasury bonds, maturing bills of exchange,
I. O. U's, wedding rings, watchchains, lockets, necklaces and bracelets
are rapidly collected.)_

BLOOM: O, I so want to be a mother.

MRS THORNTON: _(In nursetender's gown)_ Embrace me tight, dear. You'll
be soon over it. Tight, dear.

_(Bloom embraces her tightly and bears eight male yellow and white
children. They appear on a redcarpeted staircase adorned with expensive
plants. All the octuplets are handsome, with valuable metallic faces,
wellmade, respectably dressed and wellconducted, speaking five modern
languages fluently and interested in various arts and sciences. Each
has his name printed in legible letters on his shirtfront: Nasodoro,
Goldfinger, Chrysostomos, Maindoree, Silversmile, Silberselber,
Vifargent, Panargyros. They are immediately appointed to positions of
high public trust in several different countries as managing directors
of banks, traffic managers of railways, chairmen of limited liability
companies, vicechairmen of hotel syndicates.)_

A VOICE: Bloom, are you the Messiah ben Joseph or ben David?

BLOOM: _(Darkly)_ You have said it.

BROTHER BUZZ: Then perform a miracle like Father Charles.

BANTAM LYONS: Prophesy who will win the Saint Leger.

_(Bloom walks on a net, covers his left eye with his left ear, passes
through several walls, climbs Nelson's Pillar, hangs from the top ledge
by his eyelids, eats twelve dozen oysters (shells included), heals
several sufferers from king's evil, contracts his face so as to resemble
many historical personages, Lord Beaconsfield, Lord Byron, Wat Tyler,
Moses of Egypt, Moses Maimonides, Moses Mendelssohn, Henry Irving, Rip
van Winkle, Kossuth, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Baron Leopold Rothschild,
Robinson Crusoe, Sherlock Holmes, Pasteur, turns each foot
simultaneously in different directions, bids the tide turn back,
eclipses the sun by extending his little finger.)_

BRINI, PAPAL NUNCIO: _(In papal zouave's uniform, steel cuirasses as
breastplate, armplates, thighplates, legplates, large profane moustaches
and brown paper mitre) Leopoldi autem generatio._ Moses begat Noah
and Noah begat Eunuch and Eunuch begat O'Halloran and O'Halloran begat
Guggenheim and Guggenheim begat Agendath and Agendath begat Netaim and
Netaim begat Le Hirsch and Le Hirsch begat Jesurum and Jesurum begat
MacKay and MacKay begat Ostrolopsky and Ostrolopsky begat Smerdoz
and Smerdoz begat Weiss and Weiss begat Schwarz and Schwarz begat
Adrianopoli and Adrianopoli begat Aranjuez and Aranjuez begat Lewy
Lawson and Lewy Lawson begat Ichabudonosor and Ichabudonosor begat
O'Donnell Magnus and O'Donnell Magnus begat Christbaum and Christbaum
begat ben Maimun and ben Maimun begat Dusty Rhodes and Dusty Rhodes
begat Benamor and Benamor begat Jones-Smith and Jones-Smith begat
Savorgnanovich and Savorgnanovich begat Jasperstone and Jasperstone
begat Vingtetunieme and Vingtetunieme begat Szombathely and Szombathely
begat Virag and Virag begat Bloom _et vocabitur nomen eius Emmanuel._

A DEADHAND: _(Writes on the wall)_ Bloom is a cod.

CRAB: _(In bushranger's kit)_ What did you do in the cattlecreep behind
Kilbarrack?

A FEMALE INFANT: _(Shakes a rattle)_ And under Ballybough bridge?

A HOLLYBUSH: And in the devil's glen?

BLOOM: _(Blushes furiously all over from frons to nates, three tears
filling from his left eye)_ Spare my past.

THE IRISH EVICTED TENANTS: _(In bodycoats, kneebreeches, with Donnybrook
fair shillelaghs)_ Sjambok him!

_(Bloom with asses' ears seats himself in the pillory with crossed arms,
his feet protruding. He whistles_ Don Giovanni, a cenar teco. _Artane
orphans, joining hands, caper round him. Girls of the Prison Gate
Mission, joining hands, caper round in the opposite direction.)_

THE ARTANE ORPHANS:

     You hig, you hog, you dirty dog!
     You think the ladies love you!
     THE PRISON GATE GIRLS:


     If you see Kay
     Tell him he may
     See you in tea
     Tell him from me.

HORNBLOWER: _(In ephod and huntingcap, announces)_ And he shall carry
the sins of the people to Azazel, the spirit which is in the wilderness,
and to Lilith, the nighthag. And they shall stone him and defile him,
yea, all from Agendath Netaim and from Mizraim, the land of Ham.

_(All the people cast soft pantomime stones at Bloom. Many bonafide
travellers and ownerless dogs come near him and defile him. Mastiansky
and Citron approach in gaberdines, wearing long earlocks. They wag their
beards at Bloom.)_

MASTIANSKY AND CITRON: Belial! Laemlein of Istria, the false Messiah!
Abulafia! Recant!

_(George R Mesias, Bloom's tailor, appears, a tailor's goose under his
arm, presenting a bill)_

MESIAS: To alteration one pair trousers eleven shillings.

BLOOM: _(Rubs his hands cheerfully)_ Just like old times. Poor Bloom!

_(Reuben J Dodd, blackbearded iscariot, bad shepherd, bearing on his
shoulders the drowned corpse of his son, approaches the pillory.)_

REUBEN J: _(Whispers hoarsely)_ The squeak is out. A split is gone for
the flatties. Nip the first rattler.

THE FIRE BRIGADE: Pflaap!

BROTHER BUZZ: _(Invests Bloom in a yellow habit with embroidery of
painted flames and high pointed hat. He places a bag of gunpowder round
his neck and hands him over to the civil power, saying)_ Forgive him his
trespasses.

_(Lieutenant Myers of the Dublin Fire Brigade by general request sets
fire to Bloom. Lamentations.)_

THE CITIZEN: Thank heaven!

BLOOM: _(In a seamless garment marked I. H. S. stands upright amid
phoenix flames)_ Weep not for me, O daughters of Erin.

_(He exhibits to Dublin reporters traces of burning. The daughters of
Erin, in black garments, with large prayerbooks and long lighted candles
in their hands, kneel down and pray.)_

THE DAUGHTERS OF ERIN:

     Kidney of Bloom, pray for us
     Flower of the Bath, pray for us
     Mentor of Menton, pray for us
     Canvasser for the Freeman, pray for us
     Charitable Mason, pray for us
     Wandering Soap, pray for us
     Sweets of Sin, pray for us
     Music without Words, pray for us
     Reprover of the Citizen, pray for us
     Friend of all Frillies, pray for us
     Midwife Most Merciful, pray for us
     Potato Preservative against Plague and Pestilence, pray for us.

_(A choir of six hundred voices, conducted by Vincent O'brien, sings
the chorus from Handel's Messiah alleluia for the lord god omnipotent
reigneth, accompanied on the organ by Joseph Glynn. Bloom becomes mute,
shrunken, carbonised.)_


ZOE: Talk away till you're black in the face.

BLOOM: _(In caubeen with clay pipe stuck in the band, dusty brogues, an
emigrant's red handkerchief bundle in his hand, leading a black bogoak
pig by a sugaun, with a smile in his eye)_ Let me be going now, woman of
the house, for by all the goats in Connemara I'm after having the
father and mother of a bating. _(With a tear in his eye)_ All insanity.
Patriotism, sorrow for the dead, music, future of the race. To be or not
to be. Life's dream is o'er. End it peacefully. They can live on. _(He
gazes far away mournfully)_ I am ruined. A few pastilles of aconite. The
blinds drawn. A letter. Then lie back to rest. _(He breathes softly)_ No
more. I have lived. Fare. Farewell.

ZOE: _(Stiffly, her finger in her neckfillet)_ Honest? Till the next
time. _(She sneers)_ Suppose you got up the wrong side of the bed or
came too quick with your best girl. O, I can read your thoughts!

BLOOM: _(Bitterly)_ Man and woman, love, what is it? A cork and bottle.
I'm sick of it. Let everything rip.

ZOE: _(In sudden sulks)_ I hate a rotter that's insincere. Give a
bleeding whore a chance.

BLOOM: _(Repentantly)_ I am very disagreeable. You are a necessary evil.
Where are you from? London?

ZOE: _(Glibly)_ Hog's Norton where the pigs plays the organs. I'm
Yorkshire born. _(She holds his hand which is feeling for her nipple)_
I say, Tommy Tittlemouse. Stop that and begin worse. Have you cash for a
short time? Ten shillings?

BLOOM: _(Smiles, nods slowly)_ More, houri, more.

ZOE: And more's mother? _(She pats him offhandedly with velvet paws)_
Are you coming into the musicroom to see our new pianola? Come and I'll
peel off.

BLOOM: _(Feeling his occiput dubiously with the unparalleled
embarrassment of a harassed pedlar gauging the symmetry of her peeled
pears)_ Somebody would be dreadfully jealous if she knew. The greeneyed
monster. _(Earnestly)_ You know how difficult it is. I needn't tell you.

ZOE: _(Flattered)_ What the eye can't see the heart can't grieve for.
_(She pats him)_ Come.

BLOOM: Laughing witch! The hand that rocks the cradle.

ZOE: Babby!

BLOOM: _(In babylinen and pelisse, bigheaded, with a caul of dark hair,
fixes big eyes on her fluid slip and counts its bronze buckles with a
chubby finger, his moist tongue lolling and lisping)_ One two tlee: tlee
tlwo tlone.

THE BUCKLES: Love me. Love me not. Love me.

ZOE: Silent means consent. _(With little parted talons she captures his
hand, her forefinger giving to his palm the passtouch of secret monitor,
luring him to doom.)_ Hot hands cold gizzard.

_(He hesitates amid scents, music, temptations. She leads him towards
the steps, drawing him by the odour of her armpits, the vice of her
painted eyes, the rustle of her slip in whose sinuous folds lurks the
lion reek of all the male brutes that have possessed her.)_

THE MALE BRUTES: _(Exhaling sulphur of rut and dung and ramping in their
loosebox, faintly roaring, their drugged heads swaying to and fro)_
Good!

_(Zoe and Bloom reach the doorway where two sister whores are seated.
They examine him curiously from under their pencilled brows and smile to
his hasty bow. He trips awkwardly.)_

ZOE: _(Her lucky hand instantly saving him)_ Hoopsa! Don't fall
upstairs.

BLOOM: The just man falls seven times. _(He stands aside at the
threshold)_ After you is good manners.

ZOE: Ladies first, gentlemen after.

_(She crosses the threshold. He hesitates. She turns and, holding out
her hands, draws him over. He hops. On the antlered rack of the hall
hang a man 's hat and waterproof. Bloom uncovers himself but, seeing
them, frowns, then smiles, preoccupied. A door on the return landing is
flung open. A man in purple shirt and grey trousers, brownsocked, passes
with an ape's gait, his bald head and goatee beard upheld, hugging a
full waterjugjar, his twotailed black braces dangling at heels. Averting
his face quickly Bloom bends to examine on the halltable the spaniel
eyes of a running fox: then, his lifted head sniffing, follows Zoe
into the musicroom. A shade of mauve tissuepaper dims the light of the
chandelier. Round and round a moth flies, colliding, escaping. The
floor is covered with an oilcloth mosaic of jade and azure and cinnabar
rhomboids. Footmarks are stamped over it in all senses, heel to heel,
heel to hollow, toe to toe, feet locked, a morris of shuffling feet
without body phantoms, all in a scrimmage higgledypiggledy. The walls
are tapestried with a paper of yewfronds and clear glades. In the grate
is spread a screen of peacock feathers. Lynch squats crosslegged on
the hearthrug of matted hair, his cap back to the front. With a wand he
beats time slowly. Kitty Ricketts, a bony pallid whore in navy costume,
doeskin gloves rolled back from a coral wristlet, a chain purse in
her hand, sits perched on the edge of the table swinging her leg and
glancing at herself in the gilt mirror over the mantelpiece. A tag
of her corsetlace hangs slightly below her jacket. Lynch indicates
mockingly the couple at the piano.)_

KITTY: _(Coughs behind her hand)_ She's a bit imbecillic. _(She signs
with a waggling forefinger)_ Blemblem. _(Lynch lifts up her skirt and
white petticoat with his wand she settles them down quickly.)_ Respect
yourself. _(She hiccups, then bends quickly her sailor hat under which
her hair glows, red with henna)_ O, excuse!

ZOE: More limelight, Charley. _(She goes to the chandelier and turns the
gas full cock)_

KITTY: _(Peers at the gasjet)_ What ails it tonight?

LYNCH: _(Deeply)_ Enter a ghost and hobgoblins.

ZOE: Clap on the back for Zoe.

_(The wand in Lynch's hand flashes: a brass poker. Stephen stands at
the pianola on which sprawl his hat and ashplant. With two fingers he
repeats once more the series of empty fifths. Florry Talbot, a blond
feeble goosefat whore in a tatterdemalion gown of mildewed strawberry,
lolls spreadeagle in the sofacorner, her limp forearm pendent over the
bolster, listening. A heavy stye droops over her sleepy eyelid.)_

KITTY: _(Hiccups again with a kick of her horsed foot)_ O, excuse!

ZOE: _(Promptly)_ Your boy's thinking of you. Tie a knot on your shift.

_(Kitty Ricketts bends her head. Her boa uncoils, slides, glides over
her shoulder, back, arm, chair to the ground. Lynch lifts the curled
caterpillar on his wand. She snakes her neck, nestling. Stephen glances
behind at the squatted figure with its cap back to the front.)_

STEPHEN: As a matter of fact it is of no importance whether Benedetto
Marcello found it or made it. The rite is the poet's rest. It may be an
old hymn to Demeter or also illustrate _Coela enarrant gloriam Domini._
It is susceptible of nodes or modes as far apart as hyperphrygian and
mixolydian and of texts so divergent as priests haihooping round David's
that is Circe's or what am I saying Ceres' altar and David's tip
from the stable to his chief bassoonist about the alrightness of his
almightiness. _Mais nom de nom,_ that is another pair of trousers.
_Jetez la gourme. Faut que jeunesse se passe. (He stops, points at
Lynch's cap, smiles, laughs)_ Which side is your knowledge bump?

THE CAP: _(With saturnine spleen)_ Bah! It is because it is. Woman's
reason. Jewgreek is greekjew. Extremes meet. Death is the highest form
of life. Bah!

STEPHEN: You remember fairly accurately all my errors, boasts, mistakes.
How long shall I continue to close my eyes to disloyalty? Whetstone!

THE CAP: Bah!

STEPHEN: Here's another for you. _(He frowns)_ The reason is because
the fundamental and the dominant are separated by the greatest possible
interval which...

THE CAP: Which? Finish. You can't.

STEPHEN: _(With an effort)_ Interval which. Is the greatest possible
ellipse. Consistent with. The ultimate return. The octave. Which.

THE CAP: Which?

_(Outside the gramophone begins to blare_ The Holy City.)

STEPHEN: _(Abruptly)_ What went forth to the ends of the world to
traverse not itself, God, the sun, Shakespeare, a commercial traveller,
having itself traversed in reality itself becomes that self. Wait a
moment. Wait a second. Damn that fellow's noise in the street. Self
which it itself was ineluctably preconditioned to become. _Ecco!_

LYNCH: _(With a mocking whinny of laughter grins at Bloom and Zoe
Higgins)_ What a learned speech, eh?

ZOE: _(Briskly)_ God help your head, he knows more than you have
forgotten.

_(With obese stupidity Florry Talbot regards Stephen.)_

FLORRY: They say the last day is coming this summer.

KITTY: No!

ZOE: _(Explodes in laughter)_ Great unjust God!

FLORRY: _(Offended)_ Well, it was in the papers about Antichrist. O, my
foot's tickling.

_(Ragged barefoot newsboys, jogging a wagtail kite, patter past,
yelling.)_

THE NEWSBOYS: Stop press edition. Result of the rockinghorse races. Sea
serpent in the royal canal. Safe arrival of Antichrist.

_(Stephen turns and sees Bloom.)_

STEPHEN: A time, times and half a time.

_(Reuben I Antichrist, wandering jew, a clutching hand open on his
spine, stumps forward. Across his loins is slung a pilgrim's wallet from
which protrude promissory notes and dishonoured bills. Aloft over his
shoulder he bears a long boatpole from the hook of which the sodden
huddled mass of his only son, saved from Liffey waters, hangs from
the slack of its breeches. A hobgoblin in the image of Punch Costello,
hipshot, crookbacked, hydrocephalic, prognathic with receding forehead
and Ally Sloper nose, tumbles in somersaults through the gathering
darkness.)_

ALL: What?

THE HOBGOBLIN: _(His jaws chattering, capers to and fro, goggling his
eyes, squeaking, kangaroohopping with outstretched clutching arms, then
all at once thrusts his lipless face through the fork of his thighs) Il
vient! C'est moi! L'homme qui rit! L'homme primigene! (He whirls round
and round with dervish howls) Sieurs et dames, faites vos jeux! (He
crouches juggling. Tiny roulette planets fly from his hands.) Les jeux
sont faits! (The planets rush together, uttering crepitant cracks) Rien
va plus! (The planets, buoyant balloons, sail swollen up and away. He
springs off into vacuum.)_

FLORRY: _(Sinking into torpor, crossing herself secretly)_ The end of
the world!

_(A female tepid effluvium leaks out from her. Nebulous obscurity
occupies space. Through the drifting fog without the gramophone blares
over coughs and feetshuffling.)_

THE GRAMOPHONE: Jerusalem!

Open your gates and sing

Hosanna...

_(A rocket rushes up the sky and bursts. A white star fills from it,
proclaiming the consummation of all things and second coming of Elijah.
Along an infinite invisible tightrope taut from zenith to nadir the End
of the World, a twoheaded octopus in gillie's kilts, busby and tartan
filibegs, whirls through the murk, head over heels, in the form of the
Three Legs of Man.)_

THE END OF THE WORLD: _(with a Scotch accent)_ Wha'll dance the keel
row, the keel row, the keel row?

_(Over the possing drift and choking breathcoughs, Elijah's voice, harsh
as a corncrake's, jars on high. Perspiring in a loose lawn surplice with
funnel sleeves he is seen, vergerfaced, above a rostrum about which the
banner of old glory is draped. He thumps the parapet.)_

ELIJAH: No yapping, if you please, in this booth. Jake Crane, Creole
Sue, Dove Campbell, Abe Kirschner, do your coughing with your mouths
shut. Say, I am operating all this trunk line. Boys, do it now. God's
time is 12.25. Tell mother you'll be there. Rush your order and you play
a slick ace. Join on right here. Book through to eternity junction, the
nonstop run. Just one word more. Are you a god or a doggone clod? If the
second advent came to Coney Island are we ready? Florry Christ, Stephen
Christ, Zoe Christ, Bloom Christ, Kitty Christ, Lynch Christ, it's up to
you to sense that cosmic force. Have we cold feet about the cosmos?
No. Be on the side of the angels. Be a prism. You have that something
within, the higher self. You can rub shoulders with a Jesus, a Gautama,
an Ingersoll. Are you all in this vibration? I say you are. You once
nobble that, congregation, and a buck joyride to heaven becomes a back
number. You got me? It's a lifebrightener, sure. The hottest stuff ever
was. It's the whole pie with jam in. It's just the cutest snappiest line
out. It is immense, supersumptuous. It restores. It vibrates. I know
and I am some vibrator. Joking apart and, getting down to bedrock, A.
J. Christ Dowie and the harmonial philosophy, have you got that? O. K.
Seventyseven west sixtyninth street. Got me? That's it. You call me up
by sunphone any old time. Bumboosers, save your stamps. _(He shouts)_
Now then our glory song. All join heartily in the singing. Encore! _(He
sings)_ Jeru...

THE GRAMOPHONE: _(Drowning his voice)_ Whorusalaminyourhighhohhhh...
_(The disc rasps gratingly against the needle)_

THE THREE WHORES: _(Covering their ears, squawk)_ Ahhkkk!

ELIJAH: _(In rolledup shirtsleeves, black in the face, shouts at the top
of his voice, his arms uplifted)_ Big Brother up there, Mr President,
you hear what I done just been saying to you. Certainly, I sort of
believe strong in you, Mr President. I certainly am thinking now Miss
Higgins and Miss Ricketts got religion way inside them. Certainly seems
to me I don't never see no wusser scared female than the way you been,
Miss Florry, just now as I done seed you. Mr President, you come long
and help me save our sisters dear. _(He winks at his audience)_ Our Mr
President, he twig the whole lot and he aint saying nothing.

KITTY-KATE: I forgot myself. In a weak moment I erred and did what I did
on Constitution hill. I was confirmed by the bishop and enrolled in
the brown scapular. My mother's sister married a Montmorency. It was a
working plumber was my ruination when I was pure.

ZOE-FANNY: I let him larrup it into me for the fun of it.

FLORRY-TERESA: It was in consequence of a portwine beverage on top of
Hennessy's three star. I was guilty with Whelan when he slipped into the
bed.

STEPHEN: In the beginning was the word, in the end the world without
end. Blessed be the eight beatitudes.

_(The beatitudes, Dixon, Madden, Crotthers, Costello, Lenehan, Bannon,
Mulligan and Lynch in white surgical students' gowns, four abreast,
goosestepping, tramp fist past in noisy marching)_

THE BEATITUDES: _(Incoherently)_ Beer beef battledog buybull businum
barnum buggerum bishop.

LYSTER: _(In quakergrey kneebreeches and broadbrimmed hat, says
discreetly)_ He is our friend. I need not mention names. Seek thou the
light.

_(He corantos by. Best enters in hairdresser's attire, shinily
laundered, his locks in curlpapers. He leads John Eglinton who wears a
mandarin's kimono of Nankeen yellow, lizardlettered, and a high pagoda
hat.)_

BEST: _(Smiling, lifts the hat and displays a shaven poll from the crown
of which bristles a pigtail toupee tied with an orange topknot)_ I was
just beautifying him, don't you know. A thing of beauty, don't you know,
Yeats says, or I mean, Keats says.

JOHN EGLINTON: _(Produces a greencapped dark lantern and flashes it
towards a corner: with carping accent)_ Esthetics and cosmetics are for
the boudoir. I am out for truth. Plain truth for a plain man. Tanderagee
wants the facts and means to get them.

_(In the cone of the searchlight behind the coalscuttle, ollave,
holyeyed, the bearded figure of Mananaun Maclir broods, chin on knees.
He rises slowly. A cold seawind blows from his druid mouth. About his
head writhe eels and elvers. He is encrusted with weeds and shells. His
right hand holds a bicycle pump. His left hand grasps a huge crayfish by
its two talons.)_

MANANAUN MACLIR: _(With a voice of waves)_ Aum! Hek! Wal! Ak! Lub! Mor!
Ma! White yoghin of the gods. Occult pimander of Hermes Trismegistos.
_(With a voice of whistling seawind)_ Punarjanam patsypunjaub! I won't
have my leg pulled. It has been said by one: beware the left, the cult
of Shakti. _(With a cry of stormbirds)_ Shakti Shiva, darkhidden Father!
_(He smites with his bicycle pump the crayfish in his left hand. On its
cooperative dial glow the twelve signs of the zodiac. He wails with
the vehemence of the ocean.)_ Aum! Baum! Pyjaum! I am the light of the
homestead! I am the dreamery creamery butter.

_(A skeleton judashand strangles the light. The green light wanes to
mauve. The gasjet wails whistling.)_

THE GASJET: Pooah! Pfuiiiiiii!

_(Zoe runs to the chandelier and, crooking her leg, adjusts the
mantle.)_

ZOE: Who has a fag as I'm here?

LYNCH: _(Tossing a cigarette on to the table)_ Here.

ZOE: _(Her head perched aside in mock pride)_ Is that the way to hand
the _pot_ to a lady? _(She stretches up to light the cigarette over the
flame, twirling it slowly, showing the brown tufts of her armpits. Lynch
with his poker lifts boldly a side of her slip. Bare from her garters up
her flesh appears under the sapphire a nixie's green. She puffs calmly
at her cigarette.)_ Can you see the beautyspot of my behind?

LYNCH: I'm not looking

ZOE: _(Makes sheep's eyes)_ No? You wouldn't do a less thing. Would you
suck a lemon?

_(Squinting in mock shame she glances with sidelong meaning at Bloom,
then twists round towards him, pulling her slip free of the poker. Blue
fluid again flows over her flesh. Bloom stands, smiling desirously,
twirling his thumbs. Kitty Ricketts licks her middle finger with her
spittle and, gazing in the mirror, smooths both eyebrows. Lipoti Virag,
basilicogrammate, chutes rapidly down through the chimneyflue and struts
two steps to the left on gawky pink stilts. He is sausaged into several
overcoats and wears a brown macintosh under which he holds a roll of
parchment. In his left eye flashes the monocle of Cashel Boyle O'connor
Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell. On his head is perched an Egyptian pshent.
Two quills project over his ears.)_

VIRAG: _(Heels together, bows)_ My name is Virag Lipoti, of Szombathely.
_(He coughs thoughtfully, drily)_ Promiscuous nakedness is much in
evidence hereabouts, eh? Inadvertently her backview revealed the fact
that she is not wearing those rather intimate garments of which you
are a particular devotee. The injection mark on the thigh I hope you
perceived? Good.

BLOOM: Granpapachi. But...

VIRAG: Number two on the other hand, she of the cherry rouge and
coiffeuse white, whose hair owes not a little to our tribal elixir of
gopherwood, is in walking costume and tightly staysed by her sit, I
should opine. Backbone in front, so to say. Correct me but I always
understood that the act so performed by skittish humans with glimpses of
lingerie appealed to you in virtue of its exhibitionististicicity. In a
word. Hippogriff. Am I right?

BLOOM: She is rather lean.

VIRAG: _(Not unpleasantly)_ Absolutely! Well observed and those pannier
pockets of the skirt and slightly pegtop effect are devised to suggest
bunchiness of hip. A new purchase at some monster sale for which a gull
has been mulcted. Meretricious finery to deceive the eye. Observe the
attention to details of dustspecks. Never put on you tomorrow what you
can wear today. Parallax! _(With a nervous twitch of his head)_ Did you
hear my brain go snap? Pollysyllabax!

BLOOM: _(An elbow resting in a hand, a forefinger against his cheek)_
She seems sad.

VIRAG: _(Cynically, his weasel teeth bared yellow, draws down his left
eye with a finger and barks hoarsely)_ Hoax! Beware of the flapper
and bogus mournful. Lily of the alley. All possess bachelor's button
discovered by Rualdus Columbus. Tumble her. Columble her. Chameleon.
_(More genially)_ Well then, permit me to draw your attention to item
number three. There is plenty of her visible to the naked eye. Observe
the mass of oxygenated vegetable matter on her skull. What ho, she
bumps! The ugly duckling of the party, longcasted and deep in keel.

BLOOM: _(Regretfully)_ When you come out without your gun.

VIRAG: We can do you all brands, mild, medium and strong. Pay your
money, take your choice. How happy could you be with either...

BLOOM: With...?

VIRAG: _(His tongue upcurling)_ Lyum! Look. Her beam is broad. She
is coated with quite a considerable layer of fat. Obviously mammal in
weight of bosom you remark that she has in front well to the fore two
protuberances of very respectable dimensions, inclined to fall in the
noonday soupplate, while on her rere lower down are two additional
protuberances, suggestive of potent rectum and tumescent for palpation,
which leave nothing to be desired save compactness. Such fleshy parts
are the product of careful nurture. When coopfattened their livers
reach an elephantine size. Pellets of new bread with fennygreek and
gumbenjamin swamped down by potions of green tea endow them during their
brief existence with natural pincushions of quite colossal blubber. That
suits your book, eh? Fleshhotpots of Egypt to hanker after. Wallow in
it. Lycopodium. _(His throat twitches)_ Slapbang! There he goes again.

BLOOM: The stye I dislike.

VIRAG: _(Arches his eyebrows)_ Contact with a goldring, they say.
_Argumentum ad feminam_, as we said in old Rome and ancient Greece
in the consulship of Diplodocus and Ichthyosauros. For the rest Eve's
sovereign remedy. Not for sale. Hire only. Huguenot. _(He twitches)_ It
is a funny sound. _(He coughs encouragingly)_ But possibly it is only a
wart. I presume you shall have remembered what I will have taught you on
that head? Wheatenmeal with honey and nutmeg.

BLOOM: _(Reflecting)_ Wheatenmeal with lycopodium and syllabax. This
searching ordeal. It has been an unusually fatiguing day, a chapter of
accidents. Wait. I mean, wartsblood spreads warts, you said...

VIRAG: _(Severely, his nose hardhumped, his side eye winking)_ Stop
twirling your thumbs and have a good old thunk. See, you have forgotten.
Exercise your mnemotechnic. _La causa è santa_. Tara. Tara. _(Aside)_ He
will surely remember.

BLOOM: Rosemary also did I understand you to say or willpower over
parasitic tissues. Then nay no I have an inkling. The touch of a
deadhand cures. Mnemo?

VIRAG: _(Excitedly)_ I say so. I say so. E'en so. Technic. _(He taps his
parchmentroll energetically)_ This book tells you how to act with all
descriptive particulars. Consult index for agitated fear of aconite,
melancholy of muriatic, priapic pulsatilla. Virag is going to talk about
amputation. Our old friend caustic. They must be starved. Snip off with
horsehair under the denned neck. But, to change the venue to the Bulgar
and the Basque, have you made up your mind whether you like or dislike
women in male habiliments? _(With a dry snigger)_ You intended to devote
an entire year to the study of the religious problem and the summer
months of 1886 to square the circle and win that million. Pomegranate!
From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step. Pyjamas, let us say?
Or stockingette gussetted knickers, closed? Or, put we the case,
those complicated combinations, camiknickers? _(He crows derisively)_
Keekeereekee!

_(Bloom surveys uncertainly the three whores then gazes at the veiled
mauve light, hearing the everflying moth.)_

BLOOM: I wanted then to have now concluded. Nightdress was never. Hence
this. But tomorrow is a new day will be. Past was is today. What now is
will then morrow as now was be past yester.

VIRAG: _(Prompts in a pig's whisper)_ Insects of the day spend their
brief existence in reiterated coition, lured by the smell of the
inferiorly pulchritudinous fumale possessing extendified pudendal nerve
in dorsal region. Pretty Poll! _(His yellow parrotbeak gabbles nasally)_
They had a proverb in the Carpathians in or about the year five thousand
five hundred and fifty of our era. One tablespoonful of honey will
attract friend Bruin more than half a dozen barrels of first choice malt
vinegar. Bear's buzz bothers bees. But of this apart. At another time
we may resume. We were very pleased, we others. _(He coughs and, bending
his brow, rubs his nose thoughtfully with a scooping hand)_ You shall
find that these night insects follow the light. An illusion for remember
their complex unadjustable eye. For all these knotty points see the
seventeenth book of my Fundamentals of Sexology or the Love Passion
which Doctor L.B. says is the book sensation of the year. Some, to
example, there are again whose movements are automatic. Perceive. That
is his appropriate sun. Nightbird nightsun nighttown. Chase me, Charley!
_(He blows into bloom's ear)_ Buzz!

BLOOM: Bee or bluebottle too other day butting shadow on wall dazed self
then me wandered dazed down shirt good job I...

VIRAG: _(His face impassive, laughs in a rich feminine key)_ Splendid!
Spanish fly in his fly or mustard plaster on his dibble. _(He gobbles
gluttonously with turkey wattles)_ Bubbly jock! Bubbly jock! Where are
we? Open Sesame! Cometh forth! _(He unrolls his parchment rapidly and
reads, his glowworm's nose running backwards over the letters which he
claws)_ Stay, good friend. I bring thee thy answer. Redbank oysters will
shortly be upon us. I'm the best o'cook. Those succulent bivalves may
help us and the truffles of Perigord, tubers dislodged through mister
omnivorous porker, were unsurpassed in cases of nervous debility or
viragitis. Though they stink yet they sting. _(He wags his head with
cackling raillery)_ Jocular. With my eyeglass in my ocular. _(He
sneezes)_ Amen!

BLOOM: _(Absently)_ Ocularly woman's bivalve case is worse. Always open
sesame. The cloven sex. Why they fear vermin, creeping things. Yet Eve
and the serpent contradicts. Not a historical fact. Obvious analogy
to my idea. Serpents too are gluttons for woman's milk. Wind their way
through miles of omnivorous forest to sucksucculent her breast dry. Like
those bubblyjocular Roman matrons one reads of in Elephantuliasis.

VIRAG: _(His mouth projected in hard wrinkles, eyes stonily forlornly
closed, psalms in outlandish monotone)_ That the cows with their those
distended udders that they have been the the known...

BLOOM: I am going to scream. I beg your pardon. Ah? So. _(He repeats)_
Spontaneously to seek out the saurian's lair in order to entrust their
teats to his avid suction. Ant milks aphis. _(Profoundly)_ Instinct
rules the world. In life. In death.

VIRAG: _(Head askew, arches his back and hunched wingshoulders, peers
at the moth out of blear bulged eyes, points a horning claw and cries)_
Who's moth moth? Who's dear Gerald? Dear Ger, that you? O dear, he is
Gerald. O, I much fear he shall be most badly burned. Will some pleashe
pershon not now impediment so catastrophics mit agitation of firstclass
tablenumpkin? _(He mews)_ Puss puss puss puss! _(He sighs, draws back
and stares sideways down with dropping underjaw)_ Well, well. He doth
rest anon. (He snaps his jaws suddenly on the air)

THE MOTH:

     I'm a tiny tiny thing
     Ever flying in the spring
     Round and round a ringaring.
     Long ago I was a king
     Now I do this kind of thing
     On the wing, on the wing!
     Bing!

_(He rushes against the mauve shade, flapping noisily)_ Pretty pretty
pretty pretty pretty pretty petticoats.

_(From left upper entrance with two gliding steps Henry Flower comes
forward to left front centre. He wears a dark mantle and drooping plumed
sombrero. He carries a silverstringed inlaid dulcimer and a longstemmed
bamboo Jacob's pipe, its clay bowl fashioned as a female head. He wears
dark velvet hose and silverbuckled pumps. He has the romantic Saviour's
face with flowing locks, thin beard and moustache. His spindlelegs and
sparrow feet are those of the tenor Mario, prince of Candia. He settles
down his goffered ruffs and moistens his lips with a passage of his
amorous tongue.)_

HENRY: _(In a low dulcet voice, touching the strings of his guitar)_
There is a flower that bloometh.

_(Virag truculent, his jowl set, stares at the lamp. Grave Bloom regards
Zoe's neck. Henry gallant turns with pendant dewlap to the piano.)_

STEPHEN: _(To himself)_ Play with your eyes shut. Imitate pa. Filling my
belly with husks of swine. Too much of this. I will arise and go to my.
Expect this is the. Steve, thou art in a parlous way. Must visit old
Deasy or telegraph. Our interview of this morning has left on me a deep
impression. Though our ages. Will write fully tomorrow. I'm partially
drunk, by the way. _(He touches the keys again)_ Minor chord comes now.
Yes. Not much however.

_(Almidano Artifoni holds out a batonroll of music with vigorous
moustachework.)_

ARTIFONI: _Ci rifletta. Lei rovina tutto._

FLORRY: Sing us something. Love's old sweet song.

STEPHEN: No voice. I am a most finished artist. Lynch, did I show you
the letter about the lute?

FLORRY: _(Smirking)_ The bird that can sing and won't sing.

_(The Siamese twins, Philip Drunk and Philip Sober, two Oxford dons with
lawnmowers, appear in the window embrasure. Both are masked with Matthew
Arnold's face.)_

PHILIP SOBER: Take a fool's advice. All is not well. Work it out with
the buttend of a pencil, like a good young idiot. Three pounds twelve
you got, two notes, one sovereign, two crowns, if youth but knew.
Mooney's en ville, Mooney's sur mer, the Moira, Larchet's, Holles street
hospital, Burke's. Eh? I am watching you.

PHILIP DRUNK: _(Impatiently)_ Ah, bosh, man. Go to hell! I paid my way.
If I could only find out about octaves. Reduplication of personality.
Who was it told me his name? _(His lawnmower begins to purr)_ Aha, yes.
_Zoe mou sas agapo_. Have a notion I was here before. When was it not
Atkinson his card I have somewhere. Mac Somebody. Unmack I have it. He
told me about, hold on, Swinburne, was it, no?

FLORRY: And the song?

STEPHEN: Spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.

FLORRY: Are you out of Maynooth? You're like someone I knew once.

STEPHEN: Out of it now. _(To himself)_ Clever.

PHILIP DRUNK AND PHILIP SOBER: _(Their lawnmowers purring with a
rigadoon of grasshalms)_ Clever ever. Out of it out of it. By the
bye have you the book, the thing, the ashplant? Yes, there it, yes.
Cleverever outofitnow. Keep in condition. Do like us.

ZOE: There was a priest down here two nights ago to do his bit of
business with his coat buttoned up. You needn't try to hide, I says to
him. I know you've a Roman collar.

VIRAG: Perfectly logical from his standpoint. Fall of man. _(Harshly,
his pupils waxing)_ To hell with the pope! Nothing new under the sun. I
am the Virag who disclosed the Sex Secrets of Monks and Maidens. Why
I left the church of Rome. Read the Priest, the Woman and the
Confessional. Penrose. Flipperty Jippert. _(He wriggles)_ Woman, undoing
with sweet pudor her belt of rushrope, offers her allmoist yoni to man's
lingam. Short time after man presents woman with pieces of jungle meat.
Woman shows joy and covers herself with featherskins. Man loves her yoni
fiercely with big lingam, the stiff one. _(He cries) Coactus volui._
Then giddy woman will run about. Strong man grapses woman's wrist.
Woman squeals, bites, spucks. Man, now fierce angry, strikes woman's fat
yadgana. _(He chases his tail)_ Piffpaff! Popo! _(He stops, sneezes)_
Pchp! _(He worries his butt)_ Prrrrrht!

LYNCH: I hope you gave the good father a penance. Nine glorias for
shooting a bishop.

ZOE: _(Spouts walrus smoke through her nostrils)_ He couldn't get a
connection. Only, you know, sensation. A dry rush.

BLOOM: Poor man!

ZOE: _(Lightly)_ Only for what happened him.

BLOOM: How?

VIRAG: _(A diabolic rictus of black luminosity contracting his visage,
cranes his scraggy neck forward. He lifts a mooncalf nozzle and howls.)
Verfluchte Goim!_ He had a father, forty fathers. He never existed. Pig
God! He had two left feet. He was Judas Iacchia, a Libyan eunuch, the
pope's bastard. _(He leans out on tortured forepaws, elbows bent rigid,
his eye agonising in his flat skullneck and yelps over the mute world)_
A son of a whore. Apocalypse.

KITTY: And Mary Shortall that was in the lock with the pox she got from
Jimmy Pidgeon in the blue caps had a child off him that couldn't swallow
and was smothered with the convulsions in the mattress and we all
subscribed for the funeral.

PHILIP DRUNK: _(Gravely) Qui vous a mis dans cette fichue position,
Philippe?_

PHILIP SOBER: _(Gaily) c'était le sacré pigeon, Philippe._

_(Kitty unpins her hat and sets it down calmly, patting her henna hair.
And a prettier, a daintier head of winsome curls was never seen on a
whore's shoulders. Lynch puts on her hat. She whips it off.)_

LYNCH: _(Laughs)_ And to such delights has Metchnikoff inoculated
anthropoid apes.

FLORRY: _(Nods)_ Locomotor ataxy.

ZOE: _(Gaily)_ O, my dictionary.

LYNCH: Three wise virgins.

VIRAG: _(Agueshaken, profuse yellow spawn foaming over his bony
epileptic lips)_ She sold lovephiltres, whitewax, orangeflower. Panther,
the Roman centurion, polluted her with his genitories. _(He sticks out
a flickering phosphorescent scorpion tongue, his hand on his fork)_
Messiah! He burst her tympanum. _(With gibbering baboon's cries he jerks
his hips in the cynical spasm)_ Hik! Hek! Hak! Hok! Huk! Kok! Kuk!

_(Ben Jumbo Dollard, Rubicund, musclebound, hairynostrilled,
hugebearded, cabbageeared, shaggychested, shockmaned, fat-papped, stands
forth, his loins and genitals tightened into a pair of black bathing
bagslops.)_

BEN DOLLARD: _(Nakkering castanet bones in his huge padded paws, yodels
jovially in base barreltone)_ When love absorbs my ardent soul.

_(The virgins Nurse Callan and Nurse Quigley burst through the
ringkeepers and the ropes and mob him with open arms.)_

THE VIRGINS: _(Gushingly)_ Big Ben! Ben my Chree!

A VOICE: Hold that fellow with the bad breeches.

BEN DOLLARD: _(Smites his thigh in abundant laughter)_ Hold him now.

HENRY: _(Caressing on his breast a severed female head, murmurs)_ Thine
heart, mine love. _(He plucks his lutestrings)_ When first I saw...

VIRAG: _(Sloughing his skins, his multitudinous plumage moulting)_ Rats!
_(He yawns, showing a coalblack throat, and closes his jaws by an upward
push of his parchmentroll)_ After having said which I took my departure.
Farewell. Fare thee well. _Dreck!_

_(Henry Flower combs his moustache and beard rapidly with a pocketcomb
and gives a cow's lick to his hair. Steered by his rapier, he glides to
the door, his wild harp slung behind him. Virag reaches the door in two
ungainly stilthops, his tail cocked, and deftly claps sideways on the
wall a pusyellow flybill, butting it with his head.)_

THE FLYBILL: K. II. Post No Bills. Strictly confidential. Dr Hy Franks.

HENRY: All is lost now.

_(Virag unscrews his head in a trice and holds it under his arm.)_

VIRAG'S HEAD: Quack!

_(Exeunt severally.)_

STEPHEN: _(Over his shoulder to zoe)_ You would have preferred
the fighting parson who founded the protestant error. But beware
Antisthenes, the dog sage, and the last end of Arius Heresiarchus. The
agony in the closet.

LYNCH: All one and the same God to her.

STEPHEN: _(Devoutly)_ And sovereign Lord of all things.

FLORRY: _(To Stephen)_ I'm sure you're a spoiled priest. Or a monk.

LYNCH: He is. A cardinal's son.

STEPHEN: Cardinal sin. Monks of the screw.

_(His Eminence Simon Stephen Cardinal Dedalus, Primate of all Ireland,
appears in the doorway, dressed in red soutane, sandals and socks. Seven
dwarf simian acolytes, also in red, cardinal sins, uphold his train,
peeping under it. He wears a battered silk hat sideways on his head. His
thumbs are stuck in his armpits and his palms outspread. Round his
neck hangs a rosary of corks ending on his breast in a corkscrew cross.
Releasing his thumbs, he invokes grace from on high with large wave
gestures and proclaims with bloated pomp:)_

THE CARDINAL:

     Conservio lies captured
     He lies in the lowest dungeon
     With manacles and chains around his limbs
     Weighing upwards of three tons.

_(He looks at all for a moment, his right eye closed tight, his left
cheek puffed out. Then, unable to repress his merriment, he rocks to and
fro, arms akimbo, and sings with broad rollicking humour:)_

     O, the poor little fellow
     Hihihihihis legs they were yellow
     He was plump, fat and heavy and brisk as a snake
     But some bloody savage
     To graize his white cabbage
     He murdered Nell Flaherty's duckloving drake.

_(A multitude of midges swarms white over his robe. He scratches himself
with crossed arms at his ribs, grimacing, and exclaims:)_

I'm suffering the agony of the damned. By the hoky fiddle, thanks be to
Jesus those funny little chaps are not unanimous. If they were they'd
walk me off the face of the bloody globe.

_(His head aslant he blesses curtly with fore and middle fingers,
imparts the Easter kiss and doubleshuffles off comically, swaying
his hat from side to side, shrinking quickly to the size of his
trainbearers. The dwarf acolytes, giggling, peeping, nudging, ogling,
Easterkissing, zigzag behind him. His voice is heard mellow from afar,
merciful male, melodious:)_

     Shall carry my heart to thee,
     Shall carry my heart to thee,
     And the breath of the balmy night
     Shall carry my heart to thee!
     _(The trick doorhandle turns.)_


THE DOORHANDLE: Theeee!

ZOE: The devil is in that door.

_(A male form passes down the creaking staircase and is heard taking
the waterproof and hat from the rack. Bloom starts forward involuntarily
and, half closing the door as he passes, takes the chocolate from his
pocket and offers it nervously to Zoe.)_

ZOE: _(Sniffs his hair briskly)_ Hmmm! Thank your mother for the
rabbits. I'm very fond of what I like.

BLOOM: _(Hearing a male voice in talk with the whores on the doorstep,
pricks his ears)_ If it were he? After? Or because not? Or the double
event?

ZOE: _(Tears open the silverfoil)_ Fingers was made before forks. _(She
breaks off and nibbles a piece gives a piece to Kitty Ricketts and then
turns kittenishly to Lynch)_ No objection to French lozenges? _(He nods.
She taunts him.)_ Have it now or wait till you get it? _(He opens his
mouth, his head cocked. She whirls the prize in left circle. His head
follows. She whirls it back in right circle. He eyes her.)_ Catch!

_(She tosses a piece. With an adroit snap he catches it and bites it
through with a crack.)_

KITTY: _(Chewing)_ The engineer I was with at the bazaar does have
lovely ones. Full of the best liqueurs. And the viceroy was there with
his lady. The gas we had on the Toft's hobbyhorses. I'm giddy still.

BLOOM: _(In Svengali's fur overcoat, with folded arms and Napoleonic
forelock, frowns in ventriloquial exorcism with piercing eagle glance
towards the door. Then rigid with left foot advanced he makes a swift
pass with impelling fingers and gives the sign of past master, drawing
his right arm downwards from his left shoulder.)_ Go, go, go, I conjure
you, whoever you are!

_(A male cough and tread are heard passing through the mist outside.
Bloom's features relax. He places a hand in his waistcoat, posing
calmly. Zoe offers him chocolate.)_

BLOOM: _(Solemnly)_ Thanks.

ZOE: Do as you're bid. Here!

_(A firm heelclacking tread is heard on the stairs.)_

BLOOM: _(Takes the chocolate)_ Aphrodisiac? Tansy and pennyroyal. But I
bought it. Vanilla calms or? Mnemo. Confused light confuses memory. Red
influences lupus. Colours affect women's characters, any they have. This
black makes me sad. Eat and be merry for tomorrow. _(He eats)_ Influence
taste too, mauve. But it is so long since I. Seems new. Aphro. That
priest. Must come. Better late than never. Try truffles at Andrews.

_(The door opens. Bella Cohen, a massive whoremistress, enters. She
is dressed in a threequarter ivory gown, fringed round the hem with
tasselled selvedge, and cools herself flirting a black horn fan like
Minnie Hauck in_ Carmen. _On her left hand are wedding and keeper rings.
Her eyes are deeply carboned. She has a sprouting moustache. Her
olive face is heavy, slightly sweated and fullnosed with orangetainted
nostrils. She has large pendant beryl eardrops.)_

BELLA: My word! I'm all of a mucksweat.

_(She glances round her at the couples. Then her eyes rest on Bloom with
hard insistence. Her large fan winnows wind towards her heated faceneck
and embonpoint. Her falcon eyes glitter.)_

THE FAN: _(Flirting quickly, then slowly)_ Married, I see.

BLOOM: Yes. Partly, I have mislaid...

THE FAN: _(Half opening, then closing)_ And the missus is master.
Petticoat government.

BLOOM: _(Looks down with a sheepish grin)_ That is so.

THE FAN: _(Folding together, rests against her left eardrop)_ Have you
forgotten me?

BLOOM: Yes. Yo.

THE FAN: _(Folded akimbo against her waist)_ Is me her was you dreamed
before? Was then she him you us since knew? Am all them and the same now
we?

_(Bella approaches, gently tapping with the fan.)_

BLOOM: _(Wincing)_ Powerful being. In my eyes read that slumber which
women love.

THE FAN: _(Tapping)_ We have met. You are mine. It is fate.

BLOOM: _(Cowed)_ Exuberant female. Enormously I desiderate your
domination. I am exhausted, abandoned, no more young. I stand, so to
speak, with an unposted letter bearing the extra regulation fee before
the too late box of the general postoffice of human life. The door
and window open at a right angle cause a draught of thirtytwo feet per
second according to the law of falling bodies. I have felt this instant
a twinge of sciatica in my left glutear muscle. It runs in our family.
Poor dear papa, a widower, was a regular barometer from it. He believed
in animal heat. A skin of tabby lined his winter waistcoat. Near the
end, remembering king David and the Sunamite, he shared his bed with
Athos, faithful after death. A dog's spittle as you probably... _(He
winces)_ Ah!

RICHIE GOULDING: _(Bagweighted, passes the door)_ Mocking is catch. Best
value in Dub. Fit for a prince's. Liver and kidney.

THE FAN: _(Tapping)_ All things end. Be mine. Now.

BLOOM: _(Undecided)_ All now? I should not have parted with my talisman.
Rain, exposure at dewfall on the searocks, a peccadillo at my time of
life. Every phenomenon has a natural cause.

THE FAN: _(Points downwards slowly)_ You may.

BLOOM: _(Looks downwards and perceives her unfastened bootlace)_ We are
observed.

THE FAN: _(Points downwards quickly)_ You must.

BLOOM: _(With desire, with reluctance)_ I can make a true black knot.
Learned when I served my time and worked the mail order line for
Kellett's. Experienced hand. Every knot says a lot. Let me. In courtesy.
I knelt once before today. Ah!

_(Bella raises her gown slightly and, steadying her pose, lifts to the
edge of a chair a plump buskined hoof and a full pastern, silksocked.
Bloom, stifflegged, aging, bends over her hoof and with gentle fingers
draws out and in her laces.)_

BLOOM: _(Murmurs lovingly)_ To be a shoefitter in Manfield's was my
love's young dream, the darling joys of sweet buttonhooking, to lace
up crisscrossed to kneelength the dressy kid footwear satinlined, so
incredibly impossibly small, of Clyde Road ladies. Even their wax model
Raymonde I visited daily to admire her cobweb hose and stick of rhubarb
toe, as worn in Paris.

THE HOOF: Smell my hot goathide. Feel my royal weight.

BLOOM: _(Crosslacing)_ Too tight?

THE HOOF: If you bungle, Handy Andy, I'll kick your football for you.

BLOOM: Not to lace the wrong eyelet as I did the night of the bazaar
dance. Bad luck. Hook in wrong tache of her... person you mentioned.
That night she met... Now!

_(He knots the lace. Bella places her foot on the floor. Bloom raises
his head. Her heavy face, her eyes strike him in midbrow. His eyes grow
dull, darker and pouched, his nose thickens.)_

BLOOM: _(Mumbles)_ Awaiting your further orders we remain, gentlemen,...

BELLO: _(With a hard basilisk stare, in a baritone voice)_ Hound of
dishonour!

BLOOM: _(Infatuated)_ Empress!

BELLO: _(His heavy cheekchops sagging)_ Adorer of the adulterous rump!

BLOOM: _(Plaintively)_ Hugeness!

BELLO: Dungdevourer!

BLOOM: _(With sinews semiflexed)_ Magmagnificence!

BELLO: Down! _(He taps her on the shoulder with his fan)_ Incline feet
forward! Slide left foot one pace back! You will fall. You are falling.
On the hands down!

BLOOM: _(Her eyes upturned in the sign of admiration, closing, yaps)_
Truffles!

_(With a piercing epileptic cry she sinks on all fours, grunting,
snuffling, rooting at his feet: then lies, shamming dead, with eyes shut
tight, trembling eyelids, bowed upon the ground in the attitude of most
excellent master.)_

BELLO: _(With bobbed hair, purple gills, fit moustache rings round his
shaven mouth, in mountaineer's puttees, green silverbuttoned coat, sport
skirt and alpine hat with moorcock's feather, his hands stuck deep in
his breeches pockets, places his heel on her neck and grinds it in)_
Footstool! Feel my entire weight. Bow, bondslave, before the throne of
your despot's glorious heels so glistening in their proud erectness.

BLOOM: _(Enthralled, bleats)_ I promise never to disobey.

BELLO: _(Laughs loudly)_ Holy smoke! You little know what's in store for
you. I'm the Tartar to settle your little lot and break you in! I'll bet
Kentucky cocktails all round I shame it out of you, old son. Cheek me,
I dare you. If you do tremble in anticipation of heel discipline to be
inflicted in gym costume.

_(Bloom creeps under the sofa and peers out through the fringe.)_

ZOE: _(Widening her slip to screen her)_ She's not here.

BLOOM: _(Closing her eyes)_ She's not here.

FLORRY: _(Hiding her with her gown)_ She didn't mean it, Mr Bello.
She'll be good, sir.

KITTY: Don't be too hard on her, Mr Bello. Sure you won't, ma'amsir.

BELLO: _(Coaxingly)_ Come, ducky dear, I want a word with you, darling,
just to administer correction. Just a little heart to heart talk,
sweety. _(Bloom puts out her timid head)_ There's a good girly now.
_(Bello grabs her hair violently and drags her forward)_ I only want
to correct you for your own good on a soft safe spot. How's that tender
behind? O, ever so gently, pet. Begin to get ready.

BLOOM: _(Fainting)_ Don't tear my...

BELLO: _(Savagely)_ The nosering, the pliers, the bastinado, the hanging
hook, the knout I'll make you kiss while the flutes play like the Nubian
slave of old. You're in for it this time! I'll make you remember me for
the balance of your natural life. _(His forehead veins swollen, his face
congested)_ I shall sit on your ottoman saddleback every morning after
my thumping good breakfast of Matterson's fat hamrashers and a bottle
of Guinness's porter. _(He belches)_ And suck my thumping good Stock
Exchange cigar while I read the _Licensed Victualler's Gazette_. Very
possibly I shall have you slaughtered and skewered in my stables and
enjoy a slice of you with crisp crackling from the baking tin basted
and baked like sucking pig with rice and lemon or currant sauce. It will
hurt you. _(He twists her arm. Bloom squeals, turning turtle.)_

BLOOM: Don't be cruel, nurse! Don't!

BELLO: _(Twisting)_ Another!

BLOOM: _(Screams)_ O, it's hell itself! Every nerve in my body aches
like mad!

BELLO: _(Shouts)_ Good, by the rumping jumping general! That's the best
bit of news I heard these six weeks. Here, don't keep me waiting, damn
you! _(He slaps her face)_

BLOOM: _(Whimpers)_ You're after hitting me. I'll tell...

BELLO: Hold him down, girls, till I squat on him.

ZOE: Yes. Walk on him! I will.

FLORRY: I will. Don't be greedy.

KITTY: No, me. Lend him to me.

_(The brothel cook, mrs keogh, wrinkled, greybearded, in a greasy bib,
men's grey and green socks and brogues, floursmeared, a rollingpin stuck
with raw pastry in her bare red arm and hand, appears at the door.)_

MRS KEOGH: _(Ferociously)_ Can I help? _(They hold and pinion Bloom.)_

BELLO: _(Squats with a grunt on Bloom's upturned face, puffing
cigarsmoke, nursing a fat leg)_ I see Keating Clay is elected
vicechairman of the Richmond asylum and by the by Guinness's preference
shares are at sixteen three quaffers. Curse me for a fool that didn't
buy that lot Craig and Gardner told me about. Just my infernal luck,
curse it. And that Goddamned outsider _Throwaway_ at twenty to one.
_(He quenches his cigar angrily on Bloom's ear)_ Where's that Goddamned
cursed ashtray?

BLOOM: _(Goaded, buttocksmothered)_ O! O! Monsters! Cruel one!

BELLO: Ask for that every ten minutes. Beg. Pray for it as you never
prayed before. _(He thrusts out a figged fist and foul cigar)_ Here,
kiss that. Both. Kiss. _(He throws a leg astride and, pressing with
horseman's knees, calls in a hard voice)_ Gee up! A cockhorse to Banbury
cross. I'll ride him for the Eclipse stakes. _(He bends sideways and
squeezes his mount's testicles roughly, shouting)_ Ho! Off we pop! I'll
nurse you in proper fashion. _(He horserides cockhorse, leaping in the
saddle)_ The lady goes a pace a pace and the coachman goes a trot a trot
and the gentleman goes a gallop a gallop a gallop a gallop.

FLORRY: _(Pulls at Bello)_ Let me on him now. You had enough. I asked
before you.

ZOE: _(Pulling at florry)_ Me. Me. Are you not finished with him yet,
suckeress?

BLOOM: _(Stifling)_ Can't.

BELLO: Well, I'm not. Wait. _(He holds in his breath)_ Curse it. Here.
This bung's about burst. _(He uncorks himself behind: then, contorting
his features, farts loudly)_ Take that! _(He recorks himself)_ Yes, by
Jingo, sixteen three quarters.

BLOOM: _(A sweat breaking out over him)_ Not man. _(He sniffs)_ Woman.

BELLO: _(Stands up)_ No more blow hot and cold. What you longed for has
come to pass. Henceforth you are unmanned and mine in earnest, a thing
under the yoke. Now for your punishment frock. You will shed your male
garments, you understand, Ruby Cohen? and don the shot silk luxuriously
rustling over head and shoulders. And quickly too!

BLOOM: _(Shrinks)_ Silk, mistress said! O crinkly! scrapy! Must I
tiptouch it with my nails?

BELLO: _(Points to his whores)_ As they are now so will you be, wigged,
singed, perfumesprayed, ricepowdered, with smoothshaven armpits. Tape
measurements will be taken next your skin. You will be laced with cruel
force into vicelike corsets of soft dove coutille with whalebone busk to
the diamondtrimmed pelvis, the absolute outside edge, while your figure,
plumper than when at large, will be restrained in nettight frocks,
pretty two ounce petticoats and fringes and things stamped, of course,
with my houseflag, creations of lovely lingerie for Alice and nice
scent for Alice. Alice will feel the pullpull. Martha and Mary will be
a little chilly at first in such delicate thighcasing but the frilly
flimsiness of lace round your bare knees will remind you...

BLOOM: _(A charming soubrette with dauby cheeks, mustard hair and large
male hands and nose, leering mouth)_ I tried her things on only twice,
a small prank, in Holles street. When we were hard up I washed them to
save the laundry bill. My own shirts I turned. It was the purest thrift.

BELLO: _(Jeers)_ Little jobs that make mother pleased, eh? And showed
off coquettishly in your domino at the mirror behind closedrawn blinds
your unskirted thighs and hegoat's udders in various poses of surrender,
eh? Ho! ho! I have to laugh! That secondhand black operatop shift and
short trunkleg naughties all split up the stitches at her last rape that
Mrs Miriam Dandrade sold you from the Shelbourne hotel, eh?

BLOOM: Miriam. Black. Demimondaine.

BELLO: _(Guffaws)_ Christ Almighty it's too tickling, this! You were
a nicelooking Miriam when you clipped off your backgate hairs and
lay swooning in the thing across the bed as Mrs Dandrade about to be
violated by lieutenant Smythe-Smythe, Mr Philip Augustus Blockwell M.
P., signor Laci Daremo, the robust tenor, blueeyed Bert, the liftboy,
Henri Fleury of Gordon Bennett fame, Sheridan, the quadroon Croesus, the
varsity wetbob eight from old Trinity, Ponto, her splendid Newfoundland
and Bobs, dowager duchess of Manorhamilton. _(He guffaws again)_ Christ,
wouldn't it make a Siamese cat laugh?

BLOOM: _(Her hands and features working)_ It was Gerald converted me to
be a true corsetlover when I was female impersonator in the High School
play _Vice Versa_. It was dear Gerald. He got that kink, fascinated by
sister's stays. Now dearest Gerald uses pinky greasepaint and gilds his
eyelids. Cult of the beautiful.

BELLO: _(With wicked glee)_ Beautiful! Give us a breather! When you
took your seat with womanish care, lifting your billowy flounces, on the
smoothworn throne.

BLOOM: Science. To compare the various joys we each enjoy. _(Earnestly)_
And really it's better the position... because often I used to wet...

BELLO: _(Sternly)_ No insubordination! The sawdust is there in the
corner for you. I gave you strict instructions, didn't I? Do it
standing, sir! I'll teach you to behave like a jinkleman! If I catch a
trace on your swaddles. Aha! By the ass of the Dorans you'll find I'm a
martinet. The sins of your past are rising against you. Many. Hundreds.

THE SINS OF THE PAST: _(In a medley of voices)_ He went through a form
of clandestine marriage with at least one woman in the shadow of the
Black church. Unspeakable messages he telephoned mentally to Miss Dunn
at an address in D'Olier street while he presented himself indecently to
the instrument in the callbox. By word and deed he frankly encouraged
a nocturnal strumpet to deposit fecal and other matter in an unsanitary
outhouse attached to empty premises. In five public conveniences
he wrote pencilled messages offering his nuptial partner to all
strongmembered males. And by the offensively smelling vitriol works did
he not pass night after night by loving courting couples to see if and
what and how much he could see? Did he not lie in bed, the gross boar,
gloating over a nauseous fragment of wellused toilet paper presented to
him by a nasty harlot, stimulated by gingerbread and a postal order?

BELLO: _(Whistles loudly)_ Say! What was the most revolting piece of
obscenity in all your career of crime? Go the whole hog. Puke it out! Be
candid for once.

_(Mute inhuman faces throng forward, leering, vanishing, gibbering,
Booloohoom. Poldy Kock, Bootlaces a penny Cassidy's hag, blind
stripling, Larry Rhinoceros, the girl, the woman, the whore, the other,
the...)_

BLOOM: Don't ask me! Our mutual faith. Pleasants street. I only thought
the half of the... I swear on my sacred oath...

BELLO: _(Peremptorily)_ Answer. Repugnant wretch! I insist on knowing.
Tell me something to amuse me, smut or a bloody good ghoststory or a
line of poetry, quick, quick, quick! Where? How? What time? With how
many? I give you just three seconds. One! Two! Thr...

BLOOM: _(Docile, gurgles)_ I rererepugnosed in rerererepugnant

BELLO: _(Imperiously)_ O, get out, you skunk! Hold your tongue! Speak
when you're spoken to.

BLOOM: _(Bows)_ Master! Mistress! Mantamer!

_(He lifts his arms. His bangle bracelets fill.)_

BELLO: _(Satirically)_ By day you will souse and bat our smelling
underclothes also when we ladies are unwell, and swab out our latrines
with dress pinned up and a dishclout tied to your tail. Won't that be
nice? _(He places a ruby ring on her finger)_ And there now! With this
ring I thee own. Say, thank you, mistress.

BLOOM: Thank you, mistress.

BELLO: You will make the beds, get my tub ready, empty the pisspots in
the different rooms, including old Mrs Keogh's the cook's, a sandy one.
Ay, and rinse the seven of them well, mind, or lap it up like champagne.
Drink me piping hot. Hop! You will dance attendance or I'll lecture you
on your misdeeds, Miss Ruby, and spank your bare bot right well, miss,
with the hairbrush. You'll be taught the error of your ways. At night
your wellcreamed braceletted hands will wear fortythreebutton gloves
newpowdered with talc and having delicately scented fingertips. For such
favours knights of old laid down their lives. _(He chuckles)_ My boys
will be no end charmed to see you so ladylike, the colonel, above
all, when they come here the night before the wedding to fondle my new
attraction in gilded heels. First I'll have a go at you myself. A man I
know on the turf named Charles Alberta Marsh (I was in bed with him just
now and another gentleman out of the Hanaper and Petty Bag office) is
on the lookout for a maid of all work at a short knock. Swell the bust.
Smile. Droop shoulders. What offers? _(He points)_ For that lot. Trained
by owner to fetch and carry, basket in mouth. _(He bares his arm and
plunges it elbowdeep in Bloom's vulva)_ There's fine depth for you!
What, boys? That give you a hardon? _(He shoves his arm in a bidder's
face)_ Here wet the deck and wipe it round!

A BIDDER: A florin.

_(Dillon's lacquey rings his handbell.)_

THE LACQUEY: Barang!

A VOICE: One and eightpence too much.

CHARLES ALBERTA MARSH: Must be virgin. Good breath. Clean.

BELLO: _(Gives a rap with his gavel)_ Two bar. Rockbottom figure and
cheap at the price. Fourteen hands high. Touch and examine his points.
Handle him. This downy skin, these soft muscles, this tender flesh. If
I had only my gold piercer here! And quite easy to milk. Three newlaid
gallons a day. A pure stockgetter, due to lay within the hour. His
sire's milk record was a thousand gallons of whole milk in forty weeks.
Whoa my jewel! Beg up! Whoa! _(He brands his initial C on Bloom's
croup)_ So! Warranted Cohen! What advance on two bob, gentlemen?

A DARKVISAGED MAN: _(In disguised accent)_ Hoondert punt sterlink.

VOICES: _(Subdued)_ For the Caliph. Haroun Al Raschid.

BELLO: _(Gaily)_ Right. Let them all come. The scanty, daringly short
skirt, riding up at the knee to show a peep of white pantalette, is a
potent weapon and transparent stockings, emeraldgartered, with the
long straight seam trailing up beyond the knee, appeal to the better
instincts of the _blasé_ man about town. Learn the smooth mincing walk
on four inch Louis Quinze heels, the Grecian bend with provoking croup,
the thighs fluescent, knees modestly kissing. Bring all your powers of
fascination to bear on them. Pander to their Gomorrahan vices.

BLOOM: _(Bends his blushing face into his armpit and simpers with
forefinger in mouth)_ O, I know what you're hinting at now!

BELLO: What else are you good for, an impotent thing like you? _(He
stoops and, peering, pokes with his fan rudely under the fat suet folds
of Bloom's haunches)_ Up! Up! Manx cat! What have we here? Where's your
curly teapot gone to or who docked it on you, cockyolly? Sing, birdy,
sing. It's as limp as a boy of six's doing his pooly behind a cart. Buy
a bucket or sell your pump. _(Loudly)_ Can you do a man's job?

BLOOM: Eccles street...

BELLO: _(Sarcastically)_ I wouldn't hurt your feelings for the world but
there's a man of brawn in possession there. The tables are turned, my
gay young fellow! He is something like a fullgrown outdoor man. Well for
you, you muff, if you had that weapon with knobs and lumps and warts all
over it. He shot his bolt, I can tell you! Foot to foot, knee to knee,
belly to belly, bubs to breast! He's no eunuch. A shock of red hair he
has sticking out of him behind like a furzebush! Wait for nine months,
my lad! Holy ginger, it's kicking and coughing up and down in her guts
already! That makes you wild, don't it? Touches the spot? _(He spits in
contempt)_ Spittoon!

BLOOM: I was indecently treated, I... Inform the police. Hundred
pounds. Unmentionable. I...

BELLO: Would if you could, lame duck. A downpour we want not your
drizzle.

BLOOM: To drive me mad! Moll! I forgot! Forgive! Moll... We... Still...

BELLO: _(Ruthlessly)_ No, Leopold Bloom, all is changed by woman's will
since you slept horizontal in Sleepy Hollow your night of twenty years.
Return and see.

_(Old Sleepy Hollow calls over the wold.)_

SLEEPY HOLLOW: Rip van Wink! Rip van Winkle!

BLOOM: _(In tattered mocassins with a rusty fowlingpiece, tiptoeing,
fingertipping, his haggard bony bearded face peering through the diamond
panes, cries out)_ I see her! It's she! The first night at Mat Dillon's!
But that dress, the green! And her hair is dyed gold and he...

BELLO: _(Laughs mockingly)_ That's your daughter, you owl, with a
Mullingar student.

_(Milly Bloom, fairhaired, greenvested, slimsandalled, her blue scarf
in the seawind simply swirling, breaks from the arms of her lover and
calls, her young eyes wonderwide.)_

MILLY: My! It's Papli! But, O Papli, how old you've grown!

BELLO: Changed, eh? Our whatnot, our writingtable where we never wrote,
aunt Hegarty's armchair, our classic reprints of old masters. A man and
his menfriends are living there in clover. The _Cuckoos' Rest!_ Why not?
How many women had you, eh, following them up dark streets, flatfoot,
exciting them by your smothered grunts, what, you male prostitute?
Blameless dames with parcels of groceries. Turn about. Sauce for the
goose, my gander O.

BLOOM: They... I...

BELLO: _(Cuttingly)_ Their heelmarks will stamp the Brusselette carpet
you bought at Wren's auction. In their horseplay with Moll the romp to
find the buck flea in her breeches they will deface the little statue
you carried home in the rain for art for art' sake. They will violate
the secrets of your bottom drawer. Pages will be torn from your handbook
of astronomy to make them pipespills. And they will spit in your ten
shilling brass fender from Hampton Leedom's.

BLOOM: Ten and six. The act of low scoundrels. Let me go. I will return.
I will prove...

A VOICE: Swear!

_(Bloom clenches his fists and crawls forward, a bowieknife between his
teeth.)_

BELLO: As a paying guest or a kept man? Too late. You have made your
secondbest bed and others must lie in it. Your epitaph is written. You
are down and out and don't you forget it, old bean.

BLOOM: Justice! All Ireland versus one! Has nobody...? _(He bites his
thumb)_

BELLO: Die and be damned to you if you have any sense of decency
or grace about you. I can give you a rare old wine that'll send you
skipping to hell and back. Sign a will and leave us any coin you have!
If you have none see you damn well get it, steal it, rob it! We'll bury
you in our shrubbery jakes where you'll be dead and dirty with old Cuck
Cohen, my stepnephew I married, the bloody old gouty procurator and
sodomite with a crick in his neck, and my other ten or eleven husbands,
whatever the buggers' names were, suffocated in the one cesspool. _(He
explodes in a loud phlegmy laugh)_ We'll manure you, Mr Flower! _(He
pipes scoffingly)_ Byby, Poldy! Byby, Papli!

BLOOM: _(Clasps his head)_ My willpower! Memory! I have sinned! I have
suff...

_(He weeps tearlessly)_

BELLO: _(Sneers)_ Crybabby! Crocodile tears!

_(Bloom, broken, closely veiled for the sacrifice, sobs, his face to
the earth. The passing bell is heard. Darkshawled figures of the
circumcised, in sackcloth and ashes, stand by the wailing wall. M.
Shulomowitz, Joseph Goldwater, Moses Herzog, Harris Rosenberg, M.
Moisel, J. Citron, Minnie Watchman, P. Mastiansky, The Reverend Leopold
Abramovitz, Chazen. With swaying arms they wail in pneuma over the
recreant Bloom.)_

THE CIRCUMCISED: _(In dark guttural chant as they cast dead sea fruit
upon him, no flowers) Shema Israel Adonai Elohenu Adonai Echad._

VOICES: _(Sighing)_ So he's gone. Ah yes. Yes, indeed. Bloom? Never
heard of him. No? Queer kind of chap. There's the widow. That so? Ah,
yes.

_(From the suttee pyre the flame of gum camphire ascends. The pall of
incense smoke screens and disperses. Out of her oakframe a nymph with
hair unbound, lightly clad in teabrown artcolours, descends from her
grotto and passing under interlacing yews stands over Bloom.)_

THE YEWS: _(Their leaves whispering)_ Sister. Our sister. Ssh!

THE NYMPH: _(Softly)_ Mortal! _(Kindly)_ Nay, dost not weepest!

BLOOM: _(Crawls jellily forward under the boughs, streaked by sunlight,
with dignity)_ This position. I felt it was expected of me. Force of
habit.

THE NYMPH: Mortal! You found me in evil company, highkickers, coster
picnicmakers, pugilists, popular generals, immoral panto boys in
fleshtights and the nifty shimmy dancers, La Aurora and Karini, musical
act, the hit of the century. I was hidden in cheap pink paper that smelt
of rock oil. I was surrounded by the stale smut of clubmen, stories to
disturb callow youth, ads for transparencies, truedup dice and bustpads,
proprietary articles and why wear a truss with testimonial from ruptured
gentleman. Useful hints to the married.

BLOOM: _(Lifts a turtle head towards her lap)_ We have met before. On
another star.

THE NYMPH: _(Sadly)_ Rubber goods. Neverrip brand as supplied to the
aristocracy. Corsets for men. I cure fits or money refunded. Unsolicited
testimonials for Professor Waldmann's wonderful chest exuber. My bust
developed four inches in three weeks, reports Mrs Gus Rublin with photo.

BLOOM: You mean _Photo Bits?_

THE NYMPH: I do. You bore me away, framed me in oak and tinsel, set me
above your marriage couch. Unseen, one summer eve, you kissed me in
four places. And with loving pencil you shaded my eyes, my bosom and my
shame.

BLOOM: _(Humbly kisses her long hair)_ Your classic curves, beautiful
immortal, I was glad to look on you, to praise you, a thing of beauty,
almost to pray.

THE NYMPH: During dark nights I heard your praise.

BLOOM: _(Quickly)_ Yes, yes. You mean that I... Sleep reveals the worst
side of everyone, children perhaps excepted. I know I fell out of bed
or rather was pushed. Steel wine is said to cure snoring. For the rest
there is that English invention, pamphlet of which I received some days
ago, incorrectly addressed. It claims to afford a noiseless, inoffensive
vent. _(He sighs)_ 'Twas ever thus. Frailty, thy name is marriage.

THE NYMPH: _(Her fingers in her ears)_ And words. They are not in my
dictionary.

BLOOM: You understood them?

THE YEWS: Ssh!

THE NYMPH: _(Covers her face with her hands)_ What have I not seen in
that chamber? What must my eyes look down on?

BLOOM: _(Apologetically)_ I know. Soiled personal linen, wrong side up
with care. The quoits are loose. From Gibraltar by long sea long ago.

THE NYMPH: _(Bends her head)_ Worse, worse!

BLOOM: _(Reflects precautiously)_ That antiquated commode. It wasn't her
weight. She scaled just eleven stone nine. She put on nine pounds
after weaning. It was a crack and want of glue. Eh? And that absurd
orangekeyed utensil which has only one handle.

_(The sound of a waterfall is heard in bright cascade.)_

THE WATERFALL:

     Poulaphouca Poulaphouca
     Poulaphouca Poulaphouca.

THE YEWS: _(Mingling their boughs)_ Listen. Whisper. She is right, our
sister. We grew by Poulaphouca waterfall. We gave shade on languorous
summer days.


JOHN WYSE NOLAN: _(In the background, in Irish National Forester's
uniform, doffs his plumed hat)_ Prosper! Give shade on languorous days,
trees of Ireland!

THE YEWS: _(Murmuring)_ Who came to Poulaphouca with the High School
excursion? Who left his nutquesting classmates to seek our shade?

BLOOM: _(Scared)_ High School of Poula? Mnemo? Not in full possession of
faculties. Concussion. Run over by tram.

THE ECHO: Sham!

BLOOM: _(Pigeonbreasted, bottleshouldered, padded, in nondescript
juvenile grey and black striped suit, too small for him, white tennis
shoes, bordered stockings with turnover tops and a red schoolcap with
badge)_ I was in my teens, a growing boy. A little then sufficed, a
jolting car, the mingling odours of the ladies' cloakroom and lavatory,
the throng penned tight on the old Royal stairs (for they love crushes,
instinct of the herd, and the dark sexsmelling theatre unbridles
vice), even a pricelist of their hosiery. And then the heat. There were
sunspots that summer. End of school. And tipsycake. Halcyon days.

_(Halcyon days, high school boys in blue and white football jerseys and
shorts, Master Donald Turnbull, Master Abraham Chatterton, Master Owen
Goldberg, Master Jack Meredith, Master Percy Apjohn, stand in a clearing
of the trees and shout to Master Leopold Bloom.)_

THE HALCYON DAYS: Mackerel! Live us again. Hurray! _(They cheer)_

BLOOM: _(Hobbledehoy, warmgloved, mammamufflered, starred with spent
snowballs, struggles to rise)_ Again! I feel sixteen! What a lark! Let's
ring all the bells in Montague street. _(He cheers feebly)_ Hurray for
the High School!

THE ECHO: Fool!

THE YEWS: _(Rustling)_ She is right, our sister. Whisper. _(Whispered
kisses are heard in all the wood. Faces of hamadryads peep out from
the boles and among the leaves and break, blossoming into bloom.)_ Who
profaned our silent shade?

THE NYMPH: _(Coyly, through parting fingers)_ There? In the open air?

THE YEWS: _(Sweeping downward)_ Sister, yes. And on our virgin sward.

THE WATERFALL:

     Poulaphouca Poulaphouca
     Phoucaphouca Phoucaphouca.

THE NYMPH: _(With wide fingers)_ O, infamy!

BLOOM: I was precocious. Youth. The fauna. I sacrificed to the god of
the forest. The flowers that bloom in the spring. It was pairing
time. Capillary attraction is a natural phenomenon. Lotty Clarke,
flaxenhaired, I saw at her night toilette through illclosed curtains
with poor papa's operaglasses: The wanton ate grass wildly. She rolled
downhill at Rialto bridge to tempt me with her flow of animal spirits.
She climbed their crooked tree and I... A saint couldn't resist it. The
demon possessed me. Besides, who saw?

_(Staggering Bob, a whitepolled calf, thrusts a ruminating head with
humid nostrils through the foliage.)_

STAGGERING BOB: (LARGE TEARDROPS ROLLING FROM HIS PROMINENT EYES,
SNIVELS) Me. Me see.

BLOOM: Simply satisfying a need I... _(With pathos)_ No girl would when
I went girling. Too ugly. They wouldn't play...

_(High on Ben Howth through rhododendrons a nannygoat passes,
plumpuddered, buttytailed, dropping currants.)_

THE NANNYGOAT: _(Bleats)_ Megeggaggegg! Nannannanny!

BLOOM: _(Hatless, flushed, covered with burrs of thistledown and
gorsespine)_ Regularly engaged. Circumstances alter cases. _(He gazes
intently downwards on the water)_ Thirtytwo head over heels per second.
Press nightmare. Giddy Elijah. Fall from cliff. Sad end of government
printer's clerk. _(Through silversilent summer air the dummy of Bloom,
rolled in a mummy, rolls roteatingly from the Lion's Head cliff into the
purple waiting waters.)_

THE DUMMYMUMMY: Bbbbblllllblblblblobschbg!

_(Far out in the bay between bailey and kish lights the_ Erin's King
_sails, sending a broadening plume of coalsmoke from her funnel towards
the land.)_

COUNCILLOR NANNETII: _(Alone on deck, in dark alpaca, yellowkitefaced,
his hand in his waistcoat opening, declaims)_ When my country takes her
place among the nations of the earth, then, and not till then, let my
epitaph be written. I have...

BLOOM: Done. Prff!

THE NYMPH: _(Loftily)_ We immortals, as you saw today, have not such
a place and no hair there either. We are stonecold and pure. We eat
electric light. _(She arches her body in lascivious crispation, placing
her forefinger in her mouth)_ Spoke to me. Heard from behind. How then
could you...?

BLOOM: _(Pawing the heather abjectly)_ O, I have been a perfect pig.
Enemas too I have administered. One third of a pint of quassia to which
add a tablespoonful of rocksalt. Up the fundament. With Hamilton Long's
syringe, the ladies' friend.

THE NYMPH: In my presence. The powderpuff. _(She blushes and makes a
knee)_ And the rest!

BLOOM: _(Dejected)_ Yes. _Peccavi!_ I have paid homage on that living
altar where the back changes name. _(With sudden fervour)_ For why
should the dainty scented jewelled hand, the hand that rules...?

_(Figures wind serpenting in slow woodland pattern around the treestems,
cooeeing)_

THE VOICE OF KITTY: _(In the thicket)_ Show us one of them cushions.

THE VOICE OF FLORRY: Here.

_(A grouse wings clumsily through the underwood.)_

THE VOICE OF LYNCH: _(In the thicket)_ Whew! Piping hot!

THE VOICE OF ZOE: _(From the thicket)_ Came from a hot place.

THE VOICE OF VIRAG: _(A birdchief, bluestreaked and feathered in war
panoply with his assegai, striding through a crackling canebrake over
beechmast and acorns)_ Hot! Hot! Ware Sitting Bull!

BLOOM: It overpowers me. The warm impress of her warm form. Even to sit
where a woman has sat, especially with divaricated thighs, as though to
grant the last favours, most especially with previously well uplifted
white sateen coatpans. So womanly, full. It fills me full.

THE WATERFALL:

     _Phillaphulla Poulaphouca
     Poulaphouca Poulaphouca._

THE YEWS: Ssh! Sister, speak!

THE NYMPH: _(Eyeless, in nun's white habit, coif and hugewinged wimple,
softly, with remote eyes)_ Tranquilla convent. Sister Agatha. Mount
Carmel. The apparitions of Knock and Lourdes. No more desire. _(She
reclines her head, sighing)_ Only the ethereal. Where dreamy creamy gull
waves o'er the waters dull.

_(Bloom half rises. His back trouserbutton snaps.)_

THE BUTTON: Bip!

_(Two sluts of the coombe dance rainily by, shawled, yelling flatly.)_

THE SLUTS:

     O, Leopold lost the pin of his drawers
     He didn't know what to do,
     To keep it up,
     To keep it up.

BLOOM: _(Coldly)_ You have broken the spell. The last straw. If there
were only ethereal where would you all be, postulants and novices? Shy
but willing like an ass pissing.

THE YEWS: _(Their silverfoil of leaves precipitating, their skinny arms
aging and swaying)_ Deciduously!

THE NYMPH: _(Her features hardening, gropes in the folds of her habit)_
Sacrilege! To attempt my virtue! _(A large moist stain appears on her
robe)_ Sully my innocence! You are not fit to touch the garment of a
pure woman. _(She clutches again in her robe)_ Wait. Satan, you'll sing
no more lovesongs. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. _(She draws a poniard and,
clad in the sheathmail of an elected knight of nine, strikes at his
loins)_ Nekum!

BLOOM: _(Starts up, seizes her hand)_ Hoy! Nebrakada! Cat o' nine lives!
Fair play, madam. No pruningknife. The fox and the grapes, is it? What
do you lack with your barbed wire? Crucifix not thick enough? _(He
clutches her veil)_ A holy abbot you want or Brophy, the lame gardener,
or the spoutless statue of the watercarrier, or good mother Alphonsus,
eh Reynard?

THE NYMPH: _(With a cry flees from him unveiled, her plaster cast
cracking, a cloud of stench escaping from the cracks)_ Poli...!

BLOOM: _(Calls after her)_ As if you didn't get it on the double
yourselves. No jerks and multiple mucosities all over you. I tried it.
Your strength our weakness. What's our studfee? What will you pay on
the nail? You fee mendancers on the Riviera, I read. _(The fleeing nymph
raises a keen)_ Eh? I have sixteen years of black slave labour behind
me. And would a jury give me five shillings alimony tomorrow, eh? Fool
someone else, not me. _(He sniffs)_ Rut. Onions. Stale. Sulphur. Grease.

_(The figure of Bella Cohen stands before him.)_

BELLA: You'll know me the next time.

BLOOM: _(Composed, regards her) Passée._ Mutton dressed as lamb. Long
in the tooth and superfluous hair. A raw onion the last thing at night
would benefit your complexion. And take some double chin drill. Your
eyes are as vapid as the glasseyes of your stuffed fox. They have the
dimensions of your other features, that's all. I'm not a triple screw
propeller.

BELLA: _(Contemptuously)_ You're not game, in fact. _(Her sowcunt
barks)_ Fbhracht!

BLOOM: _(Contemptuously)_ Clean your nailless middle finger first, your
bully's cold spunk is dripping from your cockscomb. Take a handful of
hay and wipe yourself.

BELLA: I know you, canvasser! Dead cod!

BLOOM: I saw him, kipkeeper! Pox and gleet vendor!

BELLA: _(Turns to the piano)_ Which of you was playing the dead march
from _Saul?_

ZOE: Me. Mind your cornflowers. _(She darts to the piano and bangs
chords on it with crossed arms)_ The cat's ramble through the slag.
_(She glances back)_ Eh? Who's making love to my sweeties? _(She darts
back to the table)_ What's yours is mine and what's mine is my own.

_(Kitty, disconcerted, coats her teeth with the silver paper. Bloom
approaches Zoe.)_

BLOOM: _(Gently)_ Give me back that potato, will you?

ZOE: Forfeits, a fine thing and a superfine thing.

BLOOM: _(With feeling)_ It is nothing, but still, a relic of poor mamma.

ZOE:

     Give a thing and take it back
     God'll ask you where is that
     You'll say you don't know
     God'll send you down below.

BLOOM: There is a memory attached to it. I should like to have it.

STEPHEN: To have or not to have that is the question.

ZOE: Here. _(She hauls up a reef of her slip, revealing her bare thigh,
and unrolls the potato from the top of her stocking)_ Those that hides
knows where to find.

BELLA: _(Frowns)_ Here. This isn't a musical peepshow. And don't you
smash that piano. Who's paying here?

_(She goes to the pianola. Stephen fumbles in his pocket and, taking out
a banknote by its corner, hands it to her.)_

STEPHEN: _(With exaggerated politeness)_ This silken purse I made out
of the sow's ear of the public. Madam, excuse me. If you allow me. _(He
indicates vaguely Lynch and Bloom)_ We are all in the same sweepstake,
Kinch and Lynch. _Dans ce bordel ou tenons nostre état_.

LYNCH: _(Calls from the hearth)_ Dedalus! Give her your blessing for me.

STEPHEN: _(Hands Bella a coin)_ Gold. She has it.

BELLA: _(Looks at the money, then at Stephen, then at Zoe, Florry and
Kitty)_ Do you want three girls? It's ten shillings here.

STEPHEN: _(Delightedly)_ A hundred thousand apologies. _(He fumbles
again and takes out and hands her two crowns)_ Permit, _brevi manu_, my
sight is somewhat troubled.

_(Bella goes to the table to count the money while Stephen talks to
himself in monosyllables. Zoe bends over the table. Kitty leans over
Zoe's neck. Lynch gets up, rights his cap and, clasping Kitty's waist,
adds his head to the group.)_

FLORRY: _(Strives heavily to rise)_ Ow! My foot's asleep. _(She limps
over to the table. Bloom approaches.)_

BELLA, ZOE, KITTY, LYNCH, BLOOM: _(Chattering and squabbling)_ The
gentleman... ten shillings... paying for the three... allow me a
moment... this gentleman pays separate... who's touching it?... ow!
... mind who you're pinching... are you staying the night or a short
time?... who did?... you're a liar, excuse me... the gentleman paid
down like a gentleman... drink... it's long after eleven.

STEPHEN: _(At the pianola, making a gesture of abhorrence)_ No bottles!
What, eleven? A riddle!

ZOE: _(Lifting up her pettigown and folding a half sovereign into the
top of her stocking)_ Hard earned on the flat of my back.

LYNCH: _(Lifting Kitty from the table)_ Come!

KITTY: Wait. _(She clutches the two crowns)_

FLORRY: And me?

LYNCH: Hoopla! _(He lifts her, carries her and bumps her down on the
sofa.)_

STEPHEN:

     The fox crew, the cocks flew,
     The bells in heaven
     Were striking eleven.
     'Tis time for her poor soul
     To get out of heaven.

BLOOM: _(Quietly lays a half sovereign on the table between bella and
florry)_ So. Allow me. _(He takes up the poundnote)_ Three times ten.
We're square.

BELLA: _(Admiringly)_ You're such a slyboots, old cocky. I could kiss
you.

ZOE: _(Points)_ Him? Deep as a drawwell. _(Lynch bends Kitty back over
the sofa and kisses her. Bloom goes with the poundnote to Stephen.)_

BLOOM: This is yours.

STEPHEN: How is that? _Les distrait_ or absentminded beggar. _(He
fumbles again in his pocket and draws out a handful of coins. An object
fills.)_ That fell.

BLOOM: _(Stooping, picks up and hands a box of matches)_ This.

STEPHEN: Lucifer. Thanks.

BLOOM: _(Quietly)_ You had better hand over that cash to me to take care
of. Why pay more?

STEPHEN: _(Hands him all his coins)_ Be just before you are generous.

BLOOM: I will but is it wise? _(He counts)_ One, seven, eleven, and
five. Six. Eleven. I don't answer for what you may have lost.

STEPHEN: Why striking eleven? Proparoxyton. Moment before the next
Lessing says. Thirsty fox. _(He laughs loudly)_ Burying his grandmother.
Probably he killed her.

BLOOM: That is one pound six and eleven. One pound seven, say.

STEPHEN: Doesn't matter a rambling damn.

BLOOM: No, but...

STEPHEN: _(Comes to the table)_ Cigarette, please. _(Lynch tosses a
cigarette from the sofa to the table)_ And so Georgina Johnson is dead
and married. _(A cigarette appears on the table. Stephen looks at it)_
Wonder. Parlour magic. Married. Hm. _(He strikes a match and proceeds to
light the cigarette with enigmatic melancholy)_

LYNCH: _(Watching him)_ You would have a better chance of lighting it if
you held the match nearer.

STEPHEN: _(Brings the match near his eye)_ Lynx eye. Must get glasses.
Broke them yesterday. Sixteen years ago. Distance. The eye sees all
flat. _(He draws the match away. It goes out.)_ Brain thinks. Near:
far. Ineluctable modality of the visible. _(He frowns mysteriously)_ Hm.
Sphinx. The beast that has twobacks at midnight. Married.

ZOE: It was a commercial traveller married her and took her away with
him.

FLORRY: _(Nods)_ Mr Lambe from London.

STEPHEN: Lamb of London, who takest away the sins of our world.

LYNCH: _(Embracing Kitty on the sofa, chants deeply) Dona nobis pacem._

_(The cigarette slips from Stephen 's fingers. Bloom picks it up and
throws it in the grate.)_

BLOOM: Don't smoke. You ought to eat. Cursed dog I met. _(To Zoe)_ You
have nothing?

ZOE: Is he hungry?

STEPHEN: _(Extends his hand to her smiling and chants to the air of the
bloodoath in the_ Dusk of the Gods)

     Hangende Hunger,
     Fragende Frau,
     Macht uns alle kaputt.


ZOE: _(Tragically)_ Hamlet, I am thy father's gimlet! _(She takes
his hand)_ Blue eyes beauty I'll read your hand. _(She points to his
forehead)_ No wit, no wrinkles. _(She counts)_ Two, three, Mars, that's
courage. _(Stephen shakes his head)_ No kid.

LYNCH: Sheet lightning courage. The youth who could not shiver and
shake. _(To Zoe)_ Who taught you palmistry?

ZOE: _(Turns)_ Ask my ballocks that I haven't got. _(To Stephen)_ I see
it in your face. The eye, like that. _(She frowns with lowered head)_

LYNCH: _(Laughing, slaps Kitty behind twice)_ Like that. Pandybat.

_(Twice loudly a pandybat cracks, the coffin of the pianola flies open,
the bald little round jack-in-the-box head of Father Dolan springs up.)_

FATHER DOLAN: Any boy want flogging? Broke his glasses? Lazy idle little
schemer. See it in your eye.

_(Mild, benign, rectorial, reproving, the head of Don John Conmee rises
from the pianola coffin.)_

DON JOHN CONMEE: Now, Father Dolan! Now. I'm sure that Stephen is a very
good little boy!

ZOE: _(Examining Stephen's palm)_ Woman's hand.

STEPHEN: _(Murmurs)_ Continue. Lie. Hold me. Caress. I never could read
His handwriting except His criminal thumbprint on the haddock.

ZOE: What day were you born?

STEPHEN: Thursday. Today.

ZOE: Thursday's child has far to go. _(She traces lines on his hand)_
Line of fate. Influential friends.

FLORRY: _(Pointing)_ Imagination.

ZOE: Mount of the moon. You'll meet with a... _(She peers at his hands
abruptly)_ I won't tell you what's not good for you. Or do you want to
know?

BLOOM: _(Detaches her fingers and offers his palm)_ More harm than good.
Here. Read mine.

BELLA: Show. _(She turns up bloom's hand)_ I thought so. Knobby knuckles
for the women.

ZOE: _(Peering at bloom's palm)_ Gridiron. Travels beyond the sea and
marry money.

BLOOM: Wrong.

ZOE: _(Quickly)_ O, I see. Short little finger. Henpecked husband. That
wrong?

_(Black Liz, a huge rooster hatching in a chalked circle, rises,
stretches her wings and clucks.)_

BLACK LIZ: Gara. Klook. Klook. Klook.

_(She sidles from her newlaid egg and waddles off)_

BLOOM: _(Points to his hand)_ That weal there is an accident. Fell and
cut it twentytwo years ago. I was sixteen.

ZOE: I see, says the blind man. Tell us news.

STEPHEN: See? Moves to one great goal. I am twentytwo. Sixteen years ago
he was twentytwo too. Sixteen years ago I twentytwo tumbled. Twentytwo
years ago he sixteen fell off his hobbyhorse. _(He winces)_ Hurt my hand
somewhere. Must see a dentist. Money?

_(Zoe whispers to Florry. They giggle. Bloom releases his hand and
writes idly on the table in backhand, pencilling slow curves.)_

FLORRY: What?

_(A hackneycar, number three hundred and twentyfour, with a
gallantbuttocked mare, driven by James Barton, Harmony Avenue,
Donnybrook, trots past. Blazes Boylan and Lenehan sprawl swaying on the
sideseats. The Ormond boots crouches behind on the axle. Sadly over the
crossblind Lydia Douce and Mina Kennedy gaze.)_

THE BOOTS: _(Jogging, mocks them with thumb and wriggling wormfingers)_
Haw haw have you the horn?

_(Bronze by gold they whisper.)_

ZOE: _(To Florry)_ Whisper.

_(They whisper again)_

_(Over the well of the car Blazes Boylan leans, his boater straw set
sideways, a red flower in his mouth. Lenehan in yachtsman's cap and
white shoes officiously detaches a long hair from Blazes Boylan's coat
shoulder.)_

LENEHAN: Ho! What do I here behold? Were you brushing the cobwebs off a
few quims?

BOYLAN: _(Seated, smiles)_ Plucking a turkey.

LENEHAN: A good night's work.

BOYLAN: _(Holding up four thick bluntungulated fingers, winks)_ Blazes
Kate! Up to sample or your money back. _(He holds out a forefinger)_
Smell that.

LENEHAN: _(Smells gleefully)_ Ah! Lobster and mayonnaise. Ah!

ZOE AND FLORRY: _(Laugh together)_ Ha ha ha ha.

BOYLAN: _(Jumps surely from the car and calls loudly for all to hear)_
Hello, Bloom! Mrs Bloom dressed yet?

BLOOM: _(In flunkey's prune plush coat and kneebreeches, buff stockings
and powdered wig)_ I'm afraid not, sir. The last articles...

BOYLAN: _(Tosses him sixpence)_ Here, to buy yourself a gin and splash.
_(He hangs his hat smartly on a peg of Bloom's antlered head)_ Show me
in. I have a little private business with your wife, you understand?

BLOOM: Thank you, sir. Yes, sir. Madam Tweedy is in her bath, sir.

MARION: He ought to feel himself highly honoured. _(She plops splashing
out of the water)_ Raoul darling, come and dry me. I'm in my pelt. Only
my new hat and a carriage sponge.

BOYLAN: _(A merry twinkle in his eye)_ Topping!

BELLA: What? What is it?

_(Zoe whispers to her.)_

MARION: Let him look, the pishogue! Pimp! And scourge himself! I'll
write to a powerful prostitute or Bartholomona, the bearded woman, to
raise weals out on him an inch thick and make him bring me back a signed
and stamped receipt.

BOYLAN: (clasps himself) Here, I can't hold this little lot much longer.
(he strides off on stiff cavalry legs)

BELLA: _(Laughing)_ Ho ho ho ho.

BOYLAN: _(To Bloom, over his shoulder)_ You can apply your eye to the
keyhole and play with yourself while I just go through her a few times.

BLOOM: Thank you, sir. I will, sir. May I bring two men chums to witness
the deed and take a snapshot? _(He holds out an ointment jar)_ Vaseline,
sir? Orangeflower...? Lukewarm water...?

KITTY: _(From the sofa)_ Tell us, Florry. Tell us. What.

_(Florry whispers to her. Whispering lovewords murmur, liplapping
loudly, poppysmic plopslop.)_

MINA KENNEDY: _(Her eyes upturned)_ O, it must be like the scent of
geraniums and lovely peaches! O, he simply idolises every bit of her!
Stuck together! Covered with kisses!

LYDIA DOUCE: _(Her mouth opening)_ Yumyum. O, he's carrying her round
the room doing it! Ride a cockhorse. You could hear them in Paris and
New York. Like mouthfuls of strawberries and cream.

KITTY: _(Laughing)_ Hee hee hee.

BOYLAN'S VOICE: _(Sweetly, hoarsely, in the pit of his stomach)_ Ah!
Gooblazqruk brukarchkrasht!

MARION'S VOICE: _(Hoarsely, sweetly, rising to her throat)_ O!
Weeshwashtkissinapooisthnapoohuck?

BLOOM: _(His eyes wildly dilated, clasps himself)_ Show! Hide! Show!
Plough her! More! Shoot!

BELLA, ZOE, FLORRY, KITTY: Ho ho! Ha ha! Hee hee!

LYNCH: _(Points)_ The mirror up to nature. _(He laughs)_ Hu hu hu hu hu!

_(Stephen and Bloom gaze in the mirror. The face of William Shakespeare,
beardless, appears there, rigid in facial paralysis, crowned by the
reflection of the reindeer antlered hatrack in the hall.)_

SHAKESPEARE: _(In dignified ventriloquy)_ 'Tis the loud laugh bespeaks
the vacant mind. _(To Bloom)_ Thou thoughtest as how thou wastest
invisible. Gaze. _(He crows with a black capon's laugh)_ Iagogo! How my
Oldfellow chokit his Thursdaymornun. Iagogogo!

BLOOM: _(Smiles yellowly at the three whores)_ When will I hear the
joke?

ZOE: Before you're twice married and once a widower.

BLOOM: Lapses are condoned. Even the great Napoleon when measurements
were taken next the skin after his death...

_(Mrs Dignam, widow woman, her snubnose and cheeks flushed with
deathtalk, tears and Tunney's tawny sherry, hurries by in her weeds,
her bonnet awry, rouging and powdering her cheeks, lips and nose, a
pen chivvying her brood of cygnets. Beneath her skirt appear her late
husband's everyday trousers and turnedup boots, large eights. She holds
a Scottish widows' insurance policy and a large marquee umbrella under
which her brood run with her, Patsy hopping on one shod foot, his collar
loose, a hank of porksteaks dangling, freddy whimpering, Susy with a
crying cod's mouth, Alice struggling with the baby. She cuffs them on,
her streamers flaunting aloft.)_

FREDDY: Ah, ma, you're dragging me along!

SUSY: Mamma, the beeftea is fizzing over!

SHAKESPEARE: _(With paralytic rage)_ Weda seca whokilla farst.

_(The face of Martin Cunningham, bearded, refeatures Shakespeare's
beardless face. The marquee umbrella sways drunkenly, the children run
aside. Under the umbrella appears Mrs Cunningham in Merry Widow hat and
kimono gown. She glides sidling and bowing, twirling japanesily.)_

MRS CUNNINGHAM: _(Sings)_

And they call me the jewel of Asia!

MARTIN CUNNINGHAM: _(Gazes on her, impassive)_ Immense! Most bloody
awful demirep!

STEPHEN: _Et exaltabuntur cornua iusti._ Queens lay with prize bulls.
Remember Pasiphae for whose lust my grandoldgrossfather made the first
confessionbox. Forget not Madam Grissel Steevens nor the suine scions
of the house of Lambert. And Noah was drunk with wine. And his ark was
open.

BELLA: None of that here. Come to the wrong shop.

LYNCH: Let him alone. He's back from Paris.

ZOE: _(Runs to stephen and links him)_ O go on! Give us some parleyvoo.

_(Stephen claps hat on head and leaps over to the fireplace where he
stands with shrugged shoulders, finny hands outspread, a painted smile
on his face.)_

LYNCH: _(Oommelling on the sofa)_ Rmm Rmm Rmm Rrrrrrmmmm.

STEPHEN: _(Gabbles with marionette jerks)_ Thousand places of
entertainment to expense your evenings with lovely ladies saling gloves
and other things perhaps hers heart beerchops perfect fashionable
house very eccentric where lots cocottes beautiful dressed much about
princesses like are dancing cancan and walking there parisian clowneries
extra foolish for bachelors foreigns the same if talking a poor english
how much smart they are on things love and sensations voluptuous.
Misters very selects for is pleasure must to visit heaven and hell show
with mortuary candles and they tears silver which occur every night.
Perfectly shocking terrific of religion's things mockery seen in
universal world. All chic womans which arrive full of modesty then
disrobe and squeal loud to see vampire man debauch nun very fresh young
with _dessous troublants_. _(He clacks his tongue loudly)_ _Ho, la la!
Ce pif qu'il a!_

LYNCH: _Vive le vampire!_

THE WHORES: Bravo! Parleyvoo!

STEPHEN: _(Grimacing with head back, laughs loudly, clapping himself)_
Great success of laughing. Angels much prostitutes like and holy
apostles big damn ruffians. _Demimondaines_ nicely handsome sparkling of
diamonds very amiable costumed. Or do you are fond better what belongs
they moderns pleasure turpitude of old mans? _(He points about him with
grotesque gestures which Lynch and the whores reply to)_ Caoutchouc
statue woman reversible or lifesize tompeeptom of virgins nudities very
lesbic the kiss five ten times. Enter, gentleman, to see in mirror every
positions trapezes all that machine there besides also if desire act
awfully bestial butcher's boy pollutes in warm veal liver or omlet on
the belly _pièce de Shakespeare._

BELLA: _(Clapping her belly sinks back on the sofa, with a shout of
laughter)_ An omelette on the... Ho! ho! ho! ho!... omelette on the...

STEPHEN: _(Mincingly)_ I love you, sir darling. Speak you englishman
tongue for _double entente cordiale._ O yes, _mon loup_. How much cost?
Waterloo. Watercloset. _(He ceases suddenly and holds up a forefinger)_

BELLA: _(Laughing)_ Omelette...

THE WHORES: _(Laughing)_ Encore! Encore!

STEPHEN: Mark me. I dreamt of a watermelon.

ZOE: Go abroad and love a foreign lady.

LYNCH: Across the world for a wife.

FLORRY: Dreams goes by contraries.

STEPHEN: _(Extends his arms)_ It was here. Street of harlots. In
Serpentine avenue Beelzebub showed me her, a fubsy widow. Where's the
red carpet spread?

BLOOM: _(Approaching Stephen)_ Look...

STEPHEN: No, I flew. My foes beneath me. And ever shall be. World
without end. _(He cries) P_ater! Free!

BLOOM: I say, look...

STEPHEN: Break my spirit, will he? _O merde alors! (He cries, his
vulture talons sharpened)_ Hola! Hillyho!

_(Simon Dedalus' voice hilloes in answer, somewhat sleepy but ready.)_

SIMON: That's all right. _(He swoops uncertainly through the air,
wheeling, uttering cries of heartening, on strong ponderous buzzard
wings)_ Ho, boy! Are you going to win? Hoop! Pschatt! Stable with those
halfcastes. Wouldn't let them within the bawl of an ass. Head up! Keep
our flag flying! An eagle gules volant in a field argent displayed.
Ulster king at arms! Haihoop! _(He makes the beagle's call, giving
tongue)_ Bulbul! Burblblburblbl! Hai, boy!

_(The fronds and spaces of the wallpaper file rapidly across country.
A stout fox, drawn from covert, brush pointed, having buried his
grandmother, runs swift for the open, brighteyed, seeking badger earth,
under the leaves. The pack of staghounds follows, nose to the ground,
sniffing their quarry, beaglebaying, burblbrbling to be blooded. Ward
Union huntsmen and huntswomen live with them, hot for a kill. From Six
Mile Point, Flathouse, Nine Mile Stone follow the footpeople with knotty
sticks, hayforks, salmongaffs, lassos, flockmasters with stockwhips,
bearbaiters with tomtoms, toreadors with bullswords, greynegroes
waving torches. The crowd bawls of dicers, crown and anchor players,
thimbleriggers, broadsmen. Crows and touts, hoarse bookies in high
wizard hats clamour deafeningly.)_

THE CROWD:

     Card of the races. Racing card!
     Ten to one the field!
     Tommy on the clay here! Tommy on the clay!
     Ten to one bar one! Ten to one bar one!
     Try your luck on Spinning Jenny!
     Ten to one bar one!
     Sell the monkey, boys! Sell the monkey!
     I'll give ten to one!
     Ten to one bar one!

_(A dark horse, riderless, bolts like a phantom past the winningpost,
his mane moonfoaming, his eyeballs stars. The field follows, a bunch of
bucking mounts. Skeleton horses, Sceptre, Maximum the Second, Zinfandel,
the Duke of Westminster's Shotover, Repulse, the Duke of Beaufort's
Ceylon, prix de Paris. Dwarfs ride them, rustyarmoured, leaping, leaping
in their, in their saddles. Last in a drizzle of rain on a brokenwinded
isabelle nag, Cock of the North, the favourite, honey cap, green jacket,
orange sleeves, Garrett Deasy up, gripping the reins, a hockeystick at
the ready. His nag on spavined whitegaitered feet jogs along the rocky
road.)_

THE ORANGE LODGES: _(Jeering)_ Get down and push, mister. Last lap!
You'll be home the night!

GARRETT DEASY: _(Bolt upright, his nailscraped face plastered with
postagestamps, brandishes his hockeystick, his blue eyes flashing in the
prism of the chandelier as his mount lopes by at schooling gallop)_

_Per vias rectas!_

_(A yoke of buckets leopards all over him and his rearing nag a torrent
of mutton broth with dancing coins of carrots, barley, onions, turnips,
potatoes.)_

THE GREEN LODGES: Soft day, sir John! Soft day, your honour!

_(Private Carr, Private Compton and Cissy Caffrey pass beneath the
windows, singing in discord.)_

STEPHEN: Hark! Our friend noise in the street.

ZOE: _(Holds up her hand)_ Stop!

PRIVATE CARR, PRIVATE COMPTON AND CISSY CAFFREY:

Yet I've a sort a Yorkshire relish for...

ZOE: That's me. _(She claps her hands)_ Dance! Dance! _(She runs to the
pianola)_ Who has twopence?

BLOOM: Who'll...?

LYNCH: _(Handing her coins)_ Here.

STEPHEN: _(Cracking his fingers impatiently)_ Quick! Quick! Where's my
augur's rod? _(He runs to the piano and takes his ashplant, beating his
foot in tripudium)_

ZOE: _(Turns the drumhandle)_ There.

_(She drops two pennies in the slot. Gold, pink and violet lights
start forth. The drum turns purring in low hesitation waltz. Professor
Goodwin, in a bowknotted periwig, in court dress, wearing a stained
inverness cape, bent in two from incredible age, totters across the
room, his hands fluttering. He sits tinily on the pianostool and lifts
and beats handless sticks of arms on the keyboard, nodding with damsel's
grace, his bowknot bobbing)_

ZOE: _(Twirls round herself, heeltapping)_ Dance. Anybody here for
there? Who'll dance? Clear the table.

_(The pianola with changing lights plays in waltz time the prelude of_
My Girl's a Yorkshire Girl. _Stephen throws his ashplant on the table
and seizes Zoe round the waist. Florry and Bella push the table towards
the fireplace. Stephen, arming Zoe with exaggerated grace, begins to
waltz her round the room. Bloom stands aside. Her sleeve filling from
gracing arms reveals a white fleshflower of vaccination. Between the
curtains Professor Maginni inserts a leg on the toepoint of which spins
a silk hat. With a deft kick he sends it spinning to his crown and
jauntyhatted skates in. He wears a slate frockcoat with claret silk
lapels, a gorget of cream tulle, a green lowcut waistcoat, stock collar
with white kerchief, tight lavender trousers, patent pumps and canary
gloves. In his buttonhole is an immense dahlia. He twirls in reversed
directions a clouded cane, then wedges it tight in his oxter. He places
a hand lightly on his breastbone, bows, and fondles his flower and
buttons.)_

MAGINNI: The poetry of motion, art of calisthenics. No connection
with Madam Legget Byrne's or Levenston's. Fancy dress balls arranged.
Deportment. The Katty Lanner step. So. Watch me! My terpsichorean
abilities. _(He minuets forward three paces on tripping bee's feet) Tout
le monde en avant! Révérence! Tout le monde en place!_

_(The prelude ceases. Professor Goodwin, beating vague arms shrivels,
sinks, his live cape filling about the stool. The air in firmer waltz
time sounds. Stephen and Zoe circle freely. The lights change, glow,
fide gold rosy violet.)_

THE PIANOLA:

Two young fellows were talking about their girls, girls, girls,
Sweethearts they'd left behind...

_(From a corner the morning hours run out, goldhaired, slimsandalled,
in girlish blue, waspwaisted, with innocent hands. Nimbly they dance,
twirling their skipping ropes. The hours of noon follow in amber gold.
Laughing, linked, high haircombs flashing, they catch the sun in mocking
mirrors, lifting their arms.)_

MAGINNI: _(Clipclaps glovesilent hands) Carré! Avant deux!_ Breathe
evenly! _Balance!_

_(The morning and noon hours waltz in their places, turning, advancing
to each other, shaping their curves, bowing visavis. Cavaliers behind
them arch and suspend their arms, with hands descending to, touching,
rising from their shoulders.)_

HOURS: You may touch my.

CAVALIERS: May I touch your?

HOURS: O, but lightly!

CAVALIERS: O, so lightly!

THE PIANOLA:

My little shy little lass has a waist.

_(Zoe and Stephen turn boldly with looser swing. The twilight hours
advance from long landshadows, dispersed, lagging, languideyed, their
cheeks delicate with cipria and false faint bloom. They are in grey
gauze with dark bat sleeves that flutter in the land breeze.)_

MAGINNI: _Avant huit! Traversé! Salut! Cours de mains! Croisé!_

_(The night hours, one by one, steal to the last place. Morning, noon
and twilight hours retreat before them. They are masked, with daggered
hair and bracelets of dull bells. Weary they curchycurchy under veils.)_

THE BRACELETS: Heigho! Heigho!

ZOE: _(Twirling, her hand to her brow)_ O!

MAGINNI: _Les tiroirs! Chaîne de dames! La corbeille! Dos à dos!_

_(Arabesquing wearily they weave a pattern on the floor, weaving,
unweaving, curtseying, twirling, simply swirling.)_

ZOE: I'm giddy!

_(She frees herself, droops on a chair. Stephen seizes Florry and turns
with her.)_

MAGINNI: Boulangère! Les ronds! Les ponts! Chevaux de bois! Escargots!

_(Twining, receding, with interchanging hands the night hours link each
each with arching arms in a mosaic of movements. Stephen and Florry turn
cumbrously.)_

MAGINNI: _Dansez avec vos dames! Changez de dames! Donnez le petit
bouquet à votre dame! Remerciez!_

THE PIANOLA:

     Best, best of all,
     Baraabum!

KITTY: (JUMPS UP) O, they played that on the hobbyhorses at the Mirus
bazaar!

_(She runs to Stephen. He leaves florry brusquely and seizes Kitty.
A screaming bittern's harsh high whistle shrieks. Groangrousegurgling
Toft's cumbersome whirligig turns slowly the room right roundabout the
room.)_

THE PIANOLA:

     My girl's a Yorkshire girl.

ZOE:

Yorkshire through and through.

Come on all!

_(She seizes Florry and waltzes her.)_

STEPHEN: _Pas seul!_

_(He wheels Kitty into Lynch's arms, snatches up his ashplant from
the table and takes the floor. All wheel whirl waltz twirl. Bloombella
Kittylynch Florryzoe jujuby women. Stephen with hat ashplant frogsplits
in middle highkicks with skykicking mouth shut hand clasp part under
thigh. With clang tinkle boomhammer tallyho hornblower blue green yellow
flashes Toft's cumbersome turns with hobbyhorse riders from gilded
snakes dangled, bowels fandango leaping spurn soil foot and fall
again.)_

THE PIANOLA:

     Though she's a factory lass
     And wears no fancy clothes.

_(Closeclutched swift swifter with glareblareflare scudding they
scootlootshoot lumbering by. Baraabum!)_

TUTTI: Encore! Bis! Bravo! Encore!

SIMON: Think of your mother's people!

STEPHEN: Dance of death.

_(Bang fresh barang bang of lacquey's bell, horse, nag, steer, piglings,
Conmee on Christass, lame crutch and leg sailor in cockboat armfolded
ropepulling hitching stamp hornpipe through and through. Baraabum! On
nags hogs bellhorses Gadarene swine Corny in coffin Steel shark stone
onehandled nelson two trickies Frauenzimmer plumstained from pram
filling bawling gum he's a champion. Fuseblue peer from barrel rev.
evensong Love on hackney jaunt Blazes blind coddoubled bicyclers Dilly
with snowcake no fancy clothes. Then in last switchback lumbering up
and down bump mashtub sort of viceroy and reine relish for tublumber
bumpshire rose. Baraabum!)_

_(The couples fall aside. Stephen whirls giddily. Room whirls back. Eyes
closed he totters. Red rails fly spacewards. Stars all around suns turn
roundabout. Bright midges dance on walls. He stops dead.)_

STEPHEN: Ho!

_(Stephen's mother, emaciated, rises stark through the floor, in leper
grey with a wreath of faded orangeblossoms and a torn bridal veil, her
face worn and noseless, green with gravemould. Her hair is scant and
lank. She fixes her bluecircled hollow eyesockets on Stephen and opens
her toothless mouth uttering a silent word. A choir of virgins and
confessors sing voicelessly.)_

THE CHOIR:

     Liliata rutilantium te confessorum...
     Iubilantium te virginum...

_(from the top of a tower Buck Mulligan, in particoloured jester's dress
of puce and yellow and clown's cap with curling bell, stands gaping at
her, a smoking buttered split scone in his hand.)_

BUCK MULLIGAN: She's beastly dead. The pity of it! Mulligan meets the
afflicted mother. _(He upturns his eyes)_ Mercurial Malachi!

THE MOTHER: _(With the subtle smile of death's madness)_ I was once the
beautiful May Goulding. I am dead.

STEPHEN: _(Horrorstruck)_ Lemur, who are you? No. What bogeyman's trick
is this?

BUCK MULLIGAN: _(Shakes his curling capbell)_ The mockery of it! Kinch
dogsbody killed her bitchbody. She kicked the bucket. _(Tears of molten
butter fall from his eyes on to the scone)_ Our great sweet mother! _Epi
oinopa ponton._

THE MOTHER: _(Comes nearer, breathing upon him softly her breath of
wetted ashes)_ All must go through it, Stephen. More women than men in
the world. You too. Time will come.

STEPHEN: _(Choking with fright, remorse and horror)_ They say I killed
you, mother. He offended your memory. Cancer did it, not I. Destiny.

THE MOTHER: _(A green rill of bile trickling from a side of her mouth)_
You sang that song to me. _Love's bitter mystery._

STEPHEN: _(Eagerly)_ Tell me the word, mother, if you know now. The word
known to all men.

THE MOTHER: Who saved you the night you jumped into the train at
Dalkey with Paddy Lee? Who had pity for you when you were sad among the
strangers? Prayer is allpowerful. Prayer for the suffering souls in the
Ursuline manual and forty days' indulgence. Repent, Stephen.

STEPHEN: The ghoul! Hyena!

THE MOTHER: I pray for you in my other world. Get Dilly to make you that
boiled rice every night after your brainwork. Years and years I loved
you, O, my son, my firstborn, when you lay in my womb.

ZOE: _(Fanning herself with the grate fan)_ I'm melting!

FLORRY: _(Points to Stephen)_ Look! He's white.

BLOOM: _(Goes to the window to open it more)_ Giddy.

THE MOTHER: _(With smouldering eyes)_ Repent! O, the fire of hell!

STEPHEN: _(Panting)_ His noncorrosive sublimate! The corpsechewer! Raw
head and bloody bones.

THE MOTHER: _(Her face drawing near and nearer, sending out an ashen
breath)_ Beware! _(She raises her blackened withered right arm slowly
towards Stephen's breast with outstretched finger)_ Beware God's hand!
_(A green crab with malignant red eyes sticks deep its grinning claws in
Stephen's heart.)_

STEPHEN: _(Strangled with rage)_ Shite! _(His features grow drawn grey
and old)_

BLOOM: _(At the window)_ What?

STEPHEN: _Ah non, par exemple!_ The intellectual imagination! With me
all or not at all. _Non serviam!_

FLORRY: Give him some cold water. Wait. _(She rushes out)_

THE MOTHER: _(Wrings her hands slowly, moaning desperately)_ O Sacred
Heart of Jesus, have mercy on him! Save him from hell, O Divine Sacred
Heart!

STEPHEN: No! No! No! Break my spirit, all of you, if you can! I'll bring
you all to heel!

THE MOTHER: _(In the agony of her deathrattle)_ Have mercy on Stephen,
Lord, for my sake! Inexpressible was my anguish when expiring with love,
grief and agony on Mount Calvary.

STEPHEN: _Nothung_!

_(He lifts his ashplant high with both hands and smashes the chandelier.
Time's livid final flame leaps and, in the following darkness, ruin of
all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry.)_

THE GASJET: Pwfungg!

BLOOM: Stop!

LYNCH: _(Rushes forward and seizes Stephen's hand)_ Here! Hold on! Don't
run amok!

BELLA: Police!

_(Stephen, abandoning his ashplant, his head and arms thrown back stark,
beats the ground and flies from the room, past the whores at the door.)_

BELLA: _(Screams)_ After him!

_(The two whores rush to the halldoor. Lynch and Kitty and Zoe stampede
from the room. They talk excitedly. Bloom follows, returns.)_

THE WHORES: _(Jammed in the doorway, pointing)_ Down there.

ZOE: _(Pointing)_ There. There's something up.

BELLA: Who pays for the lamp? _(She seizes Bloom's coattail)_ Here, you
were with him. The lamp's broken.

BLOOM: _(Rushes to the hall, rushes back)_ What lamp, woman?

A WHORE: He tore his coat.

BELLA: _(Her eyes hard with anger and cupidity, points)_ Who's to pay
for that? Ten shillings. You're a witness.

BLOOM: _(Snatches up Stephen's ashplant)_ Me? Ten shillings? Haven't you
lifted enough off him? Didn't he...?

BELLA: _(Loudly)_ Here, none of your tall talk. This isn't a brothel. A
ten shilling house.

BLOOM: _(His head under the lamp, pulls the chain. Puling, the gasjet
lights up a crushed mauve purple shade. He raises the ashplant.)_ Only
the chimney's broken. Here is all he...

BELLA: _(Shrinks back and screams)_ Jesus! Don't!

BLOOM: _(Warding off a blow)_ To show you how he hit the paper. There's
not sixpenceworth of damage done. Ten shillings!

FLORRY: _(With a glass of water, enters)_ Where is he?

BELLA: Do you want me to call the police?

BLOOM: O, I know. Bulldog on the premises. But he's a Trinity student.
Patrons of your establishment. Gentlemen that pay the rent. _(He makes
a masonic sign)_ Know what I mean? Nephew of the vice-chancellor. You
don't want a scandal.

BELLA: _(Angrily)_ Trinity. Coming down here ragging after the boatraces
and paying nothing. Are you my commander here or? Where is he? I'll
charge him! Disgrace him, I will! (She Shouts) Zoe! Zoe!

BLOOM: _(Urgently)_ And if it were your own son in Oxford? _(Warningly)_
I know.

BELLA: _(Almost speechless)_ Who are. Incog!

ZOE: _(In the doorway)_ There's a row on.

BLOOM: What? Where? _(He throws a shilling on the table and starts)_
That's for the chimney. Where? I need mountain air.

_(He hurries out through the hall. The whores point. Florry follows,
spilling water from her tilted tumbler. On the doorstep all the whores
clustered talk volubly, pointing to the right where the fog has cleared
off. From the left arrives a jingling hackney car. It slows to in front
of the house. Bloom at the halldoor perceives Corny Kelleher who is
about to dismount from the car with two silent lechers. He averts
his face. Bella from within the hall urges on her whores. They blow
ickylickysticky yumyum kisses. Corny Kelleher replies with a ghastly
lewd smile. The silent lechers turn to pay the jarvey. Zoe and Kitty
still point right. Bloom, parting them swiftly, draws his caliph's hood
and poncho and hurries down the steps with sideways face. Incog Haroun
al Raschid he flits behind the silent lechers and hastens on by the
railings with fleet step of a pard strewing the drag behind him, torn
envelopes drenched in aniseed. The ashplant marks his stride. A pack
of bloodhounds, led by Hornblower of Trinity brandishing a dogwhip in
tallyho cap and an old pair of grey trousers, follow from fir, picking
up the scent, nearer, baying, panting, at fault, breaking away, throwing
their tongues, biting his heels, leaping at his tail. He walks,
runs, zigzags, gallops, lugs laid back. He is pelted with gravel,
cabbagestumps, biscuitboxes, eggs, potatoes, dead codfish, woman's
slipperslappers. After him freshfound the hue and cry zigzag gallops
in hot pursuit of follow my leader: 65 C, 66 C, night watch, John Henry
Menton, Wisdom Hely, V. B. Dillon, Councillor Nannetti, Alexander Keyes,
Larry O'rourke, Joe Cuffe Mrs O'dowd, Pisser Burke, The Nameless One,
Mrs Riordan, The Citizen, Garryowen, Whodoyoucallhim, Strangeface,
Fellowthatsolike, Sawhimbefore, Chapwithawen, Chris Callinan, Sir
Charles Cameron, Benjamin Dollard, Lenehan, Bartell d'Arcy, Joe Hynes,
red Murray, editor Brayden, T. M. Healy, Mr Justice Fitzgibbon, John
Howard Parnell, the reverend Tinned Salmon, Professor Joly, Mrs
Breen, Denis Breen, Theodore Purefoy, Mina Purefoy, the Westland
Row postmistress, C. P. M'Coy, friend of Lyons, Hoppy Holohan,
maninthestreet, othermaninthestreet, Footballboots, pugnosed driver,
rich protestant lady, Davy Byrne, Mrs Ellen M'Guinness, Mrs Joe
Gallaher, George Lidwell, Jimmy Henry on corns, Superintendent Laracy,
Father Cowley, Crofton out of the Collector-general's, Dan Dawson,
dental surgeon Bloom with tweezers, Mrs Bob Doran, Mrs Kennefick, Mrs
Wyse Nolan, John Wyse Nolan, handsomemarriedwomanrubbedagainstwide
behindinClonskeatram, the bookseller of_ Sweets of Sin, _Miss
Dubedatandshedidbedad, Mesdames Gerald and Stanislaus Moran of Roebuck,
the managing clerk of Drimmie's, Wetherup, colonel Hayes, Mastiansky,
Citron, Penrose, Aaron Figatner, Moses Herzog, Michael E Geraghty,
Inspector Troy, Mrs Galbraith, the constable off Eccles Street corner,
old doctor Brady with stethoscope, the mystery man on the beach, a
retriever, Mrs Miriam Dandrade and all her lovers.)_

THE HUE AND CRY: _(Helterskelterpelterwelter)_ He's Bloom! Stop Bloom!
Stopabloom! Stopperrobber! Hi! Hi! Stophim on the corner!

_(At the corner of Beaver Street beneath the scaffolding Bloom panting
stops on the fringe of the noisy quarrelling knot, a lot not knowing a
jot what hi! hi! row and wrangle round the whowhat brawlaltogether.)_

STEPHEN: _(With elaborate gestures, breathing deeply and slowly)_ You
are my guests. Uninvited. By virtue of the fifth of George and seventh
of Edward. History to blame. Fabled by mothers of memory.

PRIVATE CARR: _(To Cissy Caffrey)_ Was he insulting you?

STEPHEN: Addressed her in vocative feminine. Probably neuter.
Ungenitive.

VOICES: No, he didn't. I seen him. The girl there. He was in Mrs
Cohen's. What's up? Soldier and civilian.

CISSY CAFFREY: I was in company with the soldiers and they left me to
do--you know, and the young man run up behind me. But I'm faithful to
the man that's treating me though I'm only a shilling whore.

STEPHEN: _(Catches sight of Lynch's and Kitty's heads)_ Hail, Sisyphus.
_(He points to himself and the others)_ Poetic. Uropoetic.

VOICES: Shes faithfultheman.

CISSY CAFFREY: Yes, to go with him. And me with a soldier friend.

PRIVATE COMPTON: He doesn't half want a thick ear, the blighter. Biff
him one, Harry.

PRIVATE CARR: _(To Cissy)_ Was he insulting you while me and him was
having a piss?

LORD TENNYSON: _(Gentleman poet in Union Jack blazer and cricket
flannels, bareheaded, flowingbearded)_ Theirs not to reason why.

PRIVATE COMPTON: Biff him, Harry.

STEPHEN: _(To Private Compton)_ I don't know your name but you are quite
right. Doctor Swift says one man in armour will beat ten men in their
shirts. Shirt is synechdoche. Part for the whole.

CISSY CAFFREY: _(To The Crowd)_ No, I was with the privates.

STEPHEN: _(Amiably)_ Why not? The bold soldier boy. In my opinion every
lady for example...

PRIVATE CARR: _(His cap awry, advances to Stephen)_ Say, how would it
be, governor, if I was to bash in your jaw?

STEPHEN: _(Looks up to the sky)_ How? Very unpleasant. Noble art of
selfpretence. Personally, I detest action. _(He waves his hand)_ Hand
hurts me slightly. _Enfin ce sont vos oignons._ _(To Cissy Caffrey)_
Some trouble is on here. What is it precisely?

DOLLY GRAY: _(From her balcony waves her handkerchief, giving the sign
of the heroine of Jericho)_ Rahab. Cook's son, goodbye. Safe home to
Dolly. Dream of the girl you left behind and she will dream of you.

_(The soldiers turn their swimming eyes.)_

BLOOM: _(Elbowing through the crowd, plucks Stephen's sleeve
vigorously)_ Come now, professor, that carman is waiting.

STEPHEN: _(Turns)_ Eh? _(He disengages himself)_ Why should I not speak
to him or to any human being who walks upright upon this oblate orange?
_(He points his finger)_ I'm not afraid of what I can talk to if I see
his eye. Retaining the perpendicular.

_(He staggers a pace back)_

BLOOM: _(Propping him)_ Retain your own.

STEPHEN: _(Laughs emptily)_ My centre of gravity is displaced. I have
forgotten the trick. Let us sit down somewhere and discuss. Struggle
for life is the law of existence but but human philirenists, notably the
tsar and the king of England, have invented arbitration. _(He taps his
brow)_ But in here it is I must kill the priest and the king.

BIDDY THE CLAP: Did you hear what the professor said? He's a professor
out of the college.

CUNTY KATE: I did. I heard that.

BIDDY THE CLAP: He expresses himself with such marked refinement of
phraseology.

CUNTY KATE: Indeed, yes. And at the same time with such apposite
trenchancy.

PRIVATE CARR: _(Pulls himself free and comes forward)_ What's that
you're saying about my king?

_(Edward the Seventh appears in an archway. He wars a white jersey on
which an image of the Sacred Heart is stitched with the insignia of
Garter and Thistle, Golden Fleece, Elephant of Denmark, Skinner's
and Probyn's horse, Lincoln's Inn bencher and ancient and honourable
artillery company of Massachusetts. He sucks a red jujube. He is robed
as a grand elect perfect and sublime mason with trowel and apron,
marked_ made in Germany. _In his left hand he holds a plasterer's bucket
on which is printed_ Défense d'uriner. _A roar of welcome greets him.)_

EDWARD THE SEVENTH: _(Slowly, solemnly but indistinctly)_ Peace, perfect
peace. For identification, bucket in my hand. Cheerio, boys. _(He turns
to his subjects)_ We have come here to witness a clean straight fight
and we heartily wish both men the best of good luck. Mahak makar a bak.

_(He shakes hands with Private Carr, Private Compton, Stephen, Bloom and
Lynch. General applause. Edward the Seventh lifts his bucket graciously
in acknowledgment.)_

PRIVATE CARR: _(To Stephen)_ Say it again.

STEPHEN: _(Nervous, friendly, pulls himself up)_ I understand your point
of view though I have no king myself for the moment. This is the age of
patent medicines. A discussion is difficult down here. But this is the
point. You die for your country. Suppose. _(He places his arm on Private
Carr's sleeve)_ Not that I wish it for you. But I say: Let my country
die for me. Up to the present it has done so. I didn't want it to die.
Damn death. Long live life!

EDWARD THE SEVENTH: _(Levitates over heaps of slain, in the garb and
with the halo of Joking Jesus, a white jujube in his phosphorescent
face)_

My methods are new and are causing surprise. To make the blind see I
throw dust in their eyes.

STEPHEN: Kings and unicorns! _(He fills back a pace)_ Come somewhere and
we'll... What was that girl saying?...

PRIVATE COMPTON: Eh, Harry, give him a kick in the knackers. Stick one
into Jerry.

BLOOM: _(To the privates, softly)_ He doesn't know what he's saying.
Taken a little more than is good for him. Absinthe. Greeneyed monster. I
know him. He's a gentleman, a poet. It's all right.

STEPHEN: _(Nods, smiling and laughing)_ Gentleman, patriot, scholar and
judge of impostors.

PRIVATE CARR: I don't give a bugger who he is.

PRIVATE COMPTON: We don't give a bugger who he is.

STEPHEN: I seem to annoy them. Green rag to a bull.

_(Kevin Egan of Paris in black Spanish tasselled shirt and peep-o'-day
boy's hat signs to Stephen.)_

KEVIN EGAN: H'lo! _Bonjour!_ The _vieille ogresse_ with the _dents
jaunes_.

_(Patrice Egan peeps from behind, his rabbitface nibbling a quince
leaf.)_

PATRICE: _Socialiste!_

DON EMILE PATRIZIO FRANZ RUPERT POPE HENNESSY: _(In medieval hauberk,
two wild geese volant on his helm, with noble indignation points a
mailed hand against the privates)_ Werf those eykes to footboden, big
grand porcos of johnyellows todos covered of gravy!

BLOOM: _(To Stephen)_ Come home. You'll get into trouble.

STEPHEN: _(Swaying)_ I don't avoid it. He provokes my intelligence.

BIDDY THE CLAP: One immediately observes that he is of patrician
lineage.

THE VIRAGO: Green above the red, says he. Wolfe Tone.

THE BAWD: The red's as good as the green. And better. Up the soldiers!
Up King Edward!

A ROUGH: _(Laughs)_ Ay! Hands up to De Wet.

THE CITIZEN: _(With a huge emerald muffler and shillelagh, calls)_

     May the God above
     Send down a dove
     With teeth as sharp as razors
     To slit the throats
     Of the English dogs
     That hanged our Irish leaders.

THE CROPPY BOY: _(The ropenoose round his neck, gripes in his issuing
bowels with both hands)_

I bear no hate to a living thing, But I love my country beyond the king.

RUMBOLD, DEMON BARBER: _(Accompanied by two blackmasked assistants,
advances with gladstone bag which he opens)_ Ladies and gents,
cleaver purchased by Mrs Pearcy to slay Mogg. Knife with which Voisin
dismembered the wife of a compatriot and hid remains in a sheet in the
cellar, the unfortunate female's throat being cut from ear to ear. Phial
containing arsenic retrieved from body of Miss Barron which sent Seddon
to the gallows.

_(He jerks the rope. The assistants leap at the victim's legs and drag
him downward, grunting the croppy boy's tongue protrudes violently.)_

THE CROPPY BOY:

Horhot ho hray hor hother's hest.

_(He gives up the ghost. A violent erection of the hanged sends gouts
of sperm spouting through his deathclothes on to the cobblestones. Mrs
Bellingham, Mrs Yelverton Barry and the Honourable Mrs Mervyn Talboys
rush forward with their handkerchiefs to sop it up.)_

RUMBOLD: I'm near it myself. _(He undoes the noose)_ Rope which hanged
the awful rebel. Ten shillings a time. As applied to Her Royal Highness.
_(He plunges his head into the gaping belly of the hanged and draws out
his head again clotted with coiled and smoking entrails)_ My painful
duty has now been done. God save the king!

EDWARD THE SEVENTH: _(Dances slowly, solemnly, rattling his bucket, and
sings with soft contentment)_

On coronation day, on coronation day, O, won't we have a merry time,
Drinking whisky, beer and wine!

PRIVATE CARR: Here. What are you saying about my king?

STEPHEN: _(Throws up his hands)_ O, this is too monotonous! Nothing.
He wants my money and my life, though want must be his master, for
some brutish empire of his. Money I haven't. _(He searches his pockets
vaguely)_ GAVE IT TO SOMEONE.

PRIVATE CARR: Who wants your bleeding money?

STEPHEN: _(Tries to move off)_ Will someone tell me where I am least
likely to meet these necessary evils? _Ça se voit aussi à paris._ Not
that I... But, by Saint Patrick...!

_(The women's heads coalesce. Old Gummy Granny in sugarloaf hat appears
seated on a toadstool, the deathflower of the potato blight on her
breast.)_

STEPHEN: Aha! I know you, gammer! Hamlet, revenge! The old sow that eats
her farrow!

OLD GUMMY GRANNY: _(Rocking to and fro)_ Ireland's sweetheart, the king
of Spain's daughter, alanna. Strangers in my house, bad manners to them!
_(She keens with banshee woe)_ Ochone! Ochone! Silk of the kine! _(She
wails)_ You met with poor old Ireland and how does she stand?

STEPHEN: How do I stand you? The hat trick! Where's the third person of
the Blessed Trinity? Soggarth Aroon? The reverend Carrion Crow.

CISSY CAFFREY: _(Shrill)_ Stop them from fighting!

A ROUGH: Our men retreated.

PRIVATE CARR: _(Tugging at his belt)_ I'll wring the neck of any fucker
says a word against my fucking king.

BLOOM: _(Terrified)_ He said nothing. Not a word. A pure
misunderstanding.

THE CITIZEN: _Erin go bragh!_

_(Major Tweedy and the Citizen exhibit to each other medals,
decorations, trophies of war, wounds. Both salute with fierce
hostility.)_

PRIVATE COMPTON: Go it, Harry. Do him one in the eye. He's a proboer.

STEPHEN: Did I? When?

BLOOM: _(To the redcoats)_ We fought for you in South Africa, Irish
missile troops. Isn't that history? Royal Dublin Fusiliers. Honoured by
our monarch.

THE NAVVY: _(Staggering past)_ O, yes! O God, yes! O, make the kwawr a
krowawr! O! Bo!

_(Casqued halberdiers in armour thrust forward a pentice of gutted
spearpoints. Major Tweedy, moustached like Turko the terrible, in
bearskin cap with hackleplume and accoutrements, with epaulettes, gilt
chevrons and sabretaches, his breast bright with medals, toes the line.
He gives the pilgrim warrior's sign of the knights templars.)_

MAJOR TWEEDY: _(Growls gruffly)_ Rorke's Drift! Up, guards, and at them!
Mahar shalal hashbaz.

PRIVATE CARR: I'll do him in.

PRIVATE COMPTON: _(Waves the crowd back)_ Fair play, here. Make a
bleeding butcher's shop of the bugger.

_(Massed bands blare_ Garryowen _and_ God save the King.)

CISSY CAFFREY: They're going to fight. For me!

CUNTY KATE: The brave and the fair.

BIDDY THE CLAP: Methinks yon sable knight will joust it with the best.

CUNTY KATE: _(Blushing deeply)_ Nay, madam. The gules doublet and merry
saint George for me!

STEPHEN:

The harlot's cry from street to street Shall weave Old Ireland's
windingsheet.

PRIVATE CARR: _(Loosening his belt, shouts)_ I'll wring the neck of any
fucking bastard says a word against my bleeding fucking king.

BLOOM: _(Shakes Cissy Caffrey's shoulders)_ Speak, you! Are you struck
dumb? You are the link between nations and generations. Speak, woman,
sacred lifegiver!

CISSY CAFFREY: _(Alarmed, seizes Private Carr's sleeve)_ Amn't I with
you? Amn't I your girl? Cissy's your girl. _(She cries)_ Police!

STEPHEN: _(Ecstatically, to Cissy Caffrey)_

     White thy fambles, red thy gan
     And thy quarrons dainty is.


VOICES: Police!

DISTANT VOICES: Dublin's burning! Dublin's burning! On fire, on fire!

_(Brimstone fires spring up. Dense clouds roll past. Heavy Gatling guns
boom. Pandemonium. Troops deploy. Gallop of hoofs. Artillery. Hoarse
commands. Bells clang. Backers shout. Drunkards bawl. Whores screech.
Foghorns hoot. Cries of valour. Shrieks of dying. Pikes clash on
cuirasses. Thieves rob the slain. Birds of prey, winging from the sea,
rising from marshlands, swooping from eyries, hover screaming, gannets,
cormorants, vultures, goshawks, climbing woodcocks, peregrines, merlins,
blackgrouse, sea eagles, gulls, albatrosses, barnacle geese. The
midnight sun is darkened. The earth trembles. The dead of Dublin
from Prospect and Mount Jerome in white sheepskin overcoats and black
goatfell cloaks arise and appear to many. A chasm opens with a noiseless
yawn. Tom Rochford, winner, in athlete's singlet and breeches, arrives
at the head of the national hurdle handicap and leaps into the void.
He is followed by a race of runners and leapers. In wild attitudes they
spring from the brink. Their bodies plunge. Factory lasses with fancy
clothes toss redhot Yorkshire baraabombs. Society ladies lift their
skirts above their heads to protect themselves. Laughing witches in red
cutty sarks ride through the air on broomsticks. Quakerlyster plasters
blisters. It rains dragons' teeth. Armed heroes spring up from furrows.
They exchange in amity the pass of knights of the red cross and fight
duels with cavalry sabres: Wolfe Tone against Henry Grattan, Smith
O'Brien against Daniel O'Connell, Michael Davitt against Isaac Butt,
Justin M'Carthy against Parnell, Arthur Griffith against John Redmond,
John O'Leary against Lear O'Johnny, Lord Edward Fitzgerald against Lord
Gerald Fitzedward, The O'Donoghue of the Glens against The Glens of The
O'Donoghue. On an eminence, the centre of the earth, rises the feldaltar
of Saint Barbara. Black candles rise from its gospel and epistle horns.
From the high barbacans of the tower two shafts of light fall on the
smokepalled altarstone. On the altarstone Mrs Mina Purefoy, goddess of
unreason, lies, naked, fettered, a chalice resting on her swollen belly.
Father Malachi O'Flynn in a lace petticoat and reversed chasuble, his
two left feet back to the front, celebrates camp mass. The Reverend Mr
Hugh C Haines Love M. A. in a plain cassock and mortarboard, his head
and collar back to the front, holds over the celebrant's head an open
umbrella.)_

FATHER MALACHI O'FLYNN: _Introibo ad altare diaboli._

THE REVEREND MR HAINES LOVE: To the devil which hath made glad my young
days.

FATHER MALACHI O'FLYNN: _(Takes from the chalice and elevates a
blooddripping host) Corpus meum._

THE REVEREND MR HAINES LOVE: _(Raises high behind the celebrant's
petticoat, revealing his grey bare hairy buttocks between which a carrot
is stuck)_ My body.

THE VOICE OF ALL THE DAMNED: Htengier Tnetopinmo Dog Drol eht rof,
Aiulella!

_(From on high the voice of Adonai calls.)_

ADONAI: Dooooooooooog!

THE VOICE OF ALL THE BLESSED: Alleluia, for the Lord God Omnipotent
reigneth!

_(From on high the voice of Adonai calls.)_

ADONAI: Goooooooooood!

_(In strident discord peasants and townsmen of Orange and Green factions
sing_ Kick the Pope _and_ Daily, daily sing to Mary.)

PRIVATE CARR: _(With ferocious articulation)_ I'll do him in, so help me
fucking Christ! I'll wring the bastard fucker's bleeding blasted fucking
windpipe!

OLD GUMMY GRANNY: _(Thrusts a dagger towards Stephen's hand)_ Remove
him, acushla. At 8.35 a.m. you will be in heaven and Ireland will be
free. _(She prays)_ O good God, take him!

(THE RETRIEVER, NOSING ON THE FRINGE OF THE CROWD, BARKS NOISILY.)

BLOOM: _(Runs to lynch)_ Can't you get him away?

LYNCH: He likes dialectic, the universal language. Kitty! _(To Bloom)_
Get him away, you. He won't listen to me.

_(He drags Kitty away.)_

STEPHEN: _(Points) exit Judas. Et laqueo se suspendit._

BLOOM: _(Runs to Stephen)_ Come along with me now before worse happens.
Here's your stick.

STEPHEN: Stick, no. Reason. This feast of pure reason.

CISSY CAFFREY: _(Pulling Private Carr)_ Come on, you're boosed. He
insulted me but I forgive him. _(Shouting in his ear)_ I forgive him for
insulting me.

BLOOM: _(Over Stephen's shoulder)_ Yes, go. You see he's incapable.

PRIVATE CARR: _(Breaks loose)_ I'll insult him.

_(He rushes towards Stephen, fist outstretched, and strikes him in the
face. Stephen totters, collapses, falls, stunned. He lies prone, his
face to the sky, his hat rolling to the wall. Bloom follows and picks it
up.)_

MAJOR TWEEDY: _(Loudly)_ Carbine in bucket! Cease fire! Salute!

THE RETRIEVER: _(Barking furiously)_ Ute ute ute ute ute ute ute ute.

THE CROWD: Let him up! Don't strike him when he's down! Air! Who? The
soldier hit him. He's a professor. Is he hurted? Don't manhandle him!
He's fainted!

A HAG: What call had the redcoat to strike the gentleman and he under
the influence. Let them go and fight the Boers!

THE BAWD: Listen to who's talking! Hasn't the soldier a right to go with
his girl? He gave him the coward's blow.

_(They grab at each other's hair, claw at each other and spit)_

THE RETRIEVER: _(Barking)_ Wow wow wow.

BLOOM: _(Shoves them back, loudly)_ Get back, stand back!

PRIVATE COMPTON: _(Tugging his comrade)_ Here. Bugger off, Harry. Here's
the cops! _(Two raincaped watch, tall, stand in the group.)_

FIRST WATCH: What's wrong here?

PRIVATE COMPTON: We were with this lady. And he insulted us. And
assaulted my chum. _(The retriever barks)_ Who owns the bleeding tyke?

CISSY CAFFREY: _(With expectation)_ Is he bleeding!

A MAN: _(Rising from his knees)_ No. Gone off. He'll come to all right.

BLOOM: _(Glances sharply at the man)_ Leave him to me. I can easily...

SECOND WATCH: Who are you? Do you know him?

PRIVATE CARR: _(Lurches towards the watch)_ He insulted my lady friend.

BLOOM: _(Angrily)_ You hit him without provocation. I'm a witness.
Constable, take his regimental number.

SECOND WATCH: I don't want your instructions in the discharge of my
duty.

PRIVATE COMPTON: _(Pulling his comrade)_ Here, bugger off Harry. Or
Bennett'll shove you in the lockup.

PRIVATE CARR: _(Staggering as he is pulled away)_ God fuck old Bennett.
He's a whitearsed bugger. I don't give a shit for him.

FIRST WATCH: _(Takes out his notebook)_ What's his name?

BLOOM: _(Peering over the crowd)_ I just see a car there. If you give me
a hand a second, sergeant...

FIRST WATCH: Name and address.

_(Corny Kelleker, weepers round his hat, a death wreath in his hand,
appears among the bystanders.)_

BLOOM: _(Quickly)_ O, the very man! _(He whispers)_ Simon Dedalus' son.
A bit sprung. Get those policemen to move those loafers back.

SECOND WATCH: Night, Mr Kelleher.

CORNY KELLEHER: _(To the watch, with drawling eye)_ That's all right.
I know him. Won a bit on the races. Gold cup. Throwaway. _(He laughs)_
Twenty to one. Do you follow me?

FIRST WATCH: _(Turns to the crowd)_ Here, what are you all gaping at?
Move on out of that.

_(The crowd disperses slowly, muttering, down the lane.)_

CORNY KELLEHER: Leave it to me, sergeant. That'll be all right. _(He
laughs, shaking his head)_ We were often as bad ourselves, ay or worse.
What? Eh, what?

FIRST WATCH: _(Laughs)_ I suppose so.

CORNY KELLEHER: _(Nudges the second watch)_ Come and wipe your name off
the slate. _(He lilts, wagging his head)_ With my tooraloom tooraloom
tooraloom tooraloom. What, eh, do you follow me?

SECOND WATCH: _(Genially)_ Ah, sure we were too.

CORNY KELLEHER: _(Winking)_ Boys will be boys. I've a car round there.

SECOND WATCH: All right, Mr Kelleher. Good night.

CORNY KELLEHER: I'll see to that.

BLOOM: _(Shakes hands with both of the watch in turn)_ Thank you very
much, gentlemen. Thank you. _(He mumbles confidentially)_ We don't want
any scandal, you understand. Father is a wellknown highly respected
citizen. Just a little wild oats, you understand.

FIRST WATCH: O. I understand, sir.

SECOND WATCH: That's all right, sir.

FIRST WATCH: It was only in case of corporal injuries I'd have to report
it at the station.

BLOOM: _(Nods rapidly)_ Naturally. Quite right. Only your bounden duty.

SECOND WATCH: It's our duty.

CORNY KELLEHER: Good night, men.

THE WATCH: _(Saluting together)_ Night, gentlemen. _(They move off with
slow heavy tread)_

BLOOM: _(Blows)_ Providential you came on the scene. You have a car?...

CORNY KELLEHER: _(Laughs, pointing his thumb over his right shoulder to
the car brought up against the scaffolding)_ Two commercials that were
standing fizz in Jammet's. Like princes, faith. One of them lost two
quid on the race. Drowning his grief. And were on for a go with the
jolly girls. So I landed them up on Behan's car and down to nighttown.

BLOOM: I was just going home by Gardiner street when I happened to...

CORNY KELLEHER: _(Laughs)_ Sure they wanted me to join in with the mots.
No, by God, says I. Not for old stagers like myself and yourself. _(He
laughs again and leers with lacklustre eye)_ Thanks be to God we have it
in the house, what, eh, do you follow me? Hah, hah, hah!

BLOOM: _(Tries to laugh)_ He, he, he! Yes. Matter of fact I was just
visiting an old friend of mine there, Virag, you don't know him (poor
fellow, he's laid up for the past week) and we had a liquor together and
I was just making my way home...

_(The horse neighs.)_

THE HORSE: Hohohohohohoh! Hohohohome!

CORNY KELLEHER: Sure it was Behan our jarvey there that told me after
we left the two commercials in Mrs Cohen's and I told him to pull up and
got off to see. _(He laughs)_ Sober hearsedrivers a speciality. Will I
give him a lift home? Where does he hang out? Somewhere in Cabra, what?

BLOOM: No, in Sandycove, I believe, from what he let drop.

_(Stephen, prone, breathes to the stars. Corny Kelleher, asquint, drawls
at the horse. Bloom, in gloom, looms down.)_

CORNY KELLEHER: _(Scratches his nape)_ Sandycove! _(He bends down and
calls to Stephen)_ Eh! _(He calls again)_ Eh! He's covered with shavings
anyhow. Take care they didn't lift anything off him.

BLOOM: No, no, no. I have his money and his hat here and stick.

CORNY KELLEHER: Ah, well, he'll get over it. No bones broken. Well, I'll
shove along. _(He laughs)_ I've a rendezvous in the morning. Burying the
dead. Safe home!

THE HORSE: _(Neighs)_ Hohohohohome.

BLOOM: Good night. I'll just wait and take him along in a few...

_(Corny Kelleher returns to the outside car and mounts it. The horse
harness jingles.)_

CORNY KELLEHER: _(From the car, standing)_ Night.

BLOOM: Night.

_(The jarvey chucks the reins and raises his whip encouragingly. The
car and horse back slowly, awkwardly, and turn. Corny Kelleher on the
sideseat sways his head to and fro in sign of mirth at Bloom's plight.
The jarvey joins in the mute pantomimic merriment nodding from the
farther seat. Bloom shakes his head in mute mirthful reply. With thumb
and palm Corny Kelleher reassures that the two bobbies will allow the
sleep to continue for what else is to be done. With a slow nod Bloom
conveys his gratitude as that is exactly what Stephen needs. The car
jingles tooraloom round the corner of the tooraloom lane. Corny Kelleher
again reassuralooms with his hand. Bloom with his hand assuralooms Corny
Kelleher that he is reassuraloomtay. The tinkling hoofs and jingling
harness grow fainter with their tooralooloo looloo lay. Bloom, holding
in his hand Stephen's hat, festooned with shavings, and ashplant, stands
irresolute. Then he bends to him and shakes him by the shoulder.)_

BLOOM: Eh! Ho! _(There is no answer; he bends again)_ Mr Dedalus!
_(There is no answer)_ The name if you call. Somnambulist. _(He bends
again and hesitating, brings his mouth near the face of the prostrate
form)_ Stephen! _(There is no answer. He calls again.)_ Stephen!

STEPHEN: _(Groans)_ Who? Black panther. Vampire. _(He sighs and
stretches himself, then murmurs thickly with prolonged vowels)_

     Who... drive... Fergus now
     And pierce... wood's woven shade?...

_(He turns on his left side, sighing, doubling himself together.)_

BLOOM: Poetry. Well educated. Pity. _(He bends again and undoes
the buttons of Stephen's waistcoat)_ To breathe. _(He brushes the
woodshavings from Stephen's clothes with light hand and fingers)_ One
pound seven. Not hurt anyhow. _(He listens)_ What?

STEPHEN: _(Murmurs)_

    ... shadows... the woods
    ... white breast... dim sea.

_(He stretches out his arms, sighs again and curls his body. Bloom,
holding the hat and ashplant, stands erect. A dog barks in the distance.
Bloom tightens and loosens his grip on the ashplant. He looks down on
Stephen's face and form.)_

BLOOM: _(Communes with the night)_ Face reminds me of his poor mother.
In the shady wood. The deep white breast. Ferguson, I think I caught. A
girl. Some girl. Best thing could happen him. _(He murmurs)_... swear
that I will always hail, ever conceal, never reveal, any part or parts,
art or arts... _(He murmurs)_... in the rough sands of the sea... a
cabletow's length from the shore... where the tide ebbs... and flows
...

_(Silent, thoughtful, alert he stands on guard, his fingers at his lips
in the attitude of secret master. Against the dark wall a figure appears
slowly, a fairy boy of eleven, a changeling, kidnapped, dressed in an
eton suit with glass shoes and a little bronze helmet, holding a book
in his hand. He reads from right to left inaudibly, smiling, kissing the
page.)_

BLOOM: _(Wonderstruck, calls inaudibly)_ Rudy!

RUDY: _(Gazes, unseeing, into Bloom's eyes and goes on reading, kissing,
smiling. He has a delicate mauve face. On his suit he has diamond and
ruby buttons. In his free left hand he holds a slim ivory cane with a
violet bowknot. A white lambkin peeps out of his waistcoat pocket.)_




-- III --

Preparatory to anything else Mr Bloom brushed off the greater bulk of
the shavings and handed Stephen the hat and ashplant and bucked him up
generally in orthodox Samaritan fashion which he very badly needed. His
(Stephen's) mind was not exactly what you would call wandering but a bit
unsteady and on his expressed desire for some beverage to drink Mr
Bloom in view of the hour it was and there being no pump of Vartry water
available for their ablutions let alone drinking purposes hit upon an
expedient by suggesting, off the reel, the propriety of the cabman's
shelter, as it was called, hardly a stonesthrow away near Butt bridge
where they might hit upon some drinkables in the shape of a milk and
soda or a mineral. But how to get there was the rub. For the nonce he
was rather nonplussed but inasmuch as the duty plainly devolved upon him
to take some measures on the subject he pondered suitable ways and means
during which Stephen repeatedly yawned. So far as he could see he was
rather pale in the face so that it occurred to him as highly advisable
to get a conveyance of some description which would answer in their
then condition, both of them being e.d.ed, particularly Stephen, always
assuming that there was such a thing to be found. Accordingly after a
few such preliminaries as brushing, in spite of his having forgotten
to take up his rather soapsuddy handkerchief after it had done yeoman
service in the shaving line, they both walked together along Beaver
street or, more properly, lane as far as the farrier's and the
distinctly fetid atmosphere of the livery stables at the corner of
Montgomery street where they made tracks to the left from thence
debouching into Amiens street round by the corner of Dan Bergin's. But
as he confidently anticipated there was not a sign of a Jehu plying for
hire anywhere to be seen except a fourwheeler, probably engaged by some
fellows inside on the spree, outside the North Star hotel and there was
no symptom of its budging a quarter of an inch when Mr Bloom, who was
anything but a professional whistler, endeavoured to hail it by emitting
a kind of a whistle, holding his arms arched over his head, twice.

This was a quandary but, bringing common sense to bear on it, evidently
there was nothing for it but put a good face on the matter and foot it
which they accordingly did. So, bevelling around by Mullett's and the
Signal House which they shortly reached, they proceeded perforce in the
direction of Amiens street railway terminus, Mr Bloom being handicapped
by the circumstance that one of the back buttons of his trousers had,
to vary the timehonoured adage, gone the way of all buttons though,
entering thoroughly into the spirit of the thing, he heroically made
light of the mischance. So as neither of them were particularly pressed
for time, as it happened, and the temperature refreshing since it
cleared up after the recent visitation of Jupiter Pluvius, they dandered
along past by where the empty vehicle was waiting without a fare or a
jarvey. As it so happened a Dublin United Tramways Company's sandstrewer
happened to be returning and the elder man recounted to his companion _à
propos_ of the incident his own truly miraculous escape of some little
while back. They passed the main entrance of the Great Northern railway
station, the starting point for Belfast, where of course all traffic was
suspended at that late hour and passing the backdoor of the morgue
(a not very enticing locality, not to say gruesome to a degree, more
especially at night) ultimately gained the Dock Tavern and in due course
turned into Store street, famous for its C division police station.
Between this point and the high at present unlit warehouses of Beresford
place Stephen thought to think of Ibsen, associated with Baird's the
stonecutter's in his mind somehow in Talbot place, first turning on the
right, while the other who was acting as his _fidus Achates_ inhaled
with internal satisfaction the smell of James Rourke's city bakery,
situated quite close to where they were, the very palatable odour indeed
of our daily bread, of all commodities of the public the primary and
most indispensable. Bread, the staff of life, earn your bread, O tell me
where is fancy bread, at Rourke's the baker's it is said.

_En route_ to his taciturn and, not to put too fine a point on it, not
yet perfectly sober companion Mr Bloom who at all events was in complete
possession of his faculties, never more so, in fact disgustingly sober,
spoke a word of caution re the dangers of nighttown, women of ill fame
and swell mobsmen, which, barely permissible once in a while though not
as a habitual practice, was of the nature of a regular deathtrap for
young fellows of his age particularly if they had acquired drinking
habits under the influence of liquor unless you knew a little jiujitsu
for every contingency as even a fellow on the broad of his back could
administer a nasty kick if you didn't look out. Highly providential
was the appearance on the scene of Corny Kelleher when Stephen was
blissfully unconscious but for that man in the gap turning up at the
eleventh hour the finis might have been that he might have been a
candidate for the accident ward or, failing that, the bridewell and
an appearance in the court next day before Mr Tobias or, he being the
solicitor rather, old Wall, he meant to say, or Mahony which simply
spelt ruin for a chap when it got bruited about. The reason he mentioned
the fact was that a lot of those policemen, whom he cordially disliked,
were admittedly unscrupulous in the service of the Crown and, as Mr
Bloom put it, recalling a case or two in the A division in Clanbrassil
street, prepared to swear a hole through a ten gallon pot. Never on
the spot when wanted but in quiet parts of the city, Pembroke road for
example, the

guardians of the law were well in evidence, the obvious reason being
they were paid to protect the upper classes. Another thing he commented
on was equipping soldiers with firearms or sidearms of any description
liable to go off at any time which was tantamount to inciting them
against civilians should by any chance they fall out over anything. You
frittered away your time, he very sensibly maintained, and health and
also character besides which, the squandermania of the thing, fast women
of the _demimonde_ ran away with a lot of l s. d. into the bargain and
the greatest danger of all was who you got drunk with though, touching
the much vexed question of stimulants, he relished a glass of choice old
wine in season as both

nourishing and bloodmaking and possessing aperient virtues (notably a
good burgundy which he was a staunch believer in) still never beyond
a certain point where he invariably drew the line as it simply led to
trouble all round to say nothing of your being at the tender mercy of
others practically. Most of all he commented adversely on the desertion
of Stephen by all his pubhunting _confreres_ but one, a most glaring
piece of ratting on the part of his brother medicos under all the circs.

--And that one was Judas, Stephen said, who up to then had said nothing
whatsoever of any kind.

Discussing these and kindred topics they made a beeline across the back
of the Customhouse and passed under the Loop Line bridge where a brazier
of coke burning in front of a sentrybox or something like one attracted
their rather lagging footsteps. Stephen of his own accord stopped for
no special reason to look at the heap of barren cobblestones and by
the light emanating from the brazier he could just make out the darker
figure of the corporation watchman inside the gloom of the sentrybox. He
began to remember that this had happened or had been mentioned as having
happened before but it cost him no small effort before he remembered
that he recognised in the sentry a quondam friend of his father's,
Gumley. To avoid a meeting he drew nearer to the pillars of the railway
bridge.

--Someone saluted you, Mr Bloom said.

A figure of middle height on the prowl evidently under the arches
saluted again, calling:

--_Night!_

Stephen of course started rather dizzily and stopped to return the
compliment. Mr Bloom actuated by motives of inherent delicacy inasmuch
as he always believed in minding his own business moved off but
nevertheless remained on the _qui vive_ with just a shade of anxiety
though not funkyish in the least. Though unusual in the Dublin area he
knew that it was not by any means unknown for desperadoes who had next
to nothing to live on to be abroad waylaying and generally terrorising
peaceable pedestrians by placing a pistol at their head in some
secluded spot outside the city proper, famished loiterers of the
Thames embankment category they might be hanging about there or simply
marauders ready to decamp with whatever boodle they could in one fell
swoop at a moment's notice, your money or your life, leaving you there
to point a moral, gagged and garrotted.

Stephen, that is when the accosting figure came to close quarters,
though he was not in an over sober state himself recognised Corley's
breath redolent of rotten cornjuice. Lord John Corley some called him
and his genealogy came about in this wise. He was the eldest son of
inspector Corley of the G division, lately deceased, who had married
a certain Katherine Brophy, the daughter of a Louth farmer. His
grandfather Patrick Michael Corley of New Ross had married the widow
of a publican there whose maiden name had been Katherine (also) Talbot.
Rumour had it (though not proved) that she descended from the house of
the lords Talbot de Malahide in whose mansion, really an unquestionably
fine residence of its kind and well worth seeing, her mother or aunt or
some relative, a woman, as the tale went, of extreme beauty, had enjoyed
the distinction of being in service in the washkitchen. This therefore
was the reason why the still comparatively young though dissolute
man who now addressed Stephen was spoken of by some with facetious
proclivities as Lord John Corley.

Taking Stephen on one side he had the customary doleful ditty to tell.
Not as much as a farthing to purchase a night's lodgings. His friends
had all deserted him. Furthermore he had a row with Lenehan and called
him to Stephen a mean bloody swab with a sprinkling of a number of other
uncalledfor expressions. He was out of a job and implored of Stephen to
tell him where on God's earth he could get something, anything at all,
to do. No, it was the daughter of the mother in the washkitchen that
was fostersister to the heir of the house or else they were connected
through the mother in some way, both occurrences happening at the same
time if the whole thing wasn't a complete fabrication from start to
finish. Anyhow he was all in.

--I wouldn't ask you only, pursued he, on my solemn oath and God knows
I'm on the rocks.

--There'll be a job tomorrow or next day, Stephen told him, in a boys'
school at Dalkey for a gentleman usher. Mr Garrett Deasy. Try it. You
may mention my name.

--Ah, God, Corley replied, sure I couldn't teach in a school, man. I was
never one of your bright ones, he added with a half laugh. I got stuck
twice in the junior at the christian brothers.

--I have no place to sleep myself, Stephen informed him.

Corley at the first go-off was inclined to suspect it was something to
do with Stephen being fired out of his digs for bringing in a bloody
tart off the street. There was a dosshouse in Marlborough street, Mrs
Maloney's, but it was only a tanner touch and full of undesirables but
M'Conachie told him you got a decent enough do in the Brazen Head over
in Winetavern street (which was distantly suggestive to the person
addressed of friar Bacon) for a bob. He was starving too though he
hadn't said a word about it.

Though this sort of thing went on every other night or very near it
still Stephen's feelings got the better of him in a sense though he knew
that Corley's brandnew rigmarole on a par with the others was hardly
deserving of much credence. However _haud ignarus malorum miseris
succurrere disco_ etcetera as the Latin poet remarks especially as luck
would have it he got paid his screw after every middle of the month on
the sixteenth which was the date of the month as a matter of fact though
a good bit of the wherewithal was demolished. But the cream of the joke
was nothing would get it out of Corley's head that he was living in
affluence and hadn't a thing to do but hand out the needful. Whereas.
He put his hand in a pocket anyhow not with the idea of finding any food
there but thinking he might lend him anything up to a bob or so in lieu
so that he might endeavour at all events and get sufficient to eat but
the result was in the negative for, to his chagrin, he found his cash
missing. A few broken biscuits were all the result of his investigation.
He tried his hardest to recollect for the moment whether he had lost
as well he might have or left because in that contingency it was not a
pleasant lookout, very much the reverse in fact. He was altogether too
fagged out to institute a thorough search though he tried to recollect.
About biscuits he dimly remembered. Who now exactly gave them he
wondered or where was or did he buy. However in another pocket he came
across what he surmised in the dark were pennies, erroneously however,
as it turned out.

--Those are halfcrowns, man, Corley corrected him.

And so in point of fact they turned out to be. Stephen anyhow lent him
one of them.

--Thanks, Corley answered, you're a gentleman. I'll pay you back one
time. Who's that with you? I saw him a few times in the Bleeding Horse
in Camden street with Boylan, the billsticker. You might put in a good
word for us to get me taken on there. I'd carry a sandwichboard only
the girl in the office told me they're full up for the next three weeks,
man. God, you've to book ahead, man, you'd think it was for the Carl
Rosa. I don't give a shite anyway so long as I get a job, even as a
crossing sweeper.

Subsequently being not quite so down in the mouth after the two and six
he got he informed Stephen about a fellow by the name of Bags Comisky
that he said Stephen knew well out of Fullam's, the shipchandler's,
bookkeeper there that used to be often round in Nagle's back with O'Mara
and a little chap with a stutter the name of Tighe. Anyhow he was lagged
the night before last and fined ten bob for a drunk and disorderly and
refusing to go with the constable.

210

Mr Bloom in the meanwhile kept dodging about in the vicinity of the
cobblestones near the brazier of coke in front of the corporation
watchman's sentrybox who evidently a glutton for work, it struck him,
was having a quiet forty winks for all intents and purposes on his own
private account while Dublin slept. He threw an odd eye at the same time
now and then at Stephen's anything but immaculately attired interlocutor
as if he had seen that nobleman somewhere or other though where he was
not in a position to truthfully state nor had he the remotest idea when.
Being a levelheaded individual who could give points to not a few in
point of shrewd observation he also remarked on his very dilapidated
hat and slouchy wearing apparel generally testifying to a chronic
impecuniosity. Palpably he was one of his hangerson but for the
matter of that it was merely a question of one preying on his nextdoor
neighbour all round, in every deep, so to put it, a deeper depth and for
the matter of that if the man in the street chanced to be in the dock
himself penal servitude with or without the option of a fine would be
a very rara avis altogether. In any case he had a consummate amount of
cool assurance intercepting people at that hour of the night or morning.
Pretty thick that was certainly.

The pair parted company and Stephen rejoined Mr Bloom who, with his
practised eye, was not without perceiving that he had succumbed to the
blandiloquence of the other parasite. Alluding to the encounter he said,
laughingly, Stephen, that is:

--He is down on his luck. He asked me to ask you to ask somebody named
Boylan, a billsticker, to give him a job as a sandwichman.

At this intelligence, in which he seemingly evinced little interest, Mr
Bloom gazed abstractedly for the space of a half a second or so in the
direction of a bucketdredger, rejoicing in the farfamed name of Eblana,
moored alongside Customhouse quay and quite possibly out of repair,
whereupon he observed evasively:

--Everybody gets their own ration of luck, they say. Now you mention it
his face was familiar to me. But, leaving that for the moment, how much
did you part with, he queried, if I am not too inquisitive?

--Half a crown, Stephen responded. I daresay he needs it to sleep
somewhere.

--Needs! Mr Bloom ejaculated, professing not the least surprise at
the intelligence, I can quite credit the assertion and I guarantee he
invariably does. Everyone according to his needs or everyone according
to his deeds. But, talking about things in general, where, added he with
a smile, will you sleep yourself? Walking to Sandycove is out of
the question. And even supposing you did you won't get in after what
occurred at Westland Row station. Simply fag out there for nothing. I
don't mean to presume to dictate to you in the slightest degree but why
did you leave your father's house?

--To seek misfortune, was Stephen's answer.

--I met your respected father on a recent occasion, Mr Bloom
diplomatically returned, today in fact, or to be strictly accurate, on
yesterday. Where does he live at present? I gathered in the course of
conversation that he had moved.

--I believe he is in Dublin somewhere, Stephen answered unconcernedly.
Why?

--A gifted man, Mr Bloom said of Mr Dedalus senior, in more respects
than one and a born _raconteur_ if ever there was one. He takes great
pride, quite legitimate, out of you. You could go back perhaps, he
hasarded, still thinking of the very unpleasant scene at Westland Row
terminus when it was perfectly evident that the other two, Mulligan,
that is, and that English tourist friend of his, who eventually euchred
their third companion, were patently trying as if the whole bally
station belonged to them to give Stephen the slip in the confusion,
which they did.

There was no response forthcoming to the suggestion however, such as it
was, Stephen's mind's eye being too busily engaged in repicturing his
family hearth the last time he saw it with his sister Dilly sitting by
the ingle, her hair hanging down, waiting for some weak Trinidad shell
cocoa that was in the sootcoated kettle to be done so that she and he
could drink it with the oatmealwater for milk after the Friday herrings
they had eaten at two a penny with an egg apiece for Maggy, Boody and
Katey, the cat meanwhile under the mangle devouring a mess of eggshells
and charred fish heads and bones on a square of brown paper, in
accordance with the third precept of the church to fast and abstain
on the days commanded, it being quarter tense or if not, ember days or
something like that.

--No, Mr Bloom repeated again, I wouldn't personally repose much trust
in that boon companion of yours who contributes the humorous element, Dr
Mulligan, as a guide, philosopher and friend if I were in your shoes. He
knows which side his bread is buttered on though in all probability he
never realised what it is to be without regular meals. Of course you
didn't notice as much as I did. But it wouldn't occasion me the least
surprise to learn that a pinch of tobacco or some narcotic was put in
your drink for some ulterior object.

He understood however from all he heard that Dr Mulligan was a versatile
allround man, by no means confined to medicine only, who was rapidly
coming to the fore in his line and, if the report was verified, bade
fair to enjoy a flourishing practice in the not too distant future as
a tony medical practitioner drawing a handsome fee for his services
in addition to which professional status his rescue of that man from
certain drowning by artificial respiration and what they call first
aid at Skerries, or Malahide was it?, was, he was bound to admit, an
exceedingly plucky deed which he could not too highly praise, so that
frankly he was utterly at a loss to fathom what earthly reason could be
at the back of it except he put it down to sheer cussedness or jealousy,
pure and simple.

--Except it simply amounts to one thing and he is what they call picking
your brains, he ventured to throw out.

The guarded glance of half solicitude half curiosity augmented by
friendliness which he gave at Stephen's at present morose expression
of features did not throw a flood of light, none at all in fact on the
problem as to whether he had let himself be badly bamboozled to judge by
two or three lowspirited remarks he let drop or the other way about saw
through the affair and for some reason or other best known to himself
allowed matters to more or less. Grinding poverty did have that effect
and he more than conjectured that, high educational abilities though he
possessed, he experienced no little difficulty in making both ends meet.

Adjacent to the men's public urinal they perceived an icecream car round
which a group of presumably Italians in heated altercation were getting
rid of voluble expressions in their vivacious language in a particularly
animated way, there being some little differences between the parties.

--_Puttana madonna, che ci dia i quattrini! Ho ragione? Culo rotto!_

_--Intendiamoci. Mezzo sovrano piu..._

_--Dice lui, pero!_

_--Mezzo._

_--Farabutto! Mortacci sui!_

_--Ma ascolta! Cinque la testa piu..._

Mr Bloom and Stephen entered the cabman's shelter, an unpretentious
wooden structure, where, prior to then, he had rarely if ever been
before, the former having previously whispered to the latter a few
hints anent the keeper of it said to be the once famous Skin-the-Goat
Fitzharris, the invincible, though he could not vouch for the actual
facts which quite possibly there was not one vestige of truth in. A few
moments later saw our two noctambules safely seated in a discreet corner
only to be greeted by stares from the decidedly miscellaneous collection
of waifs and strays and other nondescript specimens of the genus _homo_
already there engaged in eating and drinking diversified by conversation
for whom they seemingly formed an object of marked curiosity.

--Now touching a cup of coffee, Mr Bloom ventured to plausibly suggest
to break the ice, it occurs to me you ought to sample something in the
shape of solid food, say, a roll of some description.

Accordingly his first act was with characteristic _sangfroid_ to order
these commodities quietly. The _hoi polloi_ of jarvies or stevedores
or whatever they were after a cursory examination turned their eyes
apparently dissatisfied, away though one redbearded bibulous individual
portion of whose hair was greyish, a sailor probably, still stared for
some appreciable time before transferring his rapt attention to the
floor. Mr Bloom, availing himself of the right of free speech, he having
just a bowing acquaintance with the language in dispute, though, to be
sure, rather in a quandary over _voglio_, remarked to his _protégé_ in
an audible tone of voice _a propos_ of the battle royal in the street
which was still raging fast and furious:

--A beautiful language. I mean for singing purposes. Why do you not
write your poetry in that language? _Bella Poetria_! It is so melodious
and full. _Belladonna. Voglio._

Stephen, who was trying his dead best to yawn if he could, suffering
from lassitude generally, replied:

--To fill the ear of a cow elephant. They were haggling over money.

--Is that so? Mr Bloom asked. Of course, he subjoined pensively, at the
inward reflection of there being more languages to start with than were
absolutely necessary, it may be only the southern glamour that surrounds
it.

The keeper of the shelter in the middle of this _tête-â-tête_ put a
boiling swimming cup of a choice concoction labelled coffee on the table
and a rather antediluvian specimen of a bun, or so it seemed. After
which he beat a retreat to his counter, Mr Bloom determining to have
a good square look at him later on so as not to appear to. For which
reason he encouraged Stephen to proceed with his eyes while he did
the honours by surreptitiously pushing the cup of what was temporarily
supposed to be called coffee gradually nearer him.

--Sounds are impostures, Stephen said after a pause of some little time,
like names. Cicero, Podmore. Napoleon, Mr Goodbody. Jesus, Mr Doyle.
Shakespeares were as common as Murphies. What's in a name?

--Yes, to be sure, Mr Bloom unaffectedly concurred. Of course. Our name
was changed too, he added, pushing the socalled roll across.

The redbearded sailor who had his weather eye on the newcomers boarded
Stephen, whom he had singled out for attention in particular, squarely
by asking:

--And what might your name be?

Just in the nick of time Mr Bloom touched his companion's boot but
Stephen, apparently disregarding the warm pressure from an unexpected
quarter, answered:

--Dedalus.

The sailor stared at him heavily from a pair of drowsy baggy eyes,
rather bunged up from excessive use of boose, preferably good old
Hollands and water.

--You know Simon Dedalus? he asked at length.

--I've heard of him, Stephen said.

Mr Bloom was all at sea for a moment, seeing the others evidently
eavesdropping too.

--He's Irish, the seaman bold affirmed, staring still in much the same
way and nodding. All Irish.

--All too Irish, Stephen rejoined.

As for Mr Bloom he could neither make head or tail of the whole business
and he was just asking himself what possible connection when the sailor
of his own accord turned to the other occupants of the shelter with the
remark:

--I seen him shoot two eggs off two bottles at fifty yards over his
shoulder. The lefthand dead shot.

Though he was slightly hampered by an occasional stammer and his
gestures being also clumsy as it was still he did his best to explain.

--Bottles out there, say. Fifty yards measured. Eggs on the bottles.
Cocks his gun over his shoulder. Aims.

He turned his body half round, shut up his right eye completely. Then he
screwed his features up someway sideways and glared out into the night
with an unprepossessing cast of countenance.

--Pom! he then shouted once.

The entire audience waited, anticipating an additional detonation, there
being still a further egg.

--Pom! he shouted twice.

Egg two evidently demolished, he nodded and winked, adding
bloodthirstily:

_--Buffalo Bill shoots to kill, Never missed nor he never will._

A silence ensued till Mr Bloom for agreeableness' sake just felt like
asking him whether it was for a marksmanship competition like the
Bisley.

--Beg pardon, the sailor said.

--Long ago? Mr Bloom pursued without flinching a hairsbreadth.

--Why, the sailor replied, relaxing to a certain extent under the magic
influence of diamond cut diamond, it might be a matter of ten years. He
toured the wide world with Hengler's Royal Circus. I seen him do that in
Stockholm.

--Curious coincidence, Mr Bloom confided to Stephen unobtrusively.

--Murphy's my name, the sailor continued. D. B. Murphy of Carrigaloe.
Know where that is?

--Queenstown harbour, Stephen replied.

--That's right, the sailor said. Fort Camden and Fort Carlisle. That's
where I hails from. I belongs there. That's where I hails from. My
little woman's down there. She's waiting for me, I know. _For England,
home and beauty_. She's my own true wife I haven't seen for seven years
now, sailing about.

Mr Bloom could easily picture his advent on this scene, the homecoming
to the mariner's roadside shieling after having diddled Davy Jones,
a rainy night with a blind moon. Across the world for a wife. Quite a
number of stories there were on that particular Alice Ben Bolt topic,
Enoch Arden and Rip van Winkle and does anybody hereabouts remember Caoc
O'Leary, a favourite and most trying declamation piece by the way of
poor John Casey and a bit of perfect poetry in its own small way.
Never about the runaway wife coming back, however much devoted to the
absentee. The face at the window! Judge of his astonishment when he
finally did breast the tape and the awful truth dawned upon him anent
his better half, wrecked in his affections. You little expected me but
I've come to stay and make a fresh start. There she sits, a grasswidow,
at the selfsame fireside. Believes me dead, rocked in the cradle of the
deep. And there sits uncle Chubb or Tomkin, as the case might be, the
publican of the Crown and Anchor, in shirtsleeves, eating rumpsteak and
onions. No chair for father. Broo! The wind! Her brandnew arrival is on
her knee, _post mortem_ child. With a high ro! and a randy ro! and my
galloping tearing tandy, O! Bow to the inevitable. Grin and bear it. I
remain with much love your brokenhearted husband D B Murphy.

The sailor, who scarcely seemed to be a Dublin resident, turned to one
of the jarvies with the request:

--You don't happen to have such a thing as a spare chaw about you?

The jarvey addressed as it happened had not but the keeper took a die of
plug from his good jacket hanging on a nail and the desired object was
passed from hand to hand.

--Thank you, the sailor said.

He deposited the quid in his gob and, chewing and with some slow
stammers, proceeded:

--We come up this morning eleven o'clock. The threemaster _Rosevean_
from Bridgwater with bricks. I shipped to get over. Paid off this
afternoon. There's my discharge. See? D. B. Murphy. A. B. S.

In confirmation of which statement he extricated from an inside pocket
and handed to his neighbour a not very cleanlooking folded document.

--You must have seen a fair share of the world, the keeper remarked,
leaning on the counter.

--Why, the sailor answered upon reflection upon it, I've circumnavigated
a bit since I first joined on. I was in the Red Sea. I was in China and
North America and South America. We was chased by pirates one voyage.
I seen icebergs plenty, growlers. I was in Stockholm and the Black Sea,
the Dardanelles under Captain Dalton, the best bloody man that ever
scuttled a ship. I seen Russia. _Gospodi pomilyou_. That's how the
Russians prays.

--You seen queer sights, don't be talking, put in a jarvey.

--Why, the sailor said, shifting his partially chewed plug. I seen
queer things too, ups and downs. I seen a crocodile bite the fluke of an
anchor same as I chew that quid.

He took out of his mouth the pulpy quid and, lodging it between his
teeth, bit ferociously:

--Khaan! Like that. And I seen maneaters in Peru that eats corpses and
the livers of horses. Look here. Here they are. A friend of mine sent
me.

He fumbled out a picture postcard from his inside pocket which seemed to
be in its way a species of repository and pushed it along the table. The
printed matter on it stated: _Choza de Indios. Beni, Bolivia._

All focussed their attention at the scene exhibited, a group of savage
women in striped loincloths, squatted, blinking, suckling, frowning,
sleeping amid a swarm of infants (there must have been quite a score of
them) outside some primitive shanties of osier.

--Chews coca all day, the communicative tarpaulin added. Stomachs
like breadgraters. Cuts off their diddies when they can't bear no more
children.

See them sitting there stark ballocknaked eating a dead horse's liver
raw.

His postcard proved a centre of attraction for Messrs the greenhorns for
several minutes if not more.

--Know how to keep them off? he inquired generally.

Nobody volunteering a statement he winked, saying:

--Glass. That boggles 'em. Glass.

Mr Bloom, without evincing surprise, unostentatiously turned over the
card to peruse the partially obliterated address and postmark. It ran
as follows: _Tarjeta Postal, Señor A Boudin, Galeria Becche, Santiago,
Chile._ There was no message evidently, as he took particular notice.
Though not an implicit believer in the lurid story narrated (or the
eggsniping transaction for that matter despite William Tell and the
Lazarillo-Don Cesar de Bazan incident depicted in _Maritana_ on which
occasion the former's ball passed through the latter's hat) having
detected a discrepancy between his name (assuming he was the person
he represented himself to be and not sailing under false colours
after having boxed the compass on the strict q.t. somewhere) and
the fictitious addressee of the missive which made him nourish some
suspicions of our friend's _bona fides_ nevertheless it reminded him in
a way of a longcherished plan he meant to one day realise some Wednesday
or Saturday of travelling to London via long sea not to say that he had
ever travelled extensively to any great extent but he was at heart a
born adventurer though by a trick of fate he had consistently remained
a landlubber except you call going to Holyhead which was his longest.
Martin Cunningham frequently said he would work a pass through Egan but
some deuced hitch or other eternally cropped up with the net result that
the scheme fell through. But even suppose it did come to planking
down the needful and breaking Boyd's heart it was not so dear, purse
permitting, a few guineas at the outside considering the fare to
Mullingar where he figured on going was five and six, there and back.
The trip would benefit health on account of the bracing ozone and be in
every way thoroughly pleasurable, especially for a chap whose liver was
out of order, seeing the different places along the route, Plymouth,
Falmouth, Southampton and so on culminating in an instructive tour of
the sights of the great metropolis, the spectacle of our modern Babylon
where doubtless he would see the greatest improvement, tower, abbey,
wealth of Park lane to renew acquaintance with. Another thing just
struck him as a by no means bad notion was he might have a gaze around
on the spot to see about trying to make arrangements about a concert
tour of summer music embracing the most prominent pleasure resorts,
Margate with mixed bathing and firstrate hydros and spas, Eastbourne,
Scarborough, Margate and so on, beautiful Bournemouth, the Channel
islands and similar bijou spots, which might prove highly remunerative.
Not, of course, with a hole and corner scratch company or local ladies
on the job, witness Mrs C P M'Coy type lend me your valise and I'll post
you the ticket. No, something top notch, an all star Irish caste, the
Tweedy-Flower grand opera company with his own legal consort as leading
lady as a sort of counterblast to the Elster Grimes and Moody-Manners,
perfectly simple matter and he was quite sanguine of success, providing
puffs in the local papers could be managed by some fellow with a bit of
bounce who could pull the indispensable wires and thus combine business
with pleasure. But who? That was the rub. Also, without being actually
positive, it struck him a great field was to be opened up in the line
of opening up new routes to keep pace with the times _apropos_ of the
Fishguard-Rosslare route which, it was mooted, was once more on the
_tapis_ in the circumlocution departments with the usual quantity of red
tape and dillydallying of effete fogeydom and dunderheads generally. A
great opportunity there certainly was for push and enterprise to meet
the travelling needs of the public at large, the average man, i.e.
Brown, Robinson and Co.

It was a subject of regret and absurd as well on the face of it and no
small blame to our vaunted society that the man in the street, when the
system really needed toning up, for the matter of a couple of paltry
pounds was debarred from seeing more of the world they lived in instead
of being always and ever cooped up since my old stick-in-the-mud took me
for a wife. After all, hang it, they had their eleven and more humdrum
months of it and merited a radical change of _venue_ after the grind
of city life in the summertime for choice when dame Nature is at her
spectacular best constituting nothing short of a new lease of life.
There were equally excellent opportunities for vacationists in the home
island, delightful sylvan spots for rejuvenation, offering a plethora
of attractions as well as a bracing tonic for the system in and around
Dublin and its picturesque environs even, Poulaphouca to which there was
a steamtram, but also farther away from the madding crowd in Wicklow,
rightly termed the garden of Ireland, an ideal neighbourhood for elderly
wheelmen so long as it didn't come down, and in the wilds of Donegal
where if report spoke true the _coup d'oeil_ was exceedingly grand
though the lastnamed locality was not easily getatable so that the
influx of visitors was not as yet all that it might be considering the
signal benefits to be derived from it while Howth with its historic
associations and otherwise, Silken Thomas, Grace O'Malley, George IV,
rhododendrons several hundred feet above sealevel was a favourite haunt
with all sorts and conditions of men especially in the spring when young
men's fancy, though it had its own toll of deaths by falling off the
cliffs by design or accidentally, usually, by the way, on their left
leg, it being only about three quarters of an hour's run from the
pillar. Because of course uptodate tourist travelling was as yet merely
in its infancy, so to speak, and the accommodation left much to be
desired. Interesting to fathom it seemed to him from a motive of
curiosity, pure and simple, was whether it was the traffic that created
the route or viceversa or the two sides in fact. He turned back the
other side of the card, picture, and passed it along to Stephen.

--I seen a Chinese one time, related the doughty narrator, that had
little pills like putty and he put them in the water and they opened and
every pill was something different. One was a ship, another was a house,
another was a flower. Cooks rats in your soup, he appetisingly added,
the chinks does.

Possibly perceiving an expression of dubiosity on their faces the
globetrotter went on, adhering to his adventures.

--And I seen a man killed in Trieste by an Italian chap. Knife in his
back. Knife like that.

Whilst speaking he produced a dangerouslooking claspknife quite in
keeping with his character and held it in the striking position.

--In a knockingshop it was count of a tryon between two smugglers.
Fellow hid behind a door, come up behind him. Like that. _Prepare to
meet your God_, says he. Chuk! It went into his back up to the butt.

His heavy glance drowsily roaming about kind of defied their further
questions even should they by any chance want to.

--That's a good bit of steel, repeated he, examining his formidable
_stiletto_.

After which harrowing _denouement_ sufficient to appal the stoutest he
snapped the blade to and stowed the weapon in question away as before in
his chamber of horrors, otherwise pocket.

--They're great for the cold steel, somebody who was evidently quite in
the dark said for the benefit of them all. That was why they thought
the park murders of the invincibles was done by foreigners on account of
them using knives.

At this remark passed obviously in the spirit of _where ignorance
is bliss_ Mr B. and Stephen, each in his own particular way, both
instinctively exchanged meaning glances, in a religious silence of the
strictly _entre nous_ variety however, towards where Skin-the-Goat,
_alias_ the keeper, not turning a hair, was drawing spurts of liquid
from his boiler affair. His inscrutable face which was really a work
of art, a perfect study in itself, beggaring description, conveyed
the impression that he didn't understand one jot of what was going on.
Funny, very!

There ensued a somewhat lengthy pause. One man was reading in fits and
starts a stained by coffee evening journal, another the card with the
natives _choza de_, another the seaman's discharge. Mr Bloom, so far
as he was personally concerned, was just pondering in pensive mood. He
vividly recollected when the occurrence alluded to took place as well
as yesterday, roughly some score of years previously in the days of the
land troubles, when it took the civilised world by storm, figuratively
speaking, early in the eighties, eightyone to be correct, when he was
just turned fifteen.

--Ay, boss, the sailor broke in. Give us back them papers.

The request being complied with he clawed them up with a scrape.

--Have you seen the rock of Gibraltar? Mr Bloom inquired.

The sailor grimaced, chewing, in a way that might be read as yes, ay or
no.

--Ah, you've touched there too, Mr Bloom said, Europa point, thinking he
had, in the hope that the rover might possibly by some reminiscences but
he failed to do so, simply letting spirt a jet of spew into the sawdust,
and shook his head with a sort of lazy scorn.

--What year would that be about? Mr B interrogated. Can you recall the
boats?

Our _soi-disant_ sailor munched heavily awhile hungrily before
answering:

--I'm tired of all them rocks in the sea, he said, and boats and ships.
Salt junk all the time.

Tired seemingly, he ceased. His questioner perceiving that he was not
likely to get a great deal of change out of such a wily old customer,
fell to woolgathering on the enormous dimensions of the water about the
globe, suffice it to say that, as a casual glance at the map revealed,
it covered fully three fourths of it and he fully realised accordingly
what it meant to rule the waves. On more than one occasion, a dozen
at the lowest, near the North Bull at Dollymount he had remarked a
superannuated old salt, evidently derelict, seated habitually near the
not particularly redolent sea on the wall, staring quite obliviously at
it and it at him, dreaming of fresh woods and pastures new as someone
somewhere sings. And it left him wondering why. Possibly he had tried to
find out the secret for himself, floundering up and down the antipodes
and all that sort of thing and over and under, well, not exactly under,
tempting the fates. And the odds were twenty to nil there was really no
secret about it at all. Nevertheless, without going into the _minutiae_
of the business, the eloquent fact remained that the sea was there in
all its glory and in the natural course of things somebody or other had
to sail on it and fly in the face of providence though it merely went
to show how people usually contrived to load that sort of onus on to the
other fellow like the hell idea and the lottery and insurance which were
run on identically the same lines so that for that very reason if no
other lifeboat Sunday was a highly laudable institution to which the
public at large, no matter where living inland or seaside, as the case
might be, having it brought home to them like that should extend its
gratitude also to the harbourmasters and coastguard service who had
to man the rigging and push off and out amid the elements whatever the
season when duty called _Ireland expects that every man_ and so on and
sometimes had a terrible time of it in the wintertime not forgetting the
Irish lights, Kish and others, liable to capsize at any moment, rounding
which he once with his daughter had experienced some remarkably choppy,
not to say stormy, weather.

--There was a fellow sailed with me in the Rover, the old seadog,
himself a rover, proceeded, went ashore and took up a soft job as
gentleman's valet at six quid a month. Them are his trousers I've on
me and he gave me an oilskin and that jackknife. I'm game for that job,
shaving and brushup. I hate roaming about. There's my son now, Danny,
run off to sea and his mother got him took in a draper's in Cork where
he could be drawing easy money.

--What age is he? queried one hearer who, by the way, seen from the
side, bore a distant resemblance to Henry Campbell, the townclerk, away
from the carking cares of office, unwashed of course and in a seedy
getup and a strong suspicion of nosepaint about the nasal appendage.

--Why, the sailor answered with a slow puzzled utterance, my son, Danny?
He'd be about eighteen now, way I figure it.

The Skibbereen father hereupon tore open his grey or unclean anyhow
shirt with his two hands and scratched away at his chest on which was to
be seen an image tattooed in blue Chinese ink intended to represent an
anchor.

--There was lice in that bunk in Bridgwater, he remarked, sure as nuts.
I must get a wash tomorrow or next day. It's them black lads I objects
to. I hate those buggers. Suck your blood dry, they does.

Seeing they were all looking at his chest he accommodatingly dragged
his shirt more open so that on top of the timehonoured symbol of the
mariner's hope and rest they had a full view of the figure 16 and a
young man's sideface looking frowningly rather.

--Tattoo, the exhibitor explained. That was done when we were Iying
becalmed off Odessa in the Black Sea under Captain Dalton. Fellow, the
name of Antonio, done that. There he is himself, a Greek.

--Did it hurt much doing it? one asked the sailor.

That worthy, however, was busily engaged in collecting round the.
Someway in his. Squeezing or.

--See here, he said, showing Antonio. There he is cursing the mate. And
there he is now, he added, the same fellow, pulling the skin with his
fingers, some special knack evidently, and he laughing at a yarn.

And in point of fact the young man named Antonio's livid face did
actually look like forced smiling and the curious effect excited the
unreserved admiration of everybody including Skin-the-Goat, who this
time stretched over.

--Ay, ay, sighed the sailor, looking down on his manly chest. He's gone
too. Ate by sharks after. Ay, ay.

He let go of the skin so that the profile resumed the normal expression
of before.

--Neat bit of work, one longshoreman said.

--And what's the number for? loafer number two queried.

--Eaten alive? a third asked the sailor.

--Ay, ay, sighed again the latter personage, more cheerily this
time with some sort of a half smile for a brief duration only in the
direction of the questioner about the number. Ate. A Greek he was.

And then he added with rather gallowsbird humour considering his alleged
end:

_--As bad as old Antonio, For he left me on my ownio._

The face of a streetwalker glazed and haggard under a black straw hat
peered askew round the door of the shelter palpably reconnoitring on
her own with the object of bringing more grist to her mill. Mr
Bloom, scarcely knowing which way to look, turned away on the moment
flusterfied but outwardly calm, and, picking up from the table the pink
sheet of the Abbey street organ which the jarvey, if such he was, had
laid aside, he picked it up and looked at the pink of the paper though
why pink. His reason for so doing was he recognised on the moment
round the door the same face he had caught a fleeting glimpse of that
afternoon on Ormond quay, the partially idiotic female, namely, of the
lane who knew the lady in the brown costume does be with you (Mrs B.)
and begged the chance of his washing. Also why washing which seemed
rather vague than not, your washing. Still candour compelled him to
admit he had washed his wife's undergarments when soiled in Holles
street and women would and did too a man's similar garments initialled
with Bewley and Draper's marking ink (hers were, that is) if they really
loved him, that is to say, love me, love my dirty shirt. Still just
then, being on tenterhooks, he desired the female's room more than her
company so it came as a genuine relief when the keeper made her a rude
sign to take herself off. Round the side of the Evening Telegraph he
just caught a fleeting glimpse of her face round the side of the door
with a kind of demented glassy grin showing that she was not exactly all
there, viewing with evident amusement the group of gazers round skipper
Murphy's nautical chest and then there was no more of her.

--The gunboat, the keeper said.

--It beats me, Mr Bloom confided to Stephen, medically I am speaking,
how a wretched creature like that from the Lock hospital reeking with
disease can be barefaced enough to solicit or how any man in his sober
senses, if he values his health in the least. Unfortunate creature! Of
course I suppose some man is ultimately responsible for her condition.
Still no matter what the cause is from...

Stephen had not noticed her and shrugged his shoulders, merely
remarking:

--In this country people sell much more than she ever had and do a
roaring trade. Fear not them that sell the body but have not power to
buy the soul. She is a bad merchant. She buys dear and sells cheap.

The elder man, though not by any manner of means an old maid or a prude,
said it was nothing short of a crying scandal that ought to be put a
stop to _instanter_ to say that women of that stamp (quite apart from
any oldmaidish squeamishness on the subject), a necessary evil, w ere
not licensed and medically inspected by the proper authorities, a thing,
he could truthfully state, he, as a _paterfamilias_, was a stalwart
advocate of from the very first start. Whoever embarked on a policy of
the sort, he said, and ventilated the matter thoroughly would confer a
lasting boon on everybody concerned.

--You as a good catholic, he observed, talking of body and soul, believe
in the soul. Or do you mean the intelligence, the brainpower as such,
as distinct from any outside object, the table, let us say, that cup. I
believe in that myself because it has been explained by competent men as
the convolutions of the grey matter. Otherwise we would never have such
inventions as X rays, for instance. Do you?

Thus cornered, Stephen had to make a superhuman effort of memory to try
and concentrate and remember before he could say:

--They tell me on the best authority it is a simple substance and
therefore incorruptible. It would be immortal, I understand, but for the
possibility of its annihilation by its First Cause Who, from all I
can hear, is quite capable of adding that to the number of His other
practical jokes, _corruptio per se_ and _corruptio per accidens_ both
being excluded by court etiquette.

Mr Bloom thoroughly acquiesced in the general gist of this though the
mystical finesse involved was a bit out of his sublunary depth still
he felt bound to enter a demurrer on the head of simple, promptly
rejoining:

--Simple? I shouldn't think that is the proper word. Of course, I grant
you, to concede a point, you do knock across a simple soul once in a
blue moon. But what I am anxious to arrive at is it is one thing for
instance to invent those rays Rontgen did or the telescope like Edison,
though I believe it was before his time Galileo was the man, I mean,
and the same applies to the laws, for example, of a farreaching natural
phenomenon such as electricity but it's a horse of quite another colour
to say you believe in the existence of a supernatural God.

--O that, Stephen expostulated, has been proved conclusively by several
of the bestknown passages in Holy Writ, apart from circumstantial
evidence.

On this knotty point however the views of the pair, poles apart as they
were both in schooling and everything else with the marked difference in
their respective ages, clashed.

--Has been? the more experienced of the two objected, sticking to his
original point with a smile of unbelief. I'm not so sure about that.
That's a matter for everyman's opinion and, without dragging in the
sectarian side of the business, I beg to differ with you _in toto_
there. My belief is, to tell you the candid truth, that those bits were
genuine forgeries all of them put in by monks most probably or it's the
big question of our national poet over again, who precisely wrote them
like _Hamlet_ and Bacon, as, you who know your Shakespeare infinitely
better than I, of course I needn't tell you. Can't you drink that
coffee, by the way? Let me stir it. And take a piece of that bun. It's
like one of our skipper's bricks disguised. Still no-one can give what
he hasn't got. Try a bit.

--Couldn't, Stephen contrived to get out, his mental organs for the
moment refusing to dictate further.

Faultfinding being a proverbially bad hat Mr Bloom thought well to stir
or try to the clotted sugar from the bottom and reflected with something
approaching acrimony on the Coffee Palace and its temperance (and
lucrative) work. To be sure it was a legitimate object and beyond yea or
nay did a world of good, shelters such as the present one they were in
run on teetotal lines for vagrants at night, concerts, dramatic evenings
and useful lectures (admittance free) by qualified men for the lower
orders. On the other hand he had a distinct and painful recollection
they paid his wife, Madam Marion Tweedy who had been prominently
associated with it at one time, a very modest remuneration indeed for
her pianoplaying. The idea, he was strongly inclined to believe, was
to do good and net a profit, there being no competition to speak
of. Sulphate of copper poison SO4 or something in some dried peas he
remembered reading of in a cheap eatinghouse somewhere but he couldn't
remember when it was or where. Anyhow inspection, medical inspection,
of all eatables seemed to him more than ever necessary which possibly
accounted for the vogue of Dr Tibble's Vi-Cocoa on account of the
medical analysis involved.

--Have a shot at it now, he ventured to say of the coffee after being
stirred.

Thus prevailed on to at any rate taste it Stephen lifted the heavy mug
from the brown puddle it clopped out of when taken up by the handle and
took a sip of the offending beverage.

--Still it's solid food, his good genius urged, I'm a stickler for solid
food, his one and only reason being not gormandising in the least but
regular meals as the _sine qua non_ for any kind of proper work, mental
or manual. You ought to eat more solid food. You would feel a different
man.

--Liquids I can eat, Stephen said. But O, oblige me by taking away that
knife. I can't look at the point of it. It reminds me of Roman history.

Mr Bloom promptly did as suggested and removed the incriminated article,
a blunt hornhandled ordinary knife with nothing particularly Roman or
antique about it to the lay eye, observing that the point was the least
conspicuous point about it.

--Our mutual friend's stories are like himself, Mr Bloom _apropos_ of
knives remarked to his _confidante sotto voce_. Do you think they are
genuine? He could spin those yarns for hours on end all night long and
lie like old boots. Look at him.

Yet still though his eyes were thick with sleep and sea air life was
full of a host of things and coincidences of a terrible nature and it
was quite within the bounds of possibility that it was not an
entire fabrication though at first blush there was not much inherent
probability in all the spoof he got off his chest being strictly
accurate gospel.

He had been meantime taking stock of the individual in front of him and
Sherlockholmesing him up ever since he clapped eyes on him. Though a
wellpreserved man of no little stamina, if a trifle prone to baldness,
there was something spurious in the cut of his jib that suggested a jail
delivery and it required no violent stretch of imagination to associate
such a weirdlooking specimen with the oakum and treadmill fraternity. He
might even have done for his man supposing it was his own case he told,
as people often did about others, namely, that he killed him himself
and had served his four or five goodlooking years in durance vile to say
nothing of the Antonio personage (no relation to the dramatic personage
of identical name who sprang from the pen of our national poet) who
expiated his crimes in the melodramatic manner above described. On the
other hand he might be only bluffing, a pardonable weakness because
meeting unmistakable mugs, Dublin residents, like those jarvies waiting
news from abroad would tempt any ancient mariner who sailed the ocean
seas to draw the long bow about the schooner _Hesperus_ and etcetera.
And when all was said and done the lies a fellow told about himself
couldn't probably hold a proverbial candle to the wholesale whoppers
other fellows coined about him.

--Mind you, I'm not saying that it's all a pure invention, he resumed.
Analogous scenes are occasionally, if not often, met with. Giants,
though that is rather a far cry, you see once in a way, Marcella the
midget queen. In those waxworks in Henry street I myself saw some
Aztecs, as they are called, sitting bowlegged, they couldn't straighten
their legs if you paid them because the muscles here, you see, he
proceeded, indicating on his companion the brief outline of the sinews
or whatever you like to call them behind the right knee, were utterly
powerless from sitting that way so long cramped up, being adored as
gods. There's an example again of simple souls.

However reverting to friend Sinbad and his horrifying adventures (who
reminded him a bit of Ludwig, _alias_ Ledwidge, when he occupied
the boards of the Gaiety when Michael Gunn was identified with the
management in the _Flying Dutchman_, a stupendous success, and his host
of admirers came in large numbers, everyone simply flocking to hear him
though ships of any sort, phantom or the reverse, on the stage usually
fell a bit flat as also did trains) there was nothing intrinsically
incompatible about it, he conceded. On the contrary that stab in the
back touch was quite in keeping with those italianos though candidly he
was none the less free to admit those icecreamers and friers in the fish
way not to mention the chip potato variety and so forth over in little
Italy there near the Coombe were sober thrifty hardworking fellows
except perhaps a bit too given to pothunting the harmless necessary
animal of the feline persuasion of others at night so as to have a good
old succulent tuckin with garlic _de rigueur_ off him or her next day on
the quiet and, he added, on the cheap.

--Spaniards, for instance, he continued, passionate temperaments like
that, impetuous as Old Nick, are given to taking the law into their own
hands and give you your quietus doublequick with those poignards they
carry in the abdomen. It comes from the great heat, climate generally.
My wife is, so to speak, Spanish, half that is. Point of fact she could
actually claim Spanish nationality if she wanted, having been born in
(technically) Spain, i.e. Gibraltar. She has the Spanish type. Quite
dark, regular brunette, black. I for one certainly believe climate
accounts for character. That's why I asked you if you wrote your poetry
in Italian.

--The temperaments at the door, Stephen interposed with, were very
passionate about ten shillings. _Roberto ruba roba sua_.

--Quite so, Mr Bloom dittoed.

--Then, Stephen said staring and rambling on to himself or some unknown
listener somewhere, we have the impetuosity of Dante and the isosceles
triangle miss Portinari he fell in love with and Leonardo and san
Tommaso Mastino.

--It's in the blood, Mr Bloom acceded at once. All are washed in the
blood of the sun. Coincidence I just happened to be in the Kildare
street museum 890 today, shortly prior to our meeting if I can so call
it, and I was just looking at those antique statues there. The splendid
proportions of hips, bosom. You simply don't knock against those kind of
women here. An exception here and there. Handsome yes, pretty in a way
you find but what I'm talking about is the female form. Besides they
have so little taste in dress, most of them, which greatly enhances a
woman's natural beauty, no matter what you say. Rumpled stockings, it
may be, possibly is, a foible of mine but still it's a thing I simply
hate to see.

Interest, however, was starting to flag somewhat all round and then the
others got on to talking about accidents at sea, ships lost in a fog,
goo collisions with icebergs, all that sort of thing. Shipahoy of course
had his own say to say. He had doubled the cape a few odd times and
weathered a monsoon, a kind of wind, in the China seas and through all
those perils of the deep there was one thing, he declared, stood to him
or words to that effect, a pious medal he had that saved him.

So then after that they drifted on to the wreck off Daunt's rock, wreck
of that illfated Norwegian barque nobody could think of her name for
the moment till the jarvey who had really quite a look of Henry Campbell
remembered it _Palme_ on Booterstown strand. That was the talk of the
town that year (Albert William Quill wrote a fine piece of original
verse of 910 distinctive merit on the topic for the Irish _Times_),
breakers running over her and crowds and crowds on the shore in
commotion petrified with horror. Then someone said something about the
case of the s. s. _Lady Cairns_ of Swansea run into by the _Mona_ which
was on an opposite tack in rather muggyish weather and lost with all
hands on deck. No aid was given. Her master, the _Mona's_, said he
was afraid his collision bulkhead would give way. She had no water, it
appears, in her hold.

At this stage an incident happened. It having become necessary for him
to unfurl a reef the sailor vacated his seat.

--Let me cross your bows mate, he said to his neighbour who was just
gently dropping off into a peaceful doze.

He made tracks heavily, slowly with a dumpy sort of a gait to the door,
stepped heavily down the one step there was out of the shelter and bore
due left. While he was in the act of getting his bearings Mr Bloom who
noticed when he stood up that he had two flasks of presumably ship's
rum sticking one out of each pocket for the private consumption of his
burning interior, saw him produce a bottle and uncork it or unscrew and,
applying its nozz1e to his lips, take a good old delectable swig out of
it with a gurgling noise. The irrepressible Bloom, who also had a
shrewd suspicion that the old stager went out on a manoeuvre after the
counterattraction in the shape of a female who however had disappeared
to all intents and purposes, could by straining just perceive him, when
duly refreshed by his rum puncheon exploit, gaping up at the piers and
girders of the Loop line rather out of his depth as of course it was all
radically altered since his last visit and greatly improved. Some person
or persons invisible directed him to the male urinal erected by the
cleansing committee all over the place for the purpose but after a brief
space of time during which silence reigned supreme the sailor, evidently
giving it a wide berth, eased himself closer at hand, the noise of his
bilgewater some little time subsequently splashing on the ground where
it apparently awoke a horse of the cabrank. A hoof scooped anyway for
new foothold after sleep and harness jingled. Slightly disturbed in his
sentrybox by the brazier of live coke the watcher of the corporation
stones who, though now broken down and fast breaking up, was none other
in stern reality than the Gumley aforesaid, now practically on the
parish rates, given the temporary job by Pat Tobin in all human
probability from dictates of humanity knowing him before shifted about
and shuffled in his box before composing his limbs again in to the arms
of Morpheus, a truly amazing piece of hard lines in its most virulent
form on a fellow most respectably connected and familiarised with decent
home comforts all his life who came in for a cool 100 pounds a year
at one time which of course the doublebarrelled ass proceeded to make
general ducks and drakes of. And there he was at the end of his tether
after having often painted the town tolerably pink without a beggarly
stiver. He drank needless to be told and it pointed only once more a
moral when he might quite easily be in a large way of business if--a
big if, however--he had contrived to cure himself of his particular
partiality.

All meantime were loudly lamenting the falling off in Irish shipping,
coastwise and foreign as well, which was all part and parcel of the same
thing. A Palgrave Murphy boat was put off the ways at Alexandra basin,
the only launch that year. Right enough the harbours were there only no
ships ever called.

There were wrecks and wreckers, the keeper said, who was evidently _au
fait_.

What he wanted to ascertain was why that ship ran bang against the only
rock in Galway bay when the Galway harbour scheme was mooted by a Mr
Worthington or some name like that, eh? Ask the then captain, he advised
them, how much palmoil the British government gave him for that day's
work, Captain John Lever of the Lever Line.

--Am I right, skipper? he queried of the sailor, now returning after his
private potation and the rest of his exertions.

That worthy picking up the scent of the fagend of the song or words
growled in wouldbe music but with great vim some kind of chanty or other
in seconds or thirds. Mr Bloom's sharp ears heard him then expectorate
the plug probably (which it was), so that he must have lodged it for the
time being in his fist while he did the drinking and making water jobs
and found it a bit sour after the liquid fire in question. Anyhow in
he rolled after his successful libation-_cum_-potation, introducing an
atmosphere of drink into the _soirée_, boisterously trolling, like a
veritable son of a seacook:

     _--The biscuits was as hard as brass
     And the beef as salt as Lot's wife's arse.
     O, Johnny Lever!
     Johnny Lever, O!_

After which effusion the redoubtable specimen duly arrived on the scene
and regaining his seat he sank rather than sat heavily on the form
provided. Skin-the-Goat, assuming he was he, evidently with an axe to
grind, was airing his grievances in a forcible-feeble philippic anent
the natural resources of Ireland or something of that sort which he
described in his lengthy dissertation as the richest country bar none on
the face of God's earth, far and away superior to England, with coal in
large quantities, six million pounds worth of pork exported every year,
ten millions between butter and eggs and all the riches drained out of
it by England levying taxes on the poor people that paid through the
nose always and gobbling up the best meat in the market and a lot more
surplus steam in the same vein. Their conversation accordingly became
general and all agreed that that was a fact. You could grow any mortal
thing in Irish soil, he stated, and there was that colonel Everard down
there in Navan growing tobacco. Where would you find anywhere the like
of Irish bacon? But a day of reckoning, he stated _crescendo_ with no
uncertain voice, thoroughly monopolising all the conversation, was in
store for mighty England, despite her power of pelf on account of her
crimes. There would be a fall and the greatest fall in history.
The Germans and the Japs were going to have their little lookin, he
affirmed. The Boers were the beginning of the end. Brummagem England was
toppling already and her downfall would be Ireland, her Achilles heel,
which he explained to them about the vulnerable point of Achilles, the
Greek hero, a point his auditors at once seized as he completely gripped
their attention by showing the tendon referred to on his boot. His
advice to every Irishman was: stay in the land of your birth and work
for Ireland and live for Ireland. Ireland, Parnell said, could not spare
a single one of her sons.

Silence all round marked the termination of his _finale_. The impervious
navigator heard these lurid tidings, undismayed.

--Take a bit of doing, boss, retaliated that rough diamond palpably a
bit peeved in response to the foregoing truism.

To which cold douche referring to downfall and so on the keeper
concurred but nevertheless held to his main view.

--Who's the best troops in the army? the grizzled old veteran irately
interrogated. And the best jumpers and racers? And the best admirals and
generals we've got? Tell me that.

--The Irish, for choice, retorted the cabby like Campbell, facial
blemishes apart.

--That's right, the old tarpaulin corroborated. The Irish catholic
peasant. He's the backbone of our empire. You know Jem Mullins?

While allowing him his individual opinions as everyman the keeper added
he cared nothing for any empire, ours or his, and considered no Irishman
worthy of his salt that served it. Then they began to have a few
irascible words when it waxed hotter, both, needless to say, appealing
to the listeners who followed the passage of arms with interest so long
as they didn't indulge in recriminations and come to blows.

From inside information extending over a series of years Mr Bloom was
rather inclined to poohpooh the suggestion as egregious balderdash for,
pending that consummation devoutly to be or not to be wished for, he was
fully cognisant of the fact that their neighbours across the channel,
unless they were much bigger fools than he took them for, rather
concealed their strength than the opposite. It was quite on a par with
the quixotic idea in certain quarters that in a hundred million years
the coal seam of the sister island would be played out and if, as
time went on, that turned out to be how the cat jumped all he could
personally say on the matter was that as a host of contingencies,
equally relevant to the issue, might occur ere then it was highly
advisable in the interim to try to make the most of both countries even
though poles apart. Another little interesting point, the amours of
whores and chummies, to put it in common parlance, reminded him Irish
soldiers had as often fought for England as against her, more so, in
fact. And now, why? So the scene between the pair of them, the licensee
of the place rumoured to be or have been Fitzharris, the famous
invincible, and the other, obviously bogus, reminded him forcibly as
being on all fours with the confidence trick, supposing, that is, it was
prearranged as the lookeron, a student of the human soul if anything,
the others seeing least of the game. And as for the lessee or keeper,
who probably wasn't the other person at all, he (B.) couldn't help
feeling and most properly it was better to give people like that the
goby unless you were a blithering idiot altogether and refuse to have
anything to do with them as a golden rule in private life and their
felonsetting, there always being the offchance of a Dannyman coming
forward and turning queen's evidence or king's now like Denis or Peter
Carey, an idea he utterly repudiated. Quite apart from that he disliked
those careers of wrongdoing and crime on principle. Yet, though such
criminal propensities had never been an inmate of his bosom in any
shape or form, he certainly did feel and no denying it (while inwardly
remaining what he was) a certain kind of admiration for a man who
had actually brandished a knife, cold steel, with the courage of his
political convictions (though, personally, he would never be a party to
any such thing), off the same bat as those love vendettas of the south,
have her or swing for her, when the husband frequently, after some words
passed between the two concerning her relations with the other lucky
mortal (he having had the pair watched), inflicted fatal injuries on
his adored one as a result of an alternative postnuptial _liaison_
by plunging his knife into her, until it just struck him that
Fitz, nicknamed Skin-the-Goat, merely drove the car for the actual
perpetrators of the outrage and so was not, if he was reliably informed,
actually party to the ambush which, in point of fact, was the plea some
legal luminary saved his skin on. In any case that was very ancient
history by now and as for our friend, the pseudo Skin-the-etcetera, he
had transparently outlived his welcome. He ought to have either died
naturally or on the scaffold high. Like actresses, always farewell
positively last performance then come up smiling again. Generous to a
fault of course, temperamental, no economising or any idea of the sort,
always snapping at the bone for the shadow. So similarly he had a very
shrewd suspicion that Mr Johnny Lever got rid of some l s d. in the
course of his perambulations round the docks in the congenial atmosphere
of the _Old Ireland_ tavern, come back to Erin and so on. Then as for
the other he had heard not so long before the same identical lingo as he
told Stephen how he simply but effectually silenced the offender.

--He took umbrage at something or other, that muchinjured but on the
whole eventempered person declared, I let slip. He called me a jew and
in a heated fashion offensively. So I without deviating from plain facts
in the least told him his God, I mean Christ, was a jew too and all his
family like me though in reality I'm not. That was one for him. A soft
answer turns away wrath. He hadn't a word to say for himself as everyone
saw. Am I not right?

He turned a long you are wrong gaze on Stephen of timorous dark pride
at the soft impeachment with a glance also of entreaty for he seemed to
glean in a kind of a way that it wasn't all exactly.

--_Ex quibus_, Stephen mumbled in a noncommittal accent, their two or
four eyes conversing, _Christus_ or Bloom his name is or after all any
other, _secundum carnem_.

--Of course, Mr B. proceeded to stipulate, you must look at both sides
of the question. It is hard to lay down any hard and fast rules as to
right and wrong but room for improvement all round there certainly is
though every country, they say, our own distressful included, has the
government it deserves. But with a little goodwill all round. It's all
very fine to boast of mutual superiority but what about mutual equality.
I resent violence and intolerance in any shape or form. It never
reaches anything or stops anything. A revolution must come on the due
instalments plan. It's a patent absurdity on the face of it to hate
people because they live round the corner and speak another vernacular,
in the next house so to speak.

--Memorable bloody bridge battle and seven minutes' war, Stephen
assented, between Skinner's alley and Ormond market.

Yes, Mr Bloom thoroughly agreed, entirely endorsing the remark, that
was overwhelmingly right. And the whole world was full of that sort of
thing.

--You just took the words out of my mouth, he said. A hocuspocus of
conflicting evidence that candidly you couldn't remotely...

All those wretched quarrels, in his humble opinion, stirring up
bad blood, from some bump of combativeness or gland of some kind,
erroneously supposed to be about a punctilio of honour and a flag, were
very largely a question of the money question which was at the back of
everything greed and jealousy, people never knowing when to stop.

--They accuse, remarked he audibly.

He turned away from the others who probably and spoke nearer to, so as
the others in case they.

--Jews, he softly imparted in an aside in Stephen's ear, are accused of
ruining. Not a vestige of truth in it, I can safely say. History, would
you be surprised to learn, proves up to the hilt Spain decayed when the
inquisition hounded the jews out and England prospered when Cromwell,
an uncommonly able ruffian who in other respects has much to answer for,
imported them. Why? Because they are imbued with the proper spirit. They
are practical and are proved to be so. I don't want to indulge in any
because you know the standard works on the subject and then orthodox as
you are. But in the economic, not touching religion, domain the priest
spells poverty. Spain again, you saw in the war, compared with goahead
America. Turks. It's in the dogma. Because if they didn't believe they'd
go straight to heaven when they die they'd try to live better, at least
so I think. That's the juggle on which the p.p's raise the wind on false
pretences. I'm, he resumed with dramatic force, as good an Irishman
as that rude person I told you about at the outset and I want to see
everyone, concluded he, all creeds and classes _pro rata_ having a
comfortable tidysized income, in no niggard fashion either, something
in the neighbourhood of 300 pounds per annum. That's the vital issue
at stake and it's feasible and would be provocative of friendlier
intercourse between man and man. At least that's my idea for what it's
worth. I call that patriotism. _Ubi patria_, as we learned a smattering
of in our classical days in _Alma Mater, vita bene_. Where you can live
well, the sense is, if you work.

Over his untastable apology for a cup of coffee, listening to this
synopsis of things in general, Stephen stared at nothing in particular.
He could hear, of course, all kinds of words changing colour like those
crabs about Ringsend in the morning burrowing quickly into all colours
of different sorts of the same sand where they had a home somewhere
beneath or seemed to. Then he looked up and saw the eyes that said or
didn't say the words the voice he heard said, if you work.

--Count me out, he managed to remark, meaning work.

The eyes were surprised at this observation because as he, the person
who owned them pro tem. observed or rather his voice speaking did, all
must work, have to, together.

--I mean, of course, the other hastened to affirm, work in the widest
possible sense. Also literary labour not merely for the kudos of
the thing. Writing for the newspapers which is the readiest channel
nowadays. That's work too. Important work. After all, from the little
I know of you, after all the money expended on your education you are
entitled to recoup yourself and command your price. You have every bit
as much right to live by your pen in pursuit of your philosophy as the
peasant has. What? You both belong to Ireland, the brain and the brawn.
Each is equally important.

--You suspect, Stephen retorted with a sort of a half laugh, that I may
be important because I belong to the _faubourg Saint Patrice_ called
Ireland for short.

--I would go a step farther, Mr Bloom insinuated.

--But I suspect, Stephen interrupted, that Ireland must be important
because it belongs to me.

--What belongs, queried Mr Bloom bending, fancying he was perhaps under
some misapprehension. Excuse me. Unfortunately, I didn't catch the
latter portion. What was it you...?

Stephen, patently crosstempered, repeated and shoved aside his mug of
coffee or whatever you like to call it none too politely, adding: 1170

--We can't change the country. Let us change the subject.

At this pertinent suggestion Mr Bloom, to change the subject, looked
down but in a quandary, as he couldn't tell exactly what construction
to put on belongs to which sounded rather a far cry. The rebuke of some
kind was clearer than the other part. Needless to say the fumes of
his recent orgy spoke then with some asperity in a curious bitter way
foreign to his sober state. Probably the homelife to which Mr B attached
the utmost importance had not been all that was needful or he hadn't
been familiarised with the right sort of people. With a touch of fear
for the young man beside him whom he furtively scrutinised with an air
of some consternation remembering he had just come back from Paris,
the eyes more especially reminding him forcibly of father and sister,
failing to throw much light on the subject, however, he brought to mind
instances of cultured fellows that promised so brilliantly nipped in the
bud of premature decay and nobody to blame but themselves. For instance
there was the case of O'Callaghan, for one, the halfcrazy faddist,
respectably connected though of inadequate means, with his mad vagaries
among whose other gay doings when rotto and making himself a nuisance
to everybody all round he was in the habit of ostentatiously sporting in
public a suit of brown paper (a fact). And then the usual _denouement_
after the fun had gone on fast and furious he got 1190 landed into hot
water and had to be spirited away by a few friends, after a strong hint
to a blind horse from John Mallon of Lower Castle Yard, so as not to
be made amenable under section two of the criminal law amendment act,
certain names of those subpoenaed being handed in but not divulged
for reasons which will occur to anyone with a pick of brains. Briefly,
putting two and two together, six sixteen which he pointedly turned a
deaf ear to, Antonio and so forth, jockeys and esthetes and the tattoo
which was all the go in the seventies or thereabouts even in the house
of lords because early in life the occupant of the throne, then heir
apparent, the other members of the upper ten and other high personages
simply following in the footsteps of the head of the state, he reflected
about the errors of notorieties and crowned heads running counter to
morality such as the Cornwall case a number of years before under their
veneer in a way scarcely intended by nature, a thing good Mrs Grundy,
as the law stands, was terribly down on though not for the reason they
thought they were probably whatever it was except women chiefly who were
always fiddling more or less at one another it being largely a matter of
dress and all the rest of it. Ladies who like distinctive underclothing
should, and every welltailored man must, trying to make the gap wider
between them by innuendo and give more of a genuine filip to acts of
impropriety between the two, she unbuttoned his and then he untied her,
mind the pin, whereas savages in the cannibal islands, say, at ninety
degrees in the shade not caring a continental. However, reverting to the
original, there were on the other hand others who had forced their way
to the top from the lowest rung by the aid of their bootstraps. Sheer
force of natural genius, that. With brains, sir.

For which and further reasons he felt it was his interest and duty even
to wait on and profit by the unlookedfor occasion though why he could
not exactly tell being as it was already several shillings to the
bad having in fact let himself in for it. Still to cultivate the
acquaintance of someone of no uncommon calibre who could provide food
for reflection would amply repay any small. Intellectual stimulation,
as such, was, he felt, from time to time a firstrate tonic for the mind.
Added to which was the coincidence of meeting, discussion, dance, row,
old salt of the here today and gone tomorrow type, night loafers, the
whole galaxy of events, all went to make up a miniature cameo of the
world we live in especially as the lives of the submerged tenth, viz.
coalminers, divers, scavengers etc., were very much under the microscope
lately. To improve the shining hour he wondered whether he might meet
with anything approaching the same luck as Mr Philip Beaufoy if taken
down in writing suppose he were to pen something out of the common
groove (as he fully intended doing) at the rate of one guinea per
column. _My Experiences_, let us say, _in a Cabman's Shelter_.

The pink edition extra sporting of the _Telegraph_ tell a graphic lie
lay, as luck would have it, beside his elbow and as he was just puzzling
again, far from satisfied, over a country belonging to him and the
preceding rebus the vessel came from Bridgwater and the postcard was
addressed A. Boudin find the captain's age, his eyes went aimlessly
over the respective captions which came under his special province the
allembracing give us this day our daily press. First he got a bit of a
start but it turned out to be only something about somebody named H.
du Boyes, agent for typewriters or something like that. Great battle,
Tokio. Lovemaking in Irish, 200 pounds damages. Gordon Bennett.
Emigration Swindle. Letter from His Grace. William. Ascot meeting,
the Gold Cup. Victory of outsider _Throwaway_ recalls Derby of '92 when
Capt. Marshall's dark horse _Sir Hugo_ captured the blue ribband at long
odds. New York disaster. Thousand lives lost. Foot and Mouth. Funeral of
the late Mr Patrick Dignam.

So to change the subject he read about Dignam R. I. P. which, he
reflected, was anything but a gay sendoff. Or a change of address
anyway.

--_This morning_ (Hynes put it in of course) _the remains of the late Mr
Patrick Dignam were removed from his residence, no 9 Newbridge Avenue,
Sandymount, for interment in Glasnevin. The deceased gentleman was a
most popular and genial personality in city life and his demise after a
brief illness came as a great shock to citizens of all classes by whom
he is deeply regretted. The obsequies, at which many friends of the
deceased were present, were carried out_ (certainly Hynes wrote it with
a nudge from Corny) _by Messrs H. J. O'Neill and Son, 164 North Strand
Road. The mourners included: Patk. Dignam (son), Bernard Corrigan
(brother-in-law), Jno. Henry Menton, solr, Martin Cunningham, John
Power, eatondph 1/8 ador dorador douradora_ (must be where he called
Monks the dayfather about Keyes's ad) _Thomas Kernan, Simon Dedalus,
Stephen Dedalus B.,4., Edw. J. Lambert, Cornelius T. Kelleher, Joseph
M'C Hynes, L. Boom, CP M'Coy,--M'lntosh and several others_.

Nettled not a little by L. _Boom_ (as it incorrectly stated) and the
line of bitched type but tickled to death simultaneously by C. P. M'Coy
and Stephen Dedalus B. A. who were conspicuous, needless to say, by
their total absence (to say nothing of M'Intosh) L. Boom pointed it
out to his companion B. A. engaged in stifling another yawn, half
nervousness, not forgetting the usual crop of nonsensical howlers of
misprints.

--Is that first epistle to the Hebrews, he asked as soon as his bottom
jaw would let him, in? Text: open thy mouth and put thy foot in it.

--It is. Really, Mr Bloom said (though first he fancied he alluded to
the archbishop till he added about foot and mouth with which there could
be no possible connection) overjoyed to set his mind at rest and a bit
flabbergasted at Myles Crawford's after all managing to. There.

While the other was reading it on page two Boom (to give him for the
nonce his new misnomer) whiled away a few odd leisure moments in fits
and starts with the account of the third event at Ascot on page three,
his side. Value 1000 sovs with 3000 sovs in specie added. For entire
colts and fillies. Mr F. Alexander's _Throwaway_, b. h. by _Rightaway_,
5 yrs, 9 st 4 lbs (W. Lane) 1, lord Howard de Walden's _Zinfandel_ (M.
Cannon) z, Mr W. Bass's _Sceptre_ 3. Betting 5 to 4 on _Zinfandel_,
20 to 1 _Throwaway_ (off). _Sceptre_ a shade heavier, 5 to 4 on
_Zinfandel_, 20 to 1 _Throwaway_ (off). _Throwaway_ and _Zinfandel_
stood close order. It was anybody's race then the rank outsider drew to
the fore, got long lead, beating lord Howard de Walden's chestnut
colt and Mr W. Bass's bay filly Sceptre on a 2 1/2 mile course. Winner
trained by Braime so that Lenehan's version of the business was all pure
buncombe. Secured the verdict cleverly by a length. 1000 sovs with
3000 in specie. Also ran: J de Bremond's (French horse Bantam Lyons was
anxiously inquiring after not in yet but expected any minute) _Maximum
II_. Different ways of bringing off a coup. Lovemaking damages. Though
that halfbaked Lyons ran off at a tangent in his impetuosity to get
left. Of course gambling eminently lent itself to that sort of thing
though as the event turned out the poor fool hadn't much reason to
congratulate himself on his pick, the forlorn hope. Guesswork it reduced
itself to eventually.

--There was every indication they would arrive at that, he, Bloom, said.

--Who? the other, whose hand by the way was hurt, said.

One morning you would open the paper, the cabman affirmed, and read:
_Return of Parnell_. He bet them what they liked. A Dublin fusilier was
in that shelter one night and said he saw him in South Africa. Pride it
was killed him. He ought to have done away with himself or lain low for
a time after committee room no 15 until he was his old self again with
no-one to point a finger at him. Then they would all to a man have gone
down on their marrowbones to him to come back when he had recovered
his senses. Dead he wasn't. Simply absconded somewhere. The coffin they
brought over was full of stones. He changed his name to De Wet, the Boer
general. He made a mistake to fight the priests. And so forth and so on.

All the same Bloom (properly so dubbed) was rather surprised at their
memories for in nine cases out of ten it was a case of tarbarrels and
not singly but in their thousands and then complete oblivion because it
was twenty odd years. Highly unlikely of course there was even a shadow
of truth in the stones and, even supposing, he thought a return highly
inadvisable, all things considered. Something evidently riled them in
his death. Either he petered out too tamely of acute pneumonia just when
his various different political arrangements were nearing completion
or whether it transpired he owed his death to his having neglected to
change his boots and clothes-after a wetting when a cold resulted and
failing to consult a specialist he being confined to his room till he
eventually died of it amid widespread regret before a fortnight was at
an end or quite possibly they were distressed to find the job was taken
out of their hands. Of course nobody being acquainted with his movements
even before there was absolutely no clue as to his whereabouts which
were decidedly of the _Alice, where art thou_ order even prior to his
starting to go under several aliases such as Fox and Stewart so the
remark which emanated from friend cabby might be within the bounds of
possibility. Naturally then it would prey on his mind as a born leader
of men which undoubtedly he was and a commanding figure, a sixfooter
or at any rate five feet ten or eleven in his stockinged feet, whereas
Messrs So and So who, though they weren't even a patch on the former
man, ruled the roost after their redeeming features were very few and
far between. It certainly pointed a moral, the idol with feet of clay,
and then seventytwo of his trusty henchmen rounding on him with mutual
mudslinging. And the identical same with murderers. You had to come
back. That haunting sense kind of drew you. To show the understudy in
the title _rôle_ how to. He saw him once on the auspicious occasion
when they broke up the type in the _Insuppressible_ or was it _United
Ireland_, a privilege he keenly appreciated, and, in point of fact,
handed him his silk hat when it was knocked off and he said _Thank you_,
excited as he undoubtedly was under his frigid exterior notwithstanding
the little misadventure mentioned between the cup and the lip: what's
bred in the bone. Still as regards return. You were a lucky dog if
they didn't set the terrier at you directly you got back. Then a lot of
shillyshally usually followed, Tom for and Dick and Harry against. And
then, number one, you came up against the man in possession and had to
produce your credentials like the claimant in the Tichborne case,
Roger Charles Tichborne, _Bella_ was the boat's name to the best of his
recollection he, the heir, went down in as the evidence went to show
and there was a tattoo mark too in Indian ink, lord Bellew was it, as he
might very easily have picked up the details from some pal on board ship
and then, when got up to tally with the description given, introduce
himself with: _Excuse me, my name is So and So_ or some such commonplace
remark. A more prudent course, as Bloom said to the not over effusive,
in fact like the distinguished personage under discussion beside him,
would have been to sound the lie of the land first.

--That bitch, that English whore, did for him, the shebeen proprietor
commented. She put the first nail in his coffin.

--Fine lump of a woman all the same, the _soi-disant_ townclerk Henry
Campbell remarked, and plenty of her. She loosened many a man's thighs.
I seen her picture in a barber's. The husband was a captain or an
officer.

--Ay, Skin-the-Goat amusingly added, he was and a cottonball one.

This gratuitous contribution of a humorous character occasioned a fair
amount of laughter among his _entourage_. As regards Bloom he, without
the faintest suspicion of a smile, merely gazed in the direction of
the door and reflected upon the historic story which had aroused
extraordinary interest at the time when the facts, to make matters
worse, were made public with the usual affectionate letters that passed
between them full of sweet nothings. First it was strictly Platonic till
nature intervened and an attachment sprang up between them till bit by
bit matters came to a climax and the matter became the talk of the town
till the staggering blow came as a welcome intelligence to not a few
evildisposed, however, who were resolved upon encompassing his downfall
though the thing was public property all along though not to anything
like the sensational extent that it subsequently blossomed into. Since
their names were coupled, though, since he was her declared favourite,
where was the particular necessity to proclaim it to the rank and file
from the housetops, the fact, namely, that he had shared her bedroom
which came out in the witnessbox on oath when a thrill went through the
packed court literally electrifying everybody in the shape of witnesses
swearing to having witnessed him on such and such a particular date in
the act of scrambling out of an upstairs apartment with the assistance
of a ladder in night apparel, having gained admittance in the same
fashion, a fact the weeklies, addicted to the lubric a little, simply
coined shoals of money out of. Whereas the simple fact of the case was
it was simply a case of the husband not being up to the scratch, with
nothing in common between them beyond the name, and then a real man
arriving on the scene, strong to the verge of weakness, falling a victim
to her siren charms and forgetting home ties, the usual sequel, to bask
in the loved one's smiles. The eternal question of the life connubial,
needless to say, cropped up. Can real love, supposing there happens to
be another chap in the case, exist between married folk? Poser.
Though it was no concern of theirs absolutely if he regarded her with
affection, carried away by a wave of folly. A magnificent specimen of
manhood he was truly augmented obviously by gifts of a high order, as
compared with the other military supernumerary that is (who was just the
usual everyday _farewell, my gallant captain_ kind of an individual in
the light dragoons, the 18th hussars to be accurate) and inflammable
doubtless (the fallen leader, that is, not the other) in his own
peculiar way which she of course, woman, quickly perceived as highly
likely to carve his way to fame which he almost bid fair to do till the
priests and ministers of the gospel as a whole, his erstwhile staunch
adherents, and his beloved evicted tenants for whom he had done yeoman
service in the rural parts of the country by taking up the cudgels on
their behalf in a way that exceeded their most sanguine expectations,
very effectually cooked his matrimonial goose, thereby heaping coals of
fire on his head much in the same way as the fabled ass's kick. Looking
back now in a retrospective kind of arrangement all seemed a kind of
dream. And then coming back was the worst thing you ever did because it
went without saying you would feel out of place as things always moved
with the times. Why, as he reflected, Irishtown strand, a locality he
had not been in for quite a number of years looked different somehow
since, as it happened, he went to reside on the north side. North or
south, however, it was just the wellknown case of hot passion, pure and
simple, upsetting the applecart with a vengeance and just bore out the
very thing he was saying as she also was Spanish or half so, types that
wouldn't do things by halves, passionate abandon of the south, casting
every shred of decency to the winds.

--Just bears out what I was saying, he, with glowing bosom said to
Stephen, about blood and the sun. And, if I don't greatly mistake she
was Spanish too.

--The king of Spain's daughter, Stephen answered, adding something or
other rather muddled about farewell and adieu to you Spanish onions and
the first land called the Deadman and from Ramhead to Scilly was so and
so many.

--Was she? Bloom ejaculated, surprised though not astonished by any
means, I never heard that rumour before. Possible, especially there, it
was as she lived there. So, Spain.

Carefully avoiding a book in his pocket _Sweets of_, which reminded him
by the by of that Cap l street library book out of date, he took out his
pocketbook and, turning over the various contents it contained rapidly
finally he.

--Do you consider, by the by, he said, thoughtfully selecting a faded
photo which he laid on the table, that a Spanish type?

Stephen, obviously addressed, looked down on the photo showing a large
sized lady with her fleshy charms on evidence in an open fashion as she
was in the full bloom of womanhood in evening dress cut ostentatiously
low for the occasion to give a liberal display of bosom, with more than
vision of breasts, her full lips parted and some perfect teeth, standing
near, ostensibly with gravity, a piano on the rest of which was _In Old
Madrid_, a ballad, pretty in its way, which was then all the vogue. Her
(the lady's) eyes, dark, large, looked at Stephen, about to smile about
something to be admired, Lafayette of Westmoreland street, Dublin's
premier photographic artist, being responsible for the esthetic
execution.

--Mrs Bloom, my wife the _prima donna_ Madam Marion Tweedy, Bloom
indicated. Taken a few years since. In or about ninety six. Very like
her then.

Beside the young man he looked also at the photo of the lady now his
1440 legal wife who, he intimated, was the accomplished daughter of
Major Brian Tweedy and displayed at an early age remarkable proficiency
as a singer having even made her bow to the public when her years
numbered barely sweet sixteen. As for the face it was a speaking
likeness in expression but it did not do justice to her figure which
came in for a lot of notice usually and which did not come out to the
best advantage in that getup. She could without difficulty, he said,
have posed for the ensemble, not to dwell on certain opulent curves of
the. He dwelt, being a bit of an artist in his spare time, on the female
form in general developmentally because, as it so happened, no later
than that afternoon he had seen those Grecian statues, 1450 perfectly
developed as works of art, in the National Museum. Marble could give
the original, shoulders, back, all the symmetry, all the rest. Yes,
puritanisme, it does though Saint Joseph's sovereign thievery alors
(Bandez!) Figne toi trop. Whereas no photo could because it simply
wasn't art in a word.

The spirit moving him he would much have liked to follow Jack Tar's good
example and leave the likeness there for a very few minutes to speak for
itself on the plea he so that the other could drink in the beauty for
himself, her stage presence being, frankly, a treat in itself which the
camera could not at all do justice to. But it was scarcely professional
etiquette so. Though it was a warm pleasant sort of a night now yet
wonderfully cool for the season considering, for sunshine after storm.
And he did feel a kind of need there and then to follow suit like a
kind of inward voice and satisfy a possible need by moving a motion.
Nevertheless he sat tight just viewing the slightly soiled photo creased
by opulent curves, none the worse for wear however, and looked away
thoughtfully with the intention of not further increasing the
other's possible embarrassment while gauging her symmetry of heaving
_embonpoint_. In fact the slight soiling was only an added charm like
the case of linen slightly soiled, good as new, much better in fact
with the starch out. Suppose she was gone when he? I looked for the lamp
which she told me came into his mind but merely as a passing fancy of
his because he then recollected the morning littered bed etcetera and
the book about Ruby with met him pike hoses (_sic_) in it which must
have fell down sufficiently appropriately beside the domestic chamberpot
with apologies to Lindley Murray.

The vicinity of the young man he certainly relished, educated,
_distingué_ and impulsive into the bargain, far and away the pick of the
bunch though you wouldn't think he had it in him yet you would. Besides
he said the picture was handsome which, say what you like, it was though
at the moment she was distinctly stouter. And why not? An awful lot of
makebelieve went on about that sort of thing involving a lifelong slur
with the usual splash page of gutterpress about the same old matrimonial
tangle alleging misconduct with professional golfer or the newest
stage favourite instead of being honest and aboveboard about the whole
business. How they were fated to meet and an attachment sprang up
between the two so that their names were coupled in the public eye
was told in court with letters containing the habitual mushy and
compromising expressions leaving no loophole to show that they openly
cohabited two or three times a week at some wellknown seaside hotel and
relations, when the thing ran its normal course, became in due course
intimate. Then the decree _nisi_ and the King's proctor tries to show
cause why and, he failing to quash it, _nisi_ was made absolute. But as
for that the two misdemeanants, wrapped up as they largely were in one
another, could safely afford to ignore it as they very largely did till
the matter was put in the hands of a solicitor who filed a petition for
the party wronged in due course. He, B, enjoyed the distinction of being
close to Erin's uncrowned king in the flesh when the thing occurred on
the historic _fracas_ when the fallen leader's, who notoriously stuck to
his guns to the last drop even when clothed in the mantle of adultery,
(leader's) trusty henchmen to the number of ten or a dozen or
possibly even more than that penetrated into the printing works of the
_Insuppressible_ or no it was _United Ireland_ (a by no means by the
by appropriate appellative) and broke up the typecases with hammers or
something like that all on account of some scurrilous effusions from
the facile pens of the O'Brienite scribes at the usual mudslinging
occupation reflecting on the erstwhile tribune's private morals. Though
palpably a radically altered man he was still a commanding figure though
carelessly garbed as usual with that look of settled purpose which went
a long way with the shillyshallyers till they discovered to their vast
discomfiture that their idol had feet of clay after placing him upon a
pedestal which she, however, was the first to perceive. As those were
particularly hot times in the general hullaballoo Bloom sustained a
minor injury from a nasty prod of some chap's elbow in the crowd that
of course congregated lodging some place about the pit of the stomach,
fortunately not of a grave character. His hat (Parnell's) a silk one was
inadvertently knocked off and, as a matter of strict history, Bloom was
the man who picked it up in the crush after witnessing the occurrence
meaning to return it to him (and return it to him he did with the utmost
celerity) who panting and hatless and whose thoughts were miles away
from his hat at the time all the same being a gentleman born with a
stake in the country he, as a matter of fact, having gone into it more
for the kudos of the thing than anything else, what's bred in the bone
instilled into him in infancy at his mother's knee in the shape of
knowing what good form was came out at once because he turned round to
the donor and thanked him with perfect _aplomb_, saying: _Thank you,
sir_, though in a very different tone of voice from the ornament of the
legal profession whose headgear Bloom also set to rights earlier in the
course of the day, history repeating itself with a difference, after
the burial of a mutual friend when they had left him alone in his glory
after the grim task of having committed his remains to the grave.

On the other hand what incensed him more inwardly was the blatant jokes
of the cabman and so on who passed it all off as a jest, laughing 1530
immoderately, pretending to understand everything, the why and the
wherefore, and in reality not knowing their own minds, it being a case
for the two parties themselves unless it ensued that the legitimate
husband happened to be a party to it owing to some anonymous letter from
the usual boy Jones, who happened to come across them at the crucial
moment in a loving position locked in one another's arms, drawing
attention to their illicit proceedings and leading up to a domestic
rumpus and the erring fair one begging forgiveness of her lord and
master upon her knees and promising to sever the connection and not
receive his visits any more if only the aggrieved husband would overlook
the matter and let bygones be bygones with tears in her eyes though
possibly with her tongue in her fair cheek at the same time as quite
possibly there were several others. He personally, being of a sceptical
bias, believed and didn't make the smallest bones about saying so either
that man or men in the plural were always hanging around on the waiting
list about a lady, even supposing she was the best wife in the world
and they got on fairly well together for the sake of argument, when,
neglecting her duties, she chose to be tired of wedded life and was on
for a little flutter in polite debauchery to press their attentions on
her with improper intent, the upshot being that her affections centred
on another, the cause of many _liaisons_ between still attractive
married women getting on for fair and forty and younger men, no doubt as
several famous cases of feminine infatuation proved up to the hilt.

It was a thousand pities a young fellow, blessed with an allowance of
brains as his neighbour obviously was, should waste his valuable time
with profligate women who might present him with a nice dose to last him
his lifetime. In the nature of single blessedness he would one day take
unto himself a wife when Miss Right came on the scene but in the interim
ladies' society was a _conditio sine qua non_ though he had the gravest
possible doubts, not that he wanted in the smallest to pump Stephen
about Miss Ferguson (who was very possibly the particular lodestar who
brought him down to Irishtown so early in the morning), as to whether he
would find much satisfaction basking in the boy and girl courtship idea
and the company of smirking misses without a penny to their names bi or
triweekly with the orthodox preliminary canter of complimentplaying and
walking out leading up to fond lovers' ways and flowers and chocs. To
think of him house and homeless, rooked by some landlady worse than any
stepmother, was really too bad at his age. The queer suddenly things
he popped out with attracted the elder man who was several years the
other's senior or like his father but something substantial he certainly
ought to eat even were it only an eggflip made on unadulterated maternal
nutriment or, failing that, the homely Humpty Dumpty boiled.

--At what o'clock did you dine? he questioned of the slim form and tired
though unwrinkled face.

--Some time yesterday, Stephen said.

--Yesterday! exclaimed Bloom till he remembered it was already tomorrow
Friday. Ah, you mean it's after twelve!

--The day before yesterday, Stephen said, improving on himself.

Literally astounded at this piece of intelligence Bloom reflected.
Though they didn't see eye to eye in everything a certain analogy there
somehow was as if both their minds were travelling, so to speak, in the
one train of thought. At his age when dabbling in politics roughly
some score of years previously when he had been a _quasi_ aspirant to
parliamentary honours in the Buckshot Foster days he too recollected in
retrospect (which was a source of keen satisfaction in itself) he had
a sneaking regard for those same ultra ideas. For instance when the
evicted tenants question, then at its first inception, bulked largely in
people's mind though, it goes without saying, not contributing a copper
or pinning his faith absolutely to its dictums, some of which wouldn't
exactly hold water, he at the outset in principle at all events was in
thorough sympathy with peasant possession as voicing the trend of modern
opinion (a partiality, however, which, realising his mistake, he was
subsequently partially cured of) and even was twitted with going a
step farther than Michael Davitt in the striking views he at one time
inculcated as a backtothelander, which was one reason he strongly
resented the innuendo put upon him in so barefaced a fashion by our
friend at the gathering of the clans in Barney Kiernan's so that he,
though often considerably misunderstood and the least pugnacious of
mortals, be it repeated, departed from his customary habit to give
him (metaphorically) one in the gizzard though, so far as politics
themselves were concerned, he was only too conscious of the casualties
invariably resulting from propaganda and displays of mutual animosity
and the misery and suffering it entailed as a foregone conclusion on
fine young fellows, chiefly, destruction of the fittest, in a word.

Anyhow upon weighing up the pros and cons, getting on for one, as it
was, it was high time to be retiring for the night. The crux was it
was a bit risky to bring him home as eventualities might possibly ensue
(somebody having a temper of her own sometimes) and spoil the hash
altogether as on the night he misguidedly brought home a dog (breed
unknown) with a lame paw (not that the cases were either identical or
the reverse though he had hurt his hand too) to Ontario Terrace as he
very distinctly remembered, having been there, so to speak. On the
other hand it was altogether far and away too late for the Sandymount
or Sandycove suggestion so that he was in some perplexity as to which of
the two alternatives. Everything pointed to the fact that it behoved him
to avail himself to the full of the opportunity, all things considered.
His initial impression was he was a shade standoffish or not over
effusive but it grew on him someway. For one thing he mightn't what you
call jump at the idea, if approached, and what mostly worried him was
he didn't know how to lead up to it or word it exactly, supposing he
did entertain the proposal, as it would afford him very great personal
pleasure if he would allow him to help to put coin in his way or some
wardrobe, if found suitable. At all events he wound up by concluding,
eschewing for the nonce hidebound precedent, a cup of Epps's cocoa and
a shakedown for the night plus the use of a rug or two and overcoat
doubled into a pillow at least he would be in safe hands and as warm as
a toast on a trivet he failed to perceive any very vast amount of harm
in that always with the proviso no rumpus of any sort was kicked up.
A move had to be made because that merry old soul, the grasswidower
in question who appeared to be glued to the spot, didn't appear in any
particular hurry to wend his way home to his dearly beloved Queenstown
and it was highly likely some sponger's bawdyhouse of retired beauties
where age was no bar off Sheriff street lower would be the best clue
to that equivocal character's whereabouts for a few days to come,
alternately racking their feelings (the mermaids') with sixchamber
revolver anecdotes verging on the tropical calculated to freeze
the marrow of anybody's bones and mauling their largesized charms
betweenwhiles with rough and tumble gusto to the accompaniment of large
potations of potheen and the usual blarney about himself for as to who
he in reality was let x equal my right name and address, as Mr Algebra
remarks _passim_. At the same time he inwardly chuckled over his gentle
repartee to the blood and ouns champion about his god being a jew.
People could put up with being bitten by a wolf but what properly riled
them was a bite from a sheep. The most vulnerable point too of tender
Achilles. Your god was a jew. Because mostly they appeared to imagine he
came from Carrick-on-Shannon or somewhereabouts in the county Sligo.

--I propose, our hero eventually suggested after mature reflection while
prudently pocketing her photo, as it's rather stuffy here you just come
home with me and talk things over. My diggings are quite close in the
vicinity. You can't drink that stuff. Do you like cocoa? Wait. I'll just
pay this lot.

The best plan clearly being to clear out, the remainder being plain
sailing, he beckoned, while prudently pocketing the photo, to the keeper
of the shanty who didn't seem to.

--Yes, that's the best, he assured Stephen to whom for the matter of
that Brazen Head or him or anywhere else was all more or less.

All kinds of Utopian plans were flashing through his (B's) busy brain,
education (the genuine article), literature, journalism, prize titbits,
up to date billing, concert tours in English watering resorts packed
with hydros and seaside theatres, turning money away, duets in Italian
with the accent perfectly true to nature and a quantity of other
things, no necessity, of course, to tell the world and his wife from the
housetops about it, and a slice of luck. An opening was all was wanted.
Because he more than suspected he had his father's voice to bank his
hopes on which it was quite on the cards he had so it would be just as
well, by the way no harm, to trail the conversation in the direction of
that particular red herring just to.

The cabby read out of the paper he had got hold of that the former
viceroy, earl Cadogan, had presided at the cabdrivers' association
dinner in London somewhere. Silence with a yawn or two accompanied this
thrilling announcement. Then the old specimen in the corner who appeared
to have some spark of vitality left read out that sir Anthony MacDonnell
had left Euston for the chief secretary's lodge or words to that effect.
To which absorbing piece of intelligence echo answered why.

--Give us a squint at that literature, grandfather, the ancient mariner
put in, manifesting some natural impatience.

--And welcome, answered the elderly party thus addressed.

The sailor lugged out from a case he had a pair of greenish goggles
which he very slowly hooked over his nose and both ears.

--Are you bad in the eyes? the sympathetic personage like the townclerk
queried.

--Why, answered the seafarer with the tartan beard, who seemingly was
a bit of a literary cove in his own small way, staring out of seagreen
portholes as you might well describe them as, I uses goggles reading.
Sand in the Red Sea done that. One time I could read a book in the dark,
manner of speaking. _The Arabian Nights Entertainment_ was my favourite
and _Red as a Rose is She._

Hereupon he pawed the journal open and pored upon Lord only knows what,
found drowned or the exploits of King Willow, Iremonger having made a
hundred and something second wicket not out for Notts, during which
time (completely regardless of Ire) the keeper was intensely occupied
loosening an apparently new or secondhand boot which manifestly pinched
him as he muttered against whoever it was sold it, all of them who were
sufficiently awake enough to be picked out by their facial expressions,
that is to say, either simply looking on glumly or passing a trivial
remark.

To cut a long story short Bloom, grasping the situation, was the first
to rise from his seat so as not to outstay their welcome having first
and foremost, being as good as his word that he would foot the bill for
the occasion, taken the wise precaution to unobtrusively motion to mine
host as a parting shot a scarcely perceptible sign when the others were
not looking to the effect that the amount due was forthcoming, making a
grand total of fourpence (the amount he deposited unobtrusively in
four coppers, literally the last of the Mohicans), he having previously
spotted on the printed pricelist for all who ran to read opposite him
in unmistakable figures, coffee 2d, confectionery do, and honestly well
worth twice the money once in a way, as Wetherup used to remark.

--Come, he counselled to close the _séance_.

Seeing that the ruse worked and the coast was clear they left the
shelter or shanty together and the _élite_ society of oilskin and
company whom nothing short of an earthquake would move out of their
_dolce far niente_. Stephen, who confessed to still feeling poorly and
fagged out, paused at the, for a moment, the door.

--One thing I never understood, he said to be original on the spur of
the moment. Why they put tables upside down at night, I mean chairs
upside down, on the tables in cafes. To which impromptu the neverfailing
Bloom replied without a moment's hesitation, saying straight off:

--To sweep the floor in the morning.

So saying he skipped around, nimbly considering, frankly at the same
time apologetic to get on his companion's right, a habit of his, by the
bye, his right side being, in classical idiom, his tender Achilles. The
night air was certainly now a treat to breathe though Stephen was a bit
weak on his pins.

--It will (the air) do you good, Bloom said, meaning also the walk, in
a moment. The only thing is to walk then you'll feel a different man.
Come. It's not far. Lean on me.

Accordingly he passed his left arm in Stephen's right and led him on
accordingly.

--Yes, Stephen said uncertainly because he thought he felt a strange
kind of flesh of a different man approach him, sinewless and wobbly and
all that.

Anyhow they passed the sentrybox with stones, brazier etc. where
the municipal supernumerary, ex Gumley, was still to all intents and
purposes wrapped in the arms of Murphy, as the adage has it, dreaming
of fresh fields and pastures new. And _apropos_ of coffin of stones the
analogy was not at all bad as it was in fact a stoning to death on the
part of seventytwo out of eighty odd constituencies that ratted at the
time of the split and chiefly the belauded peasant class, probably the
selfsame evicted tenants he had put in their holdings.

So they turned on to chatting about music, a form of art for which
Bloom, as a pure amateur, possessed the greatest love, as they made
tracks arm in arm across Beresford place. Wagnerian music, though
confessedly grand in its way, was a bit too heavy for Bloom and hard to
follow at the first go-off but the music of Mercadante's _Huguenots_,
Meyerbeer's _Seven Last Words on the Cross_ and Mozart's _Twelfth Mass_
he simply revelled in, the _Gloria_ in that being, to his mind, the acme
of first class music as such, literally knocking everything else into
a cocked hat. He infinitely preferred the sacred music of the catholic
church to anything the opposite shop could offer in that line such as
those Moody and Sankey hymns or _Bid me to live and i will live
thy protestant to be_. He also yielded to none in his admiration of
Rossini's _Stabat Mater_, a work simply abounding in immortal numbers,
in which his wife, Madam Marion Tweedy, made a hit, a veritable
sensation, he might safely say, greatly adding to her other laureis and
putting the others totally in the shade, in the jesuit fathers' church
in upper Gardiner street, the sacred edifice being thronged to the
doors to hear her with virtuosos, or _virtuosi_ rather. There was the
unanimous opinion that there was none to come up to her and suffice it
to say in a place of worship for music of a sacred character there was
a generally voiced desire for an encore. On the whole though favouring
preferably light opera of the _Don Giovanni_ description and _Martha_,
a gem in its line, he had a _penchant_, though with only a surface
knowledge, for the severe classical school such as Mendelssohn. And
talking of that, taking it for granted he knew all about the old
favourites, he mentioned _par excellence_ Lionel's air in _Martha,
M'appari_, which, curiously enough, he had heard or overheard, to be
more accurate, on yesterday, a privilege he keenly appreciated, from the
lips of Stephen's respected father, sung to perfection, a study of the
number, in fact, which made all the others take a back seat. Stephen, in
reply to a politely put query, said he didn't sing it but launched
out into praises of Shakespeare's songs, at least of in or about that
period, the lutenist Dowland who lived in Fetter lane near Gerard the
herbalist, who _anno ludendo hausi, Doulandus_, an instrument he was
contemplating purchasing from Mr Arnold Dolmetsch, whom B. did not quite
recall though the name certainly sounded familiar, for sixtyfive guineas
and Farnaby and son with their _dux_ and _comes_ conceits and Byrd
(William) who played the virginals, he said, in the Queen's chapel or
anywhere else he found them and one Tomkins who made toys or airs and
John Bull.

On the roadway which they were approaching whilst still speaking beyond
the swingchains a horse, dragging a sweeper, paced on the paven ground,
brushing a long swathe of mire up so that with the noise Bloom was not
perfectly certain whether he had caught aright the allusion to sixtyfive
guineas and John Bull. He inquired if it was John Bull the political
celebrity of that ilk, as it struck him, the two identical names, as a
striking coincidence.

By the chains the horse slowly swerved to turn, which perceiving, Bloom,
who was keeping a sharp lookout as usual, plucked the other's sleeve
gently, jocosely remarking:

--Our lives are in peril tonight. Beware of the steamroller.

They thereupon stopped. Bloom looked at the head of a horse not worth
anything like sixtyfive guineas, suddenly in evidence in the dark quite
near so that it seemed new, a different grouping of bones and even flesh
because palpably it was a fourwalker, a hipshaker, a blackbuttocker, a
taildangler, a headhanger putting his hind foot foremost the while the
lord of his creation sat on the perch, busy with his thoughts. But such
a good poor brute he was sorry he hadn't a lump of sugar but, as he
wisely reflected, you could scarcely be prepared for every emergency
that might crop up. He was just a big nervous foolish noodly kind of a
horse, without a second care in the world. But even a dog, he reflected,
take that mongrel in Barney Kiernan's, of the same size, would be a holy
horror to face. But it was no animal's fault in particular if he was
built that way like the camel, ship of the desert, distilling grapes
into potheen in his hump. Nine tenths of them all could be caged or
trained, nothing beyond the art of man barring the bees. Whale with a
harpoon hairpin, alligator tickle the small of his back and he sees the
joke, chalk a circle for a rooster, tiger my eagle eye. These timely
reflections anent the brutes of the field occupied his mind somewhat
distracted from Stephen's words while the ship of the street was
manoeuvring and Stephen went on about the highly interesting old.

--What's this I was saying? Ah, yes! My wife, he intimated, plunging
_in medias res_, would have the greatest of pleasure in making your
acquaintance as she is passionately attached to music of any kind.

He looked sideways in a friendly fashion at the sideface of Stephen,
image of his mother, which was not quite the same as the usual handsome
blackguard type they unquestionably had an insatiable hankering after as
he was perhaps not that way built.

Still, supposing he had his father's gift as he more than suspected,
it opened up new vistas in his mind such as Lady Fingall's Irish
industries, concert on the preceding Monday, and aristocracy in general.

Exquisite variations he was now describing on an air _Youth here has
End_ by Jans Pieter Sweelinck, a Dutchman of Amsterdam where the frows
come from. Even more he liked an old German song of _Johannes Jeep_
about the clear sea and the voices of sirens, sweet murderers of men,
which boggled Bloom a bit:

     _Von der Sirenen Listigkeit
     Tun die Poeten dichten._

These opening bars he sang and translated _extempore_. Bloom, nodding,
said he perfectly understood and begged him to go on by all means which
he did.

A phenomenally beautiful tenor voice like that, the rarest of boons,
which Bloom appreciated at the very first note he got out, could easily,
if properly handled by some recognised authority on voice production
such as Barraclough and being able to read music into the bargain,
command its own price where baritones were ten a penny and procure for
its fortunate possessor in the near future an _entrée_ into fashionable
houses in the best residential quarters of financial magnates in a large
way of business and titled people where with his university degree of
B. A. (a huge ad in its way) and gentlemanly bearing to all the more
influence the good impression he would infallibly score a distinct
success, being blessed with brains which also could be utilised for the
purpose and other requisites, if his clothes were properly attended
to so as to the better worm his way into their good graces as he, a
youthful tyro in--society's sartorial niceties, hardly understood how a
little thing like that could militate against you. It was in fact only a
matter of months and he could easily foresee him participating in their
musical and artistic _conversaziones_ during the festivities of the
Christmas season, for choice, causing a slight flutter in the dovecotes
of the fair sex and being made a lot of by ladies out for sensation,
cases of which, as he happened to know, were on record--in fact, without
giving the show away, he himself once upon a time, if he cared to, could
easily have. Added to which of course would be the pecuniary emolument
by no means to be sneezed at, going hand in hand with his tuition
fees. Not, he parenthesised, that for the sake of filthy lucre he need
necessarily embrace the lyric platform as a walk in life for any lengthy
space of time. But a step in the required direction it was beyond yea or
nay and both monetarily and mentally it contained no reflection on his
dignity in the smallest and it often turned in uncommonly handy to
be handed a cheque at a muchneeded moment when every little helped.
Besides, though taste latterly had deteriorated to a degree, original
music like that, different from the conventional rut, would rapidly
have a great vogue as it would be a decided novelty for Dublin's musical
world after the usual hackneyed run of catchy tenor solos foisted on a
confiding public by Ivan St Austell and Hilton St Just and their _genus
omne_. Yes, beyond a shadow of a doubt he could with all the cards in
his hand and he had a capital opening to make a name for himself and win
a high place in the city's esteem where he could command a stiff figure
and, booking ahead, give a grand concert for the patrons of the King
street house, given a backerup, if one were forthcoming to kick him
upstairs, so to speak, a big _if_, however, with some impetus of the
goahead sort to obviate the inevitable procrastination which often
tripped-up a too much fêted prince of good fellows. And it need not
detract from the other by one iota as, being his own master, he would
have heaps of time to practise literature in his spare moments when
desirous of so doing without its clashing with his vocal career or
containing anything derogatory whatsoever as it was a matter for himself
alone. In fact, he had the ball at his feet and that was the very reason
why the other, possessed of a remarkably sharp nose for smelling a rat
of any sort, hung on to him at all.

The horse was just then. And later on at a propitious opportunity he
purposed (Bloom did), without anyway prying into his private affairs on
the _fools step in where angels_ principle, advising him to sever his
connection with a certain budding practitioner who, he noticed, was
prone to disparage and even to a slight extent with some hilarious
pretext when not present, deprecate him, or whatever you like to call it
which in Bloom's humble opinion threw a nasty sidelight on that side of
a person's character, no pun intended.

The horse having reached the end of his tether, so to speak, halted and,
rearing high a proud feathering tail, added his quota by letting fall on
the floor which the brush would soon brush up and polish, three smoking
globes of turds. Slowly three times, one after another, from a full
crupper he mired. And humanely his driver waited till he (or she) had
ended, patient in his scythed car.

Side by side Bloom, profiting by the _contretemps_, with Stephen passed
through the gap of the chains, divided by the upright, and, stepping
over a strand of mire, went across towards Gardiner street lower,
Stephen singing more boldly, but not loudly, the end of the ballad.

_Und alle Schiffe brücken._

The driver never said a word, good, bad or indifferent, but merely
watched the two figures, as he sat on his lowbacked car, both black,
one full, one lean, walk towards the railway bridge, _to be married by
Father Maher_. As they walked they at times stopped and walked again
continuing their _tête-à-tête_ (which, of course, he was utterly out
of) about sirens enemies of man's reason, mingled with a number of other
topics of the same category, usurpers, historical cases of the kind
while the man in the sweeper car or you might as well call it in the
sleeper car who in any case couldn't possibly hear because they were too
far simply sat in his seat near the end of lower Gardiner street _and
looked after their lowbacked car_.



What parallel courses did Bloom and Stephen follow returning?

Starting united both at normal walking pace from Beresford place they
followed in the order named Lower and Middle Gardiner streets and
Mountjoy square, west: then, at reduced pace, each bearing left,
Gardiner's place by an inadvertence as far as the farther corner of
Temple street: then, at reduced pace with interruptions of halt, bearing
right, Temple street, north, as far as Hardwicke place. Approaching,
disparate, at relaxed walking pace they crossed both the circus before
George's church diametrically, the chord in any circle being less than
the arc which it subtends.


Of what did the duumvirate deliberate during their itinerary?

Music, literature, Ireland, Dublin, Paris, friendship, woman,
prostitution, diet, the influence of gaslight or the light of arc and
glowlamps on the growth of adjoining paraheliotropic trees, exposed
corporation emergency dustbuckets, the Roman catholic church,
ecclesiastical celibacy, the Irish nation, jesuit education, careers,
the study of medicine, the past day, the maleficent influence of the
presabbath, Stephen's collapse.

Did Bloom discover common factors of similarity between their respective
like and unlike reactions to experience?

Both were sensitive to artistic impressions, musical in preference to
plastic or pictorial. Both preferred a continental to an insular manner
of life, a cisatlantic to a transatlantic place of residence. Both
indurated by early domestic training and an inherited tenacity of
heterodox resistance professed their disbelief in many orthodox
religious, national, social and ethical doctrines. Both admitted
the alternately stimulating and obtunding influence of heterosexual
magnetism.


Were their views on some points divergent?

Stephen dissented openly from Bloom's views on the importance of dietary
and civic selfhelp while Bloom dissented tacitly from Stephen's views
on the eternal affirmation of the spirit of man in literature. Bloom
assented covertly to Stephen's rectification of the anachronism
involved in assigning the date of the conversion of the Irish nation to
christianity from druidism by Patrick son of Calpornus, son of Potitus,
son of Odyssus, sent by pope Celestine I in the year 432 in the reign of
Leary to the year 260 or thereabouts in the reign of Cormac MacArt (died
266 A.D.), suffocated by imperfect deglutition of aliment at Sletty
and interred at Rossnaree. The collapse which Bloom ascribed to
gastric inanition and certain chemical compounds of varying degrees of
adulteration and alcoholic strength, accelerated by mental exertion and
the velocity of rapid circular motion in a relaxing atmosphere, Stephen
attributed to the reapparition of a matutinal cloud (perceived by both
from two different points of observation Sandycove and Dublin) at first
no bigger than a woman's hand.


Was there one point on which their views were equal and negative?

The influence of gaslight or electric light on the growth of adjoining
paraheliotropic trees.


Had Bloom discussed similar subjects during nocturnal perambulations in
the past?

In 1884 with Owen Goldberg and Cecil Turnbull at night on public
thoroughfares between Longwood avenue and Leonard's corner and Leonard's
corner and Synge street and Synge street and Bloomfield avenue.

In 1885 with Percy Apjohn in the evenings, reclined against the wall
between Gibraltar villa and Bloomfield house in Crumlin, barony
of Uppercross. In 1886 occasionally with casual acquaintances and
prospective purchasers on doorsteps, in front parlours, in third class
railway carriages of suburban lines. In 1888 frequently with major Brian
Tweedy and his daughter Miss Marion Tweedy, together and separately on
the lounge in Matthew Dillon's house in Roundtown. Once in 1892 and once
in 1893 with Julius (Juda) Mastiansky, on both occasions in the parlour
of his (Bloom's) house in Lombard street, west.


What reflection concerning the irregular sequence of dates 1884, 1885,
1886, 1888, 1892, 1893, 1904 did Bloom make before their arrival at
their destination?

He reflected that the progressive extension of the field of individual
development and experience was regressively accompanied by a restriction
of the converse domain of interindividual relations.


As in what ways?

From inexistence to existence he came to many and was as one received:
existence with existence he was with any as any with any: from existence
to nonexistence gone he would be by all as none perceived.

What act did Bloom make on their arrival at their destination?

At the housesteps of the 4th Of the equidifferent uneven numbers, number
7 Eccles street, he inserted his hand mechanically into the back pocket
of his trousers to obtain his latchkey.


Was it there?

It was in the corresponding pocket of the trousers which he had worn on
the day but one preceding.


Why was he doubly irritated?

Because he had forgotten and because he remembered that he had reminded
himself twice not to forget.


What were then the alternatives before the, premeditatedly
(respectively) and inadvertently, keyless couple?

To enter or not to enter. To knock or not to knock.


Bloom's decision?

A stratagem. Resting his feet on the dwarf wall, he climbed over the
area railings, compressed his hat on his head, grasped two points at
the lower union of rails and stiles, lowered his body gradually by its
length of five feet nine inches and a half to within two feet ten inches
of the area pavement and allowed his body to move freely in space by
separating himself from the railings and crouching in preparation for
the impact of the fall.


Did he fall?

By his body's known weight of eleven stone and four pounds in
avoirdupois measure, as certified by the graduated machine for
periodical selfweighing in the premises of Francis Froedman,
pharmaceutical chemist of 19 Frederick street, north, on the last feast
of the Ascension, to wit, the twelfth day of May of the bissextile year
one thousand nine hundred and four of the christian era (jewish era five
thousand six hundred and sixtyfour, mohammadan era one thousand three
hundred and twentytwo), golden number 5, epact 13, solar cycle 9,
dominical letters C B, Roman indiction 2, Julian period 6617, MCMIV.


Did he rise uninjured by concussion?

Regaining new stable equilibrium he rose uninjured though concussed by
the impact, raised the latch of the area door by the exertion of force
at its freely moving flange and by leverage of the first kind applied
at its fulcrum, gained retarded access to the kitchen through the
subadjacent scullery, ignited a lucifer match by friction, set free
inflammable coal gas by turningon the ventcock, lit a high flame which,
by regulating, he reduced to quiescent candescence and lit finally a
portable candle.


What discrete succession of images did Stephen meanwhile perceive?

Reclined against the area railings he perceived through the transparent
kitchen panes a man regulating a gasflame of 14 CP, a man lighting a
candle of 1 CP, a man removing in turn each of his two boots, a man
leaving the kitchen holding a candle.


Did the man reappear elsewhere?

After a lapse of four minutes the glimmer of his candle was discernible
through the semitransparent semicircular glass fanlight over the
halldoor. The halldoor turned gradually on its hinges. In the open space
of the doorway the man reappeared without his hat, with his candle.


Did Stephen obey his sign?

Yes, entering softly, he helped to close and chain the door and followed
softly along the hallway the man's back and listed feet and lighted
candle past a lighted crevice of doorway on the left and carefully down
a turning staircase of more than five steps into the kitchen of Bloom's
house.


What did Bloom do?

He extinguished the candle by a sharp expiration of breath upon its
flame, drew two spoonseat deal chairs to the hearthstone, one for
Stephen with its back to the area window, the other for himself when
necessary, knelt on one knee, composed in the grate a pyre of crosslaid
resintipped sticks and various coloured papers and irregular polygons
of best Abram coal at twentyone shillings a ton from the yard of Messrs
Flower and M'Donald of 14 D'Olier street, kindled it at three projecting
points of paper with one ignited lucifer match, thereby releasing
the potential energy contained in the fuel by allowing its carbon and
hydrogen elements to enter into free union with the oxygen of the air.


Of what similar apparitions did Stephen think?

Of others elsewhere in other times who, kneeling on one knee or on two,
had kindled fires for him, of Brother Michael in the infirmary of the
college of the Society of Jesus at Clongowes Wood, Sallins, in the
county of Kildare: of his father, Simon Dedalus, in an unfurnished room
of his first residence in Dublin, number thirteen Fitzgibbon street:
of his godmother Miss Kate Morkan in the house of her dying sister Miss
Julia Morkan at 15 Usher's Island: of his aunt Sara, wife of Richie
(Richard) Goulding, in the kitchen of their lodgings at 62 Clanbrassil
street: of his mother Mary, wife of Simon Dedalus, in the kitchen of
number twelve North Richmond street on the morning of the feast of
Saint Francis Xavier 1898: of the dean of studies, Father Butt, in the
physics' theatre of university College, 16 Stephen's Green, north: of
his sister Dilly (Delia) in his father's house in Cabra.


What did Stephen see on raising his gaze to the height of a yard from
the fire towards the opposite wall?

Under a row of five coiled spring housebells a curvilinear rope,
stretched between two holdfasts athwart across the recess beside the
chimney pier, from which hung four smallsized square handkerchiefs
folded unattached consecutively in adjacent rectangles and one pair of
ladies' grey hose with Lisle suspender tops and feet in their habitual
position clamped by three erect wooden pegs two at their outer
extremities and the third at their point of junction.


What did Bloom see on the range?

On the right (smaller) hob a blue enamelled saucepan: on the left
(larger) hob a black iron kettle.


What did Bloom do at the range?

He removed the saucepan to the left hob, rose and carried the iron
kettle to the sink in order to tap the current by turning the faucet to
let it flow.


Did it flow?

Yes. From Roundwood reservoir in county Wicklow of a cubic capacity of
2400 million gallons, percolating through a subterranean aqueduct of
filter mains of single and double pipeage constructed at an initial
plant cost of 5 pounds per linear yard by way of the Dargle, Rathdown,
Glen of the Downs and Callowhill to the 26 acre reservoir at Stillorgan,
a distance of 22 statute miles, and thence, through a system of
relieving tanks, by a gradient of 250 feet to the city boundary at
Eustace bridge, upper Leeson street, though from prolonged summer drouth
and daily supply of 12 1/2 million gallons the water had fallen below
the sill of the overflow weir for which reason the borough surveyor and
waterworks engineer, Mr Spencer Harty, C. E., on the instructions of
the waterworks committee had prohibited the use of municipal water for
purposes other than those of consumption (envisaging the possibility of
recourse being had to the impotable water of the Grand and Royal canals
as in 1893) particularly as the South Dublin Guardians, notwithstanding
their ration of 15 gallons per day per pauper supplied through a 6 inch
meter, had been convicted of a wastage of 20,000 gallons per night by
a reading of their meter on the affirmation of the law agent of
the corporation, Mr Ignatius Rice, solicitor, thereby acting to the
detriment of another section of the public, selfsupporting taxpayers,
solvent, sound.

What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier,
returning to the range, admire?

Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature
in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator's
projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific
exceeding 8000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface
particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence
of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic
quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides:
its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar
icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance:
its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its
indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region
below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability
of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve
and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of
tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and
islands, its persistent formation of homothetic islands, peninsulas
and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and
volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns:
its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones:
its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and
confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic
currents, gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence
in seaquakes, waterspouts, Artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies,
freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers,
cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts:
its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs and
latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments
and exemplified by the well by the hole in the wall at Ashtown
gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its
composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part
of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead
Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate
dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst
and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and
paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow,
hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs
and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and
archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and
arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility
in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power
stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals,
rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality
derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level
to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe),
numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its
ubiquity as constituting 90 percent of the human body: the noxiousness
of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded
flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.


Having set the halffilled kettle on the now burning coals, why did he
return to the stillflowing tap?

To wash his soiled hands with a partially consumed tablet of
Barrington's lemonflavoured soap, to which paper still adhered, (bought
thirteen hours previously for fourpence and still unpaid for), in fresh
cold neverchanging everchanging water and dry them, face and hands, in a
long redbordered holland cloth passed over a wooden revolving roller.


What reason did Stephen give for declining Bloom's offer?

That he was hydrophobe, hating partial contact by immersion or total by
submersion in cold water, (his last bath having taken place in the month
of October of the preceding year), disliking the aqueous substances of
glass and crystal, distrusting aquacities of thought and language.


What impeded Bloom from giving Stephen counsels of hygiene and
prophylactic to which should be added suggestions concerning a
preliminary wetting of the head and contraction of the muscles with
rapid splashing of the face and neck and thoracic and epigastric region
in case of sea or river bathing, the parts of the human anatomy most
sensitive to cold being the nape, stomach and thenar or sole of foot?

The incompatibility of aquacity with the erratic originality of genius.


What additional didactic counsels did he similarly repress?

Dietary: concerning the respective percentage of protein and caloric
energy in bacon, salt ling and butter, the absence of the former in the
lastnamed and the abundance of the latter in the firstnamed.


Which seemed to the host to be the predominant qualities of his guest?

Confidence in himself, an equal and opposite power of abandonment and
recuperation.


What concomitant phenomenon took place in the vessel of liquid by the
agency of fire?

The phenomenon of ebullition. Fanned by a constant updraught of
ventilation between the kitchen and the chimneyflue, ignition was
communicated from the faggots of precombustible fuel to polyhedral
masses of bituminous coal, containing in compressed mineral form the
foliated fossilised decidua of primeval forests which had in turn
derived their vegetative existence from the sun, primal source of heat
(radiant), transmitted through omnipresent luminiferous diathermanous
ether. Heat (convected), a mode of motion developed by such
combustion, was constantly and increasingly conveyed from the source
of calorification to the liquid contained in the vessel, being radiated
through the uneven unpolished dark surface of the metal iron, in part
reflected, in part absorbed, in part transmitted, gradually raising
the temperature of the water from normal to boiling point, a rise in
temperature expressible as the result of an expenditure of 72 thermal
units needed to raise 1 pound of water from 50 degrees to 212 degrees
Fahrenheit.


What announced the accomplishment of this rise in temperature?

A double falciform ejection of water vapour from under the kettlelid at
both sides simultaneously.


For what personal purpose could Bloom have applied the water so boiled?

To shave himself.


What advantages attended shaving by night?

A softer beard: a softer brush if intentionally allowed to remain from
shave to shave in its agglutinated lather: a softer skin if unexpectedly
encountering female acquaintances in remote places at incustomary hours:
quiet reflections upon the course of the day: a cleaner sensation when
awaking after a fresher sleep since matutinal noises, premonitions and
perturbations, a clattered milkcan, a postman's double knock, a paper
read, reread while lathering, relathering the same spot, a shock, a
shoot, with thought of aught he sought though fraught with nought might
cause a faster rate of shaving and a nick on which incision plaster with
precision cut and humected and applied adhered: which was to be done.


Why did absence of light disturb him less than presence of noise?

Because of the surety of the sense of touch in his firm full masculine
feminine passive active hand.


What quality did it (his hand) possess but with what counteracting
influence?

The operative surgical quality but that he was reluctant to shed human
blood even when the end justified the means, preferring, in their
natural order, heliotherapy, psychophysicotherapeutics, osteopathic
surgery.


What lay under exposure on the lower, middle and upper shelves of the
kitchen dresser, opened by Bloom?

On the lower shelf five vertical breakfast plates, six horizontal
breakfast saucers on which rested inverted breakfast cups, a
moustachecup, uninverted, and saucer of Crown Derby, four white
goldrimmed eggcups, an open shammy purse displaying coins, mostly
copper, and a phial of aromatic (violet) comfits. On the middle shelf
a chipped eggcup containing pepper, a drum of table salt, four
conglomerated black olives in oleaginous paper, an empty pot of
Plumtree's potted meat, an oval wicker basket bedded with fibre and
containing one Jersey pear, a halfempty bottle of William Gilbey and
Co's white invalid port, half disrobed of its swathe of coralpink tissue
paper, a packet of Epps's soluble cocoa, five ounces of Anne Lynch's
choice tea at 2/- per lb in a crinkled leadpaper bag, a cylindrical
canister containing the best crystallised lump sugar, two onions, one,
the larger, Spanish, entire, the other, smaller, Irish, bisected with
augmented surface and more redolent, a jar of Irish Model Dairy's cream,
a jug of brown crockery containing a naggin and a quarter of soured
adulterated milk, converted by heat into water, acidulous serum and
semisolidified curds, which added to the quantity subtracted for Mr
Bloom's and Mrs Fleming's breakfasts, made one imperial pint, the total
quantity originally delivered, two cloves, a halfpenny and a small dish
containing a slice of fresh ribsteak. On the upper shelf a battery of
jamjars (empty) of various sizes and proveniences.


What attracted his attention lying on the apron of the dresser?

Four polygonal fragments of two lacerated scarlet betting tickets,
numbered 8 87, 88 6.


What reminiscences temporarily corrugated his brow?

Reminiscences of coincidences, truth stranger than fiction,
preindicative of the result of the Gold Cup flat handicap, the official
and definitive result of which he had read in the _Evening Telegraph_,
late pink edition, in the cabman's shelter, at Butt bridge.


Where had previous intimations of the result, effected or projected,
been received by him?

In Bernard Kiernan's licensed premises 8, 9 and 10 little Britain
street: in David Byrne's licensed premises, 14 Duke street: in O'Connell
street lower, outside Graham Lemon's when a dark man had placed in
his hand a throwaway (subsequently thrown away), advertising Elijah,
restorer of the church in Zion: in Lincoln place outside the premises of
F. W. Sweny and Co (Limited), dispensing chemists, when, when Frederick
M. (Bantam) Lyons had rapidly and successively requested, perused and
restituted the copy of the current issue of the _Freeman's Journal and
National Press_ which he had been about to throw away (subsequently
thrown away), he had proceeded towards the oriental edifice of
the Turkish and Warm Baths, 11 Leinster street, with the light of
inspiration shining in his countenance and bearing in his arms the
secret of the race, graven in the language of prediction.

What qualifying considerations allayed his perturbations?

The difficulties of interpretation since the significance of any event
followed its occurrence as variably as the acoustic report followed the
electrical discharge and of counterestimating against an actual loss
by failure to interpret the total sum of possible losses proceeding
originally from a successful interpretation.


His mood?

He had not risked, he did not expect, he had not been disappointed, he
was satisfied.


What satisfied him?

To have sustained no positive loss. To have brought a positive gain to
others. Light to the gentiles.


How did Bloom prepare a collation for a gentile?

He poured into two teacups two level spoonfuls, four in all, of Epps's
soluble cocoa and proceeded according to the directions for use printed
on the label, to each adding after sufficient time for infusion the
prescribed ingredients for diffusion in the manner and in the quantity
prescribed.


What supererogatory marks of special hospitality did the host show his
guest?

Relinquishing his symposiarchal right to the moustache cup of imitation
Crown Derby presented to him by his only daughter, Millicent (Milly),
he substituted a cup identical with that of his guest and served
extraordinarily to his guest and, in reduced measure, to himself the
viscous cream ordinarily reserved for the breakfast of his wife Marion
(Molly).


Was the guest conscious of and did he acknowledge these marks of
hospitality?

His attention was directed to them by his host jocosely, and he accepted
them seriously as they drank in jocoserious silence Epps's massproduct,
the creature cocoa.


Were there marks of hospitality which he contemplated but suppressed,
reserving them for another and for himself on future occasions to
complete the act begun?

The reparation of a fissure of the length of 1 1/2 inches in the right
side of his guest's jacket. A gift to his guest of one of the four
lady's handkerchiefs, if and when ascertained to be in a presentable
condition.


Who drank more quickly?

Bloom, having the advantage of ten seconds at the initiation and taking,
from the concave surface of a spoon along the handle of which a steady
flow of heat was conducted, three sips to his opponent's one, six to
two, nine to three.


What cerebration accompanied his frequentative act?

Concluding by inspection but erroneously that his silent companion was
engaged in mental composition he reflected on the pleasures derived from
literature of instruction rather than of amusement as he himself had
applied to the works of William Shakespeare more than once for the
solution of difficult problems in imaginary or real life.


Had he found their solution?

In spite of careful and repeated reading of certain classical passages,
aided by a glossary, he had derived imperfect conviction from the text,
the answers not bearing in all points.


What lines concluded his first piece of original verse written by him,
potential poet, at the age of 11 in 1877 on the occasion of the offering
of three prizes of 10/-, 5/- and 2/6 respectively for competition by the
_Shamrock_, a weekly newspaper?

     _An ambition to squint
     At my verses in print
     Makes me hope that for these you'll find room?.
     If you so condescend
     Then please place at the end
     The name of yours truly, L. Bloom._

Did he find four separating forces between his temporary guest and him?

Name, age, race, creed.


What anagrams had he made on his name in youth?

     Leopold Bloom
     Ellpodbomool
     Molldopeloob
     Bollopedoom
     Old Ollebo, M. P.


What acrostic upon the abbreviation of his first name had he (kinetic
poet) sent to Miss Marion (Molly) Tweedy on the 14 February 1888?

     _Poets oft have sung in rhyme
     Of music sweet their praise divine.
     Let them hymn it nine times nine.
     Dearer far than song or wine.
     You are mine. The world is mine._


What had prevented him from completing a topical song (music by R. G.
Johnston) on the events of the past, or fixtures for the actual, years,
entitled _If Brian Boru could but come back and see old Dublin now_,
commissioned by Michael Gunn, lessee of the Gaiety Theatre, 46, 47, 48,
49 South King street, and to be introduced into the sixth scene, the
valley of diamonds, of the second edition (30 January 1893) of the grand
annual Christmas pantomime _Sinbad the Sailor_ (produced by R Shelton
26 December 1892, written by Greenleaf Whittier, scenery by George
A. Jackson and Cecil Hicks, costumes by Mrs and Miss Whelan under
the personal supervision of Mrs Michael Gunn, ballets by Jessie Noir,
harlequinade by Thomas Otto) and sung by Nelly Bouverist, principal
girl?

Firstly, oscillation between events of imperial and of local interest,
the anticipated diamond jubilee of Queen Victoria (born 1820, acceded
1837) and the posticipated opening of the new municipal fish market:
secondly, apprehension of opposition from extreme circles on the
questions of the respective visits of Their Royal Highnesses the
duke and duchess of York (real) and of His Majesty King Brian Boru
(imaginary): thirdly, a conflict between professional etiquette and
professional emulation concerning the recent erections of the Grand
Lyric Hall on Burgh Quay and the Theatre Royal in Hawkins street:
fourthly, distraction resultant from compassion for Nelly Bouverist's
non-intellectual, non-political, non-topical expression of countenance
and concupiscence caused by Nelly Bouverist's revelations of white
articles of non-intellectual, non-political, non-topical underclothing
while she (Nelly Bouverist) was in the articles: fifthly, the
difficulties of the selection of appropriate music and humorous
allusions from _Everybody's Book of Jokes_ (1000 pages and a laugh in
every one): sixthly, the rhymes, homophonous and cacophonous, associated
with the names of the new lord mayor, Daniel Tallon, the new high
sheriff, Thomas Pile and the new solicitorgeneral, Dunbar Plunket
Barton.


What relation existed between their ages?

16 years before in 1888 when Bloom was of Stephen's present age Stephen
was 6. 16 years after in 1920 when Stephen would be of Bloom's present
age Bloom would be 54. In 1936 when Bloom would be 70 and Stephen 54
their ages initially in the ratio of 16 to 0 would be as 17 1/2 to 13
1/2, the proportion increasing and the disparity diminishing according
as arbitrary future years were added, for if the proportion existing in
1883 had continued immutable, conceiving that to be possible, till then
1904 when Stephen was 22 Bloom would be 374 and in 1920 when Stephen
would be 38, as Bloom then was, Bloom would be 646 while in 1952 when
Stephen would have attained the maximum postdiluvian age of 70 Bloom,
being 1190 years alive having been born in the year 714, would have
surpassed by 221 years the maximum antediluvian age, that of Methusalah,
969 years, while, if Stephen would continue to live until he would
attain that age in the year 3072 A.D., Bloom would have been obliged to
have been alive 83,300 years, having been obliged to have been born in
the year 81,396 B.C.


What events might nullify these calculations?

The cessation of existence of both or either, the inauguration of a
new era or calendar, the annihilation of the world and consequent
extermination of the human species, inevitable but impredictable.


How many previous encounters proved their preexisting acquaintance?

Two. The first in the lilacgarden of Matthew Dillon's house, Medina
Villa, Kimmage road, Roundtown, in 1887, in the company of Stephen's
mother, Stephen being then of the age of 5 and reluctant to give his
hand in salutation. The second in the coffeeroom of Breslin's hotel on a
rainy Sunday in the January of 1892, in the company of Stephen's father
and Stephen's granduncle, Stephen being then 5 years older.


Did Bloom accept the invitation to dinner given then by the son and
afterwards seconded by the father?

Very gratefully, with grateful appreciation, with sincere appreciative
gratitude, in appreciatively grateful sincerity of regret, he declined.


Did their conversation on the subject of these reminiscences reveal a
third connecting link between them?

Mrs Riordan (Dante), a widow of independent means, had resided in the
house of Stephen's parents from 1 September 1888 to 29 December 1891 and
had also resided during the years 1892, 1893 and 1894 in the City Arms
Hotel owned by Elizabeth O'Dowd of 54 Prussia street where, during parts
of the years 1893 and 1894, she had been a constant informant of Bloom
who resided also in the same hotel, being at that time a clerk in the
employment of Joseph Cuffe of 5 Smithfield for the superintendence of
sales in the adjacent Dublin Cattle market on the North Circular road.


Had he performed any special corporal work of mercy for her?

He had sometimes propelled her on warm summer evenings, an infirm widow
of independent, if limited, means, in her convalescent bathchair
with slow revolutions of its wheels as far as the corner of the North
Circular road opposite Mr Gavin Low's place of business where she had
remained for a certain time scanning through his onelensed binocular
fieldglasses unrecognisable citizens on tramcars, roadster bicycles
equipped with inflated pneumatic tyres, hackney carriages, tandems,
private and hired landaus, dogcarts, ponytraps and brakes passing from
the city to the Phoenix Park and vice versa.


Why could he then support that his vigil with the greater equanimity?

Because in middle youth he had often sat observing through a rondel
of bossed glass of a multicoloured pane the spectacle offered with
continual changes of the thoroughfare without, pedestrians, quadrupeds,
velocipedes, vehicles, passing slowly, quickly, evenly, round and round
and round the rim of a round and round precipitous globe.


What distinct different memories had each of her now eight years
deceased?

The older, her bezique cards and counters, her Skye terrier, her
suppositious wealth, her lapses of responsiveness and incipient
catarrhal deafness: the younger, her lamp of colza oil before the statue
of the Immaculate Conception, her green and maroon brushes for Charles
Stewart Parnell and for Michael Davitt, her tissue papers.


Were there no means still remaining to him to achieve the rejuvenation
which these reminiscences divulged to a younger companion rendered the
more desirable?

The indoor exercises, formerly intermittently practised, subsequently
abandoned, prescribed in Eugen Sandow's _Physical Strength and How to
Obtain It_ which, designed particularly for commercial men engaged in
sedentary occupations, were to be made with mental concentration in
front of a mirror so as to bring into play the various families of
muscles and produce successively a pleasant rigidity, a more pleasant
relaxation and the most pleasant repristination of juvenile agility.


Had any special agility been his in earlier youth?

Though ringweight lifting had been beyond his strength and the full
circle gyration beyond his courage yet as a High school scholar he
had excelled in his stable and protracted execution of the half lever
movement on the parallel bars in consequence of his abnormally developed
abdominal muscles.


Did either openly allude to their racial difference?

Neither.


What, reduced to their simplest reciprocal form, were Bloom's thoughts
about Stephen's thoughts about Bloom and about Stephen's thoughts about
Bloom's thoughts about Stephen?

He thought that he thought that he was a jew whereas he knew that he
knew that he knew that he was not.


What, the enclosures of reticence removed, were their respective
parentages?

Bloom, only born male transubstantial heir of Rudolf Virag (subsequently
Rudolph Bloom) of Szombathely, Vienna, Budapest, Milan, London and
Dublin and of Ellen Higgins, second daughter of Julius Higgins (born
Karoly) and Fanny Higgins (born Hegarty). Stephen, eldest surviving male
consubstantial heir of Simon Dedalus of Cork and Dublin and of Mary,
daughter of Richard and Christina Goulding (born Grier).


Had Bloom and Stephen been baptised, and where and by whom, cleric or
layman?

Bloom (three times), by the reverend Mr Gilmer Johnston M. A., alone,
in the protestant church of Saint Nicholas Without, Coombe, by James
O'Connor, Philip Gilligan and James Fitzpatrick, together, under a pump
in the village of Swords, and by the reverend Charles Malone C. C., in
the church of the Three Patrons, Rathgar. Stephen (once) by the reverend
Charles Malone C. C., alone, in the church of the Three Patrons,
Rathgar.


Did they find their educational careers similar?

Substituting Stephen for Bloom Stoom would have passed successively
through a dame's school and the high school. Substituting Bloom for
Stephen Blephen would have passed successively through the preparatory,
junior, middle and senior grades of the intermediate and through the
matriculation, first arts, second arts and arts degree courses of the
royal university.


Why did Bloom refrain from stating that he had frequented the university
of life?

Because of his fluctuating incertitude as to whether this observation
had or had not been already made by him to Stephen or by Stephen to him.


What two temperaments did they individually represent?

The scientific. The artistic.


What proofs did Bloom adduce to prove that his tendency was towards
applied, rather than towards pure, science?

Certain possible inventions of which he had cogitated when reclining
in a state of supine repletion to aid digestion, stimulated by his
appreciation of the importance of inventions now common but once
revolutionary, for example, the aeronautic parachute, the reflecting
telescope, the spiral corkscrew, the safety pin, the mineral water
siphon, the canal lock with winch and sluice, the suction pump.


Were these inventions principally intended for an improved scheme of
kindergarten?

Yes, rendering obsolete popguns, elastic airbladders, games of hazard,
catapults. They comprised astronomical kaleidoscopes exhibiting the
twelve constellations of the zodiac from Aries to Pisces, miniature
mechanical orreries, arithmetical gelatine lozenges, geometrical
to correspond with zoological biscuits, globemap playing balls,
historically costumed dolls.


What also stimulated him in his cogitations?

The financial success achieved by Ephraim Marks and Charles A. James,
the former by his 1d bazaar at 42 George's street, south, the latter
at his 6 1/2d shop and world's fancy fair and waxwork exhibition at 30
Henry street, admission 2d, children 1d: and the infinite possibilities
hitherto unexploited of the modern art of advertisement if condensed
in triliteral monoideal symbols, vertically of maximum visibility
(divined), horizontally of maximum legibility (deciphered) and of
magnetising efficacy to arrest involuntary attention, to interest, to
convince, to decide.


Such as?

K. II. Kino's 11/- Trousers. House of Keys. Alexander J. Keyes.


Such as not?

Look at this long candle. Calculate when it burns out and you receive
gratis 1 pair of our special non-compo boots, guaranteed 1 candle power.
Address: Barclay and Cook, 18 Talbot street.

Bacilikil (Insect Powder). Veribest (Boot Blacking). Uwantit (Combined
pocket twoblade penknife with corkscrew, nailfile and pipecleaner).


Such as never?

What is home without Plumtree's Potted Meat?

Incomplete.

With it an abode of bliss.

Manufactured by George Plumtree, 23 Merchants' quay, Dublin, put up in
4 oz pots, and inserted by Councillor Joseph P. Nannetti, M. P., Rotunda
Ward, 19 Hardwicke street, under the obituary notices and anniversaries
of deceases. The name on the label is Plumtree. A plumtree in a meatpot,
registered trade mark. Beware of imitations. Peatmot. Trumplee. Moutpat.
Plamtroo.


Which example did he adduce to induce Stephen to deduce that
originality, though producing its own reward, does not invariably
conduce to success?

His own ideated and rejected project of an illuminated showcart, drawn
by a beast of burden, in which two smartly dressed girls were to be
seated engaged in writing.


What suggested scene was then constructed by Stephen?

Solitary hotel in mountain pass. Autumn. Twilight. Fire lit. In dark
corner young man seated. Young woman enters. Restless. Solitary. She
sits. She goes to window. She stands. She sits. Twilight. She thinks.
On solitary hotel paper she writes. She thinks. She writes. She sighs.
Wheels and hoofs. She hurries out. He comes from his dark corner. He
seizes solitary paper. He holds it towards fire. Twilight. He reads.
Solitary.


What?

In sloping, upright and backhands: Queen's Hotel, Queen's Hotel, Queen's
Hotel. Queen's Ho...


What suggested scene was then reconstructed by Bloom?

The Queen's Hotel, Ennis, county Clare, where Rudolph Bloom (Rudolf
Virag) died on the evening of the 27 June 1886, at some hour unstated,
in consequence of an overdose of monkshood (aconite) selfadministered in
the form of a neuralgic liniment composed of 2 parts of aconite liniment
to I of chloroform liniment (purchased by him at 10.20 a.m. on the
morning of 27 June 1886 at the medical hall of Francis Dennehy, 17
Church street, Ennis) after having, though not in consequence of having,
purchased at 3.15 p.m. on the afternoon of 27 June 1886 a new boater
straw hat, extra smart (after having, though not in consequence of
having, purchased at the hour and in the place aforesaid, the toxin
aforesaid), at the general drapery store of James Cullen, 4 Main street,
Ennis.


Did he attribute this homonymity to information or coincidence or
intuition?

Coincidence.


Did he depict the scene verbally for his guest to see?

He preferred himself to see another's face and listen to another's
words by which potential narration was realised and kinetic temperament
relieved.


Did he see only a second coincidence in the second scene narrated to
him, described by the narrator as _A Pisgah Sight of Palestine or The
Parable of the Plums_?

It, with the preceding scene and with others unnarrated but existent by
implication, to which add essays on various subjects or moral apothegms
(e.g. _My Favourite Hero or Procrastination is the Thief of Time_)
composed during schoolyears, seemed to him to contain in itself and
in conjunction with the personal equation certain possibilities of
financial, social, personal and sexual success, whether specially
collected and selected as model pedagogic themes (of cent per cent
merit) for the use of preparatory and junior grade students or
contributed in printed form, following the precedent of Philip Beaufoy
or Doctor Dick or Heblon's _Studies in Blue_, to a publication of
certified circulation and solvency or employed verbally as intellectual
stimulation for sympathetic auditors, tacitly appreciative of successful
narrative and confidently augurative of successful achievement, during
the increasingly longer nights gradually following the summer solstice
on the day but three following, videlicet, Tuesday, 21 June (S. Aloysius
Gonzaga), sunrise 3.33 a.m., sunset 8.29 p.m.


Which domestic problem as much as, if not more than, any other
frequently engaged his mind?

What to do with our wives.


What had been his hypothetical singular solutions?

Parlour games (dominos, halma, tiddledywinks, spilikins, cup and ball,
nap, spoil five, bezique, twentyfive, beggar my neighbour, draughts,
chess or backgammon): embroidery, darning or knitting for the
policeaided clothing society: musical duets, mandoline and guitar, piano
and flute, guitar and piano: legal scrivenery or envelope addressing:
biweekly visits to variety entertainments: commercial activity as
pleasantly commanding and pleasingly obeyed mistress proprietress in
a cool dairy shop or warm cigar divan: the clandestine satisfaction of
erotic irritation in masculine brothels, state inspected and medically
controlled: social visits, at regular infrequent prevented intervals
and with regular frequent preventive superintendence, to and from female
acquaintances of recognised respectability in the vicinity: courses of
evening instruction specially designed to render liberal instruction
agreeable.


What instances of deficient mental development in his wife inclined him
in favour of the lastmentioned (ninth) solution?

In disoccupied moments she had more than once covered a sheet of paper
with signs and hieroglyphics which she stated were Greek and Irish and
Hebrew characters. She had interrogated constantly at varying intervals
as to the correct method of writing the capital initial of the name of
a city in Canada, Quebec. She understood little of political
complications, internal, or balance of power, external. In calculating
the addenda of bills she frequently had recourse to digital aid.
After completion of laconic epistolary compositions she abandoned
the implement of calligraphy in the encaustic pigment, exposed to
the corrosive action of copperas, green vitriol and nutgall. Unusual
polysyllables of foreign origin she interpreted phonetically or by false
analogy or by both: metempsychosis (met him pike hoses), _alias_ (a
mendacious person mentioned in sacred scripture).


What compensated in the false balance of her intelligence for these and
such deficiencies of judgment regarding persons, places and things?

The false apparent parallelism of all perpendicular arms of all
balances, proved true by construction. The counterbalance of her
proficiency of judgment regarding one person, proved true by experiment.


How had he attempted to remedy this state of comparative ignorance?

Variously. By leaving in a conspicuous place a certain book open at a
certain page: by assuming in her, when alluding explanatorily, latent
knowledge: by open ridicule in her presence of some absent other's
ignorant lapse.


With what success had he attempted direct instruction?

She followed not all, a part of the whole, gave attention with interest
comprehended with surprise, with care repeated, with greater difficulty
remembered, forgot with ease, with misgiving reremembered, rerepeated
with error.


What system had proved more effective?

Indirect suggestion implicating selfinterest.


Example?

She disliked umbrella with rain, he liked woman with umbrella, she
disliked new hat with rain, he liked woman with new hat, he bought new
hat with rain, she carried umbrella with new hat.


Accepting the analogy implied in his guest's parable which examples of
postexilic eminence did he adduce?

Three seekers of the pure truth, Moses of Egypt, Moses Maimonides,
author of _More Nebukim_ (Guide of the Perplexed) and Moses Mendelssohn
of such eminence that from Moses (of Egypt) to Moses (Mendelssohn) there
arose none like Moses (Maimonides).


What statement was made, under correction, by Bloom concerning a fourth
seeker of pure truth, by name Aristotle, mentioned, with permission, by
Stephen?

That the seeker mentioned had been a pupil of a rabbinical philosopher,
name uncertain.


Were other anapocryphal illustrious sons of the law and children of a
selected or rejected race mentioned?

Felix Bartholdy Mendelssohn (composer), Baruch Spinoza (philosopher),
Mendoza (pugilist), Ferdinand Lassalle (reformer, duellist).


What fragments of verse from the ancient Hebrew and ancient Irish
languages were cited with modulations of voice and translation of texts
by guest to host and by host to guest?

By Stephen: _suil, suil, suil arun, suil go siocair agus suil go cuin_
(walk, walk, walk your way, walk in safety, walk with care).


By Bloom: _Kkifeloch, harimon rakatejch m'baad l'zamatejch_ (thy temple
amid thy hair is as a slice of pomegranate).


How was a glyphic comparison of the phonic symbols of both languages
made in substantiation of the oral comparison?

By juxtaposition. On the penultimate blank page of a book of inferior
literary style, entituled _Sweets of Sin_ (produced by Bloom and so
manipulated that its front cover came in contact with the surface of
the table) with a pencil (supplied by Stephen) Stephen wrote the Irish
characters for gee, eh, dee, em, simple and modified, and Bloom in turn
wrote the Hebrew characters ghimel, aleph, daleth and (in the absence of
mem) a substituted qoph, explaining their arithmetical values as ordinal
and cardinal numbers, videlicet 3, 1, 4, and 100.


Was the knowledge possessed by both of each of these languages, the
extinct and the revived, theoretical or practical?

Theoretical, being confined to certain grammatical rules of accidence
and syntax and practically excluding vocabulary.


What points of contact existed between these languages and between the
peoples who spoke them?

The presence of guttural sounds, diacritic aspirations, epenthetic and
servile letters in both languages: their antiquity, both having been
taught on the plain of Shinar 242 years after the deluge in the seminary
instituted by Fenius Farsaigh, descendant of Noah, progenitor of Israel,
and ascendant of Heber and Heremon, progenitors of Ireland: their
archaeological, genealogical, hagiographical, exegetical, homiletic,
toponomastic, historical and religious literatures comprising the works
of rabbis and culdees, Torah, Talmud (Mischna and Ghemara), Massor,
Pentateuch, Book of the Dun Cow, Book of Ballymote, Garland of Howth,
Book of Kells: their dispersal, persecution, survival and revival: the
isolation of their synagogical and ecclesiastical rites in ghetto (S.
Mary's Abbey) and masshouse (Adam and Eve's tavern): the proscription
of their national costumes in penal laws and jewish dress acts: the
restoration in Chanah David of Zion and the possibility of Irish
political autonomy or devolution.


What anthem did Bloom chant partially in anticipation of that multiple,
ethnically irreducible consummation?

     _Kolod balejwaw pnimah
     Nefesch, jehudi, homijah._


Why was the chant arrested at the conclusion of this first distich?

In consequence of defective mnemotechnic.


How did the chanter compensate for this deficiency?

By a periphrastic version of the general text.


In what common study did their mutual reflections merge?

The increasing simplification traceable from the Egyptian epigraphic
hieroglyphs to the Greek and Roman alphabets and the anticipation of
modern stenography and telegraphic code in the cuneiform inscriptions
(Semitic) and the virgular quinquecostate ogham writing (Celtic). Did
the guest comply with his host's request?

Doubly, by appending his signature in Irish and Roman characters.

What was Stephen's auditive sensation?

He heard in a profound ancient male unfamiliar melody the accumulation
of the past.


What was Bloom's visual sensation?

He saw in a quick young male familiar form the predestination of a
future.


What were Stephen's and Bloom's quasisimultaneous volitional
quasisensations of concealed identities?

Visually, Stephen's: The traditional figure of hypostasis, depicted
by Johannes Damascenus, Lentulus Romanus and Epiphanius Monachus as
leucodermic, sesquipedalian with winedark hair. Auditively, Bloom's: The
traditional accent of the ecstasy of catastrophe.


What future careers had been possible for Bloom in the past and with
what exemplars?

In the church, Roman, Anglican or Nonconformist: exemplars, the very
reverend John Conmee S. J., the reverend T. Salmon, D. D., provost of
Trinity college, Dr Alexander J. Dowie. At the bar, English or Irish:
exemplars, Seymour Bushe, K. C., Rufus Isaacs, K. C. On the stage modern
or Shakespearean: exemplars, Charles Wyndham, high comedian Osmond
Tearle (died 1901), exponent of Shakespeare.


Did the host encourage his guest to chant in a modulated voice a strange
legend on an allied theme?

Reassuringly, their place, where none could hear them talk, being
secluded, reassured, the decocted beverages, allowing for subsolid
residual sediment of a mechanical mixture, water plus sugar plus cream
plus cocoa, having been consumed.


Recite the first (major) part of this chanted legend.

     _Little Harry Hughes and his schoolfellows all
     Went out for to play ball.
     And the very first ball little Harry Hughes played
     He drove it o'er the jew's garden wall.
     And the very second ball little Harry Hughes played
     He broke the jew's windows all._



How did the son of Rudolph receive this first part?


With unmixed feeling. Smiling, a jew he heard with pleasure and saw the
unbroken kitchen window.


Recite the second part (minor) of the legend.

     _Then out there came the jew's daughter
     And she all dressed in green.
     "Come back, come back, you pretty little boy,
     And play your ball again."

     "I can't come back and I won't come back
     Without my schoolfellows all.
     For if my master he did hear
     He'd make it a sorry ball."

     She took him by the lilywhite hand
     And led him along the hall
     Until she led him to a room
     Where none could hear him call.

     She took a penknife out of her pocket
     And cut off his little head.
     And now he'll play his ball no more
     For he lies among the dead._


How did the father of Millicent receive this second part?

With mixed feelings. Unsmiling, he heard and saw with wonder a jew's
daughter, all dressed in green.


Condense Stephen's commentary.

One of all, the least of all, is the victim predestined. Once by
inadvertence twice by design he challenges his destiny. It comes when he
is abandoned and challenges him reluctant and, as an apparition of hope
and youth, holds him unresisting. It leads him to a strange habitation,
to a secret infidel apartment, and there, implacable, immolates him,
consenting.


Why was the host (victim predestined) sad?

He wished that a tale of a deed should be told of a deed not by him
should by him not be told.


Why was the host (reluctant, unresisting) still?

In accordance with the law of the conservation of energy.


Why was the host (secret infidel) silent?

He weighed the possible evidences for and against ritual murder: the
incitations of the hierarchy, the superstition of the populace, the
propagation of rumour in continued fraction of veridicity, the envy of
opulence, the influence of retaliation, the sporadic reappearance of
atavistic delinquency, the mitigating circumstances of fanaticism,
hypnotic suggestion and somnambulism.


From which (if any) of these mental or physical disorders was he not
totally immune?

From hypnotic suggestion: once, waking, he had not recognised his
sleeping apartment: more than once, waking, he had been for an
indefinite time incapable of moving or uttering sounds. From
somnambulism: once, sleeping, his body had risen, crouched and
crawled in the direction of a heatless fire and, having attained
its destination, there, curled, unheated, in night attire had lain,
sleeping.


Had this latter or any cognate phenomenon declared itself in any member
of his family?

Twice, in Holles street and in Ontario terrace, his daughter Millicent
(Milly) at the ages of 6 and 8 years had uttered in sleep an exclamation
of terror and had replied to the interrogations of two figures in night
attire with a vacant mute expression.


What other infantile memories had he of her?

15 June 1889. A querulous newborn female infant crying to cause and
lessen congestion. A child renamed Padney Socks she shook with shocks
her moneybox: counted his three free moneypenny buttons, one, tloo,
tlee: a doll, a boy, a sailor she cast away: blond, born of two dark,
she had blond ancestry, remote, a violation, Herr Hauptmann Hainau,
Austrian army, proximate, a hallucination, lieutenant Mulvey, British
navy.


What endemic characteristics were present?

Conversely the nasal and frontal formation was derived in a direct
line of lineage which, though interrupted, would continue at distant
intervals to more distant intervals to its most distant intervals.


What memories had he of her adolescence?

She relegated her hoop and skippingrope to a recess. On the duke's lawn,
entreated by an English visitor, she declined to permit him to make and
take away her photographic image (objection not stated). On the South
Circular road in the company of Elsa Potter, followed by an individual
of sinister aspect, she went half way down Stamer street and turned
abruptly back (reason of change not stated). On the vigil of the 15th
anniversary of her birth she wrote a letter from Mullingar, county
Westmeath, making a brief allusion to a local student (faculty and year
not stated).


Did that first division, portending a second division, afflict him?

Less than he had imagined, more than he had hoped.


What second departure was contemporaneously perceived by him similarly,
if differently?

A temporary departure of his cat.


Why similarly, why differently?

Similarly, because actuated by a secret purpose the quest of a new male

(Mullingar student) or of a healing herb (valerian). Differently,
because of different possible returns to the inhabitants or to the
habitation.


In other respects were their differences similar?

In passivity, in economy, in the instinct of tradition, in
unexpectedness.


As?

Inasmuch as leaning she sustained her blond hair for him to ribbon it
for her (cf neckarching cat). Moreover, on the free surface of the lake
in Stephen's green amid inverted reflections of trees her uncommented
spit, describing concentric circles of waterrings, indicated by the
constancy of its permanence the locus of a somnolent prostrate fish (cf
mousewatching cat).

Again, in order to remember the date, combatants, issue and consequences
of a famous military engagement she pulled a plait of her hair (cf
earwashing cat). Furthermore, silly Milly, she dreamed of having had
an unspoken unremembered conversation with a horse whose name had been
Joseph to whom (which) she had offered a tumblerful of lemonade which
it (he) had appeared to have accepted (cf hearthdreaming cat). Hence, in
passivity, in economy, in the instinct of tradition, in unexpectedness,
their differences were similar.


In what way had he utilised gifts (1) an owl, (2) a clock, given as
matrimonial auguries, to interest and to instruct her?

As object lessons to explain: 1) the nature and habits of oviparous
animals, the possibility of aerial flight, certain abnormalities of
vision, the secular process of imbalsamation: 2) the principle of the
pendulum, exemplified in bob, wheelgear and regulator, the translation
in terms of human or social regulation of the various positions of
clockwise moveable indicators on an unmoving dial, the exactitude of the
recurrence per hour of an instant in each hour when the longer and the
shorter indicator were at the same angle of inclination, _videlicet_, 5
5/11 minutes past each hour per hour in arithmetical progression.


In what manners did she reciprocate?

She remembered: on the 27th anniversary of his birth she presented to
him a breakfast moustachecup of imitation Crown Derby porcelain ware.
She provided: at quarter day or thereabouts if or when purchases
had been made by him not for her she showed herself attentive to his
necessities, anticipating his desires. She admired: a natural phenomenon
having been explained by him to her she expressed the immediate desire
to possess without gradual acquisition a fraction of his science, the
moiety, the quarter, a thousandth part.


What proposal did Bloom, diambulist, father of Milly, somnambulist, make
to Stephen, noctambulist?

To pass in repose the hours intervening between Thursday (proper) and
Friday (normal) on an extemporised cubicle in the apartment immediately
above the kitchen and immediately adjacent to the sleeping apartment of
his host and hostess.


What various advantages would or might have resulted from a prolongation
of such an extemporisation?

For the guest: security of domicile and seclusion of study. For the
host: rejuvenation of intelligence, vicarious satisfaction. For the
hostess: disintegration of obsession, acquisition of correct Italian
pronunciation.


Why might these several provisional contingencies between a guest and
a hostess not necessarily preclude or be precluded by a permanent
eventuality of reconciliatory union between a schoolfellow and a jew's
daughter?

Because the way to daughter led through mother, the way to mother
through daughter.


To what inconsequent polysyllabic question of his host did the guest
return a monosyllabic negative answer?

If he had known the late Mrs Emily Sinico, accidentally killed at Sydney
Parade railway station, 14 October 1903.


What inchoate corollary statement was consequently suppressed by the
host?

A statement explanatory of his absence on the occasion of the interment
of Mrs Mary Dedalus (born Goulding), 26 June 1903, vigil of the
anniversary of the decease of Rudolph Bloom (born Virag).


Was the proposal of asylum accepted?

Promptly, inexplicably, with amicability, gratefully it was declined.
What exchange of money took place between host and guest?

The former returned to the latter, without interest, a sum of money
(1-7-0), one pound seven shillings sterling, advanced by the latter to
the former.


What counterproposals were alternately advanced, accepted, modified,
declined, restated in other terms, reaccepted, ratified, reconfirmed?

To inaugurate a prearranged course of Italian instruction, place
the residence of the instructed. To inaugurate a course of vocal
instruction, place the residence of the instructress. To inaugurate
a series of static semistatic and peripatetic intellectual dialogues,
places the residence of both speakers (if both speakers were resident in
the same place), the Ship hotel and tavern, 6 Lower Abbey street (W. and
E. Connery, proprietors), the National Library of Ireland, 10 Kildare
street, the National Maternity Hospital, 29, 30 and 31 Holles street, a
public garden, the vicinity of a place of worship, a conjunction of two
or more public thoroughfares, the point of bisection of a right line
drawn between their residences (if both speakers were resident in
different places).


What rendered problematic for Bloom the realisation of these mutually
selfexcluding propositions?

The irreparability of the past: once at a performance of Albert
Hengler's circus in the Rotunda, Rutland square, Dublin, an intuitive
particoloured clown in quest of paternity had penetrated from the ring
to a place in the auditorium where Bloom, solitary, was seated and had
publicly declared to an exhilarated audience that he (Bloom) was his
(the clown's) papa. The imprevidibility of the future: once in the
summer of 1898 he (Bloom) had marked a florin (2/-) with three notches
on the milled edge and tendered it m payment of an account due to and
received by J. and T. Davy, family grocers, 1 Charlemont Mall, Grand
Canal, for circulation on the waters of civic finance, for possible,
circuitous or direct, return.


Was the clown Bloom's son?

No.


Had Bloom's coin returned?

Never.


Why would a recurrent frustration the more depress him?

Because at the critical turningpoint of human existence he desired to
amend many social conditions, the product of inequality and avarice and
international animosity. He believed then that human life was infinitely
perfectible, eliminating these conditions?

There remained the generic conditions imposed by natural, as distinct
from human law, as integral parts of the human whole: the necessity of
destruction to procure alimentary sustenance: the painful character of
the ultimate functions of separate existence, the agonies of birth and
death: the monotonous menstruation of simian and (particularly) human
females extending from the age of puberty to the menopause: inevitable
accidents at sea, in mines and factories: certain very painful maladies
and their resultant surgical operations, innate lunacy and congenital
criminality, decimating epidemics: catastrophic cataclysms which make
terror the basis of human mentality: seismic upheavals the epicentres
of which are located in densely populated regions: the fact of vital
growth, through convulsions of metamorphosis, from infancy through
maturity to decay.


Why did he desist from speculation?

Because it was a task for a superior intelligence to substitute other
more acceptable phenomena in the place of the less acceptable phenomena
to be removed.


Did Stephen participate in his dejection?

He affirmed his significance as a conscious rational animal proceeding
syllogistically from the known to the unknown and a conscious rational
reagent between a micro and a macrocosm ineluctably constructed upon the
incertitude of the void.


Was this affirmation apprehended by Bloom?

Not verbally. Substantially.


What comforted his misapprehension?

That as a competent keyless citizen he had proceeded energetically from
the unknown to the known through the incertitude of the void.


In what order of precedence, with what attendant ceremony was the exodus
from the house of bondage to the wilderness of inhabitation effected?

Lighted Candle in Stick borne by

BLOOM

Diaconal Hat on Ashplant borne by

STEPHEN:


With what intonation secreto of what commemorative psalm?

The 113th, _modus peregrinus: In exitu Israel de Egypto: domus Jacob de
populo barbaro_.


What did each do at the door of egress?

Bloom set the candlestick on the floor. Stephen put the hat on his head.


For what creature was the door of egress a door of ingress?

For a cat.


What spectacle confronted them when they, first the host, then the
guest, emerged silently, doubly dark, from obscurity by a passage from
the rere of the house into the penumbra of the garden?

The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.


With what meditations did Bloom accompany his demonstration to his
companion of various constellations?

Meditations of evolution increasingly vaster: of the moon invisible in
incipient lunation, approaching perigee: of the infinite lattiginous
scintillating uncondensed milky way, discernible by daylight by an
observer placed at the lower end of a cylindrical vertical shaft 5000
ft deep sunk from the surface towards the centre of the earth: of Sirius
(alpha in Canis Maior) 10 lightyears (57,000,000,000,000 miles) distant
and in volume 900 times the dimension of our planet: of Arcturus: of the
precession of equinoxes: of Orion with belt and sextuple sun theta and
nebula in which 100 of our solar systems could be contained: of moribund
and of nascent new stars such as Nova in 1901: of our system plunging
towards the constellation of Hercules: of the parallax or parallactic
drift of socalled fixed stars, in reality evermoving wanderers from
immeasurably remote eons to infinitely remote futures in comparison with
which the years, threescore and ten, of allotted human life formed a
parenthesis of infinitesimal brevity.


Were there obverse meditations of involution increasingly less vast?

Of the eons of geological periods recorded in the stratifications of the
earth: of the myriad minute entomological organic existences concealed
in cavities of the earth, beneath removable stones, in hives and mounds,
of microbes, germs, bacteria, bacilli, spermatozoa: of the incalculable
trillions of billions of millions of imperceptible molecules contained
by cohesion of molecular affinity in a single pinhead: of the universe
of human serum constellated with red and white bodies, themselves
universes of void space constellated with other bodies, each, in
continuity, its universe of divisible component bodies of which each was
again divisible in divisions of redivisible component bodies, dividends
and divisors ever diminishing without actual division till, if the
progress were carried far enough, nought nowhere was never reached.


Why did he not elaborate these calculations to a more precise result?

Because some years previously in 1886 when occupied with the problem
of the quadrature of the circle he had learned of the existence of a
number computed to a relative degree of accuracy to be of such magnitude
and of so many places, e.g., the 9th power of the 9th power of 9, that,
the result having been obtained, 33 closely printed volumes of 1000
pages each of innumerable quires and reams of India paper would have to
be requisitioned in order to contain the complete tale of its printed
integers of units, tens, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands,
hundreds of thousands, millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions,
billions, the nucleus of the nebula of every digit of every series
containing succinctly the potentiality of being raised to the utmost
kinetic elaboration of any power of any of its powers.


Did he find the problems of the inhabitability of the planets and their
satellites by a race, given in species, and of the possible social and
moral redemption of said race by a redeemer, easier of solution?

Of a different order of difficulty. Conscious that the human organism,
normally capable of sustaining an atmospheric pressure of 19 tons,
when elevated to a considerable altitude in the terrestrial atmosphere
suffered with arithmetical progression of intensity, according as
the line of demarcation between troposphere and stratosphere was
approximated from nasal hemorrhage, impeded respiration and vertigo,
when proposing this problem for solution, he had conjectured as a
working hypothesis which could not be proved impossible that a more
adaptable and differently anatomically constructed race of beings might
subsist otherwise under Martian, Mercurial, Veneral, Jovian, Saturnian,
Neptunian or Uranian sufficient and equivalent conditions, though
an apogean humanity of beings created in varying forms with finite
differences resulting similar to the whole and to one another would
probably there as here remain inalterably and inalienably attached to
vanities, to vanities of vanities and to all that is vanity.

     And the problem of possible redemption?
     The minor was proved by the major.


Which various features of the constellations were in turn considered?

The various colours significant of various degrees of vitality (white,
yellow, crimson, vermilion, cinnabar): their degrees of brilliancy:
their magnitudes revealed up to and including the 7th: their positions:
the waggoner's star: Walsingham way: the chariot of David: the annular
cinctures of Saturn: the condensation of spiral nebulae into suns: the
interdependent gyrations of double suns: the independent synchronous
discoveries of Galileo, Simon Marius, Piazzi, Le Verrier, Herschel,
Galle: the systematisations attempted by Bode and Kepler of cubes
of distances and squares of times of revolution: the almost infinite
compressibility of hirsute comets and their vast elliptical egressive
and reentrant orbits from perihelion to aphelion: the sidereal origin of
meteoric stones: the Libyan floods on Mars about the period of the birth
of the younger astroscopist: the annual recurrence of meteoric showers
about the period of the feast of S. Lawrence (martyr, lo August): the
monthly recurrence known as the new moon with the old moon in her arms:
the posited influence of celestial on human bodies: the appearance of a
star (1st magnitude) of exceeding brilliancy dominating by night and
day (a new luminous sun generated by the collision and amalgamation in
incandescence of two nonluminous exsuns) about the period of the
birth of William Shakespeare over delta in the recumbent neversetting
constellation of Cassiopeia and of a star (2nd magnitude) of similar
origin but of lesser brilliancy which had appeared in and disappeared
from the constellation of the Corona Septentrionalis about the period
of the birth of Leopold Bloom and of other stars of (presumably) similar
origin which had (effectively or presumably) appeared in and disappeared
from the constellation of Andromeda about the period of the birth of
Stephen Dedalus, and in and from the constellation of Auriga some years
after the birth and death of Rudolph Bloom, junior, and in and from
other constellations some years before or after the birth or death of
other persons: the attendant phenomena of eclipses, solar and lunar,
from immersion to emersion, abatement of wind, transit of shadow,
taciturnity of winged creatures, emergence of nocturnal or crepuscular
animals, persistence of infernal light, obscurity of terrestrial waters,
pallor of human beings.


His (Bloom's) logical conclusion, having weighed the matter and allowing
for possible error?

That it was not a heaventree, not a heavengrot, not a heavenbeast, not
a heavenman. That it was a Utopia, there being no known method from
the known to the unknown: an infinity renderable equally finite by the
suppositious apposition of one or more bodies equally of the same and of
different magnitudes: a mobility of illusory forms immobilised in space,
remobilised in air: a past which possibly had ceased to exist as a
present before its probable spectators had entered actual present
existence.


Was he more convinced of the esthetic value of the spectacle?

Indubitably in consequence of the reiterated examples of poets in the
delirium of the frenzy of attachment or in the abasement of rejection
invoking ardent sympathetic constellations or the frigidity of the
satellite of their planet.


Did he then accept as an article of belief the theory of astrological
influences upon sublunary disasters?

It seemed to him as possible of proof as of confutation and the
nomenclature employed in its selenographical charts as attributable to
verifiable intuition as to fallacious analogy: the lake of dreams, the
sea of rains, the gulf of dews, the ocean of fecundity.


What special affinities appeared to him to exist between the moon and
woman?

Her antiquity in preceding and surviving successive tellurian
generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence:
her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising
and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced
invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to inaffirmative
interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power
to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to
incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her
visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant implacable resplendent
propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her
light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her
arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction,
when invisible.


What visible luminous sign attracted Bloom's, who attracted Stephen's,
gaze?

In the second storey (rere) of his (Bloom's) house the light of a
paraffin oil lamp with oblique shade projected on a screen of roller
blind supplied by Frank O'Hara, window blind, curtain pole and revolving
shutter manufacturer, 16 Aungier street.


How did he elucidate the mystery of an invisible attractive person, his
wife Marion (Molly) Bloom, denoted by a visible splendid sign, a lamp?

With indirect and direct verbal allusions or affirmations: with subdued
affection and admiration: with description: with impediment: with
suggestion.


Both then were silent?

Silent, each contemplating the other in both mirrors of the reciprocal
flesh of theirhisnothis fellowfaces.


Were they indefinitely inactive?

At Stephen's suggestion, at Bloom's instigation both, first Stephen,
then Bloom, in penumbra urinated, their sides contiguous, their organs
of micturition reciprocally rendered invisible by manual circumposition,
their gazes, first Bloom's, then Stephen's, elevated to the projected
luminous and semiluminous shadow.


Similarly?

The trajectories of their, first sequent, then simultaneous, urinations
were dissimilar: Bloom's longer, less irruent, in the incomplete form of
the bifurcated penultimate alphabetical letter, who in his ultimate
year at High School (1880) had been capable of attaining the point
of greatest altitude against the whole concurrent strength of the
institution, 210 scholars: Stephen's higher, more sibilant, who in the
ultimate hours of the previous day had augmented by diuretic consumption
an insistent vesical pressure.


What different problems presented themselves to each concerning the
invisible audible collateral organ of the other?

To Bloom: the problems of irritability, tumescence, rigidity,
reactivity, dimension, sanitariness, pilosity.

To Stephen: the problem of the sacerdotal integrity of Jesus circumcised
(I January, holiday of obligation to hear mass and abstain from
unnecessary servile work) and the problem as to whether the divine
prepuce, the carnal bridal ring of the holy Roman catholic apostolic
church, conserved in Calcata, were deserving of simple hyperduly or of
the fourth degree of latria accorded to the abscission of such divine
excrescences as hair and toenails.


What celestial sign was by both simultaneously observed?

A star precipitated with great apparent velocity across the firmament
from Vega in the Lyre above the zenith beyond the stargroup of the Tress
of Berenice towards the zodiacal sign of Leo.


How did the centripetal remainer afford egress to the centrifugal
departer?

By inserting the barrel of an arruginated male key in the hole of an
unstable female lock, obtaining a purchase on the bow of the key and
turning its wards from right to left, withdrawing a bolt from its
staple, pulling inward spasmodically an obsolescent unhinged door and
revealing an aperture for free egress and free ingress.


How did they take leave, one of the other, in separation?

Standing perpendicular at the same door and on different sides of its
base, the lines of their valedictory arms, meeting at any point and
forming any angle less than the sum of two right angles.


What sound accompanied the union of their tangent, the disunion of their
(respectively) centrifugal and centripetal hands?

The sound of the peal of the hour of the night by the chime of the bells
in the church of Saint George.


What echoes of that sound were by both and each heard?

By Stephen:

_Liliata rutilantium. Turma circumdet. Iubilantium te virginum. Chorus
excipiat._

By Bloom:

     _Heigho, heigho,
     Heigho, heigho._


Where were the several members of the company which with Bloom that day
at the bidding of that peal had travelled from Sandymount in the south
to Glasnevin in the north?

Martin Cunningham (in bed), Jack Power (in bed), Simon Dedalus (in bed),
Ned Lambert (in bed), Tom Kernan (in bed), Joe Hynes (in bed), John
Henry Menton (in bed), Bernard Corrigan (in bed), Patsy Dignam (in bed),
Paddy Dignam (in the grave).


Alone, what did Bloom hear?

The double reverberation of retreating feet on the heavenborn earth, the
double vibration of a jew's harp in the resonant lane.


Alone, what did Bloom feel?

The cold of interstellar space, thousands of degrees below freezing
point or the absolute zero of Fahrenheit, Centigrade or Reaumur: the
incipient intimations of proximate dawn.


Of what did bellchime and handtouch and footstep and lonechill remind
him?

Of companions now in various manners in different places defunct: Percy
Apjohn (killed in action, Modder River), Philip Gilligan (phthisis,
Jervis Street hospital), Matthew F. Kane (accidental drowning, Dublin
Bay), Philip Moisel (pyemia, Heytesbury street), Michael Hart (phthisis,
Mater Misericordiae hospital), Patrick Dignam (apoplexy, Sandymount).


What prospect of what phenomena inclined him to remain?

The disparition of three final stars, the diffusion of daybreak, the
apparition of a new solar disk.


Had he ever been a spectator of those phenomena?

Once, in 1887, after a protracted performance of charades in the house
of Luke Doyle, Kimmage, he had awaited with patience the apparition
of the diurnal phenomenon, seated on a wall, his gaze turned in the
direction of Mizrach, the east.


He remembered the initial paraphenomena?

More active air, a matutinal distant cock, ecclesiastical clocks at
various points, avine music, the isolated tread of an early wayfarer,
the visible diffusion of the light of an invisible luminous body, the
first golden limb of the resurgent sun perceptible low on the horizon.


Did he remain?

With deep inspiration he returned, retraversing the garden, reentering
the passage, reclosing the door. With brief suspiration he reassumed the
candle, reascended the stairs, reapproached the door of the front room,
hallfloor, and reentered.


What suddenly arrested his ingress?

The right temporal lobe of the hollow sphere of his cranium came into
contact with a solid timber angle where, an infinitesimal but sensible
fraction of a second later, a painful sensation was located in
consequence of antecedent sensations transmitted and registered.


Describe the alterations effected in the disposition of the articles of
furniture.

A sofa upholstered in prune plush had been translocated from opposite
the door to the ingleside near the compactly furled Union Jack (an
alteration which he had frequently intended to execute): the blue and
white checker inlaid majolicatopped table had been placed opposite the
door in the place vacated by the prune plush sofa: the walnut sideboard
(a projecting angle of which had momentarily arrested his ingress) had
been moved from its position beside the door to a more advantageous but
more perilous position in front of the door: two chairs had been moved
from right and left of the ingleside to the position originally occupied
by the blue and white checker inlaid majolicatopped table.


Describe them.

One: a squat stuffed easychair, with stout arms extended and back
slanted to the rere, which, repelled in recoil, had then upturned an
irregular fringe of a rectangular rug and now displayed on its amply
upholstered seat a centralised diffusing and diminishing discolouration.
The other: a slender splayfoot chair of glossy cane curves, placed
directly opposite the former, its frame from top to seat and from seat
to base being varnished dark brown, its seat being a bright circle of
white plaited rush.


What significances attached to these two chairs?

Significances of similitude, of posture, of symbolism, of circumstantial
evidence, of testimonial supermanence.


What occupied the position originally occupied by the sideboard?

A vertical piano (Cadby) with exposed keyboard, its closed coffin
supporting a pair of long yellow ladies' gloves and an emerald ashtray
containing four consumed matches, a partly consumed cigarette and two
discoloured ends of cigarettes, its musicrest supporting the music in
the key of G natural for voice and piano of _Love's Old Sweet Song_
(words by G. Clifton Bingham, composed by J. L. Molloy, sung by Madam
Antoinette Sterling) open at the last page with the final indications
_ad libitum, forte_, pedal, _animato_, sustained pedal, _ritirando_,
close.


With what sensations did Bloom contemplate in rotation these objects?

With strain, elevating a candlestick: with pain, feeling on his right
temple a contused tumescence: with attention, focussing his gaze on
a large dull passive and a slender bright active: with solicitation,
bending and downturning the upturned rugfringe: with amusement,
remembering Dr Malachi Mulligan's scheme of colour containing the
gradation of green: with pleasure, repeating the words and antecedent
act and perceiving through various channels of internal sensibility
the consequent and concomitant tepid pleasant diffusion of gradual
discolouration.


His next proceeding?

From an open box on the majolicatopped table he extracted a black
diminutive cone, one inch in height, placed it on its circular base on
a small tin plate, placed his candlestick on the right corner of the
mantelpiece, produced from his waistcoat a folded page of prospectus
(illustrated) entitled Agendath Netaim, unfolded the same, examined
it superficially, rolled it into a thin cylinder, ignited it in the
candleflame, applied it when ignited to the apex of the cone till the
latter reached the stage of rutilance, placed the cylinder in the basin
of the candlestick disposing its unconsumed part in such a manner as to
facilitate total combustion.


What followed this operation?

The truncated conical crater summit of the diminutive volcano emitted a
vertical and serpentine fume redolent of aromatic oriental incense.


What homothetic objects, other than the candlestick, stood on the
mantelpiece?

A timepiece of striated Connemara marble, stopped at the hour of 4.46
a.m. on the 21 March 1896, matrimonial gift of Matthew Dillon: a dwarf
tree of glacial arborescence under a transparent bellshade, matrimonial
gift of Luke and Caroline Doyle: an embalmed owl, matrimonial gift of
Alderman John Hooper.


What interchanges of looks took place between these three objects and
Bloom?

In the mirror of the giltbordered pierglass the undecorated back of the
dwarf tree regarded the upright back of the embalmed owl. Before
the mirror the matrimonial gift of Alderman John Hooper with a clear
melancholy wise bright motionless compassionate gaze regarded Bloom
while Bloom with obscure tranquil profound motionless compassionated
gaze regarded the matrimonial gift of Luke and Caroline Doyle.


What composite asymmetrical image in the mirror then attracted his
attention?

The image of a solitary (ipsorelative) mutable (aliorelative) man.


Why solitary (ipsorelative)?

_Brothers and sisters had he none. Yet that man's father was his
grandfather's son._


Why mutable (aliorelative)?

From infancy to maturity he had resembled his maternal procreatrix.
From maturity to senility he would increasingly resemble his paternal
procreator.


What final visual impression was communicated to him by the mirror?

The optical reflection of several inverted volumes improperly arranged
and not in the order of their common letters with scintillating titles
on the two bookshelves opposite.


Catalogue these books.

_Thom's Dublin Post Office Directory, 1886_. Denis Florence M'Carthy's
_Poetical Works_ (copper beechleaf bookmark at p. 5). Shakespeare's
_Works_ (dark crimson morocco, goldtooled).

_The Useful Ready Reckoner_ (brown cloth).

_The Secret History of the Court of Charles II_ (red cloth, tooled
binding). _The Child's Guide_ (blue cloth).

_The Beauties of Killarney_ (wrappers).

_When We Were Boys_ by William O'Brien M. P. (green cloth, slightly
faded, envelope bookmark at p. 217).

_Thoughts from Spinoza_ (maroon leather).

_The Story of the Heavens_ by Sir Robert Ball (blue cloth). Ellis's
_Three Trips to Madagascar_ (brown cloth, title obliterated).

_The Stark-Munro Letters_ by A. Conan Doyle, property of the City of
Dublin Public Library, 106 Capel street, lent 21 May (Whitsun Eve) 1904,
due 4 June 1904, 13 days overdue (black cloth binding, bearing white
letternumber ticket).

_Voyages in China_ by "Viator" (recovered with brown paper, red ink
title).

_Philosophy of the Talmud_ (sewn pamphlet). Lockhart's _Life of
Napoleon_ (cover wanting, marginal annotations, minimising victories,
aggrandising defeats of the protagonist).

_Soll und Haben_ by Gustav Freytag (black boards, Gothic characters,
cigarette coupon bookmark at p. 24). Hozier's _History of the
Russo-Turkish War_ (brown cloth, a volumes, with gummed label, Garrison
Library, Governor's Parade, Gibraltar, on verso of cover).

_Laurence Bloomfield in Ireland_ by William Allingham (second edition,
green cloth, gilt trefoil design, previous owner's name on recto of
flyleaf erased).

_A Handbook of Astronomy_ (cover, brown leather, detached, S plates,
antique letterpress long primer, author's footnotes nonpareil, marginal
clues brevier, captions small pica).

_The Hidden Life of Christ_ (black boards).

_In the Track of the Sun_ (yellow cloth, titlepage missing, recurrent
title intestation).

_Physical Strength and How to Obtain It_ by Eugen Sandow (red cloth).

_Short but yet Plain Elements of Geometry_ written in French by F.
Ignat. Pardies and rendered into English by John Harris D. D. London,
printed for R. Knaplock at the Bifhop's Head, MDCCXI, with dedicatory
epiftle to his worthy friend Charles Cox, efquire, Member of Parliament
for the burgh of Southwark and having ink calligraphed statement on the
flyleaf certifying that the book was the property of Michael Gallagher,
dated this 10th day of May 1822 and requefting the perfon who should
find it, if the book should be loft or go aftray, to reftore it to
Michael Gallagher, carpenter, Dufery Gate, Ennifcorthy, county Wicklow,
the fineft place in the world.


What reflections occupied his mind during the process of reversion of
the inverted volumes?

The necessity of order, a place for everything and everything in its
place: the deficient appreciation of literature possessed by females:
the incongruity of an apple incuneated in a tumbler and of an umbrella
inclined in a closestool: the insecurity of hiding any secret document
behind, beneath or between the pages of a book.


Which volume was the largest in bulk?

Hozier's _History of the Russo-Turkish war._


What among other data did the second volume of the work in question
contain?

The name of a decisive battle (forgotten), frequently remembered by a
decisive officer, major Brian Cooper Tweedy (remembered).


Why, firstly and secondly, did he not consult the work in question?

Firstly, in order to exercise mnemotechnic: secondly, because after an
interval of amnesia, when, seated at the central table, about to consult
the work in question, he remembered by mnemotechnic the name of the
military engagement, Plevna.


What caused him consolation in his sitting posture?

The candour, nudity, pose, tranquility, youth, grace, sex, counsel of a
statue erect in the centre of the table, an image of Narcissus purchased
by auction from P. A. Wren, 9 Bachelor's Walk.


What caused him irritation in his sitting posture? Inhibitory pressure
of collar (size 17) and waistcoat (5 buttons), two articles of clothing
superfluous in the costume of mature males and inelastic to alterations
of mass by expansion.


How was the irritation allayed?

He removed his collar, with contained black necktie and collapsible
stud, from his neck to a position on the left of the table. He
unbuttoned successively in reversed direction waistcoat, trousers, shirt
and vest along the medial line of irregular incrispated black hairs
extending in triangular convergence from the pelvic basin over the
circumference of the abdomen and umbilicular fossicle along the medial
line of nodes to the intersection of the sixth pectoral vertebrae,
thence produced both ways at right angles and terminating in circles
described about two equidistant points, right and left, on the summits
of the mammary prominences. He unbraced successively each of six minus
one braced trouser buttons, arranged in pairs, of which one incomplete.


What involuntary actions followed?

He compressed between 2 fingers the flesh circumjacent to a cicatrice in
the left infracostal region below the diaphragm resulting from a sting
inflicted 2 weeks and 3 days previously (23 May 1904) by a bee.
He scratched imprecisely with his right hand, though insensible of
prurition, various points and surfaces of his partly exposed, wholly
abluted skin. He inserted his left hand into the left lower pocket of
his waistcoat and extracted and replaced a silver coin (I shilling),
placed there (presumably) on the occasion (17 October 1903) of the
interment of Mrs Emily Sinico, Sydney Parade.


Compile the budget for 16 June 1904. DEBIT

     1 Pork Kidney
     1 Copy FREEMAN'S JOURNAL
     1 Bath And Gratification
     Tramfare
     1 In Memoriam Patrick Dignam
     2 Banbury cakes
     1 Lunch
     1 Renewal fee for book
     1 Packet Notepaper and Envelopes
     1 Dinner and Gratification
     1 Postal Order and Stamp
     Tramfare
     1 Pig's Foot
     1 Sheep's Trotter
     1 Cake Fry's Plain Chocolate
     1 Square Soda Bread
     1 Coffee and Bun
     Loan (Stephen Dedalus) refunded
     BALANCE


     L. s. d.
     0--0--3
     0--0--1
     0--1--6
     0--0--1
     0--5--0
     0--0--1
     0--0--7
     0--1--0
     0--0--2
     0--2--0
     0--2--8
     0--0--1
     0--0--4
     0--0--3
     0--0--1
     0--0--4
     0--0--4
     1--7--0
     0-17--5
     2-19--3
     CREDIT

     Cash in hand
     Commission recd. _Freeman's Journal_
     Loan (Stephen Dedalus)





     L. s. d.
     0--4--9
     1--7--6
     1--7--0





     2-19--3




Did the process of divestiture continue?

Sensible of a benignant persistent ache in his footsoles he extended
his foot to one side and observed the creases, protuberances and salient
points caused by foot pressure in the course of walking repeatedly in
several different directions, then, inclined, he disnoded the laceknots,
unhooked and loosened the laces, took off each of his two boots for the
second time, detached the partially moistened right sock through the
fore part of which the nail of his great toe had again effracted, raised
his right foot and, having unhooked a purple elastic sock suspender,
took off his right sock, placed his unclothed right foot on the margin
of the seat of his chair, picked at and gently lacerated the protruding
part of the great toenail, raised the part lacerated to his nostrils and
inhaled the odour of the quick, then, with satisfaction, threw away the
lacerated ungual fragment.


Why with satisfaction?

Because the odour inhaled corresponded to other odours inhaled of other
ungual fragments, picked and lacerated by Master Bloom, pupil of Mrs
Ellis's juvenile school, patiently each night in the act of brief
genuflection and nocturnal prayer and ambitious meditation.


In what ultimate ambition had all concurrent and consecutive ambitions
now coalesced?

Not to inherit by right of primogeniture, gavelkind or borough English,
or possess in perpetuity an extensive demesne of a sufficient number of
acres, roods and perches, statute land measure (valuation 42 pounds), of
grazing turbary surrounding a baronial hall with gatelodge and carriage
drive nor, on the other hand, a terracehouse or semidetached villa,
described as _Rus in Urbe_ or _Qui si sana_, but to purchase by private
treaty in fee simple a thatched bungalowshaped 2 storey dwellinghouse of
southerly aspect, surmounted by vane and lightning conductor, connected
with the earth, with porch covered by parasitic plants (ivy or Virginia
creeper), halldoor, olive green, with smart carriage finish and neat
doorbrasses, stucco front with gilt tracery at eaves and gable, rising,
if possible, upon a gentle eminence with agreeable prospect from balcony
with stone pillar parapet over unoccupied and unoccupyable interjacent
pastures and standing in 5 or 6 acres of its own ground, at such
a distance from the nearest public thoroughfare as to render its
houselights visible at night above and through a quickset hornbeam hedge
of topiary cutting, situate at a given point not less than 1 statute
mile from the periphery of the metropolis, within a time limit of not
more than 15 minutes from tram or train line (e.g., Dundrum, south, or
Sutton, north, both localities equally reported by trial to resemble the
terrestrial poles in being favourable climates for phthisical subjects),
the premises to be held under feefarm grant, lease 999 years, the
messuage to consist of 1 drawingroom with baywindow (2 lancets),
thermometer affixed, 1 sittingroom, 4 bedrooms, 2 servants' rooms, tiled
kitchen with close range and scullery, lounge hall fitted with linen
wallpresses, fumed oak sectional bookcase containing the Encyclopaedia
Britannica and New Century Dictionary, transverse obsolete medieval and
oriental weapons, dinner gong, alabaster lamp, bowl pendant, vulcanite
automatic telephone receiver with adjacent directory, handtufted
Axminster carpet with cream ground and trellis border, loo table with
pillar and claw legs, hearth with massive firebrasses and ormolu mantel
chronometer clock, guaranteed timekeeper with cathedral chime, barometer
with hygrographic chart, comfortable lounge settees and corner fitments,
upholstered in ruby plush with good springing and sunk centre, three
banner Japanese screen and cuspidors (club style, rich winecoloured
leather, gloss renewable with a minimum of labour by use of linseed
oil and vinegar) and pyramidically prismatic central chandelier lustre,
bentwood perch with fingertame parrot (expurgated language), embossed
mural paper at 10/- per dozen with transverse swags of carmine floral
design and top crown frieze, staircase, three continuous flights at
successive right angles, of varnished cleargrained oak, treads and
risers, newel, balusters and handrail, with steppedup panel dado,
dressed with camphorated wax: bathroom, hot and cold supply, reclining
and shower: water closet on mezzanine provided with opaque singlepane
oblong window, tipup seat, bracket lamp, brass tierod and brace,
armrests, footstool and artistic oleograph on inner face of door:
ditto, plain: servants' apartments with separate sanitary and hygienic
necessaries for cook, general and betweenmaid (salary, rising by
biennial unearned increments of 2 pounds, with comprehensive fidelity
insurance, annual bonus (1 pound) and retiring allowance (based on
the 65 system) after 30 years' service), pantry, buttery, larder,
refrigerator, outoffices, coal and wood cellarage with winebin (still
and sparkling vintages) for distinguished guests, if entertained to
dinner (evening dress), carbon monoxide gas supply throughout.


What additional attractions might the grounds contain?

As addenda, a tennis and fives court, a shrubbery, a glass summerhouse
with tropical palms, equipped in the best botanical manner, a rockery
with waterspray, a beehive arranged on humane principles, oval
flowerbeds in rectangular grassplots set with eccentric ellipses of
scarlet and chrome tulips, blue scillas, crocuses, polyanthus, sweet
William, sweet pea, lily of the valley (bulbs obtainable from sir James
W. Mackey (Limited) wholesale and retail seed and bulb merchants and
nurserymen, agents for chemical manures, 23 Sackville street, upper), an
orchard, kitchen garden and vinery protected against illegal trespassers
by glasstopped mural enclosures, a lumbershed with padlock for various
inventoried implements.


As?

Eeltraps, lobsterpots, fishingrods, hatchet, steelyard, grindstone,
clodcrusher, swatheturner, carriagesack, telescope ladder, 10 tooth
rake, washing clogs, haytedder, tumbling rake, billhook, paintpot,
brush, hoe and so on.

What improvements might be subsequently introduced?

A rabbitry and fowlrun, a dovecote, a botanical conservatory, 2 hammocks
(lady's and gentleman's), a sundial shaded and sheltered by laburnum
or lilac trees, an exotically harmonically accorded Japanese tinkle
gatebell affixed to left lateral gatepost, a capacious waterbutt,
a lawnmower with side delivery and grassbox, a lawnsprinkler with
hydraulic hose.


What facilities of transit were desirable?

When citybound frequent connection by train or tram from their
respective intermediate station or terminal. When countrybound
velocipedes, a chainless freewheel roadster cycle with side basketcar
attached, or draught conveyance, a donkey with wicker trap or smart
phaeton with good working solidungular cob (roan gelding, 14 h).


What might be the name of this erigible or erected residence?

Bloom Cottage. Saint Leopold's. Flowerville.


Could Bloom of 7 Eccles street foresee Bloom of Flowerville?

In loose allwool garments with Harris tweed cap, price 8/6, and useful
garden boots with elastic gussets and wateringcan, planting aligned
young firtrees, syringing, pruning, staking, sowing hayseed, trundling a
weedladen wheelbarrow without excessive fatigue at sunset amid the scent
of newmown hay, ameliorating the soil, multiplying wisdom, achieving
longevity.


What syllabus of intellectual pursuits was simultaneously possible?

Snapshot photography, comparative study of religions, folklore relative
to various amatory and superstitious practices, contemplation of the
celestial constellations.


What lighter recreations?

Outdoor: garden and fieldwork, cycling on level macadamised causeways
ascents of moderately high hills, natation in secluded fresh water and
unmolested river boating in secure wherry or light curricle with kedge
anchor on reaches free from weirs and rapids (period of estivation),
vespertinal perambulation or equestrian circumprocession with inspection
of sterile landscape and contrastingly agreeable cottagers' fires of
smoking peat turves (period of hibernation). Indoor: discussion in
tepid security of unsolved historical and criminal problems: lecture of
unexpurgated exotic erotic masterpieces: house carpentry with toolbox
containing hammer, awl nails, screws, tintacks, gimlet, tweezers,
bullnose plane and turnscrew. Might he become a gentleman farmer of
field produce and live stock?

Not impossibly, with 1 or 2 stripper cows, 1 pike of upland hay and
requisite farming implements, e.g., an end-to-end churn, a turnip pulper
etc.


What would be his civic functions and social status among the county
families and landed gentry?

Arranged successively in ascending powers of hierarchical order, that
of gardener, groundsman, cultivator, breeder, and at the zenith of his
career, resident magistrate or justice of the peace with a family crest
and coat of arms and appropriate classical motto _(Semper paratus_),
duly recorded in the court directory (Bloom, Leopold P., M. P., P. C.,
K. P., L. L. D. (_honoris causa_), Bloomville, Dundrum) and mentioned in
court and fashionable intelligence (Mr and Mrs Leopold Bloom have left
Kingstown for England).


What course of action did he outline for himself in such capacity?

A course that lay between undue clemency and excessive rigour:
the dispensation in a heterogeneous society of arbitrary classes,
incessantly rearranged in terms of greater and lesser social inequality,
of unbiassed homogeneous indisputable justice, tempered with mitigants
of the widest possible latitude but exactable to the uttermost farthing
with confiscation of estate, real and personal, to the crown. Loyal to
the highest constituted power in the land, actuated by an innate love of
rectitude his aims would be the strict maintenance of public order,
the repression of many abuses though not of all simultaneously (every
measure of reform or retrenchment being a preliminary solution to be
contained by fluxion in the final solution), the upholding of the letter
of the law (common, statute and law merchant) against all traversers in
covin and trespassers acting in contravention of bylaws and regulations,
all resuscitators (by trespass and petty larceny of kindlings) of
venville rights, obsolete by desuetude, all orotund instigators
of international persecution, all perpetuators of international
animosities, all menial molestors of domestic conviviality, all
recalcitrant violators of domestic connubiality.


Prove that he had loved rectitude from his earliest youth.

To Master Percy Apjohn at High School in 1880 he had divulged his
disbelief in the tenets of the Irish (protestant) church (to which his
father Rudolf Virag (later Rudolph Bloom) had been converted from the
Israelitic faith and communion in 1865 by the Society for promoting
Christianity among the jews) subsequently abjured by him in favour of
Roman catholicism at the epoch of and with a view to his matrimony
in 1888. To Daniel Magrane and Francis Wade in 1882 during a juvenile
friendship (terminated by the premature emigration of the former) he
had advocated during nocturnal perambulations the political theory of
colonial (e.g. Canadian) expansion and the evolutionary theories of
Charles Darwin, expounded in _The Descent of Man_ and _The Origin
of Species_. In 1885 he had publicly expressed his adherence to the
collective and national economic programme advocated by James Fintan
Lalor, John Fisher Murray, John Mitchel, J. F. X. O'Brien and others,
the agrarian policy of Michael Davitt, the constitutional agitation of
Charles Stewart Parnell (M. P. for Cork City), the programme of
peace, retrenchment and reform of William Ewart Gladstone (M. P. for
Midlothian, N. B.) and, in support of his political convictions, had
climbed up into a secure position amid the ramifications of a tree
on Northumberland road to see the entrance (2 February 1888) into the
capital of a demonstrative torchlight procession of 20,000 torchbearers,
divided into 120 trade corporations, bearing 2000 torches in escort of
the marquess of Ripon and (honest) John Morley.


How much and how did he propose to pay for this country residence?

As per prospectus of the Industrious Foreign Acclimatised Nationalised
Friendly Stateaided Building Society (incorporated 1874), a maximum
of 60 pounds per annum, being 1/6 of an assured income, derived from
giltedged securities, representing at 5 % simple interest on capital of
1200 pounds (estimate of price at 20 years' purchase), of which to be
paid on acquisition and the balance in the form of annual rent, viz. 800
pounds plus 2 1/2 % interest on the same, repayable quarterly in equal
annual instalments until extinction by amortisation of loan advanced for
purchase within a period of 20 years, amounting to an annual rental of
64 pounds, headrent included, the titledeeds to remain in possession
of the lender or lenders with a saving clause envisaging forced sale,
foreclosure and mutual compensation in the event of protracted failure
to pay the terms assigned, otherwise the messuage to become the absolute
property of the tenant occupier upon expiry of the period of years
stipulated.


What rapid but insecure means to opulence might facilitate immediate
purchase?

A private wireless telegraph which would transmit by dot and dash system
the result of a national equine handicap (flat or steeplechase) of I or
more miles and furlongs won by an outsider at odds of 50 to 1 at 3 hr
8 m p.m. at Ascot (Greenwich time), the message being received and
available for betting purposes in Dublin at 2.59 p.m. (Dunsink time).
The unexpected discovery of an object of great monetary value (precious
stone, valuable adhesive or impressed postage stamps (7 schilling,
mauve, imperforate, Hamburg, 1866: 4 pence, rose, blue paper, perforate,
Great Britain, 1855: 1 franc, stone, official, rouletted, diagonal
surcharge, Luxemburg, 1878), antique dynastical ring, unique relic) in
unusual repositories or by unusual means: from the air (dropped by an
eagle in flight), by fire (amid the carbonised remains of an incendiated
edifice), in the sea (amid flotsam, jetsam, lagan and derelict), on
earth (in the gizzard of a comestible fowl). A Spanish prisoner's
donation of a distant treasure of valuables or specie or bullion lodged
with a solvent banking corporation loo years previously at 5% compound
interest of the collective worth of 5,000,000 pounds stg (five million
pounds sterling). A contract with an inconsiderate contractee for the
delivery of 32 consignments of some given commodity in consideration of
cash payment on delivery per delivery at the initial rate of 1/4d to be
increased constantly in the geometrical progression of 2 (1/4d, 1/2d,
1d, 2d, 4d, 8d, 1s 4d, 2s 8d to 32 terms). A prepared scheme
based on a study of the laws of probability to break the bank at Monte
Carlo. A solution of the secular problem of the quadrature of the
circle, government premium 1,000,000 pounds sterling.


Was vast wealth acquirable through industrial channels?

The reclamation of dunams of waste arenary soil, proposed in the
prospectus of Agendath Netaim, Bleibtreustrasse, Berlin, W. 15, by the
cultivation of orange plantations and melonfields and reafforestation.
The utilisation of waste paper, fells of sewer rodents, human excrement
possessing chemical properties, in view of the vast production of the
first, vast number of the second and immense quantity of the third,
every normal human being of average vitality and appetite producing
annually, cancelling byproducts of water, a sum total of 80 lbs. (mixed
animal and vegetable diet), to be multiplied by 4,386,035, the total
population of Ireland according to census returns of 1901.


Were there schemes of wider scope?

A scheme to be formulated and submitted for approval to the harbour
commissioners for the exploitation of white coal (hydraulic power),
obtained by hydroelectric plant at peak of tide at Dublin bar or at
head of water at Poulaphouca or Powerscourt or catchment basins of main
streams for the economic production of 500,000 W. H. P. of electricity.
A scheme to enclose the peninsular delta of the North Bull at Dollymount
and erect on the space of the foreland, used for golf links and rifle
ranges, an asphalted esplanade with casinos, booths, shooting galleries,
hotels, boardinghouses, readingrooms, establishments for mixed bathing.
A scheme for the use of dogvans and goatvans for the delivery of early
morning milk. A scheme for the development of Irish tourist traffic in
and around Dublin by means of petrolpropelled riverboats, plying in the
fluvial fairway between Island bridge and Ringsend, charabancs, narrow
gauge local railways, and pleasure steamers for coastwise navigation
(10/- per person per day, guide (trilingual) included). A scheme for
the repristination of passenger and goods traffics over Irish waterways,
when freed from weedbeds. A scheme to connect by tramline the Cattle
Market (North Circular road and Prussia street) with the quays (Sheriff
street, lower, and East Wall), parallel with the Link line railway
laid (in conjunction with the Great Southern and Western railway line)
between the cattle park, Liffey junction, and terminus of Midland Great
Western Railway 43 to 45 North

Wall, in proximity to the terminal stations or Dublin branches of Great
Central Railway, Midland Railway of England, City of Dublin Steam Packet
Company, Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway Company, Dublin and Glasgow
Steam Packet Company, Glasgow, Dublin and Londonderry Steam Packet
Company (Laird line), British and Irish Steam Packet Company, Dublin
and Morecambe Steamers, London and North Western Railway Company, Dublin
Port and Docks Board Landing Sheds and transit sheds of Palgrave, Murphy
and Company, steamship owners, agents for steamers from Mediterranean,
Spain, Portugal, France, Belgium and Holland and for Liverpool
Underwriters' Association, the cost of acquired rolling stock for
animal transport and of additional mileage operated by the Dublin United
Tramways Company, limited, to be covered by graziers' fees.


Positing what protasis would the contraction for such several schemes
become a natural and necessary apodosis?

Given a guarantee equal to the sum sought, the support, by deed of
gift and transfer vouchers during donor's lifetime or by bequest
after donor's painless extinction, of eminent financiers (Blum Pasha,
Rothschild Guggenheim, Hirsch, Montefiore, Morgan, Rockefeller)
possessing fortunes in 6 figures, amassed during a successful life, and
joining capital with opportunity the thing required was done.


What eventuality would render him independent of such wealth?

The independent discovery of a goldseam of inexhaustible ore.


For what reason did he meditate on schemes so difficult of realisation?

It was one of his axioms that similar meditations or the automatic
relation to himself of a narrative concerning himself or tranquil
recollection of the past when practised habitually before retiring for
the night alleviated fatigue and produced as a result sound repose and
renovated vitality.


His justifications?

As a physicist he had learned that of the 70 years of complete human
life at least 2/7, viz. 20 years are passed in sleep. As a philosopher
he knew that at the termination of any allotted life only an
infinitesimal part of any person's desires has been realised. As a
physiologist he believed in the artificial placation of malignant
agencies chiefly operative during somnolence.


What did he fear?

The committal of homicide or suicide during sleep by an aberration
of the light of reason, the incommensurable categorical intelligence
situated in the cerebral convolutions.


What were habitually his final meditations?

Of some one sole unique advertisement to cause passers to stop in
wonder, a poster novelty, with all extraneous accretions excluded,
reduced to its simplest and most efficient terms not exceeding the span
of casual vision and congruous with the velocity of modern life.


What did the first drawer unlocked contain?

A Vere Foster's handwriting copybook, property of Milly (Millicent)
Bloom, certain pages of which bore diagram drawings, marked _Papli_,
which showed a large globular head with 5 hairs erect, 2 eyes in
profile, the trunk full front with 3 large buttons, 1 triangular foot: 2
fading photographs of queen Alexandra of England and of Maud Branscombe,
actress and professional beauty: a Yuletide card, bearing on it a
pictorial representation of a parasitic plant, the legend _Mizpah_, the
date Xmas 1892, the name of the senders: from Mr + Mrs M. Comerford, the
versicle: _May this Yuletide bring to thee, Joy and peace and welcome
glee_: a butt of red partly liquefied sealing wax, obtained from the
stores department of Messrs Hely's, Ltd., 89, 90, and 91 Dame street:
a box containing the remainder of a gross of gilt "J" pennibs, obtained
from same department of same firm: an old sandglass which rolled
containing sand which rolled: a sealed prophecy (never unsealed) written
by Leopold Bloom in 1886 concerning the consequences of the passing into
law of William Ewart Gladstone's Home Rule bill of 1886 (never passed
into law): a bazaar ticket, no 2004, of S. Kevin's Charity Fair, price
6d, 100 prizes: an infantile epistle, dated, small em monday, reading:
capital pee Papli comma capital aitch How are you note of interrogation
capital eye I am very well full stop new paragraph signature with
flourishes capital em Milly no stop: a cameo brooch, property of Ellen
Bloom (born Higgins), deceased: a cameo scarfpin, property of Rudolph
Bloom (born Virag), deceased: 3 typewritten letters, addressee, Henry
Flower, c/o. P. O. Westland Row, addresser, Martha Clifford, c/o. P. O.
Dolphin's Barn: the transliterated name and address of the addresser
of the 3 letters in reversed alphabetic boustrophedonic punctated
quadrilinear cryptogram (vowels suppressed) N. IGS./WI. UU. OX/W. OKS.
MH/Y. IM: a press cutting from an English weekly periodical _Modern
Society_, subject corporal chastisement in girls' schools: a pink ribbon
which had festooned an Easter egg in the year 1899: two partly uncoiled
rubber preservatives with reserve pockets, purchased by post from Box
32, P. O., Charing Cross, London, W. C.: 1 pack of 1 dozen creamlaid
envelopes and feintruled notepaper, watermarked, now reduced by 3: some
assorted Austrian-Hungarian coins: 2 coupons of the Royal and Privileged
Hungarian Lottery: a lowpower magnifying glass: 2 erotic photocards
showing a) buccal coition between nude senorita (rere presentation,
superior position) and nude torero (fore presentation, inferior
position) b) anal violation by male religious (fully clothed, eyes
abject) of female religious (partly clothed, eyes direct), purchased by
post from Box 32, P. O., Charing Cross, London, W. C.: a press cutting
of recipe for renovation of old tan boots: a Id adhesive stamp,
lavender, of the reign of Queen Victoria: a chart of the measurements
of Leopold Bloom compiled before, during and after 2 months' consecutive
use of Sandow-Whiteley's pulley exerciser (men's 15/-, athlete's 20/-)
viz. chest 28 in and 29 1/2 in, biceps 9 in and 10 in, forearm 8 1/2 in
and 9 in, thigh 10 in and 12 in, calf 11 in and 12 in: 1 prospectus of
The Wonderworker, the world's greatest remedy for rectal complaints,
direct from Wonderworker, Coventry House, South Place, London E C,
addressed (erroneously) to Mrs L. Bloom with brief accompanying note
commencing (erroneously): Dear Madam.


Quote the textual terms in which the prospectus claimed advantages for
this thaumaturgic remedy.

It heals and soothes while you sleep, in case of trouble in breaking
wind, assists nature in the most formidable way, insuring instant relief
in discharge of gases, keeping parts clean and free natural action, an
initial outlay of 7/6 making a new man of you and life worth living.
Ladies find Wonderworker especially useful, a pleasant surprise when
they note delightful result like a cool drink of fresh spring water on
a sultry summer's day. Recommend it to your lady and gentlemen friends,
lasts a lifetime. Insert long round end. Wonderworker.


Were there testimonials?

Numerous. From clergyman, British naval officer, wellknown author, city
man, hospital nurse, lady, mother of five, absentminded beggar.


How did absentminded beggar's concluding testimonial conclude?

What a pity the government did not supply our men with wonderworkers
during the South African campaign! What a relief it would have been!


What object did Bloom add to this collection of objects?

A 4th typewritten letter received by Henry Flower (let H. F. be L. B.)
from Martha Clifford (find M. C.).


What pleasant reflection accompanied this action?

The reflection that, apart from the letter in question, his magnetic
face, form and address had been favourably received during the course of
the preceding day by a wife (Mrs Josephine Breen, born Josie Powell),
a nurse, Miss Callan (Christian name unknown), a maid, Gertrude (Gerty,
family name unknown).


What possibility suggested itself?

The possibility of exercising virile power of fascination in the not
immediate future after an expensive repast in a private apartment in
the company of an elegant courtesan, of corporal beauty, moderately
mercenary, variously instructed, a lady by origin.


What did the 2nd drawer contain?

Documents: the birth certificate of Leopold Paula Bloom: an endowment
assurance policy of 500 pounds in the Scottish Widows' Assurance
Society, intestated Millicent (Milly) Bloom, coming into force at 25
years as with profit policy of 430 pounds, 462/10/0 and 500 pounds at
60 years or death, 65 years or death and death, respectively, or
with profit policy (paidup) of 299/10/0 together with cash payment of
133/10/0, at option: a bank passbook issued by the Ulster Bank, College
Green branch showing statement of a/c for halfyear ending 31 December
1903, balance in depositor's favour: 18/14/6 (eighteen pounds, fourteen
shillings and sixpence, sterling), net personalty: certificate of
possession of 900 pounds, Canadian 4 percent (inscribed) government
stock (free of stamp duty): dockets of the Catholic Cemeteries'
(Glasnevin) Committee, relative to a graveplot purchased: a local press
cutting concerning change of name by deedpoll.


Quote the textual terms of this notice.

I, Rudolph Virag, now resident at no 52 Clanbrassil street, Dublin,
formerly of Szombathely in the kingdom of Hungary, hereby give notice
that I have assumed and intend henceforth upon all occasions and at all
times to be known by the name of Rudolph Bloom.


What other objects relative to Rudolph Bloom (born Virag) were in the
2nd drawer?

An indistinct daguerreotype of Rudolf Virag and his father Leopold
Virag executed in the year 1852 in the portrait atelier of their
(respectively) 1st and 2nd cousin, Stefan Virag of Szesfehervar,
Hungary. An ancient haggadah book in which a pair of hornrimmed convex
spectacles inserted marked the passage of thanksgiving in the ritual
prayers for Pessach (Passover): a photocard of the Queen's Hotel,
Ennis, proprietor, Rudolph Bloom: an envelope addressed: _To My Dear Son
Leopold_.


What fractions of phrases did the lecture of those five whole words
evoke?

Tomorrow will be a week that I received... it is no use Leopold to be
... with your dear mother... that is not more to stand... to her...
all for me is out... be kind to Athos, Leopold... my dear son...
always... of me... _das Herz... Gott... dein_...


What reminiscences of a human subject suffering from progressive
melancholia did these objects evoke in Bloom?

An old man, widower, unkempt of hair, in bed, with head covered,
sighing: an infirm dog, Athos: aconite, resorted to by increasing doses
of grains and scruples as a palliative of recrudescent neuralgia: the
face in death of a septuagenarian, suicide by poison.


Why did Bloom experience a sentiment of remorse?

Because in immature impatience he had treated with disrespect certain
beliefs and practices.


As?

The prohibition of the use of fleshmeat and milk at one meal: the
hebdomadary symposium of incoordinately abstract, perfervidly concrete
mercantile coexreligionist excompatriots: the circumcision of
male infants: the supernatural character of Judaic scripture: the
ineffability of the tetragrammaton: the sanctity of the sabbath.


How did these beliefs and practices now appear to him?

Not more rational than they had then appeared, not less rational than
other beliefs and practices now appeared.


What first reminiscence had he of Rudolph Bloom (deceased)?

Rudolph Bloom (deceased) narrated to his son Leopold Bloom (aged 6) a
retrospective arrangement of migrations and settlements in and between
Dublin, London, Florence, Milan, Vienna, Budapest, Szombathely with
statements of satisfaction (his grandfather having seen Maria Theresia,
empress of Austria, queen of Hungary), with commercial advice (having
taken care of pence, the pounds having taken care of themselves).
Leopold Bloom (aged 6) had accompanied these narrations by constant
consultation of a geographical map of Europe (political) and by
suggestions for the establishment of affiliated business premises in the
various centres mentioned.


Had time equally but differently obliterated the memory of these
migrations in narrator and listener?

In narrator by the access of years and in consequence of the use of
narcotic toxin: in listener by the access of years and in consequence of
the action of distraction upon vicarious experiences.


What idiosyncracies of the narrator were concomitant products of
amnesia?

Occasionally he ate without having previously removed his hat.
Occasionally he drank voraciously the juice of gooseberry fool from an
inclined plate. Occasionally he removed from his lips the traces of food
by means of a lacerated envelope or other accessible fragment of paper.


What two phenomena of senescence were more frequent?

The myopic digital calculation of coins, eructation consequent upon
repletion.


What object offered partial consolation for these reminiscences?

The endowment policy, the bank passbook, the certificate of the
possession of scrip.


Reduce Bloom by cross multiplication of reverses of fortune, from which
these supports protected him, and by elimination of all positive values
to a negligible negative irrational unreal quantity.

Successively, in descending helotic order: Poverty: that of the outdoor
hawker of imitation jewellery, the dun for the recovery of bad and
doubtful debts, the poor rate and deputy cess collector. Mendicancy:
that of the fraudulent bankrupt with negligible assets paying 1s. 4d.
in the pound, sandwichman, distributor of throwaways, nocturnal vagrant,
insinuating sycophant, maimed sailor, blind stripling, superannuated
bailiffs man, marfeast, lickplate, spoilsport, pickthank, eccentric
public laughingstock seated on bench of public park under discarded
perforated umbrella. Destitution: the inmate of Old Man's House (Royal
Hospital) Kilmainham, the inmate of Simpson's Hospital for reduced but
respectable men permanently disabled by gout or want of sight. Nadir of
misery: the aged impotent disfranchised ratesupported moribund lunatic
pauper.


With which attendant indignities?

The unsympathetic indifference of previously amiable females, the
contempt of muscular males, the acceptance of fragments of bread,
the simulated ignorance of casual acquaintances, the latration of
illegitimate unlicensed vagabond dogs, the infantile discharge of
decomposed vegetable missiles, worth little or nothing, nothing or less
than nothing.


By what could such a situation be precluded?

By decease (change of state): by departure (change of place).


Which preferably?

The latter, by the line of least resistance.


What considerations rendered departure not entirely undesirable?

Constant cohabitation impeding mutual toleration of personal defects.
The habit of independent purchase increasingly cultivated. The necessity
to counteract by impermanent sojourn the permanence of arrest.


What considerations rendered departure not irrational?

The parties concerned, uniting, had increased and multiplied, which
being done, offspring produced and educed to maturity, the parties, if
not disunited were obliged to reunite for increase and multiplication,
which was absurd, to form by reunion the original couple of uniting
parties, which was impossible.


What considerations rendered departure desirable?

The attractive character of certain localities in Ireland and abroad,
as represented in general geographical maps of polychrome design or
in special ordnance survey charts by employment of scale numerals and
hachures.


In Ireland?

The cliffs of Moher, the windy wilds of Connemara, lough Neagh with
submerged petrified city, the Giant's Causeway, Fort Camden and Fort
Carlisle, the Golden Vale of Tipperary, the islands of Aran, the
pastures of royal Meath, Brigid's elm in Kildare, the Queen's Island
shipyard in Belfast, the Salmon Leap, the lakes of Killarney.


Abroad?

Ceylon (with spicegardens supplying tea to Thomas Kernan, agent for
Pulbrook, Robertson and Co, 2 Mincing Lane, London, E. C., 5 Dame
street, Dublin), Jerusalem, the holy city (with mosque of Omar and gate
of Damascus, goal of aspiration), the straits of Gibraltar (the unique
birthplace of Marion Tweedy), the Parthenon (containing statues of nude
Grecian divinities), the Wall street money market (which controlled
international finance), the Plaza de Toros at La Linea, Spain (where
O'Hara of the Camerons had slain the bull), Niagara (over which no human
being had passed with impunity), the land of the Eskimos (eaters
of soap), the forbidden country of Thibet (from which no traveller
returns), the bay of Naples (to see which was to die), the Dead Sea.


Under what guidance, following what signs?

At sea, septentrional, by night the polestar, located at the point of
intersection of the right line from beta to alpha in Ursa Maior produced
and divided externally at omega and the hypotenuse of the rightangled
triangle formed by the line alpha omega so produced and the line alpha
delta of Ursa Maior. On land, meridional, a bispherical moon, revealed
in imperfect varying phases of lunation through the posterior interstice
of the imperfectly occluded skirt of a carnose negligent perambulating
female, a pillar of the cloud by day.


What public advertisement would divulge the occultation of the departed?

5 pounds reward, lost, stolen or strayed from his residence 7 Eccles
street, missing gent about 40, answering to the name of Bloom, Leopold
(Poldy), height 5 ft 9 1/2 inches, full build, olive complexion, may
have since grown a beard, when last seen was wearing a black suit. Above
sum will be paid for information leading to his discovery.


What universal binomial denominations would be his as entity and
nonentity?

Assumed by any or known to none. Everyman or Noman.


What tributes his?

Honour and gifts of strangers, the friends of Everyman. A nymph
immortal, beauty, the bride of Noman.


Would the departed never nowhere nohow reappear?

Ever he would wander, selfcompelled, to the extreme limit of his
cometary orbit, beyond the fixed stars and variable suns and telescopic
planets, astronomical waifs and strays, to the extreme boundary of
space, passing from land to land, among peoples, amid events. Somewhere
imperceptibly he would hear and somehow reluctantly, suncompelled, obey
the summons of recall. Whence, disappearing from the constellation of
the Northern Crown he would somehow reappear reborn above delta in the
constellation of Cassiopeia and after incalculable eons of peregrination
return an estranged avenger, a wreaker of justice on malefactors, a dark
crusader, a sleeper awakened, with financial resources (by supposition)
surpassing those of Rothschild or the silver king.


What would render such return irrational?

An unsatisfactory equation between an exodus and return in time through
reversible space and an exodus and return in space through irreversible
time.


What play of forces, inducing inertia, rendered departure undesirable?

The lateness of the hour, rendering procrastinatory: the obscurity
of the night, rendering invisible: the uncertainty of thoroughfares,
rendering perilous: the necessity for repose, obviating movement: the
proximity of an occupied bed, obviating research: the anticipation of
warmth (human) tempered with coolness (linen), obviating desire and
rendering desirable: the statue of Narcissus, sound without echo,
desired desire.


What advantages were possessed by an occupied, as distinct from an
unoccupied bed?

The removal of nocturnal solitude, the superior quality of human
(mature female) to inhuman (hotwaterjar) calefaction, the stimulation of
matutinal contact, the economy of mangling done on the premises in the
case of trousers accurately folded and placed lengthwise between the
spring mattress (striped) and the woollen mattress (biscuit section).


What past consecutive causes, before rising preapprehended, of
accumulated fatigue did Bloom, before rising, silently recapitulate?

The preparation of breakfast (burnt offering): intestinal congestion and
premeditative defecation (holy of holies): the bath (rite of John): the
funeral (rite of Samuel): the advertisement of Alexander Keyes (Urim and
Thummim): the unsubstantial lunch (rite of Melchisedek): the visit to
museum and national library (holy place): the bookhunt along Bedford
row, Merchants' Arch, Wellington Quay (Simchath Torah): the music in the
Ormond Hotel (Shira Shirim): the altercation with a truculent troglodyte
in Bernard Kiernan's premises (holocaust): a blank period of time
including a cardrive, a visit to a house of mourning, a leavetaking
(wilderness): the eroticism produced by feminine exhibitionism (rite of
Onan): the prolonged delivery of Mrs Mina Purefoy (heave offering):
the visit to the disorderly house of Mrs Bella Cohen, 82 Tyrone
street, lower and subsequent brawl and chance medley in Beaver street
(Armageddon)--nocturnal perambulation to and from the cabman's shelter,
Butt Bridge (atonement).


What selfimposed enigma did Bloom about to rise in order to go so as to
conclude lest he should not conclude involuntarily apprehend?

The cause of a brief sharp unforeseen heard loud lone crack emitted by
the insentient material of a strainveined timber table.


What selfinvolved enigma did Bloom risen, going, gathering multicoloured
multiform multitudinous garments, voluntarily apprehending, not
comprehend?

Who was M'Intosh?


What selfevident enigma pondered with desultory constancy during 30
years did Bloom now, having effected natural obscurity by the extinction
of artificial light, silently suddenly comprehend?

Where was Moses when the candle went out?


What imperfections in a perfect day did Bloom, walking, charged with
collected articles of recently disvested male wearing apparel, silently,
successively, enumerate?

A provisional failure to obtain renewal of an advertisement: to obtain
a certain quantity of tea from Thomas Kernan (agent for Pulbrook,
Robertson and Co, 5 Dame Street, Dublin, and 2 Mincing Lane, London E.
C.): to certify the presence or absence of posterior rectal orifice in
the case of Hellenic female divinities: to obtain admission (gratuitous
or paid) to the performance of Leah by Mrs Bandmann Palmer at the Gaiety
Theatre, 46, 47, 48, 49 South King street.


What impression of an absent face did Bloom, arrested, silently recall?

The face of her father, the late Major Brian Cooper Tweedy, Royal Dublin
Fusiliers, of Gibraltar and Rehoboth, Dolphin's Barn.


What recurrent impressions of the same were possible by hypothesis?

Retreating, at the terminus of the Great Northern Railway, Amiens
street, with constant uniform acceleration, along parallel lines
meeting at infinity, if produced: along parallel lines, reproduced from
infinity, with constant uniform retardation, at the terminus of the
Great Northern Railway, Amiens street, returning.


What miscellaneous effects of female personal wearing apparel were
perceived by him?

A pair of new inodorous halfsilk black ladies' hose, a pair of new
violet garters, a pair of outsize ladies' drawers of India mull, cut on
generous lines, redolent of opoponax, jessamine and Muratti's Turkish
cigarettes and containing a long bright steel safety pin, folded
curvilinear, a camisole of batiste with thin lace border, an accordion
underskirt of blue silk moirette, all these objects being disposed
irregularly on the top of a rectangular trunk, quadruple battened,
having capped corners, with multicoloured labels, initialled on its fore
side in white lettering B. C. T. (Brian Cooper Tweedy).


What impersonal objects were perceived?

A commode, one leg fractured, totally covered by square cretonne
cutting, apple design, on which rested a lady's black straw hat.
Orangekeyed ware, bought of Henry Price, basket, fancy goods, chinaware
and ironmongery manufacturer, 21, 22, 23 Moore street, disposed
irregularly on the washstand and floor and consisting of basin, soapdish
and brushtray (on the washstand, together), pitcher and night article
(on the floor, separate).


Bloom's acts?

He deposited the articles of clothing on a chair, removed his remaining
articles of clothing, took from beneath the bolster at the head of the
bed a folded long white nightshirt, inserted his head and arms into the
proper apertures of the nightshirt, removed a pillow from the head to
the foot of the bed, prepared the bedlinen accordingly and entered the
bed.


How?

With circumspection, as invariably when entering an abode (his own or
not his own): with solicitude, the snakespiral springs of the mattress
being old, the brass quoits and pendent viper radii loose and tremulous
under stress and strain: prudently, as entering a lair or ambush of
lust or adders: lightly, the less to disturb: reverently, the bed of
conception and of birth, of consummation of marriage and of breach of
marriage, of sleep and of death.


What did his limbs, when gradually extended, encounter?

New clean bedlinen, additional odours, the presence of a human form,
female, hers, the imprint of a human form, male, not his, some crumbs,
some flakes of potted meat, recooked, which he removed.


If he had smiled why would he have smiled?

To reflect that each one who enters imagines himself to be the first to
enter whereas he is always the last term of a preceding series even if
the first term of a succeeding one, each imagining himself to be first,
last, only and alone whereas he is neither first nor last nor only nor
alone in a series originating in and repeated to infinity.


What preceding series?

Assuming Mulvey to be the first term of his series, Penrose, Bartell
d'Arcy, professor Goodwin, Julius Mastiansky, John Henry Menton, Father
Bernard Corrigan, a farmer at the Royal Dublin Society's Horse Show,
Maggot O'Reilly, Matthew Dillon, Valentine Blake Dillon (Lord Mayor
of Dublin), Christopher Callinan, Lenehan, an Italian organgrinder,
an unknown gentleman in the Gaiety Theatre, Benjamin Dollard, Simon
Dedalus, Andrew (Pisser) Burke, Joseph Cuffe, Wisdom Hely, Alderman John
Hooper, Dr Francis Brady, Father Sebastian of Mount Argus, a bootblack
at the General Post Office, Hugh E. (Blazes) Boylan and so each and so
on to no last term.


What were his reflections concerning the last member of this series and
late occupant of the bed?

Reflections on his vigour (a bounder), corporal proportion (a
billsticker), commercial ability (a bester), impressionability (a
boaster).


Why for the observer impressionability in addition to vigour, corporal
proportion and commercial ability?

Because he had observed with augmenting frequency in the preceding
members of the same series the same concupiscence, inflammably
transmitted, first with alarm, then with understanding, then with
desire, finally with fatigue, with alternating symptoms of epicene
comprehension and apprehension.


With what antagonistic sentiments were his subsequent reflections
affected?

Envy, jealousy, abnegation, equanimity.


Envy?

Of a bodily and mental male organism specially adapted for the
superincumbent posture of energetic human copulation and energetic
piston and cylinder movement necessary for the complete satisfaction of
a constant but not acute concupiscence resident in a bodily and mental
female organism, passive but not obtuse.


Jealousy?

Because a nature full and volatile in its free state, was alternately
the agent and reagent of attraction. Because attraction between agent(s)
and reagent(s) at all instants varied, with inverse proportion of
increase and decrease, with incessant circular extension and radial
reentrance. Because the controlled contemplation of the fluctuation of
attraction produced, if desired, a fluctuation of pleasure.


Abnegation?

In virtue of a) acquaintance initiated in September 1903 in the
establishment of George Mesias, merchant tailor and outfitter, 5 Eden
Quay, b) hospitality extended and received in kind, reciprocated and
reappropriated in person, c) comparative youth subject to impulses of
ambition and magnanimity, colleagual altruism and amorous egoism, d)
extraracial attraction, intraracial inhibition, supraracial prerogative,
e) an imminent provincial musical tour, common current expenses, net
proceeds divided.


Equanimity?

As as natural as any and every natural act of a nature expressed or
understood executed in natured nature by natural creatures in accordance
with his, her and their natured natures, of dissimilar similarity.
As not so calamitous as a cataclysmic annihilation of the planet in
consequence of a collision with a dark sun. As less reprehensible than
theft, highway robbery, cruelty to children and animals, obtaining money
under false pretences, forgery, embezzlement, misappropriation of public
money, betrayal of public trust, malingering, mayhem, corruption of
minors, criminal libel, blackmail, contempt of court, arson, treason,
felony, mutiny on the high seas, trespass, burglary, jailbreaking,
practice of unnatural vice, desertion from armed forces in the field,
perjury, poaching, usury, intelligence with the king's enemies,
impersonation, criminal assault, manslaughter, wilful and premeditated
murder. As not more abnormal than all other parallel processes of
adaptation to altered conditions of existence, resulting in a reciprocal
equilibrium between the bodily organism and its attendant circumstances,
foods, beverages, acquired habits, indulged inclinations, significant
disease. As more than inevitable, irreparable.


Why more abnegation than jealousy, less envy than equanimity?

From outrage (matrimony) to outrage (adultery) there arose nought but
outrage (copulation) yet the matrimonial violator of the matrimonially
violated had not been outraged by the adulterous violator of the
adulterously violated.


What retribution, if any?

Assassination, never, as two wrongs did not make one right. Duel by
combat, no. Divorce, not now. Exposure by mechanical artifice (automatic
bed) or individual testimony (concealed ocular witnesses), not yet. Suit
for damages by legal influence or simulation of assault with evidence of
injuries sustained (selfinflicted), not impossibly. Hushmoney by moral
influence possibly. If any, positively, connivance, introduction of
emulation (material, a prosperous rival agency of publicity: moral,
a successful rival agent of intimacy), depreciation, alienation,
humiliation, separation protecting the one separated from the other,
protecting the separator from both.


By what reflections did he, a conscious reactor against the void of
incertitude, justify to himself his sentiments?

The preordained frangibility of the hymen: the presupposed intangibility
of the thing in itself: the incongruity and disproportion between
the selfprolonging tension of the thing proposed to be done and the
selfabbreviating relaxation of the thing done; the fallaciously inferred
debility of the female: the muscularity of the male: the variations of
ethical codes: the natural grammatical transition by inversion involving
no alteration of sense of an aorist preterite proposition (parsed as
masculine subject, monosyllabic onomatopoeic transitive verb with direct
feminine object) from the active voice into its correlative aorist
preterite proposition (parsed as feminine subject, auxiliary verb
and quasimonosyllabic onomatopoeic past participle with complementary
masculine agent) in the passive voice: the continued product of
seminators by generation: the continual production of semen by
distillation: the futility of triumph or protest or vindication: the
inanity of extolled virtue: the lethargy of nescient matter: the apathy
of the stars.


In what final satisfaction did these antagonistic sentiments and
reflections, reduced to their simplest forms, converge?

Satisfaction at the ubiquity in eastern and western terrestrial
hemispheres, in all habitable lands and islands explored or unexplored
(the land of the midnight sun, the islands of the blessed, the isles of
Greece, the land of promise), of adipose anterior and posterior female
hemispheres, redolent of milk and honey and of excretory sanguine and
seminal warmth, reminiscent of secular families of curves of amplitude,
insusceptible of moods of impression or of contrarieties of expression,
expressive of mute immutable mature animality.


The visible signs of antesatisfaction?

An approximate erection: a solicitous adversion: a gradual elevation: a
tentative revelation: a silent contemplation.


Then?

He kissed the plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump, on each
plump melonous hemisphere, in their mellow yellow furrow, with obscure
prolonged provocative melonsmellonous osculation.


The visible signs of postsatisfaction?

A silent contemplation: a tentative velation: a gradual abasement: a
solicitous aversion: a proximate erection.


What followed this silent action?

Somnolent invocation, less somnolent recognition, incipient excitation,
catechetical interrogation.


With what modifications did the narrator reply to this interrogation?

Negative: he omitted to mention the clandestine correspondence between
Martha Clifford and Henry Flower, the public altercation at, in and
in the vicinity of the licensed premises of Bernard Kiernan and Co,
Limited, 8, 9 and 10 Little Britain street, the erotic provocation
and response thereto caused by the exhibitionism of Gertrude (Gerty),
surname unknown. Positive: he included mention of a performance by Mrs
Bandmann Palmer of LEAH at the Gaiety Theatre, 46, 47, 48, 49 South King
street, an invitation to supper at Wynn's (Murphy's) Hotel, 35, 36 and
37 Lower Abbey street, a volume of peccaminous pornographical tendency
entituled SWEETS OF SIN, anonymous author a gentleman of fashion, a
temporary concussion caused by a falsely calculated movement in the
course of a postcenal gymnastic display, the victim (since completely
recovered) being Stephen Dedalus, professor and author, eldest surviving
son of Simon Dedalus, of no fixed occupation, an aeronautical feat
executed by him (narrator) in the presence of a witness, the professor
and author aforesaid, with promptitude of decision and gymnastic
flexibility.


Was the narration otherwise unaltered by modifications?

Absolutely.


Which event or person emerged as the salient point of his narration?

Stephen Dedalus, professor and author.


What limitations of activity and inhibitions of conjugal rights were
perceived by listener and narrator concerning themselves during the
course of this intermittent and increasingly more laconic narration?

By the listener a limitation of fertility inasmuch as marriage had been
celebrated 1 calendar month after the 18th anniversary of her birth (8
September 1870), viz. 8 October, and consummated on the same date with
female issue born 15 June 1889, having been anticipatorily consummated
on the lo September of the same year and complete carnal intercourse,
with ejaculation of semen within the natural female organ, having last
taken place 5 weeks previous, viz. 27 November 1893, to the birth on 29
December 1893 of second (and only male) issue, deceased 9 January 1894,
aged 11 days, there remained a period of 10 years, 5 months and 18 days
during which carnal intercourse had been incomplete, without ejaculation
of semen within the natural female organ. By the narrator a limitation
of activity, mental and corporal, inasmuch as complete mental
intercourse between himself and the listener had not taken place since
the consummation of puberty, indicated by catamenic hemorrhage, of the
female issue of narrator and listener, 15 September 1903, there remained
a period of 9 months and 1 day during which, in consequence of a
preestablished natural comprehension in incomprehension between the
consummated females (listener and issue), complete corporal liberty of
action had been circumscribed.


How?

By various reiterated feminine interrogation concerning the masculine
destination whither, the place where, the time at which, the duration
for which, the object with which in the case of temporary absences,
projected or effected.


What moved visibly above the listener's and the narrator's invisible
thoughts?

The upcast reflection of a lamp and shade, an inconstant series of
concentric circles of varying gradations of light and shadow.


In what directions did listener and narrator lie?

Listener, S. E. by E.: Narrator, N. W. by W.: on the 53rd parallel
of latitude, N., and 6th meridian of longitude, W.: at an angle of 45
degrees to the terrestrial equator.


In what state of rest or motion?

At rest relatively to themselves and to each other. In motion being each
and both carried westward, forward and rereward respectively, by the
proper perpetual motion of the earth through everchanging tracks of
neverchanging space.


In what posture?

Listener: reclined semilaterally, left, left hand under head, right
leg extended in a straight line and resting on left leg, flexed, in the
attitude of Gea-Tellus, fulfilled, recumbent, big with seed. Narrator:
reclined laterally, left, with right and left legs flexed, the index
finger and thumb of the right hand resting on the bridge of the nose, in
the attitude depicted in a snapshot photograph made by Percy Apjohn, the
childman weary, the manchild in the womb.


Womb? Weary?

He rests. He has travelled.


With?

Sinbad the Sailor and Tinbad the Tailor and Jinbad the Jailer and
Whinbad the Whaler and Ninbad the Nailer and Finbad the Failer and
Binbad the Bailer and Pinbad the Pailer and Minbad the Mailer and Hinbad
the Hailer and Rinbad the Railer and Dinbad the Kailer and Vinbad the
Quailer and Linbad the Yailer and Xinbad the Phthailer.


When?

Going to dark bed there was a square round Sinbad the Sailor roc's auk's
egg in the night of the bed of all the auks of the rocs of Darkinbad the
Brightdayler.


Where?



Yes because he never did a thing like that before as ask to get his
breakfast in bed with a couple of eggs since the _City Arms_ hotel
when he used to be pretending to be laid up with a sick voice doing his
highness to make himself interesting for that old faggot Mrs Riordan
that he thought he had a great leg of and she never left us a farthing
all for masses for herself and her soul greatest miser ever was actually
afraid to lay out 4d for her methylated spirit telling me all her
ailments she had too much old chat in her about politics and earthquakes
and the end of the world let us have a bit of fun first God help the
world if all the women were her sort down on bathingsuits and lownecks
of course nobody wanted her to wear them I suppose she was pious because
no man would look at her twice I hope Ill never be like her a wonder
she didnt want us to cover our faces but she was a welleducated woman
certainly and her gabby talk about Mr Riordan here and Mr Riordan there
I suppose he was glad to get shut of her and her dog smelling my fur and
always edging to get up under my petticoats especially then still I like
that in him polite to old women like that and waiters and beggars too
hes not proud out of nothing but not always if ever he got anything
really serious the matter with him its much better for them to go into
a hospital where everything is clean but I suppose Id have to dring it
into him for a month yes and then wed have a hospital nurse next thing
on the carpet have him staying there till they throw him out or a nun
maybe like the smutty photo he has shes as much a nun as Im not yes
because theyre so weak and puling when theyre sick they want a woman
to get well if his nose bleeds youd think it was O tragic and that
dyinglooking one off the south circular when he sprained his foot at
the choir party at the sugarloaf Mountain the day I wore that dress
Miss Stack bringing him flowers the worst old ones she could find at the
bottom of the basket anything at all to get into a mans bedroom with
her old maids voice trying to imagine he was dying on account of her to
never see thy face again though he looked more like a man with his beard
a bit grown in the bed father was the same besides I hate bandaging and
dosing when he cut his toe with the razor paring his corns afraid hed
get bloodpoisoning but if it was a thing I was sick then wed see what
attention only of course the woman hides it not to give all the trouble
they do yes he came somewhere Im sure by his appetite anyway love its
not or hed be off his feed thinking of her so either it was one of those
night women if it was down there he was really and the hotel story he
made up a pack of lies to hide it planning it Hynes kept me who did I
meet ah yes I met do you remember Menton and who else who let me see
that big babbyface I saw him and he not long married flirting with a
young girl at Pooles Myriorama and turned my back on him when he slinked
out looking quite conscious what harm but he had the impudence to make
up to me one time well done to him mouth almighty and his boiled eyes of
all the big stupoes I ever met and thats called a solicitor only for
I hate having a long wrangle in bed or else if its not that its some
little bitch or other he got in with somewhere or picked up on the
sly if they only knew him as well as I do yes because the day before
yesterday he was scribbling something a letter when I came into the
front room to show him Dignams death in the paper as if something told
me and he covered it up with the blottingpaper pretending to be thinking
about business so very probably that was it to somebody who thinks
she has a softy in him because all men get a bit like that at his age
especially getting on to forty he is now so as to wheedle any money she
can out of him no fool like an old fool and then the usual kissing my
bottom was to hide it not that I care two straws now who he does it with
or knew before that way though Id like to find out so long as I dont
have the two of them under my nose all the time like that slut that Mary
we had in Ontario terrace padding out her false bottom to excite him bad
enough to get the smell of those painted women off him once or twice
I had a suspicion by getting him to come near me when I found the
long hair on his coat without that one when I went into the kitchen
pretending he was drinking water 1 woman is not enough for them it was
all his fault of course ruining servants then proposing that she could
eat at our table on Christmas day if you please O no thank you not in my
house stealing my potatoes and the oysters 2/6 per doz going out to see
her aunt if you please common robbery so it was but I was sure he had
something on with that one it takes me to find out a thing like that he
said you have no proof it was her proof O yes her aunt was very fond of
oysters but I told her what I thought of her suggesting me to go out to
be alone with her I wouldnt lower myself to spy on them the garters I
found in her room the Friday she was out that was enough for me a little
bit too much her face swelled up on her with temper when I gave her her
weeks notice I saw to that better do without them altogether do out the
rooms myself quicker only for the damn cooking and throwing out the dirt
I gave it to him anyhow either she or me leaves the house I couldnt even
touch him if I thought he was with a dirty barefaced liar and sloven
like that one denying it up to my face and singing about the place in
the W C too because she knew she was too well off yes because he couldnt
possibly do without it that long so he must do it somewhere and the last
time he came on my bottom when was it the night Boylan gave my hand a
great squeeze going along by the Tolka in my hand there steals another
I just pressed the back of his like that with my thumb to squeeze back
singing the young May moon shes beaming love because he has an idea
about him and me hes not such a fool he said Im dining out and going to
the Gaiety though Im not going to give him the satisfaction in any case
God knows hes a change in a way not to be always and ever wearing the
same old hat unless I paid some nicelooking boy to do it since I cant do
it myself a young boy would like me Id confuse him a little alone with
him if we were Id let him see my garters the new ones and make him turn
red looking at him seduce him I know what boys feel with that down
on their cheek doing that frigging drawing out the thing by the hour
question and answer would you do this that and the other with the
coalman yes with a bishop yes I would because I told him about some dean
or bishop was sitting beside me in the jews temples gardens when I was
knitting that woollen thing a stranger to Dublin what place was it and
so on about the monuments and he tired me out with statues encouraging
him making him worse than he is who is in your mind now tell me who are
you thinking of who is it tell me his name who tell me who the german
Emperor is it yes imagine Im him think of him can you feel him trying to
make a whore of me what he never will he ought to give it up now at this
age of his life simply ruination for any woman and no satisfaction in it
pretending to like it till he comes and then finish it off myself anyway
and it makes your lips pale anyhow its done now once and for all with
all the talk of the world about it people make its only the first time
after that its just the ordinary do it and think no more about it why
cant you kiss a man without going and marrying him first you sometimes
love to wildly when you feel that way so nice all over you you cant help
yourself I wish some man or other would take me sometime when hes there
and kiss me in his arms theres nothing like a kiss long and hot down to
your soul almost paralyses you then I hate that confession when I used
to go to Father Corrigan he touched me father and what harm if he did
where and I said on the canal bank like a fool but whereabouts on your
person my child on the leg behind high up was it yes rather high up was
it where you sit down yes O Lord couldnt he say bottom right out and
have done with it what has that got to do with it and did you whatever
way he put it I forget no father and I always think of the real father
what did he want to know for when I already confessed it to God he had
a nice fat hand the palm moist always I wouldnt mind feeling it neither
would he Id say by the bullneck in his horsecollar I wonder did he know
me in the box I could see his face he couldnt see mine of course hed
never turn or let on still his eyes were red when his father died theyre
lost for a woman of course must be terrible when a man cries let alone
them Id like to be embraced by one in his vestments and the smell of
incense off him like the pope besides theres no danger with a priest if
youre married hes too careful about himself then give something to H
H the pope for a penance I wonder was he satisfied with me one thing I
didnt like his slapping me behind going away so familiarly in the hall
though I laughed Im not a horse or an ass am I I suppose he was thinking
of his fathers I wonder is he awake thinking of me or dreaming am I in
it who gave him that flower he said he bought he smelt of some kind of
drink not whisky or stout or perhaps the sweety kind of paste they stick
their bills up with some liqueur Id like to sip those richlooking green
and yellow expensive drinks those stagedoor johnnies drink with the
opera hats I tasted once with my finger dipped out of that American that
had the squirrel talking stamps with father he had all he could do to
keep himself from falling asleep after the last time after we took the
port and potted meat it had a fine salty taste yes because I felt lovely
and tired myself and fell asleep as sound as a top the moment I popped
straight into bed till that thunder woke me up God be merciful to us
I thought the heavens were coming down about us to punish us when I
blessed myself and said a Hail Mary like those awful thunderbolts in
Gibraltar as if the world was coming to an end and then they come and
tell you theres no God what could you do if it was running and rushing
about nothing only make an act of contrition the candle I lit that
evening in Whitefriars street chapel for the month of May see it brought
its luck though hed scoff if he heard because he never goes to church
mass or meeting he says your soul you have no soul inside only grey
matter because he doesnt know what it is to have one yes when I lit the
lamp because he must have come 3 or 4 times with that tremendous big red
brute of a thing he has I thought the vein or whatever the dickens they
call it was going to burst though his nose is not so big after I took
off all my things with the blinds down after my hours dressing and
perfuming and combing it like iron or some kind of a thick crowbar
standing all the time he must have eaten oysters I think a few dozen he
was in great singing voice no I never in all my life felt anyone had
one the size of that to make you feel full up he must have eaten a whole
sheep after whats the idea making us like that with a big hole in the
middle of us or like a Stallion driving it up into you because thats all
they want out of you with that determined vicious look in his eye I had
to halfshut my eyes still he hasnt such a tremendous amount of spunk in
him when I made him pull out and do it on me considering how big it is
so much the better in case any of it wasnt washed out properly the last
time I let him finish it in me nice invention they made for women for
him to get all the pleasure but if someone gave them a touch of it
themselves theyd know what I went through with Milly nobody would
believe cutting her teeth too and Mina Purefoys husband give us a swing
out of your whiskers filling her up with a child or twins once a year
as regular as the clock always with a smell of children off her the one
they called budgers or something like a nigger with a shock of hair on
it Jesusjack the child is a black the last time I was there a squad of
them falling over one another and bawling you couldnt hear your ears
supposed to be healthy not satisfied till they have us swollen out like
elephants or I dont know what supposing I risked having another not off
him though still if he was married Im sure hed have a fine strong child
but I dont know Poldy has more spunk in him yes thatd be awfully jolly
I suppose it was meeting Josie Powell and the funeral and thinking about
me and Boylan set him off well he can think what he likes now if thatll
do him any good I know they were spooning a bit when I came on the scene
he was dancing and sitting out with her the night of Georgina Simpsons
housewarming and then he wanted to ram it down my neck it was on account
of not liking to see her a wallflower that was why we had the standup
row over politics he began it not me when he said about Our Lord being a
carpenter at last he made me cry of course a woman is so sensitive about
everything I was fuming with myself after for giving in only for I knew
he was gone on me and the first socialist he said He was he annoyed me
so much I couldnt put him into a temper still he knows a lot of mixedup
things especially about the body and the inside I often wanted to study
up that myself what we have inside us in that family physician I could
always hear his voice talking when the room was crowded and watch him
after that I pretended I had a coolness on with her over him because he
used to be a bit on the jealous side whenever he asked who are you going
to and I said over to Floey and he made me the present of Byron's poems
and the three pairs of gloves so that finished that I could quite easily
get him to make it up any time I know how Id even supposing he got in
with her again and was going out to see her somewhere Id know if he
refused to eat the onions I know plenty of ways ask him to tuck down the
collar of my blouse or touch him with my veil and gloves on going out I
kiss then would send them all spinning however alright well see then let
him go to her she of course would only be too delighted to pretend shes
mad in love with him that I wouldnt so much mind Id just go to her and
ask her do you love him and look her square in the eyes she couldnt fool
me but he might imagine he was and make a declaration to her with his
plabbery kind of a manner like he did to me though I had the devils own
job to get it out of him though I liked him for that it showed he could
hold in and wasnt to be got for the asking he was on the pop of asking
me too the night in the kitchen I was rolling the potato cake theres
something I want to say to you only for I put him off letting on I was
in a temper with my hands and arms full of pasty flour in any case I let
out too much the night before talking of dreams so I didnt want to let
him know more than was good for him she used to be always embracing me
Josie whenever he was there meaning him of course glauming me over and
when I said I washed up and down as far as possible asking me and did
you wash possible the women are always egging on to that putting it on
thick when hes there they know by his sly eye blinking a bit putting on
the indifferent when they come out with something the kind he is what
spoils him I dont wonder in the least because he was very handsome at
that time trying to look like Lord Byron I said I liked though he
was too beautiful for a man and he was a little before we got engaged
afterwards though she didnt like it so much the day I was in fits of
laughing with the giggles I couldnt stop about all my hairpins falling
out one after another with the mass of hair I had youre always in great
humour she said yes because it grigged her because she knew what it
meant because I used to tell her a good bit of what went on between us
not all but just enough to make her mouth water but that wasnt my fault
she didnt darken the door much after we were married I wonder what shes
got like now after living with that dotty husband of hers she had her
face beginning to look drawn and run down the last time I saw her she
must have been just after a row with him because I saw on the moment she
was edging to draw down a conversation about husbands and talk about him
to run him down what was it she told me O yes that sometimes he used to
go to bed with his muddy boots on when the maggot takes him just imagine
having to get into bed with a thing like that that might murder you
any moment what a man well its not the one way everyone goes mad Poldy
anyhow whatever he does always wipes his feet on the mat when he comes
in wet or shine and always blacks his own boots too and he always takes
off his hat when he comes up in the street like then and now hes going
about in his slippers to look for 10000 pounds for a postcard U p up
O sweetheart May wouldnt a thing like that simply bore you stiff to
extinction actually too stupid even to take his boots off now what
could you make of a man like that Id rather die 20 times over than marry
another of their sex of course hed never find another woman like me to
put up with him the way I do know me come sleep with me yes and he knows
that too at the bottom of his heart take that Mrs Maybrick that poisoned
her husband for what I wonder in love with some other man yes it was
found out on her wasnt she the downright villain to go and do a thing
like that of course some men can be dreadfully aggravating drive you mad
and always the worst word in the world what do they ask us to marry them
for if were so bad as all that comes to yes because they cant get on
without us white Arsenic she put in his tea off flypaper wasnt it I
wonder why they call it that if I asked him hed say its from the Greek
leave us as wise as we were before she must have been madly in love with
the other fellow to run the chance of being hanged O she didnt care if
that was her nature what could she do besides theyre not brutes enough
to go and hang a woman surely are they

theyre all so different Boylan talking about the shape of my foot he
noticed at once even before he was introduced when I was in the D B C
with Poldy laughing and trying to listen I was waggling my foot we both
ordered 2 teas and plain bread and butter I saw him looking with his
two old maids of sisters when I stood up and asked the girl where it was
what do I care with it dropping out of me and that black closed breeches
he made me buy takes you half an hour to let them down wetting all
myself always with some brandnew fad every other week such a long one I
did I forgot my suede gloves on the seat behind that I never got after
some robber of a woman and he wanted me to put it in the Irish times
lost in the ladies lavatory D B C Dame street finder return to Mrs
Marion Bloom and I saw his eyes on my feet going out through the turning
door he was looking when I looked back and I went there for tea 2 days
after in the hope but he wasnt now how did that excite him because I was
crossing them when we were in the other room first he meant the shoes
that are too tight to walk in my hand is nice like that if I only had a
ring with the stone for my month a nice aquamarine Ill stick him for one
and a gold bracelet I dont like my foot so much still I made him spend
once with my foot the night after Goodwins botchup of a concert so cold
and windy it was well we had that rum in the house to mull and the fire
wasnt black out when he asked to take off my stockings lying on the
hearthrug in Lombard street west and another time it was my muddy boots
hed like me to walk in all the horses dung I could find but of course
hes not natural like the rest of the world that I what did he say I
could give 9 points in 10 to Katty Lanner and beat her what does that
mean I asked him I forget what he said because the stoppress edition
just passed and the man with the curly hair in the Lucan dairy thats so
polite I think I saw his face before somewhere I noticed him when I was
tasting the butter so I took my time Bartell dArcy too that he used to
make fun of when he commenced kissing me on the choir stairs after I
sang Gounods _Ave Maria_ what are we waiting for O my heart kiss me
straight on the brow and part which is my brown part he was pretty hot
for all his tinny voice too my low notes he was always raving about if
you can believe him I liked the way he used his mouth singing then he
said wasnt it terrible to do that there in a place like that I dont see
anything so terrible about it Ill tell him about that some day not now
and surprise him ay and Ill take him there and show him the very place
too we did it so now there you are like it or lump it he thinks nothing
can happen without him knowing he hadnt an idea about my mother till we
were engaged otherwise hed never have got me so cheap as he did he was
lo times worse himself anyhow begging me to give him a tiny bit cut off
my drawers that was the evening coming along Kenilworth square he kissed
me in the eye of my glove and I had to take it off asking me questions
is it permitted to enquire the shape of my bedroom so I let him keep it
as if I forgot it to think of me when I saw him slip it into his pocket
of course hes mad on the subject of drawers thats plain to be seen
always skeezing at those brazenfaced things on the bicycles with their
skirts blowing up to their navels even when Milly and I were out with
him at the open air fete that one in the cream muslin standing right
against the sun so he could see every atom she had on when he saw me
from behind following in the rain I saw him before he saw me however
standing at the corner of the Harolds cross road with a new raincoat on
him with the muffler in the Zingari colours to show off his complexion
and the brown hat looking slyboots as usual what was he doing there
where hed no business they can go and get whatever they like from
anything at all with a skirt on it and were not to ask any questions but
they want to know where were you where are you going I could feel him
coming along skulking after me his eyes on my neck he had been keeping
away from the house he felt it was getting too warm for him so I
halfturned and stopped then he pestered me to say yes till I took off my
glove slowly watching him he said my openwork sleeves were too cold for
the rain anything for an excuse to put his hand anear me drawers drawers
the whole blessed time till I promised to give him the pair off my doll
to carry about in his waistcoat pocket _O Maria Santisima_ he did look
a big fool dreeping in the rain splendid set of teeth he had made me
hungry to look at them and beseeched of me to lift the orange petticoat
I had on with the sunray pleats that there was nobody he said hed kneel
down in the wet if I didnt so persevering he would too and ruin his new
raincoat you never know what freak theyd take alone with you theyre so
savage for it if anyone was passing so I lifted them a bit and touched
his trousers outside the way I used to Gardner after with my ring hand
to keep him from doing worse where it was too public I was dying to find
out was he circumcised he was shaking like a jelly all over they want
to do everything too quick take all the pleasure out of it and father
waiting all the time for his dinner he told me to say I left my purse in
the butchers and had to go back for it what a Deceiver then he wrote me
that letter with all those words in it how could he have the face to any
woman after his company manners making it so awkward after when we met
asking me have I offended you with my eyelids down of course he saw I
wasnt he had a few brains not like that other fool Henny Doyle he was
always breaking or tearing something in the charades I hate an unlucky
man and if I knew what it meant of course I had to say no for form sake
dont understand you I said and wasnt it natural so it is of course
it used to be written up with a picture of a womans on that wall in
Gibraltar with that word I couldnt find anywhere only for children
seeing it too young then writing every morning a letter sometimes twice
a day I liked the way he made love then he knew the way to take a woman
when he sent me the 8 big poppies because mine was the 8th then I wrote
the night he kissed my heart at Dolphins barn I couldnt describe it
simply it makes you feel like nothing on earth but he never knew how to
embrace well like Gardner I hope hell come on Monday as he said at the
same time four I hate people who come at all hours answer the door you
think its the vegetables then its somebody and you all undressed or
the door of the filthy sloppy kitchen blows open the day old frostyface
Goodwin called about the concert in Lombard street and I just after
dinner all flushed and tossed with boiling old stew dont look at me
professor I had to say Im a fright yes but he was a real old gent in his
way it was impossible to be more respectful nobody to say youre out you
have to peep out through the blind like the messengerboy today I thought
it was a putoff first him sending the port and the peaches first and I
was just beginning to yawn with nerves thinking he was trying to make a
fool of me when I knew his tattarrattat at the door he must have been
a bit late because it was l/4 after 3 when I saw the 2 Dedalus girls
coming from school I never know the time even that watch he gave me
never seems to go properly Id want to get it looked after when I threw
the penny to that lame sailor for England home and beauty when I was
whistling there is a charming girl I love and I hadnt even put on my
clean shift or powdered myself or a thing then this day week were to go
to Belfast just as well he has to go to Ennis his fathers anniversary
the 27th it wouldnt be pleasant if he did suppose our rooms at the hotel
were beside each other and any fooling went on in the new bed I couldnt
tell him to stop and not bother me with him in the next room or perhaps
some protestant clergyman with a cough knocking on the wall then hed
never believe the next day we didnt do something its all very well a
husband but you cant fool a lover after me telling him we never did
anything of course he didnt believe me no its better hes going where
he is besides something always happens with him the time going to the
Mallow concert at Maryborough ordering boiling soup for the two of
us then the bell rang out he walks down the platform with the soup
splashing about taking spoonfuls of it hadnt he the nerve and the waiter
after him making a holy show of us screeching and confusion for the
engine to start but he wouldnt pay till he finished it the two gentlemen
in the 3rd class carriage said he was quite right so he was too hes so
pigheaded sometimes when he gets a thing into his head a good job he was
able to open the carriage door with his knife or theyd have taken us on
to Cork I suppose that was done out of revenge on him O I love jaunting
in a train or a car with lovely soft cushions I wonder will he take
a 1st class for me he might want to do it in the train by tipping the
guard well O I suppose therell be the usual idiots of men gaping at
us with their eyes as stupid as ever they can possibly be that was an
exceptional man that common workman that left us alone in the carriage
that day going to Howth Id like to find out something about him l or 2
tunnels perhaps then you have to look out of the window all the nicer
then coming back suppose I never came back what would they say eloped
with him that gets you on on the stage the last concert I sang at where
its over a year ago when was it St Teresas hall Clarendon St little
chits of missies they have now singing Kathleen Kearney and her like
on account of father being in the army and my singing the absentminded
beggar and wearing a brooch for Lord Roberts when I had the map of it
all and Poldy not Irish enough was it him managed it this time I wouldnt
put it past him like he got me on to sing in the _Stabat Mater_ by going
around saying he was putting Lead Kindly Light to music I put him up to
that till the jesuits found out he was a freemason thumping the piano
lead Thou me on copied from some old opera yes and he was going about
with some of them Sinner Fein lately or whatever they call themselves
talking his usual trash and nonsense he says that little man he showed
me without the neck is very intelligent the coming man Griffiths is he
well he doesnt look it thats all I can say still it must have been him
he knew there was a boycott I hate the mention of their politics after
the war that Pretoria and Ladysmith and Bloemfontein where Gardner lieut
Stanley G 8th Bn 2nd East Lancs Rgt of enteric fever he was a lovely
fellow in khaki and just the right height over me Im sure he was brave
too he said I was lovely the evening we kissed goodbye at the canal lock
my Irish beauty he was pale with excitement about going away or wed be
seen from the road he couldnt stand properly and I so hot as I never
felt they could have made their peace in the beginning or old oom Paul
and the rest of the other old Krugers go and fight it out between them
instead of dragging on for years killing any finelooking men there were
with their fever if he was even decently shot it wouldnt have been so
bad I love to see a regiment pass in review the first time I saw the
Spanish cavalry at La Roque it was lovely after looking across the bay
from Algeciras all the lights of the rock like fireflies or those sham
battles on the 15 acres the Black Watch with their kilts in time at the
march past the 10th hussars the prince of Wales own or the lancers O the
lancers theyre grand or the Dublins that won Tugela his father made his
money over selling the horses for the cavalry well he could buy me a
nice present up in Belfast after what I gave him theyve lovely linen up
there or one of those nice kimono things I must buy a mothball like I
had before to keep in the drawer with them it would be exciting going
round with him shopping buying those things in a new city better leave
this ring behind want to keep turning and turning to get it over the
knuckle there or they might bell it round the town in their papers or
tell the police on me but theyd think were married O let them all go and
smother themselves for the fat lot I care he has plenty of money and hes
not a marrying man so somebody better get it out of him if I could find
out whether he likes me I looked a bit washy of course when I looked
close in the handglass powdering a mirror never gives you the expression
besides scrooching down on me like that all the time with his big
hipbones hes heavy too with his hairy chest for this heat always having
to lie down for them better for him put it into me from behind the way
Mrs Mastiansky told me her husband made her like the dogs do it and
stick out her tongue as far as ever she could and he so quiet and mild
with his tingating cither can you ever be up to men the way it takes
them lovely stuff in that blue suit he had on and stylish tie and socks
with the skyblue silk things on them hes certainly well off I know by
the cut his clothes have and his heavy watch but he was like a perfect
devil for a few minutes after he came back with the stoppress tearing up
the tickets and swearing blazes because he lost 20 quid he said he lost
over that outsider that won and half he put on for me on account of
Lenehans tip cursing him to the lowest pits that sponger he was making
free with me after the Glencree dinner coming back that long joult over
the featherbed mountain after the lord Mayor looking at me with his
dirty eyes Val Dillon that big heathen I first noticed him at dessert
when I was cracking the nuts with my teeth I wished I could have picked
every morsel of that chicken out of my fingers it was so tasty
and browned and as tender as anything only for I didnt want to eat
everything on my plate those forks and fishslicers were hallmarked
silver too I wish I had some I could easily have slipped a couple into
my muff when I was playing with them then always hanging out of them for
money in a restaurant for the bit you put down your throat we have to
be thankful for our mangy cup of tea itself as a great compliment to be
noticed the way the world is divided in any case if its going to go on I
want at least two other good chemises for one thing and but I dont know
what kind of drawers he likes none at all I think didnt he say yes and
half the girls in Gibraltar never wore them either naked as God made
them that Andalusian singing her Manola she didnt make much secret of
what she hadnt yes and the second pair of silkette stockings is laddered
after one days wear I could have brought them back to Lewers this
morning and kicked up a row and made that one change them only not to
upset myself and run the risk of walking into him and ruining the whole
thing and one of those kidfitting corsets Id want advertised cheap in
the Gentlewoman with elastic gores on the hips he saved the one I have
but thats no good what did they say they give a delightful figure line
11/6 obviating that unsightly broad appearance across the lower back to
reduce flesh my belly is a bit too big Ill have to knock off the
stout at dinner or am I getting too fond of it the last they sent from
ORourkes was as flat as a pancake he makes his money easy Larry they
call him the old mangy parcel he sent at Xmas a cottage cake and a
bottle of hogwash he tried to palm off as claret that he couldnt get
anyone to drink God spare his spit for fear hed die of the drouth or
I must do a few breathing exercises I wonder is that antifat any good
might overdo it the thin ones are not so much the fashion now garters
that much I have the violet pair I wore today thats all he bought me
out of the cheque he got on the first O no there was the face lotion
I finished the last of yesterday that made my skin like new I told him
over and over again get that made up in the same place and dont forget
it God only knows whether he did after all I said to him 111 know by
the bottle anyway if not I suppose 111 only have to wash in my piss like
beeftea or chickensoup with some of that opoponax and violet I thought
it was beginning to look coarse or old a bit the skin underneath is much
finer where it peeled off there on my finger after the burn its a pity
it isnt all like that and the four paltry handkerchiefs about 6/- in all
sure you cant get on in this world without style all going in food and
rent when I get it Ill lash it around I tell you in fine style I always
want to throw a handful of tea into the pot measuring and mincing if
I buy a pair of old brogues itself do you like those new shoes yes how
much were they Ive no clothes at all the brown costume and the skirt and
jacket and the one at the cleaners 3 whats that for any woman cutting
up this old hat and patching up the other the men wont look at you and
women try to walk on you because they know youve no man then with all
the things getting dearer every day for the 4 years more I have of life
up to 35 no Im what am I at all 111 be 33 in September will I what O
well look at that Mrs Galbraith shes much older than me I saw her when
I was out last week her beautys on the wane she was a lovely woman
magnificent head of hair on her down to her waist tossing it back like
that like Kitty OShea in Grantham street 1st thing I did every morning
to look across see her combing it as if she loved it and was full of it
pity I only got to know her the day before we left and that Mrs Langtry
the jersey lily the prince of Wales was in love with I suppose hes like
the first man going the roads only for the name of a king theyre all
made the one way only a black mans Id like to try a beauty up to what
was she 45 there was some funny story about the jealous old husband what
was it at all and an oyster knife he went no he made her wear a kind
of a tin thing round her and the prince of Wales yes he had the oyster
knife cant be true a thing like that like some of those books he brings
me the works of Master Francois Somebody supposed to be a priest about
a child born out of her ear because her bumgut fell out a nice word for
any priest to write and her a--e as if any fool wouldnt know what that
meant I hate that pretending of all things with that old blackguards
face on him anybody can see its not true and that Ruby and Fair Tyrants
he brought me that twice I remember when I came to page 5 o the part
about where she hangs him up out of a hook with a cord flagellate
sure theres nothing for a woman in that all invention made up about he
drinking the champagne out of her slipper after the ball was over like
the infant Jesus in the crib at Inchicore in the Blessed Virgins arms
sure no woman could have a child that big taken out of her and I thought
first it came out of her side because how could she go to the chamber
when she wanted to and she a rich lady of course she felt honoured H R H
he was in Gibraltar the year I was born I bet he found lilies there too
where he planted the tree he planted more than that in his time he might
have planted me too if hed come a bit sooner then I wouldnt be here as
I am he ought to chuck that Freeman with the paltry few shillings
he knocks out of it and go into an office or something where hed get
regular pay or a bank where they could put him up on a throne to count
the money all the day of course he prefers plottering about the house
so you cant stir with him any side whats your programme today I wish hed
even smoke a pipe like father to get the smell of a man or pretending
to be mooching about for advertisements when he could have been in Mr
Cuffes still only for what he did then sending me to try and patch it up
I could have got him promoted there to be the manager he gave me a great
mirada once or twice first he was as stiff as the mischief really and
truly Mrs Bloom only I felt rotten simply with the old rubbishy dress
that I lost the leads out of the tails with no cut in it but theyre
coming into fashion again I bought it simply to please him I knew it was
no good by the finish pity I changed my mind of going to Todd and Bums
as I said and not Lees it was just like the shop itself rummage sale a
lot of trash I hate those rich shops get on your nerves nothing kills me
altogether only he thinks he knows a great lot about a womans dress and
cooking mathering everything he can scour off the shelves into it if
I went by his advices every blessed hat I put on does that suit me yes
take that thats alright the one like a weddingcake standing up miles
off my head he said suited me or the dishcover one coming down on my
backside on pins and needles about the shopgirl in that place in Grafton
street I had the misfortune to bring him into and she as insolent as
ever she could be with her smirk saying Im afraid were giving you too
much trouble what shes there for but I stared it out of her yes he was
awfully stiff and no wonder but he changed the second time he looked
Poldy pigheaded as usual like the soup but I could see him looking very
hard at my chest when he stood up to open the door for me it was nice of
him to show me out in any case Im extremely sorry Mrs Bloom believe me
without making it too marked the first time after him being insulted and
me being supposed to be his wife I just half smiled I know my chest was
out that way at the door when he said Im extremely sorry and Im sure you
were

yes I think he made them a bit firmer sucking them like that so long he
made me thirsty titties he calls them I had to laugh yes this one anyhow
stiff the nipple gets for the least thing Ill get him to keep that up
and Ill take those eggs beaten up with marsala fatten them out for him
what are all those veins and things curious the way its made 2 the same
in case of twins theyre supposed to represent beauty placed up there
like those statues in the museum one of them pretending to hide it with
her hand are they so beautiful of course compared with what a man looks
like with his two bags full and his other thing hanging down out of
him or sticking up at you like a hatrack no wonder they hide it with a
cabbageleaf that disgusting Cameron highlander behind the meat market or
that other wretch with the red head behind the tree where the statue
of the fish used to be when I was passing pretending he was pissing
standing out for me to see it with his babyclothes up to one side the
Queens own they were a nice lot its well the Surreys relieved them
theyre always trying to show it to you every time nearly I passed
outside the mens greenhouse near the Harcourt street station just to
try some fellow or other trying to catch my eye as if it was I of the
7 wonders of the world O and the stink of those rotten places the night
coming home with Poldy after the Comerfords party oranges and lemonade
to make you feel nice and watery I went into r of them it was so biting
cold I couldnt keep it when was that 93 the canal was frozen yes it was
a few months after a pity a couple of the Camerons werent there to see
me squatting in the mens place meadero I tried to draw a picture of
it before I tore it up like a sausage or something I wonder theyre not
afraid going about of getting a kick or a bang of something there the
woman is beauty of course thats admitted when he said I could pose for a
picture naked to some rich fellow in Holles street when he lost the
job in Helys and I was selling the clothes and strumming in the coffee
palace would I be like that bath of the nymph with my hair down yes only
shes younger or Im a little like that dirty bitch in that Spanish photo
he has nymphs used they go about like that I asked him about her and
that word met something with hoses in it and he came out with some
jawbreakers about the incarnation he never can explain a thing simply
the way a body can understand then he goes and burns the bottom out of
the pan all for his Kidney this one not so much theres the mark of his
teeth still where he tried to bite the nipple I had to scream out arent
they fearful trying to hurt you I had a great breast of milk with Milly
enough for two what was the reason of that he said I could have got a
pound a week as a wet nurse all swelled out the morning that delicate
looking student that stopped in no 28 with the Citrons Penrose nearly
caught me washing through the window only for I snapped up the towel to
my face that was his studenting hurt me they used to weaning her till he
got doctor Brady to give me the belladonna prescription I had to get him
to suck them they were so hard he said it was sweeter and thicker than
cows then he wanted to milk me into the tea well hes beyond everything I
declare somebody ought to put him in the budget if I only could remember
the I half of the things and write a book out of it the works of Master
Poldy yes and its so much smoother the skin much an hour he was at them
Im sure by the clock like some kind of a big infant I had at me they
want everything in their mouth all the pleasure those men get out of a
woman I can feel his mouth O Lord I must stretch myself I wished he was
here or somebody to let myself go with and come again like that I feel
all fire inside me or if I could dream it when he made me spend the 2nd
time tickling me behind with his finger I was coming for about 5 minutes
with my legs round him I had to hug him after O Lord I wanted to shout
out all sorts of things fuck or shit or anything at all only not to look
ugly or those lines from the strain who knows the way hed take it you
want to feel your way with a man theyre not all like him thank God some
of them want you to be so nice about it I noticed the contrast he does
it and doesnt talk I gave my eyes that look with my hair a bit loose
from the tumbling and my tongue between my lips up to him the savage
brute Thursday Friday one Saturday two Sunday three O Lord I cant wait
till Monday

frseeeeeeeefronnnng train somewhere whistling the strength those engines
have in them like big giants and the water rolling all over and out of
them all sides like the end of Loves old sweeeetsonnnng the poor men
that have to be out all the night from their wives and families in those
roasting engines stifling it was today Im glad I burned the half of
those old Freemans and Photo Bits leaving things like that lying about
hes getting very careless and threw the rest of them up in the W C 111
get him to cut them tomorrow for me instead of having them there for
the next year to get a few pence for them have him asking wheres last
Januarys paper and all those old overcoats I bundled out of the hall
making the place hotter than it is that rain was lovely and refreshing
just after my beauty sleep I thought it was going to get like Gibraltar
my goodness the heat there before the levanter came on black as night
and the glare of the rock standing up in it like a big giant compared
with their 3 Rock mountain they think is so great with the red sentries
here and there the poplars and they all whitehot and the smell of the
rainwater in those tanks watching the sun all the time weltering down on
you faded all that lovely frock fathers friend Mrs Stanhope sent me from
the B Marche paris what a shame my dearest Doggerina she wrote on it
she was very nice whats this her other name was just a p c to tell you I
sent the little present have just had a jolly warm bath and feel a very
clean dog now enjoyed it wogger she called him wogger wd give anything
to be back in Gib and hear you sing Waiting and in old Madrid Concone
is the name of those exercises he bought me one of those new some word
I couldnt make out shawls amusing things but tear for the least thing
still there lovely I think dont you will always think of the lovely teas
we had together scrumptious currant scones and raspberry wafers I adore
well now dearest Doggerina be sure and write soon kind she left out
regards to your father also captain Grove with love yrs affly Hester x
x x x x she didnt look a bit married just like a girl he was years older
than her wogger he was awfully fond of me when he held down the wire
with his foot for me to step over at the bullfight at La Linea when
that matador Gomez was given the bulls ear these clothes we have to wear
whoever invented them expecting you to walk up Killiney hill then for
example at that picnic all staysed up you cant do a blessed thing in
them in a crowd run or jump out of the way thats why I was afraid when
that other ferocious old Bull began to charge the banderilleros with
the sashes and the 2 things in their hats and the brutes of men shouting
bravo toro sure the women were as bad in their nice white mantillas
ripping all the whole insides out of those poor horses I never heard of
such a thing in all my life yes he used to break his heart at me taking
off the dog barking in bell lane poor brute and it sick what became
of them ever I suppose theyre dead long ago the 2 of them its like all
through a mist makes you feel so old I made the scones of course I had
everything all to myself then a girl Hester we used to compare our hair
mine was thicker than hers she showed me how to settle it at the back
when I put it up and whats this else how to make a knot on a thread with
the one hand we were like cousins what age was I then the night of the
storm I slept in her bed she had her arms round me then we were fighting
in the morning with the pillow what fun he was watching me whenever he
got an opportunity at the band on the Alameda esplanade when I was with
father and captain Grove I looked up at the church first and then at the
windows then down and our eyes met I felt something go through me like
all needles my eyes were dancing I remember after when I looked
at myself in the glass hardly recognised myself the change he was
attractive to a girl in spite of his being a little bald intelligent
looking disappointed and gay at the same time he was like Thomas in
the shadow of Ashlydyat I had a splendid skin from the sun and the
excitement like a rose I didnt get a wink of sleep it wouldnt have been
nice on account of her but I could have stopped it in time she gave me
the Moonstone to read that was the first I read of Wilkie Collins East
Lynne I read and the shadow of Ashlydyat Mrs Henry Wood Henry Dunbar by
that other woman I lent him afterwards with Mulveys photo in it so as he
see I wasnt without and Lord Lytton Eugene Aram Molly bawn she gave me
by Mrs Hungerford on account of the name I dont like books with a Molly
in them like that one he brought me about the one from Flanders a whore
always shoplifting anything she could cloth and stuff and yards of it
O this blanket is too heavy on me thats better I havent even one decent
nightdress this thing gets all rolled under me besides him and his
fooling thats better I used to be weltering then in the heat my shift
drenched with the sweat stuck in the cheeks of my bottom on the chair
when I stood up they were so fattish and firm when I got up on the sofa
cushions to see with my clothes up and the bugs tons of them at night
and the mosquito nets I couldnt read a line Lord how long ago it seems
centuries of course they never came back and she didnt put her address
right on it either she may have noticed her wogger people were always
going away and we never I remember that day with the waves and the
boats with their high heads rocking and the smell of ship those Officers
uniforms on shore leave made me seasick he didnt say anything he was
very serious I had the high buttoned boots on and my skirt was blowing
she kissed me six or seven times didnt I cry yes I believe I did or near
it my lips were taittering when I said goodbye she had a Gorgeous wrap
of some special kind of blue colour on her for the voyage made very
peculiarly to one side like and it was extremely pretty it got as dull
as the devil after they went I was almost planning to run away mad out
of it somewhere were never easy where we are father or aunt or marriage
waiting always waiting to guiiiide him toooo me waiting nor speeeed
his flying feet their damn guns bursting and booming all over the shop
especially the Queens birthday and throwing everything down in all
directions if you didnt open the windows when general Ulysses Grant
whoever he was or did supposed to be some great fellow landed off the
ship and old Sprague the consul that was there from before the flood
dressed up poor man and he in mourning for the son then the same old
bugles for reveille in the morning and drums rolling and the unfortunate
poor devils of soldiers walking about with messtins smelling the place
more than the old longbearded jews in their jellibees and levites
assembly and sound clear and gunfire for the men to cross the lines and
the warden marching with his keys to lock the gates and the bagpipes and
only captain Groves and father talking about Rorkes drift and Plevna and
sir Garnet Wolseley and Gordon at Khartoum lighting their pipes for
them everytime they went out drunken old devil with his grog on the
windowsill catch him leaving any of it picking his nose trying to think
of some other dirty story to tell up in a corner but he never forgot
himself when I was there sending me out of the room on some blind excuse
paying his compliments the Bushmills whisky talking of course but hed
do the same to the next woman that came along I suppose he died of
galloping drink ages ago the days like years not a letter from a living
soul except the odd few I posted to myself with bits of paper in them so
bored sometimes I could fight with my nails listening to that old Arab
with the one eye and his heass of an instrument singing his heah heah
aheah all my compriments on your hotchapotch of your heass as bad as now
with the hands hanging off me looking out of the window if there was a
nice fellow even in the opposite house that medical in Holles street the
nurse was after when I put on my gloves and hat at the window to show
I was going out not a notion what I meant arent they thick never
understand what you say even youd want to print it up on a big poster
for them not even if you shake hands twice with the left he didnt
recognise me either when I half frowned at him outside Westland row
chapel where does their great intelligence come in Id like to know
grey matter they have it all in their tail if you ask me those country
gougers up in the City Arms intelligence they had a damn sight less than
the bulls and cows they were selling the meat and the coalmans bell that
noisy bugger trying to swindle me with the wrong bill he took out of his
hat what a pair of paws and pots and pans and kettles to mend any broken
bottles for a poor man today and no visitors or post ever except his
cheques or some advertisement like that wonderworker they sent him
addressed dear Madam only his letter and the card from Milly this
morning see she wrote a letter to him who did I get the last letter from
O Mrs Dwenn now what possessed her to write from Canada after so many
years to know the recipe I had for pisto madrileno Floey Dillon since
she wrote to say she was married to a very rich architect if Im to
believe all I hear with a villa and eight rooms her father was an
awfully nice man he was near seventy always goodhumoured well now Miss
Tweedy or Miss Gillespie theres the piannyer that was a solid silver
coffee service he had too on the mahogany sideboard then dying so far
away I hate people that have always their poor story to tell everybody
has their own troubles that poor Nancy Blake died a month ago of acute
neumonia well I didnt know her so well as all that she was Floeys friend
more than mine poor Nancy its a bother having to answer he always tells
me the wrong things and no stops to say like making a speech your sad
bereavement symphathy I always make that mistake and newphew with 2
double yous in I hope hell write me a longer letter the next time if its
a thing he really likes me O thanks be to the great God I got somebody
to give me what I badly wanted to put some heart up into me youve no
chances at all in this place like you used long ago I wish somebody
would write me a loveletter his wasnt much and I told him he could write
what he liked yours ever Hugh Boylan in old Madrid stuff silly women
believe love is sighing I am dying still if he wrote it I suppose thered
be some truth in it true or no it fills up your whole day and life
always something to think about every moment and see it all round you
like a new world I could write the answer in bed to let him imagine me
short just a few words not those long crossed letters Atty Dillon used
to write to the fellow that was something in the four courts that jilted
her after out of the ladies letterwriter when I told her to say a few
simple words he could twist how he liked not acting with precipat precip
itancy with equal candour the greatest earthly happiness answer to a
gentlemans proposal affirmatively my goodness theres nothing else its
all very fine for them but as for being a woman as soon as youre old
they might as well throw you out in the bottom of the ashpit.

Mulveys was the first when I was in bed that morning and Mrs Rubio
brought it in with the coffee she stood there standing when I asked her
to hand me and I pointing at them I couldnt think of the word a hairpin
to open it with ah horquilla disobliging old thing and it staring her
in the face with her switch of false hair on her and vain about her
appearance ugly as she was near 80 or a loo her face a mass of wrinkles
with all her religion domineering because she never could get over the
Atlantic fleet coming in half the ships of the world and the Union Jack
flying with all her carabineros because 4 drunken English sailors took
all the rock from them and because I didnt run into mass often enough in
Santa Maria to please her with her shawl up on her except when there was
a marriage on with all her miracles of the saints and her black blessed
virgin with the silver dress and the sun dancing 3 times on Easter
Sunday morning and when the priest was going by with the bell bringing
the vatican to the dying blessing herself for his Majestad an admirer
he signed it I near jumped out of my skin I wanted to pick him up when
I saw him following me along the Calle Real in the shop window then
he tipped me just in passing but I never thought hed write making an
appointment I had it inside my petticoat bodice all day reading it up
in every hole and corner while father was up at the drill instructing to
find out by the handwriting or the language of stamps singing I remember
shall I wear a white rose and I wanted to put on the old stupid clock to
near the time he was the first man kissed me under the Moorish wall my
sweetheart when a boy it never entered my head what kissing meant till
he put his tongue in my mouth his mouth was sweetlike young I put my
knee up to him a few times to learn the way what did I tell him I was
engaged for for fun to the son of a Spanish nobleman named Don Miguel de
la Flora and he believed me that I was to be married to him in 3 years
time theres many a true word spoken in jest there is a flower that
bloometh a few things I told him true about myself just for him to be
imagining the Spanish girls he didnt like I suppose one of them wouldnt
have him I got him excited he crushed all the flowers on my bosom he
brought me he couldnt count the pesetas and the perragordas till I
taught him Cappoquin he came from he said on the black water but it was
too short then the day before he left May yes it was May when the infant
king of Spain was born Im always like that in the spring Id like a new
fellow every year up on the tiptop under the rockgun near OHaras tower
I told him it was struck by lightning and all about the old Barbary apes
they sent to Clapham without a tail careering all over the show on each
others back Mrs Rubio said she was a regular old rock scorpion robbing
the chickens out of Inces farm and throw stones at you if you went anear
he was looking at me I had that white blouse on open in the front to
encourage him as much as I could without too openly they were just
beginning to be plump I said I was tired we lay over the firtree cove
a wild place I suppose it must be the highest rock in existence the
galleries and casemates and those frightful rocks and Saint Michaels
cave with the icicles or whatever they call them hanging down and
ladders all the mud plotching my boots Im sure thats the way down the
monkeys go under the sea to Africa when they die the ships out far like
chips that was the Malta boat passing yes the sea and the sky you could
do what you liked lie there for ever he caressed them outside they love
doing that its the roundness there I was leaning over him with my white
ricestraw hat to take the newness out of it the left side of my face the
best my blouse open for his last day transparent kind of shirt he had I
could see his chest pink he wanted to touch mine with his for a moment
but I wouldnt lee him he was awfully put out first for fear you never
know consumption or leave me with a child embarazada that old servant
Ines told me that one drop even if it got into you at all after I tried
with the Banana but I was afraid it might break and get lost up in me
somewhere because they once took something down out of a woman that was
up there for years covered with limesalts theyre all mad to get in there
where they come out of youd think they could never go far enough up and
then theyre done with you in a way till the next time yes because theres
a wonderful feeling there so tender all the time how did we finish it
off yes O yes I pulled him off into my handkerchief pretending not to
be excited but I opened my legs I wouldnt let him touch me inside my
petticoat because I had a skirt opening up the side I tormented the
life out of him first tickling him I loved rousing that dog in the hotel
rrrsssstt awokwokawok his eyes shut and a bird flying below us he was
shy all the same I liked him like that moaning I made him blush a little
when I got over him that way when I unbuttoned him and took his out and
drew back the skin it had a kind of eye in it theyre all Buttons men
down the middle on the wrong side of them Molly darling he called me
what was his name Jack Joe Harry Mulvey was it yes I think a lieutenant
he was rather fair he had a laughing kind of a voice so I went round to
the whatyoucallit everything was whatyoucallit moustache had he he said
hed come back Lord its just like yesterday to me and if I was married
hed do it to me and I promised him yes faithfully Id let him block me
now flying perhaps hes dead or killed or a captain or admiral its nearly
20 years if I said firtree cove he would if he came up behind me and
put his hands over my eyes to guess who I might recognise him hes young
still about 40 perhaps hes married some girl on the black water and is
quite changed they all do they havent half the character a woman has she
little knows what I did with her beloved husband before he ever dreamt
of her in broad daylight too in the sight of the whole world you might
say they could have put an article about it in the Chronicle I was a bit
wild after when I blew out the old bag the biscuits were in from Benady
Bros and exploded it Lord what a bang all the woodcocks and pigeons
screaming coming back the same way that we went over middle hill round
by the old guardhouse and the jews burialplace pretending to read out
the Hebrew on them I wanted to fire his pistol he said he hadnt one he
didnt know what to make of me with his peak cap on that he always wore
crooked as often as I settled it straight H M S Calypso swinging my hat
that old Bishop that spoke off the altar his long preach about womans
higher functions about girls now riding the bicycle and wearing peak
caps and the new woman bloomers God send him sense and me more money I
suppose theyre called after him I never thought that would be my
name Bloom when I used to write it in print to see how it looked on a
visiting card or practising for the butcher and oblige M Bloom youre
looking blooming Josie used to say after I married him well its better
than Breen or Briggs does brig or those awful names with bottom in them
Mrs Ramsbottom or some other kind of a bottom Mulvey I wouldnt go mad
about either or suppose I divorced him Mrs Boylan my mother whoever she
was might have given me a nicer name the Lord knows after the lovely
one she had Lunita Laredo the fun we had running along Williss road to
Europa point twisting in and out all round the other side of Jersey they
were shaking and dancing about in my blouse like Millys little ones now
when she runs up the stairs I loved looking down at them I was jumping
up at the pepper trees and the white poplars pulling the leaves off and
throwing them at him he went to India he was to write the voyages those
men have to make to the ends of the world and back its the least they
might get a squeeze or two at a woman while they can going out to be
drowned or blown up somewhere I went up Windmill hill to the flats
that Sunday morning with captain Rubios that was dead spyglass like the
sentry had he said hed have one or two from on board I wore that frock
from the B Marche paris and the coral necklace the straits shining I
could see over to Morocco almost the bay of Tangier white and the Atlas
mountain with snow on it and the straits like a river so clear Harry
Molly darling I was thinking of him on the sea all the time after at
mass when my petticoat began to slip down at the elevation weeks and
weeks I kept the handkerchief under my pillow for the smell of him there
was no decent perfume to be got in that Gibraltar only that cheap peau
dEspagne that faded and left a stink on you more than anything else I
wanted to give him a memento he gave me that clumsy Claddagh ring for
luck that I gave Gardner going to south Africa where those Boers killed
him with their war and fever but they were well beaten all the same as
if it brought its bad luck with it like an opal or pearl still it must
have been pure 18 carrot gold because it was very heavy but what could
you get in a place like that the sandfrog shower from Africa and that
derelict ship that came up to the harbour Marie the Marie whatyoucallit
no he hadnt a moustache that was Gardner yes I can see his face
cleanshaven Frseeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeefrong that train again weeping tone
once in the dear deaead days beyondre call close my eyes breath my lips
forward kiss sad look eyes open piano ere oer the world the mists began
I hate that istsbeg comes loves sweet sooooooooooong Ill let that out
full when I get in front of the footlights again Kathleen Kearney
and her lot of squealers Miss This Miss That Miss Theother lot of
sparrowfarts skitting around talking about politics they know as much
about as my backside anything in the world to make themselves someway
interesting Irish homemade beauties soldiers daughter am I ay and whose
are you bootmakers and publicans I beg your pardon coach I thought you
were a wheelbarrow theyd die down dead off their feet if ever they got
a chance of walking down the Alameda on an officers arm like me on the
bandnight my eyes flash my bust that they havent passion God help their
poor head I knew more about men and life when I was I S than theyll all
know at 50 they dont know how to sing a song like that Gardner said no
man could look at my mouth and teeth smiling like that and not think of
it I was afraid he mightnt like my accent first he so English all father
left me in spite of his stamps Ive my mothers eyes and figure anyhow
he always said theyre so snotty about themselves some of those cads he
wasnt a bit like that he was dead gone on my lips let them get a husband
first thats fit to be looked at and a daughter like mine or see if they
can excite a swell with money that can pick and choose whoever he wants
like Boylan to do it 4 or 5 times locked in each others arms or the
voice either I could have been a prima donna only I married him comes
looooves old deep down chin back not too much make it double My Ladys
Bower is too long for an encore about the moated grange at twilight and
vaunted rooms yes Ill sing Winds that blow from the south that he gave
after the choirstairs performance Ill change that lace on my black dress
to show off my bubs and Ill yes by God Ill get that big fan mended make
them burst with envy my hole is itching me always when I think of him I
feel I want to I feel some wind in me better go easy not wake him have
him at it again slobbering after washing every bit of myself back belly
and sides if we had even a bath itself or my own room anyway I wish hed
sleep in some bed by himself with his cold feet on me give us room even
to let a fart God or do the least thing better yes hold them like that
a bit on my side piano quietly sweeeee theres that train far away
pianissimo eeeee one more song

that was a relief wherever you be let your wind go free who knows if
that pork chop I took with my cup of tea after was quite good with the
heat I couldnt smell anything off it Im sure that queerlooking man in
the porkbutchers is a great rogue I hope that lamp is not smoking fill
my nose up with smuts better than having him leaving the gas on all
night I couldnt rest easy in my bed in Gibraltar even getting up to see
why am I so damned nervous about that though I like it in the winter its
more company O Lord it was rotten cold too that winter when I was
only about ten was I yes I had the big doll with all the funny clothes
dressing her up and undressing that icy wind skeeting across from those
mountains the something Nevada sierra nevada standing at the fire with
the little bit of a short shift I had up to heat myself I loved dancing
about in it then make a race back into bed Im sure that fellow opposite
used to be there the whole time watching with the lights out in the
summer and I in my skin hopping around I used to love myself then
stripped at the washstand dabbing and creaming only when it came to the
chamber performance I put out the light too so then there were 2 of us
goodbye to my sleep for this night anyhow I hope hes not going to get in
with those medicals leading him astray to imagine hes young again coming
in at 4 in the morning it must be if not more still he had the manners
not to wake me what do they find to gabber about all night squandering
money and getting drunker and drunker couldnt they drink water then he
starts giving us his orders for eggs and tea and Findon haddy and hot
buttered toast I suppose well have him sitting up like the king of
the country pumping the wrong end of the spoon up and down in his egg
wherever he learned that from and I love to hear him falling up the
stairs of a morning with the cups rattling on the tray and then play
with the cat she rubs up against you for her own sake I wonder has she
fleas shes as bad as a woman always licking and lecking but I hate their
claws I wonder do they see anything that we cant staring like that when
she sits at the top of the stairs so long and listening as I wait always
what a robber too that lovely fresh place I bought I think Ill get a bit
of fish tomorrow or today is it Friday yes I will with some blancmange
with black currant jam like long ago not those 2 lb pots of mixed plum
and apple from the London and Newcastle Williams and Woods goes twice as
far only for the bones I hate those eels cod yes Ill get a nice piece
of cod Im always getting enough for 3 forgetting anyway Im sick of that
everlasting butchers meat from Buckleys loin chops and leg beef and rib
steak and scrag of mutton and calfs pluck the very name is enough or
a picnic suppose we all gave 5/- each and or let him pay it and invite
some other woman for him who Mrs Fleming and drove out to the furry glen
or the strawberry beds wed have him examining all the horses toenails
first like he does with the letters no not with Boylan there yes with
some cold veal and ham mixed sandwiches there are little houses down
at the bottom of the banks there on purpose but its as hot as blazes he
says not a bank holiday anyhow I hate those ruck of Mary Ann coalboxes
out for the day Whit Monday is a cursed day too no wonder that bee bit
him better the seaside but Id never again in this life get into a boat
with him after him at Bray telling the boatman he knew how to row if
anyone asked could he ride the steeplechase for the gold cup hed say
yes then it came on to get rough the old thing crookeding about and the
weight all down my side telling me pull the right reins now pull the
left and the tide all swamping in floods in through the bottom and his
oar slipping out of the stirrup its a mercy we werent all drowned he can
swim of course me no theres no danger whatsoever keep yourself calm in
his flannel trousers Id like to have tattered them down off him before
all the people and give him what that one calls flagellate till he was
black and blue do him all the good in the world only for that longnosed
chap I dont know who he is with that other beauty Burke out of the City
Arms hotel was there spying around as usual on the slip always where he
wasnt wanted if there was a row on youd vomit a better face there was no
love lost between us thats 1 consolation I wonder what kind is that book
he brought me Sweets of Sin by a gentleman of fashion some other Mr de
Kock I suppose the people gave him that nickname going about with his
tube from one woman to another I couldnt even change my new white shoes
all ruined with the saltwater and the hat I had with that feather all
blowy and tossed on me how annoying and provoking because the smell of
the sea excited me of course the sardines and the bream in Catalan bay
round the back of the rock they were fine all silver in the fishermens
baskets old Luigi near a hundred they said came from Genoa and the tall
old chap with the earrings I dont like a man you have to climb up to to
get at I suppose theyre all dead and rotten long ago besides I dont like
being alone in this big barracks of a place at night I suppose Ill have
to put up with it I never brought a bit of salt in even when we moved
in the confusion musical academy he was going to make on the first floor
drawingroom with a brassplate or Blooms private hotel he suggested go
and ruin himself altogether the way his father did down in Ennis like
all the things he told father he was going to do and me but I saw
through him telling me all the lovely places we could go for the
honeymoon Venice by moonlight with the gondolas and the lake of Como he
had a picture cut out of some paper of and mandolines and lanterns O
how nice I said whatever I liked he was going to do immediately if
not sooner will you be my man will you carry my can he ought to get a
leather medal with a putty rim for all the plans he invents then leaving
us here all day youd never know what old beggar at the door for a crust
with his long story might be a tramp and put his foot in the way to
prevent me shutting it like that picture of that hardened criminal he
was called in Lloyds Weekly news 20 years in jail then he comes out and
murders an old woman for her money imagine his poor wife or mother or
whoever she is such a face youd run miles away from I couldnt rest easy
till I bolted all the doors and windows to make sure but its worse again
being locked up like in a prison or a madhouse they ought to be all shot
or the cat of nine tails a big brute like that that would attack a poor
old woman to murder her in her bed Id cut them off him so I would not
that hed be much use still better than nothing the night I was sure
I heard burglars in the kitchen and he went down in his shirt with a
candle and a poker as if he was looking for a mouse as white as a sheet
frightened out of his wits making as much noise as he possibly could
for the burglars benefit there isnt much to steal indeed the Lord knows
still its the feeling especially now with Milly away such an idea for
him to send the girl down there to learn to take photographs on account
of his grandfather instead of sending her to Skerrys academy where shed
have to learn not like me getting all IS at school only hed do a thing
like that all the same on account of me and Boylan thats why he did
it Im certain the way he plots and plans everything out I couldnt turn
round with her in the place lately unless I bolted the door first gave
me the fidgets coming in without knocking first when I put the chair
against the door just as I was washing myself there below with the glove
get on your nerves then doing the loglady all day put her in a glasscase
with two at a time to look at her if he knew she broke off the hand off
that little gimcrack statue with her roughness and carelessness before
she left that I got that little Italian boy to mend so that you cant
see the join for 2 shillings wouldnt even teem the potatoes for you of
course shes right not to ruin her hands I noticed he was always talking
to her lately at the table explaining things in the paper and she
pretending to understand sly of course that comes from his side of the
house he cant say I pretend things can he Im too honest as a matter of
fact and helping her into her coat but if there was anything wrong with
her its me shed tell not him I suppose he thinks Im finished out and
laid on the shelf well Im not no nor anything like it well see well see
now shes well on for flirting too with Tom Devans two sons imitating
me whistling with those romps of Murray girls calling for her can Milly
come out please shes in great demand to pick what they can out of her
round in Nelson street riding Harry Devans bicycle at night its as well
he sent her where she is she was just getting out of bounds wanting to
go on the skatingrink and smoking their cigarettes through their nose I
smelt it off her dress when I was biting off the thread of the button
I sewed on to the bottom of her jacket she couldnt hide much from me I
tell you only I oughtnt to have stitched it and it on her it brings a
parting and the last plumpudding too split in 2 halves see it comes out
no matter what they say her tongue is a bit too long for my taste
your blouse is open too low she says to me the pan calling the kettle
blackbottom and I had to tell her not to cock her legs up like that on
show on the windowsill before all the people passing they all look at
her like me when I was her age of course any old rag looks well on
you then a great touchmenot too in her own way at the Only Way in the
Theatre royal take your foot away out of that I hate people touching
me afraid of her life Id crush her skirt with the pleats a lot of that
touching must go on in theatres in the crush in the dark theyre always
trying to wiggle up to you that fellow in the pit at the Gaiety for
Beerbohm Tree in Trilby the last time Ill ever go there to be squashed
like that for any Trilby or her barebum every two minutes tipping me
there and looking away hes a bit daft I think I saw him after trying to
get near two stylishdressed ladies outside Switzers window at the same
little game I recognised him on the moment the face and everything but
he didnt remember me yes and she didnt even want me to kiss her at the
Broadstone going away well I hope shell get someone to dance attendance
on her the way I did when she was down with the mumps and her glands
swollen wheres this and wheres that of course she cant feel anything
deep yet I never came properly till I was what 22 or so it went into the
wrong place always only the usual girls nonsense and giggling that
Conny Connolly writing to her in white ink on black paper sealed with
sealingwax though she clapped when the curtain came down because he
looked so handsome then we had Martin Harvey for breakfast dinner and
supper I thought to myself afterwards it must be real love if a man
gives up his life for her that way for nothing I suppose there are a
few men like that left its hard to believe in it though unless it really
happened to me the majority of them with not a particle of love in their
natures to find two people like that nowadays full up of each other that
would feel the same way as you do theyre usually a bit foolish in the
head his father must have been a bit queer to go and poison himself
after her still poor old man I suppose he felt lost shes always making
love to my things too the few old rags I have wanting to put her hair up
at I S my powder too only ruin her skin on her shes time enough for that
all her life after of course shes restless knowing shes pretty with her
lips so red a pity they wont stay that way I was too but theres no use
going to the fair with the thing answering me like a fishwoman when
I asked to go for a half a stone of potatoes the day we met Mrs Joe
Gallaher at the trottingmatches and she pretended not to see us in her
trap with Friery the solicitor we werent grand enough till I gave her 2
damn fine cracks across the ear for herself take that now for answering
me like that and that for your impudence she had me that exasperated of
course contradicting I was badtempered too because how was it there was
a weed in the tea or I didnt sleep the night before cheese I ate was it
and I told her over and over again not to leave knives crossed like that
because she has nobody to command her as she said herself well if he
doesnt correct her faith I will that was the last time she turned on the
teartap I was just like that myself they darent order me about the place
its his fault of course having the two of us slaving here instead of
getting in a woman long ago am I ever going to have a proper servant
again of course then shed see him coming Id have to let her know or shed
revenge it arent they a nuisance that old Mrs Fleming you have to be
walking round after her putting the things into her hands sneezing and
farting into the pots well of course shes old she cant help it a good
job I found that rotten old smelly dishcloth that got lost behind the
dresser I knew there was something and opened the area window to let out
the smell bringing in his friends to entertain them like the night he
walked home with a dog if you please that might have been mad especially
Simon Dedalus son his father such a criticiser with his glasses up with
his tall hat on him at the cricket match and a great big hole in his
sock one thing laughing at the other and his son that got all those
prizes for whatever he won them in the intermediate imagine climbing
over the railings if anybody saw him that knew us I wonder he didnt tear
a big hole in his grand funeral trousers as if the one nature gave wasnt
enough for anybody hawking him down into the dirty old kitchen now is he
right in his head I ask pity it wasnt washing day my old pair of drawers
might have been hanging up too on the line on exhibition for all hed
ever care with the ironmould mark the stupid old bundle burned on them
he might think was something else and she never even rendered down the
fat I told her and now shes going such as she was on account of her
paralysed husband getting worse theres always something wrong with them
disease or they have to go under an operation or if its not that its
drink and he beats her Ill have to hunt around again for someone every
day I get up theres some new thing on sweet God sweet God well when Im
stretched out dead in my grave I suppose 111 have some peace I want to
get up a minute if Im let wait O Jesus wait yes that thing has come on
me yes now wouldnt that afflict you of course all the poking and rooting
and ploughing he had up in me now what am I to do Friday Saturday Sunday
wouldnt that pester the soul out of a body unless he likes it some men
do God knows theres always something wrong with us 5 days every 3 or 4
weeks usual monthly auction isnt it simply sickening that night it came
on me like that the one and only time we were in a box that Michael Gunn
gave him to see Mrs Kendal and her husband at the Gaiety something he
did about insurance for him in Drimmies I was fit to be tied though I
wouldnt give in with that gentleman of fashion staring down at me with
his glasses and him the other side of me talking about Spinoza and his
soul thats dead I suppose millions of years ago I smiled the best I
could all in a swamp leaning forward as if I was interested having to
sit it out then to the last tag I wont forget that wife of Scarli in
a hurry supposed to be a fast play about adultery that idiot in the
gallery hissing the woman adulteress he shouted I suppose he went and
had a woman in the next lane running round all the back ways after
to make up for it I wish he had what I had then hed boo I bet the cat
itself is better off than us have we too much blood up in us or what O
patience above its pouring out of me like the sea anyhow he didnt make
me pregnant as big as he is I dont want to ruin the clean sheets I just
put on I suppose the clean linen I wore brought it on too damn it damn
it and they always want to see a stain on the bed to know youre a virgin
for them all thats troubling them theyre such fools too you could be a
widow or divorced 40 times over a daub of red ink would do or blackberry
juice no thats too purply O Jamesy let me up out of this pooh sweets of
sin whoever suggested that business for women what between clothes and
cooking and children this damned old bed too jingling like the dickens
I suppose they could hear us away over the other side of the park till I
suggested to put the quilt on the floor with the pillow under my bottom
I wonder is it nicer in the day I think it is easy I think Ill cut
all this hair off me there scalding me I might look like a young girl
wouldnt he get the great suckin the next time he turned up my clothes on
me Id give anything to see his face wheres the chamber gone easy Ive a
holy horror of its breaking under me after that old commode I wonder
was I too heavy sitting on his knee I made him sit on the easychair
purposely when I took off only my blouse and skirt first in the other
room he was so busy where he oughtnt to be he never felt me I hope my
breath was sweet after those kissing comfits easy God I remember one
time I could scout it out straight whistling like a man almost easy O
Lord how noisy I hope theyre bubbles on it for a wad of money from some
fellow 111 have to perfume it in the morning dont forget I bet he
never saw a better pair of thighs than that look how white they are the
smoothest place is right there between this bit here how soft like a
peach easy God I wouldnt mind being a man and get up on a lovely woman
O Lord what a row youre making like the jersey lily easy easy O how the
waters come down at Lahore

who knows is there anything the matter with my insides or have I
something growing in me getting that thing like that every week when was
it last I Whit Monday yes its only about 3 weeks I ought to go to the
doctor only it would be like before I married him when I had that white
thing coming from me and Floey made me go to that dry old stick Dr
Collins for womens diseases on Pembroke road your vagina he called it I
suppose thats how he got all the gilt mirrors and carpets getting round
those rich ones off Stephens green running up to him for every little
fiddlefaddle her vagina and her cochinchina theyve money of course so
theyre all right I wouldnt marry him not if he was the last man in
the world besides theres something queer about their children always
smelling around those filthy bitches all sides asking me if what I did
had an offensive odour what did he want me to do but the one thing gold
maybe what a question if I smathered it all over his wrinkly old face
for him with all my compriments I suppose hed know then and could you
pass it easily pass what I thought he was talking about the rock of
Gibraltar the way he put it thats a very nice invention too by the
way only I like letting myself down after in the hole as far as I can
squeeze and pull the chain then to flush it nice cool pins and needles
still theres something in it I suppose I always used to know by Millys
when she was a child whether she had worms or not still all the same
paying him for that how much is that doctor one guinea please and asking
me had I frequent omissions where do those old fellows get all the words
they have omissions with his shortsighted eyes on me cocked sideways I
wouldnt trust him too far to give me chloroform or God knows what else
still I liked him when he sat down to write the thing out frowning so
severe his nose intelligent like that you be damned you lying strap O
anything no matter who except an idiot he was clever enough to spot
that of course that was all thinking of him and his mad crazy letters
my Precious one everything connected with your glorious Body everything
underlined that comes from it is a thing of beauty and of joy for ever
something he got out of some nonsensical book that he had me always at
myself 4 and 5 times a day sometimes and I said I hadnt are you sure
O yes I said I am quite sure in a way that shut him up I knew what was
coming next only natural weakness it was he excited me I dont know how
the first night ever we met when I was living in Rehoboth terrace we
stood staring at one another for about lo minutes as if we met somewhere
I suppose on account of my being jewess looking after my mother he used
to amuse me the things he said with the half sloothering smile on him
and all the Doyles said he was going to stand for a member of Parliament
O wasnt I the born fool to believe all his blather about home rule
and the land league sending me that long strool of a song out of the
Huguenots to sing in French to be more classy O beau pays de la Touraine
that I never even sang once explaining and rigmaroling about religion
and persecution he wont let you enjoy anything naturally then might he
as a great favour the very 1st opportunity he got a chance in Brighton
square running into my bedroom pretending the ink got on his hands to
wash it off with the Albion milk and sulphur soap I used to use and the
gelatine still round it O I laughed myself sick at him that day I better
not make an alnight sitting on this affair they ought to make chambers a
natural size so that a woman could sit on it properly he kneels down to
do it I suppose there isnt in all creation another man with the habits
he has look at the way hes sleeping at the foot of the bed how can he
without a hard bolster its well he doesnt kick or he might knock out
all my teeth breathing with his hand on his nose like that Indian god
he took me to show one wet Sunday in the museum in Kildare street all
yellow in a pinafore lying on his side on his hand with his ten toes
sticking out that he said was a bigger religion than the jews and
Our Lords both put together all over Asia imitating him as hes always
imitating everybody I suppose he used to sleep at the foot of the bed
too with his big square feet up in his wifes mouth damn this stinking
thing anyway wheres this those napkins are ah yes I know I hope the old
press doesnt creak ah I knew it would hes sleeping hard had a good time
somewhere still she must have given him great value for his money of
course he has to pay for it from her O this nuisance of a thing I hope
theyll have something better for us in the other world tying ourselves
up God help us thats all right for tonight now the lumpy old jingly
bed always reminds me of old Cohen I suppose he scratched himself in it
often enough and he thinks father bought it from Lord Napier that I used
to admire when I was a little girl because I told him easy piano O
I like my bed God here we are as bad as ever after 16 years how many
houses were we in at all Raymond terrace and Ontario terrace and Lombard
street and Holles street and he goes about whistling every time were on
the run again his huguenots or the frogs march pretending to help the
men with our 4 sticks of furniture and then the City Arms hotel worse
and worse says Warden Daly that charming place on the landing always
somebody inside praying then leaving all their stinks after them
always know who was in there last every time were just getting on right
something happens or he puts his big foot in it Thoms and Helys and Mr
Cuffes and Drimmies either hes going to be run into prison over his old
lottery tickets that was to be all our salvations or he goes and gives
impudence well have him coming home with the sack soon out of the
Freeman too like the rest on account of those Sinner Fein or the
freemasons then well see if the little man he showed me dribbling
along in the wet all by himself round by Coadys lane will give him much
consolation that he says is so capable and sincerely Irish he is indeed
judging by the sincerity of the trousers I saw on him wait theres
Georges church bells wait 3 quarters the hour l wait 2 oclock well
thats a nice hour of the night for him to be coming home at to anybody
climbing down into the area if anybody saw him Ill knock him off that
little habit tomorrow first Ill look at his shirt to see or Ill see if
he has that French letter still in his pocketbook I suppose he thinks I
dont know deceitful men all their 20 pockets arent enough for their lies
then why should we tell them even if its the truth they dont believe you
then tucked up in bed like those babies in the Aristocrats Masterpiece
he brought me another time as if we hadnt enough of that in real life
without some old Aristocrat or whatever his name is disgusting you more
with those rotten pictures children with two heads and no legs thats the
kind of villainy theyre always dreaming about with not another thing in
their empty heads they ought to get slow poison the half of them then
tea and toast for him buttered on both sides and newlaid eggs I suppose
Im nothing any more when I wouldnt let him lick me in Holles street one
night man man tyrant as ever for the one thing he slept on the floor
half the night naked the way the jews used when somebody dies belonged
to them and wouldnt eat any breakfast or speak a word wanting to be
petted so I thought I stood out enough for one time and let him he does
it all wrong too thinking only of his own pleasure his tongue is too
flat or I dont know what he forgets that wethen I dont Ill make him do
it again if he doesnt mind himself and lock him down to sleep in the
coalcellar with the blackbeetles I wonder was it her Josie off her head
with my castoffs hes such a born liar too no hed never have the courage
with a married woman thats why he wants me and Boylan though as for her
Denis as she calls him that forlornlooking spectacle you couldnt call
him a husband yes its some little bitch hes got in with even when I was
with him with Milly at the College races that Hornblower with the childs
bonnet on the top of his nob let us into by the back way he was throwing
his sheeps eyes at those two doing skirt duty up and down I tried to
wink at him first no use of course and thats the way his money goes this
is the fruits of Mr Paddy Dignam yes they were all in great style at the
grand funeral in the paper Boylan brought in if they saw a real officers
funeral thatd be something reversed arms muffled drums the poor horse
walking behind in black L Boom and Tom Kernan that drunken little
barrelly man that bit his tongue off falling down the mens W C drunk
in some place or other and Martin Cunningham and the two Dedaluses and
Fanny MCoys husband white head of cabbage skinny thing with a turn in
her eye trying to sing my songs shed want to be born all over again and
her old green dress with the lowneck as she cant attract them any other
way like dabbling on a rainy day I see it all now plainly and they call
that friendship killing and then burying one another and they all with
their wives and families at home more especially Jack Power keeping that
barmaid he does of course his wife is always sick or going to be sick
or just getting better of it and hes a goodlooking man still though
hes getting a bit grey over the ears theyre a nice lot all of them well
theyre not going to get my husband again into their clutches if I can
help it making fun of him then behind his back I know well when he goes
on with his idiotics because he has sense enough not to squander every
penny piece he earns down their gullets and looks after his wife and
family goodfornothings poor Paddy Dignam all the same Im sorry in a
way for him what are his wife and 5 children going to do unless he was
insured comical little teetotum always stuck up in some pub corner and
her or her son waiting Bill Bailey wont you please come home her widows
weeds wont improve her appearance theyre awfully becoming though if
youre goodlooking what men wasnt he yes he was at the Glencree dinner
and Ben Dollard base barreltone the night he borrowed the swallowtail
to sing out of in Holles street squeezed and squashed into them and
grinning all over his big Dolly face like a wellwhipped childs botty
didnt he look a balmy ballocks sure enough that must have been a
spectacle on the stage imagine paying 5/- in the preserved seats for
that to see him trotting off in his trowlers and Simon Dedalus too he
was always turning up half screwed singing the second verse first the
old love is the new was one of his so sweetly sang the maiden on the
hawthorn bough he was always on for flirtyfying too when I sang Maritana
with him at Freddy Mayers private opera he had a delicious glorious
voice Phoebe dearest goodbye _sweet_heart sweetheart he always sang it
not like Bartell Darcy sweet tart goodbye of course he had the gift of
the voice so there was no art in it all over you like a warm showerbath
O Maritana wildwood flower we sang splendidly though it was a bit too
high for my register even transposed and he was married at the time to
May Goulding but then hed say or do something to knock the good out of
it hes a widower now I wonder what sort is his son he says hes an author
and going to be a university professor of Italian and Im to take lessons
what is he driving at now showing him my photo its not good of me I
ought to have got it taken in drapery that never looks out of fashion
still I look young in it I wonder he didnt make him a present of it
altogether and me too after all why not I saw him driving down to the
Kingsbridge station with his father and mother I was in mourning thats
11 years ago now yes hed be 11 though what was the good in going into
mourning for what was neither one thing nor the other the first cry was
enough for me I heard the deathwatch too ticking in the wall of course
he insisted hed go into mourning for the cat I suppose hes a man now by
this time he was an innocent boy then and a darling little fellow in his
lord Fauntleroy suit and curly hair like a prince on the stage when I
saw him at Mat Dillons he liked me too I remember they all do wait by
God yes wait yes hold on he was on the cards this morning when I laid
out the deck union with a young stranger neither dark nor fair you met
before I thought it meant him but hes no chicken nor a stranger either
besides my face was turned the other way what was the 7th card after
that the 10 of spades for a journey by land then there was a letter on
its way and scandals too the 3 queens and the 8 of diamonds for a rise
in society yes wait it all came out and 2 red 8s for new garments look
at that and didnt I dream something too yes there was something about
poetry in it I hope he hasnt long greasy hair hanging into his eyes or
standing up like a red Indian what do they go about like that for only
getting themselves and their poetry laughed at I always liked poetry
when I was a girl first I thought he was a poet like lord Byron and not
an ounce of it in his composition I thought he was quite different I
wonder is he too young hes about wait 88 I was married 88 Milly is 15
yesterday 89 what age was he then at Dillons 5 or 6 about 88 I suppose
hes 20 or more Im not too old for him if hes 23 or 24 I hope hes not
that stuckup university student sort no otherwise he wouldnt go sitting
down in the old kitchen with him taking Eppss cocoa and talking of
course he pretended to understand it all probably he told him he was
out of Trinity college hes very young to be a professor I hope hes not
a professor like Goodwin was he was a potent professor of John Jameson
they all write about some woman in their poetry well I suppose he wont
find many like me where softly sighs of love the light guitar where
poetry is in the air the blue sea and the moon shining so beautifully
coming back on the nightboat from Tarifa the lighthouse at Europa point
the guitar that fellow played was so expressive will I ever go back
there again all new faces two glancing eyes a lattice hid Ill sing that
for him theyre my eyes if hes anything of a poet two eyes as darkly
bright as loves own star arent those beautiful words as loves young star
itll be a change the Lord knows to have an intelligent person to talk
to about yourself not always listening to him and Billy Prescotts ad
and Keyess ad and Tom the Devils ad then if anything goes wrong in their
business we have to suffer Im sure hes very distinguished Id like to
meet a man like that God not those other ruck besides hes young those
fine young men I could see down in Margate strand bathingplace from the
side of the rock standing up in the sun naked like a God or something
and then plunging into the sea with them why arent all men like that
thered be some consolation for a woman like that lovely little statue he
bought I could look at him all day long curly head and his shoulders
his finger up for you to listen theres real beauty and poetry for you
I often felt I wanted to kiss him all over also his lovely young cock
there so simple I wouldnt mind taking him in my mouth if nobody was
looking as if it was asking you to suck it so clean and white he looks
with his boyish face I would too in 1/2 a minute even if some of it went
down what its only like gruel or the dew theres no danger besides hed
be so clean compared with those pigs of men I suppose never dream of
washing it from I years end to the other the most of them only thats
what gives the women the moustaches Im sure itll be grand if I can only
get in with a handsome young poet at my age Ill throw them the 1st thing
in the morning till I see if the wishcard comes out or Ill try pairing
the lady herself and see if he comes out Ill read and study all I can
find or learn a bit off by heart if I knew who he likes so he wont think
me stupid if he thinks all women are the same and I can teach him the
other part Ill make him feel all over him till he half faints under
me then hell write about me lover and mistress publicly too with our 2
photographs in all the papers when he becomes famous O but then what am
I going to do about him though

no thats no way for him has he no manners nor no refinement nor no
nothing in his nature slapping us behind like that on my bottom because
I didnt call him Hugh the ignoramus that doesnt know poetry from a
cabbage thats what you get for not keeping them in their proper place
pulling off his shoes and trousers there on the chair before me so
barefaced without even asking permission and standing out that vulgar
way in the half of a shirt they wear to be admired like a priest or a
butcher or those old hypocrites in the time of Julius Caesar of course
hes right enough in his way to pass the time as a joke sure you might
as well be in bed with what with a lion God Im sure hed have something
better to say for himself an old Lion would O well I suppose its because
they were so plump and tempting in my short petticoat he couldnt resist
they excite myself sometimes its well for men all the amount of pleasure
they get off a womans body were so round and white for them always I
wished I was one myself for a change just to try with that thing they
have swelling up on you so hard and at the same time so soft when you
touch it my uncle John has a thing long I heard those cornerboys saying
passing the comer of Marrowbone lane my aunt Mary has a thing hairy
because it was dark and they knew a girl was passing it didnt make me
blush why should it either its only nature and he puts his thing long
into my aunt Marys hairy etcetera and turns out to be you put the handle
in a sweepingbrush men again all over they can pick and choose what they
please a married woman or a fast widow or a girl for their different
tastes like those houses round behind Irish street no but were to be
always chained up theyre not going to be chaining me up no damn fear
once I start I tell you for their stupid husbands jealousy why cant we
all remain friends over it instead of quarrelling her husband found it
out what they did together well naturally and if he did can he undo it
hes coronado anyway whatever he does and then he going to the other
mad extreme about the wife in Fair Tyrants of course the man never even
casts a 2nd thought on the husband or wife either its the woman he wants
and he gets her what else were we given all those desires for Id like to
know I cant help it if Im young still can I its a wonder Im not an old
shrivelled hag before my time living with him so cold never embracing
me except sometimes when hes asleep the wrong end of me not knowing I
suppose who he has any man thatd kiss a womans bottom Id throw my hat at
him after that hed kiss anything unnatural where we havent I atom of any
kind of expression in us all of us the same 2 lumps of lard before ever
Id do that to a man pfooh the dirty brutes the mere thought is enough
I kiss the feet of you senorita theres some sense in that didnt he kiss
our halldoor yes he did what a madman nobody understands his cracked
ideas but me still of course a woman wants to be embraced 20 times a day
almost to make her look young no matter by who so long as to be in love
or loved by somebody if the fellow you want isnt there sometimes by the
Lord God I was thinking would I go around by the quays there some dark
evening where nobodyd know me and pick up a sailor off the sea thatd be
hot on for it and not care a pin whose I was only do it off up in a gate
somewhere or one of those wildlooking gipsies in Rathfarnham had their
camp pitched near the Bloomfield laundry to try and steal our things if
they could I only sent mine there a few times for the name model
laundry sending me back over and over some old ones odd stockings that
blackguardlooking fellow with the fine eyes peeling a switch attack me
in the dark and ride me up against the wall without a word or a murderer
anybody what they do themselves the fine gentlemen in their silk hats
that K C lives up somewhere this way coming out of Hardwicke lane the
night he gave us the fish supper on account of winning over the boxing
match of course it was for me he gave it I knew him by his gaiters and
the walk and when I turned round a minute after just to see there was
a woman after coming out of it too some filthy prostitute then he goes
home to his wife after that only I suppose the half of those sailors are
rotten again with disease O move over your big carcass out of that for
the love of Mike listen to him the winds that waft my sighs to thee so
well he may sleep and sigh the great Suggester Don Poldo de la Flora if
he knew how he came out on the cards this morning hed have something to
sigh for a dark man in some perplexity between 2 7s too in prison for
Lord knows what he does that I dont know and Im to be slooching around
down in the kitchen to get his lordship his breakfast while hes rolled
up like a mummy will I indeed did you ever see me running Id just like
to see myself at it show them attention and they treat you like dirt
I dont care what anybody says itd be much better for the world to be
governed by the women in it you wouldnt see women going and killing one
another and slaughtering when do you ever see women rolling around drunk
like they do or gambling every penny they have and losing it on horses
yes because a woman whatever she does she knows where to stop sure they
wouldnt be in the world at all only for us they dont know what it is to
be a woman and a mother how could they where would they all of them be
if they hadnt all a mother to look after them what I never had thats
why I suppose hes running wild now out at night away from his books
and studies and not living at home on account of the usual rowy house I
suppose well its a poor case that those that have a fine son like that
theyre not satisfied and I none was he not able to make one it wasnt my
fault we came together when I was watching the two dogs up in her behind
in the middle of the naked street that disheartened me altogether I
suppose I oughtnt to have buried him in that little woolly jacket I
knitted crying as I was but give it to some poor child but I knew well
Id never have another our 1st death too it was we were never the same
since O Im not going to think myself into the glooms about that any
more I wonder why he wouldnt stay the night I felt all the time it was
somebody strange he brought in instead of roving around the city meeting
God knows who nightwalkers and pickpockets his poor mother wouldnt
like that if she was alive ruining himself for life perhaps still its a
lovely hour so silent I used to love coming home after dances the air of
the night they have friends they can talk to weve none either he wants
what he wont get or its some woman ready to stick her knife in you I
hate that in women no wonder they treat us the way they do we are a
dreadful lot of bitches I suppose its all the troubles we have makes us
so snappy Im not like that he could easy have slept in there on the sofa
in the other room I suppose he was as shy as a boy he being so young
hardly 20 of me in the next room hed have heard me on the chamber arrah
what harm Dedalus I wonder its like those names in Gibraltar Delapaz
Delagracia they had the devils queer names there father Vilaplana of
Santa Maria that gave me the rosary Rosales y OReilly in the Calle las
Siete Revueltas and Pisimbo and Mrs Opisso in Governor street O what a
name Id go and drown myself in the first river if I had a name like
her O my and all the bits of streets Paradise ramp and Bedlam ramp and
Rodgers ramp and Crutchetts ramp and the devils gap steps well small
blame to me if I am a harumscarum I know I am a bit I declare to God I
dont feel a day older than then I wonder could I get my tongue round
any of the Spanish como esta usted muy bien gracias y usted see I havent
forgotten it all I thought I had only for the grammar a noun is the
name of any person place or thing pity I never tried to read that novel
cantankerous Mrs Rubio lent me by Valera with the questions in it all
upside down the two ways I always knew wed go away in the end I can
tell him the Spanish and he tell me the Italian then hell see Im not
so ignorant what a pity he didnt stay Im sure the poor fellow was dead
tired and wanted a good sleep badly I could have brought him in his
breakfast in bed with a bit of toast so long as I didnt do it on
the knife for bad luck or if the woman was going her rounds with the
watercress and something nice and tasty there are a few olives in the
kitchen he might like I never could bear the look of them in Abrines
I could do the criada the room looks all right since I changed it the
other way you see something was telling me all the time Id have to
introduce myself not knowing me from Adam very funny wouldnt it Im his
wife or pretend we were in Spain with him half awake without a Gods
notion where he is dos huevos estrellados senor Lord the cracked things
come into my head sometimes itd be great fun supposing he stayed with us
why not theres the room upstairs empty and Millys bed in the back room
he could do his writing and studies at the table in there for all the
scribbling he does at it and if he wants to read in bed in the morning
like me as hes making the breakfast for I he can make it for 2 Im sure
Im not going to take in lodgers off the street for him if he takes
a gesabo of a house like this Id love to have a long talk with an
intelligent welleducated person Id have to get a nice pair of red
slippers like those Turks with the fez used to sell or yellow and a
nice semitransparent morning gown that I badly want or a peachblossom
dressing jacket like the one long ago in Walpoles only 8/6 or 18/6 Ill
just give him one more chance Ill get up early in the morning Im sick of
Cohens old bed in any case I might go over to the markets to see all
the vegetables and cabbages and tomatoes and carrots and all kinds of
splendid fruits all coming in lovely and fresh who knows whod be the 1st
man Id meet theyre out looking for it in the morning Mamy Dillon used
to say they are and the night too that was her massgoing Id love a
big juicy pear now to melt in your mouth like when I used to be in the
longing way then Ill throw him up his eggs and tea in the moustachecup
she gave him to make his mouth bigger I suppose hed like my nice cream
too I know what Ill do Ill go about rather gay not too much singing a
bit now and then mi fa pieta Masetto then Ill start dressing myself to
go out presto non son piu forte Ill put on my best shift and drawers let
him have a good eyeful out of that to make his micky stand for him Ill
let him know if thats what he wanted that his wife is I s l o fucked yes
and damn well fucked too up to my neck nearly not by him 5 or 6 times
handrunning theres the mark of his spunk on the clean sheet I wouldnt
bother to even iron it out that ought to satisfy him if you dont believe
me feel my belly unless I made him stand there and put him into me Ive a
mind to tell him every scrap and make him do it out in front of me serve
him right its all his own fault if I am an adulteress as the thing in
the gallery said O much about it if thats all the harm ever we did in
this vale of tears God knows its not much doesnt everybody only they
hide it I suppose thats what a woman is supposed to be there for or
He wouldnt have made us the way He did so attractive to men then if he
wants to kiss my bottom Ill drag open my drawers and bulge it right out
in his face as large as life he can stick his tongue 7 miles up my hole
as hes there my brown part then Ill tell him I want LI or perhaps 30/-
Ill tell him I want to buy underclothes then if he gives me that well he
wont be too bad I dont want to soak it all out of him like other women
do I could often have written out a fine cheque for myself and write his
name on it for a couple of pounds a few times he forgot to lock it up
besides he wont spend it Ill let him do it off on me behind provided he
doesnt smear all my good drawers O I suppose that cant be helped Ill do
the indifferent l or 2 questions Ill know by the answers when hes like
that he cant keep a thing back I know every turn in him Ill tighten my
bottom well and let out a few smutty words smellrump or lick my shit or
the first mad thing comes into my head then Ill suggest about yes O wait
now sonny my turn is coming Ill be quite gay and friendly over it O
but I was forgetting this bloody pest of a thing pfooh you wouldnt know
which to laugh or cry were such a mixture of plum and apple no Ill have
to wear the old things so much the better itll be more pointed hell
never know whether he did it or not there thats good enough for you
any old thing at all then Ill wipe him off me just like a business his
omission then Ill go out Ill have him eying up at the ceiling where is
she gone now make him want me thats the only way a quarter after what an
unearthly hour I suppose theyre just getting up in China now combing out
their pigtails for the day well soon have the nuns ringing the angelus
theyve nobody coming in to spoil their sleep except an odd priest or two
for his night office or the alarmclock next door at cockshout clattering
the brains out of itself let me see if I can doze off 1 2 3 4 5 what
kind of flowers are those they invented like the stars the wallpaper
in Lombard street was much nicer the apron he gave me was like that
something only I only wore it twice better lower this lamp and try again
so as I can get up early Ill go to Lambes there beside Findlaters and
get them to send us some flowers to put about the place in case he
brings him home tomorrow today I mean no no Fridays an unlucky day first
I want to do the place up someway the dust grows in it I think while Im
asleep then we can have music and cigarettes I can accompany him first I
must clean the keys of the piano with milk whatll I wear shall I wear
a white rose or those fairy cakes in Liptons I love the smell of a rich
big shop at 7 1/2d a lb or the other ones with the cherries in them
and the pinky sugar I Id a couple of lbs of those a nice plant for the
middle of the table Id get that cheaper in wait wheres this I saw them
not long ago I love flowers Id love to have the whole place swimming in
roses God of heaven theres nothing like nature the wild mountains then
the sea and the waves rushing then the beautiful country with the fields
of oats and wheat and all kinds of things and all the fine cattle going
about that would do your heart good to see rivers and lakes and flowers
all sorts of shapes and smells and colours springing up even out of the
ditches primroses and violets nature it is as for them saying theres no
God I wouldnt give a snap of my two fingers for all their learning why
dont they go and create something I often asked him atheists or whatever
they call themselves go and wash the cobbles off themselves first then
they go howling for the priest and they dying and why why because theyre
afraid of hell on account of their bad conscience ah yes I know them
well who was the first person in the universe before there was anybody
that made it all who ah that they dont know neither do I so there you
are they might as well try to stop the sun from rising tomorrow the sun
shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on
Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to
propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth
and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long
kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain
yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he
said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I
liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew
I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could
leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first
only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many
things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and
old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop
and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front
of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil
half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their
tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and
the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and
Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharons
and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the
cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts
of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those
handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit
down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the
posadas 2 glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron
and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we
missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his
lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson
sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the
Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and the pink
and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and
geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower
of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian
girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the
Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked
him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to
say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and
drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his
heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

Trieste-Zurich-Paris 1914-1921





End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Ulysses, by James Joyce

*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ULYSSES ***

***** This file should be named 4300-8.txt or 4300-8.zip *****
This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
        http://www.gutenberg.org/4/3/0/4300/

Produced by Col Choat

Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
will be renamed.

Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
redistribution.



*** START: FULL LICENSE ***

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK

To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
http://gutenberg.org/license).


Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
electronic works

1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.

1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
works.  See paragraph 1.E below.

1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.

1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
States.

1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:

1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
copied or distributed:

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
1.E.9.

1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.

1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.

1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
Gutenberg-tm License.

1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.

1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.

1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
that

- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."

- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
     License.  You must require such a user to return or
     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
     Project Gutenberg-tm works.

- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
     of receipt of the work.

- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.

1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.

1.F.

1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
your equipment.

1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
DAMAGE.

1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
opportunities to fix the problem.

1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.

1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.

1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.


Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm

Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
people in all walks of life.

Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.


Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation

The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
http://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.

The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
page at http://pglaf.org

For additional contact information:
     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
     Chief Executive and Director
     gbnewby@pglaf.org


Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation

Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
status with the IRS.

The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
particular state visit http://pglaf.org

While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
approach us with offers to donate.

International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.

Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate


Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
works.

Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.


Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.


Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:

     http://www.gutenberg.org

This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
The Project Gutenberg EBook of War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org


Title: War and Peace

Author: Leo Tolstoy

Posting Date: January 10, 2009 [EBook #2600]
Release Date: April, 2001
[Last updated: August 22, 2012]

Language: English


*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WAR AND PEACE ***




An Anonymous Volunteer





WAR AND PEACE

By Leo Tolstoy/Tolstoi





BOOK ONE: 1805





CHAPTER I


"Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the
Buonapartes. But I warn you, if you don't tell me that this means war,
if you still try to defend the infamies and horrors perpetrated by that
Antichrist--I really believe he is Antichrist--I will have nothing more
to do with you and you are no longer my friend, no longer my 'faithful
slave,' as you call yourself! But how do you do? I see I have frightened
you--sit down and tell me all the news."

It was in July, 1805, and the speaker was the well-known Anna Pavlovna
Scherer, maid of honor and favorite of the Empress Marya Fedorovna. With
these words she greeted Prince Vasili Kuragin, a man of high rank and
importance, who was the first to arrive at her reception. Anna Pavlovna
had had a cough for some days. She was, as she said, suffering from la
grippe; grippe being then a new word in St. Petersburg, used only by the
elite.

All her invitations without exception, written in French, and delivered
by a scarlet-liveried footman that morning, ran as follows:

"If you have nothing better to do, Count (or Prince), and if the
prospect of spending an evening with a poor invalid is not too terrible,
I shall be very charmed to see you tonight between 7 and 10--Annette
Scherer."

"Heavens! what a virulent attack!" replied the prince, not in the
least disconcerted by this reception. He had just entered, wearing an
embroidered court uniform, knee breeches, and shoes, and had stars on
his breast and a serene expression on his flat face. He spoke in that
refined French in which our grandfathers not only spoke but thought, and
with the gentle, patronizing intonation natural to a man of importance
who had grown old in society and at court. He went up to Anna Pavlovna,
kissed her hand, presenting to her his bald, scented, and shining head,
and complacently seated himself on the sofa.

"First of all, dear friend, tell me how you are. Set your friend's mind
at rest," said he without altering his tone, beneath the politeness
and affected sympathy of which indifference and even irony could be
discerned.

"Can one be well while suffering morally? Can one be calm in times like
these if one has any feeling?" said Anna Pavlovna. "You are staying the
whole evening, I hope?"

"And the fete at the English ambassador's? Today is Wednesday. I must
put in an appearance there," said the prince. "My daughter is coming for
me to take me there."

"I thought today's fete had been canceled. I confess all these
festivities and fireworks are becoming wearisome."

"If they had known that you wished it, the entertainment would have been
put off," said the prince, who, like a wound-up clock, by force of habit
said things he did not even wish to be believed.

"Don't tease! Well, and what has been decided about Novosiltsev's
dispatch? You know everything."

"What can one say about it?" replied the prince in a cold, listless
tone. "What has been decided? They have decided that Buonaparte has
burnt his boats, and I believe that we are ready to burn ours."

Prince Vasili always spoke languidly, like an actor repeating a stale
part. Anna Pavlovna Scherer on the contrary, despite her forty years,
overflowed with animation and impulsiveness. To be an enthusiast had
become her social vocation and, sometimes even when she did not
feel like it, she became enthusiastic in order not to disappoint the
expectations of those who knew her. The subdued smile which, though it
did not suit her faded features, always played round her lips expressed,
as in a spoiled child, a continual consciousness of her charming defect,
which she neither wished, nor could, nor considered it necessary, to
correct.

In the midst of a conversation on political matters Anna Pavlovna burst
out:

"Oh, don't speak to me of Austria. Perhaps I don't understand things,
but Austria never has wished, and does not wish, for war. She is
betraying us! Russia alone must save Europe. Our gracious sovereign
recognizes his high vocation and will be true to it. That is the one
thing I have faith in! Our good and wonderful sovereign has to perform
the noblest role on earth, and he is so virtuous and noble that God will
not forsake him. He will fulfill his vocation and crush the hydra of
revolution, which has become more terrible than ever in the person of
this murderer and villain! We alone must avenge the blood of the just
one.... Whom, I ask you, can we rely on?... England with her commercial
spirit will not and cannot understand the Emperor Alexander's loftiness
of soul. She has refused to evacuate Malta. She wanted to find,
and still seeks, some secret motive in our actions. What answer did
Novosiltsev get? None. The English have not understood and cannot
understand the self-abnegation of our Emperor who wants nothing for
himself, but only desires the good of mankind. And what have they
promised? Nothing! And what little they have promised they will not
perform! Prussia has always declared that Buonaparte is invincible, and
that all Europe is powerless before him.... And I don't believe a
word that Hardenburg says, or Haugwitz either. This famous Prussian
neutrality is just a trap. I have faith only in God and the lofty
destiny of our adored monarch. He will save Europe!"

She suddenly paused, smiling at her own impetuosity.

"I think," said the prince with a smile, "that if you had been sent
instead of our dear Wintzingerode you would have captured the King of
Prussia's consent by assault. You are so eloquent. Will you give me a
cup of tea?"

"In a moment. A propos," she added, becoming calm again, "I am expecting
two very interesting men tonight, le Vicomte de Mortemart, who is
connected with the Montmorencys through the Rohans, one of the best
French families. He is one of the genuine emigres, the good ones. And
also the Abbe Morio. Do you know that profound thinker? He has been
received by the Emperor. Had you heard?"

"I shall be delighted to meet them," said the prince. "But tell me," he
added with studied carelessness as if it had only just occurred to him,
though the question he was about to ask was the chief motive of his
visit, "is it true that the Dowager Empress wants Baron Funke to be
appointed first secretary at Vienna? The baron by all accounts is a poor
creature."

Prince Vasili wished to obtain this post for his son, but others were
trying through the Dowager Empress Marya Fedorovna to secure it for the
baron.

Anna Pavlovna almost closed her eyes to indicate that neither she nor
anyone else had a right to criticize what the Empress desired or was
pleased with.

"Baron Funke has been recommended to the Dowager Empress by her sister,"
was all she said, in a dry and mournful tone.

As she named the Empress, Anna Pavlovna's face suddenly assumed an
expression of profound and sincere devotion and respect mingled with
sadness, and this occurred every time she mentioned her illustrious
patroness. She added that Her Majesty had deigned to show Baron Funke
beaucoup d'estime, and again her face clouded over with sadness.

The prince was silent and looked indifferent. But, with the womanly and
courtierlike quickness and tact habitual to her, Anna Pavlovna wished
both to rebuke him (for daring to speak he had done of a man recommended
to the Empress) and at the same time to console him, so she said:

"Now about your family. Do you know that since your daughter came
out everyone has been enraptured by her? They say she is amazingly
beautiful."

The prince bowed to signify his respect and gratitude.

"I often think," she continued after a short pause, drawing nearer to
the prince and smiling amiably at him as if to show that political
and social topics were ended and the time had come for intimate
conversation--"I often think how unfairly sometimes the joys of life are
distributed. Why has fate given you two such splendid children? I don't
speak of Anatole, your youngest. I don't like him," she added in a tone
admitting of no rejoinder and raising her eyebrows. "Two such charming
children. And really you appreciate them less than anyone, and so you
don't deserve to have them."

And she smiled her ecstatic smile.

"I can't help it," said the prince. "Lavater would have said I lack the
bump of paternity."

"Don't joke; I mean to have a serious talk with you. Do you know I am
dissatisfied with your younger son? Between ourselves" (and her face
assumed its melancholy expression), "he was mentioned at Her Majesty's
and you were pitied...."

The prince answered nothing, but she looked at him significantly,
awaiting a reply. He frowned.

"What would you have me do?" he said at last. "You know I did all a
father could for their education, and they have both turned out fools.
Hippolyte is at least a quiet fool, but Anatole is an active one. That
is the only difference between them." He said this smiling in a way more
natural and animated than usual, so that the wrinkles round his mouth
very clearly revealed something unexpectedly coarse and unpleasant.

"And why are children born to such men as you? If you were not a father
there would be nothing I could reproach you with," said Anna Pavlovna,
looking up pensively.

"I am your faithful slave and to you alone I can confess that my
children are the bane of my life. It is the cross I have to bear. That
is how I explain it to myself. It can't be helped!"

He said no more, but expressed his resignation to cruel fate by a
gesture. Anna Pavlovna meditated.

"Have you never thought of marrying your prodigal son Anatole?" she
asked. "They say old maids have a mania for matchmaking, and though I
don't feel that weakness in myself as yet, I know a little person who is
very unhappy with her father. She is a relation of yours, Princess Mary
Bolkonskaya."

Prince Vasili did not reply, though, with the quickness of memory and
perception befitting a man of the world, he indicated by a movement of
the head that he was considering this information.

"Do you know," he said at last, evidently unable to check the sad
current of his thoughts, "that Anatole is costing me forty thousand
rubles a year? And," he went on after a pause, "what will it be in five
years, if he goes on like this?" Presently he added: "That's what we
fathers have to put up with.... Is this princess of yours rich?"

"Her father is very rich and stingy. He lives in the country. He is the
well-known Prince Bolkonski who had to retire from the army under the
late Emperor, and was nicknamed 'the King of Prussia.' He is very clever
but eccentric, and a bore. The poor girl is very unhappy. She has a
brother; I think you know him, he married Lise Meinen lately. He is an
aide-de-camp of Kutuzov's and will be here tonight."

"Listen, dear Annette," said the prince, suddenly taking Anna Pavlovna's
hand and for some reason drawing it downwards. "Arrange that affair for
me and I shall always be your most devoted slave-slafe with an f, as
a village elder of mine writes in his reports. She is rich and of good
family and that's all I want."

And with the familiarity and easy grace peculiar to him, he raised the
maid of honor's hand to his lips, kissed it, and swung it to and fro as
he lay back in his armchair, looking in another direction.

"Attendez," said Anna Pavlovna, reflecting, "I'll speak to Lise, young
Bolkonski's wife, this very evening, and perhaps the thing can be
arranged. It shall be on your family's behalf that I'll start my
apprenticeship as old maid."





CHAPTER II


Anna Pavlovna's drawing room was gradually filling. The highest
Petersburg society was assembled there: people differing widely in age
and character but alike in the social circle to which they belonged.
Prince Vasili's daughter, the beautiful Helene, came to take her father
to the ambassador's entertainment; she wore a ball dress and her badge
as maid of honor. The youthful little Princess Bolkonskaya, known as la
femme la plus seduisante de Petersbourg, * was also there. She had been
married during the previous winter, and being pregnant did not go to
any large gatherings, but only to small receptions. Prince Vasili's son,
Hippolyte, had come with Mortemart, whom he introduced. The Abbe Morio
and many others had also come.


     * The most fascinating woman in Petersburg.


To each new arrival Anna Pavlovna said, "You have not yet seen my aunt,"
or "You do not know my aunt?" and very gravely conducted him or her to
a little old lady, wearing large bows of ribbon in her cap, who had come
sailing in from another room as soon as the guests began to arrive;
and slowly turning her eyes from the visitor to her aunt, Anna Pavlovna
mentioned each one's name and then left them.

Each visitor performed the ceremony of greeting this old aunt whom not
one of them knew, not one of them wanted to know, and not one of them
cared about; Anna Pavlovna observed these greetings with mournful and
solemn interest and silent approval. The aunt spoke to each of them in
the same words, about their health and her own, and the health of Her
Majesty, "who, thank God, was better today." And each visitor, though
politeness prevented his showing impatience, left the old woman with a
sense of relief at having performed a vexatious duty and did not return
to her the whole evening.

The young Princess Bolkonskaya had brought some work in a
gold-embroidered velvet bag. Her pretty little upper lip, on which a
delicate dark down was just perceptible, was too short for her teeth,
but it lifted all the more sweetly, and was especially charming when she
occasionally drew it down to meet the lower lip. As is always the case
with a thoroughly attractive woman, her defect--the shortness of her
upper lip and her half-open mouth--seemed to be her own special and
peculiar form of beauty. Everyone brightened at the sight of this pretty
young woman, so soon to become a mother, so full of life and health, and
carrying her burden so lightly. Old men and dull dispirited young ones
who looked at her, after being in her company and talking to her a
little while, felt as if they too were becoming, like her, full of life
and health. All who talked to her, and at each word saw her bright smile
and the constant gleam of her white teeth, thought that they were in a
specially amiable mood that day.

The little princess went round the table with quick, short, swaying
steps, her workbag on her arm, and gaily spreading out her dress sat
down on a sofa near the silver samovar, as if all she was doing was a
pleasure to herself and to all around her. "I have brought my work,"
said she in French, displaying her bag and addressing all present.
"Mind, Annette, I hope you have not played a wicked trick on me," she
added, turning to her hostess. "You wrote that it was to be quite a
small reception, and just see how badly I am dressed." And she spread
out her arms to show her short-waisted, lace-trimmed, dainty gray dress,
girdled with a broad ribbon just below the breast.

"Soyez tranquille, Lise, you will always be prettier than anyone else,"
replied Anna Pavlovna.

"You know," said the princess in the same tone of voice and still in
French, turning to a general, "my husband is deserting me? He is going
to get himself killed. Tell me what this wretched war is for?" she
added, addressing Prince Vasili, and without waiting for an answer she
turned to speak to his daughter, the beautiful Helene.

"What a delightful woman this little princess is!" said Prince Vasili to
Anna Pavlovna.

One of the next arrivals was a stout, heavily built young man with
close-cropped hair, spectacles, the light-colored breeches fashionable
at that time, a very high ruffle, and a brown dress coat. This stout
young man was an illegitimate son of Count Bezukhov, a well-known
grandee of Catherine's time who now lay dying in Moscow. The young man
had not yet entered either the military or civil service, as he had only
just returned from abroad where he had been educated, and this was his
first appearance in society. Anna Pavlovna greeted him with the nod she
accorded to the lowest hierarchy in her drawing room. But in spite of
this lowest-grade greeting, a look of anxiety and fear, as at the sight
of something too large and unsuited to the place, came over her face
when she saw Pierre enter. Though he was certainly rather bigger than
the other men in the room, her anxiety could only have reference to
the clever though shy, but observant and natural, expression which
distinguished him from everyone else in that drawing room.

"It is very good of you, Monsieur Pierre, to come and visit a poor
invalid," said Anna Pavlovna, exchanging an alarmed glance with her aunt
as she conducted him to her.

Pierre murmured something unintelligible, and continued to look round as
if in search of something. On his way to the aunt he bowed to the little
princess with a pleased smile, as to an intimate acquaintance.

Anna Pavlovna's alarm was justified, for Pierre turned away from the
aunt without waiting to hear her speech about Her Majesty's health. Anna
Pavlovna in dismay detained him with the words: "Do you know the Abbe
Morio? He is a most interesting man."

"Yes, I have heard of his scheme for perpetual peace, and it is very
interesting but hardly feasible."

"You think so?" rejoined Anna Pavlovna in order to say something and
get away to attend to her duties as hostess. But Pierre now committed
a reverse act of impoliteness. First he had left a lady before she had
finished speaking to him, and now he continued to speak to another who
wished to get away. With his head bent, and his big feet spread apart,
he began explaining his reasons for thinking the abbe's plan chimerical.

"We will talk of it later," said Anna Pavlovna with a smile.

And having got rid of this young man who did not know how to behave, she
resumed her duties as hostess and continued to listen and watch, ready
to help at any point where the conversation might happen to flag. As
the foreman of a spinning mill, when he has set the hands to work, goes
round and notices here a spindle that has stopped or there one that
creaks or makes more noise than it should, and hastens to check the
machine or set it in proper motion, so Anna Pavlovna moved about her
drawing room, approaching now a silent, now a too-noisy group, and by a
word or slight rearrangement kept the conversational machine in steady,
proper, and regular motion. But amid these cares her anxiety about
Pierre was evident. She kept an anxious watch on him when he approached
the group round Mortemart to listen to what was being said there, and
again when he passed to another group whose center was the abbe.

Pierre had been educated abroad, and this reception at Anna Pavlovna's
was the first he had attended in Russia. He knew that all the
intellectual lights of Petersburg were gathered there and, like a child
in a toyshop, did not know which way to look, afraid of missing any
clever conversation that was to be heard. Seeing the self-confident and
refined expression on the faces of those present he was always expecting
to hear something very profound. At last he came up to Morio. Here the
conversation seemed interesting and he stood waiting for an opportunity
to express his own views, as young people are fond of doing.





CHAPTER III


Anna Pavlovna's reception was in full swing. The spindles hummed
steadily and ceaselessly on all sides. With the exception of the aunt,
beside whom sat only one elderly lady, who with her thin careworn face
was rather out of place in this brilliant society, the whole company had
settled into three groups. One, chiefly masculine, had formed round the
abbe. Another, of young people, was grouped round the beautiful Princess
Helene, Prince Vasili's daughter, and the little Princess Bolkonskaya,
very pretty and rosy, though rather too plump for her age. The third
group was gathered round Mortemart and Anna Pavlovna.

The vicomte was a nice-looking young man with soft features and polished
manners, who evidently considered himself a celebrity but out of
politeness modestly placed himself at the disposal of the circle in
which he found himself. Anna Pavlovna was obviously serving him up as a
treat to her guests. As a clever maitre d'hotel serves up as a specially
choice delicacy a piece of meat that no one who had seen it in the
kitchen would have cared to eat, so Anna Pavlovna served up to her
guests, first the vicomte and then the abbe, as peculiarly choice
morsels. The group about Mortemart immediately began discussing the
murder of the Duc d'Enghien. The vicomte said that the Duc d'Enghien had
perished by his own magnanimity, and that there were particular reasons
for Buonaparte's hatred of him.

"Ah, yes! Do tell us all about it, Vicomte," said Anna Pavlovna, with a
pleasant feeling that there was something a la Louis XV in the sound of
that sentence: "Contez nous cela, Vicomte."

The vicomte bowed and smiled courteously in token of his willingness to
comply. Anna Pavlovna arranged a group round him, inviting everyone to
listen to his tale.

"The vicomte knew the duc personally," whispered Anna Pavlovna to of
the guests. "The vicomte is a wonderful raconteur," said she to another.
"How evidently he belongs to the best society," said she to a third;
and the vicomte was served up to the company in the choicest and most
advantageous style, like a well-garnished joint of roast beef on a hot
dish.

The vicomte wished to begin his story and gave a subtle smile.

"Come over here, Helene, dear," said Anna Pavlovna to the beautiful
young princess who was sitting some way off, the center of another
group.

The princess smiled. She rose with the same unchanging smile with which
she had first entered the room--the smile of a perfectly beautiful
woman. With a slight rustle of her white dress trimmed with moss
and ivy, with a gleam of white shoulders, glossy hair, and sparkling
diamonds, she passed between the men who made way for her, not looking
at any of them but smiling on all, as if graciously allowing each the
privilege of admiring her beautiful figure and shapely shoulders,
back, and bosom--which in the fashion of those days were very much
exposed--and she seemed to bring the glamour of a ballroom with her as
she moved toward Anna Pavlovna. Helene was so lovely that not only
did she not show any trace of coquetry, but on the contrary she even
appeared shy of her unquestionable and all too victorious beauty. She
seemed to wish, but to be unable, to diminish its effect.

"How lovely!" said everyone who saw her; and the vicomte lifted his
shoulders and dropped his eyes as if startled by something extraordinary
when she took her seat opposite and beamed upon him also with her
unchanging smile.

"Madame, I doubt my ability before such an audience," said he, smilingly
inclining his head.

The princess rested her bare round arm on a little table and considered
a reply unnecessary. She smilingly waited. All the time the story was
being told she sat upright, glancing now at her beautiful round arm,
altered in shape by its pressure on the table, now at her still more
beautiful bosom, on which she readjusted a diamond necklace. From time
to time she smoothed the folds of her dress, and whenever the story
produced an effect she glanced at Anna Pavlovna, at once adopted just
the expression she saw on the maid of honor's face, and again relapsed
into her radiant smile.

The little princess had also left the tea table and followed Helene.

"Wait a moment, I'll get my work.... Now then, what are you thinking
of?" she went on, turning to Prince Hippolyte. "Fetch me my workbag."

There was a general movement as the princess, smiling and talking
merrily to everyone at once, sat down and gaily arranged herself in her
seat.

"Now I am all right," she said, and asking the vicomte to begin, she
took up her work.

Prince Hippolyte, having brought the workbag, joined the circle and
moving a chair close to hers seated himself beside her.

Le charmant Hippolyte was surprising by his extraordinary resemblance
to his beautiful sister, but yet more by the fact that in spite of
this resemblance he was exceedingly ugly. His features were like his
sister's, but while in her case everything was lit up by a joyous,
self-satisfied, youthful, and constant smile of animation, and by the
wonderful classic beauty of her figure, his face on the contrary
was dulled by imbecility and a constant expression of sullen
self-confidence, while his body was thin and weak. His eyes, nose, and
mouth all seemed puckered into a vacant, wearied grimace, and his arms
and legs always fell into unnatural positions.

"It's not going to be a ghost story?" said he, sitting down beside
the princess and hastily adjusting his lorgnette, as if without this
instrument he could not begin to speak.

"Why no, my dear fellow," said the astonished narrator, shrugging his
shoulders.

"Because I hate ghost stories," said Prince Hippolyte in a tone which
showed that he only understood the meaning of his words after he had
uttered them.

He spoke with such self-confidence that his hearers could not be sure
whether what he said was very witty or very stupid. He was dressed in
a dark-green dress coat, knee breeches of the color of cuisse de nymphe
effrayee, as he called it, shoes, and silk stockings.

The vicomte told his tale very neatly. It was an anecdote, then current,
to the effect that the Duc d'Enghien had gone secretly to Paris to visit
Mademoiselle George; that at her house he came upon Bonaparte, who also
enjoyed the famous actress' favors, and that in his presence Napoleon
happened to fall into one of the fainting fits to which he was subject,
and was thus at the duc's mercy. The latter spared him, and this
magnanimity Bonaparte subsequently repaid by death.

The story was very pretty and interesting, especially at the point
where the rivals suddenly recognized one another; and the ladies looked
agitated.

"Charming!" said Anna Pavlovna with an inquiring glance at the little
princess.

"Charming!" whispered the little princess, sticking the needle into her
work as if to testify that the interest and fascination of the story
prevented her from going on with it.

The vicomte appreciated this silent praise and smiling gratefully
prepared to continue, but just then Anna Pavlovna, who had kept a
watchful eye on the young man who so alarmed her, noticed that he was
talking too loudly and vehemently with the abbe, so she hurried to the
rescue. Pierre had managed to start a conversation with the abbe about
the balance of power, and the latter, evidently interested by the young
man's simple-minded eagerness, was explaining his pet theory. Both were
talking and listening too eagerly and too naturally, which was why Anna
Pavlovna disapproved.

"The means are... the balance of power in Europe and the rights of the
people," the abbe was saying. "It is only necessary for one powerful
nation like Russia--barbaric as she is said to be--to place herself
disinterestedly at the head of an alliance having for its object the
maintenance of the balance of power of Europe, and it would save the
world!"

"But how are you to get that balance?" Pierre was beginning.

At that moment Anna Pavlovna came up and, looking severely at Pierre,
asked the Italian how he stood Russian climate. The Italian's
face instantly changed and assumed an offensively affected, sugary
expression, evidently habitual to him when conversing with women.

"I am so enchanted by the brilliancy of the wit and culture of the
society, more especially of the feminine society, in which I have had
the honor of being received, that I have not yet had time to think of
the climate," said he.

Not letting the abbe and Pierre escape, Anna Pavlovna, the more
conveniently to keep them under observation, brought them into the
larger circle.





CHAPTER IV


Just then another visitor entered the drawing room: Prince Andrew
Bolkonski, the little princess' husband. He was a very handsome young
man, of medium height, with firm, clearcut features. Everything about
him, from his weary, bored expression to his quiet, measured step,
offered a most striking contrast to his quiet, little wife. It was
evident that he not only knew everyone in the drawing room, but had
found them to be so tiresome that it wearied him to look at or listen to
them. And among all these faces that he found so tedious, none seemed
to bore him so much as that of his pretty wife. He turned away from her
with a grimace that distorted his handsome face, kissed Anna Pavlovna's
hand, and screwing up his eyes scanned the whole company.

"You are off to the war, Prince?" said Anna Pavlovna.

"General Kutuzov," said Bolkonski, speaking French and stressing the
last syllable of the general's name like a Frenchman, "has been pleased
to take me as an aide-de-camp...."

"And Lise, your wife?"

"She will go to the country."

"Are you not ashamed to deprive us of your charming wife?"

"Andre," said his wife, addressing her husband in the same coquettish
manner in which she spoke to other men, "the vicomte has been telling us
such a tale about Mademoiselle George and Buonaparte!"

Prince Andrew screwed up his eyes and turned away. Pierre, who from
the moment Prince Andrew entered the room had watched him with glad,
affectionate eyes, now came up and took his arm. Before he looked round
Prince Andrew frowned again, expressing his annoyance with whoever was
touching his arm, but when he saw Pierre's beaming face he gave him an
unexpectedly kind and pleasant smile.

"There now!... So you, too, are in the great world?" said he to Pierre.

"I knew you would be here," replied Pierre. "I will come to supper with
you. May I?" he added in a low voice so as not to disturb the vicomte
who was continuing his story.

"No, impossible!" said Prince Andrew, laughing and pressing Pierre's
hand to show that there was no need to ask the question. He wished to
say something more, but at that moment Prince Vasili and his daughter
got up to go and the two young men rose to let them pass.

"You must excuse me, dear Vicomte," said Prince Vasili to the Frenchman,
holding him down by the sleeve in a friendly way to prevent his rising.
"This unfortunate fete at the ambassador's deprives me of a pleasure,
and obliges me to interrupt you. I am very sorry to leave your
enchanting party," said he, turning to Anna Pavlovna.

His daughter, Princess Helene, passed between the chairs, lightly
holding up the folds of her dress, and the smile shone still more
radiantly on her beautiful face. Pierre gazed at her with rapturous,
almost frightened, eyes as she passed him.

"Very lovely," said Prince Andrew.

"Very," said Pierre.

In passing Prince Vasili seized Pierre's hand and said to Anna Pavlovna:
"Educate this bear for me! He has been staying with me a whole month
and this is the first time I have seen him in society. Nothing is so
necessary for a young man as the society of clever women."

Anna Pavlovna smiled and promised to take Pierre in hand. She knew his
father to be a connection of Prince Vasili's. The elderly lady who had
been sitting with the old aunt rose hurriedly and overtook Prince Vasili
in the anteroom. All the affectation of interest she had assumed had
left her kindly and tear-worn face and it now expressed only anxiety and
fear.

"How about my son Boris, Prince?" said she, hurrying after him into the
anteroom. "I can't remain any longer in Petersburg. Tell me what news I
may take back to my poor boy."

Although Prince Vasili listened reluctantly and not very politely to
the elderly lady, even betraying some impatience, she gave him an
ingratiating and appealing smile, and took his hand that he might not go
away.

"What would it cost you to say a word to the Emperor, and then he would
be transferred to the Guards at once?" said she.

"Believe me, Princess, I am ready to do all I can," answered Prince
Vasili, "but it is difficult for me to ask the Emperor. I should advise
you to appeal to Rumyantsev through Prince Golitsyn. That would be the
best way."

The elderly lady was a Princess Drubetskaya, belonging to one of the
best families in Russia, but she was poor, and having long been out of
society had lost her former influential connections. She had now come to
Petersburg to procure an appointment in the Guards for her only son.
It was, in fact, solely to meet Prince Vasili that she had obtained an
invitation to Anna Pavlovna's reception and had sat listening to the
vicomte's story. Prince Vasili's words frightened her, an embittered
look clouded her once handsome face, but only for a moment; then she
smiled again and clutched Prince Vasili's arm more tightly.

"Listen to me, Prince," said she. "I have never yet asked you for
anything and I never will again, nor have I ever reminded you of my
father's friendship for you; but now I entreat you for God's sake to
do this for my son--and I shall always regard you as a benefactor," she
added hurriedly. "No, don't be angry, but promise! I have asked Golitsyn
and he has refused. Be the kindhearted man you always were," she said,
trying to smile though tears were in her eyes.

"Papa, we shall be late," said Princess Helene, turning her beautiful
head and looking over her classically molded shoulder as she stood
waiting by the door.

Influence in society, however, is a capital which has to be economized
if it is to last. Prince Vasili knew this, and having once realized that
if he asked on behalf of all who begged of him, he would soon be unable
to ask for himself, he became chary of using his influence. But in
Princess Drubetskaya's case he felt, after her second appeal, something
like qualms of conscience. She had reminded him of what was quite true;
he had been indebted to her father for the first steps in his career.
Moreover, he could see by her manners that she was one of those
women--mostly mothers--who, having once made up their minds, will not
rest until they have gained their end, and are prepared if necessary
to go on insisting day after day and hour after hour, and even to make
scenes. This last consideration moved him.

"My dear Anna Mikhaylovna," said he with his usual familiarity and
weariness of tone, "it is almost impossible for me to do what you ask;
but to prove my devotion to you and how I respect your father's memory,
I will do the impossible--your son shall be transferred to the Guards.
Here is my hand on it. Are you satisfied?"

"My dear benefactor! This is what I expected from you--I knew your
kindness!" He turned to go.

"Wait--just a word! When he has been transferred to the Guards..." she
faltered. "You are on good terms with Michael Ilarionovich Kutuzov...
recommend Boris to him as adjutant! Then I shall be at rest, and
then..."

Prince Vasili smiled.

"No, I won't promise that. You don't know how Kutuzov is pestered since
his appointment as Commander in Chief. He told me himself that all the
Moscow ladies have conspired to give him all their sons as adjutants."

"No, but do promise! I won't let you go! My dear benefactor..."

"Papa," said his beautiful daughter in the same tone as before, "we
shall be late."

"Well, au revoir! Good-by! You hear her?"

"Then tomorrow you will speak to the Emperor?"

"Certainly; but about Kutuzov, I don't promise."

"Do promise, do promise, Vasili!" cried Anna Mikhaylovna as he went,
with the smile of a coquettish girl, which at one time probably came
naturally to her, but was now very ill-suited to her careworn face.

Apparently she had forgotten her age and by force of habit employed
all the old feminine arts. But as soon as the prince had gone her face
resumed its former cold, artificial expression. She returned to the
group where the vicomte was still talking, and again pretended to
listen, while waiting till it would be time to leave. Her task was
accomplished.





CHAPTER V


"And what do you think of this latest comedy, the coronation at Milan?"
asked Anna Pavlovna, "and of the comedy of the people of Genoa and
Lucca laying their petitions before Monsieur Buonaparte, and Monsieur
Buonaparte sitting on a throne and granting the petitions of the
nations? Adorable! It is enough to make one's head whirl! It is as if
the whole world had gone crazy."

Prince Andrew looked Anna Pavlovna straight in the face with a sarcastic
smile.

"'Dieu me la donne, gare a qui la touche!' * They say he was very fine
when he said that," he remarked, repeating the words in Italian: "'Dio
mi l'ha dato. Guai a chi la tocchi!'"


     * God has given it to me, let him who touches it beware!


"I hope this will prove the last drop that will make the glass run
over," Anna Pavlovna continued. "The sovereigns will not be able to
endure this man who is a menace to everything."

"The sovereigns? I do not speak of Russia," said the vicomte, polite but
hopeless: "The sovereigns, madame... What have they done for Louis XVII,
for the Queen, or for Madame Elizabeth? Nothing!" and he became more
animated. "And believe me, they are reaping the reward of their betrayal
of the Bourbon cause. The sovereigns! Why, they are sending ambassadors
to compliment the usurper."

And sighing disdainfully, he again changed his position.

Prince Hippolyte, who had been gazing at the vicomte for some time
through his lorgnette, suddenly turned completely round toward the
little princess, and having asked for a needle began tracing the Conde
coat of arms on the table. He explained this to her with as much gravity
as if she had asked him to do it.

"Baton de gueules, engrele de gueules d'azur--maison Conde," said he.

The princess listened, smiling.

"If Buonaparte remains on the throne of France a year longer," the
vicomte continued, with the air of a man who, in a matter with which
he is better acquainted than anyone else, does not listen to others but
follows the current of his own thoughts, "things will have gone too far.
By intrigues, violence, exile, and executions, French society--I mean
good French society--will have been forever destroyed, and then..."

He shrugged his shoulders and spread out his hands. Pierre wished to
make a remark, for the conversation interested him, but Anna Pavlovna,
who had him under observation, interrupted:

"The Emperor Alexander," said she, with the melancholy which always
accompanied any reference of hers to the Imperial family, "has declared
that he will leave it to the French people themselves to choose their
own form of government; and I believe that once free from the usurper,
the whole nation will certainly throw itself into the arms of its
rightful king," she concluded, trying to be amiable to the royalist
emigrant.

"That is doubtful," said Prince Andrew. "Monsieur le Vicomte quite
rightly supposes that matters have already gone too far. I think it will
be difficult to return to the old regime."

"From what I have heard," said Pierre, blushing and breaking into the
conversation, "almost all the aristocracy has already gone over to
Bonaparte's side."

"It is the Buonapartists who say that," replied the vicomte without
looking at Pierre. "At the present time it is difficult to know the real
state of French public opinion."

"Bonaparte has said so," remarked Prince Andrew with a sarcastic smile.

It was evident that he did not like the vicomte and was aiming his
remarks at him, though without looking at him.

"'I showed them the path to glory, but they did not follow it,'" Prince
Andrew continued after a short silence, again quoting Napoleon's words.
"'I opened my antechambers and they crowded in.' I do not know how far
he was justified in saying so."

"Not in the least," replied the vicomte. "After the murder of the
duc even the most partial ceased to regard him as a hero. If to some
people," he went on, turning to Anna Pavlovna, "he ever was a hero,
after the murder of the duc there was one martyr more in heaven and one
hero less on earth."

Before Anna Pavlovna and the others had time to smile their appreciation
of the vicomte's epigram, Pierre again broke into the conversation, and
though Anna Pavlovna felt sure he would say something inappropriate, she
was unable to stop him.

"The execution of the Duc d'Enghien," declared Monsieur Pierre, "was a
political necessity, and it seems to me that Napoleon showed greatness
of soul by not fearing to take on himself the whole responsibility of
that deed."

"Dieu! Mon Dieu!" muttered Anna Pavlovna in a terrified whisper.

"What, Monsieur Pierre... Do you consider that assassination shows
greatness of soul?" said the little princess, smiling and drawing her
work nearer to her.

"Oh! Oh!" exclaimed several voices.

"Capital!" said Prince Hippolyte in English, and began slapping his knee
with the palm of his hand.

The vicomte merely shrugged his shoulders. Pierre looked solemnly at his
audience over his spectacles and continued.

"I say so," he continued desperately, "because the Bourbons fled
from the Revolution leaving the people to anarchy, and Napoleon alone
understood the Revolution and quelled it, and so for the general good,
he could not stop short for the sake of one man's life."

"Won't you come over to the other table?" suggested Anna Pavlovna.

But Pierre continued his speech without heeding her.

"No," cried he, becoming more and more eager, "Napoleon is great because
he rose superior to the Revolution, suppressed its abuses, preserved all
that was good in it--equality of citizenship and freedom of speech and
of the press--and only for that reason did he obtain power."

"Yes, if having obtained power, without availing himself of it to commit
murder he had restored it to the rightful king, I should have called him
a great man," remarked the vicomte.

"He could not do that. The people only gave him power that he might rid
them of the Bourbons and because they saw that he was a great man. The
Revolution was a grand thing!" continued Monsieur Pierre, betraying by
this desperate and provocative proposition his extreme youth and his
wish to express all that was in his mind.

"What? Revolution and regicide a grand thing?... Well, after that... But
won't you come to this other table?" repeated Anna Pavlovna.

"Rousseau's Contrat social," said the vicomte with a tolerant smile.

"I am not speaking of regicide, I am speaking about ideas."

"Yes: ideas of robbery, murder, and regicide," again interjected an
ironical voice.

"Those were extremes, no doubt, but they are not what is most important.
What is important are the rights of man, emancipation from prejudices,
and equality of citizenship, and all these ideas Napoleon has retained
in full force."

"Liberty and equality," said the vicomte contemptuously, as if at last
deciding seriously to prove to this youth how foolish his words were,
"high-sounding words which have long been discredited. Who does not love
liberty and equality? Even our Saviour preached liberty and equality.
Have people since the Revolution become happier? On the contrary. We
wanted liberty, but Buonaparte has destroyed it."

Prince Andrew kept looking with an amused smile from Pierre to the
vicomte and from the vicomte to their hostess. In the first moment of
Pierre's outburst Anna Pavlovna, despite her social experience, was
horror-struck. But when she saw that Pierre's sacrilegious words had
not exasperated the vicomte, and had convinced herself that it was
impossible to stop him, she rallied her forces and joined the vicomte in
a vigorous attack on the orator.

"But, my dear Monsieur Pierre," said she, "how do you explain the fact
of a great man executing a duc--or even an ordinary man who--is innocent
and untried?"

"I should like," said the vicomte, "to ask how monsieur explains the
18th Brumaire; was not that an imposture? It was a swindle, and not at
all like the conduct of a great man!"

"And the prisoners he killed in Africa? That was horrible!" said the
little princess, shrugging her shoulders.

"He's a low fellow, say what you will," remarked Prince Hippolyte.

Pierre, not knowing whom to answer, looked at them all and smiled. His
smile was unlike the half-smile of other people. When he smiled,
his grave, even rather gloomy, look was instantaneously replaced by
another--a childlike, kindly, even rather silly look, which seemed to
ask forgiveness.

The vicomte who was meeting him for the first time saw clearly that
this young Jacobin was not so terrible as his words suggested. All were
silent.

"How do you expect him to answer you all at once?" said Prince Andrew.
"Besides, in the actions of a statesman one has to distinguish between
his acts as a private person, as a general, and as an emperor. So it
seems to me."

"Yes, yes, of course!" Pierre chimed in, pleased at the arrival of this
reinforcement.

"One must admit," continued Prince Andrew, "that Napoleon as a man was
great on the bridge of Arcola, and in the hospital at Jaffa where he
gave his hand to the plague-stricken; but... but there are other acts
which it is difficult to justify."

Prince Andrew, who had evidently wished to tone down the awkwardness of
Pierre's remarks, rose and made a sign to his wife that it was time to
go.

Suddenly Prince Hippolyte started up making signs to everyone to attend,
and asking them all to be seated began:

"I was told a charming Moscow story today and must treat you to it.
Excuse me, Vicomte--I must tell it in Russian or the point will be
lost...." And Prince Hippolyte began to tell his story in such Russian
as a Frenchman would speak after spending about a year in Russia.
Everyone waited, so emphatically and eagerly did he demand their
attention to his story.

"There is in Moscow a lady, une dame, and she is very stingy. She must
have two footmen behind her carriage, and very big ones. That was her
taste. And she had a lady's maid, also big. She said..."

Here Prince Hippolyte paused, evidently collecting his ideas with
difficulty.

"She said... Oh yes! She said, 'Girl,' to the maid, 'put on a livery,
get up behind the carriage, and come with me while I make some calls.'"

Here Prince Hippolyte spluttered and burst out laughing long before his
audience, which produced an effect unfavorable to the narrator. Several
persons, among them the elderly lady and Anna Pavlovna, did however
smile.

"She went. Suddenly there was a great wind. The girl lost her hat and
her long hair came down...." Here he could contain himself no longer and
went on, between gasps of laughter: "And the whole world knew...."

And so the anecdote ended. Though it was unintelligible why he had told
it, or why it had to be told in Russian, still Anna Pavlovna and the
others appreciated Prince Hippolyte's social tact in so agreeably ending
Pierre's unpleasant and unamiable outburst. After the anecdote the
conversation broke up into insignificant small talk about the last and
next balls, about theatricals, and who would meet whom, and when and
where.





CHAPTER VI


Having thanked Anna Pavlovna for her charming soiree, the guests began
to take their leave.

Pierre was ungainly. Stout, about the average height, broad, with huge
red hands; he did not know, as the saying is, how to enter a drawing
room and still less how to leave one; that is, how to say something
particularly agreeable before going away. Besides this he was
absent-minded. When he rose to go, he took up instead of his own, the
general's three-cornered hat, and held it, pulling at the plume, till
the general asked him to restore it. All his absent-mindedness and
inability to enter a room and converse in it was, however, redeemed by
his kindly, simple, and modest expression. Anna Pavlovna turned toward
him and, with a Christian mildness that expressed forgiveness of his
indiscretion, nodded and said: "I hope to see you again, but I also hope
you will change your opinions, my dear Monsieur Pierre."

When she said this, he did not reply and only bowed, but again everybody
saw his smile, which said nothing, unless perhaps, "Opinions are
opinions, but you see what a capital, good-natured fellow I am." And
everyone, including Anna Pavlovna, felt this.

Prince Andrew had gone out into the hall, and, turning his shoulders
to the footman who was helping him on with his cloak, listened
indifferently to his wife's chatter with Prince Hippolyte who had also
come into the hall. Prince Hippolyte stood close to the pretty, pregnant
princess, and stared fixedly at her through his eyeglass.

"Go in, Annette, or you will catch cold," said the little princess,
taking leave of Anna Pavlovna. "It is settled," she added in a low
voice.

Anna Pavlovna had already managed to speak to Lise about the match she
contemplated between Anatole and the little princess' sister-in-law.

"I rely on you, my dear," said Anna Pavlovna, also in a low tone.
"Write to her and let me know how her father looks at the matter. Au
revoir!"--and she left the hall.

Prince Hippolyte approached the little princess and, bending his face
close to her, began to whisper something.

Two footmen, the princess' and his own, stood holding a shawl and a
cloak, waiting for the conversation to finish. They listened to
the French sentences which to them were meaningless, with an air of
understanding but not wishing to appear to do so. The princess as usual
spoke smilingly and listened with a laugh.

"I am very glad I did not go to the ambassador's," said Prince Hippolyte
"-so dull-. It has been a delightful evening, has it not? Delightful!"

"They say the ball will be very good," replied the princess, drawing up
her downy little lip. "All the pretty women in society will be there."

"Not all, for you will not be there; not all," said Prince Hippolyte
smiling joyfully; and snatching the shawl from the footman, whom he
even pushed aside, he began wrapping it round the princess. Either from
awkwardness or intentionally (no one could have said which) after the
shawl had been adjusted he kept his arm around her for a long time, as
though embracing her.

Still smiling, she gracefully moved away, turning and glancing at her
husband. Prince Andrew's eyes were closed, so weary and sleepy did he
seem.

"Are you ready?" he asked his wife, looking past her.

Prince Hippolyte hurriedly put on his cloak, which in the latest fashion
reached to his very heels, and, stumbling in it, ran out into the porch
following the princess, whom a footman was helping into the carriage.

"Princesse, au revoir," cried he, stumbling with his tongue as well as
with his feet.

The princess, picking up her dress, was taking her seat in the dark
carriage, her husband was adjusting his saber; Prince Hippolyte, under
pretense of helping, was in everyone's way.

"Allow me, sir," said Prince Andrew in Russian in a cold, disagreeable
tone to Prince Hippolyte who was blocking his path.

"I am expecting you, Pierre," said the same voice, but gently and
affectionately.

The postilion started, the carriage wheels rattled. Prince Hippolyte
laughed spasmodically as he stood in the porch waiting for the vicomte
whom he had promised to take home.

"Well, mon cher," said the vicomte, having seated himself beside
Hippolyte in the carriage, "your little princess is very nice, very nice
indeed, quite French," and he kissed the tips of his fingers. Hippolyte
burst out laughing.

"Do you know, you are a terrible chap for all your innocent airs,"
continued the vicomte. "I pity the poor husband, that little officer who
gives himself the airs of a monarch."

Hippolyte spluttered again, and amid his laughter said, "And you were
saying that the Russian ladies are not equal to the French? One has to
know how to deal with them."


Pierre reaching the house first went into Prince Andrew's study like
one quite at home, and from habit immediately lay down on the sofa, took
from the shelf the first book that came to his hand (it was Caesar's
Commentaries), and resting on his elbow, began reading it in the middle.

"What have you done to Mlle Scherer? She will be quite ill now," said
Prince Andrew, as he entered the study, rubbing his small white hands.

Pierre turned his whole body, making the sofa creak. He lifted his eager
face to Prince Andrew, smiled, and waved his hand.

"That abbe is very interesting but he does not see the thing in the
right light.... In my opinion perpetual peace is possible but--I do not
know how to express it... not by a balance of political power...."

It was evident that Prince Andrew was not interested in such abstract
conversation.

"One can't everywhere say all one thinks, mon cher. Well, have you
at last decided on anything? Are you going to be a guardsman or a
diplomatist?" asked Prince Andrew after a momentary silence.

Pierre sat up on the sofa, with his legs tucked under him.

"Really, I don't yet know. I don't like either the one or the other."

"But you must decide on something! Your father expects it."

Pierre at the age of ten had been sent abroad with an abbe as tutor,
and had remained away till he was twenty. When he returned to Moscow
his father dismissed the abbe and said to the young man, "Now go to
Petersburg, look round, and choose your profession. I will agree to
anything. Here is a letter to Prince Vasili, and here is money. Write to
me all about it, and I will help you in everything." Pierre had
already been choosing a career for three months, and had not decided
on anything. It was about this choice that Prince Andrew was speaking.
Pierre rubbed his forehead.

"But he must be a Freemason," said he, referring to the abbe whom he had
met that evening.

"That is all nonsense." Prince Andrew again interrupted him, "let us
talk business. Have you been to the Horse Guards?"

"No, I have not; but this is what I have been thinking and wanted to
tell you. There is a war now against Napoleon. If it were a war for
freedom I could understand it and should be the first to enter the army;
but to help England and Austria against the greatest man in the world is
not right."

Prince Andrew only shrugged his shoulders at Pierre's childish words. He
put on the air of one who finds it impossible to reply to such nonsense,
but it would in fact have been difficult to give any other answer than
the one Prince Andrew gave to this naive question.

"If no one fought except on his own conviction, there would be no wars,"
he said.

"And that would be splendid," said Pierre.

Prince Andrew smiled ironically.

"Very likely it would be splendid, but it will never come about..."

"Well, why are you going to the war?" asked Pierre.

"What for? I don't know. I must. Besides that I am going..." He paused.
"I am going because the life I am leading here does not suit me!"





CHAPTER VII


The rustle of a woman's dress was heard in the next room. Prince Andrew
shook himself as if waking up, and his face assumed the look it had had
in Anna Pavlovna's drawing room. Pierre removed his feet from the sofa.
The princess came in. She had changed her gown for a house dress as
fresh and elegant as the other. Prince Andrew rose and politely placed a
chair for her.

"How is it," she began, as usual in French, settling down briskly and
fussily in the easy chair, "how is it Annette never got married? How
stupid you men all are not to have married her! Excuse me for saying so,
but you have no sense about women. What an argumentative fellow you are,
Monsieur Pierre!"

"And I am still arguing with your husband. I can't understand why he
wants to go to the war," replied Pierre, addressing the princess with
none of the embarrassment so commonly shown by young men in their
intercourse with young women.

The princess started. Evidently Pierre's words touched her to the quick.

"Ah, that is just what I tell him!" said she. "I don't understand it; I
don't in the least understand why men can't live without wars. How is
it that we women don't want anything of the kind, don't need it? Now
you shall judge between us. I always tell him: Here he is Uncle's
aide-de-camp, a most brilliant position. He is so well known, so much
appreciated by everyone. The other day at the Apraksins' I heard a lady
asking, 'Is that the famous Prince Andrew?' I did indeed." She laughed.
"He is so well received everywhere. He might easily become aide-de-camp
to the Emperor. You know the Emperor spoke to him most graciously.
Annette and I were speaking of how to arrange it. What do you think?"

Pierre looked at his friend and, noticing that he did not like the
conversation, gave no reply.

"When are you starting?" he asked.

"Oh, don't speak of his going, don't! I won't hear it spoken of," said
the princess in the same petulantly playful tone in which she had spoken
to Hippolyte in the drawing room and which was so plainly ill-suited
to the family circle of which Pierre was almost a member. "Today when I
remembered that all these delightful associations must be broken off...
and then you know, Andre..." (she looked significantly at her husband)
"I'm afraid, I'm afraid!" she whispered, and a shudder ran down her
back.

Her husband looked at her as if surprised to notice that someone besides
Pierre and himself was in the room, and addressed her in a tone of
frigid politeness.

"What is it you are afraid of, Lise? I don't understand," said he.

"There, what egotists men all are: all, all egotists! Just for a whim of
his own, goodness only knows why, he leaves me and locks me up alone in
the country."

"With my father and sister, remember," said Prince Andrew gently.

"Alone all the same, without my friends.... And he expects me not to be
afraid."

Her tone was now querulous and her lip drawn up, giving her not a
joyful, but an animal, squirrel-like expression. She paused as if she
felt it indecorous to speak of her pregnancy before Pierre, though the
gist of the matter lay in that.

"I still can't understand what you are afraid of," said Prince Andrew
slowly, not taking his eyes off his wife.

The princess blushed, and raised her arms with a gesture of despair.

"No, Andrew, I must say you have changed. Oh, how you have..."

"Your doctor tells you to go to bed earlier," said Prince Andrew. "You
had better go."

The princess said nothing, but suddenly her short downy lip quivered.
Prince Andrew rose, shrugged his shoulders, and walked about the room.

Pierre looked over his spectacles with naive surprise, now at him and
now at her, moved as if about to rise too, but changed his mind.

"Why should I mind Monsieur Pierre being here?" exclaimed the little
princess suddenly, her pretty face all at once distorted by a tearful
grimace. "I have long wanted to ask you, Andrew, why you have changed
so to me? What have I done to you? You are going to the war and have no
pity for me. Why is it?"

"Lise!" was all Prince Andrew said. But that one word expressed an
entreaty, a threat, and above all conviction that she would herself
regret her words. But she went on hurriedly:

"You treat me like an invalid or a child. I see it all! Did you behave
like that six months ago?"

"Lise, I beg you to desist," said Prince Andrew still more emphatically.

Pierre, who had been growing more and more agitated as he listened to
all this, rose and approached the princess. He seemed unable to bear the
sight of tears and was ready to cry himself.

"Calm yourself, Princess! It seems so to you because... I assure you
I myself have experienced... and so... because... No, excuse me!
An outsider is out of place here... No, don't distress yourself...
Good-by!"

Prince Andrew caught him by the hand.

"No, wait, Pierre! The princess is too kind to wish to deprive me of the
pleasure of spending the evening with you."

"No, he thinks only of himself," muttered the princess without
restraining her angry tears.

"Lise!" said Prince Andrew dryly, raising his voice to the pitch which
indicates that patience is exhausted.

Suddenly the angry, squirrel-like expression of the princess' pretty
face changed into a winning and piteous look of fear. Her beautiful eyes
glanced askance at her husband's face, and her own assumed the timid,
deprecating expression of a dog when it rapidly but feebly wags its
drooping tail.

"Mon Dieu, mon Dieu!" she muttered, and lifting her dress with one hand
she went up to her husband and kissed him on the forehead.

"Good night, Lise," said he, rising and courteously kissing her hand as
he would have done to a stranger.





CHAPTER VIII


The friends were silent. Neither cared to begin talking. Pierre
continually glanced at Prince Andrew; Prince Andrew rubbed his forehead
with his small hand.

"Let us go and have supper," he said with a sigh, going to the door.

They entered the elegant, newly decorated, and luxurious dining room.
Everything from the table napkins to the silver, china, and glass bore
that imprint of newness found in the households of the newly married.
Halfway through supper Prince Andrew leaned his elbows on the table and,
with a look of nervous agitation such as Pierre had never before seen on
his face, began to talk--as one who has long had something on his mind
and suddenly determines to speak out.

"Never, never marry, my dear fellow! That's my advice: never marry till
you can say to yourself that you have done all you are capable of, and
until you have ceased to love the woman of your choice and have seen
her plainly as she is, or else you will make a cruel and irrevocable
mistake. Marry when you are old and good for nothing--or all that is
good and noble in you will be lost. It will all be wasted on trifles.
Yes! Yes! Yes! Don't look at me with such surprise. If you marry
expecting anything from yourself in the future, you will feel at every
step that for you all is ended, all is closed except the drawing
room, where you will be ranged side by side with a court lackey and an
idiot!... But what's the good?..." and he waved his arm.

Pierre took off his spectacles, which made his face seem different and
the good-natured expression still more apparent, and gazed at his friend
in amazement.

"My wife," continued Prince Andrew, "is an excellent woman, one of those
rare women with whom a man's honor is safe; but, O God, what would I
not give now to be unmarried! You are the first and only one to whom I
mention this, because I like you."

As he said this Prince Andrew was less than ever like that Bolkonski who
had lolled in Anna Pavlovna's easy chairs and with half-closed eyes had
uttered French phrases between his teeth. Every muscle of his thin face
was now quivering with nervous excitement; his eyes, in which the fire
of life had seemed extinguished, now flashed with brilliant light. It
was evident that the more lifeless he seemed at ordinary times, the more
impassioned he became in these moments of almost morbid irritation.

"You don't understand why I say this," he continued, "but it is the
whole story of life. You talk of Bonaparte and his career," said he
(though Pierre had not mentioned Bonaparte), "but Bonaparte when he
worked went step by step toward his goal. He was free, he had nothing
but his aim to consider, and he reached it. But tie yourself up with
a woman and, like a chained convict, you lose all freedom! And all you
have of hope and strength merely weighs you down and torments you with
regret. Drawing rooms, gossip, balls, vanity, and triviality--these are
the enchanted circle I cannot escape from. I am now going to the war,
the greatest war there ever was, and I know nothing and am fit for
nothing. I am very amiable and have a caustic wit," continued Prince
Andrew, "and at Anna Pavlovna's they listen to me. And that stupid set
without whom my wife cannot exist, and those women... If you only knew
what those society women are, and women in general! My father is right.
Selfish, vain, stupid, trivial in everything--that's what women are
when you see them in their true colors! When you meet them in society it
seems as if there were something in them, but there's nothing, nothing,
nothing! No, don't marry, my dear fellow; don't marry!" concluded Prince
Andrew.

"It seems funny to me," said Pierre, "that you, you should consider
yourself incapable and your life a spoiled life. You have everything
before you, everything. And you..."

He did not finish his sentence, but his tone showed how highly he
thought of his friend and how much he expected of him in the future.

"How can he talk like that?" thought Pierre. He considered his friend
a model of perfection because Prince Andrew possessed in the highest
degree just the very qualities Pierre lacked, and which might be best
described as strength of will. Pierre was always astonished at Prince
Andrew's calm manner of treating everybody, his extraordinary memory,
his extensive reading (he had read everything, knew everything, and had
an opinion about everything), but above all at his capacity for work and
study. And if Pierre was often struck by Andrew's lack of capacity
for philosophical meditation (to which he himself was particularly
addicted), he regarded even this not as a defect but as a sign of
strength.

Even in the best, most friendly and simplest relations of life, praise
and commendation are essential, just as grease is necessary to wheels
that they may run smoothly.

"My part is played out," said Prince Andrew. "What's the use of talking
about me? Let us talk about you," he added after a silence, smiling at
his reassuring thoughts.

That smile was immediately reflected on Pierre's face.

"But what is there to say about me?" said Pierre, his face relaxing into
a careless, merry smile. "What am I? An illegitimate son!" He suddenly
blushed crimson, and it was plain that he had made a great effort to say
this. "Without a name and without means... And it really..." But he
did not say what "it really" was. "For the present I am free and am
all right. Only I haven't the least idea what I am to do; I wanted to
consult you seriously."

Prince Andrew looked kindly at him, yet his glance--friendly and
affectionate as it was--expressed a sense of his own superiority.

"I am fond of you, especially as you are the one live man among our
whole set. Yes, you're all right! Choose what you will; it's all the
same. You'll be all right anywhere. But look here: give up visiting
those Kuragins and leading that sort of life. It suits you so badly--all
this debauchery, dissipation, and the rest of it!"

"What would you have, my dear fellow?" answered Pierre, shrugging his
shoulders. "Women, my dear fellow; women!"

"I don't understand it," replied Prince Andrew. "Women who are comme il
faut, that's a different matter; but the Kuragins' set of women, 'women
and wine' I don't understand!"

Pierre was staying at Prince Vasili Kuragin's and sharing the dissipated
life of his son Anatole, the son whom they were planning to reform by
marrying him to Prince Andrew's sister.

"Do you know?" said Pierre, as if suddenly struck by a happy thought,
"seriously, I have long been thinking of it.... Leading such a life I
can't decide or think properly about anything. One's head aches, and one
spends all one's money. He asked me for tonight, but I won't go."

"You give me your word of honor not to go?"

"On my honor!"





CHAPTER IX


It was past one o'clock when Pierre left his friend. It was a cloudless,
northern, summer night. Pierre took an open cab intending to drive
straight home. But the nearer he drew to the house the more he felt the
impossibility of going to sleep on such a night. It was light enough to
see a long way in the deserted street and it seemed more like morning
or evening than night. On the way Pierre remembered that Anatole Kuragin
was expecting the usual set for cards that evening, after which there
was generally a drinking bout, finishing with visits of a kind Pierre
was very fond of.

"I should like to go to Kuragin's," thought he.

But he immediately recalled his promise to Prince Andrew not to go
there. Then, as happens to people of weak character, he desired so
passionately once more to enjoy that dissipation he was so accustomed to
that he decided to go. The thought immediately occurred to him that his
promise to Prince Andrew was of no account, because before he gave it he
had already promised Prince Anatole to come to his gathering; "besides,"
thought he, "all such 'words of honor' are conventional things with no
definite meaning, especially if one considers that by tomorrow one may
be dead, or something so extraordinary may happen to one that honor and
dishonor will be all the same!" Pierre often indulged in reflections
of this sort, nullifying all his decisions and intentions. He went to
Kuragin's.

Reaching the large house near the Horse Guards' barracks, in which
Anatole lived, Pierre entered the lighted porch, ascended the stairs,
and went in at the open door. There was no one in the anteroom; empty
bottles, cloaks, and overshoes were lying about; there was a smell of
alcohol, and sounds of voices and shouting in the distance.

Cards and supper were over, but the visitors had not yet dispersed.
Pierre threw off his cloak and entered the first room, in which were the
remains of supper. A footman, thinking no one saw him, was drinking on
the sly what was left in the glasses. From the third room came sounds of
laughter, the shouting of familiar voices, the growling of a bear, and
general commotion. Some eight or nine young men were crowding anxiously
round an open window. Three others were romping with a young bear, one
pulling him by the chain and trying to set him at the others.

"I bet a hundred on Stevens!" shouted one.

"Mind, no holding on!" cried another.

"I bet on Dolokhov!" cried a third. "Kuragin, you part our hands."

"There, leave Bruin alone; here's a bet on."

"At one draught, or he loses!" shouted a fourth.

"Jacob, bring a bottle!" shouted the host, a tall, handsome fellow who
stood in the midst of the group, without a coat, and with his fine linen
shirt unfastened in front. "Wait a bit, you fellows.... Here is Petya!
Good man!" cried he, addressing Pierre.

Another voice, from a man of medium height with clear blue eyes,
particularly striking among all these drunken voices by its sober ring,
cried from the window: "Come here; part the bets!" This was Dolokhov,
an officer of the Semenov regiment, a notorious gambler and duelist, who
was living with Anatole. Pierre smiled, looking about him merrily.

"I don't understand. What's it all about?"

"Wait a bit, he is not drunk yet! A bottle here," said Anatole, taking a
glass from the table he went up to Pierre.

"First of all you must drink!"

Pierre drank one glass after another, looking from under his brows at
the tipsy guests who were again crowding round the window, and listening
to their chatter. Anatole kept on refilling Pierre's glass while
explaining that Dolokhov was betting with Stevens, an English naval
officer, that he would drink a bottle of rum sitting on the outer ledge
of the third floor window with his legs hanging out.

"Go on, you must drink it all," said Anatole, giving Pierre the last
glass, "or I won't let you go!"

"No, I won't," said Pierre, pushing Anatole aside, and he went up to the
window.

Dolokhov was holding the Englishman's hand and clearly and distinctly
repeating the terms of the bet, addressing himself particularly to
Anatole and Pierre.

Dolokhov was of medium height, with curly hair and light-blue eyes. He
was about twenty-five. Like all infantry officers he wore no mustache,
so that his mouth, the most striking feature of his face, was clearly
seen. The lines of that mouth were remarkably finely curved. The middle
of the upper lip formed a sharp wedge and closed firmly on the firm
lower one, and something like two distinct smiles played continually
round the two corners of the mouth; this, together with the resolute,
insolent intelligence of his eyes, produced an effect which made it
impossible not to notice his face. Dolokhov was a man of small means and
no connections. Yet, though Anatole spent tens of thousands of rubles,
Dolokhov lived with him and had placed himself on such a footing that
all who knew them, including Anatole himself, respected him more than
they did Anatole. Dolokhov could play all games and nearly always won.
However much he drank, he never lost his clearheadedness. Both Kuragin
and Dolokhov were at that time notorious among the rakes and scapegraces
of Petersburg.

The bottle of rum was brought. The window frame which prevented anyone
from sitting on the outer sill was being forced out by two footmen, who
were evidently flurried and intimidated by the directions and shouts of
the gentlemen around.

Anatole with his swaggering air strode up to the window. He wanted to
smash something. Pushing away the footmen he tugged at the frame, but
could not move it. He smashed a pane.

"You have a try, Hercules," said he, turning to Pierre.

Pierre seized the crossbeam, tugged, and wrenched the oak frame out with
a crash.

"Take it right out, or they'll think I'm holding on," said Dolokhov.

"Is the Englishman bragging?... Eh? Is it all right?" said Anatole.

"First-rate," said Pierre, looking at Dolokhov, who with a bottle of rum
in his hand was approaching the window, from which the light of the sky,
the dawn merging with the afterglow of sunset, was visible.

Dolokhov, the bottle of rum still in his hand, jumped onto the window
sill. "Listen!" cried he, standing there and addressing those in the
room. All were silent.

"I bet fifty imperials"--he spoke French that the Englishman might
understand him, but he did, not speak it very well--"I bet fifty
imperials... or do you wish to make it a hundred?" added he, addressing
the Englishman.

"No, fifty," replied the latter.

"All right. Fifty imperials... that I will drink a whole bottle of rum
without taking it from my mouth, sitting outside the window on this
spot" (he stooped and pointed to the sloping ledge outside the window)
"and without holding on to anything. Is that right?"

"Quite right," said the Englishman.

Anatole turned to the Englishman and taking him by one of the buttons
of his coat and looking down at him--the Englishman was short--began
repeating the terms of the wager to him in English.

"Wait!" cried Dolokhov, hammering with the bottle on the window sill to
attract attention. "Wait a bit, Kuragin. Listen! If anyone else does the
same, I will pay him a hundred imperials. Do you understand?"

The Englishman nodded, but gave no indication whether he intended to
accept this challenge or not. Anatole did not release him, and though
he kept nodding to show that he understood, Anatole went on translating
Dolokhov's words into English. A thin young lad, an hussar of the Life
Guards, who had been losing that evening, climbed on the window sill,
leaned over, and looked down.

"Oh! Oh! Oh!" he muttered, looking down from the window at the stones of
the pavement.

"Shut up!" cried Dolokhov, pushing him away from the window. The lad
jumped awkwardly back into the room, tripping over his spurs.

Placing the bottle on the window sill where he could reach it easily,
Dolokhov climbed carefully and slowly through the window and lowered his
legs. Pressing against both sides of the window, he adjusted himself on
his seat, lowered his hands, moved a little to the right and then to
the left, and took up the bottle. Anatole brought two candles and placed
them on the window sill, though it was already quite light. Dolokhov's
back in his white shirt, and his curly head, were lit up from both
sides. Everyone crowded to the window, the Englishman in front. Pierre
stood smiling but silent. One man, older than the others present,
suddenly pushed forward with a scared and angry look and wanted to seize
hold of Dolokhov's shirt.

"I say, this is folly! He'll be killed," said this more sensible man.

Anatole stopped him.

"Don't touch him! You'll startle him and then he'll be killed. Eh?...
What then?... Eh?"

Dolokhov turned round and, again holding on with both hands, arranged
himself on his seat.

"If anyone comes meddling again," said he, emitting the words separately
through his thin compressed lips, "I will throw him down there. Now
then!"

Saying this he again turned round, dropped his hands, took the bottle
and lifted it to his lips, threw back his head, and raised his free hand
to balance himself. One of the footmen who had stooped to pick up some
broken glass remained in that position without taking his eyes from the
window and from Dolokhov's back. Anatole stood erect with staring eyes.
The Englishman looked on sideways, pursing up his lips. The man who had
wished to stop the affair ran to a corner of the room and threw himself
on a sofa with his face to the wall. Pierre hid his face, from which a
faint smile forgot to fade though his features now expressed horror
and fear. All were still. Pierre took his hands from his eyes. Dolokhov
still sat in the same position, only his head was thrown further back
till his curly hair touched his shirt collar, and the hand holding the
bottle was lifted higher and higher and trembled with the effort. The
bottle was emptying perceptibly and rising still higher and his head
tilting yet further back. "Why is it so long?" thought Pierre. It seemed
to him that more than half an hour had elapsed. Suddenly Dolokhov made
a backward movement with his spine, and his arm trembled nervously; this
was sufficient to cause his whole body to slip as he sat on the sloping
ledge. As he began slipping down, his head and arm wavered still more
with the strain. One hand moved as if to clutch the window sill, but
refrained from touching it. Pierre again covered his eyes and thought he
would never open them again. Suddenly he was aware of a stir all around.
He looked up: Dolokhov was standing on the window sill, with a pale but
radiant face.

"It's empty."

He threw the bottle to the Englishman, who caught it neatly. Dolokhov
jumped down. He smelt strongly of rum.

"Well done!... Fine fellow!... There's a bet for you!... Devil take
you!" came from different sides.

The Englishman took out his purse and began counting out the money.
Dolokhov stood frowning and did not speak. Pierre jumped upon the window
sill.

"Gentlemen, who wishes to bet with me? I'll do the same thing!" he
suddenly cried. "Even without a bet, there! Tell them to bring me a
bottle. I'll do it.... Bring a bottle!"

"Let him do it, let him do it," said Dolokhov, smiling.

"What next? Have you gone mad?... No one would let you!... Why, you go
giddy even on a staircase," exclaimed several voices.

"I'll drink it! Let's have a bottle of rum!" shouted Pierre, banging the
table with a determined and drunken gesture and preparing to climb out
of the window.

They seized him by his arms; but he was so strong that everyone who
touched him was sent flying.

"No, you'll never manage him that way," said Anatole. "Wait a bit and
I'll get round him.... Listen! I'll take your bet tomorrow, but now we
are all going to ----'s."

"Come on then," cried Pierre. "Come on!... And we'll take Bruin with
us."

And he caught the bear, took it in his arms, lifted it from the ground,
and began dancing round the room with it.





CHAPTER X


Prince Vasili kept the promise he had given to Princess Drubetskaya who
had spoken to him on behalf of her only son Boris on the evening of Anna
Pavlovna's soiree. The matter was mentioned to the Emperor, an exception
made, and Boris transferred into the regiment of Semenov Guards with the
rank of cornet. He received, however, no appointment to Kutuzov's staff
despite all Anna Mikhaylovna's endeavors and entreaties. Soon after
Anna Pavlovna's reception Anna Mikhaylovna returned to Moscow and went
straight to her rich relations, the Rostovs, with whom she stayed when
in the town and where her darling Bory, who had only just entered a
regiment of the line and was being at once transferred to the Guards
as a cornet, had been educated from childhood and lived for years at a
time. The Guards had already left Petersburg on the tenth of August, and
her son, who had remained in Moscow for his equipment, was to join them
on the march to Radzivilov.

It was St. Natalia's day and the name day of two of the Rostovs--the
mother and the youngest daughter--both named Nataly. Ever since
the morning, carriages with six horses had been coming and going
continually, bringing visitors to the Countess Rostova's big house on
the Povarskaya, so well known to all Moscow. The countess herself and
her handsome eldest daughter were in the drawing-room with the visitors
who came to congratulate, and who constantly succeeded one another in
relays.

The countess was a woman of about forty-five, with a thin Oriental type
of face, evidently worn out with childbearing--she had had twelve.
A languor of motion and speech, resulting from weakness, gave her a
distinguished air which inspired respect. Princess Anna Mikhaylovna
Drubetskaya, who as a member of the household was also seated in the
drawing room, helped to receive and entertain the visitors. The young
people were in one of the inner rooms, not considering it necessary to
take part in receiving the visitors. The count met the guests and saw
them off, inviting them all to dinner.

"I am very, very grateful to you, mon cher," or "ma chere"--he called
everyone without exception and without the slightest variation in his
tone, "my dear," whether they were above or below him in rank--"I thank
you for myself and for our two dear ones whose name day we are keeping.
But mind you come to dinner or I shall be offended, ma chere! On
behalf of the whole family I beg you to come, mon cher!" These words he
repeated to everyone without exception or variation, and with the same
expression on his full, cheerful, clean-shaven face, the same firm
pressure of the hand and the same quick, repeated bows. As soon as he
had seen a visitor off he returned to one of those who were still in the
drawing room, drew a chair toward him or her, and jauntily spreading out
his legs and putting his hands on his knees with the air of a man who
enjoys life and knows how to live, he swayed to and fro with dignity,
offered surmises about the weather, or touched on questions of health,
sometimes in Russian and sometimes in very bad but self-confident
French; then again, like a man weary but unflinching in the fulfillment
of duty, he rose to see some visitors off and, stroking his scanty gray
hairs over his bald patch, also asked them to dinner. Sometimes on his
way back from the anteroom he would pass through the conservatory and
pantry into the large marble dining hall, where tables were being set
out for eighty people; and looking at the footmen, who were bringing in
silver and china, moving tables, and unfolding damask table linen, he
would call Dmitri Vasilevich, a man of good family and the manager of
all his affairs, and while looking with pleasure at the enormous table
would say: "Well, Dmitri, you'll see that things are all as they should
be? That's right! The great thing is the serving, that's it." And with a
complacent sigh he would return to the drawing room.

"Marya Lvovna Karagina and her daughter!" announced the countess'
gigantic footman in his bass voice, entering the drawing room. The
countess reflected a moment and took a pinch from a gold snuffbox with
her husband's portrait on it.

"I'm quite worn out by these callers. However, I'll see her and no more.
She is so affected. Ask her in," she said to the footman in a sad voice,
as if saying: "Very well, finish me off."

A tall, stout, and proud-looking woman, with a round-faced smiling
daughter, entered the drawing room, their dresses rustling.

"Dear Countess, what an age... She has been laid up, poor child...
at the Razumovski's ball... and Countess Apraksina... I was so
delighted..." came the sounds of animated feminine voices, interrupting
one another and mingling with the rustling of dresses and the scraping
of chairs. Then one of those conversations began which last out until,
at the first pause, the guests rise with a rustle of dresses and say,
"I am so delighted... Mamma's health... and Countess Apraksina..." and
then, again rustling, pass into the anteroom, put on cloaks or mantles,
and drive away. The conversation was on the chief topic of the day: the
illness of the wealthy and celebrated beau of Catherine's day, Count
Bezukhov, and about his illegitimate son Pierre, the one who had behaved
so improperly at Anna Pavlovna's reception.

"I am so sorry for the poor count," said the visitor. "He is in such bad
health, and now this vexation about his son is enough to kill him!"

"What is that?" asked the countess as if she did not know what the
visitor alluded to, though she had already heard about the cause of
Count Bezukhov's distress some fifteen times.

"That's what comes of a modern education," exclaimed the visitor. "It
seems that while he was abroad this young man was allowed to do as he
liked, now in Petersburg I hear he has been doing such terrible things
that he has been expelled by the police."

"You don't say so!" replied the countess.

"He chose his friends badly," interposed Anna Mikhaylovna. "Prince
Vasili's son, he, and a certain Dolokhov have, it is said, been up to
heaven only knows what! And they have had to suffer for it. Dolokhov
has been degraded to the ranks and Bezukhov's son sent back to Moscow.
Anatole Kuragin's father managed somehow to get his son's affair hushed
up, but even he was ordered out of Petersburg."

"But what have they been up to?" asked the countess.

"They are regular brigands, especially Dolokhov," replied the visitor.
"He is a son of Marya Ivanovna Dolokhova, such a worthy woman, but
there, just fancy! Those three got hold of a bear somewhere, put it in a
carriage, and set off with it to visit some actresses! The police tried
to interfere, and what did the young men do? They tied a policeman and
the bear back to back and put the bear into the Moyka Canal. And there
was the bear swimming about with the policeman on his back!"

"What a nice figure the policeman must have cut, my dear!" shouted the
count, dying with laughter.

"Oh, how dreadful! How can you laugh at it, Count?"

Yet the ladies themselves could not help laughing.

"It was all they could do to rescue the poor man," continued the
visitor. "And to think it is Cyril Vladimirovich Bezukhov's son who
amuses himself in this sensible manner! And he was said to be so well
educated and clever. This is all that his foreign education has done for
him! I hope that here in Moscow no one will receive him, in spite of his
money. They wanted to introduce him to me, but I quite declined: I have
my daughters to consider."

"Why do you say this young man is so rich?" asked the countess, turning
away from the girls, who at once assumed an air of inattention. "His
children are all illegitimate. I think Pierre also is illegitimate."

The visitor made a gesture with her hand.

"I should think he has a score of them."

Princess Anna Mikhaylovna intervened in the conversation, evidently
wishing to show her connections and knowledge of what went on in
society.

"The fact of the matter is," said she significantly, and also in a half
whisper, "everyone knows Count Cyril's reputation.... He has lost count
of his children, but this Pierre was his favorite."

"How handsome the old man still was only a year ago!" remarked the
countess. "I have never seen a handsomer man."

"He is very much altered now," said Anna Mikhaylovna. "Well, as I was
saying, Prince Vasili is the next heir through his wife, but the count
is very fond of Pierre, looked after his education, and wrote to the
Emperor about him; so that in the case of his death--and he is so
ill that he may die at any moment, and Dr. Lorrain has come from
Petersburg--no one knows who will inherit his immense fortune, Pierre
or Prince Vasili. Forty thousand serfs and millions of rubles! I know
it all very well for Prince Vasili told me himself. Besides, Cyril
Vladimirovich is my mother's second cousin. He's also my Bory's
godfather," she added, as if she attached no importance at all to the
fact.

"Prince Vasili arrived in Moscow yesterday. I hear he has come on some
inspection business," remarked the visitor.

"Yes, but between ourselves," said the princess, "that is a pretext. The
fact is he has come to see Count Cyril Vladimirovich, hearing how ill he
is."

"But do you know, my dear, that was a capital joke," said the count; and
seeing that the elder visitor was not listening, he turned to the young
ladies. "I can just imagine what a funny figure that policeman cut!"

And as he waved his arms to impersonate the policeman, his portly form
again shook with a deep ringing laugh, the laugh of one who always eats
well and, in particular, drinks well. "So do come and dine with us!" he
said.





CHAPTER XI


Silence ensued. The countess looked at her callers, smiling affably,
but not concealing the fact that she would not be distressed if they now
rose and took their leave. The visitor's daughter was already smoothing
down her dress with an inquiring look at her mother, when suddenly from
the next room were heard the footsteps of boys and girls running to
the door and the noise of a chair falling over, and a girl of thirteen,
hiding something in the folds of her short muslin frock, darted in and
stopped short in the middle of the room. It was evident that she had
not intended her flight to bring her so far. Behind her in the doorway
appeared a student with a crimson coat collar, an officer of the Guards,
a girl of fifteen, and a plump rosy-faced boy in a short jacket.

The count jumped up and, swaying from side to side, spread his arms wide
and threw them round the little girl who had run in.

"Ah, here she is!" he exclaimed laughing. "My pet, whose name day it is.
My dear pet!"

"Ma chere, there is a time for everything," said the countess with
feigned severity. "You spoil her, Ilya," she added, turning to her
husband.

"How do you do, my dear? I wish you many happy returns of your name
day," said the visitor. "What a charming child," she added, addressing
the mother.

This black-eyed, wide-mouthed girl, not pretty but full of life--with
childish bare shoulders which after her run heaved and shook her
bodice, with black curls tossed backward, thin bare arms, little legs
in lace-frilled drawers, and feet in low slippers--was just at that
charming age when a girl is no longer a child, though the child is not
yet a young woman. Escaping from her father she ran to hide her
flushed face in the lace of her mother's mantilla--not paying the least
attention to her severe remark--and began to laugh. She laughed, and in
fragmentary sentences tried to explain about a doll which she produced
from the folds of her frock.

"Do you see?... My doll... Mimi... You see..." was all Natasha managed
to utter (to her everything seemed funny). She leaned against her mother
and burst into such a loud, ringing fit of laughter that even the prim
visitor could not help joining in.

"Now then, go away and take your monstrosity with you," said the mother,
pushing away her daughter with pretended sternness, and turning to the
visitor she added: "She is my youngest girl."

Natasha, raising her face for a moment from her mother's mantilla,
glanced up at her through tears of laughter, and again hid her face.

The visitor, compelled to look on at this family scene, thought it
necessary to take some part in it.

"Tell me, my dear," said she to Natasha, "is Mimi a relation of yours? A
daughter, I suppose?"

Natasha did not like the visitor's tone of condescension to childish
things. She did not reply, but looked at her seriously.

Meanwhile the younger generation: Boris, the officer, Anna Mikhaylovna's
son; Nicholas, the undergraduate, the count's eldest son; Sonya, the
count's fifteen-year-old niece, and little Petya, his youngest boy,
had all settled down in the drawing room and were obviously trying to
restrain within the bounds of decorum the excitement and mirth that
shone in all their faces. Evidently in the back rooms, from which they
had dashed out so impetuously, the conversation had been more amusing
than the drawing-room talk of society scandals, the weather, and
Countess Apraksina. Now and then they glanced at one another, hardly
able to suppress their laughter.

The two young men, the student and the officer, friends from childhood,
were of the same age and both handsome fellows, though not alike. Boris
was tall and fair, and his calm and handsome face had regular, delicate
features. Nicholas was short with curly hair and an open expression.
Dark hairs were already showing on his upper lip, and his whole face
expressed impetuosity and enthusiasm. Nicholas blushed when he entered
the drawing room. He evidently tried to find something to say, but
failed. Boris on the contrary at once found his footing, and related
quietly and humorously how he had known that doll Mimi when she was
still quite a young lady, before her nose was broken; how she had aged
during the five years he had known her, and how her head had cracked
right across the skull. Having said this he glanced at Natasha. She
turned away from him and glanced at her younger brother, who was
screwing up his eyes and shaking with suppressed laughter, and unable
to control herself any longer, she jumped up and rushed from the room as
fast as her nimble little feet would carry her. Boris did not laugh.

"You were meaning to go out, weren't you, Mamma? Do you want the
carriage?" he asked his mother with a smile.

"Yes, yes, go and tell them to get it ready," she answered, returning
his smile.

Boris quietly left the room and went in search of Natasha. The plump
boy ran after them angrily, as if vexed that their program had been
disturbed.





CHAPTER XII


The only young people remaining in the drawing room, not counting the
young lady visitor and the countess' eldest daughter (who was four years
older than her sister and behaved already like a grown-up person), were
Nicholas and Sonya, the niece. Sonya was a slender little brunette with
a tender look in her eyes which were veiled by long lashes, thick black
plaits coiling twice round her head, and a tawny tint in her complexion
and especially in the color of her slender but graceful and muscular
arms and neck. By the grace of her movements, by the softness and
flexibility of her small limbs, and by a certain coyness and reserve of
manner, she reminded one of a pretty, half-grown kitten which promises
to become a beautiful little cat. She evidently considered it proper to
show an interest in the general conversation by smiling, but in spite
of herself her eyes under their thick long lashes watched her cousin who
was going to join the army, with such passionate girlish adoration that
her smile could not for a single instant impose upon anyone, and it
was clear that the kitten had settled down only to spring up with more
energy and again play with her cousin as soon as they too could, like
Natasha and Boris, escape from the drawing room.

"Ah yes, my dear," said the count, addressing the visitor and pointing
to Nicholas, "his friend Boris has become an officer, and so for
friendship's sake he is leaving the university and me, his old father,
and entering the military service, my dear. And there was a place
and everything waiting for him in the Archives Department! Isn't that
friendship?" remarked the count in an inquiring tone.

"But they say that war has been declared," replied the visitor.

"They've been saying so a long while," said the count, "and they'll say
so again and again, and that will be the end of it. My dear, there's
friendship for you," he repeated. "He's joining the hussars."

The visitor, not knowing what to say, shook her head.

"It's not at all from friendship," declared Nicholas, flaring up and
turning away as if from a shameful aspersion. "It is not from friendship
at all; I simply feel that the army is my vocation."

He glanced at his cousin and the young lady visitor; and they were both
regarding him with a smile of approbation.

"Schubert, the colonel of the Pavlograd Hussars, is dining with us
today. He has been here on leave and is taking Nicholas back with
him. It can't be helped!" said the count, shrugging his shoulders and
speaking playfully of a matter that evidently distressed him.

"I have already told you, Papa," said his son, "that if you don't wish
to let me go, I'll stay. But I know I am no use anywhere except in the
army; I am not a diplomat or a government clerk.--I don't know how to
hide what I feel." As he spoke he kept glancing with the flirtatiousness
of a handsome youth at Sonya and the young lady visitor.

The little kitten, feasting her eyes on him, seemed ready at any moment
to start her gambols again and display her kittenish nature.

"All right, all right!" said the old count. "He always flares up! This
Buonaparte has turned all their heads; they all think of how he rose
from an ensign and became Emperor. Well, well, God grant it," he added,
not noticing his visitor's sarcastic smile.

The elders began talking about Bonaparte. Julie Karagina turned to young
Rostov.

"What a pity you weren't at the Arkharovs' on Thursday. It was so dull
without you," said she, giving him a tender smile.

The young man, flattered, sat down nearer to her with a coquettish
smile, and engaged the smiling Julie in a confidential conversation
without at all noticing that his involuntary smile had stabbed the heart
of Sonya, who blushed and smiled unnaturally. In the midst of his talk
he glanced round at her. She gave him a passionately angry glance, and
hardly able to restrain her tears and maintain the artificial smile
on her lips, she got up and left the room. All Nicholas' animation
vanished. He waited for the first pause in the conversation, and then
with a distressed face left the room to find Sonya.

"How plainly all these young people wear their hearts on their
sleeves!" said Anna Mikhaylovna, pointing to Nicholas as he went out.
"Cousinage--dangereux voisinage;" * she added.


     * Cousinhood is a dangerous neighborhood.


"Yes," said the countess when the brightness these young people had
brought into the room had vanished; and as if answering a question no
one had put but which was always in her mind, "and how much suffering,
how much anxiety one has had to go through that we might rejoice in
them now! And yet really the anxiety is greater now than the joy. One is
always, always anxious! Especially just at this age, so dangerous both
for girls and boys."

"It all depends on the bringing up," remarked the visitor.

"Yes, you're quite right," continued the countess. "Till now I have
always, thank God, been my children's friend and had their full
confidence," said she, repeating the mistake of so many parents who
imagine that their children have no secrets from them. "I know I shall
always be my daughters' first confidante, and that if Nicholas, with his
impulsive nature, does get into mischief (a boy can't help it), he will
all the same never be like those Petersburg young men."

"Yes, they are splendid, splendid youngsters," chimed in the count, who
always solved questions that seemed to him perplexing by deciding that
everything was splendid. "Just fancy: wants to be an hussar. What's one
to do, my dear?"

"What a charming creature your younger girl is," said the visitor; "a
little volcano!"

"Yes, a regular volcano," said the count. "Takes after me! And what a
voice she has; though she's my daughter, I tell the truth when I say
she'll be a singer, a second Salomoni! We have engaged an Italian to
give her lessons."

"Isn't she too young? I have heard that it harms the voice to train it
at that age."

"Oh no, not at all too young!" replied the count. "Why, our mothers used
to be married at twelve or thirteen."

"And she's in love with Boris already. Just fancy!" said the countess
with a gentle smile, looking at Boris' and went on, evidently concerned
with a thought that always occupied her: "Now you see if I were to be
severe with her and to forbid it... goodness knows what they might be up
to on the sly" (she meant that they would be kissing), "but as it is,
I know every word she utters. She will come running to me of her own
accord in the evening and tell me everything. Perhaps I spoil her, but
really that seems the best plan. With her elder sister I was stricter."

"Yes, I was brought up quite differently," remarked the handsome elder
daughter, Countess Vera, with a smile.

But the smile did not enhance Vera's beauty as smiles generally do;
on the contrary it gave her an unnatural, and therefore unpleasant,
expression. Vera was good-looking, not at all stupid, quick at learning,
was well brought up, and had a pleasant voice; what she said was
true and appropriate, yet, strange to say, everyone--the visitors and
countess alike--turned to look at her as if wondering why she had said
it, and they all felt awkward.

"People are always too clever with their eldest children and try to make
something exceptional of them," said the visitor.

"What's the good of denying it, my dear? Our dear countess was too
clever with Vera," said the count. "Well, what of that? She's turned out
splendidly all the same," he added, winking at Vera.

The guests got up and took their leave, promising to return to dinner.

"What manners! I thought they would never go," said the countess, when
she had seen her guests out.





CHAPTER XIII


When Natasha ran out of the drawing room she only went as far as the
conservatory. There she paused and stood listening to the conversation
in the drawing room, waiting for Boris to come out. She was already
growing impatient, and stamped her foot, ready to cry at his not coming
at once, when she heard the young man's discreet steps approaching
neither quickly nor slowly. At this Natasha dashed swiftly among the
flower tubs and hid there.

Boris paused in the middle of the room, looked round, brushed a little
dust from the sleeve of his uniform, and going up to a mirror examined
his handsome face. Natasha, very still, peered out from her ambush,
waiting to see what he would do. He stood a little while before the
glass, smiled, and walked toward the other door. Natasha was about
to call him but changed her mind. "Let him look for me," thought she.
Hardly had Boris gone than Sonya, flushed, in tears, and muttering
angrily, came in at the other door. Natasha checked her first impulse to
run out to her, and remained in her hiding place, watching--as under an
invisible cap--to see what went on in the world. She was experiencing
a new and peculiar pleasure. Sonya, muttering to herself, kept looking
round toward the drawing-room door. It opened and Nicholas came in.

"Sonya, what is the matter with you? How can you?" said he, running up
to her.

"It's nothing, nothing; leave me alone!" sobbed Sonya.

"Ah, I know what it is."

"Well, if you do, so much the better, and you can go back to her!"

"So-o-onya! Look here! How can you torture me and yourself like that,
for a mere fancy?" said Nicholas taking her hand.

Sonya did not pull it away, and left off crying. Natasha, not stirring
and scarcely breathing, watched from her ambush with sparkling eyes.
"What will happen now?" thought she.

"Sonya! What is anyone in the world to me? You alone are everything!"
said Nicholas. "And I will prove it to you."

"I don't like you to talk like that."

"Well, then, I won't; only forgive me, Sonya!" He drew her to him and
kissed her.

"Oh, how nice," thought Natasha; and when Sonya and Nicholas had gone
out of the conservatory she followed and called Boris to her.

"Boris, come here," said she with a sly and significant look. "I
have something to tell you. Here, here!" and she led him into the
conservatory to the place among the tubs where she had been hiding.

Boris followed her, smiling.

"What is the something?" asked he.

She grew confused, glanced round, and, seeing the doll she had thrown
down on one of the tubs, picked it up.

"Kiss the doll," said she.

Boris looked attentively and kindly at her eager face, but did not
reply.

"Don't you want to? Well, then, come here," said she, and went further
in among the plants and threw down the doll. "Closer, closer!" she
whispered.

She caught the young officer by his cuffs, and a look of solemnity and
fear appeared on her flushed face.

"And me? Would you like to kiss me?" she whispered almost inaudibly,
glancing up at him from under her brows, smiling, and almost crying from
excitement.

Boris blushed.

"How funny you are!" he said, bending down to her and blushing still
more, but he waited and did nothing.

Suddenly she jumped up onto a tub to be higher than he, embraced him so
that both her slender bare arms clasped him above his neck, and, tossing
back her hair, kissed him full on the lips.

Then she slipped down among the flowerpots on the other side of the tubs
and stood, hanging her head.

"Natasha," he said, "you know that I love you, but..."

"You are in love with me?" Natasha broke in.

"Yes, I am, but please don't let us do like that.... In another four
years... then I will ask for your hand."

Natasha considered.

"Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen," she counted on her slender
little fingers. "All right! Then it's settled?"

A smile of joy and satisfaction lit up her eager face.

"Settled!" replied Boris.

"Forever?" said the little girl. "Till death itself?"

She took his arm and with a happy face went with him into the adjoining
sitting room.





CHAPTER XIV


After receiving her visitors, the countess was so tired that she gave
orders to admit no more, but the porter was told to be sure to invite
to dinner all who came "to congratulate." The countess wished to have
a tete-a-tete talk with the friend of her childhood, Princess Anna
Mikhaylovna, whom she had not seen properly since she returned from
Petersburg. Anna Mikhaylovna, with her tear-worn but pleasant face, drew
her chair nearer to that of the countess.

"With you I will be quite frank," said Anna Mikhaylovna. "There are not
many left of us old friends! That's why I so value your friendship."

Anna Mikhaylovna looked at Vera and paused. The countess pressed her
friend's hand.

"Vera," she said to her eldest daughter who was evidently not a
favorite, "how is it you have so little tact? Don't you see you are not
wanted here? Go to the other girls, or..."

The handsome Vera smiled contemptuously but did not seem at all hurt.

"If you had told me sooner, Mamma, I would have gone," she replied as
she rose to go to her own room.

But as she passed the sitting room she noticed two couples sitting,
one pair at each window. She stopped and smiled scornfully. Sonya was
sitting close to Nicholas who was copying out some verses for her, the
first he had ever written. Boris and Natasha were at the other window
and ceased talking when Vera entered. Sonya and Natasha looked at Vera
with guilty, happy faces.

It was pleasant and touching to see these little girls in love; but
apparently the sight of them roused no pleasant feeling in Vera.

"How often have I asked you not to take my things?" she said. "You have
a room of your own," and she took the inkstand from Nicholas.

"In a minute, in a minute," he said, dipping his pen.

"You always manage to do things at the wrong time," continued Vera.
"You came rushing into the drawing room so that everyone felt ashamed of
you."

Though what she said was quite just, perhaps for that very reason no one
replied, and the four simply looked at one another. She lingered in the
room with the inkstand in her hand.

"And at your age what secrets can there be between Natasha and Boris, or
between you two? It's all nonsense!"

"Now, Vera, what does it matter to you?" said Natasha in defense,
speaking very gently.

She seemed that day to be more than ever kind and affectionate to
everyone.

"Very silly," said Vera. "I am ashamed of you. Secrets indeed!"

"All have secrets of their own," answered Natasha, getting warmer. "We
don't interfere with you and Berg."

"I should think not," said Vera, "because there can never be anything
wrong in my behavior. But I'll just tell Mamma how you are behaving with
Boris."

"Natalya Ilynichna behaves very well to me," remarked Boris. "I have
nothing to complain of."

"Don't, Boris! You are such a diplomat that it is really tiresome," said
Natasha in a mortified voice that trembled slightly. (She used the word
"diplomat," which was just then much in vogue among the children, in the
special sense they attached to it.) "Why does she bother me?" And she
added, turning to Vera, "You'll never understand it, because you've
never loved anyone. You have no heart! You are a Madame de Genlis
and nothing more" (this nickname, bestowed on Vera by Nicholas,
was considered very stinging), "and your greatest pleasure is to be
unpleasant to people! Go and flirt with Berg as much as you please," she
finished quickly.

"I shall at any rate not run after a young man before visitors..."

"Well, now you've done what you wanted," put in Nicholas--"said
unpleasant things to everyone and upset them. Let's go to the nursery."

All four, like a flock of scared birds, got up and left the room.

"The unpleasant things were said to me," remarked Vera, "I said none to
anyone."

"Madame de Genlis! Madame de Genlis!" shouted laughing voices through
the door.

The handsome Vera, who produced such an irritating and unpleasant effect
on everyone, smiled and, evidently unmoved by what had been said to her,
went to the looking glass and arranged her hair and scarf. Looking at
her own handsome face she seemed to become still colder and calmer.


In the drawing room the conversation was still going on.

"Ah, my dear," said the countess, "my life is not all roses either.
Don't I know that at the rate we are living our means won't last long?
It's all the Club and his easygoing nature. Even in the country do we
get any rest? Theatricals, hunting, and heaven knows what besides! But
don't let's talk about me; tell me how you managed everything. I often
wonder at you, Annette--how at your age you can rush off alone in a
carriage to Moscow, to Petersburg, to those ministers and great people,
and know how to deal with them all! It's quite astonishing. How did you
get things settled? I couldn't possibly do it."

"Ah, my love," answered Anna Mikhaylovna, "God grant you never know
what it is to be left a widow without means and with a son you love
to distraction! One learns many things then," she added with a certain
pride. "That lawsuit taught me much. When I want to see one of those big
people I write a note: 'Princess So-and-So desires an interview with
So and-So,' and then I take a cab and go myself two, three, or four
times--till I get what I want. I don't mind what they think of me."

"Well, and to whom did you apply about Bory?" asked the countess. "You
see yours is already an officer in the Guards, while my Nicholas is
going as a cadet. There's no one to interest himself for him. To whom
did you apply?"

"To Prince Vasili. He was so kind. He at once agreed to everything,
and put the matter before the Emperor," said Princess Anna Mikhaylovna
enthusiastically, quite forgetting all the humiliation she had endured
to gain her end.

"Has Prince Vasili aged much?" asked the countess. "I have not seen him
since we acted together at the Rumyantsovs' theatricals. I expect he has
forgotten me. He paid me attentions in those days," said the countess,
with a smile.

"He is just the same as ever," replied Anna Mikhaylovna, "overflowing
with amiability. His position has not turned his head at all. He said to
me, 'I am sorry I can do so little for you, dear Princess. I am at
your command.' Yes, he is a fine fellow and a very kind relation.
But, Nataly, you know my love for my son: I would do anything for his
happiness! And my affairs are in such a bad way that my position is now
a terrible one," continued Anna Mikhaylovna, sadly, dropping her voice.
"My wretched lawsuit takes all I have and makes no progress. Would you
believe it, I have literally not a penny and don't know how to equip
Boris." She took out her handkerchief and began to cry. "I need five
hundred rubles, and have only one twenty-five-ruble note. I am in such a
state.... My only hope now is in Count Cyril Vladimirovich Bezukhov.
If he will not assist his godson--you know he is Bory's godfather--and
allow him something for his maintenance, all my trouble will have been
thrown away.... I shall not be able to equip him."

The countess' eyes filled with tears and she pondered in silence.

"I often think, though, perhaps it's a sin," said the princess, "that
here lives Count Cyril Vladimirovich Bezukhov so rich, all alone... that
tremendous fortune... and what is his life worth? It's a burden to him,
and Bory's life is only just beginning...."

"Surely he will leave something to Boris," said the countess.

"Heaven only knows, my dear! These rich grandees are so selfish. Still,
I will take Boris and go to see him at once, and I shall speak to him
straight out. Let people think what they will of me, it's really all the
same to me when my son's fate is at stake." The princess rose. "It's now
two o'clock and you dine at four. There will just be time."

And like a practical Petersburg lady who knows how to make the most of
time, Anna Mikhaylovna sent someone to call her son, and went into the
anteroom with him.

"Good-by, my dear," said she to the countess who saw her to the door,
and added in a whisper so that her son should not hear, "Wish me good
luck."

"Are you going to Count Cyril Vladimirovich, my dear?" said the count
coming out from the dining hall into the anteroom, and he added: "If
he is better, ask Pierre to dine with us. He has been to the house, you
know, and danced with the children. Be sure to invite him, my dear.
We will see how Taras distinguishes himself today. He says Count Orlov
never gave such a dinner as ours will be!"





CHAPTER XV


"My dear Boris," said Princess Anna Mikhaylovna to her son as Countess
Rostova's carriage in which they were seated drove over the straw
covered street and turned into the wide courtyard of Count Cyril
Vladimirovich Bezukhov's house. "My dear Boris," said the mother,
drawing her hand from beneath her old mantle and laying it timidly and
tenderly on her son's arm, "be affectionate and attentive to him. Count
Cyril Vladimirovich is your godfather after all, your future depends on
him. Remember that, my dear, and be nice to him, as you so well know how
to be."

"If only I knew that anything besides humiliation would come of it..."
answered her son coldly. "But I have promised and will do it for your
sake."

Although the hall porter saw someone's carriage standing at the
entrance, after scrutinizing the mother and son (who without asking to
be announced had passed straight through the glass porch between the
rows of statues in niches) and looking significantly at the lady's old
cloak, he asked whether they wanted the count or the princesses, and,
hearing that they wished to see the count, said his excellency was worse
today, and that his excellency was not receiving anyone.

"We may as well go back," said the son in French.

"My dear!" exclaimed his mother imploringly, again laying her hand on
his arm as if that touch might soothe or rouse him.

Boris said no more, but looked inquiringly at his mother without taking
off his cloak.

"My friend," said Anna Mikhaylovna in gentle tones, addressing the hall
porter, "I know Count Cyril Vladimirovich is very ill... that's why I
have come... I am a relation. I shall not disturb him, my friend... I
only need see Prince Vasili Sergeevich: he is staying here, is he not?
Please announce me."

The hall porter sullenly pulled a bell that rang upstairs, and turned
away.

"Princess Drubetskaya to see Prince Vasili Sergeevich," he called to a
footman dressed in knee breeches, shoes, and a swallow-tail coat, who
ran downstairs and looked over from the halfway landing.

The mother smoothed the folds of her dyed silk dress before a large
Venetian mirror in the wall, and in her trodden-down shoes briskly
ascended the carpeted stairs.

"My dear," she said to her son, once more stimulating him by a touch,
"you promised me!"

The son, lowering his eyes, followed her quietly.

They entered the large hall, from which one of the doors led to the
apartments assigned to Prince Vasili.

Just as the mother and son, having reached the middle of the hall, were
about to ask their way of an elderly footman who had sprung up as they
entered, the bronze handle of one of the doors turned and Prince Vasili
came out--wearing a velvet coat with a single star on his breast, as
was his custom when at home--taking leave of a good-looking, dark-haired
man. This was the celebrated Petersburg doctor, Lorrain.

"Then it is certain?" said the prince.

"Prince, humanum est errare, * but..." replied the doctor, swallowing
his r's, and pronouncing the Latin words with a French accent.


     * To err is human.


"Very well, very well..."

Seeing Anna Mikhaylovna and her son, Prince Vasili dismissed the doctor
with a bow and approached them silently and with a look of inquiry. The
son noticed that an expression of profound sorrow suddenly clouded his
mother's face, and he smiled slightly.

"Ah, Prince! In what sad circumstances we meet again! And how is our
dear invalid?" said she, as though unaware of the cold offensive look
fixed on her.

Prince Vasili stared at her and at Boris questioningly and perplexed.
Boris bowed politely. Prince Vasili without acknowledging the bow turned
to Anna Mikhaylovna, answering her query by a movement of the head and
lips indicating very little hope for the patient.

"Is it possible?" exclaimed Anna Mikhaylovna. "Oh, how awful! It is
terrible to think.... This is my son," she added, indicating Boris. "He
wanted to thank you himself."

Boris bowed again politely.

"Believe me, Prince, a mother's heart will never forget what you have
done for us."

"I am glad I was able to do you a service, my dear Anna Mikhaylovna,"
said Prince Vasili, arranging his lace frill, and in tone and manner,
here in Moscow to Anna Mikhaylovna whom he had placed under an
obligation, assuming an air of much greater importance than he had done
in Petersburg at Anna Scherer's reception.

"Try to serve well and show yourself worthy," added he, addressing Boris
with severity. "I am glad.... Are you here on leave?" he went on in his
usual tone of indifference.

"I am awaiting orders to join my new regiment, your excellency," replied
Boris, betraying neither annoyance at the prince's brusque manner nor
a desire to enter into conversation, but speaking so quietly and
respectfully that the prince gave him a searching glance.

"Are you living with your mother?"

"I am living at Countess Rostova's," replied Boris, again adding, "your
excellency."

"That is, with Ilya Rostov who married Nataly Shinshina," said Anna
Mikhaylovna.

"I know, I know," answered Prince Vasili in his monotonous voice.
"I never could understand how Nataly made up her mind to marry that
unlicked bear! A perfectly absurd and stupid fellow, and a gambler too,
I am told."

"But a very kind man, Prince," said Anna Mikhaylovna with a pathetic
smile, as though she too knew that Count Rostov deserved this censure,
but asked him not to be too hard on the poor old man. "What do the
doctors say?" asked the princess after a pause, her worn face again
expressing deep sorrow.

"They give little hope," replied the prince.

"And I should so like to thank Uncle once for all his kindness to me and
Boris. He is his godson," she added, her tone suggesting that this fact
ought to give Prince Vasili much satisfaction.

Prince Vasili became thoughtful and frowned. Anna Mikhaylovna saw that
he was afraid of finding in her a rival for Count Bezukhov's fortune,
and hastened to reassure him.

"If it were not for my sincere affection and devotion to Uncle," said
she, uttering the word with peculiar assurance and unconcern, "I know
his character: noble, upright... but you see he has no one with him
except the young princesses.... They are still young...." She bent
her head and continued in a whisper: "Has he performed his final duty,
Prince? How priceless are those last moments! It can make things no
worse, and it is absolutely necessary to prepare him if he is so ill. We
women, Prince," and she smiled tenderly, "always know how to say these
things. I absolutely must see him, however painful it may be for me. I
am used to suffering."

Evidently the prince understood her, and also understood, as he had
done at Anna Pavlovna's, that it would be difficult to get rid of Anna
Mikhaylovna.

"Would not such a meeting be too trying for him, dear Anna Mikhaylovna?"
said he. "Let us wait until evening. The doctors are expecting a
crisis."

"But one cannot delay, Prince, at such a moment! Consider that the
welfare of his soul is at stake. Ah, it is awful: the duties of a
Christian..."

A door of one of the inner rooms opened and one of the princesses, the
count's niece, entered with a cold, stern face. The length of her body
was strikingly out of proportion to her short legs. Prince Vasili turned
to her.

"Well, how is he?"

"Still the same; but what can you expect, this noise..." said the
princess, looking at Anna Mikhaylovna as at a stranger.

"Ah, my dear, I hardly knew you," said Anna Mikhaylovna with a happy
smile, ambling lightly up to the count's niece. "I have come, and am at
your service to help you nurse my uncle. I imagine what you have gone
through," and she sympathetically turned up her eyes.

The princess gave no reply and did not even smile, but left the room as
Anna Mikhaylovna took off her gloves and, occupying the position she had
conquered, settled down in an armchair, inviting Prince Vasili to take a
seat beside her.

"Boris," she said to her son with a smile, "I shall go in to see the
count, my uncle; but you, my dear, had better go to Pierre meanwhile
and don't forget to give him the Rostovs' invitation. They ask him to
dinner. I suppose he won't go?" she continued, turning to the prince.

"On the contrary," replied the prince, who had plainly become depressed,
"I shall be only too glad if you relieve me of that young man.... Here
he is, and the count has not once asked for him."

He shrugged his shoulders. A footman conducted Boris down one flight of
stairs and up another, to Pierre's rooms.





CHAPTER XVI


Pierre, after all, had not managed to choose a career for himself in
Petersburg, and had been expelled from there for riotous conduct and
sent to Moscow. The story told about him at Count Rostov's was true.
Pierre had taken part in tying a policeman to a bear. He had now been
for some days in Moscow and was staying as usual at his father's house.
Though he expected that the story of his escapade would be already known
in Moscow and that the ladies about his father--who were never favorably
disposed toward him--would have used it to turn the count against him,
he nevertheless on the day of his arrival went to his father's part of
the house. Entering the drawing room, where the princesses spent most
of their time, he greeted the ladies, two of whom were sitting at
embroidery frames while a third read aloud. It was the eldest who was
reading--the one who had met Anna Mikhaylovna. The two younger ones were
embroidering: both were rosy and pretty and they differed only in that
one had a little mole on her lip which made her much prettier. Pierre
was received as if he were a corpse or a leper. The eldest princess
paused in her reading and silently stared at him with frightened eyes;
the second assumed precisely the same expression; while the youngest,
the one with the mole, who was of a cheerful and lively disposition,
bent over her frame to hide a smile probably evoked by the amusing scene
she foresaw. She drew her wool down through the canvas and, scarcely
able to refrain from laughing, stooped as if trying to make out the
pattern.

"How do you do, cousin?" said Pierre. "You don't recognize me?"

"I recognize you only too well, too well."

"How is the count? Can I see him?" asked Pierre, awkwardly as usual, but
unabashed.

"The count is suffering physically and mentally, and apparently you have
done your best to increase his mental sufferings."

"Can I see the count?" Pierre again asked.

"Hm.... If you wish to kill him, to kill him outright, you can see
him... Olga, go and see whether Uncle's beef tea is ready--it is almost
time," she added, giving Pierre to understand that they were busy, and
busy making his father comfortable, while evidently he, Pierre, was only
busy causing him annoyance.

Olga went out. Pierre stood looking at the sisters; then he bowed and
said: "Then I will go to my rooms. You will let me know when I can see
him."

And he left the room, followed by the low but ringing laughter of the
sister with the mole.

Next day Prince Vasili had arrived and settled in the count's house. He
sent for Pierre and said to him: "My dear fellow, if you are going to
behave here as you did in Petersburg, you will end very badly; that is
all I have to say to you. The count is very, very ill, and you must not
see him at all."

Since then Pierre had not been disturbed and had spent the whole time in
his rooms upstairs.

When Boris appeared at his door Pierre was pacing up and down his room,
stopping occasionally at a corner to make menacing gestures at the wall,
as if running a sword through an invisible foe, and glaring savagely
over his spectacles, and then again resuming his walk, muttering
indistinct words, shrugging his shoulders and gesticulating.

"England is done for," said he, scowling and pointing his finger at
someone unseen. "Mr. Pitt, as a traitor to the nation and to the rights
of man, is sentenced to..." But before Pierre--who at that moment
imagined himself to be Napoleon in person and to have just effected the
dangerous crossing of the Straits of Dover and captured London--could
pronounce Pitt's sentence, he saw a well-built and handsome young
officer entering his room. Pierre paused. He had left Moscow when Boris
was a boy of fourteen, and had quite forgotten him, but in his usual
impulsive and hearty way he took Boris by the hand with a friendly
smile.

"Do you remember me?" asked Boris quietly with a pleasant smile. "I have
come with my mother to see the count, but it seems he is not well."

"Yes, it seems he is ill. People are always disturbing him," answered
Pierre, trying to remember who this young man was.

Boris felt that Pierre did not recognize him but did not consider it
necessary to introduce himself, and without experiencing the least
embarrassment looked Pierre straight in the face.

"Count Rostov asks you to come to dinner today," said he, after a
considerable pause which made Pierre feel uncomfortable.

"Ah, Count Rostov!" exclaimed Pierre joyfully. "Then you are his son,
Ilya? Only fancy, I didn't know you at first. Do you remember how we
went to the Sparrow Hills with Madame Jacquot?... It's such an age..."

"You are mistaken," said Boris deliberately, with a bold and slightly
sarcastic smile. "I am Boris, son of Princess Anna Mikhaylovna
Drubetskaya. Rostov, the father, is Ilya, and his son is Nicholas. I
never knew any Madame Jacquot."

Pierre shook his head and arms as if attacked by mosquitoes or bees.

"Oh dear, what am I thinking about? I've mixed everything up. One has so
many relatives in Moscow! So you are Boris? Of course. Well, now we
know where we are. And what do you think of the Boulogne expedition?
The English will come off badly, you know, if Napoleon gets across the
Channel. I think the expedition is quite feasible. If only Villeneuve
doesn't make a mess of things!"

Boris knew nothing about the Boulogne expedition; he did not read the
papers and it was the first time he had heard Villeneuve's name.

"We here in Moscow are more occupied with dinner parties and scandal
than with politics," said he in his quiet ironical tone. "I know nothing
about it and have not thought about it. Moscow is chiefly busy with
gossip," he continued. "Just now they are talking about you and your
father."

Pierre smiled in his good-natured way as if afraid for his companion's
sake that the latter might say something he would afterwards regret.
But Boris spoke distinctly, clearly, and dryly, looking straight into
Pierre's eyes.

"Moscow has nothing else to do but gossip," Boris went on. "Everybody
is wondering to whom the count will leave his fortune, though he may
perhaps outlive us all, as I sincerely hope he will..."

"Yes, it is all very horrid," interrupted Pierre, "very horrid."

Pierre was still afraid that this officer might inadvertently say
something disconcerting to himself.

"And it must seem to you," said Boris flushing slightly, but not
changing his tone or attitude, "it must seem to you that everyone is
trying to get something out of the rich man?"

"So it does," thought Pierre.

"But I just wish to say, to avoid misunderstandings, that you are quite
mistaken if you reckon me or my mother among such people. We are very
poor, but for my own part at any rate, for the very reason that your
father is rich, I don't regard myself as a relation of his, and neither
I nor my mother would ever ask or take anything from him."

For a long time Pierre could not understand, but when he did, he jumped
up from the sofa, seized Boris under the elbow in his quick, clumsy
way, and, blushing far more than Boris, began to speak with a feeling of
mingled shame and vexation.

"Well, this is strange! Do you suppose I... who could think?... I know
very well..."

But Boris again interrupted him.

"I am glad I have spoken out fully. Perhaps you did not like it? You
must excuse me," said he, putting Pierre at ease instead of being put
at ease by him, "but I hope I have not offended you. I always make it
a rule to speak out... Well, what answer am I to take? Will you come to
dinner at the Rostovs'?"

And Boris, having apparently relieved himself of an onerous duty and
extricated himself from an awkward situation and placed another in it,
became quite pleasant again.

"No, but I say," said Pierre, calming down, "you are a wonderful fellow!
What you have just said is good, very good. Of course you don't know me.
We have not met for such a long time... not since we were children. You
might think that I... I understand, quite understand. I could not have
done it myself, I should not have had the courage, but it's splendid. I
am very glad to have made your acquaintance. It's queer," he added after
a pause, "that you should have suspected me!" He began to laugh. "Well,
what of it! I hope we'll get better acquainted," and he pressed Boris'
hand. "Do you know, I have not once been in to see the count. He has not
sent for me.... I am sorry for him as a man, but what can one do?"

"And so you think Napoleon will manage to get an army across?" asked
Boris with a smile.

Pierre saw that Boris wished to change the subject, and being of the
same mind he began explaining the advantages and disadvantages of the
Boulogne expedition.

A footman came in to summon Boris--the princess was going. Pierre, in
order to make Boris' better acquaintance, promised to come to dinner,
and warmly pressing his hand looked affectionately over his spectacles
into Boris' eyes. After he had gone Pierre continued pacing up and down
the room for a long time, no longer piercing an imaginary foe with
his imaginary sword, but smiling at the remembrance of that pleasant,
intelligent, and resolute young man.

As often happens in early youth, especially to one who leads a lonely
life, he felt an unaccountable tenderness for this young man and made up
his mind that they would be friends.

Prince Vasili saw the princess off. She held a handkerchief to her eyes
and her face was tearful.

"It is dreadful, dreadful!" she was saying, "but cost me what it may I
shall do my duty. I will come and spend the night. He must not be left
like this. Every moment is precious. I can't think why his nieces put
it off. Perhaps God will help me to find a way to prepare him!... Adieu,
Prince! May God support you..."

"Adieu, ma bonne," answered Prince Vasili turning away from her.

"Oh, he is in a dreadful state," said the mother to her son when they
were in the carriage. "He hardly recognizes anybody."

"I don't understand, Mamma--what is his attitude to Pierre?" asked the
son.

"The will will show that, my dear; our fate also depends on it."

"But why do you expect that he will leave us anything?"

"Ah, my dear! He is so rich, and we are so poor!"

"Well, that is hardly a sufficient reason, Mamma..."

"Oh, Heaven! How ill he is!" exclaimed the mother.





CHAPTER XVII


After Anna Mikhaylovna had driven off with her son to visit Count Cyril
Vladimirovich Bezukhov, Countess Rostova sat for a long time all alone
applying her handkerchief to her eyes. At last she rang.

"What is the matter with you, my dear?" she said crossly to the maid who
kept her waiting some minutes. "Don't you wish to serve me? Then I'll
find you another place."

The countess was upset by her friend's sorrow and humiliating poverty,
and was therefore out of sorts, a state of mind which with her always
found expression in calling her maid "my dear" and speaking to her with
exaggerated politeness.

"I am very sorry, ma'am," answered the maid.

"Ask the count to come to me."

The count came waddling in to see his wife with a rather guilty look as
usual.

"Well, little countess? What a saute of game au madere we are to have,
my dear! I tasted it. The thousand rubles I paid for Taras were not
ill-spent. He is worth it!"

He sat down by his wife, his elbows on his knees and his hands ruffling
his gray hair.

"What are your commands, little countess?"

"You see, my dear... What's that mess?" she said, pointing to his
waistcoat. "It's the saute, most likely," she added with a smile. "Well,
you see, Count, I want some money."

Her face became sad.

"Oh, little countess!"... and the count began bustling to get out his
pocketbook.

"I want a great deal, Count! I want five hundred rubles," and taking out
her cambric handkerchief she began wiping her husband's waistcoat.

"Yes, immediately, immediately! Hey, who's there?" he called out in a
tone only used by persons who are certain that those they call will rush
to obey the summons. "Send Dmitri to me!"

Dmitri, a man of good family who had been brought up in the count's
house and now managed all his affairs, stepped softly into the room.

"This is what I want, my dear fellow," said the count to the deferential
young man who had entered. "Bring me..." he reflected a moment, "yes,
bring me seven hundred rubles, yes! But mind, don't bring me such
tattered and dirty notes as last time, but nice clean ones for the
countess."

"Yes, Dmitri, clean ones, please," said the countess, sighing deeply.

"When would you like them, your excellency?" asked Dmitri. "Allow me to
inform you... But, don't be uneasy," he added, noticing that the count
was beginning to breathe heavily and quickly which was always a sign of
approaching anger. "I was forgetting... Do you wish it brought at once?"

"Yes, yes; just so! Bring it. Give it to the countess."

"What a treasure that Dmitri is," added the count with a smile when
the young man had departed. "There is never any 'impossible' with him.
That's a thing I hate! Everything is possible."

"Ah, money, Count, money! How much sorrow it causes in the world," said
the countess. "But I am in great need of this sum."

"You, my little countess, are a notorious spendthrift," said the count,
and having kissed his wife's hand he went back to his study.

When Anna Mikhaylovna returned from Count Bezukhov's the money, all
in clean notes, was lying ready under a handkerchief on the countess'
little table, and Anna Mikhaylovna noticed that something was agitating
her.

"Well, my dear?" asked the countess.

"Oh, what a terrible state he is in! One would not know him, he is so
ill! I was only there a few moments and hardly said a word..."

"Annette, for heaven's sake don't refuse me," the countess began, with a
blush that looked very strange on her thin, dignified, elderly face, and
she took the money from under the handkerchief.

Anna Mikhaylovna instantly guessed her intention and stooped to be ready
to embrace the countess at the appropriate moment.

"This is for Boris from me, for his outfit."

Anna Mikhaylovna was already embracing her and weeping. The countess
wept too. They wept because they were friends, and because they were
kindhearted, and because they--friends from childhood--had to think
about such a base thing as money, and because their youth was over....
But those tears were pleasant to them both.





CHAPTER XVIII


Countess Rostova, with her daughters and a large number of guests, was
already seated in the drawing room. The count took the gentlemen into
his study and showed them his choice collection of Turkish pipes.
From time to time he went out to ask: "Hasn't she come yet?" They were
expecting Marya Dmitrievna Akhrosimova, known in society as le terrible
dragon, a lady distinguished not for wealth or rank, but for common
sense and frank plainness of speech. Marya Dmitrievna was known to the
Imperial family as well as to all Moscow and Petersburg, and both cities
wondered at her, laughed privately at her rudenesses, and told good
stories about her, while none the less all without exception respected
and feared her.

In the count's room, which was full of tobacco smoke, they talked of war
that had been announced in a manifesto, and about the recruiting. None
of them had yet seen the manifesto, but they all knew it had appeared.
The count sat on the sofa between two guests who were smoking and
talking. He neither smoked nor talked, but bending his head first to one
side and then to the other watched the smokers with evident pleasure
and listened to the conversation of his two neighbors, whom he egged on
against each other.

One of them was a sallow, clean-shaven civilian with a thin and wrinkled
face, already growing old, though he was dressed like a most fashionable
young man. He sat with his legs up on the sofa as if quite at home and,
having stuck an amber mouthpiece far into his mouth, was inhaling the
smoke spasmodically and screwing up his eyes. This was an old bachelor,
Shinshin, a cousin of the countess', a man with "a sharp tongue" as they
said in Moscow society. He seemed to be condescending to his companion.
The latter, a fresh, rosy officer of the Guards, irreproachably washed,
brushed, and buttoned, held his pipe in the middle of his mouth and with
red lips gently inhaled the smoke, letting it escape from his handsome
mouth in rings. This was Lieutenant Berg, an officer in the Semenov
regiment with whom Boris was to travel to join the army, and about
whom Natasha had, teased her elder sister Vera, speaking of Berg as her
"intended." The count sat between them and listened attentively. His
favorite occupation when not playing boston, a card game he was very
fond of, was that of listener, especially when he succeeded in setting
two loquacious talkers at one another.

"Well, then, old chap, mon tres honorable Alphonse Karlovich," said
Shinshin, laughing ironically and mixing the most ordinary Russian
expressions with the choicest French phrases--which was a peculiarity of
his speech. "Vous comptez vous faire des rentes sur l'etat; * you want
to make something out of your company?"


     * You expect to make an income out of the government.


"No, Peter Nikolaevich; I only want to show that in the cavalry the
advantages are far less than in the infantry. Just consider my own
position now, Peter Nikolaevich..."

Berg always spoke quietly, politely, and with great precision. His
conversation always related entirely to himself; he would remain calm
and silent when the talk related to any topic that had no direct bearing
on himself. He could remain silent for hours without being at all put
out of countenance himself or making others uncomfortable, but as
soon as the conversation concerned himself he would begin to talk
circumstantially and with evident satisfaction.

"Consider my position, Peter Nikolaevich. Were I in the cavalry I should
get not more than two hundred rubles every four months, even with the
rank of lieutenant; but as it is I receive two hundred and thirty," said
he, looking at Shinshin and the count with a joyful, pleasant smile,
as if it were obvious to him that his success must always be the chief
desire of everyone else.

"Besides that, Peter Nikolaevich, by exchanging into the Guards I shall
be in a more prominent position," continued Berg, "and vacancies occur
much more frequently in the Foot Guards. Then just think what can be
done with two hundred and thirty rubles! I even manage to put a little
aside and to send something to my father," he went on, emitting a smoke
ring.

"La balance y est... * A German knows how to skin a flint, as the
proverb says," remarked Shinshin, moving his pipe to the other side of
his mouth and winking at the count.


      * So that squares matters.


The count burst out laughing. The other guests seeing that Shinshin was
talking came up to listen. Berg, oblivious of irony or indifference,
continued to explain how by exchanging into the Guards he had already
gained a step on his old comrades of the Cadet Corps; how in wartime
the company commander might get killed and he, as senior in the company,
might easily succeed to the post; how popular he was with everyone in
the regiment, and how satisfied his father was with him. Berg evidently
enjoyed narrating all this, and did not seem to suspect that others,
too, might have their own interests. But all he said was so prettily
sedate, and the naivete of his youthful egotism was so obvious, that he
disarmed his hearers.

"Well, my boy, you'll get along wherever you go--foot or horse--that
I'll warrant," said Shinshin, patting him on the shoulder and taking his
feet off the sofa.

Berg smiled joyously. The count, by his guests, went into the drawing
room.

It was just the moment before a big dinner when the assembled guests,
expecting the summons to zakuska, * avoid engaging in any long
conversation but think it necessary to move about and talk, in order
to show that they are not at all impatient for their food. The host and
hostess look toward the door, and now and then glance at one another,
and the visitors try to guess from these glances who, or what, they are
waiting for--some important relation who has not yet arrived, or a dish
that is not yet ready.


     * Hors d'oeuvres.


Pierre had come just at dinnertime and was sitting awkwardly in the
middle of the drawing room on the first chair he had come across,
blocking the way for everyone. The countess tried to make him talk, but
he went on naively looking around through his spectacles as if in search
of somebody and answered all her questions in monosyllables. He was in
the way and was the only one who did not notice the fact. Most of the
guests, knowing of the affair with the bear, looked with curiosity at
this big, stout, quiet man, wondering how such a clumsy, modest fellow
could have played such a prank on a policeman.

"You have only lately arrived?" the countess asked him.

"Oui, madame," replied he, looking around him.

"You have not yet seen my husband?"

"Non, madame." He smiled quite inappropriately.

"You have been in Paris recently, I believe? I suppose it's very
interesting."

"Very interesting."

The countess exchanged glances with Anna Mikhaylovna. The latter
understood that she was being asked to entertain this young man, and
sitting down beside him she began to speak about his father; but he
answered her, as he had the countess, only in monosyllables. The other
guests were all conversing with one another. "The Razumovskis... It was
charming... You are very kind... Countess Apraksina..." was heard on all
sides. The countess rose and went into the ballroom.

"Marya Dmitrievna?" came her voice from there.

"Herself," came the answer in a rough voice, and Marya Dmitrievna
entered the room.

All the unmarried ladies and even the married ones except the very
oldest rose. Marya Dmitrievna paused at the door. Tall and stout,
holding high her fifty-year-old head with its gray curls, she stood
surveying the guests, and leisurely arranged her wide sleeves as if
rolling them up. Marya Dmitrievna always spoke in Russian.

"Health and happiness to her whose name day we are keeping and to her
children," she said, in her loud, full-toned voice which drowned all
others. "Well, you old sinner," she went on, turning to the count who
was kissing her hand, "you're feeling dull in Moscow, I daresay? Nowhere
to hunt with your dogs? But what is to be done, old man? Just see how
these nestlings are growing up," and she pointed to the girls. "You must
look for husbands for them whether you like it or not...."

"Well," said she, "how's my Cossack?" (Marya Dmitrievna always called
Natasha a Cossack) and she stroked the child's arm as she came up
fearless and gay to kiss her hand. "I know she's a scamp of a girl, but
I like her."

She took a pair of pear-shaped ruby earrings from her huge reticule and,
having given them to the rosy Natasha, who beamed with the pleasure
of her saint's-day fete, turned away at once and addressed herself to
Pierre.

"Eh, eh, friend! Come here a bit," said she, assuming a soft high tone
of voice. "Come here, my friend..." and she ominously tucked up her
sleeves still higher. Pierre approached, looking at her in a childlike
way through his spectacles.

"Come nearer, come nearer, friend! I used to be the only one to tell
your father the truth when he was in favor, and in your case it's my
evident duty." She paused. All were silent, expectant of what was to
follow, for this was clearly only a prelude.

"A fine lad! My word! A fine lad!... His father lies on his deathbed and
he amuses himself setting a policeman astride a bear! For shame, sir,
for shame! It would be better if you went to the war."

She turned away and gave her hand to the count, who could hardly keep
from laughing.

"Well, I suppose it is time we were at table?" said Marya Dmitrievna.

The count went in first with Marya Dmitrievna, the countess followed
on the arm of a colonel of hussars, a man of importance to them because
Nicholas was to go with him to the regiment; then came Anna Mikhaylovna
with Shinshin. Berg gave his arm to Vera. The smiling Julie Karagina
went in with Nicholas. After them other couples followed, filling the
whole dining hall, and last of all the children, tutors, and governesses
followed singly. The footmen began moving about, chairs scraped, the
band struck up in the gallery, and the guests settled down in their
places. Then the strains of the count's household band were replaced by
the clatter of knives and forks, the voices of visitors, and the soft
steps of the footmen. At one end of the table sat the countess with
Marya Dmitrievna on her right and Anna Mikhaylovna on her left, the
other lady visitors were farther down. At the other end sat the count,
with the hussar colonel on his left and Shinshin and the other male
visitors on his right. Midway down the long table on one side sat the
grownup young people: Vera beside Berg, and Pierre beside Boris; and on
the other side, the children, tutors, and governesses. From behind the
crystal decanters and fruit vases the count kept glancing at his wife
and her tall cap with its light-blue ribbons, and busily filled his
neighbors' glasses, not neglecting his own. The countess in turn,
without omitting her duties as hostess, threw significant glances from
behind the pineapples at her husband whose face and bald head seemed
by their redness to contrast more than usual with his gray hair. At the
ladies' end an even chatter of voices was heard all the time, at the
men's end the voices sounded louder and louder, especially that of the
colonel of hussars who, growing more and more flushed, ate and drank so
much that the count held him up as a pattern to the other guests. Berg
with tender smiles was saying to Vera that love is not an earthly but a
heavenly feeling. Boris was telling his new friend Pierre who the guests
were and exchanging glances with Natasha, who was sitting opposite.
Pierre spoke little but examined the new faces, and ate a great deal.
Of the two soups he chose turtle with savory patties and went on to the
game without omitting a single dish or one of the wines. These latter
the butler thrust mysteriously forward, wrapped in a napkin, from behind
the next man's shoulders and whispered: "Dry Madeira"... "Hungarian"...
or "Rhine wine" as the case might be. Of the four crystal glasses
engraved with the count's monogram that stood before his plate,
Pierre held out one at random and drank with enjoyment, gazing with
ever-increasing amiability at the other guests. Natasha, who sat
opposite, was looking at Boris as girls of thirteen look at the boy they
are in love with and have just kissed for the first time. Sometimes that
same look fell on Pierre, and that funny lively little girl's look made
him inclined to laugh without knowing why.

Nicholas sat at some distance from Sonya, beside Julie Karagina, to
whom he was again talking with the same involuntary smile. Sonya wore
a company smile but was evidently tormented by jealousy; now she turned
pale, now blushed and strained every nerve to overhear what Nicholas
and Julie were saying to one another. The governess kept looking round
uneasily as if preparing to resent any slight that might be put upon the
children. The German tutor was trying to remember all the dishes, wines,
and kinds of dessert, in order to send a full description of the dinner
to his people in Germany; and he felt greatly offended when the butler
with a bottle wrapped in a napkin passed him by. He frowned, trying to
appear as if he did not want any of that wine, but was mortified because
no one would understand that it was not to quench his thirst or from
greediness that he wanted it, but simply from a conscientious desire for
knowledge.





CHAPTER XIX


At the men's end of the table the talk grew more and more animated. The
colonel told them that the declaration of war had already appeared in
Petersburg and that a copy, which he had himself seen, had that day been
forwarded by courier to the commander in chief.

"And why the deuce are we going to fight Bonaparte?" remarked Shinshin.
"He has stopped Austria's cackle and I fear it will be our turn next."

The colonel was a stout, tall, plethoric German, evidently devoted to
the service and patriotically Russian. He resented Shinshin's remark.

"It is for the reasson, my goot sir," said he, speaking with a German
accent, "for the reasson zat ze Emperor knows zat. He declares in ze
manifessto zat he cannot fiew wiz indifference ze danger vreatening
Russia and zat ze safety and dignity of ze Empire as vell as ze sanctity
of its alliances..." he spoke this last word with particular emphasis as
if in it lay the gist of the matter.

Then with the unerring official memory that characterized him he
repeated from the opening words of the manifesto:

... and the wish, which constitutes the Emperor's sole and absolute
aim--to establish peace in Europe on firm foundations--has now decided
him to despatch part of the army abroad and to create a new condition
for the attainment of that purpose.

"Zat, my dear sir, is vy..." he concluded, drinking a tumbler of wine
with dignity and looking to the count for approval.

"Connaissez-vous le Proverbe: * 'Jerome, Jerome, do not roam, but turn
spindles at home!'?" said Shinshin, puckering his brows and smiling.
"Cela nous convient a merveille.*(2) Suvorov now--he knew what he was
about; yet they beat him a plate couture,*(3) and where are we to find
Suvorovs now? Je vous demande un peu,"*(4) said he, continually changing
from French to Russian.


     *Do you know the proverb?

     *(2) That suits us down to the ground.

     *(3) Hollow.

     *(4) I just ask you that.


"Ve must vight to the last tr-r-op of our plood!" said the colonel,
thumping the table; "and ve must tie for our Emperor, and zen all vill
pe vell. And ve must discuss it as little as po-o-ossible"... he dwelt
particularly on the word possible... "as po-o-ossible," he ended, again
turning to the count. "Zat is how ve old hussars look at it, and zere's
an end of it! And how do you, a young man and a young hussar, how do you
judge of it?" he added, addressing Nicholas, who when he heard that the
war was being discussed had turned from his partner with eyes and ears
intent on the colonel.

"I am quite of your opinion," replied Nicholas, flaming up, turning his
plate round and moving his wineglasses about with as much decision and
desperation as though he were at that moment facing some great danger.
"I am convinced that we Russians must die or conquer," he concluded,
conscious--as were others--after the words were uttered that his remarks
were too enthusiastic and emphatic for the occasion and were therefore
awkward.

"What you said just now was splendid!" said his partner Julie.

Sonya trembled all over and blushed to her ears and behind them and down
to her neck and shoulders while Nicholas was speaking.

Pierre listened to the colonel's speech and nodded approvingly.

"That's fine," said he.

"The young man's a real hussar!" shouted the colonel, again thumping the
table.

"What are you making such a noise about over there?" Marya Dmitrievna's
deep voice suddenly inquired from the other end of the table. "What are
you thumping the table for?" she demanded of the hussar, "and why are
you exciting yourself? Do you think the French are here?"

"I am speaking ze truce," replied the hussar with a smile.

"It's all about the war," the count shouted down the table. "You know my
son's going, Marya Dmitrievna? My son is going."

"I have four sons in the army but still I don't fret. It is all in
God's hands. You may die in your bed or God may spare you in a battle,"
replied Marya Dmitrievna's deep voice, which easily carried the whole
length of the table.

"That's true!"

Once more the conversations concentrated, the ladies' at the one end and
the men's at the other.

"You won't ask," Natasha's little brother was saying; "I know you won't
ask!"

"I will," replied Natasha.

Her face suddenly flushed with reckless and joyous resolution. She half
rose, by a glance inviting Pierre, who sat opposite, to listen to what
was coming, and turning to her mother:

"Mamma!" rang out the clear contralto notes of her childish voice,
audible the whole length of the table.

"What is it?" asked the countess, startled; but seeing by her daughter's
face that it was only mischief, she shook a finger at her sternly with a
threatening and forbidding movement of her head.

The conversation was hushed.

"Mamma! What sweets are we going to have?" and Natasha's voice sounded
still more firm and resolute.

The countess tried to frown, but could not. Marya Dmitrievna shook her
fat finger.

"Cossack!" she said threateningly.

Most of the guests, uncertain how to regard this sally, looked at the
elders.

"You had better take care!" said the countess.

"Mamma! What sweets are we going to have?" Natasha again cried boldly,
with saucy gaiety, confident that her prank would be taken in good part.

Sonya and fat little Petya doubled up with laughter.

"You see! I have asked," whispered Natasha to her little brother and to
Pierre, glancing at him again.

"Ice pudding, but you won't get any," said Marya Dmitrievna.

Natasha saw there was nothing to be afraid of and so she braved even
Marya Dmitrievna.

"Marya Dmitrievna! What kind of ice pudding? I don't like ice cream."

"Carrot ices."

"No! What kind, Marya Dmitrievna? What kind?" she almost screamed; "I
want to know!"

Marya Dmitrievna and the countess burst out laughing, and all the guests
joined in. Everyone laughed, not at Marya Dmitrievna's answer but at the
incredible boldness and smartness of this little girl who had dared to
treat Marya Dmitrievna in this fashion.

Natasha only desisted when she had been told that there would be
pineapple ice. Before the ices, champagne was served round. The band
again struck up, the count and countess kissed, and the guests, leaving
their seats, went up to "congratulate" the countess, and reached across
the table to clink glasses with the count, with the children, and with
one another. Again the footmen rushed about, chairs scraped, and in the
same order in which they had entered but with redder faces, the guests
returned to the drawing room and to the count's study.





CHAPTER XX


The card tables were drawn out, sets made up for boston, and the count's
visitors settled themselves, some in the two drawing rooms, some in the
sitting room, some in the library.

The count, holding his cards fanwise, kept himself with difficulty from
dropping into his usual after-dinner nap, and laughed at everything.
The young people, at the countess' instigation, gathered round the
clavichord and harp. Julie by general request played first. After she
had played a little air with variations on the harp, she joined the
other young ladies in begging Natasha and Nicholas, who were noted for
their musical talent, to sing something. Natasha, who was treated as
though she were grown up, was evidently very proud of this but at the
same time felt shy.

"What shall we sing?" she said.

"'The Brook,'" suggested Nicholas.

"Well, then, let's be quick. Boris, come here," said Natasha. "But where
is Sonya?"

She looked round and seeing that her friend was not in the room ran to
look for her.

Running into Sonya's room and not finding her there, Natasha ran to the
nursery, but Sonya was not there either. Natasha concluded that she must
be on the chest in the passage. The chest in the passage was the place
of mourning for the younger female generation in the Rostov household.
And there in fact was Sonya lying face downward on Nurse's dirty feather
bed on the top of the chest, crumpling her gauzy pink dress under her,
hiding her face with her slender fingers, and sobbing so convulsively
that her bare little shoulders shook. Natasha's face, which had been so
radiantly happy all that saint's day, suddenly changed: her eyes became
fixed, and then a shiver passed down her broad neck and the corners of
her mouth drooped.

"Sonya! What is it? What is the matter?... Oo... Oo... Oo...!" And
Natasha's large mouth widened, making her look quite ugly, and she began
to wail like a baby without knowing why, except that Sonya was crying.
Sonya tried to lift her head to answer but could not, and hid her face
still deeper in the bed. Natasha wept, sitting on the blue-striped
feather bed and hugging her friend. With an effort Sonya sat up and
began wiping her eyes and explaining.

"Nicholas is going away in a week's time, his... papers... have come...
he told me himself... but still I should not cry," and she showed
a paper she held in her hand--with the verses Nicholas had written,
"still, I should not cry, but you can't... no one can understand... what
a soul he has!"

And she began to cry again because he had such a noble soul.

"It's all very well for you... I am not envious... I love you and Boris
also," she went on, gaining a little strength; "he is nice... there are
no difficulties in your way.... But Nicholas is my cousin... one would
have to... the Metropolitan himself... and even then it can't be done.
And besides, if she tells Mamma" (Sonya looked upon the countess as her
mother and called her so) "that I am spoiling Nicholas' career and am
heartless and ungrateful, while truly... God is my witness," and she
made the sign of the cross, "I love her so much, and all of you, only
Vera... And what for? What have I done to her? I am so grateful to you
that I would willingly sacrifice everything, only I have nothing...."

Sonya could not continue, and again hid her face in her hands and in the
feather bed. Natasha began consoling her, but her face showed that she
understood all the gravity of her friend's trouble.

"Sonya," she suddenly exclaimed, as if she had guessed the true reason
of her friend's sorrow, "I'm sure Vera has said something to you since
dinner? Hasn't she?"

"Yes, these verses Nicholas wrote himself and I copied some others, and
she found them on my table and said she'd show them to Mamma, and that
I was ungrateful, and that Mamma would never allow him to marry me,
but that he'll marry Julie. You see how he's been with her all day...
Natasha, what have I done to deserve it?..."

And again she began to sob, more bitterly than before. Natasha lifted
her up, hugged her, and, smiling through her tears, began comforting
her.

"Sonya, don't believe her, darling! Don't believe her! Do you remember
how we and Nicholas, all three of us, talked in the sitting room after
supper? Why, we settled how everything was to be. I don't quite remember
how, but don't you remember that it could all be arranged and how nice
it all was? There's Uncle Shinshin's brother has married his first
cousin. And we are only second cousins, you know. And Boris says it
is quite possible. You know I have told him all about it. And he is so
clever and so good!" said Natasha. "Don't you cry, Sonya, dear love,
darling Sonya!" and she kissed her and laughed. "Vera's spiteful; never
mind her! And all will come right and she won't say anything to Mamma.
Nicholas will tell her himself, and he doesn't care at all for Julie."

Natasha kissed her on the hair.

Sonya sat up. The little kitten brightened, its eyes shone, and it
seemed ready to lift its tail, jump down on its soft paws, and begin
playing with the ball of worsted as a kitten should.

"Do you think so?... Really? Truly?" she said, quickly smoothing her
frock and hair.

"Really, truly!" answered Natasha, pushing in a crisp lock that had
strayed from under her friend's plaits.

Both laughed.

"Well, let's go and sing 'The Brook.'"

"Come along!"

"Do you know, that fat Pierre who sat opposite me is so funny!" said
Natasha, stopping suddenly. "I feel so happy!"

And she set off at a run along the passage.

Sonya, shaking off some down which clung to her and tucking away the
verses in the bosom of her dress close to her bony little chest, ran
after Natasha down the passage into the sitting room with flushed face
and light, joyous steps. At the visitors' request the young people sang
the quartette, "The Brook," with which everyone was delighted. Then
Nicholas sang a song he had just learned:


   At nighttime in the moon's fair glow
     How sweet, as fancies wander free,
   To feel that in this world there's one
     Who still is thinking but of thee!

   That while her fingers touch the harp
     Wafting sweet music o'er the lea,
   It is for thee thus swells her heart,
     Sighing its message out to thee...

   A day or two, then bliss unspoilt,
     But oh! till then I cannot live!...


He had not finished the last verse before the young people began to
get ready to dance in the large hall, and the sound of the feet and the
coughing of the musicians were heard from the gallery.


Pierre was sitting in the drawing-room where Shinshin had engaged him,
as a man recently returned from abroad, in a political conversation in
which several others joined but which bored Pierre. When the music began
Natasha came in and walking straight up to Pierre said, laughing and
blushing:

"Mamma told me to ask you to join the dancers."

"I am afraid of mixing the figures," Pierre replied; "but if you will
be my teacher..." And lowering his big arm he offered it to the slender
little girl.

While the couples were arranging themselves and the musicians tuning up,
Pierre sat down with his little partner. Natasha was perfectly happy;
she was dancing with a grown-up man, who had been abroad. She was
sitting in a conspicuous place and talking to him like a grown-up lady.
She had a fan in her hand that one of the ladies had given her to hold.
Assuming quite the pose of a society woman (heaven knows when and where
she had learned it) she talked with her partner, fanning herself and
smiling over the fan.

"Dear, dear! Just look at her!" exclaimed the countess as she crossed
the ballroom, pointing to Natasha.

Natasha blushed and laughed.

"Well, really, Mamma! Why should you? What is there to be surprised at?"


In the midst of the third ecossaise there was a clatter of chairs being
pushed back in the sitting room where the count and Marya Dmitrievna had
been playing cards with the majority of the more distinguished and older
visitors. They now, stretching themselves after sitting so long, and
replacing their purses and pocketbooks, entered the ballroom. First came
Marya Dmitrievna and the count, both with merry countenances. The count,
with playful ceremony somewhat in ballet style, offered his bent arm to
Marya Dmitrievna. He drew himself up, a smile of debonair gallantry lit
up his face and as soon as the last figure of the ecossaise was ended,
he clapped his hands to the musicians and shouted up to their gallery,
addressing the first violin:

"Semen! Do you know the Daniel Cooper?"

This was the count's favorite dance, which he had danced in his youth.
(Strictly speaking, Daniel Cooper was one figure of the anglaise.)

"Look at Papa!" shouted Natasha to the whole company, and quite
forgetting that she was dancing with a grown-up partner she bent her
curly head to her knees and made the whole room ring with her laughter.

And indeed everybody in the room looked with a smile of pleasure at the
jovial old gentleman, who standing beside his tall and stout partner,
Marya Dmitrievna, curved his arms, beat time, straightened his
shoulders, turned out his toes, tapped gently with his foot, and, by
a smile that broadened his round face more and more, prepared the
onlookers for what was to follow. As soon as the provocatively gay
strains of Daniel Cooper (somewhat resembling those of a merry peasant
dance) began to sound, all the doorways of the ballroom were suddenly
filled by the domestic serfs--the men on one side and the women on the
other--who with beaming faces had come to see their master making merry.

"Just look at the master! A regular eagle he is!" loudly remarked the
nurse, as she stood in one of the doorways.

The count danced well and knew it. But his partner could not and did not
want to dance well. Her enormous figure stood erect, her powerful arms
hanging down (she had handed her reticule to the countess), and only her
stern but handsome face really joined in the dance. What was expressed
by the whole of the count's plump figure, in Marya Dmitrievna found
expression only in her more and more beaming face and quivering nose.
But if the count, getting more and more into the swing of it, charmed
the spectators by the unexpectedness of his adroit maneuvers and the
agility with which he capered about on his light feet, Marya Dmitrievna
produced no less impression by slight exertions--the least effort
to move her shoulders or bend her arms when turning, or stamp her
foot--which everyone appreciated in view of her size and habitual
severity. The dance grew livelier and livelier. The other couples could
not attract a moment's attention to their own evolutions and did not
even try to do so. All were watching the count and Marya Dmitrievna.
Natasha kept pulling everyone by sleeve or dress, urging them to "look
at Papa!" though as it was they never took their eyes off the couple.
In the intervals of the dance the count, breathing deeply, waved and
shouted to the musicians to play faster. Faster, faster, and faster;
lightly, more lightly, and yet more lightly whirled the count, flying
round Marya Dmitrievna, now on his toes, now on his heels; until,
turning his partner round to her seat, he executed the final pas,
raising his soft foot backwards, bowing his perspiring head, smiling
and making a wide sweep with his arm, amid a thunder of applause and
laughter led by Natasha. Both partners stood still, breathing heavily
and wiping their faces with their cambric handkerchiefs.

"That's how we used to dance in our time, ma chere," said the count.

"That was a Daniel Cooper!" exclaimed Marya Dmitrievna, tucking up her
sleeves and puffing heavily.





CHAPTER XXI


While in the Rostovs' ballroom the sixth anglaise was being danced, to a
tune in which the weary musicians blundered, and while tired footmen and
cooks were getting the supper, Count Bezukhov had a sixth stroke.
The doctors pronounced recovery impossible. After a mute confession,
communion was administered to the dying man, preparations made for the
sacrament of unction, and in his house there was the bustle and thrill
of suspense usual at such moments. Outside the house, beyond the gates,
a group of undertakers, who hid whenever a carriage drove up, waited in
expectation of an important order for an expensive funeral. The Military
Governor of Moscow, who had been assiduous in sending aides-de-camp to
inquire after the count's health, came himself that evening to bid a
last farewell to the celebrated grandee of Catherine's court, Count
Bezukhov.

The magnificent reception room was crowded. Everyone stood up
respectfully when the Military Governor, having stayed about half an
hour alone with the dying man, passed out, slightly acknowledging their
bows and trying to escape as quickly as possible from the glances fixed
on him by the doctors, clergy, and relatives of the family. Prince
Vasili, who had grown thinner and paler during the last few days,
escorted him to the door, repeating something to him several times in
low tones.

When the Military Governor had gone, Prince Vasili sat down all alone on
a chair in the ballroom, crossing one leg high over the other, leaning
his elbow on his knee and covering his face with his hand. After sitting
so for a while he rose, and, looking about him with frightened eyes,
went with unusually hurried steps down the long corridor leading to the
back of the house, to the room of the eldest princess.

Those who were in the dimly lit reception room spoke in nervous
whispers, and, whenever anyone went into or came from the dying man's
room, grew silent and gazed with eyes full of curiosity or expectancy at
his door, which creaked slightly when opened.

"The limits of human life... are fixed and may not be o'erpassed,"
said an old priest to a lady who had taken a seat beside him and was
listening naively to his words.

"I wonder, is it not too late to administer unction?" asked the lady,
adding the priest's clerical title, as if she had no opinion of her own
on the subject.

"Ah, madam, it is a great sacrament," replied the priest, passing his
hand over the thin grizzled strands of hair combed back across his bald
head.

"Who was that? The Military Governor himself?" was being asked at the
other side of the room. "How young-looking he is!"

"Yes, and he is over sixty. I hear the count no longer recognizes
anyone. They wished to administer the sacrament of unction."

"I knew someone who received that sacrament seven times."

The second princess had just come from the sickroom with her eyes red
from weeping and sat down beside Dr. Lorrain, who was sitting in a
graceful pose under a portrait of Catherine, leaning his elbow on a
table.

"Beautiful," said the doctor in answer to a remark about the weather.
"The weather is beautiful, Princess; and besides, in Moscow one feels as
if one were in the country."

"Yes, indeed," replied the princess with a sigh. "So he may have
something to drink?"

Lorrain considered.

"Has he taken his medicine?"

"Yes."

The doctor glanced at his watch.

"Take a glass of boiled water and put a pinch of cream of tartar," and
he indicated with his delicate fingers what he meant by a pinch.

"Dere has neffer been a gase," a German doctor was saying to an
aide-de-camp, "dat one liffs after de sird stroke."

"And what a well-preserved man he was!" remarked the aide-de-camp. "And
who will inherit his wealth?" he added in a whisper.

"It von't go begging," replied the German with a smile.

Everyone again looked toward the door, which creaked as the second
princess went in with the drink she had prepared according to Lorrain's
instructions. The German doctor went up to Lorrain.

"Do you think he can last till morning?" asked the German, addressing
Lorrain in French which he pronounced badly.

Lorrain, pursing up his lips, waved a severely negative finger before
his nose.

"Tonight, not later," said he in a low voice, and he moved away with a
decorous smile of self-satisfaction at being able clearly to understand
and state the patient's condition.


Meanwhile Prince Vasili had opened the door into the princess' room.

In this room it was almost dark; only two tiny lamps were burning before
the icons and there was a pleasant scent of flowers and burnt pastilles.
The room was crowded with small pieces of furniture, whatnots,
cupboards, and little tables. The quilt of a high, white feather bed was
just visible behind a screen. A small dog began to bark.

"Ah, is it you, cousin?"

She rose and smoothed her hair, which was as usual so extremely smooth
that it seemed to be made of one piece with her head and covered with
varnish.

"Has anything happened?" she asked. "I am so terrified."

"No, there is no change. I only came to have a talk about business,
Catiche," * muttered the prince, seating himself wearily on the chair
she had just vacated. "You have made the place warm, I must say," he
remarked. "Well, sit down: let's have a talk."


     *Catherine.


"I thought perhaps something had happened," she said with her unchanging
stonily severe expression; and, sitting down opposite the prince, she
prepared to listen.

"I wished to get a nap, mon cousin, but I can't."

"Well, my dear?" said Prince Vasili, taking her hand and bending it
downwards as was his habit.

It was plain that this "well?" referred to much that they both
understood without naming.

The princess, who had a straight, rigid body, abnormally long for her
legs, looked directly at Prince Vasili with no sign of emotion in her
prominent gray eyes. Then she shook her head and glanced up at the icons
with a sigh. This might have been taken as an expression of sorrow and
devotion, or of weariness and hope of resting before long. Prince Vasili
understood it as an expression of weariness.

"And I?" he said; "do you think it is easier for me? I am as worn out
as a post horse, but still I must have a talk with you, Catiche, a very
serious talk."

Prince Vasili said no more and his cheeks began to twitch nervously, now
on one side, now on the other, giving his face an unpleasant expression
which was never to be seen on it in a drawing room. His eyes too seemed
strange; at one moment they looked impudently sly and at the next
glanced round in alarm.

The princess, holding her little dog on her lap with her thin bony
hands, looked attentively into Prince Vasili's eyes evidently resolved
not to be the first to break silence, if she had to wait till morning.

"Well, you see, my dear princess and cousin, Catherine Semenovna,"
continued Prince Vasili, returning to his theme, apparently not
without an inner struggle; "at such a moment as this one must think of
everything. One must think of the future, of all of you... I love you
all, like children of my own, as you know."

The princess continued to look at him without moving, and with the same
dull expression.

"And then of course my family has also to be considered," Prince Vasili
went on, testily pushing away a little table without looking at her.
"You know, Catiche, that we--you three sisters, Mamontov, and my
wife--are the count's only direct heirs. I know, I know how hard it is
for you to talk or think of such matters. It is no easier for me; but,
my dear, I am getting on for sixty and must be prepared for anything. Do
you know I have sent for Pierre? The count," pointing to his portrait,
"definitely demanded that he should be called."

Prince Vasili looked questioningly at the princess, but could not make
out whether she was considering what he had just said or whether she was
simply looking at him.

"There is one thing I constantly pray God to grant, mon cousin," she
replied, "and it is that He would be merciful to him and would allow his
noble soul peacefully to leave this..."

"Yes, yes, of course," interrupted Prince Vasili impatiently, rubbing
his bald head and angrily pulling back toward him the little table that
he had pushed away. "But... in short, the fact is... you know yourself
that last winter the count made a will by which he left all his
property, not to us his direct heirs, but to Pierre."

"He has made wills enough!" quietly remarked the princess. "But he
cannot leave the estate to Pierre. Pierre is illegitimate."

"But, my dear," said Prince Vasili suddenly, clutching the little table
and becoming more animated and talking more rapidly: "what if a letter
has been written to the Emperor in which the count asks for Pierre's
legitimation? Do you understand that in consideration of the count's
services, his request would be granted?..."

The princess smiled as people do who think they know more about the
subject under discussion than those they are talking with.

"I can tell you more," continued Prince Vasili, seizing her hand, "that
letter was written, though it was not sent, and the Emperor knew of it.
The only question is, has it been destroyed or not? If not, then as soon
as all is over," and Prince Vasili sighed to intimate what he meant by
the words all is over, "and the count's papers are opened, the will and
letter will be delivered to the Emperor, and the petition will certainly
be granted. Pierre will get everything as the legitimate son."

"And our share?" asked the princess smiling ironically, as if anything
might happen, only not that.

"But, my poor Catiche, it is as clear as daylight! He will then be the
legal heir to everything and you won't get anything. You must know, my
dear, whether the will and letter were written, and whether they have
been destroyed or not. And if they have somehow been overlooked, you
ought to know where they are, and must find them, because..."

"What next?" the princess interrupted, smiling sardonically and not
changing the expression of her eyes. "I am a woman, and you think we are
all stupid; but I know this: an illegitimate son cannot inherit... un
batard!" * she added, as if supposing that this translation of the
word would effectively prove to Prince Vasili the invalidity of his
contention.


     * A bastard.


"Well, really, Catiche! Can't you understand! You are so intelligent,
how is it you don't see that if the count has written a letter to the
Emperor begging him to recognize Pierre as legitimate, it follows that
Pierre will not be Pierre but will become Count Bezukhov, and will then
inherit everything under the will? And if the will and letter are not
destroyed, then you will have nothing but the consolation of having been
dutiful et tout ce qui s'ensuit! * That's certain."


     * And all that follows therefrom.


"I know the will was made, but I also know that it is invalid; and you,
mon cousin, seem to consider me a perfect fool," said the princess with
the expression women assume when they suppose they are saying something
witty and stinging.

"My dear Princess Catherine Semenovna," began Prince Vasili impatiently,
"I came here not to wrangle with you, but to talk about your interests
as with a kinswoman, a good, kind, true relation. And I tell you for the
tenth time that if the letter to the Emperor and the will in Pierre's
favor are among the count's papers, then, my dear girl, you and your
sisters are not heiresses! If you don't believe me, then believe
an expert. I have just been talking to Dmitri Onufrich" (the family
solicitor) "and he says the same."

At this a sudden change evidently took place in the princess' ideas; her
thin lips grew white, though her eyes did not change, and her voice
when she began to speak passed through such transitions as she herself
evidently did not expect.

"That would be a fine thing!" said she. "I never wanted anything and I
don't now."

She pushed the little dog off her lap and smoothed her dress.

"And this is gratitude--this is recognition for those who have
sacrificed everything for his sake!" she cried. "It's splendid! Fine! I
don't want anything, Prince."

"Yes, but you are not the only one. There are your sisters..." replied
Prince Vasili.

But the princess did not listen to him.

"Yes, I knew it long ago but had forgotten. I knew that I could expect
nothing but meanness, deceit, envy, intrigue, and ingratitude--the
blackest ingratitude--in this house..."

"Do you or do you not know where that will is?" insisted Prince Vasili,
his cheeks twitching more than ever.

"Yes, I was a fool! I still believed in people, loved them, and
sacrificed myself. But only the base, the vile succeed! I know who has
been intriguing!"

The princess wished to rise, but the prince held her by the hand. She
had the air of one who has suddenly lost faith in the whole human race.
She gave her companion an angry glance.

"There is still time, my dear. You must remember, Catiche, that it was
all done casually in a moment of anger, of illness, and was afterwards
forgotten. Our duty, my dear, is to rectify his mistake, to ease his
last moments by not letting him commit this injustice, and not to let
him die feeling that he is rendering unhappy those who..."

"Who sacrificed everything for him," chimed in the princess, who would
again have risen had not the prince still held her fast, "though he
never could appreciate it. No, mon cousin," she added with a sigh, "I
shall always remember that in this world one must expect no reward, that
in this world there is neither honor nor justice. In this world one has
to be cunning and cruel."

"Now come, come! Be reasonable. I know your excellent heart."

"No, I have a wicked heart."

"I know your heart," repeated the prince. "I value your friendship and
wish you to have as good an opinion of me. Don't upset yourself, and let
us talk sensibly while there is still time, be it a day or be it but an
hour.... Tell me all you know about the will, and above all where it is.
You must know. We will take it at once and show it to the count. He has,
no doubt, forgotten it and will wish to destroy it. You understand that
my sole desire is conscientiously to carry out his wishes; that is my
only reason for being here. I came simply to help him and you."

"Now I see it all! I know who has been intriguing--I know!" cried the
princess.

"That's not the point, my dear."

"It's that protege of yours, that sweet Princess Drubetskaya, that Anna
Mikhaylovna whom I would not take for a housemaid... the infamous, vile
woman!"

"Do not let us lose any time..."

"Ah, don't talk to me! Last winter she wheedled herself in here and
told the count such vile, disgraceful things about us, especially about
Sophie--I can't repeat them--that it made the count quite ill and he
would not see us for a whole fortnight. I know it was then he wrote this
vile, infamous paper, but I thought the thing was invalid."

"We've got to it at last--why did you not tell me about it sooner?"

"It's in the inlaid portfolio that he keeps under his pillow," said the
princess, ignoring his question. "Now I know! Yes; if I have a sin,
a great sin, it is hatred of that vile woman!" almost shrieked the
princess, now quite changed. "And what does she come worming herself in
here for? But I will give her a piece of my mind. The time will come!"





CHAPTER XXII


While these conversations were going on in the reception room and the
princess' room, a carriage containing Pierre (who had been sent for) and
Anna Mikhaylovna (who found it necessary to accompany him) was driving
into the court of Count Bezukhov's house. As the wheels rolled softly
over the straw beneath the windows, Anna Mikhaylovna, having turned with
words of comfort to her companion, realized that he was asleep in
his corner and woke him up. Rousing himself, Pierre followed Anna
Mikhaylovna out of the carriage, and only then began to think of the
interview with his dying father which awaited him. He noticed that they
had not come to the front entrance but to the back door. While he
was getting down from the carriage steps two men, who looked like
tradespeople, ran hurriedly from the entrance and hid in the shadow of
the wall. Pausing for a moment, Pierre noticed several other men of the
same kind hiding in the shadow of the house on both sides. But neither
Anna Mikhaylovna nor the footman nor the coachman, who could not help
seeing these people, took any notice of them. "It seems to be all
right," Pierre concluded, and followed Anna Mikhaylovna. She hurriedly
ascended the narrow dimly lit stone staircase, calling to Pierre,
who was lagging behind, to follow. Though he did not see why it was
necessary for him to go to the count at all, still less why he had to go
by the back stairs, yet judging by Anna Mikhaylovna's air of assurance
and haste, Pierre concluded that it was all absolutely necessary.
Halfway up the stairs they were almost knocked over by some men who,
carrying pails, came running downstairs, their boots clattering. These
men pressed close to the wall to let Pierre and Anna Mikhaylovna pass
and did not evince the least surprise at seeing them there.

"Is this the way to the princesses' apartments?" asked Anna Mikhaylovna
of one of them.

"Yes," replied a footman in a bold loud voice, as if anything were now
permissible; "the door to the left, ma'am."

"Perhaps the count did not ask for me," said Pierre when he reached the
landing. "I'd better go to my own room."

Anna Mikhaylovna paused and waited for him to come up.

"Ah, my friend!" she said, touching his arm as she had done her son's
when speaking to him that afternoon, "believe me I suffer no less than
you do, but be a man!"

"But really, hadn't I better go away?" he asked, looking kindly at her
over his spectacles.

"Ah, my dear friend! Forget the wrongs that may have been done you.
Think that he is your father... perhaps in the agony of death." She
sighed. "I have loved you like a son from the first. Trust yourself to
me, Pierre. I shall not forget your interests."

Pierre did not understand a word, but the conviction that all this had
to be grew stronger, and he meekly followed Anna Mikhaylovna who was
already opening a door.

This door led into a back anteroom. An old man, a servant of the
princesses, sat in a corner knitting a stocking. Pierre had never been
in this part of the house and did not even know of the existence of
these rooms. Anna Mikhaylovna, addressing a maid who was hurrying past
with a decanter on a tray as "my dear" and "my sweet," asked about the
princess' health and then led Pierre along a stone passage. The first
door on the left led into the princesses' apartments. The maid with the
decanter in her haste had not closed the door (everything in the house
was done in haste at that time), and Pierre and Anna Mikhaylovna in
passing instinctively glanced into the room, where Prince Vasili and the
eldest princess were sitting close together talking. Seeing them pass,
Prince Vasili drew back with obvious impatience, while the princess
jumped up and with a gesture of desperation slammed the door with all
her might.

This action was so unlike her usual composure and the fear depicted
on Prince Vasili's face so out of keeping with his dignity that Pierre
stopped and glanced inquiringly over his spectacles at his guide. Anna
Mikhaylovna evinced no surprise, she only smiled faintly and sighed, as
if to say that this was no more than she had expected.

"Be a man, my friend. I will look after your interests," said she in
reply to his look, and went still faster along the passage.

Pierre could not make out what it was all about, and still less what
"watching over his interests" meant, but he decided that all these
things had to be. From the passage they went into a large, dimly lit
room adjoining the count's reception room. It was one of those sumptuous
but cold apartments known to Pierre only from the front approach, but
even in this room there now stood an empty bath, and water had been
spilled on the carpet. They were met by a deacon with a censer and by
a servant who passed out on tiptoe without heeding them. They went into
the reception room familiar to Pierre, with two Italian windows opening
into the conservatory, with its large bust and full length portrait of
Catherine the Great. The same people were still sitting here in almost
the same positions as before, whispering to one another. All became
silent and turned to look at the pale tear-worn Anna Mikhaylovna as she
entered, and at the big stout figure of Pierre who, hanging his head,
meekly followed her.

Anna Mikhaylovna's face expressed a consciousness that the decisive
moment had arrived. With the air of a practical Petersburg lady she now,
keeping Pierre close beside her, entered the room even more boldly than
that afternoon. She felt that as she brought with her the person the
dying man wished to see, her own admission was assured. Casting a rapid
glance at all those in the room and noticing the count's confessor
there, she glided up to him with a sort of amble, not exactly bowing yet
seeming to grow suddenly smaller, and respectfully received the blessing
first of one and then of another priest.

"God be thanked that you are in time," said she to one of the priests;
"all we relatives have been in such anxiety. This young man is the
count's son," she added more softly. "What a terrible moment!"

Having said this she went up to the doctor.

"Dear doctor," said she, "this young man is the count's son. Is there
any hope?"

The doctor cast a rapid glance upwards and silently shrugged his
shoulders. Anna Mikhaylovna with just the same movement raised her
shoulders and eyes, almost closing the latter, sighed, and moved away
from the doctor to Pierre. To him, in a particularly respectful and
tenderly sad voice, she said:

"Trust in His mercy!" and pointing out a small sofa for him to sit
and wait for her, she went silently toward the door that everyone was
watching and it creaked very slightly as she disappeared behind it.

Pierre, having made up his mind to obey his monitress implicitly, moved
toward the sofa she had indicated. As soon as Anna Mikhaylovna had
disappeared he noticed that the eyes of all in the room turned to him
with something more than curiosity and sympathy. He noticed that they
whispered to one another, casting significant looks at him with a kind
of awe and even servility. A deference such as he had never before
received was shown him. A strange lady, the one who had been talking to
the priests, rose and offered him her seat; an aide-de-camp picked up
and returned a glove Pierre had dropped; the doctors became respectfully
silent as he passed by, and moved to make way for him. At first Pierre
wished to take another seat so as not to trouble the lady, and also to
pick up the glove himself and to pass round the doctors who were not
even in his way; but all at once he felt that this would not do, and
that tonight he was a person obliged to perform some sort of awful
rite which everyone expected of him, and that he was therefore bound
to accept their services. He took the glove in silence from the
aide-de-camp, and sat down in the lady's chair, placing his huge hands
symmetrically on his knees in the naive attitude of an Egyptian statue,
and decided in his own mind that all was as it should be, and that in
order not to lose his head and do foolish things he must not act on his
own ideas tonight, but must yield himself up entirely to the will of
those who were guiding him.

Not two minutes had passed before Prince Vasili with head erect
majestically entered the room. He was wearing his long coat with three
stars on his breast. He seemed to have grown thinner since the morning;
his eyes seemed larger than usual when he glanced round and noticed
Pierre. He went up to him, took his hand (a thing he never used to do),
and drew it downwards as if wishing to ascertain whether it was firmly
fixed on.

"Courage, courage, my friend! He has asked to see you. That is well!"
and he turned to go.

But Pierre thought it necessary to ask: "How is..." and hesitated, not
knowing whether it would be proper to call the dying man "the count,"
yet ashamed to call him "father."

"He had another stroke about half an hour ago. Courage, my friend..."

Pierre's mind was in such a confused state that the word "stroke"
suggested to him a blow from something. He looked at Prince Vasili
in perplexity, and only later grasped that a stroke was an attack of
illness. Prince Vasili said something to Lorrain in passing and went
through the door on tiptoe. He could not walk well on tiptoe and his
whole body jerked at each step. The eldest princess followed him, and
the priests and deacons and some servants also went in at the door.
Through that door was heard a noise of things being moved about, and at
last Anna Mikhaylovna, still with the same expression, pale but resolute
in the discharge of duty, ran out and touching Pierre lightly on the arm
said:

"The divine mercy is inexhaustible! Unction is about to be administered.
Come."

Pierre went in at the door, stepping on the soft carpet, and noticed
that the strange lady, the aide-de-camp, and some of the servants, all
followed him in, as if there were now no further need for permission to
enter that room.





CHAPTER XXIII


Pierre well knew this large room divided by columns and an arch, its
walls hung round with Persian carpets. The part of the room behind the
columns, with a high silk-curtained mahogany bedstead on one side and
on the other an immense case containing icons, was brightly illuminated
with red light like a Russian church during evening service. Under
the gleaming icons stood a long invalid chair, and in that chair
on snowy-white smooth pillows, evidently freshly changed, Pierre
saw--covered to the waist by a bright green quilt--the familiar,
majestic figure of his father, Count Bezukhov, with that gray mane of
hair above his broad forehead which reminded one of a lion, and the deep
characteristically noble wrinkles of his handsome, ruddy face. He lay
just under the icons; his large thick hands outside the quilt. Into the
right hand, which was lying palm downwards, a wax taper had been thrust
between forefinger and thumb, and an old servant, bending over from
behind the chair, held it in position. By the chair stood the priests,
their long hair falling over their magnificent glittering vestments,
with lighted tapers in their hands, slowly and solemnly conducting the
service. A little behind them stood the two younger princesses holding
handkerchiefs to their eyes, and just in front of them their eldest
sister, Catiche, with a vicious and determined look steadily fixed on
the icons, as though declaring to all that she could not answer
for herself should she glance round. Anna Mikhaylovna, with a meek,
sorrowful, and all-forgiving expression on her face, stood by the door
near the strange lady. Prince Vasili in front of the door, near the
invalid chair, a wax taper in his left hand, was leaning his left arm on
the carved back of a velvet chair he had turned round for the purpose,
and was crossing himself with his right hand, turning his eyes upward
each time he touched his forehead. His face wore a calm look of piety
and resignation to the will of God. "If you do not understand these
sentiments," he seemed to be saying, "so much the worse for you!"

Behind him stood the aide-de-camp, the doctors, and the menservants;
the men and women had separated as in church. All were silently crossing
themselves, and the reading of the church service, the subdued chanting
of deep bass voices, and in the intervals sighs and the shuffling of
feet were the only sounds that could be heard. Anna Mikhaylovna, with an
air of importance that showed that she felt she quite knew what she was
about, went across the room to where Pierre was standing and gave him
a taper. He lit it and, distracted by observing those around him, began
crossing himself with the hand that held the taper.

Sophie, the rosy, laughter-loving, youngest princess with the mole,
watched him. She smiled, hid her face in her handkerchief, and remained
with it hidden for awhile; then looking up and seeing Pierre she
again began to laugh. She evidently felt unable to look at him
without laughing, but could not resist looking at him: so to be out of
temptation she slipped quietly behind one of the columns. In the midst
of the service the voices of the priests suddenly ceased, they whispered
to one another, and the old servant who was holding the count's hand got
up and said something to the ladies. Anna Mikhaylovna stepped forward
and, stooping over the dying man, beckoned to Lorrain from behind her
back. The French doctor held no taper; he was leaning against one of the
columns in a respectful attitude implying that he, a foreigner, in spite
of all differences of faith, understood the full importance of the rite
now being performed and even approved of it. He now approached the
sick man with the noiseless step of one in full vigor of life, with his
delicate white fingers raised from the green quilt the hand that was
free, and turning sideways felt the pulse and reflected a moment. The
sick man was given something to drink, there was a stir around him, then
the people resumed their places and the service continued. During this
interval Pierre noticed that Prince Vasili left the chair on which he
had been leaning, and--with an air which intimated that he knew what he
was about and if others did not understand him it was so much the worse
for them--did not go up to the dying man, but passed by him, joined the
eldest princess, and moved with her to the side of the room where stood
the high bedstead with its silken hangings. On leaving the bed both
Prince Vasili and the princess passed out by a back door, but returned
to their places one after the other before the service was concluded.
Pierre paid no more attention to this occurrence than to the rest of
what went on, having made up his mind once for all that what he saw
happening around him that evening was in some way essential.

The chanting of the service ceased, and the voice of the priest was
heard respectfully congratulating the dying man on having received the
sacrament. The dying man lay as lifeless and immovable as before. Around
him everyone began to stir: steps were audible and whispers, among which
Anna Mikhaylovna's was the most distinct.

Pierre heard her say:

"Certainly he must be moved onto the bed; here it will be impossible..."

The sick man was so surrounded by doctors, princesses, and servants
that Pierre could no longer see the reddish-yellow face with its gray
mane--which, though he saw other faces as well, he had not lost sight of
for a single moment during the whole service. He judged by the cautious
movements of those who crowded round the invalid chair that they had
lifted the dying man and were moving him.

"Catch hold of my arm or you'll drop him!" he heard one of the servants
say in a frightened whisper. "Catch hold from underneath. Here!"
exclaimed different voices; and the heavy breathing of the bearers and
the shuffling of their feet grew more hurried, as if the weight they
were carrying were too much for them.

As the bearers, among whom was Anna Mikhaylovna, passed the young man
he caught a momentary glimpse between their heads and backs of the dying
man's high, stout, uncovered chest and powerful shoulders, raised by
those who were holding him under the armpits, and of his gray, curly,
leonine head. This head, with its remarkably broad brow and cheekbones,
its handsome, sensual mouth, and its cold, majestic expression, was
not disfigured by the approach of death. It was the same as Pierre
remembered it three months before, when the count had sent him to
Petersburg. But now this head was swaying helplessly with the uneven
movements of the bearers, and the cold listless gaze fixed itself upon
nothing.

After a few minutes' bustle beside the high bedstead, those who had
carried the sick man dispersed. Anna Mikhaylovna touched Pierre's hand
and said, "Come." Pierre went with her to the bed on which the sick
man had been laid in a stately pose in keeping with the ceremony just
completed. He lay with his head propped high on the pillows. His hands
were symmetrically placed on the green silk quilt, the palms downward.
When Pierre came up the count was gazing straight at him, but with a
look the significance of which could not be understood by mortal man.
Either this look meant nothing but that as long as one has eyes they
must look somewhere, or it meant too much. Pierre hesitated, not knowing
what to do, and glanced inquiringly at his guide. Anna Mikhaylovna made
a hurried sign with her eyes, glancing at the sick man's hand and moving
her lips as if to send it a kiss. Pierre, carefully stretching his neck
so as not to touch the quilt, followed her suggestion and pressed his
lips to the large boned, fleshy hand. Neither the hand nor a
single muscle of the count's face stirred. Once more Pierre looked
questioningly at Anna Mikhaylovna to see what he was to do next. Anna
Mikhaylovna with her eyes indicated a chair that stood beside the bed.
Pierre obediently sat down, his eyes asking if he were doing right.
Anna Mikhaylovna nodded approvingly. Again Pierre fell into the naively
symmetrical pose of an Egyptian statue, evidently distressed that his
stout and clumsy body took up so much room and doing his utmost to look
as small as possible. He looked at the count, who still gazed at the
spot where Pierre's face had been before he sat down. Anna Mikhaylovna
indicated by her attitude her consciousness of the pathetic importance
of these last moments of meeting between the father and son. This lasted
about two minutes, which to Pierre seemed an hour. Suddenly the broad
muscles and lines of the count's face began to twitch. The twitching
increased, the handsome mouth was drawn to one side (only now did Pierre
realize how near death his father was), and from that distorted mouth
issued an indistinct, hoarse sound. Anna Mikhaylovna looked attentively
at the sick man's eyes, trying to guess what he wanted; she pointed
first to Pierre, then to some drink, then named Prince Vasili in an
inquiring whisper, then pointed to the quilt. The eyes and face of the
sick man showed impatience. He made an effort to look at the servant who
stood constantly at the head of the bed.

"Wants to turn on the other side," whispered the servant, and got up to
turn the count's heavy body toward the wall.

Pierre rose to help him.

While the count was being turned over, one of his arms fell back
helplessly and he made a fruitless effort to pull it forward. Whether he
noticed the look of terror with which Pierre regarded that lifeless arm,
or whether some other thought flitted across his dying brain, at any
rate he glanced at the refractory arm, at Pierre's terror-stricken face,
and again at the arm, and on his face a feeble, piteous smile appeared,
quite out of keeping with his features, that seemed to deride his own
helplessness. At sight of this smile Pierre felt an unexpected quivering
in his breast and a tickling in his nose, and tears dimmed his eyes. The
sick man was turned on to his side with his face to the wall. He sighed.

"He is dozing," said Anna Mikhaylovna, observing that one of the
princesses was coming to take her turn at watching. "Let us go."

Pierre went out.





CHAPTER XXIV


There was now no one in the reception room except Prince Vasili and the
eldest princess, who were sitting under the portrait of Catherine the
Great and talking eagerly. As soon as they saw Pierre and his companion
they became silent, and Pierre thought he saw the princess hide
something as she whispered:

"I can't bear the sight of that woman."

"Catiche has had tea served in the small drawing room," said Prince
Vasili to Anna Mikhaylovna. "Go and take something, my poor Anna
Mikhaylovna, or you will not hold out."

To Pierre he said nothing, merely giving his arm a sympathetic squeeze
below the shoulder. Pierre went with Anna Mikhaylovna into the small
drawing room.

"There is nothing so refreshing after a sleepless night as a cup of this
delicious Russian tea," Lorrain was saying with an air of restrained
animation as he stood sipping tea from a delicate Chinese handleless
cup before a table on which tea and a cold supper were laid in the small
circular room. Around the table all who were at Count Bezukhov's house
that night had gathered to fortify themselves. Pierre well remembered
this small circular drawing room with its mirrors and little tables.
During balls given at the house Pierre, who did not know how to dance,
had liked sitting in this room to watch the ladies who, as they passed
through in their ball dresses with diamonds and pearls on their bare
shoulders, looked at themselves in the brilliantly lighted mirrors which
repeated their reflections several times. Now this same room was dimly
lighted by two candles. On one small table tea things and supper dishes
stood in disorder, and in the middle of the night a motley throng
of people sat there, not merrymaking, but somberly whispering, and
betraying by every word and movement that they none of them forgot what
was happening and what was about to happen in the bedroom. Pierre did
not eat anything though he would very much have liked to. He looked
inquiringly at his monitress and saw that she was again going on tiptoe
to the reception room where they had left Prince Vasili and the eldest
princess. Pierre concluded that this also was essential, and after a
short interval followed her. Anna Mikhaylovna was standing beside the
princess, and they were both speaking in excited whispers.

"Permit me, Princess, to know what is necessary and what is not
necessary," said the younger of the two speakers, evidently in the same
state of excitement as when she had slammed the door of her room.

"But, my dear princess," answered Anna Mikhaylovna blandly but
impressively, blocking the way to the bedroom and preventing the other
from passing, "won't this be too much for poor Uncle at a moment when he
needs repose? Worldly conversation at a moment when his soul is already
prepared..."

Prince Vasili was seated in an easy chair in his familiar attitude, with
one leg crossed high above the other. His cheeks, which were so flabby
that they looked heavier below, were twitching violently; but he wore
the air of a man little concerned in what the two ladies were saying.

"Come, my dear Anna Mikhaylovna, let Catiche do as she pleases. You know
how fond the count is of her."

"I don't even know what is in this paper," said the younger of the two
ladies, addressing Prince Vasili and pointing to an inlaid portfolio she
held in her hand. "All I know is that his real will is in his writing
table, and this is a paper he has forgotten...."

She tried to pass Anna Mikhaylovna, but the latter sprang so as to bar
her path.

"I know, my dear, kind princess," said Anna Mikhaylovna, seizing the
portfolio so firmly that it was plain she would not let go easily.
"Dear princess, I beg and implore you, have some pity on him! Je vous en
conjure..."

The princess did not reply. Their efforts in the struggle for the
portfolio were the only sounds audible, but it was evident that if
the princess did speak, her words would not be flattering to Anna
Mikhaylovna. Though the latter held on tenaciously, her voice lost none
of its honeyed firmness and softness.

"Pierre, my dear, come here. I think he will not be out of place in a
family consultation; is it not so, Prince?"

"Why don't you speak, cousin?" suddenly shrieked the princess so loud
that those in the drawing room heard her and were startled. "Why do you
remain silent when heaven knows who permits herself to interfere, making
a scene on the very threshold of a dying man's room? Intriguer!" she
hissed viciously, and tugged with all her might at the portfolio.

But Anna Mikhaylovna went forward a step or two to keep her hold on the
portfolio, and changed her grip.

Prince Vasili rose. "Oh!" said he with reproach and surprise, "this is
absurd! Come, let go I tell you."

The princess let go.

"And you too!"

But Anna Mikhaylovna did not obey him.

"Let go, I tell you! I will take the responsibility. I myself will go
and ask him, I!... does that satisfy you?"

"But, Prince," said Anna Mikhaylovna, "after such a solemn sacrament,
allow him a moment's peace! Here, Pierre, tell them your opinion," said
she, turning to the young man who, having come quite close, was gazing
with astonishment at the angry face of the princess which had lost all
dignity, and at the twitching cheeks of Prince Vasili.

"Remember that you will answer for the consequences," said Prince Vasili
severely. "You don't know what you are doing."

"Vile woman!" shouted the princess, darting unexpectedly at Anna
Mikhaylovna and snatching the portfolio from her.

Prince Vasili bent his head and spread out his hands.

At this moment that terrible door, which Pierre had watched so long
and which had always opened so quietly, burst noisily open and banged
against the wall, and the second of the three sisters rushed out
wringing her hands.

"What are you doing!" she cried vehemently. "He is dying and you leave
me alone with him!"

Her sister dropped the portfolio. Anna Mikhaylovna, stooping, quickly
caught up the object of contention and ran into the bedroom. The eldest
princess and Prince Vasili, recovering themselves, followed her. A few
minutes later the eldest sister came out with a pale hard face, again
biting her underlip. At sight of Pierre her expression showed an
irrepressible hatred.

"Yes, now you may be glad!" said she; "this is what you have been
waiting for." And bursting into tears she hid her face in her
handkerchief and rushed from the room.

Prince Vasili came next. He staggered to the sofa on which Pierre was
sitting and dropped onto it, covering his face with his hand. Pierre
noticed that he was pale and that his jaw quivered and shook as if in an
ague.

"Ah, my friend!" said he, taking Pierre by the elbow; and there was
in his voice a sincerity and weakness Pierre had never observed in it
before. "How often we sin, how much we deceive, and all for what? I am
near sixty, dear friend... I too... All will end in death, all! Death is
awful..." and he burst into tears.

Anna Mikhaylovna came out last. She approached Pierre with slow, quiet
steps.

"Pierre!" she said.

Pierre gave her an inquiring look. She kissed the young man on his
forehead, wetting him with her tears. Then after a pause she said:

"He is no more...."

Pierre looked at her over his spectacles.

"Come, I will go with you. Try to weep, nothing gives such relief as
tears."

She led him into the dark drawing room and Pierre was glad no one could
see his face. Anna Mikhaylovna left him, and when she returned he was
fast asleep with his head on his arm.

In the morning Anna Mikhaylovna said to Pierre:

"Yes, my dear, this is a great loss for us all, not to speak of you. But
God will support you: you are young, and are now, I hope, in command of
an immense fortune. The will has not yet been opened. I know you well
enough to be sure that this will not turn your head, but it imposes
duties on you, and you must be a man."

Pierre was silent.

"Perhaps later on I may tell you, my dear boy, that if I had not been
there, God only knows what would have happened! You know, Uncle promised
me only the day before yesterday not to forget Boris. But he had no
time. I hope, my dear friend, you will carry out your father's wish?"

Pierre understood nothing of all this and coloring shyly looked in
silence at Princess Anna Mikhaylovna. After her talk with Pierre, Anna
Mikhaylovna returned to the Rostovs' and went to bed. On waking in the
morning she told the Rostovs and all her acquaintances the details of
Count Bezukhov's death. She said the count had died as she would herself
wish to die, that his end was not only touching but edifying. As to the
last meeting between father and son, it was so touching that she could
not think of it without tears, and did not know which had behaved better
during those awful moments--the father who so remembered everything
and everybody at last and had spoken such pathetic words to the son, or
Pierre, whom it had been pitiful to see, so stricken was he with grief,
though he tried hard to hide it in order not to sadden his dying father.
"It is painful, but it does one good. It uplifts the soul to see such
men as the old count and his worthy son," said she. Of the behavior of
the eldest princess and Prince Vasili she spoke disapprovingly, but in
whispers and as a great secret.





CHAPTER XXV


At Bald Hills, Prince Nicholas Andreevich Bolkonski's estate, the
arrival of young Prince Andrew and his wife was daily expected, but
this expectation did not upset the regular routine of life in the
old prince's household. General in Chief Prince Nicholas Andreevich
(nicknamed in society, "the King of Prussia") ever since the Emperor
Paul had exiled him to his country estate had lived there continuously
with his daughter, Princess Mary, and her companion, Mademoiselle
Bourienne. Though in the new reign he was free to return to the
capitals, he still continued to live in the country, remarking that
anyone who wanted to see him could come the hundred miles from Moscow to
Bald Hills, while he himself needed no one and nothing. He used to
say that there are only two sources of human vice--idleness and
superstition, and only two virtues--activity and intelligence. He
himself undertook his daughter's education, and to develop these two
cardinal virtues in her gave her lessons in algebra and geometry
till she was twenty, and arranged her life so that her whole time was
occupied. He was himself always occupied: writing his memoirs, solving
problems in higher mathematics, turning snuffboxes on a lathe, working
in the garden, or superintending the building that was always going on
at his estate. As regularity is a prime condition facilitating activity,
regularity in his household was carried to the highest point of
exactitude. He always came to table under precisely the same conditions,
and not only at the same hour but at the same minute. With those about
him, from his daughter to his serfs, the prince was sharp and invariably
exacting, so that without being a hardhearted man he inspired such fear
and respect as few hardhearted men would have aroused. Although he was
in retirement and had now no influence in political affairs, every high
official appointed to the province in which the prince's estate lay
considered it his duty to visit him and waited in the lofty antechamber
just as the architect, gardener, or Princess Mary did, till the prince
appeared punctually to the appointed hour. Everyone sitting in this
antechamber experienced the same feeling of respect and even fear when
the enormously high study door opened and showed the figure of a rather
small old man, with powdered wig, small withered hands, and bushy gray
eyebrows which, when he frowned, sometimes hid the gleam of his shrewd,
youthfully glittering eyes.

On the morning of the day that the young couple were to arrive, Princess
Mary entered the antechamber as usual at the time appointed for the
morning greeting, crossing herself with trepidation and repeating a
silent prayer. Every morning she came in like that, and every morning
prayed that the daily interview might pass off well.

An old powdered manservant who was sitting in the antechamber rose
quietly and said in a whisper: "Please walk in."

Through the door came the regular hum of a lathe. The princess timidly
opened the door which moved noiselessly and easily. She paused at the
entrance. The prince was working at the lathe and after glancing round
continued his work.

The enormous study was full of things evidently in constant use.
The large table covered with books and plans, the tall glass-fronted
bookcases with keys in the locks, the high desk for writing while
standing up, on which lay an open exercise book, and the lathe with
tools laid ready to hand and shavings scattered around--all indicated
continuous, varied, and orderly activity. The motion of the small foot
shod in a Tartar boot embroidered with silver, and the firm pressure
of the lean sinewy hand, showed that the prince still possessed the
tenacious endurance and vigor of hardy old age. After a few more turns
of the lathe he removed his foot from the pedal, wiped his chisel,
dropped it into a leather pouch attached to the lathe, and, approaching
the table, summoned his daughter. He never gave his children a blessing,
so he simply held out his bristly cheek (as yet unshaven) and, regarding
her tenderly and attentively, said severely:

"Quite well? All right then, sit down." He took the exercise book
containing lessons in geometry written by himself and drew up a chair
with his foot.

"For tomorrow!" said he, quickly finding the page and making a scratch
from one paragraph to another with his hard nail.

The princess bent over the exercise book on the table.

"Wait a bit, here's a letter for you," said the old man suddenly, taking
a letter addressed in a woman's hand from a bag hanging above the table,
onto which he threw it.

At the sight of the letter red patches showed themselves on the
princess' face. She took it quickly and bent her head over it.

"From Heloise?" asked the prince with a cold smile that showed his still
sound, yellowish teeth.

"Yes, it's from Julie," replied the princess with a timid glance and a
timid smile.

"I'll let two more letters pass, but the third I'll read," said the
prince sternly; "I'm afraid you write much nonsense. I'll read the
third!"

"Read this if you like, Father," said the princess, blushing still more
and holding out the letter.

"The third, I said the third!" cried the prince abruptly, pushing the
letter away, and leaning his elbows on the table he drew toward him the
exercise book containing geometrical figures.

"Well, madam," he began, stooping over the book close to his daughter
and placing an arm on the back of the chair on which she sat, so that
she felt herself surrounded on all sides by the acrid scent of old age
and tobacco, which she had known so long. "Now, madam, these triangles
are equal; please note that the angle ABC..."

The princess looked in a scared way at her father's eyes glittering
close to her; the red patches on her face came and went, and it was
plain that she understood nothing and was so frightened that her
fear would prevent her understanding any of her father's further
explanations, however clear they might be. Whether it was the teacher's
fault or the pupil's, this same thing happened every day: the princess'
eyes grew dim, she could not see and could not hear anything, but was
only conscious of her stern father's withered face close to her, of his
breath and the smell of him, and could think only of how to get away
quickly to her own room to make out the problem in peace. The old man
was beside himself: moved the chair on which he was sitting noisily
backward and forward, made efforts to control himself and not become
vehement, but almost always did become vehement, scolded, and sometimes
flung the exercise book away.

The princess gave a wrong answer.

"Well now, isn't she a fool!" shouted the prince, pushing the book aside
and turning sharply away; but rising immediately, he paced up and down,
lightly touched his daughter's hair and sat down again.

He drew up his chair, and continued to explain.

"This won't do, Princess; it won't do," said he, when Princess Mary,
having taken and closed the exercise book with the next day's lesson,
was about to leave: "Mathematics are most important, madam! I don't want
to have you like our silly ladies. Get used to it and you'll like it,"
and he patted her cheek. "It will drive all the nonsense out of your
head."

She turned to go, but he stopped her with a gesture and took an uncut
book from the high desk.

"Here is some sort of Key to the Mysteries that your Heloise has sent
you. Religious! I don't interfere with anyone's belief... I have looked
at it. Take it. Well, now go. Go."

He patted her on the shoulder and himself closed the door after her.

Princess Mary went back to her room with the sad, scared expression that
rarely left her and which made her plain, sickly face yet plainer. She
sat down at her writing table, on which stood miniature portraits and
which was littered with books and papers. The princess was as untidy as
her father was tidy. She put down the geometry book and eagerly broke
the seal of her letter. It was from her most intimate friend from
childhood; that same Julie Karagina who had been at the Rostovs'
name-day party.

Julie wrote in French:


Dear and precious Friend, How terrible and frightful a thing is
separation! Though I tell myself that half my life and half my happiness
are wrapped up in you, and that in spite of the distance separating us
our hearts are united by indissoluble bonds, my heart rebels against
fate and in spite of the pleasures and distractions around me I cannot
overcome a certain secret sorrow that has been in my heart ever since
we parted. Why are we not together as we were last summer, in your big
study, on the blue sofa, the confidential sofa? Why cannot I now, as
three months ago, draw fresh moral strength from your look, so gentle,
calm, and penetrating, a look I loved so well and seem to see before me
as I write?


Having read thus far, Princess Mary sighed and glanced into the mirror
which stood on her right. It reflected a weak, ungraceful figure and
thin face. Her eyes, always sad, now looked with particular hopelessness
at her reflection in the glass. "She flatters me," thought the princess,
turning away and continuing to read. But Julie did not flatter her
friend, the princess' eyes--large, deep and luminous (it seemed as if at
times there radiated from them shafts of warm light)--were so beautiful
that very often in spite of the plainness of her face they gave her an
attraction more powerful than that of beauty. But the princess never saw
the beautiful expression of her own eyes--the look they had when she
was not thinking of herself. As with everyone, her face assumed a forced
unnatural expression as soon as she looked in a glass. She went on
reading:


All Moscow talks of nothing but war. One of my two brothers is already
abroad, the other is with the Guards, who are starting on their march
to the frontier. Our dear Emperor has left Petersburg and it is thought
intends to expose his precious person to the chances of war. God grant
that the Corsican monster who is destroying the peace of Europe may
be overthrown by the angel whom it has pleased the Almighty, in His
goodness, to give us as sovereign! To say nothing of my brothers, this
war has deprived me of one of the associations nearest my heart. I mean
young Nicholas Rostov, who with his enthusiasm could not bear to remain
inactive and has left the university to join the army. I will confess to
you, dear Mary, that in spite of his extreme youth his departure for
the army was a great grief to me. This young man, of whom I spoke to you
last summer, is so noble-minded and full of that real youthfulness which
one seldom finds nowadays among our old men of twenty and, particularly,
he is so frank and has so much heart. He is so pure and poetic that
my relations with him, transient as they were, have been one of the
sweetest comforts to my poor heart, which has already suffered so much.
Someday I will tell you about our parting and all that was said then.
That is still too fresh. Ah, dear friend, you are happy not to know
these poignant joys and sorrows. You are fortunate, for the latter are
generally the stronger! I know very well that Count Nicholas is too
young ever to be more to me than a friend, but this sweet friendship,
this poetic and pure intimacy, were what my heart needed. But enough of
this! The chief news, about which all Moscow gossips, is the death of
old Count Bezukhov, and his inheritance. Fancy! The three princesses
have received very little, Prince Vasili nothing, and it is Monsieur
Pierre who has inherited all the property and has besides been
recognized as legitimate; so that he is now Count Bezukhov and possessor
of the finest fortune in Russia. It is rumored that Prince Vasili played
a very despicable part in this affair and that he returned to Petersburg
quite crestfallen.

I confess I understand very little about all these matters of wills and
inheritance; but I do know that since this young man, whom we all used
to know as plain Monsieur Pierre, has become Count Bezukhov and the
owner of one of the largest fortunes in Russia, I am much amused to
watch the change in the tone and manners of the mammas burdened by
marriageable daughters, and of the young ladies themselves, toward
him, though, between you and me, he always seemed to me a poor sort
of fellow. As for the past two years people have amused themselves
by finding husbands for me (most of whom I don't even know), the
matchmaking chronicles of Moscow now speak of me as the future Countess
Bezukhova. But you will understand that I have no desire for the post. A
propos of marriages: do you know that a while ago that universal auntie
Anna Mikhaylovna told me, under the seal of strict secrecy, of a plan of
marriage for you. It is neither more nor less than with Prince Vasili's
son Anatole, whom they wish to reform by marrying him to someone rich
and distinguee, and it is on you that his relations' choice has fallen.
I don't know what you will think of it, but I consider it my duty to
let you know of it. He is said to be very handsome and a terrible
scapegrace. That is all I have been able to find out about him.

But enough of gossip. I am at the end of my second sheet of paper,
and Mamma has sent for me to go and dine at the Apraksins'. Read the
mystical book I am sending you; it has an enormous success here. Though
there are things in it difficult for the feeble human mind to grasp, it
is an admirable book which calms and elevates the soul. Adieu! Give
my respects to monsieur your father and my compliments to Mademoiselle
Bourienne. I embrace you as I love you.

JULIE

P.S. Let me have news of your brother and his charming little wife.


The princess pondered awhile with a thoughtful smile and her luminous
eyes lit up so that her face was entirely transformed. Then she suddenly
rose and with her heavy tread went up to the table. She took a sheet of
paper and her hand moved rapidly over it. This is the reply she wrote,
also in French:


Dear and precious Friend, Your letter of the 13th has given me great
delight. So you still love me, my romantic Julie? Separation, of which
you say so much that is bad, does not seem to have had its usual effect
on you. You complain of our separation. What then should I say, if I
dared complain, I who am deprived of all who are dear to me? Ah, if
we had not religion to console us life would be very sad. Why do you
suppose that I should look severely on your affection for that young
man? On such matters I am only severe with myself. I understand such
feelings in others, and if never having felt them I cannot approve of
them, neither do I condemn them. Only it seems to me that Christian
love, love of one's neighbor, love of one's enemy, is worthier, sweeter,
and better than the feelings which the beautiful eyes of a young man can
inspire in a romantic and loving young girl like yourself.

The news of Count Bezukhov's death reached us before your letter and
my father was much affected by it. He says the count was the last
representative but one of the great century, and that it is his own
turn now, but that he will do all he can to let his turn come as late as
possible. God preserve us from that terrible misfortune!

I cannot agree with you about Pierre, whom I knew as a child. He always
seemed to me to have an excellent heart, and that is the quality I value
most in people. As to his inheritance and the part played by Prince
Vasili, it is very sad for both. Ah, my dear friend, our divine
Saviour's words, that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of
a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God, are terribly
true. I pity Prince Vasili but am still more sorry for Pierre. So young,
and burdened with such riches--to what temptations he will be exposed!
If I were asked what I desire most on earth, it would be to be poorer
than the poorest beggar. A thousand thanks, dear friend, for the volume
you have sent me and which has such success in Moscow. Yet since you
tell me that among some good things it contains others which our weak
human understanding cannot grasp, it seems to me rather useless to spend
time in reading what is unintelligible and can therefore bear no fruit.
I never could understand the fondness some people have for confusing
their minds by dwelling on mystical books that merely awaken their
doubts and excite their imagination, giving them a bent for exaggeration
quite contrary to Christian simplicity. Let us rather read the Epistles
and Gospels. Let us not seek to penetrate what mysteries they contain;
for how can we, miserable sinners that we are, know the terrible and
holy secrets of Providence while we remain in this flesh which forms
an impenetrable veil between us and the Eternal? Let us rather confine
ourselves to studying those sublime rules which our divine Saviour has
left for our guidance here below. Let us try to conform to them and
follow them, and let us be persuaded that the less we let our feeble
human minds roam, the better we shall please God, who rejects all
knowledge that does not come from Him; and the less we seek to fathom
what He has been pleased to conceal from us, the sooner will He
vouchsafe its revelation to us through His divine Spirit.

My father has not spoken to me of a suitor, but has only told me that
he has received a letter and is expecting a visit from Prince Vasili. In
regard to this project of marriage for me, I will tell you, dear sweet
friend, that I look on marriage as a divine institution to which we must
conform. However painful it may be to me, should the Almighty lay
the duties of wife and mother upon me I shall try to perform them as
faithfully as I can, without disquieting myself by examining my feelings
toward him whom He may give me for husband.

I have had a letter from my brother, who announces his speedy arrival
at Bald Hills with his wife. This pleasure will be but a brief one,
however, for he will leave, us again to take part in this unhappy war
into which we have been drawn, God knows how or why. Not only where you
are--at the heart of affairs and of the world--is the talk all of
war, even here amid fieldwork and the calm of nature--which townsfolk
consider characteristic of the country--rumors of war are heard
and painfully felt. My father talks of nothing but marches and
countermarches, things of which I understand nothing; and the day
before yesterday during my daily walk through the village I witnessed a
heartrending scene.... It was a convoy of conscripts enrolled from our
people and starting to join the army. You should have seen the state of
the mothers, wives, and children of the men who were going and should
have heard the sobs. It seems as though mankind has forgotten the
laws of its divine Saviour, Who preached love and forgiveness of
injuries--and that men attribute the greatest merit to skill in killing
one another.

Adieu, dear and kind friend; may our divine Saviour and His most Holy
Mother keep you in their holy and all-powerful care!

MARY


"Ah, you are sending off a letter, Princess? I have already dispatched
mine. I have written to my poor mother," said the smiling Mademoiselle
Bourienne rapidly, in her pleasant mellow tones and with guttural r's.
She brought into Princess Mary's strenuous, mournful, and gloomy world a
quite different atmosphere, careless, lighthearted, and self-satisfied.

"Princess, I must warn you," she added, lowering her voice and evidently
listening to herself with pleasure, and speaking with exaggerated
grasseyement, "the prince has been scolding Michael Ivanovich. He is in
a very bad humor, very morose. Be prepared."

"Ah, dear friend," replied Princess Mary, "I have asked you never to
warn me of the humor my father is in. I do not allow myself to judge him
and would not have others do so."

The princess glanced at her watch and, seeing that she was five minutes
late in starting her practice on the clavichord, went into the sitting
room with a look of alarm. Between twelve and two o'clock, as the
day was mapped out, the prince rested and the princess played the
clavichord.





CHAPTER XXVI


The gray-haired valet was sitting drowsily listening to the snoring of
the prince, who was in his large study. From the far side of the house
through the closed doors came the sound of difficult passages--twenty
times repeated--of a sonata by Dussek.

Just then a closed carriage and another with a hood drove up to the
porch. Prince Andrew got out of the carriage, helped his little wife to
alight, and let her pass into the house before him. Old Tikhon, wearing
a wig, put his head out of the door of the antechamber, reported in
a whisper that the prince was sleeping, and hastily closed the door.
Tikhon knew that neither the son's arrival nor any other unusual event
must be allowed to disturb the appointed order of the day. Prince Andrew
apparently knew this as well as Tikhon; he looked at his watch as if to
ascertain whether his father's habits had changed since he was at home
last, and, having assured himself that they had not, he turned to his
wife.

"He will get up in twenty minutes. Let us go across to Mary's room," he
said.

The little princess had grown stouter during this time, but her eyes
and her short, downy, smiling lip lifted when she began to speak just as
merrily and prettily as ever.

"Why, this is a palace!" she said to her husband, looking around with
the expression with which people compliment their host at a ball. "Let's
come, quick, quick!" And with a glance round, she smiled at Tikhon, at
her husband, and at the footman who accompanied them.

"Is that Mary practicing? Let's go quietly and take her by surprise."

Prince Andrew followed her with a courteous but sad expression.

"You've grown older, Tikhon," he said in passing to the old man, who
kissed his hand.

Before they reached the room from which the sounds of the clavichord
came, the pretty, fair haired Frenchwoman, Mademoiselle Bourienne,
rushed out apparently beside herself with delight.

"Ah! what joy for the princess!" exclaimed she: "At last! I must let her
know."

"No, no, please not... You are Mademoiselle Bourienne," said the little
princess, kissing her. "I know you already through my sister-in-law's
friendship for you. She was not expecting us?"

They went up to the door of the sitting room from which came the sound
of the oft-repeated passage of the sonata. Prince Andrew stopped and
made a grimace, as if expecting something unpleasant.

The little princess entered the room. The passage broke off in the
middle, a cry was heard, then Princess Mary's heavy tread and the sound
of kissing. When Prince Andrew went in the two princesses, who had only
met once before for a short time at his wedding, were in each other's
arms warmly pressing their lips to whatever place they happened to
touch. Mademoiselle Bourienne stood near them pressing her hand to her
heart, with a beatific smile and obviously equally ready to cry or to
laugh. Prince Andrew shrugged his shoulders and frowned, as lovers
of music do when they hear a false note. The two women let go of one
another, and then, as if afraid of being too late, seized each other's
hands, kissing them and pulling them away, and again began kissing each
other on the face, and then to Prince Andrew's surprise both began to
cry and kissed again. Mademoiselle Bourienne also began to cry. Prince
Andrew evidently felt ill at ease, but to the two women it seemed quite
natural that they should cry, and apparently it never entered their
heads that it could have been otherwise at this meeting.

"Ah! my dear!... Ah! Mary!" they suddenly exclaimed, and then laughed.
"I dreamed last night..."--"You were not expecting us?..." "Ah! Mary,
you have got thinner?..." "And you have grown stouter!..."

"I knew the princess at once," put in Mademoiselle Bourienne.

"And I had no idea!..." exclaimed Princess Mary. "Ah, Andrew, I did not
see you."

Prince Andrew and his sister, hand in hand, kissed one another, and
he told her she was still the same crybaby as ever. Princess Mary had
turned toward her brother, and through her tears the loving, warm,
gentle look of her large luminous eyes, very beautiful at that moment,
rested on Prince Andrew's face.

The little princess talked incessantly, her short, downy upper lip
continually and rapidly touching her rosy nether lip when necessary
and drawing up again next moment when her face broke into a smile of
glittering teeth and sparkling eyes. She told of an accident they had
had on the Spasski Hill which might have been serious for her in her
condition, and immediately after that informed them that she had left
all her clothes in Petersburg and that heaven knew what she would have
to dress in here; and that Andrew had quite changed, and that Kitty
Odyntsova had married an old man, and that there was a suitor for Mary,
a real one, but that they would talk of that later. Princess Mary was
still looking silently at her brother and her beautiful eyes were full
of love and sadness. It was plain that she was following a train of
thought independent of her sister-in-law's words. In the midst of a
description of the last Petersburg fete she addressed her brother:

"So you are really going to the war, Andrew?" she said sighing.

Lise sighed too.

"Yes, and even tomorrow," replied her brother.

"He is leaving me here, God knows why, when he might have had
promotion..."

Princess Mary did not listen to the end, but continuing her train of
thought turned to her sister-in-law with a tender glance at her figure.

"Is it certain?" she said.

The face of the little princess changed. She sighed and said: "Yes,
quite certain. Ah! it is very dreadful..."

Her lip descended. She brought her face close to her sister-in-law's and
unexpectedly again began to cry.

"She needs rest," said Prince Andrew with a frown. "Don't you, Lise?
Take her to your room and I'll go to Father. How is he? Just the same?"

"Yes, just the same. Though I don't know what your opinion will be,"
answered the princess joyfully.

"And are the hours the same? And the walks in the avenues? And the
lathe?" asked Prince Andrew with a scarcely perceptible smile which
showed that, in spite of all his love and respect for his father, he was
aware of his weaknesses.

"The hours are the same, and the lathe, and also the mathematics and my
geometry lessons," said Princess Mary gleefully, as if her lessons in
geometry were among the greatest delights of her life.

When the twenty minutes had elapsed and the time had come for the old
prince to get up, Tikhon came to call the young prince to his father.
The old man made a departure from his usual routine in honor of his
son's arrival: he gave orders to admit him to his apartments while
he dressed for dinner. The old prince always dressed in old-fashioned
style, wearing an antique coat and powdered hair; and when Prince Andrew
entered his father's dressing room (not with the contemptuous look and
manner he wore in drawing rooms, but with the animated face with which
he talked to Pierre), the old man was sitting on a large leather-covered
chair, wrapped in a powdering mantle, entrusting his head to Tikhon.

"Ah! here's the warrior! Wants to vanquish Buonaparte?" said the old
man, shaking his powdered head as much as the tail, which Tikhon was
holding fast to plait, would allow.

"You at least must tackle him properly, or else if he goes on like this
he'll soon have us, too, for his subjects! How are you?" And he held out
his cheek.

The old man was in a good temper after his nap before dinner. (He used
to say that a nap "after dinner was silver--before dinner, golden.")
He cast happy, sidelong glances at his son from under his thick, bushy
eyebrows. Prince Andrew went up and kissed his father on the
spot indicated to him. He made no reply on his father's favorite
topic--making fun of the military men of the day, and more particularly
of Bonaparte.

"Yes, Father, I have come to you and brought my wife who is pregnant,"
said Prince Andrew, following every movement of his father's face with
an eager and respectful look. "How is your health?"

"Only fools and rakes fall ill, my boy. You know me: I am busy from
morning till night and abstemious, so of course I am well."

"Thank God," said his son smiling.

"God has nothing to do with it! Well, go on," he continued, returning to
his hobby; "tell me how the Germans have taught you to fight Bonaparte
by this new science you call 'strategy.'"

Prince Andrew smiled.

"Give me time to collect my wits, Father," said he, with a smile that
showed that his father's foibles did not prevent his son from loving and
honoring him. "Why, I have not yet had time to settle down!"

"Nonsense, nonsense!" cried the old man, shaking his pigtail to see
whether it was firmly plaited, and grasping his by the hand. "The house
for your wife is ready. Princess Mary will take her there and show her
over, and they'll talk nineteen to the dozen. That's their woman's
way! I am glad to have her. Sit down and talk. About Mikhelson's army
I understand--Tolstoy's too... a simultaneous expedition.... But what's
the southern army to do? Prussia is neutral... I know that. What about
Austria?" said he, rising from his chair and pacing up and down the room
followed by Tikhon, who ran after him, handing him different articles of
clothing. "What of Sweden? How will they cross Pomerania?"

Prince Andrew, seeing that his father insisted, began--at first
reluctantly, but gradually with more and more animation, and from habit
changing unconsciously from Russian to French as he went on--to explain
the plan of operation for the coming campaign. He explained how an army,
ninety thousand strong, was to threaten Prussia so as to bring her out
of her neutrality and draw her into the war; how part of that army was
to join some Swedish forces at Stralsund; how two hundred and twenty
thousand Austrians, with a hundred thousand Russians, were to operate in
Italy and on the Rhine; how fifty thousand Russians and as many English
were to land at Naples, and how a total force of five hundred thousand
men was to attack the French from different sides. The old prince did
not evince the least interest during this explanation, but as if he were
not listening to it continued to dress while walking about, and three
times unexpectedly interrupted. Once he stopped it by shouting: "The
white one, the white one!"

This meant that Tikhon was not handing him the waistcoat he wanted.
Another time he interrupted, saying:

"And will she soon be confined?" and shaking his head reproachfully
said: "That's bad! Go on, go on."

The third interruption came when Prince Andrew was finishing his
description. The old man began to sing, in the cracked voice of old age:
"Malbrook s'en va-t-en guerre. Dieu sait quand reviendra." *


     * "Marlborough is going to the wars; God knows when he'll
     return."


His son only smiled.

"I don't say it's a plan I approve of," said the son; "I am only telling
you what it is. Napoleon has also formed his plan by now, not worse than
this one."

"Well, you've told me nothing new," and the old man repeated,
meditatively and rapidly:

"Dieu sait quand reviendra. Go to the dining room."





CHAPTER XXVII


At the appointed hour the prince, powdered and shaven, entered the
dining room where his daughter-in-law, Princess Mary, and Mademoiselle
Bourienne were already awaiting him together with his architect, who
by a strange caprice of his employer's was admitted to table though the
position of that insignificant individual was such as could certainly
not have caused him to expect that honor. The prince, who generally kept
very strictly to social distinctions and rarely admitted even important
government officials to his table, had unexpectedly selected Michael
Ivanovich (who always went into a corner to blow his nose on his checked
handkerchief) to illustrate the theory that all men are equals, and had
more than once impressed on his daughter that Michael Ivanovich was "not
a whit worse than you or I." At dinner the prince usually spoke to the
taciturn Michael Ivanovich more often than to anyone else.

In the dining room, which like all the rooms in the house was
exceedingly lofty, the members of the household and the footmen--one
behind each chair--stood waiting for the prince to enter. The head
butler, napkin on arm, was scanning the setting of the table, making
signs to the footmen, and anxiously glancing from the clock to the door
by which the prince was to enter. Prince Andrew was looking at a large
gilt frame, new to him, containing the genealogical tree of the Princes
Bolkonski, opposite which hung another such frame with a badly painted
portrait (evidently by the hand of the artist belonging to the estate)
of a ruling prince, in a crown--an alleged descendant of Rurik and
ancestor of the Bolkonskis. Prince Andrew, looking again at that
genealogical tree, shook his head, laughing as a man laughs who looks at
a portrait so characteristic of the original as to be amusing.

"How thoroughly like him that is!" he said to Princess Mary, who had
come up to him.

Princess Mary looked at her brother in surprise. She did not understand
what he was laughing at. Everything her father did inspired her with
reverence and was beyond question.

"Everyone has his Achilles' heel," continued Prince Andrew. "Fancy, with
his powerful mind, indulging in such nonsense!"

Princess Mary could not understand the boldness of her brother's
criticism and was about to reply, when the expected footsteps were heard
coming from the study. The prince walked in quickly and jauntily as was
his wont, as if intentionally contrasting the briskness of his manners
with the strict formality of his house. At that moment the great clock
struck two and another with a shrill tone joined in from the drawing
room. The prince stood still; his lively glittering eyes from under
their thick, bushy eyebrows sternly scanned all present and rested on
the little princess. She felt, as courtiers do when the Tsar enters, the
sensation of fear and respect which the old man inspired in all around
him. He stroked her hair and then patted her awkwardly on the back of
her neck.

"I'm glad, glad, to see you," he said, looking attentively into her
eyes, and then quickly went to his place and sat down. "Sit down, sit
down! Sit down, Michael Ianovich!"

He indicated a place beside him to his daughter-in-law. A footman moved
the chair for her.

"Ho, ho!" said the old man, casting his eyes on her rounded figure.
"You've been in a hurry. That's bad!"

He laughed in his usual dry, cold, unpleasant way, with his lips only
and not with his eyes.

"You must walk, walk as much as possible, as much as possible," he said.

The little princess did not, or did not wish to, hear his words. She was
silent and seemed confused. The prince asked her about her father, and
she began to smile and talk. He asked about mutual acquaintances, and
she became still more animated and chattered away giving him greetings
from various people and retailing the town gossip.

"Countess Apraksina, poor thing, has lost her husband and she has cried
her eyes out," she said, growing more and more lively.

As she became animated the prince looked at her more and more sternly,
and suddenly, as if he had studied her sufficiently and had formed a
definite idea of her, he turned away and addressed Michael Ivanovich.

"Well, Michael Ivanovich, our Bonaparte will be having a bad time of it.
Prince Andrew" (he always spoke thus of his son) "has been telling
me what forces are being collected against him! While you and I never
thought much of him."

Michael Ivanovich did not at all know when "you and I" had said such
things about Bonaparte, but understanding that he was wanted as a peg on
which to hang the prince's favorite topic, he looked inquiringly at the
young prince, wondering what would follow.

"He is a great tactician!" said the prince to his son, pointing to the
architect.

And the conversation again turned on the war, on Bonaparte, and the
generals and statesmen of the day. The old prince seemed convinced not
only that all the men of the day were mere babies who did not know the
A B C of war or of politics, and that Bonaparte was an insignificant
little Frenchy, successful only because there were no longer any
Potemkins or Suvorovs left to oppose him; but he was also convinced that
there were no political difficulties in Europe and no real war, but
only a sort of puppet show at which the men of the day were playing,
pretending to do something real. Prince Andrew gaily bore with his
father's ridicule of the new men, and drew him on and listened to him
with evident pleasure.

"The past always seems good," said he, "but did not Suvorov himself
fall into a trap Moreau set him, and from which he did not know how to
escape?"

"Who told you that? Who?" cried the prince. "Suvorov!" And he jerked
away his plate, which Tikhon briskly caught. "Suvorov!... Consider,
Prince Andrew. Two... Frederick and Suvorov; Moreau!... Moreau would
have been a prisoner if Suvorov had had a free hand; but he had the
Hofs-kriegs-wurst-schnapps-Rath on his hands. It would have puzzled
the devil himself! When you get there you'll find out what those
Hofs-kriegs-wurst-Raths are! Suvorov couldn't manage them so what chance
has Michael Kutuzov? No, my dear boy," he continued, "you and your
generals won't get on against Buonaparte; you'll have to call in the
French, so that birds of a feather may fight together. The German,
Pahlen, has been sent to New York in America, to fetch the Frenchman,
Moreau," he said, alluding to the invitation made that year to Moreau
to enter the Russian service.... "Wonderful!... Were the Potemkins,
Suvorovs, and Orlovs Germans? No, lad, either you fellows have all lost
your wits, or I have outlived mine. May God help you, but we'll see what
will happen. Buonaparte has become a great commander among them! Hm!..."

"I don't at all say that all the plans are good," said Prince Andrew, "I
am only surprised at your opinion of Bonaparte. You may laugh as much as
you like, but all the same Bonaparte is a great general!"

"Michael Ivanovich!" cried the old prince to the architect who, busy
with his roast meat, hoped he had been forgotten: "Didn't I tell you
Buonaparte was a great tactician? Here, he says the same thing."

"To be sure, your excellency," replied the architect.

The prince again laughed his frigid laugh.

"Buonaparte was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He has got
splendid soldiers. Besides he began by attacking Germans. And only
idlers have failed to beat the Germans. Since the world began everybody
has beaten the Germans. They beat no one--except one another. He made
his reputation fighting them."

And the prince began explaining all the blunders which, according to
him, Bonaparte had made in his campaigns and even in politics. His
son made no rejoinder, but it was evident that whatever arguments were
presented he was as little able as his father to change his opinion. He
listened, refraining from a reply, and involuntarily wondered how this
old man, living alone in the country for so many years, could know and
discuss so minutely and acutely all the recent European military and
political events.

"You think I'm an old man and don't understand the present state of
affairs?" concluded his father. "But it troubles me. I don't sleep
at night. Come now, where has this great commander of yours shown his
skill?" he concluded.

"That would take too long to tell," answered the son.

"Well, then go to your Buonaparte! Mademoiselle Bourienne, here's
another admirer of that powder-monkey emperor of yours," he exclaimed in
excellent French.

"You know, Prince, I am not a Bonapartist!"

"Dieu sait quand reviendra..." hummed the prince out of tune and, with a
laugh still more so, he quitted the table.

The little princess during the whole discussion and the rest of
the dinner sat silent, glancing with a frightened look now at her
father-in-law and now at Princess Mary. When they left the table she
took her sister-in-law's arm and drew her into another room.

"What a clever man your father is," said she; "perhaps that is why I am
afraid of him."

"Oh, he is so kind!" answered Princess Mary.





CHAPTER XXVIII


Prince Andrew was to leave next evening. The old prince, not altering
his routine, retired as usual after dinner. The little princess was
in her sister-in-law's room. Prince Andrew in a traveling coat without
epaulettes had been packing with his valet in the rooms assigned to him.
After inspecting the carriage himself and seeing the trunks put in, he
ordered the horses to be harnessed. Only those things he always kept
with him remained in his room; a small box, a large canteen fitted with
silver plate, two Turkish pistols and a saber--a present from his
father who had brought it from the siege of Ochakov. All these traveling
effects of Prince Andrew's were in very good order: new, clean, and in
cloth covers carefully tied with tapes.

When starting on a journey or changing their mode of life, men capable
of reflection are generally in a serious frame of mind. At such moments
one reviews the past and plans for the future. Prince Andrew's face
looked very thoughtful and tender. With his hands behind him he paced
briskly from corner to corner of the room, looking straight before him
and thoughtfully shaking his head. Did he fear going to the war, or was
he sad at leaving his wife?--perhaps both, but evidently he did not
wish to be seen in that mood, for hearing footsteps in the passage he
hurriedly unclasped his hands, stopped at a table as if tying the
cover of the small box, and assumed his usual tranquil and impenetrable
expression. It was the heavy tread of Princess Mary that he heard.

"I hear you have given orders to harness," she cried, panting (she had
apparently been running), "and I did so wish to have another talk with
you alone! God knows how long we may again be parted. You are not angry
with me for coming? You have changed so, Andrusha," she added, as if to
explain such a question.

She smiled as she uttered his pet name, "Andrusha." It was obviously
strange to her to think that this stern handsome man should be
Andrusha--the slender mischievous boy who had been her playfellow in
childhood.

"And where is Lise?" he asked, answering her question only by a smile.

"She was so tired that she has fallen asleep on the sofa in my room. Oh,
Andrew! What a treasure of a wife you have," said she, sitting down on
the sofa, facing her brother. "She is quite a child: such a dear, merry
child. I have grown so fond of her."

Prince Andrew was silent, but the princess noticed the ironical and
contemptuous look that showed itself on his face.

"One must be indulgent to little weaknesses; who is free from them,
Andrew? Don't forget that she has grown up and been educated in
society, and so her position now is not a rosy one. We should enter into
everyone's situation. Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner. * Think
what it must be for her, poor thing, after what she has been used to,
to be parted from her husband and be left alone in the country, in her
condition! It's very hard."


     * To understand all is to forgive all.


Prince Andrew smiled as he looked at his sister, as we smile at those we
think we thoroughly understand.

"You live in the country and don't think the life terrible," he replied.

"I... that's different. Why speak of me? I don't want any other life,
and can't, for I know no other. But think, Andrew: for a young society
woman to be buried in the country during the best years of her life,
all alone--for Papa is always busy, and I... well, you know what poor
resources I have for entertaining a woman used to the best society.
There is only Mademoiselle Bourienne...."

"I don't like your Mademoiselle Bourienne at all," said Prince Andrew.

"No? She is very nice and kind and, above all, she's much to be pitied.
She has no one, no one. To tell the truth, I don't need her, and she's
even in my way. You know I always was a savage, and now am even more
so. I like being alone.... Father likes her very much. She and Michael
Ivanovich are the two people to whom he is always gentle and kind,
because he has been a benefactor to them both. As Sterne says: 'We don't
love people so much for the good they have done us, as for the good we
have done them.' Father took her when she was homeless after losing her
own father. She is very good-natured, and my father likes her way of
reading. She reads to him in the evenings and reads splendidly."

"To be quite frank, Mary, I expect Father's character sometimes makes
things trying for you, doesn't it?" Prince Andrew asked suddenly.

Princess Mary was first surprised and then aghast at this question.

"For me? For me?... Trying for me!..." said she.

"He always was rather harsh; and now I should think he's getting very
trying," said Prince Andrew, apparently speaking lightly of their father
in order to puzzle or test his sister.

"You are good in every way, Andrew, but you have a kind of intellectual
pride," said the princess, following the train of her own thoughts
rather than the trend of the conversation--"and that's a great sin.
How can one judge Father? But even if one might, what feeling except
veneration could such a man as my father evoke? And I am so contented
and happy with him. I only wish you were all as happy as I am."

Her brother shook his head incredulously.

"The only thing that is hard for me... I will tell you the truth,
Andrew... is Father's way of treating religious subjects. I don't
understand how a man of his immense intellect can fail to see what is
as clear as day, and can go so far astray. That is the only thing
that makes me unhappy. But even in this I can see lately a shade of
improvement. His satire has been less bitter of late, and there was a
monk he received and had a long talk with."

"Ah! my dear, I am afraid you and your monk are wasting your powder,"
said Prince Andrew banteringly yet tenderly.

"Ah! mon ami, I only pray, and hope that God will hear me. Andrew..."
she said timidly after a moment's silence, "I have a great favor to ask
of you."

"What is it, dear?"

"No--promise that you will not refuse! It will give you no trouble
and is nothing unworthy of you, but it will comfort me. Promise,
Andrusha!..." said she, putting her hand in her reticule but not yet
taking out what she was holding inside it, as if what she held were
the subject of her request and must not be shown before the request was
granted.

She looked timidly at her brother.

"Even if it were a great deal of trouble..." answered Prince Andrew, as
if guessing what it was about.

"Think what you please! I know you are just like Father. Think as
you please, but do this for my sake! Please do! Father's father, our
grandfather, wore it in all his wars." (She still did not take out what
she was holding in her reticule.) "So you promise?"

"Of course. What is it?"

"Andrew, I bless you with this icon and you must promise me you will
never take it off. Do you promise?"

"If it does not weigh a hundredweight and won't break my neck... To
please you..." said Prince Andrew. But immediately, noticing the pained
expression his joke had brought to his sister's face, he repented and
added: "I am glad; really, dear, I am very glad."

"Against your will He will save and have mercy on you and bring you
to Himself, for in Him alone is truth and peace," said she in a voice
trembling with emotion, solemnly holding up in both hands before her
brother a small, oval, antique, dark-faced icon of the Saviour in a gold
setting, on a finely wrought silver chain.

She crossed herself, kissed the icon, and handed it to Andrew.

"Please, Andrew, for my sake!..."

Rays of gentle light shone from her large, timid eyes. Those eyes lit
up the whole of her thin, sickly face and made it beautiful. Her brother
would have taken the icon, but she stopped him. Andrew understood,
crossed himself and kissed the icon. There was a look of tenderness, for
he was touched, but also a gleam of irony on his face.

"Thank you, my dear." She kissed him on the forehead and sat down again
on the sofa. They were silent for a while.

"As I was saying to you, Andrew, be kind and generous as you always
used to be. Don't judge Lise harshly," she began. "She is so sweet, so
good-natured, and her position now is a very hard one."

"I do not think I have complained of my wife to you, Masha, or blamed
her. Why do you say all this to me?"

Red patches appeared on Princess Mary's face and she was silent as if
she felt guilty.

"I have said nothing to you, but you have already been talked to. And I
am sorry for that," he went on.

The patches grew deeper on her forehead, neck, and cheeks. She tried to
say something but could not. Her brother had guessed right: the little
princess had been crying after dinner and had spoken of her forebodings
about her confinement, and how she dreaded it, and had complained of her
fate, her father-in-law, and her husband. After crying she had fallen
asleep. Prince Andrew felt sorry for his sister.

"Know this, Masha: I can't reproach, have not reproached, and never
shall reproach my wife with anything, and I cannot reproach myself
with anything in regard to her; and that always will be so in whatever
circumstances I may be placed. But if you want to know the truth... if
you want to know whether I am happy? No! Is she happy? No! But why this
is so I don't know..."

As he said this he rose, went to his sister, and, stooping, kissed
her forehead. His fine eyes lit up with a thoughtful, kindly, and
unaccustomed brightness, but he was looking not at his sister but over
her head toward the darkness of the open doorway.

"Let us go to her, I must say good-by. Or--go and wake and I'll come
in a moment. Petrushka!" he called to his valet: "Come here, take these
away. Put this on the seat and this to the right."

Princess Mary rose and moved to the door, then stopped and said:
"Andrew, if you had faith you would have turned to God and asked Him
to give you the love you do not feel, and your prayer would have been
answered."

"Well, may be!" said Prince Andrew. "Go, Masha; I'll come immediately."

On the way to his sister's room, in the passage which connected one
wing with the other, Prince Andrew met Mademoiselle Bourienne smiling
sweetly. It was the third time that day that, with an ecstatic and
artless smile, she had met him in secluded passages.

"Oh! I thought you were in your room," she said, for some reason
blushing and dropping her eyes.

Prince Andrew looked sternly at her and an expression of anger suddenly
came over his face. He said nothing to her but looked at her forehead
and hair, without looking at her eyes, with such contempt that the
Frenchwoman blushed and went away without a word. When he reached his
sister's room his wife was already awake and her merry voice, hurrying
one word after another, came through the open door. She was speaking as
usual in French, and as if after long self-restraint she wished to make
up for lost time.

"No, but imagine the old Countess Zubova, with false curls and her mouth
full of false teeth, as if she were trying to cheat old age.... Ha, ha,
ha! Mary!"

This very sentence about Countess Zubova and this same laugh Prince
Andrew had already heard from his wife in the presence of others some
five times. He entered the room softly. The little princess, plump and
rosy, was sitting in an easy chair with her work in her hands, talking
incessantly, repeating Petersburg reminiscences and even phrases. Prince
Andrew came up, stroked her hair, and asked if she felt rested after
their journey. She answered him and continued her chatter.

The coach with six horses was waiting at the porch. It was an autumn
night, so dark that the coachman could not see the carriage pole.
Servants with lanterns were bustling about in the porch. The immense
house was brilliant with lights shining through its lofty windows. The
domestic serfs were crowding in the hall, waiting to bid good-by to
the young prince. The members of the household were all gathered in
the reception hall: Michael Ivanovich, Mademoiselle Bourienne, Princess
Mary, and the little princess. Prince Andrew had been called to his
father's study as the latter wished to say good-by to him alone. All
were waiting for them to come out.

When Prince Andrew entered the study the old man in his old-age
spectacles and white dressing gown, in which he received no one but his
son, sat at the table writing. He glanced round.

"Going?" And he went on writing.

"I've come to say good-by."

"Kiss me here," and he touched his cheek: "Thanks, thanks!"

"What do you thank me for?"

"For not dilly-dallying and not hanging to a woman's apron strings. The
Service before everything. Thanks, thanks!" And he went on writing, so
that his quill spluttered and squeaked. "If you have anything to say,
say it. These two things can be done together," he added.

"About my wife... I am ashamed as it is to leave her on your hands..."

"Why talk nonsense? Say what you want."

"When her confinement is due, send to Moscow for an accoucheur.... Let
him be here...."

The old prince stopped writing and, as if not understanding, fixed his
stern eyes on his son.

"I know that no one can help if nature does not do her work," said
Prince Andrew, evidently confused. "I know that out of a million cases
only one goes wrong, but it is her fancy and mine. They have been
telling her things. She has had a dream and is frightened."

"Hm... Hm..." muttered the old prince to himself, finishing what he was
writing. "I'll do it."

He signed with a flourish and suddenly turning to his son began to
laugh.

"It's a bad business, eh?"

"What is bad, Father?"

"The wife!" said the old prince, briefly and significantly.

"I don't understand!" said Prince Andrew.

"No, it can't be helped, lad," said the prince. "They're all like that;
one can't unmarry. Don't be afraid; I won't tell anyone, but you know it
yourself."

He seized his son by the hand with small bony fingers, shook it, looked
straight into his son's face with keen eyes which seemed to see through
him, and again laughed his frigid laugh.

The son sighed, thus admitting that his father had understood him. The
old man continued to fold and seal his letter, snatching up and throwing
down the wax, the seal, and the paper, with his accustomed rapidity.

"What's to be done? She's pretty! I will do everything. Make your mind
easy," said he in abrupt sentences while sealing his letter.

Andrew did not speak; he was both pleased and displeased that his father
understood him. The old man got up and gave the letter to his son.

"Listen!" said he; "don't worry about your wife: what can be done shall
be. Now listen! Give this letter to Michael Ilarionovich. * I have
written that he should make use of you in proper places and not keep you
long as an adjutant: a bad position! Tell him I remember and like him.
Write and tell me how he receives you. If he is all right--serve
him. Nicholas Bolkonski's son need not serve under anyone if he is in
disfavor. Now come here."


     *Kutuzov.


He spoke so rapidly that he did not finish half his words, but his son
was accustomed to understand him. He led him to the desk, raised the
lid, drew out a drawer, and took out an exercise book filled with his
bold, tall, close handwriting.

"I shall probably die before you. So remember, these are my memoirs;
hand them to the Emperor after my death. Now here is a Lombard bond and
a letter; it is a premium for the man who writes a history of Suvorov's
wars. Send it to the Academy. Here are some jottings for you to read
when I am gone. You will find them useful."

Andrew did not tell his father that he would no doubt live a long time
yet. He felt that he must not say it.

"I will do it all, Father," he said.

"Well, now, good-by!" He gave his son his hand to kiss, and embraced
him. "Remember this, Prince Andrew, if they kill you it will hurt me,
your old father..." he paused unexpectedly, and then in a querulous
voice suddenly shrieked: "but if I hear that you have not behaved like a
son of Nicholas Bolkonski, I shall be ashamed!"

"You need not have said that to me, Father," said the son with a smile.

The old man was silent.

"I also wanted to ask you," continued Prince Andrew, "if I'm killed
and if I have a son, do not let him be taken away from you--as I said
yesterday... let him grow up with you.... Please."

"Not let the wife have him?" said the old man, and laughed.

They stood silent, facing one another. The old man's sharp eyes were
fixed straight on his son's. Something twitched in the lower part of the
old prince's face.

"We've said good-by. Go!" he suddenly shouted in a loud, angry voice,
opening his door.

"What is it? What?" asked both princesses when they saw for a moment at
the door Prince Andrew and the figure of the old man in a white dressing
gown, spectacled and wigless, shouting in an angry voice.

Prince Andrew sighed and made no reply.

"Well!" he said, turning to his wife.

And this "Well!" sounded coldly ironic, as if he were saying,: "Now go
through your performance."

"Andrew, already!" said the little princess, turning pale and looking
with dismay at her husband.

He embraced her. She screamed and fell unconscious on his shoulder.

He cautiously released the shoulder she leaned on, looked into her face,
and carefully placed her in an easy chair.

"Adieu, Mary," said he gently to his sister, taking her by the hand and
kissing her, and then he left the room with rapid steps.

The little princess lay in the armchair, Mademoiselle Bourienne chafing
her temples. Princess Mary, supporting her sister-in-law, still looked
with her beautiful eyes full of tears at the door through which Prince
Andrew had gone and made the sign of the cross in his direction. From
the study, like pistol shots, came the frequent sound of the old man
angrily blowing his nose. Hardly had Prince Andrew gone when the study
door opened quickly and the stern figure of the old man in the white
dressing gown looked out.

"Gone? That's all right!" said he; and looking angrily at the
unconscious little princess, he shook his head reprovingly and slammed
the door.





BOOK TWO: 1805





CHAPTER I


In October, 1805, a Russian army was occupying the villages and towns of
the Archduchy of Austria, and yet other regiments freshly arriving from
Russia were settling near the fortress of Braunau and burdening the
inhabitants on whom they were quartered. Braunau was the headquarters of
the commander-in-chief, Kutuzov.

On October 11, 1805, one of the infantry regiments that had just reached
Braunau had halted half a mile from the town, waiting to be inspected
by the commander in chief. Despite the un-Russian appearance of the
locality and surroundings--fruit gardens, stone fences, tiled roofs, and
hills in the distance--and despite the fact that the inhabitants (who
gazed with curiosity at the soldiers) were not Russians, the regiment
had just the appearance of any Russian regiment preparing for an
inspection anywhere in the heart of Russia.

On the evening of the last day's march an order had been received that
the commander in chief would inspect the regiment on the march. Though
the words of the order were not clear to the regimental commander, and
the question arose whether the troops were to be in marching order or
not, it was decided at a consultation between the battalion commanders
to present the regiment in parade order, on the principle that it is
always better to "bow too low than not bow low enough." So the soldiers,
after a twenty-mile march, were kept mending and cleaning all night long
without closing their eyes, while the adjutants and company commanders
calculated and reckoned, and by morning the regiment--instead of the
straggling, disorderly crowd it had been on its last march the day
before--presented a well-ordered array of two thousand men each of whom
knew his place and his duty, had every button and every strap in place,
and shone with cleanliness. And not only externally was all in order,
but had it pleased the commander in chief to look under the uniforms he
would have found on every man a clean shirt, and in every knapsack the
appointed number of articles, "awl, soap, and all," as the soldiers
say. There was only one circumstance concerning which no one could be at
ease. It was the state of the soldiers' boots. More than half the men's
boots were in holes. But this defect was not due to any fault of the
regimental commander, for in spite of repeated demands boots had not
been issued by the Austrian commissariat, and the regiment had marched
some seven hundred miles.

The commander of the regiment was an elderly, choleric, stout, and
thick-set general with grizzled eyebrows and whiskers, and wider from
chest to back than across the shoulders. He had on a brand-new uniform
showing the creases where it had been folded and thick gold epaulettes
which seemed to stand rather than lie down on his massive shoulders. He
had the air of a man happily performing one of the most solemn duties of
his life. He walked about in front of the line and at every step pulled
himself up, slightly arching his back. It was plain that the commander
admired his regiment, rejoiced in it, and that his whole mind was
engrossed by it, yet his strut seemed to indicate that, besides military
matters, social interests and the fair sex occupied no small part of his
thoughts.

"Well, Michael Mitrich, sir?" he said, addressing one of the battalion
commanders who smilingly pressed forward (it was plain that they both
felt happy). "We had our hands full last night. However, I think the
regiment is not a bad one, eh?"

The battalion commander perceived the jovial irony and laughed.

"It would not be turned off the field even on the Tsaritsin Meadow."

"What?" asked the commander.

At that moment, on the road from the town on which signalers had been
posted, two men appeared on horse back. They were an aide-de-camp
followed by a Cossack.

The aide-de-camp was sent to confirm the order which had not been
clearly worded the day before, namely, that the commander in chief
wished to see the regiment just in the state in which it had been on
the march: in their greatcoats, and packs, and without any preparation
whatever.

A member of the Hofkriegsrath from Vienna had come to Kutuzov the day
before with proposals and demands for him to join up with the army
of the Archduke Ferdinand and Mack, and Kutuzov, not considering this
junction advisable, meant, among other arguments in support of his view,
to show the Austrian general the wretched state in which the troops
arrived from Russia. With this object he intended to meet the regiment;
so the worse the condition it was in, the better pleased the commander
in chief would be. Though the aide-de-camp did not know these
circumstances, he nevertheless delivered the definite order that the
men should be in their greatcoats and in marching order, and that the
commander in chief would otherwise be dissatisfied. On hearing this the
regimental commander hung his head, silently shrugged his shoulders, and
spread out his arms with a choleric gesture.

"A fine mess we've made of it!" he remarked.

"There now! Didn't I tell you, Michael Mitrich, that if it was said
'on the march' it meant in greatcoats?" said he reproachfully to
the battalion commander. "Oh, my God!" he added, stepping resolutely
forward. "Company commanders!" he shouted in a voice accustomed to
command. "Sergeants major!... How soon will he be here?" he asked the
aide-de-camp with a respectful politeness evidently relating to the
personage he was referring to.

"In an hour's time, I should say."

"Shall we have time to change clothes?"

"I don't know, General...."

The regimental commander, going up to the line himself, ordered the
soldiers to change into their greatcoats. The company commanders ran off
to their companies, the sergeants major began bustling (the greatcoats
were not in very good condition), and instantly the squares that had up
to then been in regular order and silent began to sway and stretch and
hum with voices. On all sides soldiers were running to and fro, throwing
up their knapsacks with a jerk of their shoulders and pulling the straps
over their heads, unstrapping their overcoats and drawing the sleeves on
with upraised arms.

In half an hour all was again in order, only the squares had become gray
instead of black. The regimental commander walked with his jerky steps
to the front of the regiment and examined it from a distance.

"Whatever is this? This!" he shouted and stood still. "Commander of the
third company!"

"Commander of the third company wanted by the general!... commander to
the general... third company to the commander." The words passed along
the lines and an adjutant ran to look for the missing officer.

When the eager but misrepeated words had reached their destination in a
cry of: "The general to the third company," the missing officer appeared
from behind his company and, though he was a middle-aged man and not in
the habit of running, trotted awkwardly stumbling on his toes toward the
general. The captain's face showed the uneasiness of a schoolboy who is
told to repeat a lesson he has not learned. Spots appeared on his nose,
the redness of which was evidently due to intemperance, and his mouth
twitched nervously. The general looked the captain up and down as he
came up panting, slackening his pace as he approached.

"You will soon be dressing your men in petticoats! What is this?"
shouted the regimental commander, thrusting forward his jaw and pointing
at a soldier in the ranks of the third company in a greatcoat of bluish
cloth, which contrasted with the others. "What have you been after? The
commander in chief is expected and you leave your place? Eh? I'll teach
you to dress the men in fancy coats for a parade.... Eh...?"

The commander of the company, with his eyes fixed on his superior,
pressed two fingers more and more rigidly to his cap, as if in this
pressure lay his only hope of salvation.

"Well, why don't you speak? Whom have you got there dressed up as a
Hungarian?" said the commander with an austere gibe.

"Your excellency..."

"Well, your excellency, what? Your excellency! But what about your
excellency?... nobody knows."

"Your excellency, it's the officer Dolokhov, who has been reduced to the
ranks," said the captain softly.

"Well? Has he been degraded into a field marshal, or into a soldier? If
a soldier, he should be dressed in regulation uniform like the others."

"Your excellency, you gave him leave yourself, on the march."

"Gave him leave? Leave? That's just like you young men," said the
regimental commander cooling down a little. "Leave indeed.... One says
a word to you and you... What?" he added with renewed irritation, "I beg
you to dress your men decently."

And the commander, turning to look at the adjutant, directed his jerky
steps down the line. He was evidently pleased at his own display of
anger and walking up to the regiment wished to find a further excuse for
wrath. Having snapped at an officer for an unpolished badge, at another
because his line was not straight, he reached the third company.

"H-o-o-w are you standing? Where's your leg? Your leg?" shouted the
commander with a tone of suffering in his voice, while there were still
five men between him and Dolokhov with his bluish-gray uniform.

Dolokhov slowly straightened his bent knee, looking straight with his
clear, insolent eyes in the general's face.

"Why a blue coat? Off with it... Sergeant major! Change his coat... the
ras..." he did not finish.

"General, I must obey orders, but I am not bound to endure..." Dolokhov
hurriedly interrupted.

"No talking in the ranks!... No talking, no talking!"

"Not bound to endure insults," Dolokhov concluded in loud, ringing
tones.

The eyes of the general and the soldier met. The general became silent,
angrily pulling down his tight scarf.

"I request you to have the goodness to change your coat," he said as he
turned away.





CHAPTER II


"He's coming!" shouted the signaler at that moment.

The regimental commander, flushing, ran to his horse, seized the stirrup
with trembling hands, threw his body across the saddle, righted himself,
drew his saber, and with a happy and resolute countenance, opening
his mouth awry, prepared to shout. The regiment fluttered like a bird
preening its plumage and became motionless.

"Att-ention!" shouted the regimental commander in a soul-shaking voice
which expressed joy for himself, severity for the regiment, and welcome
for the approaching chief.

Along the broad country road, edged on both sides by trees, came a high,
light blue Viennese caleche, slightly creaking on its springs and drawn
by six horses at a smart trot. Behind the caleche galloped the suite and
a convoy of Croats. Beside Kutuzov sat an Austrian general, in a white
uniform that looked strange among the Russian black ones. The caleche
stopped in front of the regiment. Kutuzov and the Austrian general were
talking in low voices and Kutuzov smiled slightly as treading heavily
he stepped down from the carriage just as if those two thousand men
breathlessly gazing at him and the regimental commander did not exist.

The word of command rang out, and again the regiment quivered, as with a
jingling sound it presented arms. Then amidst a dead silence the feeble
voice of the commander in chief was heard. The regiment roared, "Health
to your ex... len... len... lency!" and again all became silent. At
first Kutuzov stood still while the regiment moved; then he and the
general in white, accompanied by the suite, walked between the ranks.

From the way the regimental commander saluted the commander in chief and
devoured him with his eyes, drawing himself up obsequiously, and from
the way he walked through the ranks behind the generals, bending forward
and hardly able to restrain his jerky movements, and from the way he
darted forward at every word or gesture of the commander in chief,
it was evident that he performed his duty as a subordinate with even
greater zeal than his duty as a commander. Thanks to the strictness and
assiduity of its commander the regiment, in comparison with others that
had reached Braunau at the same time, was in splendid condition. There
were only 217 sick and stragglers. Everything was in good order except
the boots.

Kutuzov walked through the ranks, sometimes stopping to say a few
friendly words to officers he had known in the Turkish war, sometimes
also to the soldiers. Looking at their boots he several times shook his
head sadly, pointing them out to the Austrian general with an expression
which seemed to say that he was not blaming anyone, but could not help
noticing what a bad state of things it was. The regimental commander
ran forward on each such occasion, fearing to miss a single word of
the commander in chief's regarding the regiment. Behind Kutuzov, at a
distance that allowed every softly spoken word to be heard, followed
some twenty men of his suite. These gentlemen talked among themselves
and sometimes laughed. Nearest of all to the commander in chief walked a
handsome adjutant. This was Prince Bolkonski. Beside him was his
comrade Nesvitski, a tall staff officer, extremely stout, with a kindly,
smiling, handsome face and moist eyes. Nesvitski could hardly keep from
laughter provoked by a swarthy hussar officer who walked beside him.
This hussar, with a grave face and without a smile or a change in the
expression of his fixed eyes, watched the regimental commander's back
and mimicked his every movement. Each time the commander started and
bent forward, the hussar started and bent forward in exactly the same
manner. Nesvitski laughed and nudged the others to make them look at the
wag.

Kutuzov walked slowly and languidly past thousands of eyes which were
starting from their sockets to watch their chief. On reaching the
third company he suddenly stopped. His suite, not having expected this,
involuntarily came closer to him.

"Ah, Timokhin!" said he, recognizing the red-nosed captain who had been
reprimanded on account of the blue greatcoat.

One would have thought it impossible for a man to stretch himself
more than Timokhin had done when he was reprimanded by the regimental
commander, but now that the commander in chief addressed him he drew
himself up to such an extent that it seemed he could not have sustained
it had the commander in chief continued to look at him, and so Kutuzov,
who evidently understood his case and wished him nothing but good,
quickly turned away, a scarcely perceptible smile flitting over his
scarred and puffy face.

"Another Ismail comrade," said he. "A brave officer! Are you satisfied
with him?" he asked the regimental commander.

And the latter--unconscious that he was being reflected in the hussar
officer as in a looking glass--started, moved forward, and answered:
"Highly satisfied, your excellency!"

"We all have our weaknesses," said Kutuzov smiling and walking away from
him. "He used to have a predilection for Bacchus."

The regimental commander was afraid he might be blamed for this and did
not answer. The hussar at that moment noticed the face of the red-nosed
captain and his drawn-in stomach, and mimicked his expression and pose
with such exactitude that Nesvitski could not help laughing. Kutuzov
turned round. The officer evidently had complete control of his face,
and while Kutuzov was turning managed to make a grimace and then assume
a most serious, deferential, and innocent expression.

The third company was the last, and Kutuzov pondered, apparently trying
to recollect something. Prince Andrew stepped forward from among the
suite and said in French:

"You told me to remind you of the officer Dolokhov, reduced to the ranks
in this regiment."

"Where is Dolokhov?" asked Kutuzov.

Dolokhov, who had already changed into a soldier's gray greatcoat, did
not wait to be called. The shapely figure of the fair-haired soldier,
with his clear blue eyes, stepped forward from the ranks, went up to the
commander in chief, and presented arms.

"Have you a complaint to make?" Kutuzov asked with a slight frown.

"This is Dolokhov," said Prince Andrew.

"Ah!" said Kutuzov. "I hope this will be a lesson to you. Do your duty.
The Emperor is gracious, and I shan't forget you if you deserve well."

The clear blue eyes looked at the commander in chief just as boldly as
they had looked at the regimental commander, seeming by their expression
to tear open the veil of convention that separates a commander in chief
so widely from a private.

"One thing I ask of your excellency," Dolokhov said in his firm,
ringing, deliberate voice. "I ask an opportunity to atone for my fault
and prove my devotion to His Majesty the Emperor and to Russia!"

Kutuzov turned away. The same smile of the eyes with which he had turned
from Captain Timokhin again flitted over his face. He turned away with
a grimace as if to say that everything Dolokhov had said to him and
everything he could say had long been known to him, that he was weary of
it and it was not at all what he wanted. He turned away and went to the
carriage.

The regiment broke up into companies, which went to their appointed
quarters near Braunau, where they hoped to receive boots and clothes and
to rest after their hard marches.

"You won't bear me a grudge, Prokhor Ignatych?" said the regimental
commander, overtaking the third company on its way to its quarters and
riding up to Captain Timokhin who was walking in front. (The regimental
commander's face now that the inspection was happily over beamed with
irrepressible delight.) "It's in the Emperor's service... it can't be
helped... one is sometimes a bit hasty on parade... I am the first to
apologize, you know me!... He was very pleased!" And he held out his
hand to the captain.

"Don't mention it, General, as if I'd be so bold!" replied the captain,
his nose growing redder as he gave a smile which showed where two front
teeth were missing that had been knocked out by the butt end of a gun at
Ismail.

"And tell Mr. Dolokhov that I won't forget him--he may be quite easy.
And tell me, please--I've been meaning to ask--how is he behaving
himself, and in general..."

"As far as the service goes he is quite punctilious, your excellency;
but his character..." said Timokhin.

"And what about his character?" asked the regimental commander.

"It's different on different days," answered the captain. "One day he
is sensible, well educated, and good-natured, and the next he's a wild
beast.... In Poland, if you please, he nearly killed a Jew."

"Oh, well, well!" remarked the regimental commander. "Still, one must
have pity on a young man in misfortune. You know he has important
connections... Well, then, you just..."

"I will, your excellency," said Timokhin, showing by his smile that he
understood his commander's wish.

"Well, of course, of course!"

The regimental commander sought out Dolokhov in the ranks and, reining
in his horse, said to him:

"After the next affair... epaulettes."

Dolokhov looked round but did not say anything, nor did the mocking
smile on his lips change.

"Well, that's all right," continued the regimental commander. "A cup of
vodka for the men from me," he added so that the soldiers could hear.
"I thank you all! God be praised!" and he rode past that company and
overtook the next one.

"Well, he's really a good fellow, one can serve under him," said
Timokhin to the subaltern beside him.

"In a word, a hearty one..." said the subaltern, laughing (the
regimental commander was nicknamed King of Hearts).

The cheerful mood of their officers after the inspection infected the
soldiers. The company marched on gaily. The soldiers' voices could be
heard on every side.

"And they said Kutuzov was blind of one eye?"

"And so he is! Quite blind!"

"No, friend, he is sharper-eyed than you are. Boots and leg bands... he
noticed everything..."

"When he looked at my feet, friend... well, thinks I..."

"And that other one with him, the Austrian, looked as if he were smeared
with chalk--as white as flour! I suppose they polish him up as they do
the guns."

"I say, Fedeshon!... Did he say when the battles are to begin? You were
near him. Everybody said that Buonaparte himself was at Braunau."

"Buonaparte himself!... Just listen to the fool, what he doesn't know!
The Prussians are up in arms now. The Austrians, you see, are putting
them down. When they've been put down, the war with Buonaparte will
begin. And he says Buonaparte is in Braunau! Shows you're a fool. You'd
better listen more carefully!"

"What devils these quartermasters are! See, the fifth company is turning
into the village already... they will have their buckwheat cooked before
we reach our quarters."

"Give me a biscuit, you devil!"

"And did you give me tobacco yesterday? That's just it, friend! Ah,
well, never mind, here you are."

"They might call a halt here or we'll have to do another four miles
without eating."

"Wasn't it fine when those Germans gave us lifts! You just sit still and
are drawn along."

"And here, friend, the people are quite beggarly. There they all seemed
to be Poles--all under the Russian crown--but here they're all regular
Germans."

"Singers to the front" came the captain's order.

And from the different ranks some twenty men ran to the front. A
drummer, their leader, turned round facing the singers, and flourishing
his arm, began a long-drawn-out soldiers' song, commencing with the
words: "Morning dawned, the sun was rising," and concluding: "On then,
brothers, on to glory, led by Father Kamenski." This song had been
composed in the Turkish campaign and now being sung in Austria, the only
change being that the words "Father Kamenski" were replaced by "Father
Kutuzov."

Having jerked out these last words as soldiers do and waved his arms
as if flinging something to the ground, the drummer--a lean, handsome
soldier of forty--looked sternly at the singers and screwed up his eyes.
Then having satisfied himself that all eyes were fixed on him, he raised
both arms as if carefully lifting some invisible but precious object
above his head and, holding it there for some seconds, suddenly flung it
down and began:

"Oh, my bower, oh, my bower...!"

"Oh, my bower new...!" chimed in twenty voices, and the castanet player,
in spite of the burden of his equipment, rushed out to the front
and, walking backwards before the company, jerked his shoulders and
flourished his castanets as if threatening someone. The soldiers,
swinging their arms and keeping time spontaneously, marched with long
steps. Behind the company the sound of wheels, the creaking of springs,
and the tramp of horses' hoofs were heard. Kutuzov and his suite were
returning to the town. The commander in chief made a sign that the
men should continue to march at ease, and he and all his suite showed
pleasure at the sound of the singing and the sight of the dancing
soldier and the gay and smartly marching men. In the second file
from the right flank, beside which the carriage passed the company,
a blue-eyed soldier involuntarily attracted notice. It was Dolokhov
marching with particular grace and boldness in time to the song and
looking at those driving past as if he pitied all who were not at that
moment marching with the company. The hussar cornet of Kutuzov's suite
who had mimicked the regimental commander, fell back from the carriage
and rode up to Dolokhov.

Hussar cornet Zherkov had at one time, in Petersburg, belonged to the
wild set led by Dolokhov. Zherkov had met Dolokhov abroad as a private
and had not seen fit to recognize him. But now that Kutuzov had spoken
to the gentleman ranker, he addressed him with the cordiality of an old
friend.

"My dear fellow, how are you?" said he through the singing, making his
horse keep pace with the company.

"How am I?" Dolokhov answered coldly. "I am as you see."

The lively song gave a special flavor to the tone of free and easy
gaiety with which Zherkov spoke, and to the intentional coldness of
Dolokhov's reply.

"And how do you get on with the officers?" inquired Zherkov.

"All right. They are good fellows. And how have you wriggled onto the
staff?"

"I was attached; I'm on duty."

Both were silent.

"She let the hawk fly upward from her wide right sleeve," went the song,
arousing an involuntary sensation of courage and cheerfulness. Their
conversation would probably have been different but for the effect of
that song.

"Is it true that Austrians have been beaten?" asked Dolokhov.

"The devil only knows! They say so."

"I'm glad," answered Dolokhov briefly and clearly, as the song demanded.

"I say, come round some evening and we'll have a game of faro!" said
Zherkov.

"Why, have you too much money?"

"Do come."

"I can't. I've sworn not to. I won't drink and won't play till I get
reinstated."

"Well, that's only till the first engagement."

"We shall see."

They were again silent.

"Come if you need anything. One can at least be of use on the staff..."

Dolokhov smiled. "Don't trouble. If I want anything, I won't beg--I'll
take it!"

"Well, never mind; I only..."

"And I only..."

"Good-by."

"Good health..."

        "It's a long, long way.
        To my native land..."


Zherkov touched his horse with the spurs; it pranced excitedly from foot
to foot uncertain with which to start, then settled down, galloped past
the company, and overtook the carriage, still keeping time to the song.





CHAPTER III


On returning from the review, Kutuzov took the Austrian general into his
private room and, calling his adjutant, asked for some papers relating
to the condition of the troops on their arrival, and the letters that
had come from the Archduke Ferdinand, who was in command of the advanced
army. Prince Andrew Bolkonski came into the room with the required
papers. Kutuzov and the Austrian member of the Hofkriegsrath were
sitting at the table on which a plan was spread out.

"Ah!..." said Kutuzov glancing at Bolkonski as if by this exclamation he
was asking the adjutant to wait, and he went on with the conversation in
French.

"All I can say, General," said he with a pleasant elegance of expression
and intonation that obliged one to listen to each deliberately spoken
word. It was evident that Kutuzov himself listened with pleasure to his
own voice. "All I can say, General, is that if the matter depended on my
personal wishes, the will of His Majesty the Emperor Francis would have
been fulfilled long ago. I should long ago have joined the archduke. And
believe me on my honour that to me personally it would be a pleasure
to hand over the supreme command of the army into the hands of a better
informed and more skillful general--of whom Austria has so many--and to
lay down all this heavy responsibility. But circumstances are sometimes
too strong for us, General."

And Kutuzov smiled in a way that seemed to say, "You are quite at
liberty not to believe me and I don't even care whether you do or not,
but you have no grounds for telling me so. And that is the whole point."

The Austrian general looked dissatisfied, but had no option but to reply
in the same tone.

"On the contrary," he said, in a querulous and angry tone that
contrasted with his flattering words, "on the contrary, your
excellency's participation in the common action is highly valued by
His Majesty; but we think the present delay is depriving the splendid
Russian troops and their commander of the laurels they have been
accustomed to win in their battles," he concluded his evidently
prearranged sentence.

Kutuzov bowed with the same smile.

"But that is my conviction, and judging by the last letter with which
His Highness the Archduke Ferdinand has honored me, I imagine that the
Austrian troops, under the direction of so skillful a leader as General
Mack, have by now already gained a decisive victory and no longer need
our aid," said Kutuzov.

The general frowned. Though there was no definite news of an Austrian
defeat, there were many circumstances confirming the unfavorable rumors
that were afloat, and so Kutuzov's suggestion of an Austrian victory
sounded much like irony. But Kutuzov went on blandly smiling with the
same expression, which seemed to say that he had a right to suppose so.
And, in fact, the last letter he had received from Mack's army informed
him of a victory and stated strategically the position of the army was
very favorable.

"Give me that letter," said Kutuzov turning to Prince Andrew. "Please
have a look at it"--and Kutuzov with an ironical smile about the corners
of his mouth read to the Austrian general the following passage, in
German, from the Archduke Ferdinand's letter:


We have fully concentrated forces of nearly seventy thousand men with
which to attack and defeat the enemy should he cross the Lech. Also,
as we are masters of Ulm, we cannot be deprived of the advantage of
commanding both sides of the Danube, so that should the enemy not
cross the Lech, we can cross the Danube, throw ourselves on his line
of communications, recross the river lower down, and frustrate his
intention should he try to direct his whole force against our faithful
ally. We shall therefore confidently await the moment when the Imperial
Russian army will be fully equipped, and shall then, in conjunction with
it, easily find a way to prepare for the enemy the fate he deserves.


Kutuzov sighed deeply on finishing this paragraph and looked at the
member of the Hofkriegsrath mildly and attentively.

"But you know the wise maxim your excellency, advising one to expect the
worst," said the Austrian general, evidently wishing to have done with
jests and to come to business. He involuntarily looked round at the
aide-de-camp.

"Excuse me, General," interrupted Kutuzov, also turning to Prince
Andrew. "Look here, my dear fellow, get from Kozlovski all the reports
from our scouts. Here are two letters from Count Nostitz and here is one
from His Highness the Archduke Ferdinand and here are these," he said,
handing him several papers, "make a neat memorandum in French out of all
this, showing all the news we have had of the movements of the Austrian
army, and then give it to his excellency."

Prince Andrew bowed his head in token of having understood from the
first not only what had been said but also what Kutuzov would have liked
to tell him. He gathered up the papers and with a bow to both, stepped
softly over the carpet and went out into the waiting room.

Though not much time had passed since Prince Andrew had left Russia, he
had changed greatly during that period. In the expression of his face,
in his movements, in his walk, scarcely a trace was left of his former
affected languor and indolence. He now looked like a man who has time
to think of the impression he makes on others, but is occupied with
agreeable and interesting work. His face expressed more satisfaction
with himself and those around him, his smile and glance were brighter
and more attractive.

Kutuzov, whom he had overtaken in Poland, had received him very kindly,
promised not to forget him, distinguished him above the other adjutants,
and had taken him to Vienna and given him the more serious commissions.
From Vienna Kutuzov wrote to his old comrade, Prince Andrew's father.


Your son bids fair to become an officer distinguished by his industry,
firmness, and expedition. I consider myself fortunate to have such a
subordinate by me.


On Kutuzov's staff, among his fellow officers and in the army generally,
Prince Andrew had, as he had had in Petersburg society, two quite
opposite reputations. Some, a minority, acknowledged him to be different
from themselves and from everyone else, expected great things of him,
listened to him, admired, and imitated him, and with them Prince
Andrew was natural and pleasant. Others, the majority, disliked him and
considered him conceited, cold, and disagreeable. But among these people
Prince Andrew knew how to take his stand so that they respected and even
feared him.

Coming out of Kutuzov's room into the waiting room with the papers in
his hand Prince Andrew came up to his comrade, the aide-de-camp on duty,
Kozlovski, who was sitting at the window with a book.

"Well, Prince?" asked Kozlovski.

"I am ordered to write a memorandum explaining why we are not
advancing."

"And why is it?"

Prince Andrew shrugged his shoulders.

"Any news from Mack?"

"No."

"If it were true that he has been beaten, news would have come."

"Probably," said Prince Andrew moving toward the outer door.

But at that instant a tall Austrian general in a greatcoat, with the
order of Maria Theresa on his neck and a black bandage round his head,
who had evidently just arrived, entered quickly, slamming the door.
Prince Andrew stopped short.

"Commander in Chief Kutuzov?" said the newly arrived general speaking
quickly with a harsh German accent, looking to both sides and advancing
straight toward the inner door.

"The commander in chief is engaged," said Kozlovski, going hurriedly up
to the unknown general and blocking his way to the door. "Whom shall I
announce?"

The unknown general looked disdainfully down at Kozlovski, who was
rather short, as if surprised that anyone should not know him.

"The commander in chief is engaged," repeated Kozlovski calmly.

The general's face clouded, his lips quivered and trembled. He took out
a notebook, hurriedly scribbled something in pencil, tore out the leaf,
gave it to Kozlovski, stepped quickly to the window, and threw himself
into a chair, gazing at those in the room as if asking, "Why do they
look at me?" Then he lifted his head, stretched his neck as if he
intended to say something, but immediately, with affected indifference,
began to hum to himself, producing a queer sound which immediately broke
off. The door of the private room opened and Kutuzov appeared in the
doorway. The general with the bandaged head bent forward as though
running away from some danger, and, making long, quick strides with his
thin legs, went up to Kutuzov.

"Vous voyez le malheureux Mack," he uttered in a broken voice.

Kutuzov's face as he stood in the open doorway remained perfectly
immobile for a few moments. Then wrinkles ran over his face like a wave
and his forehead became smooth again, he bowed his head respectfully,
closed his eyes, silently let Mack enter his room before him, and closed
the door himself behind him.

The report which had been circulated that the Austrians had been beaten
and that the whole army had surrendered at Ulm proved to be correct.
Within half an hour adjutants had been sent in various directions with
orders which showed that the Russian troops, who had hitherto been
inactive, would also soon have to meet the enemy.

Prince Andrew was one of those rare staff officers whose chief interest
lay in the general progress of the war. When he saw Mack and heard the
details of his disaster he understood that half the campaign was lost,
understood all the difficulties of the Russian army's position, and
vividly imagined what awaited it and the part he would have to
play. Involuntarily he felt a joyful agitation at the thought of the
humiliation of arrogant Austria and that in a week's time he might,
perhaps, see and take part in the first Russian encounter with the
French since Suvorov met them. He feared that Bonaparte's genius might
outweigh all the courage of the Russian troops, and at the same time
could not admit the idea of his hero being disgraced.

Excited and irritated by these thoughts Prince Andrew went toward his
room to write to his father, to whom he wrote every day. In the corridor
he met Nesvitski, with whom he shared a room, and the wag Zherkov; they
were as usual laughing.

"Why are you so glum?" asked Nesvitski noticing Prince Andrew's pale
face and glittering eyes.

"There's nothing to be gay about," answered Bolkonski.

Just as Prince Andrew met Nesvitski and Zherkov, there came toward them
from the other end of the corridor, Strauch, an Austrian general who on
Kutuzov's staff in charge of the provisioning of the Russian army, and
the member of the Hofkriegsrath who had arrived the previous evening.
There was room enough in the wide corridor for the generals to pass the
three officers quite easily, but Zherkov, pushing Nesvitski aside with
his arm, said in a breathless voice,

"They're coming!... they're coming!... Stand aside, make way, please
make way!"

The generals were passing by, looking as if they wished to avoid
embarrassing attentions. On the face of the wag Zherkov there suddenly
appeared a stupid smile of glee which he seemed unable to suppress.

"Your excellency," said he in German, stepping forward and addressing
the Austrian general, "I have the honor to congratulate you."

He bowed his head and scraped first with one foot and then with the
other, awkwardly, like a child at a dancing lesson.

The member of the Hofkriegsrath looked at him severely but, seeing
the seriousness of his stupid smile, could not but give him a moment's
attention. He screwed up his eyes showing that he was listening.

"I have the honor to congratulate you. General Mack has arrived, quite
well, only a little bruised just here," he added, pointing with a
beaming smile to his head.

The general frowned, turned away, and went on.

"Gott, wie naiv!" * said he angrily, after he had gone a few steps.


     * "Good God, what simplicity!"


Nesvitski with a laugh threw his arms round Prince Andrew, but
Bolkonski, turning still paler, pushed him away with an angry look and
turned to Zherkov. The nervous irritation aroused by the appearance of
Mack, the news of his defeat, and the thought of what lay before the
Russian army found vent in anger at Zherkov's untimely jest.

"If you, sir, choose to make a buffoon of yourself," he said sharply,
with a slight trembling of the lower jaw, "I can't prevent your doing
so; but I warn you that if you dare to play the fool in my presence, I
will teach you to behave yourself."

Nesvitski and Zherkov were so surprised by this outburst that they gazed
at Bolkonski silently with wide-open eyes.

"What's the matter? I only congratulated them," said Zherkov.

"I am not jesting with you; please be silent!" cried Bolkonski, and
taking Nesvitski's arm he left Zherkov, who did not know what to say.

"Come, what's the matter, old fellow?" said Nesvitski trying to soothe
him.

"What's the matter?" exclaimed Prince Andrew standing still in his
excitement. "Don't you understand that either we are officers serving
our Tsar and our country, rejoicing in the successes and grieving at
the misfortunes of our common cause, or we are merely lackeys who care
nothing for their master's business. Quarante mille hommes massacres et
l'armee de nos allies detruite, et vous trouvez la le mot pour rire," *
he said, as if strengthening his views by this French sentence. "C'est
bien pour un garcon de rien comme cet individu dont vous avez fait un
ami, mais pas pour vous, pas pour vous. *(2) Only a hobbledehoy could
amuse himself in this way," he added in Russian--but pronouncing the
word with a French accent--having noticed that Zherkov could still hear
him.


     * "Forty thousand men massacred and the army of our allies
     destroyed, and you find that a cause for jesting!"

     * (2) "It is all very well for that good-for-nothing fellow
     of whom you have made a friend, but not for you, not for
     you."


He waited a moment to see whether the cornet would answer, but he turned
and went out of the corridor.





CHAPTER IV


The Pavlograd Hussars were stationed two miles from Braunau. The
squadron in which Nicholas Rostov served as a cadet was quartered in
the German village of Salzeneck. The best quarters in the village were
assigned to cavalry-captain Denisov, the squadron commander, known
throughout the whole cavalry division as Vaska Denisov. Cadet Rostov,
ever since he had overtaken the regiment in Poland, had lived with the
squadron commander.

On October 11, the day when all was astir at headquarters over the news
of Mack's defeat, the camp life of the officers of this squadron was
proceeding as usual. Denisov, who had been losing at cards all night,
had not yet come home when Rostov rode back early in the morning from
a foraging expedition. Rostov in his cadet uniform, with a jerk to his
horse, rode up to the porch, swung his leg over the saddle with a supple
youthful movement, stood for a moment in the stirrup as if loathe to
part from his horse, and at last sprang down and called to his orderly.

"Ah, Bondarenko, dear friend!" said he to the hussar who rushed up
headlong to the horse. "Walk him up and down, my dear fellow," he
continued, with that gay brotherly cordiality which goodhearted young
people show to everyone when they are happy.

"Yes, your excellency," answered the Ukrainian gaily, tossing his head.

"Mind, walk him up and down well!"

Another hussar also rushed toward the horse, but Bondarenko had already
thrown the reins of the snaffle bridle over the horse's head. It was
evident that the cadet was liberal with his tips and that it paid
to serve him. Rostov patted the horse's neck and then his flank, and
lingered for a moment.

"Splendid! What a horse he will be!" he thought with a smile, and
holding up his saber, his spurs jingling, he ran up the steps of the
porch. His landlord, who in a waistcoat and a pointed cap, pitchfork in
hand, was clearing manure from the cowhouse, looked out, and his face
immediately brightened on seeing Rostov. "Schon gut Morgen! Schon gut
Morgen!" * he said winking with a merry smile, evidently pleased to
greet the young man.


    * "A very good morning! A very good morning!"


"Schon fleissig?" * said Rostov with the same gay brotherly smile which
did not leave his eager face. "Hoch Oestreicher! Hoch Russen! Kaiser
Alexander hoch!" *(2) said he, quoting words often repeated by the
German landlord.


    * "Busy already?"

    * (2) "Hurrah for the Austrians! Hurrah for the Russians!
     Hurrah for Emperor Alexander!"


The German laughed, came out of the cowshed, pulled off his cap, and
waving it above his head cried:

"Und die ganze Welt hoch!" *


    * "And hurrah for the whole world!"


Rostov waved his cap above his head like the German and cried laughing,
"Und vivat die ganze Welt!" Though neither the German cleaning his
cowshed nor Rostov back with his platoon from foraging for hay had any
reason for rejoicing, they looked at each other with joyful delight and
brotherly love, wagged their heads in token of their mutual affection,
and parted smiling, the German returning to his cowshed and Rostov going
to the cottage he occupied with Denisov.

"What about your master?" he asked Lavrushka, Denisov's orderly, whom
all the regiment knew for a rogue.

"Hasn't been in since the evening. Must have been losing," answered
Lavrushka. "I know by now, if he wins he comes back early to brag about
it, but if he stays out till morning it means he's lost and will come
back in a rage. Will you have coffee?"

"Yes, bring some."

Ten minutes later Lavrushka brought the coffee. "He's coming!" said
he. "Now for trouble!" Rostov looked out of the window and saw Denisov
coming home. Denisov was a small man with a red face, sparkling black
eyes, and black tousled mustache and hair. He wore an unfastened cloak,
wide breeches hanging down in creases, and a crumpled shako on the back
of his head. He came up to the porch gloomily, hanging his head.

"Lavwuska!" he shouted loudly and angrily, "take it off, blockhead!"

"Well, I am taking it off," replied Lavrushka's voice.

"Ah, you're up already," said Denisov, entering the room.

"Long ago," answered Rostov, "I have already been for the hay, and have
seen Fraulein Mathilde."

"Weally! And I've been losing, bwother. I lost yesterday like a damned
fool!" cried Denisov, not pronouncing his r's. "Such ill luck! Such ill
luck. As soon as you left, it began and went on. Hullo there! Tea!"

Puckering up his face though smiling, and showing his short strong
teeth, he began with stubby fingers of both hands to ruffle up his thick
tangled black hair.

"And what devil made me go to that wat?" (an officer nicknamed "the
rat") he said, rubbing his forehead and whole face with both hands.
"Just fancy, he didn't let me win a single cahd, not one cahd."

He took the lighted pipe that was offered to him, gripped it in his
fist, and tapped it on the floor, making the sparks fly, while he
continued to shout.

"He lets one win the singles and collahs it as soon as one doubles it;
gives the singles and snatches the doubles!"

He scattered the burning tobacco, smashed the pipe, and threw it away.
Then he remained silent for a while, and all at once looked cheerfully
with his glittering, black eyes at Rostov.

"If at least we had some women here; but there's nothing foh one to do
but dwink. If we could only get to fighting soon. Hullo, who's there?"
he said, turning to the door as he heard a tread of heavy boots and the
clinking of spurs that came to a stop, and a respectful cough.

"The squadron quartermaster!" said Lavrushka.

Denisov's face puckered still more.

"Wetched!" he muttered, throwing down a purse with some gold in it.
"Wostov, deah fellow, just see how much there is left and shove the
purse undah the pillow," he said, and went out to the quartermaster.

Rostov took the money and, mechanically arranging the old and new coins
in separate piles, began counting them.

"Ah! Telyanin! How d'ye do? They plucked me last night," came Denisov's
voice from the next room.

"Where? At Bykov's, at the rat's... I knew it," replied a piping voice,
and Lieutenant Telyanin, a small officer of the same squadron, entered
the room.

Rostov thrust the purse under the pillow and shook the damp little hand
which was offered him. Telyanin for some reason had been transferred
from the Guards just before this campaign. He behaved very well in
the regiment but was not liked; Rostov especially detested him and was
unable to overcome or conceal his groundless antipathy to the man.

"Well, young cavalryman, how is my Rook behaving?" he asked. (Rook was a
young horse Telyanin had sold to Rostov.)

The lieutenant never looked the man he was speaking to straight in the
face; his eyes continually wandered from one object to another.

"I saw you riding this morning..." he added.

"Oh, he's all right, a good horse," answered Rostov, though the horse
for which he had paid seven hundred rubbles was not worth half that sum.
"He's begun to go a little lame on the left foreleg," he added.

"The hoof's cracked! That's nothing. I'll teach you what to do and show
you what kind of rivet to use."

"Yes, please do," said Rostov.

"I'll show you, I'll show you! It's not a secret. And it's a horse
you'll thank me for."

"Then I'll have it brought round," said Rostov wishing to avoid
Telyanin, and he went out to give the order.

In the passage Denisov, with a pipe, was squatting on the threshold
facing the quartermaster who was reporting to him. On seeing Rostov,
Denisov screwed up his face and pointing over his shoulder with his
thumb to the room where Telyanin was sitting, he frowned and gave a
shudder of disgust.

"Ugh! I don't like that fellow," he said, regardless of the
quartermaster's presence.

Rostov shrugged his shoulders as much as to say: "Nor do I, but what's
one to do?" and, having given his order, he returned to Telyanin.

Telyanin was sitting in the same indolent pose in which Rostov had left
him, rubbing his small white hands.

"Well there certainly are disgusting people," thought Rostov as he
entered.

"Have you told them to bring the horse?" asked Telyanin, getting up and
looking carelessly about him.

"I have."

"Let us go ourselves. I only came round to ask Denisov about yesterday's
order. Have you got it, Denisov?"

"Not yet. But where are you off to?"

"I want to teach this young man how to shoe a horse," said Telyanin.

They went through the porch and into the stable. The lieutenant
explained how to rivet the hoof and went away to his own quarters.

When Rostov went back there was a bottle of vodka and a sausage on the
table. Denisov was sitting there scratching with his pen on a sheet of
paper. He looked gloomily in Rostov's face and said: "I am witing to
her."

He leaned his elbows on the table with his pen in his hand and,
evidently glad of a chance to say quicker in words what he wanted to
write, told Rostov the contents of his letter.

"You see, my fwiend," he said, "we sleep when we don't love. We are
childwen of the dust... but one falls in love and one is a God, one is
pua' as on the first day of cweation... Who's that now? Send him to the
devil, I'm busy!" he shouted to Lavrushka, who went up to him not in the
least abashed.

"Who should it be? You yourself told him to come. It's the quartermaster
for the money."

Denisov frowned and was about to shout some reply but stopped.

"Wetched business," he muttered to himself. "How much is left in the
puhse?" he asked, turning to Rostov.

"Seven new and three old imperials."

"Oh, it's wetched! Well, what are you standing there for, you sca'cwow?
Call the quahtehmasteh," he shouted to Lavrushka.

"Please, Denisov, let me lend you some: I have some, you know," said
Rostov, blushing.

"Don't like bowwowing from my own fellows, I don't," growled Denisov.

"But if you won't accept money from me like a comrade, you will offend
me. Really I have some," Rostov repeated.

"No, I tell you."

And Denisov went to the bed to get the purse from under the pillow.

"Where have you put it, Wostov?"

"Under the lower pillow."

"It's not there."

Denisov threw both pillows on the floor. The purse was not there.

"That's a miwacle."

"Wait, haven't you dropped it?" said Rostov, picking up the pillows one
at a time and shaking them.

He pulled off the quilt and shook it. The purse was not there.

"Dear me, can I have forgotten? No, I remember thinking that you kept
it under your head like a treasure," said Rostov. "I put it just here.
Where is it?" he asked, turning to Lavrushka.

"I haven't been in the room. It must be where you put it."

"But it isn't?..."

"You're always like that; you thwow a thing down anywhere and forget it.
Feel in your pockets."

"No, if I hadn't thought of it being a treasure," said Rostov, "but I
remember putting it there."

Lavrushka turned all the bedding over, looked under the bed and under
the table, searched everywhere, and stood still in the middle of the
room. Denisov silently watched Lavrushka's movements, and when the
latter threw up his arms in surprise saying it was nowhere to be found
Denisov glanced at Rostov.

"Wostov, you've not been playing schoolboy twicks..."

Rostov felt Denisov's gaze fixed on him, raised his eyes, and instantly
dropped them again. All the blood which had seemed congested somewhere
below his throat rushed to his face and eyes. He could not draw breath.

"And there hasn't been anyone in the room except the lieutenant and
yourselves. It must be here somewhere," said Lavrushka.

"Now then, you devil's puppet, look alive and hunt for it!" shouted
Denisov, suddenly, turning purple and rushing at the man with a
threatening gesture. "If the purse isn't found I'll flog you, I'll flog
you all."

Rostov, his eyes avoiding Denisov, began buttoning his coat, buckled on
his saber, and put on his cap.

"I must have that purse, I tell you," shouted Denisov, shaking his
orderly by the shoulders and knocking him against the wall.

"Denisov, let him alone, I know who has taken it," said Rostov, going
toward the door without raising his eyes. Denisov paused, thought a
moment, and, evidently understanding what Rostov hinted at, seized his
arm.

"Nonsense!" he cried, and the veins on his forehead and neck stood out
like cords. "You are mad, I tell you. I won't allow it. The purse is
here! I'll flay this scoundwel alive, and it will be found."

"I know who has taken it," repeated Rostov in an unsteady voice, and
went to the door.

"And I tell you, don't you dahe to do it!" shouted Denisov, rushing at
the cadet to restrain him.

But Rostov pulled away his arm and, with as much anger as though Denisov
were his worst enemy, firmly fixed his eyes directly on his face.

"Do you understand what you're saying?" he said in a trembling voice.
"There was no one else in the room except myself. So that if it is not
so, then..."

He could not finish, and ran out of the room.

"Ah, may the devil take you and evewybody," were the last words Rostov
heard.

Rostov went to Telyanin's quarters.

"The master is not in, he's gone to headquarters," said Telyanin's
orderly. "Has something happened?" he added, surprised at the cadet's
troubled face.

"No, nothing."

"You've only just missed him," said the orderly.

The headquarters were situated two miles away from Salzeneck, and
Rostov, without returning home, took a horse and rode there. There was
an inn in the village which the officers frequented. Rostov rode up to
it and saw Telyanin's horse at the porch.

In the second room of the inn the lieutenant was sitting over a dish of
sausages and a bottle of wine.

"Ah, you've come here too, young man!" he said, smiling and raising his
eyebrows.

"Yes," said Rostov as if it cost him a great deal to utter the word; and
he sat down at the nearest table.

Both were silent. There were two Germans and a Russian officer in the
room. No one spoke and the only sounds heard were the clatter of knives
and the munching of the lieutenant.

When Telyanin had finished his lunch he took out of his pocket a double
purse and, drawing its rings aside with his small, white, turned-up
fingers, drew out a gold imperial, and lifting his eyebrows gave it to
the waiter.

"Please be quick," he said.

The coin was a new one. Rostov rose and went up to Telyanin.

"Allow me to look at your purse," he said in a low, almost inaudible,
voice.

With shifting eyes but eyebrows still raised, Telyanin handed him the
purse.

"Yes, it's a nice purse. Yes, yes," he said, growing suddenly pale, and
added, "Look at it, young man."

Rostov took the purse in his hand, examined it and the money in it, and
looked at Telyanin. The lieutenant was looking about in his usual way
and suddenly seemed to grow very merry.

"If we get to Vienna I'll get rid of it there but in these wretched
little towns there's nowhere to spend it," said he. "Well, let me have
it, young man, I'm going."

Rostov did not speak.

"And you? Are you going to have lunch too? They feed you quite decently
here," continued Telyanin. "Now then, let me have it."

He stretched out his hand to take hold of the purse. Rostov let go of
it. Telyanin took the purse and began carelessly slipping it into the
pocket of his riding breeches, with his eyebrows lifted and his mouth
slightly open, as if to say, "Yes, yes, I am putting my purse in my
pocket and that's quite simple and is no one else's business."

"Well, young man?" he said with a sigh, and from under his lifted brows
he glanced into Rostov's eyes.

Some flash as of an electric spark shot from Telyanin's eyes to Rostov's
and back, and back again and again in an instant.

"Come here," said Rostov, catching hold of Telyanin's arm and almost
dragging him to the window. "That money is Denisov's; you took it..." he
whispered just above Telyanin's ear.

"What? What? How dare you? What?" said Telyanin.

But these words came like a piteous, despairing cry and an entreaty for
pardon. As soon as Rostov heard them, an enormous load of doubt fell
from him. He was glad, and at the same instant began to pity the
miserable man who stood before him, but the task he had begun had to be
completed.

"Heaven only knows what the people here may imagine," muttered Telyanin,
taking up his cap and moving toward a small empty room. "We must have an
explanation..."

"I know it and shall prove it," said Rostov.

"I..."

Every muscle of Telyanin's pale, terrified face began to quiver, his
eyes still shifted from side to side but with a downward look not rising
to Rostov's face, and his sobs were audible.

"Count!... Don't ruin a young fellow... here is this wretched money,
take it..." He threw it on the table. "I have an old father and
mother!..."

Rostov took the money, avoiding Telyanin's eyes, and went out of the
room without a word. But at the door he stopped and then retraced his
steps. "O God," he said with tears in his eyes, "how could you do it?"

"Count..." said Telyanin drawing nearer to him.

"Don't touch me," said Rostov, drawing back. "If you need it, take the
money," and he threw the purse to him and ran out of the inn.





CHAPTER V


That same evening there was an animated discussion among the squadron's
officers in Denisov's quarters.

"And I tell you, Rostov, that you must apologize to the colonel!" said
a tall, grizzly-haired staff captain, with enormous mustaches and
many wrinkles on his large features, to Rostov who was crimson with
excitement.

The staff captain, Kirsten, had twice been reduced to the ranks for
affairs of honor and had twice regained his commission.

"I will allow no one to call me a liar!" cried Rostov. "He told me I
lied, and I told him he lied. And there it rests. He may keep me on
duty every day, or may place me under arrest, but no one can make me
apologize, because if he, as commander of this regiment, thinks it
beneath his dignity to give me satisfaction, then..."

"You just wait a moment, my dear fellow, and listen," interrupted the
staff captain in his deep bass, calmly stroking his long mustache. "You
tell the colonel in the presence of other officers that an officer has
stolen..."

"I'm not to blame that the conversation began in the presence of other
officers. Perhaps I ought not to have spoken before them, but I am not
a diplomatist. That's why I joined the hussars, thinking that here one
would not need finesse; and he tells me that I am lying--so let him give
me satisfaction..."

"That's all right. No one thinks you a coward, but that's not the point.
Ask Denisov whether it is not out of the question for a cadet to demand
satisfaction of his regimental commander?"

Denisov sat gloomily biting his mustache and listening to the
conversation, evidently with no wish to take part in it. He answered the
staff captain's question by a disapproving shake of his head.

"You speak to the colonel about this nasty business before other
officers," continued the staff captain, "and Bogdanich" (the colonel was
called Bogdanich) "shuts you up."

"He did not shut me up, he said I was telling an untruth."

"Well, have it so, and you talked a lot of nonsense to him and must
apologize."

"Not on any account!" exclaimed Rostov.

"I did not expect this of you," said the staff captain seriously and
severely. "You don't wish to apologize, but, man, it's not only to him
but to the whole regiment--all of us--you're to blame all round. The
case is this: you ought to have thought the matter over and taken
advice; but no, you go and blurt it all straight out before the
officers. Now what was the colonel to do? Have the officer tried and
disgrace the whole regiment? Disgrace the whole regiment because of one
scoundrel? Is that how you look at it? We don't see it like that. And
Bogdanich was a brick: he told you you were saying what was not true.
It's not pleasant, but what's to be done, my dear fellow? You landed
yourself in it. And now, when one wants to smooth the thing over, some
conceit prevents your apologizing, and you wish to make the whole
affair public. You are offended at being put on duty a bit, but why not
apologize to an old and honorable officer? Whatever Bogdanich may be,
anyway he is an honorable and brave old colonel! You're quick at taking
offense, but you don't mind disgracing the whole regiment!" The staff
captain's voice began to tremble. "You have been in the regiment next
to no time, my lad, you're here today and tomorrow you'll be appointed
adjutant somewhere and can snap your fingers when it is said 'There are
thieves among the Pavlograd officers!' But it's not all the same to us!
Am I not right, Denisov? It's not the same!"

Denisov remained silent and did not move, but occasionally looked with
his glittering black eyes at Rostov.

"You value your own pride and don't wish to apologize," continued
the staff captain, "but we old fellows, who have grown up in and, God
willing, are going to die in the regiment, we prize the honor of the
regiment, and Bogdanich knows it. Oh, we do prize it, old fellow! And
all this is not right, it's not right! You may take offense or not but I
always stick to mother truth. It's not right!"

And the staff captain rose and turned away from Rostov.

"That's twue, devil take it!" shouted Denisov, jumping up. "Now then,
Wostov, now then!"

 Rostov, growing red and pale alternately, looked first at one
officer and then at the other.

"No, gentlemen, no... you mustn't think... I quite understand. You're
wrong to think that of me... I... for me... for the honor of the
regiment I'd... Ah well, I'll show that in action, and for me the honor
of the flag... Well, never mind, it's true I'm to blame, to blame all
round. Well, what else do you want?..."

"Come, that's right, Count!" cried the staff captain, turning round and
clapping Rostov on the shoulder with his big hand.

"I tell you," shouted Denisov, "he's a fine fellow."

"That's better, Count," said the staff captain, beginning to address
Rostov by his title, as if in recognition of his confession. "Go and
apologize, your excellency. Yes, go!"

"Gentlemen, I'll do anything. No one shall hear a word from me," said
Rostov in an imploring voice, "but I can't apologize, by God I can't,
do what you will! How can I go and apologize like a little boy asking
forgiveness?"

Denisov began to laugh.

"It'll be worse for you. Bogdanich is vindictive and you'll pay for your
obstinacy," said Kirsten.

"No, on my word it's not obstinacy! I can't describe the feeling. I
can't..."

"Well, it's as you like," said the staff captain. "And what has become
of that scoundrel?" he asked Denisov.

"He has weported himself sick, he's to be stwuck off the list tomowwow,"
muttered Denisov.

"It is an illness, there's no other way of explaining it," said the
staff captain.

"Illness or not, he'd better not cwoss my path. I'd kill him!" shouted
Denisov in a bloodthirsty tone.

Just then Zherkov entered the room.

"What brings you here?" cried the officers turning to the newcomer.

"We're to go into action, gentlemen! Mack has surrendered with his whole
army."

"It's not true!"

"I've seen him myself!"

"What? Saw the real Mack? With hands and feet?"

"Into action! Into action! Bring him a bottle for such news! But how did
you come here?"

"I've been sent back to the regiment all on account of that devil, Mack.
An Austrian general complained of me. I congratulated him on Mack's
arrival... What's the matter, Rostov? You look as if you'd just come out
of a hot bath."

"Oh, my dear fellow, we're in such a stew here these last two days."

The regimental adjutant came in and confirmed the news brought by
Zherkov. They were under orders to advance next day.

"We're going into action, gentlemen!"

"Well, thank God! We've been sitting here too long!"





CHAPTER VI


Kutuzov fell back toward Vienna, destroying behind him the bridges over
the rivers Inn (at Braunau) and Traun (near Linz). On October 23 the
Russian troops were crossing the river Enns. At midday the Russian
baggage train, the artillery, and columns of troops were defiling
through the town of Enns on both sides of the bridge.

It was a warm, rainy, autumnal day. The wide expanse that opened out
before the heights on which the Russian batteries stood guarding the
bridge was at times veiled by a diaphanous curtain of slanting rain, and
then, suddenly spread out in the sunlight, far-distant objects could
be clearly seen glittering as though freshly varnished. Down below,
the little town could be seen with its white, red-roofed houses, its
cathedral, and its bridge, on both sides of which streamed jostling
masses of Russian troops. At the bend of the Danube, vessels, an island,
and a castle with a park surrounded by the waters of the confluence of
the Enns and the Danube became visible, and the rocky left bank of the
Danube covered with pine forests, with a mystic background of green
treetops and bluish gorges. The turrets of a convent stood out beyond a
wild virgin pine forest, and far away on the other side of the Enns the
enemy's horse patrols could be discerned.

Among the field guns on the brow of the hill the general in command of
the rearguard stood with a staff officer, scanning the country through
his fieldglass. A little behind them Nesvitski, who had been sent to the
rearguard by the commander in chief, was sitting on the trail of a gun
carriage. A Cossack who accompanied him had handed him a knapsack and
a flask, and Nesvitski was treating some officers to pies and real
doppelkummel. The officers gladly gathered round him, some on their
knees, some squatting Turkish fashion on the wet grass.

"Yes, the Austrian prince who built that castle was no fool. It's a
fine place! Why are you not eating anything, gentlemen?" Nesvitski was
saying.

"Thank you very much, Prince," answered one of the officers, pleased to
be talking to a staff officer of such importance. "It's a lovely place!
We passed close to the park and saw two deer... and what a splendid
house!"

"Look, Prince," said another, who would have dearly liked to take
another pie but felt shy, and therefore pretended to be examining the
countryside--"See, our infantrymen have already got there. Look there
in the meadow behind the village, three of them are dragging something.
They'll ransack that castle," he remarked with evident approval.

"So they will," said Nesvitski. "No, but what I should like," added he,
munching a pie in his moist-lipped handsome mouth, "would be to slip in
over there."

He pointed with a smile to a turreted nunnery, and his eyes narrowed and
gleamed.

"That would be fine, gentlemen!"

The officers laughed.

"Just to flutter the nuns a bit. They say there are Italian girls among
them. On my word I'd give five years of my life for it!"

"They must be feeling dull, too," said one of the bolder officers,
laughing.

Meanwhile the staff officer standing in front pointed out something to
the general, who looked through his field glass.

"Yes, so it is, so it is," said the general angrily, lowering the field
glass and shrugging his shoulders, "so it is! They'll be fired on at the
crossing. And why are they dawdling there?"

On the opposite side the enemy could be seen by the naked eye, and from
their battery a milk-white cloud arose. Then came the distant report of
a shot, and our troops could be seen hurrying to the crossing.

Nesvitski rose, puffing, and went up to the general, smiling.

"Would not your excellency like a little refreshment?" he said.

"It's a bad business," said the general without answering him, "our men
have been wasting time."

"Hadn't I better ride over, your excellency?" asked Nesvitski.

"Yes, please do," answered the general, and he repeated the order that
had already once been given in detail: "and tell the hussars that
they are to cross last and to fire the bridge as I ordered; and the
inflammable material on the bridge must be reinspected."

"Very good," answered Nesvitski.

He called the Cossack with his horse, told him to put away the knapsack
and flask, and swung his heavy person easily into the saddle.

"I'll really call in on the nuns," he said to the officers who watched
him smilingly, and he rode off by the winding path down the hill.

"Now then, let's see how far it will carry, Captain. Just try!" said the
general, turning to an artillery officer. "Have a little fun to pass the
time."

"Crew, to your guns!" commanded the officer.

In a moment the men came running gaily from their campfires and began
loading.

"One!" came the command.

Number one jumped briskly aside. The gun rang out with a deafening
metallic roar, and a whistling grenade flew above the heads of our
troops below the hill and fell far short of the enemy, a little smoke
showing the spot where it burst.

The faces of officers and men brightened up at the sound. Everyone got
up and began watching the movements of our troops below, as plainly
visible as if but a stone's throw away, and the movements of the
approaching enemy farther off. At the same instant the sun came fully
out from behind the clouds, and the clear sound of the solitary shot
and the brilliance of the bright sunshine merged in a single joyous and
spirited impression.





CHAPTER VII


Two of the enemy's shots had already flown across the bridge, where
there was a crush. Halfway across stood Prince Nesvitski, who had
alighted from his horse and whose big body was jammed against the
railings. He looked back laughing to the Cossack who stood a few
steps behind him holding two horses by their bridles. Each time Prince
Nesvitski tried to move on, soldiers and carts pushed him back again and
pressed him against the railings, and all he could do was to smile.

"What a fine fellow you are, friend!" said the Cossack to a convoy
soldier with a wagon, who was pressing onto the infantrymen who were
crowded together close to his wheels and his horses. "What a fellow! You
can't wait a moment! Don't you see the general wants to pass?"

But the convoyman took no notice of the word "general" and shouted at
the soldiers who were blocking his way. "Hi there, boys! Keep to the
left! Wait a bit." But the soldiers, crowded together shoulder to
shoulder, their bayonets interlocking, moved over the bridge in a dense
mass. Looking down over the rails Prince Nesvitski saw the rapid, noisy
little waves of the Enns, which rippling and eddying round the piles of
the bridge chased each other along. Looking on the bridge he saw equally
uniform living waves of soldiers, shoulder straps, covered shakos,
knapsacks, bayonets, long muskets, and, under the shakos, faces with
broad cheekbones, sunken cheeks, and listless tired expressions, and
feet that moved through the sticky mud that covered the planks of the
bridge. Sometimes through the monotonous waves of men, like a fleck of
white foam on the waves of the Enns, an officer, in a cloak and with
a type of face different from that of the men, squeezed his way along;
sometimes like a chip of wood whirling in the river, an hussar on foot,
an orderly, or a townsman was carried through the waves of infantry; and
sometimes like a log floating down the river, an officers' or company's
baggage wagon, piled high, leather covered, and hemmed in on all sides,
moved across the bridge.

"It's as if a dam had burst," said the Cossack hopelessly. "Are there
many more of you to come?"

"A million all but one!" replied a waggish soldier in a torn coat, with
a wink, and passed on followed by another, an old man.

"If he" (he meant the enemy) "begins popping at the bridge now,"
said the old soldier dismally to a comrade, "you'll forget to scratch
yourself."

That soldier passed on, and after him came another sitting on a cart.

"Where the devil have the leg bands been shoved to?" said an orderly,
running behind the cart and fumbling in the back of it.

And he also passed on with the wagon. Then came some merry soldiers who
had evidently been drinking.

"And then, old fellow, he gives him one in the teeth with the butt end
of his gun..." a soldier whose greatcoat was well tucked up said gaily,
with a wide swing of his arm.

"Yes, the ham was just delicious..." answered another with a loud laugh.
And they, too, passed on, so that Nesvitski did not learn who had been
struck on the teeth, or what the ham had to do with it.

"Bah! How they scurry. He just sends a ball and they think they'll all
be killed," a sergeant was saying angrily and reproachfully.

"As it flies past me, Daddy, the ball I mean," said a young soldier with
an enormous mouth, hardly refraining from laughing, "I felt like dying
of fright. I did, 'pon my word, I got that frightened!" said he, as if
bragging of having been frightened.

That one also passed. Then followed a cart unlike any that had gone
before. It was a German cart with a pair of horses led by a German, and
seemed loaded with a whole houseful of effects. A fine brindled cow with
a large udder was attached to the cart behind. A woman with an unweaned
baby, an old woman, and a healthy German girl with bright red cheeks
were sitting on some feather beds. Evidently these fugitives were
allowed to pass by special permission. The eyes of all the soldiers
turned toward the women, and while the vehicle was passing at foot pace
all the soldiers' remarks related to the two young ones. Every face bore
almost the same smile, expressing unseemly thoughts about the women.

"Just see, the German sausage is making tracks, too!"

"Sell me the missis," said another soldier, addressing the German, who,
angry and frightened, strode energetically along with downcast eyes.

"See how smart she's made herself! Oh, the devils!"

"There, Fedotov, you should be quartered on them!"

"I have seen as much before now, mate!"

"Where are you going?" asked an infantry officer who was eating an
apple, also half smiling as he looked at the handsome girl.

The German closed his eyes, signifying that he did not understand.

"Take it if you like," said the officer, giving the girl an apple.

The girl smiled and took it. Nesvitski like the rest of the men on the
bridge did not take his eyes off the women till they had passed. When
they had gone by, the same stream of soldiers followed, with the same
kind of talk, and at last all stopped. As often happens, the horses of
a convoy wagon became restive at the end of the bridge, and the whole
crowd had to wait.

"And why are they stopping? There's no proper order!" said the soldiers.
"Where are you shoving to? Devil take you! Can't you wait? It'll
be worse if he fires the bridge. See, here's an officer jammed in
too"--different voices were saying in the crowd, as the men looked at
one another, and all pressed toward the exit from the bridge.

Looking down at the waters of the Enns under the bridge, Nesvitski
suddenly heard a sound new to him, of something swiftly approaching...
something big, that splashed into the water.

"Just see where it carries to!" a soldier near by said sternly, looking
round at the sound.

"Encouraging us to get along quicker," said another uneasily.

The crowd moved on again. Nesvitski realized that it was a cannon ball.

"Hey, Cossack, my horse!" he said. "Now, then, you there! get out of the
way! Make way!"

With great difficulty he managed to get to his horse, and shouting
continually he moved on. The soldiers squeezed themselves to make way
for him, but again pressed on him so that they jammed his leg, and those
nearest him were not to blame for they were themselves pressed still
harder from behind.

"Nesvitski, Nesvitski! you numskull!" came a hoarse voice from behind
him.

Nesvitski looked round and saw, some fifteen paces away but separated by
the living mass of moving infantry, Vaska Denisov, red and shaggy, with
his cap on the back of his black head and a cloak hanging jauntily over
his shoulder.

"Tell these devils, these fiends, to let me pass!" shouted Denisov
evidently in a fit of rage, his coal-black eyes with their bloodshot
whites glittering and rolling as he waved his sheathed saber in a small
bare hand as red as his face.

"Ah, Vaska!" joyfully replied Nesvitski. "What's up with you?"

"The squadwon can't pass," shouted Vaska Denisov, showing his white
teeth fiercely and spurring his black thoroughbred Arab, which twitched
its ears as the bayonets touched it, and snorted, spurting white foam
from his bit, tramping the planks of the bridge with his hoofs, and
apparently ready to jump over the railings had his rider let him. "What
is this? They're like sheep! Just like sheep! Out of the way!... Let
us pass!... Stop there, you devil with the cart! I'll hack you with my
saber!" he shouted, actually drawing his saber from its scabbard and
flourishing it.

The soldiers crowded against one another with terrified faces, and
Denisov joined Nesvitski.

"How's it you're not drunk today?" said Nesvitski when the other had
ridden up to him.

"They don't even give one time to dwink!" answered Vaska Denisov. "They
keep dwagging the wegiment to and fwo all day. If they mean to fight,
let's fight. But the devil knows what this is."

"What a dandy you are today!" said Nesvitski, looking at Denisov's new
cloak and saddlecloth.

Denisov smiled, took out of his sabretache a handkerchief that diffused
a smell of perfume, and put it to Nesvitski's nose.

"Of course. I'm going into action! I've shaved, bwushed my teeth, and
scented myself."

The imposing figure of Nesvitski followed by his Cossack, and
the determination of Denisov who flourished his sword and shouted
frantically, had such an effect that they managed to squeeze through
to the farther side of the bridge and stopped the infantry. Beside the
bridge Nesvitski found the colonel to whom he had to deliver the order,
and having done this he rode back.

Having cleared the way Denisov stopped at the end of the bridge.
Carelessly holding in his stallion that was neighing and pawing the
ground, eager to rejoin its fellows, he watched his squadron draw
nearer. Then the clang of hoofs, as of several horses galloping,
resounded on the planks of the bridge, and the squadron, officers in
front and men four abreast, spread across the bridge and began to emerge
on his side of it.

The infantry who had been stopped crowded near the bridge in the
trampled mud and gazed with that particular feeling of ill-will,
estrangement, and ridicule with which troops of different arms usually
encounter one another at the clean, smart hussars who moved past them in
regular order.

"Smart lads! Only fit for a fair!" said one.

"What good are they? They're led about just for show!" remarked another.

"Don't kick up the dust, you infantry!" jested an hussar whose prancing
horse had splashed mud over some foot soldiers.

"I'd like to put you on a two days' march with a knapsack! Your fine
cords would soon get a bit rubbed," said an infantryman, wiping the mud
off his face with his sleeve. "Perched up there, you're more like a bird
than a man."

"There now, Zikin, they ought to put you on a horse. You'd look fine,"
said a corporal, chaffing a thin little soldier who bent under the
weight of his knapsack.

"Take a stick between your legs, that'll suit you for a horse!" the
hussar shouted back.





CHAPTER VIII


The last of the infantry hurriedly crossed the bridge, squeezing
together as they approached it as if passing through a funnel. At last
the baggage wagons had all crossed, the crush was less, and the last
battalion came onto the bridge. Only Denisov's squadron of hussars
remained on the farther side of the bridge facing the enemy, who could
be seen from the hill on the opposite bank but was not yet visible from
the bridge, for the horizon as seen from the valley through which the
river flowed was formed by the rising ground only half a mile away.
At the foot of the hill lay wasteland over which a few groups of our
Cossack scouts were moving. Suddenly on the road at the top of the high
ground, artillery and troops in blue uniform were seen. These were the
French. A group of Cossack scouts retired down the hill at a trot. All
the officers and men of Denisov's squadron, though they tried to talk of
other things and to look in other directions, thought only of what
was there on the hilltop, and kept constantly looking at the patches
appearing on the skyline, which they knew to be the enemy's troops. The
weather had cleared again since noon and the sun was descending brightly
upon the Danube and the dark hills around it. It was calm, and at
intervals the bugle calls and the shouts of the enemy could be heard
from the hill. There was no one now between the squadron and the enemy
except a few scattered skirmishers. An empty space of some seven hundred
yards was all that separated them. The enemy ceased firing, and that
stern, threatening, inaccessible, and intangible line which separates
two hostile armies was all the more clearly felt.

"One step beyond that boundary line which resembles the line dividing
the living from the dead lies uncertainty, suffering, and death. And
what is there? Who is there?--there beyond that field, that tree, that
roof lit up by the sun? No one knows, but one wants to know. You fear
and yet long to cross that line, and know that sooner or later it must
be crossed and you will have to find out what is there, just as you will
inevitably have to learn what lies the other side of death. But you are
strong, healthy, cheerful, and excited, and are surrounded by other such
excitedly animated and healthy men." So thinks, or at any rate feels,
anyone who comes in sight of the enemy, and that feeling gives a
particular glamour and glad keenness of impression to everything that
takes place at such moments.

On the high ground where the enemy was, the smoke of a cannon rose,
and a ball flew whistling over the heads of the hussar squadron. The
officers who had been standing together rode off to their places. The
hussars began carefully aligning their horses. Silence fell on the whole
squadron. All were looking at the enemy in front and at the squadron
commander, awaiting the word of command. A second and a third cannon
ball flew past. Evidently they were firing at the hussars, but the balls
with rapid rhythmic whistle flew over the heads of the horsemen and fell
somewhere beyond them. The hussars did not look round, but at the sound
of each shot, as at the word of command, the whole squadron with its
rows of faces so alike yet so different, holding its breath while the
ball flew past, rose in the stirrups and sank back again. The soldiers
without turning their heads glanced at one another, curious to see their
comrades' impression. Every face, from Denisov's to that of the bugler,
showed one common expression of conflict, irritation, and excitement,
around chin and mouth. The quartermaster frowned, looking at the
soldiers as if threatening to punish them. Cadet Mironov ducked every
time a ball flew past. Rostov on the left flank, mounted on his Rook--a
handsome horse despite its game leg--had the happy air of a schoolboy
called up before a large audience for an examination in which he feels
sure he will distinguish himself. He was glancing at everyone with a
clear, bright expression, as if asking them to notice how calmly he sat
under fire. But despite himself, on his face too that same indication of
something new and stern showed round the mouth.

"Who's that curtseying there? Cadet Miwonov! That's not wight! Look at
me," cried Denisov who, unable to keep still on one spot, kept turning
his horse in front of the squadron.

The black, hairy, snub-nosed face of Vaska Denisov, and his whole short
sturdy figure with the sinewy hairy hand and stumpy fingers in which
he held the hilt of his naked saber, looked just as it usually did,
especially toward evening when he had emptied his second bottle; he was
only redder than usual. With his shaggy head thrown back like birds when
they drink, pressing his spurs mercilessly into the sides of his good
horse, Bedouin, and sitting as though falling backwards in the saddle,
he galloped to the other flank of the squadron and shouted in a hoarse
voice to the men to look to their pistols. He rode up to Kirsten. The
staff captain on his broad-backed, steady mare came at a walk to meet
him. His face with its long mustache was serious as always, only his
eyes were brighter than usual.

"Well, what about it?" said he to Denisov. "It won't come to a fight.
You'll see--we shall retire."

"The devil only knows what they're about!" muttered Denisov. "Ah,
Wostov," he cried noticing the cadet's bright face, "you've got it at
last."

And he smiled approvingly, evidently pleased with the cadet. Rostov felt
perfectly happy. Just then the commander appeared on the bridge. Denisov
galloped up to him.

"Your excellency! Let us attack them! I'll dwive them off."

"Attack indeed!" said the colonel in a bored voice, puckering up his
face as if driving off a troublesome fly. "And why are you stopping
here? Don't you see the skirmishers are retreating? Lead the squadron
back."

The squadron crossed the bridge and drew out of range of fire without
having lost a single man. The second squadron that had been in the front
line followed them across and the last Cossacks quitted the farther side
of the river.

The two Pavlograd squadrons, having crossed the bridge, retired up the
hill one after the other. Their colonel, Karl Bogdanich Schubert, came
up to Denisov's squadron and rode at a footpace not far from Rostov,
without taking any notice of him although they were now meeting for the
first time since their encounter concerning Telyanin. Rostov, feeling
that he was at the front and in the power of a man toward whom he now
admitted that he had been to blame, did not lift his eyes from the
colonel's athletic back, his nape covered with light hair, and his red
neck. It seemed to Rostov that Bogdanich was only pretending not to
notice him, and that his whole aim now was to test the cadet's courage,
so he drew himself up and looked around him merrily; then it seemed to
him that Bogdanich rode so near in order to show him his courage. Next
he thought that his enemy would send the squadron on a desperate attack
just to punish him--Rostov. Then he imagined how, after the attack,
Bogdanich would come up to him as he lay wounded and would magnanimously
extend the hand of reconciliation.

The high-shouldered figure of Zherkov, familiar to the Pavlograds as he
had but recently left their regiment, rode up to the colonel. After his
dismissal from headquarters Zherkov had not remained in the regiment,
saying he was not such a fool as to slave at the front when he could
get more rewards by doing nothing on the staff, and had succeeded in
attaching himself as an orderly officer to Prince Bagration. He now came
to his former chief with an order from the commander of the rear guard.

"Colonel," he said, addressing Rostov's enemy with an air of gloomy
gravity and glancing round at his comrades, "there is an order to stop
and fire the bridge."

"An order to who?" asked the colonel morosely.

"I don't myself know 'to who,'" replied the cornet in a serious tone,
"but the prince told me to 'go and tell the colonel that the hussars
must return quickly and fire the bridge.'"

Zherkov was followed by an officer of the suite who rode up to the
colonel of hussars with the same order. After him the stout Nesvitski
came galloping up on a Cossack horse that could scarcely carry his
weight.

"How's this, Colonel?" he shouted as he approached. "I told you to fire
the bridge, and now someone has gone and blundered; they are all beside
themselves over there and one can't make anything out."

The colonel deliberately stopped the regiment and turned to Nesvitski.

"You spoke to me of inflammable material," said he, "but you said
nothing about firing it."

"But, my dear sir," said Nesvitski as he drew up, taking off his cap and
smoothing his hair wet with perspiration with his plump hand, "wasn't I
telling you to fire the bridge, when inflammable material had been put
in position?"

"I am not your 'dear sir,' Mr. Staff Officer, and you did not tell me to
burn the bridge! I know the service, and it is my habit orders strictly
to obey. You said the bridge would be burned, but who would it burn, I
could not know by the holy spirit!"

"Ah, that's always the way!" said Nesvitski with a wave of the hand.
"How did you get here?" said he, turning to Zherkov.

"On the same business. But you are damp! Let me wring you out!"

"You were saying, Mr. Staff Officer..." continued the colonel in an
offended tone.

"Colonel," interrupted the officer of the suite, "You must be quick or
the enemy will bring up his guns to use grapeshot."

The colonel looked silently at the officer of the suite, at the stout
staff officer, and at Zherkov, and he frowned.

"I will the bridge fire," he said in a solemn tone as if to announce
that in spite of all the unpleasantness he had to endure he would still
do the right thing.

Striking his horse with his long muscular legs as if it were to blame
for everything, the colonel moved forward and ordered the second
squadron, that in which Rostov was serving under Denisov, to return to
the bridge.

"There, it's just as I thought," said Rostov to himself. "He wishes to
test me!" His heart contracted and the blood rushed to his face. "Let
him see whether I am a coward!" he thought.

Again on all the bright faces of the squadron the serious expression
appeared that they had worn when under fire. Rostov watched his enemy,
the colonel, closely--to find in his face confirmation of his own
conjecture, but the colonel did not once glance at Rostov, and looked as
he always did when at the front, solemn and stern. Then came the word of
command.

"Look sharp! Look sharp!" several voices repeated around him.

Their sabers catching in the bridles and their spurs jingling, the
hussars hastily dismounted, not knowing what they were to do. The men
were crossing themselves. Rostov no longer looked at the colonel, he
had no time. He was afraid of falling behind the hussars, so much afraid
that his heart stood still. His hand trembled as he gave his horse into
an orderly's charge, and he felt the blood rush to his heart with a
thud. Denisov rode past him, leaning back and shouting something. Rostov
saw nothing but the hussars running all around him, their spurs catching
and their sabers clattering.

"Stretchers!" shouted someone behind him.

Rostov did not think what this call for stretchers meant; he ran on,
trying only to be ahead of the others; but just at the bridge, not
looking at the ground, he came on some sticky, trodden mud, stumbled,
and fell on his hands. The others outstripped him.

"At boss zides, Captain," he heard the voice of the colonel, who,
having ridden ahead, had pulled up his horse near the bridge, with a
triumphant, cheerful face.

Rostov wiping his muddy hands on his breeches looked at his enemy and
was about to run on, thinking that the farther he went to the front the
better. But Bogdanich, without looking at or recognizing Rostov, shouted
to him:

"Who's that running on the middle of the bridge? To the right! Come
back, Cadet!" he cried angrily; and turning to Denisov, who, showing off
his courage, had ridden on to the planks of the bridge:

"Why run risks, Captain? You should dismount," he said.

"Oh, every bullet has its billet," answered Vaska Denisov, turning in
his saddle.


Meanwhile Nesvitski, Zherkov, and the officer of the suite were standing
together out of range of the shots, watching, now the small group of
men with yellow shakos, dark-green jackets braided with cord, and blue
riding breeches, who were swarming near the bridge, and then at what was
approaching in the distance from the opposite side--the blue uniforms
and groups with horses, easily recognizable as artillery.

"Will they burn the bridge or not? Who'll get there first? Will they get
there and fire the bridge or will the French get within grapeshot range
and wipe them out?" These were the questions each man of the troops
on the high ground above the bridge involuntarily asked himself with a
sinking heart--watching the bridge and the hussars in the bright evening
light and the blue tunics advancing from the other side with their
bayonets and guns.

"Ugh. The hussars will get it hot!" said Nesvitski; "they are within
grapeshot range now."

"He shouldn't have taken so many men," said the officer of the suite.

"True enough," answered Nesvitski; "two smart fellows could have done
the job just as well."

"Ah, your excellency," put in Zherkov, his eyes fixed on the hussars,
but still with that naive air that made it impossible to know whether he
was speaking in jest or in earnest. "Ah, your excellency! How you look
at things! Send two men? And who then would give us the Vladimir medal
and ribbon? But now, even if they do get peppered, the squadron may be
recommended for honors and he may get a ribbon. Our Bogdanich knows how
things are done."

"There now!" said the officer of the suite, "that's grapeshot."

He pointed to the French guns, the limbers of which were being detached
and hurriedly removed.

On the French side, amid the groups with cannon, a cloud of smoke
appeared, then a second and a third almost simultaneously, and at the
moment when the first report was heard a fourth was seen. Then two
reports one after another, and a third.

"Oh! Oh!" groaned Nesvitski as if in fierce pain, seizing the officer of
the suite by the arm. "Look! A man has fallen! Fallen, fallen!"

"Two, I think."

"If I were Tsar I would never go to war," said Nesvitski, turning away.

The French guns were hastily reloaded. The infantry in their blue
uniforms advanced toward the bridge at a run. Smoke appeared again
but at irregular intervals, and grapeshot cracked and rattled onto the
bridge. But this time Nesvitski could not see what was happening there,
as a dense cloud of smoke arose from it. The hussars had succeeded in
setting it on fire and the French batteries were now firing at them, no
longer to hinder them but because the guns were trained and there was
someone to fire at.

The French had time to fire three rounds of grapeshot before the hussars
got back to their horses. Two were misdirected and the shot went too
high, but the last round fell in the midst of a group of hussars and
knocked three of them over.

Rostov, absorbed by his relations with Bogdanich, had paused on the
bridge not knowing what to do. There was no one to hew down (as he
had always imagined battles to himself), nor could he help to fire the
bridge because he had not brought any burning straw with him like the
other soldiers. He stood looking about him, when suddenly he heard a
rattle on the bridge as if nuts were being spilt, and the hussar nearest
to him fell against the rails with a groan. Rostov ran up to him with
the others. Again someone shouted, "Stretchers!" Four men seized the
hussar and began lifting him.

"Oooh! For Christ's sake let me alone!" cried the wounded man, but still
he was lifted and laid on the stretcher.

Nicholas Rostov turned away and, as if searching for something, gazed
into the distance, at the waters of the Danube, at the sky, and at the
sun. How beautiful the sky looked; how blue, how calm, and how deep!
How bright and glorious was the setting sun! With what soft glitter the
waters of the distant Danube shone. And fairer still were the faraway
blue mountains beyond the river, the nunnery, the mysterious gorges, and
the pine forests veiled in the mist of their summits... There was peace
and happiness... "I should wish for nothing else, nothing, if only I
were there," thought Rostov. "In myself alone and in that sunshine there
is so much happiness; but here... groans, suffering, fear, and this
uncertainty and hurry... There--they are shouting again, and again are
all running back somewhere, and I shall run with them, and it, death, is
here above me and around... Another instant and I shall never again see
the sun, this water, that gorge!..."

At that instant the sun began to hide behind the clouds, and other
stretchers came into view before Rostov. And the fear of death and of
the stretchers, and love of the sun and of life, all merged into one
feeling of sickening agitation.

"O Lord God! Thou who art in that heaven, save, forgive, and protect
me!" Rostov whispered.

The hussars ran back to the men who held their horses; their voices
sounded louder and calmer, the stretchers disappeared from sight.

"Well, fwiend? So you've smelt powdah!" shouted Vaska Denisov just above
his ear.

"It's all over; but I am a coward--yes, a coward!" thought Rostov, and
sighing deeply he took Rook, his horse, which stood resting one foot,
from the orderly and began to mount.

"Was that grapeshot?" he asked Denisov.

"Yes and no mistake!" cried Denisov. "You worked like wegular bwicks and
it's nasty work! An attack's pleasant work! Hacking away at the dogs!
But this sort of thing is the very devil, with them shooting at you like
a target."

And Denisov rode up to a group that had stopped near Rostov, composed of
the colonel, Nesvitski, Zherkov, and the officer from the suite.

"Well, it seems that no one has noticed," thought Rostov. And this was
true. No one had taken any notice, for everyone knew the sensation which
the cadet under fire for the first time had experienced.

"Here's something for you to report," said Zherkov. "See if I don't get
promoted to a sublieutenancy."

"Inform the prince that I the bridge fired!" said the colonel
triumphantly and gaily.

"And if he asks about the losses?"

"A trifle," said the colonel in his bass voice: "two hussars wounded,
and one knocked out," he added, unable to restrain a happy smile, and
pronouncing the phrase "knocked out" with ringing distinctness.





CHAPTER IX


Pursued by the French army of a hundred thousand men under the command
of Bonaparte, encountering a population that was unfriendly to it,
losing confidence in its allies, suffering from shortness of supplies,
and compelled to act under conditions of war unlike anything that had
been foreseen, the Russian army of thirty-five thousand men commanded
by Kutuzov was hurriedly retreating along the Danube, stopping where
overtaken by the enemy and fighting rearguard actions only as far as
necessary to enable it to retreat without losing its heavy equipment.
There had been actions at Lambach, Amstetten, and Melk; but despite the
courage and endurance--acknowledged even by the enemy--with which the
Russians fought, the only consequence of these actions was a yet more
rapid retreat. Austrian troops that had escaped capture at Ulm and
had joined Kutuzov at Braunau now separated from the Russian army,
and Kutuzov was left with only his own weak and exhausted forces.
The defense of Vienna was no longer to be thought of. Instead of an
offensive, the plan of which, carefully prepared in accord with the
modern science of strategics, had been handed to Kutuzov when he was in
Vienna by the Austrian Hofkriegsrath, the sole and almost unattainable
aim remaining for him was to effect a junction with the forces that were
advancing from Russia, without losing his army as Mack had done at Ulm.

On the twenty-eighth of October Kutuzov with his army crossed to the
left bank of the Danube and took up a position for the first time
with the river between himself and the main body of the French. On the
thirtieth he attacked Mortier's division, which was on the left bank,
and broke it up. In this action for the first time trophies were taken:
banners, cannon, and two enemy generals. For the first time, after a
fortnight's retreat, the Russian troops had halted and after a fight had
not only held the field but had repulsed the French. Though the troops
were ill-clad, exhausted, and had lost a third of their number in
killed, wounded, sick, and stragglers; though a number of sick and
wounded had been abandoned on the other side of the Danube with a letter
in which Kutuzov entrusted them to the humanity of the enemy; and
though the big hospitals and the houses in Krems converted into military
hospitals could no longer accommodate all the sick and wounded, yet the
stand made at Krems and the victory over Mortier raised the spirits of
the army considerably. Throughout the whole army and at headquarters
most joyful though erroneous rumors were rife of the imaginary approach
of columns from Russia, of some victory gained by the Austrians, and of
the retreat of the frightened Bonaparte.

Prince Andrew during the battle had been in attendance on the Austrian
General Schmidt, who was killed in the action. His horse had been
wounded under him and his own arm slightly grazed by a bullet. As a mark
of the commander in chief's special favor he was sent with the news of
this victory to the Austrian court, now no longer at Vienna (which was
threatened by the French) but at Brunn. Despite his apparently delicate
build Prince Andrew could endure physical fatigue far better than many
very muscular men, and on the night of the battle, having arrived at
Krems excited but not weary, with dispatches from Dokhturov to Kutuzov,
he was sent immediately with a special dispatch to Brunn. To be so sent
meant not only a reward but an important step toward promotion.

The night was dark but starry, the road showed black in the snow that
had fallen the previous day--the day of the battle. Reviewing his
impressions of the recent battle, picturing pleasantly to himself the
impression his news of a victory would create, or recalling the send-off
given him by the commander in chief and his fellow officers, Prince
Andrew was galloping along in a post chaise enjoying the feelings of a
man who has at length begun to attain a long-desired happiness. As soon
as he closed his eyes his ears seemed filled with the rattle of the
wheels and the sensation of victory. Then he began to imagine that
the Russians were running away and that he himself was killed, but he
quickly roused himself with a feeling of joy, as if learning afresh that
this was not so but that on the contrary the French had run away. He
again recalled all the details of the victory and his own calm courage
during the battle, and feeling reassured he dozed off.... The dark
starry night was followed by a bright cheerful morning. The snow was
thawing in the sunshine, the horses galloped quickly, and on both sides
of the road were forests of different kinds, fields, and villages.

At one of the post stations he overtook a convoy of Russian wounded.
The Russian officer in charge of the transport lolled back in the front
cart, shouting and scolding a soldier with coarse abuse. In each of
the long German carts six or more pale, dirty, bandaged men were being
jolted over the stony road. Some of them were talking (he heard Russian
words), others were eating bread; the more severely wounded looked
silently, with the languid interest of sick children, at the envoy
hurrying past them.

Prince Andrew told his driver to stop, and asked a soldier in what
action they had been wounded. "Day before yesterday, on the Danube,"
answered the soldier. Prince Andrew took out his purse and gave the
soldier three gold pieces.

"That's for them all," he said to the officer who came up.

"Get well soon, lads!" he continued, turning to the soldiers. "There's
plenty to do still."

"What news, sir?" asked the officer, evidently anxious to start a
conversation.

"Good news!... Go on!" he shouted to the driver, and they galloped on.

It was already quite dark when Prince Andrew rattled over the paved
streets of Brunn and found himself surrounded by high buildings, the
lights of shops, houses, and street lamps, fine carriages, and all that
atmosphere of a large and active town which is always so attractive to a
soldier after camp life. Despite his rapid journey and sleepless night,
Prince Andrew when he drove up to the palace felt even more vigorous and
alert than he had done the day before. Only his eyes gleamed feverishly
and his thoughts followed one another with extraordinary clearness and
rapidity. He again vividly recalled the details of the battle, no longer
dim, but definite and in the concise form in which he imagined himself
stating them to the Emperor Francis. He vividly imagined the casual
questions that might be put to him and the answers he would give. He
expected to be at once presented to the Emperor. At the chief entrance
to the palace, however, an official came running out to meet him, and
learning that he was a special messenger led him to another entrance.

"To the right from the corridor, Euer Hochgeboren! There you will find
the adjutant on duty," said the official. "He will conduct you to the
Minister of War."

The adjutant on duty, meeting Prince Andrew, asked him to wait, and went
in to the Minister of War. Five minutes later he returned and bowing
with particular courtesy ushered Prince Andrew before him along a
corridor to the cabinet where the Minister of War was at work. The
adjutant by his elaborate courtesy appeared to wish to ward off any
attempt at familiarity on the part of the Russian messenger.

Prince Andrew's joyous feeling was considerably weakened as he
approached the door of the minister's room. He felt offended, and
without his noticing it the feeling of offense immediately turned into
one of disdain which was quite uncalled for. His fertile mind instantly
suggested to him a point of view which gave him a right to despise the
adjutant and the minister. "Away from the smell of powder, they
probably think it easy to gain victories!" he thought. His eyes narrowed
disdainfully, he entered the room of the Minister of War with peculiarly
deliberate steps. This feeling of disdain was heightened when he saw the
minister seated at a large table reading some papers and making pencil
notes on them, and for the first two or three minutes taking no notice
of his arrival. A wax candle stood at each side of the minister's bent
bald head with its gray temples. He went on reading to the end, without
raising his eyes at the opening of the door and the sound of footsteps.

"Take this and deliver it," said he to his adjutant, handing him the
papers and still taking no notice of the special messenger.

Prince Andrew felt that either the actions of Kutuzov's army interested
the Minister of War less than any of the other matters he was
concerned with, or he wanted to give the Russian special messenger that
impression. "But that is a matter of perfect indifference to me," he
thought. The minister drew the remaining papers together, arranged them
evenly, and then raised his head. He had an intellectual and distinctive
head, but the instant he turned to Prince Andrew the firm, intelligent
expression on his face changed in a way evidently deliberate and
habitual to him. His face took on the stupid artificial smile (which
does not even attempt to hide its artificiality) of a man who is
continually receiving many petitioners one after another.

"From General Field Marshal Kutuzov?" he asked. "I hope it is good news?
There has been an encounter with Mortier? A victory? It was high time!"

He took the dispatch which was addressed to him and began to read it
with a mournful expression.

"Oh, my God! My God! Schmidt!" he exclaimed in German. "What a calamity!
What a calamity!"

Having glanced through the dispatch he laid it on the table and looked
at Prince Andrew, evidently considering something.

"Ah what a calamity! You say the affair was decisive? But Mortier is
not captured." Again he pondered. "I am very glad you have brought good
news, though Schmidt's death is a heavy price to pay for the victory.
His Majesty will no doubt wish to see you, but not today. I thank
you! You must have a rest. Be at the levee tomorrow after the parade.
However, I will let you know."

The stupid smile, which had left his face while he was speaking,
reappeared.

"Au revoir! Thank you very much. His Majesty will probably desire to see
you," he added, bowing his head.

When Prince Andrew left the palace he felt that all the interest
and happiness the victory had afforded him had been now left in the
indifferent hands of the Minister of War and the polite adjutant. The
whole tenor of his thoughts instantaneously changed; the battle seemed
the memory of a remote event long past.





CHAPTER X


Prince Andrew stayed at Brunn with Bilibin, a Russian acquaintance of
his in the diplomatic service.

"Ah, my dear prince! I could not have a more welcome visitor," said
Bilibin as he came out to meet Prince Andrew. "Franz, put the prince's
things in my bedroom," said he to the servant who was ushering Bolkonski
in. "So you're a messenger of victory, eh? Splendid! And I am sitting
here ill, as you see."

After washing and dressing, Prince Andrew came into the diplomat's
luxurious study and sat down to the dinner prepared for him. Bilibin
settled down comfortably beside the fire.

After his journey and the campaign during which he had been deprived of
all the comforts of cleanliness and all the refinements of life, Prince
Andrew felt a pleasant sense of repose among luxurious surroundings such
as he had been accustomed to from childhood. Besides it was pleasant,
after his reception by the Austrians, to speak if not in Russian
(for they were speaking French) at least with a Russian who would, he
supposed, share the general Russian antipathy to the Austrians which was
then particularly strong.

Bilibin was a man of thirty-five, a bachelor, and of the same circle as
Prince Andrew. They had known each other previously in Petersburg, but
had become more intimate when Prince Andrew was in Vienna with Kutuzov.
Just as Prince Andrew was a young man who gave promise of rising high
in the military profession, so to an even greater extent Bilibin gave
promise of rising in his diplomatic career. He still a young man but
no longer a young diplomat, as he had entered the service at the age
of sixteen, had been in Paris and Copenhagen, and now held a rather
important post in Vienna. Both the foreign minister and our ambassador
in Vienna knew him and valued him. He was not one of those many
diplomats who are esteemed because they have certain negative qualities,
avoid doing certain things, and speak French. He was one of those,
who, liking work, knew how to do it, and despite his indolence would
sometimes spend a whole night at his writing table. He worked well
whatever the import of his work. It was not the question "What for?"
but the question "How?" that interested him. What the diplomatic matter
might be he did not care, but it gave him great pleasure to prepare a
circular, memorandum, or report, skillfully, pointedly, and elegantly.
Bilibin's services were valued not only for what he wrote, but also for
his skill in dealing and conversing with those in the highest spheres.

Bilibin liked conversation as he liked work, only when it could be made
elegantly witty. In society he always awaited an opportunity to say
something striking and took part in a conversation only when that was
possible. His conversation was always sprinkled with wittily original,
finished phrases of general interest. These sayings were prepared in the
inner laboratory of his mind in a portable form as if intentionally, so
that insignificant society people might carry them from drawing room to
drawing room. And, in fact, Bilibin's witticisms were hawked about
in the Viennese drawing rooms and often had an influence on matters
considered important.

His thin, worn, sallow face was covered with deep wrinkles, which always
looked as clean and well washed as the tips of one's fingers after a
Russian bath. The movement of these wrinkles formed the principal play
of expression on his face. Now his forehead would pucker into deep folds
and his eyebrows were lifted, then his eyebrows would descend and
deep wrinkles would crease his cheeks. His small, deep-set eyes always
twinkled and looked out straight.

"Well, now tell me about your exploits," said he.

Bolkonski, very modestly without once mentioning himself, described the
engagement and his reception by the Minister of War.

"They received me and my news as one receives a dog in a game of
skittles," said he in conclusion.

Bilibin smiled and the wrinkles on his face disappeared.

"Cependant, mon cher," he remarked, examining his nails from a distance
and puckering the skin above his left eye, "malgre la haute estime que
je professe pour the Orthodox Russian army, j'avoue que votre victoire
n'est pas des plus victorieuses." *


     * "But my dear fellow, with all my respect for the Orthodox
     Russian army, I must say that your victory was not
     particularly victorious."


He went on talking in this way in French, uttering only those words in
Russian on which he wished to put a contemptuous emphasis.

"Come now! You with all your forces fall on the unfortunate Mortier
and his one division, and even then Mortier slips through your fingers!
Where's the victory?"

"But seriously," said Prince Andrew, "we can at any rate say without
boasting that it was a little better than at Ulm..."

"Why didn't you capture one, just one, marshal for us?"

"Because not everything happens as one expects or with the smoothness of
a parade. We had expected, as I told you, to get at their rear by seven
in the morning but had not reached it by five in the afternoon."

"And why didn't you do it at seven in the morning? You ought to have
been there at seven in the morning," returned Bilibin with a smile. "You
ought to have been there at seven in the morning."

"Why did you not succeed in impressing on Bonaparte by diplomatic
methods that he had better leave Genoa alone?" retorted Prince Andrew in
the same tone.

"I know," interrupted Bilibin, "you're thinking it's very easy to take
marshals, sitting on a sofa by the fire! That is true, but still why
didn't you capture him? So don't be surprised if not only the Minister
of War but also his Most August Majesty the Emperor and King Francis
is not much delighted by your victory. Even I, a poor secretary of the
Russian Embassy, do not feel any need in token of my joy to give my
Franz a thaler, or let him go with his Liebchen to the Prater... True,
we have no Prater here..."

He looked straight at Prince Andrew and suddenly unwrinkled his
forehead.

"It is now my turn to ask you 'why?' mon cher," said Bolkonski. "I
confess I do not understand: perhaps there are diplomatic subtleties
here beyond my feeble intelligence, but I can't make it out. Mack loses
a whole army, the Archduke Ferdinand and the Archduke Karl give no signs
of life and make blunder after blunder. Kutuzov alone at last gains a
real victory, destroying the spell of the invincibility of the French,
and the Minister of War does not even care to hear the details."

"That's just it, my dear fellow. You see it's hurrah for the Tsar, for
Russia, for the Orthodox Greek faith! All that is beautiful, but what
do we, I mean the Austrian court, care for your victories? Bring us nice
news of a victory by the Archduke Karl or Ferdinand (one archduke's as
good as another, as you know) and even if it is only over a fire brigade
of Bonaparte's, that will be another story and we'll fire off some
cannon! But this sort of thing seems done on purpose to vex us. The
Archduke Karl does nothing, the Archduke Ferdinand disgraces himself.
You abandon Vienna, give up its defense--as much as to say: 'Heaven is
with us, but heaven help you and your capital!' The one general whom we
all loved, Schmidt, you expose to a bullet, and then you congratulate
us on the victory! Admit that more irritating news than yours could not
have been conceived. It's as if it had been done on purpose, on purpose.
Besides, suppose you did gain a brilliant victory, if even the Archduke
Karl gained a victory, what effect would that have on the general course
of events? It's too late now when Vienna is occupied by the French
army!"

"What? Occupied? Vienna occupied?"

"Not only occupied, but Bonaparte is at Schonbrunn, and the count, our
dear Count Vrbna, goes to him for orders."

After the fatigues and impressions of the journey, his reception, and
especially after having dined, Bolkonski felt that he could not take in
the full significance of the words he heard.

"Count Lichtenfels was here this morning," Bilibin continued, "and
showed me a letter in which the parade of the French in Vienna was fully
described: Prince Murat et tout le tremblement... You see that your
victory is not a matter for great rejoicing and that you can't be
received as a savior."

"Really I don't care about that, I don't care at all," said Prince
Andrew, beginning to understand that his news of the battle before Krems
was really of small importance in view of such events as the fall of
Austria's capital. "How is it Vienna was taken? What of the bridge and
its celebrated bridgehead and Prince Auersperg? We heard reports that
Prince Auersperg was defending Vienna?" he said.

"Prince Auersperg is on this, on our side of the river, and is defending
us--doing it very badly, I think, but still he is defending us. But
Vienna is on the other side. No, the bridge has not yet been taken and I
hope it will not be, for it is mined and orders have been given to
blow it up. Otherwise we should long ago have been in the mountains of
Bohemia, and you and your army would have spent a bad quarter of an hour
between two fires."

"But still this does not mean that the campaign is over," said Prince
Andrew.

"Well, I think it is. The bigwigs here think so too, but they daren't
say so. It will be as I said at the beginning of the campaign, it won't
be your skirmishing at Durrenstein, or gunpowder at all, that will
decide the matter, but those who devised it," said Bilibin quoting one
of his own mots, releasing the wrinkles on his forehead, and pausing.
"The only question is what will come of the meeting between the Emperor
Alexander and the King of Prussia in Berlin? If Prussia joins the
Allies, Austria's hand will be forced and there will be war. If not
it is merely a question of settling where the preliminaries of the new
Campo Formio are to be drawn up."

"What an extraordinary genius!" Prince Andrew suddenly exclaimed,
clenching his small hand and striking the table with it, "and what luck
the man has!"

"Buonaparte?" said Bilibin inquiringly, puckering up his forehead to
indicate that he was about to say something witty. "Buonaparte?" he
repeated, accentuating the u: "I think, however, now that he lays down
laws for Austria at Schonbrunn, il faut lui faire grace de l'u! * I
shall certainly adopt an innovation and call him simply Bonaparte!"


    * "We must let him off the u!"


"But joking apart," said Prince Andrew, "do you really think the
campaign is over?"

"This is what I think. Austria has been made a fool of, and she is not
used to it. She will retaliate. And she has been fooled in the first
place because her provinces have been pillaged--they say the Holy
Russian army loots terribly--her army is destroyed, her capital
taken, and all this for the beaux yeux * of His Sardinian Majesty. And
therefore--this is between ourselves--I instinctively feel that we are
being deceived, my instinct tells me of negotiations with France and
projects for peace, a secret peace concluded separately."


    * Fine eyes.


"Impossible!" cried Prince Andrew. "That would be too base."

"If we live we shall see," replied Bilibin, his face again becoming
smooth as a sign that the conversation was at an end.

When Prince Andrew reached the room prepared for him and lay down in a
clean shirt on the feather bed with its warmed and fragrant pillows, he
felt that the battle of which he had brought tidings was far, far away
from him. The alliance with Prussia, Austria's treachery, Bonaparte's
new triumph, tomorrow's levee and parade, and the audience with the
Emperor Francis occupied his thoughts.

He closed his eyes, and immediately a sound of cannonading, of musketry
and the rattling of carriage wheels seemed to fill his ears, and now
again drawn out in a thin line the musketeers were descending the hill,
the French were firing, and he felt his heart palpitating as he rode
forward beside Schmidt with the bullets merrily whistling all around,
and he experienced tenfold the joy of living, as he had not done since
childhood.

He woke up...

"Yes, that all happened!" he said, and, smiling happily to himself like
a child, he fell into a deep, youthful slumber.





CHAPTER XI


Next day he woke late. Recalling his recent impressions, the first
thought that came into his mind was that today he had to be presented
to the Emperor Francis; he remembered the Minister of War, the polite
Austrian adjutant, Bilibin, and last night's conversation. Having
dressed for his attendance at court in full parade uniform, which he had
not worn for a long time, he went into Bilibin's study fresh, animated,
and handsome, with his hand bandaged. In the study were four gentlemen
of the diplomatic corps. With Prince Hippolyte Kuragin, who was a
secretary to the embassy, Bolkonski was already acquainted. Bilibin
introduced him to the others.

The gentlemen assembled at Bilibin's were young, wealthy, gay society
men, who here, as in Vienna, formed a special set which Bilibin, their
leader, called les notres. * This set, consisting almost exclusively of
diplomats, evidently had its own interests which had nothing to do with
war or politics but related to high society, to certain women, and to
the official side of the service. These gentlemen received Prince
Andrew as one of themselves, an honor they did not extend to many. From
politeness and to start conversation, they asked him a few questions
about the army and the battle, and then the talk went off into merry
jests and gossip.


    * Ours.


"But the best of it was," said one, telling of the misfortune of
a fellow diplomat, "that the Chancellor told him flatly that his
appointment to London was a promotion and that he was so to regard it.
Can you fancy the figure he cut?..."

"But the worst of it, gentlemen--I am giving Kuragin away to you--is
that that man suffers, and this Don Juan, wicked fellow, is taking
advantage of it!"

Prince Hippolyte was lolling in a lounge chair with his legs over its
arm. He began to laugh.

"Tell me about that!" he said.

"Oh, you Don Juan! You serpent!" cried several voices.

"You, Bolkonski, don't know," said Bilibin turning to Prince Andrew,
"that all the atrocities of the French army (I nearly said of the
Russian army) are nothing compared to what this man has been doing among
the women!"

"La femme est la compagne de l'homme," * announced Prince Hippolyte, and
began looking through a lorgnette at his elevated legs.


    * "Woman is man's companion."


Bilibin and the rest of "ours" burst out laughing in Hippolyte's face,
and Prince Andrew saw that Hippolyte, of whom--he had to admit--he had
almost been jealous on his wife's account, was the butt of this set.

"Oh, I must give you a treat," Bilibin whispered to Bolkonski. "Kuragin
is exquisite when he discusses politics--you should see his gravity!"

He sat down beside Hippolyte and wrinkling his forehead began talking
to him about politics. Prince Andrew and the others gathered round these
two.

"The Berlin cabinet cannot express a feeling of alliance," began
Hippolyte gazing round with importance at the others, "without
expressing... as in its last note... you understand... Besides, unless
His Majesty the Emperor derogates from the principle of our alliance...

"Wait, I have not finished..." he said to Prince Andrew, seizing him
by the arm, "I believe that intervention will be stronger than
nonintervention. And..." he paused. "Finally one cannot impute the
nonreceipt of our dispatch of November 18. That is how it will end." And
he released Bolkonski's arm to indicate that he had now quite finished.

"Demosthenes, I know thee by the pebble thou secretest in thy golden
mouth!" said Bilibin, and the mop of hair on his head moved with
satisfaction.

Everybody laughed, and Hippolyte louder than anyone. He was evidently
distressed, and breathed painfully, but could not restrain the wild
laughter that convulsed his usually impassive features.

"Well now, gentlemen," said Bilibin, "Bolkonski is my guest in this
house and in Brunn itself. I want to entertain him as far as I can, with
all the pleasures of life here. If we were in Vienna it would be easy,
but here, in this wretched Moravian hole, it is more difficult, and I
beg you all to help me. Brunn's attractions must be shown him. You can
undertake the theater, I society, and you, Hippolyte, of course the
women."

"We must let him see Amelie, she's exquisite!" said one of "ours,"
kissing his finger tips.

"In general we must turn this bloodthirsty soldier to more humane
interests," said Bilibin.

"I shall scarcely be able to avail myself of your hospitality,
gentlemen, it is already time for me to go," replied Prince Andrew
looking at his watch.

"Where to?"

"To the Emperor."

"Oh! Oh! Oh! Well, au revoir, Bolkonski! Au revoir, Prince! Come back
early to dinner," cried several voices. "We'll take you in hand."

"When speaking to the Emperor, try as far as you can to praise the way
that provisions are supplied and the routes indicated," said Bilibin,
accompanying him to the hall.

"I should like to speak well of them, but as far as I know the facts, I
can't," replied Bolkonski, smiling.

"Well, talk as much as you can, anyway. He has a passion for giving
audiences, but he does not like talking himself and can't do it, as you
will see."





CHAPTER XII


At the levee Prince Andrew stood among the Austrian officers as he had
been told to, and the Emperor Francis merely looked fixedly into his
face and just nodded to him with his long head. But after it was
over, the adjutant he had seen the previous day ceremoniously informed
Bolkonski that the Emperor desired to give him an audience. The Emperor
Francis received him standing in the middle of the room. Before the
conversation began Prince Andrew was struck by the fact that the Emperor
seemed confused and blushed as if not knowing what to say.

"Tell me, when did the battle begin?" he asked hurriedly.

Prince Andrew replied. Then followed other questions just as simple:
"Was Kutuzov well? When had he left Krems?" and so on. The Emperor spoke
as if his sole aim were to put a given number of questions--the answers
to these questions, as was only too evident, did not interest him.

"At what o'clock did the battle begin?" asked the Emperor.

"I cannot inform Your Majesty at what o'clock the battle began at the
front, but at Durrenstein, where I was, our attack began after five in
the afternoon," replied Bolkonski growing more animated and expecting
that he would have a chance to give a reliable account, which he had
ready in his mind, of all he knew and had seen. But the Emperor smiled
and interrupted him.

"How many miles?"

"From where to where, Your Majesty?"

"From Durrenstein to Krems."

"Three and a half miles, Your Majesty."

"The French have abandoned the left bank?"

"According to the scouts the last of them crossed on rafts during the
night."

"Is there sufficient forage in Krems?"

"Forage has not been supplied to the extent..."

The Emperor interrupted him.

"At what o'clock was General Schmidt killed?"

"At seven o'clock, I believe."

"At seven o'clock? It's very sad, very sad!"

The Emperor thanked Prince Andrew and bowed. Prince Andrew withdrew and
was immediately surrounded by courtiers on all sides. Everywhere he saw
friendly looks and heard friendly words. Yesterday's adjutant reproached
him for not having stayed at the palace, and offered him his own house.
The Minister of War came up and congratulated him on the Maria Theresa
Order of the third grade, which the Emperor was conferring on him. The
Empress' chamberlain invited him to see Her Majesty. The archduchess
also wished to see him. He did not know whom to answer, and for a few
seconds collected his thoughts. Then the Russian ambassador took him by
the shoulder, led him to the window, and began to talk to him.

Contrary to Bilibin's forecast the news he had brought was joyfully
received. A thanksgiving service was arranged, Kutuzov was awarded
the Grand Cross of Maria Theresa, and the whole army received rewards.
Bolkonski was invited everywhere, and had to spend the whole morning
calling on the principal Austrian dignitaries. Between four and five in
the afternoon, having made all his calls, he was returning to Bilibin's
house thinking out a letter to his father about the battle and his visit
to Brunn. At the door he found a vehicle half full of luggage. Franz,
Bilibin's man, was dragging a portmanteau with some difficulty out of
the front door.

Before returning to Bilibin's Prince Andrew had gone to a bookshop to
provide himself with some books for the campaign, and had spent some
time in the shop.

"What is it?" he asked.

"Oh, your excellency!" said Franz, with difficulty rolling the
portmanteau into the vehicle, "we are to move on still farther. The
scoundrel is again at our heels!"

"Eh? What?" asked Prince Andrew.

Bilibin came out to meet him. His usually calm face showed excitement.

"There now! Confess that this is delightful," said he. "This affair of
the Thabor Bridge, at Vienna.... They have crossed without striking a
blow!"

Prince Andrew could not understand.

"But where do you come from not to know what every coachman in the town
knows?"

"I come from the archduchess'. I heard nothing there."

"And you didn't see that everybody is packing up?"

"I did not... What is it all about?" inquired Prince Andrew impatiently.

"What's it all about? Why, the French have crossed the bridge that
Auersperg was defending, and the bridge was not blown up: so Murat is
now rushing along the road to Brunn and will be here in a day or two."

"What? Here? But why did they not blow up the bridge, if it was mined?"

"That is what I ask you. No one, not even Bonaparte, knows why."

Bolkonski shrugged his shoulders.

"But if the bridge is crossed it means that the army too is lost? It
will be cut off," said he.

"That's just it," answered Bilibin. "Listen! The French entered
Vienna as I told you. Very well. Next day, which was yesterday, those
gentlemen, messieurs les marechaux, * Murat, Lannes, and Belliard,
mount and ride to the bridge. (Observe that all three are Gascons.)
'Gentlemen,' says one of them, 'you know the Thabor Bridge is mined and
doubly mined and that there are menacing fortifications at its head and
an army of fifteen thousand men has been ordered to blow up the bridge
and not let us cross? But it will please our sovereign the Emperor
Napoleon if we take this bridge, so let us three go and take it!' 'Yes,
let's!' say the others. And off they go and take the bridge, cross it,
and now with their whole army are on this side of the Danube, marching
on us, you, and your lines of communication."


    * The marshalls.


"Stop jesting," said Prince Andrew sadly and seriously. This news
grieved him and yet he was pleased.

As soon as he learned that the Russian army was in such a hopeless
situation it occurred to him that it was he who was destined to lead it
out of this position; that here was the Toulon that would lift him from
the ranks of obscure officers and offer him the first step to fame!
Listening to Bilibin he was already imagining how on reaching the army
he would give an opinion at the war council which would be the only one
that could save the army, and how he alone would be entrusted with the
executing of the plan.

"Stop this jesting," he said

"I am not jesting," Bilibin went on. "Nothing is truer or sadder. These
gentlemen ride onto the bridge alone and wave white handkerchiefs; they
assure the officer on duty that they, the marshals, are on their way to
negotiate with Prince Auersperg. He lets them enter the tete-de-pont. *
They spin him a thousand gasconades, saying that the war is over, that
the Emperor Francis is arranging a meeting with Bonaparte, that they
desire to see Prince Auersperg, and so on. The officer sends for
Auersperg; these gentlemen embrace the officers, crack jokes, sit on the
cannon, and meanwhile a French battalion gets to the bridge unobserved,
flings the bags of incendiary material into the water, and approaches
the tete-de-pont. At length appears the lieutenant general, our dear
Prince Auersperg von Mautern himself. 'Dearest foe! Flower of the
Austrian army, hero of the Turkish wars Hostilities are ended, we can
shake one another's hand.... The Emperor Napoleon burns with impatience
to make Prince Auersperg's acquaintance.' In a word, those gentlemen,
Gascons indeed, so bewildered him with fine words, and he is so
flattered by his rapidly established intimacy with the French marshals,
and so dazzled by the sight of Murat's mantle and ostrich plumes,
qu'il n'y voit que du feu, et oublie celui qu'il devait faire faire sur
l'ennemi!" *(2) In spite of the animation of his speech, Bilibin did not
forget to pause after this mot to give time for its due appreciation.
"The French battalion rushes to the bridgehead, spikes the guns, and the
bridge is taken! But what is best of all," he went on, his excitement
subsiding under the delightful interest of his own story, "is that the
sergeant in charge of the cannon which was to give the signal to fire
the mines and blow up the bridge, this sergeant, seeing that the French
troops were running onto the bridge, was about to fire, but Lannes
stayed his hand. The sergeant, who was evidently wiser than his general,
goes up to Auersperg and says: 'Prince, you are being deceived, here are
the French!' Murat, seeing that all is lost if the sergeant is allowed
to speak, turns to Auersperg with feigned astonishment (he is a
true Gascon) and says: 'I don't recognize the world-famous Austrian
discipline, if you allow a subordinate to address you like that!' It
was a stroke of genius. Prince Auersperg feels his dignity at stake and
orders the sergeant to be arrested. Come, you must own that this affair
of the Thabor Bridge is delightful! It is not exactly stupidity, nor
rascality...."


     * Bridgehead.

     * (2) That their fire gets into his eyes and he forgets that
     he ought to be firing at the enemy.


"It may be treachery," said Prince Andrew, vividly imagining the gray
overcoats, wounds, the smoke of gunpowder, the sounds of firing, and the
glory that awaited him.

"Not that either. That puts the court in too bad a light," replied
Bilibin. "It's not treachery nor rascality nor stupidity: it is just
as at Ulm... it is..."--he seemed to be trying to find the right
expression. "C'est... c'est du Mack. Nous sommes mackes (It is... it
is a bit of Mack. We are Macked)," he concluded, feeling that he
had produced a good epigram, a fresh one that would be repeated. His
hitherto puckered brow became smooth as a sign of pleasure, and with a
slight smile he began to examine his nails.

"Where are you off to?" he said suddenly to Prince Andrew who had risen
and was going toward his room.

"I am going away."

"Where to?"

"To the army."

"But you meant to stay another two days?"

"But now I am off at once."

And Prince Andrew after giving directions about his departure went to
his room.

"Do you know, mon cher," said Bilibin following him, "I have been
thinking about you. Why are you going?"

And in proof of the conclusiveness of his opinion all the wrinkles
vanished from his face.

Prince Andrew looked inquiringly at him and gave no reply.

"Why are you going? I know you think it your duty to gallop back to
the army now that it is in danger. I understand that. Mon cher, it is
heroism!"

"Not at all," said Prince Andrew.

"But as you are a philosopher, be a consistent one, look at the other
side of the question and you will see that your duty, on the contrary,
is to take care of yourself. Leave it to those who are no longer fit for
anything else.... You have not been ordered to return and have not been
dismissed from here; therefore, you can stay and go with us wherever our
ill luck takes us. They say we are going to Olmutz, and Olmutz is a very
decent town. You and I will travel comfortably in my caleche."

"Do stop joking, Bilibin," cried Bolkonski.

"I am speaking sincerely as a friend! Consider! Where and why are you
going, when you might remain here? You are faced by one of two things,"
and the skin over his left temple puckered, "either you will not reach
your regiment before peace is concluded, or you will share defeat and
disgrace with Kutuzov's whole army."

And Bilibin unwrinkled his temple, feeling that the dilemma was
insoluble.

"I cannot argue about it," replied Prince Andrew coldly, but he thought:
"I am going to save the army."

"My dear fellow, you are a hero!" said Bilibin.





CHAPTER XIII


That same night, having taken leave of the Minister of War, Bolkonski
set off to rejoin the army, not knowing where he would find it and
fearing to be captured by the French on the way to Krems.

In Brunn everybody attached to the court was packing up, and the heavy
baggage was already being dispatched to Olmutz. Near Hetzelsdorf Prince
Andrew struck the high road along which the Russian army was moving with
great haste and in the greatest disorder. The road was so obstructed
with carts that it was impossible to get by in a carriage. Prince Andrew
took a horse and a Cossack from a Cossack commander, and hungry and
weary, making his way past the baggage wagons, rode in search of the
commander in chief and of his own luggage. Very sinister reports of the
position of the army reached him as he went along, and the appearance of
the troops in their disorderly flight confirmed these rumors.

"Cette armee russe que l'or de l'Angleterre a transportee des extremites
de l'univers, nous allons lui faire eprouver le meme sort--(le sort de
l'armee d'Ulm)." * He remembered these words in Bonaparte's address
to his army at the beginning of the campaign, and they awoke in him
astonishment at the genius of his hero, a feeling of wounded pride,
and a hope of glory. "And should there be nothing left but to die?" he
thought. "Well, if need be, I shall do it no worse than others."


     * "That Russian army which has been brought from the ends of
     the earth by English gold, we shall cause to share the same
     fate--(the fate of the army at Ulm)."


He looked with disdain at the endless confused mass of detachments,
carts, guns, artillery, and again baggage wagons and vehicles of all
kinds overtaking one another and blocking the muddy road, three and
sometimes four abreast. From all sides, behind and before, as far as ear
could reach, there were the rattle of wheels, the creaking of carts
and gun carriages, the tramp of horses, the crack of whips, shouts, the
urging of horses, and the swearing of soldiers, orderlies, and officers.
All along the sides of the road fallen horses were to be seen, some
flayed, some not, and broken-down carts beside which solitary soldiers
sat waiting for something, and again soldiers straggling from their
companies, crowds of whom set off to the neighboring villages, or
returned from them dragging sheep, fowls, hay, and bulging sacks. At
each ascent or descent of the road the crowds were yet denser and the
din of shouting more incessant. Soldiers floundering knee-deep in mud
pushed the guns and wagons themselves. Whips cracked, hoofs slipped,
traces broke, and lungs were strained with shouting. The officers
directing the march rode backward and forward between the carts. Their
voices were but feebly heard amid the uproar and one saw by their faces
that they despaired of the possibility of checking this disorder.

"Here is our dear Orthodox Russian army," thought Bolkonski, recalling
Bilibin's words.

Wishing to find out where the commander in chief was, he rode up to
a convoy. Directly opposite to him came a strange one-horse vehicle,
evidently rigged up by soldiers out of any available materials and
looking like something between a cart, a cabriolet, and a caleche. A
soldier was driving, and a woman enveloped in shawls sat behind the
apron under the leather hood of the vehicle. Prince Andrew rode up
and was just putting his question to a soldier when his attention
was diverted by the desperate shrieks of the woman in the vehicle. An
officer in charge of transport was beating the soldier who was driving
the woman's vehicle for trying to get ahead of others, and the strokes
of his whip fell on the apron of the equipage. The woman screamed
piercingly. Seeing Prince Andrew she leaned out from behind the apron
and, waving her thin arms from under the woolen shawl, cried:

"Mr. Aide-de-camp! Mr. Aide-de-camp!... For heaven's sake... Protect
me! What will become of us? I am the wife of the doctor of the Seventh
Chasseurs.... They won't let us pass, we are left behind and have lost
our people..."

"I'll flatten you into a pancake!" shouted the angry officer to the
soldier. "Turn back with your slut!"

"Mr. Aide-de-camp! Help me!... What does it all mean?" screamed the
doctor's wife.

"Kindly let this cart pass. Don't you see it's a woman?" said Prince
Andrew riding up to the officer.

The officer glanced at him, and without replying turned again to the
soldier. "I'll teach you to push on!... Back!"

"Let them pass, I tell you!" repeated Prince Andrew, compressing his
lips.

"And who are you?" cried the officer, turning on him with tipsy rage,
"who are you? Are you in command here? Eh? I am commander here, not
you! Go back or I'll flatten you into a pancake," repeated he. This
expression evidently pleased him.

"That was a nice snub for the little aide-de-camp," came a voice from
behind.

Prince Andrew saw that the officer was in that state of senseless,
tipsy rage when a man does not know what he is saying. He saw that his
championship of the doctor's wife in her queer trap might expose him to
what he dreaded more than anything in the world--to ridicule; but his
instinct urged him on. Before the officer finished his sentence Prince
Andrew, his face distorted with fury, rode up to him and raised his
riding whip.

"Kind...ly let--them--pass!"

The officer flourished his arm and hastily rode away.

"It's all the fault of these fellows on the staff that there's this
disorder," he muttered. "Do as you like."

Prince Andrew without lifting his eyes rode hastily away from the
doctor's wife, who was calling him her deliverer, and recalling with
a sense of disgust the minutest details of this humiliating scene he
galloped on to the village where he was told that the commander in chief
was.

On reaching the village he dismounted and went to the nearest house,
intending to rest if but for a moment, eat something, and try to sort
out the stinging and tormenting thoughts that confused his mind. "This
is a mob of scoundrels and not an army," he was thinking as he went up
to the window of the first house, when a familiar voice called him by
name.

He turned round. Nesvitski's handsome face looked out of the little
window. Nesvitski, moving his moist lips as he chewed something, and
flourishing his arm, called him to enter.

"Bolkonski! Bolkonski!... Don't you hear? Eh? Come quick..." he shouted.

Entering the house, Prince Andrew saw Nesvitski and another adjutant
having something to eat. They hastily turned round to him asking if he
had any news. On their familiar faces he read agitation and alarm. This
was particularly noticeable on Nesvitski's usually laughing countenance.

"Where is the commander in chief?" asked Bolkonski.

"Here, in that house," answered the adjutant.

"Well, is it true that it's peace and capitulation?" asked Nesvitski.

"I was going to ask you. I know nothing except that it was all I could
do to get here."

"And we, my dear boy! It's terrible! I was wrong to laugh at Mack,
we're getting it still worse," said Nesvitski. "But sit down and have
something to eat."

"You won't be able to find either your baggage or anything else now,
Prince. And God only knows where your man Peter is," said the other
adjutant.

"Where are headquarters?"

"We are to spend the night in Znaim."

"Well, I have got all I need into packs for two horses," said Nesvitski.
"They've made up splendid packs for me--fit to cross the Bohemian
mountains with. It's a bad lookout, old fellow! But what's the matter
with you? You must be ill to shiver like that," he added, noticing that
Prince Andrew winced as at an electric shock.

"It's nothing," replied Prince Andrew.

He had just remembered his recent encounter with the doctor's wife and
the convoy officer.

"What is the commander in chief doing here?" he asked.

"I can't make out at all," said Nesvitski.

"Well, all I can make out is that everything is abominable, abominable,
quite abominable!" said Prince Andrew, and he went off to the house
where the commander in chief was.

Passing by Kutuzov's carriage and the exhausted saddle horses of his
suite, with their Cossacks who were talking loudly together, Prince
Andrew entered the passage. Kutuzov himself, he was told, was in the
house with Prince Bagration and Weyrother. Weyrother was the Austrian
general who had succeeded Schmidt. In the passage little Kozlovski was
squatting on his heels in front of a clerk. The clerk, with cuffs turned
up, was hastily writing at a tub turned bottom upwards. Kozlovski's face
looked worn--he too had evidently not slept all night. He glanced at
Prince Andrew and did not even nod to him.

"Second line... have you written it?" he continued dictating to the
clerk. "The Kiev Grenadiers, Podolian..."

"One can't write so fast, your honor," said the clerk, glancing angrily
and disrespectfully at Kozlovski.

Through the door came the sounds of Kutuzov's voice, excited and
dissatisfied, interrupted by another, an unfamiliar voice. From the
sound of these voices, the inattentive way Kozlovski looked at him, the
disrespectful manner of the exhausted clerk, the fact that the clerk and
Kozlovski were squatting on the floor by a tub so near to the commander
in chief, and from the noisy laughter of the Cossacks holding the
horses near the window, Prince Andrew felt that something important and
disastrous was about to happen.

He turned to Kozlovski with urgent questions.

"Immediately, Prince," said Kozlovski. "Dispositions for Bagration."

"What about capitulation?"

"Nothing of the sort. Orders are issued for a battle."

Prince Andrew moved toward the door from whence voices were heard.
Just as he was going to open it the sounds ceased, the door opened,
and Kutuzov with his eagle nose and puffy face appeared in the doorway.
Prince Andrew stood right in front of Kutuzov but the expression of the
commander in chief's one sound eye showed him to be so preoccupied with
thoughts and anxieties as to be oblivious of his presence. He looked
straight at his adjutant's face without recognizing him.

"Well, have you finished?" said he to Kozlovski.

"One moment, your excellency."

Bagration, a gaunt middle-aged man of medium height with a firm,
impassive face of Oriental type, came out after the commander in chief.

"I have the honor to present myself," repeated Prince Andrew rather
loudly, handing Kutuzov an envelope.

"Ah, from Vienna? Very good. Later, later!"

Kutuzov went out into the porch with Bagration.

"Well, good-by, Prince," said he to Bagration. "My blessing, and may
Christ be with you in your great endeavor!"

His face suddenly softened and tears came into his eyes. With his left
hand he drew Bagration toward him, and with his right, on which he wore
a ring, he made the sign of the cross over him with a gesture evidently
habitual, offering his puffy cheek, but Bagration kissed him on the neck
instead.

"Christ be with you!" Kutuzov repeated and went toward his carriage.
"Get in with me," said he to Bolkonski.

"Your excellency, I should like to be of use here. Allow me to remain
with Prince Bagration's detachment."

"Get in," said Kutuzov, and noticing that Bolkonski still delayed, he
added: "I need good officers myself, need them myself!"

They got into the carriage and drove for a few minutes in silence.

"There is still much, much before us," he said, as if with an old man's
penetration he understood all that was passing in Bolkonski's mind. "If
a tenth part of his detachment returns I shall thank God," he added as
if speaking to himself.

Prince Andrew glanced at Kutuzov's face only a foot distant from him and
involuntarily noticed the carefully washed seams of the scar near his
temple, where an Ismail bullet had pierced his skull, and the empty eye
socket. "Yes, he has a right to speak so calmly of those men's death,"
thought Bolkonski.

"That is why I beg to be sent to that detachment," he said.

Kutuzov did not reply. He seemed to have forgotten what he had been
saying, and sat plunged in thought. Five minutes later, gently swaying
on the soft springs of the carriage, he turned to Prince Andrew.
There was not a trace of agitation on his face. With delicate irony he
questioned Prince Andrew about the details of his interview with the
Emperor, about the remarks he had heard at court concerning the Krems
affair, and about some ladies they both knew.





CHAPTER XIV


On November 1 Kutuzov had received, through a spy, news that the army he
commanded was in an almost hopeless position. The spy reported that the
French, after crossing the bridge at Vienna, were advancing in immense
force upon Kutuzov's line of communication with the troops that were
arriving from Russia. If Kutuzov decided to remain at Krems, Napoleon's
army of one hundred and fifty thousand men would cut him off completely
and surround his exhausted army of forty thousand, and he would find
himself in the position of Mack at Ulm. If Kutuzov decided to abandon
the road connecting him with the troops arriving from Russia, he would
have to march with no road into unknown parts of the Bohemian mountains,
defending himself against superior forces of the enemy and abandoning
all hope of a junction with Buxhowden. If Kutuzov decided to retreat
along the road from Krems to Olmutz, to unite with the troops arriving
from Russia, he risked being forestalled on that road by the French
who had crossed the Vienna bridge, and encumbered by his baggage and
transport, having to accept battle on the march against an enemy three
times as strong, who would hem him in from two sides.

Kutuzov chose this latter course.

The French, the spy reported, having crossed the Vienna bridge, were
advancing by forced marches toward Znaim, which lay sixty-six miles off
on the line of Kutuzov's retreat. If he reached Znaim before the
French, there would be great hope of saving the army; to let the
French forestall him at Znaim meant the exposure of his whole army to a
disgrace such as that of Ulm, or to utter destruction. But to forestall
the French with his whole army was impossible. The road for the French
from Vienna to Znaim was shorter and better than the road for the
Russians from Krems to Znaim.

The night he received the news, Kutuzov sent Bagration's vanguard, four
thousand strong, to the right across the hills from the Krems-Znaim to
the Vienna-Znaim road. Bagration was to make this march without resting,
and to halt facing Vienna with Znaim to his rear, and if he succeeded
in forestalling the French he was to delay them as long as possible.
Kutuzov himself with all his transport took the road to Znaim.

Marching thirty miles that stormy night across roadless hills, with his
hungry, ill-shod soldiers, and losing a third of his men as stragglers
by the way, Bagration came out on the Vienna-Znaim road at Hollabrunn
a few hours ahead of the French who were approaching Hollabrunn from
Vienna. Kutuzov with his transport had still to march for some days
before he could reach Znaim. Hence Bagration with his four thousand
hungry, exhausted men would have to detain for days the whole enemy army
that came upon him at Hollabrunn, which was clearly impossible. But a
freak of fate made the impossible possible. The success of the trick
that had placed the Vienna bridge in the hands of the French without
a fight led Murat to try to deceive Kutuzov in a similar way. Meeting
Bagration's weak detachment on the Znaim road he supposed it to be
Kutuzov's whole army. To be able to crush it absolutely he awaited the
arrival of the rest of the troops who were on their way from Vienna,
and with this object offered a three days' truce on condition that both
armies should remain in position without moving. Murat declared that
negotiations for peace were already proceeding, and that he therefore
offered this truce to avoid unnecessary bloodshed. Count Nostitz, the
Austrian general occupying the advanced posts, believed Murat's emissary
and retired, leaving Bagration's division exposed. Another emissary rode
to the Russian line to announce the peace negotiations and to offer the
Russian army the three days' truce. Bagration replied that he was not
authorized either to accept or refuse a truce and sent his adjutant to
Kutuzov to report the offer he had received.

A truce was Kutuzov's sole chance of gaining time, giving Bagration's
exhausted troops some rest, and letting the transport and heavy convoys
(whose movements were concealed from the French) advance if but one
stage nearer Znaim. The offer of a truce gave the only, and a quite
unexpected, chance of saving the army. On receiving the news he
immediately dispatched Adjutant General Wintzingerode, who was in
attendance on him, to the enemy camp. Wintzingerode was not merely
to agree to the truce but also to offer terms of capitulation, and
meanwhile Kutuzov sent his adjutants back to hasten to the utmost the
movements of the baggage trains of the entire army along the Krems-Znaim
road. Bagration's exhausted and hungry detachment, which alone covered
this movement of the transport and of the whole army, had to remain
stationary in face of an enemy eight times as strong as itself.

Kutuzov's expectations that the proposals of capitulation (which were in
no way binding) might give time for part of the transport to pass, and
also that Murat's mistake would very soon be discovered, proved
correct. As soon as Bonaparte (who was at Schonbrunn, sixteen miles from
Hollabrunn) received Murat's dispatch with the proposal of a truce and
a capitulation, he detected a ruse and wrote the following letter to
Murat:


Schonbrunn, 25th Brumaire, 1805,

at eight o'clock in the morning

To PRINCE MURAT,

I cannot find words to express to you my displeasure. You command only
my advance guard, and have no right to arrange an armistice without my
order. You are causing me to lose the fruits of a campaign. Break
the armistice immediately and march on the enemy. Inform him that the
general who signed that capitulation had no right to do so, and that no
one but the Emperor of Russia has that right.

If, however, the Emperor of Russia ratifies that convention, I will
ratify it; but it is only a trick. March on, destroy the Russian
army.... You are in a position to seize its baggage and artillery.

The Russian Emperor's aide-de-camp is an impostor. Officers are nothing
when they have no powers; this one had none.... The Austrians let
themselves be tricked at the crossing of the Vienna bridge, you are
letting yourself be tricked by an aide-de-camp of the Emperor.

NAPOLEON


Bonaparte's adjutant rode full gallop with this menacing letter to
Murat. Bonaparte himself, not trusting to his generals, moved with all
the Guards to the field of battle, afraid of letting a ready victim
escape, and Bagration's four thousand men merrily lighted campfires,
dried and warmed themselves, cooked their porridge for the first time
for three days, and not one of them knew or imagined what was in store
for him.





CHAPTER XV


Between three and four o'clock in the afternoon Prince Andrew, who had
persisted in his request to Kutuzov, arrived at Grunth and reported
himself to Bagration. Bonaparte's adjutant had not yet reached Murat's
detachment and the battle had not yet begun. In Bagration's detachment
no one knew anything of the general position of affairs. They talked of
peace but did not believe in its possibility; others talked of a battle
but also disbelieved in the nearness of an engagement. Bagration,
knowing Bolkonski to be a favorite and trusted adjutant, received him
with distinction and special marks of favor, explaining to him that
there would probably be an engagement that day or the next, and giving
him full liberty to remain with him during the battle or to join the
rearguard and have an eye on the order of retreat, "which is also very
important."

"However, there will hardly be an engagement today," said Bagration as
if to reassure Prince Andrew.

"If he is one of the ordinary little staff dandies sent to earn a medal
he can get his reward just as well in the rearguard, but if he wishes to
stay with me, let him... he'll be of use here if he's a brave officer,"
thought Bagration. Prince Andrew, without replying, asked the prince's
permission to ride round the position to see the disposition of the
forces, so as to know his bearings should he be sent to execute an
order. The officer on duty, a handsome, elegantly dressed man with a
diamond ring on his forefinger, who was fond of speaking French though
he spoke it badly, offered to conduct Prince Andrew.

On all sides they saw rain-soaked officers with dejected faces who
seemed to be seeking something, and soldiers dragging doors, benches,
and fencing from the village.

"There now, Prince! We can't stop those fellows," said the staff officer
pointing to the soldiers. "The officers don't keep them in hand. And
there," he pointed to a sutler's tent, "they crowd in and sit. This
morning I turned them all out and now look, it's full again. I must go
there, Prince, and scare them a bit. It won't take a moment."

"Yes, let's go in and I will get myself a roll and some cheese," said
Prince Andrew who had not yet had time to eat anything.

"Why didn't you mention it, Prince? I would have offered you something."

They dismounted and entered the tent. Several officers, with flushed and
weary faces, were sitting at the table eating and drinking.

"Now what does this mean, gentlemen?" said the staff officer, in the
reproachful tone of a man who has repeated the same thing more than
once. "You know it won't do to leave your posts like this. The prince
gave orders that no one should leave his post. Now you, Captain," and he
turned to a thin, dirty little artillery officer who without his boots
(he had given them to the canteen keeper to dry), in only his stockings,
rose when they entered, smiling not altogether comfortably.

"Well, aren't you ashamed of yourself, Captain Tushin?" he continued.
"One would think that as an artillery officer you would set a good
example, yet here you are without your boots! The alarm will be sounded
and you'll be in a pretty position without your boots!" (The staff
officer smiled.) "Kindly return to your posts, gentlemen, all of you,
all!" he added in a tone of command.

Prince Andrew smiled involuntarily as he looked at the artillery officer
Tushin, who silent and smiling, shifting from one stockinged foot to the
other, glanced inquiringly with his large, intelligent, kindly eyes from
Prince Andrew to the staff officer.

"The soldiers say it feels easier without boots," said Captain Tushin
smiling shyly in his uncomfortable position, evidently wishing to adopt
a jocular tone. But before he had finished he felt that his jest was
unacceptable and had not come off. He grew confused.

"Kindly return to your posts," said the staff officer trying to preserve
his gravity.

Prince Andrew glanced again at the artillery officer's small figure.
There was something peculiar about it, quite unsoldierly, rather comic,
but extremely attractive.

The staff officer and Prince Andrew mounted their horses and rode on.

Having ridden beyond the village, continually meeting and overtaking
soldiers and officers of various regiments, they saw on their left some
entrenchments being thrown up, the freshly dug clay of which showed up
red. Several battalions of soldiers, in their shirt sleeves despite
the cold wind, swarmed in these earthworks like a host of white ants;
spadefuls of red clay were continually being thrown up from behind the
bank by unseen hands. Prince Andrew and the officer rode up, looked at
the entrenchment, and went on again. Just behind it they came upon some
dozens of soldiers, continually replaced by others, who ran from the
entrenchment. They had to hold their noses and put their horses to a
trot to escape from the poisoned atmosphere of these latrines.

"Voila l'agrement des camps, monsieur le Prince," * said the staff
officer.


    * "This is a pleasure one gets in camp, Prince."


They rode up the opposite hill. From there the French could already be
seen. Prince Andrew stopped and began examining the position.

"That's our battery," said the staff officer indicating the highest
point. "It's in charge of the queer fellow we saw without his boots. You
can see everything from there; let's go there, Prince."

"Thank you very much, I will go on alone," said Prince Andrew, wishing
to rid himself of this staff officer's company, "please don't trouble
yourself further."

The staff officer remained behind and Prince Andrew rode on alone.

The farther forward and nearer the enemy he went, the more orderly and
cheerful were the troops. The greatest disorder and depression had been
in the baggage train he had passed that morning on the Znaim road seven
miles away from the French. At Grunth also some apprehension and alarm
could be felt, but the nearer Prince Andrew came to the French lines the
more confident was the appearance of our troops. The soldiers in
their greatcoats were ranged in lines, the sergeants major and company
officers were counting the men, poking the last man in each section in
the ribs and telling him to hold his hand up. Soldiers scattered over
the whole place were dragging logs and brushwood and were building
shelters with merry chatter and laughter; around the fires sat others,
dressed and undressed, drying their shirts and leg bands or mending
boots or overcoats and crowding round the boilers and porridge cookers.
In one company dinner was ready, and the soldiers were gazing eagerly
at the steaming boiler, waiting till the sample, which a quartermaster
sergeant was carrying in a wooden bowl to an officer who sat on a log
before his shelter, had been tasted.

Another company, a lucky one for not all the companies had vodka,
crowded round a pockmarked, broad-shouldered sergeant major who, tilting
a keg, filled one after another the canteen lids held out to him. The
soldiers lifted the canteen lids to their lips with reverential faces,
emptied them, rolling the vodka in their mouths, and walked away from
the sergeant major with brightened expressions, licking their lips and
wiping them on the sleeves of their greatcoats. All their faces were
as serene as if all this were happening at home awaiting peaceful
encampment, and not within sight of the enemy before an action in
which at least half of them would be left on the field. After passing a
chasseur regiment and in the lines of the Kiev grenadiers--fine fellows
busy with similar peaceful affairs--near the shelter of the regimental
commander, higher than and different from the others, Prince Andrew came
out in front of a platoon of grenadiers before whom lay a naked man. Two
soldiers held him while two others were flourishing their switches and
striking him regularly on his bare back. The man shrieked unnaturally.
A stout major was pacing up and down the line, and regardless of the
screams kept repeating:

"It's a shame for a soldier to steal; a soldier must be honest,
honorable, and brave, but if he robs his fellows there is no honor in
him, he's a scoundrel. Go on! Go on!"

So the swishing sound of the strokes, and the desperate but unnatural
screams, continued.

"Go on, go on!" said the major.

A young officer with a bewildered and pained expression on his face
stepped away from the man and looked round inquiringly at the adjutant
as he rode by.

Prince Andrew, having reached the front line, rode along it. Our front
line and that of the enemy were far apart on the right and left flanks,
but in the center where the men with a flag of truce had passed that
morning, the lines were so near together that the men could see one
another's faces and speak to one another. Besides the soldiers who
formed the picket line on either side, there were many curious onlookers
who, jesting and laughing, stared at their strange foreign enemies.

Since early morning--despite an injunction not to approach the picket
line--the officers had been unable to keep sight-seers away. The
soldiers forming the picket line, like showmen exhibiting a curiosity,
no longer looked at the French but paid attention to the sight-seers and
grew weary waiting to be relieved. Prince Andrew halted to have a look
at the French.

"Look! Look there!" one soldier was saying to another, pointing to a
Russian musketeer who had gone up to the picket line with an officer and
was rapidly and excitedly talking to a French grenadier. "Hark to him
jabbering! Fine, isn't it? It's all the Frenchy can do to keep up with
him. There now, Sidorov!"

"Wait a bit and listen. It's fine!" answered Sidorov, who was considered
an adept at French.

The soldier to whom the laughers referred was Dolokhov. Prince Andrew
recognized him and stopped to listen to what he was saying. Dolokhov had
come from the left flank where their regiment was stationed, with his
captain.

"Now then, go on, go on!" incited the officer, bending forward and
trying not to lose a word of the speech which was incomprehensible to
him. "More, please: more! What's he saying?"

Dolokhov did not answer the captain; he had been drawn into a hot
dispute with the French grenadier. They were naturally talking about the
campaign. The Frenchman, confusing the Austrians with the Russians, was
trying to prove that the Russians had surrendered and had fled all
the way from Ulm, while Dolokhov maintained that the Russians had not
surrendered but had beaten the French.

"We have orders to drive you off here, and we shall drive you off," said
Dolokhov.

"Only take care you and your Cossacks are not all captured!" said the
French grenadier.

The French onlookers and listeners laughed.

"We'll make you dance as we did under Suvorov...," * said Dolokhov.


    * "On vous fera danser."


"Qu' est-ce qu'il chante?" * asked a Frenchman.


    * "What's he singing about?"


"It's ancient history," said another, guessing that it referred to a
former war. "The Emperor will teach your Suvara as he has taught the
others..."

"Bonaparte..." began Dolokhov, but the Frenchman interrupted him.

"Not Bonaparte. He is the Emperor! Sacre nom...!" cried he angrily.

"The devil skin your Emperor."

And Dolokhov swore at him in coarse soldier's Russian and shouldering
his musket walked away.

"Let us go, Ivan Lukich," he said to the captain.

"Ah, that's the way to talk French," said the picket soldiers. "Now,
Sidorov, you have a try!"

Sidorov, turning to the French, winked, and began to jabber meaningless
sounds very fast: "Kari, mala, tafa, safi, muter, Kaska," he said,
trying to give an expressive intonation to his voice.

"Ho! ho! ho! Ha! ha! ha! ha! Ouh! ouh!" came peals of such healthy and
good-humored laughter from the soldiers that it infected the French
involuntarily, so much so that the only thing left to do seemed to be
to unload the muskets, explode the ammunition, and all return home as
quickly as possible.

But the guns remained loaded, the loopholes in blockhouses and
entrenchments looked out just as menacingly, and the unlimbered cannon
confronted one another as before.





CHAPTER XVI


Having ridden round the whole line from right flank to left, Prince
Andrew made his way up to the battery from which the staff officer had
told him the whole field could be seen. Here he dismounted, and stopped
beside the farthest of the four unlimbered cannon. Before the guns an
artillery sentry was pacing up and down; he stood at attention when the
officer arrived, but at a sign resumed his measured, monotonous pacing.
Behind the guns were their limbers and still farther back picket ropes
and artillerymen's bonfires. To the left, not far from the farthest
cannon, was a small, newly constructed wattle shed from which came the
sound of officers' voices in eager conversation.

It was true that a view over nearly the whole Russian position and the
greater part of the enemy's opened out from this battery. Just facing
it, on the crest of the opposite hill, the village of Schon Grabern
could be seen, and in three places to left and right the French troops
amid the smoke of their campfires, the greater part of whom were
evidently in the village itself and behind the hill. To the left from
that village, amid the smoke, was something resembling a battery, but it
was impossible to see it clearly with the naked eye. Our right flank was
posted on a rather steep incline which dominated the French position.
Our infantry were stationed there, and at the farthest point the
dragoons. In the center, where Tushin's battery stood and from which
Prince Andrew was surveying the position, was the easiest and most
direct descent and ascent to the brook separating us from Schon Grabern.
On the left our troops were close to a copse, in which smoked the
bonfires of our infantry who were felling wood. The French line was
wider than ours, and it was plain that they could easily outflank us
on both sides. Behind our position was a steep and deep dip, making it
difficult for artillery and cavalry to retire. Prince Andrew took
out his notebook and, leaning on the cannon, sketched a plan of the
position. He made some notes on two points, intending to mention them to
Bagration. His idea was, first, to concentrate all the artillery in the
center, and secondly, to withdraw the cavalry to the other side of the
dip. Prince Andrew, being always near the commander in chief, closely
following the mass movements and general orders, and constantly studying
historical accounts of battles, involuntarily pictured to himself the
course of events in the forthcoming action in broad outline. He imagined
only important possibilities: "If the enemy attacks the right flank,"
he said to himself, "the Kiev grenadiers and the Podolsk chasseurs must
hold their position till reserves from the center come up. In that case
the dragoons could successfully make a flank counterattack. If they
attack our center we, having the center battery on this high ground,
shall withdraw the left flank under its cover, and retreat to the dip by
echelons." So he reasoned.... All the time he had been beside the gun,
he had heard the voices of the officers distinctly, but as often happens
had not understood a word of what they were saying. Suddenly, however,
he was struck by a voice coming from the shed, and its tone was so
sincere that he could not but listen.

"No, friend," said a pleasant and, as it seemed to Prince Andrew, a
familiar voice, "what I say is that if it were possible to know what is
beyond death, none of us would be afraid of it. That's so, friend."

Another, a younger voice, interrupted him: "Afraid or not, you can't
escape it anyhow."

"All the same, one is afraid! Oh, you clever people," said a third manly
voice interrupting them both. "Of course you artillery men are very
wise, because you can take everything along with you--vodka and snacks."

And the owner of the manly voice, evidently an infantry officer,
laughed.

"Yes, one is afraid," continued the first speaker, he of the familiar
voice. "One is afraid of the unknown, that's what it is. Whatever we may
say about the soul going to the sky... we know there is no sky but only
an atmosphere."

The manly voice again interrupted the artillery officer.

"Well, stand us some of your herb vodka, Tushin," it said.

"Why," thought Prince Andrew, "that's the captain who stood up in
the sutler's hut without his boots." He recognized the agreeable,
philosophizing voice with pleasure.

"Some herb vodka? Certainly!" said Tushin. "But still, to conceive a
future life..."

He did not finish. Just then there was a whistle in the air; nearer and
nearer, faster and louder, louder and faster, a cannon ball, as if it
had not finished saying what was necessary, thudded into the ground near
the shed with super human force, throwing up a mass of earth. The ground
seemed to groan at the terrible impact.

And immediately Tushin, with a short pipe in the corner of his mouth and
his kind, intelligent face rather pale, rushed out of the shed followed
by the owner of the manly voice, a dashing infantry officer who hurried
off to his company, buttoning up his coat as he ran.





CHAPTER XVII


Mounting his horse again Prince Andrew lingered with the battery,
looking at the puff from the gun that had sent the ball. His eyes
ran rapidly over the wide space, but he only saw that the hitherto
motionless masses of the French now swayed and that there really was
a battery to their left. The smoke above it had not yet dispersed. Two
mounted Frenchmen, probably adjutants, were galloping up the hill. A
small but distinctly visible enemy column was moving down the hill,
probably to strengthen the front line. The smoke of the first shot had
not yet dispersed before another puff appeared, followed by a report.
The battle had begun! Prince Andrew turned his horse and galloped back
to Grunth to find Prince Bagration. He heard the cannonade behind him
growing louder and more frequent. Evidently our guns had begun to reply.
From the bottom of the slope, where the parleys had taken place, came
the report of musketry.

Lemarrois had just arrived at a gallop with Bonaparte's stern letter,
and Murat, humiliated and anxious to expiate his fault, had at once
moved his forces to attack the center and outflank both the Russian
wings, hoping before evening and before the arrival of the Emperor to
crush the contemptible detachment that stood before him.

"It has begun. Here it is!" thought Prince Andrew, feeling the blood
rush to his heart. "But where and how will my Toulon present itself?"

Passing between the companies that had been eating porridge and drinking
vodka a quarter of an hour before, he saw everywhere the same rapid
movement of soldiers forming ranks and getting their muskets ready,
and on all their faces he recognized the same eagerness that filled his
heart. "It has begun! Here it is, dreadful but enjoyable!" was what the
face of each soldier and each officer seemed to say.

Before he had reached the embankments that were being thrown up, he saw,
in the light of the dull autumn evening, mounted men coming toward him.
The foremost, wearing a Cossack cloak and lambskin cap and riding a
white horse, was Prince Bagration. Prince Andrew stopped, waiting for
him to come up; Prince Bagration reined in his horse and recognizing
Prince Andrew nodded to him. He still looked ahead while Prince Andrew
told him what he had seen.

The feeling, "It has begun! Here it is!" was seen even on Prince
Bagration's hard brown face with its half-closed, dull, sleepy eyes.
Prince Andrew gazed with anxious curiosity at that impassive face
and wished he could tell what, if anything, this man was thinking and
feeling at that moment. "Is there anything at all behind that impassive
face?" Prince Andrew asked himself as he looked. Prince Bagration bent
his head in sign of agreement with what Prince Andrew told him, and
said, "Very good!" in a tone that seemed to imply that everything that
took place and was reported to him was exactly what he had foreseen.
Prince Andrew, out of breath with his rapid ride, spoke quickly.
Prince Bagration, uttering his words with an Oriental accent, spoke
particularly slowly, as if to impress the fact that there was no need to
hurry. However, he put his horse to a trot in the direction of Tushin's
battery. Prince Andrew followed with the suite. Behind Prince Bagration
rode an officer of the suite, the prince's personal adjutant, Zherkov,
an orderly officer, the staff officer on duty, riding a fine bobtailed
horse, and a civilian--an accountant who had asked permission to
be present at the battle out of curiosity. The accountant, a stout,
full-faced man, looked around him with a naive smile of satisfaction
and presented a strange appearance among the hussars, Cossacks, and
adjutants, in his camlet coat, as he jolted on his horse with a convoy
officer's saddle.

"He wants to see a battle," said Zherkov to Bolkonski, pointing to the
accountant, "but he feels a pain in the pit of his stomach already."

"Oh, leave off!" said the accountant with a beaming but rather cunning
smile, as if flattered at being made the subject of Zherkov's joke, and
purposely trying to appear stupider than he really was.

"It is very strange, mon Monsieur Prince," said the staff officer. (He
remembered that in French there is some peculiar way of addressing a
prince, but could not get it quite right.)

By this time they were all approaching Tushin's battery, and a ball
struck the ground in front of them.

"What's that that has fallen?" asked the accountant with a naive smile.

"A French pancake," answered Zherkov.

"So that's what they hit with?" asked the accountant. "How awful!"

He seemed to swell with satisfaction. He had hardly finished speaking
when they again heard an unexpectedly violent whistling which suddenly
ended with a thud into something soft... f-f-flop! and a Cossack, riding
a little to their right and behind the accountant, crashed to earth with
his horse. Zherkov and the staff officer bent over their saddles and
turned their horses away. The accountant stopped, facing the Cossack,
and examined him with attentive curiosity. The Cossack was dead, but the
horse still struggled.

Prince Bagration screwed up his eyes, looked round, and, seeing the
cause of the confusion, turned away with indifference, as if to say, "Is
it worth while noticing trifles?" He reined in his horse with the case
of a skillful rider and, slightly bending over, disengaged his saber
which had caught in his cloak. It was an old-fashioned saber of a kind
no longer in general use. Prince Andrew remembered the story of Suvorov
giving his saber to Bagration in Italy, and the recollection was
particularly pleasant at that moment. They had reached the battery at
which Prince Andrew had been when he examined the battlefield.

"Whose company?" asked Prince Bagration of an artilleryman standing by
the ammunition wagon.

He asked, "Whose company?" but he really meant, "Are you frightened
here?" and the artilleryman understood him.

"Captain Tushin's, your excellency!" shouted the red-haired, freckled
gunner in a merry voice, standing to attention.

"Yes, yes," muttered Bagration as if considering something, and he rode
past the limbers to the farthest cannon.

As he approached, a ringing shot issued from it deafening him and his
suite, and in the smoke that suddenly surrounded the gun they could see
the gunners who had seized it straining to roll it quickly back to its
former position. A huge, broad-shouldered gunner, Number One, holding
a mop, his legs far apart, sprang to the wheel; while Number Two with
a trembling hand placed a charge in the cannon's mouth. The short,
round-shouldered Captain Tushin, stumbling over the tail of the gun
carriage, moved forward and, not noticing the general, looked out
shading his eyes with his small hand.

"Lift it two lines more and it will be just right," cried he in a feeble
voice to which he tried to impart a dashing note, ill suited to his weak
figure. "Number Two!" he squeaked. "Fire, Medvedev!"

Bagration called to him, and Tushin, raising three fingers to his cap
with a bashful and awkward gesture not at all like a military salute
but like a priest's benediction, approached the general. Though Tushin's
guns had been intended to cannonade the valley, he was firing incendiary
balls at the village of Schon Grabern visible just opposite, in front of
which large masses of French were advancing.

No one had given Tushin orders where and at what to fire, but after
consulting his sergeant major, Zakharchenko, for whom he had great
respect, he had decided that it would be a good thing to set fire to the
village. "Very good!" said Bagration in reply to the officer's report,
and began deliberately to examine the whole battlefield extended before
him. The French had advanced nearest on our right. Below the height on
which the Kiev regiment was stationed, in the hollow where the rivulet
flowed, the soul-stirring rolling and crackling of musketry was heard,
and much farther to the right beyond the dragoons, the officer of the
suite pointed out to Bagration a French column that was outflanking us.
To the left the horizon bounded by the adjacent wood. Prince Bagration
ordered two battalions from the center to be sent to reinforce the right
flank. The officer of the suite ventured to remark to the prince that
if these battalions went away, the guns would remain without support.
Prince Bagration turned to the officer and with his dull eyes looked at
him in silence. It seemed to Prince Andrew that the officer's remark was
just and that really no answer could be made to it. But at that moment
an adjutant galloped up with a message from the commander of the
regiment in the hollow and news that immense masses of the French were
coming down upon them and that his regiment was in disorder and was
retreating upon the Kiev grenadiers. Prince Bagration bowed his head in
sign of assent and approval. He rode off at a walk to the right and sent
an adjutant to the dragoons with orders to attack the French. But this
adjutant returned half an hour later with the news that the commander
of the dragoons had already retreated beyond the dip in the ground, as
a heavy fire had been opened on him and he was losing men uselessly, and
so had hastened to throw some sharpshooters into the wood.

"Very good!" said Bagration.

As he was leaving the battery, firing was heard on the left also, and
as it was too far to the left flank for him to have time to go there
himself, Prince Bagration sent Zherkov to tell the general in command
(the one who had paraded his regiment before Kutuzov at Braunau) that
he must retreat as quickly as possible behind the hollow in the rear,
as the right flank would probably not be able to withstand the enemy's
attack very long. About Tushin and the battalion that had been in
support of his battery all was forgotten. Prince Andrew listened
attentively to Bagration's colloquies with the commanding officers and
the orders he gave them and, to his surprise, found that no orders were
really given, but that Prince Bagration tried to make it appear that
everything done by necessity, by accident, or by the will of subordinate
commanders was done, if not by his direct command, at least in accord
with his intentions. Prince Andrew noticed, however, that though what
happened was due to chance and was independent of the commander's will,
owing to the tact Bagration showed, his presence was very valuable.
Officers who approached him with disturbed countenances became calm;
soldiers and officers greeted him gaily, grew more cheerful in his
presence, and were evidently anxious to display their courage before
him.





CHAPTER XVIII


Prince Bagration, having reached the highest point of our right flank,
began riding downhill to where the roll of musketry was heard but where
on account of the smoke nothing could be seen. The nearer they got to
the hollow the less they could see but the more they felt the nearness
of the actual battlefield. They began to meet wounded men. One with a
bleeding head and no cap was being dragged along by two soldiers who
supported him under the arms. There was a gurgle in his throat and he
was spitting blood. A bullet had evidently hit him in the throat or
mouth. Another was walking sturdily by himself but without his musket,
groaning aloud and swinging his arm which had just been hurt, while
blood from it was streaming over his greatcoat as from a bottle. He had
that moment been wounded and his face showed fear rather than suffering.
Crossing a road they descended a steep incline and saw several men
lying on the ground; they also met a crowd of soldiers some of whom were
unwounded. The soldiers were ascending the hill breathing heavily, and
despite the general's presence were talking loudly and gesticulating.
In front of them rows of gray cloaks were already visible through the
smoke, and an officer catching sight of Bagration rushed shouting after
the crowd of retreating soldiers, ordering them back. Bagration rode up
to the ranks along which shots crackled now here and now there, drowning
the sound of voices and the shouts of command. The whole air reeked with
smoke. The excited faces of the soldiers were blackened with it. Some
were using their ramrods, others putting powder on the touchpans or
taking charges from their pouches, while others were firing, though who
they were firing at could not be seen for the smoke which there was no
wind to carry away. A pleasant humming and whistling of bullets were
often heard. "What is this?" thought Prince Andrew approaching the crowd
of soldiers. "It can't be an attack, for they are not moving; it can't
be a square--for they are not drawn up for that."

The commander of the regiment, a thin, feeble-looking old man with a
pleasant smile--his eyelids drooping more than half over his old eyes,
giving him a mild expression, rode up to Bagration and welcomed him as
a host welcomes an honored guest. He reported that his regiment had
been attacked by French cavalry and that, though the attack had been
repulsed, he had lost more than half his men. He said the attack
had been repulsed, employing this military term to describe what had
occurred to his regiment, but in reality he did not himself know what
had happened during that half-hour to the troops entrusted to him, and
could not say with certainty whether the attack had been repulsed or his
regiment had been broken up. All he knew was that at the commencement
of the action balls and shells began flying all over his regiment and
hitting men and that afterwards someone had shouted "Cavalry!" and our
men had begun firing. They were still firing, not at the cavalry which
had disappeared, but at French infantry who had come into the hollow and
were firing at our men. Prince Bagration bowed his head as a sign
that this was exactly what he had desired and expected. Turning to his
adjutant he ordered him to bring down the two battalions of the Sixth
Chasseurs whom they had just passed. Prince Andrew was struck by
the changed expression on Prince Bagration's face at this moment. It
expressed the concentrated and happy resolution you see on the face of
a man who on a hot day takes a final run before plunging into the water.
The dull, sleepy expression was no longer there, nor the affectation
of profound thought. The round, steady, hawk's eyes looked before him
eagerly and rather disdainfully, not resting on anything although his
movements were still slow and measured.

The commander of the regiment turned to Prince Bagration, entreating him
to go back as it was too dangerous to remain where they were. "Please,
your excellency, for God's sake!" he kept saying, glancing for support
at an officer of the suite who turned away from him. "There, you see!"
and he drew attention to the bullets whistling, singing, and hissing
continually around them. He spoke in the tone of entreaty and reproach
that a carpenter uses to a gentleman who has picked up an ax: "We are
used to it, but you, sir, will blister your hands." He spoke as if those
bullets could not kill him, and his half-closed eyes gave still more
persuasiveness to his words. The staff officer joined in the colonel's
appeals, but Bagration did not reply; he only gave an order to
cease firing and re-form, so as to give room for the two approaching
battalions. While he was speaking, the curtain of smoke that had
concealed the hollow, driven by a rising wind, began to move from right
to left as if drawn by an invisible hand, and the hill opposite, with
the French moving about on it, opened out before them. All eyes fastened
involuntarily on this French column advancing against them and winding
down over the uneven ground. One could already see the soldiers' shaggy
caps, distinguish the officers from the men, and see the standard
flapping against its staff.

"They march splendidly," remarked someone in Bagration's suite.

The head of the column had already descended into the hollow. The clash
would take place on this side of it...

The remains of our regiment which had been in action rapidly formed up
and moved to the right; from behind it, dispersing the laggards, came
two battalions of the Sixth Chasseurs in fine order. Before they had
reached Bagration, the weighty tread of the mass of men marching in step
could be heard. On their left flank, nearest to Bagration, marched
a company commander, a fine round-faced man, with a stupid and happy
expression--the same man who had rushed out of the wattle shed. At that
moment he was clearly thinking of nothing but how dashing a fellow he
would appear as he passed the commander.

With the self-satisfaction of a man on parade, he stepped lightly with
his muscular legs as if sailing along, stretching himself to his full
height without the smallest effort, his ease contrasting with the heavy
tread of the soldiers who were keeping step with him. He carried close
to his leg a narrow unsheathed sword (small, curved, and not like a real
weapon) and looked now at the superior officers and now back at the men
without losing step, his whole powerful body turning flexibly. It was as
if all the powers of his soul were concentrated on passing the commander
in the best possible manner, and feeling that he was doing it well he
was happy. "Left... left... left..." he seemed to repeat to himself at
each alternate step; and in time to this, with stern but varied faces,
the wall of soldiers burdened with knapsacks and muskets marched in
step, and each one of these hundreds of soldiers seemed to be repeating
to himself at each alternate step, "Left... left... left..." A fat
major skirted a bush, puffing and falling out of step; a soldier who had
fallen behind, his face showing alarm at his defection, ran at a trot,
panting to catch up with his company. A cannon ball, cleaving the air,
flew over the heads of Bagration and his suite, and fell into the
column to the measure of "Left... left!" "Close up!" came the company
commander's voice in jaunty tones. The soldiers passed in a semicircle
round something where the ball had fallen, and an old trooper on the
flank, a noncommissioned officer who had stopped beside the dead men,
ran to catch up his line and, falling into step with a hop, looked back
angrily, and through the ominous silence and the regular tramp of feet
beating the ground in unison, one seemed to hear left... left... left.

"Well done, lads!" said Prince Bagration.

"Glad to do our best, your ex'len-lency!" came a confused shout from
the ranks. A morose soldier marching on the left turned his eyes on
Bagration as he shouted, with an expression that seemed to say: "We know
that ourselves!" Another, without looking round, as though fearing to
relax, shouted with his mouth wide open and passed on.

The order was given to halt and down knapsacks.

Bagration rode round the ranks that had marched past him and dismounted.
He gave the reins to a Cossack, took off and handed over his felt coat,
stretched his legs, and set his cap straight. The head of the French
column, with its officers leading, appeared from below the hill.

"Forward, with God!" said Bagration, in a resolute, sonorous voice,
turning for a moment to the front line, and slightly swinging his arms,
he went forward uneasily over the rough field with the awkward gait of
a cavalryman. Prince Andrew felt that an invisible power was leading him
forward, and experienced great happiness.

The French were already near. Prince Andrew, walking beside Bagration,
could clearly distinguish their bandoliers, red epaulets, and even their
faces. (He distinctly saw an old French officer who, with gaitered legs
and turned-out toes, climbed the hill with difficulty.) Prince Bagration
gave no further orders and silently continued to walk on in front of the
ranks. Suddenly one shot after another rang out from the French, smoke
appeared all along their uneven ranks, and musket shots sounded. Several
of our men fell, among them the round-faced officer who had marched so
gaily and complacently. But at the moment the first report was heard,
Bagration looked round and shouted, "Hurrah!"

"Hurrah--ah!--ah!" rang a long-drawn shout from our ranks, and passing
Bagration and racing one another they rushed in an irregular but joyous
and eager crowd down the hill at their disordered foe.





CHAPTER XIX


The attack of the Sixth Chasseurs secured the retreat of our right
flank. In the center Tushin's forgotten battery, which had managed to
set fire to the Schon Grabern village, delayed the French advance. The
French were putting out the fire which the wind was spreading, and thus
gave us time to retreat. The retirement of the center to the other side
of the dip in the ground at the rear was hurried and noisy, but the
different companies did not get mixed. But our left--which consisted
of the Azov and Podolsk infantry and the Pavlograd hussars--was
simultaneously attacked and outflanked by superior French forces under
Lannes and was thrown into confusion. Bagration had sent Zherkov to the
general commanding that left flank with orders to retreat immediately.

Zherkov, not removing his hand from his cap, turned his horse about
and galloped off. But no sooner had he left Bagration than his courage
failed him. He was seized by panic and could not go where it was
dangerous.

Having reached the left flank, instead of going to the front where the
firing was, he began to look for the general and his staff where they
could not possibly be, and so did not deliver the order.

The command of the left flank belonged by seniority to the commander of
the regiment Kutuzov had reviewed at Braunau and in which Dolokhov was
serving as a private. But the command of the extreme left flank had been
assigned to the commander of the Pavlograd regiment in which Rostov
was serving, and a misunderstanding arose. The two commanders were much
exasperated with one another and, long after the action had begun on
the right flank and the French were already advancing, were engaged
in discussion with the sole object of offending one another. But the
regiments, both cavalry and infantry, were by no means ready for the
impending action. From privates to general they were not expecting a
battle and were engaged in peaceful occupations, the cavalry feeding the
horses and the infantry collecting wood.

"He higher iss dan I in rank," said the German colonel of the hussars,
flushing and addressing an adjutant who had ridden up, "so let him do
what he vill, but I cannot sacrifice my hussars... Bugler, sount ze
retreat!"

But haste was becoming imperative. Cannon and musketry, mingling
together, thundered on the right and in the center, while the capotes of
Lannes' sharpshooters were already seen crossing the milldam and forming
up within twice the range of a musket shot. The general in command of
the infantry went toward his horse with jerky steps, and having mounted
drew himself up very straight and tall and rode to the Pavlograd
commander. The commanders met with polite bows but with secret
malevolence in their hearts.

"Once again, Colonel," said the general, "I can't leave half my men
in the wood. I beg of you, I beg of you," he repeated, "to occupy the
position and prepare for an attack."

"I peg of you yourself not to mix in vot is not your business!" suddenly
replied the irate colonel. "If you vere in the cavalry..."

"I am not in the cavalry, Colonel, but I am a Russian general and if you
are not aware of the fact..."

"Quite avare, your excellency," suddenly shouted the colonel, touching
his horse and turning purple in the face. "Vill you be so goot to
come to ze front and see dat zis position iss no goot? I don't vish to
destroy my men for your pleasure!"

"You forget yourself, Colonel. I am not considering my own pleasure and
I won't allow it to be said!"

Taking the colonel's outburst as a challenge to his courage, the general
expanded his chest and rode, frowning, beside him to the front line, as
if their differences would be settled there amongst the bullets. They
reached the front, several bullets sped over them, and they halted in
silence. There was nothing fresh to be seen from the line, for from
where they had been before it had been evident that it was impossible
for cavalry to act among the bushes and broken ground, as well as that
the French were outflanking our left. The general and colonel looked
sternly and significantly at one another like two fighting cocks
preparing for battle, each vainly trying to detect signs of cowardice
in the other. Both passed the examination successfully. As there was
nothing to be said, and neither wished to give occasion for it to be
alleged that he had been the first to leave the range of fire, they
would have remained there for a long time testing each other's courage
had it not been that just then they heard the rattle of musketry and a
muffled shout almost behind them in the wood. The French had attacked
the men collecting wood in the copse. It was no longer possible for the
hussars to retreat with the infantry. They were cut off from the line of
retreat on the left by the French. However inconvenient the position, it
was now necessary to attack in order to cut away through for themselves.

The squadron in which Rostov was serving had scarcely time to mount
before it was halted facing the enemy. Again, as at the Enns bridge,
there was nothing between the squadron and the enemy, and again that
terrible dividing line of uncertainty and fear--resembling the line
separating the living from the dead--lay between them. All were
conscious of this unseen line, and the question whether they would cross
it or not, and how they would cross it, agitated them all.

The colonel rode to the front, angrily gave some reply to questions put
to him by the officers, and, like a man desperately insisting on having
his own way, gave an order. No one said anything definite, but the rumor
of an attack spread through the squadron. The command to form up rang
out and the sabers whizzed as they were drawn from their scabbards.
Still no one moved. The troops of the left flank, infantry and hussars
alike, felt that the commander did not himself know what to do, and this
irresolution communicated itself to the men.

"If only they would be quick!" thought Rostov, feeling that at last
the time had come to experience the joy of an attack of which he had so
often heard from his fellow hussars.

"Fo'ward, with God, lads!" rang out Denisov's voice. "At a twot
fo'ward!"

The horses' croups began to sway in the front line. Rook pulled at the
reins and started of his own accord.

Before him, on the right, Rostov saw the front lines of his hussars and
still farther ahead a dark line which he could not see distinctly but
took to be the enemy. Shots could be heard, but some way off.

"Faster!" came the word of command, and Rostov felt Rook's flanks
drooping as he broke into a gallop.

Rostov anticipated his horse's movements and became more and more
elated. He had noticed a solitary tree ahead of him. This tree had been
in the middle of the line that had seemed so terrible--and now he
had crossed that line and not only was there nothing terrible, but
everything was becoming more and more happy and animated. "Oh, how I
will slash at him!" thought Rostov, gripping the hilt of his saber.

"Hur-a-a-a-ah!" came a roar of voices. "Let anyone come my way now,"
thought Rostov driving his spurs into Rook and letting him go at a full
gallop so that he outstripped the others. Ahead, the enemy was already
visible. Suddenly something like a birch broom seemed to sweep over the
squadron. Rostov raised his saber, ready to strike, but at that instant
the trooper Nikitenko, who was galloping ahead, shot away from him, and
Rostov felt as in a dream that he continued to be carried forward
with unnatural speed but yet stayed on the same spot. From behind him
Bondarchuk, an hussar he knew, jolted against him and looked angrily at
him. Bondarchuk's horse swerved and galloped past.

"How is it I am not moving? I have fallen, I am killed!" Rostov asked
and answered at the same instant. He was alone in the middle of a field.
Instead of the moving horses and hussars' backs, he saw nothing before
him but the motionless earth and the stubble around him. There was warm
blood under his arm. "No, I am wounded and the horse is killed." Rook
tried to rise on his forelegs but fell back, pinning his rider's leg.
Blood was flowing from his head; he struggled but could not rise. Rostov
also tried to rise but fell back, his sabretache having become entangled
in the saddle. Where our men were, and where the French, he did not
know. There was no one near.

Having disentangled his leg, he rose. "Where, on which side, was now the
line that had so sharply divided the two armies?" he asked himself and
could not answer. "Can something bad have happened to me?" he wondered
as he got up: and at that moment he felt that something superfluous was
hanging on his benumbed left arm. The wrist felt as if it were not his.
He examined his hand carefully, vainly trying to find blood on it. "Ah,
here are people coming," he thought joyfully, seeing some men running
toward him. "They will help me!" In front came a man wearing a strange
shako and a blue cloak, swarthy, sunburned, and with a hooked nose. Then
came two more, and many more running behind. One of them said something
strange, not in Russian. In among the hindmost of these men wearing
similar shakos was a Russian hussar. He was being held by the arms and
his horse was being led behind him.

"It must be one of ours, a prisoner. Yes. Can it be that they will take
me too? Who are these men?" thought Rostov, scarcely believing his eyes.
"Can they be French?" He looked at the approaching Frenchmen, and though
but a moment before he had been galloping to get at them and hack them
to pieces, their proximity now seemed so awful that he could not believe
his eyes. "Who are they? Why are they running? Can they be coming at me?
And why? To kill me? Me whom everyone is so fond of?" He remembered
his mother's love for him, and his family's, and his friends', and the
enemy's intention to kill him seemed impossible. "But perhaps they may
do it!" For more than ten seconds he stood not moving from the spot or
realizing the situation. The foremost Frenchman, the one with the hooked
nose, was already so close that the expression of his face could be
seen. And the excited, alien face of that man, his bayonet hanging down,
holding his breath, and running so lightly, frightened Rostov. He seized
his pistol and, instead of firing it, flung it at the Frenchman and
ran with all his might toward the bushes. He did not now run with the
feeling of doubt and conflict with which he had trodden the Enns bridge,
but with the feeling of a hare fleeing from the hounds. One single
sentiment, that of fear for his young and happy life, possessed his
whole being. Rapidly leaping the furrows, he fled across the field with
the impetuosity he used to show at catchplay, now and then turning his
good-natured, pale, young face to look back. A shudder of terror went
through him: "No, better not look," he thought, but having reached the
bushes he glanced round once more. The French had fallen behind, and
just as he looked round the first man changed his run to a walk and,
turning, shouted something loudly to a comrade farther back. Rostov
paused. "No, there's some mistake," thought he. "They can't have wanted
to kill me." But at the same time, his left arm felt as heavy as if
a seventy-pound weight were tied to it. He could run no more. The
Frenchman also stopped and took aim. Rostov closed his eyes and stooped
down. One bullet and then another whistled past him. He mustered his
last remaining strength, took hold of his left hand with his right, and
reached the bushes. Behind these were some Russian sharpshooters.





CHAPTER XX


The infantry regiments that had been caught unawares in the outskirts
of the wood ran out of it, the different companies getting mixed, and
retreated as a disorderly crowd. One soldier, in his fear, uttered the
senseless cry, "Cut off!" that is so terrible in battle, and that word
infected the whole crowd with a feeling of panic.

"Surrounded! Cut off? We're lost!" shouted the fugitives.

The moment he heard the firing and the cry from behind, the general
realized that something dreadful had happened to his regiment, and the
thought that he, an exemplary officer of many years' service who had
never been to blame, might be held responsible at headquarters for
negligence or inefficiency so staggered him that, forgetting the
recalcitrant cavalry colonel, his own dignity as a general, and above
all quite forgetting the danger and all regard for self-preservation, he
clutched the crupper of his saddle and, spurring his horse, galloped to
the regiment under a hail of bullets which fell around, but fortunately
missed him. His one desire was to know what was happening and at any
cost correct, or remedy, the mistake if he had made one, so that he,
an exemplary officer of twenty-two years' service, who had never been
censured, should not be held to blame.

Having galloped safely through the French, he reached a field behind
the copse across which our men, regardless of orders, were running and
descending the valley. That moment of moral hesitation which decides
the fate of battles had arrived. Would this disorderly crowd of soldiers
attend to the voice of their commander, or would they, disregarding him,
continue their flight? Despite his desperate shouts that used to seem
so terrible to the soldiers, despite his furious purple countenance
distorted out of all likeness to his former self, and the flourishing of
his saber, the soldiers all continued to run, talking, firing into the
air, and disobeying orders. The moral hesitation which decided the fate
of battles was evidently culminating in a panic.

The general had a fit of coughing as a result of shouting and of the
powder smoke and stopped in despair. Everything seemed lost. But at that
moment the French who were attacking, suddenly and without any apparent
reason, ran back and disappeared from the outskirts, and Russian
sharpshooters showed themselves in the copse. It was Timokhin's company,
which alone had maintained its order in the wood and, having lain in
ambush in a ditch, now attacked the French unexpectedly. Timokhin, armed
only with a sword, had rushed at the enemy with such a desperate cry and
such mad, drunken determination that, taken by surprise, the French had
thrown down their muskets and run. Dolokhov, running beside Timokhin,
killed a Frenchman at close quarters and was the first to seize the
surrendering French officer by his collar. Our fugitives returned, the
battalions re-formed, and the French who had nearly cut our left flank
in half were for the moment repulsed. Our reserve units were able to
join up, and the fight was at an end. The regimental commander and Major
Ekonomov had stopped beside a bridge, letting the retreating companies
pass by them, when a soldier came up and took hold of the commander's
stirrup, almost leaning against him. The man was wearing a bluish coat
of broadcloth, he had no knapsack or cap, his head was bandaged, and
over his shoulder a French munition pouch was slung. He had an officer's
sword in his hand. The soldier was pale, his blue eyes looked impudently
into the commander's face, and his lips were smiling. Though the
commander was occupied in giving instructions to Major Ekonomov, he
could not help taking notice of the soldier.

"Your excellency, here are two trophies," said Dolokhov, pointing to the
French sword and pouch. "I have taken an officer prisoner. I stopped the
company." Dolokhov breathed heavily from weariness and spoke in abrupt
sentences. "The whole company can bear witness. I beg you will remember
this, your excellency!"

"All right, all right," replied the commander, and turned to Major
Ekonomov.

But Dolokhov did not go away; he untied the handkerchief around his
head, pulled it off, and showed the blood congealed on his hair.

"A bayonet wound. I remained at the front. Remember, your excellency!"


Tushin's battery had been forgotten and only at the very end of the
action did Prince Bagration, still hearing the cannonade in the center,
send his orderly staff officer, and later Prince Andrew also, to order
the battery to retire as quickly as possible. When the supports attached
to Tushin's battery had been moved away in the middle of the action
by someone's order, the battery had continued firing and was only not
captured by the French because the enemy could not surmise that anyone
could have the effrontery to continue firing from four quite undefended
guns. On the contrary, the energetic action of that battery led the
French to suppose that here--in the center--the main Russian forces were
concentrated. Twice they had attempted to attack this point, but on each
occasion had been driven back by grapeshot from the four isolated guns
on the hillock.

Soon after Prince Bagration had left him, Tushin had succeeded in
setting fire to Schon Grabern.

"Look at them scurrying! It's burning! Just see the smoke! Fine! Grand!
Look at the smoke, the smoke!" exclaimed the artillerymen, brightening
up.

All the guns, without waiting for orders, were being fired in the
direction of the conflagration. As if urging each other on, the soldiers
cried at each shot: "Fine! That's good! Look at it... Grand!" The fire,
fanned by the breeze, was rapidly spreading. The French columns that had
advanced beyond the village went back; but as though in revenge for this
failure, the enemy placed ten guns to the right of the village and began
firing them at Tushin's battery.

In their childlike glee, aroused by the fire and their luck in
successfully cannonading the French, our artillerymen only noticed this
battery when two balls, and then four more, fell among our guns, one
knocking over two horses and another tearing off a munition-wagon
driver's leg. Their spirits once roused were, however, not diminished,
but only changed character. The horses were replaced by others from a
reserve gun carriage, the wounded were carried away, and the four guns
were turned against the ten-gun battery. Tushin's companion officer
had been killed at the beginning of the engagement and within an hour
seventeen of the forty men of the guns' crews had been disabled, but the
artillerymen were still as merry and lively as ever. Twice they noticed
the French appearing below them, and then they fired grapeshot at them.

Little Tushin, moving feebly and awkwardly, kept telling his orderly to
"refill my pipe for that one!" and then, scattering sparks from it, ran
forward shading his eyes with his small hand to look at the French.

"Smack at 'em, lads!" he kept saying, seizing the guns by the wheels and
working the screws himself.

Amid the smoke, deafened by the incessant reports which always made him
jump, Tushin not taking his pipe from his mouth ran from gun to gun, now
aiming, now counting the charges, now giving orders about replacing dead
or wounded horses and harnessing fresh ones, and shouting in his feeble
voice, so high pitched and irresolute. His face grew more and more
animated. Only when a man was killed or wounded did he frown and turn
away from the sight, shouting angrily at the men who, as is always the
case, hesitated about lifting the injured or dead. The soldiers, for the
most part handsome fellows and, as is always the case in an artillery
company, a head and shoulders taller and twice as broad as their
officer--all looked at their commander like children in an embarrassing
situation, and the expression on his face was invariably reflected on
theirs.

Owing to the terrible uproar and the necessity for concentration and
activity, Tushin did not experience the slightest unpleasant sense of
fear, and the thought that he might be killed or badly wounded never
occurred to him. On the contrary, he became more and more elated. It
seemed to him that it was a very long time ago, almost a day, since he
had first seen the enemy and fired the first shot, and that the corner
of the field he stood on was well-known and familiar ground. Though he
thought of everything, considered everything, and did everything the
best of officers could do in his position, he was in a state akin to
feverish delirium or drunkenness.

From the deafening sounds of his own guns around him, the whistle and
thud of the enemy's cannon balls, from the flushed and perspiring faces
of the crew bustling round the guns, from the sight of the blood of men
and horses, from the little puffs of smoke on the enemy's side (always
followed by a ball flying past and striking the earth, a man, a gun, a
horse), from the sight of all these things a fantastic world of his
own had taken possession of his brain and at that moment afforded him
pleasure. The enemy's guns were in his fancy not guns but pipes from
which occasional puffs were blown by an invisible smoker.

"There... he's puffing again," muttered Tushin to himself, as a small
cloud rose from the hill and was borne in a streak to the left by the
wind.

"Now look out for the ball... we'll throw it back."

"What do you want, your honor?" asked an artilleryman, standing close
by, who heard him muttering.

"Nothing... only a shell..." he answered.

"Come along, our Matvevna!" he said to himself. "Matvevna" * was the
name his fancy gave to the farthest gun of the battery, which was large
and of an old pattern. The French swarming round their guns seemed to
him like ants. In that world, the handsome drunkard Number One of the
second gun's crew was "uncle"; Tushin looked at him more often than
at anyone else and took delight in his every movement. The sound of
musketry at the foot of the hill, now diminishing, now increasing,
seemed like someone's breathing. He listened intently to the ebb and
flow of these sounds.


    * Daughter of Matthew.


"Ah! Breathing again, breathing!" he muttered to himself.

He imagined himself as an enormously tall, powerful man who was throwing
cannon balls at the French with both hands.

"Now then, Matvevna, dear old lady, don't let me down!" he was saying as
he moved from the gun, when a strange, unfamiliar voice called above his
head: "Captain Tushin! Captain!"

Tushin turned round in dismay. It was the staff officer who had turned
him out of the booth at Grunth. He was shouting in a gasping voice:

"Are you mad? You have twice been ordered to retreat, and you..."

"Why are they down on me?" thought Tushin, looking in alarm at his
superior.

"I... don't..." he muttered, holding up two fingers to his cap. "I..."

But the staff officer did not finish what he wanted to say. A cannon
ball, flying close to him, caused him to duck and bend over his horse.
He paused, and just as he was about to say something more, another ball
stopped him. He turned his horse and galloped off.

"Retire! All to retire!" he shouted from a distance.

The soldiers laughed. A moment later, an adjutant arrived with the same
order.

It was Prince Andrew. The first thing he saw on riding up to the space
where Tushin's guns were stationed was an unharnessed horse with a
broken leg, that lay screaming piteously beside the harnessed horses.
Blood was gushing from its leg as from a spring. Among the limbers lay
several dead men. One ball after another passed over as he approached
and he felt a nervous shudder run down his spine. But the mere thought
of being afraid roused him again. "I cannot be afraid," thought he, and
dismounted slowly among the guns. He delivered the order and did not
leave the battery. He decided to have the guns removed from their
positions and withdrawn in his presence. Together with Tushin, stepping
across the bodies and under a terrible fire from the French, he attended
to the removal of the guns.

"A staff officer was here a minute ago, but skipped off," said an
artilleryman to Prince Andrew. "Not like your honor!"

Prince Andrew said nothing to Tushin. They were both so busy as to seem
not to notice one another. When having limbered up the only two cannon
that remained uninjured out of the four, they began moving down the hill
(one shattered gun and one unicorn were left behind), Prince Andrew rode
up to Tushin.

"Well, till we meet again..." he said, holding out his hand to Tushin.

"Good-by, my dear fellow," said Tushin. "Dear soul! Good-by, my dear
fellow!" and for some unknown reason tears suddenly filled his eyes.





CHAPTER XXI


The wind had fallen and black clouds, merging with the powder smoke,
hung low over the field of battle on the horizon. It was growing
dark and the glow of two conflagrations was the more conspicuous. The
cannonade was dying down, but the rattle of musketry behind and on
the right sounded oftener and nearer. As soon as Tushin with his guns,
continually driving round or coming upon wounded men, was out of range
of fire and had descended into the dip, he was met by some of the staff,
among them the staff officer and Zherkov, who had been twice sent to
Tushin's battery but had never reached it. Interrupting one another,
they all gave, and transmitted, orders as to how to proceed,
reprimanding and reproaching him. Tushin gave no orders, and,
silently--fearing to speak because at every word he felt ready to weep
without knowing why--rode behind on his artillery nag. Though the orders
were to abandon the wounded, many of them dragged themselves after
troops and begged for seats on the gun carriages. The jaunty infantry
officer who just before the battle had rushed out of Tushin's wattle
shed was laid, with a bullet in his stomach, on "Matvevna's" carriage.
At the foot of the hill, a pale hussar cadet, supporting one hand with
the other, came up to Tushin and asked for a seat.

"Captain, for God's sake! I've hurt my arm," he said timidly. "For God's
sake... I can't walk. For God's sake!"

It was plain that this cadet had already repeatedly asked for a lift and
been refused. He asked in a hesitating, piteous voice.

"Tell them to give me a seat, for God's sake!"

"Give him a seat," said Tushin. "Lay a cloak for him to sit on, lad,"
he said, addressing his favorite soldier. "And where is the wounded
officer?"

"He has been set down. He died," replied someone.

"Help him up. Sit down, dear fellow, sit down! Spread out the cloak,
Antonov."

The cadet was Rostov. With one hand he supported the other; he was pale
and his jaw trembled, shivering feverishly. He was placed on "Matvevna,"
the gun from which they had removed the dead officer. The cloak they
spread under him was wet with blood which stained his breeches and arm.

"What, are you wounded, my lad?" said Tushin, approaching the gun on
which Rostov sat.

"No, it's a sprain."

"Then what is this blood on the gun carriage?" inquired Tushin.

"It was the officer, your honor, stained it," answered the artilleryman,
wiping away the blood with his coat sleeve, as if apologizing for the
state of his gun.

It was all that they could do to get the guns up the rise aided by the
infantry, and having reached the village of Gruntersdorf they halted. It
had grown so dark that one could not distinguish the uniforms ten paces
off, and the firing had begun to subside. Suddenly, near by on the
right, shouting and firing were again heard. Flashes of shot gleamed in
the darkness. This was the last French attack and was met by soldiers
who had sheltered in the village houses. They all rushed out of the
village again, but Tushin's guns could not move, and the artillerymen,
Tushin, and the cadet exchanged silent glances as they awaited their
fate. The firing died down and soldiers, talking eagerly, streamed out
of a side street.

"Not hurt, Petrov?" asked one.

"We've given it 'em hot, mate! They won't make another push now," said
another.

"You couldn't see a thing. How they shot at their own fellows! Nothing
could be seen. Pitch-dark, brother! Isn't there something to drink?"

The French had been repulsed for the last time. And again and again in
the complete darkness Tushin's guns moved forward, surrounded by the
humming infantry as by a frame.

In the darkness, it seemed as though a gloomy unseen river was flowing
always in one direction, humming with whispers and talk and the sound of
hoofs and wheels. Amid the general rumble, the groans and voices of the
wounded were more distinctly heard than any other sound in the darkness
of the night. The gloom that enveloped the army was filled with their
groans, which seemed to melt into one with the darkness of the night.
After a while the moving mass became agitated, someone rode past on a
white horse followed by his suite, and said something in passing: "What
did he say? Where to, now? Halt, is it? Did he thank us?" came eager
questions from all sides. The whole moving mass began pressing closer
together and a report spread that they were ordered to halt: evidently
those in front had halted. All remained where they were in the middle of
the muddy road.

Fires were lighted and the talk became more audible. Captain Tushin,
having given orders to his company, sent a soldier to find a dressing
station or a doctor for the cadet, and sat down by a bonfire the
soldiers had kindled on the road. Rostov, too, dragged himself to the
fire. From pain, cold, and damp, a feverish shivering shook his whole
body. Drowsiness was irresistibly mastering him, but he kept awake by
an excruciating pain in his arm, for which he could find no satisfactory
position. He kept closing his eyes and then again looking at the fire,
which seemed to him dazzlingly red, and at the feeble, round-shouldered
figure of Tushin who was sitting cross-legged like a Turk beside him.
Tushin's large, kind, intelligent eyes were fixed with sympathy and
commiseration on Rostov, who saw that Tushin with his whole heart wished
to help him but could not.

From all sides were heard the footsteps and talk of the infantry, who
were walking, driving past, and settling down all around. The sound
of voices, the tramping feet, the horses' hoofs moving in mud, the
crackling of wood fires near and afar, merged into one tremulous rumble.

It was no longer, as before, a dark, unseen river flowing through the
gloom, but a dark sea swelling and gradually subsiding after a storm.
Rostov looked at and listened listlessly to what passed before and
around him. An infantryman came to the fire, squatted on his heels, held
his hands to the blaze, and turned away his face.

"You don't mind your honor?" he asked Tushin. "I've lost my company,
your honor. I don't know where... such bad luck!"

With the soldier, an infantry officer with a bandaged cheek came up to
the bonfire, and addressing Tushin asked him to have the guns moved a
trifle to let a wagon go past. After he had gone, two soldiers rushed to
the campfire. They were quarreling and fighting desperately, each trying
to snatch from the other a boot they were both holding on to.

"You picked it up?... I dare say! You're very smart!" one of them
shouted hoarsely.

Then a thin, pale soldier, his neck bandaged with a bloodstained leg
band, came up and in angry tones asked the artillerymen for water.

"Must one die like a dog?" said he.

Tushin told them to give the man some water. Then a cheerful soldier ran
up, begging a little fire for the infantry.

"A nice little hot torch for the infantry! Good luck to you, fellow
countrymen. Thanks for the fire--we'll return it with interest," said
he, carrying away into the darkness a glowing stick.

Next came four soldiers, carrying something heavy on a cloak, and passed
by the fire. One of them stumbled.

"Who the devil has put the logs on the road?" snarled he.

"He's dead--why carry him?" said another.

"Shut up!"

And they disappeared into the darkness with their load.

"Still aching?" Tushin asked Rostov in a whisper.

"Yes."

"Your honor, you're wanted by the general. He is in the hut here," said
a gunner, coming up to Tushin.

"Coming, friend."

Tushin rose and, buttoning his greatcoat and pulling it straight, walked
away from the fire.

Not far from the artillery campfire, in a hut that had been prepared
for him, Prince Bagration sat at dinner, talking with some commanding
officers who had gathered at his quarters. The little old man with
the half-closed eyes was there greedily gnawing a mutton bone, and the
general who had served blamelessly for twenty-two years, flushed by a
glass of vodka and the dinner; and the staff officer with the signet
ring, and Zherkov, uneasily glancing at them all, and Prince Andrew,
pale, with compressed lips and feverishly glittering eyes.

In a corner of the hut stood a standard captured from the French, and
the accountant with the naive face was feeling its texture, shaking his
head in perplexity--perhaps because the banner really interested him,
perhaps because it was hard for him, hungry as he was, to look on at
a dinner where there was no place for him. In the next hut there was a
French colonel who had been taken prisoner by our dragoons. Our officers
were flocking in to look at him. Prince Bagration was thanking the
individual commanders and inquiring into details of the action and our
losses. The general whose regiment had been inspected at Braunau was
informing the prince that as soon as the action began he had withdrawn
from the wood, mustered the men who were woodcutting, and, allowing the
French to pass him, had made a bayonet charge with two battalions and
had broken up the French troops.

"When I saw, your excellency, that their first battalion was
disorganized, I stopped in the road and thought: 'I'll let them come
on and will meet them with the fire of the whole battalion'--and that's
what I did."

The general had so wished to do this and was so sorry he had not managed
to do it that it seemed to him as if it had really happened. Perhaps
it might really have been so? Could one possibly make out amid all that
confusion what did or did not happen?

"By the way, your excellency, I should inform you," he
continued--remembering Dolokhov's conversation with Kutuzov and his last
interview with the gentleman-ranker--"that Private Dolokhov, who was
reduced to the ranks, took a French officer prisoner in my presence and
particularly distinguished himself."

"I saw the Pavlograd hussars attack there, your excellency," chimed in
Zherkov, looking uneasily around. He had not seen the hussars all that
day, but had heard about them from an infantry officer. "They broke up
two squares, your excellency."

Several of those present smiled at Zherkov's words, expecting one of his
usual jokes, but noticing that what he was saying redounded to the glory
of our arms and of the day's work, they assumed a serious expression,
though many of them knew that what he was saying was a lie devoid of any
foundation. Prince Bagration turned to the old colonel:

"Gentlemen, I thank you all; all arms have behaved heroically: infantry,
cavalry, and artillery. How was it that two guns were abandoned in
the center?" he inquired, searching with his eyes for someone. (Prince
Bagration did not ask about the guns on the left flank; he knew that all
the guns there had been abandoned at the very beginning of the action.)
"I think I sent you?" he added, turning to the staff officer on duty.

"One was damaged," answered the staff officer, "and the other I can't
understand. I was there all the time giving orders and had only just
left.... It is true that it was hot there," he added, modestly.

Someone mentioned that Captain Tushin was bivouacking close to the
village and had already been sent for.

"Oh, but you were there?" said Prince Bagration, addressing Prince
Andrew.

"Of course, we only just missed one another," said the staff officer,
with a smile to Bolkonski.

"I had not the pleasure of seeing you," said Prince Andrew, coldly and
abruptly.

All were silent. Tushin appeared at the threshold and made his way
timidly from behind the backs of the generals. As he stepped past the
generals in the crowded hut, feeling embarrassed as he always was by the
sight of his superiors, he did not notice the staff of the banner and
stumbled over it. Several of those present laughed.

"How was it a gun was abandoned?" asked Bagration, frowning, not so much
at the captain as at those who were laughing, among whom Zherkov laughed
loudest.

Only now, when he was confronted by the stern authorities, did his guilt
and the disgrace of having lost two guns and yet remaining alive present
themselves to Tushin in all their horror. He had been so excited that
he had not thought about it until that moment. The officers' laughter
confused him still more. He stood before Bagration with his lower
jaw trembling and was hardly able to mutter: "I don't know... your
excellency... I had no men... your excellency."

"You might have taken some from the covering troops."

Tushin did not say that there were no covering troops, though that
was perfectly true. He was afraid of getting some other officer into
trouble, and silently fixed his eyes on Bagration as a schoolboy who has
blundered looks at an examiner.

The silence lasted some time. Prince Bagration, apparently not wishing
to be severe, found nothing to say; the others did not venture to
intervene. Prince Andrew looked at Tushin from under his brows and his
fingers twitched nervously.

"Your excellency!" Prince Andrew broke the silence with his abrupt
voice, "you were pleased to send me to Captain Tushin's battery. I went
there and found two thirds of the men and horses knocked out, two guns
smashed, and no supports at all."

Prince Bagration and Tushin looked with equal intentness at Bolkonski,
who spoke with suppressed agitation.

"And, if your excellency will allow me to express my opinion," he
continued, "we owe today's success chiefly to the action of that battery
and the heroic endurance of Captain Tushin and his company," and without
awaiting a reply, Prince Andrew rose and left the table.

Prince Bagration looked at Tushin, evidently reluctant to show distrust
in Bolkonski's emphatic opinion yet not feeling able fully to credit it,
bent his head, and told Tushin that he could go. Prince Andrew went out
with him.

"Thank you; you saved me, my dear fellow!" said Tushin.

Prince Andrew gave him a look, but said nothing and went away. He felt
sad and depressed. It was all so strange, so unlike what he had hoped.


"Who are they? Why are they here? What do they want? And when will all
this end?" thought Rostov, looking at the changing shadows before
him. The pain in his arm became more and more intense. Irresistible
drowsiness overpowered him, red rings danced before his eyes, and the
impression of those voices and faces and a sense of loneliness merged
with the physical pain. It was they, these soldiers--wounded and
unwounded--it was they who were crushing, weighing down, and twisting
the sinews and scorching the flesh of his sprained arm and shoulder. To
rid himself of them he closed his eyes.

For a moment he dozed, but in that short interval innumerable things
appeared to him in a dream: his mother and her large white hand, Sonya's
thin little shoulders, Natasha's eyes and laughter, Denisov with his
voice and mustache, and Telyanin and all that affair with Telyanin and
Bogdanich. That affair was the same thing as this soldier with the harsh
voice, and it was that affair and this soldier that were so agonizingly,
incessantly pulling and pressing his arm and always dragging it in one
direction. He tried to get away from them, but they would not for an
instant let his shoulder move a hair's breadth. It would not ache--it
would be well--if only they did not pull it, but it was impossible to
get rid of them.

He opened his eyes and looked up. The black canopy of night hung less
than a yard above the glow of the charcoal. Flakes of falling snow were
fluttering in that light. Tushin had not returned, the doctor had not
come. He was alone now, except for a soldier who was sitting naked at
the other side of the fire, warming his thin yellow body.

"Nobody wants me!" thought Rostov. "There is no one to help me or pity
me. Yet I was once at home, strong, happy, and loved." He sighed and,
doing so, groaned involuntarily.

"Eh, is anything hurting you?" asked the soldier, shaking his shirt out
over the fire, and not waiting for an answer he gave a grunt and added:
"What a lot of men have been crippled today--frightful!"

Rostov did not listen to the soldier. He looked at the snowflakes
fluttering above the fire and remembered a Russian winter at his warm,
bright home, his fluffy fur coat, his quickly gliding sleigh, his
healthy body, and all the affection and care of his family. "And why did
I come here?" he wondered.

Next day the French army did not renew their attack, and the remnant of
Bagration's detachment was reunited to Kutuzov's army.





BOOK THREE: 1805





CHAPTER I


Prince Vasili was not a man who deliberately thought out his plans.
Still less did he think of injuring anyone for his own advantage. He
was merely a man of the world who had got on and to whom getting on had
become a habit. Schemes and devices for which he never rightly accounted
to himself, but which formed the whole interest of his life,
were constantly shaping themselves in his mind, arising from the
circumstances and persons he met. Of these plans he had not merely one
or two in his head but dozens, some only beginning to form themselves,
some approaching achievement, and some in course of disintegration. He
did not, for instance, say to himself: "This man now has influence, I
must gain his confidence and friendship and through him obtain a special
grant." Nor did he say to himself: "Pierre is a rich man, I must entice
him to marry my daughter and lend me the forty thousand rubles I need."
But when he came across a man of position his instinct immediately told
him that this man could be useful, and without any premeditation Prince
Vasili took the first opportunity to gain his confidence, flatter him,
become intimate with him, and finally make his request.

He had Pierre at hand in Moscow and procured for him an appointment as
Gentleman of the Bedchamber, which at that time conferred the status of
Councilor of State, and insisted on the young man accompanying him to
Petersburg and staying at his house. With apparent absent-mindedness,
yet with unhesitating assurance that he was doing the right thing,
Prince Vasili did everything to get Pierre to marry his daughter. Had he
thought out his plans beforehand he could not have been so natural and
shown such unaffected familiarity in intercourse with everybody both
above and below him in social standing. Something always drew him toward
those richer and more powerful than himself and he had rare skill in
seizing the most opportune moment for making use of people.

Pierre, on unexpectedly becoming Count Bezukhov and a rich man, felt
himself after his recent loneliness and freedom from cares so beset and
preoccupied that only in bed was he able to be by himself. He had to
sign papers, to present himself at government offices, the purpose of
which was not clear to him, to question his chief steward, to visit his
estate near Moscow, and to receive many people who formerly did not
even wish to know of his existence but would now have been offended
and grieved had he chosen not to see them. These different
people--businessmen, relations, and acquaintances alike--were all
disposed to treat the young heir in the most friendly and flattering
manner: they were all evidently firmly convinced of Pierre's noble
qualities. He was always hearing such words as: "With your remarkable
kindness," or, "With your excellent heart," "You are yourself so
honorable Count," or, "Were he as clever as you," and so on, till
he began sincerely to believe in his own exceptional kindness and
extraordinary intelligence, the more so as in the depth of his heart it
had always seemed to him that he really was very kind and intelligent.
Even people who had formerly been spiteful toward him and evidently
unfriendly now became gentle and affectionate. The angry eldest
princess, with the long waist and hair plastered down like a doll's,
had come into Pierre's room after the funeral. With drooping eyes
and frequent blushes she told him she was very sorry about their past
misunderstandings and did not now feel she had a right to ask him for
anything, except only for permission, after the blow she had received,
to remain for a few weeks longer in the house she so loved and where
she had sacrificed so much. She could not refrain from weeping at these
words. Touched that this statuesque princess could so change, Pierre
took her hand and begged her forgiveness, without knowing what for.
From that day the eldest princess quite changed toward Pierre and began
knitting a striped scarf for him.

"Do this for my sake, mon cher; after all, she had to put up with a
great deal from the deceased," said Prince Vasili to him, handing him a
deed to sign for the princess' benefit.

Prince Vasili had come to the conclusion that it was necessary to throw
this bone--a bill for thirty thousand rubles--to the poor princess that
it might not occur to her to speak of his share in the affair of the
inlaid portfolio. Pierre signed the deed and after that the princess
grew still kinder. The younger sisters also became affectionate to him,
especially the youngest, the pretty one with the mole, who often made
him feel confused by her smiles and her own confusion when meeting him.

It seemed so natural to Pierre that everyone should like him, and it
would have seemed so unnatural had anyone disliked him, that he could
not but believe in the sincerity of those around him. Besides, he had
no time to ask himself whether these people were sincere or not. He
was always busy and always felt in a state of mild and cheerful
intoxication. He felt as though he were the center of some important and
general movement; that something was constantly expected of him, that if
he did not do it he would grieve and disappoint many people, but if he
did this and that, all would be well; and he did what was demanded of
him, but still that happy result always remained in the future.

More than anyone else, Prince Vasili took possession of Pierre's affairs
and of Pierre himself in those early days. From the death of Count
Bezukhov he did not let go his hold of the lad. He had the air of a
man oppressed by business, weary and suffering, who yet would not, for
pity's sake, leave this helpless youth who, after all, was the son of
his old friend and the possessor of such enormous wealth, to the caprice
of fate and the designs of rogues. During the few days he spent in
Moscow after the death of Count Bezukhov, he would call Pierre, or go to
him himself, and tell him what ought to be done in a tone of weariness
and assurance, as if he were adding every time: "You know I am
overwhelmed with business and it is purely out of charity that I trouble
myself about you, and you also know quite well that what I propose is
the only thing possible."

"Well, my dear fellow, tomorrow we are off at last," said Prince Vasili
one day, closing his eyes and fingering Pierre's elbow, speaking as if
he were saying something which had long since been agreed upon and could
not now be altered. "We start tomorrow and I'm giving you a place in
my carriage. I am very glad. All our important business here is now
settled, and I ought to have been off long ago. Here is something I have
received from the chancellor. I asked him for you, and you have been
entered in the diplomatic corps and made a Gentleman of the Bedchamber.
The diplomatic career now lies open before you."

Notwithstanding the tone of wearied assurance with which these words
were pronounced, Pierre, who had so long been considering his career,
wished to make some suggestion. But Prince Vasili interrupted him in the
special deep cooing tone, precluding the possibility of interrupting
his speech, which he used in extreme cases when special persuasion was
needed.

"Mais, mon cher, I did this for my own sake, to satisfy my conscience,
and there is nothing to thank me for. No one has ever complained yet of
being too much loved; and besides, you are free, you could throw it
up tomorrow. But you will see everything for yourself when you get to
Petersburg. It is high time for you to get away from these terrible
recollections." Prince Vasili sighed. "Yes, yes, my boy. And my valet
can go in your carriage. Ah! I was nearly forgetting," he added. "You
know, mon cher, your father and I had some accounts to settle, so I have
received what was due from the Ryazan estate and will keep it; you won't
require it. We'll go into the accounts later."

By "what was due from the Ryazan estate" Prince Vasili meant several
thousand rubles quitrent received from Pierre's peasants, which the
prince had retained for himself.

In Petersburg, as in Moscow, Pierre found the same atmosphere of
gentleness and affection. He could not refuse the post, or rather the
rank (for he did nothing), that Prince Vasili had procured for him,
and acquaintances, invitations, and social occupations were so numerous
that, even more than in Moscow, he felt a sense of bewilderment, bustle,
and continual expectation of some good, always in front of him but never
attained.

Of his former bachelor acquaintances many were no longer in Petersburg.
The Guards had gone to the front; Dolokhov had been reduced to the
ranks; Anatole was in the army somewhere in the provinces; Prince Andrew
was abroad; so Pierre had not the opportunity to spend his nights as he
used to like to spend them, or to open his mind by intimate talks with
a friend older than himself and whom he respected. His whole time was
taken up with dinners and balls and was spent chiefly at Prince Vasili's
house in the company of the stout princess, his wife, and his beautiful
daughter Helene.

Like the others, Anna Pavlovna Scherer showed Pierre the change of
attitude toward him that had taken place in society.

Formerly in Anna Pavlovna's presence, Pierre had always felt that what
he was saying was out of place, tactless and unsuitable, that remarks
which seemed to him clever while they formed in his mind became foolish
as soon as he uttered them, while on the contrary Hippolyte's stupidest
remarks came out clever and apt. Now everything Pierre said was
charmant. Even if Anna Pavlovna did not say so, he could see that she
wished to and only refrained out of regard for his modesty.

In the beginning of the winter of 1805-6 Pierre received one of Anna
Pavlovna's usual pink notes with an invitation to which was added: "You
will find the beautiful Helene here, whom it is always delightful to
see."

When he read that sentence, Pierre felt for the first time that some
link which other people recognized had grown up between himself and
Helene, and that thought both alarmed him, as if some obligation were
being imposed on him which he could not fulfill, and pleased him as an
entertaining supposition.

Anna Pavlovna's "At Home" was like the former one, only the novelty she
offered her guests this time was not Mortemart, but a diplomatist fresh
from Berlin with the very latest details of the Emperor Alexander's
visit to Potsdam, and of how the two august friends had pledged
themselves in an indissoluble alliance to uphold the cause of justice
against the enemy of the human race. Anna Pavlovna received Pierre with
a shade of melancholy, evidently relating to the young man's recent loss
by the death of Count Bezukhov (everyone constantly considered it a
duty to assure Pierre that he was greatly afflicted by the death of the
father he had hardly known), and her melancholy was just like the august
melancholy she showed at the mention of her most august Majesty the
Empress Marya Fedorovna. Pierre felt flattered by this. Anna Pavlovna
arranged the different groups in her drawing room with her habitual
skill. The large group, in which were Prince Vasili and the generals,
had the benefit of the diplomat. Another group was at the tea table.
Pierre wished to join the former, but Anna Pavlovna--who was in the
excited condition of a commander on a battlefield to whom thousands
of new and brilliant ideas occur which there is hardly time to put in
action--seeing Pierre, touched his sleeve with her finger, saying:

"Wait a bit, I have something in view for you this evening." (She
glanced at Helene and smiled at her.) "My dear Helene, be charitable to
my poor aunt who adores you. Go and keep her company for ten minutes.
And that it will not be too dull, here is the dear count who will not
refuse to accompany you."

The beauty went to the aunt, but Anna Pavlovna detained Pierre, looking
as if she had to give some final necessary instructions.

"Isn't she exquisite?" she said to Pierre, pointing to the stately
beauty as she glided away. "And how she carries herself! For so young a
girl, such tact, such masterly perfection of manner! It comes from her
heart. Happy the man who wins her! With her the least worldly of men
would occupy a most brilliant position in society. Don't you think so? I
only wanted to know your opinion," and Anna Pavlovna let Pierre go.

Pierre, in reply, sincerely agreed with her as to Helene's perfection of
manner. If he ever thought of Helene, it was just of her beauty and her
remarkable skill in appearing silently dignified in society.

The old aunt received the two young people in her corner, but seemed
desirous of hiding her adoration for Helene and inclined rather to show
her fear of Anna Pavlovna. She looked at her niece, as if inquiring what
she was to do with these people. On leaving them, Anna Pavlovna again
touched Pierre's sleeve, saying: "I hope you won't say that it is dull
in my house again," and she glanced at Helene.

Helene smiled, with a look implying that she did not admit the
possibility of anyone seeing her without being enchanted. The aunt
coughed, swallowed, and said in French that she was very pleased to see
Helene, then she turned to Pierre with the same words of welcome and
the same look. In the middle of a dull and halting conversation, Helene
turned to Pierre with the beautiful bright smile that she gave to
everyone. Pierre was so used to that smile, and it had so little meaning
for him, that he paid no attention to it. The aunt was just speaking of
a collection of snuffboxes that had belonged to Pierre's father, Count
Bezukhov, and showed them her own box. Princess Helene asked to see the
portrait of the aunt's husband on the box lid.

"That is probably the work of Vinesse," said Pierre, mentioning a
celebrated miniaturist, and he leaned over the table to take the
snuffbox while trying to hear what was being said at the other table.

He half rose, meaning to go round, but the aunt handed him the snuffbox,
passing it across Helene's back. Helene stooped forward to make room,
and looked round with a smile. She was, as always at evening parties,
wearing a dress such as was then fashionable, cut very low at front and
back. Her bust, which had always seemed like marble to Pierre, was
so close to him that his shortsighted eyes could not but perceive the
living charm of her neck and shoulders, so near to his lips that he need
only have bent his head a little to have touched them. He was conscious
of the warmth of her body, the scent of perfume, and the creaking of her
corset as she moved. He did not see her marble beauty forming a complete
whole with her dress, but all the charm of her body only covered by her
garments. And having once seen this he could not help being aware of it,
just as we cannot renew an illusion we have once seen through.

"So you have never noticed before how beautiful I am?" Helene seemed to
say. "You had not noticed that I am a woman? Yes, I am a woman who
may belong to anyone--to you too," said her glance. And at that moment
Pierre felt that Helene not only could, but must, be his wife, and that
it could not be otherwise.

He knew this at that moment as surely as if he had been standing at the
altar with her. How and when this would be he did not know, he did not
even know if it would be a good thing (he even felt, he knew not why,
that it would be a bad thing), but he knew it would happen.

Pierre dropped his eyes, lifted them again, and wished once more to see
her as a distant beauty far removed from him, as he had seen her every
day until then, but he could no longer do it. He could not, any more
than a man who has been looking at a tuft of steppe grass through the
mist and taking it for a tree can again take it for a tree after he has
once recognized it to be a tuft of grass. She was terribly close to him.
She already had power over him, and between them there was no longer any
barrier except the barrier of his own will.

"Well, I will leave you in your little corner," came Anna Pavlovna's
voice, "I see you are all right there."

And Pierre, anxiously trying to remember whether he had done anything
reprehensible, looked round with a blush. It seemed to him that everyone
knew what had happened to him as he knew it himself.

A little later when he went up to the large circle, Anna Pavlovna said
to him: "I hear you are refitting your Petersburg house?"

This was true. The architect had told him that it was necessary, and
Pierre, without knowing why, was having his enormous Petersburg house
done up.

"That's a good thing, but don't move from Prince Vasili's. It is good to
have a friend like the prince," she said, smiling at Prince Vasili. "I
know something about that. Don't I? And you are still so young. You need
advice. Don't be angry with me for exercising an old woman's privilege."

She paused, as women always do, expecting something after they have
mentioned their age. "If you marry it will be a different thing," she
continued, uniting them both in one glance. Pierre did not look at
Helene nor she at him. But she was just as terribly close to him. He
muttered something and colored.

When he got home he could not sleep for a long time for thinking of what
had happened. What had happened? Nothing. He had merely understood that
the woman he had known as a child, of whom when her beauty was
mentioned he had said absent-mindedly: "Yes, she's good looking," he had
understood that this woman might belong to him.

"But she's stupid. I have myself said she is stupid," he thought. "There
is something nasty, something wrong, in the feeling she excites in me.
I have been told that her brother Anatole was in love with her and she
with him, that there was quite a scandal and that that's why he was sent
away. Hippolyte is her brother... Prince Vasili is her father... It's
bad...." he reflected, but while he was thinking this (the reflection
was still incomplete), he caught himself smiling and was conscious
that another line of thought had sprung up, and while thinking of her
worthlessness he was also dreaming of how she would be his wife, how she
would love him become quite different, and how all he had thought and
heard of her might be false. And he again saw her not as the daughter
of Prince Vasili, but visualized her whole body only veiled by its gray
dress. "But no! Why did this thought never occur to me before?" and
again he told himself that it was impossible, that there would be
something unnatural, and as it seemed to him dishonorable, in this
marriage. He recalled her former words and looks and the words and looks
of those who had seen them together. He recalled Anna Pavlovna's words
and looks when she spoke to him about his house, recalled thousands of
such hints from Prince Vasili and others, and was seized by terror lest
he had already, in some way, bound himself to do something that was
evidently wrong and that he ought not to do. But at the very time he was
expressing this conviction to himself, in another part of his mind her
image rose in all its womanly beauty.





CHAPTER II


In November, 1805, Prince Vasili had to go on a tour of inspection in
four different provinces. He had arranged this for himself so as to
visit his neglected estates at the same time and pick up his son Anatole
where his regiment was stationed, and take him to visit Prince Nicholas
Bolkonski in order to arrange a match for him with the daughter of that
rich old man. But before leaving home and undertaking these new affairs,
Prince Vasili had to settle matters with Pierre, who, it is true, had
latterly spent whole days at home, that is, in Prince Vasili's house
where he was staying, and had been absurd, excited, and foolish in
Helene's presence (as a lover should be), but had not yet proposed to
her.

"This is all very fine, but things must be settled," said Prince Vasili
to himself, with a sorrowful sigh, one morning, feeling that Pierre
who was under such obligations to him ("But never mind that") was not
behaving very well in this matter. "Youth, frivolity... well, God be
with him," thought he, relishing his own goodness of heart, "but it must
be brought to a head. The day after tomorrow will be Lelya's name day.
I will invite two or three people, and if he does not understand what he
ought to do then it will be my affair--yes, my affair. I am her father."

Six weeks after Anna Pavlovna's "At Home" and after the sleepless night
when he had decided that to marry Helene would be a calamity and that he
ought to avoid her and go away, Pierre, despite that decision, had not
left Prince Vasili's and felt with terror that in people's eyes he was
every day more and more connected with her, that it was impossible for
him to return to his former conception of her, that he could not break
away from her, and that though it would be a terrible thing he would
have to unite his fate with hers. He might perhaps have been able
to free himself but that Prince Vasili (who had rarely before given
receptions) now hardly let a day go by without having an evening party
at which Pierre had to be present unless he wished to spoil the general
pleasure and disappoint everyone's expectation. Prince Vasili, in the
rare moments when he was at home, would take Pierre's hand in passing
and draw it downwards, or absent-mindedly hold out his wrinkled,
clean-shaven cheek for Pierre to kiss and would say: "Till tomorrow,"
or, "Be in to dinner or I shall not see you," or, "I am staying in for
your sake," and so on. And though Prince Vasili, when he stayed in (as
he said) for Pierre's sake, hardly exchanged a couple of words with him,
Pierre felt unable to disappoint him. Every day he said to himself one
and the same thing: "It is time I understood her and made up my mind
what she really is. Was I mistaken before, or am I mistaken now? No, she
is not stupid, she is an excellent girl," he sometimes said to himself
"she never makes a mistake, never says anything stupid. She says little,
but what she does say is always clear and simple, so she is not stupid.
She never was abashed and is not abashed now, so she cannot be a bad
woman!" He had often begun to make reflections or think aloud in
her company, and she had always answered him either by a brief but
appropriate remark--showing that it did not interest her--or by a silent
look and smile which more palpably than anything else showed Pierre her
superiority. She was right in regarding all arguments as nonsense in
comparison with that smile.

She always addressed him with a radiantly confiding smile meant for him
alone, in which there was something more significant than in the general
smile that usually brightened her face. Pierre knew that everyone was
waiting for him to say a word and cross a certain line, and he knew that
sooner or later he would step across it, but an incomprehensible terror
seized him at the thought of that dreadful step. A thousand times during
that month and a half while he felt himself drawn nearer and nearer to
that dreadful abyss, Pierre said to himself: "What am I doing? I need
resolution. Can it be that I have none?"

He wished to take a decision, but felt with dismay that in this matter
he lacked that strength of will which he had known in himself and really
possessed. Pierre was one of those who are only strong when they feel
themselves quite innocent, and since that day when he was overpowered by
a feeling of desire while stooping over the snuffbox at Anna Pavlovna's,
an unacknowledged sense of the guilt of that desire paralyzed his will.

On Helene's name day, a small party of just their own people--as his
wife said--met for supper at Prince Vasili's. All these friends and
relations had been given to understand that the fate of the young girl
would be decided that evening. The visitors were seated at supper.
Princess Kuragina, a portly imposing woman who had once been handsome,
was sitting at the head of the table. On either side of her sat the
more important guests--an old general and his wife, and Anna Pavlovna
Scherer. At the other end sat the younger and less important guests, and
there too sat the members of the family, and Pierre and Helene, side by
side. Prince Vasili was not having any supper: he went round the table
in a merry mood, sitting down now by one, now by another, of the guests.
To each of them he made some careless and agreeable remark except to
Pierre and Helene, whose presence he seemed not to notice. He enlivened
the whole party. The wax candles burned brightly, the silver and crystal
gleamed, so did the ladies' toilets and the gold and silver of the
men's epaulets; servants in scarlet liveries moved round the table, the
clatter of plates, knives, and glasses mingled with the animated hum of
several conversations. At one end of the table, the old chamberlain was
heard assuring an old baroness that he loved her passionately, at which
she laughed; at the other could be heard the story of the misfortunes of
some Mary Viktorovna or other. At the center of the table, Prince Vasili
attracted everybody's attention. With a facetious smile on his face, he
was telling the ladies about last Wednesday's meeting of the Imperial
Council, at which Sergey Kuzmich Vyazmitinov, the new military governor
general of Petersburg, had received and read the then famous rescript
of the Emperor Alexander from the army to Sergey Kuzmich, in which the
Emperor said that he was receiving from all sides declarations of
the people's loyalty, that the declaration from Petersburg gave him
particular pleasure, and that he was proud to be at the head of such a
nation and would endeavor to be worthy of it. This rescript began with
the words: "Sergey Kuzmich, From all sides reports reach me," etc.

"Well, and so he never got farther than: 'Sergey Kuzmich'?" asked one of
the ladies.

"Exactly, not a hair's breadth farther," answered Prince Vasili,
laughing, "'Sergey Kuzmich... From all sides... From all sides... Sergey
Kuzmich...' Poor Vyazmitinov could not get any farther! He began the
rescript again and again, but as soon as he uttered 'Sergey' he sobbed,
'Kuz-mi-ch,' tears, and 'From all sides' was smothered in sobs and he
could get no farther. And again his handkerchief, and again: 'Sergey
Kuzmich, From all sides,'... and tears, till at last somebody else was
asked to read it."

"Kuzmich... From all sides... and then tears," someone repeated
laughing.

"Don't be unkind," cried Anna Pavlovna from her end of the table holding
up a threatening finger. "He is such a worthy and excellent man, our
dear Vyazmitinov...."

Everybody laughed a great deal. At the head of the table, where the
honored guests sat, everyone seemed to be in high spirits and under the
influence of a variety of exciting sensations. Only Pierre and
Helene sat silently side by side almost at the bottom of the table, a
suppressed smile brightening both their faces, a smile that had nothing
to do with Sergey Kuzmich--a smile of bashfulness at their own feelings.
But much as all the rest laughed, talked, and joked, much as they
enjoyed their Rhine wine, saute, and ices, and however they avoided
looking at the young couple, and heedless and unobservant as they seemed
of them, one could feel by the occasional glances they gave that the
story about Sergey Kuzmich, the laughter, and the food were all a
pretense, and that the whole attention of that company was directed
to--Pierre and Helene. Prince Vasili mimicked the sobbing of Sergey
Kuzmich and at the same time his eyes glanced toward his daughter, and
while he laughed the expression on his face clearly said: "Yes... it's
getting on, it will all be settled today." Anna Pavlovna threatened
him on behalf of "our dear Vyazmitinov," and in her eyes, which, for an
instant, glanced at Pierre, Prince Vasili read a congratulation on his
future son-in-law and on his daughter's happiness. The old princess
sighed sadly as she offered some wine to the old lady next to her and
glanced angrily at her daughter, and her sigh seemed to say: "Yes,
there's nothing left for you and me but to sip sweet wine, my dear,
now that the time has come for these young ones to be thus boldly,
provocatively happy." "And what nonsense all this is that I am saying!"
thought a diplomatist, glancing at the happy faces of the lovers.
"That's happiness!"

Into the insignificant, trifling, and artificial interests uniting that
society had entered the simple feeling of the attraction of a healthy
and handsome young man and woman for one another. And this human feeling
dominated everything else and soared above all their affected chatter.
Jests fell flat, news was not interesting, and the animation was
evidently forced. Not only the guests but even the footmen waiting at
table seemed to feel this, and they forgot their duties as they looked
at the beautiful Helene with her radiant face and at the red, broad, and
happy though uneasy face of Pierre. It seemed as if the very light of
the candles was focused on those two happy faces alone.

Pierre felt that he was the center of it all, and this both pleased and
embarrassed him. He was like a man entirely absorbed in some occupation.
He did not see, hear, or understand anything clearly. Only now and
then detached ideas and impressions from the world of reality shot
unexpectedly through his mind.

"So it is all finished!" he thought. "And how has it all happened? How
quickly! Now I know that not because of her alone, nor of myself alone,
but because of everyone, it must inevitably come about. They are all
expecting it, they are so sure that it will happen that I cannot, I
cannot, disappoint them. But how will it be? I do not know, but it will
certainly happen!" thought Pierre, glancing at those dazzling shoulders
close to his eyes.

Or he would suddenly feel ashamed of he knew not what. He felt it
awkward to attract everyone's attention and to be considered a lucky man
and, with his plain face, to be looked on as a sort of Paris possessed
of a Helen. "But no doubt it always is and must be so!" he consoled
himself. "And besides, what have I done to bring it about? How did
it begin? I traveled from Moscow with Prince Vasili. Then there was
nothing. So why should I not stay at his house? Then I played cards with
her and picked up her reticule and drove out with her. How did it begin,
when did it all come about?" And here he was sitting by her side as her
betrothed, seeing, hearing, feeling her nearness, her breathing, her
movements, her beauty. Then it would suddenly seem to him that it was
not she but he was so unusually beautiful, and that that was why they
all looked so at him, and flattered by this general admiration he would
expand his chest, raise his head, and rejoice at his good fortune.
Suddenly he heard a familiar voice repeating something to him a second
time. But Pierre was so absorbed that he did not understand what was
said.

"I am asking you when you last heard from Bolkonski," repeated Prince
Vasili a third time. "How absent-minded you are, my dear fellow."

Prince Vasili smiled, and Pierre noticed that everyone was smiling at
him and Helene. "Well, what of it, if you all know it?" thought Pierre.
"What of it? It's the truth!" and he himself smiled his gentle childlike
smile, and Helene smiled too.

"When did you get the letter? Was it from Olmutz?" repeated Prince
Vasili, who pretended to want to know this in order to settle a dispute.

"How can one talk or think of such trifles?" thought Pierre.

"Yes, from Olmutz," he answered, with a sigh.

After supper Pierre with his partner followed the others into the
drawing room. The guests began to disperse, some without taking leave
of Helene. Some, as if unwilling to distract her from an important
occupation, came up to her for a moment and made haste to go away,
refusing to let her see them off. The diplomatist preserved a mournful
silence as he left the drawing room. He pictured the vanity of his
diplomatic career in comparison with Pierre's happiness. The old general
grumbled at his wife when she asked how his leg was. "Oh, the old fool,"
he thought. "That Princess Helene will be beautiful still when she's
fifty."

"I think I may congratulate you," whispered Anna Pavlovna to the old
princess, kissing her soundly. "If I hadn't this headache I'd have
stayed longer."

The old princess did not reply, she was tormented by jealousy of her
daughter's happiness.

While the guests were taking their leave Pierre remained for a long time
alone with Helene in the little drawing room where they were sitting.
He had often before, during the last six weeks, remained alone with her,
but had never spoken to her of love. Now he felt that it was inevitable,
but he could not make up his mind to take the final step. He felt
ashamed; he felt that he was occupying someone else's place here beside
Helene. "This happiness is not for you," some inner voice whispered to
him. "This happiness is for those who have not in them what there is in
you."

But, as he had to say something, he began by asking her whether she was
satisfied with the party. She replied in her usual simple manner that
this name day of hers had been one of the pleasantest she had ever had.

Some of the nearest relatives had not yet left. They were sitting in
the large drawing room. Prince Vasili came up to Pierre with languid
footsteps. Pierre rose and said it was getting late. Prince Vasili gave
him a look of stern inquiry, as though what Pierre had just said was
so strange that one could not take it in. But then the expression of
severity changed, and he drew Pierre's hand downwards, made him sit
down, and smiled affectionately.

"Well, Lelya?" he asked, turning instantly to his daughter and
addressing her with the careless tone of habitual tenderness natural to
parents who have petted their children from babyhood, but which Prince
Vasili had only acquired by imitating other parents.

And he again turned to Pierre.

"Sergey Kuzmich--From all sides-" he said, unbuttoning the top button of
his waistcoat.

Pierre smiled, but his smile showed that he knew it was not the story
about Sergey Kuzmich that interested Prince Vasili just then, and Prince
Vasili saw that Pierre knew this. He suddenly muttered something and
went away. It seemed to Pierre that even the prince was disconcerted.
The sight of the discomposure of that old man of the world touched
Pierre: he looked at Helene and she too seemed disconcerted, and her
look seemed to say: "Well, it is your own fault."

"The step must be taken but I cannot, I cannot!" thought Pierre, and he
again began speaking about indifferent matters, about Sergey Kuzmich,
asking what the point of the story was as he had not heard it properly.
Helene answered with a smile that she too had missed it.

When Prince Vasili returned to the drawing room, the princess, his wife,
was talking in low tones to the elderly lady about Pierre.

"Of course, it is a very brilliant match, but happiness, my dear..."

"Marriages are made in heaven," replied the elderly lady.

Prince Vasili passed by, seeming not to hear the ladies, and sat down on
a sofa in a far corner of the room. He closed his eyes and seemed to be
dozing. His head sank forward and then he roused himself.

"Aline," he said to his wife, "go and see what they are about."

The princess went up to the door, passed by it with a dignified and
indifferent air, and glanced into the little drawing room. Pierre and
Helene still sat talking just as before.

"Still the same," she said to her husband.

Prince Vasili frowned, twisting his mouth, his cheeks quivered and his
face assumed the coarse, unpleasant expression peculiar to him. Shaking
himself, he rose, threw back his head, and with resolute steps went
past the ladies into the little drawing room. With quick steps he went
joyfully up to Pierre. His face was so unusually triumphant that Pierre
rose in alarm on seeing it.

"Thank God!" said Prince Vasili. "My wife has told me everything!" (He
put one arm around Pierre and the other around his daughter.)--"My dear
boy... Lelya... I am very pleased." (His voice trembled.) "I loved your
father... and she will make you a good wife... God bless you!..."

He embraced his daughter, and then again Pierre, and kissed him with his
malodorous mouth. Tears actually moistened his cheeks.

"Princess, come here!" he shouted.

The old princess came in and also wept. The elderly lady was using
her handkerchief too. Pierre was kissed, and he kissed the beautiful
Helene's hand several times. After a while they were left alone again.

"All this had to be and could not be otherwise," thought Pierre, "so
it is useless to ask whether it is good or bad. It is good because it's
definite and one is rid of the old tormenting doubt." Pierre held the
hand of his betrothed in silence, looking at her beautiful bosom as it
rose and fell.

"Helene!" he said aloud and paused.

"Something special is always said in such cases," he thought, but could
not remember what it was that people say. He looked at her face. She
drew nearer to him. Her face flushed.

"Oh, take those off... those..." she said, pointing to his spectacles.

Pierre took them off, and his eyes, besides the strange look eyes have
from which spectacles have just been removed, had also a frightened and
inquiring look. He was about to stoop over her hand and kiss it, but
with a rapid, almost brutal movement of her head, she intercepted his
lips and met them with her own. Her face struck Pierre, by its altered,
unpleasantly excited expression.

"It is too late now, it's done; besides I love her," thought Pierre.

"Je vous aime!" * he said, remembering what has to be said at such
moments: but his words sounded so weak that he felt ashamed of himself.


    * "I love you."


Six weeks later he was married, and settled in Count Bezukhov's large,
newly furnished Petersburg house, the happy possessor, as people said,
of a wife who was a celebrated beauty and of millions of money.





CHAPTER III


Old Prince Nicholas Bolkonski received a letter from Prince Vasili in
November, 1805, announcing that he and his son would be paying him a
visit. "I am starting on a journey of inspection, and of course I shall
think nothing of an extra seventy miles to come and see you at the same
time, my honored benefactor," wrote Prince Vasili. "My son Anatole is
accompanying me on his way to the army, so I hope you will allow him
personally to express the deep respect that, emulating his father, he
feels for you."

"It seems that there will be no need to bring Mary out, suitors are
coming to us of their own accord," incautiously remarked the little
princess on hearing the news.

Prince Nicholas frowned, but said nothing.

A fortnight after the letter Prince Vasili's servants came one evening
in advance of him, and he and his son arrived next day.

Old Bolkonski had always had a poor opinion of Prince Vasili's
character, but more so recently, since in the new reigns of Paul and
Alexander Prince Vasili had risen to high position and honors. And now,
from the hints contained in his letter and given by the little princess,
he saw which way the wind was blowing, and his low opinion changed into
a feeling of contemptuous ill will. He snorted whenever he mentioned
him. On the day of Prince Vasili's arrival, Prince Bolkonski was
particularly discontented and out of temper. Whether he was in a bad
temper because Prince Vasili was coming, or whether his being in a bad
temper made him specially annoyed at Prince Vasili's visit, he was in a
bad temper, and in the morning Tikhon had already advised the architect
not to go to the prince with his report.

"Do you hear how he's walking?" said Tikhon, drawing the architect's
attention to the sound of the prince's footsteps. "Stepping flat on his
heels--we know what that means...."

However, at nine o'clock the prince, in his velvet coat with a sable
collar and cap, went out for his usual walk. It had snowed the day
before and the path to the hothouse, along which the prince was in the
habit of walking, had been swept: the marks of the broom were still
visible in the snow and a shovel had been left sticking in one of the
soft snowbanks that bordered both sides of the path. The prince went
through the conservatories, the serfs' quarters, and the outbuildings,
frowning and silent.

"Can a sleigh pass?" he asked his overseer, a venerable man, resembling
his master in manners and looks, who was accompanying him back to the
house.

"The snow is deep. I am having the avenue swept, your honor."

The prince bowed his head and went up to the porch. "God be thanked,"
thought the overseer, "the storm has blown over!"

"It would have been hard to drive up, your honor," he added. "I heard,
your honor, that a minister is coming to visit your honor."

The prince turned round to the overseer and fixed his eyes on him,
frowning.

"What? A minister? What minister? Who gave orders?" he said in his
shrill, harsh voice. "The road is not swept for the princess my
daughter, but for a minister! For me, there are no ministers!"

"Your honor, I thought..."

"You thought!" shouted the prince, his words coming more and more
rapidly and indistinctly. "You thought!... Rascals! Blackguards!... I'll
teach you to think!" and lifting his stick he swung it and would have
hit Alpatych, the overseer, had not the latter instinctively avoided the
blow. "Thought... Blackguards..." shouted the prince rapidly.

But although Alpatych, frightened at his own temerity in avoiding the
stroke, came up to the prince, bowing his bald head resignedly before
him, or perhaps for that very reason, the prince, though he continued to
shout: "Blackguards!... Throw the snow back on the road!" did not lift
his stick again but hurried into the house.

Before dinner, Princess Mary and Mademoiselle Bourienne, who knew
that the prince was in a bad humor, stood awaiting him; Mademoiselle
Bourienne with a radiant face that said: "I know nothing, I am the same
as usual," and Princess Mary pale, frightened, and with downcast eyes.
What she found hardest to bear was to know that on such occasions she
ought to behave like Mademoiselle Bourienne, but could not. She thought:
"If I seem not to notice he will think that I do not sympathize with
him; if I seem sad and out of spirits myself, he will say (as he has
done before) that I'm in the dumps."

The prince looked at his daughter's frightened face and snorted.

"Fool... or dummy!" he muttered.

"And the other one is not here. They've been telling tales," he
thought--referring to the little princess who was not in the dining
room.

"Where is the princess?" he asked. "Hiding?"

"She is not very well," answered Mademoiselle Bourienne with a bright
smile, "so she won't come down. It is natural in her state."

"Hm! Hm!" muttered the prince, sitting down.

His plate seemed to him not quite clean, and pointing to a spot he
flung it away. Tikhon caught it and handed it to a footman. The little
princess was not unwell, but had such an overpowering fear of the prince
that, hearing he was in a bad humor, she had decided not to appear.

"I am afraid for the baby," she said to Mademoiselle Bourienne: "Heaven
knows what a fright might do."

In general at Bald Hills the little princess lived in constant fear, and
with a sense of antipathy to the old prince which she did not
realize because the fear was so much the stronger feeling. The prince
reciprocated this antipathy, but it was overpowered by his contempt
for her. When the little princess had grown accustomed to life at Bald
Hills, she took a special fancy to Mademoiselle Bourienne, spent whole
days with her, asked her to sleep in her room, and often talked with her
about the old prince and criticized him.

"So we are to have visitors, mon prince?" remarked Mademoiselle
Bourienne, unfolding her white napkin with her rosy fingers. "His
Excellency Prince Vasili Kuragin and his son, I understand?" she said
inquiringly.

"Hm!--his excellency is a puppy.... I got him his appointment in the
service," said the prince disdainfully. "Why his son is coming I don't
understand. Perhaps Princess Elizabeth and Princess Mary know. I don't
want him." (He looked at his blushing daughter.) "Are you unwell today?
Eh? Afraid of the 'minister' as that idiot Alpatych called him this
morning?"

"No, mon pere."

Though Mademoiselle Bourienne had been so unsuccessful in her choice
of a subject, she did not stop talking, but chattered about the
conservatories and the beauty of a flower that had just opened, and
after the soup the prince became more genial.

After dinner, he went to see his daughter-in-law. The little princess
was sitting at a small table, chattering with Masha, her maid. She grew
pale on seeing her father-in-law.

She was much altered. She was now plain rather than pretty. Her cheeks
had sunk, her lip was drawn up, and her eyes drawn down.

"Yes, I feel a kind of oppression," she said in reply to the prince's
question as to how she felt.

"Do you want anything?"

"No, merci, mon pere."

"Well, all right, all right."

He left the room and went to the waiting room where Alpatych stood with
bowed head.

"Has the snow been shoveled back?"

"Yes, your excellency. Forgive me for heaven's sake... It was only my
stupidity."

"All right, all right," interrupted the prince, and laughing his
unnatural way, he stretched out his hand for Alpatych to kiss, and then
proceeded to his study.

Prince Vasili arrived that evening. He was met in the avenue by coachmen
and footmen, who, with loud shouts, dragged his sleighs up to one of the
lodges over the road purposely laden with snow.

Prince Vasili and Anatole had separate rooms assigned to them.

Anatole, having taken off his overcoat, sat with arms akimbo before a
table on a corner of which he smilingly and absent-mindedly fixed his
large and handsome eyes. He regarded his whole life as a continual round
of amusement which someone for some reason had to provide for him.
And he looked on this visit to a churlish old man and a rich and ugly
heiress in the same way. All this might, he thought, turn out very well
and amusingly. "And why not marry her if she really has so much money?
That never does any harm," thought Anatole.

He shaved and scented himself with the care and elegance which had
become habitual to him and, his handsome head held high, entered his
father's room with the good-humored and victorious air natural to him.
Prince Vasili's two valets were busy dressing him, and he looked round
with much animation and cheerfully nodded to his son as the latter
entered, as if to say: "Yes, that's how I want you to look."

"I say, Father, joking apart, is she very hideous?" Anatole asked, as if
continuing a conversation the subject of which had often been mentioned
during the journey.

"Enough! What nonsense! Above all, try to be respectful and cautious
with the old prince."

"If he starts a row I'll go away," said Prince Anatole. "I can't bear
those old men! Eh?"

"Remember, for you everything depends on this."

In the meantime, not only was it known in the maidservants' rooms that
the minister and his son had arrived, but the appearance of both had
been minutely described. Princess Mary was sitting alone in her room,
vainly trying to master her agitation.

"Why did they write, why did Lise tell me about it? It can never
happen!" she said, looking at herself in the glass. "How shall I enter
the drawing room? Even if I like him I can't now be myself with him."
The mere thought of her father's look filled her with terror. The little
princess and Mademoiselle Bourienne had already received from Masha,
the lady's maid, the necessary report of how handsome the minister's son
was, with his rosy cheeks and dark eyebrows, and with what difficulty
the father had dragged his legs upstairs while the son had followed him
like an eagle, three steps at a time. Having received this information,
the little princess and Mademoiselle Bourienne, whose chattering voices
had reached her from the corridor, went into Princess Mary's room.

"You know they've come, Marie?" said the little princess, waddling in,
and sinking heavily into an armchair.

She was no longer in the loose gown she generally wore in the morning,
but had on one of her best dresses. Her hair was carefully done and her
face was animated, which, however, did not conceal its sunken and faded
outlines. Dressed as she used to be in Petersburg society, it was still
more noticeable how much plainer she had become. Some unobtrusive touch
had been added to Mademoiselle Bourienne's toilet which rendered her
fresh and pretty face yet more attractive.

"What! Are you going to remain as you are, dear princess?" she began.
"They'll be announcing that the gentlemen are in the drawing room and we
shall have to go down, and you have not smartened yourself up at all!"

The little princess got up, rang for the maid, and hurriedly and merrily
began to devise and carry out a plan of how Princess Mary should be
dressed. Princess Mary's self-esteem was wounded by the fact that
the arrival of a suitor agitated her, and still more so by both her
companions' not having the least conception that it could be otherwise.
To tell them that she felt ashamed for herself and for them would be to
betray her agitation, while to decline their offers to dress her would
prolong their banter and insistence. She flushed, her beautiful eyes
grew dim, red blotches came on her face, and it took on the unattractive
martyrlike expression it so often wore, as she submitted herself to
Mademoiselle Bourienne and Lise. Both these women quite sincerely tried
to make her look pretty. She was so plain that neither of them could
think of her as a rival, so they began dressing her with perfect
sincerity, and with the naive and firm conviction women have that dress
can make a face pretty.

"No really, my dear, this dress is not pretty," said Lise, looking
sideways at Princess Mary from a little distance. "You have a maroon
dress, have it fetched. Really! You know the fate of your whole life may
be at stake. But this one is too light, it's not becoming!"

It was not the dress, but the face and whole figure of Princess Mary
that was not pretty, but neither Mademoiselle Bourienne nor the little
princess felt this; they still thought that if a blue ribbon were placed
in the hair, the hair combed up, and the blue scarf arranged lower on
the best maroon dress, and so on, all would be well. They forgot that
the frightened face and the figure could not be altered, and that
however they might change the setting and adornment of that face, it
would still remain piteous and plain. After two or three changes to
which Princess Mary meekly submitted, just as her hair had been arranged
on the top of her head (a style that quite altered and spoiled her
looks) and she had put on a maroon dress with a pale-blue scarf, the
little princess walked twice round her, now adjusting a fold of the
dress with her little hand, now arranging the scarf and looking at her
with her head bent first on one side and then on the other.

"No, it will not do," she said decidedly, clasping her hands. "No, Mary,
really this dress does not suit you. I prefer you in your little gray
everyday dress. Now please, do it for my sake. Katie," she said to the
maid, "bring the princess her gray dress, and you'll see, Mademoiselle
Bourienne, how I shall arrange it," she added, smiling with a foretaste
of artistic pleasure.

But when Katie brought the required dress, Princess Mary remained
sitting motionless before the glass, looking at her face, and saw in the
mirror her eyes full of tears and her mouth quivering, ready to burst
into sobs.

"Come, dear princess," said Mademoiselle Bourienne, "just one more
little effort."

The little princess, taking the dress from the maid, came up to Princess
Mary.

"Well, now we'll arrange something quite simple and becoming," she said.

The three voices, hers, Mademoiselle Bourienne's, and Katie's, who was
laughing at something, mingled in a merry sound, like the chirping of
birds.

"No, leave me alone," said Princess Mary.

Her voice sounded so serious and so sad that the chirping of the birds
was silenced at once. They looked at the beautiful, large, thoughtful
eyes full of tears and of thoughts, gazing shiningly and imploringly at
them, and understood that it was useless and even cruel to insist.

"At least, change your coiffure," said the little princess. "Didn't I
tell you," she went on, turning reproachfully to Mademoiselle Bourienne,
"Mary's is a face which such a coiffure does not suit in the least. Not
in the least! Please change it."

"Leave me alone, please leave me alone! It is all quite the same to me,"
answered a voice struggling with tears.

Mademoiselle Bourienne and the little princess had to own to themselves
that Princess Mary in this guise looked very plain, worse than usual,
but it was too late. She was looking at them with an expression they
both knew, an expression thoughtful and sad. This expression in Princess
Mary did not frighten them (she never inspired fear in anyone), but they
knew that when it appeared on her face, she became mute and was not to
be shaken in her determination.

"You will change it, won't you?" said Lise. And as Princess Mary gave no
answer, she left the room.

Princess Mary was left alone. She did not comply with Lise's request,
she not only left her hair as it was, but did not even look in her
glass. Letting her arms fall helplessly, she sat with downcast eyes and
pondered. A husband, a man, a strong dominant and strangely attractive
being rose in her imagination, and carried her into a totally different
happy world of his own. She fancied a child, her own--such as she had
seen the day before in the arms of her nurse's daughter--at her own
breast, the husband standing by and gazing tenderly at her and the
child. "But no, it is impossible, I am too ugly," she thought.

"Please come to tea. The prince will be out in a moment," came the
maid's voice at the door.

She roused herself, and felt appalled at what she had been thinking, and
before going down she went into the room where the icons hung and, her
eyes fixed on the dark face of a large icon of the Saviour lit by a
lamp, she stood before it with folded hands for a few moments. A painful
doubt filled her soul. Could the joy of love, of earthly love for a
man, be for her? In her thoughts of marriage Princess Mary dreamed of
happiness and of children, but her strongest, most deeply hidden longing
was for earthly love. The more she tried to hide this feeling from
others and even from herself, the stronger it grew. "O God," she said,
"how am I to stifle in my heart these temptations of the devil? How am I
to renounce forever these vile fancies, so as peacefully to fulfill
Thy will?" And scarcely had she put that question than God gave her the
answer in her own heart. "Desire nothing for thyself, seek nothing, be
not anxious or envious. Man's future and thy own fate must remain hidden
from thee, but live so that thou mayest be ready for anything. If it be
God's will to prove thee in the duties of marriage, be ready to fulfill
His will." With this consoling thought (but yet with a hope for the
fulfillment of her forbidden earthly longing) Princess Mary sighed,
and having crossed herself went down, thinking neither of her gown and
coiffure nor of how she would go in nor of what she would say. What
could all that matter in comparison with the will of God, without Whose
care not a hair of man's head can fall?





CHAPTER IV


When Princess Mary came down, Prince Vasili and his son were already
in the drawing room, talking to the little princess and Mademoiselle
Bourienne. When she entered with her heavy step, treading on her heels,
the gentlemen and Mademoiselle Bourienne rose and the little princess,
indicating her to the gentlemen, said: "Voila Marie!" Princess Mary saw
them all and saw them in detail. She saw Prince Vasili's face, serious
for an instant at the sight of her, but immediately smiling again, and
the little princess curiously noting the impression "Marie" produced on
the visitors. And she saw Mademoiselle Bourienne, with her ribbon and
pretty face, and her unusually animated look which was fixed on him,
but him she could not see, she only saw something large, brilliant,
and handsome moving toward her as she entered the room. Prince Vasili
approached first, and she kissed the bold forehead that bent over her
hand and answered his question by saying that, on the contrary, she
remembered him quite well. Then Anatole came up to her. She still could
not see him. She only felt a soft hand taking hers firmly, and she
touched with her lips a white forehead, over which was beautiful
light-brown hair smelling of pomade. When she looked up at him she was
struck by his beauty. Anatole stood with his right thumb under a button
of his uniform, his chest expanded and his back drawn in, slightly
swinging one foot, and, with his head a little bent, looked with beaming
face at the princess without speaking and evidently not thinking about
her at all. Anatole was not quick-witted, nor ready or eloquent in
conversation, but he had the faculty, so invaluable in society, of
composure and imperturbable self-possession. If a man lacking in
self-confidence remains dumb on a first introduction and betrays a
consciousness of the impropriety of such silence and an anxiety to find
something to say, the effect is bad. But Anatole was dumb, swung his
foot, and smilingly examined the princess' hair. It was evident that he
could be silent in this way for a very long time. "If anyone finds this
silence inconvenient, let him talk, but I don't want to," he seemed to
say. Besides this, in his behavior to women Anatole had a manner
which particularly inspires in them curiosity, awe, and even love--a
supercilious consciousness of his own superiority. It was as if he said
to them: "I know you, I know you, but why should I bother about you?
You'd be only too glad, of course." Perhaps he did not really think this
when he met women--even probably he did not, for in general he thought
very little--but his looks and manner gave that impression. The princess
felt this, and as if wishing to show him that she did not even dare
expect to interest him, she turned to his father. The conversation was
general and animated, thanks to Princess Lise's voice and little downy
lip that lifted over her white teeth. She met Prince Vasili with that
playful manner often employed by lively chatty people, and consisting
in the assumption that between the person they so address and themselves
there are some semi-private, long-established jokes and amusing
reminiscences, though no such reminiscences really exist--just as none
existed in this case. Prince Vasili readily adopted her tone and the
little princess also drew Anatole, whom she hardly knew, into these
amusing recollections of things that had never occurred. Mademoiselle
Bourienne also shared them and even Princess Mary felt herself
pleasantly made to share in these merry reminiscences.

"Here at least we shall have the benefit of your company all to
ourselves, dear prince," said the little princess (of course, in French)
to Prince Vasili. "It's not as at Annette's * receptions where you
always ran away; you remember cette chere Annette!"


    * Anna Pavlovna.


"Ah, but you won't talk politics to me like Annette!"

"And our little tea table?"

"Oh, yes!"

"Why is it you were never at Annette's?" the little princess asked
Anatole. "Ah, I know, I know," she said with a sly glance, "your brother
Hippolyte told me about your goings on. Oh!" and she shook her finger at
him, "I have even heard of your doings in Paris!"

"And didn't Hippolyte tell you?" asked Prince Vasili, turning to his son
and seizing the little princess' arm as if she would have run away and
he had just managed to catch her, "didn't he tell you how he himself was
pining for the dear princess, and how she showed him the door? Oh, she
is a pearl among women, Princess," he added, turning to Princess Mary.

When Paris was mentioned, Mademoiselle Bourienne for her part seized the
opportunity of joining in the general current of recollections.

She took the liberty of inquiring whether it was long since Anatole
had left Paris and how he had liked that city. Anatole answered the
Frenchwoman very readily and, looking at her with a smile, talked to her
about her native land. When he saw the pretty little Bourienne, Anatole
came to the conclusion that he would not find Bald Hills dull either.
"Not at all bad!" he thought, examining her, "not at all bad, that
little companion! I hope she will bring her along with her when we're
married, la petite est gentille." *


    * The little one is charming.


The old prince dressed leisurely in his study, frowning and considering
what he was to do. The coming of these visitors annoyed him. "What are
Prince Vasili and that son of his to me? Prince Vasili is a shallow
braggart and his son, no doubt, is a fine specimen," he grumbled to
himself. What angered him was that the coming of these visitors revived
in his mind an unsettled question he always tried to stifle, one about
which he always deceived himself. The question was whether he could ever
bring himself to part from his daughter and give her to a husband. The
prince never directly asked himself that question, knowing beforehand
that he would have to answer it justly, and justice clashed not only
with his feelings but with the very possibility of life. Life without
Princess Mary, little as he seemed to value her, was unthinkable to
him. "And why should she marry?" he thought. "To be unhappy for certain.
There's Lise, married to Andrew--a better husband one would think could
hardly be found nowadays--but is she contented with her lot? And who
would marry Marie for love? Plain and awkward! They'll take her for her
connections and wealth. Are there no women living unmarried, and even
the happier for it?" So thought Prince Bolkonski while dressing, and
yet the question he was always putting off demanded an immediate
answer. Prince Vasili had brought his son with the evident intention of
proposing, and today or tomorrow he would probably ask for an answer.
His birth and position in society were not bad. "Well, I've nothing
against it," the prince said to himself, "but he must be worthy of her.
And that is what we shall see."

"That is what we shall see! That is what we shall see!" he added aloud.

He entered the drawing room with his usual alert step, glancing rapidly
round the company. He noticed the change in the little princess' dress,
Mademoiselle Bourienne's ribbon, Princess Mary's unbecoming coiffure,
Mademoiselle Bourienne's and Anatole's smiles, and the loneliness of his
daughter amid the general conversation. "Got herself up like a fool!"
he thought, looking irritably at her. "She is shameless, and he ignores
her!"

He went straight up to Prince Vasili.

"Well! How d'ye do? How d'ye do? Glad to see you!"

"Friendship laughs at distance," began Prince Vasili in his usual rapid,
self-confident, familiar tone. "Here is my second son; please love and
befriend him."

Prince Bolkonski surveyed Anatole.

"Fine young fellow! Fine young fellow!" he said. "Well, come and kiss
me," and he offered his cheek.

Anatole kissed the old man, and looked at him with curiosity and perfect
composure, waiting for a display of the eccentricities his father had
told him to expect.

Prince Bolkonski sat down in his usual place in the corner of the sofa
and, drawing up an armchair for Prince Vasili, pointed to it and began
questioning him about political affairs and news. He seemed to listen
attentively to what Prince Vasili said, but kept glancing at Princess
Mary.

"And so they are writing from Potsdam already?" he said, repeating
Prince Vasili's last words. Then rising, he suddenly went up to his
daughter.

"Is it for visitors you've got yourself up like that, eh?" said he.
"Fine, very fine! You have done up your hair in this new way for the
visitors, and before the visitors I tell you that in future you are
never to dare to change your way of dress without my consent."

"It was my fault, mon pere," interceded the little princess, with a
blush.

"You must do as you please," said Prince Bolkonski, bowing to his
daughter-in-law, "but she need not make a fool of herself, she's plain
enough as it is."

And he sat down again, paying no more attention to his daughter, who was
reduced to tears.

"On the contrary, that coiffure suits the princess very well," said
Prince Vasili.

"Now you, young prince, what's your name?" said Prince Bolkonski,
turning to Anatole, "come here, let us talk and get acquainted."

"Now the fun begins," thought Anatole, sitting down with a smile beside
the old prince.

"Well, my dear boy, I hear you've been educated abroad, not taught to
read and write by the deacon, like your father and me. Now tell me,
my dear boy, are you serving in the Horse Guards?" asked the old man,
scrutinizing Anatole closely and intently.

"No, I have been transferred to the line," said Anatole, hardly able to
restrain his laughter.

"Ah! That's a good thing. So, my dear boy, you wish to serve the Tsar
and the country? It is wartime. Such a fine fellow must serve. Well, are
you off to the front?"

"No, Prince, our regiment has gone to the front, but I am attached...
what is it I am attached to, Papa?" said Anatole, turning to his father
with a laugh.

"A splendid soldier, splendid! 'What am I attached to!' Ha, ha, ha!"
laughed Prince Bolkonski, and Anatole laughed still louder. Suddenly
Prince Bolkonski frowned.

"You may go," he said to Anatole.

Anatole returned smiling to the ladies.

"And so you've had him educated abroad, Prince Vasili, haven't you?"
said the old prince to Prince Vasili.

"I have done my best for him, and I can assure you the education there
is much better than ours."

"Yes, everything is different nowadays, everything is changed. The lad's
a fine fellow, a fine fellow! Well, come with me now." He took Prince
Vasili's arm and led him to his study. As soon as they were alone
together, Prince Vasili announced his hopes and wishes to the old
prince.

"Well, do you think I shall prevent her, that I can't part from her?"
said the old prince angrily. "What an idea! I'm ready for it tomorrow!
Only let me tell you, I want to know my son-in-law better. You know
my principles--everything aboveboard? I will ask her tomorrow in your
presence; if she is willing, then he can stay on. He can stay and I'll
see." The old prince snorted. "Let her marry, it's all the same to me!"
he screamed in the same piercing tone as when parting from his son.

"I will tell you frankly," said Prince Vasili in the tone of a crafty
man convinced of the futility of being cunning with so keen-sighted
companion. "You know, you see right through people. Anatole is no
genius, but he is an honest, goodhearted lad; an excellent son or
kinsman."

"All right, all right, we'll see!"

As always happens when women lead lonely lives for any length of time
without male society, on Anatole's appearance all the three women of
Prince Bolkonski's household felt that their life had not been real
till then. Their powers of reasoning, feeling, and observing immediately
increased tenfold, and their life, which seemed to have been passed in
darkness, was suddenly lit up by a new brightness, full of significance.

Princess Mary grew quite unconscious of her face and coiffure. The
handsome open face of the man who might perhaps be her husband absorbed
all her attention. He seemed to her kind, brave, determined, manly, and
magnanimous. She felt convinced of that. Thousands of dreams of a future
family life continually rose in her imagination. She drove them away and
tried to conceal them.

"But am I not too cold with him?" thought the princess. "I try to be
reserved because in the depth of my soul I feel too near to him already,
but then he cannot know what I think of him and may imagine that I do
not like him."

And Princess Mary tried, but could not manage, to be cordial to her new
guest. "Poor girl, she's devilish ugly!" thought Anatole.

Mademoiselle Bourienne, also roused to great excitement by Anatole's
arrival, thought in another way. Of course, she, a handsome young woman
without any definite position, without relations or even a country, did
not intend to devote her life to serving Prince Bolkonski, to reading
aloud to him and being friends with Princess Mary. Mademoiselle
Bourienne had long been waiting for a Russian prince who, able to
appreciate at a glance her superiority to the plain, badly dressed,
ungainly Russian princesses, would fall in love with her and carry her
off; and here at last was a Russian prince. Mademoiselle Bourienne knew
a story, heard from her aunt but finished in her own way, which she
liked to repeat to herself. It was the story of a girl who had been
seduced, and to whom her poor mother (sa pauvre mere) appeared, and
reproached her for yielding to a man without being married. Mademoiselle
Bourienne was often touched to tears as in imagination she told this
story to him, her seducer. And now he, a real Russian prince, had
appeared. He would carry her away and then sa pauvre mere would appear
and he would marry her. So her future shaped itself in Mademoiselle
Bourienne's head at the very time she was talking to Anatole about
Paris. It was not calculation that guided her (she did not even for a
moment consider what she should do), but all this had long been familiar
to her, and now that Anatole had appeared it just grouped itself around
him and she wished and tried to please him as much as possible.

The little princess, like an old war horse that hears the trumpet,
unconsciously and quite forgetting her condition, prepared for the
familiar gallop of coquetry, without any ulterior motive or any
struggle, but with naive and lighthearted gaiety.

Although in female society Anatole usually assumed the role of a man
tired of being run after by women, his vanity was flattered by the
spectacle of his power over these three women. Besides that, he was
beginning to feel for the pretty and provocative Mademoiselle Bourienne
that passionate animal feeling which was apt to master him with great
suddenness and prompt him to the coarsest and most reckless actions.

After tea, the company went into the sitting room and Princess Mary was
asked to play on the clavichord. Anatole, laughing and in high spirits,
came and leaned on his elbows, facing her and beside Mademoiselle
Bourienne. Princess Mary felt his look with a painfully joyous emotion.
Her favorite sonata bore her into a most intimately poetic world and the
look she felt upon her made that world still more poetic. But Anatole's
expression, though his eyes were fixed on her, referred not to her but
to the movements of Mademoiselle Bourienne's little foot, which he was
then touching with his own under the clavichord. Mademoiselle Bourienne
was also looking at Princess Mary, and in her lovely eyes there was a
look of fearful joy and hope that was also new to the princess.

"How she loves me!" thought Princess Mary. "How happy I am now, and how
happy I may be with such a friend and such a husband! Husband? Can it
be possible?" she thought, not daring to look at his face, but still
feeling his eyes gazing at her.

In the evening, after supper, when all were about to retire, Anatole
kissed Princess Mary's hand. She did not know how she found the courage,
but she looked straight into his handsome face as it came near to her
shortsighted eyes. Turning from Princess Mary he went up and kissed
Mademoiselle Bourienne's hand. (This was not etiquette, but then he did
everything so simply and with such assurance!) Mademoiselle Bourienne
flushed, and gave the princess a frightened look.

"What delicacy!" thought the princess. "Is it possible that Amelie"
(Mademoiselle Bourienne) "thinks I could be jealous of her, and not
value her pure affection and devotion to me?" She went up to her and
kissed her warmly. Anatole went up to kiss the little princess' hand.

"No! No! No! When your father writes to tell me that you are behaving
well I will give you my hand to kiss. Not till then!" she said. And
smilingly raising a finger at him, she left the room.





CHAPTER V


They all separated, but, except Anatole who fell asleep as soon as he
got into bed, all kept awake a long time that night.

"Is he really to be my husband, this stranger who is so kind--yes, kind,
that is the chief thing," thought Princess Mary; and fear, which she had
seldom experienced, came upon her. She feared to look round, it seemed
to her that someone was there standing behind the screen in the dark
corner. And this someone was he--the devil--and he was also this man
with the white forehead, black eyebrows, and red lips.

She rang for her maid and asked her to sleep in her room.

Mademoiselle Bourienne walked up and down the conservatory for a long
time that evening, vainly expecting someone, now smiling at someone, now
working herself up to tears with the imaginary words of her pauvre mere
rebuking her for her fall.

The little princess grumbled to her maid that her bed was badly made.
She could not lie either on her face or on her side. Every position was
awkward and uncomfortable, and her burden oppressed her now more than
ever because Anatole's presence had vividly recalled to her the time
when she was not like that and when everything was light and gay. She
sat in an armchair in her dressing jacket and nightcap and Katie, sleepy
and disheveled, beat and turned the heavy feather bed for the third
time, muttering to herself.

"I told you it was all lumps and holes!" the little princess repeated.
"I should be glad enough to fall asleep, so it's not my fault!" and her
voice quivered like that of a child about to cry.

The old prince did not sleep either. Tikhon, half asleep, heard him
pacing angrily about and snorting. The old prince felt as though he
had been insulted through his daughter. The insult was the more pointed
because it concerned not himself but another, his daughter, whom he
loved more than himself. He kept telling himself that he would consider
the whole matter and decide what was right and how he should act, but
instead of that he only excited himself more and more.

"The first man that turns up--she forgets her father and everything
else, runs upstairs and does up her hair and wags her tail and is unlike
herself! Glad to throw her father over! And she knew I should notice
it. Fr... fr... fr! And don't I see that that idiot had eyes only for
Bourienne--I shall have to get rid of her. And how is it she has not
pride enough to see it? If she has no pride for herself she might at
least have some for my sake! She must be shown that the blockhead thinks
nothing of her and looks only at Bourienne. No, she has no pride... but
I'll let her see...."

The old prince knew that if he told his daughter she was making a
mistake and that Anatole meant to flirt with Mademoiselle Bourienne,
Princess Mary's self-esteem would be wounded and his point (not to
be parted from her) would be gained, so pacifying himself with this
thought, he called Tikhon and began to undress.

"What devil brought them here?" thought he, while Tikhon was putting the
nightshirt over his dried-up old body and gray-haired chest. "I never
invited them. They came to disturb my life--and there is not much of it
left."

"Devil take 'em!" he muttered, while his head was still covered by the
shirt.

Tikhon knew his master's habit of sometimes thinking aloud, and
therefore met with unaltered looks the angrily inquisitive expression of
the face that emerged from the shirt.

"Gone to bed?" asked the prince.

Tikhon, like all good valets, instinctively knew the direction of his
master's thoughts. He guessed that the question referred to Prince
Vasili and his son.

"They have gone to bed and put out their lights, your excellency."

"No good... no good..." said the prince rapidly, and thrusting his feet
into his slippers and his arms into the sleeves of his dressing gown, he
went to the couch on which he slept.

Though no words had passed between Anatole and Mademoiselle Bourienne,
they quite understood one another as to the first part of their romance,
up to the appearance of the pauvre mere; they understood that they had
much to say to one another in private and so they had been seeking an
opportunity since morning to meet one another alone. When Princess Mary
went to her father's room at the usual hour, Mademoiselle Bourienne and
Anatole met in the conservatory.

Princess Mary went to the door of the study with special trepidation.
It seemed to her that not only did everybody know that her fate would be
decided that day, but that they also knew what she thought about it.
She read this in Tikhon's face and in that of Prince Vasili's valet, who
made her a low bow when she met him in the corridor carrying hot water.

The old prince was very affectionate and careful in his treatment of
his daughter that morning. Princess Mary well knew this painstaking
expression of her father's. His face wore that expression when his
dry hands clenched with vexation at her not understanding a sum in
arithmetic, when rising from his chair he would walk away from her,
repeating in a low voice the same words several times over.

He came to the point at once, treating her ceremoniously.

"I have had a proposition made me concerning you," he said with an
unnatural smile. "I expect you have guessed that Prince Vasili has not
come and brought his pupil with him" (for some reason Prince Bolkonski
referred to Anatole as a "pupil") "for the sake of my beautiful eyes.
Last night a proposition was made me on your account and, as you know my
principles, I refer it to you."

"How am I to understand you, mon pere?" said the princess, growing pale
and then blushing.

"How understand me!" cried her father angrily. "Prince Vasili finds you
to his taste as a daughter-in-law and makes a proposal to you on his
pupil's behalf. That's how it's to be understood! 'How understand
it'!... And I ask you!"

"I do not know what you think, Father," whispered the princess.

"I? I? What of me? Leave me out of the question. I'm not going to get
married. What about you? That's what I want to know."

The princess saw that her father regarded the matter with disapproval,
but at that moment the thought occurred to her that her fate would be
decided now or never. She lowered her eyes so as not to see the gaze
under which she felt that she could not think, but would only be able to
submit from habit, and she said: "I wish only to do your will, but if
I had to express my own desire..." She had no time to finish. The old
prince interrupted her.

"That's admirable!" he shouted. "He will take you with your dowry and
take Mademoiselle Bourienne into the bargain. She'll be the wife, while
you..."

The prince stopped. He saw the effect these words had produced on his
daughter. She lowered her head and was ready to burst into tears.

"Now then, now then, I'm only joking!" he said. "Remember this,
Princess, I hold to the principle that a maiden has a full right to
choose. I give you freedom. Only remember that your life's happiness
depends on your decision. Never mind me!"

"But I do not know, Father!"

"There's no need to talk! He receives his orders and will marry you or
anybody; but you are free to choose.... Go to your room, think it over,
and come back in an hour and tell me in his presence: yes or no. I know
you will pray over it. Well, pray if you like, but you had better think
it over. Go! Yes or no, yes or no, yes or no!" he still shouted when the
princess, as if lost in a fog, had already staggered out of the study.

Her fate was decided and happily decided. But what her father had said
about Mademoiselle Bourienne was dreadful. It was untrue to be sure, but
still it was terrible, and she could not help thinking of it. She was
going straight on through the conservatory, neither seeing nor hearing
anything, when suddenly the well-known whispering of Mademoiselle
Bourienne aroused her. She raised her eyes, and two steps away saw
Anatole embracing the Frenchwoman and whispering something to her. With
a horrified expression on his handsome face, Anatole looked at Princess
Mary, but did not at once take his arm from the waist of Mademoiselle
Bourienne who had not yet seen her.

"Who's that? Why? Wait a moment!" Anatole's face seemed to say. Princess
Mary looked at them in silence. She could not understand it. At last
Mademoiselle Bourienne gave a scream and ran away. Anatole bowed to
Princess Mary with a gay smile, as if inviting her to join in a laugh at
this strange incident, and then shrugging his shoulders went to the door
that led to his own apartments.

An hour later, Tikhon came to call Princess Mary to the old prince;
he added that Prince Vasili was also there. When Tikhon came to her
Princess Mary was sitting on the sofa in her room, holding the weeping
Mademoiselle Bourienne in her arms and gently stroking her hair. The
princess' beautiful eyes with all their former calm radiance were
looking with tender affection and pity at Mademoiselle Bourienne's
pretty face.

"No, Princess, I have lost your affection forever!" said Mademoiselle
Bourienne.

"Why? I love you more than ever," said Princess Mary, "and I will try to
do all I can for your happiness."

"But you despise me. You who are so pure can never understand being so
carried away by passion. Oh, only my poor mother..."

"I quite understand," answered Princess Mary, with a sad smile. "Calm
yourself, my dear. I will go to my father," she said, and went out.

Prince Vasili, with one leg thrown high over the other and a snuffbox in
his hand, was sitting there with a smile of deep emotion on his face,
as if stirred to his heart's core and himself regretting and laughing
at his own sensibility, when Princess Mary entered. He hurriedly took a
pinch of snuff.

"Ah, my dear, my dear!" he began, rising and taking her by both hands.
Then, sighing, he added: "My son's fate is in your hands. Decide, my
dear, good, gentle Marie, whom I have always loved as a daughter!"

He drew back and a real tear appeared in his eye.

"Fr... fr..." snorted Prince Bolkonski. "The prince is making a
proposition to you in his pupil's--I mean, his son's--name. Do you
wish or not to be Prince Anatole Kuragin's wife? Reply: yes or no," he
shouted, "and then I shall reserve the right to state my opinion also.
Yes, my opinion, and only my opinion," added Prince Bolkonski, turning
to Prince Vasili and answering his imploring look. "Yes, or no?"

"My desire is never to leave you, Father, never to separate my life
from yours. I don't wish to marry," she answered positively, glancing at
Prince Vasili and at her father with her beautiful eyes.

"Humbug! Nonsense! Humbug, humbug, humbug!" cried Prince Bolkonski,
frowning and taking his daughter's hand; he did not kiss her, but only
bending his forehead to hers just touched it, and pressed her hand so
that she winced and uttered a cry.

Prince Vasili rose.

"My dear, I must tell you that this is a moment I shall never, never
forget. But, my dear, will you not give us a little hope of touching
this heart, so kind and generous? Say 'perhaps'... The future is so
long. Say 'perhaps.'"

"Prince, what I have said is all there is in my heart. I thank you for
the honor, but I shall never be your son's wife."

"Well, so that's finished, my dear fellow! I am very glad to have seen
you. Very glad! Go back to your rooms, Princess. Go!" said the old
prince. "Very, very glad to have seen you," repeated he, embracing
Prince Vasili.

"My vocation is a different one," thought Princess Mary. "My vocation
is to be happy with another kind of happiness, the happiness of love
and self-sacrifice. And cost what it may, I will arrange poor Amelie's
happiness, she loves him so passionately, and so passionately repents. I
will do all I can to arrange the match between them. If he is not rich I
will give her the means; I will ask my father and Andrew. I shall be so
happy when she is his wife. She is so unfortunate, a stranger, alone,
helpless! And, oh God, how passionately she must love him if she could
so far forget herself! Perhaps I might have done the same!..." thought
Princess Mary.





CHAPTER VI


It was long since the Rostovs had news of Nicholas. Not till
midwinter was the count at last handed a letter addressed in his son's
handwriting. On receiving it, he ran on tiptoe to his study in alarm and
haste, trying to escape notice, closed the door, and began to read the
letter.

Anna Mikhaylovna, who always knew everything that passed in the house,
on hearing of the arrival of the letter went softly into the room and
found the count with it in his hand, sobbing and laughing at the same
time.

Anna Mikhaylovna, though her circumstances had improved, was still
living with the Rostovs.

"My dear friend?" said she, in a tone of pathetic inquiry, prepared to
sympathize in any way.

The count sobbed yet more.

"Nikolenka... a letter... wa... a... s... wounded... my darling boy...
the countess... promoted to be an officer... thank God... How tell the
little countess!"

Anna Mikhaylovna sat down beside him, with her own handkerchief wiped
the tears from his eyes and from the letter, then having dried her
own eyes she comforted the count, and decided that at dinner and till
teatime she would prepare the countess, and after tea, with God's help,
would inform her.

At dinner Anna Mikhaylovna talked the whole time about the war news and
about Nikolenka, twice asked when the last letter had been received from
him, though she knew that already, and remarked that they might very
likely be getting a letter from him that day. Each time that these hints
began to make the countess anxious and she glanced uneasily at the
count and at Anna Mikhaylovna, the latter very adroitly turned the
conversation to insignificant matters. Natasha, who, of the whole
family, was the most gifted with a capacity to feel any shades of
intonation, look, and expression, pricked up her ears from the beginning
of the meal and was certain that there was some secret between her
father and Anna Mikhaylovna, that it had something to do with her
brother, and that Anna Mikhaylovna was preparing them for it. Bold as
she was, Natasha, who knew how sensitive her mother was to anything
relating to Nikolenka, did not venture to ask any questions at dinner,
but she was too excited to eat anything and kept wriggling about on her
chair regardless of her governess' remarks. After dinner, she rushed
head long after Anna Mikhaylovna and, dashing at her, flung herself on
her neck as soon as she overtook her in the sitting room.

"Auntie, darling, do tell me what it is!"

"Nothing, my dear."

"No, dearest, sweet one, honey, I won't give up--I know you know
something."

Anna Mikhaylovna shook her head.

"You are a little slyboots," she said.

"A letter from Nikolenka! I'm sure of it!" exclaimed Natasha, reading
confirmation in Anna Mikhaylovna's face.

"But for God's sake, be careful, you know how it may affect your mamma."

"I will, I will, only tell me! You won't? Then I will go and tell at
once."

Anna Mikhaylovna, in a few words, told her the contents of the letter,
on condition that she should tell no one.

"No, on my true word of honor," said Natasha, crossing herself, "I won't
tell anyone!" and she ran off at once to Sonya.

"Nikolenka... wounded... a letter," she announced in gleeful triumph.

"Nicholas!" was all Sonya said, instantly turning white.

Natasha, seeing the impression the news of her brother's wound produced
on Sonya, felt for the first time the sorrowful side of the news.

She rushed to Sonya, hugged her, and began to cry.

"A little wound, but he has been made an officer; he is well now, he
wrote himself," said she through her tears.

"There now! It's true that all you women are crybabies," remarked Petya,
pacing the room with large, resolute strides. "Now I'm very glad, very
glad indeed, that my brother has distinguished himself so. You are all
blubberers and understand nothing."

Natasha smiled through her tears.

"You haven't read the letter?" asked Sonya.

"No, but she said that it was all over and that he's now an officer."

"Thank God!" said Sonya, crossing herself. "But perhaps she deceived
you. Let us go to Mamma."

Petya paced the room in silence for a time.

"If I'd been in Nikolenka's place I would have killed even more of those
Frenchmen," he said. "What nasty brutes they are! I'd have killed so
many that there'd have been a heap of them."

"Hold your tongue, Petya, what a goose you are!"

"I'm not a goose, but they are who cry about trifles," said Petya.

"Do you remember him?" Natasha suddenly asked, after a moment's silence.

Sonya smiled.

"Do I remember Nicholas?"

"No, Sonya, but do you remember so that you remember him perfectly,
remember everything?" said Natasha, with an expressive gesture,
evidently wishing to give her words a very definite meaning. "I remember
Nikolenka too, I remember him well," she said. "But I don't remember
Boris. I don't remember him a bit."

"What! You don't remember Boris?" asked Sonya in surprise.

"It's not that I don't remember--I know what he is like, but not as I
remember Nikolenka. Him--I just shut my eyes and remember, but Boris...
No!" (She shut her eyes.) "No! there's nothing at all."

"Oh, Natasha!" said Sonya, looking ecstatically and earnestly at her
friend as if she did not consider her worthy to hear what she meant to
say and as if she were saying it to someone else, with whom joking was
out of the question, "I am in love with your brother once for all and,
whatever may happen to him or to me, shall never cease to love him as
long as I live."

Natasha looked at Sonya with wondering and inquisitive eyes, and said
nothing. She felt that Sonya was speaking the truth, that there was such
love as Sonya was speaking of. But Natasha had not yet felt anything
like it. She believed it could be, but did not understand it.

"Shall you write to him?" she asked.

Sonya became thoughtful. The question of how to write to Nicholas, and
whether she ought to write, tormented her. Now that he was already an
officer and a wounded hero, would it be right to remind him of herself
and, as it might seem, of the obligations to her he had taken on
himself?

"I don't know. I think if he writes, I will write too," she said,
blushing.

"And you won't feel ashamed to write to him?"

Sonya smiled.

"No."

"And I should be ashamed to write to Boris. I'm not going to."

"Why should you be ashamed?"

"Well, I don't know. It's awkward and would make me ashamed."

"And I know why she'd be ashamed," said Petya, offended by Natasha's
previous remark. "It's because she was in love with that fat one in
spectacles" (that was how Petya described his namesake, the new Count
Bezukhov) "and now she's in love with that singer" (he meant Natasha's
Italian singing master), "that's why she's ashamed!"

"Petya, you're a stupid!" said Natasha.

"Not more stupid than you, madam," said the nine-year-old Petya, with
the air of an old brigadier.

The countess had been prepared by Anna Mikhaylovna's hints at dinner.
On retiring to her own room, she sat in an armchair, her eyes fixed on a
miniature portrait of her son on the lid of a snuffbox, while the tears
kept coming into her eyes. Anna Mikhaylovna, with the letter, came on
tiptoe to the countess' door and paused.

"Don't come in," she said to the old count who was following her. "Come
later." And she went in, closing the door behind her.

The count put his ear to the keyhole and listened.

At first he heard the sound of indifferent voices, then Anna
Mikhaylovna's voice alone in a long speech, then a cry, then silence,
then both voices together with glad intonations, and then footsteps.
Anna Mikhaylovna opened the door. Her face wore the proud expression of
a surgeon who has just performed a difficult operation and admits the
public to appreciate his skill.

"It is done!" she said to the count, pointing triumphantly to the
countess, who sat holding in one hand the snuffbox with its portrait and
in the other the letter, and pressing them alternately to her lips.

When she saw the count, she stretched out her arms to him, embraced his
bald head, over which she again looked at the letter and the portrait,
and in order to press them again to her lips, she slightly pushed away
the bald head. Vera, Natasha, Sonya, and Petya now entered the room,
and the reading of the letter began. After a brief description of
the campaign and the two battles in which he had taken part, and his
promotion, Nicholas said that he kissed his father's and mother's hands
asking for their blessing, and that he kissed Vera, Natasha, and Petya.
Besides that, he sent greetings to Monsieur Schelling, Madame Schoss,
and his old nurse, and asked them to kiss for him "dear Sonya, whom he
loved and thought of just the same as ever." When she heard this Sonya
blushed so that tears came into her eyes and, unable to bear the looks
turned upon her, ran away into the dancing hall, whirled round it at
full speed with her dress puffed out like a balloon, and, flushed and
smiling, plumped down on the floor. The countess was crying.

"Why are you crying, Mamma?" asked Vera. "From all he says one should be
glad and not cry."

This was quite true, but the count, the countess, and Natasha looked
at her reproachfully. "And who is it she takes after?" thought the
countess.

Nicholas' letter was read over hundreds of times, and those who were
considered worthy to hear it had to come to the countess, for she
did not let it out of her hands. The tutors came, and the nurses, and
Dmitri, and several acquaintances, and the countess reread the letter
each time with fresh pleasure and each time discovered in it fresh
proofs of Nikolenka's virtues. How strange, how extraordinary, how
joyful it seemed, that her son, the scarcely perceptible motion of whose
tiny limbs she had felt twenty years ago within her, that son about whom
she used to have quarrels with the too indulgent count, that son who had
first learned to say "pear" and then "granny," that this son should now
be away in a foreign land amid strange surroundings, a manly warrior
doing some kind of man's work of his own, without help or guidance.
The universal experience of ages, showing that children do grow
imperceptibly from the cradle to manhood, did not exist for the
countess. Her son's growth toward manhood, at each of its stages,
had seemed as extraordinary to her as if there had never existed the
millions of human beings who grew up in the same way. As twenty
years before, it seemed impossible that the little creature who lived
somewhere under her heart would ever cry, suck her breast, and begin to
speak, so now she could not believe that that little creature could be
this strong, brave man, this model son and officer that, judging by this
letter, he now was.

"What a style! How charmingly he describes!" said she, reading the
descriptive part of the letter. "And what a soul! Not a word about
himself.... Not a word! About some Denisov or other, though he himself,
I dare say, is braver than any of them. He says nothing about his
sufferings. What a heart! How like him it is! And how he has remembered
everybody! Not forgetting anyone. I always said when he was only so
high--I always said...."

For more than a week preparations were being made, rough drafts of
letters to Nicholas from all the household were written and copied out,
while under the supervision of the countess and the solicitude of the
count, money and all things necessary for the uniform and equipment
of the newly commissioned officer were collected. Anna Mikhaylovna,
practical woman that she was, had even managed by favor with army
authorities to secure advantageous means of communication for herself
and her son. She had opportunities of sending her letters to the Grand
Duke Constantine Pavlovich, who commanded the Guards. The Rostovs
supposed that The Russian Guards, Abroad, was quite a definite address,
and that if a letter reached the Grand Duke in command of the Guards
there was no reason why it should not reach the Pavlograd regiment,
which was presumably somewhere in the same neighborhood. And so it was
decided to send the letters and money by the Grand Duke's courier to
Boris and Boris was to forward them to Nicholas. The letters were
from the old count, the countess, Petya, Vera, Natasha, and Sonya, and
finally there were six thousand rubles for his outfit and various other
things the old count sent to his son.





CHAPTER VII


On the twelfth of November, Kutuzov's active army, in camp before
Olmutz, was preparing to be reviewed next day by the two Emperors--the
Russian and the Austrian. The Guards, just arrived from Russia, spent
the night ten miles from Olmutz and next morning were to come straight
to the review, reaching the field at Olmutz by ten o'clock.

That day Nicholas Rostov received a letter from Boris, telling him that
the Ismaylov regiment was quartered for the night ten miles from Olmutz
and that he wanted to see him as he had a letter and money for him.
Rostov was particularly in need of money now that the troops, after
their active service, were stationed near Olmutz and the camp swarmed
with well-provisioned sutlers and Austrian Jews offering all sorts
of tempting wares. The Pavlograds held feast after feast, celebrating
awards they had received for the campaign, and made expeditions to
Olmutz to visit a certain Caroline the Hungarian, who had recently
opened a restaurant there with girls as waitresses. Rostov, who had
just celebrated his promotion to a cornetcy and bought Denisov's horse,
Bedouin, was in debt all round, to his comrades and the sutlers. On
receiving Boris' letter he rode with a fellow officer to Olmutz, dined
there, drank a bottle of wine, and then set off alone to the Guards'
camp to find his old playmate. Rostov had not yet had time to get his
uniform. He had on a shabby cadet jacket, decorated with a soldier's
cross, equally shabby cadet's riding breeches lined with worn leather,
and an officer's saber with a sword knot. The Don horse he was riding
was one he had bought from a Cossack during the campaign, and he wore a
crumpled hussar cap stuck jauntily back on one side of his head. As he
rode up to the camp he thought how he would impress Boris and all his
comrades of the Guards by his appearance--that of a fighting hussar who
had been under fire.

The Guards had made their whole march as if on a pleasure trip, parading
their cleanliness and discipline. They had come by easy stages, their
knapsacks conveyed on carts, and the Austrian authorities had provided
excellent dinners for the officers at every halting place. The regiments
had entered and left the town with their bands playing, and by the Grand
Duke's orders the men had marched all the way in step (a practice on
which the Guards prided themselves), the officers on foot and at their
proper posts. Boris had been quartered, and had marched all the way,
with Berg who was already in command of a company. Berg, who had
obtained his captaincy during the campaign, had gained the confidence of
his superiors by his promptitude and accuracy and had arranged his money
matters very satisfactorily. Boris, during the campaign, had made the
acquaintance of many persons who might prove useful to him, and by
a letter of recommendation he had brought from Pierre had become
acquainted with Prince Andrew Bolkonski, through whom he hoped to obtain
a post on the commander in chief's staff. Berg and Boris, having rested
after yesterday's march, were sitting, clean and neatly dressed, at a
round table in the clean quarters allotted to them, playing chess.
Berg held a smoking pipe between his knees. Boris, in the accurate way
characteristic of him, was building a little pyramid of chessmen with
his delicate white fingers while awaiting Berg's move, and watched his
opponent's face, evidently thinking about the game as he always thought
only of whatever he was engaged on.

"Well, how are you going to get out of that?" he remarked.

"We'll try to," replied Berg, touching a pawn and then removing his
hand.

At that moment the door opened.

"Here he is at last!" shouted Rostov. "And Berg too! Oh, you
petisenfans, allay cushay dormir!" he exclaimed, imitating his Russian
nurse's French, at which he and Boris used to laugh long ago.

"Dear me, how you have changed!"

Boris rose to meet Rostov, but in doing so did not omit to steady and
replace some chessmen that were falling. He was about to embrace his
friend, but Nicholas avoided him. With that peculiar feeling of youth,
that dread of beaten tracks, and wish to express itself in a manner
different from that of its elders which is often insincere, Nicholas
wished to do something special on meeting his friend. He wanted to pinch
him, push him, do anything but kiss him--a thing everybody did. But
notwithstanding this, Boris embraced him in a quiet, friendly way and
kissed him three times.

They had not met for nearly half a year and, being at the age when young
men take their first steps on life's road, each saw immense changes in
the other, quite a new reflection of the society in which they had taken
those first steps. Both had changed greatly since they last met and both
were in a hurry to show the changes that had taken place in them.

"Oh, you damned dandies! Clean and fresh as if you'd been to a fete,
not like us sinners of the line," cried Rostov, with martial swagger
and with baritone notes in his voice, new to Boris, pointing to his own
mud-bespattered breeches. The German landlady, hearing Rostov's loud
voice, popped her head in at the door.

"Eh, is she pretty?" he asked with a wink.

"Why do you shout so? You'll frighten them!" said Boris. "I did not
expect you today," he added. "I only sent you the note yesterday by
Bolkonski--an adjutant of Kutuzov's, who's a friend of mine. I did not
think he would get it to you so quickly.... Well, how are you? Been
under fire already?" asked Boris.

Without answering, Rostov shook the soldier's Cross of St. George
fastened to the cording of his uniform and, indicating a bandaged arm,
glanced at Berg with a smile.

"As you see," he said.

"Indeed? Yes, yes!" said Boris, with a smile. "And we too have had a
splendid march. You know, of course, that His Imperial Highness rode
with our regiment all the time, so that we had every comfort and every
advantage. What receptions we had in Poland! What dinners and balls!
I can't tell you. And the Tsarevich was very gracious to all our
officers."

And the two friends told each other of their doings, the one of his
hussar revels and life in the fighting line, the other of the pleasures
and advantages of service under members of the Imperial family.

"Oh, you Guards!" said Rostov. "I say, send for some wine."

Boris made a grimace.

"If you really want it," said he.

He went to his bed, drew a purse from under the clean pillow, and sent
for wine.

"Yes, and I have some money and a letter to give you," he added.

Rostov took the letter and, throwing the money on the sofa, put both
arms on the table and began to read. After reading a few lines, he
glanced angrily at Berg, then, meeting his eyes, hid his face behind the
letter.

"Well, they've sent you a tidy sum," said Berg, eying the heavy purse
that sank into the sofa. "As for us, Count, we get along on our pay. I
can tell you for myself..."

"I say, Berg, my dear fellow," said Rostov, "when you get a letter from
home and meet one of your own people whom you want to talk everything
over with, and I happen to be there, I'll go at once, to be out of
your way! Do go somewhere, anywhere... to the devil!" he exclaimed, and
immediately seizing him by the shoulder and looking amiably into his
face, evidently wishing to soften the rudeness of his words, he added,
"Don't be hurt, my dear fellow; you know I speak from my heart as to an
old acquaintance."

"Oh, don't mention it, Count! I quite understand," said Berg, getting up
and speaking in a muffled and guttural voice.

"Go across to our hosts: they invited you," added Boris.

Berg put on the cleanest of coats, without a spot or speck of dust,
stood before a looking glass and brushed the hair on his temples
upwards, in the way affected by the Emperor Alexander, and, having
assured himself from the way Rostov looked at it that his coat had been
noticed, left the room with a pleasant smile.

"Oh dear, what a beast I am!" muttered Rostov, as he read the letter.

"Why?"

"Oh, what a pig I am, not to have written and to have given them such
a fright! Oh, what a pig I am!" he repeated, flushing suddenly. "Well,
have you sent Gabriel for some wine? All right let's have some!"

In the letter from his parents was enclosed a letter of recommendation
to Bagration which the old countess at Anna Mikhaylovna's advice had
obtained through an acquaintance and sent to her son, asking him to take
it to its destination and make use of it.

"What nonsense! Much I need it!" said Rostov, throwing the letter under
the table.

"Why have you thrown that away?" asked Boris.

"It is some letter of recommendation... what the devil do I want it
for!"

"Why 'What the devil'?" said Boris, picking it up and reading the
address. "This letter would be of great use to you."

"I want nothing, and I won't be anyone's adjutant."

"Why not?" inquired Boris.

"It's a lackey's job!"

"You are still the same dreamer, I see," remarked Boris, shaking his
head.

"And you're still the same diplomatist! But that's not the point...
Come, how are you?" asked Rostov.

"Well, as you see. So far everything's all right, but I confess I should
much like to be an adjutant and not remain at the front."

"Why?"

"Because when once a man starts on military service, he should try to
make as successful a career of it as possible."

"Oh, that's it!" said Rostov, evidently thinking of something else.

He looked intently and inquiringly into his friend's eyes, evidently
trying in vain to find the answer to some question.

Old Gabriel brought in the wine.

"Shouldn't we now send for Berg?" asked Boris. "He would drink with you.
I can't."

"Well, send for him... and how do you get on with that German?" asked
Rostov, with a contemptuous smile.

"He is a very, very nice, honest, and pleasant fellow," answered Boris.

Again Rostov looked intently into Boris' eyes and sighed. Berg returned,
and over the bottle of wine conversation between the three officers
became animated. The Guardsmen told Rostov of their march and how they
had been made much of in Russia, Poland, and abroad. They spoke of the
sayings and doings of their commander, the Grand Duke, and told stories
of his kindness and irascibility. Berg, as usual, kept silent when the
subject did not relate to himself, but in connection with the stories
of the Grand Duke's quick temper he related with gusto how in Galicia he
had managed to deal with the Grand Duke when the latter made a tour of
the regiments and was annoyed at the irregularity of a movement. With a
pleasant smile Berg related how the Grand Duke had ridden up to him in
a violent passion, shouting: "Arnauts!" ("Arnauts" was the Tsarevich's
favorite expression when he was in a rage) and called for the company
commander.

"Would you believe it, Count, I was not at all alarmed, because I knew
I was right. Without boasting, you know, I may say that I know the Army
Orders by heart and know the Regulations as well as I do the Lord's
Prayer. So, Count, there never is any negligence in my company, and so
my conscience was at ease. I came forward...." (Berg stood up and showed
how he presented himself, with his hand to his cap, and really it
would have been difficult for a face to express greater respect and
self-complacency than his did.) "Well, he stormed at me, as the saying
is, stormed and stormed and stormed! It was not a matter of life but
rather of death, as the saying is. 'Albanians!' and 'devils!' and 'To
Siberia!'" said Berg with a sagacious smile. "I knew I was in the right
so I kept silent; was not that best, Count?... 'Hey, are you dumb?' he
shouted. Still I remained silent. And what do you think, Count? The
next day it was not even mentioned in the Orders of the Day. That's what
keeping one's head means. That's the way, Count," said Berg, lighting
his pipe and emitting rings of smoke.

"Yes, that was fine," said Rostov, smiling.

But Boris noticed that he was preparing to make fun of Berg, and
skillfully changed the subject. He asked him to tell them how and where
he got his wound. This pleased Rostov and he began talking about it, and
as he went on became more and more animated. He told them of his Schon
Grabern affair, just as those who have taken part in a battle generally
do describe it, that is, as they would like it to have been, as they
have heard it described by others, and as sounds well, but not at all as
it really was. Rostov was a truthful young man and would on no
account have told a deliberate lie. He began his story meaning to tell
everything just as it happened, but imperceptibly, involuntarily, and
inevitably he lapsed into falsehood. If he had told the truth to his
hearers--who like himself had often heard stories of attacks and had
formed a definite idea of what an attack was and were expecting to hear
just such a story--they would either not have believed him or, still
worse, would have thought that Rostov was himself to blame since what
generally happens to the narrators of cavalry attacks had not happened
to him. He could not tell them simply that everyone went at a trot and
that he fell off his horse and sprained his arm and then ran as hard as
he could from a Frenchman into the wood. Besides, to tell everything as
it really happened, it would have been necessary to make an effort of
will to tell only what happened. It is very difficult to tell the truth,
and young people are rarely capable of it. His hearers expected a story
of how beside himself and all aflame with excitement, he had flown like
a storm at the square, cut his way in, slashed right and left, how his
saber had tasted flesh and he had fallen exhausted, and so on. And so he
told them all that.

In the middle of his story, just as he was saying: "You cannot imagine
what a strange frenzy one experiences during an attack," Prince Andrew,
whom Boris was expecting, entered the room. Prince Andrew, who liked
to help young men, was flattered by being asked for his assistance and
being well disposed toward Boris, who had managed to please him the day
before, he wished to do what the young man wanted. Having been sent with
papers from Kutuzov to the Tsarevich, he looked in on Boris, hoping to
find him alone. When he came in and saw an hussar of the line recounting
his military exploits (Prince Andrew could not endure that sort of man),
he gave Boris a pleasant smile, frowned as with half-closed eyes he
looked at Rostov, bowed slightly and wearily, and sat down languidly
on the sofa: he felt it unpleasant to have dropped in on bad company.
Rostov flushed up on noticing this, but he did not care, this was a mere
stranger. Glancing, however, at Boris, he saw that he too seemed ashamed
of the hussar of the line.

In spite of Prince Andrew's disagreeable, ironical tone, in spite of
the contempt with which Rostov, from his fighting army point of view,
regarded all these little adjutants on the staff of whom the newcomer
was evidently one, Rostov felt confused, blushed, and became silent.
Boris inquired what news there might be on the staff, and what, without
indiscretion, one might ask about our plans.

"We shall probably advance," replied Bolkonski, evidently reluctant to
say more in the presence of a stranger.

Berg took the opportunity to ask, with great politeness, whether, as was
rumored, the allowance of forage money to captains of companies would be
doubled. To this Prince Andrew answered with a smile that he could
give no opinion on such an important government order, and Berg laughed
gaily.

"As to your business," Prince Andrew continued, addressing Boris, "we
will talk of it later" (and he looked round at Rostov). "Come to me
after the review and we will do what is possible."

And, having glanced round the room, Prince Andrew turned to Rostov,
whose state of unconquerable childish embarrassment now changing to
anger he did not condescend to notice, and said: "I think you were
talking of the Schon Grabern affair? Were you there?"

"I was there," said Rostov angrily, as if intending to insult the
aide-de-camp.

Bolkonski noticed the hussar's state of mind, and it amused him. With a
slightly contemptuous smile, he said: "Yes, there are many stories now
told about that affair!"

"Yes, stories!" repeated Rostov loudly, looking with eyes suddenly grown
furious, now at Boris, now at Bolkonski. "Yes, many stories! But our
stories are the stories of men who have been under the enemy's fire! Our
stories have some weight, not like the stories of those fellows on the
staff who get rewards without doing anything!"

"Of whom you imagine me to be one?" said Prince Andrew, with a quiet and
particularly amiable smile.

A strange feeling of exasperation and yet of respect for this man's
self-possession mingled at that moment in Rostov's soul.

"I am not talking about you," he said, "I don't know you and, frankly, I
don't want to. I am speaking of the staff in general."

"And I will tell you this," Prince Andrew interrupted in a tone of quiet
authority, "you wish to insult me, and I am ready to agree with you that
it would be very easy to do so if you haven't sufficient self-respect,
but admit that the time and place are very badly chosen. In a day or two
we shall all have to take part in a greater and more serious duel, and
besides, Drubetskoy, who says he is an old friend of yours, is not at
all to blame that my face has the misfortune to displease you. However,"
he added rising, "you know my name and where to find me, but don't
forget that I do not regard either myself or you as having been at all
insulted, and as a man older than you, my advice is to let the matter
drop. Well then, on Friday after the review I shall expect you,
Drubetskoy. Au revoir!" exclaimed Prince Andrew, and with a bow to them
both he went out.

Only when Prince Andrew was gone did Rostov think of what he ought to
have said. And he was still more angry at having omitted to say it. He
ordered his horse at once and, coldly taking leave of Boris, rode
home. Should he go to headquarters next day and challenge that affected
adjutant, or really let the matter drop, was the question that worried
him all the way. He thought angrily of the pleasure he would have at
seeing the fright of that small and frail but proud man when covered by
his pistol, and then he felt with surprise that of all the men he knew
there was none he would so much like to have for a friend as that very
adjutant whom he so hated.





CHAPTER VIII


The day after Rostov had been to see Boris, a review was held of the
Austrian and Russian troops, both those freshly arrived from Russia
and those who had been campaigning under Kutuzov. The two Emperors, the
Russian with his heir the Tsarevich, and the Austrian with the Archduke,
inspected the allied army of eighty thousand men.

From early morning the smart clean troops were on the move, forming up
on the field before the fortress. Now thousands of feet and bayonets
moved and halted at the officers' command, turned with banners flying,
formed up at intervals, and wheeled round other similar masses of
infantry in different uniforms; now was heard the rhythmic beat of
hoofs and the jingling of showy cavalry in blue, red, and green braided
uniforms, with smartly dressed bandsmen in front mounted on black, roan,
or gray horses; then again, spreading out with the brazen clatter of the
polished shining cannon that quivered on the gun carriages and with
the smell of linstocks, came the artillery which crawled between the
infantry and cavalry and took up its appointed position. Not only the
generals in full parade uniforms, with their thin or thick waists drawn
in to the utmost, their red necks squeezed into their stiff collars, and
wearing scarves and all their decorations, not only the elegant, pomaded
officers, but every soldier with his freshly washed and shaven face and
his weapons clean and polished to the utmost, and every horse groomed
till its coat shone like satin and every hair of its wetted mane lay
smooth--felt that no small matter was happening, but an important and
solemn affair. Every general and every soldier was conscious of his own
insignificance, aware of being but a drop in that ocean of men, and
yet at the same time was conscious of his strength as a part of that
enormous whole.

From early morning strenuous activities and efforts had begun and by ten
o'clock all had been brought into due order. The ranks were drawn up on
the vast field. The whole army was extended in three lines: the cavalry
in front, behind it the artillery, and behind that again the infantry.

A space like a street was left between each two lines of troops. The
three parts of that army were sharply distinguished: Kutuzov's fighting
army (with the Pavlograds on the right flank of the front); those
recently arrived from Russia, both Guards and regiments of the line;
and the Austrian troops. But they all stood in the same lines, under one
command, and in a like order.

Like wind over leaves ran an excited whisper: "They're coming! They're
coming!" Alarmed voices were heard, and a stir of final preparation
swept over all the troops.

From the direction of Olmutz in front of them, a group was seen
approaching. And at that moment, though the day was still, a light gust
of wind blowing over the army slightly stirred the streamers on the
lances and the unfolded standards fluttered against their staffs. It
looked as if by that slight motion the army itself was expressing its
joy at the approach of the Emperors. One voice was heard shouting: "Eyes
front!" Then, like the crowing of cocks at sunrise, this was repeated by
others from various sides and all became silent.

In the deathlike stillness only the tramp of horses was heard. This
was the Emperors' suites. The Emperors rode up to the flank, and the
trumpets of the first cavalry regiment played the general march. It
seemed as though not the trumpeters were playing, but as if the army
itself, rejoicing at the Emperors' approach, had naturally burst into
music. Amid these sounds, only the youthful kindly voice of the Emperor
Alexander was clearly heard. He gave the words of greeting, and the
first regiment roared "Hurrah!" so deafeningly, continuously, and
joyfully that the men themselves were awed by their multitude and the
immensity of the power they constituted.

Rostov, standing in the front lines of Kutuzov's army which the Tsar
approached first, experienced the same feeling as every other man in
that army: a feeling of self-forgetfulness, a proud consciousness of
might, and a passionate attraction to him who was the cause of this
triumph.

He felt that at a single word from that man all this vast mass (and he
himself an insignificant atom in it) would go through fire and water,
commit crime, die, or perform deeds of highest heroism, and so he could
not but tremble and his heart stand still at the imminence of that word.

"Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!" thundered from all sides, one regiment after
another greeting the Tsar with the strains of the march, and then
"Hurrah!"... Then the general march, and again "Hurrah! Hurrah!" growing
ever stronger and fuller and merging into a deafening roar.

Till the Tsar reached it, each regiment in its silence and immobility
seemed like a lifeless body, but as soon as he came up it became alive,
its thunder joining the roar of the whole line along which he had
already passed. Through the terrible and deafening roar of those voices,
amid the square masses of troops standing motionless as if turned to
stone, hundreds of riders composing the suites moved carelessly but
symmetrically and above all freely, and in front of them two men--the
Emperors. Upon them the undivided, tensely passionate attention of that
whole mass of men was concentrated.

The handsome young Emperor Alexander, in the uniform of the Horse
Guards, wearing a cocked hat with its peaks front and back, with his
pleasant face and resonant though not loud voice, attracted everyone's
attention.

Rostov was not far from the trumpeters, and with his keen sight had
recognized the Tsar and watched his approach. When he was within twenty
paces, and Nicholas could clearly distinguish every detail of his
handsome, happy young face, he experienced a feeling tenderness and
ecstasy such as he had never before known. Every trait and every
movement of the Tsar's seemed to him enchanting.

Stopping in front of the Pavlograds, the Tsar said something in French
to the Austrian Emperor and smiled.

Seeing that smile, Rostov involuntarily smiled himself and felt a still
stronger flow of love for his sovereign. He longed to show that love in
some way and knowing that this was impossible was ready to cry. The Tsar
called the colonel of the regiment and said a few words to him.

"Oh God, what would happen to me if the Emperor spoke to me?" thought
Rostov. "I should die of happiness!"

The Tsar addressed the officers also: "I thank you all, gentlemen, I
thank you with my whole heart." To Rostov every word sounded like a
voice from heaven. How gladly would he have died at once for his Tsar!

"You have earned the St. George's standards and will be worthy of them."

"Oh, to die, to die for him," thought Rostov.

The Tsar said something more which Rostov did not hear, and the
soldiers, straining their lungs, shouted "Hurrah!"

Rostov too, bending over his saddle, shouted "Hurrah!" with all his
might, feeling that he would like to injure himself by that shout, if
only to express his rapture fully.

The Tsar stopped a few minutes in front of the hussars as if undecided.

"How can the Emperor be undecided?" thought Rostov, but then even this
indecision appeared to him majestic and enchanting, like everything else
the Tsar did.

That hesitation lasted only an instant. The Tsar's foot, in the narrow
pointed boot then fashionable, touched the groin of the bobtailed bay
mare he rode, his hand in a white glove gathered up the reins, and he
moved off accompanied by an irregularly swaying sea of aides-de-camp.
Farther and farther he rode away, stopping at other regiments, till at
last only his white plumes were visible to Rostov from amid the suites
that surrounded the Emperors.

Among the gentlemen of the suite, Rostov noticed Bolkonski, sitting
his horse indolently and carelessly. Rostov recalled their quarrel of
yesterday and the question presented itself whether he ought or ought
not to challenge Bolkonski. "Of course not!" he now thought. "Is it
worth thinking or speaking of it at such a moment? At a time of such
love, such rapture, and such self-sacrifice, what do any of our quarrels
and affronts matter? I love and forgive everybody now."

When the Emperor had passed nearly all the regiments, the troops began
a ceremonial march past him, and Rostov on Bedouin, recently purchased
from Denisov, rode past too, at the rear of his squadron--that is, alone
and in full view of the Emperor.

Before he reached him, Rostov, who was a splendid horseman, spurred
Bedouin twice and successfully put him to the showy trot in which the
animal went when excited. Bending his foaming muzzle to his chest, his
tail extended, Bedouin, as if also conscious of the Emperor's eye
upon him, passed splendidly, lifting his feet with a high and graceful
action, as if flying through the air without touching the ground.

Rostov himself, his legs well back and his stomach drawn in and feeling
himself one with his horse, rode past the Emperor with a frowning but
blissful face "like a vewy devil," as Denisov expressed it.

"Fine fellows, the Pavlograds!" remarked the Emperor.

"My God, how happy I should be if he ordered me to leap into the fire
this instant!" thought Rostov.

When the review was over, the newly arrived officers, and also
Kutuzov's, collected in groups and began to talk about the awards, about
the Austrians and their uniforms, about their lines, about Bonaparte,
and how badly the latter would fare now, especially if the Essen corps
arrived and Prussia took our side.

But the talk in every group was chiefly about the Emperor Alexander. His
every word and movement was described with ecstasy.

They all had but one wish: to advance as soon as possible against the
enemy under the Emperor's command. Commanded by the Emperor himself
they could not fail to vanquish anyone, be it whom it might: so thought
Rostov and most of the officers after the review.

All were then more confident of victory than the winning of two battles
would have made them.





CHAPTER IX


The day after the review, Boris, in his best uniform and with his
comrade Berg's best wishes for success, rode to Olmutz to see Bolkonski,
wishing to profit by his friendliness and obtain for himself the best
post he could--preferably that of adjutant to some important personage,
a position in the army which seemed to him most attractive. "It is all
very well for Rostov, whose father sends him ten thousand rubles at a
time, to talk about not wishing to cringe to anybody and not be anyone's
lackey, but I who have nothing but my brains have to make a career
and must not miss opportunities, but must avail myself of them!" he
reflected.

He did not find Prince Andrew in Olmutz that day, but the appearance of
the town where the headquarters and the diplomatic corps were stationed
and the two Emperors were living with their suites, households, and
courts only strengthened his desire to belong to that higher world.

He knew no one, and despite his smart Guardsman's uniform, all these
exalted personages passing in the streets in their elegant carriages
with their plumes, ribbons, and medals, both courtiers and military
men, seemed so immeasurably above him, an insignificant officer of the
Guards, that they not only did not wish to, but simply could not, be
aware of his existence. At the quarters of the commander in chief,
Kutuzov, where he inquired for Bolkonski, all the adjutants and even the
orderlies looked at him as if they wished to impress on him that a great
many officers like him were always coming there and that everybody was
heartily sick of them. In spite of this, or rather because of it, next
day, November 15, after dinner he again went to Olmutz and, entering the
house occupied by Kutuzov, asked for Bolkonski. Prince Andrew was in and
Boris was shown into a large hall probably formerly used for dancing,
but in which five beds now stood, and furniture of various kinds: a
table, chairs, and a clavichord. One adjutant, nearest the door, was
sitting at the table in a Persian dressing gown, writing. Another,
the red, stout Nesvitski, lay on a bed with his arms under his head,
laughing with an officer who had sat down beside him. A third was
playing a Viennese waltz on the clavichord, while a fourth, lying on
the clavichord, sang the tune. Bolkonski was not there. None of these
gentlemen changed his position on seeing Boris. The one who was writing
and whom Boris addressed turned round crossly and told him Bolkonski
was on duty and that he should go through the door on the left into the
reception room if he wished to see him. Boris thanked him and went to
the reception room, where he found some ten officers and generals.

When he entered, Prince Andrew, his eyes drooping contemptuously (with
that peculiar expression of polite weariness which plainly says, "If it
were not my duty I would not talk to you for a moment"), was listening
to an old Russian general with decorations, who stood very erect, almost
on tiptoe, with a soldier's obsequious expression on his purple face,
reporting something.

"Very well, then, be so good as to wait," said Prince Andrew to the
general, in Russian, speaking with the French intonation he affected
when he wished to speak contemptuously, and noticing Boris, Prince
Andrew, paying no more heed to the general who ran after him imploring
him to hear something more, nodded and turned to him with a cheerful
smile.

At that moment Boris clearly realized what he had before surmised, that
in the army, besides the subordination and discipline prescribed in the
military code, which he and the others knew in the regiment, there was
another, more important, subordination, which made this tight-laced,
purple-faced general wait respectfully while Captain Prince Andrew, for
his own pleasure, chose to chat with Lieutenant Drubetskoy. More than
ever was Boris resolved to serve in future not according to the written
code, but under this unwritten law. He felt now that merely by having
been recommended to Prince Andrew he had already risen above the general
who at the front had the power to annihilate him, a lieutenant of the
Guards. Prince Andrew came up to him and took his hand.

"I am very sorry you did not find me in yesterday. I was fussing about
with Germans all day. We went with Weyrother to survey the dispositions.
When Germans start being accurate, there's no end to it!"

Boris smiled, as if he understood what Prince Andrew was alluding to
as something generally known. But it was the first time he had heard
Weyrother's name, or even the term "dispositions."

"Well, my dear fellow, so you still want to be an adjutant? I have been
thinking about you."

"Yes, I was thinking"--for some reason Boris could not help
blushing--"of asking the commander in chief. He has had a letter from
Prince Kuragin about me. I only wanted to ask because I fear the Guards
won't be in action," he added as if in apology.

"All right, all right. We'll talk it over," replied Prince Andrew.
"Only let me report this gentleman's business, and I shall be at your
disposal."

While Prince Andrew went to report about the purple-faced general, that
gentleman--evidently not sharing Boris' conception of the advantages
of the unwritten code of subordination--looked so fixedly at the
presumptuous lieutenant who had prevented his finishing what he had to
say to the adjutant that Boris felt uncomfortable. He turned away and
waited impatiently for Prince Andrew's return from the commander in
chief's room.

"You see, my dear fellow, I have been thinking about you," said Prince
Andrew when they had gone into the large room where the clavichord was.
"It's no use your going to the commander in chief. He would say a lot of
pleasant things, ask you to dinner" ("That would not be bad as regards
the unwritten code," thought Boris), "but nothing more would come of it.
There will soon be a battalion of us aides-de-camp and adjutants! But
this is what we'll do: I have a good friend, an adjutant general and an
excellent fellow, Prince Dolgorukov; and though you may not know it, the
fact is that now Kutuzov with his staff and all of us count for
nothing. Everything is now centered round the Emperor. So we will go to
Dolgorukov; I have to go there anyhow and I have already spoken to him
about you. We shall see whether he cannot attach you to himself or find
a place for you somewhere nearer the sun."

Prince Andrew always became specially keen when he had to guide a young
man and help him to worldly success. Under cover of obtaining help
of this kind for another, which from pride he would never accept for
himself, he kept in touch with the circle which confers success and
which attracted him. He very readily took up Boris' cause and went with
him to Dolgorukov.

It was late in the evening when they entered the palace at Olmutz
occupied by the Emperors and their retinues.

That same day a council of war had been held in which all the members of
the Hofkriegsrath and both Emperors took part. At that council, contrary
to the views of the old generals Kutuzov and Prince Schwartzenberg, it
had been decided to advance immediately and give battle to Bonaparte.
The council of war was just over when Prince Andrew accompanied by Boris
arrived at the palace to find Dolgorukov. Everyone at headquarters was
still under the spell of the day's council, at which the party of the
young had triumphed. The voices of those who counseled delay and advised
waiting for something else before advancing had been so completely
silenced and their arguments confuted by such conclusive evidence of the
advantages of attacking that what had been discussed at the council--the
coming battle and the victory that would certainly result from it--no
longer seemed to be in the future but in the past. All the advantages
were on our side. Our enormous forces, undoubtedly superior to
Napoleon's, were concentrated in one place, the troops inspired by the
Emperors' presence were eager for action. The strategic position where
the operations would take place was familiar in all its details to
the Austrian General Weyrother: a lucky accident had ordained that the
Austrian army should maneuver the previous year on the very fields where
the French had now to be fought; the adjacent locality was known and
shown in every detail on the maps, and Bonaparte, evidently weakened,
was undertaking nothing.

Dolgorukov, one of the warmest advocates of an attack, had just returned
from the council, tired and exhausted but eager and proud of the victory
that had been gained. Prince Andrew introduced his protege, but Prince
Dolgorukov politely and firmly pressing his hand said nothing to Boris
and, evidently unable to suppress the thoughts which were uppermost in
his mind at that moment, addressed Prince Andrew in French.

"Ah, my dear fellow, what a battle we have gained! God grant that
the one that will result from it will be as victorious! However, dear
fellow," he said abruptly and eagerly, "I must confess to having been
unjust to the Austrians and especially to Weyrother. What exactitude,
what minuteness, what knowledge of the locality, what foresight for
every eventuality, every possibility even to the smallest detail! No, my
dear fellow, no conditions better than our present ones could have been
devised. This combination of Austrian precision with Russian valor--what
more could be wished for?"

"So the attack is definitely resolved on?" asked Bolkonski.

"And do you know, my dear fellow, it seems to me that Bonaparte has
decidedly lost bearings, you know that a letter was received from him
today for the Emperor." Dolgorukov smiled significantly.

"Is that so? And what did he say?" inquired Bolkonski.

"What can he say? Tra-di-ri-di-ra and so on... merely to gain time. I
tell you he is in our hands, that's certain! But what was most amusing,"
he continued, with a sudden, good-natured laugh, "was that we could not
think how to address the reply! If not as 'Consul' and of course not as
'Emperor,' it seemed to me it should be to 'General Bonaparte.'"

"But between not recognizing him as Emperor and calling him General
Bonaparte, there is a difference," remarked Bolkonski.

"That's just it," interrupted Dolgorukov quickly, laughing. "You know
Bilibin--he's a very clever fellow. He suggested addressing him as
'Usurper and Enemy of Mankind.'"

Dolgorukov laughed merrily.

"Only that?" said Bolkonski.

"All the same, it was Bilibin who found a suitable form for the address.
He is a wise and clever fellow."

"What was it?"

"To the Head of the French Government... Au chef du gouvernement
francais," said Dolgorukov, with grave satisfaction. "Good, wasn't it?"

"Yes, but he will dislike it extremely," said Bolkonski.

"Oh yes, very much! My brother knows him, he's dined with him--the
present Emperor--more than once in Paris, and tells me he never met a
more cunning or subtle diplomatist--you know, a combination of French
adroitness and Italian play-acting! Do you know the tale about him and
Count Markov? Count Markov was the only man who knew how to handle him.
You know the story of the handkerchief? It is delightful!"

And the talkative Dolgorukov, turning now to Boris, now to Prince
Andrew, told how Bonaparte wishing to test Markov, our ambassador,
purposely dropped a handkerchief in front of him and stood looking at
Markov, probably expecting Markov to pick it up for him, and how Markov
immediately dropped his own beside it and picked it up without touching
Bonaparte's.

"Delightful!" said Bolkonski. "But I have come to you, Prince, as a
petitioner on behalf of this young man. You see..." but before Prince
Andrew could finish, an aide-de-camp came in to summon Dolgorukov to the
Emperor.

"Oh, what a nuisance," said Dolgorukov, getting up hurriedly and
pressing the hands of Prince Andrew and Boris. "You know I should be
very glad to do all in my power both for you and for this dear young
man." Again he pressed the hand of the latter with an expression of
good-natured, sincere, and animated levity. "But you see... another
time!"

Boris was excited by the thought of being so close to the higher powers
as he felt himself to be at that moment. He was conscious that here
he was in contact with the springs that set in motion the enormous
movements of the mass of which in his regiment he felt himself a tiny,
obedient, and insignificant atom. They followed Prince Dolgorukov out
into the corridor and met--coming out of the door of the Emperor's room
by which Dolgorukov had entered--a short man in civilian clothes with a
clever face and sharply projecting jaw which, without spoiling his face,
gave him a peculiar vivacity and shiftiness of expression. This short
man nodded to Dolgorukov as to an intimate friend and stared at Prince
Andrew with cool intensity, walking straight toward him and evidently
expecting him to bow or to step out of his way. Prince Andrew did
neither: a look of animosity appeared on his face and the other turned
away and went down the side of the corridor.

"Who was that?" asked Boris.

"He is one of the most remarkable, but to me most unpleasant of men--the
Minister of Foreign Affairs, Prince Adam Czartoryski.... It is such men
as he who decide the fate of nations," added Bolkonski with a sigh he
could not suppress, as they passed out of the palace.

Next day, the army began its campaign, and up to the very battle of
Austerlitz, Boris was unable to see either Prince Andrew or Dolgorukov
again and remained for a while with the Ismaylov regiment.





CHAPTER X


At dawn on the sixteenth of November, Denisov's squadron, in which
Nicholas Rostov served and which was in Prince Bagration's detachment,
moved from the place where it had spent the night, advancing into action
as arranged, and after going behind other columns for about two thirds
of a mile was stopped on the highroad. Rostov saw the Cossacks and then
the first and second squadrons of hussars and infantry battalions
and artillery pass by and go forward and then Generals Bagration and
Dolgorukov ride past with their adjutants. All the fear before action
which he had experienced as previously, all the inner struggle to
conquer that fear, all his dreams of distinguishing himself as a true
hussar in this battle, had been wasted. Their squadron remained in
reserve and Nicholas Rostov spent that day in a dull and wretched mood.
At nine in the morning, he heard firing in front and shouts of hurrah,
and saw wounded being brought back (there were not many of them), and
at last he saw how a whole detachment of French cavalry was brought in,
convoyed by a sotnya of Cossacks. Evidently the affair was over and,
though not big, had been a successful engagement. The men and officers
returning spoke of a brilliant victory, of the occupation of the town of
Wischau and the capture of a whole French squadron. The day was bright
and sunny after a sharp night frost, and the cheerful glitter of that
autumn day was in keeping with the news of victory which was conveyed,
not only by the tales of those who had taken part in it, but also by
the joyful expression on the faces of soldiers, officers, generals, and
adjutants, as they passed Rostov going or coming. And Nicholas, who had
vainly suffered all the dread that precedes a battle and had spent that
happy day in inactivity, was all the more depressed.

"Come here, Wostov. Let's dwink to dwown our gwief!" shouted Denisov,
who had settled down by the roadside with a flask and some food.

The officers gathered round Denisov's canteen, eating and talking.

"There! They are bringing another!" cried one of the officers,
indicating a captive French dragoon who was being brought in on foot by
two Cossacks.

One of them was leading by the bridle a fine large French horse he had
taken from the prisoner.

"Sell us that horse!" Denisov called out to the Cossacks.

"If you like, your honor!"

The officers got up and stood round the Cossacks and their prisoner.
The French dragoon was a young Alsatian who spoke French with a German
accent. He was breathless with agitation, his face was red, and when
he heard some French spoken he at once began speaking to the officers,
addressing first one, then another. He said he would not have been
taken, it was not his fault but the corporal's who had sent him to seize
some horsecloths, though he had told him the Russians were there. And at
every word he added: "But don't hurt my little horse!" and stroked the
animal. It was plain that he did not quite grasp where he was. Now
he excused himself for having been taken prisoner and now, imagining
himself before his own officers, insisted on his soldierly discipline
and zeal in the service. He brought with him into our rearguard all the
freshness of atmosphere of the French army, which was so alien to us.

The Cossacks sold the horse for two gold pieces, and Rostov, being the
richest of the officers now that he had received his money, bought it.

"But don't hurt my little horse!" said the Alsatian good-naturedly to
Rostov when the animal was handed over to the hussar.

Rostov smilingly reassured the dragoon and gave him money.

"Alley! Alley!" said the Cossack, touching the prisoner's arm to make
him go on.

"The Emperor! The Emperor!" was suddenly heard among the hussars.

All began to run and bustle, and Rostov saw coming up the road behind
him several riders with white plumes in their hats. In a moment everyone
was in his place, waiting.

Rostov did not know or remember how he ran to his place and mounted.
Instantly his regret at not having been in action and his dejected mood
amid people of whom he was weary had gone, instantly every thought of
himself had vanished. He was filled with happiness at his nearness to
the Emperor. He felt that this nearness by itself made up to him for the
day he had lost. He was happy as a lover when the longed-for moment of
meeting arrives. Not daring to look round and without looking round, he
was ecstatically conscious of his approach. He felt it not only from the
sound of the hoofs of the approaching cavalcade, but because as he drew
near everything grew brighter, more joyful, more significant, and more
festive around him. Nearer and nearer to Rostov came that sun shedding
beams of mild and majestic light around, and already he felt himself
enveloped in those beams, he heard his voice, that kindly, calm, and
majestic voice that was yet so simple! And as if in accord with
Rostov's feeling, there was a deathly stillness amid which was heard the
Emperor's voice.

"The Pavlograd hussars?" he inquired.

"The reserves, sire!" replied a voice, a very human one compared to that
which had said: "The Pavlograd hussars?"

The Emperor drew level with Rostov and halted. Alexander's face was
even more beautiful than it had been three days before at the review. It
shone with such gaiety and youth, such innocent youth, that it suggested
the liveliness of a fourteen-year-old boy, and yet it was the face
of the majestic Emperor. Casually, while surveying the squadron, the
Emperor's eyes met Rostov's and rested on them for not more than two
seconds. Whether or no the Emperor understood what was going on in
Rostov's soul (it seemed to Rostov that he understood everything), at
any rate his light-blue eyes gazed for about two seconds into Rostov's
face. A gentle, mild light poured from them. Then all at once he
raised his eyebrows, abruptly touched his horse with his left foot, and
galloped on.

The younger Emperor could not restrain his wish to be present at the
battle and, in spite of the remonstrances of his courtiers, at twelve
o'clock left the third column with which he had been and galloped toward
the vanguard. Before he came up with the hussars, several adjutants met
him with news of the successful result of the action.

This battle, which consisted in the capture of a French squadron, was
represented as a brilliant victory over the French, and so the
Emperor and the whole army, especially while the smoke hung over
the battlefield, believed that the French had been defeated and were
retreating against their will. A few minutes after the Emperor had
passed, the Pavlograd division was ordered to advance. In Wischau
itself, a petty German town, Rostov saw the Emperor again. In the
market place, where there had been some rather heavy firing before the
Emperor's arrival, lay several killed and wounded soldiers whom there
had not been time to move. The Emperor, surrounded by his suite
of officers and courtiers, was riding a bobtailed chestnut mare, a
different one from that which he had ridden at the review, and bending
to one side he gracefully held a gold lorgnette to his eyes and looked
at a soldier who lay prone, with blood on his uncovered head. The
wounded soldier was so dirty, coarse, and revolting that his proximity
to the Emperor shocked Rostov. Rostov saw how the Emperor's rather round
shoulders shuddered as if a cold shiver had run down them, how his left
foot began convulsively tapping the horse's side with the spur, and how
the well-trained horse looked round unconcerned and did not stir. An
adjutant, dismounting, lifted the soldier under the arms to place him on
a stretcher that had been brought. The soldier groaned.

"Gently, gently! Can't you do it more gently?" said the Emperor
apparently suffering more than the dying soldier, and he rode away.

Rostov saw tears filling the Emperor's eyes and heard him, as he was
riding away, say to Czartoryski: "What a terrible thing war is: what a
terrible thing! Quelle terrible chose que la guerre!"

The troops of the vanguard were stationed before Wischau, within sight
of the enemy's lines, which all day long had yielded ground to us at
the least firing. The Emperor's gratitude was announced to the vanguard,
rewards were promised, and the men received a double ration of vodka.
The campfires crackled and the soldiers' songs resounded even more
merrily than on the previous night. Denisov celebrated his promotion to
the rank of major, and Rostov, who had already drunk enough, at the end
of the feast proposed the Emperor's health. "Not 'our Sovereign, the
Emperor,' as they say at official dinners," said he, "but the health of
our Sovereign, that good, enchanting, and great man! Let us drink to his
health and to the certain defeat of the French!"

"If we fought before," he said, "not letting the French pass, as at
Schon Grabern, what shall we not do now when he is at the front? We will
all die for him gladly! Is it not so, gentlemen? Perhaps I am not saying
it right, I have drunk a good deal--but that is how I feel, and so do
you too! To the health of Alexander the First! Hurrah!"

"Hurrah!" rang the enthusiastic voices of the officers.

And the old cavalry captain, Kirsten, shouted enthusiastically and no
less sincerely than the twenty-year-old Rostov.

When the officers had emptied and smashed their glasses, Kirsten filled
others and, in shirt sleeves and breeches, went glass in hand to the
soldiers' bonfires and with his long gray mustache, his white chest
showing under his open shirt, he stood in a majestic pose in the light
of the campfire, waving his uplifted arm.

"Lads! here's to our Sovereign, the Emperor, and victory over our
enemies! Hurrah!" he exclaimed in his dashing, old, hussar's baritone.

The hussars crowded round and responded heartily with loud shouts.

Late that night, when all had separated, Denisov with his short hand
patted his favorite, Rostov, on the shoulder.

"As there's no one to fall in love with on campaign, he's fallen in love
with the Tsar," he said.

"Denisov, don't make fun of it!" cried Rostov. "It is such a lofty,
beautiful feeling, such a..."

"I believe it, I believe it, fwiend, and I share and appwove..."

"No, you don't understand!"

And Rostov got up and went wandering among the campfires, dreaming of
what happiness it would be to die--not in saving the Emperor's life (he
did not even dare to dream of that), but simply to die before his eyes.
He really was in love with the Tsar and the glory of the Russian
arms and the hope of future triumph. And he was not the only man to
experience that feeling during those memorable days preceding the battle
of Austerlitz: nine tenths of the men in the Russian army were then in
love, though less ecstatically, with their Tsar and the glory of the
Russian arms.





CHAPTER XI


The next day the Emperor stopped at Wischau, and Villier, his physician,
was repeatedly summoned to see him. At headquarters and among the troops
near by the news spread that the Emperor was unwell. He ate nothing and
had slept badly that night, those around him reported. The cause of this
indisposition was the strong impression made on his sensitive mind by
the sight of the killed and wounded.

At daybreak on the seventeenth, a French officer who had come with
a flag of truce, demanding an audience with the Russian Emperor, was
brought into Wischau from our outposts. This officer was Savary. The
Emperor had only just fallen asleep and so Savary had to wait. At midday
he was admitted to the Emperor, and an hour later he rode off with
Prince Dolgorukov to the advanced post of the French army.

It was rumored that Savary had been sent to propose to Alexander
a meeting with Napoleon. To the joy and pride of the whole army, a
personal interview was refused, and instead of the Sovereign, Prince
Dolgorukov, the victor at Wischau, was sent with Savary to negotiate
with Napoleon if, contrary to expectations, these negotiations were
actuated by a real desire for peace.

Toward evening Dolgorukov came back, went straight to the Tsar, and
remained alone with him for a long time.

On the eighteenth and nineteenth of November, the army advanced two
days' march and the enemy's outposts after a brief interchange of shots
retreated. In the highest army circles from midday on the nineteenth, a
great, excitedly bustling activity began which lasted till the morning
of the twentieth, when the memorable battle of Austerlitz was fought.

Till midday on the nineteenth, the activity--the eager talk, running
to and fro, and dispatching of adjutants--was confined to the Emperor's
headquarters. But on the afternoon of that day, this activity reached
Kutuzov's headquarters and the staffs of the commanders of columns. By
evening, the adjutants had spread it to all ends and parts of the army,
and in the night from the nineteenth to the twentieth, the whole eighty
thousand allied troops rose from their bivouacs to the hum of voices,
and the army swayed and started in one enormous mass six miles long.

The concentrated activity which had begun at the Emperor's headquarters
in the morning and had started the whole movement that followed was like
the first movement of the main wheel of a large tower clock. One wheel
slowly moved, another was set in motion, and a third, and wheels began
to revolve faster and faster, levers and cogwheels to work, chimes to
play, figures to pop out, and the hands to advance with regular motion
as a result of all that activity.

Just as in the mechanism of a clock, so in the mechanism of the military
machine, an impulse once given leads to the final result; and just as
indifferently quiescent till the moment when motion is transmitted
to them are the parts of the mechanism which the impulse has not yet
reached. Wheels creak on their axles as the cogs engage one another and
the revolving pulleys whirr with the rapidity of their movement, but a
neighboring wheel is as quiet and motionless as though it were prepared
to remain so for a hundred years; but the moment comes when the lever
catches it and obeying the impulse that wheel begins to creak and joins
in the common motion the result and aim of which are beyond its ken.

Just as in a clock, the result of the complicated motion of innumerable
wheels and pulleys is merely a slow and regular movement of the
hands which show the time, so the result of all the complicated human
activities of 160,000 Russians and French--all their passions, desires,
remorse, humiliations, sufferings, outbursts of pride, fear, and
enthusiasm--was only the loss of the battle of Austerlitz, the so-called
battle of the three Emperors--that is to say, a slow movement of the
hand on the dial of human history.

Prince Andrew was on duty that day and in constant attendance on the
commander in chief.

At six in the evening, Kutuzov went to the Emperor's headquarters and
after staying but a short time with the Tsar went to see the grand
marshal of the court, Count Tolstoy.

Bolkonski took the opportunity to go in to get some details of the
coming action from Dolgorukov. He felt that Kutuzov was upset and
dissatisfied about something and that at headquarters they were
dissatisfied with him, and also that at the Emperor's headquarters
everyone adopted toward him the tone of men who know something others do
not know: he therefore wished to speak to Dolgorukov.

"Well, how d'you do, my dear fellow?" said Dolgorukov, who was sitting
at tea with Bilibin. "The fete is for tomorrow. How is your old fellow?
Out of sorts?"

"I won't say he is out of sorts, but I fancy he would like to be heard."

"But they heard him at the council of war and will hear him when he
talks sense, but to temporize and wait for something now when Bonaparte
fears nothing so much as a general battle is impossible."

"Yes, you have seen him?" said Prince Andrew. "Well, what is Bonaparte
like? How did he impress you?"

"Yes, I saw him, and am convinced that he fears nothing so much as a
general engagement," repeated Dolgorukov, evidently prizing this general
conclusion which he had arrived at from his interview with Napoleon.
"If he weren't afraid of a battle why did he ask for that interview? Why
negotiate, and above all why retreat, when to retreat is so contrary
to his method of conducting war? Believe me, he is afraid, afraid of a
general battle. His hour has come! Mark my words!"

"But tell me, what is he like, eh?" said Prince Andrew again.

"He is a man in a gray overcoat, very anxious that I should call him
'Your Majesty,' but who, to his chagrin, got no title from me! That's
the sort of man he is, and nothing more," replied Dolgorukov, looking
round at Bilibin with a smile.

"Despite my great respect for old Kutuzov," he continued, "we should be
a nice set of fellows if we were to wait about and so give him a chance
to escape, or to trick us, now that we certainly have him in our hands!
No, we mustn't forget Suvorov and his rule--not to put yourself in a
position to be attacked, but yourself to attack. Believe me in war the
energy of young men often shows the way better than all the experience
of old Cunctators."

"But in what position are we going to attack him? I have been at the
outposts today and it is impossible to say where his chief forces are
situated," said Prince Andrew.

He wished to explain to Dolgorukov a plan of attack he had himself
formed.

"Oh, that is all the same," Dolgorukov said quickly, and getting up he
spread a map on the table. "All eventualities have been foreseen. If he
is standing before Brunn..."

And Prince Dolgorukov rapidly but indistinctly explained Weyrother's
plan of a flanking movement.

Prince Andrew began to reply and to state his own plan, which might have
been as good as Weyrother's, but for the disadvantage that Weyrother's
had already been approved. As soon as Prince Andrew began to demonstrate
the defects of the latter and the merits of his own plan, Prince
Dolgorukov ceased to listen to him and gazed absent-mindedly not at the
map, but at Prince Andrew's face.

"There will be a council of war at Kutuzov's tonight, though; you can
say all this there," remarked Dolgorukov.

"I will do so," said Prince Andrew, moving away from the map.

"Whatever are you bothering about, gentlemen?" said Bilibin, who, till
then, had listened with an amused smile to their conversation and now
was evidently ready with a joke. "Whether tomorrow brings victory or
defeat, the glory of our Russian arms is secure. Except your Kutuzov,
there is not a single Russian in command of a column! The commanders
are: Herr General Wimpfen, le Comte de Langeron, le Prince de
Lichtenstein, le Prince, de Hohenlohe, and finally Prishprish, and so on
like all those Polish names."

"Be quiet, backbiter!" said Dolgorukov. "It is not true; there are now
two Russians, Miloradovich, and Dokhturov, and there would be a third,
Count Arakcheev, if his nerves were not too weak."

"However, I think General Kutuzov has come out," said Prince Andrew. "I
wish you good luck and success, gentlemen!" he added and went out after
shaking hands with Dolgorukov and Bilibin.

On the way home, Prince Andrew could not refrain from asking Kutuzov,
who was sitting silently beside him, what he thought of tomorrow's
battle.

Kutuzov looked sternly at his adjutant and, after a pause, replied: "I
think the battle will be lost, and so I told Count Tolstoy and asked
him to tell the Emperor. What do you think he replied? 'But, my dear
general, I am engaged with rice and cutlets, look after military matters
yourself!' Yes... That was the answer I got!"





CHAPTER XII


Shortly after nine o'clock that evening, Weyrother drove with his plans
to Kutuzov's quarters where the council of war was to be held. All the
commanders of columns were summoned to the commander in chief's and with
the exception of Prince Bagration, who declined to come, were all there
at the appointed time.

Weyrother, who was in full control of the proposed battle, by his
eagerness and briskness presented a marked contrast to the dissatisfied
and drowsy Kutuzov, who reluctantly played the part of chairman and
president of the council of war. Weyrother evidently felt himself to be
at the head of a movement that had already become unrestrainable. He was
like a horse running downhill harnessed to a heavy cart. Whether he was
pulling it or being pushed by it he did not know, but rushed along at
headlong speed with no time to consider what this movement might lead
to. Weyrother had been twice that evening to the enemy's picket line to
reconnoiter personally, and twice to the Emperors, Russian and Austrian,
to report and explain, and to his headquarters where he had dictated
the dispositions in German, and now, much exhausted, he arrived at
Kutuzov's.

He was evidently so busy that he even forgot to be polite to the
commander in chief. He interrupted him, talked rapidly and indistinctly,
without looking at the man he was addressing, and did not reply to
questions put to him. He was bespattered with mud and had a pitiful,
weary, and distracted air, though at the same time he was haughty and
self-confident.

Kutuzov was occupying a nobleman's castle of modest dimensions near
Ostralitz. In the large drawing room which had become the commander in
chief's office were gathered Kutuzov himself, Weyrother, and the members
of the council of war. They were drinking tea, and only awaited Prince
Bagration to begin the council. At last Bagration's orderly came with
the news that the prince could not attend. Prince Andrew came in
to inform the commander in chief of this and, availing himself of
permission previously given him by Kutuzov to be present at the council,
he remained in the room.

"Since Prince Bagration is not coming, we may begin," said Weyrother,
hurriedly rising from his seat and going up to the table on which an
enormous map of the environs of Brunn was spread out.

Kutuzov, with his uniform unbuttoned so that his fat neck bulged over
his collar as if escaping, was sitting almost asleep in a low chair,
with his podgy old hands resting symmetrically on its arms. At the sound
of Weyrother's voice, he opened his one eye with an effort.

"Yes, yes, if you please! It is already late," said he, and nodding his
head he let it droop and again closed his eye.

If at first the members of the council thought that Kutuzov was
pretending to sleep, the sounds his nose emitted during the reading that
followed proved that the commander in chief at that moment was absorbed
by a far more serious matter than a desire to show his contempt for
the dispositions or anything else--he was engaged in satisfying the
irresistible human need for sleep. He really was asleep. Weyrother, with
the gesture of a man too busy to lose a moment, glanced at Kutuzov and,
having convinced himself that he was asleep, took up a paper and in
a loud, monotonous voice began to read out the dispositions for the
impending battle, under a heading which he also read out:

"Dispositions for an attack on the enemy position behind Kobelnitz and
Sokolnitz, November 30, 1805."

The dispositions were very complicated and difficult. They began as
follows:

"As the enemy's left wing rests on wooded hills and his right extends
along Kobelnitz and Sokolnitz behind the ponds that are there, while we,
on the other hand, with our left wing by far outflank his right, it is
advantageous to attack the enemy's latter wing especially if we occupy
the villages of Sokolnitz and Kobelnitz, whereby we can both fall on
his flank and pursue him over the plain between Schlappanitz and the
Thuerassa forest, avoiding the defiles of Schlappanitz and Bellowitz
which cover the enemy's front. For this object it is necessary that...
The first column marches... The second column marches... The third
column marches..." and so on, read Weyrother.

The generals seemed to listen reluctantly to the difficult dispositions.
The tall, fair-haired General Buxhowden stood, leaning his back against
the wall, his eyes fixed on a burning candle, and seemed not to listen
or even to wish to be thought to listen. Exactly opposite Weyrother,
with his glistening wide-open eyes fixed upon him and his mustache
twisted upwards, sat the ruddy Miloradovich in a military pose, his
elbows turned outwards, his hands on his knees, and his shoulders
raised. He remained stubbornly silent, gazing at Weyrother's face, and
only turned away his eyes when the Austrian chief of staff finished
reading. Then Miloradovich looked round significantly at the other
generals. But one could not tell from that significant look whether he
agreed or disagreed and was satisfied or not with the arrangements. Next
to Weyrother sat Count Langeron who, with a subtle smile that never left
his typically southern French face during the whole time of the reading,
gazed at his delicate fingers which rapidly twirled by its corners
a gold snuffbox on which was a portrait. In the middle of one of the
longest sentences, he stopped the rotary motion of the snuffbox, raised
his head, and with inimical politeness lurking in the corners of his
thin lips interrupted Weyrother, wishing to say something. But the
Austrian general, continuing to read, frowned angrily and jerked his
elbows, as if to say: "You can tell me your views later, but now be so
good as to look at the map and listen." Langeron lifted his eyes with an
expression of perplexity, turned round to Miloradovich as if seeking an
explanation, but meeting the latter's impressive but meaningless gaze
drooped his eyes sadly and again took to twirling his snuffbox.

"A geography lesson!" he muttered as if to himself, but loud enough to
be heard.

Przebyszewski, with respectful but dignified politeness, held his
hand to his ear toward Weyrother, with the air of a man absorbed in
attention. Dohkturov, a little man, sat opposite Weyrother, with
an assiduous and modest mien, and stooping over the outspread map
conscientiously studied the dispositions and the unfamiliar locality. He
asked Weyrother several times to repeat words he had not clearly heard
and the difficult names of villages. Weyrother complied and Dohkturov
noted them down.

When the reading which lasted more than an hour was over, Langeron again
brought his snuffbox to rest and, without looking at Weyrother or at
anyone in particular, began to say how difficult it was to carry out
such a plan in which the enemy's position was assumed to be known,
whereas it was perhaps not known, since the enemy was in movement.
Langeron's objections were valid but it was obvious that their chief
aim was to show General Weyrother--who had read his dispositions with as
much self-confidence as if he were addressing school children--that he
had to do, not with fools, but with men who could teach him something in
military matters.

When the monotonous sound of Weyrother's voice ceased, Kutuzov opened
his eye as a miller wakes up when the soporific drone of the mill wheel
is interrupted. He listened to what Langeron said, as if remarking, "So
you are still at that silly business!" quickly closed his eye again, and
let his head sink still lower.

Langeron, trying as virulently as possible to sting Weyrother's vanity
as author of the military plan, argued that Bonaparte might easily
attack instead of being attacked, and so render the whole of this
plan perfectly worthless. Weyrother met all objections with a firm and
contemptuous smile, evidently prepared beforehand to meet all objections
be they what they might.

"If he could attack us, he would have done so today," said he.

"So you think he is powerless?" said Langeron.

"He has forty thousand men at most," replied Weyrother, with the smile
of a doctor to whom an old wife wishes to explain the treatment of a
case.

"In that case he is inviting his doom by awaiting our attack," said
Langeron, with a subtly ironical smile, again glancing round for support
to Miloradovich who was near him.

But Miloradovich was at that moment evidently thinking of anything
rather than of what the generals were disputing about.

"Ma foi!" said he, "tomorrow we shall see all that on the battlefield."

Weyrother again gave that smile which seemed to say that to him it was
strange and ridiculous to meet objections from Russian generals and to
have to prove to them what he had not merely convinced himself of, but
had also convinced the sovereign Emperors of.

"The enemy has quenched his fires and a continual noise is heard from
his camp," said he. "What does that mean? Either he is retreating, which
is the only thing we need fear, or he is changing his position." (He
smiled ironically.) "But even if he also took up a position in the
Thuerassa, he merely saves us a great deal of trouble and all our
arrangements to the minutest detail remain the same."

"How is that?..." began Prince Andrew, who had for long been waiting an
opportunity to express his doubts.

Kutuzov here woke up, coughed heavily, and looked round at the generals.

"Gentlemen, the dispositions for tomorrow--or rather for today, for it
is past midnight--cannot now be altered," said he. "You have heard them,
and we shall all do our duty. But before a battle, there is nothing more
important..." he paused, "than to have a good sleep."

He moved as if to rise. The generals bowed and retired. It was past
midnight. Prince Andrew went out.


The council of war, at which Prince Andrew had not been able to
express his opinion as he had hoped to, left on him a vague and uneasy
impression. Whether Dolgorukov and Weyrother, or Kutuzov, Langeron, and
the others who did not approve of the plan of attack, were right--he did
not know. "But was it really not possible for Kutuzov to state his views
plainly to the Emperor? Is it possible that on account of court and
personal considerations tens of thousands of lives, and my life, my
life," he thought, "must be risked?"

"Yes, it is very likely that I shall be killed tomorrow," he thought.
And suddenly, at this thought of death, a whole series of most distant,
most intimate, memories rose in his imagination: he remembered his last
parting from his father and his wife; he remembered the days when he
first loved her. He thought of her pregnancy and felt sorry for her and
for himself, and in a nervously emotional and softened mood he went out
of the hut in which he was billeted with Nesvitski and began to walk up
and down before it.

The night was foggy and through the fog the moonlight gleamed
mysteriously. "Yes, tomorrow, tomorrow!" he thought. "Tomorrow
everything may be over for me! All these memories will be no more, none
of them will have any meaning for me. Tomorrow perhaps, even certainly,
I have a presentiment that for the first time I shall have to show all I
can do." And his fancy pictured the battle, its loss, the concentration
of fighting at one point, and the hesitation of all the commanders. And
then that happy moment, that Toulon for which he had so long waited,
presents itself to him at last. He firmly and clearly expresses his
opinion to Kutuzov, to Weyrother, and to the Emperors. All are struck by
the justness of his views, but no one undertakes to carry them out, so
he takes a regiment, a division-stipulates that no one is to interfere
with his arrangements--leads his division to the decisive point, and
gains the victory alone. "But death and suffering?" suggested another
voice. Prince Andrew, however, did not answer that voice and went on
dreaming of his triumphs. The dispositions for the next battle are
planned by him alone. Nominally he is only an adjutant on Kutuzov's
staff, but he does everything alone. The next battle is won by him
alone. Kutuzov is removed and he is appointed... "Well and then?" asked
the other voice. "If before that you are not ten times wounded, killed,
or betrayed, well... what then?..." "Well then," Prince Andrew answered
himself, "I don't know what will happen and don't want to know, and
can't, but if I want this--want glory, want to be known to men, want to
be loved by them, it is not my fault that I want it and want nothing
but that and live only for that. Yes, for that alone! I shall never
tell anyone, but, oh God! what am I to do if I love nothing but fame
and men's esteem? Death, wounds, the loss of family--I fear nothing. And
precious and dear as many persons are to me--father, sister, wife--those
dearest to me--yet dreadful and unnatural as it seems, I would give them
all at once for a moment of glory, of triumph over men, of love from men
I don't know and never shall know, for the love of these men here," he
thought, as he listened to voices in Kutuzov's courtyard. The voices
were those of the orderlies who were packing up; one voice, probably a
coachman's, was teasing Kutuzov's old cook whom Prince Andrew knew, and
who was called Tit. He was saying, "Tit, I say, Tit!"

"Well?" returned the old man.

"Go, Tit, thresh a bit!" said the wag.

"Oh, go to the devil!" called out a voice, drowned by the laughter of
the orderlies and servants.

"All the same, I love and value nothing but triumph over them all, I
value this mystic power and glory that is floating here above me in this
mist!"





CHAPTER XIII


That same night, Rostov was with a platoon on skirmishing duty in front
of Bagration's detachment. His hussars were placed along the line
in couples and he himself rode along the line trying to master the
sleepiness that kept coming over him. An enormous space, with our army's
campfires dimly glowing in the fog, could be seen behind him; in front
of him was misty darkness. Rostov could see nothing, peer as he would
into that foggy distance: now something gleamed gray, now there was
something black, now little lights seemed to glimmer where the enemy
ought to be, now he fancied it was only something in his own eyes.
His eyes kept closing, and in his fancy appeared--now the Emperor, now
Denisov, and now Moscow memories--and he again hurriedly opened his eyes
and saw close before him the head and ears of the horse he was riding,
and sometimes, when he came within six paces of them, the black figures
of hussars, but in the distance was still the same misty darkness. "Why
not?... It might easily happen," thought Rostov, "that the Emperor will
meet me and give me an order as he would to any other officer; he'll
say: 'Go and find out what's there.' There are many stories of his
getting to know an officer in just such a chance way and attaching him
to himself! What if he gave me a place near him? Oh, how I would guard
him, how I would tell him the truth, how I would unmask his deceivers!"
And in order to realize vividly his love devotion to the sovereign,
Rostov pictured to himself an enemy or a deceitful German, whom he would
not only kill with pleasure but whom he would slap in the face before
the Emperor. Suddenly a distant shout aroused him. He started and opened
his eyes.

"Where am I? Oh yes, in the skirmishing line... pass and
watchword--shaft, Olmutz. What a nuisance that our squadron will be in
reserve tomorrow," he thought. "I'll ask leave to go to the front, this
may be my only chance of seeing the Emperor. It won't be long now before
I am off duty. I'll take another turn and when I get back I'll go to the
general and ask him." He readjusted himself in the saddle and touched up
his horse to ride once more round his hussars. It seemed to him that it
was getting lighter. To the left he saw a sloping descent lit up, and
facing it a black knoll that seemed as steep as a wall. On this knoll
there was a white patch that Rostov could not at all make out: was it
a glade in the wood lit up by the moon, or some unmelted snow, or some
white houses? He even thought something moved on that white spot. "I
expect it's snow... that spot... a spot--une tache," he thought. "There
now... it's not a tache... Natasha... sister, black eyes... Na...
tasha... (Won't she be surprised when I tell her how I've seen the
Emperor?) Natasha... take my sabretache..."--"Keep to the right, your
honor, there are bushes here," came the voice of an hussar, past whom
Rostov was riding in the act of falling asleep. Rostov lifted his
head that had sunk almost to his horse's mane and pulled up beside
the hussar. He was succumbing to irresistible, youthful, childish
drowsiness. "But what was I thinking? I mustn't forget. How shall
I speak to the Emperor? No, that's not it--that's tomorrow. Oh yes!
Natasha... sabretache... saber them... Whom? The hussars... Ah, the
hussars with mustaches. Along the Tverskaya Street rode the hussar with
mustaches... I thought about him too, just opposite Guryev's house...
Old Guryev.... Oh, but Denisov's a fine fellow. But that's all nonsense.
The chief thing is that the Emperor is here. How he looked at me and
wished to say something, but dared not.... No, it was I who dared not.
But that's nonsense, the chief thing is not to forget the important
thing I was thinking of. Yes, Na-tasha, sabretache, oh, yes, yes! That's
right!" And his head once more sank to his horse's neck. All at once it
seemed to him that he was being fired at. "What? What? What?... Cut them
down! What?..." said Rostov, waking up. At the moment he opened his eyes
he heard in front of him, where the enemy was, the long-drawn shouts
of thousands of voices. His horse and the horse of the hussar near him
pricked their ears at these shouts. Over there, where the shouting came
from, a fire flared up and went out again, then another, and all along
the French line on the hill fires flared up and the shouting grew louder
and louder. Rostov could hear the sound of French words but could not
distinguish them. The din of many voices was too great; all he could
hear was: "ahahah!" and "rrrr!"

"What's that? What do you make of it?" said Rostov to the hussar beside
him. "That must be the enemy's camp!"

The hussar did not reply.

"Why, don't you hear it?" Rostov asked again, after waiting for a reply.

"Who can tell, your honor?" replied the hussar reluctantly.

"From the direction, it must be the enemy," repeated Rostov.

"It may be he or it may be nothing," muttered the hussar. "It's dark...
Steady!" he cried to his fidgeting horse.

Rostov's horse was also getting restive: it pawed the frozen ground,
pricking its ears at the noise and looking at the lights. The shouting
grew still louder and merged into a general roar that only an army
of several thousand men could produce. The lights spread farther and
farther, probably along the line of the French camp. Rostov no longer
wanted to sleep. The gay triumphant shouting of the enemy army had a
stimulating effect on him. "Vive l'Empereur! L'Empereur!" he now heard
distinctly.

"They can't be far off, probably just beyond the stream," he said to the
hussar beside him.

The hussar only sighed without replying and coughed angrily. The sound
of horse's hoofs approaching at a trot along the line of hussars was
heard, and out of the foggy darkness the figure of a sergeant of hussars
suddenly appeared, looming huge as an elephant.

"Your honor, the generals!" said the sergeant, riding up to Rostov.

Rostov, still looking round toward the fires and the shouts, rode with
the sergeant to meet some mounted men who were riding along the line.
One was on a white horse. Prince Bagration and Prince Dolgorukov with
their adjutants had come to witness the curious phenomenon of the lights
and shouts in the enemy's camp. Rostov rode up to Bagration, reported to
him, and then joined the adjutants listening to what the generals were
saying.

"Believe me," said Prince Dolgorukov, addressing Bagration, "it is
nothing but a trick! He has retreated and ordered the rearguard to
kindle fires and make a noise to deceive us."

"Hardly," said Bagration. "I saw them this evening on that knoll; if
they had retreated they would have withdrawn from that too.... Officer!"
said Bagration to Rostov, "are the enemy's skirmishers still there?"

"They were there this evening, but now I don't know, your excellency.
Shall I go with some of my hussars to see?" replied Rostov.

Bagration stopped and, before replying, tried to see Rostov's face in
the mist.

"Well, go and see," he said, after a pause.

"Yes, sir."

Rostov spurred his horse, called to Sergeant Fedchenko and two other
hussars, told them to follow him, and trotted downhill in the direction
from which the shouting came. He felt both frightened and pleased to be
riding alone with three hussars into that mysterious and dangerous misty
distance where no one had been before him. Bagration called to him from
the hill not to go beyond the stream, but Rostov pretended not to hear
him and did not stop but rode on and on, continually mistaking bushes
for trees and gullies for men and continually discovering his mistakes.
Having descended the hill at a trot, he no longer saw either our own or
the enemy's fires, but heard the shouting of the French more loudly and
distinctly. In the valley he saw before him something like a river, but
when he reached it he found it was a road. Having come out onto the road
he reined in his horse, hesitating whether to ride along it or cross it
and ride over the black field up the hillside. To keep to the road which
gleamed white in the mist would have been safer because it would be
easier to see people coming along it. "Follow me!" said he, crossed the
road, and began riding up the hill at a gallop toward the point where
the French pickets had been standing that evening.

"Your honor, there he is!" cried one of the hussars behind him. And
before Rostov had time to make out what the black thing was that had
suddenly appeared in the fog, there was a flash, followed by a report,
and a bullet whizzing high up in the mist with a plaintive sound passed
out of hearing. Another musket missed fire but flashed in the pan.
Rostov turned his horse and galloped back. Four more reports followed
at intervals, and the bullets passed somewhere in the fog singing in
different tones. Rostov reined in his horse, whose spirits had risen,
like his own, at the firing, and went back at a footpace. "Well, some
more! Some more!" a merry voice was saying in his soul. But no more
shots came.

Only when approaching Bagration did Rostov let his horse gallop again,
and with his hand at the salute rode up to the general.

Dolgorukov was still insisting that the French had retreated and had
only lit fires to deceive us.

"What does that prove?" he was saying as Rostov rode up. "They might
retreat and leave the pickets."

"It's plain that they have not all gone yet, Prince," said Bagration.
"Wait till tomorrow morning, we'll find out everything tomorrow."

"The picket is still on the hill, your excellency, just where it was
in the evening," reported Rostov, stooping forward with his hand at the
salute and unable to repress the smile of delight induced by his ride
and especially by the sound of the bullets.

"Very good, very good," said Bagration. "Thank you, officer."

"Your excellency," said Rostov, "may I ask a favor?"

"What is it?"

"Tomorrow our squadron is to be in reserve. May I ask to be attached to
the first squadron?"

"What's your name?"

"Count Rostov."

"Oh, very well, you may stay in attendance on me."

"Count Ilya Rostov's son?" asked Dolgorukov.

But Rostov did not reply.

"Then I may reckon on it, your excellency?"

"I will give the order."

"Tomorrow very likely I may be sent with some message to the Emperor,"
thought Rostov.

"Thank God!"


The fires and shouting in the enemy's army were occasioned by the fact
that while Napoleon's proclamation was being read to the troops the
Emperor himself rode round his bivouacs. The soldiers, on seeing him,
lit wisps of straw and ran after him, shouting, "Vive l'Empereur!"
Napoleon's proclamation was as follows:


Soldiers! The Russian army is advancing against you to avenge the
Austrian army of Ulm. They are the same battalions you broke at
Hollabrunn and have pursued ever since to this place. The position we
occupy is a strong one, and while they are marching to go round me on
the right they will expose a flank to me. Soldiers! I will myself direct
your battalions. I will keep out of fire if you with your habitual valor
carry disorder and confusion into the enemy's ranks, but should victory
be in doubt, even for a moment, you will see your Emperor exposing
himself to the first blows of the enemy, for there must be no doubt of
victory, especially on this day when what is at stake is the honor of
the French infantry, so necessary to the honor of our nation.

Do not break your ranks on the plea of removing the wounded! Let every
man be fully imbued with the thought that we must defeat these hirelings
of England, inspired by such hatred of our nation! This victory will
conclude our campaign and we can return to winter quarters, where fresh
French troops who are being raised in France will join us, and the peace
I shall conclude will be worthy of my people, of you, and of myself.

NAPOLEON





CHAPTER XIV


At five in the morning it was still quite dark. The troops of the
center, the reserves, and Bagration's right flank had not yet moved, but
on the left flank the columns of infantry, cavalry, and artillery, which
were to be the first to descend the heights to attack the French right
flank and drive it into the Bohemian mountains according to plan, were
already up and astir. The smoke of the campfires, into which they were
throwing everything superfluous, made the eyes smart. It was cold and
dark. The officers were hurriedly drinking tea and breakfasting, the
soldiers, munching biscuit and beating a tattoo with their feet to
warm themselves, gathering round the fires throwing into the flames the
remains of sheds, chairs, tables, wheels, tubs, and everything that they
did not want or could not carry away with them. Austrian column guides
were moving in and out among the Russian troops and served as heralds
of the advance. As soon as an Austrian officer showed himself near a
commanding officer's quarters, the regiment began to move: the soldiers
ran from the fires, thrust their pipes into their boots, their bags
into the carts, got their muskets ready, and formed rank. The officers
buttoned up their coats, buckled on their swords and pouches, and moved
along the ranks shouting. The train drivers and orderlies harnessed and
packed the wagons and tied on the loads. The adjutants and battalion
and regimental commanders mounted, crossed themselves, gave final
instructions, orders, and commissions to the baggage men who remained
behind, and the monotonous tramp of thousands of feet resounded. The
column moved forward without knowing where and unable, from the masses
around them, the smoke and the increasing fog, to see either the place
they were leaving or that to which they were going.

A soldier on the march is hemmed in and borne along by his regiment as
much as a sailor is by his ship. However far he has walked, whatever
strange, unknown, and dangerous places he reaches, just as a sailor is
always surrounded by the same decks, masts, and rigging of his ship, so
the soldier always has around him the same comrades, the same ranks,
the same sergeant major Ivan Mitrich, the same company dog Jack, and the
same commanders. The sailor rarely cares to know the latitude in which
his ship is sailing, but on the day of battle--heaven knows how and
whence--a stern note of which all are conscious sounds in the moral
atmosphere of an army, announcing the approach of something decisive
and solemn, and awakening in the men an unusual curiosity. On the day of
battle the soldiers excitedly try to get beyond the interests of their
regiment, they listen intently, look about, and eagerly ask concerning
what is going on around them.

The fog had grown so dense that though it was growing light they could
not see ten paces ahead. Bushes looked like gigantic trees and level
ground like cliffs and slopes. Anywhere, on any side, one might
encounter an enemy invisible ten paces off. But the columns advanced
for a long time, always in the same fog, descending and ascending hills,
avoiding gardens and enclosures, going over new and unknown ground, and
nowhere encountering the enemy. On the contrary, the soldiers became
aware that in front, behind, and on all sides, other Russian columns
were moving in the same direction. Every soldier felt glad to know that
to the unknown place where he was going, many more of our men were going
too.

"There now, the Kurskies have also gone past," was being said in the
ranks.

"It's wonderful what a lot of our troops have gathered, lads! Last
night I looked at the campfires and there was no end of them. A regular
Moscow!"

Though none of the column commanders rode up to the ranks or talked to
the men (the commanders, as we saw at the council of war, were out of
humor and dissatisfied with the affair, and so did not exert themselves
to cheer the men but merely carried out the orders), yet the troops
marched gaily, as they always do when going into action, especially to
an attack. But when they had marched for about an hour in the dense fog,
the greater part of the men had to halt and an unpleasant consciousness
of some dislocation and blunder spread through the ranks. How such
a consciousness is communicated is very difficult to define, but it
certainly is communicated very surely, and flows rapidly, imperceptibly,
and irrepressibly, as water does in a creek. Had the Russian army been
alone without any allies, it might perhaps have been a long time before
this consciousness of mismanagement became a general conviction, but as
it was, the disorder was readily and naturally attributed to the stupid
Germans, and everyone was convinced that a dangerous muddle had been
occasioned by the sausage eaters.

"Why have we stopped? Is the way blocked? Or have we already come up
against the French?"

"No, one can't hear them. They'd be firing if we had."

"They were in a hurry enough to start us, and now here we stand in
the middle of a field without rhyme or reason. It's all those damned
Germans' muddling! What stupid devils!"

"Yes, I'd send them on in front, but no fear, they're crowding up
behind. And now here we stand hungry."

"I say, shall we soon be clear? They say the cavalry are blocking the
way," said an officer.

"Ah, those damned Germans! They don't know their own country!" said
another.

"What division are you?" shouted an adjutant, riding up.

"The Eighteenth."

"Then why are you here? You should have gone on long ago, now you won't
get there till evening."

"What stupid orders! They don't themselves know what they are doing!"
said the officer and rode off.

Then a general rode past shouting something angrily, not in Russian.

"Tafa-lafa! But what he's jabbering no one can make out," said a
soldier, mimicking the general who had ridden away. "I'd shoot them, the
scoundrels!"

"We were ordered to be at the place before nine, but we haven't got
halfway. Fine orders!" was being repeated on different sides.

And the feeling of energy with which the troops had started began to
turn into vexation and anger at the stupid arrangements and at the
Germans.

The cause of the confusion was that while the Austrian cavalry was
moving toward our left flank, the higher command found that our center
was too far separated from our right flank and the cavalry were all
ordered to turn back to the right. Several thousand cavalry crossed in
front of the infantry, who had to wait.

At the front an altercation occurred between an Austrian guide and a
Russian general. The general shouted a demand that the cavalry should be
halted, the Austrian argued that not he, but the higher command, was to
blame. The troops meanwhile stood growing listless and dispirited. After
an hour's delay they at last moved on, descending the hill. The fog that
was dispersing on the hill lay still more densely below, where they were
descending. In front in the fog a shot was heard and then another, at
first irregularly at varying intervals--trata... tat--and then more and
more regularly and rapidly, and the action at the Goldbach Stream began.

Not expecting to come on the enemy down by the stream, and having
stumbled on him in the fog, hearing no encouraging word from their
commanders, and with a consciousness of being too late spreading through
the ranks, and above all being unable to see anything in front or around
them in the thick fog, the Russians exchanged shots with the enemy
lazily and advanced and again halted, receiving no timely orders from
the officers or adjutants who wandered about in the fog in those unknown
surroundings unable to find their own regiments. In this way the action
began for the first, second, and third columns, which had gone down
into the valley. The fourth column, with which Kutuzov was, stood on the
Pratzen Heights.

Below, where the fight was beginning, there was still thick fog; on the
higher ground it was clearing, but nothing could be seen of what was
going on in front. Whether all the enemy forces were, as we supposed,
six miles away, or whether they were near by in that sea of mist, no one
knew till after eight o'clock.

It was nine o'clock in the morning. The fog lay unbroken like a sea down
below, but higher up at the village of Schlappanitz where Napoleon stood
with his marshals around him, it was quite light. Above him was a clear
blue sky, and the sun's vast orb quivered like a huge hollow, crimson
float on the surface of that milky sea of mist. The whole French army,
and even Napoleon himself with his staff, were not on the far side of
the streams and hollows of Sokolnitz and Schlappanitz beyond which we
intended to take up our position and begin the action, but were on this
side, so close to our own forces that Napoleon with the naked eye could
distinguish a mounted man from one on foot. Napoleon, in the blue cloak
which he had worn on his Italian campaign, sat on his small gray Arab
horse a little in front of his marshals. He gazed silently at the hills
which seemed to rise out of the sea of mist and on which the Russian
troops were moving in the distance, and he listened to the sounds of
firing in the valley. Not a single muscle of his face--which in those
days was still thin--moved. His gleaming eyes were fixed intently on one
spot. His predictions were being justified. Part of the Russian force
had already descended into the valley toward the ponds and lakes and
part were leaving these Pratzen Heights which he intended to attack
and regarded as the key to the position. He saw over the mist that in
a hollow between two hills near the village of Pratzen, the Russian
columns, their bayonets glittering, were moving continuously in one
direction toward the valley and disappearing one after another into
the mist. From information he had received the evening before, from the
sound of wheels and footsteps heard by the outposts during the night,
by the disorderly movement of the Russian columns, and from all
indications, he saw clearly that the allies believed him to be far away
in front of them, and that the columns moving near Pratzen constituted
the center of the Russian army, and that that center was already
sufficiently weakened to be successfully attacked. But still he did not
begin the engagement.

Today was a great day for him--the anniversary of his coronation. Before
dawn he had slept for a few hours, and refreshed, vigorous, and in good
spirits, he mounted his horse and rode out into the field in that happy
mood in which everything seems possible and everything succeeds. He sat
motionless, looking at the heights visible above the mist, and his cold
face wore that special look of confident, self-complacent happiness that
one sees on the face of a boy happily in love. The marshals stood
behind him not venturing to distract his attention. He looked now at the
Pratzen Heights, now at the sun floating up out of the mist.

When the sun had entirely emerged from the fog, and fields and mist were
aglow with dazzling light--as if he had only awaited this to begin the
action--he drew the glove from his shapely white hand, made a sign
with it to the marshals, and ordered the action to begin. The marshals,
accompanied by adjutants, galloped off in different directions, and
a few minutes later the chief forces of the French army moved rapidly
toward those Pratzen Heights which were being more and more denuded by
Russian troops moving down the valley to their left.





CHAPTER XV


At eight o'clock Kutuzov rode to Pratzen at the head of the fourth
column, Miloradovich's, the one that was to take the place of
Przebyszewski's and Langeron's columns which had already gone down into
the valley. He greeted the men of the foremost regiment and gave them
the order to march, thereby indicating that he intended to lead that
column himself. When he had reached the village of Pratzen he halted.
Prince Andrew was behind, among the immense number forming the commander
in chief's suite. He was in a state of suppressed excitement and
irritation, though controlledly calm as a man is at the approach of a
long-awaited moment. He was firmly convinced that this was the day of
his Toulon, or his bridge of Arcola. How it would come about he did not
know, but he felt sure it would do so. The locality and the position of
our troops were known to him as far as they could be known to anyone
in our army. His own strategic plan, which obviously could not now be
carried out, was forgotten. Now, entering into Weyrother's plan, Prince
Andrew considered possible contingencies and formed new projects such as
might call for his rapidity of perception and decision.

To the left down below in the mist, the musketry fire of unseen forces
could be heard. It was there Prince Andrew thought the fight would
concentrate. "There we shall encounter difficulties, and there," thought
he, "I shall be sent with a brigade or division, and there, standard in
hand, I shall go forward and break whatever is in front of me."

He could not look calmly at the standards of the passing battalions.
Seeing them he kept thinking, "That may be the very standard with which
I shall lead the army."

In the morning all that was left of the night mist on the heights was
a hoar frost now turning to dew, but in the valleys it still lay like a
milk-white sea. Nothing was visible in the valley to the left into which
our troops had descended and from whence came the sounds of firing.
Above the heights was the dark clear sky, and to the right the vast orb
of the sun. In front, far off on the farther shore of that sea of mist,
some wooded hills were discernible, and it was there the enemy probably
was, for something could be descried. On the right the Guards were
entering the misty region with a sound of hoofs and wheels and now and
then a gleam of bayonets; to the left beyond the village similar masses
of cavalry came up and disappeared in the sea of mist. In front and
behind moved infantry. The commander in chief was standing at the end of
the village letting the troops pass by him. That morning Kutuzov seemed
worn and irritable. The infantry passing before him came to a halt
without any command being given, apparently obstructed by something in
front.

"Do order them to form into battalion columns and go round the village!"
he said angrily to a general who had ridden up. "Don't you understand,
your excellency, my dear sir, that you must not defile through narrow
village streets when we are marching against the enemy?"

"I intended to re-form them beyond the village, your excellency,"
answered the general.

Kutuzov laughed bitterly.

"You'll make a fine thing of it, deploying in sight of the enemy! Very
fine!"

"The enemy is still far away, your excellency. According to the
dispositions..."

"The dispositions!" exclaimed Kutuzov bitterly. "Who told you that?...
Kindly do as you are ordered."

"Yes, sir."

"My dear fellow," Nesvitski whispered to Prince Andrew, "the old man is
as surly as a dog."

An Austrian officer in a white uniform with green plumes in his hat
galloped up to Kutuzov and asked in the Emperor's name had the fourth
column advanced into action.

Kutuzov turned round without answering and his eye happened to fall upon
Prince Andrew, who was beside him. Seeing him, Kutuzov's malevolent and
caustic expression softened, as if admitting that what was being done
was not his adjutant's fault, and still not answering the Austrian
adjutant, he addressed Bolkonski.

"Go, my dear fellow, and see whether the third division has passed the
village. Tell it to stop and await my orders."

Hardly had Prince Andrew started than he stopped him.

"And ask whether sharpshooters have been posted," he added. "What are
they doing? What are they doing?" he murmured to himself, still not
replying to the Austrian.

Prince Andrew galloped off to execute the order.

Overtaking the battalions that continued to advance, he stopped
the third division and convinced himself that there really were no
sharpshooters in front of our columns. The colonel at the head of the
regiment was much surprised at the commander in chief's order to throw
out skirmishers. He had felt perfectly sure that there were other troops
in front of him and that the enemy must be at least six miles away.
There was really nothing to be seen in front except a barren descent
hidden by dense mist. Having given orders in the commander in chief's
name to rectify this omission, Prince Andrew galloped back. Kutuzov
still in the same place, his stout body resting heavily in the saddle
with the lassitude of age, sat yawning wearily with closed eyes. The
troops were no longer moving, but stood with the butts of their muskets
on the ground.

"All right, all right!" he said to Prince Andrew, and turned to a
general who, watch in hand, was saying it was time they started as all
the left-flank columns had already descended.

"Plenty of time, your excellency," muttered Kutuzov in the midst of a
yawn. "Plenty of time," he repeated.

Just then at a distance behind Kutuzov was heard the sound of regiments
saluting, and this sound rapidly came nearer along the whole extended
line of the advancing Russian columns. Evidently the person they were
greeting was riding quickly. When the soldiers of the regiment in front
of which Kutuzov was standing began to shout, he rode a little to one
side and looked round with a frown. Along the road from Pratzen galloped
what looked like a squadron of horsemen in various uniforms. Two of them
rode side by side in front, at full gallop. One in a black uniform with
white plumes in his hat rode a bobtailed chestnut horse, the other who
was in a white uniform rode a black one. These were the two Emperors
followed by their suites. Kutuzov, affecting the manners of an old
soldier at the front, gave the command "Attention!" and rode up to the
Emperors with a salute. His whole appearance and manner were suddenly
transformed. He put on the air of a subordinate who obeys without
reasoning. With an affectation of respect which evidently struck
Alexander unpleasantly, he rode up and saluted.

This unpleasant impression merely flitted over the young and happy face
of the Emperor like a cloud of haze across a clear sky and vanished.
After his illness he looked rather thinner that day than on the field of
Olmutz where Bolkonski had seen him for the first time abroad, but there
was still the same bewitching combination of majesty and mildness in his
fine gray eyes, and on his delicate lips the same capacity for varying
expression and the same prevalent appearance of goodhearted innocent
youth.

At the Olmutz review he had seemed more majestic; here he seemed
brighter and more energetic. He was slightly flushed after galloping two
miles, and reining in his horse he sighed restfully and looked round
at the faces of his suite, young and animated as his own. Czartoryski,
Novosiltsev, Prince Volkonsky, Strogonov, and the others, all richly
dressed gay young men on splendid, well-groomed, fresh, only slightly
heated horses, exchanging remarks and smiling, had stopped behind the
Emperor. The Emperor Francis, a rosy, long faced young man, sat very
erect on his handsome black horse, looking about him in a leisurely and
preoccupied manner. He beckoned to one of his white adjutants and asked
some question--"Most likely he is asking at what o'clock they started,"
thought Prince Andrew, watching his old acquaintance with a smile
he could not repress as he recalled his reception at Brunn. In the
Emperors' suite were the picked young orderly officers of the Guard and
line regiments, Russian and Austrian. Among them were grooms leading the
Tsar's beautiful relay horses covered with embroidered cloths.

As when a window is opened a whiff of fresh air from the fields enters
a stuffy room, so a whiff of youthfulness, energy, and confidence of
success reached Kutuzov's cheerless staff with the galloping advent of
all these brilliant young men.

"Why aren't you beginning, Michael Ilarionovich?" said the Emperor
Alexander hurriedly to Kutuzov, glancing courteously at the same time at
the Emperor Francis.

"I am waiting, Your Majesty," answered Kutuzov, bending forward
respectfully.

The Emperor, frowning slightly, bent his ear forward as if he had not
quite heard.

"Waiting, Your Majesty," repeated Kutuzov. (Prince Andrew noted that
Kutuzov's upper lip twitched unnaturally as he said the word "waiting.")
"Not all the columns have formed up yet, Your Majesty."

The Tsar heard but obviously did not like the reply; he shrugged his
rather round shoulders and glanced at Novosiltsev who was near him, as
if complaining of Kutuzov.

"You know, Michael Ilarionovich, we are not on the Empress' Field where
a parade does not begin till all the troops are assembled," said the
Tsar with another glance at the Emperor Francis, as if inviting him if
not to join in at least to listen to what he was saying. But the Emperor
Francis continued to look about him and did not listen.

"That is just why I do not begin, sire," said Kutuzov in a resounding
voice, apparently to preclude the possibility of not being heard, and
again something in his face twitched--"That is just why I do not begin,
sire, because we are not on parade and not on the Empress' Field," said
clearly and distinctly.

In the Emperor's suite all exchanged rapid looks that expressed
dissatisfaction and reproach. "Old though he may be, he should not, he
certainly should not, speak like that," their glances seemed to say.

The Tsar looked intently and observantly into Kutuzov's eye waiting to
hear whether he would say anything more. But Kutuzov, with respectfully
bowed head, seemed also to be waiting. The silence lasted for about a
minute.

"However, if you command it, Your Majesty," said Kutuzov, lifting his
head and again assuming his former tone of a dull, unreasoning, but
submissive general.

He touched his horse and having called Miloradovich, the commander of
the column, gave him the order to advance.

The troops again began to move, and two battalions of the Novgorod and
one of the Apsheron regiment went forward past the Emperor.

As this Apsheron battalion marched by, the red-faced Miloradovich,
without his greatcoat, with his Orders on his breast and an enormous
tuft of plumes in his cocked hat worn on one side with its corners front
and back, galloped strenuously forward, and with a dashing salute reined
in his horse before the Emperor.

"God be with you, general!" said the Emperor.

"Ma foi, sire, nous ferons ce qui sera dans notre possibilite, sire,"
* he answered gaily, raising nevertheless ironic smiles among the
gentlemen of the Tsar's suite by his poor French.


     * "Indeed, Sire, we shall do everything it is possible to
     do, Sire."


Miloradovich wheeled his horse sharply and stationed himself a little
behind the Emperor. The Apsheron men, excited by the Tsar's presence,
passed in step before the Emperors and their suites at a bold, brisk
pace.

"Lads!" shouted Miloradovich in a loud, self-confident, and cheery
voice, obviously so elated by the sound of firing, by the prospect
of battle, and by the sight of the gallant Apsherons, his comrades in
Suvorov's time, now passing so gallantly before the Emperors, that
he forgot the sovereigns' presence. "Lads, it's not the first village
you've had to take," cried he.

"Glad to do our best!" shouted the soldiers.

The Emperor's horse started at the sudden cry. This horse that had
carried the sovereign at reviews in Russia bore him also here on the
field of Austerlitz, enduring the heedless blows of his left foot and
pricking its ears at the sound of shots just as it had done on the
Empress' Field, not understanding the significance of the firing, nor
of the nearness of the Emperor Francis' black cob, nor of all that was
being said, thought, and felt that day by its rider.

The Emperor turned with a smile to one of his followers and made a
remark to him, pointing to the gallant Apsherons.





CHAPTER XVI


Kutuzov accompanied by his adjutants rode at a walking pace behind the
carabineers.

When he had gone less than half a mile in the rear of the column he
stopped at a solitary, deserted house that had probably once been an
inn, where two roads parted. Both of them led downhill and troops were
marching along both.

The fog had begun to clear and enemy troops were already dimly visible
about a mile and a half off on the opposite heights. Down below, on
the left, the firing became more distinct. Kutuzov had stopped and was
speaking to an Austrian general. Prince Andrew, who was a little behind
looking at them, turned to an adjutant to ask him for a field glass.

"Look, look!" said this adjutant, looking not at the troops in the
distance, but down the hill before him. "It's the French!"

The two generals and the adjutant took hold of the field glass, trying
to snatch it from one another. The expression on all their faces
suddenly changed to one of horror. The French were supposed to be a
mile and a half away, but had suddenly and unexpectedly appeared just in
front of us.

"It's the enemy?... No!... Yes, see it is!... for certain.... But how is
that?" said different voices.

With the naked eye Prince Andrew saw below them to the right, not more
than five hundred paces from where Kutuzov was standing, a dense French
column coming up to meet the Apsherons.

"Here it is! The decisive moment has arrived. My turn has come," thought
Prince Andrew, and striking his horse he rode up to Kutuzov.

"The Apsherons must be stopped, your excellency," cried he. But at that
very instant a cloud of smoke spread all round, firing was heard quite
close at hand, and a voice of naive terror barely two steps from Prince
Andrew shouted, "Brothers! All's lost!" And at this as if at a command,
everyone began to run.

Confused and ever-increasing crowds were running back to where five
minutes before the troops had passed the Emperors. Not only would it
have been difficult to stop that crowd, it was even impossible not to
be carried back with it oneself. Bolkonski only tried not to lose touch
with it, and looked around bewildered and unable to grasp what was
happening in front of him. Nesvitski with an angry face, red and unlike
himself, was shouting to Kutuzov that if he did not ride away at once
he would certainly be taken prisoner. Kutuzov remained in the same place
and without answering drew out a handkerchief. Blood was flowing from
his cheek. Prince Andrew forced his way to him.

"You are wounded?" he asked, hardly able to master the trembling of his
lower jaw.

"The wound is not here, it is there!" said Kutuzov, pressing the
handkerchief to his wounded cheek and pointing to the fleeing soldiers.
"Stop them!" he shouted, and at the same moment, probably realizing that
it was impossible to stop them, spurred his horse and rode to the right.

A fresh wave of the flying mob caught him and bore him back with it.

The troops were running in such a dense mass that once surrounded by
them it was difficult to get out again. One was shouting, "Get on! Why
are you hindering us?" Another in the same place turned round and fired
in the air; a third was striking the horse Kutuzov himself rode. Having
by a great effort got away to the left from that flood of men, Kutuzov,
with his suite diminished by more than half, rode toward a sound of
artillery fire near by. Having forced his way out of the crowd of
fugitives, Prince Andrew, trying to keep near Kutuzov, saw on the slope
of the hill amid the smoke a Russian battery that was still firing and
Frenchmen running toward it. Higher up stood some Russian infantry,
neither moving forward to protect the battery nor backward with the
fleeing crowd. A mounted general separated himself from the infantry and
approached Kutuzov. Of Kutuzov's suite only four remained. They were all
pale and exchanged looks in silence.

"Stop those wretches!" gasped Kutuzov to the regimental commander,
pointing to the flying soldiers; but at that instant, as if to punish
him for those words, bullets flew hissing across the regiment and across
Kutuzov's suite like a flock of little birds.

The French had attacked the battery and, seeing Kutuzov, were firing
at him. After this volley the regimental commander clutched at his leg;
several soldiers fell, and a second lieutenant who was holding the
flag let it fall from his hands. It swayed and fell, but caught on the
muskets of the nearest soldiers. The soldiers started firing without
orders.

"Oh! Oh! Oh!" groaned Kutuzov despairingly and looked around....
"Bolkonski!" he whispered, his voice trembling from a consciousness
of the feebleness of age, "Bolkonski!" he whispered, pointing to the
disordered battalion and at the enemy, "what's that?"

But before he had finished speaking, Prince Andrew, feeling tears of
shame and anger choking him, had already leapt from his horse and run to
the standard.

"Forward, lads!" he shouted in a voice piercing as a child's.

"Here it is!" thought he, seizing the staff of the standard and hearing
with pleasure the whistle of bullets evidently aimed at him. Several
soldiers fell.

"Hurrah!" shouted Prince Andrew, and, scarcely able to hold up the heavy
standard, he ran forward with full confidence that the whole battalion
would follow him.

And really he only ran a few steps alone. One soldier moved and then
another and soon the whole battalion ran forward shouting "Hurrah!" and
overtook him. A sergeant of the battalion ran up and took the flag
that was swaying from its weight in Prince Andrew's hands, but he
was immediately killed. Prince Andrew again seized the standard and,
dragging it by the staff, ran on with the battalion. In front he saw our
artillerymen, some of whom were fighting, while others, having abandoned
their guns, were running toward him. He also saw French infantry
soldiers who were seizing the artillery horses and turning the guns
round. Prince Andrew and the battalion were already within twenty paces
of the cannon. He heard the whistle of bullets above him unceasingly and
to right and left of him soldiers continually groaned and dropped. But
he did not look at them: he looked only at what was going on in front
of him--at the battery. He now saw clearly the figure of a red-haired
gunner with his shako knocked awry, pulling one end of a mop while
a French soldier tugged at the other. He could distinctly see the
distraught yet angry expression on the faces of these two men, who
evidently did not realize what they were doing.

"What are they about?" thought Prince Andrew as he gazed at them. "Why
doesn't the red-haired gunner run away as he is unarmed? Why doesn't the
Frenchman stab him? He will not get away before the Frenchman remembers
his bayonet and stabs him...."

And really another French soldier, trailing his musket, ran up to
the struggling men, and the fate of the red-haired gunner, who had
triumphantly secured the mop and still did not realize what awaited him,
was about to be decided. But Prince Andrew did not see how it ended. It
seemed to him as though one of the soldiers near him hit him on the head
with the full swing of a bludgeon. It hurt a little, but the worst of
it was that the pain distracted him and prevented his seeing what he had
been looking at.

"What's this? Am I falling? My legs are giving way," thought he, and
fell on his back. He opened his eyes, hoping to see how the struggle of
the Frenchmen with the gunners ended, whether the red-haired gunner had
been killed or not and whether the cannon had been captured or saved.
But he saw nothing. Above him there was now nothing but the sky--the
lofty sky, not clear yet still immeasurably lofty, with gray clouds
gliding slowly across it. "How quiet, peaceful, and solemn; not at all
as I ran," thought Prince Andrew--"not as we ran, shouting and fighting,
not at all as the gunner and the Frenchman with frightened and angry
faces struggled for the mop: how differently do those clouds glide
across that lofty infinite sky! How was it I did not see that lofty sky
before? And how happy I am to have found it at last! Yes! All is vanity,
all falsehood, except that infinite sky. There is nothing, nothing, but
that. But even it does not exist, there is nothing but quiet and peace.
Thank God!..."





CHAPTER XVII


On our right flank commanded by Bagration, at nine o'clock the battle
had not yet begun. Not wishing to agree to Dolgorukov's demand to
commence the action, and wishing to avert responsibility from himself,
Prince Bagration proposed to Dolgorukov to send to inquire of the
commander in chief. Bagration knew that as the distance between the two
flanks was more than six miles, even if the messenger were not killed
(which he very likely would be), and found the commander in chief
(which would be very difficult), he would not be able to get back before
evening.

Bagration cast his large, expressionless, sleepy eyes round his suite,
and the boyish face Rostov, breathless with excitement and hope, was the
first to catch his eye. He sent him.

"And if I should meet His Majesty before I meet the commander in chief,
your excellency?" said Rostov, with his hand to his cap.

"You can give the message to His Majesty," said Dolgorukov, hurriedly
interrupting Bagration.

On being relieved from picket duty Rostov had managed to get a few
hours' sleep before morning and felt cheerful, bold, and resolute, with
elasticity of movement, faith in his good fortune, and generally in that
state of mind which makes everything seem possible, pleasant, and easy.

All his wishes were being fulfilled that morning: there was to be a
general engagement in which he was taking part, more than that, he was
orderly to the bravest general, and still more, he was going with a
message to Kutuzov, perhaps even to the sovereign himself. The morning
was bright, he had a good horse under him, and his heart was full of
joy and happiness. On receiving the order he gave his horse the rein and
galloped along the line. At first he rode along the line of Bagration's
troops, which had not yet advanced into action but were standing
motionless; then he came to the region occupied by Uvarov's cavalry
and here he noticed a stir and signs of preparation for battle; having
passed Uvarov's cavalry he clearly heard the sound of cannon and
musketry ahead of him. The firing grew louder and louder.

In the fresh morning air were now heard, not two or three musket shots
at irregular intervals as before, followed by one or two cannon shots,
but a roll of volleys of musketry from the slopes of the hill before
Pratzen, interrupted by such frequent reports of cannon that sometimes
several of them were not separated from one another but merged into a
general roar.

He could see puffs of musketry smoke that seemed to chase one another
down the hillsides, and clouds of cannon smoke rolling, spreading,
and mingling with one another. He could also, by the gleam of bayonets
visible through the smoke, make out moving masses of infantry and narrow
lines of artillery with green caissons.

Rostov stopped his horse for a moment on a hillock to see what was going
on, but strain his attention as he would he could not understand or make
out anything of what was happening: there in the smoke men of some sort
were moving about, in front and behind moved lines of troops; but why,
whither, and who they were, it was impossible to make out. These sights
and sounds had no depressing or intimidating effect on him; on the
contrary, they stimulated his energy and determination.

"Go on! Go on! Give it them!" he mentally exclaimed at these sounds,
and again proceeded to gallop along the line, penetrating farther and
farther into the region where the army was already in action.

"How it will be there I don't know, but all will be well!" thought
Rostov.

After passing some Austrian troops he noticed that the next part of the
line (the Guards) was already in action.

"So much the better! I shall see it close," he thought.

He was riding almost along the front line. A handful of men came
galloping toward him. They were our Uhlans who with disordered
ranks were returning from the attack. Rostov got out of their way,
involuntarily noticed that one of them was bleeding, and galloped on.

"That is no business of mine," he thought. He had not ridden many
hundred yards after that before he saw to his left, across the whole
width of the field, an enormous mass of cavalry in brilliant white
uniforms, mounted on black horses, trotting straight toward him and
across his path. Rostov put his horse to full gallop to get out of the
way of these men, and he would have got clear had they continued at the
same speed, but they kept increasing their pace, so that some of the
horses were already galloping. Rostov heard the thud of their hoofs and
the jingle of their weapons and saw their horses, their figures, and
even their faces, more and more distinctly. They were our Horse Guards,
advancing to attack the French cavalry that was coming to meet them.

The Horse Guards were galloping, but still holding in their horses.
Rostov could already see their faces and heard the command: "Charge!"
shouted by an officer who was urging his thoroughbred to full speed.
Rostov, fearing to be crushed or swept into the attack on the French,
galloped along the front as hard as his horse could go, but still was
not in time to avoid them.

The last of the Horse Guards, a huge pockmarked fellow, frowned angrily
on seeing Rostov before him, with whom he would inevitably collide.
This Guardsman would certainly have bowled Rostov and his Bedouin over
(Rostov felt himself quite tiny and weak compared to these gigantic men
and horses) had it not occurred to Rostov to flourish his whip before
the eyes of the Guardsman's horse. The heavy black horse, sixteen hands
high, shied, throwing back its ears; but the pockmarked Guardsman drove
his huge spurs in violently, and the horse, flourishing its tail and
extending its neck, galloped on yet faster. Hardly had the Horse Guards
passed Rostov before he heard them shout, "Hurrah!" and looking back saw
that their foremost ranks were mixed up with some foreign cavalry
with red epaulets, probably French. He could see nothing more, for
immediately afterwards cannon began firing from somewhere and smoke
enveloped everything.

At that moment, as the Horse Guards, having passed him, disappeared in
the smoke, Rostov hesitated whether to gallop after them or to go where
he was sent. This was the brilliant charge of the Horse Guards that
amazed the French themselves. Rostov was horrified to hear later that
of all that mass of huge and handsome men, of all those brilliant,
rich youths, officers and cadets, who had galloped past him on their
thousand-ruble horses, only eighteen were left after the charge.

"Why should I envy them? My chance is not lost, and maybe I shall see
the Emperor immediately!" thought Rostov and galloped on.

When he came level with the Foot Guards he noticed that about them and
around them cannon balls were flying, of which he was aware not so
much because he heard their sound as because he saw uneasiness on
the soldiers' faces and unnatural warlike solemnity on those of the
officers.

Passing behind one of the lines of a regiment of Foot Guards he heard a
voice calling him by name.

"Rostov!"

"What?" he answered, not recognizing Boris.

"I say, we've been in the front line! Our regiment attacked!" said Boris
with the happy smile seen on the faces of young men who have been under
fire for the first time.

Rostov stopped.

"Have you?" he said. "Well, how did it go?"

"We drove them back!" said Boris with animation, growing talkative. "Can
you imagine it?" and he began describing how the Guards, having taken
up their position and seeing troops before them, thought they were
Austrians, and all at once discovered from the cannon balls discharged
by those troops that they were themselves in the front line and had
unexpectedly to go into action. Rostov without hearing Boris to the end
spurred his horse.

"Where are you off to?" asked Boris.

"With a message to His Majesty."

"There he is!" said Boris, thinking Rostov had said "His Highness,"
and pointing to the Grand Duke who with his high shoulders and frowning
brows stood a hundred paces away from them in his helmet and Horse
Guards' jacket, shouting something to a pale, white uniformed Austrian
officer.

"But that's the Grand Duke, and I want the commander in chief or the
Emperor," said Rostov, and was about to spur his horse.

"Count! Count!" shouted Berg who ran up from the other side as eager
as Boris. "Count! I am wounded in my right hand" (and he showed his
bleeding hand with a handkerchief tied round it) "and I remained at the
front. I held my sword in my left hand, Count. All our family--the von
Bergs--have been knights!"

He said something more, but Rostov did not wait to hear it and rode
away.

Having passed the Guards and traversed an empty space, Rostov, to avoid
again getting in front of the first line as he had done when the Horse
Guards charged, followed the line of reserves, going far round the place
where the hottest musket fire and cannonade were heard. Suddenly he
heard musket fire quite close in front of him and behind our troops,
where he could never have expected the enemy to be.

"What can it be?" he thought. "The enemy in the rear of our army?
Impossible!" And suddenly he was seized by a panic of fear for himself
and for the issue of the whole battle. "But be that what it may,"
he reflected, "there is no riding round it now. I must look for the
commander in chief here, and if all is lost it is for me to perish with
the rest."

The foreboding of evil that had suddenly come over Rostov was more and
more confirmed the farther he rode into the region behind the village of
Pratzen, which was full of troops of all kinds.

"What does it mean? What is it? Whom are they firing at? Who is firing?"
Rostov kept asking as he came up to Russian and Austrian soldiers
running in confused crowds across his path.

"The devil knows! They've killed everybody! It's all up now!" he
was told in Russian, German, and Czech by the crowd of fugitives who
understood what was happening as little as he did.

"Kill the Germans!" shouted one.

"May the devil take them--the traitors!"

"Zum Henker diese Russen!" * muttered a German.


    * "Hang these Russians!"


Several wounded men passed along the road, and words of abuse, screams,
and groans mingled in a general hubbub, then the firing died down.
Rostov learned later that Russian and Austrian soldiers had been firing
at one another.

"My God! What does it all mean?" thought he. "And here, where at any
moment the Emperor may see them.... But no, these must be only a handful
of scoundrels. It will soon be over, it can't be that, it can't be! Only
to get past them quicker, quicker!"

The idea of defeat and flight could not enter Rostov's head. Though he
saw French cannon and French troops on the Pratzen Heights just where he
had been ordered to look for the commander in chief, he could not, did
not wish to, believe that.





CHAPTER XVIII


Rostov had been ordered to look for Kutuzov and the Emperor near the
village of Pratzen. But neither they nor a single commanding officer
were there, only disorganized crowds of troops of various kinds. He
urged on his already weary horse to get quickly past these crowds, but
the farther he went the more disorganized they were. The highroad on
which he had come out was thronged with caleches, carriages of all
sorts, and Russian and Austrian soldiers of all arms, some wounded and
some not. This whole mass droned and jostled in confusion under the
dismal influence of cannon balls flying from the French batteries
stationed on the Pratzen Heights.

"Where is the Emperor? Where is Kutuzov?" Rostov kept asking everyone he
could stop, but got no answer from anyone.

At last seizing a soldier by his collar he forced him to answer.

"Eh, brother! They've all bolted long ago!" said the soldier, laughing
for some reason and shaking himself free.

Having left that soldier who was evidently drunk, Rostov stopped the
horse of a batman or groom of some important personage and began to
question him. The man announced that the Tsar had been driven in a
carriage at full speed about an hour before along that very road and
that he was dangerously wounded.

"It can't be!" said Rostov. "It must have been someone else."

"I saw him myself," replied the man with a self-confident smile of
derision. "I ought to know the Emperor by now, after the times I've seen
him in Petersburg. I saw him just as I see you.... There he sat in the
carriage as pale as anything. How they made the four black horses fly!
Gracious me, they did rattle past! It's time I knew the Imperial horses
and Ilya Ivanych. I don't think Ilya drives anyone except the Tsar!"

Rostov let go of the horse and was about to ride on, when a wounded
officer passing by addressed him:

"Who is it you want?" he asked. "The commander in chief? He was killed
by a cannon ball--struck in the breast before our regiment."

"Not killed--wounded!" another officer corrected him.

"Who? Kutuzov?" asked Rostov.

"Not Kutuzov, but what's his name--well, never mind... there are not
many left alive. Go that way, to that village, all the commanders are
there," said the officer, pointing to the village of Hosjeradek, and he
walked on.

Rostov rode on at a footpace not knowing why or to whom he was now
going. The Emperor was wounded, the battle lost. It was impossible to
doubt it now. Rostov rode in the direction pointed out to him, in which
he saw turrets and a church. What need to hurry? What was he now to say
to the Tsar or to Kutuzov, even if they were alive and unwounded?

"Take this road, your honor, that way you will be killed at once!" a
soldier shouted to him. "They'd kill you there!"

"Oh, what are you talking about?" said another. "Where is he to go? That
way is nearer."

Rostov considered, and then went in the direction where they said he
would be killed.

"It's all the same now. If the Emperor is wounded, am I to try to save
myself?" he thought. He rode on to the region where the greatest number
of men had perished in fleeing from Pratzen. The French had not yet
occupied that region, and the Russians--the uninjured and slightly
wounded--had left it long ago. All about the field, like heaps of manure
on well-kept plowland, lay from ten to fifteen dead and wounded to each
couple of acres. The wounded crept together in twos and threes and one
could hear their distressing screams and groans, sometimes feigned--or
so it seemed to Rostov. He put his horse to a trot to avoid seeing all
these suffering men, and he felt afraid--afraid not for his life, but
for the courage he needed and which he knew would not stand the sight of
these unfortunates.

The French, who had ceased firing at this field strewn with dead and
wounded where there was no one left to fire at, on seeing an adjutant
riding over it trained a gun on him and fired several shots. The
sensation of those terrible whistling sounds and of the corpses around
him merged in Rostov's mind into a single feeling of terror and pity for
himself. He remembered his mother's last letter. "What would she feel,"
thought he, "if she saw me here now on this field with the cannon aimed
at me?"

In the village of Hosjeradek there were Russian troops retiring from
the field of battle, who though still in some confusion were less
disordered. The French cannon did not reach there and the musketry fire
sounded far away. Here everyone clearly saw and said that the battle
was lost. No one whom Rostov asked could tell him where the Emperor
or Kutuzov was. Some said the report that the Emperor was wounded was
correct, others that it was not, and explained the false rumor that had
spread by the fact that the Emperor's carriage had really galloped from
the field of battle with the pale and terrified Ober-Hofmarschal Count
Tolstoy, who had ridden out to the battlefield with others in the
Emperor's suite. One officer told Rostov that he had seen someone from
headquarters behind the village to the left, and thither Rostov rode,
not hoping to find anyone but merely to ease his conscience. When he had
ridden about two miles and had passed the last of the Russian troops, he
saw, near a kitchen garden with a ditch round it, two men on horseback
facing the ditch. One with a white plume in his hat seemed familiar to
Rostov; the other on a beautiful chestnut horse (which Rostov fancied he
had seen before) rode up to the ditch, struck his horse with his spurs,
and giving it the rein leaped lightly over. Only a little earth crumbled
from the bank under the horse's hind hoofs. Turning the horse sharply,
he again jumped the ditch, and deferentially addressed the horseman with
the white plumes, evidently suggesting that he should do the same. The
rider, whose figure seemed familiar to Rostov and involuntarily riveted
his attention, made a gesture of refusal with his head and hand and
by that gesture Rostov instantly recognized his lamented and adored
monarch.

"But it can't be he, alone in the midst of this empty field!" thought
Rostov. At that moment Alexander turned his head and Rostov saw the
beloved features that were so deeply engraved on his memory. The Emperor
was pale, his cheeks sunken and his eyes hollow, but the charm, the
mildness of his features, was all the greater. Rostov was happy in the
assurance that the rumors about the Emperor being wounded were false. He
was happy to be seeing him. He knew that he might and even ought to
go straight to him and give the message Dolgorukov had ordered him to
deliver.

But as a youth in love trembles, is unnerved, and dares not utter the
thoughts he has dreamed of for nights, but looks around for help or a
chance of delay and flight when the longed-for moment comes and he is
alone with her, so Rostov, now that he had attained what he had longed
for more than anything else in the world, did not know how to approach
the Emperor, and a thousand reasons occurred to him why it would be
inconvenient, unseemly, and impossible to do so.

"What! It is as if I were glad of a chance to take advantage of his
being alone and despondent! A strange face may seem unpleasant or
painful to him at this moment of sorrow; besides, what can I say to him
now, when my heart fails me and my mouth feels dry at the mere sight of
him?" Not one of the innumerable speeches addressed to the Emperor that
he had composed in his imagination could he now recall. Those speeches
were intended for quite other conditions, they were for the most part
to be spoken at a moment of victory and triumph, generally when he was
dying of wounds and the sovereign had thanked him for heroic deeds, and
while dying he expressed the love his actions had proved.

"Besides how can I ask the Emperor for his instructions for the right
flank now that it is nearly four o'clock and the battle is lost?
No, certainly I must not approach him, I must not intrude on his
reflections. Better die a thousand times than risk receiving an unkind
look or bad opinion from him," Rostov decided; and sorrowfully and with
a heart full despair he rode away, continually looking back at the Tsar,
who still remained in the same attitude of indecision.

While Rostov was thus arguing with himself and riding sadly away,
Captain von Toll chanced to ride to the same spot, and seeing the
Emperor at once rode up to him, offered his services, and assisted him
to cross the ditch on foot. The Emperor, wishing to rest and feeling
unwell, sat down under an apple tree and von Toll remained beside him.
Rostov from a distance saw with envy and remorse how von Toll spoke
long and warmly to the Emperor and how the Emperor, evidently weeping,
covered his eyes with his hand and pressed von Toll's hand.

"And I might have been in his place!" thought Rostov, and hardly
restraining his tears of pity for the Emperor, he rode on in utter
despair, not knowing where to or why he was now riding.

His despair was all the greater from feeling that his own weakness was
the cause of his grief.

He might... not only might but should, have gone up to the sovereign. It
was a unique chance to show his devotion to the Emperor and he had not
made use of it.... "What have I done?" thought he. And he turned round
and galloped back to the place where he had seen the Emperor, but there
was no one beyond the ditch now. Only some carts and carriages were
passing by. From one of the drivers he learned that Kutuzov's staff were
not far off, in the village the vehicles were going to. Rostov
followed them. In front of him walked Kutuzov's groom leading horses
in horsecloths. Then came a cart, and behind that walked an old,
bandy-legged domestic serf in a peaked cap and sheepskin coat.

"Tit! I say, Tit!" said the groom.

"What?" answered the old man absent-mindedly.

"Go, Tit! Thresh a bit!"

"Oh, you fool!" said the old man, spitting angrily. Some time passed in
silence, and then the same joke was repeated.


Before five in the evening the battle had been lost at all points. More
than a hundred cannon were already in the hands of the French.

Przebyszewski and his corps had laid down their arms. Other columns
after losing half their men were retreating in disorderly confused
masses.

The remains of Langeron's and Dokhturov's mingled forces were crowding
around the dams and banks of the ponds near the village of Augesd.

After five o'clock it was only at the Augesd Dam that a hot cannonade
(delivered by the French alone) was still to be heard from numerous
batteries ranged on the slopes of the Pratzen Heights, directed at our
retreating forces.

In the rearguard, Dokhturov and others rallying some battalions kept up
a musketry fire at the French cavalry that was pursuing our troops. It
was growing dusk. On the narrow Augesd Dam where for so many years the
old miller had been accustomed to sit in his tasseled cap peacefully
angling, while his grandson, with shirt sleeves rolled up, handled the
floundering silvery fish in the watering can, on that dam over which for
so many years Moravians in shaggy caps and blue jackets had peacefully
driven their two-horse carts loaded with wheat and had returned dusty
with flour whitening their carts--on that narrow dam amid the wagons and
the cannon, under the horses' hoofs and between the wagon wheels, men
disfigured by fear of death now crowded together, crushing one another,
dying, stepping over the dying and killing one another, only to move on
a few steps and be killed themselves in the same way.

Every ten seconds a cannon ball flew compressing the air around, or
a shell burst in the midst of that dense throng, killing some and
splashing with blood those near them.

Dolokhov--now an officer--wounded in the arm, and on foot, with the
regimental commander on horseback and some ten men of his company,
represented all that was left of that whole regiment. Impelled by the
crowd, they had got wedged in at the approach to the dam and, jammed in
on all sides, had stopped because a horse in front had fallen under a
cannon and the crowd were dragging it out. A cannon ball killed someone
behind them, another fell in front and splashed Dolokhov with blood.
The crowd, pushing forward desperately, squeezed together, moved a few
steps, and again stopped.

"Move on a hundred yards and we are certainly saved, remain here another
two minutes and it is certain death," thought each one.

Dolokhov who was in the midst of the crowd forced his way to the edge of
the dam, throwing two soldiers off their feet, and ran onto the slippery
ice that covered the millpool.

"Turn this way!" he shouted, jumping over the ice which creaked under
him; "turn this way!" he shouted to those with the gun. "It bears!..."

The ice bore him but it swayed and creaked, and it was plain that it
would give way not only under a cannon or a crowd, but very soon even
under his weight alone. The men looked at him and pressed to the
bank, hesitating to step onto the ice. The general on horseback at the
entrance to the dam raised his hand and opened his mouth to address
Dolokhov. Suddenly a cannon ball hissed so low above the crowd that
everyone ducked. It flopped into something moist, and the general fell
from his horse in a pool of blood. Nobody gave him a look or thought of
raising him.

"Get onto the ice, over the ice! Go on! Turn! Don't you hear? Go on!"
innumerable voices suddenly shouted after the ball had struck the
general, the men themselves not knowing what, or why, they were
shouting.

One of the hindmost guns that was going onto the dam turned off onto the
ice. Crowds of soldiers from the dam began running onto the frozen pond.
The ice gave way under one of the foremost soldiers, and one leg slipped
into the water. He tried to right himself but fell in up to his waist.
The nearest soldiers shrank back, the gun driver stopped his horse, but
from behind still came the shouts: "Onto the ice, why do you stop? Go
on! Go on!" And cries of horror were heard in the crowd. The soldiers
near the gun waved their arms and beat the horses to make them turn and
move on. The horses moved off the bank. The ice, that had held under
those on foot, collapsed in a great mass, and some forty men who were on
it dashed, some forward and some back, drowning one another.

Still the cannon balls continued regularly to whistle and flop onto the
ice and into the water and oftenest of all among the crowd that covered
the dam, the pond, and the bank.





CHAPTER XIX


On the Pratzen Heights, where he had fallen with the flagstaff in his
hand, lay Prince Andrew Bolkonski bleeding profusely and unconsciously
uttering a gentle, piteous, and childlike moan.

Toward evening he ceased moaning and became quite still. He did not know
how long his unconsciousness lasted. Suddenly he again felt that he was
alive and suffering from a burning, lacerating pain in his head.

"Where is it, that lofty sky that I did not know till now, but saw
today?" was his first thought. "And I did not know this suffering
either," he thought. "Yes, I did not know anything, anything at all till
now. But where am I?"

He listened and heard the sound of approaching horses, and voices
speaking French. He opened his eyes. Above him again was the same lofty
sky with clouds that had risen and were floating still higher, and
between them gleamed blue infinity. He did not turn his head and did not
see those who, judging by the sound of hoofs and voices, had ridden up
and stopped near him.

It was Napoleon accompanied by two aides-de-camp. Bonaparte riding
over the battlefield had given final orders to strengthen the batteries
firing at the Augesd Dam and was looking at the killed and wounded left
on the field.

"Fine men!" remarked Napoleon, looking at a dead Russian grenadier,
who, with his face buried in the ground and a blackened nape, lay on his
stomach with an already stiffened arm flung wide.

"The ammunition for the guns in position is exhausted, Your Majesty,"
said an adjutant who had come from the batteries that were firing at
Augesd.

"Have some brought from the reserve," said Napoleon, and having gone on
a few steps he stopped before Prince Andrew, who lay on his back with
the flagstaff that had been dropped beside him. (The flag had already
been taken by the French as a trophy.)

"That's a fine death!" said Napoleon as he gazed at Bolkonski.

Prince Andrew understood that this was said of him and that it was
Napoleon who said it. He heard the speaker addressed as Sire. But he
heard the words as he might have heard the buzzing of a fly. Not only
did they not interest him, but he took no notice of them and at once
forgot them. His head was burning, he felt himself bleeding to death,
and he saw above him the remote, lofty, and everlasting sky. He knew it
was Napoleon--his hero--but at that moment Napoleon seemed to him such a
small, insignificant creature compared with what was passing now between
himself and that lofty infinite sky with the clouds flying over it. At
that moment it meant nothing to him who might be standing over him, or
what was said of him; he was only glad that people were standing near
him and only wished that they would help him and bring him back to
life, which seemed to him so beautiful now that he had today learned to
understand it so differently. He collected all his strength, to stir and
utter a sound. He feebly moved his leg and uttered a weak, sickly groan
which aroused his own pity.

"Ah! He is alive," said Napoleon. "Lift this young man up and carry him
to the dressing station."

Having said this, Napoleon rode on to meet Marshal Lannes, who, hat in
hand, rode up smiling to the Emperor to congratulate him on the victory.

Prince Andrew remembered nothing more: he lost consciousness from the
terrible pain of being lifted onto the stretcher, the jolting while
being moved, and the probing of his wound at the dressing station.
He did not regain consciousness till late in the day, when with other
wounded and captured Russian officers he was carried to the hospital.
During this transfer he felt a little stronger and was able to look
about him and even speak.

The first words he heard on coming to his senses were those of a French
convoy officer, who said rapidly: "We must halt here: the Emperor
will pass here immediately; it will please him to see these gentlemen
prisoners."

"There are so many prisoners today, nearly the whole Russian army, that
he is probably tired of them," said another officer.

"All the same! They say this one is the commander of all the Emperor
Alexander's Guards," said the first one, indicating a Russian officer in
the white uniform of the Horse Guards.

Bolkonski recognized Prince Repnin whom he had met in Petersburg
society. Beside him stood a lad of nineteen, also a wounded officer of
the Horse Guards.

Bonaparte, having come up at a gallop, stopped his horse.

"Which is the senior?" he asked, on seeing the prisoners.

They named the colonel, Prince Repnin.

"You are the commander of the Emperor Alexander's regiment of Horse
Guards?" asked Napoleon.

"I commanded a squadron," replied Repnin.

"Your regiment fulfilled its duty honorably," said Napoleon.

"The praise of a great commander is a soldier's highest reward," said
Repnin.

"I bestow it with pleasure," said Napoleon. "And who is that young man
beside you?"

Prince Repnin named Lieutenant Sukhtelen.

After looking at him Napoleon smiled.

"He's very young to come to meddle with us."

"Youth is no hindrance to courage," muttered Sukhtelen in a failing
voice.

"A splendid reply!" said Napoleon. "Young man, you will go far!"

Prince Andrew, who had also been brought forward before the Emperor's
eyes to complete the show of prisoners, could not fail to attract his
attention. Napoleon apparently remembered seeing him on the battlefield
and, addressing him, again used the epithet "young man" that was
connected in his memory with Prince Andrew.

"Well, and you, young man," said he. "How do you feel, mon brave?"

Though five minutes before, Prince Andrew had been able to say a few
words to the soldiers who were carrying him, now with his eyes fixed
straight on Napoleon, he was silent.... So insignificant at that moment
seemed to him all the interests that engrossed Napoleon, so mean did his
hero himself with his paltry vanity and joy in victory appear,
compared to the lofty, equitable, and kindly sky which he had seen and
understood, that he could not answer him.

Everything seemed so futile and insignificant in comparison with the
stern and solemn train of thought that weakness from loss of blood,
suffering, and the nearness of death aroused in him. Looking into
Napoleon's eyes Prince Andrew thought of the insignificance of
greatness, the unimportance of life which no one could understand, and
the still greater unimportance of death, the meaning of which no one
alive could understand or explain.

The Emperor without waiting for an answer turned away and said to one of
the officers as he went: "Have these gentlemen attended to and taken
to my bivouac; let my doctor, Larrey, examine their wounds. Au revoir,
Prince Repnin!" and he spurred his horse and galloped away.

His face shone with self-satisfaction and pleasure.

The soldiers who had carried Prince Andrew had noticed and taken the
little gold icon Princess Mary had hung round her brother's neck, but
seeing the favor the Emperor showed the prisoners, they now hastened to
return the holy image.

Prince Andrew did not see how and by whom it was replaced, but the
little icon with its thin gold chain suddenly appeared upon his chest
outside his uniform.

"It would be good," thought Prince Andrew, glancing at the icon his
sister had hung round his neck with such emotion and reverence, "it
would be good if everything were as clear and simple as it seems to
Mary. How good it would be to know where to seek for help in this life,
and what to expect after it beyond the grave! How happy and calm I
should be if I could now say: 'Lord, have mercy on me!'... But to whom
should I say that? Either to a Power indefinable, incomprehensible,
which I not only cannot address but which I cannot even express in
words--the Great All or Nothing-" said he to himself, "or to that God
who has been sewn into this amulet by Mary! There is nothing certain,
nothing at all except the unimportance of everything I understand, and
the greatness of something incomprehensible but all-important."

The stretchers moved on. At every jolt he again felt unendurable pain;
his feverishness increased and he grew delirious. Visions of his father,
wife, sister, and future son, and the tenderness he had felt the night
before the battle, the figure of the insignificant little Napoleon, and
above all this the lofty sky, formed the chief subjects of his delirious
fancies.

The quiet home life and peaceful happiness of Bald Hills presented
itself to him. He was already enjoying that happiness when that
little Napoleon had suddenly appeared with his unsympathizing look of
shortsighted delight at the misery of others, and doubts and torments
had followed, and only the heavens promised peace. Toward morning
all these dreams melted and merged into the chaos and darkness of
unconciousness and oblivion which in the opinion of Napoleon's doctor,
Larrey, was much more likely to end in death than in convalescence.

"He is a nervous, bilious subject," said Larrey, "and will not recover."

And Prince Andrew, with others fatally wounded, was left to the care of
the inhabitants of the district.





BOOK FOUR: 1806





CHAPTER I


Early in the year 1806 Nicholas Rostov returned home on leave. Denisov
was going home to Voronezh and Rostov persuaded him to travel with him
as far as Moscow and to stay with him there. Meeting a comrade at the
last post station but one before Moscow, Denisov had drunk three bottles
of wine with him and, despite the jolting ruts across the snow-covered
road, did not once wake up on the way to Moscow, but lay at the bottom
of the sleigh beside Rostov, who grew more and more impatient the nearer
they got to Moscow.

"How much longer? How much longer? Oh, these insufferable streets,
shops, bakers' signboards, street lamps, and sleighs!" thought Rostov,
when their leave permits had been passed at the town gate and they had
entered Moscow.

"Denisov! We're here! He's asleep," he added, leaning forward with his
whole body as if in that position he hoped to hasten the speed of the
sleigh.

Denisov gave no answer.

"There's the corner at the crossroads, where the cabman, Zakhar, has his
stand, and there's Zakhar himself and still the same horse! And here's
the little shop where we used to buy gingerbread! Can't you hurry up?
Now then!"

"Which house is it?" asked the driver.

"Why, that one, right at the end, the big one. Don't you see? That's our
house," said Rostov. "Of course, it's our house! Denisov, Denisov! We're
almost there!"

Denisov raised his head, coughed, and made no answer.

"Dmitri," said Rostov to his valet on the box, "those lights are in our
house, aren't they?"

"Yes, sir, and there's a light in your father's study."

"Then they've not gone to bed yet? What do you think? Mind now,
don't forget to put out my new coat," added Rostov, fingering his new
mustache. "Now then, get on," he shouted to the driver. "Do wake up,
Vaska!" he went on, turning to Denisov, whose head was again nodding.
"Come, get on! You shall have three rubles for vodka--get on!" Rostov
shouted, when the sleigh was only three houses from his door. It seemed
to him the horses were not moving at all. At last the sleigh bore to the
right, drew up at an entrance, and Rostov saw overhead the old familiar
cornice with a bit of plaster broken off, the porch, and the post by the
side of the pavement. He sprang out before the sleigh stopped, and ran
into the hall. The house stood cold and silent, as if quite regardless
of who had come to it. There was no one in the hall. "Oh God! Is
everyone all right?" he thought, stopping for a moment with a sinking
heart, and then immediately starting to run along the hall and up the
warped steps of the familiar staircase. The well-known old door handle,
which always angered the countess when it was not properly cleaned,
turned as loosely as ever. A solitary tallow candle burned in the
anteroom.

Old Michael was asleep on the chest. Prokofy, the footman, who was so
strong that he could lift the back of the carriage from behind, sat
plaiting slippers out of cloth selvedges. He looked up at the opening
door and his expression of sleepy indifference suddenly changed to one
of delighted amazement.

"Gracious heavens! The young count!" he cried, recognizing his
young master. "Can it be? My treasure!" and Prokofy, trembling with
excitement, rushed toward the drawing-room door, probably in order to
announce him, but, changing his mind, came back and stooped to kiss the
young man's shoulder.

"All well?" asked Rostov, drawing away his arm.

"Yes, God be thanked! Yes! They've just finished supper. Let me have a
look at you, your excellency."

"Is everything quite all right?"

"The Lord be thanked, yes!"

Rostov, who had completely forgotten Denisov, not wishing anyone to
forestall him, threw off his fur coat and ran on tiptoe through the
large dark ballroom. All was the same: there were the same old card
tables and the same chandelier with a cover over it; but someone had
already seen the young master, and, before he had reached the drawing
room, something flew out from a side door like a tornado and began
hugging and kissing him. Another and yet another creature of the same
kind sprang from a second door and a third; more hugging, more kissing,
more outcries, and tears of joy. He could not distinguish which was
Papa, which Natasha, and which Petya. Everyone shouted, talked, and
kissed him at the same time. Only his mother was not there, he noticed
that.

"And I did not know... Nicholas... My darling!..."

"Here he is... our own... Kolya, * dear fellow... How he has changed!...
Where are the candles?... Tea!..."


    * Nicholas.


"And me, kiss me!"

"Dearest... and me!"

Sonya, Natasha, Petya, Anna Mikhaylovna, Vera, and the old count were
all hugging him, and the serfs, men and maids, flocked into the room,
exclaiming and oh-ing and ah-ing.

Petya, clinging to his legs, kept shouting, "And me too!"

Natasha, after she had pulled him down toward her and covered his face
with kisses, holding him tight by the skirt of his coat, sprang away and
pranced up and down in one place like a goat and shrieked piercingly.

All around were loving eyes glistening with tears of joy, and all around
were lips seeking a kiss.

Sonya too, all rosy red, clung to his arm and, radiant with bliss,
looked eagerly toward his eyes, waiting for the look for which she
longed. Sonya now was sixteen and she was very pretty, especially at
this moment of happy, rapturous excitement. She gazed at him, not taking
her eyes off him, and smiling and holding her breath. He gave her a
grateful look, but was still expectant and looking for someone. The old
countess had not yet come. But now steps were heard at the door, steps
so rapid that they could hardly be his mother's.

Yet it was she, dressed in a new gown which he did not know, made since
he had left. All the others let him go, and he ran to her. When they
met, she fell on his breast, sobbing. She could not lift her face, but
only pressed it to the cold braiding of his hussar's jacket. Denisov,
who had come into the room unnoticed by anyone, stood there and wiped
his eyes at the sight.

"Vasili Denisov, your son's friend," he said, introducing himself to the
count, who was looking inquiringly at him.

"You are most welcome! I know, I know," said the count, kissing and
embracing Denisov. "Nicholas wrote us... Natasha, Vera, look! Here is
Denisov!"

The same happy, rapturous faces turned to the shaggy figure of Denisov.

"Darling Denisov!" screamed Natasha, beside herself with rapture,
springing to him, putting her arms round him, and kissing him. This
escapade made everybody feel confused. Denisov blushed too, but smiled
and, taking Natasha's hand, kissed it.

Denisov was shown to the room prepared for him, and the Rostovs all
gathered round Nicholas in the sitting room.

The old countess, not letting go of his hand and kissing it every
moment, sat beside him: the rest, crowding round him, watched every
movement, word, or look of his, never taking their blissfully adoring
eyes off him. His brother and sisters struggled for the places nearest
to him and disputed with one another who should bring him his tea,
handkerchief, and pipe.

Rostov was very happy in the love they showed him; but the first
moment of meeting had been so beatific that his present joy seemed
insufficient, and he kept expecting something more, more and yet more.

Next morning, after the fatigues of their journey, the travelers slept
till ten o'clock.

In the room next their bedroom there was a confusion of sabers,
satchels, sabretaches, open portmanteaus, and dirty boots. Two freshly
cleaned pairs with spurs had just been placed by the wall. The servants
were bringing in jugs and basins, hot water for shaving, and their
well-brushed clothes. There was a masculine odor and a smell of tobacco.

"Hallo, Gwiska--my pipe!" came Vasili Denisov's husky voice. "Wostov,
get up!"

Rostov, rubbing his eyes that seemed glued together, raised his
disheveled head from the hot pillow.

"Why, is it late?"

"Late! It's nearly ten o'clock," answered Natasha's voice. A rustle of
starched petticoats and the whispering and laughter of girls' voices
came from the adjoining room. The door was opened a crack and there was
a glimpse of something blue, of ribbons, black hair, and merry faces.
It was Natasha, Sonya, and Petya, who had come to see whether they were
getting up.

"Nicholas! Get up!" Natasha's voice was again heard at the door.

"Directly!"

Meanwhile, Petya, having found and seized the sabers in the outer room,
with the delight boys feel at the sight of a military elder brother, and
forgetting that it was unbecoming for the girls to see men undressed,
opened the bedroom door.

"Is this your saber?" he shouted.

The girls sprang aside. Denisov hid his hairy legs under the blanket,
looking with a scared face at his comrade for help. The door, having let
Petya in, closed again. A sound of laughter came from behind it.

"Nicholas! Come out in your dressing gown!" said Natasha's voice.

"Is this your saber?" asked Petya. "Or is it yours?" he said, addressing
the black-mustached Denisov with servile deference.

Rostov hurriedly put something on his feet, drew on his dressing gown,
and went out. Natasha had put on one spurred boot and was just getting
her foot into the other. Sonya, when he came in, was twirling round and
was about to expand her dresses into a balloon and sit down. They were
dressed alike, in new pale-blue frocks, and were both fresh, rosy, and
bright. Sonya ran away, but Natasha, taking her brother's arm, led him
into the sitting room, where they began talking. They hardly gave one
another time to ask questions and give replies concerning a thousand
little matters which could not interest anyone but themselves. Natasha
laughed at every word he said or that she said herself, not because what
they were saying was amusing, but because she felt happy and was unable
to control her joy which expressed itself by laughter.

"Oh, how nice, how splendid!" she said to everything.

Rostov felt that, under the influence of the warm rays of love, that
childlike smile which had not once appeared on his face since he left
home now for the first time after eighteen months again brightened his
soul and his face.

"No, but listen," she said, "now you are quite a man, aren't you? I'm
awfully glad you're my brother." She touched his mustache. "I want to
know what you men are like. Are you the same as we? No?"

"Why did Sonya run away?" asked Rostov.

"Ah, yes! That's a whole long story! How are you going to speak to
her--thou or you?"

"As may happen," said Rostov.

"No, call her you, please! I'll tell you all about it some other time.
No, I'll tell you now. You know Sonya's my dearest friend. Such a friend
that I burned my arm for her sake. Look here!"

She pulled up her muslin sleeve and showed him a red scar on her long,
slender, delicate arm, high above the elbow on that part that is covered
even by a ball dress.

"I burned this to prove my love for her. I just heated a ruler in the
fire and pressed it there!"

Sitting on the sofa with the little cushions on its arms, in what used
to be his old schoolroom, and looking into Natasha's wildly bright eyes,
Rostov re-entered that world of home and childhood which had no meaning
for anyone else, but gave him some of the best joys of his life; and the
burning of an arm with a ruler as a proof of love did not seem to him
senseless, he understood and was not surprised at it.

"Well, and is that all?" he asked.

"We are such friends, such friends! All that ruler business was just
nonsense, but we are friends forever. She, if she loves anyone, does it
for life, but I don't understand that, I forget quickly."

"Well, what then?"

"Well, she loves me and you like that."

Natasha suddenly flushed.

"Why, you remember before you went away?... Well, she says you are to
forget all that.... She says: 'I shall love him always, but let him be
free.' Isn't that lovely and noble! Yes, very noble? Isn't it?" asked
Natasha, so seriously and excitedly that it was evident that what she
was now saying she had talked of before, with tears.

Rostov became thoughtful.

"I never go back on my word," he said. "Besides, Sonya is so charming
that only a fool would renounce such happiness."

"No, no!" cried Natasha, "she and I have already talked it over. We knew
you'd say so. But it won't do, because you see, if you say that--if you
consider yourself bound by your promise--it will seem as if she had not
meant it seriously. It makes it as if you were marrying her because you
must, and that wouldn't do at all."

Rostov saw that it had been well considered by them. Sonya had already
struck him by her beauty on the preceding day. Today, when he had caught
a glimpse of her, she seemed still more lovely. She was a charming girl
of sixteen, evidently passionately in love with him (he did not doubt
that for an instant). Why should he not love her now, and even marry
her, Rostov thought, but just now there were so many other pleasures
and interests before him! "Yes, they have taken a wise decision," he
thought, "I must remain free."

"Well then, that's excellent," said he. "We'll talk it over later on.
Oh, how glad I am to have you!"

"Well, and are you still true to Boris?" he continued.

"Oh, what nonsense!" cried Natasha, laughing. "I don't think about him
or anyone else, and I don't want anything of the kind."

"Dear me! Then what are you up to now?"

"Now?" repeated Natasha, and a happy smile lit up her face. "Have you
seen Duport?"

"No."

"Not seen Duport--the famous dancer? Well then, you won't understand.
That's what I'm up to."

Curving her arms, Natasha held out her skirts as dancers do, ran back
a few steps, turned, cut a caper, brought her little feet sharply
together, and made some steps on the very tips of her toes.

"See, I'm standing! See!" she said, but could not maintain herself on
her toes any longer. "So that's what I'm up to! I'll never marry anyone,
but will be a dancer. Only don't tell anyone."

Rostov laughed so loud and merrily that Denisov, in his bedroom, felt
envious and Natasha could not help joining in.

"No, but don't you think it's nice?" she kept repeating.

"Nice! And so you no longer wish to marry Boris?"

Natasha flared up. "I don't want to marry anyone. And I'll tell him so
when I see him!"

"Dear me!" said Rostov.

"But that's all rubbish," Natasha chattered on. "And is Denisov nice?"
she asked.

"Yes, indeed!"

"Oh, well then, good-by: go and dress. Is he very terrible, Denisov?"

"Why terrible?" asked Nicholas. "No, Vaska is a splendid fellow."

"You call him Vaska? That's funny! And is he very nice?"

"Very."

"Well then, be quick. We'll all have breakfast together."

And Natasha rose and went out of the room on tiptoe, like a ballet
dancer, but smiling as only happy girls of fifteen can smile. When
Rostov met Sonya in the drawing room, he reddened. He did not know how
to behave with her. The evening before, in the first happy moment of
meeting, they had kissed each other, but today they felt it could not
be done; he felt that everybody, including his mother and sisters, was
looking inquiringly at him and watching to see how he would behave with
her. He kissed her hand and addressed her not as thou but as you--Sonya.
But their eyes met and said thou, and exchanged tender kisses. Her looks
asked him to forgive her for having dared, by Natasha's intermediacy, to
remind him of his promise, and then thanked him for his love. His looks
thanked her for offering him his freedom and told her that one way or
another he would never cease to love her, for that would be impossible.

"How strange it is," said Vera, selecting a moment when all were silent,
"that Sonya and Nicholas now say you to one another and meet like
strangers."

Vera's remark was correct, as her remarks always were, but, like most of
her observations, it made everyone feel uncomfortable, not only Sonya,
Nicholas, and Natasha, but even the old countess, who--dreading
this love affair which might hinder Nicholas from making a brilliant
match--blushed like a girl.

Denisov, to Rostov's surprise, appeared in the drawing room with pomaded
hair, perfumed, and in a new uniform, looking just as smart as he made
himself when going into battle, and he was more amiable to the ladies
and gentlemen than Rostov had ever expected to see him.





CHAPTER II


On his return to Moscow from the army, Nicholas Rostov was welcomed
by his home circle as the best of sons, a hero, and their darling
Nikolenka; by his relations as a charming, attractive, and polite young
man; by his acquaintances as a handsome lieutenant of hussars, a good
dancer, and one of the best matches in the city.

The Rostovs knew everybody in Moscow. The old count had money enough
that year, as all his estates had been remortgaged, and so Nicholas,
acquiring a trotter of his own, very stylish riding breeches of the
latest cut, such as no one else yet had in Moscow, and boots of the
latest fashion, with extremely pointed toes and small silver spurs,
passed his time very gaily. After a short period of adapting himself
to the old conditions of life, Nicholas found it very pleasant to be
at home again. He felt that he had grown up and matured very much. His
despair at failing in a Scripture examination, his borrowing money from
Gavril to pay a sleigh driver, his kissing Sonya on the sly--he now
recalled all this as childishness he had left immeasurably behind.
Now he was a lieutenant of hussars, in a jacket laced with silver, and
wearing the Cross of St. George, awarded to soldiers for bravery in
action, and in the company of well-known, elderly, and respected racing
men was training a trotter of his own for a race. He knew a lady on one
of the boulevards whom he visited of an evening. He led the mazurka at
the Arkharovs' ball, talked about the war with Field Marshal Kamenski,
visited the English Club, and was on intimate terms with a colonel of
forty to whom Denisov had introduced him.

His passion for the Emperor had cooled somewhat in Moscow. But still, as
he did not see him and had no opportunity of seeing him, he often spoke
about him and about his love for him, letting it be understood that he
had not told all and that there was something in his feelings for the
Emperor not everyone could understand, and with his whole soul he shared
the adoration then common in Moscow for the Emperor, who was spoken of
as the "angel incarnate."

During Rostov's short stay in Moscow, before rejoining the army, he did
not draw closer to Sonya, but rather drifted away from her. She was very
pretty and sweet, and evidently deeply in love with him, but he was at
the period of youth when there seems so much to do that there is no time
for that sort of thing and a young man fears to bind himself and prizes
his freedom which he needs for so many other things. When he thought of
Sonya, during this stay in Moscow, he said to himself, "Ah, there will
be, and there are, many more such girls somewhere whom I do not yet
know. There will be time enough to think about love when I want to, but
now I have no time." Besides, it seemed to him that the society of women
was rather derogatory to his manhood. He went to balls and into ladies'
society with an affectation of doing so against his will. The races, the
English Club, sprees with Denisov, and visits to a certain house--that
was another matter and quite the thing for a dashing young hussar!

At the beginning of March, old Count Ilya Rostov was very busy arranging
a dinner in honor of Prince Bagration at the English Club.

The count walked up and down the hall in his dressing gown, giving
orders to the club steward and to the famous Feoktist, the Club's head
cook, about asparagus, fresh cucumbers, strawberries, veal, and fish
for this dinner. The count had been a member and on the committee of
the Club from the day it was founded. To him the Club entrusted the
arrangement of the festival in honor of Bagration, for few men knew so
well how to arrange a feast on an open-handed, hospitable scale, and
still fewer men would be so well able and willing to make up out of
their own resources what might be needed for the success of the fete.
The club cook and the steward listened to the count's orders with
pleased faces, for they knew that under no other management could they
so easily extract a good profit for themselves from a dinner costing
several thousand rubles.

"Well then, mind and have cocks' comb in the turtle soup, you know!"

"Shall we have three cold dishes then?" asked the cook.

The count considered.

"We can't have less--yes, three... the mayonnaise, that's one," said he,
bending down a finger.

"Then am I to order those large sterlets?" asked the steward.

"Yes, it can't be helped if they won't take less. Ah, dear me! I was
forgetting. We must have another entree. Ah, goodness gracious!" he
clutched at his head. "Who is going to get me the flowers? Dmitri! Eh,
Dmitri! Gallop off to our Moscow estate," he said to the factotum who
appeared at his call. "Hurry off and tell Maksim, the gardener, to set
the serfs to work. Say that everything out of the hothouses must be
brought here well wrapped up in felt. I must have two hundred pots here
on Friday."

Having given several more orders, he was about to go to his "little
countess" to have a rest, but remembering something else of importance,
he returned again, called back the cook and the club steward, and again
began giving orders. A light footstep and the clinking of spurs were
heard at the door, and the young count, handsome, rosy, with a dark
little mustache, evidently rested and made sleeker by his easy life in
Moscow, entered the room.

"Ah, my boy, my head's in a whirl!" said the old man with a smile, as if
he felt a little confused before his son. "Now, if you would only help
a bit! I must have singers too. I shall have my own orchestra, but
shouldn't we get the gypsy singers as well? You military men like that
sort of thing."

"Really, Papa, I believe Prince Bagration worried himself less before
the battle of Schon Grabern than you do now," said his son with a smile.

The old count pretended to be angry.

"Yes, you talk, but try it yourself!"

And the count turned to the cook, who, with a shrewd and respectful
expression, looked observantly and sympathetically at the father and
son.

"What have the young people come to nowadays, eh, Feoktist?" said he.
"Laughing at us old fellows!"

"That's so, your excellency, all they have to do is to eat a good
dinner, but providing it and serving it all up, that's not their
business!"

"That's it, that's it!" exclaimed the count, and gaily seizing his son
by both hands, he cried, "Now I've got you, so take the sleigh and pair
at once, and go to Bezukhov's, and tell him 'Count Ilya has sent you
to ask for strawberries and fresh pineapples.' We can't get them from
anyone else. He's not there himself, so you'll have to go in and ask the
princesses; and from there go on to the Rasgulyay--the coachman Ipatka
knows--and look up the gypsy Ilyushka, the one who danced at Count
Orlov's, you remember, in a white Cossack coat, and bring him along to
me."

"And am I to bring the gypsy girls along with him?" asked Nicholas,
laughing. "Dear, dear!..."

At that moment, with noiseless footsteps and with the businesslike,
preoccupied, yet meekly Christian look which never left her face, Anna
Mikhaylovna entered the hall. Though she came upon the count in his
dressing gown every day, he invariably became confused and begged her to
excuse his costume.

"No matter at all, my dear count," she said, meekly closing her eyes.
"But I'll go to Bezukhov's myself. Pierre has arrived, and now we shall
get anything we want from his hothouses. I have to see him in any case.
He has forwarded me a letter from Boris. Thank God, Boris is now on the
staff."

The count was delighted at Anna Mikhaylovna's taking upon herself one of
his commissions and ordered the small closed carriage for her.

"Tell Bezukhov to come. I'll put his name down. Is his wife with him?"
he asked.

Anna Mikhaylovna turned up her eyes, and profound sadness was depicted
on her face.

"Ah, my dear friend, he is very unfortunate," she said. "If what we hear
is true, it is dreadful. How little we dreamed of such a thing when we
were rejoicing at his happiness! And such a lofty angelic soul as young
Bezukhov! Yes, I pity him from my heart, and shall try to give him what
consolation I can."

"Wh-what is the matter?" asked both the young and old Rostov.

Anna Mikhaylovna sighed deeply.

"Dolokhov, Mary Ivanovna's son," she said in a mysterious whisper, "has
compromised her completely, they say. Pierre took him up, invited him to
his house in Petersburg, and now... she has come here and that daredevil
after her!" said Anna Mikhaylovna, wishing to show her sympathy for
Pierre, but by involuntary intonations and a half smile betraying her
sympathy for the "daredevil," as she called Dolokhov. "They say Pierre
is quite broken by his misfortune."

"Dear, dear! But still tell him to come to the Club--it will all blow
over. It will be a tremendous banquet."

Next day, the third of March, soon after one o'clock, two hundred and
fifty members of the English Club and fifty guests were awaiting the
guest of honor and hero of the Austrian campaign, Prince Bagration, to
dinner.

On the first arrival of the news of the battle of Austerlitz, Moscow had
been bewildered. At that time, the Russians were so used to victories
that on receiving news of the defeat some would simply not believe it,
while others sought some extraordinary explanation of so strange an
event. In the English Club, where all who were distinguished, important,
and well informed foregathered when the news began to arrive in
December, nothing was said about the war and the last battle, as
though all were in a conspiracy of silence. The men who set the tone in
conversation--Count Rostopchin, Prince Yuri Dolgorukov, Valuev, Count
Markov, and Prince Vyazemski--did not show themselves at the Club, but
met in private houses in intimate circles, and the Moscovites who took
their opinions from others--Ilya Rostov among them--remained for a
while without any definite opinion on the subject of the war and without
leaders. The Moscovites felt that something was wrong and that to
discuss the bad news was difficult, and so it was best to be silent.
But after a while, just as a jury comes out of its room, the bigwigs
who guided the Club's opinion reappeared, and everybody began speaking
clearly and definitely. Reasons were found for the incredible,
unheard-of, and impossible event of a Russian defeat, everything became
clear, and in all corners of Moscow the same things began to be
said. These reasons were the treachery of the Austrians, a defective
commissariat, the treachery of the Pole Przebyszewski and of the
Frenchman Langeron, Kutuzov's incapacity, and (it was whispered) the
youth and inexperience of the sovereign, who had trusted worthless and
insignificant people. But the army, the Russian army, everyone declared,
was extraordinary and had achieved miracles of valor. The soldiers,
officers, and generals were heroes. But the hero of heroes was Prince
Bagration, distinguished by his Schon Grabern affair and by the retreat
from Austerlitz, where he alone had withdrawn his column unbroken and
had all day beaten back an enemy force twice as numerous as his own.
What also conduced to Bagration's being selected as Moscow's hero was
the fact that he had no connections in the city and was a stranger
there. In his person, honor was shown to a simple fighting Russian
soldier without connections and intrigues, and to one who was associated
by memories of the Italian campaign with the name of Suvorov.
Moreover, paying such honor to Bagration was the best way of expressing
disapproval and dislike of Kutuzov.

"Had there been no Bagration, it would have been necessary to invent
him," said the wit Shinshin, parodying the words of Voltaire. Kutuzov
no one spoke of, except some who abused him in whispers, calling him a
court weathercock and an old satyr.

All Moscow repeated Prince Dolgorukov's saying: "If you go on modeling
and modeling you must get smeared with clay," suggesting consolation
for our defeat by the memory of former victories; and the words of
Rostopchin, that French soldiers have to be incited to battle by
highfalutin words, and Germans by logical arguments to show them that it
is more dangerous to run away than to advance, but that Russian soldiers
only need to be restrained and held back! On all sides, new and fresh
anecdotes were heard of individual examples of heroism shown by our
officers and men at Austerlitz. One had saved a standard, another had
killed five Frenchmen, a third had loaded five cannon singlehanded. Berg
was mentioned, by those who did not know him, as having, when wounded
in the right hand, taken his sword in the left, and gone forward. Of
Bolkonski, nothing was said, and only those who knew him intimately
regretted that he had died so young, leaving a pregnant wife with his
eccentric father.





CHAPTER III


On that third of March, all the rooms in the English Club were filled
with a hum of conversation, like the hum of bees swarming in springtime.
The members and guests of the Club wandered hither and thither, sat,
stood, met, and separated, some in uniform and some in evening dress,
and a few here and there with powdered hair and in Russian kaftans.
Powdered footmen, in livery with buckled shoes and smart stockings,
stood at every door anxiously noting visitors' every movement in order
to offer their services. Most of those present were elderly, respected
men with broad, self-confident faces, fat fingers, and resolute gestures
and voices. This class of guests and members sat in certain habitual
places and met in certain habitual groups. A minority of those present
were casual guests--chiefly young men, among whom were Denisov, Rostov,
and Dolokhov--who was now again an officer in the Semenov regiment. The
faces of these young people, especially those who were military men,
bore that expression of condescending respect for their elders which
seems to say to the older generation, "We are prepared to respect and
honor you, but all the same remember that the future belongs to us."

Nesvitski was there as an old member of the Club. Pierre, who at his
wife's command had let his hair grow and abandoned his spectacles, went
about the rooms fashionably dressed but looking sad and dull. Here, as
elsewhere, he was surrounded by an atmosphere of subservience to his
wealth, and being in the habit of lording it over these people, he
treated them with absent-minded contempt.

By his age he should have belonged to the younger men, but by his wealth
and connections he belonged to the groups old and honored guests, and
so he went from one group to another. Some of the most important old men
were the center of groups which even strangers approached respectfully
to hear the voices of well-known men. The largest circles formed round
Count Rostopchin, Valuev, and Naryshkin. Rostopchin was describing how
the Russians had been overwhelmed by flying Austrians and had had to
force their way through them with bayonets.

Valuev was confidentially telling that Uvarov had been sent from
Petersburg to ascertain what Moscow was thinking about Austerlitz.

In the third circle, Naryshkin was speaking of the meeting of the
Austrian Council of War at which Suvorov crowed like a cock in reply to
the nonsense talked by the Austrian generals. Shinshin, standing close
by, tried to make a joke, saying that Kutuzov had evidently failed to
learn from Suvorov even so simple a thing as the art of crowing like a
cock, but the elder members glanced severely at the wit, making him
feel that in that place and on that day, it was improper to speak so of
Kutuzov.

Count Ilya Rostov, hurried and preoccupied, went about in his soft boots
between the dining and drawing rooms, hastily greeting the important and
unimportant, all of whom he knew, as if they were all equals, while his
eyes occasionally sought out his fine well-set-up young son, resting
on him and winking joyfully at him. Young Rostov stood at a window with
Dolokhov, whose acquaintance he had lately made and highly valued. The
old count came up to them and pressed Dolokhov's hand.

"Please come and visit us... you know my brave boy... been together out
there... both playing the hero... Ah, Vasili Ignatovich... How d'ye do,
old fellow?" he said, turning to an old man who was passing, but before
he had finished his greeting there was a general stir, and a footman who
had run in announced, with a frightened face: "He's arrived!"

Bells rang, the stewards rushed forward, and--like rye shaken together
in a shovel--the guests who had been scattered about in different rooms
came together and crowded in the large drawing room by the door of the
ballroom.

Bagration appeared in the doorway of the anteroom without hat or sword,
which, in accord with the Club custom, he had given up to the hall
porter. He had no lambskin cap on his head, nor had he a loaded whip
over his shoulder, as when Rostov had seen him on the eve of the battle
of Austerlitz, but wore a tight new uniform with Russian and foreign
Orders, and the Star of St. George on his left breast. Evidently just
before coming to the dinner he had had his hair and whiskers trimmed,
which changed his appearance for the worse. There was something naively
festive in his air, which, in conjunction with his firm and virile
features, gave him a rather comical expression. Bekleshev and Theodore
Uvarov, who had arrived with him, paused at the doorway to allow him,
as the guest of honor, to enter first. Bagration was embarrassed, not
wishing to avail himself of their courtesy, and this caused some delay
at the doors, but after all he did at last enter first. He walked shyly
and awkwardly over the parquet floor of the reception room, not knowing
what to do with his hands; he was more accustomed to walk over a plowed
field under fire, as he had done at the head of the Kursk regiment at
Schon Grabern--and he would have found that easier. The committeemen
met him at the first door and, expressing their delight at seeing such a
highly honored guest, took possession of him as it were, without waiting
for his reply, surrounded him, and led him to the drawing room. It was
at first impossible to enter the drawing-room door for the crowd of
members and guests jostling one another and trying to get a good look at
Bagration over each other's shoulders, as if he were some rare animal.
Count Ilya Rostov, laughing and repeating the words, "Make way, dear
boy! Make way, make way!" pushed through the crowd more energetically
than anyone, led the guests into the drawing room, and seated them on
the center sofa. The bigwigs, the most respected members of the Club,
beset the new arrivals. Count Ilya, again thrusting his way through the
crowd, went out of the drawing room and reappeared a minute later with
another committeeman, carrying a large silver salver which he presented
to Prince Bagration. On the salver lay some verses composed and printed
in the hero's honor. Bagration, on seeing the salver, glanced around
in dismay, as though seeking help. But all eyes demanded that he should
submit. Feeling himself in their power, he resolutely took the salver
with both hands and looked sternly and reproachfully at the count who
had presented it to him. Someone obligingly took the dish from Bagration
(or he would, it seemed, have held it till evening and have gone in to
dinner with it) and drew his attention to the verses.

"Well, I will read them, then!" Bagration seemed to say, and, fixing
his weary eyes on the paper, began to read them with a fixed and serious
expression. But the author himself took the verses and began reading
them aloud. Bagration bowed his head and listened:

   Bring glory then to Alexander's reign
   And on the throne our Titus shield.
   A dreaded foe be thou, kindhearted as a man,
   A Rhipheus at home, a Caesar in the field!
   E'en fortunate Napoleon
   Knows by experience, now, Bagration,
   And dare not Herculean Russians trouble...

But before he had finished reading, a stentorian major-domo announced
that dinner was ready! The door opened, and from the dining room came
the resounding strains of the polonaise:

   Conquest's joyful thunder waken,
   Triumph, valiant Russians, now!...

and Count Rostov, glancing angrily at the author who went on reading his
verses, bowed to Bagration. Everyone rose, feeling that dinner was more
important than verses, and Bagration, again preceding all the rest,
went in to dinner. He was seated in the place of honor between two
Alexanders--Bekleshev and Naryshkin--which was a significant allusion to
the name of the sovereign. Three hundred persons took their seats in the
dining room, according to their rank and importance: the more important
nearer to the honored guest, as naturally as water flows deepest where
the land lies lowest.

Just before dinner, Count Ilya Rostov presented his son to Bagration,
who recognized him and said a few words to him, disjointed and awkward,
as were all the words he spoke that day, and Count Ilya looked joyfully
and proudly around while Bagration spoke to his son.

Nicholas Rostov, with Denisov and his new acquaintance, Dolokhov, sat
almost at the middle of the table. Facing them sat Pierre, beside Prince
Nesvitski. Count Ilya Rostov with the other members of the committee sat
facing Bagration and, as the very personification of Moscow hospitality,
did the honors to the prince.

His efforts had not been in vain. The dinner, both the Lenten and the
other fare, was splendid, yet he could not feel quite at ease till the
end of the meal. He winked at the butler, whispered directions to the
footmen, and awaited each expected dish with some anxiety. Everything
was excellent. With the second course, a gigantic sterlet (at sight of
which Ilya Rostov blushed with self-conscious pleasure), the footmen
began popping corks and filling the champagne glasses. After the fish,
which made a certain sensation, the count exchanged glances with the
other committeemen. "There will be many toasts, it's time to begin," he
whispered, and taking up his glass, he rose. All were silent, waiting
for what he would say.

"To the health of our Sovereign, the Emperor!" he cried, and at the same
moment his kindly eyes grew moist with tears of joy and enthusiasm. The
band immediately struck up "Conquest's joyful thunder waken..." All rose
and cried "Hurrah!" Bagration also rose and shouted "Hurrah!" in exactly
the same voice in which he had shouted it on the field at Schon Grabern.
Young Rostov's ecstatic voice could be heard above the three hundred
others. He nearly wept. "To the health of our Sovereign, the Emperor!"
he roared, "Hurrah!" and emptying his glass at one gulp he dashed it to
the floor. Many followed his example, and the loud shouting continued
for a long time. When the voices subsided, the footmen cleared away the
broken glass and everybody sat down again, smiling at the noise they had
made and exchanging remarks. The old count rose once more, glanced at a
note lying beside his plate, and proposed a toast, "To the health of the
hero of our last campaign, Prince Peter Ivanovich Bagration!" and again
his blue eyes grew moist. "Hurrah!" cried the three hundred voices
again, but instead of the band a choir began singing a cantata composed
by Paul Ivanovich Kutuzov:

   Russians! O'er all barriers on!
   Courage conquest guarantees;
   Have we not Bagration?
   He brings foe men to their knees,... etc.


As soon as the singing was over, another and another toast was proposed
and Count Ilya Rostov became more and more moved, more glass was
smashed, and the shouting grew louder. They drank to Bekleshev,
Naryshkin, Uvarov, Dolgorukov, Apraksin, Valuev, to the committee, to
all the Club members and to all the Club guests, and finally to Count
Ilya Rostov separately, as the organizer of the banquet. At that
toast, the count took out his handkerchief and, covering his face, wept
outright.





CHAPTER IV


Pierre sat opposite Dolokhov and Nicholas Rostov. As usual, he ate and
drank much, and eagerly. But those who knew him intimately noticed that
some great change had come over him that day. He was silent all through
dinner and looked about, blinking and scowling, or, with fixed eyes and
a look of complete absent-mindedness, kept rubbing the bridge of his
nose. His face was depressed and gloomy. He seemed to see and hear
nothing of what was going on around him and to be absorbed by some
depressing and unsolved problem.

The unsolved problem that tormented him was caused by hints given by the
princess, his cousin, at Moscow, concerning Dolokhov's intimacy with his
wife, and by an anonymous letter he had received that morning, which in
the mean jocular way common to anonymous letters said that he saw badly
through his spectacles, but that his wife's connection with Dolokhov was
a secret to no one but himself. Pierre absolutely disbelieved both the
princess' hints and the letter, but he feared now to look at Dolokhov,
who was sitting opposite him. Every time he chanced to meet Dolokhov's
handsome insolent eyes, Pierre felt something terrible and monstrous
rising in his soul and turned quickly away. Involuntarily recalling his
wife's past and her relations with Dolokhov, Pierre saw clearly that
what was said in the letter might be true, or might at least seem to be
true had it not referred to his wife. He involuntarily remembered
how Dolokhov, who had fully recovered his former position after the
campaign, had returned to Petersburg and come to him. Availing himself
of his friendly relations with Pierre as a boon companion, Dolokhov
had come straight to his house, and Pierre had put him up and lent him
money. Pierre recalled how Helene had smilingly expressed disapproval of
Dolokhov's living at their house, and how cynically Dolokhov had praised
his wife's beauty to him and from that time till they came to Moscow had
not left them for a day.

"Yes, he is very handsome," thought Pierre, "and I know him. It would be
particularly pleasant to him to dishonor my name and ridicule me, just
because I have exerted myself on his behalf, befriended him, and helped
him. I know and understand what a spice that would add to the pleasure
of deceiving me, if it really were true. Yes, if it were true, but I
do not believe it. I have no right to, and can't, believe it." He
remembered the expression Dolokhov's face assumed in his moments of
cruelty, as when tying the policeman to the bear and dropping them into
the water, or when he challenged a man to a duel without any reason,
or shot a post-boy's horse with a pistol. That expression was often
on Dolokhov's face when looking at him. "Yes, he is a bully," thought
Pierre, "to kill a man means nothing to him. It must seem to him that
everyone is afraid of him, and that must please him. He must think that
I, too, am afraid of him--and in fact I am afraid of him," he thought,
and again he felt something terrible and monstrous rising in his soul.
Dolokhov, Denisov, and Rostov were now sitting opposite Pierre and
seemed very gay. Rostov was talking merrily to his two friends, one of
whom was a dashing hussar and the other a notorious duelist and
rake, and every now and then he glanced ironically at Pierre, whose
preoccupied, absent-minded, and massive figure was a very noticeable one
at the dinner. Rostov looked inimically at Pierre, first because Pierre
appeared to his hussar eyes as a rich civilian, the husband of a
beauty, and in a word--an old woman; and secondly because Pierre in his
preoccupation and absent-mindedness had not recognized Rostov and had
not responded to his greeting. When the Emperor's health was drunk,
Pierre, lost in thought, did not rise or lift his glass.

"What are you about?" shouted Rostov, looking at him in an ecstasy of
exasperation. "Don't you hear it's His Majesty the Emperor's health?"

Pierre sighed, rose submissively, emptied his glass, and, waiting till
all were seated again, turned with his kindly smile to Rostov.

"Why, I didn't recognize you!" he said. But Rostov was otherwise
engaged; he was shouting "Hurrah!"

"Why don't you renew the acquaintance?" said Dolokhov to Rostov.

"Confound him, he's a fool!" said Rostov.

"One should make up to the husbands of pretty women," said Denisov.

Pierre did not catch what they were saying, but knew they were talking
about him. He reddened and turned away.

"Well, now to the health of handsome women!" said Dolokhov, and with
a serious expression, but with a smile lurking at the corners of his
mouth, he turned with his glass to Pierre.

"Here's to the health of lovely women, Peterkin--and their lovers!" he
added.

Pierre, with downcast eyes, drank out of his glass without looking at
Dolokhov or answering him. The footman, who was distributing leaflets
with Kutuzov's cantata, laid one before Pierre as one of the principal
guests. He was just going to take it when Dolokhov, leaning across,
snatched it from his hand and began reading it. Pierre looked at
Dolokhov and his eyes dropped, the something terrible and monstrous that
had tormented him all dinnertime rose and took possession of him. He
leaned his whole massive body across the table.

"How dare you take it?" he shouted.

Hearing that cry and seeing to whom it was addressed, Nesvitski and the
neighbor on his right quickly turned in alarm to Bezukhov.

"Don't! Don't! What are you about?" whispered their frightened voices.

Dolokhov looked at Pierre with clear, mirthful, cruel eyes, and that
smile of his which seemed to say, "Ah! This is what I like!"

"You shan't have it!" he said distinctly.

Pale, with quivering lips, Pierre snatched the copy.

"You...! you... scoundrel! I challenge you!" he ejaculated, and, pushing
back his chair, he rose from the table.

At the very instant he did this and uttered those words, Pierre felt
that the question of his wife's guilt which had been tormenting him the
whole day was finally and indubitably answered in the affirmative. He
hated her and was forever sundered from her. Despite Denisov's request
that he would take no part in the matter, Rostov agreed to be Dolokhov's
second, and after dinner he discussed the arrangements for the duel with
Nesvitski, Bezukhov's second. Pierre went home, but Rostov with Dolokhov
and Denisov stayed on at the Club till late, listening to the gypsies
and other singers.

"Well then, till tomorrow at Sokolniki," said Dolokhov, as he took leave
of Rostov in the Club porch.

"And do you feel quite calm?" Rostov asked.

Dolokhov paused.

"Well, you see, I'll tell you the whole secret of dueling in two
words. If you are going to fight a duel, and you make a will and write
affectionate letters to your parents, and if you think you may be
killed, you are a fool and are lost for certain. But go with the firm
intention of killing your man as quickly and surely as possible, and
then all will be right, as our bear huntsman at Kostroma used to tell
me. 'Everyone fears a bear,' he says, 'but when you see one your fear's
all gone, and your only thought is not to let him get away!' And that's
how it is with me. A demain, mon cher." *


    * Till tomorrow, my dear fellow.


Next day, at eight in the morning, Pierre and Nesvitski drove to the
Sokolniki forest and found Dolokhov, Denisov, and Rostov already there.
Pierre had the air of a man preoccupied with considerations which had no
connection with the matter in hand. His haggard face was yellow. He had
evidently not slept that night. He looked about distractedly and screwed
up his eyes as if dazzled by the sun. He was entirely absorbed by two
considerations: his wife's guilt, of which after his sleepless night he
had not the slightest doubt, and the guiltlessness of Dolokhov, who had
no reason to preserve the honor of a man who was nothing to him.... "I
should perhaps have done the same thing in his place," thought Pierre.
"It's even certain that I should have done the same, then why this duel,
this murder? Either I shall kill him, or he will hit me in the head,
or elbow, or knee. Can't I go away from here, run away, bury myself
somewhere?" passed through his mind. But just at moments when such
thoughts occurred to him, he would ask in a particularly calm and
absent-minded way, which inspired the respect of the onlookers, "Will it
be long? Are things ready?"

When all was ready, the sabers stuck in the snow to mark the barriers,
and the pistols loaded, Nesvitski went up to Pierre.

"I should not be doing my duty, Count," he said in timid tones, "and
should not justify your confidence and the honor you have done me in
choosing me for your second, if at this grave, this very grave, moment I
did not tell you the whole truth. I think there is no sufficient ground
for this affair, or for blood to be shed over it.... You were not right,
not quite in the right, you were impetuous..."

"Oh yes, it is horribly stupid," said Pierre.

"Then allow me to express your regrets, and I am sure your opponent
will accept them," said Nesvitski (who like the others concerned in the
affair, and like everyone in similar cases, did not yet believe that the
affair had come to an actual duel). "You know, Count, it is much more
honorable to admit one's mistake than to let matters become irreparable.
There was no insult on either side. Allow me to convey...."

"No! What is there to talk about?" said Pierre. "It's all the same....
Is everything ready?" he added. "Only tell me where to go and where to
shoot," he said with an unnaturally gentle smile.

He took the pistol in his hand and began asking about the working of the
trigger, as he had not before held a pistol in his hand--a fact that he
did not wish to confess.

"Oh yes, like that, I know, I only forgot," said he.

"No apologies, none whatever," said Dolokhov to Denisov (who on his
side had been attempting a reconciliation), and he also went up to the
appointed place.

The spot chosen for the duel was some eighty paces from the road,
where the sleighs had been left, in a small clearing in the pine forest
covered with melting snow, the frost having begun to break up during the
last few days. The antagonists stood forty paces apart at the farther
edge of the clearing. The seconds, measuring the paces, left tracks in
the deep wet snow between the place where they had been standing and
Nesvitski's and Dolokhov's sabers, which were stuck into the ground
ten paces apart to mark the barrier. It was thawing and misty; at forty
paces' distance nothing could be seen. For three minutes all had been
ready, but they still delayed and all were silent.





CHAPTER V


"Well begin!" said Dolokhov.

"All right," said Pierre, still smiling in the same way. A feeling of
dread was in the air. It was evident that the affair so lightly begun
could no longer be averted but was taking its course independently of
men's will.

Denisov first went to the barrier and announced: "As the adve'sawies
have wefused a weconciliation, please pwoceed. Take your pistols, and at
the word thwee begin to advance.

"O-ne! T-wo! Thwee!" he shouted angrily and stepped aside.

The combatants advanced along the trodden tracks, nearer and nearer to
one another, beginning to see one another through the mist. They had the
right to fire when they liked as they approached the barrier. Dolokhov
walked slowly without raising his pistol, looking intently with his
bright, sparkling blue eyes into his antagonist's face. His mouth wore
its usual semblance of a smile.

"So I can fire when I like!" said Pierre, and at the word "three," he
went quickly forward, missing the trodden path and stepping into
the deep snow. He held the pistol in his right hand at arm's length,
apparently afraid of shooting himself with it. His left hand he held
carefully back, because he wished to support his right hand with it and
knew he must not do so. Having advanced six paces and strayed off
the track into the snow, Pierre looked down at his feet, then quickly
glanced at Dolokhov and, bending his finger as he had been shown, fired.
Not at all expecting so loud a report, Pierre shuddered at the sound and
then, smiling at his own sensations, stood still. The smoke, rendered
denser by the mist, prevented him from seeing anything for an instant,
but there was no second report as he had expected. He only heard
Dolokhov's hurried steps, and his figure came in view through the smoke.
He was pressing one hand to his left side, while the other clutched
his drooping pistol. His face was pale. Rostov ran toward him and said
something.

"No-o-o!" muttered Dolokhov through his teeth, "no, it's not over." And
after stumbling a few staggering steps right up to the saber, he sank
on the snow beside it. His left hand was bloody; he wiped it on his
coat and supported himself with it. His frowning face was pallid and
quivered.

"Plea..." began Dolokhov, but could not at first pronounce the word.

"Please," he uttered with an effort.

Pierre, hardly restraining his sobs, began running toward Dolokhov and
was about to cross the space between the barriers, when Dolokhov cried:

"To your barrier!" and Pierre, grasping what was meant, stopped by his
saber. Only ten paces divided them. Dolokhov lowered his head to the
snow, greedily bit at it, again raised his head, adjusted himself, drew
in his legs and sat up, seeking a firm center of gravity. He sucked and
swallowed the cold snow, his lips quivered but his eyes, still smiling,
glittered with effort and exasperation as he mustered his remaining
strength. He raised his pistol and aimed.

"Sideways! Cover yourself with your pistol!" ejaculated Nesvitski.

"Cover yourself!" even Denisov cried to his adversary.

Pierre, with a gentle smile of pity and remorse, his arms and legs
helplessly spread out, stood with his broad chest directly facing
Dolokhov looked sorrowfully at him. Denisov, Rostov, and Nesvitski
closed their eyes. At the same instant they heard a report and
Dolokhov's angry cry.

"Missed!" shouted Dolokhov, and he lay helplessly, face downwards on the
snow.

Pierre clutched his temples, and turning round went into the forest,
trampling through the deep snow, and muttering incoherent words:

"Folly... folly! Death... lies..." he repeated, puckering his face.

Nesvitski stopped him and took him home.

Rostov and Denisov drove away with the wounded Dolokhov.

The latter lay silent in the sleigh with closed eyes and did not answer
a word to the questions addressed to him. But on entering Moscow he
suddenly came to and, lifting his head with an effort, took Rostov, who
was sitting beside him, by the hand. Rostov was struck by the totally
altered and unexpectedly rapturous and tender expression on Dolokhov's
face.

"Well? How do you feel?" he asked.

"Bad! But it's not that, my friend-" said Dolokhov with a gasping voice.
"Where are we? In Moscow, I know. I don't matter, but I have killed her,
killed... She won't get over it! She won't survive...."

"Who?" asked Rostov.

"My mother! My mother, my angel, my adored angel mother," and Dolokhov
pressed Rostov's hand and burst into tears.

When he had become a little quieter, he explained to Rostov that he was
living with his mother, who, if she saw him dying, would not survive it.
He implored Rostov to go on and prepare her.

Rostov went on ahead to do what was asked, and to his great surprise
learned that Dolokhov the brawler, Dolokhov the bully, lived in Moscow
with an old mother and a hunchback sister, and was the most affectionate
of sons and brothers.





CHAPTER VI


Pierre had of late rarely seen his wife alone. Both in Petersburg and in
Moscow their house was always full of visitors. The night after the
duel he did not go to his bedroom but, as he often did, remained in his
father's room, that huge room in which Count Bezukhov had died.

He lay down on the sofa meaning to fall asleep and forget all that
had happened to him, but could not do so. Such a storm of feelings,
thoughts, and memories suddenly arose within him that he could not fall
asleep, nor even remain in one place, but had to jump up and pace the
room with rapid steps. Now he seemed to see her in the early days of
their marriage, with bare shoulders and a languid, passionate look on
her face, and then immediately he saw beside her Dolokhov's handsome,
insolent, hard, and mocking face as he had seen it at the banquet, and
then that same face pale, quivering, and suffering, as it had been when
he reeled and sank on the snow.

"What has happened?" he asked himself. "I have killed her lover, yes,
killed my wife's lover. Yes, that was it! And why? How did I come to do
it?"--"Because you married her," answered an inner voice.

"But in what was I to blame?" he asked. "In marrying her without loving
her; in deceiving yourself and her." And he vividly recalled that moment
after supper at Prince Vasili's, when he spoke those words he had found
so difficult to utter: "I love you." "It all comes from that! Even then
I felt it," he thought. "I felt then that it was not so, that I had no
right to do it. And so it turns out."

He remembered his honeymoon and blushed at the recollection.
Particularly vivid, humiliating, and shameful was the recollection of
how one day soon after his marriage he came out of the bedroom into his
study a little before noon in his silk dressing gown and found his head
steward there, who, bowing respectfully, looked into his face and at
his dressing gown and smiled slightly, as if expressing respectful
understanding of his employer's happiness.

"But how often I have felt proud of her, proud of her majestic beauty
and social tact," thought he; "been proud of my house, in which she
received all Petersburg, proud of her unapproachability and beauty. So
this is what I was proud of! I then thought that I did not understand
her. How often when considering her character I have told myself that
I was to blame for not understanding her, for not understanding that
constant composure and complacency and lack of all interests or desires,
and the whole secret lies in the terrible truth that she is a depraved
woman. Now I have spoken that terrible word to myself all has become
clear.

"Anatole used to come to borrow money from her and used to kiss her
naked shoulders. She did not give him the money, but let herself be
kissed. Her father in jest tried to rouse her jealousy, and she replied
with a calm smile that she was not so stupid as to be jealous: 'Let him
do what he pleases,' she used to say of me. One day I asked her if she
felt any symptoms of pregnancy. She laughed contemptuously and said she
was not a fool to want to have children, and that she was not going to
have any children by me."

Then he recalled the coarseness and bluntness of her thoughts and the
vulgarity of the expressions that were natural to her, though she had
been brought up in the most aristocratic circles.

"I'm not such a fool.... Just you try it on.... Allez-vous promener," *
she used to say. Often seeing the success she had with young and old men
and women Pierre could not understand why he did not love her.


    * "You clear out of this."


"Yes, I never loved her," said he to himself; "I knew she was a depraved
woman," he repeated, "but dared not admit it to myself. And now there's
Dolokhov sitting in the snow with a forced smile and perhaps dying,
while meeting my remorse with some forced bravado!"

Pierre was one of those people who, in spite of an appearance of what
is called weak character, do not seek a confidant in their troubles. He
digested his sufferings alone.

"It is all, all her fault," he said to himself; "but what of that? Why
did I bind myself to her? Why did I say 'Je vous aime' * to her, which
was a lie, and worse than a lie? I am guilty and must endure... what?
A slur on my name? A misfortune for life? Oh, that's nonsense," he
thought. "The slur on my name and honor--that's all apart from myself."


    * I love you.


"Louis XVI was executed because they said he was dishonorable and a
criminal," came into Pierre's head, "and from their point of view they
were right, as were those too who canonized him and died a martyr's
death for his sake. Then Robespierre was beheaded for being a despot.
Who is right and who is wrong? No one! But if you are alive--live:
tomorrow you'll die as I might have died an hour ago. And is it worth
tormenting oneself, when one has only a moment of life in comparison
with eternity?"

But at the moment when he imagined himself calmed by such reflections,
she suddenly came into his mind as she was at the moments when he had
most strongly expressed his insincere love for her, and he felt the
blood rush to his heart and had again to get up and move about and break
and tear whatever came to his hand. "Why did I tell her that 'Je vous
aime'?" he kept repeating to himself. And when he had said it for the
tenth time, Moliere's words: "Mais que diable allait-il faire dans cette
galere?"* occurred to him, and he began to laugh at himself.

     * "But what the devil was he doing in that galley?"

In the night he called his valet and told him to pack up to go to
Petersburg. He could not imagine how he could speak to her now. He
resolved to go away next day and leave a letter informing her of his
intention to part from her forever.

Next morning when the valet came into the room with his coffee, Pierre
was lying asleep on the ottoman with an open book in his hand.

He woke up and looked round for a while with a startled expression,
unable to realize where he was.

"The countess told me to inquire whether your excellency was at home,"
said the valet.

But before Pierre could decide what answer he would send, the countess
herself in a white satin dressing gown embroidered with silver and with
simply dressed hair (two immense plaits twice round her lovely head like
a coronet) entered the room, calm and majestic, except that there was
a wrathful wrinkle on her rather prominent marble brow. With her
imperturbable calm she did not begin to speak in front of the valet.
She knew of the duel and had come to speak about it. She waited till the
valet had set down the coffee things and left the room. Pierre looked
at her timidly over his spectacles, and like a hare surrounded by hounds
who lays back her ears and continues to crouch motionless before her
enemies, he tried to continue reading. But feeling this to be senseless
and impossible, he again glanced timidly at her. She did not sit down
but looked at him with a contemptuous smile, waiting for the valet to
go.

"Well, what's this now? What have you been up to now, I should like to
know?" she asked sternly.

"I? What have I...?" stammered Pierre.

"So it seems you're a hero, eh? Come now, what was this duel about? What
is it meant to prove? What? I ask you."

Pierre turned over heavily on the ottoman and opened his mouth, but
could not reply.

"If you won't answer, I'll tell you..." Helene went on. "You believe
everything you're told. You were told..." Helene laughed, "that Dolokhov
was my lover," she said in French with her coarse plainness of speech,
uttering the word amant as casually as any other word, "and you believed
it! Well, what have you proved? What does this duel prove? That you're
a fool, que vous etes un sot, but everybody knew that. What will be the
result? That I shall be the laughingstock of all Moscow, that everyone
will say that you, drunk and not knowing what you were about, challenged
a man you are jealous of without cause." Helene raised her voice and
became more and more excited, "A man who's a better man than you in
every way..."

"Hm... Hm...!" growled Pierre, frowning without looking at her, and not
moving a muscle.

"And how could you believe he was my lover? Why? Because I like his
company? If you were cleverer and more agreeable, I should prefer
yours."

"Don't speak to me... I beg you," muttered Pierre hoarsely.

"Why shouldn't I speak? I can speak as I like, and I tell you plainly
that there are not many wives with husbands such as you who would not
have taken lovers (des amants), but I have not done so," said she.

Pierre wished to say something, looked at her with eyes whose strange
expression she did not understand, and lay down again. He was suffering
physically at that moment, there was a weight on his chest and he could
not breathe. He knew that he must do something to put an end to this
suffering, but what he wanted to do was too terrible.

"We had better separate," he muttered in a broken voice.

"Separate? Very well, but only if you give me a fortune," said Helene.
"Separate! That's a thing to frighten me with!"

Pierre leaped up from the sofa and rushed staggering toward her.

"I'll kill you!" he shouted, and seizing the marble top of a table
with a strength he had never before felt, he made a step toward her
brandishing the slab.

Helene's face became terrible, she shrieked and sprang aside. His
father's nature showed itself in Pierre. He felt the fascination and
delight of frenzy. He flung down the slab, broke it, and swooping down
on her with outstretched hands shouted, "Get out!" in such a terrible
voice that the whole house heard it with horror. God knows what he would
have done at that moment had Helene not fled from the room.


A week later Pierre gave his wife full power to control all his estates
in Great Russia, which formed the larger part of his property, and left
for Petersburg alone.





CHAPTER VII


Two months had elapsed since the news of the battle of Austerlitz and
the loss of Prince Andrew had reached Bald Hills, and in spite of the
letters sent through the embassy and all the searches made, his body had
not been found nor was he on the list of prisoners. What was worst of
all for his relations was the fact that there was still a possibility of
his having been picked up on the battlefield by the people of the
place and that he might now be lying, recovering or dying, alone among
strangers and unable to send news of himself. The gazettes from which
the old prince first heard of the defeat at Austerlitz stated, as usual
very briefly and vaguely, that after brilliant engagements the Russians
had had to retreat and had made their withdrawal in perfect order. The
old prince understood from this official report that our army had been
defeated. A week after the gazette report of the battle of Austerlitz
came a letter from Kutuzov informing the prince of the fate that had
befallen his son.

"Your son," wrote Kutuzov, "fell before my eyes, a standard in his hand
and at the head of a regiment--he fell as a hero, worthy of his father
and his fatherland. To the great regret of myself and of the whole army
it is still uncertain whether he is alive or not. I comfort myself and
you with the hope that your son is alive, for otherwise he would have
been mentioned among the officers found on the field of battle, a list
of whom has been sent me under flag of truce."

After receiving this news late in the evening, when he was alone in his
study, the old prince went for his walk as usual next morning, but he
was silent with his steward, the gardener, and the architect, and though
he looked very grim he said nothing to anyone.

When Princess Mary went to him at the usual hour he was working at his
lathe and, as usual, did not look round at her.

"Ah, Princess Mary!" he said suddenly in an unnatural voice, throwing
down his chisel. (The wheel continued to revolve by its own impetus,
and Princess Mary long remembered the dying creak of that wheel, which
merged in her memory with what followed.)

She approached him, saw his face, and something gave way within her.
Her eyes grew dim. By the expression of her father's face, not sad, not
crushed, but angry and working unnaturally, she saw that hanging over
her and about to crush her was some terrible misfortune, the worst
in life, one she had not yet experienced, irreparable and
incomprehensible--the death of one she loved.

"Father! Andrew!"--said the ungraceful, awkward princess with such an
indescribable charm of sorrow and self-forgetfulness that her father
could not bear her look but turned away with a sob.

"Bad news! He's not among the prisoners nor among the killed! Kutuzov
writes..." and he screamed as piercingly as if he wished to drive the
princess away by that scream... "Killed!"

The princess did not fall down or faint. She was already pale, but on
hearing these words her face changed and something brightened in her
beautiful, radiant eyes. It was as if joy--a supreme joy apart from the
joys and sorrows of this world--overflowed the great grief within her.
She forgot all fear of her father, went up to him, took his hand, and
drawing him down put her arm round his thin, scraggy neck.

"Father," she said, "do not turn away from me, let us weep together."

"Scoundrels! Blackguards!" shrieked the old man, turning his face away
from her. "Destroying the army, destroying the men! And why? Go, go and
tell Lise."

The princess sank helplessly into an armchair beside her father and
wept. She saw her brother now as he had been at the moment when he took
leave of her and of Lise, his look tender yet proud. She saw him tender
and amused as he was when he put on the little icon. "Did he believe?
Had he repented of his unbelief? Was he now there? There in the realms
of eternal peace and blessedness?" she thought.

"Father, tell me how it happened," she asked through her tears.

"Go! Go! Killed in battle, where the best of Russian men and Russia's
glory were led to destruction. Go, Princess Mary. Go and tell Lise. I
will follow."

When Princess Mary returned from her father, the little princess sat
working and looked up with that curious expression of inner, happy calm
peculiar to pregnant women. It was evident that her eyes did not see
Princess Mary but were looking within... into herself... at something
joyful and mysterious taking place within her.

"Mary," she said, moving away from the embroidery frame and lying back,
"give me your hand." She took her sister-in-law's hand and held it below
her waist.

Her eyes were smiling expectantly, her downy lip rose and remained
lifted in childlike happiness.

Princess Mary knelt down before her and hid her face in the folds of her
sister-in-law's dress.

"There, there! Do you feel it? I feel so strange. And do you know, Mary,
I am going to love him very much," said Lise, looking with bright and
happy eyes at her sister-in-law.

Princess Mary could not lift her head, she was weeping.

"What is the matter, Mary?"

"Nothing... only I feel sad... sad about Andrew," she said, wiping away
her tears on her sister-in-law's knee.

Several times in the course of the morning Princess Mary began trying to
prepare her sister-in-law, and every time began to cry. Unobservant as
was the little princess, these tears, the cause of which she did not
understand, agitated her. She said nothing but looked about uneasily as
if in search of something. Before dinner the old prince, of whom she was
always afraid, came into her room with a peculiarly restless and malign
expression and went out again without saying a word. She looked at
Princess Mary, then sat thinking for a while with that expression of
attention to something within her that is only seen in pregnant women,
and suddenly began to cry.

"Has anything come from Andrew?" she asked.

"No, you know it's too soon for news. But my father is anxious and I
feel afraid."

"So there's nothing?"

"Nothing," answered Princess Mary, looking firmly with her radiant eyes
at her sister-in-law.

She had determined not to tell her and persuaded her father to hide the
terrible news from her till after her confinement, which was expected
within a few days. Princess Mary and the old prince each bore and hid
their grief in their own way. The old prince would not cherish any hope:
he made up his mind that Prince Andrew had been killed, and though he
sent an official to Austria to seek for traces of his son, he ordered a
monument from Moscow which he intended to erect in his own garden to his
memory, and he told everybody that his son had been killed. He tried not
to change his former way of life, but his strength failed him. He walked
less, ate less, slept less, and became weaker every day. Princess Mary
hoped. She prayed for her brother as living and was always awaiting news
of his return.





CHAPTER VIII


"Dearest," said the little princess after breakfast on the morning of
the nineteenth March, and her downy little lip rose from old habit, but
as sorrow was manifest in every smile, the sound of every word, and even
every footstep in that house since the terrible news had come, so now
the smile of the little princess--influenced by the general mood though
without knowing its cause--was such as to remind one still more of the
general sorrow.

"Dearest, I'm afraid this morning's fruschtique *--as Foka the cook
calls it--has disagreed with me."


    * Fruhstuck: breakfast.


"What is the matter with you, my darling? You look pale. Oh, you
are very pale!" said Princess Mary in alarm, running with her soft,
ponderous steps up to her sister-in-law.

"Your excellency, should not Mary Bogdanovna be sent for?" said one
of the maids who was present. (Mary Bogdanovna was a midwife from the
neighboring town, who had been at Bald Hills for the last fortnight.)

"Oh yes," assented Princess Mary, "perhaps that's it. I'll go. Courage,
my angel." She kissed Lise and was about to leave the room.

"Oh, no, no!" And besides the pallor and the physical suffering on the
little princess' face, an expression of childish fear of inevitable pain
showed itself.

"No, it's only indigestion?... Say it's only indigestion, say so,
Mary! Say..." And the little princess began to cry capriciously like
a suffering child and to wring her little hands even with some
affectation. Princess Mary ran out of the room to fetch Mary Bogdanovna.

"Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu! Oh!" she heard as she left the room.

The midwife was already on her way to meet her, rubbing her small, plump
white hands with an air of calm importance.

"Mary Bogdanovna, I think it's beginning!" said Princess Mary looking at
the midwife with wide-open eyes of alarm.

"Well, the Lord be thanked, Princess," said Mary Bogdanovna, not
hastening her steps. "You young ladies should not know anything about
it."

"But how is it the doctor from Moscow is not here yet?" said the
princess. (In accordance with Lise's and Prince Andrew's wishes they had
sent in good time to Moscow for a doctor and were expecting him at any
moment.)

"No matter, Princess, don't be alarmed," said Mary Bogdanovna. "We'll
manage very well without a doctor."

Five minutes later Princess Mary from her room heard something heavy
being carried by. She looked out. The men servants were carrying the
large leather sofa from Prince Andrew's study into the bedroom. On their
faces was a quiet and solemn look.

Princess Mary sat alone in her room listening to the sounds in the
house, now and then opening her door when someone passed and watching
what was going on in the passage. Some women passing with quiet steps in
and out of the bedroom glanced at the princess and turned away. She did
not venture to ask any questions, and shut the door again, now sitting
down in her easy chair, now taking her prayer book, now kneeling before
the icon stand. To her surprise and distress she found that her prayers
did not calm her excitement. Suddenly her door opened softly and her old
nurse, Praskovya Savishna, who hardly ever came to that room as the old
prince had forbidden it, appeared on the threshold with a shawl round
her head.

"I've come to sit with you a bit, Masha," said the nurse, "and here
I've brought the prince's wedding candles to light before his saint, my
angel," she said with a sigh.

"Oh, nurse, I'm so glad!"

"God is merciful, birdie."

The nurse lit the gilt candles before the icons and sat down by the door
with her knitting. Princess Mary took a book and began reading. Only
when footsteps or voices were heard did they look at one another, the
princess anxious and inquiring, the nurse encouraging. Everyone in the
house was dominated by the same feeling that Princess Mary experienced
as she sat in her room. But owing to the superstition that the fewer
the people who know of it the less a woman in travail suffers, everyone
tried to pretend not to know; no one spoke of it, but apart from the
ordinary staid and respectful good manners habitual in the prince's
household, a common anxiety, a softening of the heart, and a
consciousness that something great and mysterious was being accomplished
at that moment made itself felt.

There was no laughter in the maids' large hall. In the men servants'
hall all sat waiting, silently and alert. In the outlying serfs'
quarters torches and candles were burning and no one slept. The old
prince, stepping on his heels, paced up and down his study and sent
Tikhon to ask Mary Bogdanovna what news.--"Say only that 'the prince
told me to ask,' and come and tell me her answer."

"Inform the prince that labor has begun," said Mary Bogdanovna, giving
the messenger a significant look.

Tikhon went and told the prince.

"Very good!" said the prince closing the door behind him, and Tikhon did
not hear the slightest sound from the study after that.

After a while he re-entered it as if to snuff the candles, and, seeing
the prince was lying on the sofa, looked at him, noticed his perturbed
face, shook his head, and going up to him silently kissed him on the
shoulder and left the room without snuffing the candles or saying why he
had entered. The most solemn mystery in the world continued its course.
Evening passed, night came, and the feeling of suspense and softening of
heart in the presence of the unfathomable did not lessen but increased.
No one slept.

It was one of those March nights when winter seems to wish to resume its
sway and scatters its last snows and storms with desperate fury. A relay
of horses had been sent up the highroad to meet the German doctor from
Moscow who was expected every moment, and men on horseback with lanterns
were sent to the crossroads to guide him over the country road with its
hollows and snow-covered pools of water.

Princess Mary had long since put aside her book: she sat silent, her
luminous eyes fixed on her nurse's wrinkled face (every line of which
she knew so well), on the lock of gray hair that escaped from under the
kerchief, and the loose skin that hung under her chin.

Nurse Savishna, knitting in hand, was telling in low tones, scarcely
hearing or understanding her own words, what she had told hundreds of
times before: how the late princess had given birth to Princess Mary
in Kishenev with only a Moldavian peasant woman to help instead of a
midwife.

"God is merciful, doctors are never needed," she said.

Suddenly a gust of wind beat violently against the casement of the
window, from which the double frame had been removed (by order of the
prince, one window frame was removed in each room as soon as the larks
returned), and, forcing open a loosely closed latch, set the damask
curtain flapping and blew out the candle with its chill, snowy draft.
Princess Mary shuddered; her nurse, putting down the stocking she was
knitting, went to the window and leaning out tried to catch the open
casement. The cold wind flapped the ends of her kerchief and her loose
locks of gray hair.

"Princess, my dear, there's someone driving up the avenue!" she said,
holding the casement and not closing it. "With lanterns. Most likely the
doctor."

"Oh, my God! thank God!" said Princess Mary. "I must go and meet him, he
does not know Russian."

Princess Mary threw a shawl over her head and ran to meet the newcomer.
As she was crossing the anteroom she saw through the window a carriage
with lanterns, standing at the entrance. She went out on the stairs. On
a banister post stood a tallow candle which guttered in the draft. On
the landing below, Philip, the footman, stood looking scared and holding
another candle. Still lower, beyond the turn of the staircase, one
could hear the footstep of someone in thick felt boots, and a voice that
seemed familiar to Princess Mary was saying something.

"Thank God!" said the voice. "And Father?"

"Gone to bed," replied the voice of Demyan the house steward, who was
downstairs.

Then the voice said something more, Demyan replied, and the steps in the
felt boots approached the unseen bend of the staircase more rapidly.

"It's Andrew!" thought Princess Mary. "No it can't be, that would be too
extraordinary," and at the very moment she thought this, the face and
figure of Prince Andrew, in a fur cloak the deep collar of which covered
with snow, appeared on the landing where the footman stood with the
candle. Yes, it was he, pale, thin, with a changed and strangely
softened but agitated expression on his face. He came up the stairs and
embraced his sister.

"You did not get my letter?" he asked, and not waiting for a
reply--which he would not have received, for the princess was unable to
speak--he turned back, rapidly mounted the stairs again with the doctor
who had entered the hall after him (they had met at the last post
station), and again embraced his sister.

"What a strange fate, Masha darling!" And having taken off his cloak and
felt boots, he went to the little princess' apartment.





CHAPTER IX


The little princess lay supported by pillows, with a white cap on her
head (the pains had just left her). Strands of her black hair lay round
her inflamed and perspiring cheeks, her charming rosy mouth with its
downy lip was open and she was smiling joyfully. Prince Andrew entered
and paused facing her at the foot of the sofa on which she was lying.
Her glittering eyes, filled with childlike fear and excitement, rested
on him without changing their expression. "I love you all and have done
no harm to anyone; why must I suffer so? Help me!" her look seemed to
say. She saw her husband, but did not realize the significance of his
appearance before her now. Prince Andrew went round the sofa and kissed
her forehead.

"My darling!" he said--a word he had never used to her before. "God is
merciful...."

She looked at him inquiringly and with childlike reproach.

"I expected help from you and I get none, none from you either!" said
her eyes. She was not surprised at his having come; she did not realize
that he had come. His coming had nothing to do with her sufferings or
with their relief. The pangs began again and Mary Bogdanovna advised
Prince Andrew to leave the room.

The doctor entered. Prince Andrew went out and, meeting Princess Mary,
again joined her. They began talking in whispers, but their talk broke
off at every moment. They waited and listened.

"Go, dear," said Princess Mary.

Prince Andrew went again to his wife and sat waiting in the room next
to hers. A woman came from the bedroom with a frightened face and became
confused when she saw Prince Andrew. He covered his face with his hands
and remained so for some minutes. Piteous, helpless, animal moans came
through the door. Prince Andrew got up, went to the door, and tried to
open it. Someone was holding it shut.

"You can't come in! You can't!" said a terrified voice from within.

He began pacing the room. The screaming ceased, and a few more seconds
went by. Then suddenly a terrible shriek--it could not be hers, she
could not scream like that--came from the bedroom. Prince Andrew ran to
the door; the scream ceased and he heard the wail of an infant.

"What have they taken a baby in there for?" thought Prince Andrew in the
first second. "A baby? What baby...? Why is there a baby there? Or is
the baby born?"

Then suddenly he realized the joyful significance of that wail; tears
choked him, and leaning his elbows on the window sill be began to cry,
sobbing like a child. The door opened. The doctor with his shirt sleeves
tucked up, without a coat, pale and with a trembling jaw, came out
of the room. Prince Andrew turned to him, but the doctor gave him a
bewildered look and passed by without a word. A woman rushed out and
seeing Prince Andrew stopped, hesitating on the threshold. He went into
his wife's room. She was lying dead, in the same position he had seen
her in five minutes before and, despite the fixed eyes and the pallor of
the cheeks, the same expression was on her charming childlike face with
its upper lip covered with tiny black hair.

"I love you all, and have done no harm to anyone; and what have you done
to me?"--said her charming, pathetic, dead face.

In a corner of the room something red and tiny gave a grunt and squealed
in Mary Bogdanovna's trembling white hands.


Two hours later Prince Andrew, stepping softly, went into his father's
room. The old man already knew everything. He was standing close to
the door and as soon as it opened his rough old arms closed like a vise
round his son's neck, and without a word he began to sob like a child.


Three days later the little princess was buried, and Prince Andrew went
up the steps to where the coffin stood, to give her the farewell kiss.
And there in the coffin was the same face, though with closed eyes. "Ah,
what have you done to me?" it still seemed to say, and Prince Andrew
felt that something gave way in his soul and that he was guilty of a sin
he could neither remedy nor forget. He could not weep. The old man too
came up and kissed the waxen little hands that lay quietly crossed one
on the other on her breast, and to him, too, her face seemed to say:
"Ah, what have you done to me, and why?" And at the sight the old man
turned angrily away.


Another five days passed, and then the young Prince Nicholas Andreevich
was baptized. The wet nurse supported the coverlet with her chin,
while the priest with a goose feather anointed the boy's little red and
wrinkled soles and palms.

His grandfather, who was his godfather, trembling and afraid of dropping
him, carried the infant round the battered tin font and handed him over
to the godmother, Princess Mary. Prince Andrew sat in another room,
faint with fear lest the baby should be drowned in the font, and awaited
the termination of the ceremony. He looked up joyfully at the baby when
the nurse brought it to him and nodded approval when she told him that
the wax with the baby's hair had not sunk in the font but had floated.





CHAPTER X


Rostov's share in Dolokhov's duel with Bezukhov was hushed up by the
efforts of the old count, and instead of being degraded to the ranks
as he expected he was appointed an adjutant to the governor general of
Moscow. As a result he could not go to the country with the rest of the
family, but was kept all summer in Moscow by his new duties. Dolokhov
recovered, and Rostov became very friendly with him during his
convalescence. Dolokhov lay ill at his mother's who loved him
passionately and tenderly, and old Mary Ivanovna, who had grown fond of
Rostov for his friendship to her Fedya, often talked to him about her
son.

"Yes, Count," she would say, "he is too noble and pure-souled for
our present, depraved world. No one now loves virtue; it seems like
a reproach to everyone. Now tell me, Count, was it right, was it
honorable, of Bezukhov? And Fedya, with his noble spirit, loved him and
even now never says a word against him. Those pranks in Petersburg when
they played some tricks on a policeman, didn't they do it together?
And there! Bezukhov got off scotfree, while Fedya had to bear the whole
burden on his shoulders. Fancy what he had to go through! It's true he
has been reinstated, but how could they fail to do that? I think there
were not many such gallant sons of the fatherland out there as he. And
now--this duel! Have these people no feeling, or honor? Knowing him to
be an only son, to challenge him and shoot so straight! It's well
God had mercy on us. And what was it for? Who doesn't have intrigues
nowadays? Why, if he was so jealous, as I see things he should have
shown it sooner, but he lets it go on for months. And then to call him
out, reckoning on Fedya not fighting because he owed him money! What
baseness! What meanness! I know you understand Fedya, my dear count;
that, believe me, is why I am so fond of you. Few people do understand
him. He is such a lofty, heavenly soul!"

Dolokhov himself during his convalescence spoke to Rostov in a way no
one would have expected of him.

"I know people consider me a bad man!" he said. "Let them! I don't care
a straw about anyone but those I love; but those I love, I love so that
I would give my life for them, and the others I'd throttle if they
stood in my way. I have an adored, a priceless mother, and two or three
friends--you among them--and as for the rest I only care about them
in so far as they are harmful or useful. And most of them are harmful,
especially the women. Yes, dear boy," he continued, "I have met loving,
noble, high-minded men, but I have not yet met any women--countesses
or cooks--who were not venal. I have not yet met that divine purity and
devotion I look for in women. If I found such a one I'd give my life for
her! But those!..." and he made a gesture of contempt. "And believe me,
if I still value my life it is only because I still hope to meet such
a divine creature, who will regenerate, purify, and elevate me. But you
don't understand it."

"Oh, yes, I quite understand," answered Rostov, who was under his new
friend's influence.

In the autumn the Rostovs returned to Moscow. Early in the winter
Denisov also came back and stayed with them. The first half of the
winter of 1806, which Nicholas Rostov spent in Moscow, was one of the
happiest, merriest times for him and the whole family. Nicholas brought
many young men to his parents' house. Vera was a handsome girl of
twenty; Sonya a girl of sixteen with all the charm of an opening flower;
Natasha, half grown up and half child, was now childishly amusing, now
girlishly enchanting.

At that time in the Rostovs' house there prevailed an amorous atmosphere
characteristic of homes where there are very young and very
charming girls. Every young man who came to the house--seeing those
impressionable, smiling young faces (smiling probably at their own
happiness), feeling the eager bustle around him, and hearing the fitful
bursts of song and music and the inconsequent but friendly prattle of
young girls ready for anything and full of hope--experienced the
same feeling; sharing with the young folk of the Rostovs' household a
readiness to fall in love and an expectation of happiness.

Among the young men introduced by Rostov one of the first was Dolokhov,
whom everyone in the house liked except Natasha. She almost quarreled
with her brother about him. She insisted that he was a bad man, and
that in the duel with Bezukhov, Pierre was right and Dolokhov wrong, and
further that he was disagreeable and unnatural.

"There's nothing for me to understand," she cried out with resolute
self-will, "he is wicked and heartless. There now, I like your Denisov
though he is a rake and all that, still I like him; so you see I do
understand. I don't know how to put it... with this one everything is
calculated, and I don't like that. But Denisov..."

"Oh, Denisov is quite different," replied Nicholas, implying that even
Denisov was nothing compared to Dolokhov--"you must understand what a
soul there is in Dolokhov, you should see him with his mother. What a
heart!"

"Well, I don't know about that, but I am uncomfortable with him. And do
you know he has fallen in love with Sonya?"

"What nonsense..."

"I'm certain of it; you'll see."

Natasha's prediction proved true. Dolokhov, who did not usually care
for the society of ladies, began to come often to the house, and the
question for whose sake he came (though no one spoke of it) was soon
settled. He came because of Sonya. And Sonya, though she would never
have dared to say so, knew it and blushed scarlet every time Dolokhov
appeared.

Dolokhov often dined at the Rostovs', never missed a performance at
which they were present, and went to Iogel's balls for young people
which the Rostovs always attended. He was pointedly attentive to Sonya
and looked at her in such a way that not only could she not bear his
glances without coloring, but even the old countess and Natasha blushed
when they saw his looks.

It was evident that this strange, strong man was under the irresistible
influence of the dark, graceful girl who loved another.

Rostov noticed something new in Dolokhov's relations with Sonya, but
he did not explain to himself what these new relations were. "They're
always in love with someone," he thought of Sonya and Natasha. But he
was not as much at ease with Sonya and Dolokhov as before and was less
frequently at home.

In the autumn of 1806 everybody had again begun talking of the war with
Napoleon with even greater warmth than the year before. Orders were
given to raise recruits, ten men in every thousand for the regular army,
and besides this, nine men in every thousand for the militia. Everywhere
Bonaparte was anathematized and in Moscow nothing but the coming war
was talked of. For the Rostov family the whole interest of these
preparations for war lay in the fact that Nicholas would not hear of
remaining in Moscow, and only awaited the termination of Denisov's
furlough after Christmas to return with him to their regiment. His
approaching departure did not prevent his amusing himself, but rather
gave zest to his pleasures. He spent the greater part of his time away
from home, at dinners, parties, and balls.





CHAPTER XI


On the third day after Christmas Nicholas dined at home, a thing he had
rarely done of late. It was a grand farewell dinner, as he and Denisov
were leaving to join their regiment after Epiphany. About twenty people
were present, including Dolokhov and Denisov.

Never had love been so much in the air, and never had the amorous
atmosphere made itself so strongly felt in the Rostovs' house as at this
holiday time. "Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That
is the only reality in the world, all else is folly. It is the one thing
we are interested in here," said the spirit of the place.

Nicholas, having as usual exhausted two pairs of horses, without
visiting all the places he meant to go to and where he had been invited,
returned home just before dinner. As soon as he entered he noticed and
felt the tension of the amorous air in the house, and also noticed a
curious embarrassment among some of those present. Sonya, Dolokhov,
and the old countess were especially disturbed, and to a lesser degree
Natasha. Nicholas understood that something must have happened between
Sonya and Dolokhov before dinner, and with the kindly sensitiveness
natural to him was very gentle and wary with them both at dinner. On
that same evening there was to be one of the balls that Iogel (the
dancing master) gave for his pupils during the holidays.

"Nicholas, will you come to Iogel's? Please do!" said Natasha. "He asked
you, and Vasili Dmitrich * is also going."


    * Denisov.


"Where would I not go at the countess' command!" said Denisov, who at
the Rostovs' had jocularly assumed the role of Natasha's knight. "I'm
even weady to dance the pas de chale."

"If I have time," answered Nicholas. "But I promised the Arkharovs; they
have a party."

"And you?" he asked Dolokhov, but as soon as he had asked the question
he noticed that it should not have been put.

"Perhaps," coldly and angrily replied Dolokhov, glancing at Sonya, and,
scowling, he gave Nicholas just such a look as he had given Pierre at
the Club dinner.

"There is something up," thought Nicholas, and he was further confirmed
in this conclusion by the fact that Dolokhov left immediately after
dinner. He called Natasha and asked her what was the matter.

"And I was looking for you," said Natasha running out to him. "I told
you, but you would not believe it," she said triumphantly. "He has
proposed to Sonya!"

Little as Nicholas had occupied himself with Sonya of late, something
seemed to give way within him at this news. Dolokhov was a suitable and
in some respects a brilliant match for the dowerless, orphan girl. From
the point of view of the old countess and of society it was out of the
question for her to refuse him. And therefore Nicholas' first feeling
on hearing the news was one of anger with Sonya.... He tried to say,
"That's capital; of course she'll forget her childish promises and
accept the offer," but before he had time to say it Natasha began again.

"And fancy! she refused him quite definitely!" adding, after a pause,
"she told him she loved another."

"Yes, my Sonya could not have done otherwise!" thought Nicholas.

"Much as Mamma pressed her, she refused, and I know she won't change
once she has said..."

"And Mamma pressed her!" said Nicholas reproachfully.

"Yes," said Natasha. "Do you know, Nicholas--don't be angry--but I know
you will not marry her. I know, heaven knows how, but I know for certain
that you won't marry her."

"Now you don't know that at all!" said Nicholas. "But I must talk to
her. What a darling Sonya is!" he added with a smile.

"Ah, she is indeed a darling! I'll send her to you."

And Natasha kissed her brother and ran away.

A minute later Sonya came in with a frightened, guilty, and scared look.
Nicholas went up to her and kissed her hand. This was the first time
since his return that they had talked alone and about their love.

"Sophie," he began, timidly at first and then more and more boldly,
"if you wish to refuse one who is not only a brilliant and advantageous
match but a splendid, noble fellow... he is my friend..."

Sonya interrupted him.

"I have already refused," she said hurriedly.

"If you are refusing for my sake, I am afraid that I..."

Sonya again interrupted. She gave him an imploring, frightened look.

"Nicholas, don't tell me that!" she said.

"No, but I must. It may be arrogant of me, but still it is best to say
it. If you refuse him on my account, I must tell you the whole truth. I
love you, and I think I love you more than anyone else...."

"That is enough for me," said Sonya, blushing.

"No, but I have been in love a thousand times and shall fall in
love again, though for no one have I such a feeling of friendship,
confidence, and love as I have for you. Then I am young. Mamma does
not wish it. In a word, I make no promise. And I beg you to consider
Dolokhov's offer," he said, articulating his friend's name with
difficulty.

"Don't say that to me! I want nothing. I love you as a brother and
always shall, and I want nothing more."

"You are an angel: I am not worthy of you, but I am afraid of misleading
you."

And Nicholas again kissed her hand.





CHAPTER XII


Iogel's were the most enjoyable balls in Moscow. So said the mothers as
they watched their young people executing their newly learned steps, and
so said the youths and maidens themselves as they danced till they were
ready to drop, and so said the grown-up young men and women who came to
these balls with an air of condescension and found them most enjoyable.
That year two marriages had come of these balls. The two pretty young
Princesses Gorchakov met suitors there and were married and so further
increased the fame of these dances. What distinguished them from others
was the absence of host or hostess and the presence of the good-natured
Iogel, flying about like a feather and bowing according to the rules of
his art, as he collected the tickets from all his visitors. There was
the fact that only those came who wished to dance and amuse themselves
as girls of thirteen and fourteen do who are wearing long dresses for
the first time. With scarcely any exceptions they all were, or seemed to
be, pretty--so rapturous were their smiles and so sparkling their eyes.
Sometimes the best of the pupils, of whom Natasha, who was exceptionally
graceful, was first, even danced the pas de chale, but at this last ball
only the ecossaise, the anglaise, and the mazurka, which was just coming
into fashion, were danced. Iogel had taken a ballroom in Bezukhov's
house, and the ball, as everyone said, was a great success. There were
many pretty girls and the Rostov girls were among the prettiest. They
were both particularly happy and gay. That evening, proud of Dolokhov's
proposal, her refusal, and her explanation with Nicholas, Sonya twirled
about before she left home so that the maid could hardly get her hair
plaited, and she was transparently radiant with impulsive joy.

Natasha no less proud of her first long dress and of being at a real
ball was even happier. They were both dressed in white muslin with pink
ribbons.

Natasha fell in love the very moment she entered the ballroom. She
was not in love with anyone in particular, but with everyone. Whatever
person she happened to look at she was in love with for that moment.

"Oh, how delightful it is!" she kept saying, running up to Sonya.

Nicholas and Denisov were walking up and down, looking with kindly
patronage at the dancers.

"How sweet she is--she will be a weal beauty!" said Denisov.

"Who?"

"Countess Natasha," answered Denisov.

"And how she dances! What gwace!" he said again after a pause.

"Who are you talking about?"

"About your sister," ejaculated Denisov testily.

Rostov smiled.

"My dear count, you were one of my best pupils--you must dance," said
little Iogel coming up to Nicholas. "Look how many charming young
ladies-" He turned with the same request to Denisov who was also a
former pupil of his.

"No, my dear fellow, I'll be a wallflower," said Denisov. "Don't you
wecollect what bad use I made of your lessons?"

"Oh no!" said Iogel, hastening to reassure him. "You were only
inattentive, but you had talent--oh yes, you had talent!"

 The band struck up the newly introduced mazurka. Nicholas could not
refuse Iogel and asked Sonya to dance. Denisov sat down by the old
ladies and, leaning on his saber and beating time with his foot, told
them something funny and kept them amused, while he watched the young
people dancing, Iogel with Natasha, his pride and his best pupil, were
the first couple. Noiselessly, skillfully stepping with his little feet
in low shoes, Iogel flew first across the hall with Natasha, who, though
shy, went on carefully executing her steps. Denisov did not take
his eyes off her and beat time with his saber in a way that clearly
indicated that if he was not dancing it was because he would not and not
because he could not. In the middle of a figure he beckoned to Rostov
who was passing:

"This is not at all the thing," he said. "What sort of Polish mazuwka is
this? But she does dance splendidly."

Knowing that Denisov had a reputation even in Poland for the masterly
way in which he danced the mazurka, Nicholas ran up to Natasha:

"Go and choose Denisov. He is a real dancer, a wonder!" he said.

When it came to Natasha's turn to choose a partner, she rose and,
tripping rapidly across in her little shoes trimmed with bows, ran
timidly to the corner where Denisov sat. She saw that everybody was
looking at her and waiting. Nicholas saw that Denisov was refusing
though he smiled delightedly. He ran up to them.

"Please, Vasili Dmitrich," Natasha was saying, "do come!"

"Oh no, let me off, Countess," Denisov replied.

"Now then, Vaska," said Nicholas.

"They coax me as if I were Vaska the cat!" said Denisov jokingly.

"I'll sing for you a whole evening," said Natasha.

"Oh, the faiwy! She can do anything with me!" said Denisov, and he
unhooked his saber. He came out from behind the chairs, clasped his
partner's hand firmly, threw back his head, and advanced his foot,
waiting for the beat. Only on horse back and in the mazurka was
Denisov's short stature not noticeable and he looked the fine fellow he
felt himself to be. At the right beat of the music he looked sideways at
his partner with a merry and triumphant air, suddenly stamped with one
foot, bounded from the floor like a ball, and flew round the room taking
his partner with him. He glided silently on one foot half across the
room, and seeming not to notice the chairs was dashing straight at them,
when suddenly, clinking his spurs and spreading out his legs, he stopped
short on his heels, stood so a second, stamped on the spot clanking his
spurs, whirled rapidly round, and, striking his left heel against his
right, flew round again in a circle. Natasha guessed what he meant to
do, and abandoning herself to him followed his lead hardly knowing how.
First he spun her round, holding her now with his left, now with his
right hand, then falling on one knee he twirled her round him, and again
jumping up, dashed so impetuously forward that it seemed as if he would
rush through the whole suite of rooms without drawing breath, and then
he suddenly stopped and performed some new and unexpected steps. When at
last, smartly whirling his partner round in front of her chair, he drew
up with a click of his spurs and bowed to her, Natasha did not even make
him a curtsy. She fixed her eyes on him in amazement, smiling as if she
did not recognize him.

"What does this mean?" she brought out.

Although Iogel did not acknowledge this to be the real mazurka, everyone
was delighted with Denisov's skill, he was asked again and again as a
partner, and the old men began smilingly to talk about Poland and the
good old days. Denisov, flushed after the mazurka and mopping himself
with his handkerchief, sat down by Natasha and did not leave her for the
rest of the evening.





CHAPTER XIII


For two days after that Rostov did not see Dolokhov at his own or at
Dolokhov's home: on the third day he received a note from him:


As I do not intend to be at your house again for reasons you know
of, and am going to rejoin my regiment, I am giving a farewell supper
tonight to my friends--come to the English Hotel.


About ten o'clock Rostov went to the English Hotel straight from the
theater, where he had been with his family and Denisov. He was at once
shown to the best room, which Dolokhov had taken for that evening. Some
twenty men were gathered round a table at which Dolokhov sat between
two candles. On the table was a pile of gold and paper money, and he was
keeping the bank. Rostov had not seen him since his proposal and Sonya's
refusal and felt uncomfortable at the thought of how they would meet.

Dolokhov's clear, cold glance met Rostov as soon as he entered the door,
as though he had long expected him.

"It's a long time since we met," he said. "Thanks for coming. I'll just
finish dealing, and then Ilyushka will come with his chorus."

"I called once or twice at your house," said Rostov, reddening.

Dolokhov made no reply.

"You may punt," he said.

Rostov recalled at that moment a strange conversation he had once had
with Dolokhov. "None but fools trust to luck in play," Dolokhov had then
said.

"Or are you afraid to play with me?" Dolokhov now asked as if guessing
Rostov's thought.

Beneath his smile Rostov saw in him the mood he had shown at the Club
dinner and at other times, when as if tired of everyday life he had felt
a need to escape from it by some strange, and usually cruel, action.

Rostov felt ill at ease. He tried, but failed, to find some joke
with which to reply to Dolokhov's words. But before he had thought
of anything, Dolokhov, looking straight in his face, said slowly and
deliberately so that everyone could hear:

"Do you remember we had a talk about cards... 'He's a fool who trusts to
luck, one should make certain,' and I want to try."

"To try his luck or the certainty?" Rostov asked himself.

"Well, you'd better not play," Dolokhov added, and springing a new pack
of cards said: "Bank, gentlemen!"

Moving the money forward he prepared to deal. Rostov sat down by his
side and at first did not play. Dolokhov kept glancing at him.

"Why don't you play?" he asked.

And strange to say Nicholas felt that he could not help taking up a
card, putting a small stake on it, and beginning to play.

"I have no money with me," he said.

"I'll trust you."

Rostov staked five rubles on a card and lost, staked again, and again
lost. Dolokhov "killed," that is, beat, ten cards of Rostov's running.

"Gentlemen," said Dolokhov after he had dealt for some time. "Please
place your money on the cards or I may get muddled in the reckoning."

One of the players said he hoped he might be trusted.

"Yes, you might, but I am afraid of getting the accounts mixed. So I
ask you to put the money on your cards," replied Dolokhov. "Don't stint
yourself, we'll settle afterwards," he added, turning to Rostov.

The game continued; a waiter kept handing round champagne.

All Rostov's cards were beaten and he had eight hundred rubles scored
up against him. He wrote "800 rubles" on a card, but while the waiter
filled his glass he changed his mind and altered it to his usual stake
of twenty rubles.

"Leave it," said Dolokhov, though he did not seem to be even looking at
Rostov, "you'll win it back all the sooner. I lose to the others but win
from you. Or are you afraid of me?" he asked again.

Rostov submitted. He let the eight hundred remain and laid down a seven
of hearts with a torn corner, which he had picked up from the floor. He
well remembered that seven afterwards. He laid down the seven of hearts,
on which with a broken bit of chalk he had written "800 rubles" in clear
upright figures; he emptied the glass of warm champagne that was handed
him, smiled at Dolokhov's words, and with a sinking heart, waiting for
a seven to turn up, gazed at Dolokhov's hands which held the pack. Much
depended on Rostov's winning or losing on that seven of hearts. On the
previous Sunday the old count had given his son two thousand rubles,
and though he always disliked speaking of money difficulties had told
Nicholas that this was all he could let him have till May, and asked him
to be more economical this time. Nicholas had replied that it would be
more than enough for him and that he gave his word of honor not to take
anything more till the spring. Now only twelve hundred rubles was left
of that money, so that this seven of hearts meant for him not only the
loss of sixteen hundred rubles, but the necessity of going back on his
word. With a sinking heart he watched Dolokhov's hands and thought,
"Now then, make haste and let me have this card and I'll take my cap
and drive home to supper with Denisov, Natasha, and Sonya, and will
certainly never touch a card again." At that moment his home life,
jokes with Petya, talks with Sonya, duets with Natasha, piquet with his
father, and even his comfortable bed in the house on the Povarskaya rose
before him with such vividness, clearness, and charm that it seemed as
if it were all a lost and unappreciated bliss, long past. He could not
conceive that a stupid chance, letting the seven be dealt to the right
rather than to the left, might deprive him of all this happiness, newly
appreciated and newly illumined, and plunge him into the depths of
unknown and undefined misery. That could not be, yet he awaited with
a sinking heart the movement of Dolokhov's hands. Those broad, reddish
hands, with hairy wrists visible from under the shirt cuffs, laid down
the pack and took up a glass and a pipe that were handed him.

"So you are not afraid to play with me?" repeated Dolokhov, and as if
about to tell a good story he put down the cards, leaned back in his
chair, and began deliberately with a smile:

"Yes, gentlemen, I've been told there's a rumor going about Moscow that
I'm a sharper, so I advise you to be careful."

"Come now, deal!" exclaimed Rostov.

"Oh, those Moscow gossips!" said Dolokhov, and he took up the cards with
a smile.

"Aah!" Rostov almost screamed lifting both hands to his head. The seven
he needed was lying uppermost, the first card in the pack. He had lost
more than he could pay.

"Still, don't ruin yourself!" said Dolokhov with a side glance at Rostov
as he continued to deal.





CHAPTER XIV


An hour and a half later most of the players were but little interested
in their own play.

The whole interest was concentrated on Rostov. Instead of sixteen
hundred rubles he had a long column of figures scored against him,
which he had reckoned up to ten thousand, but that now, as he vaguely
supposed, must have risen to fifteen thousand. In reality it already
exceeded twenty thousand rubles. Dolokhov was no longer listening to
stories or telling them, but followed every movement of Rostov's hands
and occasionally ran his eyes over the score against him. He had decided
to play until that score reached forty-three thousand. He had fixed on
that number because forty-three was the sum of his and Sonya's joint
ages. Rostov, leaning his head on both hands, sat at the table which
was scrawled over with figures, wet with spilled wine, and littered
with cards. One tormenting impression did not leave him: that those
broad-boned reddish hands with hairy wrists visible from under the shirt
sleeves, those hands which he loved and hated, held him in their power.

"Six hundred rubles, ace, a corner, a nine... winning it back's
impossible... Oh, how pleasant it was at home!... The knave, double
or quits... it can't be!... And why is he doing this to me?" Rostov
pondered. Sometimes he staked a large sum, but Dolokhov refused to
accept it and fixed the stake himself. Nicholas submitted to him, and at
one moment prayed to God as he had done on the battlefield at the bridge
over the Enns, and then guessed that the card that came first to hand
from the crumpled heap under the table would save him, now counted the
cords on his coat and took a card with that number and tried staking the
total of his losses on it, then he looked round for aid from the other
players, or peered at the now cold face of Dolokhov and tried to read
what was passing in his mind.

"He knows of course what this loss means to me. He can't want my ruin.
Wasn't he my friend? Wasn't I fond of him? But it's not his fault.
What's he to do if he has such luck?... And it's not my fault either,"
he thought to himself, "I have done nothing wrong. Have I killed anyone,
or insulted or wished harm to anyone? Why such a terrible misfortune?
And when did it begin? Such a little while ago I came to this table with
the thought of winning a hundred rubles to buy that casket for Mamma's
name day and then going home. I was so happy, so free, so lighthearted!
And I did not realize how happy I was! When did that end and when did
this new, terrible state of things begin? What marked the change? I sat
all the time in this same place at this table, chose and placed cards,
and watched those broad-boned agile hands in the same way. When did it
happen and what has happened? I am well and strong and still the same
and in the same place. No, it can't be! Surely it will all end in
nothing!"

He was flushed and bathed in perspiration, though the room was not hot.
His face was terrible and piteous to see, especially from its helpless
efforts to seem calm.

The score against him reached the fateful sum of forty-three thousand.
Rostov had just prepared a card, by bending the corner of which he meant
to double the three thousand just put down to his score, when Dolokhov,
slamming down the pack of cards, put it aside and began rapidly adding
up the total of Rostov's debt, breaking the chalk as he marked the
figures in his clear, bold hand.

"Supper, it's time for supper! And here are the gypsies!"

Some swarthy men and women were really entering from the cold outside
and saying something in their gypsy accents. Nicholas understood that it
was all over; but he said in an indifferent tone:

"Well, won't you go on? I had a splendid card all ready," as if it were
the fun of the game which interested him most.

"It's all up! I'm lost!" thought he. "Now a bullet through my
brain--that's all that's left me!" And at the same time he said in a
cheerful voice:

"Come now, just this one more little card!"

"All right!" said Dolokhov, having finished the addition. "All right!
Twenty-one rubles," he said, pointing to the figure twenty-one by which
the total exceeded the round sum of forty-three thousand; and taking up
a pack he prepared to deal. Rostov submissively unbent the corner of his
card and, instead of the six thousand he had intended, carefully wrote
twenty-one.

"It's all the same to me," he said. "I only want to see whether you will
let me win this ten, or beat it."

Dolokhov began to deal seriously. Oh, how Rostov detested at that moment
those hands with their short reddish fingers and hairy wrists, which
held him in their power.... The ten fell to him.

"You owe forty-three thousand, Count," said Dolokhov, and stretching
himself he rose from the table. "One does get tired sitting so long," he
added.

"Yes, I'm tired too," said Rostov.

Dolokhov cut him short, as if to remind him that it was not for him to
jest.

"When am I to receive the money, Count?"

Rostov, flushing, drew Dolokhov into the next room.

"I cannot pay it all immediately. Will you take an I.O.U.?" he said.

"I say, Rostov," said Dolokhov clearly, smiling and looking Nicholas
straight in the eyes, "you know the saying, 'Lucky in love, unlucky at
cards.' Your cousin is in love with you, I know."

"Oh, it's terrible to feel oneself so in this man's power," thought
Rostov. He knew what a shock he would inflict on his father and mother
by the news of this loss, he knew what a relief it would be to escape
it all, and felt that Dolokhov knew that he could save him from all this
shame and sorrow, but wanted now to play with him as a cat does with a
mouse.

"Your cousin..." Dolokhov started to say, but Nicholas interrupted him.

"My cousin has nothing to do with this and it's not necessary to mention
her!" he exclaimed fiercely.

"Then when am I to have it?"

"Tomorrow," replied Rostov and left the room.





CHAPTER XV


To say "tomorrow" and keep up a dignified tone was not difficult, but to
go home alone, see his sisters, brother, mother, and father, confess
and ask for money he had no right to after giving his word of honor, was
terrible.

At home, they had not yet gone to bed. The young people, after returning
from the theater, had had supper and were grouped round the clavichord.
As soon as Nicholas entered, he was enfolded in that poetic atmosphere
of love which pervaded the Rostov household that winter and, now after
Dolokhov's proposal and Iogel's ball, seemed to have grown thicker
round Sonya and Natasha as the air does before a thunderstorm. Sonya and
Natasha, in the light-blue dresses they had worn at the theater, looking
pretty and conscious of it, were standing by the clavichord, happy and
smiling. Vera was playing chess with Shinshin in the drawing room. The
old countess, waiting for the return of her husband and son, sat playing
patience with the old gentlewoman who lived in their house. Denisov,
with sparkling eyes and ruffled hair, sat at the clavichord striking
chords with his short fingers, his legs thrown back and his eyes rolling
as he sang, with his small, husky, but true voice, some verses called
"Enchantress," which he had composed, and to which he was trying to fit
music:

   Enchantress, say, to my forsaken lyre
   What magic power is this recalls me still?
   What spark has set my inmost soul on fire,
   What is this bliss that makes my fingers thrill?

He was singing in passionate tones, gazing with his sparkling
black-agate eyes at the frightened and happy Natasha.

"Splendid! Excellent!" exclaimed Natasha. "Another verse," she said,
without noticing Nicholas.

"Everything's still the same with them," thought Nicholas, glancing into
the drawing room, where he saw Vera and his mother with the old lady.

"Ah, and here's Nicholas!" cried Natasha, running up to him.

"Is Papa at home?" he asked.

"I am so glad you've come!" said Natasha, without answering him. "We are
enjoying ourselves! Vasili Dmitrich is staying a day longer for my sake!
Did you know?"

"No, Papa is not back yet," said Sonya.

"Nicholas, have you come? Come here, dear!" called the old countess from
the drawing room.

Nicholas went to her, kissed her hand, and sitting down silently at her
table began to watch her hands arranging the cards. From the dancing
room, they still heard the laughter and merry voices trying to persuade
Natasha to sing.

"All wight! All wight!" shouted Denisov. "It's no good making excuses
now! It's your turn to sing the ba'cawolla--I entweat you!"

The countess glanced at her silent son.

"What is the matter?" she asked.

"Oh, nothing," said he, as if weary of being continually asked the same
question. "Will Papa be back soon?"

"I expect so."

"Everything's the same with them. They know nothing about it! Where am I
to go?" thought Nicholas, and went again into the dancing room where the
clavichord stood.

Sonya was sitting at the clavichord, playing the prelude to Denisov's
favorite barcarolle. Natasha was preparing to sing. Denisov was looking
at her with enraptured eyes.

Nicholas began pacing up and down the room.

"Why do they want to make her sing? How can she sing? There's nothing to
be happy about!" thought he.

Sonya struck the first chord of the prelude.

"My God, I'm a ruined and dishonored man! A bullet through my brain is
the only thing left me--not singing!" his thoughts ran on. "Go away? But
where to? It's one--let them sing!"

He continued to pace the room, looking gloomily at Denisov and the girls
and avoiding their eyes.

"Nikolenka, what is the matter?" Sonya's eyes fixed on him seemed to
ask. She noticed at once that something had happened to him.

Nicholas turned away from her. Natasha too, with her quick instinct, had
instantly noticed her brother's condition. But, though she noticed it,
she was herself in such high spirits at that moment, so far from sorrow,
sadness, or self-reproach, that she purposely deceived herself as
young people often do. "No, I am too happy now to spoil my enjoyment by
sympathy with anyone's sorrow," she felt, and she said to herself: "No,
I must be mistaken, he must be feeling happy, just as I am."

"Now, Sonya!" she said, going to the very middle of the room, where she
considered the resonance was best.

Having lifted her head and let her arms droop lifelessly, as ballet
dancers do, Natasha, rising energetically from her heels to her toes,
stepped to the middle of the room and stood still.

"Yes, that's me!" she seemed to say, answering the rapt gaze with which
Denisov followed her.

"And what is she so pleased about?" thought Nicholas, looking at his
sister. "Why isn't she dull and ashamed?"

Natasha took the first note, her throat swelled, her chest rose,
her eyes became serious. At that moment she was oblivious of her
surroundings, and from her smiling lips flowed sounds which anyone may
produce at the same intervals and hold for the same time, but which
leave you cold a thousand times and the thousand and first time thrill
you and make you weep.

Natasha, that winter, had for the first time begun to sing seriously,
mainly because Denisov so delighted in her singing. She no longer sang
as a child, there was no longer in her singing that comical, childish,
painstaking effect that had been in it before; but she did not yet sing
well, as all the connoisseurs who heard her said: "It is not trained,
but it is a beautiful voice that must be trained." Only they generally
said this some time after she had finished singing. While that untrained
voice, with its incorrect breathing and labored transitions, was
sounding, even the connoisseurs said nothing, but only delighted in
it and wished to hear it again. In her voice there was a virginal
freshness, an unconsciousness of her own powers, and an as yet untrained
velvety softness, which so mingled with her lack of art in singing that
it seemed as if nothing in that voice could be altered without spoiling
it.

"What is this?" thought Nicholas, listening to her with widely opened
eyes. "What has happened to her? How she is singing today!" And suddenly
the whole world centered for him on anticipation of the next note, the
next phrase, and everything in the world was divided into three beats:
"Oh mio crudele affetto."... One, two, three... one, two, three...
One... "Oh mio crudele affetto."... One, two, three... One. "Oh, this
senseless life of ours!" thought Nicholas. "All this misery, and money,
and Dolokhov, and anger, and honor--it's all nonsense... but this is
real.... Now then, Natasha, now then, dearest! Now then, darling! How
will she take that si? She's taken it! Thank God!" And without noticing
that he was singing, to strengthen the si he sung a second, a third
below the high note. "Ah, God! How fine! Did I really take it? How
fortunate!" he thought.

Oh, how that chord vibrated, and how moved was something that was finest
in Rostov's soul! And this something was apart from everything else
in the world and above everything in the world. "What were losses, and
Dolokhov, and words of honor?... All nonsense! One might kill and rob
and yet be happy..."





CHAPTER XVI


It was long since Rostov had felt such enjoyment from music as he did
that day. But no sooner had Natasha finished her barcarolle than
reality again presented itself. He got up without saying a word and went
downstairs to his own room. A quarter of an hour later the old count
came in from his Club, cheerful and contented. Nicholas, hearing him
drive up, went to meet him.

"Well--had a good time?" said the old count, smiling gaily and proudly
at his son.

Nicholas tried to say "Yes," but could not: and he nearly burst into
sobs. The count was lighting his pipe and did not notice his son's
condition.

"Ah, it can't be avoided!" thought Nicholas, for the first and last
time. And suddenly, in the most casual tone, which made him feel ashamed
of himself, he said, as if merely asking his father to let him have the
carriage to drive to town:

"Papa, I have come on a matter of business. I was nearly forgetting. I
need some money."

"Dear me!" said his father, who was in a specially good humor. "I told
you it would not be enough. How much?"

"Very much," said Nicholas flushing, and with a stupid careless smile,
for which he was long unable to forgive himself, "I have lost a little,
I mean a good deal, a great deal--forty three thousand."

"What! To whom?... Nonsense!" cried the count, suddenly reddening with
an apoplectic flush over neck and nape as old people do.

"I promised to pay tomorrow," said Nicholas.

"Well!..." said the old count, spreading out his arms and sinking
helplessly on the sofa.

"It can't be helped It happens to everyone!" said the son, with a
bold, free, and easy tone, while in his soul he regarded himself as a
worthless scoundrel whose whole life could not atone for his crime. He
longed to kiss his father's hands and kneel to beg his forgiveness, but
said, in a careless and even rude voice, that it happens to everyone!

The old count cast down his eyes on hearing his son's words and began
bustlingly searching for something.

"Yes, yes," he muttered, "it will be difficult, I fear, difficult to
raise... happens to everybody! Yes, who has not done it?"

And with a furtive glance at his son's face, the count went out of the
room.... Nicholas had been prepared for resistance, but had not at all
expected this.

"Papa! Pa-pa!" he called after him, sobbing, "forgive me!" And seizing
his father's hand, he pressed it to his lips and burst into tears.

While father and son were having their explanation, the mother and
daughter were having one not less important. Natasha came running to her
mother, quite excited.

"Mamma!... Mamma!... He has made me..."

"Made what?"

"Made, made me an offer, Mamma! Mamma!" she exclaimed.

The countess did not believe her ears. Denisov had proposed. To whom? To
this chit of a girl, Natasha, who not so long ago was playing with dolls
and who was still having lessons.

"Don't, Natasha! What nonsense!" she said, hoping it was a joke.

"Nonsense, indeed! I am telling you the fact," said Natasha indignantly.
"I come to ask you what to do, and you call it 'nonsense!'"

The countess shrugged her shoulders.

"If it is true that Monsieur Denisov has made you a proposal, tell him
he is a fool, that's all!"

"No, he's not a fool!" replied Natasha indignantly and seriously.

"Well then, what do you want? You're all in love nowadays. Well, if you
are in love, marry him!" said the countess, with a laugh of annoyance.
"Good luck to you!"

"No, Mamma, I'm not in love with him, I suppose I'm not in love with
him."

"Well then, tell him so."

"Mamma, are you cross? Don't be cross, dear! Is it my fault?"

"No, but what is it, my dear? Do you want me to go and tell him?" said
the countess smiling.

"No, I will do it myself, only tell me what to say. It's all very well
for you," said Natasha, with a responsive smile. "You should have
seen how he said it! I know he did not mean to say it, but it came out
accidently."

"Well, all the same, you must refuse him."

"No, I mustn't. I am so sorry for him! He's so nice."

"Well then, accept his offer. It's high time for you to be married,"
answered the countess sharply and sarcastically.

"No, Mamma, but I'm so sorry for him. I don't know how I'm to say it."

"And there's nothing for you to say. I shall speak to him myself," said
the countess, indignant that they should have dared to treat this little
Natasha as grown up.

"No, not on any account! I will tell him myself, and you'll listen at
the door," and Natasha ran across the drawing room to the dancing hall,
where Denisov was sitting on the same chair by the clavichord with his
face in his hands.

He jumped up at the sound of her light step.

"Nataly," he said, moving with rapid steps toward her, "decide my fate.
It is in your hands."

"Vasili Dmitrich, I'm so sorry for you!... No, but you are so nice...
but it won't do...not that... but as a friend, I shall always love you."

Denisov bent over her hand and she heard strange sounds she did not
understand. She kissed his rough curly black head. At this instant, they
heard the quick rustle of the countess' dress. She came up to them.

"Vasili Dmitrich, I thank you for the honor," she said, with an
embarrassed voice, though it sounded severe to Denisov--"but my daughter
is so young, and I thought that, as my son's friend, you would have
addressed yourself first to me. In that case you would not have obliged
me to give this refusal."

"Countess..." said Denisov, with downcast eyes and a guilty face. He
tried to say more, but faltered.

Natasha could not remain calm, seeing him in such a plight. She began to
sob aloud.

"Countess, I have done w'ong," Denisov went on in an unsteady voice,
"but believe me, I so adore your daughter and all your family that I
would give my life twice over..." He looked at the countess, and seeing
her severe face said: "Well, good-by, Countess," and kissing her
hand, he left the room with quick resolute strides, without looking at
Natasha.


Next day Rostov saw Denisov off. He did not wish to stay another day in
Moscow. All Denisov's Moscow friends gave him a farewell entertainment
at the gypsies', with the result that he had no recollection of how he
was put in the sleigh or of the first three stages of his journey.

After Denisov's departure, Rostov spent another fortnight in Moscow,
without going out of the house, waiting for the money his father could
not at once raise, and he spent most of his time in the girls' room.

Sonya was more tender and devoted to him than ever. It was as if she
wanted to show him that his losses were an achievement that made her
love him all the more, but Nicholas now considered himself unworthy of
her.

He filled the girls' albums with verses and music, and having at last
sent Dolokhov the whole forty-three thousand rubles and received his
receipt, he left at the end of November, without taking leave of any of
his acquaintances, to overtake his regiment which was already in Poland.





BOOK FIVE: 1806 - 07





CHAPTER I


After his interview with his wife Pierre left for Petersburg. At the
Torzhok post station, either there were no horses or the postmaster
would not supply them. Pierre was obliged to wait. Without undressing,
he lay down on the leather sofa in front of a round table, put his big
feet in their overboots on the table, and began to reflect.

"Will you have the portmanteaus brought in? And a bed got ready, and
tea?" asked his valet.

Pierre gave no answer, for he neither heard nor saw anything. He had
begun to think of the last station and was still pondering on the same
question--one so important that he took no notice of what went on around
him. Not only was he indifferent as to whether he got to Petersburg
earlier or later, or whether he secured accommodation at this station,
but compared to the thoughts that now occupied him it was a matter of
indifference whether he remained there for a few hours or for the rest
of his life.

The postmaster, his wife, the valet, and a peasant woman selling Torzhok
embroidery came into the room offering their services. Without changing
his careless attitude, Pierre looked at them over his spectacles unable
to understand what they wanted or how they could go on living without
having solved the problems that so absorbed him. He had been engrossed
by the same thoughts ever since the day he returned from Sokolniki after
the duel and had spent that first agonizing, sleepless night. But now,
in the solitude of the journey, they seized him with special force. No
matter what he thought about, he always returned to these same questions
which he could not solve and yet could not cease to ask himself. It was
as if the thread of the chief screw which held his life together were
stripped, so that the screw could not get in or out, but went on turning
uselessly in the same place.

The postmaster came in and began obsequiously to beg his excellency to
wait only two hours, when, come what might, he would let his excellency
have the courier horses. It was plain that he was lying and only wanted
to get more money from the traveler.

"Is this good or bad?" Pierre asked himself. "It is good for me, bad
for another traveler, and for himself it's unavoidable, because he needs
money for food; the man said an officer had once given him a thrashing
for letting a private traveler have the courier horses. But the officer
thrashed him because he had to get on as quickly as possible. And I,"
continued Pierre, "shot Dolokhov because I considered myself injured,
and Louis XVI was executed because they considered him a criminal, and
a year later they executed those who executed him--also for some reason.
What is bad? What is good? What should one love and what hate? What does
one live for? And what am I? What is life, and what is death? What power
governs all?"

There was no answer to any of these questions, except one, and that not
a logical answer and not at all a reply to them. The answer was: "You'll
die and all will end. You'll die and know all, or cease asking." But
dying was also dreadful.

The Torzhok peddler woman, in a whining voice, went on offering her
wares, especially a pair of goatskin slippers. "I have hundreds of
rubles I don't know what to do with, and she stands in her tattered
cloak looking timidly at me," he thought. "And what does she want the
money for? As if that money could add a hair's breadth to happiness or
peace of mind. Can anything in the world make her or me less a prey
to evil and death?--death which ends all and must come today or
tomorrow--at any rate, in an instant as compared with eternity." And
again he twisted the screw with the stripped thread, and again it turned
uselessly in the same place.

His servant handed him a half-cut novel, in the form of letters, by
Madame de Souza. He began reading about the sufferings and virtuous
struggles of a certain Emilie de Mansfeld. "And why did she resist her
seducer when she loved him?" he thought. "God could not have put into
her heart an impulse that was against His will. My wife--as she once
was--did not struggle, and perhaps she was right. Nothing has been found
out, nothing discovered," Pierre again said to himself. "All we can know
is that we know nothing. And that's the height of human wisdom."

Everything within and around him seemed confused, senseless, and
repellent. Yet in this very repugnance to all his circumstances Pierre
found a kind of tantalizing satisfaction.

"I make bold to ask your excellency to move a little for this
gentleman," said the postmaster, entering the room followed by another
traveler, also detained for lack of horses.

The newcomer was a short, large-boned, yellow-faced, wrinkled old
man, with gray bushy eyebrows overhanging bright eyes of an indefinite
grayish color.

Pierre took his feet off the table, stood up, and lay down on a bed that
had been got ready for him, glancing now and then at the newcomer, who,
with a gloomy and tired face, was wearily taking off his wraps with the
aid of his servant, and not looking at Pierre. With a pair of felt boots
on his thin bony legs, and keeping on a worn, nankeen-covered, sheepskin
coat, the traveler sat down on the sofa, leaned back his big head with
its broad temples and close-cropped hair, and looked at Bezukhov. The
stern, shrewd, and penetrating expression of that look struck Pierre. He
felt a wish to speak to the stranger, but by the time he had made up his
mind to ask him a question about the roads, the traveler had closed his
eyes. His shriveled old hands were folded and on the finger of one of
them Pierre noticed a large cast iron ring with a seal representing a
death's head. The stranger sat without stirring, either resting or, as
it seemed to Pierre, sunk in profound and calm meditation. His servant
was also a yellow, wrinkled old man, without beard or mustache,
evidently not because he was shaven but because they had never grown.
This active old servant was unpacking the traveler's canteen and
preparing tea. He brought in a boiling samovar. When everything was
ready, the stranger opened his eyes, moved to the table, filled a
tumbler with tea for himself and one for the beardless old man to whom
he passed it. Pierre began to feel a sense of uneasiness, and the
need, even the inevitability, of entering into conversation with this
stranger.

The servant brought back his tumbler turned upside down, * with an
unfinished bit of nibbled sugar, and asked if anything more would be
wanted.


    * To indicate he did not want more tea.


"No. Give me the book," said the stranger.

The servant handed him a book which Pierre took to be a devotional work,
and the traveler became absorbed in it. Pierre looked at him. All at
once the stranger closed the book, putting in a marker, and again,
leaning with his arms on the back of the sofa, sat in his former
position with his eyes shut. Pierre looked at him and had not time
to turn away when the old man, opening his eyes, fixed his steady and
severe gaze straight on Pierre's face.

Pierre felt confused and wished to avoid that look, but the bright old
eyes attracted him irresistibly.





CHAPTER II


"I have the pleasure of addressing Count Bezukhov, if I am not
mistaken," said the stranger in a deliberate and loud voice.

Pierre looked silently and inquiringly at him over his spectacles.

"I have heard of you, my dear sir," continued the stranger, "and of your
misfortune." He seemed to emphasize the last word, as if to say--"Yes,
misfortune! Call it what you please, I know that what happened to you in
Moscow was a misfortune."--"I regret it very much, my dear sir."

Pierre flushed and, hurriedly putting his legs down from the bed, bent
forward toward the old man with a forced and timid smile.

"I have not referred to this out of curiosity, my dear sir, but for
greater reasons."

He paused, his gaze still on Pierre, and moved aside on the sofa by way
of inviting the other to take a seat beside him. Pierre felt reluctant
to enter into conversation with this old man, but, submitting to him
involuntarily, came up and sat down beside him.

"You are unhappy, my dear sir," the stranger continued. "You are young
and I am old. I should like to help you as far as lies in my power."

"Oh, yes!" said Pierre, with a forced smile. "I am very grateful to you.
Where are you traveling from?"

The stranger's face was not genial, it was even cold and severe, but
in spite of this, both the face and words of his new acquaintance were
irresistibly attractive to Pierre.

"But if for reason you don't feel inclined to talk to me," said the old
man, "say so, my dear sir." And he suddenly smiled, in an unexpected and
tenderly paternal way.

"Oh no, not at all! On the contrary, I am very glad to make your
acquaintance," said Pierre. And again, glancing at the stranger's hands,
he looked more closely at the ring, with its skull--a Masonic sign.

"Allow me to ask," he said, "are you a Mason?"

"Yes, I belong to the Brotherhood of the Freemasons," said the stranger,
looking deeper and deeper into Pierre's eyes. "And in their name and my
own I hold out a brotherly hand to you."

"I am afraid," said Pierre, smiling, and wavering between the confidence
the personality of the Freemason inspired in him and his own habit
of ridiculing the Masonic beliefs--"I am afraid I am very far from
understanding--how am I to put it?--I am afraid my way of looking at the
world is so opposed to yours that we shall not understand one another."

"I know your outlook," said the Mason, "and the view of life you
mention, and which you think is the result of your own mental efforts,
is the one held by the majority of people, and is the invariable fruit
of pride, indolence, and ignorance. Forgive me, my dear sir, but if I
had not known it I should not have addressed you. Your view of life is a
regrettable delusion."

"Just as I may suppose you to be deluded," said Pierre, with a faint
smile.

"I should never dare to say that I know the truth," said the Mason,
whose words struck Pierre more and more by their precision and firmness.
"No one can attain to truth by himself. Only by laying stone on stone
with the cooperation of all, by the millions of generations from our
forefather Adam to our own times, is that temple reared which is to be a
worthy dwelling place of the Great God," he added, and closed his eyes.

"I ought to tell you that I do not believe... do not believe in God,"
said Pierre, regretfully and with an effort, feeling it essential to
speak the whole truth.

The Mason looked intently at Pierre and smiled as a rich man with
millions in hand might smile at a poor fellow who told him that he, poor
man, had not the five rubles that would make him happy.

"Yes, you do not know Him, my dear sir," said the Mason. "You cannot
know Him. You do not know Him and that is why you are unhappy."

"Yes, yes, I am unhappy," assented Pierre. "But what am I to do?"

"You know Him not, my dear sir, and so you are very unhappy. You do not
know Him, but He is here, He is in me, He is in my words, He is in thee,
and even in those blasphemous words thou hast just uttered!" pronounced
the Mason in a stern and tremulous voice.

He paused and sighed, evidently trying to calm himself.

"If He were not," he said quietly, "you and I would not be speaking
of Him, my dear sir. Of what, of whom, are we speaking? Whom hast thou
denied?" he suddenly asked with exulting austerity and authority in
his voice. "Who invented Him, if He did not exist? Whence came thy
conception of the existence of such an incomprehensible Being? didst
thou, and why did the whole world, conceive the idea of the existence
of such an incomprehensible Being, a Being all-powerful, eternal, and
infinite in all His attributes?..."

He stopped and remained silent for a long time.

Pierre could not and did not wish to break this silence.

"He exists, but to understand Him is hard," the Mason began again,
looking not at Pierre but straight before him, and turning the leaves
of his book with his old hands which from excitement he could not keep
still. "If it were a man whose existence thou didst doubt I could bring
him to thee, could take him by the hand and show him to thee. But how
can I, an insignificant mortal, show His omnipotence, His infinity, and
all His mercy to one who is blind, or who shuts his eyes that he may not
see or understand Him and may not see or understand his own vileness and
sinfulness?" He paused again. "Who art thou? Thou dreamest that thou art
wise because thou couldst utter those blasphemous words," he went
on, with a somber and scornful smile. "And thou art more foolish and
unreasonable than a little child, who, playing with the parts of a
skillfully made watch, dares to say that, as he does not understand
its use, he does not believe in the master who made it. To know Him is
hard.... For ages, from our forefather Adam to our own day, we labor to
attain that knowledge and are still infinitely far from our aim; but
in our lack of understanding we see only our weakness and His
greatness...."

Pierre listened with swelling heart, gazing into the Mason's face with
shining eyes, not interrupting or questioning him, but believing with
his whole soul what the stranger said. Whether he accepted the wise
reasoning contained in the Mason's words, or believed as a child
believes, in the speaker's tone of conviction and earnestness, or the
tremor of the speaker's voice--which sometimes almost broke--or those
brilliant aged eyes grown old in this conviction, or the calm firmness
and certainty of his vocation, which radiated from his whole being (and
which struck Pierre especially by contrast with his own dejection and
hopelessness)--at any rate, Pierre longed with his whole soul to believe
and he did believe, and felt a joyful sense of comfort, regeneration,
and return to life.

"He is not to be apprehended by reason, but by life," said the Mason.

"I do not understand," said Pierre, feeling with dismay doubts
reawakening. He was afraid of any want of clearness, any weakness, in
the Mason's arguments; he dreaded not to be able to believe in him.
"I don't understand," he said, "how it is that the mind of man cannot
attain the knowledge of which you speak."

The Mason smiled with his gentle fatherly smile.

"The highest wisdom and truth are like the purest liquid we may wish to
imbibe," he said. "Can I receive that pure liquid into an impure vessel
and judge of its purity? Only by the inner purification of myself can I
retain in some degree of purity the liquid I receive."

"Yes, yes, that is so," said Pierre joyfully.

"The highest wisdom is not founded on reason alone, not on those worldly
sciences of physics, history, chemistry, and the like, into which
intellectual knowledge is divided. The highest wisdom is one. The
highest wisdom has but one science--the science of the whole--the
science explaining the whole creation and man's place in it. To receive
that science it is necessary to purify and renew one's inner self, and
so before one can know, it is necessary to believe and to perfect one's
self. And to attain this end, we have the light called conscience that
God has implanted in our souls."

"Yes, yes," assented Pierre.

"Look then at thy inner self with the eyes of the spirit, and ask
thyself whether thou art content with thyself. What hast thou attained
relying on reason only? What art thou? You are young, you are rich, you
are clever, you are well educated. And what have you done with all these
good gifts? Are you content with yourself and with your life?"

"No, I hate my life," Pierre muttered, wincing.

"Thou hatest it. Then change it, purify thyself; and as thou art
purified, thou wilt gain wisdom. Look at your life, my dear sir.
How have you spent it? In riotous orgies and debauchery, receiving
everything from society and giving nothing in return. You have become
the possessor of wealth. How have you used it? What have you done
for your neighbor? Have you ever thought of your tens of thousands
of slaves? Have you helped them physically and morally? No! You have
profited by their toil to lead a profligate life. That is what you have
done. Have you chosen a post in which you might be of service to your
neighbor? No! You have spent your life in idleness. Then you married,
my dear sir--took on yourself responsibility for the guidance of a young
woman; and what have you done? You have not helped her to find the way
of truth, my dear sir, but have thrust her into an abyss of deceit and
misery. A man offended you and you shot him, and you say you do not know
God and hate your life. There is nothing strange in that, my dear sir!"

After these words, the Mason, as if tired by his long discourse, again
leaned his arms on the back of the sofa and closed his eyes. Pierre
looked at that aged, stern, motionless, almost lifeless face and moved
his lips without uttering a sound. He wished to say, "Yes, a vile, idle,
vicious life!" but dared not break the silence.

The Mason cleared his throat huskily, as old men do, and called his
servant.

"How about the horses?" he asked, without looking at Pierre.

"The exchange horses have just come," answered the servant. "Will you
not rest here?"

"No, tell them to harness."

"Can he really be going away leaving me alone without having told me
all, and without promising to help me?" thought Pierre, rising with
downcast head; and he began to pace the room, glancing occasionally at
the Mason. "Yes, I never thought of it, but I have led a contemptible
and profligate life, though I did not like it and did not want to,"
thought Pierre. "But this man knows the truth and, if he wished to,
could disclose it to me."

Pierre wished to say this to the Mason, but did not dare to. The
traveler, having packed his things with his practiced hands, began
fastening his coat. When he had finished, he turned to Bezukhov, and
said in a tone of indifferent politeness:

"Where are you going to now, my dear sir?"

"I?... I'm going to Petersburg," answered Pierre, in a childlike,
hesitating voice. "I thank you. I agree with all you have said. But do
not suppose me to be so bad. With my whole soul I wish to be what you
would have me be, but I have never had help from anyone.... But it is
I, above all, who am to blame for everything. Help me, teach me, and
perhaps I may..."

Pierre could not go on. He gulped and turned away.

The Mason remained silent for a long time, evidently considering.

"Help comes from God alone," he said, "but such measure of help as
our Order can bestow it will render you, my dear sir. You are going to
Petersburg. Hand this to Count Willarski" (he took out his notebook and
wrote a few words on a large sheet of paper folded in four). "Allow me
to give you a piece of advice. When you reach the capital, first of all
devote some time to solitude and self-examination and do not resume your
former way of life. And now I wish you a good journey, my dear sir," he
added, seeing that his servant had entered... "and success."

The traveler was Joseph Alexeevich Bazdeev, as Pierre saw from the
postmaster's book. Bazdeev had been one of the best-known Freemasons and
Martinists, even in Novikov's time. For a long while after he had gone,
Pierre did not go to bed or order horses but paced up and down the room,
pondering over his vicious past, and with a rapturous sense of beginning
anew pictured to himself the blissful, irreproachable, virtuous future
that seemed to him so easy. It seemed to him that he had been vicious
only because he had somehow forgotten how good it is to be virtuous. Not
a trace of his former doubts remained in his soul. He firmly believed
in the possibility of the brotherhood of men united in the aim
of supporting one another in the path of virtue, and that is how
Freemasonry presented itself to him.





CHAPTER III


On reaching Petersburg Pierre did not let anyone know of his arrival, he
went nowhere and spent whole days in reading Thomas a Kempis, whose book
had been sent him by someone unknown. One thing he continually realized
as he read that book: the joy, hitherto unknown to him, of believing
in the possibility of attaining perfection, and in the possibility of
active brotherly love among men, which Joseph Alexeevich had revealed to
him. A week after his arrival, the young Polish count, Willarski, whom
Pierre had known slightly in Petersburg society, came into his room
one evening in the official and ceremonious manner in which Dolokhov's
second had called on him, and, having closed the door behind him and
satisfied himself that there was nobody else in the room, addressed
Pierre.

"I have come to you with a message and an offer, Count," he said without
sitting down. "A person of very high standing in our Brotherhood has
made application for you to be received into our Order before the usual
term and has proposed to me to be your sponsor. I consider it a
sacred duty to fulfill that person's wishes. Do you wish to enter the
Brotherhood of Freemasons under my sponsorship?"

The cold, austere tone of this man, whom he had almost always before met
at balls, amiably smiling in the society of the most brilliant women,
surprised Pierre.

"Yes, I do wish it," said he.

Willarski bowed his head.

"One more question, Count," he said, "which I beg you to answer in
all sincerity--not as a future Mason but as an honest man: have you
renounced your former convictions--do you believe in God?"

Pierre considered.

"Yes... yes, I believe in God," he said.

"In that case..." began Willarski, but Pierre interrupted him.

"Yes, I do believe in God," he repeated.

"In that case we can go," said Willarski. "My carriage is at your
service."

Willarski was silent throughout the drive. To Pierre's inquiries as to
what he must do and how he should answer, Willarski only replied that
brothers more worthy than he would test him and that Pierre had only to
tell the truth.

Having entered the courtyard of a large house where the Lodge had its
headquarters, and having ascended a dark staircase, they entered a small
well-lit anteroom where they took off their cloaks without the aid of
a servant. From there they passed into another room. A man in strange
attire appeared at the door. Willarski, stepping toward him, said
something to him in French in an undertone and then went up to a small
wardrobe in which Pierre noticed garments such as he had never seen
before. Having taken a kerchief from the cupboard, Willarski bound
Pierre's eyes with it and tied it in a knot behind, catching some hairs
painfully in the knot. Then he drew his face down, kissed him, and
taking him by the hand led him forward. The hairs tied in the knot hurt
Pierre and there were lines of pain on his face and a shamefaced smile.
His huge figure, with arms hanging down and with a puckered, though
smiling face, moved after Willarski with uncertain, timid steps.

Having led him about ten paces, Willarski stopped.

"Whatever happens to you," he said, "you must bear it all manfully
if you have firmly resolved to join our Brotherhood." (Pierre nodded
affirmatively.) "When you hear a knock at the door, you will uncover
your eyes," added Willarski. "I wish you courage and success," and,
pressing Pierre's hand, he went out.

Left alone, Pierre went on smiling in the same way. Once or twice he
shrugged his and raised his hand to the kerchief, as if wishing to take
it off, but let it drop again. The five minutes spent with his eyes
bandaged seemed to him an hour. His arms felt numb, his legs almost gave
way, it seemed to him that he was tired out. He experienced a variety of
most complex sensations. He felt afraid of what would happen to him and
still more afraid of showing his fear. He felt curious to know what was
going to happen and what would be revealed to him; but most of all, he
felt joyful that the moment had come when he would at last start on that
path of regeneration and on the actively virtuous life of which he had
been dreaming since he met Joseph Alexeevich. Loud knocks were heard at
the door. Pierre took the bandage off his eyes and glanced around him.
The room was in black darkness, only a small lamp was burning inside
something white. Pierre went nearer and saw that the lamp stood on a
black table on which lay an open book. The book was the Gospel, and the
white thing with the lamp inside was a human skull with its cavities and
teeth. After reading the first words of the Gospel: "In the beginning
was the Word and the Word was with God," Pierre went round the table and
saw a large open box filled with something. It was a coffin with bones
inside. He was not at all surprised by what he saw. Hoping to enter on
an entirely new life quite unlike the old one, he expected everything
to be unusual, even more unusual than what he was seeing. A skull, a
coffin, the Gospel--it seemed to him that he had expected all this and
even more. Trying to stimulate his emotions he looked around. "God,
death, love, the brotherhood of man," he kept saying to himself,
associating these words with vague yet joyful ideas. The door opened and
someone came in.

By the dim light, to which Pierre had already become accustomed, he
saw rather short man. Having evidently come from the light into the
darkness, the man paused, then moved with cautious steps toward the
table and placed on it his small leather-gloved hands.

This short man had on a white leather apron which covered his chest and
part of his legs; he had on a kind of necklace above which rose a high
white ruffle, outlining his rather long face which was lit up from
below.

"For what have you come hither?" asked the newcomer, turning in Pierre's
direction at a slight rustle made by the latter. "Why have you, who do
not believe in the truth of the light and who have not seen the light,
come here? What do you seek from us? Wisdom, virtue, enlightenment?"

At the moment the door opened and the stranger came in, Pierre felt a
sense of awe and veneration such as he had experienced in his boyhood at
confession; he felt himself in the presence of one socially a complete
stranger, yet nearer to him through the brotherhood of man. With bated
breath and beating heart he moved toward the Rhetor (by which name the
brother who prepared a seeker for entrance into the Brotherhood was
known). Drawing nearer, he recognized in the Rhetor a man he knew,
Smolyaninov, and it mortified him to think that the newcomer was an
acquaintance--he wished him simply a brother and a virtuous instructor.
For a long time he could not utter a word, so that the Rhetor had to
repeat his question.

"Yes... I... I... desire regeneration," Pierre uttered with difficulty.

"Very well," said Smolyaninov, and went on at once: "Have you any idea
of the means by which our holy Order will help you to reach your aim?"
said he quietly and quickly.

"I... hope... for guidance... help... in regeneration," said Pierre,
with a trembling voice and some difficulty in utterance due to his
excitement and to being unaccustomed to speak of abstract matters in
Russian.

"What is your conception of Freemasonry?"

"I imagine that Freemasonry is the fraternity and equality of men who
have virtuous aims," said Pierre, feeling ashamed of the inadequacy of
his words for the solemnity of the moment, as he spoke. "I imagine..."

"Good!" said the Rhetor quickly, apparently satisfied with this answer.
"Have you sought for means of attaining your aim in religion?"

"No, I considered it erroneous and did not follow it," said Pierre,
so softly that the Rhetor did not hear him and asked him what he was
saying. "I have been an atheist," answered Pierre.

"You are seeking for truth in order to follow its laws in your life,
therefore you seek wisdom and virtue. Is that not so?" said the Rhetor,
after a moment's pause.

"Yes, yes," assented Pierre.

The Rhetor cleared his throat, crossed his gloved hands on his breast,
and began to speak.

"Now I must disclose to you the chief aim of our Order," he said, "and
if this aim coincides with yours, you may enter our Brotherhood with
profit. The first and chief object of our Order, the foundation on which
it rests and which no human power can destroy, is the preservation and
handing on to posterity of a certain important mystery... which has come
down to us from the remotest ages, even from the first man--a mystery on
which perhaps the fate of mankind depends. But since this mystery is of
such a nature that nobody can know or use it unless he be prepared by
long and diligent self-purification, not everyone can hope to attain it
quickly. Hence we have a secondary aim, that of preparing our members as
much as possible to reform their hearts, to purify and enlighten their
minds, by means handed on to us by tradition from those who have striven
to attain this mystery, and thereby to render them capable of receiving
it.

"By purifying and regenerating our members we try, thirdly, to improve
the whole human race, offering it in our members an example of piety
and virtue, and thereby try with all our might to combat the evil which
sways the world. Think this over and I will come to you again."

"To combat the evil which sways the world..." Pierre repeated, and a
mental image of his future activity in this direction rose in his mind.
He imagined men such as he had himself been a fortnight ago, and he
addressed an edifying exhortation to them. He imagined to himself
vicious and unfortunate people whom he would assist by word and deed,
imagined oppressors whose victims he would rescue. Of the three
objects mentioned by the Rhetor, this last, that of improving mankind,
especially appealed to Pierre. The important mystery mentioned by the
Rhetor, though it aroused his curiosity, did not seem to him essential,
and the second aim, that of purifying and regenerating himself, did not
much interest him because at that moment he felt with delight that he
was already perfectly cured of his former faults and was ready for all
that was good.

Half an hour later, the Rhetor returned to inform the seeker of the
seven virtues, corresponding to the seven steps of Solomon's temple,
which every Freemason should cultivate in himself. These virtues were:
1. Discretion, the keeping of the secrets of the Order. 2. Obedience to
those of higher ranks in the Order.  3. Morality.  4. Love of mankind.
5. Courage. 6. Generosity. 7. The love of death.

"In the seventh place, try, by the frequent thought of death," the
Rhetor said, "to bring yourself to regard it not as a dreaded foe, but
as a friend that frees the soul grown weary in the labors of virtue
from this distressful life, and leads it to its place of recompense and
peace."

"Yes, that must be so," thought Pierre, when after these words the
Rhetor went away, leaving him to solitary meditation. "It must be so,
but I am still so weak that I love my life, the meaning of which is only
now gradually opening before me." But five of the other virtues which
Pierre recalled, counting them on his fingers, he felt already in his
soul: courage, generosity, morality, love of mankind, and especially
obedience--which did not even seem to him a virtue, but a joy. (He now
felt so glad to be free from his own lawlessness and to submit his will
to those who knew the indubitable truth.) He forgot what the seventh
virtue was and could not recall it.

The third time the Rhetor came back more quickly and asked Pierre
whether he was still firm in his intention and determined to submit to
all that would be required of him.

"I am ready for everything," said Pierre.

"I must also inform you," said the Rhetor, "that our Order delivers its
teaching not in words only but also by other means, which may perhaps
have a stronger effect on the sincere seeker after wisdom and virtue
than mere words. This chamber with what you see therein should already
have suggested to your heart, if it is sincere, more than words could
do. You will perhaps also see in your further initiation a like
method of enlightenment. Our Order imitates the ancient societies that
explained their teaching by hieroglyphics. A hieroglyph," said the
Rhetor, "is an emblem of something not cognizable by the senses but
which possesses qualities resembling those of the symbol."

Pierre knew very well what a hieroglyph was, but dared not speak. He
listened to the Rhetor in silence, feeling from all he said that his
ordeal was about to begin.

"If you are resolved, I must begin your initiation," said the Rhetor
coming closer to Pierre. "In token of generosity I ask you to give me
all your valuables."

"But I have nothing here," replied Pierre, supposing that he was asked
to give up all he possessed.

"What you have with you: watch, money, rings...."

Pierre quickly took out his purse and watch, but could not manage for
some time to get the wedding ring off his fat finger. When that had been
done, the Rhetor said:

"In token of obedience, I ask you to undress."

Pierre took off his coat, waistcoat, and left boot according to the
Rhetor's instructions. The Mason drew the shirt back from Pierre's left
breast, and stooping down pulled up the left leg of his trousers to
above the knee. Pierre hurriedly began taking off his right boot also
and was going to tuck up the other trouser leg to save this stranger the
trouble, but the Mason told him that was not necessary and gave him
a slipper for his left foot. With a childlike smile of embarrassment,
doubt, and self-derision, which appeared on his face against his will,
Pierre stood with his arms hanging down and legs apart, before his
brother Rhetor, and awaited his further commands.

"And now, in token of candor, I ask you to reveal to me your chief
passion," said the latter.

"My passion! I have had so many," replied Pierre.

"That passion which more than all others caused you to waver on the path
of virtue," said the Mason.

Pierre paused, seeking a reply.

"Wine? Gluttony? Idleness? Laziness? Irritability? Anger? Women?" He
went over his vices in his mind, not knowing to which of them to give
the pre-eminence.

"Women," he said in a low, scarcely audible voice.

The Mason did not move and for a long time said nothing after this
answer. At last he moved up to Pierre and, taking the kerchief that lay
on the table, again bound his eyes.

"For the last time I say to you--turn all your attention upon yourself,
put a bridle on your senses, and seek blessedness, not in passion but
in your own heart. The source of blessedness is not without us but
within...."

Pierre had already long been feeling in himself that refreshing source
of blessedness which now flooded his heart with glad emotion.





CHAPTER IV


Soon after this there came into the dark chamber to fetch Pierre, not
the Rhetor but Pierre's sponsor, Willarski, whom he recognized by his
voice. To fresh questions as to the firmness of his resolution Pierre
replied: "Yes, yes, I agree," and with a beaming, childlike smile, his
fat chest uncovered, stepping unevenly and timidly in one slippered and
one booted foot, he advanced, while Willarski held a sword to his
bare chest. He was conducted from that room along passages that turned
backwards and forwards and was at last brought to the doors of the
Lodge. Willarski coughed, he was answered by the Masonic knock with
mallets, the doors opened before them. A bass voice (Pierre was still
blindfolded) questioned him as to who he was, when and where he was
born, and so on. Then he was again led somewhere still blindfolded,
and as they went along he was told allegories of the toils of his
pilgrimage, of holy friendship, of the Eternal Architect of the
universe, and of the courage with which he should endure toils and
dangers. During these wanderings, Pierre noticed that he was spoken of
now as the "Seeker," now as the "Sufferer," and now as the "Postulant,"
to the accompaniment of various knockings with mallets and swords. As he
was being led up to some object he noticed a hesitation and uncertainty
among his conductors. He heard those around him disputing in whispers
and one of them insisting that he should be led along a certain carpet.
After that they took his right hand, placed it on something, and told
him to hold a pair of compasses to his left breast with the other hand
and to repeat after someone who read aloud an oath of fidelity to the
laws of the Order. The candles were then extinguished and some spirit
lighted, as Pierre knew by the smell, and he was told that he would now
see the lesser light. The bandage was taken off his eyes and, by the
faint light of the burning spirit, Pierre, as in a dream, saw several
men standing before him, wearing aprons like the Rhetor's and holding
swords in their hands pointed at his breast. Among them stood a man
whose white shirt was stained with blood. On seeing this, Pierre moved
forward with his breast toward the swords, meaning them to pierce it.
But the swords were drawn back from him and he was at once blindfolded
again.

"Now thou hast seen the lesser light," uttered a voice. Then the candles
were relit and he was told that he would see the full light; the bandage
was again removed and more than ten voices said together: "Sic transit
gloria mundi."

Pierre gradually began to recover himself and looked about at the room
and at the people in it. Round a long table covered with black sat some
twelve men in garments like those he had already seen. Some of them
Pierre had met in Petersburg society. In the President's chair sat a
young man he did not know, with a peculiar cross hanging from his neck.
On his right sat the Italian abbe whom Pierre had met at Anna Pavlovna's
two years before. There were also present a very distinguished dignitary
and a Swiss who had formerly been tutor at the Kuragins'. All maintained
a solemn silence, listening to the words of the President, who held a
mallet in his hand. Let into the wall was a star-shaped light. At one
side of the table was a small carpet with various figures worked upon
it, at the other was something resembling an altar on which lay a
Testament and a skull. Round it stood seven large candlesticks like
those used in churches. Two of the brothers led Pierre up to the altar,
placed his feet at right angles, and bade him lie down, saying that he
must prostrate himself at the Gates of the Temple.

"He must first receive the trowel," whispered one of the brothers.

"Oh, hush, please!" said another.

Pierre, perplexed, looked round with his shortsighted eyes without
obeying, and suddenly doubts arose in his mind. "Where am I? What am
I doing? Aren't they laughing at me? Shan't I be ashamed to remember
this?" But these doubts only lasted a moment. Pierre glanced at the
serious faces of those around, remembered all he had already gone
through, and realized that he could not stop halfway. He was aghast
at his hesitation and, trying to arouse his former devotional feeling,
prostrated himself before the Gates of the Temple. And really, the
feeling of devotion returned to him even more strongly than before. When
he had lain there some time, he was told to get up, and a white leather
apron, such as the others wore, was put on him: he was given a trowel
and three pairs of gloves, and then the Grand Master addressed him. He
told him that he should try to do nothing to stain the whiteness of that
apron, which symbolized strength and purity; then of the unexplained
trowel, he told him to toil with it to cleanse his own heart from vice,
and indulgently to smooth with it the heart of his neighbor. As to the
first pair of gloves, a man's, he said that Pierre could not know their
meaning but must keep them. The second pair of man's gloves he was
to wear at the meetings, and finally of the third, a pair of women's
gloves, he said: "Dear brother, these woman's gloves are intended for
you too. Give them to the woman whom you shall honor most of all. This
gift will be a pledge of your purity of heart to her whom you select to
be your worthy helpmeet in Masonry." And after a pause, he added: "But
beware, dear brother, that these gloves do not deck hands that are
unclean." While the Grand Master said these last words it seemed
to Pierre that he grew embarrassed. Pierre himself grew still more
confused, blushed like a child till tears came to his eyes, began
looking about him uneasily, and an awkward pause followed.

This silence was broken by one of the brethren, who led Pierre up to the
rug and began reading to him from a manuscript book an explanation of
all the figures on it: the sun, the moon, a hammer, a plumb line, a
trowel, a rough stone and a squared stone, a pillar, three windows, and
so on. Then a place was assigned to Pierre, he was shown the signs of
the Lodge, told the password, and at last was permitted to sit down.
The Grand Master began reading the statutes. They were very long, and
Pierre, from joy, agitation, and embarrassment, was not in a state to
understand what was being read. He managed to follow only the last words
of the statutes and these remained in his mind.

"In our temples we recognize no other distinctions," read the Grand
Master, "but those between virtue and vice. Beware of making any
distinctions which may infringe equality. Fly to a brother's aid whoever
he may be, exhort him who goeth astray, raise him that falleth, never
bear malice or enmity toward thy brother. Be kindly and courteous.
Kindle in all hearts the flame of virtue. Share thy happiness with thy
neighbor, and may envy never dim the purity of that bliss. Forgive thy
enemy, do not avenge thyself except by doing him good. Thus fulfilling
the highest law thou shalt regain traces of the ancient dignity which
thou hast lost."

He finished and, getting up, embraced and kissed Pierre, who, with tears
of joy in his eyes, looked round him, not knowing how to answer the
congratulations and greetings from acquaintances that met him on all
sides. He acknowledged no acquaintances but saw in all these men only
brothers, and burned with impatience to set to work with them.

The Grand Master rapped with his mallet. All the Masons sat down in
their places, and one of them read an exhortation on the necessity of
humility.

The Grand Master proposed that the last duty should be performed, and
the distinguished dignitary who bore the title of "Collector of Alms"
went round to all the brothers. Pierre would have liked to subscribe all
he had, but fearing that it might look like pride subscribed the same
amount as the others.

The meeting was at an end, and on reaching home Pierre felt as if he had
returned from a long journey on which he had spent dozens of years, had
become completely changed, and had quite left behind his former habits
and way of life.





CHAPTER V


The day after he had been received into the Lodge, Pierre was sitting at
home reading a book and trying to fathom the significance of the Square,
one side of which symbolized God, another moral things, a third
physical things, and the fourth a combination of these. Now and then
his attention wandered from the book and the Square and he formed in
imagination a new plan of life. On the previous evening at the Lodge, he
had heard that a rumor of his duel had reached the Emperor and that it
would be wiser for him to leave Petersburg. Pierre proposed going to his
estates in the south and there attending to the welfare of his serfs. He
was joyfully planning this new life, when Prince Vasili suddenly entered
the room.

"My dear fellow, what have you been up to in Moscow? Why have you
quarreled with Helene, mon cher? You are under a delusion," said
Prince Vasili, as he entered. "I know all about it, and I can tell you
positively that Helene is as innocent before you as Christ was before
the Jews."

Pierre was about to reply, but Prince Vasili interrupted him.

"And why didn't you simply come straight to me as to a friend? I know
all about it and understand it all," he said. "You behaved as becomes
a man who values his honor, perhaps too hastily, but we won't go into
that. But consider the position in which you are placing her and me
in the eyes of society, and even of the court," he added, lowering his
voice. "She is living in Moscow and you are here. Remember, dear boy,"
and he drew Pierre's arm downwards, "it is simply a misunderstanding. I
expect you feel it so yourself. Let us write her a letter at once, and
she'll come here and all will be explained, or else, my dear boy, let me
tell you it's quite likely you'll have to suffer for it."

Prince Vasili gave Pierre a significant look.

"I know from reliable sources that the Dowager Empress is taking a keen
interest in the whole affair. You know she is very gracious to Helene."

Pierre tried several times to speak, but, on one hand, Prince Vasili did
not let him and, on the other, Pierre himself feared to begin to speak
in the tone of decided refusal and disagreement in which he had firmly
resolved to answer his father-in-law. Moreover, the words of the Masonic
statutes, "be kindly and courteous," recurred to him. He blinked, went
red, got up and sat down again, struggling with himself to do what was
for him the most difficult thing in life--to say an unpleasant thing
to a man's face, to say what the other, whoever he might be, did not
expect. He was so used to submitting to Prince Vasili's tone of careless
self-assurance that he felt he would be unable to withstand it now, but
he also felt that on what he said now his future depended--whether he
would follow the same old road, or that new path so attractively shown
him by the Masons, on which he firmly believed he would be reborn to a
new life.

"Now, dear boy," said Prince Vasili playfully, "say 'yes,' and I'll
write to her myself, and we will kill the fatted calf."

But before Prince Vasili had finished his playful speech, Pierre,
without looking at him, and with a kind of fury that made him like his
father, muttered in a whisper:

"Prince, I did not ask you here. Go, please go!" And he jumped up and
opened the door for him.

"Go!" he repeated, amazed at himself and glad to see the look of
confusion and fear that showed itself on Prince Vasili's face.

"What's the matter with you? Are you ill?"

"Go!" the quivering voice repeated. And Prince Vasili had to go without
receiving any explanation.

A week later, Pierre, having taken leave of his new friends, the Masons,
and leaving large sums of money with them for alms, went away to his
estates. His new brethren gave him letters to the Kiev and Odessa Masons
and promised to write to him and guide him in his new activity.





CHAPTER VI


The duel between Pierre and Dolokhov was hushed up and, in spite of the
Emperor's severity regarding duels at that time, neither the principals
nor their seconds suffered for it. But the story of the duel, confirmed
by Pierre's rupture with his wife, was the talk of society. Pierre
who had been regarded with patronizing condescension when he was an
illegitimate son, and petted and extolled when he was the best match
in Russia, had sunk greatly in the esteem of society after his
marriage--when the marriageable daughters and their mothers had nothing
to hope from him--especially as he did not know how, and did not wish,
to court society's favor. Now he alone was blamed for what had happened,
he was said to be insanely jealous and subject like his father to fits
of bloodthirsty rage. And when after Pierre's departure Helene returned
to Petersburg, she was received by all her acquaintances not only
cordially, but even with a shade of deference due to her misfortune.
When conversation turned on her husband Helene assumed a dignified
expression, which with characteristic tact she had acquired though she
did not understand its significance. This expression suggested that she
had resolved to endure her troubles uncomplainingly and that her husband
was a cross laid upon her by God. Prince Vasili expressed his opinion
more openly. He shrugged his shoulders when Pierre was mentioned and,
pointing to his forehead, remarked:

"A bit touched--I always said so."

"I said from the first," declared Anna Pavlovna referring to Pierre, "I
said at the time and before anyone else" (she insisted on her priority)
"that that senseless young man was spoiled by the depraved ideas of
these days. I said so even at the time when everybody was in raptures
about him, when he had just returned from abroad, and when, if you
remember, he posed as a sort of Marat at one of my soirees. And how has
it ended? I was against this marriage even then and foretold all that
has happened."

Anna Pavlovna continued to give on free evenings the same kind of
soirees as before--such as she alone had the gift of arranging--at which
was to be found "the cream of really good society, the bloom of the
intellectual essence of Petersburg," as she herself put it. Besides
this refined selection of society Anna Pavlovna's receptions were
also distinguished by the fact that she always presented some new and
interesting person to the visitors and that nowhere else was the state
of the political thermometer of legitimate Petersburg court society so
dearly and distinctly indicated.

Toward the end of 1806, when all the sad details of Napoleon's
destruction of the Prussian army at Jena and Auerstadt and the surrender
of most of the Prussian fortresses had been received, when our troops
had already entered Prussia and our second war with Napoleon was
beginning, Anna Pavlovna gave one of her soirees. The "cream of really
good society" consisted of the fascinating Helene, forsaken by her
husband, Mortemart, the delightful Prince Hippolyte who had just
returned from Vienna, two diplomatists, the old aunt, a young man
referred to in that drawing room as "a man of great merit" (un homme de
beaucoup de merite), a newly appointed maid of honor and her mother, and
several other less noteworthy persons.

The novelty Anna Pavlovna was setting before her guests that evening was
Boris Drubetskoy, who had just arrived as a special messenger from the
Prussian army and was aide-de-camp to a very important personage.

The temperature shown by the political thermometer to the company that
evening was this:

"Whatever the European sovereigns and commanders may do to countenance
Bonaparte, and to cause me, and us in general, annoyance and
mortification, our opinion of Bonaparte cannot alter. We shall not cease
to express our sincere views on that subject, and can only say to the
King of Prussia and others: 'So much the worse for you. Tu l'as voulu,
George Dandin,' that's all we have to say about it!"

When Boris, who was to be served up to the guests, entered the drawing
room, almost all the company had assembled, and the conversation, guided
by Anna Pavlovna, was about our diplomatic relations with Austria and
the hope of an alliance with her.

Boris, grown more manly and looking fresh, rosy and self-possessed,
entered the drawing room elegantly dressed in the uniform of an
aide-de-camp and was duly conducted to pay his respects to the aunt and
then brought back to the general circle.

Anna Pavlovna gave him her shriveled hand to kiss and introduced him to
several persons whom he did not know, giving him a whispered description
of each.

"Prince Hippolyte Kuragin, M. Krug, the charge d'affaires from
Copenhagen--a profound intellect," and simply, "Mr. Shitov--a man of
great merit"--this of the man usually so described.

Thanks to Anna Mikhaylovna's efforts, his own tastes, and the
peculiarities of his reserved nature, Boris had managed during his
service to place himself very advantageously. He was aide-de-camp to a
very important personage, had been sent on a very important mission to
Prussia, and had just returned from there as a special messenger. He had
become thoroughly conversant with that unwritten code with which he had
been so pleased at Olmutz and according to which an ensign might rank
incomparably higher than a general, and according to which what was
needed for success in the service was not effort or work, or courage, or
perseverance, but only the knowledge of how to get on with those who can
grant rewards, and he was himself often surprised at the rapidity of his
success and at the inability of others to understand these things.
In consequence of this discovery his whole manner of life, all
his relations with old friends, all his plans for his future, were
completely altered. He was not rich, but would spend his last groat to
be better dressed than others, and would rather deprive himself of many
pleasures than allow himself to be seen in a shabby equipage or appear
in the streets of Petersburg in an old uniform. He made friends with
and sought the acquaintance of only those above him in position and
who could therefore be of use to him. He liked Petersburg and despised
Moscow. The remembrance of the Rostovs' house and of his childish love
for Natasha was unpleasant to him and he had not once been to see the
Rostovs since the day of his departure for the army. To be in Anna
Pavlovna's drawing room he considered an important step up in the
service, and he at once understood his role, letting his hostess make
use of whatever interest he had to offer. He himself carefully scanned
each face, appraising the possibilities of establishing intimacy with
each of those present, and the advantages that might accrue. He took the
seat indicated to him beside the fair Helene and listened to the general
conversation.

"Vienna considers the bases of the proposed treaty so unattainable that
not even a continuity of most brilliant successes would secure them, and
she doubts the means we have of gaining them. That is the actual phrase
used by the Vienna cabinet," said the Danish charge d'affaires.

"The doubt is flattering," said "the man of profound intellect," with a
subtle smile.

"We must distinguish between the Vienna cabinet and the Emperor of
Austria," said Mortemart. "The Emperor of Austria can never have thought
of such a thing, it is only the cabinet that says it."

"Ah, my dear vicomte," put in Anna Pavlovna, "L'Urope" (for some
reason she called it Urope as if that were a specially refined French
pronunciation which she could allow herself when conversing with a
Frenchman), "L'Urope ne sera jamais notre alliee sincere." *


    * "Europe will never be our sincere ally."


After that Anna Pavlovna led up to the courage and firmness of the King
of Prussia, in order to draw Boris into the conversation.

Boris listened attentively to each of the speakers, awaiting his turn,
but managed meanwhile to look round repeatedly at his neighbor, the
beautiful Helene, whose eyes several times met those of the handsome
young aide-de-camp with a smile.

Speaking of the position of Prussia, Anna Pavlovna very naturally asked
Boris to tell them about his journey to Glogau and in what state he
found the Prussian army. Boris, speaking with deliberation, told them in
pure, correct French many interesting details about the armies and the
court, carefully abstaining from expressing an opinion of his own about
the facts he was recounting. For some time he engrossed the general
attention, and Anna Pavlovna felt that the novelty she had served up was
received with pleasure by all her visitors. The greatest attention
of all to Boris' narrative was shown by Helene. She asked him several
questions about his journey and seemed greatly interested in the state
of the Prussian army. As soon as he had finished she turned to him with
her usual smile.

"You absolutely must come and see me," she said in a tone that implied
that, for certain considerations he could not know of, this was
absolutely necessary.

"On Tuesday between eight and nine. It will give me great pleasure."

Boris promised to fulfill her wish and was about to begin a conversation
with her, when Anna Pavlovna called him away on the pretext that her
aunt wished to hear him.

"You know her husband, of course?" said Anna Pavlovna, closing her eyes
and indicating Helene with a sorrowful gesture. "Ah, she is such an
unfortunate and charming woman! Don't mention him before her--please
don't! It is too painful for her!"





CHAPTER VII


When Boris and Anna Pavlovna returned to the others Prince Hippolyte had
the ear of the company.

Bending forward in his armchair he said: "Le Roi de Prusse!" and having
said this laughed. Everyone turned toward him.

"Le Roi de Prusse?" Hippolyte said interrogatively, again laughing, and
then calmly and seriously sat back in his chair. Anna Pavlovna waited
for him to go on, but as he seemed quite decided to say no more she
began to tell of how at Potsdam the impious Bonaparte had stolen the
sword of Frederick the Great.

"It is the sword of Frederick the Great which I..." she began, but
Hippolyte interrupted her with the words: "Le Roi de Prusse..." and
again, as soon as all turned toward him, excused himself and said no
more.

Anna Pavlovna frowned. Mortemart, Hippolyte's friend, addressed him
firmly.

"Come now, what about your Roi de Prusse?"

Hippolyte laughed as if ashamed of laughing.

"Oh, it's nothing. I only wished to say..." (he wanted to repeat a joke
he had heard in Vienna and which he had been trying all that evening to
get in) "I only wished to say that we are wrong to fight pour le Roi de
Prusse!"

Boris smiled circumspectly, so that it might be taken as ironical or
appreciative according to the way the joke was received. Everybody
laughed.

"Your joke is too bad, it's witty but unjust," said Anna Pavlovna,
shaking her little shriveled finger at him.

"We are not fighting pour le Roi de Prusse, but for right principles.
Oh, that wicked Prince Hippolyte!" she said.

The conversation did not flag all evening and turned chiefly on the
political news. It became particularly animated toward the end of the
evening when the rewards bestowed by the Emperor were mentioned.

"You know N-- N-- received a snuffbox with the portrait last year?" said
"the man of profound intellect." "Why shouldn't S-- S-- get the same
distinction?"

"Pardon me! A snuffbox with the Emperor's portrait is a reward but not a
distinction," said the diplomatist--"a gift, rather."

"There are precedents, I may mention Schwarzenberg."

"It's impossible," replied another.

"Will you bet? The ribbon of the order is a different matter...."

When everybody rose to go, Helene who had spoken very little all
the evening again turned to Boris, asking him in a tone of caressing
significant command to come to her on Tuesday.

"It is of great importance to me," she said, turning with a smile toward
Anna Pavlovna, and Anna Pavlovna, with the same sad smile with which she
spoke of her exalted patroness, supported Helene's wish.

It seemed as if from some words Boris had spoken that evening about the
Prussian army, Helene had suddenly found it necessary to see him. She
seemed to promise to explain that necessity to him when he came on
Tuesday.

But on Tuesday evening, having come to Helene's splendid salon, Boris
received no clear explanation of why it had been necessary for him to
come. There were other guests and the countess talked little to him, and
only as he kissed her hand on taking leave said unexpectedly and in a
whisper, with a strangely unsmiling face: "Come to dinner tomorrow... in
the evening. You must come.... Come!"

During that stay in Petersburg, Boris became an intimate in the
countess' house.





CHAPTER VIII


The war was flaming up and nearing the Russian frontier. Everywhere
one heard curses on Bonaparte, "the enemy of mankind." Militiamen and
recruits were being enrolled in the villages, and from the seat of
war came contradictory news, false as usual and therefore variously
interpreted. The life of old Prince Bolkonski, Prince Andrew, and
Princess Mary had greatly changed since 1805.

In 1806 the old prince was made one of the eight commanders in chief
then appointed to supervise the enrollment decreed throughout Russia.
Despite the weakness of age, which had become particularly noticeable
since the time when he thought his son had been killed, he did not think
it right to refuse a duty to which he had been appointed by the Emperor
himself, and this fresh opportunity for action gave him new energy
and strength. He was continually traveling through the three provinces
entrusted to him, was pedantic in the fulfillment of his duties, severe
to cruelty with his subordinates, and went into everything down to the
minutest details himself. Princess Mary had ceased taking lessons in
mathematics from her father, and when the old prince was at home went
to his study with the wet nurse and little Prince Nicholas (as his
grandfather called him). The baby Prince Nicholas lived with his wet
nurse and nurse Savishna in the late princess' rooms and Princess Mary
spent most of the day in the nursery, taking a mother's place to her
little nephew as best she could. Mademoiselle Bourienne, too, seemed
passionately fond of the boy, and Princess Mary often deprived herself
to give her friend the pleasure of dandling the little angel--as she
called her nephew--and playing with him.

Near the altar of the church at Bald Hills there was a chapel over the
tomb of the little princess, and in this chapel was a marble monument
brought from Italy, representing an angel with outspread wings ready to
fly upwards. The angel's upper lip was slightly raised as though
about to smile, and once on coming out of the chapel Prince Andrew and
Princess Mary admitted to one another that the angel's face reminded
them strangely of the little princess. But what was still stranger,
though of this Prince Andrew said nothing to his sister, was that in the
expression the sculptor had happened to give the angel's face, Prince
Andrew read the same mild reproach he had read on the face of his dead
wife: "Ah, why have you done this to me?"

Soon after Prince Andrew's return the old prince made over to him a
large estate, Bogucharovo, about twenty-five miles from Bald Hills.
Partly because of the depressing memories associated with Bald Hills,
partly because Prince Andrew did not always feel equal to bearing with
his father's peculiarities, and partly because he needed solitude,
Prince Andrew made use of Bogucharovo, began building and spent most of
his time there.

After the Austerlitz campaign Prince Andrew had firmly resolved not
to continue his military service, and when the war recommenced
and everybody had to serve, he took a post under his father in the
recruitment so as to avoid active service. The old prince and his son
seemed to have changed roles since the campaign of 1805. The old man,
roused by activity, expected the best results from the new campaign,
while Prince Andrew on the contrary, taking no part in the war and
secretly regretting this, saw only the dark side.

On February 26, 1807, the old prince set off on one of his circuits.
Prince Andrew remained at Bald Hills as usual during his father's
absence. Little Nicholas had been unwell for four days. The coachman who
had driven the old prince to town returned bringing papers and letters
for Prince Andrew.

Not finding the young prince in his study the valet went with the
letters to Princess Mary's apartments, but did not find him there. He
was told that the prince had gone to the nursery.

"If you please, your excellency, Petrusha has brought some papers,"
said one of the nursemaids to Prince Andrew who was sitting on a child's
little chair while, frowning and with trembling hands, he poured drops
from a medicine bottle into a wineglass half full of water.

"What is it?" he said crossly, and, his hand shaking unintentionally,
he poured too many drops into the glass. He threw the mixture onto the
floor and asked for some more water. The maid brought it.

There were in the room a child's cot, two boxes, two armchairs, a
table, a child's table, and the little chair on which Prince Andrew was
sitting. The curtains were drawn, and a single candle was burning on the
table, screened by a bound music book so that the light did not fall on
the cot.

"My dear," said Princess Mary, addressing her brother from beside the
cot where she was standing, "better wait a bit... later..."

"Oh, leave off, you always talk nonsense and keep putting things
off--and this is what comes of it!" said Prince Andrew in an exasperated
whisper, evidently meaning to wound his sister.

"My dear, really... it's better not to wake him... he's asleep," said
the princess in a tone of entreaty.

Prince Andrew got up and went on tiptoe up to the little bed, wineglass
in hand.

"Perhaps we'd really better not wake him," he said hesitating.

"As you please... really... I think so... but as you please," said
Princess Mary, evidently intimidated and confused that her opinion had
prevailed. She drew her brother's attention to the maid who was calling
him in a whisper.

It was the second night that neither of them had slept, watching the boy
who was in a high fever. These last days, mistrusting their household
doctor and expecting another for whom they had sent to town, they had
been trying first one remedy and then another. Worn out by sleeplessness
and anxiety they threw their burden of sorrow on one another and
reproached and disputed with each other.

"Petrusha has come with papers from your father," whispered the maid.

Prince Andrew went out.

"Devil take them!" he muttered, and after listening to the verbal
instructions his father had sent and taking the correspondence and his
father's letter, he returned to the nursery.

"Well?" he asked.

"Still the same. Wait, for heaven's sake. Karl Ivanich always says that
sleep is more important than anything," whispered Princess Mary with a
sigh.

Prince Andrew went up to the child and felt him. He was burning hot.

"Confound you and your Karl Ivanich!" He took the glass with the drops
and again went up to the cot.

"Andrew, don't!" said Princess Mary.

But he scowled at her angrily though also with suffering in his eyes,
and stooped glass in hand over the infant.

"But I wish it," he said. "I beg you--give it him!"

Princess Mary shrugged her shoulders but took the glass submissively
and calling the nurse began giving the medicine. The child screamed
hoarsely. Prince Andrew winced and, clutching his head, went out and sat
down on a sofa in the next room.

He still had all the letters in his hand. Opening them mechanically he
began reading. The old prince, now and then using abbreviations, wrote
in his large elongated hand on blue paper as follows:


Have just this moment received by special messenger very joyful news--if
it's not false. Bennigsen seems to have obtained a complete victory
over Buonaparte at Eylau. In Petersburg everyone is rejoicing, and
the rewards sent to the army are innumerable. Though he is a German--I
congratulate him! I can't make out what the commander at Korchevo--a
certain Khandrikov--is up to; till now the additional men and provisions
have not arrived. Gallop off to him at once and say I'll have his head
off if everything is not here in a week. Have received another letter
about the Preussisch-Eylau battle from Petenka--he took part in it--and
it's all true. When mischief-makers don't meddle even a German beats
Buonaparte. He is said to be fleeing in great disorder. Mind you gallop
off to Korchevo without delay and carry out instructions!


Prince Andrew sighed and broke the seal of another envelope. It was
a closely written letter of two sheets from Bilibin. He folded it up
without reading it and reread his father's letter, ending with the
words: "Gallop off to Korchevo and carry out instructions!"

"No, pardon me, I won't go now till the child is better," thought he,
going to the door and looking into the nursery.

Princess Mary was still standing by the cot, gently rocking the baby.

"Ah yes, and what else did he say that's unpleasant?" thought Prince
Andrew, recalling his father's letter. "Yes, we have gained a victory
over Bonaparte, just when I'm not serving. Yes, yes, he's always poking
fun at me.... Ah, well! Let him!" And he began reading Bilibin's letter
which was written in French. He read without understanding half of it,
read only to forget, if but for a moment, what he had too long been
thinking of so painfully to the exclusion of all else.





CHAPTER IX


Bilibin was now at army headquarters in a diplomatic capacity, and
though he wrote in French and used French jests and French idioms,
he described the whole campaign with a fearless self-censure and
self-derision genuinely Russian. Bilibin wrote that the obligation of
diplomatic discretion tormented him, and he was happy to have in Prince
Andrew a reliable correspondent to whom he could pour out the bile he
had accumulated at the sight of all that was being done in the army.
The letter was old, having been written before the battle at
Preussisch-Eylau.

"Since the day of our brilliant success at Austerlitz," wrote Bilibin,
"as you know, my dear prince, I never leave headquarters. I have
certainly acquired a taste for war, and it is just as well for me; what
I have seen during these last three months is incredible.

"I begin ab ovo. 'The enemy of the human race,' as you know, attacks the
Prussians. The Prussians are our faithful allies who have only betrayed
us three times in three years. We take up their cause, but it turns out
that 'the enemy of the human race' pays no heed to our fine speeches
and in his rude and savage way throws himself on the Prussians without
giving them time to finish the parade they had begun, and in two twists
of the hand he breaks them to smithereens and installs himself in the
palace at Potsdam.

"'I most ardently desire,' writes the King of Prussia to Bonaparte,
'that Your Majesty should be received and treated in my palace in a
manner agreeable to yourself, and in so far as circumstances allowed, I
have hastened to take all steps to that end. May I have succeeded!' The
Prussian generals pride themselves on being polite to the French and lay
down their arms at the first demand.

"The head of the garrison at Glogau, with ten thousand men, asks the
King of Prussia what he is to do if he is summoned to surrender.... All
this is absolutely true.

"In short, hoping to settle matters by taking up a warlike attitude, it
turns out that we have landed ourselves in war, and what is more, in
war on our own frontiers, with and for the King of Prussia. We have
everything in perfect order, only one little thing is lacking, namely,
a commander in chief. As it was considered that the Austerlitz success
might have been more decisive had the commander in chief not been so
young, all our octogenarians were reviewed, and of Prozorovski
and Kamenski the latter was preferred. The general comes to us,
Suvorov-like, in a kibitka, and is received with acclamations of joy and
triumph.

"On the 4th, the first courier arrives from Petersburg. The mails
are taken to the field marshal's room, for he likes to do everything
himself. I am called in to help sort the letters and take those meant
for us. The field marshal looks on and waits for letters addressed
to him. We search, but none are to be found. The field marshal grows
impatient and sets to work himself and finds letters from the Emperor
to Count T., Prince V., and others. Then he bursts into one of his wild
furies and rages at everyone and everything, seizes the letters, opens
them, and reads those from the Emperor addressed to others. 'Ah! So
that's the way they treat me! No confidence in me! Ah, ordered to keep
an eye on me! Very well then! Get along with you!' So he writes the
famous order of the day to General Bennigsen:

'I am wounded and cannot ride and consequently cannot command the army.
You have brought your army corps to Pultusk, routed: here it is exposed,
and without fuel or forage, so something must be done, and, as you
yourself reported to Count Buxhowden yesterday, you must think of
retreating to our frontier--which do today.'

"'From all my riding,' he writes to the Emperor, 'I have got a saddle
sore which, coming after all my previous journeys, quite prevents my
riding and commanding so vast an army, so I have passed on the command
to the general next in seniority, Count Buxhowden, having sent him my
whole staff and all that belongs to it, advising him if there is a lack
of bread, to move farther into the interior of Prussia, for only one
day's ration of bread remains, and in some regiments none at all, as
reported by the division commanders, Ostermann and Sedmoretzki, and
all that the peasants had has been eaten up. I myself will remain in
hospital at Ostrolenka till I recover. In regard to which I humbly
submit my report, with the information that if the army remains in its
present bivouac another fortnight there will not be a healthy man left
in it by spring.

"'Grant leave to retire to his country seat to an old man who is already
in any case dishonored by being unable to fulfill the great and
glorious task for which he was chosen. I shall await your most gracious
permission here in hospital, that I may not have to play the part of a
secretary rather than commander in the army. My removal from the army
does not produce the slightest stir--a blind man has left it. There are
thousands such as I in Russia.'

"The field marshal is angry with the Emperor and he punishes us all,
isn't it logical?

"This is the first act. Those that follow are naturally increasingly
interesting and entertaining. After the field marshal's departure it
appears that we are within sight of the enemy and must give battle.
Buxhowden is commander in chief by seniority, but General Bennigsen does
not quite see it; more particularly as it is he and his corps who are
within sight of the enemy and he wishes to profit by the opportunity to
fight a battle 'on his own hand' as the Germans say. He does so. This
is the battle of Pultusk, which is considered a great victory but in my
opinion was nothing of the kind. We civilians, as you know, have a very
bad way of deciding whether a battle was won or lost. Those who retreat
after a battle have lost it is what we say; and according to that it is
we who lost the battle of Pultusk. In short, we retreat after the battle
but send a courier to Petersburg with news of a victory, and General
Bennigsen, hoping to receive from Petersburg the post of commander in
chief as a reward for his victory, does not give up the command of
the army to General Buxhowden. During this interregnum we begin a very
original and interesting series of maneuvers. Our aim is no longer, as
it should be, to avoid or attack the enemy, but solely to avoid
General Buxhowden who by right of seniority should be our chief. So
energetically do we pursue this aim that after crossing an unfordable
river we burn the bridges to separate ourselves from our enemy, who at
the moment is not Bonaparte but Buxhowden. General Buxhowden was all but
attacked and captured by a superior enemy force as a result of one of
these maneuvers that enabled us to escape him. Buxhowden pursues us--we
scuttle. He hardly crosses the river to our side before we recross to
the other. At last our enemy. Buxhowden, catches us and attacks. Both
generals are angry, and the result is a challenge on Buxhowden's part
and an epileptic fit on Bennigsen's. But at the critical moment the
courier who carried the news of our victory at Pultusk to Petersburg
returns bringing our appointment as commander in chief, and our first
foe, Buxhowden, is vanquished; we can now turn our thoughts to the
second, Bonaparte. But as it turns out, just at that moment a third
enemy rises before us--namely the Orthodox Russian soldiers, loudly
demanding bread, meat, biscuits, fodder, and whatnot! The stores are
empty, the roads impassable. The Orthodox begin looting, and in a way
of which our last campaign can give you no idea. Half the regiments form
bands and scour the countryside and put everything to fire and sword.
The inhabitants are totally ruined, the hospitals overflow with
sick, and famine is everywhere. Twice the marauders even attack our
headquarters, and the commander in chief has to ask for a battalion to
disperse them. During one of these attacks they carried off my empty
portmanteau and my dressing gown. The Emperor proposes to give all
commanders of divisions the right to shoot marauders, but I much fear
this will oblige one half the army to shoot the other."

At first Prince Andrew read with his eyes only, but after a while,
in spite of himself (although he knew how far it was safe to trust
Bilibin), what he had read began to interest him more and more. When he
had read thus far, he crumpled the letter up and threw it away. It was
not what he had read that vexed him, but the fact that the life out
there in which he had now no part could perturb him. He shut his eyes,
rubbed his forehead as if to rid himself of all interest in what he
had read, and listened to what was passing in the nursery. Suddenly he
thought he heard a strange noise through the door. He was seized with
alarm lest something should have happened to the child while he was
reading the letter. He went on tiptoe to the nursery door and opened it.

Just as he went in he saw that the nurse was hiding something from him
with a scared look and that Princess Mary was no longer by the cot.

"My dear," he heard what seemed to him her despairing whisper behind
him.

As often happens after long sleeplessness and long anxiety, he was
seized by an unreasoning panic--it occurred to him that the child was
dead. All that he saw and heard seemed to confirm this terror.

"All is over," he thought, and a cold sweat broke out on his forehead.
He went to the cot in confusion, sure that he would find it empty and
that the nurse had been hiding the dead baby. He drew the curtain aside
and for some time his frightened, restless eyes could not find the baby.
At last he saw him: the rosy boy had tossed about till he lay across the
bed with his head lower than the pillow, and was smacking his lips in
his sleep and breathing evenly.

Prince Andrew was as glad to find the boy like that, as if he had
already lost him. He bent over him and, as his sister had taught him,
tried with his lips whether the child was still feverish. The soft
forehead was moist. Prince Andrew touched the head with his hand; even
the hair was wet, so profusely had the child perspired. He was not dead,
but evidently the crisis was over and he was convalescent. Prince Andrew
longed to snatch up, to squeeze, to hold to his heart, this helpless
little creature, but dared not do so. He stood over him, gazing at his
head and at the little arms and legs which showed under the blanket. He
heard a rustle behind him and a shadow appeared under the curtain of
the cot. He did not look round, but still gazing at the infant's face
listened to his regular breathing. The dark shadow was Princess Mary,
who had come up to the cot with noiseless steps, lifted the curtain,
and dropped it again behind her. Prince Andrew recognized her without
looking and held out his hand to her. She pressed it.

"He has perspired," said Prince Andrew.

"I was coming to tell you so."

The child moved slightly in his sleep, smiled, and rubbed his forehead
against the pillow.

Prince Andrew looked at his sister. In the dim shadow of the curtain her
luminous eyes shone more brightly than usual from the tears of joy that
were in them. She leaned over to her brother and kissed him, slightly
catching the curtain of the cot. Each made the other a warning gesture
and stood still in the dim light beneath the curtain as if not wishing
to leave that seclusion where they three were shut off from all the
world. Prince Andrew was the first to move away, ruffling his hair
against the muslin of the curtain.

"Yes, this is the one thing left me now," he said with a sigh.





CHAPTER X


Soon after his admission to the Masonic Brotherhood, Pierre went to the
Kiev province, where he had the greatest number of serfs, taking with
him full directions which he had written down for his own guidance as to
what he should do on his estates.

When he reached Kiev he sent for all his stewards to the head office
and explained to them his intentions and wishes. He told them that steps
would be taken immediately to free his serfs--and that till then they
were not to be overburdened with labor, women while nursing their babies
were not to be sent to work, assistance was to be given to the serfs,
punishments were to be admonitory and not corporal, and hospitals,
asylums, and schools were to be established on all the estates. Some of
the stewards (there were semiliterate foremen among them) listened with
alarm, supposing these words to mean that the young count was displeased
with their management and embezzlement of money, some after their first
fright were amused by Pierre's lisp and the new words they had not heard
before, others simply enjoyed hearing how the master talked, while the
cleverest among them, including the chief steward, understood from this
speech how they could best handle the master for their own ends.

The chief steward expressed great sympathy with Pierre's intentions, but
remarked that besides these changes it would be necessary to go into the
general state of affairs which was far from satisfactory.

Despite Count Bezukhov's enormous wealth, since he had come into an
income which was said to amount to five hundred thousand rubles a year,
Pierre felt himself far poorer than when his father had made him
an allowance of ten thousand rubles. He had a dim perception of the
following budget:

About 80,000 went in payments on all the estates to the Land Bank, about
30,000 went for the upkeep of the estate near Moscow, the town house,
and the allowance to the three princesses; about 15,000 was given in
pensions and the same amount for asylums; 150,000 alimony was sent to
the countess; about 70,000 went for interest on debts. The building of a
new church, previously begun, had cost about 10,000 in each of the last
two years, and he did not know how the rest, about 100,000 rubles, was
spent, and almost every year he was obliged to borrow. Besides this the
chief steward wrote every year telling him of fires and bad harvests,
or of the necessity of rebuilding factories and workshops. So the first
task Pierre had to face was one for which he had very little aptitude or
inclination--practical business.

He discussed estate affairs every day with his chief steward. But
he felt that this did not forward matters at all. He felt that these
consultations were detached from real affairs and did not link up with
them or make them move. On the one hand, the chief steward put the state
of things to him in the very worst light, pointing out the necessity of
paying off the debts and undertaking new activities with serf labor,
to which Pierre did not agree. On the other hand, Pierre demanded that
steps should be taken to liberate the serfs, which the steward met by
showing the necessity of first paying off the loans from the Land Bank,
and the consequent impossibility of a speedy emancipation.

The steward did not say it was quite impossible, but suggested selling
the forests in the province of Kostroma, the land lower down the river,
and the Crimean estate, in order to make it possible: all of which
operations according to him were connected with such complicated
measures--the removal of injunctions, petitions, permits, and so
on--that Pierre became quite bewildered and only replied:

"Yes, yes, do so."

Pierre had none of the practical persistence that would have enabled him
to attend to the business himself and so he disliked it and only tried
to pretend to the steward that he was attending to it. The steward
for his part tried to pretend to the count that he considered these
consultations very valuable for the proprietor and troublesome to
himself.

In Kiev Pierre found some people he knew, and strangers hastened to make
his acquaintance and joyfully welcomed the rich newcomer, the
largest landowner of the province. Temptations to Pierre's greatest
weakness--the one to which he had confessed when admitted to the
Lodge--were so strong that he could not resist them. Again whole days,
weeks, and months of his life passed in as great a rush and were as much
occupied with evening parties, dinners, lunches, and balls, giving him
no time for reflection, as in Petersburg. Instead of the new life he had
hoped to lead he still lived the old life, only in new surroundings.

Of the three precepts of Freemasonry Pierre realized that he did not
fulfill the one which enjoined every Mason to set an example of moral
life, and that of the seven virtues he lacked two--morality and the love
of death. He consoled himself with the thought that he fulfilled
another of the precepts--that of reforming the human race--and had other
virtues--love of his neighbor, and especially generosity.

In the spring of 1807 he decided to return to Petersburg. On the way he
intended to visit all his estates and see for himself how far his orders
had been carried out and in what state were the serfs whom God had
entrusted to his care and whom he intended to benefit.

The chief steward, who considered the young count's attempts almost
insane--unprofitable to himself, to the count, and to the serfs--made
some concessions. Continuing to represent the liberation of the serfs as
impracticable, he arranged for the erection of large buildings--schools,
hospitals, and asylums--on all the estates before the master arrived.
Everywhere preparations were made not for ceremonious welcomes (which
he knew Pierre would not like), but for just such gratefully religious
ones, with offerings of icons and the bread and salt of hospitality,
as, according to his understanding of his master, would touch and delude
him.

The southern spring, the comfortable rapid traveling in a Vienna
carriage, and the solitude of the road, all had a gladdening effect on
Pierre. The estates he had not before visited were each more picturesque
than the other; the serfs everywhere seemed thriving and touchingly
grateful for the benefits conferred on them. Everywhere were receptions,
which though they embarrassed Pierre awakened a joyful feeling in the
depth of his heart. In one place the peasants presented him with bread
and salt and an icon of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, asking permission,
as a mark of their gratitude for the benefits he had conferred on them,
to build a new chantry to the church at their own expense in honor
of Peter and Paul, his patron saints. In another place the women with
infants in arms met him to thank him for releasing them from hard
work. On a third estate the priest, bearing a cross, came to meet
him surrounded by children whom, by the count's generosity, he was
instructing in reading, writing, and religion. On all his estates Pierre
saw with his own eyes brick buildings erected or in course of erection,
all on one plan, for hospitals, schools, and almshouses, which were soon
to be opened. Everywhere he saw the stewards' accounts, according to
which the serfs' manorial labor had been diminished, and heard the
touching thanks of deputations of serfs in their full-skirted blue
coats.

What Pierre did not know was that the place where they presented him
with bread and salt and wished to build a chantry in honor of Peter and
Paul was a market village where a fair was held on St. Peter's day,
and that the richest peasants (who formed the deputation) had begun
the chantry long before, but that nine tenths of the peasants in that
villages were in a state of the greatest poverty. He did not know that
since the nursing mothers were no longer sent to work on his land, they
did still harder work on their own land. He did not know that the priest
who met him with the cross oppressed the peasants by his exactions, and
that the pupils' parents wept at having to let him take their children
and secured their release by heavy payments. He did not know that the
brick buildings, built to plan, were being built by serfs whose manorial
labor was thus increased, though lessened on paper. He did not know that
where the steward had shown him in the accounts that the serfs' payments
had been diminished by a third, their obligatory manorial work had been
increased by a half. And so Pierre was delighted with his visit to his
estates and quite recovered the philanthropic mood in which he had left
Petersburg, and wrote enthusiastic letters to his "brother-instructor"
as he called the Grand Master.

"How easy it is, how little effort it needs, to do so much good,"
thought Pierre, "and how little attention we pay to it!"

He was pleased at the gratitude he received, but felt abashed at
receiving it. This gratitude reminded him of how much more he might do
for these simple, kindly people.

The chief steward, a very stupid but cunning man who saw perfectly
through the naive and intelligent count and played with him as with
a toy, seeing the effect these prearranged receptions had on Pierre,
pressed him still harder with proofs of the impossibility and above all
the uselessness of freeing the serfs, who were quite happy as it was.

Pierre in his secret soul agreed with the steward that it would be
difficult to imagine happier people, and that God only knew what would
happen to them when they were free, but he insisted, though reluctantly,
on what he thought right. The steward promised to do all in his power
to carry out the count's wishes, seeing clearly that not only would the
count never be able to find out whether all measures had been taken for
the sale of the land and forests and to release them from the Land Bank,
but would probably never even inquire and would never know that the
newly erected buildings were standing empty and that the serfs continued
to give in money and work all that other people's serfs gave--that is to
say, all that could be got out of them.





CHAPTER XI


Returning from his journey through South Russia in the happiest state
of mind, Pierre carried out an intention he had long had of visiting his
friend Bolkonski, whom he had not seen for two years.

Bogucharovo lay in a flat uninteresting part of the country among fields
and forests of fir and birch, which were partly cut down. The house lay
behind a newly dug pond filled with water to the brink and with banks
still bare of grass. It was at the end of a village that stretched
along the highroad in the midst of a young copse in which were a few fir
trees.

The homestead consisted of a threshing floor, outhouses, stables, a
bathhouse, a lodge, and a large brick house with semicircular facade
still in course of construction. Round the house was a garden newly laid
out. The fences and gates were new and solid; two fire pumps and a
water cart, painted green, stood in a shed; the paths were straight,
the bridges were strong and had handrails. Everything bore an impress of
tidiness and good management. Some domestic serfs Pierre met, in reply
to inquiries as to where the prince lived, pointed out a small newly
built lodge close to the pond. Anton, a man who had looked after Prince
Andrew in his boyhood, helped Pierre out of his carriage, said that the
prince was at home, and showed him into a clean little anteroom.

Pierre was struck by the modesty of the small though clean house after
the brilliant surroundings in which he had last met his friend in
Petersburg.

He quickly entered the small reception room with its still-unplastered
wooden walls redolent of pine, and would have gone farther, but Anton
ran ahead on tiptoe and knocked at a door.

"Well, what is it?" came a sharp, unpleasant voice.

"A visitor," answered Anton.

"Ask him to wait," and the sound was heard of a chair being pushed back.

Pierre went with rapid steps to the door and suddenly came face to
face with Prince Andrew, who came out frowning and looking old. Pierre
embraced him and lifting his spectacles kissed his friend on the cheek
and looked at him closely.

"Well, I did not expect you, I am very glad," said Prince Andrew.

Pierre said nothing; he looked fixedly at his friend with surprise. He
was struck by the change in him. His words were kindly and there was a
smile on his lips and face, but his eyes were dull and lifeless and in
spite of his evident wish to do so he could not give them a joyous
and glad sparkle. Prince Andrew had grown thinner, paler, and more
manly-looking, but what amazed and estranged Pierre till he got used
to it were his inertia and a wrinkle on his brow indicating prolonged
concentration on some one thought.

As is usually the case with people meeting after a prolonged separation,
it was long before their conversation could settle on anything. They
put questions and gave brief replies about things they knew ought to
be talked over at length. At last the conversation gradually settled on
some of the topics at first lightly touched on: their past life, plans
for the future, Pierre's journeys and occupations, the war, and so
on. The preoccupation and despondency which Pierre had noticed in his
friend's look was now still more clearly expressed in the smile with
which he listened to Pierre, especially when he spoke with joyful
animation of the past or the future. It was as if Prince Andrew would
have liked to sympathize with what Pierre was saying, but could not.
The latter began to feel that it was in bad taste to speak of his
enthusiasms, dreams, and hopes of happiness or goodness, in Prince
Andrew's presence. He was ashamed to express his new Masonic views,
which had been particularly revived and strengthened by his late tour.
He checked himself, fearing to seem naive, yet he felt an irresistible
desire to show his friend as soon as possible that he was now a quite
different, and better, Pierre than he had been in Petersburg.

"I can't tell you how much I have lived through since then. I hardly
know myself again."

"Yes, we have altered much, very much, since then," said Prince Andrew.

"Well, and you? What are your plans?"

"Plans!" repeated Prince Andrew ironically. "My plans?" he said, as if
astonished at the word. "Well, you see, I'm building. I mean to settle
here altogether next year...."

Pierre looked silently and searchingly into Prince Andrew's face, which
had grown much older.

"No, I meant to ask..." Pierre began, but Prince Andrew interrupted him.

"But why talk of me?... Talk to me, yes, tell me about your travels and
all you have been doing on your estates."

Pierre began describing what he had done on his estates, trying as far
as possible to conceal his own part in the improvements that had been
made. Prince Andrew several times prompted Pierre's story of what he had
been doing, as though it were all an old-time story, and he listened not
only without interest but even as if ashamed of what Pierre was telling
him.

Pierre felt uncomfortable and even depressed in his friend's company and
at last became silent.

"I'll tell you what, my dear fellow," said Prince Andrew, who evidently
also felt depressed and constrained with his visitor, "I am only
bivouacking here and have just come to look round. I am going back to
my sister today. I will introduce you to her. But of course you know her
already," he said, evidently trying to entertain a visitor with whom he
now found nothing in common. "We will go after dinner. And would you now
like to look round my place?"

They went out and walked about till dinnertime, talking of the political
news and common acquaintances like people who do not know each other
intimately. Prince Andrew spoke with some animation and interest only of
the new homestead he was constructing and its buildings, but even here,
while on the scaffolding, in the midst of a talk explaining the future
arrangements of the house, he interrupted himself:

"However, this is not at all interesting. Let us have dinner, and then
we'll set off."

At dinner, conversation turned on Pierre's marriage.

"I was very much surprised when I heard of it," said Prince Andrew.

Pierre blushed, as he always did when it was mentioned, and said
hurriedly: "I will tell you some time how it all happened. But you know
it is all over, and forever."

"Forever?" said Prince Andrew. "Nothing's forever."

"But you know how it all ended, don't you? You heard of the duel?"

"And so you had to go through that too!"

"One thing I thank God for is that I did not kill that man," said
Pierre.

"Why so?" asked Prince Andrew. "To kill a vicious dog is a very good
thing really."

"No, to kill a man is bad--wrong."

"Why is it wrong?" urged Prince Andrew. "It is not given to man to know
what is right and what is wrong. Men always did and always will err, and
in nothing more than in what they consider right and wrong."

"What does harm to another is wrong," said Pierre, feeling with pleasure
that for the first time since his arrival Prince Andrew was roused, had
begun to talk, and wanted to express what had brought him to his present
state.

"And who has told you what is bad for another man?" he asked.

"Bad! Bad!" exclaimed Pierre. "We all know what is bad for ourselves."

"Yes, we know that, but the harm I am conscious of in myself is
something I cannot inflict on others," said Prince Andrew, growing more
and more animated and evidently wishing to express his new outlook to
Pierre. He spoke in French. "I only know two very real evils in life:
remorse and illness. The only good is the absence of those evils. To
live for myself avoiding those two evils is my whole philosophy now."

"And love of one's neighbor, and self-sacrifice?" began Pierre. "No, I
can't agree with you! To live only so as not to do evil and not to
have to repent is not enough. I lived like that, I lived for myself
and ruined my life. And only now when I am living, or at least trying"
(Pierre's modesty made him correct himself) "to live for others, only
now have I understood all the happiness of life. No, I shall not agree
with you, and you do not really believe what you are saying." Prince
Andrew looked silently at Pierre with an ironic smile.

"When you see my sister, Princess Mary, you'll get on with her," he
said. "Perhaps you are right for yourself," he added after a short
pause, "but everyone lives in his own way. You lived for yourself and
say you nearly ruined your life and only found happiness when you
began living for others. I experienced just the reverse. I lived for
glory.--And after all what is glory? The same love of others, a desire
to do something for them, a desire for their approval.--So I lived for
others, and not almost, but quite, ruined my life. And I have become
calmer since I began to live only for myself."

"But what do you mean by living only for yourself?" asked Pierre,
growing excited. "What about your son, your sister, and your father?"

"But that's just the same as myself--they are not others," explained
Prince Andrew. "The others, one's neighbors, le prochain, as you and
Princess Mary call it, are the chief source of all error and evil. Le
prochain--your Kiev peasants to whom you want to do good."

And he looked at Pierre with a mocking, challenging expression. He
evidently wished to draw him on.

"You are joking," replied Pierre, growing more and more excited. "What
error or evil can there be in my wishing to do good, and even doing a
little--though I did very little and did it very badly? What evil can
there be in it if unfortunate people, our serfs, people like ourselves,
were growing up and dying with no idea of God and truth beyond
ceremonies and meaningless prayers and are now instructed in a
comforting belief in future life, retribution, recompense, and
consolation? What evil and error are there in it, if people were dying
of disease without help while material assistance could so easily be
rendered, and I supplied them with a doctor, a hospital, and an asylum
for the aged? And is it not a palpable, unquestionable good if a
peasant, or a woman with a baby, has no rest day or night and I give
them rest and leisure?" said Pierre, hurrying and lisping. "And I have
done that though badly and to a small extent; but I have done something
toward it and you cannot persuade me that it was not a good action,
and more than that, you can't make me believe that you do not think so
yourself. And the main thing is," he continued, "that I know, and know
for certain, that the enjoyment of doing this good is the only sure
happiness in life."

"Yes, if you put it like that it's quite a different matter," said
Prince Andrew. "I build a house and lay out a garden, and you build
hospitals. The one and the other may serve as a pastime. But what's
right and what's good must be judged by one who knows all, but not by
us. Well, you want an argument," he added, "come on then."

They rose from the table and sat down in the entrance porch which served
as a veranda.

"Come, let's argue then," said Prince Andrew, "You talk of schools," he
went on, crooking a finger, "education and so forth; that is, you want
to raise him" (pointing to a peasant who passed by them taking off his
cap) "from his animal condition and awaken in him spiritual needs, while
it seems to me that animal happiness is the only happiness possible, and
that is just what you want to deprive him of. I envy him, but you
want to make him what I am, without giving him my means. Then you say,
'lighten his toil.' But as I see it, physical labor is as essential to
him, as much a condition of his existence, as mental activity is to you
or me. You can't help thinking. I go to bed after two in the morning,
thoughts come and I can't sleep but toss about till dawn, because I
think and can't help thinking, just as he can't help plowing and mowing;
if he didn't, he would go to the drink shop or fall ill. Just as I could
not stand his terrible physical labor but should die of it in a week, so
he could not stand my physical idleness, but would grow fat and die.
The third thing--what else was it you talked about?" and Prince Andrew
crooked a third finger. "Ah, yes, hospitals, medicine. He has a fit,
he is dying, and you come and bleed him and patch him up. He will drag
about as a cripple, a burden to everybody, for another ten years. It
would be far easier and simpler for him to die. Others are being born
and there are plenty of them as it is. It would be different if you
grudged losing a laborer--that's how I regard him--but you want to cure
him from love of him. And he does not want that. And besides, what a
notion that medicine ever cured anyone! Killed them, yes!" said he,
frowning angrily and turning away from Pierre.

Prince Andrew expressed his ideas so clearly and distinctly that it was
evident he had reflected on this subject more than once, and he spoke
readily and rapidly like a man who has not talked for a long time. His
glance became more animated as his conclusions became more hopeless.

"Oh, that is dreadful, dreadful!" said Pierre. "I don't understand how
one can live with such ideas. I had such moments myself not long ago, in
Moscow and when traveling, but at such times I collapsed so that I don't
live at all--everything seems hateful to me... myself most of all. Then
I don't eat, don't wash... and how is it with you?..."

"Why not wash? That is not cleanly," said Prince Andrew; "on the
contrary one must try to make one's life as pleasant as possible. I'm
alive, that is not my fault, so I must live out my life as best I can
without hurting others."

"But with such ideas what motive have you for living? One would sit
without moving, undertaking nothing...."

"Life as it is leaves one no peace. I should be thankful to do nothing,
but here on the one hand the local nobility have done me the honor to
choose me to be their marshal; it was all I could do to get out of it.
They could not understand that I have not the necessary qualifications
for it--the kind of good-natured, fussy shallowness necessary for the
position. Then there's this house, which must be built in order to
have a nook of one's own in which to be quiet. And now there's this
recruiting."

"Why aren't you serving in the army?"

"After Austerlitz!" said Prince Andrew gloomily. "No, thank you very
much! I have promised myself not to serve again in the active Russian
army. And I won't--not even if Bonaparte were here at Smolensk
threatening Bald Hills--even then I wouldn't serve in the Russian army!
Well, as I was saying," he continued, recovering his composure, "now
there's this recruiting. My father is chief in command of the Third
District, and my only way of avoiding active service is to serve under
him."

"Then you are serving?"

"I am."

He paused a little while.

"And why do you serve?"

"Why, for this reason! My father is one of the most remarkable men of
his time. But he is growing old, and though not exactly cruel he has too
energetic a character. He is so accustomed to unlimited power that he is
terrible, and now he has this authority of a commander in chief of
the recruiting, granted by the Emperor. If I had been two hours late
a fortnight ago he would have had a paymaster's clerk at Yukhnovna
hanged," said Prince Andrew with a smile. "So I am serving because I
alone have any influence with my father, and now and then can save him
from actions which would torment him afterwards."

"Well, there you see!"

"Yes, but it is not as you imagine," Prince Andrew continued. "I did
not, and do not, in the least care about that scoundrel of a clerk who
had stolen some boots from the recruits; I should even have been very
glad to see him hanged, but I was sorry for my father--that again is for
myself."

Prince Andrew grew more and more animated. His eyes glittered feverishly
while he tried to prove to Pierre that in his actions there was no
desire to do good to his neighbor.

"There now, you wish to liberate your serfs," he continued; "that is a
very good thing, but not for you--I don't suppose you ever had anyone
flogged or sent to Siberia--and still less for your serfs. If they are
beaten, flogged, or sent to Siberia, I don't suppose they are any the
worse off. In Siberia they lead the same animal life, and the stripes on
their bodies heal, and they are happy as before. But it is a good thing
for proprietors who perish morally, bring remorse upon themselves,
stifle this remorse and grow callous, as a result of being able to
inflict punishments justly and unjustly. It is those people I pity, and
for their sake I should like to liberate the serfs. You may not have
seen, but I have seen, how good men brought up in those traditions of
unlimited power, in time when they grow more irritable, become cruel and
harsh, are conscious of it, but cannot restrain themselves and grow more
and more miserable."

Prince Andrew spoke so earnestly that Pierre could not help thinking
that these thoughts had been suggested to Prince Andrew by his father's
case.

He did not reply.

"So that's what I'm sorry for--human dignity, peace of mind, purity, and
not the serfs' backs and foreheads, which, beat and shave as you may,
always remain the same backs and foreheads."

"No, no! A thousand times no! I shall never agree with you," said
Pierre.





CHAPTER XII


In the evening Andrew and Pierre got into the open carriage and drove to
Bald Hills. Prince Andrew, glancing at Pierre, broke the silence now and
then with remarks which showed that he was in a good temper.

Pointing to the fields, he spoke of the improvements he was making in
his husbandry.

Pierre remained gloomily silent, answering in monosyllables and
apparently immersed in his own thoughts.

He was thinking that Prince Andrew was unhappy, had gone astray, did not
see the true light, and that he, Pierre, ought to aid, enlighten, and
raise him. But as soon as he thought of what he should say, he felt that
Prince Andrew with one word, one argument, would upset all his teaching,
and he shrank from beginning, afraid of exposing to possible ridicule
what to him was precious and sacred.

"No, but why do you think so?" Pierre suddenly began, lowering his
head and looking like a bull about to charge, "why do you think so? You
should not think so."

"Think? What about?" asked Prince Andrew with surprise.

"About life, about man's destiny. It can't be so. I myself thought
like that, and do you know what saved me? Freemasonry! No, don't smile.
Freemasonry is not a religious ceremonial sect, as I thought it was:
Freemasonry is the best expression of the best, the eternal, aspects of
humanity."

And he began to explain Freemasonry as he understood it to Prince
Andrew. He said that Freemasonry is the teaching of Christianity freed
from the bonds of State and Church, a teaching of equality, brotherhood,
and love.

"Only our holy brotherhood has the real meaning of life, all the rest
is a dream," said Pierre. "Understand, my dear fellow, that outside this
union all is filled with deceit and falsehood and I agree with you that
nothing is left for an intelligent and good man but to live out
his life, like you, merely trying not to harm others. But make our
fundamental convictions your own, join our brotherhood, give yourself up
to us, let yourself be guided, and you will at once feel yourself, as I
have felt myself, a part of that vast invisible chain the beginning of
which is hidden in heaven," said Pierre.

Prince Andrew, looking straight in front of him, listened in silence to
Pierre's words. More than once, when the noise of the wheels prevented
his catching what Pierre said, he asked him to repeat it, and by the
peculiar glow that came into Prince Andrew's eyes and by his silence,
Pierre saw that his words were not in vain and that Prince Andrew would
not interrupt him or laugh at what he said.

They reached a river that had overflowed its banks and which they had to
cross by ferry. While the carriage and horses were being placed on it,
they also stepped on the raft.

Prince Andrew, leaning his arms on the raft railing, gazed silently at
the flooding waters glittering in the setting sun.

"Well, what do you think about it?" Pierre asked. "Why are you silent?"

"What do I think about it? I am listening to you. It's all very well....
You say: join our brotherhood and we will show you the aim of life, the
destiny of man, and the laws which govern the world. But who are we?
Men. How is it you know everything? Why do I alone not see what you see?
You see a reign of goodness and truth on earth, but I don't see it."

Pierre interrupted him.

"Do you believe in a future life?" he asked.

"A future life?" Prince Andrew repeated, but Pierre, giving him no time
to reply, took the repetition for a denial, the more readily as he knew
Prince Andrew's former atheistic convictions.

"You say you can't see a reign of goodness and truth on earth. Nor could
I, and it cannot be seen if one looks on our life here as the end
of everything. On earth, here on this earth" (Pierre pointed to the
fields), "there is no truth, all is false and evil; but in the universe,
in the whole universe there is a kingdom of truth, and we who are now
the children of earth are--eternally--children of the whole universe.
Don't I feel in my soul that I am part of this vast harmonious whole?
Don't I feel that I form one link, one step, between the lower and
higher beings, in this vast harmonious multitude of beings in whom the
Deity--the Supreme Power if you prefer the term--is manifest? If I see,
clearly see, that ladder leading from plant to man, why should I suppose
it breaks off at me and does not go farther and farther? I feel that I
cannot vanish, since nothing vanishes in this world, but that I shall
always exist and always have existed. I feel that beyond me and above me
there are spirits, and that in this world there is truth."

"Yes, that is Herder's theory," said Prince Andrew, "but it is not that
which can convince me, dear friend--life and death are what convince.
What convinces is when one sees a being dear to one, bound up with one's
own life, before whom one was to blame and had hoped to make it right"
(Prince Andrew's voice trembled and he turned away), "and suddenly that
being is seized with pain, suffers, and ceases to exist.... Why? It
cannot be that there is no answer. And I believe there is.... That's
what convinces, that is what has convinced me," said Prince Andrew.

"Yes, yes, of course," said Pierre, "isn't that what I'm saying?"

"No. All I say is that it is not argument that convinces me of the
necessity of a future life, but this: when you go hand in hand with
someone and all at once that person vanishes there, into nowhere, and
you yourself are left facing that abyss, and look in. And I have looked
in...."

"Well, that's it then! You know that there is a there and there is a
Someone? There is the future life. The Someone is--God."

Prince Andrew did not reply. The carriage and horses had long since been
taken off, onto the farther bank, and reharnessed. The sun had sunk half
below the horizon and an evening frost was starring the puddles near
the ferry, but Pierre and Andrew, to the astonishment of the footmen,
coachmen, and ferrymen, still stood on the raft and talked.

"If there is a God and future life, there is truth and good, and man's
highest happiness consists in striving to attain them. We must live, we
must love, and we must believe that we live not only today on this scrap
of earth, but have lived and shall live forever, there, in the Whole,"
said Pierre, and he pointed to the sky.

Prince Andrew stood leaning on the railing of the raft listening to
Pierre, and he gazed with his eyes fixed on the red reflection of the
sun gleaming on the blue waters. There was perfect stillness. Pierre
became silent. The raft had long since stopped and only the waves of the
current beat softly against it below. Prince Andrew felt as if the sound
of the waves kept up a refrain to Pierre's words, whispering:

"It is true, believe it."

He sighed, and glanced with a radiant, childlike, tender look at
Pierre's face, flushed and rapturous, but yet shy before his superior
friend.

"Yes, if it only were so!" said Prince Andrew. "However, it is time to
get on," he added, and, stepping off the raft, he looked up at the sky
to which Pierre had pointed, and for the first time since Austerlitz saw
that high, everlasting sky he had seen while lying on that battlefield;
and something that had long been slumbering, something that was best
within him, suddenly awoke, joyful and youthful, in his soul. It
vanished as soon as he returned to the customary conditions of his
life, but he knew that this feeling which he did not know how to develop
existed within him. His meeting with Pierre formed an epoch in Prince
Andrew's life. Though outwardly he continued to live in the same old
way, inwardly he began a new life.





CHAPTER XIII


It was getting dusk when Prince Andrew and Pierre drove up to the front
entrance of the house at Bald Hills. As they approached the house,
Prince Andrew with a smile drew Pierre's attention to a commotion going
on at the back porch. A woman, bent with age, with a wallet on her back,
and a short, long-haired, young man in a black garment had rushed back
to the gate on seeing the carriage driving up. Two women ran out after
them, and all four, looking round at the carriage, ran in dismay up the
steps of the back porch.

"Those are Mary's 'God's folk,'" said Prince Andrew. "They have mistaken
us for my father. This is the one matter in which she disobeys him. He
orders these pilgrims to be driven away, but she receives them."

"But what are 'God's folk'?" asked Pierre.

Prince Andrew had no time to answer. The servants came out to meet them,
and he asked where the old prince was and whether he was expected back
soon.

The old prince had gone to the town and was expected back any minute.

Prince Andrew led Pierre to his own apartments, which were always kept
in perfect order and readiness for him in his father's house; he himself
went to the nursery.

"Let us go and see my sister," he said to Pierre when he returned.
"I have not found her yet, she is hiding now, sitting with her 'God's
folk.' It will serve her right, she will be confused, but you will see
her 'God's folk.' It's really very curious."

"What are 'God's folk'?" asked Pierre.

"Come, and you'll see for yourself."

Princess Mary really was disconcerted and red patches came on her face
when they went in. In her snug room, with lamps burning before the icon
stand, a young lad with a long nose and long hair, wearing a monk's
cassock, sat on the sofa beside her, behind a samovar. Near them, in an
armchair, sat a thin, shriveled, old woman, with a meek expression on
her childlike face.

"Andrew, why didn't you warn me?" said the princess, with mild reproach,
as she stood before her pilgrims like a hen before her chickens.

"Charmee de vous voir. Je suis tres contente de vous voir," * she said
to Pierre as he kissed her hand. She had known him as a child, and now
his friendship with Andrew, his misfortune with his wife, and above all
his kindly, simple face disposed her favorably toward him. She looked at
him with her beautiful radiant eyes and seemed to say, "I like you very
much, but please don't laugh at my people." After exchanging the first
greetings, they sat down.


    * "Delighted to see you. I am very glad to see you."


"Ah, and Ivanushka is here too!" said Prince Andrew, glancing with a
smile at the young pilgrim.

"Andrew!" said Princess Mary, imploringly. "Il faut que vous sachiez que
c'est une femme," * said Prince Andrew to Pierre.

"Andrew, au nom de Dieu!" *(2) Princess Mary repeated.


     * "You must know that this is a woman."

     * (2) "For heaven's sake."


It was evident that Prince Andrew's ironical tone toward the pilgrims
and Princess Mary's helpless attempts to protect them were their
customary long-established relations on the matter.

"Mais, ma bonne amie," said Prince Andrew, "vous devriez au contraire
m'etre reconnaissante de ce que j'explique a Pierre votre intimite avec
ce jeune homme." *


     * "But, my dear, you ought on the contrary to be grateful to
     me for explaining to Pierre your intimacy with this young
     man."


"Really?" said Pierre, gazing over his spectacles with curiosity and
seriousness (for which Princess Mary was specially grateful to him) into
Ivanushka's face, who, seeing that she was being spoken about, looked
round at them all with crafty eyes.

Princess Mary's embarrassment on her people's account was quite
unnecessary. They were not in the least abashed. The old woman, lowering
her eyes but casting side glances at the newcomers, had turned her cup
upside down and placed a nibbled bit of sugar beside it, and sat
quietly in her armchair, though hoping to be offered another cup of tea.
Ivanushka, sipping out of her saucer, looked with sly womanish eyes from
under her brows at the young men.

"Where have you been? To Kiev?" Prince Andrew asked the old woman.

"I have, good sir," she answered garrulously. "Just at Christmastime I
was deemed worthy to partake of the holy and heavenly sacrament at the
shrine of the saint. And now I'm from Kolyazin, master, where a great
and wonderful blessing has been revealed."

"And was Ivanushka with you?"

"I go by myself, benefactor," said Ivanushka, trying to speak in a bass
voice. "I only came across Pelageya in Yukhnovo..."

Pelageya interrupted her companion; she evidently wished to tell what
she had seen.

"In Kolyazin, master, a wonderful blessing has been revealed."

"What is it? Some new relics?" asked Prince Andrew.

"Andrew, do leave off," said Princess Mary. "Don't tell him, Pelageya."

"No... why not, my dear, why shouldn't I? I like him. He is kind, he is
one of God's chosen, he's a benefactor, he once gave me ten rubles, I
remember. When I was in Kiev, Crazy Cyril says to me (he's one of God's
own and goes barefoot summer and winter), he says, 'Why are you not
going to the right place? Go to Kolyazin where a wonder-working icon of
the Holy Mother of God has been revealed.' On hearing those words I said
good-by to the holy folk and went."

All were silent, only the pilgrim woman went on in measured tones,
drawing in her breath.

"So I come, master, and the people say to me: 'A great blessing has been
revealed, holy oil trickles from the cheeks of our blessed Mother, the
Holy Virgin Mother of God'...."

"All right, all right, you can tell us afterwards," said Princess Mary,
flushing.

"Let me ask her," said Pierre. "Did you see it yourselves?" he inquired.

"Oh, yes, master, I was found worthy. Such a brightness on the face like
the light of heaven, and from the blessed Mother's cheek it drops and
drops...."

"But, dear me, that must be a fraud!" said Pierre, naively, who had
listened attentively to the pilgrim.

"Oh, master, what are you saying?" exclaimed the horrified Pelageya,
turning to Princess Mary for support.

"They impose on the people," he repeated.

"Lord Jesus Christ!" exclaimed the pilgrim woman, crossing herself. "Oh,
don't speak so, master! There was a general who did not believe, and
said, 'The monks cheat,' and as soon as he'd said it he went blind. And
he dreamed that the Holy Virgin Mother of the Kiev catacombs came to him
and said, 'Believe in me and I will make you whole.' So he begged: 'Take
me to her, take me to her.' It's the real truth I'm telling you, I saw
it myself. So he was brought, quite blind, straight to her, and he goes
up to her and falls down and says, 'Make me whole,' says he, 'and I'll
give thee what the Tsar bestowed on me.' I saw it myself, master, the
star is fixed into the icon. Well, and what do you think? He received
his sight! It's a sin to speak so. God will punish you," she said
admonishingly, turning to Pierre.

"How did the star get into the icon?" Pierre asked.

"And was the Holy Mother promoted to the rank of general?" said Prince
Andrew, with a smile.

Pelageya suddenly grew quite pale and clasped her hands.

"Oh, master, master, what a sin! And you who have a son!" she began, her
pallor suddenly turning to a vivid red. "Master, what have you said? God
forgive you!" And she crossed herself. "Lord forgive him! My dear, what
does it mean?..." she asked, turning to Princess Mary. She got up
and, almost crying, began to arrange her wallet. She evidently felt
frightened and ashamed to have accepted charity in a house where such
things could be said, and was at the same time sorry to have now to
forgo the charity of this house.

"Now, why need you do it?" said Princess Mary. "Why did you come to
me?..."

"Come, Pelageya, I was joking," said Pierre. "Princesse, ma parole,
je n'ai pas voulu l'offenser. * I did not mean anything, I was only
joking," he said, smiling shyly and trying to efface his offense. "It
was all my fault, and Andrew was only joking."


    * "Princess, on my word, I did not wish to offend her."


Pelageya stopped doubtfully, but in Pierre's face there was such a look
of sincere penitence, and Prince Andrew glanced so meekly now at her and
now at Pierre, that she was gradually reassured.





CHAPTER XIV


The pilgrim woman was appeased and, being encouraged to talk, gave a
long account of Father Amphilochus, who led so holy a life that his
hands smelled of incense, and how on her last visit to Kiev some monks
she knew let her have the keys of the catacombs, and how she, taking
some dried bread with her, had spent two days in the catacombs with the
saints. "I'd pray awhile to one, ponder awhile, then go on to another.
I'd sleep a bit and then again go and kiss the relics, and there was
such peace all around, such blessedness, that one don't want to come
out, even into the light of heaven again."

Pierre listened to her attentively and seriously. Prince Andrew went
out of the room, and then, leaving "God's folk" to finish their tea,
Princess Mary took Pierre into the drawing room.

"You are very kind," she said to him.

"Oh, I really did not mean to hurt her feelings. I understand them so
well and have the greatest respect for them."

Princess Mary looked at him silently and smiled affectionately.

"I have known you a long time, you see, and am as fond of you as of a
brother," she said. "How do you find Andrew?" she added hurriedly, not
giving him time to reply to her affectionate words. "I am very anxious
about him. His health was better in the winter, but last spring his
wound reopened and the doctor said he ought to go away for a cure. And
I am also very much afraid for him spiritually. He has not a character
like us women who, when we suffer, can weep away our sorrows. He keeps
it all within him. Today he is cheerful and in good spirits, but that
is the effect of your visit--he is not often like that. If you could
persuade him to go abroad. He needs activity, and this quiet regular
life is very bad for him. Others don't notice it, but I see it."

Toward ten o'clock the men servants rushed to the front door, hearing
the bells of the old prince's carriage approaching. Prince Andrew and
Pierre also went out into the porch.

"Who's that?" asked the old prince, noticing Pierre as he got out of the
carriage.

"Ah! Very glad! Kiss me," he said, having learned who the young stranger
was.

The old prince was in a good temper and very gracious to Pierre.

Before supper, Prince Andrew, coming back to his father's study, found
him disputing hotly with his visitor. Pierre was maintaining that a time
would come when there would be no more wars. The old prince disputed it
chaffingly, but without getting angry.

"Drain the blood from men's veins and put in water instead, then there
will be no more war! Old women's nonsense--old women's nonsense!" he
repeated, but still he patted Pierre affectionately on the shoulder, and
then went up to the table where Prince Andrew, evidently not wishing
to join in the conversation, was looking over the papers his father
had brought from town. The old prince went up to him and began to talk
business.

"The marshal, a Count Rostov, hasn't sent half his contingent. He
came to town and wanted to invite me to dinner--I gave him a pretty
dinner!... And there, look at this.... Well, my boy," the old prince
went on, addressing his son and patting Pierre on the shoulder. "A fine
fellow--your friend--I like him! He stirs me up. Another says clever
things and one doesn't care to listen, but this one talks rubbish yet
stirs an old fellow up. Well, go! Get along! Perhaps I'll come and sit
with you at supper. We'll have another dispute. Make friends with my
little fool, Princess Mary," he shouted after Pierre, through the door.

Only now, on his visit to Bald Hills, did Pierre fully realize the
strength and charm of his friendship with Prince Andrew. That charm was
not expressed so much in his relations with him as with all his family
and with the household. With the stern old prince and the gentle, timid
Princess Mary, though he had scarcely known them, Pierre at once felt
like an old friend. They were all fond of him already. Not only Princess
Mary, who had been won by his gentleness with the pilgrims, gave him her
most radiant looks, but even the one-year-old "Prince Nicholas" (as his
grandfather called him) smiled at Pierre and let himself be taken in
his arms, and Michael Ivanovich and Mademoiselle Bourienne looked at him
with pleasant smiles when he talked to the old prince.

The old prince came in to supper; this was evidently on Pierre's
account. And during the two days of the young man's visit he was
extremely kind to him and told him to visit them again.

When Pierre had gone and the members of the household met together, they
began to express their opinions of him as people always do after a new
acquaintance has left, but as seldom happens, no one said anything but
what was good of him.





CHAPTER XV


When returning from his leave, Rostov felt, for the first time, how
close was the bond that united him to Denisov and the whole regiment.

On approaching it, Rostov felt as he had done when approaching his home
in Moscow. When he saw the first hussar with the unbuttoned uniform of
his regiment, when he recognized red-haired Dementyev and saw the
picket ropes of the roan horses, when Lavrushka gleefully shouted to his
master, "The count has come!" and Denisov, who had been asleep on his
bed, ran all disheveled out of the mud hut to embrace him, and the
officers collected round to greet the new arrival, Rostov experienced
the same feeling as when his mother, his father, and his sister had
embraced him, and tears of joy choked him so that he could not speak.
The regiment was also a home, and as unalterably dear and precious as
his parents' house.

When he had reported himself to the commander of the regiment and had
been reassigned to his former squadron, had been on duty and had gone
out foraging, when he had again entered into all the little interests
of the regiment and felt himself deprived of liberty and bound in one
narrow, unchanging frame, he experienced the same sense of peace, of
moral support, and the same sense of being at home here in his own
place, as he had felt under the parental roof. But here was none of
all that turmoil of the world at large, where he did not know his right
place and took mistaken decisions; here was no Sonya with whom he ought,
or ought not, to have an explanation; here was no possibility of going
there or not going there; here there were not twenty-four hours in the
day which could be spent in such a variety of ways; there was not that
innumerable crowd of people of whom not one was nearer to him or farther
from him than another; there were none of those uncertain and undefined
money relations with his father, and nothing to recall that terrible
loss to Dolokhov. Here, in the regiment, all was clear and simple.
The whole world was divided into two unequal parts: one, our Pavlograd
regiment; the other, all the rest. And the rest was no concern of
his. In the regiment, everything was definite: who was lieutenant, who
captain, who was a good fellow, who a bad one, and most of all, who was
a comrade. The canteenkeeper gave one credit, one's pay came every four
months, there was nothing to think out or decide, you had only to do
nothing that was considered bad in the Pavlograd regiment and, when
given an order, to do what was clearly, distinctly, and definitely
ordered--and all would be well.

Having once more entered into the definite conditions of this regimental
life, Rostov felt the joy and relief a tired man feels on lying down to
rest. Life in the regiment, during this campaign, was all the pleasanter
for him, because, after his loss to Dolokhov (for which, in spite of all
his family's efforts to console him, he could not forgive himself), he
had made up his mind to atone for his fault by serving, not as he
had done before, but really well, and by being a perfectly first-rate
comrade and officer--in a word, a splendid man altogether, a thing which
seemed so difficult out in the world, but so possible in the regiment.

After his losses, he had determined to pay back his debt to his parents
in five years. He received ten thousand rubles a year, but now resolved
to take only two thousand and leave the rest to repay the debt to his
parents.

Our army, after repeated retreats and advances and battles at Pultusk
and Preussisch-Eylau, was concentrated near Bartenstein. It was awaiting
the Emperor's arrival and the beginning of a new campaign.

The Pavlograd regiment, belonging to that part of the army which had
served in the 1805 campaign, had been recruiting up to strength in
Russia, and arrived too late to take part in the first actions of the
campaign. It had been neither at Pultusk nor at Preussisch-Eylau and,
when it joined the army in the field in the second half of the campaign,
was attached to Platov's division.

Platov's division was acting independently of the main army. Several
times parts of the Pavlograd regiment had exchanged shots with the
enemy, had taken prisoners, and once had even captured Marshal Oudinot's
carriages. In April the Pavlograds were stationed immovably for some
weeks near a totally ruined and deserted German village.

A thaw had set in, it was muddy and cold, the ice on the river broke,
and the roads became impassable. For days neither provisions for the
men nor fodder for the horses had been issued. As no transports could
arrive, the men dispersed about the abandoned and deserted villages,
searching for potatoes, but found few even of these.

Everything had been eaten up and the inhabitants had all fled--if any
remained, they were worse than beggars and nothing more could be taken
from them; even the soldiers, usually pitiless enough, instead of taking
anything from them, often gave them the last of their rations.

The Pavlograd regiment had had only two men wounded in action, but had
lost nearly half its men from hunger and sickness. In the hospitals,
death was so certain that soldiers suffering from fever, or the swelling
that came from bad food, preferred to remain on duty, and hardly able
to drag their legs went to the front rather than to the hospitals.
When spring came on, the soldiers found a plant just showing out of the
ground that looked like asparagus, which, for some reason, they called
"Mashka's sweet root." It was very bitter, but they wandered about the
fields seeking it and dug it out with their sabers and ate it, though
they were ordered not to do so, as it was a noxious plant. That spring a
new disease broke out among the soldiers, a swelling of the arms, legs,
and face, which the doctors attributed to eating this root. But in spite
of all this, the soldiers of Denisov's squadron fed chiefly on "Mashka's
sweet root," because it was the second week that the last of the
biscuits were being doled out at the rate of half a pound a man and the
last potatoes received had sprouted and frozen.

The horses also had been fed for a fortnight on straw from the thatched
roofs and had become terribly thin, though still covered with tufts of
felty winter hair.

Despite this destitution, the soldiers and officers went on living just
as usual. Despite their pale swollen faces and tattered uniforms, the
hussars formed line for roll call, kept things in order, groomed their
horses, polished their arms, brought in straw from the thatched roofs in
place of fodder, and sat down to dine round the caldrons from which
they rose up hungry, joking about their nasty food and their hunger. As
usual, in their spare time, they lit bonfires, steamed themselves before
them naked; smoked, picked out and baked sprouting rotten potatoes, told
and listened to stories of Potemkin's and Suvorov's campaigns, or to
legends of Alesha the Sly, or the priest's laborer Mikolka.

The officers, as usual, lived in twos and threes in the roofless,
half-ruined houses. The seniors tried to collect straw and potatoes and,
in general, food for the men. The younger ones occupied themselves as
before, some playing cards (there was plenty of money, though there was
no food), some with more innocent games, such as quoits and skittles.
The general trend of the campaign was rarely spoken of, partly because
nothing certain was known about it, partly because there was a vague
feeling that in the main it was going badly.

Rostov lived, as before, with Denisov, and since their furlough they had
become more friendly than ever. Denisov never spoke of Rostov's family,
but by the tender friendship his commander showed him, Rostov felt
that the elder hussar's luckless love for Natasha played a part in
strengthening their friendship. Denisov evidently tried to expose Rostov
to danger as seldom as possible, and after an action greeted his safe
return with evident joy. On one of his foraging expeditions, in
a deserted and ruined village to which he had come in search of
provisions, Rostov found a family consisting of an old Pole and his
daughter with an infant in arms. They were half clad, hungry, too weak
to get away on foot and had no means of obtaining a conveyance. Rostov
brought them to his quarters, placed them in his own lodging, and
kept them for some weeks while the old man was recovering. One of his
comrades, talking of women, began chaffing Rostov, saying that he was
more wily than any of them and that it would not be a bad thing if he
introduced to them the pretty Polish girl he had saved. Rostov took the
joke as an insult, flared up, and said such unpleasant things to the
officer that it was all Denisov could do to prevent a duel. When the
officer had gone away, Denisov, who did not himself know what Rostov's
relations with the Polish girl might be, began to upbraid him for his
quickness of temper, and Rostov replied:

"Say what you like.... She is like a sister to me, and I can't tell you
how it offended me... because... well, for that reason...."

Denisov patted him on the shoulder and began rapidly pacing the room
without looking at Rostov, as was his way at moments of deep feeling.

"Ah, what a mad bweed you Wostovs are!" he muttered, and Rostov noticed
tears in his eyes.





CHAPTER XVI


In April the troops were enlivened by news of the Emperor's arrival,
but Rostov had no chance of being present at the review he held at
Bartenstein, as the Pavlograds were at the outposts far beyond that
place.

They were bivouacking. Denisov and Rostov were living in an earth hut,
dug out for them by the soldiers and roofed with branches and turf. The
hut was made in the following manner, which had then come into vogue. A
trench was dug three and a half feet wide, four feet eight inches deep,
and eight feet long. At one end of the trench, steps were cut out and
these formed the entrance and vestibule. The trench itself was the room,
in which the lucky ones, such as the squadron commander, had a board,
lying on piles at the end opposite the entrance, to serve as a table. On
each side of the trench, the earth was cut out to a breadth of about two
and a half feet, and this did duty for bedsteads and couches. The roof
was so constructed that one could stand up in the middle of the trench
and could even sit up on the beds if one drew close to the table.
Denisov, who was living luxuriously because the soldiers of his squadron
liked him, had also a board in the roof at the farther end, with a piece
of (broken but mended) glass in it for a window. When it was very cold,
embers from the soldiers' campfire were placed on a bent sheet of iron
on the steps in the "reception room"--as Denisov called that part of
the hut--and it was then so warm that the officers, of whom there were
always some with Denisov and Rostov, sat in their shirt sleeves.

In April, Rostov was on orderly duty. One morning, between seven and
eight, returning after a sleepless night, he sent for embers, changed
his rain-soaked underclothes, said his prayers, drank tea, got warm,
then tidied up the things on the table and in his own corner, and,
his face glowing from exposure to the wind and with nothing on but his
shirt, lay down on his back, putting his arms under his head. He was
pleasantly considering the probability of being promoted in a few days
for his last reconnoitering expedition, and was awaiting Denisov, who
had gone out somewhere and with whom he wanted a talk.

Suddenly he heard Denisov shouting in a vibrating voice behind the hut,
evidently much excited. Rostov moved to the window to see whom he was
speaking to, and saw the quartermaster, Topcheenko.

"I ordered you not to let them eat that Mashka woot stuff!" Denisov was
shouting. "And I saw with my own eyes how Lazarchuk bwought some fwom
the fields."

"I have given the order again and again, your honor, but they don't
obey," answered the quartermaster.

Rostov lay down again on his bed and thought complacently: "Let him fuss
and bustle now, my job's done and I'm lying down--capitally!" He could
hear that Lavrushka--that sly, bold orderly of Denisov's--was talking,
as well as the quartermaster. Lavrushka was saying something about
loaded wagons, biscuits, and oxen he had seen when he had gone out for
provisions.

Then Denisov's voice was heard shouting farther and farther away.
"Saddle! Second platoon!"

"Where are they off to now?" thought Rostov.

Five minutes later, Denisov came into the hut, climbed with muddy boots
on the bed, lit his pipe, furiously scattered his things about, took
his leaded whip, buckled on his saber, and went out again. In answer
to Rostov's inquiry where he was going, he answered vaguely and crossly
that he had some business.

"Let God and our gweat monarch judge me afterwards!" said Denisov going
out, and Rostov heard the hoofs of several horses splashing through the
mud. He did not even trouble to find out where Denisov had gone. Having
got warm in his corner, he fell asleep and did not leave the hut till
toward evening. Denisov had not yet returned. The weather had cleared
up, and near the next hut two officers and a cadet were playing svayka,
laughing as they threw their missiles which buried themselves in the
soft mud. Rostov joined them. In the middle of the game, the officers
saw some wagons approaching with fifteen hussars on their skinny horses
behind them. The wagons escorted by the hussars drew up to the picket
ropes and a crowd of hussars surrounded them.

"There now, Denisov has been worrying," said Rostov, "and here are the
provisions."

"So they are!" said the officers. "Won't the soldiers be glad!"

A little behind the hussars came Denisov, accompanied by two infantry
officers with whom he was talking.

Rostov went to meet them.

"I warn you, Captain," one of the officers, a short thin man, evidently
very angry, was saying.

"Haven't I told you I won't give them up?" replied Denisov.

"You will answer for it, Captain. It is mutiny--seizing the transport of
one's own army. Our men have had nothing to eat for two days."

"And mine have had nothing for two weeks," said Denisov.

"It is robbery! You'll answer for it, sir!" said the infantry officer,
raising his voice.

"Now, what are you pestewing me for?" cried Denisov, suddenly losing his
temper. "I shall answer for it and not you, and you'd better not buzz
about here till you get hurt. Be off! Go!" he shouted at the officers.

"Very well, then!" shouted the little officer, undaunted and not riding
away. "If you are determined to rob, I'll..."

"Go to the devil! quick ma'ch, while you're safe and sound!" and Denisov
turned his horse on the officer.

"Very well, very well!" muttered the officer, threateningly, and turning
his horse he trotted away, jolting in his saddle.

"A dog astwide a fence! A weal dog astwide a fence!" shouted Denisov
after him (the most insulting expression a cavalryman can address to a
mounted infantryman) and riding up to Rostov, he burst out laughing.

"I've taken twansports from the infantwy by force!" he said. "After all,
can't let our men starve."

The wagons that had reached the hussars had been consigned to an
infantry regiment, but learning from Lavrushka that the transport
was unescorted, Denisov with his hussars had seized it by force. The
soldiers had biscuits dealt out to them freely, and they even shared
them with the other squadrons.

The next day the regimental commander sent for Denisov, and holding his
fingers spread out before his eyes said:

"This is how I look at this affair: I know nothing about it and won't
begin proceedings, but I advise you to ride over to the staff and settle
the business there in the commissariat department and if possible sign
a receipt for such and such stores received. If not, as the demand was
booked against an infantry regiment, there will be a row and the affair
may end badly."

From the regimental commander's, Denisov rode straight to the staff with
a sincere desire to act on this advice. In the evening he came back to
his dugout in a state such as Rostov had never yet seen him in. Denisov
could not speak and gasped for breath. When Rostov asked what was the
matter, he only uttered some incoherent oaths and threats in a hoarse,
feeble voice.

Alarmed at Denisov's condition, Rostov suggested that he should undress,
drink some water, and send for the doctor.

"Twy me for wobbewy... oh! Some more water... Let them twy me, but I'll
always thwash scoundwels... and I'll tell the Empewo'... Ice..." he
muttered.

The regimental doctor, when he came, said it was absolutely necessary to
bleed Denisov. A deep saucer of black blood was taken from his hairy arm
and only then was he able to relate what had happened to him.

"I get there," began Denisov. "'Now then, where's your chief's
quarters?' They were pointed out. 'Please to wait.' 'I've widden twenty
miles and have duties to attend to and no time to wait. Announce me.'
Vewy well, so out comes their head chief--also took it into his head to
lecture me: 'It's wobbewy!'--'Wobbewy,' I say, 'is not done by man who
seizes pwovisions to feed his soldiers, but by him who takes them to
fill his own pockets!' 'Will you please be silent?' 'Vewy good!' Then he
says: 'Go and give a weceipt to the commissioner, but your affair will
be passed on to headquarters.' I go to the commissioner. I enter, and at
the table... who do you think? No, but wait a bit!... Who is it that's
starving us?" shouted Denisov, hitting the table with the fist of his
newly bled arm so violently that the table nearly broke down and
the tumblers on it jumped about. "Telyanin! 'What? So it's you who's
starving us to death! Is it? Take this and this!' and I hit him so
pat, stwaight on his snout... 'Ah, what a... what a...!' and I sta'ted
fwashing him... Well, I've had a bit of fun I can tell you!" cried
Denisov, gleeful and yet angry, his white teeth showing under his black
mustache. "I'd have killed him if they hadn't taken him away!"

"But what are you shouting for? Calm yourself," said Rostov. "You've set
your arm bleeding afresh. Wait, we must tie it up again."

Denisov was bandaged up again and put to bed. Next day he woke calm and
cheerful.

But at noon the adjutant of the regiment came into Rostov's and
Denisov's dugout with a grave and serious face and regretfully showed
them a paper addressed to Major Denisov from the regimental commander
in which inquiries were made about yesterday's occurrence. The adjutant
told them that the affair was likely to take a very bad turn: that a
court-martial had been appointed, and that in view of the severity with
which marauding and insubordination were now regarded, degradation to
the ranks would be the best that could be hoped for.

The case, as represented by the offended parties, was that, after
seizing the transports, Major Denisov, being drunk, went to the chief
quartermaster and without any provocation called him a thief, threatened
to strike him, and on being led out had rushed into the office and given
two officials a thrashing, and dislocated the arm of one of them.

In answer to Rostov's renewed questions, Denisov said, laughing, that he
thought he remembered that some other fellow had got mixed up in it, but
that it was all nonsense and rubbish, and he did not in the least fear
any kind of trial, and that if those scoundrels dared attack him he
would give them an answer that they would not easily forget.

Denisov spoke contemptuously of the whole matter, but Rostov knew him
too well not to detect that (while hiding it from others) at heart
he feared a court-martial and was worried over the affair, which was
evidently taking a bad turn. Every day, letters of inquiry and notices
from the court arrived, and on the first of May, Denisov was ordered to
hand the squadron over to the next in seniority and appear before
the staff of his division to explain his violence at the commissariat
office. On the previous day Platov reconnoitered with two Cossack
regiments and two squadrons of hussars. Denisov, as was his wont, rode
out in front of the outposts, parading his courage. A bullet fired by
a French sharpshooter hit him in the fleshy part of his leg. Perhaps at
another time Denisov would not have left the regiment for so slight a
wound, but now he took advantage of it to excuse himself from appearing
at the staff and went into hospital.





CHAPTER XVII


In June the battle of Friedland was fought, in which the Pavlograds did
not take part, and after that an armistice was proclaimed. Rostov, who
felt his friend's absence very much, having no news of him since he
left and feeling very anxious about his wound and the progress of his
affairs, took advantage of the armistice to get leave to visit Denisov
in hospital.

The hospital was in a small Prussian town that had been twice devastated
by Russian and French troops. Because it was summer, when it is so
beautiful out in the fields, the little town presented a particularly
dismal appearance with its broken roofs and fences, its foul streets,
tattered inhabitants, and the sick and drunken soldiers wandering about.

The hospital was in a brick building with some of the window frames and
panes broken and a courtyard surrounded by the remains of a wooden fence
that had been pulled to pieces. Several bandaged soldiers, with pale
swollen faces, were sitting or walking about in the sunshine in the
yard.

Directly Rostov entered the door he was enveloped by a smell of
putrefaction and hospital air. On the stairs he met a Russian army
doctor smoking a cigar. The doctor was followed by a Russian assistant.

"I can't tear myself to pieces," the doctor was saying. "Come to Makar
Alexeevich in the evening. I shall be there."

The assistant asked some further questions.

"Oh, do the best you can! Isn't it all the same?" The doctor noticed
Rostov coming upstairs.

"What do you want, sir?" said the doctor. "What do you want? The bullets
having spared you, do you want to try typhus? This is a pesthouse, sir."

"How so?" asked Rostov.

"Typhus, sir. It's death to go in. Only we two, Makeev and I" (he
pointed to the assistant), "keep on here. Some five of us doctors have
died in this place.... When a new one comes he is done for in a week,"
said the doctor with evident satisfaction. "Prussian doctors have been
invited here, but our allies don't like it at all."

Rostov explained that he wanted to see Major Denisov of the hussars, who
was wounded.

"I don't know. I can't tell you, sir. Only think! I am alone in charge
of three hospitals with more than four hundred patients! It's well that
the charitable Prussian ladies send us two pounds of coffee and some
lint each month or we should be lost!" he laughed. "Four hundred, sir,
and they're always sending me fresh ones. There are four hundred? Eh?"
he asked, turning to the assistant.

The assistant looked fagged out. He was evidently vexed and impatient
for the talkative doctor to go.

"Major Denisov," Rostov said again. "He was wounded at Molliten."

"Dead, I fancy. Eh, Makeev?" queried the doctor, in a tone of
indifference.

The assistant, however, did not confirm the doctor's words.

"Is he tall and with reddish hair?" asked the doctor.

Rostov described Denisov's appearance.

"There was one like that," said the doctor, as if pleased. "That one is
dead, I fancy. However, I'll look up our list. We had a list. Have you
got it, Makeev?"

"Makar Alexeevich has the list," answered the assistant. "But if you'll
step into the officers' wards you'll see for yourself," he added,
turning to Rostov.

"Ah, you'd better not go, sir," said the doctor, "or you may have to
stay here yourself."

But Rostov bowed himself away from the doctor and asked the assistant to
show him the way.

"Only don't blame me!" the doctor shouted up after him.

Rostov and the assistant went into the dark corridor. The smell was so
strong there that Rostov held his nose and had to pause and collect
his strength before he could go on. A door opened to the right, and an
emaciated sallow man on crutches, barefoot and in underclothing, limped
out and, leaning against the doorpost, looked with glittering envious
eyes at those who were passing. Glancing in at the door, Rostov saw that
the sick and wounded were lying on the floor on straw and overcoats.

"May I go in and look?"

"What is there to see?" said the assistant.

But, just because the assistant evidently did not want him to go in,
Rostov entered the soldiers' ward. The foul air, to which he had already
begun to get used in the corridor, was still stronger here. It was a
little different, more pungent, and one felt that this was where it
originated.

In the long room, brightly lit up by the sun through the large windows,
the sick and wounded lay in two rows with their heads to the walls, and
leaving a passage in the middle. Most of them were unconscious and
paid no attention to the newcomers. Those who were conscious raised
themselves or lifted their thin yellow faces, and all looked intently at
Rostov with the same expression of hope, of relief, reproach, and envy
of another's health. Rostov went to the middle of the room and looking
through the open doors into the two adjoining rooms saw the same thing
there. He stood still, looking silently around. He had not at all
expected such a sight. Just before him, almost across the middle of the
passage on the bare floor, lay a sick man, probably a Cossack to judge
by the cut of his hair. The man lay on his back, his huge arms and legs
outstretched. His face was purple, his eyes were rolled back so that
only the whites were seen, and on his bare legs and arms which were
still red, the veins stood out like cords. He was knocking the back of
his head against the floor, hoarsely uttering some word which he kept
repeating. Rostov listened and made out the word. It was "drink, drink,
a drink!" Rostov glanced round, looking for someone who would put this
man back in his place and bring him water.

"Who looks after the sick here?" he asked the assistant.

Just then a commissariat soldier, a hospital orderly, came in from the
next room, marching stiffly, and drew up in front of Rostov.

"Good day, your honor!" he shouted, rolling his eyes at Rostov and
evidently mistaking him for one of the hospital authorities.

"Get him to his place and give him some water," said Rostov, pointing to
the Cossack.

"Yes, your honor," the soldier replied complacently, and rolling his
eyes more than ever he drew himself up still straighter, but did not
move.

"No, it's impossible to do anything here," thought Rostov, lowering his
eyes, and he was going out, but became aware of an intense look fixed
on him on his right, and he turned. Close to the corner, on an overcoat,
sat an old, unshaven, gray-bearded soldier as thin as a skeleton, with a
stern sallow face and eyes intently fixed on Rostov. The man's neighbor
on one side whispered something to him, pointing at Rostov, who noticed
that the old man wanted to speak to him. He drew nearer and saw that the
old man had only one leg bent under him, the other had been amputated
above the knee. His neighbor on the other side, who lay motionless some
distance from him with his head thrown back, was a young soldier with
a snub nose. His pale waxen face was still freckled and his eyes were
rolled back. Rostov looked at the young soldier and a cold chill ran
down his back.

"Why, this one seems..." he began, turning to the assistant.

"And how we've been begging, your honor," said the old soldier, his
jaw quivering. "He's been dead since morning. After all we're men, not
dogs."

"I'll send someone at once. He shall be taken away--taken away at once,"
said the assistant hurriedly. "Let us go, your honor."

"Yes, yes, let us go," said Rostov hastily, and lowering his eyes and
shrinking, he tried to pass unnoticed between the rows of reproachful
envious eyes that were fixed upon him, and went out of the room.





CHAPTER XVIII


Going along the corridor, the assistant led Rostov to the officers'
wards, consisting of three rooms, the doors of which stood open. There
were beds in these rooms and the sick and wounded officers were lying or
sitting on them. Some were walking about the rooms in hospital dressing
gowns. The first person Rostov met in the officers' ward was a thin
little man with one arm, who was walking about the first room in a
nightcap and hospital dressing gown, with a pipe between his teeth.
Rostov looked at him, trying to remember where he had seen him before.

"See where we've met again!" said the little man. "Tushin, Tushin, don't
you remember, who gave you a lift at Schon Grabern? And I've had a bit
cut off, you see..." he went on with a smile, pointing to the empty
sleeve of his dressing gown. "Looking for Vasili Dmitrich Denisov? My
neighbor," he added, when he heard who Rostov wanted. "Here, here," and
Tushin led him into the next room, from whence came sounds of several
laughing voices.

"How can they laugh, or even live at all here?" thought Rostov, still
aware of that smell of decomposing flesh that had been so strong in
the soldiers' ward, and still seeming to see fixed on him those envious
looks which had followed him out from both sides, and the face of that
young soldier with eyes rolled back.

Denisov lay asleep on his bed with his head under the blanket, though it
was nearly noon.

"Ah, Wostov? How are you, how are you?" he called out, still in the
same voice as in the regiment, but Rostov noticed sadly that under this
habitual ease and animation some new, sinister, hidden feeling showed
itself in the expression of Denisov's face and the intonations of his
voice.

His wound, though a slight one, had not yet healed even now, six weeks
after he had been hit. His face had the same swollen pallor as the faces
of the other hospital patients, but it was not this that struck Rostov.
What struck him was that Denisov did not seem glad to see him, and
smiled at him unnaturally. He did not ask about the regiment, nor about
the general state of affairs, and when Rostov spoke of these matters did
not listen.

Rostov even noticed that Denisov did not like to be reminded of the
regiment, or in general of that other free life which was going on
outside the hospital. He seemed to try to forget that old life and
was only interested in the affair with the commissariat officers. On
Rostov's inquiry as to how the matter stood, he at once produced from
under his pillow a paper he had received from the commission and the
rough draft of his answer to it. He became animated when he began
reading his paper and specially drew Rostov's attention to the stinging
rejoinders he made to his enemies. His hospital companions, who had
gathered round Rostov--a fresh arrival from the world outside--gradually
began to disperse as soon as Denisov began reading his answer. Rostov
noticed by their faces that all those gentlemen had already heard that
story more than once and were tired of it. Only the man who had the next
bed, a stout Uhlan, continued to sit on his bed, gloomily frowning and
smoking a pipe, and little one-armed Tushin still listened, shaking his
head disapprovingly. In the middle of the reading, the Uhlan interrupted
Denisov.

"But what I say is," he said, turning to Rostov, "it would be best
simply to petition the Emperor for pardon. They say great rewards will
now be distributed, and surely a pardon would be granted...."

"Me petition the Empewo'!" exclaimed Denisov, in a voice to which he
tried hard to give the old energy and fire, but which sounded like an
expression of irritable impotence. "What for? If I were a wobber I would
ask mercy, but I'm being court-martialed for bwinging wobbers to book.
Let them twy me, I'm not afwaid of anyone. I've served the Tsar and
my countwy honowably and have not stolen! And am I to be degwaded?...
Listen, I'm w'iting to them stwaight. This is what I say: 'If I had
wobbed the Tweasuwy...'"

"It's certainly well written," said Tushin, "but that's not the point,
Vasili Dmitrich," and he also turned to Rostov. "One has to submit, and
Vasili Dmitrich doesn't want to. You know the auditor told you it was a
bad business."

"Well, let it be bad," said Denisov.

"The auditor wrote out a petition for you," continued Tushin, "and
you ought to sign it and ask this gentleman to take it. No doubt he"
(indicating Rostov) "has connections on the staff. You won't find a
better opportunity."

"Haven't I said I'm not going to gwovel?" Denisov interrupted him, went
on reading his paper.

Rostov had not the courage to persuade Denisov, though he instinctively
felt that the way advised by Tushin and the other officers was the
safest, and though he would have been glad to be of service to Denisov.
He knew his stubborn will and straightforward hasty temper.

When the reading of Denisov's virulent reply, which took more than an
hour, was over, Rostov said nothing, and he spent the rest of the day in
a most dejected state of mind amid Denisov's hospital comrades, who had
gathered round him, telling them what he knew and listening to their
stories. Denisov was moodily silent all the evening.

Late in the evening, when Rostov was about to leave, he asked Denisov
whether he had no commission for him.

"Yes, wait a bit," said Denisov, glancing round at the officers, and
taking his papers from under his pillow he went to the window, where he
had an inkpot, and sat down to write.

"It seems it's no use knocking one's head against a wall!" he said,
coming from the window and giving Rostov a large envelope. In it was
the petition to the Emperor drawn up by the auditor, in which Denisov,
without alluding to the offenses of the commissariat officials, simply
asked for pardon.

"Hand it in. It seems..."

He did not finish, but gave a painfully unnatural smile.





CHAPTER XIX


Having returned to the regiment and told the commander the state of
Denisov's affairs, Rostov rode to Tilsit with the letter to the Emperor.

On the thirteenth of June the French and Russian Emperors arrived in
Tilsit. Boris Drubetskoy had asked the important personage on whom he
was in attendance, to include him in the suite appointed for the stay at
Tilsit.

"I should like to see the great man," he said, alluding to Napoleon,
whom hitherto he, like everyone else, had always called Buonaparte.

"You are speaking of Buonaparte?" asked the general, smiling.

Boris looked at his general inquiringly and immediately saw that he was
being tested.

"I am speaking, Prince, of the Emperor Napoleon," he replied. The
general patted him on the shoulder, with a smile.

"You will go far," he said, and took him to Tilsit with him.

Boris was among the few present at the Niemen on the day the two
Emperors met. He saw the raft, decorated with monograms, saw Napoleon
pass before the French Guards on the farther bank of the river, saw the
pensive face of the Emperor Alexander as he sat in silence in a tavern
on the bank of the Niemen awaiting Napoleon's arrival, saw both Emperors
get into boats, and saw how Napoleon--reaching the raft first--stepped
quickly forward to meet Alexander and held out his hand to him, and how
they both retired into the pavilion. Since he had begun to move in the
highest circles Boris had made it his habit to watch attentively all
that went on around him and to note it down. At the time of the meeting
at Tilsit he asked the names of those who had come with Napoleon and
about the uniforms they wore, and listened attentively to words spoken
by important personages. At the moment the Emperors went into the
pavilion he looked at his watch, and did not forget to look at it
again when Alexander came out. The interview had lasted an hour and
fifty-three minutes. He noted this down that same evening, among other
facts he felt to be of historic importance. As the Emperor's suite was
a very small one, it was a matter of great importance, for a man who
valued his success in the service, to be at Tilsit on the occasion of
this interview between the two Emperors, and having succeeded in this,
Boris felt that henceforth his position was fully assured. He had not
only become known, but people had grown accustomed to him and accepted
him. Twice he had executed commissions to the Emperor himself, so
that the latter knew his face, and all those at court, far from
cold-shouldering him as at first when they considered him a newcomer,
would now have been surprised had he been absent.

Boris lodged with another adjutant, the Polish Count Zhilinski.
Zhilinski, a Pole brought up in Paris, was rich, and passionately
fond of the French, and almost every day of the stay at Tilsit, French
officers of the Guard and from French headquarters were dining and
lunching with him and Boris.

On the evening of the twenty-fourth of June, Count Zhilinski arranged a
supper for his French friends. The guest of honor was an aide-de-camp of
Napoleon's, there were also several French officers of the Guard, and
a page of Napoleon's, a young lad of an old aristocratic French
family. That same day, Rostov, profiting by the darkness to avoid being
recognized in civilian dress, came to Tilsit and went to the lodging
occupied by Boris and Zhilinski.

Rostov, in common with the whole army from which he came, was far
from having experienced the change of feeling toward Napoleon and the
French--who from being foes had suddenly become friends--that had taken
place at headquarters and in Boris. In the army, Bonaparte and the
French were still regarded with mingled feelings of anger, contempt,
and fear. Only recently, talking with one of Platov's Cossack officers,
Rostov had argued that if Napoleon were taken prisoner he would be
treated not as a sovereign, but as a criminal. Quite lately, happening
to meet a wounded French colonel on the road, Rostov had maintained with
heat that peace was impossible between a legitimate sovereign and the
criminal Bonaparte. Rostov was therefore unpleasantly struck by the
presence of French officers in Boris' lodging, dressed in uniforms he
had been accustomed to see from quite a different point of view from
the outposts of the flank. As soon as he noticed a French officer, who
thrust his head out of the door, that warlike feeling of hostility which
he always experienced at the sight of the enemy suddenly seized him. He
stopped at the threshold and asked in Russian whether Drubetskoy lived
there. Boris, hearing a strange voice in the anteroom, came out to meet
him. An expression of annoyance showed itself for a moment on his face
on first recognizing Rostov.

"Ah, it's you? Very glad, very glad to see you," he said, however,
coming toward him with a smile. But Rostov had noticed his first
impulse.

"I've come at a bad time I think. I should not have come, but I have
business," he said coldly.

"No, I only wonder how you managed to get away from your regiment. Dans
un moment je suis a vous," * he said, answering someone who called him.


    * "In a minute I shall be at your disposal."


"I see I'm intruding," Rostov repeated.

The look of annoyance had already disappeared from Boris' face: having
evidently reflected and decided how to act, he very quietly took
both Rostov's hands and led him into the next room. His eyes, looking
serenely and steadily at Rostov, seemed to be veiled by something, as if
screened by blue spectacles of conventionality. So it seemed to Rostov.

"Oh, come now! As if you could come at a wrong time!" said Boris, and he
led him into the room where the supper table was laid and introduced
him to his guests, explaining that he was not a civilian, but an hussar
officer, and an old friend of his.

"Count Zhilinski--le Comte N. N.--le Capitaine S. S.," said he,
naming his guests. Rostov looked frowningly at the Frenchmen, bowed
reluctantly, and remained silent.

Zhilinski evidently did not receive this new Russian person very
willingly into his circle and did not speak to Rostov. Boris did not
appear to notice the constraint the newcomer produced and, with the same
pleasant composure and the same veiled look in his eyes with which he
had met Rostov, tried to enliven the conversation. One of the Frenchmen,
with the politeness characteristic of his countrymen, addressed the
obstinately taciturn Rostov, saying that the latter had probably come to
Tilsit to see the Emperor.

"No, I came on business," replied Rostov, briefly.

Rostov had been out of humor from the moment he noticed the look of
dissatisfaction on Boris' face, and as always happens to those in a bad
humor, it seemed to him that everyone regarded him with aversion and
that he was in everybody's way. He really was in their way, for he alone
took no part in the conversation which again became general. The looks
the visitors cast on him seemed to say: "And what is he sitting here
for?" He rose and went up to Boris.

"Anyhow, I'm in your way," he said in a low tone. "Come and talk over my
business and I'll go away."

"Oh, no, not at all," said Boris. "But if you are tired, come and lie
down in my room and have a rest."

"Yes, really..."

They went into the little room where Boris slept. Rostov, without
sitting down, began at once, irritably (as if Boris were to blame
in some way) telling him about Denisov's affair, asking him whether,
through his general, he could and would intercede with the Emperor on
Denisov's behalf and get Denisov's petition handed in. When he and Boris
were alone, Rostov felt for the first time that he could not look Boris
in the face without a sense of awkwardness. Boris, with one leg crossed
over the other and stroking his left hand with the slender fingers of
his right, listened to Rostov as a general listens to the report of a
subordinate, now looking aside and now gazing straight into Rostov's
eyes with the same veiled look. Each time this happened Rostov felt
uncomfortable and cast down his eyes.

"I have heard of such cases and know that His Majesty is very severe
in such affairs. I think it would be best not to bring it before the
Emperor, but to apply to the commander of the corps.... But in general,
I think..."

"So you don't want to do anything? Well then, say so!" Rostov almost
shouted, not looking Boris in the face.

Boris smiled.

"On the contrary, I will do what I can. Only I thought..."

At that moment Zhilinski's voice was heard calling Boris.

"Well then, go, go, go..." said Rostov, and refusing supper and
remaining alone in the little room, he walked up and down for a long
time, hearing the lighthearted French conversation from the next room.





CHAPTER XX


Rostov had come to Tilsit the day least suitable for a petition on
Denisov's behalf. He could not himself go to the general in attendance
as he was in mufti and had come to Tilsit without permission to do
so, and Boris, even had he wished to, could not have done so on the
following day. On that day, June 27, the preliminaries of peace were
signed. The Emperors exchanged decorations: Alexander received the Cross
of the Legion of Honor and Napoleon the Order of St. Andrew of the
First Degree, and a dinner had been arranged for the evening, given by
a battalion of the French Guards to the Preobrazhensk battalion. The
Emperors were to be present at that banquet.

Rostov felt so ill at ease and uncomfortable with Boris that, when the
latter looked in after supper, he pretended to be asleep, and early next
morning went away, avoiding Boris. In his civilian clothes and a
round hat, he wandered about the town, staring at the French and their
uniforms and at the streets and houses where the Russian and French
Emperors were staying. In a square he saw tables being set up and
preparations made for the dinner; he saw the Russian and French colors
draped from side to side of the streets, with huge monograms A and N. In
the windows of the houses also flags and bunting were displayed.

"Boris doesn't want to help me and I don't want to ask him. That's
settled," thought Nicholas. "All is over between us, but I won't leave
here without having done all I can for Denisov and certainly not without
getting his letter to the Emperor. The Emperor!... He is here!" thought
Rostov, who had unconsciously returned to the house where Alexander
lodged.

Saddled horses were standing before the house and the suite were
assembling, evidently preparing for the Emperor to come out.

"I may see him at any moment," thought Rostov. "If only I were to hand
the letter direct to him and tell him all... could they really arrest me
for my civilian clothes? Surely not! He would understand on whose side
justice lies. He understands everything, knows everything. Who can be
more just, more magnanimous than he? And even if they did arrest me for
being here, what would it matter?" thought he, looking at an officer who
was entering the house the Emperor occupied. "After all, people do go
in.... It's all nonsense! I'll go in and hand the letter to the Emperor
myself so much the worse for Drubetskoy who drives me to it!" And
suddenly with a determination he himself did not expect, Rostov felt for
the letter in his pocket and went straight to the house.

"No, I won't miss my opportunity now, as I did after Austerlitz," he
thought, expecting every moment to meet the monarch, and conscious of
the blood that rushed to his heart at the thought. "I will fall at his
feet and beseech him. He will lift me up, will listen, and will even
thank me. 'I am happy when I can do good, but to remedy injustice is the
greatest happiness,'" Rostov fancied the sovereign saying. And passing
people who looked after him with curiosity, he entered the porch of the
Emperor's house.

A broad staircase led straight up from the entry, and to the right he
saw a closed door. Below, under the staircase, was a door leading to the
lower floor.

"Whom do you want?" someone inquired.

"To hand in a letter, a petition, to His Majesty," said Nicholas, with a
tremor in his voice.

"A petition? This way, to the officer on duty" (he was shown the door
leading downstairs), "only it won't be accepted."

On hearing this indifferent voice, Rostov grew frightened at what he
was doing; the thought of meeting the Emperor at any moment was so
fascinating and consequently so alarming that he was ready to run away,
but the official who had questioned him opened the door, and Rostov
entered.

A short stout man of about thirty, in white breeches and high boots and
a batiste shirt that he had evidently only just put on, standing in that
room, and his valet was buttoning on to the back of his breeches a
new pair of handsome silk-embroidered braces that, for some reason,
attracted Rostov's attention. This man was speaking to someone in the
adjoining room.

"A good figure and in her first bloom," he was saying, but on seeing
Rostov, he stopped short and frowned.

"What is it? A petition?"

"What is it?" asked the person in the other room.

"Another petitioner," answered the man with the braces.

"Tell him to come later. He'll be coming out directly, we must go."

"Later... later! Tomorrow. It's too late..."

Rostov turned and was about to go, but the man in the braces stopped
him.

"Whom have you come from? Who are you?"

"I come from Major Denisov," answered Rostov.

"Are you an officer?"

"Lieutenant Count Rostov."

"What audacity! Hand it in through your commander. And go along with
you... go," and he continued to put on the uniform the valet handed him.

Rostov went back into the hall and noticed that in the porch there were
many officers and generals in full parade uniform, whom he had to pass.

Cursing his temerity, his heart sinking at the thought of finding
himself at any moment face to face with the Emperor and being put to
shame and arrested in his presence, fully alive now to the impropriety
of his conduct and repenting of it, Rostov, with downcast eyes, was
making his way out of the house through the brilliant suite when a
familiar voice called him and a hand detained him.

"What are you doing here, sir, in civilian dress?" asked a deep voice.

It was a cavalry general who had obtained the Emperor's special favor
during this campaign, and who had formerly commanded the division in
which Rostov was serving.

Rostov, in dismay, began justifying himself, but seeing the kindly,
jocular face of the general, he took him aside and in an excited voice
told him the whole affair, asking him to intercede for Denisov, whom the
general knew. Having heard Rostov to the end, the general shook his head
gravely.

"I'm sorry, sorry for that fine fellow. Give me the letter."

Hardly had Rostov handed him the letter and finished explaining
Denisov's case, when hasty steps and the jingling of spurs were heard
on the stairs, and the general, leaving him, went to the porch. The
gentlemen of the Emperor's suite ran down the stairs and went to their
horses. Hayne, the same groom who had been at Austerlitz, led up the
Emperor's horse, and the faint creak of a footstep Rostov knew at once
was heard on the stairs. Forgetting the danger of being recognized,
Rostov went close to the porch, together with some inquisitive
civilians, and again, after two years, saw those features he adored:
that same face and same look and step, and the same union of majesty and
mildness.... And the feeling of enthusiasm and love for his sovereign
rose again in Rostov's soul in all its old force. In the uniform of
the Preobrazhensk regiment--white chamois-leather breeches and high
boots--and wearing a star Rostov did not know (it was that of the Legion
d'honneur), the monarch came out into the porch, putting on his gloves
and carrying his hat under his arm. He stopped and looked about him,
brightening everything around by his glance. He spoke a few words to
some of the generals, and, recognizing the former commander of Rostov's
division, smiled and beckoned to him.

All the suite drew back and Rostov saw the general talking for some time
to the Emperor.

The Emperor said a few words to him and took a step toward his horse.
Again the crowd of members of the suite and street gazers (among whom
was Rostov) moved nearer to the Emperor. Stopping beside his horse, with
his hand on the saddle, the Emperor turned to the cavalry general and
said in a loud voice, evidently wishing to be heard by all:

"I cannot do it, General. I cannot, because the law is stronger than I,"
and he raised his foot to the stirrup.

The general bowed his head respectfully, and the monarch mounted and
rode down the street at a gallop. Beside himself with enthusiasm, Rostov
ran after him with the crowd.





CHAPTER XXI


The Emperor rode to the square where, facing one another, a battalion
of the Preobrazhensk regiment stood on the right and a battalion of the
French Guards in their bearskin caps on the left.

As the Tsar rode up to one flank of the battalions, which presented
arms, another group of horsemen galloped up to the opposite flank, and
at the head of them Rostov recognized Napoleon. It could be no one else.
He came at a gallop, wearing a small hat, a blue uniform open over a
white vest, and the St. Andrew ribbon over his shoulder. He was riding
a very fine thoroughbred gray Arab horse with a crimson gold-embroidered
saddlecloth. On approaching Alexander he raised his hat, and as he did
so, Rostov, with his cavalryman's eye, could not help noticing that
Napoleon did not sit well or firmly in the saddle. The battalions
shouted "Hurrah!" and "Vive l'Empereur!" Napoleon said something to
Alexander, and both Emperors dismounted and took each other's hands.
Napoleon's face wore an unpleasant and artificial smile. Alexander was
saying something affable to him.

In spite of the trampling of the French gendarmes' horses, which were
pushing back the crowd, Rostov kept his eyes on every movement of
Alexander and Bonaparte. It struck him as a surprise that Alexander
treated Bonaparte as an equal and that the latter was quite at ease with
the Tsar, as if such relations with an Emperor were an everyday matter
to him.

Alexander and Napoleon, with the long train of their suites, approached
the right flank of the Preobrazhensk battalion and came straight up to
the crowd standing there. The crowd unexpectedly found itself so close
to the Emperors that Rostov, standing in the front row, was afraid he
might be recognized.

"Sire, I ask your permission to present the Legion of Honor to the
bravest of your soldiers," said a sharp, precise voice, articulating
every letter.

This was said by the undersized Napoleon, looking up straight into
Alexander's eyes. Alexander listened attentively to what was said to him
and, bending his head, smiled pleasantly.

"To him who has borne himself most bravely in this last war," added
Napoleon, accentuating each syllable, as with a composure and assurance
exasperating to Rostov, he ran his eyes over the Russian ranks drawn
up before him, who all presented arms with their eyes fixed on their
Emperor.

"Will Your Majesty allow me to consult the colonel?" said Alexander and
took a few hasty steps toward Prince Kozlovski, the commander of the
battalion.

Bonaparte meanwhile began taking the glove off his small white hand,
tore it in doing so, and threw it away. An aide-de-camp behind him
rushed forward and picked it up.

"To whom shall it be given?" the Emperor Alexander asked Koslovski, in
Russian in a low voice.

"To whomever Your Majesty commands."

The Emperor knit his brows with dissatisfaction and, glancing back,
remarked:

"But we must give him an answer."

Kozlovski scanned the ranks resolutely and included Rostov in his
scrutiny.

"Can it be me?" thought Rostov.

"Lazarev!" the colonel called, with a frown, and Lazarev, the first
soldier in the rank, stepped briskly forward.

"Where are you off to? Stop here!" voices whispered to Lazarev who did
not know where to go. Lazarev stopped, casting a sidelong look at his
colonel in alarm. His face twitched, as often happens to soldiers called
before the ranks.

Napoleon slightly turned his head, and put his plump little hand out
behind him as if to take something. The members of his suite, guessing
at once what he wanted, moved about and whispered as they passed
something from one to another, and a page--the same one Rostov had seen
the previous evening at Boris'--ran forward and, bowing respectfully
over the outstretched hand and not keeping it waiting a moment, laid
in it an Order on a red ribbon. Napoleon, without looking, pressed two
fingers together and the badge was between them. Then he approached
Lazarev (who rolled his eyes and persistently gazed at his own monarch),
looked round at the Emperor Alexander to imply that what he was now
doing was done for the sake of his ally, and the small white hand
holding the Order touched one of Lazarev's buttons. It was as if
Napoleon knew that it was only necessary for his hand to deign to touch
that soldier's breast for the soldier to be forever happy, rewarded, and
distinguished from everyone else in the world. Napoleon merely laid
the cross on Lazarev's breast and, dropping his hand, turned toward
Alexander as though sure that the cross would adhere there. And it
really did.

Officious hands, Russian and French, immediately seized the cross and
fastened it to the uniform. Lazarev glanced morosely at the little man
with white hands who was doing something to him and, still standing
motionless presenting arms, looked again straight into Alexander's eyes,
as if asking whether he should stand there, or go away, or do something
else. But receiving no orders, he remained for some time in that rigid
position.

The Emperors remounted and rode away. The Preobrazhensk battalion,
breaking rank, mingled with the French Guards and sat down at the tables
prepared for them.

Lazarev sat in the place of honor. Russian and French officers embraced
him, congratulated him, and pressed his hands. Crowds of officers and
civilians drew near merely to see him. A rumble of Russian and French
voices and laughter filled the air round the tables in the square.
Two officers with flushed faces, looking cheerful and happy, passed by
Rostov.

"What d'you think of the treat? All on silver plate," one of them was
saying. "Have you seen Lazarev?"

"I have."

"Tomorrow, I hear, the Preobrazhenskis will give them a dinner."

"Yes, but what luck for Lazarev! Twelve hundred francs' pension for
life."

"Here's a cap, lads!" shouted a Preobrazhensk soldier, donning a shaggy
French cap.

"It's a fine thing! First-rate!"

"Have you heard the password?" asked one Guards' officer of another.
"The day before yesterday it was 'Napoleon, France, bravoure';
yesterday, 'Alexandre, Russie, grandeur.' One day our Emperor gives it
and next day Napoleon. Tomorrow our Emperor will send a St. George's
Cross to the bravest of the French Guards. It has to be done. He must
respond in kind."

Boris, too, with his friend Zhilinski, came to see the Preobrazhensk
banquet. On his way back, he noticed Rostov standing by the corner of a
house.

"Rostov! How d'you do? We missed one another," he said, and could
not refrain from asking what was the matter, so strangely dismal and
troubled was Rostov's face.

"Nothing, nothing," replied Rostov.

"You'll call round?"

"Yes, I will."

Rostov stood at that corner for a long time, watching the feast from a
distance. In his mind, a painful process was going on which he could
not bring to a conclusion. Terrible doubts rose in his soul. Now he
remembered Denisov with his changed expression, his submission, and the
whole hospital, with arms and legs torn off and its dirt and disease. So
vividly did he recall that hospital stench of dead flesh that he
looked round to see where the smell came from. Next he thought of that
self-satisfied Bonaparte, with his small white hand, who was now an
Emperor, liked and respected by Alexander. Then why those severed
arms and legs and those dead men?... Then again he thought of Lazarev
rewarded and Denisov punished and unpardoned. He caught himself
harboring such strange thoughts that he was frightened.

The smell of the food the Preobrazhenskis were eating and a sense of
hunger recalled him from these reflections; he had to get something to
eat before going away. He went to a hotel he had noticed that morning.
There he found so many people, among them officers who, like himself,
had come in civilian clothes, that he had difficulty in getting a
dinner. Two officers of his own division joined him. The conversation
naturally turned on the peace. The officers, his comrades, like most of
the army, were dissatisfied with the peace concluded after the battle of
Friedland. They said that had we held out a little longer Napoleon would
have been done for, as his troops had neither provisions nor ammunition.
Nicholas ate and drank (chiefly the latter) in silence. He finished a
couple of bottles of wine by himself. The process in his mind went on
tormenting him without reaching a conclusion. He feared to give way to
his thoughts, yet could not get rid of them. Suddenly, on one of the
officers' saying that it was humiliating to look at the French, Rostov
began shouting with uncalled-for wrath, and therefore much to the
surprise of the officers:

"How can you judge what's best?" he cried, the blood suddenly rushing to
his face. "How can you judge the Emperor's actions? What right have
we to argue? We cannot comprehend either the Emperor's aims or his
actions!"

"But I never said a word about the Emperor!" said the officer,
justifying himself, and unable to understand Rostov's outburst, except
on the supposition that he was drunk.

But Rostov did not listen to him.

"We are not diplomatic officials, we are soldiers and nothing more," he
went on. "If we are ordered to die, we must die. If we're punished, it
means that we have deserved it, it's not for us to judge. If the Emperor
pleases to recognize Bonaparte as Emperor and to conclude an alliance
with him, it means that that is the right thing to do. If once we begin
judging and arguing about everything, nothing sacred will be left! That
way we shall be saying there is no God--nothing!" shouted Nicholas,
banging the table--very little to the point as it seemed to his
listeners, but quite relevantly to the course of his own thoughts.

"Our business is to do our duty, to fight and not to think! That's
all...." said he.

"And to drink," said one of the officers, not wishing to quarrel.

"Yes, and to drink," assented Nicholas. "Hullo there! Another bottle!"
he shouted.

In 1808 the Emperor Alexander went to Erfurt for a fresh interview with
the Emperor Napoleon, and in the upper circles of Petersburg there was
much talk of the grandeur of this important meeting.





CHAPTER XXII


In 1809 the intimacy between "the world's two arbiters," as Napoleon
and Alexander were called, was such that when Napoleon declared war on
Austria a Russian corps crossed the frontier to co-operate with our
old enemy Bonaparte against our old ally the Emperor of Austria, and in
court circles the possibility of marriage between Napoleon and one of
Alexander's sisters was spoken of. But besides considerations of
foreign policy, the attention of Russian society was at that time keenly
directed on the internal changes that were being undertaken in all the
departments of government.

Life meanwhile--real life, with its essential interests of health and
sickness, toil and rest, and its intellectual interests in thought,
science, poetry, music, love, friendship, hatred, and passions--went on
as usual, independently of and apart from political friendship or enmity
with Napoleon Bonaparte and from all the schemes of reconstruction.





BOOK SIX: 1808 - 10





CHAPTER I


Prince Andrew had spent two years continuously in the country.

All the plans Pierre had attempted on his estates--and constantly
changing from one thing to another had never accomplished--were carried
out by Prince Andrew without display and without perceptible difficulty.

He had in the highest degree a practical tenacity which Pierre lacked,
and without fuss or strain on his part this set things going.

On one of his estates the three hundred serfs were liberated and became
free agricultural laborers--this being one of the first examples of
the kind in Russia. On other estates the serfs' compulsory labor was
commuted for a quitrent. A trained midwife was engaged for Bogucharovo
at his expense, and a priest was paid to teach reading and writing to
the children of the peasants and household serfs.

Prince Andrew spent half his time at Bald Hills with his father and his
son, who was still in the care of nurses. The other half he spent in
"Bogucharovo Cloister," as his father called Prince Andrew's estate.
Despite the indifference to the affairs of the world he had expressed
to Pierre, he diligently followed all that went on, received many books,
and to his surprise noticed that when he or his father had visitors
from Petersburg, the very vortex of life, these people lagged behind
himself--who never left the country--in knowledge of what was happening
in home and foreign affairs.

Besides being occupied with his estates and reading a great variety of
books, Prince Andrew was at this time busy with a critical survey of
our last two unfortunate campaigns, and with drawing up a proposal for a
reform of the army rules and regulations.

In the spring of 1809 he went to visit the Ryazan estates which had been
inherited by his son, whose guardian he was.

Warmed by the spring sunshine he sat in the caleche looking at the new
grass, the first leaves on the birches, and the first puffs of white
spring clouds floating across the clear blue sky. He was not thinking of
anything, but looked absent-mindedly and cheerfully from side to side.

They crossed the ferry where he had talked with Pierre the year before.
They went through the muddy village, past threshing floors and green
fields of winter rye, downhill where snow still lodged near the bridge,
uphill where the clay had been liquefied by the rain, past strips of
stubble land and bushes touched with green here and there, and into a
birch forest growing on both sides of the road. In the forest it was
almost hot, no wind could be felt. The birches with their sticky green
leaves were motionless, and lilac-colored flowers and the first blades
of green grass were pushing up and lifting last year's leaves. The
coarse evergreen color of the small fir trees scattered here and there
among the birches was an unpleasant reminder of winter. On entering the
forest the horses began to snort and sweated visibly.

Peter the footman made some remark to the coachman; the latter assented.
But apparently the coachman's sympathy was not enough for Peter, and he
turned on the box toward his master.

"How pleasant it is, your excellency!" he said with a respectful smile.

"What?"

"It's pleasant, your excellency!"

"What is he talking about?" thought Prince Andrew. "Oh, the spring,
I suppose," he thought as he turned round. "Yes, really everything is
green already.... How early! The birches and cherry and alders too are
coming out.... But the oaks show no sign yet. Ah, here is one oak!"

 At the edge of the road stood an oak. Probably ten times the age of
the birches that formed the forest, it was ten times as thick and twice
as tall as they. It was an enormous tree, its girth twice as great as a
man could embrace, and evidently long ago some of its branches had been
broken off and its bark scarred. With its huge ungainly limbs sprawling
unsymmetrically, and its gnarled hands and fingers, it stood an aged,
stern, and scornful monster among the smiling birch trees. Only the
dead-looking evergreen firs dotted about in the forest, and this oak,
refused to yield to the charm of spring or notice either the spring or
the sunshine.

"Spring, love, happiness!" this oak seemed to say. "Are you not weary of
that stupid, meaningless, constantly repeated fraud? Always the same and
always a fraud? There is no spring, no sun, no happiness! Look at those
cramped dead firs, ever the same, and at me too, sticking out my broken
and barked fingers just where they have grown, whether from my back or
my sides: as they have grown so I stand, and I do not believe in your
hopes and your lies."

As he passed through the forest Prince Andrew turned several times to
look at that oak, as if expecting something from it. Under the oak,
too, were flowers and grass, but it stood among them scowling, rigid,
misshapen, and grim as ever.

"Yes, the oak is right, a thousand times right," thought Prince Andrew.
"Let others--the young--yield afresh to that fraud, but we know life,
our life is finished!"

A whole sequence of new thoughts, hopeless but mournfully pleasant, rose
in his soul in connection with that tree. During this journey he, as
it were, considered his life afresh and arrived at his old conclusion,
restful in its hopelessness: that it was not for him to begin anything
anew--but that he must live out his life, content to do no harm, and not
disturbing himself or desiring anything.





CHAPTER II


Prince Andrew had to see the Marshal of the Nobility for the district
in connection with the affairs of the Ryazan estate of which he was
trustee. This Marshal was Count Ilya Rostov, and in the middle of May
Prince Andrew went to visit him.

It was now hot spring weather. The whole forest was already clothed in
green. It was dusty and so hot that on passing near water one longed to
bathe.

Prince Andrew, depressed and preoccupied with the business about which
he had to speak to the Marshal, was driving up the avenue in the grounds
of the Rostovs' house at Otradnoe. He heard merry girlish cries behind
some trees on the right and saw a group of girls running to cross
the path of his caleche. Ahead of the rest and nearer to him ran a
dark-haired, remarkably slim, pretty girl in a yellow chintz dress, with
a white handkerchief on her head from under which loose locks of hair
escaped. The girl was shouting something but, seeing that he was a
stranger, ran back laughing without looking at him.

Suddenly, he did not know why, he felt a pang. The day was so beautiful,
the sun so bright, everything around so gay, but that slim pretty girl
did not know, or wish to know, of his existence and was contented and
cheerful in her own separate--probably foolish--but bright and happy
life. "What is she so glad about? What is she thinking of? Not of
the military regulations or of the arrangement of the Ryazan serfs'
quitrents. Of what is she thinking? Why is she so happy?" Prince Andrew
asked himself with instinctive curiosity.

In 1809 Count Ilya Rostov was living at Otradnoe just as he had done
in former years, that is, entertaining almost the whole province with
hunts, theatricals, dinners, and music. He was glad to see Prince
Andrew, as he was to see any new visitor, and insisted on his staying
the night.

During the dull day, in the course of which he was entertained by his
elderly hosts and by the more important of the visitors (the old count's
house was crowded on account of an approaching name day), Prince Andrew
repeatedly glanced at Natasha, gay and laughing among the younger
members of the company, and asked himself each time, "What is she
thinking about? Why is she so glad?"

That night, alone in new surroundings, he was long unable to sleep. He
read awhile and then put out his candle, but relit it. It was hot in the
room, the inside shutters of which were closed. He was cross with the
stupid old man (as he called Rostov), who had made him stay by assuring
him that some necessary documents had not yet arrived from town, and he
was vexed with himself for having stayed.

He got up and went to the window to open it. As soon as he opened the
shutters the moonlight, as if it had long been watching for this, burst
into the room. He opened the casement. The night was fresh, bright, and
very still. Just before the window was a row of pollard trees, looking
black on one side and with a silvery light on the other. Beneath the
trees grewsome kind of lush, wet, bushy vegetation with silver-lit
leaves and stems here and there. Farther back beyond the dark trees a
roof glittered with dew, to the right was a leafy tree with brilliantly
white trunk and branches, and above it shone the moon, nearly at its
full, in a pale, almost starless, spring sky. Prince Andrew leaned his
elbows on the window ledge and his eyes rested on that sky.

His room was on the first floor. Those in the rooms above were also
awake. He heard female voices overhead.

"Just once more," said a girlish voice above him which Prince Andrew
recognized at once.

"But when are you coming to bed?" replied another voice.

"I won't, I can't sleep, what's the use? Come now for the last time."

 Two girlish voices sang a musical passage--the end of some song.

"Oh, how lovely! Now go to sleep, and there's an end of it."

"You go to sleep, but I can't," said the first voice, coming nearer to
the window. She was evidently leaning right out, for the rustle of her
dress and even her breathing could be heard. Everything was stone-still,
like the moon and its light and the shadows. Prince Andrew, too, dared
not stir, for fear of betraying his unintentional presence.

"Sonya! Sonya!" he again heard the first speaker. "Oh, how can you
sleep? Only look how glorious it is! Ah, how glorious! Do wake up,
Sonya!" she said almost with tears in her voice. "There never, never was
such a lovely night before!"

Sonya made some reluctant reply.

"Do just come and see what a moon!... Oh, how lovely! Come here....
Darling, sweetheart, come here! There, you see? I feel like sitting down
on my heels, putting my arms round my knees like this, straining tight,
as tight as possible, and flying away! Like this...."

"Take care, you'll fall out."

He heard the sound of a scuffle and Sonya's disapproving voice: "It's
past one o'clock."

"Oh, you only spoil things for me. All right, go, go!"

Again all was silent, but Prince Andrew knew she was still sitting
there. From time to time he heard a soft rustle and at times a sigh.

"O God, O God! What does it mean?" she suddenly exclaimed. "To bed then,
if it must be!" and she slammed the casement.

"For her I might as well not exist!" thought Prince Andrew while he
listened to her voice, for some reason expecting yet fearing that she
might say something about him. "There she is again! As if it were on
purpose," thought he.

In his soul there suddenly arose such an unexpected turmoil of youthful
thoughts and hopes, contrary to the whole tenor of his life, that unable
to explain his condition to himself he lay down and fell asleep at once.





CHAPTER III


Next morning, having taken leave of no one but the count, and not
waiting for the ladies to appear, Prince Andrew set off for home.

It was already the beginning of June when on his return journey he drove
into the birch forest where the gnarled old oak had made so strange and
memorable an impression on him. In the forest the harness bells sounded
yet more muffled than they had done six weeks before, for now all was
thick, shady, and dense, and the young firs dotted about in the forest
did not jar on the general beauty but, lending themselves to the mood
around, were delicately green with fluffy young shoots.

The whole day had been hot. Somewhere a storm was gathering, but only
a small cloud had scattered some raindrops lightly, sprinkling the road
and the sappy leaves. The left side of the forest was dark in the shade,
the right side glittered in the sunlight, wet and shiny and scarcely
swayed by the breeze. Everything was in blossom, the nightingales
trilled, and their voices reverberated now near, now far away.

"Yes, here in this forest was that oak with which I agreed," thought
Prince Andrew. "But where is it?" he again wondered, gazing at the left
side of the road, and without recognizing it he looked with admiration
at the very oak he sought. The old oak, quite transfigured, spreading
out a canopy of sappy dark-green foliage, stood rapt and slightly
trembling in the rays of the evening sun. Neither gnarled fingers nor
old scars nor old doubts and sorrows were any of them in evidence now.
Through the hard century-old bark, even where there were no twigs,
leaves had sprouted such as one could hardly believe the old veteran
could have produced.

"Yes, it is the same oak," thought Prince Andrew, and all at once he was
seized by an unreasoning springtime feeling of joy and renewal. All the
best moments of his life suddenly rose to his memory. Austerlitz with
the lofty heavens, his wife's dead reproachful face, Pierre at the
ferry, that girl thrilled by the beauty of the night, and that night
itself and the moon, and.... all this rushed suddenly to his mind.

"No, life is not over at thirty-one!" Prince Andrew suddenly decided
finally and decisively. "It is not enough for me to know what I have in
me--everyone must know it: Pierre, and that young girl who wanted to
fly away into the sky, everyone must know me, so that my life may not be
lived for myself alone while others live so apart from it, but so that
it may be reflected in them all, and they and I may live in harmony!"


On reaching home Prince Andrew decided to go to Petersburg that autumn
and found all sorts of reasons for this decision. A whole series of
sensible and logical considerations showing it to be essential for him
to go to Petersburg, and even to re-enter the service, kept springing
up in his mind. He could not now understand how he could ever even have
doubted the necessity of taking an active share in life, just as a month
before he had not understood how the idea of leaving the quiet country
could ever enter his head. It now seemed clear to him that all his
experience of life must be senselessly wasted unless he applied it to
some kind of work and again played an active part in life. He did not
even remember how formerly, on the strength of similar wretched logical
arguments, it had seemed obvious that he would be degrading himself if
he now, after the lessons he had had in life, allowed himself to believe
in the possibility of being useful and in the possibility of happiness
or love. Now reason suggested quite the opposite. After that journey
to Ryazan he found the country dull; his former pursuits no longer
interested him, and often when sitting alone in his study he got up,
went to the mirror, and gazed a long time at his own face. Then he would
turn away to the portrait of his dead Lise, who with hair curled a la
grecque looked tenderly and gaily at him out of the gilt frame. She
did not now say those former terrible words to him, but looked simply,
merrily, and inquisitively at him. And Prince Andrew, crossing his
arms behind him, long paced the room, now frowning, now smiling, as
he reflected on those irrational, inexpressible thoughts, secret as a
crime, which altered his whole life and were connected with Pierre, with
fame, with the girl at the window, the oak, and woman's beauty and love.
And if anyone came into his room at such moments he was particularly
cold, stern, and above all unpleasantly logical.

"My dear," Princess Mary entering at such a moment would say, "little
Nicholas can't go out today, it's very cold."

"If it were hot," Prince Andrew would reply at such times very dryly
to his sister, "he could go out in his smock, but as it is cold he must
wear warm clothes, which were designed for that purpose. That is what
follows from the fact that it is cold; and not that a child who needs
fresh air should remain at home," he would add with extreme logic, as
if punishing someone for those secret illogical emotions that stirred
within him.

At such moments Princess Mary would think how intellectual work dries
men up.





CHAPTER IV


Prince Andrew arrived in Petersburg in August, 1809. It was the time
when the youthful Speranski was at the zenith of his fame and his
reforms were being pushed forward with the greatest energy. That same
August the Emperor was thrown from his caleche, injured his leg, and
remained three weeks at Peterhof, receiving Speranski every day and no
one else. At that time the two famous decrees were being prepared that
so agitated society--abolishing court ranks and introducing
examinations to qualify for the grades of Collegiate Assessor and State
Councilor--and not merely these but a whole state constitution,
intended to change the existing order of government in Russia: legal,
administrative, and financial, from the Council of State down to the
district tribunals. Now those vague liberal dreams with which the
Emperor Alexander had ascended the throne, and which he had tried to put
into effect with the aid of his associates, Czartoryski, Novosiltsev,
Kochubey, and Strogonov--whom he himself in jest had called his Comite
de salut public--were taking shape and being realized.

Now all these men were replaced by Speranski on the civil side, and
Arakcheev on the military. Soon after his arrival Prince Andrew, as a
gentleman of the chamber, presented himself at court and at a levee. The
Emperor, though he met him twice, did not favor him with a single word.
It had always seemed to Prince Andrew before that he was antipathetic
to the Emperor and that the latter disliked his face and personality
generally, and in the cold, repellent glance the Emperor gave him, he
now found further confirmation of this surmise. The courtiers explained
the Emperor's neglect of him by His Majesty's displeasure at Bolkonski's
not having served since 1805.

"I know myself that one cannot help one's sympathies and antipathies,"
thought Prince Andrew, "so it will not do to present my proposal for
the reform of the army regulations to the Emperor personally, but the
project will speak for itself."

He mentioned what he had written to an old field marshal, a friend of
his father's. The field marshal made an appointment to see him, received
him graciously, and promised to inform the Emperor. A few days later
Prince Andrew received notice that he was to go to see the Minister of
War, Count Arakcheev.


On the appointed day Prince Andrew entered Count Arakcheev's waiting
room at nine in the morning.

He did not know Arakcheev personally, had never seen him, and all he had
heard of him inspired him with but little respect for the man.

"He is Minister of War, a man trusted by the Emperor, and I need not
concern myself about his personal qualities: he has been commissioned
to consider my project, so he alone can get it adopted," thought Prince
Andrew as he waited among a number of important and unimportant people
in Count Arakcheev's waiting room.

During his service, chiefly as an adjutant, Prince Andrew had seen the
anterooms of many important men, and the different types of such rooms
were well known to him. Count Arakcheev's anteroom had quite a special
character. The faces of the unimportant people awaiting their turn for
an audience showed embarrassment and servility; the faces of those of
higher rank expressed a common feeling of awkwardness, covered by a mask
of unconcern and ridicule of themselves, their situation, and the person
for whom they were waiting. Some walked thoughtfully up and down,
others whispered and laughed. Prince Andrew heard the nickname "Sila
Andreevich" and the words, "Uncle will give it to us hot," in reference
to Count Arakcheev. One general (an important personage), evidently
feeling offended at having to wait so long, sat crossing and uncrossing
his legs and smiling contemptuously to himself.

But the moment the door opened one feeling alone appeared on all
faces--that of fear. Prince Andrew for the second time asked the
adjutant on duty to take in his name, but received an ironical look and
was told that his turn would come in due course. After some others had
been shown in and out of the minister's room by the adjutant on duty,
an officer who struck Prince Andrew by his humiliated and frightened
air was admitted at that terrible door. This officer's audience lasted
a long time. Then suddenly the grating sound of a harsh voice was heard
from the other side of the door, and the officer--with pale face and
trembling lips--came out and passed through the waiting room, clutching
his head.

After this Prince Andrew was conducted to the door and the officer on
duty said in a whisper, "To the right, at the window."

Prince Andrew entered a plain tidy room and saw at the table a man of
forty with a long waist, a long closely cropped head, deep wrinkles,
scowling brows above dull greenish-hazel eyes and an overhanging red
nose. Arakcheev turned his head toward him without looking at him.

"What is your petition?" asked Arakcheev.

"I am not petitioning, your excellency," returned Prince Andrew quietly.

Arakcheev's eyes turned toward him.

"Sit down," said he. "Prince Bolkonski?"

"I am not petitioning about anything. His Majesty the Emperor has
deigned to send your excellency a project submitted by me..."

"You see, my dear sir, I have read your project," interrupted Arakcheev,
uttering only the first words amiably and then--again without looking
at Prince Andrew--relapsing gradually into a tone of grumbling contempt.
"You are proposing new military laws? There are many laws but no one to
carry out the old ones. Nowadays everybody designs laws, it is easier
writing than doing."

"I came at His Majesty the Emperor's wish to learn from your excellency
how you propose to deal with the memorandum I have presented," said
Prince Andrew politely.

"I have endorsed a resolution on your memorandum and sent it to the
committee. I do not approve of it," said Arakcheev, rising and taking a
paper from his writing table. "Here!" and he handed it to Prince Andrew.

Across the paper was scrawled in pencil, without capital letters,
misspelled, and without punctuation: "Unsoundly constructed because
resembles an imitation of the French military code and from the Articles
of War needlessly deviating."

"To what committee has the memorandum been referred?" inquired Prince
Andrew.

"To the Committee on Army Regulations, and I have recommended that your
honor should be appointed a member, but without a salary."

Prince Andrew smiled.

"I don't want one."

"A member without salary," repeated Arakcheev. "I have the honor...
Eh! Call the next one! Who else is there?" he shouted, bowing to Prince
Andrew.





CHAPTER V


While waiting for the announcement of his appointment to the committee
Prince Andrew looked up his former acquaintances, particularly those he
knew to be in power and whose aid he might need. In Petersburg he now
experienced the same feeling he had had on the eve of a battle, when
troubled by anxious curiosity and irresistibly attracted to the ruling
circles where the future, on which the fate of millions depended, was
being shaped. From the irritation of the older men, the curiosity of the
uninitiated, the reserve of the initiated, the hurry and preoccupation
of everyone, and the innumerable committees and commissions of whose
existence he learned every day, he felt that now, in 1809, here in
Petersburg a vast civil conflict was in preparation, the commander in
chief of which was a mysterious person he did not know, but who
was supposed to be a man of genius--Speranski. And this movement of
reconstruction of which Prince Andrew had a vague idea, and Speranski
its chief promoter, began to interest him so keenly that the question
of the army regulations quickly receded to a secondary place in his
consciousness.

Prince Andrew was most favorably placed to secure good reception in the
highest and most diverse Petersburg circles of the day. The reforming
party cordially welcomed and courted him, in the first place because
he was reputed to be clever and very well read, and secondly because by
liberating his serfs he had obtained the reputation of being a liberal.
The party of the old and dissatisfied, who censured the innovations,
turned to him expecting his sympathy in their disapproval of the
reforms, simply because he was the son of his father. The feminine
society world welcomed him gladly, because he was rich, distinguished, a
good match, and almost a newcomer, with a halo of romance on account
of his supposed death and the tragic loss of his wife. Besides this
the general opinion of all who had known him previously was that he had
greatly improved during these last five years, having softened and grown
more manly, lost his former affectation, pride, and contemptuous irony,
and acquired the serenity that comes with years. People talked about
him, were interested in him, and wanted to meet him.

The day after his interview with Count Arakcheev, Prince Andrew spent
the evening at Count Kochubey's. He told the count of his interview with
Sila Andreevich (Kochubey spoke of Arakcheev by that nickname with the
same vague irony Prince Andrew had noticed in the Minister of War's
anteroom).

"Mon cher, even in this case you can't do without Michael Mikhaylovich
Speranski. He manages everything. I'll speak to him. He has promised to
come this evening."

"What has Speranski to do with the army regulations?" asked Prince
Andrew.

Kochubey shook his head smilingly, as if surprised at Bolkonski's
simplicity.

"We were talking to him about you a few days ago," Kochubey continued,
"and about your freed plowmen."

"Oh, is it you, Prince, who have freed your serfs?" said an old man of
Catherine's day, turning contemptuously toward Bolkonski.

"It was a small estate that brought in no profit," replied Prince
Andrew, trying to extenuate his action so as not to irritate the old man
uselessly.

"Afraid of being late..." said the old man, looking at Kochubey.

"There's one thing I don't understand," he continued. "Who will plow the
land if they are set free? It is easy to write laws, but difficult to
rule.... Just the same as now--I ask you, Count--who will be heads of
the departments when everybody has to pass examinations?"

"Those who pass the examinations, I suppose," replied Kochubey, crossing
his legs and glancing round.

"Well, I have Pryanichnikov serving under me, a splendid man, a
priceless man, but he's sixty. Is he to go up for examination?"

"Yes, that's a difficulty, as education is not at all general, but..."

Count Kochubey did not finish. He rose, took Prince Andrew by the arm,
and went to meet a tall, bald, fair man of about forty with a large open
forehead and a long face of unusual and peculiar whiteness, who was
just entering. The newcomer wore a blue swallow-tail coat with a cross
suspended from his neck and a star on his left breast. It was Speranski.
Prince Andrew recognized him at once, and felt a throb within him, as
happens at critical moments of life. Whether it was from respect, envy,
or anticipation, he did not know. Speranski's whole figure was of a
peculiar type that made him easily recognizable. In the society in which
Prince Andrew lived he had never seen anyone who together with awkward
and clumsy gestures possessed such calmness and self-assurance; he
had never seen so resolute yet gentle an expression as that in those
half-closed, rather humid eyes, or so firm a smile that expressed
nothing; nor had he heard such a refined, smooth, soft voice; above all
he had never seen such delicate whiteness of face or hands--hands which
were broad, but very plump, soft, and white. Such whiteness and softness
Prince Andrew had only seen on the faces of soldiers who had been long
in hospital. This was Speranski, Secretary of State, reporter to the
Emperor and his companion at Erfurt, where he had more than once met and
talked with Napoleon.

Speranski did not shift his eyes from one face to another as people
involuntarily do on entering a large company and was in no hurry to
speak. He spoke slowly, with assurance that he would be listened to, and
he looked only at the person with whom he was conversing.

Prince Andrew followed Speranski's every word and movement with
particular attention. As happens to some people, especially to men
who judge those near to them severely, he always on meeting
anyone new--especially anyone whom, like Speranski, he knew by
reputation--expected to discover in him the perfection of human
qualities.

Speranski told Kochubey he was sorry he had been unable to come sooner
as he had been detained at the palace. He did not say that the Emperor
had kept him, and Prince Andrew noticed this affectation of modesty.
When Kochubey introduced Prince Andrew, Speranski slowly turned his eyes
to Bolkonski with his customary smile and looked at him in silence.

"I am very glad to make your acquaintance. I had heard of you, as
everyone has," he said after a pause.

Kochubey said a few words about the reception Arakcheev had given
Bolkonski. Speranski smiled more markedly.

"The chairman of the Committee on Army Regulations is my good friend
Monsieur Magnitski," he said, fully articulating every word and
syllable, "and if you like I can put you in touch with him." He paused
at the full stop. "I hope you will find him sympathetic and ready to
co-operate in promoting all that is reasonable."

A circle soon formed round Speranski, and the old man who had talked
about his subordinate Pryanichnikov addressed a question to him.

Prince Andrew without joining in the conversation watched every movement
of Speranski's: this man, not long since an insignificant divinity
student, who now, Bolkonski thought, held in his hands--those plump
white hands--the fate of Russia. Prince Andrew was struck by the
extraordinarily disdainful composure with which Speranski answered
the old man. He appeared to address condescending words to him from an
immeasurable height. When the old man began to speak too loud, Speranski
smiled and said he could not judge of the advantage or disadvantage of
what pleased the sovereign.

Having talked for a little while in the general circle, Speranski rose
and coming up to Prince Andrew took him along to the other end of the
room. It was clear that he thought it necessary to interest himself in
Bolkonski.

"I had no chance to talk with you, Prince, during the animated
conversation in which that venerable gentleman involved me," he said
with a mildly contemptuous smile, as if intimating by that smile that he
and Prince Andrew understood the insignificance of the people with whom
he had just been talking. This flattered Prince Andrew. "I have known of
you for a long time: first from your action with regard to your serfs,
a first example, of which it is very desirable that there should be more
imitators; and secondly because you are one of those gentlemen of the
chamber who have not considered themselves offended by the new decree
concerning the ranks allotted to courtiers, which is causing so much
gossip and tittle-tattle."

"No," said Prince Andrew, "my father did not wish me to take advantage
of the privilege. I began the service from the lower grade."

"Your father, a man of the last century, evidently stands above our
contemporaries who so condemn this measure which merely reestablishes
natural justice."

"I think, however, that these condemnations have some ground," returned
Prince Andrew, trying to resist Speranski's influence, of which he began
to be conscious. He did not like to agree with him in everything and
felt a wish to contradict. Though he usually spoke easily and well,
he felt a difficulty in expressing himself now while talking with
Speranski. He was too much absorbed in observing the famous man's
personality.

"Grounds of personal ambition maybe," Speranski put in quietly.

"And of state interest to some extent," said Prince Andrew.

"What do you mean?" asked Speranski quietly, lowering his eyes.

"I am an admirer of Montesquieu," replied Prince Andrew, "and his idea
that le principe des monarchies est l'honneur me parait incontestable.
Certains droits et privileges de la noblesse me paraissent etre des
moyens de soutenir ce sentiment." *


     * "The principle of monarchies is honor seems to me
     incontestable. Certain rights and privileges for the
     aristocracy appear to me a means of maintaining that
     sentiment."


The smile vanished from Speranski's white face, which was much improved
by the change. Probably Prince Andrew's thought interested him.

"Si vous envisagez la question sous ce point de vue," * he began,
pronouncing French with evident difficulty, and speaking even slower
than in Russian but quite calmly.


    * "If you regard the question from that point of view."


Speranski went on to say that honor, l'honeur, cannot be upheld by
privileges harmful to the service; that honor, l'honneur, is either a
negative concept of not doing what is blameworthy or it is a source of
emulation in pursuit of commendation and rewards, which recognize it.
His arguments were concise, simple, and clear.

"An institution upholding honor, the source of emulation, is one similar
to the Legion d'honneur of the great Emperor Napoleon, not harmful
but helpful to the success of the service, but not a class or court
privilege."

"I do not dispute that, but it cannot be denied that court privileges
have attained the same end," returned Prince Andrew. "Every courtier
considers himself bound to maintain his position worthily."

"Yet you do not care to avail yourself of the privilege, Prince," said
Speranski, indicating by a smile that he wished to finish amiably an
argument which was embarrassing for his companion. "If you will do
me the honor of calling on me on Wednesday," he added, "I will, after
talking with Magnitski, let you know what may interest you, and shall
also have the pleasure of a more detailed chat with you."

Closing his eyes, he bowed a la francaise, without taking leave, and
trying to attract as little attention as possible, he left the room.





CHAPTER VI


During the first weeks of his stay in Petersburg Prince Andrew felt the
whole trend of thought he had formed during his life of seclusion quite
overshadowed by the trifling cares that engrossed him in that city.

On returning home in the evening he would jot down in his notebook four
or five necessary calls or appointments for certain hours. The mechanism
of life, the arrangement of the day so as to be in time everywhere,
absorbed the greater part of his vital energy. He did nothing, did
not even think or find time to think, but only talked, and talked
successfully, of what he had thought while in the country.

He sometimes noticed with dissatisfaction that he repeated the same
remark on the same day in different circles. But he was so busy for
whole days together that he had no time to notice that he was thinking
of nothing.

As he had done on their first meeting at Kochubey's, Speranski produced
a strong impression on Prince Andrew on the Wednesday, when he
received him tete-a-tete at his own house and talked to him long and
confidentially.

To Bolkonski so many people appeared contemptible and insignificant
creatures, and he so longed to find in someone the living ideal of that
perfection toward which he strove, that he readily believed that in
Speranski he had found this ideal of a perfectly rational and virtuous
man. Had Speranski sprung from the same class as himself and possessed
the same breeding and traditions, Bolkonski would soon have discovered
his weak, human, unheroic sides; but as it was, Speranski's strange and
logical turn of mind inspired him with respect all the more because he
did not quite understand him. Moreover, Speranski, either because he
appreciated the other's capacity or because he considered it necessary
to win him to his side, showed off his dispassionate calm reasonableness
before Prince Andrew and flattered him with that subtle flattery which
goes hand in hand with self-assurance and consists in a tacit assumption
that one's companion is the only man besides oneself capable of
understanding the folly of the rest of mankind and the reasonableness
and profundity of one's own ideas.

During their long conversation on Wednesday evening, Speranski more than
once remarked: "We regard everything that is above the common level of
rooted custom..." or, with a smile: "But we want the wolves to be fed
and the sheep to be safe..." or: "They cannot understand this..." and
all in a way that seemed to say: "We, you and I, understand what they
are and who we are."

This first long conversation with Speranski only strengthened in Prince
Andrew the feeling he had experienced toward him at their first meeting.
He saw in him a remarkable, clear-thinking man of vast intellect who by
his energy and persistence had attained power, which he was using solely
for the welfare of Russia. In Prince Andrew's eyes Speranski was the man
he would himself have wished to be--one who explained all the facts of
life reasonably, considered important only what was rational, and was
capable of applying the standard of reason to everything. Everything
seemed so simple and clear in Speranski's exposition that Prince Andrew
involuntarily agreed with him about everything. If he replied and
argued, it was only because he wished to maintain his independence and
not submit to Speranski's opinions entirely. Everything was right and
everything was as it should be: only one thing disconcerted Prince
Andrew. This was Speranski's cold, mirrorlike look, which did not allow
one to penetrate to his soul, and his delicate white hands, which Prince
Andrew involuntarily watched as one does watch the hands of those who
possess power. This mirrorlike gaze and those delicate hands irritated
Prince Andrew, he knew not why. He was unpleasantly struck, too, by the
excessive contempt for others that he observed in Speranski, and by the
diversity of lines of argument he used to support his opinions. He
made use of every kind of mental device, except analogy, and passed too
boldly, it seemed to Prince Andrew, from one to another. Now he would
take up the position of a practical man and condemn dreamers; now that
of a satirist, and laugh ironically at his opponents; now grow severely
logical, or suddenly rise to the realm of metaphysics. (This last
resource was one he very frequently employed.) He would transfer a
question to metaphysical heights, pass on to definitions of space, time,
and thought, and, having deduced the refutation he needed, would again
descend to the level of the original discussion.

In general the trait of Speranski's mentality which struck Prince Andrew
most was his absolute and unshakable belief in the power and authority
of reason. It was evident that the thought could never occur to him
which to Prince Andrew seemed so natural, namely, that it is after all
impossible to express all one thinks; and that he had never felt the
doubt, "Is not all I think and believe nonsense?" And it was just this
peculiarity of Speranski's mind that particularly attracted Prince
Andrew.

During the first period of their acquaintance Bolkonski felt a
passionate admiration for him similar to that which he had once felt for
Bonaparte. The fact that Speranski was the son of a village priest, and
that stupid people might meanly despise him on account of his humble
origin (as in fact many did), caused Prince Andrew to cherish his
sentiment for him the more, and unconsciously to strengthen it.

On that first evening Bolkonski spent with him, having mentioned the
Commission for the Revision of the Code of Laws, Speranski told him
sarcastically that the Commission had existed for a hundred and fifty
years, had cost millions, and had done nothing except that Rosenkampf
had stuck labels on the corresponding paragraphs of the different codes.

"And that is all the state has for the millions it has spent," said he.
"We want to give the Senate new juridical powers, but we have no laws.
That is why it is a sin for men like you, Prince, not to serve in these
times!"

Prince Andrew said that for that work an education in jurisprudence was
needed which he did not possess.

"But nobody possesses it, so what would you have? It is a vicious circle
from which we must break a way out."

A week later Prince Andrew was a member of the Committee on Army
Regulations and--what he had not at all expected--was chairman of a
section of the committee for the revision of the laws. At Speranski's
request he took the first part of the Civil Code that was being drawn up
and, with the aid of the Code Napoleon and the Institutes of Justinian,
he worked at formulating the section on Personal Rights.





CHAPTER VII


Nearly two years before this, in 1808, Pierre on returning to Petersburg
after visiting his estates had involuntarily found himself in a leading
position among the Petersburg Freemasons. He arranged dining and funeral
lodge meetings, enrolled new members, and busied himself uniting various
lodges and acquiring authentic charters. He gave money for the erection
of temples and supplemented as far as he could the collection of alms,
in regard to which the majority of members were stingy and irregular.
He supported almost singlehanded a poorhouse the order had founded in
Petersburg.

His life meanwhile continued as before, with the same infatuations and
dissipations. He liked to dine and drink well, and though he considered
it immoral and humiliating could not resist the temptations of the
bachelor circles in which he moved.

Amid the turmoil of his activities and distractions, however, Pierre at
the end of a year began to feel that the more firmly he tried to rest
upon it, the more Masonic ground on which he stood gave way under him.
At the same time he felt that the deeper the ground sank under him the
closer bound he involuntarily became to the order. When he had joined
the Freemasons he had experienced the feeling of one who confidently
steps onto the smooth surface of a bog. When he put his foot down it
sank in. To make quite sure of the firmness of the ground, he put
his other foot down and sank deeper still, became stuck in it, and
involuntarily waded knee-deep in the bog.

Joseph Alexeevich was not in Petersburg--he had of late stood aside
from the affairs of the Petersburg lodges, and lived almost entirely in
Moscow. All the members of the lodges were men Pierre knew in ordinary
life, and it was difficult for him to regard them merely as Brothers in
Freemasonry and not as Prince B. or Ivan Vasilevich D., whom he knew in
society mostly as weak and insignificant men. Under the Masonic aprons
and insignia he saw the uniforms and decorations at which they aimed in
ordinary life. Often after collecting alms, and reckoning up twenty
to thirty rubles received for the most part in promises from a dozen
members, of whom half were as well able to pay as himself, Pierre
remembered the Masonic vow in which each Brother promised to devote
all his belongings to his neighbor, and doubts on which he tried not to
dwell arose in his soul.

He divided the Brothers he knew into four categories. In the first he
put those who did not take an active part in the affairs of the lodges
or in human affairs, but were exclusively occupied with the mystical
science of the order: with questions of the threefold designation of
God, the three primordial elements--sulphur, mercury, and salt--or
the meaning of the square and all the various figures of the temple of
Solomon. Pierre respected this class of Brothers to which the elder ones
chiefly belonged, including, Pierre thought, Joseph Alexeevich himself,
but he did not share their interests. His heart was not in the mystical
aspect of Freemasonry.

In the second category Pierre reckoned himself and others like him,
seeking and vacillating, who had not yet found in Freemasonry a straight
and comprehensible path, but hoped to do so.

In the third category he included those Brothers (the majority) who saw
nothing in Freemasonry but the external forms and ceremonies, and prized
the strict performance of these forms without troubling about their
purport or significance. Such were Willarski and even the Grand Master
of the principal lodge.

Finally, to the fourth category also a great many Brothers belonged,
particularly those who had lately joined. These according to Pierre's
observations were men who had no belief in anything, nor desire for
anything, but joined the Freemasons merely to associate with the wealthy
young Brothers who were influential through their connections or rank,
and of whom there were very many in the lodge.

Pierre began to feel dissatisfied with what he was doing. Freemasonry,
at any rate as he saw it here, sometimes seemed to him based merely
on externals. He did not think of doubting Freemasonry itself, but
suspected that Russian Masonry had taken a wrong path and deviated
from its original principles. And so toward the end of the year he went
abroad to be initiated into the higher secrets of the order.

In the summer of 1809 Pierre returned to Petersburg. Our Freemasons knew
from correspondence with those abroad that Bezukhov had obtained the
confidence of many highly placed persons, had been initiated into many
mysteries, had been raised to a higher grade, and was bringing back with
him much that might conduce to the advantage of the Masonic cause
in Russia. The Petersburg Freemasons all came to see him, tried to
ingratiate themselves with him, and it seemed to them all that he was
preparing something for them and concealing it.

A solemn meeting of the lodge of the second degree was convened, at
which Pierre promised to communicate to the Petersburg Brothers what
he had to deliver to them from the highest leaders of their order. The
meeting was a full one. After the usual ceremonies Pierre rose and began
his address.

"Dear Brothers," he began, blushing and stammering, with a written
speech in his hand, "it is not sufficient to observe our mysteries in
the seclusion of our lodge--we must act--act! We are drowsing, but we
must act." Pierre raised his notebook and began to read.

"For the dissemination of pure truth and to secure the triumph
of virtue," he read, "we must cleanse men from prejudice, diffuse
principles in harmony with the spirit of the times, undertake the
education of the young, unite ourselves in indissoluble bonds with the
wisest men, boldly yet prudently overcome superstitions, infidelity, and
folly, and form of those devoted to us a body linked together by unity
of purpose and possessed of authority and power.

"To attain this end we must secure a preponderance of virtue over vice
and must endeavor to secure that the honest man may, even in this world,
receive a lasting reward for his virtue. But in these great endeavors we
are gravely hampered by the political institutions of today. What is
to be done in these circumstances? To favor revolutions, overthrow
everything, repel force by force?... No! We are very far from that.
Every violent reform deserves censure, for it quite fails to remedy
evil while men remain what they are, and also because wisdom needs no
violence.

"The whole plan of our order should be based on the idea of preparing
men of firmness and virtue bound together by unity of conviction--aiming
at the punishment of vice and folly, and patronizing talent and virtue:
raising worthy men from the dust and attaching them to our Brotherhood.
Only then will our order have the power unobtrusively to bind the hands
of the protectors of disorder and to control them without their being
aware of it. In a word, we must found a form of government holding
universal sway, which should be diffused over the whole world without
destroying the bonds of citizenship, and beside which all other
governments can continue in their customary course and do everything
except what impedes the great aim of our order, which is to obtain for
virtue the victory over vice. This aim was that of Christianity itself.
It taught men to be wise and good and for their own benefit to follow
the example and instruction of the best and wisest men.

"At that time, when everything was plunged in darkness, preaching alone
was of course sufficient. The novelty of Truth endowed her with
special strength, but now we need much more powerful methods. It is
now necessary that man, governed by his senses, should find in virtue
a charm palpable to those senses. It is impossible to eradicate the
passions; but we must strive to direct them to a noble aim, and it is
therefore necessary that everyone should be able to satisfy his passions
within the limits of virtue. Our order should provide means to that end.

"As soon as we have a certain number of worthy men in every state,
each of them again training two others and all being closely united,
everything will be possible for our order, which has already in secret
accomplished much for the welfare of mankind."

This speech not only made a strong impression, but created excitement in
the lodge. The majority of the Brothers, seeing in it dangerous designs
of Illuminism, * met it with a coldness that surprised Pierre. The Grand
Master began answering him, and Pierre began developing his views with
more and more warmth. It was long since there had been so stormy a
meeting. Parties were formed, some accusing Pierre of Illuminism, others
supporting him. At that meeting he was struck for the first time by
the endless variety of men's minds, which prevents a truth from ever
presenting itself identically to two persons. Even those members
who seemed to be on his side understood him in their own way with
limitations and alterations he could not agree to, as what he always
wanted most was to convey his thought to others just as he himself
understood it.


     * The Illuminati sought to substitute republican for
     monarchical institutions.


At the end of the meeting the Grand Master with irony and ill-will
reproved Bezukhov for his vehemence and said it was not love of virtue
alone, but also a love of strife that had moved him in the dispute.
Pierre did not answer him and asked briefly whether his proposal would
be accepted. He was told that it would not, and without waiting for the
usual formalities he left the lodge and went home.





CHAPTER VIII


Again Pierre was overtaken by the depression he so dreaded. For three
days after the delivery of his speech at the lodge he lay on a sofa at
home receiving no one and going nowhere.

It was just then that he received a letter from his wife, who implored
him to see her, telling him how grieved she was about him and how she
wished to devote her whole life to him.

At the end of the letter she informed him that in a few days she would
return to Petersburg from abroad.

Following this letter one of the Masonic Brothers whom Pierre respected
less than the others forced his way in to see him and, turning the
conversation upon Pierre's matrimonial affairs, by way of fraternal
advice expressed the opinion that his severity to his wife was wrong
and that he was neglecting one of the first rules of Freemasonry by not
forgiving the penitent.

At the same time his mother-in-law, Prince Vasili's wife, sent to
him imploring him to come if only for a few minutes to discuss a most
important matter. Pierre saw that there was a conspiracy against him and
that they wanted to reunite him with his wife, and in the mood he then
was, this was not even unpleasant to him. Nothing mattered to him.
Nothing in life seemed to him of much importance, and under the
influence of the depression that possessed him he valued neither his
liberty nor his resolution to punish his wife.

"No one is right and no one is to blame; so she too is not to blame," he
thought.

If he did not at once give his consent to a reunion with his wife, it
was only because in his state of depression he did not feel able to take
any step. Had his wife come to him, he would not have turned her away.
Compared to what preoccupied him, was it not a matter of indifference
whether he lived with his wife or not?

Without replying either to his wife or his mother-in-law, Pierre late
one night prepared for a journey and started for Moscow to see Joseph
Alexeevich. This is what he noted in his diary:


Moscow, 17th November

I have just returned from my benefactor, and hasten to write down what
I have experienced. Joseph Alexeevich is living poorly and has for three
years been suffering from a painful disease of the bladder. No one has
ever heard him utter a groan or a word of complaint. From morning till
late at night, except when he eats his very plain food, he is working
at science. He received me graciously and made me sit down on the bed
on which he lay. I made the sign of the Knights of the East and of
Jerusalem, and he responded in the same manner, asking me with a mild
smile what I had learned and gained in the Prussian and Scottish lodges.
I told him everything as best I could, and told him what I had proposed
to our Petersburg lodge, of the bad reception I had encountered, and of
my rupture with the Brothers. Joseph Alexeevich, having remained silent
and thoughtful for a good while, told me his view of the matter, which
at once lit up for me my whole past and the future path I should follow.
He surprised me by asking whether I remembered the threefold aim of
the order: (1) The preservation and study of the mystery. (2) The
purification and reformation of oneself for its reception, and (3) The
improvement of the human race by striving for such purification. Which
is the principal aim of these three? Certainly self-reformation and
self-purification. Only to this aim can we always strive independently
of circumstances. But at the same time just this aim demands the
greatest efforts of us; and so, led astray by pride, losing sight of
this aim, we occupy ourselves either with the mystery which in our
impurity we are unworthy to receive, or seek the reformation of
the human race while ourselves setting an example of baseness and
profligacy. Illuminism is not a pure doctrine, just because it is
attracted by social activity and puffed up by pride. On this ground
Joseph Alexeevich condemned my speech and my whole activity, and in the
depth of my soul I agreed with him. Talking of my family affairs he
said to me, "the chief duty of a true Mason, as I have told you, lies in
perfecting himself. We often think that by removing all the difficulties
of our life we shall more quickly reach our aim, but on the contrary,
my dear sir, it is only in the midst of worldly cares that we can attain
our three chief aims: (1) Self-knowledge--for man can only know himself
by comparison, (2) Self-perfecting, which can only be attained by
conflict, and (3) The attainment of the chief virtue--love of death.
Only the vicissitudes of life can show us its vanity and develop our
innate love of death or of rebirth to a new life." These words are all
the more remarkable because, in spite of his great physical sufferings,
Joseph Alexeevich is never weary of life though he loves death, for
which--in spite of the purity and loftiness of his inner man--he does
not yet feel himself sufficiently prepared. My benefactor then explained
to me fully the meaning of the Great Square of creation and pointed out
to me that the numbers three and seven are the basis of everything. He
advised me not to avoid intercourse with the Petersburg Brothers, but
to take up only second-grade posts in the lodge, to try, while
diverting the Brothers from pride, to turn them toward the true path
self-knowledge and self-perfecting. Besides this he advised me for
myself personally above all to keep a watch over myself, and to that end
he gave me a notebook, the one I am now writing in and in which I will
in future note down all my actions.


Petersburg, 23rd November

I am again living with my wife. My mother-in-law came to me in tears and
said that Helene was here and that she implored me to hear her; that she
was innocent and unhappy at my desertion, and much more. I knew that if
I once let myself see her I should not have strength to go on refusing
what she wanted. In my perplexity I did not know whose aid and advice
to seek. Had my benefactor been here he would have told me what to do.
I went to my room and reread Joseph Alexeevich's letters and recalled
my conversations with him, and deduced from it all that I ought not
to refuse a suppliant, and ought to reach a helping hand to
everyone--especially to one so closely bound to me--and that I must bear
my cross. But if I forgive her for the sake of doing right, then let
union with her have only a spiritual aim. That is what I decided, and
what I wrote to Joseph Alexeevich. I told my wife that I begged her to
forget the past, to forgive me whatever wrong I may have done her, and
that I had nothing to forgive. It gave me joy to tell her this. She need
not know how hard it was for me to see her again. I have settled on the
upper floor of this big house and am experiencing a happy feeling of
regeneration.





CHAPTER IX


At that time, as always happens, the highest society that met at court
and at the grand balls was divided into several circles, each with its
own particular tone. The largest of these was the French circle of the
Napoleonic alliance, the circle of Count Rumyantsev and Caulaincourt.
In this group Helene, as soon as she had settled in Petersburg with her
husband, took a very prominent place. She was visited by the members of
the French embassy and by many belonging to that circle and noted for
their intellect and polished manners.

Helene had been at Erfurt during the famous meeting of the Emperors
and had brought from there these connections with the Napoleonic
notabilities. At Erfurt her success had been brilliant. Napoleon himself
had noticed her in the theater and said of her: "C'est un superbe
animal." * Her success as a beautiful and elegant woman did not surprise
Pierre, for she had become even handsomer than before. What did surprise
him was that during these last two years his wife had succeeded in
gaining the reputation "d' une femme charmante, aussi spirituelle que
belle." *(2) The distinguished Prince de Ligne wrote her eight-page
letters. Bilibin saved up his epigrams to produce them in Countess
Bezukhova's presence. To be received in the Countess Bezukhova's salon
was regarded as a diploma of intellect. Young men read books before
attending Helene's evenings, to have something to say in her salon, and
secretaries of the embassy, and even ambassadors, confided diplomatic
secrets to her, so that in a way Helene was a power. Pierre, who knew
she was very stupid, sometimes attended, with a strange feeling of
perplexity and fear, her evenings and dinner parties, where politics,
poetry, and philosophy were discussed. At these parties his feelings
were like those of a conjuror who always expects his trick to be found
out at any moment. But whether because stupidity was just what was
needed to run such a salon, or because those who were deceived found
pleasure in the deception, at any rate it remained unexposed and Helene
Bezukhova's reputation as a lovely and clever woman became so firmly
established that she could say the emptiest and stupidest things and
everybody would go into raptures over every word of hers and look for a
profound meaning in it of which she herself had no conception.


     * "That's a superb animal."

     * (2) "Of a charming woman, as witty as she is lovely."


Pierre was just the husband needed for a brilliant society woman. He was
that absent-minded crank, a grand seigneur husband who was in no one's
way, and far from spoiling the high tone and general impression of the
drawing room, he served, by the contrast he presented to her, as an
advantageous background to his elegant and tactful wife. Pierre during
the last two years, as a result of his continual absorption in abstract
interests and his sincere contempt for all else, had acquired in his
wife's circle, which did not interest him, that air of unconcern,
indifference, and benevolence toward all, which cannot be acquired
artificially and therefore inspires involuntary respect. He entered
his wife's drawing room as one enters a theater, was acquainted with
everybody, equally pleased to see everyone, and equally indifferent to
them all. Sometimes he joined in a conversation which interested him
and, regardless of whether any "gentlemen of the embassy" were present
or not, lispingly expressed his views, which were sometimes not at all
in accord with the accepted tone of the moment. But the general opinion
concerning the queer husband of "the most distinguished woman in
Petersburg" was so well established that no one took his freaks
seriously.

Among the many young men who frequented her house every day, Boris
Drubetskoy, who had already achieved great success in the service, was
the most intimate friend of the Bezukhov household since Helene's return
from Erfurt. Helene spoke of him as "mon page" and treated him like a
child. Her smile for him was the same as for everybody, but sometimes
that smile made Pierre uncomfortable. Toward him Boris behaved with a
particularly dignified and sad deference. This shade of deference also
disturbed Pierre. He had suffered so painfully three years before
from the mortification to which his wife had subjected him that he now
protected himself from the danger of its repetition, first by not being
a husband to his wife, and secondly by not allowing himself to suspect.

"No, now that she has become a bluestocking she has finally renounced
her former infatuations," he told himself. "There has never been
an instance of a bluestocking being carried away by affairs of the
heart"--a statement which, though gathered from an unknown source, he
believed implicitly. Yet strange to say Boris' presence in his wife's
drawing room (and he was almost always there) had a physical effect upon
Pierre; it constricted his limbs and destroyed the unconsciousness and
freedom of his movements.

"What a strange antipathy," thought Pierre, "yet I used to like him very
much."

In the eyes of the world Pierre was a great gentleman, the rather blind
and absurd husband of a distinguished wife, a clever crank who did
nothing but harmed nobody and was a first-rate, good-natured fellow. But
a complex and difficult process of internal development was taking place
all this time in Pierre's soul, revealing much to him and causing him
many spiritual doubts and joys.





CHAPTER X


Pierre went on with his diary, and this is what he wrote in it during
that time:


24th November

Got up at eight, read the Scriptures, then went to my duties. (By Joseph
Alexeevich's advice Pierre had entered the service of the state and
served on one of the committees.) Returned home for dinner and dined
alone--the countess had many visitors I do not like. I ate and drank
moderately and after dinner copied out some passages for the Brothers.
In the evening I went down to the countess and told a funny story about
B., and only remembered that I ought not to have done so when everybody
laughed loudly at it.

I am going to bed with a happy and tranquil mind. Great God, help me to
walk in Thy paths, (1) to conquer anger by calmness and deliberation,
(2) to vanquish lust by self-restraint and repulsion, (3) to withdraw
from worldliness, but not avoid (a) the service of the state, (b) family
duties, (c) relations with my friends, and the management of my affairs.


27th November

I got up late. On waking I lay long in bed yielding to sloth. O God,
help and strengthen me that I may walk in Thy ways! Read the Scriptures,
but without proper feeling. Brother Urusov came and we talked about
worldly vanities. He told me of the Emperor's new projects. I began to
criticize them, but remembered my rules and my benefactor's words--that
a true Freemason should be a zealous worker for the state when his aid
is required and a quiet onlooker when not called on to assist. My tongue
is my enemy. Brothers G. V. and O. visited me and we had a preliminary
talk about the reception of a new Brother. They laid on me the duty of
Rhetor. I feel myself weak and unworthy. Then our talk turned to the
interpretation of the seven pillars and steps of the Temple, the seven
sciences, the seven virtues, the seven vices, and the seven gifts of the
Holy Spirit. Brother O. was very eloquent. In the evening the admission
took place. The new decoration of the Premises contributed much to the
magnificence of the spectacle. It was Boris Drubetskoy who was admitted.
I nominated him and was the Rhetor. A strange feeling agitated me all
the time I was alone with him in the dark chamber. I caught myself
harboring a feeling of hatred toward him which I vainly tried to
overcome. That is why I should really like to save him from evil and
lead him into the path of truth, but evil thoughts of him did not leave
me. It seemed to me that his object in entering the Brotherhood was
merely to be intimate and in favor with members of our lodge. Apart
from the fact that he had asked me several times whether N. and S. were
members of our lodge (a question to which I could not reply) and that
according to my observation he is incapable of feeling respect for our
holy order and is too preoccupied and satisfied with the outer man to
desire spiritual improvement, I had no cause to doubt him, but he seemed
to me insincere, and all the time I stood alone with him in the dark
temple it seemed to me that he was smiling contemptuously at my words,
and I wished really to stab his bare breast with the sword I held to it.
I could not be eloquent, nor could I frankly mention my doubts to the
Brothers and to the Grand Master. Great Architect of Nature, help me to
find the true path out of the labyrinth of lies!


 After this, three pages were left blank in the diary, and then
the following was written:


I have had a long and instructive talk alone with Brother V., who
advised me to hold fast by brother A. Though I am unworthy, much was
revealed to me. Adonai is the name of the creator of the world. Elohim
is the name of the ruler of all. The third name is the name unutterable
which means the All. Talks with Brother V. strengthen, refresh, and
support me in the path of virtue. In his presence doubt has no place.
The distinction between the poor teachings of mundane science and our
sacred all-embracing teaching is clear to me. Human sciences dissect
everything to comprehend it, and kill everything to examine it. In the
holy science of our order all is one, all is known in its entirety and
life. The Trinity--the three elements of matter--are sulphur, mercury,
and salt. Sulphur is of an oily and fiery nature; in combination with
salt by its fiery nature it arouses a desire in the latter by means
of which it attracts mercury, seizes it, holds it, and in combination
produces other bodies. Mercury is a fluid, volatile, spiritual essence.
Christ, the Holy Spirit, Him!...


3rd December

Awoke late, read the Scriptures but was apathetic. Afterwards went and
paced up and down the large hall. I wished to meditate, but instead my
imagination pictured an occurrence of four years ago, when Dolokhov,
meeting me in Moscow after our duel, said he hoped I was enjoying
perfect peace of mind in spite of my wife's absence. At the time I gave
him no answer. Now I recalled every detail of that meeting and in my
mind gave him the most malevolent and bitter replies. I recollected
myself and drove away that thought only when I found myself glowing with
anger, but I did not sufficiently repent. Afterwards Boris Drubetskoy
came and began relating various adventures. His coming vexed me from the
first, and I said something disagreeable to him. He replied. I flared
up and said much that was unpleasant and even rude to him. He became
silent, and I recollected myself only when it was too late. My God, I
cannot get on with him at all. The cause of this is my egotism. I set
myself above him and so become much worse than he, for he is lenient
to my rudeness while I on the contrary nourish contempt for him. O God,
grant that in his presence I may rather see my own vileness, and behave
so that he too may benefit. After dinner I fell asleep and as I was
drowsing off I clearly heard a voice saying in my left ear, "Thy day!"

I dreamed that I was walking in the dark and was suddenly surrounded by
dogs, but I went on undismayed. Suddenly a smallish dog seized my left
thigh with its teeth and would not let go. I began to throttle it with
my hands. Scarcely had I torn it off before another, a bigger one, began
biting me. I lifted it up, but the higher I lifted it the bigger and
heavier it grew. And suddenly Brother A. came and, taking my arm, led
me to a building to enter which we had to pass along a narrow plank.
I stepped on it, but it bent and gave way and I began to clamber up a
fence which I could scarcely reach with my hands. After much effort I
dragged myself up, so that my leg hung down on one side and my body on
the other. I looked round and saw Brother A. standing on the fence and
pointing me to a broad avenue and garden, and in the garden was a large
and beautiful building. I woke up. O Lord, great Architect of Nature,
help me to tear from myself these dogs--my passions especially the last,
which unites in itself the strength of all the former ones, and aid me
to enter that temple of virtue to a vision of which I attained in my
dream.


7th December

I dreamed that Joseph Alexeevich was sitting in my house, and that I
was very glad and wished to entertain him. It seemed as if I chattered
incessantly with other people and suddenly remembered that this could
not please him, and I wished to come close to him and embrace him. But
as soon as I drew near I saw that his face had changed and grown young,
and he was quietly telling me something about the teaching of our order,
but so softly that I could not hear it. Then it seemed that we all left
the room and something strange happened. We were sitting or lying on
the floor. He was telling me something, and I wished to show him my
sensibility, and not listening to what he was saying I began picturing
to myself the condition of my inner man and the grace of God sanctifying
me. And tears came into my eyes, and I was glad he noticed this. But he
looked at me with vexation and jumped up, breaking off his remarks. I
felt abashed and asked whether what he had been saying did not concern
me; but he did not reply, gave me a kind look, and then we suddenly
found ourselves in my bedroom where there is a double bed. He lay down
on the edge of it and I burned with longing to caress him and lie down
too. And he said, "Tell me frankly what is your chief temptation? Do
you know it? I think you know it already." Abashed by this question,
I replied that sloth was my chief temptation. He shook his head
incredulously; and even more abashed, I said that though I was living
with my wife as he advised, I was not living with her as her husband. To
this he replied that one should not deprive a wife of one's embraces and
gave me to understand that that was my duty. But I replied that I should
be ashamed to do it, and suddenly everything vanished. And I awoke and
found in my mind the text from the Gospel: "The life was the light of
men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it
not." Joseph Alexeevich's face had looked young and bright. That day I
received a letter from my benefactor in which he wrote about "conjugal
duties."


9th December

I had a dream from which I awoke with a throbbing heart. I saw that
I was in Moscow in my house, in the big sitting room, and Joseph
Alexeevich came in from the drawing room. I seemed to know at once that
the process of regeneration had already taken place in him, and I rushed
to meet him. I embraced him and kissed his hands, and he said, "Hast
thou noticed that my face is different?" I looked at him, still holding
him in my arms, and saw that his face was young, but that he had no hair
on his head and his features were quite changed. And I said, "I should
have known you had I met you by chance," and I thought to myself, "Am I
telling the truth?" And suddenly I saw him lying like a dead body; then
he gradually recovered and went with me into my study carrying a large
book of sheets of drawing paper; I said, "I drew that," and he answered
by bowing his head. I opened the book, and on all the pages there
were excellent drawings. And in my dream I knew that these drawings
represented the love adventures of the soul with its beloved. And on
its pages I saw a beautiful representation of a maiden in transparent
garments and with a transparent body, flying up to the clouds. And I
seemed to know that this maiden was nothing else than a representation
of the Song of Songs. And looking at those drawings I dreamed I felt
that I was doing wrong, but could not tear myself away from them. Lord,
help me! My God, if Thy forsaking me is Thy doing, Thy will be done; but
if I am myself the cause, teach me what I should do! I shall perish of
my debauchery if Thou utterly desertest me!





CHAPTER XI


The Rostovs' monetary affairs had not improved during the two years they
had spent in the country.

Though Nicholas Rostov had kept firmly to his resolution and was still
serving modestly in an obscure regiment, spending comparatively little,
the way of life at Otradnoe--Mitenka's management of affairs, in
particular--was such that the debts inevitably increased every year. The
only resource obviously presenting itself to the old count was to apply
for an official post, so he had come to Petersburg to look for one and
also, as he said, to let the lassies enjoy themselves for the last time.

Soon after their arrival in Petersburg Berg proposed to Vera and was
accepted.

Though in Moscow the Rostovs belonged to the best society without
themselves giving it a thought, yet in Petersburg their circle of
acquaintances was a mixed and indefinite one. In Petersburg they were
provincials, and the very people they had entertained in Moscow without
inquiring to what set they belonged, here looked down on them.

The Rostovs lived in the same hospitable way in Petersburg as in Moscow,
and the most diverse people met at their suppers. Country neighbors from
Otradnoe, impoverished old squires and their daughters, Peronskaya a
maid of honor, Pierre Bezukhov, and the son of their district postmaster
who had obtained a post in Petersburg. Among the men who very soon
became frequent visitors at the Rostovs' house in Petersburg were Boris,
Pierre whom the count had met in the street and dragged home with
him, and Berg who spent whole days at the Rostovs' and paid the eldest
daughter, Countess Vera, the attentions a young man pays when he intends
to propose.

Not in vain had Berg shown everybody his right hand wounded at
Austerlitz and held a perfectly unnecessary sword in his left. He
narrated that episode so persistently and with so important an air that
everyone believed in the merit and usefulness of his deed, and he had
obtained two decorations for Austerlitz.

In the Finnish war he also managed to distinguish himself. He had picked
up the scrap of a grenade that had killed an aide-de-camp standing near
the commander in chief and had taken it to his commander. Just as he had
done after Austerlitz, he related this occurrence at such length and
so insistently that everyone again believed it had been necessary to do
this, and he received two decorations for the Finnish war also. In
1809 he was a captain in the Guards, wore medals, and held some special
lucrative posts in Petersburg.

Though some skeptics smiled when told of Berg's merits, it could not be
denied that he was a painstaking and brave officer, on excellent terms
with his superiors, and a moral young man with a brilliant career before
him and an assured position in society.

Four years before, meeting a German comrade in the stalls of a Moscow
theater, Berg had pointed out Vera Rostova to him and had said in
German, "das soll mein Weib werden," * and from that moment had made up
his mind to marry her. Now in Petersburg, having considered the Rostovs'
position and his own, he decided that the time had come to propose.


    * "That girl shall be my wife."


Berg's proposal was at first received with a perplexity that was not
flattering to him. At first it seemed strange that the son of an obscure
Livonian gentleman should propose marriage to a Countess Rostova; but
Berg's chief characteristic was such a naive and good natured egotism
that the Rostovs involuntarily came to think it would be a good thing,
since he himself was so firmly convinced that it was good, indeed
excellent. Moreover, the Rostovs' affairs were seriously embarrassed, as
the suitor could not but know; and above all, Vera was twenty-four, had
been taken out everywhere, and though she was certainly good-looking
and sensible, no one up to now had proposed to her. So they gave their
consent.

"You see," said Berg to his comrade, whom he called "friend" only
because he knew that everyone has friends, "you see, I have considered
it all, and should not marry if I had not thought it all out or if it
were in any way unsuitable. But on the contrary, my papa and mamma
are now provided for--I have arranged that rent for them in the Baltic
Provinces--and I can live in Petersburg on my pay, and with her fortune
and my good management we can get along nicely. I am not marrying for
money--I consider that dishonorable--but a wife should bring her
share and a husband his. I have my position in the service, she has
connections and some means. In our times that is worth something, isn't
it? But above all, she is a handsome, estimable girl, and she loves
me..."

Berg blushed and smiled.

"And I love her, because her character is sensible and very good.
Now the other sister, though they are the same family, is quite
different--an unpleasant character and has not the same intelligence.
She is so... you know?... Unpleasant... But my fiancee!... Well, you
will be coming," he was going to say, "to dine," but changed his mind
and said "to take tea with us," and quickly doubling up his tongue he
blew a small round ring of tobacco smoke, perfectly embodying his dream
of happiness.

After the first feeling of perplexity aroused in the parents by Berg's
proposal, the holiday tone of joyousness usual at such times took
possession of the family, but the rejoicing was external and insincere.
In the family's feeling toward this wedding a certain awkwardness and
constraint was evident, as if they were ashamed of not having loved Vera
sufficiently and of being so ready to get her off their hands. The old
count felt this most. He would probably have been unable to state
the cause of his embarrassment, but it resulted from the state of his
affairs. He did not know at all how much he had, what his debts amounted
to, or what dowry he could give Vera. When his daughters were born
he had assigned to each of them, for her dowry, an estate with three
hundred serfs; but one of these estates had already been sold, and the
other was mortgaged and the interest so much in arrears that it would
have to be sold, so that it was impossible to give it to Vera. Nor had
he any money.

Berg had already been engaged a month, and only a week remained before
the wedding, but the count had not yet decided in his own mind the
question of the dowry, nor spoken to his wife about it. At one time the
count thought of giving her the Ryazan estate or of selling a forest, at
another time of borrowing money on a note of hand. A few days before
the wedding Berg entered the count's study early one morning and, with
a pleasant smile, respectfully asked his future father-in-law to let him
know what Vera's dowry would be. The count was so disconcerted by this
long-foreseen inquiry that without consideration he gave the first reply
that came into his head. "I like your being businesslike about it.... I
like it. You shall be satisfied...."

And patting Berg on the shoulder he got up, wishing to end the
conversation. But Berg, smiling pleasantly, explained that if he did not
know for certain how much Vera would have and did not receive at least
part of the dowry in advance, he would have to break matters off.

"Because, consider, Count--if I allowed myself to marry now without
having definite means to maintain my wife, I should be acting badly...."

The conversation ended by the count, who wished to be generous and to
avoid further importunity, saying that he would give a note of hand
for eighty thousand rubles. Berg smiled meekly, kissed the count on the
shoulder, and said that he was very grateful, but that it was impossible
for him to arrange his new life without receiving thirty thousand in
ready money. "Or at least twenty thousand, Count," he added, "and then a
note of hand for only sixty thousand."

"Yes, yes, all right!" said the count hurriedly. "Only excuse me, my
dear fellow, I'll give you twenty thousand and a note of hand for eighty
thousand as well. Yes, yes! Kiss me."





CHAPTER XII


Natasha was sixteen and it was the year 1809, the very year to which she
had counted on her fingers with Boris after they had kissed four years
ago. Since then she had not seen him. Before Sonya and her mother, if
Boris happened to be mentioned, she spoke quite freely of that
episode as of some childish, long-forgotten matter that was not worth
mentioning. But in the secret depths of her soul the question whether
her engagement to Boris was a jest or an important, binding promise
tormented her.

Since Boris left Moscow in 1805 to join the army he had not seen the
Rostovs. He had been in Moscow several times, and had passed near
Otradnoe, but had never been to see them.

Sometimes it occurred to Natasha that he did not wish to see her, and
this conjecture was confirmed by the sad tone in which her elders spoke
of him.

"Nowadays old friends are not remembered," the countess would say when
Boris was mentioned.

Anna Mikhaylovna also had of late visited them less frequently, seemed
to hold herself with particular dignity, and always spoke rapturously
and gratefully of the merits of her son and the brilliant career on
which he had entered. When the Rostovs came to Petersburg Boris called
on them.

He drove to their house in some agitation. The memory of Natasha was his
most poetic recollection. But he went with the firm intention of letting
her and her parents feel that the childish relations between himself and
Natasha could not be binding either on her or on him. He had a brilliant
position in society thanks to his intimacy with Countess Bezukhova,
a brilliant position in the service thanks to the patronage of an
important personage whose complete confidence he enjoyed, and he was
beginning to make plans for marrying one of the richest heiresses in
Petersburg, plans which might very easily be realized. When he entered
the Rostovs' drawing room Natasha was in her own room. When she heard
of his arrival she almost ran into the drawing room, flushed and beaming
with a more than cordial smile.

Boris remembered Natasha in a short dress, with dark eyes shining from
under her curls and boisterous, childish laughter, as he had known her
four years before; and so he was taken aback when quite a different
Natasha entered, and his face expressed rapturous astonishment. This
expression on his face pleased Natasha.

"Well, do you recognize your little madcap playmate?" asked the
countess.

Boris kissed Natasha's hand and said that he was astonished at the
change in her.

"How handsome you have grown!"

"I should think so!" replied Natasha's laughing eyes.

"And is Papa older?" she asked.

Natasha sat down and, without joining in Boris' conversation with the
countess, silently and minutely studied her childhood's suitor. He felt
the weight of that resolute and affectionate scrutiny and glanced at her
occasionally.

Boris' uniform, spurs, tie, and the way his hair was brushed were all
comme il faut and in the latest fashion. This Natasha noticed at once.
He sat rather sideways in the armchair next to the countess, arranging
with his right hand the cleanest of gloves that fitted his left hand
like a skin, and he spoke with a particularly refined compression of his
lips about the amusements of the highest Petersburg society, recalling
with mild irony old times in Moscow and Moscow acquaintances. It was
not accidentally, Natasha felt, that he alluded, when speaking of the
highest aristocracy, to an ambassador's ball he had attended, and to
invitations he had received from N.N. and S.S.

All this time Natasha sat silent, glancing up at him from under her
brows. This gaze disturbed and confused Boris more and more. He looked
round more frequently toward her, and broke off in what he was saying.
He did not stay more than ten minutes, then rose and took his leave. The
same inquisitive, challenging, and rather mocking eyes still looked at
him. After his first visit Boris said to himself that Natasha attracted
him just as much as ever, but that he must not yield to that feeling,
because to marry her, a girl almost without fortune, would mean ruin to
his career, while to renew their former relations without intending to
marry her would be dishonorable. Boris made up his mind to avoid meeting
Natasha, but despite that resolution he called again a few days later
and began calling often and spending whole days at the Rostovs'. It
seemed to him that he ought to have an explanation with Natasha and tell
her that the old times must be forgotten, that in spite of everything...
she could not be his wife, that he had no means, and they would never
let her marry him. But he failed to do so and felt awkward about
entering on such an explanation. From day to day he became more and more
entangled. It seemed to her mother and Sonya that Natasha was in love
with Boris as of old. She sang him his favorite songs, showed him her
album, making him write in it, did not allow him to allude to the past,
letting it be understood how delightful was the present; and every day
he went away in a fog, without having said what he meant to, and not
knowing what he was doing or why he came, or how it would all end. He
left off visiting Helene and received reproachful notes from her every
day, and yet he continued to spend whole days with the Rostovs.





CHAPTER XIII


One night when the old countess, in nightcap and dressing jacket,
without her false curls, and with her poor little knob of hair showing
under her white cotton cap, knelt sighing and groaning on a rug and
bowing to the ground in prayer, her door creaked and Natasha, also in
a dressing jacket with slippers on her bare feet and her hair in
curlpapers, ran in. The countess--her prayerful mood dispelled--looked
round and frowned. She was finishing her last prayer: "Can it be that
this couch will be my grave?" Natasha, flushed and eager, seeing
her mother in prayer, suddenly checked her rush, half sat down, and
unconsciously put out her tongue as if chiding herself. Seeing that
her mother was still praying she ran on tiptoe to the bed and, rapidly
slipping one little foot against the other, pushed off her slippers and
jumped onto the bed the countess had feared might become her grave. This
couch was high, with a feather bed and five pillows each smaller than
the one below. Natasha jumped on it, sank into the feather bed, rolled
over to the wall, and began snuggling up the bedclothes as she settled
down, raising her knees to her chin, kicking out and laughing almost
inaudibly, now covering herself up head and all, and now peeping at her
mother. The countess finished her prayers and came to the bed with a
stern face, but seeing, that Natasha's head was covered, she smiled in
her kind, weak way.

"Now then, now then!" said she.

"Mamma, can we have a talk? Yes?" said Natasha. "Now, just one on your
throat and another... that'll do!" And seizing her mother round the
neck, she kissed her on the throat. In her behavior to her mother
Natasha seemed rough, but she was so sensitive and tactful that however
she clasped her mother she always managed to do it without hurting her
or making her feel uncomfortable or displeased.

"Well, what is it tonight?" said the mother, having arranged her pillows
and waited until Natasha, after turning over a couple of times, had
settled down beside her under the quilt, spread out her arms, and
assumed a serious expression.

These visits of Natasha's at night before the count returned from his
club were one of the greatest pleasures of both mother, and daughter.

"What is it tonight?--But I have to tell you..."

Natasha put her hand on her mother's mouth.

"About Boris... I know," she said seriously; "that's what I have come
about. Don't say it--I know. No, do tell me!" and she removed her hand.
"Tell me, Mamma! He's nice?"

"Natasha, you are sixteen. At your age I was married. You say Boris is
nice. He is very nice, and I love him like a son. But what then?...
What are you thinking about? You have quite turned his head, I can see
that...."

As she said this the countess looked round at her daughter. Natasha
was lying looking steadily straight before her at one of the mahogany
sphinxes carved on the corners of the bedstead, so that the countess
only saw her daughter's face in profile. That face struck her by its
peculiarly serious and concentrated expression.

Natasha was listening and considering.

"Well, what then?" said she.

"You have quite turned his head, and why? What do you want of him? You
know you can't marry him."

"Why not?" said Natasha, without changing her position.

"Because he is young, because he is poor, because he is a relation...
and because you yourself don't love him."

"How do you know?"

"I know. It is not right, darling!"

 "But if I want to..." said Natasha.

"Leave off talking nonsense," said the countess.

"But if I want to..."

"Natasha, I am in earnest..."

Natasha did not let her finish. She drew the countess' large hand to
her, kissed it on the back and then on the palm, then again turned it
over and began kissing first one knuckle, then the space between the
knuckles, then the next knuckle, whispering, "January, February, March,
April, May. Speak, Mamma, why don't you say anything? Speak!" said she,
turning to her mother, who was tenderly gazing at her daughter and in
that contemplation seemed to have forgotten all she had wished to say.

"It won't do, my love! Not everyone will understand this friendship
dating from your childish days, and to see him so intimate with you may
injure you in the eyes of other young men who visit us, and above all
it torments him for nothing. He may already have found a suitable and
wealthy match, and now he's half crazy."

"Crazy?" repeated Natasha.

"I'll tell you some things about myself. I had a cousin..."

"I know! Cyril Matveich... but he is old."

"He was not always old. But this is what I'll do, Natasha, I'll have a
talk with Boris. He need not come so often...."

"Why not, if he likes to?"

"Because I know it will end in nothing...."

"How can you know? No, Mamma, don't speak to him! What nonsense!" said
Natasha in the tone of one being deprived of her property. "Well, I
won't marry, but let him come if he enjoys it and I enjoy it." Natasha
smiled and looked at her mother. "Not to marry, but just so," she added.

"How so, my pet?"

"Just so. There's no need for me to marry him. But... just so."

"Just so, just so," repeated the countess, and shaking all over, she
went off into a good humored, unexpected, elderly laugh.

"Don't laugh, stop!" cried Natasha. "You're shaking the whole bed!
You're awfully like me, just such another giggler.... Wait..." and she
seized the countess' hands and kissed a knuckle of the little finger,
saying, "June," and continued, kissing, "July, August," on the other
hand. "But, Mamma, is he very much in love? What do you think? Was
anybody ever so much in love with you? And he's very nice, very, very
nice. Only not quite my taste--he is so narrow, like the dining-room
clock.... Don't you understand? Narrow, you know--gray, light gray..."

"What rubbish you're talking!" said the countess.

Natasha continued: "Don't you really understand? Nicholas would
understand.... Bezukhov, now, is blue, dark-blue and red, and he is
square."

"You flirt with him too," said the countess, laughing.

"No, he is a Freemason, I have found out. He is fine, dark-blue and
red.... How can I explain it to you?"

"Little countess!" the count's voice called from behind the door.
"You're not asleep?" Natasha jumped up, snatched up her slippers, and
ran barefoot to her own room.

It was a long time before she could sleep. She kept thinking that no one
could understand all that she understood and all there was in her.

"Sonya?" she thought, glancing at that curled-up, sleeping little kitten
with her enormous plait of hair. "No, how could she? She's virtuous. She
fell in love with Nicholas and does not wish to know anything more. Even
Mamma does not understand. It is wonderful how clever I am and how...
charming she is," she went on, speaking of herself in the third person,
and imagining it was some very wise man--the wisest and best of
men--who was saying it of her. "There is everything, everything in her,"
continued this man. "She is unusually intelligent, charming... and
then she is pretty, uncommonly pretty, and agile--she swims and rides
splendidly... and her voice! One can really say it's a wonderful voice!"

She hummed a scrap from her favorite opera by Cherubini, threw herself
on her bed, laughed at the pleasant thought that she would immediately
fall asleep, called Dunyasha the maid to put out the candle, and before
Dunyasha had left the room had already passed into yet another happier
world of dreams, where everything was as light and beautiful as in
reality, and even more so because it was different.


Next day the countess called Boris aside and had a talk with him, after
which he ceased coming to the Rostovs'.





CHAPTER XIV


On the thirty-first of December, New Year's Eve, 1809 - 10 an old
grandee of Catherine's day was giving a ball and midnight supper. The
diplomatic corps and the Emperor himself were to be present.

The grandee's well-known mansion on the English Quay glittered with
innumerable lights. Police were stationed at the brightly lit entrance
which was carpeted with red baize, and not only gendarmes but dozens of
police officers and even the police master himself stood at the porch.
Carriages kept driving away and fresh ones arriving, with red-liveried
footmen and footmen in plumed hats. From the carriages emerged men
wearing uniforms, stars, and ribbons, while ladies in satin and ermine
cautiously descended the carriage steps which were let down for them
with a clatter, and then walked hurriedly and noiselessly over the baize
at the entrance.

Almost every time a new carriage drove up a whisper ran through the
crowd and caps were doffed.

"The Emperor?... No, a minister.... prince... ambassador. Don't you see
the plumes?..." was whispered among the crowd.

One person, better dressed than the rest, seemed to know everyone and
mentioned by name the greatest dignitaries of the day.

A third of the visitors had already arrived, but the Rostovs, who were
to be present, were still hurrying to get dressed.

There had been many discussions and preparations for this ball in the
Rostov family, many fears that the invitation would not arrive, that the
dresses would not be ready, or that something would not be arranged as
it should be.

Marya Ignatevna Peronskaya, a thin and shallow maid of honor at the
court of the Dowager Empress, who was a friend and relation of the
countess and piloted the provincial Rostovs in Petersburg high society,
was to accompany them to the ball.

They were to call for her at her house in the Taurida Gardens at ten
o'clock, but it was already five minutes to ten, and the girls were not
yet dressed.

Natasha was going to her first grand ball. She had got up at eight that
morning and had been in a fever of excitement and activity all day. All
her powers since morning had been concentrated on ensuring that they
all--she herself, Mamma, and Sonya--should be as well dressed as
possible. Sonya and her mother put themselves entirely in her hands. The
countess was to wear a claret-colored velvet dress, and the two girls
white gauze over pink silk slips, with roses on their bodices and their
hair dressed a la grecque.

Everything essential had already been done; feet, hands, necks, and
ears washed, perfumed, and powdered, as befits a ball; the openwork
silk stockings and white satin shoes with ribbons were already on; the
hairdressing was almost done. Sonya was finishing dressing and so was
the countess, but Natasha, who had bustled about helping them all, was
behindhand. She was still sitting before a looking-glass with a dressing
jacket thrown over her slender shoulders. Sonya stood ready dressed in
the middle of the room and, pressing the head of a pin till it hurt her
dainty finger, was fixing on a last ribbon that squeaked as the pin went
through it.

"That's not the way, that's not the way, Sonya!" cried Natasha turning
her head and clutching with both hands at her hair which the maid who
was dressing it had not time to release. "That bow is not right. Come
here!"

Sonya sat down and Natasha pinned the ribbon on differently.

"Allow me, Miss! I can't do it like that," said the maid who was holding
Natasha's hair.

"Oh, dear! Well then, wait. That's right, Sonya."

"Aren't you ready? It is nearly ten," came the countess' voice.

"Directly! Directly! And you, Mamma?"

"I have only my cap to pin on."

"Don't do it without me!" called Natasha. "You won't do it right."

"But it's already ten."

They had decided to be at the ball by half past ten, and Natasha had
still to get dressed and they had to call at the Taurida Gardens.

When her hair was done, Natasha, in her short petticoat from under which
her dancing shoes showed, and in her mother's dressing jacket, ran up to
Sonya, scrutinized her, and then ran to her mother. Turning her mother's
head this way and that, she fastened on the cap and, hurriedly kissing
her gray hair, ran back to the maids who were turning up the hem of her
skirt.

The cause of the delay was Natasha's skirt, which was too long. Two
maids were turning up the hem and hurriedly biting off the ends of
thread. A third with pins in her mouth was running about between the
countess and Sonya, and a fourth held the whole of the gossamer garment
up high on one uplifted hand.

"Mavra, quicker, darling!"

"Give me my thimble, Miss, from there..."

"Whenever will you be ready?" asked the count coming to the door. "Here
is some scent. Peronskaya must be tired of waiting."

"It's ready, Miss," said the maid, holding up the shortened gauze dress
with two fingers, and blowing and shaking something off it, as if by
this to express a consciousness of the airiness and purity of what she
held.

Natasha began putting on the dress.

"In a minute! In a minute! Don't come in, Papa!" she cried to her father
as he opened the door--speaking from under the filmy skirt which still
covered her whole face.

Sonya slammed the door to. A minute later they let the count in. He was
wearing a blue swallow-tail coat, shoes and stockings, and was perfumed
and his hair pomaded.

"Oh, Papa! how nice you look! Charming!" cried Natasha, as she stood in
the middle of the room smoothing out the folds of the gauze.

"If you please, Miss! allow me," said the maid, who on her knees was
pulling the skirt straight and shifting the pins from one side of her
mouth to the other with her tongue.

"Say what you like," exclaimed Sonya, in a despairing voice as she
looked at Natasha, "say what you like, it's still too long."

Natasha stepped back to look at herself in the pier glass. The dress was
too long.

"Really, madam, it is not at all too long," said Mavra, crawling on her
knees after her young lady.

"Well, if it's too long we'll take it up... we'll tack it up in one
minute," said the resolute Dunyasha taking a needle that was stuck on
the front of her little shawl and, still kneeling on the floor, set to
work once more.

At that moment, with soft steps, the countess came in shyly, in her cap
and velvet gown.

"Oo-oo, my beauty!" exclaimed the count, "she looks better than any of
you!"

He would have embraced her but, blushing, she stepped aside fearing to
be rumpled.

"Mamma, your cap, more to this side," said Natasha. "I'll arrange it,"
and she rushed forward so that the maids who were tacking up her skirt
could not move fast enough and a piece of gauze was torn off.

"Oh goodness! What has happened? Really it was not my fault!"

"Never mind, I'll run it up, it won't show," said Dunyasha.

"What a beauty--a very queen!" said the nurse as she came to the door.
"And Sonya! They are lovely!"

At a quarter past ten they at last got into their carriages and started.
But they had still to call at the Taurida Gardens.

Peronskaya was quite ready. In spite of her age and plainness she had
gone through the same process as the Rostovs, but with less flurry--for
to her it was a matter of routine. Her ugly old body was washed,
perfumed, and powdered in just the same way. She had washed behind her
ears just as carefully, and when she entered her drawing room in her
yellow dress, wearing her badge as maid of honor, her old lady's maid
was as full of rapturous admiration as the Rostovs' servants had been.

She praised the Rostovs' toilets. They praised her taste and toilet, and
at eleven o'clock, careful of their coiffures and dresses, they settled
themselves in their carriages and drove off.





CHAPTER XV


Natasha had not had a moment free since early morning and had not once
had time to think of what lay before her.

In the damp chill air and crowded closeness of the swaying carriage, she
for the first time vividly imagined what was in store for her there at
the ball, in those brightly lighted rooms--with music, flowers, dances,
the Emperor, and all the brilliant young people of Petersburg. The
prospect was so splendid that she hardly believed it would come true,
so out of keeping was it with the chill darkness and closeness of the
carriage. She understood all that awaited her only when, after stepping
over the red baize at the entrance, she entered the hall, took off her
fur cloak, and, beside Sonya and in front of her mother, mounted the
brightly illuminated stairs between the flowers. Only then did she
remember how she must behave at a ball, and tried to assume the majestic
air she considered indispensable for a girl on such an occasion. But,
fortunately for her, she felt her eyes growing misty, she saw nothing
clearly, her pulse beat a hundred to the minute, and the blood throbbed
at her heart. She could not assume that pose, which would have made her
ridiculous, and she moved on almost fainting from excitement and trying
with all her might to conceal it. And this was the very attitude that
became her best. Before and behind them other visitors were entering,
also talking in low tones and wearing ball dresses. The mirrors on the
landing reflected ladies in white, pale-blue, and pink dresses, with
diamonds and pearls on their bare necks and arms.

Natasha looked in the mirrors and could not distinguish her reflection
from the others. All was blended into one brilliant procession.
On entering the ballroom the regular hum of voices, footsteps, and
greetings deafened Natasha, and the light and glitter dazzled her still
more. The host and hostess, who had already been standing at the door
for half an hour repeating the same words to the various arrivals,
"Charme de vous voir," * greeted the Rostovs and Peronskaya in the same
manner.


    * "Delighted to see you."


The two girls in their white dresses, each with a rose in her black
hair, both curtsied in the same way, but the hostess' eye involuntarily
rested longer on the slim Natasha. She looked at her and gave her alone
a special smile in addition to her usual smile as hostess. Looking at
her she may have recalled the golden, irrecoverable days of her own
girlhood and her own first ball. The host also followed Natasha with his
eyes and asked the count which was his daughter.

"Charming!" said he, kissing the tips of his fingers.

In the ballroom guests stood crowding at the entrance doors awaiting
the Emperor. The countess took up a position in one of the front rows of
that crowd. Natasha heard and felt that several people were asking about
her and looking at her. She realized that those noticing her liked her,
and this observation helped to calm her.

"There are some like ourselves and some worse," she thought.

Peronskaya was pointing out to the countess the most important people at
the ball.

"That is the Dutch ambassador, do you see? That gray-haired man," she
said, indicating an old man with a profusion of silver-gray curly hair,
who was surrounded by ladies laughing at something he said.

"Ah, here she is, the Queen of Petersburg, Countess Bezukhova," said
Peronskaya, indicating Helene who had just entered. "How lovely! She
is quite equal to Marya Antonovna. See how the men, young and old, pay
court to her. Beautiful and clever... they say Prince--is quite mad
about her. But see, those two, though not good-looking, are even more
run after."

She pointed to a lady who was crossing the room followed by a very plain
daughter.

"She is a splendid match, a millionairess," said Peronskaya. "And look,
here come her suitors."

"That is Bezukhova's brother, Anatole Kuragin," she said, indicating a
handsome officer of the Horse Guards who passed by them with head erect,
looking at something over the heads of the ladies. "He's handsome,
isn't he? I hear they will marry him to that rich girl. But your cousin,
Drubetskoy, is also very attentive to her. They say she has millions. Oh
yes, that's the French ambassador himself!" she replied to the countess'
inquiry about Caulaincourt. "Looks as if he were a king! All the same,
the French are charming, very charming. No one more charming in society.
Ah, here she is! Yes, she is still the most beautiful of them all, our
Marya Antonovna! And how simply she is dressed! Lovely! And that stout
one in spectacles is the universal Freemason," she went on, indicating
Pierre. "Put him beside his wife and he looks a regular buffoon!"

Pierre, swaying his stout body, advanced, making way through the crowd
and nodding to right and left as casually and good-naturedly as if he
were passing through a crowd at a fair. He pushed through, evidently
looking for someone.

Natasha looked joyfully at the familiar face of Pierre, "the buffoon,"
as Peronskaya had called him, and knew he was looking for them, and
for her in particular. He had promised to be at the ball and introduce
partners to her.

But before he reached them Pierre stopped beside a very handsome, dark
man of middle height, and in a white uniform, who stood by a window
talking to a tall man wearing stars and a ribbon. Natasha at once
recognized the shorter and younger man in the white uniform: it was
Bolkonski, who seemed to her to have grown much younger, happier, and
better-looking.

"There's someone else we know--Bolkonski, do you see, Mamma?" said
Natasha, pointing out Prince Andrew. "You remember, he stayed a night
with us at Otradnoe."

"Oh, you know him?" said Peronskaya. "I can't bear him. Il fait a
present la pluie et le beau temps. * He's too proud for anything. Takes
after his father. And he's hand in glove with Speranski, writing some
project or other. Just look how he treats the ladies! There's one
talking to him and he has turned away," she said, pointing at him. "I'd
give it to him if he treated me as he does those ladies."


    * "He is all the rage just now."





CHAPTER XVI


Suddenly everybody stirred, began talking, and pressed forward and then
back, and between the two rows, which separated, the Emperor entered to
the sounds of music that had immediately struck up. Behind him walked
his host and hostess. He walked in rapidly, bowing to right and left
as if anxious to get the first moments of the reception over. The band
played the polonaise in vogue at that time on account of the words that
had been set to it, beginning: "Alexander, Elisaveta, all our hearts you
ravish quite..." The Emperor passed on to the drawing room, the crowd
made a rush for the doors, and several persons with excited faces
hurried there and back again. Then the crowd hastily retired from
the drawing-room door, at which the Emperor reappeared talking to the
hostess. A young man, looking distraught, pounced down on the ladies,
asking them to move aside. Some ladies, with faces betraying complete
forgetfulness of all the rules of decorum, pushed forward to the
detriment of their toilets. The men began to choose partners and take
their places for the polonaise.

Everyone moved back, and the Emperor came smiling out of the drawing
room leading his hostess by the hand but not keeping time to the
music. The host followed with Marya Antonovna Naryshkina; then came
ambassadors, ministers, and various generals, whom Peronskaya diligently
named. More than half the ladies already had partners and were taking
up, or preparing to take up, their positions for the polonaise. Natasha
felt that she would be left with her mother and Sonya among a minority
of women who crowded near the wall, not having been invited to dance.
She stood with her slender arms hanging down, her scarcely defined bosom
rising and falling regularly, and with bated breath and glittering,
frightened eyes gazed straight before her, evidently prepared for the
height of joy or misery. She was not concerned about the Emperor or any
of those great people whom Peronskaya was pointing out--she had but one
thought: "Is it possible no one will ask me, that I shall not be among
the first to dance? Is it possible that not one of all these men will
notice me? They do not even seem to see me, or if they do they look as
if they were saying, 'Ah, she's not the one I'm after, so it's not worth
looking at her!' No, it's impossible," she thought. "They must know
how I long to dance, how splendidly I dance, and how they would enjoy
dancing with me."

The strains of the polonaise, which had continued for a considerable
time, had begun to sound like a sad reminiscence to Natasha's ears. She
wanted to cry. Peronskaya had left them. The count was at the other end
of the room. She and the countess and Sonya were standing by themselves
as in the depths of a forest amid that crowd of strangers, with no one
interested in them and not wanted by anyone. Prince Andrew with a lady
passed by, evidently not recognizing them. The handsome Anatole was
smilingly talking to a partner on his arm and looked at Natasha as one
looks at a wall. Boris passed them twice and each time turned away. Berg
and his wife, who were not dancing, came up to them.

This family gathering seemed humiliating to Natasha--as if there were
nowhere else for the family to talk but here at the ball. She did not
listen to or look at Vera, who was telling her something about her own
green dress.

At last the Emperor stopped beside his last partner (he had danced
with three) and the music ceased. A worried aide-de-camp ran up to the
Rostovs requesting them to stand farther back, though as it was they
were already close to the wall, and from the gallery resounded the
distinct, precise, enticingly rhythmical strains of a waltz. The Emperor
looked smilingly down the room. A minute passed but no one had yet begun
dancing. An aide-de-camp, the Master of Ceremonies, went up to Countess
Bezukhova and asked her to dance. She smilingly raised her hand and laid
it on his shoulder without looking at him. The aide-de-camp, an adept
in his art, grasping his partner firmly round her waist, with confident
deliberation started smoothly, gliding first round the edge of the
circle, then at the corner of the room he caught Helene's left hand
and turned her, the only sound audible, apart from the ever-quickening
music, being the rhythmic click of the spurs on his rapid, agile feet,
while at every third beat his partner's velvet dress spread out and
seemed to flash as she whirled round. Natasha gazed at them and was
ready to cry because it was not she who was dancing that first turn of
the waltz.

Prince Andrew, in the white uniform of a cavalry colonel, wearing
stockings and dancing shoes, stood looking animated and bright in the
front row of the circle not far from the Rostovs. Baron Firhoff was
talking to him about the first sitting of the Council of State to be
held next day. Prince Andrew, as one closely connected with Speranski
and participating in the work of the legislative commission, could give
reliable information about that sitting, concerning which various rumors
were current. But not listening to what Firhoff was saying, he was
gazing now at the sovereign and now at the men intending to dance who
had not yet gathered courage to enter the circle.

Prince Andrew was watching these men abashed by the Emperor's presence,
and the women who were breathlessly longing to be asked to dance.

Pierre came up to him and caught him by the arm.

"You always dance. I have a protegee, the young Rostova, here. Ask her,"
he said.

"Where is she?" asked Bolkonski. "Excuse me!" he added, turning to the
baron, "we will finish this conversation elsewhere--at a ball one
must dance." He stepped forward in the direction Pierre indicated. The
despairing, dejected expression of Natasha's face caught his eye.
He recognized her, guessed her feelings, saw that it was her debut,
remembered her conversation at the window, and with an expression of
pleasure on his face approached Countess Rostova.

"Allow me to introduce you to my daughter," said the countess, with
heightened color.

"I have the pleasure of being already acquainted, if the countess
remembers me," said Prince Andrew with a low and courteous bow quite
belying Peronskaya's remarks about his rudeness, and approaching Natasha
he held out his arm to grasp her waist before he had completed his
invitation. He asked her to waltz. That tremulous expression on
Natasha's face, prepared either for despair or rapture, suddenly
brightened into a happy, grateful, childlike smile.

"I have long been waiting for you," that frightened happy little girl
seemed to say by the smile that replaced the threatened tears, as she
raised her hand to Prince Andrew's shoulder. They were the second couple
to enter the circle. Prince Andrew was one of the best dancers of his
day and Natasha danced exquisitely. Her little feet in their white satin
dancing shoes did their work swiftly, lightly, and independently of
herself, while her face beamed with ecstatic happiness. Her slender bare
arms and neck were not beautiful--compared to Helene's her shoulders
looked thin and her bosom undeveloped. But Helene seemed, as it were,
hardened by a varnish left by the thousands of looks that had scanned
her person, while Natasha was like a girl exposed for the first time,
who would have felt very much ashamed had she not been assured that this
was absolutely necessary.

Prince Andrew liked dancing, and wishing to escape as quickly as
possible from the political and clever talk which everyone addressed
to him, wishing also to break up the circle of restraint he disliked,
caused by the Emperor's presence, he danced, and had chosen Natasha
because Pierre pointed her out to him and because she was the first
pretty girl who caught his eye; but scarcely had he embraced that
slender supple figure and felt her stirring so close to him and smiling
so near him than the wine of her charm rose to his head, and he
felt himself revived and rejuvenated when after leaving her he stood
breathing deeply and watching the other dancers.





CHAPTER XVII


After Prince Andrew, Boris came up to ask Natasha for a dance, and then
the aide-de-camp who had opened the ball, and several other young men,
so that, flushed and happy, and passing on her superfluous partners to
Sonya, she did not cease dancing all the evening. She noticed and saw
nothing of what occupied everyone else. Not only did she fail to notice
that the Emperor talked a long time with the French ambassador, and how
particularly gracious he was to a certain lady, or that Prince So-and-so
and So-and-so did and said this and that, and that Helene had great
success and was honored by the special attention of So-and-so, but she
did not even see the Emperor, and only noticed that he had gone because
the ball became livelier after his departure. For one of the merry
cotillions before supper Prince Andrew was again her partner. He
reminded her of their first encounter in the Otradnoe avenue, and how
she had been unable to sleep that moonlight night, and told her how he
had involuntarily overheard her. Natasha blushed at that recollection
and tried to excuse herself, as if there had been something to be
ashamed of in what Prince Andrew had overheard.

Like all men who have grown up in society, Prince Andrew liked meeting
someone there not of the conventional society stamp. And such was
Natasha, with her surprise, her delight, her shyness, and even her
mistakes in speaking French. With her he behaved with special care and
tenderness, sitting beside her and talking of the simplest and most
unimportant matters; he admired her shy grace. In the middle of the
cotillion, having completed one of the figures, Natasha, still out of
breath, was returning to her seat when another dancer chose her. She was
tired and panting and evidently thought of declining, but immediately
put her hand gaily on the man's shoulder, smiling at Prince Andrew.

"I'd be glad to sit beside you and rest: I'm tired; but you see how they
keep asking me, and I'm glad of it, I'm happy and I love everybody, and
you and I understand it all," and much, much more was said in her smile.
When her partner left her Natasha ran across the room to choose two
ladies for the figure.

"If she goes to her cousin first and then to another lady, she will be
my wife," said Prince Andrew to himself quite to his own surprise, as he
watched her. She did go first to her cousin.

"What rubbish sometimes enters one's head!" thought Prince Andrew, "but
what is certain is that that girl is so charming, so original, that she
won't be dancing here a month before she will be married.... Such as
she are rare here," he thought, as Natasha, readjusting a rose that was
slipping on her bodice, settled herself beside him.

When the cotillion was over the old count in his blue coat came up to
the dancers. He invited Prince Andrew to come and see them, and asked
his daughter whether she was enjoying herself. Natasha did not answer at
once but only looked up with a smile that said reproachfully: "How can
you ask such a question?"

"I have never enjoyed myself so much before!" she said, and Prince
Andrew noticed how her thin arms rose quickly as if to embrace her
father and instantly dropped again. Natasha was happier than she had
ever been in her life. She was at that height of bliss when one becomes
completely kind and good and does not believe in the possibility of
evil, unhappiness, or sorrow.

At that ball Pierre for the first time felt humiliated by the position
his wife occupied in court circles. He was gloomy and absent-minded. A
deep furrow ran across his forehead, and standing by a window he stared
over his spectacles seeing no one.

On her way to supper Natasha passed him.

Pierre's gloomy, unhappy look struck her. She stopped in front of him.
She wished to help him, to bestow on him the superabundance of her own
happiness.

"How delightful it is, Count!" said she. "Isn't it?"

Pierre smiled absent-mindedly, evidently not grasping what she said.

"Yes, I am very glad," he said.

"How can people be dissatisfied with anything?" thought Natasha.
"Especially such a capital fellow as Bezukhov!" In Natasha's eyes all
the people at the ball alike were good, kind, and splendid people,
loving one another; none of them capable of injuring another--and so
they ought all to be happy.





CHAPTER XVIII


Next day Prince Andrew thought of the ball, but his mind did not dwell
on it long. "Yes, it was a very brilliant ball," and then... "Yes, that
little Rostova is very charming. There's something fresh, original,
un-Petersburg-like about her that distinguishes her." That was all he
thought about yesterday's ball, and after his morning tea he set to
work.

But either from fatigue or want of sleep he was ill-disposed for work
and could get nothing done. He kept criticizing his own work, as he
often did, and was glad when he heard someone coming.

The visitor was Bitski, who served on various committees, frequented all
the societies in Petersburg, and a passionate devotee of the new ideas
and of Speranski, and a diligent Petersburg newsmonger--one of those men
who choose their opinions like their clothes according to the fashion,
but who for that very reason appear to be the warmest partisans. Hardly
had he got rid of his hat before he ran into Prince Andrew's room with a
preoccupied air and at once began talking. He had just heard particulars
of that morning's sitting of the Council of State opened by the Emperor,
and he spoke of it enthusiastically. The Emperor's speech had been
extraordinary. It had been a speech such as only constitutional monarchs
deliver. "The Sovereign plainly said that the Council and Senate are
estates of the realm, he said that the government must rest not on
authority but on secure bases. The Emperor said that the fiscal system
must be reorganized and the accounts published," recounted Bitski,
emphasizing certain words and opening his eyes significantly.

"Ah, yes! Today's events mark an epoch, the greatest epoch in our
history," he concluded.

Prince Andrew listened to the account of the opening of the Council of
State, which he had so impatiently awaited and to which he had attached
such importance, and was surprised that this event, now that it had
taken place, did not affect him, and even seemed quite insignificant. He
listened with quiet irony to Bitski's enthusiastic account of it. A very
simple thought occurred to him: "What does it matter to me or to Bitski
what the Emperor was pleased to say at the Council? Can all that make me
any happier or better?"

And this simple reflection suddenly destroyed all the interest Prince
Andrew had felt in the impending reforms. He was going to dine that
evening at Speranski's, "with only a few friends," as the host had said
when inviting him. The prospect of that dinner in the intimate home
circle of the man he so admired had greatly interested Prince
Andrew, especially as he had not yet seen Speranski in his domestic
surroundings, but now he felt disinclined to go to it.

At the appointed hour, however, he entered the modest house Speranski
owned in the Taurida Gardens. In the parqueted dining room this small
house, remarkable for its extreme cleanliness (suggesting that of a
monastery), Prince Andrew, who was rather late, found the friendly
gathering of Speranski's intimate acquaintances already assembled at
five o'clock. There were no ladies present except Speranski's little
daughter (long-faced like her father) and her governess. The other
guests were Gervais, Magnitski, and Stolypin. While still in the
anteroom Prince Andrew heard loud voices and a ringing staccato
laugh--a laugh such as one hears on the stage. Someone--it sounded like
Speranski--was distinctly ejaculating ha-ha-ha. Prince Andrew had never
before heard Speranski's famous laugh, and this ringing, high pitched
laughter from a statesman made a strange impression on him.

He entered the dining room. The whole company were standing between two
windows at a small table laid with hors-d'oeuvres. Speranski, wearing
a gray swallow-tail coat with a star on the breast, and evidently still
the same waistcoat and high white stock he had worn at the meeting of
the Council of State, stood at the table with a beaming countenance. His
guests surrounded him. Magnitski, addressing himself to Speranski, was
relating an anecdote, and Speranski was laughing in advance at what
Magnitski was going to say. When Prince Andrew entered the room
Magnitski's words were again crowned by laughter. Stolypin gave a deep
bass guffaw as he munched a piece of bread and cheese. Gervais laughed
softly with a hissing chuckle, and Speranski in a high-pitched staccato
manner.

Still laughing, Speranski held out his soft white hand to Prince Andrew.

"Very pleased to see you, Prince," he said. "One moment..." he went on,
turning to Magnitski and interrupting his story. "We have agreed that
this is a dinner for recreation, with not a word about business!" and
turning again to the narrator he began to laugh afresh.

Prince Andrew looked at the laughing Speranski with astonishment,
regret, and disillusionment. It seemed to him that this was not
Speranski but someone else. Everything that had formerly appeared
mysterious and fascinating in Speranski suddenly became plain and
unattractive.

At dinner the conversation did not cease for a moment and seemed to
consist of the contents of a book of funny anecdotes. Before Magnitski
had finished his story someone else was anxious to relate something
still funnier. Most of the anecdotes, if not relating to the state
service, related to people in the service. It seemed that in this
company the insignificance of those people was so definitely accepted
that the only possible attitude toward them was one of good humored
ridicule. Speranski related how at the Council that morning a deaf
dignitary, when asked his opinion, replied that he thought so too.
Gervais gave a long account of an official revision, remarkable for the
stupidity of everybody concerned. Stolypin, stuttering, broke into the
conversation and began excitedly talking of the abuses that existed
under the former order of things--threatening to give a serious turn
to the conversation. Magnitski starting quizzing Stolypin about his
vehemence. Gervais intervened with a joke, and the talk reverted to its
former lively tone.

Evidently Speranski liked to rest after his labors and find amusement
in a circle of friends, and his guests, understanding his wish, tried
to enliven him and amuse themselves. But their gaiety seemed to Prince
Andrew mirthless and tiresome. Speranski's high-pitched voice struck
him unpleasantly, and the incessant laughter grated on him like a false
note. Prince Andrew did not laugh and feared that he would be a damper
on the spirits of the company, but no one took any notice of his being
out of harmony with the general mood. They all seemed very gay.

He tried several times to join in the conversation, but his remarks were
tossed aside each time like a cork thrown out of the water, and he could
not jest with them.

There was nothing wrong or unseemly in what they said, it was witty and
might have been funny, but it lacked just that something which is the
salt of mirth, and they were not even aware that such a thing existed.

After dinner Speranski's daughter and her governess rose. He patted the
little girl with his white hand and kissed her. And that gesture, too,
seemed unnatural to Prince Andrew.

The men remained at table over their port--English fashion. In the midst
of a conversation that was started about Napoleon's Spanish affairs,
which they all agreed in approving, Prince Andrew began to express a
contrary opinion. Speranski smiled and, with an evident wish to prevent
the conversation from taking an unpleasant course, told a story that had
no connection with the previous conversation. For a few moments all were
silent.

Having sat some time at table, Speranski corked a bottle of wine and,
remarking, "Nowadays good wine rides in a carriage and pair," passed it
to the servant and got up. All rose and continuing to talk loudly went
into the drawing room. Two letters brought by a courier were handed to
Speranski and he took them to his study. As soon as he had left the room
the general merriment stopped and the guests began to converse sensibly
and quietly with one another.

"Now for the recitation!" said Speranski on returning from his study. "A
wonderful talent!" he said to Prince Andrew, and Magnitski immediately
assumed a pose and began reciting some humorous verses in French which
he had composed about various well-known Petersburg people. He was
interrupted several times by applause. When the verses were finished
Prince Andrew went up to Speranski and took his leave.

"Where are you off to so early?" asked Speranski.

"I promised to go to a reception."

They said no more. Prince Andrew looked closely into those mirrorlike,
impenetrable eyes, and felt that it had been ridiculous of him to have
expected anything from Speranski and from any of his own activities
connected with him, or ever to have attributed importance to what
Speranski was doing. That precise, mirthless laughter rang in Prince
Andrew's ears long after he had left the house.

When he reached home Prince Andrew began thinking of his life in
Petersburg during those last four months as if it were something new. He
recalled his exertions and solicitations, and the history of his project
of army reform, which had been accepted for consideration and which they
were trying to pass over in silence simply because another, a very poor
one, had already been prepared and submitted to the Emperor. He thought
of the meetings of a committee of which Berg was a member. He remembered
how carefully and at what length everything relating to form and
procedure was discussed at those meetings, and how sedulously and
promptly all that related to the gist of the business was evaded. He
recalled his labors on the Legal Code, and how painstakingly he had
translated the articles of the Roman and French codes into Russian,
and he felt ashamed of himself. Then he vividly pictured to himself
Bogucharovo, his occupations in the country, his journey to Ryazan;
he remembered the peasants and Dron the village elder, and mentally
applying to them the Personal Rights he had divided into paragraphs, he
felt astonished that he could have spent so much time on such useless
work.





CHAPTER XIX


Next day Prince Andrew called at a few houses he had not visited before,
and among them at the Rostovs' with whom he had renewed acquaintance
at the ball. Apart from considerations of politeness which demanded the
call, he wanted to see that original, eager girl who had left such a
pleasant impression on his mind, in her own home.

Natasha was one of the first to meet him. She was wearing a dark-blue
house dress in which Prince Andrew thought her even prettier than in her
ball dress. She and all the Rostov family welcomed him as an old friend,
simply and cordially. The whole family, whom he had formerly judged
severely, now seemed to him to consist of excellent, simple, and kindly
people. The old count's hospitality and good nature, which struck one
especially in Petersburg as a pleasant surprise, were such that Prince
Andrew could not refuse to stay to dinner. "Yes," he thought, "they
are capital people, who of course have not the slightest idea what a
treasure they possess in Natasha; but they are kindly folk and form
the best possible setting for this strikingly poetic, charming girl,
overflowing with life!"

In Natasha Prince Andrew was conscious of a strange world completely
alien to him and brimful of joys unknown to him, a different world,
that in the Otradnoe avenue and at the window that moonlight night had
already begun to disconcert him. Now this world disconcerted him no
longer and was no longer alien to him, but he himself having entered it
found in it a new enjoyment.

After dinner Natasha, at Prince Andrew's request, went to the clavichord
and began singing. Prince Andrew stood by a window talking to the ladies
and listened to her. In the midst of a phrase he ceased speaking and
suddenly felt tears choking him, a thing he had thought impossible for
him. He looked at Natasha as she sang, and something new and joyful
stirred in his soul. He felt happy and at the same time sad. He had
absolutely nothing to weep about yet he was ready to weep. What about?
His former love? The little princess? His disillusionments?... His hopes
for the future?... Yes and no. The chief reason was a sudden, vivid
sense of the terrible contrast between something infinitely great and
illimitable within him and that limited and material something that he,
and even she, was. This contrast weighed on and yet cheered him while
she sang.

As soon as Natasha had finished she went up to him and asked how he
liked her voice. She asked this and then became confused, feeling that
she ought not to have asked it. He smiled, looking at her, and said he
liked her singing as he liked everything she did.

Prince Andrew left the Rostovs' late in the evening. He went to bed from
habit, but soon realized that he could not sleep. Having lit his candle
he sat up in bed, then got up, then lay down again not at all troubled
by his sleeplessness: his soul was as fresh and joyful as if he had
stepped out of a stuffy room into God's own fresh air. It did not enter
his head that he was in love with Natasha; he was not thinking about
her, but only picturing her to himself, and in consequence all life
appeared in a new light. "Why do I strive, why do I toil in this narrow,
confined frame, when life, all life with all its joys, is open to me?"
said he to himself. And for the first time for a very long while he
began making happy plans for the future. He decided that he must attend
to his son's education by finding a tutor and putting the boy in his
charge, then he ought to retire from the service and go abroad, and see
England, Switzerland and Italy. "I must use my freedom while I feel so
much strength and youth in me," he said to himself. "Pierre was right
when he said one must believe in the possibility of happiness in order
to be happy, and now I do believe in it. Let the dead bury their dead,
but while one has life one must live and be happy!" thought he.





CHAPTER XX


One morning Colonel Berg, whom Pierre knew as he knew everybody in
Moscow and Petersburg, came to see him. Berg arrived in an immaculate
brand-new uniform, with his hair pomaded and brushed forward over his
temples as the Emperor Alexander wore his hair.

"I have just been to see the countess, your wife. Unfortunately she
could not grant my request, but I hope, Count, I shall be more fortunate
with you," he said with a smile.

"What is it you wish, Colonel? I am at your service."

"I have now quite settled in my new rooms, Count" (Berg said this with
perfect conviction that this information could not but be agreeable),
"and so I wish to arrange just a small party for my own and my wife's
friends." (He smiled still more pleasantly.) "I wished to ask the
countess and you to do me the honor of coming to tea and to supper."

Only Countess Helene, considering the society of such people as the
Bergs beneath her, could be cruel enough to refuse such an invitation.
Berg explained so clearly why he wanted to collect at his house a small
but select company, and why this would give him pleasure, and why though
he grudged spending money on cards or anything harmful, he was prepared
to run into some expense for the sake of good society--that Pierre could
not refuse, and promised to come.

"But don't be late, Count, if I may venture to ask; about ten minutes to
eight, please. We shall make up a rubber. Our general is coming. He
is very good to me. We shall have supper, Count. So you will do me the
favor."

Contrary to his habit of being late, Pierre on that day arrived at the
Bergs' house, not at ten but at fifteen minutes to eight.

Having prepared everything necessary for the party, the Bergs were ready
for their guests' arrival.

In their new, clean, and light study with its small busts and pictures
and new furniture sat Berg and his wife. Berg, closely buttoned up in
his new uniform, sat beside his wife explaining to her that one always
could and should be acquainted with people above one, because only then
does one get satisfaction from acquaintances.

"You can get to know something, you can ask for something. See how I
managed from my first promotion." (Berg measured his life not by years
but by promotions.) "My comrades are still nobodies, while I am only
waiting for a vacancy to command a regiment, and have the happiness to
be your husband." (He rose and kissed Vera's hand, and on the way to
her straightened out a turned-up corner of the carpet.) "And how have I
obtained all this? Chiefly by knowing how to choose my aquaintances. It
goes without saying that one must be conscientious and methodical."

Berg smiled with a sense of his superiority over a weak woman, and
paused, reflecting that this dear wife of his was after all but a weak
woman who could not understand all that constitutes a man's dignity,
what it was ein Mann zu sein. * Vera at the same time smiling with a
sense of superiority over her good, conscientious husband, who all the
same understood life wrongly, as according to Vera all men did. Berg,
judging by his wife, thought all women weak and foolish. Vera, judging
only by her husband and generalizing from that observation, supposed
that all men, though they understand nothing and are conceited and
selfish, ascribe common sense to themselves alone.


    * To be a man.


Berg rose and embraced his wife carefully, so as not to crush her lace
fichu for which he had paid a good price, kissing her straight on the
lips.

"The only thing is, we mustn't have children too soon," he continued,
following an unconscious sequence of ideas.

"Yes," answered Vera, "I don't at all want that. We must live for
society."

"Princess Yusupova wore one exactly like this," said Berg, pointing to
the fichu with a happy and kindly smile.

Just then Count Bezukhov was announced. Husband and wife glanced at one
another, both smiling with self-satisfaction, and each mentally claiming
the honor of this visit.

"This is what comes of knowing how to make acquaintances," thought Berg.
"This is what comes of knowing how to conduct oneself."

"But please don't interrupt me when I am entertaining the guests," said
Vera, "because I know what interests each of them and what to say to
different people."

Berg smiled again.

"It can't be helped: men must sometimes have masculine conversation,"
said he.

They received Pierre in their small, new drawing-room, where it was
impossible to sit down anywhere without disturbing its symmetry,
neatness, and order; so it was quite comprehensible and not strange that
Berg, having generously offered to disturb the symmetry of an armchair
or of the sofa for his dear guest, but being apparently painfully
undecided on the matter himself, eventually left the visitor to settle
the question of selection. Pierre disturbed the symmetry by moving a
chair for himself, and Berg and Vera immediately began their evening
party, interrupting each other in their efforts to entertain their
guest.

Vera, having decided in her own mind that Pierre ought to be entertained
with conversation about the French embassy, at once began accordingly.
Berg, having decided that masculine conversation was required,
interrupted his wife's remarks and touched on the question of the war
with Austria, and unconsciously jumped from the general subject to
personal considerations as to the proposals made him to take part in the
Austrian campaign and the reasons why he had declined them. Though the
conversation was very incoherent and Vera was angry at the intrusion
of the masculine element, both husband and wife felt with satisfaction
that, even if only one guest was present, their evening had begun very
well and was as like as two peas to every other evening party with its
talk, tea, and lighted candles.

Before long Boris, Berg's old comrade, arrived. There was a shade of
condescension and patronage in his treatment of Berg and Vera. After
Boris came a lady with the colonel, then the general himself, then the
Rostovs, and the party became unquestionably exactly like all other
evening parties. Berg and Vera could not repress their smiles of
satisfaction at the sight of all this movement in their drawing room,
at the sound of the disconnected talk, the rustling of dresses, and the
bowing and scraping. Everything was just as everybody always has it,
especially so the general, who admired the apartment, patted Berg on the
shoulder, and with parental authority superintended the setting out of
the table for boston. The general sat down by Count Ilya Rostov, who was
next to himself the most important guest. The old people sat with the
old, the young with the young, and the hostess at the tea table, on
which stood exactly the same kind of cakes in a silver cake basket as
the Panins had at their party. Everything was just as it was everywhere
else.





CHAPTER XXI


Pierre, as one of the principal guests, had to sit down to boston
with Count Rostov, the general, and the colonel. At the card table he
happened to be directly facing Natasha, and was struck by a curious
change that had come over her since the ball. She was silent, and not
only less pretty than at the ball, but only redeemed from plainness by
her look of gentle indifference to everything around.

"What's the matter with her?" thought Pierre, glancing at her. She was
sitting by her sister at the tea table, and reluctantly, without looking
at him, made some reply to Boris who sat down beside her. After playing
out a whole suit and to his partner's delight taking five tricks,
Pierre, hearing greetings and the steps of someone who had entered the
room while he was picking up his tricks, glanced again at Natasha.

"What has happened to her?" he asked himself with still greater
surprise.

Prince Andrew was standing before her, saying something to her with a
look of tender solicitude. She, having raised her head, was looking up
at him, flushed and evidently trying to master her rapid breathing. And
the bright glow of some inner fire that had been suppressed was again
alight in her. She was completely transformed and from a plain girl had
again become what she had been at the ball.

Prince Andrew went up to Pierre, and the latter noticed a new and
youthful expression in his friend's face.

Pierre changed places several times during the game, sitting now with
his back to Natasha and now facing her, but during the whole of the six
rubbers he watched her and his friend.

"Something very important is happening between them," thought Pierre,
and a feeling that was both joyful and painful agitated him and made him
neglect the game.

After six rubbers the general got up, saying that it was no use playing
like that, and Pierre was released. Natasha on one side was talking with
Sonya and Boris, and Vera with a subtle smile was saying something to
Prince Andrew. Pierre went up to his friend and, asking whether they
were talking secrets, sat down beside them. Vera, having noticed Prince
Andrew's attentions to Natasha, decided that at a party, a real evening
party, subtle allusions to the tender passion were absolutely necessary
and, seizing a moment when Prince Andrew was alone, began a conversation
with him about feelings in general and about her sister. With so
intellectual a guest as she considered Prince Andrew to be, she felt
that she had to employ her diplomatic tact.

When Pierre went up to them he noticed that Vera was being carried away
by her self-satisfied talk, but that Prince Andrew seemed embarrassed, a
thing that rarely happened with him.

"What do you think?" Vera was saying with an arch smile. "You are so
discerning, Prince, and understand people's characters so well at a
glance. What do you think of Natalie? Could she be constant in her
attachments? Could she, like other women" (Vera meant herself), "love a
man once for all and remain true to him forever? That is what I consider
true love. What do you think, Prince?"

"I know your sister too little," replied Prince Andrew, with a sarcastic
smile under which he wished to hide his embarrassment, "to be able to
solve so delicate a question, and then I have noticed that the less
attractive a woman is the more constant she is likely to be," he added,
and looked up at Pierre who was just approaching them.

"Yes, that is true, Prince. In our days," continued Vera--mentioning
"our days" as people of limited intelligence are fond of doing,
imagining that they have discovered and appraised the peculiarities of
"our days" and that human characteristics change with the times--"in our
days a girl has so much freedom that the pleasure of being courted often
stifles real feeling in her. And it must be confessed that Natalie is
very susceptible." This return to the subject of Natalie caused Prince
Andrew to knit his brows with discomfort: he was about to rise, but Vera
continued with a still more subtle smile:

"I think no one has been more courted than she," she went on, "but till
quite lately she never cared seriously for anyone. Now you know, Count,"
she said to Pierre, "even our dear cousin Boris, who, between ourselves,
was very far gone in the land of tenderness..." (alluding to a map of
love much in vogue at that time).

Prince Andrew frowned and remained silent.

"You are friendly with Boris, aren't you?" asked Vera.

"Yes, I know him..."

"I expect he has told you of his childish love for Natasha?"

"Oh, there was childish love?" suddenly asked Prince Andrew, blushing
unexpectedly.

"Yes, you know between cousins intimacy often leads to love. Le
cousinage est un dangereux voisinage. * Don't you think so?"


    * "Cousinhood is a dangerous neighborhood."


"Oh, undoubtedly!" said Prince Andrew, and with sudden and unnatural
liveliness he began chaffing Pierre about the need to be very careful
with his fifty-year-old Moscow cousins, and in the midst of these
jesting remarks he rose, taking Pierre by the arm, and drew him aside.

"Well?" asked Pierre, seeing his friend's strange animation with
surprise, and noticing the glance he turned on Natasha as he rose.

"I must... I must have a talk with you," said Prince Andrew. "You know
that pair of women's gloves?" (He referred to the Masonic gloves given
to a newly initiated Brother to present to the woman he loved.) "I...
but no, I will talk to you later on," and with a strange light in his
eyes and restlessness in his movements, Prince Andrew approached
Natasha and sat down beside her. Pierre saw how Prince Andrew asked her
something and how she flushed as she replied.

But at that moment Berg came to Pierre and began insisting that he
should take part in an argument between the general and the colonel on
the affairs in Spain.

Berg was satisfied and happy. The smile of pleasure never left his face.
The party was very successful and quite like other parties he had seen.
Everything was similar: the ladies' subtle talk, the cards, the general
raising his voice at the card table, and the samovar and the tea cakes;
only one thing was lacking that he had always seen at the evening
parties he wished to imitate. They had not yet had a loud conversation
among the men and a dispute about something important and clever. Now
the general had begun such a discussion and so Berg drew Pierre to it.





CHAPTER XXII


Next day, having been invited by the count, Prince Andrew dined with the
Rostovs and spent the rest of the day there.

Everyone in the house realized for whose sake Prince Andrew came, and
without concealing it he tried to be with Natasha all day. Not only in
the soul of the frightened yet happy and enraptured Natasha, but in the
whole house, there was a feeling of awe at something important that was
bound to happen. The countess looked with sad and sternly serious eyes
at Prince Andrew when he talked to Natasha and timidly started some
artificial conversation about trifles as soon as he looked her way.
Sonya was afraid to leave Natasha and afraid of being in the way when
she was with them. Natasha grew pale, in a panic of expectation, when
she remained alone with him for a moment. Prince Andrew surprised her by
his timidity. She felt that he wanted to say something to her but could
not bring himself to do so.

In the evening, when Prince Andrew had left, the countess went up to
Natasha and whispered: "Well, what?"

"Mamma! For heaven's sake don't ask me anything now! One can't talk
about that," said Natasha.

But all the same that night Natasha, now agitated and now frightened,
lay a long time in her mother's bed gazing straight before her. She told
her how he had complimented her, how he told her he was going abroad,
asked her where they were going to spend the summer, and then how he had
asked her about Boris.

"But such a... such a... never happened to me before!" she said. "Only I
feel afraid in his presence. I am always afraid when I'm with him. What
does that mean? Does it mean that it's the real thing? Yes? Mamma, are
you asleep?"

"No, my love; I am frightened myself," answered her mother. "Now go!"

"All the same I shan't sleep. What silliness, to sleep! Mummy! Mummy!
such a thing never happened to me before," she said, surprised and
alarmed at the feeling she was aware of in herself. "And could we ever
have thought!..."

It seemed to Natasha that even at the time she first saw Prince Andrew
at Otradnoe she had fallen in love with him. It was as if she feared
this strange, unexpected happiness of meeting again the very man she had
then chosen (she was firmly convinced she had done so) and of finding
him, as it seemed, not indifferent to her.

"And it had to happen that he should come specially to Petersburg while
we are here. And it had to happen that we should meet at that ball.
It is fate. Clearly it is fate that everything led up to this! Already
then, directly I saw him I felt something peculiar."

"What else did he say to you? What are those verses? Read them..." said
her mother, thoughtfully, referring to some verses Prince Andrew had
written in Natasha's album.

"Mamma, one need not be ashamed of his being a widower?"

"Don't, Natasha! Pray to God. 'Marriages are made in heaven,'" said her
mother.

"Darling Mummy, how I love you! How happy I am!" cried Natasha, shedding
tears of joy and excitement and embracing her mother.

At that very time Prince Andrew was sitting with Pierre and telling him
of his love for Natasha and his firm resolve to make her his wife.

That day Countess Helene had a reception at her house. The French
ambassador was there, and a foreign prince of the blood who had of
late become a frequent visitor of hers, and many brilliant ladies and
gentlemen. Pierre, who had come downstairs, walked through the rooms and
struck everyone by his preoccupied, absent-minded, and morose air.

Since the ball he had felt the approach of a fit of nervous depression
and had made desperate efforts to combat it. Since the intimacy of
his wife with the royal prince, Pierre had unexpectedly been made a
gentleman of the bedchamber, and from that time he had begun to feel
oppressed and ashamed in court society, and dark thoughts of the vanity
of all things human came to him oftener than before. At the same time
the feeling he had noticed between his protegee Natasha and Prince
Andrew accentuated his gloom by the contrast between his own position
and his friend's. He tried equally to avoid thinking about his wife,
and about Natasha and Prince Andrew; and again everything seemed to him
insignificant in comparison with eternity; again the question: for what?
presented itself; and he forced himself to work day and night at Masonic
labors, hoping to drive away the evil spirit that threatened him. Toward
midnight, after he had left the countess' apartments, he was sitting
upstairs in a shabby dressing gown, copying out the original transaction
of the Scottish lodge of Freemasons at a table in his low room cloudy
with tobacco smoke, when someone came in. It was Prince Andrew.

"Ah, it's you!" said Pierre with a preoccupied, dissatisfied air. "And
I, you see, am hard at it." He pointed to his manuscript book with that
air of escaping from the ills of life with which unhappy people look at
their work.

Prince Andrew, with a beaming, ecstatic expression of renewed life on
his face, paused in front of Pierre and, not noticing his sad look,
smiled at him with the egotism of joy.

"Well, dear heart," said he, "I wanted to tell you about it yesterday
and I have come to do so today. I never experienced anything like it
before. I am in love, my friend!"

Suddenly Pierre heaved a deep sigh and dumped his heavy person down on
the sofa beside Prince Andrew.

"With Natasha Rostova, yes?" said he.

"Yes, yes! Who else should it be? I should never have believed it,
but the feeling is stronger than I. Yesterday I tormented myself and
suffered, but I would not exchange even that torment for anything in
the world, I have not lived till now. At last I live, but I can't live
without her! But can she love me?... I am too old for her.... Why don't
you speak?"

"I? I? What did I tell you?" said Pierre suddenly, rising and beginning
to pace up and down the room. "I always thought it.... That girl is
such a treasure... she is a rare girl.... My dear friend, I entreat you,
don't philosophize, don't doubt, marry, marry, marry.... And I am sure
there will not be a happier man than you."

"But what of her?"

"She loves you."

"Don't talk rubbish..." said Prince Andrew, smiling and looking into
Pierre's eyes.

"She does, I know," Pierre cried fiercely.

"But do listen," returned Prince Andrew, holding him by the arm. "Do you
know the condition I am in? I must talk about it to someone."

"Well, go on, go on. I am very glad," said Pierre, and his face really
changed, his brow became smooth, and he listened gladly to Prince
Andrew. Prince Andrew seemed, and really was, quite a different, quite
a new man. Where was his spleen, his contempt for life, his
disillusionment? Pierre was the only person to whom he made up his mind
to speak openly; and to him he told all that was in his soul. Now he
boldly and lightly made plans for an extended future, said he could not
sacrifice his own happiness to his father's caprice, and spoke of how he
would either make his father consent to this marriage and love her, or
would do without his consent; then he marveled at the feeling that had
mastered him as at something strange, apart from and independent of
himself.

"I should not have believed anyone who told me that I was capable of
such love," said Prince Andrew. "It is not at all the same feeling
that I knew in the past. The whole world is now for me divided into two
halves: one half is she, and there all is joy, hope, light: the
other half is everything where she is not, and there is all gloom and
darkness...."

"Darkness and gloom," reiterated Pierre: "yes, yes, I understand that."

"I cannot help loving the light, it is not my fault. And I am very
happy! You understand me? I know you are glad for my sake."

"Yes, yes," Pierre assented, looking at his friend with a touched and
sad expression in his eyes. The brighter Prince Andrew's lot appeared to
him, the gloomier seemed his own.





CHAPTER XXIII


Prince Andrew needed his father's consent to his marriage, and to obtain
this he started for the country next day.

His father received his son's communication with external composure, but
inward wrath. He could not comprehend how anyone could wish to alter his
life or introduce anything new into it, when his own life was already
ending. "If only they would let me end my days as I want to," thought
the old man, "then they might do as they please." With his son, however,
he employed the diplomacy he reserved for important occasions and,
adopting a quiet tone, discussed the whole matter.

In the first place the marriage was not a brilliant one as regards
birth, wealth, or rank. Secondly, Prince Andrew was no longer as young
as he had been and his health was poor (the old man laid special stress
on this), while she was very young. Thirdly, he had a son whom it would
be a pity to entrust to a chit of a girl. "Fourthly and finally," the
father said, looking ironically at his son, "I beg you to put it off for
a year: go abroad, take a cure, look out as you wanted to for a German
tutor for Prince Nicholas. Then if your love or passion or obstinacy--as
you please--is still as great, marry! And that's my last word on it.
Mind, the last..." concluded the prince, in a tone which showed that
nothing would make him alter his decision.

Prince Andrew saw clearly that the old man hoped that his feelings, or
his fiancee's, would not stand a year's test, or that he (the old
prince himself) would die before then, and he decided to conform to his
father's wish--to propose, and postpone the wedding for a year.

Three weeks after the last evening he had spent with the Rostovs, Prince
Andrew returned to Petersburg.


Next day after her talk with her mother Natasha expected Bolkonski all
day, but he did not come. On the second and third day it was the same.
Pierre did not come either and Natasha, not knowing that Prince Andrew
had gone to see his father, could not explain his absence to herself.

Three weeks passed in this way. Natasha had no desire to go out anywhere
and wandered from room to room like a shadow, idle and listless; she
wept secretly at night and did not go to her mother in the evenings. She
blushed continually and was irritable. It seemed to her that everybody
knew about her disappointment and was laughing at her and pitying her.
Strong as was her inward grief, this wound to her vanity intensified her
misery.

Once she came to her mother, tried to say something, and suddenly began
to cry. Her tears were those of an offended child who does not know why
it is being punished.

The countess began to soothe Natasha, who after first listening to her
mother's words, suddenly interrupted her:

"Leave off, Mamma! I don't think, and don't want to think about it! He
just came and then left off, left off..."

Her voice trembled, and she again nearly cried, but recovered and went
on quietly:

"And I don't at all want to get married. And I am afraid of him; I have
now become quite calm, quite calm."

The day after this conversation Natasha put on the old dress which
she knew had the peculiar property of conducing to cheerfulness in the
mornings, and that day she returned to the old way of life which she had
abandoned since the ball. Having finished her morning tea she went to
the ballroom, which she particularly liked for its loud resonance, and
began singing her solfeggio. When she had finished her first exercise
she stood still in the middle of the room and sang a musical phrase that
particularly pleased her. She listened joyfully (as though she had not
expected it) to the charm of the notes reverberating, filling the
whole empty ballroom, and slowly dying away; and all at once she felt
cheerful. "What's the good of making so much of it? Things are nice as
it is," she said to herself, and she began walking up and down the room,
not stepping simply on the resounding parquet but treading with each
step from the heel to the toe (she had on a new and favorite pair of
shoes) and listening to the regular tap of the heel and creak of the toe
as gladly as she had to the sounds of her own voice. Passing a mirror
she glanced into it. "There, that's me!" the expression of her face
seemed to say as she caught sight of herself. "Well, and very nice too!
I need nobody."

A footman wanted to come in to clear away something in the room but she
would not let him, and having closed the door behind him continued her
walk. That morning she had returned to her favorite mood--love of, and
delight in, herself. "How charming that Natasha is!" she said again,
speaking as some third, collective, male person. "Pretty, a good voice,
young, and in nobody's way if only they leave her in peace." But
however much they left her in peace she could not now be at peace, and
immediately felt this.

In the hall the porch door opened, and someone asked, "At home?" and
then footsteps were heard. Natasha was looking at the mirror, but did
not see herself. She listened to the sounds in the hall. When she saw
herself, her face was pale. It was he. She knew this for certain, though
she hardly heard his voice through the closed doors.

Pale and agitated, Natasha ran into the drawing room.

"Mamma! Bolkonski has come!" she said. "Mamma, it is awful, it is
unbearable! I don't want... to be tormented? What am I to do?..."

Before the countess could answer, Prince Andrew entered the room with
an agitated and serious face. As soon as he saw Natasha his face
brightened. He kissed the countess' hand and Natasha's, and sat down
beside the sofa.

"It is long since we had the pleasure..." began the countess, but Prince
Andrew interrupted her by answering her intended question, obviously in
haste to say what he had to.

"I have not been to see you all this time because I have been at my
father's. I had to talk over a very important matter with him. I only
got back last night," he said glancing at Natasha; "I want to have a
talk with you, Countess," he added after a moment's pause.

The countess lowered her eyes, sighing deeply.

"I am at your disposal," she murmured.

Natasha knew that she ought to go away, but was unable to do so:
something gripped her throat, and regardless of manners she stared
straight at Prince Andrew with wide-open eyes.

"At once? This instant!... No, it can't be!" she thought.

Again he glanced at her, and that glance convinced her that she was not
mistaken. Yes, at once, that very instant, her fate would be decided.

"Go, Natasha! I will call you," said the countess in a whisper.

Natasha glanced with frightened imploring eyes at Prince Andrew and at
her mother and went out.

"I have come, Countess, to ask for your daughter's hand," said Prince
Andrew.

The countess' face flushed hotly, but she said nothing.

"Your offer..." she began at last sedately. He remained silent, looking
into her eyes. "Your offer..." (she grew confused) "is agreeable to us,
and I accept your offer. I am glad. And my husband... I hope... but it
will depend on her...."

"I will speak to her when I have your consent.... Do you give it to me?"
said Prince Andrew.

"Yes," replied the countess. She held out her hand to him, and with a
mixed feeling of estrangement and tenderness pressed her lips to his
forehead as he stooped to kiss her hand. She wished to love him as a
son, but felt that to her he was a stranger and a terrifying man. "I am
sure my husband will consent," said the countess, "but your father..."

"My father, to whom I have told my plans, has made it an express
condition of his consent that the wedding is not to take place for a
year. And I wished to tell you of that," said Prince Andrew.

"It is true that Natasha is still young, but--so long as that?..."

"It is unavoidable," said Prince Andrew with a sigh.

"I will send her to you," said the countess, and left the room.

"Lord have mercy upon us!" she repeated while seeking her daughter.

Sonya said that Natasha was in her bedroom. Natasha was sitting on
the bed, pale and dry eyed, and was gazing at the icons and whispering
something as she rapidly crossed herself. Seeing her mother she jumped
up and flew to her.

"Well, Mamma?... Well?..."

"Go, go to him. He is asking for your hand," said the countess,
coldly it seemed to Natasha. "Go... go," said the mother, sadly and
reproachfully, with a deep sigh, as her daughter ran away.

Natasha never remembered how she entered the drawing room. When she came
in and saw him she paused. "Is it possible that this stranger has now
become everything to me?" she asked herself, and immediately answered,
"Yes, everything! He alone is now dearer to me than everything in the
world." Prince Andrew came up to her with downcast eyes.

"I have loved you from the very first moment I saw you. May I hope?"

He looked at her and was struck by the serious impassioned expression of
her face. Her face said: "Why ask? Why doubt what you cannot but know?
Why speak, when words cannot express what one feels?"

She drew near to him and stopped. He took her hand and kissed it.

"Do you love me?"

"Yes, yes!" Natasha murmured as if in vexation. Then she sighed loudly
and, catching her breath more and more quickly, began to sob.

"What is it? What's the matter?"

"Oh, I am so happy!" she replied, smiled through her tears, bent over
closer to him, paused for an instant as if asking herself whether she
might, and then kissed him.

Prince Andrew held her hands, looked into her eyes, and did not find
in his heart his former love for her. Something in him had suddenly
changed; there was no longer the former poetic and mystic charm of
desire, but there was pity for her feminine and childish weakness, fear
at her devotion and trustfulness, and an oppressive yet joyful sense of
the duty that now bound him to her forever. The present feeling, though
not so bright and poetic as the former, was stronger and more serious.

"Did your mother tell you that it cannot be for a year?" asked Prince
Andrew, still looking into her eyes.

"Is it possible that I--the 'chit of a girl,' as everybody called me,"
thought Natasha--"is it possible that I am now to be the wife and the
equal of this strange, dear, clever man whom even my father looks up to?
Can it be true? Can it be true that there can be no more playing with
life, that now I am grown up, that on me now lies a responsibility for
my every word and deed? Yes, but what did he ask me?"

"No," she replied, but she had not understood his question.

"Forgive me!" he said. "But you are so young, and I have already been
through so much in life. I am afraid for you, you do not yet know
yourself."

Natasha listened with concentrated attention, trying but failing to take
in the meaning of his words.

"Hard as this year which delays my happiness will be," continued Prince
Andrew, "it will give you time to be sure of yourself. I ask you to
make me happy in a year, but you are free: our engagement shall remain a
secret, and should you find that you do not love me, or should you come
to love..." said Prince Andrew with an unnatural smile.

"Why do you say that?" Natasha interrupted him. "You know that from the
very day you first came to Otradnoe I have loved you," she cried, quite
convinced that she spoke the truth.

"In a year you will learn to know yourself...."

"A whole year!" Natasha repeated suddenly, only now realizing that
the marriage was to be postponed for a year. "But why a year? Why a
year?..."

Prince Andrew began to explain to her the reasons for this delay.
Natasha did not hear him.

"And can't it be helped?" she asked. Prince Andrew did not reply, but
his face expressed the impossibility of altering that decision.

"It's awful! Oh, it's awful! awful!" Natasha suddenly cried, and again
burst into sobs. "I shall die, waiting a year: it's impossible, it's
awful!" She looked into her lover's face and saw in it a look of
commiseration and perplexity.

"No, no! I'll do anything!" she said, suddenly checking her tears. "I am
so happy."

The father and mother came into the room and gave the betrothed couple
their blessing.

From that day Prince Andrew began to frequent the Rostovs' as Natasha's
affianced lover.





CHAPTER XXIV


No betrothal ceremony took place and Natasha's engagement to Bolkonski
was not announced; Prince Andrew insisted on that. He said that as he
was responsible for the delay he ought to bear the whole burden of it;
that he had given his word and bound himself forever, but that he did
not wish to bind Natasha and gave her perfect freedom. If after six
months she felt that she did not love him she would have full right to
reject him. Naturally neither Natasha nor her parents wished to hear of
this, but Prince Andrew was firm. He came every day to the Rostovs',
but did not behave to Natasha as an affianced lover: he did not use
the familiar thou, but said you to her, and kissed only her hand. After
their engagement, quite different, intimate, and natural relations
sprang up between them. It was as if they had not known each other till
now. Both liked to recall how they had regarded each other when as
yet they were nothing to one another; they felt themselves now quite
different beings: then they were artificial, now natural and sincere. At
first the family felt some constraint in intercourse with Prince Andrew;
he seemed a man from another world, and for a long time Natasha trained
the family to get used to him, proudly assuring them all that he only
appeared to be different, but was really just like all of them, and that
she was not afraid of him and no one else ought to be. After a few
days they grew accustomed to him, and without restraint in his presence
pursued their usual way of life, in which he took his part. He could
talk about rural economy with the count, fashions with the countess
and Natasha, and about albums and fancywork with Sonya. Sometimes the
household both among themselves and in his presence expressed their
wonder at how it had all happened, and at the evident omens there had
been of it: Prince Andrew's coming to Otradnoe and their coming to
Petersburg, and the likeness between Natasha and Prince Andrew which
her nurse had noticed on his first visit, and Andrew's encounter with
Nicholas in 1805, and many other incidents betokening that it had to be.

In the house that poetic dullness and quiet reigned which always
accompanies the presence of a betrothed couple. Often when all sitting
together everyone kept silent. Sometimes the others would get up and
go away and the couple, left alone, still remained silent. They rarely
spoke of their future life. Prince Andrew was afraid and ashamed to
speak of it. Natasha shared this as she did all his feelings, which she
constantly divined. Once she began questioning him about his son. Prince
Andrew blushed, as he often did now--Natasha particularly liked it in
him--and said that his son would not live with them.

"Why not?" asked Natasha in a frightened tone.

"I cannot take him away from his grandfather, and besides..."

"How I should have loved him!" said Natasha, immediately guessing his
thought; "but I know you wish to avoid any pretext for finding fault
with us."

Sometimes the old count would come up, kiss Prince Andrew, and ask his
advice about Petya's education or Nicholas' service. The old countess
sighed as she looked at them; Sonya was always getting frightened lest
she should be in the way and tried to find excuses for leaving them
alone, even when they did not wish it. When Prince Andrew spoke (he
could tell a story very well), Natasha listened to him with pride; when
she spoke she noticed with fear and joy that he gazed attentively and
scrutinizingly at her. She asked herself in perplexity: "What does he
look for in me? He is trying to discover something by looking at me!
What if what he seeks in me is not there?" Sometimes she fell into one
of the mad, merry moods characteristic of her, and then she particularly
loved to hear and see how Prince Andrew laughed. He seldom laughed, but
when he did he abandoned himself entirely to his laughter, and after
such a laugh she always felt nearer to him. Natasha would have been
completely happy if the thought of the separation awaiting her and
drawing near had not terrified her, just as the mere thought of it made
him turn pale and cold.

On the eve of his departure from Petersburg Prince Andrew brought with
him Pierre, who had not been to the Rostovs' once since the ball. Pierre
seemed disconcerted and embarrassed. He was talking to the countess,
and Natasha sat down beside a little chess table with Sonya, thereby
inviting Prince Andrew to come too. He did so.

"You have known Bezukhov a long time?" he asked. "Do you like him?"

"Yes, he's a dear, but very absurd."

And as usual when speaking of Pierre, she began to tell anecdotes of his
absent-mindedness, some of which had even been invented about him.

"Do you know I have entrusted him with our secret? I have known him from
childhood. He has a heart of gold. I beg you, Natalie," Prince Andrew
said with sudden seriousness--"I am going away and heaven knows what may
happen. You may cease to... all right, I know I am not to say that. Only
this, then: whatever may happen to you when I am not here..."

"What can happen?"

"Whatever trouble may come," Prince Andrew continued, "I beg you,
Mademoiselle Sophie, whatever may happen, to turn to him alone for
advice and help! He is a most absent-minded and absurd fellow, but he
has a heart of gold."

Neither her father, nor her mother, nor Sonya, nor Prince Andrew himself
could have foreseen how the separation from her lover would act on
Natasha. Flushed and agitated she went about the house all that day,
dry-eyed, occupied with most trivial matters as if not understanding
what awaited her. She did not even cry when, on taking leave, he kissed
her hand for the last time. "Don't go!" she said in a tone that made him
wonder whether he really ought not to stay and which he remembered long
afterwards. Nor did she cry when he was gone; but for several days she
sat in her room dry-eyed, taking no interest in anything and only saying
now and then, "Oh, why did he go away?"

But a fortnight after his departure, to the surprise of those around
her, she recovered from her mental sickness just as suddenly and became
her old self again, but with a change in her moral physiognomy, as a
child gets up after a long illness with a changed expression of face.





CHAPTER XXV


During that year after his son's departure, Prince Nicholas Bolkonski's
health and temper became much worse. He grew still more irritable, and
it was Princess Mary who generally bore the brunt of his frequent fits
of unprovoked anger. He seemed carefully to seek out her tender spots so
as to torture her mentally as harshly as possible. Princess Mary had
two passions and consequently two joys--her nephew, little Nicholas, and
religion--and these were the favorite subjects of the prince's attacks
and ridicule. Whatever was spoken of he would bring round to the
superstitiousness of old maids, or the petting and spoiling of children.
"You want to make him"--little Nicholas--"into an old maid like
yourself! A pity! Prince Andrew wants a son and not an old maid," he
would say. Or, turning to Mademoiselle Bourienne, he would ask her in
Princess Mary's presence how she liked our village priests and icons and
would joke about them.

He continually hurt Princess Mary's feelings and tormented her, but it
cost her no effort to forgive him. Could he be to blame toward her, or
could her father, whom she knew loved her in spite of it all, be unjust?
And what is justice? The princess never thought of that proud word
"justice." All the complex laws of man centered for her in one clear
and simple law--the law of love and self-sacrifice taught us by Him who
lovingly suffered for mankind though He Himself was God. What had she to
do with the justice or injustice of other people? She had to endure and
love, and that she did.

During the winter Prince Andrew had come to Bald Hills and had been gay,
gentle, and more affectionate than Princess Mary had known him for a
long time past. She felt that something had happened to him, but he said
nothing to her about his love. Before he left he had a long talk with
his father about something, and Princess Mary noticed that before his
departure they were dissatisfied with one another.

Soon after Prince Andrew had gone, Princess Mary wrote to her friend
Julie Karagina in Petersburg, whom she had dreamed (as all girls dream)
of marrying to her brother, and who was at that time in mourning for her
own brother, killed in Turkey.


Sorrow, it seems, is our common lot, my dear, tender friend Julie.

Your loss is so terrible that I can only explain it to myself as a
special providence of God who, loving you, wishes to try you and your
excellent mother. Oh, my friend! Religion, and religion alone, can--I
will not say comfort us--but save us from despair. Religion alone can
explain to us what without its help man cannot comprehend: why, for what
cause, kind and noble beings able to find happiness in life--not merely
harming no one but necessary to the happiness of others--are called away
to God, while cruel, useless, harmful persons, or such as are a burden
to themselves and to others, are left living. The first death I saw,
and one I shall never forget--that of my dear sister-in-law--left that
impression on me. Just as you ask destiny why your splendid brother
had to die, so I asked why that angel Lise, who not only never wronged
anyone, but in whose soul there were never any unkind thoughts, had to
die. And what do you think, dear friend? Five years have passed since
then, and already I, with my petty understanding, begin to see clearly
why she had to die, and in what way that death was but an expression
of the infinite goodness of the Creator, whose every action, though
generally incomprehensible to us, is but a manifestation of His infinite
love for His creatures. Perhaps, I often think, she was too angelically
innocent to have the strength to perform all a mother's duties. As a
young wife she was irreproachable; perhaps she could not have been so
as a mother. As it is, not only has she left us, and particularly Prince
Andrew, with the purest regrets and memories, but probably she will
there receive a place I dare not hope for myself. But not to speak of
her alone, that early and terrible death has had the most beneficent
influence on me and on my brother in spite of all our grief. Then, at
the moment of our loss, these thoughts could not occur to me; I should
then have dismissed them with horror, but now they are very clear and
certain. I write all this to you, dear friend, only to convince you
of the Gospel truth which has become for me a principle of life: not
a single hair of our heads will fall without His will. And His will is
governed only by infinite love for us, and so whatever befalls us is for
our good.

You ask whether we shall spend next winter in Moscow. In spite of my
wish to see you, I do not think so and do not want to do so. You will
be surprised to hear that the reason for this is Buonaparte! The case
is this: my father's health is growing noticeably worse, he cannot stand
any contradiction and is becoming irritable. This irritability is, as
you know, chiefly directed to political questions. He cannot endure
the notion that Buonaparte is negotiating on equal terms with all the
sovereigns of Europe and particularly with our own, the grandson of the
Great Catherine! As you know, I am quite indifferent to politics, but
from my father's remarks and his talks with Michael Ivanovich I know all
that goes on in the world and especially about the honors conferred on
Buonaparte, who only at Bald Hills in the whole world, it seems, is not
accepted as a great man, still less as Emperor of France. And my father
cannot stand this. It seems to me that it is chiefly because of his
political views that my father is reluctant to speak of going to
Moscow; for he foresees the encounters that would result from his way
of expressing his views regardless of anybody. All the benefit he might
derive from a course of treatment he would lose as a result of the
disputes about Buonaparte which would be inevitable. In any case it will
be decided very shortly.

Our family life goes on in the old way except for my brother Andrew's
absence. He, as I wrote you before, has changed very much of late. After
his sorrow he only this year quite recovered his spirits. He has again
become as I used to know him when a child: kind, affectionate, with that
heart of gold to which I know no equal. He has realized, it seems to me,
that life is not over for him. But together with this mental change
he has grown physically much weaker. He has become thinner and more
nervous. I am anxious about him and glad he is taking this trip abroad
which the doctors recommended long ago. I hope it will cure him. You
write that in Petersburg he is spoken of as one of the most active,
cultivated, and capable of the young men. Forgive my vanity as a
relation, but I never doubted it. The good he has done to everybody
here, from his peasants up to the gentry, is incalculable. On his
arrival in Petersburg he received only his due. I always wonder at the
way rumors fly from Petersburg to Moscow, especially such false ones as
that you write about--I mean the report of my brother's betrothal to
the little Rostova. I do not think my brother will ever marry again, and
certainly not her; and this is why: first, I know that though he rarely
speaks about the wife he has lost, the grief of that loss has gone too
deep in his heart for him ever to decide to give her a successor and our
little angel a stepmother. Secondly because, as far as I know, that girl
is not the kind of girl who could please Prince Andrew. I do not think
he would choose her for a wife, and frankly I do not wish it. But I am
running on too long and am at the end of my second sheet. Good-by,
my dear friend. May God keep you in His holy and mighty care. My dear
friend, Mademoiselle Bourienne, sends you kisses.

MARY





CHAPTER XXVI


In the middle of the summer Princess Mary received an unexpected letter
from Prince Andrew in Switzerland in which he gave her strange and
surprising news. He informed her of his engagement to Natasha Rostova.
The whole letter breathed loving rapture for his betrothed and tender
and confiding affection for his sister. He wrote that he had never loved
as he did now and that only now did he understand and know what life
was. He asked his sister to forgive him for not having told her of his
resolve when he had last visited Bald Hills, though he had spoken of it
to his father. He had not done so for fear Princess Mary should ask her
father to give his consent, irritating him and having to bear the brunt
of his displeasure without attaining her object. "Besides," he wrote,
"the matter was not then so definitely settled as it is now. My father
then insisted on a delay of a year and now already six months, half of
that period, have passed, and my resolution is firmer than ever. If the
doctors did not keep me here at the spas I should be back in Russia, but
as it is I have to postpone my return for three months. You know me
and my relations with Father. I want nothing from him. I have been and
always shall be independent; but to go against his will and arouse his
anger, now that he may perhaps remain with us such a short time, would
destroy half my happiness. I am now writing to him about the same
question, and beg you to choose a good moment to hand him the letter
and to let me know how he looks at the whole matter and whether there is
hope that he may consent to reduce the term by four months."

After long hesitations, doubts, and prayers, Princess Mary gave the
letter to her father. The next day the old prince said to her quietly:

"Write and tell your brother to wait till I am dead.... It won't be
long--I shall soon set him free."

The princess was about to reply, but her father would not let her speak
and, raising his voice more and more, cried:

"Marry, marry, my boy!... A good family!... Clever people, eh? Rich,
eh? Yes, a nice stepmother little Nicholas will have! Write and tell
him that he may marry tomorrow if he likes. She will be little Nicholas'
stepmother and I'll marry Bourienne!... Ha, ha, ha! He mustn't be
without a stepmother either! Only one thing, no more women are wanted
in my house--let him marry and live by himself. Perhaps you will go and
live with him too?" he added, turning to Princess Mary. "Go in heavens
name! Go out into the frost... the frost... the frost!"

After this outburst the prince did not speak any more about the matter.
But repressed vexation at his son's poor-spirited behavior found
expression in his treatment of his daughter. To his former pretexts
for irony a fresh one was now added--allusions to stepmothers and
amiabilities to Mademoiselle Bourienne.

"Why shouldn't I marry her?" he asked his daughter. "She'll make a
splendid princess!"

And latterly, to her surprise and bewilderment, Princess Mary
noticed that her father was really associating more and more with the
Frenchwoman. She wrote to Prince Andrew about the reception of his
letter, but comforted him with hopes of reconciling their father to the
idea.

Little Nicholas and his education, her brother Andrew, and religion were
Princess Mary's joys and consolations; but besides that, since everyone
must have personal hopes, Princess Mary in the profoundest depths of her
heart had a hidden dream and hope that supplied the chief consolation
of her life. This comforting dream and hope were given her by God's
folk--the half-witted and other pilgrims who visited her without the
prince's knowledge. The longer she lived, the more experience and
observation she had of life, the greater was her wonder at the
short-sightedness of men who seek enjoyment and happiness here on earth:
toiling, suffering, struggling, and harming one another, to obtain that
impossible, visionary, sinful happiness. Prince Andrew had loved his
wife, she died, but that was not enough: he wanted to bind his happiness
to another woman. Her father objected to this because he wanted a more
distinguished and wealthier match for Andrew. And they all struggled
and suffered and tormented one another and injured their souls, their
eternal souls, for the attainment of benefits which endure but for an
instant. Not only do we know this ourselves, but Christ, the Son of God,
came down to earth and told us that this life is but for a moment and is
a probation; yet we cling to it and think to find happiness in it. "How
is it that no one realizes this?" thought Princess Mary. "No one except
these despised God's folk who, wallet on back, come to me by the back
door, afraid of being seen by the prince, not for fear of ill-usage by
him but for fear of causing him to sin. To leave family, home, and all
the cares of worldly welfare, in order without clinging to anything to
wander in hempen rags from place to place under an assumed name, doing
no one any harm but praying for all--for those who drive one away as
well as for those who protect one: higher than that life and truth there
is no life or truth!"

There was one pilgrim, a quiet pockmarked little woman of fifty called
Theodosia, who for over thirty years had gone about barefoot and worn
heavy chains. Princess Mary was particularly fond of her. Once, when in
a room with a lamp dimly lit before the icon Theodosia was talking of
her life, the thought that Theodosia alone had found the true path of
life suddenly came to Princess Mary with such force that she resolved to
become a pilgrim herself. When Theodosia had gone to sleep Princess Mary
thought about this for a long time, and at last made up her mind that,
strange as it might seem, she must go on a pilgrimage. She disclosed
this thought to no one but to her confessor, Father Akinfi, the monk,
and he approved of her intention. Under guise of a present for the
pilgrims, Princess Mary prepared a pilgrim's complete costume for
herself: a coarse smock, bast shoes, a rough coat, and a black kerchief.
Often, approaching the chest of drawers containing this secret treasure,
Princess Mary paused, uncertain whether the time had not already come to
put her project into execution.

Often, listening to the pilgrims' tales, she was so stimulated by their
simple speech, mechanical to them but to her so full of deep meaning,
that several times she was on the point of abandoning everything and
running away from home. In imagination she already pictured herself by
Theodosia's side, dressed in coarse rags, walking with a staff, a wallet
on her back, along the dusty road, directing her wanderings from one
saint's shrine to another, free from envy, earthly love, or desire, and
reaching at last the place where there is no more sorrow or sighing, but
eternal joy and bliss.

"I shall come to a place and pray there, and before having time to get
used to it or getting to love it, I shall go farther. I will go on till
my legs fail, and I'll lie down and die somewhere, and shall at last
reach that eternal, quiet haven, where there is neither sorrow nor
sighing..." thought Princess Mary.

But afterwards, when she saw her father and especially little Koko
(Nicholas), her resolve weakened. She wept quietly, and felt that she
was a sinner who loved her father and little nephew more than God.





BOOK SEVEN: 1810 - 11





CHAPTER I


The Bible legend tells us that the absence of labor--idleness--was a
condition of the first man's blessedness before the Fall. Fallen man has
retained a love of idleness, but the curse weighs on the race not only
because we have to seek our bread in the sweat of our brows, but because
our moral nature is such that we cannot be both idle and at ease. An
inner voice tells us we are in the wrong if we are idle. If man could
find a state in which he felt that though idle he was fulfilling his
duty, he would have found one of the conditions of man's primitive
blessedness. And such a state of obligatory and irreproachable idleness
is the lot of a whole class--the military. The chief attraction of
military service has consisted and will consist in this compulsory and
irreproachable idleness.

Nicholas Rostov experienced this blissful condition to the full when,
after 1807, he continued to serve in the Pavlograd regiment, in which he
already commanded the squadron he had taken over from Denisov.

Rostov had become a bluff, good-natured fellow, whom his Moscow
acquaintances would have considered rather bad form, but who was liked
and respected by his comrades, subordinates, and superiors, and was well
contented with his life. Of late, in 1809, he found in letters from home
more frequent complaints from his mother that their affairs were falling
into greater and greater disorder, and that it was time for him to come
back to gladden and comfort his old parents.

Reading these letters, Nicholas felt a dread of their wanting to
take him away from surroundings in which, protected from all the
entanglements of life, he was living so calmly and quietly. He felt that
sooner or later he would have to re-enter that whirlpool of life, with
its embarrassments and affairs to be straightened out, its accounts with
stewards, quarrels, and intrigues, its ties, society, and with Sonya's
love and his promise to her. It was all dreadfully difficult and
complicated; and he replied to his mother in cold, formal letters in
French, beginning: "My dear Mamma," and ending: "Your obedient son,"
which said nothing of when he would return. In 1810 he received letters
from his parents, in which they told him of Natasha's engagement to
Bolkonski, and that the wedding would be in a year's time because
the old prince made difficulties. This letter grieved and mortified
Nicholas. In the first place he was sorry that Natasha, for whom he
cared more than for anyone else in the family, should be lost to the
home; and secondly, from his hussar point of view, he regretted not to
have been there to show that fellow Bolkonski that connection with him
was no such great honor after all, and that if he loved Natasha he
might dispense with permission from his dotard father. For a moment he
hesitated whether he should not apply for leave in order to see Natasha
before she was married, but then came the maneuvers, and considerations
about Sonya and about the confusion of their affairs, and Nicholas again
put it off. But in the spring of that year, he received a letter from
his mother, written without his father's knowledge, and that letter
persuaded him to return. She wrote that if he did not come and take
matters in hand, their whole property would be sold by auction and they
would all have to go begging. The count was so weak, and trusted Mitenka
so much, and was so good-natured, that everybody took advantage of him
and things were going from bad to worse. "For God's sake, I implore
you, come at once if you do not wish to make me and the whole family
wretched," wrote the countess.

This letter touched Nicholas. He had that common sense of a
matter-of-fact man which showed him what he ought to do.

The right thing now was, if not to retire from the service, at any rate
to go home on leave. Why he had to go he did not know; but after his
after-dinner nap he gave orders to saddle Mars, an extremely vicious
gray stallion that had not been ridden for a long time, and when
he returned with the horse all in a lather, he informed Lavrushka
(Denisov's servant who had remained with him) and his comrades who
turned up in the evening that he was applying for leave and was going
home. Difficult and strange as it was for him to reflect that he would
go away without having heard from the staff--and this interested him
extremely--whether he was promoted to a captaincy or would receive the
Order of St. Anne for the last maneuvers; strange as it was to think
that he would go away without having sold his three roans to the Polish
Count Golukhovski, who was bargaining for the horses Rostov had betted
he would sell for two thousand rubles; incomprehensible as it
seemed that the ball the hussars were giving in honor of the Polish
Mademoiselle Przazdziecka (out of rivalry to the Uhlans who had given
one in honor of their Polish Mademoiselle Borzozowska) would take place
without him--he knew he must go away from this good, bright world to
somewhere where everything was stupid and confused. A week later he
obtained his leave. His hussar comrades--not only those of his own
regiment, but the whole brigade--gave Rostov a dinner to which the
subscription was fifteen rubles a head, and at which there were two
bands and two choirs of singers. Rostov danced the Trepak with Major
Basov; the tipsy officers tossed, embraced, and dropped Rostov; the
soldiers of the third squadron tossed him too, and shouted "hurrah!"
and then they put him in his sleigh and escorted him as far as the first
post station.

During the first half of the journey--from Kremenchug to Kiev--all
Rostov's thoughts, as is usual in such cases, were behind him, with the
squadron; but when he had gone more than halfway he began to forget his
three roans and Dozhoyveyko, his quartermaster, and to wonder anxiously
how things would be at Otradnoe and what he would find there. Thoughts
of home grew stronger the nearer he approached it--far stronger, as
though this feeling of his was subject to the law by which the force of
attraction is in inverse proportion to the square of the distance. At
the last post station before Otradnoe he gave the driver a three-ruble
tip, and on arriving he ran breathlessly, like a boy, up the steps of
his home.

After the rapture of meeting, and after that odd feeling of unsatisfied
expectation--the feeling that "everything is just the same, so why did I
hurry?"--Nicholas began to settle down in his old home world. His father
and mother were much the same, only a little older. What was new in them
was a certain uneasiness and occasional discord, which there used not to
be, and which, as Nicholas soon found out, was due to the bad state of
their affairs. Sonya was nearly twenty; she had stopped growing prettier
and promised nothing more than she was already, but that was enough.
She exhaled happiness and love from the time Nicholas returned, and the
faithful, unalterable love of this girl had a gladdening effect on him.
Petya and Natasha surprised Nicholas most. Petya was a big handsome
boy of thirteen, merry, witty, and mischievous, with a voice that was
already breaking. As for Natasha, for a long while Nicholas wondered and
laughed whenever he looked at her.

"You're not the same at all," he said.

"How? Am I uglier?"

"On the contrary, but what dignity? A princess!" he whispered to her.

"Yes, yes, yes!" cried Natasha, joyfully.

She told him about her romance with Prince Andrew and of his visit to
Otradnoe and showed him his last letter.

"Well, are you glad?" Natasha asked. "I am so tranquil and happy now."

"Very glad," answered Nicholas. "He is an excellent fellow.... And are
you very much in love?"

"How shall I put it?" replied Natasha. "I was in love with Boris, with
my teacher, and with Denisov, but this is quite different. I feel at
peace and settled. I know that no better man than he exists, and I am
calm and contented now. Not at all as before."

Nicholas expressed his disapproval of the postponement of the marriage
for a year; but Natasha attacked her brother with exasperation, proving
to him that it could not be otherwise, and that it would be a bad thing
to enter a family against the father's will, and that she herself wished
it so.

"You don't at all understand," she said.

Nicholas was silent and agreed with her.

Her brother often wondered as he looked at her. She did not seem at
all like a girl in love and parted from her affianced husband. She was
even-tempered and calm and quite as cheerful as of old. This amazed
Nicholas and even made him regard Bolkonski's courtship skeptically.
He could not believe that her fate was sealed, especially as he had
not seen her with Prince Andrew. It always seemed to him that there was
something not quite right about this intended marriage.

"Why this delay? Why no betrothal?" he thought. Once, when he had
touched on this topic with his mother, he discovered, to his surprise
and somewhat to his satisfaction, that in the depth of her soul she too
had doubts about this marriage.

"You see he writes," said she, showing her son a letter of Prince
Andrew's, with that latent grudge a mother always has in regard to
a daughter's future married happiness, "he writes that he won't come
before December. What can be keeping him? Illness, probably! His health
is very delicate. Don't tell Natasha. And don't attach importance to her
being so bright: that's because she's living through the last days of
her girlhood, but I know what she is like every time we receive a letter
from him! However, God grant that everything turns out well!" (She
always ended with these words.) "He is an excellent man!"





CHAPTER II


After reaching home Nicholas was at first serious and even dull. He was
worried by the impending necessity of interfering in the stupid business
matters for which his mother had called him home. To throw off this
burden as quickly as possible, on the third day after his arrival he
went, angry and scowling and without answering questions as to where he
was going, to Mitenka's lodge and demanded an account of everything. But
what an account of everything might be Nicholas knew even less than the
frightened and bewildered Mitenka. The conversation and the examination
of the accounts with Mitenka did not last long. The village elder,
a peasant delegate, and the village clerk, who were waiting in the
passage, heard with fear and delight first the young count's voice
roaring and snapping and rising louder and louder, and then words of
abuse, dreadful words, ejaculated one after the other.

"Robber!... Ungrateful wretch!... I'll hack the dog to pieces! I'm not
my father!... Robbing us!..." and so on.

Then with no less fear and delight they saw how the young count, red in
the face and with bloodshot eyes, dragged Mitenka out by the scruff of
the neck and applied his foot and knee to his behind with great agility
at convenient moments between the words, shouting, "Be off! Never let me
see your face here again, you villain!"

Mitenka flew headlong down the six steps and ran away into the
shrubbery. (This shrubbery was a well-known haven of refuge for culprits
at Otradnoe. Mitenka himself, returning tipsy from the town, used to
hide there, and many of the residents at Otradnoe, hiding from Mitenka,
knew of its protective qualities.)

Mitenka's wife and sisters-in-law thrust their heads and frightened
faces out of the door of a room where a bright samovar was boiling and
where the steward's high bedstead stood with its patchwork quilt.

The young count paid no heed to them, but, breathing hard, passed by
with resolute strides and went into the house.

The countess, who heard at once from the maids what had happened at the
lodge, was calmed by the thought that now their affairs would certainly
improve, but on the other hand felt anxious as to the effect this
excitement might have on her son. She went several times to his door on
tiptoe and listened, as he lighted one pipe after another.

Next day the old count called his son aside and, with an embarrassed
smile, said to him:

"But you know, my dear boy, it's a pity you got excited! Mitenka has
told me all about it."

"I knew," thought Nicholas, "that I should never understand anything in
this crazy world."

"You were angry that he had not entered those 700 rubles. But they were
carried forward--and you did not look at the other page."

"Papa, he is a blackguard and a thief! I know he is! And what I have
done, I have done; but, if you like, I won't speak to him again."

"No, my dear boy" (the count, too, felt embarrassed. He knew he had
mismanaged his wife's property and was to blame toward his children,
but he did not know how to remedy it). "No, I beg you to attend to the
business. I am old. I..."

"No, Papa. Forgive me if I have caused you unpleasantness. I understand
it all less than you do."

"Devil take all these peasants, and money matters, and carryings forward
from page to page," he thought. "I used to understand what a 'corner'
and the stakes at cards meant, but carrying forward to another page I
don't understand at all," said he to himself, and after that he did not
meddle in business affairs. But once the countess called her son and
informed him that she had a promissory note from Anna Mikhaylovna for
two thousand rubles, and asked him what he thought of doing with it.

"This," answered Nicholas. "You say it rests with me. Well, I don't like
Anna Mikhaylovna and I don't like Boris, but they were our friends and
poor. Well then, this!" and he tore up the note, and by so doing caused
the old countess to weep tears of joy. After that, young Rostov took
no further part in any business affairs, but devoted himself with
passionate enthusiasm to what was to him a new pursuit--the chase--for
which his father kept a large establishment.





CHAPTER III


The weather was already growing wintry and morning frosts congealed
an earth saturated by autumn rains. The verdure had thickened and its
bright green stood out sharply against the brownish strips of winter rye
trodden down by the cattle, and against the pale-yellow stubble of the
spring buckwheat. The wooded ravines and the copses, which at the end of
August had still been green islands amid black fields and stubble, had
become golden and bright-red islands amid the green winter rye. The
hares had already half changed their summer coats, the fox cubs were
beginning to scatter, and the young wolves were bigger than dogs. It was
the best time of the year for the chase. The hounds of that ardent young
sportsman Rostov had not merely reached hard winter condition, but were
so jaded that at a meeting of the huntsmen it was decided to give them
a three days' rest and then, on the sixteenth of September, to go on
a distant expedition, starting from the oak grove where there was an
undisturbed litter of wolf cubs.

All that day the hounds remained at home. It was frosty and the air was
sharp, but toward evening the sky became overcast and it began to thaw.
On the fifteenth, when young Rostov, in his dressing gown, looked out of
the window, he saw it was an unsurpassable morning for hunting: it was
as if the sky were melting and sinking to the earth without any wind.
The only motion in the air was that of the dripping, microscopic
particles of drizzling mist. The bare twigs in the garden were hung with
transparent drops which fell on the freshly fallen leaves. The earth in
the kitchen garden looked wet and black and glistened like poppy seed
and at a short distance merged into the dull, moist veil of mist.
Nicholas went out into the wet and muddy porch. There was a smell of
decaying leaves and of dog. Milka, a black-spotted, broad-haunched bitch
with prominent black eyes, got up on seeing her master, stretched her
hind legs, lay down like a hare, and then suddenly jumped up and licked
him right on his nose and mustache. Another borzoi, a dog, catching
sight of his master from the garden path, arched his back and, rushing
headlong toward the porch with lifted tail, began rubbing himself
against his legs.

"O-hoy!" came at that moment, that inimitable huntsman's call which
unites the deepest bass with the shrillest tenor, and round the corner
came Daniel the head huntsman and head kennelman, a gray, wrinkled old
man with hair cut straight over his forehead, Ukrainian fashion, a
long bent whip in his hand, and that look of independence and scorn of
everything that is only seen in huntsmen. He doffed his Circassian cap
to his master and looked at him scornfully. This scorn was not offensive
to his master. Nicholas knew that this Daniel, disdainful of everybody
and who considered himself above them, was all the same his serf and
huntsman.

"Daniel!" Nicholas said timidly, conscious at the sight of the weather,
the hounds, and the huntsman that he was being carried away by that
irresistible passion for sport which makes a man forget all his previous
resolutions, as a lover forgets in the presence of his mistress.

"What orders, your excellency?" said the huntsman in his deep bass, deep
as a proto-deacon's and hoarse with hallooing--and two flashing black
eyes gazed from under his brows at his master, who was silent. "Can you
resist it?" those eyes seemed to be asking.

"It's a good day, eh? For a hunt and a gallop, eh?" asked Nicholas,
scratching Milka behind the ears.

Daniel did not answer, but winked instead.

"I sent Uvarka at dawn to listen," his bass boomed out after a minute's
pause. "He says she's moved them into the Otradnoe enclosure. They were
howling there." (This meant that the she-wolf, about whom they both
knew, had moved with her cubs to the Otradnoe copse, a small place a
mile and a half from the house.)

"We ought to go, don't you think so?" said Nicholas. "Come to me with
Uvarka."

"As you please."

"Then put off feeding them."

"Yes, sir."

Five minutes later Daniel and Uvarka were standing in Nicholas' big
study. Though Daniel was not a big man, to see him in a room was
like seeing a horse or a bear on the floor among the furniture and
surroundings of human life. Daniel himself felt this, and as usual stood
just inside the door, trying to speak softly and not move, for fear of
breaking something in the master's apartment, and he hastened to say all
that was necessary so as to get from under that ceiling, out into the
open under the sky once more.

Having finished his inquiries and extorted from Daniel an opinion that
the hounds were fit (Daniel himself wished to go hunting), Nicholas
ordered the horses to be saddled. But just as Daniel was about to
go Natasha came in with rapid steps, not having done up her hair or
finished dressing and with her old nurse's big shawl wrapped round her.
Petya ran in at the same time.

"You are going?" asked Natasha. "I knew you would! Sonya said you
wouldn't go, but I knew that today is the sort of day when you couldn't
help going."

"Yes, we are going," replied Nicholas reluctantly, for today, as he
intended to hunt seriously, he did not want to take Natasha and Petya.
"We are going, but only wolf hunting: it would be dull for you."

"You know it is my greatest pleasure," said Natasha. "It's not fair; you
are going by yourself, are having the horses saddled and said nothing to
us about it."

"'No barrier bars a Russian's path'--we'll go!" shouted Petya.

"But you can't. Mamma said you mustn't," said Nicholas to Natasha.

"Yes, I'll go. I shall certainly go," said Natasha decisively. "Daniel,
tell them to saddle for us, and Michael must come with my dogs," she
added to the huntsman.

It seemed to Daniel irksome and improper to be in a room at all, but to
have anything to do with a young lady seemed to him impossible. He
cast down his eyes and hurried out as if it were none of his business,
careful as he went not to inflict any accidental injury on the young
lady.





CHAPTER IV


The old count, who had always kept up an enormous hunting establishment
but had now handed it all completely over to his son's care, being in
very good spirits on this fifteenth of September, prepared to go out
with the others.

In an hour's time the whole hunting party was at the porch. Nicholas,
with a stern and serious air which showed that now was no time for
attending to trifles, went past Natasha and Petya who were trying to
tell him something. He had a look at all the details of the hunt, sent
a pack of hounds and huntsmen on ahead to find the quarry, mounted his
chestnut Donets, and whistling to his own leash of borzois, set off
across the threshing ground to a field leading to the Otradnoe wood.
The old count's horse, a sorrel gelding called Viflyanka, was led by the
groom in attendance on him, while the count himself was to drive in a
small trap straight to a spot reserved for him.

They were taking fifty-four hounds, with six hunt attendants and
whippers-in. Besides the family, there were eight borzoi kennelmen
and more than forty borzois, so that, with the borzois on the leash
belonging to members of the family, there were about a hundred and
thirty dogs and twenty horsemen.

Each dog knew its master and its call. Each man in the hunt knew his
business, his place, what he had to do. As soon as they had passed the
fence they all spread out evenly and quietly, without noise or talk,
along the road and field leading to the Otradnoe covert.

The horses stepped over the field as over a thick carpet, now and then
splashing into puddles as they crossed a road. The misty sky still
seemed to descend evenly and imperceptibly toward the earth, the air
was still, warm, and silent. Occasionally the whistle of a huntsman,
the snort of a horse, the crack of a whip, or the whine of a straggling
hound could be heard.

When they had gone a little less than a mile, five more riders with
dogs appeared out of the mist, approaching the Rostovs. In front rode a
fresh-looking, handsome old man with a large gray mustache.

"Good morning, Uncle!" said Nicholas, when the old man drew near.

"That's it. Come on!... I was sure of it," began "Uncle." (He was
a distant relative of the Rostovs', a man of small means, and their
neighbor.) "I knew you wouldn't be able to resist it and it's a good
thing you're going. That's it! Come on!" (This was "Uncle's" favorite
expression.) "Take the covert at once, for my Girchik says the Ilagins
are at Korniki with their hounds. That's it. Come on!... They'll take
the cubs from under your very nose."

"That's where I'm going. Shall we join up our packs?" asked Nicholas.

The hounds were joined into one pack, and "Uncle" and Nicholas rode on
side by side. Natasha, muffled up in shawls which did not hide her eager
face and shining eyes, galloped up to them. She was followed by Petya
who always kept close to her, by Michael, a huntsman, and by a groom
appointed to look after her. Petya, who was laughing, whipped and pulled
at his horse. Natasha sat easily and confidently on her black Arabchik
and reined him in without effort with a firm hand.

"Uncle" looked round disapprovingly at Petya and Natasha. He did not
like to combine frivolity with the serious business of hunting.

"Good morning, Uncle! We are going too!" shouted Petya.

"Good morning, good morning! But don't go overriding the hounds," said
"Uncle" sternly.

"Nicholas, what a fine dog Trunila is! He knew me," said Natasha,
referring to her favorite hound.

"In the first place, Trunila is not a 'dog,' but a harrier," thought
Nicholas, and looked sternly at his sister, trying to make her feel the
distance that ought to separate them at that moment. Natasha understood
it.

"You mustn't think we'll be in anyone's way, Uncle," she said. "We'll go
to our places and won't budge."

"A good thing too, little countess," said "Uncle," "only mind you don't
fall off your horse," he added, "because--that's it, come on!--you've
nothing to hold on to."

The oasis of the Otradnoe covert came in sight a few hundred yards off,
the huntsmen were already nearing it. Rostov, having finally settled
with "Uncle" where they should set on the hounds, and having shown
Natasha where she was to stand--a spot where nothing could possibly run
out--went round above the ravine.

"Well, nephew, you're going for a big wolf," said "Uncle." "Mind and
don't let her slip!"

"That's as may happen," answered Rostov. "Karay, here!" he shouted,
answering "Uncle's" remark by this call to his borzoi. Karay was a
shaggy old dog with a hanging jowl, famous for having tackled a big wolf
unaided. They all took up their places.

The old count, knowing his son's ardor in the hunt, hurried so as not
to be late, and the huntsmen had not yet reached their places when Count
Ilya Rostov, cheerful, flushed, and with quivering cheeks, drove up
with his black horses over the winter rye to the place reserved for him,
where a wolf might come out. Having straightened his coat and fastened
on his hunting knives and horn, he mounted his good, sleek, well-fed,
and comfortable horse, Viflyanka, which was turning gray, like himself.
His horses and trap were sent home. Count Ilya Rostov, though not at
heart a keen sportsman, knew the rules of the hunt well, and rode to
the bushy edge of the road where he was to stand, arranged his reins,
settled himself in the saddle, and, feeling that he was ready, looked
about with a smile.

Beside him was Simon Chekmar, his personal attendant, an old horseman
now somewhat stiff in the saddle. Chekmar held in leash three formidable
wolfhounds, who had, however, grown fat like their master and his horse.
Two wise old dogs lay down unleashed. Some hundred paces farther along
the edge of the wood stood Mitka, the count's other groom, a daring
horseman and keen rider to hounds. Before the hunt, by old custom, the
count had drunk a silver cupful of mulled brandy, taken a snack, and
washed it down with half a bottle of his favorite Bordeaux.

He was somewhat flushed with the wine and the drive. His eyes were
rather moist and glittered more than usual, and as he sat in his saddle,
wrapped up in his fur coat, he looked like a child taken out for an
outing.

The thin, hollow-cheeked Chekmar, having got everything ready, kept
glancing at his master with whom he had lived on the best of terms for
thirty years, and understanding the mood he was in expected a pleasant
chat. A third person rode up circumspectly through the wood (it was
plain that he had had a lesson) and stopped behind the count. This
person was a gray-bearded old man in a woman's cloak, with a tall
peaked cap on his head. He was the buffoon, who went by a woman's name,
Nastasya Ivanovna.

"Well, Nastasya Ivanovna!" whispered the count, winking at him. "If you
scare away the beast, Daniel'll give it you!"

"I know a thing or two myself!" said Nastasya Ivanovna.

"Hush!" whispered the count and turned to Simon. "Have you seen the
young countess?" he asked. "Where is she?"

"With young Count Peter, by the Zharov rank grass," answered Simon,
smiling. "Though she's a lady, she's very fond of hunting."

"And you're surprised at the way she rides, Simon, eh?" said the count.
"She's as good as many a man!"

"Of course! It's marvelous. So bold, so easy!"

"And Nicholas? Where is he? By the Lyadov upland, isn't he?"

"Yes, sir. He knows where to stand. He understands the matter so well
that Daniel and I are often quite astounded," said Simon, well knowing
what would please his master.

"Rides well, eh? And how well he looks on his horse, eh?"

"A perfect picture! How he chased a fox out of the rank grass by the
Zavarzinsk thicket the other day! Leaped a fearful place; what a sight
when they rushed from the covert... the horse worth a thousand rubles
and the rider beyond all price! Yes, one would have to search far to
find another as smart."

"To search far..." repeated the count, evidently sorry Simon had not
said more. "To search far," he said, turning back the skirt of his coat
to get at his snuffbox.

"The other day when he came out from Mass in full uniform, Michael
Sidorych..." Simon did not finish, for on the still air he had
distinctly caught the music of the hunt with only two or three hounds
giving tongue. He bent down his head and listened, shaking a warning
finger at his master. "They are on the scent of the cubs..." he
whispered, "straight to the Lyadov uplands."

The count, forgetting to smooth out the smile on his face, looked into
the distance straight before him, down the narrow open space, holding
the snuffbox in his hand but not taking any. After the cry of the hounds
came the deep tones of the wolf call from Daniel's hunting horn; the
pack joined the first three hounds and they could be heard in full cry,
with that peculiar lift in the note that indicates that they are after
a wolf. The whippers-in no longer set on the hounds, but changed to the
cry of ulyulyu, and above the others rose Daniel's voice, now a deep
bass, now piercingly shrill. His voice seemed to fill the whole wood and
carried far beyond out into the open field.

After listening a few moments in silence, the count and his attendant
convinced themselves that the hounds had separated into two packs: the
sound of the larger pack, eagerly giving tongue, began to die away in
the distance, the other pack rushed by the wood past the count, and it
was with this that Daniel's voice was heard calling ulyulyu. The sounds
of both packs mingled and broke apart again, but both were becoming more
distant.

Simon sighed and stooped to straighten the leash a young borzoi had
entangled; the count too sighed and, noticing the snuffbox in his hand,
opened it and took a pinch. "Back!" cried Simon to a borzoi that was
pushing forward out of the wood. The count started and dropped the
snuffbox. Nastasya Ivanovna dismounted to pick it up. The count and
Simon were looking at him.

Then, unexpectedly, as often happens, the sound of the hunt suddenly
approached, as if the hounds in full cry and Daniel ulyulyuing were just
in front of them.

The count turned and saw on his right Mitka staring at him with eyes
starting out of his head, raising his cap and pointing before him to the
other side.

"Look out!" he shouted, in a voice plainly showing that he had long
fretted to utter that word, and letting the borzois slip he galloped
toward the count.

The count and Simon galloped out of the wood and saw on their left a
wolf which, softly swaying from side to side, was coming at a quiet
lope farther to the left to the very place where they were standing.
The angry borzois whined and getting free of the leash rushed past the
horses' feet at the wolf.

The wolf paused, turned its heavy forehead toward the dogs awkwardly,
like a man suffering from the quinsy, and, still slightly swaying
from side to side, gave a couple of leaps and with a swish of its tail
disappeared into the skirt of the wood. At the same instant, with a cry
like a wail, first one hound, then another, and then another, sprang
helter-skelter from the wood opposite and the whole pack rushed across
the field toward the very spot where the wolf had disappeared. The hazel
bushes parted behind the hounds and Daniel's chestnut horse appeared,
dark with sweat. On its long back sat Daniel, hunched forward, capless,
his disheveled gray hair hanging over his flushed, perspiring face.

"Ulyulyulyu! ulyulyu!..." he cried. When he caught sight of the count
his eyes flashed lightning.

"Blast you!" he shouted, holding up his whip threateningly at the count.

"You've let the wolf go!... What sportsmen!" and as if scorning to
say more to the frightened and shamefaced count, he lashed the heaving
flanks of his sweating chestnut gelding with all the anger the count
had aroused and flew off after the hounds. The count, like a punished
schoolboy, looked round, trying by a smile to win Simon's sympathy for
his plight. But Simon was no longer there. He was galloping round by the
bushes while the field was coming up on both sides, all trying to head
the wolf, but it vanished into the wood before they could do so.





CHAPTER V


Nicholas Rostov meanwhile remained at his post, waiting for the wolf. By
the way the hunt approached and receded, by the cries of the dogs
whose notes were familiar to him, by the way the voices of the huntsmen
approached, receded, and rose, he realized what was happening at the
copse. He knew that young and old wolves were there, that the hounds had
separated into two packs, that somewhere a wolf was being chased, and
that something had gone wrong. He expected the wolf to come his way any
moment. He made thousands of different conjectures as to where and
from what side the beast would come and how he would set upon it. Hope
alternated with despair. Several times he addressed a prayer to God
that the wolf should come his way. He prayed with that passionate and
shamefaced feeling with which men pray at moments of great excitement
arising from trivial causes. "What would it be to Thee to do this for
me?" he said to God. "I know Thou art great, and that it is a sin to ask
this of Thee, but for God's sake do let the old wolf come my way and
let Karay spring at it--in sight of 'Uncle' who is watching from over
there--and seize it by the throat in a death grip!" A thousand times
during that half-hour Rostov cast eager and restless glances over the
edge of the wood, with the two scraggy oaks rising above the aspen
undergrowth and the gully with its water-worn side and "Uncle's" cap
just visible above the bush on his right.

"No, I shan't have such luck," thought Rostov, "yet what wouldn't it
be worth! It is not to be! Everywhere, at cards and in war, I am always
unlucky." Memories of Austerlitz and of Dolokhov flashed rapidly and
clearly through his mind. "Only once in my life to get an old wolf, I
want only that!" thought he, straining eyes and ears and looking to the
left and then to the right and listening to the slightest variation of
note in the cries of the dogs.

Again he looked to the right and saw something running toward him across
the deserted field. "No, it can't be!" thought Rostov, taking a deep
breath, as a man does at the coming of something long hoped for. The
height of happiness was reached--and so simply, without warning, or
noise, or display, that Rostov could not believe his eyes and remained
in doubt for over a second. The wolf ran forward and jumped heavily over
a gully that lay in her path. She was an old animal with a gray back and
big reddish belly. She ran without hurry, evidently feeling sure that
no one saw her. Rostov, holding his breath, looked round at the borzois.
They stood or lay not seeing the wolf or understanding the situation.
Old Karay had turned his head and was angrily searching for fleas,
baring his yellow teeth and snapping at his hind legs.

"Ulyulyulyu!" whispered Rostov, pouting his lips. The borzois jumped up,
jerking the rings of the leashes and pricking their ears. Karay finished
scratching his hindquarters and, cocking his ears, got up with quivering
tail from which tufts of matted hair hung down.

"Shall I loose them or not?" Nicholas asked himself as the wolf
approached him coming from the copse. Suddenly the wolf's whole
physiognomy changed: she shuddered, seeing what she had probably never
seen before--human eyes fixed upon her--and turning her head a little
toward Rostov, she paused.

"Back or forward? Eh, no matter, forward..." the wolf seemed to say to
herself, and she moved forward without again looking round and with a
quiet, long, easy yet resolute lope.

"Ulyulyu!" cried Nicholas, in a voice not his own, and of its own accord
his good horse darted headlong downhill, leaping over gullies to head
off the wolf, and the borzois passed it, running faster still. Nicholas
did not hear his own cry nor feel that he was galloping, nor see the
borzois, nor the ground over which he went: he saw only the wolf, who,
increasing her speed, bounded on in the same direction along the hollow.
The first to come into view was Milka, with her black markings and
powerful quarters, gaining upon the wolf. Nearer and nearer... now she
was ahead of it; but the wolf turned its head to face her, and instead
of putting on speed as she usually did Milka suddenly raised her tail
and stiffened her forelegs.

"Ulyulyulyulyu!" shouted Nicholas.

The reddish Lyubim rushed forward from behind Milka, sprang impetuously
at the wolf, and seized it by its hindquarters, but immediately jumped
aside in terror. The wolf crouched, gnashed her teeth, and again rose
and bounded forward, followed at the distance of a couple of feet by all
the borzois, who did not get any closer to her.

"She'll get away! No, it's impossible!" thought Nicholas, still shouting
with a hoarse voice.

"Karay, ulyulyu!..." he shouted, looking round for the old borzoi who
was now his only hope. Karay, with all the strength age had left him,
stretched himself to the utmost and, watching the wolf, galloped heavily
aside to intercept it. But the quickness of the wolf's lope and the
borzoi's slower pace made it plain that Karay had miscalculated.
Nicholas could already see not far in front of him the wood where the
wolf would certainly escape should she reach it. But, coming toward
him, he saw hounds and a huntsman galloping almost straight at the wolf.
There was still hope. A long, yellowish young borzoi, one Nicholas did
not know, from another leash, rushed impetuously at the wolf from in
front and almost knocked her over. But the wolf jumped up more quickly
than anyone could have expected and, gnashing her teeth, flew at the
yellowish borzoi, which, with a piercing yelp, fell with its head on the
ground, bleeding from a gash in its side.

"Karay? Old fellow!..." wailed Nicholas.

Thanks to the delay caused by this crossing of the wolf's path, the old
dog with its felted hair hanging from its thigh was within five paces of
it. As if aware of her danger, the wolf turned her eyes on Karay, tucked
her tail yet further between her legs, and increased her speed. But
here Nicholas only saw that something happened to Karay--the borzoi was
suddenly on the wolf, and they rolled together down into a gully just in
front of them.

That instant, when Nicholas saw the wolf struggling in the gully
with the dogs, while from under them could be seen her gray hair and
outstretched hind leg and her frightened choking head, with her ears
laid back (Karay was pinning her by the throat), was the happiest moment
of his life. With his hand on his saddlebow, he was ready to dismount
and stab the wolf, when she suddenly thrust her head up from among that
mass of dogs, and then her forepaws were on the edge of the gully. She
clicked her teeth (Karay no longer had her by the throat), leaped with
a movement of her hind legs out of the gully, and having disengaged
herself from the dogs, with tail tucked in again, went forward. Karay,
his hair bristling, and probably bruised or wounded, climbed with
difficulty out of the gully.

"Oh my God! Why?" Nicholas cried in despair.

"Uncle's" huntsman was galloping from the other side across the wolf's
path and his borzois once more stopped the animal's advance. She was
again hemmed in.

Nicholas and his attendant, with "Uncle" and his huntsman, were all
riding round the wolf, crying "ulyulyu!" shouting and preparing to
dismount each moment that the wolf crouched back, and starting forward
again every time she shook herself and moved toward the wood where she
would be safe.

Already, at the beginning of this chase, Daniel, hearing the ulyulyuing,
had rushed out from the wood. He saw Karay seize the wolf, and checked
his horse, supposing the affair to be over. But when he saw that the
horsemen did not dismount and that the wolf shook herself and ran for
safety, Daniel set his chestnut galloping, not at the wolf but straight
toward the wood, just as Karay had run to cut the animal off. As a
result of this, he galloped up to the wolf just when she had been
stopped a second time by "Uncle's" borzois.

Daniel galloped up silently, holding a naked dagger in his left hand and
thrashing the laboring sides of his chestnut horse with his whip as if
it were a flail.

Nicholas neither saw nor heard Daniel until the chestnut, breathing
heavily, panted past him, and he heard the fall of a body and saw Daniel
lying on the wolf's back among the dogs, trying to seize her by the
ears. It was evident to the dogs, the hunters, and to the wolf herself
that all was now over. The terrified wolf pressed back her ears and
tried to rise, but the borzois stuck to her. Daniel rose a little, took
a step, and with his whole weight, as if lying down to rest, fell on
the wolf, seizing her by the ears. Nicholas was about to stab her, but
Daniel whispered, "Don't! We'll gag her!" and, changing his position,
set his foot on the wolf's neck. A stick was thrust between her jaws
and she was fastened with a leash, as if bridled, her legs were bound
together, and Daniel rolled her over once or twice from side to side.

With happy, exhausted faces, they laid the old wolf, alive, on a shying
and snorting horse and, accompanied by the dogs yelping at her, took her
to the place where they were all to meet. The hounds had killed two of
the cubs and the borzois three. The huntsmen assembled with their booty
and their stories, and all came to look at the wolf, which, with her
broad-browed head hanging down and the bitten stick between her jaws,
gazed with great glassy eyes at this crowd of dogs and men surrounding
her. When she was touched, she jerked her bound legs and looked wildly
yet simply at everybody. Old Count Rostov also rode up and touched the
wolf.

"Oh, what a formidable one!" said he. "A formidable one, eh?" he asked
Daniel, who was standing near.

"Yes, your excellency," answered Daniel, quickly doffing his cap.

The count remembered the wolf he had let slip and his encounter with
Daniel.

"Ah, but you are a crusty fellow, friend!" said the count.

For sole reply Daniel gave him a shy, childlike, meek, and amiable
smile.





CHAPTER VI


The old count went home, and Natasha and Petya promised to return very
soon, but as it was still early the hunt went farther. At midday
they put the hounds into a ravine thickly overgrown with young trees.
Nicholas standing in a fallow field could see all his whips.

Facing him lay a field of winter rye, there his own huntsman stood alone
in a hollow behind a hazel bush. The hounds had scarcely been loosed
before Nicholas heard one he knew, Voltorn, giving tongue at intervals;
other hounds joined in, now pausing and now again giving tongue. A
moment later he heard a cry from the wooded ravine that a fox had been
found, and the whole pack, joining together, rushed along the ravine
toward the ryefield and away from Nicholas.

He saw the whips in their red caps galloping along the edge of the
ravine, he even saw the hounds, and was expecting a fox to show itself
at any moment on the ryefield opposite.

The huntsman standing in the hollow moved and loosed his borzois, and
Nicholas saw a queer, short-legged red fox with a fine brush going hard
across the field. The borzois bore down on it.... Now they drew close
to the fox which began to dodge between the field in sharper and sharper
curves, trailing its brush, when suddenly a strange white borzoi dashed
in followed by a black one, and everything was in confusion; the borzois
formed a star-shaped figure, scarcely swaying their bodies and with
tails turned away from the center of the group. Two huntsmen galloped up
to the dogs; one in a red cap, the other, a stranger, in a green coat.

"What's this?" thought Nicholas. "Where's that huntsman from? He is not
'Uncle's' man."

The huntsmen got the fox, but stayed there a long time without strapping
it to the saddle. Their horses, bridled and with high saddles, stood
near them and there too the dogs were lying. The huntsmen waved their
arms and did something to the fox. Then from that spot came the sound of
a horn, with the signal agreed on in case of a fight.

"That's Ilagin's huntsman having a row with our Ivan," said Nicholas'
groom.

Nicholas sent the man to call Natasha and Petya to him, and rode at a
footpace to the place where the whips were getting the hounds together.
Several of the field galloped to the spot where the fight was going on.

Nicholas dismounted, and with Natasha and Petya, who had ridden up,
stopped near the hounds, waiting to see how the matter would end. Out of
the bushes came the huntsman who had been fighting and rode toward
his young master, with the fox tied to his crupper. While still at a
distance he took off his cap and tried to speak respectfully, but he was
pale and breathless and his face was angry. One of his eyes was black,
but he probably was not even aware of it.

"What has happened?" asked Nicholas.

"A likely thing, killing a fox our dogs had hunted! And it was my gray
bitch that caught it! Go to law, indeed!... He snatches at the fox! I
gave him one with the fox. Here it is on my saddle! Do you want a taste
of this?..." said the huntsman, pointing to his dagger and probably
imagining himself still speaking to his foe.

Nicholas, not stopping to talk to the man, asked his sister and Petya to
wait for him and rode to the spot where the enemy's, Ilagin's, hunting
party was.

The victorious huntsman rode off to join the field, and there,
surrounded by inquiring sympathizers, recounted his exploits.

The facts were that Ilagin, with whom the Rostovs had a quarrel and were
at law, hunted over places that belonged by custom to the Rostovs, and
had now, as if purposely, sent his men to the very woods the Rostovs
were hunting and let his man snatch a fox their dogs had chased.

Nicholas, though he had never seen Ilagin, with his usual absence
of moderation in judgment, hated him cordially from reports of his
arbitrariness and violence, and regarded him as his bitterest foe. He
rode in angry agitation toward him, firmly grasping his whip and fully
prepared to take the most resolute and desperate steps to punish his
enemy.

Hardly had he passed an angle of the wood before a stout gentleman in
a beaver cap came riding toward him on a handsome raven-black horse,
accompanied by two hunt servants.

Instead of an enemy, Nicholas found in Ilagin a stately and courteous
gentleman who was particularly anxious to make the young count's
acquaintance. Having ridden up to Nicholas, Ilagin raised his beaver
cap and said he much regretted what had occurred and would have the man
punished who had allowed himself to seize a fox hunted by someone else's
borzois. He hoped to become better acquainted with the count and invited
him to draw his covert.

Natasha, afraid that her brother would do something dreadful, had
followed him in some excitement. Seeing the enemies exchanging friendly
greetings, she rode up to them. Ilagin lifted his beaver cap still
higher to Natasha and said, with a pleasant smile, that the young
countess resembled Diana in her passion for the chase as well as in her
beauty, of which he had heard much.

To expiate his huntsman's offense, Ilagin pressed the Rostovs to come to
an upland of his about a mile away which he usually kept for himself and
which, he said, swarmed with hares. Nicholas agreed, and the hunt, now
doubled, moved on.

The way to Iligin's upland was across the fields. The hunt servants fell
into line. The masters rode together. "Uncle," Rostov, and Ilagin kept
stealthily glancing at one another's dogs, trying not to be observed by
their companions and searching uneasily for rivals to their own borzois.

Rostov was particularly struck by the beauty of a small, pure-bred,
red-spotted bitch on Ilagin's leash, slender but with muscles like
steel, a delicate muzzle, and prominent black eyes. He had heard of the
swiftness of Ilagin's borzois, and in that beautiful bitch saw a rival
to his own Milka.

In the middle of a sober conversation begun by Ilagin about the year's
harvest, Nicholas pointed to the red-spotted bitch.

"A fine little bitch, that!" said he in a careless tone. "Is she swift?"

"That one? Yes, she's a good dog, gets what she's after," answered
Ilagin indifferently, of the red-spotted bitch Erza, for which, a year
before, he had given a neighbor three families of house serfs. "So in
your parts, too, the harvest is nothing to boast of, Count?" he went on,
continuing the conversation they had begun. And considering it polite
to return the young count's compliment, Ilagin looked at his borzois
and picked out Milka who attracted his attention by her breadth. "That
black-spotted one of yours is fine--well shaped!" said he.

"Yes, she's fast enough," replied Nicholas, and thought: "If only a
full-grown hare would cross the field now I'd show you what sort of
borzoi she is," and turning to his groom, he said he would give a ruble
to anyone who found a hare.

"I don't understand," continued Ilagin, "how some sportsmen can be so
jealous about game and dogs. For myself, I can tell you, Count, I enjoy
riding in company such as this... what could be better?" (he again
raised his cap to Natasha) "but as for counting skins and what one
takes, I don't care about that."

"Of course not!"

"Or being upset because someone else's borzoi and not mine catches
something. All I care about is to enjoy seeing the chase, is it not so,
Count? For I consider that..."

"A-tu!" came the long-drawn cry of one of the borzoi whippers-in, who
had halted. He stood on a knoll in the stubble, holding his whip aloft,
and again repeated his long-drawn cry, "A-tu!" (This call and the
uplifted whip meant that he saw a sitting hare.)

"Ah, he has found one, I think," said Ilagin carelessly. "Yes, we must
ride up.... Shall we both course it?" answered Nicholas, seeing in Erza
and "Uncle's" red Rugay two rivals he had never yet had a chance of
pitting against his own borzois. "And suppose they outdo my Milka at
once!" he thought as he rode with "Uncle" and Ilagin toward the hare.

"A full-grown one?" asked Ilagin as he approached the whip who had
sighted the hare--and not without agitation he looked round and whistled
to Erza.

"And you, Michael Nikanorovich?" he said, addressing "Uncle."

The latter was riding with a sullen expression on his face.

"How can I join in? Why, you've given a village for each of your
borzois! That's it, come on! Yours are worth thousands. Try yours
against one another, you two, and I'll look on!"

"Rugay, hey, hey!" he shouted. "Rugayushka!" he added, involuntarily by
this diminutive expressing his affection and the hopes he placed on this
red borzoi. Natasha saw and felt the agitation the two elderly men and
her brother were trying to conceal, and was herself excited by it.

The huntsman stood halfway up the knoll holding up his whip and the
gentlefolk rode up to him at a footpace; the hounds that were far off
on the horizon turned away from the hare, and the whips, but not the
gentlefolk, also moved away. All were moving slowly and sedately.

"How is it pointing?" asked Nicholas, riding a hundred paces toward the
whip who had sighted the hare.

But before the whip could reply, the hare, scenting the frost coming
next morning, was unable to rest and leaped up. The pack on leash rushed
downhill in full cry after the hare, and from all sides the borzois that
were not on leash darted after the hounds and the hare. All the hunt,
who had been moving slowly, shouted, "Stop!" calling in the hounds,
while the borzoi whips, with a cry of "A-tu!" galloped across the field
setting the borzois on the hare. The tranquil Ilagin, Nicholas, Natasha,
and "Uncle" flew, reckless of where and how they went, seeing only the
borzois and the hare and fearing only to lose sight even for an instant
of the chase. The hare they had started was a strong and swift one. When
he jumped up he did not run at once, but pricked his ears listening to
the shouting and trampling that resounded from all sides at once. He
took a dozen bounds, not very quickly, letting the borzois gain on him,
and, finally having chosen his direction and realized his danger, laid
back his ears and rushed off headlong. He had been lying in the stubble,
but in front of him was the autumn sowing where the ground was soft.
The two borzois of the huntsman who had sighted him, having been the
nearest, were the first to see and pursue him, but they had not gone far
before Ilagin's red-spotted Erza passed them, got within a length, flew
at the hare with terrible swiftness aiming at his scut, and, thinking
she had seized him, rolled over like a ball. The hare arched his
back and bounded off yet more swiftly. From behind Erza rushed the
broad-haunched, black-spotted Milka and began rapidly gaining on the
hare.

"Milashka, dear!" rose Nicholas' triumphant cry. It looked as if Milka
would immediately pounce on the hare, but she overtook him and flew
past. The hare had squatted. Again the beautiful Erza reached him, but
when close to the hare's scut paused as if measuring the distance, so as
not to make a mistake this time but seize his hind leg.

"Erza, darling!" Ilagin wailed in a voice unlike his own. Erza did not
hearken to his appeal. At the very moment when she would have seized her
prey, the hare moved and darted along the balk between the winter rye
and the stubble. Again Erza and Milka were abreast, running like a pair
of carriage horses, and began to overtake the hare, but it was easier
for the hare to run on the balk and the borzois did not overtake him so
quickly.

"Rugay, Rugayushka! That's it, come on!" came a third voice just then,
and "Uncle's" red borzoi, straining and curving its back, caught up
with the two foremost borzois, pushed ahead of them regardless of the
terrible strain, put on speed close to the hare, knocked it off the balk
onto the ryefield, again put on speed still more viciously, sinking to
his knees in the muddy field, and all one could see was how, muddying
his back, he rolled over with the hare. A ring of borzois surrounded
him. A moment later everyone had drawn up round the crowd of dogs. Only
the delighted "Uncle" dismounted, and cut off a pad, shaking the hare
for the blood to drip off, and anxiously glancing round with restless
eyes while his arms and legs twitched. He spoke without himself knowing
whom to or what about. "That's it, come on! That's a dog!... There,
it has beaten them all, the thousand-ruble as well as the one-ruble
borzois. That's it, come on!" said he, panting and looking wrathfully
around as if he were abusing someone, as if they were all his enemies
and had insulted him, and only now had he at last succeeded in
justifying himself. "There are your thousand-ruble ones.... That's it,
come on!..."

"Rugay, here's a pad for you!" he said, throwing down the hare's muddy
pad. "You've deserved it, that's it, come on!"

"She'd tired herself out, she'd run it down three times by herself,"
said Nicholas, also not listening to anyone and regardless of whether he
were heard or not.

"But what is there in running across it like that?" said Ilagin's groom.

"Once she had missed it and turned it away, any mongrel could take it,"
Ilagin was saying at the same time, breathless from his gallop and his
excitement. At the same moment Natasha, without drawing breath, screamed
joyously, ecstatically, and so piercingly that it set everyone's ear
tingling. By that shriek she expressed what the others expressed by all
talking at once, and it was so strange that she must herself have been
ashamed of so wild a cry and everyone else would have been amazed at it
at any other time. "Uncle" himself twisted up the hare, threw it neatly
and smartly across his horse's back as if by that gesture he meant to
rebuke everybody, and, with an air of not wishing to speak to anyone,
mounted his bay and rode off. The others all followed, dispirited and
shamefaced, and only much later were they able to regain their former
affectation of indifference. For a long time they continued to look at
red Rugay who, his arched back spattered with mud and clanking the ring
of his leash, walked along just behind "Uncle's" horse with the serene
air of a conqueror.

"Well, I am like any other dog as long as it's not a question of
coursing. But when it is, then look out!" his appearance seemed to
Nicholas to be saying.

When, much later, "Uncle" rode up to Nicholas and began talking to him,
he felt flattered that, after what had happened, "Uncle" deigned to
speak to him.





CHAPTER VII


Toward evening Ilagin took leave of Nicholas, who found that they were
so far from home that he accepted "Uncle's" offer that the hunting party
should spend the night in his little village of Mikhaylovna.

"And if you put up at my house that will be better still. That's it,
come on!" said "Uncle." "You see it's damp weather, and you could rest,
and the little countess could be driven home in a trap."

"Uncle's" offer was accepted. A huntsman was sent to Otradnoe for a
trap, while Nicholas rode with Natasha and Petya to "Uncle's" house.

Some five male domestic serfs, big and little, rushed out to the front
porch to meet their master. A score of women serfs, old and young, as
well as children, popped out from the back entrance to have a look at
the hunters who were arriving. The presence of Natasha--a woman, a lady,
and on horseback--raised the curiosity of the serfs to such a degree
that many of them came up to her, stared her in the face, and unabashed
by her presence made remarks about her as though she were some prodigy
on show and not a human being able to hear or understand what was said
about her.

"Arinka! Look, she sits sideways! There she sits and her skirt
dangles.... See, she's got a little hunting horn!"

"Goodness gracious! See her knife?..."

"Isn't she a Tartar!"

"How is it you didn't go head over heels?" asked the boldest of all,
addressing Natasha directly.

"Uncle" dismounted at the porch of his little wooden house which
stood in the midst of an overgrown garden and, after a glance at his
retainers, shouted authoritatively that the superfluous ones should take
themselves off and that all necessary preparations should be made to
receive the guests and the visitors.

The serfs all dispersed. "Uncle" lifted Natasha off her horse and taking
her hand led her up the rickety wooden steps of the porch. The house,
with its bare, unplastered log walls, was not overclean--it did not seem
that those living in it aimed at keeping it spotless--but neither was
it noticeably neglected. In the entry there was a smell of fresh apples,
and wolf and fox skins hung about.

"Uncle" led the visitors through the anteroom into a small hall with a
folding table and red chairs, then into the drawing room with a round
birchwood table and a sofa, and finally into his private room where
there was a tattered sofa, a worn carpet, and portraits of Suvorov, of
the host's father and mother, and of himself in military uniform. The
study smelt strongly of tobacco and dogs. "Uncle" asked his visitors
to sit down and make themselves at home, and then went out of the room.
Rugay, his back still muddy, came into the room and lay down on the
sofa, cleaning himself with his tongue and teeth. Leading from the study
was a passage in which a partition with ragged curtains could be seen.
From behind this came women's laughter and whispers. Natasha, Nicholas,
and Petya took off their wraps and sat down on the sofa. Petya, leaning
on his elbow, fell asleep at once. Natasha and Nicholas were silent.
Their faces glowed, they were hungry and very cheerful. They looked
at one another (now that the hunt was over and they were in the house,
Nicholas no longer considered it necessary to show his manly superiority
over his sister), Natasha gave him a wink, and neither refrained long
from bursting into a peal of ringing laughter even before they had a
pretext ready to account for it.

After a while "Uncle" came in, in a Cossack coat, blue trousers, and
small top boots. And Natasha felt that this costume, the very one she
had regarded with surprise and amusement at Otradnoe, was just the right
thing and not at all worse than a swallow-tail or frock coat. "Uncle"
too was in high spirits and far from being offended by the brother's
and sister's laughter (it could never enter his head that they might be
laughing at his way of life) he himself joined in the merriment.

"That's right, young countess, that's it, come on! I never saw anyone
like her!" said he, offering Nicholas a pipe with a long stem and, with
a practiced motion of three fingers, taking down another that had been
cut short. "She's ridden all day like a man, and is as fresh as ever!"

Soon after "Uncle's" reappearance the door was opened, evidently from
the sound by a barefooted girl, and a stout, rosy, good-looking woman
of about forty, with a double chin and full red lips, entered carrying a
large loaded tray. With hospitable dignity and cordiality in her glance
and in every motion, she looked at the visitors and, with a pleasant
smile, bowed respectfully. In spite of her exceptional stoutness, which
caused her to protrude her chest and stomach and throw back her head,
this woman (who was "Uncle's" housekeeper) trod very lightly. She went
to the table, set down the tray, and with her plump white hands deftly
took from it the bottles and various hors d'oeuvres and dishes and
arranged them on the table. When she had finished, she stepped aside and
stopped at the door with a smile on her face. "Here I am. I am she! Now
do you understand 'Uncle'?" her expression said to Rostov. How could one
help understanding? Not only Nicholas, but even Natasha understood
the meaning of his puckered brow and the happy complacent smile that
slightly puckered his lips when Anisya Fedorovna entered. On the tray
was a bottle of herb wine, different kinds of vodka, pickled mushrooms,
rye cakes made with buttermilk, honey in the comb, still mead and
sparkling mead, apples, nuts (raw and roasted), and nut-and-honey
sweets. Afterwards she brought a freshly roasted chicken, ham, preserves
made with honey, and preserves made with sugar.

All this was the fruit of Anisya Fedorovna's housekeeping, gathered and
prepared by her. The smell and taste of it all had a smack of Anisya
Fedorovna herself: a savor of juiciness, cleanliness, whiteness, and
pleasant smiles.

"Take this, little Lady-Countess!" she kept saying, as she offered
Natasha first one thing and then another.

Natasha ate of everything and thought she had never seen or eaten such
buttermilk cakes, such aromatic jam, such honey-and-nut sweets, or such
a chicken anywhere. Anisya Fedorovna left the room.

After supper, over their cherry brandy, Rostov and "Uncle" talked of
past and future hunts, of Rugay and Ilagin's dogs, while Natasha sat
upright on the sofa and listened with sparkling eyes. She tried several
times to wake Petya that he might eat something, but he only muttered
incoherent words without waking up. Natasha felt so lighthearted and
happy in these novel surroundings that she only feared the trap would
come for her too soon. After a casual pause, such as often occurs
when receiving friends for the first time in one's own house, "Uncle,"
answering a thought that was in his visitors' mind, said:

"This, you see, is how I am finishing my days... Death will come. That's
it, come on! Nothing will remain. Then why harm anyone?"

"Uncle's" face was very significant and even handsome as he said this.
Involuntarily Rostov recalled all the good he had heard about him from
his father and the neighbors. Throughout the whole province "Uncle" had
the reputation of being the most honorable and disinterested of cranks.
They called him in to decide family disputes, chose him as executor,
confided secrets to him, elected him to be a justice and to other posts;
but he always persistently refused public appointments, passing the
autumn and spring in the fields on his bay gelding, sitting at home in
winter, and lying in his overgrown garden in summer.

"Why don't you enter the service, Uncle?"

"I did once, but gave it up. I am not fit for it. That's it, come on! I
can't make head or tail of it. That's for you--I haven't brains enough.
Now, hunting is another matter--that's it, come on! Open the door,
there!" he shouted. "Why have you shut it?"

The door at the end of the passage led to the huntsmen's room, as they
called the room for the hunt servants.

There was a rapid patter of bare feet, and an unseen hand opened the
door into the huntsmen's room, from which came the clear sounds of a
balalayka on which someone, who was evidently a master of the art, was
playing. Natasha had been listening to those strains for some time and
now went out into the passage to hear better.

"That's Mitka, my coachman.... I have got him a good balalayka. I'm fond
of it," said "Uncle."

It was the custom for Mitka to play the balalayka in the huntsmen's room
when "Uncle" returned from the chase. "Uncle" was fond of such music.

"How good! Really very good!" said Nicholas with some unintentional
superciliousness, as if ashamed to confess that the sounds pleased him
very much.

"Very good?" said Natasha reproachfully, noticing her brother's tone.
"Not 'very good' it's simply delicious!"

Just as "Uncle's" pickled mushrooms, honey, and cherry brandy had seemed
to her the best in the world, so also that song, at that moment, seemed
to her the acme of musical delight.

"More, please, more!" cried Natasha at the door as soon as the balalayka
ceased. Mitka tuned up afresh, and recommenced thrumming the balalayka
to the air of My Lady, with trills and variations. "Uncle" sat
listening, slightly smiling, with his head on one side. The air was
repeated a hundred times. The balalayka was retuned several times and
the same notes were thrummed again, but the listeners did not grow weary
of it and wished to hear it again and again. Anisya Fedorovna came in
and leaned her portly person against the doorpost.

"You like listening?" she said to Natasha, with a smile extremely like
"Uncle's." "That's a good player of ours," she added.

"He doesn't play that part right!" said "Uncle" suddenly, with an
energetic gesture. "Here he ought to burst out--that's it, come
on!--ought to burst out."

"Do you play then?" asked Natasha.

"Uncle" did not answer, but smiled.

"Anisya, go and see if the strings of my guitar are all right. I haven't
touched it for a long time. That's it--come on! I've given it up."

Anisya Fedorovna, with her light step, willingly went to fulfill her
errand and brought back the guitar.

Without looking at anyone, "Uncle" blew the dust off it and, tapping the
case with his bony fingers, tuned the guitar and settled himself in his
armchair. He took the guitar a little above the fingerboard, arching
his left elbow with a somewhat theatrical gesture, and, with a wink at
Anisya Fedorovna, struck a single chord, pure and sonorous, and then
quietly, smoothly, and confidently began playing in very slow time, not
My Lady, but the well-known song: Came a maiden down the street. The
tune, played with precision and in exact time, began to thrill in the
hearts of Nicholas and Natasha, arousing in them the same kind of sober
mirth as radiated from Anisya Fedorovna's whole being. Anisya Fedorovna
flushed, and drawing her kerchief over her face went laughing out of
the room. "Uncle" continued to play correctly, carefully, with energetic
firmness, looking with a changed and inspired expression at the spot
where Anisya Fedorovna had just stood. Something seemed to be laughing
a little on one side of his face under his gray mustaches, especially as
the song grew brisker and the time quicker and when, here and there, as
he ran his fingers over the strings, something seemed to snap.

"Lovely, lovely! Go on, Uncle, go on!" shouted Natasha as soon as he had
finished. She jumped up and hugged and kissed him. "Nicholas, Nicholas!"
she said, turning to her brother, as if asking him: "What is it moves me
so?"

Nicholas too was greatly pleased by "Uncle's" playing, and "Uncle"
played the piece over again. Anisya Fedorovna's smiling face reappeared
in the doorway and behind hers other faces...

    Fetching water clear and sweet,
    Stop, dear maiden, I entreat--

played "Uncle" once more, running his fingers skillfully over the
strings, and then he stopped short and jerked his shoulders.

"Go on, Uncle dear," Natasha wailed in an imploring tone as if her life
depended on it.

"Uncle" rose, and it was as if there were two men in him: one of them
smiled seriously at the merry fellow, while the merry fellow struck a
naive and precise attitude preparatory to a folk dance.

"Now then, niece!" he exclaimed, waving to Natasha the hand that had
just struck a chord.

Natasha threw off the shawl from her shoulders, ran forward to face
"Uncle," and setting her arms akimbo also made a motion with her
shoulders and struck an attitude.

Where, how, and when had this young countess, educated by an emigree
French governess, imbibed from the Russian air she breathed that spirit
and obtained that manner which the pas de chale * would, one would have
supposed, long ago have effaced? But the spirit and the movements were
those inimitable and unteachable Russian ones that "Uncle" had expected
of her. As soon as she had struck her pose, and smiled triumphantly,
proudly, and with sly merriment, the fear that had at first seized
Nicholas and the others that she might not do the right thing was at an
end, and they were already admiring her.


    * The French shawl dance.


She did the right thing with such precision, such complete precision,
that Anisya Fedorovna, who had at once handed her the handkerchief she
needed for the dance, had tears in her eyes, though she laughed as she
watched this slim, graceful countess, reared in silks and velvets and so
different from herself, who yet was able to understand all that was in
Anisya and in Anisya's father and mother and aunt, and in every Russian
man and woman.

"Well, little countess; that's it--come on!" cried "Uncle," with a
joyous laugh, having finished the dance. "Well done, niece! Now a fine
young fellow must be found as husband for you. That's it--come on!"

"He's chosen already," said Nicholas smiling.

"Oh?" said "Uncle" in surprise, looking inquiringly at Natasha, who
nodded her head with a happy smile.

"And such a one!" she said. But as soon as she had said it a new train
of thoughts and feelings arose in her. "What did Nicholas' smile mean
when he said 'chosen already'? Is he glad of it or not? It is as if he
thought my Bolkonski would not approve of or understand our gaiety. But
he would understand it all. Where is he now?" she thought, and her face
suddenly became serious. But this lasted only a second. "Don't dare
to think about it," she said to herself, and sat down again smilingly
beside "Uncle," begging him to play something more.

"Uncle" played another song and a valse; then after a pause he cleared
his throat and sang his favorite hunting song:

    As 'twas growing dark last night
    Fell the snow so soft and light...


"Uncle" sang as peasants sing, with full and naive conviction that the
whole meaning of a song lies in the words and that the tune comes of
itself, and that apart from the words there is no tune, which exists
only to give measure to the words. As a result of this the unconsidered
tune, like the song of a bird, was extraordinarily good. Natasha was in
ecstasies over "Uncle's" singing. She resolved to give up learning the
harp and to play only the guitar. She asked "Uncle" for his guitar and
at once found the chords of the song.

After nine o'clock two traps and three mounted men, who had been sent
to look for them, arrived to fetch Natasha and Petya. The count and
countess did not know where they were and were very anxious, said one of
the men.

Petya was carried out like a log and laid in the larger of the two
traps. Natasha and Nicholas got into the other. "Uncle" wrapped
Natasha up warmly and took leave of her with quite a new tenderness. He
accompanied them on foot as far as the bridge that could not be crossed,
so that they had to go round by the ford, and he sent huntsmen to ride
in front with lanterns.

"Good-by, dear niece," his voice called out of the darkness--not the
voice Natasha had known previously, but the one that had sung As 'twas
growing dark last night.

In the village through which they passed there were red lights and a
cheerful smell of smoke.

"What a darling Uncle is!" said Natasha, when they had come out onto the
highroad.

"Yes," returned Nicholas. "You're not cold?"

"No. I'm quite, quite all right. I feel so comfortable!" answered
Natasha, almost perplexed by her feelings. They remained silent a long
while. The night was dark and damp. They could not see the horses, but
only heard them splashing through the unseen mud.

What was passing in that receptive childlike soul that so eagerly caught
and assimilated all the diverse impressions of life? How did they all
find place in her? But she was very happy. As they were nearing home she
suddenly struck up the air of As 'twas growing dark last night--the tune
of which she had all the way been trying to get and had at last caught.

"Got it?" said Nicholas.

"What were you thinking about just now, Nicholas?" inquired Natasha.

They were fond of asking one another that question.

"I?" said Nicholas, trying to remember. "Well, you see, first I thought
that Rugay, the red hound, was like Uncle, and that if he were a man he
would always keep Uncle near him, if not for his riding, then for his
manner. What a good fellow Uncle is! Don't you think so?... Well, and
you?"

"I? Wait a bit, wait.... Yes, first I thought that we are driving along
and imagining that we are going home, but that heaven knows where we are
really going in the darkness, and that we shall arrive and suddenly find
that we are not in Otradnoe, but in Fairyland. And then I thought... No,
nothing else."

"I know, I expect you thought of him," said Nicholas, smiling as Natasha
knew by the sound of his voice.

"No," said Natasha, though she had in reality been thinking about Prince
Andrew at the same time as of the rest, and of how he would have liked
"Uncle." "And then I was saying to myself all the way, 'How well Anisya
carried herself, how well!'" And Nicholas heard her spontaneous, happy,
ringing laughter. "And do you know," she suddenly said, "I know that I
shall never again be as happy and tranquil as I am now."

"Rubbish, nonsense, humbug!" exclaimed Nicholas, and he thought: "How
charming this Natasha of mine is! I have no other friend like her and
never shall have. Why should she marry? We might always drive about
together!"

"What a darling this Nicholas of mine is!" thought Natasha.

"Ah, there are still lights in the drawingroom!" she said, pointing to
the windows of the house that gleamed invitingly in the moist velvety
darkness of the night.





CHAPTER VIII


Count Ilya Rostov had resigned the position of Marshal of the Nobility
because it involved him in too much expense, but still his affairs did
not improve. Natasha and Nicholas often noticed their parents conferring
together anxiously and privately and heard suggestions of selling the
fine ancestral Rostov house and estate near Moscow. It was not necessary
to entertain so freely as when the count had been Marshal, and life at
Otradnoe was quieter than in former years, but still the enormous house
and its lodges were full of people and more than twenty sat down to
table every day. These were all their own people who had settled down
in the house almost as members of the family, or persons who were, it
seemed, obliged to live in the count's house. Such were Dimmler the
musician and his wife, Vogel the dancing master and his family, Belova,
an old maiden lady, an inmate of the house, and many others such as
Petya's tutors, the girls' former governess, and other people who simply
found it preferable and more advantageous to live in the count's house
than at home. They had not as many visitors as before, but the old
habits of life without which the count and countess could not
conceive of existence remained unchanged. There was still the hunting
establishment which Nicholas had even enlarged, the same fifty horses
and fifteen grooms in the stables, the same expensive presents and
dinner parties to the whole district on name days; there were still the
count's games of whist and boston, at which--spreading out his cards so
that everybody could see them--he let himself be plundered of hundreds
of rubles every day by his neighbors, who looked upon an opportunity to
play a rubber with Count Rostov as a most profitable source of income.

The count moved in his affairs as in a huge net, trying not to believe
that he was entangled but becoming more and more so at every step, and
feeling too feeble to break the meshes or to set to work carefully and
patiently to disentangle them. The countess, with her loving heart, felt
that her children were being ruined, that it was not the count's fault
for he could not help being what he was--that (though he tried to
hide it) he himself suffered from the consciousness of his own and his
children's ruin, and she tried to find means of remedying the position.
From her feminine point of view she could see only one solution, namely,
for Nicholas to marry a rich heiress. She felt this to be their last
hope and that if Nicholas refused the match she had found for him, she
would have to abandon the hope of ever getting matters right. This match
was with Julie Karagina, the daughter of excellent and virtuous parents,
a girl the Rostovs had known from childhood, and who had now become a
wealthy heiress through the death of the last of her brothers.

The countess had written direct to Julie's mother in Moscow suggesting a
marriage between their children and had received a favorable answer
from her. Karagina had replied that for her part she was agreeable, and
everything depend on her daughter's inclination. She invited Nicholas to
come to Moscow.

Several times the countess, with tears in her eyes, told her son that
now both her daughters were settled, her only wish was to see him
married. She said she could lie down in her grave peacefully if that
were accomplished. Then she told him that she knew of a splendid girl
and tried to discover what he thought about marriage.

At other times she praised Julie to him and advised him to go to Moscow
during the holidays to amuse himself. Nicholas guessed what his mother's
remarks were leading to and during one of these conversations induced
her to speak quite frankly. She told him that her only hope of getting
their affairs disentangled now lay in his marrying Julie Karagina.

"But, Mamma, suppose I loved a girl who has no fortune, would you expect
me to sacrifice my feelings and my honor for the sake of money?" he
asked his mother, not realizing the cruelty of his question and only
wishing to show his noble-mindedness.

"No, you have not understood me," said his mother, not knowing how to
justify herself. "You have not understood me, Nikolenka. It is your
happiness I wish for," she added, feeling that she was telling an
untruth and was becoming entangled. She began to cry.

"Mamma, don't cry! Only tell me that you wish it, and you know I will
give my life, anything, to put you at ease," said Nicholas. "I would
sacrifice anything for you--even my feelings."

But the countess did not want the question put like that: she did not
want a sacrifice from her son, she herself wished to make a sacrifice
for him.

"No, you have not understood me, don't let us talk about it," she
replied, wiping away her tears.

"Maybe I do love a poor girl," said Nicholas to himself. "Am I to
sacrifice my feelings and my honor for money? I wonder how Mamma could
speak so to me. Because Sonya is poor I must not love her," he thought,
"must not respond to her faithful, devoted love? Yet I should certainly
be happier with her than with some doll-like Julie. I can always
sacrifice my feelings for my family's welfare," he said to himself,
"but I can't coerce my feelings. If I love Sonya, that feeling is for me
stronger and higher than all else."

Nicholas did not go to Moscow, and the countess did not renew the
conversation with him about marriage. She saw with sorrow, and sometimes
with exasperation, symptoms of a growing attachment between her son and
the portionless Sonya. Though she blamed herself for it, she could
not refrain from grumbling at and worrying Sonya, often pulling her
up without reason, addressing her stiffly as "my dear," and using the
formal "you" instead of the intimate "thou" in speaking to her. The
kindhearted countess was the more vexed with Sonya because that poor,
dark-eyed niece of hers was so meek, so kind, so devotedly grateful to
her benefactors, and so faithfully, unchangingly, and unselfishly in
love with Nicholas, that there were no grounds for finding fault with
her.

Nicholas was spending the last of his leave at home. A fourth letter had
come from Prince Andrew, from Rome, in which he wrote that he would have
been on his way back to Russia long ago had not his wound unexpectedly
reopened in the warm climate, which obliged him to defer his return till
the beginning of the new year. Natasha was still as much in love with
her betrothed, found the same comfort in that love, and was still as
ready to throw herself into all the pleasures of life as before; but at
the end of the fourth month of their separation she began to have fits
of depression which she could not master. She felt sorry for herself:
sorry that she was being wasted all this time and of no use to
anyone--while she felt herself so capable of loving and being loved.

Things were not cheerful in the Rostovs' home.





CHAPTER IX


Christmas came and except for the ceremonial Mass, the solemn and
wearisome Christmas congratulations from neighbors and servants, and the
new dresses everyone put on, there were no special festivities, though
the calm frost of twenty degrees Reaumur, the dazzling sunshine by day,
and the starlight of the winter nights seemed to call for some special
celebration of the season.

On the third day of Christmas week, after the midday dinner, all the
inmates of the house dispersed to various rooms. It was the dullest time
of the day. Nicholas, who had been visiting some neighbors that morning,
was asleep on the sitting-room sofa. The old count was resting in his
study. Sonya sat in the drawing room at the round table, copying a
design for embroidery. The countess was playing patience. Nastasya
Ivanovna the buffoon sat with a sad face at the window with two old
ladies. Natasha came into the room, went up to Sonya, glanced at
what she was doing, and then went up to her mother and stood without
speaking.

"Why are you wandering about like an outcast?" asked her mother. "What
do you want?"

"Him... I want him... now, this minute! I want him!" said Natasha, with
glittering eyes and no sign of a smile.

The countess lifted her head and looked attentively at her daughter.

"Don't look at me, Mamma! Don't look; I shall cry directly."

"Sit down with me a little," said the countess.

"Mamma, I want him. Why should I be wasted like this, Mamma?"

Her voice broke, tears gushed from her eyes, and she turned quickly to
hide them and left the room.

She passed into the sitting room, stood there thinking awhile, and then
went into the maids' room. There an old maidservant was grumbling at a
young girl who stood panting, having just run in through the cold from
the serfs' quarters.

"Stop playing--there's a time for everything," said the old woman.

"Let her alone, Kondratevna," said Natasha. "Go, Mavrushka, go."

Having released Mavrushka, Natasha crossed the dancing hall and went
to the vestibule. There an old footman and two young ones were playing
cards. They broke off and rose as she entered.

"What can I do with them?" thought Natasha.

"Oh, Nikita, please go... where can I send him?... Yes, go to the yard
and fetch a fowl, please, a cock, and you, Misha, bring me some oats."

"Just a few oats?" said Misha, cheerfully and readily.

"Go, go quickly," the old man urged him.

"And you, Theodore, get me a piece of chalk."

On her way past the butler's pantry she told them to set a samovar,
though it was not at all the time for tea.

Foka, the butler, was the most ill-tempered person in the house. Natasha
liked to test her power over him. He distrusted the order and asked
whether the samovar was really wanted.

"Oh dear, what a young lady!" said Foka, pretending to frown at Natasha.

No one in the house sent people about or gave them as much trouble as
Natasha did. She could not see people unconcernedly, but had to send
them on some errand. She seemed to be trying whether any of them would
get angry or sulky with her; but the serfs fulfilled no one's orders so
readily as they did hers. "What can I do, where can I go?" thought she,
as she went slowly along the passage.

"Nastasya Ivanovna, what sort of children shall I have?" she asked the
buffoon, who was coming toward her in a woman's jacket.

"Why, fleas, crickets, grasshoppers," answered the buffoon.

"O Lord, O Lord, it's always the same! Oh, where am I to go? What am I
to do with myself?" And tapping with her heels, she ran quickly upstairs
to see Vogel and his wife who lived on the upper story.

Two governesses were sitting with the Vogels at a table, on which were
plates of raisins, walnuts, and almonds. The governesses were discussing
whether it was cheaper to live in Moscow or Odessa. Natasha sat down,
listened to their talk with a serious and thoughtful air, and then got
up again.

"The island of Madagascar," she said, "Ma-da-gas-car," she repeated,
articulating each syllable distinctly, and, not replying to Madame
Schoss who asked her what she was saying, she went out of the room.

Her brother Petya was upstairs too; with the man in attendance on him he
was preparing fireworks to let off that night.

"Petya! Petya!" she called to him. "Carry me downstairs."

Petya ran up and offered her his back. She jumped on it, putting her
arms round his neck, and he pranced along with her.

"No, don't... the island of Madagascar!" she said, and jumping off his
back she went downstairs.

Having as it were reviewed her kingdom, tested her power, and made sure
that everyone was submissive, but that all the same it was dull, Natasha
betook herself to the ballroom, picked up her guitar, sat down in a dark
corner behind a bookcase, and began to run her fingers over the strings
in the bass, picking out a passage she recalled from an opera she had
heard in Petersburg with Prince Andrew. What she drew from the guitar
would have had no meaning for other listeners, but in her imagination
a whole series of reminiscences arose from those sounds. She sat behind
the bookcase with her eyes fixed on a streak of light escaping from the
pantry door and listened to herself and pondered. She was in a mood for
brooding on the past.

Sonya passed to the pantry with a glass in her hand. Natasha glanced at
her and at the crack in the pantry door, and it seemed to her that she
remembered the light falling through that crack once before and Sonya
passing with a glass in her hand. "Yes it was exactly the same," thought
Natasha.

"Sonya, what is this?" she cried, twanging a thick string.

"Oh, you are there!" said Sonya with a start, and came near and
listened. "I don't know. A storm?" she ventured timidly, afraid of being
wrong.

"There! That's just how she started and just how she came up smiling
timidly when all this happened before," thought Natasha, "and in just
the same way I thought there was something lacking in her."

"No, it's the chorus from The Water-Carrier, listen!" and Natasha sang
the air of the chorus so that Sonya should catch it. "Where were you
going?" she asked.

"To change the water in this glass. I am just finishing the design."

"You always find something to do, but I can't," said Natasha. "And
where's Nicholas?"

"Asleep, I think."

"Sonya, go and wake him," said Natasha. "Tell him I want him to come and
sing."

She sat awhile, wondering what the meaning of it all having happened
before could be, and without solving this problem, or at all regretting
not having done so, she again passed in fancy to the time when she was
with him and he was looking at her with a lover's eyes.

"Oh, if only he would come quicker! I am so afraid it will never be!
And, worst of all, I am growing old--that's the thing! There won't then
be in me what there is now. But perhaps he'll come today, will come
immediately. Perhaps he has come and is sitting in the drawing room.
Perhaps he came yesterday and I have forgotten it." She rose, put down
the guitar, and went to the drawing room.

All the domestic circle, tutors, governesses, and guests, were already
at the tea table. The servants stood round the table--but Prince Andrew
was not there and life was going on as before.

"Ah, here she is!" said the old count, when he saw Natasha enter. "Well,
sit down by me." But Natasha stayed by her mother and glanced round as
if looking for something.

"Mamma!" she muttered, "give him to me, give him, Mamma, quickly,
quickly!" and she again had difficulty in repressing her sobs.

She sat down at the table and listened to the conversation between the
elders and Nicholas, who had also come to the table. "My God, my God!
The same faces, the same talk, Papa holding his cup and blowing in the
same way!" thought Natasha, feeling with horror a sense of repulsion
rising up in her for the whole household, because they were always the
same.

After tea, Nicholas, Sonya, and Natasha went to the sitting room, to
their favorite corner where their most intimate talks always began.





CHAPTER X


"Does it ever happen to you," said Natasha to her brother, when they
settled down in the sitting room, "does it ever happen to you to feel
as if there were nothing more to come--nothing; that everything good is
past? And to feel not exactly dull, but sad?"

"I should think so!" he replied. "I have felt like that when everything
was all right and everyone was cheerful. The thought has come into my
mind that I was already tired of it all, and that we must all die.
Once in the regiment I had not gone to some merrymaking where there was
music... and suddenly I felt so depressed..."

"Oh yes, I know, I know, I know!" Natasha interrupted him. "When I was
quite little that used to be so with me. Do you remember when I was
punished once about some plums? You were all dancing, and I sat sobbing
in the schoolroom? I shall never forget it: I felt sad and sorry for
everyone, for myself, and for everyone. And I was innocent--that was the
chief thing," said Natasha. "Do you remember?"

"I remember," answered Nicholas. "I remember that I came to you
afterwards and wanted to comfort you, but do you know, I felt ashamed
to. We were terribly absurd. I had a funny doll then and wanted to give
it to you. Do you remember?"

"And do you remember," Natasha asked with a pensive smile, "how once,
long, long ago, when we were quite little, Uncle called us into the
study--that was in the old house--and it was dark--we went in and
suddenly there stood..."

"A Negro," chimed in Nicholas with a smile of delight. "Of course I
remember. Even now I don't know whether there really was a Negro, or if
we only dreamed it or were told about him."

"He was gray, you remember, and had white teeth, and stood and looked at
us..."

"Sonya, do you remember?" asked Nicholas.

"Yes, yes, I do remember something too," Sonya answered timidly.

"You know I have asked Papa and Mamma about that Negro," said Natasha,
"and they say there was no Negro at all. But you see, you remember!"

"Of course I do, I remember his teeth as if I had just seen them."

"How strange it is! It's as if it were a dream! I like that."

"And do you remember how we rolled hard-boiled eggs in the ballroom, and
suddenly two old women began spinning round on the carpet? Was that real
or not? Do you remember what fun it was?"

"Yes, and you remember how Papa in his blue overcoat fired a gun in the
porch?"

So they went through their memories, smiling with pleasure: not the sad
memories of old age, but poetic, youthful ones--those impressions of
one's most distant past in which dreams and realities blend--and they
laughed with quiet enjoyment.

Sonya, as always, did not quite keep pace with them, though they shared
the same reminiscences.

Much that they remembered had slipped from her mind, and what she
recalled did not arouse the same poetic feeling as they experienced. She
simply enjoyed their pleasure and tried to fit in with it.

She only really took part when they recalled Sonya's first arrival. She
told them how afraid she had been of Nicholas because he had on a corded
jacket and her nurse had told her that she, too, would be sewn up with
cords.

"And I remember their telling me that you had been born under a
cabbage," said Natasha, "and I remember that I dared not disbelieve it
then, but knew that it was not true, and I felt so uncomfortable."

While they were talking a maid thrust her head in at the other door of
the sitting room.

"They have brought the cock, Miss," she said in a whisper.

"It isn't wanted, Petya. Tell them to take it away," replied Natasha.

In the middle of their talk in the sitting room, Dimmler came in and
went up to the harp that stood there in a corner. He took off its cloth
covering, and the harp gave out a jarring sound.

"Mr. Dimmler, please play my favorite nocturne by Field," came the old
countess' voice from the drawing room.

Dimmler struck a chord and, turning to Natasha, Nicholas, and Sonya,
remarked: "How quiet you young people are!"

"Yes, we're philosophizing," said Natasha, glancing round for a moment
and then continuing the conversation. They were now discussing dreams.

Dimmler began to play; Natasha went on tiptoe noiselessly to the table,
took up a candle, carried it out, and returned, seating herself quietly
in her former place. It was dark in the room especially where they were
sitting on the sofa, but through the big windows the silvery light of
the full moon fell on the floor. Dimmler had finished the piece but
still sat softly running his fingers over the strings, evidently
uncertain whether to stop or to play something else.

"Do you know," said Natasha in a whisper, moving closer to Nicholas and
Sonya, "that when one goes on and on recalling memories, one at last
begins to remember what happened before one was in the world..."

"That is metempsychosis," said Sonya, who had always learned well, and
remembered everything. "The Egyptians believed that our souls have lived
in animals, and will go back into animals again."

"No, I don't believe we ever were in animals," said Natasha, still in
a whisper though the music had ceased. "But I am certain that we
were angels somewhere there, and have been here, and that is why we
remember...."

"May I join you?" said Dimmler who had come up quietly, and he sat down
by them.

"If we have been angels, why have we fallen lower?" said Nicholas. "No,
that can't be!"

"Not lower, who said we were lower?... How do I know what I was before?"
Natasha rejoined with conviction. "The soul is immortal--well then, if I
shall always live I must have lived before, lived for a whole eternity."

"Yes, but it is hard for us to imagine eternity," remarked Dimmler,
who had joined the young folk with a mildly condescending smile but now
spoke as quietly and seriously as they.

"Why is it hard to imagine eternity?" said Natasha. "It is now today,
and it will be tomorrow, and always; and there was yesterday, and the
day before..."

"Natasha! Now it's your turn. Sing me something," they heard the
countess say. "Why are you sitting there like conspirators?"

"Mamma, I don't at all want to," replied Natasha, but all the same she
rose.

None of them, not even the middle-aged Dimmler, wanted to break off
their conversation and quit that corner in the sitting room, but Natasha
got up and Nicholas sat down at the clavichord. Standing as usual in the
middle of the hall and choosing the place where the resonance was best,
Natasha began to sing her mother's favorite song.

She had said she did not want to sing, but it was long since she had
sung, and long before she again sang, as she did that evening. The
count, from his study where he was talking to Mitenka, heard her and,
like a schoolboy in a hurry to run out to play, blundered in his talk
while giving orders to the steward, and at last stopped, while Mitenka
stood in front of him also listening and smiling. Nicholas did not take
his eyes off his sister and drew breath in time with her. Sonya, as she
listened, thought of the immense difference there was between herself
and her friend, and how impossible it was for her to be anything like as
bewitching as her cousin. The old countess sat with a blissful yet sad
smile and with tears in her eyes, occasionally shaking her head. She
thought of Natasha and of her own youth, and of how there was something
unnatural and dreadful in this impending marriage of Natasha and Prince
Andrew.

Dimmler, who had seated himself beside the countess, listened with
closed eyes.

"Ah, Countess," he said at last, "that's a European talent, she has
nothing to learn--what softness, tenderness, and strength...."

"Ah, how afraid I am for her, how afraid I am!" said the countess, not
realizing to whom she was speaking. Her maternal instinct told her that
Natasha had too much of something, and that because of this she would
not be happy. Before Natasha had finished singing, fourteen-year-old
Petya rushed in delightedly, to say that some mummers had arrived.

Natasha stopped abruptly.

"Idiot!" she screamed at her brother and, running to a chair, threw
herself on it, sobbing so violently that she could not stop for a long
time.

"It's nothing, Mamma, really it's nothing; only Petya startled me," she
said, trying to smile, but her tears still flowed and sobs still choked
her.

The mummers (some of the house serfs) dressed up as bears, Turks,
innkeepers, and ladies--frightening and funny--bringing in with them the
cold from outside and a feeling of gaiety, crowded, at first timidly,
into the anteroom, then hiding behind one another they pushed into
the ballroom where, shyly at first and then more and more merrily and
heartily, they started singing, dancing, and playing Christmas games.
The countess, when she had identified them and laughed at their
costumes, went into the drawing room. The count sat in the ballroom,
smiling radiantly and applauding the players. The young people had
disappeared.

Half an hour later there appeared among the other mummers in the
ballroom an old lady in a hooped skirt--this was Nicholas. A Turkish
girl was Petya. A clown was Dimmler. An hussar was Natasha, and a
Circassian was Sonya with burnt-cork mustache and eyebrows.

After the condescending surprise, nonrecognition, and praise, from those
who were not themselves dressed up, the young people decided that their
costumes were so good that they ought to be shown elsewhere.

Nicholas, who, as the roads were in splendid condition, wanted to take
them all for a drive in his troyka, proposed to take with them about a
dozen of the serf mummers and drive to "Uncle's."

"No, why disturb the old fellow?" said the countess. "Besides, you
wouldn't have room to turn round there. If you must go, go to the
Melyukovs'."

Melyukova was a widow, who, with her family and their tutors and
governesses, lived three miles from the Rostovs.

"That's right, my dear," chimed in the old count, thoroughly aroused.
"I'll dress up at once and go with them. I'll make Pashette open her
eyes."

But the countess would not agree to his going; he had had a bad leg all
these last days. It was decided that the count must not go, but that
if Louisa Ivanovna (Madame Schoss) would go with them, the young ladies
might go to the Melyukovs', Sonya, generally so timid and shy, more
urgently than anyone begging Louisa Ivanovna not to refuse.

Sonya's costume was the best of all. Her mustache and eyebrows were
extraordinarily becoming. Everyone told her she looked very handsome,
and she was in a spirited and energetic mood unusual with her. Some
inner voice told her that now or never her fate would be decided, and
in her male attire she seemed quite a different person. Louisa Ivanovna
consented to go, and in half an hour four troyka sleighs with large and
small bells, their runners squeaking and whistling over the frozen snow,
drove up to the porch.

Natasha was foremost in setting a merry holiday tone, which, passing
from one to another, grew stronger and reached its climax when they all
came out into the frost and got into the sleighs, talking, calling to
one another, laughing, and shouting.

Two of the troykas were the usual household sleighs, the third was
the old count's with a trotter from the Orlov stud as shaft horse,
the fourth was Nicholas' own with a short shaggy black shaft horse.
Nicholas, in his old lady's dress over which he had belted his hussar
overcoat, stood in the middle of the sleigh, reins in hand.

It was so light that he could see the moonlight reflected from the metal
harness disks and from the eyes of the horses, who looked round in alarm
at the noisy party under the shadow of the porch roof.

Natasha, Sonya, Madame Schoss, and two maids got into Nicholas' sleigh;
Dimmler, his wife, and Petya, into the old count's, and the rest of the
mummers seated themselves in the other two sleighs.

"You go ahead, Zakhar!" shouted Nicholas to his father's coachman,
wishing for a chance to race past him.

The old count's troyka, with Dimmler and his party, started forward,
squeaking on its runners as though freezing to the snow, its deep-toned
bell clanging. The side horses, pressing against the shafts of the
middle horse, sank in the snow, which was dry and glittered like sugar,
and threw it up.

Nicholas set off, following the first sleigh; behind him the others
moved noisily, their runners squeaking. At first they drove at a steady
trot along the narrow road. While they drove past the garden the shadows
of the bare trees often fell across the road and hid the brilliant
moonlight, but as soon as they were past the fence, the snowy plain
bathed in moonlight and motionless spread out before them glittering
like diamonds and dappled with bluish shadows. Bang, bang! went the
first sleigh over a cradle hole in the snow of the road, and each of
the other sleighs jolted in the same way, and rudely breaking the
frost-bound stillness, the troykas began to speed along the road, one
after the other.

"A hare's track, a lot of tracks!" rang out Natasha's voice through the
frost-bound air.

"How light it is, Nicholas!" came Sonya's voice.

Nicholas glanced round at Sonya, and bent down to see her face closer.
Quite a new, sweet face with black eyebrows and mustaches peeped up at
him from her sable furs--so close and yet so distant--in the moonlight.

"That used to be Sonya," thought he, and looked at her closer and
smiled.

"What is it, Nicholas?"

"Nothing," said he and turned again to the horses.

When they came out onto the beaten highroad--polished by sleigh runners
and cut up by rough-shod hoofs, the marks of which were visible in the
moonlight--the horses began to tug at the reins of their own accord and
increased their pace. The near side horse, arching his head and breaking
into a short canter, tugged at his traces. The shaft horse swayed from
side to side, moving his ears as if asking: "Isn't it time to begin
now?" In front, already far ahead the deep bell of the sleigh ringing
farther and farther off, the black horses driven by Zakhar could be
clearly seen against the white snow. From that sleigh one could hear the
shouts, laughter, and voices of the mummers.

"Gee up, my darlings!" shouted Nicholas, pulling the reins to one side
and flourishing the whip.

It was only by the keener wind that met them and the jerks given by the
side horses who pulled harder--ever increasing their gallop--that one
noticed how fast the troyka was flying. Nicholas looked back. With
screams squeals, and waving of whips that caused even the shaft horses
to gallop--the other sleighs followed. The shaft horse swung steadily
beneath the bow over its head, with no thought of slackening pace and
ready to put on speed when required.

Nicholas overtook the first sleigh. They were driving downhill and
coming out upon a broad trodden track across a meadow, near a river.

"Where are we?" thought he. "It's the Kosoy meadow, I suppose. But
no--this is something new I've never seen before. This isn't the Kosoy
meadow nor the Demkin hill, and heaven only knows what it is! It is
something new and enchanted. Well, whatever it may be..." And shouting
to his horses, he began to pass the first sleigh.

Zakhar held back his horses and turned his face, which was already
covered with hoarfrost to his eyebrows.

Nicholas gave the horses the rein, and Zakhar, stretching out his arms,
clucked his tongue and let his horses go.

"Now, look out, master!" he cried.

Faster still the two troykas flew side by side, and faster moved the
feet of the galloping side horses. Nicholas began to draw ahead. Zakhar,
while still keeping his arms extended, raised one hand with the reins.

"No you won't, master!" he shouted.

Nicholas put all his horses to a gallop and passed Zakhar. The horses
showered the fine dry snow on the faces of those in the sleigh--beside
them sounded quick ringing bells and they caught confused glimpses of
swiftly moving legs and the shadows of the troyka they were passing.
The whistling sound of the runners on the snow and the voices of girls
shrieking were heard from different sides.

Again checking his horses, Nicholas looked around him. They were still
surrounded by the magic plain bathed in moonlight and spangled with
stars.

"Zakhar is shouting that I should turn to the left, but why to the
left?" thought Nicholas. "Are we getting to the Melyukovs'? Is this
Melyukovka? Heaven only knows where we are going, and heaven knows what
is happening to us--but it is very strange and pleasant whatever it is."
And he looked round in the sleigh.

"Look, his mustache and eyelashes are all white!" said one of the
strange, pretty, unfamiliar people--the one with fine eyebrows and
mustache.

"I think this used to be Natasha," thought Nicholas, "and that was
Madame Schoss, but perhaps it's not, and this Circassian with the
mustache I don't know, but I love her."

"Aren't you cold?" he asked.

They did not answer but began to laugh. Dimmler from the sleigh behind
shouted something--probably something funny--but they could not make out
what he said.

"Yes, yes!" some voices answered, laughing.

"But here was a fairy forest with black moving shadows, and a glitter
of diamonds and a flight of marble steps and the silver roofs of fairy
buildings and the shrill yells of some animals. And if this is really
Melyukovka, it is still stranger that we drove heaven knows where and
have come to Melyukovka," thought Nicholas.

It really was Melyukovka, and maids and footmen with merry faces came
running, out to the porch carrying candles.

"Who is it?" asked someone in the porch.

"The mummers from the count's. I know by the horses," replied some
voices.





CHAPTER XI


Pelageya Danilovna Melyukova, a broadly built, energetic woman wearing
spectacles, sat in the drawing room in a loose dress, surrounded by
her daughters whom she was trying to keep from feeling dull. They were
quietly dropping melted wax into snow and looking at the shadows the wax
figures would throw on the wall, when they heard the steps and voices of
new arrivals in the vestibule.

Hussars, ladies, witches, clowns, and bears, after clearing their
throats and wiping the hoarfrost from their faces in the vestibule,
came into the ballroom where candles were hurriedly lighted. The
clown--Dimmler--and the lady--Nicholas--started a dance. Surrounded by
the screaming children the mummers, covering their faces and disguising
their voices, bowed to their hostess and arranged themselves about the
room.

"Dear me! there's no recognizing them! And Natasha! See whom she looks
like! She really reminds me of somebody. But Herr Dimmler--isn't
he good! I didn't know him! And how he dances. Dear me, there's a
Circassian. Really, how becoming it is to dear Sonya. And who is that?
Well, you have cheered us up! Nikita and Vanya--clear away the tables!
And we were sitting so quietly. Ha, ha, ha!... The hussar, the hussar!
Just like a boy! And the legs!... I can't look at him..." different
voices were saying.

Natasha, the young Melyukovs' favorite, disappeared with them into the
back rooms where a cork and various dressing gowns and male garments
were called for and received from the footman by bare girlish arms from
behind the door. Ten minutes later, all the young Melyukovs joined the
mummers.

Pelageya Danilovna, having given orders to clear the rooms for the
visitors and arranged about refreshments for the gentry and the serfs,
went about among the mummers without removing her spectacles, peering
into their faces with a suppressed smile and failing to recognize any of
them. It was not merely Dimmler and the Rostovs she failed to recognize,
she did not even recognize her own daughters, or her late husband's,
dressing gowns and uniforms, which they had put on.

"And who is this?" she asked her governess, peering into the face of her
own daughter dressed up as a Kazan-Tartar. "I suppose it is one of the
Rostovs! Well, Mr. Hussar, and what regiment do you serve in?" she asked
Natasha. "Here, hand some fruit jelly to the Turk!" she ordered the
butler who was handing things round. "That's not forbidden by his law."

Sometimes, as she looked at the strange but amusing capers cut by the
dancers, who--having decided once for all that being disguised, no one
would recognize them--were not at all shy, Pelageya Danilovna hid
her face in her handkerchief, and her whole stout body shook with
irrepressible, kindly, elderly laughter.

"My little Sasha! Look at Sasha!" she said.

After Russian country dances and chorus dances, Pelageya Danilovna made
the serfs and gentry join in one large circle: a ring, a string, and a
silver ruble were fetched and they all played games together.

In an hour, all the costumes were crumpled and disordered. The corked
eyebrows and mustaches were smeared over the perspiring, flushed, and
merry faces. Pelageya Danilovna began to recognize the mummers, admired
their cleverly contrived costumes, and particularly how they suited the
young ladies, and she thanked them all for having entertained her so
well. The visitors were invited to supper in the drawing room, and the
serfs had something served to them in the ballroom.

"Now to tell one's fortune in the empty bathhouse is frightening!" said
an old maid who lived with the Melyukovs, during supper.

"Why?" said the eldest Melyukov girl.

"You wouldn't go, it takes courage..."

"I'll go," said Sonya.

"Tell what happened to the young lady!" said the second Melyukov girl.

"Well," began the old maid, "a young lady once went out, took a cock,
laid the table for two, all properly, and sat down. After sitting a
while, she suddenly hears someone coming... a sleigh drives up with
harness bells; she hears him coming! He comes in, just in the shape of a
man, like an officer--comes in and sits down to table with her."

"Ah! ah!" screamed Natasha, rolling her eyes with horror.

"Yes? And how... did he speak?"

"Yes, like a man. Everything quite all right, and he began persuading
her; and she should have kept him talking till cockcrow, but she got
frightened, just got frightened and hid her face in her hands. Then he
caught her up. It was lucky the maids ran in just then..."

"Now, why frighten them?" said Pelageya Danilovna.

"Mamma, you used to try your fate yourself..." said her daughter.

"And how does one do it in a barn?" inquired Sonya.

"Well, say you went to the barn now, and listened. It depends on what
you hear; hammering and knocking--that's bad; but a sound of shifting
grain is good and one sometimes hears that, too."

"Mamma, tell us what happened to you in the barn."

Pelageya Danilovna smiled.

"Oh, I've forgotten..." she replied. "But none of you would go?"

"Yes, I will; Pelageya Danilovna, let me! I'll go," said Sonya.

"Well, why not, if you're not afraid?"

"Louisa Ivanovna, may I?" asked Sonya.

Whether they were playing the ring and string game or the ruble game or
talking as now, Nicholas did not leave Sonya's side, and gazed at her
with quite new eyes. It seemed to him that it was only today, thanks
to that burnt-cork mustache, that he had fully learned to know her. And
really, that evening, Sonya was brighter, more animated, and prettier
than Nicholas had ever seen her before.

"So that's what she is like; what a fool I have been!" he thought gazing
at her sparkling eyes, and under the mustache a happy rapturous smile
dimpled her cheeks, a smile he had never seen before.

"I'm not afraid of anything," said Sonya. "May I go at once?" She got
up.

They told her where the barn was and how she should stand and listen,
and they handed her a fur cloak. She threw this over her head and
shoulders and glanced at Nicholas.

"What a darling that girl is!" thought he. "And what have I been
thinking of till now?"

Sonya went out into the passage to go to the barn. Nicholas went hastily
to the front porch, saying he felt too hot. The crowd of people really
had made the house stuffy.

Outside, there was the same cold stillness and the same moon, but even
brighter than before. The light was so strong and the snow sparkled with
so many stars that one did not wish to look up at the sky and the real
stars were unnoticed. The sky was black and dreary, while the earth was
gay.

"I am a fool, a fool! what have I been waiting for?" thought Nicholas,
and running out from the porch he went round the corner of the house and
along the path that led to the back porch. He knew Sonya would pass
that way. Halfway lay some snow-covered piles of firewood and across and
along them a network of shadows from the bare old lime trees fell on the
snow and on the path. This path led to the barn. The log walls of the
barn and its snow-covered roof, that looked as if hewn out of some
precious stone, sparkled in the moonlight. A tree in the garden snapped
with the frost, and then all was again perfectly silent. His bosom
seemed to inhale not air but the strength of eternal youth and gladness.

From the back porch came the sound of feet descending the steps, the
bottom step upon which snow had fallen gave a ringing creak and he heard
the voice of an old maidservant saying, "Straight, straight, along the
path, Miss. Only, don't look back."

"I am not afraid," answered Sonya's voice, and along the path toward
Nicholas came the crunching, whistling sound of Sonya's feet in her thin
shoes.

Sonya came along, wrapped in her cloak. She was only a couple of paces
away when she saw him, and to her too he was not the Nicholas she
had known and always slightly feared. He was in a woman's dress, with
tousled hair and a happy smile new to Sonya. She ran rapidly toward him.

"Quite different and yet the same," thought Nicholas, looking at her
face all lit up by the moonlight. He slipped his arms under the cloak
that covered her head, embraced her, pressed her to him, and kissed her
on the lips that wore a mustache and had a smell of burnt cork. Sonya
kissed him full on the lips, and disengaging her little hands pressed
them to his cheeks.

"Sonya!... Nicholas!"... was all they said. They ran to the barn and
then back again, re-entering, he by the front and she by the back porch.





CHAPTER XII


When they all drove back from Pelageya Danilovna's, Natasha, who always
saw and noticed everything, arranged that she and Madame Schoss should
go back in the sleigh with Dimmler, and Sonya with Nicholas and the
maids.

On the way back Nicholas drove at a steady pace instead of racing and
kept peering by that fantastic all-transforming light into Sonya's face
and searching beneath the eyebrows and mustache for his former and his
present Sonya from whom he had resolved never to be parted again. He
looked and recognizing in her both the old and the new Sonya, and
being reminded by the smell of burnt cork of the sensation of her kiss,
inhaled the frosty air with a full breast and, looking at the ground
flying beneath him and at the sparkling sky, felt himself again in
fairyland.

"Sonya, is it well with thee?" he asked from time to time.

"Yes!" she replied. "And with thee?"

When halfway home Nicholas handed the reins to the coachman and ran for
a moment to Natasha's sleigh and stood on its wing.

"Natasha!" he whispered in French, "do you know I have made up my mind
about Sonya?"

"Have you told her?" asked Natasha, suddenly beaming all over with joy.

"Oh, how strange you are with that mustache and those eyebrows!...
Natasha--are you glad?"

"I am so glad, so glad! I was beginning to be vexed with you. I did not
tell you, but you have been treating her badly. What a heart she has,
Nicholas! I am horrid sometimes, but I was ashamed to be happy while
Sonya was not," continued Natasha. "Now I am so glad! Well, run back to
her."

"No, wait a bit.... Oh, how funny you look!" cried Nicholas, peering
into her face and finding in his sister too something new, unusual, and
bewitchingly tender that he had not seen in her before. "Natasha, it's
magical, isn't it?"

"Yes," she replied. "You have done splendidly."

"Had I seen her before as she is now," thought Nicholas, "I should long
ago have asked her what to do and have done whatever she told me, and
all would have been well."

"So you are glad and I have done right?"

"Oh, quite right! I had a quarrel with Mamma some time ago about it.
Mamma said she was angling for you. How could she say such a thing! I
nearly stormed at Mamma. I will never let anyone say anything bad of
Sonya, for there is nothing but good in her."

"Then it's all right?" said Nicholas, again scrutinizing the expression
of his sister's face to see if she was in earnest. Then he jumped down
and, his boots scrunching the snow, ran back to his sleigh. The same
happy, smiling Circassian, with mustache and beaming eyes looking up
from under a sable hood, was still sitting there, and that Circassian
was Sonya, and that Sonya was certainly his future happy and loving
wife.

When they reached home and had told their mother how they had spent the
evening at the Melyukovs', the girls went to their bedroom. When they
had undressed, but without washing off the cork mustaches, they sat a
long time talking of their happiness. They talked of how they would live
when they were married, how their husbands would be friends, and how
happy they would be. On Natasha's table stood two looking glasses which
Dunyasha had prepared beforehand.

"Only when will all that be? I am afraid never.... It would be too
good!" said Natasha, rising and going to the looking glasses.

"Sit down, Natasha; perhaps you'll see him," said Sonya.

Natasha lit the candles, one on each side of one of the looking glasses,
and sat down.

"I see someone with a mustache," said Natasha, seeing her own face.

"You mustn't laugh, Miss," said Dunyasha.

With Sonya's help and the maid's, Natasha got the glass she held into
the right position opposite the other; her face assumed a serious
expression and she sat silent. She sat a long time looking at the
receding line of candles reflected in the glasses and expecting (from
tales she had heard) to see a coffin, or him, Prince Andrew, in that
last dim, indistinctly outlined square. But ready as she was to take the
smallest speck for the image of a man or of a coffin, she saw nothing.
She began blinking rapidly and moved away from the looking glasses.

"Why is it others see things and I don't?" she said. "You sit down now,
Sonya. You absolutely must, tonight! Do it for me.... Today I feel so
frightened!"

Sonya sat down before the glasses, got the right position, and began
looking.

"Now, Miss Sonya is sure to see something," whispered Dunyasha; "while
you do nothing but laugh."

Sonya heard this and Natasha's whisper:

"I know she will. She saw something last year."

For about three minutes all were silent.

"Of course she will!" whispered Natasha, but did not finish... suddenly
Sonya pushed away the glass she was holding and covered her eyes with
her hand.

"Oh, Natasha!" she cried.

"Did you see? Did you? What was it?" exclaimed Natasha, holding up the
looking glass.

Sonya had not seen anything, she was just wanting to blink and to get
up when she heard Natasha say, "Of course she will!" She did not wish to
disappoint either Dunyasha or Natasha, but it was hard to sit still.
She did not herself know how or why the exclamation escaped her when she
covered her eyes.

"You saw him?" urged Natasha, seizing her hand.

"Yes. Wait a bit... I... saw him," Sonya could not help saying, not yet
knowing whom Natasha meant by him, Nicholas or Prince Andrew.

"But why shouldn't I say I saw something? Others do see! Besides who can
tell whether I saw anything or not?" flashed through Sonya's mind.

"Yes, I saw him," she said.

"How? Standing or lying?"

"No, I saw... At first there was nothing, then I saw him lying down."

"Andrew lying? Is he ill?" asked Natasha, her frightened eyes fixed on
her friend.

"No, on the contrary, on the contrary! His face was cheerful, and he
turned to me." And when saying this she herself fancied she had really
seen what she described.

"Well, and then, Sonya?..."

"After that, I could not make out what there was; something blue and
red..."

"Sonya! When will he come back? When shall I see him! O, God, how afraid
I am for him and for myself and about everything!..." Natasha began, and
without replying to Sonya's words of comfort she got into bed, and long
after her candle was out lay open-eyed and motionless, gazing at the
moonlight through the frosty windowpanes.





CHAPTER XIII


Soon after the Christmas holidays Nicholas told his mother of his love
for Sonya and of his firm resolve to marry her. The countess, who had
long noticed what was going on between them and was expecting this
declaration, listened to him in silence and then told her son that he
might marry whom he pleased, but that neither she nor his father would
give their blessing to such a marriage. Nicholas, for the first time,
felt that his mother was displeased with him and that, despite her love
for him, she would not give way. Coldly, without looking at her son,
she sent for her husband and, when he came, tried briefly and coldly to
inform him of the facts, in her son's presence, but unable to restrain
herself she burst into tears of vexation and left the room. The old
count began irresolutely to admonish Nicholas and beg him to abandon his
purpose. Nicholas replied that he could not go back on his word, and his
father, sighing and evidently disconcerted, very soon became silent and
went in to the countess. In all his encounters with his son, the count
was always conscious of his own guilt toward him for having wasted the
family fortune, and so he could not be angry with him for refusing to
marry an heiress and choosing the dowerless Sonya. On this occasion, he
was only more vividly conscious of the fact that if his affairs had not
been in disorder, no better wife for Nicholas than Sonya could have
been wished for, and that no one but himself with his Mitenka and
his uncomfortable habits was to blame for the condition of the family
finances.

The father and mother did not speak of the matter to their son again,
but a few days later the countess sent for Sonya and, with a cruelty
neither of them expected, reproached her niece for trying to catch
Nicholas and for ingratitude. Sonya listened silently with downcast eyes
to the countess' cruel words, without understanding what was required
of her. She was ready to sacrifice everything for her benefactors.
Self-sacrifice was her most cherished idea but in this case she could
not see what she ought to sacrifice, or for whom. She could not help
loving the countess and the whole Rostov family, but neither could she
help loving Nicholas and knowing that his happiness depended on that
love. She was silent and sad and did not reply. Nicholas felt the
situation to be intolerable and went to have an explanation with his
mother. He first implored her to forgive him and Sonya and consent to
their marriage, then he threatened that if she molested Sonya he would
at once marry her secretly.

The countess, with a coldness her son had never seen in her before,
replied that he was of age, that Prince Andrew was marrying without his
father's consent, and he could do the same, but that she would never
receive that intriguer as her daughter.

Exploding at the word intriguer, Nicholas, raising his voice, told
his mother he had never expected her to try to force him to sell his
feelings, but if that were so, he would say for the last time.... But he
had no time to utter the decisive word which the expression of his face
caused his mother to await with terror, and which would perhaps have
forever remained a cruel memory to them both. He had not time to say it,
for Natasha, with a pale and set face, entered the room from the door at
which she had been listening.

"Nicholas, you are talking nonsense! Be quiet, be quiet, be quiet, I
tell you!..." she almost screamed, so as to drown his voice.

"Mamma darling, it's not at all so... my poor, sweet darling," she
said to her mother, who conscious that they had been on the brink of
a rupture gazed at her son with terror, but in the obstinacy and
excitement of the conflict could not and would not give way.

"Nicholas, I'll explain to you. Go away! Listen, Mamma darling," said
Natasha.

Her words were incoherent, but they attained the purpose at which she
was aiming.

The countess, sobbing heavily, hid her face on her daughter's breast,
while Nicholas rose, clutching his head, and left the room.

Natasha set to work to effect a reconciliation, and so far succeeded
that Nicholas received a promise from his mother that Sonya should not
be troubled, while he on his side promised not to undertake anything
without his parents' knowledge.

Firmly resolved, after putting his affairs in order in the regiment,
to retire from the army and return and marry Sonya, Nicholas, serious,
sorrowful, and at variance with his parents, but, as it seemed to him,
passionately in love, left at the beginning of January to rejoin his
regiment.

After Nicholas had gone things in the Rostov household were more
depressing than ever, and the countess fell ill from mental agitation.

Sonya was unhappy at the separation from Nicholas and still more so on
account of the hostile tone the countess could not help adopting toward
her. The count was more perturbed than ever by the condition of his
affairs, which called for some decisive action. Their town house and
estate near Moscow had inevitably to be sold, and for this they had
to go to Moscow. But the countess' health obliged them to delay their
departure from day to day.

Natasha, who had borne the first period of separation from her betrothed
lightly and even cheerfully, now grew more agitated and impatient every
day. The thought that her best days, which she would have employed
in loving him, were being vainly wasted, with no advantage to anyone,
tormented her incessantly. His letters for the most part irritated her.
It hurt her to think that while she lived only in the thought of him, he
was living a real life, seeing new places and new people that interested
him. The more interesting his letters were the more vexed she felt.
Her letters to him, far from giving her any comfort, seemed to her a
wearisome and artificial obligation. She could not write, because she
could not conceive the possibility of expressing sincerely in a letter
even a thousandth part of what she expressed by voice, smile, and
glance. She wrote to him formal, monotonous, and dry letters, to which
she attached no importance herself, and in the rough copies of which the
countess corrected her mistakes in spelling.

There was still no improvement in the countess' health, but it was
impossible to defer the journey to Moscow any longer. Natasha's
trousseau had to be ordered and the house sold. Moreover, Prince Andrew
was expected in Moscow, where old Prince Bolkonski was spending the
winter, and Natasha felt sure he had already arrived.

So the countess remained in the country, and the count, taking Sonya and
Natasha with him, went to Moscow at the end of January.





BOOK EIGHT: 1811 - 12





CHAPTER I


After Prince Andrew's engagement to Natasha, Pierre without any apparent
cause suddenly felt it impossible to go on living as before. Firmly
convinced as he was of the truths revealed to him by his benefactor,
and happy as he had been in perfecting his inner man, to which he had
devoted himself with such ardor--all the zest of such a life vanished
after the engagement of Andrew and Natasha and the death of Joseph
Alexeevich, the news of which reached him almost at the same time.
Only the skeleton of life remained: his house, a brilliant wife who now
enjoyed the favors of a very important personage, acquaintance with all
Petersburg, and his court service with its dull formalities. And this
life suddenly seemed to Pierre unexpectedly loathsome. He ceased keeping
a diary, avoided the company of the Brothers, began going to the Club
again, drank a great deal, and came once more in touch with the bachelor
sets, leading such a life that the Countess Helene thought it necessary
to speak severely to him about it. Pierre felt that she was right, and
to avoid compromising her went away to Moscow.

In Moscow as soon as he entered his huge house in which the faded and
fading princesses still lived, with its enormous retinue; as soon as,
driving through the town, he saw the Iberian shrine with innumerable
tapers burning before the golden covers of the icons, the Kremlin Square
with its snow undisturbed by vehicles, the sleigh drivers and hovels of
the Sivtsev Vrazhok, those old Moscovites who desired nothing, hurried
nowhere, and were ending their days leisurely; when he saw those old
Moscow ladies, the Moscow balls, and the English Club, he felt himself
at home in a quiet haven. In Moscow he felt at peace, at home, warm and
dirty as in an old dressing gown.

Moscow society, from the old women down to the children, received Pierre
like a long-expected guest whose place was always ready awaiting him.
For Moscow society Pierre was the nicest, kindest, most intellectual,
merriest, and most magnanimous of cranks, a heedless, genial nobleman of
the old Russian type. His purse was always empty because it was open to
everyone.

Benefit performances, poor pictures, statues, benevolent societies,
gypsy choirs, schools, subscription dinners, sprees, Freemasons,
churches, and books--no one and nothing met with a refusal from him, and
had it not been for two friends who had borrowed large sums from him and
taken him under their protection, he would have given everything away.
There was never a dinner or soiree at the Club without him. As soon as
he sank into his place on the sofa after two bottles of Margaux he was
surrounded, and talking, disputing, and joking began. When there
were quarrels, his kindly smile and well-timed jests reconciled the
antagonists. The Masonic dinners were dull and dreary when he was not
there.

When after a bachelor supper he rose with his amiable and kindly smile,
yielding to the entreaties of the festive company to drive off somewhere
with them, shouts of delight and triumph arose among the young men.
At balls he danced if a partner was needed. Young ladies, married and
unmarried, liked him because without making love to any of them, he was
equally amiable to all, especially after supper. "Il est charmant; il
n'a pas de sexe," * they said of him.


    * "He is charming; he has no sex."


Pierre was one of those retired gentlemen-in-waiting of whom there were
hundreds good-humoredly ending their days in Moscow.

How horrified he would have been seven years before, when he first
arrived from abroad, had he been told that there was no need for him
to seek or plan anything, that his rut had long been shaped, eternally
predetermined, and that wriggle as he might, he would be what all in
his position were. He could not have believed it! Had he not at one
time longed with all his heart to establish a republic in Russia;
then himself to be a Napoleon; then to be a philosopher; and then
a strategist and the conqueror of Napoleon? Had he not seen the
possibility of, and passionately desired, the regeneration of the sinful
human race, and his own progress to the highest degree of perfection?
Had he not established schools and hospitals and liberated his serfs?

But instead of all that--here he was, the wealthy husband of an
unfaithful wife, a retired gentleman-in-waiting, fond of eating and
drinking and, as he unbuttoned his waistcoat, of abusing the government
a bit, a member of the Moscow English Club, and a universal favorite in
Moscow society. For a long time he could not reconcile himself to the
idea that he was one of those same retired Moscow gentlemen-in-waiting
he had so despised seven years before.

Sometimes he consoled himself with the thought that he was only living
this life temporarily; but then he was shocked by the thought of how
many, like himself, had entered that life and that Club temporarily,
with all their teeth and hair, and had only left it when not a single
tooth or hair remained.

In moments of pride, when he thought of his position it seemed to
him that he was quite different and distinct from those other retired
gentlemen-in-waiting he had formerly despised: they were empty, stupid,
contented fellows, satisfied with their position, "while I am still
discontented and want to do something for mankind. But perhaps all these
comrades of mine struggled just like me and sought something new, a
path in life of their own, and like me were brought by force of
circumstances, society, and race--by that elemental force against which
man is powerless--to the condition I am in," said he to himself in
moments of humility; and after living some time in Moscow he no longer
despised, but began to grow fond of, to respect, and to pity his
comrades in destiny, as he pitied himself.

Pierre no longer suffered moments of despair, hypochondria, and disgust
with life, but the malady that had formerly found expression in such
acute attacks was driven inwards and never left him for a moment.
"What for? Why? What is going on in the world?" he would ask himself in
perplexity several times a day, involuntarily beginning to reflect anew
on the meaning of the phenomena of life; but knowing by experience that
there were no answers to these questions he made haste to turn away
from them, and took up a book, or hurried of to the Club or to Apollon
Nikolaevich's, to exchange the gossip of the town.

"Helene, who has never cared for anything but her own body and is one
of the stupidest women in the world," thought Pierre, "is regarded by
people as the acme of intelligence and refinement, and they pay homage
to her. Napoleon Bonaparte was despised by all as long as he was great,
but now that he has become a wretched comedian the Emperor Francis wants
to offer him his daughter in an illegal marriage. The Spaniards, through
the Catholic clergy, offer praise to God for their victory over the
French on the fourteenth of June, and the French, also through the
Catholic clergy, offer praise because on that same fourteenth of June
they defeated the Spaniards. My brother Masons swear by the blood that
they are ready to sacrifice everything for their neighbor, but they
do not give a ruble each to the collections for the poor, and they
intrigue, the Astraea Lodge against the Manna Seekers, and fuss about an
authentic Scotch carpet and a charter that nobody needs, and the meaning
of which the very man who wrote it does not understand. We all profess
the Christian law of forgiveness of injuries and love of our neighbors,
the law in honor of which we have built in Moscow forty times forty
churches--but yesterday a deserter was knouted to death and a minister
of that same law of love and forgiveness, a priest, gave the soldier a
cross to kiss before his execution." So thought Pierre, and the whole of
this general deception which everyone accepts, accustomed as he was to
it, astonished him each time as if it were something new. "I understand
the deception and confusion," he thought, "but how am I to tell them
all that I see? I have tried, and have always found that they too in the
depths of their souls understand it as I do, and only try not to see
it. So it appears that it must be so! But I--what is to become of
me?" thought he. He had the unfortunate capacity many men, especially
Russians, have of seeing and believing in the possibility of goodness
and truth, but of seeing the evil and falsehood of life too clearly
to be able to take a serious part in it. Every sphere of work was
connected, in his eyes, with evil and deception. Whatever he tried to
be, whatever he engaged in, the evil and falsehood of it repulsed him
and blocked every path of activity. Yet he had to live and to find
occupation. It was too dreadful to be under the burden of these
insoluble problems, so he abandoned himself to any distraction in order
to forget them. He frequented every kind of society, drank much, bought
pictures, engaged in building, and above all--read.

He read, and read everything that came to hand. On coming home, while
his valets were still taking off his things, he picked up a book and
began to read. From reading he passed to sleeping, from sleeping to
gossip in drawing rooms of the Club, from gossip to carousals and women;
from carousals back to gossip, reading, and wine. Drinking became more
and more a physical and also a moral necessity. Though the doctors
warned him that with his corpulence wine was dangerous for him, he
drank a great deal. He was only quite at ease when having poured several
glasses of wine mechanically into his large mouth he felt a pleasant
warmth in his body, an amiability toward all his fellows, and a
readiness to respond superficially to every idea without probing it
deeply. Only after emptying a bottle or two did he feel dimly that the
terribly tangled skein of life which previously had terrified him was
not as dreadful as he had thought. He was always conscious of some
aspect of that skein, as with a buzzing in his head after dinner or
supper he chatted or listened to conversation or read. But under the
influence of wine he said to himself: "It doesn't matter. I'll get it
unraveled. I have a solution ready, but have no time now--I'll think it
all out later on!" But the later on never came.

In the morning, on an empty stomach, all the old questions appeared as
insoluble and terrible as ever, and Pierre hastily picked up a book, and
if anyone came to see him he was glad.

Sometimes he remembered how he had heard that soldiers in war when
entrenched under the enemy's fire, if they have nothing to do, try hard
to find some occupation the more easily to bear the danger. To Pierre
all men seemed like those soldiers, seeking refuge from life: some in
ambition, some in cards, some in framing laws, some in women, some in
toys, some in horses, some in politics, some in sport, some in wine,
and some in governmental affairs. "Nothing is trivial, and nothing is
important, it's all the same--only to save oneself from it as best one
can," thought Pierre. "Only not to see it, that dreadful it!"





CHAPTER II


At the beginning of winter Prince Nicholas Bolkonski and his daughter
moved to Moscow. At that time enthusiasm for the Emperor Alexander's
regime had weakened and a patriotic and anti-French tendency prevailed
there, and this, together with his past and his intellect and his
originality, at once made Prince Nicholas Bolkonski an object of
particular respect to the Moscovites and the center of the Moscow
opposition to the government.

The prince had aged very much that year. He showed marked signs of
senility by a tendency to fall asleep, forgetfulness of quite recent
events, remembrance of remote ones, and the childish vanity with which
he accepted the role of head of the Moscow opposition. In spite of this
the old man inspired in all his visitors alike a feeling of respectful
veneration--especially of an evening when he came in to tea in his
old-fashioned coat and powdered wig and, aroused by anyone, told his
abrupt stories of the past, or uttered yet more abrupt and scathing
criticisms of the present. For them all, that old-fashioned house with
its gigantic mirrors, pre-Revolution furniture, powdered footmen, and
the stern shrewd old man (himself a relic of the past century) with his
gentle daughter and the pretty Frenchwoman who were reverently devoted
to him presented a majestic and agreeable spectacle. But the visitors
did not reflect that besides the couple of hours during which they saw
their host, there were also twenty-two hours in the day during which the
private and intimate life of the house continued.

Latterly that private life had become very trying for Princess Mary.
There in Moscow she was deprived of her greatest pleasures--talks with
the pilgrims and the solitude which refreshed her at Bald Hills--and she
had none of the advantages and pleasures of city life. She did not go
out into society; everyone knew that her father would not let her go
anywhere without him, and his failing health prevented his going out
himself, so that she was not invited to dinners and evening parties. She
had quite abandoned the hope of getting married. She saw the coldness
and malevolence with which the old prince received and dismissed the
young men, possible suitors, who sometimes appeared at their house. She
had no friends: during this visit to Moscow she had been disappointed in
the two who had been nearest to her. Mademoiselle Bourienne, with whom
she had never been able to be quite frank, had now become unpleasant to
her, and for various reasons Princess Mary avoided her. Julie, with whom
she had corresponded for the last five years, was in Moscow, but proved
to be quite alien to her when they met. Just then Julie, who by the
death of her brothers had become one of the richest heiresses in Moscow,
was in the full whirl of society pleasures. She was surrounded by young
men who, she fancied, had suddenly learned to appreciate her worth.
Julie was at that stage in the life of a society woman when she feels
that her last chance of marrying has come and that her fate must be
decided now or never. On Thursdays Princess Mary remembered with a
mournful smile that she now had no one to write to, since Julie--whose
presence gave her no pleasure was here and they met every week. Like
the old emigre who declined to marry the lady with whom he had spent his
evenings for years, she regretted Julie's presence and having no one to
write to. In Moscow Princess Mary had no one to talk to, no one to whom
to confide her sorrow, and much sorrow fell to her lot just then. The
time for Prince Andrew's return and marriage was approaching, but his
request to her to prepare his father for it had not been carried out; in
fact, it seemed as if matters were quite hopeless, for at every mention
of the young Countess Rostova the old prince (who apart from that was
usually in a bad temper) lost control of himself. Another lately added
sorrow arose from the lessons she gave her six year-old nephew. To her
consternation she detected in herself in relation to little Nicholas
some symptoms of her father's irritability. However often she told
herself that she must not get irritable when teaching her nephew, almost
every time that, pointer in hand, she sat down to show him the French
alphabet, she so longed to pour her own knowledge quickly and easily
into the child--who was already afraid that Auntie might at any moment
get angry--that at his slightest inattention she trembled, became
flustered and heated, raised her voice, and sometimes pulled him by the
arm and put him in the corner. Having put him in the corner she would
herself begin to cry over her cruel, evil nature, and little Nicholas,
following her example, would sob, and without permission would leave his
corner, come to her, pull her wet hands from her face, and comfort
her. But what distressed the princess most of all was her father's
irritability, which was always directed against her and had of late
amounted to cruelty. Had he forced her to prostrate herself to the
ground all night, had he beaten her or made her fetch wood or water, it
would never have entered her mind to think her position hard; but this
loving despot--the more cruel because he loved her and for that reason
tormented himself and her--knew how not merely to hurt and humiliate
her deliberately, but to show her that she was always to blame for
everything. Of late he had exhibited a new trait that tormented Princess
Mary more than anything else; this was his ever-increasing intimacy with
Mademoiselle Bourienne. The idea that at the first moment of receiving
the news of his son's intentions had occurred to him in jest--that
if Andrew got married he himself would marry Bourienne--had evidently
pleased him, and latterly he had persistently, and as it seemed to
Princess Mary merely to offend her, shown special endearments to
the companion and expressed his dissatisfaction with his daughter by
demonstrations of love of Bourienne.

One day in Moscow in Princess Mary's presence (she thought her father
did it purposely when she was there) the old prince kissed Mademoiselle
Bourienne's hand and, drawing her to him, embraced her affectionately.
Princess Mary flushed and ran out of the room. A few minutes later
Mademoiselle Bourienne came into Princess Mary's room smiling and making
cheerful remarks in her agreeable voice. Princess Mary hastily wiped
away her tears, went resolutely up to Mademoiselle Bourienne, and
evidently unconscious of what she was doing began shouting in angry
haste at the Frenchwoman, her voice breaking: "It's horrible, vile,
inhuman, to take advantage of the weakness..." She did not finish.
"Leave my room," she exclaimed, and burst into sobs.

Next day the prince did not say a word to his daughter, but she noticed
that at dinner he gave orders that Mademoiselle Bourienne should be
served first. After dinner, when the footman handed coffee and from
habit began with the princess, the prince suddenly grew furious,
threw his stick at Philip, and instantly gave instructions to have him
conscripted for the army.

"He doesn't obey... I said it twice... and he doesn't obey! She is the
first person in this house; she's my best friend," cried the prince.
"And if you allow yourself," he screamed in a fury, addressing Princess
Mary for the first time, "to forget yourself again before her as you
dared to do yesterday, I will show you who is master in this house. Go!
Don't let me set eyes on you; beg her pardon!"

Princess Mary asked Mademoiselle Bourienne's pardon, and also her
father's pardon for herself and for Philip the footman, who had begged
for her intervention.

At such moments something like a pride of sacrifice gathered in her
soul. And suddenly that father whom she had judged would look for his
spectacles in her presence, fumbling near them and not seeing them, or
would forget something that had just occurred, or take a false step with
his failing legs and turn to see if anyone had noticed his feebleness,
or, worst of all, at dinner when there were no visitors to excite him
would suddenly fall asleep, letting his napkin drop and his shaking head
sink over his plate. "He is old and feeble, and I dare to condemn
him!" she thought at such moments, with a feeling of revulsion against
herself.





CHAPTER III


In 1811 there was living in Moscow a French doctor--Metivier--who had
rapidly become the fashion. He was enormously tall, handsome, amiable
as Frenchmen are, and was, as all Moscow said, an extraordinarily clever
doctor. He was received in the best houses not merely as a doctor, but
as an equal.

Prince Nicholas had always ridiculed medicine, but latterly on
Mademoiselle Bourienne's advice had allowed this doctor to visit him and
had grown accustomed to him. Metivier came to see the prince about twice
a week.

On December 6--St. Nicholas' Day and the prince's name day--all Moscow
came to the prince's front door but he gave orders to admit no one
and to invite to dinner only a small number, a list of whom he gave to
Princess Mary.

Metivier, who came in the morning with his felicitations, considered
it proper in his quality of doctor de forcer la consigne, * as he told
Princess Mary, and went in to see the prince. It happened that on that
morning of his name day the prince was in one of his worst moods. He had
been going about the house all the morning finding fault with everyone
and pretending not to understand what was said to him and not to be
understood himself. Princess Mary well knew this mood of quiet absorbed
querulousness, which generally culminated in a burst of rage, and she
went about all that morning as though facing a cocked and loaded gun and
awaited the inevitable explosion. Until the doctor's arrival the morning
had passed off safely. After admitting the doctor, Princess Mary sat
down with a book in the drawing room near the door through which she
could hear all that passed in the study.


    * To force the guard.


At first she heard only Metivier's voice, then her father's, then both
voices began speaking at the same time, the door was flung open, and
on the threshold appeared the handsome figure of the terrified Metivier
with his shock of black hair, and the prince in his dressing gown and
fez, his face distorted with fury and the pupils of his eyes rolled
downwards.

"You don't understand?" shouted the prince, "but I do! French spy, slave
of Buonaparte, spy, get out of my house! Be off, I tell you..."

Metivier, shrugging his shoulders, went up to Mademoiselle Bourienne who
at the sound of shouting had run in from an adjoining room.

"The prince is not very well: bile and rush of blood to the head.
Keep calm, I will call again tomorrow," said Metivier; and putting his
fingers to his lips he hastened away.

Through the study door came the sound of slippered feet and the cry:
"Spies, traitors, traitors everywhere! Not a moment's peace in my own
house!"

After Metivier's departure the old prince called his daughter in, and
the whole weight of his wrath fell on her. She was to blame that a spy
had been admitted. Had he not told her, yes, told her to make a list,
and not to admit anyone who was not on that list? Then why was that
scoundrel admitted? She was the cause of it all. With her, he said, he
could not have a moment's peace and could not die quietly.

"No, ma'am! We must part, we must part! Understand that, understand
it! I cannot endure any more," he said, and left the room. Then, as if
afraid she might find some means of consolation, he returned and trying
to appear calm added: "And don't imagine I have said this in a moment of
anger. I am calm. I have thought it over, and it will be carried
out--we must part; so find some place for yourself...." But he could not
restrain himself and with the virulence of which only one who loves
is capable, evidently suffering himself, he shook his fists at her and
screamed:

"If only some fool would marry her!" Then he slammed the door, sent for
Mademoiselle Bourienne, and subsided into his study.

At two o'clock the six chosen guests assembled for dinner.

These guests--the famous Count Rostopchin, Prince Lopukhin with his
nephew, General Chatrov an old war comrade of the prince's, and of the
younger generation Pierre and Boris Drubetskoy--awaited the prince in
the drawing room.

Boris, who had come to Moscow on leave a few days before, had been
anxious to be presented to Prince Nicholas Bolkonski, and had contrived
to ingratiate himself so well that the old prince in his case made an
exception to the rule of not receiving bachelors in his house.

The prince's house did not belong to what is known as fashionable
society, but his little circle--though not much talked about in
town--was one it was more flattering to be received in than any other.
Boris had realized this the week before when the commander in chief
in his presence invited Rostopchin to dinner on St. Nicholas' Day, and
Rostopchin had replied that he could not come:

"On that day I always go to pay my devotions to the relics of Prince
Nicholas Bolkonski."

"Oh, yes, yes!" replied the commander in chief. "How is he?..."

The small group that assembled before dinner in the lofty old-fashioned
drawing room with its old furniture resembled the solemn gathering of
a court of justice. All were silent or talked in low tones. Prince
Nicholas came in serious and taciturn. Princess Mary seemed even quieter
and more diffident than usual. The guests were reluctant to address her,
feeling that she was in no mood for their conversation. Count Rostopchin
alone kept the conversation going, now relating the latest town news,
and now the latest political gossip.

Lopukhin and the old general occasionally took part in the conversation.
Prince Bolkonski listened as a presiding judge receives a report, only
now and then, silently or by a brief word, showing that he took heed of
what was being reported to him. The tone of the conversation was such as
indicated that no one approved of what was being done in the political
world. Incidents were related evidently confirming the opinion that
everything was going from bad to worse, but whether telling a story or
giving an opinion the speaker always stopped, or was stopped, at the
point beyond which his criticism might touch the sovereign himself.

At dinner the talk turned on the latest political news: Napoleon's
seizure of the Duke of Oldenburg's territory, and the Russian Note,
hostile to Napoleon, which had been sent to all the European courts.

"Bonaparte treats Europe as a pirate does a captured vessel," said Count
Rostopchin, repeating a phrase he had uttered several times before. "One
only wonders at the long-suffering or blindness of the crowned heads.
Now the Pope's turn has come and Bonaparte doesn't scruple to depose the
head of the Catholic Church--yet all keep silent! Our sovereign alone
has protested against the seizure of the Duke of Oldenburg's territory,
and even..." Count Rostopchin paused, feeling that he had reached the
limit beyond which censure was impossible.

"Other territories have been offered in exchange for the Duchy of
Oldenburg," said Prince Bolkonski. "He shifts the Dukes about as I might
move my serfs from Bald Hills to Bogucharovo or my Ryazan estates."

"The Duke of Oldenburg bears his misfortunes with admirable strength of
character and resignation," remarked Boris, joining in respectfully.

He said this because on his journey from Petersburg he had had the honor
of being presented to the Duke. Prince Bolkonski glanced at the young
man as if about to say something in reply, but changed his mind,
evidently considering him too young.

"I have read our protests about the Oldenburg affair and was surprised
how badly the Note was worded," remarked Count Rostopchin in the casual
tone of a man dealing with a subject quite familiar to him.

Pierre looked at Rostopchin with naive astonishment, not understanding
why he should be disturbed by the bad composition of the Note.

"Does it matter, Count, how the Note is worded," he asked, "so long as
its substance is forcible?"

"My dear fellow, with our five hundred thousand troops it should be easy
to have a good style," returned Count Rostopchin.

Pierre now understood the count's dissatisfaction with the wording of
the Note.

"One would have thought quill drivers enough had sprung up," remarked
the old prince. "There in Petersburg they are always writing--not notes
only but even new laws. My Andrew there has written a whole volume
of laws for Russia. Nowadays they are always writing!" and he laughed
unnaturally.

There was a momentary pause in the conversation; the old general cleared
his throat to draw attention.

"Did you hear of the last event at the review in Petersburg? The figure
cut by the new French ambassador."

"Eh? Yes, I heard something: he said something awkward in His Majesty's
presence."

"His Majesty drew attention to the Grenadier division and to the march
past," continued the general, "and it seems the ambassador took no
notice and allowed himself to reply that: 'We in France pay no attention
to such trifles!' The Emperor did not condescend to reply. At the next
review, they say, the Emperor did not once deign to address him."

All were silent. On this fact relating to the Emperor personally, it was
impossible to pass any judgment.

"Impudent fellows!" said the prince. "You know Metivier? I turned him
out of my house this morning. He was here; they admitted him in spite of
my request that they should let no one in," he went on, glancing angrily
at his daughter.

And he narrated his whole conversation with the French doctor and the
reasons that convinced him that Metivier was a spy. Though these reasons
were very insufficient and obscure, no one made any rejoinder.

After the roast, champagne was served. The guests rose to congratulate
the old prince. Princess Mary, too, went round to him.

He gave her a cold, angry look and offered her his wrinkled,
clean-shaven cheek to kiss. The whole expression of his face told her
that he had not forgotten the morning's talk, that his decision remained
in force, and only the presence of visitors hindered his speaking of it
to her now.

When they went into the drawing room where coffee was served, the old
men sat together.

Prince Nicholas grew more animated and expressed his views on the
impending war.

He said that our wars with Bonaparte would be disastrous so long as we
sought alliances with the Germans and thrust ourselves into European
affairs, into which we had been drawn by the Peace of Tilsit. "We ought
not to fight either for or against Austria. Our political interests are
all in the East, and in regard to Bonaparte the only thing is to have
an armed frontier and a firm policy, and he will never dare to cross the
Russian frontier, as was the case in 1807!"

"How can we fight the French, Prince?" said Count Rostopchin. "Can we
arm ourselves against our teachers and divinities? Look at our youths,
look at our ladies! The French are our Gods: Paris is our Kingdom of
Heaven."

He began speaking louder, evidently to be heard by everyone.

"French dresses, French ideas, French feelings! There now, you turned
Metivier out by the scruff of his neck because he is a Frenchman and a
scoundrel, but our ladies crawl after him on their knees. I went to
a party last night, and there out of five ladies three were Roman
Catholics and had the Pope's indulgence for doing woolwork on Sundays.
And they themselves sit there nearly naked, like the signboards at our
Public Baths if I may say so. Ah, when one looks at our young people,
Prince, one would like to take Peter the Great's old cudgel out of the
museum and belabor them in the Russian way till all the nonsense jumps
out of them."

All were silent. The old prince looked at Rostopchin with a smile and
wagged his head approvingly.

"Well, good-by, your excellency, keep well!" said Rostopchin, getting up
with characteristic briskness and holding out his hand to the prince.

"Good-by, my dear fellow.... His words are music, I never tire of
hearing him!" said the old prince, keeping hold of the hand and offering
his cheek to be kissed.

Following Rostopchin's example the others also rose.





CHAPTER IV


Princess Mary as she sat listening to the old men's talk and
faultfinding, understood nothing of what she heard; she only wondered
whether the guests had all observed her father's hostile attitude toward
her. She did not even notice the special attentions and amiabilities
shown her during dinner by Boris Drubetskoy, who was visiting them for
the third time already.

Princess Mary turned with absent-minded questioning look to Pierre, who
hat in hand and with a smile on his face was the last of the guests to
approach her after the old prince had gone out and they were left alone
in the drawing room.

"May I stay a little longer?" he said, letting his stout body sink into
an armchair beside her.

"Oh yes," she answered. "You noticed nothing?" her look asked.

Pierre was in an agreeable after-dinner mood. He looked straight before
him and smiled quietly.

"Have you known that young man long, Princess?" he asked.

"Who?"

"Drubetskoy."

"No, not long..."

"Do you like him?"

"Yes, he is an agreeable young man.... Why do you ask me that?" said
Princess Mary, still thinking of that morning's conversation with her
father.

"Because I have noticed that when a young man comes on leave from
Petersburg to Moscow it is usually with the object of marrying an
heiress."

"You have observed that?" said Princess Mary.

"Yes," returned Pierre with a smile, "and this young man now manages
matters so that where there is a wealthy heiress there he is too. I
can read him like a book. At present he is hesitating whom to lay siege
to--you or Mademoiselle Julie Karagina. He is very attentive to her."

"He visits them?"

"Yes, very often. And do you know the new way of courting?" said Pierre
with an amused smile, evidently in that cheerful mood of good humored
raillery for which he so often reproached himself in his diary.

"No," replied Princess Mary.

"To please Moscow girls nowadays one has to be melancholy. He is very
melancholy with Mademoiselle Karagina," said Pierre.

"Really?" asked Princess Mary, looking into Pierre's kindly face and
still thinking of her own sorrow. "It would be a relief," thought she,
"if I ventured to confide what I am feeling to someone. I should like
to tell everything to Pierre. He is kind and generous. It would be a
relief. He would give me advice."

"Would you marry him?"

"Oh, my God, Count, there are moments when I would marry anybody!" she
cried suddenly to her own surprise and with tears in her voice. "Ah, how
bitter it is to love someone near to you and to feel that..." she went
on in a trembling voice, "that you can do nothing for him but grieve
him, and to know that you cannot alter this. Then there is only one
thing left--to go away, but where could I go?"

"What is wrong? What is it, Princess?"

But without finishing what she was saying, Princess Mary burst into
tears.

"I don't know what is the matter with me today. Don't take any
notice--forget what I have said!"

Pierre's gaiety vanished completely. He anxiously questioned the
princess, asked her to speak out fully and confide her grief to him; but
she only repeated that she begged him to forget what she had said, that
she did not remember what she had said, and that she had no trouble
except the one he knew of--that Prince Andrew's marriage threatened to
cause a rupture between father and son.

"Have you any news of the Rostovs?" she asked, to change the subject.
"I was told they are coming soon. I am also expecting Andrew any day. I
should like them to meet here."

"And how does he now regard the matter?" asked Pierre, referring to the
old prince.

Princess Mary shook her head.

"What is to be done? In a few months the year will be up. The thing is
impossible. I only wish I could spare my brother the first moments. I
wish they would come sooner. I hope to be friends with her. You have
known them a long time," said Princess Mary. "Tell me honestly the whole
truth: what sort of girl is she, and what do you think of her?--The real
truth, because you know Andrew is risking so much doing this against his
father's will that I should like to know..."

An undefined instinct told Pierre that these explanations, and repeated
requests to be told the whole truth, expressed ill-will on the
princess' part toward her future sister-in-law and a wish that he should
disapprove of Andrew's choice; but in reply he said what he felt rather
than what he thought.

"I don't know how to answer your question," he said, blushing without
knowing why. "I really don't know what sort of girl she is; I can't
analyze her at all. She is enchanting, but what makes her so I don't
know. That is all one can say about her."

Princess Mary sighed, and the expression on her face said: "Yes, that's
what I expected and feared."

"Is she clever?" she asked.

Pierre considered.

"I think not," he said, "and yet--yes. She does not deign to be
clever.... Oh no, she is simply enchanting, and that is all."

Princess Mary again shook her head disapprovingly.

"Ah, I so long to like her! Tell her so if you see her before I do."

"I hear they are expected very soon," said Pierre.

Princess Mary told Pierre of her plan to become intimate with her future
sister-in-law as soon as the Rostovs arrived and to try to accustom the
old prince to her.





CHAPTER V


Boris had not succeeded in making a wealthy match in Petersburg, so with
the same object in view he came to Moscow. There he wavered between the
two richest heiresses, Julie and Princess Mary. Though Princess Mary
despite her plainness seemed to him more attractive than Julie, he,
without knowing why, felt awkward about paying court to her. When they
had last met on the old prince's name day, she had answered at random
all his attempts to talk sentimentally, evidently not listening to what
he was saying.

Julie on the contrary accepted his attentions readily, though in a
manner peculiar to herself.

She was twenty-seven. After the death of her brothers she had become
very wealthy. She was by now decidedly plain, but thought herself not
merely as good-looking as before but even far more attractive. She
was confirmed in this delusion by the fact that she had become a very
wealthy heiress and also by the fact that the older she grew the less
dangerous she became to men, and the more freely they could associate
with her and avail themselves of her suppers, soirees, and the animated
company that assembled at her house, without incurring any obligation.
A man who would have been afraid ten years before of going every day
to the house when there was a girl of seventeen there, for fear of
compromising her and committing himself, would now go boldly every day
and treat her not as a marriageable girl but as a sexless acquaintance.

That winter the Karagins' house was the most agreeable and hospitable
in Moscow. In addition to the formal evening and dinner parties, a large
company, chiefly of men, gathered there every day, supping at midnight
and staying till three in the morning. Julie never missed a ball, a
promenade, or a play. Her dresses were always of the latest fashion.
But in spite of that she seemed to be disillusioned about everything and
told everyone that she did not believe either in friendship or in
love, or any of the joys of life, and expected peace only "yonder." She
adopted the tone of one who has suffered a great disappointment, like a
girl who has either lost the man she loved or been cruelly deceived by
him. Though nothing of the kind had happened to her she was regarded in
that light, and had even herself come to believe that she had suffered
much in life. This melancholy, which did not prevent her amusing
herself, did not hinder the young people who came to her house from
passing the time pleasantly. Every visitor who came to the house paid
his tribute to the melancholy mood of the hostess, and then amused
himself with society gossip, dancing, intellectual games, and bouts
rimes, which were in vogue at the Karagins'. Only a few of these young
men, among them Boris, entered more deeply into Julie's melancholy, and
with these she had prolonged conversations in private on the vanity
of all worldly things, and to them she showed her albums filled with
mournful sketches, maxims, and verses.

To Boris, Julie was particularly gracious: she regretted his early
disillusionment with life, offered him such consolation of friendship
as she who had herself suffered so much could render, and showed him her
album. Boris sketched two trees in the album and wrote: "Rustic trees,
your dark branches shed gloom and melancholy upon me."

On another page he drew a tomb, and wrote:

    La mort est secourable et la mort est tranquille.
    Ah! contre les douleurs il n'y a pas d'autre asile. *


    * Death gives relief and death is peaceful.


Ah! from suffering there is no other refuge.

Julie said this was charming

"There is something so enchanting in the smile of melancholy," she said
to Boris, repeating word for word a passage she had copied from a book.
"It is a ray of light in the darkness, a shade between sadness and
despair, showing the possibility of consolation."

In reply Boris wrote these lines:

    Aliment de poison d'une ame trop sensible,
    Toi, sans qui le bonheur me serait impossible,
    Tendre melancholie, ah, viens me consoler,
    Viens calmer les tourments de ma sombre retraite,
    Et mele une douceur secrete
    A ces pleurs que je sens couler. *


      *Poisonous nourishment of a too sensitive soul,
     Thou, without whom happiness would for me be impossible,
     Tender melancholy, ah, come to console me,
     Come to calm the torments of my gloomy retreat,
     And mingle a secret sweetness
     With these tears that I feel to be flowing.


For Boris, Julie played most doleful nocturnes on her harp. Boris read
Poor Liza aloud to her, and more than once interrupted the reading
because of the emotions that choked him. Meeting at large gatherings
Julie and Boris looked on one another as the only souls who understood
one another in a world of indifferent people.

Anna Mikhaylovna, who often visited the Karagins, while playing cards
with the mother made careful inquiries as to Julie's dowry (she was to
have two estates in Penza and the Nizhegorod forests). Anna Mikhaylovna
regarded the refined sadness that united her son to the wealthy Julie
with emotion, and resignation to the Divine will.

"You are always charming and melancholy, my dear Julie," she said to
the daughter. "Boris says his soul finds repose at your house. He has
suffered so many disappointments and is so sensitive," said she to the
mother. "Ah, my dear, I can't tell you how fond I have grown of Julie
latterly," she said to her son. "But who could help loving her? She is
an angelic being! Ah, Boris, Boris!"--she paused. "And how I pity her
mother," she went on; "today she showed me her accounts and letters from
Penza (they have enormous estates there), and she, poor thing, has no
one to help her, and they do cheat her so!"

Boris smiled almost imperceptibly while listening to his mother. He
laughed blandly at her naive diplomacy but listened to what she had
to say, and sometimes questioned her carefully about the Penza and
Nizhegorod estates.

Julie had long been expecting a proposal from her melancholy adorer and
was ready to accept it; but some secret feeling of repulsion for her,
for her passionate desire to get married, for her artificiality, and
a feeling of horror at renouncing the possibility of real love still
restrained Boris. His leave was expiring. He spent every day and whole
days at the Karagins', and every day on thinking the matter over told
himself that he would propose tomorrow. But in Julie's presence, looking
at her red face and chin (nearly always powdered), her moist eyes, and
her expression of continual readiness to pass at once from melancholy
to an unnatural rapture of married bliss, Boris could not utter the
decisive words, though in imagination he had long regarded himself as
the possessor of those Penza and Nizhegorod estates and had apportioned
the use of the income from them. Julie saw Boris' indecision, and
sometimes the thought occurred to her that she was repulsive to him, but
her feminine self-deception immediately supplied her with consolation,
and she told herself that he was only shy from love. Her melancholy,
however, began to turn to irritability, and not long before Boris'
departure she formed a definite plan of action. Just as Boris' leave of
absence was expiring, Anatole Kuragin made his appearance in Moscow, and
of course in the Karagins' drawing room, and Julie, suddenly abandoning
her melancholy, became cheerful and very attentive to Kuragin.

"My dear," said Anna Mikhaylovna to her son, "I know from a reliable
source that Prince Vasili has sent his son to Moscow to get him married
to Julie. I am so fond of Julie that I should be sorry for her. What do
you think of it, my dear?"

The idea of being made a fool of and of having thrown away that whole
month of arduous melancholy service to Julie, and of seeing all the
revenue from the Penza estates which he had already mentally apportioned
and put to proper use fall into the hands of another, and especially
into the hands of that idiot Anatole, pained Boris. He drove to the
Karagins' with the firm intention of proposing. Julie met him in a gay,
careless manner, spoke casually of how she had enjoyed yesterday's ball,
and asked when he was leaving. Though Boris had come intentionally to
speak of his love and therefore meant to be tender, he began speaking
irritably of feminine inconstancy, of how easily women can turn from
sadness to joy, and how their moods depend solely on who happens to be
paying court to them. Julie was offended and replied that it was true
that a woman needs variety, and the same thing over and over again would
weary anyone.

"Then I should advise you..." Boris began, wishing to sting her; but at
that instant the galling thought occurred to him that he might have to
leave Moscow without having accomplished his aim, and have vainly wasted
his efforts--which was a thing he never allowed to happen.

He checked himself in the middle of the sentence, lowered his eyes to
avoid seeing her unpleasantly irritated and irresolute face, and said:

"I did not come here at all to quarrel with you. On the contrary..."

He glanced at her to make sure that he might go on. Her irritability had
suddenly quite vanished, and her anxious, imploring eyes were fixed on
him with greedy expectation. "I can always arrange so as not to see her
often," thought Boris. "The affair has been begun and must be finished!"
He blushed hotly, raised his eyes to hers, and said:

"You know my feelings for you!"

There was no need to say more: Julie's face shone with triumph and
self-satisfaction; but she forced Boris to say all that is said on such
occasions--that he loved her and had never loved any other woman more
than her. She knew that for the Penza estates and Nizhegorod forests she
could demand this, and she received what she demanded.

The affianced couple, no longer alluding to trees that shed gloom and
melancholy upon them, planned the arrangements of a splendid house in
Petersburg, paid calls, and prepared everything for a brilliant wedding.





CHAPTER VI


At the end of January old Count Rostov went to Moscow with Natasha and
Sonya. The countess was still unwell and unable to travel but it was
impossible to wait for her recovery. Prince Andrew was expected in
Moscow any day, the trousseau had to be ordered and the estate near
Moscow had to be sold, besides which the opportunity of presenting his
future daughter-in-law to old Prince Bolkonski while he was in Moscow
could not be missed. The Rostovs' Moscow house had not been heated that
winter and, as they had come only for a short time and the countess
was not with them, the count decided to stay with Marya Dmitrievna
Akhrosimova, who had long been pressing her hospitality on them.

Late one evening the Rostovs' four sleighs drove into Marya Dmitrievna's
courtyard in the old Konyusheny street. Marya Dmitrievna lived alone.
She had already married off her daughter, and her sons were all in the
service.

She held herself as erect, told everyone her opinion as candidly,
loudly, and bluntly as ever, and her whole bearing seemed a reproach
to others for any weakness, passion, or temptation--the possibility of
which she did not admit. From early in the morning, wearing a dressing
jacket, she attended to her household affairs, and then she drove out:
on holy days to church and after the service to jails and prisons on
affairs of which she never spoke to anyone. On ordinary days, after
dressing, she received petitioners of various classes, of whom there
were always some. Then she had dinner, a substantial and appetizing meal
at which there were always three or four guests; after dinner she played
a game of boston, and at night she had the newspapers or a new book read
to her while she knitted. She rarely made an exception and went out to
pay visits, and then only to the most important persons in the town.

She had not yet gone to bed when the Rostovs arrived and the pulley of
the hall door squeaked from the cold as it let in the Rostovs and their
servants. Marya Dmitrievna, with her spectacles hanging down on her nose
and her head flung back, stood in the hall doorway looking with a stern,
grim face at the new arrivals. One might have thought she was angry with
the travelers and would immediately turn them out, had she not at the
same time been giving careful instructions to the servants for the
accommodation of the visitors and their belongings.

"The count's things? Bring them here," she said, pointing to the
portmanteaus and not greeting anyone. "The young ladies'? There to the
left. Now what are you dawdling for?" she cried to the maids. "Get the
samovar ready!... You've grown plumper and prettier," she remarked,
drawing Natasha (whose cheeks were glowing from the cold) to her by the
hood. "Foo! You are cold! Now take off your things, quick!" she shouted
to the count who was going to kiss her hand. "You're half frozen,
I'm sure! Bring some rum for tea!... Bonjour, Sonya dear!" she added,
turning to Sonya and indicating by this French greeting her slightly
contemptuous though affectionate attitude toward her.

When they came in to tea, having taken off their outdoor things and
tidied themselves up after their journey, Marya Dmitrievna kissed them
all in due order.

"I'm heartily glad you have come and are staying with me. It was high
time," she said, giving Natasha a significant look. "The old man is here
and his son's expected any day. You'll have to make his acquaintance.
But we'll speak of that later on," she added, glancing at Sonya with a
look that showed she did not want to speak of it in her presence. "Now
listen," she said to the count. "What do you want tomorrow? Whom will
you send for? Shinshin?" she crooked one of her fingers. "The sniveling
Anna Mikhaylovna? That's two. She's here with her son. The son is
getting married! Then Bezukhov, eh? He is here too, with his wife. He
ran away from her and she came galloping after him. He dined with me on
Wednesday. As for them"--and she pointed to the girls--"tomorrow I'll
take them first to the Iberian shrine of the Mother of God, and then
we'll drive to the Super-Rogue's. I suppose you'll have everything new.
Don't judge by me: sleeves nowadays are this size! The other day young
Princess Irina Vasilevna came to see me; she was an awful sight--looked
as if she had put two barrels on her arms. You know not a day passes
now without some new fashion.... And what have you to do yourself?" she
asked the count sternly.

"One thing has come on top of another: her rags to buy, and now a
purchaser has turned up for the Moscow estate and for the house. If you
will be so kind, I'll fix a time and go down to the estate just for a
day, and leave my lassies with you."

"All right. All right. They'll be safe with me, as safe as in Chancery!
I'll take them where they must go, scold them a bit, and pet them a
bit," said Marya Dmitrievna, touching her goddaughter and favorite,
Natasha, on the cheek with her large hand.

Next morning Marya Dmitrievna took the young ladies to the Iberian
shrine of the Mother of God and to Madame Suppert-Roguet, who was so
afraid of Marya Dmitrievna that she always let her have costumes at a
loss merely to get rid of her. Marya Dmitrievna ordered almost the
whole trousseau. When they got home she turned everybody out of the room
except Natasha, and then called her pet to her armchair.

"Well, now we'll talk. I congratulate you on your betrothed. You've
hooked a fine fellow! I am glad for your sake and I've known him since
he was so high." She held her hand a couple of feet from the ground.
Natasha blushed happily. "I like him and all his family. Now listen! You
know that old Prince Nicholas much dislikes his son's marrying. The old
fellow's crotchety! Of course Prince Andrew is not a child and can shift
without him, but it's not nice to enter a family against a father's
will. One wants to do it peacefully and lovingly. You're a clever girl
and you'll know how to manage. Be kind, and use your wits. Then all will
be well."

Natasha remained silent, from shyness Marya Dmitrievna supposed, but
really because she disliked anyone interfering in what touched her love
of Prince Andrew, which seemed to her so apart from all human affairs
that no one could understand it. She loved and knew Prince Andrew, he
loved her only, and was to come one of these days and take her. She
wanted nothing more.

"You see I have known him a long time and am also fond of Mary, your
future sister-in-law. 'Husbands' sisters bring up blisters,' but this
one wouldn't hurt a fly. She has asked me to bring you two together.
Tomorrow you'll go with your father to see her. Be very nice and
affectionate to her: you're younger than she. When he comes, he'll find
you already know his sister and father and are liked by them. Am I right
or not? Won't that be best?"

"Yes, it will," Natasha answered reluctantly.





CHAPTER VII


Next day, by Marya Dmitrievna's advice, Count Rostov took Natasha to
call on Prince Nicholas Bolkonski. The count did not set out cheerfully
on this visit, at heart he felt afraid. He well remembered the last
interview he had had with the old prince at the time of the enrollment,
when in reply to an invitation to dinner he had had to listen to an
angry reprimand for not having provided his full quota of men. Natasha,
on the other hand, having put on her best gown, was in the highest
spirits. "They can't help liking me," she thought. "Everybody always has
liked me, and I am so willing to do anything they wish, so ready to
be fond of him--for being his father--and of her--for being his
sister--that there is no reason for them not to like me..."

They drove up to the gloomy old house on the Vozdvizhenka and entered
the vestibule.

"Well, the Lord have mercy on us!" said the count, half in jest, half
in earnest; but Natasha noticed that her father was flurried on entering
the anteroom and inquired timidly and softly whether the prince and
princess were at home.

When they had been announced a perturbation was noticeable among the
servants. The footman who had gone to announce them was stopped by
another in the large hall and they whispered to one another. Then a
maidservant ran into the hall and hurriedly said something, mentioning
the princess. At last an old, cross looking footman came and announced
to the Rostovs that the prince was not receiving, but that the princess
begged them to walk up. The first person who came to meet the visitors
was Mademoiselle Bourienne. She greeted the father and daughter with
special politeness and showed them to the princess' room. The princess,
looking excited and nervous, her face flushed in patches, ran in to meet
the visitors, treading heavily, and vainly trying to appear cordial and
at ease. From the first glance Princess Mary did not like Natasha. She
thought her too fashionably dressed, frivolously gay and vain. She did
not at all realize that before having seen her future sister-in-law she
was prejudiced against her by involuntary envy of her beauty, youth, and
happiness, as well as by jealousy of her brother's love for her. Apart
from this insuperable antipathy to her, Princess Mary was agitated just
then because on the Rostovs' being announced, the old prince had shouted
that he did not wish to see them, that Princess Mary might do so if
she chose, but they were not to be admitted to him. She had decided to
receive them, but feared lest the prince might at any moment indulge in
some freak, as he seemed much upset by the Rostovs' visit.

"There, my dear princess, I've brought you my songstress," said the
count, bowing and looking round uneasily as if afraid the old prince
might appear. "I am so glad you should get to know one another... very
sorry the prince is still ailing," and after a few more commonplace
remarks he rose. "If you'll allow me to leave my Natasha in your
hands for a quarter of an hour, Princess, I'll drive round to see Anna
Semenovna, it's quite near in the Dogs' Square, and then I'll come back
for her."

The count had devised this diplomatic ruse (as he afterwards told his
daughter) to give the future sisters-in-law an opportunity to talk
to one another freely, but another motive was to avoid the danger of
encountering the old prince, of whom he was afraid. He did not mention
this to his daughter, but Natasha noticed her father's nervousness
and anxiety and felt mortified by it. She blushed for him, grew still
angrier at having blushed, and looked at the princess with a bold and
defiant expression which said that she was not afraid of anybody. The
princess told the count that she would be delighted, and only begged him
to stay longer at Anna Semenovna's, and he departed.

Despite the uneasy glances thrown at her by Princess Mary--who wished to
have a tete-a-tete with Natasha--Mademoiselle Bourienne remained in
the room and persistently talked about Moscow amusements and theaters.
Natasha felt offended by the hesitation she had noticed in the anteroom,
by her father's nervousness, and by the unnatural manner of the princess
who--she thought--was making a favor of receiving her, and so everything
displeased her. She did not like Princess Mary, whom she thought very
plain, affected, and dry. Natasha suddenly shrank into herself and
involuntarily assumed an offhand air which alienated Princess Mary still
more. After five minutes of irksome, constrained conversation, they
heard the sound of slippered feet rapidly approaching. Princess Mary
looked frightened.

The door opened and the old prince, in a dressing gown and a white
nightcap, came in.

"Ah, madam!" he began. "Madam, Countess... Countess Rostova, if I am
not mistaken... I beg you to excuse me, to excuse me... I did not know,
madam. God is my witness, I did not know you had honored us with a
visit, and I came in such a costume only to see my daughter. I beg
you to excuse me... God is my witness, I didn't know-" he repeated,
stressing the word "God" so unnaturally and so unpleasantly that
Princess Mary stood with downcast eyes not daring to look either at her
father or at Natasha.

Nor did the latter, having risen and curtsied, know what to do.
Mademoiselle Bourienne alone smiled agreeably.

"I beg you to excuse me, excuse me! God is my witness, I did not know,"
muttered the old man, and after looking Natasha over from head to foot
he went out.

Mademoiselle Bourienne was the first to recover herself after this
apparition and began speaking about the prince's indisposition. Natasha
and Princess Mary looked at one another in silence, and the longer they
did so without saying what they wanted to say, the greater grew their
antipathy to one another.

When the count returned, Natasha was impolitely pleased and hastened
to get away: at that moment she hated the stiff, elderly princess, who
could place her in such an embarrassing position and had spent half an
hour with her without once mentioning Prince Andrew. "I couldn't begin
talking about him in the presence of that Frenchwoman," thought Natasha.
The same thought was meanwhile tormenting Princess Mary. She knew what
she ought to have said to Natasha, but she had been unable to say it
because Mademoiselle Bourienne was in the way, and because, without
knowing why, she felt it very difficult to speak of the marriage. When
the count was already leaving the room, Princess Mary went up hurriedly
to Natasha, took her by the hand, and said with a deep sigh:

"Wait, I must..."

Natasha glanced at her ironically without knowing why.

"Dear Natalie," said Princess Mary, "I want you to know that I am glad
my brother has found happiness...."

She paused, feeling that she was not telling the truth. Natasha noticed
this and guessed its reason.

"I think, Princess, it is not convenient to speak of that now," she said
with external dignity and coldness, though she felt the tears choking
her.

"What have I said and what have I done?" thought she, as soon as she was
out of the room.

They waited a long time for Natasha to come to dinner that day. She sat
in her room crying like a child, blowing her nose and sobbing. Sonya
stood beside her, kissing her hair.

"Natasha, what is it about?" she asked. "What do they matter to you? It
will all pass, Natasha."

"But if you only knew how offensive it was... as if I..."

"Don't talk about it, Natasha. It wasn't your fault so why should you
mind? Kiss me," said Sonya.

Natasha raised her head and, kissing her friend on the lips, pressed her
wet face against her.

"I can't tell you, I don't know. No one's to blame," said Natasha--"It's
my fault. But it all hurts terribly. Oh, why doesn't he come?..."

She came in to dinner with red eyes. Marya Dmitrievna, who knew how
the prince had received the Rostovs, pretended not to notice how upset
Natasha was and jested resolutely and loudly at table with the count and
the other guests.





CHAPTER VIII


That evening the Rostovs went to the Opera, for which Marya Dmitrievna
had taken a box.

Natasha did not want to go, but could not refuse Marya Dmitrievna's kind
offer which was intended expressly for her. When she came ready dressed
into the ballroom to await her father, and looking in the large mirror
there saw that she was pretty, very pretty, she felt even more sad, but
it was a sweet, tender sadness.

"O God, if he were here now I would not behave as I did then, but
differently. I would not be silly and afraid of things, I would simply
embrace him, cling to him, and make him look at me with those searching
inquiring eyes with which he has so often looked at me, and then I would
make him laugh as he used to laugh. And his eyes--how I see those eyes!"
thought Natasha. "And what do his father and sister matter to me? I
love him alone, him, him, with that face and those eyes, with his smile,
manly and yet childlike.... No, I had better not think of him; not think
of him but forget him, quite forget him for the present. I can't bear
this waiting and I shall cry in a minute!" and she turned away from the
glass, making an effort not to cry. "And how can Sonya love Nicholas
so calmly and quietly and wait so long and so patiently?" thought she,
looking at Sonya, who also came in quite ready, with a fan in her hand.
"No, she's altogether different. I can't!"

Natasha at that moment felt so softened and tender that it was not
enough for her to love and know she was beloved, she wanted now, at
once, to embrace the man she loved, to speak and hear from him words of
love such as filled her heart. While she sat in the carriage beside her
father, pensively watching the lights of the street lamps flickering on
the frozen window, she felt still sadder and more in love, and forgot
where she was going and with whom. Having fallen into the line of
carriages, the Rostovs' carriage drove up to the theater, its wheels
squeaking over the snow. Natasha and Sonya, holding up their dresses,
jumped out quickly. The count got out helped by the footmen, and,
passing among men and women who were entering and the program sellers,
they all three went along the corridor to the first row of boxes.
Through the closed doors the music was already audible.

"Natasha, your hair!..." whispered Sonya.

An attendant deferentially and quickly slipped before the ladies and
opened the door of their box. The music sounded louder and through the
door rows of brightly lit boxes in which ladies sat with bare arms and
shoulders, and noisy stalls brilliant with uniforms, glittered before
their eyes. A lady entering the next box shot a glance of feminine envy
at Natasha. The curtain had not yet risen and the overture was being
played. Natasha, smoothing her gown, went in with Sonya and sat down,
scanning the brilliant tiers of boxes opposite. A sensation she had not
experienced for a long time--that of hundreds of eyes looking at
her bare arms and neck--suddenly affected her both agreeably and
disagreeably and called up a whole crowd of memories, desires and
emotions associated with that feeling.

The two remarkably pretty girls, Natasha and Sonya, with Count Rostov
who had not been seen in Moscow for a long time, attracted general
attention. Moreover, everybody knew vaguely of Natasha's engagement to
Prince Andrew, and knew that the Rostovs had lived in the country ever
since, and all looked with curiosity at a fiancee who was making one of
the best matches in Russia.

Natasha's looks, as everyone told her, had improved in the country, and
that evening thanks to her agitation she was particularly pretty. She
struck those who saw her by her fullness of life and beauty, combined
with her indifference to everything about her. Her black eyes looked at
the crowd without seeking anyone, and her delicate arm, bare to
above the elbow, lay on the velvet edge of the box, while, evidently
unconsciously, she opened and closed her hand in time to the music,
crumpling her program. "Look, there's Alenina," said Sonya, "with her
mother, isn't it?"

"Dear me, Michael Kirilovich has grown still stouter!" remarked the
count.

"Look at our Anna Mikhaylovna--what a headdress she has on!"

"The Karagins, Julie--and Boris with them. One can see at once that
they're engaged...."

"Drubetskoy has proposed?"

"Oh yes, I heard it today," said Shinshin, coming into the Rostovs' box.

Natasha looked in the direction in which her father's eyes were turned
and saw Julie sitting beside her mother with a happy look on her face
and a string of pearls round her thick red neck--which Natasha knew was
covered with powder. Behind them, wearing a smile and leaning over with
an ear to Julie's mouth, was Boris' handsome smoothly brushed head. He
looked at the Rostovs from under his brows and said something, smiling,
to his betrothed.

"They are talking about us, about me and him!" thought Natasha. "And he
no doubt is calming her jealousy of me. They needn't trouble themselves!
If only they knew how little I am concerned about any of them."

Behind them sat Anna Mikhaylovna wearing a green headdress and with a
happy look of resignation to the will of God on her face. Their box was
pervaded by that atmosphere of an affianced couple which Natasha knew so
well and liked so much. She turned away and suddenly remembered all that
had been so humiliating in her morning's visit.

"What right has he not to wish to receive me into his family? Oh, better
not think of it--not till he comes back!" she told herself, and began
looking at the faces, some strange and some familiar, in the stalls. In
the front, in the very center, leaning back against the orchestra rail,
stood Dolokhov in a Persian dress, his curly hair brushed up into a huge
shock. He stood in full view of the audience, well aware that he was
attracting everyone's attention, yet as much at ease as though he were
in his own room. Around him thronged Moscow's most brilliant young men,
whom he evidently dominated.

The count, laughing, nudged the blushing Sonya and pointed to her former
adorer.

"Do you recognize him?" said he. "And where has he sprung from?" he
asked, turning to Shinshin. "Didn't he vanish somewhere?"

"He did," replied Shinshin. "He was in the Caucasus and ran away from
there. They say he has been acting as minister to some ruling prince in
Persia, where he killed the Shah's brother. Now all the Moscow ladies
are mad about him! It's 'Dolokhov the Persian' that does it! We never
hear a word but Dolokhov is mentioned. They swear by him, they offer
him to you as they would a dish of choice sterlet. Dolokhov and Anatole
Kuragin have turned all our ladies' heads."

A tall, beautiful woman with a mass of plaited hair and much exposed
plump white shoulders and neck, round which she wore a double string of
large pearls, entered the adjoining box rustling her heavy silk dress
and took a long time settling into her place.

Natasha involuntarily gazed at that neck, those shoulders, and pearls
and coiffure, and admired the beauty of the shoulders and the pearls.
While Natasha was fixing her gaze on her for the second time the lady
looked round and, meeting the count's eyes, nodded to him and smiled.
She was the Countess Bezukhova, Pierre's wife, and the count, who knew
everyone in society, leaned over and spoke to her.

"Have you been here long, Countess?" he inquired. "I'll call, I'll call
to kiss your hand. I'm here on business and have brought my girls with
me. They say Semenova acts marvelously. Count Pierre never used to
forget us. Is he here?"

"Yes, he meant to look in," answered Helene, and glanced attentively at
Natasha.

Count Rostov resumed his seat.

"Handsome, isn't she?" he whispered to Natasha.

"Wonderful!" answered Natasha. "She's a woman one could easily fall in
love with."

Just then the last chords of the overture were heard and the conductor
tapped with his stick. Some latecomers took their seats in the stalls,
and the curtain rose.

As soon as it rose everyone in the boxes and stalls became silent, and
all the men, old and young, in uniform and evening dress, and all the
women with gems on their bare flesh, turned their whole attention with
eager curiosity to the stage. Natasha too began to look at it.





CHAPTER IX


The floor of the stage consisted of smooth boards, at the sides was
some painted cardboard representing trees, and at the back was a cloth
stretched over boards. In the center of the stage sat some girls in red
bodices and white skirts. One very fat girl in a white silk dress sat
apart on a low bench, to the back of which a piece of green cardboard
was glued. They all sang something. When they had finished their song
the girl in white went up to the prompter's box and a man with tight
silk trousers over his stout legs, and holding a plume and a dagger,
went up to her and began singing, waving his arms about.

First the man in the tight trousers sang alone, then she sang, then they
both paused while the orchestra played and the man fingered the hand
of the girl in white, obviously awaiting the beat to start singing with
her. They sang together and everyone in the theater began clapping
and shouting, while the man and woman on the stage--who represented
lovers--began smiling, spreading out their arms, and bowing.

After her life in the country, and in her present serious mood, all this
seemed grotesque and amazing to Natasha. She could not follow the opera
nor even listen to the music; she saw only the painted cardboard and the
queerly dressed men and women who moved, spoke, and sang so strangely in
that brilliant light. She knew what it was all meant to represent, but
it was so pretentiously false and unnatural that she first felt ashamed
for the actors and then amused at them. She looked at the faces of the
audience, seeking in them the same sense of ridicule and perplexity she
herself experienced, but they all seemed attentive to what was happening
on the stage, and expressed delight which to Natasha seemed feigned. "I
suppose it has to be like this!" she thought. She kept looking round in
turn at the rows of pomaded heads in the stalls and then at the
seminude women in the boxes, especially at Helene in the next box,
who--apparently quite unclothed--sat with a quiet tranquil smile, not
taking her eyes off the stage. And feeling the bright light that flooded
the whole place and the warm air heated by the crowd, Natasha little
by little began to pass into a state of intoxication she had not
experienced for a long while. She did not realize who and where she
was, nor what was going on before her. As she looked and thought, the
strangest fancies unexpectedly and disconnectedly passed through her
mind: the idea occurred to her of jumping onto the edge of the box and
singing the air the actress was singing, then she wished to touch with
her fan an old gentleman sitting not far from her, then to lean over to
Helene and tickle her.

At a moment when all was quiet before the commencement of a song, a door
leading to the stalls on the side nearest the Rostovs' box creaked, and
the steps of a belated arrival were heard. "There's Kuragin!" whispered
Shinshin. Countess Bezukhova turned smiling to the newcomer, and
Natasha, following the direction of that look, saw an exceptionally
handsome adjutant approaching their box with a self-assured yet
courteous bearing. This was Anatole Kuragin whom she had seen and
noticed long ago at the ball in Petersburg. He was now in an adjutant's
uniform with one epaulet and a shoulder knot. He moved with a restrained
swagger which would have been ridiculous had he not been so good-looking
and had his handsome face not worn such an expression of good-humored
complacency and gaiety. Though the performance was proceeding, he walked
deliberately down the carpeted gangway, his sword and spurs slightly
jingling and his handsome perfumed head held high. Having looked at
Natasha he approached his sister, laid his well gloved hand on the edge
of her box, nodded to her, and leaning forward asked a question, with a
motion toward Natasha.

"Mais charmante!" said he, evidently referring to Natasha, who did not
exactly hear his words but understood them from the movement of his
lips. Then he took his place in the first row of the stalls and sat down
beside Dolokhov, nudging with his elbow in a friendly and offhand way
that Dolokhov whom others treated so fawningly. He winked at him gaily,
smiled, and rested his foot against the orchestra screen.

"How like the brother is to the sister," remarked the count. "And how
handsome they both are!"

Shinshin, lowering his voice, began to tell the count of some intrigue
of Kuragin's in Moscow, and Natasha tried to overhear it just because he
had said she was "charmante."

The first act was over. In the stalls everyone began moving about, going
out and coming in.

Boris came to the Rostovs' box, received their congratulations very
simply, and raising his eyebrows with an absent-minded smile conveyed
to Natasha and Sonya his fiancee's invitation to her wedding, and
went away. Natasha with a gay, coquettish smile talked to him, and
congratulated on his approaching wedding that same Boris with whom she
had formerly been in love. In the state of intoxication she was in,
everything seemed simple and natural.

The scantily clad Helene smiled at everyone in the same way, and Natasha
gave Boris a similar smile.

Helene's box was filled and surrounded from the stalls by the most
distinguished and intellectual men, who seemed to vie with one another
in their wish to let everyone see that they knew her.

During the whole of that entr'acte Kuragin stood with Dolokhov in front
of the orchestra partition, looking at the Rostovs' box. Natasha knew he
was talking about her and this afforded her pleasure. She even turned so
that he should see her profile in what she thought was its most becoming
aspect. Before the beginning of the second act Pierre appeared in the
stalls. The Rostovs had not seen him since their arrival. His face
looked sad, and he had grown still stouter since Natasha last saw him.
He passed up to the front rows, not noticing anyone. Anatole went up to
him and began speaking to him, looking at and indicating the Rostovs'
box. On seeing Natasha Pierre grew animated and, hastily passing between
the rows, came toward their box. When he got there he leaned on his
elbows and, smiling, talked to her for a long time. While conversing
with Pierre, Natasha heard a man's voice in Countess Bezukhova's box and
something told her it was Kuragin. She turned and their eyes met.
Almost smiling, he gazed straight into her eyes with such an enraptured
caressing look that it seemed strange to be so near him, to look at him
like that, to be so sure he admired her, and not to be acquainted with
him.

In the second act there was scenery representing tombstones, there was a
round hole in the canvas to represent the moon, shades were raised over
the footlights, and from horns and contrabass came deep notes while many
people appeared from right and left wearing black cloaks and holding
things like daggers in their hands. They began waving their arms. Then
some other people ran in and began dragging away the maiden who had been
in white and was now in light blue. They did not drag her away at once,
but sang with her for a long time and then at last dragged her off, and
behind the scenes something metallic was struck three times and
everyone knelt down and sang a prayer. All these things were repeatedly
interrupted by the enthusiastic shouts of the audience.

During this act every time Natasha looked toward the stalls she saw
Anatole Kuragin with an arm thrown across the back of his chair, staring
at her. She was pleased to see that he was captivated by her and it did
not occur to her that there was anything wrong in it.

When the second act was over Countess Bezukhova rose, turned to the
Rostovs' box--her whole bosom completely exposed--beckoned the old count
with a gloved finger, and paying no attention to those who had entered
her box began talking to him with an amiable smile.

"Do make me acquainted with your charming daughters," said she. "The
whole town is singing their praises and I don't even know then!"

Natasha rose and curtsied to the splendid countess. She was so pleased
by praise from this brilliant beauty that she blushed with pleasure.

"I want to become a Moscovite too, now," said Helene. "How is it you're
not ashamed to bury such pearls in the country?"

Countess Bezukhova quite deserved her reputation of being a fascinating
woman. She could say what she did not think--especially what was
flattering--quite simply and naturally.

"Dear count, you must let me look after your daughters! Though I am not
staying here long this time--nor are you--I will try to amuse them. I
have already heard much of you in Petersburg and wanted to get to know
you," said she to Natasha with her stereotyped and lovely smile. "I had
heard about you from my page, Drubetskoy. Have you heard he is getting
married? And also from my husband's friend Bolkonski, Prince Andrew
Bolkonski," she went on with special emphasis, implying that she knew of
his relation to Natasha. To get better acquainted she asked that one
of the young ladies should come into her box for the rest of the
performance, and Natasha moved over to it.

The scene of the third act represented a palace in which many candles
were burning and pictures of knights with short beards hung on the
walls. In the middle stood what were probably a king and a queen. The
king waved his right arm and, evidently nervous, sang something badly
and sat down on a crimson throne. The maiden who had been first in white
and then in light blue, now wore only a smock, and stood beside the
throne with her hair down. She sang something mournfully, addressing the
queen, but the king waved his arm severely, and men and women with bare
legs came in from both sides and began dancing all together. Then the
violins played very shrilly and merrily and one of the women with thick
bare legs and thin arms, separating from the others, went behind the
wings, adjusted her bodice, returned to the middle of the stage, and
began jumping and striking one foot rapidly against the other. In the
stalls everyone clapped and shouted "bravo!" Then one of the men went
into a corner of the stage. The cymbals and horns in the orchestra
struck up more loudly, and this man with bare legs jumped very high and
waved his feet about very rapidly. (He was Duport, who received sixty
thousand rubles a year for this art.) Everybody in the stalls, boxes,
and galleries began clapping and shouting with all their might, and the
man stopped and began smiling and bowing to all sides. Then other men
and women danced with bare legs. Then the king again shouted to the
sound of music, and they all began singing. But suddenly a storm
came on, chromatic scales and diminished sevenths were heard in the
orchestra, everyone ran off, again dragging one of their number away,
and the curtain dropped. Once more there was a terrible noise and
clatter among the audience, and with rapturous faces everyone began
shouting: "Duport! Duport! Duport!" Natasha no longer thought this
strange. She looked about with pleasure, smiling joyfully.

"Isn't Duport delightful?" Helene asked her.

"Oh, yes," replied Natasha.





CHAPTER X


During the entr'acte a whiff of cold air came into Helene's box, the
door opened, and Anatole entered, stooping and trying not to brush
against anyone.

"Let me introduce my brother to you," said Helene, her eyes shifting
uneasily from Natasha to Anatole.

Natasha turned her pretty little head toward the elegant young officer
and smiled at him over her bare shoulder. Anatole, who was as handsome
at close quarters as at a distance, sat down beside her and told her he
had long wished to have this happiness--ever since the Naryshkins' ball
in fact, at which he had had the well-remembered pleasure of seeing her.
Kuragin was much more sensible and simple with women than among men.
He talked boldly and naturally, and Natasha was strangely and agreeably
struck by the fact that there was nothing formidable in this man about
whom there was so much talk, but that on the contrary his smile was most
naive, cheerful, and good-natured.

Kuragin asked her opinion of the performance and told her how at a
previous performance Semenova had fallen down on the stage.

"And do you know, Countess," he said, suddenly addressing her as an
old, familiar acquaintance, "we are getting up a costume tournament; you
ought to take part in it! It will be great fun. We shall all meet at the
Karagins'! Please come! No! Really, eh?" said he.

While saying this he never removed his smiling eyes from her face, her
neck, and her bare arms. Natasha knew for certain that he was enraptured
by her. This pleased her, yet his presence made her feel constrained and
oppressed. When she was not looking at him she felt that he was looking
at her shoulders, and she involuntarily caught his eye so that he should
look into hers rather than this. But looking into his eyes she was
frightened, realizing that there was not that barrier of modesty she had
always felt between herself and other men. She did not know how it was
that within five minutes she had come to feel herself terribly near to
this man. When she turned away she feared he might seize her from behind
by her bare arm and kiss her on the neck. They spoke of most ordinary
things, yet she felt that they were closer to one another than she had
ever been to any man. Natasha kept turning to Helene and to her father,
as if asking what it all meant, but Helene was engaged in conversation
with a general and did not answer her look, and her father's eyes said
nothing but what they always said: "Having a good time? Well, I'm glad
of it!"

During one of these moments of awkward silence when Anatole's prominent
eyes were gazing calmly and fixedly at her, Natasha, to break the
silence, asked him how he liked Moscow. She asked the question and
blushed. She felt all the time that by talking to him she was doing
something improper. Anatole smiled as though to encourage her.

"At first I did not like it much, because what makes a town pleasant
ce sont les jolies femmes, * isn't that so? But now I like it very much
indeed," he said, looking at her significantly. "You'll come to the
costume tournament, Countess? Do come!" and putting out his hand to her
bouquet and dropping his voice, he added, "You will be the prettiest
there. Do come, dear countess, and give me this flower as a pledge!"


    * Are the pretty women.


Natasha did not understand what he was saying any more than he did
himself, but she felt that his incomprehensible words had an improper
intention. She did not know what to say and turned away as if she had
not heard his remark. But as soon as she had turned away she felt that
he was there, behind, so close behind her.

"How is he now? Confused? Angry? Ought I to put it right?" she asked
herself, and she could not refrain from turning round. She looked
straight into his eyes, and his nearness, self-assurance, and the
good-natured tenderness of his smile vanquished her. She smiled just
as he was doing, gazing straight into his eyes. And again she felt with
horror that no barrier lay between him and her.

The curtain rose again. Anatole left the box, serene and gay. Natasha
went back to her father in the other box, now quite submissive to the
world she found herself in. All that was going on before her now seemed
quite natural, but on the other hand all her previous thoughts of her
betrothed, of Princess Mary, or of life in the country did not once
recur to her mind and were as if belonging to a remote past.

In the fourth act there was some sort of devil who sang waving his arm
about, till the boards were withdrawn from under him and he disappeared
down below. That was the only part of the fourth act that Natasha saw.
She felt agitated and tormented, and the cause of this was Kuragin whom
she could not help watching. As they were leaving the theater Anatole
came up to them, called their carriage, and helped them in. As he was
putting Natasha in he pressed her arm above the elbow. Agitated and
flushed she turned round. He was looking at her with glittering eyes,
smiling tenderly.


Only after she had reached home was Natasha able clearly to think over
what had happened to her, and suddenly remembering Prince Andrew she
was horrified, and at tea to which all had sat down after the opera, she
gave a loud exclamation, flushed, and ran out of the room.

"O God! I am lost!" she said to herself. "How could I let him?" She sat
for a long time hiding her flushed face in her hands trying to realize
what had happened to her, but was unable either to understand what
had happened or what she felt. Everything seemed dark, obscure,
and terrible. There in that enormous, illuminated theater where the
bare-legged Duport, in a tinsel-decorated jacket, jumped about to the
music on wet boards, and young girls and old men, and the nearly naked
Helene with her proud, calm smile, rapturously cried "bravo!"--there in
the presence of that Helene it had all seemed clear and simple; but now,
alone by herself, it was incomprehensible. "What is it? What was that
terror I felt of him? What is this gnawing of conscience I am feeling
now?" she thought.

Only to the old countess at night in bed could Natasha have told all she
was feeling. She knew that Sonya with her severe and simple views
would either not understand it at all or would be horrified at such a
confession. So Natasha tried to solve what was torturing her by herself.

"Am I spoiled for Andrew's love or not?" she asked herself, and with
soothing irony replied: "What a fool I am to ask that! What did happen
to me? Nothing! I have done nothing, I didn't lead him on at all. Nobody
will know and I shall never see him again," she told herself. "So it is
plain that nothing has happened and there is nothing to repent of, and
Andrew can love me still. But why 'still?' O God, why isn't he here?"
Natasha quieted herself for a moment, but again some instinct told her
that though all this was true, and though nothing had happened, yet the
former purity of her love for Prince Andrew had perished. And again in
imagination she went over her whole conversation with Kuragin, and again
saw the face, gestures, and tender smile of that bold handsome man when
he pressed her arm.





CHAPTER XI


Anatole Kuragin was staying in Moscow because his father had sent him
away from Petersburg, where he had been spending twenty thousand rubles
a year in cash, besides running up debts for as much more, which his
creditors demanded from his father.

His father announced to him that he would now pay half his debts for the
last time, but only on condition that he went to Moscow as adjutant
to the commander in chief--a post his father had procured for him--and
would at last try to make a good match there. He indicated to him
Princess Mary and Julie Karagina.

Anatole consented and went to Moscow, where he put up at Pierre's house.
Pierre received him unwillingly at first, but got used to him after a
while, sometimes even accompanied him on his carousals, and gave him
money under the guise of loans.

As Shinshin had remarked, from the time of his arrival Anatole had
turned the heads of the Moscow ladies, especially by the fact that
he slighted them and plainly preferred the gypsy girls and French
actresses--with the chief of whom, Mademoiselle George, he was said to
be on intimate relations. He had never missed a carousal at Danilov's
or other Moscow revelers', drank whole nights through, outvying everyone
else, and was at all the balls and parties of the best society. There
was talk of his intrigues with some of the ladies, and he flirted with a
few of them at the balls. But he did not run after the unmarried girls,
especially the rich heiresses who were most of them plain. There was a
special reason for this, as he had got married two years before--a fact
known only to his most intimate friends. At that time while with his
regiment in Poland, a Polish landowner of small means had forced him to
marry his daughter. Anatole had very soon abandoned his wife and, for a
payment which he agreed to send to his father-in-law, had arranged to be
free to pass himself off as a bachelor.

Anatole was always content with his position, with himself, and with
others. He was instinctively and thoroughly convinced that it was
impossible for him to live otherwise than as he did and that he had
never in his life done anything base. He was incapable of considering
how his actions might affect others or what the consequences of this or
that action of his might be. He was convinced that, as a duck is so made
that it must live in water, so God had made him such that he must spend
thirty thousand rubles a year and always occupy a prominent position in
society. He believed this so firmly that others, looking at him, were
persuaded of it too and did not refuse him either a leading place
in society or money, which he borrowed from anyone and everyone and
evidently would not repay.

He was not a gambler, at any rate he did not care about winning. He was
not vain. He did not mind what people thought of him. Still less could
he be accused of ambition. More than once he had vexed his father by
spoiling his own career, and he laughed at distinctions of all kinds. He
was not mean, and did not refuse anyone who asked of him. All he cared
about was gaiety and women, and as according to his ideas there
was nothing dishonorable in these tastes, and he was incapable of
considering what the gratification of his tastes entailed for others,
he honestly considered himself irreproachable, sincerely despised rogues
and bad people, and with a tranquil conscience carried his head high.

Rakes, those male Magdalenes, have a secret feeling of innocence
similar to that which female Magdalenes have, based on the same hope of
forgiveness. "All will be forgiven her, for she loved much; and all will
be forgiven him, for he enjoyed much."

Dolokhov, who had reappeared that year in Moscow after his exile and
his Persian adventures, and was leading a life of luxury, gambling, and
dissipation, associated with his old Petersburg comrade Kuragin and made
use of him for his own ends.

Anatole was sincerely fond of Dolokhov for his cleverness and audacity.
Dolokhov, who needed Anatole Kuragin's name, position, and connections
as a bait to draw rich young men into his gambling set, made use of him
and amused himself at his expense without letting the other feel it.
Apart from the advantage he derived from Anatole, the very process
of dominating another's will was in itself a pleasure, a habit, and a
necessity to Dolokhov.

Natasha had made a strong impression on Kuragin. At supper after
the opera he described to Dolokhov with the air of a connoisseur the
attractions of her arms, shoulders, feet, and hair and expressed his
intention of making love to her. Anatole had no notion and was incapable
of considering what might come of such love-making, as he never had any
notion of the outcome of any of his actions.

"She's first-rate, my dear fellow, but not for us," replied Dolokhov.

"I will tell my sister to ask her to dinner," said Anatole. "Eh?"

"You'd better wait till she's married...."

"You know, I adore little girls, they lose their heads at once," pursued
Anatole.

"You have been caught once already by a 'little girl,'" said Dolokhov
who knew of Kuragin's marriage. "Take care!"

"Well, that can't happen twice! Eh?" said Anatole, with a good-humored
laugh.





CHAPTER XII


The day after the opera the Rostovs went nowhere and nobody came to see
them. Marya Dmitrievna talked to the count about something which they
concealed from Natasha. Natasha guessed they were talking about the old
prince and planning something, and this disquieted and offended her.
She was expecting Prince Andrew any moment and twice that day sent a
manservant to the Vozdvizhenka to ascertain whether he had come. He had
not arrived. She suffered more now than during her first days in Moscow.
To her impatience and pining for him were now added the unpleasant
recollection of her interview with Princess Mary and the old prince,
and a fear and anxiety of which she did not understand the cause. She
continually fancied that either he would never come or that something
would happen to her before he came. She could no longer think of him by
herself calmly and continuously as she had done before. As soon as she
began to think of him, the recollection of the old prince, of Princess
Mary, of the theater, and of Kuragin mingled with her thoughts. The
question again presented itself whether she was not guilty, whether she
had not already broken faith with Prince Andrew, and again she found
herself recalling to the minutest detail every word, every gesture, and
every shade in the play of expression on the face of the man who had
been able to arouse in her such an incomprehensible and terrifying
feeling. To the family Natasha seemed livelier than usual, but she was
far less tranquil and happy than before.

On Sunday morning Marya Dmitrievna invited her visitors to Mass at her
parish church--the Church of the Assumption built over the graves of
victims of the plague.

"I don't like those fashionable churches," she said, evidently priding
herself on her independence of thought. "God is the same every where.
We have an excellent priest, he conducts the service decently and with
dignity, and the deacon is the same. What holiness is there in giving
concerts in the choir? I don't like it, it's just self-indulgence!"

Marya Dmitrievna liked Sundays and knew how to keep them. Her whole
house was scrubbed and cleaned on Saturdays; neither she nor the
servants worked, and they all wore holiday dress and went to church. At
her table there were extra dishes at dinner, and the servants had vodka
and roast goose or suckling pig. But in nothing in the house was the
holiday so noticeable as in Marya Dmitrievna's broad, stern face, which
on that day wore an invariable look of solemn festivity.

After Mass, when they had finished their coffee in the dining room
where the loose covers had been removed from the furniture, a servant
announced that the carriage was ready, and Marya Dmitrievna rose with
a stern air. She wore her holiday shawl, in which she paid calls, and
announced that she was going to see Prince Nicholas Bolkonski to have an
explanation with him about Natasha.

After she had gone, a dressmaker from Madame Suppert-Roguet waited
on the Rostovs, and Natasha, very glad of this diversion, having shut
herself into a room adjoining the drawing room, occupied herself trying
on the new dresses. Just as she had put on a bodice without sleeves and
only tacked together, and was turning her head to see in the glass how
the back fitted, she heard in the drawing room the animated sounds of
her father's voice and another's--a woman's--that made her flush. It
was Helene. Natasha had not time to take off the bodice before the door
opened and Countess Bezukhova, dressed in a purple velvet gown with
a high collar, came into the room beaming with good-humored amiable
smiles.

"Oh, my enchantress!" she cried to the blushing Natasha. "Charming! No,
this is really beyond anything, my dear count," said she to Count Rostov
who had followed her in. "How can you live in Moscow and go nowhere? No,
I won't let you off! Mademoiselle George will recite at my house
tonight and there'll be some people, and if you don't bring your lovely
girls--who are prettier than Mademoiselle George--I won't know you! My
husband is away in Tver or I would send him to fetch you. You must come.
You positively must! Between eight and nine."

She nodded to the dressmaker, whom she knew and who had curtsied
respectfully to her, and seated herself in an armchair beside the
looking glass, draping the folds of her velvet dress picturesquely. She
did not cease chattering good-naturedly and gaily, continually praising
Natasha's beauty. She looked at Natasha's dresses and praised them, as
well as a new dress of her own made of "metallic gauze," which she had
received from Paris, and advised Natasha to have one like it.

"But anything suits you, my charmer!" she remarked.

A smile of pleasure never left Natasha's face. She felt happy and as if
she were blossoming under the praise of this dear Countess Bezukhova who
had formerly seemed to her so unapproachable and important and was now
so kind to her. Natasha brightened up and felt almost in love with
this woman, who was so beautiful and so kind. Helene for her part was
sincerely delighted with Natasha and wished to give her a good time.
Anatole had asked her to bring him and Natasha together, and she was
calling on the Rostovs for that purpose. The idea of throwing her
brother and Natasha together amused her.

Though at one time, in Petersburg, she had been annoyed with Natasha for
drawing Boris away, she did not think of that now, and in her own way
heartily wished Natasha well. As she was leaving the Rostovs she called
her protegee aside.

"My brother dined with me yesterday--we nearly died of laughter--he ate
nothing and kept sighing for you, my charmer! He is madly, quite madly,
in love with you, my dear."

Natasha blushed scarlet when she heard this.

"How she blushes, how she blushes, my pretty!" said Helene. "You must
certainly come. If you love somebody, my charmer, that is not a reason
to shut yourself up. Even if you are engaged, I am sure your fiance
would wish you to go into society rather than be bored to death."

"So she knows I am engaged, and she and her husband Pierre--that good
Pierre--have talked and laughed about this. So it's all right." And
again, under Helene's influence, what had seemed terrible now seemed
simple and natural. "And she is such a grande dame, so kind, and
evidently likes me so much. And why not enjoy myself?" thought Natasha,
gazing at Helene with wide-open, wondering eyes.

Marya Dmitrievna came back to dinner taciturn and serious, having
evidently suffered a defeat at the old prince's. She was still too
agitated by the encounter to be able to talk of the affair calmly. In
answer to the count's inquiries she replied that things were all right
and that she would tell about it next day. On hearing of Countess
Bezukhova's visit and the invitation for that evening, Marya Dmitrievna
remarked:

"I don't care to have anything to do with Bezukhova and don't advise you
to; however, if you've promised--go. It will divert your thoughts," she
added, addressing Natasha.





CHAPTER XIII


Count Rostov took the girls to Countess Bezukhova's. There were a good
many people there, but nearly all strangers to Natasha. Count Rostov was
displeased to see that the company consisted almost entirely of men and
women known for the freedom of their conduct. Mademoiselle George was
standing in a corner of the drawing room surrounded by young men. There
were several Frenchmen present, among them Metivier who from the time
Helene reached Moscow had been an intimate in her house. The count
decided not to sit down to cards or let his girls out of his sight and
to get away as soon as Mademoiselle George's performance was over.

Anatole was at the door, evidently on the lookout for the Rostovs.
Immediately after greeting the count he went up to Natasha and followed
her. As soon as she saw him she was seized by the same feeling she had
had at the opera--gratified vanity at his admiration of her and fear at
the absence of a moral barrier between them.

Helene welcomed Natasha delightedly and was loud in admiration of her
beauty and her dress. Soon after their arrival Mademoiselle George went
out of the room to change her costume. In the drawing room people began
arranging the chairs and taking their seats. Anatole moved a chair for
Natasha and was about to sit down beside her, but the count, who never
lost sight of her, took the seat himself. Anatole sat down behind her.

Mademoiselle George, with her bare, fat, dimpled arms, and a red shawl
draped over one shoulder, came into the space left vacant for her, and
assumed an unnatural pose. Enthusiastic whispering was audible.

Mademoiselle George looked sternly and gloomily at the audience and
began reciting some French verses describing her guilty love for her
son. In some places she raised her voice, in others she whispered,
lifting her head triumphantly; sometimes she paused and uttered hoarse
sounds, rolling her eyes.

"Adorable! divine! delicious!" was heard from every side.

Natasha looked at the fat actress, but neither saw nor heard nor
understood anything of what went on before her. She only felt herself
again completely borne away into this strange senseless world--so remote
from her old world--a world in which it was impossible to know what
was good or bad, reasonable or senseless. Behind her sat Anatole,
and conscious of his proximity she experienced a frightened sense of
expectancy.

After the first monologue the whole company rose and surrounded
Mademoiselle George, expressing their enthusiasm.

"How beautiful she is!" Natasha remarked to her father who had also
risen and was moving through the crowd toward the actress.

"I don't think so when I look at you!" said Anatole, following Natasha.
He said this at a moment when she alone could hear him. "You are
enchanting... from the moment I saw you I have never ceased..."

"Come, come, Natasha!" said the count, as he turned back for his
daughter. "How beautiful she is!" Natasha without saying anything
stepped up to her father and looked at him with surprised inquiring
eyes.

After giving several recitations, Mademoiselle George left, and Countess
Bezukhova asked her visitors into the ballroom.

The count wished to go home, but Helene entreated him not to spoil her
improvised ball, and the Rostovs stayed on. Anatole asked Natasha for a
valse and as they danced he pressed her waist and hand and told her she
was bewitching and that he loved her. During the ecossaise, which she
also danced with him, Anatole said nothing when they happened to be by
themselves, but merely gazed at her. Natasha lifted her frightened eyes
to him, but there was such confident tenderness in his affectionate look
and smile that she could not, whilst looking at him, say what she had to
say. She lowered her eyes.

"Don't say such things to me. I am betrothed and love another," she said
rapidly.... She glanced at him.

Anatole was not upset or pained by what she had said.

"Don't speak to me of that! What can I do?" said he. "I tell you I
am madly, madly, in love with you! Is it my fault that you are
enchanting?... It's our turn to begin."

Natasha, animated and excited, looked about her with wide-open
frightened eyes and seemed merrier than usual. She understood hardly
anything that went on that evening. They danced the ecossaise and the
Grossvater. Her father asked her to come home, but she begged to remain.
Wherever she went and whomever she was speaking to, she felt his eyes
upon her. Later on she recalled how she had asked her father to let her
go to the dressing room to rearrange her dress, that Helene had followed
her and spoken laughingly of her brother's love, and that she again met
Anatole in the little sitting room. Helene had disappeared leaving them
alone, and Anatole had taken her hand and said in a tender voice:

"I cannot come to visit you but is it possible that I shall never see
you? I love you madly. Can I never...?" and, blocking her path, he
brought his face close to hers.

His large, glittering, masculine eyes were so close to hers that she saw
nothing but them.

"Natalie?" he whispered inquiringly while she felt her hands being
painfully pressed. "Natalie?"

"I don't understand. I have nothing to say," her eyes replied.

Burning lips were pressed to hers, and at the same instant she felt
herself released, and Helene's footsteps and the rustle of her dress
were heard in the room. Natasha looked round at her, and then, red
and trembling, threw a frightened look of inquiry at Anatole and moved
toward the door.

"One word, just one, for God's sake!" cried Anatole.

She paused. She so wanted a word from him that would explain to her what
had happened and to which she could find no answer.

"Natalie, just a word, only one!" he kept repeating, evidently not
knowing what to say and he repeated it till Helene came up to them.

Helene returned with Natasha to the drawing room. The Rostovs went away
without staying for supper.

After reaching home Natasha did not sleep all night. She was tormented
by the insoluble question whether she loved Anatole or Prince Andrew.
She loved Prince Andrew--she remembered distinctly how deeply she loved
him. But she also loved Anatole, of that there was no doubt. "Else how
could all this have happened?" thought she. "If, after that, I could
return his smile when saying good-by, if I was able to let it come to
that, it means that I loved him from the first. It means that he is
kind, noble, and splendid, and I could not help loving him. What am I
to do if I love him and the other one too?" she asked herself, unable to
find an answer to these terrible questions.





CHAPTER XIV


Morning came with its cares and bustle. Everyone got up and began to
move about and talk, dressmakers came again. Marya Dmitrievna appeared,
and they were called to breakfast. Natasha kept looking uneasily at
everybody with wide-open eyes, as if wishing to intercept every glance
directed toward her, and tried to appear the same as usual.

After breakfast, which was her best time, Marya Dmitrievna sat down in
her armchair and called Natasha and the count to her.

"Well, friends, I have now thought the whole matter over and this is
my advice," she began. "Yesterday, as you know, I went to see Prince
Bolkonski. Well, I had a talk with him.... He took it into his head to
begin shouting, but I am not one to be shouted down. I said what I had
to say!"

"Well, and he?" asked the count.

"He? He's crazy... he did not want to listen. But what's the use
of talking? As it is we have worn the poor girl out," said Marya
Dmitrievna. "My advice to you is finish your business and go back home
to Otradnoe... and wait there."

"Oh, no!" exclaimed Natasha.

"Yes, go back," said Marya Dmitrievna, "and wait there. If your
betrothed comes here now--there will be no avoiding a quarrel; but alone
with the old man he will talk things over and then come on to you."

Count Rostov approved of this suggestion, appreciating its
reasonableness. If the old man came round it would be all the better to
visit him in Moscow or at Bald Hills later on; and if not, the wedding,
against his wishes, could only be arranged at Otradnoe.

"That is perfectly true. And I am sorry I went to see him and took her,"
said the old count.

"No, why be sorry? Being here, you had to pay your respects. But if he
won't--that's his affair," said Marya Dmitrievna, looking for something
in her reticule. "Besides, the trousseau is ready, so there is nothing
to wait for; and what is not ready I'll send after you. Though I don't
like letting you go, it is the best way. So go, with God's blessing!"

Having found what she was looking for in the reticule she handed it to
Natasha. It was a letter from Princess Mary.

"She has written to you. How she torments herself, poor thing! She's
afraid you might think that she does not like you."

"But she doesn't like me," said Natasha.

"Don't talk nonsense!" cried Marya Dmitrievna.

"I shan't believe anyone, I know she doesn't like me," replied Natasha
boldly as she took the letter, and her face expressed a cold and angry
resolution that caused Marya Dmitrievna to look at her more intently and
to frown.

"Don't answer like that, my good girl!" she said. "What I say is true!
Write an answer!" Natasha did not reply and went to her own room to read
Princess Mary's letter.

Princess Mary wrote that she was in despair at the misunderstanding that
had occurred between them. Whatever her father's feelings might be, she
begged Natasha to believe that she could not help loving her as the one
chosen by her brother, for whose happiness she was ready to sacrifice
everything.

"Do not think, however," she wrote, "that my father is ill-disposed
toward you. He is an invalid and an old man who must be forgiven; but
he is good and magnanimous and will love her who makes his son happy."
Princess Mary went on to ask Natasha to fix a time when she could see
her again.

After reading the letter Natasha sat down at the writing table to answer
it. "Dear Princess," she wrote in French quickly and mechanically, and
then paused. What more could she write after all that had happened
the evening before? "Yes, yes! All that has happened, and now all is
changed," she thought as she sat with the letter she had begun before
her. "Must I break off with him? Must I really? That's awful..." and to
escape from these dreadful thoughts she went to Sonya and began sorting
patterns with her.

After dinner Natasha went to her room and again took up Princess Mary's
letter. "Can it be that it is all over?" she thought. "Can it be
that all this has happened so quickly and has destroyed all that went
before?" She recalled her love for Prince Andrew in all its former
strength, and at the same time felt that she loved Kuragin. She vividly
pictured herself as Prince Andrew's wife, and the scenes of happiness
with him she had so often repeated in her imagination, and at the
same time, aglow with excitement, recalled every detail of yesterday's
interview with Anatole.

"Why could that not be as well?" she sometimes asked herself in complete
bewilderment. "Only so could I be completely happy; but now I have to
choose, and I can't be happy without either of them. Only," she thought,
"to tell Prince Andrew what has happened or to hide it from him are
both equally impossible. But with that one nothing is spoiled. But am
I really to abandon forever the joy of Prince Andrew's love, in which I
have lived so long?"

"Please, Miss!" whispered a maid entering the room with a mysterious
air. "A man told me to give you this-" and she handed Natasha a letter.

"Only, for Christ's sake..." the girl went on, as Natasha, without
thinking, mechanically broke the seal and read a love letter from
Anatole, of which, without taking in a word, she understood only that
it was a letter from him--from the man she loved. Yes, she loved him, or
else how could that have happened which had happened? And how could she
have a love letter from him in her hand?

With trembling hands Natasha held that passionate love letter which
Dolokhov had composed for Anatole, and as she read it she found in it an
echo of all that she herself imagined she was feeling.

"Since yesterday evening my fate has been sealed; to be loved by you or
to die. There is no other way for me," the letter began. Then he went
on to say that he knew her parents would not give her to him--for this
there were secret reasons he could reveal only to her--but that if
she loved him she need only say the word yes, and no human power could
hinder their bliss. Love would conquer all. He would steal her away and
carry her off to the ends of the earth.

"Yes, yes! I love him!" thought Natasha, reading the letter for the
twentieth time and finding some peculiarly deep meaning in each word of
it.

That evening Marya Dmitrievna was going to the Akharovs' and proposed to
take the girls with her. Natasha, pleading a headache, remained at home.





CHAPTER XV


On returning late in the evening Sonya went to Natasha's room, and to
her surprise found her still dressed and asleep on the sofa. Open on the
table, beside her lay Anatole's letter. Sonya picked it up and read it.

As she read she glanced at the sleeping Natasha, trying to find in her
face an explanation of what she was reading, but did not find it. Her
face was calm, gentle, and happy. Clutching her breast to keep herself
from choking, Sonya, pale and trembling with fear and agitation, sat
down in an armchair and burst into tears.

"How was it I noticed nothing? How could it go so far? Can she have
left off loving Prince Andrew? And how could she let Kuragin go to
such lengths? He is a deceiver and a villain, that's plain! What will
Nicholas, dear noble Nicholas, do when he hears of it? So this is
the meaning of her excited, resolute, unnatural look the day before
yesterday, yesterday, and today," thought Sonya. "But it can't be that
she loves him! She probably opened the letter without knowing who it was
from. Probably she is offended by it. She could not do such a thing!"

Sonya wiped away her tears and went up to Natasha, again scanning her
face.

"Natasha!" she said, just audibly.

Natasha awoke and saw Sonya.

"Ah, you're back?"

And with the decision and tenderness that often come at the moment
of awakening, she embraced her friend, but noticing Sonya's look of
embarrassment, her own face expressed confusion and suspicion.

"Sonya, you've read that letter?" she demanded.

"Yes," answered Sonya softly.

Natasha smiled rapturously.

"No, Sonya, I can't any longer!" she said. "I can't hide it from you
any longer. You know, we love one another! Sonya, darling, he writes...
Sonya..."

Sonya stared open-eyed at Natasha, unable to believe her ears.

"And Bolkonski?" she asked.

"Ah, Sonya, if you only knew how happy I am!" cried Natasha. "You don't
know what love is...."

"But, Natasha, can that be all over?"

Natasha looked at Sonya with wide-open eyes as if she could not grasp
the question.

"Well, then, are you refusing Prince Andrew?" said Sonya.

"Oh, you don't understand anything! Don't talk nonsense, just listen!"
said Natasha, with momentary vexation.

"But I can't believe it," insisted Sonya. "I don't understand. How is it
you have loved a man for a whole year and suddenly... Why, you have only
seen him three times! Natasha, I don't believe you, you're joking! In
three days to forget everything and so..."

"Three days?" said Natasha. "It seems to me I've loved him a hundred
years. It seems to me that I have never loved anyone before. You can't
understand it.... Sonya, wait a bit, sit here," and Natasha embraced and
kissed her.

"I had heard that it happens like this, and you must have heard it too,
but it's only now that I feel such love. It's not the same as before.
As soon as I saw him I felt he was my master and I his slave, and that
I could not help loving him. Yes, his slave! Whatever he orders I shall
do. You don't understand that. What can I do? What can I do, Sonya?"
cried Natasha with a happy yet frightened expression.

"But think what you are doing," cried Sonya. "I can't leave it like
this. This secret correspondence... How could you let him go so far?"
she went on, with a horror and disgust she could hardly conceal.

"I told you that I have no will," Natasha replied. "Why can't you
understand? I love him!"

"Then I won't let it come to that... I shall tell!" cried Sonya,
bursting into tears.

"What do you mean? For God's sake... If you tell, you are my enemy!"
declared Natasha. "You want me to be miserable, you want us to be
separated...."

When she saw Natasha's fright, Sonya shed tears of shame and pity for
her friend.

"But what has happened between you?" she asked. "What has he said to
you? Why doesn't he come to the house?"

Natasha did not answer her questions.

"For God's sake, Sonya, don't tell anyone, don't torture me," Natasha
entreated. "Remember no one ought to interfere in such matters! I have
confided in you...."

"But why this secrecy? Why doesn't he come to the house?" asked Sonya.
"Why doesn't he openly ask for your hand? You know Prince Andrew gave
you complete freedom--if it is really so; but I don't believe it!
Natasha, have you considered what these secret reasons can be?"

Natasha looked at Sonya with astonishment. Evidently this question
presented itself to her mind for the first time and she did not know how
to answer it.

"I don't know what the reasons are. But there must be reasons!"

Sonya sighed and shook her head incredulously.

"If there were reasons..." she began.

But Natasha, guessing her doubts, interrupted her in alarm.

"Sonya, one can't doubt him! One can't, one can't! Don't you
understand?" she cried.

"Does he love you?"

"Does he love me?" Natasha repeated with a smile of pity at her friend's
lack of comprehension. "Why, you have read his letter and you have seen
him."

"But if he is dishonorable?"

"He! dishonorable? If you only knew!" exclaimed Natasha.

"If he is an honorable man he should either declare his intentions or
cease seeing you; and if you won't do this, I will. I will write to him,
and I will tell Papa!" said Sonya resolutely.

"But I can't live without him!" cried Natasha.

"Natasha, I don't understand you. And what are you saying! Think of your
father and of Nicholas."

"I don't want anyone, I don't love anyone but him. How dare you say he
is dishonorable? Don't you know that I love him?" screamed Natasha. "Go
away, Sonya! I don't want to quarrel with you, but go, for God's sake
go! You see how I am suffering!" Natasha cried angrily, in a voice of
despair and repressed irritation. Sonya burst into sobs and ran from the
room.

Natasha went to the table and without a moment's reflection wrote that
answer to Princess Mary which she had been unable to write all
the morning. In this letter she said briefly that all their
misunderstandings were at an end; that availing herself of the
magnanimity of Prince Andrew who when he went abroad had given her her
freedom, she begged Princess Mary to forget everything and forgive her
if she had been to blame toward her, but that she could not be his wife.
At that moment this all seemed quite easy, simple, and clear to Natasha.


On Friday the Rostovs were to return to the country, but on Wednesday
the count went with the prospective purchaser to his estate near Moscow.

On the day the count left, Sonya and Natasha were invited to a big
dinner party at the Karagins', and Marya Dmitrievna took them there. At
that party Natasha again met Anatole, and Sonya noticed that she spoke
to him, trying not to be overheard, and that all through dinner she was
more agitated than ever. When they got home Natasha was the first to
begin the explanation Sonya expected.

"There, Sonya, you were talking all sorts of nonsense about him,"
Natasha began in a mild voice such as children use when they wish to be
praised. "We have had an explanation today."

"Well, what happened? What did he say? Natasha, how glad I am you're not
angry with me! Tell me everything--the whole truth. What did he say?"

Natasha became thoughtful.

"Oh, Sonya, if you knew him as I do! He said... He asked me what I had
promised Bolkonski. He was glad I was free to refuse him."

Sonya sighed sorrowfully.

"But you haven't refused Bolkonski?" said she.

"Perhaps I have. Perhaps all is over between me and Bolkonski. Why do
you think so badly of me?"

"I don't think anything, only I don't understand this..."

"Wait a bit, Sonya, you'll understand everything. You'll see what a man
he is! Now don't think badly of me or of him. I don't think badly of
anyone: I love and pity everybody. But what am I to do?"

Sonya did not succumb to the tender tone Natasha used toward her. The
more emotional and ingratiating the expression of Natasha's face became,
the more serious and stern grew Sonya's.

"Natasha," said she, "you asked me not to speak to you, and I haven't
spoken, but now you yourself have begun. I don't trust him, Natasha. Why
this secrecy?"

"Again, again!" interrupted Natasha.

"Natasha, I am afraid for you!"

"Afraid of what?"

"I am afraid you're going to your ruin," said Sonya resolutely, and was
herself horrified at what she had said.

Anger again showed in Natasha's face.

"And I'll go to my ruin, I will, as soon as possible! It's not your
business! It won't be you, but I, who'll suffer. Leave me alone, leave
me alone! I hate you!"

"Natasha!" moaned Sonya, aghast.

"I hate you, I hate you! You're my enemy forever!" And Natasha ran out
of the room.

Natasha did not speak to Sonya again and avoided her. With the same
expression of agitated surprise and guilt she went about the house,
taking up now one occupation, now another, and at once abandoning them.

Hard as it was for Sonya, she watched her friend and did not let her out
of her sight.

The day before the count was to return, Sonya noticed that Natasha sat
by the drawingroom window all the morning as if expecting something and
that she made a sign to an officer who drove past, whom Sonya took to be
Anatole.

Sonya began watching her friend still more attentively and noticed that
at dinner and all that evening Natasha was in a strange and unnatural
state. She answered questions at random, began sentences she did not
finish, and laughed at everything.

After tea Sonya noticed a housemaid at Natasha's door timidly waiting
to let her pass. She let the girl go in, and then listening at the door
learned that another letter had been delivered.

Then suddenly it became clear to Sonya that Natasha had some dreadful
plan for that evening. Sonya knocked at her door. Natasha did not let
her in.

"She will run away with him!" thought Sonya. "She is capable of
anything. There was something particularly pathetic and resolute in her
face today. She cried as she said good-by to Uncle," Sonya remembered.
"Yes, that's it, she means to elope with him, but what am I to do?"
thought she, recalling all the signs that clearly indicated that Natasha
had some terrible intention. "The count is away. What am I to do? Write
to Kuragin demanding an explanation? But what is there to oblige him
to reply? Write to Pierre, as Prince Andrew asked me to in case of some
misfortune?... But perhaps she really has already refused Bolkonski--she
sent a letter to Princess Mary yesterday. And Uncle is away...." To tell
Marya Dmitrievna who had such faith in Natasha seemed to Sonya terrible.
"Well, anyway," thought Sonya as she stood in the dark passage, "now or
never I must prove that I remember the family's goodness to me and that
I love Nicholas. Yes! If I don't sleep for three nights I'll not leave
this passage and will hold her back by force and will and not let the
family be disgraced," thought she.





CHAPTER XVI


Anatole had lately moved to Dolokhov's. The plan for Natalie Rostova's
abduction had been arranged and the preparations made by Dolokhov a few
days before, and on the day that Sonya, after listening at Natasha's
door, resolved to safeguard her, it was to have been put into execution.
Natasha had promised to come out to Kuragin at the back porch at ten
that evening. Kuragin was to put her into a troyka he would have
ready and to drive her forty miles to the village of Kamenka, where an
unfrocked priest was in readiness to perform a marriage ceremony over
them. At Kamenka a relay of horses was to wait which would take them to
the Warsaw highroad, and from there they would hasten abroad with post
horses.

Anatole had a passport, an order for post horses, ten thousand rubles
he had taken from his sister and another ten thousand borrowed with
Dolokhov's help.

Two witnesses for the mock marriage--Khvostikov, a retired petty
official whom Dolokhov made use of in his gambling transactions, and
Makarin, a retired hussar, a kindly, weak fellow who had an unbounded
affection for Kuragin--were sitting at tea in Dolokhov's front room.

In his large study, the walls of which were hung to the ceiling with
Persian rugs, bearskins, and weapons, sat Dolokhov in a traveling cloak
and high boots, at an open desk on which lay abacus and some bundles of
paper money. Anatole, with uniform unbuttoned, walked to and fro from
the room where the witnesses were sitting, through the study to the room
behind, where his French valet and others were packing the last of his
things. Dolokhov was counting the money and noting something down.

"Well," he said, "Khvostikov must have two thousand."

"Give it to him, then," said Anatole.

"Makarka" (their name for Makarin) "will go through fire and water for
you for nothing. So here are our accounts all settled," said Dolokhov,
showing him the memorandum. "Is that right?"

"Yes, of course," returned Anatole, evidently not listening to Dolokhov
and looking straight before him with a smile that did not leave his
face.

Dolokhov banged down the lid of his desk and turned to Anatole with an
ironic smile:

"Do you know? You'd really better drop it all. There's still time!"

"Fool," retorted Anatole. "Don't talk nonsense! If you only knew... it's
the devil knows what!"

"No, really, give it up!" said Dolokhov. "I am speaking seriously. It's
no joke, this plot you've hatched."

"What, teasing again? Go to the devil! Eh?" said Anatole, making a
grimace. "Really it's no time for your stupid jokes," and he left the
room.

Dolokhov smiled contemptuously and condescendingly when Anatole had gone
out.

"You wait a bit," he called after him. "I'm not joking, I'm talking
sense. Come here, come here!"

Anatole returned and looked at Dolokhov, trying to give him his
attention and evidently submitting to him involuntarily.

"Now listen to me. I'm telling you this for the last time. Why should
I joke about it? Did I hinder you? Who arranged everything for you? Who
found the priest and got the passport? Who raised the money? I did it
all."

"Well, thank you for it. Do you think I am not grateful?" And Anatole
sighed and embraced Dolokhov.

"I helped you, but all the same I must tell you the truth; it is a
dangerous business, and if you think about it--a stupid business. Well,
you'll carry her off--all right! Will they let it stop at that? It
will come out that you're already married. Why, they'll have you in the
criminal court...."

"Oh, nonsense, nonsense!" Anatole ejaculated and again made a grimace.
"Didn't I explain to you? What?" And Anatole, with the partiality
dull-witted people have for any conclusion they have reached by their
own reasoning, repeated the argument he had already put to Dolokhov
a hundred times. "Didn't I explain to you that I have come to this
conclusion: if this marriage is invalid," he went on, crooking one
finger, "then I have nothing to answer for; but if it is valid, no
matter! Abroad no one will know anything about it. Isn't that so? And
don't talk to me, don't, don't."

"Seriously, you'd better drop it! You'll only get yourself into a mess!"

"Go to the devil!" cried Anatole and, clutching his hair, left the room,
but returned at once and dropped into an armchair in front of Dolokhov
with his feet turned under him. "It's the very devil! What? Feel how it
beats!" He took Dolokhov's hand and put it on his heart. "What a foot,
my dear fellow! What a glance! A goddess!" he added in French. "What?"

Dolokhov with a cold smile and a gleam in his handsome insolent eyes
looked at him--evidently wishing to get some more amusement out of him.

"Well and when the money's gone, what then?"

"What then? Eh?" repeated Anatole, sincerely perplexed by a thought
of the future. "What then?... Then, I don't know.... But why talk
nonsense!" He glanced at his watch. "It's time!"

Anatole went into the back room.

"Now then! Nearly ready? You're dawdling!" he shouted to the servants.

Dolokhov put away the money, called a footman whom he ordered to bring
something for them to eat and drink before the journey, and went into
the room where Khvostikov and Makarin were sitting.

Anatole lay on the sofa in the study leaning on his elbow and smiling
pensively, while his handsome lips muttered tenderly to himself.

"Come and eat something. Have a drink!" Dolokhov shouted to him from the
other room.

"I don't want to," answered Anatole continuing to smile.

"Come! Balaga is here."

Anatole rose and went into the dining room. Balaga was a famous troyka
driver who had known Dolokhov and Anatole some six years and had given
them good service with his troykas. More than once when Anatole's
regiment was stationed at Tver he had taken him from Tver in the
evening, brought him to Moscow by daybreak, and driven him back again
the next night. More than once he had enabled Dolokhov to escape when
pursued. More than once he had driven them through the town with gypsies
and "ladykins" as he called the cocottes. More than once in their
service he had run over pedestrians and upset vehicles in the streets
of Moscow and had always been protected from the consequences by "my
gentlemen" as he called them. He had ruined more than one horse in their
service. More than once they had beaten him, and more than once they
had made him drunk on champagne and Madeira, which he loved; and he knew
more than one thing about each of them which would long ago have sent an
ordinary man to Siberia. They often called Balaga into their orgies and
made him drink and dance at the gypsies', and more than one thousand
rubles of their money had passed through his hands. In their service he
risked his skin and his life twenty times a year, and in their service
had lost more horses than the money he had from them would buy. But
he liked them; liked that mad driving at twelve miles an hour, liked
upsetting a driver or running down a pedestrian, and flying at full
gallop through the Moscow streets. He liked to hear those wild, tipsy
shouts behind him: "Get on! Get on!" when it was impossible to go any
faster. He liked giving a painful lash on the neck to some peasant
who, more dead than alive, was already hurrying out of his way. "Real
gentlemen!" he considered them.

Anatole and Dolokhov liked Balaga too for his masterly driving and
because he liked the things they liked. With others Balaga bargained,
charging twenty-five rubles for a two hours' drive, and rarely drove
himself, generally letting his young men do so. But with "his gentlemen"
he always drove himself and never demanded anything for his work. Only
a couple of times a year--when he knew from their valets that they had
money in hand--he would turn up of a morning quite sober and with a deep
bow would ask them to help him. The gentlemen always made him sit down.

"Do help me out, Theodore Ivanych, sir," or "your excellency," he would
say. "I am quite out of horses. Let me have what you can to go to the
fair."

And Anatole and Dolokhov, when they had money, would give him a thousand
or a couple of thousand rubles.

Balaga was a fair-haired, short, and snub-nosed peasant of about
twenty-seven; red-faced, with a particularly red thick neck, glittering
little eyes, and a small beard. He wore a fine, dark-blue, silk-lined
cloth coat over a sheepskin.

On entering the room now he crossed himself, turning toward the front
corner of the room, and went up to Dolokhov, holding out a small, black
hand.

"Theodore Ivanych!" he said, bowing.

"How d'you do, friend? Well, here he is!"

"Good day, your excellency!" he said, again holding out his hand to
Anatole who had just come in.

"I say, Balaga," said Anatole, putting his hands on the man's shoulders,
"do you care for me or not? Eh? Now, do me a service.... What horses
have you come with? Eh?"

"As your messenger ordered, your special beasts," replied Balaga.

"Well, listen, Balaga! Drive all three to death but get me there in
three hours. Eh?"

"When they are dead, what shall I drive?" said Balaga with a wink.

"Mind, I'll smash your face in! Don't make jokes!" cried Anatole,
suddenly rolling his eyes.

"Why joke?" said the driver, laughing. "As if I'd grudge my gentlemen
anything! As fast as ever the horses can gallop, so fast we'll go!"

"Ah!" said Anatole. "Well, sit down."

"Yes, sit down!" said Dolokhov.

"I'll stand, Theodore Ivanych."

"Sit down; nonsense! Have a drink!" said Anatole, and filled a large
glass of Madeira for him.

The driver's eyes sparkled at the sight of the wine. After refusing
it for manners' sake, he drank it and wiped his mouth with a red silk
handkerchief he took out of his cap.

"And when are we to start, your excellency?"

"Well..." Anatole looked at his watch. "We'll start at once. Mind,
Balaga! You'll get there in time? Eh?"

"That depends on our luck in starting, else why shouldn't we be there
in time?" replied Balaga. "Didn't we get you to Tver in seven hours? I
think you remember that, your excellency?"

"Do you know, one Christmas I drove from Tver," said Anatole, smilingly
at the recollection and turning to Makarin who gazed rapturously at him
with wide-open eyes. "Will you believe it, Makarka, it took one's breath
away, the rate we flew. We came across a train of loaded sleighs and
drove right over two of them. Eh?"

"Those were horses!" Balaga continued the tale. "That time I'd harnessed
two young side horses with the bay in the shafts," he went on, turning
to Dolokhov. "Will you believe it, Theodore Ivanych, those animals flew
forty miles? I couldn't hold them in, my hands grew numb in the sharp
frost so that I threw down the reins--'Catch hold yourself, your
excellency!' says I, and I just tumbled on the bottom of the sleigh and
sprawled there. It wasn't a case of urging them on, there was no holding
them in till we reached the place. The devils took us there in three
hours! Only the near one died of it."





CHAPTER XVII


Anatole went out of the room and returned a few minutes later wearing
a fur coat girt with a silver belt, and a sable cap jauntily set on one
side and very becoming to his handsome face. Having looked in a mirror,
and standing before Dolokhov in the same pose he had assumed before it,
he lifted a glass of wine.

"Well, good-by, Theodore. Thank you for everything and farewell!" said
Anatole. "Well, comrades and friends..." he considered for a moment
"...of my youth, farewell!" he said, turning to Makarin and the others.

Though they were all going with him, Anatole evidently wished to make
something touching and solemn out of this address to his comrades. He
spoke slowly in a loud voice and throwing out his chest slightly swayed
one leg.

"All take glasses; you too, Balaga. Well, comrades and friends of my
youth, we've had our fling and lived and reveled. Eh? And now, when
shall we meet again? I am going abroad. We have had a good time--now
farewell, lads! To our health! Hurrah!..." he cried, and emptying his
glass flung it on the floor.

"To your health!" said Balaga who also emptied his glass, and wiped his
mouth with his handkerchief.

Makarin embraced Anatole with tears in his eyes.

"Ah, Prince, how sorry I am to part from you!

"Let's go. Let's go!" cried Anatole.

Balaga was about to leave the room.

"No, stop!" said Anatole. "Shut the door; we have first to sit down.
That's the way."

They shut the door and all sat down.

"Now, quick march, lads!" said Anatole, rising.

Joseph, his valet, handed him his sabretache and saber, and they all
went out into the vestibule.

"And where's the fur cloak?" asked Dolokhov. "Hey, Ignatka! Go to
Matrena Matrevna and ask her for the sable cloak. I have heard what
elopements are like," continued Dolokhov with a wink. "Why, she'll rush
out more dead than alive just in the things she is wearing; if you delay
at all there'll be tears and 'Papa' and 'Mamma,' and she's frozen in
a minute and must go back--but you wrap the fur cloak round her first
thing and carry her to the sleigh."

The valet brought a woman's fox-lined cloak.

"Fool, I told you the sable one! Hey, Matrena, the sable!" he shouted so
that his voice rang far through the rooms.

A handsome, slim, and pale-faced gypsy girl with glittering black eyes
and curly blue-black hair, wearing a red shawl, ran out with a sable
mantle on her arm.

"Here, I don't grudge it--take it!" she said, evidently afraid of her
master and yet regretful of her cloak.

Dolokhov, without answering, took the cloak, threw it over Matrena, and
wrapped her up in it.

"That's the way," said Dolokhov, "and then so!" and he turned the collar
up round her head, leaving only a little of the face uncovered. "And
then so, do you see?" and he pushed Anatole's head forward to meet the
gap left by the collar, through which Matrena's brilliant smile was
seen.

"Well, good-by, Matrena," said Anatole, kissing her. "Ah, my revels here
are over. Remember me to Steshka. There, good-by! Good-by, Matrena, wish
me luck!"

"Well, Prince, may God give you great luck!" said Matrena in her gypsy
accent.

Two troykas were standing before the porch and two young drivers were
holding the horses. Balaga took his seat in the front one and holding
his elbows high arranged the reins deliberately. Anatole and Dolokhov
got in with him. Makarin, Khvostikov, and a valet seated themselves in
the other sleigh.

"Well, are you ready?" asked Balaga.

"Go!" he cried, twisting the reins round his hands, and the troyka tore
down the Nikitski Boulevard.

"Tproo! Get out of the way! Hi!... Tproo!..." The shouting of Balaga
and of the sturdy young fellow seated on the box was all that could
be heard. On the Arbat Square the troyka caught against a carriage;
something cracked, shouts were heard, and the troyka flew along the
Arbat Street.

After taking a turn along the Podnovinski Boulevard, Balaga began to
rein in, and turning back drew up at the crossing of the old Konyusheny
Street.

The young fellow on the box jumped down to hold the horses and Anatole
and Dolokhov went along the pavement. When they reached the gate
Dolokhov whistled. The whistle was answered, and a maidservant ran out.

"Come into the courtyard or you'll be seen; she'll come out directly,"
said she.

Dolokhov stayed by the gate. Anatole followed the maid into the
courtyard, turned the corner, and ran up into the porch.

He was met by Gabriel, Marya Dmitrievna's gigantic footman.

"Come to the mistress, please," said the footman in his deep bass,
intercepting any retreat.

"To what Mistress? Who are you?" asked Anatole in a breathless whisper.

"Kindly step in, my orders are to bring you in."

"Kuragin! Come back!" shouted Dolokhov. "Betrayed! Back!"

Dolokhov, after Anatole entered, had remained at the wicket gate and was
struggling with the yard porter who was trying to lock it. With a last
desperate effort Dolokhov pushed the porter aside, and when Anatole ran
back seized him by the arm, pulled him through the wicket, and ran back
with him to the troyka.





CHAPTER XVIII


Marya Dmitrievna, having found Sonya weeping in the corridor, made her
confess everything, and intercepting the note to Natasha she read it and
went into Natasha's room with it in her hand.

"You shameless good-for-nothing!" said she. "I won't hear a word."

Pushing back Natasha who looked at her with astonished but tearless
eyes, she locked her in; and having given orders to the yard porter to
admit the persons who would be coming that evening, but not to let them
out again, and having told the footman to bring them up to her, she
seated herself in the drawing room to await the abductors.

When Gabriel came to inform her that the men who had come had run
away again, she rose frowning, and clasping her hands behind her paced
through the rooms a long time considering what she should do. Toward
midnight she went to Natasha's room fingering the key in her pocket.
Sonya was sitting sobbing in the corridor. "Marya Dmitrievna, for God's
sake let me in to her!" she pleaded, but Marya Dmitrievna unlocked
the door and went in without giving her an answer.... "Disgusting,
abominable... In my house... horrid girl, hussy! I'm only sorry for her
father!" thought she, trying to restrain her wrath. "Hard as it may
be, I'll tell them all to hold their tongues and will hide it from the
count." She entered the room with resolute steps. Natasha lying on the
sofa, her head hidden in her hands, and she did not stir. She was in
just the same position in which Marya Dmitrievna had left her.

"A nice girl! Very nice!" said Marya Dmitrievna. "Arranging meetings
with lovers in my house! It's no use pretending: you listen when I speak
to you!" And Marya Dmitrievna touched her arm. "Listen when I speak!
You've disgraced yourself like the lowest of hussies. I'd treat you
differently, but I'm sorry for your father, so I will conceal it."

Natasha did not change her position, but her whole body heaved with
noiseless, convulsive sobs which choked her. Marya Dmitrievna glanced
round at Sonya and seated herself on the sofa beside Natasha.

"It's lucky for him that he escaped me; but I'll find him!" she said in
her rough voice. "Do you hear what I am saying or not?" she added.

She put her large hand under Natasha's face and turned it toward her.
Both Marya Dmitrievna and Sonya were amazed when they saw how Natasha
looked. Her eyes were dry and glistening, her lips compressed, her
cheeks sunken.

"Let me be!... What is it to me?... I shall die!" she muttered,
wrenching herself from Marya Dmitrievna's hands with a vicious effort
and sinking down again into her former position.

"Natalie!" said Marya Dmitrievna. "I wish for your good. Lie still,
stay like that then, I won't touch you. But listen. I won't tell you how
guilty you are. You know that yourself. But when your father comes back
tomorrow what am I to tell him? Eh?"

Again Natasha's body shook with sobs.

"Suppose he finds out, and your brother, and your betrothed?"

"I have no betrothed: I have refused him!" cried Natasha.

"That's all the same," continued Marya Dmitrievna. "If they hear of
this, will they let it pass? He, your father, I know him... if he
challenges him to a duel will that be all right? Eh?"

"Oh, let me be! Why have you interfered at all? Why? Why? Who asked
you to?" shouted Natasha, raising herself on the sofa and looking
malignantly at Marya Dmitrievna.

"But what did you want?" cried Marya Dmitrievna, growing angry again.
"Were you kept under lock and key? Who hindered his coming to the house?
Why carry you off as if you were some gypsy singing girl?... Well, if he
had carried you off... do you think they wouldn't have found him?
Your father, or brother, or your betrothed? And he's a scoundrel, a
wretch--that's a fact!"

"He is better than any of you!" exclaimed Natasha getting up. "If you
hadn't interfered... Oh, my God! What is it all? What is it? Sonya,
why?... Go away!"

And she burst into sobs with the despairing vehemence with which people
bewail disasters they feel they have themselves occasioned. Marya
Dmitrievna was to speak again but Natasha cried out:

"Go away! Go away! You all hate and despise me!" and she threw herself
back on the sofa.

Marya Dmitrievna went on admonishing her for some time, enjoining on her
that it must all be kept from her father and assuring her that nobody
would know anything about it if only Natasha herself would undertake
to forget it all and not let anyone see that something had happened.
Natasha did not reply, nor did she sob any longer, but she grew cold
and had a shivering fit. Marya Dmitrievna put a pillow under her head,
covered her with two quilts, and herself brought her some lime-flower
water, but Natasha did not respond to her.

"Well, let her sleep," said Marya Dmitrievna as she went out of the room
supposing Natasha to be asleep.

But Natasha was not asleep; with pale face and fixed wide-open eyes she
looked straight before her. All that night she did not sleep or weep and
did not speak to Sonya who got up and went to her several times.

Next day Count Rostov returned from his estate near Moscow in time for
lunch as he had promised. He was in very good spirits; the affair with
the purchaser was going on satisfactorily, and there was nothing to keep
him any longer in Moscow, away from the countess whom he missed. Marya
Dmitrievna met him and told him that Natasha had been very unwell the
day before and that they had sent for the doctor, but that she was
better now. Natasha had not left her room that morning. With compressed
and parched lips and dry fixed eyes, she sat at the window, uneasily
watching the people who drove past and hurriedly glancing round at
anyone who entered the room. She was evidently expecting news of him and
that he would come or would write to her.

When the count came to see her she turned anxiously round at the sound
of a man's footstep, and then her face resumed its cold and malevolent
expression. She did not even get up to greet him. "What is the matter
with you, my angel? Are you ill?" asked the count.

After a moment's silence Natasha answered: "Yes, ill."

In reply to the count's anxious inquiries as to why she was so dejected
and whether anything had happened to her betrothed, she assured him
that nothing had happened and asked him not to worry. Marya Dmitrievna
confirmed Natasha's assurances that nothing had happened. From
the pretense of illness, from his daughter's distress, and by the
embarrassed faces of Sonya and Marya Dmitrievna, the count saw clearly
that something had gone wrong during his absence, but it was so terrible
for him to think that anything disgraceful had happened to his beloved
daughter, and he so prized his own cheerful tranquillity, that he
avoided inquiries and tried to assure himself that nothing particularly
had happened; and he was only dissatisfied that her indisposition
delayed their return to the country.





CHAPTER XIX


From the day his wife arrived in Moscow Pierre had been intending to go
away somewhere, so as not to be near her. Soon after the Rostovs came
to Moscow the effect Natasha had on him made him hasten to carry out
his intention. He went to Tver to see Joseph Alexeevich's widow, who
had long since promised to hand over to him some papers of her deceased
husband's.

When he returned to Moscow Pierre was handed a letter from Marya
Dmitrievna asking him to come and see her on a matter of great
importance relating to Andrew Bolkonski and his betrothed. Pierre had
been avoiding Natasha because it seemed to him that his feeling for her
was stronger than a married man's should be for his friend's fiancee.
Yet some fate constantly threw them together.

"What can have happened? And what can they want with me?" thought he
as he dressed to go to Marya Dmitrievna's. "If only Prince Andrew would
hurry up and come and marry her!" thought he on his way to the house.

On the Tverskoy Boulevard a familiar voice called to him.

"Pierre! Been back long?" someone shouted. Pierre raised his head. In
a sleigh drawn by two gray trotting-horses that were bespattering the
dashboard with snow, Anatole and his constant companion Makarin dashed
past. Anatole was sitting upright in the classic pose of military
dandies, the lower part of his face hidden by his beaver collar and his
head slightly bent. His face was fresh and rosy, his white-plumed hat,
tilted to one side, disclosed his curled and pomaded hair besprinkled
with powdery snow.

"Yes, indeed, that's a true sage," thought Pierre. "He sees nothing
beyond the pleasure of the moment, nothing troubles him and so he is
always cheerful, satisfied, and serene. What wouldn't I give to be like
him!" he thought enviously.

In Marya Dmitrievna's anteroom the footman who helped him off with his
fur coat said that the mistress asked him to come to her bedroom.

When he opened the ballroom door Pierre saw Natasha sitting at the
window, with a thin, pale, and spiteful face. She glanced round at him,
frowned, and left the room with an expression of cold dignity.

"What has happened?" asked Pierre, entering Marya Dmitrievna's room.

"Fine doings!" answered Dmitrievna. "For fifty-eight years have I lived
in this world and never known anything so disgraceful!"

And having put him on his honor not to repeat anything she told him,
Marya Dmitrievna informed him that Natasha had refused Prince Andrew
without her parents' knowledge and that the cause of this was Anatole
Kuragin into whose society Pierre's wife had thrown her and with whom
Natasha had tried to elope during her father's absence, in order to be
married secretly.

Pierre raised his shoulders and listened open-mouthed to what was told
him, scarcely able to believe his own ears. That Prince Andrew's
deeply loved affianced wife--the same Natasha Rostova who used to be so
charming--should give up Bolkonski for that fool Anatole who was already
secretly married (as Pierre knew), and should be so in love with him as
to agree to run away with him, was something Pierre could not conceive
and could not imagine.

He could not reconcile the charming impression he had of Natasha, whom
he had known from a child, with this new conception of her baseness,
folly, and cruelty. He thought of his wife. "They are all alike!" he
said to himself, reflecting that he was not the only man unfortunate
enough to be tied to a bad woman. But still he pitied Prince Andrew to
the point of tears and sympathized with his wounded pride, and the more
he pitied his friend the more did he think with contempt and even with
disgust of that Natasha who had just passed him in the ballroom with
such a look of cold dignity. He did not know that Natasha's soul was
overflowing with despair, shame, and humiliation, and that it was not
her fault that her face happened to assume an expression of calm dignity
and severity.

"But how get married?" said Pierre, in answer to Marya Dmitrievna. "He
could not marry--he is married!"

"Things get worse from hour to hour!" ejaculated Marya Dmitrievna. "A
nice youth! What a scoundrel! And she's expecting him--expecting
him since yesterday. She must be told! Then at least she won't go on
expecting him."

After hearing the details of Anatole's marriage from Pierre, and giving
vent to her anger against Anatole in words of abuse, Marya Dmitrievna
told Pierre why she had sent for him. She was afraid that the count or
Bolkonski, who might arrive at any moment, if they knew of this affair
(which she hoped to hide from them) might challenge Anatole to a duel,
and she therefore asked Pierre to tell his brother-in-law in her name to
leave Moscow and not dare to let her set eyes on him again. Pierre--only
now realizing the danger to the old count, Nicholas, and Prince
Andrew--promised to do as she wished. Having briefly and exactly
explained her wishes to him, she let him go to the drawing room.

"Mind, the count knows nothing. Behave as if you know nothing either,"
she said. "And I will go and tell her it is no use expecting him! And
stay to dinner if you care to!" she called after Pierre.

Pierre met the old count, who seemed nervous and upset. That morning
Natasha had told him that she had rejected Bolkonski.

"Troubles, troubles, my dear fellow!" he said to Pierre. "What troubles
one has with these girls without their mother! I do so regret having
come here.... I will be frank with you. Have you heard she has broken
off her engagement without consulting anybody? It's true this engagement
never was much to my liking. Of course he is an excellent man, but
still, with his father's disapproval they wouldn't have been happy, and
Natasha won't lack suitors. Still, it has been going on so long, and
to take such a step without father's or mother's consent! And now she's
ill, and God knows what! It's hard, Count, hard to manage daughters in
their mother's absence...."

Pierre saw that the count was much upset and tried to change the
subject, but the count returned to his troubles.

Sonya entered the room with an agitated face.

"Natasha is not quite well; she's in her room and would like to see you.
Marya Dmitrievna is with her and she too asks you to come."

"Yes, you are a great friend of Bolkonski's, no doubt she wants to send
him a message," said the count. "Oh dear! Oh dear! How happy it all
was!"

And clutching the spare gray locks on his temples the count left the
room.

When Marya Dmitrievna told Natasha that Anatole was married, Natasha
did not wish to believe it and insisted on having it confirmed by Pierre
himself. Sonya told Pierre this as she led him along the corridor to
Natasha's room.

Natasha, pale and stern, was sitting beside Marya Dmitrievna, and her
eyes, glittering feverishly, met Pierre with a questioning look the
moment he entered. She did not smile or nod, but only gazed fixedly at
him, and her look asked only one thing: was he a friend, or like the
others an enemy in regard to Anatole? As for Pierre, he evidently did
not exist for her.

"He knows all about it," said Marya Dmitrievna pointing to Pierre and
addressing Natasha. "Let him tell you whether I have told the truth."

Natasha looked from one to the other as a hunted and wounded animal
looks at the approaching dogs and sportsmen.

"Natalya Ilynichna," Pierre began, dropping his eyes with a feeling of
pity for her and loathing for the thing he had to do, "whether it is
true or not should make no difference to you, because..."

"Then it is not true that he's married!"

"Yes, it is true."

"Has he been married long?" she asked. "On your honor?..."

Pierre gave his word of honor.

"Is he still here?" she asked, quickly.

"Yes, I have just seen him."

She was evidently unable to speak and made a sign with her hands that
they should leave her alone.





CHAPTER XX


Pierre did not stay for dinner, but left the room and went away at once.
He drove through the town seeking Anatole Kuragin, at the thought of
whom now the blood rushed to his heart and he felt a difficulty in
breathing. He was not at the ice hills, nor at the gypsies', nor at
Komoneno's. Pierre drove to the Club. In the Club all was going on as
usual. The members who were assembling for dinner were sitting about
in groups; they greeted Pierre and spoke of the town news. The footman
having greeted him, knowing his habits and his acquaintances, told him
there was a place left for him in the small dining room and that Prince
Michael Zakharych was in the library, but Paul Timofeevich had not yet
arrived. One of Pierre's acquaintances, while they were talking about
the weather, asked if he had heard of Kuragin's abduction of Rostova
which was talked of in the town, and was it true? Pierre laughed and
said it was nonsense for he had just come from the Rostovs'. He asked
everyone about Anatole. One man told him he had not come yet, and
another that he was coming to dinner. Pierre felt it strange to see this
calm, indifferent crowd of people unaware of what was going on in his
soul. He paced through the ballroom, waited till everyone had come, and
as Anatole had not turned up did not stay for dinner but drove home.

Anatole, for whom Pierre was looking, dined that day with Dolokhov,
consulting him as to how to remedy this unfortunate affair. It seemed to
him essential to see Natasha. In the evening he drove to his sister's
to discuss with her how to arrange a meeting. When Pierre returned home
after vainly hunting all over Moscow, his valet informed him that Prince
Anatole was with the countess. The countess' drawing room was full of
guests.

Pierre without greeting his wife whom he had not seen since his
return--at that moment she was more repulsive to him than ever--entered
the drawing room and seeing Anatole went up to him.

"Ah, Pierre," said the countess going up to her husband. "You don't know
what a plight our Anatole..."

She stopped, seeing in the forward thrust of her husband's head, in his
glowing eyes and his resolute gait, the terrible indications of that
rage and strength which she knew and had herself experienced after his
duel with Dolokhov.

"Where you are, there is vice and evil!" said Pierre to his wife.
"Anatole, come with me! I must speak to you," he added in French.

Anatole glanced round at his sister and rose submissively, ready to
follow Pierre. Pierre, taking him by the arm, pulled him toward himself
and was leading him from the room.

"If you allow yourself in my drawing room..." whispered Helene, but
Pierre did not reply and went out of the room.

Anatole followed him with his usual jaunty step but his face betrayed
anxiety.

Having entered his study Pierre closed the door and addressed Anatole
without looking at him.

"You promised Countess Rostova to marry her and were about to elope with
her, is that so?"

"Mon cher," answered Anatole (their whole conversation was in French),
"I don't consider myself bound to answer questions put to me in that
tone."

Pierre's face, already pale, became distorted by fury. He seized Anatole
by the collar of his uniform with his big hand and shook him from side
to side till Anatole's face showed a sufficient degree of terror.

"When I tell you that I must talk to you!..." repeated Pierre.

"Come now, this is stupid. What?" said Anatole, fingering a button of
his collar that had been wrenched loose with a bit of the cloth.

"You're a scoundrel and a blackguard, and I don't know what deprives
me from the pleasure of smashing your head with this!" said Pierre,
expressing himself so artificially because he was talking French.

He took a heavy paperweight and lifted it threateningly, but at once put
it back in its place.

"Did you promise to marry her?"

"I... I didn't think of it. I never promised, because..."

Pierre interrupted him.

"Have you any letters of hers? Any letters?" he said, moving toward
Anatole.

Anatole glanced at him and immediately thrust his hand into his pocket
and drew out his pocketbook.

Pierre took the letter Anatole handed him and, pushing aside a table
that stood in his way, threw himself on the sofa.

"I shan't be violent, don't be afraid!" said Pierre in answer to a
frightened gesture of Anatole's. "First, the letters," said he, as if
repeating a lesson to himself. "Secondly," he continued after a short
pause, again rising and again pacing the room, "tomorrow you must get
out of Moscow."

"But how can I?..."

"Thirdly," Pierre continued without listening to him, "you must never
breathe a word of what has passed between you and Countess Rostova.
I know I can't prevent your doing so, but if you have a spark of
conscience..." Pierre paced the room several times in silence.

Anatole sat at a table frowning and biting his lips.

"After all, you must understand that besides your pleasure there is such
a thing as other people's happiness and peace, and that you are ruining
a whole life for the sake of amusing yourself! Amuse yourself with women
like my wife--with them you are within your rights, for they know what
you want of them. They are armed against you by the same experience
of debauchery; but to promise a maid to marry her... to deceive, to
kidnap.... Don't you understand that it is as mean as beating an old man
or a child?..."

Pierre paused and looked at Anatole no longer with an angry but with a
questioning look.

"I don't know about that, eh?" said Anatole, growing more confident as
Pierre mastered his wrath. "I don't know that and don't want to," he
said, not looking at Pierre and with a slight tremor of his lower jaw,
"but you have used such words to me--'mean' and so on--which as a man of
honor I can't allow anyone to use."

Pierre glanced at him with amazement, unable to understand what he
wanted.

"Though it was tete-a-tete," Anatole continued, "still I can't..."

"Is it satisfaction you want?" said Pierre ironically.

"You could at least take back your words. What? If you want me to do as
you wish, eh?"

"I take them back, I take them back!" said Pierre, "and I ask you to
forgive me." Pierre involuntarily glanced at the loose button. "And if
you require money for your journey..."

Anatole smiled. The expression of that base and cringing smile, which
Pierre knew so well in his wife, revolted him.

"Oh, vile and heartless brood!" he exclaimed, and left the room.

Next day Anatole left for Petersburg.





CHAPTER XXI


Pierre drove to Marya Dmitrievna's to tell her of the fulfillment of her
wish that Kuragin should be banished from Moscow. The whole house was in
a state of alarm and commotion. Natasha was very ill, having, as Marya
Dmitrievna told him in secret, poisoned herself the night after she had
been told that Anatole was married, with some arsenic she had stealthily
procured. After swallowing a little she had been so frightened that she
woke Sonya and told her what she had done. The necessary antidotes had
been administered in time and she was now out of danger, though still so
weak that it was out of the question to move her to the country, and
so the countess had been sent for. Pierre saw the distracted count, and
Sonya, who had a tear-stained face, but he could not see Natasha.

Pierre dined at the club that day and heard on all sides gossip about
the attempted abduction of Rostova. He resolutely denied these
rumors, assuring everyone that nothing had happened except that his
brother-in-law had proposed to her and been refused. It seemed to
Pierre that it was his duty to conceal the whole affair and re-establish
Natasha's reputation.

He was awaiting Prince Andrew's return with dread and went every day to
the old prince's for news of him.

Old Prince Bolkonski heard all the rumors current in the town from
Mademoiselle Bourienne and had read the note to Princess Mary in which
Natasha had broken off her engagement. He seemed in better spirits than
usual and awaited his son with great impatience.

Some days after Anatole's departure Pierre received a note from Prince
Andrew, informing him of his arrival and asking him to come to see him.

As soon as he reached Moscow, Prince Andrew had received from his
father Natasha's note to Princess Mary breaking off her engagement
(Mademoiselle Bourienne had purloined it from Princess Mary and given
it to the old prince), and he heard from him the story of Natasha's
elopement, with additions.

Prince Andrew had arrived in the evening and Pierre came to see him next
morning. Pierre expected to find Prince Andrew in almost the same state
as Natasha and was therefore surprised on entering the drawing room
to hear him in the study talking in a loud animated voice about some
intrigue going on in Petersburg. The old prince's voice and another now
and then interrupted him. Princess Mary came out to meet Pierre. She
sighed, looking toward the door of the room where Prince Andrew was,
evidently intending to express her sympathy with his sorrow, but Pierre
saw by her face that she was glad both at what had happened and at the
way her brother had taken the news of Natasha's faithlessness.

"He says he expected it," she remarked. "I know his pride will not let
him express his feelings, but still he has taken it better, far better,
than I expected. Evidently it had to be...."

"But is it possible that all is really ended?" asked Pierre.

Princess Mary looked at him with astonishment. She did not understand
how he could ask such a question. Pierre went into the study. Prince
Andrew, greatly changed and plainly in better health, but with a fresh
horizontal wrinkle between his brows, stood in civilian dress facing
his father and Prince Meshcherski, warmly disputing and vigorously
gesticulating. The conversation was about Speranski--the news of whose
sudden exile and alleged treachery had just reached Moscow.

"Now he is censured and accused by all who were enthusiastic about him
a month ago," Prince Andrew was saying, "and by those who were unable to
understand his aims. To judge a man who is in disfavor and to throw on
him all the blame of other men's mistakes is very easy, but I maintain
that if anything good has been accomplished in this reign it was done by
him, by him alone."

He paused at the sight of Pierre. His face quivered and immediately
assumed a vindictive expression.

"Posterity will do him justice," he concluded, and at once turned to
Pierre.

"Well, how are you? Still getting stouter?" he said with animation, but
the new wrinkle on his forehead deepened. "Yes, I am well," he said in
answer to Pierre's question, and smiled.

To Pierre that smile said plainly: "I am well, but my health is now of
no use to anyone."

After a few words to Pierre about the awful roads from the Polish
frontier, about people he had met in Switzerland who knew Pierre, and
about M. Dessalles, whom he had brought from abroad to be his son's
tutor, Prince Andrew again joined warmly in the conversation about
Speranski which was still going on between the two old men.

"If there were treason, or proofs of secret relations with Napoleon,
they would have been made public," he said with warmth and haste. "I do
not, and never did, like Speranski personally, but I like justice!"

Pierre now recognized in his friend a need with which he was only too
familiar, to get excited and to have arguments about extraneous matters
in order to stifle thoughts that were too oppressive and too intimate.
When Prince Meshcherski had left, Prince Andrew took Pierre's arm and
asked him into the room that had been assigned him. A bed had been made
up there, and some open portmanteaus and trunks stood about. Prince
Andrew went to one and took out a small casket, from which he drew a
packet wrapped in paper. He did it all silently and very quickly. He
stood up and coughed. His face was gloomy and his lips compressed.

"Forgive me for troubling you..."

Pierre saw that Prince Andrew was going to speak of Natasha, and his
broad face expressed pity and sympathy. This expression irritated Prince
Andrew, and in a determined, ringing, and unpleasant tone he continued:

"I have received a refusal from Countess Rostova and have heard reports
of your brother-in-law having sought her hand, or something of that
kind. Is that true?"

"Both true and untrue," Pierre began; but Prince Andrew interrupted him.

"Here are her letters and her portrait," said he.

He took the packet from the table and handed it to Pierre.

"Give this to the countess... if you see her."

"She is very ill," said Pierre.

"Then she is here still?" said Prince Andrew. "And Prince Kuragin?" he
added quickly.

"He left long ago. She has been at death's door."

"I much regret her illness," said Prince Andrew; and he smiled like his
father, coldly, maliciously, and unpleasantly.

"So Monsieur Kuragin has not honored Countess Rostova with his hand?"
said Prince Andrew, and he snorted several times.

"He could not marry, for he was married already," said Pierre.

Prince Andrew laughed disagreeably, again reminding one of his father.

"And where is your brother-in-law now, if I may ask?" he said.

"He has gone to Peters... But I don't know," said Pierre.

"Well, it doesn't matter," said Prince Andrew. "Tell Countess Rostova
that she was and is perfectly free and that I wish her all that is
good."

Pierre took the packet. Prince Andrew, as if trying to remember whether
he had something more to say, or waiting to see if Pierre would say
anything, looked fixedly at him.

"I say, do you remember our discussion in Petersburg?" asked Pierre,
"about..."

"Yes," returned Prince Andrew hastily. "I said that a fallen woman
should be forgiven, but I didn't say I could forgive her. I can't."

"But can this be compared...?" said Pierre.

Prince Andrew interrupted him and cried sharply: "Yes, ask her hand
again, be magnanimous, and so on?... Yes, that would be very noble, but
I am unable to follow in that gentleman's footsteps. If you wish to be
my friend never speak to me of that... of all that! Well, good-by. So
you'll give her the packet?"

Pierre left the room and went to the old prince and Princess Mary.

The old man seemed livelier than usual. Princess Mary was the same as
always, but beneath her sympathy for her brother, Pierre noticed her
satisfaction that the engagement had been broken off. Looking at them
Pierre realized what contempt and animosity they all felt for the
Rostovs, and that it was impossible in their presence even to mention
the name of her who could give up Prince Andrew for anyone else.

At dinner the talk turned on the war, the approach of which was becoming
evident. Prince Andrew talked incessantly, arguing now with his father,
now with the Swiss tutor Dessalles, and showing an unnatural animation,
the cause of which Pierre so well understood.





CHAPTER XXII


That same evening Pierre went to the Rostovs' to fulfill the commission
entrusted to him. Natasha was in bed, the count at the Club, and Pierre,
after giving the letters to Sonya, went to Marya Dmitrievna who was
interested to know how Prince Andrew had taken the news. Ten minutes
later Sonya came to Marya Dmitrievna.

"Natasha insists on seeing Count Peter Kirilovich," said she.

"But how? Are we to take him up to her? The room there has not been
tidied up."

"No, she has dressed and gone into the drawing room," said Sonya.

Marya Dmitrievna only shrugged her shoulders.

"When will her mother come? She has worried me to death! Now mind, don't
tell her everything!" said she to Pierre. "One hasn't the heart to scold
her, she is so much to be pitied, so much to be pitied."

Natasha was standing in the middle of the drawing room, emaciated, with
a pale set face, but not at all shamefaced as Pierre expected to find
her. When he appeared at the door she grew flurried, evidently undecided
whether to go to meet him or to wait till he came up.

Pierre hastened to her. He thought she would give him her hand as
usual; but she, stepping up to him, stopped, breathing heavily, her arms
hanging lifelessly just in the pose she used to stand in when she
went to the middle of the ballroom to sing, but with quite a different
expression of face.

"Peter Kirilovich," she began rapidly, "Prince Bolkonski was your
friend--is your friend," she corrected herself. (It seemed to her that
everything that had once been must now be different.) "He told me once
to apply to you..."

Pierre sniffed as he looked at her, but did not speak. Till then he had
reproached her in his heart and tried to despise her, but he now felt so
sorry for her that there was no room in his soul for reproach.

"He is here now: tell him... to for... forgive me!" She stopped and
breathed still more quickly, but did not shed tears.

"Yes... I will tell him," answered Pierre; "but..."

He did not know what to say.

Natasha was evidently dismayed at the thought of what he might think she
had meant.

"No, I know all is over," she said hurriedly. "No, that can never be.
I'm only tormented by the wrong I have done him. Tell him only that I
beg him to forgive, forgive, forgive me for everything...."

She trembled all over and sat down on a chair.

A sense of pity he had never before known overflowed Pierre's heart.

"I will tell him, I will tell him everything once more," said Pierre.
"But... I should like to know one thing...."

"Know what?" Natasha's eyes asked.

"I should like to know, did you love..." Pierre did not know how to
refer to Anatole and flushed at the thought of him--"did you love that
bad man?"

"Don't call him bad!" said Natasha. "But I don't know, don't know at
all...."

She began to cry and a still greater sense of pity, tenderness, and love
welled up in Pierre. He felt the tears trickle under his spectacles and
hoped they would not be noticed.

"We won't speak of it any more, my dear," said Pierre, and his gentle,
cordial tone suddenly seemed very strange to Natasha.

"We won't speak of it, my dear--I'll tell him everything; but one thing
I beg of you, consider me your friend and if you want help, advice, or
simply to open your heart to someone--not now, but when your mind is
clearer think of me!" He took her hand and kissed it. "I shall be happy
if it's in my power..."

Pierre grew confused.

"Don't speak to me like that. I am not worth it!" exclaimed Natasha and
turned to leave the room, but Pierre held her hand.

He knew he had something more to say to her. But when he said it he was
amazed at his own words.

"Stop, stop! You have your whole life before you," said he to her.

"Before me? No! All is over for me," she replied with shame and
self-abasement.

 "All over?" he repeated. "If I were not myself, but the handsomest,
cleverest, and best man in the world, and were free, I would this moment
ask on my knees for your hand and your love!"

For the first time for many days Natasha wept tears of gratitude and
tenderness, and glancing at Pierre she went out of the room.

Pierre too when she had gone almost ran into the anteroom, restraining
tears of tenderness and joy that choked him, and without finding the
sleeves of his fur cloak threw it on and got into his sleigh.

"Where to now, your excellency?" asked the coachman.

"Where to?" Pierre asked himself. "Where can I go now? Surely not to the
Club or to pay calls?" All men seemed so pitiful, so poor, in comparison
with this feeling of tenderness and love he experienced: in comparison
with that softened, grateful, last look she had given him through her
tears.

"Home!" said Pierre, and despite twenty-two degrees of frost Fahrenheit
he threw open the bearskin cloak from his broad chest and inhaled the
air with joy.

It was clear and frosty. Above the dirty, ill-lit streets, above the
black roofs, stretched the dark starry sky. Only looking up at the sky
did Pierre cease to feel how sordid and humiliating were all mundane
things compared with the heights to which his soul had just been raised.
At the entrance to the Arbat Square an immense expanse of dark starry
sky presented itself to his eyes. Almost in the center of it, above the
Prechistenka Boulevard, surrounded and sprinkled on all sides by stars
but distinguished from them all by its nearness to the earth, its white
light, and its long uplifted tail, shone the enormous and brilliant
comet of 1812--the comet which was said to portend all kinds of woes
and the end of the world. In Pierre, however, that comet with its long
luminous tail aroused no feeling of fear. On the contrary he gazed
joyfully, his eyes moist with tears, at this bright comet which, having
traveled in its orbit with inconceivable velocity through immeasurable
space, seemed suddenly--like an arrow piercing the earth--to remain
fixed in a chosen spot, vigorously holding its tail erect, shining and
displaying its white light amid countless other scintillating stars. It
seemed to Pierre that this comet fully responded to what was passing in
his own softened and uplifted soul, now blossoming into a new life.





BOOK NINE: 1812





CHAPTER I


From the close of the year 1811 intensified arming and concentrating of
the forces of Western Europe began, and in 1812 these forces--millions
of men, reckoning those transporting and feeding the army--moved from
the west eastwards to the Russian frontier, toward which since 1811
Russian forces had been similarly drawn. On the twelfth of June, 1812,
the forces of Western Europe crossed the Russian frontier and war
began, that is, an event took place opposed to human reason and to human
nature. Millions of men perpetrated against one another such innumerable
crimes, frauds, treacheries, thefts, forgeries, issues of false money,
burglaries, incendiarisms, and murders as in whole centuries are not
recorded in the annals of all the law courts of the world, but which
those who committed them did not at the time regard as being crimes.

What produced this extraordinary occurrence? What were its causes? The
historians tell us with naive assurance that its causes were the wrongs
inflicted on the Duke of Oldenburg, the nonobservance of the Continental
System, the ambition of Napoleon, the firmness of Alexander, the
mistakes of the diplomatists, and so on.

Consequently, it would only have been necessary for Metternich,
Rumyantsev, or Talleyrand, between a levee and an evening party, to have
taken proper pains and written a more adroit note, or for Napoleon to
have written to Alexander: "My respected Brother, I consent to restore
the duchy to the Duke of Oldenburg"--and there would have been no war.

We can understand that the matter seemed like that to contemporaries.
It naturally seemed to Napoleon that the war was caused by England's
intrigues (as in fact he said on the island of St. Helena). It naturally
seemed to members of the English Parliament that the cause of the war
was Napoleon's ambition; to the Duke of Oldenburg, that the cause of the
war was the violence done to him; to businessmen that the cause of the
war was the Continental System which was ruining Europe; to the generals
and old soldiers that the chief reason for the war was the necessity of
giving them employment; to the legitimists of that day that it was the
need of re-establishing les bons principes, and to the diplomatists of
that time that it all resulted from the fact that the alliance between
Russia and Austria in 1809 had not been sufficiently well concealed
from Napoleon, and from the awkward wording of Memorandum No. 178. It
is natural that these and a countless and infinite quantity of other
reasons, the number depending on the endless diversity of points
of view, presented themselves to the men of that day; but to us, to
posterity who view the thing that happened in all its magnitude and
perceive its plain and terrible meaning, these causes seem insufficient.
To us it is incomprehensible that millions of Christian men killed and
tortured each other either because Napoleon was ambitious or Alexander
was firm, or because England's policy was astute or the Duke of
Oldenburg wronged. We cannot grasp what connection such circumstances
have with the actual fact of slaughter and violence: why because the
Duke was wronged, thousands of men from the other side of Europe killed
and ruined the people of Smolensk and Moscow and were killed by them.

To us, their descendants, who are not historians and are not carried
away by the process of research and can therefore regard the event
with unclouded common sense, an incalculable number of causes present
themselves. The deeper we delve in search of these causes the more of
them we find; and each separate cause or whole series of causes appears
to us equally valid in itself and equally false by its insignificance
compared to the magnitude of the events, and by its impotence--apart
from the cooperation of all the other coincident causes--to occasion the
event. To us, the wish or objection of this or that French corporal to
serve a second term appears as much a cause as Napoleon's refusal to
withdraw his troops beyond the Vistula and to restore the duchy of
Oldenburg; for had he not wished to serve, and had a second, a third,
and a thousandth corporal and private also refused, there would have
been so many less men in Napoleon's army and the war could not have
occurred.

Had Napoleon not taken offense at the demand that he should withdraw
beyond the Vistula, and not ordered his troops to advance, there would
have been no war; but had all his sergeants objected to serving a second
term then also there could have been no war. Nor could there have been
a war had there been no English intrigues and no Duke of Oldenburg, and
had Alexander not felt insulted, and had there not been an autocratic
government in Russia, or a Revolution in France and a subsequent
dictatorship and Empire, or all the things that produced the French
Revolution, and so on. Without each of these causes nothing could have
happened. So all these causes--myriads of causes--coincided to bring it
about. And so there was no one cause for that occurrence, but it had
to occur because it had to. Millions of men, renouncing their human
feelings and reason, had to go from west to east to slay their fellows,
just as some centuries previously hordes of men had come from the east
to the west, slaying their fellows.

The actions of Napoleon and Alexander, on whose words the event seemed
to hang, were as little voluntary as the actions of any soldier who was
drawn into the campaign by lot or by conscription. This could not be
otherwise, for in order that the will of Napoleon and Alexander (on whom
the event seemed to depend) should be carried out, the concurrence of
innumerable circumstances was needed without any one of which the event
could not have taken place. It was necessary that millions of men in
whose hands lay the real power--the soldiers who fired, or transported
provisions and guns--should consent to carry out the will of these weak
individuals, and should have been induced to do so by an infinite number
of diverse and complex causes.

We are forced to fall back on fatalism as an explanation of irrational
events (that is to say, events the reasonableness of which we do
not understand). The more we try to explain such events in history
reasonably, the more unreasonable and incomprehensible do they become to
us.

Each man lives for himself, using his freedom to attain his personal
aims, and feels with his whole being that he can now do or abstain from
doing this or that action; but as soon as he has done it, that action
performed at a certain moment in time becomes irrevocable and belongs to
history, in which it has not a free but a predestined significance.

There are two sides to the life of every man, his individual life, which
is the more free the more abstract its interests, and his elemental hive
life in which he inevitably obeys laws laid down for him.

Man lives consciously for himself, but is an unconscious instrument in
the attainment of the historic, universal, aims of humanity. A deed done
is irrevocable, and its result coinciding in time with the actions of
millions of other men assumes an historic significance. The higher a man
stands on the social ladder, the more people he is connected with
and the more power he has over others, the more evident is the
predestination and inevitability of his every action.

"The king's heart is in the hands of the Lord."

A king is history's slave.

History, that is, the unconscious, general, hive life of mankind, uses
every moment of the life of kings as a tool for its own purposes.

Though Napoleon at that time, in 1812, was more convinced than ever that
it depended on him, verser (ou ne pas verser) le sang de ses peuples
*--as Alexander expressed it in the last letter he wrote him--he had
never been so much in the grip of inevitable laws, which compelled him,
while thinking that he was acting on his own volition, to perform
for the hive life--that is to say, for history--whatever had to be
performed.


    * "To shed (or not to shed) the blood of his peoples."


The people of the west moved eastwards to slay their fellow men, and
by the law of coincidence thousands of minute causes fitted in and
co-ordinated to produce that movement and war: reproaches for the
nonobservance of the Continental System, the Duke of Oldenburg's
wrongs, the movement of troops into Prussia--undertaken (as it seemed
to Napoleon) only for the purpose of securing an armed peace, the
French Emperor's love and habit of war coinciding with his people's
inclinations, allurement by the grandeur of the preparations, and the
expenditure on those preparations and the need of obtaining advantages
to compensate for that expenditure, the intoxicating honors he received
in Dresden, the diplomatic negotiations which, in the opinion of
contemporaries, were carried on with a sincere desire to attain peace,
but which only wounded the self-love of both sides, and millions of
other causes that adapted themselves to the event that was happening or
coincided with it.

When an apple has ripened and falls, why does it fall? Because of its
attraction to the earth, because its stalk withers, because it is dried
by the sun, because it grows heavier, because the wind shakes it, or
because the boy standing below wants to eat it?

Nothing is the cause. All this is only the coincidence of conditions in
which all vital organic and elemental events occur. And the botanist
who finds that the apple falls because the cellular tissue decays and so
forth is equally right with the child who stands under the tree and says
the apple fell because he wanted to eat it and prayed for it. Equally
right or wrong is he who says that Napoleon went to Moscow because he
wanted to, and perished because Alexander desired his destruction, and
he who says that an undermined hill weighing a million tons fell because
the last navvy struck it for the last time with his mattock. In historic
events the so-called great men are labels giving names to events, and
like labels they have but the smallest connection with the event itself.

Every act of theirs, which appears to them an act of their own will, is
in an historical sense involuntary and is related to the whole course of
history and predestined from eternity.





CHAPTER II


On the twenty-ninth of May Napoleon left Dresden, where he had spent
three weeks surrounded by a court that included princes, dukes, kings,
and even an emperor. Before leaving, Napoleon showed favor to the
emperor, kings, and princes who had deserved it, reprimanded the kings
and princes with whom he was dissatisfied, presented pearls and diamonds
of his own--that is, which he had taken from other kings--to the Empress
of Austria, and having, as his historian tells us, tenderly embraced
the Empress Marie Louise--who regarded him as her husband, though he had
left another wife in Paris--left her grieved by the parting which
she seemed hardly able to bear. Though the diplomatists still firmly
believed in the possibility of peace and worked zealously to that end,
and though the Emperor Napoleon himself wrote a letter to Alexander,
calling him Monsieur mon frere, and sincerely assured him that he did
not want war and would always love and honor him--yet he set off to
join his army, and at every station gave fresh orders to accelerate the
movement of his troops from west to east. He went in a traveling coach
with six horses, surrounded by pages, aides-de-camp, and an escort,
along the road to Posen, Thorn, Danzig, and Konigsberg. At each of these
towns thousands of people met him with excitement and enthusiasm.

The army was moving from west to east, and relays of six horses carried
him in the same direction. On the tenth of June, * coming up with the
army, he spent the night in apartments prepared for him on the estate of
a Polish count in the Vilkavisski forest.


    * Old style.


Next day, overtaking the army, he went in a carriage to the Niemen, and,
changing into a Polish uniform, he drove to the riverbank in order to
select a place for the crossing.

Seeing, on the other side, some Cossacks (les Cosaques) and the
wide-spreading steppes in the midst of which lay the holy city of Moscow
(Moscou, la ville sainte), the capital of a realm such as the Scythia
into which Alexander the Great had marched--Napoleon unexpectedly, and
contrary alike to strategic and diplomatic considerations, ordered an
advance, and the next day his army began to cross the Niemen.

Early in the morning of the twelfth of June he came out of his tent,
which was pitched that day on the steep left bank of the Niemen, and
looked through a spyglass at the streams of his troops pouring out of
the Vilkavisski forest and flowing over the three bridges thrown across
the river. The troops, knowing of the Emperor's presence, were on the
lookout for him, and when they caught sight of a figure in an overcoat
and a cocked hat standing apart from his suite in front of his tent on
the hill, they threw up their caps and shouted: "Vive l'Empereur!" and
one after another poured in a ceaseless stream out of the vast forest
that had concealed them and, separating, flowed on and on by the three
bridges to the other side.

"Now we'll go into action. Oh, when he takes it in hand himself, things
get hot... by heaven!... There he is!... Vive l'Empereur! So these
are the steppes of Asia! It's a nasty country all the same. Au revoir,
Beauche; I'll keep the best palace in Moscow for you! Au revoir. Good
luck!... Did you see the Emperor? Vive l'Empereur!... preur!--If
they make me Governor of India, Gerard, I'll make you Minister of
Kashmir--that's settled. Vive l'Empereur! Hurrah! hurrah! hurrah! The
Cossacks--those rascals--see how they run! Vive l'Empereur! There he
is, do you see him? I've seen him twice, as I see you now. The little
corporal... I saw him give the cross to one of the veterans.... Vive
l'Empereur!" came the voices of men, old and young, of most diverse
characters and social positions. On the faces of all was one common
expression of joy at the commencement of the long-expected campaign and
of rapture and devotion to the man in the gray coat who was standing on
the hill.

On the thirteenth of June a rather small, thoroughbred Arab horse was
brought to Napoleon. He mounted it and rode at a gallop to one of the
bridges over the Niemen, deafened continually by incessant and rapturous
acclamations which he evidently endured only because it was impossible
to forbid the soldiers to express their love of him by such shouting,
but the shouting which accompanied him everywhere disturbed him and
distracted him from the military cares that had occupied him from the
time he joined the army. He rode across one of the swaying pontoon
bridges to the farther side, turned sharply to the left, and galloped in
the direction of Kovno, preceded by enraptured, mounted chasseurs of the
Guard who, breathless with delight, galloped ahead to clear a path for
him through the troops. On reaching the broad river Viliya, he stopped
near a regiment of Polish Uhlans stationed by the river.

"Vivat!" shouted the Poles, ecstatically, breaking their ranks and
pressing against one another to see him.

Napoleon looked up and down the river, dismounted, and sat down on a log
that lay on the bank. At a mute sign from him, a telescope was handed
him which he rested on the back of a happy page who had run up to him,
and he gazed at the opposite bank. Then he became absorbed in a map laid
out on the logs. Without lifting his head he said something, and two of
his aides-de-camp galloped off to the Polish Uhlans.

"What? What did he say?" was heard in the ranks of the Polish Uhlans
when one of the aides-de-camp rode up to them.

The order was to find a ford and to cross the river. The colonel of the
Polish Uhlans, a handsome old man, flushed and, fumbling in his speech
from excitement, asked the aide-de-camp whether he would be permitted
to swim the river with his Uhlans instead of seeking a ford. In evident
fear of refusal, like a boy asking for permission to get on a horse, he
begged to be allowed to swim across the river before the Emperor's
eyes. The aide-de-camp replied that probably the Emperor would not be
displeased at this excess of zeal.

As soon as the aide-de-camp had said this, the old mustached officer,
with happy face and sparkling eyes, raised his saber, shouted "Vivat!"
and, commanding the Uhlans to follow him, spurred his horse and galloped
into the river. He gave an angry thrust to his horse, which had grown
restive under him, and plunged into the water, heading for the deepest
part where the current was swift. Hundreds of Uhlans galloped in after
him. It was cold and uncanny in the rapid current in the middle of the
stream, and the Uhlans caught hold of one another as they fell off their
horses. Some of the horses were drowned and some of the men; the others
tried to swim on, some in the saddle and some clinging to their horses'
manes. They tried to make their way forward to the opposite bank and,
though there was a ford one third of a mile away, were proud that they
were swimming and drowning in this river under the eyes of the man who
sat on the log and was not even looking at what they were doing. When
the aide-de-camp, having returned and choosing an opportune moment,
ventured to draw the Emperor's attention to the devotion of the Poles
to his person, the little man in the gray overcoat got up and, having
summoned Berthier, began pacing up and down the bank with him, giving
him instructions and occasionally glancing disapprovingly at the
drowning Uhlans who distracted his attention.

For him it was no new conviction that his presence in any part of
the world, from Africa to the steppes of Muscovy alike, was enough to
dumfound people and impel them to insane self-oblivion. He called for
his horse and rode to his quarters.

Some forty Uhlans were drowned in the river, though boats were sent to
their assistance. The majority struggled back to the bank from which
they had started. The colonel and some of his men got across and with
difficulty clambered out on the further bank. And as soon as they had
got out, in their soaked and streaming clothes, they shouted "Vivat!"
and looked ecstatically at the spot where Napoleon had been but where he
no longer was and at that moment considered themselves happy.

That evening, between issuing one order that the forged Russian paper
money prepared for use in Russia should be delivered as quickly as
possible and another that a Saxon should be shot, on whom a letter
containing information about the orders to the French army had been
found, Napoleon also gave instructions that the Polish colonel who
had needlessly plunged into the river should be enrolled in the Legion
d'honneur of which Napoleon was himself the head.

Quos vult perdere dementat. *


    * Those whom (God) wishes to destroy he drives mad.





CHAPTER III


The Emperor of Russia had, meanwhile, been in Vilna for more than a
month, reviewing troops and holding maneuvers. Nothing was ready for the
war that everyone expected and to prepare for which the Emperor had come
from Petersburg. There was no general plan of action. The vacillation
between the various plans that were proposed had even increased after
the Emperor had been at headquarters for a month. Each of the three
armies had its own commander in chief, but there was no supreme
commander of all the forces, and the Emperor did not assume that
responsibility himself.

The longer the Emperor remained in Vilna the less did everybody--tired
of waiting--prepare for the war. All the efforts of those who surrounded
the sovereign seemed directed merely to making him spend his time
pleasantly and forget that war was impending.

In June, after many balls and fetes given by the Polish magnates, by the
courtiers, and by the Emperor himself, it occurred to one of the Polish
aides-de-camp in attendance that a dinner and ball should be given for
the Emperor by his aides-de-camp. This idea was eagerly received.
The Emperor gave his consent. The aides-de-camp collected money by
subscription. The lady who was thought to be most pleasing to the
Emperor was invited to act as hostess. Count Bennigsen, being a
landowner in the Vilna province, offered his country house for the fete,
and the thirteenth of June was fixed for a ball, dinner, regatta, and
fireworks at Zakret, Count Bennigsen's country seat.

The very day that Napoleon issued the order to cross the Niemen, and
his vanguard, driving off the Cossacks, crossed the Russian frontier,
Alexander spent the evening at the entertainment given by his
aides-de-camp at Bennigsen's country house.

It was a gay and brilliant fete. Connoisseurs of such matters declared
that rarely had so many beautiful women been assembled in one place.
Countess Bezukhova was present among other Russian ladies who had
followed the sovereign from Petersburg to Vilna and eclipsed the refined
Polish ladies by her massive, so called Russian type of beauty. The
Emperor noticed her and honored her with a dance.

Boris Drubetskoy, having left his wife in Moscow and being for the
present en garcon (as he phrased it), was also there and, though not an
aide-de-camp, had subscribed a large sum toward the expenses. Boris
was now a rich man who had risen to high honors and no longer sought
patronage but stood on an equal footing with the highest of those of his
own age. He was meeting Helene in Vilna after not having seen her for
a long time and did not recall the past, but as Helene was enjoying
the favors of a very important personage and Boris had only recently
married, they met as good friends of long standing.

At midnight dancing was still going on. Helene, not having a suitable
partner, herself offered to dance the mazurka with Boris. They were the
third couple. Boris, coolly looking at Helene's dazzling bare shoulders
which emerged from a dark, gold-embroidered, gauze gown, talked to her
of old acquaintances and at the same time, unaware of it himself and
unnoticed by others, never for an instant ceased to observe the Emperor
who was in the same room. The Emperor was not dancing, he stood in the
doorway, stopping now one pair and now another with gracious words which
he alone knew how to utter.

As the mazurka began, Boris saw that Adjutant General Balashev, one of
those in closest attendance on the Emperor, went up to him and contrary
to court etiquette stood near him while he was talking to a Polish
lady. Having finished speaking to her, the Emperor looked inquiringly
at Balashev and, evidently understanding that he only acted thus because
there were important reasons for so doing, nodded slightly to the lady
and turned to him. Hardly had Balashev begun to speak before a look of
amazement appeared on the Emperor's face. He took Balashev by the arm
and crossed the room with him, unconsciously clearing a path seven
yards wide as the people on both sides made way for him. Boris noticed
Arakcheev's excited face when the sovereign went out with Balashev.
Arakcheev looked at the Emperor from under his brow and, sniffing with
his red nose, stepped forward from the crowd as if expecting the Emperor
to address him. (Boris understood that Arakcheev envied Balashev and
was displeased that evidently important news had reached the Emperor
otherwise than through himself.)

But the Emperor and Balashev passed out into the illuminated garden
without noticing Arakcheev who, holding his sword and glancing
wrathfully around, followed some twenty paces behind them.

All the time Boris was going through the figures of the mazurka, he was
worried by the question of what news Balashev had brought and how he
could find it out before others. In the figure in which he had to choose
two ladies, he whispered to Helene that he meant to choose Countess
Potocka who, he thought, had gone out onto the veranda, and glided over
the parquet to the door opening into the garden, where, seeing Balashev
and the Emperor returning to the veranda, he stood still. They were
moving toward the door. Boris, fluttering as if he had not had time to
withdraw, respectfully pressed close to the doorpost with bowed head.

The Emperor, with the agitation of one who has been personally
affronted, was finishing with these words:

"To enter Russia without declaring war! I will not make peace as long as
a single armed enemy remains in my country!" It seemed to Boris that it
gave the Emperor pleasure to utter these words. He was satisfied with
the form in which he had expressed his thoughts, but displeased that
Boris had overheard it.

"Let no one know of it!" the Emperor added with a frown.

Boris understood that this was meant for him and, closing his eyes,
slightly bowed his head. The Emperor re-entered the ballroom and
remained there about another half-hour.

Boris was thus the first to learn the news that the French army had
crossed the Niemen and, thanks to this, was able to show certain
important personages that much that was concealed from others was
usually known to him, and by this means he rose higher in their
estimation.


The unexpected news of the French having crossed the Niemen was
particularly startling after a month of unfulfilled expectations, and at
a ball. On first receiving the news, under the influence of indignation
and resentment the Emperor had found a phrase that pleased him, fully
expressed his feelings, and has since become famous. On returning home
at two o'clock that night he sent for his secretary, Shishkov, and told
him to write an order to the troops and a rescript to Field Marshal
Prince Saltykov, in which he insisted on the words being inserted that
he would not make peace so long as a single armed Frenchman remained on
Russian soil.

Next day the following letter was sent to Napoleon:


Monsieur mon frere,

Yesterday I learned that, despite the loyalty with which I have kept
my engagements with Your Majesty, your troops have crossed the Russian
frontier, and I have this moment received from Petersburg a note, in
which Count Lauriston informs me, as a reason for this aggression, that
Your Majesty has considered yourself to be in a state of war with me
from the time Prince Kuragin asked for his passports. The reasons on
which the Duc de Bassano based his refusal to deliver them to him would
never have led me to suppose that that could serve as a pretext for
aggression. In fact, the ambassador, as he himself has declared, was
never authorized to make that demand, and as soon as I was informed of
it I let him know how much I disapproved of it and ordered him to remain
at his post. If Your Majesty does not intend to shed the blood of our
peoples for such a misunderstanding, and consents to withdraw your
troops from Russian territory, I will regard what has passed as not
having occurred and an understanding between us will be possible. In
the contrary case, Your Majesty, I shall see myself forced to repel an
attack that nothing on my part has provoked. It still depends on Your
Majesty to preserve humanity from the calamity of another war. I am,
etc.,

(signed) Alexander.





CHAPTER IV


At two in the morning of the fourteenth of June, the Emperor, having
sent for Balashev and read him his letter to Napoleon, ordered him to
take it and hand it personally to the French Emperor. When dispatching
Balashev, the Emperor repeated to him the words that he would not make
peace so long as a single armed enemy remained on Russian soil and told
him to transmit those words to Napoleon. Alexander did not insert them
in his letter to Napoleon, because with his characteristic tact he felt
it would be injudicious to use them at a moment when a last attempt at
reconciliation was being made, but he definitely instructed Balashev to
repeat them personally to Napoleon.

Having set off in the small hours of the fourteenth, accompanied by a
bugler and two Cossacks, Balashev reached the French outposts at the
village of Rykonty, on the Russian side of the Niemen, by dawn. There he
was stopped by French cavalry sentinels.

A French noncommissioned officer of hussars, in crimson uniform and a
shaggy cap, shouted to the approaching Balashev to halt. Balashev did
not do so at once, but continued to advance along the road at a walking
pace.

The noncommissioned officer frowned and, muttering words of abuse,
advanced his horse's chest against Balashev, put his hand to his saber,
and shouted rudely at the Russian general, asking: was he deaf that
he did not do as he was told? Balashev mentioned who he was. The
noncommissioned officer began talking with his comrades about regimental
matters without looking at the Russian general.

After living at the seat of the highest authority and power, after
conversing with the Emperor less than three hours before, and in general
being accustomed to the respect due to his rank in the service, Balashev
found it very strange here on Russian soil to encounter this hostile,
and still more this disrespectful, application of brute force to
himself.

The sun was only just appearing from behind the clouds, the air was
fresh and dewy. A herd of cattle was being driven along the road from
the village, and over the fields the larks rose trilling, one after
another, like bubbles rising in water.

Balashev looked around him, awaiting the arrival of an officer from the
village. The Russian Cossacks and bugler and the French hussars looked
silently at one another from time to time.

A French colonel of hussars, who had evidently just left his bed, came
riding from the village on a handsome sleek gray horse, accompanied
by two hussars. The officer, the soldiers, and their horses all looked
smart and well kept.

It was that first period of a campaign when troops are still in full
trim, almost like that of peacetime maneuvers, but with a shade of
martial swagger in their clothes, and a touch of the gaiety and spirit
of enterprise which always accompany the opening of a campaign.

The French colonel with difficulty repressed a yawn, but was polite and
evidently understood Balashev's importance. He led him past his soldiers
and behind the outposts and told him that his wish to be presented to
the Emperor would most likely be satisfied immediately, as the Emperor's
quarters were, he believed, not far off.

They rode through the village of Rykonty, past tethered French hussar
horses, past sentinels and men who saluted their colonel and stared with
curiosity at a Russian uniform, and came out at the other end of the
village. The colonel said that the commander of the division was a mile
and a quarter away and would receive Balashev and conduct him to his
destination.

The sun had by now risen and shone gaily on the bright verdure.

They had hardly ridden up a hill, past a tavern, before they saw a group
of horsemen coming toward them. In front of the group, on a black horse
with trappings that glittered in the sun, rode a tall man with plumes
in his hat and black hair curling down to his shoulders. He wore a red
mantle, and stretched his long legs forward in French fashion. This man
rode toward Balashev at a gallop, his plumes flowing and his gems and
gold lace glittering in the bright June sunshine.

Balashev was only two horses' length from the equestrian with the
bracelets, plumes, necklaces, and gold embroidery, who was galloping
toward him with a theatrically solemn countenance, when Julner, the
French colonel, whispered respectfully: "The King of Naples!" It was,
in fact, Murat, now called "King of Naples." Though it was quite
incomprehensible why he should be King of Naples, he was called so,
and was himself convinced that he was so, and therefore assumed a more
solemn and important air than formerly. He was so sure that he really
was the King of Naples that when, on the eve of his departure from that
city, while walking through the streets with his wife, some Italians
called out to him: "Viva il re!" * he turned to his wife with a pensive
smile and said: "Poor fellows, they don't know that I am leaving them
tomorrow!"


    * "Long live the king."


But though he firmly believed himself to be King of Naples and pitied
the grief felt by the subjects he was abandoning, latterly, after he
had been ordered to return to military service--and especially since his
last interview with Napoleon in Danzig, when his august brother-in-law
had told him: "I made you King that you should reign in my way, but not
in yours!"--he had cheerfully taken up his familiar business, and--like
a well-fed but not overfat horse that feels himself in harness and grows
skittish between the shafts--he dressed up in clothes as variegated
and expensive as possible, and gaily and contentedly galloped along the
roads of Poland, without himself knowing why or whither.

On seeing the Russian general he threw back his head, with its long hair
curling to his shoulders, in a majestically royal manner, and looked
inquiringly at the French colonel. The colonel respectfully informed His
Majesty of Balashev's mission, whose name he could not pronounce.

"De Bal-macheve!" said the King (overcoming by his assurance the
difficulty that had presented itself to the colonel). "Charmed to
make your acquaintance, General!" he added, with a gesture of kingly
condescension.

As soon as the King began to speak loud and fast his royal dignity
instantly forsook him, and without noticing it he passed into his
natural tone of good-natured familiarity. He laid his hand on the
withers of Balashev's horse and said:

"Well, General, it all looks like war," as if regretting a circumstance
of which he was unable to judge.

"Your Majesty," replied Balashev, "my master, the Emperor, does not
desire war and as Your Majesty sees..." said Balashev, using the words
Your Majesty at every opportunity, with the affectation unavoidable in
frequently addressing one to whom the title was still a novelty.

Murat's face beamed with stupid satisfaction as he listened to "Monsieur
de Bal-macheve." But royaute oblige! * and he felt it incumbent on
him, as a king and an ally, to confer on state affairs with Alexander's
envoy. He dismounted, took Balashev's arm, and moving a few steps away
from his suite, which waited respectfully, began to pace up and down
with him, trying to speak significantly. He referred to the fact that
the Emperor Napoleon had resented the demand that he should withdraw his
troops from Prussia, especially when that demand became generally known
and the dignity of France was thereby offended.


    * "Royalty has its obligations."


Balashev replied that there was "nothing offensive in the demand,
because..." but Murat interrupted him.

"Then you don't consider the Emperor Alexander the aggressor?" he asked
unexpectedly, with a kindly and foolish smile.

Balashev told him why he considered Napoleon to be the originator of the
war.

"Oh, my dear general!" Murat again interrupted him, "with all my heart I
wish the Emperors may arrange the affair between them, and that the war
begun by no wish of mine may finish as quickly as possible!" said he,
in the tone of a servant who wants to remain good friends with another
despite a quarrel between their masters.

And he went on to inquiries about the Grand Duke and the state of his
health, and to reminiscences of the gay and amusing times he had spent
with him in Naples. Then suddenly, as if remembering his royal dignity,
Murat solemnly drew himself up, assumed the pose in which he had stood
at his coronation, and, waving his right arm, said:

"I won't detain you longer, General. I wish success to your mission,"
and with his embroidered red mantle, his flowing feathers, and his
glittering ornaments, he rejoined his suite who were respectfully
awaiting him.

Balashev rode on, supposing from Murat's words that he would very soon
be brought before Napoleon himself. But instead of that, at the next
village the sentinels of Davout's infantry corps detained him as
the pickets of the vanguard had done, and an adjutant of the corps
commander, who was fetched, conducted him into the village to Marshal
Davout.





CHAPTER V


Davout was to Napoleon what Arakcheev was to Alexander--though not a
coward like Arakcheev, he was as precise, as cruel, and as unable to
express his devotion to his monarch except by cruelty.

In the organism of states such men are necessary, as wolves are
necessary in the organism of nature, and they always exist, always
appear and hold their own, however incongruous their presence and their
proximity to the head of the government may be. This inevitability alone
can explain how the cruel Arakcheev, who tore out a grenadier's mustache
with his own hands, whose weak nerves rendered him unable to face
danger, and who was neither an educated man nor a courtier, was able to
maintain his powerful position with Alexander, whose own character was
chivalrous, noble, and gentle.

Balashev found Davout seated on a barrel in the shed of a peasant's hut,
writing--he was auditing accounts. Better quarters could have been
found him, but Marshal Davout was one of those men who purposely put
themselves in most depressing conditions to have a justification for
being gloomy. For the same reason they are always hard at work and in a
hurry. "How can I think of the bright side of life when, as you see, I
am sitting on a barrel and working in a dirty shed?" the expression of
his face seemed to say. The chief pleasure and necessity of such men,
when they encounter anyone who shows animation, is to flaunt their own
dreary, persistent activity. Davout allowed himself that pleasure when
Balashev was brought in. He became still more absorbed in his task when
the Russian general entered, and after glancing over his spectacles at
Balashev's face, which was animated by the beauty of the morning and
by his talk with Murat, he did not rise or even stir, but scowled still
more and sneered malevolently.

When he noticed in Balashev's face the disagreeable impression this
reception produced, Davout raised his head and coldly asked what he
wanted.

Thinking he could have been received in such a manner only because
Davout did not know that he was adjutant general to the Emperor
Alexander and even his envoy to Napoleon, Balashev hastened to inform
him of his rank and mission. Contrary to his expectation, Davout, after
hearing him, became still surlier and ruder.

"Where is your dispatch?" he inquired. "Give it to me. I will send it to
the Emperor."

Balashev replied that he had been ordered to hand it personally to the
Emperor.

"Your Emperor's orders are obeyed in your army, but here," said Davout,
"you must do as you're told."

And, as if to make the Russian general still more conscious of his
dependence on brute force, Davout sent an adjutant to call the officer
on duty.

Balashev took out the packet containing the Emperor's letter and laid it
on the table (made of a door with its hinges still hanging on it, laid
across two barrels). Davout took the packet and read the inscription.

"You are perfectly at liberty to treat me with respect or not,"
protested Balashev, "but permit me to observe that I have the honor to
be adjutant general to His Majesty...."

Davout glanced at him silently and plainly derived pleasure from the
signs of agitation and confusion which appeared on Balashev's face.

"You will be treated as is fitting," said he and, putting the packet in
his pocket, left the shed.

A minute later the marshal's adjutant, de Castres, came in and conducted
Balashev to the quarters assigned him.

That day he dined with the marshal, at the same board on the barrels.

Next day Davout rode out early and, after asking Balashev to come to
him, peremptorily requested him to remain there, to move on with the
baggage train should orders come for it to move, and to talk to no one
except Monsieur de Castres.

After four days of solitude, ennui, and consciousness of his impotence
and insignificance--particularly acute by contrast with the sphere of
power in which he had so lately moved--and after several marches with
the marshal's baggage and the French army, which occupied the
whole district, Balashev was brought to Vilna--now occupied by the
French--through the very gate by which he had left it four days
previously.

Next day the imperial gentleman-in-waiting, the Comte de Turenne, came
to Balashev and informed him of the Emperor Napoleon's wish to honor him
with an audience.

Four days before, sentinels of the Preobrazhensk regiment had stood in
front of the house to which Balashev was conducted, and now two French
grenadiers stood there in blue uniforms unfastened in front and with
shaggy caps on their heads, and an escort of hussars and Uhlans and a
brilliant suite of aides-de-camp, pages, and generals, who were waiting
for Napoleon to come out, were standing at the porch, round his saddle
horse and his Mameluke, Rustan. Napoleon received Balashev in the very
house in Vilna from which Alexander had dispatched him on his mission.





CHAPTER VI


Though Balashev was used to imperial pomp, he was amazed at the luxury
and magnificence of Napoleon's court.

The Comte de Turenne showed him into a big reception room where many
generals, gentlemen-in-waiting, and Polish magnates--several of whom
Balashev had seen at the court of the Emperor of Russia--were waiting.
Duroc said that Napoleon would receive the Russian general before going
for his ride.

After some minutes, the gentleman-in-waiting who was on duty came into
the great reception room and, bowing politely, asked Balashev to follow
him.

Balashev went into a small reception room, one door of which led into a
study, the very one from which the Russian Emperor had dispatched him
on his mission. He stood a minute or two, waiting. He heard hurried
footsteps beyond the door, both halves of it were opened rapidly; all
was silent and then from the study the sound was heard of other steps,
firm and resolute--they were those of Napoleon. He had just finished
dressing for his ride, and wore a blue uniform, opening in front over
a white waistcoat so long that it covered his rotund stomach, white
leather breeches tightly fitting the fat thighs of his short legs, and
Hessian boots. His short hair had evidently just been brushed, but one
lock hung down in the middle of his broad forehead. His plump white neck
stood out sharply above the black collar of his uniform, and he smelled
of Eau de Cologne. His full face, rather young-looking, with its
prominent chin, wore a gracious and majestic expression of imperial
welcome.

He entered briskly, with a jerk at every step and his head slightly
thrown back. His whole short corpulent figure with broad thick
shoulders, and chest and stomach involuntarily protruding, had that
imposing and stately appearance one sees in men of forty who live in
comfort. It was evident, too, that he was in the best of spirits that
day.

He nodded in answer to Balashav's low and respectful bow, and coming up
to him at once began speaking like a man who values every moment of his
time and does not condescend to prepare what he has to say but is sure
he will always say the right thing and say it well.

"Good day, General!" said he. "I have received the letter you brought
from the Emperor Alexander and am very glad to see you." He glanced with
his large eyes into Balashav's face and immediately looked past him.

It was plain that Balashev's personality did not interest him at all.
Evidently only what took place within his own mind interested him.
Nothing outside himself had any significance for him, because everything
in the world, it seemed to him, depended entirely on his will.

"I do not, and did not, desire war," he continued, "but it has been
forced on me. Even now" (he emphasized the word) "I am ready to receive
any explanations you can give me."

And he began clearly and concisely to explain his reasons for
dissatisfaction with the Russian government. Judging by the calmly
moderate and amicable tone in which the French Emperor spoke, Balashev
was firmly persuaded that he wished for peace and intended to enter into
negotiations.

When Napoleon, having finished speaking, looked inquiringly at the
Russian envoy, Balashev began a speech he had prepared long before:
"Sire! The Emperor, my master..." but the sight of the Emperor's eyes
bent on him confused him. "You are flurried--compose yourself!" Napoleon
seemed to say, as with a scarcely perceptible smile he looked at
Balashev's uniform and sword.

Balashev recovered himself and began to speak. He said that the
Emperor Alexander did not consider Kurakin's demand for his passports a
sufficient cause for war; that Kurakin had acted on his own initiative
and without his sovereign's assent, that the Emperor Alexander did not
desire war, and had no relations with England.

"Not yet!" interposed Napoleon, and, as if fearing to give vent to his
feelings, he frowned and nodded slightly as a sign that Balashev might
proceed.

After saying all he had been instructed to say, Balashev added that
the Emperor Alexander wished for peace, but would not enter into
negotiations except on condition that... Here Balashev hesitated:
he remembered the words the Emperor Alexander had not written in his
letter, but had specially inserted in the rescript to Saltykov and had
told Balashev to repeat to Napoleon. Balashev remembered these words,
"So long as a single armed foe remains on Russian soil," but some
complex feeling restrained him. He could not utter them, though he
wished to do so. He grew confused and said: "On condition that the
French army retires beyond the Niemen."

Napoleon noticed Balashev's embarrassment when uttering these last
words; his face twitched and the calf of his left leg began to quiver
rhythmically. Without moving from where he stood he began speaking in
a louder tone and more hurriedly than before. During the speech that
followed, Balashev, who more than once lowered his eyes, involuntarily
noticed the quivering of Napoleon's left leg which increased the more
Napoleon raised his voice.

"I desire peace, no less than the Emperor Alexander," he began. "Have
I not for eighteen months been doing everything to obtain it? I
have waited eighteen months for explanations. But in order to begin
negotiations, what is demanded of me?" he said, frowning and making an
energetic gesture of inquiry with his small white plump hand.

"The withdrawal of your army beyond the Niemen, sire," replied Balashev.

"The Niemen?" repeated Napoleon. "So now you want me to retire beyond
the Niemen--only the Niemen?" repeated Napoleon, looking straight at
Balashev.

The latter bowed his head respectfully.

Instead of the demand of four months earlier to withdraw from Pomerania,
only a withdrawal beyond the Niemen was now demanded. Napoleon turned
quickly and began to pace the room.

"You say the demand now is that I am to withdraw beyond the Niemen
before commencing negotiations, but in just the same way two months ago
the demand was that I should withdraw beyond the Vistula and the Oder,
and yet you are willing to negotiate."

He went in silence from one corner of the room to the other and again
stopped in front of Balashev. Balashev noticed that his left leg was
quivering faster than before and his face seemed petrified in its stern
expression. This quivering of his left leg was a thing Napoleon was
conscious of. "The vibration of my left calf is a great sign with me,"
he remarked at a later date.

"Such demands as to retreat beyond the Vistula and Oder may be made to a
Prince of Baden, but not to me!" Napoleon almost screamed, quite to his
own surprise. "If you gave me Petersburg and Moscow I could not accept
such conditions. You say I have begun this war! But who first joined his
army? The Emperor Alexander, not I! And you offer me negotiations when I
have expended millions, when you are in alliance with England, and when
your position is a bad one. You offer me negotiations! But what is the
aim of your alliance with England? What has she given you?" he continued
hurriedly, evidently no longer trying to show the advantages of peace
and discuss its possibility, but only to prove his own rectitude and
power and Alexander's errors and duplicity.

The commencement of his speech had obviously been made with the
intention of demonstrating the advantages of his position and showing
that he was nevertheless willing to negotiate. But he had begun talking,
and the more he talked the less could he control his words.

The whole purport of his remarks now was evidently to exalt himself and
insult Alexander--just what he had least desired at the commencement of
the interview.

"I hear you have made peace with Turkey?"

Balashev bowed his head affirmatively.

"Peace has been concluded..." he began.

But Napoleon did not let him speak. He evidently wanted to do all the
talking himself, and continued to talk with the sort of eloquence and
unrestrained irritability to which spoiled people are so prone.

"Yes, I know you have made peace with the Turks without obtaining
Moldavia and Wallachia; I would have given your sovereign those
provinces as I gave him Finland. Yes," he went on, "I promised and would
have given the Emperor Alexander Moldavia and Wallachia, and now he
won't have those splendid provinces. Yet he might have united them to
his empire and in a single reign would have extended Russia from the
Gulf of Bothnia to the mouths of the Danube. Catherine the Great could
not have done more," said Napoleon, growing more and more excited as he
paced up and down the room, repeating to Balashev almost the very words
he had used to Alexander himself at Tilsit. "All that, he would have
owed to my friendship. Oh, what a splendid reign!" he repeated several
times, then paused, drew from his pocket a gold snuffbox, lifted it to
his nose, and greedily sniffed at it.

"What a splendid reign the Emperor Alexander's might have been!"

He looked compassionately at Balashev, and as soon as the latter tried
to make some rejoinder hastily interrupted him.

"What could he wish or look for that he would not have obtained
through my friendship?" demanded Napoleon, shrugging his shoulders
in perplexity. "But no, he has preferred to surround himself with
my enemies, and with whom? With Steins, Armfeldts, Bennigsens, and
Wintzingerodes! Stein, a traitor expelled from his own country;
Armfeldt, a rake and an intriguer; Wintzingerode, a fugitive French
subject; Bennigsen, rather more of a soldier than the others, but all
the same an incompetent who was unable to do anything in 1807 and who
should awaken terrible memories in the Emperor Alexander's mind....
Granted that were they competent they might be made use of," continued
Napoleon--hardly able to keep pace in words with the rush of thoughts
that incessantly sprang up, proving how right and strong he was (in his
perception the two were one and the same)--"but they are not even that!
They are neither fit for war nor peace! Barclay is said to be the
most capable of them all, but I cannot say so, judging by his first
movements. And what are they doing, all these courtiers? Pfuel proposes,
Armfeldt disputes, Bennigsen considers, and Barclay, called on to act,
does not know what to decide on, and time passes bringing no result.
Bagration alone is a military man. He's stupid, but he has experience,
a quick eye, and resolution.... And what role is your young monarch
playing in that monstrous crowd? They compromise him and throw on him
the responsibility for all that happens. A sovereign should not be with
the army unless he is a general!" said Napoleon, evidently uttering
these words as a direct challenge to the Emperor. He knew how Alexander
desired to be a military commander.

"The campaign began only a week ago, and you haven't even been able to
defend Vilna. You are cut in two and have been driven out of the Polish
provinces. Your army is grumbling."

"On the contrary, Your Majesty," said Balashev, hardly able to remember
what had been said to him and following these verbal fireworks with
difficulty, "the troops are burning with eagerness..."

"I know everything!" Napoleon interrupted him. "I know everything. I
know the number of your battalions as exactly as I know my own. You have
not two hundred thousand men, and I have three times that number. I give
you my word of honor," said Napoleon, forgetting that his word of honor
could carry no weight--"I give you my word of honor that I have five
hundred and thirty thousand men this side of the Vistula. The Turks will
be of no use to you; they are worth nothing and have shown it by making
peace with you. As for the Swedes--it is their fate to be governed
by mad kings. Their king was insane and they changed him for
another--Bernadotte, who promptly went mad--for no Swede would ally
himself with Russia unless he were mad."

Napoleon grinned maliciously and again raised his snuffbox to his nose.

Balashev knew how to reply to each of Napoleon's remarks, and would
have done so; he continually made the gesture of a man wishing to say
something, but Napoleon always interrupted him. To the alleged insanity
of the Swedes, Balashev wished to reply that when Russia is on her side
Sweden is practically an island: but Napoleon gave an angry exclamation
to drown his voice. Napoleon was in that state of irritability in which
a man has to talk, talk, and talk, merely to convince himself that he is
in the right. Balashev began to feel uncomfortable: as envoy he feared
to demean his dignity and felt the necessity of replying; but, as a man,
he shrank before the transport of groundless wrath that had evidently
seized Napoleon. He knew that none of the words now uttered by Napoleon
had any significance, and that Napoleon himself would be ashamed of them
when he came to his senses. Balashev stood with downcast eyes, looking
at the movements of Napoleon's stout legs and trying to avoid meeting
his eyes.

"But what do I care about your allies?" said Napoleon. "I have
allies--the Poles. There are eighty thousand of them and they fight like
lions. And there will be two hundred thousand of them."

And probably still more perturbed by the fact that he had uttered this
obvious falsehood, and that Balashev still stood silently before him in
the same attitude of submission to fate, Napoleon abruptly turned
round, drew close to Balashev's face, and, gesticulating rapidly and
energetically with his white hands, almost shouted:

"Know that if you stir up Prussia against me, I'll wipe it off the map
of Europe!" he declared, his face pale and distorted by anger, and he
struck one of his small hands energetically with the other. "Yes, I
will throw you back beyond the Dvina and beyond the Dnieper, and will
re-erect against you that barrier which it was criminal and blind of
Europe to allow to be destroyed. Yes, that is what will happen to you.
That is what you have gained by alienating me!" And he walked silently
several times up and down the room, his fat shoulders twitching.

He put his snuffbox into his waistcoat pocket, took it out again, lifted
it several times to his nose, and stopped in front of Balashev. He
paused, looked ironically straight into Balashev's eyes, and said in a
quiet voice:

"And yet what a splendid reign your master might have had!"

Balashev, feeling it incumbent on him to reply, said that from the
Russian side things did not appear in so gloomy a light. Napoleon was
silent, still looking derisively at him and evidently not listening to
him. Balashev said that in Russia the best results were expected from
the war. Napoleon nodded condescendingly, as if to say, "I know it's
your duty to say that, but you don't believe it yourself. I have
convinced you."

When Balashev had ended, Napoleon again took out his snuffbox, sniffed
at it, and stamped his foot twice on the floor as a signal. The door
opened, a gentleman-in-waiting, bending respectfully, handed the Emperor
his hat and gloves; another brought him a pocket handkerchief. Napoleon,
without giving them a glance, turned to Balashev:

"Assure the Emperor Alexander from me," said he, taking his hat, "that
I am as devoted to him as before: I know him thoroughly and very highly
esteem his lofty qualities. I will detain you no longer, General; you
shall receive my letter to the Emperor."

And Napoleon went quickly to the door. Everyone in the reception room
rushed forward and descended the staircase.





CHAPTER VII


After all that Napoleon had said to him--those bursts of anger and the
last dryly spoken words: "I will detain you no longer, General; you
shall receive my letter," Balashev felt convinced that Napoleon would
not wish to see him, and would even avoid another meeting with him--an
insulted envoy--especially as he had witnessed his unseemly anger. But,
to his surprise, Balashev received, through Duroc, an invitation to dine
with the Emperor that day.

Bessieres, Caulaincourt, and Berthier were present at that dinner.

Napoleon met Balashev cheerfully and amiably. He not only showed no sign
of constraint or self-reproach on account of his outburst that morning,
but, on the contrary, tried to reassure Balashev. It was evident that
he had long been convinced that it was impossible for him to make a
mistake, and that in his perception whatever he did was right, not
because it harmonized with any idea of right and wrong, but because he
did it.

The Emperor was in very good spirits after his ride through Vilna, where
crowds of people had rapturously greeted and followed him. From all
the windows of the streets through which he rode, rugs, flags, and his
monogram were displayed, and the Polish ladies, welcoming him, waved
their handkerchiefs to him.

At dinner, having placed Balashev beside him, Napoleon not only treated
him amiably but behaved as if Balashev were one of his own courtiers,
one of those who sympathized with his plans and ought to rejoice at
his success. In the course of conversation he mentioned Moscow and
questioned Balashev about the Russian capital, not merely as an
interested traveler asks about a new city he intends to visit, but as
if convinced that Balashev, as a Russian, must be flattered by his
curiosity.

"How many inhabitants are there in Moscow? How many houses? Is it true
that Moscow is called 'Holy Moscow'? How many churches are there in
Moscow?" he asked.

And receiving the reply that there were more than two hundred churches,
he remarked:

"Why such a quantity of churches?"

"The Russians are very devout," replied Balashev.

"But a large number of monasteries and churches is always a sign of the
backwardness of a people," said Napoleon, turning to Caulaincourt for
appreciation of this remark.

Balashev respectfully ventured to disagree with the French Emperor.

"Every country has its own character," said he.

"But nowhere in Europe is there anything like that," said Napoleon.

"I beg your Majesty's pardon," returned Balashev, "besides Russia there
is Spain, where there are also many churches and monasteries."

This reply of Balashev's, which hinted at the recent defeats of the
French in Spain, was much appreciated when he related it at Alexander's
court, but it was not much appreciated at Napoleon's dinner, where it
passed unnoticed.

The uninterested and perplexed faces of the marshals showed that they
were puzzled as to what Balashev's tone suggested. "If there is a point
we don't see it, or it is not at all witty," their expressions seemed
to say. So little was his rejoinder appreciated that Napoleon did not
notice it at all and naively asked Balashev through what towns the
direct road from there to Moscow passed. Balashev, who was on the alert
all through the dinner, replied that just as "all roads lead to Rome,"
so all roads lead to Moscow: there were many roads, and "among them the
road through Poltava, which Charles XII chose." Balashev involuntarily
flushed with pleasure at the aptitude of this reply, but hardly had
he uttered the word Poltava before Caulaincourt began speaking of the
badness of the road from Petersburg to Moscow and of his Petersburg
reminiscences.

After dinner they went to drink coffee in Napoleon's study, which four
days previously had been that of the Emperor Alexander. Napoleon sat
down, toying with his Sevres coffee cup, and motioned Balashev to a
chair beside him.

Napoleon was in that well-known after-dinner mood which, more than
any reasoned cause, makes a man contented with himself and disposed to
consider everyone his friend. It seemed to him that he was surrounded
by men who adored him: and he felt convinced that, after his dinner,
Balashev too was his friend and worshiper. Napoleon turned to him with a
pleasant, though slightly ironic, smile.

"They tell me this is the room the Emperor Alexander occupied? Strange,
isn't it, General?" he said, evidently not doubting that this remark
would be agreeable to his hearer since it went to prove his, Napoleon's,
superiority to Alexander.

Balashev made no reply and bowed his head in silence.

"Yes. Four days ago in this room, Wintzingerode and Stein were
deliberating," continued Napoleon with the same derisive and
self-confident smile. "What I can't understand," he went on, "is that
the Emperor Alexander has surrounded himself with my personal enemies.
That I do not... understand. Has he not thought that I may do the same?"
and he turned inquiringly to Balashev, and evidently this thought turned
him back on to the track of his morning's anger, which was still fresh
in him.

"And let him know that I will do so!" said Napoleon, rising and pushing
his cup away with his hand. "I'll drive all his Wurttemberg, Baden, and
Weimar relations out of Germany.... Yes. I'll drive them out. Let him
prepare an asylum for them in Russia!"

Balashev bowed his head with an air indicating that he would like to
make his bow and leave, and only listened because he could not help
hearing what was said to him. Napoleon did not notice this expression;
he treated Balashev not as an envoy from his enemy, but as a man
now fully devoted to him and who must rejoice at his former master's
humiliation.

"And why has the Emperor Alexander taken command of the armies? What is
the good of that? War is my profession, but his business is to reign
and not to command armies! Why has he taken on himself such a
responsibility?"

Again Napoleon brought out his snuffbox, paced several times up and down
the room in silence, and then, suddenly and unexpectedly, went up to
Balashev and with a slight smile, as confidently, quickly, and simply
as if he were doing something not merely important but pleasing to
Balashev, he raised his hand to the forty-year-old Russian general's
face and, taking him by the ear, pulled it gently, smiling with his lips
only.

To have one's ear pulled by the Emperor was considered the greatest
honor and mark of favor at the French court.

"Well, adorer and courtier of the Emperor Alexander, why don't you say
anything?" said he, as if it was ridiculous, in his presence, to be the
adorer and courtier of anyone but himself, Napoleon. "Are the horses
ready for the general?" he added, with a slight inclination of his head
in reply to Balashev's bow. "Let him have mine, he has a long way to
go!"

The letter taken by Balashev was the last Napoleon sent to Alexander.
Every detail of the interview was communicated to the Russian monarch,
and the war began...





CHAPTER VIII


After his interview with Pierre in Moscow, Prince Andrew went to
Petersburg, on business as he told his family, but really to meet
Anatole Kuragin whom he felt it necessary to encounter. On reaching
Petersburg he inquired for Kuragin but the latter had already left the
city. Pierre had warned his brother-in-law that Prince Andrew was on
his track. Anatole Kuragin promptly obtained an appointment from
the Minister of War and went to join the army in Moldavia. While in
Petersburg Prince Andrew met Kutuzov, his former commander who was
always well disposed toward him, and Kutuzov suggested that he should
accompany him to the army in Moldavia, to which the old general had
been appointed commander in chief. So Prince Andrew, having received an
appointment on the headquarters staff, left for Turkey.

Prince Andrew did not think it proper to write and challenge Kuragin.
He thought that if he challenged him without some fresh cause it might
compromise the young Countess Rostova and so he wanted to meet Kuragin
personally in order to find a fresh pretext for a duel. But he again
failed to meet Kuragin in Turkey, for soon after Prince Andrew arrived,
the latter returned to Russia. In a new country, amid new conditions,
Prince Andrew found life easier to bear. After his betrothed had broken
faith with him--which he felt the more acutely the more he tried to
conceal its effects--the surroundings in which he had been happy became
trying to him, and the freedom and independence he had once prized
so highly were still more so. Not only could he no longer think the
thoughts that had first come to him as he lay gazing at the sky on the
field of Austerlitz and had later enlarged upon with Pierre, and which
had filled his solitude at Bogucharovo and then in Switzerland and Rome,
but he even dreaded to recall them and the bright and boundless horizons
they had revealed. He was now concerned only with the nearest practical
matters unrelated to his past interests, and he seized on these the more
eagerly the more those past interests were closed to him. It was as if
that lofty, infinite canopy of heaven that had once towered above him
had suddenly turned into a low, solid vault that weighed him down, in
which all was clear, but nothing eternal or mysterious.

Of the activities that presented themselves to him, army service was the
simplest and most familiar. As a general on duty on Kutuzov's staff,
he applied himself to business with zeal and perseverance and surprised
Kutuzov by his willingness and accuracy in work. Not having found
Kuragin in Turkey, Prince Andrew did not think it necessary to rush back
to Russia after him, but all the same he knew that however long it might
be before he met Kuragin, despite his contempt for him and despite all
the proofs he deduced to convince himself that it was not worth stooping
to a conflict with him--he knew that when he did meet him he would not
be able to resist calling him out, any more than a ravenous man can help
snatching at food. And the consciousness that the insult was not yet
avenged, that his rancor was still unspent, weighed on his heart and
poisoned the artificial tranquillity which he managed to obtain in
Turkey by means of restless, plodding, and rather vainglorious and
ambitious activity.

In the year 1812, when news of the war with Napoleon reached
Bucharest--where Kutuzov had been living for two months, passing his
days and nights with a Wallachian woman--Prince Andrew asked Kutuzov
to transfer him to the Western Army. Kutuzov, who was already weary of
Bolkonski's activity which seemed to reproach his own idleness, very
readily let him go and gave him a mission to Barclay de Tolly.

Before joining the Western Army which was then, in May, encamped at
Drissa, Prince Andrew visited Bald Hills which was directly on his way,
being only two miles off the Smolensk highroad. During the last three
years there had been so many changes in his life, he had thought, felt,
and seen so much (having traveled both in the east and the west), that
on reaching Bald Hills it struck him as strange and unexpected to find
the way of life there unchanged and still the same in every detail.
He entered through the gates with their stone pillars and drove up
the avenue leading to the house as if he were entering an enchanted,
sleeping castle. The same old stateliness, the same cleanliness, the
same stillness reigned there, and inside there was the same furniture,
the same walls, sounds, and smell, and the same timid faces, only
somewhat older. Princess Mary was still the same timid, plain maiden
getting on in years, uselessly and joylessly passing the best years of
her life in fear and constant suffering. Mademoiselle Bourienne was
the same coquettish, self-satisfied girl, enjoying every moment of her
existence and full of joyous hopes for the future. She had merely become
more self-confident, Prince Andrew thought. Dessalles, the tutor he had
brought from Switzerland, was wearing a coat of Russian cut and
talking broken Russian to the servants, but was still the same narrowly
intelligent, conscientious, and pedantic preceptor. The old prince
had changed in appearance only by the loss of a tooth, which left a
noticeable gap on one side of his mouth; in character he was the same as
ever, only showing still more irritability and skepticism as to what was
happening in the world. Little Nicholas alone had changed. He had grown,
become rosier, had curly dark hair, and, when merry and laughing, quite
unconsciously lifted the upper lip of his pretty little mouth just
as the little princess used to do. He alone did not obey the law of
immutability in the enchanted, sleeping castle. But though externally
all remained as of old, the inner relations of all these people had
changed since Prince Andrew had seen them last. The household was
divided into two alien and hostile camps, who changed their habits for
his sake and only met because he was there. To the one camp belonged
the old prince, Mademoiselle Bourienne, and the architect; to the other
Princess Mary, Dessalles, little Nicholas, and all the old nurses and
maids.

During his stay at Bald Hills all the family dined together, but they
were ill at ease and Prince Andrew felt that he was a visitor for whose
sake an exception was being made and that his presence made them all
feel awkward. Involuntarily feeling this at dinner on the first day, he
was taciturn, and the old prince noticing this also became morosely dumb
and retired to his apartments directly after dinner. In the evening,
when Prince Andrew went to him and, trying to rouse him, began to
tell him of the young Count Kamensky's campaign, the old prince
began unexpectedly to talk about Princess Mary, blaming her for her
superstitions and her dislike of Mademoiselle Bourienne, who, he said,
was the only person really attached to him.

The old prince said that if he was ill it was only because of Princess
Mary: that she purposely worried and irritated him, and that by
indulgence and silly talk she was spoiling little Prince Nicholas. The
old prince knew very well that he tormented his daughter and that her
life was very hard, but he also knew that he could not help tormenting
her and that she deserved it. "Why does Prince Andrew, who sees this,
say nothing to me about his sister? Does he think me a scoundrel, or an
old fool who, without any reason, keeps his own daughter at a distance
and attaches this Frenchwoman to himself? He doesn't understand, so I
must explain it, and he must hear me out," thought the old prince.
And he began explaining why he could not put up with his daughter's
unreasonable character.

"If you ask me," said Prince Andrew, without looking up (he was
censuring his father for the first time in his life), "I did not wish to
speak about it, but as you ask me I will give you my frank opinion. If
there is any misunderstanding and discord between you and Mary, I can't
blame her for it at all. I know how she loves and respects you. Since
you ask me," continued Prince Andrew, becoming irritable--as he was
always liable to do of late--"I can only say that if there are any
misunderstandings they are caused by that worthless woman, who is not
fit to be my sister's companion."

The old man at first stared fixedly at his son, and an unnatural smile
disclosed the fresh gap between his teeth to which Prince Andrew could
not get accustomed.

"What companion, my dear boy? Eh? You've already been talking it over!
Eh?"

"Father, I did not want to judge," said Prince Andrew, in a hard and
bitter tone, "but you challenged me, and I have said, and always shall
say, that Mary is not to blame, but those to blame--the one to blame--is
that Frenchwoman."

"Ah, he has passed judgment... passed judgement!" said the old man in a
low voice and, as it seemed to Prince Andrew, with some embarrassment,
but then he suddenly jumped up and cried: "Be off, be off! Let not a
trace of you remain here!..."


Prince Andrew wished to leave at once, but Princess Mary persuaded him
to stay another day. That day he did not see his father, who did not
leave his room and admitted no one but Mademoiselle Bourienne and
Tikhon, but asked several times whether his son had gone. Next day,
before leaving, Prince Andrew went to his son's rooms. The boy,
curly-headed like his mother and glowing with health, sat on his knee,
and Prince Andrew began telling him the story of Bluebeard, but fell
into a reverie without finishing the story. He thought not of this
pretty child, his son whom he held on his knee, but of himself. He
sought in himself either remorse for having angered his father or regret
at leaving home for the first time in his life on bad terms with him,
and was horrified to find neither. What meant still more to him was that
he sought and did not find in himself the former tenderness for his son
which he had hoped to reawaken by caressing the boy and taking him on
his knee.

"Well, go on!" said his son.

Prince Andrew, without replying, put him down from his knee and went out
of the room.

As soon as Prince Andrew had given up his daily occupations, and
especially on returning to the old conditions of life amid which he had
been happy, weariness of life overcame him with its former intensity,
and he hastened to escape from these memories and to find some work as
soon as possible.

"So you've decided to go, Andrew?" asked his sister.

"Thank God that I can," replied Prince Andrew. "I am very sorry you
can't."

"Why do you say that?" replied Princess Mary. "Why do you say that,
when you are going to this terrible war, and he is so old? Mademoiselle
Bourienne says he has been asking about you...."

As soon as she began to speak of that, her lips trembled and her tears
began to fall. Prince Andrew turned away and began pacing the room.

"Ah, my God! my God! When one thinks who and what--what trash--can cause
people misery!" he said with a malignity that alarmed Princess Mary.

She understood that when speaking of "trash" he referred not only to
Mademoiselle Bourienne, the cause of her misery, but also to the man who
had ruined his own happiness.

"Andrew! One thing I beg, I entreat of you!" she said, touching his
elbow and looking at him with eyes that shone through her tears. "I
understand you" (she looked down). "Don't imagine that sorrow is the
work of men. Men are His tools." She looked a little above Prince
Andrew's head with the confident, accustomed look with which one looks
at the place where a familiar portrait hangs. "Sorrow is sent by Him,
not by men. Men are His instruments, they are not to blame. If you think
someone has wronged you, forget it and forgive! We have no right to
punish. And then you will know the happiness of forgiving."

"If I were a woman I would do so, Mary. That is a woman's virtue. But
a man should not and cannot forgive and forget," he replied, and though
till that moment he had not been thinking of Kuragin, all his unexpended
anger suddenly swelled up in his heart.

"If Mary is already persuading me forgive, it means that I ought long
ago to have punished him," he thought. And giving her no further reply,
he began thinking of the glad vindictive moment when he would meet
Kuragin who he knew was now in the army.

Princess Mary begged him to stay one day more, saying that she knew how
unhappy her father would be if Andrew left without being reconciled to
him, but Prince Andrew replied that he would probably soon be back again
from the army and would certainly write to his father, but that the
longer he stayed now the more embittered their differences would become.

"Good-by, Andrew! Remember that misfortunes come from God, and men are
never to blame," were the last words he heard from his sister when he
took leave of her.

"Then it must be so!" thought Prince Andrew as he drove out of the
avenue from the house at Bald Hills. "She, poor innocent creature, is
left to be victimized by an old man who has outlived his wits. The old
man feels he is guilty, but cannot change himself. My boy is growing up
and rejoices in life, in which like everybody else he will deceive or be
deceived. And I am off to the army. Why? I myself don't know. I want
to meet that man whom I despise, so as to give him a chance to kill and
laugh at me!"

These conditions of life had been the same before, but then they were
all connected, while now they had all tumbled to pieces. Only senseless
things, lacking coherence, presented themselves one after another to
Prince Andrew's mind.





CHAPTER IX


Prince Andrew reached the general headquarters of the army at the end of
June. The first army, with which was the Emperor, occupied the fortified
camp at Drissa; the second army was retreating, trying to effect a
junction with the first one from which it was said to be cut off by
large French forces. Everyone was dissatisfied with the general course
of affairs in the Russian army, but no one anticipated any danger of
invasion of the Russian provinces, and no one thought the war would
extend farther than the western, the Polish, provinces.

Prince Andrew found Barclay de Tolly, to whom he had been assigned, on
the bank of the Drissa. As there was not a single town or large
village in the vicinity of the camp, the immense number of generals and
courtiers accompanying the army were living in the best houses of the
villages on both sides of the river, over a radius of six miles. Barclay
de Tolly was quartered nearly three miles from the Emperor. He received
Bolkonski stiffly and coldly and told him in his foreign accent that he
would mention him to the Emperor for a decision as to his employment,
but asked him meanwhile to remain on his staff. Anatole Kuragin, whom
Prince Andrew had hoped to find with the army, was not there. He had
gone to Petersburg, but Prince Andrew was glad to hear this. His mind
was occupied by the interests of the center that was conducting
a gigantic war, and he was glad to be free for a while from the
distraction caused by the thought of Kuragin. During the first four
days, while no duties were required of him, Prince Andrew rode round the
whole fortified camp and, by the aid of his own knowledge and by
talks with experts, tried to form a definite opinion about it. But the
question whether the camp was advantageous or disadvantageous remained
for him undecided. Already from his military experience and what he had
seen in the Austrian campaign, he had come to the conclusion that in
war the most deeply considered plans have no significance and that all
depends on the way unexpected movements of the enemy--that cannot be
foreseen--are met, and on how and by whom the whole matter is handled.
To clear up this last point for himself, Prince Andrew, utilizing his
position and acquaintances, tried to fathom the character of the control
of the army and of the men and parties engaged in it, and he deduced for
himself the following of the state of affairs.

While the Emperor had still been at Vilna, the forces had been divided
into three armies. First, the army under Barclay de Tolly, secondly, the
army under Bagration, and thirdly, the one commanded by Tormasov. The
Emperor was with the first army, but not as commander in chief. In the
orders issued it was stated, not that the Emperor would take command,
but only that he would be with the army. The Emperor, moreover, had
with him not a commander in chief's staff but the imperial headquarters
staff. In attendance on him was the head of the imperial staff,
Quartermaster General Prince Volkonski, as well as generals, imperial
aides-de-camp, diplomatic officials, and a large number of foreigners,
but not the army staff. Besides these, there were in attendance on the
Emperor without any definite appointments: Arakcheev, the ex-Minister
of War; Count Bennigsen, the senior general in rank; the Grand Duke
Tsarevich Constantine Pavlovich; Count Rumyantsev, the Chancellor;
Stein, a former Prussian minister; Armfeldt, a Swedish general; Pfuel,
the chief author of the plan of campaign; Paulucci, an adjutant general
and Sardinian emigre; Wolzogen--and many others. Though these men had
no military appointment in the army, their position gave them influence,
and often a corps commander, or even the commander in chief, did not
know in what capacity he was questioned by Bennigsen, the Grand Duke,
Arakcheev, or Prince Volkonski, or was given this or that advice and did
not know whether a certain order received in the form of advice emanated
from the man who gave it or from the Emperor and whether it had to be
executed or not. But this was only the external condition; the essential
significance of the presence of the Emperor and of all these people,
from a courtier's point of view (and in an Emperor's vicinity all became
courtiers), was clear to everyone. It was this: the Emperor did not
assume the title of commander in chief, but disposed of all the armies;
the men around him were his assistants. Arakcheev was a faithful
custodian to enforce order and acted as the sovereign's bodyguard.
Bennigsen was a landlord in the Vilna province who appeared to be doing
the honors of the district, but was in reality a good general, useful
as an adviser and ready at hand to replace Barclay. The Grand Duke
was there because it suited him to be. The ex-Minister Stein was there
because his advice was useful and the Emperor Alexander held him in high
esteem personally. Armfeldt virulently hated Napoleon and was a general
full of self-confidence, a quality that always influenced Alexander.
Paulucci was there because he was bold and decided in speech. The
adjutants general were there because they always accompanied the
Emperor, and lastly and chiefly Pfuel was there because he had drawn up
the plan of campaign against Napoleon and, having induced Alexander to
believe in the efficacy of that plan, was directing the whole business
of the war. With Pfuel was Wolzogen, who expressed Pfuel's thoughts in
a more comprehensible way than Pfuel himself (who was a harsh, bookish
theorist, self-confident to the point of despising everyone else) was
able to do.

Besides these Russians and foreigners who propounded new and unexpected
ideas every day--especially the foreigners, who did so with a boldness
characteristic of people employed in a country not their own--there were
many secondary personages accompanying the army because their principals
were there.

Among the opinions and voices in this immense, restless, brilliant,
and proud sphere, Prince Andrew noticed the following sharply defined
subdivisions of tendencies and parties:

The first party consisted of Pfuel and his adherents--military theorists
who believed in a science of war with immutable laws--laws of oblique
movements, outflankings, and so forth. Pfuel and his adherents demanded
a retirement into the depths of the country in accordance with precise
laws defined by a pseudo-theory of war, and they saw only barbarism,
ignorance, or evil intention in every deviation from that theory. To
this party belonged the foreign nobles, Wolzogen, Wintzingerode, and
others, chiefly Germans.

The second party was directly opposed to the first; one extreme, as
always happens, was met by representatives of the other. The members of
this party were those who had demanded an advance from Vilna into Poland
and freedom from all prearranged plans. Besides being advocates of bold
action, this section also represented nationalism, which made them still
more one-sided in the dispute. They were Russians: Bagration, Ermolov
(who was beginning to come to the front), and others. At that time a
famous joke of Ermolov's was being circulated, that as a great favor he
had petitioned the Emperor to make him a German. The men of that party,
remembering Suvorov, said that what one had to do was not to reason,
or stick pins into maps, but to fight, beat the enemy, keep him out of
Russia, and not let the army get discouraged.

To the third party--in which the Emperor had most confidence--belonged
the courtiers who tried to arrange compromises between the other two.
The members of this party, chiefly civilians and to whom Arakcheev
belonged, thought and said what men who have no convictions but wish
to seem to have some generally say. They said that undoubtedly war,
particularly against such a genius as Bonaparte (they called him
Bonaparte now), needs most deeply devised plans and profound scientific
knowledge and in that respect Pfuel was a genius, but at the same time
it had to be acknowledged that the theorists are often one sided, and
therefore one should not trust them absolutely, but should also listen
to what Pfuel's opponents and practical men of experience in warfare had
to say, and then choose a middle course. They insisted on the retention
of the camp at Drissa, according to Pfuel's plan, but on changing the
movements of the other armies. Though, by this course, neither one aim
nor the other could be attained, yet it seemed best to the adherents of
this third party.

Of a fourth opinion the most conspicuous representative was the
Tsarevich, who could not forget his disillusionment at Austerlitz, where
he had ridden out at the head of the Guards, in his casque and cavalry
uniform as to a review, expecting to crush the French gallantly; but
unexpectedly finding himself in the front line had narrowly escaped amid
the general confusion. The men of this party had both the quality
and the defect of frankness in their opinions. They feared Napoleon,
recognized his strength and their own weakness, and frankly said so.
They said: "Nothing but sorrow, shame, and ruin will come of all this!
We have abandoned Vilna and Vitebsk and shall abandon Drissa. The only
reasonable thing left to do is to conclude peace as soon as possible,
before we are turned out of Petersburg."

This view was very general in the upper army circles and found support
also in Petersburg and from the chancellor, Rumyantsev, who, for other
reasons of state, was in favor of peace.

The fifth party consisted of those who were adherents of Barclay de
Tolly, not so much as a man but as minister of war and commander in
chief. "Be he what he may" (they always began like that), "he is an
honest, practical man and we have nobody better. Give him real power,
for war cannot be conducted successfully without unity of command, and
he will show what he can do, as he did in Finland. If our army is well
organized and strong and has withdrawn to Drissa without suffering
any defeats, we owe this entirely to Barclay. If Barclay is now to
be superseded by Bennigsen all will be lost, for Bennigsen showed his
incapacity already in 1807."

The sixth party, the Bennigsenites, said, on the contrary, that at any
rate there was no one more active and experienced than Bennigsen: "and
twist about as you may, you will have to come to Bennigsen eventually.
Let the others make mistakes now!" said they, arguing that our
retirement to Drissa was a most shameful reverse and an unbroken series
of blunders. "The more mistakes that are made the better. It will at any
rate be understood all the sooner that things cannot go on like this.
What is wanted is not some Barclay or other, but a man like Bennigsen,
who made his mark in 1807, and to whom Napoleon himself did justice--a
man whose authority would be willingly recognized, and Bennigsen is the
only such man."

The seventh party consisted of the sort of people who are always to
be found, especially around young sovereigns, and of whom there were
particularly many round Alexander--generals and imperial aides-de-camp
passionately devoted to the Emperor, not merely as a monarch but as a
man, adoring him sincerely and disinterestedly, as Rostov had done
in 1805, and who saw in him not only all the virtues but all human
capabilities as well. These men, though enchanted with the sovereign
for refusing the command of the army, yet blamed him for such excessive
modesty, and only desired and insisted that their adored sovereign
should abandon his diffidence and openly announce that he would place
himself at the head of the army, gather round him a commander in chief's
staff, and, consulting experienced theoreticians and practical men where
necessary, would himself lead the troops, whose spirits would thereby be
raised to the highest pitch.

The eighth and largest group, which in its enormous numbers was to the
others as ninety-nine to one, consisted of men who desired neither
peace nor war, neither an advance nor a defensive camp at the Drissa
or anywhere else, neither Barclay nor the Emperor, neither Pfuel nor
Bennigsen, but only the one most essential thing--as much advantage
and pleasure for themselves as possible. In the troubled waters of
conflicting and intersecting intrigues that eddied about the Emperor's
headquarters, it was possible to succeed in many ways unthinkable at
other times. A man who simply wished to retain his lucrative post would
today agree with Pfuel, tomorrow with his opponent, and the day after,
merely to avoid responsibility or to please the Emperor, would declare
that he had no opinion at all on the matter. Another who wished to
gain some advantage would attract the Emperor's attention by loudly
advocating the very thing the Emperor had hinted at the day before,
and would dispute and shout at the council, beating his breast and
challenging those who did not agree with him to duels, thereby proving
that he was prepared to sacrifice himself for the common good. A third,
in the absence of opponents, between two councils would simply solicit
a special gratuity for his faithful services, well knowing that at that
moment people would be too busy to refuse him. A fourth while seemingly
overwhelmed with work would often come accidentally under the Emperor's
eye. A fifth, to achieve his long-cherished aim of dining with the
Emperor, would stubbornly insist on the correctness or falsity of some
newly emerging opinion and for this object would produce arguments more
or less forcible and correct.

All the men of this party were fishing for rubles, decorations, and
promotions, and in this pursuit watched only the weathercock of imperial
favor, and directly they noticed it turning in any direction, this whole
drone population of the army began blowing hard that way, so that it
was all the harder for the Emperor to turn it elsewhere. Amid the
uncertainties of the position, with the menace of serious danger giving
a peculiarly threatening character to everything, amid this vortex of
intrigue, egotism, conflict of views and feelings, and the diversity
of race among these people--this eighth and largest party of those
preoccupied with personal interests imparted great confusion and
obscurity to the common task. Whatever question arose, a swarm of these
drones, without having finished their buzzing on a previous theme, flew
over to the new one and by their hum drowned and obscured the voices of
those who were disputing honestly.

From among all these parties, just at the time Prince Andrew reached
the army, another, a ninth party, was being formed and was beginning
to raise its voice. This was the party of the elders, reasonable men
experienced and capable in state affairs, who, without sharing any of
those conflicting opinions, were able to take a detached view of what
was going on at the staff at headquarters and to consider means of
escape from this muddle, indecision, intricacy, and weakness.

The men of this party said and thought that what was wrong resulted
chiefly from the Emperor's presence in the army with his military court
and from the consequent presence there of an indefinite, conditional,
and unsteady fluctuation of relations, which is in place at court but
harmful in an army; that a sovereign should reign but not command the
army, and that the only way out of the position would be for the Emperor
and his court to leave the army; that the mere presence of the Emperor
paralyzed the action of fifty thousand men required to secure his
personal safety, and that the worst commander in chief if independent
would be better than the very best one trammeled by the presence and
authority of the monarch.

Just at the time Prince Andrew was living unoccupied at Drissa,
Shishkov, the Secretary of State and one of the chief representatives of
this party, wrote a letter to the Emperor which Arakcheev and Balashev
agreed to sign. In this letter, availing himself of permission given him
by the Emperor to discuss the general course of affairs, he respectfully
suggested--on the plea that it was necessary for the sovereign to arouse
a warlike spirit in the people of the capital--that the Emperor should
leave the army.

That arousing of the people by their sovereign and his call to them to
defend their country--the very incitement which was the chief cause of
Russia's triumph in so far as it was produced by the Tsar's personal
presence in Moscow--was suggested to the Emperor, and accepted by him,
as a pretext for quitting the army.





CHAPTER X


This letter had not yet been presented to the Emperor when Barclay, one
day at dinner, informed Bolkonski that the sovereign wished to see him
personally, to question him about Turkey, and that Prince Andrew was to
present himself at Bennigsen's quarters at six that evening.

News was received at the Emperor's quarters that very day of a fresh
movement by Napoleon which might endanger the army--news subsequently
found to be false. And that morning Colonel Michaud had ridden round the
Drissa fortifications with the Emperor and had pointed out to him that
this fortified camp constructed by Pfuel, and till then considered
a chef-d'oeuvre of tactical science which would ensure Napoleon's
destruction, was an absurdity, threatening the destruction of the
Russian army.

Prince Andrew arrived at Bennigsen's quarters--a country gentleman's
house of moderate size, situated on the very banks of the river. Neither
Bennigsen nor the Emperor was there, but Chernyshev, the Emperor's
aide-de-camp, received Bolkonski and informed him that the Emperor,
accompanied by General Bennigsen and Marquis Paulucci, had gone a second
time that day to inspect the fortifications of the Drissa camp, of the
suitability of which serious doubts were beginning to be felt.

Chernyshev was sitting at a window in the first room with a French novel
in his hand. This room had probably been a music room; there was still
an organ in it on which some rugs were piled, and in one corner stood
the folding bedstead of Bennigsen's adjutant. This adjutant was also
there and sat dozing on the rolled-up bedding, evidently exhausted by
work or by feasting. Two doors led from the room, one straight on into
what had been the drawing room, and another, on the right, to the study.
Through the first door came the sound of voices conversing in German
and occasionally in French. In that drawing room were gathered, by
the Emperor's wish, not a military council (the Emperor preferred
indefiniteness), but certain persons whose opinions he wished to know in
view of the impending difficulties. It was not a council of war, but,
as it were, a council to elucidate certain questions for the Emperor
personally. To this semicouncil had been invited the Swedish General
Armfeldt, Adjutant General Wolzogen, Wintzingerode (whom Napoleon had
referred to as a renegade French subject), Michaud, Toll, Count Stein
who was not a military man at all, and Pfuel himself, who, as Prince
Andrew had heard, was the mainspring of the whole affair. Prince Andrew
had an opportunity of getting a good look at him, for Pfuel arrived soon
after himself and, in passing through to the drawing room, stopped a
minute to speak to Chernyshev.

At first sight, Pfuel, in his ill-made uniform of a Russian general,
which fitted him badly like a fancy costume, seemed familiar to Prince
Andrew, though he saw him now for the first time. There was about
him something of Weyrother, Mack, and Schmidt, and many other German
theorist-generals whom Prince Andrew had seen in 1805, but he was more
typical than any of them. Prince Andrew had never yet seen a German
theorist in whom all the characteristics of those others were united to
such an extent.

Pfuel was short and very thin but broad-boned, of coarse, robust build,
broad in the hips, and with prominent shoulder blades. His face was
much wrinkled and his eyes deep set. His hair had evidently been hastily
brushed smooth in front of the temples, but stuck up behind in quaint
little tufts. He entered the room, looking restlessly and angrily
around, as if afraid of everything in that large apartment. Awkwardly
holding up his sword, he addressed Chernyshev and asked in German where
the Emperor was. One could see that he wished to pass through the rooms
as quickly as possible, finish with the bows and greetings, and sit down
to business in front of a map, where he would feel at home. He nodded
hurriedly in reply to Chernyshev, and smiled ironically on hearing that
the sovereign was inspecting the fortifications that he, Pfuel, had
planned in accord with his theory. He muttered something to himself
abruptly and in a bass voice, as self-assured Germans do--it might
have been "stupid fellow"... or "the whole affair will be ruined," or
"something absurd will come of it."... Prince Andrew did not catch
what he said and would have passed on, but Chernyshev introduced him to
Pfuel, remarking that Prince Andrew was just back from Turkey where the
war had terminated so fortunately. Pfuel barely glanced--not so much at
Prince Andrew as past him--and said, with a laugh: "That must have been
a fine tactical war"; and, laughing contemptuously, went on into the
room from which the sound of voices was heard.

Pfuel, always inclined to be irritably sarcastic, was particularly
disturbed that day, evidently by the fact that they had dared to inspect
and criticize his camp in his absence. From this short interview with
Pfuel, Prince Andrew, thanks to his Austerlitz experiences, was able to
form a clear conception of the man. Pfuel was one of those hopelessly
and immutably self-confident men, self-confident to the point of
martyrdom as only Germans are, because only Germans are self-confident
on the basis of an abstract notion--science, that is, the supposed
knowledge of absolute truth. A Frenchman is self-assured because he
regards himself personally, both in mind and body, as irresistibly
attractive to men and women. An Englishman is self-assured, as being a
citizen of the best-organized state in the world, and therefore as an
Englishman always knows what he should do and knows that all he does as
an Englishman is undoubtedly correct. An Italian is self-assured because
he is excitable and easily forgets himself and other people. A Russian
is self-assured just because he knows nothing and does not want to know
anything, since he does not believe that anything can be known. The
German's self-assurance is worst of all, stronger and more
repulsive than any other, because he imagines that he knows the
truth--science--which he himself has invented but which is for him the
absolute truth.

Pfuel was evidently of that sort. He had a science--the theory of
oblique movements deduced by him from the history of Frederick the
Great's wars, and all he came across in the history of more recent
warfare seemed to him absurd and barbarous--monstrous collisions in
which so many blunders were committed by both sides that these wars
could not be called wars, they did not accord with the theory, and
therefore could not serve as material for science.

In 1806 Pfuel had been one of those responsible, for the plan of
campaign that ended in Jena and Auerstadt, but he did not see the least
proof of the fallibility of his theory in the disasters of that war. On
the contrary, the deviations made from his theory were, in his opinion,
the sole cause of the whole disaster, and with characteristically
gleeful sarcasm he would remark, "There, I said the whole affair would
go to the devil!" Pfuel was one of those theoreticians who so love
their theory that they lose sight of the theory's object--its practical
application. His love of theory made him hate everything practical, and
he would not listen to it. He was even pleased by failures, for failures
resulting from deviations in practice from the theory only proved to him
the accuracy of his theory.

He said a few words to Prince Andrew and Chernyshev about the present
war, with the air of a man who knows beforehand that all will go wrong,
and who is not displeased that it should be so. The unbrushed tufts
of hair sticking up behind and the hastily brushed hair on his temples
expressed this most eloquently.

He passed into the next room, and the deep, querulous sounds of his
voice were at once heard from there.





CHAPTER XI


Prince Andrew's eyes were still following Pfuel out of the room when
Count Bennigsen entered hurriedly, and nodding to Bolkonski, but not
pausing, went into the study, giving instructions to his adjutant as he
went. The Emperor was following him, and Bennigsen had hastened on
to make some preparations and to be ready to receive the sovereign.
Chernyshev and Prince Andrew went out into the porch, where the Emperor,
who looked fatigued, was dismounting. Marquis Paulucci was talking to
him with particular warmth and the Emperor, with his head bent to the
left, was listening with a dissatisfied air. The Emperor moved forward
evidently wishing to end the conversation, but the flushed and excited
Italian, oblivious of decorum, followed him and continued to speak.

"And as for the man who advised forming this camp--the Drissa camp,"
said Paulucci, as the Emperor mounted the steps and noticing Prince
Andrew scanned his unfamiliar face, "as to that person, sire..."
continued Paulucci, desperately, apparently unable to restrain himself,
"the man who advised the Drissa camp--I see no alternative but the
lunatic asylum or the gallows!"

Without heeding the end of the Italian's remarks, and as though
not hearing them, the Emperor, recognizing Bolkonski, addressed him
graciously.

"I am very glad to see you! Go in there where they are meeting, and wait
for me."

The Emperor went into the study. He was followed by Prince Peter
Mikhaylovich Volkonski and Baron Stein, and the door closed behind them.
Prince Andrew, taking advantage of the Emperor's permission, accompanied
Paulucci, whom he had known in Turkey, into the drawing room where the
council was assembled.

Prince Peter Mikhaylovich Volkonski occupied the position, as it were,
of chief of the Emperor's staff. He came out of the study into the
drawing room with some maps which he spread on a table, and put
questions on which he wished to hear the opinion of the gentlemen
present. What had happened was that news (which afterwards proved to be
false) had been received during the night of a movement by the French to
outflank the Drissa camp.

The first to speak was General Armfeldt who, to meet the difficulty that
presented itself, unexpectedly proposed a perfectly new position
away from the Petersburg and Moscow roads. The reason for this was
inexplicable (unless he wished to show that he, too, could have an
opinion), but he urged that at this point the army should unite and
there await the enemy. It was plain that Armfeldt had thought out that
plan long ago and now expounded it not so much to answer the questions
put--which, in fact, his plan did not answer--as to avail himself of the
opportunity to air it. It was one of the millions of proposals, one as
good as another, that could be made as long as it was quite unknown
what character the war would take. Some disputed his arguments, others
defended them. Young Count Toll objected to the Swedish general's views
more warmly than anyone else, and in the course of the dispute drew from
his side pocket a well-filled notebook, which he asked permission to
read to them. In these voluminous notes Toll suggested another scheme,
totally different from Armfeldt's or Pfuel's plan of campaign. In answer
to Toll, Paulucci suggested an advance and an attack, which, he urged,
could alone extricate us from the present uncertainty and from the trap
(as he called the Drissa camp) in which we were situated.

During all these discussions Pfuel and his interpreter, Wolzogen
(his "bridge" in court relations), were silent. Pfuel only snorted
contemptuously and turned away, to show that he would never demean
himself by replying to such nonsense as he was now hearing. So when
Prince Volkonski, who was in the chair, called on him to give his
opinion, he merely said:

"Why ask me? General Armfeldt has proposed a splendid position with an
exposed rear, or why not this Italian gentleman's attack--very fine, or
a retreat, also good! Why ask me?" said he. "Why, you yourselves know
everything better than I do."

But when Volkonski said, with a frown, that it was in the Emperor's name
that he asked his opinion, Pfuel rose and, suddenly growing animated,
began to speak:

"Everything has been spoiled, everything muddled, everybody thought they
knew better than I did, and now you come to me! How mend matters? There
is nothing to mend! The principles laid down by me must be strictly
adhered to," said he, drumming on the table with his bony fingers. "What
is the difficulty? Nonsense, childishness!"

He went up to the map and speaking rapidly began proving that no
eventuality could alter the efficiency of the Drissa camp, that
everything had been foreseen, and that if the enemy were really going to
outflank it, the enemy would inevitably be destroyed.

Paulucci, who did not know German, began questioning him in French.
Wolzogen came to the assistance of his chief, who spoke French badly,
and began translating for him, hardly able to keep pace with Pfuel, who
was rapidly demonstrating that not only all that had happened, but all
that could happen, had been foreseen in his scheme, and that if there
were now any difficulties the whole fault lay in the fact that his plan
had not been precisely executed. He kept laughing sarcastically, he
demonstrated, and at last contemptuously ceased to demonstrate, like
a mathematician who ceases to prove in various ways the accuracy of
a problem that has already been proved. Wolzogen took his place and
continued to explain his views in French, every now and then turning to
Pfuel and saying, "Is it not so, your excellency?" But Pfuel, like a man
heated in a fight who strikes those on his own side, shouted angrily at
his own supporter, Wolzogen:

"Well, of course, what more is there to explain?"

Paulucci and Michaud both attacked Wolzogen simultaneously in French.
Armfeldt addressed Pfuel in German. Toll explained to Volkonski in
Russian. Prince Andrew listened and observed in silence.

Of all these men Prince Andrew sympathized most with Pfuel, angry,
determined, and absurdly self-confident as he was. Of all those present,
evidently he alone was not seeking anything for himself, nursed no
hatred against anyone, and only desired that the plan, formed on a
theory arrived at by years of toil, should be carried out. He was
ridiculous, and unpleasantly sarcastic, but yet he inspired involuntary
respect by his boundless devotion to an idea. Besides this, the remarks
of all except Pfuel had one common trait that had not been noticeable
at the council of war in 1805: there was now a panic fear of Napoleon's
genius, which, though concealed, was noticeable in every rejoinder.
Everything was assumed to be possible for Napoleon, they expected him
from every side, and invoked his terrible name to shatter each other's
proposals. Pfuel alone seemed to consider Napoleon a barbarian like
everyone else who opposed his theory. But besides this feeling of
respect, Pfuel evoked pity in Prince Andrew. From the tone in which
the courtiers addressed him and the way Paulucci had allowed himself to
speak of him to the Emperor, but above all from a certain desperation
in Pfuel's own expressions, it was clear that the others knew, and Pfuel
himself felt, that his fall was at hand. And despite his self-confidence
and grumpy German sarcasm he was pitiable, with his hair smoothly
brushed on the temples and sticking up in tufts behind. Though he
concealed the fact under a show of irritation and contempt, he was
evidently in despair that the sole remaining chance of verifying his
theory by a huge experiment and proving its soundness to the whole world
was slipping away from him.

The discussions continued a long time, and the longer they lasted
the more heated became the disputes, culminating in shouts and
personalities, and the less was it possible to arrive at any general
conclusion from all that had been said. Prince Andrew, listening to this
polyglot talk and to these surmises, plans, refutations, and shouts,
felt nothing but amazement at what they were saying. A thought that had
long since and often occurred to him during his military activities--the
idea that there is not and cannot be any science of war, and that
therefore there can be no such thing as a military genius--now appeared
to him an obvious truth. "What theory and science is possible about a
matter the conditions and circumstances of which are unknown and cannot
be defined, especially when the strength of the acting forces cannot be
ascertained? No one was or is able to foresee in what condition our or
the enemy's armies will be in a day's time, and no one can gauge the
force of this or that detachment. Sometimes--when there is not a coward
at the front to shout, 'We are cut off!' and start running, but a brave
and jolly lad who shouts, 'Hurrah!'--a detachment of five thousand
is worth thirty thousand, as at Schon Grabern, while at times fifty
thousand run from eight thousand, as at Austerlitz. What science can
there be in a matter in which, as in all practical matters, nothing
can be defined and everything depends on innumerable conditions, the
significance of which is determined at a particular moment which arrives
no one knows when? Armfeldt says our army is cut in half, and Paulucci
says we have got the French army between two fires; Michaud says that
the worthlessness of the Drissa camp lies in having the river behind it,
and Pfuel says that is what constitutes its strength; Toll proposes
one plan, Armfeldt another, and they are all good and all bad, and the
advantages of any suggestions can be seen only at the moment of trial.
And why do they all speak of a 'military genius'? Is a man a genius who
can order bread to be brought up at the right time and say who is to go
to the right and who to the left? It is only because military men are
invested with pomp and power and crowds of sychophants flatter power,
attributing to it qualities of genius it does not possess. The best
generals I have known were, on the contrary, stupid or absent-minded
men. Bagration was the best, Napoleon himself admitted that. And of
Bonaparte himself! I remember his limited, self-satisfied face on the
field of Austerlitz. Not only does a good army commander not need any
special qualities, on the contrary he needs the absence of the highest
and best human attributes--love, poetry, tenderness, and philosophic
inquiring doubt. He should be limited, firmly convinced that what he
is doing is very important (otherwise he will not have sufficient
patience), and only then will he be a brave leader. God forbid that he
should be humane, should love, or pity, or think of what is just
and unjust. It is understandable that a theory of their 'genius' was
invented for them long ago because they have power! The success of a
military action depends not on them, but on the man in the ranks who
shouts, 'We are lost!' or who shouts, 'Hurrah!' And only in the ranks
can one serve with assurance of being useful."

So thought Prince Andrew as he listened to the talking, and he roused
himself only when Paulucci called him and everyone was leaving.

At the review next day the Emperor asked Prince Andrew where he would
like to serve, and Prince Andrew lost his standing in court circles
forever by not asking to remain attached to the sovereign's person, but
for permission to serve in the army.





CHAPTER XII


Before the beginning of the campaign, Rostov had received a letter from
his parents in which they told him briefly of Natasha's illness and the
breaking off of her engagement to Prince Andrew (which they explained by
Natasha's having rejected him) and again asked Nicholas to retire from
the army and return home. On receiving this letter, Nicholas did not
even make any attempt to get leave of absence or to retire from the
army, but wrote to his parents that he was sorry Natasha was ill and her
engagement broken off, and that he would do all he could to meet their
wishes. To Sonya he wrote separately.

"Adored friend of my soul!" he wrote. "Nothing but honor could keep
me from returning to the country. But now, at the commencement of the
campaign, I should feel dishonored, not only in my comrades' eyes but
in my own, if I preferred my own happiness to my love and duty to the
Fatherland. But this shall be our last separation. Believe me, directly
the war is over, if I am still alive and still loved by you, I will
throw up everything and fly to you, to press you forever to my ardent
breast."

It was, in fact, only the commencement of the campaign that prevented
Rostov from returning home as he had promised and marrying Sonya. The
autumn in Otradnoe with the hunting, and the winter with the Christmas
holidays and Sonya's love, had opened out to him a vista of tranquil
rural joys and peace such as he had never known before, and which now
allured him. "A splendid wife, children, a good pack of hounds, a
dozen leashes of smart borzois, agriculture, neighbors, service by
election..." thought he. But now the campaign was beginning, and he had
to remain with his regiment. And since it had to be so, Nicholas Rostov,
as was natural to him, felt contented with the life he led in the
regiment and was able to find pleasure in that life.

On his return from his furlough Nicholas, having been joyfully welcomed
by his comrades, was sent to obtain remounts and brought back from the
Ukraine excellent horses which pleased him and earned him commendation
from his commanders. During his absence he had been promoted captain,
and when the regiment was put on war footing with an increase in
numbers, he was again allotted his old squadron.

The campaign began, the regiment was moved into Poland on double pay,
new officers arrived, new men and horses, and above all everybody was
infected with the merrily excited mood that goes with the commencement
of a war, and Rostov, conscious of his advantageous position in the
regiment, devoted himself entirely to the pleasures and interests of
military service, though he knew that sooner or later he would have to
relinquish them.

The troops retired from Vilna for various complicated reasons of state,
political and strategic. Each step of the retreat was accompanied by
a complicated interplay of interests, arguments, and passions at
headquarters. For the Pavlograd hussars, however, the whole of this
retreat during the finest period of summer and with sufficient supplies
was a very simple and agreeable business.

It was only at headquarters that there was depression, uneasiness, and
intriguing; in the body of the army they did not ask themselves where
they were going or why. If they regretted having to retreat, it was only
because they had to leave billets they had grown accustomed to, or some
pretty young Polish lady. If the thought that things looked bad chanced
to enter anyone's head, he tried to be as cheerful as befits a good
soldier and not to think of the general trend of affairs, but only of
the task nearest to hand. First they camped gaily before Vilna, making
acquaintance with the Polish landowners, preparing for reviews and being
reviewed by the Emperor and other high commanders. Then came an order
to retreat to Sventsyani and destroy any provisions they could not carry
away with them. Sventsyani was remembered by the hussars only as the
drunken camp, a name the whole army gave to their encampment there,
and because many complaints were made against the troops, who, taking
advantage of the order to collect provisions, took also horses,
carriages, and carpets from the Polish proprietors. Rostov remembered
Sventsyani, because on the first day of their arrival at that small town
he changed his sergeant major and was unable to manage all the drunken
men of his squadron who, unknown to him, had appropriated five barrels
of old beer. From Sventsyani they retired farther and farther to Drissa,
and thence again beyond Drissa, drawing near to the frontier of Russia
proper.

On the thirteenth of July the Pavlograds took part in a serious action
for the first time.

On the twelfth of July, on the eve of that action, there was a heavy
storm of rain and hail. In general, the summer of 1812 was remarkable
for its storms.

The two Pavlograd squadrons were bivouacking on a field of rye, which
was already in ear but had been completely trodden down by cattle and
horses. The rain was descending in torrents, and Rostov, with a young
officer named Ilyin, his protege, was sitting in a hastily constructed
shelter. An officer of their regiment, with long mustaches extending
onto his cheeks, who after riding to the staff had been overtaken by the
rain, entered Rostov's shelter.

"I have come from the staff, Count. Have you heard of Raevski's
exploit?"

And the officer gave them details of the Saltanov battle, which he had
heard at the staff.

Rostov, smoking his pipe and turning his head about as the water
trickled down his neck, listened inattentively, with an occasional
glance at Ilyin, who was pressing close to him. This officer, a lad
of sixteen who had recently joined the regiment, was now in the same
relation to Nicholas that Nicholas had been to Denisov seven years
before. Ilyin tried to imitate Rostov in everything and adored him as a
girl might have done.

Zdrzhinski, the officer with the long mustache, spoke grandiloquently of
the Saltanov dam being "a Russian Thermopylae," and of how a deed worthy
of antiquity had been performed by General Raevski. He recounted how
Raevski had led his two sons onto the dam under terrific fire and had
charged with them beside him. Rostov heard the story and not only said
nothing to encourage Zdrzhinski's enthusiasm but, on the contrary,
looked like a man ashamed of what he was hearing, though with no
intention of contradicting it. Since the campaigns of Austerlitz and
of 1807 Rostov knew by experience that men always lie when describing
military exploits, as he himself had done when recounting them; besides
that, he had experience enough to know that nothing happens in war at
all as we can imagine or relate it. And so he did not like Zdrzhinski's
tale, nor did he like Zdrzhinski himself who, with his mustaches
extending over his cheeks, bent low over the face of his hearer, as was
his habit, and crowded Rostov in the narrow shanty. Rostov looked at him
in silence. "In the first place, there must have been such a confusion
and crowding on the dam that was being attacked that if Raevski did lead
his sons there, it could have had no effect except perhaps on some dozen
men nearest to him," thought he, "the rest could not have seen how or
with whom Raevski came onto the dam. And even those who did see it
would not have been much stimulated by it, for what had they to do with
Raevski's tender paternal feelings when their own skins were in danger?
And besides, the fate of the Fatherland did not depend on whether
they took the Saltanov dam or not, as we are told was the case at
Thermopylae. So why should he have made such a sacrifice? And why expose
his own children in the battle? I would not have taken my brother Petya
there, or even Ilyin, who's a stranger to me but a nice lad, but would
have tried to put them somewhere under cover," Nicholas continued
to think, as he listened to Zdrzhinski. But he did not express his
thoughts, for in such matters, too, he had gained experience. He knew
that this tale redounded to the glory of our arms and so one had to
pretend not to doubt it. And he acted accordingly.

"I can't stand this any more," said Ilyin, noticing that Rostov did not
relish Zdrzhinski's conversation. "My stockings and shirt... and the
water is running on my seat! I'll go and look for shelter. The rain
seems less heavy."

Ilyin went out and Zdrzhinski rode away.

Five minutes later Ilyin, splashing through the mud, came running back
to the shanty.

"Hurrah! Rostov, come quick! I've found it! About two hundred yards away
there's a tavern where ours have already gathered. We can at least get
dry there, and Mary Hendrikhovna's there."

Mary Hendrikhovna was the wife of the regimental doctor, a pretty young
German woman he had married in Poland. The doctor, whether from lack
of means or because he did not like to part from his young wife in
the early days of their marriage, took her about with him wherever the
hussar regiment went and his jealousy had become a standing joke among
the hussar officers.

Rostov threw his cloak over his shoulders, shouted to Lavrushka to
follow with the things, and--now slipping in the mud, now splashing
right through it--set off with Ilyin in the lessening rain and the
darkness that was occasionally rent by distant lightning.

"Rostov, where are you?"

"Here. What lightning!" they called to one another.





CHAPTER XIII


In the tavern, before which stood the doctor's covered cart, there were
already some five officers. Mary Hendrikhovna, a plump little blonde
German, in a dressing jacket and nightcap, was sitting on a broad bench
in the front corner. Her husband, the doctor, lay asleep behind her.
Rostov and Ilyin, on entering the room, were welcomed with merry shouts
and laughter.

"Dear me, how jolly we are!" said Rostov laughing.

"And why do you stand there gaping?"

"What swells they are! Why, the water streams from them! Don't make our
drawing room so wet."

"Don't mess Mary Hendrikhovna's dress!" cried other voices.

Rostov and Ilyin hastened to find a corner where they could change into
dry clothes without offending Mary Hendrikhovna's modesty. They were
going into a tiny recess behind a partition to change, but found it
completely filled by three officers who sat playing cards by the light
of a solitary candle on an empty box, and these officers would on no
account yield their position. Mary Hendrikhovna obliged them with the
loan of a petticoat to be used as a curtain, and behind that screen
Rostov and Ilyin, helped by Lavrushka who had brought their kits,
changed their wet things for dry ones.

A fire was made up in the dilapidated brick stove. A board was found,
fixed on two saddles and covered with a horsecloth, a small samovar was
produced and a cellaret and half a bottle of rum, and having asked Mary
Hendrikhovna to preside, they all crowded round her. One offered her a
clean handkerchief to wipe her charming hands, another spread a jacket
under her little feet to keep them from the damp, another hung his coat
over the window to keep out the draft, and yet another waved the flies
off her husband's face, lest he should wake up.

"Leave him alone," said Mary Hendrikhovna, smiling timidly and happily.
"He is sleeping well as it is, after a sleepless night."

"Oh, no, Mary Hendrikhovna," replied the officer, "one must look after
the doctor. Perhaps he'll take pity on me someday, when it comes to
cutting off a leg or an arm for me."

There were only three tumblers, the water was so muddy that one could
not make out whether the tea was strong or weak, and the samovar held
only six tumblers of water, but this made it all the pleasanter to
take turns in order of seniority to receive one's tumbler from Mary
Hendrikhovna's plump little hands with their short and not overclean
nails. All the officers appeared to be, and really were, in love with
her that evening. Even those playing cards behind the partition soon
left their game and came over to the samovar, yielding to the general
mood of courting Mary Hendrikhovna. She, seeing herself surrounded by
such brilliant and polite young men, beamed with satisfaction, try as
she might to hide it, and perturbed as she evidently was each time her
husband moved in his sleep behind her.

There was only one spoon, sugar was more plentiful than anything
else, but it took too long to dissolve, so it was decided that Mary
Hendrikhovna should stir the sugar for everyone in turn. Rostov received
his tumbler, and adding some rum to it asked Mary Hendrikhovna to stir
it.

"But you take it without sugar?" she said, smiling all the time, as if
everything she said and everything the others said was very amusing and
had a double meaning.

"It is not the sugar I want, but only that your little hand should stir
my tea."

Mary Hendrikhovna assented and began looking for the spoon which someone
meanwhile had pounced on.

"Use your finger, Mary Hendrikhovna, it will be still nicer," said
Rostov.

"Too hot!" she replied, blushing with pleasure.

Ilyin put a few drops of rum into the bucket of water and brought it to
Mary Hendrikhovna, asking her to stir it with her finger.

"This is my cup," said he. "Only dip your finger in it and I'll drink it
all up."

When they had emptied the samovar, Rostov took a pack of cards and
proposed that they should play "Kings" with Mary Hendrikhovna. They drew
lots to settle who should make up her set. At Rostov's suggestion it
was agreed that whoever became "King" should have the right to kiss Mary
Hendrikhovna's hand, and that the "Booby" should go to refill and reheat
the samovar for the doctor when the latter awoke.

"Well, but supposing Mary Hendrikhovna is 'King'?" asked Ilyin.

"As it is, she is Queen, and her word is law!"

They had hardly begun to play before the doctor's disheveled head
suddenly appeared from behind Mary Hendrikhovna. He had been awake for
some time, listening to what was being said, and evidently found nothing
entertaining or amusing in what was going on. His face was sad and
depressed. Without greeting the officers, he scratched himself and asked
to be allowed to pass as they were blocking the way. As soon as he
had left the room all the officers burst into loud laughter and Mary
Hendrikhovna blushed till her eyes filled with tears and thereby became
still more attractive to them. Returning from the yard, the doctor
told his wife (who had ceased to smile so happily, and looked at him in
alarm, awaiting her sentence) that the rain had ceased and they must go
to sleep in their covered cart, or everything in it would be stolen.

"But I'll send an orderly.... Two of them!" said Rostov. "What an idea,
doctor!"

"I'll stand guard on it myself!" said Ilyin.

"No, gentlemen, you have had your sleep, but I have not slept for two
nights," replied the doctor, and he sat down morosely beside his wife,
waiting for the game to end.

Seeing his gloomy face as he frowned at his wife, the officers grew
still merrier, and some of them could not refrain from laughter, for
which they hurriedly sought plausible pretexts. When he had gone, taking
his wife with him, and had settled down with her in their covered cart,
the officers lay down in the tavern, covering themselves with their
wet cloaks, but they did not sleep for a long time; now they exchanged
remarks, recalling the doctor's uneasiness and his wife's delight, now
they ran out into the porch and reported what was taking place in the
covered trap. Several times Rostov, covering his head, tried to go
to sleep, but some remark would arouse him and conversation would be
resumed, to the accompaniment of unreasoning, merry, childlike laughter.





CHAPTER XIV


It was nearly three o'clock but no one was yet asleep, when the
quartermaster appeared with an order to move on to the little town
of Ostrovna. Still laughing and talking, the officers began hurriedly
getting ready and again boiled some muddy water in the samovar. But
Rostov went off to his squadron without waiting for tea. Day was
breaking, the rain had ceased, and the clouds were dispersing. It felt
damp and cold, especially in clothes that were still moist. As they left
the tavern in the twilight of the dawn, Rostov and Ilyin both glanced
under the wet and glistening leather hood of the doctor's cart, from
under the apron of which his feet were sticking out, and in the middle
of which his wife's nightcap was visible and her sleepy breathing
audible.

"She really is a dear little thing," said Rostov to Ilyin, who was
following him.

"A charming woman!" said Ilyin, with all the gravity of a boy of
sixteen.

Half an hour later the squadron was lined up on the road. The command
was heard to "mount" and the soldiers crossed themselves and mounted.
Rostov riding in front gave the order "Forward!" and the hussars, with
clanking sabers and subdued talk, their horses' hoofs splashing in the
mud, defiled in fours and moved along the broad road planted with birch
trees on each side, following the infantry and a battery that had gone
on in front.

Tattered, blue-purple clouds, reddening in the east, were scudding
before the wind. It was growing lighter and lighter. That curly grass
which always grows by country roadsides became clearly visible, still
wet with the night's rain; the drooping branches of the birches, also
wet, swayed in the wind and flung down bright drops of water to one
side. The soldiers' faces were more and more clearly visible. Rostov,
always closely followed by Ilyin, rode along the side of the road
between two rows of birch trees.

When campaigning, Rostov allowed himself the indulgence of riding not
a regimental but a Cossack horse. A judge of horses and a sportsman,
he had lately procured himself a large, fine, mettlesome, Donets horse,
dun-colored, with light mane and tail, and when he rode it no one could
outgallop him. To ride this horse was a pleasure to him, and he thought
of the horse, of the morning, of the doctor's wife, but not once of the
impending danger.

Formerly, when going into action, Rostov had felt afraid; now he had
not the least feeling of fear. He was fearless, not because he had grown
used to being under fire (one cannot grow used to danger), but because
he had learned how to manage his thoughts when in danger. He had grown
accustomed when going into action to think about anything but what would
seem most likely to interest him--the impending danger. During the
first period of his service, hard as he tried and much as he reproached
himself with cowardice, he had not been able to do this, but with time
it had come of itself. Now he rode beside Ilyin under the birch trees,
occasionally plucking leaves from a branch that met his hand, sometimes
touching his horse's side with his foot, or, without turning round,
handing a pipe he had finished to an hussar riding behind him, with as
calm and careless an air as though he were merely out for a ride. He
glanced with pity at the excited face of Ilyin, who talked much and in
great agitation. He knew from experience the tormenting expectation of
terror and death the cornet was suffering and knew that only time could
help him.

As soon as the sun appeared in a clear strip of sky beneath the clouds,
the wind fell, as if it dared not spoil the beauty of the summer morning
after the storm; drops still continued to fall, but vertically now, and
all was still. The whole sun appeared on the horizon and disappeared
behind a long narrow cloud that hung above it. A few minutes later it
reappeared brighter still from behind the top of the cloud, tearing its
edge. Everything grew bright and glittered. And with that light, and as
if in reply to it, came the sound of guns ahead of them.

Before Rostov had had time to consider and determine the distance of
that firing, Count Ostermann-Tolstoy's adjutant came galloping from
Vitebsk with orders to advance at a trot along the road.

The squadron overtook and passed the infantry and the battery--which
had also quickened their pace--rode down a hill, and passing through an
empty and deserted village again ascended. The horses began to lather
and the men to flush.

"Halt! Dress your ranks!" the order of the regimental commander was
heard ahead. "Forward by the left. Walk, march!" came the order from in
front.

And the hussars, passing along the line of troops on the left flank of
our position, halted behind our Uhlans who were in the front line. To
the right stood our infantry in a dense column: they were the reserve.
Higher up the hill, on the very horizon, our guns were visible through
the wonderfully clear air, brightly illuminated by slanting morning
sunbeams. In front, beyond a hollow dale, could be seen the enemy's
columns and guns. Our advanced line, already in action, could be heard
briskly exchanging shots with the enemy in the dale.

At these sounds, long unheard, Rostov's spirits rose, as at the strains
of the merriest music. Trap-ta-ta-tap! cracked the shots, now together,
now several quickly one after another. Again all was silent and then
again it sounded as if someone were walking on detonators and exploding
them.

The hussars remained in the same place for about an hour. A cannonade
began. Count Ostermann with his suite rode up behind the squadron,
halted, spoke to the commander of the regiment, and rode up the hill to
the guns.

After Ostermann had gone, a command rang out to the Uhlans.

"Form column! Prepare to charge!"

The infantry in front of them parted into platoons to allow the cavalry
to pass. The Uhlans started, the streamers on their spears fluttering,
and trotted downhill toward the French cavalry which was seen below to
the left.

As soon as the Uhlans descended the hill, the hussars were ordered up
the hill to support the battery. As they took the places vacated by the
Uhlans, bullets came from the front, whining and whistling, but fell
spent without taking effect.

The sounds, which he had not heard for so long, had an even more
pleasurable and exhilarating effect on Rostov than the previous sounds
of firing. Drawing himself up, he viewed the field of battle opening out
before him from the hill, and with his whole soul followed the movement
of the Uhlans. They swooped down close to the French dragoons, something
confused happened there amid the smoke, and five minutes later our
Uhlans were galloping back, not to the place they had occupied but more
to the left, and among the orange-colored Uhlans on chestnut horses and
behind them, in a large group, blue French dragoons on gray horses could
be seen.





CHAPTER XV


Rostov, with his keen sportsman's eye, was one of the first to catch
sight of these blue French dragoons pursuing our Uhlans. Nearer and
nearer in disorderly crowds came the Uhlans and the French dragoons
pursuing them. He could already see how these men, who looked so small
at the foot of the hill, jostled and overtook one another, waving their
arms and their sabers in the air.

Rostov gazed at what was happening before him as at a hunt. He felt
instinctively that if the hussars struck at the French dragoons now, the
latter could not withstand them, but if a charge was to be made it must
be done now, at that very moment, or it would be too late. He looked
around. A captain, standing beside him, was gazing like himself with
eyes fixed on the cavalry below them.

"Andrew Sevastyanych!" said Rostov. "You know, we could crush them...."

"A fine thing too!" replied the captain, "and really..."

Rostov, without waiting to hear him out, touched his horse, galloped to
the front of his squadron, and before he had time to finish giving the
word of command, the whole squadron, sharing his feeling, was following
him. Rostov himself did not know how or why he did it. He acted as he
did when hunting, without reflecting or considering. He saw the dragoons
near and that they were galloping in disorder; he knew they could not
withstand an attack--knew there was only that moment and that if he let
it slip it would not return. The bullets were whining and whistling so
stimulatingly around him and his horse was so eager to go that he could
not restrain himself. He touched his horse, gave the word of command,
and immediately, hearing behind him the tramp of the horses of his
deployed squadron, rode at full trot downhill toward the dragoons.
Hardly had they reached the bottom of the hill before their pace
instinctively changed to a gallop, which grew faster and faster as they
drew nearer to our Uhlans and the French dragoons who galloped after
them. The dragoons were now close at hand. On seeing the hussars, the
foremost began to turn, while those behind began to halt. With the same
feeling with which he had galloped across the path of a wolf, Rostov
gave rein to his Donets horse and galloped to intersect the path of the
dragoons' disordered lines. One Uhlan stopped, another who was on foot
flung himself to the ground to avoid being knocked over, and a riderless
horse fell in among the hussars. Nearly all the French dragoons were
galloping back. Rostov, picking out one on a gray horse, dashed after
him. On the way he came upon a bush, his gallant horse cleared it, and
almost before he had righted himself in his saddle he saw that he would
immediately overtake the enemy he had selected. That Frenchman, by his
uniform an officer, was going at a gallop, crouching on his gray horse
and urging it on with his saber. In another moment Rostov's horse dashed
its breast against the hindquarters of the officer's horse, almost
knocking it over, and at the same instant Rostov, without knowing why,
raised his saber and struck the Frenchman with it.

The instant he had done this, all Rostov's animation vanished. The
officer fell, not so much from the blow--which had but slightly cut his
arm above the elbow--as from the shock to his horse and from fright.
Rostov reined in his horse, and his eyes sought his foe to see whom he
had vanquished. The French dragoon officer was hopping with one foot on
the ground, the other being caught in the stirrup. His eyes, screwed
up with fear as if he every moment expected another blow, gazed up at
Rostov with shrinking terror. His pale and mud-stained face--fair and
young, with a dimple in the chin and light-blue eyes--was not an enemy's
face at all suited to a battlefield, but a most ordinary, homelike face.
Before Rostov had decided what to do with him, the officer cried, "I
surrender!" He hurriedly but vainly tried to get his foot out of the
stirrup and did not remove his frightened blue eyes from Rostov's face.
Some hussars who galloped up disengaged his foot and helped him into the
saddle. On all sides, the hussars were busy with the dragoons; one was
wounded, but though his face was bleeding, he would not give up his
horse; another was perched up behind an hussar with his arms round him;
a third was being helped by an hussar to mount his horse. In front, the
French infantry were firing as they ran. The hussars galloped hastily
back with their prisoners. Rostov galloped back with the rest, aware of
an unpleasant feeling of depression in his heart. Something vague and
confused, which he could not at all account for, had come over him with
the capture of that officer and the blow he had dealt him.

Count Ostermann-Tolstoy met the returning hussars, sent for Rostov,
thanked him, and said he would report his gallant deed to the Emperor
and would recommend him for a St. George's Cross. When sent for by Count
Ostermann, Rostov, remembering that he had charged without orders,
felt sure his commander was sending for him to punish him for breach of
discipline. Ostermann's flattering words and promise of a reward should
therefore have struck him all the more pleasantly, but he still felt
that same vaguely disagreeable feeling of moral nausea. "But what
on earth is worrying me?" he asked himself as he rode back from the
general. "Ilyin? No, he's safe. Have I disgraced myself in any way? No,
that's not it." Something else, resembling remorse, tormented him. "Yes,
oh yes, that French officer with the dimple. And I remember how my arm
paused when I raised it."

Rostov saw the prisoners being led away and galloped after them to have
a look at his Frenchman with the dimple on his chin. He was sitting in
his foreign uniform on an hussar packhorse and looked anxiously about
him; The sword cut on his arm could scarcely be called a wound. He
glanced at Rostov with a feigned smile and waved his hand in greeting.
Rostov still had the same indefinite feeling, as of shame.

All that day and the next his friends and comrades noticed that Rostov,
without being dull or angry, was silent, thoughtful, and preoccupied.
He drank reluctantly, tried to remain alone, and kept turning something
over in his mind.

Rostov was always thinking about that brilliant exploit of his, which to
his amazement had gained him the St. George's Cross and even given him
a reputation for bravery, and there was something he could not at all
understand. "So others are even more afraid than I am!" he thought. "So
that's all there is in what is called heroism! And did I do it for my
country's sake? And how was he to blame, with his dimple and blue eyes?
And how frightened he was! He thought that I should kill him. Why should
I kill him? My hand trembled. And they have given me a St. George's
Cross.... I can't make it out at all."

But while Nicholas was considering these questions and still could reach
no clear solution of what puzzled him so, the wheel of fortune in the
service, as often happens, turned in his favor. After the affair at
Ostrovna he was brought into notice, received command of an hussar
battalion, and when a brave officer was needed he was chosen.





CHAPTER XVI


On receiving news of Natasha's illness, the countess, though not quite
well yet and still weak, went to Moscow with Petya and the rest of the
household, and the whole family moved from Marya Dmitrievna's house to
their own and settled down in town.

Natasha's illness was so serious that, fortunately for her and for
her parents, the consideration of all that had caused the illness,
her conduct and the breaking off of her engagement, receded into the
background. She was so ill that it was impossible for them to consider
in how far she was to blame for what had happened. She could not eat
or sleep, grew visibly thinner, coughed, and, as the doctors made them
feel, was in danger. They could not think of anything but how to help
her. Doctors came to see her singly and in consultation, talked much in
French, German, and Latin, blamed one another, and prescribed a great
variety of medicines for all the diseases known to them, but the simple
idea never occurred to any of them that they could not know the disease
Natasha was suffering from, as no disease suffered by a live man can be
known, for every living person has his own peculiarities and always
has his own peculiar, personal, novel, complicated disease, unknown to
medicine--not a disease of the lungs, liver, skin, heart, nerves, and
so on mentioned in medical books, but a disease consisting of one of the
innumerable combinations of the maladies of those organs. This simple
thought could not occur to the doctors (as it cannot occur to a wizard
that he is unable to work his charms) because the business of their
lives was to cure, and they received money for it and had spent the best
years of their lives on that business. But, above all, that thought
was kept out of their minds by the fact that they saw they were
really useful, as in fact they were to the whole Rostov family. Their
usefulness did not depend on making the patient swallow substances for
the most part harmful (the harm was scarcely perceptible, as they
were given in small doses), but they were useful, necessary, and
indispensable because they satisfied a mental need of the invalid and
of those who loved her--and that is why there are, and always will be,
pseudo-healers, wise women, homeopaths, and allopaths. They satisfied
that eternal human need for hope of relief, for sympathy, and that
something should be done, which is felt by those who are suffering. They
satisfied the need seen in its most elementary form in a child, when it
wants to have a place rubbed that has been hurt. A child knocks itself
and runs at once to the arms of its mother or nurse to have the aching
spot rubbed or kissed, and it feels better when this is done. The child
cannot believe that the strongest and wisest of its people have no
remedy for its pain, and the hope of relief and the expression of its
mother's sympathy while she rubs the bump comforts it. The doctors were
of use to Natasha because they kissed and rubbed her bump, assuring her
that it would soon pass if only the coachman went to the chemist's in
the Arbat and got a powder and some pills in a pretty box for a ruble
and seventy kopeks, and if she took those powders in boiled water at
intervals of precisely two hours, neither more nor less.

What would Sonya and the count and countess have done, how would they
have looked, if nothing had been done, if there had not been those pills
to give by the clock, the warm drinks, the chicken cutlets, and all the
other details of life ordered by the doctors, the carrying out of which
supplied an occupation and consolation to the family circle? How would
the count have borne his dearly loved daughter's illness had he not
known that it was costing him a thousand rubles, and that he would not
grudge thousands more to benefit her, or had he not known that if her
illness continued he would not grudge yet other thousands and would take
her abroad for consultations there, and had he not been able to explain
the details of how Metivier and Feller had not understood the symptoms,
but Frise had, and Mudrov had diagnosed them even better? What would the
countess have done had she not been able sometimes to scold the invalid
for not strictly obeying the doctor's orders?

"You'll never get well like that," she would say, forgetting her grief
in her vexation, "if you won't obey the doctor and take your medicine at
the right time! You mustn't trifle with it, you know, or it may turn to
pneumonia," she would go on, deriving much comfort from the utterance of
that foreign word, incomprehensible to others as well as to herself.

What would Sonya have done without the glad consciousness that she had
not undressed during the first three nights, in order to be ready to
carry out all the doctor's injunctions with precision, and that she
still kept awake at night so as not to miss the proper time when the
slightly harmful pills in the little gilt box had to be administered?
Even to Natasha herself it was pleasant to see that so many sacrifices
were being made for her sake, and to know that she had to take medicine
at certain hours, though she declared that no medicine would cure her
and that it was all nonsense. And it was even pleasant to be able to
show, by disregarding the orders, that she did not believe in medical
treatment and did not value her life.

The doctor came every day, felt her pulse, looked at her tongue, and
regardless of her grief-stricken face joked with her. But when he had
gone into another room, to which the countess hurriedly followed him, he
assumed a grave air and thoughtfully shaking his head said that though
there was danger, he had hopes of the effect of this last medicine and
one must wait and see, that the malady was chiefly mental, but... And
the countess, trying to conceal the action from herself and from him,
slipped a gold coin into his hand and always returned to the patient
with a more tranquil mind.

The symptoms of Natasha's illness were that she ate little, slept
little, coughed, and was always low-spirited. The doctors said that
she could not get on without medical treatment, so they kept her in the
stifling atmosphere of the town, and the Rostovs did not move to the
country that summer of 1812.

In spite of the many pills she swallowed and the drops and powders out
of the little bottles and boxes of which Madame Schoss who was fond of
such things made a large collection, and in spite of being deprived of
the country life to which she was accustomed, youth prevailed. Natasha's
grief began to be overlaid by the impressions of daily life, it ceased
to press so painfully on her heart, it gradually faded into the past,
and she began to recover physically.





CHAPTER XVII


Natasha was calmer but no happier. She not merely avoided all external
forms of pleasure--balls, promenades, concerts, and theaters--but she
never laughed without a sound of tears in her laughter. She could not
sing. As soon as she began to laugh, or tried to sing by herself, tears
choked her: tears of remorse, tears at the recollection of those pure
times which could never return, tears of vexation that she should so
uselessly have ruined her young life which might have been so happy.
Laughter and singing in particular seemed to her like a blasphemy,
in face of her sorrow. Without any need of self-restraint, no wish to
coquet ever entered her head. She said and felt at that time that no
man was more to her than Nastasya Ivanovna, the buffoon. Something stood
sentinel within her and forbade her every joy. Besides, she had lost all
the old interests of her carefree girlish life that had been so full
of hope. The previous autumn, the hunting, "Uncle," and the Christmas
holidays spent with Nicholas at Otradnoe were what she recalled oftenest
and most painfully. What would she not have given to bring back even a
single day of that time! But it was gone forever. Her presentiment at
the time had not deceived her--that that state of freedom and readiness
for any enjoyment would not return again. Yet it was necessary to live
on.

It comforted her to reflect that she was not better as she had formerly
imagined, but worse, much worse, than anybody else in the world. But
this was not enough. She knew that, and asked herself, "What next?"
But there was nothing to come. There was no joy in life, yet life was
passing. Natasha apparently tried not to be a burden or a hindrance to
anyone, but wanted nothing for herself. She kept away from everyone in
the house and felt at ease only with her brother Petya. She liked to
be with him better than with the others, and when alone with him she
sometimes laughed. She hardly ever left the house and of those who came
to see them was glad to see only one person, Pierre. It would have been
impossible to treat her with more delicacy, greater care, and at the
same time more seriously than did Count Bezukhov. Natasha unconsciously
felt this delicacy and so found great pleasure in his society. But
she was not even grateful to him for it; nothing good on Pierre's part
seemed to her to be an effort, it seemed so natural for him to be kind
to everyone that there was no merit in his kindness. Sometimes Natasha
noticed embarrassment and awkwardness on his part in her presence,
especially when he wanted to do something to please her, or feared that
something they spoke of would awaken memories distressing to her. She
noticed this and attributed it to his general kindness and shyness,
which she imagined must be the same toward everyone as it was to her.
After those involuntary words--that if he were free he would have asked
on his knees for her hand and her love--uttered at a moment when she was
so strongly agitated, Pierre never spoke to Natasha of his feelings;
and it seemed plain to her that those words, which had then so comforted
her, were spoken as all sorts of meaningless words are spoken to comfort
a crying child. It was not because Pierre was a married man, but because
Natasha felt very strongly with him that moral barrier the absence of
which she had experienced with Kuragin that it never entered her head
that the relations between him and herself could lead to love on her
part, still less on his, or even to the kind of tender, self-conscious,
romantic friendship between a man and a woman of which she had known
several instances.

Before the end of the fast of St. Peter, Agrafena Ivanovna Belova, a
country neighbor of the Rostovs, came to Moscow to pay her devotions at
the shrines of the Moscow saints. She suggested that Natasha should fast
and prepare for Holy Communion, and Natasha gladly welcomed the idea.
Despite the doctor's orders that she should not go out early in the
morning, Natasha insisted on fasting and preparing for the sacrament,
not as they generally prepared for it in the Rostov family by attending
three services in their own house, but as Agrafena Ivanovna did, by
going to church every day for a week and not once missing Vespers,
Matins, or Mass.

The countess was pleased with Natasha's zeal; after the poor results of
the medical treatment, in the depths of her heart she hoped that prayer
might help her daughter more than medicines and, though not without
fear and concealing it from the doctor, she agreed to Natasha's wish and
entrusted her to Belova. Agrafena Ivanovna used to come to wake Natasha
at three in the morning, but generally found her already awake. She was
afraid of being late for Matins. Hastily washing, and meekly putting on
her shabbiest dress and an old mantilla, Natasha, shivering in the fresh
air, went out into the deserted streets lit by the clear light of dawn.
By Agrafena Ivanovna's advice Natasha prepared herself not in their
own parish, but at a church where, according to the devout Agrafena
Ivanovna, the priest was a man of very severe and lofty life. There were
never many people in the church; Natasha always stood beside Belova in
the customary place before an icon of the Blessed Virgin, let into the
screen before the choir on the left side, and a feeling, new to her, of
humility before something great and incomprehensible, seized her when
at that unusual morning hour, gazing at the dark face of the Virgin
illuminated by the candles burning before it and by the morning light
falling from the window, she listened to the words of the service which
she tried to follow with understanding. When she understood them her
personal feeling became interwoven in the prayers with shades of its
own. When she did not understand, it was sweeter still to think that
the wish to understand everything is pride, that it is impossible to
understand all, that it is only necessary to believe and to commit
oneself to God, whom she felt guiding her soul at those moments. She
crossed herself, bowed low, and when she did not understand, in horror
at her own vileness, simply asked God to forgive her everything,
everything, to have mercy upon her. The prayers to which she surrendered
herself most of all were those of repentance. On her way home at an
early hour when she met no one but bricklayers going to work or men
sweeping the street, and everybody within the houses was still asleep,
Natasha experienced a feeling new to her, a sense of the possibility
of correcting her faults, the possibility of a new, clean life, and of
happiness.

During the whole week she spent in this way, that feeling grew every
day. And the happiness of taking communion, or "communing" as Agrafena
Ivanovna, joyously playing with the word, called it, seemed to Natasha
so great that she felt she should never live till that blessed Sunday.

But the happy day came, and on that memorable Sunday, when, dressed in
white muslin, she returned home after communion, for the first time for
many months she felt calm and not oppressed by the thought of the life
that lay before her.

The doctor who came to see her that day ordered her to continue the
powders he had prescribed a fortnight previously.

"She must certainly go on taking them morning and evening," said
he, evidently sincerely satisfied with his success. "Only, please be
particular about it.

"Be quite easy," he continued playfully, as he adroitly took the gold
coin in his palm. "She will soon be singing and frolicking about. The
last medicine has done her a very great deal of good. She has freshened
up very much."

The countess, with a cheerful expression on her face, looked down at her
nails and spat a little for luck as she returned to the drawing room.





CHAPTER XVIII


At the beginning of July more and more disquieting reports about the war
began to spread in Moscow; people spoke of an appeal by the Emperor to
the people, and of his coming himself from the army to Moscow. And as
up to the eleventh of July no manifesto or appeal had been received,
exaggerated reports became current about them and about the position of
Russia. It was said that the Emperor was leaving the army because it was
in danger, it was said that Smolensk had surrendered, that Napoleon had
an army of a million and only a miracle could save Russia.

On the eleventh of July, which was Saturday, the manifesto was received
but was not yet in print, and Pierre, who was at the Rostovs', promised
to come to dinner next day, Sunday, and bring a copy of the manifesto
and appeal, which he would obtain from Count Rostopchin.

That Sunday, the Rostovs went to Mass at the Razumovskis' private chapel
as usual. It was a hot July day. Even at ten o'clock, when the Rostovs
got out of their carriage at the chapel, the sultry air, the shouts of
hawkers, the light and gay summer clothes of the crowd, the dusty leaves
of the trees on the boulevard, the sounds of the band and the white
trousers of a battalion marching to parade, the rattling of wheels on
the cobblestones, and the brilliant, hot sunshine were all full of that
summer languor, that content and discontent with the present, which
is most strongly felt on a bright, hot day in town. All the Moscow
notabilities, all the Rostovs' acquaintances, were at the Razumovskis'
chapel, for, as if expecting something to happen, many wealthy families
who usually left town for their country estates had not gone away that
summer. As Natasha, at her mother's side, passed through the crowd
behind a liveried footman who cleared the way for them, she heard a
young man speaking about her in too loud a whisper.

"That's Rostova, the one who..."

"She's much thinner, but all the same she's pretty!"

She heard, or thought she heard, the names of Kuragin and Bolkonski. But
she was always imagining that. It always seemed to her that everyone
who looked at her was thinking only of what had happened to her. With a
sinking heart, wretched as she always was now when she found herself
in a crowd, Natasha in her lilac silk dress trimmed with black lace
walked--as women can walk--with the more repose and stateliness the
greater the pain and shame in her soul. She knew for certain that she
was pretty, but this no longer gave her satisfaction as it used to.
On the contrary it tormented her more than anything else of late, and
particularly so on this bright, hot summer day in town. "It's Sunday
again--another week past," she thought, recalling that she had been here
the Sunday before, "and always the same life that is no life, and the
same surroundings in which it used to be so easy to live. I'm pretty,
I'm young, and I know that now I am good. I used to be bad, but now I
know I am good," she thought, "but yet my best years are slipping by
and are no good to anyone." She stood by her mother's side and exchanged
nods with acquaintances near her. From habit she scrutinized the ladies'
dresses, condemned the bearing of a lady standing close by who was not
crossing herself properly but in a cramped manner, and again she thought
with vexation that she was herself being judged and was judging others,
and suddenly, at the sound of the service, she felt horrified at her own
vileness, horrified that the former purity of her soul was again lost to
her.

A comely, fresh-looking old man was conducting the service with that
mild solemnity which has so elevating and soothing an effect on the
souls of the worshipers. The gates of the sanctuary screen were closed,
the curtain was slowly drawn, and from behind it a soft mysterious voice
pronounced some words. Tears, the cause of which she herself did not
understand, made Natasha's breast heave, and a joyous but oppressive
feeling agitated her.

"Teach me what I should do, how to live my life, how I may grow good
forever, forever!" she pleaded.

The deacon came out onto the raised space before the altar screen and,
holding his thumb extended, drew his long hair from under his dalmatic
and, making the sign of the cross on his breast, began in a loud and
solemn voice to recite the words of the prayer...

"In peace let us pray unto the Lord."

"As one community, without distinction of class, without enmity, united
by brotherly love--let us pray!" thought Natasha.

"For the peace that is from above, and for the salvation of our souls."

"For the world of angels and all the spirits who dwell above us," prayed
Natasha.

When they prayed for the warriors, she thought of her brother and
Denisov. When they prayed for all traveling by land and sea, she
remembered Prince Andrew, prayed for him, and asked God to forgive her
all the wrongs she had done him. When they prayed for those who love us,
she prayed for the members of her own family, her father and mother and
Sonya, realizing for the first time how wrongly she had acted toward
them, and feeling all the strength of her love for them. When they
prayed for those who hate us, she tried to think of her enemies and
people who hated her, in order to pray for them. She included among her
enemies the creditors and all who had business dealings with her
father, and always at the thought of enemies and those who hated her she
remembered Anatole who had done her so much harm--and though he did not
hate her she gladly prayed for him as for an enemy. Only at prayer did
she feel able to think clearly and calmly of Prince Andrew and Anatole,
as men for whom her feelings were as nothing compared with her awe and
devotion to God. When they prayed for the Imperial family and the Synod,
she bowed very low and made the sign of the cross, saying to herself
that even if she did not understand, still she could not doubt, and at
any rate loved the governing Synod and prayed for it.

When he had finished the Litany the deacon crossed the stole over his
breast and said, "Let us commit ourselves and our whole lives to Christ
the Lord!"

"Commit ourselves to God," Natasha inwardly repeated. "Lord God, I
submit myself to Thy will!" she thought. "I want nothing, wish for
nothing; teach me what to do and how to use my will! Take me, take
me!" prayed Natasha, with impatient emotion in her heart, not crossing
herself but letting her slender arms hang down as if expecting some
invisible power at any moment to take her and deliver her from herself,
from her regrets, desires, remorse, hopes, and sins.

The countess looked round several times at her daughter's softened face
and shining eyes and prayed God to help her.

Unexpectedly, in the middle of the service, and not in the usual order
Natasha knew so well, the deacon brought out a small stool, the one he
knelt on when praying on Trinity Sunday, and placed it before the doors
of the sanctuary screen. The priest came out with his purple velvet
biretta on his head, adjusted his hair, and knelt down with an effort.
Everybody followed his example and they looked at one another in
surprise. Then came the prayer just received from the Synod--a prayer
for the deliverance of Russia from hostile invasion.

"Lord God of might, God of our salvation!" began the priest in that
voice, clear, not grandiloquent but mild, in which only the Slav clergy
read and which acts so irresistibly on a Russian heart.

"Lord God of might, God of our salvation! Look this day in mercy and
blessing on Thy humble people, and graciously hear us, spare us, and
have mercy upon us! This foe confounding Thy land, desiring to lay
waste the whole world, rises against us; these lawless men are gathered
together to overthrow Thy kingdom, to destroy Thy dear Jerusalem, Thy
beloved Russia; to defile Thy temples, to overthrow Thine altars, and to
desecrate our holy shrines. How long, O Lord, how long shall the wicked
triumph? How long shall they wield unlawful power?

"Lord God! Hear us when we pray to Thee; strengthen with Thy might
our most gracious sovereign lord, the Emperor Alexander Pavlovich; be
mindful of his uprightness and meekness, reward him according to his
righteousness, and let it preserve us, Thy chosen Israel! Bless his
counsels, his undertakings, and his work; strengthen his kingdom by
Thine almighty hand, and give him victory over his enemy, even as Thou
gavest Moses the victory over Amalek, Gideon over Midian, and David over
Goliath. Preserve his army, put a bow of brass in the hands of those who
have armed themselves in Thy Name, and gird their loins with strength
for the fight. Take up the spear and shield and arise to help us;
confound and put to shame those who have devised evil against us, may
they be before the faces of Thy faithful warriors as dust before the
wind, and may Thy mighty Angel confound them and put them to flight; may
they be ensnared when they know it not, and may the plots they have laid
in secret be turned against them; let them fall before Thy servants'
feet and be laid low by our hosts! Lord, Thou art able to save both
great and small; Thou art God, and man cannot prevail against Thee!

"God of our fathers! Remember Thy bounteous mercy and loving-kindness
which are from of old; turn not Thy face from us, but be gracious to our
unworthiness, and in Thy great goodness and Thy many mercies regard not
our transgressions and iniquities! Create in us a clean heart and renew
a right spirit within us, strengthen us all in Thy faith, fortify our
hope, inspire us with true love one for another, arm us with unity of
spirit in the righteous defense of the heritage Thou gavest to us and
to our fathers, and let not the scepter of the wicked be exalted against
the destiny of those Thou hast sanctified.

"O Lord our God, in whom we believe and in whom we put our trust, let us
not be confounded in our hope of Thy mercy, and give us a token of Thy
blessing, that those who hate us and our Orthodox faith may see it and
be put to shame and perish, and may all the nations know that Thou art
the Lord and we are Thy people. Show Thy mercy upon us this day, O Lord,
and grant us Thy salvation; make the hearts of Thy servants to rejoice
in Thy mercy; smite down our enemies and destroy them swiftly beneath
the feet of Thy faithful servants! For Thou art the defense, the succor,
and the victory of them that put their trust in Thee, and to Thee be all
glory, to Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, now and forever, world without
end. Amen."

In Natasha's receptive condition of soul this prayer affected her
strongly. She listened to every word about the victory of Moses over
Amalek, of Gideon over Midian, and of David over Goliath, and about
the destruction of "Thy Jerusalem," and she prayed to God with the
tenderness and emotion with which her heart was overflowing, but without
fully understanding what she was asking of God in that prayer. She
shared with all her heart in the prayer for the spirit of righteousness,
for the strengthening of the heart by faith and hope, and its animation
by love. But she could not pray that her enemies might be trampled under
foot when but a few minutes before she had been wishing she had more
of them that she might pray for them. But neither could she doubt the
righteousness of the prayer that was being read on bended knees. She
felt in her heart a devout and tremulous awe at the thought of the
punishment that overtakes men for their sins, and especially of her own
sins, and she prayed to God to forgive them all, and her too, and to
give them all, and her too, peace and happiness. And it seemed to her
that God heard her prayer.





CHAPTER XIX


From the day when Pierre, after leaving the Rostovs' with Natasha's
grateful look fresh in his mind, had gazed at the comet that seemed to
be fixed in the sky and felt that something new was appearing on his own
horizon--from that day the problem of the vanity and uselessness of all
earthly things, that had incessantly tormented him, no longer presented
itself. That terrible question "Why?" "Wherefore?" which had come to him
amid every occupation, was now replaced, not by another question or by a
reply to the former question, but by her image. When he listened to, or
himself took part in, trivial conversations, when he read or heard of
human baseness or folly, he was not horrified as formerly, and did
not ask himself why men struggled so about these things when all is so
transient and incomprehensible--but he remembered her as he had last
seen her, and all his doubts vanished--not because she had answered
the questions that had haunted him, but because his conception of her
transferred him instantly to another, a brighter, realm of spiritual
activity in which no one could be justified or guilty--a realm of
beauty and love which it was worth living for. Whatever worldly baseness
presented itself to him, he said to himself:

"Well, supposing N. N. swindled the country and the Tsar, and the
country and the Tsar confer honors upon him, what does that matter? She
smiled at me yesterday and asked me to come again, and I love her, and
no one will ever know it." And his soul felt calm and peaceful.

Pierre still went into society, drank as much and led the same idle
and dissipated life, because besides the hours he spent at the Rostovs'
there were other hours he had to spend somehow, and the habits and
acquaintances he had made in Moscow formed a current that bore him along
irresistibly. But latterly, when more and more disquieting reports came
from the seat of war and Natasha's health began to improve and she
no longer aroused in him the former feeling of careful pity, an
ever-increasing restlessness, which he could not explain, took
possession of him. He felt that the condition he was in could not
continue long, that a catastrophe was coming which would change his
whole life, and he impatiently sought everywhere for signs of that
approaching catastrophe. One of his brother Masons had revealed to
Pierre the following prophecy concerning Napoleon, drawn from the
Revelation of St. John.

In chapter 13, verse 18, of the Apocalypse, it is said:


Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of
the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred
threescore and six.

And in the fifth verse of the same chapter:


And there was given unto him a mouth speaking great things and
blasphemies; and power was given unto him to continue forty and two
months.


The French alphabet, written out with the same numerical values as the
Hebrew, in which the first nine letters denote units and the others
tens, will have the following significance:

      a   b   c   d   e   f   g   h   i   k
      1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9   10
       l    m    n    o    p    q    r    s
      20   30   40   50   60   70   80   90
             t    u    v    w    x    y
            100  110  120  130  140  150
                        z
                       160


Writing the words L'Empereur Napoleon in numbers, it appears that the
sum of them is 666, and that Napoleon was therefore the beast foretold
in the Apocalypse. Moreover, by applying the same system to the words
quarante-deux, * which was the term allowed to the beast that "spoke
great things and blasphemies," the same number 666 was obtained; from
which it followed that the limit fixed for Napoleon's power had come
in the year 1812 when the French emperor was forty-two. This prophecy
pleased Pierre very much and he often asked himself what would put an
end to the power of the beast, that is, of Napoleon, and tried by the
same system of using letters as numbers and adding them up, to find an
answer to the question that engrossed him. He wrote the words L'Empereur
Alexandre, La nation russe and added up their numbers, but the sums
were either more or less than 666. Once when making such calculations he
wrote down his own name in French, Comte Pierre Besouhoff, but the
sum of the numbers did not come right. Then he changed the spelling,
substituting a z for the s and adding de and the article le, still
without obtaining the desired result. Then it occurred to him: if the
answer to the question were contained in his name, his nationality would
also be given in the answer. So he wrote Le russe Besuhof and adding
up the numbers got 671. This was only five too much, and five was
represented by e, the very letter elided from the article le before the
word Empereur. By omitting the e, though incorrectly, Pierre got the
answer he sought. L'russe Besuhof made 666. This discovery excited him.
How, or by what means, he was connected with the great event foretold in
the Apocalypse he did not know, but he did not doubt that connection for
a moment. His love for Natasha, Antichrist, Napoleon, the invasion, the
comet, 666, L'Empereur Napoleon, and L'russe Besuhof--all this had to
mature and culminate, to lift him out of that spellbound, petty sphere
of Moscow habits in which he felt himself held captive and lead him to a
great achievement and great happiness.


    * Forty-two.


On the eve of the Sunday when the special prayer was read, Pierre had
promised the Rostovs to bring them, from Count Rostopchin whom he knew
well, both the appeal to the people and the news from the army. In the
morning, when he went to call at Rostopchin's he met there a courier
fresh from the army, an acquaintance of his own, who often danced at
Moscow balls.

"Do, please, for heaven's sake, relieve me of something!" said the
courier. "I have a sackful of letters to parents."

Among these letters was one from Nicholas Rostov to his father. Pierre
took that letter, and Rostopchin also gave him the Emperor's appeal to
Moscow, which had just been printed, the last army orders, and his own
most recent bulletin. Glancing through the army orders, Pierre found in
one of them, in the lists of killed, wounded, and rewarded, the name of
Nicholas Rostov, awarded a St. George's Cross of the Fourth Class for
courage shown in the Ostrovna affair, and in the same order the name
of Prince Andrew Bolkonski, appointed to the command of a regiment of
Chasseurs. Though he did not want to remind the Rostovs of Bolkonski,
Pierre could not refrain from making them happy by the news of their
son's having received a decoration, so he sent that printed army order
and Nicholas' letter to the Rostovs, keeping the appeal, the bulletin,
and the other orders to take with him when he went to dinner.

His conversation with Count Rostopchin and the latter's tone of anxious
hurry, the meeting with the courier who talked casually of how badly
things were going in the army, the rumors of the discovery of spies in
Moscow and of a leaflet in circulation stating that Napoleon promised
to be in both the Russian capitals by the autumn, and the talk of the
Emperor's being expected to arrive next day--all aroused with fresh
force that feeling of agitation and expectation in Pierre which he had
been conscious of ever since the appearance of the comet, and especially
since the beginning of the war.

He had long been thinking of entering the army and would have done so
had he not been hindered, first, by his membership of the Society of
Freemasons to which he was bound by oath and which preached perpetual
peace and the abolition of war, and secondly, by the fact that when he
saw the great mass of Muscovites who had donned uniform and were talking
patriotism, he somehow felt ashamed to take the step. But the chief
reason for not carrying out his intention to enter the army lay in the
vague idea that he was L'russe Besuhof who had the number of the beast,
666; that his part in the great affair of setting a limit to the
power of the beast that spoke great and blasphemous things had been
predestined from eternity, and that therefore he ought not to undertake
anything, but wait for what was bound to come to pass.





CHAPTER XX


A few intimate friends were dining with the Rostovs that day, as usual
on Sundays.

Pierre came early so as to find them alone.

He had grown so stout this year that he would have been abnormal had he
not been so tall, so broad of limb, and so strong that he carried his
bulk with evident ease.

He went up the stairs, puffing and muttering something. His coachman did
not even ask whether he was to wait. He knew that when his master was
at the Rostovs' he stayed till midnight. The Rostovs' footman rushed
eagerly forward to help him off with his cloak and take his hat and
stick. Pierre, from club habit, always left both hat and stick in the
anteroom.

The first person he saw in the house was Natasha. Even before he saw
her, while taking off his cloak, he heard her. She was practicing solfa
exercises in the music room. He knew that she had not sung since her
illness, and so the sound of her voice surprised and delighted him. He
opened the door softly and saw her, in the lilac dress she had worn at
church, walking about the room singing. She had her back to him when he
opened the door, but when, turning quickly, she saw his broad, surprised
face, she blushed and came rapidly up to him.

"I want to try to sing again," she said, adding as if by way of excuse,
"it is, at least, something to do."

"That's capital!"

"How glad I am you've come! I am so happy today," she said, with the old
animation Pierre had not seen in her for a long time. "You know Nicholas
has received a St. George's Cross? I am so proud of him."

"Oh yes, I sent that announcement. But I don't want to interrupt you,"
he added, and was about to go to the drawing room.

Natasha stopped him.

"Count, is it wrong of me to sing?" she said blushing, and fixing her
eyes inquiringly on him.

"No... Why should it be? On the contrary... But why do you ask me?"

"I don't know myself," Natasha answered quickly, "but I should not like
to do anything you disapproved of. I believe in you completely. You
don't know how important you are to me, how much you've done for me...."
She spoke rapidly and did not notice how Pierre flushed at her words. "I
saw in that same army order that he, Bolkonski" (she whispered the name
hastily), "is in Russia, and in the army again. What do you think?"--she
was speaking hurriedly, evidently afraid her strength might fail
her--"Will he ever forgive me? Will he not always have a bitter feeling
toward me? What do you think? What do you think?"

"I think..." Pierre replied, "that he has nothing to forgive.... If I
were in his place..."

By association of ideas, Pierre was at once carried back to the day
when, trying to comfort her, he had said that if he were not himself but
the best man in the world and free, he would ask on his knees for her
hand; and the same feeling of pity, tenderness, and love took possession
of him and the same words rose to his lips. But she did not give him
time to say them.

"Yes, you... you..." she said, uttering the word you
rapturously--"that's a different thing. I know no one kinder, more
generous, or better than you; nobody could be! Had you not been
there then, and now too, I don't know what would have become of me,
because..."

Tears suddenly rose in her eyes, she turned away, lifted her music
before her eyes, began singing again, and again began walking up and
down the room.

Just then Petya came running in from the drawing room.

Petya was now a handsome rosy lad of fifteen with full red lips and
resembled Natasha. He was preparing to enter the university, but he and
his friend Obolenski had lately, in secret, agreed to join the hussars.

Petya had come rushing out to talk to his namesake about this affair.
He had asked Pierre to find out whether he would be accepted in the
hussars.

Pierre walked up and down the drawing room, not listening to what Petya
was saying.

Petya pulled him by the arm to attract his attention.

"Well, what about my plan? Peter Kirilych, for heaven's sake! You are my
only hope," said Petya.

"Oh yes, your plan. To join the hussars? I'll mention it, I'll bring it
all up today."

"Well, mon cher, have you got the manifesto?" asked the old count. "The
countess has been to Mass at the Razumovskis' and heard the new prayer.
She says it's very fine."

"Yes, I've got it," said Pierre. "The Emperor is to be here tomorrow...
there's to be an Extraordinary Meeting of the nobility, and they are
talking of a levy of ten men per thousand. Oh yes, let me congratulate
you!"

"Yes, yes, thank God! Well, and what news from the army?"

"We are again retreating. They say we're already near Smolensk," replied
Pierre.

"O Lord, O Lord!" exclaimed the count. "Where is the manifesto?"

"The Emperor's appeal? Oh yes!"

Pierre began feeling in his pockets for the papers, but could not find
them. Still slapping his pockets, he kissed the hand of the countess
who entered the room and glanced uneasily around, evidently expecting
Natasha, who had left off singing but had not yet come into the drawing
room.

"On my word, I don't know what I've done with it," he said.

"There he is, always losing everything!" remarked the countess.

Natasha entered with a softened and agitated expression of face and
sat down looking silently at Pierre. As soon as she entered, Pierre's
features, which had been gloomy, suddenly lighted up, and while still
searching for the papers he glanced at her several times.

"No, really! I'll drive home, I must have left them there. I'll
certainly..."

"But you'll be late for dinner."

"Oh! And my coachman has gone."

But Sonya, who had gone to look for the papers in the anteroom, had
found them in Pierre's hat, where he had carefully tucked them under the
lining. Pierre was about to begin reading.

"No, after dinner," said the old count, evidently expecting much
enjoyment from that reading.

At dinner, at which champagne was drunk to the health of the new
chevalier of St. George, Shinshin told them the town news, of the
illness of the old Georgian princess, of Metivier's disappearance from
Moscow, and of how some German fellow had been brought to Rostopchin
and accused of being a French "spyer" (so Count Rostopchin had told the
story), and how Rostopchin let him go and assured the people that he was
"not a spire at all, but only an old German ruin."

"People are being arrested..." said the count. "I've told the countess
she should not speak French so much. It's not the time for it now."

"And have you heard?" Shinshin asked. "Prince Golitsyn has engaged a
master to teach him Russian. It is becoming dangerous to speak French in
the streets."

"And how about you, Count Peter Kirilych? If they call up the militia,
you too will have to mount a horse," remarked the old count, addressing
Pierre.

Pierre had been silent and preoccupied all through dinner, seeming not
to grasp what was said. He looked at the count.

"Oh yes, the war," he said. "No! What sort of warrior should I make? And
yet everything is so strange, so strange! I can't make it out. I don't
know, I am very far from having military tastes, but in these times no
one can answer for himself."

After dinner the count settled himself comfortably in an easy chair and
with a serious face asked Sonya, who was considered an excellent reader,
to read the appeal.


"To Moscow, our ancient Capital!

"The enemy has entered the borders of Russia with immense forces. He
comes to despoil our beloved country."


Sonya read painstakingly in her high-pitched voice. The count listened
with closed eyes, heaving abrupt sighs at certain passages.

Natasha sat erect, gazing with a searching look now at her father and
now at Pierre.

Pierre felt her eyes on him and tried not to look round. The countess
shook her head disapprovingly and angrily at every solemn expression
in the manifesto. In all these words she saw only that the danger
threatening her son would not soon be over. Shinshin, with a sarcastic
smile on his lips, was evidently preparing to make fun of anything that
gave him the opportunity: Sonya's reading, any remark of the count's, or
even the manifesto itself should no better pretext present itself.

After reading about the dangers that threatened Russia, the hopes the
Emperor placed on Moscow and especially on its illustrious nobility,
Sonya, with a quiver in her voice due chiefly to the attention that was
being paid to her, read the last words:


"We ourselves will not delay to appear among our people in that Capital
and in other parts of our realm for consultation, and for the direction
of all our levies, both those now barring the enemy's path and those
freshly formed to defeat him wherever he may appear. May the ruin he
hopes to bring upon us recoil on his own head, and may Europe delivered
from bondage glorify the name of Russia!"


"Yes, that's it!" cried the count, opening his moist eyes and sniffing
repeatedly, as if a strong vinaigrette had been held to his nose; and he
added, "Let the Emperor but say the word and we'll sacrifice everything
and begrudge nothing."

Before Shinshin had time to utter the joke he was ready to make on the
count's patriotism, Natasha jumped up from her place and ran to her
father.

"What a darling our Papa is!" she cried, kissing him, and she again
looked at Pierre with the unconscious coquetry that had returned to her
with her better spirits.

"There! Here's a patriot for you!" said Shinshin.

"Not a patriot at all, but simply..." Natasha replied in an injured
tone. "Everything seems funny to you, but this isn't at all a joke...."

"A joke indeed!" put in the count. "Let him but say the word and we'll
all go.... We're not Germans!"

"But did you notice, it says, 'for consultation'?" said Pierre.

"Never mind what it's for...."

At this moment, Petya, to whom nobody was paying any attention, came up
to his father with a very flushed face and said in his breaking voice
that was now deep and now shrill:

"Well, Papa, I tell you definitely, and Mamma too, it's as you please,
but I say definitely that you must let me enter the army, because I
can't... that's all...."

The countess, in dismay, looked up to heaven, clasped her hands, and
turned angrily to her husband.

"That comes of your talking!" said she.

But the count had already recovered from his excitement.

"Come, come!" said he. "Here's a fine warrior! No! Nonsense! You must
study."

"It's not nonsense, Papa. Fedya Obolenski is younger than I, and he's
going too. Besides, all the same I can't study now when..." Petya
stopped short, flushed till he perspired, but still got out the words,
"when our Fatherland is in danger."

"That'll do, that'll do--nonsense...."

"But you said yourself that we would sacrifice everything."

"Petya! Be quiet, I tell you!" cried the count, with a glance at his
wife, who had turned pale and was staring fixedly at her son.

"And I tell you--Peter Kirilych here will also tell you..."

"Nonsense, I tell you. Your mother's milk has hardly dried on your lips
and you want to go into the army! There, there, I tell you," and the
count moved to go out of the room, taking the papers, probably to reread
them in his study before having a nap.

"Well, Peter Kirilych, let's go and have a smoke," he said.

Pierre was agitated and undecided. Natasha's unwontedly brilliant eyes,
continually glancing at him with a more than cordial look, had reduced
him to this condition.

"No, I think I'll go home."

"Home? Why, you meant to spend the evening with us.... You don't
often come nowadays as it is, and this girl of mine," said the count
good-naturedly, pointing to Natasha, "only brightens up when you're
here."

"Yes, I had forgotten... I really must go home... business..." said
Pierre hurriedly.

"Well, then, au revoir!" said the count, and went out of the room.

"Why are you going? Why are you upset?" asked Natasha, and she looked
challengingly into Pierre's eyes.

"Because I love you!" was what he wanted to say, but he did not say it,
and only blushed till the tears came, and lowered his eyes.

"Because it is better for me to come less often... because... No, simply
I have business...."

"Why? No, tell me!" Natasha began resolutely and suddenly stopped.

They looked at each other with dismayed and embarrassed faces. He tried
to smile but could not: his smile expressed suffering, and he silently
kissed her hand and went out.

Pierre made up his mind not to go to the Rostovs' any more.





CHAPTER XXI


After the definite refusal he had received, Petya went to his room
and there locked himself in and wept bitterly. When he came in to tea,
silent, morose, and with tear-stained face, everybody pretended not to
notice anything.

Next day the Emperor arrived in Moscow, and several of the Rostovs'
domestic serfs begged permission to go to have a look at him. That
morning Petya was a long time dressing and arranging his hair and
collar to look like a grown-up man. He frowned before his looking glass,
gesticulated, shrugged his shoulders, and finally, without saying a word
to anyone, took his cap and left the house by the back door, trying to
avoid notice. Petya decided to go straight to where the Emperor was and
to explain frankly to some gentleman-in-waiting (he imagined the Emperor
to be always surrounded by gentlemen-in-waiting) that he, Count Rostov,
in spite of his youth wished to serve his country; that youth could be
no hindrance to loyalty, and that he was ready to... While
dressing, Petya had prepared many fine things he meant to say to the
gentleman-in-waiting.

It was on the very fact of being so young that Petya counted for success
in reaching the Emperor--he even thought how surprised everyone would be
at his youthfulness--and yet in the arrangement of his collar and hair
and by his sedate deliberate walk he wished to appear a grown-up man.
But the farther he went and the more his attention was diverted by the
ever-increasing crowds moving toward the Kremlin, the less he remembered
to walk with the sedateness and deliberation of a man. As he approached
the Kremlin he even began to avoid being crushed and resolutely stuck
out his elbows in a menacing way. But within the Trinity Gateway he
was so pressed to the wall by people who probably were unaware of the
patriotic intentions with which he had come that in spite of all his
determination he had to give in, and stop while carriages passed in,
rumbling beneath the archway. Beside Petya stood a peasant woman, a
footman, two tradesmen, and a discharged soldier. After standing some
time in the gateway, Petya tried to move forward in front of the others
without waiting for all the carriages to pass, and he began resolutely
working his way with his elbows, but the woman just in front of him, who
was the first against whom he directed his efforts, angrily shouted at
him:

"What are you shoving for, young lordling? Don't you see we're all
standing still? Then why push?"

"Anybody can shove," said the footman, and also began working his elbows
to such effect that he pushed Petya into a very filthy corner of the
gateway.

Petya wiped his perspiring face with his hands and pulled up the damp
collar which he had arranged so well at home to seem like a man's.

He felt that he no longer looked presentable, and feared that if he were
now to approach the gentlemen-in-waiting in that plight he would not be
admitted to the Emperor. But it was impossible to smarten oneself up
or move to another place, because of the crowd. One of the generals who
drove past was an acquaintance of the Rostovs', and Petya thought of
asking his help, but came to the conclusion that that would not be a
manly thing to do. When the carriages had all passed in, the crowd,
carrying Petya with it, streamed forward into the Kremlin Square which
was already full of people. There were people not only in the square,
but everywhere--on the slopes and on the roofs. As soon as Petya found
himself in the square he clearly heard the sound of bells and the joyous
voices of the crowd that filled the whole Kremlin.

For a while the crowd was less dense, but suddenly all heads were bared,
and everyone rushed forward in one direction. Petya was being pressed so
that he could scarcely breathe, and everybody shouted, "Hurrah! hurrah!
hurrah!" Petya stood on tiptoe and pushed and pinched, but could see
nothing except the people about him.

All the faces bore the same expression of excitement and enthusiasm. A
tradesman's wife standing beside Petya sobbed, and the tears ran down
her cheeks.

"Father! Angel! Dear one!" she kept repeating, wiping away her tears
with her fingers.

"Hurrah!" was heard on all sides.

For a moment the crowd stood still, but then it made another rush
forward.

Quite beside himself, Petya, clinching his teeth and rolling his eyes
ferociously, pushed forward, elbowing his way and shouting "hurrah!" as
if he were prepared that instant to kill himself and everyone else, but
on both sides of him other people with similarly ferocious faces pushed
forward and everybody shouted "hurrah!"

"So this is what the Emperor is!" thought Petya. "No, I can't petition
him myself--that would be too bold." But in spite of this he continued
to struggle desperately forward, and from between the backs of those
in front he caught glimpses of an open space with a strip of red cloth
spread out on it; but just then the crowd swayed back--the police
in front were pushing back those who had pressed too close to the
procession: the Emperor was passing from the palace to the Cathedral of
the Assumption--and Petya unexpectedly received such a blow on his side
and ribs and was squeezed so hard that suddenly everything grew dim
before his eyes and he lost consciousness. When he came to himself, a
man of clerical appearance with a tuft of gray hair at the back of his
head and wearing a shabby blue cassock--probably a church clerk and
chanter--was holding him under the arm with one hand while warding off
the pressure of the crowd with the other.

"You've crushed the young gentleman!" said the clerk. "What are you up
to? Gently!... They've crushed him, crushed him!"

The Emperor entered the Cathedral of the Assumption. The crowd spread
out again more evenly, and the clerk led Petya--pale and breathless--to
the Tsar-cannon. Several people were sorry for Petya, and suddenly a
crowd turned toward him and pressed round him. Those who stood nearest
him attended to him, unbuttoned his coat, seated him on the raised
platform of the cannon, and reproached those others (whoever they might
be) who had crushed him.

"One might easily get killed that way! What do they mean by it? Killing
people! Poor dear, he's as white as a sheet!"--various voices were heard
saying.

Petya soon came to himself, the color returned to his face, the pain had
passed, and at the cost of that temporary unpleasantness he had obtained
a place by the cannon from where he hoped to see the Emperor who
would be returning that way. Petya no longer thought of presenting his
petition. If he could only see the Emperor he would be happy!

While the service was proceeding in the Cathedral of the Assumption--it
was a combined service of prayer on the occasion of the Emperor's
arrival and of thanksgiving for the conclusion of peace with the
Turks--the crowd outside spread out and hawkers appeared, selling kvas,
gingerbread, and poppyseed sweets (of which Petya was particularly
fond), and ordinary conversation could again be heard. A tradesman's
wife was showing a rent in her shawl and telling how much the shawl had
cost; another was saying that all silk goods had now got dear. The clerk
who had rescued Petya was talking to a functionary about the priests who
were officiating that day with the bishop. The clerk several times used
the word "plenary" (of the service), a word Petya did not understand.
Two young citizens were joking with some serf girls who were cracking
nuts. All these conversations, especially the joking with the girls,
were such as might have had a particular charm for Petya at his age, but
they did not interest him now. He sat on his elevation--the pedestal of
the cannon--still agitated as before by the thought of the Emperor and
by his love for him. The feeling of pain and fear he had experienced
when he was being crushed, together with that of rapture, still further
intensified his sense of the importance of the occasion.

Suddenly the sound of a firing of cannon was heard from the embankment,
to celebrate the signing of peace with the Turks, and the crowd rushed
impetuously toward the embankment to watch the firing. Petya too would
have run there, but the clerk who had taken the young gentleman under
his protection stopped him. The firing was still proceeding when
officers, generals, and gentlemen-in-waiting came running out of the
cathedral, and after them others in a more leisurely manner: caps were
again raised, and those who had run to look at the cannon ran back
again. At last four men in uniforms and sashes emerged from the
cathedral doors. "Hurrah! hurrah!" shouted the crowd again.

"Which is he? Which?" asked Petya in a tearful voice, of those around
him, but no one answered him, everybody was too excited; and Petya,
fixing on one of those four men, whom he could not clearly see for the
tears of joy that filled his eyes, concentrated all his enthusiasm
on him--though it happened not to be the Emperor--frantically shouted
"Hurrah!" and resolved that tomorrow, come what might, he would join the
army.

The crowd ran after the Emperor, followed him to the palace, and began
to disperse. It was already late, and Petya had not eaten anything and
was drenched with perspiration, yet he did not go home but stood with
that diminishing, but still considerable, crowd before the palace while
the Emperor dined--looking in at the palace windows, expecting he knew
not what, and envying alike the notables he saw arriving at the entrance
to dine with the Emperor and the court footmen who served at table,
glimpses of whom could be seen through the windows.

While the Emperor was dining, Valuev, looking out of the window, said:

"The people are still hoping to see Your Majesty again."

The dinner was nearly over, and the Emperor, munching a biscuit, rose
and went out onto the balcony. The people, with Petya among them, rushed
toward the balcony.

"Angel! Dear one! Hurrah! Father!..." cried the crowd, and Petya with
it, and again the women and men of weaker mold, Petya among them, wept
with joy.

A largish piece of the biscuit the Emperor was holding in his hand broke
off, fell on the balcony parapet, and then to the ground. A coachman in
a jerkin, who stood nearest, sprang forward and snatched it up. Several
people in the crowd rushed at the coachman. Seeing this the Emperor had
a plateful of biscuits brought him and began throwing them down from
the balcony. Petya's eyes grew bloodshot, and still more excited by the
danger of being crushed, he rushed at the biscuits. He did not know why,
but he had to have a biscuit from the Tsar's hand and he felt that he
must not give way. He sprang forward and upset an old woman who was
catching at a biscuit; the old woman did not consider herself defeated
though she was lying on the ground--she grabbed at some biscuits but
her hand did not reach them. Petya pushed her hand away with his knee,
seized a biscuit, and as if fearing to be too late, again shouted
"Hurrah!" with a voice already hoarse.

The Emperor went in, and after that the greater part of the crowd began
to disperse.

"There! I said if only we waited--and so it was!" was being joyfully
said by various people.

Happy as Petya was, he felt sad at having to go home knowing that all
the enjoyment of that day was over. He did not go straight home from
the Kremlin, but called on his friend Obolenski, who was fifteen and was
also entering the regiment. On returning home Petya announced resolutely
and firmly that if he was not allowed to enter the service he would
run away. And next day, Count Ilya Rostov--though he had not yet quite
yielded--went to inquire how he could arrange for Petya to serve where
there would be least danger.





CHAPTER XXII


Two days later, on the fifteenth of July, an immense number of carriages
were standing outside the Sloboda Palace.

The great halls were full. In the first were the nobility and gentry in
their uniforms, in the second bearded merchants in full-skirted coats
of blue cloth and wearing medals. In the noblemen's hall there was
an incessant movement and buzz of voices. The chief magnates sat on
high-backed chairs at a large table under the portrait of the Emperor,
but most of the gentry were strolling about the room.

All these nobles, whom Pierre met every day at the Club or in their own
houses, were in uniform--some in that of Catherine's day, others in that
of Emperor Paul, others again in the new uniforms of Alexander's time or
the ordinary uniform of the nobility, and the general characteristic
of being in uniform imparted something strange and fantastic to these
diverse and familiar personalities, both old and young. The old men,
dim-eyed, toothless, bald, sallow, and bloated, or gaunt and wrinkled,
were especially striking. For the most part they sat quietly in their
places and were silent, or, if they walked about and talked, attached
themselves to someone younger. On all these faces, as on the faces
of the crowd Petya had seen in the Square, there was a striking
contradiction: the general expectation of a solemn event, and at the
same time the everyday interests in a boston card party, Peter the cook,
Zinaida Dmitrievna's health, and so on.

Pierre was there too, buttoned up since early morning in a nobleman's
uniform that had become too tight for him. He was agitated;
this extraordinary gathering not only of nobles but also of the
merchant-class--les etats generaux (States-General)--evoked in him
a whole series of ideas he had long laid aside but which were deeply
graven in his soul: thoughts of the Contrat social and the French
Revolution. The words that had struck him in the Emperor's appeal--that
the sovereign was coming to the capital for consultation with his
people--strengthened this idea. And imagining that in this direction
something important which he had long awaited was drawing near, he
strolled about watching and listening to conversations, but nowhere
finding any confirmation of the ideas that occupied him.

The Emperor's manifesto was read, evoking enthusiasm, and then all moved
about discussing it. Besides the ordinary topics of conversation, Pierre
heard questions of where the marshals of the nobility were to stand when
the Emperor entered, when a ball should be given in the Emperor's
honor, whether they should group themselves by districts or by whole
provinces... and so on; but as soon as the war was touched on, or
what the nobility had been convened for, the talk became undecided and
indefinite. Then all preferred listening to speaking.

A middle-aged man, handsome and virile, in the uniform of a retired
naval officer, was speaking in one of the rooms, and a small crowd was
pressing round him. Pierre went up to the circle that had formed round
the speaker and listened. Count Ilya Rostov, in a military uniform of
Catherine's time, was sauntering with a pleasant smile among the crowd,
with all of whom he was acquainted. He too approached that group and
listened with a kindly smile and nods of approval, as he always did,
to what the speaker was saying. The retired naval man was speaking very
boldly, as was evident from the expression on the faces of the listeners
and from the fact that some people Pierre knew as the meekest and
quietest of men walked away disapprovingly or expressed disagreement
with him. Pierre pushed his way into the middle of the group, listened,
and convinced himself that the man was indeed a liberal, but of views
quite different from his own. The naval officer spoke in a particularly
sonorous, musical, and aristocratic baritone voice, pleasantly
swallowing his r's and generally slurring his consonants: the voice of
a man calling out to his servant, "Heah! Bwing me my pipe!" It was
indicative of dissipation and the exercise of authority.

"What if the Smolensk people have offahd to waise militia for the
Empewah? Ah we to take Smolensk as our patte'n? If the noble awistocwacy
of the pwovince of Moscow thinks fit, it can show its loyalty to our
sov'weign the Empewah in other ways. Have we fo'gotten the waising of
the militia in the yeah 'seven? All that did was to enwich the pwiests'
sons and thieves and wobbahs...."

Count Ilya Rostov smiled blandly and nodded approval.

"And was our militia of any use to the Empia? Not at all! It only wuined
our farming! Bettah have another conscwiption... o' ou' men will wetu'n
neithah soldiers no' peasants, and we'll get only depwavity fwom them.
The nobility don't gwudge theah lives--evewy one of us will go and bwing
in more wecwuits, and the sov'weign" (that was the way he referred to
the Emperor) "need only say the word and we'll all die fo' him!" added
the orator with animation.

Count Rostov's mouth watered with pleasure and he nudged Pierre, but
Pierre wanted to speak himself. He pushed forward, feeling stirred,
but not yet sure what stirred him or what he would say. Scarcely had he
opened his mouth when one of the senators, a man without a tooth in his
head, with a shrewd though angry expression, standing near the first
speaker, interrupted him. Evidently accustomed to managing debates and
to maintaining an argument, he began in low but distinct tones:

"I imagine, sir," said he, mumbling with his toothless mouth, "that we
have been summoned here not to discuss whether it's best for the empire
at the present moment to adopt conscription or to call out the militia.
We have been summoned to reply to the appeal with which our sovereign
the Emperor has honored us. But to judge what is best--conscription or
the militia--we can leave to the supreme authority...."

Pierre suddenly saw an outlet for his excitement. He hardened his heart
against the senator who was introducing this set and narrow attitude
into the deliberations of the nobility. Pierre stepped forward and
interrupted him. He himself did not yet know what he would say, but he
began to speak eagerly, occasionally lapsing into French or expressing
himself in bookish Russian.

"Excuse me, your excellency," he began. (He was well acquainted with
the senator, but thought it necessary on this occasion to address him
formally.) "Though I don't agree with the gentleman..." (he hesitated:
he wished to say, "Mon tres honorable preopinant"--"My very honorable
opponent") "with the gentleman... whom I have not the honor of knowing,
I suppose that the nobility have been summoned not merely to express
their sympathy and enthusiasm but also to consider the means by which
we can assist our Fatherland! I imagine," he went on, warming to his
subject, "that the Emperor himself would not be satisfied to find in us
merely owners of serfs whom we are willing to devote to his service,
and chair a canon * we are ready to make of ourselves--and not to obtain
from us any co-co-counsel."


    * "Food for cannon."


Many persons withdrew from the circle, noticing the senator's sarcastic
smile and the freedom of Pierre's remarks. Only Count Rostov was pleased
with them as he had been pleased with those of the naval officer, the
senator, and in general with whatever speech he had last heard.

"I think that before discussing these questions," Pierre continued, "we
should ask the Emperor--most respectfully ask His Majesty--to let us
know the number of our troops and the position in which our army and our
forces now are, and then..."

But scarcely had Pierre uttered these words before he was attacked from
three sides. The most vigorous attack came from an old acquaintance,
a boston player who had always been well disposed toward him, Stepan
Stepanovich Adraksin. Adraksin was in uniform, and whether as a result
of the uniform or from some other cause Pierre saw before him quite a
different man. With a sudden expression of malevolence on his aged face,
Adraksin shouted at Pierre:

"In the first place, I tell you we have no right to question the Emperor
about that, and secondly, if the Russian nobility had that right, the
Emperor could not answer such a question. The troops are moved
according to the enemy's movements and the number of men increases and
decreases..."

Another voice, that of a nobleman of medium height and about forty years
of age, whom Pierre had formerly met at the gypsies' and knew as a bad
cardplayer, and who, also transformed by his uniform, came up to Pierre,
interrupted Adraksin.

"Yes, and this is not a time for discussing," he continued, "but for
acting: there is war in Russia! The enemy is advancing to destroy
Russia, to desecrate the tombs of our fathers, to carry off our wives
and children." The nobleman smote his breast. "We will all arise, every
one of us will go, for our father the Tsar!" he shouted, rolling his
bloodshot eyes. Several approving voices were heard in the crowd. "We
are Russians and will not grudge our blood in defense of our faith, the
throne, and the Fatherland! We must cease raving if we are sons of
our Fatherland! We will show Europe how Russia rises to the defense of
Russia!"

Pierre wished to reply, but could not get in a word. He felt that his
words, apart from what meaning they conveyed, were less audible than the
sound of his opponent's voice.

Count Rostov at the back of the crowd was expressing approval; several
persons, briskly turning a shoulder to the orator at the end of a
phrase, said:

"That's right, quite right! Just so!"

Pierre wished to say that he was ready to sacrifice his money, his
serfs, or himself, only one ought to know the state of affairs in
order to be able to improve it, but he was unable to speak. Many voices
shouted and talked at the same time, so that Count Rostov had not time
to signify his approval of them all, and the group increased, dispersed,
re-formed, and then moved with a hum of talk into the largest hall and
to the big table. Not only was Pierre's attempt to speak unsuccessful,
but he was rudely interrupted, pushed aside, and people turned away
from him as from a common enemy. This happened not because they were
displeased by the substance of his speech, which had even been forgotten
after the many subsequent speeches, but to animate it the crowd needed a
tangible object to love and a tangible object to hate. Pierre became the
latter. Many other orators spoke after the excited nobleman, and all in
the same tone. Many spoke eloquently and with originality.

Glinka, the editor of the Russian Messenger, who was recognized (cries
of "author! author!" were heard in the crowd), said that "hell must be
repulsed by hell," and that he had seen a child smiling at lightning
flashes and thunderclaps, but "we will not be that child."

"Yes, yes, at thunderclaps!" was repeated approvingly in the back rows
of the crowd.

The crowd drew up to the large table, at which sat gray-haired or bald
seventy-year-old magnates, uniformed and besashed almost all of whom
Pierre had seen in their own homes with their buffoons, or playing
boston at the clubs. With an incessant hum of voices the crowd advanced
to the table. Pressed by the throng against the high backs of the
chairs, the orators spoke one after another and sometimes two together.
Those standing behind noticed what a speaker omitted to say and hastened
to supply it. Others in that heat and crush racked their brains to find
some thought and hastened to utter it. The old magnates, whom Pierre
knew, sat and turned to look first at one and then at another, and their
faces for the most part only expressed the fact that they found it very
hot. Pierre, however, felt excited, and the general desire to show that
they were ready to go to all lengths--which found expression in the
tones and looks more than in the substance of the speeches--infected him
too. He did not renounce his opinions, but felt himself in some way to
blame and wished to justify himself.

"I only said that it would be more to the purpose to make sacrifices
when we know what is needed!" said he, trying to be heard above the
other voices.

One of the old men nearest to him looked round, but his attention was
immediately diverted by an exclamation at the other side of the table.

"Yes, Moscow will be surrendered! She will be our expiation!" shouted
one man.

"He is the enemy of mankind!" cried another. "Allow me to speak...."
"Gentlemen, you are crushing me!..."





CHAPTER XXIII


At that moment Count Rostopchin with his protruding chin and alert eyes,
wearing the uniform of a general with sash over his shoulder, entered
the room, stepping briskly to the front of the crowd of gentry.

"Our sovereign the Emperor will be here in a moment," said Rostopchin.
"I am straight from the palace. Seeing the position we are in, I think
there is little need for discussion. The Emperor has deigned to summon
us and the merchants. Millions will pour forth from there"--he pointed
to the merchants' hall--"but our business is to supply men and not spare
ourselves... That is the least we can do!"

A conference took place confined to the magnates sitting at the table.
The whole consultation passed more than quietly. After all the preceding
noise the sound of their old voices saying one after another, "I
agree," or for variety, "I too am of that opinion," and so on had even a
mournful effect.

The secretary was told to write down the resolution of the Moscow
nobility and gentry, that they would furnish ten men, fully equipped,
out of every thousand serfs, as the Smolensk gentry had done. Their
chairs made a scraping noise as the gentlemen who had conferred rose
with apparent relief, and began walking up and down, arm in arm, to
stretch their legs and converse in couples.

"The Emperor! The Emperor!" a sudden cry resounded through the halls and
the whole throng hurried to the entrance.

The Emperor entered the hall through a broad path between two lines of
nobles. Every face expressed respectful, awe-struck curiosity. Pierre
stood rather far off and could not hear all that the Emperor said. From
what he did hear he understood that the Emperor spoke of the danger
threatening the empire and of the hopes he placed on the Moscow
nobility. He was answered by a voice which informed him of the
resolution just arrived at.

"Gentlemen!" said the Emperor with a quivering voice.

There was a rustling among the crowd and it again subsided, so that
Pierre distinctly heard the pleasantly human voice of the Emperor saying
with emotion:

"I never doubted the devotion of the Russian nobles, but today it has
surpassed my expectations. I thank you in the name of the Fatherland!
Gentlemen, let us act! Time is most precious..."

The Emperor ceased speaking, the crowd began pressing round him, and
rapturous exclamations were heard from all sides.

"Yes, most precious... a royal word," said Count Rostov, with a sob. He
stood at the back, and, though he had heard hardly anything, understood
everything in his own way.

From the hall of the nobility the Emperor went to that of the merchants.
There he remained about ten minutes. Pierre was among those who saw him
come out from the merchants' hall with tears of emotion in his eyes.
As became known later, he had scarcely begun to address the merchants
before tears gushed from his eyes and he concluded in a trembling
voice. When Pierre saw the Emperor he was coming out accompanied by two
merchants, one of whom Pierre knew, a fat otkupshchik. The other was
the mayor, a man with a thin sallow face and narrow beard. Both were
weeping. Tears filled the thin man's eyes, and the fat otkupshchik
sobbed outright like a child and kept repeating:

"Our lives and property--take them, Your Majesty!"

Pierre's one feeling at the moment was a desire to show that he was
ready to go all lengths and was prepared to sacrifice everything. He now
felt ashamed of his speech with its constitutional tendency and sought
an opportunity of effacing it. Having heard that Count Mamonov was
furnishing a regiment, Bezukhov at once informed Rostopchin that he
would give a thousand men and their maintenance.

Old Rostov could not tell his wife of what had passed without tears, and
at once consented to Petya's request and went himself to enter his name.

Next day the Emperor left Moscow. The assembled nobles all took off
their uniforms and settled down again in their homes and clubs, and not
without some groans gave orders to their stewards about the enrollment,
feeling amazed themselves at what they had done.





BOOK TEN: 1812





CHAPTER I


Napoleon began the war with Russia because he could not resist going
to Dresden, could not help having his head turned by the homage he
received, could not help donning a Polish uniform and yielding to the
stimulating influence of a June morning, and could not refrain from
bursts of anger in the presence of Kurakin and then of Balashev.

Alexander refused negotiations because he felt himself to be personally
insulted. Barclay de Tolly tried to command the army in the best
way, because he wished to fulfill his duty and earn fame as a great
commander. Rostov charged the French because he could not restrain
his wish for a gallop across a level field; and in the same way the
innumerable people who took part in the war acted in accord with their
personal characteristics, habits, circumstances, and aims. They were
moved by fear or vanity, rejoiced or were indignant, reasoned, imagining
that they knew what they were doing and did it of their own free will,
but they all were involuntary tools of history, carrying on a work
concealed from them but comprehensible to us. Such is the inevitable
fate of men of action, and the higher they stand in the social hierarchy
the less are they free.

The actors of 1812 have long since left the stage, their personal
interests have vanished leaving no trace, and nothing remains of that
time but its historic results.

Providence compelled all these men, striving to attain personal aims, to
further the accomplishment of a stupendous result no one of them at all
expected--neither Napoleon, nor Alexander, nor still less any of those
who did the actual fighting.

The cause of the destruction of the French army in 1812 is clear to us
now. No one will deny that that cause was, on the one hand, its advance
into the heart of Russia late in the season without any preparation for
a winter campaign and, on the other, the character given to the war
by the burning of Russian towns and the hatred of the foe this aroused
among the Russian people. But no one at the time foresaw (what now seems
so evident) that this was the only way an army of eight hundred thousand
men--the best in the world and led by the best general--could be
destroyed in conflict with a raw army of half its numerical strength,
and led by inexperienced commanders as the Russian army was. Not only
did no one see this, but on the Russian side every effort was made to
hinder the only thing that could save Russia, while on the French side,
despite Napoleon's experience and so-called military genius, every
effort was directed to pushing on to Moscow at the end of the summer,
that is, to doing the very thing that was bound to lead to destruction.

In historical works on the year 1812 French writers are very fond of
saying that Napoleon felt the danger of extending his line, that he
sought a battle and that his marshals advised him to stop at Smolensk,
and of making similar statements to show that the danger of the campaign
was even then understood. Russian authors are still fonder of telling
us that from the commencement of the campaign a Scythian war plan was
adopted to lure Napoleon into the depths of Russia, and this plan some
of them attribute to Pfuel, others to a certain Frenchman, others
to Toll, and others again to Alexander himself--pointing to notes,
projects, and letters which contain hints of such a line of action.
But all these hints at what happened, both from the French side and the
Russian, are advanced only because they fit in with the event. Had that
event not occurred these hints would have been forgotten, as we have
forgotten the thousands and millions of hints and expectations to the
contrary which were current then but have now been forgotten because
the event falsified them. There are always so many conjectures as to the
issue of any event that however it may end there will always be people
to say: "I said then that it would be so," quite forgetting that amid
their innumerable conjectures many were to quite the contrary effect.

Conjectures as to Napoleon's awareness of the danger of extending his
line, and (on the Russian side) as to luring the enemy into the depths
of Russia, are evidently of that kind, and only by much straining can
historians attribute such conceptions to Napoleon and his marshals,
or such plans to the Russian commanders. All the facts are in flat
contradiction to such conjectures. During the whole period of the war
not only was there no wish on the Russian side to draw the French
into the heart of the country, but from their first entry into Russia
everything was done to stop them. And not only was Napoleon not afraid
to extend his line, but he welcomed every step forward as a triumph and
did not seek battle as eagerly as in former campaigns, but very lazily.

At the very beginning of the war our armies were divided, and our sole
aim was to unite them, though uniting the armies was no advantage if we
meant to retire and lure the enemy into the depths of the country. Our
Emperor joined the army to encourage it to defend every inch of Russian
soil and not to retreat. The enormous Drissa camp was formed on Pfuel's
plan, and there was no intention of retiring farther. The Emperor
reproached the commanders in chief for every step they retired. He could
not bear the idea of letting the enemy even reach Smolensk, still less
could he contemplate the burning of Moscow, and when our armies did
unite he was displeased that Smolensk was abandoned and burned without a
general engagement having been fought under its walls.

So thought the Emperor, and the Russian commanders and people were still
more provoked at the thought that our forces were retreating into the
depths of the country.

Napoleon having cut our armies apart advanced far into the country and
missed several chances of forcing an engagement. In August he was at
Smolensk and thought only of how to advance farther, though as we now
see that advance was evidently ruinous to him.

The facts clearly show that Napoleon did not foresee the danger of the
advance on Moscow, nor did Alexander and the Russian commanders then
think of luring Napoleon on, but quite the contrary. The luring of
Napoleon into the depths of the country was not the result of any plan,
for no one believed it to be possible; it resulted from a most complex
interplay of intrigues, aims, and wishes among those who took part in
the war and had no perception whatever of the inevitable, or of the one
way of saving Russia. Everything came about fortuitously. The armies
were divided at the commencement of the campaign. We tried to unite
them, with the evident intention of giving battle and checking the
enemy's advance, and by this effort to unite them while avoiding battle
with a much stronger enemy, and necessarily withdrawing the armies at
an acute angle--we led the French on to Smolensk. But we withdrew at an
acute angle not only because the French advanced between our two armies;
the angle became still more acute and we withdrew still farther, because
Barclay de Tolly was an unpopular foreigner disliked by Bagration (who
would come under his command), and Bagration--being in command of the
second army--tried to postpone joining up and coming under Barclay's
command as long as he could. Bagration was slow in effecting the
junction--though that was the chief aim of all at headquarters--because,
as he alleged, he exposed his army to danger on this march, and it was
best for him to retire more to the left and more to the south, worrying
the enemy from flank and rear and securing from the Ukraine recruits for
his army; and it looks as if he planned this in order not to come under
the command of the detested foreigner Barclay, whose rank was inferior
to his own.

The Emperor was with the army to encourage it, but his presence and
ignorance of what steps to take, and the enormous number of advisers and
plans, destroyed the first army's energy and it retired.

The intention was to make a stand at the Drissa camp, but Paulucci,
aiming at becoming commander in chief, unexpectedly employed his energy
to influence Alexander, and Pfuel's whole plan was abandoned and the
command entrusted to Barclay. But as Barclay did not inspire confidence
his power was limited. The armies were divided, there was no unity of
command, and Barclay was unpopular; but from this confusion, division,
and the unpopularity of the foreign commander in chief, there resulted
on the one hand indecision and the avoidance of a battle (which we could
not have refrained from had the armies been united and had someone else,
instead of Barclay, been in command) and on the other an ever-increasing
indignation against the foreigners and an increase in patriotic zeal.

At last the Emperor left the army, and as the most convenient and indeed
the only pretext for his departure it was decided that it was necessary
for him to inspire the people in the capitals and arouse the nation in
general to a patriotic war. And by this visit of the Emperor to Moscow
the strength of the Russian army was trebled.

He left in order not to obstruct the commander in chief's undivided
control of the army, and hoping that more decisive action would then
be taken, but the command of the armies became still more confused and
enfeebled. Bennigsen, the Tsarevich, and a swarm of adjutants general
remained with the army to keep the commander in chief under observation
and arouse his energy, and Barclay, feeling less free than ever under
the observation of all these "eyes of the Emperor," became still more
cautious of undertaking any decisive action and avoided giving battle.

Barclay stood for caution. The Tsarevich hinted at treachery and
demanded a general engagement. Lubomirski, Bronnitski, Wlocki, and the
others of that group stirred up so much trouble that Barclay, under
pretext of sending papers to the Emperor, dispatched these Polish
adjutants general to Petersburg and plunged into an open struggle with
Bennigsen and the Tsarevich.

At Smolensk the armies at last reunited, much as Bagration disliked it.

Bagration drove up in a carriage to the house occupied by Barclay.
Barclay donned his sash and came out to meet and report to his senior
officer Bagration.

Despite his seniority in rank Bagration, in this contest of magnanimity,
took his orders from Barclay, but, having submitted, agreed with him
less than ever. By the Emperor's orders Bagration reported direct to
him. He wrote to Arakcheev, the Emperor's confidant: "It must be as
my sovereign pleases, but I cannot work with the Minister (meaning
Barclay). For God's sake send me somewhere else if only in command of
a regiment. I cannot stand it here. Headquarters are so full of Germans
that a Russian cannot exist and there is no sense in anything. I thought
I was really serving my sovereign and the Fatherland, but it turns out
that I am serving Barclay. I confess I do not want to."

The swarm of Bronnitskis and Wintzingerodes and their like still further
embittered the relations between the commanders in chief, and even
less unity resulted. Preparations were made to fight the French before
Smolensk. A general was sent to survey the position. This general,
hating Barclay, rode to visit a friend of his own, a corps commander,
and, having spent the day with him, returned to Barclay and condemned,
as unsuitable from every point of view, the battleground he had not
seen.

While disputes and intrigues were going on about the future field of
battle, and while we were looking for the French--having lost touch with
them--the French stumbled upon Neverovski's division and reached the
walls of Smolensk.

It was necessary to fight an unexpected battle at Smolensk to save our
lines of communication. The battle was fought and thousands were killed
on both sides.

Smolensk was abandoned contrary to the wishes of the Emperor and of the
whole people. But Smolensk was burned by its own inhabitants-who had
been misled by their governor. And these ruined inhabitants, setting
an example to other Russians, went to Moscow thinking only of their own
losses but kindling hatred of the foe. Napoleon advanced farther and we
retired, thus arriving at the very result which caused his destruction.





CHAPTER II


The day after his son had left, Prince Nicholas sent for Princess Mary
to come to his study.

"Well? Are you satisfied now?" said he. "You've made me quarrel with my
son! Satisfied, are you? That's all you wanted! Satisfied?... It hurts
me, it hurts. I'm old and weak and this is what you wanted. Well then,
gloat over it! Gloat over it!"

After that Princess Mary did not see her father for a whole week. He was
ill and did not leave his study.

Princess Mary noticed to her surprise that during this illness the
old prince not only excluded her from his room, but did not admit
Mademoiselle Bourienne either. Tikhon alone attended him.

At the end of the week the prince reappeared and resumed his former way
of life, devoting himself with special activity to building operations
and the arrangement of the gardens and completely breaking off his
relations with Mademoiselle Bourienne. His looks and cold tone to his
daughter seemed to say: "There, you see? You plotted against me, you
lied to Prince Andrew about my relations with that Frenchwoman and made
me quarrel with him, but you see I need neither her nor you!"

Princess Mary spent half of every day with little Nicholas, watching
his lessons, teaching him Russian and music herself, and talking to
Dessalles; the rest of the day she spent over her books, with her old
nurse, or with "God's folk" who sometimes came by the back door to see
her.

Of the war Princess Mary thought as women do think about wars. She
feared for her brother who was in it, was horrified by and amazed at
the strange cruelty that impels men to kill one another, but she did not
understand the significance of this war, which seemed to her like all
previous wars. She did not realize the significance of this war, though
Dessalles with whom she constantly conversed was passionately interested
in its progress and tried to explain his own conception of it to her,
and though the "God's folk" who came to see her reported, in their own
way, the rumors current among the people of an invasion by Antichrist,
and though Julie (now Princess Drubetskaya), who had resumed
correspondence with her, wrote patriotic letters from Moscow.

"I write you in Russian, my good friend," wrote Julie in her Frenchified
Russian, "because I have a detestation for all the French, and the
same for their language which I cannot support to hear spoken.... We in
Moscow are elated by enthusiasm for our adored Emperor.

"My poor husband is enduring pains and hunger in Jewish taverns, but the
news which I have inspires me yet more.

"You heard probably of the heroic exploit of Raevski, embracing his two
sons and saying: 'I will perish with them but we will not be shaken!'
And truly though the enemy was twice stronger than we, we were
unshakable. We pass the time as we can, but in war as in war! The
princesses Aline and Sophie sit whole days with me, and we, unhappy
widows of live men, make beautiful conversations over our charpie, only
you, my friend, are missing..." and so on.

The chief reason Princess Mary did not realize the full significance of
this war was that the old prince never spoke of it, did not recognize
it, and laughed at Dessalles when he mentioned it at dinner.
The prince's tone was so calm and confident that Princess Mary
unhesitatingly believed him.

All that July the old prince was exceedingly active and even animated.
He planned another garden and began a new building for the domestic
serfs. The only thing that made Princess Mary anxious about him was that
he slept very little and, instead of sleeping in his study as usual,
changed his sleeping place every day. One day he would order his camp
bed to be set up in the glass gallery, another day he remained on the
couch or on the lounge chair in the drawing room and dozed there without
undressing, while--instead of Mademoiselle Bourienne--a serf boy read to
him. Then again he would spend a night in the dining room.

On August 1, a second letter was received from Prince Andrew. In his
first letter which came soon after he had left home, Prince Andrew had
dutifully asked his father's forgiveness for what he had allowed himself
to say and begged to be restored to his favor. To this letter the old
prince had replied affectionately, and from that time had kept the
Frenchwoman at a distance. Prince Andrew's second letter, written near
Vitebsk after the French had occupied that town, gave a brief account of
the whole campaign, enclosed for them a plan he had drawn and forecasts
as to the further progress of the war. In this letter Prince Andrew
pointed out to his father the danger of staying at Bald Hills, so near
the theater of war and on the army's direct line of march, and advised
him to move to Moscow.

At dinner that day, on Dessalles' mentioning that the French were said
to have already entered Vitebsk, the old prince remembered his son's
letter.

"There was a letter from Prince Andrew today," he said to Princess
Mary--"Haven't you read it?"

"No, Father," she replied in a frightened voice.

She could not have read the letter as she did not even know it had
arrived.

"He writes about this war," said the prince, with the ironic smile that
had become habitual to him in speaking of the present war.

"That must be very interesting," said Dessalles. "Prince Andrew is in a
position to know..."

"Oh, very interesting!" said Mademoiselle Bourienne.

"Go and get it for me," said the old prince to Mademoiselle Bourienne.
"You know--under the paperweight on the little table."

Mademoiselle Bourienne jumped up eagerly.

"No, don't!" he exclaimed with a frown. "You go, Michael Ivanovich."

Michael Ivanovich rose and went to the study. But as soon as he had left
the room the old prince, looking uneasily round, threw down his napkin
and went himself.

"They can't do anything... always make some muddle," he muttered.

While he was away Princess Mary, Dessalles, Mademoiselle Bourienne, and
even little Nicholas exchanged looks in silence. The old prince returned
with quick steps, accompanied by Michael Ivanovich, bringing the letter
and a plan. These he put down beside him--not letting anyone read them
at dinner.

On moving to the drawing room he handed the letter to Princess Mary and,
spreading out before him the plan of the new building and fixing his
eyes upon it, told her to read the letter aloud. When she had done so
Princess Mary looked inquiringly at her father. He was examining the
plan, evidently engrossed in his own ideas.

"What do you think of it, Prince?" Dessalles ventured to ask.

"I? I?..." said the prince as if unpleasantly awakened, and not taking
his eyes from the plan of the building.

"Very possibly the theater of war will move so near to us that..."

"Ha ha ha! The theater of war!" said the prince. "I have said and still
say that the theater of war is Poland and the enemy will never get
beyond the Niemen."

Dessalles looked in amazement at the prince, who was talking of the
Niemen when the enemy was already at the Dnieper, but Princess Mary,
forgetting the geographical position of the Niemen, thought that what
her father was saying was correct.

"When the snow melts they'll sink in the Polish swamps. Only they
could fail to see it," the prince continued, evidently thinking of the
campaign of 1807 which seemed to him so recent. "Bennigsen should have
advanced into Prussia sooner, then things would have taken a different
turn..."

"But, Prince," Dessalles began timidly, "the letter mentions
Vitebsk...."

"Ah, the letter? Yes..." replied the prince peevishly. "Yes... yes..."
His face suddenly took on a morose expression. He paused. "Yes, he
writes that the French were beaten at... at... what river is it?"

Dessalles dropped his eyes.

"The prince says nothing about that," he remarked gently.

"Doesn't he? But I didn't invent it myself."

No one spoke for a long time.

"Yes... yes... Well, Michael Ivanovich," he suddenly went on, raising
his head and pointing to the plan of the building, "tell me how you mean
to alter it...."

Michael Ivanovich went up to the plan, and the prince after speaking to
him about the building looked angrily at Princess Mary and Dessalles and
went to his own room.

Princess Mary saw Dessalles' embarrassed and astonished look fixed on
her father, noticed his silence, and was struck by the fact that her
father had forgotten his son's letter on the drawing-room table; but she
was not only afraid to speak of it and ask Dessalles the reason of his
confusion and silence, but was afraid even to think about it.

In the evening Michael Ivanovich, sent by the prince, came to Princess
Mary for Prince Andrew's letter which had been forgotten in the drawing
room. She gave it to him and, unpleasant as it was to her to do so,
ventured to ask him what her father was doing.

"Always busy," replied Michael Ivanovich with a respectfully ironic
smile which caused Princess Mary to turn pale. "He's worrying very much
about the new building. He has been reading a little, but now"--Michael
Ivanovich went on, lowering his voice--"now he's at his desk, busy with
his will, I expect." (One of the prince's favorite occupations of late
had been the preparation of some papers he meant to leave at his death
and which he called his "will.")

"And Alpatych is being sent to Smolensk?" asked Princess Mary.

"Oh, yes, he has been waiting to start for some time."





CHAPTER III


When Michael Ivanovich returned to the study with the letter, the old
prince, with spectacles on and a shade over his eyes, was sitting at his
open bureau with screened candles, holding a paper in his
outstretched hand, and in a somewhat dramatic attitude was reading his
manuscript--his "Remarks" as he termed it--which was to be transmitted
to the Emperor after his death.

When Michael Ivanovich went in there were tears in the prince's eyes
evoked by the memory of the time when the paper he was now reading had
been written. He took the letter from Michael Ivanovich's hand, put it
in his pocket, folded up his papers, and called in Alpatych who had long
been waiting.

The prince had a list of things to be bought in Smolensk and, walking
up and down the room past Alpatych who stood by the door, he gave his
instructions.

"First, notepaper--do you hear? Eight quires, like this sample,
gilt-edged... it must be exactly like the sample. Varnish, sealing wax,
as in Michael Ivanovich's list."

He paced up and down for a while and glanced at his notes.

"Then hand to the governor in person a letter about the deed."

Next, bolts for the doors of the new building were wanted and had to be
of a special shape the prince had himself designed, and a leather case
had to be ordered to keep the "will" in.

The instructions to Alpatych took over two hours and still the prince
did not let him go. He sat down, sank into thought, closed his eyes, and
dozed off. Alpatych made a slight movement.

"Well, go, go! If anything more is wanted I'll send after you."

Alpatych went out. The prince again went to his bureau, glanced into it,
fingered his papers, closed the bureau again, and sat down at the table
to write to the governor.

It was already late when he rose after sealing the letter. He wished
to sleep, but he knew he would not be able to and that most depressing
thoughts came to him in bed. So he called Tikhon and went through the
rooms with him to show him where to set up the bed for that night.

He went about looking at every corner. Every place seemed
unsatisfactory, but worst of all was his customary couch in the study.
That couch was dreadful to him, probably because of the oppressive
thoughts he had had when lying there. It was unsatisfactory everywhere,
but the corner behind the piano in the sitting room was better than
other places: he had never slept there yet.

With the help of a footman Tikhon brought in the bedstead and began
putting it up.

"That's not right! That's not right!" cried the prince, and himself
pushed it a few inches from the corner and then closer in again.

"Well, at last I've finished, now I'll rest," thought the prince, and
let Tikhon undress him.

Frowning with vexation at the effort necessary to divest himself of his
coat and trousers, the prince undressed, sat down heavily on the
bed, and appeared to be meditating as he looked contemptuously at his
withered yellow legs. He was not meditating, but only deferring the
moment of making the effort to lift those legs up and turn over on the
bed. "Ugh, how hard it is! Oh, that this toil might end and you would
release me!" thought he. Pressing his lips together he made that effort
for the twenty-thousandth time and lay down. But hardly had he done so
before he felt the bed rocking backwards and forwards beneath him as if
it were breathing heavily and jolting. This happened to him almost every
night. He opened his eyes as they were closing.

"No peace, damn them!" he muttered, angry he knew not with whom. "Ah
yes, there was something else important, very important, that I was
keeping till I should be in bed. The bolts? No, I told him about them.
No, it was something, something in the drawing room. Princess Mary
talked some nonsense. Dessalles, that fool, said something. Something in
my pocket--can't remember..."

"Tikhon, what did we talk about at dinner?"

"About Prince Michael..."

"Be quiet, quiet!" The prince slapped his hand on the table. "Yes, I
know, Prince Andrew's letter! Princess Mary read it. Dessalles said
something about Vitebsk. Now I'll read it."

He had the letter taken from his pocket and the table--on which stood a
glass of lemonade and a spiral wax candle--moved close to the bed, and
putting on his spectacles he began reading. Only now in the stillness of
the night, reading it by the faint light under the green shade, did he
grasp its meaning for a moment.

"The French at Vitebsk, in four days' march they may be at Smolensk;
perhaps are already there! Tikhon!" Tikhon jumped up. "No, no, I don't
want anything!" he shouted.

He put the letter under the candlestick and closed his eyes. And there
rose before him the Danube at bright noonday: reeds, the Russian
camp, and himself a young general without a wrinkle on his ruddy face,
vigorous and alert, entering Potemkin's gaily colored tent, and a
burning sense of jealousy of "the favorite" agitated him now as strongly
as it had done then. He recalled all the words spoken at that
first meeting with Potemkin. And he saw before him a plump, rather
sallow-faced, short, stout woman, the Empress Mother, with her smile
and her words at her first gracious reception of him, and then that same
face on the catafalque, and the encounter he had with Zubov over her
coffin about his right to kiss her hand.

"Oh, quicker, quicker! To get back to that time and have done with all
the present! Quicker, quicker--and that they should leave me in peace!"





CHAPTER IV


Bald Hills, Prince Nicholas Bolkonski's estate, lay forty miles east
from Smolensk and two miles from the main road to Moscow.

The same evening that the prince gave his instructions to Alpatych,
Dessalles, having asked to see Princess Mary, told her that, as the
prince was not very well and was taking no steps to secure his safety,
though from Prince Andrew's letter it was evident that to remain at Bald
Hills might be dangerous, he respectfully advised her to send a letter
by Alpatych to the Provincial Governor at Smolensk, asking him to let
her know the state of affairs and the extent of the danger to which
Bald Hills was exposed. Dessalles wrote this letter to the Governor
for Princess Mary, she signed it, and it was given to Alpatych with
instructions to hand it to the Governor and to come back as quickly as
possible if there was danger.

Having received all his orders Alpatych, wearing a white beaver hat--a
present from the prince--and carrying a stick as the prince did,
went out accompanied by his family. Three well-fed roans stood ready
harnessed to a small conveyance with a leather hood.

The larger bell was muffled and the little bells on the harness stuffed
with paper. The prince allowed no one at Bald Hills to drive with
ringing bells; but on a long journey Alpatych liked to have them. His
satellites--the senior clerk, a countinghouse clerk, a scullery maid,
a cook, two old women, a little pageboy, the coachman, and various
domestic serfs--were seeing him off.

His daughter placed chintz-covered down cushions for him to sit on and
behind his back. His old sister-in-law popped in a small bundle, and one
of the coachmen helped him into the vehicle.

"There! There! Women's fuss! Women, women!" said Alpatych, puffing and
speaking rapidly just as the prince did, and he climbed into the trap.

After giving the clerk orders about the work to be done, Alpatych, not
trying to imitate the prince now, lifted the hat from his bald head and
crossed himself three times.

"If there is anything... come back, Yakov Alpatych! For Christ's sake
think of us!" cried his wife, referring to the rumors of war and the
enemy.

"Women, women! Women's fuss!" muttered Alpatych to himself and started
on his journey, looking round at the fields of yellow rye and the
still-green, thickly growing oats, and at other quite black fields just
being plowed a second time.

As he went along he looked with pleasure at the year's splendid crop
of corn, scrutinized the strips of ryefield which here and there were
already being reaped, made his calculations as to the sowing and the
harvest, and asked himself whether he had not forgotten any of the
prince's orders.

Having baited the horses twice on the way, he arrived at the town toward
evening on the fourth of August.

Alpatych kept meeting and overtaking baggage trains and troops on the
road. As he approached Smolensk he heard the sounds of distant firing,
but these did not impress him. What struck him most was the sight of a
splendid field of oats in which a camp had been pitched and which
was being mown down by the soldiers, evidently for fodder. This fact
impressed Alpatych, but in thinking about his own business he soon
forgot it.

All the interests of his life for more than thirty years had been
bounded by the will of the prince, and he never went beyond that limit.
Everything not connected with the execution of the prince's orders did
not interest and did not even exist for Alpatych.

On reaching Smolensk on the evening of the fourth of August he put up
in the Gachina suburb across the Dnieper, at the inn kept by Ferapontov,
where he had been in the habit of putting up for the last thirty years.
Some thirty years ago Ferapontov, by Alpatych's advice, had bought a
wood from the prince, had begun to trade, and now had a house, an
inn, and a corn dealer's shop in that province. He was a stout, dark,
red-faced peasant in the forties, with thick lips, a broad knob of a
nose, similar knobs over his black frowning brows, and a round belly.

Wearing a waistcoat over his cotton shirt, Ferapontov was standing
before his shop which opened onto the street. On seeing Alpatych he went
up to him.

"You're welcome, Yakov Alpatych. Folks are leaving the town, but you
have come to it," said he.

"Why are they leaving the town?" asked Alpatych.

"That's what I say. Folks are foolish! Always afraid of the French."

"Women's fuss, women's fuss!" said Alpatych.

"Just what I think, Yakov Alpatych. What I say is: orders have been
given not to let them in, so that must be right. And the peasants are
asking three rubles for carting--it isn't Christian!"

Yakov Alpatych heard without heeding. He asked for a samovar and for hay
for his horses, and when he had had his tea he went to bed.

All night long troops were moving past the inn. Next morning Alpatych
donned a jacket he wore only in town and went out on business. It was a
sunny morning and by eight o'clock it was already hot. "A good day for
harvesting," thought Alpatych.

From beyond the town firing had been heard since early morning. At eight
o'clock the booming of cannon was added to the sound of musketry. Many
people were hurrying through the streets and there were many soldiers,
but cabs were still driving about, tradesmen stood at their shops, and
service was being held in the churches as usual. Alpatych went to the
shops, to government offices, to the post office, and to the Governor's.
In the offices and shops and at the post office everyone was talking
about the army and about the enemy who was already attacking the town,
everybody was asking what should be done, and all were trying to calm
one another.

In front of the Governor's house Alpatych found a large number of
people, Cossacks, and a traveling carriage of the Governor's. At the
porch he met two of the landed gentry, one of whom he knew. This man, an
ex-captain of police, was saying angrily:

"It's no joke, you know! It's all very well if you're single. 'One man
though undone is but one,' as the proverb says, but with thirteen in
your family and all the property... They've brought us to utter ruin!
What sort of governors are they to do that? They ought to be hanged--the
brigands!..."

"Oh come, that's enough!" said the other.

"What do I care? Let him hear! We're not dogs," said the ex-captain of
police, and looking round he noticed Alpatych.

"Oh, Yakov Alpatych! What have you come for?"

"To see the Governor by his excellency's order," answered Alpatych,
lifting his head and proudly thrusting his hand into the bosom of his
coat as he always did when he mentioned the prince.... "He has ordered
me to inquire into the position of affairs," he added.

"Yes, go and find out!" shouted the angry gentleman. "They've brought
things to such a pass that there are no carts or anything!... There it
is again, do you hear?" said he, pointing in the direction whence came
the sounds of firing.

"They've brought us all to ruin... the brigands!" he repeated, and
descended the porch steps.

Alpatych swayed his head and went upstairs. In the waiting room were
tradesmen, women, and officials, looking silently at one another. The
door of the Governor's room opened and they all rose and moved forward.
An official ran out, said some words to a merchant, called a stout
official with a cross hanging on his neck to follow him, and vanished
again, evidently wishing to avoid the inquiring looks and questions
addressed to him. Alpatych moved forward and next time the official came
out addressed him, one hand placed in the breast of his buttoned coat,
and handed him two letters.

"To his Honor Baron Asch, from General-in-Chief Prince Bolkonski," he
announced with such solemnity and significance that the official turned
to him and took the letters.

A few minutes later the Governor received Alpatych and hurriedly said to
him:

"Inform the prince and princess that I knew nothing: I acted on the
highest instructions--here..." and he handed a paper to Alpatych.
"Still, as the prince is unwell my advice is that they should go to
Moscow. I am just starting myself. Inform them..."

But the Governor did not finish: a dusty perspiring officer ran into the
room and began to say something in French. The Governor's face expressed
terror.

"Go," he said, nodding his head to Alpatych, and began questioning the
officer.

Eager, frightened, helpless glances were turned on Alpatych when he came
out of the Governor's room. Involuntarily listening now to the firing,
which had drawn nearer and was increasing in strength, Alpatych hurried
to his inn. The paper handed to him by the Governor said this:


"I assure you that the town of Smolensk is not in the slightest danger
as yet and it is unlikely that it will be threatened with any. I from
the one side and Prince Bagration from the other are marching to unite
our forces before Smolensk, which junction will be effected on the
22nd instant, and both armies with their united forces will defend our
compatriots of the province entrusted to your care till our efforts
shall have beaten back the enemies of our Fatherland, or till the last
warrior in our valiant ranks has perished. From this you will see that
you have a perfect right to reassure the inhabitants of Smolensk, for
those defended by two such brave armies may feel assured of victory."
(Instructions from Barclay de Tolly to Baron Asch, the civil governor of
Smolensk, 1812.)


People were anxiously roaming about the streets.

Carts piled high with household utensils, chairs, and cupboards kept
emerging from the gates of the yards and moving along the streets.
Loaded carts stood at the house next to Ferapontov's and women were
wailing and lamenting as they said good-by. A small watchdog ran round
barking in front of the harnessed horses.

Alpatych entered the innyard at a quicker pace than usual and went
straight to the shed where his horses and trap were. The coachman was
asleep. He woke him up, told him to harness, and went into the passage.
From the host's room came the sounds of a child crying, the despairing
sobs of a woman, and the hoarse angry shouting of Ferapontov. The cook
began running hither and thither in the passage like a frightened hen,
just as Alpatych entered.

"He's done her to death. Killed the mistress!... Beat her... dragged her
about so!..."

"What for?" asked Alpatych.

"She kept begging to go away. She's a woman! 'Take me away,' says she,
'don't let me perish with my little children! Folks,' she says, 'are all
gone, so why,' she says, 'don't we go?' And he began beating and pulling
her about so!"

At these words Alpatych nodded as if in approval, and not wishing to
hear more went to the door of the room opposite the innkeeper's, where
he had left his purchases.

"You brute, you murderer!" screamed a thin, pale woman who, with a baby
in her arms and her kerchief torn from her head, burst through the door
at that moment and down the steps into the yard.

Ferapontov came out after her, but on seeing Alpatych adjusted his
waistcoat, smoothed his hair, yawned, and followed Alpatych into the
opposite room.

"Going already?" said he.

Alpatych, without answering or looking at his host, sorted his packages
and asked how much he owed.

"We'll reckon up! Well, have you been to the Governor's?" asked
Ferapontov. "What has been decided?"

Alpatych replied that the Governor had not told him anything definite.

"With our business, how can we get away?" said Ferapontov. "We'd have
to pay seven rubles a cartload to Dorogobuzh and I tell them they're
not Christians to ask it! Selivanov, now, did a good stroke last
Thursday--sold flour to the army at nine rubles a sack. Will you have
some tea?" he added.

While the horses were being harnessed Alpatych and Ferapontov over their
tea talked of the price of corn, the crops, and the good weather for
harvesting.

"Well, it seems to be getting quieter," remarked Ferapontov, finishing
his third cup of tea and getting up. "Ours must have got the best of it.
The orders were not to let them in. So we're in force, it seems....
They say the other day Matthew Ivanych Platov drove them into the river
Marina and drowned some eighteen thousand in one day."

Alpatych collected his parcels, handed them to the coachman who had come
in, and settled up with the innkeeper. The noise of wheels, hoofs, and
bells was heard from the gateway as a little trap passed out.

It was by now late in the afternoon. Half the street was in shadow, the
other half brightly lit by the sun. Alpatych looked out of the window
and went to the door. Suddenly the strange sound of a far-off whistling
and thud was heard, followed by a boom of cannon blending into a dull
roar that set the windows rattling.

He went out into the street: two men were running past toward the
bridge. From different sides came whistling sounds and the thud of
cannon balls and bursting shells falling on the town. But these sounds
were hardly heard in comparison with the noise of the firing outside the
town and attracted little attention from the inhabitants. The town was
being bombarded by a hundred and thirty guns which Napoleon had ordered
up after four o'clock. The people did not at once realize the meaning of
this bombardment.

At first the noise of the falling bombs and shells only aroused
curiosity. Ferapontov's wife, who till then had not ceased wailing under
the shed, became quiet and with the baby in her arms went to the gate,
listening to the sounds and looking in silence at the people.

The cook and a shop assistant came to the gate. With lively curiosity
everyone tried to get a glimpse of the projectiles as they flew over
their heads. Several people came round the corner talking eagerly.

"What force!" remarked one. "Knocked the roof and ceiling all to
splinters!"

"Routed up the earth like a pig," said another.

"That's grand, it bucks one up!" laughed the first. "Lucky you jumped
aside, or it would have wiped you out!"

Others joined those men and stopped and told how cannon balls had fallen
on a house close to them. Meanwhile still more projectiles, now with
the swift sinister whistle of a cannon ball, now with the agreeable
intermittent whistle of a shell, flew over people's heads incessantly,
but not one fell close by, they all flew over. Alpatych was getting into
his trap. The innkeeper stood at the gate.

"What are you staring at?" he shouted to the cook, who in her red skirt,
with sleeves rolled up, swinging her bare elbows, had stepped to the
corner to listen to what was being said.

"What marvels!" she exclaimed, but hearing her master's voice she turned
back, pulling down her tucked-up skirt.

Once more something whistled, but this time quite close, swooping
downwards like a little bird; a flame flashed in the middle of the
street, something exploded, and the street was shrouded in smoke.

"Scoundrel, what are you doing?" shouted the innkeeper, rushing to the
cook.

At that moment the pitiful wailing of women was heard from different
sides, the frightened baby began to cry, and people crowded silently
with pale faces round the cook. The loudest sound in that crowd was her
wailing.

"Oh-h-h! Dear souls, dear kind souls! Don't let me die! My good
souls!..."

Five minutes later no one remained in the street. The cook, with her
thigh broken by a shell splinter, had been carried into the kitchen.
Alpatych, his coachman, Ferapontov's wife and children and the house
porter were all sitting in the cellar, listening. The roar of guns, the
whistling of projectiles, and the piteous moaning of the cook, which
rose above the other sounds, did not cease for a moment. The mistress
rocked and hushed her baby and when anyone came into the cellar asked
in a pathetic whisper what had become of her husband who had remained
in the street. A shopman who entered told her that her husband had
gone with others to the cathedral, whence they were fetching the
wonder-working icon of Smolensk.

Toward dusk the cannonade began to subside. Alpatych left the cellar
and stopped in the doorway. The evening sky that had been so clear was
clouded with smoke, through which, high up, the sickle of the new moon
shone strangely. Now that the terrible din of the guns had ceased a hush
seemed to reign over the town, broken only by the rustle of footsteps,
the moaning, the distant cries, and the crackle of fires which seemed
widespread everywhere. The cook's moans had now subsided. On two sides
black curling clouds of smoke rose and spread from the fires. Through
the streets soldiers in various uniforms walked or ran confusedly in
different directions like ants from a ruined ant-hill. Several of them
ran into Ferapontov's yard before Alpatych's eyes. Alpatych went out
to the gate. A retreating regiment, thronging and hurrying, blocked the
street.

Noticing him, an officer said: "The town is being abandoned. Get away,
get away!" and then, turning to the soldiers, shouted:

"I'll teach you to run into the yards!"

Alpatych went back to the house, called the coachman, and told him to
set off. Ferapontov's whole household came out too, following Alpatych
and the coachman. The women, who had been silent till then, suddenly
began to wail as they looked at the fires--the smoke and even the flames
of which could be seen in the failing twilight--and as if in reply
the same kind of lamentation was heard from other parts of the street.
Inside the shed Alpatych and the coachman arranged the tangled reins and
traces of their horses with trembling hands.

As Alpatych was driving out of the gate he saw some ten soldiers in
Ferapontov's open shop, talking loudly and filling their bags and
knapsacks with flour and sunflower seeds. Just then Ferapontov returned
and entered his shop. On seeing the soldiers he was about to shout at
them, but suddenly stopped and, clutching at his hair, burst into sobs
and laughter:

"Loot everything, lads! Don't let those devils get it!" he cried, taking
some bags of flour himself and throwing them into the street.

Some of the soldiers were frightened and ran away, others went on
filling their bags. On seeing Alpatych, Ferapontov turned to him:

"Russia is done for!" he cried. "Alpatych, I'll set the place on fire
myself. We're done for!..." and Ferapontov ran into the yard.

Soldiers were passing in a constant stream along the street blocking
it completely, so that Alpatych could not pass out and had to wait.
Ferapontov's wife and children were also sitting in a cart waiting till
it was possible to drive out.

Night had come. There were stars in the sky and the new moon shone out
amid the smoke that screened it. On the sloping descent to the Dnieper
Alpatych's cart and that of the innkeeper's wife, which were slowly
moving amid the rows of soldiers and of other vehicles, had to stop.
In a side street near the crossroads where the vehicles had stopped, a
house and some shops were on fire. This fire was already burning itself
out. The flames now died down and were lost in the black smoke, now
suddenly flared up again brightly, lighting up with strange distinctness
the faces of the people crowding at the crossroads. Black figures
flitted about before the fire, and through the incessant crackling of
the flames talking and shouting could be heard. Seeing that his trap
would not be able to move on for some time, Alpatych got down and turned
into the side street to look at the fire. Soldiers were continually
rushing backwards and forwards near it, and he saw two of them and a
man in a frieze coat dragging burning beams into another yard across the
street, while others carried bundles of hay.

Alpatych went up to a large crowd standing before a high barn which was
blazing briskly. The walls were all on fire and the back wall had fallen
in, the wooden roof was collapsing, and the rafters were alight. The
crowd was evidently watching for the roof to fall in, and Alpatych
watched for it too.

"Alpatych!" a familiar voice suddenly hailed the old man.

"Mercy on us! Your excellency!" answered Alpatych, immediately
recognizing the voice of his young prince.

Prince Andrew in his riding cloak, mounted on a black horse, was looking
at Alpatych from the back of the crowd.

"Why are you here?" he asked.

"Your... your excellency," stammered Alpatych and broke into sobs. "Are
we really lost? Master!..."

"Why are you here?" Prince Andrew repeated.

At that moment the flames flared up and showed his young master's pale
worn face. Alpatych told how he had been sent there and how difficult it
was to get away.

"Are we really quite lost, your excellency?" he asked again.

Prince Andrew without replying took out a notebook and raising his knee
began writing in pencil on a page he tore out. He wrote to his sister:


"Smolensk is being abandoned. Bald Hills will be occupied by the enemy
within a week. Set off immediately for Moscow. Let me know at once when
you will start. Send by special messenger to Usvyazh."


Having written this and given the paper to Alpatych, he told him how
to arrange for departure of the prince, the princess, his son, and the
boy's tutor, and how and where to let him know immediately. Before
he had had time to finish giving these instructions, a chief of staff
followed by a suite galloped up to him.

"You are a colonel?" shouted the chief of staff with a German accent,
in a voice familiar to Prince Andrew. "Houses are set on fire in your
presence and you stand by! What does this mean? You will answer for
it!" shouted Berg, who was now assistant to the chief of staff of the
commander of the left flank of the infantry of the first army, a place,
as Berg said, "very agreeable and well en evidence."

Prince Andrew looked at him and without replying went on speaking to
Alpatych.

"So tell them that I shall await a reply till the tenth, and if by the
tenth I don't receive news that they have all got away I shall have to
throw up everything and come myself to Bald Hills."

"Prince," said Berg, recognizing Prince Andrew, "I only spoke because
I have to obey orders, because I always do obey exactly.... You must
please excuse me," he went on apologetically.

Something cracked in the flames. The fire died down for a moment and
wreaths of black smoke rolled from under the roof. There was another
terrible crash and something huge collapsed.

"Ou-rou-rou!" yelled the crowd, echoing the crash of the collapsing roof
of the barn, the burning grain in which diffused a cakelike aroma all
around. The flames flared up again, lighting the animated, delighted,
exhausted faces of the spectators.

The man in the frieze coat raised his arms and shouted:

"It's fine, lads! Now it's raging... It's fine!"

"That's the owner himself," cried several voices.

"Well then," continued Prince Andrew to Alpatych, "report to them as I
have told you"; and not replying a word to Berg who was now mute beside
him, he touched his horse and rode down the side street.





CHAPTER V


From Smolensk the troops continued to retreat, followed by the enemy.
On the tenth of August the regiment Prince Andrew commanded was marching
along the highroad past the avenue leading to Bald Hills. Heat and
drought had continued for more than three weeks. Each day fleecy clouds
floated across the sky and occasionally veiled the sun, but toward
evening the sky cleared again and the sun set in reddish-brown mist.
Heavy night dews alone refreshed the earth. The unreaped corn was
scorched and shed its grain. The marshes dried up. The cattle lowed from
hunger, finding no food on the sun-parched meadows. Only at night and
in the forests while the dew lasted was there any freshness. But on the
road, the highroad along which the troops marched, there was no such
freshness even at night or when the road passed through the forest; the
dew was imperceptible on the sandy dust churned up more than six inches
deep. As soon as day dawned the march began. The artillery and baggage
wagons moved noiselessly through the deep dust that rose to the very
hubs of the wheels, and the infantry sank ankle-deep in that soft,
choking, hot dust that never cooled even at night. Some of this dust
was kneaded by the feet and wheels, while the rest rose and hung like a
cloud over the troops, settling in eyes, ears, hair, and nostrils, and
worst of all in the lungs of the men and beasts as they moved along that
road. The higher the sun rose the higher rose that cloud of dust, and
through the screen of its hot fine particles one could look with naked
eye at the sun, which showed like a huge crimson ball in the unclouded
sky. There was no wind, and the men choked in that motionless
atmosphere. They marched with handkerchiefs tied over their noses and
mouths. When they passed through a village they all rushed to the wells
and fought for the water and drank it down to the mud.

Prince Andrew was in command of a regiment, and the management of that
regiment, the welfare of the men and the necessity of receiving
and giving orders, engrossed him. The burning of Smolensk and its
abandonment made an epoch in his life. A novel feeling of anger against
the foe made him forget his own sorrow. He was entirely devoted to the
affairs of his regiment and was considerate and kind to his men and
officers. In the regiment they called him "our prince," were proud
of him and loved him. But he was kind and gentle only to those of his
regiment, to Timokhin and the like--people quite new to him, belonging
to a different world and who could not know and understand his past. As
soon as he came across a former acquaintance or anyone from the
staff, he bristled up immediately and grew spiteful, ironical, and
contemptuous. Everything that reminded him of his past was repugnant to
him, and so in his relations with that former circle he confined himself
to trying to do his duty and not to be unfair.

In truth everything presented itself in a dark and gloomy light to
Prince Andrew, especially after the abandonment of Smolensk on the sixth
of August (he considered that it could and should have been defended)
and after his sick father had had to flee to Moscow, abandoning to
pillage his dearly beloved Bald Hills which he had built and peopled.
But despite this, thanks to his regiment, Prince Andrew had something to
think about entirely apart from general questions. Two days previously
he had received news that his father, son, and sister had left for
Moscow; and though there was nothing for him to do at Bald Hills, Prince
Andrew with a characteristic desire to foment his own grief decided that
he must ride there.

He ordered his horse to be saddled and, leaving his regiment on the
march, rode to his father's estate where he had been born and spent his
childhood. Riding past the pond where there used always to be dozens
of women chattering as they rinsed their linen or beat it with wooden
beetles, Prince Andrew noticed that there was not a soul about and that
the little washing wharf, torn from its place and half submerged, was
floating on its side in the middle of the pond. He rode to the keeper's
lodge. No one at the stone entrance gates of the drive and the door
stood open. Grass had already begun to grow on the garden paths, and
horses and calves were straying in the English park. Prince Andrew rode
up to the hothouse; some of the glass panes were broken, and of the
trees in tubs some were overturned and others dried up. He called for
Taras the gardener, but no one replied. Having gone round the corner
of the hothouse to the ornamental garden, he saw that the carved garden
fence was broken and branches of the plum trees had been torn off with
the fruit. An old peasant whom Prince Andrew in his childhood had often
seen at the gate was sitting on a green garden seat, plaiting a bast
shoe.

He was deaf and did not hear Prince Andrew ride up. He was sitting on
the seat the old prince used to like to sit on, and beside him strips of
bast were hanging on the broken and withered branch of a magnolia.

Prince Andrew rode up to the house. Several limes in the old garden had
been cut down and a piebald mare and her foal were wandering in front of
the house among the rosebushes. The shutters were all closed, except at
one window which was open. A little serf boy, seeing Prince Andrew, ran
into the house. Alpatych, having sent his family away, was alone at
Bald Hills and was sitting indoors reading the Lives of the Saints. On
hearing that Prince Andrew had come, he went out with his spectacles on
his nose, buttoning his coat, and, hastily stepping up, without a word
began weeping and kissing Prince Andrew's knee.

Then, vexed at his own weakness, he turned away and began to report
on the position of affairs. Everything precious and valuable had been
removed to Bogucharovo. Seventy quarters of grain had also been carted
away. The hay and the spring corn, of which Alpatych said there had been
a remarkable crop that year, had been commandeered by the troops and
mown down while still green. The peasants were ruined; some of them too
had gone to Bogucharovo, only a few remained.

Without waiting to hear him out, Prince Andrew asked:

"When did my father and sister leave?" meaning when did they leave for
Moscow.

Alpatych, understanding the question to refer to their departure for
Bogucharovo, replied that they had left on the seventh and again went
into details concerning the estate management, asking for instructions.

"Am I to let the troops have the oats, and to take a receipt for them?
We have still six hundred quarters left," he inquired.

"What am I to say to him?" thought Prince Andrew, looking down on the
old man's bald head shining in the sun and seeing by the expression on
his face that the old man himself understood how untimely such questions
were and only asked them to allay his grief.

"Yes, let them have it," replied Prince Andrew.

"If you noticed some disorder in the garden," said Alpatych, "it was
impossible to prevent it. Three regiments have been here and spent
the night, dragoons mostly. I took down the name and rank of their
commanding officer, to hand in a complaint about it."

"Well, and what are you going to do? Will you stay here if the enemy
occupies the place?" asked Prince Andrew.

Alpatych turned his face to Prince Andrew, looked at him, and suddenly
with a solemn gesture raised his arm.

"He is my refuge! His will be done!" he exclaimed.

A group of bareheaded peasants was approaching across the meadow toward
the prince.

"Well, good-by!" said Prince Andrew, bending over to Alpatych. "You
must go away too, take away what you can and tell the serfs to go to the
Ryazan estate or to the one near Moscow."

Alpatych clung to Prince Andrew's leg and burst into sobs. Gently
disengaging himself, the prince spurred his horse and rode down the
avenue at a gallop.

The old man was still sitting in the ornamental garden, like a fly
impassive on the face of a loved one who is dead, tapping the last on
which he was making the bast shoe, and two little girls, running out
from the hot house carrying in their skirts plums they had plucked from
the trees there, came upon Prince Andrew. On seeing the young master,
the elder one with frightened look clutched her younger companion by the
hand and hid with her behind a birch tree, not stopping to pick up some
green plums they had dropped.

Prince Andrew turned away with startled haste, unwilling to let them
see that they had been observed. He was sorry for the pretty frightened
little girl, was afraid of looking at her, and yet felt an irresistible
desire to do so. A new sensation of comfort and relief came over him
when, seeing these girls, he realized the existence of other human
interests entirely aloof from his own and just as legitimate as those
that occupied him. Evidently these girls passionately desired one
thing--to carry away and eat those green plums without being caught--and
Prince Andrew shared their wish for the success of their enterprise. He
could not resist looking at them once more. Believing their danger past,
they sprang from their ambush and, chirruping something in their shrill
little voices and holding up their skirts, their bare little sunburned
feet scampered merrily and quickly across the meadow grass.

Prince Andrew was somewhat refreshed by having ridden off the dusty
highroad along which the troops were moving. But not far from Bald Hills
he again came out on the road and overtook his regiment at its halting
place by the dam of a small pond. It was past one o'clock. The sun,
a red ball through the dust, burned and scorched his back intolerably
through his black coat. The dust always hung motionless above the buzz
of talk that came from the resting troops. There was no wind. As he
crossed the dam Prince Andrew smelled the ooze and freshness of the
pond. He longed to get into that water, however dirty it might be, and
he glanced round at the pool from whence came sounds of shrieks and
laughter. The small, muddy, green pond had risen visibly more than a
foot, flooding the dam, because it was full of the naked white bodies
of soldiers with brick-red hands, necks, and faces, who were splashing
about in it. All this naked white human flesh, laughing and shrieking,
floundered about in that dirty pool like carp stuffed into a watering
can, and the suggestion of merriment in that floundering mass rendered
it specially pathetic.

One fair-haired young soldier of the third company, whom Prince Andrew
knew and who had a strap round the calf of one leg, crossed himself,
stepped back to get a good run, and plunged into the water; another,
a dark noncommissioned officer who was always shaggy, stood up to his
waist in the water joyfully wriggling his muscular figure and snorted
with satisfaction as he poured the water over his head with hands
blackened to the wrists. There were sounds of men slapping one another,
yelling, and puffing.

Everywhere on the bank, on the dam, and in the pond, there was healthy,
white, muscular flesh. The officer, Timokhin, with his red little nose,
standing on the dam wiping himself with a towel, felt confused at seeing
the prince, but made up his mind to address him nevertheless.

"It's very nice, your excellency! Wouldn't you like to?" said he.

"It's dirty," replied Prince Andrew, making a grimace.

"We'll clear it out for you in a minute," said Timokhin, and, still
undressed, ran off to clear the men out of the pond.

"The prince wants to bathe."

"What prince? Ours?" said many voices, and the men were in such haste
to clear out that the prince could hardly stop them. He decided that he
would rather wash himself with water in the barn.

"Flesh, bodies, cannon fodder!" he thought, and he looked at his own
naked body and shuddered, not from cold but from a sense of disgust
and horror he did not himself understand, aroused by the sight of that
immense number of bodies splashing about in the dirty pond.


On the seventh of August Prince Bagration wrote as follows from his
quarters at Mikhaylovna on the Smolensk road:


Dear Count Alexis Andreevich--(He was writing to Arakcheev but knew that
his letter would be read by the Emperor, and therefore weighed every
word in it to the best of his ability.)

I expect the Minister (Barclay de Tolly) has already reported the
abandonment of Smolensk to the enemy. It is pitiable and sad, and
the whole army is in despair that this most important place has been
wantonly abandoned. I, for my part, begged him personally most urgently
and finally wrote him, but nothing would induce him to consent. I swear
to you on my honor that Napoleon was in such a fix as never before and
might have lost half his army but could not have taken Smolensk. Our
troops fought, and are fighting, as never before. With fifteen thousand
men I held the enemy at bay for thirty-five hours and beat him; but he
would not hold out even for fourteen hours. It is disgraceful, a stain
on our army, and as for him, he ought, it seems to me, not to live. If
he reports that our losses were great, it is not true; perhaps about
four thousand, not more, and not even that; but even were they ten
thousand, that's war! But the enemy has lost masses...

What would it have cost him to hold out for another two days? They would
have had to retire of their own accord, for they had no water for men
or horses. He gave me his word he would not retreat, but suddenly sent
instructions that he was retiring that night. We cannot fight in this
way, or we may soon bring the enemy to Moscow...

There is a rumor that you are thinking of peace. God forbid that you
should make peace after all our sacrifices and such insane retreats! You
would set all Russia against you and every one of us would feel ashamed
to wear the uniform. If it has come to this--we must fight as long as
Russia can and as long as there are men able to stand...

One man ought to be in command, and not two. Your Minister may perhaps
be good as a Minister, but as a general he is not merely bad but
execrable, yet to him is entrusted the fate of our whole country.... I
am really frantic with vexation; forgive my writing boldly. It is clear
that the man who advocates the conclusion of a peace, and that the
Minister should command the army, does not love our sovereign and
desires the ruin of us all. So I write you frankly: call out the
militia. For the Minister is leading these visitors after him to Moscow
in a most masterly way. The whole army feels great suspicion of the
Imperial aide-de-camp Wolzogen. He is said to be more Napoleon's man
than ours, and he is always advising the Minister. I am not merely civil
to him but obey him like a corporal, though I am his senior. This is
painful, but, loving my benefactor and sovereign, I submit. Only I am
sorry for the Emperor that he entrusts our fine army to such as he.
Consider that on our retreat we have lost by fatigue and left in the
hospital more than fifteen thousand men, and had we attacked this would
not have happened. Tell me, for God's sake, what will Russia, our mother
Russia, say to our being so frightened, and why are we abandoning our
good and gallant Fatherland to such rabble and implanting feelings of
hatred and shame in all our subjects? What are we scared at and of whom
are we afraid? I am not to blame that the Minister is vacillating,
a coward, dense, dilatory, and has all bad qualities. The whole army
bewails it and calls down curses upon him...





CHAPTER VI


Among the innumerable categories applicable to the phenomena of human
life one may discriminate between those in which substance prevails
and those in which form prevails. To the latter--as distinguished
from village, country, provincial, or even Moscow life--we may allot
Petersburg life, and especially the life of its salons. That life of
the salons is unchanging. Since the year 1805 we had made peace and had
again quarreled with Bonaparte and had made constitutions and unmade
them again, but the salons of Anna Pavlovna and Helene remained just as
they had been--the one seven and the other five years before. At Anna
Pavlovna's they talked with perplexity of Bonaparte's successes just
as before and saw in them and in the subservience shown to him by the
European sovereigns a malicious conspiracy, the sole object of which was
to cause unpleasantness and anxiety to the court circle of which Anna
Pavlovna was the representative. And in Helene's salon, which Rumyantsev
himself honored with his visits, regarding Helene as a remarkably
intelligent woman, they talked with the same ecstasy in 1812 as in 1808
of the "great nation" and the "great man," and regretted our rupture
with France, a rupture which, according to them, ought to be promptly
terminated by peace.

Of late, since the Emperor's return from the army, there had been some
excitement in these conflicting salon circles and some demonstrations
of hostility to one another, but each camp retained its own tendency.
In Anna Pavlovna's circle only those Frenchmen were admitted who were
deep-rooted legitimists, and patriotic views were expressed to the
effect that one ought not to go to the French theater and that to
maintain the French troupe was costing the government as much as a whole
army corps. The progress of the war was eagerly followed, and only
the reports most flattering to our army were circulated. In the French
circle of Helene and Rumyantsev the reports of the cruelty of the
enemy and of the war were contradicted and all Napoleon's attempts at
conciliation were discussed. In that circle they discountenanced those
who advised hurried preparations for a removal to Kazan of the court and
the girls' educational establishments under the patronage of the Dowager
Empress. In Helene's circle the war in general was regarded as a series
of formal demonstrations which would very soon end in peace, and the
view prevailed expressed by Bilibin--who now in Petersburg was quite
at home in Helene's house, which every clever man was obliged to
visit--that not by gunpowder but by those who invented it would matters
be settled. In that circle the Moscow enthusiasm--news of which had
reached Petersburg simultaneously with the Emperor's return--was
ridiculed sarcastically and very cleverly, though with much caution.

Anna Pavlovna's circle on the contrary was enraptured by this enthusiasm
and spoke of it as Plutarch speaks of the deeds of the ancients.
Prince Vasili, who still occupied his former important posts, formed a
connecting link between these two circles. He visited his "good friend
Anna Pavlovna" as well as his daughter's "diplomatic salon," and often
in his constant comings and goings between the two camps became confused
and said at Helene's what he should have said at Anna Pavlovna's and
vice versa.

Soon after the Emperor's return Prince Vasili in a conversation about
the war at Anna Pavlovna's severely condemned Barclay de Tolly, but was
undecided as to who ought to be appointed commander in chief. One of the
visitors, usually spoken of as "a man of great merit," having described
how he had that day seen Kutuzov, the newly chosen chief of the
Petersburg militia, presiding over the enrollment of recruits at the
Treasury, cautiously ventured to suggest that Kutuzov would be the man
to satisfy all requirements.

Anna Pavlovna remarked with a melancholy smile that Kutuzov had done
nothing but cause the Emperor annoyance.

"I have talked and talked at the Assembly of the Nobility," Prince
Vasili interrupted, "but they did not listen to me. I told them his
election as chief of the militia would not please the Emperor. They did
not listen to me.

"It's all this mania for opposition," he went on. "And who for? It is
all because we want to ape the foolish enthusiasm of those Muscovites,"
Prince Vasili continued, forgetting for a moment that though at Helene's
one had to ridicule the Moscow enthusiasm, at Anna Pavlovna's one had to
be ecstatic about it. But he retrieved his mistake at once. "Now, is
it suitable that Count Kutuzov, the oldest general in Russia, should
preside at that tribunal? He will get nothing for his pains! How could
they make a man commander in chief who cannot mount a horse, who drops
asleep at a council, and has the very worst morals! A good reputation
he made for himself at Bucharest! I don't speak of his capacity as a
general, but at a time like this how they appoint a decrepit, blind old
man, positively blind? A fine idea to have a blind general! He can't see
anything. To play blindman's bluff? He can't see at all!"

No one replied to his remarks.

This was quite correct on the twenty-fourth of July. But on the
twenty-ninth of July Kutuzov received the title of Prince. This might
indicate a wish to get rid of him, and therefore Prince Vasili's opinion
continued to be correct though he was not now in any hurry to express
it. But on the eighth of August a committee, consisting of Field Marshal
Saltykov, Arakcheev, Vyazmitinov, Lopukhin, and Kochubey met to consider
the progress of the war. This committee came to the conclusion that
our failures were due to a want of unity in the command and though the
members of the committee were aware of the Emperor's dislike of Kutuzov,
after a short deliberation they agreed to advise his appointment as
commander in chief. That same day Kutuzov was appointed commander
in chief with full powers over the armies and over the whole region
occupied by them.

On the ninth of August Prince Vasili at Anna Pavlovna's again met the
"man of great merit." The latter was very attentive to Anna Pavlovna
because he wanted to be appointed director of one of the educational
establishments for young ladies. Prince Vasili entered the room with the
air of a happy conqueror who has attained the object of his desires.

"Well, have you heard the great news? Prince Kutuzov is field marshal!
All dissensions are at an end! I am so glad, so delighted! At last
we have a man!" said he, glancing sternly and significantly round at
everyone in the drawing room.

The "man of great merit," despite his desire to obtain the post of
director, could not refrain from reminding Prince Vasili of his former
opinion. Though this was impolite to Prince Vasili in Anna Pavlovna's
drawing room, and also to Anna Pavlovna herself who had received the
news with delight, he could not resist the temptation.

"But, Prince, they say he is blind!" said he, reminding Prince Vasili of
his own words.

"Eh? Nonsense! He sees well enough," said Prince Vasili rapidly, in a
deep voice and with a slight cough--the voice and cough with which he
was wont to dispose of all difficulties.

"He sees well enough," he added. "And what I am so pleased about," he
went on, "is that our sovereign has given him full powers over all
the armies and the whole region--powers no commander in chief ever had
before. He is a second autocrat," he concluded with a victorious smile.

"God grant it! God grant it!" said Anna Pavlovna.

The "man of great merit," who was still a novice in court circles,
wishing to flatter Anna Pavlovna by defending her former position on
this question, observed:

"It is said that the Emperor was reluctant to give Kutuzov those powers.
They say he blushed like a girl to whom Joconde is read, when he said to
Kutuzov: 'Your Emperor and the Fatherland award you this honor.'"

"Perhaps the heart took no part in that speech," said Anna Pavlovna.

"Oh, no, no!" warmly rejoined Prince Vasili, who would not now yield
Kutuzov to anyone; in his opinion Kutuzov was not only admirable
himself, but was adored by everybody. "No, that's impossible," said he,
"for our sovereign appreciated him so highly before."

"God grant only that Prince Kutuzov assumes real power and does not
allow anyone to put a spoke in his wheel," observed Anna Pavlovna.

Understanding at once to whom she alluded, Prince Vasili said in a
whisper:

"I know for a fact that Kutuzov made it an absolute condition that the
Tsarevich should not be with the army. Do you know what he said to the
Emperor?"

And Prince Vasili repeated the words supposed to have been spoken by
Kutuzov to the Emperor. "I can neither punish him if he does wrong nor
reward him if he does right."

"Oh, a very wise man is Prince Kutuzov! I have known him a long time!"

"They even say," remarked the "man of great merit" who did not yet
possess courtly tact, "that his excellency made it an express condition
that the sovereign himself should not be with the army."

As soon as he said this both Prince Vasili and Anna Pavlovna turned away
from him and glanced sadly at one another with a sigh at his naivete.





CHAPTER VII


While this was taking place in Petersburg the French had already passed
Smolensk and were drawing nearer and nearer to Moscow. Napoleon's
historian Thiers, like other of his historians, trying to justify his
hero says that he was drawn to the walls of Moscow against his will. He
is as right as other historians who look for the explanation of historic
events in the will of one man; he is as right as the Russian historians
who maintain that Napoleon was drawn to Moscow by the skill of the
Russian commanders. Here besides the law of retrospection, which regards
all the past as a preparation for events that subsequently occur,
the law of reciprocity comes in, confusing the whole matter. A good
chessplayer having lost a game is sincerely convinced that his loss
resulted from a mistake he made and looks for that mistake in the
opening, but forgets that at each stage of the game there were similar
mistakes and that none of his moves were perfect. He only notices the
mistake to which he pays attention, because his opponent took advantage
of it. How much more complex than this is the game of war, which
occurs under certain limits of time, and where it is not one will that
manipulates lifeless objects, but everything results from innumerable
conflicts of various wills!

After Smolensk Napoleon sought a battle beyond Dorogobuzh at Vyazma, and
then at Tsarevo-Zaymishche, but it happened that owing to a conjunction
of innumerable circumstances the Russians could not give battle till
they reached Borodino, seventy miles from Moscow. From Vyazma Napoleon
ordered a direct advance on Moscow.

Moscou, la capitale asiatique de ce grand empire, la ville sacree des
peuples d'Alexandre, Moscou avec ses innombrables eglises en forme de
pagodes chinoises, * this Moscow gave Napoleon's imagination no rest.
On the march from Vyazma to Tsarevo-Zaymishche he rode his light bay
bobtailed ambler accompanied by his Guards, his bodyguard, his pages,
and aides-de-camp. Berthier, his chief of staff, dropped behind to
question a Russian prisoner captured by the cavalry. Followed by
Lelorgne d'Ideville, an interpreter, he overtook Napoleon at a gallop
and reined in his horse with an amused expression.


     * "Moscow, the Asiatic capital of this great empire, the
     sacred city of Alexander's people, Moscow with its
     innumerable churches shaped like Chinese pagodas."


"Well?" asked Napoleon.

"One of Platov's Cossacks says that Platov's corps is joining up with
the main army and that Kutuzov has been appointed commander in chief. He
is a very shrewd and garrulous fellow."

Napoleon smiled and told them to give the Cossack a horse and bring the
man to him. He wished to talk to him himself. Several adjutants galloped
off, and an hour later, Lavrushka, the serf Denisov had handed over
to Rostov, rode up to Napoleon in an orderly's jacket and on a French
cavalry saddle, with a merry, and tipsy face. Napoleon told him to ride
by his side and began questioning him.

"You are a Cossack?"

"Yes, a Cossack, your Honor."

"The Cossack, not knowing in what company he was, for Napoleon's plain
appearance had nothing about it that would reveal to an Oriental mind
the presence of a monarch, talked with extreme familiarity of the
incidents of the war," says Thiers, narrating this episode. In
reality Lavrushka, having got drunk the day before and left his master
dinnerless, had been whipped and sent to the village in quest of
chickens, where he engaged in looting till the French took him prisoner.
Lavrushka was one of those coarse, bare-faced lackeys who have seen all
sorts of things, consider it necessary to do everything in a mean and
cunning way, are ready to render any sort of service to their master,
and are keen at guessing their master's baser impulses, especially those
prompted by vanity and pettiness.

Finding himself in the company of Napoleon, whose identity he had easily
and surely recognized, Lavrushka was not in the least abashed but merely
did his utmost to gain his new master's favor.

He knew very well that this was Napoleon, but Napoleon's presence could
no more intimidate him than Rostov's, or a sergeant major's with the
rods, would have done, for he had nothing that either the sergeant major
or Napoleon could deprive him of.

So he rattled on, telling all the gossip he had heard among the
orderlies. Much of it true. But when Napoleon asked him whether the
Russians thought they would beat Bonaparte or not, Lavrushka screwed up
his eyes and considered.

In this question he saw subtle cunning, as men of his type see cunning
in everything, so he frowned and did not answer immediately.

"It's like this," he said thoughtfully, "if there's a battle soon, yours
will win. That's right. But if three days pass, then after that, well,
then that same battle will not soon be over."

Lelorgne d'Ideville smilingly interpreted this speech to Napoleon thus:
"If a battle takes place within the next three days the French will
win, but if later, God knows what will happen." Napoleon did not smile,
though he was evidently in high good humor, and he ordered these words
to be repeated.

Lavrushka noticed this and to entertain him further, pretending not to
know who Napoleon was, added:

"We know that you have Bonaparte and that he has beaten everybody in
the world, but we are a different matter..."--without knowing why or how
this bit of boastful patriotism slipped out at the end.

The interpreter translated these words without the last phrase, and
Bonaparte smiled. "The young Cossack made his mighty interlocutor
smile," says Thiers. After riding a few paces in silence, Napoleon
turned to Berthier and said he wished to see how the news that he was
talking to the Emperor himself, to that very Emperor who had written his
immortally victorious name on the Pyramids, would affect this enfant du
Don. *


    * "Child of the Don."


The fact was accordingly conveyed to Lavrushka.

Lavrushka, understanding that this was done to perplex him and that
Napoleon expected him to be frightened, to gratify his new masters
promptly pretended to be astonished and awe-struck, opened his eyes
wide, and assumed the expression he usually put on when taken to be
whipped. "As soon as Napoleon's interpreter had spoken," says Thiers,
"the Cossack, seized by amazement, did not utter another word, but rode
on, his eyes fixed on the conqueror whose fame had reached him across
the steppes of the East. All his loquacity was suddenly arrested and
replaced by a naive and silent feeling of admiration. Napoleon, after
making the Cossack a present, had him set free like a bird restored to
its native fields."

Napoleon rode on, dreaming of the Moscow that so appealed to his
imagination, and "the bird restored to its native fields" galloped to
our outposts, inventing on the way all that had not taken place but that
he meant to relate to his comrades. What had really taken place he did
not wish to relate because it seemed to him not worth telling. He
found the Cossacks, inquired for the regiment operating with Platov's
detachment and by evening found his master, Nicholas Rostov, quartered
at Yankovo. Rostov was just mounting to go for a ride round the
neighboring villages with Ilyin; he let Lavrushka have another horse and
took him along with him.





CHAPTER VIII


Princess Mary was not in Moscow and out of danger as Prince Andrew
supposed.

After the return of Alpatych from Smolensk the old prince suddenly
seemed to awake as from a dream. He ordered the militiamen to be called
up from the villages and armed, and wrote a letter to the commander in
chief informing him that he had resolved to remain at Bald Hills to the
last extremity and to defend it, leaving to the commander in chief's
discretion to take measures or not for the defense of Bald Hills, where
one of Russia's oldest generals would be captured or killed, and he
announced to his household that he would remain at Bald Hills.

But while himself remaining, he gave instructions for the departure of
the princess and Dessalles with the little prince to Bogucharovo and
thence to Moscow. Princess Mary, alarmed by her father's feverish and
sleepless activity after his previous apathy, could not bring herself to
leave him alone and for the first time in her life ventured to disobey
him. She refused to go away and her father's fury broke over her in a
terrible storm. He repeated every injustice he had ever inflicted on
her. Trying to convict her, he told her she had worn him out, had caused
his quarrel with his son, had harbored nasty suspicions of him, making
it the object of her life to poison his existence, and he drove her from
his study telling her that if she did not go away it was all the same
to him. He declared that he did not wish to remember her existence and
warned her not to dare to let him see her. The fact that he did not, as
she had feared, order her to be carried away by force but only told her
not to let him see her cheered Princess Mary. She knew it was a proof
that in the depth of his soul he was glad she was remaining at home and
had not gone away.

The morning after little Nicholas had left, the old prince donned his
full uniform and prepared to visit the commander in chief. His caleche
was already at the door. Princess Mary saw him walk out of the house in
his uniform wearing all his orders and go down the garden to review his
armed peasants and domestic serfs. She sat by the window listening to
his voice which reached her from the garden. Suddenly several men came
running up the avenue with frightened faces.

Princess Mary ran out to the porch, down the flower-bordered path, and
into the avenue. A large crowd of militiamen and domestics were moving
toward her, and in their midst several men were supporting by
the armpits and dragging along a little old man in a uniform and
decorations. She ran up to him and, in the play of the sunlight that
fell in small round spots through the shade of the lime-tree avenue,
could not be sure what change there was in his face. All she could see
was that his former stern and determined expression had altered to one
of timidity and submission. On seeing his daughter he moved his helpless
lips and made a hoarse sound. It was impossible to make out what he
wanted. He was lifted up, carried to his study, and laid on the very
couch he had so feared of late.

The doctor, who was fetched that same night, bled him and said that the
prince had had a seizure paralyzing his right side.

It was becoming more and more dangerous to remain at Bald Hills, and
next day they moved the prince to Bogucharovo, the doctor accompanying
him.

By the time they reached Bogucharovo, Dessalles and the little prince
had already left for Moscow.

For three weeks the old prince lay stricken by paralysis in the new
house Prince Andrew had built at Bogucharovo, ever in the same state,
getting neither better nor worse. He was unconscious and lay like
a distorted corpse. He muttered unceasingly, his eyebrows and lips
twitching, and it was impossible to tell whether he understood what was
going on around him or not. One thing was certain--that he was suffering
and wished to say something. But what it was, no one could tell: it
might be some caprice of a sick and half-crazy man, or it might relate
to public affairs, or possibly to family concerns.

The doctor said this restlessness did not mean anything and was due
to physical causes; but Princess Mary thought he wished to tell
her something, and the fact that her presence always increased his
restlessness confirmed her opinion.

He was evidently suffering both physically and mentally. There was no
hope of recovery. It was impossible for him to travel, it would not do
to let him die on the road. "Would it not be better if the end did come,
the very end?" Princess Mary sometimes thought. Night and day, hardly
sleeping at all, she watched him and, terrible to say, often watched
him not with hope of finding signs of improvement but wishing to find
symptoms of the approach of the end.

Strange as it was to her to acknowledge this feeling in herself, yet
there it was. And what seemed still more terrible to her was that since
her father's illness began (perhaps even sooner, when she stayed with
him expecting something to happen), all the personal desires and hopes
that had been forgotten or sleeping within her had awakened. Thoughts
that had not entered her mind for years--thoughts of a life free from
the fear of her father, and even the possibility of love and of family
happiness--floated continually in her imagination like temptations
of the devil. Thrust them aside as she would, questions continually
recurred to her as to how she would order her life now, after that.
These were temptations of the devil and Princess Mary knew it. She knew
that the sole weapon against him was prayer, and she tried to pray. She
assumed an attitude of prayer, looked at the icons, repeated the words
of a prayer, but she could not pray. She felt that a different world had
now taken possession of her--the life of a world of strenuous and free
activity, quite opposed to the spiritual world in which till now she
had been confined and in which her greatest comfort had been prayer.
She could not pray, could not weep, and worldly cares took possession of
her.

It was becoming dangerous to remain in Bogucharovo. News of the approach
of the French came from all sides, and in one village, ten miles from
Bogucharovo, a homestead had been looted by French marauders.

The doctor insisted on the necessity of moving the prince; the
provincial Marshal of the Nobility sent an official to Princess Mary
to persuade her to get away as quickly as possible, and the head of the
rural police having come to Bogucharovo urged the same thing, saying
that the French were only some twenty-five miles away, that French
proclamations were circulating in the villages, and that if the princess
did not take her father away before the fifteenth, he could not answer
for the consequences.

The princess decided to leave on the fifteenth. The cares of preparation
and giving orders, for which everyone came to her, occupied her all day.
She spent the night of the fourteenth as usual, without undressing, in
the room next to the one where the prince lay. Several times, waking up,
she heard his groans and muttering, the creak of his bed, and the steps
of Tikhon and the doctor when they turned him over. Several times she
listened at the door, and it seemed to her that his mutterings were
louder than usual and that they turned him over oftener. She could not
sleep and several times went to the door and listened, wishing to enter
but not deciding to do so. Though he did not speak, Princess Mary saw
and knew how unpleasant every sign of anxiety on his account was to him.
She had noticed with what dissatisfaction he turned from the look she
sometimes involuntarily fixed on him. She knew that her going in during
the night at an unusual hour would irritate him.

But never had she felt so grieved for him or so much afraid of losing
him. She recalled all her life with him and in every word and act of his
found an expression of his love of her. Occasionally amid these memories
temptations of the devil would surge into her imagination: thoughts of
how things would be after his death, and how her new, liberated life
would be ordered. But she drove these thoughts away with disgust. Toward
morning he became quiet and she fell asleep.

She woke late. That sincerity which often comes with waking showed her
clearly what chiefly concerned her about her father's illness. On waking
she listened to what was going on behind the door and, hearing him
groan, said to herself with a sigh that things were still the same.

"But what could have happened? What did I want? I want his death!" she
cried with a feeling of loathing for herself.

She washed, dressed, said her prayers, and went out to the porch. In
front of it stood carriages without horses and things were being packed
into the vehicles.

It was a warm, gray morning. Princess Mary stopped at the porch, still
horrified by her spiritual baseness and trying to arrange her thoughts
before going to her father. The doctor came downstairs and went out to
her.

"He is a little better today," said he. "I was looking for you. One can
make out something of what he is saying. His head is clearer. Come in,
he is asking for you..."

Princess Mary's heart beat so violently at this news that she grew pale
and leaned against the wall to keep from falling. To see him, talk to
him, feel his eyes on her now that her whole soul was overflowing with
those dreadful, wicked temptations, was a torment of joy and terror.

"Come," said the doctor.

Princess Mary entered her father's room and went up to his bed. He was
lying on his back propped up high, and his small bony hands with
their knotted purple veins were lying on the quilt; his left eye gazed
straight before him, his right eye was awry, and his brows and lips
motionless. He seemed altogether so thin, small, and pathetic. His face
seemed to have shriveled or melted; his features had grown smaller.
Princess Mary went up and kissed his hand. His left hand pressed hers
so that she understood that he had long been waiting for her to come. He
twitched her hand, and his brows and lips quivered angrily.

She looked at him in dismay trying to guess what he wanted of her. When
she changed her position so that his left eye could see her face he
calmed down, not taking his eyes off her for some seconds. Then his lips
and tongue moved, sounds came, and he began to speak, gazing timidly and
imploringly at her, evidently afraid that she might not understand.

Straining all her faculties Princess Mary looked at him. The comic
efforts with which he moved his tongue made her drop her eyes and with
difficulty repress the sobs that rose to her throat. He said something,
repeating the same words several times. She could not understand them,
but tried to guess what he was saying and inquiringly repeated the words
he uttered.

"Mmm...ar...ate...ate..." he repeated several times.

It was quite impossible to understand these sounds. The doctor thought
he had guessed them, and inquiringly repeated: "Mary, are you afraid?"
The prince shook his head, again repeated the same sounds.

"My mind, my mind aches?" questioned Princess Mary.

He made a mumbling sound in confirmation of this, took her hand, and
began pressing it to different parts of his breast as if trying to find
the right place for it.

"Always thoughts... about you... thoughts..." he then uttered much
more clearly than he had done before, now that he was sure of being
understood.

Princess Mary pressed her head against his hand, trying to hide her sobs
and tears.

He moved his hand over her hair.

"I have been calling you all night..." he brought out.

"If only I had known..." she said through her tears. "I was afraid to
come in."

He pressed her hand.

"Weren't you asleep?"

"No, I did not sleep," said Princess Mary, shaking her head.

Unconsciously imitating her father, she now tried to express herself as
he did, as much as possible by signs, and her tongue too seemed to move
with difficulty.

"Dear one... Dearest..." Princess Mary could not quite make out what he
had said, but from his look it was clear that he had uttered a tender
caressing word such as he had never used to her before. "Why didn't you
come in?"

"And I was wishing for his death!" thought Princess Mary.

He was silent awhile.

"Thank you... daughter dear!... for all, for all... forgive!... thank
you!... forgive!... thank you!..." and tears began to flow from his
eyes. "Call Andrew!" he said suddenly, and a childish, timid expression
of doubt showed itself on his face as he spoke.

He himself seemed aware that his demand was meaningless. So at least it
seemed to Princess Mary.

"I have a letter from him," she replied.

He glanced at her with timid surprise.

"Where is he?"

"He's with the army, Father, at Smolensk."

He closed his eyes and remained silent a long time. Then as if in
answer to his doubts and to confirm the fact that now he understood and
remembered everything, he nodded his head and reopened his eyes.

"Yes," he said, softly and distinctly. "Russia has perished. They've
destroyed her."

And he began to sob, and again tears flowed from his eyes. Princess Mary
could no longer restrain herself and wept while she gazed at his face.

Again he closed his eyes. His sobs ceased, he pointed to his eyes, and
Tikhon, understanding him, wiped away the tears.

Then he again opened his eyes and said something none of them could
understand for a long time, till at last Tikhon understood and repeated
it. Princess Mary had sought the meaning of his words in the mood in
which he had just been speaking. She thought he was speaking of Russia,
or Prince Andrew, of herself, of his grandson, or of his own death, and
so she could not guess his words.

"Put on your white dress. I like it," was what he said.

Having understood this Princess Mary sobbed still louder, and the doctor
taking her arm led her out to the veranda, soothing her and trying to
persuade her to prepare for her journey. When she had left the room the
prince again began speaking about his son, about the war, and about the
Emperor, angrily twitching his brows and raising his hoarse voice, and
then he had a second and final stroke.

Princess Mary stayed on the veranda. The day had cleared, it was hot and
sunny. She could understand nothing, think of nothing and feel nothing,
except passionate love for her father, love such as she thought she had
never felt till that moment. She ran out sobbing into the garden and as
far as the pond, along the avenues of young lime trees Prince Andrew had
planted.

"Yes... I... I... I wished for his death! Yes, I wanted it to end
quicker.... I wished to be at peace.... And what will become of me? What
use will peace be when he is no longer here?" Princess Mary murmured,
pacing the garden with hurried steps and pressing her hands to her bosom
which heaved with convulsive sobs.

When she had completed the tour of the garden, which brought her again
to the house, she saw Mademoiselle Bourienne--who had remained at
Bogucharovo and did not wish to leave it--coming toward her with a
stranger. This was the Marshal of the Nobility of the district, who
had come personally to point out to the princess the necessity for her
prompt departure. Princess Mary listened without understanding him; she
led him to the house, offered him lunch, and sat down with him. Then,
excusing herself, she went to the door of the old prince's room. The
doctor came out with an agitated face and said she could not enter.

"Go away, Princess! Go away... go away!"

She returned to the garden and sat down on the grass at the foot of the
slope by the pond, where no one could see her. She did not know how
long she had been there when she was aroused by the sound of a woman's
footsteps running along the path. She rose and saw Dunyasha her maid,
who was evidently looking for her, and who stopped suddenly as if in
alarm on seeing her mistress.

"Please come, Princess... The Prince," said Dunyasha in a breaking
voice.

"Immediately, I'm coming, I'm coming!" replied the princess hurriedly,
not giving Dunyasha time to finish what she was saying, and trying to
avoid seeing the girl she ran toward the house.

"Princess, it's God's will! You must be prepared for everything," said
the Marshal, meeting her at the house door.

"Let me alone; it's not true!" she cried angrily to him.

The doctor tried to stop her. She pushed him aside and ran to her
father's door. "Why are these people with frightened faces stopping me?
I don't want any of them! And what are they doing here?" she thought.
She opened the door and the bright daylight in that previously darkened
room startled her. In the room were her nurse and other women. They all
drew back from the bed, making way for her. He was still lying on the
bed as before, but the stern expression of his quiet face made Princess
Mary stop short on the threshold.

"No, he's not dead--it's impossible!" she told herself and approached
him, and repressing the terror that seized her, she pressed her lips
to his cheek. But she stepped back immediately. All the force of the
tenderness she had been feeling for him vanished instantly and was
replaced by a feeling of horror at what lay there before her. "No, he
is no more! He is not, but here where he was is something unfamiliar and
hostile, some dreadful, terrifying, and repellent mystery!" And hiding
her face in her hands, Princess Mary sank into the arms of the doctor,
who held her up.


In the presence of Tikhon and the doctor the women washed what had been
the prince, tied his head up with a handkerchief that the mouth should
not stiffen while open, and with another handkerchief tied together the
legs that were already spreading apart. Then they dressed him in uniform
with his decorations and placed his shriveled little body on a table.
Heaven only knows who arranged all this and when, but it all got done
as if of its own accord. Toward night candles were burning round his
coffin, a pall was spread over it, the floor was strewn with sprays of
juniper, a printed band was tucked in under his shriveled head, and in a
corner of the room sat a chanter reading the psalms.

Just as horses shy and snort and gather about a dead horse, so the
inmates of the house and strangers crowded into the drawing room round
the coffin--the Marshal, the village Elder, peasant women--and all with
fixed and frightened eyes, crossing themselves, bowed and kissed the old
prince's cold and stiffened hand.





CHAPTER IX


Until Prince Andrew settled in Bogucharovo its owners had always been
absentees, and its peasants were of quite a different character from
those of Bald Hills. They differed from them in speech, dress, and
disposition. They were called steppe peasants. The old prince used to
approve of them for their endurance at work when they came to Bald Hills
to help with the harvest or to dig ponds, and ditches, but he disliked
them for their boorishness.

Prince Andrew's last stay at Bogucharovo, when he introduced hospitals
and schools and reduced the quitrent the peasants had to pay, had not
softened their disposition but had on the contrary strengthened in
them the traits of character the old prince called boorishness. Various
obscure rumors were always current among them: at one time a rumor that
they would all be enrolled as Cossacks; at another of a new religion to
which they were all to be converted; then of some proclamation of the
Tsar's and of an oath to the Tsar Paul in 1797 (in connection with which
it was rumored that freedom had been granted them but the landowners had
stopped it), then of Peter Fedorovich's return to the throne in seven
years' time, when everything would be made free and so "simple" that
there would be no restrictions. Rumors of the war with Bonaparte and
his invasion were connected in their minds with the same sort of vague
notions of Antichrist, the end of the world, and "pure freedom."

In the vicinity of Bogucharovo were large villages belonging to the
crown or to owners whose serfs paid quitrent and could work where they
pleased. There were very few resident landlords in the neighborhood
and also very few domestic or literate serfs, and in the lives of the
peasantry of those parts the mysterious undercurrents in the life of
the Russian people, the causes and meaning of which are so baffling to
contemporaries, were more clearly and strongly noticeable than among
others. One instance, which had occurred some twenty years before, was
a movement among the peasants to emigrate to some unknown "warm rivers."
Hundreds of peasants, among them the Bogucharovo folk, suddenly began
selling their cattle and moving in whole families toward the southeast.
As birds migrate to somewhere beyond the sea, so these men with their
wives and children streamed to the southeast, to parts where none of
them had ever been. They set off in caravans, bought their freedom one
by one or ran away, and drove or walked toward the "warm rivers." Many
of them were punished, some sent to Siberia, many died of cold and
hunger on the road, many returned of their own accord, and the movement
died down of itself just as it had sprung up, without apparent reason.
But such undercurrents still existed among the people and gathered new
forces ready to manifest themselves just as strangely, unexpectedly, and
at the same time simply, naturally, and forcibly. Now in 1812, to anyone
living in close touch with these people it was apparent that these
undercurrents were acting strongly and nearing an eruption.

Alpatych, who had reached Bogucharovo shortly before the old prince's
death, noticed an agitation among the peasants, and that contrary to
what was happening in the Bald Hills district, where over a radius of
forty miles all the peasants were moving away and leaving their villages
to be devastated by the Cossacks, the peasants in the steppe region
round Bogucharovo were, it was rumored, in touch with the French,
received leaflets from them that passed from hand to hand, and did not
migrate. He learned from domestic serfs loyal to him that the peasant
Karp, who possessed great influence in the village commune and had
recently been away driving a government transport, had returned with
news that the Cossacks were destroying deserted villages, but that the
French did not harm them. Alpatych also knew that on the previous day
another peasant had even brought from the village of Visloukhovo, which
was occupied by the French, a proclamation by a French general that no
harm would be done to the inhabitants, and if they remained they would
be paid for anything taken from them. As proof of this the peasant had
brought from Visloukhovo a hundred rubles in notes (he did not know that
they were false) paid to him in advance for hay.

More important still, Alpatych learned that on the morning of the
very day he gave the village Elder orders to collect carts to move the
princess' luggage from Bogucharovo, there had been a village meeting at
which it had been decided not to move but to wait. Yet there was no
time to waste. On the fifteenth, the day of the old prince's death,
the Marshal had insisted on Princess Mary's leaving at once, as it was
becoming dangerous. He had told her that after the sixteenth he could
not be responsible for what might happen. On the evening of the day the
old prince died the Marshal went away, promising to return next day for
the funeral. But this he was unable to do, for he received tidings that
the French had unexpectedly advanced, and had barely time to remove his
own family and valuables from his estate.

For some thirty years Bogucharovo had been managed by the village Elder,
Dron, whom the old prince called by the diminutive "Dronushka."

Dron was one of those physically and mentally vigorous peasants who grow
big beards as soon as they are of age and go on unchanged till they
are sixty or seventy, without a gray hair or the loss of a tooth, as
straight and strong at sixty as at thirty.

Soon after the migration to the "warm rivers," in which he had taken
part like the rest, Dron was made village Elder and overseer of
Bogucharovo, and had since filled that post irreproachably for
twenty-three years. The peasants feared him more than they did their
master. The masters, both the old prince and the young, and the steward
respected him and jestingly called him "the Minister." During the
whole time of his service Dron had never been drunk or ill, never after
sleepless nights or the hardest tasks had he shown the least fatigue,
and though he could not read he had never forgotten a single money
account or the number of quarters of flour in any of the endless
cartloads he sold for the prince, nor a single shock of the whole corn
crop on any single acre of the Bogucharovo fields.

Alpatych, arriving from the devastated Bald Hills estate, sent for his
Dron on the day of the prince's funeral and told him to have twelve
horses got ready for the princess' carriages and eighteen carts for
the things to be removed from Bogucharovo. Though the peasants paid
quitrent, Alpatych thought no difficulty would be made about complying
with this order, for there were two hundred and thirty households at
work in Bogucharovo and the peasants were well to do. But on hearing the
order Dron lowered his eyes and remained silent. Alpatych named certain
peasants he knew, from whom he told him to take the carts.

Dron replied that the horses of these peasants were away carting.
Alpatych named others, but they too, according to Dron, had no horses
available: some horses were carting for the government, others were too
weak, and others had died for want of fodder. It seemed that no horses
could be had even for the carriages, much less for the carting.

Alpatych looked intently at Dron and frowned. Just as Dron was a model
village Elder, so Alpatych had not managed the prince's estates for
twenty years in vain. He was a model steward, possessing in the highest
degree the faculty of divining the needs and instincts of those he dealt
with. Having glanced at Dron he at once understood that his answers did
not express his personal views but the general mood of the Bogucharovo
commune, by which the Elder had already been carried away. But he also
knew that Dron, who had acquired property and was hated by the commune,
must be hesitating between the two camps: the masters' and the serfs'.
He noticed this hesitation in Dron's look and therefore frowned and
moved closer up to him.

"Now just listen, Dronushka," said he. "Don't talk nonsense to me. His
excellency Prince Andrew himself gave me orders to move all the people
away and not leave them with the enemy, and there is an order from the
Tsar about it too. Anyone who stays is a traitor to the Tsar. Do you
hear?"

"I hear," Dron answered without lifting his eyes.

Alpatych was not satisfied with this reply.

"Eh, Dron, it will turn out badly!" he said, shaking his head.

"The power is in your hands," Dron rejoined sadly.

"Eh, Dron, drop it!" Alpatych repeated, withdrawing his hand from his
bosom and solemnly pointing to the floor at Dron's feet. "I can see
through you and three yards into the ground under you," he continued,
gazing at the floor in front of Dron.

Dron was disconcerted, glanced furtively at Alpatych and again lowered
his eyes.

"You drop this nonsense and tell the people to get ready to leave their
homes and go to Moscow and to get carts ready for tomorrow morning
for the princess' things. And don't go to any meeting yourself, do you
hear?"

Dron suddenly fell on his knees.

"Yakov Alpatych, discharge me! Take the keys from me and discharge me,
for Christ's sake!"

"Stop that!" cried Alpatych sternly. "I see through you and three yards
under you," he repeated, knowing that his skill in beekeeping, his
knowledge of the right time to sow the oats, and the fact that he had
been able to retain the old prince's favor for twenty years had long
since gained him the reputation of being a wizard, and that the power of
seeing three yards under a man is considered an attribute of wizards.

Dron got up and was about to say something, but Alpatych interrupted
him.

"What is it you have got into your heads, eh?... What are you thinking
of, eh?"

"What am I to do with the people?" said Dron. "They're quite beside
themselves; I have already told them..."

"'Told them,' I dare say!" said Alpatych. "Are they drinking?" he asked
abruptly.

"Quite beside themselves, Yakov Alpatych; they've fetched another
barrel."

"Well, then, listen! I'll go to the police officer, and you tell them
so, and that they must stop this and the carts must be got ready."

"I understand."

Alpatych did not insist further. He had managed people for a long time
and knew that the chief way to make them obey is to show no suspicion
that they can possibly disobey. Having wrung a submissive "I understand"
from Dron, Alpatych contented himself with that, though he not only
doubted but felt almost certain that without the help of troops the
carts would not be forthcoming.

And so it was, for when evening came no carts had been provided. In the
village, outside the drink shop, another meeting was being held, which
decided that the horses should be driven out into the woods and the
carts should not be provided. Without saying anything of this to the
princess, Alpatych had his own belongings taken out of the carts which
had arrived from Bald Hills and had those horses got ready for
the princess' carriages. Meanwhile he went himself to the police
authorities.





CHAPTER X


After her father's funeral Princess Mary shut herself up in her room and
did not admit anyone. A maid came to the door to say that Alpatych was
asking for orders about their departure. (This was before his talk with
Dron.) Princess Mary raised herself on the sofa on which she had been
lying and replied through the closed door that she did not mean to go
away and begged to be left in peace.

The windows of the room in which she was lying looked westward. She
lay on the sofa with her face to the wall, fingering the buttons of the
leather cushion and seeing nothing but that cushion, and her confused
thoughts were centered on one subject--the irrevocability of death and
her own spiritual baseness, which she had not suspected, but which had
shown itself during her father's illness. She wished to pray but did not
dare to, dared not in her present state of mind address herself to God.
She lay for a long time in that position.

The sun had reached the other side of the house, and its slanting rays
shone into the open window, lighting up the room and part of the morocco
cushion at which Princess Mary was looking. The flow of her thoughts
suddenly stopped. Unconsciously she sat up, smoothed her hair, got up,
and went to the window, involuntarily inhaling the freshness of the
clear but windy evening.

"Yes, you can well enjoy the evening now! He is gone and no one will
hinder you," she said to herself, and sinking into a chair she let her
head fall on the window sill.

Someone spoke her name in a soft and tender voice from the garden and
kissed her head. She looked up. It was Mademoiselle Bourienne in a black
dress and weepers. She softly approached Princess Mary, sighed, kissed
her, and immediately began to cry. The princess looked up at her. All
their former disharmony and her own jealousy recurred to her mind.
But she remembered too how he had changed of late toward Mademoiselle
Bourienne and could not bear to see her, thereby showing how unjust were
the reproaches Princess Mary had mentally addressed to her. "Besides,
is it for me, for me who desired his death, to condemn anyone?" she
thought.

Princess Mary vividly pictured to herself the position of Mademoiselle
Bourienne, whom she had of late kept at a distance, but who yet was
dependent on her and living in her house. She felt sorry for her
and held out her hand with a glance of gentle inquiry. Mademoiselle
Bourienne at once began crying again and kissed that hand, speaking of
the princess' sorrow and making herself a partner in it. She said her
only consolation was the fact that the princess allowed her to share her
sorrow, that all the old misunderstandings should sink into nothing but
this great grief; that she felt herself blameless in regard to everyone,
and that he, from above, saw her affection and gratitude. The princess
heard her, not heeding her words but occasionally looking up at her and
listening to the sound of her voice.

"Your position is doubly terrible, dear princess," said Mademoiselle
Bourienne after a pause. "I understand that you could not, and cannot,
think of yourself, but with my love for you I must do so.... Has
Alpatych been to you? Has he spoken to you of going away?" she asked.

Princess Mary did not answer. She did not understand who was to go or
where to. "Is it possible to plan or think of anything now? Is it not
all the same?" she thought, and did not reply.

"You know, chere Marie," said Mademoiselle Bourienne, "that we are in
danger--are surrounded by the French. It would be dangerous to move now.
If we go we are almost sure to be taken prisoners, and God knows..."

Princess Mary looked at her companion without understanding what she was
talking about.

"Oh, if anyone knew how little anything matters to me now," she said.
"Of course I would on no account wish to go away from him.... Alpatych
did say something about going.... Speak to him; I can do nothing,
nothing, and don't want to...."

"I've spoken to him. He hopes we should be in time to get away tomorrow,
but I think it would now be better to stay here," said Mademoiselle
Bourienne. "Because, you will agree, chere Marie, to fall into the hands
of the soldiers or of riotous peasants would be terrible."

Mademoiselle Bourienne took from her reticule a proclamation (not
printed on ordinary Russian paper) of General Rameau's, telling people
not to leave their homes and that the French authorities would afford
them proper protection. She handed this to the princess.

"I think it would be best to appeal to that general," she continued,
"and I am sure that all due respect would be shown you."

Princess Mary read the paper, and her face began to quiver with stifled
sobs.

"From whom did you get this?" she asked.

"They probably recognized that I am French, by my name," replied
Mademoiselle Bourienne blushing.

Princess Mary, with the paper in her hand, rose from the window and with
a pale face went out of the room and into what had been Prince Andrew's
study.

"Dunyasha, send Alpatych, or Dronushka, or somebody to me!" she said,
"and tell Mademoiselle Bourienne not to come to me," she added, hearing
Mademoiselle Bourienne's voice. "We must go at once, at once!" she said,
appalled at the thought of being left in the hands of the French.

"If Prince Andrew heard that I was in the power of the French! That
I, the daughter of Prince Nicholas Bolkonski, asked General Rameau for
protection and accepted his favor!" This idea horrified her, made her
shudder, blush, and feel such a rush of anger and pride as she had never
experienced before. All that was distressing, and especially all that
was humiliating, in her position rose vividly to her mind. "They, the
French, would settle in this house: M. le General Rameau would occupy
Prince Andrew's study and amuse himself by looking through and reading
his letters and papers. Mademoiselle Bourienne would do the honors of
Bogucharovo for him. I should be given a small room as a favor, the
soldiers would violate my father's newly dug grave to steal his crosses
and stars, they would tell me of their victories over the Russians, and
would pretend to sympathize with my sorrow..." thought Princess Mary,
not thinking her own thoughts but feeling bound to think like her father
and her brother. For herself she did not care where she remained or what
happened to her, but she felt herself the representative of her dead
father and of Prince Andrew. Involuntarily she thought their thoughts
and felt their feelings. What they would have said and what they would
have done she felt bound to say and do. She went into Prince Andrew's
study, trying to enter completely into his ideas, and considered her
position.

The demands of life, which had seemed to her annihilated by her father's
death, all at once rose before her with a new, previously unknown force
and took possession of her.

Agitated and flushed she paced the room, sending now for Michael
Ivanovich and now for Tikhon or Dron. Dunyasha, the nurse, and the other
maids could not say in how far Mademoiselle Bourienne's statement was
correct. Alpatych was not at home, he had gone to the police. Neither
could the architect Michael Ivanovich, who on being sent for came in
with sleepy eyes, tell Princess Mary anything. With just the same smile
of agreement with which for fifteen years he had been accustomed to
answer the old prince without expressing views of his own, he now
replied to Princess Mary, so that nothing definite could be got from his
answers. The old valet Tikhon, with sunken, emaciated face that bore the
stamp of inconsolable grief, replied: "Yes, Princess" to all Princess
Mary's questions and hardly refrained from sobbing as he looked at her.

At length Dron, the village Elder, entered the room and with a deep bow
to Princess Mary came to a halt by the doorpost.

Princess Mary walked up and down the room and stopped in front of him.

"Dronushka," she said, regarding as a sure friend this Dronushka who
always used to bring a special kind of gingerbread from his visit to the
fair at Vyazma every year and smilingly offer it to her, "Dronushka, now
since our misfortune..." she began, but could not go on.

"We are all in God's hands," said he, with a sigh.

They were silent for a while.

"Dronushka, Alpatych has gone off somewhere and I have no one to turn
to. Is it true, as they tell me, that I can't even go away?"

"Why shouldn't you go away, your excellency? You can go," said Dron.

"I was told it would be dangerous because of the enemy. Dear friend, I
can do nothing. I understand nothing. I have nobody! I want to go away
tonight or early tomorrow morning."

Dron paused. He looked askance at Princess Mary and said: "There are no
horses; I told Yakov Alpatych so."

"Why are there none?" asked the princess.

"It's all God's scourge," said Dron. "What horses we had have been
taken for the army or have died--this is such a year! It's not a case of
feeding horses--we may die of hunger ourselves! As it is, some go three
days without eating. We've nothing, we've been ruined."

Princess Mary listened attentively to what he told her.

"The peasants are ruined? They have no bread?" she asked.

"They're dying of hunger," said Dron. "It's not a case of carting."

"But why didn't you tell me, Dronushka? Isn't it possible to help them?
I'll do all I can...."

To Princess Mary it was strange that now, at a moment when such sorrow
was filling her soul, there could be rich people and poor, and the rich
could refrain from helping the poor. She had heard vaguely that there
was such a thing as "landlord's corn" which was sometimes given to the
peasants. She also knew that neither her father nor her brother would
refuse to help the peasants in need, she only feared to make some
mistake in speaking about the distribution of the grain she wished to
give. She was glad such cares presented themselves, enabling her
without scruple to forget her own grief. She began asking Dron about the
peasants' needs and what there was in Bogucharovo that belonged to the
landlord.

"But we have grain belonging to my brother?" she said.

"The landlord's grain is all safe," replied Dron proudly. "Our prince
did not order it to be sold."

"Give it to the peasants, let them have all they need; I give you leave
in my brother's name," said she.

Dron made no answer but sighed deeply.

"Give them that corn if there is enough of it. Distribute it all. I
give this order in my brother's name; and tell them that what is ours is
theirs. We do not grudge them anything. Tell them so."

Dron looked intently at the princess while she was speaking.

"Discharge me, little mother, for God's sake! Order the keys to be taken
from me," said he. "I have served twenty-three years and have done no
wrong. Discharge me, for God's sake!"

Princess Mary did not understand what he wanted of her or why he was
asking to be discharged. She replied that she had never doubted his
devotion and that she was ready to do anything for him and for the
peasants.





CHAPTER XI


An hour later Dunyasha came to tell the princess that Dron had come, and
all the peasants had assembled at the barn by the princess' order and
wished to have word with their mistress.

"But I never told them to come," said Princess Mary. "I only told Dron
to let them have the grain."

"Only, for God's sake, Princess dear, have them sent away and don't go
out to them. It's all a trick," said Dunyasha, "and when Yakov Alpatych
returns let us get away... and please don't..."

"What is a trick?" asked Princess Mary in surprise.

"I know it is, only listen to me for God's sake! Ask nurse too. They say
they don't agree to leave Bogucharovo as you ordered."

"You're making some mistake. I never ordered them to go away," said
Princess Mary. "Call Dronushka."

Dron came and confirmed Dunyasha's words; the peasants had come by the
princess' order.

"But I never sent for them," declared the princess. "You must have given
my message wrong. I only said that you were to give them the grain."

Dron only sighed in reply.

"If you order it they will go away," said he.

"No, no. I'll go out to them," said Princess Mary, and in spite of
the nurse's and Dunyasha's protests she went out into the porch; Dron,
Dunyasha, the nurse, and Michael Ivanovich following her.

"They probably think I am offering them the grain to bribe them to
remain here, while I myself go away leaving them to the mercy of the
French," thought Princess Mary. "I will offer them monthly rations and
housing at our Moscow estate. I am sure Andrew would do even more in
my place," she thought as she went out in the twilight toward the crowd
standing on the pasture by the barn.

The men crowded closer together, stirred, and rapidly took off their
hats. Princess Mary lowered her eyes and, tripping over her skirt, came
close up to them. So many different eyes, old and young, were fixed
on her, and there were so many different faces, that she could not
distinguish any of them and, feeling that she must speak to them all
at once, did not know how to do it. But again the sense that she
represented her father and her brother gave her courage, and she boldly
began her speech.

"I am very glad you have come," she said without raising her eyes, and
feeling her heart beating quickly and violently. "Dronushka tells me
that the war has ruined you. That is our common misfortune, and I
shall grudge nothing to help you. I am myself going away because it
is dangerous here... the enemy is near... because... I am giving you
everything, my friends, and I beg you to take everything, all our grain,
so that you may not suffer want! And if you have been told that I
am giving you the grain to keep you here--that is not true. On the
contrary, I ask you to go with all your belongings to our estate near
Moscow, and I promise you I will see to it that there you shall want for
nothing. You shall be given food and lodging."

The princess stopped. Sighs were the only sound heard in the crowd.

"I am not doing this on my own account," she continued, "I do it in the
name of my dead father, who was a good master to you, and of my brother
and his son."

Again she paused. No one broke the silence.

"Ours is a common misfortune and we will share it together. All that is
mine is yours," she concluded, scanning the faces before her.

All eyes were gazing at her with one and the same expression. She
could not fathom whether it was curiosity, devotion, gratitude, or
apprehension and distrust--but the expression on all the faces was
identical.

"We are all very thankful for your bounty, but it won't do for us to
take the landlord's grain," said a voice at the back of the crowd.

"But why not?" asked the princess.

No one replied and Princess Mary, looking round at the crowd, found that
every eye she met now was immediately dropped.

"But why don't you want to take it?" she asked again.

No one answered.

The silence began to oppress the princess and she tried to catch
someone's eye.

"Why don't you speak?" she inquired of a very old man who stood just
in front of her leaning on his stick. "If you think something more is
wanted, tell me! I will do anything," said she, catching his eye.

But as if this angered him, he bent his head quite low and muttered:

"Why should we agree? We don't want the grain."

"Why should we give up everything? We don't agree. Don't agree.... We
are sorry for you, but we're not willing. Go away yourself, alone..."
came from various sides of the crowd.

And again all the faces in that crowd bore an identical expression,
though now it was certainly not an expression of curiosity or gratitude,
but of angry resolve.

"But you can't have understood me," said Princess Mary with a sad smile.
"Why don't you want to go? I promise to house and feed you, while here
the enemy would ruin you..."

But her voice was drowned by the voices of the crowd.

"We're not willing. Let them ruin us! We won't take your grain. We don't
agree."

Again Princess Mary tried to catch someone's eye, but not a single eye
in the crowd was turned to her; evidently they were all trying to avoid
her look. She felt strange and awkward.

"Oh yes, an artful tale! Follow her into slavery! Pull down your houses
and go into bondage! I dare say! 'I'll give you grain, indeed!' she
says," voices in the crowd were heard saying.

With drooping head Princess Mary left the crowd and went back to the
house. Having repeated her order to Dron to have horses ready for her
departure next morning, she went to her room and remained alone with her
own thoughts.





CHAPTER XII


For a long time that night Princess Mary sat by the open window of her
room hearing the sound of the peasants' voices that reached her from
the village, but it was not of them she was thinking. She felt that she
could not understand them however much she might think about them. She
thought only of one thing, her sorrow, which, after the break caused
by cares for the present, seemed already to belong to the past. Now she
could remember it and weep or pray.

After sunset the wind had dropped. The night was calm and fresh. Toward
midnight the voices began to subside, a cock crowed, the full moon began
to show from behind the lime trees, a fresh white dewy mist began to
rise, and stillness reigned over the village and the house.

Pictures of the near past--her father's illness and last moments--rose
one after another to her memory. With mournful pleasure she now lingered
over these images, repelling with horror only the last one, the
picture of his death, which she felt she could not contemplate even in
imagination at this still and mystic hour of night. And these pictures
presented themselves to her so clearly and in such detail that they
seemed now present, now past, and now future.

She vividly recalled the moment when he had his first stroke and was
being dragged along by his armpits through the garden at Bald Hills,
muttering something with his helpless tongue, twitching his gray
eyebrows and looking uneasily and timidly at her.

"Even then he wanted to tell me what he told me the day he died," she
thought. "He had always thought what he said then." And she recalled in
all its detail the night at Bald Hills before he had the last stroke,
when with a foreboding of disaster she had remained at home against his
will. She had not slept and had stolen downstairs on tiptoe, and going
to the door of the conservatory where he slept that night had listened
at the door. In a suffering and weary voice he was saying something to
Tikhon, speaking of the Crimea and its warm nights and of the Empress.
Evidently he had wanted to talk. "And why didn't he call me? Why didn't
he let me be there instead of Tikhon?" Princess Mary had thought and
thought again now. "Now he will never tell anyone what he had in his
soul. Never will that moment return for him or for me when he might have
said all he longed to say, and not Tikhon but I might have heard and
understood him. Why didn't I enter the room?" she thought. "Perhaps he
would then have said to me what he said the day he died. While talking
to Tikhon he asked about me twice. He wanted to see me, and I was
standing close by, outside the door. It was sad and painful for him
to talk to Tikhon who did not understand him. I remember how he began
speaking to him about Lise as if she were alive--he had forgotten she
was dead--and Tikhon reminded him that she was no more, and he shouted,
'Fool!' He was greatly depressed. From behind the door I heard how he
lay down on his bed groaning and loudly exclaimed, 'My God!' Why didn't
I go in then? What could he have done to me? What could I have lost? And
perhaps he would then have been comforted and would have said that word
to me." And Princess Mary uttered aloud the caressing word he had said
to her on the day of his death. "Dear-est!" she repeated, and began
sobbing, with tears that relieved her soul. She now saw his face before
her. And not the face she had known ever since she could remember and
had always seen at a distance, but the timid, feeble face she had seen
for the first time quite closely, with all its wrinkles and details,
when she stooped near to his mouth to catch what he said.

"Dear-est!" she repeated again.

"What was he thinking when he uttered that word? What is he thinking
now?" This question suddenly presented itself to her, and in answer she
saw him before her with the expression that was on his face as he lay
in his coffin with his chin bound up with a white handkerchief. And the
horror that had seized her when she touched him and convinced herself
that that was not he, but something mysterious and horrible, seized her
again. She tried to think of something else and to pray, but could do
neither. With wide-open eyes she gazed at the moonlight and the shadows,
expecting every moment to see his dead face, and she felt that the
silence brooding over the house and within it held her fast.

"Dunyasha," she whispered. "Dunyasha!" she screamed wildly, and tearing
herself out of this silence she ran to the servants' quarters to meet
her old nurse and the maidservants who came running toward her.





CHAPTER XIII


On the seventeenth of August Rostov and Ilyin, accompanied by Lavrushka
who had just returned from captivity and by an hussar orderly, left
their quarters at Yankovo, ten miles from Bogucharovo, and went for a
ride--to try a new horse Ilyin had bought and to find out whether there
was any hay to be had in the villages.

For the last three days Bogucharovo had lain between the two hostile
armies, so that it was as easy for the Russian rearguard to get to it as
for the French vanguard; Rostov, as a careful squadron commander, wished
to take such provisions as remained at Bogucharovo before the French
could get them.

Rostov and Ilyin were in the merriest of moods. On the way to
Bogucharovo, a princely estate with a dwelling house and farm where
they hoped to find many domestic serfs and pretty girls, they questioned
Lavrushka about Napoleon and laughed at his stories, and raced one
another to try Ilyin's horse.

Rostov had no idea that the village he was entering was the property of
that very Bolkonski who had been engaged to his sister.

Rostov and Ilyin gave rein to their horses for a last race along the
incline before reaching Bogucharovo, and Rostov, outstripping Ilyin, was
the first to gallop into the village street.

"You're first!" cried Ilyin, flushed.

"Yes, always first both on the grassland and here," answered Rostov,
stroking his heated Donets horse.

"And I'd have won on my Frenchy, your excellency," said Lavrushka
from behind, alluding to his shabby cart horse, "only I didn't wish to
mortify you."

They rode at a footpace to the barn, where a large crowd of peasants was
standing.

Some of the men bared their heads, others stared at the new arrivals
without doffing their caps. Two tall old peasants with wrinkled faces
and scanty beards emerged from the tavern, smiling, staggering, and
singing some incoherent song, and approached the officers.

"Fine fellows!" said Rostov laughing. "Is there any hay here?"

"And how like one another," said Ilyin.

"A mo-o-st me-r-r-y co-o-m-pa...!" sang one of the peasants with a
blissful smile.

One of the men came out of the crowd and went up to Rostov.

"Who do you belong to?" he asked.

"The French," replied Ilyin jestingly, "and here is Napoleon
himself"--and he pointed to Lavrushka.

"Then you are Russians?" the peasant asked again.

"And is there a large force of you here?" said another, a short man,
coming up.

"Very large," answered Rostov. "But why have you collected here?" he
added. "Is it a holiday?"

"The old men have met to talk over the business of the commune," replied
the peasant, moving away.

At that moment, on the road leading from the big house, two women and a
man in a white hat were seen coming toward the officers.

"The one in pink is mine, so keep off!" said Ilyin on seeing Dunyasha
running resolutely toward him.

"She'll be ours!" said Lavrushka to Ilyin, winking.

"What do you want, my pretty?" said Ilyin with a smile.

"The princess ordered me to ask your regiment and your name."

"This is Count Rostov, squadron commander, and I am your humble
servant."

"Co-o-om-pa-ny!" roared the tipsy peasant with a beatific smile as
he looked at Ilyin talking to the girl. Following Dunyasha, Alpatych
advanced to Rostov, having bared his head while still at a distance.

"May I make bold to trouble your honor?" said he respectfully, but with
a shade of contempt for the youthfulness of this officer and with a hand
thrust into his bosom. "My mistress, daughter of General in Chief Prince
Nicholas Bolkonski who died on the fifteenth of this month, finding
herself in difficulties owing to the boorishness of these people"--he
pointed to the peasants--"asks you to come up to the house.... Won't
you, please, ride on a little farther," said Alpatych with a melancholy
smile, "as it is not convenient in the presence of...?" He pointed to
the two peasants who kept as close to him as horseflies to a horse.

"Ah!... Alpatych... Ah, Yakov Alpatych... Grand! Forgive us for Christ's
sake, eh?" said the peasants, smiling joyfully at him.

Rostov looked at the tipsy peasants and smiled.

"Or perhaps they amuse your honor?" remarked Alpatych with a staid air,
as he pointed at the old men with his free hand.

"No, there's not much to be amused at here," said Rostov, and rode on a
little way. "What's the matter?" he asked.

"I make bold to inform your honor that the rude peasants here don't
wish to let the mistress leave the estate, and threaten to unharness her
horses, so that though everything has been packed up since morning, her
excellency cannot get away."

"Impossible!" exclaimed Rostov.

"I have the honor to report to you the actual truth," said Alpatych.

Rostov dismounted, gave his horse to the orderly, and followed Alpatych
to the house, questioning him as to the state of affairs. It appeared
that the princess' offer of corn to the peasants the previous day, and
her talk with Dron and at the meeting, had actually had so bad an effect
that Dron had finally given up the keys and joined the peasants and had
not appeared when Alpatych sent for him; and that in the morning when
the princess gave orders to harness for her journey, the peasants had
come in a large crowd to the barn and sent word that they would not let
her leave the village: that there was an order not to move, and that
they would unharness the horses. Alpatych had gone out to admonish them,
but was told (it was chiefly Karp who did the talking, Dron not showing
himself in the crowd) that they could not let the princess go, that
there was an order to the contrary, but that if she stayed they would
serve her as before and obey her in everything.

At the moment when Rostov and Ilyin were galloping along the road,
Princess Mary, despite the dissuasions of Alpatych, her nurse, and the
maids, had given orders to harness and intended to start, but when the
cavalrymen were espied they were taken for Frenchmen, the coachman ran
away, and the women in the house began to wail.

"Father! Benefactor! God has sent you!" exclaimed deeply moved voices as
Rostov passed through the anteroom.

Princess Mary was sitting helpless and bewildered in the large sitting
room, when Rostov was shown in. She could not grasp who he was and why
he had come, or what was happening to her. When she saw his Russian
face, and by his walk and the first words he uttered recognized him as a
man of her own class, she glanced at him with her deep radiant look and
began speaking in a voice that faltered and trembled with emotion. This
meeting immediately struck Rostov as a romantic event. "A helpless girl
overwhelmed with grief, left to the mercy of coarse, rioting peasants!
And what a strange fate sent me here! What gentleness and nobility there
are in her features and expression!" thought he as he looked at her and
listened to her timid story.

When she began to tell him that all this had happened the day after her
father's funeral, her voiced trembled. She turned away, and then, as if
fearing he might take her words as meant to move him to pity, looked at
him with an apprehensive glance of inquiry. There were tears in Rostov's
eyes. Princess Mary noticed this and glanced gratefully at him with that
radiant look which caused the plainness of her face to be forgotten.

"I cannot express, Princess, how glad I am that I happened to ride here
and am able to show my readiness to serve you," said Rostov, rising. "Go
when you please, and I give you my word of honor that no one shall dare
to cause you annoyance if only you will allow me to act as your escort."
And bowing respectfully, as if to a lady of royal blood, he moved toward
the door.

Rostov's deferential tone seemed to indicate that though he would
consider himself happy to be acquainted with her, he did not wish to
take advantage of her misfortunes to intrude upon her.

Princess Mary understood this and appreciated his delicacy.

"I am very, very grateful to you," she said in French, "but I hope it
was all a misunderstanding and that no one is to blame for it." She
suddenly began to cry.

"Excuse me!" she said.

Rostov, knitting his brows, left the room with another low bow.





CHAPTER XIV


"Well, is she pretty? Ah, friend--my pink one is delicious; her name is
Dunyasha...."

But on glancing at Rostov's face Ilyin stopped short. He saw that his
hero and commander was following quite a different train of thought.

Rostov glanced angrily at Ilyin and without replying strode off with
rapid steps to the village.

"I'll show them; I'll give it to them, the brigands!" said he to
himself.

Alpatych at a gliding trot, only just managing not to run, kept up with
him with difficulty.

"What decision have you been pleased to come to?" said he.

Rostov stopped and, clenching his fists, suddenly and sternly turned on
Alpatych.

"Decision? What decision? Old dotard!..." cried he. "What have you been
about? Eh? The peasants are rioting, and you can't manage them? You're
a traitor yourself! I know you. I'll flay you all alive!..." And as if
afraid of wasting his store of anger, he left Alpatych and went rapidly
forward. Alpatych, mastering his offended feelings, kept pace with
Rostov at a gliding gait and continued to impart his views. He said
the peasants were obdurate and that at the present moment it would be
imprudent to "overresist" them without an armed force, and would it not
be better first to send for the military?

"I'll give them armed force... I'll 'overresist' them!" uttered Rostov
meaninglessly, breathless with irrational animal fury and the need to
vent it.

Without considering what he would do he moved unconciously with quick,
resolute steps toward the crowd. And the nearer he drew to it the more
Alpatych felt that this unreasonable action might produce good results.
The peasants in the crowd were similarly impressed when they saw
Rostov's rapid, firm steps and resolute, frowning face.

After the hussars had come to the village and Rostov had gone to see the
princess, a certain confusion and dissension had arisen among the crowd.
Some of the peasants said that these new arrivals were Russians and
might take it amiss that the mistress was being detained. Dron was of
this opinion, but as soon as he expressed it Karp and others attacked
their ex-Elder.

"How many years have you been fattening on the commune?" Karp shouted at
him. "It's all one to you! You'll dig up your pot of money and take
it away with you.... What does it matter to you whether our homes are
ruined or not?"

"We've been told to keep order, and that no one is to leave their homes
or take away a single grain, and that's all about it!" cried another.

"It was your son's turn to be conscripted, but no fear! You begrudged
your lump of a son," a little old man suddenly began attacking
Dron--"and so they took my Vanka to be shaved for a soldier! But we all
have to die."

"To be sure, we all have to die. I'm not against the commune," said
Dron.

"That's it--not against it! You've filled your belly...."

The two tall peasants had their say. As soon as Rostov, followed by
Ilyin, Lavrushka, and Alpatych, came up to the crowd, Karp, thrusting
his fingers into his belt and smiling a little, walked to the front.
Dron on the contrary retired to the rear and the crowd drew closer
together.

"Who is your Elder here? Hey?" shouted Rostov, coming up to the crowd
with quick steps.

"The Elder? What do you want with him?..." asked Karp.

But before the words were well out of his mouth, his cap flew off and a
fierce blow jerked his head to one side.

"Caps off, traitors!" shouted Rostov in a wrathful voice. "Where's the
Elder?" he cried furiously.

"The Elder.... He wants the Elder!... Dron Zakharych, you!" meek and
flustered voices here and there were heard calling and caps began to
come off their heads.

"We don't riot, we're following the orders," declared Karp, and at that
moment several voices began speaking together.

"It's as the old men have decided--there's too many of you giving
orders."

"Arguing? Mutiny!... Brigands! Traitors!" cried Rostov unmeaningly in a
voice not his own, gripping Karp by the collar. "Bind him, bind him!" he
shouted, though there was no one to bind him but Lavrushka and Alpatych.

Lavrushka, however, ran up to Karp and seized him by the arms from
behind.

"Shall I call up our men from beyond the hill?" he called out.

Alpatych turned to the peasants and ordered two of them by name to come
and bind Karp. The men obediently came out of the crowd and began taking
off their belts.

"Where's the Elder?" demanded Rostov in a loud voice.

With a pale and frowning face Dron stepped out of the crowd.

"Are you the Elder? Bind him, Lavrushka!" shouted Rostov, as if that
order, too, could not possibly meet with any opposition.

And in fact two more peasants began binding Dron, who took off his own
belt and handed it to them, as if to aid them.

"And you all listen to me!" said Rostov to the peasants. "Be off to your
houses at once, and don't let one of your voices be heard!"

"Why, we've not done any harm! We did it just out of foolishness. It's
all nonsense... I said then that it was not in order," voices were heard
bickering with one another.

"There! What did I say?" said Alpatych, coming into his own again. "It's
wrong, lads!"

 "All our stupidity, Yakov Alpatych," came the answers, and the
crowd began at once to disperse through the village.

The two bound men were led off to the master's house. The two drunken
peasants followed them.

"Aye, when I look at you!..." said one of them to Karp.

"How can one talk to the masters like that? What were you thinking of,
you fool?" added the other--"A real fool!"

Two hours later the carts were standing in the courtyard of the
Bogucharovo house. The peasants were briskly carrying out the
proprietor's goods and packing them on the carts, and Dron, liberated at
Princess Mary's wish from the cupboard where he had been confined, was
standing in the yard directing the men.

"Don't put it in so carelessly," said one of the peasants, a man with a
round smiling face, taking a casket from a housemaid. "You know it has
cost money! How can you chuck it in like that or shove it under the cord
where it'll get rubbed? I don't like that way of doing things. Let it
all be done properly, according to rule. Look here, put it under the
bast matting and cover it with hay--that's the way!"

"Eh, books, books!" said another peasant, bringing out Prince Andrew's
library cupboards. "Don't catch up against it! It's heavy, lads--solid
books."

"Yes, they worked all day and didn't play!" remarked the tall,
round-faced peasant gravely, pointing with a significant wink at the
dictionaries that were on the top.


Unwilling to obtrude himself on the princess, Rostov did not go back to
the house but remained in the village awaiting her departure. When her
carriage drove out of the house, he mounted and accompanied her eight
miles from Bogucharovo to where the road was occupied by our troops. At
the inn at Yankovo he respectfully took leave of her, for the first time
permitting himself to kiss her hand.

"How can you speak so!" he blushingly replied to Princess Mary's
expressions of gratitude for her deliverance, as she termed what had
occurred. "Any police officer would have done as much! If we had had
only peasants to fight, we should not have let the enemy come so far,"
said he with a sense of shame and wishing to change the subject. "I
am only happy to have had the opportunity of making your acquaintance.
Good-by, Princess. I wish you happiness and consolation and hope to meet
you again in happier circumstances. If you don't want to make me blush,
please don't thank me!"

But the princess, if she did not again thank him in words, thanked
him with the whole expression of her face, radiant with gratitude and
tenderness. She could not believe that there was nothing to thank him
for. On the contrary, it seemed to her certain that had he not been
there she would have perished at the hands of the mutineers and of the
French, and that he had exposed himself to terrible and obvious danger
to save her, and even more certain was it that he was a man of lofty and
noble soul, able to understand her position and her sorrow. His kind,
honest eyes, with the tears rising in them when she herself had begun to
cry as she spoke of her loss, did not leave her memory.

When she had taken leave of him and remained alone she suddenly felt
her eyes filling with tears, and then not for the first time the strange
question presented itself to her: did she love him?

On the rest of the way to Moscow, though the princess' position was not
a cheerful one, Dunyasha, who went with her in the carriage, more than
once noticed that her mistress leaned out of the window and smiled at
something with an expression of mingled joy and sorrow.

"Well, supposing I do love him?" thought Princess Mary.

Ashamed as she was of acknowledging to herself that she had fallen in
love with a man who would perhaps never love her, she comforted herself
with the thought that no one would ever know it and that she would not
be to blame if, without ever speaking of it to anyone, she continued to
the end of her life to love the man with whom she had fallen in love for
the first and last time in her life.

Sometimes when she recalled his looks, his sympathy, and his words,
happiness did not appear impossible to her. It was at those moments that
Dunyasha noticed her smiling as she looked out of the carriage window.

"Was it not fate that brought him to Bogucharovo, and at that very
moment?" thought Princess Mary. "And that caused his sister to refuse my
brother?" And in all this Princess Mary saw the hand of Providence.

The impression the princess made on Rostov was a very agreeable one. To
remember her gave him pleasure, and when his comrades, hearing of his
adventure at Bogucharovo, rallied him on having gone to look for hay
and having picked up one of the wealthiest heiresses in Russia, he grew
angry. It made him angry just because the idea of marrying the gentle
Princess Mary, who was attractive to him and had an enormous fortune,
had against his will more than once entered his head. For himself
personally Nicholas could not wish for a better wife: by marrying her
he would make the countess his mother happy, would be able to put his
father's affairs in order, and would even--he felt it--ensure Princess
Mary's happiness.

But Sonya? And his plighted word? That was why Rostov grew angry when he
was rallied about Princess Bolkonskaya.





CHAPTER XV


On receiving command of the armies Kutuzov remembered Prince Andrew and
sent an order for him to report at headquarters.

Prince Andrew arrived at Tsarevo-Zaymishche on the very day and at the
very hour that Kutuzov was reviewing the troops for the first time. He
stopped in the village at the priest's house in front of which stood the
commander in chief's carriage, and he sat down on the bench at the gate
awaiting his Serene Highness, as everyone now called Kutuzov. From the
field beyond the village came now sounds of regimental music and now the
roar of many voices shouting "Hurrah!" to the new commander in chief.
Two orderlies, a courier and a major-domo, stood near by, some ten paces
from Prince Andrew, availing themselves of Kutuzov's absence and of the
fine weather. A short, swarthy lieutenant colonel of hussars with thick
mustaches and whiskers rode up to the gate and, glancing at Prince
Andrew, inquired whether his Serene Highness was putting up there and
whether he would soon be back.

Prince Andrew replied that he was not on his Serene Highness' staff
but was himself a new arrival. The lieutenant colonel turned to a smart
orderly, who, with the peculiar contempt with which a commander in
chief's orderly speaks to officers, replied:

"What? His Serene Highness? I expect he'll be here soon. What do you
want?"

The lieutenant colonel of hussars smiled beneath his mustache at the
orderly's tone, dismounted, gave his horse to a dispatch runner, and
approached Bolkonski with a slight bow. Bolkonski made room for him on
the bench and the lieutenant colonel sat down beside him.

"You're also waiting for the commander in chief?" said he. "They say he
weceives evewyone, thank God!... It's awful with those sausage eaters!
Ermolov had weason to ask to be pwomoted to be a German! Now p'waps
Wussians will get a look in. As it was, devil only knows what was
happening. We kept wetweating and wetweating. Did you take part in the
campaign?" he asked.

"I had the pleasure," replied Prince Andrew, "not only of taking part
in the retreat but of losing in that retreat all I held dear--not to
mention the estate and home of my birth--my father, who died of grief. I
belong to the province of Smolensk."

"Ah? You're Pwince Bolkonski? Vewy glad to make your acquaintance! I'm
Lieutenant Colonel Denisov, better known as 'Vaska,'" said Denisov,
pressing Prince Andrew's hand and looking into his face with a
particularly kindly attention. "Yes, I heard," said he sympathetically,
and after a short pause added: "Yes, it's Scythian warfare. It's all
vewy well--only not for those who get it in the neck. So you are Pwince
Andwew Bolkonski?" He swayed his head. "Vewy pleased, Pwince, to make
your acquaintance!" he repeated again, smiling sadly, and he again
pressed Prince Andrew's hand.

Prince Andrew knew Denisov from what Natasha had told him of her first
suitor. This memory carried him sadly and sweetly back to those painful
feelings of which he had not thought lately, but which still found
place in his soul. Of late he had received so many new and very serious
impressions--such as the retreat from Smolensk, his visit to Bald Hills,
and the recent news of his father's death--and had experienced so many
emotions, that for a long time past those memories had not entered his
mind, and now that they did, they did not act on him with nearly their
former strength. For Denisov, too, the memories awakened by the name of
Bolkonski belonged to a distant, romantic past, when after supper and
after Natasha's singing he had proposed to a little girl of fifteen
without realizing what he was doing. He smiled at the recollection of
that time and of his love for Natasha, and passed at once to what now
interested him passionately and exclusively. This was a plan of campaign
he had devised while serving at the outposts during the retreat. He had
proposed that plan to Barclay de Tolly and now wished to propose it
to Kutuzov. The plan was based on the fact that the French line
of operation was too extended, and it proposed that instead of, or
concurrently with, action on the front to bar the advance of the French,
we should attack their line of communication. He began explaining his
plan to Prince Andrew.

"They can't hold all that line. It's impossible. I will undertake to
bweak thwough. Give me five hundwed men and I will bweak the line,
that's certain! There's only one way--guewilla warfare!"

Denisov rose and began gesticulating as he explained his plan to
Bolkonski. In the midst of his explanation shouts were heard from the
army, growing more incoherent and more diffused, mingling with music
and songs and coming from the field where the review was held. Sounds of
hoofs and shouts were nearing the village.

"He's coming! He's coming!" shouted a Cossack standing at the gate.

Bolkonski and Denisov moved to the gate, at which a knot of soldiers
(a guard of honor) was standing, and they saw Kutuzov coming down the
street mounted on a rather small sorrel horse. A huge suite of generals
rode behind him. Barclay was riding almost beside him, and a crowd of
officers ran after and around them shouting, "Hurrah!"

His adjutants galloped into the yard before him. Kutuzov was impatiently
urging on his horse, which ambled smoothly under his weight, and he
raised his hand to his white Horse Guard's cap with a red band and no
peak, nodding his head continually. When he came up to the guard of
honor, a fine set of Grenadiers mostly wearing decorations, who were
giving him the salute, he looked at them silently and attentively for
nearly a minute with the steady gaze of a commander and then turned to
the crowd of generals and officers surrounding him. Suddenly his face
assumed a subtle expression, he shrugged his shoulders with an air of
perplexity.

"And with such fine fellows to retreat and retreat! Well, good-by,
General," he added, and rode into the yard past Prince Andrew and
Denisov.

"Hurrah! hurrah! hurrah!" shouted those behind him.

Since Prince Andrew had last seen him Kutuzov had grown still more
corpulent, flaccid, and fat. But the bleached eyeball, the scar, and the
familiar weariness of his expression were still the same. He was wearing
the white Horse Guard's cap and a military overcoat with a whip hanging
over his shoulder by a thin strap. He sat heavily and swayed limply on
his brisk little horse.

"Whew... whew... whew!" he whistled just audibly as he rode into the
yard. His face expressed the relief of relaxed strain felt by a man who
means to rest after a ceremony. He drew his left foot out of the stirrup
and, lurching with his whole body and puckering his face with the
effort, raised it with difficulty onto the saddle, leaned on his knee,
groaned, and slipped down into the arms of the Cossacks and adjutants
who stood ready to assist him.

He pulled himself together, looked round, screwing up his eyes, glanced
at Prince Andrew, and, evidently not recognizing him, moved with his
waddling gait to the porch. "Whew... whew... whew!" he whistled, and
again glanced at Prince Andrew. As often occurs with old men, it was
only after some seconds that the impression produced by Prince Andrew's
face linked itself up with Kutuzov's remembrance of his personality.

"Ah, how do you do, my dear prince? How do you do, my dear boy? Come
along..." said he, glancing wearily round, and he stepped onto the porch
which creaked under his weight.

He unbuttoned his coat and sat down on a bench in the porch.

"And how's your father?"

"I received news of his death, yesterday," replied Prince Andrew
abruptly.

Kutuzov looked at him with eyes wide open with dismay and then took off
his cap and crossed himself:

"May the kingdom of Heaven be his! God's will be done to us all!" He
sighed deeply, his whole chest heaving, and was silent for a while. "I
loved him and respected him, and sympathize with you with all my heart."

He embraced Prince Andrew, pressing him to his fat breast, and for some
time did not let him go. When he released him Prince Andrew saw that
Kutuzov's flabby lips were trembling and that tears were in his eyes. He
sighed and pressed on the bench with both hands to raise himself.

"Come! Come with me, we'll have a talk," said he.

But at that moment Denisov, no more intimidated by his superiors than by
the enemy, came with jingling spurs up the steps of the porch, despite
the angry whispers of the adjutants who tried to stop him. Kutuzov, his
hands still pressed on the seat, glanced at him glumly. Denisov, having
given his name, announced that he had to communicate to his Serene
Highness a matter of great importance for their country's welfare.
Kutuzov looked wearily at him and, lifting his hands with a gesture of
annoyance, folded them across his stomach, repeating the words: "For our
country's welfare? Well, what is it? Speak!" Denisov blushed like a
girl (it was strange to see the color rise in that shaggy, bibulous,
time-worn face) and boldly began to expound his plan of cutting the
enemy's lines of communication between Smolensk and Vyazma. Denisov came
from those parts and knew the country well. His plan seemed decidedly
a good one, especially from the strength of conviction with which he
spoke. Kutuzov looked down at his own legs, occasionally glancing at the
door of the adjoining hut as if expecting something unpleasant to emerge
from it. And from that hut, while Denisov was speaking, a general with a
portfolio under his arm really did appear.

"What?" said Kutuzov, in the midst of Denisov's explanations, "are you
ready so soon?"

"Ready, your Serene Highness," replied the general.

Kutuzov swayed his head, as much as to say: "How is one man to deal with
it all?" and again listened to Denisov.

"I give my word of honor as a Wussian officer," said Denisov, "that I
can bweak Napoleon's line of communication!"

"What relation are you to Intendant General Kiril Andreevich Denisov?"
asked Kutuzov, interrupting him.

"He is my uncle, your Sewene Highness."

"Ah, we were friends," said Kutuzov cheerfully. "All right, all right,
friend, stay here at the staff and tomorrow we'll have a talk."

With a nod to Denisov he turned away and put out his hand for the papers
Konovnitsyn had brought him.

"Would not your Serene Highness like to come inside?" said the general
on duty in a discontented voice, "the plans must be examined and several
papers have to be signed."

An adjutant came out and announced that everything was in readiness
within. But Kutuzov evidently did not wish to enter that room till he
was disengaged. He made a grimace...

"No, tell them to bring a small table out here, my dear boy. I'll look
at them here," said he. "Don't go away," he added, turning to Prince
Andrew, who remained in the porch and listened to the general's report.

While this was being given, Prince Andrew heard the whisper of a woman's
voice and the rustle of a silk dress behind the door. Several times on
glancing that way he noticed behind that door a plump, rosy, handsome
woman in a pink dress with a lilac silk kerchief on her head, holding
a dish and evidently awaiting the entrance of the commander in chief.
Kutuzov's adjutant whispered to Prince Andrew that this was the wife of
the priest whose home it was, and that she intended to offer his Serene
Highness bread and salt. "Her husband has welcomed his Serene Highness
with the cross at the church, and she intends to welcome him in the
house.... She's very pretty," added the adjutant with a smile. At
those words Kutuzov looked round. He was listening to the general's
report--which consisted chiefly of a criticism of the position at
Tsarevo-Zaymishche--as he had listened to Denisov, and seven years
previously had listened to the discussion at the Austerlitz council of
war. He evidently listened only because he had ears which, though there
was a piece of tow in one of them, could not help hearing; but it
was evident that nothing the general could say would surprise or even
interest him, that he knew all that would be said beforehand, and heard
it all only because he had to, as one has to listen to the chanting of
a service of prayer. All that Denisov had said was clever and to the
point. What the general was saying was even more clever and to
the point, but it was evident that Kutuzov despised knowledge
and cleverness, and knew of something else that would decide the
matter--something independent of cleverness and knowledge. Prince
Andrew watched the commander in chief's face attentively, and the only
expression he could see there was one of boredom, curiosity as to the
meaning of the feminine whispering behind the door, and a desire to
observe propriety. It was evident that Kutuzov despised cleverness and
learning and even the patriotic feeling shown by Denisov, but despised
them not because of his own intellect, feelings, or knowledge--he did
not try to display any of these--but because of something else. He
despised them because of his old age and experience of life. The only
instruction Kutuzov gave of his own accord during that report referred
to looting by the Russian troops. At the end of the report the general
put before him for signature a paper relating to the recovery of payment
from army commanders for green oats mown down by the soldiers, when
landowners lodged petitions for compensation.

After hearing the matter, Kutuzov smacked his lips together and shook
his head.

"Into the stove... into the fire with it! I tell you once for all, my
dear fellow," said he, "into the fire with all such things! Let them cut
the crops and burn wood to their hearts' content. I don't order it
or allow it, but I don't exact compensation either. One can't get on
without it. 'When wood is chopped the chips will fly.'" He looked at the
paper again. "Oh, this German precision!" he muttered, shaking his head.





CHAPTER XVI


"Well, that's all!" said Kutuzov as he signed the last of the documents,
and rising heavily and smoothing out the folds in his fat white neck he
moved toward the door with a more cheerful expression.

The priest's wife, flushing rosy red, caught up the dish she had after
all not managed to present at the right moment, though she had so long
been preparing for it, and with a low bow offered it to Kutuzov.

He screwed up his eyes, smiled, lifted her chin with his hand, and said:

"Ah, what a beauty! Thank you, sweetheart!"

He took some gold pieces from his trouser pocket and put them on the
dish for her. "Well, my dear, and how are we getting on?" he asked,
moving to the door of the room assigned to him. The priest's wife
smiled, and with dimples in her rosy cheeks followed him into the room.
The adjutant came out to the porch and asked Prince Andrew to lunch with
him. Half an hour later Prince Andrew was again called to Kutuzov.
He found him reclining in an armchair, still in the same unbuttoned
overcoat. He had in his hand a French book which he closed as Prince
Andrew entered, marking the place with a knife. Prince Andrew saw by the
cover that it was Les Chevaliers du Cygne by Madame de Genlis.

"Well, sit down, sit down here. Let's have a talk," said Kutuzov. "It's
sad, very sad. But remember, my dear fellow, that I am a father to you,
a second father...."

Prince Andrew told Kutuzov all he knew of his father's death, and what
he had seen at Bald Hills when he passed through it.

"What... what they have brought us to!" Kutuzov suddenly cried in an
agitated voice, evidently picturing vividly to himself from Prince
Andrew's story the condition Russia was in. "But give me time, give me
time!" he said with a grim look, evidently not wishing to continue this
agitating conversation, and added: "I sent for you to keep you with me."

"I thank your Serene Highness, but I fear I am no longer fit for the
staff," replied Prince Andrew with a smile which Kutuzov noticed.

Kutuzov glanced inquiringly at him.

"But above all," added Prince Andrew, "I have grown used to my regiment,
am fond of the officers, and I fancy the men also like me. I should be
sorry to leave the regiment. If I decline the honor of being with you,
believe me..."

A shrewd, kindly, yet subtly derisive expression lit up Kutuzov's podgy
face. He cut Bolkonski short.

"I am sorry, for I need you. But you're right, you're right! It's not
here that men are needed. Advisers are always plentiful, but men are
not. The regiments would not be what they are if the would-be advisers
served there as you do. I remember you at Austerlitz.... I remember,
yes, I remember you with the standard!" said Kutuzov, and a flush of
pleasure suffused Prince Andrew's face at this recollection.

Taking his hand and drawing him downwards, Kutuzov offered his cheek to
be kissed, and again Prince Andrew noticed tears in the old man's eyes.
Though Prince Andrew knew that Kutuzov's tears came easily, and that he
was particularly tender to and considerate of him from a wish to
show sympathy with his loss, yet this reminder of Austerlitz was both
pleasant and flattering to him.

"Go your way and God be with you. I know your path is the path of
honor!" He paused. "I missed you at Bucharest, but I needed someone to
send." And changing the subject, Kutuzov began to speak of the Turkish
war and the peace that had been concluded. "Yes, I have been much
blamed," he said, "both for that war and the peace... but everything
came at the right time. Tout vient a point a celui qui sait attendre. *
And there were as many advisers there as here..." he went on, returning
to the subject of "advisers" which evidently occupied him. "Ah, those
advisers!" said he. "If we had listened to them all we should not have
made peace with Turkey and should not have been through with that war.
Everything in haste, but more haste, less speed. Kamenski would have
been lost if he had not died. He stormed fortresses with thirty thousand
men. It is not difficult to capture a fortress but it is difficult to
win a campaign. For that, not storming and attacking but patience and
time are wanted. Kamenski sent soldiers to Rustchuk, but I only employed
these two things and took more fortresses than Kamenski and made them
Turks eat horseflesh!" He swayed his head. "And the French shall too,
believe me," he went on, growing warmer and beating his chest, "I'll
make them eat horseflesh!" And tears again dimmed his eyes.


    * "Everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait."


"But shan't we have to accept battle?" remarked Prince Andrew.

"We shall if everybody wants it; it can't be helped.... But believe
me, my dear boy, there is nothing stronger than those two: patience and
time, they will do it all. But the advisers n'entendent pas de cette
oreille, voila le mal. * Some want a thing--others don't. What's one to
do?" he asked, evidently expecting an answer. "Well, what do you want
us to do?" he repeated and his eye shone with a deep, shrewd look.
"I'll tell you what to do," he continued, as Prince Andrew still did not
reply: "I will tell you what to do, and what I do. Dans le doute, mon
cher," he paused, "abstiens-toi" *(2)--he articulated the French proverb
deliberately.


     * "Don't see it that way, that's the trouble."

     * (2) "When in doubt, my dear fellow, do nothing."


"Well, good-by, my dear fellow; remember that with all my heart I share
your sorrow, and that for you I am not a Serene Highness, nor a prince,
nor a commander in chief, but a father! If you want anything come
straight to me. Good-by, my dear boy."

Again he embraced and kissed Prince Andrew, but before the latter
had left the room Kutuzov gave a sigh of relief and went on with his
unfinished novel, Les Chevaliers du Cygne by Madame de Genlis.

Prince Andrew could not have explained how or why it was, but after that
interview with Kutuzov he went back to his regiment reassured as to
the general course of affairs and as to the man to whom it had been
entrusted. The more he realized the absence of all personal motive in
that old man--in whom there seemed to remain only the habit of passions,
and in place of an intellect (grouping events and drawing conclusions)
only the capacity calmly to contemplate the course of events--the more
reassured he was that everything would be as it should. "He will not
bring in any plan of his own. He will not devise or undertake
anything," thought Prince Andrew, "but he will hear everything, remember
everything, and put everything in its place. He will not hinder
anything useful nor allow anything harmful. He understands that there is
something stronger and more important than his own will--the inevitable
course of events, and he can see them and grasp their significance,
and seeing that significance can refrain from meddling and renounce his
personal wish directed to something else. And above all," thought Prince
Andrew, "one believes in him because he's Russian, despite the novel
by Genlis and the French proverbs, and because his voice shook when he
said: 'What they have brought us to!' and had a sob in it when he said
he would 'make them eat horseflesh!'"

On such feelings, more or less dimly shared by all, the unanimity and
general approval were founded with which, despite court influences, the
popular choice of Kutuzov as commander in chief was received.





CHAPTER XVII


After the Emperor had left Moscow, life flowed on there in its usual
course, and its course was so very usual that it was difficult to
remember the recent days of patriotic elation and ardor, hard to believe
that Russia was really in danger and that the members of the English
Club were also sons of the Fatherland ready to sacrifice everything
for it. The one thing that recalled the patriotic fervor everyone had
displayed during the Emperor's stay was the call for contributions of
men and money, a necessity that as soon as the promises had been made
assumed a legal, official form and became unavoidable.

With the enemy's approach to Moscow, the Moscovites' view of their
situation did not grow more serious but on the contrary became even
more frivolous, as always happens with people who see a great danger
approaching. At the approach of danger there are always two voices that
speak with equal power in the human soul: one very reasonably tells a
man to consider the nature of the danger and the means of escaping it;
the other, still more reasonably, says that it is too depressing and
painful to think of the danger, since it is not in man's power to
foresee everything and avert the general course of events, and it is
therefore better to disregard what is painful till it comes, and to
think about what is pleasant. In solitude a man generally listens to
the first voice, but in society to the second. So it was now with the
inhabitants of Moscow. It was long since people had been as gay in
Moscow as that year.

Rostopchin's broadsheets, headed by woodcuts of a drink shop, a potman,
and a Moscow burgher called Karpushka Chigirin, "who--having been
a militiaman and having had rather too much at the pub--heard that
Napoleon wished to come to Moscow, grew angry, abused the French in very
bad language, came out of the drink shop, and, under the sign of the
eagle, began to address the assembled people," were read and discussed,
together with the latest of Vasili Lvovich Pushkin's bouts rimes.

In the corner room at the Club, members gathered to read these
broadsheets, and some liked the way Karpushka jeered at the French,
saying: "They will swell up with Russian cabbage, burst with our
buckwheat porridge, and choke themselves with cabbage soup. They are all
dwarfs and one peasant woman will toss three of them with a hayfork."
Others did not like that tone and said it was stupid and vulgar. It was
said that Rostopchin had expelled all Frenchmen and even all foreigners
from Moscow, and that there had been some spies and agents of Napoleon
among them; but this was told chiefly to introduce Rostopchin's witty
remark on that occasion. The foreigners were deported to Nizhni by boat,
and Rostopchin had said to them in French: "Rentrez en vousmemes; entrez
dans la barque, et n'en faites pas une barque de Charon." * There was
talk of all the government offices having been already removed from
Moscow, and to this Shinshin's witticism was added--that for that alone
Moscow ought to be grateful to Napoleon. It was said that Mamonov's
regiment would cost him eight hundred thousand rubles, and that Bezukhov
had spent even more on his, but that the best thing about Bezukhov's
action was that he himself was going to don a uniform and ride at the
head of his regiment without charging anything for the show.


     * "Think it over; get into the barque, and take care not to
     make it a barque of Charon."


"You don't spare anyone," said Julie Drubetskaya as she collected
and pressed together a bunch of raveled lint with her thin, beringed
fingers.

Julie was preparing to leave Moscow next day and was giving a farewell
soiree.

"Bezukhov est ridicule, but he is so kind and good-natured. What
pleasure is there to be so caustique?"

"A forfeit!" cried a young man in militia uniform whom Julie called "mon
chevalier," and who was going with her to Nizhni.

In Julie's set, as in many other circles in Moscow, it had been agreed
that they would speak nothing but Russian and that those who made a
slip and spoke French should pay fines to the Committee of Voluntary
Contributions.

"Another forfeit for a Gallicism," said a Russian writer who was
present. "'What pleasure is there to be' is not Russian!"

"You spare no one," continued Julie to the young man without heeding the
author's remark.

"For caustique--I am guilty and will pay, and I am prepared to pay again
for the pleasure of telling you the truth. For Gallicisms I won't be
responsible," she remarked, turning to the author: "I have neither the
money nor the time, like Prince Galitsyn, to engage a master to teach me
Russian!"

"Ah, here he is!" she added. "Quand on... No, no," she said to the
militia officer, "you won't catch me. Speak of the sun and you see its
rays!" and she smiled amiably at Pierre. "We were just talking of you,"
she said with the facility in lying natural to a society woman. "We were
saying that your regiment would be sure to be better than Mamonov's."

"Oh, don't talk to me of my regiment," replied Pierre, kissing his
hostess' hand and taking a seat beside her. "I am so sick of it."

"You will, of course, command it yourself?" said Julie, directing a sly,
sarcastic glance toward the militia officer.

The latter in Pierre's presence had ceased to be caustic, and his face
expressed perplexity as to what Julie's smile might mean. In spite of
his absent-mindedness and good nature, Pierre's personality immediately
checked any attempt to ridicule him to his face.

"No," said Pierre, with a laughing glance at his big, stout body. "I
should make too good a target for the French, besides I am afraid I
should hardly be able to climb onto a horse."

Among those whom Julie's guests happened to choose to gossip about were
the Rostovs.

"I hear that their affairs are in a very bad way," said Julie. "And he
is so unreasonable, the count himself I mean. The Razumovskis wanted
to buy his house and his estate near Moscow, but it drags on and on. He
asks too much."

"No, I think the sale will come off in a few days," said someone.
"Though it is madness to buy anything in Moscow now."

"Why?" asked Julie. "You don't think Moscow is in danger?"

"Then why are you leaving?"

"I? What a question! I am going because... well, because everyone is
going: and besides--I am not Joan of Arc or an Amazon."

"Well, of course, of course! Let me have some more strips of linen."

"If he manages the business properly he will be able to pay off all his
debts," said the militia officer, speaking of Rostov.

"A kindly old man but not up to much. And why do they stay on so long in
Moscow? They meant to leave for the country long ago. Natalie is quite
well again now, isn't she?" Julie asked Pierre with a knowing smile.

"They are waiting for their younger son," Pierre replied. "He joined
Obolenski's Cossacks and went to Belaya Tserkov where the regiment is
being formed. But now they have had him transferred to my regiment and
are expecting him every day. The count wanted to leave long ago, but the
countess won't on any account leave Moscow till her son returns."

"I met them the day before yesterday at the Arkharovs'. Natalie has
recovered her looks and is brighter. She sang a song. How easily some
people get over everything!"

"Get over what?" inquired Pierre, looking displeased.

Julie smiled.

"You know, Count, such knights as you are only found in Madame de
Souza's novels."

"What knights? What do you mean?" demanded Pierre, blushing.

"Oh, come, my dear count! C'est la fable de tout Moscou. Je vous admire,
ma parole d'honneur!" *


    * "It is the talk of all Moscow. My word, I admire you!"


"Forfeit, forfeit!" cried the militia officer.

"All right, one can't talk--how tiresome!"

"What is 'the talk of all Moscow'?" Pierre asked angrily, rising to his
feet.

"Come now, Count, you know!"

"I don't know anything about it," said Pierre.

"I know you were friendly with Natalie, and so... but I was always more
friendly with Vera--that dear Vera."

"No, madame!" Pierre continued in a tone of displeasure, "I have not
taken on myself the role of Natalie Rostova's knight at all, and have
not been to their house for nearly a month. But I cannot understand the
cruelty..."

"Qui s'excuse s'accuse," * said Julie, smiling and waving the lint
triumphantly, and to have the last word she promptly changed the
subject. "Do you know what I heard today? Poor Mary Bolkonskaya arrived
in Moscow yesterday. Do you know that she has lost her father?"


    * "Who excuses himself, accuses himself."


"Really? Where is she? I should like very much to see her," said Pierre.

"I spent the evening with her yesterday. She is going to their estate
near Moscow either today or tomorrow morning, with her nephew."

"Well, and how is she?" asked Pierre.

"She is well, but sad. But do you know who rescued her? It is quite a
romance. Nicholas Rostov! She was surrounded, and they wanted to kill
her and had wounded some of her people. He rushed in and saved her...."

"Another romance," said the militia officer. "Really, this general
flight has been arranged to get all the old maids married off. Catiche
is one and Princess Bolkonskaya another."

"Do you know, I really believe she is un petit peu amoureuse du jeune
homme." *


    * "A little bit in love with the young man."


"Forfeit, forfeit, forfeit!"

"But how could one say that in Russian?"





CHAPTER XVIII


When Pierre returned home he was handed two of Rostopchin's broadsheets
that had been brought that day.

The first declared that the report that Count Rostopchin had forbidden
people to leave Moscow was false; on the contrary he was glad that
ladies and tradesmen's wives were leaving the city. "There will be less
panic and less gossip," ran the broadsheet "but I will stake my life
on it that scoundrel will not enter Moscow." These words showed Pierre
clearly for the first time that the French would enter Moscow. The
second broadsheet stated that our headquarters were at Vyazma, that
Count Wittgenstein had defeated the French, but that as many of the
inhabitants of Moscow wished to be armed, weapons were ready for them
at the arsenal: sabers, pistols, and muskets which could be had at a low
price. The tone of the proclamation was not as jocose as in the former
Chigirin talks. Pierre pondered over these broadsheets. Evidently the
terrible stormcloud he had desired with the whole strength of his soul
but which yet aroused involuntary horror in him was drawing near.

"Shall I join the army and enter the service, or wait?" he asked himself
for the hundredth time. He took a pack of cards that lay on the table
and began to lay them out for a game of patience.

"If this patience comes out," he said to himself after shuffling the
cards, holding them in his hand, and lifting his head, "if it comes out,
it means... what does it mean?"

He had not decided what it should mean when he heard the voice of the
eldest princess at the door asking whether she might come in.

"Then it will mean that I must go to the army," said Pierre to himself.
"Come in, come in!" he added to the princess.

Only the eldest princess, the one with the stony face and long waist,
was still living in Pierre's house. The two younger ones had both
married.

"Excuse my coming to you, cousin," she said in a reproachful and
agitated voice. "You know some decision must be come to. What is going
to happen? Everyone has left Moscow and the people are rioting. How is
it that we are staying on?"

"On the contrary, things seem satisfactory, ma cousine," said Pierre
in the bantering tone he habitually adopted toward her, always feeling
uncomfortable in the role of her benefactor.

"Satisfactory, indeed! Very satisfactory! Barbara Ivanovna told me today
how our troops are distinguishing themselves. It certainly does them
credit! And the people too are quite mutinous--they no longer obey,
even my maid has taken to being rude. At this rate they will soon begin
beating us. One can't walk in the streets. But, above all, the French
will be here any day now, so what are we waiting for? I ask just one
thing of you, cousin," she went on, "arrange for me to be taken to
Petersburg. Whatever I may be, I can't live under Bonaparte's rule."

"Oh, come, ma cousine! Where do you get your information from? On the
contrary..."

"I won't submit to your Napoleon! Others may if they please.... If you
don't want to do this..."

"But I will, I'll give the order at once."

The princess was apparently vexed at not having anyone to be angry with.
Muttering to herself, she sat down on a chair.

"But you have been misinformed," said Pierre. "Everything is quiet in
the city and there is not the slightest danger. See! I've just been
reading..." He showed her the broadsheet. "Count Rostopchin writes that
he will stake his life on it that the enemy will not enter Moscow."

"Oh, that count of yours!" said the princess malevolently. "He is a
hypocrite, a rascal who has himself roused the people to riot. Didn't
he write in those idiotic broadsheets that anyone, 'whoever it might be,
should be dragged to the lockup by his hair'? (How silly!) 'And honor
and glory to whoever captures him,' he says. This is what his cajolery
has brought us to! Barbara Ivanovna told me the mob near killed her
because she said something in French."

"Oh, but it's so... You take everything so to heart," said Pierre, and
began laying out his cards for patience.

Although that patience did come out, Pierre did not join the army,
but remained in deserted Moscow ever in the same state of agitation,
irresolution, and alarm, yet at the same time joyfully expecting
something terrible.

Next day toward evening the princess set off, and Pierre's head steward
came to inform him that the money needed for the equipment of his
regiment could not be found without selling one of the estates. In
general the head steward made out to Pierre that his project of raising
a regiment would ruin him. Pierre listened to him, scarcely able to
repress a smile.

"Well then, sell it," said he. "What's to be done? I can't draw back
now!"

The worse everything became, especially his own affairs, the better
was Pierre pleased and the more evident was it that the catastrophe he
expected was approaching. Hardly anyone he knew was left in town. Julie
had gone, and so had Princess Mary. Of his intimate friends only the
Rostovs remained, but he did not go to see them.

To distract his thoughts he drove that day to the village of Vorontsovo
to see the great balloon Leppich was constructing to destroy the foe,
and a trial balloon that was to go up next day. The balloon was not yet
ready, but Pierre learned that it was being constructed by the Emperor's
desire. The Emperor had written to Count Rostopchin as follows:


As soon as Leppich is ready, get together a crew of reliable and
intelligent men for his car and send a courier to General Kutuzov to let
him know. I have informed him of the matter.

Please impress upon Leppich to be very careful where he descends for
the first time, that he may not make a mistake and fall into the enemy's
hands. It is essential for him to combine his movements with those of
the commander in chief.


On his way home from Vorontsovo, as he was passing the Bolotnoe Place
Pierre, seeing a large crowd round the Lobnoe Place, stopped and got out
of his trap. A French cook accused of being a spy was being flogged. The
flogging was only just over, and the executioner was releasing from the
flogging bench a stout man with red whiskers, in blue stockings and
a green jacket, who was moaning piteously. Another criminal, thin and
pale, stood near. Judging by their faces they were both Frenchmen. With
a frightened and suffering look resembling that on the thin Frenchman's
face, Pierre pushed his way in through the crowd.

"What is it? Who is it? What is it for?" he kept asking.

But the attention of the crowd--officials, burghers, shopkeepers,
peasants, and women in cloaks and in pelisses--was so eagerly centered
on what was passing in Lobnoe Place that no one answered him. The stout
man rose, frowned, shrugged his shoulders, and evidently trying to
appear firm began to pull on his jacket without looking about him, but
suddenly his lips trembled and he began to cry, in the way full-blooded
grown-up men cry, though angry with himself for doing so. In the crowd
people began talking loudly, to stifle their feelings of pity as it
seemed to Pierre.

"He's cook to some prince."

"Eh, mounseer, Russian sauce seems to be sour to a Frenchman... sets his
teeth on edge!" said a wrinkled clerk who was standing behind Pierre,
when the Frenchman began to cry.

The clerk glanced round, evidently hoping that his joke would be
appreciated. Some people began to laugh, others continued to watch in
dismay the executioner who was undressing the other man.

Pierre choked, his face puckered, and he turned hastily away, went back
to his trap muttering something to himself as he went, and took his
seat. As they drove along he shuddered and exclaimed several times so
audibly that the coachman asked him:

"What is your pleasure?"

"Where are you going?" shouted Pierre to the man, who was driving to
Lubyanka Street.

"To the Governor's, as you ordered," answered the coachman.

"Fool! Idiot!" shouted Pierre, abusing his coachman--a thing he rarely
did. "Home, I told you! And drive faster, blockhead!" "I must get away
this very day," he murmured to himself.

At the sight of the tortured Frenchman and the crowd surrounding the
Lobnoe Place, Pierre had so definitely made up his mind that he could no
longer remain in Moscow and would leave for the army that very day that
it seemed to him that either he had told the coachman this or that the
man ought to have known it for himself.

On reaching home Pierre gave orders to Evstafey--his head coachman who
knew everything, could do anything, and was known to all Moscow--that
he would leave that night for the army at Mozhaysk, and that his saddle
horses should be sent there. This could not all be arranged that day,
so on Evstafey's representation Pierre had to put off his departure till
next day to allow time for the relay horses to be sent on in advance.

On the twenty-fourth the weather cleared up after a spell of rain, and
after dinner Pierre left Moscow. When changing horses that night
in Perkhushkovo, he learned that there had been a great battle that
evening. (This was the battle of Shevardino.) He was told that there in
Perkhushkovo the earth trembled from the firing, but nobody could answer
his questions as to who had won. At dawn next day Pierre was approaching
Mozhaysk.

Every house in Mozhaysk had soldiers quartered in it, and at the hostel
where Pierre was met by his groom and coachman there was no room to be
had. It was full of officers.

Everywhere in Mozhaysk and beyond it, troops were stationed or on the
march. Cossacks, foot and horse soldiers, wagons, caissons, and cannon
were everywhere. Pierre pushed forward as fast as he could, and the
farther he left Moscow behind and the deeper he plunged into that sea
of troops the more was he overcome by restless agitation and a new and
joyful feeling he had not experienced before. It was a feeling akin to
what he had felt at the Sloboda Palace during the Emperor's visit--a
sense of the necessity of undertaking something and sacrificing
something. He now experienced a glad consciousness that everything that
constitutes men's happiness--the comforts of life, wealth, even
life itself--is rubbish it is pleasant to throw away, compared with
something... With what? Pierre could not say, and he did not try to
determine for whom and for what he felt such particular delight in
sacrificing everything. He was not occupied with the question of what to
sacrifice for; the fact of sacrificing in itself afforded him a new and
joyous sensation.





CHAPTER XIX


On the twenty-fourth of August the battle of the Shevardino Redoubt was
fought, on the twenty-fifth not a shot was fired by either side, and on
the twenty-sixth the battle of Borodino itself took place.

Why and how were the battles of Shevardino and Borodino given and
accepted? Why was the battle of Borodino fought? There was not the least
sense in it for either the French or the Russians. Its immediate result
for the Russians was, and was bound to be, that we were brought nearer
to the destruction of Moscow--which we feared more than anything in
the world; and for the French its immediate result was that they were
brought nearer to the destruction of their whole army--which they feared
more than anything in the world. What the result must be was quite
obvious, and yet Napoleon offered and Kutuzov accepted that battle.

If the commanders had been guided by reason, it would seem that it must
have been obvious to Napoleon that by advancing thirteen hundred miles
and giving battle with a probability of losing a quarter of his army,
he was advancing to certain destruction, and it must have been equally
clear to Kutuzov that by accepting battle and risking the loss of a
quarter of his army he would certainly lose Moscow. For Kutuzov this was
mathematically clear, as it is that if when playing draughts I have one
man less and go on exchanging, I shall certainly lose, and therefore
should not exchange. When my opponent has sixteen men and I have
fourteen, I am only one eighth weaker than he, but when I have exchanged
thirteen more men he will be three times as strong as I am.

Before the battle of Borodino our strength in proportion to the French
was about as five to six, but after that battle it was little more than
one to two: previously we had a hundred thousand against a hundred and
twenty thousand; afterwards little more than fifty thousand against a
hundred thousand. Yet the shrewd and experienced Kutuzov accepted the
battle, while Napoleon, who was said to be a commander of genius,
gave it, losing a quarter of his army and lengthening his lines of
communication still more. If it is said that he expected to end the
campaign by occupying Moscow as he had ended a previous campaign by
occupying Vienna, there is much evidence to the contrary. Napoleon's
historians themselves tell us that from Smolensk onwards he wished
to stop, knew the danger of his extended position, and knew that the
occupation of Moscow would not be the end of the campaign, for he had
seen at Smolensk the state in which Russian towns were left to him, and
had not received a single reply to his repeated announcements of his
wish to negotiate.

In giving and accepting battle at Borodino, Kutuzov acted involuntarily
and irrationally. But later on, to fit what had occurred, the historians
provided cunningly devised evidence of the foresight and genius of the
generals who, of all the blind tools of history were the most enslaved
and involuntary.

The ancients have left us model heroic poems in which the heroes furnish
the whole interest of the story, and we are still unable to accustom
ourselves to the fact that for our epoch histories of that kind are
meaningless.

On the other question, how the battle of Borodino and the preceding
battle of Shevardino were fought, there also exists a definite and
well-known, but quite false, conception. All the historians describe the
affair as follows:

The Russian army, they say, in its retreat from Smolensk sought out
for itself the best position for a general engagement and found such a
position at Borodino.

The Russians, they say, fortified this position in advance on the left
of the highroad (from Moscow to Smolensk) and almost at a right angle
to it, from Borodino to Utitsa, at the very place where the battle was
fought.

In front of this position, they say, a fortified outpost was set up on
the Shevardino mound to observe the enemy. On the twenty-fourth, we
are told, Napoleon attacked this advanced post and took it, and, on the
twenty-sixth, attacked the whole Russian army, which was in position on
the field of Borodino.

So the histories say, and it is all quite wrong, as anyone who cares to
look into the matter can easily convince himself.

The Russians did not seek out the best position but, on the contrary,
during the retreat passed many positions better than Borodino. They did
not stop at any one of these positions because Kutuzov did not wish to
occupy a position he had not himself chosen, because the popular demand
for a battle had not yet expressed itself strongly enough, and because
Miloradovich had not yet arrived with the militia, and for many other
reasons. The fact is that other positions they had passed were stronger,
and that the position at Borodino (the one where the battle was fought),
far from being strong, was no more a position than any other spot one
might find in the Russian Empire by sticking a pin into the map at
hazard.

Not only did the Russians not fortify the position on the field of
Borodino to the left of, and at a right angle to, the highroad (that
is, the position on which the battle took place), but never till the
twenty-fifth of August, 1812, did they think that a battle might be
fought there. This was shown first by the fact that there were no
entrenchments there by the twenty fifth and that those begun on the
twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth were not completed, and secondly, by the
position of the Shevardino Redoubt. That redoubt was quite senseless
in front of the position where the battle was accepted. Why was it
more strongly fortified than any other post? And why were all efforts
exhausted and six thousand men sacrificed to defend it till late at
night on the twenty-fourth? A Cossack patrol would have sufficed to
observe the enemy. Thirdly, as proof that the position on which the
battle was fought had not been foreseen and that the Shevardino Redoubt
was not an advanced post of that position, we have the fact that up to
the twenty-fifth, Barclay de Tolly and Bagration were convinced that the
Shevardino Redoubt was the left flank of the position, and that Kutuzov
himself in his report, written in hot haste after the battle, speaks of
the Shevardino Redoubt as the left flank of the position. It was much
later, when reports on the battle of Borodino were written at leisure,
that the incorrect and extraordinary statement was invented (probably to
justify the mistakes of a commander in chief who had to be represented
as infallible) that the Shevardino Redoubt was an advanced post--whereas
in reality it was simply a fortified point on the left flank--and
that the battle of Borodino was fought by us on an entrenched position
previously selected, where as it was fought on a quite unexpected spot
which was almost unentrenched.

The case was evidently this: a position was selected along the river
Kolocha--which crosses the highroad not at a right angle but at an acute
angle--so that the left flank was at Shevardino, the right flank near
the village of Novoe, and the center at Borodino at the confluence of
the rivers Kolocha and Voyna.

To anyone who looks at the field of Borodino without thinking of how
the battle was actually fought, this position, protected by the river
Kolocha, presents itself as obvious for an army whose object was to
prevent an enemy from advancing along the Smolensk road to Moscow.

Napoleon, riding to Valuevo on the twenty-fourth, did not see (as the
history books say he did) the position of the Russians from Utitsa
to Borodino (he could not have seen that position because it did not
exist), nor did he see an advanced post of the Russian army, but while
pursuing the Russian rearguard he came upon the left flank of the
Russian position--at the Shevardino Redoubt--and unexpectedly for the
Russians moved his army across the Kolocha. And the Russians, not having
time to begin a general engagement, withdrew their left wing from the
position they had intended to occupy and took up a new position which
had not been foreseen and was not fortified. By crossing to the other
side of the Kolocha to the left of the highroad, Napoleon shifted the
whole forthcoming battle from right to left (looking from the Russian
side) and transferred it to the plain between Utitsa, Semenovsk, and
Borodino--a plain no more advantageous as a position than any other
plain in Russia--and there the whole battle of the twenty-sixth of
August took place.

Had Napoleon not ridden out on the evening of the twenty-fourth to the
Kolocha, and had he not then ordered an immediate attack on the redoubt
but had begun the attack next morning, no one would have doubted that
the Shevardino Redoubt was the left flank of our position, and the
battle would have taken place where we expected it. In that case
we should probably have defended the Shevardino Redoubt--our left
flank--still more obstinately. We should have attacked Napoleon in the
center or on the right, and the engagement would have taken place on the
twenty-fifth, in the position we intended and had fortified. But as the
attack on our left flank took place in the evening after the retreat of
our rear guard (that is, immediately after the fight at Gridneva), and
as the Russian commanders did not wish, or were not in time, to begin a
general engagement then on the evening of the twenty-fourth, the first
and chief action of the battle of Borodino was already lost on the
twenty-fourth, and obviously led to the loss of the one fought on the
twenty-sixth.

After the loss of the Shevardino Redoubt, we found ourselves on the
morning of the twenty-fifth without a position for our left flank, and
were forced to bend it back and hastily entrench it where it chanced to
be.

Not only was the Russian army on the twenty-sixth defended by weak,
unfinished entrenchments, but the disadvantage of that position was
increased by the fact that the Russian commanders--not having fully
realized what had happened, namely the loss of our position on the left
flank and the shifting of the whole field of the forthcoming battle from
right to left--maintained their extended position from the village of
Novoe to Utitsa, and consequently had to move their forces from right to
left during the battle. So it happened that throughout the whole battle
the Russians opposed the entire French army launched against our left
flank with but half as many men. (Poniatowski's action against Utitsa,
and Uvarov's on the right flank against the French, were actions
distinct from the main course of the battle.) So the battle of Borodino
did not take place at all as (in an effort to conceal our commanders'
mistakes even at the cost of diminishing the glory due to the Russian
army and people) it has been described. The battle of Borodino was not
fought on a chosen and entrenched position with forces only slightly
weaker than those of the enemy, but, as a result of the loss of the
Shevardino Redoubt, the Russians fought the battle of Borodino on an
open and almost unentrenched position, with forces only half as numerous
as the French; that is to say, under conditions in which it was not
merely unthinkable to fight for ten hours and secure an indecisive
result, but unthinkable to keep an army even from complete
disintegration and flight.





CHAPTER XX


On the morning of the twenty-fifth Pierre was leaving Mozhaysk. At the
descent of the high steep hill, down which a winding road led out of the
town past the cathedral on the right, where a service was being held and
the bells were ringing, Pierre got out of his vehicle and proceeded on
foot. Behind him a cavalry regiment was coming down the hill preceded by
its singers. Coming up toward him was a train of carts carrying men who
had been wounded in the engagement the day before. The peasant drivers,
shouting and lashing their horses, kept crossing from side to side. The
carts, in each of which three or four wounded soldiers were lying
or sitting, jolted over the stones that had been thrown on the steep
incline to make it something like a road. The wounded, bandaged with
rags, with pale cheeks, compressed lips, and knitted brows, held on to
the sides of the carts as they were jolted against one another. Almost
all of them stared with naive, childlike curiosity at Pierre's white hat
and green swallow-tail coat.

Pierre's coachman shouted angrily at the convoy of wounded to keep to
one side of the road. The cavalry regiment, as it descended the hill
with its singers, surrounded Pierre's carriage and blocked the road.
Pierre stopped, being pressed against the side of the cutting in which
the road ran. The sunshine from behind the hill did not penetrate into
the cutting and there it was cold and damp, but above Pierre's head was
the bright August sunshine and the bells sounded merrily. One of the
carts with wounded stopped by the side of the road close to Pierre. The
driver in his bast shoes ran panting up to it, placed a stone under one
of its tireless hind wheels, and began arranging the breech-band on his
little horse.

One of the wounded, an old soldier with a bandaged arm who was following
the cart on foot, caught hold of it with his sound hand and turned to
look at Pierre.

"I say, fellow countryman! Will they set us down here or take us on to
Moscow?" he asked.

Pierre was so deep in thought that he did not hear the question. He was
looking now at the cavalry regiment that had met the convoy of wounded,
now at the cart by which he was standing, in which two wounded men
were sitting and one was lying. One of those sitting up in the cart had
probably been wounded in the cheek. His whole head was wrapped in rags
and one cheek was swollen to the size of a baby's head. His nose
and mouth were twisted to one side. This soldier was looking at the
cathedral and crossing himself. Another, a young lad, a fair-haired
recruit as white as though there was no blood in his thin face, looked
at Pierre kindly, with a fixed smile. The third lay prone so that his
face was not visible. The cavalry singers were passing close by:

   Ah lost, quite lost... is my head so keen,
   Living in a foreign land.

they sang their soldiers' dance song.

As if responding to them but with a different sort of merriment, the
metallic sound of the bells reverberated high above and the hot rays of
the sun bathed the top of the opposite slope with yet another sort of
merriment. But beneath the slope, by the cart with the wounded near the
panting little nag where Pierre stood, it was damp, somber, and sad.

The soldier with the swollen cheek looked angrily at the cavalry
singers.

"Oh, the coxcombs!" he muttered reproachfully.

"It's not the soldiers only, but I've seen peasants today, too....
The peasants--even they have to go," said the soldier behind the cart,
addressing Pierre with a sad smile. "No distinctions made nowadays....
They want the whole nation to fall on them--in a word, it's Moscow! They
want to make an end of it."

In spite of the obscurity of the soldier's words Pierre understood what
he wanted to say and nodded approval.

The road was clear again; Pierre descended the hill and drove on.

He kept looking to either side of the road for familiar faces, but only
saw everywhere the unfamiliar faces of various military men of different
branches of the service, who all looked with astonishment at his white
hat and green tail coat.

Having gone nearly three miles he at last met an acquaintance and
eagerly addressed him. This was one of the head army doctors. He was
driving toward Pierre in a covered gig, sitting beside a young surgeon,
and on recognizing Pierre he told the Cossack who occupied the driver's
seat to pull up.

"Count! Your excellency, how come you to be here?" asked the doctor.

"Well, you know, I wanted to see..."

"Yes, yes, there will be something to see...."

Pierre got out and talked to the doctor, explaining his intention of
taking part in a battle.

The doctor advised him to apply direct to Kutuzov.

"Why should you be God knows where out of sight, during the battle?" he
said, exchanging glances with his young companion. "Anyhow his Serene
Highness knows you and will receive you graciously. That's what you must
do."

The doctor seemed tired and in a hurry.

"You think so?... Ah, I also wanted to ask you where our position is
exactly?" said Pierre.

"The position?" repeated the doctor. "Well, that's not my line. Drive
past Tatarinova, a lot of digging is going on there. Go up the hillock
and you'll see."

"Can one see from there?... If you would..."

But the doctor interrupted him and moved toward his gig.

"I would go with you but on my honor I'm up to here"--and he pointed to
his throat. "I'm galloping to the commander of the corps. How do matters
stand?... You know, Count, there'll be a battle tomorrow. Out of an army
of a hundred thousand we must expect at least twenty thousand wounded,
and we haven't stretchers, or bunks, or dressers, or doctors enough for
six thousand. We have ten thousand carts, but we need other things as
well--we must manage as best we can!"

The strange thought that of the thousands of men, young and old, who
had stared with merry surprise at his hat (perhaps the very men he had
noticed), twenty thousand were inevitably doomed to wounds and death
amazed Pierre.

"They may die tomorrow; why are they thinking of anything but death?"
And by some latent sequence of thought the descent of the Mozhaysk hill,
the carts with the wounded, the ringing bells, the slanting rays of the
sun, and the songs of the cavalrymen vividly recurred to his mind.

"The cavalry ride to battle and meet the wounded and do not for a moment
think of what awaits them, but pass by, winking at the wounded. Yet from
among these men twenty thousand are doomed to die, and they wonder at my
hat! Strange!" thought Pierre, continuing his way to Tatarinova.

In front of a landowner's house to the left of the road stood carriages,
wagons, and crowds of orderlies and sentinels. The commander in chief
was putting up there, but just when Pierre arrived he was not in and
hardly any of the staff were there--they had gone to the church service.
Pierre drove on toward Gorki.

When he had ascended the hill and reached the little village street, he
saw for the first time peasant militiamen in their white shirts and with
crosses on their caps, who, talking and laughing loudly, animated and
perspiring, were at work on a huge knoll overgrown with grass to the
right of the road.

Some of them were digging, others were wheeling barrowloads of earth
along planks, while others stood about doing nothing.

Two officers were standing on the knoll, directing the men. On seeing
these peasants, who were evidently still amused by the novelty of their
position as soldiers, Pierre once more thought of the wounded men at
Mozhaysk and understood what the soldier had meant when he said: "They
want the whole nation to fall on them." The sight of these bearded
peasants at work on the battlefield, with their queer, clumsy boots
and perspiring necks, and their shirts opening from the left toward
the middle, unfastened, exposing their sunburned collarbones, impressed
Pierre more strongly with the solemnity and importance of the moment
than anything he had yet seen or heard.





CHAPTER XXI


Pierre stepped out of his carriage and, passing the toiling militiamen,
ascended the knoll from which, according to the doctor, the battlefield
could be seen.

It was about eleven o'clock. The sun shone somewhat to the left and
behind him and brightly lit up the enormous panorama which, rising like
an amphitheater, extended before him in the clear rarefied atmosphere.

From above on the left, bisecting that amphitheater, wound the Smolensk
highroad, passing through a village with a white church some five
hundred paces in front of the knoll and below it. This was Borodino.
Below the village the road crossed the river by a bridge and, winding
down and up, rose higher and higher to the village of Valuevo visible
about four miles away, where Napoleon was then stationed. Beyond Valuevo
the road disappeared into a yellowing forest on the horizon. Far in
the distance in that birch and fir forest to the right of the road, the
cross and belfry of the Kolocha Monastery gleamed in the sun. Here and
there over the whole of that blue expanse, to right and left of the
forest and the road, smoking campfires could be seen and indefinite
masses of troops--ours and the enemy's. The ground to the right--along
the course of the Kolocha and Moskva rivers--was broken and hilly.
Between the hollows the villages of Bezubova and Zakharino showed in the
distance. On the left the ground was more level; there were fields of
grain, and the smoking ruins of Semenovsk, which had been burned down,
could be seen.

All that Pierre saw was so indefinite that neither the left nor the
right side of the field fully satisfied his expectations. Nowhere
could he see the battlefield he had expected to find, but only fields,
meadows, troops, woods, the smoke of campfires, villages, mounds, and
streams; and try as he would he could descry no military "position" in
this place which teemed with life, nor could he even distinguish our
troops from the enemy's.

"I must ask someone who knows," he thought, and addressed an officer who
was looking with curiosity at his huge unmilitary figure.

"May I ask you," said Pierre, "what village that is in front?"

"Burdino, isn't it?" said the officer, turning to his companion.

"Borodino," the other corrected him.

The officer, evidently glad of an opportunity for a talk, moved up to
Pierre.

"Are those our men there?" Pierre inquired.

"Yes, and there, further on, are the French," said the officer. "There
they are, there... you can see them."

"Where? Where?" asked Pierre.

"One can see them with the naked eye... Why, there!"

The officer pointed with his hand to the smoke visible on the left
beyond the river, and the same stern and serious expression that Pierre
had noticed on many of the faces he had met came into his face.

"Ah, those are the French! And over there?..." Pierre pointed to a knoll
on the left, near which some troops could be seen.

"Those are ours."

"Ah, ours! And there?..." Pierre pointed to another knoll in the
distance with a big tree on it, near a village that lay in a hollow
where also some campfires were smoking and something black was visible.

"That's his again," said the officer. (It was the Shevardino Redoubt.)
"It was ours yesterday, but now it is his."

"Then how about our position?"

"Our position?" replied the officer with a smile of satisfaction. "I
can tell you quite clearly, because I constructed nearly all our
entrenchments. There, you see? There's our center, at Borodino, just
there," and he pointed to the village in front of them with the white
church. "That's where one crosses the Kolocha. You see down there where
the rows of hay are lying in the hollow, there's the bridge. That's our
center. Our right flank is over there"--he pointed sharply to the right,
far away in the broken ground--"That's where the Moskva River is, and
we have thrown up three redoubts there, very strong ones. The left
flank..." here the officer paused. "Well, you see, that's difficult to
explain.... Yesterday our left flank was there at Shevardino, you see,
where the oak is, but now we have withdrawn our left wing--now it is
over there, do you see that village and the smoke? That's Semenovsk,
yes, there," he pointed to Raevski's knoll. "But the battle will hardly
be there. His having moved his troops there is only a ruse; he will
probably pass round to the right of the Moskva. But wherever it may be,
many a man will be missing tomorrow!" he remarked.

An elderly sergeant who had approached the officer while he was giving
these explanations had waited in silence for him to finish speaking, but
at this point, evidently not liking the officer's remark, interrupted
him.

"Gabions must be sent for," said he sternly.

The officer appeared abashed, as though he understood that one might
think of how many men would be missing tomorrow but ought not to speak
of it.

"Well, send number three company again," the officer replied hurriedly.

"And you, are you one of the doctors?"

"No, I've come on my own," answered Pierre, and he went down the hill
again, passing the militiamen.

"Oh, those damned fellows!" muttered the officer who followed him,
holding his nose as he ran past the men at work.

"There they are... bringing her, coming... There they are... They'll be
here in a minute..." voices were suddenly heard saying; and officers,
soldiers, and militiamen began running forward along the road.

A church procession was coming up the hill from Borodino. First along
the dusty road came the infantry in ranks, bareheaded and with arms
reversed. From behind them came the sound of church singing.

Soldiers and militiamen ran bareheaded past Pierre toward the
procession.

"They are bringing her, our Protectress!... The Iberian Mother of God!"
someone cried.

"The Smolensk Mother of God," another corrected him.

The militiamen, both those who had been in the village and those who had
been at work on the battery, threw down their spades and ran to meet the
church procession. Following the battalion that marched along the dusty
road came priests in their vestments--one little old man in a hood with
attendants and singers. Behind them soldiers and officers bore a large,
dark-faced icon with an embossed metal cover. This was the icon that had
been brought from Smolensk and had since accompanied the army. Behind,
before, and on both sides, crowds of militiamen with bared heads walked,
ran, and bowed to the ground.

At the summit of the hill they stopped with the icon; the men who had
been holding it up by the linen bands attached to it were relieved by
others, the chanters relit their censers, and service began. The hot
rays of the sun beat down vertically and a fresh soft wind played with
the hair of the bared heads and with the ribbons decorating the icon.
The singing did not sound loud under the open sky. An immense crowd
of bareheaded officers, soldiers, and militiamen surrounded the icon.
Behind the priest and a chanter stood the notabilities on a spot
reserved for them. A bald general with a St. George's Cross on his neck
stood just behind the priest's back, and without crossing himself (he
was evidently a German) patiently awaited the end of the service, which
he considered it necessary to hear to the end, probably to arouse the
patriotism of the Russian people. Another general stood in a martial
pose, crossing himself by shaking his hand in front of his chest
while looking about him. Standing among the crowd of peasants, Pierre
recognized several acquaintances among these notables, but did not
look at them--his whole attention was absorbed in watching the serious
expression on the faces of the crowd of soldiers and militiamen who were
all gazing eagerly at the icon. As soon as the tired chanters, who were
singing the service for the twentieth time that day, began lazily and
mechanically to sing: "Save from calamity Thy servants, O Mother of
God," and the priest and deacon chimed in: "For to Thee under God we all
flee as to an inviolable bulwark and protection," there again kindled in
all those faces the same expression of consciousness of the solemnity
of the impending moment that Pierre had seen on the faces at the foot of
the hill at Mozhaysk and momentarily on many and many faces he had met
that morning; and heads were bowed more frequently and hair tossed back,
and sighs and the sound men made as they crossed themselves were heard.

The crowd round the icon suddenly parted and pressed against Pierre.
Someone, a very important personage judging by the haste with which way
was made for him, was approaching the icon.

It was Kutuzov, who had been riding round the position and on his way
back to Tatarinova had stopped where the service was being held. Pierre
recognized him at once by his peculiar figure, which distinguished him
from everybody else.

With a long overcoat on his exceedingly stout, round-shouldered body,
with uncovered white head and puffy face showing the white ball of the
eye he had lost, Kutuzov walked with plunging, swaying gait into
the crowd and stopped behind the priest. He crossed himself with an
accustomed movement, bent till he touched the ground with his hand, and
bowed his white head with a deep sigh. Behind Kutuzov was Bennigsen and
the suite. Despite the presence of the commander in chief, who attracted
the attention of all the superior officers, the militiamen and soldiers
continued their prayers without looking at him.

When the service was over, Kutuzov stepped up to the icon, sank heavily
to his knees, bowed to the ground, and for a long time tried vainly to
rise, but could not do so on account of his weakness and weight. His
white head twitched with the effort. At last he rose, kissed the icon as
a child does with naively pouting lips, and again bowed till he touched
the ground with his hand. The other generals followed his example,
then the officers, and after them with excited faces, pressing on one
another, crowding, panting, and pushing, scrambled the soldiers and
militiamen.





CHAPTER XXII


Staggering amid the crush, Pierre looked about him.

"Count Peter Kirilovich! How did you get here?" said a voice.

Pierre looked round. Boris Drubetskoy, brushing his knees with his hand
(he had probably soiled them when he, too, had knelt before the icon),
came up to him smiling. Boris was elegantly dressed, with a slightly
martial touch appropriate to a campaign. He wore a long coat and like
Kutuzov had a whip slung across his shoulder.

Meanwhile Kutuzov had reached the village and seated himself in the
shade of the nearest house, on a bench which one Cossack had run
to fetch and another had hastily covered with a rug. An immense and
brilliant suite surrounded him.

The icon was carried further, accompanied by the throng. Pierre stopped
some thirty paces from Kutuzov, talking to Boris.

He explained his wish to be present at the battle and to see the
position.

"This is what you must do," said Boris. "I will do the honors of the
camp to you. You will see everything best from where Count Bennigsen
will be. I am in attendance on him, you know; I'll mention it to him.
But if you want to ride round the position, come along with us. We are
just going to the left flank. Then when we get back, do spend the night
with me and we'll arrange a game of cards. Of course you know Dmitri
Sergeevich? Those are his quarters," and he pointed to the third house
in the village of Gorki.

"But I should like to see the right flank. They say it's very strong,"
said Pierre. "I should like to start from the Moskva River and ride
round the whole position."

"Well, you can do that later, but the chief thing is the left flank."

"Yes, yes. But where is Prince Bolkonski's regiment? Can you point it
out to me?"

"Prince Andrew's? We shall pass it and I'll take you to him."

"What about the left flank?" asked Pierre

"To tell you the truth, between ourselves, God only knows what state our
left flank is in," said Boris confidentially lowering his voice. "It is
not at all what Count Bennigsen intended. He meant to fortify that knoll
quite differently, but..." Boris shrugged his shoulders, "his Serene
Highness would not have it, or someone persuaded him. You see..." but
Boris did not finish, for at that moment Kaysarov, Kutuzov's adjutant,
came up to Pierre. "Ah, Kaysarov!" said Boris, addressing him with an
unembarrassed smile, "I was just trying to explain our position to
the count. It is amazing how his Serene Highness could so foresee the
intentions of the French!"

"You mean the left flank?" asked Kaysarov.

"Yes, exactly; the left flank is now extremely strong."

Though Kutuzov had dismissed all unnecessary men from the staff, Boris
had contrived to remain at headquarters after the changes. He had
established himself with Count Bennigsen, who, like all on whom Boris
had been in attendance, considered young Prince Drubetskoy an invaluable
man.

In the higher command there were two sharply defined parties: Kutuzov's
party and that of Bennigsen, the chief of staff. Boris belonged to the
latter and no one else, while showing servile respect to Kutuzov, could
so create an impression that the old fellow was not much good and that
Bennigsen managed everything. Now the decisive moment of battle had come
when Kutuzov would be destroyed and the power pass to Bennigsen, or even
if Kutuzov won the battle it would be felt that everything was done by
Bennigsen. In any case many great rewards would have to be given for
tomorrow's action, and new men would come to the front. So Boris was
full of nervous vivacity all day.

After Kaysarov, others whom Pierre knew came up to him, and he had not
time to reply to all the questions about Moscow that were showered upon
him, or to listen to all that was told him. The faces all expressed
animation and apprehension, but it seemed to Pierre that the cause of
the excitement shown in some of these faces lay chiefly in questions
of personal success; his mind, however, was occupied by the different
expression he saw on other faces--an expression that spoke not of
personal matters but of the universal questions of life and death.
Kutuzov noticed Pierre's figure and the group gathered round him.

"Call him to me," said Kutuzov.

An adjutant told Pierre of his Serene Highness' wish, and Pierre went
toward Kutuzov's bench. But a militiaman got there before him. It was
Dolokhov.

"How did that fellow get here?" asked Pierre.

"He's a creature that wriggles in anywhere!" was the answer. "He
has been degraded, you know. Now he wants to bob up again. He's been
proposing some scheme or other and has crawled into the enemy's picket
line at night.... He's a brave fellow."

Pierre took off his hat and bowed respectfully to Kutuzov.

"I concluded that if I reported to your Serene Highness you might send
me away or say that you knew what I was reporting, but then I shouldn't
lose anything..." Dolokhov was saying.

"Yes, yes."

"But if I were right, I should be rendering a service to my Fatherland
for which I am ready to die."

"Yes, yes."

"And should your Serene Highness require a man who will not spare his
skin, please think of me.... Perhaps I may prove useful to your Serene
Highness."

"Yes... Yes..." Kutuzov repeated, his laughing eye narrowing more and
more as he looked at Pierre.

Just then Boris, with his courtierlike adroitness, stepped up to
Pierre's side near Kutuzov and in a most natural manner, without
raising his voice, said to Pierre, as though continuing an interrupted
conversation:

"The militia have put on clean white shirts to be ready to die. What
heroism, Count!"

Boris evidently said this to Pierre in order to be overheard by his
Serene Highness. He knew Kutuzov's attention would be caught by those
words, and so it was.

"What are you saying about the militia?" he asked Boris.

"Preparing for tomorrow, your Serene Highness--for death--they have put
on clean shirts."

"Ah... a wonderful, a matchless people!" said Kutuzov; and he closed his
eyes and swayed his head. "A matchless people!" he repeated with a sigh.

"So you want to smell gunpowder?" he said to Pierre. "Yes, it's a
pleasant smell. I have the honor to be one of your wife's adorers. Is
she well? My quarters are at your service."

And as often happens with old people, Kutuzov began looking about
absent-mindedly as if forgetting all he wanted to say or do.

Then, evidently remembering what he wanted, he beckoned to Andrew
Kaysarov, his adjutant's brother.

"Those verses... those verses of Marin's... how do they go, eh? Those he
wrote about Gerakov: 'Lectures for the corps inditing'... Recite them,
recite them!" said he, evidently preparing to laugh.

Kaysarov recited.... Kutuzov smilingly nodded his head to the rhythm of
the verses.

When Pierre had left Kutuzov, Dolokhov came up to him and took his hand.

"I am very glad to meet you here, Count," he said aloud, regardless
of the presence of strangers and in a particularly resolute and solemn
tone. "On the eve of a day when God alone knows who of us is fated to
survive, I am glad of this opportunity to tell you that I regret the
misunderstandings that occurred between us and should wish you not to
have any ill feeling for me. I beg you to forgive me."

Pierre looked at Dolokhov with a smile, not knowing what to say to him.
With tears in his eyes Dolokhov embraced Pierre and kissed him.

Boris said a few words to his general, and Count Bennigsen turned to
Pierre and proposed that he should ride with him along the line.

"It will interest you," said he.

"Yes, very much," replied Pierre.

Half an hour later Kutuzov left for Tatarinova, and Bennigsen and his
suite, with Pierre among them, set out on their ride along the line.





CHAPTER XXIII


From Gorki, Bennigsen descended the highroad to the bridge which, when
they had looked at it from the hill, the officer had pointed out as
being the center of our position and where rows of fragrant new-mown hay
lay by the riverside. They rode across that bridge into the village of
Borodino and thence turned to the left, passing an enormous number of
troops and guns, and came to a high knoll where militiamen were digging.
This was the redoubt, as yet unnamed, which afterwards became known as
the Raevski Redoubt, or the Knoll Battery, but Pierre paid no special
attention to it. He did not know that it would become more memorable to
him than any other spot on the plain of Borodino.

They then crossed the hollow to Semenovsk, where the soldiers were
dragging away the last logs from the huts and barns. Then they rode
downhill and uphill, across a ryefield trodden and beaten down as if by
hail, following a track freshly made by the artillery over the furrows
of the plowed land, and reached some fleches * which were still being
dug.


    * A kind of entrenchment.


At the fleches Bennigsen stopped and began looking at the Shevardino
Redoubt opposite, which had been ours the day before and where several
horsemen could be descried. The officers said that either Napoleon or
Murat was there, and they all gazed eagerly at this little group of
horsemen. Pierre also looked at them, trying to guess which of the
scarcely discernible figures was Napoleon. At last those mounted men
rode away from the mound and disappeared.

Bennigsen spoke to a general who approached him, and began explaining
the whole position of our troops. Pierre listened to him, straining each
faculty to understand the essential points of the impending battle, but
was mortified to feel that his mental capacity was inadequate for the
task. He could make nothing of it. Bennigsen stopped speaking and,
noticing that Pierre was listening, suddenly said to him:

"I don't think this interests you?"

"On the contrary it's very interesting!" replied Pierre not quite
truthfully.

From the fleches they rode still farther to the left, along a road
winding through a thick, low-growing birch wood. In the middle of the
wood a brown hare with white feet sprang out and, scared by the tramp of
the many horses, grew so confused that it leaped along the road in front
of them for some time, arousing general attention and laughter, and only
when several voices shouted at it did it dart to one side and disappear
in the thicket. After going through the wood for about a mile and a half
they came out on a glade where troops of Tuchkov's corps were stationed
to defend the left flank.

Here, at the extreme left flank, Bennigsen talked a great deal and with
much heat, and, as it seemed to Pierre, gave orders of great military
importance. In front of Tuchkov's troops was some high ground not
occupied by troops. Bennigsen loudly criticized this mistake, saying
that it was madness to leave a height which commanded the country around
unoccupied and to place troops below it. Some of the generals expressed
the same opinion. One in particular declared with martial heat that they
were put there to be slaughtered. Bennigsen on his own authority ordered
the troops to occupy the high ground. This disposition on the left flank
increased Pierre's doubt of his own capacity to understand military
matters. Listening to Bennigsen and the generals criticizing the
position of the troops behind the hill, he quite understood them and
shared their opinion, but for that very reason he could not understand
how the man who put them there behind the hill could have made so gross
and palpable a blunder.

Pierre did not know that these troops were not, as Bennigsen supposed,
put there to defend the position, but were in a concealed position as
an ambush, that they should not be seen and might be able to strike an
approaching enemy unexpectedly. Bennigsen did not know this and moved
the troops forward according to his own ideas without mentioning the
matter to the commander in chief.





CHAPTER XXIV


On that bright evening of August 25, Prince Andrew lay leaning on his
elbow in a broken-down shed in the village of Knyazkovo at the further
end of his regiment's encampment. Through a gap in the broken wall he
could see, beside the wooden fence, a row of thirty year-old birches
with their lower branches lopped off, a field on which shocks of
oats were standing, and some bushes near which rose the smoke of
campfires--the soldiers' kitchens.

Narrow and burdensome and useless to anyone as his life now seemed to
him, Prince Andrew on the eve of battle felt agitated and irritable as
he had done seven years before at Austerlitz.

He had received and given the orders for next day's battle and had
nothing more to do. But his thoughts--the simplest, clearest, and
therefore most terrible thoughts--would give him no peace. He knew that
tomorrow's battle would be the most terrible of all he had taken
part in, and for the first time in his life the possibility of death
presented itself to him--not in relation to any worldly matter or with
reference to its effect on others, but simply in relation to himself, to
his own soul--vividly, plainly, terribly, and almost as a certainty. And
from the height of this perception all that had previously tormented and
preoccupied him suddenly became illumined by a cold white light without
shadows, without perspective, without distinction of outline. All life
appeared to him like magic-lantern pictures at which he had long been
gazing by artificial light through a glass. Now he suddenly saw those
badly daubed pictures in clear daylight and without a glass. "Yes,
yes! There they are, those false images that agitated, enraptured,
and tormented me," said he to himself, passing in review the principal
pictures of the magic lantern of life and regarding them now in the cold
white daylight of his clear perception of death. "There they are, those
rudely painted figures that once seemed splendid and mysterious.
Glory, the good of society, love of a woman, the Fatherland itself--how
important these pictures appeared to me, with what profound meaning they
seemed to be filled! And it is all so simple, pale, and crude in the
cold white light of this morning which I feel is dawning for me." The
three great sorrows of his life held his attention in particular: his
love for a woman, his father's death, and the French invasion which had
overrun half Russia. "Love... that little girl who seemed to me brimming
over with mystic forces! Yes, indeed, I loved her. I made romantic plans
of love and happiness with her! Oh, what a boy I was!" he said aloud
bitterly. "Ah me! I believed in some ideal love which was to keep her
faithful to me for the whole year of my absence! Like the gentle dove
in the fable she was to pine apart from me.... But it was much simpler
really.... It was all very simple and horrible."

"When my father built Bald Hills he thought the place was his: his
land, his air, his peasants. But Napoleon came and swept him aside,
unconscious of his existence, as he might brush a chip from his path,
and his Bald Hills and his whole life fell to pieces. Princess Mary says
it is a trial sent from above. What is the trial for, when he is not
here and will never return? He is not here! For whom then is the trial
intended? The Fatherland, the destruction of Moscow! And tomorrow I
shall be killed, perhaps not even by a Frenchman but by one of our own
men, by a soldier discharging a musket close to my ear as one of them
did yesterday, and the French will come and take me by head and heels
and fling me into a hole that I may not stink under their noses, and new
conditions of life will arise, which will seem quite ordinary to others
and about which I shall know nothing. I shall not exist..."

He looked at the row of birches shining in the sunshine, with their
motionless green and yellow foliage and white bark. "To die... to be
killed tomorrow... That I should not exist... That all this should still
be, but no me...."

And the birches with their light and shade, the curly clouds, the
smoke of the campfires, and all that was around him changed and seemed
terrible and menacing. A cold shiver ran down his spine. He rose
quickly, went out of the shed, and began to walk about.

After he had returned, voices were heard outside the shed. "Who's that?"
he cried.

The red-nosed Captain Timokhin, formerly Dolokhov's squadron commander,
but now from lack of officers a battalion commander, shyly entered the
shed followed by an adjutant and the regimental paymaster.

Prince Andrew rose hastily, listened to the business they had come
about, gave them some further instructions, and was about to dismiss
them when he heard a familiar, lisping, voice behind the shed.

"Devil take it!" said the voice of a man stumbling over something.

Prince Andrew looked out of the shed and saw Pierre, who had tripped
over a pole on the ground and had nearly fallen, coming his way. It was
unpleasant to Prince Andrew to meet people of his own set in general,
and Pierre especially, for he reminded him of all the painful moments of
his last visit to Moscow.

"You? What a surprise!" said he. "What brings you here? This is
unexpected!"

As he said this his eyes and face expressed more than coldness--they
expressed hostility, which Pierre noticed at once. He had approached
the shed full of animation, but on seeing Prince Andrew's face he felt
constrained and ill at ease.

"I have come... simply... you know... come... it interests me," said
Pierre, who had so often that day senselessly repeated that word
"interesting." "I wish to see the battle."

"Oh yes, and what do the Masonic brothers say about war? How would they
stop it?" said Prince Andrew sarcastically. "Well, and how's Moscow? And
my people? Have they reached Moscow at last?" he asked seriously.

"Yes, they have. Julie Drubetskaya told me so. I went to see them, but
missed them. They have gone to your estate near Moscow."





CHAPTER XXV


The officers were about to take leave, but Prince Andrew, apparently
reluctant to be left alone with his friend, asked them to stay and have
tea. Seats were brought in and so was the tea. The officers gazed with
surprise at Pierre's huge stout figure and listened to his talk of
Moscow and the position of our army, round which he had ridden. Prince
Andrew remained silent, and his expression was so forbidding that Pierre
addressed his remarks chiefly to the good-natured battalion commander.

"So you understand the whole position of our troops?" Prince Andrew
interrupted him.

"Yes--that is, how do you mean?" said Pierre. "Not being a military man
I can't say I have understood it fully, but I understand the general
position."

"Well, then, you know more than anyone else, be it who it may," said
Prince Andrew.

"Oh!" said Pierre, looking over his spectacles in perplexity at Prince
Andrew. "Well, and what do you think of Kutuzov's appointment?" he
asked.

"I was very glad of his appointment, that's all I know," replied Prince
Andrew.

"And tell me your opinion of Barclay de Tolly. In Moscow they are saying
heaven knows what about him.... What do you think of him?"

"Ask them," replied Prince Andrew, indicating the officers.

Pierre looked at Timokhin with the condescendingly interrogative smile
with which everybody involuntarily addressed that officer.

"We see light again, since his Serenity has been appointed, your
excellency," said Timokhin timidly, and continually turning to glance at
his colonel.

"Why so?" asked Pierre.

"Well, to mention only firewood and fodder, let me inform you. Why, when
we were retreating from Sventsyani we dare not touch a stick or a wisp
of hay or anything. You see, we were going away, so he would get it all;
wasn't it so, your excellency?" and again Timokhin turned to the prince.
"But we daren't. In our regiment two officers were court-martialed for
that kind of thing. But when his Serenity took command everything became
straight forward. Now we see light..."

"Then why was it forbidden?"

Timokhin looked about in confusion, not knowing what or how to answer
such a question. Pierre put the same question to Prince Andrew.

"Why, so as not to lay waste the country we were abandoning to the
enemy," said Prince Andrew with venomous irony. "It is very sound:
one can't permit the land to be pillaged and accustom the troops to
marauding. At Smolensk too he judged correctly that the French might
outflank us, as they had larger forces. But he could not understand
this," cried Prince Andrew in a shrill voice that seemed to escape him
involuntarily: "he could not understand that there, for the first time,
we were fighting for Russian soil, and that there was a spirit in the
men such as I had never seen before, that we had held the French for
two days, and that that success had increased our strength tenfold. He
ordered us to retreat, and all our efforts and losses went for nothing.
He had no thought of betraying us, he tried to do the best he could,
he thought out everything, and that is why he is unsuitable. He is
unsuitable now, just because he plans out everything very thoroughly and
accurately as every German has to. How can I explain?... Well, say your
father has a German valet, and he is a splendid valet and satisfies your
father's requirements better than you could, then it's all right to let
him serve. But if your father is mortally sick you'll send the valet
away and attend to your father with your own unpracticed, awkward hands,
and will soothe him better than a skilled man who is a stranger could.
So it has been with Barclay. While Russia was well, a foreigner could
serve her and be a splendid minister; but as soon as she is in danger
she needs one of her own kin. But in your Club they have been making him
out a traitor! They slander him as a traitor, and the only result will
be that afterwards, ashamed of their false accusations, they will make
him out a hero or a genius instead of a traitor, and that will be still
more unjust. He is an honest and very punctilious German."

"And they say he's a skillful commander," rejoined Pierre.

"I don't understand what is meant by 'a skillful commander,'" replied
Prince Andrew ironically.

"A skillful commander?" replied Pierre. "Why, one who foresees all
contingencies... and foresees the adversary's intentions."

"But that's impossible," said Prince Andrew as if it were a matter
settled long ago.

Pierre looked at him in surprise.

"And yet they say that war is like a game of chess?" he remarked.

"Yes," replied Prince Andrew, "but with this little difference, that
in chess you may think over each move as long as you please and are not
limited for time, and with this difference too, that a knight is always
stronger than a pawn, and two pawns are always stronger than one, while
in war a battalion is sometimes stronger than a division and sometimes
weaker than a company. The relative strength of bodies of troops can
never be known to anyone. Believe me," he went on, "if things
depended on arrangements made by the staff, I should be there making
arrangements, but instead of that I have the honor to serve here in
the regiment with these gentlemen, and I consider that on us tomorrow's
battle will depend and not on those others.... Success never depends,
and never will depend, on position, or equipment, or even on numbers,
and least of all on position."

"But on what then?"

"On the feeling that is in me and in him," he pointed to Timokhin, "and
in each soldier."

Prince Andrew glanced at Timokhin, who looked at his commander in alarm
and bewilderment. In contrast to his former reticent taciturnity
Prince Andrew now seemed excited. He could apparently not refrain from
expressing the thoughts that had suddenly occurred to him.

"A battle is won by those who firmly resolve to win it! Why did we lose
the battle at Austerlitz? The French losses were almost equal to ours,
but very early we said to ourselves that we were losing the battle,
and we did lose it. And we said so because we had nothing to fight for
there, we wanted to get away from the battlefield as soon as we could.
'We've lost, so let us run,' and we ran. If we had not said that till
the evening, heaven knows what might not have happened. But tomorrow we
shan't say it! You talk about our position, the left flank weak and the
right flank too extended," he went on. "That's all nonsense, there's
nothing of the kind. But what awaits us tomorrow? A hundred million most
diverse chances which will be decided on the instant by the fact that
our men or theirs run or do not run, and that this man or that man is
killed, but all that is being done at present is only play. The fact is
that those men with whom you have ridden round the position not only
do not help matters, but hinder. They are only concerned with their own
petty interests."

"At such a moment?" said Pierre reproachfully.

"At such a moment!" Prince Andrew repeated. "To them it is only a moment
affording opportunities to undermine a rival and obtain an extra cross
or ribbon. For me tomorrow means this: a Russian army of a hundred
thousand and a French army of a hundred thousand have met to fight, and
the thing is that these two hundred thousand men will fight and the side
that fights more fiercely and spares itself least will win. And if you
like I will tell you that whatever happens and whatever muddles those at
the top may make, we shall win tomorrow's battle. Tomorrow, happen what
may, we shall win!"

"There now, your excellency! That's the truth, the real truth," said
Timokhin. "Who would spare himself now? The soldiers in my battalion,
believe me, wouldn't drink their vodka! 'It's not the day for that!'
they say."

All were silent. The officers rose. Prince Andrew went out of the shed
with them, giving final orders to the adjutant. After they had gone
Pierre approached Prince Andrew and was about to start a conversation
when they heard the clatter of three horses' hoofs on the road not far
from the shed, and looking in that direction Prince Andrew recognized
Wolzogen and Clausewitz accompanied by a Cossack. They rode close by
continuing to converse, and Prince Andrew involuntarily heard these
words:

"Der Krieg muss in Raum verlegt werden. Der Ansicht kann ich nicht genug
Preis geben," * said one of them.


     * "The war must be extended widely. I cannot sufficiently
     commend that view."


"Oh, ja," said the other, "der Zweck ist nur den Feind zu schwachen,
so kann man gewiss nicht den Verlust der Privat-Personen in Achtung
nehmen." *


     * "Oh, yes, the only aim is to weaken the enemy, so of
     course one cannot take into account the loss of private
     individuals."


"Oh, no," agreed the other.

"Extend widely!" said Prince Andrew with an angry snort, when they had
ridden past. "In that 'extend' were my father, son, and sister, at
Bald Hills. That's all the same to him! That's what I was saying to
you--those German gentlemen won't win the battle tomorrow but will only
make all the mess they can, because they have nothing in their German
heads but theories not worth an empty eggshell and haven't in their
hearts the one thing needed tomorrow--that which Timokhin has. They
have yielded up all Europe to him, and have now come to teach us. Fine
teachers!" and again his voice grew shrill.

"So you think we shall win tomorrow's battle?" asked Pierre.

"Yes, yes," answered Prince Andrew absently. "One thing I would do if
I had the power," he began again, "I would not take prisoners. Why take
prisoners? It's chivalry! The French have destroyed my home and are on
their way to destroy Moscow, they have outraged and are outraging me
every moment. They are my enemies. In my opinion they are all criminals.
And so thinks Timokhin and the whole army. They should be executed!
Since they are my foes they cannot be my friends, whatever may have been
said at Tilsit."

"Yes, yes," muttered Pierre, looking with shining eyes at Prince Andrew.
"I quite agree with you!"

The question that had perturbed Pierre on the Mozhaysk hill and all
that day now seemed to him quite clear and completely solved. He now
understood the whole meaning and importance of this war and of the
impending battle. All he had seen that day, all the significant and
stern expressions on the faces he had seen in passing, were lit up
for him by a new light. He understood that latent heat (as they say in
physics) of patriotism which was present in all these men he had seen,
and this explained to him why they all prepared for death calmly, and as
it were lightheartedly.

"Not take prisoners," Prince Andrew continued: "That by itself would
quite change the whole war and make it less cruel. As it is we have
played at war--that's what's vile! We play at magnanimity and all that
stuff. Such magnanimity and sensibility are like the magnanimity and
sensibility of a lady who faints when she sees a calf being killed: she
is so kindhearted that she can't look at blood, but enjoys eating the
calf served up with sauce. They talk to us of the rules of war, of
chivalry, of flags of truce, of mercy to the unfortunate and so on. It's
all rubbish! I saw chivalry and flags of truce in 1805; they humbugged
us and we humbugged them. They plunder other people's houses, issue
false paper money, and worst of all they kill my children and my
father, and then talk of rules of war and magnanimity to foes! Take no
prisoners, but kill and be killed! He who has come to this as I have
through the same sufferings..."

Prince Andrew, who had thought it was all the same to him whether or
not Moscow was taken as Smolensk had been, was suddenly checked in his
speech by an unexpected cramp in his throat. He paced up and down a
few times in silence, but his eyes glittered feverishly and his lips
quivered as he began speaking.

"If there was none of this magnanimity in war, we should go to war only
when it was worth while going to certain death, as now. Then there would
not be war because Paul Ivanovich had offended Michael Ivanovich. And
when there was a war, like this one, it would be war! And then the
determination of the troops would be quite different. Then all these
Westphalians and Hessians whom Napoleon is leading would not follow
him into Russia, and we should not go to fight in Austria and Prussia
without knowing why. War is not courtesy but the most horrible thing in
life; and we ought to understand that and not play at war. We ought to
accept this terrible necessity sternly and seriously. It all lies in
that: get rid of falsehood and let war be war and not a game. As it is
now, war is the favorite pastime of the idle and frivolous. The military
calling is the most highly honored.

"But what is war? What is needed for success in warfare? What are the
habits of the military? The aim of war is murder; the methods of war
are spying, treachery, and their encouragement, the ruin of a country's
inhabitants, robbing them or stealing to provision the army, and fraud
and falsehood termed military craft. The habits of the military class
are the absence of freedom, that is, discipline, idleness, ignorance,
cruelty, debauchery, and drunkenness. And in spite of all this it is the
highest class, respected by everyone. All the kings, except the Chinese,
wear military uniforms, and he who kills most people receives the
highest rewards.

"They meet, as we shall meet tomorrow, to murder one another; they kill
and maim tens of thousands, and then have thanksgiving services for
having killed so many people (they even exaggerate the number), and they
announce a victory, supposing that the more people they have killed
the greater their achievement. How does God above look at them and hear
them?" exclaimed Prince Andrew in a shrill, piercing voice. "Ah, my
friend, it has of late become hard for me to live. I see that I have
begun to understand too much. And it doesn't do for man to taste of the
tree of knowledge of good and evil.... Ah, well, it's not for long!" he
added.

"However, you're sleepy, and it's time for me to sleep. Go back to
Gorki!" said Prince Andrew suddenly.

"Oh no!" Pierre replied, looking at Prince Andrew with frightened,
compassionate eyes.

"Go, go! Before a battle one must have one's sleep out," repeated Prince
Andrew.

He came quickly up to Pierre and embraced and kissed him. "Good-by, be
off!" he shouted. "Whether we meet again or not..." and turning away
hurriedly he entered the shed.

It was already dark, and Pierre could not make out whether the
expression of Prince Andrew's face was angry or tender.

For some time he stood in silence considering whether he should follow
him or go away. "No, he does not want it!" Pierre concluded. "And I know
that this is our last meeting!" He sighed deeply and rode back to Gorki.

On re-entering the shed Prince Andrew lay down on a rug, but he could
not sleep.

He closed his eyes. One picture succeeded another in his imagination. On
one of them he dwelt long and joyfully. He vividly recalled an evening
in Petersburg. Natasha with animated and excited face was telling him
how she had gone to look for mushrooms the previous summer and had lost
her way in the big forest. She incoherently described the depths of
the forest, her feelings, and a talk with a beekeeper she met, and
constantly interrupted her story to say: "No, I can't! I'm not telling
it right; no, you don't understand," though he encouraged her by saying
that he did understand, and he really had understood all she wanted to
say. But Natasha was not satisfied with her own words: she felt that
they did not convey the passionately poetic feeling she had experienced
that day and wished to convey. "He was such a delightful old man, and
it was so dark in the forest... and he had such kind... No, I can't
describe it," she had said, flushed and excited. Prince Andrew smiled
now the same happy smile as then when he had looked into her eyes. "I
understood her," he thought. "I not only understood her, but it was
just that inner, spiritual force, that sincerity, that frankness of
soul--that very soul of hers which seemed to be fettered by her body--it
was that soul I loved in her... loved so strongly and happily..." and
suddenly he remembered how his love had ended. "He did not need anything
of that kind. He neither saw nor understood anything of the sort. He
only saw in her a pretty and fresh young girl, with whom he did not
deign to unite his fate. And I?... and he is still alive and gay!"

Prince Andrew jumped up as if someone had burned him, and again began
pacing up and down in front of the shed.





CHAPTER XXVI


On August 25, the eve of the battle of Borodino, M. de Beausset, prefect
of the French Emperor's palace, arrived at Napoleon's quarters at
Valuevo with Colonel Fabvier, the former from Paris and the latter from
Madrid.

Donning his court uniform, M. de Beausset ordered a box he had
brought for the Emperor to be carried before him and entered the first
compartment of Napoleon's tent, where he began opening the box while
conversing with Napoleon's aides-de-camp who surrounded him.

Fabvier, not entering the tent, remained at the entrance talking to some
generals of his acquaintance.

The Emperor Napoleon had not yet left his bedroom and was finishing his
toilet. Slightly snorting and grunting, he presented now his back and
now his plump hairy chest to the brush with which his valet was rubbing
him down. Another valet, with his finger over the mouth of a bottle,
was sprinkling Eau de Cologne on the Emperor's pampered body with an
expression which seemed to say that he alone knew where and how much Eau
de Cologne should be sprinkled. Napoleon's short hair was wet and
matted on the forehead, but his face, though puffy and yellow, expressed
physical satisfaction. "Go on, harder, go on!" he muttered to the valet
who was rubbing him, slightly twitching and grunting. An aide-de-camp,
who had entered the bedroom to report to the Emperor the number of
prisoners taken in yesterday's action, was standing by the door after
delivering his message, awaiting permission to withdraw. Napoleon,
frowning, looked at him from under his brows.

"No prisoners!" said he, repeating the aide-de-camp's words. "They
are forcing us to exterminate them. So much the worse for the Russian
army.... Go on... harder, harder!" he muttered, hunching his back and
presenting his fat shoulders.

"All right. Let Monsieur de Beausset enter, and Fabvier too," he said,
nodding to the aide-de-camp.

"Yes, sire," and the aide-de-camp disappeared through the door of the
tent.

Two valets rapidly dressed His Majesty, and wearing the blue uniform of
the Guards he went with firm quick steps to the reception room.

De Beausset's hands meanwhile were busily engaged arranging the present
he had brought from the Empress, on two chairs directly in front of the
entrance. But Napoleon had dressed and come out with such unexpected
rapidity that he had not time to finish arranging the surprise.

Napoleon noticed at once what they were about and guessed that they were
not ready. He did not wish to deprive them of the pleasure of giving him
a surprise, so he pretended not to see de Beausset and called Fabvier to
him, listening silently and with a stern frown to what Fabvier told him
of the heroism and devotion of his troops fighting at Salamanca, at
the other end of Europe, with but one thought--to be worthy of their
Emperor--and but one fear--to fail to please him. The result of
that battle had been deplorable. Napoleon made ironic remarks during
Fabvier's account, as if he had not expected that matters could go
otherwise in his absence.

"I must make up for that in Moscow," said Napoleon. "I'll see you
later," he added, and summoned de Beausset, who by that time had
prepared the surprise, having placed something on the chairs and covered
it with a cloth.

De Beausset bowed low, with that courtly French bow which only the
old retainers of the Bourbons knew how to make, and approached him,
presenting an envelope.

Napoleon turned to him gaily and pulled his ear.

"You have hurried here. I am very glad. Well, what is Paris saying?" he
asked, suddenly changing his former stern expression for a most cordial
tone.

"Sire, all Paris regrets your absence," replied de Beausset as was
proper.

But though Napoleon knew that de Beausset had to say something of this
kind, and though in his lucid moments he knew it was untrue, he was
pleased to hear it from him. Again he honored him by touching his ear.

"I am very sorry to have made you travel so far," said he.

"Sire, I expected nothing less than to find you at the gates of Moscow,"
replied de Beausset.

Napoleon smiled and, lifting his head absent-mindedly, glanced to the
right. An aide-de-camp approached with gliding steps and offered him a
gold snuffbox, which he took.

"Yes, it has happened luckily for you," he said, raising the open
snuffbox to his nose. "You are fond of travel, and in three days you
will see Moscow. You surely did not expect to see that Asiatic capital.
You will have a pleasant journey."

De Beausset bowed gratefully at this regard for his taste for travel (of
which he had not till then been aware).

"Ha, what's this?" asked Napoleon, noticing that all the courtiers were
looking at something concealed under a cloth.

With courtly adroitness de Beausset half turned and without turning his
back to the Emperor retired two steps, twitching off the cloth at the
same time, and said:

"A present to Your Majesty from the Empress."

It was a portrait, painted in bright colors by Gerard, of the son borne
to Napoleon by the daughter of the Emperor of Austria, the boy whom for
some reason everyone called "The King of Rome."

A very pretty curly-headed boy with a look of the Christ in the Sistine
Madonna was depicted playing at stick and ball. The ball represented the
terrestrial globe and the stick in his other hand a scepter.

Though it was not clear what the artist meant to express by depicting
the so-called King of Rome spiking the earth with a stick, the allegory
apparently seemed to Napoleon, as it had done to all who had seen it in
Paris, quite clear and very pleasing.

"The King of Rome!" he said, pointing to the portrait with a graceful
gesture. "Admirable!"

With the natural capacity of an Italian for changing the expression of
his face at will, he drew nearer to the portrait and assumed a look
of pensive tenderness. He felt that what he now said and did would
be historical, and it seemed to him that it would now be best for
him--whose grandeur enabled his son to play stick and ball with the
terrestrial globe--to show, in contrast to that grandeur, the simplest
paternal tenderness. His eyes grew dim, he moved forward, glanced round
at a chair (which seemed to place itself under him), and sat down on it
before the portrait. At a single gesture from him everyone went out on
tiptoe, leaving the great man to himself and his emotion.

Having sat still for a while he touched--himself not knowing why--the
thick spot of paint representing the highest light in the portrait,
rose, and recalled de Beausset and the officer on duty. He ordered the
portrait to be carried outside his tent, that the Old Guard, stationed
round it, might not be deprived of the pleasure of seeing the King of
Rome, the son and heir of their adored monarch.

And while he was doing M. de Beausset the honor of breakfasting with
him, they heard, as Napoleon had anticipated, the rapturous cries of the
officers and men of the Old Guard who had run up to see the portrait.

"Vive l'Empereur! Vive le roi de Rome! Vive l'Empereur!" came those
ecstatic cries.

After breakfast Napoleon in de Beausset's presence dictated his order of
the day to the army.

"Short and energetic!" he remarked when he had read over the
proclamation which he had dictated straight off without corrections. It
ran:


Soldiers! This is the battle you have so longed for. Victory depends on
you. It is essential for us; it will give us all we need: comfortable
quarters and a speedy return to our country. Behave as you did at
Austerlitz, Friedland, Vitebsk, and Smolensk. Let our remotest posterity
recall your achievements this day with pride. Let it be said of each of
you: "He was in the great battle before Moscow!"


"Before Moscow!" repeated Napoleon, and inviting M. de Beausset, who was
so fond of travel, to accompany him on his ride, he went out of the tent
to where the horses stood saddled.

"Your Majesty is too kind!" replied de Beausset to the invitation to
accompany the Emperor; he wanted to sleep, did not know how to ride and
was afraid of doing so.

But Napoleon nodded to the traveler, and de Beausset had to mount. When
Napoleon came out of the tent the shouting of the Guards before his
son's portrait grew still louder. Napoleon frowned.

"Take him away!" he said, pointing with a gracefully majestic gesture to
the portrait. "It is too soon for him to see a field of battle."

De Beausset closed his eyes, bowed his head, and sighed deeply, to
indicate how profoundly he valued and comprehended the Emperor's words.





CHAPTER XXVII


On the twenty-fifth of August, so his historians tell us, Napoleon spent
the whole day on horseback inspecting the locality, considering plans
submitted to him by his marshals, and personally giving commands to his
generals.

The original line of the Russian forces along the river Kolocha had
been dislocated by the capture of the Shevardino Redoubt on the
twenty-fourth, and part of the line--the left flank--had been drawn
back. That part of the line was not entrenched and in front of it the
ground was more open and level than elsewhere. It was evident to anyone,
military or not, that it was here the French should attack. It would
seem that not much consideration was needed to reach this conclusion,
nor any particular care or trouble on the part of the Emperor and his
marshals, nor was there any need of that special and supreme quality
called genius that people are so apt to ascribe to Napoleon; yet the
historians who described the event later and the men who then surrounded
Napoleon, and he himself, thought otherwise.

Napoleon rode over the plain and surveyed the locality with a profound
air and in silence, nodded with approval or shook his head dubiously,
and without communicating to the generals around him the profound
course of ideas which guided his decisions merely gave them his final
conclusions in the form of commands. Having listened to a suggestion
from Davout, who was now called Prince d'Eckmuhl, to turn the Russian
left wing, Napoleon said it should not be done, without explaining
why not. To a proposal made by General Campan (who was to attack the
fleches) to lead his division through the woods, Napoleon agreed, though
the so-called Duke of Elchingen (Ney) ventured to remark that a movement
through the woods was dangerous and might disorder the division.

Having inspected the country opposite the Shevardino Redoubt, Napoleon
pondered a little in silence and then indicated the spots where two
batteries should be set up by the morrow to act against the Russian
entrenchments, and the places where, in line with them, the field
artillery should be placed.

After giving these and other commands he returned to his tent, and the
dispositions for the battle were written down from his dictation.

These dispositions, of which the French historians write with enthusiasm
and other historians with profound respect, were as follows:


At dawn the two new batteries established during the night on the
plain occupied by the Prince d'Eckmuhl will open fire on the opposing
batteries of the enemy.

At the same time the commander of the artillery of the 1st Corps,
General Pernetti, with thirty cannon of Campan's division and all the
howitzers of Dessaix's and Friant's divisions, will move forward, open
fire, and overwhelm with shellfire the enemy's battery, against which
will operate:

        24 guns of the artillery of the Guards
        30 guns of Campan's division

 and     8 guns of Friant's and Dessaix's divisions
        --

 in all 62 guns.


The commander of the artillery of the 3rd Corps, General Fouche, will
place the howitzers of the 3rd and 8th Corps, sixteen in all, on the
flanks of the battery that is to bombard the entrenchment on the left,
which will have forty guns in all directed against it.

General Sorbier must be ready at the first order to advance with all the
howitzers of the Guard's artillery against either one or other of the
entrenchments.

During the cannonade Prince Poniatowski is to advance through the wood
on the village and turn the enemy's position.

General Campan will move through the wood to seize the first
fortification.

After the advance has begun in this manner, orders will be given in
accordance with the enemy's movements.

The cannonade on the left flank will begin as soon as the guns of the
right wing are heard. The sharpshooters of Morand's division and of
the vice-King's division will open a heavy fire on seeing the attack
commence on the right wing.

The vice-King will occupy the village and cross by its three bridges,
advancing to the same heights as Morand's and Gibrard's divisions, which
under his leadership will be directed against the redoubt and come into
line with the rest of the forces.

All this must be done in good order (le tout se fera avec ordre et
methode) as far as possible retaining troops in reserve.

The Imperial Camp near Mozhaysk,

September, 6, 1812.



These dispositions, which are very obscure and confused if one allows
oneself to regard the arrangements without religious awe of his genius,
related to Napoleon's orders to deal with four points--four different
orders. Not one of these was, or could be, carried out.

In the disposition it is said first that the batteries placed on the
spot chosen by Napoleon, with the guns of Pernetti and Fouche; which
were to come in line with them, 102 guns in all, were to open fire and
shower shells on the Russian fleches and redoubts. This could not be
done, as from the spots selected by Napoleon the projectiles did not
carry to the Russian works, and those 102 guns shot into the air until
the nearest commander, contrary to Napoleon's instructions, moved them
forward.

The second order was that Poniatowski, moving to the village through the
wood, should turn the Russian left flank. This could not be done and
was not done, because Poniatowski, advancing on the village through the
wood, met Tuchkov there barring his way, and could not and did not turn
the Russian position.

The third order was: General Campan will move through the wood to seize
the first fortification. General Campan's division did not seize the
first fortification but was driven back, for on emerging from the wood
it had to reform under grapeshot, of which Napoleon was unaware.

The fourth order was: The vice-King will occupy the village (Borodino)
and cross by its three bridges, advancing to the same heights as
Morand's and Gdrard's divisions (for whose movements no directions are
given), which under his leadership will be directed against the redoubt
and come into line with the rest of the forces.

As far as one can make out, not so much from this unintelligible
sentence as from the attempts the vice-King made to execute the orders
given him, he was to advance from the left through Borodino to the
redoubt while the divisions of Morand and Gerard were to advance
simultaneously from the front.

All this, like the other parts of the disposition, was not and could
not be executed. After passing through Borodino the vice-King was driven
back to the Kolocha and could get no farther; while the divisions of
Morand and Gerard did not take the redoubt but were driven back, and the
redoubt was only taken at the end of the battle by the cavalry (a thing
probably unforeseen and not heard of by Napoleon). So not one of
the orders in the disposition was, or could be, executed. But in the
disposition it is said that, after the fight has commenced in this
manner, orders will be given in accordance with the enemy's movements,
and so it might be supposed that all necessary arrangements would be
made by Napoleon during the battle. But this was not and could not be
done, for during the whole battle Napoleon was so far away that, as
appeared later, he could not know the course of the battle and not one
of his orders during the fight could be executed.





CHAPTER XXVIII


Many historians say that the French did not win the battle of Borodino
because Napoleon had a cold, and that if he had not had a cold the
orders he gave before and during the battle would have been still more
full of genius and Russia would have been lost and the face of the world
have been changed. To historians who believe that Russia was shaped by
the will of one man--Peter the Great--and that France from a republic
became an empire and French armies went to Russia at the will of one
man--Napoleon--to say that Russia remained a power because Napoleon
had a bad cold on the twenty-fourth of August may seem logical and
convincing.

If it had depended on Napoleon's will to fight or not to fight the
battle of Borodino, and if this or that other arrangement depended on
his will, then evidently a cold affecting the manifestation of his will
might have saved Russia, and consequently the valet who omitted to bring
Napoleon his waterproof boots on the twenty-fourth would have been
the savior of Russia. Along that line of thought such a deduction is
indubitable, as indubitable as the deduction Voltaire made in jest
(without knowing what he was jesting at) when he saw that the Massacre
of St. Bartholomew was due to Charles IX's stomach being deranged. But
to men who do not admit that Russia was formed by the will of one man,
Peter I, or that the French Empire was formed and the war with Russia
begun by the will of one man, Napoleon, that argument seems not merely
untrue and irrational, but contrary to all human reality. To the
question of what causes historic events another answer presents itself,
namely, that the course of human events is predetermined from on
high--depends on the coincidence of the wills of all who take part
in the events, and that a Napoleon's influence on the course of these
events is purely external and fictitious.

Strange as at first glance it may seem to suppose that the Massacre of
St. Bartholomew was not due to Charles IX's will, though he gave the
order for it and thought it was done as a result of that order; and
strange as it may seem to suppose that the slaughter of eighty thousand
men at Borodino was not due to Napoleon's will, though he ordered the
commencement and conduct of the battle and thought it was done
because he ordered it; strange as these suppositions appear, yet human
dignity--which tells me that each of us is, if not more at least not
less a man than the great Napoleon--demands the acceptance of that
solution of the question, and historic investigation abundantly confirms
it.

At the battle of Borodino Napoleon shot at no one and killed no one.
That was all done by the soldiers. Therefore it was not he who killed
people.

The French soldiers went to kill and be killed at the battle of Borodino
not because of Napoleon's orders but by their own volition. The whole
army--French, Italian, German, Polish, and Dutch--hungry, ragged, and
weary of the campaign, felt at the sight of an army blocking their road
to Moscow that the wine was drawn and must be drunk. Had Napoleon then
forbidden them to fight the Russians, they would have killed him and
have proceeded to fight the Russians because it was inevitable.

When they heard Napoleon's proclamation offering them, as compensation
for mutilation and death, the words of posterity about their having been
in the battle before Moscow, they cried "Vive l'Empereur!" just as they
had cried "Vive l'Empereur!" at the sight of the portrait of the boy
piercing the terrestrial globe with a toy stick, and just as they would
have cried "Vive l'Empereur!" at any nonsense that might be told them.
There was nothing left for them to do but cry "Vive l'Empereur!" and go
to fight, in order to get food and rest as conquerors in Moscow. So it
was not because of Napoleon's commands that they killed their fellow
men.

And it was not Napoleon who directed the course of the battle, for none
of his orders were executed and during the battle he did not know what
was going on before him. So the way in which these people killed one
another was not decided by Napoleon's will but occurred independently of
him, in accord with the will of hundreds of thousands of people who took
part in the common action. It only seemed to Napoleon that it all took
place by his will. And so the question whether he had or had not a
cold has no more historic interest than the cold of the least of the
transport soldiers.

Moreover, the assertion made by various writers that his cold was
the cause of his dispositions not being as well planned as on former
occasions, and of his orders during the battle not being as good as
previously, is quite baseless, which again shows that Napoleon's cold on
the twenty-sixth of August was unimportant.

The dispositions cited above are not at all worse, but are even
better, than previous dispositions by which he had won victories. His
pseudo-orders during the battle were also no worse than formerly, but
much the same as usual. These dispositions and orders only seem worse
than previous ones because the battle of Borodino was the first Napoleon
did not win. The profoundest and most excellent dispositions and orders
seem very bad, and every learned militarist criticizes them with looks
of importance, when they relate to a battle that has been lost, and the
very worst dispositions and orders seem very good, and serious people
fill whole volumes to demonstrate their merits, when they relate to a
battle that has been won.

The dispositions drawn up by Weyrother for the battle of Austerlitz were
a model of perfection for that kind of composition, but still they were
criticized--criticized for their very perfection, for their excessive
minuteness.

Napoleon at the battle of Borodino fulfilled his office as
representative of authority as well as, and even better than, at other
battles. He did nothing harmful to the progress of the battle; he
inclined to the most reasonable opinions, he made no confusion, did not
contradict himself, did not get frightened or run away from the field of
battle, but with his great tact and military experience carried out his
role of appearing to command, calmly and with dignity.





CHAPTER XXIX


On returning from a second inspection of the lines, Napoleon remarked:

"The chessmen are set up, the game will begin tomorrow!"

Having ordered punch and summoned de Beausset, he began to talk to him
about Paris and about some changes he meant to make in the Empress'
household, surprising the prefect by his memory of minute details
relating to the court.

He showed an interest in trifles, joked about de Beausset's love of
travel, and chatted carelessly, as a famous, self-confident surgeon who
knows his job does when turning up his sleeves and putting on his apron
while a patient is being strapped to the operating table. "The matter is
in my hands and is clear and definite in my head. When the time comes to
set to work I shall do it as no one else could, but now I can jest, and
the more I jest and the calmer I am the more tranquil and confident you
ought to be, and the more amazed at my genius."

Having finished his second glass of punch, Napoleon went to rest before
the serious business which, he considered, awaited him next day. He
was so much interested in that task that he was unable to sleep, and
in spite of his cold which had grown worse from the dampness of the
evening, he went into the large division of the tent at three o'clock in
the morning, loudly blowing his nose. He asked whether the Russians had
not withdrawn, and was told that the enemy's fires were still in the
same places. He nodded approval.

The adjutant in attendance came into the tent.

"Well, Rapp, do you think we shall do good business today?" Napoleon
asked him.

"Without doubt, sire," replied Rapp.

Napoleon looked at him.

"Do you remember, sire, what you did me the honor to say at Smolensk?"
continued Rapp. "The wine is drawn and must be drunk."

Napoleon frowned and sat silent for a long time leaning his head on his
hand.

"This poor army!" he suddenly remarked. "It has diminished greatly since
Smolensk. Fortune is frankly a courtesan, Rapp. I have always said so
and I am beginning to experience it. But the Guards, Rapp, the Guards
are intact?" he remarked interrogatively.

"Yes, sire," replied Rapp.

Napoleon took a lozenge, put it in his mouth, and glanced at his watch.
He was not sleepy and it was still not nearly morning. It was impossible
to give further orders for the sake of killing time, for the orders had
all been given and were now being executed.

"Have the biscuits and rice been served out to the regiments of the
Guards?" asked Napoleon sternly.

"Yes, sire."

"The rice too?"

Rapp replied that he had given the Emperor's order about the rice, but
Napoleon shook his head in dissatisfaction as if not believing that
his order had been executed. An attendant came in with punch. Napoleon
ordered another glass to be brought for Rapp, and silently sipped his
own.

"I have neither taste nor smell," he remarked, sniffing at his glass.
"This cold is tiresome. They talk about medicine--what is the good of
medicine when it can't cure a cold! Corvisart gave me these lozenges but
they don't help at all. What can doctors cure? One can't cure anything.
Our body is a machine for living. It is organized for that, it is its
nature. Let life go on in it unhindered and let it defend itself, it
will do more than if you paralyze it by encumbering it with remedies.
Our body is like a perfect watch that should go for a certain time; the
watchmaker cannot open it, he can only adjust it by fumbling, and that
blindfold.... Yes, our body is just a machine for living, that is all."

And having entered on the path of definition, of which he was fond,
Napoleon suddenly and unexpectedly gave a new one.

"Do you know, Rapp, what military art is?" asked he. "It is the art of
being stronger than the enemy at a given moment. That's all."

Rapp made no reply.

"Tomorrow we shall have to deal with Kutuzov!" said Napoleon. "We shall
see! Do you remember at Braunau he commanded an army for three weeks
and did not once mount a horse to inspect his entrenchments.... We shall
see!"

He looked at his watch. It was still only four o'clock. He did not feel
sleepy. The punch was finished and there was still nothing to do. He
rose, walked to and fro, put on a warm overcoat and a hat, and went
out of the tent. The night was dark and damp, a scarcely perceptible
moisture was descending from above. Near by, the campfires were dimly
burning among the French Guards, and in the distance those of the
Russian line shone through the smoke. The weather was calm, and the
rustle and tramp of the French troops already beginning to move to take
up their positions were clearly audible.

Napoleon walked about in front of his tent, looked at the fires and
listened to these sounds, and as he was passing a tall guardsman in
a shaggy cap, who was standing sentinel before his tent and had drawn
himself up like a black pillar at sight of the Emperor, Napoleon stopped
in front of him.

"What year did you enter the service?" he asked with that affectation
of military bluntness and geniality with which he always addressed the
soldiers.

The man answered the question.

"Ah! One of the old ones! Has your regiment had its rice?"

"It has, Your Majesty."

Napoleon nodded and walked away.


At half-past five Napoleon rode to the village of Shevardino.

It was growing light, the sky was clearing, only a single cloud lay in
the east. The abandoned campfires were burning themselves out in the
faint morning light.

On the right a single deep report of a cannon resounded and died away in
the prevailing silence. Some minutes passed. A second and a third report
shook the air, then a fourth and a fifth boomed solemnly near by on the
right.

The first shots had not yet ceased to reverberate before others rang out
and yet more were heard mingling with and overtaking one another.

Napoleon with his suite rode up to the Shevardino Redoubt where he
dismounted. The game had begun.





CHAPTER XXX


On returning to Gorki after having seen Prince Andrew, Pierre ordered
his groom to get the horses ready and to call him early in the morning,
and then immediately fell asleep behind a partition in a corner Boris
had given up to him.

Before he was thoroughly awake next morning everybody had already left
the hut. The panes were rattling in the little windows and his groom was
shaking him.

"Your excellency! Your excellency! Your excellency!" he kept repeating
pertinaciously while he shook Pierre by the shoulder without looking at
him, having apparently lost hope of getting him to wake up.

"What? Has it begun? Is it time?" Pierre asked, waking up.

"Hear the firing," said the groom, a discharged soldier. "All the
gentlemen have gone out, and his Serene Highness himself rode past long
ago."

Pierre dressed hastily and ran out to the porch. Outside all was bright,
fresh, dewy, and cheerful. The sun, just bursting forth from behind a
cloud that had concealed it, was shining, with rays still half broken
by the clouds, over the roofs of the street opposite, on the
dew-besprinkled dust of the road, on the walls of the houses, on the
windows, the fence, and on Pierre's horses standing before the hut. The
roar of guns sounded more distinct outside. An adjutant accompanied by a
Cossack passed by at a sharp trot.

"It's time, Count; it's time!" cried the adjutant.

Telling the groom to follow him with the horses, Pierre went down the
street to the knoll from which he had looked at the field of battle the
day before. A crowd of military men was assembled there, members of the
staff could be heard conversing in French, and Kutuzov's gray head in
a white cap with a red band was visible, his gray nape sunk between his
shoulders. He was looking through a field glass down the highroad before
him.

Mounting the steps to the knoll Pierre looked at the scene before him,
spellbound by beauty. It was the same panorama he had admired from that
spot the day before, but now the whole place was full of troops and
covered by smoke clouds from the guns, and the slanting rays of the
bright sun, rising slightly to the left behind Pierre, cast upon it
through the clear morning air penetrating streaks of rosy, golden tinted
light and long dark shadows. The forest at the farthest extremity of
the panorama seemed carved in some precious stone of a yellowish-green
color; its undulating outline was silhouetted against the horizon and
was pierced beyond Valuevo by the Smolensk highroad crowded with troops.
Nearer at hand glittered golden cornfields interspersed with copses.
There were troops to be seen everywhere, in front and to the right and
left. All this was vivid, majestic, and unexpected; but what impressed
Pierre most of all was the view of the battlefield itself, of Borodino
and the hollows on both sides of the Kolocha.

Above the Kolocha, in Borodino and on both sides of it, especially to
the left where the Voyna flowing between its marshy banks falls into
the Kolocha, a mist had spread which seemed to melt, to dissolve, and to
become translucent when the brilliant sun appeared and magically colored
and outlined everything. The smoke of the guns mingled with this mist,
and over the whole expanse and through that mist the rays of the morning
sun were reflected, flashing back like lightning from the water, from
the dew, and from the bayonets of the troops crowded together by the
riverbanks and in Borodino. A white church could be seen through the
mist, and here and there the roofs of huts in Borodino as well as dense
masses of soldiers, or green ammunition chests and ordnance. And all
this moved, or seemed to move, as the smoke and mist spread out over
the whole space. Just as in the mist-enveloped hollow near Borodino, so
along the entire line outside and above it and especially in the woods
and fields to the left, in the valleys and on the summits of the high
ground, clouds of powder smoke seemed continually to spring up out of
nothing, now singly, now several at a time, some translucent, others
dense, which, swelling, growing, rolling, and blending, extended over
the whole expanse.

These puffs of smoke and (strange to say) the sound of the firing
produced the chief beauty of the spectacle.

"Puff!"--suddenly a round compact cloud of smoke was seen merging from
violet into gray and milky white, and "boom!" came the report a second
later.

"Puff! puff!"--and two clouds arose pushing one another and blending
together; and "boom, boom!" came the sounds confirming what the eye had
seen.

Pierre glanced round at the first cloud, which he had seen as a round
compact ball, and in its place already were balloons of smoke floating
to one side, and--"puff" (with a pause)--"puff, puff!" three and
then four more appeared and then from each, with the same
interval--"boom--boom, boom!" came the fine, firm, precise sounds in
reply. It seemed as if those smoke clouds sometimes ran and sometimes
stood still while woods, fields, and glittering bayonets ran past them.
From the left, over fields and bushes, those large balls of smoke were
continually appearing followed by their solemn reports, while nearer
still, in the hollows and woods, there burst from the muskets small
cloudlets that had no time to become balls, but had their little echoes
in just the same way. "Trakh-ta-ta-takh!" came the frequent crackle of
musketry, but it was irregular and feeble in comparison with the reports
of the cannon.

Pierre wished to be there with that smoke, those shining bayonets, that
movement, and those sounds. He turned to look at Kutuzov and his suite,
to compare his impressions with those of others. They were all looking
at the field of battle as he was, and, as it seemed to him, with the
same feelings. All their faces were now shining with that latent warmth
of feeling Pierre had noticed the day before and had fully understood
after his talk with Prince Andrew.

"Go, my dear fellow, go... and Christ be with you!" Kutuzov was
saying to a general who stood beside him, not taking his eye from the
battlefield.

Having received this order the general passed by Pierre on his way down
the knoll.

"To the crossing!" said the general coldly and sternly in reply to one
of the staff who asked where he was going.

"I'll go there too, I too!" thought Pierre, and followed the general.

The general mounted a horse a Cossack had brought him. Pierre went to
his groom who was holding his horses and, asking which was the quietest,
clambered onto it, seized it by the mane, and turning out his toes
pressed his heels against its sides and, feeling that his spectacles
were slipping off but unable to let go of the mane and reins, he
galloped after the general, causing the staff officers to smile as they
watched him from the knoll.





CHAPTER XXXI


Having descended the hill the general after whom Pierre was galloping
turned sharply to the left, and Pierre, losing sight of him, galloped
in among some ranks of infantry marching ahead of him. He tried to pass
either in front of them or to the right or left, but there were soldiers
everywhere, all with the same preoccupied expression and busy with
some unseen but evidently important task. They all gazed with the same
dissatisfied and inquiring expression at this stout man in a white hat,
who for some unknown reason threatened to trample them under his horse's
hoofs.

"Why ride into the middle of the battalion?" one of them shouted at him.

Another prodded his horse with the butt end of a musket, and Pierre,
bending over his saddlebow and hardly able to control his shying horse,
galloped ahead of the soldiers where there was a free space.

There was a bridge ahead of him, where other soldiers stood firing.
Pierre rode up to them. Without being aware of it he had come to the
bridge across the Kolocha between Gorki and Borodino, which the French
(having occupied Borodino) were attacking in the first phase of the
battle. Pierre saw that there was a bridge in front of him and that
soldiers were doing something on both sides of it and in the meadow,
among the rows of new-mown hay which he had taken no notice of amid the
smoke of the campfires the day before; but despite the incessant firing
going on there he had no idea that this was the field of battle. He did
not notice the sound of the bullets whistling from every side, or the
projectiles that flew over him, did not see the enemy on the other side
of the river, and for a long time did not notice the killed and wounded,
though many fell near him. He looked about him with a smile which did
not leave his face.

"Why's that fellow in front of the line?" shouted somebody at him again.

"To the left!... Keep to the right!" the men shouted to him.

Pierre went to the right, and unexpectedly encountered one of Raevski's
adjutants whom he knew. The adjutant looked angrily at him, evidently
also intending to shout at him, but on recognizing him he nodded.

"How have you got here?" he said, and galloped on.

Pierre, feeling out of place there, having nothing to do, and afraid of
getting in someone's way again, galloped after the adjutant.

"What's happening here? May I come with you?" he asked.

"One moment, one moment!" replied the adjutant, and riding up to a stout
colonel who was standing in the meadow, he gave him some message and
then addressed Pierre.

"Why have you come here, Count?" he asked with a smile. "Still
inquisitive?"

"Yes, yes," assented Pierre.

But the adjutant turned his horse about and rode on.

"Here it's tolerable," said he, "but with Bagration on the left flank
they're getting it frightfully hot."

"Really?" said Pierre. "Where is that?"

"Come along with me to our knoll. We can get a view from there and in
our battery it is still bearable," said the adjutant. "Will you come?"

"Yes, I'll come with you," replied Pierre, looking round for his groom.

It was only now that he noticed wounded men staggering along or being
carried on stretchers. On that very meadow he had ridden over the day
before, a soldier was lying athwart the rows of scented hay, with his
head thrown awkwardly back and his shako off.

"Why haven't they carried him away?" Pierre was about to ask, but seeing
the stern expression of the adjutant who was also looking that way, he
checked himself.

Pierre did not find his groom and rode along the hollow with the
adjutant to Raevski's Redoubt. His horse lagged behind the adjutant's
and jolted him at every step.

"You don't seem to be used to riding, Count?" remarked the adjutant.

"No it's not that, but her action seems so jerky," said Pierre in a
puzzled tone.

"Why... she's wounded!" said the adjutant. "In the off foreleg above the
knee. A bullet, no doubt. I congratulate you, Count, on your baptism of
fire!"

Having ridden in the smoke past the Sixth Corps, behind the artillery
which had been moved forward and was in action, deafening them with the
noise of firing, they came to a small wood. There it was cool and quiet,
with a scent of autumn. Pierre and the adjutant dismounted and walked up
the hill on foot.

"Is the general here?" asked the adjutant on reaching the knoll.

"He was here a minute ago but has just gone that way," someone told him,
pointing to the right.

The adjutant looked at Pierre as if puzzled what to do with him now.

"Don't trouble about me," said Pierre. "I'll go up onto the knoll if I
may?"

"Yes, do. You'll see everything from there and it's less dangerous, and
I'll come for you."

Pierre went to the battery and the adjutant rode on. They did not meet
again, and only much later did Pierre learn that he lost an arm that
day.

The knoll to which Pierre ascended was that famous one afterwards known
to the Russians as the Knoll Battery or Raevski's Redoubt, and to the
French as la grande redoute, la fatale redoute, la redoute du centre,
around which tens of thousands fell, and which the French regarded as
the key to the whole position.

This redoubt consisted of a knoll, on three sides of which trenches had
been dug. Within the entrenchment stood ten guns that were being fired
through openings in the earthwork.

In line with the knoll on both sides stood other guns which also fired
incessantly. A little behind the guns stood infantry. When ascending
that knoll Pierre had no notion that this spot, on which small trenches
had been dug and from which a few guns were firing, was the most
important point of the battle.

On the contrary, just because he happened to be there he thought it one
of the least significant parts of the field.

Having reached the knoll, Pierre sat down at one end of a trench
surrounding the battery and gazed at what was going on around him with
an unconsciously happy smile. Occasionally he rose and walked about the
battery still with that same smile, trying not to obstruct the soldiers
who were loading, hauling the guns, and continually running past
him with bags and charges. The guns of that battery were being fired
continually one after another with a deafening roar, enveloping the
whole neighborhood in powder smoke.

In contrast with the dread felt by the infantrymen placed in support,
here in the battery where a small number of men busy at their work were
separated from the rest by a trench, everyone experienced a common and
as it were family feeling of animation.

The intrusion of Pierre's nonmilitary figure in a white hat made an
unpleasant impression at first. The soldiers looked askance at him with
surprise and even alarm as they went past him. The senior artillery
officer, a tall, long-legged, pockmarked man, moved over to Pierre as if
to see the action of the farthest gun and looked at him with curiosity.

A young round-faced officer, quite a boy still and evidently only just
out of the Cadet College, who was zealously commanding the two guns
entrusted to him, addressed Pierre sternly.

"Sir," he said, "permit me to ask you to stand aside. You must not be
here."

The soldiers shook their heads disapprovingly as they looked at Pierre.
But when they had convinced themselves that this man in the white hat
was doing no harm, but either sat quietly on the slope of the trench
with a shy smile or, politely making way for the soldiers, paced up
and down the battery under fire as calmly as if he were on a boulevard,
their feeling of hostile distrust gradually began to change into a
kindly and bantering sympathy, such as soldiers feel for their dogs,
cocks, goats, and in general for the animals that live with the
regiment. The men soon accepted Pierre into their family, adopted him,
gave him a nickname ("our gentleman"), and made kindly fun of him among
themselves.

A shell tore up the earth two paces from Pierre and he looked around
with a smile as he brushed from his clothes some earth it had thrown up.

"And how's it you're not afraid, sir, really now?" a red-faced,
broad-shouldered soldier asked Pierre, with a grin that disclosed a set
of sound, white teeth.

"Are you afraid, then?" said Pierre.

"What else do you expect?" answered the soldier. "She has no mercy, you
know! When she comes spluttering down, out go your innards. One can't
help being afraid," he said laughing.

Several of the men, with bright kindly faces, stopped beside Pierre.
They seemed not to have expected him to talk like anybody else, and the
discovery that he did so delighted them.

"It's the business of us soldiers. But in a gentleman it's wonderful!
There's a gentleman for you!"

"To your places!" cried the young officer to the men gathered round
Pierre.

The young officer was evidently exercising his duties for the first or
second time and therefore treated both his superiors and the men with
great precision and formality.

The booming cannonade and the fusillade of musketry were growing more
intense over the whole field, especially to the left where Bagration's
fleches were, but where Pierre was the smoke of the firing made it
almost impossible to distinguish anything. Moreover, his whole attention
was engrossed by watching the family circle--separated from all
else--formed by the men in the battery. His first unconscious feeling
of joyful animation produced by the sights and sounds of the battlefield
was now replaced by another, especially since he had seen that soldier
lying alone in the hayfield. Now, seated on the slope of the trench, he
observed the faces of those around him.

By ten o'clock some twenty men had already been carried away from the
battery; two guns were smashed and cannon balls fell more and more
frequently on the battery and spent bullets buzzed and whistled around.
But the men in the battery seemed not to notice this, and merry voices
and jokes were heard on all sides.

"A live one!" shouted a man as a whistling shell approached.

"Not this way! To the infantry!" added another with loud laughter,
seeing the shell fly past and fall into the ranks of the supports.

"Are you bowing to a friend, eh?" remarked another, chaffing a peasant
who ducked low as a cannon ball flew over.

Several soldiers gathered by the wall of the trench, looking out to see
what was happening in front.

"They've withdrawn the front line, it has retired," said they, pointing
over the earthwork.

"Mind your own business," an old sergeant shouted at them. "If they've
retired it's because there's work for them to do farther back."

And the sergeant, taking one of the men by the shoulders, gave him a
shove with his knee. This was followed by a burst of laughter.

"To the fifth gun, wheel it up!" came shouts from one side.

"Now then, all together, like bargees!" rose the merry voices of those
who were moving the gun.

"Oh, she nearly knocked our gentleman's hat off!" cried the red-faced
humorist, showing his teeth chaffing Pierre. "Awkward baggage!" he added
reproachfully to a cannon ball that struck a cannon wheel and a man's
leg.

"Now then, you foxes!" said another, laughing at some militiamen who,
stooping low, entered the battery to carry away the wounded man.

"So this gruel isn't to your taste? Oh, you crows! You're scared!" they
shouted at the militiamen who stood hesitating before the man whose leg
had been torn off.

"There, lads... oh, oh!" they mimicked the peasants, "they don't like it
at all!"

Pierre noticed that after every ball that hit the redoubt, and after
every loss, the liveliness increased more and more.

As the flames of the fire hidden within come more and more vividly and
rapidly from an approaching thundercloud, so, as if in opposition to
what was taking place, the lightning of hidden fire growing more and
more intense glowed in the faces of these men.

Pierre did not look out at the battlefield and was not concerned to know
what was happening there; he was entirely absorbed in watching this fire
which burned ever more brightly and which he felt was flaming up in the
same way in his own soul.

At ten o'clock the infantry that had been among the bushes in front of
the battery and along the Kamenka streamlet retreated. From the battery
they could be seen running back past it carrying their wounded on
their muskets. A general with his suite came to the battery, and after
speaking to the colonel gave Pierre an angry look and went away again
having ordered the infantry supports behind the battery to lie down,
so as to be less exposed to fire. After this from amid the ranks of
infantry to the right of the battery came the sound of a drum and shouts
of command, and from the battery one saw how those ranks of infantry
moved forward.

Pierre looked over the wall of the trench and was particularly struck
by a pale young officer who, letting his sword hang down, was walking
backwards and kept glancing uneasily around.

The ranks of the infantry disappeared amid the smoke but their
long-drawn shout and rapid musketry firing could still be heard. A few
minutes later crowds of wounded men and stretcher-bearers came back from
that direction. Projectiles began to fall still more frequently in the
battery. Several men were lying about who had not been removed. Around
the cannon the men moved still more briskly and busily. No one any
longer took notice of Pierre. Once or twice he was shouted at for being
in the way. The senior officer moved with big, rapid strides from one
gun to another with a frowning face. The young officer, with his face
still more flushed, commanded the men more scrupulously than ever. The
soldiers handed up the charges, turned, loaded, and did their business
with strained smartness. They gave little jumps as they walked, as
though they were on springs.

The stormcloud had come upon them, and in every face the fire which
Pierre had watched kindle burned up brightly. Pierre standing beside the
commanding officer. The young officer, his hand to his shako, ran up to
his superior.

"I have the honor to report, sir, that only eight rounds are left. Are
we to continue firing?" he asked.

"Grapeshot!" the senior shouted, without answering the question, looking
over the wall of the trench.

Suddenly something happened: the young officer gave a gasp and bending
double sat down on the ground like a bird shot on the wing. Everything
became strange, confused, and misty in Pierre's eyes.

One cannon ball after another whistled by and struck the earthwork, a
soldier, or a gun. Pierre, who had not noticed these sounds before,
now heard nothing else. On the right of the battery soldiers shouting
"Hurrah!" were running not forwards but backwards, it seemed to Pierre.

A cannon ball struck the very end of the earth work by which he was
standing, crumbling down the earth; a black ball flashed before his eyes
and at the same instant plumped into something. Some militiamen who were
entering the battery ran back.

"All with grapeshot!" shouted the officer.

The sergeant ran up to the officer and in a frightened whisper informed
him (as a butler at dinner informs his master that there is no more of
some wine asked for) that there were no more charges.

"The scoundrels! What are they doing?" shouted the officer, turning to
Pierre.

The officer's face was red and perspiring and his eyes glittered under
his frowning brow.

"Run to the reserves and bring up the ammunition boxes!" he yelled,
angrily avoiding Pierre with his eyes and speaking to his men.

"I'll go," said Pierre.

The officer, without answering him, strode across to the opposite side.

"Don't fire.... Wait!" he shouted.

The man who had been ordered to go for ammunition stumbled against
Pierre.

"Eh, sir, this is no place for you," said he, and ran down the slope.

Pierre ran after him, avoiding the spot where the young officer was
sitting.

One cannon ball, another, and a third flew over him, falling in front,
beside, and behind him. Pierre ran down the slope. "Where am I going?"
he suddenly asked himself when he was already near the green ammunition
wagons. He halted irresolutely, not knowing whether to return or go on.
Suddenly a terrible concussion threw him backwards to the ground. At the
same instant he was dazzled by a great flash of flame, and immediately a
deafening roar, crackling, and whistling made his ears tingle.

When he came to himself he was sitting on the ground leaning on his
hands; the ammunition wagons he had been approaching no longer existed,
only charred green boards and rags littered the scorched grass, and a
horse, dangling fragments of its shaft behind it, galloped past, while
another horse lay, like Pierre, on the ground, uttering prolonged and
piercing cries.





CHAPTER XXXII


Beside himself with terror Pierre jumped up and ran back to the battery,
as to the only refuge from the horrors that surrounded him.

On entering the earthwork he noticed that there were men doing something
there but that no shots were being fired from the battery. He had no
time to realize who these men were. He saw the senior officer lying on
the earth wall with his back turned as if he were examining something
down below and that one of the soldiers he had noticed before was
struggling forward shouting "Brothers!" and trying to free himself from
some men who were holding him by the arm. He also saw something else
that was strange.

But he had not time to realize that the colonel had been killed, that
the soldier shouting "Brothers!" was a prisoner, and that another man
had been bayoneted in the back before his eyes, for hardly had he run
into the redoubt before a thin, sallow-faced, perspiring man in a blue
uniform rushed on him sword in hand, shouting something. Instinctively
guarding against the shock--for they had been running together at full
speed before they saw one another--Pierre put out his hands and seized
the man (a French officer) by the shoulder with one hand and by the
throat with the other. The officer, dropping his sword, seized Pierre by
his collar.

For some seconds they gazed with frightened eyes at one another's
unfamiliar faces and both were perplexed at what they had done and
what they were to do next. "Am I taken prisoner or have I taken him
prisoner?" each was thinking. But the French officer was evidently more
inclined to think he had been taken prisoner because Pierre's strong
hand, impelled by instinctive fear, squeezed his throat ever tighter and
tighter. The Frenchman was about to say something, when just above their
heads, terrible and low, a cannon ball whistled, and it seemed to Pierre
that the French officer's head had been torn off, so swiftly had he
ducked it.

Pierre too bent his head and let his hands fall. Without further thought
as to who had taken whom prisoner, the Frenchman ran back to the battery
and Pierre ran down the slope stumbling over the dead and wounded who,
it seemed to him, caught at his feet. But before he reached the foot
of the knoll he was met by a dense crowd of Russian soldiers who,
stumbling, tripping up, and shouting, ran merrily and wildly toward
the battery. (This was the attack for which Ermolov claimed the credit,
declaring that only his courage and good luck made such a feat possible:
it was the attack in which he was said to have thrown some St. George's
Crosses he had in his pocket into the battery for the first soldiers to
take who got there.)

The French who had occupied the battery fled, and our troops shouting
"Hurrah!" pursued them so far beyond the battery that it was difficult
to call them back.

The prisoners were brought down from the battery and among them was
a wounded French general, whom the officers surrounded. Crowds of
wounded--some known to Pierre and some unknown--Russians and French,
with faces distorted by suffering, walked, crawled, and were carried on
stretchers from the battery. Pierre again went up onto the knoll where
he had spent over an hour, and of that family circle which had received
him as a member he did not find a single one. There were many dead whom
he did not know, but some he recognized. The young officer still sat in
the same way, bent double, in a pool of blood at the edge of the earth
wall. The red-faced man was still twitching, but they did not carry him
away.

Pierre ran down the slope once more.

"Now they will stop it, now they will be horrified at what they have
done!" he thought, aimlessly going toward a crowd of stretcher bearers
moving from the battlefield.

But behind the veil of smoke the sun was still high, and in front and
especially to the left, near Semenovsk, something seemed to be seething
in the smoke, and the roar of cannon and musketry did not diminish, but
even increased to desperation like a man who, straining himself, shrieks
with all his remaining strength.





CHAPTER XXXIII


The chief action of the battle of Borodino was fought within the seven
thousand feet between Borodino and Bagration's fleches. Beyond that
space there was, on the one side, a demonstration made by the Russians
with Uvarov's cavalry at midday, and on the other side, beyond Utitsa,
Poniatowski's collision with Tuchkov; but these two were detached and
feeble actions in comparison with what took place in the center of the
battlefield. On the field between Borodino and the fleches, beside the
wood, the chief action of the day took place on an open space visible
from both sides and was fought in the simplest and most artless way.

The battle began on both sides with a cannonade from several hundred
guns.

Then when the whole field was covered with smoke, two divisions,
Campan's and Dessaix's, advanced from the French right, while Murat's
troops advanced on Borodino from their left.

From the Shevardino Redoubt where Napoleon was standing the fleches were
two thirds of a mile away, and it was more than a mile as the crow flies
to Borodino, so that Napoleon could not see what was happening there,
especially as the smoke mingling with the mist hid the whole locality.
The soldiers of Dessaix's division advancing against the fleches could
only be seen till they had entered the hollow that lay between them and
the fleches. As soon as they had descended into that hollow, the smoke
of the guns and musketry on the fleches grew so dense that it covered
the whole approach on that side of it. Through the smoke glimpses could
be caught of something black--probably men--and at times the glint of
bayonets. But whether they were moving or stationary, whether they were
French or Russian, could not be discovered from the Shevardino Redoubt.

The sun had risen brightly and its slanting rays struck straight into
Napoleon's face as, shading his eyes with his hand, he looked at the
fleches. The smoke spread out before them, and at times it looked as if
the smoke were moving, at times as if the troops moved. Sometimes shouts
were heard through the firing, but it was impossible to tell what was
being done there.

Napoleon, standing on the knoll, looked through a field glass, and in
its small circlet saw smoke and men, sometimes his own and sometimes
Russians, but when he looked again with the naked eye, he could not tell
where what he had seen was.

He descended the knoll and began walking up and down before it.

Occasionally he stopped, listened to the firing, and gazed intently at
the battlefield.

But not only was it impossible to make out what was happening from where
he was standing down below, or from the knoll above on which some of his
generals had taken their stand, but even from the fleches themselves--in
which by this time there were now Russian and now French soldiers,
alternately or together, dead, wounded, alive, frightened, or
maddened--even at those fleches themselves it was impossible to make out
what was taking place. There for several hours amid incessant cannon and
musketry fire, now Russians were seen alone, now Frenchmen alone, now
infantry, and now cavalry: they appeared, fired, fell, collided, not
knowing what to do with one another, screamed, and ran back again.

From the battlefield adjutants he had sent out, and orderlies from his
marshals, kept galloping up to Napoleon with reports of the progress
of the action, but all these reports were false, both because it was
impossible in the heat of battle to say what was happening at any given
moment and because many of the adjutants did not go to the actual place
of conflict but reported what they had heard from others; and also
because while an adjutant was riding more than a mile to Napoleon
circumstances changed and the news he brought was already becoming
false. Thus an adjutant galloped up from Murat with tidings that
Borodino had been occupied and the bridge over the Kolocha was in the
hands of the French. The adjutant asked whether Napoleon wished the
troops to cross it? Napoleon gave orders that the troops should form up
on the farther side and wait. But before that order was given--almost
as soon in fact as the adjutant had left Borodino--the bridge had been
retaken by the Russians and burned, in the very skirmish at which Pierre
had been present at the beginning of the battle.

An adjutant galloped up from the fleches with a pale and frightened face
and reported to Napoleon that their attack had been repulsed, Campan
wounded, and Davout killed; yet at the very time the adjutant had been
told that the French had been repulsed, the fleches had in fact been
recaptured by other French troops, and Davout was alive and only
slightly bruised. On the basis of these necessarily untrustworthy
reports Napoleon gave his orders, which had either been executed before
he gave them or could not be and were not executed.

The marshals and generals, who were nearer to the field of battle
but, like Napoleon, did not take part in the actual fighting and only
occasionally went within musket range, made their own arrangements
without asking Napoleon and issued orders where and in what direction to
fire and where cavalry should gallop and infantry should run. But even
their orders, like Napoleon's, were seldom carried out, and then but
partially. For the most part things happened contrary to their orders.
Soldiers ordered to advance ran back on meeting grapeshot; soldiers
ordered to remain where they were, suddenly, seeing Russians
unexpectedly before them, sometimes rushed back and sometimes forward,
and the cavalry dashed without orders in pursuit of the flying Russians.
In this way two cavalry regiments galloped through the Semenovsk hollow
and as soon as they reached the top of the incline turned round and
galloped full speed back again. The infantry moved in the same way,
sometimes running to quite other places than those they were ordered to
go to. All orders as to where and when to move the guns, when to send
infantry to shoot or horsemen to ride down the Russian infantry--all
such orders were given by the officers on the spot nearest to the
units concerned, without asking either Ney, Davout, or Murat, much less
Napoleon. They did not fear getting into trouble for not fulfilling
orders or for acting on their own initiative, for in battle what is at
stake is what is dearest to man--his own life--and it sometimes seems
that safety lies in running back, sometimes in running forward; and
these men who were right in the heat of the battle acted according to
the mood of the moment. In reality, however, all these movements forward
and backward did not improve or alter the position of the troops. All
their rushing and galloping at one another did little harm, the harm of
disablement and death was caused by the balls and bullets that flew over
the fields on which these men were floundering about. As soon as they
left the place where the balls and bullets were flying about, their
superiors, located in the background, re-formed them and brought them
under discipline and under the influence of that discipline led them
back to the zone of fire, where under the influence of fear of death
they lost their discipline and rushed about according to the chance
promptings of the throng.





CHAPTER XXXIV


Napoleon's generals--Davout, Ney, and Murat, who were near that region
of fire and sometimes even entered it--repeatedly led into it huge
masses of well-ordered troops. But contrary to what had always happened
in their former battles, instead of the news they expected of the
enemy's flight, these orderly masses returned thence as disorganized
and terrified mobs. The generals re-formed them, but their numbers
constantly decreased. In the middle of the day Murat sent his adjutant
to Napoleon to demand reinforcements.

Napoleon sat at the foot of the knoll, drinking punch, when Murat's
adjutant galloped up with an assurance that the Russians would be routed
if His Majesty would let him have another division.

"Reinforcements?" said Napoleon in a tone of stern surprise, looking at
the adjutant--a handsome lad with long black curls arranged like Murat's
own--as though he did not understand his words.

"Reinforcements!" thought Napoleon to himself. "How can they need
reinforcements when they already have half the army directed against a
weak, unentrenched Russian wing?"

"Tell the King of Naples," said he sternly, "that it is not noon yet,
and I don't yet see my chessboard clearly. Go!..."

The handsome boy adjutant with the long hair sighed deeply without
removing his hand from his hat and galloped back to where men were being
slaughtered.

Napoleon rose and having summoned Caulaincourt and Berthier began
talking to them about matters unconnected with the battle.

In the midst of this conversation, which was beginning to interest
Napoleon, Berthier's eyes turned to look at a general with a suite, who
was galloping toward the knoll on a lathering horse. It was Belliard.
Having dismounted he went up to the Emperor with rapid strides and in
a loud voice began boldly demonstrating the necessity of sending
reinforcements. He swore on his honor that the Russians were lost if the
Emperor would give another division.

Napoleon shrugged his shoulders and continued to pace up and down
without replying. Belliard began talking loudly and eagerly to the
generals of the suite around him.

"You are very fiery, Belliard," said Napoleon, when he again came up to
the general. "In the heat of a battle it is easy to make a mistake. Go
and have another look and then come back to me."

Before Belliard was out of sight, a messenger from another part of the
battlefield galloped up.

"Now then, what do you want?" asked Napoleon in the tone of a man
irritated at being continually disturbed.

"Sire, the prince..." began the adjutant.

"Asks for reinforcements?" said Napoleon with an angry gesture.

The adjutant bent his head affirmatively and began to report, but the
Emperor turned from him, took a couple of steps, stopped, came back, and
called Berthier.

"We must give reserves," he said, moving his arms slightly apart.
"Who do you think should be sent there?" he asked of Berthier (whom he
subsequently termed "that gosling I have made an eagle").

"Send Claparede's division, sire," replied Berthier, who knew all the
divisions regiments, and battalions by heart.

Napoleon nodded assent.

The adjutant galloped to Claparede's division and a few minutes later
the Young Guards stationed behind the knoll moved forward. Napoleon
gazed silently in that direction.

"No!" he suddenly said to Berthier. "I can't send Claparede. Send
Friant's division."

Though there was no advantage in sending Friant's division instead of
Claparede's, and even in obvious inconvenience and delay in stopping
Claparede and sending Friant now, the order was carried out exactly.
Napoleon did not notice that in regard to his army he was playing the
part of a doctor who hinders by his medicines--a role he so justly
understood and condemned.

Friant's division disappeared as the others had done into the smoke
of the battlefield. From all sides adjutants continued to arrive at a
gallop and as if by agreement all said the same thing. They all asked
for reinforcements and all said that the Russians were holding their
positions and maintaining a hellish fire under which the French army was
melting away.

Napoleon sat on a campstool, wrapped in thought.

M. de Beausset, the man so fond of travel, having fasted since morning,
came up to the Emperor and ventured respectfully to suggest lunch to His
Majesty.

"I hope I may now congratulate Your Majesty on a victory?" said he.

Napoleon silently shook his head in negation. Assuming the negation to
refer only to the victory and not to the lunch, M. de Beausset ventured
with respectful jocularity to remark that there is no reason for not
having lunch when one can get it.

"Go away..." exclaimed Napoleon suddenly and morosely, and turned aside.

A beatific smile of regret, repentance, and ecstasy beamed on M. de
Beausset's face and he glided away to the other generals.

Napoleon was experiencing a feeling of depression like that of an
ever-lucky gambler who, after recklessly flinging money about and always
winning, suddenly just when he has calculated all the chances of the
game, finds that the more he considers his play the more surely he
loses.

His troops were the same, his generals the same, the same preparations
had been made, the same dispositions, and the same proclamation courte
et energique, he himself was still the same: he knew that and knew that
he was now even more experienced and skillful than before. Even the
enemy was the same as at Austerlitz and Friedland--yet the terrible
stroke of his arm had supernaturally become impotent.

All the old methods that had been unfailingly crowned with success: the
concentration of batteries on one point, an attack by reserves to break
the enemy's line, and a cavalry attack by "the men of iron," all these
methods had already been employed, yet not only was there no victory,
but from all sides came the same news of generals killed and wounded,
of reinforcements needed, of the impossibility of driving back the
Russians, and of disorganization among his own troops.

Formerly, after he had given two or three orders and uttered a
few phrases, marshals and adjutants had come galloping up with
congratulations and happy faces, announcing the trophies taken, the
corps of prisoners, bundles of enemy eagles and standards, cannon and
stores, and Murat had only begged leave to loose the cavalry to gather
in the baggage wagons. So it had been at Lodi, Marengo, Arcola, Jena,
Austerlitz, Wagram, and so on. But now something strange was happening
to his troops.

Despite news of the capture of the fleches, Napoleon saw that this was
not the same, not at all the same, as what had happened in his former
battles. He saw that what he was feeling was felt by all the men about
him experienced in the art of war. All their faces looked dejected, and
they all shunned one another's eyes--only a de Beausset could fail to
grasp the meaning of what was happening.

But Napoleon with his long experience of war well knew the meaning of
a battle not gained by the attacking side in eight hours, after all
efforts had been expended. He knew that it was a lost battle and that
the least accident might now--with the fight balanced on such a strained
center--destroy him and his army.

When he ran his mind over the whole of this strange Russian campaign in
which not one battle had been won, and in which not a flag, or cannon,
or army corps had been captured in two months, when he looked at the
concealed depression on the faces around him and heard reports of the
Russians still holding their ground--a terrible feeling like a nightmare
took possession of him, and all the unlucky accidents that might destroy
him occurred to his mind. The Russians might fall on his left wing,
might break through his center, he himself might be killed by a stray
cannon ball. All this was possible. In former battles he had only
considered the possibilities of success, but now innumerable unlucky
chances presented themselves, and he expected them all. Yes, it was like
a dream in which a man fancies that a ruffian is coming to attack him,
and raises his arm to strike that ruffian a terrible blow which he knows
should annihilate him, but then feels that his arm drops powerless and
limp like a rag, and the horror of unavoidable destruction seizes him in
his helplessness.

The news that the Russians were attacking the left flank of the French
army aroused that horror in Napoleon. He sat silently on a campstool
below the knoll, with head bowed and elbows on his knees. Berthier
approached and suggested that they should ride along the line to
ascertain the position of affairs.

"What? What do you say?" asked Napoleon. "Yes, tell them to bring me my
horse."

He mounted and rode toward Semenovsk.

Amid the powder smoke, slowly dispersing over the whole space through
which Napoleon rode, horses and men were lying in pools of blood, singly
or in heaps. Neither Napoleon nor any of his generals had ever before
seen such horrors or so many slain in such a small area. The roar of
guns, that had not ceased for ten hours, wearied the ear and gave
a peculiar significance to the spectacle, as music does to tableaux
vivants. Napoleon rode up the high ground at Semenovsk, and through the
smoke saw ranks of men in uniforms of a color unfamiliar to him. They
were Russians.

The Russians stood in serried ranks behind Semenovsk village and its
knoll, and their guns boomed incessantly along their line and sent
forth clouds of smoke. It was no longer a battle: it was a continuous
slaughter which could be of no avail either to the French or the
Russians. Napoleon stopped his horse and again fell into the reverie
from which Berthier had aroused him. He could not stop what was going on
before him and around him and was supposed to be directed by him and to
depend on him, and from its lack of success this affair, for the first
time, seemed to him unnecessary and horrible.

One of the generals rode up to Napoleon and ventured to offer to lead
the Old Guard into action. Ney and Berthier, standing near Napoleon,
exchanged looks and smiled contemptuously at this general's senseless
offer.

Napoleon bowed his head and remained silent a long time.

"At eight hundred leagues from France, I will not have my Guard
destroyed!" he said, and turning his horse rode back to Shevardino.





CHAPTER XXXV


On the rug-covered bench where Pierre had seen him in the morning sat
Kutuzov, his gray head hanging, his heavy body relaxed. He gave no
orders, but only assented to or dissented from what others suggested.

"Yes, yes, do that," he replied to various proposals. "Yes, yes: go,
dear boy, and have a look," he would say to one or another of those
about him; or, "No, don't, we'd better wait!" He listened to the reports
that were brought him and gave directions when his subordinates demanded
that of him; but when listening to the reports it seemed as if he
were not interested in the import of the words spoken, but rather in
something else--in the expression of face and tone of voice of those who
were reporting. By long years of military experience he knew, and with
the wisdom of age understood, that it is impossible for one man to
direct hundreds of thousands of others struggling with death, and he
knew that the result of a battle is decided not by the orders of a
commander in chief, nor the place where the troops are stationed, nor by
the number of cannon or of slaughtered men, but by that intangible force
called the spirit of the army, and he watched this force and guided it
in as far as that was in his power.

Kutuzov's general expression was one of concentrated quiet attention,
and his face wore a strained look as if he found it difficult to master
the fatigue of his old and feeble body.

At eleven o'clock they brought him news that the fleches captured by the
French had been retaken, but that Prince Bagration was wounded. Kutuzov
groaned and swayed his head.

"Ride over to Prince Peter Ivanovich and find out about it exactly," he
said to one of his adjutants, and then turned to the Duke of Wurttemberg
who was standing behind him.

"Will Your Highness please take command of the first army?"

Soon after the duke's departure--before he could possibly have reached
Semenovsk--his adjutant came back from him and told Kutuzov that the
duke asked for more troops.

Kutuzov made a grimace and sent an order to Dokhturov to take over the
command of the first army, and a request to the duke--whom he said he
could not spare at such an important moment--to return to him. When
they brought him news that Murat had been taken prisoner, and the staff
officers congratulated him, Kutuzov smiled.

"Wait a little, gentlemen," said he. "The battle is won, and there is
nothing extraordinary in the capture of Murat. Still, it is better to
wait before we rejoice."

But he sent an adjutant to take the news round the army.

When Scherbinin came galloping from the left flank with news that the
French had captured the fleches and the village of Semenovsk, Kutuzov,
guessing by the sounds of the battle and by Scherbinin's looks that the
news was bad, rose as if to stretch his legs and, taking Scherbinin's
arm, led him aside.

"Go, my dear fellow," he said to Ermolov, "and see whether something
can't be done."

Kutuzov was in Gorki, near the center of the Russian position. The
attack directed by Napoleon against our left flank had been several
times repulsed. In the center the French had not got beyond Borodino,
and on their left flank Uvarov's cavalry had put the French to flight.

Toward three o'clock the French attacks ceased. On the faces of all
who came from the field of battle, and of those who stood around him,
Kutuzov noticed an expression of extreme tension. He was satisfied with
the day's success--a success exceeding his expectations, but the old
man's strength was failing him. Several times his head dropped low as if
it were falling and he dozed off. Dinner was brought him.

Adjutant General Wolzogen, the man who when riding past Prince Andrew
had said, "the war should be extended widely," and whom Bagration so
detested, rode up while Kutuzov was at dinner. Wolzogen had come from
Barclay de Tolly to report on the progress of affairs on the left flank.
The sagacious Barclay de Tolly, seeing crowds of wounded men running
back and the disordered rear of the army, weighed all the circumstances,
concluded that the battle was lost, and sent his favorite officer to the
commander in chief with that news.

Kutuzov was chewing a piece of roast chicken with difficulty and glanced
at Wolzogen with eyes that brightened under their puckering lids.

Wolzogen, nonchalantly stretching his legs, approached Kutuzov with a
half-contemptuous smile on his lips, scarcely touching the peak of his
cap.

He treated his Serene Highness with a somewhat affected nonchalance
intended to show that, as a highly trained military man, he left it to
Russians to make an idol of this useless old man, but that he knew whom
he was dealing with. "Der alte Herr" (as in their own set the Germans
called Kutuzov) "is making himself very comfortable," thought Wolzogen,
and looking severely at the dishes in front of Kutuzov he began to
report to "the old gentleman" the position of affairs on the left flank
as Barclay had ordered him to and as he himself had seen and understood
it.

"All the points of our position are in the enemy's hands and we cannot
dislodge them for lack of troops, the men are running away and it is
impossible to stop them," he reported.

Kutuzov ceased chewing and fixed an astonished gaze on Wolzogen, as
if not understanding what was said to him. Wolzogen, noticing "the old
gentleman's" agitation, said with a smile:

"I have not considered it right to conceal from your Serene Highness
what I have seen. The troops are in complete disorder..."

"You have seen? You have seen?..." Kutuzov shouted frowning, and rising
quickly he went up to Wolzogen.

"How... how dare you!..." he shouted, choking and making a threatening
gesture with his trembling arms: "How dare you, sir, say that to me? You
know nothing about it. Tell General Barclay from me that his information
is incorrect and that the real course of the battle is better known to
me, the commander in chief, than to him."

Wolzogen was about to make a rejoinder, but Kutuzov interrupted him.

"The enemy has been repulsed on the left and defeated on the right
flank. If you have seen amiss, sir, do not allow yourself to say what
you don't know! Be so good as to ride to General Barclay and inform
him of my firm intention to attack the enemy tomorrow," said Kutuzov
sternly.

All were silent, and the only sound audible was the heavy breathing of
the panting old general.

"They are repulsed everywhere, for which I thank God and our brave army!
The enemy is beaten, and tomorrow we shall drive him from the sacred
soil of Russia," said Kutuzov crossing himself, and he suddenly sobbed
as his eyes filled with tears.

Wolzogen, shrugging his shoulders and curling his lips, stepped silently
aside, marveling at "the old gentleman's" conceited stupidity.

"Ah, here he is, my hero!" said Kutuzov to a portly, handsome,
dark-haired general who was just ascending the knoll.

This was Raevski, who had spent the whole day at the most important part
of the field of Borodino.

Raevski reported that the troops were firmly holding their ground and
that the French no longer ventured to attack.

After hearing him, Kutuzov said in French:

"Then you do not think, like some others, that we must retreat?"

"On the contrary, your Highness, in indecisive actions it is always
the most stubborn who remain victors," replied Raevski, "and in my
opinion..."

"Kaysarov!" Kutuzov called to his adjutant. "Sit down and write out
the order of the day for tomorrow. And you," he continued, addressing
another, "ride along the line and announce that tomorrow we attack."

While Kutuzov was talking to Raevski and dictating the order of the day,
Wolzogen returned from Barclay and said that General Barclay wished to
have written confirmation of the order the field marshal had given.

Kutuzov, without looking at Wolzogen, gave directions for the order to
be written out which the former commander in chief, to avoid personal
responsibility, very judiciously wished to receive.

And by means of that mysterious indefinable bond which maintains
throughout an army one and the same temper, known as "the spirit of
the army," and which constitutes the sinew of war, Kutuzov's words, his
order for a battle next day, immediately became known from one end of
the army to the other.

It was far from being the same words or the same order that reached the
farthest links of that chain. The tales passing from mouth to mouth at
different ends of the army did not even resemble what Kutuzov had said,
but the sense of his words spread everywhere because what he said was
not the outcome of cunning calculations, but of a feeling that lay in
the commander in chief's soul as in that of every Russian.

And on learning that tomorrow they were to attack the enemy, and hearing
from the highest quarters a confirmation of what they wanted to believe,
the exhausted, wavering men felt comforted and inspirited.





CHAPTER XXXVI


Prince Andrew's regiment was among the reserves which till after one
o'clock were stationed inactive behind Semenovsk, under heavy artillery
fire. Toward two o'clock the regiment, having already lost more than
two hundred men, was moved forward into a trampled oatfield in the gap
between Semenovsk and the Knoll Battery, where thousands of men perished
that day and on which an intense, concentrated fire from several hundred
enemy guns was directed between one and two o'clock.

Without moving from that spot or firing a single shot the regiment here
lost another third of its men. From in front and especially from the
right, in the unlifting smoke the guns boomed, and out of the mysterious
domain of smoke that overlay the whole space in front, quick hissing
cannon balls and slow whistling shells flew unceasingly. At times, as
if to allow them a respite, a quarter of an hour passed during which
the cannon balls and shells all flew overhead, but sometimes several men
were torn from the regiment in a minute and the slain were continually
being dragged away and the wounded carried off.

With each fresh blow less and less chance of life remained for those not
yet killed. The regiment stood in columns of battalion, three hundred
paces apart, but nevertheless the men were always in one and the same
mood. All alike were taciturn and morose. Talk was rarely heard in the
ranks, and it ceased altogether every time the thud of a successful
shot and the cry of "stretchers!" was heard. Most of the time, by their
officers' order, the men sat on the ground. One, having taken off his
shako, carefully loosened the gathers of its lining and drew them tight
again; another, rubbing some dry clay between his palms, polished
his bayonet; another fingered the strap and pulled the buckle of his
bandolier, while another smoothed and refolded his leg bands and put
his boots on again. Some built little houses of the tufts in the plowed
ground, or plaited baskets from the straw in the cornfield. All seemed
fully absorbed in these pursuits. When men were killed or wounded, when
rows of stretchers went past, when some troops retreated, and when great
masses of the enemy came into view through the smoke, no one paid any
attention to these things. But when our artillery or cavalry advanced or
some of our infantry were seen to move forward, words of approval
were heard on all sides. But the liveliest attention was attracted by
occurrences quite apart from, and unconnected with, the battle. It was
as if the minds of these morally exhausted men found relief in everyday,
commonplace occurrences. A battery of artillery was passing in front of
the regiment. The horse of an ammunition cart put its leg over a trace.
"Hey, look at the trace horse!... Get her leg out! She'll fall.... Ah,
they don't see it!" came identical shouts from the ranks all along the
regiment. Another time, general attention was attracted by a small brown
dog, coming heaven knows whence, which trotted in a preoccupied manner
in front of the ranks with tail stiffly erect till suddenly a shell fell
close by, when it yelped, tucked its tail between its legs, and darted
aside. Yells and shrieks of laughter rose from the whole regiment. But
such distractions lasted only a moment, and for eight hours the men had
been inactive, without food, in constant fear of death, and their pale
and gloomy faces grew ever paler and gloomier.

Prince Andrew, pale and gloomy like everyone in the regiment, paced up
and down from the border of one patch to another, at the edge of the
meadow beside an oatfield, with head bowed and arms behind his back.
There was nothing for him to do and no orders to be given. Everything
went on of itself. The killed were dragged from the front, the wounded
carried away, and the ranks closed up. If any soldiers ran to the
rear they returned immediately and hastily. At first Prince Andrew,
considering it his duty to rouse the courage of the men and to set them
an example, walked about among the ranks, but he soon became convinced
that this was unnecessary and that there was nothing he could teach
them. All the powers of his soul, as of every soldier there, were
unconsciously bent on avoiding the contemplation of the horrors of their
situation. He walked along the meadow, dragging his feet, rustling the
grass, and gazing at the dust that covered his boots; now he took big
strides trying to keep to the footprints left on the meadow by the
mowers, then he counted his steps, calculating how often he must walk
from one strip to another to walk a mile, then he stripped the flowers
from the wormwood that grew along a boundary rut, rubbed them in his
palms, and smelled their pungent, sweetly bitter scent. Nothing remained
of the previous day's thoughts. He thought of nothing. He listened with
weary ears to the ever-recurring sounds, distinguishing the whistle
of flying projectiles from the booming of the reports, glanced at the
tiresomely familiar faces of the men of the first battalion, and
waited. "Here it comes... this one is coming our way again!" he thought,
listening to an approaching whistle in the hidden region of smoke. "One,
another! Again! It has hit...." He stopped and looked at the ranks. "No,
it has gone over. But this one has hit!" And again he started trying
to reach the boundary strip in sixteen paces. A whizz and a thud! Five
paces from him, a cannon ball tore up the dry earth and disappeared. A
chill ran down his back. Again he glanced at the ranks. Probably many
had been hit--a large crowd had gathered near the second battalion.

"Adjutant!" he shouted. "Order them not to crowd together."

The adjutant, having obeyed this instruction, approached Prince Andrew.
From the other side a battalion commander rode up.

"Look out!" came a frightened cry from a soldier and, like a bird
whirring in rapid flight and alighting on the ground, a shell dropped
with little noise within two steps of Prince Andrew and close to the
battalion commander's horse. The horse first, regardless of whether it
was right or wrong to show fear, snorted, reared almost throwing the
major, and galloped aside. The horse's terror infected the men.

"Lie down!" cried the adjutant, throwing himself flat on the ground.

Prince Andrew hesitated. The smoking shell spun like a top between him
and the prostrate adjutant, near a wormwood plant between the field and
the meadow.

"Can this be death?" thought Prince Andrew, looking with a quite new,
envious glance at the grass, the wormwood, and the streamlet of smoke
that curled up from the rotating black ball. "I cannot, I do not wish
to die. I love life--I love this grass, this earth, this air...." He
thought this, and at the same time remembered that people were looking
at him.

"It's shameful, sir!" he said to the adjutant. "What..."

He did not finish speaking. At one and the same moment came the sound of
an explosion, a whistle of splinters as from a breaking window frame,
a suffocating smell of powder, and Prince Andrew started to one side,
raising his arm, and fell on his chest. Several officers ran up to him.
From the right side of his abdomen, blood was welling out making a large
stain on the grass.

The militiamen with stretchers who were called up stood behind the
officers. Prince Andrew lay on his chest with his face in the grass,
breathing heavily and noisily.

"What are you waiting for? Come along!"

The peasants went up and took him by his shoulders and legs, but he
moaned piteously and, exchanging looks, they set him down again.

"Pick him up, lift him, it's all the same!" cried someone.

They again took him by the shoulders and laid him on the stretcher.

"Ah, God! My God! What is it? The stomach? That means death! My
God!"--voices among the officers were heard saying.

"It flew a hair's breadth past my ear," said the adjutant.

The peasants, adjusting the stretcher to their shoulders, started
hurriedly along the path they had trodden down, to the dressing station.

"Keep in step! Ah... those peasants!" shouted an officer, seizing by
their shoulders and checking the peasants, who were walking unevenly and
jolting the stretcher.

"Get into step, Fedor... I say, Fedor!" said the foremost peasant.

"Now that's right!" said the one behind joyfully, when he had got into
step.

"Your excellency! Eh, Prince!" said the trembling voice of Timokhin, who
had run up and was looking down on the stretcher.

Prince Andrew opened his eyes and looked up at the speaker from the
stretcher into which his head had sunk deep and again his eyelids
drooped.


The militiamen carried Prince Andrew to the dressing station by the
wood, where wagons were stationed. The dressing station consisted of
three tents with flaps turned back, pitched at the edge of a birch wood.
In the wood, wagons and horses were standing. The horses were eating
oats from their movable troughs and sparrows flew down and pecked the
grains that fell. Some crows, scenting blood, flew among the birch
trees cawing impatiently. Around the tents, over more than five acres,
bloodstained men in various garbs stood, sat, or lay. Around the wounded
stood crowds of soldier stretcher-bearers with dismal and attentive
faces, whom the officers keeping order tried in vain to drive from the
spot. Disregarding the officers' orders, the soldiers stood leaning
against their stretchers and gazing intently, as if trying to comprehend
the difficult problem of what was taking place before them. From the
tents came now loud angry cries and now plaintive groans. Occasionally
dressers ran out to fetch water, or to point out those who were to be
brought in next. The wounded men awaiting their turn outside the tents
groaned, sighed, wept, screamed, swore, or asked for vodka. Some were
delirious. Prince Andrew's bearers, stepping over the wounded who had
not yet been bandaged, took him, as a regimental commander, close up to
one of the tents and there stopped, awaiting instructions. Prince Andrew
opened his eyes and for a long time could not make out what was going
on around him. He remembered the meadow, the wormwood, the field, the
whirling black ball, and his sudden rush of passionate love of life.
Two steps from him, leaning against a branch and talking loudly and
attracting general attention, stood a tall, handsome, black-haired
noncommissioned officer with a bandaged head. He had been wounded in the
head and leg by bullets. Around him, eagerly listening to his talk, a
crowd of wounded and stretcher-bearers was gathered.

"We kicked him out from there so that he chucked everything, we grabbed
the King himself!" cried he, looking around him with eyes that glittered
with fever. "If only reserves had come up just then, lads, there
wouldn't have been nothing left of him! I tell you surely..."

Like all the others near the speaker, Prince Andrew looked at him with
shining eyes and experienced a sense of comfort. "But isn't it all the
same now?" thought he. "And what will be there, and what has there been
here? Why was I so reluctant to part with life? There was something in
this life I did not and do not understand."





CHAPTER XXXVII


One of the doctors came out of the tent in a bloodstained apron,
holding a cigar between the thumb and little finger of one of his small
bloodstained hands, so as not to smear it. He raised his head and looked
about him, but above the level of the wounded men. He evidently wanted a
little respite. After turning his head from right to left for some time,
he sighed and looked down.

"All right, immediately," he replied to a dresser who pointed Prince
Andrew out to him, and he told them to carry him into the tent.

Murmurs arose among the wounded who were waiting.

"It seems that even in the next world only the gentry are to have a
chance!" remarked one.

Prince Andrew was carried in and laid on a table that had only just been
cleared and which a dresser was washing down. Prince Andrew could not
make out distinctly what was in that tent. The pitiful groans from all
sides and the torturing pain in his thigh, stomach, and back distracted
him. All he saw about him merged into a general impression of naked,
bleeding human bodies that seemed to fill the whole of the low tent, as
a few weeks previously, on that hot August day, such bodies had filled
the dirty pond beside the Smolensk road. Yes, it was the same flesh,
the same chair a canon, the sight of which had even then filled him with
horror, as by a presentiment.

There were three operating tables in the tent. Two were occupied, and
on the third they placed Prince Andrew. For a little while he was left
alone and involuntarily witnessed what was taking place on the other two
tables. On the nearest one sat a Tartar, probably a Cossack, judging by
the uniform thrown down beside him. Four soldiers were holding him, and
a spectacled doctor was cutting into his muscular brown back.

"Ooh, ooh, ooh!" grunted the Tartar, and suddenly lifting up his swarthy
snub-nosed face with its high cheekbones, and baring his white teeth,
he began to wriggle and twitch his body and utter piercing, ringing,
and prolonged yells. On the other table, round which many people were
crowding, a tall well-fed man lay on his back with his head thrown back.
His curly hair, its color, and the shape of his head seemed strangely
familiar to Prince Andrew. Several dressers were pressing on his chest
to hold him down. One large, white, plump leg twitched rapidly all
the time with a feverish tremor. The man was sobbing and choking
convulsively. Two doctors--one of whom was pale and trembling--were
silently doing something to this man's other, gory leg. When he had
finished with the Tartar, whom they covered with an overcoat, the
spectacled doctor came up to Prince Andrew, wiping his hands.

He glanced at Prince Andrew's face and quickly turned away.

"Undress him! What are you waiting for?" he cried angrily to the
dressers.

His very first, remotest recollections of childhood came back to Prince
Andrew's mind when the dresser with sleeves rolled up began hastily to
undo the buttons of his clothes and undressed him. The doctor bent
down over the wound, felt it, and sighed deeply. Then he made a sign to
someone, and the torturing pain in his abdomen caused Prince Andrew to
lose consciousness. When he came to himself the splintered portions of
his thighbone had been extracted, the torn flesh cut away, and the
wound bandaged. Water was being sprinkled on his face. As soon as Prince
Andrew opened his eyes, the doctor bent over, kissed him silently on the
lips, and hurried away.

After the sufferings he had been enduring, Prince Andrew enjoyed a
blissful feeling such as he had not experienced for a long time. All
the best and happiest moments of his life--especially his earliest
childhood, when he used to be undressed and put to bed, and when leaning
over him his nurse sang him to sleep and he, burying his head in the
pillow, felt happy in the mere consciousness of life--returned to his
memory, not merely as something past but as something present.

The doctors were busily engaged with the wounded man the shape of whose
head seemed familiar to Prince Andrew: they were lifting him up and
trying to quiet him.

"Show it to me.... Oh, ooh... Oh! Oh, ooh!" his frightened moans could
be heard, subdued by suffering and broken by sobs.

Hearing those moans Prince Andrew wanted to weep. Whether because he
was dying without glory, or because he was sorry to part with life,
or because of those memories of a childhood that could not return, or
because he was suffering and others were suffering and that man near him
was groaning so piteously--he felt like weeping childlike, kindly, and
almost happy tears.

The wounded man was shown his amputated leg stained with clotted blood
and with the boot still on.

"Oh! Oh, ooh!" he sobbed, like a woman.

The doctor who had been standing beside him, preventing Prince Andrew
from seeing his face, moved away.

"My God! What is this? Why is he here?" said Prince Andrew to himself.

In the miserable, sobbing, enfeebled man whose leg had just been
amputated, he recognized Anatole Kuragin. Men were supporting him in
their arms and offering him a glass of water, but his trembling, swollen
lips could not grasp its rim. Anatole was sobbing painfully. "Yes, it is
he! Yes, that man is somehow closely and painfully connected with me,"
thought Prince Andrew, not yet clearly grasping what he saw before him.
"What is the connection of that man with my childhood and life?" he
asked himself without finding an answer. And suddenly a new unexpected
memory from that realm of pure and loving childhood presented itself to
him. He remembered Natasha as he had seen her for the first time at the
ball in 1810, with her slender neck and arms and with a frightened happy
face ready for rapture, and love and tenderness for her, stronger
and more vivid than ever, awoke in his soul. He now remembered the
connection that existed between himself and this man who was dimly
gazing at him through tears that filled his swollen eyes. He remembered
everything, and ecstatic pity and love for that man overflowed his happy
heart.

Prince Andrew could no longer restrain himself and wept tender loving
tears for his fellow men, for himself, and for his own and their errors.

"Compassion, love of our brothers, for those who love us and for those
who hate us, love of our enemies; yes, that love which God preached on
earth and which Princess Mary taught me and I did not understand--that
is what made me sorry to part with life, that is what remained for me
had I lived. But now it is too late. I know it!"





CHAPTER XXXVIII


The terrible spectacle of the battlefield covered with dead and wounded,
together with the heaviness of his head and the news that some twenty
generals he knew personally had been killed or wounded, and the
consciousness of the impotence of his once mighty arm, produced an
unexpected impression on Napoleon who usually liked to look at the
killed and wounded, thereby, he considered, testing his strength of
mind. This day the horrible appearance of the battlefield overcame
that strength of mind which he thought constituted his merit and his
greatness. He rode hurriedly from the battlefield and returned to the
Shevardino knoll, where he sat on his campstool, his sallow face
swollen and heavy, his eyes dim, his nose red, and his voice hoarse,
involuntarily listening, with downcast eyes, to the sounds of firing.
With painful dejection he awaited the end of this action, in which he
regarded himself as a participant and which he was unable to arrest.
A personal, human feeling for a brief moment got the better of the
artificial phantasm of life he had served so long. He felt in his own
person the sufferings and death he had witnessed on the battlefield.
The heaviness of his head and chest reminded him of the possibility
of suffering and death for himself. At that moment he did not desire
Moscow, or victory, or glory (what need had he for any more glory?). The
one thing he wished for was rest, tranquillity, and freedom. But when he
had been on the Semenovsk heights the artillery commander had proposed
to him to bring several batteries of artillery up to those heights to
strengthen the fire on the Russian troops crowded in front of Knyazkovo.
Napoleon had assented and had given orders that news should be brought
to him of the effect those batteries produced.

An adjutant came now to inform him that the fire of two hundred guns
had been concentrated on the Russians, as he had ordered, but that they
still held their ground.

"Our fire is mowing them down by rows, but still they hold on," said the
adjutant.

"They want more!..." said Napoleon in a hoarse voice.

"Sire?" asked the adjutant who had not heard the remark.

"They want more!" croaked Napoleon frowning. "Let them have it!"

Even before he gave that order the thing he did not desire, and for
which he gave the order only because he thought it was expected of him,
was being done. And he fell back into that artificial realm of imaginary
greatness, and again--as a horse walking a treadmill thinks it is doing
something for itself--he submissively fulfilled the cruel, sad, gloomy,
and inhuman role predestined for him.

And not for that day and hour alone were the mind and conscience
darkened of this man on whom the responsibility for what was happening
lay more than on all the others who took part in it. Never to the end
of his life could he understand goodness, beauty, or truth, or the
significance of his actions which were too contrary to goodness and
truth, too remote from everything human, for him ever to be able to
grasp their meaning. He could not disavow his actions, belauded as they
were by half the world, and so he had to repudiate truth, goodness, and
all humanity.

Not only on that day, as he rode over the battlefield strewn with men
killed and maimed (by his will as he believed), did he reckon as he
looked at them how many Russians there were for each Frenchman and,
deceiving himself, find reason for rejoicing in the calculation that
there were five Russians for every Frenchman. Not on that day alone
did he write in a letter to Paris that "the battle field was superb,"
because fifty thousand corpses lay there, but even on the island of St.
Helena in the peaceful solitude where he said he intended to devote his
leisure to an account of the great deeds he had done, he wrote:


The Russian war should have been the most popular war of modern times:
it was a war of good sense, for real interests, for the tranquillity and
security of all; it was purely pacific and conservative.

It was a war for a great cause, the end of uncertainties and the
beginning of security. A new horizon and new labors were opening out,
full of well-being and prosperity for all. The European system was
already founded; all that remained was to organize it.

Satisfied on these great points and with tranquility everywhere, I
too should have had my Congress and my Holy Alliance. Those ideas were
stolen from me. In that reunion of great sovereigns we should have
discussed our interests like one family, and have rendered account to
the peoples as clerk to master.

Europe would in this way soon have been, in fact, but one people, and
anyone who traveled anywhere would have found himself always in the
common fatherland. I should have demanded the freedom of all navigable
rivers for everybody, that the seas should be common to all, and that
the great standing armies should be reduced henceforth to mere guards
for the sovereigns.

On returning to France, to the bosom of the great, strong, magnificent,
peaceful, and glorious fatherland, I should have proclaimed
her frontiers immutable; all future wars purely defensive, all
aggrandizement antinational. I should have associated my son in the
Empire; my dictatorship would have been finished, and his constitutional
reign would have begun.

Paris would have been the capital of the world, and the French the envy
of the nations!

My leisure then, and my old age, would have been devoted, in company
with the Empress and during the royal apprenticeship of my son, to
leisurely visiting, with our own horses and like a true country couple,
every corner of the Empire, receiving complaints, redressing wrongs,
and scattering public buildings and benefactions on all sides and
everywhere.


Napoleon, predestined by Providence for the gloomy role of executioner
of the peoples, assured himself that the aim of his actions had been the
peoples' welfare and that he could control the fate of millions and by
the employment of power confer benefactions.


"Of four hundred thousand who crossed the Vistula," he wrote further
of the Russian war, "half were Austrians, Prussians, Saxons, Poles,
Bavarians, Wurttembergers, Mecklenburgers, Spaniards, Italians, and
Neapolitans. The Imperial army, strictly speaking, was one third
composed of Dutch, Belgians, men from the borders of the Rhine,
Piedmontese, Swiss, Genevese, Tuscans, Romans, inhabitants of the
Thirty-second Military Division, of Bremen, of Hamburg, and so on: it
included scarcely a hundred and forty thousand who spoke French. The
Russian expedition actually cost France less than fifty thousand men;
the Russian army in its retreat from Vilna to Moscow lost in the various
battles four times more men than the French army; the burning of Moscow
cost the lives of a hundred thousand Russians who died of cold and want
in the woods; finally, in its march from Moscow to the Oder the Russian
army also suffered from the severity of the season; so that by the time
it reached Vilna it numbered only fifty thousand, and at Kalisch less
than eighteen thousand."


He imagined that the war with Russia came about by his will, and the
horrors that occurred did not stagger his soul. He boldly took the
whole responsibility for what happened, and his darkened mind found
justification in the belief that among the hundreds of thousands who
perished there were fewer Frenchmen than Hessians and Bavarians.





CHAPTER XXXIX


Several tens of thousands of the slain lay in diverse postures and
various uniforms on the fields and meadows belonging to the Davydov
family and to the crown serfs--those fields and meadows where for
hundreds of years the peasants of Borodino, Gorki, Shevardino, and
Semenovsk had reaped their harvests and pastured their cattle. At the
dressing stations the grass and earth were soaked with blood for a space
of some three acres around. Crowds of men of various arms, wounded and
unwounded, with frightened faces, dragged themselves back to Mozhaysk
from the one army and back to Valuevo from the other. Other crowds,
exhausted and hungry, went forward led by their officers. Others held
their ground and continued to fire.

Over the whole field, previously so gaily beautiful with the glitter of
bayonets and cloudlets of smoke in the morning sun, there now spread a
mist of damp and smoke and a strange acid smell of saltpeter and blood.
Clouds gathered and drops of rain began to fall on the dead and wounded,
on the frightened, exhausted, and hesitating men, as if to say: "Enough,
men! Enough! Cease... bethink yourselves! What are you doing?"

To the men of both sides alike, worn out by want of food and rest,
it began equally to appear doubtful whether they should continue to
slaughter one another; all the faces expressed hesitation, and the
question arose in every soul: "For what, for whom, must I kill and be
killed?... You may go and kill whom you please, but I don't want to do
so anymore!" By evening this thought had ripened in every soul. At any
moment these men might have been seized with horror at what they were
doing and might have thrown up everything and run away anywhere.

But though toward the end of the battle the men felt all the horror of
what they were doing, though they would have been glad to leave off,
some incomprehensible, mysterious power continued to control them, and
they still brought up the charges, loaded, aimed, and applied the match,
though only one artilleryman survived out of every three, and though
they stumbled and panted with fatigue, perspiring and stained with blood
and powder. The cannon balls flew just as swiftly and cruelly from both
sides, crushing human bodies, and that terrible work which was not done
by the will of a man but at the will of Him who governs men and worlds
continued.

Anyone looking at the disorganized rear of the Russian army would have
said that, if only the French made one more slight effort, it would
disappear; and anyone looking at the rear of the French army would have
said that the Russians need only make one more slight effort and the
French would be destroyed. But neither the French nor the Russians made
that effort, and the flame of battle burned slowly out.

The Russians did not make that effort because they were not attacking
the French. At the beginning of the battle they stood blocking the
way to Moscow and they still did so at the end of the battle as at the
beginning. But even had the aim of the Russians been to drive the French
from their positions, they could not have made this last effort, for all
the Russian troops had been broken up, there was no part of the Russian
army that had not suffered in the battle, and though still holding their
positions they had lost ONE HALF of their army.

The French, with the memory of all their former victories during
fifteen years, with the assurance of Napoleon's invincibility, with the
consciousness that they had captured part of the battlefield and had
lost only a quarter of their men and still had their Guards intact,
twenty thousand strong, might easily have made that effort. The French
who had attacked the Russian army in order to drive it from its position
ought to have made that effort, for as long as the Russians continued to
block the road to Moscow as before, the aim of the French had not been
attained and all their efforts and losses were in vain. But the French
did not make that effort. Some historians say that Napoleon need only
have used his Old Guards, who were intact, and the battle would have
been won. To speak of what would have happened had Napoleon sent his
Guards is like talking of what would happen if autumn became spring. It
could not be. Napoleon did not give his Guards, not because he did not
want to, but because it could not be done. All the generals, officers,
and soldiers of the French army knew it could not be done, because the
flagging spirit of the troops would not permit it.

It was not Napoleon alone who had experienced that nightmare feeling
of the mighty arm being stricken powerless, but all the generals and
soldiers of his army whether they had taken part in the battle or not,
after all their experience of previous battles--when after one tenth of
such efforts the enemy had fled--experienced a similar feeling of terror
before an enemy who, after losing HALF his men, stood as threateningly
at the end as at the beginning of the battle. The moral force of the
attacking French army was exhausted. Not that sort of victory which is
defined by the capture of pieces of material fastened to sticks, called
standards, and of the ground on which the troops had stood and were
standing, but a moral victory that convinces the enemy of the moral
superiority of his opponent and of his own impotence was gained by the
Russians at Borodino. The French invaders, like an infuriated animal
that has in its onslaught received a mortal wound, felt that they were
perishing, but could not stop, any more than the Russian army, weaker
by one half, could help swerving. By impetus gained, the French army was
still able to roll forward to Moscow, but there, without further effort
on the part of the Russians, it had to perish, bleeding from the mortal
wound it had received at Borodino. The direct consequence of the battle
of Borodino was Napoleon's senseless flight from Moscow, his retreat
along the old Smolensk road, the destruction of the invading army of
five hundred thousand men, and the downfall of Napoleonic France, on
which at Borodino for the first time the hand of an opponent of stronger
spirit had been laid.





BOOK ELEVEN: 1812





CHAPTER I


Absolute continuity of motion is not comprehensible to the human mind.
Laws of motion of any kind become comprehensible to man only when he
examines arbitrarily selected elements of that motion; but at the
same time, a large proportion of human error comes from the arbitrary
division of continuous motion into discontinuous elements. There is a
well known, so-called sophism of the ancients consisting in this, that
Achilles could never catch up with a tortoise he was following, in spite
of the fact that he traveled ten times as fast as the tortoise. By
the time Achilles has covered the distance that separated him from the
tortoise, the tortoise has covered one tenth of that distance ahead
of him: when Achilles has covered that tenth, the tortoise has covered
another one hundredth, and so on forever. This problem seemed to
the ancients insoluble. The absurd answer (that Achilles could never
overtake the tortoise) resulted from this: that motion was arbitrarily
divided into discontinuous elements, whereas the motion both of Achilles
and of the tortoise was continuous.

By adopting smaller and smaller elements of motion we only approach a
solution of the problem, but never reach it. Only when we have admitted
the conception of the infinitely small, and the resulting geometrical
progression with a common ratio of one tenth, and have found the sum of
this progression to infinity, do we reach a solution of the problem.

A modern branch of mathematics having achieved the art of dealing with
the infinitely small can now yield solutions in other more complex
problems of motion which used to appear insoluble.

This modern branch of mathematics, unknown to the ancients, when dealing
with problems of motion admits the conception of the infinitely small,
and so conforms to the chief condition of motion (absolute continuity)
and thereby corrects the inevitable error which the human mind cannot
avoid when it deals with separate elements of motion instead of
examining continuous motion.

In seeking the laws of historical movement just the same thing happens.
The movement of humanity, arising as it does from innumerable arbitrary
human wills, is continuous.

To understand the laws of this continuous movement is the aim of
history. But to arrive at these laws, resulting from the sum of all
those human wills, man's mind postulates arbitrary and disconnected
units. The first method of history is to take an arbitrarily selected
series of continuous events and examine it apart from others, though
there is and can be no beginning to any event, for one event always
flows uninterruptedly from another.

The second method is to consider the actions of some one man--a king or
a commander--as equivalent to the sum of many individual wills; whereas
the sum of individual wills is never expressed by the activity of a
single historic personage.

Historical science in its endeavor to draw nearer to truth continually
takes smaller and smaller units for examination. But however small the
units it takes, we feel that to take any unit disconnected from others,
or to assume a beginning of any phenomenon, or to say that the will of
many men is expressed by the actions of any one historic personage, is
in itself false.

It needs no critical exertion to reduce utterly to dust any deductions
drawn from history. It is merely necessary to select some larger or
smaller unit as the subject of observation--as criticism has every
right to do, seeing that whatever unit history observes must always be
arbitrarily selected.

Only by taking infinitesimally small units for observation (the
differential of history, that is, the individual tendencies of men) and
attaining to the art of integrating them (that is, finding the sum of
these infinitesimals) can we hope to arrive at the laws of history.

The first fifteen years of the nineteenth century in Europe present an
extraordinary movement of millions of people. Men leave their customary
pursuits, hasten from one side of Europe to the other, plunder and
slaughter one another, triumph and are plunged in despair, and for some
years the whole course of life is altered and presents an intensive
movement which first increases and then slackens. What was the cause of
this movement, by what laws was it governed? asks the mind of man.

The historians, replying to this question, lay before us the sayings and
doings of a few dozen men in a building in the city of Paris, calling
these sayings and doings "the Revolution"; then they give a detailed
biography of Napoleon and of certain people favorable or hostile to him;
tell of the influence some of these people had on others, and say: that
is why this movement took place and those are its laws.

But the mind of man not only refuses to believe this explanation, but
plainly says that this method of explanation is fallacious, because in
it a weaker phenomenon is taken as the cause of a stronger. The sum of
human wills produced the Revolution and Napoleon, and only the sum of
those wills first tolerated and then destroyed them.

"But every time there have been conquests there have been conquerors;
every time there has been a revolution in any state there have been
great men," says history. And, indeed, human reason replies: every time
conquerors appear there have been wars, but this does not prove that the
conquerors caused the wars and that it is possible to find the laws of
a war in the personal activity of a single man. Whenever I look at my
watch and its hands point to ten, I hear the bells of the neighboring
church; but because the bells begin to ring when the hands of the clock
reach ten, I have no right to assume that the movement of the bells is
caused by the position of the hands of the watch.

Whenever I see the movement of a locomotive I hear the whistle and see
the valves opening and wheels turning; but I have no right to conclude
that the whistling and the turning of wheels are the cause of the
movement of the engine.

The peasants say that a cold wind blows in late spring because the oaks
are budding, and really every spring cold winds do blow when the oak
is budding. But though I do not know what causes the cold winds to blow
when the oak buds unfold, I cannot agree with the peasants that the
unfolding of the oak buds is the cause of the cold wind, for the
force of the wind is beyond the influence of the buds. I see only a
coincidence of occurrences such as happens with all the phenomena of
life, and I see that however much and however carefully I observe the
hands of the watch, and the valves and wheels of the engine, and the
oak, I shall not discover the cause of the bells ringing, the engine
moving, or of the winds of spring. To that I must entirely change my
point of view and study the laws of the movement of steam, of the
bells, and of the wind. History must do the same. And attempts in this
direction have already been made.

To study the laws of history we must completely change the subject of
our observation, must leave aside kings, ministers, and generals, and
study the common, infinitesimally small elements by which the masses are
moved. No one can say in how far it is possible for man to advance
in this way toward an understanding of the laws of history; but it is
evident that only along that path does the possibility of discovering
the laws of history lie, and that as yet not a millionth part as much
mental effort has been applied in this direction by historians as has
been devoted to describing the actions of various kings, commanders,
and ministers and propounding the historians' own reflections concerning
these actions.





CHAPTER II


The forces of a dozen European nations burst into Russia. The Russian
army and people avoided a collision till Smolensk was reached, and again
from Smolensk to Borodino. The French army pushed on to Moscow, its
goal, its impetus ever increasing as it neared its aim, just as the
velocity of a falling body increases as it approaches the earth. Behind
it were seven hundred miles of hunger-stricken, hostile country; ahead
were a few dozen miles separating it from its goal. Every soldier in
Napoleon's army felt this and the invasion moved on by its own momentum.

The more the Russian army retreated the more fiercely a spirit of hatred
of the enemy flared up, and while it retreated the army increased and
consolidated. At Borodino a collision took place. Neither army was
broken up, but the Russian army retreated immediately after the
collision as inevitably as a ball recoils after colliding with another
having a greater momentum, and with equal inevitability the ball
of invasion that had advanced with such momentum rolled on for some
distance, though the collision had deprived it of all its force.

The Russians retreated eighty miles--to beyond Moscow--and the French
reached Moscow and there came to a standstill. For five weeks after that
there was not a single battle. The French did not move. As a bleeding,
mortally wounded animal licks its wounds, they remained inert in Moscow
for five weeks, and then suddenly, with no fresh reason, fled back:
they made a dash for the Kaluga road, and (after a victory--for at
Malo-Yaroslavets the field of conflict again remained theirs) without
undertaking a single serious battle, they fled still more rapidly back
to Smolensk, beyond Smolensk, beyond the Berezina, beyond Vilna, and
farther still.

On the evening of the twenty-sixth of August, Kutuzov and the whole
Russian army were convinced that the battle of Borodino was a victory.
Kutuzov reported so to the Emperor. He gave orders to prepare for a
fresh conflict to finish the enemy and did this not to deceive anyone,
but because he knew that the enemy was beaten, as everyone who had taken
part in the battle knew it.

But all that evening and next day reports came in one after another
of unheard-of losses, of the loss of half the army, and a fresh battle
proved physically impossible.

It was impossible to give battle before information had been collected,
the wounded gathered in, the supplies of ammunition replenished, the
slain reckoned up, new officers appointed to replace those who had been
killed, and before the men had had food and sleep. And meanwhile, the
very next morning after the battle, the French army advanced of itself
upon the Russians, carried forward by the force of its own momentum now
seemingly increased in inverse proportion to the square of the distance
from its aim. Kutuzov's wish was to attack next day, and the whole
army desired to do so. But to make an attack the wish to do so is not
sufficient, there must also be a possibility of doing it, and that
possibility did not exist. It was impossible not to retreat a day's
march, and then in the same way it was impossible not to retreat another
and a third day's march, and at last, on the first of September when
the army drew near Moscow--despite the strength of the feeling that had
arisen in all ranks--the force of circumstances compelled it to retire
beyond Moscow. And the troops retired one more, last, day's march, and
abandoned Moscow to the enemy.

For people accustomed to think that plans of campaign and battles are
made by generals--as any one of us sitting over a map in his study may
imagine how he would have arranged things in this or that battle--the
questions present themselves: Why did Kutuzov during the retreat not do
this or that? Why did he not take up a position before reaching Fili?
Why did he not retire at once by the Kaluga road, abandoning Moscow? and
so on. People accustomed to think in that way forget, or do not know,
the inevitable conditions which always limit the activities of any
commander in chief. The activity of a commander in chief does not at all
resemble the activity we imagine to ourselves when we sit at ease in
our studies examining some campaign on the map, with a certain number of
troops on this and that side in a certain known locality, and begin our
plans from some given moment. A commander in chief is never dealing
with the beginning of any event--the position from which we always
contemplate it. The commander in chief is always in the midst of a
series of shifting events and so he never can at any moment consider the
whole import of an event that is occurring. Moment by moment the event
is imperceptibly shaping itself, and at every moment of this continuous,
uninterrupted shaping of events the commander in chief is in the
midst of a most complex play of intrigues, worries, contingencies,
authorities, projects, counsels, threats, and deceptions and is
continually obliged to reply to innumerable questions addressed to him,
which constantly conflict with one another.

Learned military authorities quite seriously tell us that Kutuzov should
have moved his army to the Kaluga road long before reaching Fili, and
that somebody actually submitted such a proposal to him. But a commander
in chief, especially at a difficult moment, has always before him not
one proposal but dozens simultaneously. And all these proposals, based
on strategics and tactics, contradict each other.

A commander in chief's business, it would seem, is simply to choose one
of these projects. But even that he cannot do. Events and time do not
wait. For instance, on the twenty-eighth it is suggested to him to
cross to the Kaluga road, but just then an adjutant gallops up from
Miloradovich asking whether he is to engage the French or retire. An
order must be given him at once, that instant. And the order to retreat
carries us past the turn to the Kaluga road. And after the adjutant
comes the commissary general asking where the stores are to be taken,
and the chief of the hospitals asks where the wounded are to go, and a
courier from Petersburg brings a letter from the sovereign which does
not admit of the possibility of abandoning Moscow, and the commander in
chief's rival, the man who is undermining him (and there are always
not merely one but several such), presents a new project diametrically
opposed to that of turning to the Kaluga road, and the commander in
chief himself needs sleep and refreshment to maintain his energy and
a respectable general who has been overlooked in the distribution of
rewards comes to complain, and the inhabitants of the district pray to
be defended, and an officer sent to inspect the locality comes in and
gives a report quite contrary to what was said by the officer
previously sent; and a spy, a prisoner, and a general who has been
on reconnaissance, all describe the position of the enemy's army
differently. People accustomed to misunderstand or to forget these
inevitable conditions of a commander in chief's actions describe to
us, for instance, the position of the army at Fili and assume that the
commander in chief could, on the first of September, quite freely decide
whether to abandon Moscow or defend it; whereas, with the Russian army
less than four miles from Moscow, no such question existed. When had
that question been settled? At Drissa and at Smolensk and most
palpably of all on the twenty-fourth of August at Shevardino and on
the twenty-sixth at Borodino, and each day and hour and minute of the
retreat from Borodino to Fili.





CHAPTER III


When Ermolov, having been sent by Kutuzov to inspect the position, told
the field marshal that it was impossible to fight there before Moscow
and that they must retreat, Kutuzov looked at him in silence.

"Give me your hand," said he and, turning it over so as to feel the
pulse, added: "You are not well, my dear fellow. Think what you are
saying!"

Kutuzov could not yet admit the possibility of retreating beyond Moscow
without a battle.

On the Poklonny Hill, four miles from the Dorogomilov gate of Moscow,
Kutuzov got out of his carriage and sat down on a bench by the roadside.
A great crowd of generals gathered round him, and Count Rostopchin, who
had come out from Moscow, joined them. This brilliant company separated
into several groups who all discussed the advantages and disadvantages
of the position, the state of the army, the plans suggested, the
situation of Moscow, and military questions generally. Though they had
not been summoned for the purpose, and though it was not so called, they
all felt that this was really a council of war. The conversations all
dealt with public questions. If anyone gave or asked for personal
news, it was done in a whisper and they immediately reverted to general
matters. No jokes, or laughter, or smiles even, were seen among all
these men. They evidently all made an effort to hold themselves at the
height the situation demanded. And all these groups, while talking
among themselves, tried to keep near the commander in chief (whose
bench formed the center of the gathering) and to speak so that he might
overhear them. The commander in chief listened to what was being said
and sometimes asked them to repeat their remarks, but did not himself
take part in the conversations or express any opinion. After hearing
what was being said by one or other of these groups he generally turned
away with an air of disappointment, as though they were not speaking of
anything he wished to hear. Some discussed the position that had been
chosen, criticizing not the position itself so much as the mental
capacity of those who had chosen it. Others argued that a mistake had
been made earlier and that a battle should have been fought two days
before. Others again spoke of the battle of Salamanca, which was
described by Crosart, a newly arrived Frenchman in a Spanish uniform.
(This Frenchman and one of the German princes serving with the Russian
army were discussing the siege of Saragossa and considering the
possibility of defending Moscow in a similar manner.) Count Rostopchin
was telling a fourth group that he was prepared to die with the city
train bands under the walls of the capital, but that he still could not
help regretting having been left in ignorance of what was happening, and
that had he known it sooner things would have been different.... A
fifth group, displaying the profundity of their strategic perceptions,
discussed the direction the troops would now have to take. A sixth group
was talking absolute nonsense. Kutuzov's expression grew more and more
preoccupied and gloomy. From all this talk he saw only one thing: that
to defend Moscow was a physical impossibility in the full meaning of
those words, that is to say, so utterly impossible that if any senseless
commander were to give orders to fight, confusion would result but the
battle would still not take place. It would not take place because the
commanders not merely all recognized the position to be impossible, but
in their conversations were only discussing what would happen after its
inevitable abandonment. How could the commanders lead their troops to
a field of battle they considered impossible to hold? The lower-grade
officers and even the soldiers (who too reason) also considered the
position impossible and therefore could not go to fight, fully convinced
as they were of defeat. If Bennigsen insisted on the position being
defended and others still discussed it, the question was no longer
important in itself but only as a pretext for disputes and intrigue.
This Kutuzov knew well.

Bennigsen, who had chosen the position, warmly displayed his Russian
patriotism (Kutuzov could not listen to this without wincing) by
insisting that Moscow must be defended. His aim was as clear as daylight
to Kutuzov: if the defense failed, to throw the blame on Kutuzov who had
brought the army as far as the Sparrow Hills without giving battle; if
it succeeded, to claim the success as his own; or if battle were not
given, to clear himself of the crime of abandoning Moscow. But this
intrigue did not now occupy the old man's mind. One terrible question
absorbed him and to that question he heard no reply from anyone. The
question for him now was: "Have I really allowed Napoleon to reach
Moscow, and when did I do so? When was it decided? Can it have been
yesterday when I ordered Platov to retreat, or was it the evening
before, when I had a nap and told Bennigsen to issue orders? Or was it
earlier still?... When, when was this terrible affair decided? Moscow
must be abandoned. The army must retreat and the order to do so must
be given." To give that terrible order seemed to him equivalent to
resigning the command of the army. And not only did he love power to
which he was accustomed (the honours awarded to Prince Prozorovski,
under whom he had served in Turkey, galled him), but he was convinced
that he was destined to save Russia and that that was why, against
the Emperor's wish and by the will of the people, he had been chosen
commander in chief. He was convinced that he alone could maintain
command of the army in these difficult circumstances, and that in all
the world he alone could encounter the invincible Napoleon without fear,
and he was horrified at the thought of the order he had to issue. But
something had to be decided, and these conversations around him which
were assuming too free a character must be stopped.

He called the most important generals to him.

"My head, be it good or bad, must depend on itself," said he, rising
from the bench, and he rode to Fili where his carriages were waiting.





CHAPTER IV


The Council of War began to assemble at two in the afternoon in the
better and roomier part of Andrew Savostyanov's hut. The men, women, and
children of the large peasant family crowded into the back room across
the passage. Only Malasha, Andrew's six-year-old granddaughter whom
his Serene Highness had petted and to whom he had given a lump of sugar
while drinking his tea, remained on the top of the brick oven in the
larger room. Malasha looked down from the oven with shy delight at the
faces, uniforms, and decorations of the generals, who one after another
came into the room and sat down on the broad benches in the corner
under the icons. "Granddad" himself, as Malasha in her own mind called
Kutuzov, sat apart in a dark corner behind the oven. He sat, sunk deep
in a folding armchair, and continually cleared his throat and pulled at
the collar of his coat which, though it was unbuttoned, still seemed
to pinch his neck. Those who entered went up one by one to the field
marshal; he pressed the hands of some and nodded to others. His adjutant
Kaysarov was about to draw back the curtain of the window facing
Kutuzov, but the latter moved his hand angrily and Kaysarov understood
that his Serene Highness did not wish his face to be seen.

Round the peasant's deal table, on which lay maps, plans, pencils, and
papers, so many people gathered that the orderlies brought in another
bench and put it beside the table. Ermolov, Kaysarov, and Toll, who had
just arrived, sat down on this bench. In the foremost place, immediately
under the icons, sat Barclay de Tolly, his high forehead merging into
his bald crown. He had a St. George's Cross round his neck and looked
pale and ill. He had been feverish for two days and was now shivering
and in pain. Beside him sat Uvarov, who with rapid gesticulations was
giving him some information, speaking in low tones as they all did.
Chubby little Dokhturov was listening attentively with eyebrows
raised and arms folded on his stomach. On the other side sat Count
Ostermann-Tolstoy, seemingly absorbed in his own thoughts. His broad
head with its bold features and glittering eyes was resting on his hand.
Raevski, twitching forward the black hair on his temples as was his
habit, glanced now at Kutuzov and now at the door with a look of
impatience. Konovnitsyn's firm, handsome, and kindly face was lit up by
a tender, sly smile. His glance met Malasha's, and the expression of his
eyes caused the little girl to smile.

They were all waiting for Bennigsen, who on the pretext of inspecting
the position was finishing his savory dinner. They waited for him from
four till six o'clock and did not begin their deliberations all that
time but talked in low tones of other matters.

Only when Bennigsen had entered the hut did Kutuzov leave his corner and
draw toward the table, but not near enough for the candles that had been
placed there to light up his face.

Bennigsen opened the council with the question: "Are we to abandon
Russia's ancient and sacred capital without a struggle, or are we to
defend it?" A prolonged and general silence followed. There was a frown
on every face and only Kutuzov's angry grunts and occasional cough
broke the silence. All eyes were gazing at him. Malasha too looked at
"Granddad." She was nearest to him and saw how his face puckered; he
seemed about to cry, but this did not last long.

"Russia's ancient and sacred capital!" he suddenly said, repeating
Bennigsen's words in an angry voice and thereby drawing attention to the
false note in them. "Allow me to tell you, your excellency, that that
question has no meaning for a Russian." (He lurched his heavy body
forward.) "Such a question cannot be put; it is senseless! The question
I have asked these gentlemen to meet to discuss is a military one.
The question is that of saving Russia. Is it better to give up Moscow
without a battle, or by accepting battle to risk losing the army as well
as Moscow? That is the question on which I want your opinion," and he
sank back in his chair.

The discussion began. Bennigsen did not yet consider his game lost.
Admitting the view of Barclay and others that a defensive battle at
Fili was impossible, but imbued with Russian patriotism and the love
of Moscow, he proposed to move troops from the right to the left flank
during the night and attack the French right flank the following day.
Opinions were divided, and arguments were advanced for and against that
project. Ermolov, Dokhturov, and Raevski agreed with Bennigsen. Whether
feeling it necessary to make a sacrifice before abandoning the capital
or guided by other, personal considerations, these generals seemed not
to understand that this council could not alter the inevitable course
of events and that Moscow was in effect already abandoned. The other
generals, however, understood it and, leaving aside the question of
Moscow, spoke of the direction the army should take in its retreat.
Malasha, who kept her eyes fixed on what was going on before her,
understood the meaning of the council differently. It seemed to her that
it was only a personal struggle between "Granddad" and "Long-coat" as
she termed Bennigsen. She saw that they grew spiteful when they spoke to
one another, and in her heart she sided with "Granddad." In the midst of
the conversation she noticed "Granddad" give Bennigsen a quick, subtle
glance, and then to her joys he saw that "Granddad" said something to
"Long-coat" which settled him. Bennigsen suddenly reddened and paced
angrily up and down the room. What so affected him was Kutuzov's calm
and quiet comment on the advantage or disadvantage of Bennigsen's
proposal to move troops by night from the right to the left flank to
attack the French right wing.

"Gentlemen," said Kutuzov, "I cannot approve of the count's plan. Moving
troops in close proximity to an enemy is always dangerous, and military
history supports that view. For instance..." Kutuzov seemed to reflect,
searching for an example, then with a clear, naive look at Bennigsen he
added: "Oh yes; take the battle of Friedland, which I think the count
well remembers, and which was... not fully successful, only because our
troops were rearranged too near the enemy..."

There followed a momentary pause, which seemed very long to them all.

The discussion recommenced, but pauses frequently occurred and they all
felt that there was no more to be said.

During one of these pauses Kutuzov heaved a deep sigh as if preparing to
speak. They all looked at him.

"Well, gentlemen, I see that it is I who will have to pay for the broken
crockery," said he, and rising slowly he moved to the table. "Gentlemen,
I have heard your views. Some of you will not agree with me. But I," he
paused, "by the authority entrusted to me by my Sovereign and country,
order a retreat."

After that the generals began to disperse with the solemnity and
circumspect silence of people who are leaving, after a funeral.

Some of the generals, in low tones and in a strain very different from
the way they had spoken during the council, communicated something to
their commander in chief.

Malasha, who had long been expected for supper, climbed carefully
backwards down from the oven, her bare little feet catching at its
projections, and slipping between the legs of the generals she darted
out of the room.

When he had dismissed the generals Kutuzov sat a long time with his
elbows on the table, thinking always of the same terrible question:
"When, when did the abandonment of Moscow become inevitable? When was
that done which settled the matter? And who was to blame for it?"

"I did not expect this," said he to his adjutant Schneider when the
latter came in late that night. "I did not expect this! I did not think
this would happen."

"You should take some rest, your Serene Highness," replied Schneider.

"But no! They shall eat horseflesh yet, like the Turks!" exclaimed
Kutuzov without replying, striking the table with his podgy fist. "They
shall too, if only..."





CHAPTER V


At that very time, in circumstances even more important than retreating
without a battle, namely the evacuation and burning of Moscow,
Rostopchin, who is usually represented as being the instigator of that
event, acted in an altogether different manner from Kutuzov.

After the battle of Borodino the abandonment and burning of Moscow was
as inevitable as the retreat of the army beyond Moscow without fighting.

Every Russian might have predicted it, not by reasoning but by the
feeling implanted in each of us and in our fathers.

The same thing that took place in Moscow had happened in all the towns
and villages on Russian soil beginning with Smolensk, without the
participation of Count Rostopchin and his broadsheets. The people
awaited the enemy unconcernedly, did not riot or become excited or tear
anyone to pieces, but faced its fate, feeling within it the strength to
find what it should do at that most difficult moment. And as soon as the
enemy drew near the wealthy classes went away abandoning their property,
while the poorer remained and burned and destroyed what was left.

The consciousness that this would be so and would always be so was and
is present in the heart of every Russian. And a consciousness of this,
and a foreboding that Moscow would be taken, was present in Russian
Moscow society in 1812. Those who had quitted Moscow already in July
and at the beginning of August showed that they expected this. Those who
went away, taking what they could and abandoning their houses and half
their belongings, did so from the latent patriotism which expresses
itself not by phrases or by giving one's children to save the fatherland
and similar unnatural exploits, but unobtrusively, simply, organically,
and therefore in the way that always produces the most powerful results.

"It is disgraceful to run away from danger; only cowards are running
away from Moscow," they were told. In his broadsheets Rostopchin
impressed on them that to leave Moscow was shameful. They were ashamed
to be called cowards, ashamed to leave, but still they left, knowing
it had to be done. Why did they go? It is impossible to suppose that
Rostopchin had scared them by his accounts of horrors Napoleon had
committed in conquered countries. The first people to go away were the
rich educated people who knew quite well that Vienna and Berlin had
remained intact and that during Napoleon's occupation the inhabitants
had spent their time pleasantly in the company of the charming Frenchmen
whom the Russians, and especially the Russian ladies, then liked so
much.

They went away because for Russians there could be no question as to
whether things would go well or ill under French rule in Moscow. It was
out of the question to be under French rule, it would be the worst thing
that could happen. They went away even before the battle of Borodino and
still more rapidly after it, despite Rostopchin's calls to defend Moscow
or the announcement of his intention to take the wonder-working icon of
the Iberian Mother of God and go to fight, or of the balloons that were
to destroy the French, and despite all the nonsense Rostopchin wrote in
his broadsheets. They knew that it was for the army to fight, and that
if it could not succeed it would not do to take young ladies and house
serfs to the Three Hills quarter of Moscow to fight Napoleon, and that
they must go away, sorry as they were to abandon their property
to destruction. They went away without thinking of the tremendous
significance of that immense and wealthy city being given over to
destruction, for a great city with wooden buildings was certain when
abandoned by its inhabitants to be burned. They went away each on his
own account, and yet it was only in consequence of their going away
that the momentous event was accomplished that will always remain the
greatest glory of the Russian people. The lady who, afraid of being
stopped by Count Rostopchin's orders, had already in June moved with her
Negroes and her women jesters from Moscow to her Saratov estate, with
a vague consciousness that she was not Bonaparte's servant, was really,
simply, and truly carrying out the great work which saved Russia. But
Count Rostopchin, who now taunted those who left Moscow and now had the
government offices removed; now distributed quite useless weapons to
the drunken rabble; now had processions displaying the icons, and now
forbade Father Augustin to remove icons or the relics of saints; now
seized all the private carts in Moscow and on one hundred and thirty-six
of them removed the balloon that was being constructed by Leppich; now
hinted that he would burn Moscow and related how he had set fire to his
own house; now wrote a proclamation to the French solemnly upbraiding
them for having destroyed his Orphanage; now claimed the glory of
having hinted that he would burn Moscow and now repudiated the deed;
now ordered the people to catch all spies and bring them to him, and now
reproached them for doing so; now expelled all the French residents from
Moscow, and now allowed Madame Aubert-Chalme (the center of the whole
French colony in Moscow) to remain, but ordered the venerable old
postmaster Klyucharev to be arrested and exiled for no particular
offense; now assembled the people at the Three Hills to fight the French
and now, to get rid of them, handed over to them a man to be killed
and himself drove away by a back gate; now declared that he would
not survive the fall of Moscow, and now wrote French verses in albums
concerning his share in the affair--this man did not understand the
meaning of what was happening but merely wanted to do something himself
that would astonish people, to perform some patriotically heroic
feat; and like a child he made sport of the momentous, and unavoidable
event--the abandonment and burning of Moscow--and tried with his puny
hand now to speed and now to stay the enormous, popular tide that bore
him along with it.





CHAPTER VI


Helene, having returned with the court from Vilna to Petersburg, found
herself in a difficult position.

In Petersburg she had enjoyed the special protection of a grandee who
occupied one of the highest posts in the Empire. In Vilna she had formed
an intimacy with a young foreign prince. When she returned to Petersburg
both the magnate and the prince were there, and both claimed their
rights. Helene was faced by a new problem--how to preserve her intimacy
with both without offending either.

What would have seemed difficult or even impossible to another woman did
not cause the least embarrassment to Countess Bezukhova, who evidently
deserved her reputation of being a very clever woman. Had she attempted
concealment, or tried to extricate herself from her awkward position
by cunning, she would have spoiled her case by acknowledging herself
guilty. But Helene, like a really great man who can do whatever
he pleases, at once assumed her own position to be correct, as she
sincerely believed it to be, and that everyone else was to blame.

The first time the young foreigner allowed himself to reproach her, she
lifted her beautiful head and, half turning to him, said firmly: "That's
just like a man--selfish and cruel! I expected nothing else. A woman
sacrifices herself for you, she suffers, and this is her reward! What
right have you, monseigneur, to demand an account of my attachments and
friendships? He is a man who has been more than a father to me!" The
prince was about to say something, but Helene interrupted him.

"Well, yes," said she, "it may be that he has other sentiments for me
than those of a father, but that is not a reason for me to shut my door
on him. I am not a man, that I should repay kindness with ingratitude!
Know, monseigneur, that in all that relates to my intimate feelings I
render account only to God and to my conscience," she concluded, laying
her hand on her beautiful, fully expanded bosom and looking up to
heaven.

"But for heaven's sake listen to me!"

"Marry me, and I will be your slave!"

"But that's impossible."

"You won't deign to demean yourself by marrying me, you..." said Helene,
beginning to cry.

The prince tried to comfort her, but Helene, as if quite distraught,
said through her tears that there was nothing to prevent her marrying,
that there were precedents (there were up to that time very few, but
she mentioned Napoleon and some other exalted personages), that she had
never been her husband's wife, and that she had been sacrificed.

"But the law, religion..." said the prince, already yielding.

"The law, religion... What have they been invented for if they can't
arrange that?" said Helene.

The prince was surprised that so simple an idea had not occurred to him,
and he applied for advice to the holy brethren of the Society of Jesus,
with whom he was on intimate terms.

A few days later at one of those enchanting fetes which Helene gave at
her country house on the Stone Island, the charming Monsieur de Jobert,
a man no longer young, with snow white hair and brilliant black eyes,
a Jesuit a robe courte * was presented to her, and in the garden by the
light of the illuminations and to the sound of music talked to her for a
long time of the love of God, of Christ, of the Sacred Heart, and of the
consolations the one true Catholic religion affords in this world and
the next. Helene was touched, and more than once tears rose to her eyes
and to those of Monsieur de Jobert and their voices trembled. A dance,
for which her partner came to seek her, put an end to her discourse with
her future directeur de conscience, but the next evening Monsieur de
Jobert came to see Helene when she was alone, and after that often came
again.


    * Lay member of the Society of Jesus.


One day he took the countess to a Roman Catholic church, where she knelt
down before the altar to which she was led. The enchanting, middle-aged
Frenchman laid his hands on her head and, as she herself afterward
described it, she felt something like a fresh breeze wafted into her
soul. It was explained to her that this was la grace.

After that a long-frocked abbe was brought to her. She confessed to
him, and he absolved her from her sins. Next day she received a box
containing the Sacred Host, which was left at her house for her to
partake of. A few days later Helene learned with pleasure that she had
now been admitted to the true Catholic Church and that in a few days the
Pope himself would hear of her and would send her a certain document.

All that was done around her and to her at this time, all the attention
devoted to her by so many clever men and expressed in such pleasant,
refined ways, and the state of dove-like purity she was now in (she wore
only white dresses and white ribbons all that time) gave her pleasure,
but her pleasure did not cause her for a moment to forget her aim. And
as it always happens in contests of cunning that a stupid person gets
the better of cleverer ones, Helene--having realized that the main
object of all these words and all this trouble was, after converting her
to Catholicism, to obtain money from her for Jesuit institutions (as to
which she received indications)-before parting with her money insisted
that the various operations necessary to free her from her husband
should be performed. In her view the aim of every religion was merely
to preserve certain proprieties while affording satisfaction to
human desires. And with this aim, in one of her talks with her Father
Confessor, she insisted on an answer to the question, in how far was she
bound by her marriage?

They were sitting in the twilight by a window in the drawing room.
The scent of flowers came in at the window. Helene was wearing a white
dress, transparent over her shoulders and bosom. The abbe, a well-fed
man with a plump, clean-shaven chin, a pleasant firm mouth, and white
hands meekly folded on his knees, sat close to Helene and, with a
subtle smile on his lips and a peaceful look of delight at her beauty,
occasionally glanced at her face as he explained his opinion on the
subject. Helene with an uneasy smile looked at his curly hair and his
plump, clean-shaven, blackish cheeks and every moment expected the
conversation to take a fresh turn. But the abbe, though he evidently
enjoyed the beauty of his companion, was absorbed in his mastery of the
matter.

The course of the Father Confessor's arguments ran as follows: "Ignorant
of the import of what you were undertaking, you made a vow of conjugal
fidelity to a man who on his part, by entering the married state without
faith in the religious significance of marriage, committed an act of
sacrilege. That marriage lacked the dual significance it should have
had. Yet in spite of this your vow was binding. You swerved from it.
What did you commit by so acting? A venial, or a mortal, sin? A venial
sin, for you acted without evil intention. If now you married again
with the object of bearing children, your sin might be forgiven. But the
question is again a twofold one: firstly..."

But suddenly Helene, who was getting bored, said with one of her
bewitching smiles: "But I think that having espoused the true religion I
cannot be bound by what a false religion laid upon me."

The director of her conscience was astounded at having the case
presented to him thus with the simplicity of Columbus' egg. He was
delighted at the unexpected rapidity of his pupil's progress, but could
not abandon the edifice of argument he had laboriously constructed.

"Let us understand one another, Countess," said he with a smile, and
began refuting his spiritual daughter's arguments.





CHAPTER VII


Helene understood that the question was very simple and easy from
the ecclesiastical point of view, and that her directors were making
difficulties only because they were apprehensive as to how the matter
would be regarded by the secular authorities.

So she decided that it was necessary to prepare the opinion of society.
She provoked the jealousy of the elderly magnate and told him what she
had told her other suitor; that is, she put the matter so that the only
way for him to obtain a right over her was to marry her. The elderly
magnate was at first as much taken aback by this suggestion of marriage
with a woman whose husband was alive, as the younger man had been, but
Helene's imperturbable conviction that it was as simple and natural as
marrying a maiden had its effect on him too. Had Helene herself shown
the least sign of hesitation, shame, or secrecy, her cause would
certainly have been lost; but not only did she show no signs of secrecy
or shame, on the contrary, with good-natured naivete she told her
intimate friends (and these were all Petersburg) that both the prince
and the magnate had proposed to her and that she loved both and was
afraid of grieving either.

A rumor immediately spread in Petersburg, not that Helene wanted to
be divorced from her husband (had such a report spread many would have
opposed so illegal an intention) but simply that the unfortunate and
interesting Helene was in doubt which of the two men she should marry.
The question was no longer whether this was possible, but only which was
the better match and how the matter would be regarded at court. There
were, it is true, some rigid individuals unable to rise to the height of
such a question, who saw in the project a desecration of the sacrament
of marriage, but there were not many such and they remained silent,
while the majority were interested in Helene's good fortune and in the
question which match would be the more advantageous. Whether it was
right or wrong to remarry while one had a husband living they did not
discuss, for that question had evidently been settled by people "wiser
than you or me," as they said, and to doubt the correctness of that
decision would be to risk exposing one's stupidity and incapacity to
live in society.

Only Marya Dmitrievna Akhrosimova, who had come to Petersburg that
summer to see one of her sons, allowed herself plainly to express
an opinion contrary to the general one. Meeting Helene at a ball she
stopped her in the middle of the room and, amid general silence, said
in her gruff voice: "So wives of living men have started marrying
again! Perhaps you think you have invented a novelty? You have been
forestalled, my dear! It was thought of long ago. It is done in all the
brothels," and with these words Marya Dmitrievna, turning up her wide
sleeves with her usual threatening gesture and glancing sternly round,
moved across the room.

Though people were afraid of Marya Dmitrievna she was regarded in
Petersburg as a buffoon, and so of what she had said they only noticed,
and repeated in a whisper, the one coarse word she had used, supposing
the whole sting of her remark to lie in that word.

Prince Vasili, who of late very often forgot what he had said and
repeated one and the same thing a hundred times, remarked to his
daughter whenever he chanced to see her:

"Helene, I have a word to say to you," and he would lead her
aside, drawing her hand downward. "I have heard of certain projects
concerning... you know. Well my dear child, you know how your father's
heart rejoices to know that you... You have suffered so much.... But, my
dear child, consult only your own heart. That is all I have to say," and
concealing his unvarying emotion he would press his cheek against his
daughter's and move away.

Bilibin, who had not lost his reputation of an exceedingly clever man,
and who was one of the disinterested friends so brilliant a woman as
Helene always has--men friends who can never change into lovers--once
gave her his view of the matter at a small and intimate gathering.

"Listen, Bilibin," said Helene (she always called friends of that sort
by their surnames), and she touched his coat sleeve with her white,
beringed fingers. "Tell me, as you would a sister, what I ought to do.
Which of the two?"

Bilibin wrinkled up the skin over his eyebrows and pondered, with a
smile on his lips.

"You are not taking me unawares, you know," said he. "As a true friend,
I have thought and thought again about your affair. You see, if you
marry the prince"--he meant the younger man--and he crooked one finger,
"you forever lose the chance of marrying the other, and you will
displease the court besides. (You know there is some kind of
connection.) But if you marry the old count you will make his last days
happy, and as widow of the Grand... the prince would no longer be making
a mesalliance by marrying you," and Bilibin smoothed out his forehead.

"That's a true friend!" said Helene beaming, and again touching
Bilibin's sleeve. "But I love them, you know, and don't want to distress
either of them. I would give my life for the happiness of them both."

Bilibin shrugged his shoulders, as much as to say that not even he could
help in that difficulty.

"Une maitresse-femme! * That's what is called putting things squarely.
She would like to be married to all three at the same time," thought he.


    * A masterly woman.


"But tell me, how will your husband look at the matter?" Bilibin asked,
his reputation being so well established that he did not fear to ask so
naive a question. "Will he agree?"

"Oh, he loves me so!" said Helene, who for some reason imagined that
Pierre too loved her. "He will do anything for me."

Bilibin puckered his skin in preparation for something witty.

"Even divorce you?" said he.

Helene laughed.

Among those who ventured to doubt the justifiability of the proposed
marriage was Helene's mother, Princess Kuragina. She was continually
tormented by jealousy of her daughter, and now that jealousy concerned
a subject near to her own heart, she could not reconcile herself to the
idea. She consulted a Russian priest as to the possibility of divorce
and remarriage during a husband's lifetime, and the priest told her that
it was impossible, and to her delight showed her a text in the Gospel
which (as it seemed to him) plainly forbids remarriage while the husband
is alive.

Armed with these arguments, which appeared to her unanswerable, she
drove to her daughter's early one morning so as to find her alone.

Having listened to her mother's objections, Helene smiled blandly and
ironically.

"But it says plainly: 'Whosoever shall marry her that is divorced...'"
said the old princess.

"Ah, Maman, ne dites pas de betises. Vous ne comprenez rien. Dans ma
position j'ai des devoirs," * said Helene changing from Russian, in
which language she always felt that her case did not sound quite clear,
into French which suited it better.


     * "Oh, Mamma, don't talk nonsense! You don't understand
     anything. In my position I have obligations."


"But, my dear...."

"Oh, Mamma, how is it you don't understand that the Holy Father, who has
the right to grant dispensations..."

Just then the lady companion who lived with Helene came in to announce
that His Highness was in the ballroom and wished to see her.

"Non, dites-lui que je ne veux pas le voir, que je suis furieuse contre
lui, parce qu'il m'a manque parole." *


     * "No, tell him I don't wish to see him, I am furious with
     him for not keeping his word to me."


"Comtesse, a tout peche misericorde," * said a fair-haired young man
with a long face and nose, as he entered the room.


    * "Countess, there is mercy for every sin."


The old princess rose respectfully and curtsied. The young man who had
entered took no notice of her. The princess nodded to her daughter and
sidled out of the room.

"Yes, she is right," thought the old princess, all her convictions
dissipated by the appearance of His Highness. "She is right, but how
is it that we in our irrecoverable youth did not know it? Yet it is so
simple," she thought as she got into her carriage.


By the beginning of August Helene's affairs were clearly defined and
she wrote a letter to her husband--who, as she imagined, loved her very
much--informing him of her intention to marry N.N. and of her having
embraced the one true faith, and asking him to carry out all the
formalities necessary for a divorce, which would be explained to him by
the bearer of the letter.


And so I pray God to have you, my friend, in His holy and powerful
keeping--Your friend Helene.


This letter was brought to Pierre's house when he was on the field of
Borodino.





CHAPTER VIII


Toward the end of the battle of Borodino, Pierre, having run down
from Raevski's battery a second time, made his way through a gully to
Knyazkovo with a crowd of soldiers, reached the dressing station, and
seeing blood and hearing cries and groans hurried on, still entangled in
the crowds of soldiers.

The one thing he now desired with his whole soul was to get away quickly
from the terrible sensations amid which he had lived that day and return
to ordinary conditions of life and sleep quietly in a room in his own
bed. He felt that only in the ordinary conditions of life would he
be able to understand himself and all he had seen and felt. But such
ordinary conditions of life were nowhere to be found.

Though shells and bullets did not whistle over the road along which he
was going, still on all sides there was what there had been on the field
of battle. There were still the same suffering, exhausted, and sometimes
strangely indifferent faces, the same blood, the same soldiers'
overcoats, the same sounds of firing which, though distant now, still
aroused terror, and besides this there were the foul air and the dust.

Having gone a couple of miles along the Mozhaysk road, Pierre sat down
by the roadside.

Dusk had fallen, and the roar of guns died away. Pierre lay leaning on
his elbow for a long time, gazing at the shadows that moved past him in
the darkness. He was continually imagining that a cannon ball was flying
toward him with a terrific whizz, and then he shuddered and sat up. He
had no idea how long he had been there. In the middle of the night three
soldiers, having brought some firewood, settled down near him and began
lighting a fire.

The soldiers, who threw sidelong glances at Pierre, got the fire to burn
and placed an iron pot on it into which they broke some dried bread and
put a little dripping. The pleasant odor of greasy viands mingled with
the smell of smoke. Pierre sat up and sighed. The three soldiers were
eating and talking among themselves, taking no notice of him.

"And who may you be?" one of them suddenly asked Pierre, evidently
meaning what Pierre himself had in mind, namely: "If you want to eat
we'll give you some food, only let us know whether you are an honest
man."

"I, I..." said Pierre, feeling it necessary to minimize his social
position as much as possible so as to be nearer to the soldiers and
better understood by them. "By rights I am a militia officer, but my men
are not here. I came to the battle and have lost them."

"There now!" said one of the soldiers.

Another shook his head.

"Would you like a little mash?" the first soldier asked, and handed
Pierre a wooden spoon after licking it clean.

Pierre sat down by the fire and began eating the mash, as they called
the food in the cauldron, and he thought it more delicious than any food
he had ever tasted. As he sat bending greedily over it, helping himself
to large spoonfuls and chewing one after another, his face was lit up by
the fire and the soldiers looked at him in silence.

"Where have you to go to? Tell us!" said one of them.

"To Mozhaysk."

"You're a gentleman, aren't you?"

"Yes."

"And what's your name?"

"Peter Kirilych."

"Well then, Peter Kirilych, come along with us, we'll take you there."

In the total darkness the soldiers walked with Pierre to Mozhaysk.

By the time they got near Mozhaysk and began ascending the steep hill
into the town, the cocks were already crowing. Pierre went on with the
soldiers, quite forgetting that his inn was at the bottom of the hill
and that he had already passed it. He would not soon have remembered
this, such was his state of forgetfulness, had he not halfway up the
hill stumbled upon his groom, who had been to look for him in the
town and was returning to the inn. The groom recognized Pierre in the
darkness by his white hat.

"Your excellency!" he said. "Why, we were beginning to despair! How is
it you are on foot? And where are you going, please?"

"Oh, yes!" said Pierre.

The soldiers stopped.

"So you've found your folk?" said one of them. "Well, good-by, Peter
Kirilych--isn't it?"

"Good-by, Peter Kirilych!" Pierre heard the other voices repeat.

"Good-by!" he said and turned with his groom toward the inn.

"I ought to give them something!" he thought, and felt in his pocket.
"No, better not!" said another, inner voice.

There was not a room to be had at the inn, they were all occupied.
Pierre went out into the yard and, covering himself up head and all, lay
down in his carriage.





CHAPTER IX


Scarcely had Pierre laid his head on the pillow before he felt himself
falling asleep, but suddenly, almost with the distinctness of reality,
he heard the boom, boom, boom of firing, the thud of projectiles, groans
and cries, and smelled blood and powder, and a feeling of horror and
dread of death seized him. Filled with fright he opened his eyes and
lifted his head from under his cloak. All was tranquil in the yard. Only
someone's orderly passed through the gateway, splashing through the mud,
and talked to the innkeeper. Above Pierre's head some pigeons, disturbed
by the movement he had made in sitting up, fluttered under the dark roof
of the penthouse. The whole courtyard was permeated by a strong peaceful
smell of stable yards, delightful to Pierre at that moment. He could see
the clear starry sky between the dark roofs of two penthouses.

"Thank God, there is no more of that!" he thought, covering up his head
again. "Oh, what a terrible thing is fear, and how shamefully I yielded
to it! But they... they were steady and calm all the time, to the
end..." thought he.

They, in Pierre's mind, were the soldiers, those who had been at the
battery, those who had given him food, and those who had prayed before
the icon. They, those strange men he had not previously known, stood out
clearly and sharply from everyone else.

"To be a soldier, just a soldier!" thought Pierre as he fell asleep,
"to enter communal life completely, to be imbued by what makes them what
they are. But how cast off all the superfluous, devilish burden of my
outer man? There was a time when I could have done it. I could have run
away from my father, as I wanted to. Or I might have been sent to serve
as a soldier after the duel with Dolokhov." And the memory of the dinner
at the English Club when he had challenged Dolokhov flashed through
Pierre's mind, and then he remembered his benefactor at Torzhok. And now
a picture of a solemn meeting of the lodge presented itself to his mind.
It was taking place at the English Club and someone near and dear to him
sat at the end of the table. "Yes, that is he! It is my benefactor.
But he died!" thought Pierre. "Yes, he died, and I did not know he was
alive. How sorry I am that he died, and how glad I am that he is alive
again!" On one side of the table sat Anatole, Dolokhov, Nesvitski,
Denisov, and others like them (in his dream the category to which these
men belonged was as clearly defined in his mind as the category of
those he termed they), and he heard those people, Anatole and Dolokhov,
shouting and singing loudly; yet through their shouting the voice of his
benefactor was heard speaking all the time and the sound of his words
was as weighty and uninterrupted as the booming on the battlefield, but
pleasant and comforting. Pierre did not understand what his benefactor
was saying, but he knew (the categories of thoughts were also quite
distinct in his dream) that he was talking of goodness and the
possibility of being what they were. And they with their simple, kind,
firm faces surrounded his benefactor on all sides. But though they were
kindly they did not look at Pierre and did not know him. Wishing to
speak and to attract their attention, he got up, but at that moment his
legs grew cold and bare.

He felt ashamed, and with one arm covered his legs from which his cloak
had in fact slipped. For a moment as he was rearranging his cloak Pierre
opened his eyes and saw the same penthouse roofs, posts, and yard, but
now they were all bluish, lit up, and glittering with frost or dew.

"It is dawn," thought Pierre. "But that's not what I want. I want to
hear and understand my benefactor's words." Again he covered himself up
with his cloak, but now neither the lodge nor his benefactor was there.
There were only thoughts clearly expressed in words, thoughts that
someone was uttering or that he himself was formulating.

Afterwards when he recalled those thoughts Pierre was convinced that
someone outside himself had spoken them, though the impressions of that
day had evoked them. He had never, it seemed to him, been able to think
and express his thoughts like that when awake.

"To endure war is the most difficult subordination of man's freedom to
the law of God," the voice had said. "Simplicity is submission to the
will of God; you cannot escape from Him. And they are simple. They do
not talk, but act. The spoken word is silver but the unspoken is golden.
Man can be master of nothing while he fears death, but he who does not
fear it possesses all. If there were no suffering, man would not know
his limitations, would not know himself. The hardest thing (Pierre went
on thinking, or hearing, in his dream) is to be able in your soul to
unite the meaning of all. To unite all?" he asked himself. "No, not
to unite. Thoughts cannot be united, but to harness all these thoughts
together is what we need! Yes, one must harness them, must harness
them!" he repeated to himself with inward rapture, feeling that these
words and they alone expressed what he wanted to say and solved the
question that tormented him.

"Yes, one must harness, it is time to harness."

"Time to harness, time to harness, your excellency! Your excellency!"
some voice was repeating. "We must harness, it is time to harness...."

It was the voice of the groom, trying to wake him. The sun shone
straight into Pierre's face. He glanced at the dirty innyard in the
middle of which soldiers were watering their lean horses at the pump
while carts were passing out of the gate. Pierre turned away with
repugnance, and closing his eyes quickly fell back on the carriage seat.
"No, I don't want that, I don't want to see and understand that. I want
to understand what was revealing itself to me in my dream. One second
more and I should have understood it all! But what am I to do? Harness,
but how can I harness everything?" and Pierre felt with horror that the
meaning of all he had seen and thought in the dream had been destroyed.

The groom, the coachman, and the innkeeper told Pierre that an officer
had come with news that the French were already near Mozhaysk and that
our men were leaving it.

Pierre got up and, having told them to harness and overtake him, went on
foot through the town.

The troops were moving on, leaving about ten thousand wounded behind
them. There were wounded in the yards, at the windows of the houses, and
the streets were crowded with them. In the streets, around carts that
were to take some of the wounded away, shouts, curses, and blows could
be heard. Pierre offered the use of his carriage, which had overtaken
him, to a wounded general he knew, and drove with him to Moscow. On the
way Pierre was told of the death of his brother-in-law Anatole and of
that of Prince Andrew.





CHAPTER X


On the thirteenth of August Pierre reached Moscow. Close to the gates of
the city he was met by Count Rostopchin's adjutant.

"We have been looking for you everywhere," said the adjutant. "The count
wants to see you particularly. He asks you to come to him at once on a
very important matter."

Without going home, Pierre took a cab and drove to see the Moscow
commander in chief.

Count Rostopchin had only that morning returned to town from his summer
villa at Sokolniki. The anteroom and reception room of his house
were full of officials who had been summoned or had come for orders.
Vasilchikov and Platov had already seen the count and explained to him
that it was impossible to defend Moscow and that it would have to be
surrendered. Though this news was being concealed from the inhabitants,
the officials--the heads of the various government departments--knew
that Moscow would soon be in the enemy's hands, just as Count Rostopchin
himself knew it, and to escape personal responsibility they had all
come to the governor to ask how they were to deal with their various
departments.

As Pierre was entering the reception room a courier from the army came
out of Rostopchin's private room.

In answer to questions with which he was greeted, the courier made a
despairing gesture with his hand and passed through the room.

While waiting in the reception room Pierre with weary eyes watched the
various officials, old and young, military and civilian, who were there.
They all seemed dissatisfied and uneasy. Pierre went up to a group of
men, one of whom he knew. After greeting Pierre they continued their
conversation.

"If they're sent out and brought back again later on it will do no harm,
but as things are now one can't answer for anything."

"But you see what he writes..." said another, pointing to a printed
sheet he held in his hand.

"That's another matter. That's necessary for the people," said the
first.

"What is it?" asked Pierre.

"Oh, it's a fresh broadsheet."

Pierre took it and began reading.


His Serene Highness has passed through Mozhaysk in order to join up with
the troops moving toward him and has taken up a strong position where
the enemy will not soon attack him. Forty eight guns with ammunition
have been sent him from here, and his Serene Highness says he will
defend Moscow to the last drop of blood and is even ready to fight in
the streets. Do not be upset, brothers, that the law courts are closed;
things have to be put in order, and we will deal with villains in our
own way! When the time comes I shall want both town and peasant lads and
will raise the cry a day or two beforehand, but they are not wanted yet
so I hold my peace. An ax will be useful, a hunting spear not bad, but a
three-pronged fork will be best of all: a Frenchman is no heavier than a
sheaf of rye. Tomorrow after dinner I shall take the Iberian icon of
the Mother of God to the wounded in the Catherine Hospital where we will
have some water blessed. That will help them to get well quicker. I,
too, am well now: one of my eyes was sore but now I am on the lookout
with both.


"But military men have told me that it is impossible to fight in the
town," said Pierre, "and that the position..."

"Well, of course! That's what we were saying," replied the first
speaker.

"And what does he mean by 'One of my eyes was sore but now I am on the
lookout with both'?" asked Pierre.

"The count had a sty," replied the adjutant smiling, "and was very much
upset when I told him people had come to ask what was the matter with
him. By the by, Count," he added suddenly, addressing Pierre with a
smile, "we heard that you have family troubles and that the countess,
your wife..."

"I have heard nothing," Pierre replied unconcernedly. "But what have you
heard?"

"Oh, well, you know people often invent things. I only say what I
heard."

"But what did you hear?"

"Well, they say," continued the adjutant with the same smile, "that
the countess, your wife, is preparing to go abroad. I expect it's
nonsense...."

"Possibly," remarked Pierre, looking about him absent-mindedly. "And who
is that?" he asked, indicating a short old man in a clean blue peasant
overcoat, with a big snow-white beard and eyebrows and a ruddy face.

"He? That's a tradesman, that is to say, he's the restaurant
keeper, Vereshchagin. Perhaps you have heard of that affair with the
proclamation."

"Oh, so that is Vereshchagin!" said Pierre, looking at the firm, calm
face of the old man and seeking any indication of his being a traitor.

"That's not he himself, that's the father of the fellow who wrote the
proclamation," said the adjutant. "The young man is in prison and I
expect it will go hard with him."

An old gentleman wearing a star and another official, a German wearing a
cross round his neck, approached the speaker.

"It's a complicated story, you know," said the adjutant. "That
proclamation appeared about two months ago. The count was informed of
it. He gave orders to investigate the matter. Gabriel Ivanovich
here made the inquiries. The proclamation had passed through exactly
sixty-three hands. He asked one, 'From whom did you get it?' 'From
so-and-so.' He went to the next one. 'From whom did you get it?' and so
on till he reached Vereshchagin, a half educated tradesman, you know, 'a
pet of a trader,'" said the adjutant smiling. "They asked him, 'Who gave
it you?' And the point is that we knew whom he had it from. He could
only have had it from the Postmaster. But evidently they had come to
some understanding. He replied: 'From no one; I made it up myself.'
They threatened and questioned him, but he stuck to that: 'I made it
up myself.' And so it was reported to the count, who sent for the man.
'From whom did you get the proclamation?' 'I wrote it myself.' Well, you
know the count," said the adjutant cheerfully, with a smile of pride,
"he flared up dreadfully--and just think of the fellow's audacity,
lying, and obstinacy!"

 "And the count wanted him to say it was from Klyucharev? I
understand!" said Pierre.

"Not at all," rejoined the adjutant in dismay. "Klyucharev had his own
sins to answer for without that and that is why he has been banished.
But the point is that the count was much annoyed. 'How could you have
written it yourself?' said he, and he took up the Hamburg Gazette that
was lying on the table. 'Here it is! You did not write it yourself but
translated it, and translated it abominably, because you don't even know
French, you fool.' And what do you think? 'No,' said he, 'I have not
read any papers, I made it up myself.' 'If that's so, you're a traitor
and I'll have you tried, and you'll be hanged! Say from whom you had
it.' 'I have seen no papers, I made it up myself.' And that was the end
of it. The count had the father fetched, but the fellow stuck to it.
He was sent for trial and condemned to hard labor, I believe. Now the
father has come to intercede for him. But he's a good-for-nothing lad!
You know that sort of tradesman's son, a dandy and lady-killer. He
attended some lectures somewhere and imagines that the devil is no match
for him. That's the sort of fellow he is. His father keeps a cookshop
here by the Stone Bridge, and you know there was a large icon of God
Almighty painted with a scepter in one hand and an orb in the other.
Well, he took that icon home with him for a few days and what did he do?
He found some scoundrel of a painter..."





CHAPTER XI


In the middle of this fresh tale Pierre was summoned to the commander in
chief.

When he entered the private room Count Rostopchin, puckering his face,
was rubbing his forehead and eyes with his hand. A short man was saying
something, but when Pierre entered he stopped speaking and went out.

"Ah, how do you do, great warrior?" said Rostopchin as soon as the short
man had left the room. "We have heard of your prowess. But that's not
the point. Between ourselves, mon cher, do you belong to the Masons?" he
went on severely, as though there were something wrong about it which
he nevertheless intended to pardon. Pierre remained silent. "I am well
informed, my friend, but I am aware that there are Masons and I hope
that you are not one of those who on pretense of saving mankind wish to
ruin Russia."

"Yes, I am a Mason," Pierre replied.

"There, you see, mon cher! I expect you know that Messrs. Speranski and
Magnitski have been deported to their proper place. Mr. Klyucharev has
been treated in the same way, and so have others who on the plea of
building up the temple of Solomon have tried to destroy the temple of
their fatherland. You can understand that there are reasons for this and
that I could not have exiled the Postmaster had he not been a harmful
person. It has now come to my knowledge that you lent him your carriage
for his removal from town, and that you have even accepted papers from
him for safe custody. I like you and don't wish you any harm and--as
you are only half my age--I advise you, as a father would, to cease
all communication with men of that stamp and to leave here as soon as
possible."

"But what did Klyucharev do wrong, Count?" asked Pierre.

"That is for me to know, but not for you to ask," shouted Rostopchin.

"If he is accused of circulating Napoleon's proclamation it is not
proved that he did so," said Pierre without looking at Rostopchin, "and
Vereshchagin..."

"There we are!" Rostopchin shouted at Pierre louder than before,
frowning suddenly. "Vereshchagin is a renegade and a traitor who will
be punished as he deserves," said he with the vindictive heat with which
people speak when recalling an insult. "But I did not summon you to
discuss my actions, but to give you advice--or an order if you prefer
it. I beg you to leave the town and break off all communication
with such men as Klyucharev. And I will knock the nonsense out of
anybody"--but probably realizing that he was shouting at Bezukhov who
so far was not guilty of anything, he added, taking Pierre's hand in a
friendly manner, "We are on the eve of a public disaster and I haven't
time to be polite to everybody who has business with me. My head is
sometimes in a whirl. Well, mon cher, what are you doing personally?"

"Why, nothing," answered Pierre without raising his eyes or changing the
thoughtful expression of his face.

The count frowned.

"A word of friendly advice, mon cher. Be off as soon as you can, that's
all I have to tell you. Happy he who has ears to hear. Good-by, my dear
fellow. Oh, by the by!" he shouted through the doorway after Pierre,
"is it true that the countess has fallen into the clutches of the holy
fathers of the Society of Jesus?"

Pierre did not answer and left Rostopchin's room more sullen and angry
than he had ever before shown himself.

When he reached home it was already getting dark. Some eight people had
come to see him that evening: the secretary of a committee, the colonel
of his battalion, his steward, his major-domo, and various petitioners.
They all had business with Pierre and wanted decisions from him. Pierre
did not understand and was not interested in any of these questions and
only answered them in order to get rid of these people. When left alone
at last he opened and read his wife's letter.

"They, the soldiers at the battery, Prince Andrew killed... that old
man... Simplicity is submission to God. Suffering is necessary... the
meaning of all... one must harness... my wife is getting married... One
must forget and understand..." And going to his bed he threw himself on
it without undressing and immediately fell asleep.

When he awoke next morning the major-domo came to inform him that a
special messenger, a police officer, had come from Count Rostopchin to
know whether Count Bezukhov had left or was leaving the town.

A dozen persons who had business with Pierre were awaiting him in the
drawing room. Pierre dressed hurriedly and, instead of going to see
them, went to the back porch and out through the gate.

From that time till the end of the destruction of Moscow no one of
Bezukhov's household, despite all the search they made, saw Pierre again
or knew where he was.





CHAPTER XII


The Rostovs remained in Moscow till the first of September, that is,
till the eve of the enemy's entry into the city.

After Petya had joined Obolenski's regiment of Cossacks and left for
Belaya Tserkov where that regiment was forming, the countess was seized
with terror. The thought that both her sons were at the war, had both
gone from under her wing, that today or tomorrow either or both of them
might be killed like the three sons of one of her acquaintances, struck
her that summer for the first time with cruel clearness. She tried to
get Nicholas back and wished to go herself to join Petya, or to get
him an appointment somewhere in Petersburg, but neither of these proved
possible. Petya could not return unless his regiment did so or unless
he was transferred to another regiment on active service. Nicholas was
somewhere with the army and had not sent a word since his last letter,
in which he had given a detailed account of his meeting with Princess
Mary. The countess did not sleep at night, or when she did fall asleep
dreamed that she saw her sons lying dead. After many consultations and
conversations, the count at last devised means to tranquillize her. He
got Petya transferred from Obolenski's regiment to Bezukhov's, which was
in training near Moscow. Though Petya would remain in the service, this
transfer would give the countess the consolation of seeing at least one
of her sons under her wing, and she hoped to arrange matters for her
Petya so as not to let him go again, but always get him appointed to
places where he could not possibly take part in a battle. As long as
Nicholas alone was in danger the countess imagined that she loved her
first-born more than all her other children and even reproached herself
for it; but when her youngest: the scapegrace who had been bad at
lessons, was always breaking things in the house and making himself a
nuisance to everybody, that snub-nosed Petya with his merry black eyes
and fresh rosy cheeks where soft down was just beginning to show--when
he was thrown amid those big, dreadful, cruel men who were fighting
somewhere about something and apparently finding pleasure in it--then
his mother thought she loved him more, much more, than all her other
children. The nearer the time came for Petya to return, the more uneasy
grew the countess. She began to think she would never live to see such
happiness. The presence of Sonya, of her beloved Natasha, or even of
her husband irritated her. "What do I want with them? I want no one but
Petya," she thought.

At the end of August the Rostovs received another letter from Nicholas.
He wrote from the province of Voronezh where he had been sent to procure
remounts, but that letter did not set the countess at ease. Knowing that
one son was out of danger she became the more anxious about Petya.

Though by the twentieth of August nearly all the Rostovs' acquaintances
had left Moscow, and though everybody tried to persuade the countess to
get away as quickly as possible, she would not hear of leaving before
her treasure, her adored Petya, returned. On the twenty-eighth of August
he arrived. The passionate tenderness with which his mother received him
did not please the sixteen-year-old officer. Though she concealed from
him her intention of keeping him under her wing, Petya guessed her
designs, and instinctively fearing that he might give way to emotion
when with her--might "become womanish" as he termed it to himself--he
treated her coldly, avoided her, and during his stay in Moscow attached
himself exclusively to Natasha for whom he had always had a particularly
brotherly tenderness, almost lover-like.

Owing to the count's customary carelessness nothing was ready for their
departure by the twenty-eighth of August and the carts that were to
come from their Ryazan and Moscow estates to remove their household
belongings did not arrive till the thirtieth.

From the twenty-eighth till the thirty-first all Moscow was in a bustle
and commotion. Every day thousands of men wounded at Borodino were
brought in by the Dorogomilov gate and taken to various parts of Moscow,
and thousands of carts conveyed the inhabitants and their possessions
out by the other gates. In spite of Rostopchin's broadsheets, or because
of them or independently of them, the strangest and most contradictory
rumors were current in the town. Some said that no one was to be allowed
to leave the city, others on the contrary said that all the icons had
been taken out of the churches and everybody was to be ordered to leave.
Some said there had been another battle after Borodino at which the
French had been routed, while others on the contrary reported that the
Russian army had been destroyed. Some talked about the Moscow militia
which, preceded by the clergy, would go to the Three Hills; others
whispered that Augustin had been forbidden to leave, that traitors had
been seized, that the peasants were rioting and robbing people on their
way from Moscow, and so on. But all this was only talk; in reality
(though the Council of Fili, at which it was decided to abandon Moscow,
had not yet been held) both those who went away and those who remained
behind felt, though they did not show it, that Moscow would certainly
be abandoned, and that they ought to get away as quickly as possible and
save their belongings. It was felt that everything would suddenly break
up and change, but up to the first of September nothing had done so.
As a criminal who is being led to execution knows that he must die
immediately, but yet looks about him and straightens the cap that is
awry on his head, so Moscow involuntarily continued its wonted life,
though it knew that the time of its destruction was near when the
conditions of life to which its people were accustomed to submit would
be completely upset.

During the three days preceding the occupation of Moscow the whole
Rostov family was absorbed in various activities. The head of the
family, Count Ilya Rostov, continually drove about the city collecting
the current rumors from all sides and gave superficial and hasty orders
at home about the preparations for their departure.

The countess watched the things being packed, was dissatisfied with
everything, was constantly in pursuit of Petya who was always running
away from her, and was jealous of Natasha with whom he spent all his
time. Sonya alone directed the practical side of matters by getting
things packed. But of late Sonya had been particularly sad and silent.
Nicholas' letter in which he mentioned Princess Mary had elicited, in
her presence, joyous comments from the countess, who saw an intervention
of Providence in this meeting of the princess and Nicholas.

"I was never pleased at Bolkonski's engagement to Natasha," said the
countess, "but I always wanted Nicholas to marry the princess, and had a
presentiment that it would happen. What a good thing it would be!"

Sonya felt that this was true: that the only possibility of retrieving
the Rostovs' affairs was by Nicholas marrying a rich woman, and that the
princess was a good match. It was very bitter for her. But despite
her grief, or perhaps just because of it, she took on herself all the
difficult work of directing the storing and packing of their things and
was busy for whole days. The count and countess turned to her when they
had any orders to give. Petya and Natasha on the contrary, far from
helping their parents, were generally a nuisance and a hindrance to
everyone. Almost all day long the house resounded with their running
feet, their cries, and their spontaneous laughter. They laughed and were
gay not because there was any reason to laugh, but because gaiety and
mirth were in their hearts and so everything that happened was a cause
for gaiety and laughter to them. Petya was in high spirits because
having left home a boy he had returned (as everybody told him) a fine
young man, because he was at home, because he had left Belaya Tserkov
where there was no hope of soon taking part in a battle and had come to
Moscow where there was to be fighting in a few days, and chiefly because
Natasha, whose lead he always followed, was in high spirits. Natasha was
gay because she had been sad too long and now nothing reminded her of
the cause of her sadness, and because she was feeling well. She was also
happy because she had someone to adore her: the adoration of others
was a lubricant the wheels of her machine needed to make them run
freely--and Petya adored her. Above all, they were gay because there was
a war near Moscow, there would be fighting at the town gates, arms were
being given out, everybody was escaping--going away somewhere, and
in general something extraordinary was happening, and that is always
exciting, especially to the young.





CHAPTER XIII


On Saturday, the thirty-first of August, everything in the Rostovs'
house seemed topsy-turvy. All the doors were open, all the furniture was
being carried out or moved about, and the mirrors and pictures had been
taken down. There were trunks in the rooms, and hay, wrapping paper, and
ropes were scattered about. The peasants and house serfs carrying out
the things were treading heavily on the parquet floors. The yard was
crowded with peasant carts, some loaded high and already corded up,
others still empty.

The voices and footsteps of the many servants and of the peasants who
had come with the carts resounded as they shouted to one another in
the yard and in the house. The count had been out since morning. The
countess had a headache brought on by all the noise and turmoil and was
lying down in the new sitting room with a vinegar compress on her head.
Petya was not at home, he had gone to visit a friend with whom he meant
to obtain a transfer from the militia to the active army. Sonya was in
the ballroom looking after the packing of the glass and china. Natasha
was sitting on the floor of her dismantled room with dresses, ribbons,
and scarves strewn all about her, gazing fixedly at the floor and
holding in her hands the old ball dress (already out of fashion) which
she had worn at her first Petersburg ball.

Natasha was ashamed of doing nothing when everyone else was so busy, and
several times that morning had tried to set to work, but her heart was
not in it, and she could not and did not know how to do anything except
with all her heart and all her might. For a while she had stood beside
Sonya while the china was being packed and tried to help, but soon gave
it up and went to her room to pack her own things. At first she found it
amusing to give away dresses and ribbons to the maids, but when that was
done and what was left had still to be packed, she found it dull.

"Dunyasha, you pack! You will, won't you, dear?" And when Dunyasha
willingly promised to do it all for her, Natasha sat down on the floor,
took her old ball dress, and fell into a reverie quite unrelated to what
ought to have occupied her thoughts now. She was roused from her reverie
by the talk of the maids in the next room (which was theirs) and by the
sound of their hurried footsteps going to the back porch. Natasha got
up and looked out of the window. An enormously long row of carts full of
wounded men had stopped in the street.

The housekeeper, the old nurse, the cooks, coachmen, maids, footmen,
postilions, and scullions stood at the gate, staring at the wounded.

Natasha, throwing a clean pocket handkerchief over her hair and holding
an end of it in each hand, went out into the street.

The former housekeeper, old Mavra Kuzminichna, had stepped out of the
crowd by the gate, gone up to a cart with a hood constructed of bast
mats, and was speaking to a pale young officer who lay inside.
Natasha moved a few steps forward and stopped shyly, still holding her
handkerchief, and listened to what the housekeeper was saying.

"Then you have nobody in Moscow?" she was saying. "You would be more
comfortable somewhere in a house... in ours, for instance... the family
are leaving."

"I don't know if it would be allowed," replied the officer in a weak
voice. "Here is our commanding officer... ask him," and he pointed to a
stout major who was walking back along the street past the row of carts.

Natasha glanced with frightened eyes at the face of the wounded officer
and at once went to meet the major.

"May the wounded men stay in our house?" she asked.

The major raised his hand to his cap with a smile.

"Which one do you want, Ma'am'selle?" said he, screwing up his eyes and
smiling.

Natasha quietly repeated her question, and her face and whole
manner were so serious, though she was still holding the ends of
her handkerchief, that the major ceased smiling and after some
reflection--as if considering in how far the thing was possible--replied
in the affirmative.

"Oh yes, why not? They may," he said.

With a slight inclination of her head, Natasha stepped back quickly to
Mavra Kuzminichna, who stood talking compassionately to the officer.

"They may. He says they may!" whispered Natasha.

The cart in which the officer lay was turned into the Rostovs' yard,
and dozens of carts with wounded men began at the invitation of the
townsfolk to turn into the yards and to draw up at the entrances of the
houses in Povarskaya Street. Natasha was evidently pleased to be dealing
with new people outside the ordinary routine of her life. She and Mavra
Kuzminichna tried to get as many of the wounded as possible into their
yard.

"Your Papa must be told, though," said Mavra Kuzminichna.

"Never mind, never mind, what does it matter? For one day we can move
into the drawing room. They can have all our half of the house."

"There now, young lady, you do take things into your head! Even if we
put them into the wing, the men's room, or the nurse's room, we must ask
permission."

"Well, I'll ask."

Natasha ran into the house and went on tiptoe through the half-open door
into the sitting room, where there was a smell of vinegar and Hoffman's
drops.

"Are you asleep, Mamma?"

"Oh, what sleep-?" said the countess, waking up just as she was dropping
into a doze.

"Mamma darling!" said Natasha, kneeling by her mother and bringing her
face close to her mother's, "I am sorry, forgive me, I'll never do it
again; I woke you up! Mavra Kuzminichna has sent me: they have brought
some wounded here--officers. Will you let them come? They have nowhere
to go. I knew you'd let them come!" she said quickly all in one breath.

"What officers? Whom have they brought? I don't understand anything
about it," said the countess.

Natasha laughed, and the countess too smiled slightly.

"I knew you'd give permission... so I'll tell them," and, having kissed
her mother, Natasha got up and went to the door.

In the hall she met her father, who had returned with bad news.

"We've stayed too long!" said the count with involuntary vexation. "The
Club is closed and the police are leaving."

"Papa, is it all right--I've invited some of the wounded into the
house?" said Natasha.

"Of course it is," he answered absently. "That's not the point. I beg
you not to indulge in trifles now, but to help to pack, and tomorrow we
must go, go, go!...."

And the count gave a similar order to the major-domo and the servants.

At dinner Petya having returned home told them the news he had heard.
He said the people had been getting arms in the Kremlin, and that though
Rostopchin's broadsheet had said that he would sound a call two or three
days in advance, the order had certainly already been given for everyone
to go armed to the Three Hills tomorrow, and that there would be a big
battle there.

The countess looked with timid horror at her son's eager, excited face
as he said this. She realized that if she said a word about his not
going to the battle (she knew he enjoyed the thought of the impending
engagement) he would say something about men, honor, and the
fatherland--something senseless, masculine, and obstinate which there
would be no contradicting, and her plans would be spoiled; and so,
hoping to arrange to leave before then and take Petya with her as their
protector and defender, she did not answer him, but after dinner called
the count aside and implored him with tears to take her away quickly,
that very night if possible. With a woman's involuntary loving cunning
she, who till then had not shown any alarm, said that she would die of
fright if they did not leave that very night. Without any pretense she
was now afraid of everything.





CHAPTER XIV


Madame Schoss, who had been out to visit her daughter, increased the
countess' fears still more by telling what she had seen at a spirit
dealer's in Myasnitski Street. When returning by that street she had
been unable to pass because of a drunken crowd rioting in front of
the shop. She had taken a cab and driven home by a side street and the
cabman had told her that the people were breaking open the barrels at
the drink store, having received orders to do so.

After dinner the whole Rostov household set to work with enthusiastic
haste packing their belongings and preparing for their departure. The
old count, suddenly setting to work, kept passing from the yard to the
house and back again, shouting confused instructions to the hurrying
people, and flurrying them still more. Petya directed things in the
yard. Sonya, owing to the count's contradictory orders, lost her head
and did not know what to do. The servants ran noisily about the house
and yard, shouting and disputing. Natasha, with the ardor characteristic
of all she did suddenly set to work too. At first her intervention in
the business of packing was received skeptically. Everybody expected
some prank from her and did not wish to obey her; but she resolutely
and passionately demanded obedience, grew angry and nearly cried because
they did not heed her, and at last succeeded in making them believe her.
Her first exploit, which cost her immense effort and established her
authority, was the packing of the carpets. The count had valuable
Gobelin tapestries and Persian carpets in the house. When Natasha set
to work two cases were standing open in the ballroom, one almost full
up with crockery, the other with carpets. There was also much china
standing on the tables, and still more was being brought in from the
storeroom. A third case was needed and servants had gone to fetch it.

"Sonya, wait a bit--we'll pack everything into these," said Natasha.

"You can't, Miss, we have tried to," said the butler's assistant.

"No, wait a minute, please."

And Natasha began rapidly taking out of the case dishes and plates
wrapped in paper.

"The dishes must go in here among the carpets," said she.

"Why, it's a mercy if we can get the carpets alone into three cases,"
said the butler's assistant.

"Oh, wait, please!" And Natasha began rapidly and deftly sorting out the
things. "These aren't needed," said she, putting aside some plates of
Kiev ware. "These--yes, these must go among the carpets," she said,
referring to the Saxony china dishes.

"Don't, Natasha! Leave it alone! We'll get it all packed," urged Sonya
reproachfully.

"What a young lady she is!" remarked the major-domo.

But Natasha would not give in. She turned everything out and began
quickly repacking, deciding that the inferior Russian carpets and
unnecessary crockery should not be taken at all. When everything had
been taken out of the cases, they recommenced packing, and it turned
out that when the cheaper things not worth taking had nearly all been
rejected, the valuable ones really did all go into the two cases. Only
the lid of the case containing the carpets would not shut down. A few
more things might have been taken out, but Natasha insisted on having
her own way. She packed, repacked, pressed, made the butler's assistant
and Petya--whom she had drawn into the business of packing--press on the
lid, and made desperate efforts herself.

"That's enough, Natasha," said Sonya. "I see you were right, but just
take out the top one."

"I won't!" cried Natasha, with one hand holding back the hair that hung
over her perspiring face, while with the other she pressed down the
carpets. "Now press, Petya! Press, Vasilich, press hard!" she cried.

The carpets yielded and the lid closed; Natasha, clapping her hands,
screamed with delight and tears fell from her eyes. But this only
lasted a moment. She at once set to work afresh and they now trusted her
completely. The count was not angry even when they told him that Natasha
had countermanded an order of his, and the servants now came to her
to ask whether a cart was sufficiently loaded, and whether it might
be corded up. Thanks to Natasha's directions the work now went on
expeditiously, unnecessary things were left, and the most valuable
packed as compactly as possible.

But hard as they all worked till quite late that night, they could not
get everything packed. The countess had fallen asleep and the count,
having put off their departure till next morning, went to bed.

Sonya and Natasha slept in the sitting room without undressing.

That night another wounded man was driven down the Povarskaya, and Mavra
Kuzminichna, who was standing at the gate, had him brought into the
Rostovs' yard. Mavra Kuzminichna concluded that he was a very important
man. He was being conveyed in a caleche with a raised hood, and was
quite covered by an apron. On the box beside the driver sat a venerable
old attendant. A doctor and two soldiers followed the carriage in a
cart.

"Please come in here. The masters are going away and the whole house
will be empty," said the old woman to the old attendant.

"Well, perhaps," said he with a sigh. "We don't expect to get him home
alive! We have a house of our own in Moscow, but it's a long way from
here, and there's nobody living in it."

"Do us the honor to come in, there's plenty of everything in the
master's house. Come in," said Mavra Kuzminichna. "Is he very ill?" she
asked.

The attendant made a hopeless gesture.

"We don't expect to get him home! We must ask the doctor."

And the old servant got down from the box and went up to the cart.

"All right!" said the doctor.

The old servant returned to the caleche, looked into it, shook his
head disconsolately, told the driver to turn into the yard, and stopped
beside Mavra Kuzminichna.

"O, Lord Jesus Christ!" she murmured.

She invited them to take the wounded man into the house.

"The masters won't object..." she said.

But they had to avoid carrying the man upstairs, and so they took him
into the wing and put him in the room that had been Madame Schoss'.

This wounded man was Prince Andrew Bolkonski.





CHAPTER XV


Moscow's last day had come. It was a clear bright autumn day, a Sunday.
The church bells everywhere were ringing for service, just as usual on
Sundays. Nobody seemed yet to realize what awaited the city.

Only two things indicated the social condition of Moscow--the rabble,
that is the poor people, and the price of commodities. An enormous crowd
of factory hands, house serfs, and peasants, with whom some officials,
seminarists, and gentry were mingled, had gone early that morning to
the Three Hills. Having waited there for Rostopchin who did not turn
up, they became convinced that Moscow would be surrendered, and then
dispersed all about the town to the public houses and cookshops. Prices
too that day indicated the state of affairs. The price of weapons, of
gold, of carts and horses, kept rising, but the value of paper money and
city articles kept falling, so that by midday there were instances of
carters removing valuable goods, such as cloth, and receiving in payment
a half of what they carted, while peasant horses were fetching five
hundred rubles each, and furniture, mirrors, and bronzes were being
given away for nothing.

In the Rostovs' staid old-fashioned house the dissolution of former
conditions of life was but little noticeable. As to the serfs the only
indication was that three out of their huge retinue disappeared
during the night, but nothing was stolen; and as to the value of their
possessions, the thirty peasant carts that had come in from their
estates and which many people envied proved to be extremely valuable and
they were offered enormous sums of money for them. Not only were huge
sums offered for the horses and carts, but on the previous evening and
early in the morning of the first of September, orderlies and servants
sent by wounded officers came to the Rostovs' and wounded men dragged
themselves there from the Rostovs' and from neighboring houses where
they were accommodated, entreating the servants to try to get them
a lift out of Moscow. The major-domo to whom these entreaties were
addressed, though he was sorry for the wounded, resolutely refused,
saying that he dare not even mention the matter to the count. Pity these
wounded men as one might, it was evident that if they were given one
cart there would be no reason to refuse another, or all the carts and
one's own carriages as well. Thirty carts could not save all the wounded
and in the general catastrophe one could not disregard oneself and one's
own family. So thought the major-domo on his master's behalf.

On waking up that morning Count Ilya Rostov left his bedroom softly, so
as not to wake the countess who had fallen asleep only toward morning,
and came out to the porch in his lilac silk dressing gown. In the yard
stood the carts ready corded. The carriages were at the front porch.
The major-domo stood at the porch talking to an elderly orderly and to
a pale young officer with a bandaged arm. On seeing the count the
major-domo made a significant and stern gesture to them both to go away.

"Well, Vasilich, is everything ready?" asked the count, and stroking his
bald head he looked good-naturedly at the officer and the orderly and
nodded to them. (He liked to see new faces.)

"We can harness at once, your excellency."

"Well, that's right. As soon as the countess wakes we'll be off, God
willing! What is it, gentlemen?" he added, turning to the officer. "Are
you staying in my house?"

The officer came nearer and suddenly his face flushed crimson.

"Count, be so good as to allow me... for God's sake, to get into some
corner of one of your carts! I have nothing here with me.... I shall be
all right on a loaded cart..."

Before the officer had finished speaking the orderly made the same
request on behalf of his master.

"Oh, yes, yes, yes!" said the count hastily. "I shall be very pleased,
very pleased. Vasilich, you'll see to it. Just unload one or two carts.
Well, what of it... do what's necessary..." said the count, muttering
some indefinite order.

But at the same moment an expression of warm gratitude on the officer's
face had already sealed the order. The count looked around him. In the
yard, at the gates, at the window of the wings, wounded officers and
their orderlies were to be seen. They were all looking at the count and
moving toward the porch.

"Please step into the gallery, your excellency," said the major-domo.
"What are your orders about the pictures?"

The count went into the house with him, repeating his order not to
refuse the wounded who asked for a lift.

"Well, never mind, some of the things can be unloaded," he added in a
soft, confidential voice, as though afraid of being overheard.

At nine o'clock the countess woke up, and Matrena Timofeevna, who had
been her lady's maid before her marriage and now performed a sort of
chief gendarme's duty for her, came to say that Madame Schoss was much
offended and the young ladies' summer dresses could not be left behind.
On inquiry, the countess learned that Madame Schoss was offended because
her trunk had been taken down from its cart, and all the loads were
being uncorded and the luggage taken out of the carts to make room for
wounded men whom the count in the simplicity of his heart had ordered
that they should take with them. The countess sent for her husband.

"What is this, my dear? I hear that the luggage is being unloaded."

"You know, love, I wanted to tell you... Countess dear... an officer
came to me to ask for a few carts for the wounded. After all, ours are
things that can be bought but think what being left behind means to
them!... Really now, in our own yard--we asked them in ourselves and
there are officers among them.... You know, I think, my dear... let them
be taken... where's the hurry?"

The count spoke timidly, as he always did when talking of money matters.
The countess was accustomed to this tone as a precursor of news of
something detrimental to the children's interests, such as the building
of a new gallery or conservatory, the inauguration of a private theater
or an orchestra. She was accustomed always to oppose anything announced
in that timid tone and considered it her duty to do so.

She assumed her dolefully submissive manner and said to her husband:
"Listen to me, Count, you have managed matters so that we are getting
nothing for the house, and now you wish to throw away all our--all the
children's property! You said yourself that we have a hundred thousand
rubles' worth of things in the house. I don't consent, my dear, I don't!
Do as you please! It's the government's business to look after the
wounded; they know that. Look at the Lopukhins opposite, they cleared
out everything two days ago. That's what other people do. It's only
we who are such fools. If you have no pity on me, have some for the
children."

Flourishing his arms in despair the count left the room without
replying.

"Papa, what are you doing that for?" asked Natasha, who had followed him
into her mother's room.

"Nothing! What business is it of yours?" muttered the count angrily.

"But I heard," said Natasha. "Why does Mamma object?"

"What business is it of yours?" cried the count.

Natasha stepped up to the window and pondered.

"Papa! Here's Berg coming to see us," said she, looking out of the
window.





CHAPTER XVI


Berg, the Rostovs' son-in-law, was already a colonel wearing the orders
of Vladimir and Anna, and he still filled the quiet and agreeable post
of assistant to the head of the staff of the assistant commander of the
first division of the Second Army.

On the first of September he had come to Moscow from the army.

He had nothing to do in Moscow, but he had noticed that everyone in the
army was asking for leave to visit Moscow and had something to do there.
So he considered it necessary to ask for leave of absence for family and
domestic reasons.

Berg drove up to his father-in-law's house in his spruce little trap
with a pair of sleek roans, exactly like those of a certain prince. He
looked attentively at the carts in the yard and while going up to the
porch took out a clean pocket handkerchief and tied a knot in it.

From the anteroom Berg ran with smooth though impatient steps into the
drawing room, where he embraced the count, kissed the hands of Natasha
and Sonya, and hastened to inquire after "Mamma's" health.

"Health, at a time like this?" said the count. "Come, tell us the news!
Is the army retreating or will there be another battle?"

"God Almighty alone can decide the fate of our fatherland, Papa," said
Berg. "The army is burning with a spirit of heroism and the leaders, so
to say, have now assembled in council. No one knows what is coming. But
in general I can tell you, Papa, that such a heroic spirit, the truly
antique valor of the Russian army, which they--which it" (he
corrected himself) "has shown or displayed in the battle of the
twenty-sixth--there are no words worthy to do it justice! I tell you,
Papa" (he smote himself on the breast as a general he had heard speaking
had done, but Berg did it a trifle late for he should have struck his
breast at the words "Russian army"), "I tell you frankly that we, the
commanders, far from having to urge the men on or anything of that kind,
could hardly restrain those... those... yes, those exploits of antique
valor," he went on rapidly. "General Barclay de Tolly risked his life
everywhere at the head of the troops, I can assure you. Our corps was
stationed on a hillside. You can imagine!"

And Berg related all that he remembered of the various tales he had
heard those days. Natasha watched him with an intent gaze that confused
him, as if she were trying to find in his face the answer to some
question.

"Altogether such heroism as was displayed by the Russian warriors
cannot be imagined or adequately praised!" said Berg, glancing round
at Natasha, and as if anxious to conciliate her, replying to her intent
look with a smile. "'Russia is not in Moscow, she lives in the hearts of
her sons!' Isn't it so, Papa?" said he.

Just then the countess came in from the sitting room with a weary and
dissatisfied expression. Berg hurriedly jumped up, kissed her hand,
asked about her health, and, swaying his head from side to side to
express sympathy, remained standing beside her.

"Yes, Mamma, I tell you sincerely that these are hard and sad times for
every Russian. But why are you so anxious? You have still time to get
away...."

"I can't think what the servants are about," said the countess, turning
to her husband. "I have just been told that nothing is ready yet.
Somebody after all must see to things. One misses Mitenka at such times.
There won't be any end to it."

The count was about to say something, but evidently restrained himself.
He got up from his chair and went to the door.

At that moment Berg drew out his handkerchief as if to blow his nose
and, seeing the knot in it, pondered, shaking his head sadly and
significantly.

"And I have a great favor to ask of you, Papa," said he.

"Hm..." said the count, and stopped.

"I was driving past Yusupov's house just now," said Berg with a laugh,
"when the steward, a man I know, ran out and asked me whether I wouldn't
buy something. I went in out of curiosity, you know, and there is a
small chiffonier and a dressing table. You know how dear Vera wanted a
chiffonier like that and how we had a dispute about it." (At the mention
of the chiffonier and dressing table Berg involuntarily changed his tone
to one of pleasure at his admirable domestic arrangements.) "And it's
such a beauty! It pulls out and has a secret English drawer, you know!
And dear Vera has long wanted one. I wish to give her a surprise, you
see. I saw so many of those peasant carts in your yard. Please let me
have one, I will pay the man well, and..."

The count frowned and coughed.

"Ask the countess, I don't give orders."

"If it's inconvenient, please don't," said Berg. "Only I so wanted it,
for dear Vera's sake."

"Oh, go to the devil, all of you! To the devil, the devil, the devil..."
cried the old count. "My head's in a whirl!"

And he left the room. The countess began to cry.

"Yes, Mamma! Yes, these are very hard times!" said Berg.

Natasha left the room with her father and, as if finding it difficult to
reach some decision, first followed him and then ran downstairs.

Petya was in the porch, engaged in giving out weapons to the servants
who were to leave Moscow. The loaded carts were still standing in the
yard. Two of them had been uncorded and a wounded officer was climbing
into one of them helped by an orderly.

"Do you know what it's about?" Petya asked Natasha.

She understood that he meant what were their parents quarreling about.
She did not answer.

"It's because Papa wanted to give up all the carts to the wounded," said
Petya. "Vasilich told me. I consider..."

"I consider," Natasha suddenly almost shouted, turning her angry face to
Petya, "I consider it so horrid, so abominable, so... I don't know what.
Are we despicable Germans?"

Her throat quivered with convulsive sobs and, afraid of weakening and
letting the force of her anger run to waste, she turned and rushed
headlong up the stairs.

Berg was sitting beside the countess consoling her with the respectful
attention of a relative. The count, pipe in hand, was pacing up and down
the room, when Natasha, her face distorted by anger, burst in like a
tempest and approached her mother with rapid steps.

"It's horrid! It's abominable!" she screamed. "You can't possibly have
ordered it!"

Berg and the countess looked at her, perplexed and frightened. The count
stood still at the window and listened.

"Mamma, it's impossible: see what is going on in the yard!" she cried.
"They will be left!..."

"What's the matter with you? Who are 'they'? What do you want?"

"Why, the wounded! It's impossible, Mamma. It's monstrous!... No, Mamma
darling, it's not the thing. Please forgive me, darling.... Mamma, what
does it matter what we take away? Only look what is going on in the
yard... Mamma!... It's impossible!"

The count stood by the window and listened without turning round.
Suddenly he sniffed and put his face closer to the window.

The countess glanced at her daughter, saw her face full of shame for her
mother, saw her agitation, and understood why her husband did not turn
to look at her now, and she glanced round quite disconcerted.

"Oh, do as you like! Am I hindering anyone?" she said, not surrendering
at once.

"Mamma, darling, forgive me!"

But the countess pushed her daughter away and went up to her husband.

"My dear, you order what is right.... You know I don't understand about
it," said she, dropping her eyes shamefacedly.

"The eggs... the eggs are teaching the hen," muttered the count through
tears of joy, and he embraced his wife who was glad to hide her look of
shame on his breast.

"Papa! Mamma! May I see to it? May I?..." asked Natasha. "We will still
take all the most necessary things."

The count nodded affirmatively, and Natasha, at the rapid pace at which
she used to run when playing at tag, ran through the ballroom to the
anteroom and downstairs into the yard.

The servants gathered round Natasha, but could not believe the strange
order she brought them until the count himself, in his wife's name,
confirmed the order to give up all the carts to the wounded and take the
trunks to the storerooms. When they understood that order the servants
set to work at this new task with pleasure and zeal. It no longer seemed
strange to them but on the contrary it seemed the only thing that could
be done, just as a quarter of an hour before it had not seemed strange
to anyone that the wounded should be left behind and the goods carted
away but that had seemed the only thing to do.

The whole household, as if to atone for not having done it sooner, set
eagerly to work at the new task of placing the wounded in the carts. The
wounded dragged themselves out of their rooms and stood with pale but
happy faces round the carts. The news that carts were to be had spread
to the neighboring houses, from which wounded men began to come into the
Rostovs' yard. Many of the wounded asked them not to unload the carts
but only to let them sit on the top of the things. But the work of
unloading, once started, could not be arrested. It seemed not to matter
whether all or only half the things were left behind. Cases full of
china, bronzes, pictures, and mirrors that had been so carefully
packed the night before now lay about the yard, and still they went on
searching for and finding possibilities of unloading this or that and
letting the wounded have another and yet another cart.

"We can take four more men," said the steward. "They can have my trap,
or else what is to become of them?"

"Let them have my wardrobe cart," said the countess. "Dunyasha can go
with me in the carriage."

They unloaded the wardrobe cart and sent it to take wounded men from a
house two doors off. The whole household, servants included, was bright
and animated. Natasha was in a state of rapturous excitement such as she
had not known for a long time.

"What could we fasten this onto?" asked the servants, trying to fix a
trunk on the narrow footboard behind a carriage. "We must keep at least
one cart."

"What's in it?" asked Natasha.

"The count's books."

"Leave it, Vasilich will put it away. It's not wanted."

The phaeton was full of people and there was a doubt as to where Count
Peter could sit.

"On the box. You'll sit on the box, won't you, Petya?" cried Natasha.

Sonya too was busy all this time, but the aim of her efforts was quite
different from Natasha's. She was putting away the things that had to
be left behind and making a list of them as the countess wished, and she
tried to get as much taken away with them as possible.





CHAPTER XVII


Before two o'clock in the afternoon the Rostovs' four carriages, packed
full and with the horses harnessed, stood at the front door. One by one
the carts with the wounded had moved out of the yard.

The caleche in which Prince Andrew was being taken attracted Sonya's
attention as it passed the front porch. With the help of a maid she was
arranging a seat for the countess in the huge high coach that stood at
the entrance.

"Whose caleche is that?" she inquired, leaning out of the carriage
window.

"Why, didn't you know, Miss?" replied the maid. "The wounded prince: he
spent the night in our house and is going with us."

"But who is it? What's his name?"

"It's our intended that was--Prince Bolkonski himself! They say he is
dying," replied the maid with a sigh.

Sonya jumped out of the coach and ran to the countess. The countess,
tired out and already dressed in shawl and bonnet for her journey,
was pacing up and down the drawing room, waiting for the household to
assemble for the usual silent prayer with closed doors before starting.
Natasha was not in the room.

"Mamma," said Sonya, "Prince Andrew is here, mortally wounded. He is
going with us."

The countess opened her eyes in dismay and, seizing Sonya's arm, glanced
around.

"Natasha?" she murmured.

At that moment this news had only one significance for both of them.
They knew their Natasha, and alarm as to what would happen if she heard
this news stifled all sympathy for the man they both liked.

"Natasha does not know yet, but he is going with us," said Sonya.

"You say he is dying?"

Sonya nodded.

The countess put her arms around Sonya and began to cry.

"The ways of God are past finding out!" she thought, feeling that the
Almighty Hand, hitherto unseen, was becoming manifest in all that was
now taking place.

"Well, Mamma? Everything is ready. What's the matter?" asked Natasha, as
with animated face she ran into the room.

"Nothing," answered the countess. "If everything is ready let us start."

And the countess bent over her reticule to hide her agitated face. Sonya
embraced Natasha and kissed her.

Natasha looked at her inquiringly.

"What is it? What has happened?"

"Nothing... No..."

"Is it something very bad for me? What is it?" persisted Natasha with
her quick intuition.

Sonya sighed and made no reply. The count, Petya, Madame Schoss, Mavra
Kuzminichna, and Vasilich came into the drawing room and, having closed
the doors, they all sat down and remained for some moments silently
seated without looking at one another.

The count was the first to rise, and with a loud sigh crossed himself
before the icon. All the others did the same. Then the count embraced
Mavra Kuzminichna and Vasilich, who were to remain in Moscow, and while
they caught at his hand and kissed his shoulder he patted their backs
lightly with some vaguely affectionate and comforting words. The
countess went into the oratory and there Sonya found her on her knees
before the icons that had been left here and there hanging on the wall.
(The most precious ones, with which some family tradition was connected,
were being taken with them.)

In the porch and in the yard the men whom Petya had armed with swords
and daggers, with trousers tucked inside their high boots and with belts
and girdles tightened, were taking leave of those remaining behind.

As is always the case at a departure, much had been forgotten or put in
the wrong place, and for a long time two menservants stood one on
each side of the open door and the carriage steps waiting to help the
countess in, while maids rushed with cushions and bundles from the house
to the carriages, the caleche, the phaeton, and back again.

"They always will forget everything!" said the countess. "Don't you know
I can't sit like that?"

And Dunyasha, with clenched teeth, without replying but with an
aggrieved look on her face, hastily got into the coach to rearrange the
seat.

"Oh, those servants!" said the count, swaying his head.

Efim, the old coachman, who was the only one the countess trusted to
drive her, sat perched up high on the box and did not so much as glance
round at what was going on behind him. From thirty years' experience
he knew it would be some time yet before the order, "Be off, in God's
name!" would be given him: and he knew that even when it was said
he would be stopped once or twice more while they sent back to fetch
something that had been forgotten, and even after that he would again
be stopped and the countess herself would lean out of the window and beg
him for the love of heaven to drive carefully down the hill. He knew
all this and therefore waited calmly for what would happen, with more
patience than the horses, especially the near one, the chestnut Falcon,
who was pawing the ground and champing his bit. At last all were
seated, the carriage steps were folded and pulled up, the door was shut,
somebody was sent for a traveling case, and the countess leaned out
and said what she had to say. Then Efim deliberately doffed his hat and
began crossing himself. The postilion and all the other servants did the
same. "Off, in God's name!" said Efim, putting on his hat. "Start!" The
postilion started the horses, the off pole horse tugged at his collar,
the high springs creaked, and the body of the coach swayed. The footman
sprang onto the box of the moving coach which jolted as it passed out
of the yard onto the uneven roadway; the other vehicles jolted in
their turn, and the procession of carriages moved up the street. In the
carriages, the caleche, and the phaeton, all crossed themselves as they
passed the church opposite the house. Those who were to remain in Moscow
walked on either side of the vehicles seeing the travelers off.

Rarely had Natasha experienced so joyful a feeling as now, sitting in
the carriage beside the countess and gazing at the slowly receding
walls of forsaken, agitated Moscow. Occasionally she leaned out of the
carriage window and looked back and then forward at the long train of
wounded in front of them. Almost at the head of the line she could see
the raised hood of Prince Andrew's caleche. She did not know who was
in it, but each time she looked at the procession her eyes sought that
caleche. She knew it was right in front.

In Kudrino, from the Nikitski, Presnya, and Podnovinsk Streets came
several other trains of vehicles similar to the Rostovs', and as they
passed along the Sadovaya Street the carriages and carts formed two rows
abreast.

As they were going round the Sukharev water tower Natasha, who was
inquisitively and alertly scrutinizing the people driving or walking
past, suddenly cried out in joyful surprise:

"Dear me! Mamma, Sonya, look, it's he!"

"Who? Who?"

"Look! Yes, on my word, it's Bezukhov!" said Natasha, putting her head
out of the carriage and staring at a tall, stout man in a coachman's
long coat, who from his manner of walking and moving was evidently
a gentleman in disguise, and who was passing under the arch of the
Sukharev tower accompanied by a small, sallow-faced, beardless old man
in a frieze coat.

"Yes, it really is Bezukhov in a coachman's coat, with a queer-looking
old boy. Really," said Natasha, "look, look!"

"No, it's not he. How can you talk such nonsense?"

"Mamma," screamed Natasha, "I'll stake my head it's he! I assure you!
Stop, stop!" she cried to the coachman.

But the coachman could not stop, for from the Meshchanski Street came
more carts and carriages, and the Rostovs were being shouted at to move
on and not block the way.

In fact, however, though now much farther off than before, the Rostovs
all saw Pierre--or someone extraordinarily like him--in a coachman's
coat, going down the street with head bent and a serious face beside a
small, beardless old man who looked like a footman. That old man
noticed a face thrust out of the carriage window gazing at them, and
respectfully touching Pierre's elbow said something to him and pointed
to the carriage. Pierre, evidently engrossed in thought, could not at
first understand him. At length when he had understood and looked in the
direction the old man indicated, he recognized Natasha, and following
his first impulse stepped instantly and rapidly toward the coach. But
having taken a dozen steps he seemed to remember something and stopped.

Natasha's face, leaning out of the window, beamed with quizzical
kindliness.

"Peter Kirilovich, come here! We have recognized you! This is
wonderful!" she cried, holding out her hand to him. "What are you doing?
Why are you like this?"

Pierre took her outstretched hand and kissed it awkwardly as he walked
along beside her while the coach still moved on.

"What is the matter, Count?" asked the countess in a surprised and
commiserating tone.

"What? What? Why? Don't ask me," said Pierre, and looked round at
Natasha whose radiant, happy expression--of which he was conscious
without looking at her--filled him with enchantment.

"Are you remaining in Moscow, then?"

Pierre hesitated.

"In Moscow?" he said in a questioning tone. "Yes, in Moscow. Good-by!"

"Ah, if only I were a man? I'd certainly stay with you. How splendid!"
said Natasha. "Mamma, if you'll let me, I'll stay!"

Pierre glanced absently at Natasha and was about to say something, but
the countess interrupted him.

"You were at the battle, we heard."

"Yes, I was," Pierre answered. "There will be another battle
tomorrow..." he began, but Natasha interrupted him.

"But what is the matter with you, Count? You are not like yourself...."

"Oh, don't ask me, don't ask me! I don't know myself. Tomorrow... But
no! Good-by, good-by!" he muttered. "It's an awful time!" and dropping
behind the carriage he stepped onto the pavement.

Natasha continued to lean out of the window for a long time, beaming at
him with her kindly, slightly quizzical, happy smile.





CHAPTER XVIII


For the last two days, ever since leaving home, Pierre had been living
in the empty house of his deceased benefactor, Bazdeev. This is how it
happened.

When he woke up on the morning after his return to Moscow and his
interview with Count Rostopchin, he could not for some time make out
where he was and what was expected of him. When he was informed that
among others awaiting him in his reception room there was a Frenchman
who had brought a letter from his wife, the Countess Helene, he felt
suddenly overcome by that sense of confusion and hopelessness to which
he was apt to succumb. He felt that everything was now at an end, all
was in confusion and crumbling to pieces, that nobody was right or
wrong, the future held nothing, and there was no escape from this
position. Smiling unnaturally and muttering to himself, he first sat
down on the sofa in an attitude of despair, then rose, went to the door
of the reception room and peeped through the crack, returned flourishing
his arms, and took up a book. His major-domo came in a second time to
say that the Frenchman who had brought the letter from the countess
was very anxious to see him if only for a minute, and that someone from
Bazdeev's widow had called to ask Pierre to take charge of her husband's
books, as she herself was leaving for the country.

"Oh, yes, in a minute; wait... or no! No, of course... go and say I will
come directly," Pierre replied to the major-domo.

But as soon as the man had left the room Pierre took up his hat which
was lying on the table and went out of his study by the other door.
There was no one in the passage. He went along the whole length of this
passage to the stairs and, frowning and rubbing his forehead with
both hands, went down as far as the first landing. The hall porter was
standing at the front door. From the landing where Pierre stood there
was a second staircase leading to the back entrance. He went down that
staircase and out into the yard. No one had seen him. But there were
some carriages waiting, and as soon as Pierre stepped out of the gate
the coachmen and the yard porter noticed him and raised their caps to
him. When he felt he was being looked at he behaved like an ostrich
which hides its head in a bush in order not to be seen: he hung his head
and quickening his pace went down the street.

Of all the affairs awaiting Pierre that day the sorting of Joseph
Bazdeev's books and papers appeared to him the most necessary.

He hired the first cab he met and told the driver to go to the
Patriarch's Ponds, where the widow Bazdeev's house was.

Continually turning round to look at the rows of loaded carts that were
making their way from all sides out of Moscow, and balancing his bulky
body so as not to slip out of the ramshackle old vehicle, Pierre,
experiencing the joyful feeling of a boy escaping from school, began to
talk to his driver.

The man told him that arms were being distributed today at the Kremlin
and that tomorrow everyone would be sent out beyond the Three Hills
gates and a great battle would be fought there.

Having reached the Patriarch's Ponds Pierre found the Bazdeevs' house,
where he had not been for a long time past. He went up to the gate.
Gerasim, that sallow beardless old man Pierre had seen at Torzhok five
years before with Joseph Bazdeev, came out in answer to his knock.

"At home?" asked Pierre.

"Owing to the present state of things Sophia Danilovna has gone to the
Torzhok estate with the children, your excellency."

"I will come in all the same, I have to look through the books," said
Pierre.

"Be so good as to step in. Makar Alexeevich, the brother of my late
master--may the kingdom of heaven be his--has remained here, but he is
in a weak state as you know," said the old servant.

Pierre knew that Makar Alexeevich was Joseph Bazdeev's half-insane
brother and a hard drinker.

"Yes, yes, I know. Let us go in..." said Pierre and entered the house.

A tall, bald-headed old man with a red nose, wearing a dressing gown and
with galoshes on his bare feet, stood in the anteroom. On seeing Pierre
he muttered something angrily and went away along the passage.

"He was a very clever man but has now grown quite feeble, as your honor
sees," said Gerasim. "Will you step into the study?" Pierre nodded. "As
it was sealed up so it has remained, but Sophia Danilovna gave orders
that if anyone should come from you they were to have the books."

Pierre went into that gloomy study which he had entered with such
trepidation in his benefactor's lifetime. The room, dusty and untouched
since the death of Joseph Bazdeev was now even gloomier.

Gerasim opened one of the shutters and left the room on tiptoe. Pierre
went round the study, approached the cupboard in which the manuscripts
were kept, and took out what had once been one of the most important,
the holy of holies of the order. This was the authentic Scotch Acts
with Bazdeev's notes and explanations. He sat down at the dusty writing
table, and, having laid the manuscripts before him, opened them out,
closed them, finally pushed them away, and resting his head on his hand
sank into meditation.

Gerasim looked cautiously into the study several times and saw Pierre
always sitting in the same attitude.

More than two hours passed and Gerasim took the liberty of making a
slight noise at the door to attract his attention, but Pierre did not
hear him.

"Is the cabman to be discharged, your honor?"

"Oh yes!" said Pierre, rousing himself and rising hurriedly. "Look
here," he added, taking Gerasim by a button of his coat and looking down
at the old man with moist, shining, and ecstatic eyes, "I say, do you
know that there is going to be a battle tomorrow?"

"We heard so," replied the man.

"I beg you not to tell anyone who I am, and to do what I ask you."

"Yes, your excellency," replied Gerasim. "Will you have something to
eat?"

"No, but I want something else. I want peasant clothes and a pistol,"
said Pierre, unexpectedly blushing.

"Yes, your excellency," said Gerasim after thinking for a moment.

All the rest of that day Pierre spent alone in his benefactor's study,
and Gerasim heard him pacing restlessly from one corner to another and
talking to himself. And he spent the night on a bed made up for him
there.

Gerasim, being a servant who in his time had seen many strange things,
accepted Pierre's taking up his residence in the house without
surprise, and seemed pleased to have someone to wait on. That same
evening--without even asking himself what they were wanted for--he
procured a coachman's coat and cap for Pierre, and promised to get him
the pistol next day. Makar Alexeevich came twice that evening shuffling
along in his galoshes as far as the door and stopped and looked
ingratiatingly at Pierre. But as soon as Pierre turned toward him he
wrapped his dressing gown around him with a shamefaced and angry look
and hurried away. It was when Pierre (wearing the coachman's coat which
Gerasim had procured for him and had disinfected by steam) was on his
way with the old man to buy the pistol at the Sukharev market that he
met the Rostovs.





CHAPTER XIX


Kutuzov's order to retreat through Moscow to the Ryazan road was issued
at night on the first of September.

The first troops started at once, and during the night they marched
slowly and steadily without hurry. At daybreak, however, those nearing
the town at the Dorogomilov bridge saw ahead of them masses of soldiers
crowding and hurrying across the bridge, ascending on the opposite side
and blocking the streets and alleys, while endless masses of troops were
bearing down on them from behind, and an unreasoning hurry and alarm
overcame them. They all rushed forward to the bridge, onto it, and
to the fords and the boats. Kutuzov himself had driven round by side
streets to the other side of Moscow.

By ten o'clock in the morning of the second of September, only the rear
guard remained in the Dorogomilov suburb, where they had ample room. The
main army was on the other side of Moscow or beyond it.

At that very time, at ten in the morning of the second of September,
Napoleon was standing among his troops on the Poklonny Hill looking at
the panorama spread out before him. From the twenty-sixth of August
to the second of September, that is from the battle of Borodino to the
entry of the French into Moscow, during the whole of that agitating,
memorable week, there had been the extraordinary autumn weather that
always comes as a surprise, when the sun hangs low and gives more heat
than in spring, when everything shines so brightly in the rare clear
atmosphere that the eyes smart, when the lungs are strengthened and
refreshed by inhaling the aromatic autumn air, when even the nights
are warm, and when in those dark warm nights, golden stars startle and
delight us continually by falling from the sky.

At ten in the morning of the second of September this weather still
held.

The brightness of the morning was magical. Moscow seen from the Poklonny
Hill lay spaciously spread out with her river, her gardens, and her
churches, and she seemed to be living her usual life, her cupolas
glittering like stars in the sunlight.

The view of the strange city with its peculiar architecture, such as
he had never seen before, filled Napoleon with the rather envious and
uneasy curiosity men feel when they see an alien form of life that has
no knowledge of them. This city was evidently living with the full force
of its own life. By the indefinite signs which, even at a distance,
distinguish a living body from a dead one, Napoleon from the Poklonny
Hill perceived the throb of life in the town and felt, as it were, the
breathing of that great and beautiful body.

Every Russian looking at Moscow feels her to be a mother; every
foreigner who sees her, even if ignorant of her significance as the
mother city, must feel her feminine character, and Napoleon felt it.

"Cette ville asiatique aux innombrables eglises, Moscou la sainte. La
voila done enfin, cette fameuse ville! Il etait temps," * said he, and
dismounting he ordered a plan of Moscow to be spread out before him, and
summoned Lelorgne d'Ideville, the interpreter.


     * "That Asiatic city of the innumerable churches, holy
     Moscow! Here it is then at last, that famous city. It was
     high time."


"A town captured by the enemy is like a maid who has lost her honor,"
thought he (he had said so to Tuchkov at Smolensk). From that point of
view he gazed at the Oriental beauty he had not seen before. It seemed
strange to him that his long-felt wish, which had seemed unattainable,
had at last been realized. In the clear morning light he gazed now at
the city and now at the plan, considering its details, and the assurance
of possessing it agitated and awed him.

"But could it be otherwise?" he thought. "Here is this capital at my
feet. Where is Alexander now, and of what is he thinking? A strange,
beautiful, and majestic city; and a strange and majestic moment! In what
light must I appear to them!" thought he, thinking of his troops.
"Here she is, the reward for all those fainthearted men," he reflected,
glancing at those near him and at the troops who were approaching and
forming up. "One word from me, one movement of my hand, and that ancient
capital of the Tsars would perish. But my clemency is always ready to
descend upon the vanquished. I must be magnanimous and truly great. But
no, it can't be true that I am in Moscow," he suddenly thought.
"Yet here she is lying at my feet, with her golden domes and crosses
scintillating and twinkling in the sunshine. But I shall spare her. On
the ancient monuments of barbarism and despotism I will inscribe great
words of justice and mercy.... It is just this which Alexander will
feel most painfully, I know him." (It seemed to Napoleon that the chief
import of what was taking place lay in the personal struggle between
himself and Alexander.) "From the height of the Kremlin--yes, there
is the Kremlin, yes--I will give them just laws; I will teach them the
meaning of true civilization, I will make generations of boyars remember
their conqueror with love. I will tell the deputation that I did not,
and do not, desire war, that I have waged war only against the false
policy of their court; that I love and respect Alexander and that in
Moscow I will accept terms of peace worthy of myself and of my people.
I do not wish to utilize the fortunes of war to humiliate an honored
monarch. 'Boyars,' I will say to them, 'I do not desire war, I desire
the peace and welfare of all my subjects.' However, I know their
presence will inspire me, and I shall speak to them as I always do:
clearly, impressively, and majestically. But can it be true that I am in
Moscow? Yes, there she lies."

"Qu'on m'amene les boyars," * said he to his suite.


    * "Bring the boyars to me."


A general with a brilliant suite galloped off at once to fetch the
boyars.

Two hours passed. Napoleon had lunched and was again standing in the
same place on the Poklonny Hill awaiting the deputation. His speech to
the boyars had already taken definite shape in his imagination. That
speech was full of dignity and greatness as Napoleon understood it.

He was himself carried away by the tone of magnanimity he intended to
adopt toward Moscow. In his imagination he appointed days for assemblies
at the palace of the Tsars, at which Russian notables and his own would
mingle. He mentally appointed a governor, one who would win the
hearts of the people. Having learned that there were many charitable
institutions in Moscow he mentally decided that he would shower favors
on them all. He thought that, as in Africa he had to put on a burnoose
and sit in a mosque, so in Moscow he must be beneficent like the Tsars.
And in order finally to touch the hearts of the Russians--and being like
all Frenchmen unable to imagine anything sentimental without a reference
to ma chere, ma tendre, ma pauvre mere * --he decided that he would
place an inscription on all these establishments in large letters:
"This establishment is dedicated to my dear mother." Or no, it should
be simply: Maison de ma Mere, *(2) he concluded. "But am I really in
Moscow? Yes, here it lies before me, but why is the deputation from the
city so long in appearing?" he wondered.


     * "My dear, my tender, my poor mother."

     * (2) "House of my Mother."


Meanwhile an agitated consultation was being carried on in whispers
among his generals and marshals at the rear of his suite. Those sent to
fetch the deputation had returned with the news that Moscow was empty,
that everyone had left it. The faces of those who were not conferring
together were pale and perturbed. They were not alarmed by the fact
that Moscow had been abandoned by its inhabitants (grave as that fact
seemed), but by the question how to tell the Emperor--without putting
him in the terrible position of appearing ridiculous--that he had been
awaiting the boyars so long in vain: that there were drunken mobs left
in Moscow but no one else. Some said that a deputation of some sort must
be scraped together, others disputed that opinion and maintained that
the Emperor should first be carefully and skillfully prepared, and then
told the truth.

"He will have to be told, all the same," said some gentlemen of the
suite. "But, gentlemen..."

The position was the more awkward because the Emperor, meditating upon
his magnanimous plans, was pacing patiently up and down before the
outspread map, occasionally glancing along the road to Moscow from under
his lifted hand with a bright and proud smile.

"But it's impossible..." declared the gentlemen of the suite, shrugging
their shoulders but not venturing to utter the implied word--le
ridicule...

At last the Emperor, tired of futile expectation, his actor's instinct
suggesting to him that the sublime moment having been too long drawn out
was beginning to lose its sublimity, gave a sign with his hand. A single
report of a signaling gun followed, and the troops, who were already
spread out on different sides of Moscow, moved into the city through
Tver, Kaluga, and Dorogomilov gates. Faster and faster, vying with
one another, they moved at the double or at a trot, vanishing amid the
clouds of dust they raised and making the air ring with a deafening roar
of mingling shouts.

Drawn on by the movement of his troops Napoleon rode with them as far as
the Dorogomilov gate, but there again stopped and, dismounting from his
horse, paced for a long time by the Kammer-Kollezski rampart, awaiting
the deputation.





CHAPTER XX


Meanwhile Moscow was empty. There were still people in it, perhaps a
fiftieth part of its former inhabitants had remained, but it was empty.
It was empty in the sense that a dying queenless hive is empty.

In a queenless hive no life is left though to a superficial glance it
seems as much alive as other hives.

The bees circle round a queenless hive in the hot beams of the midday
sun as gaily as around the living hives; from a distance it smells of
honey like the others, and bees fly in and out in the same way. But one
has only to observe that hive to realize that there is no longer any
life in it. The bees do not fly in the same way, the smell and the sound
that meet the beekeeper are not the same. To the beekeeper's tap on the
wall of the sick hive, instead of the former instant unanimous
humming of tens of thousands of bees with their abdomens threateningly
compressed, and producing by the rapid vibration of their wings an
aerial living sound, the only reply is a disconnected buzzing from
different parts of the deserted hive. From the alighting board, instead
of the former spirituous fragrant smell of honey and venom, and the warm
whiffs of crowded life, comes an odor of emptiness and decay mingling
with the smell of honey. There are no longer sentinels sounding the
alarm with their abdomens raised, and ready to die in defense of the
hive. There is no longer the measured quiet sound of throbbing activity,
like the sound of boiling water, but diverse discordant sounds of
disorder. In and out of the hive long black robber bees smeared with
honey fly timidly and shiftily. They do not sting, but crawl away from
danger. Formerly only bees laden with honey flew into the hive, and they
flew out empty; now they fly out laden. The beekeeper opens the lower
part of the hive and peers in. Instead of black, glossy bees--tamed by
toil, clinging to one another's legs and drawing out the wax, with a
ceaseless hum of labor--that used to hang in long clusters down to
the floor of the hive, drowsy shriveled bees crawl about separately
in various directions on the floor and walls of the hive. Instead of a
neatly glued floor, swept by the bees with the fanning of their wings,
there is a floor littered with bits of wax, excrement, dying bees
scarcely moving their legs, and dead ones that have not been cleared
away.

The beekeeper opens the upper part of the hive and examines the super.
Instead of serried rows of bees sealing up every gap in the combs and
keeping the brood warm, he sees the skillful complex structures of the
combs, but no longer in their former state of purity. All is neglected
and foul. Black robber bees are swiftly and stealthily prowling about
the combs, and the short home bees, shriveled and listless as if they
were old, creep slowly about without trying to hinder the robbers,
having lost all motive and all sense of life. Drones, bumblebees, wasps,
and butterflies knock awkwardly against the walls of the hive in their
flight. Here and there among the cells containing dead brood and honey
an angry buzzing can sometimes be heard. Here and there a couple of
bees, by force of habit and custom cleaning out the brood cells, with
efforts beyond their strength laboriously drag away a dead bee or
bumblebee without knowing why they do it. In another corner two old bees
are languidly fighting, or cleaning themselves, or feeding one another,
without themselves knowing whether they do it with friendly or hostile
intent. In a third place a crowd of bees, crushing one another, attack
some victim and fight and smother it, and the victim, enfeebled or
killed, drops from above slowly and lightly as a feather, among the heap
of corpses. The keeper opens the two center partitions to examine
the brood cells. In place of the former close dark circles formed by
thousands of bees sitting back to back and guarding the high mystery
of generation, he sees hundreds of dull, listless, and sleepy shells of
bees. They have almost all died unawares, sitting in the sanctuary they
had guarded and which is now no more. They reek of decay and death. Only
a few of them still move, rise, and feebly fly to settle on the enemy's
hand, lacking the spirit to die stinging him; the rest are dead and fall
as lightly as fish scales. The beekeeper closes the hive, chalks a mark
on it, and when he has time tears out its contents and burns it clean.

So in the same way Moscow was empty when Napoleon, weary, uneasy, and
morose, paced up and down in front of the Kammer-Kollezski rampart,
awaiting what to his mind was a necessary, if but formal, observance of
the proprieties--a deputation.

In various corners of Moscow there still remained a few people aimlessly
moving about, following their old habits and hardly aware of what they
were doing.

When with due circumspection Napoleon was informed that Moscow was
empty, he looked angrily at his informant, turned away, and silently
continued to walk to and fro.

"My carriage!" he said.

He took his seat beside the aide-de-camp on duty and drove into the
suburb. "Moscow deserted!" he said to himself. "What an incredible
event!"

He did not drive into the town, but put up at an inn in the Dorogomilov
suburb.

The coup de theatre had not come off.





CHAPTER XXI


The Russian troops were passing through Moscow from two o'clock at night
till two in the afternoon and bore away with them the wounded and the
last of the inhabitants who were leaving.

The greatest crush during the movement of the troops took place at the
Stone, Moskva, and Yauza bridges.

While the troops, dividing into two parts when passing around the
Kremlin, were thronging the Moskva and the Stone bridges, a great many
soldiers, taking advantage of the stoppage and congestion, turned back
from the bridges and slipped stealthily and silently past the church of
Vasili the Beatified and under the Borovitski gate, back up the hill
to the Red Square where some instinct told them they could easily take
things not belonging to them. Crowds of the kind seen at cheap sales
filled all the passages and alleys of the Bazaar. But there were no
dealers with voices of ingratiating affability inviting customers to
enter; there were no hawkers, nor the usual motley crowd of female
purchasers--but only soldiers, in uniforms and overcoats though without
muskets, entering the Bazaar empty-handed and silently making their way
out through its passages with bundles. Tradesmen and their assistants
(of whom there were but few) moved about among the soldiers quite
bewildered. They unlocked their shops and locked them up again, and
themselves carried goods away with the help of their assistants. On the
square in front of the Bazaar were drummers beating the muster call.
But the roll of the drums did not make the looting soldiers run in the
direction of the drum as formerly, but made them, on the contrary, run
farther away. Among the soldiers in the shops and passages some men were
to be seen in gray coats, with closely shaven heads. Two officers, one
with a scarf over his uniform and mounted on a lean, dark-gray horse,
the other in an overcoat and on foot, stood at the corner of Ilyinka
Street, talking. A third officer galloped up to them.

"The general orders them all to be driven out at once, without fail.
This is outrageous! Half the men have dispersed."

"Where are you off to?... Where?..." he shouted to three infantrymen
without muskets who, holding up the skirts of their overcoats, were
slipping past him into the Bazaar passage. "Stop, you rascals!"

"But how are you going to stop them?" replied another officer. "There is
no getting them together. The army should push on before the rest bolt,
that's all!"

"How can one push on? They are stuck there, wedged on the bridge, and
don't move. Shouldn't we put a cordon round to prevent the rest from
running away?"

"Come, go in there and drive them out!" shouted the senior officer.

The officer in the scarf dismounted, called up a drummer, and went with
him into the arcade. Some soldiers started running away in a group. A
shopkeeper with red pimples on his cheeks near the nose, and a calm,
persistent, calculating expression on his plump face, hurriedly and
ostentatiously approached the officer, swinging his arms.

"Your honor!" said he. "Be so good as to protect us! We won't grudge
trifles, you are welcome to anything--we shall be delighted! Pray!...
I'll fetch a piece of cloth at once for such an honorable gentleman,
or even two pieces with pleasure. For we feel how it is; but what's all
this--sheer robbery! If you please, could not guards be placed if only
to let us close the shop...."

Several shopkeepers crowded round the officer.

"Eh, what twaddle!" said one of them, a thin, stern-looking man. "When
one's head is gone one doesn't weep for one's hair! Take what any of you
like!" And flourishing his arm energetically he turned sideways to the
officer.

"It's all very well for you, Ivan Sidorych, to talk," said the first
tradesman angrily. "Please step inside, your honor!"

"Talk indeed!" cried the thin one. "In my three shops here I have a
hundred thousand rubles' worth of goods. Can they be saved when the army
has gone? Eh, what people! 'Against God's might our hands can't fight.'"

"Come inside, your honor!" repeated the tradesman, bowing.

The officer stood perplexed and his face showed indecision.

"It's not my business!" he exclaimed, and strode on quickly down one of
the passages.

From one open shop came the sound of blows and vituperation, and just
as the officer came up to it a man in a gray coat with a shaven head was
flung out violently.

This man, bent double, rushed past the tradesman and the officer. The
officer pounced on the soldiers who were in the shops, but at that
moment fearful screams reached them from the huge crowd on the Moskva
bridge and the officer ran out into the square.

"What is it? What is it?" he asked, but his comrade was already
galloping off past Vasili the Beatified in the direction from which the
screams came.

The officer mounted his horse and rode after him. When he reached the
bridge he saw two unlimbered guns, the infantry crossing the bridge,
several overturned carts, and frightened and laughing faces among the
troops. Beside the cannon a cart was standing to which two horses were
harnessed. Four borzois with collars were pressing close to the wheels.
The cart was loaded high, and at the very top, beside a child's chair
with its legs in the air, sat a peasant woman uttering piercing and
desperate shrieks. He was told by his fellow officers that the screams
of the crowd and the shrieks of the woman were due to the fact that
General Ermolov, coming up to the crowd and learning that soldiers were
dispersing among the shops while crowds of civilians blocked the bridge,
had ordered two guns to be unlimbered and made a show of firing at the
bridge. The crowd, crushing one another, upsetting carts, and shouting
and squeezing desperately, had cleared off the bridge and the troops
were now moving forward.





CHAPTER XXII


Meanwhile, the city itself was deserted. There was hardly anyone in the
streets. The gates and shops were all closed, only here and there round
the taverns solitary shouts or drunken songs could be heard. Nobody
drove through the streets and footsteps were rarely heard. The
Povarskaya was quite still and deserted. The huge courtyard of the
Rostovs' house was littered with wisps of hay and with dung from the
horses, and not a soul was to be seen there. In the great drawing
room of the house, which had been left with all it contained, were
two people. They were the yard porter Ignat, and the page boy Mishka,
Vasilich's grandson who had stayed in Moscow with his grandfather.
Mishka had opened the clavichord and was strumming on it with
one finger. The yard porter, his arms akimbo, stood smiling with
satisfaction before the large mirror.

"Isn't it fine, eh, Uncle Ignat?" said the boy, suddenly beginning to
strike the keyboard with both hands.

"Only fancy!" answered Ignat, surprised at the broadening grin on his
face in the mirror.

"Impudence! Impudence!" they heard behind them the voice of Mavra
Kuzminichna who had entered silently. "How he's grinning, the fat mug!
Is that what you're here for? Nothing's cleared away down there and
Vasilich is worn out. Just you wait a bit!"

Ignat left off smiling, adjusted his belt, and went out of the room with
meekly downcast eyes.

"Aunt, I did it gently," said the boy.

"I'll give you something gently, you monkey you!" cried Mavra
Kuzminichna, raising her arm threateningly. "Go and get the samovar to
boil for your grandfather."

Mavra Kuzminichna flicked the dust off the clavichord and closed it, and
with a deep sigh left the drawing room and locked its main door.

Going out into the yard she paused to consider where she should go
next--to drink tea in the servants' wing with Vasilich, or into the
storeroom to put away what still lay about.

She heard the sound of quick footsteps in the quiet street. Someone
stopped at the gate, and the latch rattled as someone tried to open it.
Mavra Kuzminichna went to the gate.

"Who do you want?"

"The count--Count Ilya Andreevich Rostov."

"And who are you?"

"An officer, I have to see him," came the reply in a pleasant, well-bred
Russian voice.

Mavra Kuzminichna opened the gate and an officer of eighteen, with the
round face of a Rostov, entered the yard.

"They have gone away, sir. Went away yesterday at vespertime," said
Mavra Kuzminichna cordially.

The young officer standing in the gateway, as if hesitating whether to
enter or not, clicked his tongue.

"Ah, how annoying!" he muttered. "I should have come yesterday.... Ah,
what a pity."

Meanwhile, Mavra Kuzminichna was attentively and sympathetically
examining the familiar Rostov features of the young man's face, his
tattered coat and trodden-down boots.

"What did you want to see the count for?" she asked.

"Oh well... it can't be helped!" said he in a tone of vexation and
placed his hand on the gate as if to leave.

He again paused in indecision.

"You see," he suddenly said, "I am a kinsman of the count's and he has
been very kind to me. As you see" (he glanced with an amused air and
good-natured smile at his coat and boots) "my things are worn out and I
have no money, so I was going to ask the count..."

Mavra Kuzminichna did not let him finish.

"Just wait a minute, sir. One little moment," said she.

And as soon as the officer let go of the gate handle she turned and,
hurrying away on her old legs, went through the back yard to the
servants' quarters.

While Mavra Kuzminichna was running to her room the officer walked about
the yard gazing at his worn-out boots with lowered head and a faint
smile on his lips. "What a pity I've missed Uncle! What a nice old
woman! Where has she run off to? And how am I to find the nearest way
to overtake my regiment, which must by now be getting near the Rogozhski
gate?" thought he. Just then Mavra Kuzminichna appeared from behind
the corner of the house with a frightened yet resolute look, carrying a
rolled-up check kerchief in her hand. While still a few steps from
the officer she unfolded the kerchief and took out of it a white
twenty-five-ruble assignat and hastily handed it to him.

"If his excellency had been at home, as a kinsman he would of course...
but as it is..."

Mavra Kuzminichna grew abashed and confused. The officer did not
decline, but took the note quietly and thanked her.

"If the count had been at home..." Mavra Kuzminichna went on
apologetically. "Christ be with you, sir! May God preserve you!" said
she, bowing as she saw him out.

Swaying his head and smiling as if amused at himself, the officer ran
almost at a trot through the deserted streets toward the Yauza bridge to
overtake his regiment.

But Mavra Kuzminichna stood at the closed gate for some time with moist
eyes, pensively swaying her head and feeling an unexpected flow of
motherly tenderness and pity for the unknown young officer.





CHAPTER XXIII


From an unfinished house on the Varvarka, the ground floor of which was
a dramshop, came drunken shouts and songs. On benches round the tables
in a dirty little room sat some ten factory hands. Tipsy and perspiring,
with dim eyes and wide-open mouths, they were all laboriously singing
some song or other. They were singing discordantly, arduously, and with
great effort, evidently not because they wished to sing, but because
they wanted to show they were drunk and on a spree. One, a tall,
fair-haired lad in a clean blue coat, was standing over the others. His
face with its fine straight nose would have been handsome had it not
been for his thin, compressed, twitching lips and dull, gloomy, fixed
eyes. Evidently possessed by some idea, he stood over those who were
singing, and solemnly and jerkily flourished above their heads his white
arm with the sleeve turned up to the elbow, trying unnaturally to spread
out his dirty fingers. The sleeve of his coat kept slipping down and he
always carefully rolled it up again with his left hand, as if it were
most important that the sinewy white arm he was flourishing should be
bare. In the midst of the song cries were heard, and fighting and blows
in the passage and porch. The tall lad waved his arm.

"Stop it!" he exclaimed peremptorily. "There's a fight, lads!" And,
still rolling up his sleeve, he went out to the porch.

The factory hands followed him. These men, who under the leadership of
the tall lad were drinking in the dramshop that morning, had brought the
publican some skins from the factory and for this had had drink served
them. The blacksmiths from a neighboring smithy, hearing the sounds of
revelry in the tavern and supposing it to have been broken into, wished
to force their way in too and a fight in the porch had resulted.

The publican was fighting one of the smiths at the door, and when the
workmen came out the smith, wrenching himself free from the tavern
keeper, fell face downward on the pavement.

Another smith tried to enter the doorway, pressing against the publican
with his chest.

The lad with the turned-up sleeve gave the smith a blow in the face and
cried wildly: "They're fighting us, lads!"

At that moment the first smith got up and, scratching his bruised
face to make it bleed, shouted in a tearful voice: "Police! Murder!...
They've killed a man, lads!"

"Oh, gracious me, a man beaten to death--killed!..." screamed a woman
coming out of a gate close by.

A crowd gathered round the bloodstained smith.

"Haven't you robbed people enough--taking their last shirts?" said a
voice addressing the publican. "What have you killed a man for, you
thief?"

The tall lad, standing in the porch, turned his bleared eyes from the
publican to the smith and back again as if considering whom he ought to
fight now.

"Murderer!" he shouted suddenly to the publican. "Bind him, lads!"

"I daresay you would like to bind me!" shouted the publican, pushing
away the men advancing on him, and snatching his cap from his head he
flung it on the ground.

As if this action had some mysterious and menacing significance, the
workmen surrounding the publican paused in indecision.

"I know the law very well, mates! I'll take the matter to the captain
of police. You think I won't get to him? Robbery is not permitted to
anybody now a days!" shouted the publican, picking up his cap.

"Come along then! Come along then!" the publican and the tall young
fellow repeated one after the other, and they moved up the street
together.

The bloodstained smith went beside them. The factory hands and others
followed behind, talking and shouting.

At the corner of the Moroseyka, opposite a large house with closed
shutters and bearing a bootmaker's signboard, stood a score of thin,
worn-out, gloomy-faced bootmakers, wearing overalls and long tattered
coats.

"He should pay folks off properly," a thin workingman, with frowning
brows and a straggly beard, was saying.

"But he's sucked our blood and now he thinks he's quit of us. He's been
misleading us all the week and now that he's brought us to this pass
he's made off."

On seeing the crowd and the bloodstained man the workman ceased
speaking, and with eager curiosity all the bootmakers joined the moving
crowd.

"Where are all the folks going?"

"Why, to the police, of course!"

"I say, is it true that we have been beaten?" "And what did you think?
Look what folks are saying."

Questions and answers were heard. The publican, taking advantage of the
increased crowd, dropped behind and returned to his tavern.

The tall youth, not noticing the disappearance of his foe, waved his
bare arm and went on talking incessantly, attracting general attention
to himself. It was around him that the people chiefly crowded, expecting
answers from him to the questions that occupied all their minds.

"He must keep order, keep the law, that's what the government is there
for. Am I not right, good Christians?" said the tall youth, with a
scarcely perceptible smile. "He thinks there's no government! How can
one do without government? Or else there would be plenty who'd rob us."

"Why talk nonsense?" rejoined voices in the crowd. "Will they give
up Moscow like this? They told you that for fun, and you believed it!
Aren't there plenty of troops on the march? Let him in, indeed! That's
what the government is for. You'd better listen to what people are
saying," said some of the mob pointing to the tall youth.

By the wall of China-Town a smaller group of people were gathered round
a man in a frieze coat who held a paper in his hand.

"An ukase, they are reading an ukase! Reading an ukase!" cried voices in
the crowd, and the people rushed toward the reader.

The man in the frieze coat was reading the broadsheet of August 31 When
the crowd collected round him he seemed confused, but at the demand
of the tall lad who had pushed his way up to him, he began in a rather
tremulous voice to read the sheet from the beginning.

"Early tomorrow I shall go to his Serene Highness," he read ("Sirin
Highness," said the tall fellow with a triumphant smile on his lips and
a frown on his brow), "to consult with him to act, and to aid the army
to exterminate these scoundrels. We too will take part..." the reader
went on, and then paused ("Do you see," shouted the youth victoriously,
"he's going to clear up the whole affair for you...."), "in destroying
them, and will send these visitors to the devil. I will come back to
dinner, and we'll set to work. We will do, completely do, and undo these
scoundrels."

The last words were read out in the midst of complete silence. The tall
lad hung his head gloomily. It was evident that no one had understood
the last part. In particular, the words "I will come back to dinner,"
evidently displeased both reader and audience. The people's minds
were tuned to a high pitch and this was too simple and needlessly
comprehensible--it was what any one of them might have said and
therefore was what an ukase emanating from the highest authority should
not say.

They all stood despondent and silent. The tall youth moved his lips and
swayed from side to side.

"We should ask him... that's he himself?"... "Yes, ask him indeed!...
Why not? He'll explain"... voices in the rear of the crowd were
suddenly heard saying, and the general attention turned to the police
superintendent's trap which drove into the square attended by two
mounted dragoons.

The superintendent of police, who had gone that morning by Count
Rostopchin's orders to burn the barges and had in connection with that
matter acquired a large sum of money which was at that moment in his
pocket, on seeing a crowd bearing down upon him told his coachman to
stop.

"What people are these?" he shouted to the men, who were moving singly
and timidly in the direction of his trap.

"What people are these?" he shouted again, receiving no answer.

"Your honor..." replied the shopman in the frieze coat, "your honor, in
accord with the proclamation of his highest excellency the count, they
desire to serve, not sparing their lives, and it is not any kind of
riot, but as his highest excellence said..."

"The count has not left, he is here, and an order will be issued
concerning you," said the superintendent of police. "Go on!" he ordered
his coachman.

The crowd halted, pressing around those who had heard what the
superintendent had said, and looking at the departing trap.

The superintendent of police turned round at that moment with a scared
look, said something to his coachman, and his horses increased their
speed.

"It's a fraud, lads! Lead the way to him, himself!" shouted the tall
youth. "Don't let him go, lads! Let him answer us! Keep him!" shouted
different people and the people dashed in pursuit of the trap.

Following the superintendent of police and talking loudly the crowd went
in the direction of the Lubyanka Street.

"There now, the gentry and merchants have gone away and left us to
perish. Do they think we're dogs?" voices in the crowd were heard saying
more and more frequently.





CHAPTER XXIV


On the evening of the first of September, after his interview with
Kutuzov, Count Rostopchin had returned to Moscow mortified and offended
because he had not been invited to attend the council of war, and
because Kutuzov had paid no attention to his offer to take part in the
defense of the city; amazed also at the novel outlook revealed to him
at the camp, which treated the tranquillity of the capital and its
patriotic fervor as not merely secondary but quite irrelevant and
unimportant matters. Distressed, offended, and surprised by all this,
Rostopchin had returned to Moscow. After supper he lay down on a sofa
without undressing, and was awakened soon after midnight by a courier
bringing him a letter from Kutuzov. This letter requested the count to
send police officers to guide the troops through the town, as the army
was retreating to the Ryazan road beyond Moscow. This was not news to
Rostopchin. He had known that Moscow would be abandoned not merely since
his interview the previous day with Kutuzov on the Poklonny Hill but
ever since the battle of Borodino, for all the generals who came to
Moscow after that battle had said unanimously that it was impossible to
fight another battle, and since then the government property had been
removed every night, and half the inhabitants had left the city
with Rostopchin's own permission. Yet all the same this information
astonished and irritated the count, coming as it did in the form of a
simple note with an order from Kutuzov, and received at night, breaking
in on his beauty sleep.

When later on in his memoirs Count Rostopchin explained his actions at
this time, he repeatedly says that he was then actuated by two important
considerations: to maintain tranquillity in Moscow and expedite the
departure of the inhabitants. If one accepts this twofold aim all
Rostopchin's actions appear irreproachable. "Why were the holy relics,
the arms, ammunition, gunpowder, and stores of corn not removed? Why
were thousands of inhabitants deceived into believing that Moscow would
not be given up--and thereby ruined?" "To preserve the tranquillity
of the city," explains Count Rostopchin. "Why were bundles of useless
papers from the government offices, and Leppich's balloon and other
articles removed?" "To leave the town empty," explains Count Rostopchin.
One need only admit that public tranquillity is in danger and any action
finds a justification.

All the horrors of the reign of terror were based only on solicitude for
public tranquillity.

On what, then, was Count Rostopchin's fear for the tranquillity of
Moscow based in 1812? What reason was there for assuming any probability
of an uprising in the city? The inhabitants were leaving it and the
retreating troops were filling it. Why should that cause the masses to
riot?

Neither in Moscow nor anywhere in Russia did anything resembling an
insurrection ever occur when the enemy entered a town. More than
ten thousand people were still in Moscow on the first and second of
September, and except for a mob in the governor's courtyard, assembled
there at his bidding, nothing happened. It is obvious that there would
have been even less reason to expect a disturbance among the people
if after the battle of Borodino, when the surrender of Moscow became
certain or at least probable, Rostopchin instead of exciting the people
by distributing arms and broadsheets had taken steps to remove all
the holy relics, the gunpowder, munitions, and money, and had told the
population plainly that the town would be abandoned.

Rostopchin, though he had patriotic sentiments, was a sanguine and
impulsive man who had always moved in the highest administrative circles
and had no understanding at all of the people he supposed himself to
be guiding. Ever since the enemy's entry into Smolensk he had in
imagination been playing the role of director of the popular feeling
of "the heart of Russia." Not only did it seem to him (as to all
administrators) that he controlled the external actions of Moscow's
inhabitants, but he also thought he controlled their mental attitude by
means of his broadsheets and posters, written in a coarse tone which the
people despise in their own class and do not understand from those in
authority. Rostopchin was so pleased with the fine role of leader of
popular feeling, and had grown so used to it, that the necessity of
relinquishing that role and abandoning Moscow without any heroic display
took him unawares and he suddenly felt the ground slip away from under
his feet, so that he positively did not know what to do. Though he knew
it was coming, he did not till the last moment wholeheartedly believe
that Moscow would be abandoned, and did not prepare for it. The
inhabitants left against his wishes. If the government offices were
removed, this was only done on the demand of officials to whom the count
yielded reluctantly. He was absorbed in the role he had created
for himself. As is often the case with those gifted with an ardent
imagination, though he had long known that Moscow would be abandoned he
knew it only with his intellect, he did not believe it in his heart and
did not adapt himself mentally to this new position of affairs.

All his painstaking and energetic activity (in how far it was useful
and had any effect on the people is another question) had been simply
directed toward arousing in the masses his own feeling of patriotic
hatred of the French.

But when events assumed their true historical character, when expressing
hatred for the French in words proved insufficient, when it was not
even possible to express that hatred by fighting a battle, when
self-confidence was of no avail in relation to the one question before
Moscow, when the whole population streamed out of Moscow as one man,
abandoning their belongings and proving by that negative action all
the depth of their national feeling, then the role chosen by Rostopchin
suddenly appeared senseless. He unexpectedly felt himself ridiculous,
weak, and alone, with no ground to stand on.

When, awakened from his sleep, he received that cold, peremptory note
from Kutuzov, he felt the more irritated the more he felt himself
to blame. All that he had been specially put in charge of, the state
property which he should have removed, was still in Moscow and it was no
longer possible to take the whole of it away.

"Who is to blame for it? Who has let things come to such a pass?" he
ruminated. "Not I, of course. I had everything ready. I had Moscow
firmly in hand. And this is what they have let it come to! Villains!
Traitors!" he thought, without clearly defining who the villains and
traitors were, but feeling it necessary to hate those traitors whoever
they might be who were to blame for the false and ridiculous position in
which he found himself.

All that night Count Rostopchin issued orders, for which people came to
him from all parts of Moscow. Those about him had never seen the count
so morose and irritable.

"Your excellency, the Director of the Registrar's Department has sent
for instructions... From the Consistory, from the Senate, from the
University, from the Foundling Hospital, the Suffragan has sent...
asking for information.... What are your orders about the Fire Brigade?
From the governor of the prison... from the superintendent of the
lunatic asylum..." All night long such announcements were continually
being received by the count.

To all these inquiries he gave brief and angry replies indicating that
orders from him were not now needed, that the whole affair, carefully
prepared by him, had now been ruined by somebody, and that that somebody
would have to bear the whole responsibility for all that might happen.

"Oh, tell that blockhead," he said in reply to the question from the
Registrar's Department, "that he should remain to guard his documents.
Now why are you asking silly questions about the Fire Brigade? They have
horses, let them be off to Vladimir, and not leave them to the French."

"Your excellency, the superintendent of the lunatic asylum has come:
what are your commands?"

"My commands? Let them go away, that's all.... And let the lunatics
out into the town. When lunatics command our armies God evidently means
these other madmen to be free."

In reply to an inquiry about the convicts in the prison, Count
Rostopchin shouted angrily at the governor:

"Do you expect me to give you two battalions--which we have not got--for
a convoy? Release them, that's all about it!"

"Your excellency, there are some political prisoners, Meshkov,
Vereshchagin..."

"Vereshchagin! Hasn't he been hanged yet?" shouted Rostopchin. "Bring
him to me!"





CHAPTER XXV


Toward nine o'clock in the morning, when the troops were already moving
through Moscow, nobody came to the count any more for instructions.
Those who were able to get away were going of their own accord, those
who remained behind decided for themselves what they must do.

The count ordered his carriage that he might drive to Sokolniki, and sat
in his study with folded hands, morose, sallow, and taciturn.

In quiet and untroubled times it seems to every administrator that it
is only by his efforts that the whole population under his rule is
kept going, and in this consciousness of being indispensable every
administrator finds the chief reward of his labor and efforts. While the
sea of history remains calm the ruler-administrator in his frail bark,
holding on with a boat hook to the ship of the people and himself
moving, naturally imagines that his efforts move the ship he is holding
on to. But as soon as a storm arises and the sea begins to heave and
the ship to move, such a delusion is no longer possible. The ship moves
independently with its own enormous motion, the boat hook no longer
reaches the moving vessel, and suddenly the administrator, instead
of appearing a ruler and a source of power, becomes an insignificant,
useless, feeble man.

Rostopchin felt this, and it was this which exasperated him.

The superintendent of police, whom the crowd had stopped, went in to
see him at the same time as an adjutant who informed the count that the
horses were harnessed. They were both pale, and the superintendent of
police, after reporting that he had executed the instructions he had
received, informed the count that an immense crowd had collected in the
courtyard and wished to see him.

Without saying a word Rostopchin rose and walked hastily to his light,
luxurious drawing room, went to the balcony door, took hold of the
handle, let it go again, and went to the window from which he had a
better view of the whole crowd. The tall lad was standing in front,
flourishing his arm and saying something with a stern look. The blood
stained smith stood beside him with a gloomy face. A drone of voices was
audible through the closed window.

"Is my carriage ready?" asked Rostopchin, stepping back from the window.

"It is, your excellency," replied the adjutant.

Rostopchin went again to the balcony door.

"But what do they want?" he asked the superintendent of police.

"Your excellency, they say they have got ready, according to your
orders, to go against the French, and they shouted something about
treachery. But it is a turbulent crowd, your excellency--I hardly
managed to get away from it. Your excellency, I venture to suggest..."

"You may go. I don't need you to tell me what to do!" exclaimed
Rostopchin angrily.

He stood by the balcony door looking at the crowd.

"This is what they have done with Russia! This is what they have done
with me!" thought he, full of an irrepressible fury that welled up
within him against the someone to whom what was happening might be
attributed. As often happens with passionate people, he was mastered by
anger but was still seeking an object on which to vent it. "Here is
that mob, the dregs of the people," he thought as he gazed at the crowd:
"this rabble they have roused by their folly! They want a victim,"
he thought as he looked at the tall lad flourishing his arm. And this
thought occurred to him just because he himself desired a victim,
something on which to vent his rage.

"Is the carriage ready?" he asked again.

"Yes, your excellency. What are your orders about Vereshchagin? He is
waiting at the porch," said the adjutant.

"Ah!" exclaimed Rostopchin, as if struck by an unexpected recollection.

And rapidly opening the door he went resolutely out onto the balcony.
The talking instantly ceased, hats and caps were doffed, and all eyes
were raised to the count.

"Good morning, lads!" said the count briskly and loudly. "Thank you for
coming. I'll come out to you in a moment, but we must first settle
with the villain. We must punish the villain who has caused the ruin of
Moscow. Wait for me!"

And the count stepped as briskly back into the room and slammed the door
behind him.

A murmur of approbation and satisfaction ran through the crowd. "He'll
settle with all the villains, you'll see! And you said the French...
He'll show you what law is!" the mob were saying as if reproving one
another for their lack of confidence.

A few minutes later an officer came hurriedly out of the front door,
gave an order, and the dragoons formed up in line. The crowd moved
eagerly from the balcony toward the porch. Rostopchin, coming out there
with quick angry steps, looked hastily around as if seeking someone.

"Where is he?" he inquired. And as he spoke he saw a young man coming
round the corner of the house between two dragoons. He had a long thin
neck, and his head, that had been half shaved, was again covered by
short hair. This young man was dressed in a threadbare blue cloth coat
lined with fox fur, that had once been smart, and dirty hempen convict
trousers, over which were pulled his thin, dirty, trodden-down boots.
On his thin, weak legs were heavy chains which hampered his irresolute
movements.

"Ah!" said Rostopchin, hurriedly turning away his eyes from the young
man in the fur-lined coat and pointing to the bottom step of the porch.
"Put him there."

The young man in his clattering chains stepped clumsily to the spot
indicated, holding away with one finger the coat collar which chafed
his neck, turned his long neck twice this way and that, sighed, and
submissively folded before him his thin hands, unused to work.

For several seconds while the young man was taking his place on the step
the silence continued. Only among the back rows of the people, who were
all pressing toward the one spot, could sighs, groans, and the shuffling
of feet be heard.

While waiting for the young man to take his place on the step Rostopchin
stood frowning and rubbing his face with his hand.

"Lads!" said he, with a metallic ring in his voice. "This man,
Vereshchagin, is the scoundrel by whose doing Moscow is perishing."

The young man in the fur-lined coat, stooping a little, stood in a
submissive attitude, his fingers clasped before him. His emaciated young
face, disfigured by the half-shaven head, hung down hopelessly. At
the count's first words he raised it slowly and looked up at him as if
wishing to say something or at least to meet his eye. But Rostopchin did
not look at him. A vein in the young man's long thin neck swelled like a
cord and went blue behind the ear, and suddenly his face flushed.

All eyes were fixed on him. He looked at the crowd, and rendered more
hopeful by the expression he read on the faces there, he smiled sadly
and timidly, and lowering his head shifted his feet on the step.

"He has betrayed his Tsar and his country, he has gone over to
Bonaparte. He alone of all the Russians has disgraced the Russian name,
he has caused Moscow to perish," said Rostopchin in a sharp, even voice,
but suddenly he glanced down at Vereshchagin who continued to stand in
the same submissive attitude. As if inflamed by the sight, he raised his
arm and addressed the people, almost shouting:

"Deal with him as you think fit! I hand him over to you."

The crowd remained silent and only pressed closer and closer to
one another. To keep one another back, to breathe in that stifling
atmosphere, to be unable to stir, and to await something unknown,
uncomprehended, and terrible, was becoming unbearable. Those standing
in front, who had seen and heard what had taken place before them, all
stood with wide open eyes and mouths, straining with all their strength,
and held back the crowd that was pushing behind them.

"Beat him!... Let the traitor perish and not disgrace the Russian name!"
shouted Rostopchin. "Cut him down. I command it."

Hearing not so much the words as the angry tone of Rostopchin's voice,
the crowd moaned and heaved forward, but again paused.

"Count!" exclaimed the timid yet theatrical voice of Vereshchagin in the
midst of the momentary silence that ensued, "Count! One God is above us
both...." He lifted his head and again the thick vein in his thin neck
filled with blood and the color rapidly came and went in his face.

He did not finish what he wished to say.

"Cut him down! I command it..." shouted Rostopchin, suddenly growing
pale like Vereshchagin.

"Draw sabers!" cried the dragoon officer, drawing his own.

Another still stronger wave flowed through the crowd and reaching the
front ranks carried it swaying to the very steps of the porch. The tall
youth, with a stony look on his face, and rigid and uplifted arm, stood
beside Vereshchagin.

"Saber him!" the dragoon officer almost whispered.

And one of the soldiers, his face all at once distorted with fury,
struck Vereshchagin on the head with the blunt side of his saber.

"Ah!" cried Vereshchagin in meek surprise, looking round with a
frightened glance as if not understanding why this was done to him. A
similar moan of surprise and horror ran through the crowd. "O Lord!"
exclaimed a sorrowful voice.

But after the exclamation of surprise that had escaped from Vereshchagin
he uttered a plaintive cry of pain, and that cry was fatal. The barrier
of human feeling, strained to the utmost, that had held the crowd in
check suddenly broke. The crime had begun and must now be completed. The
plaintive moan of reproach was drowned by the threatening and angry roar
of the crowd. Like the seventh and last wave that shatters a ship, that
last irresistible wave burst from the rear and reached the front ranks,
carrying them off their feet and engulfing them all. The dragoon was
about to repeat his blow. Vereshchagin with a cry of horror, covering
his head with his hands, rushed toward the crowd. The tall youth,
against whom he stumbled, seized his thin neck with his hands and,
yelling wildly, fell with him under the feet of the pressing, struggling
crowd.

Some beat and tore at Vereshchagin, others at the tall youth. And the
screams of those that were being trampled on and of those who tried to
rescue the tall lad only increased the fury of the crowd. It was a long
time before the dragoons could extricate the bleeding youth, beaten
almost to death. And for a long time, despite the feverish haste with
which the mob tried to end the work that had been begun, those who were
hitting, throttling, and tearing at Vereshchagin were unable to kill
him, for the crowd pressed from all sides, swaying as one mass with them
in the center and rendering it impossible for them either to kill him or
let him go.

"Hit him with an ax, eh!... Crushed?... Traitor, he sold Christ....
Still alive... tenacious... serves him right! Torture serves a thief
right. Use the hatchet!... What--still alive?"

Only when the victim ceased to struggle and his cries changed to a
long-drawn, measured death rattle did the crowd around his prostrate,
bleeding corpse begin rapidly to change places. Each one came
up, glanced at what had been done, and with horror, reproach, and
astonishment pushed back again.

"O Lord! The people are like wild beasts! How could he be alive?" voices
in the crowd could be heard saying. "Quite a young fellow too... must
have been a merchant's son. What men!... and they say he's not the right
one.... How not the right one?... O Lord! And there's another has been
beaten too--they say he's nearly done for.... Oh, the people... Aren't
they afraid of sinning?..." said the same mob now, looking with pained
distress at the dead body with its long, thin, half-severed neck and its
livid face stained with blood and dust.

A painstaking police officer, considering the presence of a corpse in
his excellency's courtyard unseemly, told the dragoons to take it away.
Two dragoons took it by its distorted legs and dragged it along the
ground. The gory, dust-stained, half-shaven head with its long neck
trailed twisting along the ground. The crowd shrank back from it.

At the moment when Vereshchagin fell and the crowd closed in with savage
yells and swayed about him, Rostopchin suddenly turned pale and, instead
of going to the back entrance where his carriage awaited him, went
with hurried steps and bent head, not knowing where and why, along the
passage leading to the rooms on the ground floor. The count's face was
white and he could not control the feverish twitching of his lower jaw.

"This way, your excellency... Where are you going?... This way,
please..." said a trembling, frightened voice behind him.

Count Rostopchin was unable to reply and, turning obediently, went in
the direction indicated. At the back entrance stood his caleche. The
distant roar of the yelling crowd was audible even there. He hastily
took his seat and told the coachman to drive him to his country house in
Sokolniki.

When they reached the Myasnitski Street and could no longer hear
the shouts of the mob, the count began to repent. He remembered with
dissatisfaction the agitation and fear he had betrayed before his
subordinates. "The mob is terrible--disgusting," he said to himself
in French. "They are like wolves whom nothing but flesh can appease."
"Count! One God is above us both!"--Vereshchagin's words suddenly
recurred to him, and a disagreeable shiver ran down his back. But this
was only a momentary feeling and Count Rostopchin smiled disdainfully
at himself. "I had other duties," thought he. "The people had to be
appeased. Many other victims have perished and are perishing for the
public good"--and he began thinking of his social duties to his family
and to the city entrusted to him, and of himself--not himself as
Theodore Vasilyevich Rostopchin (he fancied that Theodore Vasilyevich
Rostopchin was sacrificing himself for the public good) but himself as
governor, the representative of authority and of the Tsar. "Had I been
simply Theodore Vasilyevich my course of action would have been quite
different, but it was my duty to safeguard my life and dignity as
commander in chief."

Lightly swaying on the flexible springs of his carriage and no longer
hearing the terrible sounds of the crowd, Rostopchin grew physically
calm and, as always happens, as soon as he became physically tranquil
his mind devised reasons why he should be mentally tranquil too. The
thought which tranquillized Rostopchin was not a new one. Since the
world began and men have killed one another no one has ever committed
such a crime against his fellow man without comforting himself with
this same idea. This idea is le bien public, the hypothetical welfare of
other people.

To a man not swayed by passion that welfare is never certain, but he
who commits such a crime always knows just where that welfare lies. And
Rostopchin now knew it.

Not only did his reason not reproach him for what he had done, but
he even found cause for self-satisfaction in having so successfully
contrived to avail himself of a convenient opportunity to punish a
criminal and at the same time pacify the mob.

"Vereshchagin was tried and condemned to death," thought Rostopchin
(though the Senate had only condemned Vereshchagin to hard labor), "he
was a traitor and a spy. I could not let him go unpunished and so I have
killed two birds with one stone: to appease the mob I gave them a victim
and at the same time punished a miscreant."

Having reached his country house and begun to give orders about domestic
arrangements, the count grew quite tranquil.

Half an hour later he was driving with his fast horses across the
Sokolniki field, no longer thinking of what had occurred but considering
what was to come. He was driving to the Yauza bridge where he had heard
that Kutuzov was. Count Rostopchin was mentally preparing the angry and
stinging reproaches he meant to address to Kutuzov for his deception. He
would make that foxy old courtier feel that the responsibility for all
the calamities that would follow the abandonment of the city and the
ruin of Russia (as Rostopchin regarded it) would fall upon his doting
old head. Planning beforehand what he would say to Kutuzov, Rostopchin
turned angrily in his caleche and gazed sternly from side to side.

The Sokolniki field was deserted. Only at the end of it, in front of the
almshouse and the lunatic asylum, could be seen some people in white
and others like them walking singly across the field shouting and
gesticulating.

One of these was running to cross the path of Count Rostopchin's
carriage, and the count himself, his coachman, and his dragoons
looked with vague horror and curiosity at these released lunatics and
especially at the one running toward them.

Swaying from side to side on his long, thin legs in his fluttering
dressing gown, this lunatic was running impetuously, his gaze fixed on
Rostopchin, shouting something in a hoarse voice and making signs to him
to stop. The lunatic's solemn, gloomy face was thin and yellow, with
its beard growing in uneven tufts. His black, agate pupils with
saffron-yellow whites moved restlessly near the lower eyelids.

"Stop! Pull up, I tell you!" he cried in a piercing voice, and again
shouted something breathlessly with emphatic intonations and gestures.

Coming abreast of the caleche he ran beside it.

"Thrice have they slain me, thrice have I risen from the dead. They
stoned me, crucified me... I shall rise... shall rise... shall rise.
They have torn my body. The kingdom of God will be overthrown... Thrice
will I overthrow it and thrice re-establish it!" he cried, raising his
voice higher and higher.

Count Rostopchin suddenly grew pale as he had done when the crowd closed
in on Vereshchagin. He turned away. "Go fas... faster!" he cried in a
trembling voice to his coachman. The caleche flew over the ground as
fast as the horses could draw it, but for a long time Count Rostopchin
still heard the insane despairing screams growing fainter in the
distance, while his eyes saw nothing but the astonished, frightened,
bloodstained face of "the traitor" in the fur-lined coat.

Recent as that mental picture was, Rostopchin already felt that it had
cut deep into his heart and drawn blood. Even now he felt clearly that
the gory trace of that recollection would not pass with time, but that
the terrible memory would, on the contrary, dwell in his heart ever more
cruelly and painfully to the end of his life. He seemed still to hear
the sound of his own words: "Cut him down! I command it...."

"Why did I utter those words? It was by some accident I said them....
I need not have said them," he thought. "And then nothing would have
happened." He saw the frightened and then infuriated face of the dragoon
who dealt the blow, the look of silent, timid reproach that boy in the
fur-lined coat had turned upon him. "But I did not do it for my own
sake. I was bound to act that way.... The mob, the traitor... the public
welfare," thought he.

Troops were still crowding at the Yauza bridge. It was hot. Kutuzov,
dejected and frowning, sat on a bench by the bridge toying with his
whip in the sand when a caleche dashed up noisily. A man in a general's
uniform with plumes in his hat went up to Kutuzov and said something
in French. It was Count Rostopchin. He told Kutuzov that he had come
because Moscow, the capital, was no more and only the army remained.

"Things would have been different if your Serene Highness had not told
me that you would not abandon Moscow without another battle; all this
would not have happened," he said.

Kutuzov looked at Rostopchin as if, not grasping what was said to him,
he was trying to read something peculiar written at that moment on the
face of the man addressing him. Rostopchin grew confused and became
silent. Kutuzov slightly shook his head and not taking his penetrating
gaze from Rostopchin's face muttered softly:

"No! I shall not give up Moscow without a battle!"

Whether Kutuzov was thinking of something entirely different when
he spoke those words, or uttered them purposely, knowing them to be
meaningless, at any rate Rostopchin made no reply and hastily left him.
And strange to say, the Governor of Moscow, the proud Count Rostopchin,
took up a Cossack whip and went to the bridge where he began with shouts
to drive on the carts that blocked the way.





CHAPTER XXVI


Toward four o'clock in the afternoon Murat's troops were entering
Moscow. In front rode a detachment of Wurttemberg hussars and behind
them rode the King of Naples himself accompanied by a numerous suite.

About the middle of the Arbat Street, near the Church of the Miraculous
Icon of St. Nicholas, Murat halted to await news from the advanced
detachment as to the condition in which they had found the citadel, le
Kremlin.

Around Murat gathered a group of those who had remained in Moscow. They
all stared in timid bewilderment at the strange, long-haired commander
dressed up in feathers and gold.

"Is that their Tsar himself? He's not bad!" low voices could be heard
saying.

An interpreter rode up to the group.

"Take off your cap... your caps!" These words went from one to another
in the crowd. The interpreter addressed an old porter and asked if
it was far to the Kremlin. The porter, listening in perplexity to the
unfamiliar Polish accent and not realizing that the interpreter was
speaking Russian, did not understand what was being said to him and
slipped behind the others.

Murat approached the interpreter and told him to ask where the Russian
army was. One of the Russians understood what was asked and several
voices at once began answering the interpreter. A French officer,
returning from the advanced detachment, rode up to Murat and reported
that the gates of the citadel had been barricaded and that there was
probably an ambuscade there.

"Good!" said Murat and, turning to one of the gentlemen in his suite,
ordered four light guns to be moved forward to fire at the gates.

The guns emerged at a trot from the column following Murat and advanced
up the Arbat. When they reached the end of the Vozdvizhenka Street they
halted and drew in the Square. Several French officers superintended the
placing of the guns and looked at the Kremlin through field glasses.

The bells in the Kremlin were ringing for vespers, and this sound
troubled the French. They imagined it to be a call to arms. A few
infantrymen ran to the Kutafyev Gate. Beams and wooden screens had been
put there, and two musket shots rang out from under the gate as soon as
an officer and men began to run toward it. A general who was standing
by the guns shouted some words of command to the officer, and the latter
ran back again with his men.

The sound of three more shots came from the gate.

One shot struck a French soldier's foot, and from behind the screens
came the strange sound of a few voices shouting. Instantly as at a
word of command the expression of cheerful serenity on the faces of
the French general, officers, and men changed to one of determined
concentrated readiness for strife and suffering. To all of them from
the marshal to the least soldier, that place was not the Vozdvizhenka,
Mokhavaya, or Kutafyev Street, nor the Troitsa Gate (places familiar in
Moscow), but a new battlefield which would probably prove sanguinary.
And all made ready for that battle. The cries from the gates ceased. The
guns were advanced, the artillerymen blew the ash off their linstocks,
and an officer gave the word "Fire!" This was followed by two whistling
sounds of canister shot, one after another. The shot rattled against
the stone of the gate and upon the wooden beams and screens, and two
wavering clouds of smoke rose over the Square.

A few instants after the echo of the reports resounding over the
stone-built Kremlin had died away the French heard a strange sound above
their head. Thousands of crows rose above the walls and circled in the
air, cawing and noisily flapping their wings. Together with that sound
came a solitary human cry from the gateway and amid the smoke appeared
the figure of a bareheaded man in a peasant's coat. He grasped a musket
and took aim at the French. "Fire!" repeated the officer once more,
and the reports of a musket and of two cannon shots were heard
simultaneously. The gate was again hidden by smoke.

Nothing more stirred behind the screens and the French infantry soldiers
and officers advanced to the gate. In the gateway lay three wounded and
four dead. Two men in peasant coats ran away at the foot of the wall,
toward the Znamenka.

"Clear that away!" said the officer, pointing to the beams and the
corpses, and the French soldiers, after dispatching the wounded, threw
the corpses over the parapet.

Who these men were nobody knew. "Clear that away!" was all that was said
of them, and they were thrown over the parapet and removed later on that
they might not stink. Thiers alone dedicates a few eloquent lines to
their memory: "These wretches had occupied the sacred citadel, having
supplied themselves with guns from the arsenal, and fired" (the
wretches) "at the French. Some of them were sabered and the Kremlin was
purged of their presence."

Murat was informed that the way had been cleared. The French entered
the gates and began pitching their camp in the Senate Square. Out of the
windows of the Senate House the soldiers threw chairs into the Square
for fuel and kindled fires there.

Other detachments passed through the Kremlin and encamped along
the Moroseyka, the Lubyanka, and Pokrovka Streets. Others quartered
themselves along the Vozdvizhenka, the Nikolski, and the Tverskoy
Streets. No masters of the houses being found anywhere, the French were
not billeted on the inhabitants as is usual in towns but lived in it as
in a camp.

Though tattered, hungry, worn out, and reduced to a third of their
original number, the French entered Moscow in good marching order. It
was a weary and famished, but still a fighting and menacing army. But
it remained an army only until its soldiers had dispersed into their
different lodgings. As soon as the men of the various regiments began
to disperse among the wealthy and deserted houses, the army was lost
forever and there came into being something nondescript, neither
citizens nor soldiers but what are known as marauders. When five weeks
later these same men left Moscow, they no longer formed an army. They
were a mob of marauders, each carrying a quantity of articles which
seemed to him valuable or useful. The aim of each man when he left
Moscow was no longer, as it had been, to conquer, but merely to keep
what he had acquired. Like a monkey which puts its paw into the narrow
neck of a jug, and having seized a handful of nuts will not open its
fist for fear of losing what it holds, and therefore perishes, the
French when they left Moscow had inevitably to perish because they
carried their loot with them, yet to abandon what they had stolen was as
impossible for them as it is for the monkey to open its paw and let
go of its nuts. Ten minutes after each regiment had entered a Moscow
district, not a soldier or officer was left. Men in military uniforms
and Hessian boots could be seen through the windows, laughing and
walking through the rooms. In cellars and storerooms similar men were
busy among the provisions, and in the yards unlocking or breaking open
coach house and stable doors, lighting fires in kitchens and kneading
and baking bread with rolled-up sleeves, and cooking; or frightening,
amusing, or caressing women and children. There were many such men both
in the shops and houses--but there was no army.

Order after order was issued by the French commanders that day
forbidding the men to disperse about the town, sternly forbidding any
violence to the inhabitants or any looting, and announcing a roll call
for that very evening. But despite all these measures the men, who had
till then constituted an army, flowed all over the wealthy, deserted
city with its comforts and plentiful supplies. As a hungry herd of
cattle keeps well together when crossing a barren field, but gets out
of hand and at once disperses uncontrollably as soon as it reaches rich
pastures, so did the army disperse all over the wealthy city.

No residents were left in Moscow, and the soldiers--like water
percolating through sand--spread irresistibly through the city in all
directions from the Kremlin into which they had first marched. The
cavalry, on entering a merchant's house that had been abandoned and
finding there stabling more than sufficient for their horses, went on,
all the same, to the next house which seemed to them better. Many of
them appropriated several houses, chalked their names on them, and
quarreled and even fought with other companies for them. Before they had
had time to secure quarters the soldiers ran out into the streets to
see the city and, hearing that everything had been abandoned, rushed
to places where valuables were to be had for the taking. The officers
followed to check the soldiers and were involuntarily drawn into doing
the same. In Carriage Row carriages had been left in the shops, and
generals flocked there to select caleches and coaches for themselves.
The few inhabitants who had remained invited commanding officers to
their houses, hoping thereby to secure themselves from being plundered.
There were masses of wealth and there seemed no end to it. All around
the quarters occupied by the French were other regions still unexplored
and unoccupied where, they thought, yet greater riches might be found.
And Moscow engulfed the army ever deeper and deeper. When water is
spilled on dry ground both the dry ground and the water disappear and
mud results; and in the same way the entry of the famished army into the
rich and deserted city resulted in fires and looting and the destruction
of both the army and the wealthy city.


The French attributed the Fire of Moscow au patriotisme feroce de
Rostopchine, * the Russians to the barbarity of the French. In reality,
however, it was not, and could not be, possible to explain the burning
of Moscow by making any individual, or any group of people, responsible
for it. Moscow was burned because it found itself in a position in which
any town built of wood was bound to burn, quite apart from whether it
had, or had not, a hundred and thirty inferior fire engines. Deserted
Moscow had to burn as inevitably as a heap of shavings has to burn on
which sparks continually fall for several days. A town built of wood,
where scarcely a day passes without conflagrations when the house owners
are in residence and a police force is present, cannot help burning when
its inhabitants have left it and it is occupied by soldiers who smoke
pipes, make campfires of the Senate chairs in the Senate Square, and
cook themselves meals twice a day. In peacetime it is only necessary to
billet troops in the villages of any district and the number of fires in
that district immediately increases. How much then must the probability
of fire be increased in an abandoned, wooden town where foreign troops
are quartered. "Le patriotisme feroce de Rostopchine" and the barbarity
of the French were not to blame in the matter. Moscow was set on fire by
the soldiers' pipes, kitchens, and campfires, and by the carelessness of
enemy soldiers occupying houses they did not own. Even if there was any
arson (which is very doubtful, for no one had any reason to burn the
houses--in any case a troublesome and dangerous thing to do), arson
cannot be regarded as the cause, for the same thing would have happened
without any incendiarism.


    * To Rostopchin's ferocious patriotism.


However tempting it might be for the French to blame Rostopchin's
ferocity and for Russians to blame the scoundrel Bonaparte, or later
on to place an heroic torch in the hands of their own people, it is
impossible not to see that there could be no such direct cause of the
fire, for Moscow had to burn as every village, factory, or house must
burn which is left by its owners and in which strangers are allowed to
live and cook their porridge. Moscow was burned by its inhabitants, it
is true, but by those who had abandoned it and not by those who remained
in it. Moscow when occupied by the enemy did not remain intact like
Berlin, Vienna, and other towns, simply because its inhabitants
abandoned it and did not welcome the French with bread and salt, nor
bring them the keys of the city.





CHAPTER XXVII


The absorption of the French by Moscow, radiating starwise as it did,
only reached the quarter where Pierre was staying by the evening of the
second of September.

After the last two days spent in solitude and unusual circumstances,
Pierre was in a state bordering on insanity. He was completely obsessed
by one persistent thought. He did not know how or when this thought had
taken such possession of him, but he remembered nothing of the past,
understood nothing of the present, and all he saw and heard appeared to
him like a dream.

He had left home only to escape the intricate tangle of life's demands
that enmeshed him, and which in his present condition he was unable
to unravel. He had gone to Joseph Alexeevich's house, on the plea of
sorting the deceased's books and papers, only in search of rest from
life's turmoil, for in his mind the memory of Joseph Alexeevich was
connected with a world of eternal, solemn, and calm thoughts, quite
contrary to the restless confusion into which he felt himself being
drawn. He sought a quiet refuge, and in Joseph Alexeevich's study he
really found it. When he sat with his elbows on the dusty writing table
in the deathlike stillness of the study, calm and significant memories
of the last few days rose one after another in his imagination,
particularly of the battle of Borodino and of that vague sense of his
own insignificance and insincerity compared with the truth, simplicity,
and strength of the class of men he mentally classed as they. When
Gerasim roused him from his reverie the idea occurred to him of taking
part in the popular defense of Moscow which he knew was projected. And
with that object he had asked Gerasim to get him a peasant's coat and
a pistol, confiding to him his intentions of remaining in Joseph
Alexeevich's house and keeping his name secret. Then during the first
day spent in inaction and solitude (he tried several times to fix his
attention on the Masonic manuscripts, but was unable to do so) the idea
that had previously occurred to him of the cabalistic significance of
his name in connection with Bonaparte's more than once vaguely presented
itself. But the idea that he, L'russe Besuhof, was destined to set a
limit to the power of the Beast was as yet only one of the fancies that
often passed through his mind and left no trace behind.

When, having bought the coat merely with the object of taking part among
the people in the defense of Moscow, Pierre had met the Rostovs and
Natasha had said to him: "Are you remaining in Moscow?... How splendid!"
the thought flashed into his mind that it really would be a good thing,
even if Moscow were taken, for him to remain there and do what he was
predestined to do.

Next day, with the sole idea of not sparing himself and not lagging in
any way behind them, Pierre went to the Three Hills gate. But when he
returned to the house convinced that Moscow would not be defended, he
suddenly felt that what before had seemed to him merely a possibility
had now become absolutely necessary and inevitable. He must remain in
Moscow, concealing his name, and must meet Napoleon and kill him, and
either perish or put an end to the misery of all Europe--which it seemed
to him was solely due to Napoleon.

Pierre knew all the details of the attempt on Bonaparte's life in 1809
by a German student in Vienna, and knew that the student had been shot.
And the risk to which he would expose his life by carrying out his
design excited him still more.

Two equally strong feelings drew Pierre irresistibly to this purpose.
The first was a feeling of the necessity of sacrifice and suffering in
view of the common calamity, the same feeling that had caused him to go
to Mozhaysk on the twenty-fifth and to make his way to the very thick
of the battle and had now caused him to run away from his home and, in
place of the luxury and comfort to which he was accustomed, to sleep
on a hard sofa without undressing and eat the same food as Gerasim.
The other was that vague and quite Russian feeling of contempt for
everything conventional, artificial, and human--for everything the
majority of men regard as the greatest good in the world. Pierre had
first experienced this strange and fascinating feeling at the Sloboda
Palace, when he had suddenly felt that wealth, power, and life--all that
men so painstakingly acquire and guard--if it has any worth has so only
by reason of the joy with which it can all be renounced.

It was the feeling that induces a volunteer recruit to spend his last
penny on drink, and a drunken man to smash mirrors or glasses for no
apparent reason and knowing that it will cost him all the money he
possesses: the feeling which causes a man to perform actions which from
an ordinary point of view are insane, to test, as it were, his personal
power and strength, affirming the existence of a higher, nonhuman
criterion of life.

From the very day Pierre had experienced this feeling for the first time
at the Sloboda Palace he had been continuously under its influence, but
only now found full satisfaction for it. Moreover, at this moment Pierre
was supported in his design and prevented from renouncing it by what he
had already done in that direction. If he were now to leave Moscow like
everyone else, his flight from home, the peasant coat, the pistol, and
his announcement to the Rostovs that he would remain in Moscow would all
become not merely meaningless but contemptible and ridiculous, and to
this Pierre was very sensitive.

Pierre's physical condition, as is always the case, corresponded to his
mental state. The unaccustomed coarse food, the vodka he drank during
those days, the absence of wine and cigars, his dirty unchanged linen,
two almost sleepless nights passed on a short sofa without bedding--all
this kept him in a state of excitement bordering on insanity.

It was two o'clock in the afternoon. The French had already entered
Moscow. Pierre knew this, but instead of acting he only thought about
his undertaking, going over its minutest details in his mind. In his
fancy he did not clearly picture to himself either the striking of the
blow or the death of Napoleon, but with extraordinary vividness and
melancholy enjoyment imagined his own destruction and heroic endurance.

"Yes, alone, for the sake of all, I must do it or perish!" he thought.
"Yes, I will approach... and then suddenly... with pistol or dagger?
But that is all the same! 'It is not I but the hand of Providence that
punishes thee,' I shall say," thought he, imagining what he would say
when killing Napoleon. "Well then, take me and execute me!" he went on,
speaking to himself and bowing his head with a sad but firm expression.

While Pierre, standing in the middle of the room, was talking to himself
in this way, the study door opened and on the threshold appeared
the figure of Makar Alexeevich, always so timid before but now quite
transformed.

His dressing gown was unfastened, his face red and distorted. He
was obviously drunk. On seeing Pierre he grew confused at first, but
noticing embarrassment on Pierre's face immediately grew bold and,
staggering on his thin legs, advanced into the middle of the room.

"They're frightened," he said confidentially in a hoarse voice. "I say I
won't surrender, I say... Am I not right, sir?"

He paused and then suddenly seeing the pistol on the table seized it
with unexpected rapidity and ran out into the corridor.

Gerasim and the porter, who had followed Makar Alexeevich, stopped him
in the vestibule and tried to take the pistol from him. Pierre, coming
out into the corridor, looked with pity and repulsion at the half-crazy
old man. Makar Alexeevich, frowning with exertion, held on to the pistol
and screamed hoarsely, evidently with some heroic fancy in his head.

"To arms! Board them! No, you shan't get it," he yelled.

"That will do, please, that will do. Have the goodness--please, sir, to
let go! Please, sir..." pleaded Gerasim, trying carefully to steer Makar
Alexeevich by the elbows back to the door.

"Who are you? Bonaparte!..." shouted Makar Alexeevich.

"That's not right, sir. Come to your room, please, and rest. Allow me to
have the pistol."

"Be off, thou base slave! Touch me not! See this?" shouted Makar
Alexeevich, brandishing the pistol. "Board them!"

"Catch hold!" whispered Gerasim to the porter.

They seized Makar Alexeevich by the arms and dragged him to the door.

The vestibule was filled with the discordant sounds of a struggle and of
a tipsy, hoarse voice.

Suddenly a fresh sound, a piercing feminine scream, reverberated from
the porch and the cook came running into the vestibule.

"It's them! Gracious heavens! O Lord, four of them, horsemen!" she
cried.

Gerasim and the porter let Makar Alexeevich go, and in the now silent
corridor the sound of several hands knocking at the front door could be
heard.





CHAPTER XXVIII


Pierre, having decided that until he had carried out his design he would
disclose neither his identity nor his knowledge of French, stood at the
half-open door of the corridor, intending to conceal himself as soon
as the French entered. But the French entered and still Pierre did not
retire--an irresistible curiosity kept him there.

There were two of them. One was an officer--a tall, soldierly, handsome
man--the other evidently a private or an orderly, sunburned, short, and
thin, with sunken cheeks and a dull expression. The officer walked in
front, leaning on a stick and slightly limping. When he had advanced
a few steps he stopped, having apparently decided that these were good
quarters, turned round to the soldiers standing at the entrance, and in
a loud voice of command ordered them to put up the horses. Having done
that, the officer, lifting his elbow with a smart gesture, stroked his
mustache and lightly touched his hat.

"Bonjour, la compagnie!" * said he gaily, smiling and looking about him.


    * "Good day, everybody!"


No one gave any reply.

"Vous etes le bourgeois?" * the officer asked Gerasim.


    * "Are you the master here?"


Gerasim gazed at the officer with an alarmed and inquiring look.

"Quartier, quartier, logement!" said the officer, looking down at the
little man with a condescending and good-natured smile. "Les francais
sont de bons enfants. Que diable! Voyons! Ne nous fachons pas, mon
vieux!" * added he, clapping the scared and silent Gerasim on the
shoulder. "Well, does no one speak French in this establishment?" he
asked again in French, looking around and meeting Pierre's eyes. Pierre
moved away from the door.


     * "Quarters, quarters, lodgings! The French are good
     fellows. What the devil! There, don't let us be cross, old
     fellow!"


Again the officer turned to Gerasim and asked him to show him the rooms
in the house.

"Master, not here--don't understand... me, you..." said Gerasim, trying
to render his words more comprehensible by contorting them.

Still smiling, the French officer spread out his hands before Gerasim's
nose, intimating that he did not understand him either, and moved,
limping, to the door at which Pierre was standing. Pierre wished to go
away and conceal himself, but at that moment he saw Makar Alexeevich
appearing at the open kitchen door with the pistol in his hand. With
a madman's cunning, Makar Alexeevich eyed the Frenchman, raised his
pistol, and took aim.

"Board them!" yelled the tipsy man, trying to press the trigger. Hearing
the yell the officer turned round, and at the same moment Pierre threw
himself on the drunkard. Just when Pierre snatched at and struck up the
pistol Makar Alexeevich at last got his fingers on the trigger, there
was a deafening report, and all were enveloped in a cloud of smoke. The
Frenchman turned pale and rushed to the door.

Forgetting his intention of concealing his knowledge of French, Pierre,
snatching away the pistol and throwing it down, ran up to the officer
and addressed him in French.

"You are not wounded?" he asked.

"I think not," answered the Frenchman, feeling himself over. "But I have
had a lucky escape this time," he added, pointing to the damaged plaster
of the wall. "Who is that man?" said he, looking sternly at Pierre.

"Oh, I am really in despair at what has occurred," said Pierre rapidly,
quite forgetting the part he had intended to play. "He is an unfortunate
madman who did not know what he was doing."

The officer went up to Makar Alexeevich and took him by the collar.

Makar Alexeevich was standing with parted lips, swaying, as if about to
fall asleep, as he leaned against the wall.

"Brigand! You shall pay for this," said the Frenchman, letting go
of him. "We French are merciful after victory, but we do not pardon
traitors," he added, with a look of gloomy dignity and a fine energetic
gesture.

Pierre continued, in French, to persuade the officer not to hold that
drunken imbecile to account. The Frenchman listened in silence with the
same gloomy expression, but suddenly turned to Pierre with a smile. For
a few seconds he looked at him in silence. His handsome face assumed a
melodramatically gentle expression and he held out his hand.

"You have saved my life. You are French," said he.

For a Frenchman that deduction was indubitable. Only a Frenchman could
perform a great deed, and to save his life--the life of M. Ramballe,
captain of the 13th Light Regiment--was undoubtedly a very great deed.

But however indubitable that conclusion and the officer's conviction
based upon it, Pierre felt it necessary to disillusion him.

"I am Russian," he said quickly.

"Tut, tut, tut! Tell that to others," said the officer, waving his
finger before his nose and smiling. "You shall tell me all about that
presently. I am delighted to meet a compatriot. Well, and what are we
to do with this man?" he added, addressing himself to Pierre as to a
brother.

Even if Pierre were not a Frenchman, having once received that loftiest
of human appellations he could not renounce it, said the officer's look
and tone. In reply to his last question Pierre again explained who Makar
Alexeevich was and how just before their arrival that drunken imbecile
had seized the loaded pistol which they had not had time to recover from
him, and begged the officer to let the deed go unpunished.

The Frenchman expanded his chest and made a majestic gesture with his
arm.

"You have saved my life! You are French. You ask his pardon? I grant it
you. Lead that man away!" said he quickly and energetically, and taking
the arm of Pierre whom he had promoted to be a Frenchman for saving his
life, he went with him into the room.

The soldiers in the yard, hearing the shot, came into the passage asking
what had happened, and expressed their readiness to punish the culprits,
but the officer sternly checked them.

"You will be called in when you are wanted," he said.

The soldiers went out again, and the orderly, who had meanwhile had time
to visit the kitchen, came up to his officer.

"Captain, there is soup and a leg of mutton in the kitchen," said he.
"Shall I serve them up?"

"Yes, and some wine," answered the captain.





CHAPTER XXIX


When the French officer went into the room with Pierre the latter again
thought it his duty to assure him that he was not French and wished to
go away, but the officer would not hear of it. He was so very polite,
amiable, good-natured, and genuinely grateful to Pierre for saving his
life that Pierre had not the heart to refuse, and sat down with him in
the parlor--the first room they entered. To Pierre's assurances that he
was not a Frenchman, the captain, evidently not understanding how anyone
could decline so flattering an appellation, shrugged his shoulders and
said that if Pierre absolutely insisted on passing for a Russian let it
be so, but for all that he would be forever bound to Pierre by gratitude
for saving his life.

Had this man been endowed with the slightest capacity for perceiving the
feelings of others, and had he at all understood what Pierre's feelings
were, the latter would probably have left him, but the man's animated
obtuseness to everything other than himself disarmed Pierre.

"A Frenchman or a Russian prince incognito," said the officer, looking
at Pierre's fine though dirty linen and at the ring on his finger.
"I owe my life to you and offer you my friendship. A Frenchman never
forgets either an insult or a service. I offer you my friendship. That
is all I can say."

There was so much good nature and nobility (in the French sense of the
word) in the officer's voice, in the expression of his face and in
his gestures, that Pierre, unconsciously smiling in response to the
Frenchman's smile, pressed the hand held out to him.

"Captain Ramballe, of the 13th Light Regiment, Chevalier of the Legion
of Honor for the affair on the seventh of September," he introduced
himself, a self-satisfied irrepressible smile puckering his lips under
his mustache. "Will you now be so good as to tell me with whom I have
the honor of conversing so pleasantly, instead of being in the ambulance
with that maniac's bullet in my body?"

Pierre replied that he could not tell him his name and, blushing,
began to try to invent a name and to say something about his reason for
concealing it, but the Frenchman hastily interrupted him.

"Oh, please!" said he. "I understand your reasons. You are an officer...
a superior officer perhaps. You have borne arms against us. That's not
my business. I owe you my life. That is enough for me. I am quite at
your service. You belong to the gentry?" he concluded with a shade of
inquiry in his tone. Pierre bent his head. "Your baptismal name, if you
please. That is all I ask. Monsieur Pierre, you say.... That's all I
want to know."

When the mutton and an omelet had been served and a samovar and vodka
brought, with some wine which the French had taken from a Russian cellar
and brought with them, Ramballe invited Pierre to share his dinner, and
himself began to eat greedily and quickly like a healthy and hungry man,
munching his food rapidly with his strong teeth, continually smacking
his lips, and repeating--"Excellent! Delicious!" His face grew red and
was covered with perspiration. Pierre was hungry and shared the dinner
with pleasure. Morel, the orderly, brought some hot water in a saucepan
and placed a bottle of claret in it. He also brought a bottle of kvass,
taken from the kitchen for them to try. That beverage was already known
to the French and had been given a special name. They called it limonade
de cochon (pig's lemonade), and Morel spoke well of the limonade de
cochon he had found in the kitchen. But as the captain had the wine they
had taken while passing through Moscow, he left the kvass to Morel and
applied himself to the bottle of Bordeaux. He wrapped the bottle up
to its neck in a table napkin and poured out wine for himself and for
Pierre. The satisfaction of his hunger and the wine rendered the captain
still more lively and he chatted incessantly all through dinner.

"Yes, my dear Monsieur Pierre, I owe you a fine votive candle for
saving me from that maniac.... You see, I have bullets enough in my
body already. Here is one I got at Wagram" (he touched his side) "and a
second at Smolensk"--he showed a scar on his cheek--"and this leg which
as you see does not want to march, I got that on the seventh at the
great battle of la Moskowa. Sacre Dieu! It was splendid! That deluge of
fire was worth seeing. It was a tough job you set us there, my word!
You may be proud of it! And on my honor, in spite of the cough I caught
there, I should be ready to begin again. I pity those who did not see
it."

"I was there," said Pierre.

"Bah, really? So much the better! You are certainly brave foes. The
great redoubt held out well, by my pipe!" continued the Frenchman. "And
you made us pay dear for it. I was at it three times--sure as I sit
here. Three times we reached the guns and three times we were thrown
back like cardboard figures. Oh, it was beautiful, Monsieur Pierre! Your
grenadiers were splendid, by heaven! I saw them close up their ranks six
times in succession and march as if on parade. Fine fellows! Our King of
Naples, who knows what's what, cried 'Bravo!' Ha, ha! So you are one of
us soldiers!" he added, smiling, after a momentary pause. "So much
the better, so much the better, Monsieur Pierre! Terrible in battle...
gallant... with the fair" (he winked and smiled), "that's what the
French are, Monsieur Pierre, aren't they?"

The captain was so naively and good-humoredly gay, so real, and so
pleased with himself that Pierre almost winked back as he looked merrily
at him. Probably the word "gallant" turned the captain's thoughts to the
state of Moscow.

"Apropos, tell me please, is it true that the women have all left
Moscow? What a queer idea! What had they to be afraid of?"

"Would not the French ladies leave Paris if the Russians entered it?"
asked Pierre.

"Ha, ha, ha!" The Frenchman emitted a merry, sanguine chuckle, patting
Pierre on the shoulder. "What a thing to say!" he exclaimed. "Paris?...
But Paris, Paris..."

"Paris--the capital of the world," Pierre finished his remark for him.

The captain looked at Pierre. He had a habit of stopping short in the
middle of his talk and gazing intently with his laughing, kindly eyes.

"Well, if you hadn't told me you were Russian, I should have wagered
that you were Parisian! You have that... I don't know what, that..." and
having uttered this compliment, he again gazed at him in silence.

"I have been in Paris. I spent years there," said Pierre.

"Oh yes, one sees that plainly. Paris!... A man who doesn't know Paris
is a savage. You can tell a Parisian two leagues off. Paris is Talma, la
Duchenois, Potier, the Sorbonne, the boulevards," and noticing that
his conclusion was weaker than what had gone before, he added quickly:
"There is only one Paris in the world. You have been to Paris and have
remained Russian. Well, I don't esteem you the less for it."

Under the influence of the wine he had drunk, and after the days he had
spent alone with his depressing thoughts, Pierre involuntarily enjoyed
talking with this cheerful and good-natured man.

"To return to your ladies--I hear they are lovely. What a wretched idea
to go and bury themselves in the steppes when the French army is
in Moscow. What a chance those girls have missed! Your peasants,
now--that's another thing; but you civilized people, you ought to know
us better than that. We took Vienna, Berlin, Madrid, Naples, Rome,
Warsaw, all the world's capitals.... We are feared, but we are loved.
We are nice to know. And then the Emperor..." he began, but Pierre
interrupted him.

"The Emperor," Pierre repeated, and his face suddenly became sad and
embarrassed, "is the Emperor...?"

"The Emperor? He is generosity, mercy, justice, order, genius--that's
what the Emperor is! It is I, Ramballe, who tell you so.... I assure you
I was his enemy eight years ago. My father was an emigrant count.... But
that man has vanquished me. He has taken hold of me. I could not resist
the sight of the grandeur and glory with which he has covered France.
When I understood what he wanted--when I saw that he was preparing a bed
of laurels for us, you know, I said to myself: 'That is a monarch,' and
I devoted myself to him! So there! Oh yes, mon cher, he is the greatest
man of the ages past or future."

"Is he in Moscow?" Pierre stammered with a guilty look.

The Frenchman looked at his guilty face and smiled.

"No, he will make his entry tomorrow," he replied, and continued his
talk.

Their conversation was interrupted by the cries of several voices at
the gate and by Morel, who came to say that some Wurttemberg hussars had
come and wanted to put up their horses in the yard where the captain's
horses were. This difficulty had arisen chiefly because the hussars did
not understand what was said to them in French.

The captain had their senior sergeant called in, and in a stern voice
asked him to what regiment he belonged, who was his commanding officer,
and by what right he allowed himself to claim quarters that were already
occupied. The German who knew little French, answered the two first
questions by giving the names of his regiment and of his commanding
officer, but in reply to the third question which he did not understand
said, introducing broken French into his own German, that he was the
quartermaster of the regiment and his commander had ordered him to
occupy all the houses one after another. Pierre, who knew German,
translated what the German said to the captain and gave the captain's
reply to the Wurttemberg hussar in German. When he had understood what
was said to him, the German submitted and took his men elsewhere. The
captain went out into the porch and gave some orders in a loud voice.

When he returned to the room Pierre was sitting in the same place as
before, with his head in his hands. His face expressed suffering. He
really was suffering at that moment. When the captain went out and he
was left alone, suddenly he came to himself and realized the position
he was in. It was not that Moscow had been taken or that the happy
conquerors were masters in it and were patronizing him. Painful as
that was it was not that which tormented Pierre at the moment. He was
tormented by the consciousness of his own weakness. The few glasses of
wine he had drunk and the conversation with this good-natured man had
destroyed the mood of concentrated gloom in which he had spent the last
few days and which was essential for the execution of his design. The
pistol, dagger, and peasant coat were ready. Napoleon was to enter the
town next day. Pierre still considered that it would be a useful and
worthy action to slay the evildoer, but now he felt that he would not
do it. He did not know why, but he felt a foreboding that he would not
carry out his intention. He struggled against the confession of his
weakness but dimly felt that he could not overcome it and that his
former gloomy frame of mind, concerning vengeance, killing, and
self-sacrifice, had been dispersed like dust by contact with the first
man he met.

The captain returned to the room, limping slightly and whistling a tune.

The Frenchman's chatter which had previously amused Pierre now repelled
him. The tune he was whistling, his gait, and the gesture with which
he twirled his mustache, all now seemed offensive. "I will go away
immediately. I won't say another word to him," thought Pierre. He
thought this, but still sat in the same place. A strange feeling of
weakness tied him to the spot; he wished to get up and go away, but
could not do so.

The captain, on the other hand, seemed very cheerful. He paced up and
down the room twice. His eyes shone and his mustache twitched as if he
were smiling to himself at some amusing thought.

"The colonel of those Wurttembergers is delightful," he suddenly said.
"He's a German, but a nice fellow all the same.... But he's a German."
He sat down facing Pierre. "By the way, you know German, then?"

Pierre looked at him in silence.

"What is the German for 'shelter'?"

"Shelter?" Pierre repeated. "The German for shelter is Unterkunft."

"How do you say it?" the captain asked quickly and doubtfully.

"Unterkunft," Pierre repeated.

"Onterkoff," said the captain and looked at Pierre for some seconds with
laughing eyes. "These Germans are first-rate fools, don't you think so,
Monsieur Pierre?" he concluded.

"Well, let's have another bottle of this Moscow Bordeaux, shall we?
Morel will warm us up another little bottle. Morel!" he called out
gaily.

Morel brought candles and a bottle of wine. The captain looked at Pierre
by the candlelight and was evidently struck by the troubled expression
on his companion's face. Ramballe, with genuine distress and sympathy in
his face, went up to Pierre and bent over him.

"There now, we're sad," said he, touching Pierre's hand. "Have I
upset you? No, really, have you anything against me?" he asked Pierre.
"Perhaps it's the state of affairs?"

Pierre did not answer, but looked cordially into the Frenchman's eyes
whose expression of sympathy was pleasing to him.

"Honestly, without speaking of what I owe you, I feel friendship for
you. Can I do anything for you? Dispose of me. It is for life and death.
I say it with my hand on my heart!" said he, striking his chest.

"Thank you," said Pierre.

The captain gazed intently at him as he had done when he learned that
"shelter" was Unterkunft in German, and his face suddenly brightened.

"Well, in that case, I drink to our friendship!" he cried gaily, filling
two glasses with wine.

Pierre took one of the glasses and emptied it. Ramballe emptied his too,
again pressed Pierre's hand, and leaned his elbows on the table in a
pensive attitude.

"Yes, my dear friend," he began, "such is fortune's caprice. Who would
have said that I should be a soldier and a captain of dragoons in the
service of Bonaparte, as we used to call him? Yet here I am in Moscow
with him. I must tell you, mon cher," he continued in the sad and
measured tones of a man who intends to tell a long story, "that our name
is one of the most ancient in France."

And with a Frenchman's easy and naive frankness the captain told Pierre
the story of his ancestors, his childhood, youth, and manhood, and all
about his relations and his financial and family affairs, "ma pauvre
mere" playing of course an important part in the story.

"But all that is only life's setting, the real thing is love--love! Am I
not right, Monsieur Pierre?" said he, growing animated. "Another glass?"

Pierre again emptied his glass and poured himself out a third.

"Oh, women, women!" and the captain, looking with glistening eyes at
Pierre, began talking of love and of his love affairs.

There were very many of these, as one could easily believe, looking
at the officer's handsome, self-satisfied face, and noting the eager
enthusiasm with which he spoke of women. Though all Ramballe's love
stories had the sensual character which Frenchmen regard as the special
charm and poetry of love, yet he told his story with such sincere
conviction that he alone had experienced and known all the charm of love
and he described women so alluringly that Pierre listened to him with
curiosity.

It was plain that l'amour which the Frenchman was so fond of was not
that low and simple kind that Pierre had once felt for his wife, nor
was it the romantic love stimulated by himself that he experienced for
Natasha. (Ramballe despised both these kinds of love equally: the one
he considered the "love of clodhoppers" and the other the "love
of simpletons.") L'amour which the Frenchman worshiped consisted
principally in the unnaturalness of his relation to the woman and in a
combination of incongruities giving the chief charm to the feeling.

Thus the captain touchingly recounted the story of his love for a
fascinating marquise of thirty-five and at the same time for a charming,
innocent child of seventeen, daughter of the bewitching marquise. The
conflict of magnanimity between the mother and the daughter, ending in
the mother's sacrificing herself and offering her daughter in marriage
to her lover, even now agitated the captain, though it was the memory of
a distant past. Then he recounted an episode in which the husband
played the part of the lover, and he--the lover--assumed the role of the
husband, as well as several droll incidents from his recollections of
Germany, where "shelter" is called Unterkunft and where the husbands eat
sauerkraut and the young girls are "too blonde."

Finally, the latest episode in Poland still fresh in the captain's
memory, and which he narrated with rapid gestures and glowing face, was
of how he had saved the life of a Pole (in general, the saving of
life continually occurred in the captain's stories) and the Pole had
entrusted to him his enchanting wife (parisienne de coeur) while himself
entering the French service. The captain was happy, the enchanting
Polish lady wished to elope with him, but, prompted by magnanimity, the
captain restored the wife to the husband, saying as he did so: "I have
saved your life, and I save your honor!" Having repeated these words the
captain wiped his eyes and gave himself a shake, as if driving away the
weakness which assailed him at this touching recollection.

Listening to the captain's tales, Pierre--as often happens late in the
evening and under the influence of wine--followed all that was told him,
understood it all, and at the same time followed a train of personal
memories which, he knew not why, suddenly arose in his mind. While
listening to these love stories his own love for Natasha unexpectedly
rose to his mind, and going over the pictures of that love in his
imagination he mentally compared them with Ramballe's tales. Listening
to the story of the struggle between love and duty, Pierre saw before
his eyes every minutest detail of his last meeting with the object of
his love at the Sukharev water tower. At the time of that meeting it had
not produced an effect upon him--he had not even once recalled it. But
now it seemed to him that that meeting had had in it something very
important and poetic.

"Peter Kirilovich, come here! We have recognized you," he now seemed
to hear the words she had uttered and to see before him her eyes, her
smile, her traveling hood, and a stray lock of her hair... and there
seemed to him something pathetic and touching in all this.

Having finished his tale about the enchanting Polish lady, the captain
asked Pierre if he had ever experienced a similar impulse to sacrifice
himself for love and a feeling of envy of the legitimate husband.

Challenged by this question Pierre raised his head and felt a need to
express the thoughts that filled his mind. He began to explain that he
understood love for a women somewhat differently. He said that in all
his life he had loved and still loved only one woman, and that she could
never be his.

"Tiens!" said the captain.

Pierre then explained that he had loved this woman from his earliest
years, but that he had not dared to think of her because she was too
young, and because he had been an illegitimate son without a name.
Afterwards when he had received a name and wealth he dared not think of
her because he loved her too well, placing her far above everything in
the world, and especially therefore above himself.

When he had reached this point, Pierre asked the captain whether he
understood that.

The captain made a gesture signifying that even if he did not understand
it he begged Pierre to continue.

"Platonic love, clouds..." he muttered.

Whether it was the wine he had drunk, or an impulse of frankness, or the
thought that this man did not, and never would, know any of those who
played a part in his story, or whether it was all these things together,
something loosened Pierre's tongue. Speaking thickly and with a faraway
look in his shining eyes, he told the whole story of his life: his
marriage, Natasha's love for his best friend, her betrayal of him, and
all his own simple relations with her. Urged on by Ramballe's questions
he also told what he had at first concealed--his own position and even
his name.

More than anything else in Pierre's story the captain was impressed by
the fact that Pierre was very rich, had two mansions in Moscow, and that
he had abandoned everything and not left the city, but remained there
concealing his name and station.

When it was late at night they went out together into the street. The
night was warm and light. To the left of the house on the Pokrovka a
fire glowed--the first of those that were beginning in Moscow. To the
right and high up in the sky was the sickle of the waning moon and
opposite to it hung that bright comet which was connected in Pierre's
heart with his love. At the gate stood Gerasim, the cook, and two
Frenchmen. Their laughter and their mutually incomprehensible remarks in
two languages could be heard. They were looking at the glow seen in the
town.

There was nothing terrible in the one small, distant fire in the immense
city.

Gazing at the high starry sky, at the moon, at the comet, and at the
glow from the fire, Pierre experienced a joyful emotion. "There now,
how good it is, what more does one need?" thought he. And suddenly
remembering his intention he grew dizzy and felt so faint that he leaned
against the fence to save himself from falling.

Without taking leave of his new friend, Pierre left the gate with
unsteady steps and returning to his room lay down on the sofa and
immediately fell asleep.





CHAPTER XXX


The glow of the first fire that began on the second of September was
watched from the various roads by the fugitive Muscovites and by the
retreating troops, with many different feelings.

The Rostov party spent the night at Mytishchi, fourteen miles from
Moscow. They had started so late on the first of September, the road
had been so blocked by vehicles and troops, so many things had been
forgotten for which servants were sent back, that they had decided to
spend that night at a place three miles out of Moscow. The next morning
they woke late and were again delayed so often that they only got as far
as Great Mytishchi. At ten o'clock that evening the Rostov family and
the wounded traveling with them were all distributed in the yards and
huts of that large village. The Rostovs' servants and coachmen and the
orderlies of the wounded officers, after attending to their masters, had
supper, fed the horses, and came out into the porches.

In a neighboring hut lay Raevski's adjutant with a fractured wrist. The
awful pain he suffered made him moan incessantly and piteously, and his
moaning sounded terrible in the darkness of the autumn night. He had
spent the first night in the same yard as the Rostovs. The countess said
she had been unable to close her eyes on account of his moaning, and at
Mytishchi she moved into a worse hut simply to be farther away from the
wounded man.

In the darkness of the night one of the servants noticed, above the high
body of a coach standing before the porch, the small glow of another
fire. One glow had long been visible and everybody knew that it was
Little Mytishchi burning--set on fire by Mamonov's Cossacks.

"But look here, brothers, there's another fire!" remarked an orderly.

All turned their attention to the glow.

"But they told us Little Mytishchi had been set on fire by Mamonov's
Cossacks."

"But that's not Mytishchi, it's farther away."

"Look, it must be in Moscow!"

Two of the gazers went round to the other side of the coach and sat down
on its steps.

"It's more to the left, why, Little Mytishchi is over there, and this is
right on the other side."

Several men joined the first two.

"See how it's flaring," said one. "That's a fire in Moscow: either in
the Sushchevski or the Rogozhski quarter."

No one replied to this remark and for some time they all gazed silently
at the spreading flames of the second fire in the distance.

Old Daniel Terentich, the count's valet (as he was called), came up to
the group and shouted at Mishka.

"What are you staring at, you good-for-nothing?... The count will be
calling and there's nobody there; go and gather the clothes together."

"I only ran out to get some water," said Mishka.

"But what do you think, Daniel Terentich? Doesn't it look as if that
glow were in Moscow?" remarked one of the footmen.

Daniel Terentich made no reply, and again for a long time they were all
silent. The glow spread, rising and falling, farther and farther still.

"God have mercy.... It's windy and dry..." said another voice.

"Just look! See what it's doing now. O Lord! You can even see the crows
flying. Lord have mercy on us sinners!"

"They'll put it out, no fear!"

"Who's to put it out?" Daniel Terentich, who had hitherto been silent,
was heard to say. His voice was calm and deliberate. "Moscow it is,
brothers," said he. "Mother Moscow, the white..." his voice faltered,
and he gave way to an old man's sob.

And it was as if they had all only waited for this to realize the
significance for them of the glow they were watching. Sighs were heard,
words of prayer, and the sobbing of the count's old valet.





CHAPTER XXXI


The valet, returning to the cottage, informed the count that Moscow was
burning. The count donned his dressing gown and went out to look. Sonya
and Madame Schoss, who had not yet undressed, went out with him. Only
Natasha and the countess remained in the room. Petya was no longer
with the family, he had gone on with his regiment which was making for
Troitsa.

The countess, on hearing that Moscow was on fire, began to cry. Natasha,
pale, with a fixed look, was sitting on the bench under the icons just
where she had sat down on arriving and paid no attention to her father's
words. She was listening to the ceaseless moaning of the adjutant, three
houses off.

"Oh, how terrible," said Sonya returning from the yard chilled and
frightened. "I believe the whole of Moscow will burn, there's an awful
glow! Natasha, do look! You can see it from the window," she said to her
cousin, evidently wishing to distract her mind.

But Natasha looked at her as if not understanding what was said to her
and again fixed her eyes on the corner of the stove. She had been in
this condition of stupor since the morning, when Sonya, to the surprise
and annoyance of the countess, had for some unaccountable reason found
it necessary to tell Natasha of Prince Andrew's wound and of his being
with their party. The countess had seldom been so angry with anyone as
she was with Sonya. Sonya had cried and begged to be forgiven and now,
as if trying to atone for her fault, paid unceasing attention to her
cousin.

"Look, Natasha, how dreadfully it is burning!" said she.

"What's burning?" asked Natasha. "Oh, yes, Moscow."

And as if in order not to offend Sonya and to get rid of her, she turned
her face to the window, looked out in such a way that it was evident
that she could not see anything, and again settled down in her former
attitude.

"But you didn't see it!"

"Yes, really I did," Natasha replied in a voice that pleaded to be left
in peace.

Both the countess and Sonya understood that, naturally, neither Moscow
nor the burning of Moscow nor anything else could seem of importance to
Natasha.

The count returned and lay down behind the partition. The countess went
up to her daughter and touched her head with the back of her hand as she
was wont to do when Natasha was ill, then touched her forehead with her
lips as if to feel whether she was feverish, and finally kissed her.

"You are cold. You are trembling all over. You'd better lie down," said
the countess.

"Lie down? All right, I will. I'll lie down at once," said Natasha.

When Natasha had been told that morning that Prince Andrew was seriously
wounded and was traveling with their party, she had at first asked many
questions: Where was he going? How was he wounded? Was it serious? And
could she see him? But after she had been told that she could not see
him, that he was seriously wounded but that his life was not in danger,
she ceased to ask questions or to speak at all, evidently disbelieving
what they told her, and convinced that say what she might she would
still be told the same. All the way she had sat motionless in a corner
of the coach with wide open eyes, and the expression in them which the
countess knew so well and feared so much, and now she sat in the same
way on the bench where she had seated herself on arriving. She was
planning something and either deciding or had already decided something
in her mind. The countess knew this, but what it might be she did not
know, and this alarmed and tormented her.

"Natasha, undress, darling; lie down on my bed."

A bed had been made on a bedstead for the countess only. Madame Schoss
and the two girls were to sleep on some hay on the floor.

"No, Mamma, I will lie down here on the floor," Natasha replied
irritably and she went to the window and opened it. Through the open
window the moans of the adjutant could be heard more distinctly. She put
her head out into the damp night air, and the countess saw her slim neck
shaking with sobs and throbbing against the window frame. Natasha knew
it was not Prince Andrew who was moaning. She knew Prince Andrew was in
the same yard as themselves and in a part of the hut across the passage;
but this dreadful incessant moaning made her sob. The countess exchanged
a look with Sonya.

"Lie down, darling; lie down, my pet," said the countess, softly
touching Natasha's shoulders. "Come, lie down."

"Oh, yes... I'll lie down at once," said Natasha, and began hurriedly
undressing, tugging at the tapes of her petticoat.

When she had thrown off her dress and put on a dressing jacket, she sat
down with her foot under her on the bed that had been made up on the
floor, jerked her thin and rather short plait of hair to the front,
and began replaiting it. Her long, thin, practiced fingers rapidly
unplaited, replaited, and tied up her plait. Her head moved from side
to side from habit, but her eyes, feverishly wide, looked fixedly before
her. When her toilet for the night was finished she sank gently onto the
sheet spread over the hay on the side nearest the door.

"Natasha, you'd better lie in the middle," said Sonya.

"I'll stay here," muttered Natasha. "Do lie down," she added crossly,
and buried her face in the pillow.

The countess, Madame Schoss, and Sonya undressed hastily and lay down.
The small lamp in front of the icons was the only light left in
the room. But in the yard there was a light from the fire at Little
Mytishchi a mile and a half away, and through the night came the noise
of people shouting at a tavern Mamonov's Cossacks had set up across the
street, and the adjutant's unceasing moans could still be heard.

For a long time Natasha listened attentively to the sounds that reached
her from inside and outside the room and did not move. First she heard
her mother praying and sighing and the creaking of her bed under
her, then Madame Schoss' familiar whistling snore and Sonya's gentle
breathing. Then the countess called to Natasha. Natasha did not answer.

"I think she's asleep, Mamma," said Sonya softly.

After a short silence the countess spoke again but this time no one
replied.

Soon after that Natasha heard her mother's even breathing. Natasha did
not move, though her little bare foot, thrust out from under the quilt,
was growing cold on the bare floor.

As if to celebrate a victory over everybody, a cricket chirped in a
crack in the wall. A cock crowed far off and another replied near
by. The shouting in the tavern had died down; only the moaning of the
adjutant was heard. Natasha sat up.

"Sonya, are you asleep? Mamma?" she whispered.

No one replied. Natasha rose slowly and carefully, crossed herself, and
stepped cautiously on the cold and dirty floor with her slim, supple,
bare feet. The boards of the floor creaked. Stepping cautiously from one
foot to the other she ran like a kitten the few steps to the door and
grasped the cold door handle.

It seemed to her that something heavy was beating rhythmically against
all the walls of the room: it was her own heart, sinking with alarm and
terror and overflowing with love.

She opened the door and stepped across the threshold and onto the cold,
damp earthen floor of the passage. The cold she felt refreshed her. With
her bare feet she touched a sleeping man, stepped over him, and opened
the door into the part of the hut where Prince Andrew lay. It was dark
in there. In the farthest corner, on a bench beside a bed on which
something was lying, stood a tallow candle with a long, thick, and
smoldering wick.

From the moment she had been told that morning of Prince Andrew's wound
and his presence there, Natasha had resolved to see him. She did not
know why she had to, she knew the meeting would be painful, but felt the
more convinced that it was necessary.

All day she had lived only in hope of seeing him that night. But now
that the moment had come she was filled with dread of what she might
see. How was he maimed? What was left of him? Was he like that incessant
moaning of the adjutant's? Yes, he was altogether like that. In her
imagination he was that terrible moaning personified. When she saw an
indistinct shape in the corner, and mistook his knees raised under the
quilt for his shoulders, she imagined a horrible body there, and stood
still in terror. But an irresistible impulse drew her forward. She
cautiously took one step and then another, and found herself in the
middle of a small room containing baggage. Another man--Timokhin--was
lying in a corner on the benches beneath the icons, and two others--the
doctor and a valet--lay on the floor.

The valet sat up and whispered something. Timokhin, kept awake by the
pain in his wounded leg, gazed with wide-open eyes at this strange
apparition of a girl in a white chemise, dressing jacket, and nightcap.
The valet's sleepy, frightened exclamation, "What do you want? What's
the matter?" made Natasha approach more swiftly to what was lying in the
corner. Horribly unlike a man as that body looked, she must see him.
She passed the valet, the snuff fell from the candle wick, and she saw
Prince Andrew clearly with his arms outside the quilt, and such as she
had always seen him.

He was the same as ever, but the feverish color of his face, his
glittering eyes rapturously turned toward her, and especially his neck,
delicate as a child's, revealed by the turn-down collar of his shirt,
gave him a peculiarly innocent, childlike look, such as she had never
seen on him before. She went up to him and with a swift, flexible,
youthful movement dropped on her knees.

He smiled and held out his hand to her.





CHAPTER XXXII


Seven days had passed since Prince Andrew found himself in the
ambulance station on the field of Borodino. His feverish state and the
inflammation of his bowels, which were injured, were in the doctor's
opinion sure to carry him off. But on the seventh day he ate with
pleasure a piece of bread with some tea, and the doctor noticed that his
temperature was lower. He had regained consciousness that morning.
The first night after they left Moscow had been fairly warm and he had
remained in the caleche, but at Mytishchi the wounded man himself asked
to be taken out and given some tea. The pain caused by his removal into
the hut had made him groan aloud and again lose consciousness. When he
had been placed on his camp bed he lay for a long time motionless with
closed eyes. Then he opened them and whispered softly: "And the tea?"
His remembering such a small detail of everyday life astonished
the doctor. He felt Prince Andrew's pulse, and to his surprise and
dissatisfaction found it had improved. He was dissatisfied because he
knew by experience that if his patient did not die now, he would do so
a little later with greater suffering. Timokhin, the red-nosed major of
Prince Andrew's regiment, had joined him in Moscow and was being
taken along with him, having been wounded in the leg at the battle of
Borodino. They were accompanied by a doctor, Prince Andrew's valet, his
coachman, and two orderlies.

They gave Prince Andrew some tea. He drank it eagerly, looking with
feverish eyes at the door in front of him as if trying to understand and
remember something.

"I don't want any more. Is Timokhin here?" he asked.

Timokhin crept along the bench to him.

"I am here, your excellency."

"How's your wound?"

"Mine, sir? All right. But how about you?"

Prince Andrew again pondered as if trying to remember something.

"Couldn't one get a book?" he asked.

"What book?"

"The Gospels. I haven't one."

The doctor promised to procure it for him and began to ask how he
was feeling. Prince Andrew answered all his questions reluctantly but
reasonably, and then said he wanted a bolster placed under him as he was
uncomfortable and in great pain. The doctor and valet lifted the cloak
with which he was covered and, making wry faces at the noisome smell of
mortifying flesh that came from the wound, began examining that dreadful
place. The doctor was very much displeased about something and made a
change in the dressings, turning the wounded man over so that he groaned
again and grew unconscious and delirious from the agony. He kept asking
them to get him the book and put it under him.

"What trouble would it be to you?" he said. "I have not got one. Please
get it for me and put it under for a moment," he pleaded in a piteous
voice.

The doctor went into the passage to wash his hands.

"You fellows have no conscience," said he to the valet who was pouring
water over his hands. "For just one moment I didn't look after you...
It's such pain, you know, that I wonder how he can bear it."

"By the Lord Jesus Christ, I thought we had put something under him!"
said the valet.

The first time Prince Andrew understood where he was and what was the
matter with him and remembered being wounded and how was when he asked
to be carried into the hut after his caleche had stopped at Mytishchi.
After growing confused from pain while being carried into the hut he
again regained consciousness, and while drinking tea once more recalled
all that had happened to him, and above all vividly remembered the
moment at the ambulance station when, at the sight of the sufferings of
a man he disliked, those new thoughts had come to him which promised him
happiness. And those thoughts, though now vague and indefinite, again
possessed his soul. He remembered that he had now a new source of
happiness and that this happiness had something to do with the Gospels.
That was why he asked for a copy of them. The uncomfortable position in
which they had put him and turned him over again confused his thoughts,
and when he came to himself a third time it was in the complete
stillness of the night. Everybody near him was sleeping. A cricket
chirped from across the passage; someone was shouting and singing in
the street; cockroaches rustled on the table, on the icons, and on
the walls, and a big fly flopped at the head of the bed and around the
candle beside him, the wick of which was charred and had shaped itself
like a mushroom.

His mind was not in a normal state. A healthy man usually thinks of,
feels, and remembers innumerable things simultaneously, but has the
power and will to select one sequence of thoughts or events on which to
fix his whole attention. A healthy man can tear himself away from the
deepest reflections to say a civil word to someone who comes in and can
then return again to his own thoughts. But Prince Andrew's mind was not
in a normal state in that respect. All the powers of his mind were more
active and clearer than ever, but they acted apart from his will. Most
diverse thoughts and images occupied him simultaneously. At times his
brain suddenly began to work with a vigor, clearness, and depth it had
never reached when he was in health, but suddenly in the midst of its
work it would turn to some unexpected idea and he had not the strength
to turn it back again.

"Yes, a new happiness was revealed to me of which man cannot be
deprived," he thought as he lay in the semidarkness of the quiet hut,
gazing fixedly before him with feverish wide open eyes. "A happiness
lying beyond material forces, outside the material influences that act
on man--a happiness of the soul alone, the happiness of loving. Every
man can understand it, but to conceive it and enjoin it was possible
only for God. But how did God enjoin that law? And why was the Son...?"

And suddenly the sequence of these thoughts broke off, and Prince Andrew
heard (without knowing whether it was a delusion or reality) a
soft whispering voice incessantly and rhythmically repeating
"piti-piti-piti," and then "titi," and then again "piti-piti-piti," and
"ti-ti" once more. At the same time he felt that above his face, above
the very middle of it, some strange airy structure was being erected out
of slender needles or splinters, to the sound of this whispered music.
He felt that he had to balance carefully (though it was difficult) so
that this airy structure should not collapse; but nevertheless it kept
collapsing and again slowly rising to the sound of whispered rhythmic
music--"it stretches, stretches, spreading out and stretching," said
Prince Andrew to himself. While listening to this whispering and feeling
the sensation of this drawing out and the construction of this edifice
of needles, he also saw by glimpses a red halo round the candle, and
heard the rustle of the cockroaches and the buzzing of the fly that
flopped against his pillow and his face. Each time the fly touched his
face it gave him a burning sensation and yet to his surprise it did not
destroy the structure, though it knocked against the very region of his
face where it was rising. But besides this there was something else of
importance. It was something white by the door--the statue of a sphinx,
which also oppressed him.

"But perhaps that's my shirt on the table," he thought, "and that's my
legs, and that is the door, but why is it always stretching and drawing
itself out, and 'piti-piti-piti' and 'ti-ti' and 'piti-piti-piti'...?
That's enough, please leave off!" Prince Andrew painfully entreated
someone. And suddenly thoughts and feelings again swam to the surface of
his mind with peculiar clearness and force.

"Yes--love," he thought again quite clearly. "But not love which loves
for something, for some quality, for some purpose, or for some reason,
but the love which I--while dying--first experienced when I saw my enemy
and yet loved him. I experienced that feeling of love which is the very
essence of the soul and does not require an object. Now again I feel
that bliss. To love one's neighbors, to love one's enemies, to love
everything, to love God in all His manifestations. It is possible to
love someone dear to you with human love, but an enemy can only be loved
by divine love. That is why I experienced such joy when I felt that I
loved that man. What has become of him? Is he alive?...

"When loving with human love one may pass from love to hatred, but
divine love cannot change. No, neither death nor anything else can
destroy it. It is the very essence of the soul. Yet how many people have
I hated in my life? And of them all, I loved and hated none as I did
her." And he vividly pictured to himself Natasha, not as he had done in
the past with nothing but her charms which gave him delight, but for
the first time picturing to himself her soul. And he understood her
feelings, her sufferings, shame, and remorse. He now understood for the
first time all the cruelty of his rejection of her, the cruelty of his
rupture with her. "If only it were possible for me to see her once more!
Just once, looking into those eyes to say..."


"Piti-piti-piti and ti-ti and piti-piti-piti boom!" flopped the fly...
And his attention was suddenly carried into another world, a world of
reality and delirium in which something particular was happening. In
that world some structure was still being erected and did not fall,
something was still stretching out, and the candle with its red halo
was still burning, and the same shirtlike sphinx lay near the door; but
besides all this something creaked, there was a whiff of fresh air, and
a new white sphinx appeared, standing at the door. And that sphinx had
the pale face and shining eyes of the very Natasha of whom he had just
been thinking.

"Oh, how oppressive this continual delirium is," thought Prince Andrew,
trying to drive that face from his imagination. But the face remained
before him with the force of reality and drew nearer. Prince Andrew
wished to return to that former world of pure thought, but he could not,
and delirium drew him back into its domain. The soft whispering voice
continued its rhythmic murmur, something oppressed him and stretched
out, and the strange face was before him. Prince Andrew collected all
his strength in an effort to recover his senses, he moved a little, and
suddenly there was a ringing in his ears, a dimness in his eyes, and
like a man plunged into water he lost consciousness. When he came to
himself, Natasha, that same living Natasha whom of all people he most
longed to love with this new pure divine love that had been revealed to
him, was kneeling before him. He realized that it was the real living
Natasha, and he was not surprised but quietly happy. Natasha, motionless
on her knees (she was unable to stir), with frightened eyes riveted on
him, was restraining her sobs. Her face was pale and rigid. Only in the
lower part of it something quivered.

Prince Andrew sighed with relief, smiled, and held out his hand.

"You?" he said. "How fortunate!"

With a rapid but careful movement Natasha drew nearer to him on her
knees and, taking his hand carefully, bent her face over it and began
kissing it, just touching it lightly with her lips.

"Forgive me!" she whispered, raising her head and glancing at him.
"Forgive me!"

"I love you," said Prince Andrew.

"Forgive...!"

"Forgive what?" he asked.

"Forgive me for what I ha-ve do-ne!" faltered Natasha in a scarcely
audible, broken whisper, and began kissing his hand more rapidly, just
touching it with her lips.

"I love you more, better than before," said Prince Andrew, lifting her
face with his hand so as to look into her eyes.

Those eyes, filled with happy tears, gazed at him timidly,
compassionately, and with joyous love. Natasha's thin pale face, with
its swollen lips, was more than plain--it was dreadful. But Prince
Andrew did not see that, he saw her shining eyes which were beautiful.
They heard the sound of voices behind them.

Peter the valet, who was now wide awake, had roused the doctor.
Timokhin, who had not slept at all because of the pain in his leg, had
long been watching all that was going on, carefully covering his bare
body with the sheet as he huddled up on his bench.

"What's this?" said the doctor, rising from his bed. "Please go away,
madam!"

At that moment a maid sent by the countess, who had noticed her
daughter's absence, knocked at the door.

Like a somnambulist aroused from her sleep Natasha went out of the room
and, returning to her hut, fell sobbing on her bed.


From that time, during all the rest of the Rostovs' journey, at every
halting place and wherever they spent a night, Natasha never left the
wounded Bolkonski, and the doctor had to admit that he had not expected
from a young girl either such firmness or such skill in nursing a
wounded man.

Dreadful as the countess imagined it would be should Prince Andrew
die in her daughter's arms during the journey--as, judging by what
the doctor said, it seemed might easily happen--she could not oppose
Natasha. Though with the intimacy now established between the wounded
man and Natasha the thought occurred that should he recover their former
engagement would be renewed, no one--least of all Natasha and Prince
Andrew--spoke of this: the unsettled question of life and death, which
hung not only over Bolkonski but over all Russia, shut out all other
considerations.





CHAPTER XXXIII


On the third of September Pierre awoke late. His head was aching, the
clothes in which he had slept without undressing felt uncomfortable on
his body, and his mind had a dim consciousness of something shameful
he had done the day before. That something shameful was his yesterday's
conversation with Captain Ramballe.

It was eleven by the clock, but it seemed peculiarly dark out of doors.
Pierre rose, rubbed his eyes, and seeing the pistol with an engraved
stock which Gerasim had replaced on the writing table, he remembered
where he was and what lay before him that very day.

"Am I not too late?" he thought. "No, probably he won't make his entry
into Moscow before noon."

Pierre did not allow himself to reflect on what lay before him, but
hastened to act.

After arranging his clothes, he took the pistol and was about to go out.
But it then occurred to him for the first time that he certainly could
not carry the weapon in his hand through the streets. It was difficult
to hide such a big pistol even under his wide coat. He could not
carry it unnoticed in his belt or under his arm. Besides, it had been
discharged, and he had not had time to reload it. "No matter, dagger
will do," he said to himself, though when planning his design he had
more than once come to the conclusion that the chief mistake made by the
student in 1809 had been to try to kill Napoleon with a dagger. But as
his chief aim consisted not in carrying out his design, but in proving
to himself that he would not abandon his intention and was doing all he
could to achieve it, Pierre hastily took the blunt jagged dagger in a
green sheath which he had bought at the Sukharev market with the pistol,
and hid it under his waistcoat.

Having tied a girdle over his coat and pulled his cap low on his head,
Pierre went down the corridor, trying to avoid making a noise or meeting
the captain, and passed out into the street.

The conflagration, at which he had looked with so much indifference the
evening before, had greatly increased during the night. Moscow was on
fire in several places. The buildings in Carriage Row, across the river,
in the Bazaar and the Povarskoy, as well as the barges on the Moskva
River and the timber yards by the Dorogomilov Bridge, were all ablaze.

Pierre's way led through side streets to the Povarskoy and from there
to the church of St. Nicholas on the Arbat, where he had long before
decided that the deed should be done. The gates of most of the houses
were locked and the shutters up. The streets and lanes were deserted.
The air was full of smoke and the smell of burning. Now and then he met
Russians with anxious and timid faces, and Frenchmen with an air not of
the city but of the camp, walking in the middle of the streets. Both
the Russians and the French looked at Pierre with surprise. Besides his
height and stoutness, and the strange morose look of suffering in his
face and whole figure, the Russians stared at Pierre because they could
not make out to what class he could belong. The French followed him with
astonishment in their eyes chiefly because Pierre, unlike all the
other Russians who gazed at the French with fear and curiosity, paid no
attention to them. At the gate of one house three Frenchmen, who were
explaining something to some Russians who did not understand them,
stopped Pierre asking if he did not know French.

Pierre shook his head and went on. In another side street a sentinel
standing beside a green caisson shouted at him, but only when the shout
was threateningly repeated and he heard the click of the man's musket as
he raised it did Pierre understand that he had to pass on the other side
of the street. He heard nothing and saw nothing of what went on around
him. He carried his resolution within himself in terror and haste, like
something dreadful and alien to him, for, after the previous night's
experience, he was afraid of losing it. But he was not destined to bring
his mood safely to his destination. And even had he not been hindered by
anything on the way, his intention could not now have been carried out,
for Napoleon had passed the Arbat more than four hours previously on his
way from the Dorogomilov suburb to the Kremlin, and was now sitting in
a very gloomy frame of mind in a royal study in the Kremlin, giving
detailed and exact orders as to measures to be taken immediately
to extinguish the fire, to prevent looting, and to reassure the
inhabitants. But Pierre did not know this; he was entirely absorbed
in what lay before him, and was tortured--as those are who obstinately
undertake a task that is impossible for them not because of its
difficulty but because of its incompatibility with their natures--by the
fear of weakening at the decisive moment and so losing his self-esteem.

Though he heard and saw nothing around him he found his way by instinct
and did not go wrong in the side streets that led to the Povarskoy.

As Pierre approached that street the smoke became denser and denser--he
even felt the heat of the fire. Occasionally curly tongues of flame rose
from under the roofs of the houses. He met more people in the streets
and they were more excited. But Pierre, though he felt that something
unusual was happening around him, did not realize that he was
approaching the fire. As he was going along a foot path across a
wide-open space adjoining the Povarskoy on one side and the gardens
of Prince Gruzinski's house on the other, Pierre suddenly heard the
desperate weeping of a woman close to him. He stopped as if awakening
from a dream and lifted his head.

By the side of the path, on the dusty dry grass, all sorts of household
goods lay in a heap: featherbeds, a samovar, icons, and trunks. On the
ground, beside the trunks, sat a thin woman no longer young, with long,
prominent upper teeth, and wearing a black cloak and cap. This woman,
swaying to and fro and muttering something, was choking with sobs. Two
girls of about ten and twelve, dressed in dirty short frocks and cloaks,
were staring at their mother with a look of stupefaction on their pale
frightened faces. The youngest child, a boy of about seven, who wore an
overcoat and an immense cap evidently not his own, was crying in his
old nurse's arms. A dirty, barefooted maid was sitting on a trunk,
and, having undone her pale-colored plait, was pulling it straight
and sniffing at her singed hair. The woman's husband, a short,
round-shouldered man in the undress uniform of a civilian official, with
sausage-shaped whiskers and showing under his square-set cap the hair
smoothly brushed forward over his temples, with expressionless face was
moving the trunks, which were placed one on another, and was dragging
some garments from under them.

As soon as she saw Pierre, the woman almost threw herself at his feet.

"Dear people, good Christians, save me, help me, dear friends... help
us, somebody," she muttered between her sobs. "My girl... My daughter!
My youngest daughter is left behind. She's burned! Ooh! Was it for this
I nursed you.... Ooh!"

"Don't, Mary Nikolievna!" said her husband to her in a low voice,
evidently only to justify himself before the stranger. "Sister must have
taken her, or else where can she be?" he added.

"Monster! Villain!" shouted the woman angrily, suddenly ceasing to weep.
"You have no heart, you don't feel for your own child! Another man would
have rescued her from the fire. But this is a monster and neither a
man nor a father! You, honored sir, are a noble man," she went on,
addressing Pierre rapidly between her sobs. "The fire broke out
alongside, and blew our way, the maid called out 'Fire!' and we rushed
to collect our things. We ran out just as we were.... This is what we
have brought away.... The icons, and my dowry bed, all the rest is lost.
We seized the children. But not Katie! Ooh! O Lord!..." and again she
began to sob. "My child, my dear one! Burned, burned!"

"But where was she left?" asked Pierre.

From the expression of his animated face the woman saw that this man
might help her.

"Oh, dear sir!" she cried, seizing him by the legs. "My benefactor, set
my heart at ease.... Aniska, go, you horrid girl, show him the way!" she
cried to the maid, angrily opening her mouth and still farther exposing
her long teeth.

"Show me the way, show me, I... I'll do it," gasped Pierre rapidly.

The dirty maidservant stepped from behind the trunk, put up her plait,
sighed, and went on her short, bare feet along the path. Pierre felt
as if he had come back to life after a heavy swoon. He held his head
higher, his eyes shone with the light of life, and with swift steps
he followed the maid, overtook her, and came out on the Povarskoy. The
whole street was full of clouds of black smoke. Tongues of flame here
and there broke through that cloud. A great number of people crowded in
front of the conflagration. In the middle of the street stood a French
general saying something to those around him. Pierre, accompanied by the
maid, was advancing to the spot where the general stood, but the French
soldiers stopped him.

"On ne passe pas!" * cried a voice.


    * "You can't pass!"


"This way, uncle," cried the girl. "We'll pass through the side street,
by the Nikulins'!"

Pierre turned back, giving a spring now and then to keep up with her.
She ran across the street, turned down a side street to the left, and,
passing three houses, turned into a yard on the right.

"It's here, close by," said she and, running across the yard, opened a
gate in a wooden fence and, stopping, pointed out to him a small wooden
wing of the house, which was burning brightly and fiercely. One of its
sides had fallen in, another was on fire, and bright flames issued from
the openings of the windows and from under the roof.

As Pierre passed through the fence gate, he was enveloped by hot air and
involuntarily stopped.

"Which is it? Which is your house?" he asked.

"Ooh!" wailed the girl, pointing to the wing. "That's it, that was our
lodging. You've burned to death, our treasure, Katie, my precious little
missy! Ooh!" lamented Aniska, who at the sight of the fire felt that she
too must give expression to her feelings.

Pierre rushed to the wing, but the heat was so great that he
involuntarily passed round in a curve and came upon the large house
that was as yet burning only at one end, just below the roof, and around
which swarmed a crowd of Frenchmen. At first Pierre did not realize
what these men, who were dragging something out, were about; but seeing
before him a Frenchman hitting a peasant with a blunt saber and trying
to take from him a fox-fur coat, he vaguely understood that looting was
going on there, but he had no time to dwell on that idea.

The sounds of crackling and the din of falling walls and ceilings, the
whistle and hiss of the flames, the excited shouts of the people, and
the sight of the swaying smoke, now gathering into thick black clouds
and now soaring up with glittering sparks, with here and there dense
sheaves of flame (now red and now like golden fish scales creeping along
the walls), and the heat and smoke and rapidity of motion, produced
on Pierre the usual animating effects of a conflagration. It had a
peculiarly strong effect on him because at the sight of the fire he felt
himself suddenly freed from the ideas that had weighed him down. He felt
young, bright, adroit, and resolute. He ran round to the other side of
the lodge and was about to dash into that part of it which was still
standing, when just above his head he heard several voices shouting
and then a cracking sound and the ring of something heavy falling close
beside him.

Pierre looked up and saw at a window of the large house some Frenchmen
who had just thrown out the drawer of a chest, filled with metal
articles. Other French soldiers standing below went up to the drawer.

"What does this fellow want?" shouted one of them referring to Pierre.

"There's a child in that house. Haven't you seen a child?" cried Pierre.

"What's he talking about? Get along!" said several voices, and one of
the soldiers, evidently afraid that Pierre might want to take from
them some of the plate and bronzes that were in the drawer, moved
threateningly toward him.

"A child?" shouted a Frenchman from above. "I did hear something
squealing in the garden. Perhaps it's his brat that the fellow is
looking for. After all, one must be human, you know...."

"Where is it? Where?" said Pierre.

"There! There!" shouted the Frenchman at the window, pointing to the
garden at the back of the house. "Wait a bit--I'm coming down."

And a minute or two later the Frenchman, a black-eyed fellow with a spot
on his cheek, in shirt sleeves, really did jump out of a window on the
ground floor, and clapping Pierre on the shoulder ran with him into the
garden.

"Hurry up, you others!" he called out to his comrades. "It's getting
hot."

When they reached a gravel path behind the house the Frenchman pulled
Pierre by the arm and pointed to a round, graveled space where a
three-year-old girl in a pink dress was lying under a seat.

"There is your child! Oh, a girl, so much the better!" said the
Frenchman. "Good-by, Fatty. We must be human, we are all mortal you
know!" and the Frenchman with the spot on his cheek ran back to his
comrades.

Breathless with joy, Pierre ran to the little girl and was going to take
her in his arms. But seeing a stranger the sickly, scrofulous-looking
child, unattractively like her mother, began to yell and run away.
Pierre, however, seized her and lifted her in his arms. She screamed
desperately and angrily and tried with her little hands to pull Pierre's
hands away and to bite them with her slobbering mouth. Pierre was seized
by a sense of horror and repulsion such as he had experienced when
touching some nasty little animal. But he made an effort not to throw
the child down and ran with her to the large house. It was now, however,
impossible to get back the way he had come; the maid, Aniska, was no
longer there, and Pierre with a feeling of pity and disgust pressed the
wet, painfully sobbing child to himself as tenderly as he could and ran
with her through the garden seeking another way out.





CHAPTER XXXIV


Having run through different yards and side streets, Pierre got back
with his little burden to the Gruzinski garden at the corner of the
Povarskoy. He did not at first recognize the place from which he had set
out to look for the child, so crowded was it now with people and goods
that had been dragged out of the houses. Besides Russian families who
had taken refuge here from the fire with their belongings, there were
several French soldiers in a variety of clothing. Pierre took no notice
of them. He hurried to find the family of that civil servant in order to
restore the daughter to her mother and go to save someone else. Pierre
felt that he had still much to do and to do quickly. Glowing with the
heat and from running, he felt at that moment more strongly than ever
the sense of youth, animation, and determination that had come on him
when he ran to save the child. She had now become quiet and, clinging
with her little hands to Pierre's coat, sat on his arm gazing about
her like some little wild animal. He glanced at her occasionally with a
slight smile. He fancied he saw something pathetically innocent in that
frightened, sickly little face.

He did not find the civil servant or his wife where he had left them. He
walked among the crowd with rapid steps, scanning the various faces he
met. Involuntarily he noticed a Georgian or Armenian family
consisting of a very handsome old man of Oriental type, wearing a new,
cloth-covered, sheepskin coat and new boots, an old woman of similar
type, and a young woman. That very young woman seemed to Pierre the
perfection of Oriental beauty, with her sharply outlined, arched,
black eyebrows and the extraordinarily soft, bright color of her long,
beautiful, expressionless face. Amid the scattered property and the
crowd on the open space, she, in her rich satin cloak with a bright
lilac shawl on her head, suggested a delicate exotic plant thrown out
onto the snow. She was sitting on some bundles a little behind the old
woman, and looked from under her long lashes with motionless, large,
almond-shaped eyes at the ground before her. Evidently she was aware
of her beauty and fearful because of it. Her face struck Pierre and,
hurrying along by the fence, he turned several times to look at her.
When he had reached the fence, still without finding those he sought, he
stopped and looked about him.

With the child in his arms his figure was now more conspicuous than
before, and a group of Russians, both men and women, gathered about him.

"Have you lost anyone, my dear fellow? You're of the gentry yourself,
aren't you? Whose child is it?" they asked him.

Pierre replied that the child belonged to a woman in a black coat who
had been sitting there with her other children, and he asked whether
anyone knew where she had gone.

"Why, that must be the Anferovs," said an old deacon, addressing a
pockmarked peasant woman. "Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy!" he added
in his customary bass.

"The Anferovs? No," said the woman. "They left in the morning. That must
be either Mary Nikolievna's or the Ivanovs'!"

"He says 'a woman,' and Mary Nikolievna is a lady," remarked a house
serf.

"Do you know her? She's thin, with long teeth," said Pierre.

"That's Mary Nikolievna! They went inside the garden when these wolves
swooped down," said the woman, pointing to the French soldiers.

"O Lord, have mercy!" added the deacon.

"Go over that way, they're there. It's she! She kept on lamenting and
crying," continued the woman. "It's she. Here, this way!"

But Pierre was not listening to the woman. He had for some seconds been
intently watching what was going on a few steps away. He was looking at
the Armenian family and at two French soldiers who had gone up to them.
One of these, a nimble little man, was wearing a blue coat tied round
the waist with a rope. He had a nightcap on his head and his feet were
bare. The other, whose appearance particularly struck Pierre, was a
long, lank, round-shouldered, fair-haired man, slow in his movements
and with an idiotic expression of face. He wore a woman's loose gown
of frieze, blue trousers, and large torn Hessian boots. The little
barefooted Frenchman in the blue coat went up to the Armenians and,
saying something, immediately seized the old man by his legs and the old
man at once began pulling off his boots. The other in the frieze gown
stopped in front of the beautiful Armenian girl and with his hands in
his pockets stood staring at her, motionless and silent.

"Here, take the child!" said Pierre peremptorily and hurriedly to the
woman, handing the little girl to her. "Give her back to them, give her
back!" he almost shouted, putting the child, who began screaming, on the
ground, and again looking at the Frenchman and the Armenian family.

The old man was already sitting barefoot. The little Frenchman had
secured his second boot and was slapping one boot against the other.
The old man was saying something in a voice broken by sobs, but Pierre
caught but a glimpse of this, his whole attention was directed to the
Frenchman in the frieze gown who meanwhile, swaying slowly from side to
side, had drawn nearer to the young woman and taking his hands from his
pockets had seized her by the neck.

The beautiful Armenian still sat motionless and in the same attitude,
with her long lashes drooping as if she did not see or feel what the
soldier was doing to her.

While Pierre was running the few steps that separated him from the
Frenchman, the tall marauder in the frieze gown was already tearing
from her neck the necklace the young Armenian was wearing, and the young
woman, clutching at her neck, screamed piercingly.

"Let that woman alone!" exclaimed Pierre hoarsely in a furious voice,
seizing the soldier by his round shoulders and throwing him aside.

The soldier fell, got up, and ran away. But his comrade, throwing down
the boots and drawing his sword, moved threateningly toward Pierre.

"Voyons, Pas de betises!" * he cried.


    * "Look here, no nonsense!"


Pierre was in such a transport of rage that he remembered nothing and
his strength increased tenfold. He rushed at the barefooted Frenchman
and, before the latter had time to draw his sword, knocked him off his
feet and hammered him with his fists. Shouts of approval were heard
from the crowd around, and at the same moment a mounted patrol of French
Uhlans appeared from round the corner. The Uhlans came up at a trot to
Pierre and the Frenchman and surrounded them. Pierre remembered nothing
of what happened after that. He only remembered beating someone and
being beaten and finally feeling that his hands were bound and that a
crowd of French soldiers stood around him and were searching him.

"Lieutenant, he has a dagger," were the first words Pierre understood.

"Ah, a weapon?" said the officer and turned to the barefooted soldier
who had been arrested with Pierre. "All right, you can tell all about it
at the court-martial." Then he turned to Pierre. "Do you speak French?"

Pierre looked around him with bloodshot eyes and did not reply. His
face probably looked very terrible, for the officer said something in
a whisper and four more Uhlans left the ranks and placed themselves on
both sides of Pierre.

"Do you speak French?" the officer asked again, keeping at a distance
from Pierre. "Call the interpreter."

A little man in Russian civilian clothes rode out from the ranks, and
by his clothes and manner of speaking Pierre at once knew him to be a
French salesman from one of the Moscow shops.

"He does not look like a common man," said the interpreter, after a
searching look at Pierre.

"Ah, he looks very much like an incendiary," remarked the officer. "And
ask him who he is," he added.

"Who are you?" asked the interpreter in poor Russian. "You must answer
the chief."

"I will not tell you who I am. I am your prisoner--take me!" Pierre
suddenly replied in French.

"Ah, ah!" muttered the officer with a frown. "Well then, march!"

A crowd had collected round the Uhlans. Nearest to Pierre stood the
pockmarked peasant woman with the little girl, and when the patrol
started she moved forward.

"Where are they taking you to, you poor dear?" said she. "And the little
girl, the little girl, what am I to do with her if she's not theirs?"
said the woman.

"What does that woman want?" asked the officer.

Pierre was as if intoxicated. His elation increased at the sight of the
little girl he had saved.

"What does she want?" he murmured. "She is bringing me my daughter whom
I have just saved from the flames," said he. "Good-by!" And without
knowing how this aimless lie had escaped him, he went along with
resolute and triumphant steps between the French soldiers.

The French patrol was one of those sent out through the various
streets of Moscow by Durosnel's order to put a stop to the pillage,
and especially to catch the incendiaries who, according to the general
opinion which had that day originated among the higher French officers,
were the cause of the conflagrations. After marching through a number
of streets the patrol arrested five more Russian suspects: a small
shopkeeper, two seminary students, a peasant, and a house serf, besides
several looters. But of all these various suspected characters, Pierre
was considered to be the most suspicious of all. When they had all been
brought for the night to a large house on the Zubov Rampart that was
being used as a guardhouse, Pierre was placed apart under strict guard.





BOOK TWELVE: 1812





CHAPTER I


In Petersburg at that time a complicated struggle was being carried on
with greater heat than ever in the highest circles, between the parties
of Rumyantsev, the French, Marya Fedorovna, the Tsarevich, and others,
drowned as usual by the buzzing of the court drones. But the calm,
luxurious life of Petersburg, concerned only about phantoms and
reflections of real life, went on in its old way and made it hard,
except by a great effort, to realize the danger and the difficult
position of the Russian people. There were the same receptions and
balls, the same French theater, the same court interests and service
interests and intrigues as usual. Only in the very highest circles were
attempts made to keep in mind the difficulties of the actual position.
Stories were whispered of how differently the two Empresses behaved
in these difficult circumstances. The Empress Marya, concerned for
the welfare of the charitable and educational institutions under her
patronage, had given directions that they should all be removed to
Kazan, and the things belonging to these institutions had already been
packed up. The Empress Elisabeth, however, when asked what instructions
she would be pleased to give--with her characteristic Russian patriotism
had replied that she could give no directions about state institutions
for that was the affair of the sovereign, but as far as she personally
was concerned she would be the last to quit Petersburg.

At Anna Pavlovna's on the twenty-sixth of August, the very day of the
battle of Borodino, there was a soiree, the chief feature of which was
to be the reading of a letter from His Lordship the Bishop when sending
the Emperor an icon of the Venerable Sergius. It was regarded as a model
of ecclesiastical, patriotic eloquence. Prince Vasili himself, famed for
his elocution, was to read it. (He used to read at the Empress'.) The
art of his reading was supposed to lie in rolling out the words, quite
independently of their meaning, in a loud and singsong voice alternating
between a despairing wail and a tender murmur, so that the wail fell
quite at random on one word and the murmur on another. This reading,
as was always the case at Anna Pavlovna's soirees, had a political
significance. That evening she expected several important personages who
had to be made ashamed of their visits to the French theater and aroused
to a patriotic temper. A good many people had already arrived, but Anna
Pavlovna, not yet seeing all those whom she wanted in her drawing room,
did not let the reading begin but wound up the springs of a general
conversation.

The news of the day in Petersburg was the illness of Countess Bezukhova.
She had fallen ill unexpectedly a few days previously, had missed
several gatherings of which she was usually ornament, and was said to be
receiving no one, and instead of the celebrated Petersburg doctors who
usually attended her had entrusted herself to some Italian doctor who
was treating her in some new and unusual way.

They all knew very well that the enchanting countess' illness arose from
an inconvenience resulting from marrying two husbands at the same time,
and that the Italian's cure consisted in removing such inconvenience;
but in Anna Pavlovna's presence no one dared to think of this or even
appear to know it.

"They say the poor countess is very ill. The doctor says it is angina
pectoris."

"Angina? Oh, that's a terrible illness!"

"They say that the rivals are reconciled, thanks to the angina..." and
the word angina was repeated with great satisfaction.

"The count is pathetic, they say. He cried like a child when the doctor
told him the case was dangerous."

"Oh, it would be a terrible loss, she is an enchanting woman."

"You are speaking of the poor countess?" said Anna Pavlovna, coming
up just then. "I sent to ask for news, and hear that she is a little
better. Oh, she is certainly the most charming woman in the world," she
went on, with a smile at her own enthusiasm. "We belong to different
camps, but that does not prevent my esteeming her as she deserves. She
is very unfortunate!" added Anna Pavlovna.

Supposing that by these words Anna Pavlovna was somewhat lifting the
veil from the secret of the countess' malady, an unwary young man
ventured to express surprise that well known doctors had not been called
in and that the countess was being attended by a charlatan who might
employ dangerous remedies.

"Your information maybe better than mine," Anna Pavlovna suddenly and
venomously retorted on the inexperienced young man, "but I know on good
authority that this doctor is a very learned and able man. He is private
physician to the Queen of Spain."

And having thus demolished the young man, Anna Pavlovna turned to
another group where Bilibin was talking about the Austrians: having
wrinkled up his face he was evidently preparing to smooth it out again
and utter one of his mots.

"I think it is delightful," he said, referring to a diplomatic note that
had been sent to Vienna with some Austrian banners captured from the
French by Wittgenstein, "the hero of Petropol" as he was then called in
Petersburg.

"What? What's that?" asked Anna Pavlovna, securing silence for the mot,
which she had heard before.

And Bilibin repeated the actual words of the diplomatic dispatch, which
he had himself composed.

"The Emperor returns these Austrian banners," said Bilibin, "friendly
banners gone astray and found on a wrong path," and his brow became
smooth again.

"Charming, charming!" observed Prince Vasili.

"The path to Warsaw, perhaps," Prince Hippolyte remarked loudly and
unexpectedly. Everybody looked at him, understanding what he meant.
Prince Hippolyte himself glanced around with amused surprise. He knew no
more than the others what his words meant. During his diplomatic career
he had more than once noticed that such utterances were received as very
witty, and at every opportunity he uttered in that way the first words
that entered his head. "It may turn out very well," he thought, "but
if not, they'll know how to arrange matters." And really, during the
awkward silence that ensued, that insufficiently patriotic person
entered whom Anna Pavlovna had been waiting for and wished to convert,
and she, smiling and shaking a finger at Hippolyte, invited Prince
Vasili to the table and bringing him two candles and the manuscript
begged him to begin. Everyone became silent.


"Most Gracious Sovereign and Emperor!" Prince Vasili sternly declaimed,
looking round at his audience as if to inquire whether anyone had
anything to say to the contrary. But no one said anything. "Moscow, our
ancient capital, the New Jerusalem, receives her Christ"--he placed a
sudden emphasis on the word her--"as a mother receives her zealous sons
into her arms, and through the gathering mists, foreseeing the brilliant
glory of thy rule, sings in exultation, 'Hosanna, blessed is he that
cometh!'"


Prince Vasili pronounced these last words in a tearful voice.

Bilibin attentively examined his nails, and many of those present
appeared intimidated, as if asking in what they were to blame. Anna
Pavlovna whispered the next words in advance, like an old woman
muttering the prayer at Communion: "Let the bold and insolent
Goliath..." she whispered.

Prince Vasili continued.


"Let the bold and insolent Goliath from the borders of France encompass
the realms of Russia with death-bearing terrors; humble Faith, the sling
of the Russian David, shall suddenly smite his head in his bloodthirsty
pride. This icon of the Venerable Sergius, the servant of God and
zealous champion of old of our country's weal, is offered to Your
Imperial Majesty. I grieve that my waning strength prevents rejoicing
in the sight of your most gracious presence. I raise fervent prayers to
Heaven that the Almighty may exalt the race of the just, and mercifully
fulfill the desires of Your Majesty."


"What force! What a style!" was uttered in approval both of reader and
of author.

Animated by that address Anna Pavlovna's guests talked for a long time
of the state of the fatherland and offered various conjectures as to the
result of the battle to be fought in a few days.

"You will see," said Anna Pavlovna, "that tomorrow, on the Emperor's
birthday, we shall receive news. I have a favorable presentiment!"





CHAPTER II


Anna Pavlovna's presentiment was in fact fulfilled. Next day during the
service at the palace church in honor of the Emperor's birthday, Prince
Volkonski was called out of the church and received a dispatch from
Prince Kutuzov. It was Kutuzov's report, written from Tatarinova on the
day of the battle. Kutuzov wrote that the Russians had not retreated a
step, that the French losses were much heavier than ours, and that he
was writing in haste from the field of battle before collecting full
information. It followed that there must have been a victory. And at
once, without leaving the church, thanks were rendered to the Creator
for His help and for the victory.

Anna Pavlovna's presentiment was justified, and all that morning a
joyously festive mood reigned in the city. Everyone believed the victory
to have been complete, and some even spoke of Napoleon's having been
captured, of his deposition, and of the choice of a new ruler for
France.

It is very difficult for events to be reflected in their real strength
and completeness amid the conditions of court life and far from the
scene of action. General events involuntarily group themselves around
some particular incident. So now the courtiers' pleasure was based as
much on the fact that the news had arrived on the Emperor's birthday as
on the fact of the victory itself. It was like a successfully arranged
surprise. Mention was made in Kutuzov's report of the Russian losses,
among which figured the names of Tuchkov, Bagration, and Kutaysov. In
the Petersburg world this sad side of the affair again involuntarily
centered round a single incident: Kutaysov's death. Everybody knew
him, the Emperor liked him, and he was young and interesting. That day
everyone met with the words:

"What a wonderful coincidence! Just during the service. But what a loss
Kutaysov is! How sorry I am!"

"What did I tell about Kutuzov?" Prince Vasili now said with a
prophet's pride. "I always said he was the only man capable of defeating
Napoleon."

But next day no news arrived from the army and the public mood grew
anxious. The courtiers suffered because of the suffering the suspense
occasioned the Emperor.

"Fancy the Emperor's position!" said they, and instead of extolling
Kutuzov as they had done the day before, they condemned him as the cause
of the Emperor's anxiety. That day Prince Vasili no longer boasted of
his protege Kutuzov, but remained silent when the commander in chief was
mentioned. Moreover, toward evening, as if everything conspired to make
Petersburg society anxious and uneasy, a terrible piece of news was
added. Countess Helene Bezukhova had suddenly died of that terrible
malady it had been so agreeable to mention. Officially, at large
gatherings, everyone said that Countess Bezukhova had died of a
terrible attack of angina pectoris, but in intimate circles details
were mentioned of how the private physician of the Queen of Spain had
prescribed small doses of a certain drug to produce a certain effect;
but Helene, tortured by the fact that the old count suspected her and
that her husband to whom she had written (that wretched, profligate
Pierre) had not replied, had suddenly taken a very large dose of the
drug, and had died in agony before assistance could be rendered her.
It was said that Prince Vasili and the old count had turned upon the
Italian, but the latter had produced such letters from the unfortunate
deceased that they had immediately let the matter drop.

Talk in general centered round three melancholy facts: the Emperor's
lack of news, the loss of Kutuzov, and the death of Helene.

On the third day after Kutuzov's report a country gentleman arrived from
Moscow, and news of the surrender of Moscow to the French spread through
the whole town. This was terrible! What a position for the Emperor to
be in! Kutuzov was a traitor, and Prince Vasili during the visits of
condolence paid to him on the occasion of his daughter's death said of
Kutuzov, whom he had formerly praised (it was excusable for him in his
grief to forget what he had said), that it was impossible to expect
anything else from a blind and depraved old man.

"I only wonder that the fate of Russia could have been entrusted to such
a man."

As long as this news remained unofficial it was possible to doubt it,
but the next day the following communication was received from Count
Rostopchin:


Prince Kutuzov's adjutant has brought me a letter in which he demands
police officers to guide the army to the Ryazan road. He writes that
he is regretfully abandoning Moscow. Sire! Kutuzov's action decides the
fate of the capital and of your empire! Russia will shudder to learn of
the abandonment of the city in which her greatness is centered and in
which lie the ashes of your ancestors! I shall follow the army. I have
had everything removed, and it only remains for me to weep over the fate
of my fatherland.


On receiving this dispatch the Emperor sent Prince Volkonski to Kutuzov
with the following rescript:


Prince Michael Ilarionovich! Since the twenty-ninth of August I have
received no communication from you, yet on the first of September I
received from the commander in chief of Moscow, via Yaroslavl, the sad
news that you, with the army, have decided to abandon Moscow. You can
yourself imagine the effect this news has had on me, and your silence
increases my astonishment. I am sending this by Adjutant-General Prince
Volkonski, to hear from you the situation of the army and the reasons
that have induced you to take this melancholy decision.





CHAPTER III


Nine days after the abandonment of Moscow, a messenger from Kutuzov
reached Petersburg with the official announcement of that event. This
messenger was Michaud, a Frenchman who did not know Russian, but who was
quoique etranger, russe de coeur et d'ame, * as he said of himself.


    * Though a foreigner, Russian in heart and soul.


The Emperor at once received this messenger in his study at the palace
on Stone Island. Michaud, who had never seen Moscow before the campaign
and who did not know Russian, yet felt deeply moved (as he wrote) when
he appeared before notre tres gracieux souverain * with the news of the
burning of Moscow, dont les flammes eclairaient sa route. *(2)


     * Our most gracious sovereign.

     * (2) Whose flames illumined his route.


Though the source of M. Michaud's chagrin must have been different from
that which caused Russians to grieve, he had such a sad face when shown
into the Emperor's study that the latter at once asked:

"Have you brought me sad news, Colonel?"

"Very sad, sire," replied Michaud, lowering his eyes with a sigh. "The
abandonment of Moscow."

"Have they surrendered my ancient capital without a battle?" asked the
Emperor quickly, his face suddenly flushing.

Michaud respectfully delivered the message Kutuzov had entrusted to him,
which was that it had been impossible to fight before Moscow, and that
as the only remaining choice was between losing the army as well as
Moscow, or losing Moscow alone, the field marshal had to choose the
latter.

The Emperor listened in silence, not looking at Michaud.

"Has the enemy entered the city?" he asked.

"Yes, sire, and Moscow is now in ashes. I left it all in flames,"
replied Michaud in a decided tone, but glancing at the Emperor he was
frightened by what he had done.

The Emperor began to breathe heavily and rapidly, his lower lip
trembled, and tears instantly appeared in his fine blue eyes.

But this lasted only a moment. He suddenly frowned, as if blaming
himself for his weakness, and raising his head addressed Michaud in a
firm voice:

"I see, Colonel, from all that is happening, that Providence requires
great sacrifices of us... I am ready to submit myself in all things to
His will; but tell me, Michaud, how did you leave the army when it
saw my ancient capital abandoned without a battle? Did you not notice
discouragement?..."

Seeing that his most gracious ruler was calm once more, Michaud also
grew calm, but was not immediately ready to reply to the Emperor's
direct and relevant question which required a direct answer.

"Sire, will you allow me to speak frankly as befits a loyal soldier?" he
asked to gain time.

"Colonel, I always require it," replied the Emperor. "Conceal nothing
from me, I wish to know absolutely how things are."

"Sire!" said Michaud with a subtle, scarcely perceptible smile on his
lips, having now prepared a well-phrased reply, "sire, I left the
whole army, from its chiefs to the lowest soldier, without exception in
desperate and agonized terror..."

"How is that?" the Emperor interrupted him, frowning sternly. "Would
misfortune make my Russians lose heart?... Never!"

Michaud had only waited for this to bring out the phrase he had
prepared.

"Sire," he said, with respectful playfulness, "they are only afraid lest
Your Majesty, in the goodness of your heart, should allow yourself to be
persuaded to make peace. They are burning for the combat," declared this
representative of the Russian nation, "and to prove to Your Majesty by
the sacrifice of their lives how devoted they are...."

"Ah!" said the Emperor reassured, and with a kindly gleam in his eyes,
he patted Michaud on the shoulder. "You set me at ease, Colonel."

He bent his head and was silent for some time.

"Well, then, go back to the army," he said, drawing himself up to his
full height and addressing Michaud with a gracious and majestic gesture,
"and tell our brave men and all my good subjects wherever you go that
when I have not a soldier left I shall put myself at the head of my
beloved nobility and my good peasants and so use the last resources of
my empire. It still offers me more than my enemies suppose," said the
Emperor growing more and more animated; "but should it ever be ordained
by Divine Providence," he continued, raising to heaven his fine eyes
shining with emotion, "that my dynasty should cease to reign on the
throne of my ancestors, then after exhausting all the means at my
command, I shall let my beard grow to here" (he pointed halfway down his
chest) "and go and eat potatoes with the meanest of my peasants, rather
than sign the disgrace of my country and of my beloved people whose
sacrifices I know how to appreciate."

Having uttered these words in an agitated voice the Emperor suddenly
turned away as if to hide from Michaud the tears that rose to his eyes,
and went to the further end of his study. Having stood there a few
moments, he strode back to Michaud and pressed his arm below the elbow
with a vigorous movement. The Emperor's mild and handsome face was
flushed and his eyes gleamed with resolution and anger.

"Colonel Michaud, do not forget what I say to you here, perhaps we may
recall it with pleasure someday... Napoleon or I," said the Emperor,
touching his breast. "We can no longer both reign together. I have
learned to know him, and he will not deceive me any more...."

And the Emperor paused, with a frown.

When he heard these words and saw the expression of firm resolution
in the Emperor's eyes, Michaud--quoique etranger, russe de coeur et
d'ame--at that solemn moment felt himself enraptured by all that he had
heard (as he used afterwards to say), and gave expression to his
own feelings and those of the Russian people whose representative he
considered himself to be, in the following words:

"Sire!" said he, "Your Majesty is at this moment signing the glory of
the nation and the salvation of Europe!"

With an inclination of the head the Emperor dismissed him.





CHAPTER IV


It is natural for us who were not living in those days to imagine that
when half Russia had been conquered and the inhabitants were fleeing to
distant provinces, and one levy after another was being raised for the
defense of the fatherland, all Russians from the greatest to the least
were solely engaged in sacrificing themselves, saving their fatherland,
or weeping over its downfall. The tales and descriptions of that time
without exception speak only of the self-sacrifice, patriotic devotion,
despair, grief, and the heroism of the Russians. But it was not really
so. It appears so to us because we see only the general historic
interest of that time and do not see all the personal human interests
that people had. Yet in reality those personal interests of the moment
so much transcend the general interests that they always prevent the
public interest from being felt or even noticed. Most of the people at
that time paid no attention to the general progress of events but were
guided only by their private interests, and they were the very people
whose activities at that period were most useful.

Those who tried to understand the general course of events and to take
part in it by self-sacrifice and heroism were the most useless members
of society, they saw everything upside down, and all they did for the
common good turned out to be useless and foolish--like Pierre's and
Mamonov's regiments which looted Russian villages, and the lint the
young ladies prepared and that never reached the wounded, and so on.
Even those, fond of intellectual talk and of expressing their feelings,
who discussed Russia's position at the time involuntarily introduced
into their conversation either a shade of pretense and falsehood or
useless condemnation and anger directed against people accused of
actions no one could possibly be guilty of. In historic events the rule
forbidding us to eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge is specially
applicable. Only unconscious action bears fruit, and he who plays a part
in an historic event never understands its significance. If he tries to
realize it his efforts are fruitless.

The more closely a man was engaged in the events then taking place in
Russia the less did he realize their significance. In Petersburg and
in the provinces at a distance from Moscow, ladies, and gentlemen in
militia uniforms, wept for Russia and its ancient capital and talked of
self-sacrifice and so on; but in the army which retired beyond Moscow
there was little talk or thought of Moscow, and when they caught sight
of its burned ruins no one swore to be avenged on the French, but they
thought about their next pay, their next quarters, of Matreshka the
vivandiere, and like matters.

As the war had caught him in the service, Nicholas Rostov took a close
and prolonged part in the defense of his country, but did so casually,
without any aim at self-sacrifice, and he therefore looked at what was
going on in Russia without despair and without dismally racking his
brains over it. Had he been asked what he thought of the state of
Russia, he would have said that it was not his business to think about
it, that Kutuzov and others were there for that purpose, but that he had
heard that the regiments were to be made up to their full strength, that
fighting would probably go on for a long time yet, and that things being
so it was quite likely he might be in command of a regiment in a couple
of years' time.

As he looked at the matter in this way, he learned that he was being
sent to Voronezh to buy remounts for his division, not only without
regret at being prevented from taking part in the coming battle, but
with the greatest pleasure--which he did not conceal and which his
comrades fully understood.

A few days before the battle of Borodino, Nicholas received the
necessary money and warrants, and having sent some hussars on in
advance, he set out with post horses for Voronezh.

Only a man who has experienced it--that is, has passed some months
continuously in an atmosphere of campaigning and war--can understand
the delight Nicholas felt when he escaped from the region covered by the
army's foraging operations, provision trains, and hospitals. When--free
from soldiers, wagons, and the filthy traces of a camp--he saw villages
with peasants and peasant women, gentlemen's country houses, fields
where cattle were grazing, posthouses with stationmasters asleep in
them, he rejoiced as though seeing all this for the first time. What for
a long while specially surprised and delighted him were the women, young
and healthy, without a dozen officers making up to each of them; women,
too, who were pleased and flattered that a passing officer should joke
with them.

In the highest spirits Nicholas arrived at night at a hotel in Voronezh,
ordered things he had long been deprived of in camp, and next day, very
clean-shaven and in a full-dress uniform he had not worn for a long
time, went to present himself to the authorities.

The commander of the militia was a civilian general, an old man who was
evidently pleased with his military designation and rank. He received
Nicholas brusquely (imagining this to be characteristically military)
and questioned him with an important air, as if considering the general
progress of affairs and approving and disapproving with full right to do
so. Nicholas was in such good spirits that this merely amused him.

From the commander of the militia he drove to the governor. The governor
was a brisk little man, very simple and affable. He indicated the stud
farms at which Nicholas might procure horses, recommended to him a horse
dealer in the town and a landowner fourteen miles out of town who had
the best horses, and promised to assist him in every way.

"You are Count Ilya Rostov's son? My wife was a great friend of your
mother's. We are at home on Thursdays--today is Thursday, so please come
and see us quite informally," said the governor, taking leave of him.

Immediately on leaving the governor's, Nicholas hired post horses and,
taking his squadron quartermaster with him, drove at a gallop to the
landowner, fourteen miles away, who had the stud. Everything seemed to
him pleasant and easy during that first part of his stay in Voronezh
and, as usually happens when a man is in a pleasant state of mind,
everything went well and easily.

The landowner to whom Nicholas went was a bachelor, an old cavalryman, a
horse fancier, a sportsman, the possessor of some century-old brandy
and some old Hungarian wine, who had a snuggery where he smoked, and who
owned some splendid horses.

In very few words Nicholas bought seventeen picked stallions for six
thousand rubles--to serve, as he said, as samples of his remounts.
After dining and taking rather too much of the Hungarian wine,
Nicholas--having exchanged kisses with the landowner, with whom he was
already on the friendliest terms--galloped back over abominable roads,
in the brightest frame of mind, continually urging on the driver so as
to be in time for the governor's party.

When he had changed, poured water over his head, and scented himself,
Nicholas arrived at the governor's rather late, but with the phrase
"better late than never" on his lips.

It was not a ball, nor had dancing been announced, but everyone knew
that Catherine Petrovna would play valses and the ecossaise on the
clavichord and that there would be dancing, and so everyone had come as
to a ball.

Provincial life in 1812 went on very much as usual, but with this
difference, that it was livelier in the towns in consequence of the
arrival of many wealthy families from Moscow, and as in everything that
went on in Russia at that time a special recklessness was noticeable, an
"in for a penny, in for a pound--who cares?" spirit, and the inevitable
small talk, instead of turning on the weather and mutual acquaintances,
now turned on Moscow, the army, and Napoleon.

The society gathered together at the governor's was the best in
Voronezh.

There were a great many ladies and some of Nicholas' Moscow
acquaintances, but there were no men who could at all vie with the
cavalier of St. George, the hussar remount officer, the good-natured
and well-bred Count Rostov. Among the men was an Italian prisoner, an
officer of the French army; and Nicholas felt that the presence of that
prisoner enhanced his own importance as a Russian hero. The Italian
was, as it were, a war trophy. Nicholas felt this, it seemed to him
that everyone regarded the Italian in the same light, and he treated him
cordially though with dignity and restraint.

As soon as Nicholas entered in his hussar uniform, diffusing around him
a fragrance of perfume and wine, and had uttered the words "better late
than never" and heard them repeated several times by others, people
clustered around him; all eyes turned on him, and he felt at once that
he had entered into his proper position in the province--that of a
universal favorite: a very pleasant position, and intoxicatingly so
after his long privations. At posting stations, at inns, and in the
landowner's snuggery, maidservants had been flattered by his notice, and
here too at the governor's party there were (as it seemed to Nicholas)
an inexhaustible number of pretty young women, married and unmarried,
impatiently awaiting his notice. The women and girls flirted with him
and, from the first day, the people concerned themselves to get this
fine young daredevil of an hussar married and settled down. Among these
was the governor's wife herself, who welcomed Rostov as a near relative
and called him "Nicholas."

Catherine Petrovna did actually play valses and the ecossaise, and
dancing began in which Nicholas still further captivated the provincial
society by his agility. His particularly free manner of dancing even
surprised them all. Nicholas was himself rather surprised at the way he
danced that evening. He had never danced like that in Moscow and would
even have considered such a very free and easy manner improper and in
bad form, but here he felt it incumbent on him to astonish them all by
something unusual, something they would have to accept as the regular
thing in the capital though new to them in the provinces.

All the evening Nicholas paid attention to a blue-eyed, plump and
pleasing little blonde, the wife of one of the provincial officials.
With the naive conviction of young men in a merry mood that other men's
wives were created for them, Rostov did not leave the lady's side and
treated her husband in a friendly and conspiratorial style, as if,
without speaking of it, they knew how capitally Nicholas and the lady
would get on together. The husband, however, did not seem to share that
conviction and tried to behave morosely with Rostov. But the
latter's good-natured naivete was so boundless that sometimes even he
involuntarily yielded to Nicholas' good humor. Toward the end of the
evening, however, as the wife's face grew more flushed and animated, the
husband's became more and more melancholy and solemn, as though there
were but a given amount of animation between them and as the wife's
share increased the husband's diminished.





CHAPTER V


Nicholas sat leaning slightly forward in an armchair, bending closely
over the blonde lady and paying her mythological compliments with a
smile that never left his face. Jauntily shifting the position of his
legs in their tight riding breeches, diffusing an odor of perfume, and
admiring his partner, himself, and the fine outlines of his legs in
their well-fitting Hessian boots, Nicholas told the blonde lady that he
wished to run away with a certain lady here in Voronezh.

"Which lady?"

"A charming lady, a divine one. Her eyes" (Nicholas looked at his
partner) "are blue, her mouth coral and ivory; her figure" (he glanced
at her shoulders) "like Diana's...."

The husband came up and sullenly asked his wife what she was talking
about.

"Ah, Nikita Ivanych!" cried Nicholas, rising politely, and as if wishing
Nikita Ivanych to share his joke, he began to tell him of his intention
to elope with a blonde lady.

The husband smiled gloomily, the wife gaily. The governor's good-natured
wife came up with a look of disapproval.

"Anna Ignatyevna wants to see you, Nicholas," said she, pronouncing the
name so that Nicholas at once understood that Anna Ignatyevna was a very
important person. "Come, Nicholas! You know you let me call you so?"

"Oh, yes, Aunt. Who is she?"

"Anna Ignatyevna Malvintseva. She has heard from her niece how you
rescued her... Can you guess?"

"I rescued such a lot of them!" said Nicholas.

"Her niece, Princess Bolkonskaya. She is here in Voronezh with her aunt.
Oho! How you blush. Why, are...?"

"Not a bit! Please don't, Aunt!"

"Very well, very well!... Oh, what a fellow you are!"

The governor's wife led him up to a tall and very stout old lady with
a blue headdress, who had just finished her game of cards with the most
important personages of the town. This was Malvintseva, Princess Mary's
aunt on her mother's side, a rich, childless widow who always lived in
Voronezh. When Rostov approached her she was standing settling up for
the game. She looked at him and, screwing up her eyes sternly, continued
to upbraid the general who had won from her.

"Very pleased, mon cher," she then said, holding out her hand to
Nicholas. "Pray come and see me."

After a few words about Princess Mary and her late father, whom
Malvintseva had evidently not liked, and having asked what Nicholas
knew of Prince Andrew, who also was evidently no favorite of hers, the
important old lady dismissed Nicholas after repeating her invitation to
come to see her.

Nicholas promised to come and blushed again as he bowed. At the mention
of Princess Mary he experienced a feeling of shyness and even of fear,
which he himself did not understand.

When he had parted from Malvintseva Nicholas wished to return to the
dancing, but the governor's little wife placed her plump hand on his
sleeve and, saying that she wanted to have a talk with him, led him to
her sitting room, from which those who were there immediately withdrew
so as not to be in her way.

"Do you know, dear boy," began the governor's wife with a serious
expression on her kind little face, "that really would be the match for
you: would you like me to arrange it?"

"Whom do you mean, Aunt?" asked Nicholas.

"I will make a match for you with the princess. Catherine Petrovna
speaks of Lily, but I say, no--the princess! Do you want me to do it? I
am sure your mother will be grateful to me. What a charming girl she is,
really! And she is not at all so plain, either."

"Not at all," replied Nicholas as if offended at the idea. "As befits
a soldier, Aunt, I don't force myself on anyone or refuse anything," he
said before he had time to consider what he was saying.

"Well then, remember, this is not a joke!"

"Of course not!"

"Yes, yes," the governor's wife said as if talking to herself. "But,
my dear boy, among other things you are too attentive to the other, the
blonde. One is sorry for the husband, really...."

"Oh no, we are good friends with him," said Nicholas in the simplicity
of his heart; it did not enter his head that a pastime so pleasant to
himself might not be pleasant to someone else.

"But what nonsense I have been saying to the governor's wife!" thought
Nicholas suddenly at supper. "She will really begin to arrange a
match... and Sonya...?" And on taking leave of the governor's wife,
when she again smilingly said to him, "Well then, remember!" he drew her
aside.

"But see here, to tell the truth, Aunt..."

"What is it, my dear? Come, let's sit down here," said she.

Nicholas suddenly felt a desire and need to tell his most intimate
thoughts (which he would not have told to his mother, his sister, or
his friend) to this woman who was almost a stranger. When he afterwards
recalled that impulse to unsolicited and inexplicable frankness which
had very important results for him, it seemed to him--as it seems to
everyone in such cases--that it was merely some silly whim that seized
him: yet that burst of frankness, together with other trifling events,
had immense consequences for him and for all his family.

"You see, Aunt, Mamma has long wanted me to marry an heiress, but the
very idea of marrying for money is repugnant to me."

"Oh yes, I understand," said the governor's wife.

"But Princess Bolkonskaya--that's another matter. I will tell you the
truth. In the first place I like her very much, I feel drawn to her; and
then, after I met her under such circumstances--so strangely, the idea
often occurred to me: 'This is fate.' Especially if you remember that
Mamma had long been thinking of it; but I had never happened to meet her
before, somehow it had always happened that we did not meet. And as long
as my sister Natasha was engaged to her brother it was of course out of
the question for me to think of marrying her. And it must needs happen
that I should meet her just when Natasha's engagement had been broken
off... and then everything... So you see... I never told this to anyone
and never will, only to you."

The governor's wife pressed his elbow gratefully.

"You know Sonya, my cousin? I love her, and promised to marry her, and
will do so.... So you see there can be no question about-" said Nicholas
incoherently and blushing.

"My dear boy, what a way to look at it! You know Sonya has nothing and
you yourself say your Papa's affairs are in a very bad way. And what
about your mother? It would kill her, that's one thing. And what sort of
life would it be for Sonya--if she's a girl with a heart? Your mother
in despair, and you all ruined.... No, my dear, you and Sonya ought to
understand that."

Nicholas remained silent. It comforted him to hear these arguments.

"All the same, Aunt, it is impossible," he rejoined with a sigh, after
a short pause. "Besides, would the princess have me? And besides, she is
now in mourning. How can one think of it!"

"But you don't suppose I'm going to get you married at once? There is
always a right way of doing things," replied the governor's wife.

"What a matchmaker you are, Aunt..." said Nicholas, kissing her plump
little hand.





CHAPTER VI


On reaching Moscow after her meeting with Rostov, Princess Mary had
found her nephew there with his tutor, and a letter from Prince Andrew
giving her instructions how to get to her Aunt Malvintseva at Voronezh.
That feeling akin to temptation which had tormented her during her
father's illness, since his death, and especially since her meeting with
Rostov was smothered by arrangements for the journey, anxiety about her
brother, settling in a new house, meeting new people, and attending to
her nephew's education. She was sad. Now, after a month passed in quiet
surroundings, she felt more and more deeply the loss of her father which
was associated in her mind with the ruin of Russia. She was agitated and
incessantly tortured by the thought of the dangers to which her brother,
the only intimate person now remaining to her, was exposed. She was
worried too about her nephew's education for which she had always felt
herself incompetent, but in the depths of her soul she felt at peace--a
peace arising from consciousness of having stifled those personal dreams
and hopes that had been on the point of awakening within her and were
related to her meeting with Rostov.

The day after her party the governor's wife came to see Malvintseva
and, after discussing her plan with the aunt, remarked that though
under present circumstances a formal betrothal was, of course, not to be
thought of, all the same the young people might be brought together and
could get to know one another. Malvintseva expressed approval, and the
governor's wife began to speak of Rostov in Mary's presence, praising
him and telling how he had blushed when Princess Mary's name was
mentioned. But Princess Mary experienced a painful rather than a joyful
feeling--her mental tranquillity was destroyed, and desires, doubts,
self-reproach, and hopes reawoke.

During the two days that elapsed before Rostov called, Princess Mary
continually thought of how she ought to behave to him. First she decided
not to come to the drawing room when he called to see her aunt--that it
would not be proper for her, in her deep mourning, to receive visitors;
then she thought this would be rude after what he had done for her; then
it occurred to her that her aunt and the governor's wife had intentions
concerning herself and Rostov--their looks and words at times seemed to
confirm this supposition--then she told herself that only she, with
her sinful nature, could think this of them: they could not forget that
situated as she was, while still wearing deep mourning, such matchmaking
would be an insult to her and to her father's memory. Assuming that she
did go down to see him, Princess Mary imagined the words he would say
to her and what she would say to him, and these words sometimes seemed
undeservedly cold and then to mean too much. More than anything she
feared lest the confusion she felt might overwhelm her and betray her as
soon as she saw him.

But when on Sunday after church the footman announced in the drawing
room that Count Rostov had called, the princess showed no confusion,
only a slight blush suffused her cheeks and her eyes lit up with a new
and radiant light.

"You have met him, Aunt?" said she in a calm voice, unable herself to
understand that she could be outwardly so calm and natural.

When Rostov entered the room, the princess dropped her eyes for an
instant, as if to give the visitor time to greet her aunt, and then
just as Nicholas turned to her she raised her head and met his look with
shining eyes. With a movement full of dignity and grace she half rose
with a smile of pleasure, held out her slender, delicate hand to him,
and began to speak in a voice in which for the first time new deep
womanly notes vibrated. Mademoiselle Bourienne, who was in the drawing
room, looked at Princess Mary in bewildered surprise. Herself a
consummate coquette, she could not have maneuvered better on meeting a
man she wished to attract.

"Either black is particularly becoming to her or she really has greatly
improved without my having noticed it. And above all, what tact and
grace!" thought Mademoiselle Bourienne.

Had Princess Mary been capable of reflection at that moment, she would
have been more surprised than Mademoiselle Bourienne at the change that
had taken place in herself. From the moment she recognized that dear,
loved face, a new life force took possession of her and compelled her to
speak and act apart from her own will. From the time Rostov entered, her
face became suddenly transformed. It was as if a light had been kindled
in a carved and painted lantern and the intricate, skillful, artistic
work on its sides, that previously seemed dark, coarse, and meaningless,
was suddenly shown up in unexpected and striking beauty. For the first
time all that pure, spiritual, inward travail through which she had
lived appeared on the surface. All her inward labor, her dissatisfaction
with herself, her sufferings, her strivings after goodness, her
meekness, love, and self-sacrifice--all this now shone in those radiant
eyes, in her delicate smile, and in every trait of her gentle face.

Rostov saw all this as clearly as if he had known her whole life. He
felt that the being before him was quite different from, and better
than, anyone he had met before, and above all better than himself.

Their conversation was very simple and unimportant. They spoke of the
war, and like everyone else unconsciously exaggerated their sorrow about
it; they spoke of their last meeting--Nicholas trying to change
the subject--they talked of the governor's kind wife, of Nicholas'
relations, and of Princess Mary's.

She did not talk about her brother, diverting the conversation as soon
as her aunt mentioned Andrew. Evidently she could speak of Russia's
misfortunes with a certain artificiality, but her brother was too near
her heart and she neither could nor would speak lightly of him. Nicholas
noticed this, as he noticed every shade of Princess Mary's character
with an observation unusual to him, and everything confirmed his
conviction that she was a quite unusual and extraordinary being.
Nicholas blushed and was confused when people spoke to him about the
princess (as she did when he was mentioned) and even when he thought of
her, but in her presence he felt quite at ease, and said not at all what
he had prepared, but what, quite appropriately, occurred to him at the
moment.

When a pause occurred during his short visit, Nicholas, as is usual when
there are children, turned to Prince Andrew's little son, caressing him
and asking whether he would like to be an hussar. He took the boy on
his knee, played with him, and looked round at Princess Mary. With a
softened, happy, timid look she watched the boy she loved in the arms
of the man she loved. Nicholas also noticed that look and, as if
understanding it, flushed with pleasure and began to kiss the boy with
good natured playfulness.

As she was in mourning Princess Mary did not go out into society, and
Nicholas did not think it the proper thing to visit her again; but all
the same the governor's wife went on with her matchmaking, passing on to
Nicholas the flattering things Princess Mary said of him and vice
versa, and insisting on his declaring himself to Princess Mary. For this
purpose she arranged a meeting between the young people at the bishop's
house before Mass.

Though Rostov told the governor's wife that he would not make any
declaration to Princess Mary, he promised to go.

As at Tilsit Rostov had not allowed himself to doubt that what everybody
considered right was right, so now, after a short but sincere struggle
between his effort to arrange his life by his own sense of justice, and
in obedient submission to circumstances, he chose the latter and yielded
to the power he felt irresistibly carrying him he knew not where. He
knew that after his promise to Sonya it would be what he deemed base to
declare his feelings to Princess Mary. And he knew that he would never
act basely. But he also knew (or rather felt at the bottom of his heart)
that by resigning himself now to the force of circumstances and to those
who were guiding him, he was not only doing nothing wrong, but was doing
something very important--more important than anything he had ever done
in his life.

After meeting Princess Mary, though the course of his life went on
externally as before, all his former amusements lost their charm for him
and he often thought about her. But he never thought about her as he
had thought of all the young ladies without exception whom he had met
in society, nor as he had for a long time, and at one time rapturously,
thought about Sonya. He had pictured each of those young ladies as
almost all honest-hearted young men do, that is, as a possible wife,
adapting her in his imagination to all the conditions of married life:
a white dressing gown, his wife at the tea table, his wife's carriage,
little ones, Mamma and Papa, their relations to her, and so on--and
these pictures of the future had given him pleasure. But with Princess
Mary, to whom they were trying to get him engaged, he could never
picture anything of future married life. If he tried, his pictures
seemed incongruous and false. It made him afraid.





CHAPTER VII


The dreadful news of the battle of Borodino, of our losses in killed and
wounded, and the still more terrible news of the loss of Moscow reached
Voronezh in the middle of September. Princess Mary, having learned of
her brother's wound only from the Gazette and having no definite news of
him, prepared (so Nicholas heard, he had not seen her again himself) to
set off in search of Prince Andrew.

When he received the news of the battle of Borodino and the abandonment
of Moscow, Rostov was not seized with despair, anger, the desire for
vengeance, or any feeling of that kind, but everything in Voronezh
suddenly seemed to him dull and tiresome, and he experienced an
indefinite feeling of shame and awkwardness. The conversations he heard
seemed to him insincere; he did not know how to judge all these affairs
and felt that only in the regiment would everything again become clear
to him. He made haste to finish buying the horses, and often became
unreasonably angry with his servant and squadron quartermaster.

A few days before his departure a special thanksgiving, at which
Nicholas was present, was held in the cathedral for the Russian victory.
He stood a little behind the governor and held himself with military
decorum through the service, meditating on a great variety of subjects.
When the service was over the governor's wife beckoned him to her.

"Have you seen the princess?" she asked, indicating with a movement of
her head a lady standing on the opposite side, beyond the choir.

Nicholas immediately recognized Princess Mary not so much by the profile
he saw under her bonnet as by the feeling of solicitude, timidity, and
pity that immediately overcame him. Princess Mary, evidently engrossed
by her thoughts, was crossing herself for the last time before leaving
the church.

Nicholas looked at her face with surprise. It was the same face he had
seen before, there was the same general expression of refined, inner,
spiritual labor, but now it was quite differently lit up. There was a
pathetic expression of sorrow, prayer, and hope in it. As had occurred
before when she was present, Nicholas went up to her without waiting to
be prompted by the governor's wife and not asking himself whether or not
it was right and proper to address her here in church, and told her he
had heard of her trouble and sympathized with his whole soul. As soon as
she heard his voice a vivid glow kindled in her face, lighting up both
her sorrow and her joy.

"There is one thing I wanted to tell you, Princess," said Rostov. "It
is that if your brother, Prince Andrew Nikolievich, were not living, it
would have been at once announced in the Gazette, as he is a colonel."

The princess looked at him, not grasping what he was saying, but cheered
by the expression of regretful sympathy on his face.

"And I have known so many cases of a splinter wound" (the Gazette said
it was a shell) "either proving fatal at once or being very slight,"
continued Nicholas. "We must hope for the best, and I am sure..."

Princess Mary interrupted him.

"Oh, that would be so dread..." she began and, prevented by agitation
from finishing, she bent her head with a movement as graceful as
everything she did in his presence and, looking up at him gratefully,
went out, following her aunt.

That evening Nicholas did not go out, but stayed at home to settle some
accounts with the horse dealers. When he had finished that business it
was already too late to go anywhere but still too early to go to bed,
and for a long time he paced up and down the room, reflecting on his
life, a thing he rarely did.

Princess Mary had made an agreeable impression on him when he had met
her in Smolensk province. His having encountered her in such exceptional
circumstances, and his mother having at one time mentioned her to him as
a good match, had drawn his particular attention to her. When he met her
again in Voronezh the impression she made on him was not merely pleasing
but powerful. Nicholas had been struck by the peculiar moral beauty he
observed in her at this time. He was, however, preparing to go away and
it had not entered his head to regret that he was thus depriving himself
of chances of meeting her. But that day's encounter in church had, he
felt, sunk deeper than was desirable for his peace of mind. That pale,
sad, refined face, that radiant look, those gentle graceful gestures,
and especially the deep and tender sorrow expressed in all her features
agitated him and evoked his sympathy. In men Rostov could not bear to
see the expression of a higher spiritual life (that was why he did not
like Prince Andrew) and he referred to it contemptuously as philosophy
and dreaminess, but in Princess Mary that very sorrow which revealed
the depth of a whole spiritual world foreign to him was an irresistible
attraction.

"She must be a wonderful woman. A real angel!" he said to himself.
"Why am I not free? Why was I in such a hurry with Sonya?" And he
involuntarily compared the two: the lack of spirituality in the one and
the abundance of it in the other--a spirituality he himself lacked and
therefore valued most highly. He tried to picture what would happen were
he free. How he would propose to her and how she would become his wife.
But no, he could not imagine that. He felt awed, and no clear picture
presented itself to his mind. He had long ago pictured to himself a
future with Sonya, and that was all clear and simple just because it
had all been thought out and he knew all there was in Sonya, but it was
impossible to picture a future with Princess Mary, because he did not
understand her but simply loved her.

Reveries about Sonya had had something merry and playful in them, but to
dream of Princess Mary was always difficult and a little frightening.

"How she prayed!" he thought. "It was plain that her whole soul was in
her prayer. Yes, that was the prayer that moves mountains, and I am
sure her prayer will be answered. Why don't I pray for what I want?" he
suddenly thought. "What do I want? To be free, released from Sonya...
She was right," he thought, remembering what the governor's wife had
said: "Nothing but misfortune can come of marrying Sonya. Muddles,
grief for Mamma... business difficulties... muddles, terrible muddles!
Besides, I don't love her--not as I should. O, God! release me from
this dreadful, inextricable position!" he suddenly began to pray. "Yes,
prayer can move mountains, but one must have faith and not pray as
Natasha and I used to as children, that the snow might turn into
sugar--and then run out into the yard to see whether it had done so.
No, but I am not praying for trifles now," he thought as he put his pipe
down in a corner, and folding his hands placed himself before the icon.
Softened by memories of Princess Mary he began to pray as he had not
done for a long time. Tears were in his eyes and in his throat when the
door opened and Lavrushka came in with some papers.

"Blockhead! Why do you come in without being called?" cried Nicholas,
quickly changing his attitude.

"From the governor," said Lavrushka in a sleepy voice. "A courier has
arrived and there's a letter for you."

"Well, all right, thanks. You can go!"

Nicholas took the two letters, one of which was from his mother and
the other from Sonya. He recognized them by the handwriting and opened
Sonya's first. He had read only a few lines when he turned pale and his
eyes opened wide with fear and joy.

"No, it's not possible!" he cried aloud.

Unable to sit still he paced up and down the room holding the letter and
reading it. He glanced through it, then read it again, and then again,
and standing still in the middle of the room he raised his shoulders,
stretching out his hands, with his mouth wide open and his eyes fixed.
What he had just been praying for with confidence that God would hear
him had come to pass; but Nicholas was as much astonished as if it were
something extraordinary and unexpected, and as if the very fact that it
had happened so quickly proved that it had not come from God to whom he
had prayed, but by some ordinary coincidence.

This unexpected and, as it seemed to Nicholas, quite voluntary letter
from Sonya freed him from the knot that fettered him and from which
there had seemed no escape. She wrote that the last unfortunate
events--the loss of almost the whole of the Rostovs' Moscow
property--and the countess' repeatedly expressed wish that Nicholas
should marry Princess Bolkonskaya, together with his silence and
coldness of late, had all combined to make her decide to release him
from his promise and set him completely free.


It would be too painful to me to think that I might be a cause of sorrow
or discord in the family that has been so good to me (she wrote), and my
love has no aim but the happiness of those I love; so, Nicholas, I
beg you to consider yourself free, and to be assured that, in spite of
everything, no one can love you more than does

Your Sonya


Both letters were written from Troitsa. The other, from the countess,
described their last days in Moscow, their departure, the fire, and
the destruction of all their property. In this letter the countess also
mentioned that Prince Andrew was among the wounded traveling with them;
his state was very critical, but the doctor said there was now more
hope. Sonya and Natasha were nursing him.

Next day Nicholas took his mother's letter and went to see Princess
Mary. Neither he nor she said a word about what "Natasha nursing him"
might mean, but thanks to this letter Nicholas suddenly became almost as
intimate with the princess as if they were relations.

The following day he saw Princess Mary off on her journey to Yaroslavl,
and a few days later left to rejoin his regiment.





CHAPTER VIII


Sonya's letter written from Troitsa, which had come as an answer to
Nicholas' prayer, was prompted by this: the thought of getting Nicholas
married to an heiress occupied the old countess' mind more and more. She
knew that Sonya was the chief obstacle to this happening, and Sonya's
life in the countess' house had grown harder and harder, especially
after they had received a letter from Nicholas telling of his meeting
with Princess Mary in Bogucharovo. The countess let no occasion slip of
making humiliating or cruel allusions to Sonya.

But a few days before they left Moscow, moved and excited by all that
was going on, she called Sonya to her and, instead of reproaching and
making demands on her, tearfully implored her to sacrifice herself
and repay all that the family had done for her by breaking off her
engagement with Nicholas.

"I shall not be at peace till you promise me this."

Sonya burst into hysterical tears and replied through her sobs that
she would do anything and was prepared for anything, but gave no actual
promise and could not bring herself to decide to do what was demanded
of her. She must sacrifice herself for the family that had reared and
brought her up. To sacrifice herself for others was Sonya's habit. Her
position in the house was such that only by sacrifice could she show her
worth, and she was accustomed to this and loved doing it. But in all her
former acts of self-sacrifice she had been happily conscious that they
raised her in her own esteem and in that of others, and so made her more
worthy of Nicholas whom she loved more than anything in the world. But
now they wanted her to sacrifice the very thing that constituted the
whole reward for her self-sacrifice and the whole meaning of her life.
And for the first time she felt bitterness against those who had been
her benefactors only to torture her the more painfully; she felt jealous
of Natasha who had never experienced anything of this sort, had never
needed to sacrifice herself, but made others sacrifice themselves for
her and yet was beloved by everybody. And for the first time Sonya felt
that out of her pure, quiet love for Nicholas a passionate feeling
was beginning to grow up which was stronger than principle, virtue,
or religion. Under the influence of this feeling Sonya, whose life of
dependence had taught her involuntarily to be secretive, having answered
the countess in vague general terms, avoided talking with her and
resolved to wait till she should see Nicholas, not in order to set him
free but on the contrary at that meeting to bind him to her forever.

The bustle and terror of the Rostovs' last days in Moscow stifled the
gloomy thoughts that oppressed Sonya. She was glad to find escape
from them in practical activity. But when she heard of Prince Andrew's
presence in their house, despite her sincere pity for him and for
Natasha, she was seized by a joyful and superstitious feeling that God
did not intend her to be separated from Nicholas. She knew that Natasha
loved no one but Prince Andrew and had never ceased to love him. She
knew that being thrown together again under such terrible circumstances
they would again fall in love with one another, and that Nicholas would
then not be able to marry Princess Mary as they would be within the
prohibited degrees of affinity. Despite all the terror of what had
happened during those last days and during the first days of their
journey, this feeling that Providence was intervening in her personal
affairs cheered Sonya.

At the Troitsa monastery the Rostovs first broke their journey for a
whole day.

Three large rooms were assigned to them in the monastery hostelry, one
of which was occupied by Prince Andrew. The wounded man was much better
that day and Natasha was sitting with him. In the next room sat the
count and countess respectfully conversing with the prior, who was
calling on them as old acquaintances and benefactors of the monastery.
Sonya was there too, tormented by curiosity as to what Prince Andrew and
Natasha were talking about. She heard the sound of their voices through
the door. That door opened and Natasha came out, looking excited. Not
noticing the monk, who had risen to greet her and was drawing back the
wide sleeve on his right arm, she went up to Sonya and took her hand.

"Natasha, what are you about? Come here!" said the countess.

Natasha went up to the monk for his blessing, and he advised her to pray
for aid to God and His saint.

As soon as the prior withdrew, Natasha took her friend by the hand and
went with her into the unoccupied room.

"Sonya, will he live?" she asked. "Sonya, how happy I am, and how
unhappy!... Sonya, dovey, everything is as it used to be. If only he
lives! He cannot... because... because... of" and Natasha burst into
tears.

"Yes! I knew it! Thank God!" murmured Sonya. "He will live."

Sonya was not less agitated than her friend by the latter's fear and
grief and by her own personal feelings which she shared with no one.
Sobbing, she kissed and comforted Natasha. "If only he lives!" she
thought. Having wept, talked, and wiped away their tears, the two
friends went together to Prince Andrew's door. Natasha opened it
cautiously and glanced into the room, Sonya standing beside her at the
half-open door.

Prince Andrew was lying raised high on three pillows. His pale face was
calm, his eyes closed, and they could see his regular breathing.

"O, Natasha!" Sonya suddenly almost screamed, catching her companion's
arm and stepping back from the door.

"What? What is it?" asked Natasha.

"It's that, that..." said Sonya, with a white face and trembling lips.

Natasha softly closed the door and went with Sonya to the window, not
yet understanding what the latter was telling her.

"You remember," said Sonya with a solemn and frightened expression.
"You remember when I looked in the mirror for you... at Otradnoe at
Christmas? Do you remember what I saw?"

"Yes, yes!" cried Natasha opening her eyes wide, and vaguely recalling
that Sonya had told her something about Prince Andrew whom she had seen
lying down.

"You remember?" Sonya went on. "I saw it then and told everybody, you
and Dunyasha. I saw him lying on a bed," said she, making a gesture with
her hand and a lifted finger at each detail, "and that he had his eyes
closed and was covered just with a pink quilt, and that his hands were
folded," she concluded, convincing herself that the details she had just
seen were exactly what she had seen in the mirror.

She had in fact seen nothing then but had mentioned the first thing that
came into her head, but what she had invented then seemed to her now
as real as any other recollection. She not only remembered what she had
then said--that he turned to look at her and smiled and was covered with
something red--but was firmly convinced that she had then seen and said
that he was covered with a pink quilt and that his eyes were closed.

"Yes, yes, it really was pink!" cried Natasha, who now thought she
too remembered the word pink being used, and saw in this the most
extraordinary and mysterious part of the prediction.

"But what does it mean?" she added meditatively.

"Oh, I don't know, it is all so strange," replied Sonya, clutching at
her head.

A few minutes later Prince Andrew rang and Natasha went to him, but
Sonya, feeling unusually excited and touched, remained at the window
thinking about the strangeness of what had occurred.


They had an opportunity that day to send letters to the army, and the
countess was writing to her son.

"Sonya!" said the countess, raising her eyes from her letter as her
niece passed, "Sonya, won't you write to Nicholas?" She spoke in a soft,
tremulous voice, and in the weary eyes that looked over her spectacles
Sonya read all that the countess meant to convey with these words. Those
eyes expressed entreaty, shame at having to ask, fear of a refusal, and
readiness for relentless hatred in case of such refusal.

Sonya went up to the countess and, kneeling down, kissed her hand.

"Yes, Mamma, I will write," said she.

Sonya was softened, excited, and touched by all that had occurred that
day, especially by the mysterious fulfillment she had just seen of her
vision. Now that she knew that the renewal of Natasha's relations with
Prince Andrew would prevent Nicholas from marrying Princess Mary, she
was joyfully conscious of a return of that self-sacrificing spirit in
which she was accustomed to live and loved to live. So with a joyful
consciousness of performing a magnanimous deed--interrupted several
times by the tears that dimmed her velvety black eyes--she wrote that
touching letter the arrival of which had so amazed Nicholas.





CHAPTER IX


The officer and soldiers who had arrested Pierre treated him with
hostility but yet with respect, in the guardhouse to which he was taken.
In their attitude toward him could still be felt both uncertainty as
to who he might be--perhaps a very important person--and hostility as a
result of their recent personal conflict with him.

But when the guard was relieved next morning, Pierre felt that for the
new guard--both officers and men--he was not as interesting as he had
been to his captors; and in fact the guard of the second day did not
recognize in this big, stout man in a peasant coat the vigorous person
who had fought so desperately with the marauder and the convoy and had
uttered those solemn words about saving a child; they saw in him only
No. 17 of the captured Russians, arrested and detained for some reason
by order of the Higher Command. If they noticed anything remarkable
about Pierre, it was only his unabashed, meditative concentration
and thoughtfulness, and the way he spoke French, which struck them as
surprisingly good. In spite of this he was placed that day with the
other arrested suspects, as the separate room he had occupied was
required by an officer.

All the Russians confined with Pierre were men of the lowest class and,
recognizing him as a gentleman, they all avoided him, more especially as
he spoke French. Pierre felt sad at hearing them making fun of him.

That evening he learned that all these prisoners (he, probably, among
them) were to be tried for incendiarism. On the third day he was taken
with the others to a house where a French general with a white mustache
sat with two colonels and other Frenchmen with scarves on their arms.
With the precision and definiteness customary in addressing prisoners,
and which is supposed to preclude human frailty, Pierre like the others
was questioned as to who he was, where he had been, with what object,
and so on.

These questions, like questions put at trials generally, left the
essence of the matter aside, shut out the possibility of that essence's
being revealed, and were designed only to form a channel through which
the judges wished the answers of the accused to flow so as to lead to
the desired result, namely a conviction. As soon as Pierre began to say
anything that did not fit in with that aim, the channel was removed and
the water could flow to waste. Pierre felt, moreover, what the accused
always feel at their trial, perplexity as to why these questions were
put to him. He had a feeling that it was only out of condescension or a
kind of civility that this device of placing a channel was employed. He
knew he was in these men's power, that only by force had they brought
him there, that force alone gave them the right to demand answers
to their questions, and that the sole object of that assembly was to
inculpate him. And so, as they had the power and wish to inculpate
him, this expedient of an inquiry and trial seemed unnecessary. It was
evident that any answer would lead to conviction. When asked what he
was doing when he was arrested, Pierre replied in a rather tragic manner
that he was restoring to its parents a child he had saved from the
flames. Why had he fought the marauder? Pierre answered that he "was
protecting a woman," and that "to protect a woman who was being insulted
was the duty of every man; that..." They interrupted him, for this
was not to the point. Why was he in the yard of a burning house where
witnesses had seen him? He replied that he had gone out to see what
was happening in Moscow. Again they interrupted him: they had not asked
where he was going, but why he was found near the fire? Who was he? they
asked, repeating their first question, which he had declined to answer.
Again he replied that he could not answer it.

"Put that down, that's bad... very bad," sternly remarked the general
with the white mustache and red flushed face.


On the fourth day fires broke out on the Zubovski rampart.

Pierre and thirteen others were moved to the coach house of a merchant's
house near the Crimean bridge. On his way through the streets Pierre
felt stifled by the smoke which seemed to hang over the whole
city. Fires were visible on all sides. He did not then realize the
significance of the burning of Moscow, and looked at the fires with
horror.

He passed four days in the coach house near the Crimean bridge and
during that time learned, from the talk of the French soldiers, that all
those confined there were awaiting a decision which might come any day
from the marshal. What marshal this was, Pierre could not learn from the
soldiers. Evidently for them "the marshal" represented a very high and
rather mysterious power.

These first days, before the eighth of September when the prisoners were
had up for a second examination, were the hardest of all for Pierre.





CHAPTER X


On the eighth of September an officer--a very important one judging by
the respect the guards showed him--entered the coach house where the
prisoners were. This officer, probably someone on the staff, was holding
a paper in his hand, and called over all the Russians there, naming
Pierre as "the man who does not give his name." Glancing indolently and
indifferently at all the prisoners, he ordered the officer in charge
to have them decently dressed and tidied up before taking them to the
marshal. An hour later a squad of soldiers arrived and Pierre with
thirteen others was led to the Virgin's Field. It was a fine day, sunny
after rain, and the air was unusually pure. The smoke did not hang low
as on the day when Pierre had been taken from the guardhouse on the
Zubovski rampart, but rose through the pure air in columns. No flames
were seen, but columns of smoke rose on all sides, and all Moscow as far
as Pierre could see was one vast charred ruin. On all sides there were
waste spaces with only stoves and chimney stacks still standing, and
here and there the blackened walls of some brick houses. Pierre gazed
at the ruins and did not recognize districts he had known well. Here and
there he could see churches that had not been burned. The Kremlin, which
was not destroyed, gleamed white in the distance with its towers and
the belfry of Ivan the Great. The domes of the New Convent of the Virgin
glittered brightly and its bells were ringing particularly clearly.
These bells reminded Pierre that it was Sunday and the feast of the
Nativity of the Virgin. But there seemed to be no one to celebrate this
holiday: everywhere were blackened ruins, and the few Russians to be
seen were tattered and frightened people who tried to hide when they saw
the French.

It was plain that the Russian nest was ruined and destroyed, but in
place of the Russian order of life that had been destroyed, Pierre
unconsciously felt that a quite different, firm, French order had been
established over this ruined nest. He felt this in the looks of
the soldiers who, marching in regular ranks briskly and gaily, were
escorting him and the other criminals; he felt it in the looks of an
important French official in a carriage and pair driven by a soldier,
whom they met on the way. He felt it in the merry sounds of regimental
music he heard from the left side of the field, and felt and realized
it especially from the list of prisoners the French officer had read out
when he came that morning. Pierre had been taken by one set of soldiers
and led first to one and then to another place with dozens of other men,
and it seemed that they might have forgotten him, or confused him with
the others. But no: the answers he had given when questioned had come
back to him in his designation as "the man who does not give his name,"
and under that appellation, which to Pierre seemed terrible, they were
now leading him somewhere with unhesitating assurance on their faces
that he and all the other prisoners were exactly the ones they wanted
and that they were being taken to the proper place. Pierre felt himself
to be an insignificant chip fallen among the wheels of a machine whose
action he did not understand but which was working well.

He and the other prisoners were taken to the right side of the Virgin's
Field, to a large white house with an immense garden not far from the
convent. This was Prince Shcherbitov's house, where Pierre had often
been in other days, and which, as he learned from the talk of the
soldiers, was now occupied by the marshal, the Duke of Eckmuhl (Davout).

They were taken to the entrance and led into the house one by one.
Pierre was the sixth to enter. He was conducted through a glass gallery,
an anteroom, and a hall, which were familiar to him, into a long low
study at the door of which stood an adjutant.

Davout, spectacles on nose, sat bent over a table at the further end of
the room. Pierre went close up to him, but Davout, evidently consulting
a paper that lay before him, did not look up. Without raising his eyes,
he said in a low voice:

"Who are you?"

Pierre was silent because he was incapable of uttering a word. To him
Davout was not merely a French general, but a man notorious for his
cruelty. Looking at his cold face, as he sat like a stern schoolmaster
who was prepared to wait awhile for an answer, Pierre felt that every
instant of delay might cost him his life; but he did not know what
to say. He did not venture to repeat what he had said at his first
examination, yet to disclose his rank and position was dangerous and
embarrassing. So he was silent. But before he had decided what to do,
Davout raised his head, pushed his spectacles back on his forehead,
screwed up his eyes, and looked intently at him.

"I know that man," he said in a cold, measured tone, evidently
calculated to frighten Pierre.

The chill that had been running down Pierre's back now seized his head
as in a vise.

"You cannot know me, General, I have never seen you..."

"He is a Russian spy," Davout interrupted, addressing another general
who was present, but whom Pierre had not noticed.

Davout turned away. With an unexpected reverberation in his voice Pierre
rapidly began:

"No, monseigneur," he said, suddenly remembering that Davout was a duke.
"No, monseigneur, you cannot have known me. I am a militia officer and
have not quitted Moscow."

"Your name?" asked Davout.

"Bezukhov."

"What proof have I that you are not lying?"

"Monseigneur!" exclaimed Pierre, not in an offended but in a pleading
voice.

Davout looked up and gazed intently at him. For some seconds they looked
at one another, and that look saved Pierre. Apart from conditions of war
and law, that look established human relations between the two men. At
that moment an immense number of things passed dimly through both their
minds, and they realized that they were both children of humanity and
were brothers.

At the first glance, when Davout had only raised his head from the
papers where human affairs and lives were indicated by numbers, Pierre
was merely a circumstance, and Davout could have shot him without
burdening his conscience with an evil deed, but now he saw in him a
human being. He reflected for a moment.

"How can you show me that you are telling the truth?" said Davout
coldly.

Pierre remembered Ramballe, and named him and his regiment and the
street where the house was.

"You are not what you say," returned Davout.

In a trembling, faltering voice Pierre began adducing proofs of the
truth of his statements.

But at that moment an adjutant entered and reported something to Davout.

Davout brightened up at the news the adjutant brought, and began
buttoning up his uniform. It seemed that he had quite forgotten Pierre.

When the adjutant reminded him of the prisoner, he jerked his head in
Pierre's direction with a frown and ordered him to be led away. But
where they were to take him Pierre did not know: back to the coach house
or to the place of execution his companions had pointed out to him as
they crossed the Virgin's Field.

He turned his head and saw that the adjutant was putting another
question to Davout.

"Yes, of course!" replied Davout, but what this "yes" meant, Pierre did
not know.

Pierre could not afterwards remember how he went, whether it was far, or
in which direction. His faculties were quite numbed, he was stupefied,
and noticing nothing around him went on moving his legs as the others
did till they all stopped and he stopped too. The only thought in his
mind at that time was: who was it that had really sentenced him to
death? Not the men on the commission that had first examined him--not
one of them wished to or, evidently, could have done it. It was not
Davout, who had looked at him in so human a way. In another moment
Davout would have realized that he was doing wrong, but just then
the adjutant had come in and interrupted him. The adjutant, also, had
evidently had no evil intent though he might have refrained from coming
in. Then who was executing him, killing him, depriving him of life--him,
Pierre, with all his memories, aspirations, hopes, and thoughts? Who was
doing this? And Pierre felt that it was no one.

It was a system--a concurrence of circumstances.

A system of some sort was killing him--Pierre--depriving him of life, of
everything, annihilating him.





CHAPTER XI


From Prince Shcherbatov's house the prisoners were led straight down the
Virgin's Field, to the left of the nunnery, as far as a kitchen garden
in which a post had been set up. Beyond that post a fresh pit had been
dug in the ground, and near the post and the pit a large crowd stood
in a semicircle. The crowd consisted of a few Russians and many of
Napoleon's soldiers who were not on duty--Germans, Italians, and
Frenchmen, in a variety of uniforms. To the right and left of the post
stood rows of French troops in blue uniforms with red epaulets and high
boots and shakos.

The prisoners were placed in a certain order, according to the list
(Pierre was sixth), and were led to the post. Several drums suddenly
began to beat on both sides of them, and at that sound Pierre felt as
if part of his soul had been torn away. He lost the power of thinking
or understanding. He could only hear and see. And he had only one
wish--that the frightful thing that had to happen should happen quickly.
Pierre looked round at his fellow prisoners and scrutinized them.

The two first were convicts with shaven heads. One was tall and thin,
the other dark, shaggy, and sinewy, with a flat nose. The third was
a domestic serf, about forty-five years old, with grizzled hair and a
plump, well-nourished body. The fourth was a peasant, a very handsome
man with a broad, light-brown beard and black eyes. The fifth was a
factory hand, a thin, sallow-faced lad of eighteen in a loose coat.

Pierre heard the French consulting whether to shoot them separately or
two at a time. "In couples," replied the officer in command in a calm
voice. There was a stir in the ranks of the soldiers and it was evident
that they were all hurrying--not as men hurry to do something they
understand, but as people hurry to finish a necessary but unpleasant and
incomprehensible task.

A French official wearing a scarf came up to the right of the row of
prisoners and read out the sentence in Russian and in French.

Then two pairs of Frenchmen approached the criminals and at the
officer's command took the two convicts who stood first in the row. The
convicts stopped when they reached the post and, while sacks were being
brought, looked dumbly around as a wounded beast looks at an approaching
huntsman. One crossed himself continually, the other scratched his back
and made a movement of the lips resembling a smile. With hurried hands
the soldiers blindfolded them, drawing the sacks over their heads, and
bound them to the post.

Twelve sharpshooters with muskets stepped out of the ranks with a firm
regular tread and halted eight paces from the post. Pierre turned away
to avoid seeing what was going to happen. Suddenly a crackling, rolling
noise was heard which seemed to him louder than the most terrific
thunder, and he looked round. There was some smoke, and the Frenchmen
were doing something near the pit, with pale faces and trembling hands.
Two more prisoners were led up. In the same way and with similar looks,
these two glanced vainly at the onlookers with only a silent appeal for
protection in their eyes, evidently unable to understand or believe
what was going to happen to them. They could not believe it because they
alone knew what their life meant to them, and so they neither understood
nor believed that it could be taken from them.

Again Pierre did not wish to look and again turned away; but again the
sound as of a frightful explosion struck his ear, and at the same moment
he saw smoke, blood, and the pale, scared faces of the Frenchmen who
were again doing something by the post, their trembling hands impeding
one another. Pierre, breathing heavily, looked around as if asking what
it meant. The same question was expressed in all the looks that met his.

On the faces of all the Russians and of the French soldiers and officers
without exception, he read the same dismay, horror, and conflict that
were in his own heart. "But who, after all, is doing this? They are all
suffering as I am. Who then is it? Who?" flashed for an instant through
his mind.

"Sharpshooters of the 86th, forward!" shouted someone. The fifth
prisoner, the one next to Pierre, was led away--alone. Pierre did not
understand that he was saved, that he and the rest had been brought
there only to witness the execution. With ever-growing horror, and no
sense of joy or relief, he gazed at what was taking place. The fifth man
was the factory lad in the loose cloak. The moment they laid hands on
him he sprang aside in terror and clutched at Pierre. (Pierre shuddered
and shook himself free.) The lad was unable to walk. They dragged him
along, holding him up under the arms, and he screamed. When they got
him to the post he grew quiet, as if he suddenly understood something.
Whether he understood that screaming was useless or whether he thought
it incredible that men should kill him, at any rate he took his stand at
the post, waiting to be blindfolded like the others, and like a wounded
animal looked around him with glittering eyes.

Pierre was no longer able to turn away and close his eyes. His curiosity
and agitation, like that of the whole crowd, reached the highest pitch
at this fifth murder. Like the others this fifth man seemed calm; he
wrapped his loose cloak closer and rubbed one bare foot with the other.

When they began to blindfold him he himself adjusted the knot which
hurt the back of his head; then when they propped him against the
bloodstained post, he leaned back and, not being comfortable in that
position, straightened himself, adjusted his feet, and leaned back again
more comfortably. Pierre did not take his eyes from him and did not miss
his slightest movement.

Probably a word of command was given and was followed by the reports of
eight muskets; but try as he would Pierre could not afterwards remember
having heard the slightest sound of the shots. He only saw how the
workman suddenly sank down on the cords that held him, how blood showed
itself in two places, how the ropes slackened under the weight of the
hanging body, and how the workman sat down, his head hanging unnaturally
and one leg bent under him. Pierre ran up to the post. No one hindered
him. Pale, frightened people were doing something around the workman.
The lower jaw of an old Frenchman with a thick mustache trembled as he
untied the ropes. The body collapsed. The soldiers dragged it awkwardly
from the post and began pushing it into the pit.

They all plainly and certainly knew that they were criminals who must
hide the traces of their guilt as quickly as possible.

Pierre glanced into the pit and saw that the factory lad was lying with
his knees close up to his head and one shoulder higher than the other.
That shoulder rose and fell rhythmically and convulsively, but spadefuls
of earth were already being thrown over the whole body. One of the
soldiers, evidently suffering, shouted gruffly and angrily at Pierre to
go back. But Pierre did not understand him and remained near the post,
and no one drove him away.

When the pit had been filled up a command was given. Pierre was taken
back to his place, and the rows of troops on both sides of the post
made a half turn and went past it at a measured pace. The twenty-four
sharpshooters with discharged muskets, standing in the center of the
circle, ran back to their places as the companies passed by.

Pierre gazed now with dazed eyes at these sharpshooters who ran in
couples out of the circle. All but one rejoined their companies. This
one, a young soldier, his face deadly pale, his shako pushed back, and
his musket resting on the ground, still stood near the pit at the spot
from which he had fired. He swayed like a drunken man, taking some steps
forward and back to save himself from falling. An old, noncommissioned
officer ran out of the ranks and taking him by the elbow dragged him to
his company. The crowd of Russians and Frenchmen began to disperse. They
all went away silently and with drooping heads.

"That will teach them to start fires," said one of the Frenchmen.

Pierre glanced round at the speaker and saw that it was a soldier who
was trying to find some relief after what had been done, but was not
able to do so. Without finishing what he had begun to say he made a
hopeless movement with his arm and went away.





CHAPTER XII


After the execution Pierre was separated from the rest of the prisoners
and placed alone in a small, ruined, and befouled church.

Toward evening a noncommissioned officer entered with two soldiers and
told him that he had been pardoned and would now go to the barracks for
the prisoners of war. Without understanding what was said to him, Pierre
got up and went with the soldiers. They took him to the upper end of the
field, where there were some sheds built of charred planks, beams,
and battens, and led him into one of them. In the darkness some twenty
different men surrounded Pierre. He looked at them without understanding
who they were, why they were there, or what they wanted of him. He heard
what they said, but did not understand the meaning of the words and
made no kind of deduction from or application of them. He replied to
questions they put to him, but did not consider who was listening to his
replies, nor how they would understand them. He looked at their faces
and figures, but they all seemed to him equally meaningless.

From the moment Pierre had witnessed those terrible murders committed by
men who did not wish to commit them, it was as if the mainspring of
his life, on which everything depended and which made everything appear
alive, had suddenly been wrenched out and everything had collapsed
into a heap of meaningless rubbish. Though he did not acknowledge it to
himself, his faith in the right ordering of the universe, in humanity,
in his own soul, and in God, had been destroyed. He had experienced this
before, but never so strongly as now. When similar doubts had assailed
him before, they had been the result of his own wrongdoing, and at the
bottom of his heart he had felt that relief from his despair and from
those doubts was to be found within himself. But now he felt that
the universe had crumbled before his eyes and only meaningless ruins
remained, and this not by any fault of his own. He felt that it was not
in his power to regain faith in the meaning of life.

Around him in the darkness men were standing and evidently something
about him interested them greatly. They were telling him something and
asking him something. Then they led him away somewhere, and at last he
found himself in a corner of the shed among men who were laughing and
talking on all sides.

"Well, then, mates... that very prince who..." some voice at the other
end of the shed was saying, with a strong emphasis on the word who.

Sitting silent and motionless on a heap of straw against the wall,
Pierre sometimes opened and sometimes closed his eyes. But as soon as
he closed them he saw before him the dreadful face of the factory
lad--especially dreadful because of its simplicity--and the faces of the
murderers, even more dreadful because of their disquiet. And he opened
his eyes again and stared vacantly into the darkness around him.

Beside him in a stooping position sat a small man of whose presence he
was first made aware by a strong smell of perspiration which came from
him every time he moved. This man was doing something to his legs in the
darkness, and though Pierre could not see his face he felt that the man
continually glanced at him. On growing used to the darkness Pierre saw
that the man was taking off his leg bands, and the way he did it aroused
Pierre's interest.

Having unwound the string that tied the band on one leg, he carefully
coiled it up and immediately set to work on the other leg, glancing up
at Pierre. While one hand hung up the first string the other was already
unwinding the band on the second leg. In this way, having carefully
removed the leg bands by deft circular motions of his arm following
one another uninterruptedly, the man hung the leg bands up on some pegs
fixed above his head. Then he took out a knife, cut something, closed
the knife, placed it under the head of his bed, and, seating himself
comfortably, clasped his arms round his lifted knees and fixed his eyes
on Pierre. The latter was conscious of something pleasant, comforting,
and well rounded in these deft movements, in the man's well-ordered
arrangements in his corner, and even in his very smell, and he looked at
the man without taking his eyes from him.

"You've seen a lot of trouble, sir, eh?" the little man suddenly said.

And there was so much kindliness and simplicity in his singsong voice
that Pierre tried to reply, but his jaw trembled and he felt tears
rising to his eyes. The little fellow, giving Pierre no time to betray
his confusion, instantly continued in the same pleasant tones:

"Eh, lad, don't fret!" said he, in the tender singsong caressing voice
old Russian peasant women employ. "Don't fret, friend--'suffer an hour,
live for an age!' that's how it is, my dear fellow. And here we live,
thank heaven, without offense. Among these folk, too, there are good
men as well as bad," said he, and still speaking, he turned on his knees
with a supple movement, got up, coughed, and went off to another part of
the shed.

"Eh, you rascal!" Pierre heard the same kind voice saying at the other
end of the shed. "So you've come, you rascal? She remembers... Now, now,
that'll do!"

And the soldier, pushing away a little dog that was jumping up at
him, returned to his place and sat down. In his hands he had something
wrapped in a rag.

"Here, eat a bit, sir," said he, resuming his former respectful tone as
he unwrapped and offered Pierre some baked potatoes. "We had soup for
dinner and the potatoes are grand!"

Pierre had not eaten all day and the smell of the potatoes seemed
extremely pleasant to him. He thanked the soldier and began to eat.

"Well, are they all right?" said the soldier with a smile. "You should
do like this."

He took a potato, drew out his clasp knife, cut the potato into two
equal halves on the palm of his hand, sprinkled some salt on it from the
rag, and handed it to Pierre.

"The potatoes are grand!" he said once more. "Eat some like that!"

Pierre thought he had never eaten anything that tasted better.

"Oh, I'm all right," said he, "but why did they shoot those poor
fellows? The last one was hardly twenty."

"Tss, tt...!" said the little man. "Ah, what a sin... what a sin!" he
added quickly, and as if his words were always waiting ready in his
mouth and flew out involuntarily he went on: "How was it, sir, that you
stayed in Moscow?"

"I didn't think they would come so soon. I stayed accidentally," replied
Pierre.

"And how did they arrest you, dear lad? At your house?"

"No, I went to look at the fire, and they arrested me there, and tried
me as an incendiary."

"Where there's law there's injustice," put in the little man.

"And have you been here long?" Pierre asked as he munched the last of
the potato.

"I? It was last Sunday they took me, out of a hospital in Moscow."

"Why, are you a soldier then?"

"Yes, we are soldiers of the Apsheron regiment. I was dying of fever. We
weren't told anything. There were some twenty of us lying there. We had
no idea, never guessed at all."

"And do you feel sad here?" Pierre inquired.

"How can one help it, lad? My name is Platon, and the surname is
Karataev," he added, evidently wishing to make it easier for Pierre to
address him. "They call me 'little falcon' in the regiment. How is one
to help feeling sad? Moscow--she's the mother of cities. How can one see
all this and not feel sad? But 'the maggot gnaws the cabbage, yet dies
first'; that's what the old folks used to tell us," he added rapidly.

"What? What did you say?" asked Pierre.

"Who? I?" said Karataev. "I say things happen not as we plan but as God
judges," he replied, thinking that he was repeating what he had said
before, and immediately continued:

"Well, and you, have you a family estate, sir? And a house? So you have
abundance, then? And a housewife? And your old parents, are they still
living?" he asked.

And though it was too dark for Pierre to see, he felt that a suppressed
smile of kindliness puckered the soldier's lips as he put these
questions. He seemed grieved that Pierre had no parents, especially that
he had no mother.

"A wife for counsel, a mother-in-law for welcome, but there's none as
dear as one's own mother!" said he. "Well, and have you little ones?" he
went on asking.

Again Pierre's negative answer seemed to distress him, and he hastened
to add:

"Never mind! You're young folks yet, and please God may still have some.
The great thing is to live in harmony...."

"But it's all the same now," Pierre could not help saying.

"Ah, my dear fellow!" rejoined Karataev, "never decline a prison or a
beggar's sack!"

He seated himself more comfortably and coughed, evidently preparing to
tell a long story.

"Well, my dear fellow, I was still living at home," he began. "We had
a well-to-do homestead, plenty of land, we peasants lived well and our
house was one to thank God for. When Father and we went out mowing
there were seven of us. We lived well. We were real peasants. It so
happened..."

And Platon Karataev told a long story of how he had gone into someone's
copse to take wood, how he had been caught by the keeper, had been
tried, flogged, and sent to serve as a soldier.

"Well, lad," and a smile changed the tone of his voice "we thought it
was a misfortune but it turned out a blessing! If it had not been for
my sin, my brother would have had to go as a soldier. But he, my younger
brother, had five little ones, while I, you see, only left a wife
behind. We had a little girl, but God took her before I went as a
soldier. I come home on leave and I'll tell you how it was, I look and
see that they are living better than before. The yard full of cattle,
the women at home, two brothers away earning wages, and only Michael the
youngest, at home. Father, he says, 'All my children are the same to
me: it hurts the same whichever finger gets bitten. But if Platon hadn't
been shaved for a soldier, Michael would have had to go.' called us
all to him and, will you believe it, placed us in front of the icons.
'Michael,' he says, 'come here and bow down to his feet; and you, young
woman, you bow down too; and you, grandchildren, also bow down before
him! Do you understand?' he says. That's how it is, dear fellow. Fate
looks for a head. But we are always judging, 'that's not well--that's
not right!' Our luck is like water in a dragnet: you pull at it and it
bulges, but when you've drawn it out it's empty! That's how it is."

And Platon shifted his seat on the straw.

After a short silence he rose.

"Well, I think you must be sleepy," said he, and began rapidly crossing
himself and repeating:

"Lord Jesus Christ, holy Saint Nicholas, Frola and Lavra! Lord Jesus
Christ, holy Saint Nicholas, Frola and Lavra! Lord Jesus Christ, have
mercy on us and save us!" he concluded, then bowed to the ground, got
up, sighed, and sat down again on his heap of straw. "That's the way.
Lay me down like a stone, O God, and raise me up like a loaf," he
muttered as he lay down, pulling his coat over him.

"What prayer was that you were saying?" asked Pierre.

"Eh?" murmured Platon, who had almost fallen asleep. "What was I saying?
I was praying. Don't you pray?"

"Yes, I do," said Pierre. "But what was that you said: Frola and Lavra?"

"Well, of course," replied Platon quickly, "the horses' saints. One must
pity the animals too. Eh, the rascal! Now you've curled up and got warm,
you daughter of a bitch!" said Karataev, touching the dog that lay at
his feet, and again turning over he fell asleep immediately.

Sounds of crying and screaming came from somewhere in the distance
outside, and flames were visible through the cracks of the shed, but
inside it was quiet and dark. For a long time Pierre did not sleep, but
lay with eyes open in the darkness, listening to the regular snoring
of Platon who lay beside him, and he felt that the world that had been
shattered was once more stirring in his soul with a new beauty and on
new and unshakable foundations.





CHAPTER XIII


Twenty-three soldiers, three officers, and two officials were confined
in the shed in which Pierre had been placed and where he remained for
four weeks.

When Pierre remembered them afterwards they all seemed misty figures to
him except Platon Karataev, who always remained in his mind a most
vivid and precious memory and the personification of everything Russian,
kindly, and round. When Pierre saw his neighbor next morning at dawn
the first impression of him, as of something round, was fully confirmed:
Platon's whole figure--in a French overcoat girdled with a cord, a
soldier's cap, and bast shoes--was round. His head was quite round,
his back, chest, shoulders, and even his arms, which he held as if ever
ready to embrace something, were rounded, his pleasant smile and his
large, gentle brown eyes were also round.

Platon Karataev must have been fifty, judging by his stories of
campaigns he had been in, told as by an old soldier. He did not himself
know his age and was quite unable to determine it. But his brilliantly
white, strong teeth which showed in two unbroken semicircles when he
laughed--as he often did--were all sound and good, there was not a gray
hair in his beard or on his head, and his whole body gave an impression
of suppleness and especially of firmness and endurance.

His face, despite its fine, rounded wrinkles, had an expression of
innocence and youth, his voice was pleasant and musical. But the chief
peculiarity of his speech was its directness and appositeness. It was
evident that he never considered what he had said or was going to say,
and consequently the rapidity and justice of his intonation had an
irresistible persuasiveness.

His physical strength and agility during the first days of his
imprisonment were such that he seemed not to know what fatigue and
sickness meant. Every night before lying down, he said: "Lord, lay me
down as a stone and raise me up as a loaf!" and every morning on getting
up, he said: "I lay down and curled up, I get up and shake myself." And
indeed he only had to lie down, to fall asleep like a stone, and he
only had to shake himself, to be ready without a moment's delay for some
work, just as children are ready to play directly they awake. He could
do everything, not very well but not badly. He baked, cooked, sewed,
planed, and mended boots. He was always busy, and only at night allowed
himself conversation--of which he was fond--and songs. He did not sing
like a trained singer who knows he is listened to, but like the birds,
evidently giving vent to the sounds in the same way that one stretches
oneself or walks about to get rid of stiffness, and the sounds were
always high-pitched, mournful, delicate, and almost feminine, and his
face at such times was very serious.

Having been taken prisoner and allowed his beard to grow, he seemed to
have thrown off all that had been forced upon him--everything military
and alien to himself--and had returned to his former peasant habits.

"A soldier on leave--a shirt outside breeches," he would say.

He did not like talking about his life as a soldier, though he did not
complain, and often mentioned that he had not been flogged once during
the whole of his army service. When he related anything it was generally
some old and evidently precious memory of his "Christian" life, as he
called his peasant existence. The proverbs, of which his talk was full,
were for the most part not the coarse and indecent saws soldiers
employ, but those folk sayings which taken without a context seem so
insignificant, but when used appositely suddenly acquire a significance
of profound wisdom.

He would often say the exact opposite of what he had said on a previous
occasion, yet both would be right. He liked to talk and he talked well,
adorning his speech with terms of endearment and with folk sayings which
Pierre thought he invented himself, but the chief charm of his talk lay
in the fact that the commonest events--sometimes just such as Pierre
had witnessed without taking notice of them--assumed in Karataev's a
character of solemn fitness. He liked to hear the folk tales one of the
soldiers used to tell of an evening (they were always the same), but
most of all he liked to hear stories of real life. He would smile
joyfully when listening to such stories, now and then putting in a word
or asking a question to make the moral beauty of what he was told clear
to himself. Karataev had no attachments, friendships, or love, as Pierre
understood them, but loved and lived affectionately with everything life
brought him in contact with, particularly with man--not any particular
man, but those with whom he happened to be. He loved his dog, his
comrades, the French, and Pierre who was his neighbor, but Pierre felt
that in spite of Karataev's affectionate tenderness for him (by which
he unconsciously gave Pierre's spiritual life its due) he would not have
grieved for a moment at parting from him. And Pierre began to feel in
the same way toward Karataev.

To all the other prisoners Platon Karataev seemed a most ordinary
soldier. They called him "little falcon" or "Platosha," chaffed him
good-naturedly, and sent him on errands. But to Pierre he always
remained what he had seemed that first night: an unfathomable, rounded,
eternal personification of the spirit of simplicity and truth.

Platon Karataev knew nothing by heart except his prayers. When he began
to speak he seemed not to know how he would conclude.

Sometimes Pierre, struck by the meaning of his words, would ask him to
repeat them, but Platon could never recall what he had said a moment
before, just as he never could repeat to Pierre the words of his
favorite song: native and birch tree and my heart is sick occurred in
it, but when spoken and not sung, no meaning could be got out of it. He
did not, and could not, understand the meaning of words apart from
their context. Every word and action of his was the manifestation of
an activity unknown to him, which was his life. But his life, as he
regarded it, had no meaning as a separate thing. It had meaning only as
part of a whole of which he was always conscious. His words and actions
flowed from him as evenly, inevitably, and spontaneously as fragrance
exhales from a flower. He could not understand the value or significance
of any word or deed taken separately.





CHAPTER XIV


When Princess Mary heard from Nicholas that her brother was with the
Rostovs at Yaroslavl she at once prepared to go there, in spite of her
aunt's efforts to dissuade her--and not merely to go herself but to
take her nephew with her. Whether it were difficult or easy, possible
or impossible, she did not ask and did not want to know: it was her duty
not only herself to be near her brother who was perhaps dying, but to do
everything possible to take his son to him, and so she prepared to set
off. That she had not heard from Prince Andrew himself, Princess Mary
attributed to his being too weak to write or to his considering the long
journey too hard and too dangerous for her and his son.

In a few days Princess Mary was ready to start. Her equipages were the
huge family coach in which she had traveled to Voronezh, a semiopen
trap, and a baggage cart. With her traveled Mademoiselle Bourienne,
little Nicholas and his tutor, her old nurse, three maids, Tikhon, and a
young footman and courier her aunt had sent to accompany her.

The usual route through Moscow could not be thought of, and the
roundabout way Princess Mary was obliged to take through Lipetsk,
Ryazan, Vladimir, and Shuya was very long and, as post horses were not
everywhere obtainable, very difficult, and near Ryazan where the French
were said to have shown themselves was even dangerous.

During this difficult journey Mademoiselle Bourienne, Dessalles, and
Princess Mary's servants were astonished at her energy and firmness of
spirit. She went to bed later and rose earlier than any of them, and
no difficulties daunted her. Thanks to her activity and energy, which
infected her fellow travelers, they approached Yaroslavl by the end of
the second week.

The last days of her stay in Voronezh had been the happiest of her life.
Her love for Rostov no longer tormented or agitated her. It filled her
whole soul, had become an integral part of herself, and she no longer
struggled against it. Latterly she had become convinced that she loved
and was beloved, though she never said this definitely to herself
in words. She had become convinced of it at her last interview with
Nicholas, when he had come to tell her that her brother was with the
Rostovs. Not by a single word had Nicholas alluded to the fact that
Prince Andrew's relations with Natasha might, if he recovered, be
renewed, but Princess Mary saw by his face that he knew and thought of
this.

Yet in spite of that, his relation to her--considerate, delicate, and
loving--not only remained unchanged, but it sometimes seemed to Princess
Mary that he was even glad that the family connection between them
allowed him to express his friendship more freely. She knew that she
loved for the first and only time in her life and felt that she was
beloved, and was happy in regard to it.

But this happiness on one side of her spiritual nature did not prevent
her feeling grief for her brother with full force; on the contrary, that
spiritual tranquility on the one side made it the more possible for her
to give full play to her feeling for her brother. That feeling was so
strong at the moment of leaving Voronezh that those who saw her off, as
they looked at her careworn, despairing face, felt sure she would fall
ill on the journey. But the very difficulties and preoccupations of the
journey, which she took so actively in hand, saved her for a while from
her grief and gave her strength.

As always happens when traveling, Princess Mary thought only of the
journey itself, forgetting its object. But as she approached Yaroslavl
the thought of what might await her there--not after many days, but that
very evening--again presented itself to her and her agitation increased
to its utmost limit.

The courier who had been sent on in advance to find out where the
Rostovs were staying in Yaroslavl, and in what condition Prince Andrew
was, when he met the big coach just entering the town gates was appalled
by the terrible pallor of the princess' face that looked out at him from
the window.

"I have found out everything, your excellency: the Rostovs are staying
at the merchant Bronnikov's house, in the Square not far from here,
right above the Volga," said the courier.

Princess Mary looked at him with frightened inquiry, not understanding
why he did not reply to what she chiefly wanted to know: how was her
brother? Mademoiselle Bourienne put that question for her.

"How is the prince?" she asked.

"His excellency is staying in the same house with them."

"Then he is alive," thought Princess Mary, and asked in a low voice:
"How is he?"

"The servants say he is still the same."

What "still the same" might mean Princess Mary did not ask, but with an
unnoticed glance at little seven-year-old Nicholas, who was sitting in
front of her looking with pleasure at the town, she bowed her head
and did not raise it again till the heavy coach, rumbling, shaking and
swaying, came to a stop. The carriage steps clattered as they were let
down.

The carriage door was opened. On the left there was water--a great
river--and on the right a porch. There were people at the entrance:
servants, and a rosy girl with a large plait of black hair, smiling as
it seemed to Princess Mary in an unpleasantly affected way. (This was
Sonya.) Princess Mary ran up the steps. "This way, this way!" said the
girl, with the same artificial smile, and the princess found herself in
the hall facing an elderly woman of Oriental type, who came rapidly to
meet her with a look of emotion. This was the countess. She embraced
Princess Mary and kissed her.

"Mon enfant!" she muttered, "je vous aime et vous connais depuis
longtemps." *


    * "My child! I love you and have known you a long time."


 Despite her excitement, Princess Mary realized that this was the
countess and that it was necessary to say something to her. Hardly
knowing how she did it, she contrived to utter a few polite phrases in
French in the same tone as those that had been addressed to her, and
asked: "How is he?"

"The doctor says that he is not in danger," said the countess, but as
she spoke she raised her eyes with a sigh, and her gesture conveyed a
contradiction of her words.

"Where is he? Can I see him--can I?" asked the princess.

"One moment, Princess, one moment, my dear! Is this his son?" said the
countess, turning to little Nicholas who was coming in with Dessalles.
"There will be room for everybody, this is a big house. Oh, what a
lovely boy!"

The countess took Princess Mary into the drawing room, where Sonya was
talking to Mademoiselle Bourienne. The countess caressed the boy, and
the old count came in and welcomed the princess. He had changed very
much since Princess Mary had last seen him. Then he had been a brisk,
cheerful, self-assured old man; now he seemed a pitiful, bewildered
person. While talking to Princess Mary he continually looked round as
if asking everyone whether he was doing the right thing. After the
destruction of Moscow and of his property, thrown out of his accustomed
groove he seemed to have lost the sense of his own significance and to
feel that there was no longer a place for him in life.

In spite of her one desire to see her brother as soon as possible, and
her vexation that at the moment when all she wanted was to see him they
should be trying to entertain her and pretending to admire her nephew,
the princess noticed all that was going on around her and felt the
necessity of submitting, for a time, to this new order of things which
she had entered. She knew it to be necessary, and though it was hard for
her she was not vexed with these people.

"This is my niece," said the count, introducing Sonya--"You don't know
her, Princess?"

Princess Mary turned to Sonya and, trying to stifle the hostile
feeling that arose in her toward the girl, she kissed her. But she felt
oppressed by the fact that the mood of everyone around her was so far
from what was in her own heart.

"Where is he?" she asked again, addressing them all.

"He is downstairs. Natasha is with him," answered Sonya, flushing. "We
have sent to ask. I think you must be tired, Princess."

Tears of vexation showed themselves in Princess Mary's eyes. She turned
away and was about to ask the countess again how to go to him, when
light, impetuous, and seemingly buoyant steps were heard at the
door. The princess looked round and saw Natasha coming in, almost
running--that Natasha whom she had liked so little at their meeting in
Moscow long since.

But hardly had the princess looked at Natasha's face before she realized
that here was a real comrade in her grief, and consequently a friend.
She ran to meet her, embraced her, and began to cry on her shoulder.

As soon as Natasha, sitting at the head of Prince Andrew's bed, heard
of Princess Mary's arrival, she softly left his room and hastened to her
with those swift steps that had sounded buoyant to Princess Mary.

There was only one expression on her agitated face when she ran into the
drawing room--that of love--boundless love for him, for her, and for all
that was near to the man she loved; and of pity, suffering for others,
and passionate desire to give herself entirely to helping them. It was
plain that at that moment there was in Natasha's heart no thought of
herself or of her own relations with Prince Andrew.

Princess Mary, with her acute sensibility, understood all this at the
first glance at Natasha's face, and wept on her shoulder with sorrowful
pleasure.

"Come, come to him, Mary," said Natasha, leading her into the other
room.

Princess Mary raised her head, dried her eyes, and turned to Natasha.
She felt that from her she would be able to understand and learn
everything.

"How..." she began her question but stopped short.

She felt that it was impossible to ask, or to answer, in words.
Natasha's face and eyes would have to tell her all more clearly and
profoundly.

Natasha was gazing at her, but seemed afraid and in doubt whether to say
all she knew or not; she seemed to feel that before those luminous eyes
which penetrated into the very depths of her heart, it was impossible
not to tell the whole truth which she saw. And suddenly, Natasha's lips
twitched, ugly wrinkles gathered round her mouth, and covering her face
with her hands she burst into sobs.

Princess Mary understood.

But she still hoped, and asked, in words she herself did not trust:

"But how is his wound? What is his general condition?"

"You, you... will see," was all Natasha could say.

They sat a little while downstairs near his room till they had left off
crying and were able to go to him with calm faces.

"How has his whole illness gone? Is it long since he grew worse? When
did this happen?" Princess Mary inquired.

Natasha told her that at first there had been danger from his feverish
condition and the pain he suffered, but at Troitsa that had passed
and the doctor had only been afraid of gangrene. That danger had also
passed. When they reached Yaroslavl the wound had begun to fester
(Natasha knew all about such things as festering) and the doctor had
said that the festering might take a normal course. Then fever set in,
but the doctor had said the fever was not very serious.

"But two days ago this suddenly happened," said Natasha, struggling with
her sobs. "I don't know why, but you will see what he is like."

"Is he weaker? Thinner?" asked the princess.

"No, it's not that, but worse. You will see. O, Mary, he is too good, he
cannot, cannot live, because..."





CHAPTER XV


When Natasha opened Prince Andrew's door with a familiar movement and
let Princess Mary pass into the room before her, the princess felt the
sobs in her throat. Hard as she had tried to prepare herself, and now
tried to remain tranquil, she knew that she would be unable to look at
him without tears.

The princess understood what Natasha had meant by the words: "two days
ago this suddenly happened." She understood those words to mean that he
had suddenly softened and that this softening and gentleness were signs
of approaching death. As she stepped to the door she already saw in
imagination Andrew's face as she remembered it in childhood, a gentle,
mild, sympathetic face which he had rarely shown, and which therefore
affected her very strongly. She was sure he would speak soft, tender
words to her such as her father had uttered before his death, and
that she would not be able to bear it and would burst into sobs in his
presence. Yet sooner or later it had to be, and she went in. The sobs
rose higher and higher in her throat as she more and more clearly
distinguished his form and her shortsighted eyes tried to make out his
features, and then she saw his face and met his gaze.

He was lying in a squirrel-fur dressing gown on a divan, surrounded by
pillows. He was thin and pale. In one thin, translucently white hand
he held a handkerchief, while with the other he stroked the delicate
mustache he had grown, moving his fingers slowly. His eyes gazed at them
as they entered.

On seeing his face and meeting his eyes Princess Mary's pace suddenly
slackened, she felt her tears dry up and her sobs ceased. She suddenly
felt guilty and grew timid on catching the expression of his face and
eyes.

"But in what am I to blame?" she asked herself. And his cold, stern look
replied: "Because you are alive and thinking of the living, while I..."

In the deep gaze that seemed to look not outwards but inwards there
was an almost hostile expression as he slowly regarded his sister and
Natasha.

He kissed his sister, holding her hand in his as was their wont.

"How are you, Mary? How did you manage to get here?" said he in a voice
as calm and aloof as his look.

Had he screamed in agony, that scream would not have struck such horror
into Princess Mary's heart as the tone of his voice.

"And have you brought little Nicholas?" he asked in the same slow, quiet
manner and with an obvious effort to remember.

"How are you now?" said Princess Mary, herself surprised at what she was
saying.

"That, my dear, you must ask the doctor," he replied, and again making
an evident effort to be affectionate, he said with his lips only (his
words clearly did not correspond to his thoughts):

"Merci, chere amie, d'etre venue." *


    * "Thank you for coming, my dear."


Princess Mary pressed his hand. The pressure made him wince just
perceptibly. He was silent, and she did not know what to say. She now
understood what had happened to him two days before. In his words, his
tone, and especially in that calm, almost antagonistic look could be
felt an estrangement from everything belonging to this world, terrible
in one who is alive. Evidently only with an effort did he understand
anything living; but it was obvious that he failed to understand, not
because he lacked the power to do so but because he understood something
else--something the living did not and could not understand--and which
wholly occupied his mind.

"There, you see how strangely fate has brought us together," said he,
breaking the silence and pointing to Natasha. "She looks after me all
the time."

Princess Mary heard him and did not understand how he could say such a
thing. He, the sensitive, tender Prince Andrew, how could he say that,
before her whom he loved and who loved him? Had he expected to live he
could not have said those words in that offensively cold tone. If he had
not known that he was dying, how could he have failed to pity her and
how could he speak like that in her presence? The only explanation was
that he was indifferent, because something else, much more important,
had been revealed to him.

The conversation was cold and disconnected and continually broke off.

"Mary came by way of Ryazan," said Natasha.

Prince Andrew did not notice that she called his sister Mary, and only
after calling her so in his presence did Natasha notice it herself.

"Really?" he asked.

"They told her that all Moscow has been burned down, and that..."

Natasha stopped. It was impossible to talk. It was plain that he was
making an effort to listen, but could not do so.

"Yes, they say it's burned," he said. "It's a great pity," and he gazed
straight before him, absently stroking his mustache with his fingers.

"And so you have met Count Nicholas, Mary?" Prince Andrew suddenly said,
evidently wishing to speak pleasantly to them. "He wrote here that he
took a great liking to you," he went on simply and calmly, evidently
unable to understand all the complex significance his words had for
living people. "If you liked him too, it would be a good thing for you
to get married," he added rather more quickly, as if pleased at having
found words he had long been seeking.

Princess Mary heard his words but they had no meaning for her, except as
a proof of how far away he now was from everything living.

"Why talk of me?" she said quietly and glanced at Natasha.

Natasha, who felt her glance, did not look at her. All three were again
silent.

"Andrew, would you like..." Princess Mary suddenly said in a trembling
voice, "would you like to see little Nicholas? He is always talking
about you!"

Prince Andrew smiled just perceptibly and for the first time, but
Princess Mary, who knew his face so well, saw with horror that he did
not smile with pleasure or affection for his son, but with quiet, gentle
irony because he thought she was trying what she believed to be the last
means of arousing him.

"Yes, I shall be very glad to see him. Is he quite well?"

When little Nicholas was brought into Prince Andrew's room he looked at
his father with frightened eyes, but did not cry, because no one else
was crying. Prince Andrew kissed him and evidently did not know what to
say to him.

When Nicholas had been led away, Princess Mary again went up to her
brother, kissed him, and unable to restrain her tears any longer began
to cry.

He looked at her attentively.

"Is it about Nicholas?" he asked.

Princess Mary nodded her head, weeping.

"Mary, you know the Gosp..." but he broke off.

"What did you say?"

"Nothing. You mustn't cry here," he said, looking at her with the same
cold expression.


When Princess Mary began to cry, he understood that she was crying at
the thought that little Nicholas would be left without a father. With
a great effort he tried to return to life and to see things from their
point of view.

"Yes, to them it must seem sad!" he thought. "But how simple it is.

"The fowls of the air sow not, neither do they reap, yet your Father
feedeth them," he said to himself and wished to say to Princess Mary;
"but no, they will take it their own way, they won't understand!
They can't understand that all those feelings they prize so--all our
feelings, all those ideas that seem so important to us, are unnecessary.
We cannot understand one another," and he remained silent.


Prince Andrew's little son was seven. He could scarcely read, and knew
nothing. After that day he lived through many things, gaining knowledge,
observation, and experience, but had he possessed all the faculties he
afterwards acquired, he could not have had a better or more profound
understanding of the meaning of the scene he had witnessed between
his father, Mary, and Natasha, than he had then. He understood it
completely, and, leaving the room without crying, went silently up
to Natasha who had come out with him and looked shyly at her with his
beautiful, thoughtful eyes, then his uplifted, rosy upper lip trembled
and leaning his head against her he began to cry.

After that he avoided Dessalles and the countess who caressed him and
either sat alone or came timidly to Princess Mary, or to Natasha of whom
he seemed even fonder than of his aunt, and clung to them quietly and
shyly.

When Princess Mary had left Prince Andrew she fully understood what
Natasha's face had told her. She did not speak any more to Natasha of
hopes of saving his life. She took turns with her beside his sofa, and
did not cry any more, but prayed continually, turning in soul to that
Eternal and Unfathomable, whose presence above the dying man was now so
evident.





CHAPTER XVI


Not only did Prince Andrew know he would die, but he felt that he was
dying and was already half dead. He was conscious of an aloofness from
everything earthly and a strange and joyous lightness of existence.
Without haste or agitation he awaited what was coming. That inexorable,
eternal, distant, and unknown the presence of which he had felt
continually all his life--was now near to him and, by the strange
lightness he experienced, almost comprehensible and palpable...


Formerly he had feared the end. He had twice experienced that terribly
tormenting fear of death--the end--but now he no longer understood that
fear.

 He had felt it for the first time when the shell spun like a top
before him, and he looked at the fallow field, the bushes, and the sky,
and knew that he was face to face with death. When he came to himself
after being wounded and the flower of eternal, unfettered love had
instantly unfolded itself in his soul as if freed from the bondage of
life that had restrained it, he no longer feared death and ceased to
think about it.

During the hours of solitude, suffering, and partial delirium he
spent after he was wounded, the more deeply he penetrated into the new
principle of eternal love revealed to him, the more he unconsciously
detached himself from earthly life. To love everything and everybody and
always to sacrifice oneself for love meant not to love anyone, not
to live this earthly life. And the more imbued he became with that
principle of love, the more he renounced life and the more completely
he destroyed that dreadful barrier which--in the absence of such
love--stands between life and death. When during those first days he
remembered that he would have to die, he said to himself: "Well, what of
it? So much the better!"

But after the night in Mytishchi when, half delirious, he had seen her
for whom he longed appear before him and, having pressed her hand to his
lips, had shed gentle, happy tears, love for a particular woman again
crept unobserved into his heart and once more bound him to life. And
joyful and agitating thoughts began to occupy his mind. Recalling the
moment at the ambulance station when he had seen Kuragin, he could not
now regain the feeling he then had, but was tormented by the question
whether Kuragin was alive. And he dared not inquire.

His illness pursued its normal physical course, but what Natasha
referred to when she said: "This suddenly happened," had occurred two
days before Princess Mary arrived. It was the last spiritual struggle
between life and death, in which death gained the victory. It was
the unexpected realization of the fact that he still valued life as
presented to him in the form of his love for Natasha, and a last, though
ultimately vanquished, attack of terror before the unknown.

It was evening. As usual after dinner he was slightly feverish, and his
thoughts were preternaturally clear. Sonya was sitting by the table. He
began to doze. Suddenly a feeling of happiness seized him.

"Ah, she has come!" thought he.

And so it was: in Sonya's place sat Natasha who had just come in
noiselessly.

Since she had begun looking after him, he had always experienced this
physical consciousness of her nearness. She was sitting in an armchair
placed sideways, screening the light of the candle from him, and was
knitting a stocking. She had learned to knit stockings since Prince
Andrew had casually mentioned that no one nursed the sick so well as old
nurses who knit stockings, and that there is something soothing in
the knitting of stockings. The needles clicked lightly in her slender,
rapidly moving hands, and he could clearly see the thoughtful profile
of her drooping face. She moved, and the ball rolled off her knees. She
started, glanced round at him, and screening the candle with her hand
stooped carefully with a supple and exact movement, picked up the ball,
and regained her former position.

He looked at her without moving and saw that she wanted to draw a
deep breath after stooping, but refrained from doing so and breathed
cautiously.

At the Troitsa monastery they had spoken of the past, and he had told
her that if he lived he would always thank God for his wound which had
brought them together again, but after that they never spoke of the
future.

"Can it or can it not be?" he now thought as he looked at her and
listened to the light click of the steel needles. "Can fate have brought
me to her so strangely only for me to die?... Is it possible that the
truth of life has been revealed to me only to show me that I have spent
my life in falsity? I love her more than anything in the world! But what
am I to do if I love her?" he thought, and he involuntarily groaned,
from a habit acquired during his sufferings.

On hearing that sound Natasha put down the stocking, leaned nearer to
him, and suddenly, noticing his shining eyes, stepped lightly up to him
and bent over him.

"You are not asleep?"

"No, I have been looking at you a long time. I felt you come in. No one
else gives me that sense of soft tranquillity that you do... that light.
I want to weep for joy."

Natasha drew closer to him. Her face shone with rapturous joy.

"Natasha, I love you too much! More than anything in the world."

"And I!"--She turned away for an instant. "Why too much?" she asked.

"Why too much?... Well, what do you, what do you feel in your soul, your
whole soul--shall I live? What do you think?"

"I am sure of it, sure!" Natasha almost shouted, taking hold of both his
hands with a passionate movement.

He remained silent awhile.

"How good it would be!" and taking her hand he kissed it.

Natasha felt happy and agitated, but at once remembered that this would
not do and that he had to be quiet.

"But you have not slept," she said, repressing her joy. "Try to sleep...
please!"

He pressed her hand and released it, and she went back to the candle and
sat down again in her former position. Twice she turned and looked at
him, and her eyes met his beaming at her. She set herself a task on her
stocking and resolved not to turn round till it was finished.

Soon he really shut his eyes and fell asleep. He did not sleep long and
suddenly awoke with a start and in a cold perspiration.

As he fell asleep he had still been thinking of the subject that now
always occupied his mind--about life and death, and chiefly about death.
He felt himself nearer to it.

"Love? What is love?" he thought.

"Love hinders death. Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I
understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only
because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to
die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and
eternal source." These thoughts seemed to him comforting. But they were
only thoughts. Something was lacking in them, they were not clear, they
were too one-sidedly personal and brain-spun. And there was the former
agitation and obscurity. He fell asleep.

He dreamed that he was lying in the room he really was in, but that
he was quite well and unwounded. Many various, indifferent, and
insignificant people appeared before him. He talked to them and
discussed something trivial. They were preparing to go away somewhere.
Prince Andrew dimly realized that all this was trivial and that he had
more important cares, but he continued to speak, surprising them by
empty witticisms. Gradually, unnoticed, all these persons began to
disappear and a single question, that of the closed door, superseded
all else. He rose and went to the door to bolt and lock it. Everything
depended on whether he was, or was not, in time to lock it. He went, and
tried to hurry, but his legs refused to move and he knew he would not be
in time to lock the door though he painfully strained all his powers. He
was seized by an agonizing fear. And that fear was the fear of death. It
stood behind the door. But just when he was clumsily creeping toward
the door, that dreadful something on the other side was already pressing
against it and forcing its way in. Something not human--death--was
breaking in through that door, and had to be kept out. He seized the
door, making a final effort to hold it back--to lock it was no longer
possible--but his efforts were weak and clumsy and the door, pushed from
behind by that terror, opened and closed again.

Once again it pushed from outside. His last superhuman efforts were vain
and both halves of the door noiselessly opened. It entered, and it was
death, and Prince Andrew died.

But at the instant he died, Prince Andrew remembered that he was asleep,
and at the very instant he died, having made an effort, he awoke.

"Yes, it was death! I died--and woke up. Yes, death is an awakening!"
And all at once it grew light in his soul and the veil that had till
then concealed the unknown was lifted from his spiritual vision. He felt
as if powers till then confined within him had been liberated, and that
strange lightness did not again leave him.

When, waking in a cold perspiration, he moved on the divan, Natasha went
up and asked him what was the matter. He did not answer and looked at
her strangely, not understanding.

That was what had happened to him two days before Princess Mary's
arrival. From that day, as the doctor expressed it, the wasting fever
assumed a malignant character, but what the doctor said did not interest
Natasha, she saw the terrible moral symptoms which to her were more
convincing.

From that day an awakening from life came to Prince Andrew together with
his awakening from sleep. And compared to the duration of life it did
not seem to him slower than an awakening from sleep compared to the
duration of a dream.

There was nothing terrible or violent in this comparatively slow
awakening.

His last days and hours passed in an ordinary and simple way. Both
Princess Mary and Natasha, who did not leave him, felt this. They did
not weep or shudder and during these last days they themselves felt
that they were not attending on him (he was no longer there, he had left
them) but on what reminded them most closely of him--his body. Both felt
this so strongly that the outward and terrible side of death did not
affect them and they did not feel it necessary to foment their grief.
Neither in his presence nor out of it did they weep, nor did they ever
talk to one another about him. They felt that they could not express in
words what they understood.

They both saw that he was sinking slowly and quietly, deeper and deeper,
away from them, and they both knew that this had to be so and that it
was right.

He confessed, and received communion: everyone came to take leave of
him. When they brought his son to him, he pressed his lips to the boy's
and turned away, not because he felt it hard and sad (Princess Mary and
Natasha understood that) but simply because he thought it was all that
was required of him, but when they told him to bless the boy, he did
what was demanded and looked round as if asking whether there was
anything else he should do.

When the last convulsions of the body, which the spirit was leaving,
occurred, Princess Mary and Natasha were present.

"Is it over?" said Princess Mary when his body had for a few minutes
lain motionless, growing cold before them. Natasha went up, looked at
the dead eyes, and hastened to close them. She closed them but did not
kiss them, but clung to that which reminded her most nearly of him--his
body.

"Where has he gone? Where is he now?..."

When the body, washed and dressed, lay in the coffin on a table,
everyone came to take leave of him and they all wept.

Little Nicholas cried because his heart was rent by painful perplexity.
The countess and Sonya cried from pity for Natasha and because he was
no more. The old count cried because he felt that before long, he, too,
must take the same terrible step.

Natasha and Princess Mary also wept now, but not because of their own
personal grief; they wept with a reverent and softening emotion which
had taken possession of their souls at the consciousness of the
simple and solemn mystery of death that had been accomplished in their
presence.





BOOK THIRTEEN: 1812





CHAPTER I


Man's mind cannot grasp the causes of events in their completeness, but
the desire to find those causes is implanted in man's soul. And without
considering the multiplicity and complexity of the conditions any one
of which taken separately may seem to be the cause, he snatches at the
first approximation to a cause that seems to him intelligible and says:
"This is the cause!" In historical events (where the actions of men are
the subject of observation) the first and most primitive approximation
to present itself was the will of the gods and, after that, the will of
those who stood in the most prominent position--the heroes of history.
But we need only penetrate to the essence of any historic event--which
lies in the activity of the general mass of men who take part in it--to
be convinced that the will of the historic hero does not control the
actions of the mass but is itself continually controlled. It may seem
to be a matter of indifference whether we understand the meaning of
historical events this way or that; yet there is the same difference
between a man who says that the people of the West moved on the East
because Napoleon wished it and a man who says that this happened because
it had to happen, as there is between those who declared that the
earth was stationary and that the planets moved round it and those who
admitted that they did not know what upheld the earth, but knew there
were laws directing its movement and that of the other planets. There
is, and can be, no cause of an historical event except the one cause of
all causes. But there are laws directing events, and some of these laws
are known to us while we are conscious of others we cannot comprehend.
The discovery of these laws is only possible when we have quite
abandoned the attempt to find the cause in the will of some one man,
just as the discovery of the laws of the motion of the planets was
possible only when men abandoned the conception of the fixity of the
earth.

The historians consider that, next to the battle of Borodino and the
occupation of Moscow by the enemy and its destruction by fire, the most
important episode of the war of 1812 was the movement of the Russian
army from the Ryazana to the Kaluga road and to the Tarutino camp--the
so-called flank march across the Krasnaya Pakhra River. They ascribe the
glory of that achievement of genius to different men and dispute as to
whom the honor is due. Even foreign historians, including the French,
acknowledge the genius of the Russian commanders when they speak of
that flank march. But it is hard to understand why military writers,
and following them others, consider this flank march to be the profound
conception of some one man who saved Russia and destroyed Napoleon. In
the first place it is hard to understand where the profundity and genius
of this movement lay, for not much mental effort was needed to see that
the best position for an army when it is not being attacked is where
there are most provisions; and even a dull boy of thirteen could have
guessed that the best position for an army after its retreat from Moscow
in 1812 was on the Kaluga road. So it is impossible to understand by
what reasoning the historians reach the conclusion that this maneuver
was a profound one. And it is even more difficult to understand just why
they think that this maneuver was calculated to save Russia and destroy
the French; for this flank march, had it been preceded, accompanied,
or followed by other circumstances, might have proved ruinous to the
Russians and salutary for the French. If the position of the Russian
army really began to improve from the time of that march, it does not at
all follow that the march was the cause of it.

That flank march might not only have failed to give any advantage to
the Russian army, but might in other circumstances have led to its
destruction. What would have happened had Moscow not burned down? If
Murat had not lost sight of the Russians? If Napoleon had not remained
inactive? If the Russian army at Krasnaya Pakhra had given battle as
Bennigsen and Barclay advised? What would have happened had the French
attacked the Russians while they were marching beyond the Pakhra? What
would have happened if on approaching Tarutino, Napoleon had attacked
the Russians with but a tenth of the energy he had shown when he
attacked them at Smolensk? What would have happened had the French moved
on Petersburg?... In any of these eventualities the flank march that
brought salvation might have proved disastrous.

The third and most incomprehensible thing is that people studying
history deliberately avoid seeing that this flank march cannot be
attributed to any one man, that no one ever foresaw it, and that in
reality, like the retreat from Fili, it did not suggest itself to anyone
in its entirety, but resulted--moment by moment, step by step, event by
event--from an endless number of most diverse circumstances and was only
seen in its entirety when it had been accomplished and belonged to the
past.

At the council at Fili the prevailing thought in the minds of the
Russian commanders was the one naturally suggesting itself, namely, a
direct retreat by the Nizhni road. In proof of this there is the fact
that the majority of the council voted for such a retreat, and above
all there is the well-known conversation after the council, between the
commander in chief and Lanskoy, who was in charge of the commissariat
department. Lanskoy informed the commander in chief that the army
supplies were for the most part stored along the Oka in the Tula and
Ryazan provinces, and that if they retreated on Nizhni the army would
be separated from its supplies by the broad river Oka, which cannot be
crossed early in winter. This was the first indication of the necessity
of deviating from what had previously seemed the most natural course--a
direct retreat on Nizhni-Novgorod. The army turned more to the south,
along the Ryazan road and nearer to its supplies. Subsequently the
inactivity of the French (who even lost sight of the Russian army),
concern for the safety of the arsenal at Tula, and especially the
advantages of drawing nearer to its supplies caused the army to turn
still further south to the Tula road. Having crossed over, by a forced
march, to the Tula road beyond the Pakhra, the Russian commanders
intended to remain at Podolsk and had no thought of the Tarutino
position; but innumerable circumstances and the reappearance of French
troops who had for a time lost touch with the Russians, and projects
of giving battle, and above all the abundance of provisions in Kaluga
province, obliged our army to turn still more to the south and to cross
from the Tula to the Kaluga road and go to Tarutino, which was between
the roads along which those supplies lay. Just as it is impossible to
say when it was decided to abandon Moscow, so it is impossible to say
precisely when, or by whom, it was decided to move to Tarutino. Only
when the army had got there, as the result of innumerable and varying
forces, did people begin to assure themselves that they had desired this
movement and long ago foreseen its result.





CHAPTER II


The famous flank movement merely consisted in this: after the advance
of the French had ceased, the Russian army, which had been continually
retreating straight back from the invaders, deviated from that direct
course and, not finding itself pursued, was naturally drawn toward the
district where supplies were abundant.

If instead of imagining to ourselves commanders of genius leading the
Russian army, we picture that army without any leaders, it could not
have done anything but make a return movement toward Moscow, describing
an arc in the direction where most provisions were to be found and where
the country was richest.

That movement from the Nizhni to the Ryazan, Tula, and Kaluga roads was
so natural that even the Russian marauders moved in that direction, and
demands were sent from Petersburg for Kutuzov to take his army that
way. At Tarutino Kutuzov received what was almost a reprimand from
the Emperor for having moved his army along the Ryazan road, and the
Emperor's letter indicated to him the very position he had already
occupied near Kaluga.

Having rolled like a ball in the direction of the impetus given by the
whole campaign and by the battle of Borodino, the Russian army--when
the strength of that impetus was exhausted and no fresh push was
received--assumed the position natural to it.

Kutuzov's merit lay, not in any strategic maneuver of genius, as it is
called, but in the fact that he alone understood the significance of
what had happened. He alone then understood the meaning of the French
army's inactivity, he alone continued to assert that the battle of
Borodino had been a victory, he alone--who as commander in chief might
have been expected to be eager to attack--employed his whole strength to
restrain the Russian army from useless engagements.

The beast wounded at Borodino was lying where the fleeing hunter had
left him; but whether he was still alive, whether he was strong and
merely lying low, the hunter did not know. Suddenly the beast was heard
to moan.

The moan of that wounded beast (the French army) which betrayed its
calamitous condition was the sending of Lauriston to Kutuzov's camp with
overtures for peace.

Napoleon, with his usual assurance that whatever entered his head was
right, wrote to Kutuzov the first words that occurred to him, though
they were meaningless.


MONSIEUR LE PRINCE KOUTOUZOV: I am sending one of my adjutants-general
to discuss several interesting questions with you. I beg your Highness
to credit what he says to you, especially when he expresses the
sentiment of esteem and special regard I have long entertained for your
person. This letter having no other object, I pray God, monsieur le
Prince Koutouzov, to keep you in His holy and gracious protection!

NAPOLEON

MOSCOW, OCTOBER 30, 1812


Kutuzov replied: "I should be cursed by posterity were I looked on as
the initiator of a settlement of any sort. Such is the present spirit
of my nation." But he continued to exert all his powers to restrain his
troops from attacking.

During the month that the French troops were pillaging in Moscow and
the Russian troops were quietly encamped at Tarutino, a change had taken
place in the relative strength of the two armies--both in spirit and in
number--as a result of which the superiority had passed to the Russian
side. Though the condition and numbers of the French army were unknown
to the Russians, as soon as that change occurred the need of attacking
at once showed itself by countless signs. These signs were: Lauriston's
mission; the abundance of provisions at Tarutino; the reports coming in
from all sides of the inactivity and disorder of the French; the flow of
recruits to our regiments; the fine weather; the long rest the Russian
soldiers had enjoyed, and the impatience to do what they had been
assembled for, which usually shows itself in an army that has been
resting; curiosity as to what the French army, so long lost sight of,
was doing; the boldness with which our outposts now scouted close up to
the French stationed at Tarutino; the news of easy successes gained by
peasants and guerrilla troops over the French, the envy aroused by this;
the desire for revenge that lay in the heart of every Russian as long as
the French were in Moscow, and (above all) a dim consciousness in every
soldier's mind that the relative strength of the armies had changed and
that the advantage was now on our side. There was a substantial change
in the relative strength, and an advance had become inevitable. And at
once, as a clock begins to strike and chime as soon as the minute hand
has completed a full circle, this change was shown by an increased
activity, whirring, and chiming in the higher spheres.





CHAPTER III


The Russian army was commanded by Kutuzov and his staff, and also by the
Emperor from Petersburg. Before the news of the abandonment of Moscow
had been received in Petersburg, a detailed plan of the whole campaign
had been drawn up and sent to Kutuzov for his guidance. Though this plan
had been drawn up on the supposition that Moscow was still in our hands,
it was approved by the staff and accepted as a basis for action.
Kutuzov only replied that movements arranged from a distance were always
difficult to execute. So fresh instructions were sent for the solution
of difficulties that might be encountered, as well as fresh people who
were to watch Kutuzov's actions and report upon them.

Besides this, the whole staff of the Russian army was now reorganized.
The posts left vacant by Bagration, who had been killed, and by
Barclay, who had gone away in dudgeon, had to be filled. Very serious
consideration was given to the question whether it would be better to
put A in B's place and B in D's, or on the contrary to put D in A's
place, and so on--as if anything more than A's or B's satisfaction
depended on this.

As a result of the hostility between Kutuzov and Bennigsen, his Chief of
Staff, the presence of confidential representatives of the Emperor, and
these transfers, a more than usually complicated play of parties
was going on among the staff of the army. A was undermining B, D was
undermining C, and so on in all possible combinations and permutations.
In all these plottings the subject of intrigue was generally the conduct
of the war, which all these men believed they were directing; but this
affair of the war went on independently of them, as it had to go:
that is, never in the way people devised, but flowing always from the
essential attitude of the masses. Only in the highest spheres did
all these schemes, crossings, and interminglings appear to be a true
reflection of what had to happen.


Prince Michael Ilarionovich! (wrote the Emperor on the second of October
in a letter that reached Kutuzov after the battle at Tarutino) Since
September 2 Moscow has been in the hands of the enemy. Your last reports
were written on the twentieth, and during all this time not only has
no action been taken against the enemy or for the relief of the ancient
capital, but according to your last report you have even retreated
farther. Serpukhov is already occupied by an enemy detachment and Tula
with its famous arsenal so indispensable to the army, is in danger.
From General Wintzingerode's reports, I see that an enemy corps of ten
thousand men is moving on the Petersburg road. Another corps of several
thousand men is moving on Dmitrov. A third has advanced along the
Vladimir road, and a fourth, rather considerable detachment is stationed
between Ruza and Mozhaysk. Napoleon himself was in Moscow as late as
the twenty-fifth. In view of all this information, when the enemy has
scattered his forces in large detachments, and with Napoleon and his
Guards in Moscow, is it possible that the enemy's forces confronting you
are so considerable as not to allow of your taking the offensive? On the
contrary, he is probably pursuing you with detachments, or at most with
an army corps much weaker than the army entrusted to you. It would seem
that, availing yourself of these circumstances, you might advantageously
attack a weaker one and annihilate him, or at least oblige him to
retreat, retaining in our hands an important part of the provinces now
occupied by the enemy, and thereby averting danger from Tula and other
towns in the interior. You will be responsible if the enemy is able to
direct a force of any size against Petersburg to threaten this capital
in which it has not been possible to retain many troops; for with the
army entrusted to you, and acting with resolution and energy, you have
ample means to avert this fresh calamity. Remember that you have still
to answer to our offended country for the loss of Moscow. You have
experienced my readiness to reward you. That readiness will not weaken
in me, but I and Russia have a right to expect from you all the zeal,
firmness, and success which your intellect, military talent, and the
courage of the troops you command justify us in expecting.


But by the time this letter, which proved that the real relation of
the forces had already made itself felt in Petersburg, was dispatched,
Kutuzov had found himself unable any longer to restrain the army he
commanded from attacking and a battle had taken place.

On the second of October a Cossack, Shapovalov, who was out scouting,
killed one hare and wounded another. Following the wounded hare he made
his way far into the forest and came upon the left flank of Murat's
army, encamped there without any precautions. The Cossack laughingly
told his comrades how he had almost fallen into the hands of the French.
A cornet, hearing the story, informed his commander.

The Cossack was sent for and questioned. The Cossack officers wished
to take advantage of this chance to capture some horses, but one of
the superior officers, who was acquainted with the higher authorities,
reported the incident to a general on the staff. The state of things on
the staff had of late been exceedingly strained. Ermolov had been to
see Bennigsen a few days previously and had entreated him to use
his influence with the commander in chief to induce him to take the
offensive.

"If I did not know you I should think you did not want what you are
asking for. I need only advise anything and his Highness is sure to do
the opposite," replied Bennigsen.

The Cossack's report, confirmed by horse patrols who were sent out, was
the final proof that events had matured. The tightly coiled spring was
released, the clock began to whirr and the chimes to play. Despite all
his supposed power, his intellect, his experience, and his knowledge of
men, Kutuzov--having taken into consideration the Cossack's report, a
note from Bennigsen who sent personal reports to the Emperor, the wishes
he supposed the Emperor to hold, and the fact that all the generals
expressed the same wish--could no longer check the inevitable movement,
and gave the order to do what he regarded as useless and harmful--gave
his approval, that is, to the accomplished fact.





CHAPTER IV


Bennigsen's note and the Cossack's information that the left flank
of the French was unguarded were merely final indications that it was
necessary to order an attack, and it was fixed for the fifth of October.

On the morning of the fourth of October Kutuzov signed the dispositions.
Toll read them to Ermolov, asking him to attend to the further
arrangements.

"All right--all right. I haven't time just now," replied Ermolov, and
left the hut.

The dispositions drawn up by Toll were very good. As in the Austerlitz
dispositions, it was written--though not in German this time:

"The First Column will march here and here," "the Second Column will
march there and there," and so on; and on paper, all these columns
arrived at their places at the appointed time and destroyed the enemy.
Everything had been admirably thought out as is usual in dispositions,
and as is always the case, not a single column reached its place at the
appointed time.

When the necessary number of copies of the dispositions had been
prepared, an officer was summoned and sent to deliver them to Ermolov
to deal with. A young officer of the Horse Guards, Kutuzov's orderly,
pleased at the importance of the mission entrusted to him, went to
Ermolov's quarters.

"Gone away," said Ermolov's orderly.

The officer of the Horse Guards went to a general with whom Ermolov was
often to be found.

"No, and the general's out too."

The officer, mounting his horse, rode off to someone else.

"No, he's gone out."

"If only they don't make me responsible for this delay! What a nuisance
it is!" thought the officer, and he rode round the whole camp. One man
said he had seen Ermolov ride past with some other generals, others said
he must have returned home. The officer searched till six o'clock in the
evening without even stopping to eat. Ermolov was nowhere to be found
and no one knew where he was. The officer snatched a little food at
a comrade's, and rode again to the vanguard to find Miloradovich.
Miloradovich too was away, but here he was told that he had gone to a
ball at General Kikin's and that Ermolov was probably there too.

"But where is it?"

"Why, there, over at Echkino," said a Cossack officer, pointing to a
country house in the far distance.

"What, outside our line?"

"They've put two regiments as outposts, and they're having such a spree
there, it's awful! Two bands and three sets of singers!"

The officer rode out beyond our lines to Echkino. While still at a
distance he heard as he rode the merry sounds of a soldier's dance song
proceeding from the house.

"In the meadows... in the meadows!" he heard, accompanied by whistling
and the sound of a torban, drowned every now and then by shouts. These
sounds made his spirits rise, but at the same time he was afraid that
he would be blamed for not having executed sooner the important order
entrusted to him. It was already past eight o'clock. He dismounted
and went up into the porch of a large country house which had remained
intact between the Russian and French forces. In the refreshment room
and the hall, footmen were bustling about with wine and viands. Groups
of singers stood outside the windows. The officer was admitted and
immediately saw all the chief generals of the army together, and among
them Ermolov's big imposing figure. They all had their coats unbuttoned
and were standing in a semicircle with flushed and animated faces,
laughing loudly. In the middle of the room a short handsome general with
a red face was dancing the trepak with much spirit and agility.

"Ha, ha, ha! Bravo, Nicholas Ivanych! Ha, ha, ha!"

The officer felt that by arriving with important orders at such a moment
he was doubly to blame, and he would have preferred to wait; but one of
the generals espied him and, hearing what he had come about, informed
Ermolov.

Ermolov came forward with a frown on his face and, hearing what the
officer had to say, took the papers from him without a word.


"You think he went off just by chance?" said a comrade, who was on the
staff that evening, to the officer of the Horse Guards, referring to
Ermolov. "It was a trick. It was done on purpose to get Konovnitsyn into
trouble. You'll see what a mess there'll be tomorrow."





CHAPTER V


Next day the decrepit Kutuzov, having given orders to be called early,
said his prayers, dressed, and, with an unpleasant consciousness of
having to direct a battle he did not approve of, got into his caleche
and drove from Letashovka (a village three and a half miles from
Tarutino) to the place where the attacking columns were to meet. He sat
in the caleche, dozing and waking up by turns, and listening for any
sound of firing on the right as an indication that the action had begun.
But all was still quiet. A damp dull autumn morning was just dawning. On
approaching Tarutino Kutuzov noticed cavalrymen leading their horses to
water across the road along which he was driving. Kutuzov looked at
them searchingly, stopped his carriage, and inquired what regiment they
belonged to. They belonged to a column that should have been far in
front and in ambush long before then. "It may be a mistake," thought
the old commander in chief. But a little further on he saw infantry
regiments with their arms piled and the soldiers, only partly dressed,
eating their rye porridge and carrying fuel. He sent for an officer. The
officer reported that no order to advance had been received.

"How! Not rec..." Kutuzov began, but checked himself immediately and
sent for a senior officer. Getting out of his caleche, he waited with
drooping head and breathing heavily, pacing silently up and down. When
Eykhen, the officer of the general staff whom he had summoned, appeared,
Kutuzov went purple in the face, not because that officer was to blame
for the mistake, but because he was an object of sufficient importance
for him to vent his wrath on. Trembling and panting the old man fell
into that state of fury in which he sometimes used to roll on the
ground, and he fell upon Eykhen, threatening him with his hands,
shouting and loading him with gross abuse. Another man, Captain Brozin,
who happened to turn up and who was not at all to blame, suffered the
same fate.

"What sort of another blackguard are you? I'll have you shot!
Scoundrels!" yelled Kutuzov in a hoarse voice, waving his arms and
reeling.

He was suffering physically. He, the commander in chief, a Serene
Highness who everybody said possessed powers such as no man had ever had
in Russia, to be placed in this position--made the laughingstock of the
whole army! "I needn't have been in such a hurry to pray about today,
or have kept awake thinking everything over all night," thought he to
himself. "When I was a chit of an officer no one would have dared to
mock me so... and now!" He was in a state of physical suffering as if
from corporal punishment, and could not avoid expressing it by cries of
anger and distress. But his strength soon began to fail him, and looking
about him, conscious of having said much that was amiss, he again got
into his caleche and drove back in silence.

His wrath, once expended, did not return, and blinking feebly he
listened to excuses and self-justifications (Ermolov did not come to see
him till the next day) and to the insistence of Bennigsen, Konovnitsyn,
and Toll that the movement that had miscarried should be executed next
day. And once more Kutuzov had to consent.





CHAPTER VI


Next day the troops assembled in their appointed places in the evening
and advanced during the night. It was an autumn night with dark purple
clouds, but no rain. The ground was damp but not muddy, and the troops
advanced noiselessly, only occasionally a jingling of the artillery
could be faintly heard. The men were forbidden to talk out loud, to
smoke their pipes, or to strike a light, and they tried to prevent their
horses neighing. The secrecy of the undertaking heightened its charm
and they marched gaily. Some columns, supposing they had reached their
destination, halted, piled arms, and settled down on the cold ground,
but the majority marched all night and arrived at places where they
evidently should not have been.

Only Count Orlov-Denisov with his Cossacks (the least important
detachment of all) got to his appointed place at the right time. This
detachment halted at the outskirts of a forest, on the path leading from
the village of Stromilova to Dmitrovsk.

Toward dawn, Count Orlov-Denisov, who had dozed off, was awakened by a
deserter from the French army being brought to him. This was a Polish
sergeant of Poniatowski's corps, who explained in Polish that he had
come over because he had been slighted in the service: that he ought
long ago to have been made an officer, that he was braver than any of
them, and so he had left them and wished to pay them out. He said that
Murat was spending the night less than a mile from where they were,
and that if they would let him have a convoy of a hundred men he would
capture him alive. Count Orlov-Denisov consulted his fellow officers.

The offer was too tempting to be refused. Everyone volunteered to go and
everybody advised making the attempt. After much disputing and arguing,
Major-General Grekov with two Cossack regiments decided to go with the
Polish sergeant.

"Now, remember," said Count Orlov-Denisov to the sergeant at parting,
"if you have been lying I'll have you hanged like a dog; but if it's
true you shall have a hundred gold pieces!"

Without replying, the sergeant, with a resolute air, mounted and rode
away with Grekov whose men had quickly assembled. They disappeared into
the forest, and Count Orlov-Denisov, having seen Grekov off, returned,
shivering from the freshness of the early dawn and excited by what he
had undertaken on his own responsibility, and began looking at the enemy
camp, now just visible in the deceptive light of dawn and the dying
campfires. Our columns ought to have begun to appear on an open
declivity to his right. He looked in that direction, but though the
columns would have been visible quite far off, they were not to be seen.
It seemed to the count that things were beginning to stir in the French
camp, and his keen-sighted adjutant confirmed this.

"Oh, it is really too late," said Count Orlov, looking at the camp.

As often happens when someone we have trusted is no longer before
our eyes, it suddenly seemed quite clear and obvious to him that the
sergeant was an impostor, that he had lied, and that the whole Russian
attack would be ruined by the absence of those two regiments, which
he would lead away heaven only knew where. How could one capture a
commander in chief from among such a mass of troops!

"I am sure that rascal was lying," said the count.

"They can still be called back," said one of his suite, who like Count
Orlov felt distrustful of the adventure when he looked at the enemy's
camp.

"Eh? Really... what do you think? Should we let them go on or not?"

"Will you have them fetched back?"

"Fetch them back, fetch them back!" said Count Orlov with sudden
determination, looking at his watch. "It will be too late. It is quite
light."

And the adjutant galloped through the forest after Grekov. When Grekov
returned, Count Orlov-Denisov, excited both by the abandoned attempt and
by vainly awaiting the infantry columns that still did not appear, as
well as by the proximity of the enemy, resolved to advance. All his men
felt the same excitement.

"Mount!" he commanded in a whisper. The men took their places and
crossed themselves.... "Forward, with God's aid!"

"Hurrah-ah-ah!" reverberated in the forest, and the Cossack companies,
trailing their lances and advancing one after another as if poured out
of a sack, dashed gaily across the brook toward the camp.

One desperate, frightened yell from the first French soldier who saw the
Cossacks, and all who were in the camp, undressed and only just waking
up, ran off in all directions, abandoning cannons, muskets, and horses.

Had the Cossacks pursued the French, without heeding what was behind and
around them, they would have captured Murat and everything there.
That was what the officers desired. But it was impossible to make the
Cossacks budge when once they had got booty and prisoners. None of them
listened to orders. Fifteen hundred prisoners and thirty-eight guns were
taken on the spot, besides standards and (what seemed most important to
the Cossacks) horses, saddles, horsecloths, and the like. All this had
to be dealt with, the prisoners and guns secured, the booty divided--not
without some shouting and even a little fighting among themselves--and
it was on this that the Cossacks all busied themselves.

The French, not being farther pursued, began to recover themselves: they
formed into detachments and began firing. Orlov-Denisov, still waiting
for the other columns to arrive, advanced no further.

Meantime, according to the dispositions which said that "the First
Column will march" and so on, the infantry of the belated columns,
commanded by Bennigsen and directed by Toll, had started in due order
and, as always happens, had got somewhere, but not to their appointed
places. As always happens the men, starting cheerfully, began to halt;
murmurs were heard, there was a sense of confusion, and finally a
backward movement. Adjutants and generals galloped about, shouted, grew
angry, quarreled, said they had come quite wrong and were late, gave
vent to a little abuse, and at last gave it all up and went forward,
simply to get somewhere. "We shall get somewhere or other!" And they did
indeed get somewhere, though not to their right places; a few eventually
even got to their right place, but too late to be of any use and only
in time to be fired at. Toll, who in this battle played the part of
Weyrother at Austerlitz, galloped assiduously from place to place,
finding everything upside down everywhere. Thus he stumbled on Bagovut's
corps in a wood when it was already broad daylight, though the corps
should long before have joined Orlov-Denisov. Excited and vexed by the
failure and supposing that someone must be responsible for it, Toll
galloped up to the commander of the corps and began upbraiding him
severely, saying that he ought to be shot. General Bagovut, a fighting
old soldier of placid temperament, being also upset by all the delay,
confusion, and cross-purposes, fell into a rage to everybody's surprise
and quite contrary to his usual character and said disagreeable things
to Toll.

"I prefer not to take lessons from anyone, but I can die with my men as
well as anybody," he said, and advanced with a single division.

Coming out onto a field under the enemy's fire, this brave general went
straight ahead, leading his men under fire, without considering in his
agitation whether going into action now, with a single division, would
be of any use or no. Danger, cannon balls, and bullets were just what he
needed in his angry mood. One of the first bullets killed him, and other
bullets killed many of his men. And his division remained under fire for
some time quite uselessly.





CHAPTER VII


Meanwhile another column was to have attacked the French from the front,
but Kutuzov accompanied that column. He well knew that nothing but
confusion would come of this battle undertaken against his will, and as
far as was in his power held the troops back. He did not advance.

He rode silently on his small gray horse, indolently answering
suggestions that they should attack.

"The word attack is always on your tongue, but you don't see that we are
unable to execute complicated maneuvers," said he to Miloradovich who
asked permission to advance.

"We couldn't take Murat prisoner this morning or get to the place in
time, and nothing can be done now!" he replied to someone else.

When Kutuzov was informed that at the French rear--where according to
the reports of the Cossacks there had previously been nobody--there were
now two battalions of Poles, he gave a sidelong glance at Ermolov who
was behind him and to whom he had not spoken since the previous day.

"You see! They are asking to attack and making plans of all kinds,
but as soon as one gets to business nothing is ready, and the enemy,
forewarned, takes measures accordingly."

Ermolov screwed up his eyes and smiled faintly on hearing these words.
He understood that for him the storm had blown over, and that Kutuzov
would content himself with that hint.

"He's having a little fun at my expense," said Ermolov softly, nudging
with his knee Raevski who was at his side.

Soon after this, Ermolov moved up to Kutuzov and respectfully remarked:

"It is not too late yet, your Highness--the enemy has not gone away--if
you were to order an attack! If not, the Guards will not so much as see
a little smoke."

Kutuzov did not reply, but when they reported to him that Murat's troops
were in retreat he ordered an advance, though at every hundred paces he
halted for three quarters of an hour.

The whole battle consisted in what Orlov-Denisov's Cossacks had done:
the rest of the army merely lost some hundreds of men uselessly.

In consequence of this battle Kutuzov received a diamond decoration,
and Bennigsen some diamonds and a hundred thousand rubles, others also
received pleasant recognitions corresponding to their various grades,
and following the battle fresh changes were made in the staff.

"That's how everything is done with us, all topsy-turvy!" said the
Russian officers and generals after the Tarutino battle, letting it be
understood that some fool there is doing things all wrong but that
we ourselves should not have done so, just as people speak today. But
people who talk like that either do not know what they are talking about
or deliberately deceive themselves. No battle--Tarutino, Borodino, or
Austerlitz--takes place as those who planned it anticipated. That is an
essential condition.

A countless number of free forces (for nowhere is man freer than during
a battle, where it is a question of life and death) influence the course
taken by the fight, and that course never can be known in advance and
never coincides with the direction of any one force.

If many simultaneously and variously directed forces act on a given
body, the direction of its motion cannot coincide with any one of those
forces, but will always be a mean--what in mechanics is represented by
the diagonal of a parallelogram of forces.

If in the descriptions given by historians, especially French ones, we
find their wars and battles carried out in accordance with previously
formed plans, the only conclusion to be drawn is that those descriptions
are false.

The battle of Tarutino obviously did not attain the aim Toll had in
view--to lead the troops into action in the order prescribed by the
dispositions; nor that which Count Orlov-Denisov may have had in
view--to take Murat prisoner; nor the result of immediately destroying
the whole corps, which Bennigsen and others may have had in view; nor
the aim of the officer who wished to go into action to distinguish
himself; nor that of the Cossack who wanted more booty than he got, and
so on. But if the aim of the battle was what actually resulted and what
all the Russians of that day desired--to drive the French out of Russia
and destroy their army--it is quite clear that the battle of Tarutino,
just because of its incongruities, was exactly what was wanted at that
stage of the campaign. It would be difficult and even impossible to
imagine any result more opportune than the actual outcome of this
battle. With a minimum of effort and insignificant losses, despite the
greatest confusion, the most important results of the whole campaign
were attained: the transition from retreat to advance, an exposure of
the weakness of the French, and the administration of that shock which
Napoleon's army had only awaited to begin its flight.





CHAPTER VIII


Napoleon enters Moscow after the brilliant victory de la Moskowa; there
can be no doubt about the victory for the battlefield remains in the
hands of the French. The Russians retreat and abandon their ancient
capital. Moscow, abounding in provisions, arms, munitions, and
incalculable wealth, is in Napoleon's hands. The Russian army, only half
the strength of the French, does not make a single attempt to attack for
a whole month. Napoleon's position is most brilliant. He can either fall
on the Russian army with double its strength and destroy it; negotiate
an advantageous peace, or in case of a refusal make a menacing move on
Petersburg, or even, in the case of a reverse, return to Smolensk or
Vilna; or remain in Moscow; in short, no special genius would seem to be
required to retain the brilliant position the French held at that time.
For that, only very simple and easy steps were necessary: not to allow
the troops to loot, to prepare winter clothing--of which there was
sufficient in Moscow for the whole army--and methodically to collect
the provisions, of which (according to the French historians) there were
enough in Moscow to supply the whole army for six months. Yet Napoleon,
that greatest of all geniuses, who the historians declare had control of
the army, took none of these steps.

He not merely did nothing of the kind, but on the contrary he used his
power to select the most foolish and ruinous of all the courses open
to him. Of all that Napoleon might have done: wintering in Moscow,
advancing on Petersburg or on Nizhni-Novgorod, or retiring by a more
northerly or more southerly route (say by the road Kutuzov afterwards
took), nothing more stupid or disastrous can be imagined than what he
actually did. He remained in Moscow till October, letting the troops
plunder the city; then, hesitating whether to leave a garrison behind
him, he quitted Moscow, approached Kutuzov without joining battle,
turned to the right and reached Malo-Yaroslavets, again without
attempting to break through and take the road Kutuzov took, but retiring
instead to Mozhaysk along the devastated Smolensk road. Nothing more
stupid than that could have been devised, or more disastrous for the
army, as the sequel showed. Had Napoleon's aim been to destroy his army,
the most skillful strategist could hardly have devised any series
of actions that would so completely have accomplished that purpose,
independently of anything the Russian army might do.

Napoleon, the man of genius, did this! But to say that he destroyed his
army because he wished to, or because he was very stupid, would be as
unjust as to say that he had brought his troops to Moscow because he
wished to and because he was very clever and a genius.

In both cases his personal activity, having no more force than the
personal activity of any soldier, merely coincided with the laws that
guided the event.

The historians quite falsely represent Napoleon's faculties as having
weakened in Moscow, and do so only because the results did not justify
his actions. He employed all his ability and strength to do the best he
could for himself and his army, as he had done previously and as he did
subsequently in 1813. His activity at that time was no less astounding
than it was in Egypt, in Italy, in Austria, and in Prussia. We do not
know for certain in how far his genius was genuine in Egypt--where forty
centuries looked down upon his grandeur--for his great exploits there
are all told us by Frenchmen. We cannot accurately estimate his genius
in Austria or Prussia, for we have to draw our information from French
or German sources, and the incomprehensible surrender of whole corps
without fighting and of fortresses without a siege must incline Germans
to recognize his genius as the only explanation of the war carried on
in Germany. But we, thank God, have no need to recognize his genius
in order to hide our shame. We have paid for the right to look at the
matter plainly and simply, and we will not abandon that right.

His activity in Moscow was as amazing and as full of genius as
elsewhere. Order after order and plan after plan were issued by him
from the time he entered Moscow till the time he left it. The absence
of citizens and of a deputation, and even the burning of Moscow, did not
disconcert him. He did not lose sight either of the welfare of his
army or of the doings of the enemy, or of the welfare of the people
of Russia, or of the direction of affairs in Paris, or of diplomatic
considerations concerning the terms of the anticipated peace.





CHAPTER IX


With regard to military matters, Napoleon immediately on his entry into
Moscow gave General Sabastiani strict orders to observe the movements
of the Russian army, sent army corps out along the different roads, and
charged Murat to find Kutuzov. Then he gave careful directions about the
fortification of the Kremlin, and drew up a brilliant plan for a future
campaign over the whole map of Russia.

With regard to diplomatic questions, Napoleon summoned Captain Yakovlev,
who had been robbed and was in rags and did not know how to get out of
Moscow, minutely explained to him his whole policy and his magnanimity,
and having written a letter to the Emperor Alexander in which he
considered it his duty to inform his Friend and Brother that Rostopchin
had managed affairs badly in Moscow, he dispatched Yakovlev to
Petersburg.

Having similarly explained his views and his magnanimity to Tutolmin, he
dispatched that old man also to Petersburg to negotiate.

With regard to legal matters, immediately after the fires he gave orders
to find and execute the incendiaries. And the scoundrel Rostopchin was
punished by an order to burn down his houses.

With regard to administrative matters, Moscow was granted a
constitution. A municipality was established and the following
announcement issued:


INHABITANTS OF MOSCOW!

Your misfortunes are cruel, but His Majesty the Emperor and King
desires to arrest their course. Terrible examples have taught you how he
punishes disobedience and crime. Strict measures have been taken to
put an end to disorder and to re-establish public security. A
paternal administration, chosen from among yourselves, will form your
municipality or city government. It will take care of you, of your
needs, and of your welfare. Its members will be distinguished by a red
ribbon worn across the shoulder, and the mayor of the city will wear
a white belt as well. But when not on duty they will only wear a red
ribbon round the left arm.

The city police is established on its former footing, and better order
already prevails in consequence of its activity. The government has
appointed two commissaries general, or chiefs of police, and twenty
commissaries or captains of wards have been appointed to the different
wards of the city. You will recognize them by the white ribbon they will
wear on the left arm. Several churches of different denominations are
open, and divine service is performed in them unhindered. Your fellow
citizens are returning every day to their homes and orders have been
given that they should find in them the help and protection due to
their misfortunes. These are the measures the government has adopted to
re-establish order and relieve your condition. But to achieve this
aim it is necessary that you should add your efforts and should, if
possible, forget the misfortunes you have suffered, should entertain
the hope of a less cruel fate, should be certain that inevitable and
ignominious death awaits those who make any attempt on your persons or
on what remains of your property, and finally that you should not doubt
that these will be safeguarded, since such is the will of the greatest
and most just of monarchs. Soldiers and citizens, of whatever nation you
may be, re-establish public confidence, the source of the welfare of
a state, live like brothers, render mutual aid and protection one to
another, unite to defeat the intentions of the evil-minded, obey the
military and civil authorities, and your tears will soon cease to flow!


With regard to supplies for the army, Napoleon decreed that all the
troops in turn should enter Moscow a la maraude * to obtain provisions
for themselves, so that the army might have its future provided for.


    * As looters.


With regard to religion, Napoleon ordered the priests to be brought back
and services to be again performed in the churches.

With regard to commerce and to provisioning the army, the following was
placarded everywhere:


PROCLAMATION!

You, peaceful inhabitants of Moscow, artisans and workmen whom
misfortune has driven from the city, and you scattered tillers of
the soil, still kept out in the fields by groundless fear, listen!
Tranquillity is returning to this capital and order is being restored in
it. Your fellow countrymen are emerging boldly from their hiding places
on finding that they are respected. Any violence to them or to their
property is promptly punished. His Majesty the Emperor and King protects
them, and considers no one among you his enemy except those who disobey
his orders. He desires to end your misfortunes and restore you to your
homes and families. Respond, therefore, to his benevolent intentions
and come to us without fear. Inhabitants, return with confidence to your
abodes! You will soon find means of satisfying your needs. Craftsmen
and industrious artisans, return to your work, your houses, your shops,
where the protection of guards awaits you! You shall receive proper pay
for your work. And lastly you too, peasants, come from the forests where
you are hiding in terror, return to your huts without fear, in full
assurance that you will find protection! Markets are established in the
city where peasants can bring their surplus supplies and the products of
the soil. The government has taken the following steps to ensure freedom
of sale for them: (1) From today, peasants, husbandmen, and those
living in the neighborhood of Moscow may without any danger bring their
supplies of all kinds to two appointed markets, of which one is on
the Mokhovaya Street and the other at the Provision Market. (2) Such
supplies will be bought from them at such prices as seller and buyer may
agree on, and if a seller is unable to obtain a fair price he will be
free to take his goods back to his village and no one may hinder him
under any pretense. (3) Sunday and Wednesday of each week are appointed
as the chief market days and to that end a sufficient number of troops
will be stationed along the highroads on Tuesdays and Saturdays at such
distances from the town as to protect the carts. (4) Similar measures
will be taken that peasants with their carts and horses may meet with no
hindrance on their return journey. (5) Steps will immediately be taken
to re-establish ordinary trading.

Inhabitants of the city and villages, and you, workingmen and artisans,
to whatever nation you belong, you are called on to carry out the
paternal intentions of His Majesty the Emperor and King and to
co-operate with him for the public welfare! Lay your respect and
confidence at his feet and do not delay to unite with us!


With the object of raising the spirits of the troops and of the people,
reviews were constantly held and rewards distributed. The Emperor
rode through the streets to comfort the inhabitants, and, despite his
preoccupation with state affairs, himself visited the theaters that were
established by his order.

In regard to philanthropy, the greatest virtue of crowned heads,
Napoleon also did all in his power. He caused the words Maison de ma
Mere to be inscribed on the charitable institutions, thereby combining
tender filial affection with the majestic benevolence of a monarch. He
visited the Foundling Hospital and, allowing the orphans saved by him
to kiss his white hands, graciously conversed with Tutolmin. Then, as
Thiers eloquently recounts, he ordered his soldiers to be paid in forged
Russian money which he had prepared: "Raising the use of these means
by an act worthy of himself and of the French army, he let relief
be distributed to those who had been burned out. But as food was too
precious to be given to foreigners, who were for the most part enemies,
Napoleon preferred to supply them with money with which to purchase food
from outside, and had paper rubles distributed to them."

With reference to army discipline, orders were continually being issued
to inflict severe punishment for the nonperformance of military duties
and to suppress robbery.





CHAPTER X


But strange to say, all these measures, efforts, and plans--which were
not at all worse than others issued in similar circumstances--did not
affect the essence of the matter but, like the hands of a clock detached
from the mechanism, swung about in an arbitrary and aimless way without
engaging the cogwheels.

With reference to the military side--the plan of campaign--that work of
genius of which Thiers remarks that, "His genius never devised anything
more profound, more skillful, or more admirable," and enters into a
polemic with M. Fain to prove that this work of genius must be referred
not to the fourth but to the fifteenth of October--that plan never was
or could be executed, for it was quite out of touch with the facts
of the case. The fortifying of the Kremlin, for which la Mosquee (as
Napoleon termed the church of Basil the Beatified) was to have been
razed to the ground, proved quite useless. The mining of the Kremlin
only helped toward fulfilling Napoleon's wish that it should be blown
up when he left Moscow--as a child wants the floor on which he has
hurt himself to be beaten. The pursuit of the Russian army, about which
Napoleon was so concerned, produced an unheard-of result. The French
generals lost touch with the Russian army of sixty thousand men, and
according to Thiers it was only eventually found, like a lost pin, by
the skill--and apparently the genius--of Murat.

With reference to diplomacy, all Napoleon's arguments as to his
magnanimity and justice, both to Tutolmin and to Yakovlev (whose chief
concern was to obtain a greatcoat and a conveyance), proved useless;
Alexander did not receive these envoys and did not reply to their
embassage.

With regard to legal matters, after the execution of the supposed
incendiaries the rest of Moscow burned down.

With regard to administrative matters, the establishment of a
municipality did not stop the robberies and was only of use to certain
people who formed part of that municipality and under pretext of
preserving order looted Moscow or saved their own property from being
looted.

With regard to religion, as to which in Egypt matters had so easily been
settled by Napoleon's visit to a mosque, no results were achieved.
Two or three priests who were found in Moscow did try to carry out
Napoleon's wish, but one of them was slapped in the face by a French
soldier while conducting service, and a French official reported of
another that: "The priest whom I found and invited to say Mass cleaned
and locked up the church. That night the doors were again broken
open, the padlocks smashed, the books mutilated, and other disorders
perpetrated."

With reference to commerce, the proclamation to industrious workmen and
to peasants evoked no response. There were no industrious workmen, and
the peasants caught the commissaries who ventured too far out of town
with the proclamation and killed them.

As to the theaters for the entertainment of the people and the troops,
these did not meet with success either. The theaters set up in the
Kremlin and in Posnyakov's house were closed again at once because the
actors and actresses were robbed.

Even philanthropy did not have the desired effect. The genuine as
well as the false paper money which flooded Moscow lost its value. The
French, collecting booty, cared only for gold. Not only was the
paper money valueless which Napoleon so graciously distributed to the
unfortunate, but even silver lost its value in relation to gold.

But the most amazing example of the ineffectiveness of the orders given
by the authorities at that time was Napoleon's attempt to stop the
looting and re-establish discipline.

This is what the army authorities were reporting:

"Looting continues in the city despite the decrees against it. Order
is not yet restored and not a single merchant is carrying on trade in a
lawful manner. The sutlers alone venture to trade, and they sell stolen
goods."

"The neighborhood of my ward continues to be pillaged by soldiers of
the 3rd Corps who, not satisfied with taking from the unfortunate
inhabitants hiding in the cellars the little they have left, even have
the ferocity to wound them with their sabers, as I have repeatedly
witnessed."

"Nothing new, except that the soldiers are robbing and
pillaging--October 9."

"Robbery and pillaging continue. There is a band of thieves in our
district who ought to be arrested by a strong force--October 11."

"The Emperor is extremely displeased that despite the strict orders to
stop pillage, parties of marauding Guards are continually seen returning
to the Kremlin. Among the Old Guard disorder and pillage were renewed
more violently than ever yesterday evening, last night, and today. The
Emperor sees with regret that the picked soldiers appointed to guard his
person, who should set an example of discipline, carry disobedience to
such a point that they break into the cellars and stores containing army
supplies. Others have disgraced themselves to the extent of disobeying
sentinels and officers, and have abused and beaten them."

"The Grand Marshal of the palace," wrote the governor, "complains
bitterly that in spite of repeated orders, the soldiers continue to
commit nuisances in all the courtyards and even under the very windows
of the Emperor."

That army, like a herd of cattle run wild and trampling underfoot the
provender which might have saved it from starvation, disintegrated and
perished with each additional day it remained in Moscow. But it did not
go away.

It began to run away only when suddenly seized by a panic caused by the
capture of transport trains on the Smolensk road, and by the battle of
Tarutino. The news of that battle of Tarutino, unexpectedly received
by Napoleon at a review, evoked in him a desire to punish the Russians
(Thiers says), and he issued the order for departure which the whole
army was demanding.

Fleeing from Moscow the soldiers took with them everything they had
stolen. Napoleon, too, carried away his own personal tresor, but on
seeing the baggage trains that impeded the army, he was (Thiers says)
horror-struck. And yet with his experience of war he did not order all
the superfluous vehicles to be burned, as he had done with those of a
certain marshal when approaching Moscow. He gazed at the caleches and
carriages in which soldiers were riding and remarked that it was a very
good thing, as those vehicles could be used to carry provisions, the
sick, and the wounded.

The plight of the whole army resembled that of a wounded animal which
feels it is perishing and does not know what it is doing. To study the
skillful tactics and aims of Napoleon and his army from the time it
entered Moscow till it was destroyed is like studying the dying leaps
and shudders of a mortally wounded animal. Very often a wounded animal,
hearing a rustle, rushes straight at the hunter's gun, runs forward and
back again, and hastens its own end. Napoleon, under pressure from his
whole army, did the same thing. The rustle of the battle of Tarutino
frightened the beast, and it rushed forward onto the hunter's gun,
reached him, turned back, and finally--like any wild beast--ran back
along the most disadvantageous and dangerous path, where the old scent
was familiar.

During the whole of that period Napoleon, who seems to us to have been
the leader of all these movements--as the figurehead of a ship may
seem to a savage to guide the vessel--acted like a child who, holding a
couple of strings inside a carriage, thinks he is driving it.





CHAPTER XI


Early in the morning of the sixth of October Pierre went out of the
shed, and on returning stopped by the door to play with a little
blue-gray dog, with a long body and short bandy legs, that jumped about
him. This little dog lived in their shed, sleeping beside Karataev at
night; it sometimes made excursions into the town but always returned
again. Probably it had never had an owner, and it still belonged to
nobody and had no name. The French called it Azor; the soldier who
told stories called it Femgalka; Karataev and others called it Gray, or
sometimes Flabby. Its lack of a master, a name, or even of a breed or
any definite color did not seem to trouble the blue-gray dog in the
least. Its furry tail stood up firm and round as a plume, its bandy legs
served it so well that it would often gracefully lift a hind leg and run
very easily and quickly on three legs, as if disdaining to use all
four. Everything pleased it. Now it would roll on its back, yelping with
delight, now bask in the sun with a thoughtful air of importance, and
now frolic about playing with a chip of wood or a straw.

Pierre's attire by now consisted of a dirty torn shirt (the only
remnant of his former clothing), a pair of soldier's trousers which by
Karataev's advice he tied with string round the ankles for warmth, and
a peasant coat and cap. Physically he had changed much during this
time. He no longer seemed stout, though he still had the appearance of
solidity and strength hereditary in his family. A beard and mustache
covered the lower part of his face, and a tangle of hair, infested
with lice, curled round his head like a cap. The look of his eyes
was resolute, calm, and animatedly alert, as never before. The former
slackness which had shown itself even in his eyes was now replaced by an
energetic readiness for action and resistance. His feet were bare.

Pierre first looked down the field across which vehicles and horsemen
were passing that morning, then into the distance across the river, then
at the dog who was pretending to be in earnest about biting him,
and then at his bare feet which he placed with pleasure in various
positions, moving his dirty thick big toes. Every time he looked at his
bare feet a smile of animated self-satisfaction flitted across his face.
The sight of them reminded him of all he had experienced and learned
during these weeks and this recollection was pleasant to him.

For some days the weather had been calm and clear with slight frosts in
the mornings--what is called an "old wives' summer."

In the sunshine the air was warm, and that warmth was particularly
pleasant with the invigorating freshness of the morning frost still in
the air.

On everything--far and near--lay the magic crystal glitter seen only
at that time of autumn. The Sparrow Hills were visible in the distance,
with the village, the church, and the large white house. The bare trees,
the sand, the bricks and roofs of the houses, the green church spire,
and the corners of the white house in the distance, all stood out in the
transparent air in most delicate outline and with unnatural clearness.
Near by could be seen the familiar ruins of a half-burned mansion
occupied by the French, with lilac bushes still showing dark green
beside the fence. And even that ruined and befouled house--which in
dull weather was repulsively ugly--seemed quietly beautiful now, in the
clear, motionless brilliance.

A French corporal, with coat unbuttoned in a homely way, a skullcap on
his head, and a short pipe in his mouth, came from behind a corner of
the shed and approached Pierre with a friendly wink.

"What sunshine, Monsieur Kiril!" (Their name for Pierre.) "Eh? Just like
spring!"

And the corporal leaned against the door and offered Pierre his pipe,
though whenever he offered it Pierre always declined it.

"To be on the march in such weather..." he began.

Pierre inquired what was being said about leaving, and the corporal told
him that nearly all the troops were starting and there ought to be an
order about the prisoners that day. Sokolov, one of the soldiers in the
shed with Pierre, was dying, and Pierre told the corporal that something
should be done about him. The corporal replied that Pierre need not
worry about that as they had an ambulance and a permanent hospital and
arrangements would be made for the sick, and that in general everything
that could happen had been foreseen by the authorities.

"Besides, Monsieur Kiril, you have only to say a word to the captain,
you know. He is a man who never forgets anything. Speak to the captain
when he makes his round, he will do anything for you."

(The captain of whom the corporal spoke often had long chats with Pierre
and showed him all sorts of favors.)

"'You see, St. Thomas,' he said to me the other day. 'Monsieur Kiril is
a man of education, who speaks French. He is a Russian seigneur who has
had misfortunes, but he is a man. He knows what's what.... If he wants
anything and asks me, he won't get a refusal. When one has studied, you
see, one likes education and well-bred people.' It is for your sake I
mention it, Monsieur Kiril. The other day if it had not been for you
that affair would have ended ill."

And after chatting a while longer, the corporal went away. (The affair
he had alluded to had happened a few days before--a fight between the
prisoners and the French soldiers, in which Pierre had succeeded in
pacifying his comrades.) Some of the prisoners who had heard Pierre
talking to the corporal immediately asked what the Frenchman had said.
While Pierre was repeating what he had been told about the army leaving
Moscow, a thin, sallow, tattered French soldier came up to the door of
the shed. Rapidly and timidly raising his fingers to his forehead by way
of greeting, he asked Pierre whether the soldier Platoche to whom he had
given a shirt to sew was in that shed.

A week before the French had had boot leather and linen issued to them,
which they had given out to the prisoners to make up into boots and
shirts for them.

"Ready, ready, dear fellow!" said Karataev, coming out with a neatly
folded shirt.

Karataev, on account of the warm weather and for convenience at work,
was wearing only trousers and a tattered shirt as black as soot. His
hair was bound round, workman fashion, with a wisp of lime-tree bast,
and his round face seemed rounder and pleasanter than ever.

"A promise is own brother to performance! I said Friday and here it is,
ready," said Platon, smiling and unfolding the shirt he had sewn.

The Frenchman glanced around uneasily and then, as if overcoming his
hesitation, rapidly threw off his uniform and put on the shirt. He had
a long, greasy, flowered silk waistcoat next to his sallow, thin bare
body, but no shirt. He was evidently afraid the prisoners looking on
would laugh at him, and thrust his head into the shirt hurriedly. None
of the prisoners said a word.

"See, it fits well!" Platon kept repeating, pulling the shirt straight.

The Frenchman, having pushed his head and hands through, without raising
his eyes, looked down at the shirt and examined the seams.

"You see, dear man, this is not a sewing shop, and I had no proper
tools; and, as they say, one needs a tool even to kill a louse," said
Platon with one of his round smiles, obviously pleased with his work.

"It's good, quite good, thank you," said the Frenchman, in French, "but
there must be some linen left over.

"It will fit better still when it sets to your body," said Karataev,
still admiring his handiwork. "You'll be nice and comfortable...."

"Thanks, thanks, old fellow.... But the bits left over?" said the
Frenchman again and smiled. He took out an assignation ruble note and
gave it to Karataev. "But give me the pieces that are over."

Pierre saw that Platon did not want to understand what the Frenchman
was saying, and he looked on without interfering. Karataev thanked the
Frenchman for the money and went on admiring his own work. The Frenchman
insisted on having the pieces returned that were left over and asked
Pierre to translate what he said.

"What does he want the bits for?" said Karataev. "They'd make fine leg
bands for us. Well, never mind."

And Karataev, with a suddenly changed and saddened expression, took
a small bundle of scraps from inside his shirt and gave it to the
Frenchman without looking at him. "Oh dear!" muttered Karataev and went
away. The Frenchman looked at the linen, considered for a moment, then
looked inquiringly at Pierre and, as if Pierre's look had told him
something, suddenly blushed and shouted in a squeaky voice:

"Platoche! Eh, Platoche! Keep them yourself!" And handing back the odd
bits he turned and went out.

"There, look at that," said Karataev, swaying his head. "People said
they were not Christians, but they too have souls. It's what the old
folk used to say: 'A sweating hand's an open hand, a dry hand's close.'
He's naked, but yet he's given it back."

Karataev smiled thoughtfully and was silent awhile looking at the
pieces.

"But they'll make grand leg bands, dear friend," he said, and went back
into the shed.





CHAPTER XII


Four weeks had passed since Pierre had been taken prisoner and though
the French had offered to move him from the men's to the officers' shed,
he had stayed in the shed where he was first put.

In burned and devastated Moscow Pierre experienced almost the extreme
limits of privation a man can endure; but thanks to his physical
strength and health, of which he had till then been unconscious, and
thanks especially to the fact that the privations came so gradually that
it was impossible to say when they began, he endured his position
not only lightly but joyfully. And just at this time he obtained the
tranquillity and ease of mind he had formerly striven in vain to reach.
He had long sought in different ways that tranquillity of mind, that
inner harmony which had so impressed him in the soldiers at the battle
of Borodino. He had sought it in philanthropy, in Freemasonry, in the
dissipations of town life, in wine, in heroic feats of self-sacrifice,
and in romantic love for Natasha; he had sought it by reasoning--and all
these quests and experiments had failed him. And now without thinking
about it he had found that peace and inner harmony only through the
horror of death, through privation, and through what he recognized in
Karataev.

Those dreadful moments he had lived through at the executions had as it
were forever washed away from his imagination and memory the agitating
thoughts and feelings that had formerly seemed so important. It did
not now occur to him to think of Russia, or the war, or politics, or
Napoleon. It was plain to him that all these things were no business
of his, and that he was not called on to judge concerning them and
therefore could not do so. "Russia and summer weather are not bound
together," he thought, repeating words of Karataev's which he found
strangely consoling. His intention of killing Napoleon and his
calculations of the cabalistic number of the beast of the Apocalypse now
seemed to him meaningless and even ridiculous. His anger with his wife
and anxiety that his name should not be smirched now seemed not merely
trivial but even amusing. What concern was it of his that somewhere or
other that woman was leading the life she preferred? What did it matter
to anybody, and especially to him, whether or not they found out that
their prisoner's name was Count Bezukhov?

He now often remembered his conversation with Prince Andrew and quite
agreed with him, though he understood Prince Andrew's thoughts somewhat
differently. Prince Andrew had thought and said that happiness could
only be negative, but had said it with a shade of bitterness and irony
as though he was really saying that all desire for positive happiness is
implanted in us merely to torment us and never be satisfied. But Pierre
believed it without any mental reservation. The absence of suffering,
the satisfaction of one's needs and consequent freedom in the choice of
one's occupation, that is, of one's way of life, now seemed to Pierre to
be indubitably man's highest happiness. Here and now for the first time
he fully appreciated the enjoyment of eating when he wanted to eat,
drinking when he wanted to drink, sleeping when he wanted to sleep, of
warmth when he was cold, of talking to a fellow man when he wished to
talk and to hear a human voice. The satisfaction of one's needs--good
food, cleanliness, and freedom--now that he was deprived of all this,
seemed to Pierre to constitute perfect happiness; and the choice
of occupation, that is, of his way of life--now that that was so
restricted--seemed to him such an easy matter that he forgot that a
superfluity of the comforts of life destroys all joy in satisfying one's
needs, while great freedom in the choice of occupation--such freedom as
his wealth, his education, and his social position had given him in
his own life--is just what makes the choice of occupation insolubly
difficult and destroys the desire and possibility of having an
occupation.

All Pierre's daydreams now turned on the time when he would be free. Yet
subsequently, and for the rest of his life, he thought and spoke with
enthusiasm of that month of captivity, of those irrecoverable, strong,
joyful sensations, and chiefly of the complete peace of mind and inner
freedom which he experienced only during those weeks.

When on the first day he got up early, went out of the shed at dawn, and
saw the cupolas and crosses of the New Convent of the Virgin still dark
at first, the hoarfrost on the dusty grass, the Sparrow Hills, and the
wooded banks above the winding river vanishing in the purple distance,
when he felt the contact of the fresh air and heard the noise of the
crows flying from Moscow across the field, and when afterwards light
gleamed from the east and the sun's rim appeared solemnly from behind a
cloud, and the cupolas and crosses, the hoarfrost, the distance and the
river, all began to sparkle in the glad light--Pierre felt a new joy and
strength in life such as he had never before known. And this not only
stayed with him during the whole of his imprisonment, but even grew in
strength as the hardships of his position increased.

That feeling of alertness and of readiness for anything was still
further strengthened in him by the high opinion his fellow prisoners
formed of him soon after his arrival at the shed. With his knowledge
of languages, the respect shown him by the French, his simplicity, his
readiness to give anything asked of him (he received the allowance
of three rubles a week made to officers); with his strength, which he
showed to the soldiers by pressing nails into the walls of the hut; his
gentleness to his companions, and his capacity for sitting still and
thinking without doing anything (which seemed to them incomprehensible),
he appeared to them a rather mysterious and superior being. The very
qualities that had been a hindrance, if not actually harmful, to him in
the world he had lived in--his strength, his disdain for the comforts of
life, his absent-mindedness and simplicity--here among these people
gave him almost the status of a hero. And Pierre felt that their opinion
placed responsibilities upon him.





CHAPTER XIII


The French evacuation began on the night between the sixth and seventh
of October: kitchens and sheds were dismantled, carts loaded, and troops
and baggage trains started.

At seven in the morning a French convoy in marching trim, wearing shakos
and carrying muskets, knapsacks, and enormous sacks, stood in front
of the sheds, and animated French talk mingled with curses sounded all
along the lines.

In the shed everyone was ready, dressed, belted, shod, and only awaited
the order to start. The sick soldier, Sokolov, pale and thin with dark
shadows round his eyes, alone sat in his place barefoot and not dressed.
His eyes, prominent from the emaciation of his face, gazed inquiringly
at his comrades who were paying no attention to him, and he moaned
regularly and quietly. It was evidently not so much his sufferings that
caused him to moan (he had dysentery) as his fear and grief at being
left alone.

Pierre, girt with a rope round his waist and wearing shoes Karataev had
made for him from some leather a French soldier had torn off a tea chest
and brought to have his boots mended with, went up to the sick man and
squatted down beside him.

"You know, Sokolov, they are not all going away! They have a hospital
here. You may be better off than we others," said Pierre.

"O Lord! Oh, it will be the death of me! O Lord!" moaned the man in a
louder voice.

"I'll go and ask them again directly," said Pierre, rising and going to
the door of the shed.

Just as Pierre reached the door, the corporal who had offered him a
pipe the day before came up to it with two soldiers. The corporal and
soldiers were in marching kit with knapsacks and shakos that had metal
straps, and these changed their familiar faces.

The corporal came, according to orders, to shut the door. The prisoners
had to be counted before being let out.

"Corporal, what will they do with the sick man?..." Pierre began.

But even as he spoke he began to doubt whether this was the corporal
he knew or a stranger, so unlike himself did the corporal seem at that
moment. Moreover, just as Pierre was speaking a sharp rattle of drums
was suddenly heard from both sides. The corporal frowned at Pierre's
words and, uttering some meaningless oaths, slammed the door. The shed
became semidark, and the sharp rattle of the drums on two sides drowned
the sick man's groans.

"There it is!... It again!..." said Pierre to himself, and an
involuntary shudder ran down his spine. In the corporal's changed face,
in the sound of his voice, in the stirring and deafening noise of the
drums, he recognized that mysterious, callous force which compelled
people against their will to kill their fellow men--that force the
effect of which he had witnessed during the executions. To fear or to
try to escape that force, to address entreaties or exhortations to those
who served as its tools, was useless. Pierre knew this now. One had to
wait and endure. He did not again go to the sick man, nor turn to look
at him, but stood frowning by the door of the hut.

When that door was opened and the prisoners, crowding against one
another like a flock of sheep, squeezed into the exit, Pierre pushed
his way forward and approached that very captain who as the corporal had
assured him was ready to do anything for him. The captain was also in
marching kit, and on his cold face appeared that same it which Pierre
had recognized in the corporal's words and in the roll of the drums.

"Pass on, pass on!" the captain reiterated, frowning sternly, and
looking at the prisoners who thronged past him.

Pierre went up to him, though he knew his attempt would be vain.

"What now?" the officer asked with a cold look as if not recognizing
Pierre.

Pierre told him about the sick man.

"He'll manage to walk, devil take him!" said the captain. "Pass on, pass
on!" he continued without looking at Pierre.

"But he is dying," Pierre again began.

"Be so good..." shouted the captain, frowning angrily.

"Dram-da-da-dam, dam-dam..." rattled the drums, and Pierre understood
that this mysterious force completely controlled these men and that it
was now useless to say any more.

The officer prisoners were separated from the soldiers and told to march
in front. There were about thirty officers, with Pierre among them, and
about three hundred men.

The officers, who had come from the other sheds, were all strangers to
Pierre and much better dressed than he. They looked at him and at his
shoes mistrustfully, as at an alien. Not far from him walked a fat major
with a sallow, bloated, angry face, who was wearing a Kazan dressing
gown tied round with a towel, and who evidently enjoyed the respect of
his fellow prisoners. He kept one hand, in which he clasped his tobacco
pouch, inside the bosom of his dressing gown and held the stem of his
pipe firmly with the other. Panting and puffing, the major grumbled and
growled at everybody because he thought he was being pushed and that
they were all hurrying when they had nowhere to hurry to and were
all surprised at something when there was nothing to be surprised at.
Another, a thin little officer, was speaking to everyone, conjecturing
where they were now being taken and how far they would get that day. An
official in felt boots and wearing a commissariat uniform ran round from
side to side and gazed at the ruins of Moscow, loudly announcing his
observations as to what had been burned down and what this or that part
of the city was that they could see. A third officer, who by his accent
was a Pole, disputed with the commissariat officer, arguing that he was
mistaken in his identification of the different wards of Moscow.

"What are you disputing about?" said the major angrily. "What does it
matter whether it is St. Nicholas or St. Blasius? You see it's burned
down, and there's an end of it.... What are you pushing for? Isn't the
road wide enough?" said he, turning to a man behind him who was not
pushing him at all.

"Oh, oh, oh! What have they done?" the prisoners on one side and another
were heard saying as they gazed on the charred ruins. "All beyond the
river, and Zubova, and in the Kremlin.... Just look! There's not half of
it left. Yes, I told you--the whole quarter beyond the river, and so it
is."

"Well, you know it's burned, so what's the use of talking?" said the
major.

As they passed near a church in the Khamovniki (one of the few unburned
quarters of Moscow) the whole mass of prisoners suddenly started to one
side and exclamations of horror and disgust were heard.

"Ah, the villains! What heathens! Yes; dead, dead, so he is... And
smeared with something!"

Pierre too drew near the church where the thing was that evoked these
exclamations, and dimly made out something leaning against the palings
surrounding the church. From the words of his comrades who saw better
than he did, he found that this was the body of a man, set upright
against the palings with its face smeared with soot.

"Go on! What the devil... Go on! Thirty thousand devils!..." the convoy
guards began cursing and the French soldiers, with fresh virulence,
drove away with their swords the crowd of prisoners who were gazing at
the dead man.





CHAPTER XIV


Through the cross streets of the Khamovniki quarter the prisoners
marched, followed only by their escort and the vehicles and wagons
belonging to that escort, but when they reached the supply stores they
came among a huge and closely packed train of artillery mingled with
private vehicles.

At the bridge they all halted, waiting for those in front to get across.
From the bridge they had a view of endless lines of moving baggage
trains before and behind them. To the right, where the Kaluga road turns
near Neskuchny, endless rows of troops and carts stretched away into
the distance. These were troops of Beauharnais' corps which had started
before any of the others. Behind, along the riverside and across the
Stone Bridge, were Ney's troops and transport.

Davout's troops, in whose charge were the prisoners, were crossing the
Crimean bridge and some were already debouching into the Kaluga road.
But the baggage trains stretched out so that the last of Beauharnais'
train had not yet got out of Moscow and reached the Kaluga road when
the vanguard of Ney's army was already emerging from the Great Ordynka
Street.

When they had crossed the Crimean bridge the prisoners moved a few steps
forward, halted, and again moved on, and from all sides vehicles and men
crowded closer and closer together. They advanced the few hundred paces
that separated the bridge from the Kaluga road, taking more than an
hour to do so, and came out upon the square where the streets of the
Transmoskva ward and the Kaluga road converge, and the prisoners jammed
close together had to stand for some hours at that crossway. From all
sides, like the roar of the sea, were heard the rattle of wheels, the
tramp of feet, and incessant shouts of anger and abuse. Pierre stood
pressed against the wall of a charred house, listening to that noise
which mingled in his imagination with the roll of the drums.

To get a better view, several officer prisoners climbed onto the wall of
the half-burned house against which Pierre was leaning.

"What crowds! Just look at the crowds!... They've loaded goods even on
the cannon! Look there, those are furs!" they exclaimed. "Just see what
the blackguards have looted.... There! See what that one has behind
in the cart.... Why, those are settings taken from some icons, by
heaven!... Oh, the rascals!... See how that fellow has loaded
himself up, he can hardly walk! Good lord, they've even grabbed those
chaises!... See that fellow there sitting on the trunks.... Heavens!
They're fighting."

"That's right, hit him on the snout--on his snout! Like this, we
shan't get away before evening. Look, look there.... Why, that must be
Napoleon's own. See what horses! And the monograms with a crown! It's
like a portable house.... That fellow's dropped his sack and doesn't see
it. Fighting again... A woman with a baby, and not bad-looking either!
Yes, I dare say, that's the way they'll let you pass... Just look,
there's no end to it. Russian wenches, by heaven, so they are! In
carriages--see how comfortably they've settled themselves!"

Again, as at the church in Khamovniki, a wave of general curiosity
bore all the prisoners forward onto the road, and Pierre, thanks to
his stature, saw over the heads of the others what so attracted their
curiosity. In three carriages involved among the munition carts, closely
squeezed together, sat women with rouged faces, dressed in glaring
colors, who were shouting something in shrill voices.

From the moment Pierre had recognized the appearance of the mysterious
force nothing had seemed to him strange or dreadful: neither the corpse
smeared with soot for fun nor these women hurrying away nor the burned
ruins of Moscow. All that he now witnessed scarcely made an impression
on him--as if his soul, making ready for a hard struggle, refused to
receive impressions that might weaken it.

The women's vehicles drove by. Behind them came more carts, soldiers,
wagons, soldiers, gun carriages, carriages, soldiers, ammunition carts,
more soldiers, and now and then women.

Pierre did not see the people as individuals but saw their movement.

All these people and horses seemed driven forward by some invisible
power. During the hour Pierre watched them they all came flowing from
the different streets with one and the same desire to get on quickly;
they all jostled one another, began to grow angry and to fight, white
teeth gleamed, brows frowned, ever the same words of abuse flew from
side to side, and all the faces bore the same swaggeringly resolute
and coldly cruel expression that had struck Pierre that morning on the
corporal's face when the drums were beating.

It was not till nearly evening that the officer commanding the escort
collected his men and with shouts and quarrels forced his way in among
the baggage trains, and the prisoners, hemmed in on all sides, emerged
onto the Kaluga road.

They marched very quickly, without resting, and halted only when the sun
began to set. The baggage carts drew up close together and the men
began to prepare for their night's rest. They all appeared angry and
dissatisfied. For a long time, oaths, angry shouts, and fighting could
be heard from all sides. A carriage that followed the escort ran
into one of the carts and knocked a hole in it with its pole. Several
soldiers ran toward the cart from different sides: some beat the
carriage horses on their heads, turning them aside, others fought among
themselves, and Pierre saw that one German was badly wounded on the head
by a sword.

It seemed that all these men, now that they had stopped amid fields
in the chill dusk of the autumn evening, experienced one and the same
feeling of unpleasant awakening from the hurry and eagerness to push on
that had seized them at the start. Once at a standstill they all seemed
to understand that they did not yet know where they were going, and that
much that was painful and difficult awaited them on this journey.

During this halt the escort treated the prisoners even worse than they
had done at the start. It was here that the prisoners for the first time
received horseflesh for their meat ration.

From the officer down to the lowest soldier they showed what seemed like
personal spite against each of the prisoners, in unexpected contrast to
their former friendly relations.

This spite increased still more when, on calling over the roll of
prisoners, it was found that in the bustle of leaving Moscow one Russian
soldier, who had pretended to suffer from colic, had escaped. Pierre saw
a Frenchman beat a Russian soldier cruelly for straying too far from
the road, and heard his friend the captain reprimand and threaten to
court-martial a noncommissioned officer on account of the escape of the
Russian. To the noncommissioned officer's excuse that the prisoner was
ill and could not walk, the officer replied that the order was to shoot
those who lagged behind. Pierre felt that that fatal force which had
crushed him during the executions, but which he had not felt during his
imprisonment, now again controlled his existence. It was terrible, but
he felt that in proportion to the efforts of that fatal force to crush
him, there grew and strengthened in his soul a power of life independent
of it.

He ate his supper of buckwheat soup with horseflesh and chatted with his
comrades.

Neither Pierre nor any of the others spoke of what they had seen in
Moscow, or of the roughness of their treatment by the French, or of the
order to shoot them which had been announced to them. As if in reaction
against the worsening of their position they were all particularly
animated and gay. They spoke of personal reminiscences, of amusing
scenes they had witnessed during the campaign, and avoided all talk of
their present situation.

The sun had set long since. Bright stars shone out here and there in the
sky. A red glow as of a conflagration spread above the horizon from the
rising full moon, and that vast red ball swayed strangely in the gray
haze. It grew light. The evening was ending, but the night had not yet
come. Pierre got up and left his new companions, crossing between the
campfires to the other side of the road where he had been told the
common soldier prisoners were stationed. He wanted to talk to them. On
the road he was stopped by a French sentinel who ordered him back.

Pierre turned back, not to his companions by the campfire, but to an
unharnessed cart where there was nobody. Tucking his legs under him and
dropping his head he sat down on the cold ground by the wheel of the
cart and remained motionless a long while sunk in thought. Suddenly he
burst out into a fit of his broad, good-natured laughter, so loud that
men from various sides turned with surprise to see what this strange and
evidently solitary laughter could mean.

"Ha-ha-ha!" laughed Pierre. And he said aloud to himself: "The soldier
did not let me pass. They took me and shut me up. They hold me captive.
What, me? Me? My immortal soul? Ha-ha-ha! Ha-ha-ha!..." and he laughed
till tears started to his eyes.

A man got up and came to see what this queer big fellow was laughing at
all by himself. Pierre stopped laughing, got up, went farther away from
the inquisitive man, and looked around him.

The huge, endless bivouac that had previously resounded with the
crackling of campfires and the voices of many men had grown quiet, the
red campfires were growing paler and dying down. High up in the light
sky hung the full moon. Forests and fields beyond the camp, unseen
before, were now visible in the distance. And farther still, beyond
those forests and fields, the bright, oscillating, limitless distance
lured one to itself. Pierre glanced up at the sky and the twinkling
stars in its faraway depths. "And all that is me, all that is within me,
and it is all I!" thought Pierre. "And they caught all that and put it
into a shed boarded up with planks!" He smiled, and went and lay down to
sleep beside his companions.





CHAPTER XV


In the early days of October another envoy came to Kutuzov with a letter
from Napoleon proposing peace and falsely dated from Moscow, though
Napoleon was already not far from Kutuzov on the old Kaluga road.
Kutuzov replied to this letter as he had done to the one formerly
brought by Lauriston, saying that there could be no question of peace.

Soon after that a report was received from Dorokhov's guerrilla
detachment operating to the left of Tarutino that troops of Broussier's
division had been seen at Forminsk and that being separated from the
rest of the French army they might easily be destroyed. The soldiers and
officers again demanded action. Generals on the staff, excited by the
memory of the easy victory at Tarutino, urged Kutuzov to carry out
Dorokhov's suggestion. Kutuzov did not consider any offensive necessary.
The result was a compromise which was inevitable: a small detachment was
sent to Forminsk to attack Broussier.

By a strange coincidence, this task, which turned out to be a most
difficult and important one, was entrusted to Dokhturov--that same
modest little Dokhturov whom no one had described to us as drawing up
plans of battles, dashing about in front of regiments, showering crosses
on batteries, and so on, and who was thought to be and was spoken of
as undecided and undiscerning--but whom we find commanding wherever
the position was most difficult all through the Russo-French wars from
Austerlitz to the year 1813. At Austerlitz he remained last at the
Augezd dam, rallying the regiments, saving what was possible when all
were flying and perishing and not a single general was left in the rear
guard. Ill with fever he went to Smolensk with twenty thousand men
to defend the town against Napoleon's whole army. In Smolensk, at the
Malakhov Gate, he had hardly dozed off in a paroxysm of fever before he
was awakened by the bombardment of the town--and Smolensk held out all
day long. At the battle of Borodino, when Bagration was killed and nine
tenths of the men of our left flank had fallen and the full force of the
French artillery fire was directed against it, the man sent there was
this same irresolute and undiscerning Dokhturov--Kutuzov hastening to
rectify a mistake he had made by sending someone else there first.
And the quiet little Dokhturov rode thither, and Borodino became the
greatest glory of the Russian army. Many heroes have been described to
us in verse and prose, but of Dokhturov scarcely a word has been said.

It was Dokhturov again whom they sent to Forminsk and from there to
Malo-Yaroslavets, the place where the last battle with the French was
fought and where the obvious disintegration of the French army began;
and we are told of many geniuses and heroes of that period of the
campaign, but of Dokhturov nothing or very little is said and that
dubiously. And this silence about Dokhturov is the clearest testimony to
his merit.

It is natural for a man who does not understand the workings of a
machine to imagine that a shaving that has fallen into it by chance
and is interfering with its action and tossing about in it is its most
important part. The man who does not understand the construction of
the machine cannot conceive that the small connecting cogwheel which
revolves quietly is one of the most essential parts of the machine, and
not the shaving which merely harms and hinders the working.

On the tenth of October when Dokhturov had gone halfway to Forminsk and
stopped at the village of Aristovo, preparing faithfully to execute the
orders he had received, the whole French army having, in its convulsive
movement, reached Murat's position apparently in order to give
battle--suddenly without any reason turned off to the left onto the new
Kaluga road and began to enter Forminsk, where only Broussier had
been till then. At that time Dokhturov had under his command, besides
Dorokhov's detachment, the two small guerrilla detachments of Figner and
Seslavin.

On the evening of October 11 Seslavin came to the Aristovo headquarters
with a French guardsman he had captured. The prisoner said that the
troops that had entered Forminsk that day were the vanguard of the whole
army, that Napoleon was there and the whole army had left Moscow four
days previously. That same evening a house serf who had come from
Borovsk said he had seen an immense army entering the town. Some
Cossacks of Dokhturov's detachment reported having sighted the French
Guards marching along the road to Borovsk. From all these reports it was
evident that where they had expected to meet a single division there
was now the whole French army marching from Moscow in an unexpected
direction--along the Kaluga road. Dokhturov was unwilling to undertake
any action, as it was not clear to him now what he ought to do. He had
been ordered to attack Forminsk. But only Broussier had been there at
that time and now the whole French army was there. Ermolov wished to act
on his own judgment, but Dokhturov insisted that he must have Kutuzov's
instructions. So it was decided to send a dispatch to the staff.

For this purpose a capable officer, Bolkhovitinov, was chosen, who
was to explain the whole affair by word of mouth, besides delivering
a written report. Toward midnight Bolkhovitinov, having received the
dispatch and verbal instructions, galloped off to the General Staff
accompanied by a Cossack with spare horses.





CHAPTER XVI


It was a warm, dark, autumn night. It had been raining for four days.
Having changed horses twice and galloped twenty miles in an hour and a
half over a sticky, muddy road, Bolkhovitinov reached Litashevka after
one o'clock at night. Dismounting at a cottage on whose wattle fence
hung a signboard, GENERAL STAFF, and throwing down his reins, he entered
a dark passage.

"The general on duty, quick! It's very important!" said he to someone
who had risen and was sniffing in the dark passage.

"He has been very unwell since the evening and this is the third night
he has not slept," said the orderly pleadingly in a whisper. "You should
wake the captain first."

"But this is very important, from General Dokhturov," said
Bolkhovitinov, entering the open door which he had found by feeling in
the dark.

The orderly had gone in before him and began waking somebody.

"Your honor, your honor! A courier."

"What? What's that? From whom?" came a sleepy voice.

"From Dokhturov and from Alexey Petrovich. Napoleon is at Forminsk,"
said Bolkhovitinov, unable to see in the dark who was speaking but
guessing by the voice that it was not Konovnitsyn.

The man who had wakened yawned and stretched himself.

"I don't like waking him," he said, fumbling for something. "He is very
ill. Perhaps this is only a rumor."

"Here is the dispatch," said Bolkhovitinov. "My orders are to give it at
once to the general on duty."

"Wait a moment, I'll light a candle. You damned rascal, where do you
always hide it?" said the voice of the man who was stretching himself,
to the orderly. (This was Shcherbinin, Konovnitsyn's adjutant.) "I've
found it, I've found it!" he added.

The orderly was striking a light and Shcherbinin was fumbling for
something on the candlestick.

"Oh, the nasty beasts!" said he with disgust.

By the light of the sparks Bolkhovitinov saw Shcherbinin's youthful face
as he held the candle, and the face of another man who was still asleep.
This was Konovnitsyn.

When the flame of the sulphur splinters kindled by the tinder burned
up, first blue and then red, Shcherbinin lit the tallow candle, from
the candlestick of which the cockroaches that had been gnawing it were
running away, and looked at the messenger. Bolkhovitinov was bespattered
all over with mud and had smeared his face by wiping it with his sleeve.

"Who gave the report?" inquired Shcherbinin, taking the envelope.

"The news is reliable," said Bolkhovitinov. "Prisoners, Cossacks, and
the scouts all say the same thing."

"There's nothing to be done, we'll have to wake him," said Shcherbinin,
rising and going up to the man in the nightcap who lay covered by a
greatcoat. "Peter Petrovich!" said he. (Konovnitsyn did not stir.) "To
the General Staff!" he said with a smile, knowing that those words would
be sure to arouse him.

And in fact the head in the nightcap was lifted at once. On
Konovnitsyn's handsome, resolute face with cheeks flushed by fever,
there still remained for an instant a faraway dreamy expression remote
from present affairs, but then he suddenly started and his face assumed
its habitual calm and firm appearance.

"Well, what is it? From whom?" he asked immediately but without hurry,
blinking at the light.

While listening to the officer's report Konovnitsyn broke the seal and
read the dispatch. Hardly had he done so before he lowered his legs in
their woolen stockings to the earthen floor and began putting on his
boots. Then he took off his nightcap, combed his hair over his temples,
and donned his cap.

"Did you get here quickly? Let us go to his Highness."

Konovnitsyn had understood at once that the news brought was of great
importance and that no time must be lost. He did not consider or ask
himself whether the news was good or bad. That did not interest him. He
regarded the whole business of the war not with his intelligence or his
reason but by something else. There was within him a deep unexpressed
conviction that all would be well, but that one must not trust to this
and still less speak about it, but must only attend to one's own work.
And he did his work, giving his whole strength to the task.

Peter Petrovich Konovnitsyn, like Dokhturov, seems to have been included
merely for propriety's sake in the list of the so-called heroes of
1812--the Barclays, Raevskis, Ermolovs, Platovs, and Miloradoviches.
Like Dokhturov he had the reputation of being a man of very limited
capacity and information, and like Dokhturov he never made plans of
battle but was always found where the situation was most difficult.
Since his appointment as general on duty he had always slept with his
door open, giving orders that every messenger should be allowed to wake
him up. In battle he was always under fire, so that Kutuzov reproved him
for it and feared to send him to the front, and like Dokhturov he
was one of those unnoticed cogwheels that, without clatter or noise,
constitute the most essential part of the machine.

Coming out of the hut into the damp, dark night Konovnitsyn
frowned--partly from an increased pain in his head and partly at
the unpleasant thought that occurred to him, of how all that nest
of influential men on the staff would be stirred up by this news,
especially Bennigsen, who ever since Tarutino had been at daggers
drawn with Kutuzov; and how they would make suggestions, quarrel, issue
orders, and rescind them. And this premonition was disagreeable to him
though he knew it could not be helped.

And in fact Toll, to whom he went to communicate the news, immediately
began to expound his plans to a general sharing his quarters, until
Konovnitsyn, who listened in weary silence, reminded him that they must
go to see his Highness.





CHAPTER XVII


Kutuzov like all old people did not sleep much at night. He often fell
asleep unexpectedly in the daytime, but at night, lying on his bed
without undressing, he generally remained awake thinking.

So he lay now on his bed, supporting his large, heavy, scarred head on
his plump hand, with his one eye open, meditating and peering into the
darkness.

Since Bennigsen, who corresponded with the Emperor and had more
influence than anyone else on the staff, had begun to avoid him, Kutuzov
was more at ease as to the possibility of himself and his troops being
obliged to take part in useless aggressive movements. The lesson of the
Tarutino battle and of the day before it, which Kutuzov remembered with
pain, must, he thought, have some effect on others too.

"They must understand that we can only lose by taking the offensive.
Patience and time are my warriors, my champions," thought Kutuzov. He
knew that an apple should not be plucked while it is green. It will fall
of itself when ripe, but if picked unripe the apple is spoiled, the tree
is harmed, and your teeth are set on edge. Like an experienced sportsman
he knew that the beast was wounded, and wounded as only the whole
strength of Russia could have wounded it, but whether it was mortally
wounded or not was still an undecided question. Now by the fact of
Lauriston and Barthelemi having been sent, and by the reports of the
guerrillas, Kutuzov was almost sure that the wound was mortal. But he
needed further proofs and it was necessary to wait.

"They want to run to see how they have wounded it. Wait and we shall
see! Continual maneuvers, continual advances!" thought he. "What for?
Only to distinguish themselves! As if fighting were fun. They are
like children from whom one can't get any sensible account of what has
happened because they all want to show how well they can fight. But
that's not what is needed now.

"And what ingenious maneuvers they all propose to me! It seems to
them that when they have thought of two or three contingencies" (he
remembered the general plan sent him from Petersburg) "they have
foreseen everything. But the contingencies are endless."

The undecided question as to whether the wound inflicted at Borodino was
mortal or not had hung over Kutuzov's head for a whole month. On the one
hand the French had occupied Moscow. On the other Kutuzov felt assured
with all his being that the terrible blow into which he and all the
Russians had put their whole strength must have been mortal. But in any
case proofs were needed; he had waited a whole month for them and grew
more impatient the longer he waited. Lying on his bed during those
sleepless nights he did just what he reproached those younger generals
for doing. He imagined all sorts of possible contingencies, just like
the younger men, but with this difference, that he saw thousands of
contingencies instead of two or three and based nothing on them. The
longer he thought the more contingencies presented themselves. He
imagined all sorts of movements of the Napoleonic army as a whole or
in sections--against Petersburg, or against him, or to outflank him.
He thought too of the possibility (which he feared most of all) that
Napoleon might fight him with his own weapon and remain in Moscow
awaiting him. Kutuzov even imagined that Napoleon's army might turn back
through Medyn and Yukhnov, but the one thing he could not foresee was
what happened--the insane, convulsive stampede of Napoleon's army
during its first eleven days after leaving Moscow: a stampede which made
possible what Kutuzov had not yet even dared to think of--the complete
extermination of the French. Dorokhov's report about Broussier's
division, the guerrillas' reports of distress in Napoleon's army, rumors
of preparations for leaving Moscow, all confirmed the supposition that
the French army was beaten and preparing for flight. But these were
only suppositions, which seemed important to the younger men but not to
Kutuzov. With his sixty years' experience he knew what value to attach
to rumors, knew how apt people who desire anything are to group all news
so that it appears to confirm what they desire, and he knew how readily
in such cases they omit all that makes for the contrary. And the more
he desired it the less he allowed himself to believe it. This question
absorbed all his mental powers. All else was to him only life's
customary routine. To such customary routine belonged his conversations
with the staff, the letters he wrote from Tarutino to Madame de Stael,
the reading of novels, the distribution of awards, his correspondence
with Petersburg, and so on. But the destruction of the French, which he
alone foresaw, was his heart's one desire.

On the night of the eleventh of October he lay leaning on his arm and
thinking of that.

There was a stir in the next room and he heard the steps of Toll,
Konovnitsyn, and Bolkhovitinov.

"Eh, who's there? Come in, come in! What news?" the field marshal called
out to them.

While a footman was lighting a candle, Toll communicated the substance
of the news.

"Who brought it?" asked Kutuzov with a look which, when the candle was
lit, struck Toll by its cold severity.

"There can be no doubt about it, your Highness."

"Call him in, call him here."

Kutuzov sat up with one leg hanging down from the bed and his big paunch
resting against the other which was doubled under him. He screwed up his
seeing eye to scrutinize the messenger more carefully, as if wishing to
read in his face what preoccupied his own mind.

"Tell me, tell me, friend," said he to Bolkhovitinov in his low, aged
voice, as he pulled together the shirt which gaped open on his chest,
"come nearer--nearer. What news have you brought me? Eh? That Napoleon
has left Moscow? Are you sure? Eh?"

Bolkhovitinov gave a detailed account from the beginning of all he had
been told to report.

"Speak quicker, quicker! Don't torture me!" Kutuzov interrupted him.

Bolkhovitinov told him everything and was then silent, awaiting
instructions. Toll was beginning to say something but Kutuzov checked
him. He tried to say something, but his face suddenly puckered and
wrinkled; he waved his arm at Toll and turned to the opposite side of
the room, to the corner darkened by the icons that hung there.

"O Lord, my Creator, Thou has heard our prayer..." said he in a
tremulous voice with folded hands. "Russia is saved. I thank Thee, O
Lord!" and he wept.





CHAPTER XVIII


From the time he received this news to the end of the campaign all
Kutuzov's activity was directed toward restraining his troops, by
authority, by guile, and by entreaty, from useless attacks,
maneuvers, or encounters with the perishing enemy. Dokhturov went to
Malo-Yaroslavets, but Kutuzov lingered with the main army and gave
orders for the evacuation of Kaluga--a retreat beyond which town seemed
to him quite possible.

Everywhere Kutuzov retreated, but the enemy without waiting for his
retreat fled in the opposite direction.

Napoleon's historians describe to us his skilled maneuvers at Tarutino
and Malo-Yaroslavets, and make conjectures as to what would have
happened had Napoleon been in time to penetrate into the rich southern
provinces.

But not to speak of the fact that nothing prevented him from advancing
into those southern provinces (for the Russian army did not bar his
way), the historians forget that nothing could have saved his army, for
then already it bore within itself the germs of inevitable ruin. How
could that army--which had found abundant supplies in Moscow and had
trampled them underfoot instead of keeping them, and on arriving at
Smolensk had looted provisions instead of storing them--how could that
army recuperate in Kaluga province, which was inhabited by Russians such
as those who lived in Moscow, and where fire had the same property of
consuming what was set ablaze?

That army could not recover anywhere. Since the battle of Borodino
and the pillage of Moscow it had borne within itself, as it were, the
chemical elements of dissolution.

The members of what had once been an army--Napoleon himself and all his
soldiers fled--without knowing whither, each concerned only to make his
escape as quickly as possible from this position, of the hopelessness of
which they were all more or less vaguely conscious.

So it came about that at the council at Malo-Yaroslavets, when the
generals pretending to confer together expressed various opinions, all
mouths were closed by the opinion uttered by the simple-minded soldier
Mouton who, speaking last, said what they all felt: that the one thing
needful was to get away as quickly as possible; and no one, not
even Napoleon, could say anything against that truth which they all
recognized.

But though they all realized that it was necessary to get away, there
still remained a feeling of shame at admitting that they must flee. An
external shock was needed to overcome that shame, and this shock came in
due time. It was what the French called "le hourra de l'Empereur."

The day after the council at Malo-Yaroslavets Napoleon rode out early in
the morning amid the lines of his army with his suite of marshals and
an escort, on the pretext of inspecting the army and the scene of the
previous and of the impending battle. Some Cossacks on the prowl for
booty fell in with the Emperor and very nearly captured him. If the
Cossacks did not capture Napoleon then, what saved him was the very
thing that was destroying the French army, the booty on which the
Cossacks fell. Here as at Tarutino they went after plunder, leaving the
men. Disregarding Napoleon they rushed after the plunder and Napoleon
managed to escape.

When les enfants du Don might so easily have taken the Emperor himself
in the midst of his army, it was clear that there was nothing for it but
to fly as fast as possible along the nearest, familiar road. Napoleon
with his forty-year-old stomach understood that hint, not feeling his
former agility and boldness, and under the influence of the fright
the Cossacks had given him he at once agreed with Mouton and issued
orders--as the historians tell us--to retreat by the Smolensk road.

That Napoleon agreed with Mouton, and that the army retreated, does
not prove that Napoleon caused it to retreat, but that the forces which
influenced the whole army and directed it along the Mozhaysk (that is,
the Smolensk) road acted simultaneously on him also.





CHAPTER XIX


A man in motion always devises an aim for that motion. To be able to go
a thousand miles he must imagine that something good awaits him at the
end of those thousand miles. One must have the prospect of a promised
land to have the strength to move.

The promised land for the French during their advance had been Moscow,
during their retreat it was their native land. But that native land
was too far off, and for a man going a thousand miles it is absolutely
necessary to set aside his final goal and to say to himself: "Today I
shall get to a place twenty-five miles off where I shall rest and
spend the night," and during the first day's journey that resting place
eclipses his ultimate goal and attracts all his hopes and desires. And
the impulses felt by a single person are always magnified in a crowd.

For the French retreating along the old Smolensk road, the final
goal--their native land--was too remote, and their immediate goal
was Smolensk, toward which all their desires and hopes, enormously
intensified in the mass, urged them on. It was not that they knew that
much food and fresh troops awaited them in Smolensk, nor that they were
told so (on the contrary their superior officers, and Napoleon himself,
knew that provisions were scarce there), but because this alone could
give them strength to move on and endure their present privations. So
both those who knew and those who did not know deceived themselves, and
pushed on to Smolensk as to a promised land.

Coming out onto the highroad the French fled with surprising energy
and unheard-of rapidity toward the goal they had fixed on. Besides the
common impulse which bound the whole crowd of French into one mass and
supplied them with a certain energy, there was another cause binding
them together--their great numbers. As with the physical law of gravity,
their enormous mass drew the individual human atoms to itself. In their
hundreds of thousands they moved like a whole nation.

Each of them desired nothing more than to give himself up as a prisoner
to escape from all this horror and misery; but on the one hand the force
of this common attraction to Smolensk, their goal, drew each of them in
the same direction; on the other hand an army corps could not surrender
to a company, and though the French availed themselves of every
convenient opportunity to detach themselves and to surrender on the
slightest decent pretext, such pretexts did not always occur. Their
very numbers and their crowded and swift movement deprived them of that
possibility and rendered it not only difficult but impossible for the
Russians to stop this movement, to which the French were directing all
their energies. Beyond a certain limit no mechanical disruption of the
body could hasten the process of decomposition.

A lump of snow cannot be melted instantaneously. There is a certain
limit of time in less than which no amount of heat can melt the snow. On
the contrary the greater the heat the more solidified the remaining snow
becomes.

Of the Russian commanders Kutuzov alone understood this. When the flight
of the French army along the Smolensk road became well defined, what
Konovnitsyn had foreseen on the night of the eleventh of October began
to occur. The superior officers all wanted to distinguish themselves,
to cut off, to seize, to capture, and to overthrow the French, and all
clamored for action.

Kutuzov alone used all his power (and such power is very limited in the
case of any commander in chief) to prevent an attack.

He could not tell them what we say now: "Why fight, why block the road,
losing our own men and inhumanly slaughtering unfortunate wretches? What
is the use of that, when a third of their army has melted away on the
road from Moscow to Vyazma without any battle?" But drawing from his
aged wisdom what they could understand, he told them of the golden
bridge, and they laughed at and slandered him, flinging themselves on,
rending and exulting over the dying beast.

Ermolov, Miloradovich, Platov, and others in proximity to the French
near Vyazma could not resist their desire to cut off and break up two
French corps, and by way of reporting their intention to Kutuzov they
sent him a blank sheet of paper in an envelope.

And try as Kutuzov might to restrain the troops, our men attacked,
trying to bar the road. Infantry regiments, we are told, advanced to the
attack with music and with drums beating, and killed and lost thousands
of men.

But they did not cut off or overthrow anybody and the French army,
closing up more firmly at the danger, continued, while steadily melting
away, to pursue its fatal path to Smolensk.





BOOK FOURTEEN: 1812





CHAPTER I


The Battle of Borodino, with the occupation of Moscow that followed it
and the flight of the French without further conflicts, is one of the
most instructive phenomena in history.

All historians agree that the external activity of states and nations
in their conflicts with one another is expressed in wars, and that as a
direct result of greater or less success in war the political strength
of states and nations increases or decreases.

Strange as may be the historical account of how some king or emperor,
having quarreled with another, collects an army, fights his enemy's
army, gains a victory by killing three, five, or ten thousand men, and
subjugates a kingdom and an entire nation of several millions, all
the facts of history (as far as we know it) confirm the truth of the
statement that the greater or lesser success of one army against another
is the cause, or at least an essential indication, of an increase or
decrease in the strength of the nation--even though it is unintelligible
why the defeat of an army--a hundredth part of a nation--should oblige
that whole nation to submit. An army gains a victory, and at once the
rights of the conquering nation have increased to the detriment of the
defeated. An army has suffered defeat, and at once a people loses its
rights in proportion to the severity of the reverse, and if its army
suffers a complete defeat the nation is quite subjugated.

So according to history it has been found from the most ancient times,
and so it is to our own day. All Napoleon's wars serve to confirm this
rule. In proportion to the defeat of the Austrian army Austria loses
its rights, and the rights and the strength of France increase. The
victories of the French at Jena and Auerstadt destroy the independent
existence of Prussia.

But then, in 1812, the French gain a victory near Moscow. Moscow is
taken and after that, with no further battles, it is not Russia that
ceases to exist, but the French army of six hundred thousand, and
then Napoleonic France itself. To strain the facts to fit the rules of
history: to say that the field of battle at Borodino remained in the
hands of the Russians, or that after Moscow there were other battles
that destroyed Napoleon's army, is impossible.

After the French victory at Borodino there was no general engagement nor
any that were at all serious, yet the French army ceased to exist. What
does this mean? If it were an example taken from the history of China,
we might say that it was not an historic phenomenon (which is the
historians' usual expedient when anything does not fit their standards);
if the matter concerned some brief conflict in which only a small number
of troops took part, we might treat it as an exception; but this event
occurred before our fathers' eyes, and for them it was a question of the
life or death of their fatherland, and it happened in the greatest of
all known wars.

The period of the campaign of 1812 from the battle of Borodino to the
expulsion of the French proved that the winning of a battle does not
produce a conquest and is not even an invariable indication of conquest;
it proved that the force which decides the fate of peoples lies not in
the conquerors, nor even in armies and battles, but in something else.

The French historians, describing the condition of the French army
before it left Moscow, affirm that all was in order in the Grand Army,
except the cavalry, the artillery, and the transport--there was no
forage for the horses or the cattle. That was a misfortune no one could
remedy, for the peasants of the district burned their hay rather than
let the French have it.

The victory gained did not bring the usual results because the peasants
Karp and Vlas (who after the French had evacuated Moscow drove in their
carts to pillage the town, and in general personally failed to manifest
any heroic feelings), and the whole innumerable multitude of such
peasants, did not bring their hay to Moscow for the high price offered
them, but burned it instead.

Let us imagine two men who have come out to fight a duel with rapiers
according to all the rules of the art of fencing. The fencing has
gone on for some time; suddenly one of the combatants, feeling himself
wounded and understanding that the matter is no joke but concerns his
life, throws down his rapier, and seizing the first cudgel that comes to
hand begins to brandish it. Then let us imagine that the combatant who
so sensibly employed the best and simplest means to attain his end was
at the same time influenced by traditions of chivalry and, desiring to
conceal the facts of the case, insisted that he had gained his victory
with the rapier according to all the rules of art. One can imagine what
confusion and obscurity would result from such an account of the duel.

The fencer who demanded a contest according to the rules of fencing was
the French army; his opponent who threw away the rapier and snatched up
the cudgel was the Russian people; those who try to explain the matter
according to the rules of fencing are the historians who have described
the event.

After the burning of Smolensk a war began which did not follow any
previous traditions of war. The burning of towns and villages, the
retreats after battles, the blow dealt at Borodino and the renewed
retreat, the burning of Moscow, the capture of marauders, the seizure of
transports, and the guerrilla war were all departures from the rules.

Napoleon felt this, and from the time he took up the correct fencing
attitude in Moscow and instead of his opponent's rapier saw a cudgel
raised above his head, he did not cease to complain to Kutuzov and to
the Emperor Alexander that the war was being carried on contrary to all
the rules--as if there were any rules for killing people. In spite of
the complaints of the French as to the nonobservance of the rules, in
spite of the fact that to some highly placed Russians it seemed rather
disgraceful to fight with a cudgel and they wanted to assume a pose en
quarte or en tierce according to all the rules, and to make an adroit
thrust en prime, and so on--the cudgel of the people's war was lifted
with all its menacing and majestic strength, and without consulting
anyone's tastes or rules and regardless of anything else, it rose and
fell with stupid simplicity, but consistently, and belabored the French
till the whole invasion had perished.

And it is well for a people who do not--as the French did in
1813--salute according to all the rules of art, and, presenting the hilt
of their rapier gracefully and politely, hand it to their magnanimous
conqueror, but at the moment of trial, without asking what rules others
have adopted in similar cases, simply and easily pick up the first
cudgel that comes to hand and strike with it till the feeling of
resentment and revenge in their soul yields to a feeling of contempt and
compassion.





CHAPTER II


One of the most obvious and advantageous departures from the so-called
laws of war is the action of scattered groups against men pressed
together in a mass. Such action always occurs in wars that take on a
national character. In such actions, instead of two crowds opposing
each other, the men disperse, attack singly, run away when attacked by
stronger forces, but again attack when opportunity offers. This was done
by the guerrillas in Spain, by the mountain tribes in the Caucasus, and
by the Russians in 1812.

People have called this kind of war "guerrilla warfare" and assume that
by so calling it they have explained its meaning. But such a war does
not fit in under any rule and is directly opposed to a well-known rule
of tactics which is accepted as infallible. That rule says that an
attacker should concentrate his forces in order to be stronger than his
opponent at the moment of conflict.

Guerrilla war (always successful, as history shows) directly infringes
that rule.

This contradiction arises from the fact that military science assumes
the strength of an army to be identical with its numbers. Military
science says that the more troops the greater the strength. Les gros
bataillons ont toujours raison. *


    * Large battalions are always victorious.


For military science to say this is like defining momentum in mechanics
by reference to the mass only: stating that momenta are equal or unequal
to each other simply because the masses involved are equal or unequal.

Momentum (quantity of motion) is the product of mass and velocity.

In military affairs the strength of an army is the product of its mass
and some unknown x.

Military science, seeing in history innumerable instances of the fact
that the size of any army does not coincide with its strength and that
small detachments defeat larger ones, obscurely admits the existence
of this unknown factor and tries to discover it--now in a geometric
formation, now in the equipment employed, now, and most usually, in the
genius of the commanders. But the assignment of these various meanings
to the factor does not yield results which accord with the historic
facts.

Yet it is only necessary to abandon the false view (adopted to gratify
the "heroes") of the efficacy of the directions issued in wartime by
commanders, in order to find this unknown quantity.

That unknown quantity is the spirit of the army, that is to say, the
greater or lesser readiness to fight and face danger felt by all the men
composing an army, quite independently of whether they are, or are not,
fighting under the command of a genius, in two--or three-line formation,
with cudgels or with rifles that repeat thirty times a minute. Men
who want to fight will always put themselves in the most advantageous
conditions for fighting.

The spirit of an army is the factor which multiplied by the mass gives
the resulting force. To define and express the significance of this
unknown factor--the spirit of an army--is a problem for science.

This problem is only solvable if we cease arbitrarily to substitute
for the unknown x itself the conditions under which that force becomes
apparent--such as the commands of the general, the equipment employed,
and so on--mistaking these for the real significance of the factor,
and if we recognize this unknown quantity in its entirety as being
the greater or lesser desire to fight and to face danger. Only then,
expressing known historic facts by equations and comparing the relative
significance of this factor, can we hope to define the unknown.

Ten men, battalions, or divisions, fighting fifteen men, battalions, or
divisions, conquer--that is, kill or take captive--all the others, while
themselves losing four, so that on the one side four and on the other
fifteen were lost. Consequently the four were equal to the fifteen, and
therefore 4x = 15y. Consequently x/y = 15/4. This equation does not
give us the value of the unknown factor but gives us a ratio between two
unknowns. And by bringing variously selected historic units (battles,
campaigns, periods of war) into such equations, a series of numbers
could be obtained in which certain laws should exist and might be
discovered.

The tactical rule that an army should act in masses when attacking, and
in smaller groups in retreat, unconsciously confirms the truth that the
strength of an army depends on its spirit. To lead men forward under
fire more discipline (obtainable only by movement in masses) is needed
than is needed to resist attacks. But this rule which leaves out of
account the spirit of the army continually proves incorrect and is in
particularly striking contrast to the facts when some strong rise or
fall in the spirit of the troops occurs, as in all national wars.

The French, retreating in 1812--though according to tactics they should
have separated into detachments to defend themselves--congregated into
a mass because the spirit of the army had so fallen that only the mass
held the army together. The Russians, on the contrary, ought according
to tactics to have attacked in mass, but in fact they split up
into small units, because their spirit had so risen that separate
individuals, without orders, dealt blows at the French without needing
any compulsion to induce them to expose themselves to hardships and
dangers.





CHAPTER III


The so-called partisan war began with the entry of the French into
Smolensk.

Before partisan warfare had been officially recognized by the
government, thousands of enemy stragglers, marauders, and foragers had
been destroyed by the Cossacks and the peasants, who killed them off
as instinctively as dogs worry a stray mad dog to death. Denis Davydov,
with his Russian instinct, was the first to recognize the value of
this terrible cudgel which regardless of the rules of military science
destroyed the French, and to him belongs the credit for taking the first
step toward regularizing this method of warfare.

On August 24 Davydov's first partisan detachment was formed and then
others were recognized. The further the campaign progressed the more
numerous these detachments became.

The irregulars destroyed the great army piecemeal. They gathered the
fallen leaves that dropped of themselves from that withered tree--the
French army--and sometimes shook that tree itself. By October, when
the French were fleeing toward Smolensk, there were hundreds of such
companies, of various sizes and characters. There were some that adopted
all the army methods and had infantry, artillery, staffs, and the
comforts of life. Others consisted solely of Cossack cavalry. There were
also small scratch groups of foot and horse, and groups of peasants and
landowners that remained unknown. A sacristan commanded one party which
captured several hundred prisoners in the course of a month; and there
was Vasilisa, the wife of a village elder, who slew hundreds of the
French.

The partisan warfare flamed up most fiercely in the latter days of
October. Its first period had passed: when the partisans themselves,
amazed at their own boldness, feared every minute to be surrounded
and captured by the French, and hid in the forests without unsaddling,
hardly daring to dismount and always expecting to be pursued. By the end
of October this kind of warfare had taken definite shape: it had become
clear to all what could be ventured against the French and what could
not. Now only the commanders of detachments with staffs, and moving
according to rules at a distance from the French, still regarded many
things as impossible. The small bands that had started their activities
long before and had already observed the French closely considered
things possible which the commanders of the big detachments did not dare
to contemplate. The Cossacks and peasants who crept in among the French
now considered everything possible.

On October 22, Denisov (who was one of the irregulars) was with his
group at the height of the guerrilla enthusiasm. Since early morning he
and his party had been on the move. All day long he had been watching
from the forest that skirted the highroad a large French convoy of
cavalry baggage and Russian prisoners separated from the rest of the
army, which--as was learned from spies and prisoners--was moving under a
strong escort to Smolensk. Besides Denisov and Dolokhov (who also led
a small party and moved in Denisov's vicinity), the commanders of some
large divisions with staffs also knew of this convoy and, as Denisov
expressed it, were sharpening their teeth for it. Two of the commanders
of large parties--one a Pole and the other a German--sent invitations
to Denisov almost simultaneously, requesting him to join up with their
divisions to attack the convoy.

"No, bwother, I have gwown mustaches myself," said Denisov on reading
these documents, and he wrote to the German that, despite his heartfelt
desire to serve under so valiant and renowned a general, he had to forgo
that pleasure because he was already under the command of the Polish
general. To the Polish general he replied to the same effect, informing
him that he was already under the command of the German.

Having arranged matters thus, Denisov and Dolokhov intended, without
reporting matters to the higher command, to attack and seize that
convoy with their own small forces. On October 22 it was moving from
the village of Mikulino to that of Shamshevo. To the left of the road
between Mikulino and Shamshevo there were large forests, extending in
some places up to the road itself though in others a mile or more back
from it. Through these forests Denisov and his party rode all day,
sometimes keeping well back in them and sometimes coming to the very
edge, but never losing sight of the moving French. That morning,
Cossacks of Denisov's party had seized and carried off into the forest
two wagons loaded with cavalry saddles, which had stuck in the mud not
far from Mikulino where the forest ran close to the road. Since then,
and until evening, the party had watched the movements of the French
without attacking. It was necessary to let the French reach Shamshevo
quietly without alarming them and then, after joining Dolokhov who was
to come that evening to a consultation at a watchman's hut in the forest
less than a mile from Shamshevo, to surprise the French at dawn, falling
like an avalanche on their heads from two sides, and rout and capture
them all at one blow.

In their rear, more than a mile from Mikulino where the forest came
right up to the road, six Cossacks were posted to report if any fresh
columns of French should show themselves.

Beyond Shamshevo, Dolokhov was to observe the road in the same way, to
find out at what distance there were other French troops. They reckoned
that the convoy had fifteen hundred men. Denisov had two hundred, and
Dolokhov might have as many more, but the disparity of numbers did not
deter Denisov. All that he now wanted to know was what troops these were
and to learn that he had to capture a "tongue"--that is, a man from
the enemy column. That morning's attack on the wagons had been made so
hastily that the Frenchmen with the wagons had all been killed; only a
little drummer boy had been taken alive, and as he was a straggler he
could tell them nothing definite about the troops in that column.

Denisov considered it dangerous to make a second attack for fear of
putting the whole column on the alert, so he sent Tikhon Shcherbaty, a
peasant of his party, to Shamshevo to try and seize at least one of the
French quartermasters who had been sent on in advance.





CHAPTER IV


It was a warm rainy autumn day. The sky and the horizon were both
the color of muddy water. At times a sort of mist descended, and then
suddenly heavy slanting rain came down.

Denisov in a felt cloak and a sheepskin cap from which the rain ran down
was riding a thin thoroughbred horse with sunken sides. Like his horse,
which turned its head and laid its ears back, he shrank from the driving
rain and gazed anxiously before him. His thin face with its short, thick
black beard looked angry.

Beside Denisov rode an esaul, * Denisov's fellow worker, also in felt
cloak and sheepskin cap, and riding a large sleek Don horse.


    * A captain of Cossacks.


Esaul Lovayski the Third was a tall man as straight as an arrow,
pale-faced, fair-haired, with narrow light eyes and with calm
self-satisfaction in his face and bearing. Though it was impossible to
say in what the peculiarity of the horse and rider lay, yet at first
glance at the esaul and Denisov one saw that the latter was wet and
uncomfortable and was a man mounted on a horse, while looking at the
esaul one saw that he was as comfortable and as much at ease as always
and that he was not a man who had mounted a horse, but a man who was one
with his horse, a being consequently possessed of twofold strength.

A little ahead of them walked a peasant guide, wet to the skin and
wearing a gray peasant coat and a white knitted cap.

A little behind, on a poor, small, lean Kirghiz mount with an enormous
tail and mane and a bleeding mouth, rode a young officer in a blue
French overcoat.

Beside him rode an hussar, with a boy in a tattered French uniform and
blue cap behind him on the crupper of his horse. The boy held on to the
hussar with cold, red hands, and raising his eyebrows gazed about him
with surprise. This was the French drummer boy captured that morning.

Behind them along the narrow, sodden, cutup forest road came hussars in
threes and fours, and then Cossacks: some in felt cloaks, some in French
greatcoats, and some with horsecloths over their heads. The horses,
being drenched by the rain, all looked black whether chestnut or bay.
Their necks, with their wet, close-clinging manes, looked strangely
thin. Steam rose from them. Clothes, saddles, reins, were all wet,
slippery, and sodden, like the ground and the fallen leaves that strewed
the road. The men sat huddled up trying not to stir, so as to warm the
water that had trickled to their bodies and not admit the fresh cold
water that was leaking in under their seats, their knees, and at the
back of their necks. In the midst of the outspread line of Cossacks two
wagons, drawn by French horses and by saddled Cossack horses that had
been hitched on in front, rumbled over the tree stumps and branches and
splashed through the water that lay in the ruts.

Denisov's horse swerved aside to avoid a pool in the track and bumped
his rider's knee against a tree.

"Oh, the devil!" exclaimed Denisov angrily, and showing his teeth he
struck his horse three times with his whip, splashing himself and his
comrades with mud.

Denisov was out of sorts both because of the rain and also from hunger
(none of them had eaten anything since morning), and yet more because he
still had no news from Dolokhov and the man sent to capture a "tongue"
had not returned.

"There'll hardly be another such chance to fall on a transport as today.
It's too risky to attack them by oneself, and if we put it off till
another day one of the big guerrilla detachments will snatch the prey
from under our noses," thought Denisov, continually peering forward,
hoping to see a messenger from Dolokhov.

On coming to a path in the forest along which he could see far to the
right, Denisov stopped.

"There's someone coming," said he.

The esaul looked in the direction Denisov indicated.

"There are two, an officer and a Cossack. But it is not presupposable
that it is the lieutenant colonel himself," said the esaul, who was fond
of using words the Cossacks did not know.

The approaching riders having descended a decline were no longer
visible, but they reappeared a few minutes later. In front, at a weary
gallop and using his leather whip, rode an officer, disheveled and
drenched, whose trousers had worked up to above his knees. Behind him,
standing in the stirrups, trotted a Cossack. The officer, a very young
lad with a broad rosy face and keen merry eyes, galloped up to Denisov
and handed him a sodden envelope.

"From the general," said the officer. "Please excuse its not being quite
dry."

Denisov, frowning, took the envelope and opened it.

"There, they kept telling us: 'It's dangerous, it's dangerous,'"
said the officer, addressing the esaul while Denisov was reading
the dispatch. "But Komarov and I"--he pointed to the Cossack--"were
prepared. We have each of us two pistols.... But what's this?" he asked,
noticing the French drummer boy. "A prisoner? You've already been in
action? May I speak to him?"

"Wostov! Petya!" exclaimed Denisov, having run through the dispatch.
"Why didn't you say who you were?" and turning with a smile he held out
his hand to the lad.

The officer was Petya Rostov.

All the way Petya had been preparing himself to behave with Denisov as
befitted a grownup man and an officer--without hinting at their previous
acquaintance. But as soon as Denisov smiled at him Petya brightened
up, blushed with pleasure, forgot the official manner he had been
rehearsing, and began telling him how he had already been in a battle
near Vyazma and how a certain hussar had distinguished himself there.

"Well, I am glad to see you," Denisov interrupted him, and his face
again assumed its anxious expression.

"Michael Feoklitych," said he to the esaul, "this is again fwom that
German, you know. He"--he indicated Petya--"is serving under him."

And Denisov told the esaul that the dispatch just delivered was a
repetition of the German general's demand that he should join forces
with him for an attack on the transport.

"If we don't take it tomowwow, he'll snatch it fwom under our noses," he
added.

While Denisov was talking to the esaul, Petya--abashed by Denisov's
cold tone and supposing that it was due to the condition of his
trousers--furtively tried to pull them down under his greatcoat so
that no one should notice it, while maintaining as martial an air as
possible.

"Will there be any orders, your honor?" he asked Denisov, holding his
hand at the salute and resuming the game of adjutant and general for
which he had prepared himself, "or shall I remain with your honor?"

"Orders?" Denisov repeated thoughtfully. "But can you stay till
tomowwow?"

"Oh, please... May I stay with you?" cried Petya.

"But, just what did the genewal tell you? To weturn at once?" asked
Denisov.

Petya blushed.

"He gave me no instructions. I think I could?" he returned, inquiringly.

"Well, all wight," said Denisov.

And turning to his men he directed a party to go on to the halting place
arranged near the watchman's hut in the forest, and told the officer on
the Kirghiz horse (who performed the duties of an adjutant) to go and
find out where Dolokhov was and whether he would come that evening.
Denisov himself intended going with the esaul and Petya to the edge of
the forest where it reached out to Shamshevo, to have a look at the part
of the French bivouac they were to attack next day.

"Well, old fellow," said he to the peasant guide, "lead us to
Shamshevo."

Denisov, Petya, and the esaul, accompanied by some Cossacks and the
hussar who had the prisoner, rode to the left across a ravine to the
edge of the forest.





CHAPTER V


The rain had stopped, and only the mist was falling and drops from
the trees. Denisov, the esaul, and Petya rode silently, following the
peasant in the knitted cap who, stepping lightly with outturned toes
and moving noiselessly in his bast shoes over the roots and wet leaves,
silently led them to the edge of the forest.

He ascended an incline, stopped, looked about him, and advanced to where
the screen of trees was less dense. On reaching a large oak tree that
had not yet shed its leaves, he stopped and beckoned mysteriously to
them with his hand.

Denisov and Petya rode up to him. From the spot where the peasant was
standing they could see the French. Immediately beyond the forest, on a
downward slope, lay a field of spring rye. To the right, beyond a steep
ravine, was a small village and a landowner's house with a broken roof.
In the village, in the house, in the garden, by the well, by the pond,
over all the rising ground, and all along the road uphill from the
bridge leading to the village, not more than five hundred yards
away, crowds of men could be seen through the shimmering mist. Their
un-Russian shouting at their horses which were straining uphill with the
carts, and their calls to one another, could be clearly heard.

"Bwing the prisoner here," said Denisov in a low voice, not taking his
eyes off the French.

A Cossack dismounted, lifted the boy down, and took him to Denisov.
Pointing to the French troops, Denisov asked him what these and those
of them were. The boy, thrusting his cold hands into his pockets and
lifting his eyebrows, looked at Denisov in affright, but in spite of
an evident desire to say all he knew gave confused answers, merely
assenting to everything Denisov asked him. Denisov turned away from him
frowning and addressed the esaul, conveying his own conjectures to him.

Petya, rapidly turning his head, looked now at the drummer boy, now
at Denisov, now at the esaul, and now at the French in the village and
along the road, trying not to miss anything of importance.

"Whether Dolokhov comes or not, we must seize it, eh?" said Denisov with
a merry sparkle in his eyes.

"It is a very suitable spot," said the esaul.

"We'll send the infantwy down by the swamps," Denisov continued.
"They'll cweep up to the garden; you'll wide up fwom there with the
Cossacks"--he pointed to a spot in the forest beyond the village--"and I
with my hussars fwom here. And at the signal shot..."

"The hollow is impassable--there's a swamp there," said the esaul. "The
horses would sink. We must ride round more to the left...."

While they were talking in undertones the crack of a shot sounded
from the low ground by the pond, a puff of white smoke appeared, then
another, and the sound of hundreds of seemingly merry French voices
shouting together came up from the slope. For a moment Denisov and the
esaul drew back. They were so near that they thought they were the cause
of the firing and shouting. But the firing and shouting did not relate
to them. Down below, a man wearing something red was running through the
marsh. The French were evidently firing and shouting at him.

"Why, that's our Tikhon," said the esaul.

"So it is! It is!"

"The wascal!" said Denisov.

"He'll get away!" said the esaul, screwing up his eyes.

The man whom they called Tikhon, having run to the stream, plunged in
so that the water splashed in the air, and, having disappeared for an
instant, scrambled out on all fours, all black with the wet, and ran on.
The French who had been pursuing him stopped.

"Smart, that!" said the esaul.

"What a beast!" said Denisov with his former look of vexation. "What has
he been doing all this time?"

"Who is he?" asked Petya.

"He's our plastun. I sent him to capture a 'tongue.'"

"Oh, yes," said Petya, nodding at the first words Denisov uttered as if
he understood it all, though he really did not understand anything of
it.

Tikhon Shcherbaty was one of the most indispensable men in their band.
He was a peasant from Pokrovsk, near the river Gzhat. When Denisov had
come to Pokrovsk at the beginning of his operations and had as usual
summoned the village elder and asked him what he knew about the French,
the elder, as though shielding himself, had replied, as all village
elders did, that he had neither seen nor heard anything of them. But
when Denisov explained that his purpose was to kill the French, and
asked if no French had strayed that way, the elder replied that some
"more-orderers" had really been at their village, but that Tikhon
Shcherbaty was the only man who dealt with such matters. Denisov had
Tikhon called and, having praised him for his activity, said a few words
in the elder's presence about loyalty to the Tsar and the country and
the hatred of the French that all sons of the fatherland should cherish.

"We don't do the French any harm," said Tikhon, evidently frightened by
Denisov's words. "We only fooled about with the lads for fun, you know!
We killed a score or so of 'more-orderers,' but we did no harm else..."

Next day when Denisov had left Pokrovsk, having quite forgotten about
this peasant, it was reported to him that Tikhon had attached himself
to their party and asked to be allowed to remain with it. Denisov gave
orders to let him do so.

Tikhon, who at first did rough work, laying campfires, fetching water,
flaying dead horses, and so on, soon showed a great liking and aptitude
for partisan warfare. At night he would go out for booty and always
brought back French clothing and weapons, and when told to would bring
in French captives also. Denisov then relieved him from drudgery and
began taking him with him when he went out on expeditions and had him
enrolled among the Cossacks.

Tikhon did not like riding, and always went on foot, never lagging
behind the cavalry. He was armed with a musketoon (which he carried
rather as a joke), a pike and an ax, which latter he used as a wolf uses
its teeth, with equal ease picking fleas out of its fur or crunching
thick bones. Tikhon with equal accuracy would split logs with blows at
arm's length, or holding the head of the ax would cut thin little pegs
or carve spoons. In Denisov's party he held a peculiar and exceptional
position. When anything particularly difficult or nasty had to be
done--to push a cart out of the mud with one's shoulders, pull a horse
out of a swamp by its tail, skin it, slink in among the French, or walk
more than thirty miles in a day--everybody pointed laughingly at Tikhon.

"It won't hurt that devil--he's as strong as a horse!" they said of him.

Once a Frenchman Tikhon was trying to capture fired a pistol at him
and shot him in the fleshy part of the back. That wound (which Tikhon
treated only with internal and external applications of vodka) was the
subject of the liveliest jokes by the whole detachment--jokes in which
Tikhon readily joined.

"Hallo, mate! Never again? Gave you a twist?" the Cossacks would banter
him. And Tikhon, purposely writhing and making faces, pretended to be
angry and swore at the French with the funniest curses. The only effect
of this incident on Tikhon was that after being wounded he seldom
brought in prisoners.

He was the bravest and most useful man in the party. No one found more
opportunities for attacking, no one captured or killed more Frenchmen,
and consequently he was made the buffoon of all the Cossacks and hussars
and willingly accepted that role. Now he had been sent by Denisov
overnight to Shamshevo to capture a "tongue." But whether because he
had not been content to take only one Frenchman or because he had slept
through the night, he had crept by day into some bushes right among the
French and, as Denisov had witnessed from above, had been detected by
them.





CHAPTER VI


After talking for some time with the esaul about next day's attack,
which now, seeing how near they were to the French, he seemed to have
definitely decided on, Denisov turned his horse and rode back.

"Now, my lad, we'll go and get dwy," he said to Petya.

As they approached the watchhouse Denisov stopped, peering into the
forest. Among the trees a man with long legs and long, swinging arms,
wearing a short jacket, bast shoes, and a Kazan hat, was approaching
with long, light steps. He had a musketoon over his shoulder and an ax
stuck in his girdle. When he espied Denisov he hastily threw something
into the bushes, removed his sodden hat by its floppy brim, and
approached his commander. It was Tikhon. His wrinkled and pockmarked
face and narrow little eyes beamed with self-satisfied merriment. He
lifted his head high and gazed at Denisov as if repressing a laugh.

"Well, where did you disappear to?" inquired Denisov.

"Where did I disappear to? I went to get Frenchmen," answered Tikhon
boldly and hurriedly, in a husky but melodious bass voice.

"Why did you push yourself in there by daylight? You ass! Well, why
haven't you taken one?"

"Oh, I took one all right," said Tikhon.

"Where is he?"

"You see, I took him first thing at dawn," Tikhon continued, spreading
out his flat feet with outturned toes in their bast shoes. "I took him
into the forest. Then I see he's no good and think I'll go and fetch a
likelier one."

"You see?... What a wogue--it's just as I thought," said Denisov to the
esaul. "Why didn't you bwing that one?"

"What was the good of bringing him?" Tikhon interrupted hastily and
angrily--"that one wouldn't have done for you. As if I don't know what
sort you want!"

"What a bwute you are!... Well?"

"I went for another one," Tikhon continued, "and I crept like this
through the wood and lay down." (He suddenly lay down on his stomach
with a supple movement to show how he had done it.) "One turned up and
I grabbed him, like this." (He jumped up quickly and lightly.) "'Come
along to the colonel,' I said. He starts yelling, and suddenly there
were four of them. They rushed at me with their little swords. So I went
for them with my ax, this way: 'What are you up to?' says I. 'Christ
be with you!'" shouted Tikhon, waving his arms with an angry scowl and
throwing out his chest.

"Yes, we saw from the hill how you took to your heels through the
puddles!" said the esaul, screwing up his glittering eyes.

Petya badly wanted to laugh, but noticed that they all refrained from
laughing. He turned his eyes rapidly from Tikhon's face to the esaul's
and Denisov's, unable to make out what it all meant.

"Don't play the fool!" said Denisov, coughing angrily. "Why didn't you
bwing the first one?"

Tikhon scratched his back with one hand and his head with the other,
then suddenly his whole face expanded into a beaming, foolish grin,
disclosing a gap where he had lost a tooth (that was why he was called
Shcherbaty--the gap-toothed). Denisov smiled, and Petya burst into a
peal of merry laughter in which Tikhon himself joined.

"Oh, but he was a regular good-for-nothing," said Tikhon. "The clothes
on him--poor stuff! How could I bring him? And so rude, your honor! Why,
he says: 'I'm a general's son myself, I won't go!' he says."

"You are a bwute!" said Denisov. "I wanted to question..."

"But I questioned him," said Tikhon. "He said he didn't know much.
'There are a lot of us,' he says, 'but all poor stuff--only soldiers
in name,' he says. 'Shout loud at them,' he says, 'and you'll take
them all,'" Tikhon concluded, looking cheerfully and resolutely into
Denisov's eyes.

"I'll give you a hundwed sharp lashes--that'll teach you to play the
fool!" said Denisov severely.

"But why are you angry?" remonstrated Tikhon, "just as if I'd never seen
your Frenchmen! Only wait till it gets dark and I'll fetch you any of
them you want--three if you like."

"Well, let's go," said Denisov, and rode all the way to the watchhouse
in silence and frowning angrily.

Tikhon followed behind and Petya heard the Cossacks laughing with him
and at him, about some pair of boots he had thrown into the bushes.

When the fit of laughter that had seized him at Tikhon's words and smile
had passed and Petya realized for a moment that this Tikhon had killed a
man, he felt uneasy. He looked round at the captive drummer boy and felt
a pang in his heart. But this uneasiness lasted only a moment. He felt
it necessary to hold his head higher, to brace himself, and to question
the esaul with an air of importance about tomorrow's undertaking, that
he might not be unworthy of the company in which he found himself.

The officer who had been sent to inquire met Denisov on the way with the
news that Dolokhov was soon coming and that all was well with him.

Denisov at once cheered up and, calling Petya to him, said: "Well, tell
me about yourself."





CHAPTER VII


Petya, having left his people after their departure from Moscow, joined
his regiment and was soon taken as orderly by a general commanding a
large guerrilla detachment. From the time he received his commission,
and especially since he had joined the active army and taken part in
the battle of Vyazma, Petya had been in a constant state of blissful
excitement at being grown-up and in a perpetual ecstatic hurry not to
miss any chance to do something really heroic. He was highly delighted
with what he saw and experienced in the army, but at the same time
it always seemed to him that the really heroic exploits were being
performed just where he did not happen to be. And he was always in a
hurry to get where he was not.

When on the twenty-first of October his general expressed a wish to send
somebody to Denisov's detachment, Petya begged so piteously to be sent
that the general could not refuse. But when dispatching him he recalled
Petya's mad action at the battle of Vyazma, where instead of riding by
the road to the place to which he had been sent, he had galloped to the
advanced line under the fire of the French and had there twice fired
his pistol. So now the general explicitly forbade his taking part in any
action whatever of Denisov's. That was why Petya had blushed and grown
confused when Denisov asked him whether he could stay. Before they had
ridden to the outskirts of the forest Petya had considered he must carry
out his instructions strictly and return at once. But when he saw the
French and saw Tikhon and learned that there would certainly be an
attack that night, he decided, with the rapidity with which young people
change their views, that the general, whom he had greatly respected till
then, was a rubbishy German, that Denisov was a hero, the esaul a hero,
and Tikhon a hero too, and that it would be shameful for him to leave
them at a moment of difficulty.

It was already growing dusk when Denisov, Petya, and the esaul rode up
to the watchhouse. In the twilight saddled horses could be seen, and
Cossacks and hussars who had rigged up rough shelters in the glade and
were kindling glowing fires in a hollow of the forest where the French
could not see the smoke. In the passage of the small watchhouse a
Cossack with sleeves rolled up was chopping some mutton. In the room
three officers of Denisov's band were converting a door into a tabletop.
Petya took off his wet clothes, gave them to be dried, and at once began
helping the officers to fix up the dinner table.

In ten minutes the table was ready and a napkin spread on it. On the
table were vodka, a flask of rum, white bread, roast mutton, and salt.

Sitting at table with the officers and tearing the fat savory mutton
with his hands, down which the grease trickled, Petya was in an ecstatic
childish state of love for all men, and consequently of confidence that
others loved him in the same way.

"So then what do you think, Vasili Dmitrich?" said he to Denisov. "It's
all right my staying a day with you?" And not waiting for a reply he
answered his own question: "You see I was told to find out--well, I
am finding out.... Only do let me into the very... into the chief... I
don't want a reward... But I want..."

Petya clenched his teeth and looked around, throwing back his head and
flourishing his arms.

"Into the vewy chief..." Denisov repeated with a smile.

"Only, please let me command something, so that I may really command..."
Petya went on. "What would it be to you?... Oh, you want a knife?" he
said, turning to an officer who wished to cut himself a piece of mutton.

And he handed him his clasp knife. The officer admired it.

"Please keep it. I have several like it," said Petya, blushing.
"Heavens! I was quite forgetting!" he suddenly cried. "I have some
raisins, fine ones; you know, seedless ones. We have a new sutler and
he has such capital things. I bought ten pounds. I am used to something
sweet. Would you like some?..." and Petya ran out into the passage to
his Cossack and brought back some bags which contained about five pounds
of raisins. "Have some, gentlemen, have some!"

"You want a coffeepot, don't you?" he asked the esaul. "I bought a
capital one from our sutler! He has splendid things. And he's very
honest, that's the chief thing. I'll be sure to send it to you. Or
perhaps your flints are giving out, or are worn out--that happens
sometimes, you know. I have brought some with me, here they are"--and he
showed a bag--"a hundred flints. I bought them very cheap. Please take
as many as you want, or all if you like...."

Then suddenly, dismayed lest he had said too much, Petya stopped and
blushed.

He tried to remember whether he had not done anything else that was
foolish. And running over the events of the day he remembered the French
drummer boy. "It's capital for us here, but what of him? Where have they
put him? Have they fed him? Haven't they hurt his feelings?" he thought.
But having caught himself saying too much about the flints, he was now
afraid to speak out.

"I might ask," he thought, "but they'll say: 'He's a boy himself and so
he pities the boy.' I'll show them tomorrow whether I'm a boy. Will it
seem odd if I ask?" Petya thought. "Well, never mind!" and immediately,
blushing and looking anxiously at the officers to see if they appeared
ironical, he said:

"May I call in that boy who was taken prisoner and give him something to
eat?... Perhaps..."

"Yes, he's a poor little fellow," said Denisov, who evidently saw
nothing shameful in this reminder. "Call him in. His name is Vincent
Bosse. Have him fetched."

"I'll call him," said Petya.

"Yes, yes, call him. A poor little fellow," Denisov repeated.

Petya was standing at the door when Denisov said this. He slipped in
between the officers, came close to Denisov, and said:

"Let me kiss you, dear old fellow! Oh, how fine, how splendid!"

And having kissed Denisov he ran out of the hut.

"Bosse! Vincent!" Petya cried, stopping outside the door.

"Who do you want, sir?" asked a voice in the darkness.

Petya replied that he wanted the French lad who had been captured that
day.

"Ah, Vesenny?" said a Cossack.

Vincent, the boy's name, had already been changed by the Cossacks into
Vesenny (vernal) and into Vesenya by the peasants and soldiers. In both
these adaptations the reference to spring (vesna) matched the impression
made by the young lad.

"He is warming himself there by the bonfire. Ho, Vesenya!
Vesenya!--Vesenny!" laughing voices were heard calling to one another in
the darkness.

"He's a smart lad," said an hussar standing near Petya. "We gave him
something to eat a while ago. He was awfully hungry!"

The sound of bare feet splashing through the mud was heard in the
darkness, and the drummer boy came to the door.

"Ah, c'est vous!" said Petya. "Voulez-vous manger? N'ayez pas peur, on
ne vous fera pas de mal," * he added shyly and affectionately, touching
the boy's hand. "Entrez, entrez." *(2)


     * "Ah, it's you! Do you want something to eat? Don't be
     afraid, they won't hurt you."

     * (2) "Come in, come in."


"Merci, monsieur," * said the drummer boy in a trembling almost childish
voice, and he began scraping his dirty feet on the threshold.


    * "Thank you, sir."


There were many things Petya wanted to say to the drummer boy, but did
not dare to. He stood irresolutely beside him in the passage. Then in
the darkness he took the boy's hand and pressed it.

"Come in, come in!" he repeated in a gentle whisper. "Oh, what can I do
for him?" he thought, and opening the door he let the boy pass in first.

When the boy had entered the hut, Petya sat down at a distance from
him, considering it beneath his dignity to pay attention to him. But
he fingered the money in his pocket and wondered whether it would seem
ridiculous to give some to the drummer boy.





CHAPTER VIII


The arrival of Dolokhov diverted Petya's attention from the drummer boy,
to whom Denisov had had some mutton and vodka given, and whom he had had
dressed in a Russian coat so that he might be kept with their band and
not sent away with the other prisoners. Petya had heard in the army many
stories of Dolokhov's extraordinary bravery and of his cruelty to the
French, so from the moment he entered the hut Petya did not take his
eyes from him, but braced himself up more and more and held his head
high, that he might not be unworthy even of such company.

Dolokhov's appearance amazed Petya by its simplicity.

Denisov wore a Cossack coat, had a beard, had an icon of Nicholas the
Wonder-Worker on his breast, and his way of speaking and everything he
did indicated his unusual position. But Dolokhov, who in Moscow had worn
a Persian costume, had now the appearance of a most correct officer of
the Guards. He was clean-shaven and wore a Guardsman's padded coat with
an Order of St. George at his buttonhole and a plain forage cap set
straight on his head. He took off his wet felt cloak in a corner of
the room, and without greeting anyone went up to Denisov and began
questioning him about the matter in hand. Denisov told him of the
designs the large detachments had on the transport, of the message Petya
had brought, and his own replies to both generals. Then he told him all
he knew of the French detachment.

"That's so. But we must know what troops they are and their numbers,"
said Dolokhov. "It will be necessary to go there. We can't start the
affair without knowing for certain how many there are. I like to work
accurately. Here now--wouldn't one of these gentlemen like to ride over
to the French camp with me? I have brought a spare uniform."

"I, I... I'll go with you!" cried Petya.

"There's no need for you to go at all," said Denisov, addressing
Dolokhov, "and as for him, I won't let him go on any account."

"I like that!" exclaimed Petya. "Why shouldn't I go?"

"Because it's useless."

"Well, you must excuse me, because... because... I shall go, and that's
all. You'll take me, won't you?" he said, turning to Dolokhov.

"Why not?" Dolokhov answered absently, scrutinizing the face of the
French drummer boy. "Have you had that youngster with you long?" he
asked Denisov.

"He was taken today but he knows nothing. I'm keeping him with me."

"Yes, and where do you put the others?" inquired Dolokhov.

"Where? I send them away and take a weceipt for them," shouted Denisov,
suddenly flushing. "And I say boldly that I have not a single man's life
on my conscience. Would it be difficult for you to send thirty or
thwee hundwed men to town under escort, instead of staining--I speak
bluntly--staining the honor of a soldier?"

"That kind of amiable talk would be suitable from this young count of
sixteen," said Dolokhov with cold irony, "but it's time for you to drop
it."

"Why, I've not said anything! I only say that I'll certainly go with
you," said Petya shyly.

"But for you and me, old fellow, it's time to drop these amenities,"
continued Dolokhov, as if he found particular pleasure in speaking of
this subject which irritated Denisov. "Now, why have you kept this lad?"
he went on, swaying his head. "Because you are sorry for him! Don't we
know those 'receipts' of yours? You send a hundred men away, and thirty
get there. The rest either starve or get killed. So isn't it all the
same not to send them?"

The esaul, screwing up his light-colored eyes, nodded approvingly.

"That's not the point. I'm not going to discuss the matter. I do not
wish to take it on my conscience. You say they'll die. All wight. Only
not by my fault!"

Dolokhov began laughing.

"Who has told them not to capture me these twenty times over? But if
they did catch me they'd string me up to an aspen tree, and with all
your chivalry just the same." He paused. "However, we must get to work.
Tell the Cossack to fetch my kit. I have two French uniforms in it.
Well, are you coming with me?" he asked Petya.

"I? Yes, yes, certainly!" cried Petya, blushing almost to tears and
glancing at Denisov.

While Dolokhov had been disputing with Denisov what should be done with
prisoners, Petya had once more felt awkward and restless; but again he
had no time to grasp fully what they were talking about. "If grown-up,
distinguished men think so, it must be necessary and right," thought he.
"But above all Denisov must not dare to imagine that I'll obey him and
that he can order me about. I will certainly go to the French camp with
Dolokhov. If he can, so can I!"

And to all Denisov's persuasions, Petya replied that he too was
accustomed to do everything accurately and not just anyhow, and that he
never considered personal danger.

"For you'll admit that if we don't know for sure how many of them there
are... hundreds of lives may depend on it, while there are only two
of us. Besides, I want to go very much and certainly will go, so don't
hinder me," said he. "It will only make things worse..."





CHAPTER IX


Having put on French greatcoats and shakos, Petya and Dolokhov rode to
the clearing from which Denisov had reconnoitered the French camp,
and emerging from the forest in pitch darkness they descended into the
hollow. On reaching the bottom, Dolokhov told the Cossacks accompanying
him to await him there and rode on at a quick trot along the road to the
bridge. Petya, his heart in his mouth with excitement, rode by his side.

"If we're caught, I won't be taken alive! I have a pistol," whispered
he.

"Don't talk Russian," said Dolokhov in a hurried whisper, and at that
very moment they heard through the darkness the challenge: "Qui vive?" *
and the click of a musket.


    * "Who goes there?"


The blood rushed to Petya's face and he grasped his pistol.

"Lanciers du 6-me," * replied Dolokhov, neither hastening nor slackening
his horse's pace.


    * "Lancers of the 6th Regiment."


The black figure of a sentinel stood on the bridge.

"Mot d'ordre." *


    * "Password."


Dolokhov reined in his horse and advanced at a walk.

"Dites donc, le colonel Gerard est ici?" * he asked.


    * "Tell me, is Colonel Gerard here?"


"Mot d'ordre," repeated the sentinel, barring the way and not replying.

"Quand un officier fait sa ronde, les sentinelles ne demandent pas le
mot d'ordre..." cried Dolokhov suddenly flaring up and riding straight
at the sentinel. "Je vous demande si le colonel est ici." *


     * "When an officer is making his round, sentinels don't ask
     him for the password.... I am asking you if the colonel is
     here."


And without waiting for an answer from the sentinel, who had stepped
aside, Dolokhov rode up the incline at a walk.

Noticing the black outline of a man crossing the road, Dolokhov stopped
him and inquired where the commander and officers were. The man,
a soldier with a sack over his shoulder, stopped, came close up to
Dolokhov's horse, touched it with his hand, and explained simply and in
a friendly way that the commander and the officers were higher up
the hill to the right in the courtyard of the farm, as he called the
landowner's house.

Having ridden up the road, on both sides of which French talk could be
heard around the campfires, Dolokhov turned into the courtyard of the
landowner's house. Having ridden in, he dismounted and approached a
big blazing campfire, around which sat several men talking noisily.
Something was boiling in a small cauldron at the edge of the fire and
a soldier in a peaked cap and blue overcoat, lit up by the fire, was
kneeling beside it stirring its contents with a ramrod.

"Oh, he's a hard nut to crack," said one of the officers who was sitting
in the shadow at the other side of the fire.

"He'll make them get a move on, those fellows!" said another, laughing.

Both fell silent, peering out through the darkness at the sound of
Dolokhov's and Petya's steps as they advanced to the fire leading their
horses.

"Bonjour, messieurs!" * said Dolokhov loudly and clearly.


    * "Good day, gentlemen."


There was a stir among the officers in the shadow beyond the fire,
and one tall, long-necked officer, walking round the fire, came up to
Dolokhov.

"Is that you, Clement?" he asked. "Where the devil...?" But, noticing
his mistake, he broke off short and, with a frown, greeted Dolokhov as a
stranger, asking what he could do for him.

Dolokhov said that he and his companion were trying to overtake their
regiment, and addressing the company in general asked whether they knew
anything of the 6th Regiment. None of them knew anything, and Petya
thought the officers were beginning to look at him and Dolokhov with
hostility and suspicion. For some seconds all were silent.

"If you were counting on the evening soup, you have come too late," said
a voice from behind the fire with a repressed laugh.

Dolokhov replied that they were not hungry and must push on farther that
night.

He handed the horses over to the soldier who was stirring the pot and
squatted down on his heels by the fire beside the officer with the long
neck. That officer did not take his eyes from Dolokhov and again asked
to what regiment he belonged. Dolokhov, as if he had not heard the
question, did not reply, but lighting a short French pipe which he took
from his pocket began asking the officer in how far the road before them
was safe from Cossacks.

"Those brigands are everywhere," replied an officer from behind the
fire.

Dolokhov remarked that the Cossacks were a danger only to stragglers
such as his companion and himself, "but probably they would not dare to
attack large detachments?" he added inquiringly. No one replied.

"Well, now he'll come away," Petya thought every moment as he stood by
the campfire listening to the talk.

But Dolokhov restarted the conversation which had dropped and began
putting direct questions as to how many men there were in the battalion,
how many battalions, and how many prisoners. Asking about the Russian
prisoners with that detachment, Dolokhov said:

"A horrid business dragging these corpses about with one! It would be
better to shoot such rabble," and burst into loud laughter, so strange
that Petya thought the French would immediately detect their disguise,
and involuntarily took a step back from the campfire.

No one replied a word to Dolokhov's laughter, and a French officer whom
they could not see (he lay wrapped in a greatcoat) rose and whispered
something to a companion. Dolokhov got up and called to the soldier who
was holding their horses.

"Will they bring our horses or not?" thought Petya, instinctively
drawing nearer to Dolokhov.

The horses were brought.

"Good evening, gentlemen," said Dolokhov.

Petya wished to say "Good night" but could not utter a word. The
officers were whispering together. Dolokhov was a long time mounting
his horse which would not stand still, then he rode out of the yard at a
footpace. Petya rode beside him, longing to look round to see whether or
not the French were running after them, but not daring to.

Coming out onto the road Dolokhov did not ride back across the open
country, but through the village. At one spot he stopped and listened.
"Do you hear?" he asked. Petya recognized the sound of Russian voices
and saw the dark figures of Russian prisoners round their campfires.
When they had descended to the bridge Petya and Dolokhov rode past the
sentinel, who without saying a word paced morosely up and down it, then
they descended into the hollow where the Cossacks awaited them.

"Well now, good-by. Tell Denisov, 'at the first shot at daybreak,'" said
Dolokhov and was about to ride away, but Petya seized hold of him.

"Really!" he cried, "you are such a hero! Oh, how fine, how splendid!
How I love you!"

"All right, all right!" said Dolokhov. But Petya did not let go of him
and Dolokhov saw through the gloom that Petya was bending toward him and
wanted to kiss him. Dolokhov kissed him, laughed, turned his horse, and
vanished into the darkness.





CHAPTER X


Having returned to the watchman's hut, Petya found Denisov in the
passage. He was awaiting Petya's return in a state of agitation,
anxiety, and self-reproach for having let him go.

"Thank God!" he exclaimed. "Yes, thank God!" he repeated, listening to
Petya's rapturous account. "But, devil take you, I haven't slept because
of you! Well, thank God. Now lie down. We can still get a nap before
morning."

"But... no," said Petya, "I don't want to sleep yet. Besides I know
myself, if I fall asleep it's finished. And then I am used to not
sleeping before a battle."

He sat awhile in the hut joyfully recalling the details of his
expedition and vividly picturing to himself what would happen next day.

Then, noticing that Denisov was asleep, he rose and went out of doors.

It was still quite dark outside. The rain was over, but drops were still
falling from the trees. Near the watchman's hut the black shapes of the
Cossacks' shanties and of horses tethered together could be seen. Behind
the hut the dark shapes of the two wagons with their horses beside them
were discernible, and in the hollow the dying campfire gleamed red.
Not all the Cossacks and hussars were asleep; here and there, amid the
sounds of falling drops and the munching of the horses near by, could be
heard low voices which seemed to be whispering.

Petya came out, peered into the darkness, and went up to the wagons.
Someone was snoring under them, and around them stood saddled horses
munching their oats. In the dark Petya recognized his own horse, which
he called "Karabakh" though it was of Ukranian breed, and went up to it.

"Well, Karabakh! We'll do some service tomorrow," said he, sniffing its
nostrils and kissing it.

"Why aren't you asleep, sir?" said a Cossack who was sitting under a
wagon.

"No, ah... Likhachev--isn't that your name? Do you know I have only just
come back! We've been into the French camp."

And Petya gave the Cossack a detailed account not only of his ride but
also of his object, and why he considered it better to risk his life
than to act "just anyhow."

"Well, you should get some sleep now," said the Cossack.

"No, I am used to this," said Petya. "I say, aren't the flints in your
pistols worn out? I brought some with me. Don't you want any? You can
have some."

The Cossack bent forward from under the wagon to get a closer look at
Petya.

"Because I am accustomed to doing everything accurately," said Petya.
"Some fellows do things just anyhow, without preparation, and then
they're sorry for it afterwards. I don't like that."

"Just so," said the Cossack.

"Oh yes, another thing! Please, my dear fellow, will you sharpen my
saber for me? It's got bl..." (Petya feared to tell a lie, and the saber
never had been sharpened.) "Can you do it?"

"Of course I can."

Likhachev got up, rummaged in his pack, and soon Petya heard the warlike
sound of steel on whetstone. He climbed onto the wagon and sat on its
edge. The Cossack was sharpening the saber under the wagon.

"I say! Are the lads asleep?" asked Petya.

"Some are, and some aren't--like us."

"Well, and that boy?"

"Vesenny? Oh, he's thrown himself down there in the passage. Fast asleep
after his fright. He was that glad!"

After that Petya remained silent for a long time, listening to the
sounds. He heard footsteps in the darkness and a black figure appeared.

"What are you sharpening?" asked a man coming up to the wagon.

"Why, this gentleman's saber."

"That's right," said the man, whom Petya took to be an hussar. "Was the
cup left here?"

"There, by the wheel!"

The hussar took the cup.

"It must be daylight soon," said he, yawning, and went away.

Petya ought to have known that he was in a forest with Denisov's
guerrilla band, less than a mile from the road, sitting on a wagon
captured from the French beside which horses were tethered, that under
it Likhachev was sitting sharpening a saber for him, that the big dark
blotch to the right was the watchman's hut, and the red blotch below to
the left was the dying embers of a campfire, that the man who had come
for the cup was an hussar who wanted a drink; but he neither knew nor
waited to know anything of all this. He was in a fairy kingdom where
nothing resembled reality. The big dark blotch might really be the
watchman's hut or it might be a cavern leading to the very depths of
the earth. Perhaps the red spot was a fire, or it might be the eye of an
enormous monster. Perhaps he was really sitting on a wagon, but it might
very well be that he was not sitting on a wagon but on a terribly high
tower from which, if he fell, he would have to fall for a whole day or a
whole month, or go on falling and never reach the bottom. Perhaps it
was just the Cossack, Likhachev, who was sitting under the wagon, but it
might be the kindest, bravest, most wonderful, most splendid man in the
world, whom no one knew of. It might really have been that the hussar
came for water and went back into the hollow, but perhaps he had simply
vanished--disappeared altogether and dissolved into nothingness.

Nothing Petya could have seen now would have surprised him. He was in a
fairy kingdom where everything was possible.

He looked up at the sky. And the sky was a fairy realm like the earth.
It was clearing, and over the tops of the trees clouds were swiftly
sailing as if unveiling the stars. Sometimes it looked as if the clouds
were passing, and a clear black sky appeared. Sometimes it seemed as
if the black spaces were clouds. Sometimes the sky seemed to be rising
high, high overhead, and then it seemed to sink so low that one could
touch it with one's hand.

Petya's eyes began to close and he swayed a little.

The trees were dripping. Quiet talking was heard. The horses neighed and
jostled one another. Someone snored.

"Ozheg-zheg, Ozheg-zheg..." hissed the saber against the whetstone,
and suddenly Petya heard an harmonious orchestra playing some unknown,
sweetly solemn hymn. Petya was as musical as Natasha and more so than
Nicholas, but had never learned music or thought about it, and so the
melody that unexpectedly came to his mind seemed to him particularly
fresh and attractive. The music became more and more audible. The melody
grew and passed from one instrument to another. And what was played was
a fugue--though Petya had not the least conception of what a fugue is.
Each instrument--now resembling a violin and now a horn, but better
and clearer than violin or horn--played its own part, and before it had
finished the melody merged with another instrument that began almost the
same air, and then with a third and a fourth; and they all blended into
one and again became separate and again blended, now into solemn church
music, now into something dazzlingly brilliant and triumphant.

"Oh--why, that was in a dream!" Petya said to himself, as he lurched
forward. "It's in my ears. But perhaps it's music of my own. Well, go
on, my music! Now!..."

He closed his eyes, and, from all sides as if from a distance, sounds
fluttered, grew into harmonies, separated, blended, and again all
mingled into the same sweet and solemn hymn. "Oh, this is delightful!
As much as I like and as I like!" said Petya to himself. He tried to
conduct that enormous orchestra.

"Now softly, softly die away!" and the sounds obeyed him. "Now fuller,
more joyful. Still more and more joyful!" And from an unknown depth rose
increasingly triumphant sounds. "Now voices join in!" ordered Petya. And
at first from afar he heard men's voices and then women's. The voices
grew in harmonious triumphant strength, and Petya listened to their
surpassing beauty in awe and joy.

With a solemn triumphal march there mingled a song, the drip from the
trees, and the hissing of the saber, "Ozheg-zheg-zheg..." and again the
horses jostled one another and neighed, not disturbing the choir but
joining in it.

Petya did not know how long this lasted: he enjoyed himself all the
time, wondered at his enjoyment and regretted that there was no one to
share it. He was awakened by Likhachev's kindly voice.

"It's ready, your honor; you can split a Frenchman in half with it!"

Petya woke up.

"It's getting light, it's really getting light!" he exclaimed.

The horses that had previously been invisible could now be seen to their
very tails, and a watery light showed itself through the bare branches.
Petya shook himself, jumped up, took a ruble from his pocket and gave it
to Likhachev; then he flourished the saber, tested it, and sheathed
it. The Cossacks were untying their horses and tightening their saddle
girths.

"And here's the commander," said Likhachev.

Denisov came out of the watchman's hut and, having called Petya, gave
orders to get ready.





CHAPTER XI


The men rapidly picked out their horses in the semidarkness, tightened
their saddle girths, and formed companies. Denisov stood by the
watchman's hut giving final orders. The infantry of the detachment
passed along the road and quickly disappeared amid the trees in the mist
of early dawn, hundreds of feet splashing through the mud. The esaul
gave some orders to his men. Petya held his horse by the bridle,
impatiently awaiting the order to mount. His face, having been bathed
in cold water, was all aglow, and his eyes were particularly brilliant.
Cold shivers ran down his spine and his whole body pulsed rhythmically.

"Well, is ev'wything weady?" asked Denisov. "Bwing the horses."

The horses were brought. Denisov was angry with the Cossack because the
saddle girths were too slack, reproved him, and mounted. Petya put his
foot in the stirrup. His horse by habit made as if to nip his leg, but
Petya leaped quickly into the saddle unconscious of his own weight and,
turning to look at the hussars starting in the darkness behind him, rode
up to Denisov.

"Vasili Dmitrich, entrust me with some commission! Please... for God's
sake...!" said he.

Denisov seemed to have forgotten Petya's very existence. He turned to
glance at him.

"I ask one thing of you," he said sternly, "to obey me and not shove
yourself forward anywhere."

He did not say another word to Petya but rode in silence all the way.
When they had come to the edge of the forest it was noticeably growing
light over the field. Denisov talked in whispers with the esaul and
the Cossacks rode past Petya and Denisov. When they had all ridden by,
Denisov touched his horse and rode down the hill. Slipping onto their
haunches and sliding, the horses descended with their riders into the
ravine. Petya rode beside Denisov, the pulsation of his body constantly
increasing. It was getting lighter and lighter, but the mist still hid
distant objects. Having reached the valley, Denisov looked back and
nodded to a Cossack beside him.

"The signal!" said he.

The Cossack raised his arm and a shot rang out. In an instant the tramp
of horses galloping forward was heard, shouts came from various sides,
and then more shots.

At the first sound of trampling hoofs and shouting, Petya lashed his
horse and loosening his rein galloped forward, not heeding Denisov who
shouted at him. It seemed to Petya that at the moment the shot was
fired it suddenly became as bright as noon. He galloped to the bridge.
Cossacks were galloping along the road in front of him. On the bridge
he collided with a Cossack who had fallen behind, but he galloped on.
In front of him soldiers, probably Frenchmen, were running from right
to left across the road. One of them fell in the mud under his horse's
feet.

Cossacks were crowding about a hut, busy with something. From the midst
of that crowd terrible screams arose. Petya galloped up, and the
first thing he saw was the pale face and trembling jaw of a Frenchman,
clutching the handle of a lance that had been aimed at him.

"Hurrah!... Lads!... ours!" shouted Petya, and giving rein to his
excited horse he galloped forward along the village street.

He could hear shooting ahead of him. Cossacks, hussars, and ragged
Russian prisoners, who had come running from both sides of the road,
were shouting something loudly and incoherently. A gallant-looking
Frenchman, in a blue overcoat, capless, and with a frowning red face,
had been defending himself against the hussars. When Petya galloped
up the Frenchman had already fallen. "Too late again!" flashed through
Petya's mind and he galloped on to the place from which the rapid firing
could be heard. The shots came from the yard of the landowner's house
he had visited the night before with Dolokhov. The French were making
a stand there behind a wattle fence in a garden thickly overgrown with
bushes and were firing at the Cossacks who crowded at the gateway.
Through the smoke, as he approached the gate, Petya saw Dolokhov, whose
face was of a pale-greenish tint, shouting to his men. "Go round! Wait
for the infantry!" he exclaimed as Petya rode up to him.

"Wait?... Hurrah-ah-ah!" shouted Petya, and without pausing a moment
galloped to the place whence came the sounds of firing and where the
smoke was thickest.

A volley was heard, and some bullets whistled past, while others plashed
against something. The Cossacks and Dolokhov galloped after Petya into
the gateway of the courtyard. In the dense wavering smoke some of the
French threw down their arms and ran out of the bushes to meet the
Cossacks, while others ran down the hill toward the pond. Petya was
galloping along the courtyard, but instead of holding the reins he waved
both his arms about rapidly and strangely, slipping farther and farther
to one side in his saddle. His horse, having galloped up to a campfire
that was smoldering in the morning light, stopped suddenly, and Petya
fell heavily on to the wet ground. The Cossacks saw that his arms and
legs jerked rapidly though his head was quite motionless. A bullet had
pierced his skull.

After speaking to the senior French officer, who came out of the house
with a white handkerchief tied to his sword and announced that
they surrendered, Dolokhov dismounted and went up to Petya, who lay
motionless with outstretched arms.

"Done for!" he said with a frown, and went to the gate to meet Denisov
who was riding toward him.

"Killed?" cried Denisov, recognizing from a distance the unmistakably
lifeless attitude--very familiar to him--in which Petya's body was
lying.

"Done for!" repeated Dolokhov as if the utterance of these words
afforded him pleasure, and he went quickly up to the prisoners, who
were surrounded by Cossacks who had hurried up. "We won't take them!" he
called out to Denisov.

Denisov did not reply; he rode up to Petya, dismounted, and with
trembling hands turned toward himself the bloodstained, mud-bespattered
face which had already gone white.

"I am used to something sweet. Raisins, fine ones... take them all!" he
recalled Petya's words. And the Cossacks looked round in surprise at the
sound, like the yelp of a dog, with which Denisov turned away, walked to
the wattle fence, and seized hold of it.

Among the Russian prisoners rescued by Denisov and Dolokhov was Pierre
Bezukhov.





CHAPTER XII


During the whole of their march from Moscow no fresh orders had been
issued by the French authorities concerning the party of prisoners
among whom was Pierre. On the twenty-second of October that party was
no longer with the same troops and baggage trains with which it had left
Moscow. Half the wagons laden with hardtack that had traveled the first
stages with them had been captured by Cossacks, the other half had gone
on ahead. Not one of those dismounted cavalrymen who had marched in
front of the prisoners was left; they had all disappeared. The artillery
the prisoners had seen in front of them during the first days was
now replaced by Marshal Junot's enormous baggage train, convoyed by
Westphalians. Behind the prisoners came a cavalry baggage train.

From Vyazma onwards the French army, which had till then moved in three
columns, went on as a single group. The symptoms of disorder that Pierre
had noticed at their first halting place after leaving Moscow had now
reached the utmost limit.

The road along which they moved was bordered on both sides by dead
horses; ragged men who had fallen behind from various regiments
continually changed about, now joining the moving column, now again
lagging behind it.

Several times during the march false alarms had been given and the
soldiers of the escort had raised their muskets, fired, and run
headlong, crushing one another, but had afterwards reassembled and
abused each other for their causeless panic.

These three groups traveling together--the cavalry stores, the convoy of
prisoners, and Junot's baggage train--still constituted a separate and
united whole, though each of the groups was rapidly melting away.

Of the artillery baggage train which had consisted of a hundred and
twenty wagons, not more than sixty now remained; the rest had been
captured or left behind. Some of Junot's wagons also had been captured
or abandoned. Three wagons had been raided and robbed by stragglers
from Davout's corps. From the talk of the Germans Pierre learned that
a larger guard had been allotted to that baggage train than to the
prisoners, and that one of their comrades, a German soldier, had been
shot by the marshal's own order because a silver spoon belonging to the
marshal had been found in his possession.

The group of prisoners had melted away most of all. Of the three hundred
and thirty men who had set out from Moscow fewer than a hundred now
remained. The prisoners were more burdensome to the escort than even the
cavalry saddles or Junot's baggage. They understood that the saddles and
Junot's spoon might be of some use, but that cold and hungry soldiers
should have to stand and guard equally cold and hungry Russians who
froze and lagged behind on the road (in which case the order was to
shoot them) was not merely incomprehensible but revolting. And the
escort, as if afraid, in the grievous condition they themselves were in,
of giving way to the pity they felt for the prisoners and so rendering
their own plight still worse, treated them with particular moroseness
and severity.

At Dorogobuzh while the soldiers of the convoy, after locking the
prisoners in a stable, had gone off to pillage their own stores, several
of the soldier prisoners tunneled under the wall and ran away, but were
recaptured by the French and shot.

The arrangement adopted when they started, that the officer prisoners
should be kept separate from the rest, had long since been abandoned.
All who could walk went together, and after the third stage Pierre had
rejoined Karataev and the gray-blue bandy-legged dog that had chosen
Karataev for its master.

On the third day after leaving Moscow Karataev again fell ill with the
fever he had suffered from in the hospital in Moscow, and as he grew
gradually weaker Pierre kept away from him. Pierre did not know why, but
since Karataev had begun to grow weaker it had cost him an effort to
go near him. When he did so and heard the subdued moaning with which
Karataev generally lay down at the halting places, and when he smelled
the odor emanating from him which was now stronger than before, Pierre
moved farther away and did not think about him.

While imprisoned in the shed Pierre had learned not with his intellect
but with his whole being, by life itself, that man is created for
happiness, that happiness is within him, in the satisfaction of simple
human needs, and that all unhappiness arises not from privation but from
superfluity. And now during these last three weeks of the march he had
learned still another new, consolatory truth--that nothing in this world
is terrible. He had learned that as there is no condition in which man
can be happy and entirely free, so there is no condition in which he
need be unhappy and lack freedom. He learned that suffering and freedom
have their limits and that those limits are very near together; that the
person in a bed of roses with one crumpled petal suffered as keenly as
he now, sleeping on the bare damp earth with one side growing chilled
while the other was warming; and that when he had put on tight dancing
shoes he had suffered just as he did now when he walked with bare feet
that were covered with sores--his footgear having long since fallen to
pieces. He discovered that when he had married his wife--of his own free
will as it had seemed to him--he had been no more free than now
when they locked him up at night in a stable. Of all that he himself
subsequently termed his sufferings, but which at the time he scarcely
felt, the worst was the state of his bare, raw, and scab-covered feet.
(The horseflesh was appetizing and nourishing, the saltpeter flavor of
the gunpowder they used instead of salt was even pleasant; there was
no great cold, it was always warm walking in the daytime, and at night
there were the campfires; the lice that devoured him warmed his body.)
The one thing that was at first hard to bear was his feet.

After the second day's march Pierre, having examined his feet by the
campfire, thought it would be impossible to walk on them; but when
everybody got up he went along, limping, and, when he had warmed up,
walked without feeling the pain, though at night his feet were more
terrible to look at than before. However, he did not look at them now,
but thought of other things.

Only now did Pierre realize the full strength of life in man and the
saving power he has of transferring his attention from one thing
to another, which is like the safety valve of a boiler that allows
superfluous steam to blow off when the pressure exceeds a certain limit.

He did not see and did not hear how they shot the prisoners who lagged
behind, though more than a hundred perished in that way. He did not
think of Karataev who grew weaker every day and evidently would soon
have to share that fate. Still less did Pierre think about himself. The
harder his position became and the more terrible the future, the more
independent of that position in which he found himself were the joyful
and comforting thoughts, memories, and imaginings that came to him.





CHAPTER XIII


At midday on the twenty-second of October Pierre was going uphill along
the muddy, slippery road, looking at his feet and at the roughness of
the way. Occasionally he glanced at the familiar crowd around him and
then again at his feet. The former and the latter were alike familiar
and his own. The blue-gray bandy legged dog ran merrily along the side
of the road, sometimes in proof of its agility and self-satisfaction
lifting one hind leg and hopping along on three, and then again going on
all four and rushing to bark at the crows that sat on the carrion. The
dog was merrier and sleeker than it had been in Moscow. All around lay
the flesh of different animals--from men to horses--in various stages
of decomposition; and as the wolves were kept off by the passing men the
dog could eat all it wanted.

It had been raining since morning and had seemed as if at any moment it
might cease and the sky clear, but after a short break it began raining
harder than before. The saturated road no longer absorbed the water,
which ran along the ruts in streams.

Pierre walked along, looking from side to side, counting his steps in
threes, and reckoning them off on his fingers. Mentally addressing the
rain, he repeated: "Now then, now then, go on! Pelt harder!"

It seemed to him that he was thinking of nothing, but far down and
deep within him his soul was occupied with something important and
comforting. This something was a most subtle spiritual deduction from a
conversation with Karataev the day before.

At their yesterday's halting place, feeling chilly by a dying campfire,
Pierre had got up and gone to the next one, which was burning better.
There Platon Karataev was sitting covered up--head and all--with
his greatcoat as if it were a vestment, telling the soldiers in his
effective and pleasant though now feeble voice a story Pierre knew. It
was already past midnight, the hour when Karataev was usually free of
his fever and particularly lively. When Pierre reached the fire and
heard Platon's voice enfeebled by illness, and saw his pathetic face
brightly lit up by the blaze, he felt a painful prick at his heart. His
feeling of pity for this man frightened him and he wished to go away,
but there was no other fire, and Pierre sat down, trying not to look at
Platon.

"Well, how are you?" he asked.

"How am I? If we grumble at sickness, God won't grant us death," replied
Platon, and at once resumed the story he had begun.

"And so, brother," he continued, with a smile on his pale emaciated face
and a particularly happy light in his eyes, "you see, brother..."

Pierre had long been familiar with that story. Karataev had told it
to him alone some half-dozen times and always with a specially joyful
emotion. But well as he knew it, Pierre now listened to that tale as to
something new, and the quiet rapture Karataev evidently felt as he told
it communicated itself also to Pierre. The story was of an old merchant
who lived a good and God-fearing life with his family, and who went once
to the Nizhni fair with a companion--a rich merchant.

Having put up at an inn they both went to sleep, and next morning his
companion was found robbed and with his throat cut. A bloodstained knife
was found under the old merchant's pillow. He was tried, knouted, and
his nostrils having been torn off, "all in due form" as Karataev put it,
he was sent to hard labor in Siberia.

"And so, brother" (it was at this point that Pierre came up), "ten years
or more passed by. The old man was living as a convict, submitting as
he should and doing no wrong. Only he prayed to God for death. Well, one
night the convicts were gathered just as we are, with the old man among
them. And they began telling what each was suffering for, and how they
had sinned against God. One told how he had taken a life, another had
taken two, a third had set a house on fire, while another had simply
been a vagrant and had done nothing. So they asked the old man: 'What
are you being punished for, Daddy?'--'I, my dear brothers,' said he, 'am
being punished for my own and other men's sins. But I have not killed
anyone or taken anything that was not mine, but have only helped my
poorer brothers. I was a merchant, my dear brothers, and had much
property. 'And he went on to tell them all about it in due order. 'I
don't grieve for myself,' he says, 'God, it seems, has chastened me.
Only I am sorry for my old wife and the children,' and the old man began
to weep. Now it happened that in the group was the very man who had
killed the other merchant. 'Where did it happen, Daddy?' he said. 'When,
and in what month?' He asked all about it and his heart began to ache.
So he comes up to the old man like this, and falls down at his feet!
'You are perishing because of me, Daddy,' he says. 'It's quite true,
lads, that this man,' he says, 'is being tortured innocently and for
nothing! I,' he says, 'did that deed, and I put the knife under your
head while you were asleep. Forgive me, Daddy,' he says, 'for Christ's
sake!'"

Karataev paused, smiling joyously as he gazed into the fire, and he drew
the logs together.

"And the old man said, 'God will forgive you, we are all sinners in His
sight. I suffer for my own sins,' and he wept bitter tears. Well,
and what do you think, dear friends?" Karataev continued, his face
brightening more and more with a rapturous smile as if what he now had
to tell contained the chief charm and the whole meaning of his story:
"What do you think, dear fellows? That murderer confessed to the
authorities. 'I have taken six lives,' he says (he was a great sinner),
'but what I am most sorry for is this old man. Don't let him suffer
because of me.' So he confessed and it was all written down and the
papers sent off in due form. The place was a long way off, and while
they were judging, what with one thing and another, filling in the
papers all in due form--the authorities I mean--time passed. The affair
reached the Tsar. After a while the Tsar's decree came: to set the
merchant free and give him a compensation that had been awarded. The
paper arrived and they began to look for the old man. 'Where is the old
man who has been suffering innocently and in vain? A paper has come from
the Tsar!' so they began looking for him," here Karataev's lower jaw
trembled, "but God had already forgiven him--he was dead! That's how it
was, dear fellows!" Karataev concluded and sat for a long time silent,
gazing before him with a smile.

And Pierre's soul was dimly but joyfully filled not by the story itself
but by its mysterious significance: by the rapturous joy that lit up
Karataev's face as he told it, and the mystic significance of that joy.





CHAPTER XIV


"A vos places!" * suddenly cried a voice.


    * "To your places."


A pleasant feeling of excitement and an expectation of something
joyful and solemn was aroused among the soldiers of the convoy and the
prisoners. From all sides came shouts of command, and from the left came
smartly dressed cavalrymen on good horses, passing the prisoners at a
trot. The expression on all faces showed the tension people feel at the
approach of those in authority. The prisoners thronged together and were
pushed off the road. The convoy formed up.

"The Emperor! The Emperor! The Marshal! The Duke!" and hardly had the
sleek cavalry passed, before a carriage drawn by six gray horses rattled
by. Pierre caught a glimpse of a man in a three-cornered hat with a
tranquil look on his handsome, plump, white face. It was one of the
marshals. His eye fell on Pierre's large and striking figure, and in
the expression with which he frowned and looked away Pierre thought he
detected sympathy and a desire to conceal that sympathy.

The general in charge of the stores galloped after the carriage with a
red and frightened face, whipping up his skinny horse. Several officers
formed a group and some soldiers crowded round them. Their faces all
looked excited and worried.

"What did he say? What did he say?" Pierre heard them ask.

While the marshal was passing, the prisoners had huddled together in a
crowd, and Pierre saw Karataev whom he had not yet seen that morning.
He sat in his short overcoat leaning against a birch tree. On his face,
besides the look of joyful emotion it had worn yesterday while telling
the tale of the merchant who suffered innocently, there was now an
expression of quiet solemnity.

Karataev looked at Pierre with his kindly round eyes now filled with
tears, evidently wishing him to come near that he might say something to
him. But Pierre was not sufficiently sure of himself. He made as if he
did not notice that look and moved hastily away.

When the prisoners again went forward Pierre looked round. Karataev
was still sitting at the side of the road under the birch tree and two
Frenchmen were talking over his head. Pierre did not look round again
but went limping up the hill.

From behind, where Karataev had been sitting, came the sound of a shot.
Pierre heard it plainly, but at that moment he remembered that he
had not yet finished reckoning up how many stages still remained to
Smolensk--a calculation he had begun before the marshal went by. And
he again started reckoning. Two French soldiers ran past Pierre, one of
whom carried a lowered and smoking gun. They both looked pale, and
in the expression on their faces--one of them glanced timidly at
Pierre--there was something resembling what he had seen on the face of
the young soldier at the execution. Pierre looked at the soldier and
remembered that, two days before, that man had burned his shirt while
drying it at the fire and how they had laughed at him.

Behind him, where Karataev had been sitting, the dog began to howl.
"What a stupid beast! Why is it howling?" thought Pierre.

His comrades, the prisoner soldiers walking beside him, avoided looking
back at the place where the shot had been fired and the dog was howling,
just as Pierre did, but there was a set look on all their faces.





CHAPTER XV


The stores, the prisoners, and the marshal's baggage train stopped at
the village of Shamshevo. The men crowded together round the campfires.
Pierre went up to the fire, ate some roast horseflesh, lay down with his
back to the fire, and immediately fell asleep. He again slept as he had
done at Mozhaysk after the battle of Borodino.

Again real events mingled with dreams and again someone, he or another,
gave expression to his thoughts, and even to the same thoughts that had
been expressed in his dream at Mozhaysk.

"Life is everything. Life is God. Everything changes and moves and that
movement is God. And while there is life there is joy in consciousness
of the divine. To love life is to love God. Harder and more blessed
than all else is to love this life in one's sufferings, in innocent
sufferings."

"Karataev!" came to Pierre's mind.

And suddenly he saw vividly before him a long-forgotten, kindly old man
who had given him geography lessons in Switzerland. "Wait a bit,"
said the old man, and showed Pierre a globe. This globe was alive--a
vibrating ball without fixed dimensions. Its whole surface consisted of
drops closely pressed together, and all these drops moved and changed
places, sometimes several of them merging into one, sometimes one
dividing into many. Each drop tried to spread out and occupy as much
space as possible, but others striving to do the same compressed it,
sometimes destroyed it, and sometimes merged with it.

"That is life," said the old teacher.

"How simple and clear it is," thought Pierre. "How is it I did not know
it before?"

"God is in the midst, and each drop tries to expand so as to reflect
Him to the greatest extent. And it grows, merges, disappears from the
surface, sinks to the depths, and again emerges. There now, Karataev
has spread out and disappeared. Do you understand, my child?" said the
teacher.

"Do you understand, damn you?" shouted a voice, and Pierre woke up.

He lifted himself and sat up. A Frenchman who had just pushed a Russian
soldier away was squatting by the fire, engaged in roasting a piece
of meat stuck on a ramrod. His sleeves were rolled up and his sinewy,
hairy, red hands with their short fingers deftly turned the ramrod. His
brown morose face with frowning brows was clearly visible by the glow of
the charcoal.

"It's all the same to him," he muttered, turning quickly to a soldier
who stood behind him. "Brigand! Get away!"

And twisting the ramrod he looked gloomily at Pierre, who turned
away and gazed into the darkness. A prisoner, the Russian soldier the
Frenchman had pushed away, was sitting near the fire patting something
with his hand. Looking more closely Pierre recognized the blue-gray dog,
sitting beside the soldier, wagging its tail.

"Ah, he's come?" said Pierre. "And Plat-" he began, but did not finish.

Suddenly and simultaneously a crowd of memories awoke in his fancy--of
the look Platon had given him as he sat under the tree, of the shot
heard from that spot, of the dog's howl, of the guilty faces of the two
Frenchmen as they ran past him, of the lowered and smoking gun, and of
Karataev's absence at this halt--and he was on the point of realizing
that Karataev had been killed, but just at that instant, he knew not
why, the recollection came to his mind of a summer evening he had spent
with a beautiful Polish lady on the veranda of his house in Kiev. And
without linking up the events of the day or drawing a conclusion
from them, Pierre closed his eyes, seeing a vision of the country in
summertime mingled with memories of bathing and of the liquid, vibrating
globe, and he sank into water so that it closed over his head.

Before sunrise he was awakened by shouts and loud and rapid firing.
French soldiers were running past him.

"The Cossacks!" one of them shouted, and a moment later a crowd of
Russians surrounded Pierre.

For a long time he could not understand what was happening to him. All
around he heard his comrades sobbing with joy.

"Brothers! Dear fellows! Darlings!" old soldiers exclaimed, weeping, as
they embraced Cossacks and hussars.

The hussars and Cossacks crowded round the prisoners; one offered them
clothes, another boots, and a third bread. Pierre sobbed as he sat
among them and could not utter a word. He hugged the first soldier who
approached him, and kissed him, weeping.

Dolokhov stood at the gate of the ruined house, letting a crowd
of disarmed Frenchmen pass by. The French, excited by all that had
happened, were talking loudly among themselves, but as they passed
Dolokhov who gently switched his boots with his whip and watched them
with cold glassy eyes that boded no good, they became silent. On the
opposite side stood Dolokhov's Cossack, counting the prisoners and
marking off each hundred with a chalk line on the gate.

"How many?" Dolokhov asked the Cossack.

"The second hundred," replied the Cossack.

"Filez, filez!" * Dolokhov kept saying, having adopted this expression
from the French, and when his eyes met those of the prisoners they
flashed with a cruel light.


    * "Get along, get along!"


Denisov, bareheaded and with a gloomy face, walked behind some Cossacks
who were carrying the body of Petya Rostov to a hole that had been dug
in the garden.





CHAPTER XVI


After the twenty-eighth of October when the frosts began, the flight of
the French assumed a still more tragic character, with men freezing,
or roasting themselves to death at the campfires, while carriages
with people dressed in furs continued to drive past, carrying away the
property that had been stolen by the Emperor, kings, and dukes; but
the process of the flight and disintegration of the French army went on
essentially as before.

From Moscow to Vyazma the French army of seventy-three thousand men not
reckoning the Guards (who did nothing during the whole war but pillage)
was reduced to thirty-six thousand, though not more than five thousand
had fallen in battle. From this beginning the succeeding terms of the
progression could be determined mathematically. The French army melted
away and perished at the same rate from Moscow to Vyazma, from Vyazma
to Smolensk, from Smolensk to the Berezina, and from the Berezina to
Vilna--independently of the greater or lesser intensity of the cold,
the pursuit, the barring of the way, or any other particular conditions.
Beyond Vyazma the French army instead of moving in three columns huddled
together into one mass, and so went on to the end. Berthier wrote to his
Emperor (we know how far commanding officers allow themselves to diverge
from the truth in describing the condition of an army) and this is what
he said:


I deem it my duty to report to Your Majesty the condition of the various
corps I have had occasion to observe during different stages of the last
two or three days' march. They are almost disbanded. Scarcely a quarter
of the soldiers remain with the standards of their regiments, the others
go off by themselves in different directions hoping to find food and
escape discipline. In general they regard Smolensk as the place where
they hope to recover. During the last few days many of the men have been
seen to throw away their cartridges and their arms. In such a state
of affairs, whatever your ultimate plans may be, the interest of Your
Majesty's service demands that the army should be rallied at Smolensk
and should first of all be freed from ineffectives, such as dismounted
cavalry, unnecessary baggage, and artillery material that is no longer
in proportion to the present forces. The soldiers, who are worn out with
hunger and fatigue, need these supplies as well as a few days' rest.
Many have died these last days on the road or at the bivouacs. This
state of things is continually becoming worse and makes one fear that
unless a prompt remedy is applied the troops will no longer be under
control in case of an engagement.

November 9: twenty miles from Smolensk.


After staggering into Smolensk which seemed to them a promised land, the
French, searching for food, killed one another, sacked their own stores,
and when everything had been plundered fled farther.

They all went without knowing whither or why they were going. Still less
did that genius, Napoleon, know it, for no one issued any orders to
him. But still he and those about him retained their old habits: wrote
commands, letters, reports, and orders of the day; called one another
sire, mon cousin, prince d'Eckmuhl, roi de Naples, and so on. But these
orders and reports were only on paper, nothing in them was acted upon
for they could not be carried out, and though they entitled one
another Majesties, Highnesses, or Cousins, they all felt that they were
miserable wretches who had done much evil for which they had now to
pay. And though they pretended to be concerned about the army, each
was thinking only of himself and of how to get away quickly and save
himself.





CHAPTER XVII


The movements of the Russian and French armies during the campaign
from Moscow back to the Niemen were like those in a game of Russian
blindman's bluff, in which two players are blindfolded and one of
them occasionally rings a little bell to inform the catcher of his
whereabouts. First he rings his bell fearlessly, but when he gets into
a tight place he runs away as quietly as he can, and often thinking to
escape runs straight into his opponent's arms.

At first while they were still moving along the Kaluga road, Napoleon's
armies made their presence known, but later when they reached the
Smolensk road they ran holding the clapper of their bell tight--and
often thinking they were escaping ran right into the Russians.

Owing to the rapidity of the French flight and the Russian pursuit
and the consequent exhaustion of the horses, the chief means
of approximately ascertaining the enemy's position--by cavalry
scouting--was not available. Besides, as a result of the frequent
and rapid change of position by each army, even what information was
obtained could not be delivered in time. If news was received one day
that the enemy had been in a certain position the day before, by the
third day when something could have been done, that army was already two
days' march farther on and in quite another position.

One army fled and the other pursued. Beyond Smolensk there were several
different roads available for the French, and one would have thought
that during their stay of four days they might have learned where
the enemy was, might have arranged some more advantageous plan and
undertaken something new. But after a four days' halt the mob, with no
maneuvers or plans, again began running along the beaten track, neither
to the right nor to the left but along the old--the worst--road, through
Krasnoe and Orsha.

Expecting the enemy from behind and not in front, the French separated
in their flight and spread out over a distance of twenty-four hours. In
front of them all fled the Emperor, then the kings, then the dukes. The
Russian army, expecting Napoleon to take the road to the right
beyond the Dnieper--which was the only reasonable thing for him to
do--themselves turned to the right and came out onto the highroad at
Krasnoe. And here as in a game of blindman's buff the French ran into
our vanguard. Seeing their enemy unexpectedly the French fell into
confusion and stopped short from the sudden fright, but then they
resumed their flight, abandoning their comrades who were farther behind.
Then for three days separate portions of the French army--first Murat's
(the vice-king's), then Davout's, and then Ney's--ran, as it were, the
gauntlet of the Russian army. They abandoned one another, abandoned
all their heavy baggage, their artillery, and half their men, and fled,
getting past the Russians by night by making semicircles to the right.

Ney, who came last, had been busying himself blowing up the walls of
Smolensk which were in nobody's way, because despite the unfortunate
plight of the French or because of it, they wished to punish the floor
against which they had hurt themselves. Ney, who had had a corps of ten
thousand men, reached Napoleon at Orsha with only one thousand men left,
having abandoned all the rest and all his cannon, and having crossed the
Dnieper at night by stealth at a wooded spot.

From Orsha they fled farther along the road to Vilna, still playing
at blindman's buff with the pursuing army. At the Berezina they again
became disorganized, many were drowned and many surrendered, but those
who got across the river fled farther. Their supreme chief donned a
fur coat and, having seated himself in a sleigh, galloped on alone,
abandoning his companions. The others who could do so drove away too,
leaving those who could not to surrender or die.





CHAPTER XVIII


This campaign consisted in a flight of the French during which they did
all they could to destroy themselves. From the time they turned onto
the Kaluga road to the day their leader fled from the army, none of the
movements of the crowd had any sense. So one might have thought that
regarding this period of the campaign the historians, who attributed
the actions of the mass to the will of one man, would have found it
impossible to make the story of the retreat fit their theory. But
no! Mountains of books have been written by the historians about this
campaign, and everywhere are described Napoleon's arrangements, the
maneuvers, and his profound plans which guided the army, as well as the
military genius shown by his marshals.

The retreat from Malo-Yaroslavets when he had a free road into a
well-supplied district and the parallel road was open to him along
which Kutuzov afterwards pursued him--this unnecessary retreat along
a devastated road--is explained to us as being due to profound
considerations. Similarly profound considerations are given for
his retreat from Smolensk to Orsha. Then his heroism at Krasnoe is
described, where he is reported to have been prepared to accept battle
and take personal command, and to have walked about with a birch stick
and said:

"J'ai assez fait l'empereur; il est temps de faire le general," * but
nevertheless immediately ran away again, abandoning to its fate the
scattered fragments of the army he left behind.


     * "I have acted the Emperor long enough; it is time to act
     the general."


Then we are told of the greatness of soul of the marshals, especially
of Ney--a greatness of soul consisting in this: that he made his way by
night around through the forest and across the Dnieper and escaped to
Orsha, abandoning standards, artillery, and nine tenths of his men.

And lastly, the final departure of the great Emperor from his heroic
army is presented to us by the historians as something great and
characteristic of genius. Even that final running away, described in
ordinary language as the lowest depth of baseness which every child
is taught to be ashamed of--even that act finds justification in the
historians' language.

When it is impossible to stretch the very elastic threads of historical
ratiocination any farther, when actions are clearly contrary to all
that humanity calls right or even just, the historians produce a saving
conception of "greatness." "Greatness," it seems, excludes the standards
of right and wrong. For the "great" man nothing is wrong, there is no
atrocity for which a "great" man can be blamed.

"C'est grand!" * say the historians, and there no longer exists either
good or evil but only "grand" and "not grand." Grand is good, not
grand is bad. Grand is the characteristic, in their conception, of some
special animals called "heroes." And Napoleon, escaping home in a warm
fur coat and leaving to perish those who were not merely his comrades
but were (in his opinion) men he had brought there, feels que c'est
grand, *(2) and his soul is tranquil.


     * "It is great."

     * (2) That it is great.


"Du sublime (he saw something sublime in himself) au ridicule il n'y
a qu'un pas," * said he. And the whole world for fifty years has been
repeating: "Sublime! Grand! Napoleon le Grand!" Du sublime au ridicule
il n'y a qu'un pas.


    * "From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step."


And it occurs to no one that to admit a greatness not commensurable with
the standard of right and wrong is merely to admit one's own nothingness
and immeasurable meanness.

For us with the standard of good and evil given us by Christ, no human
actions are incommensurable. And there is no greatness where simplicity,
goodness, and truth are absent.





CHAPTER XIX


What Russian, reading the account of the last part of the campaign
of 1812, has not experienced an uncomfortable feeling of regret,
dissatisfaction, and perplexity? Who has not asked himself how it is
that the French were not all captured or destroyed when our three armies
surrounded them in superior numbers, when the disordered French, hungry
and freezing, surrendered in crowds, and when (as the historians relate)
the aim of the Russians was to stop the French, to cut them off, and
capture them all?

How was it that the Russian army, which when numerically weaker than the
French had given battle at Borodino, did not achieve its purpose when it
had surrounded the French on three sides and when its aim was to capture
them? Can the French be so enormously superior to us that when we had
surrounded them with superior forces we could not beat them? How could
that happen?

History (or what is called by that name) replying to these questions
says that this occurred because Kutuzov and Tormasov and Chichagov, and
this man and that man, did not execute such and such maneuvers...

But why did they not execute those maneuvers? And why if they were
guilty of not carrying out a prearranged plan were they not tried and
punished? But even if we admitted that Kutuzov, Chichagov, and others
were the cause of the Russian failures, it is still incomprehensible
why, the position of the Russian army being what it was at Krasnoe and
at the Berezina (in both cases we had superior forces), the French army
with its marshals, kings, and Emperor was not captured, if that was what
the Russians aimed at.

The explanation of this strange fact given by Russian military
historians (to the effect that Kutuzov hindered an attack) is unfounded,
for we know that he could not restrain the troops from attacking at
Vyazma and Tarutino.

Why was the Russian army--which with inferior forces had withstood the
enemy in full strength at Borodino--defeated at Krasnoe and the Berezina
by the disorganized crowds of the French when it was numerically
superior?

If the aim of the Russians consisted in cutting off and capturing
Napoleon and his marshals--and that aim was not merely frustrated but
all attempts to attain it were most shamefully baffled--then this last
period of the campaign is quite rightly considered by the French to be a
series of victories, and quite wrongly considered victorious by Russian
historians.

The Russian military historians in so far as they submit to claims
of logic must admit that conclusion, and in spite of their lyrical
rhapsodies about valor, devotion, and so forth, must reluctantly admit
that the French retreat from Moscow was a series of victories for
Napoleon and defeats for Kutuzov.

But putting national vanity entirely aside one feels that such a
conclusion involves a contradiction, since the series of French
victories brought the French complete destruction, while the series
of Russian defeats led to the total destruction of their enemy and the
liberation of their country.

The source of this contradiction lies in the fact that the historians
studying the events from the letters of the sovereigns and the generals,
from memoirs, reports, projects, and so forth, have attributed to this
last period of the war of 1812 an aim that never existed, namely that of
cutting off and capturing Napoleon with his marshals and his army.

There never was or could have been such an aim, for it would have been
senseless and its attainment quite impossible.

It would have been senseless, first because Napoleon's disorganized
army was flying from Russia with all possible speed, that is to say, was
doing just what every Russian desired. So what was the use of performing
various operations on the French who were running away as fast as they
possibly could?

Secondly, it would have been senseless to block the passage of men whose
whole energy was directed to flight.

Thirdly, it would have been senseless to sacrifice one's own troops in
order to destroy the French army, which without external interference
was destroying itself at such a rate that, though its path was not
blocked, it could not carry across the frontier more than it actually
did in December, namely a hundredth part of the original army.

Fourthly, it would have been senseless to wish to take captive the
Emperor, kings, and dukes--whose capture would have been in the highest
degree embarrassing for the Russians, as the most adroit diplomatists of
the time (Joseph de Maistre and others) recognized. Still more senseless
would have been the wish to capture army corps of the French, when our
own army had melted away to half before reaching Krasnoe and a whole
division would have been needed to convoy the corps of prisoners, and
when our men were not always getting full rations and the prisoners
already taken were perishing of hunger.

All the profound plans about cutting off and capturing Napoleon and his
army were like the plan of a market gardener who, when driving out of
his garden a cow that had trampled down the beds he had planted, should
run to the gate and hit the cow on the head. The only thing to be said
in excuse of that gardener would be that he was very angry. But not even
that could be said for those who drew up this project, for it was not
they who had suffered from the trampled beds.

But besides the fact that cutting off Napoleon with his army would have
been senseless, it was impossible.

It was impossible first because--as experience shows that a three-mile
movement of columns on a battlefield never coincides with the plans--the
probability of Chichagov, Kutuzov, and Wittgenstein effecting a junction
on time at an appointed place was so remote as to be tantamount to
impossibility, as in fact thought Kutuzov, who when he received the plan
remarked that diversions planned over great distances do not yield the
desired results.

Secondly it was impossible, because to paralyze the momentum with which
Napoleon's army was retiring, incomparably greater forces than the
Russians possessed would have been required.

Thirdly it was impossible, because the military term "to cut off" has no
meaning. One can cut off a slice of bread, but not an army. To cut
off an army--to bar its road--is quite impossible, for there is always
plenty of room to avoid capture and there is the night when nothing can
be seen, as the military scientists might convince themselves by the
example of Krasnoe and of the Berezina. It is only possible to capture
prisoners if they agree to be captured, just as it is only possible
to catch a swallow if it settles on one's hand. Men can only be taken
prisoners if they surrender according to the rules of strategy and
tactics, as the Germans did. But the French troops quite rightly did not
consider that this suited them, since death by hunger and cold awaited
them in flight or captivity alike.

Fourthly and chiefly it was impossible, because never since the world
began has a war been fought under such conditions as those that obtained
in 1812, and the Russian army in its pursuit of the French strained its
strength to the utmost and could not have done more without destroying
itself.

During the movement of the Russian army from Tarutino to Krasnoe it
lost fifty thousand sick or stragglers, that is a number equal to the
population of a large provincial town. Half the men fell out of the army
without a battle.

And it is of this period of the campaign--when the army lacked boots
and sheepskin coats, was short of provisions and without vodka, and
was camping out at night for months in the snow with fifteen degrees
of frost, when there were only seven or eight hours of daylight and
the rest was night in which the influence of discipline cannot be
maintained, when men were taken into that region of death where
discipline fails, not for a few hours only as in a battle, but for
months, where they were every moment fighting death from hunger and
cold, when half the army perished in a single month--it is of this
period of the campaign that the historians tell us how Miloradovich
should have made a flank march to such and such a place, Tormasov to
another place, and Chichagov should have crossed (more than knee-deep
in snow) to somewhere else, and how so-and-so "routed" and "cut off" the
French and so on and so on.

The Russians, half of whom died, did all that could and should have been
done to attain an end worthy of the nation, and they are not to blame
because other Russians, sitting in warm rooms, proposed that they should
do what was impossible.

All that strange contradiction now difficult to understand between the
facts and the historical accounts only arises because the historians
dealing with the matter have written the history of the beautiful words
and sentiments of various generals, and not the history of the events.

To them the words of Miloradovich seem very interesting, and so do their
surmises and the rewards this or that general received; but the question
of those fifty thousand men who were left in hospitals and in graves
does not even interest them, for it does not come within the range of
their investigation.

Yet one need only discard the study of the reports and general plans and
consider the movement of those hundreds of thousands of men who took a
direct part in the events, and all the questions that seemed insoluble
easily and simply receive an immediate and certain solution.

The aim of cutting off Napoleon and his army never existed except in
the imaginations of a dozen people. It could not exist because it was
senseless and unattainable.

The people had a single aim: to free their land from invasion. That aim
was attained in the first place of itself, as the French ran away,
and so it was only necessary not to stop their flight. Secondly it was
attained by the guerrilla warfare which was destroying the French, and
thirdly by the fact that a large Russian army was following the French,
ready to use its strength in case their movement stopped.

The Russian army had to act like a whip to a running animal. And the
experienced driver knew it was better to hold the whip raised as a
menace than to strike the running animal on the head.





BOOK FIFTEEN: 1812 - 13





CHAPTER I


When seeing a dying animal a man feels a sense of horror: substance
similar to his own is perishing before his eyes. But when it is a
beloved and intimate human being that is dying, besides this horror at
the extinction of life there is a severance, a spiritual wound, which
like a physical wound is sometimes fatal and sometimes heals, but always
aches and shrinks at any external irritating touch.

After Prince Andrew's death Natasha and Princess Mary alike felt this.
Drooping in spirit and closing their eyes before the menacing cloud of
death that overhung them, they dared not look life in the face. They
carefully guarded their open wounds from any rough and painful contact.
Everything: a carriage passing rapidly in the street, a summons to
dinner, the maid's inquiry what dress to prepare, or worse still any
word of insincere or feeble sympathy, seemed an insult, painfully
irritated the wound, interrupting that necessary quiet in which
they both tried to listen to the stern and dreadful choir that still
resounded in their imagination, and hindered their gazing into those
mysterious limitless vistas that for an instant had opened out before
them.

Only when alone together were they free from such outrage and pain.
They spoke little even to one another, and when they did it was of very
unimportant matters.

Both avoided any allusion to the future. To admit the possibility of
a future seemed to them to insult his memory. Still more carefully did
they avoid anything relating to him who was dead. It seemed to them that
what they had lived through and experienced could not be expressed in
words, and that any reference to the details of his life infringed the
majesty and sacredness of the mystery that had been accomplished before
their eyes.

Continued abstention from speech, and constant avoidance of everything
that might lead up to the subject--this halting on all sides at the
boundary of what they might not mention--brought before their minds with
still greater purity and clearness what they were both feeling.

But pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.
Princess Mary, in her position as absolute and independent arbiter of
her own fate and guardian and instructor of her nephew, was the first to
be called back to life from that realm of sorrow in which she had dwelt
for the first fortnight. She received letters from her relations to
which she had to reply; the room in which little Nicholas had been put
was damp and he began to cough; Alpatych came to Yaroslavl with reports
on the state of their affairs and with advice and suggestions that they
should return to Moscow to the house on the Vozdvizhenka Street, which
had remained uninjured and needed only slight repairs. Life did not
stand still and it was necessary to live. Hard as it was for Princess
Mary to emerge from the realm of secluded contemplation in which she
had lived till then, and sorry and almost ashamed as she felt to leave
Natasha alone, yet the cares of life demanded her attention and she
involuntarily yielded to them. She went through the accounts with
Alpatych, conferred with Dessalles about her nephew, and gave orders and
made preparations for the journey to Moscow.

Natasha remained alone and, from the time Princess Mary began making
preparations for departure, held aloof from her too.

Princess Mary asked the countess to let Natasha go with her to Moscow,
and both parents gladly accepted this offer, for they saw their daughter
losing strength every day and thought that a change of scene and the
advice of Moscow doctors would be good for her.

"I am not going anywhere," Natasha replied when this was proposed to
her. "Do please just leave me alone!" And she ran out of the room, with
difficulty refraining from tears of vexation and irritation rather than
of sorrow.

After she felt herself deserted by Princes Mary and alone in her grief,
Natasha spent most of the time in her room by herself, sitting huddled
up feet and all in the corner of the sofa, tearing and twisting
something with her slender nervous fingers and gazing intently and
fixedly at whatever her eyes chanced to fall on. This solitude exhausted
and tormented her but she was in absolute need of it. As soon as anyone
entered she got up quickly, changed her position and expression, and
picked up a book or some sewing, evidently waiting impatiently for the
intruder to go.

She felt all the time as if she might at any moment penetrate that
on which--with a terrible questioning too great for her strength--her
spiritual gaze was fixed.

One day toward the end of December Natasha, pale and thin, dressed in a
black woolen gown, her plaited hair negligently twisted into a knot, was
crouched feet and all in the corner of her sofa, nervously crumpling and
smoothing out the end of her sash while she looked at a corner of the
door.

She was gazing in the direction in which he had gone--to the other side
of life. And that other side of life, of which she had never before
thought and which had formerly seemed to her so far away and improbable,
was now nearer and more akin and more comprehensible than this side of
life, where everything was either emptiness and desolation or suffering
and indignity.

She was gazing where she knew him to be; but she could not imagine him
otherwise than as he had been here. She now saw him again as he had been
at Mytishchi, at Troitsa, and at Yaroslavl.

She saw his face, heard his voice, repeated his words and her own, and
sometimes devised other words they might have spoken.

There he is lying back in an armchair in his velvet cloak, leaning
his head on his thin pale hand. His chest is dreadfully hollow and his
shoulders raised. His lips are firmly closed, his eyes glitter, and a
wrinkle comes and goes on his pale forehead. One of his legs twitches
just perceptibly, but rapidly. Natasha knows that he is struggling with
terrible pain. "What is that pain like? Why does he have that pain? What
does he feel? How does it hurt him?" thought Natasha. He noticed her
watching him, raised his eyes, and began to speak seriously:

"One thing would be terrible," said he: "to bind oneself forever to a
suffering man. It would be continual torture." And he looked searchingly
at her. Natasha as usual answered before she had time to think what
she would say. She said: "This can't go on--it won't. You will get
well--quite well."

She now saw him from the commencement of that scene and relived what she
had then felt. She recalled his long sad and severe look at those words
and understood the meaning of the rebuke and despair in that protracted
gaze.

"I agreed," Natasha now said to herself, "that it would be dreadful if
he always continued to suffer. I said it then only because it would have
been dreadful for him, but he understood it differently. He thought it
would be dreadful for me. He then still wished to live and feared death.
And I said it so awkwardly and stupidly! I did not say what I meant.
I thought quite differently. Had I said what I thought, I should have
said: even if he had to go on dying, to die continually before my eyes,
I should have been happy compared with what I am now. Now there is
nothing... nobody. Did he know that? No, he did not and never will know
it. And now it will never, never be possible to put it right." And
now he again seemed to be saying the same words to her, only in her
imagination Natasha this time gave him a different answer. She stopped
him and said: "Terrible for you, but not for me! You know that for me
there is nothing in life but you, and to suffer with you is the greatest
happiness for me," and he took her hand and pressed it as he had
pressed it that terrible evening four days before his death. And in her
imagination she said other tender and loving words which she might have
said then but only spoke now: "I love thee!... thee! I love, love..."
she said, convulsively pressing her hands and setting her teeth with a
desperate effort...

She was overcome by sweet sorrow and tears were already rising in her
eyes; then she suddenly asked herself to whom she was saying this.
Again everything was shrouded in hard, dry perplexity, and again with a
strained frown she peered toward the world where he was. And now, now
it seemed to her she was penetrating the mystery.... But at the instant
when it seemed that the incomprehensible was revealing itself to her a
loud rattle of the door handle struck painfully on her ears. Dunyasha,
her maid, entered the room quickly and abruptly with a frightened look
on her face and showing no concern for her mistress.

"Come to your Papa at once, please!" said she with a strange, excited
look. "A misfortune... about Peter Ilynich... a letter," she finished
with a sob.





CHAPTER II


Besides a feeling of aloofness from everybody Natasha was feeling
a special estrangement from the members of her own family. All of
them--her father, mother, and Sonya--were so near to her, so familiar,
so commonplace, that all their words and feelings seemed an insult to
the world in which she had been living of late, and she felt not
merely indifferent to them but regarded them with hostility. She heard
Dunyasha's words about Peter Ilynich and a misfortune, but did not grasp
them.

"What misfortune? What misfortune can happen to them? They just live
their own old, quiet, and commonplace life," thought Natasha.

As she entered the ballroom her father was hurriedly coming out of
her mother's room. His face was puckered up and wet with tears. He
had evidently run out of that room to give vent to the sobs that were
choking him. When he saw Natasha he waved his arms despairingly and
burst into convulsively painful sobs that distorted his soft round face.

"Pe... Petya... Go, go, she... is calling..." and weeping like a child
and quickly shuffling on his feeble legs to a chair, he almost fell into
it, covering his face with his hands.

Suddenly an electric shock seemed to run through Natasha's whole being.
Terrible anguish struck her heart, she felt a dreadful ache as if
something was being torn inside her and she were dying. But the pain
was immediately followed by a feeling of release from the oppressive
constraint that had prevented her taking part in life. The sight of her
father, the terribly wild cries of her mother that she heard through the
door, made her immediately forget herself and her own grief.

She ran to her father, but he feebly waved his arm, pointing to her
mother's door. Princess Mary, pale and with quivering chin, came out
from that room and taking Natasha by the arm said something to her.
Natasha neither saw nor heard her. She went in with rapid steps, pausing
at the door for an instant as if struggling with herself, and then ran
to her mother.

The countess was lying in an armchair in a strange and awkward position,
stretching out and beating her head against the wall. Sonya and the
maids were holding her arms.

"Natasha! Natasha!..." cried the countess. "It's not true... it's not
true... He's lying... Natasha!" she shrieked, pushing those around her
away. "Go away, all of you; it's not true! Killed!... ha, ha, ha!...
It's not true!"

Natasha put one knee on the armchair, stooped over her mother, embraced
her, and with unexpected strength raised her, turned her face toward
herself, and clung to her.

"Mummy!... darling!... I am here, my dearest Mummy," she kept on
whispering, not pausing an instant.

She did not let go of her mother but struggled tenderly with her,
demanded a pillow and hot water, and unfastened and tore open her
mother's dress.

"My dearest darling... Mummy, my precious!..." she whispered
incessantly, kissing her head, her hands, her face, and feeling her own
irrepressible and streaming tears tickling her nose and cheeks.

The countess pressed her daughter's hand, closed her eyes, and became
quiet for a moment. Suddenly she sat up with unaccustomed swiftness,
glanced vacantly around her, and seeing Natasha began to press her
daughter's head with all her strength. Then she turned toward her
daughter's face which was wincing with pain and gazed long at it.

"Natasha, you love me?" she said in a soft trustful whisper. "Natasha,
you would not deceive me? You'll tell me the whole truth?"

Natasha looked at her with eyes full of tears and in her look there was
nothing but love and an entreaty for forgiveness.

"My darling Mummy!" she repeated, straining all the power of her love to
find some way of taking on herself the excess of grief that crushed her
mother.

And again in a futile struggle with reality her mother, refusing to
believe that she could live when her beloved boy was killed in the bloom
of life, escaped from reality into a world of delirium.

Natasha did not remember how that day passed nor that night, nor the
next day and night. She did not sleep and did not leave her mother. Her
persevering and patient love seemed completely to surround the countess
every moment, not explaining or consoling, but recalling her to life.

During the third night the countess kept very quiet for a few minutes,
and Natasha rested her head on the arm of her chair and closed her eyes,
but opened them again on hearing the bedstead creak. The countess was
sitting up in bed and speaking softly.

"How glad I am you have come. You are tired. Won't you have some tea?"
Natasha went up to her. "You have improved in looks and grown more
manly," continued the countess, taking her daughter's hand.

"Mamma! What are you saying..."

"Natasha, he is no more, no more!"

And embracing her daughter, the countess began to weep for the first
time.





CHAPTER III


Princess Mary postponed her departure. Sonya and the count tried to
replace Natasha but could not. They saw that she alone was able to
restrain her mother from unreasoning despair. For three weeks Natasha
remained constantly at her mother's side, sleeping on a lounge chair
in her room, making her eat and drink, and talking to her incessantly
because the mere sound of her tender, caressing tones soothed her
mother.

The mother's wounded spirit could not heal. Petya's death had torn from
her half her life. When the news of Petya's death had come she had been
a fresh and vigorous woman of fifty, but a month later she left her room
a listless old woman taking no interest in life. But the same blow that
almost killed the countess, this second blow, restored Natasha to life.

A spiritual wound produced by a rending of the spiritual body is like
a physical wound and, strange as it may seem, just as a deep wound may
heal and its edges join, physical and spiritual wounds alike can yet
heal completely only as the result of a vital force from within.

Natasha's wound healed in that way. She thought her life was ended,
but her love for her mother unexpectedly showed her that the essence of
life--love--was still active within her. Love awoke and so did life.

Prince Andrew's last days had bound Princess Mary and Natasha together;
this new sorrow brought them still closer to one another. Princess Mary
put off her departure, and for three weeks looked after Natasha as if
she had been a sick child. The last weeks passed in her mother's bedroom
had strained Natasha's physical strength.

One afternoon noticing Natasha shivering with fever, Princess Mary took
her to her own room and made her lie down on the bed. Natasha lay down,
but when Princess Mary had drawn the blinds and was going away she
called her back.

"I don't want to sleep, Mary, sit by me a little."

"You are tired--try to sleep."

"No, no. Why did you bring me away? She will be asking for me."

"She is much better. She spoke so well today," said Princess Mary.

Natasha lay on the bed and in the semidarkness of the room scanned
Princess Mary's face.

"Is she like him?" thought Natasha. "Yes, like and yet not like. But she
is quite original, strange, new, and unknown. And she loves me. What
is in her heart? All that is good. But how? What is her mind like? What
does she think about me? Yes, she is splendid!"

"Mary," she said timidly, drawing Princess Mary's hand to herself,
"Mary, you mustn't think me wicked. No? Mary darling, how I love you!
Let us be quite, quite friends."

And Natasha, embracing her, began kissing her face and hands, making
Princess Mary feel shy but happy by this demonstration of her feelings.

From that day a tender and passionate friendship such as exists only
between women was established between Princess Mary and Natasha. They
were continually kissing and saying tender things to one another and
spent most of their time together. When one went out the other became
restless and hastened to rejoin her. Together they felt more in harmony
with one another than either of them felt with herself when alone. A
feeling stronger than friendship sprang up between them; an exclusive
feeling of life being possible only in each other's presence.

Sometimes they were silent for hours; sometimes after they were already
in bed they would begin talking and go on till morning. They spoke most
of what was long past. Princess Mary spoke of her childhood, of her
mother, her father, and her daydreams; and Natasha, who with a passive
lack of understanding had formerly turned away from that life of
devotion, submission, and the poetry of Christian self-sacrifice, now
feeling herself bound to Princess Mary by affection, learned to love her
past too and to understand a side of life previously incomprehensible to
her. She did not think of applying submission and self-abnegation to her
own life, for she was accustomed to seek other joys, but she understood
and loved in another those previously incomprehensible virtues. For
Princess Mary, listening to Natasha's tales of childhood and early
youth, there also opened out a new and hitherto uncomprehended side of
life: belief in life and its enjoyment.

Just as before, they never mentioned him so as not to lower (as they
thought) their exalted feelings by words; but this silence about him had
the effect of making them gradually begin to forget him without being
conscious of it.

Natasha had grown thin and pale and physically so weak that they all
talked about her health, and this pleased her. But sometimes she was
suddenly overcome by fear not only of death but of sickness, weakness,
and loss of good looks, and involuntarily she examined her bare arm
carefully, surprised at its thinness, and in the morning noticed her
drawn and, as it seemed to her, piteous face in her glass. It seemed to
her that things must be so, and yet it was dreadfully sad.

One day she went quickly upstairs and found herself out of breath.
Unconsciously she immediately invented a reason for going down, and
then, testing her strength, ran upstairs again, observing the result.

Another time when she called Dunyasha her voice trembled, so she called
again--though she could hear Dunyasha coming--called her in the deep
chest tones in which she had been wont to sing, and listened attentively
to herself.

She did not know and would not have believed it, but beneath the layer
of slime that covered her soul and seemed to her impenetrable, delicate
young shoots of grass were already sprouting, which taking root would so
cover with their living verdure the grief that weighed her down that
it would soon no longer be seen or noticed. The wound had begun to heal
from within.

At the end of January Princess Mary left for Moscow, and the count
insisted on Natasha's going with her to consult the doctors.





CHAPTER IV


After the encounter at Vyazma, where Kutuzov had been unable to hold
back his troops in their anxiety to overwhelm and cut off the enemy and
so on, the farther movement of the fleeing French, and of the Russians
who pursued them, continued as far as Krasnoe without a battle. The
flight was so rapid that the Russian army pursuing the French could
not keep up with them; cavalry and artillery horses broke down, and the
information received of the movements of the French was never reliable.

The men in the Russian army were so worn out by this continuous marching
at the rate of twenty-seven miles a day that they could not go any
faster.

To realize the degree of exhaustion of the Russian army it is only
necessary to grasp clearly the meaning of the fact that, while not
losing more than five thousand killed and wounded after Tarutino and
less than a hundred prisoners, the Russian army which left that place a
hundred thousand strong reached Krasnoe with only fifty thousand.

The rapidity of the Russian pursuit was just as destructive to our army
as the flight of the French was to theirs. The only difference was that
the Russian army moved voluntarily, with no such threat of destruction
as hung over the French, and that the sick Frenchmen were left behind
in enemy hands while the sick Russians left behind were among their
own people. The chief cause of the wastage of Napoleon's army was
the rapidity of its movement, and a convincing proof of this is the
corresponding decrease of the Russian army.

Kutuzov as far as was in his power, instead of trying to check the
movement of the French as was desired in Petersburg and by the Russian
army generals, directed his whole activity here, as he had done at
Tarutino and Vyazma, to hastening it on while easing the movement of our
army.

But besides this, since the exhaustion and enormous diminution of the
army caused by the rapidity of the advance had become evident, another
reason for slackening the pace and delaying presented itself to Kutuzov.
The aim of the Russian army was to pursue the French. The road the
French would take was unknown, and so the closer our troops trod on
their heels the greater distance they had to cover. Only by following
at some distance could one cut across the zigzag path of the French. All
the artful maneuvers suggested by our generals meant fresh movements of
the army and a lengthening of its marches, whereas the only reasonable
aim was to shorten those marches. To that end Kutuzov's activity was
directed during the whole campaign from Moscow to Vilna--not casually or
intermittently but so consistently that he never once deviated from it.

Kutuzov felt and knew--not by reasoning or science but with the whole of
his Russian being--what every Russian soldier felt: that the French were
beaten, that the enemy was flying and must be driven out; but at the
same time he like the soldiers realized all the hardship of this march,
the rapidity of which was unparalleled for such a time of the year.

But to the generals, especially the foreign ones in the Russian army,
who wished to distinguish themselves, to astonish somebody, and for some
reason to capture a king or a duke--it seemed that now--when any battle
must be horrible and senseless--was the very time to fight and conquer
somebody. Kutuzov merely shrugged his shoulders when one after
another they presented projects of maneuvers to be made with those
soldiers--ill-shod, insufficiently clad, and half starved--who within a
month and without fighting a battle had dwindled to half their number,
and who at the best if the flight continued would have to go a greater
distance than they had already traversed, before they reached the
frontier.

This longing to distinguish themselves, to maneuver, to overthrow, and
to cut off showed itself particularly whenever the Russians stumbled on
the French army.

So it was at Krasnoe, where they expected to find one of the three
French columns and stumbled instead on Napoleon himself with sixteen
thousand men. Despite all Kutuzov's efforts to avoid that ruinous
encounter and to preserve his troops, the massacre of the broken mob
of French soldiers by worn-out Russians continued at Krasnoe for three
days.

Toll wrote a disposition: "The first column will march to so and so,"
etc. And as usual nothing happened in accord with the disposition.
Prince Eugene of Wurttemberg fired from a hill over the French crowds
that were running past, and demanded reinforcements which did not
arrive. The French, avoiding the Russians, dispersed and hid themselves
in the forest by night, making their way round as best they could, and
continued their flight.

Miloradovich, who said he did not want to know anything about the
commissariat affairs of his detachment, and could never be found when
he was wanted--that chevalier sans peur et sans reproche * as he styled
himself--who was fond of parleys with the French, sent envoys demanding
their surrender, wasted time, and did not do what he was ordered to do.


    * Knight without fear and without reproach.


"I give you that column, lads," he said, riding up to the troops and
pointing out the French to the cavalry.

And the cavalry, with spurs and sabers urging on horses that could
scarcely move, trotted with much effort to the column presented
to them--that is to say, to a crowd of Frenchmen stark with cold,
frost-bitten, and starving--and the column that had been presented to
them threw down its arms and surrendered as it had long been anxious to
do.

At Krasnoe they took twenty-six thousand prisoners, several hundred
cannon, and a stick called a "marshal's staff," and disputed as to
who had distinguished himself and were pleased with their
achievement--though they much regretted not having taken Napoleon, or at
least a marshal or a hero of some sort, and reproached one another and
especially Kutuzov for having failed to do so.

These men, carried away by their passions, were but blind tools of the
most melancholy law of necessity, but considered themselves heroes and
imagined that they were accomplishing a most noble and honorable
deed. They blamed Kutuzov and said that from the very beginning of the
campaign he had prevented their vanquishing Napoleon, that he thought of
nothing but satisfying his passions and would not advance from the Linen
Factories because he was comfortable there, that at Krasnoe he checked
the advance because on learning that Napoleon was there he had quite
lost his head, and that it was probable that he had an understanding
with Napoleon and had been bribed by him, and so on, and so on.

Not only did his contemporaries, carried away by their passions, talk
in this way, but posterity and history have acclaimed Napoleon as grand,
while Kutuzov is described by foreigners as a crafty, dissolute, weak
old courtier, and by Russians as something indefinite--a sort of puppet
useful only because he had a Russian name.





CHAPTER V


In 1812 and 1813 Kutuzov was openly accused of blundering. The Emperor
was dissatisfied with him. And in a history recently written by order
of the Highest Authorities it is said that Kutuzov was a cunning court
liar, frightened of the name of Napoleon, and that by his blunders at
Krasnoe and the Berezina he deprived the Russian army of the glory of
complete victory over the French. *


     * History of the year 1812. The character of Kutuzov and
     reflections on the unsatisfactory results of the battles at
     Krasnoe, by Bogdanovich.


Such is the fate not of great men (grands hommes) whom the Russian mind
does not acknowledge, but of those rare and always solitary individuals
who, discerning the will of Providence, submit their personal will to
it. The hatred and contempt of the crowd punish such men for discerning
the higher laws.

For Russian historians, strange and terrible to say, Napoleon--that most
insignificant tool of history who never anywhere, even in exile, showed
human dignity--Napoleon is the object of adulation and enthusiasm; he
is grand. But Kutuzov--the man who from the beginning to the end of his
activity in 1812, never once swerving by word or deed from Borodino to
Vilna, presented an example exceptional in history of self-sacrifice
and a present consciousness of the future importance of what was
happening--Kutuzov seems to them something indefinite and pitiful, and
when speaking of him and of the year 1812 they always seem a little
ashamed.

And yet it is difficult to imagine an historical character whose
activity was so unswervingly directed to a single aim; and it would be
difficult to imagine any aim more worthy or more consonant with the
will of the whole people. Still more difficult would it be to find
an instance in history of the aim of an historical personage being so
completely accomplished as that to which all Kutuzov's efforts were
directed in 1812.

Kutuzov never talked of "forty centuries looking down from the
Pyramids," of the sacrifices he offered for the fatherland, or of
what he intended to accomplish or had accomplished; in general he said
nothing about himself, adopted no prose, always appeared to be the
simplest and most ordinary of men, and said the simplest and most
ordinary things. He wrote letters to his daughters and to Madame de
Stael, read novels, liked the society of pretty women, jested with
generals, officers, and soldiers, and never contradicted those who tried
to prove anything to him. When Count Rostopchin at the Yauza bridge
galloped up to Kutuzov with personal reproaches for having caused the
destruction of Moscow, and said: "How was it you promised not to abandon
Moscow without a battle?" Kutuzov replied: "And I shall not abandon
Moscow without a battle," though Moscow was then already abandoned. When
Arakcheev, coming to him from the Emperor, said that Ermolov ought to
be appointed chief of the artillery, Kutuzov replied: "Yes, I was
just saying so myself," though a moment before he had said quite the
contrary. What did it matter to him--who then alone amid a senseless
crowd understood the whole tremendous significance of what was
happening--what did it matter to him whether Rostopchin attributed the
calamities of Moscow to him or to himself? Still less could it matter to
him who was appointed chief of the artillery.

Not merely in these cases but continually did that old man--who by
experience of life had reached the conviction that thoughts and the
words serving as their expression are not what move people--use quite
meaningless words that happened to enter his head.

But that man, so heedless of his words, did not once during the whole
time of his activity utter one word inconsistent with the single aim
toward which he moved throughout the whole war. Obviously in spite of
himself, in very diverse circumstances, he repeatedly expressed his real
thoughts with the bitter conviction that he would not be understood.
Beginning with the battle of Borodino, from which time his disagreement
with those about him began, he alone said that the battle of Borodino
was a victory, and repeated this both verbally and in his dispatches
and reports up to the time of his death. He alone said that the loss of
Moscow is not the loss of Russia. In reply to Lauriston's proposal of
peace, he said: There can be no peace, for such is the people's will. He
alone during the retreat of the French said that all our maneuvers are
useless, everything is being accomplished of itself better than we could
desire; that the enemy must be offered "a golden bridge"; that neither
the Tarutino, the Vyazma, nor the Krasnoe battles were necessary; that
we must keep some force to reach the frontier with, and that he would
not sacrifice a single Russian for ten Frenchmen.

And this courtier, as he is described to us, who lies to Arakcheev
to please the Emperor, he alone--incurring thereby the Emperor's
displeasure--said in Vilna that to carry the war beyond the frontier is
useless and harmful.

Nor do words alone prove that only he understood the meaning of the
events. His actions--without the smallest deviation--were all directed
to one and the same threefold end: (1) to brace all his strength for
conflict with the French, (2) to defeat them, and (3) to drive them out
of Russia, minimizing as far as possible the sufferings of our people
and of our army.

This procrastinator Kutuzov, whose motto was "Patience and Time,"
this enemy of decisive action, gave battle at Borodino, investing the
preparations for it with unparalleled solemnity. This Kutuzov who before
the battle of Austerlitz began said that it would be lost, he alone, in
contradiction to everyone else, declared till his death that Borodino
was a victory, despite the assurance of generals that the battle was
lost and despite the fact that for an army to have to retire after
winning a battle was unprecedented. He alone during the whole retreat
insisted that battles, which were useless then, should not be fought,
and that a new war should not be begun nor the frontiers of Russia
crossed.

It is easy now to understand the significance of these events--if
only we abstain from attributing to the activity of the mass aims that
existed only in the heads of a dozen individuals--for the events and
results now lie before us.

But how did that old man, alone, in opposition to the general opinion,
so truly discern the importance of the people's view of the events that
in all his activity he was never once untrue to it?

The source of that extraordinary power of penetrating the meaning of the
events then occuring lay in the national feeling which he possessed in
full purity and strength.

Only the recognition of the fact that he possessed this feeling caused
the people in so strange a manner, contrary to the Tsar's wish, to
select him--an old man in disfavor--to be their representative in the
national war. And only that feeling placed him on that highest human
pedestal from which he, the commander in chief, devoted all his powers
not to slaying and destroying men but to saving and showing pity on
them.

That simple, modest, and therefore truly great, figure could not be cast
in the false mold of a European hero--the supposed ruler of men--that
history has invented.

To a lackey no man can be great, for a lackey has his own conception of
greatness.





CHAPTER VI


The fifth of November was the first day of what is called the battle of
Krasnoe. Toward evening--after much disputing and many mistakes made by
generals who did not go to their proper places, and after adjutants had
been sent about with counterorders--when it had become plain that the
enemy was everywhere in flight and that there could and would be no
battle, Kutuzov left Krasnoe and went to Dobroe whither his headquarters
had that day been transferred.

The day was clear and frosty. Kutuzov rode to Dobroe on his plump little
white horse, followed by an enormous suite of discontented generals who
whispered among themselves behind his back. All along the road groups of
French prisoners captured that day (there were seven thousand of them)
were crowding to warm themselves at campfires. Near Dobroe an immense
crowd of tattered prisoners, buzzing with talk and wrapped and bandaged
in anything they had been able to get hold of, were standing in the road
beside a long row of unharnessed French guns. At the approach of the
commander in chief the buzz of talk ceased and all eyes were fixed on
Kutuzov who, wearing a white cap with a red band and a padded overcoat
that bulged on his round shoulders, moved slowly along the road on his
white horse. One of the generals was reporting to him where the guns and
prisoners had been captured.

Kutuzov seemed preoccupied and did not listen to what the general was
saying. He screwed up his eyes with a dissatisfied look as he gazed
attentively and fixedly at these prisoners, who presented a specially
wretched appearance. Most of them were disfigured by frost-bitten noses
and cheeks, and nearly all had red, swollen and festering eyes.

One group of the French stood close to the road, and two of them, one of
whom had his face covered with sores, were tearing a piece of raw
flesh with their hands. There was something horrible and bestial in
the fleeting glance they threw at the riders and in the malevolent
expression with which, after a glance at Kutuzov, the soldier with the
sores immediately turned away and went on with what he was doing.

Kutuzov looked long and intently at these two soldiers. He puckered his
face, screwed up his eyes, and pensively swayed his head. At another
spot he noticed a Russian soldier laughingly patting a Frenchman on the
shoulder, saying something to him in a friendly manner, and Kutuzov with
the same expression on his face again swayed his head.

"What were you saying?" he asked the general, who continuing his report
directed the commander in chief's attention to some standards captured
from the French and standing in front of the Preobrazhensk regiment.

"Ah, the standards!" said Kutuzov, evidently detaching himself with
difficulty from the thoughts that preoccupied him.

He looked about him absently. Thousands of eyes were looking at him from
all sides awaiting a word from him.

He stopped in front of the Preobrazhensk regiment, sighed deeply, and
closed his eyes. One of his suite beckoned to the soldiers carrying
the standards to advance and surround the commander in chief with them.
Kutuzov was silent for a few seconds and then, submitting with evident
reluctance to the duty imposed by his position, raised his head
and began to speak. A throng of officers surrounded him. He looked
attentively around at the circle of officers, recognizing several of
them.

"I thank you all!" he said, addressing the soldiers and then again the
officers. In the stillness around him his slowly uttered words were
distinctly heard. "I thank you all for your hard and faithful service.
The victory is complete and Russia will not forget you! Honor to you
forever."

He paused and looked around.

"Lower its head, lower it!" he said to a soldier who had accidentally
lowered the French eagle he was holding before the Preobrazhensk
standards. "Lower, lower, that's it. Hurrah lads!" he added, addressing
the men with a rapid movement of his chin.

"Hur-r-rah!" roared thousands of voices.

While the soldiers were shouting Kutuzov leaned forward in his saddle
and bowed his head, and his eye lit up with a mild and apparently ironic
gleam.

"You see, brothers..." said he when the shouts had ceased... and all at
once his voice and the expression of his face changed. It was no longer
the commander in chief speaking but an ordinary old man who wanted to
tell his comrades something very important.

There was a stir among the throng of officers and in the ranks of the
soldiers, who moved that they might hear better what he was going to
say.

"You see, brothers, I know it's hard for you, but it can't be helped!
Bear up; it won't be for long now! We'll see our visitors off and then
we'll rest. The Tsar won't forget your service. It is hard for you, but
still you are at home while they--you see what they have come to," said
he, pointing to the prisoners. "Worse off than our poorest beggars.
While they were strong we didn't spare ourselves, but now we may even
pity them. They are human beings too. Isn't it so, lads?"

He looked around, and in the direct, respectful, wondering gaze fixed
upon him he read sympathy with what he had said. His face grew brighter
and brighter with an old man's mild smile, which drew the corners of his
lips and eyes into a cluster of wrinkles. He ceased speaking and bowed
his head as if in perplexity.

"But after all who asked them here? Serves them right, the bloody
bastards!" he cried, suddenly lifting his head.

And flourishing his whip he rode off at a gallop for the first time
during the whole campaign, and left the broken ranks of the soldiers
laughing joyfully and shouting "Hurrah!"

Kutuzov's words were hardly understood by the troops. No one could have
repeated the field marshal's address, begun solemnly and then changing
into an old man's simplehearted talk; but the hearty sincerity of that
speech, the feeling of majestic triumph combined with pity for the foe
and consciousness of the justice of our cause, exactly expressed by that
old man's good-natured expletives, was not merely understood but lay
in the soul of every soldier and found expression in their joyous and
long-sustained shouts. Afterwards when one of the generals addressed
Kutuzov asking whether he wished his caleche to be sent for, Kutuzov in
answering unexpectedly gave a sob, being evidently greatly moved.





CHAPTER VII


When the troops reached their night's halting place on the eighth of
November, the last day of the Krasnoe battles, it was already growing
dusk. All day it had been calm and frosty with occasional lightly
falling snow and toward evening it began to clear. Through the falling
snow a purple-black and starry sky showed itself and the frost grew
keener.

An infantry regiment which had left Tarutino three thousand strong but
now numbered only nine hundred was one of the first to arrive that night
at its halting place--a village on the highroad. The quartermasters who
met the regiment announced that all the huts were full of sick and dead
Frenchmen, cavalrymen, and members of the staff. There was only one hut
available for the regimental commander.

The commander rode up to his hut. The regiment passed through the
village and stacked its arms in front of the last huts.

Like some huge many-limbed animal, the regiment began to prepare its
lair and its food. One part of it dispersed and waded knee-deep
through the snow into a birch forest to the right of the village, and
immediately the sound of axes and swords, the crashing of branches,
and merry voices could be heard from there. Another section amid the
regimental wagons and horses which were standing in a group was busy
getting out caldrons and rye biscuit, and feeding the horses. A third
section scattered through the village arranging quarters for the staff
officers, carrying out the French corpses that were in the huts, and
dragging away boards, dry wood, and thatch from the roofs, for the
campfires, or wattle fences to serve for shelter.

Some fifteen men with merry shouts were shaking down the high wattle
wall of a shed, the roof of which had already been removed.

"Now then, all together--shove!" cried the voices, and the huge surface
of the wall, sprinkled with snow and creaking with frost, was seen
swaying in the gloom of the night. The lower stakes cracked more and
more and at last the wall fell, and with it the men who had been pushing
it. Loud, coarse laughter and joyous shouts ensued.

"Now then, catch hold in twos! Hand up the lever! That's it... Where are
you shoving to?"

"Now, all together! But wait a moment, boys... With a song!"

All stood silent, and a soft, pleasant velvety voice began to sing. At
the end of the third verse as the last note died away, twenty voices
roared out at once: "Oo-oo-oo-oo! That's it. All together! Heave away,
boys!..." but despite their united efforts the wattle hardly moved, and
in the silence that followed the heavy breathing of the men was audible.

"Here, you of the Sixth Company! Devils that you are! Lend a hand...
will you? You may want us one of these days."

Some twenty men of the Sixth Company who were on their way into the
village joined the haulers, and the wattle wall, which was about
thirty-five feet long and seven feet high, moved forward along the
village street, swaying, pressing upon and cutting the shoulders of the
gasping men.

"Get along... Falling? What are you stopping for? There now..."

Merry senseless words of abuse flowed freely.

"What are you up to?" suddenly came the authoritative voice of a
sergeant major who came upon the men who were hauling their burden.
"There are gentry here; the general himself is in that hut, and you
foul-mouthed devils, you brutes, I'll give it to you!" shouted he,
hitting the first man who came in his way a swinging blow on the back.
"Can't you make less noise?"

The men became silent. The soldier who had been struck groaned and wiped
his face, which had been scratched till it bled by his falling against
the wattle.

"There, how that devil hits out! He's made my face all bloody," said he
in a frightened whisper when the sergeant major had passed on.

"Don't you like it?" said a laughing voice, and moderating their tones
the men moved forward.

When they were out of the village they began talking again as loud as
before, interlarding their talk with the same aimless expletives.

In the hut which the men had passed, the chief officers had gathered and
were in animated talk over their tea about the events of the day and the
maneuvers suggested for tomorrow. It was proposed to make a flank march
to the left, cut off the Vice-King (Murat) and capture him.

By the time the soldiers had dragged the wattle fence to its place
the campfires were blazing on all sides ready for cooking, the wood
crackled, the snow was melting, and black shadows of soldiers flitted
to and fro all over the occupied space where the snow had been trodden
down.

Axes and choppers were plied all around. Everything was done without any
orders being given. Stores of wood were brought for the night, shelters
were rigged up for the officers, caldrons were being boiled, and muskets
and accouterments put in order.

The wattle wall the men had brought was set up in a semicircle by the
Eighth Company as a shelter from the north, propped up by musket rests,
and a campfire was built before it. They beat the tattoo, called the
roll, had supper, and settled down round the fires for the night--some
repairing their footgear, some smoking pipes, and some stripping
themselves naked to steam the lice out of their shirts.





CHAPTER VIII


One would have thought that under the almost incredibly wretched
conditions the Russian soldiers were in at that time--lacking warm boots
and sheepskin coats, without a roof over their heads, in the snow
with eighteen degrees of frost, and without even full rations (the
commissariat did not always keep up with the troops)--they would have
presented a very sad and depressing spectacle.

On the contrary, the army had never under the best material conditions
presented a more cheerful and animated aspect. This was because all who
began to grow depressed or who lost strength were sifted out of the army
day by day. All the physically or morally weak had long since been
left behind and only the flower of the army--physically and
mentally--remained.

More men collected behind the wattle fence of the Eighth Company than
anywhere else. Two sergeants major were sitting with them and their
campfire blazed brighter than others. For leave to sit by their wattle
they demanded contributions of fuel.

"Eh, Makeev! What has become of you, you son of a bitch? Are you lost or
have the wolves eaten you? Fetch some more wood!" shouted a red-haired
and red-faced man, screwing up his eyes and blinking because of the
smoke but not moving back from the fire. "And you, Jackdaw, go and fetch
some wood!" said he to another soldier.

This red-haired man was neither a sergeant nor a corporal, but being
robust he ordered about those weaker than himself. The soldier
they called "Jackdaw," a thin little fellow with a sharp nose, rose
obediently and was about to go but at that instant there came into
the light of the fire the slender, handsome figure of a young soldier
carrying a load of wood.

"Bring it here--that's fine!"

They split up the wood, pressed it down on the fire, blew at it with
their mouths, and fanned it with the skirts of their greatcoats, making
the flames hiss and crackle. The men drew nearer and lit their pipes.
The handsome young soldier who had brought the wood, setting his arms
akimbo, began stamping his cold feet rapidly and deftly on the spot
where he stood.

"Mother! The dew is cold but clear.... It's well that I'm a
musketeer..." he sang, pretending to hiccough after each syllable.

"Look out, your soles will fly off!" shouted the red-haired man,
noticing that the sole of the dancer's boot was hanging loose. "What a
fellow you are for dancing!"

The dancer stopped, pulled off the loose piece of leather, and threw it
on the fire.

"Right enough, friend," said he, and, having sat down, took out of his
knapsack a scrap of blue French cloth, and wrapped it round his foot.
"It's the steam that spoils them," he added, stretching out his feet
toward the fire.

"They'll soon be issuing us new ones. They say that when we've finished
hammering them, we're to receive double kits!"

"And that son of a bitch Petrov has lagged behind after all, it seems,"
said one sergeant major.

"I've had an eye on him this long while," said the other.

"Well, he's a poor sort of soldier..."

"But in the Third Company they say nine men were missing yesterday."

"Yes, it's all very well, but when a man's feet are frozen how can he
walk?"

"Eh? Don't talk nonsense!" said a sergeant major.

"Do you want to be doing the same?" said an old soldier, turning
reproachfully to the man who had spoken of frozen feet.

"Well, you know," said the sharp-nosed man they called Jackdaw in a
squeaky and unsteady voice, raising himself at the other side of the
fire, "a plump man gets thin, but for a thin one it's death. Take
me, now! I've got no strength left," he added, with sudden resolution
turning to the sergeant major. "Tell them to send me to hospital; I'm
aching all over; anyway I shan't be able to keep up."

"That'll do, that'll do!" replied the sergeant major quietly.

The soldier said no more and the talk went on.

"What a lot of those Frenchies were taken today, and the fact is that
not one of them had what you might call real boots on," said a soldier,
starting a new theme. "They were no more than make-believes."

"The Cossacks have taken their boots. They were clearing the hut for the
colonel and carried them out. It was pitiful to see them, boys," put in
the dancer. "As they turned them over one seemed still alive and, would
you believe it, he jabbered something in their lingo."

"But they're a clean folk, lads," the first man went on; "he was
white--as white as birchbark--and some of them are such fine fellows,
you might think they were nobles."

"Well, what do you think? They make soldiers of all classes there."

"But they don't understand our talk at all," said the dancer with a
puzzled smile. "I asked him whose subject he was, and he jabbered in his
own way. A queer lot!"

"But it's strange, friends," continued the man who had wondered at their
whiteness, "the peasants at Mozhaysk were saying that when they began
burying the dead--where the battle was you know--well, those dead had
been lying there for nearly a month, and says the peasant, 'they lie
as white as paper, clean, and not as much smell as a puff of powder
smoke.'"

"Was it from the cold?" asked someone.

"You're a clever fellow! From the cold indeed! Why, it was hot. If it
had been from the cold, ours would not have rotted either. 'But,' he
says, 'go up to ours and they are all rotten and maggoty. So,' he says,
'we tie our faces up with kerchiefs and turn our heads away as we drag
them off: we can hardly do it. But theirs,' he says, 'are white as paper
and not so much smell as a whiff of gunpowder.'"

All were silent.

"It must be from their food," said the sergeant major. "They used to
gobble the same food as the gentry."

No one contradicted him.

"That peasant near Mozhaysk where the battle was said the men were all
called up from ten villages around and they carted for twenty days and
still didn't finish carting the dead away. And as for the wolves, he
says..."

"That was a real battle," said an old soldier. "It's the only one worth
remembering; but since that... it's only been tormenting folk."

"And do you know, Daddy, the day before yesterday we ran at them and,
my word, they didn't let us get near before they just threw down their
muskets and went on their knees. 'Pardon!' they say. That's only one
case. They say Platov took 'Poleon himself twice. But he didn't know the
right charm. He catches him and catches him--no good! He turns into
a bird in his hands and flies away. And there's no way of killing him
either."

"You're a first-class liar, Kiselev, when I come to look at you!"

"Liar, indeed! It's the real truth."

"If he fell into my hands, when I'd caught him I'd bury him in the
ground with an aspen stake to fix him down. What a lot of men he's
ruined!"

"Well, anyhow we're going to end it. He won't come here again," remarked
the old soldier, yawning.

The conversation flagged, and the soldiers began settling down to sleep.

"Look at the stars. It's wonderful how they shine! You would think the
women had spread out their linen," said one of the men, gazing with
admiration at the Milky Way.

"That's a sign of a good harvest next year."

"We shall want some more wood."

"You warm your back and your belly gets frozen. That's queer."

"O Lord!"

"What are you pushing for? Is the fire only for you? Look how he's
sprawling!"

In the silence that ensued, the snoring of those who had fallen asleep
could be heard. Others turned over and warmed themselves, now and again
exchanging a few words. From a campfire a hundred paces off came a sound
of general, merry laughter.

"Hark at them roaring there in the Fifth Company!" said one of the
soldiers, "and what a lot of them there are!"

One of the men got up and went over to the Fifth Company.

"They're having such fun," said he, coming back. "Two Frenchies have
turned up. One's quite frozen and the other's an awful swaggerer. He's
singing songs...."

"Oh, I'll go across and have a look...."

And several of the men went over to the Fifth Company.





CHAPTER IX


The fifth company was bivouacking at the very edge of the forest. A huge
campfire was blazing brightly in the midst of the snow, lighting up the
branches of trees heavy with hoarfrost.

About midnight they heard the sound of steps in the snow of the forest,
and the crackling of dry branches.

"A bear, lads," said one of the men.

They all raised their heads to listen, and out of the forest into the
bright firelight stepped two strangely clad human figures clinging to
one another.

These were two Frenchmen who had been hiding in the forest. They came up
to the fire, hoarsely uttering something in a language our soldiers did
not understand. One was taller than the other; he wore an officer's hat
and seemed quite exhausted. On approaching the fire he had been going to
sit down, but fell. The other, a short sturdy soldier with a shawl
tied round his head, was stronger. He raised his companion and said
something, pointing to his mouth. The soldiers surrounded the Frenchmen,
spread a greatcoat on the ground for the sick man, and brought some
buckwheat porridge and vodka for both of them.

The exhausted French officer was Ramballe and the man with his head
wrapped in the shawl was Morel, his orderly.

When Morel had drunk some vodka and finished his bowl of porridge he
suddenly became unnaturally merry and chattered incessantly to the
soldiers, who could not understand him. Ramballe refused food and
resting his head on his elbow lay silent beside the campfire, looking at
the Russian soldiers with red and vacant eyes. Occasionally he emitted
a long-drawn groan and then again became silent. Morel, pointing to his
shoulders, tried to impress on the soldiers the fact that Ramballe was
an officer and ought to be warmed. A Russian officer who had come up
to the fire sent to ask his colonel whether he would not take a French
officer into his hut to warm him, and when the messenger returned and
said that the colonel wished the officer to be brought to him, Ramballe
was told to go. He rose and tried to walk, but staggered and would have
fallen had not a soldier standing by held him up.

"You won't do it again, eh?" said one of the soldiers, winking and
turning mockingly to Ramballe.

"Oh, you fool! Why talk rubbish, lout that you are--a real peasant!"
came rebukes from all sides addressed to the jesting soldier.

They surrounded Ramballe, lifted him on the crossed arms of two
soldiers, and carried him to the hut. Ramballe put his arms around their
necks while they carried him and began wailing plaintively:

"Oh, you fine fellows, my kind, kind friends! These are men! Oh, my
brave, kind friends," and he leaned his head against the shoulder of one
of the men like a child.

Meanwhile Morel was sitting in the best place by the fire, surrounded by
the soldiers.

Morel, a short sturdy Frenchman with inflamed and streaming eyes, was
wearing a woman's cloak and had a shawl tied woman fashion round his
head over his cap. He was evidently tipsy, and was singing a French song
in a hoarse broken voice, with an arm thrown round the nearest soldier.
The soldiers simply held their sides as they watched him.

"Now then, now then, teach us how it goes! I'll soon pick it up. How is
it?" said the man--a singer and a wag--whom Morel was embracing.

"Vive Henri Quatre! Vive ce roi valiant!" sang Morel, winking. "Ce
diable a quatre..." *


     * "Long live Henry the Fourth, that valiant king! That rowdy
     devil."


"Vivarika! Vif-seruvaru! Sedyablyaka!" repeated the soldier, flourishing
his arm and really catching the tune.

"Bravo! Ha, ha, ha!" rose their rough, joyous laughter from all sides.

Morel, wrinkling up his face, laughed too.

"Well, go on, go on!"

    "Qui eut le triple talent,
    De boire, de battre,
    Et d'etre un vert galant." *


      * Who had a triple talent
      For drinking, for fighting,
      And for being a gallant old boy...


"It goes smoothly, too. Well, now, Zaletaev!"

"Ke..." Zaletaev, brought out with effort: "ke-e-e-e," he drawled,
laboriously pursing his lips, "le-trip-ta-la-de-bu-de-ba, e
de-tra-va-ga-la" he sang.

"Fine! Just like the Frenchie! Oh, ho ho! Do you want some more to eat?"

"Give him some porridge: it takes a long time to get filled up after
starving."

They gave him some more porridge and Morel with a laugh set to work on
his third bowl. All the young soldiers smiled gaily as they watched him.
The older men, who thought it undignified to amuse themselves with such
nonsense, continued to lie at the opposite side of the fire, but one
would occasionally raise himself on an elbow and glance at Morel with a
smile.

"They are men too," said one of them as he wrapped himself up in his
coat. "Even wormwood grows on its own root."

"O Lord, O Lord! How starry it is! Tremendous! That means a hard
frost...."

They all grew silent. The stars, as if knowing that no one was looking
at them, began to disport themselves in the dark sky: now flaring
up, now vanishing, now trembling, they were busy whispering something
gladsome and mysterious to one another.





CHAPTER X


The French army melted away at the uniform rate of a mathematical
progression; and that crossing of the Berezina about which so much has
been written was only one intermediate stage in its destruction, and
not at all the decisive episode of the campaign. If so much has been
and still is written about the Berezina, on the French side this is only
because at the broken bridge across that river the calamities their army
had been previously enduring were suddenly concentrated at one moment
into a tragic spectacle that remained in every memory, and on the
Russian side merely because in Petersburg--far from the seat of war--a
plan (again one of Pfuel's) had been devised to catch Napoleon in a
strategic trap at the Berezina River. Everyone assured himself that all
would happen according to plan, and therefore insisted that it was just
the crossing of the Berezina that destroyed the French army. In reality
the results of the crossing were much less disastrous to the French--in
guns and men lost--than Krasnoe had been, as the figures show.

The sole importance of the crossing of the Berezina lies in the fact
that it plainly and indubitably proved the fallacy of all the plans for
cutting off the enemy's retreat and the soundness of the only possible
line of action--the one Kutuzov and the general mass of the army
demanded--namely, simply to follow the enemy up. The French crowd fled
at a continually increasing speed and all its energy was directed to
reaching its goal. It fled like a wounded animal and it was impossible
to block its path. This was shown not so much by the arrangements it
made for crossing as by what took place at the bridges. When the bridges
broke down, unarmed soldiers, people from Moscow and women with
children who were with the French transport, all--carried on by vis
inertiae--pressed forward into boats and into the ice-covered water and
did not, surrender.

That impulse was reasonable. The condition of fugitives and of pursuers
was equally bad. As long as they remained with their own people each
might hope for help from his fellows and the definite place he held
among them. But those who surrendered, while remaining in the same
pitiful plight, would be on a lower level to claim a share in the
necessities of life. The French did not need to be informed of the fact
that half the prisoners--with whom the Russians did not know what to
do--perished of cold and hunger despite their captors' desire to save
them; they felt that it could not be otherwise. The most compassionate
Russian commanders, those favorable to the French--and even the
Frenchmen in the Russian service--could do nothing for the prisoners.
The French perished from the conditions to which the Russian army was
itself exposed. It was impossible to take bread and clothes from our
hungry and indispensable soldiers to give to the French who, though not
harmful, or hated, or guilty, were simply unnecessary. Some Russians
even did that, but they were exceptions.

Certain destruction lay behind the French but in front there was hope.
Their ships had been burned, there was no salvation save in collective
flight, and on that the whole strength of the French was concentrated.

The farther they fled the more wretched became the plight of the
remnant, especially after the Berezina, on which (in consequence of the
Petersburg plan) special hopes had been placed by the Russians, and
the keener grew the passions of the Russian commanders, who blamed one
another and Kutuzov most of all. Anticipation that the failure of
the Petersburg Berezina plan would be attributed to Kutuzov led
to dissatisfaction, contempt, and ridicule, more and more strongly
expressed. The ridicule and contempt were of course expressed in a
respectful form, making it impossible for him to ask wherein he was
to blame. They did not talk seriously to him; when reporting to him or
asking for his sanction they appeared to be fulfilling a regrettable
formality, but they winked behind his back and tried to mislead him at
every turn.

Because they could not understand him all these people assumed that
it was useless to talk to the old man; that he would never grasp the
profundity of their plans, that he would answer with his phrases (which
they thought were mere phrases) about a "golden bridge," about the
impossibility of crossing the frontier with a crowd of tatterdemalions,
and so forth. They had heard all that before. And all he said--that it
was necessary to await provisions, or that the men had no boots--was so
simple, while what they proposed was so complicated and clever, that
it was evident that he was old and stupid and that they, though not in
power, were commanders of genius.

After the junction with the army of the brilliant admiral and Petersburg
hero Wittgenstein, this mood and the gossip of the staff reached their
maximum. Kutuzov saw this and merely sighed and shrugged his shoulders.
Only once, after the affair of the Berezina, did he get angry and write
to Bennigsen (who reported separately to the Emperor) the following
letter:

"On account of your spells of ill health, will your excellency please
be so good as to set off for Kaluga on receipt of this, and there await
further commands and appointments from His Imperial Majesty."

But after Bennigsen's departure, the Grand Duke Tsarevich Constantine
Pavlovich joined the army. He had taken part in the beginning of the
campaign but had subsequently been removed from the army by Kutuzov.
Now having come to the army, he informed Kutuzov of the Emperor's
displeasure at the poor success of our forces and the slowness of their
advance. The Emperor intended to join the army personally in a few days'
time.

The old man, experienced in court as well as in military affairs--this
same Kutuzov who in August had been chosen commander in chief
against the sovereign's wishes and who had removed the Grand Duke and
heir--apparent from the army--who on his own authority and contrary
to the Emperor's will had decided on the abandonment of Moscow, now
realized at once that his day was over, that his part was played,
and that the power he was supposed to hold was no longer his. And he
understood this not merely from the attitude of the court. He saw on the
one hand that the military business in which he had played his part was
ended and felt that his mission was accomplished; and at the same time
he began to be conscious of the physical weariness of his aged body and
of the necessity of physical rest.

On the twenty-ninth of November Kutuzov entered Vilna--his "dear Vilna"
as he called it. Twice during his career Kutuzov had been governor of
Vilna. In that wealthy town, which had not been injured, he found old
friends and associations, besides the comforts of life of which he had
so long been deprived. And he suddenly turned from the cares of army
and state and, as far as the passions that seethed around him allowed,
immersed himself in the quiet life to which he had formerly been
accustomed, as if all that was taking place and all that had still to be
done in the realm of history did not concern him at all.

Chichagov, one of the most zealous "cutters-off" and "breakers-up," who
had first wanted to effect a diversion in Greece and then in Warsaw but
never wished to go where he was sent: Chichagov, noted for the boldness
with which he spoke to the Emperor, and who considered Kutuzov to be
under an obligation to him because when he was sent to make peace
with Turkey in 1811 independently of Kutuzov, and found that peace had
already been concluded, he admitted to the Emperor that the merit of
securing that peace was really Kutuzov's; this Chichagov was the first
to meet Kutuzov at the castle where the latter was to stay. In undress
naval uniform, with a dirk, and holding his cap under his arm, he handed
Kutuzov a garrison report and the keys of the town. The contemptuously
respectful attitude of the younger men to the old man in his dotage was
expressed in the highest degree by the behavior of Chichagov, who knew
of the accusations that were being directed against Kutuzov.

When speaking to Chichagov, Kutuzov incidentally mentioned that the
vehicles packed with china that had been captured from him at Borisov
had been recovered and would be restored to him.

"You mean to imply that I have nothing to eat out of.... On the
contrary, I can supply you with everything even if you want to give
dinner parties," warmly replied Chichagov, who tried by every word he
spoke to prove his own rectitude and therefore imagined Kutuzov to be
animated by the same desire.

Kutuzov, shrugging his shoulders, replied with his subtle penetrating
smile: "I meant merely to say what I said."

Contrary to the Emperor's wish Kutuzov detained the greater part of the
army at Vilna. Those about him said that he became extraordinarily slack
and physically feeble during his stay in that town. He attended to army
affairs reluctantly, left everything to his generals, and while awaiting
the Emperor's arrival led a dissipated life.

Having left Petersburg on the seventh of December with his suite--Count
Tolstoy, Prince Volkonski, Arakcheev, and others--the Emperor reached
Vilna on the eleventh, and in his traveling sleigh drove straight to
the castle. In spite of the severe frost some hundred generals and staff
officers in full parade uniform stood in front of the castle, as well as
a guard of honor of the Semenov regiment.

A courier who galloped to the castle in advance, in a troyka with three
foam-flecked horses, shouted "Coming!" and Konovnitsyn rushed into the
vestibule to inform Kutuzov, who was waiting in the hall porter's little
lodge.

A minute later the old man's large stout figure in full-dress uniform,
his chest covered with orders and a scarf drawn round his stomach,
waddled out into the porch. He put on his hat with its peaks to the
sides and, holding his gloves in his hand and walking with an effort
sideways down the steps to the level of the street, took in his hand the
report he had prepared for the Emperor.

There was running to and fro and whispering; another troyka flew
furiously up, and then all eyes were turned on an approaching sleigh
in which the figures of the Emperor and Volkonski could already be
descried.

From the habit of fifty years all this had a physically agitating effect
on the old general. He carefully and hastily felt himself all over,
readjusted his hat, and pulling himself together drew himself up and,
at the very moment when the Emperor, having alighted from the sleigh,
lifted his eyes to him, handed him the report and began speaking in his
smooth, ingratiating voice.

The Emperor with a rapid glance scanned Kutuzov from head to foot,
frowned for an instant, but immediately mastering himself went up to the
old man, extended his arms and embraced him. And this embrace too, owing
to a long-standing impression related to his innermost feelings, had its
usual effect on Kutuzov and he gave a sob.

The Emperor greeted the officers and the Semenov guard, and again
pressing the old man's hand went with him into the castle.

When alone with the field marshal the Emperor expressed his
dissatisfaction at the slowness of the pursuit and at the mistakes made
at Krasnoe and the Berezina, and informed him of his intentions for a
future campaign abroad. Kutuzov made no rejoinder or remark. The same
submissive, expressionless look with which he had listened to the
Emperor's commands on the field of Austerlitz seven years before settled
on his face now.

When Kutuzov came out of the study and with lowered head was crossing
the ballroom with his heavy waddling gait, he was arrested by someone's
voice saying:

"Your Serene Highness!"

Kutuzov raised his head and looked for a long while into the eyes of
Count Tolstoy, who stood before him holding a silver salver on which lay
a small object. Kutuzov seemed not to understand what was expected of
him.

Suddenly he seemed to remember; a scarcely perceptible smile flashed
across his puffy face, and bowing low and respectfully he took the
object that lay on the salver. It was the Order of St. George of the
First Class.





CHAPTER XI


Next day the field marshal gave a dinner and ball which the Emperor
honored by his presence. Kutuzov had received the Order of St. George
of the First Class and the Emperor showed him the highest honors, but
everyone knew of the imperial dissatisfaction with him. The proprieties
were observed and the Emperor was the first to set that example,
but everybody understood that the old man was blameworthy and
good-for-nothing. When Kutuzov, conforming to a custom of Catherine's
day, ordered the standards that had been captured to be lowered at the
Emperor's feet on his entering the ballroom, the Emperor made a wry face
and muttered something in which some people caught the words, "the old
comedian."

The Emperor's displeasure with Kutuzov was specially increased at Vilna
by the fact that Kutuzov evidently could not or would not understand the
importance of the coming campaign.

When on the following morning the Emperor said to the officers assembled
about him: "You have not only saved Russia, you have saved Europe!" they
all understood that the war was not ended.

Kutuzov alone would not see this and openly expressed his opinion that
no fresh war could improve the position or add to the glory of Russia,
but could only spoil and lower the glorious position that Russia had
gained. He tried to prove to the Emperor the impossibility of levying
fresh troops, spoke of the hardships already endured by the people, of
the possibility of failure and so forth.

This being the field marshal's frame of mind he was naturally regarded
as merely a hindrance and obstacle to the impending war.

To avoid unpleasant encounters with the old man, the natural method was
to do what had been done with him at Austerlitz and with Barclay at
the beginning of the Russian campaign--to transfer the authority to the
Emperor himself, thus cutting the ground from under the commander in
chief's feet without upsetting the old man by informing him of the
change.

With this object his staff was gradually reconstructed and its real
strength removed and transferred to the Emperor. Toll, Konovnitsyn, and
Ermolov received fresh appointments. Everyone spoke loudly of the field
marshal's great weakness and failing health.

His health had to be bad for his place to be taken away and given to
another. And in fact his health was poor.

So naturally, simply, and gradually--just as he had come from Turkey to
the Treasury in Petersburg to recruit the militia, and then to the army
when he was needed there--now when his part was played out, Kutuzov's
place was taken by a new and necessary performer.

The war of 1812, besides its national significance dear to every Russian
heart, was now to assume another, a European, significance.

The movement of peoples from west to east was to be succeeded by a
movement of peoples from east to west, and for this fresh war another
leader was necessary, having qualities and views differing from
Kutuzov's and animated by different motives.

Alexander I was as necessary for the movement of the peoples from east
to west and for the refixing of national frontiers as Kutuzov had been
for the salvation and glory of Russia.

Kutuzov did not understand what Europe, the balance of power, or
Napoleon meant. He could not understand it. For the representative of
the Russian people, after the enemy had been destroyed and Russia had
been liberated and raised to the summit of her glory, there was nothing
left to do as a Russian. Nothing remained for the representative of the
national war but to die, and Kutuzov died.





CHAPTER XII


As generally happens, Pierre did not feel the full effects of the
physical privation and strain he had suffered as prisoner until after
they were over. After his liberation he reached Orel, and on the third
day there, when preparing to go to Kiev, he fell ill and was laid up
for three months. He had what the doctors termed "bilious fever." But
despite the fact that the doctors treated him, bled him, and gave him
medicines to drink, he recovered.

Scarcely any impression was left on Pierre's mind by all that happened
to him from the time of his rescue till his illness. He remembered
only the dull gray weather now rainy and now snowy, internal physical
distress, and pains in his feet and side. He remembered a general
impression of the misfortunes and sufferings of people and of being
worried by the curiosity of officers and generals who questioned him, he
also remembered his difficulty in procuring a conveyance and horses, and
above all he remembered his incapacity to think and feel all that time.
On the day of his rescue he had seen the body of Petya Rostov. That same
day he had learned that Prince Andrew, after surviving the battle of
Borodino for more than a month had recently died in the Rostovs' house
at Yaroslavl, and Denisov who told him this news also mentioned Helene's
death, supposing that Pierre had heard of it long before. All this at
the time seemed merely strange to Pierre: he felt he could not grasp its
significance. Just then he was only anxious to get away as quickly as
possible from places where people were killing one another, to some
peaceful refuge where he could recover himself, rest, and think over
all the strange new facts he had learned; but on reaching Orel he
immediately fell ill. When he came to himself after his illness he saw
in attendance on him two of his servants, Terenty and Vaska, who had
come from Moscow; and also his cousin the eldest princess, who had been
living on his estate at Elets and hearing of his rescue and illness had
come to look after him.

It was only gradually during his convalescence that Pierre lost the
impressions he had become accustomed to during the last few months
and got used to the idea that no one would oblige him to go anywhere
tomorrow, that no one would deprive him of his warm bed, and that he
would be sure to get his dinner, tea, and supper. But for a long time in
his dreams he still saw himself in the conditions of captivity. In the
same way little by little he came to understand the news he had been
told after his rescue, about the death of Prince Andrew, the death of
his wife, and the destruction of the French.

A joyous feeling of freedom--that complete inalienable freedom natural
to man which he had first experienced at the first halt outside
Moscow--filled Pierre's soul during his convalescence. He was surprised
to find that this inner freedom, which was independent of external
conditions, now had as it were an additional setting of external
liberty. He was alone in a strange town, without acquaintances. No one
demanded anything of him or sent him anywhere. He had all he wanted:
the thought of his wife which had been a continual torment to him was no
longer there, since she was no more.

"Oh, how good! How splendid!" said he to himself when a cleanly laid
table was moved up to him with savory beef tea, or when he lay down for
the night on a soft clean bed, or when he remembered that the French had
gone and that his wife was no more. "Oh, how good, how splendid!"

And by old habit he asked himself the question: "Well, and what then?
What am I going to do?" And he immediately gave himself the answer:
"Well, I shall live. Ah, how splendid!"

The very question that had formerly tormented him, the thing he had
continually sought to find--the aim of life--no longer existed for
him now. That search for the aim of life had not merely disappeared
temporarily--he felt that it no longer existed for him and could not
present itself again. And this very absence of an aim gave him the
complete, joyous sense of freedom which constituted his happiness at
this time.

He could not see an aim, for he now had faith--not faith in any kind
of rule, or words, or ideas, but faith in an ever-living, ever-manifest
God. Formerly he had sought Him in aims he set himself. That search for
an aim had been simply a search for God, and suddenly in his captivity
he had learned not by words or reasoning but by direct feeling what his
nurse had told him long ago: that God is here and everywhere. In his
captivity he had learned that in Karataev God was greater, more infinite
and unfathomable than in the Architect of the Universe recognized by the
Freemasons. He felt like a man who after straining his eyes to see into
the far distance finds what he sought at his very feet. All his life
he had looked over the heads of the men around him, when he should have
merely looked in front of him without straining his eyes.

In the past he had never been able to find that great inscrutable
infinite something. He had only felt that it must exist somewhere and
had looked for it. In everything near and comprehensible he had only
what was limited, petty, commonplace, and senseless. He had equipped
himself with a mental telescope and looked into remote space, where
petty worldliness hiding itself in misty distance had seemed to him
great and infinite merely because it was not clearly seen. And such
had European life, politics, Freemasonry, philosophy, and philanthropy
seemed to him. But even then, at moments of weakness as he had accounted
them, his mind had penetrated to those distances and he had there seen
the same pettiness, worldliness, and senselessness. Now, however, he
had learned to see the great, eternal, and infinite in everything, and
therefore--to see it and enjoy its contemplation--he naturally threw
away the telescope through which he had till now gazed over men's heads,
and gladly regarded the ever-changing, eternally great, unfathomable,
and infinite life around him. And the closer he looked the more tranquil
and happy he became. That dreadful question, "What for?" which had
formerly destroyed all his mental edifices, no longer existed for him.
To that question, "What for?" a simple answer was now always ready in
his soul: "Because there is a God, that God without whose will not one
hair falls from a man's head."





CHAPTER XIII


In external ways Pierre had hardly changed at all. In appearance he
was just what he used to be. As before he was absent-minded and seemed
occupied not with what was before his eyes but with something special
of his own. The difference between his former and present self was that
formerly when he did not grasp what lay before him or was said to
him, he had puckered his forehead painfully as if vainly seeking to
distinguish something at a distance. At present he still forgot what was
said to him and still did not see what was before his eyes, but he now
looked with a scarcely perceptible and seemingly ironic smile at what
was before him and listened to what was said, though evidently seeing
and hearing something quite different. Formerly he had appeared to be
a kindhearted but unhappy man, and so people had been inclined to avoid
him. Now a smile at the joy of life always played round his lips, and
sympathy for others, shone in his eyes with a questioning look as to
whether they were as contented as he was, and people felt pleased by his
presence.

Previously he had talked a great deal, grew excited when he talked, and
seldom listened; now he was seldom carried away in conversation and
knew how to listen so that people readily told him their most intimate
secrets.

The princess, who had never liked Pierre and had been particularly
hostile to him since she had felt herself under obligations to him after
the old count's death, now after staying a short time in Orel--where she
had come intending to show Pierre that in spite of his ingratitude she
considered it her duty to nurse him--felt to her surprise and vexation
that she had become fond of him. Pierre did not in any way seek her
approval, he merely studied her with interest. Formerly she had felt
that he regarded her with indifference and irony, and so had shrunk into
herself as she did with others and had shown him only the combative side
of her nature; but now he seemed to be trying to understand the most
intimate places of her heart, and, mistrustfully at first but afterwards
gratefully, she let him see the hidden, kindly sides of her character.

The most cunning man could not have crept into her confidence more
successfully, evoking memories of the best times of her youth and
showing sympathy with them. Yet Pierre's cunning consisted simply in
finding pleasure in drawing out the human qualities of the embittered,
hard, and (in her own way) proud princess.

"Yes, he is a very, very kind man when he is not under the influence of
bad people but of people such as myself," thought she.

His servants too--Terenty and Vaska--in their own way noticed the change
that had taken place in Pierre. They considered that he had become much
"simpler." Terenty, when he had helped him undress and wished him good
night, often lingered with his master's boots in his hands and clothes
over his arm, to see whether he would not start a talk. And Pierre,
noticing that Terenty wanted a chat, generally kept him there.

"Well, tell me... now, how did you get food?" he would ask.

And Terenty would begin talking of the destruction of Moscow, and of
the old count, and would stand for a long time holding the clothes and
talking, or sometimes listening to Pierre's stories, and then would go
out into the hall with a pleasant sense of intimacy with his master and
affection for him.

The doctor who attended Pierre and visited him every day, though he
considered it his duty as a doctor to pose as a man whose every moment
was of value to suffering humanity, would sit for hours with Pierre
telling him his favorite anecdotes and his observations on the
characters of his patients in general, and especially of the ladies.

"It's a pleasure to talk to a man like that; he is not like our
provincials," he would say.

There were several prisoners from the French army in Orel, and the
doctor brought one of them, a young Italian, to see Pierre.

This officer began visiting Pierre, and the princess used to make fun of
the tenderness the Italian expressed for him.

The Italian seemed happy only when he could come to see Pierre, talk
with him, tell him about his past, his life at home, and his love,
and pour out to him his indignation against the French and especially
against Napoleon.

"If all Russians are in the least like you, it is sacrilege to fight
such a nation," he said to Pierre. "You, who have suffered so from the
French, do not even feel animosity toward them."

Pierre had evoked the passionate affection of the Italian merely by
evoking the best side of his nature and taking a pleasure in so doing.

During the last days of Pierre's stay in Orel his old Masonic
acquaintance Count Willarski, who had introduced him to the lodge in
1807, came to see him. Willarski was married to a Russian heiress who
had a large estate in Orel province, and he occupied a temporary post in
the commissariat department in that town.

Hearing that Bezukhov was in Orel, Willarski, though they had never been
intimate, came to him with the professions of friendship and intimacy
that people who meet in a desert generally express for one another.
Willarski felt dull in Orel and was pleased to meet a man of his own
circle and, as he supposed, of similar interests.

But to his surprise Willarski soon noticed that Pierre had lagged much
behind the times, and had sunk, as he expressed it to himself, into
apathy and egotism.

"You are letting yourself go, my dear fellow," he said.

But for all that Willarski found it pleasanter now than it had been
formerly to be with Pierre, and came to see him every day. To Pierre as
he looked at and listened to Willarski, it seemed strange to think that
he had been like that himself but a short time before.

Willarski was a married man with a family, busy with his family affairs,
his wife's affairs, and his official duties. He regarded all these
occupations as hindrances to life, and considered that they were all
contemptible because their aim was the welfare of himself and his
family. Military, administrative, political, and Masonic interests
continually absorbed his attention. And Pierre, without trying to
change the other's views and without condemning him, but with the quiet,
joyful, and amused smile now habitual to him, was interested in this
strange though very familiar phenomenon.

There was a new feature in Pierre's relations with Willarski, with the
princess, with the doctor, and with all the people he now met, which
gained for him the general good will. This was his acknowledgment of
the impossibility of changing a man's convictions by words, and his
recognition of the possibility of everyone thinking, feeling, and seeing
things each from his own point of view. This legitimate peculiarity of
each individual which used to excite and irritate Pierre now became a
basis of the sympathy he felt for, and the interest he took in, other
people. The difference, and sometimes complete contradiction, between
men's opinions and their lives, and between one man and another, pleased
him and drew from him an amused and gentle smile.

In practical matters Pierre unexpectedly felt within himself a center
of gravity he had previously lacked. Formerly all pecuniary questions,
especially requests for money to which, as an extremely wealthy man,
he was very exposed, produced in him a state of hopeless agitation and
perplexity. "To give or not to give?" he had asked himself. "I have
it and he needs it. But someone else needs it still more. Who needs it
most? And perhaps they are both impostors?" In the old days he had been
unable to find a way out of all these surmises and had given to all
who asked as long as he had anything to give. Formerly he had been in a
similar state of perplexity with regard to every question concerning his
property, when one person advised one thing and another something else.

Now to his surprise he found that he no longer felt either doubt or
perplexity about these questions. There was now within him a judge who
by some rule unknown to him decided what should or should not be done.

He was as indifferent as heretofore to money matters, but now he felt
certain of what ought and what ought not to be done. The first time he
had recourse to his new judge was when a French prisoner, a colonel,
came to him and, after talking a great deal about his exploits,
concluded by making what amounted to a demand that Pierre should give
him four thousand francs to send to his wife and children. Pierre
refused without the least difficulty or effort, and was afterwards
surprised how simple and easy had been what used to appear so
insurmountably difficult. At the same time that he refused the colonel's
demand he made up his mind that he must have recourse to artifice when
leaving Orel, to induce the Italian officer to accept some money of
which he was evidently in need. A further proof to Pierre of his own
more settled outlook on practical matters was furnished by his decision
with regard to his wife's debts and to the rebuilding of his houses in
and near Moscow.

His head steward came to him at Orel and Pierre reckoned up with him his
diminished income. The burning of Moscow had cost him, according to the
head steward's calculation, about two million rubles.

To console Pierre for these losses the head steward gave him an estimate
showing that despite these losses his income would not be diminished but
would even be increased if he refused to pay his wife's debts which he
was under no obligation to meet, and did not rebuild his Moscow house
and the country house on his Moscow estate, which had cost him eighty
thousand rubles a year and brought in nothing.

"Yes, of course that's true," said Pierre with a cheerful smile. "I
don't need all that at all. By being ruined I have become much richer."

But in January Savelich came from Moscow and gave him an account of the
state of things there, and spoke of the estimate an architect had made
of the cost of rebuilding the town and country houses, speaking of this
as of a settled matter. About the same time he received letters from
Prince Vasili and other Petersburg acquaintances speaking of his wife's
debts. And Pierre decided that the steward's proposals which had so
pleased him were wrong and that he must go to Petersburg and settle his
wife's affairs and must rebuild in Moscow. Why this was necessary he
did not know, but he knew for certain that it was necessary. His income
would be reduced by three fourths, but he felt it must be done.

Willarski was going to Moscow and they agreed to travel together.

During the whole time of his convalescence in Orel Pierre had
experienced a feeling of joy, freedom, and life; but when during his
journey he found himself in the open world and saw hundreds of new
faces, that feeling was intensified. Throughout his journey he felt like
a schoolboy on holiday. Everyone--the stagecoach driver, the post-house
overseers, the peasants on the roads and in the villages--had a
new significance for him. The presence and remarks of Willarski who
continually deplored the ignorance and poverty of Russia and its
backwardness compared with Europe only heightened Pierre's pleasure.
Where Willarski saw deadness Pierre saw an extraordinary strength
and vitality--the strength which in that vast space amid the snows
maintained the life of this original, peculiar, and unique people.
He did not contradict Willarski and even seemed to agree with him--an
apparent agreement being the simplest way to avoid discussions that
could lead to nothing--and he smiled joyfully as he listened to him.





CHAPTER XIV


It would be difficult to explain why and whither ants whose heap
has been destroyed are hurrying: some from the heap dragging bits of
rubbish, larvae, and corpses, others back to the heap, or why they
jostle, overtake one another, and fight, and it would be equally
difficult to explain what caused the Russians after the departure of the
French to throng to the place that had formerly been Moscow. But when
we watch the ants round their ruined heap, the tenacity, energy, and
immense number of the delving insects prove that despite the destruction
of the heap, something indestructible, which though intangible is the
real strength of the colony, still exists; and similarly, though in
Moscow in the month of October there was no government and no churches,
shrines, riches, or houses--it was still the Moscow it had been in
August. All was destroyed, except something intangible yet powerful and
indestructible.

The motives of those who thronged from all sides to Moscow after it had
been cleared of the enemy were most diverse and personal, and at first
for the most part savage and brutal. One motive only they all had in
common: a desire to get to the place that had been called Moscow, to
apply their activities there.

Within a week Moscow already had fifteen thousand inhabitants, in a
fortnight twenty-five thousand, and so on. By the autumn of 1813 the
number, ever increasing and increasing, exceeded what it had been in
1812.

The first Russians to enter Moscow were the Cossacks of Wintzingerode's
detachment, peasants from the adjacent villages, and residents who had
fled from Moscow and had been hiding in its vicinity. The Russians who
entered Moscow, finding it plundered, plundered it in their turn. They
continued what the French had begun. Trains of peasant carts came to
Moscow to carry off to the villages what had been abandoned in the
ruined houses and the streets. The Cossacks carried off what they could
to their camps, and the householders seized all they could find in other
houses and moved it to their own, pretending that it was their property.

But the first plunderers were followed by a second and a third
contingent, and with increasing numbers plundering became more and more
difficult and assumed more definite forms.

The French found Moscow abandoned but with all the organizations of
regular life, with diverse branches of commerce and craftsmanship, with
luxury, and governmental and religious institutions. These forms were
lifeless but still existed. There were bazaars, shops, warehouses,
market stalls, granaries--for the most part still stocked with
goods--and there were factories and workshops, palaces and wealthy
houses filled with luxuries, hospitals, prisons, government offices,
churches, and cathedrals. The longer the French remained the more these
forms of town life perished, until finally all was merged into one
confused, lifeless scene of plunder.

The more the plundering by the French continued, the more both the
wealth of Moscow and the strength of its plunderers was destroyed. But
plundering by the Russians, with which the reoccupation of the city
began, had an opposite effect: the longer it continued and the greater
the number of people taking part in it the more rapidly was the wealth
of the city and its regular life restored.

Besides the plunderers, very various people, some drawn by curiosity,
some by official duties, some by self-interest--house owners, clergy,
officials of all kinds, tradesmen, artisans, and peasants--streamed into
Moscow as blood flows to the heart.

Within a week the peasants who came with empty carts to carry off
plunder were stopped by the authorities and made to cart the corpses
out of the town. Other peasants, having heard of their comrades'
discomfiture, came to town bringing rye, oats, and hay, and beat down
one another's prices to below what they had been in former days. Gangs
of carpenters hoping for high pay arrived in Moscow every day, and on
all sides logs were being hewn, new houses built, and old, charred ones
repaired. Tradesmen began trading in booths. Cookshops and taverns were
opened in partially burned houses. The clergy resumed the services
in many churches that had not been burned. Donors contributed
Church property that had been stolen. Government clerks set up their
baize-covered tables and their pigeonholes of documents in small rooms.
The higher authorities and the police organized the distribution of
goods left behind by the French. The owners of houses in which much
property had been left, brought there from other houses, complained of
the injustice of taking everything to the Faceted Palace in the Kremlin;
others insisted that as the French had gathered things from different
houses into this or that house, it would be unfair to allow its owner to
keep all that was found there. They abused the police and bribed them,
made out estimates at ten times their value for government stores that
had perished in the fire, and demanded relief. And Count Rostopchin
wrote proclamations.





CHAPTER XV


At the end of January Pierre went to Moscow and stayed in an annex of
his house which had not been burned. He called on Count Rostopchin and
on some acquaintances who were back in Moscow, and he intended to leave
for Petersburg two days later. Everybody was celebrating the victory,
everything was bubbling with life in the ruined but reviving city.
Everyone was pleased to see Pierre, everyone wished to meet him, and
everyone questioned him about what he had seen. Pierre felt particularly
well disposed toward them all, but was now instinctively on his
guard for fear of binding himself in any way. To all questions put to
him--whether important or quite trifling--such as: Where would he live?
Was he going to rebuild? When was he going to Petersburg and would he
mind taking a parcel for someone?--he replied: "Yes, perhaps," or, "I
think so," and so on.

He had heard that the Rostovs were at Kostroma but the thought of
Natasha seldom occurred to him. If it did it was only as a pleasant
memory of the distant past. He felt himself not only free from social
obligations but also from that feeling which, it seemed to him, he had
aroused in himself.

On the third day after his arrival he heard from the Drubetskoys that
Princess Mary was in Moscow. The death, sufferings, and last days of
Prince Andrew had often occupied Pierre's thoughts and now recurred to
him with fresh vividness. Having heard at dinner that Princess Mary
was in Moscow and living in her house--which had not been burned--in
Vozdvizhenka Street, he drove that same evening to see her.

On his way to the house Pierre kept thinking of Prince Andrew, of their
friendship, of his various meetings with him, and especially of the last
one at Borodino.

"Is it possible that he died in the bitter frame of mind he was then in?
Is it possible that the meaning of life was not disclosed to him
before he died?" thought Pierre. He recalled Karataev and his death and
involuntarily began to compare these two men, so different, and yet so
similar in that they had both lived and both died and in the love he
felt for both of them.

Pierre drove up to the house of the old prince in a most serious mood.
The house had escaped the fire; it showed signs of damage but its
general aspect was unchanged. The old footman, who met Pierre with a
stern face as if wishing to make the visitor feel that the absence
of the old prince had not disturbed the order of things in the house,
informed him that the princess had gone to her own apartments, and that
she received on Sundays.

"Announce me. Perhaps she will see me," said Pierre.

"Yes, sir," said the man. "Please step into the portrait gallery."

A few minutes later the footman returned with Dessalles, who brought
word from the princess that she would be very glad to see Pierre if he
would excuse her want of ceremony and come upstairs to her apartment.

In a rather low room lit by one candle sat the princess and with her
another person dressed in black. Pierre remembered that the princess
always had lady companions, but who they were and what they were like
he never knew or remembered. "This must be one of her companions," he
thought, glancing at the lady in the black dress.

The princess rose quickly to meet him and held out her hand.

"Yes," she said, looking at his altered face after he had kissed her
hand, "so this is how we meet again. He spoke of you even at the very
last," she went on, turning her eyes from Pierre to her companion with a
shyness that surprised him for an instant.

"I was so glad to hear of your safety. It was the first piece of good
news we had received for a long time."

Again the princess glanced round at her companion with even more
uneasiness in her manner and was about to add something, but Pierre
interrupted her.

"Just imagine--I knew nothing about him!" said he. "I thought he had
been killed. All I know I heard at second hand from others. I only know
that he fell in with the Rostovs.... What a strange coincidence!"

Pierre spoke rapidly and with animation. He glanced once at the
companion's face, saw her attentive and kindly gaze fixed on him, and,
as often happens when one is talking, felt somehow that this companion
in the black dress was a good, kind, excellent creature who would not
hinder his conversing freely with Princess Mary.

But when he mentioned the Rostovs, Princess Mary's face expressed still
greater embarrassment. She again glanced rapidly from Pierre's face to
that of the lady in the black dress and said:

"Do you really not recognize her?"

Pierre looked again at the companion's pale, delicate face with its
black eyes and peculiar mouth, and something near to him, long forgotten
and more than sweet, looked at him from those attentive eyes.

"But no, it can't be!" he thought. "This stern, thin, pale face that
looks so much older! It cannot be she. It merely reminds me of her."
But at that moment Princess Mary said, "Natasha!" And with difficulty,
effort, and stress, like the opening of a door grown rusty on its
hinges, a smile appeared on the face with the attentive eyes, and from
that opening door came a breath of fragrance which suffused Pierre with
a happiness he had long forgotten and of which he had not even been
thinking--especially at that moment. It suffused him, seized him, and
enveloped him completely. When she smiled doubt was no longer possible,
it was Natasha and he loved her.

At that moment Pierre involuntarily betrayed to her, to Princess Mary,
and above all to himself, a secret of which he himself had been unaware.
He flushed joyfully yet with painful distress. He tried to hide his
agitation. But the more he tried to hide it the more clearly--clearer
than any words could have done--did he betray to himself, to her, and to
Princess Mary that he loved her.

"No, it's only the unexpectedness of it," thought Pierre. But as soon as
he tried to continue the conversation he had begun with Princess Mary he
again glanced at Natasha, and a still-deeper flush suffused his face and
a still-stronger agitation of mingled joy and fear seized his soul. He
became confused in his speech and stopped in the middle of what he was
saying.

Pierre had failed to notice Natasha because he did not at all expect to
see her there, but he had failed to recognize her because the change in
her since he last saw her was immense. She had grown thin and pale, but
that was not what made her unrecognizable; she was unrecognizable at the
moment he entered because on that face whose eyes had always shone with
a suppressed smile of the joy of life, now when he first entered and
glanced at her there was not the least shadow of a smile: only her eyes
were kindly attentive and sadly interrogative.

Pierre's confusion was not reflected by any confusion on Natasha's part,
but only by the pleasure that just perceptibly lit up her whole face.





CHAPTER XVI


"She has come to stay with me," said Princess Mary. "The count and
countess will be here in a few days. The countess is in a dreadful
state; but it was necessary for Natasha herself to see a doctor. They
insisted on her coming with me."

"Yes, is there a family free from sorrow now?" said Pierre, addressing
Natasha. "You know it happened the very day we were rescued. I saw him.
What a delightful boy he was!"

Natasha looked at him, and by way of answer to his words her eyes
widened and lit up.

"What can one say or think of as a consolation?" said Pierre. "Nothing!
Why had such a splendid boy, so full of life, to die?"

"Yes, in these days it would be hard to live without faith..." remarked
Princess Mary.

"Yes, yes, that is really true," Pierre hastily interrupted her.

"Why is it true?" Natasha asked, looking attentively into Pierre's eyes.

"How can you ask why?" said Princess Mary. "The thought alone of what
awaits..."

Natasha without waiting for Princess Mary to finish again looked
inquiringly at Pierre.

"And because," Pierre continued, "only one who believes that there is a
God ruling us can bear a loss such as hers and... yours."

Natasha had already opened her mouth to speak but suddenly stopped.
Pierre hurriedly turned away from her and again addressed Princess Mary,
asking about his friend's last days.

Pierre's confusion had now almost vanished, but at the same time he felt
that his freedom had also completely gone. He felt that there was now a
judge of his every word and action whose judgment mattered more to
him than that of all the rest of the world. As he spoke now he was
considering what impression his words would make on Natasha. He did
not purposely say things to please her, but whatever he was saying he
regarded from her standpoint.

Princess Mary--reluctantly as is usual in such cases--began telling of
the condition in which she had found Prince Andrew. But Pierre's face
quivering with emotion, his questions and his eager restless expression,
gradually compelled her to go into details which she feared to recall
for her own sake.

"Yes, yes, and so...?" Pierre kept saying as he leaned toward her with
his whole body and eagerly listened to her story. "Yes, yes... so he
grew tranquil and softened? With all his soul he had always sought one
thing--to be perfectly good--so he could not be afraid of death.
The faults he had--if he had any--were not of his making. So he did
soften?... What a happy thing that he saw you again," he added, suddenly
turning to Natasha and looking at her with eyes full of tears.

Natasha's face twitched. She frowned and lowered her eyes for a moment.
She hesitated for an instant whether to speak or not.

"Yes, that was happiness," she then said in her quiet voice with its
deep chest notes. "For me it certainly was happiness." She paused. "And
he... he... he said he was wishing for it at the very moment I entered
the room...."

Natasha's voice broke. She blushed, pressed her clasped hands on her
knees, and then controlling herself with an evident effort lifted her
head and began to speak rapidly.

"We knew nothing of it when we started from Moscow. I did not dare to
ask about him. Then suddenly Sonya told me he was traveling with us. I
had no idea and could not imagine what state he was in, all I wanted was
to see him and be with him," she said, trembling, and breathing quickly.

And not letting them interrupt her she went on to tell what she had
never yet mentioned to anyone--all she had lived through during those
three weeks of their journey and life at Yaroslavl.

Pierre listened to her with lips parted and eyes fixed upon her full of
tears. As he listened he did not think of Prince Andrew, nor of death,
nor of what she was telling. He listened to her and felt only pity for
her, for what she was suffering now while she was speaking.

Princess Mary, frowning in her effort to hold back her tears, sat beside
Natasha, and heard for the first time the story of those last days of
her brother's and Natasha's love.

Evidently Natasha needed to tell that painful yet joyful tale.

She spoke, mingling most trifling details with the intimate secrets of
her soul, and it seemed as if she could never finish. Several times she
repeated the same thing twice.

Dessalles' voice was heard outside the door asking whether little
Nicholas might come in to say good night.

"Well, that's all--everything," said Natasha.

She got up quickly just as Nicholas entered, almost ran to the door
which was hidden by curtains, struck her head against it, and rushed
from the room with a moan either of pain or sorrow.

Pierre gazed at the door through which she had disappeared and did not
understand why he suddenly felt all alone in the world.

Princess Mary roused him from his abstraction by drawing his attention
to her nephew who had entered the room.

At that moment of emotional tenderness young Nicholas' face, which
resembled his father's, affected Pierre so much that when he had kissed
the boy he got up quickly, took out his handkerchief, and went to the
window. He wished to take leave of Princess Mary, but she would not let
him go.

"No, Natasha and I sometimes don't go to sleep till after two, so please
don't go. I will order supper. Go downstairs, we will come immediately."

Before Pierre left the room Princess Mary told him: "This is the first
time she has talked of him like that."





CHAPTER XVII


Pierre was shown into the large, brightly lit dining room; a few minutes
later he heard footsteps and Princess Mary entered with Natasha. Natasha
was calm, though a severe and grave expression had again settled on her
face. They all three of them now experienced that feeling of awkwardness
which usually follows after a serious and heartfelt talk. It is
impossible to go back to the same conversation, to talk of trifles is
awkward, and yet the desire to speak is there and silence seems like
affectation. They went silently to table. The footmen drew back the
chairs and pushed them up again. Pierre unfolded his cold table napkin
and, resolving to break the silence, looked at Natasha and at Princess
Mary. They had evidently both formed the same resolution; the eyes of
both shone with satisfaction and a confession that besides sorrow life
also has joy.

"Do you take vodka, Count?" asked Princess Mary, and those words
suddenly banished the shadows of the past. "Now tell us about yourself,"
said she. "One hears such improbable wonders about you."

"Yes," replied Pierre with the smile of mild irony now habitual to him.
"They even tell me wonders I myself never dreamed of! Mary Abramovna
invited me to her house and kept telling me what had happened, or ought
to have happened, to me. Stepan Stepanych also instructed me how I ought
to tell of my experiences. In general I have noticed that it is very
easy to be an interesting man (I am an interesting man now); people
invite me out and tell me all about myself."

Natasha smiled and was on the point of speaking.

"We have been told," Princess Mary interrupted her, "that you lost two
millions in Moscow. Is that true?"

"But I am three times as rich as before," returned Pierre.

Though the position was now altered by his decision to pay his wife's
debts and to rebuild his houses, Pierre still maintained that he had
become three times as rich as before.

"What I have certainly gained is freedom," he began seriously, but did
not continue, noticing that this theme was too egotistic.

"And are you building?"

"Yes. Savelich says I must!"

"Tell me, you did not know of the countess' death when you decided to
remain in Moscow?" asked Princess Mary and immediately blushed, noticing
that her question, following his mention of freedom, ascribed to his
words a meaning he had perhaps not intended.

"No," answered Pierre, evidently not considering awkward the meaning
Princess Mary had given to his words. "I heard of it in Orel and you
cannot imagine how it shocked me. We were not an exemplary couple," he
added quickly, glancing at Natasha and noticing on her face curiosity as
to how he would speak of his wife, "but her death shocked me terribly.
When two people quarrel they are always both in fault, and one's own
guilt suddenly becomes terribly serious when the other is no longer
alive. And then such a death... without friends and without consolation!
I am very, very sorry for her," he concluded, and was pleased to notice
a look of glad approval on Natasha's face.

"Yes, and so you are once more an eligible bachelor," said Princess
Mary.

Pierre suddenly flushed crimson and for a long time tried not to look
at Natasha. When he ventured to glance her way again her face was cold,
stern, and he fancied even contemptuous.

"And did you really see and speak to Napoleon, as we have been told?"
said Princess Mary.

Pierre laughed.

"No, not once! Everybody seems to imagine that being taken prisoner
means being Napoleon's guest. Not only did I never see him but I heard
nothing about him--I was in much lower company!"

Supper was over, and Pierre who at first declined to speak about his
captivity was gradually led on to do so.

"But it's true that you remained in Moscow to kill Napoleon?" Natasha
asked with a slight smile. "I guessed it then when we met at the
Sukharev tower, do you remember?"

Pierre admitted that it was true, and from that was gradually led by
Princess Mary's questions and especially by Natasha's into giving a
detailed account of his adventures.

At first he spoke with the amused and mild irony now customary with
him toward everybody and especially toward himself, but when he came
to describe the horrors and sufferings he had witnessed he was
unconsciously carried away and began speaking with the suppressed
emotion of a man re-experiencing in recollection strong impressions he
has lived through.

Princess Mary with a gentle smile looked now at Pierre and now at
Natasha. In the whole narrative she saw only Pierre and his goodness.
Natasha, leaning on her elbow, the expression of her face constantly
changing with the narrative, watched Pierre with an attention that never
wandered--evidently herself experiencing all that he described. Not only
her look, but her exclamations and the brief questions she put, showed
Pierre that she understood just what he wished to convey. It was clear
that she understood not only what he said but also what he wished to,
but could not, express in words. The account Pierre gave of the incident
with the child and the woman for protecting whom he was arrested was
this: "It was an awful sight--children abandoned, some in the flames...
One was snatched out before my eyes... and there were women who had
their things snatched off and their earrings torn out..." he flushed
and grew confused. "Then a patrol arrived and all the men--all those who
were not looting, that is--were arrested, and I among them."

"I am sure you're not telling us everything; I am sure you did
something..." said Natasha and pausing added, "something fine?"

Pierre continued. When he spoke of the execution he wanted to pass
over the horrible details, but Natasha insisted that he should not omit
anything.

Pierre began to tell about Karataev, but paused. By this time he had
risen from the table and was pacing the room, Natasha following him with
her eyes. Then he added:

"No, you can't understand what I learned from that illiterate man--that
simple fellow."

"Yes, yes, go on!" said Natasha. "Where is he?"

"They killed him almost before my eyes."

And Pierre, his voice trembling continually, went on to tell of the last
days of their retreat, of Karataev's illness and his death.

He told of his adventures as he had never yet recalled them. He now, as
it were, saw a new meaning in all he had gone through. Now that he was
telling it all to Natasha he experienced that pleasure which a man has
when women listen to him--not clever women who when listening either try
to remember what they hear to enrich their minds and when opportunity
offers to retell it, or who wish to adopt it to some thought of their
own and promptly contribute their own clever comments prepared in their
little mental workshop--but the pleasure given by real women gifted with
a capacity to select and absorb the very best a man shows of himself.
Natasha without knowing it was all attention: she did not lose a word,
no single quiver in Pierre's voice, no look, no twitch of a muscle in
his face, nor a single gesture. She caught the unfinished word in its
flight and took it straight into her open heart, divining the secret
meaning of all Pierre's mental travail.

Princess Mary understood his story and sympathized with him, but she
now saw something else that absorbed all her attention. She saw the
possibility of love and happiness between Natasha and Pierre, and the
first thought of this filled her heart with gladness.

It was three o'clock in the morning. The footmen came in with sad and
stern faces to change the candles, but no one noticed them.

Pierre finished his story. Natasha continued to look at him intently
with bright, attentive, and animated eyes, as if trying to understand
something more which he had perhaps left untold. Pierre in shamefaced
and happy confusion glanced occasionally at her, and tried to think what
to say next to introduce a fresh subject. Princess Mary was silent. It
occurred to none of them that it was three o'clock and time to go to
bed.

"People speak of misfortunes and sufferings," remarked Pierre, "but if
at this moment I were asked: 'Would you rather be what you were before
you were taken prisoner, or go through all this again?' then for
heaven's sake let me again have captivity and horseflesh! We imagine
that when we are thrown out of our usual ruts all is lost, but it is
only then that what is new and good begins. While there is life there is
happiness. There is much, much before us. I say this to you," he added,
turning to Natasha.

"Yes, yes," she said, answering something quite different. "I too should
wish nothing but to relive it all from the beginning."

Pierre looked intently at her.

"Yes, and nothing more," said Natasha.

"It's not true, not true!" cried Pierre. "I am not to blame for being
alive and wishing to live--nor you either."

Suddenly Natasha bent her head, covered her face with her hands, and
began to cry.

"What is it, Natasha?" said Princess Mary.

"Nothing, nothing." She smiled at Pierre through her tears. "Good night!
It is time for bed."

Pierre rose and took his leave.


Princess Mary and Natasha met as usual in the bedroom. They talked of
what Pierre had told them. Princess Mary did not express her opinion of
Pierre nor did Natasha speak of him.

"Well, good night, Mary!" said Natasha. "Do you know, I am often afraid
that by not speaking of him" (she meant Prince Andrew) "for fear of not
doing justice to our feelings, we forget him."

Princess Mary sighed deeply and thereby acknowledged the justice of
Natasha's remark, but she did not express agreement in words.

"Is it possible to forget?" said she.

"It did me so much good to tell all about it today. It was hard and
painful, but good, very good!" said Natasha. "I am sure he really loved
him. That is why I told him... Was it all right?" she added, suddenly
blushing.

"To tell Pierre? Oh, yes. What a splendid man he is!" said Princess
Mary.

"Do you know, Mary..." Natasha suddenly said with a mischievous smile
such as Princess Mary had not seen on her face for a long time, "he has
somehow grown so clean, smooth, and fresh--as if he had just come out of
a Russian bath; do you understand? Out of a moral bath. Isn't it true?"

"Yes," replied Princess Mary. "He has greatly improved."

"With a short coat and his hair cropped; just as if, well, just as if he
had come straight from the bath... Papa used to..."

"I understand why he" (Prince Andrew) "liked no one so much as him,"
said Princess Mary.

"Yes, and yet he is quite different. They say men are friends when
they are quite different. That must be true. Really he is quite unlike
him--in everything."

"Yes, but he's wonderful."

"Well, good night," said Natasha.

And the same mischievous smile lingered for a long time on her face as
if it had been forgotten there.





CHAPTER XVIII


It was a long time before Pierre could fall asleep that night. He paced
up and down his room, now turning his thoughts on a difficult problem
and frowning, now suddenly shrugging his shoulders and wincing, and now
smiling happily.

He was thinking of Prince Andrew, of Natasha, and of their love, at one
moment jealous of her past, then reproaching himself for that feeling.
It was already six in the morning and he still paced up and down the
room.

"Well, what's to be done if it cannot be avoided? What's to be done?
Evidently it has to be so," said he to himself, and hastily undressing
he got into bed, happy and agitated but free from hesitation or
indecision.

"Strange and impossible as such happiness seems, I must do everything
that she and I may be man and wife," he told himself.

A few days previously Pierre had decided to go to Petersburg on the
Friday. When he awoke on the Thursday, Savelich came to ask him about
packing for the journey.

"What, to Petersburg? What is Petersburg? Who is there in Petersburg?"
he asked involuntarily, though only to himself. "Oh, yes, long ago
before this happened I did for some reason mean to go to Petersburg,"
he reflected. "Why? But perhaps I shall go. What a good fellow he is and
how attentive, and how he remembers everything," he thought, looking at
Savelich's old face, "and what a pleasant smile he has!"

"Well, Savelich, do you still not wish to accept your freedom?" Pierre
asked him.

"What's the good of freedom to me, your excellency? We lived under the
late count--the kingdom of heaven be his!--and we have lived under you
too, without ever being wronged."

"And your children?"

"The children will live just the same. With such masters one can live."

"But what about my heirs?" said Pierre. "Supposing I suddenly marry...
it might happen," he added with an involuntary smile.

"If I may take the liberty, your excellency, it would be a good thing."

"How easy he thinks it," thought Pierre. "He doesn't know how terrible
it is and how dangerous. Too soon or too late... it is terrible!"

"So what are your orders? Are you starting tomorrow?" asked Savelich.

"No, I'll put it off for a bit. I'll tell you later. You must forgive
the trouble I have put you to," said Pierre, and seeing Savelich smile,
he thought: "But how strange it is that he should not know that now
there is no Petersburg for me, and that that must be settled first of
all! But probably he knows it well enough and is only pretending. Shall
I have a talk with him and see what he thinks?" Pierre reflected. "No,
another time."

At breakfast Pierre told the princess, his cousin, that he had been to
see Princess Mary the day before and had there met--"Whom do you think?
Natasha Rostova!"

The princess seemed to see nothing more extraordinary in that than if he
had seen Anna Semenovna.

"Do you know her?" asked Pierre.

"I have seen the princess," she replied. "I heard that they were
arranging a match for her with young Rostov. It would be a very good
thing for the Rostovs, they are said to be utterly ruined."

"No; I mean do you know Natasha Rostova?"

"I heard about that affair of hers at the time. It was a great pity."

"No, she either doesn't understand or is pretending," thought Pierre.
"Better not say anything to her either."

The princess too had prepared provisions for Pierre's journey.

"How kind they all are," thought Pierre. "What is surprising is that
they should trouble about these things now when it can no longer be of
interest to them. And all for me!"

On the same day the Chief of Police came to Pierre, inviting him to send
a representative to the Faceted Palace to recover things that were to be
returned to their owners that day.

"And this man too," thought Pierre, looking into the face of the Chief
of Police. "What a fine, good-looking officer and how kind. Fancy
bothering about such trifles now! And they actually say he is not honest
and takes bribes. What nonsense! Besides, why shouldn't he take bribes?
That's the way he was brought up, and everybody does it. But what a
kind, pleasant face and how he smiles as he looks at me."

Pierre went to Princess Mary's to dinner.

As he drove through the streets past the houses that had been burned
down, he was surprised by the beauty of those ruins. The picturesqueness
of the chimney stacks and tumble-down walls of the burned-out quarters
of the town, stretching out and concealing one another, reminded him of
the Rhine and the Colosseum. The cabmen he met and their passengers,
the carpenters cutting the timber for new houses with axes, the women
hawkers, and the shopkeepers, all looked at him with cheerful beaming
eyes that seemed to say: "Ah, there he is! Let's see what will come of
it!"

At the entrance to Princess Mary's house Pierre felt doubtful whether
he had really been there the night before and really seen Natasha and
talked to her. "Perhaps I imagined it; perhaps I shall go in and find
no one there." But he had hardly entered the room before he felt her
presence with his whole being by the loss of his sense of freedom. She
was in the same black dress with soft folds and her hair was done the
same way as the day before, yet she was quite different. Had she been
like this when he entered the day before he could not for a moment have
failed to recognize her.

She was as he had known her almost as a child and later on as Prince
Andrew's fiancee. A bright questioning light shone in her eyes, and on
her face was a friendly and strangely roguish expression.

Pierre dined with them and would have spent the whole evening there, but
Princess Mary was going to vespers and Pierre left the house with her.

Next day he came early, dined, and stayed the whole evening. Though
Princess Mary and Natasha were evidently glad to see their visitor and
though all Pierre's interest was now centered in that house, by the
evening they had talked over everything and the conversation passed from
one trivial topic to another and repeatedly broke off. He stayed so long
that Princess Mary and Natasha exchanged glances, evidently wondering
when he would go. Pierre noticed this but could not go. He felt uneasy
and embarrassed, but sat on because he simply could not get up and take
his leave.

Princess Mary, foreseeing no end to this, rose first, and complaining of
a headache began to say good night.

"So you are going to Petersburg tomorrow?" she asked.

"No, I am not going," Pierre replied hastily, in a surprised tone and as
though offended. "Yes... no... to Petersburg? Tomorrow--but I won't say
good-by yet. I will call round in case you have any commissions for me,"
said he, standing before Princess Mary and turning red, but not taking
his departure.

Natasha gave him her hand and went out. Princess Mary on the other hand
instead of going away sank into an armchair, and looked sternly and
intently at him with her deep, radiant eyes. The weariness she
had plainly shown before had now quite passed off. With a deep and
long-drawn sigh she seemed to be prepared for a lengthy talk.

When Natasha left the room Pierre's confusion and awkwardness
immediately vanished and were replaced by eager excitement. He quickly
moved an armchair toward Princess Mary.

"Yes, I wanted to tell you," said he, answering her look as if she had
spoken. "Princess, help me! What am I to do? Can I hope? Princess, my
dear friend, listen! I know it all. I know I am not worthy of her, I
know it's impossible to speak of it now. But I want to be a brother to
her. No, not that, I don't, I can't..."

He paused and rubbed his face and eyes with his hands.

"Well," he went on with an evident effort at self-control and coherence.
"I don't know when I began to love her, but I have loved her and her
alone all my life, and I love her so that I cannot imagine life without
her. I cannot propose to her at present, but the thought that
perhaps she might someday be my wife and that I may be missing that
possibility... that possibility... is terrible. Tell me, can I hope?
Tell me what I am to do, dear princess!" he added after a pause, and
touched her hand as she did not reply.

"I am thinking of what you have told me," answered Princess Mary.
"This is what I will say. You are right that to speak to her of love at
present..."

Princess Mary stopped. She was going to say that to speak of love was
impossible, but she stopped because she had seen by the sudden change
in Natasha two days before that she would not only not be hurt if Pierre
spoke of his love, but that it was the very thing she wished for.

"To speak to her now wouldn't do," said the princess all the same.

"But what am I to do?"

"Leave it to me," said Princess Mary. "I know..."

Pierre was looking into Princess Mary's eyes.

"Well?... Well?..." he said.

"I know that she loves... will love you," Princess Mary corrected
herself.

Before her words were out, Pierre had sprung up and with a frightened
expression seized Princess Mary's hand.

"What makes you think so? You think I may hope? You think...?"

"Yes, I think so," said Princess Mary with a smile. "Write to her
parents, and leave it to me. I will tell her when I can. I wish it to
happen and my heart tells me it will."

"No, it cannot be! How happy I am! But it can't be.... How happy I am!
No, it can't be!" Pierre kept saying as he kissed Princess Mary's hands.

"Go to Petersburg, that will be best. And I will write to you," she
said.

"To Petersburg? Go there? Very well, I'll go. But I may come again
tomorrow?"

Next day Pierre came to say good-by. Natasha was less animated than
she had been the day before; but that day as he looked at her Pierre
sometimes felt as if he was vanishing and that neither he nor she
existed any longer, that nothing existed but happiness. "Is it possible?
No, it can't be," he told himself at every look, gesture, and word that
filled his soul with joy.

When on saying good-by he took her thin, slender hand, he could not help
holding it a little longer in his own.

"Is it possible that this hand, that face, those eyes, all this treasure
of feminine charm so strange to me now, is it possible that it will one
day be mine forever, as familiar to me as I am to myself?... No, that's
impossible!..."

"Good-by, Count," she said aloud. "I shall look forward very much to
your return," she added in a whisper.

And these simple words, her look, and the expression on her face which
accompanied them, formed for two months the subject of inexhaustible
memories, interpretations, and happy meditations for Pierre. "'I shall
look forward very much to your return....' Yes, yes, how did she say it?
Yes, 'I shall look forward very much to your return.' Oh, how happy I
am! What is happening to me? How happy I am!" said Pierre to himself.





CHAPTER XIX


There was nothing in Pierre's soul now at all like what had troubled it
during his courtship of Helene.

He did not repeat to himself with a sickening feeling of shame the words
he had spoken, or say: "Oh, why did I not say that?" and, "Whatever made
me say 'Je vous aime'?" On the contrary, he now repeated in imagination
every word that he or Natasha had spoken and pictured every detail of
her face and smile, and did not wish to diminish or add anything, but
only to repeat it again and again. There was now not a shadow of doubt
in his mind as to whether what he had undertaken was right or wrong.
Only one terrible doubt sometimes crossed his mind: "Wasn't it all
a dream? Isn't Princess Mary mistaken? Am I not too conceited and
self-confident? I believe all this--and suddenly Princess Mary will tell
her, and she will be sure to smile and say: 'How strange! He must be
deluding himself. Doesn't he know that he is a man, just a man, while
I...? I am something altogether different and higher.'"

That was the only doubt often troubling Pierre. He did not now make any
plans. The happiness before him appeared so inconceivable that if only
he could attain it, it would be the end of all things. Everything ended
with that.

A joyful, unexpected frenzy, of which he had thought himself incapable,
possessed him. The whole meaning of life--not for him alone but for the
whole world--seemed to him centered in his love and the possibility of
being loved by her. At times everybody seemed to him to be occupied with
one thing only--his future happiness. Sometimes it seemed to him that
other people were all as pleased as he was himself and merely tried to
hide that pleasure by pretending to be busy with other interests. In
every word and gesture he saw allusions to his happiness. He often
surprised those he met by his significantly happy looks and smiles which
seemed to express a secret understanding between him and them. And when
he realized that people might not be aware of his happiness, he pitied
them with his whole heart and felt a desire somehow to explain to them
that all that occupied them was a mere frivolous trifle unworthy of
attention.

When it was suggested to him that he should enter the civil service,
or when the war or any general political affairs were discussed on the
assumption that everybody's welfare depended on this or that issue
of events, he would listen with a mild and pitying smile and surprise
people by his strange comments. But at this time he saw everybody--both
those who, as he imagined, understood the real meaning of life (that
is, what he was feeling) and those unfortunates who evidently did not
understand it--in the bright light of the emotion that shone within
himself, and at once without any effort saw in everyone he met
everything that was good and worthy of being loved.

When dealing with the affairs and papers of his dead wife, her memory
aroused in him no feeling but pity that she had not known the bliss he
now knew. Prince Vasili, who having obtained a new post and some
fresh decorations was particularly proud at this time, seemed to him a
pathetic, kindly old man much to be pitied.

Often in afterlife Pierre recalled this period of blissful insanity. All
the views he formed of men and circumstances at this time remained true
for him always. He not only did not renounce them subsequently, but when
he was in doubt or inwardly at variance, he referred to the views he had
held at this time of his madness and they always proved correct.

"I may have appeared strange and queer then," he thought, "but I was
not so mad as I seemed. On the contrary I was then wiser and had
more insight than at any other time, and understood all that is worth
understanding in life, because... because I was happy."

Pierre's insanity consisted in not waiting, as he used to do, to
discover personal attributes which he termed "good qualities" in people
before loving them; his heart was now overflowing with love, and by
loving people without cause he discovered indubitable causes for loving
them.





CHAPTER XX


After Pierre's departure that first evening, when Natasha had said to
Princess Mary with a gaily mocking smile: "He looks just, yes, just as
if he had come out of a Russian bath--in a short coat and with his hair
cropped," something hidden and unknown to herself, but irrepressible,
awoke in Natasha's soul.

Everything: her face, walk, look, and voice, was suddenly altered.
To her own surprise a power of life and hope of happiness rose to the
surface and demanded satisfaction. From that evening she seemed to have
forgotten all that had happened to her. She no longer complained of her
position, did not say a word about the past, and no longer feared to
make happy plans for the future. She spoke little of Pierre, but when
Princess Mary mentioned him a long-extinguished light once more kindled
in her eyes and her lips curved with a strange smile.

The change that took place in Natasha at first surprised Princess Mary;
but when she understood its meaning it grieved her. "Can she have loved
my brother so little as to be able to forget him so soon?" she thought
when she reflected on the change. But when she was with Natasha she was
not vexed with her and did not reproach her. The reawakened power
of life that had seized Natasha was so evidently irrepressible and
unexpected by her that in her presence Princess Mary felt that she had
no right to reproach her even in her heart.

 Natasha gave herself up so fully and frankly to this new feeling
that she did not try to hide the fact that she was no longer sad, but
bright and cheerful.

When Princess Mary returned to her room after her nocturnal talk with
Pierre, Natasha met her on the threshold.

"He has spoken? Yes? He has spoken?" she repeated.

And a joyful yet pathetic expression which seemed to beg forgiveness for
her joy settled on Natasha's face.

"I wanted to listen at the door, but I knew you would tell me."

Understandable and touching as the look with which Natasha gazed at
her seemed to Princess Mary, and sorry as she was to see her agitation,
these words pained her for a moment. She remembered her brother and his
love.

"But what's to be done? She can't help it," thought the princess.

And with a sad and rather stern look she told Natasha all that Pierre
had said. On hearing that he was going to Petersburg Natasha was
astounded.

"To Petersburg!" she repeated as if unable to understand.

But noticing the grieved expression on Princess Mary's face she guessed
the reason of that sadness and suddenly began to cry.

"Mary," said she, "tell me what I should do! I am afraid of being bad.
Whatever you tell me, I will do. Tell me...."

"You love him?"

"Yes," whispered Natasha.

"Then why are you crying? I am happy for your sake," said Princess Mary,
who because of those tears quite forgave Natasha's joy.

"It won't be just yet--someday. Think what fun it will be when I am his
wife and you marry Nicholas!"

"Natasha, I have asked you not to speak of that. Let us talk about you."

They were silent awhile.

"But why go to Petersburg?" Natasha suddenly asked, and hastily replied
to her own question. "But no, no, he must... Yes, Mary, He must...."





FIRST EPILOGUE: 1813 - 20





CHAPTER I


Seven years had passed. The storm-tossed sea of European history had
subsided within its shores and seemed to have become calm. But the
mysterious forces that move humanity (mysterious because the laws of
their motion are unknown to us) continued to operate.

Though the surface of the sea of history seemed motionless, the movement
of humanity went on as unceasingly as the flow of time. Various groups
of people formed and dissolved, the coming formation and dissolution of
kingdoms and displacement of peoples was in course of preparation.

The sea of history was not driven spasmodically from shore to shore as
previously. It was seething in its depths. Historic figures were not
borne by the waves from one shore to another as before. They now seemed
to rotate on one spot. The historical figures at the head of armies,
who formerly reflected the movement of the masses by ordering wars,
campaigns, and battles, now reflected the restless movement by political
and diplomatic combinations, laws, and treaties.

The historians call this activity of the historical figures "the
reaction."

In dealing with this period they sternly condemn the historical
personages who, in their opinion, caused what they describe as the
reaction. All the well-known people of that period, from Alexander and
Napoleon to Madame de Stael, Photius, Schelling, Fichte, Chateaubriand,
and the rest, pass before their stern judgment seat and are acquitted or
condemned according to whether they conduced to progress or to reaction.

According to their accounts a reaction took place at that time in Russia
also, and the chief culprit was Alexander I, the same man who according
to them was the chief cause of the liberal movement at the commencement
of his reign, being the savior of Russia.

There is no one in Russian literature now, from schoolboy essayist to
learned historian, who does not throw his little stone at Alexander for
things he did wrong at this period of his reign.

"He ought to have acted in this way and in that way. In this case he did
well and in that case badly. He behaved admirably at the beginning of
his reign and during 1812, but acted badly by giving a constitution
to Poland, forming the Holy Alliance, entrusting power to Arakcheev,
favoring Golitsyn and mysticism, and afterwards Shishkov and Photius.
He also acted badly by concerning himself with the active army and
disbanding the Semenov regiment."

It would take a dozen pages to enumerate all the reproaches the
historians address to him, based on their knowledge of what is good for
humanity.

What do these reproaches mean?

Do not the very actions for which the historians praise Alexander I
(the liberal attempts at the beginning of his reign, his struggle with
Napoleon, the firmness he displayed in 1812 and the campaign of 1813)
flow from the same sources--the circumstances of his birth, education,
and life--that made his personality what it was and from which the
actions for which they blame him (the Holy Alliance, the restoration of
Poland, and the reaction of 1820 and later) also flowed?

In what does the substance of those reproaches lie?

It lies in the fact that an historic character like Alexander I,
standing on the highest possible pinnacle of human power with the
blinding light of history focused upon him; a character exposed to those
strongest of all influences: the intrigues, flattery, and self-deception
inseparable from power; a character who at every moment of his life
felt a responsibility for all that was happening in Europe; and not
a fictitious but a live character who like every man had his personal
habits, passions, and impulses toward goodness, beauty, and truth--that
this character--though not lacking in virtue (the historians do not
accuse him of that)--had not the same conception of the welfare of
humanity fifty years ago as a present-day professor who from his
youth upwards has been occupied with learning: that is, with books and
lectures and with taking notes from them.

But even if we assume that fifty years ago Alexander I was mistaken in
his view of what was good for the people, we must inevitably assume that
the historian who judges Alexander will also after the lapse of some
time turn out to be mistaken in his view of what is good for humanity.
This assumption is all the more natural and inevitable because, watching
the movement of history, we see that every year and with each new
writer, opinion as to what is good for mankind changes; so that what
once seemed good, ten years later seems bad, and vice versa. And what is
more, we find at one and the same time quite contradictory views as to
what is bad and what is good in history: some people regard giving a
constitution to Poland and forming the Holy Alliance as praiseworthy in
Alexander, while others regard it as blameworthy.

The activity of Alexander or of Napoleon cannot be called useful or
harmful, for it is impossible to say for what it was useful or harmful.
If that activity displeases somebody, this is only because it does
not agree with his limited understanding of what is good. Whether the
preservation of my father's house in Moscow, or the glory of the Russian
arms, or the prosperity of the Petersburg and other universities, or the
freedom of Poland or the greatness of Russia, or the balance of power in
Europe, or a certain kind of European culture called "progress" appear
to me to be good or bad, I must admit that besides these things the
action of every historic character has other more general purposes
inaccessible to me.

But let us assume that what is called science can harmonize all
contradictions and possesses an unchanging standard of good and bad by
which to try historic characters and events; let us say that Alexander
could have done everything differently; let us say that with guidance
from those who blame him and who profess to know the ultimate aim of the
movement of humanity, he might have arranged matters according to the
program his present accusers would have given him--of nationality,
freedom, equality, and progress (these, I think, cover the ground). Let
us assume that this program was possible and had then been formulated,
and that Alexander had acted on it. What would then have become of the
activity of all those who opposed the tendency that then prevailed in
the government--an activity that in the opinion of the historians was
good and beneficent? Their activity would not have existed: there would
have been no life, there would have been nothing.

If we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, the possibility of
life is destroyed.





CHAPTER II


If we assume as the historians do that great men lead humanity to the
attainment of certain ends--the greatness of Russia or of France,
the balance of power in Europe, the diffusion of the ideas of the
Revolution, general progress, or anything else--then it is impossible
to explain the facts of history without introducing the conceptions of
chance and genius.

If the aim of the European wars at the beginning of the nineteenth
century had been the aggrandizement of Russia, that aim might have been
accomplished without all the preceding wars and without the invasion. If
the aim was the aggrandizement of France, that might have been attained
without the Revolution and without the Empire. If the aim was the
dissemination of ideas, the printing press could have accomplished that
much better than warfare. If the aim was the progress of civilization,
it is easy to see that there are other ways of diffusing civilization
more expedient than by the destruction of wealth and of human lives.

Why did it happen in this and not in some other way?

Because it happened so! "Chance created the situation; genius utilized
it," says history.

But what is chance? What is genius?

The words chance and genius do not denote any really existing thing and
therefore cannot be defined. Those words only denote a certain stage of
understanding of phenomena. I do not know why a certain event occurs; I
think that I cannot know it; so I do not try to know it and I talk about
chance. I see a force producing effects beyond the scope of ordinary
human agencies; I do not understand why this occurs and I talk of
genius.

To a herd of rams, the ram the herdsman drives each evening into a
special enclosure to feed and that becomes twice as fat as the others
must seem to be a genius. And it must appear an astonishing conjunction
of genius with a whole series of extraordinary chances that this ram,
who instead of getting into the general fold every evening goes into
a special enclosure where there are oats--that this very ram, swelling
with fat, is killed for meat.

But the rams need only cease to suppose that all that happens to them
happens solely for the attainment of their sheepish aims; they need only
admit that what happens to them may also have purposes beyond their ken,
and they will at once perceive a unity and coherence in what happened
to the ram that was fattened. Even if they do not know for what purpose
they are fattened, they will at least know that all that happened to the
ram did not happen accidentally, and will no longer need the conceptions
of chance or genius.

Only by renouncing our claim to discern a purpose immediately
intelligible to us, and admitting the ultimate purpose to be beyond our
ken, may we discern the sequence of experiences in the lives of
historic characters and perceive the cause of the effect they produce
(incommensurable with ordinary human capabilities), and then the words
chance and genius become superfluous.

We need only confess that we do not know the purpose of the European
convulsions and that we know only the facts--that is, the murders, first
in France, then in Italy, in Africa, in Prussia, in Austria, in Spain,
and in Russia--and that the movements from the west to the east and from
the east to the west form the essence and purpose of these events, and
not only shall we have no need to see exceptional ability and genius in
Napoleon and Alexander, but we shall be unable to consider them to
be anything but like other men, and we shall not be obliged to have
recourse to chance for an explanation of those small events which made
these people what they were, but it will be clear that all those small
events were inevitable.

By discarding a claim to knowledge of the ultimate purpose, we shall
clearly perceive that just as one cannot imagine a blossom or seed for
any single plant better suited to it than those it produces, so it is
impossible to imagine any two people more completely adapted down to the
smallest detail for the purpose they had to fulfill, than Napoleon and
Alexander with all their antecedents.





CHAPTER III


The fundamental and essential significance of the European events of the
beginning of the nineteenth century lies in the movement of the mass of
the European peoples from west to east and afterwards from east to west.
The commencement of that movement was the movement from west to east.
For the peoples of the west to be able to make their warlike movement
to Moscow it was necessary: (1) that they should form themselves into
a military group of a size able to endure a collision with the warlike
military group of the east, (2) that they should abandon all established
traditions and customs, and (3) that during their military movement they
should have at their head a man who could justify to himself and to them
the deceptions, robberies, and murders which would have to be committed
during that movement.

And beginning with the French Revolution the old inadequately large
group was destroyed, as well as the old habits and traditions, and step
by step a group was formed of larger dimensions with new customs and
traditions, and a man was produced who would stand at the head of the
coming movement and bear the responsibility for all that had to be done.

A man without convictions, without habits, without traditions, without
a name, and not even a Frenchman, emerges--by what seem the strangest
chances--from among all the seething French parties, and without joining
any one of them is borne forward to a prominent position.

The ignorance of his colleagues, the weakness and insignificance of
his opponents, the frankness of his falsehoods, and the dazzling and
self-confident limitations of this man raise him to the head of the
army. The brilliant qualities of the soldiers of the army sent to Italy,
his opponents' reluctance to fight, and his own childish audacity and
self-confidence secure him military fame. Innumerable so called chances
accompany him everywhere. The disfavor into which he falls with the
rulers of France turns to his advantage. His attempts to avoid his
predestined path are unsuccessful: he is not received into the Russian
service, and the appointment he seeks in Turkey comes to nothing. During
the war in Italy he is several times on the verge of destruction and
each time is saved in an unexpected manner. Owing to various diplomatic
considerations the Russian armies--just those which might have destroyed
his prestige--do not appear upon the scene till he is no longer there.

On his return from Italy he finds the government in Paris in a process
of dissolution in which all those who are in it are inevitably wiped
out and destroyed. And by chance an escape from this dangerous position
presents itself in the form of an aimless and senseless expedition
to Africa. Again so-called chance accompanies him. Impregnable Malta
surrenders without a shot; his most reckless schemes are crowned with
success. The enemy's fleet, which subsequently did not let a single boat
pass, allows his entire army to elude it. In Africa a whole series of
outrages are committed against the almost unarmed inhabitants. And the
men who commit these crimes, especially their leader, assure themselves
that this is admirable, this is glory--it resembles Caesar and Alexander
the Great and is therefore good.

This ideal of glory and grandeur--which consists not merely in
considering nothing wrong that one does but in priding oneself on every
crime one commits, ascribing to it an incomprehensible supernatural
significance--that ideal, destined to guide this man and his associates,
had scope for its development in Africa. Whatever he does succeeds. The
plague does not touch him. The cruelty of murdering prisoners is not
imputed to him as a fault. His childishly rash, uncalled-for, and
ignoble departure from Africa, leaving his comrades in distress, is
set down to his credit, and again the enemy's fleet twice lets him slip
past. When, intoxicated by the crimes he has committed so successfully,
he reaches Paris, the dissolution of the republican government, which a
year earlier might have ruined him, has reached its extreme limit, and
his presence there now as a newcomer free from party entanglements can
only serve to exalt him--and though he himself has no plan, he is quite
ready for his new role.

He had no plan, he was afraid of everything, but the parties snatched at
him and demanded his participation.

He alone--with his ideal of glory and grandeur developed in Italy and
Egypt, his insane self-adulation, his boldness in crime and frankness in
lying--he alone could justify what had to be done.

He is needed for the place that awaits him, and so almost apart from
his will and despite his indecision, his lack of a plan, and all his
mistakes, he is drawn into a conspiracy that aims at seizing power and
the conspiracy is crowned with success.

He is pushed into a meeting of the legislature. In alarm he wishes to
flee, considering himself lost. He pretends to fall into a swoon and
says senseless things that should have ruined him. But the once proud
and shrewd rulers of France, feeling that their part is played out, are
even more bewildered than he, and do not say the words they should have
said to destroy him and retain their power.

Chance, millions of chances, give him power, and all men as if by
agreement co-operate to confirm that power. Chance forms the characters
of the rulers of France, who submit to him; chance forms the character
of Paul I of Russia who recognizes his government; chance contrives
a plot against him which not only fails to harm him but confirms his
power. Chance puts the Duc d'Enghien in his hands and unexpectedly
causes him to kill him--thereby convincing the mob more forcibly than
in any other way that he had the right, since he had the might.
Chance contrives that though he directs all his efforts to prepare an
expedition against England (which would inevitably have ruined him) he
never carries out that intention, but unexpectedly falls upon Mack and
the Austrians, who surrender without a battle. Chance and genius give
him the victory at Austerlitz; and by chance all men, not only the
French but all Europe--except England which does not take part in the
events about to happen--despite their former horror and detestation of
his crimes, now recognize his authority, the title he has given
himself, and his ideal of grandeur and glory, which seems excellent and
reasonable to them all.

As if measuring themselves and preparing for the coming movement, the
western forces push toward the east several times in 1805, 1806, 1807,
and 1809, gaining strength and growing. In 1811 the group of people that
had formed in France unites into one group with the peoples of Central
Europe. The strength of the justification of the man who stands at the
head of the movement grows with the increased size of the group. During
the ten-year preparatory period this man had formed relations with all
the crowned heads of Europe. The discredited rulers of the world can
oppose no reasonable ideal to the insensate Napoleonic ideal of
glory and grandeur. One after another they hasten to display their
insignificance before him. The King of Prussia sends his wife to seek
the great man's mercy; the Emperor of Austria considers it a favor that
this man receives a daughter of the Caesars into his bed; the Pope, the
guardian of all that the nations hold sacred, utilizes religion for the
aggrandizement of the great man. It is not Napoleon who prepares himself
for the accomplishment of his role, so much as all those round him who
prepare him to take on himself the whole responsibility for what is
happening and has to happen. There is no step, no crime or petty fraud
he commits, which in the mouths of those around him is not at once
represented as a great deed. The most suitable fete the Germans can
devise for him is a celebration of Jena and Auerstadt. Not only is he
great, but so are his ancestors, his brothers, his stepsons, and his
brothers-in-law. Everything is done to deprive him of the remains of his
reason and to prepare him for his terrible part. And when he is ready so
too are the forces.

The invasion pushes eastward and reaches its final goal--Moscow. That
city is taken; the Russian army suffers heavier losses than the opposing
armies had suffered in the former war from Austerlitz to Wagram. But
suddenly instead of those chances and that genius which hitherto had
so consistently led him by an uninterrupted series of successes to the
predestined goal, an innumerable sequence of inverse chances occur--from
the cold in his head at Borodino to the sparks which set Moscow on
fire, and the frosts--and instead of genius, stupidity and immeasurable
baseness become evident.

The invaders flee, turn back, flee again, and all the chances are now
not for Napoleon but always against him.

A countermovement is then accomplished from east to west with a
remarkable resemblance to the preceding movement from west to east.
Attempted drives from east to west--similar to the contrary movements of
1805, 1807, and 1809--precede the great westward movement; there is the
same coalescence into a group of enormous dimensions; the same adhesion
of the people of Central Europe to the movement; the same hesitation
midway, and the same increasing rapidity as the goal is approached.

Paris, the ultimate goal, is reached. The Napoleonic government and army
are destroyed. Napoleon himself is no longer of any account; all his
actions are evidently pitiful and mean, but again an inexplicable chance
occurs. The allies detest Napoleon whom they regard as the cause of
their sufferings. Deprived of power and authority, his crimes and his
craft exposed, he should have appeared to them what he appeared ten
years previously and one year later--an outlawed brigand. But by some
strange chance no one perceives this. His part is not yet ended. The man
who ten years before and a year later was considered an outlawed brigand
is sent to an island two days' sail from France, which for some reason
is presented to him as his dominion, and guards are given to him and
millions of money are paid him.





CHAPTER IV


The flood of nations begins to subside into its normal channels. The
waves of the great movement abate, and on the calm surface eddies are
formed in which float the diplomatists, who imagine that they have
caused the floods to abate.

But the smooth sea again suddenly becomes disturbed. The diplomatists
think that their disagreements are the cause of this fresh pressure
of natural forces; they anticipate war between their sovereigns; the
position seems to them insoluble. But the wave they feel to be rising
does not come from the quarter they expect. It rises again from the same
point as before--Paris. The last backwash of the movement from the west
occurs: a backwash which serves to solve the apparently insuperable
diplomatic difficulties and ends the military movement of that period of
history.

The man who had devastated France returns to France alone, without any
conspiracy and without soldiers. Any guard might arrest him, but by
strange chance no one does so and all rapturously greet the man they
cursed the day before and will curse again a month later.

This man is still needed to justify the final collective act.

That act is performed.

The last role is played. The actor is bidden to disrobe and wash off his
powder and paint: he will not be wanted any more.

And some years pass during which he plays a pitiful comedy to himself
in solitude on his island, justifying his actions by intrigues and lies
when the justification is no longer needed, and displaying to the whole
world what it was that people had mistaken for strength as long as an
unseen hand directed his actions.

The manager having brought the drama to a close and stripped the actor
shows him to us.

"See what you believed in! This is he! Do you now see that it was not he
but I who moved you?"

But dazed by the force of the movement, it was long before people
understood this.

Still greater coherence and inevitability is seen in the life of
Alexander I, the man who stood at the head of the countermovement from
east to west.

What was needed for him who, overshadowing others, stood at the head of
that movement from east to west?

What was needed was a sense of justice and a sympathy with European
affairs, but a remote sympathy not dulled by petty interests; a moral
superiority over those sovereigns of the day who co-operated with him;
a mild and attractive personality; and a personal grievance against
Napoleon. And all this was found in Alexander I; all this had been
prepared by innumerable so-called chances in his life: his education,
his early liberalism, the advisers who surrounded him, and by
Austerlitz, and Tilsit, and Erfurt.

During the national war he was inactive because he was not needed. But
as soon as the necessity for a general European war presented itself he
appeared in his place at the given moment and, uniting the nations of
Europe, led them to the goal.

The goal is reached. After the final war of 1815 Alexander possesses all
possible power. How does he use it?

Alexander I--the pacifier of Europe, the man who from his early years
had striven only for his people's welfare, the originator of the liberal
innovations in his fatherland--now that he seemed to possess the utmost
power and therefore to have the possibility of bringing about the
welfare of his peoples--at the time when Napoleon in exile was drawing
up childish and mendacious plans of how he would have made mankind happy
had he retained power--Alexander I, having fulfilled his mission and
feeling the hand of God upon him, suddenly recognizes the insignificance
of that supposed power, turns away from it, and gives it into the hands
of contemptible men whom he despises, saying only:

"Not unto us, not unto us, but unto Thy Name!... I too am a man like the
rest of you. Let me live like a man and think of my soul and of God."

As the sun and each atom of ether is a sphere complete in itself, and
yet at the same time only a part of a whole too immense for man to
comprehend, so each individual has within himself his own aims and yet
has them to serve a general purpose incomprehensible to man.

A bee settling on a flower has stung a child. And the child is afraid
of bees and declares that bees exist to sting people. A poet admires the
bee sucking from the chalice of a flower and says it exists to suck the
fragrance of flowers. A beekeeper, seeing the bee collect pollen from
flowers and carry it to the hive, says that it exists to gather honey.
Another beekeeper who has studied the life of the hive more closely
says that the bee gathers pollen dust to feed the young bees and rear
a queen, and that it exists to perpetuate its race. A botanist notices
that the bee flying with the pollen of a male flower to a pistil
fertilizes the latter, and sees in this the purpose of the bee's
existence. Another, observing the migration of plants, notices that the
bee helps in this work, and may say that in this lies the purpose of the
bee. But the ultimate purpose of the bee is not exhausted by the first,
the second, or any of the processes the human mind can discern. The
higher the human intellect rises in the discovery of these purposes,
the more obvious it becomes, that the ultimate purpose is beyond our
comprehension.

All that is accessible to man is the relation of the life of the bee to
other manifestations of life. And so it is with the purpose of historic
characters and nations.





CHAPTER V


Natasha's wedding to Bezukhov, which took place in 1813, was the last
happy event in the family of the old Rostovs. Count Ilya Rostov died
that same year and, as always happens, after the father's death the
family group broke up.

The events of the previous year: the burning of Moscow and the flight
from it, the death of Prince Andrew, Natasha's despair, Petya's death,
and the old countess' grief fell blow after blow on the old count's
head. He seemed to be unable to understand the meaning of all these
events, and bowed his old head in a spiritual sense as if expecting and
inviting further blows which would finish him. He seemed now frightened
and distraught and now unnaturally animated and enterprising.

The arrangements for Natasha's marriage occupied him for a while. He
ordered dinners and suppers and obviously tried to appear cheerful, but
his cheerfulness was not infectious as it used to be: on the contrary it
evoked the compassion of those who knew and liked him.

When Pierre and his wife had left, he grew very quiet and began to
complain of depression. A few days later he fell ill and took to his
bed. He realized from the first that he would not get up again, despite
the doctor's encouragement. The countess passed a fortnight in an
armchair by his pillow without undressing. Every time she gave him
his medicine he sobbed and silently kissed her hand. On his last day,
sobbing, he asked her and his absent son to forgive him for having
dissipated their property--that being the chief fault of which he was
conscious. After receiving communion and unction he quietly died; and
next day a throng of acquaintances who came to pay their last respects
to the deceased filled the house rented by the Rostovs. All these
acquaintances, who had so often dined and danced at his house and had so
often laughed at him, now said, with a common feeling of self-reproach
and emotion, as if justifying themselves: "Well, whatever he may have
been he was a most worthy man. You don't meet such men nowadays.... And
which of us has not weaknesses of his own?"

It was just when the count's affairs had become so involved that it was
impossible to say what would happen if he lived another year that he
unexpectedly died.

Nicholas was with the Russian army in Paris when the news of his
father's death reached him. He at once resigned his commission, and
without waiting for it to be accepted took leave of absence and went to
Moscow. The state of the count's affairs became quite obvious a month
after his death, surprising everyone by the immense total of small
debts the existence of which no one had suspected. The debts amounted to
double the value of the property.

Friends and relations advised Nicholas to decline the inheritance. But
he regarded such a refusal as a slur on his father's memory, which he
held sacred, and therefore would not hear of refusing and accepted the
inheritance together with the obligation to pay the debts.

The creditors who had so long been silent, restrained by a vague
but powerful influence exerted on them while he lived by the count's
careless good nature, all proceeded to enforce their claims at once. As
always happens in such cases rivalry sprang up as to which should get
paid first, and those who like Mitenka held promissory notes given them
as presents now became the most exacting of the creditors. Nicholas was
allowed no respite and no peace, and those who had seemed to pity
the old man--the cause of their losses (if they were losses)--now
remorselessly pursued the young heir who had voluntarily undertaken the
debts and was obviously not guilty of contracting them.

Not one of the plans Nicholas tried succeeded; the estate was sold by
auction for half its value, and half the debts still remained
unpaid. Nicholas accepted thirty thousand rubles offered him by his
brother-in-law Bezukhov to pay off debts he regarded as genuinely due
for value received. And to avoid being imprisoned for the remainder, as
the creditors threatened, he re-entered the government service.

He could not rejoin the army where he would have been made colonel at
the next vacancy, for his mother now clung to him as her one hold on
life; and so despite his reluctance to remain in Moscow among people who
had known him before, and despite his abhorrence of the civil service,
he accepted a post in Moscow in that service, doffed the uniform of
which he was so fond, and moved with his mother and Sonya to a small
house on the Sivtsev Vrazhek.

Natasha and Pierre were living in Petersburg at the time and had no
clear idea of Nicholas' circumstances. Having borrowed money from his
brother-in-law, Nicholas tried to hide his wretched condition from him.
His position was the more difficult because with his salary of twelve
hundred rubles he had not only to keep himself, his mother, and Sonya,
but had to shield his mother from knowledge of their poverty. The
countess could not conceive of life without the luxurious conditions she
had been used to from childhood and, unable to realize how hard it was
for her son, kept demanding now a carriage (which they did not keep) to
send for a friend, now some expensive article of food for herself, or
wine for her son, or money to buy a present as a surprise for Natasha or
Sonya, or for Nicholas himself.

Sonya kept house, attended on her aunt, read to her, put up with her
whims and secret ill-will, and helped Nicholas to conceal their poverty
from the old countess. Nicholas felt himself irredeemably indebted
to Sonya for all she was doing for his mother and greatly admired her
patience and devotion, but tried to keep aloof from her.

He seemed in his heart to reproach her for being too perfect, and
because there was nothing to reproach her with. She had all that people
are valued for, but little that could have made him love her. He felt
that the more he valued her the less he loved her. He had taken her at
her word when she wrote giving him his freedom and now behaved as if all
that had passed between them had been long forgotten and could never in
any case be renewed.

Nicholas' position became worse and worse. The idea of putting something
aside out of his salary proved a dream. Not only did he not save
anything, but to comply with his mother's demands he even incurred some
small debts. He could see no way out of this situation. The idea of
marrying some rich woman, which was suggested to him by his female
relations, was repugnant to him. The other way out--his mother's
death--never entered his head. He wished for nothing and hoped
for nothing, and deep in his heart experienced a gloomy and stern
satisfaction in an uncomplaining endurance of his position. He tried
to avoid his old acquaintances with their commiseration and offensive
offers of assistance; he avoided all distraction and recreation, and
even at home did nothing but play cards with his mother, pace silently
up and down the room, and smoke one pipe after another. He seemed
carefully to cherish within himself the gloomy mood which alone enabled
him to endure his position.





CHAPTER VI


At the beginning of winter Princess Mary came to Moscow. From reports
current in town she learned how the Rostovs were situated, and how "the
son has sacrificed himself for his mother," as people were saying.

"I never expected anything else of him," said Princess Mary to herself,
feeling a joyous sense of her love for him. Remembering her friendly
relations with all the Rostovs which had made her almost a member of the
family, she thought it her duty to go to see them. But remembering her
relations with Nicholas in Voronezh she was shy about doing so. Making
a great effort she did however go to call on them a few weeks after her
arrival in Moscow.

Nicholas was the first to meet her, as the countess' room could only be
reached through his. But instead of being greeted with pleasure as she
had expected, at his first glance at her his face assumed a cold, stiff,
proud expression she had not seen on it before. He inquired about her
health, led the way to his mother, and having sat there for five minutes
left the room.

When the princess came out of the countess' room Nicholas met her again,
and with marked solemnity and stiffness accompanied her to the anteroom.
To her remarks about his mother's health he made no reply. "What's that
to you? Leave me in peace," his looks seemed to say.

"Why does she come prowling here? What does she want? I can't bear these
ladies and all these civilities!" said he aloud in Sonya's presence,
evidently unable to repress his vexation, after the princess' carriage
had disappeared.

"Oh, Nicholas, how can you talk like that?" cried Sonya, hardly able to
conceal her delight. "She is so kind and Mamma is so fond of her!"

Nicholas did not reply and tried to avoid speaking of the princess any
more. But after her visit the old countess spoke of her several times a
day.

She sang her praises, insisted that her son must call on her, expressed
a wish to see her often, but yet always became ill-humored when she
began to talk about her.

Nicholas tried to keep silence when his mother spoke of the princess,
but his silence irritated her.

"She is a very admirable and excellent young woman," said she, "and you
must go and call on her. You would at least be seeing somebody, and I
think it must be dull for you only seeing us."

"But I don't in the least want to, Mamma."

"You used to want to, and now you don't. Really I don't understand you,
my dear. One day you are dull, and the next you refuse to see anyone."

"But I never said I was dull."

"Why, you said yourself you don't want even to see her. She is a very
admirable young woman and you always liked her, but now suddenly you
have got some notion or other in your head. You hide everything from
me."

"Not at all, Mamma."

"If I were asking you to do something disagreeable now--but I only ask
you to return a call. One would think mere politeness required it....
Well, I have asked you, and now I won't interfere any more since you
have secrets from your mother."

"Well, then, I'll go if you wish it."

"It doesn't matter to me. I only wish it for your sake."

Nicholas sighed, bit his mustache, and laid out the cards for a
patience, trying to divert his mother's attention to another topic.

The same conversation was repeated next day and the day after, and the
day after that.

After her visit to the Rostovs and her unexpectedly chilly reception by
Nicholas, Princess Mary confessed to herself that she had been right in
not wishing to be the first to call.

"I expected nothing else," she told herself, calling her pride to her
aid. "I have nothing to do with him and I only wanted to see the
old lady, who was always kind to me and to whom I am under many
obligations."

But she could not pacify herself with these reflections; a feeling akin
to remorse troubled her when she thought of her visit. Though she had
firmly resolved not to call on the Rostovs again and to forget the whole
matter, she felt herself all the time in an awkward position. And when
she asked herself what distressed her, she had to admit that it was her
relation to Rostov. His cold, polite manner did not express his feeling
for her (she knew that) but it concealed something, and until she could
discover what that something was, she felt that she could not be at
ease.

One day in midwinter when sitting in the schoolroom attending to her
nephew's lessons, she was informed that Rostov had called. With a firm
resolution not to betray herself and not show her agitation, she sent
for Mademoiselle Bourienne and went with her to the drawing room.

Her first glance at Nicholas' face told her that he had only come to
fulfill the demands of politeness, and she firmly resolved to maintain
the tone in which he addressed her.

They spoke of the countess' health, of their mutual friends, of the
latest war news, and when the ten minutes required by propriety had
elapsed after which a visitor may rise, Nicholas got up to say good-by.

With Mademoiselle Bourienne's help the princess had maintained the
conversation very well, but at the very last moment, just when he rose,
she was so tired of talking of what did not interest her, and her
mind was so full of the question why she alone was granted so little
happiness in life, that in a fit of absent-mindedness she sat still, her
luminous eyes gazing fixedly before her, not noticing that he had risen.

Nicholas glanced at her and, wishing to appear not to notice her
abstraction, made some remark to Mademoiselle Bourienne and then
again looked at the princess. She still sat motionless with a look of
suffering on her gentle face. He suddenly felt sorry for her and was
vaguely conscious that he might be the cause of the sadness her face
expressed. He wished to help her and say something pleasant, but could
think of nothing to say.

"Good-by, Princess!" said he.

She started, flushed, and sighed deeply.

"Oh, I beg your pardon," she said as if waking up. "Are you going
already, Count? Well then, good-by! Oh, but the cushion for the
countess!"

"Wait a moment, I'll fetch it," said Mademoiselle Bourienne, and she
left the room.

They both sat silent, with an occasional glance at one another.

"Yes, Princess," said Nicholas at last with a sad smile, "it doesn't
seem long ago since we first met at Bogucharovo, but how much water
has flowed since then! In what distress we all seemed to be then, yet
I would give much to bring back that time... but there's no bringing it
back."

Princess Mary gazed intently into his eyes with her own luminous ones
as he said this. She seemed to be trying to fathom the hidden meaning of
his words which would explain his feeling for her.

"Yes, yes," said she, "but you have no reason to regret the past, Count.
As I understand your present life, I think you will always recall it
with satisfaction, because the self-sacrifice that fills it now..."

"I cannot accept your praise," he interrupted her hurriedly. "On the
contrary I continually reproach myself.... But this is not at all an
interesting or cheerful subject."

His face again resumed its former stiff and cold expression. But the
princess had caught a glimpse of the man she had known and loved, and it
was to him that she now spoke.

"I thought you would allow me to tell you this," she said. "I had come
so near to you... and to all your family that I thought you would not
consider my sympathy misplaced, but I was mistaken," and suddenly her
voice trembled. "I don't know why," she continued, recovering herself,
"but you used to be different, and..."

"There are a thousand reasons why," laying special emphasis on the why.
"Thank you, Princess," he added softly. "Sometimes it is hard."

"So that's why! That's why!" a voice whispered in Princess Mary's soul.
"No, it was not only that gay, kind, and frank look, not only that
handsome exterior, that I loved in him. I divined his noble, resolute,
self-sacrificing spirit too," she said to herself. "Yes, he is poor now
and I am rich.... Yes, that's the only reason.... Yes, were it not for
that..." And remembering his former tenderness, and looking now at his
kind, sorrowful face, she suddenly understood the cause of his coldness.

"But why, Count, why?" she almost cried, unconsciously moving closer to
him. "Why? Tell me. You must tell me!"

He was silent.

"I don't understand your why, Count," she continued, "but it's hard for
me... I confess it. For some reason you wish to deprive me of our former
friendship. And that hurts me." There were tears in her eyes and in her
voice. "I have had so little happiness in life that every loss is hard
for me to bear.... Excuse me, good-by!" and suddenly she began to cry
and was hurrying from the room.

"Princess, for God's sake!" he exclaimed, trying to stop her.
"Princess!"

She turned round. For a few seconds they gazed silently into one
another's eyes--and what had seemed impossible and remote suddenly
became possible, inevitable, and very near.





CHAPTER VII


In the winter of 1813 Nicholas married Princess Mary and moved to Bald
Hills with his wife, his mother, and Sonya.

Within four years he had paid off all his remaining debts without
selling any of his wife's property, and having received a small
inheritance on the death of a cousin he paid his debt to Pierre as well.

In another three years, by 1820, he had so managed his affairs that he
was able to buy a small estate adjoining Bald Hills and was negotiating
to buy back Otradnoe--that being his pet dream.

Having started farming from necessity, he soon grew so devoted to it
that it became his favorite and almost his sole occupation. Nicholas was
a plain farmer: he did not like innovations, especially the English ones
then coming into vogue. He laughed at theoretical treatises on estate
management, disliked factories, the raising of expensive products,
and the buying of expensive seed corn, and did not make a hobby of any
particular part of the work on his estate. He always had before his
mind's eye the estate as a whole and not any particular part of it. The
chief thing in his eyes was not the nitrogen in the soil, nor the oxygen
in the air, nor manures, nor special plows, but that most important
agent by which nitrogen, oxygen, manure, and plow were made
effective--the peasant laborer. When Nicholas first began farming
and began to understand its different branches, it was the serf who
especially attracted his attention. The peasant seemed to him not merely
a tool, but also a judge of farming and an end in himself. At first
he watched the serfs, trying to understand their aims and what they
considered good and bad, and only pretended to direct them and give
orders while in reality learning from them their methods, their manner
of speech, and their judgment of what was good and bad. Only when he
had understood the peasants' tastes and aspirations, had learned to talk
their language, to grasp the hidden meaning of their words, and felt
akin to them did he begin boldly to manage his serfs, that is, to
perform toward them the duties demanded of him. And Nicholas' management
produced very brilliant results.

Guided by some gift of insight, on taking up the management of the
estates he at once unerringly appointed as bailiff, village elder, and
delegate, the very men the serfs would themselves have chosen had they
had the right to choose, and these posts never changed hands. Before
analyzing the properties of manure, before entering into the debit and
credit (as he ironically called it), he found out how many cattle the
peasants had and increased the number by all possible means. He kept the
peasant families together in the largest groups possible, not allowing
the family groups to divide into separate households. He was hard alike
on the lazy, the depraved, and the weak, and tried to get them expelled
from the commune.

He was as careful of the sowing and reaping of the peasants' hay
and corn as of his own, and few landowners had their crops sown
and harvested so early and so well, or got so good a return, as did
Nicholas.

He disliked having anything to do with the domestic serfs--the "drones"
as he called them--and everyone said he spoiled them by his laxity. When
a decision had to be taken regarding a domestic serf, especially if one
had to be punished, he always felt undecided and consulted everybody in
the house; but when it was possible to have a domestic serf conscripted
instead of a land worker he did so without the least hesitation. He
never felt any hesitation in dealing with the peasants. He knew that his
every decision would be approved by them all with very few exceptions.

He did not allow himself either to be hard on or punish a man, or to
make things easy for or reward anyone, merely because he felt inclined
to do so. He could not have said by what standard he judged what he
should or should not do, but the standard was quite firm and definite in
his own mind.

Often, speaking with vexation of some failure or irregularity, he would
say: "What can one do with our Russian peasants?" and imagined that he
could not bear them.

Yet he loved "our Russian peasants" and their way of life with his whole
soul, and for that very reason had understood and assimilated the one
way and manner of farming which produced good results.

Countess Mary was jealous of this passion of her husband's and regretted
that she could not share it; but she could not understand the joys and
vexations he derived from that world, to her so remote and alien. She
could not understand why he was so particularly animated and happy
when, after getting up at daybreak and spending the whole morning in the
fields or on the threshing floor, he returned from the sowing or mowing
or reaping to have tea with her. She did not understand why he spoke
with such admiration and delight of the farming of the thrifty and
well-to-do peasant Matthew Ermishin, who with his family had carted
corn all night; or of the fact that his (Nicholas') sheaves were already
stacked before anyone else had his harvest in. She did not understand
why he stepped out from the window to the veranda and smiled under his
mustache and winked so joyfully, when warm steady rain began to fall
on the dry and thirsty shoots of the young oats, or why when the wind
carried away a threatening cloud during the hay harvest he would return
from the barn, flushed, sunburned, and perspiring, with a smell of
wormwood and gentian in his hair and, gleefully rubbing his hands, would
say: "Well, one more day and my grain and the peasants' will all be
under cover."

Still less did she understand why he, kindhearted and always ready to
anticipate her wishes, should become almost desperate when she brought
him a petition from some peasant men or women who had appealed to her
to be excused some work; why he, that kind Nicholas, should obstinately
refuse her, angrily asking her not to interfere in what was not her
business. She felt he had a world apart, which he loved passionately and
which had laws she had not fathomed.

Sometimes when, trying to understand him, she spoke of the good work he
was doing for his serfs, he would be vexed and reply: "Not in the least;
it never entered my head and I wouldn't do that for their good! That's
all poetry and old wives' talk--all that doing good to one's neighbor!
What I want is that our children should not have to go begging. I must
put our affairs in order while I am alive, that's all. And to do that,
order and strictness are essential.... That's all about it!" said he,
clenching his vigorous fist. "And fairness, of course," he added, "for
if the peasant is naked and hungry and has only one miserable horse, he
can do no good either for himself or for me."

And all Nicholas did was fruitful--probably just because he refused to
allow himself to think that he was doing good to others for virtue's
sake. His means increased rapidly; serfs from neighboring estates came
to beg him to buy them, and long after his death the memory of his
administration was devoutly preserved among the serfs. "He was a
master... the peasants' affairs first and then his own. Of course he was
not to be trifled with either--in a word, he was a real master!"





CHAPTER VIII


One matter connected with his management sometimes worried Nicholas, and
that was his quick temper together with his old hussar habit of making
free use of his fists. At first he saw nothing reprehensible in
this, but in the second year of his marriage his view of that form of
punishment suddenly changed.

Once in summer he had sent for the village elder from Bogucharovo, a
man who had succeeded to the post when Dron died and who was accused of
dishonesty and various irregularities. Nicholas went out into the porch
to question him, and immediately after the elder had given a few replies
the sound of cries and blows were heard. On returning to lunch Nicholas
went up to his wife, who sat with her head bent low over her embroidery
frame, and as usual began to tell her what he had been doing that
morning. Among other things he spoke of the Bogucharovo elder. Countess
Mary turned red and then pale, but continued to sit with head bowed and
lips compressed and gave her husband no reply.

"Such an insolent scoundrel!" he cried, growing hot again at the mere
recollection of him. "If he had told me he was drunk and did not see...
But what is the matter with you, Mary?" he suddenly asked.

Countess Mary raised her head and tried to speak, but hastily looked
down again and her lips puckered.

"Why, whatever is the matter, my dearest?"

The looks of the plain Countess Mary always improved when she was in
tears. She never cried from pain or vexation, but always from sorrow or
pity, and when she wept her radiant eyes acquired an irresistible charm.

The moment Nicholas took her hand she could no longer restrain herself
and began to cry.

"Nicholas, I saw it... he was to blame, but why do you... Nicholas!" and
she covered her face with her hands.

Nicholas said nothing. He flushed crimson, left her side, and paced up
and down the room. He understood what she was weeping about, but could
not in his heart at once agree with her that what he had regarded
from childhood as quite an everyday event was wrong. "Is it just
sentimentality, old wives' tales, or is she right?" he asked himself.
Before he had solved that point he glanced again at her face filled with
love and pain, and he suddenly realized that she was right and that he
had long been sinning against himself.

"Mary," he said softly, going up to her, "it will never happen again;
I give you my word. Never," he repeated in a trembling voice like a boy
asking for forgiveness.

The tears flowed faster still from the countess' eyes. She took his hand
and kissed it.

"Nicholas, when did you break your cameo?" she asked to change the
subject, looking at his finger on which he wore a ring with a cameo of
Laocoon's head.

"Today--it was the same affair. Oh, Mary, don't remind me of it!" and
again he flushed. "I give you my word of honor it shan't occur again,
and let this always be a reminder to me," and he pointed to the broken
ring.

After that, when in discussions with his village elders or stewards the
blood rushed to his face and his fists began to clench, Nicholas would
turn the broken ring on his finger and would drop his eyes before the
man who was making him angry. But he did forget himself once or twice
within a twelvemonth, and then he would go and confess to his wife, and
would again promise that this should really be the very last time.

"Mary, you must despise me!" he would say. "I deserve it."

"You should go, go away at once, if you don't feel strong enough to
control yourself," she would reply sadly, trying to comfort her husband.

Among the gentry of the province Nicholas was respected but not liked.
He did not concern himself with the interests of his own class, and
consequently some thought him proud and others thought him stupid. The
whole summer, from spring sowing to harvest, he was busy with the work
on his farm. In autumn he gave himself up to hunting with the same
business like seriousness--leaving home for a month, or even two, with
his hunt. In winter he visited his other villages or spent his time
reading. The books he read were chiefly historical, and on these he
spent a certain sum every year. He was collecting, as he said, a serious
library, and he made it a rule to read through all the books he bought.
He would sit in his study with a grave air, reading--a task he first
imposed upon himself as a duty, but which afterwards became a habit
affording him a special kind of pleasure and a consciousness of
being occupied with serious matters. In winter, except for business
excursions, he spent most of his time at home making himself one with
his family and entering into all the details of his children's relations
with their mother. The harmony between him and his wife grew closer and
closer and he daily discovered fresh spiritual treasures in her.

From the time of his marriage Sonya had lived in his house. Before
that, Nicholas had told his wife all that had passed between himself and
Sonya, blaming himself and commending her. He had asked Princess Mary to
be gentle and kind to his cousin. She thoroughly realized the wrong he
had done Sonya, felt herself to blame toward her, and imagined that her
wealth had influenced Nicholas' choice. She could not find fault with
Sonya in any way and tried to be fond of her, but often felt ill-will
toward her which she could not overcome.

Once she had a talk with her friend Natasha about Sonya and about her
own injustice toward her.

"You know," said Natasha, "you have read the Gospels a great deal--there
is a passage in them that just fits Sonya."

"What?" asked Countess Mary, surprised.

"'To him that hath shall be given, and from him that hath not shall be
taken away.' You remember? She is one that hath not; why, I don't know.
Perhaps she lacks egotism, I don't know, but from her is taken away, and
everything has been taken away. Sometimes I am dreadfully sorry for her.
Formerly I very much wanted Nicholas to marry her, but I always had
a sort of presentiment that it would not come off. She is a sterile
flower, you know--like some strawberry blossoms. Sometimes I am sorry
for her, and sometimes I think she doesn't feel it as you or I would."

Though Countess Mary told Natasha that those words in the Gospel must be
understood differently, yet looking at Sonya she agreed with Natasha's
explanation. It really seemed that Sonya did not feel her position
trying, and had grown quite reconciled to her lot as a sterile flower.
She seemed to be fond not so much of individuals as of the family as a
whole. Like a cat, she had attached herself not to the people but to the
home. She waited on the old countess, petted and spoiled the children,
was always ready to render the small services for which she had a gift,
and all this was unconsciously accepted from her with insufficient
gratitude.

The country seat at Bald Hills had been rebuilt, though not on the same
scale as under the old prince.

The buildings, begun under straitened circumstances, were more than
simple. The immense house on the old stone foundations was of wood,
plastered only inside. It had bare deal floors and was furnished with
very simple hard sofas, armchairs, tables, and chairs made by their own
serf carpenters out of their own birchwood. The house was spacious
and had rooms for the house serfs and apartments for visitors. Whole
families of the Rostovs' and Bolkonskis' relations sometimes came to
Bald Hills with sixteen horses and dozens of servants and stayed for
months. Besides that, four times a year, on the name days and birthdays
of the hosts, as many as a hundred visitors would gather there for a day
or two. The rest of the year life pursued its unbroken routine with its
ordinary occupations, and its breakfasts, lunches, dinners, and suppers,
provided out of the produce of the estate.





CHAPTER IX


It was the eve of St. Nicholas, the fifth of December, 1820. Natasha had
been staying at her brother's with her husband and children since early
autumn. Pierre had gone to Petersburg on business of his own for three
weeks as he said, but had remained there nearly seven weeks and was
expected back every minute.

Besides the Bezukhov family, Nicholas' old friend the retired General
Vasili Dmitrich Denisov was staying with the Rostovs this fifth of
December.

On the sixth, which was his name day when the house would be full of
visitors, Nicholas knew he would have to exchange his Tartar tunic for
a tail coat, and put on narrow boots with pointed toes, and drive to
the new church he had built, and then receive visitors who would come to
congratulate him, offer them refreshments, and talk about the elections
of the nobility; but he considered himself entitled to spend the eve
of that day in his usual way. He examined the bailiff's accounts of
the village in Ryazan which belonged to his wife's nephew, wrote two
business letters, and walked over to the granaries, cattle yards and
stables before dinner. Having taken precautions against the general
drunkenness to be expected on the morrow because it was a great saint's
day, he returned to dinner, and without having time for a private talk
with his wife sat down at the long table laid for twenty persons, at
which the whole household had assembled. At that table were his mother,
his mother's old lady companion Belova, his wife, their three children
with their governess and tutor, his wife's nephew with his tutor, Sonya,
Denisov, Natasha, her three children, their governess, and old Michael
Ivanovich, the late prince's architect, who was living on in retirement
at Bald Hills.

Countess Mary sat at the other end of the table. When her husband took
his place she concluded, from the rapid manner in which after taking
up his table napkin he pushed back the tumbler and wineglass standing
before him, that he was out of humor, as was sometimes the case when he
came in to dinner straight from the farm--especially before the soup.
Countess Mary well knew that mood of his, and when she herself was in
a good frame of mind quietly waited till he had had his soup and then
began to talk to him and make him admit that there was no cause for his
ill-humor. But today she quite forgot that and was hurt that he should
be angry with her without any reason, and she felt unhappy. She asked
him where he had been. He replied. She again inquired whether
everything was going well on the farm. Her unnatural tone made him wince
unpleasantly and he replied hastily.

"Then I'm not mistaken," thought Countess Mary. "Why is he cross with
me?" She concluded from his tone that he was vexed with her and wished
to end the conversation. She knew her remarks sounded unnatural, but
could not refrain from asking some more questions.

Thanks to Denisov the conversation at table soon became general and
lively, and she did not talk to her husband. When they left the table
and went as usual to thank the old countess, Countess Mary held out her
hand and kissed her husband, and asked him why he was angry with her.

"You always have such strange fancies! I didn't even think of being
angry," he replied.

But the word always seemed to her to imply: "Yes, I am angry but I won't
tell you why."

Nicholas and his wife lived together so happily that even Sonya and the
old countess, who felt jealous and would have liked them to disagree,
could find nothing to reproach them with; but even they had their
moments of antagonism. Occasionally, and it was always just after they
had been happiest together, they suddenly had a feeling of estrangement
and hostility, which occurred most frequently during Countess Mary's
pregnancies, and this was such a time.

"Well, messieurs et mesdames," said Nicholas loudly and with apparent
cheerfulness (it seemed to Countess Mary that he did it on purpose to
vex her), "I have been on my feet since six this morning. Tomorrow I
shall have to suffer, so today I'll go and rest."

And without a word to his wife he went to the little sitting room and
lay down on the sofa.

"That's always the way," thought Countess Mary. "He talks to everyone
except me. I see... I see that I am repulsive to him, especially when I
am in this condition." She looked down at her expanded figure and in the
glass at her pale, sallow, emaciated face in which her eyes now looked
larger than ever.

And everything annoyed her--Denisov's shouting and laughter, Natasha's
talk, and especially a quick glance Sonya gave her.

Sonya was always the first excuse Countess Mary found for feeling
irritated.

Having sat awhile with her visitors without understanding anything of
what they were saying, she softly left the room and went to the nursery.

The children were playing at "going to Moscow" in a carriage made of
chairs and invited her to go with them. She sat down and played with
them a little, but the thought of her husband and his unreasonable
crossness worried her. She got up and, walking on tiptoe with
difficulty, went to the small sitting room.

"Perhaps he is not asleep; I'll have an explanation with him," she
said to herself. Little Andrew, her eldest boy, imitating his mother,
followed her on tiptoe. She did not notice him.

"Mary, dear, I think he is asleep--he was so tired," said Sonya, meeting
her in the large sitting room (it seemed to Countess Mary that she
crossed her path everywhere). "Andrew may wake him."

Countess Mary looked round, saw little Andrew following her, felt that
Sonya was right, and for that very reason flushed and with evident
difficulty refrained from saying something harsh. She made no reply, but
to avoid obeying Sonya beckoned to Andrew to follow her quietly and went
to the door. Sonya went away by another door. From the room in which
Nicholas was sleeping came the sound of his even breathing, every
slightest tone of which was familiar to his wife. As she listened to it
she saw before her his smooth handsome forehead, his mustache, and his
whole face, as she had so often seen it in the stillness of the night
when he slept. Nicholas suddenly moved and cleared his throat. And at
that moment little Andrew shouted from outside the door: "Papa! Mamma's
standing here!" Countess Mary turned pale with fright and made signs
to the boy. He grew silent, and quiet ensued for a moment, terrible to
Countess Mary. She knew how Nicholas disliked being waked. Then through
the door she heard Nicholas clearing his throat again and stirring, and
his voice said crossly:

"I can't get a moment's peace.... Mary, is that you? Why did you bring
him here?"

"I only came in to look and did not notice... forgive me..."

Nicholas coughed and said no more. Countess Mary moved away from the
door and took the boy back to the nursery. Five minutes later little
black-eyed three-year-old Natasha, her father's pet, having learned from
her brother that Papa was asleep and Mamma was in the sitting room, ran
to her father unobserved by her mother. The dark-eyed little girl boldly
opened the creaking door, went up to the sofa with energetic steps of
her sturdy little legs, and having examined the position of her father,
who was asleep with his back to her, rose on tiptoe and kissed the hand
which lay under his head. Nicholas turned with a tender smile on his
face.

"Natasha, Natasha!" came Countess Mary's frightened whisper from the
door. "Papa wants to sleep."

"No, Mamma, he doesn't want to sleep," said little Natasha with
conviction. "He's laughing."

Nicholas lowered his legs, rose, and took his daughter in his arms.

"Come in, Mary," he said to his wife.

She went in and sat down by her husband.

"I did not notice him following me," she said timidly. "I just looked
in."

Holding his little girl with one arm, Nicholas glanced at his wife and,
seeing her guilty expression, put his other arm around her and kissed
her hair.

"May I kiss Mamma?" he asked Natasha.

Natasha smiled bashfully.

"Again!" she commanded, pointing with a peremptory gesture to the spot
where Nicholas had placed the kiss.

"I don't know why you think I am cross," said Nicholas, replying to the
question he knew was in his wife's mind.

"You have no idea how unhappy, how lonely, I feel when you are like
that. It always seems to me..."

"Mary, don't talk nonsense. You ought to be ashamed of yourself!" he
said gaily.

"It seems to be that you can't love me, that I am so plain... always...
and now... in this cond..."

"Oh, how absurd you are! It is not beauty that endears, it's love that
makes us see beauty. It is only Malvinas and women of that kind who are
loved for their beauty. But do I love my wife? I don't love her, but...
I don't know how to put it. Without you, or when something comes between
us like this, I seem lost and can't do anything. Now do I love my
finger? I don't love it, but just try to cut it off!"

"I'm not like that myself, but I understand. So you're not angry with
me?"

"Awfully angry!" he said, smiling and getting up. And smoothing his hair
he began to pace the room.

"Do you know, Mary, what I've been thinking?" he began, immediately
thinking aloud in his wife's presence now that they had made it up.

He did not ask if she was ready to listen to him. He did not care. A
thought had occurred to him and so it belonged to her also. And he told
her of his intention to persuade Pierre to stay with them till spring.

Countess Mary listened till he had finished, made some remark, and in
her turn began thinking aloud. Her thoughts were about the children.

"You can see the woman in her already," she said in French, pointing to
little Natasha. "You reproach us women with being illogical. Here is our
logic. I say: 'Papa wants to sleep!' but she says, 'No, he's laughing.'
And she was right," said Countess Mary with a happy smile.

"Yes, yes." And Nicholas, taking his little daughter in his strong hand,
lifted her high, placed her on his shoulder, held her by the legs, and
paced the room with her. There was an expression of carefree happiness
on the faces of both father and daughter.

"But you know you may be unfair. You are too fond of this one," his wife
whispered in French.

"Yes, but what am I to do?... I try not to show..."

At that moment they heard the sound of the door pulley and footsteps in
the hall and anteroom, as if someone had arrived.

"Somebody has come."

"I am sure it is Pierre. I will go and see," said Countess Mary and left
the room.

In her absence Nicholas allowed himself to give his little daughter a
gallop round the room. Out of breath, he took the laughing child quickly
from his shoulder and pressed her to his heart. His capers reminded
him of dancing, and looking at the child's round happy little face he
thought of what she would be like when he was an old man, taking her
into society and dancing the mazurka with her as his old father had
danced Daniel Cooper with his daughter.

"It is he, it is he, Nicholas!" said Countess Mary, re-entering the room
a few minutes later. "Now our Natasha has come to life. You should have
seen her ecstasy, and how he caught it for having stayed away so long.
Well, come along now, quick, quick! It's time you two were parted," she
added, looking smilingly at the little girl who clung to her father.

Nicholas went out holding the child by the hand.

Countess Mary remained in the sitting room.

"I should never, never have believed that one could be so happy," she
whispered to herself. A smile lit up her face but at the same time she
sighed, and her deep eyes expressed a quiet sadness as though she
felt, through her happiness, that there is another sort of happiness
unattainable in this life and of which she involuntarily thought at that
instant.





CHAPTER X


Natasha had married in the early spring of 1813, and in 1820 already had
three daughters besides a son for whom she had longed and whom she was
now nursing. She had grown stouter and broader, so that it was difficult
to recognize in this robust, motherly woman the slim, lively Natasha of
former days. Her features were more defined and had a calm, soft,
and serene expression. In her face there was none of the ever-glowing
animation that had formerly burned there and constituted its charm.
Now her face and body were often all that one saw, and her soul was
not visible at all. All that struck the eye was a strong, handsome, and
fertile woman. The old fire very rarely kindled in her face now. That
happened only when, as was the case that day, her husband returned home,
or a sick child was convalescent, or when she and Countess Mary spoke of
Prince Andrew (she never mentioned him to her husband, who she imagined
was jealous of Prince Andrew's memory), or on the rare occasions when
something happened to induce her to sing, a practice she had quite
abandoned since her marriage. At the rare moments when the old fire
did kindle in her handsome, fully developed body she was even more
attractive than in former days.

Since their marriage Natasha and her husband had lived in Moscow, in
Petersburg, on their estate near Moscow, or with her mother, that is to
say, in Nicholas' house. The young Countess Bezukhova was not often seen
in society, and those who met her there were not pleased with her
and found her neither attractive nor amiable. Not that Natasha liked
solitude--she did not know whether she liked it or not, she even thought
that she did not--but with her pregnancies, her confinements, the
nursing of her children, and sharing every moment of her husband's life,
she had demands on her time which could be satisfied only by renouncing
society. All who had known Natasha before her marriage wondered at the
change in her as at something extraordinary. Only the old countess with
her maternal instinct had realized that all Natasha's outbursts had
been due to her need of children and a husband--as she herself had once
exclaimed at Otradnoe not so much in fun as in earnest--and her mother
was now surprised at the surprise expressed by those who had never
understood Natasha, and she kept saying that she had always known that
Natasha would make an exemplary wife and mother.

"Only she lets her love of her husband and children overflow all
bounds," said the countess, "so that it even becomes absurd."

Natasha did not follow the golden rule advocated by clever folk,
especially by the French, which says that a girl should not let herself
go when she marries, should not neglect her accomplishments, should be
even more careful of her appearance than when she was unmarried, and
should fascinate her husband as much as she did before he became her
husband. Natasha on the contrary had at once abandoned all her witchery,
of which her singing had been an unusually powerful part. She gave it up
just because it was so powerfully seductive. She took no pains with
her manners or with delicacy of speech, or with her toilet, or to show
herself to her husband in her most becoming attitudes, or to avoid
inconveniencing him by being too exacting. She acted in contradiction
to all those rules. She felt that the allurements instinct had formerly
taught her to use would now be merely ridiculous in the eyes of
her husband, to whom she had from the first moment given herself up
entirely--that is, with her whole soul, leaving no corner of it hidden
from him. She felt that her unity with her husband was not maintained
by the poetic feelings that had attracted him to her, but by something
else--indefinite but firm as the bond between her own body and soul.

To fluff out her curls, put on fashionable dresses, and sing romantic
songs to fascinate her husband would have seemed as strange as to adorn
herself to attract herself. To adorn herself for others might perhaps
have been agreeable--she did not know--but she had no time at all for
it. The chief reason for devoting no time either to singing, to dress,
or to choosing her words was that she really had no time to spare for
these things.

We know that man has the faculty of becoming completely absorbed in
a subject however trivial it may be, and that there is no subject so
trivial that it will not grow to infinite proportions if one's entire
attention is devoted to it.

The subject which wholly engrossed Natasha's attention was her family:
that is, her husband whom she had to keep so that he should belong
entirely to her and to the home, and the children whom she had to bear,
bring into the world, nurse, and bring up.

And the deeper she penetrated, not with her mind only but with her whole
soul, her whole being, into the subject that absorbed her, the larger
did that subject grow and the weaker and more inadequate did her powers
appear, so that she concentrated them wholly on that one thing and yet
was unable to accomplish all that she considered necessary.

There were then as now conversations and discussions about women's
rights, the relations of husband and wife and their freedom and rights,
though these themes were not yet termed questions as they are now; but
these topics were not merely uninteresting to Natasha, she positively
did not understand them.

These questions, then as now, existed only for those who see nothing in
marriage but the pleasure married people get from one another, that is,
only the beginnings of marriage and not its whole significance, which
lies in the family.

Discussions and questions of that kind, which are like the question of
how to get the greatest gratification from one's dinner, did not then
and do not now exist for those for whom the purpose of a dinner is the
nourishment it affords; and the purpose of marriage is the family.

If the purpose of dinner is to nourish the body, a man who eats two
dinners at once may perhaps get more enjoyment but will not attain his
purpose, for his stomach will not digest the two dinners.

If the purpose of marriage is the family, the person who wishes to have
many wives or husbands may perhaps obtain much pleasure, but in that
case will not have a family.

If the purpose of food is nourishment and the purpose of marriage is the
family, the whole question resolves itself into not eating more than one
can digest, and not having more wives or husbands than are needed for
the family--that is, one wife or one husband. Natasha needed a husband.
A husband was given her and he gave her a family. And she not only saw
no need of any other or better husband, but as all the powers of her
soul were intent on serving that husband and family, she could not
imagine and saw no interest in imagining how it would be if things were
different.

Natasha did not care for society in general, but prized the more the
society of her relatives--Countess Mary, and her brother, her mother,
and Sonya. She valued the company of those to whom she could come
striding disheveled from the nursery in her dressing gown, and with
joyful face show a yellow instead of a green stain on baby's napkin, and
from whom she could hear reassuring words to the effect that baby was
much better.

To such an extent had Natasha let herself go that the way she dressed
and did her hair, her ill-chosen words, and her jealousy--she was
jealous of Sonya, of the governess, and of every woman, pretty or
plain--were habitual subjects of jest to those about her. The general
opinion was that Pierre was under his wife's thumb, which was really
true. From the very first days of their married life Natasha had
announced her demands. Pierre was greatly surprised by his wife's view,
to him a perfectly novel one, that every moment of his life belonged to
her and to the family. His wife's demands astonished him, but they also
flattered him, and he submitted to them.

Pierre's subjection consisted in the fact that he not only dared not
flirt with, but dared not even speak smilingly to, any other woman; did
not dare dine at the Club as a pastime, did not dare spend money on a
whim, and did not dare absent himself for any length of time, except on
business--in which his wife included his intellectual pursuits, which
she did not in the least understand but to which she attributed great
importance. To make up for this, at home Pierre had the right to
regulate his life and that of the whole family exactly as he chose. At
home Natasha placed herself in the position of a slave to her husband,
and the whole household went on tiptoe when he was occupied--that is,
was reading or writing in his study. Pierre had but to show a partiality
for anything to get just what he liked done always. He had only to
express a wish and Natasha would jump up and run to fulfill it.

The entire household was governed according to Pierre's supposed orders,
that is, by his wishes which Natasha tried to guess. Their way of
life and place of residence, their acquaintances and ties, Natasha's
occupations, the children's upbringing, were all selected not merely
with regard to Pierre's expressed wishes, but to what Natasha from the
thoughts he expressed in conversation supposed his wishes to be. And she
deduced the essentials of his wishes quite correctly, and having once
arrived at them clung to them tenaciously. When Pierre himself wanted to
change his mind she would fight him with his own weapons.

Thus in a time of trouble ever memorable to him after the birth of their
first child who was delicate, when they had to change the wet nurse
three times and Natasha fell ill from despair, Pierre one day told her
of Rousseau's view, with which he quite agreed, that to have a wet
nurse is unnatural and harmful. When her next baby was born, despite
the opposition of her mother, the doctors, and even of her husband
himself--who were all vigorously opposed to her nursing her baby
herself, a thing then unheard of and considered injurious--she insisted
on having her own way, and after that nursed all her babies herself.

It very often happened that in a moment of irritation husband and wife
would have a dispute, but long afterwards Pierre to his surprise and
delight would find in his wife's ideas and actions the very thought
against which she had argued, but divested of everything superfluous
that in the excitement of the dispute he had added when expressing his
opinion.

After seven years of marriage Pierre had the joyous and firm
consciousness that he was not a bad man, and he felt this because he saw
himself reflected in his wife. He felt the good and bad within himself
inextricably mingled and overlapping. But only what was really good in
him was reflected in his wife, all that was not quite good was rejected.
And this was not the result of logical reasoning but was a direct and
mysterious reflection.





CHAPTER XI


Two months previously when Pierre was already staying with the Rostovs
he had received a letter from Prince Theodore, asking him to come
to Petersburg to confer on some important questions that were being
discussed there by a society of which Pierre was one of the principal
founders.

On reading that letter (she always read her husband's letters) Natasha
herself suggested that he should go to Petersburg, though she would feel
his absence very acutely. She attributed immense importance to all
her husband's intellectual and abstract interests though she did not
understand them, and she always dreaded being a hindrance to him in such
matters. To Pierre's timid look of inquiry after reading the letter she
replied by asking him to go, but to fix a definite date for his return.
He was given four weeks' leave of absence.

Ever since that leave of absence had expired, more than a fortnight
before, Natasha had been in a constant state of alarm, depression, and
irritability.

Denisov, now a general on the retired list and much dissatisfied with
the present state of affairs, had arrived during that fortnight. He
looked at Natasha with sorrow and surprise as at a bad likeness of a
person once dear. A dull, dejected look, random replies, and talk about
the nursery was all he saw and heard from his former enchantress.

Natasha was sad and irritable all that time, especially when her mother,
her brother, Sonya, or Countess Mary in their efforts to console her
tried to excuse Pierre and suggested reasons for his delay in returning.

"It's all nonsense, all rubbish--those discussions which lead to nothing
and all those idiotic societies!" Natasha declared of the very affairs
in the immense importance of which she firmly believed.

And she would go to the nursery to nurse Petya, her only boy. No one
else could tell her anything so comforting or so reasonable as this
little three-month-old creature when he lay at her breast and she was
conscious of the movement of his lips and the snuffling of his little
nose. That creature said: "You are angry, you are jealous, you would
like to pay him out, you are afraid--but here am I! And I am he..." and
that was unanswerable. It was more than true.

During that fortnight of anxiety Natasha resorted to the baby for
comfort so often, and fussed over him so much, that she overfed him and
he fell ill. She was terrified by his illness, and yet that was just
what she needed. While attending to him she bore the anxiety about her
husband more easily.

She was nursing her boy when the sound of Pierre's sleigh was heard
at the front door, and the old nurse--knowing how to please her
mistress--entered the room inaudibly but hurriedly and with a beaming
face.

"Has he come?" Natasha asked quickly in a whisper, afraid to move lest
she should rouse the dozing baby.

"He's come, ma'am," whispered the nurse.

The blood rushed to Natasha's face and her feet involuntarily moved, but
she could not jump up and run out. The baby again opened his eyes and
looked at her. "You're here?" he seemed to be saying, and again lazily
smacked his lips.

Cautiously withdrawing her breast, Natasha rocked him a little, handed
him to the nurse, and went with rapid steps toward the door. But at the
door she stopped as if her conscience reproached her for having in
her joy left the child too soon, and she glanced round. The nurse with
raised elbows was lifting the infant over the rail of his cot.

"Go, ma'am! Don't worry, go!" she whispered, smiling, with the kind of
familiarity that grows up between a nurse and her mistress.

Natasha ran with light footsteps to the anteroom.

Denisov, who had come out of the study into the dancing room with his
pipe, now for the first time recognized the old Natasha. A flood of
brilliant, joyful light poured from her transfigured face.

"He's come!" she exclaimed as she ran past, and Denisov felt that he too
was delighted that Pierre, whom he did not much care for, had returned.

On reaching the vestibule Natasha saw a tall figure in a fur coat
unwinding his scarf. "It's he! It's really he! He has come!" she said
to herself, and rushing at him embraced him, pressed his head to her
breast, and then pushed him back and gazed at his ruddy, happy face,
covered with hoarfrost. "Yes, it is he, happy and contented..."

Then all at once she remembered the tortures of suspense she had
experienced for the last fortnight, and the joy that had lit up her
face vanished; she frowned and overwhelmed Pierre with a torrent of
reproaches and angry words.

"Yes, it's all very well for you. You are pleased, you've had a good
time.... But what about me? You might at least have shown consideration
for the children. I am nursing and my milk was spoiled.... Petya was at
death's door. But you were enjoying yourself. Yes, enjoying..."

Pierre knew he was not to blame, for he could not have come sooner; he
knew this outburst was unseemly and would blow over in a minute or two;
above all he knew that he himself was bright and happy. He wanted
to smile but dared not even think of doing so. He made a piteous,
frightened face and bent down.

"I could not, on my honor. But how is Petya?"

"All right now. Come along! I wonder you're not ashamed! If only you
could see what I was like without you, how I suffered!"

"You are well?"

"Come, come!" she said, not letting go of his arm. And they went to
their rooms.

When Nicholas and his wife came to look for Pierre he was in the nursery
holding his baby son, who was again awake, on his huge right palm and
dandling him. A blissful bright smile was fixed on the baby's broad face
with its toothless open mouth. The storm was long since over and there
was bright, joyous sunshine on Natasha's face as she gazed tenderly at
her husband and child.

"And have you talked everything well over with Prince Theodore?" she
asked.

"Yes, capitally."

"You see, he holds it up." (She meant the baby's head.) "But how he did
frighten me... You've seen the princess? Is it true she's in love with
that..."

"Yes, just fancy..."

At that moment Nicholas and Countess Mary came in. Pierre with the baby
on his hand stooped, kissed them, and replied to their inquiries. But
in spite of much that was interesting and had to be discussed, the baby
with the little cap on its unsteady head evidently absorbed all his
attention.

"How sweet!" said Countess Mary, looking at and playing with the baby.
"Now, Nicholas," she added, turning to her husband, "I can't understand
how it is you don't see the charm of these delicious marvels."

"I don't and can't," replied Nicholas, looking coldly at the baby. "A
lump of flesh. Come along, Pierre!"

"And yet he's such an affectionate father," said Countess Mary,
vindicating her husband, "but only after they are a year old or so..."

"Now, Pierre nurses them splendidly," said Natasha. "He says his hand is
just made for a baby's seat. Just look!"

"Only not for this..." Pierre suddenly exclaimed with a laugh, and
shifting the baby he gave him to the nurse.





CHAPTER XII


As in every large household, there were at Bald Hills several perfectly
distinct worlds which merged into one harmonious whole, though each
retained its own peculiarities and made concessions to the others. Every
event, joyful or sad, that took place in that house was important to all
these worlds, but each had its own special reasons to rejoice or grieve
over that occurrence independently of the others.

For instance, Pierre's return was a joyful and important event and they
all felt it to be so.

The servants--the most reliable judges of their masters because they
judge not by their conversation or expressions of feeling but by their
acts and way of life--were glad of Pierre's return because they knew
that when he was there Count Nicholas would cease going every day to
attend to the estate, and would be in better spirits and temper, and
also because they would all receive handsome presents for the holidays.

The children and their governesses were glad of Pierre's return because
no one else drew them into the social life of the household as he did.
He alone could play on the clavichord that ecossaise (his only piece)
to which, as he said, all possible dances could be danced, and they felt
sure he had brought presents for them all.

Young Nicholas, now a slim lad of fifteen, delicate and intelligent,
with curly light-brown hair and beautiful eyes, was delighted because
Uncle Pierre as he called him was the object of his rapturous and
passionate affection. No one had instilled into him this love for Pierre
whom he saw only occasionally. Countess Mary who had brought him up
had done her utmost to make him love her husband as she loved him, and
little Nicholas did love his uncle, but loved him with just a shade of
contempt. Pierre, however, he adored. He did not want to be an hussar or
a Knight of St. George like his uncle Nicholas; he wanted to be learned,
wise, and kind like Pierre. In Pierre's presence his face always shone
with pleasure and he flushed and was breathless when Pierre spoke to
him. He did not miss a single word he uttered, and would afterwards,
with Dessalles or by himself, recall and reconsider the meaning of
everything Pierre had said. Pierre's past life and his unhappiness prior
to 1812 (of which young Nicholas had formed a vague poetic picture from
some words he had overheard), his adventures in Moscow, his captivity,
Platon Karataev (of whom he had heard from Pierre), his love for Natasha
(of whom the lad was also particularly fond), and especially Pierre's
friendship with the father whom Nicholas could not remember--all this
made Pierre in his eyes a hero and a saint.

From broken remarks about Natasha and his father, from the emotion with
which Pierre spoke of that dead father, and from the careful, reverent
tenderness with which Natasha spoke of him, the boy, who was only just
beginning to guess what love is, derived the notion that his father had
loved Natasha and when dying had left her to his friend. But the father
whom the boy did not remember appeared to him a divinity who could not
be pictured, and of whom he never thought without a swelling heart and
tears of sadness and rapture. So the boy also was happy that Pierre had
arrived.

The guests welcomed Pierre because he always helped to enliven and unite
any company he was in.

The grown-up members of the family, not to mention his wife, were
pleased to have back a friend whose presence made life run more smoothly
and peacefully.

The old ladies were pleased with the presents he brought them, and
especially that Natasha would now be herself again.

Pierre felt the different outlooks of these various worlds and made
haste to satisfy all their expectations.

Though the most absent-minded and forgetful of men, Pierre, with the aid
of a list his wife drew up, had now bought everything, not forgetting
his mother--and brother-in-law's commissions, nor the dress material for
a present to Belova, nor toys for his wife's nephews. In the early days
of his marriage it had seemed strange to him that his wife should expect
him not to forget to procure all the things he undertook to buy, and he
had been taken aback by her serious annoyance when on his first trip he
forgot everything. But in time he grew used to this demand. Knowing that
Natasha asked nothing for herself, and gave him commissions for others
only when he himself had offered to undertake them, he now found an
unexpected and childlike pleasure in this purchase of presents for
everyone in the house, and never forgot anything. If he now incurred
Natasha's censure it was only for buying too many and too expensive
things. To her other defects (as most people thought them, but which
to Pierre were qualities) of untidiness and neglect of herself, she now
added stinginess.

From the time that Pierre began life as a family man on a footing
entailing heavy expenditure, he had noticed to his surprise that he
spent only half as much as before, and that his affairs--which had been
in disorder of late, chiefly because of his first wife's debts--had
begun to improve.

Life was cheaper because it was circumscribed: that most expensive
luxury, the kind of life that can be changed at any moment, was no
longer his nor did he wish for it. He felt that his way of life had now
been settled once for all till death and that to change it was not in
his power, and so that way of life proved economical.

With a merry, smiling face Pierre was sorting his purchases.

"What do you think of this?" said he, unrolling a piece of stuff like a
shopman.

Natasha, who was sitting opposite to him with her eldest daughter on her
lap, turned her sparkling eyes swiftly from her husband to the things he
showed her.

"That's for Belova? Excellent!" She felt the quality of the material.
"It was a ruble an arshin, I suppose?"

Pierre told her the price.

"Too dear!" Natasha remarked. "How pleased the children will be and
Mamma too! Only you need not have bought me this," she added, unable to
suppress a smile as she gazed admiringly at a gold comb set with pearls,
of a kind then just coming into fashion.

"Adele tempted me: she kept on telling me to buy it," returned Pierre.

"When am I to wear it?" and Natasha stuck it in her coil of hair. "When
I take little Masha into society? Perhaps they will be fashionable again
by then. Well, let's go now."

And collecting the presents they went first to the nursery and then to
the old countess' rooms.

The countess was sitting with her companion Belova, playing
grand-patience as usual, when Pierre and Natasha came into the drawing
room with parcels under their arms.

The countess was now over sixty, was quite gray, and wore a cap with a
frill that surrounded her face. Her face had shriveled, her upper lip
had sunk in, and her eyes were dim.

After the deaths of her son and husband in such rapid succession, she
felt herself a being accidentally forgotten in this world and left
without aim or object for her existence. She ate, drank, slept, or kept
awake, but did not live. Life gave her no new impressions. She wanted
nothing from life but tranquillity, and that tranquillity only death
could give her. But until death came she had to go on living, that is,
to use her vital forces. A peculiarity one sees in very young children
and very old people was particularly evident in her. Her life had
no external aims--only a need to exercise her various functions and
inclinations was apparent. She had to eat, sleep, think, speak, weep,
work, give vent to her anger, and so on, merely because she had a
stomach, a brain, muscles, nerves, and a liver. She did these things not
under any external impulse as people in the full vigor of life do,
when behind the purpose for which they strive that of exercising their
functions remains unnoticed. She talked only because she physically
needed to exercise her tongue and lungs. She cried as a child does,
because her nose had to be cleared, and so on. What for people in their
full vigor is an aim was for her evidently merely a pretext.

Thus in the morning--especially if she had eaten anything rich the day
before--she felt a need of being angry and would choose as the handiest
pretext Belova's deafness.

She would begin to say something to her in a low tone from the other end
of the room.

"It seems a little warmer today, my dear," she would murmur.

And when Belova replied: "Oh yes, they've come," she would mutter
angrily: "O Lord! How stupid and deaf she is!"

Another pretext would be her snuff, which would seem too dry or too damp
or not rubbed fine enough. After these fits of irritability her face
would grow yellow, and her maids knew by infallible symptoms when Belova
would again be deaf, the snuff damp, and the countess' face yellow. Just
as she needed to work off her spleen so she had sometimes to exercise
her still-existing faculty of thinking--and the pretext for that was a
game of patience. When she needed to cry, the deceased count would be
the pretext. When she wanted to be agitated, Nicholas and his health
would be the pretext, and when she felt a need to speak spitefully, the
pretext would be Countess Mary. When her vocal organs needed exercise,
which was usually toward seven o'clock when she had had an after-dinner
rest in a darkened room, the pretext would be the retelling of the same
stories over and over again to the same audience.

The old lady's condition was understood by the whole household though no
one ever spoke of it, and they all made every possible effort to satisfy
her needs. Only by a rare glance exchanged with a sad smile
between Nicholas, Pierre, Natasha, and Countess Mary was the common
understanding of her condition expressed.

But those glances expressed something more: they said that she had
played her part in life, that what they now saw was not her whole self,
that we must all become like her, and that they were glad to yield to
her, to restrain themselves for this once precious being formerly as
full of life as themselves, but now so much to be pitied. "Memento
mori," said these glances.

Only the really heartless, the stupid ones of that household, and the
little children failed to understand this and avoided her.





CHAPTER XIII


When Pierre and his wife entered the drawing room the countess was in
one of her customary states in which she needed the mental exertion of
playing patience, and so--though by force of habit she greeted him
with the words she always used when Pierre or her son returned after an
absence: "High time, my dear, high time! We were all weary of waiting
for you. Well, thank God!" and received her presents with another
customary remark: "It's not the gift that's precious, my dear, but that
you give it to me, an old woman..."--yet it was evident that she was
not pleased by Pierre's arrival at that moment when it diverted her
attention from the unfinished game.

She finished her game of patience and only then examined the presents.
They consisted of a box for cards, of splendid workmanship, a
bright-blue Sevres tea cup with shepherdesses depicted on it and with
a lid, and a gold snuffbox with the count's portrait on the lid which
Pierre had had done by a miniaturist in Petersburg. The countess had
long wished for such a box, but as she did not want to cry just then she
glanced indifferently at the portrait and gave her attention chiefly to
the box for cards.

"Thank you, my dear, you have cheered me up," said she as she always
did. "But best of all you have brought yourself back--for I never saw
anything like it, you ought to give your wife a scolding! What are we
to do with her? She is like a mad woman when you are away. Doesn't see
anything, doesn't remember anything," she went on, repeating her usual
phrases. "Look, Anna Timofeevna," she added to her companion, "see what
a box for cards my son has brought us!"

Belova admired the presents and was delighted with her dress material.

Though Pierre, Natasha, Nicholas, Countess Mary, and Denisov had much to
talk about that they could not discuss before the old countess--not
that anything was hidden from her, but because she had dropped so
far behindhand in many things that had they begun to converse in her
presence they would have had to answer inopportune questions and to
repeat what they had already told her many times: that so-and-so was
dead and so-and-so was married, which she would again be unable to
remember--yet they sat at tea round the samovar in the drawing room from
habit, and Pierre answered the countess' questions as to whether Prince
Vasili had aged and whether Countess Mary Alexeevna had sent greetings
and still thought of them, and other matters that interested no one and
to which she herself was indifferent.

Conversation of this kind, interesting to no one yet unavoidable,
continued all through teatime. All the grown-up members of the family
were assembled near the round tea table at which Sonya presided beside
the samovar. The children with their tutors and governesses had had
tea and their voices were audible from the next room. At tea all sat
in their accustomed places: Nicholas beside the stove at a small table
where his tea was handed to him; Milka, the old gray borzoi bitch
(daughter of the first Milka), with a quite gray face and large black
eyes that seemed more prominent than ever, lay on the armchair beside
him; Denisov, whose curly hair, mustache, and whiskers had turned half
gray, sat beside countess Mary with his general's tunic unbuttoned;
Pierre sat between his wife and the old countess. He spoke of what he
knew might interest the old lady and that she could understand. He
told her of external social events and of the people who had formed
the circle of her contemporaries and had once been a real, living, and
distinct group, but who were now for the most part scattered about the
world and like herself were garnering the last ears of the harvests they
had sown in earlier years. But to the old countess those contemporaries
of hers seemed to be the only serious and real society. Natasha saw by
Pierre's animation that his visit had been interesting and that he had
much to tell them but dare not say it before the old countess. Denisov,
not being a member of the family, did not understand Pierre's caution
and being, as a malcontent, much interested in what was occurring in
Petersburg, kept urging Pierre to tell them about what had happened in
the Semenovsk regiment, then about Arakcheev, and then about the Bible
Society. Once or twice Pierre was carried away and began to speak of
these things, but Nicholas and Natasha always brought him back to the
health of Prince Ivan and Countess Mary Alexeevna.

"Well, and all this idiocy--Gossner and Tatawinova?" Denisov asked. "Is
that weally still going on?"

"Going on?" Pierre exclaimed. "Why more than ever! The Bible Society is
the whole government now!"

 "What is that, mon cher ami?" asked the countess, who had
finished her tea and evidently needed a pretext for being angry
after her meal. "What are you saying about the government? I don't
understand."

"Well, you know, Maman," Nicholas interposed, knowing how to translate
things into his mother's language, "Prince Alexander Golitsyn has
founded a society and in consequence has great influence, they say."

"Arakcheev and Golitsyn," incautiously remarked Pierre, "are now the
whole government! And what a government! They see treason everywhere and
are afraid of everything."

"Well, and how is Prince Alexander to blame? He is a most estimable
man. I used to meet him at Mary Antonovna's," said the countess in an
offended tone; and still more offended that they all remained silent,
she went on: "Nowadays everyone finds fault. A Gospel Society! Well, and
what harm is there in that?" and she rose (everybody else got up too)
and with a severe expression sailed back to her table in the sitting
room.

The melancholy silence that followed was broken by the sounds of the
children's voices and laughter from the next room. Evidently some jolly
excitement was going on there.

"Finished, finished!" little Natasha's gleeful yell rose above them all.

Pierre exchanged glances with Countess Mary and Nicholas (Natasha he
never lost sight of) and smiled happily.

"That's delightful music!" said he.

"It means that Anna Makarovna has finished her stocking," said Countess
Mary.

"Oh, I'll go and see," said Pierre, jumping up. "You know," he added,
stopping at the door, "why I'm especially fond of that music? It is
always the first thing that tells me all is well. When I was driving
here today, the nearer I got to the house the more anxious I grew. As I
entered the anteroom I heard Andrusha's peals of laughter and that meant
that all was well."

"I know! I know that feeling," said Nicholas. "But I mustn't go
there--those stockings are to be a surprise for me."

Pierre went to the children, and the shouting and laughter grew still
louder.

"Come, Anna Makarovna," Pierre's voice was heard saying, "come here into
the middle of the room and at the word of command, 'One, two,' and when
I say 'three'... You stand here, and you in my arms--well now! One,
two!..." said Pierre, and a silence followed: "three!" and a rapturously
breathless cry of children's voices filled the room. "Two, two!" they
shouted.

This meant two stockings, which by a secret process known only to
herself Anna Makarovna used to knit at the same time on the same
needles, and which, when they were ready, she always triumphantly drew,
one out of the other, in the children's presence.





CHAPTER XIV


Soon after this the children came in to say good night. They kissed
everyone, the tutors and governesses made their bows, and they went out.
Only young Nicholas and his tutor remained. Dessalles whispered to the
boy to come downstairs.

"No, Monsieur Dessalles, I will ask my aunt to let me stay," replied
Nicholas Bolkonski also in a whisper.

"Ma tante, please let me stay," said he, going up to his aunt.

His face expressed entreaty, agitation, and ecstasy. Countess Mary
glanced at him and turned to Pierre.

"When you are here he can't tear himself away," she said.

"I will bring him to you directly, Monsieur Dessalles. Good night!"
said Pierre, giving his hand to the Swiss tutor, and he turned to young
Nicholas with a smile. "You and I haven't seen anything of one another
yet... How like he is growing, Mary!" he added, addressing Countess
Mary.

"Like my father?" asked the boy, flushing crimson and looking up at
Pierre with bright, ecstatic eyes.

Pierre nodded, and went on with what he had been saying when the
children had interrupted. Countess Mary sat down doing woolwork; Natasha
did not take her eyes off her husband. Nicholas and Denisov rose, asked
for their pipes, smoked, went to fetch more tea from Sonya--who
sat weary but resolute at the samovar--and questioned Pierre. The
curly-headed, delicate boy sat with shining eyes unnoticed in a corner,
starting every now and then and muttering something to himself, and
evidently experiencing a new and powerful emotion as he turned his curly
head, with his thin neck exposed by his turn-down collar, toward the
place where Pierre sat.

The conversation turned on the contemporary gossip about those in power,
in which most people see the chief interest of home politics. Denisov,
dissatisfied with the government on account of his own disappointments
in the service, heard with pleasure of the things done in Petersburg
which seemed to him stupid, and made forcible and sharp comments on what
Pierre told them.

"One used to have to be a German--now one must dance with Tatawinova
and Madame Kwudener, and wead Ecka'tshausen and the bwethwen. Oh, they
should let that fine fellow Bonaparte lose--he'd knock all this nonsense
out of them! Fancy giving the command of the Semenov wegiment to a
fellow like that Schwa'tz!" he cried.

Nicholas, though free from Denisov's readiness to find fault with
everything, also thought that discussion of the government was a very
serious and weighty matter, and the fact that A had been appointed
Minister of This and B Governor General of That, and that the Emperor
had said so-and-so and this minister so-and-so, seemed to him very
important. And so he thought it necessary to take an interest in these
things and to question Pierre. The questions put by these two kept the
conversation from changing its ordinary character of gossip about the
higher government circles.

But Natasha, knowing all her husband's ways and ideas, saw that he had
long been wishing but had been unable to divert the conversation to
another channel and express his own deeply felt idea for the sake of
which he had gone to Petersburg to consult with his new friend Prince
Theodore, and she helped him by asking how his affairs with Prince
Theodore had gone.

"What was it about?" asked Nicholas.

"Always the same thing," said Pierre, looking round at his listeners.
"Everybody sees that things are going so badly that they cannot be
allowed to go on so and that it is the duty of all decent men to
counteract it as far as they can."

"What can decent men do?" Nicholas inquired, frowning slightly. "What
can be done?"

"Why, this..."

"Come into my study," said Nicholas.

Natasha, who had long expected to be fetched to nurse her baby, now
heard the nurse calling her and went to the nursery. Countess Mary
followed her. The men went into the study and little Nicholas Bolkonski
followed them unnoticed by his uncle and sat down at the writing table
in a shady corner by the window.

"Well, what would you do?" asked Denisov.

"Always some fantastic schemes," said Nicholas.

"Why this," began Pierre, not sitting down but pacing the room,
sometimes stopping short, gesticulating, and lisping: "the position
in Petersburg is this: the Emperor does not look into anything. He
has abandoned himself altogether to this mysticism" (Pierre could not
tolerate mysticism in anyone now). "He seeks only for peace, and only
these people sans foi ni loi * can give it him--people who recklessly
hack at and strangle everything--Magnitski, Arakcheev, and tutti
quanti.... You will agree that if you did not look after your estates
yourself but only wanted a quiet life, the harsher your steward was the
more readily your object might be attained," he said to Nicholas.


    * Without faith or law.


"Well, what does that lead up to?" said Nicholas.

"Well, everything is going to ruin! Robbery in the law courts, in the
army nothing but flogging, drilling, and Military Settlements; the
people are tortured, enlightenment is suppressed. All that is young and
honest is crushed! Everyone sees that this cannot go on. Everything is
strained to such a degree that it will certainly break," said Pierre (as
those who examine the actions of any government have always said since
governments began). "I told them just one thing in Petersburg."

"Told whom?"

"Well, you know whom," said Pierre, with a meaning glance from under
his brows. "Prince Theodore and all those. To encourage culture and
philanthropy is all very well of course. The aim is excellent but in the
present circumstances something else is needed."

At that moment Nicholas noticed the presence of his nephew. His face
darkened and he went up to the boy.

"Why are you here?"

"Why? Let him be," said Pierre, taking Nicholas by the arm and
continuing. "That is not enough, I told them. Something else is needed.
When you stand expecting the overstrained string to snap at any moment,
when everyone is expecting the inevitable catastrophe, as many as
possible must join hands as closely as they can to withstand the general
calamity. Everything that is young and strong is being enticed away and
depraved. One is lured by women, another by honors, a third by ambition
or money, and they go over to that camp. No independent men, such as you
or I, are left. What I say is widen the scope of our society, let the
mot d'ordre be not virtue alone but independence and action as well!"

Nicholas, who had left his nephew, irritably pushed up an armchair, sat
down in it, and listened to Pierre, coughing discontentedly and frowning
more and more.

"But action with what aim?" he cried. "And what position will you adopt
toward the government?"

"Why, the position of assistants. The society need not be secret if the
government allows it. Not merely is it not hostile to government, but it
is a society of true conservatives--a society of gentlemen in the full
meaning of that word. It is only to prevent some Pugachev or other from
killing my children and yours, and Arakcheev from sending me off to some
Military Settlement. We join hands only for the public welfare and the
general safety."

"Yes, but it's a secret society and therefore a hostile and harmful one
which can only cause harm."

"Why? Did the Tugendbund which saved Europe" (they did not then venture
to suggest that Russia had saved Europe) "do any harm? The Tugendbund
is an alliance of virtue: it is love, mutual help... it is what Christ
preached on the Cross."

Natasha, who had come in during the conversation, looked joyfully at her
husband. It was not what he was saying that pleased her--that did not
even interest her, for it seemed to her that was all extremely simple
and that she had known it a long time (it seemed so to her because she
knew that it sprang from Pierre's whole soul), but it was his animated
and enthusiastic appearance that made her glad.

The boy with the thin neck stretching out from the turn-down
collar--whom everyone had forgotten--gazed at Pierre with even greater
and more rapturous joy. Every word of Pierre's burned into his heart,
and with a nervous movement of his fingers he unconsciously broke the
sealing wax and quill pens his hands came upon on his uncle's table.

"It is not at all what you suppose; but that is what the German
Tugendbund was, and what I am proposing."

"No, my fwiend! The Tugendbund is all vewy well for the sausage eaters,
but I don't understand it and can't even pwonounce it," interposed
Denisov in a loud and resolute voice. "I agwee that evewything here is
wotten and howwible, but the Tugendbund I don't understand. If we're
not satisfied, let us have a bunt of our own. That's all wight. Je suis
vot'e homme!" *


    * "I'm your man."


Pierre smiled, Natasha began to laugh, but Nicholas knitted his brows
still more and began proving to Pierre that there was no prospect of
any great change and that all the danger he spoke of existed only in his
imagination. Pierre maintained the contrary, and as his mental faculties
were greater and more resourceful, Nicholas felt himself cornered. This
made him still angrier, for he was fully convinced, not by reasoning
but by something within him stronger than reason, of the justice of his
opinion.

"I will tell you this," he said, rising and trying with nervously
twitching fingers to prop up his pipe in a corner, but finally
abandoning the attempt. "I can't prove it to you. You say that
everything here is rotten and that an overthrow is coming: I don't
see it. But you also say that our oath of allegiance is a conditional
matter, and to that I reply: 'You are my best friend, as you know,
but if you formed a secret society and began working against the
government--be it what it may--I know it is my duty to obey the
government. And if Arakcheev ordered me to lead a squadron against you
and cut you down, I should not hesitate an instant, but should do it.'
And you may argue about that as you like!"

An awkward silence followed these words. Natasha was the first to speak,
defending her husband and attacking her brother. Her defense was weak
and inapt but she attained her object. The conversation was resumed, and
no longer in the unpleasantly hostile tone of Nicholas' last remark.

When they all got up to go in to supper, little Nicholas Bolkonski went
up to Pierre, pale and with shining, radiant eyes.

"Uncle Pierre, you... no... If Papa were alive... would he agree with
you?" he asked.

And Pierre suddenly realized what a special, independent, complex, and
powerful process of thought and feeling must have been going on in
this boy during that conversation, and remembering all he had said he
regretted that the lad should have heard him. He had, however, to give
him an answer.

"Yes, I think so," he said reluctantly, and left the study.

The lad looked down and seemed now for the first time to notice what he
had done to the things on the table. He flushed and went up to Nicholas.

"Uncle, forgive me, I did that... unintentionally," he said, pointing to
the broken sealing wax and pens.

Nicholas started angrily.

"All right, all right," he said, throwing the bits under the table.

And evidently suppressing his vexation with difficulty, he turned away
from the boy.

"You ought not to have been here at all," he said.





CHAPTER XV


The conversation at supper was not about politics or societies, but
turned on the subject Nicholas liked best--recollections of 1812.
Denisov started these and Pierre was particularly agreeable and amusing
about them. The family separated on the most friendly terms.

After supper Nicholas, having undressed in his study and given
instructions to the steward who had been waiting for him, went to the
bedroom in his dressing gown, where he found his wife still at her
table, writing.

"What are you writing, Mary?" Nicholas asked.

Countess Mary blushed. She was afraid that what she was writing would
not be understood or approved by her husband.

She had wanted to conceal what she was writing from him, but at the same
time was glad he had surprised her at it and that she would now have to
tell him.

"A diary, Nicholas," she replied, handing him a blue exercise book
filled with her firm, bold writing.

"A diary?" Nicholas repeated with a shade of irony, and he took up the
book.

It was in French.


December 4. Today when Andrusha (her eldest boy) woke up he did not
wish to dress and Mademoiselle Louise sent for me. He was naughty and
obstinate. I tried threats, but he only grew angrier. Then I took the
matter in hand: I left him alone and began with nurse's help to get the
other children up, telling him that I did not love him. For a long time
he was silent, as if astonished, then he jumped out of bed, ran to me in
his shirt, and sobbed so that I could not calm him for a long time.
It was plain that what troubled him most was that he had grieved me.
Afterwards in the evening when I gave him his ticket, he again began
crying piteously and kissing me. One can do anything with him by
tenderness.


"What is a 'ticket'?" Nicholas inquired.

"I have begun giving the elder ones marks every evening, showing how
they have behaved."

Nicholas looked into the radiant eyes that were gazing at him, and
continued to turn over the pages and read. In the diary was set down
everything in the children's lives that seemed noteworthy to their
mother as showing their characters or suggesting general reflections
on educational methods. They were for the most part quite insignificant
trifles, but did not seem so to the mother or to the father either, now
that he read this diary about his children for the first time.

Under the date "5" was entered:


Mitya was naughty at table. Papa said he was to have no pudding. He had
none, but looked so unhappily and greedily at the others while they were
eating! I think that punishment by depriving children of sweets only
develops their greediness. Must tell Nicholas this.


Nicholas put down the book and looked at his wife. The radiant eyes
gazed at him questioningly: would he approve or disapprove of her
diary? There could be no doubt not only of his approval but also of his
admiration for his wife.

Perhaps it need not be done so pedantically, thought Nicholas, or even
done at all, but this untiring, continual spiritual effort of which the
sole aim was the children's moral welfare delighted him. Had Nicholas
been able to analyze his feelings he would have found that his steady,
tender, and proud love of his wife rested on his feeling of wonder at
her spirituality and at the lofty moral world, almost beyond his reach,
in which she had her being.

He was proud of her intelligence and goodness, recognized his own
insignificance beside her in the spiritual world, and rejoiced all the
more that she with such a soul not only belonged to him but was part of
himself.

"I quite, quite approve, my dearest!" said he with a significant look,
and after a short pause he added: "And I behaved badly today. You
weren't in the study. We began disputing--Pierre and I--and I lost my
temper. But he is impossible: such a child! I don't know what would
become of him if Natasha didn't keep him in hand.... Have you any idea
why he went to Petersburg? They have formed..."

"Yes, I know," said Countess Mary. "Natasha told me."

"Well, then, you know," Nicholas went on, growing hot at the mere
recollection of their discussion, "he wanted to convince me that it is
every honest man's duty to go against the government, and that the oath
of allegiance and duty... I am sorry you weren't there. They all fell
on me--Denisov and Natasha... Natasha is absurd. How she rules over him!
And yet there need only be a discussion and she has no words of her
own but only repeats his sayings..." added Nicholas, yielding to that
irresistible inclination which tempts us to judge those nearest and
dearest to us. He forgot that what he was saying about Natasha could
have been applied word for word to himself in relation to his wife.

"Yes, I have noticed that," said Countess Mary.

"When I told him that duty and the oath were above everything, he
started proving goodness knows what! A pity you were not there--what
would you have said?"

"As I see it you were quite right, and I told Natasha so. Pierre says
everybody is suffering, tortured, and being corrupted, and that it
is our duty to help our neighbor. Of course he is right there," said
Countess Mary, "but he forgets that we have other duties nearer to us,
duties indicated to us by God Himself, and that though we might expose
ourselves to risks we must not risk our children."

"Yes, that's it! That's just what I said to him," put in Nicholas, who
fancied he really had said it. "But they insisted on their own view:
love of one's neighbor and Christianity--and all this in the presence of
young Nicholas, who had gone into my study and broke all my things."

"Ah, Nicholas, do you know I am often troubled about little Nicholas,"
said Countess Mary. "He is such an exceptional boy. I am afraid I
neglect him in favor of my own: we all have children and relations while
he has no one. He is constantly alone with his thoughts."

"Well, I don't think you need reproach yourself on his account. All that
the fondest mother could do for her son you have done and are doing for
him, and of course I am glad of it. He is a fine lad, a fine lad! This
evening he listened to Pierre in a sort of trance, and fancy--as we were
going in to supper I looked and he had broken everything on my table to
bits, and he told me of it himself at once! I never knew him to tell an
untruth. A fine lad, a fine lad!" repeated Nicholas, who at heart was
not fond of Nicholas Bolkonski but was always anxious to recognize that
he was a fine lad.

"Still, I am not the same as his own mother," said Countess Mary. "I
feel I am not the same and it troubles me. A wonderful boy, but I am
dreadfully afraid for him. It would be good for him to have companions."

"Well it won't be for long. Next summer I'll take him to Petersburg,"
said Nicholas. "Yes, Pierre always was a dreamer and always will be,"
he continued, returning to the talk in the study which had evidently
disturbed him. "Well, what business is it of mine what goes on
there--whether Arakcheev is bad, and all that? What business was it of
mine when I married and was so deep in debt that I was threatened with
prison, and had a mother who could not see or understand it? And
then there are you and the children and our affairs. Is it for my own
pleasure that I am at the farm or in the office from morning to night?
No, but I know I must work to comfort my mother, to repay you, and not
to leave the children such beggars as I was."

Countess Mary wanted to tell him that man does not live by bread alone
and that he attached too much importance to these matters. But she knew
she must not say this and that it would be useless to do so. She only
took his hand and kissed it. He took this as a sign of approval and
a confirmation of his thoughts, and after a few minutes' reflection
continued to think aloud.

"You know, Mary, today Elias Mitrofanych" (this was his overseer) "came
back from the Tambov estate and told me they are already offering eighty
thousand rubles for the forest."

And with an eager face Nicholas began to speak of the possibility of
repurchasing Otradnoe before long, and added: "Another ten years of life
and I shall leave the children... in an excellent position."

Countess Mary listened to her husband and understood all that he told
her. She knew that when he thought aloud in this way he would sometimes
ask her what he had been saying, and be vexed if he noticed that she
had been thinking about something else. But she had to force herself to
attend, for what he was saying did not interest her at all. She looked
at him and did not think, but felt, about something different. She felt
a submissive tender love for this man who would never understand all
that she understood, and this seemed to make her love for him still
stronger and added a touch of passionate tenderness. Besides this
feeling which absorbed her altogether and hindered her from following
the details of her husband's plans, thoughts that had no connection with
what he was saying flitted through her mind. She thought of her nephew.
Her husband's account of the boy's agitation while Pierre was speaking
struck her forcibly, and various traits of his gentle, sensitive
character recurred to her mind; and while thinking of her nephew she
thought also of her own children. She did not compare them with him, but
compared her feeling for them with her feeling for him, and felt
with regret that there was something lacking in her feeling for young
Nicholas.

Sometimes it seemed to her that this difference arose from the
difference in their ages, but she felt herself to blame toward him and
promised in her heart to do better and to accomplish the impossible--in
this life to love her husband, her children, little Nicholas, and all
her neighbors, as Christ loved mankind. Countess Mary's soul always
strove toward the infinite, the eternal, and the absolute, and could
therefore never be at peace. A stern expression of the lofty, secret
suffering of a soul burdened by the body appeared on her face. Nicholas
gazed at her. "O God! What will become of us if she dies, as I always
fear when her face is like that?" thought he, and placing himself before
the icon he began to say his evening prayers.





CHAPTER XVI


Natasha and Pierre, left alone, also began to talk as only a husband
and wife can talk, that is, with extraordinary clearness and rapidity,
understanding and expressing each other's thoughts in ways contrary to
all rules of logic, without premises, deductions, or conclusions, and in
a quite peculiar way. Natasha was so used to this kind of talk with her
husband that for her it was the surest sign of something being wrong
between them if Pierre followed a line of logical reasoning. When he
began proving anything, or talking argumentatively and calmly and she,
led on by his example, began to do the same, she knew that they were on
the verge of a quarrel.

From the moment they were alone and Natasha came up to him with
wide-open happy eyes, and quickly seizing his head pressed it to her
bosom, saying: "Now you are all mine, mine! You won't escape!"--from
that moment this conversation began, contrary to all the laws of logic
and contrary to them because quite different subjects were talked about
at one and the same time. This simultaneous discussion of many topics
did not prevent a clear understanding but on the contrary was the surest
sign that they fully understood one another.

Just as in a dream when all is uncertain, unreasoning, and
contradictory, except the feeling that guides the dream, so in this
intercourse contrary to all laws of reason, the words themselves were
not consecutive and clear but only the feeling that prompted them.

Natasha spoke to Pierre about her brother's life and doings, of how she
had suffered and lacked life during his own absence, and of how she
was fonder than ever of Mary, and how Mary was in every way better than
herself. In saying this Natasha was sincere in acknowledging Mary's
superiority, but at the same time by saying it she made a demand on
Pierre that he should, all the same, prefer her to Mary and to all
other women, and that now, especially after having seen many women in
Petersburg, he should tell her so afresh.

Pierre, answering Natasha's words, told her how intolerable it had been
for him to meet ladies at dinners and balls in Petersburg.

"I have quite lost the knack of talking to ladies," he said. "It was
simply dull. Besides, I was very busy."

Natasha looked intently at him and went on:

"Mary is so splendid," she said. "How she understands children! It is as
if she saw straight into their souls. Yesterday, for instance, Mitya was
naughty..."

"How like his father he is," Pierre interjected.

Natasha knew why he mentioned Mitya's likeness to Nicholas: the
recollection of his dispute with his brother-in-law was unpleasant and
he wanted to know what Natasha thought of it.

"Nicholas has the weakness of never agreeing with anything not generally
accepted. But I understand that you value what opens up a fresh line,"
said she, repeating words Pierre had once uttered.

"No, the chief point is that to Nicholas ideas and discussions are
an amusement--almost a pastime," said Pierre. "For instance, he is
collecting a library and has made it a rule not to buy a new book
till he has read what he had already bought--Sismondi and Rousseau and
Montesquieu," he added with a smile. "You know how much I..." he began
to soften down what he had said; but Natasha interrupted him to show
that this was unnecessary.

"So you say ideas are an amusement to him...."

"Yes, and for me nothing else is serious. All the time in Petersburg I
saw everyone as in a dream. When I am taken up by a thought, all else is
mere amusement."

"Ah, I'm so sorry I wasn't there when you met the children," said
Natasha. "Which was most delighted? Lisa, I'm sure."

"Yes," Pierre replied, and went on with what was in his mind. "Nicholas
says we ought not to think. But I can't help it. Besides, when I was in
Petersburg I felt (I can say this to you) that the whole affair would go
to pieces without me--everyone was pulling his own way. But I succeeded
in uniting them all; and then my idea is so clear and simple. You see,
I don't say that we ought to oppose this and that. We may be mistaken.
What I say is: 'Join hands, you who love the right, and let there be but
one banner--that of active virtue.' Prince Sergey is a fine fellow and
clever."

Natasha would have had no doubt as to the greatness of Pierre's idea,
but one thing disconcerted her. "Can a man so important and necessary to
society be also my husband? How did this happen?" She wished to express
this doubt to him. "Now who could decide whether he is really cleverer
than all the others?" she asked herself, and passed in review all those
whom Pierre most respected. Judging by what he had said there was no one
he had respected so highly as Platon Karataev.

"Do you know what I am thinking about?" she asked. "About Platon
Karataev. Would he have approved of you now, do you think?"

Pierre was not at all surprised at this question. He understood his
wife's line of thought.

"Platon Karataev?" he repeated, and pondered, evidently sincerely
trying to imagine Karataev's opinion on the subject. "He would not have
understood... yet perhaps he would."

"I love you awfully!" Natasha suddenly said. "Awfully, awfully!"

"No, he would not have approved," said Pierre, after reflection. "What
he would have approved of is our family life. He was always so anxious
to find seemliness, happiness, and peace in everything, and I should
have been proud to let him see us. There now--you talk of my absence,
but you wouldn't believe what a special feeling I have for you after a
separation...."

"Yes, I should think..." Natasha began.

"No, it's not that. I never leave off loving you. And one couldn't love
more, but this is something special.... Yes, of course-" he did not
finish because their eyes meeting said the rest.

"What nonsense it is," Natasha suddenly exclaimed, "about honeymoons,
and that the greatest happiness is at first! On the contrary, now is
the best of all. If only you did not go away! Do you remember how
we quarreled? And it was always my fault. Always mine. And what we
quarreled about--I don't even remember!"

"Always about the same thing," said Pierre with a smile. "Jealo..."

"Don't say it! I can't bear it!" Natasha cried, and her eyes glittered
coldly and vindictively. "Did you see her?" she added, after a pause.

"No, and if I had I shouldn't have recognized her."

They were silent for a while.

"Oh, do you know? While you were talking in the study I was looking at
you," Natasha began, evidently anxious to disperse the cloud that had
come over them. "You are as like him as two peas--like the boy." (She
meant her little son.) "Oh, it's time to go to him.... The milk's
come.... But I'm sorry to leave you."

They were silent for a few seconds. Then suddenly turning to one
another at the same time they both began to speak. Pierre began with
self-satisfaction and enthusiasm, Natasha with a quiet, happy smile.
Having interrupted one another they both stopped to let the other
continue.

"No. What did you say? Go on, go on."

"No, you go on, I was talking nonsense," said Natasha.

Pierre finished what he had begun. It was the sequel to his complacent
reflections on his success in Petersburg. At that moment it seemed to
him that he was chosen to give a new direction to the whole of Russian
society and to the whole world.

"I only wished to say that ideas that have great results are always
simple ones. My whole idea is that if vicious people are united and
constitute a power, then honest folk must do the same. Now that's simple
enough."

"Yes."

"And what were you going to say?"

"I? Only nonsense."

"But all the same?"

"Oh nothing, only a trifle," said Natasha, smilingly still more
brightly. "I only wanted to tell you about Petya: today nurse was coming
to take him from me, and he laughed, shut his eyes, and clung to me. I'm
sure he thought he was hiding. Awfully sweet! There, now he's crying.
Well, good-by!" and she left the room.


Meanwhile downstairs in young Nicholas Bolkonski's bedroom a little lamp
was burning as usual. (The boy was afraid of the dark and they could
not cure him of it.) Dessalles slept propped up on four pillows and his
Roman nose emitted sounds of rhythmic snoring. Little Nicholas, who had
just waked up in a cold perspiration, sat up in bed and gazed before him
with wide-open eyes. He had awaked from a terrible dream. He had dreamed
that he and Uncle Pierre, wearing helmets such as were depicted in
his Plutarch, were leading a huge army. The army was made up of white
slanting lines that filled the air like the cobwebs that float about in
autumn and which Dessalles called les fils de la Vierge. In front was
Glory, which was similar to those threads but rather thicker. He and
Pierre were borne along lightly and joyously, nearer and nearer to their
goal. Suddenly the threads that moved them began to slacken and become
entangled and it grew difficult to move. And Uncle Nicholas stood before
them in a stern and threatening attitude.

"Have you done this?" he said, pointing to some broken sealing wax and
pens. "I loved you, but I have orders from Arakcheev and will kill
the first of you who moves forward." Little Nicholas turned to look
at Pierre but Pierre was no longer there. In his place was his
father--Prince Andrew--and his father had neither shape nor form, but he
existed, and when little Nicholas perceived him he grew faint with love:
he felt himself powerless, limp, and formless. His father caressed and
pitied him. But Uncle Nicholas came nearer and nearer to them. Terror
seized young Nicholas and he awoke.

"My father!" he thought. (Though there were two good portraits of Prince
Andrew in the house, Nicholas never imagined him in human form.) "My
father has been with me and caressed me. He approved of me and of Uncle
Pierre. Whatever he may tell me, I will do it. Mucius Scaevola burned
his hand. Why should not the same sort of thing happen to me? I know
they want me to learn. And I will learn. But someday I shall have
finished learning, and then I will do something. I only pray God that
something may happen to me such as happened to Plutarch's men, and I
will act as they did. I will do better. Everyone shall know me, love me,
and be delighted with me!" And suddenly his bosom heaved with sobs and
he began to cry.

"Are you ill?" he heard Dessalles' voice asking.

"No," answered Nicholas, and lay back on his pillow.

"He is good and kind and I am fond of him!" he thought of Dessalles.
"But Uncle Pierre! Oh, what a wonderful man he is! And my father? Oh,
Father, Father! Yes, I will do something with which even he would be
satisfied...."





SECOND EPILOGUE





CHAPTER I


History is the life of nations and of humanity. To seize and put into
words, to describe directly the life of humanity or even of a single
nation, appears impossible.

The ancient historians all employed one and the same method to describe
and seize the apparently elusive--the life of a people. They described
the activity of individuals who ruled the people, and regarded the
activity of those men as representing the activity of the whole nation.

The question: how did individuals make nations act as they wished and by
what was the will of these individuals themselves guided? the ancients
met by recognizing a divinity which subjected the nations to the will of
a chosen man, and guided the will of that chosen man so as to accomplish
ends that were predestined.

For the ancients these questions were solved by a belief in the direct
participation of the Deity in human affairs.

Modern history, in theory, rejects both these principles.

It would seem that having rejected the belief of the ancients in man's
subjection to the Deity and in a predetermined aim toward which nations
are led, modern history should study not the manifestations of power but
the causes that produce it. But modern history has not done this. Having
in theory rejected the view held by the ancients, it still follows them
in practice.

Instead of men endowed with divine authority and directly guided by
the will of God, modern history has given us either heroes endowed with
extraordinary, superhuman capacities, or simply men of very various
kinds, from monarchs to journalists, who lead the masses. Instead of the
former divinely appointed aims of the Jewish, Greek, or Roman nations,
which ancient historians regarded as representing the progress of
humanity, modern history has postulated its own aims--the welfare of the
French, German, or English people, or, in its highest abstraction, the
welfare and civilization of humanity in general, by which is usually
meant that of the peoples occupying a small northwesterly portion of a
large continent.

Modern history has rejected the beliefs of the ancients without
replacing them by a new conception, and the logic of the situation has
obliged the historians, after they had apparently rejected the divine
authority of the kings and the "fate" of the ancients, to reach the same
conclusion by another road, that is, to recognize (1) nations guided
by individual men, and (2) the existence of a known aim to which these
nations and humanity at large are tending.

At the basis of the works of all the modern historians from Gibbon to
Buckle, despite their seeming disagreements and the apparent novelty of
their outlooks, lie those two old, unavoidable assumptions.

In the first place the historian describes the activity of individuals
who in his opinion have directed humanity (one historian considers
only monarchs, generals, and ministers as being such men, while another
includes also orators, learned men, reformers, philosophers, and poets).
Secondly, it is assumed that the goal toward which humanity is being led
is known to the historians: to one of them this goal is the greatness of
the Roman, Spanish, or French realm; to another it is liberty, equality,
and a certain kind of civilization of a small corner of the world called
Europe.

In 1789 a ferment arises in Paris; it grows, spreads, and is expressed
by a movement of peoples from west to east. Several times it moves
eastward and collides with a countermovement from the east westward.
In 1812 it reaches its extreme limit, Moscow, and then, with remarkable
symmetry, a countermovement occurs from east to west, attracting to
it, as the first movement had done, the nations of middle Europe. The
counter movement reaches the starting point of the first movement in the
west--Paris--and subsides.

During that twenty-year period an immense number of fields were left
untilled, houses were burned, trade changed its direction, millions
of men migrated, were impoverished, or were enriched, and millions
of Christian men professing the law of love of their fellows slew one
another.

What does all this mean? Why did it happen? What made those people burn
houses and slay their fellow men? What were the causes of these events?
What force made men act so? These are the instinctive, plain, and
most legitimate questions humanity asks itself when it encounters the
monuments and tradition of that period.

For a reply to these questions the common sense of mankind turns to the
science of history, whose aim is to enable nations and humanity to know
themselves.

If history had retained the conception of the ancients it would have
said that God, to reward or punish his people, gave Napoleon power and
directed his will to the fulfillment of the divine ends, and that reply,
would have been clear and complete. One might believe or disbelieve
in the divine significance of Napoleon, but for anyone believing in
it there would have been nothing unintelligible in the history of that
period, nor would there have been any contradictions.

But modern history cannot give that reply. Science does not admit the
conception of the ancients as to the direct participation of the Deity
in human affairs, and therefore history ought to give other answers.

Modern history replying to these questions says: you want to know what
this movement means, what caused it, and what force produced these
events? Then listen:

"Louis XIV was a very proud and self-confident man; he had such and such
mistresses and such and such ministers and he ruled France badly. His
descendants were weak men and they too ruled France badly. And they had
such and such favorites and such and such mistresses. Moreover, certain
men wrote some books at that time. At the end of the eighteenth century
there were a couple of dozen men in Paris who began to talk about all
men being free and equal. This caused people all over France to begin
to slash at and drown one another. They killed the king and many other
people. At that time there was in France a man of genius--Napoleon. He
conquered everybody everywhere--that is, he killed many people because
he was a great genius. And for some reason he went to kill Africans, and
killed them so well and was so cunning and wise that when he returned to
France he ordered everybody to obey him, and they all obeyed him. Having
become an Emperor he again went out to kill people in Italy, Austria,
and Prussia. And there too he killed a great many. In Russia there
was an Emperor, Alexander, who decided to restore order in Europe and
therefore fought against Napoleon. In 1807 he suddenly made friends
with him, but in 1811 they again quarreled and again began killing many
people. Napoleon led six hundred thousand men into Russia and captured
Moscow; then he suddenly ran away from Moscow, and the Emperor
Alexander, helped by the advice of Stein and others, united Europe to
arm against the disturber of its peace. All Napoleon's allies suddenly
became his enemies and their forces advanced against the fresh forces he
raised. The Allies defeated Napoleon, entered Paris, forced Napoleon to
abdicate, and sent him to the island of Elba, not depriving him of the
title of Emperor and showing him every respect, though five years before
and one year later they all regarded him as an outlaw and a brigand.
Then Louis XVIII, who till then had been the laughingstock both of the
French and the Allies, began to reign. And Napoleon, shedding tears
before his Old Guards, renounced the throne and went into exile. Then
the skillful statesmen and diplomatists (especially Talleyrand, who
managed to sit down in a particular chair before anyone else and
thereby extended the frontiers of France) talked in Vienna and by
these conversations made the nations happy or unhappy. Suddenly the
diplomatists and monarchs nearly quarreled and were on the point of
again ordering their armies to kill one another, but just then Napoleon
arrived in France with a battalion, and the French, who had been hating
him, immediately all submitted to him. But the Allied monarchs were
angry at this and went to fight the French once more. And they defeated
the genius Napoleon and, suddenly recognizing him as a brigand, sent him
to the island of St. Helena. And the exile, separated from the beloved
France so dear to his heart, died a lingering death on that rock and
bequeathed his great deeds to posterity. But in Europe a reaction
occurred and the sovereigns once again all began to oppress their
subjects."

It would be a mistake to think that this is ironic--a caricature of the
historical accounts. On the contrary it is a very mild expression of
the contradictory replies, not meeting the questions, which all the
historians give, from the compilers of memoirs and the histories
of separate states to the writers of general histories and the new
histories of the culture of that period.

The strangeness and absurdity of these replies arise from the fact that
modern history, like a deaf man, answers questions no one has asked.

If the purpose of history be to give a description of the movement of
humanity and of the peoples, the first question--in the absence of a
reply to which all the rest will be incomprehensible--is: what is the
power that moves peoples? To this, modern history laboriously replies
either that Napoleon was a great genius, or that Louis XIV was very
proud, or that certain writers wrote certain books.

All that may be so and mankind is ready to agree with it, but it is not
what was asked. All that would be interesting if we recognized a divine
power based on itself and always consistently directing its nations
through Napoleons, Louis-es, and writers; but we do not acknowledge such
a power, and therefore before speaking about Napoleons, Louis-es, and
authors, we ought to be shown the connection existing between these men
and the movement of the nations.

If instead of a divine power some other force has appeared, it should
be explained in what this new force consists, for the whole interest of
history lies precisely in that force.

History seems to assume that this force is self-evident and known to
everyone. But in spite of every desire to regard it as known, anyone
reading many historical works cannot help doubting whether this new
force, so variously understood by the historians themselves, is really
quite well known to everybody.





CHAPTER II


What force moves the nations?

Biographical historians and historians of separate nations understand
this force as a power inherent in heroes and rulers. In their narration
events occur solely by the will of a Napoleon, and Alexander, or in
general of the persons they describe. The answers given by this kind
of historian to the question of what force causes events to happen are
satisfactory only as long as there is but one historian to each event.
As soon as historians of different nationalities and tendencies begin
to describe the same event, the replies they give immediately lose all
meaning, for this force is understood by them all not only differently
but often in quite contradictory ways. One historian says that an
event was produced by Napoleon's power, another that it was produced by
Alexander's, a third that it was due to the power of some other person.
Besides this, historians of that kind contradict each other even
in their statement as to the force on which the authority of some
particular person was based. Thiers, a Bonapartist, says that Napoleon's
power was based on his virtue and genius. Lanfrey, a Republican, says it
was based on his trickery and deception of the people. So the historians
of this class, by mutually destroying one another's positions, destroy
the understanding of the force which produces events, and furnish no
reply to history's essential question.

Writers of universal history who deal with all the nations seem to
recognize how erroneous is the specialist historians' view of the force
which produces events. They do not recognize it as a power inherent in
heroes and rulers, but as the resultant of a multiplicity of variously
directed forces. In describing a war or the subjugation of a people, a
general historian looks for the cause of the event not in the power
of one man, but in the interaction of many persons connected with the
event.

According to this view the power of historical personages, represented
as the product of many forces, can no longer, it would seem, be regarded
as a force that itself produces events. Yet in most cases universal
historians still employ the conception of power as a force that itself
produces events, and treat it as their cause. In their exposition, an
historic character is first the product of his time, and his power only
the resultant of various forces, and then his power is itself a force
producing events. Gervinus, Schlosser, and others, for instance, at one
time prove Napoleon to be a product of the Revolution, of the ideas of
1789 and so forth, and at another plainly say that the campaign of 1812
and other things they do not like were simply the product of Napoleon's
misdirected will, and that the very ideas of 1789 were arrested in their
development by Napoleon's caprice. The ideas of the Revolution and the
general temper of the age produced Napoleon's power. But Napoleon's
power suppressed the ideas of the Revolution and the general temper of
the age.

This curious contradiction is not accidental. Not only does it occur at
every step, but the universal historians' accounts are all made up of
a chain of such contradictions. This contradiction occurs because after
entering the field of analysis the universal historians stop halfway.

To find component forces equal to the composite or resultant force, the
sum of the components must equal the resultant. This condition is never
observed by the universal historians, and so to explain the resultant
forces they are obliged to admit, in addition to the insufficient
components, another unexplained force affecting the resultant action.

Specialist historians describing the campaign of 1813 or the restoration
of the Bourbons plainly assert that these events were produced by the
will of Alexander. But the universal historian Gervinus, refuting this
opinion of the specialist historian, tries to prove that the campaign of
1813 and the restoration of the Bourbons were due to other things beside
Alexander's will--such as the activity of Stein, Metternich, Madame
de Stael, Talleyrand, Fichte Chateaubriand, and others. The historian
evidently decomposes Alexander's power into the components: Talleyrand,
Chateaubriand, and the rest--but the sum of the components, that is,
the interactions of Chateaubriand, Talleyrand, Madame de Stael, and the
others, evidently does not equal the resultant, namely the phenomenon
of millions of Frenchmen submitting to the Bourbons. That Chateaubriand,
Madame de Stael, and others spoke certain words to one another only
affected their mutual relations but does not account for the submission
of millions. And therefore to explain how from these relations of theirs
the submission of millions of people resulted--that is, how component
forces equal to one A gave a resultant equal to a thousand times A--the
historian is again obliged to fall back on power--the force he had
denied--and to recognize it as the resultant of the forces, that is, he
has to admit an unexplained force acting on the resultant. And that is
just what the universal historians do, and consequently they not only
contradict the specialist historians but contradict themselves.

Peasants having no clear idea of the cause of rain, say, according to
whether they want rain or fine weather: "The wind has blown the clouds
away," or, "The wind has brought up the clouds." And in the same way the
universal historians sometimes, when it pleases them and fits in with
their theory, say that power is the result of events, and sometimes,
when they want to prove something else, say that power produces events.

A third class of historians--the so-called historians of
culture--following the path laid down by the universal historians who
sometimes accept writers and ladies as forces producing events--again
take that force to be something quite different. They see it in what is
called culture--in mental activity.

The historians of culture are quite consistent in regard to their
progenitors, the writers of universal histories, for if historical
events may be explained by the fact that certain persons treated one
another in such and such ways, why not explain them by the fact that
such and such people wrote such and such books? Of the immense number of
indications accompanying every vital phenomenon, these historians select
the indication of intellectual activity and say that this indication is
the cause. But despite their endeavors to prove that the cause of events
lies in intellectual activity, only by a great stretch can one admit
that there is any connection between intellectual activity and the
movement of peoples, and in no case can one admit that intellectual
activity controls people's actions, for that view is not confirmed by
such facts as the very cruel murders of the French Revolution resulting
from the doctrine of the equality of man, or the very cruel wars and
executions resulting from the preaching of love.

But even admitting as correct all the cunningly devised arguments with
which these histories are filled--admitting that nations are governed by
some undefined force called an idea--history's essential question still
remains unanswered, and to the former power of monarchs and to the
influence of advisers and other people introduced by the universal
historians, another, newer force--the idea--is added, the connection of
which with the masses needs explanation. It is possible to understand
that Napoleon had power and so events occurred; with some effort one may
even conceive that Napoleon together with other influences was the cause
of an event; but how a book, Le Contrat social, had the effect of making
Frenchmen begin to drown one another cannot be understood without an
explanation of the causal nexus of this new force with the event.

Undoubtedly some relation exists between all who live contemporaneously,
and so it is possible to find some connection between the intellectual
activity of men and their historical movements, just as such a
connection may be found between the movements of humanity and commerce,
handicraft, gardening, or anything else you please. But why intellectual
activity is considered by the historians of culture to be the cause or
expression of the whole historical movement is hard to understand.
Only the following considerations can have led the historians to such
a conclusion: (1) that history is written by learned men, and so it is
natural and agreeable for them to think that the activity of their class
supplies the basis of the movement of all humanity, just as a similar
belief is natural and agreeable to traders, agriculturists, and soldiers
(if they do not express it, that is merely because traders and soldiers
do not write history), and (2) that spiritual activity, enlightenment,
civilization, culture, ideas, are all indistinct, indefinite conceptions
under whose banner it is very easy to use words having a still less
definite meaning, and which can therefore be readily introduced into any
theory.

But not to speak of the intrinsic quality of histories of this kind
(which may possibly even be of use to someone for something) the
histories of culture, to which all general histories tend more and more
to approximate, are significant from the fact that after seriously
and minutely examining various religious, philosophic, and political
doctrines as causes of events, as soon as they have to describe an
actual historic event such as the campaign of 1812 for instance, they
involuntarily describe it as resulting from an exercise of power--and
say plainly that that was the result of Napoleon's will. Speaking so,
the historians of culture involuntarily contradict themselves, and show
that the new force they have devised does not account for what happens
in history, and that history can only be explained by introducing a
power which they apparently do not recognize.





CHAPTER III


A locomotive is moving. Someone asks: "What moves it?" A peasant says
the devil moves it. Another man says the locomotive moves because its
wheels go round. A third asserts that the cause of its movement lies in
the smoke which the wind carries away.

The peasant is irrefutable. He has devised a complete explanation. To
refute him someone would have to prove to him that there is no devil,
or another peasant would have to explain to him that it is not the devil
but a German, who moves the locomotive. Only then, as a result of the
contradiction, will they see that they are both wrong. But the man who
says that the movement of the wheels is the cause refutes himself, for
having once begun to analyze he ought to go on and explain further why
the wheels go round; and till he has reached the ultimate cause of the
movement of the locomotive in the pressure of steam in the boiler, he
has no right to stop in his search for the cause. The man who explains
the movement of the locomotive by the smoke that is carried back has
noticed that the wheels do not supply an explanation and has taken the
first sign that occurs to him and in his turn has offered that as an
explanation.

The only conception that can explain the movement of the locomotive is
that of a force commensurate with the movement observed.

The only conception that can explain the movement of the peoples is that
of some force commensurate with the whole movement of the peoples.

Yet to supply this conception various historians take forces of
different kinds, all of which are incommensurate with the movement
observed. Some see it as a force directly inherent in heroes, as the
peasant sees the devil in the locomotive; others as a force resulting
from several other forces, like the movement of the wheels; others again
as an intellectual influence, like the smoke that is blown away.

So long as histories are written of separate individuals, whether
Caesars, Alexanders, Luthers, or Voltaires, and not the histories
of all, absolutely all those who take part in an event, it is quite
impossible to describe the movement of humanity without the conception
of a force compelling men to direct their activity toward a certain end.
And the only such conception known to historians is that of power.

This conception is the one handle by means of which the material of
history, as at present expounded, can be dealt with, and anyone who
breaks that handle off, as Buckle did, without finding some other method
of treating historical material, merely deprives himself of the one
possible way of dealing with it. The necessity of the conception of
power as an explanation of historical events is best demonstrated by
the universal historians and historians of culture themselves, for they
professedly reject that conception but inevitably have recourse to it at
every step.

In dealing with humanity's inquiry, the science of history up to now
is like money in circulation--paper money and coin. The biographies and
special national histories are like paper money. They can be used and
can circulate and fulfill their purpose without harm to anyone and even
advantageously, as long as no one asks what is the security behind them.
You need only forget to ask how the will of heroes produces events, and
such histories as Thiers' will be interesting and instructive and may
perhaps even possess a tinge of poetry. But just as doubts of the real
value of paper money arise either because, being easy to make, too much
of it gets made or because people try to exchange it for gold, so also
doubts concerning the real value of such histories arise either because
too many of them are written or because in his simplicity of heart
someone inquires: by what force did Napoleon do this?--that is, wants
to exchange the current paper money for the real gold of actual
comprehension.

The writers of universal histories and of the history of culture are
like people who, recognizing the defects of paper money, decide to
substitute for it money made of metal that has not the specific gravity
of gold. It may indeed make jingling coin, but will do no more than
that. Paper money may deceive the ignorant, but nobody is deceived by
tokens of base metal that have no value but merely jingle. As gold is
gold only if it is serviceable not merely for exchange but also for use,
so universal historians will be valuable only when they can reply to
history's essential question: what is power? The universal historians
give contradictory replies to that question, while the historians of
culture evade it and answer something quite different. And as counters
of imitation gold can be used only among a group of people who agree to
accept them as gold, or among those who do not know the nature of
gold, so universal historians and historians of culture, not answering
humanity's essential question, serve as currency for some purposes of
their own, only in universities and among the mass of readers who have a
taste for what they call "serious reading."





CHAPTER IV


Having abandoned the conception of the ancients as to the divine
subjection of the will of a nation to some chosen man and the subjection
of that man's will to the Deity, history cannot without contradictions
take a single step till it has chosen one of two things: either a return
to the former belief in the direct intervention of the Deity in human
affairs or a definite explanation of the meaning of the force producing
historical events and termed "power."

A return to the first is impossible, the belief has been destroyed; and
so it is essential to explain what is meant by power.

Napoleon ordered an army to be raised and go to war. We are so
accustomed to that idea and have become so used to it that the question:
why did six hundred thousand men go to fight when Napoleon uttered
certain words, seems to us senseless. He had the power and so what he
ordered was done.

This reply is quite satisfactory if we believe that the power was given
him by God. But as soon as we do not admit that, it becomes essential to
determine what is this power of one man over others.

It cannot be the direct physical power of a strong man over a weak
one--a domination based on the application or threat of physical force,
like the power of Hercules; nor can it be based on the effect of moral
force, as in their simplicity some historians think who say that the
leading figures in history are heroes, that is, men gifted with a
special strength of soul and mind called genius. This power cannot be
based on the predominance of moral strength, for, not to mention heroes
such as Napoleon about whose moral qualities opinions differ widely,
history shows us that neither a Louis XI nor a Metternich, who ruled
over millions of people, had any particular moral qualities, but on the
contrary were generally morally weaker than any of the millions they
ruled over.

If the source of power lies neither in the physical nor in the moral
qualities of him who possesses it, it must evidently be looked for
elsewhere--in the relation to the people of the man who wields the
power.

And that is how power is understood by the science of jurisprudence,
that exchange bank of history which offers to exchange history's
understanding of power for true gold.

Power is the collective will of the people transferred, by expressed or
tacit consent, to their chosen rulers.

In the domain of jurisprudence, which consists of discussions of how a
state and power might be arranged were it possible for all that to
be arranged, it is all very clear; but when applied to history that
definition of power needs explanation.

The science of jurisprudence regards the state and power as the ancients
regarded fire--namely, as something existing absolutely. But for
history, the state and power are merely phenomena, just as for modern
physics fire is not an element but a phenomenon.

From this fundamental difference between the view held by history and
that held by jurisprudence, it follows that jurisprudence can tell
minutely how in its opinion power should be constituted and what
power--existing immutably outside time--is, but to history's questions
about the meaning of the mutations of power in time it can answer
nothing.

If power be the collective will of the people transferred to their
ruler, was Pugachev a representative of the will of the people? If not,
then why was Napoleon I? Why was Napoleon III a criminal when he was
taken prisoner at Boulogne, and why, later on, were those criminals whom
he arrested?

Do palace revolutions--in which sometimes only two or three people take
part--transfer the will of the people to a new ruler? In international
relations, is the will of the people also transferred to their
conqueror? Was the will of the Confederation of the Rhine transferred
to Napoleon in 1806? Was the will of the Russian people transferred
to Napoleon in 1809, when our army in alliance with the French went to
fight the Austrians?

To these questions three answers are possible:

Either to assume (1) that the will of the people is always
unconditionally transferred to the ruler or rulers they have chosen, and
that therefore every emergence of a new power, every struggle
against the power once appointed, should be absolutely regarded as an
infringement of the real power; or (2) that the will of the people
is transferred to the rulers conditionally, under definite and known
conditions, and to show that all limitations, conflicts, and even
destructions of power result from a nonobservance by the rulers of the
conditions under which their power was entrusted to them; or (3) that
the will of the people is delegated to the rulers conditionally, but
that the conditions are unknown and indefinite, and that the appearance
of several authorities, their struggles and their falls, result solely
from the greater or lesser fulfillment by the rulers of these unknown
conditions on which the will of the people is transferred from some
people to others.

And these are the three ways in which the historians do explain the
relation of the people to their rulers.

Some historians--those biographical and specialist historians already
referred to--in their simplicity failing to understand the question of
the meaning of power, seem to consider that the collective will of
the people is unconditionally transferred to historical persons, and
therefore when describing some single state they assume that particular
power to be the one absolute and real power, and that any other force
opposing this is not a power but a violation of power--mere violence.

Their theory, suitable for primitive and peaceful periods of history,
has the inconvenience--in application to complex and stormy periods in
the life of nations during which various powers arise simultaneously and
struggle with one another--that a Legitimist historian will prove
that the National Convention, the Directory, and Bonaparte were mere
infringers of the true power, while a Republican and a Bonapartist will
prove: the one that the Convention and the other that the Empire was the
real power, and that all the others were violations of power.
Evidently the explanations furnished by these historians being mutually
contradictory can only satisfy young children.

Recognizing the falsity of this view of history, another set of
historians say that power rests on a conditional delegation of the will
of the people to their rulers, and that historical leaders have power
only conditionally on carrying out the program that the will of the
people has by tacit agreement prescribed to them. But what this program
consists in these historians do not say, or if they do they continually
contradict one another.

Each historian, according to his view of what constitutes a nation's
progress, looks for these conditions in the greatness, wealth, freedom,
or enlightenment of citizens of France or some other country. But not
to mention the historians' contradictions as to the nature of this
program--or even admitting that some one general program of these
conditions exists--the facts of history almost always contradict that
theory. If the conditions under which power is entrusted consist in the
wealth, freedom, and enlightenment of the people, how is it that Louis
XIV and Ivan the Terrible end their reigns tranquilly, while Louis XVI
and Charles I are executed by their people? To this question historians
reply that Louis XIV's activity, contrary to the program, reacted on
Louis XVI. But why did it not react on Louis XIV or on Louis XV--why
should it react just on Louis XVI? And what is the time limit for such
reactions? To these questions there are and can be no answers. Equally
little does this view explain why for several centuries the collective
will is not withdrawn from certain rulers and their heirs, and
then suddenly during a period of fifty years is transferred to the
Convention, to the Directory, to Napoleon, to Alexander, to Louis XVIII,
to Napoleon again, to Charles X, to Louis Philippe, to a Republican
government, and to Napoleon III. When explaining these rapid transfers
of the people's will from one individual to another, especially in view
of international relations, conquests, and alliances, the historians are
obliged to admit that some of these transfers are not normal delegations
of the people's will but are accidents dependent on cunning, on
mistakes, on craft, or on the weakness of a diplomatist, a ruler, or a
party leader. So that the greater part of the events of history--civil
wars, revolutions, and conquests--are presented by these historians
not as the results of free transferences of the people's will, but as
results of the ill-directed will of one or more individuals, that is,
once again, as usurpations of power. And so these historians also see
and admit historical events which are exceptions to the theory.

These historians resemble a botanist who, having noticed that some
plants grow from seeds producing two cotyledons, should insist that all
that grows does so by sprouting into two leaves, and that the palm, the
mushroom, and even the oak, which blossom into full growth and no longer
resemble two leaves, are deviations from the theory.

Historians of the third class assume that the will of the people
is transferred to historic personages conditionally, but that the
conditions are unknown to us. They say that historical personages have
power only because they fulfill the will of the people which has been
delegated to them.

But in that case, if the force that moves nations lies not in the
historic leaders but in the nations themselves, what significance have
those leaders?

The leaders, these historians tell us, express the will of the people:
the activity of the leaders represents the activity of the people.

But in that case the question arises whether all the activity of the
leaders serves as an expression of the people's will or only some part
of it. If the whole activity of the leaders serves as the expression of
the people's will, as some historians suppose, then all the details
of the court scandals contained in the biographies of a Napoleon or
a Catherine serve to express the life of the nation, which is evident
nonsense; but if it is only some particular side of the activity of an
historical leader which serves to express the people's life, as other
so-called "philosophical" historians believe, then to determine which
side of the activity of a leader expresses the nation's life, we have
first of all to know in what the nation's life consists.

Met by this difficulty historians of that class devise some most
obscure, impalpable, and general abstraction which can cover all
conceivable occurrences, and declare this abstraction to be the aim of
humanity's movement. The most usual generalizations adopted by almost
all the historians are: freedom, equality, enlightenment, progress,
civilization, and culture. Postulating some generalization as the goal
of the movement of humanity, the historians study the men of whom the
greatest number of monuments have remained: kings, ministers, generals,
authors, reformers, popes, and journalists, to the extent to which in
their opinion these persons have promoted or hindered that abstraction.
But as it is in no way proved that the aim of humanity does consist in
freedom, equality, enlightenment, or civilization, and as the connection
of the people with the rulers and enlighteners of humanity is only based
on the arbitrary assumption that the collective will of the people is
always transferred to the men whom we have noticed, it happens that the
activity of the millions who migrate, burn houses, abandon agriculture,
and destroy one another never is expressed in the account of the
activity of some dozen people who did not burn houses, practice
agriculture, or slay their fellow creatures.

History proves this at every turn. Is the ferment of the peoples of
the west at the end of the eighteenth century and their drive eastward
explained by the activity of Louis XIV, XV, and XVI, their mistresses
and ministers, and by the lives of Napoleon, Rousseau, Diderot,
Beaumarchais, and others?

Is the movement of the Russian people eastward to Kazan and Siberia
expressed by details of the morbid character of Ivan the Terrible and by
his correspondence with Kurbski?

Is the movement of the peoples at the time of the Crusades explained by
the life and activity of the Godfreys and the Louis-es and their ladies?
For us that movement of the peoples from west to east, without
leaders, with a crowd of vagrants, and with Peter the Hermit, remains
incomprehensible. And yet more incomprehensible is the cessation of that
movement when a rational and sacred aim for the Crusade--the deliverance
of Jerusalem--had been clearly defined by historic leaders. Popes,
kings, and knights incited the peoples to free the Holy Land; but the
people did not go, for the unknown cause which had previously impelled
them to go no longer existed. The history of the Godfreys and the
Minnesingers can evidently not cover the life of the peoples. And the
history of the Godfreys and the Minnesingers has remained the history
of Godfreys and Minnesingers, but the history of the life of the peoples
and their impulses has remained unknown.

Still less does the history of authors and reformers explain to us the
life of the peoples.

The history of culture explains to us the impulses and conditions of
life and thought of a writer or a reformer. We learn that Luther had
a hot temper and said such and such things; we learn that Rousseau was
suspicious and wrote such and such books; but we do not learn why after
the Reformation the peoples massacred one another, nor why during the
French Revolution they guillotined one another.

If we unite both these kinds of history, as is done by the newest
historians, we shall have the history of monarchs and writers, but not
the history of the life of the peoples.





CHAPTER V


The life of the nations is not contained in the lives of a few men, for
the connection between those men and the nations has not been found.
The theory that this connection is based on the transference of the
collective will of a people to certain historical personages is an
hypothesis unconfirmed by the experience of history.

The theory of the transference of the collective will of the people to
historic persons may perhaps explain much in the domain of jurisprudence
and be essential for its purposes, but in its application to history, as
soon as revolutions, conquests, or civil wars occur--that is, as soon as
history begins--that theory explains nothing.

The theory seems irrefutable just because the act of transference of the
people's will cannot be verified, for it never occurred.

Whatever happens and whoever may stand at the head of affairs, the
theory can always say that such and such a person took the lead because
the collective will was transferred to him.

The replies this theory gives to historical questions are like the
replies of a man who, watching the movements of a herd of cattle and
paying no attention to the varying quality of the pasturage in different
parts of the field, or to the driving of the herdsman, should attribute
the direction the herd takes to what animal happens to be at its head.

"The herd goes in that direction because the animal in front leads
it and the collective will of all the other animals is vested in that
leader." This is what historians of the first class say--those who
assume the unconditional transference of the people's will.

"If the animals leading the herd change, this happens because the
collective will of all the animals is transferred from one leader to
another, according to whether the animal is or is not leading them in
the direction selected by the whole herd." Such is the reply historians
who assume that the collective will of the people is delegated to
rulers under conditions which they regard as known. (With this method
of observation it often happens that the observer, influenced by the
direction he himself prefers, regards those as leaders who, owing to the
people's change of direction, are no longer in front, but on one side,
or even in the rear.)

"If the animals in front are continually changing and the direction of
the whole herd is constantly altered, this is because in order to follow
a given direction the animals transfer their will to the animals that
have attracted our attention, and to study the movements of the herd
we must watch the movements of all the prominent animals moving on all
sides of the herd." So say the third class of historians who regard all
historical persons, from monarchs to journalists, as the expression of
their age.

The theory of the transference of the will of the people to historic
persons is merely a paraphrase--a restatement of the question in other
words.

What causes historical events? Power. What is power? Power is the
collective will of the people transferred to one person. Under what
condition is the will of the people delegated to one person? On
condition that that person expresses the will of the whole people. That
is, power is power: in other words, power is a word the meaning of which
we do not understand.


If the realm of human knowledge were confined to abstract reasoning,
then having subjected to criticism the explanation of "power" that
juridical science gives us, humanity would conclude that power is merely
a word and has no real existence. But to understand phenomena man
has, besides abstract reasoning, experience by which he verifies his
reflections. And experience tells us that power is not merely a word but
an actually existing phenomenon.

Not to speak of the fact that no description of the collective activity
of men can do without the conception of power, the existence of power is
proved both by history and by observing contemporary events.

Whenever an event occurs a man appears or men appear, by whose will the
event seems to have taken place. Napoleon III issues a decree and the
French go to Mexico. The King of Prussia and Bismarck issue decrees and
an army enters Bohemia. Napoleon I issues a decree and an army enters
Russia. Alexander I gives a command and the French submit to the
Bourbons. Experience shows us that whatever event occurs it is always
related to the will of one or of several men who have decreed it.

The historians, in accord with the old habit of acknowledging divine
intervention in human affairs, want to see the cause of events in
the expression of the will of someone endowed with power, but that
supposition is not confirmed either by reason or by experience.

On the one side reflection shows that the expression of a man's
will--his words--are only part of the general activity expressed in an
event, as for instance in a war or a revolution, and so without assuming
an incomprehensible, supernatural force--a miracle--one cannot admit
that words can be the immediate cause of the movements of millions of
men. On the other hand, even if we admitted that words could be the
cause of events, history shows that the expression of the will of
historical personages does not in most cases produce any effect, that
is to say, their commands are often not executed, and sometimes the very
opposite of what they order occurs.

Without admitting divine intervention in the affairs of humanity we
cannot regard "power" as the cause of events.

Power, from the standpoint of experience, is merely the relation that
exists between the expression of someone's will and the execution of
that will by others.

To explain the conditions of that relationship we must first establish a
conception of the expression of will, referring it to man and not to the
Deity.

If the Deity issues a command, expresses His will, as ancient history
tells us, the expression of that will is independent of time and is not
caused by anything, for the Divinity is not controlled by an event. But
speaking of commands that are the expression of the will of men acting
in time and in relation to one another, to explain the connection of
commands with events we must restore: (1) the condition of all that
takes place: the continuity of movement in time both of the events and
of the person who commands, and (2) the inevitability of the connection
between the person commanding and those who execute his command.





CHAPTER VI


Only the expression of the will of the Deity, not dependent on time, can
relate to a whole series of events occurring over a period of years or
centuries, and only the Deity, independent of everything, can by His
sole will determine the direction of humanity's movement; but man acts
in time and himself takes part in what occurs.

Reinstating the first condition omitted, that of time, we see that no
command can be executed without some preceding order having been given
rendering the execution of the last command possible.

No command ever appears spontaneously, or itself covers a whole series
of occurrences; but each command follows from another, and never refers
to a whole series of events but always to one moment only of an event.

When, for instance, we say that Napoleon ordered armies to go to war,
we combine in one simultaneous expression a whole series of consecutive
commands dependent one on another. Napoleon could not have commanded
an invasion of Russia and never did so. Today he ordered such and such
papers to be written to Vienna, to Berlin, and to Petersburg;
tomorrow such and such decrees and orders to the army, the fleet, the
commissariat, and so on and so on--millions of commands, which formed
a whole series corresponding to a series of events which brought the
French armies into Russia.

If throughout his reign Napoleon gave commands concerning an invasion
of England and expended on no other undertaking so much time and effort,
and yet during his whole reign never once attempted to execute that
design but undertook an expedition into Russia, with which country he
considered it desirable to be in alliance (a conviction he repeatedly
expressed)--this came about because his commands did not correspond to
the course of events in the first case, but did so correspond in the
latter.

For an order to be certainly executed, it is necessary that a man should
order what can be executed. But to know what can and what cannot be
executed is impossible, not only in the case of Napoleon's invasion of
Russia in which millions participated, but even in the simplest event,
for in either case millions of obstacles may arise to prevent its
execution. Every order executed is always one of an immense number
unexecuted. All the impossible orders inconsistent with the course of
events remain unexecuted. Only the possible ones get linked up with a
consecutive series of commands corresponding to a series of events, and
are executed.

Our false conception that an event is caused by a command which precedes
it is due to the fact that when the event has taken place and out of
thousands of others those few commands which were consistent with that
event have been executed, we forget about the others that were not
executed because they could not be. Apart from that, the chief source
of our error in this matter is due to the fact that in the historical
accounts a whole series of innumerable, diverse, and petty events, such
for instance as all those which led the French armies to Russia, is
generalized into one event in accord with the result produced by that
series of events, and corresponding with this generalization the whole
series of commands is also generalized into a single expression of will.

We say that Napoleon wished to invade Russia and invaded it. In
reality in all Napoleon's activity we never find anything resembling an
expression of that wish, but find a series of orders, or expressions of
his will, very variously and indefinitely directed. Amid a long series
of unexecuted orders of Napoleon's one series, for the campaign of 1812,
was carried out--not because those orders differed in any way from the
other, unexecuted orders but because they coincided with the course of
events that led the French army into Russia; just as in stencil work
this or that figure comes out not because the color was laid on from
this side or in that way, but because it was laid on from all sides over
the figure cut in the stencil.

So that examining the relation in time of the commands to the events,
we find that a command can never be the cause of the event, but that a
certain definite dependence exists between the two.

To understand in what this dependence consists it is necessary to
reinstate another omitted condition of every command proceeding not from
the Deity but from a man, which is, that the man who gives the command
himself takes part in the event.

This relation of the commander to those he commands is just what is
called power. This relation consists in the following:

For common action people always unite in certain combinations, in which
regardless of the difference of the aims set for the common action, the
relation between those taking part in it is always the same.

Men uniting in these combinations always assume such relations toward
one another that the larger number take a more direct share, and the
smaller number a less direct share, in the collective action for which
they have combined.

Of all the combinations in which men unite for collective action one of
the most striking and definite examples is an army.

Every army is composed of lower grades of the service--the rank and
file--of whom there are always the greatest number; of the next higher
military rank--corporals and noncommissioned officers of whom there are
fewer, and of still-higher officers of whom there are still fewer,
and so on to the highest military command which is concentrated in one
person.

A military organization may be quite correctly compared to a cone, of
which the base with the largest diameter consists of the rank and file;
the next higher and smaller section of the cone consists of the next
higher grades of the army, and so on to the apex, the point of which
will represent the commander in chief.

The soldiers, of whom there are the most, form the lower section of
the cone and its base. The soldier himself does the stabbing, hacking,
burning, and pillaging, and always receives orders for these actions
from men above him; he himself never gives an order. The noncommissioned
officers (of whom there are fewer) perform the action itself less
frequently than the soldiers, but they already give commands. An
officer still less often acts directly himself, but commands still more
frequently. A general does nothing but command the troops, indicates the
objective, and hardly ever uses a weapon himself. The commander in chief
never takes direct part in the action itself, but only gives general
orders concerning the movement of the mass of the troops. A similar
relation of people to one another is seen in every combination of men
for common activity--in agriculture, trade, and every administration.

And so without particularly analyzing all the contiguous sections of
a cone and of the ranks of an army, or the ranks and positions in
any administrative or public business whatever from the lowest to the
highest, we see a law by which men, to take associated action, combine
in such relations that the more directly they participate in performing
the action the less they can command and the more numerous they are,
while the less their direct participation in the action itself, the more
they command and the fewer of them there are; rising in this way from
the lowest ranks to the man at the top, who takes the least direct share
in the action and directs his activity chiefly to commanding.

This relation of the men who command to those they command is what
constitutes the essence of the conception called power.

Having restored the condition of time under which all events occur,
we find that a command is executed only when it is related to a
corresponding series of events. Restoring the essential condition of
relation between those who command and those who execute, we find that
by the very nature of the case those who command take the smallest part
in the action itself and that their activity is exclusively directed to
commanding.





CHAPTER VII


When an event is taking place people express their opinions and wishes
about it, and as the event results from the collective activity of
many people, some one of the opinions or wishes expressed is sure to be
fulfilled if but approximately. When one of the opinions expressed
is fulfilled, that opinion gets connected with the event as a command
preceding it.

Men are hauling a log. Each of them expresses his opinion as to how and
where to haul it. They haul the log away, and it happens that this is
done as one of them said. He ordered it. There we have command and power
in their primary form. The man who worked most with his hands could not
think so much about what he was doing, or reflect on or command what
would result from the common activity; while the man who commanded
more would evidently work less with his hands on account of his greater
verbal activity.

When some larger concourse of men direct their activity to a common aim
there is a yet sharper division of those who, because their activity is
given to directing and commanding, take less part in the direct work.

When a man works alone he always has a certain set of reflections which
as it seems to him directed his past activity, justify his present
activity, and guide him in planning his future actions. Just the same is
done by a concourse of people, allowing those who do not take a direct
part in the activity to devise considerations, justifications, and
surmises concerning their collective activity.

For reasons known or unknown to us the French began to drown and kill
one another. And corresponding to the event its justification appears in
people's belief that this was necessary for the welfare of France, for
liberty, and for equality. People ceased to kill one another, and
this event was accompanied by its justification in the necessity for a
centralization of power, resistance to Europe, and so on. Men went
from the west to the east killing their fellow men, and the event
was accompanied by phrases about the glory of France, the baseness of
England, and so on. History shows us that these justifications of the
events have no common sense and are all contradictory, as in the case of
killing a man as the result of recognizing his rights, and the killing
of millions in Russia for the humiliation of England. But these
justifications have a very necessary significance in their own day.

These justifications release those who produce the events from moral
responsibility. These temporary aims are like the broom fixed in front
of a locomotive to clear the snow from the rails in front: they clear
men's moral responsibilities from their path.

Without such justification there would be no reply to the simplest
question that presents itself when examining each historical event. How
is it that millions of men commit collective crimes--make war, commit
murder, and so on?

With the present complex forms of political and social life in Europe
can any event that is not prescribed, decreed, or ordered by monarchs,
ministers, parliaments, or newspapers be imagined? Is there any
collective action which cannot find its justification in political
unity, in patriotism, in the balance of power, or in civilization? So
that every event that occurs inevitably coincides with some expressed
wish and, receiving a justification, presents itself as the result of
the will of one man or of several men.

In whatever direction a ship moves, the flow of the waves it cuts
will always be noticeable ahead of it. To those on board the ship the
movement of those waves will be the only perceptible motion.

Only by watching closely moment by moment the movement of that flow and
comparing it with the movement of the ship do we convince ourselves that
every bit of it is occasioned by the forward movement of the ship,
and that we were led into error by the fact that we ourselves were
imperceptibly moving.

We see the same if we watch moment by moment the movement of historical
characters (that is, re-establish the inevitable condition of all that
occurs--the continuity of movement in time) and do not lose sight of the
essential connection of historical persons with the masses.

When the ship moves in one direction there is one and the same wave
ahead of it, when it turns frequently the wave ahead of it also turns
frequently. But wherever it may turn there always will be the wave
anticipating its movement.

Whatever happens it always appears that just that event was foreseen
and decreed. Wherever the ship may go, the rush of water which neither
directs nor increases its movement foams ahead of it, and at a distance
seems to us not merely to move of itself but to govern the ship's
movement also.


Examining only those expressions of the will of historical persons
which, as commands, were related to events, historians have assumed
that the events depended on those commands. But examining the events
themselves and the connection in which the historical persons stood to
the people, we have found that they and their orders were dependent on
events. The incontestable proof of this deduction is that, however many
commands were issued, the event does not take place unless there are
other causes for it, but as soon as an event occurs--be it what it
may--then out of all the continually expressed wishes of different
people some will always be found which by their meaning and their time
of utterance are related as commands to the events.

Arriving at this conclusion we can reply directly and positively to
these two essential questions of history:

(1) What is power?

(2) What force produces the movement of the nations?

(1) Power is the relation of a given person to other individuals,
in which the more this person expresses opinions, predictions, and
justifications of the collective action that is performed, the less is
his participation in that action.

(2) The movement of nations is caused not by power, nor by intellectual
activity, nor even by a combination of the two as historians have
supposed, but by the activity of all the people who participate in
the events, and who always combine in such a way that those taking
the largest direct share in the event take on themselves the least
responsibility and vice versa.

Morally the wielder of power appears to cause the event; physically
it is those who submit to the power. But as the moral activity is
inconceivable without the physical, the cause of the event is neither in
the one nor in the other but in the union of the two.

Or in other words, the conception of a cause is inapplicable to the
phenomena we are examining.

In the last analysis we reach the circle of infinity--that final limit
to which in every domain of thought man's reason arrives if it is not
playing with the subject. Electricity produces heat, heat produces
electricity. Atoms attract each other and atoms repel one another.

Speaking of the interaction of heat and electricity and of atoms, we
cannot say why this occurs, and we say that it is so because it is
inconceivable otherwise, because it must be so and that it is a law. The
same applies to historical events. Why war and revolution occur we do
not know. We only know that to produce the one or the other action,
people combine in a certain formation in which they all take part, and
we say that this is so because it is unthinkable otherwise, or in other
words that it is a law.





CHAPTER VIII


If history dealt only with external phenomena, the establishment of this
simple and obvious law would suffice and we should have finished our
argument. But the law of history relates to man. A particle of matter
cannot tell us that it does not feel the law of attraction or repulsion
and that that law is untrue, but man, who is the subject of history,
says plainly: I am free and am therefore not subject to the law.

The presence of the problem of man's free will, though unexpressed, is
felt at every step of history.

All seriously thinking historians have involuntarily encountered this
question. All the contradictions and obscurities of history and the
false path historical science has followed are due solely to the lack of
a solution of that question.

If the will of every man were free, that is, if each man could act as he
pleased, all history would be a series of disconnected incidents.

If in a thousand years even one man in a million could act freely, that
is, as he chose, it is evident that one single free act of that man's
in violation of the laws governing human action would destroy the
possibility of the existence of any laws for the whole of humanity.

If there be a single law governing the actions of men, free will cannot
exist, for then man's will is subject to that law.

In this contradiction lies the problem of free will, which from most
ancient times has occupied the best human minds and from most ancient
times has been presented in its whole tremendous significance.

The problem is that regarding man as a subject of observation
from whatever point of view--theological, historical, ethical, or
philosophic--we find a general law of necessity to which he (like all
that exists) is subject. But regarding him from within ourselves as what
we are conscious of, we feel ourselves to be free.

This consciousness is a source of self-cognition quite apart from and
independent of reason. Through his reason man observes himself, but only
through consciousness does he know himself.

Apart from consciousness of self no observation or application of reason
is conceivable.

To understand, observe, and draw conclusions, man must first of all be
conscious of himself as living. A man is only conscious of himself as
a living being by the fact that he wills, that is, is conscious of
his volition. But his will--which forms the essence of his life--man
recognizes (and can but recognize) as free.

If, observing himself, man sees that his will is always directed by
one and the same law (whether he observes the necessity of taking
food, using his brain, or anything else) he cannot recognize this
never-varying direction of his will otherwise than as a limitation of
it. Were it not free it could not be limited. A man's will seems to him
to be limited just because he is not conscious of it except as free.

You say: I am not free. But I have lifted my hand and let it fall.
Everyone understands that this illogical reply is an irrefutable
demonstration of freedom.

That reply is the expression of a consciousness that is not subject to
reason.

If the consciousness of freedom were not a separate and independent
source of self-consciousness it would be subject to reasoning and
to experience, but in fact such subjection does not exist and is
inconceivable.

A series of experiments and arguments proves to every man that he, as
an object of observation, is subject to certain laws, and man submits to
them and never resists the laws of gravity or impermeability once he
has become acquainted with them. But the same series of experiments
and arguments proves to him that the complete freedom of which he is
conscious in himself is impossible, and that his every action depends
on his organization, his character, and the motives acting upon him; yet
man never submits to the deductions of these experiments and arguments.
Having learned from experiment and argument that a stone falls
downwards, a man indubitably believes this and always expects the law
that he has learned to be fulfilled.

But learning just as certainly that his will is subject to laws, he does
not and cannot believe this.

However often experiment and reasoning may show a man that under the
same conditions and with the same character he will do the same thing as
before, yet when under the same conditions and with the same character
he approaches for the thousandth time the action that always ends in the
same way, he feels as certainly convinced as before the experiment
that he can act as he pleases. Every man, savage or sage, however
incontestably reason and experiment may prove to him that it is
impossible to imagine two different courses of action in precisely the
same conditions, feels that without this irrational conception (which
constitutes the essence of freedom) he cannot imagine life. He feels
that however impossible it may be, it is so, for without this conception
of freedom not only would he be unable to understand life, but he would
be unable to live for a single moment.

He could not live, because all man's efforts, all his impulses to life,
are only efforts to increase freedom. Wealth and poverty, fame and
obscurity, power and subordination, strength and weakness, health and
disease, culture and ignorance, work and leisure, repletion and hunger,
virtue and vice, are only greater or lesser degrees of freedom.

A man having no freedom cannot be conceived of except as deprived of
life.

If the conception of freedom appears to reason to be a senseless
contradiction like the possibility of performing two actions at one and
the same instant of time, or of an effect without a cause, that only
proves that consciousness is not subject to reason.

This unshakable, irrefutable consciousness of freedom, uncontrolled by
experiment or argument, recognized by all thinkers and felt by everyone
without exception, this consciousness without which no conception of man
is possible constitutes the other side of the question.

Man is the creation of an all-powerful, all-good, and all-seeing God.
What is sin, the conception of which arises from the consciousness of
man's freedom? That is a question for theology.

The actions of men are subject to general immutable laws expressed in
statistics. What is man's responsibility to society, the conception of
which results from the conception of freedom? That is a question for
jurisprudence.

Man's actions proceed from his innate character and the motives acting
upon him. What is conscience and the perception of right and wrong
in actions that follows from the consciousness of freedom? That is a
question for ethics.

Man in connection with the general life of humanity appears subject
to laws which determine that life. But the same man apart from that
connection appears to be free. How should the past life of nations and
of humanity be regarded--as the result of the free, or as the result of
the constrained, activity of man? That is a question for history.

Only in our self-confident day of the popularization of
knowledge--thanks to that most powerful engine of ignorance, the
diffusion of printed matter--has the question of the freedom of will
been put on a level on which the question itself cannot exist. In our
time the majority of so-called advanced people--that is, the crowd of
ignoramuses--have taken the work of the naturalists who deal with one
side of the question for a solution of the whole problem.

They say and write and print that the soul and freedom do not exist,
for the life of man is expressed by muscular movements and muscular
movements are conditioned by the activity of the nerves; the soul and
free will do not exist because at an unknown period of time we sprang
from the apes. They say this, not at all suspecting that thousands of
years ago that same law of necessity which with such ardor they are now
trying to prove by physiology and comparative zoology was not merely
acknowledged by all the religions and all the thinkers, but has never
been denied. They do not see that the role of the natural sciences in
this matter is merely to serve as an instrument for the illumination
of one side of it. For the fact that, from the point of view of
observation, reason and the will are merely secretions of the brain, and
that man following the general law may have developed from lower animals
at some unknown period of time, only explains from a fresh side
the truth admitted thousands of years ago by all the religious and
philosophic theories--that from the point of view of reason man is
subject to the law of necessity; but it does not advance by a hair's
breadth the solution of the question, which has another, opposite, side,
based on the consciousness of freedom.

If men descended from the apes at an unknown period of time, that is
as comprehensible as that they were made from a handful of earth at a
certain period of time (in the first case the unknown quantity is the
time, in the second case it is the origin); and the question of how
man's consciousness of freedom is to be reconciled with the law of
necessity to which he is subject cannot be solved by comparative
physiology and zoology, for in a frog, a rabbit, or an ape, we can
observe only the muscular nervous activity, but in man we observe
consciousness as well as the muscular and nervous activity.

The naturalists and their followers, thinking they can solve this
question, are like plasterers set to plaster one side of the walls of
a church who, availing themselves of the absence of the chief
superintendent of the work, should in an access of zeal plaster over the
windows, icons, woodwork, and still unbuttressed walls, and should be
delighted that from their point of view as plasterers, everything is now
so smooth and regular.





CHAPTER IX


For the solution of the question of free will or inevitability, history
has this advantage over other branches of knowledge in which the
question is dealt with, that for history this question does not refer
to the essence of man's free will but its manifestation in the past and
under certain conditions.

In regard to this question, history stands to the other sciences as
experimental science stands to abstract science.

The subject for history is not man's will itself but our presentation of
it.

And so for history, the insoluble mystery presented by the
incompatibility of free will and inevitability does not exist as it does
for theology, ethics, and philosophy. History surveys a presentation of
man's life in which the union of these two contradictions has already
taken place.

In actual life each historic event, each human action, is very clearly
and definitely understood without any sense of contradiction, although
each event presents itself as partly free and partly compulsory.

To solve the question of how freedom and necessity are combined and
what constitutes the essence of these two conceptions, the philosophy
of history can and should follow a path contrary to that taken by other
sciences. Instead of first defining the conceptions of freedom and
inevitability in themselves, and then ranging the phenomena of life
under those definitions, history should deduce a definition of the
conception of freedom and inevitability themselves from the immense
quantity of phenomena of which it is cognizant and that always appear
dependent on these two elements.

Whatever presentation of the activity of many men or of an individual
we may consider, we always regard it as the result partly of man's free
will and partly of the law of inevitability.

Whether we speak of the migration of the peoples and the incursions
of the barbarians, or of the decrees of Napoleon III, or of someone's
action an hour ago in choosing one direction out of several for his
walk, we are unconscious of any contradiction. The degree of freedom and
inevitability governing the actions of these people is clearly defined
for us.

Our conception of the degree of freedom often varies according to
differences in the point of view from which we regard the event, but
every human action appears to us as a certain combination of freedom and
inevitability. In every action we examine we see a certain measure of
freedom and a certain measure of inevitability. And always the more
freedom we see in any action the less inevitability do we perceive, and
the more inevitability the less freedom.

The proportion of freedom to inevitability decreases and increases
according to the point of view from which the action is regarded, but
their relation is always one of inverse proportion.

A sinking man who clutches at another and drowns him; or a hungry mother
exhausted by feeding her baby, who steals some food; or a man trained
to discipline who on duty at the word of command kills a defenseless
man--seem less guilty, that is, less free and more subject to the law of
necessity, to one who knows the circumstances in which these people were
placed, and more free to one who does not know that the man was himself
drowning, that the mother was hungry, that the soldier was in the ranks,
and so on. Similarly a man who committed a murder twenty years ago and
has since lived peaceably and harmlessly in society seems less guilty
and his action more due to the law of inevitability, to someone who
considers his action after twenty years have elapsed than to one who
examined it the day after it was committed. And in the same way every
action of an insane, intoxicated, or highly excited man appears less
free and more inevitable to one who knows the mental condition of him
who committed the action, and seems more free and less inevitable to one
who does not know it. In all these cases the conception of freedom
is increased or diminished and the conception of compulsion is
correspondingly decreased or increased, according to the point of view
from which the action is regarded. So that the greater the conception of
necessity the smaller the conception of freedom and vice versa.

Religion, the common sense of mankind, the science of jurisprudence,
and history itself understand alike this relation between necessity and
freedom.

All cases without exception in which our conception of freedom and
necessity is increased and diminished depend on three considerations:

(1) The relation to the external world of the man who commits the deeds.

(2) His relation to time.

(3) His relation to the causes leading to the action.

The first consideration is the clearness of our perception of the man's
relation to the external world and the greater or lesser clearness
of our understanding of the definite position occupied by the man
in relation to everything coexisting with him. This is what makes it
evident that a drowning man is less free and more subject to necessity
than one standing on dry ground, and that makes the actions of a man
closely connected with others in a thickly populated district, or of one
bound by family, official, or business duties, seem certainly less free
and more subject to necessity than those of a man living in solitude and
seclusion.

If we consider a man alone, apart from his relation to everything around
him, each action of his seems to us free. But if we see his relation
to anything around him, if we see his connection with anything
whatever--with a man who speaks to him, a book he reads, the work on
which he is engaged, even with the air he breathes or the light that
falls on the things about him--we see that each of these circumstances
has an influence on him and controls at least some side of his activity.
And the more we perceive of these influences the more our conception of
his freedom diminishes and the more our conception of the necessity that
weighs on him increases.

The second consideration is the more or less evident time relation of
the man to the world and the clearness of our perception of the place
the man's action occupies in time. That is the ground which makes the
fall of the first man, resulting in the production of the human race,
appear evidently less free than a man's entry into marriage today. It is
the reason why the life and activity of people who lived centuries ago
and are connected with me in time cannot seem to me as free as the life
of a contemporary, the consequences of which are still unknown to me.

The degree of our conception of freedom or inevitability depends in this
respect on the greater or lesser lapse of time between the performance
of the action and our judgment of it.

If I examine an act I performed a moment ago in approximately the same
circumstances as those I am in now, my action appears to me undoubtedly
free. But if I examine an act performed a month ago, then being in
different circumstances, I cannot help recognizing that if that act had
not been committed much that resulted from it--good, agreeable, and even
essential--would not have taken place. If I reflect on an action still
more remote, ten years ago or more, then the consequences of my action
are still plainer to me and I find it hard to imagine what would have
happened had that action not been performed. The farther I go back
in memory, or what is the same thing the farther I go forward in my
judgment, the more doubtful becomes my belief in the freedom of my
action.

In history we find a very similar progress of conviction concerning
the part played by free will in the general affairs of humanity. A
contemporary event seems to us to be indubitably the doing of all the
known participants, but with a more remote event we already see its
inevitable results which prevent our considering anything else possible.
And the farther we go back in examining events the less arbitrary do
they appear.

The Austro-Prussian war appears to us undoubtedly the result of the
crafty conduct of Bismarck, and so on. The Napoleonic wars still seem
to us, though already questionably, to be the outcome of their heroes'
will. But in the Crusades we already see an event occupying its definite
place in history and without which we cannot imagine the modern history
of Europe, though to the chroniclers of the Crusades that event appeared
as merely due to the will of certain people. In regard to the migration
of the peoples it does not enter anyone's head today to suppose that
the renovation of the European world depended on Attila's caprice. The
farther back in history the object of our observation lies, the more
doubtful does the free will of those concerned in the event become and
the more manifest the law of inevitability.

The third consideration is the degree to which we apprehend that
endless chain of causation inevitably demanded by reason, in which each
phenomenon comprehended, and therefore man's every action, must have
its definite place as a result of what has gone before and as a cause of
what will follow.

The better we are acquainted with the physiological, psychological, and
historical laws deduced by observation and by which man is controlled,
and the more correctly we perceive the physiological, psychological,
and historical causes of the action, and the simpler the action we are
observing and the less complex the character and mind of the man in
question, the more subject to inevitability and the less free do our
actions and those of others appear.

When we do not at all understand the cause of an action, whether a
crime, a good action, or even one that is simply nonmoral, we ascribe a
greater amount of freedom to it. In the case of a crime we most urgently
demand the punishment for such an act; in the case of a virtuous act we
rate its merit most highly. In an indifferent case we recognize in it
more individuality, originality, and independence. But if even one of
the innumerable causes of the act is known to us we recognize a certain
element of necessity and are less insistent on punishment for the crime,
or the acknowledgment of the merit of the virtuous act, or the freedom
of the apparently original action. That a criminal was reared among male
factors mitigates his fault in our eyes. The self-sacrifice of a father
or mother, or self-sacrifice with the possibility of a reward, is more
comprehensible than gratuitous self-sacrifice, and therefore seems less
deserving of sympathy and less the result of free will. The founder of a
sect or party, or an inventor, impresses us less when we know how or by
what the way was prepared for his activity. If we have a large range
of examples, if our observation is constantly directed to seeking the
correlation of cause and effect in people's actions, their actions
appear to us more under compulsion and less free the more correctly we
connect the effects with the causes. If we examined simple actions and
had a vast number of such actions under observation, our conception of
their inevitability would be still greater. The dishonest conduct of the
son of a dishonest father, the misconduct of a woman who had fallen
into bad company, a drunkard's relapse into drunkenness, and so on are
actions that seem to us less free the better we understand their cause.
If the man whose actions we are considering is on a very low stage
of mental development, like a child, a madman, or a simpleton--then,
knowing the causes of the act and the simplicity of the character and
intelligence in question, we see so large an element of necessity and so
little free will that as soon as we know the cause prompting the action
we can foretell the result.

On these three considerations alone is based the conception of
irresponsibility for crimes and the extenuating circumstances admitted
by all legislative codes. The responsibility appears greater or less
according to our greater or lesser knowledge of the circumstances in
which the man was placed whose action is being judged, and according
to the greater or lesser interval of time between the commission of the
action and its investigation, and according to the greater or lesser
understanding of the causes that led to the action.





CHAPTER X


Thus our conception of free will and inevitability gradually diminishes
or increases according to the greater or lesser connection with the
external world, the greater or lesser remoteness of time, and the
greater or lesser dependence on the causes in relation to which we
contemplate a man's life.

So that if we examine the case of a man whose connection with the
external world is well known, where the time between the action and
its examination is great, and where the causes of the action are most
accessible, we get the conception of a maximum of inevitability and a
minimum of free will. If we examine a man little dependent on external
conditions, whose action was performed very recently, and the causes of
whose action are beyond our ken, we get the conception of a minimum of
inevitability and a maximum of freedom.

In neither case--however we may change our point of view, however plain
we may make to ourselves the connection between the man and the external
world, however inaccessible it may be to us, however long or short the
period of time, however intelligible or incomprehensible the causes
of the action may be--can we ever conceive either complete freedom or
complete necessity.

(1) To whatever degree we may imagine a man to be exempt from the
influence of the external world, we never get a conception of freedom
in space. Every human action is inevitably conditioned by what surrounds
him and by his own body. I lift my arm and let it fall. My action seems
to me free; but asking myself whether I could raise my arm in every
direction, I see that I raised it in the direction in which there was
least obstruction to that action either from things around me or from
the construction of my own body. I chose one out of all the possible
directions because in it there were fewest obstacles. For my action
to be free it was necessary that it should encounter no obstacles. To
conceive of a man being free we must imagine him outside space, which is
evidently impossible.

(2) However much we approximate the time of judgment to the time of the
deed, we never get a conception of freedom in time. For if I examine
an action committed a second ago I must still recognize it as not
being free, for it is irrevocably linked to the moment at which it was
committed. Can I lift my arm? I lift it, but ask myself: could I have
abstained from lifting my arm at the moment that has already passed? To
convince myself of this I do not lift it the next moment. But I am
not now abstaining from doing so at the first moment when I asked the
question. Time has gone by which I could not detain, the arm I then
lifted is no longer the same as the arm I now refrain from lifting,
nor is the air in which I lifted it the same that now surrounds me. The
moment in which the first movement was made is irrevocable, and at that
moment I could make only one movement, and whatever movement I made
would be the only one. That I did not lift my arm a moment later does
not prove that I could have abstained from lifting it then. And since I
could make only one movement at that single moment of time, it could not
have been any other. To imagine it as free, it is necessary to imagine
it in the present, on the boundary between the past and the future--that
is, outside time, which is impossible.

(3) However much the difficulty of understanding the causes may be
increased, we never reach a conception of complete freedom, that is,
an absence of cause. However inaccessible to us may be the cause of the
expression of will in any action, our own or another's, the first demand
of reason is the assumption of and search for a cause, for without a
cause no phenomenon is conceivable. I raise my arm to perform an action
independently of any cause, but my wish to perform an action without a
cause is the cause of my action.

But even if--imagining a man quite exempt from all influences, examining
only his momentary action in the present, unevoked by any cause--we were
to admit so infinitely small a remainder of inevitability as equaled
zero, we should even then not have arrived at the conception of complete
freedom in man, for a being uninfluenced by the external world, standing
outside of time and independent of cause, is no longer a man.

In the same way we can never imagine the action of a man quite devoid of
freedom and entirely subject to the law of inevitability.

(1) However we may increase our knowledge of the conditions of space
in which man is situated, that knowledge can never be complete, for the
number of those conditions is as infinite as the infinity of space. And
therefore so long as not all the conditions influencing men are defined,
there is no complete inevitability but a certain measure of freedom
remains.

(2) However we may prolong the period of time between the action we are
examining and the judgment upon it, that period will be finite, while
time is infinite, and so in this respect too there can never be absolute
inevitability.

(3) However accessible may be the chain of causation of any action, we
shall never know the whole chain since it is endless, and so again we
never reach absolute inevitability.

But besides this, even if, admitting the remaining minimum of freedom to
equal zero, we assumed in some given case--as for instance in that of a
dying man, an unborn babe, or an idiot--complete absence of freedom, by
so doing we should destroy the very conception of man in the case we are
examining, for as soon as there is no freedom there is also no man. And
so the conception of the action of a man subject solely to the law of
inevitability without any element of freedom is just as impossible as
the conception of a man's completely free action.

And so to imagine the action of a man entirely subject to the law of
inevitability without any freedom, we must assume the knowledge of an
infinite number of space relations, an infinitely long period of time,
and an infinite series of causes.

To imagine a man perfectly free and not subject to the law of
inevitability, we must imagine him all alone, beyond space, beyond time,
and free from dependence on cause.

In the first case, if inevitability were possible without freedom
we should have reached a definition of inevitability by the laws of
inevitability itself, that is, a mere form without content.

In the second case, if freedom were possible without inevitability we
should have arrived at unconditioned freedom beyond space, time, and
cause, which by the fact of its being unconditioned and unlimited would
be nothing, or mere content without form.

We should in fact have reached those two fundamentals of which man's
whole outlook on the universe is constructed--the incomprehensible
essence of life, and the laws defining that essence.

Reason says: (1) space with all the forms of matter that give it
visibility is infinite, and cannot be imagined otherwise. (2) Time is
infinite motion without a moment of rest and is unthinkable otherwise.
(3) The connection between cause and effect has no beginning and can
have no end.

Consciousness says: (1) I alone am, and all that exists is but me,
consequently I include space. (2) I measure flowing time by the fixed
moment of the present in which alone I am conscious of myself as living,
consequently I am outside time. (3) I am beyond cause, for I feel myself
to be the cause of every manifestation of my life.

Reason gives expression to the laws of inevitability. Consciousness
gives expression to the essence of freedom.

Freedom not limited by anything is the essence of life, in man's
consciousness. Inevitability without content is man's reason in its
three forms.

Freedom is the thing examined. Inevitability is what examines. Freedom
is the content. Inevitability is the form.

Only by separating the two sources of cognition, related to one another
as form to content, do we get the mutually exclusive and separately
incomprehensible conceptions of freedom and inevitability.

Only by uniting them do we get a clear conception of man's life.

Apart from these two concepts which in their union mutually define one
another as form and content, no conception of life is possible.

All that we know of the life of man is merely a certain relation of free
will to inevitability, that is, of consciousness to the laws of reason.

All that we know of the external world of nature is only a certain
relation of the forces of nature to inevitability, or of the essence of
life to the laws of reason.

The great natural forces lie outside us and we are not conscious of
them; we call those forces gravitation, inertia, electricity, animal
force, and so on, but we are conscious of the force of life in man and
we call that freedom.

But just as the force of gravitation, incomprehensible in itself but
felt by every man, is understood by us only to the extent to which we
know the laws of inevitability to which it is subject (from the first
knowledge that all bodies have weight, up to Newton's law), so too the
force of free will, incomprehensible in itself but of which everyone is
conscious, is intelligible to us only in as far as we know the laws of
inevitability to which it is subject (from the fact that every man dies,
up to the knowledge of the most complex economic and historic laws).

All knowledge is merely a bringing of this essence of life under the
laws of reason.

Man's free will differs from every other force in that man is directly
conscious of it, but in the eyes of reason it in no way differs from
any other force. The forces of gravitation, electricity, or chemical
affinity are only distinguished from one another in that they are
differently defined by reason. Just so the force of man's free will
is distinguished by reason from the other forces of nature only by the
definition reason gives it. Freedom, apart from necessity, that is,
apart from the laws of reason that define it, differs in no way from
gravitation, or heat, or the force that makes things grow; for reason,
it is only a momentary undefinable sensation of life.

And as the undefinable essence of the force moving the heavenly bodies,
the undefinable essence of the forces of heat and electricity, or
of chemical affinity, or of the vital force, forms the content of
astronomy, physics, chemistry, botany, zoology, and so on, just in the
same way does the force of free will form the content of history.
But just as the subject of every science is the manifestation of this
unknown essence of life while that essence itself can only be the
subject of metaphysics, even the manifestation of the force of free will
in human beings in space, in time, and in dependence on cause forms
the subject of history, while free will itself is the subject of
metaphysics.

In the experimental sciences what we know we call the laws of
inevitability, what is unknown to us we call vital force. Vital force is
only an expression for the unknown remainder over and above what we know
of the essence of life.

So also in history what is known to us we call laws of inevitability,
what is unknown we call free will. Free will is for history only an
expression for the unknown remainder of what we know about the laws of
human life.





CHAPTER XI


History examines the manifestations of man's free will in connection
with the external world in time and in dependence on cause, that is, it
defines this freedom by the laws of reason, and so history is a science
only in so far as this free will is defined by those laws.

The recognition of man's free will as something capable of influencing
historical events, that is, as not subject to laws, is the same for
history as the recognition of a free force moving the heavenly bodies
would be for astronomy.

That assumption would destroy the possibility of the existence of laws,
that is, of any science whatever. If there is even a single body
moving freely, then the laws of Kepler and Newton are negatived and no
conception of the movement of the heavenly bodies any longer exists. If
any single action is due to free will, then not a single historical law
can exist, nor any conception of historical events.

For history, lines exist of the movement of human wills, one end
of which is hidden in the unknown but at the other end of which a
consciousness of man's will in the present moves in space, time, and
dependence on cause.

The more this field of motion spreads out before our eyes, the more
evident are the laws of that movement. To discover and define those laws
is the problem of history.

From the standpoint from which the science of history now regards its
subject on the path it now follows, seeking the causes of events in
man's freewill, a scientific enunciation of those laws is impossible,
for however man's free will may be restricted, as soon as we recognize
it as a force not subject to law, the existence of law becomes
impossible.

Only by reducing this element of free will to the infinitesimal, that
is, by regarding it as an infinitely small quantity, can we convince
ourselves of the absolute inaccessibility of the causes, and then
instead of seeking causes, history will take the discovery of laws as
its problem.

The search for these laws has long been begun and the new methods of
thought which history must adopt are being worked out simultaneously
with the self-destruction toward which--ever dissecting and dissecting
the causes of phenomena--the old method of history is moving.

All human sciences have traveled along that path. Arriving at
infinitesimals, mathematics, the most exact of sciences, abandons the
process of analysis and enters on the new process of the integration
of unknown, infinitely small, quantities. Abandoning the conception
of cause, mathematics seeks law, that is, the property common to all
unknown, infinitely small, elements.

In another form but along the same path of reflection the other sciences
have proceeded. When Newton enunciated the law of gravity he did not say
that the sun or the earth had a property of attraction; he said that all
bodies from the largest to the smallest have the property of attracting
one another, that is, leaving aside the question of the cause of the
movement of the bodies, he expressed the property common to all bodies
from the infinitely large to the infinitely small. The same is done by
the natural sciences: leaving aside the question of cause, they seek for
laws. History stands on the same path. And if history has for its object
the study of the movement of the nations and of humanity and not the
narration of episodes in the lives of individuals, it too, setting
aside the conception of cause, should seek the laws common to all the
inseparably interconnected infinitesimal elements of free will.





CHAPTER XII


From the time the law of Copernicus was discovered and proved, the mere
recognition of the fact that it was not the sun but the earth that moves
sufficed to destroy the whole cosmography of the ancients. By disproving
that law it might have been possible to retain the old conception of
the movements of the bodies, but without disproving it, it would seem
impossible to continue studying the Ptolemaic worlds. But even after
the discovery of the law of Copernicus the Ptolemaic worlds were still
studied for a long time.

From the time the first person said and proved that the number of births
or of crimes is subject to mathematical laws, and that this or that
mode of government is determined by certain geographical and economic
conditions, and that certain relations of population to soil produce
migrations of peoples, the foundations on which history had been built
were destroyed in their essence.

By refuting these new laws the former view of history might have been
retained; but without refuting them it would seem impossible to continue
studying historic events as the results of man's free will. For if a
certain mode of government was established or certain migrations
of peoples took place in consequence of such and such geographic,
ethnographic, or economic conditions, then the free will of those
individuals who appear to us to have established that mode of government
or occasioned the migrations can no longer be regarded as the cause.

And yet the former history continues to be studied side by side with the
laws of statistics, geography, political economy, comparative philology,
and geology, which directly contradict its assumptions.

The struggle between the old views and the new was long and stubbornly
fought out in physical philosophy. Theology stood on guard for the
old views and accused the new of violating revelation. But when truth
conquered, theology established itself just as firmly on the new
foundation.

Just as prolonged and stubborn is the struggle now proceeding between
the old and the new conception of history, and theology in the same way
stands on guard for the old view, and accuses the new view of subverting
revelation.

In the one case as in the other, on both sides the struggle provokes
passion and stifles truth. On the one hand there is fear and regret for
the loss of the whole edifice constructed through the ages, on the other
is the passion for destruction.

To the men who fought against the rising truths of physical philosophy,
it seemed that if they admitted that truth it would destroy faith in
God, in the creation of the firmament, and in the miracle of Joshua the
son of Nun. To the defenders of the laws of Copernicus and Newton, to
Voltaire for example, it seemed that the laws of astronomy destroyed
religion, and he utilized the law of gravitation as a weapon against
religion.

Just so it now seems as if we have only to admit the law of
inevitability, to destroy the conception of the soul, of good and evil,
and all the institutions of state and church that have been built up on
those conceptions.

So too, like Voltaire in his time, uninvited defenders of the law of
inevitability today use that law as a weapon against religion, though
the law of inevitability in history, like the law of Copernicus in
astronomy, far from destroying, even strengthens the foundation on which
the institutions of state and church are erected.

As in the question of astronomy then, so in the question of history
now, the whole difference of opinion is based on the recognition or
nonrecognition of something absolute, serving as the measure of visible
phenomena. In astronomy it was the immovability of the earth, in history
it is the independence of personality--free will.

As with astronomy the difficulty of recognizing the motion of the earth
lay in abandoning the immediate sensation of the earth's fixity and of
the motion of the planets, so in history the difficulty of recognizing
the subjection of personality to the laws of space, time, and cause
lies in renouncing the direct feeling of the independence of one's own
personality. But as in astronomy the new view said: "It is true that we
do not feel the movement of the earth, but by admitting its immobility
we arrive at absurdity, while by admitting its motion (which we do not
feel) we arrive at laws," so also in history the new view says: "It is
true that we are not conscious of our dependence, but by admitting our
free will we arrive at absurdity, while by admitting our dependence on
the external world, on time, and on cause, we arrive at laws."

In the first case it was necessary to renounce the consciousness of an
unreal immobility in space and to recognize a motion we did not feel;
in the present case it is similarly necessary to renounce a freedom
that does not exist, and to recognize a dependence of which we are not
conscious.





End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy

*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WAR AND PEACE ***

***** This file should be named 2600.txt or 2600.zip *****
This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
        http://www.gutenberg.org/2/6/0/2600/

An Anonymous Volunteer

Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
will be renamed.

Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
redistribution.



*** START: FULL LICENSE ***

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK

To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
http://gutenberg.org/license).


Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
electronic works

1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.

1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
works.  See paragraph 1.E below.

1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.

1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
States.

1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:

1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
copied or distributed:

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
1.E.9.

1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.

1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.

1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
Gutenberg-tm License.

1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.

1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.

1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
that

- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."

- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
     License.  You must require such a user to return or
     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
     Project Gutenberg-tm works.

- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
     of receipt of the work.

- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.

1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.

1.F.

1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
your equipment.

1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
DAMAGE.

1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
opportunities to fix the problem.

1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.

1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.

1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.


Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm

Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
people in all walks of life.

Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
assistance they need, are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.


Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation

The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
http://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.

The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
page at http://pglaf.org

For additional contact information:
     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
     Chief Executive and Director
     gbnewby@pglaf.org


Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation

Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
status with the IRS.

The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
particular state visit http://pglaf.org

While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
approach us with offers to donate.

International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.

Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate


Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
works.

Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.


Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.


Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:

     http://www.gutenberg.org

This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.